The Boyscast with Ryan Long - The Man Whose Predictions Are Always Right - Balaji Srinivasan

Episode Date: November 1, 2022

Balaji Srinivasan is an angel investor, tech founder, and WSJ bestselling author of The Network State. Democrat republican polarization article mentioned by Balaji: https://www.vox.com/2015/4/23/8485443/polarization-congress-visualization SUPPORT THE BOYSCAST: https://www.patreon.com/theboyscast http://ryanlongcomedy.com MERCH - ryanlongstore.com Ryan @ryanlongcomedy Danny @dannyjokes Balaji @balajis LEAVE US A FIVE STAR REVIEW! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Interviews That's the thing, they don't know about what we're capable of intellectually This one was quite the rabbit out of the hat So there's this guy, Balaji He's been right about everything He's one of probably the best twitter accounts me and danny just spent like you know a couple hours with him after the podcast hanging and it was like we were both smartest i've ever met by far like my head hurts a little bit right now we both left

being like fuck that guy's smarter than us i knew he was smarter than us i'm more concerned with how much the extent how wide the margin well it's interesting because like I said, I've forever ago saw him like on different podcasts popping up and I was very like, who the hell is this guy? So anyways, actually we talk about it at the beginning then how like we ended up having him on the podcast, but I thought this was like super cool. So awesome. Awesome. how like we ended up having him on the podcast but i thought this was like super cool so awesome awesome everyone the boys cast interview series you know the tuesdays be coming at you yeah you know what to do all right this is bella g to me this was like the whole thing was super like very

internet where you're like are you in new york and i'm like yeah i happen to actually be in new york right now because me and danny have talked about you multiple times even on the podcast and i've you were like one of those people that every time i kind of saw you pop up somewhere i remember the first time was tim ferris i was like who is this like i just thought we both thought you were the man and then so chris williamson had him on and he tagged me in something and then i was like yo heard your podcast with biology i thought it was sick and then he messaged me immediately and i was like if you're ever in new york and he's like i'm here right now and it was like it was like five seconds of being like oh this podcast was good to be in like now you're in a studio which is is that not peak internet

well that is actually that's a lot of what i talk about in the book because there's like these the networks day exactly our community is really online and then it's, you know, it's there. But so do you want to, should I intro? How are you? Well, I'll say why the quick thing of why I felt like people like you or the like opinions I think are so sick is because everyone is always talking about like what should happen. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then I feel like you're kind of talking about like what's likely to happen and then what to do about it. Right. Which is why I feel like me and him both immigrated here too. Right. From Canada.

Oh really? Okay. Yeah. And I, you talked about that too, where there's like a different mentality where all of this in Canada and we're like, yeah,

we're, yeah, that's why you leave. You have to leave. Right. And everyone's still there being like how to fix this. It's like, so does it feel like that kind of was the type of stuff you were talking about absolutely right look because the thing is um it is way easier to be against

something than to be for something and most of the time like most people's affection for a politician is based nowadays especially on what they're against more than what they're for yeah and so everybody can be very precise about what they're against when you get them to actually say what they're for suddenly a coalition breaks into like 50 different factions. Yeah, because people are like, I'm not for that. And you're like, okay, well, not that then. Yeah, exactly. That's right.

And it's kind of like, you know, think about all the places you are not versus the place you are. It's kind of like that, but in ideological space rather than physical space, you know. So, you know, part of what I was trying to do with with uh you know v1 of the network state and so just you know for the audience if they don't know go primer yeah yeah so go to the network state.com it's a new book that um that i just wrote can i describe it and you tell me sure sure this is what i thought like essentially you're saying if the way that you describe it is you're not like crazy bullish on america as being like the sole center of everything moving forward and then with you kind of see the world as like centralized versus decentralized and what it looks like moving forward

is people sort of form communities online and essentially they could even like buy land and have presidents and stuff like that. And that's kind of what you think the future might look like. Or if it does look like something like that, you outlined how it will happen. Yeah. So one thing I want to. Yes, definitely. Definitely in the ballpark and close.

But I want to kind of offer a few. Of course. Asterix, whatever. Yeah. So I would say I'm definitely pro-american values in the sense that there's certain universal values of which the united america was the best representative of those you know fair play equality under the law rule of law you know um you know abiding by contracts treating people with all that type of stuff you know which uh has unfortunately

you're like is is that going away it stuff you know which uh has unfortunately you're like is is that going away it is unfortunately going away to some extent you're getting more tribal you're getting people mad at each other we just moved here yeah that's right i know we moved here from canada where it's one degree worse so in sort of the same way that that torch was passed from arguably from greece to rome and then after a long delay from like Rome to the UK and UK to the US right like and each person being an imperfect messenger you know there's uh I think the next torch pass is uh from the Americas to the internet the internet is not the same as America people think of it as the same but it's really not the same and in fact in many ways it's more um it is to the internet is to the americas what the

americas were to the old world of europe it is for example it's a more global kind of thing there's more people there from all over the world uh you have you go from common law of the uk to the constitution of the u.s to the smart contract of the blockchain you just get more precise about what you're doing right so it's both more capitalist and more inclusive you know so a new frontier it's a new frontier right so it kind of if you think it's like v3 right and one way i think wait what's v3 just the third version version three okay yeah version three point i thought it was like you know no yeah yeah so it's a it's not a podcast abbreviation that's right so. So, I mean, one way of thinking about that, I mentioned this, and it's something that most people don't have what we call priced in, right? What is not priced in, for example, is the fact that the majority of English speakers online in the next 10 years or so are going to be Indian.

Why? Because about a billion-something Indians have just gotten online, and many Indians speak speak english and many more are quickly learning english due to being online indians crush it well there's some indians who are quite good you know i mean not all of them are quite good and but the thing is that that internet unlike the chinese internet is not air gapped from the american internet the chinese internet is its own world right like because the great fire they've got they've got a galapagos islands ecosystem where they've got different versions of everything and things are you know you've got you know fish with feathers everything is like all their own apps that are essentially like the apps we use but just specifically like yes though though it is

like we chat but but uh you know what is what's useful there's a book called AI Superpowers by Kai-Fu Lee okay it came out right before the pandemic it's it's now about a few years old but it'll give you a snapshot of this sort of Galapagos Islands ecosystem where, for example, one of the biggest companies in China is like the Chinese version of Groupon. It's called Meituan. But it did a lot more. Imagine if Groupon executed extremely well, right? Nothing against Groupon, but, you know, the American version did only like so-so.

The Chinese version had like amazing willpower CEOs and, you know, or CEO and did extremely well. That wasn't just they like a deal better? It wasn't just deal better. They do a lot of other stuff right? Were they before Groupon? I think they were at first a Groupon clone but now they far exceeded that. Groupon had like the most insane

hype at the time. Everybody's like what is this thing? And now it's like yeah I get five dollars off of sandwich. Some Broadway show I didn't even really want to go to. And you couldn't even cash it in anymore. Well it's interesting though Andrew Mason's original I mean look even really want to go to. And you couldn't even cash it in anymore. Well, it's interesting, though. Andrew Mason's original, I mean, look, it's hard to build a business and so on. And the fact that he got it to public is good. But, yes, there was a huge amount of hype about it 10 years ago.

But the entire concept of crowdfunding, having a crowdfunded deal tip over if you have enough collective action online. You know, he had actually, Andrew Mason had started the thing as um the point which was like this uh attempt to try to get people to cooperate online to do something together we found was that it's easiest to cooperate to get them to buy something at that time that was like 10 12 years ago perhaps you might be able to get them to cooperate to do something of more significance now today 10 12 years later when there's a lot more tools are being developed you know so but to your point right so yes i'm not that bullish on the particular state as a guarantor of those values, but I am bullish on those values.

So how do we actually work around that? How do we actually, you know, preserve some sort of global rule of law? You know, one way I put it, I had this article that came out in Foreign Policy a few months ago, and it's like, you know, the U.S. is less and less a guarantor of the rules-based order. China doesn't even pretend to be. You know, it is essentially just it's self-interested for the Han. You know, you can do a deal. Yeah, they're almost like kind of similar.

But one's like, yeah, that's the deal. And the other is like, no, we're not like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Right. So I talked about how, you know, there's this weird convergence of the two things. You know, in China, they call it human flesh search and here we call it cancellation okay they call that that's what they called that yeah it's it I mean transfer just think about what that sounds like they call it human flesh search culture well look at these comedians talking about human flesh search culture

yeah so human flesh search basically you know it's a very evocative term it's like you know there's this guy online he said something wrong and so then these when he went to amsterdam he said he was doing a bit of a human foot well okay sure so so this is a different version so this is like uh this is this is the unfun version i guess so um basically they find somebody saying something bad online and then all of these chinese netizens their equivalent of 4chan just goes and trawls through to find who this person is where they are it's like pawing through all of the flesh of all the humans to find that one person who said some thought crime, and then the whole internet

piles on them, right? That's what happened to Uncle Roger. Yeah, I guess so, yeah. Lots of people, I'm sure. Yeah, this comedian who was on our show, but the same thing happened. He said something about off-color about Taiwan, like a joke or something. Oh, yeah, yeah. And he had a whole PR fiasco. Right, exactly. So there's analogs of all this stuff on the Chinese internet, but it's And like he had a whole PR fiasco and. Right.

Exactly. So, so there's analogs of all this stuff on the Chinese internet, but it's often like the inverse. For example, you're not, you're not criticized for being, you know, too nationalist, but not for not being nationalist enough. Okay. Yeah, of course. So they have in their own way gone to this ultra right ethnic nationalist level since xi jinping took office just to you know quantify this because it's less visible to us

you know being outside on the order of 90 percent of like governors and so on in china were like replaced like the plipro the standing committee uh there's various facts and figures i'll probably like tweet afterwards to get the exact numbers but something that if i recall correct like 57 out of 63 of a particular group were replaced by Xi Jinping going into like 2017. Cleaned house. Cleaned house, right? It's like sports.

Well, yeah. So about like 90% of people were just like replaced like this. And then you started really seeing the change in attitude where the sort of more quiet internationalist capitalist attitude of the, you know, Deng, Jiang, Hu era, era you know those are like the three leaders of china prior to uh prior to xi jinping um that kind of sort of quieter multi-lateralist like we're just making stuff and selling it to the world hide your you know hide your strength and bide your time that'll gone now so so-called wolf warrior diplomacy where they're just very aggressive wolf warrior is like the chinese rambo? It's become very popular over there.

So China has their big movie that's like Rambo? Yeah, Wolf Warrior 2. If you've never seen it. And he's fighting for China? Yeah, so go watch it because it is something where it is like Rambo, except it's the Americans that are the bad guy. Oh, you know what? I saw a preview of it because it's such it's like a the biggest movie right

and the whole thing is yeah america's the bad guy yeah they're fighting against america i love that guy as a dad that's like frank stallone like it's like exactly the same yeah so like wolf warrior 2 or more recently the battle of lake changjin right that's the one i saw yeah okay right so both of those were like i think number one in the chinese box office i think battle of lake changjin is now number one globally. Even as Hollywood is sort of tanking, China has sort of taken over many aspects of 20th century America. It's got this gigantic, probably the single largest market, all those kinds of things. And it basically shows, again, all of the Hollywood, you know, techniques,

but, you know, the ominous music plays on top of, you know american military yeah okay it is disorienting i mean that's how like a lot of people here would probably like to make american movies too yeah but that's true except the difference is i feel that when they're made in the u.s there's also an american good guy yeah yeah right there's there's the activist or what have you who stands up to the military right exactly what it is that's right it's up to those people uh storming the capital correct so the problem is the rainbow flags on them as a ceremony what happened okay right exactly so but the problem and solution are both coming from within the house so therefore it's like it's one thing but when you see it just totally overseas it's quite a different that is a different hierarchy a different tribe versus this tribe old school america well yeah okay right so so now the thing is it's quite a different that is a different hierarchy a different tribe versus this tribe old school america well yeah okay right so so now the thing is it's worth it's worth watching this

because um it's just uh it's just getting a sense of temperature check on where other cultures are at right yeah uh and you know this is something which is um i i find it interesting because i mean for example can you most people don't know how china got rich do you know how china got rich or rich manufacturer iphones well so that's part of it right but like i mean they were communist yeah how did they what happened they like opened up the markets but yeah but what what exactly do you like no i don't know i just thought they kind of i think it was like a lot of like bootleg dvds sure so what happened was ding xiaoping who was uh a communist revolutionary also but he was purged multiple times managed to win power in what was effectively a coup in the mid-1970s he took over and without changing the brand of communism started doing things that were these so-called

special economic zones um starting with one across the causeway from from hong kong called shenzhen that worked and he did he called it communism even though it was capitalism okay and uh that grew like a weed and so then he started cloning it across the east coast of of china and uh you know more special accounts cropped up and eventually you know he was able to essentially turn around the country and he took over he took power at like i think age 78 and most people thought he's going to die like soon but he managed to run it until like his 90s and then he transitioned power in the early 90s over to jang si min and uh and then that kind of that like began so he was like a startup founder at age 78 right okay which is i mean just think about the stress of running china okay now there's lots of criticism one can make of dang i think ezra vogel's biography is probably you know one of the best on this but um it is there's

also if you want to just quick article the npr has this uh article and it's called the secret document that transformed china one thing that people don't get is you know when you talk about what communism was capitalism was punishable by death okay just to give you a sense before deng you know became the then he made it like we're basically going to do it but we're going to call it the old thing exactly he had the saying very famous saying black cat white cat doesn't matter if it catches mice but before deng uh you know there was a there's a province called xiao geng and there are a bunch of farmers there and um you know the communism was interpreted in not just in china but other places to mean that there wasn't even any personal property or anything.

The teeth in your head, they belong to the collective. OK, so all these farmers, they were like on basically just starving. But if they kept any grain for themselves, then, you know, the the the guy, the commissar who's overlooking that district would notice. Right. So these guys did is they did something worst. Yeah, right. So so these guys is these come in and worst yeah that's right so so these guys is these come in and you're like looking extra chubby and you're like nothing yeah exactly that's right so because so essentially what these guys did these farmers they signed a secret contract which was itself contracts were illegal okay they signed a secret contract that basically said

okay look we're all gonna take some of the the grain that we uh make this time and uh if we are killed for this then the ones who are not killed will take care of our children okay that's the kind of that was the level basic profit sharing and a contract was so taboo in china that they like signed this secret document and hid it in their their roof okay and so what happened once once they had the screen and all these guys once they could keep some of what they earned wow they had a gigantic bumper harvest so of course the authorities were like hmm you seem to have a lot of grain nowadays yeah and so they were going to get killed but uh ding raised up his hand and was like okay no we're doing the new communism this time right it's it's capitalism now we call it communism right yeah yeah but that's like the reason that

story is kind of important to know it is just like how insane this stuff got. Right. And importantly, you know, the the red terror, the excesses of communism in the Soviet Union happened in the 1910s, you know, 1930s. Right. But there was like a lag and it became like insane in China within living memory. You know, in the 1960s, 1970s, you had the Great Leap Forward. You had the 1950s, 1950s, 1960 had the Great Leap Forward. You had the, well, 1950s, Great Leap Forward. 1960s and 70s, the Cultural Revolution. So within living memory, this thing that had sort of burned its way out through the population of the Soviet Union, which had settled into sort of this Brezhnev, like, it wasn't as murderous, was just like carving a swath through China in the 60s and 70s.

It's still very live. You know, probably, you know, people listening to this podcast were alive when people were being killed for capitalism in China. Okay. Okay. Now, from that to Chinese tech billionaires in one generation is so insane. Yeah, that's wild. That, you know, you have to, you have to sort of understand what kind of turnaround happened in their society, you know, just to understand like how much of a head of steam they have.

They feel highly motivated and what have you. They, like they're, yeah, and they're. Like they're trying to catch up. Well, they're trying to catch up. Or take over. For example, yeah. So there's aspects of U.S. history that other people would consider very obscure that are now about 16, 19 or something like that. Other cultures pick through.

There's about 100 billion people who've ever lived. So you can pick through 100 billion lifetimes to find those things that kind of support your case and so what is china what's big in china the opium wars you know what the opium wars were yeah yeah so essentially like you know whether it's a british or actually the the americans were allied with them at one point this is called eight nations alliance um to essentially fight to deal drugs in china for profit and like addict the the population to it so and that yeah it's pretty easy to paint that as like the bad guys were coming in to try to get everyone addicted to drugs exactly that's right and so so essentially this stuff which is not stressed in the west is

big over there really big right well it's like some tiny thing that you kind of hear about it's a footnote in a history book here but it's like a huge front page daily even still because yes because they have like we remember shirts like kind of thing it's like a huge front page daily even still because yes because they have like we remember shirts like kind of thing it's politically useful right of course and so i talk about a lot of this in the book which is essentially you know you will essentially each regime will have propaganda that is useful to it that is not useful to the other side right and uh so it's not so much usually sometimes what they say is false sometimes what they say is true it's just not useful to the side so it doesn't even acknowledge it right and so what while the bigger the opium wars they don't really talk too much about mao and the great leap forward

and all that stuff they'll say mao was seven parts good and three parts bad why well at least he unified the country and he kicked out the japanese okay that's the well you know and he's good for that right uh you know he didn't have to do it quite that way that you know he was there were many other problems with that but that's very sugar-coated very sugar-coated extremely sugar they killed a few people yeah but what's everyone's gonna kill a few people what's interesting about it exactly exactly right so what's interesting about it is there's actually three very different groups that are all invested in the idea that China is, quote, communist. The first is the Chinese Communist Party itself, right, which wants to maintain that Deng's coup in the 1970s was like like continuous, right, that it was still the same same thing.

Right. The second are many Republicans who want to say, oh, the Chinese Communist Party, you know, right. republicans who want to say oh the chinese communist party you know right and the third are many tankies who project onto china look how good it's gone yeah exactly right so whereas really what they are is ultra-nationalist you know they they do use communist stuff they are doing like the so-called common prosperity doctrine where they're going after lots of rich guys but yeah that's like the alibaba guy and stuff yeah yes wasn't it that he sort of he had all these opinions and then like he disappeared for two months he came back and he was like got a little too big for his bridges that's right so one way exactly so one way of thinking about it is communism is whatever the chinese communist

party says it is okay and um what that means is basically um you know they're at the center of a network, and it could be Xinjiang. It could be Taiwan. It could be Hong Kong. It could be Falun Gong, which is like a religious movement. It could be the tech libertarianish capitalists of Jack Ma. It could be Bo X's like who's an ultra maoist and so and so forth there's various kinds of deviations from their center of opinion some are to the left some are to the right some are to the libertarian right doesn't matter anything

that deviates too far is not communist communism is whatever the chinese communist party says so what's the center of opinion in like north america democracy right or the american democrat party says it is is i think i already say so yes because you know it's so funny because yeah that was like one of the questions that kept like i kept asking people and no one had a good answer because i was like i always hear people say they're against democracy and i'm like i really i'm like i don't get what that means because everything they say it's like stuff they do too it's like so are you like they're just like i guess use like trump the election thing but it's like they did this i don't get it okay okay so let's let's take it

let's use let's start with different words and then come back to this one right um something like christianity or communism or capitalism or democracy is such a capacious word that it can contain both x and its opposite for example right christianity originally you know the original christianity around the time of the romans was a slave revolt that tore down the empire later that same word christianity was used to uh basically justify the so-called holy roman empire which styled itself as successor to the roman empire and it was like a christian fusion right um the concept of a christian king was sort of oxymoronic at least for the early christians right like this was like a this was like a slave revolt basically right and uh you know when you The concept of a Christian king was sort of oxymoronic, at least for the early Christians, right?

Like this was like a slave revolt basically, right? And, you know, when you think about communism, communism also has meant both killing all the capitalists and capitalists joining the Communist Party more recently, right? And when you think about capitalism itself, think about what, you know, 1800s agrarian capitalism versus 1900s industrial capitalism versus you know 2000s technological capitalism i mean it's not quite the opposite but it's very different right you know the kinds of things you know how your country or like the tech version now versus the tech version exactly that's what i mean so i mean the technological capitalism of today in the 2000s right yeah right so in the same way like democracy means many different things for example one thing that you can do if you go to google uh google engrams or google books actually

and there's a thing where you can type in and look at old words i think it's engrams or google books right i think it's google engrams you can type in republic comma democracy and what you'll see is republic people used to refer to the u.s as a republic and that's like declined it's more of like a twitter thing that people say to argue now well so what you're gonna is republic, people used to refer to the U.S. as a republic. And that's like declined. It's more of like a Twitter thing that people say to argue now. Well, so what you're going to get is, you're going to get probably, in my view, you're going to get the Republicans starting to say, our republic. I will actually, now that you say that, I do notice there's more people on the right who refer to it as a republic.

Exactly. Almost like a correction, because they're always like, this is a democracy. And they're like, it's not. It's not supposed to be. And to show what side they're on, I think is a democracy. And they're like, it's not. Well, or. It's not supposed to be. And to show what side they're on, I think, like almost verbally, you know. It's like the patriot thing. Yeah, yeah. Only right wing people call themselves patriots on Twitter.

Yeah, exactly. People on the left do never refer to themselves as patriots, even though they might be patriotic. Sometimes like politicians will say, like, if you were an actual patriot, you would do this. Yes, yes. And so and that's like this sort of double reversal where you try to use the other guy's language on them but uh and by the way on this like you know i think of democrat republican is becoming like sunni versus shiite so i don't want any part of it i just want to be best theory well it's actually so let me actually put some meat on those bones right uh

something like 96 of democrats uh are not married to republicans okay and if you look there if you google uh for example uh vox actually has a link to google vox uh democrat republican network diagram polarization i think 2011 okay and we will see you might put this in the you know show notes or afterwards is um a relatively unified you know roughly bipartisan congress in the 1940s that pulls apart gradually into two groups that only vote with each other straight party line votes over and over again the only you know bipartisan votes are for like bailouts or bombings or things like that okay i'm sure you know when they do something both stupid and evil it's bipartisan yeah term right and so the leadership is pulling into really two

different groups and um there's a cgr 2017 article it's like bright part change right wing media ecosystem that shows a similar diagram not at the level of congress but level the population again at the network level you can see red and blue becoming literally separate networks right now what that what that means is it's not one nation under god indivisible it's two nations the democrat and republican nations i will say that like i do see in real life a lot of people where like the dude's sort of like a little more right wing and the girl's sort of more a little liberal and it kind of it seems to work yeah but but if you look at least if you look at the numbers on this they Who they actually vote for. When they marry.

It's more about the cities. Yeah, exactly. It's becoming tribal, right? It's literally becoming something where ideology becomes biology in one generation. Meaning, basically, it's like Protestant Catholic. It's like Sunni Shiite. This is not something, if you look at all the graphs. Just like any other one.

Yeah, exactly. It's becoming two ethnic groups. Like Republicans marry Republicans and Democrats marry Democrats. And they live in different places. That's the sort that's happening, right? any other one yeah exactly it's it's becoming two ethnic groups like republicans marry republicans and democrats marry democrats and they live in those different places that's the sort that's happening right that's when they're talking people are talking about the divorce like the people like national divorce national divorce exactly so divorce has already happened in the cloud we're seeing it start to materialize on the land basically like twitter and truth social yeah right exactly so exactly in the cloud you already have these social networks you start to

have apps that are right coded apps and podcasts and stuff that are left coded, because you have foundational premises that divide these worldviews, you know, and, and then you what's interesting is the reason one way you can show that's really just tribes is during COVID, Democrats probably can switch sides several times. You know, at first it was extremely, you know, right coded to think, oh, the coronavirus could be an issue because, you know, but it's a huge switch. Actually, yeah, it's a huge switch. Right. Like you can't you know, you can't explain this by some reference to kind of immutable right and left at first it was something where the china virus was a huge deal and it was racist talk about the china virus then switch sides and then you know trump was saying you know we need to slow down the testing this is not a big deal etc and you know the the left is saying oh my god you know we need to test more etc total switch from it's just to oppose him do you think just to oppose him just to oppose each other both to oppose you kind of predicted like i don't even want to get yes yes yes he's right about

everything well i i i i'm not always i mean you know some of my investments work some of them don't that's how i kind of record them but i do think i got this one correct mostly um the is that what happened is trump came out in favor of vaccines and then you know calma harris and others said that they would potentially not take a trump vaccine because it'd been rushed through so many people said that so you said that during a debate yeah during debate yeah and then it flipped again where now the right is you know like anti-vax and you know some of them are skeptical of the germ theory of disease and the left wanted masks for four-year-olds forever or whatever right and so i mean it is not necessarily that

like oh both sides have a piece of truth it could be that both sides are actually like gone in some ways you know and you just kind of be like okay just let them slug it out you know like as so is that where you see like as an individual you're just like that like why unless it like what like why get involved in this yeah right that's just gonna go on forever once see the thing is like when we read if you really believe in one of those things and maybe that's right so when you when you read about other societies and like space and time do you want to get in the middle of the protestants and catholics when they're arguing over the whether the wafer is the body of christ or not right yeah like i don't want to get in the

middle of that right like slug it out you know good luck right you know may the best man win you know and just just basically be away from that same with like you know sunni shia do you want to be in the middle of the iran iraq conflict his girlfriend arguing for a piece of cake or something yeah exactly you know like that um no yeah but do you think that there's some people who will essentially say like oh it's uh it must be nice to not have to to be able to sit on the sidelines because for them to go this is like real world well yeah yeah so here's the thing first is the folks who say that are usually uh those are the folks who are usually also complaining about white privilege they tend to be the most privileged whites yes

you know so to speak right and so you know it's like barnard bam you could just be like okay which private school sidley okay which one did you go you know but also like anytime like anyone i feel like when you're trying to do anything like uh moving forward at least in your own life anyone that starts being like oh i like yeah i would do that but i have like some moral you're just like those are the people that tune out immediately but there's an immediate counter argument to that by the way and you know you know the game of slaps in new york like you go like this like this you know on top of each other right so what they're trying to do is you're putting forth an argument and they're asserting a dominance move they're trying to say you're a bad person right they're not arguing true false

they're saying you're bad oh it must be nice to be so privileged that you don't have to be concerned about this and then so you know you can try arguing true false but you have to actually go back with they're a bad person well actually um the rest of the world doesn't want to get involved in another white and white war so white and white violence why don't you guys get get and all these other poor people around the world can can go and build up their own economies right and uh you know so the thing is that somebody like that essentially they're like uh they don't even realize how aggressive they're being necessarily verbally what they're trying to do is insult you and gain status and you just can't let that you just have to do i always feel

like too i think that's exactly right and then also you're like sort of like a casualty to their agenda like you're not even on the same wavelength it's just like you're you're trying to do something and it's just like a little bit in the way for them so yeah you know what i mean it's like so you should not like don't even like these people are irrelevant they're they're actually very a good way to think about it we know the term greedy right these people are very status greedy okay they want to always have the highest status in any interaction. They're not willing to just engage with you as a peer and so on. They want to assert a dominance move of you're a sinner somehow. Oh, and they've got a practice repertoire really of sort of verbal tools, scalpels and hammers and so on, right? That actually were kind of

developed in academia to win various kinds of faculty lounge battles okay nerd battles yeah yeah yeah exactly so so all of these battles in like humanities you know departments and so on those weapons spilled out onto twitter they work a little less especially like it's like the debating stuff like the amount of people who you go on twitter and just the average person on twitter just knows every you know like debating Latin, debating term. And you're like, why do you all know this? Right, exactly, because it's memetic, right? In fact, actually, I had this.

I'm just going to read this tweet to you just because it kind of illustrates something. Hold on. My dude, bad take. This ain't it, chief. Read the room and do better. I know you hope she sees this, this bro but as a haver of good opinions you're posting cringe so stop licking them boots log off touch grass and delete your account okay it's like all of them in just one it's all they're just one right and and so the thing about this is

i posted this that's how i tweet so so the thing is once you kind of post them all together right um and you know people at first didn't get that it was parodic because it was it was really like 11 cliches or whatever like a parody oh okay yeah so it was like 11 cliches like back to back right yeah and what i call this i call this down talk you know it's like this condescending tone yikes you missed yikes yikes yes big yikes uh you know uh you you know that's a quiet part out loud uh stay in your lane not a good look take the l ratio it's a it's a person that was like a doll that you pull the thing and it only has like 11 uh like phrases that come out yeah that's right so so basically we're it's like gpt3 don't that is it's like a ai thing yeah the ai the uh similar like like a

chatbot yeah yeah that's right so if you take not a good look take the l in ratio you can combine that into not a good look man take the l already you're getting ratioed it's like an algebra of put downs yeah okay is that going to be a shirt available in your merch store something well i the thing is what i what i do is i you know when you distill all of that right and you can put it all together and you can see because they're all spread out. Yeah, so what happens? Yeah, you realize that that's almost like

people learning words that they're repeating. Somebody came up with that, and it was like a little verbal knife for close quarters combat that fits in the 140 or 280 character environment of Twitter. And so because that little verbal knife kind of works there, it's like copied and cloned,

this digital knife that you can just stab. Like in a video game. It's like a karate move karate it's like a karate move it's like a karate move it's exactly right so it's like a verbal like this right but then you can often go meta and you can actually block grab you know like you know neo and the matrix so you can turn that that knife into just digital bits by just quoting like 50 of them and then that person it's clear that they're like cliche it'd be like a like a movie where the villain, they just had to show a mirror to them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. They'd go to dust.

So in the same way, those are like the dumb versions, right? The smarter versions are check your privilege, toxic masculinity, all that type of stuff. Higher stakes. Yeah, they're higher stakes because they have a bunch of theory behind them. And all all that theory delegitimizes the target on the other side it's like is academia there's all these papers and stuff behind it because you know using a phrase like that is bringing in reinforcements right yeah they're they're citing effectively scripture to say why you are a sinner and why they should have

higher status than you right go ahead okay no i was just gonna say so all that's like yeah that that's like such accurate description of like kind of how the internet culture works or whatever and then so you're kind of saying if you're like a person all this is happening and obviously yeah you want to have like some tools to like defend yourself and like argue against it and whatever especially in your personal life probably but like then you see that is like a thing that's not going away and it's kind of just generally like eating at the foundation of America and then what actually happens is this kind of like after America thing? Yeah, so let's talk about that.

So basically, people have, I mean, part of that whole thing that we're describing, it predated social media, by the way. People blame it all on social media and so on. But that dynamic predated social media. There was cable news. There's other stuff. In many ways, you can trace it all the way back to there's a gigantic centralization arc up to 1950,

and now we're in the middle of a huge decentralization arc that's happening even faster than the centralization. So you go railroads and mass media and mass production and the age of the factory where everything is choke-pointed through General Motors and General Mills and General Electric. That's like the mid-20th century. production and the age of the factory where like everything is choke-pointed through general motors and general mills and general electric right that's that's like the mid-20th century one telephone company at t and two superpowers us and usr and and three television stations everything's choke-pointed in 1950 something and then it starts all breaking apart as you go from the transistor

cable news the personal computer the, the internet, the smartphone, cryptocurrency, it just starts disintegrating and decentralizing, you know. And what's happened, though, is all of these institutions that were built for this giant centralizing era are not built for this era. So they're just flailing, you know, they're massively overbuilt for what it is that we're in, you know, and at least a lot of Western institutions. So So the question is then what does the other side look like, right? And I think many ways you can't turn back the hands of the clock in a normal sense, but you can turn them all the way around. You can just turn it all ding and then you start something new. And so the book, The Network State, what it's about is fundamentally

finding your community online. I'll give the short version and then I'll give the long version. Finding your community online, um i'll give the short version i'll give the long version finding your community online a highly aligned online community organizing them to first do online things and then do a very important offline thing which is crowdfunding territory to live together with right that territory doesn't all have to be in one place importantly it could be even two people in a group house okay or it's a small group house you know what i mean like two people in a in an apartment or 10 people in a group house or 30 people getting like a cul-de-sac of houses next to each other those pockets around the world you start coalescing from a bunch of atomized nodes in the cloud to start being little pockets around on the earth go ahead no one the one thing that

actually i felt like i didn't get is because so if you like think of how that sort of starts to play out and you have these communities and you're like what if you bought land what if you had a thing and that i could see how that could be it but then i guess the other part is like wouldn't like the countries just say well you you're not a like part of that country part of this country you never pay tax like when people try seasteading or things like that people can't just move to any country they want if that like location happens to be also what are the percentage odds that those just or how many of them at least just turn into like cults where there's the one guy at the top having sex with everybody else and i i there's like a million if there's like i guess it depends

yeah i guess if there's how many of them yeah i'm sure that if there was a country like a little island with like 50 people that maybe would be like that too right you're you're good you're going to see what does the government do like wouldn't they just say like yeah this whole thing's not happening yeah so so right so several visas canceled gotta go home totally totally so several so first of all um you know the cult kind of thing is usually some a group that's like isolated from the world they usually a cult does not want to talk to the rest of the world so it's right this is more like um you know actually the early americas were settled by lots of groups that wanted to be an example to the world right that's a huge difference you know to be an example

to the world for example like the oneida commune that was started in like northern new york or um there you know you know if you think about pennsylvania william penn's community you know the the puritans uh there were a bunch of you know groups that went about pennsylvania william penn's community you know the the puritans uh there were a bunch of you know groups that went and settled the midwest and they were all essentially either religious or purpose-driven communities okay and uh they just recruited people there and they wanted to build what they saw of as the better life and serving as an example to others okay okay so that is actually how how America was built in the 1800s. There's a good book by Charles Nordhoff

called Communistic Societies of the United States. Back in the 1800s, at that time, communistic did not mean communism. Like, the word got... It was a commune. It made a commune. Like a kubutz or something. Yeah, it was voluntary and opt-in.

That's a key thing, right? As opposed to just take all the money. It was collective, but it was a voluntary collective. Very important. So I guess maybe to start, you would have to just still pay the tax in this, but you're part of this other thing too? Right, exactly.

So essentially the thing is, there's a whole spectrum of levels of sovereignty. Maybe your tax on the one could be tax deductible. Yeah, so let's, well, right. So now let's talk about this for a second. So basically, with respect to cryptocurrency first, let's do that first, then let's come to this okay with cryptocurrency there are crypto and fiat exchanges right you can have bitcoin you can sell

it for u.s dollars and vice versa ethereum for you know uh yen all all these different cryptocurrencies and fiat currencies around the world and the existence of cryptocurrency does not mean or has not meant that fiat law completely goes away, right? Nor that fiat currency completely goes away. There is an interface between them, which is complicated. And it varies in different countries. There's regulations like KYC, all this stuff. There's countries that have tried to ban it.

There's countries that have now started to embrace it. There's states like Wyoming, which have allowed you to now incorporate on-chain using Ethereum. There's states like El Salvador that have adopted Bitcoin. So there's a spectrum of responses by legacy states, as well as ways that you can take this new system and start docking it to the old system. And over time, the old system, if it can't ban the new system, which it can't for various reasons that I'll get into,

or at least it's hard for it to, because this is decentralized and there's people from around the world who believe in it, and's built to be hard to ban if the old system can't ban the new system there's parts of it or at least if it all of it can't ban it china might be able to ban other countries can't then it starts sort of seeing some of the merit bending to flexing with integrating with or being transformed by the new system okay that we're in the middle of now we're about 10 years into that right about 20 30 years into the internet all the politicians are on the internet now have we noticed yeah every government website is on the internet the news is true social yeah well or whatever right exactly the ones we follow are fine fine fine right yeah so or or twitter or whatever right yeah and so

the the new system the internet which was poo-pooed and dismissed and you know twitter is this totally ludicrous thing of tweeting your breakfast. And now every single politician in the entire world knows the importance of Twitter. Right. That was 15 years. OK, 15 years for. Yeah, I guess that's true. It's not that long. Right.

So it's the same thing again. Well, right. So now if you talk about not cryptocurrencies and fiat currencies, but crypto countries and fiat countries, what does that exchange, what does that surface look like? Right. And the surface looks complicated. Why? Because your crypto country, if it has 100,000 people, I've got a visual on my website. If you go to the network state in one image, 100,000 people, they could have piling up all over the world, right? You have this group over here. It's like a town of 1,000. Here's a group house of 50 you have little clusters and you know

all around the world some of them are in south america some of them are in the pacific islands etc etc okay and so let's say you're in 100 legacy countries these hundred how do you get recognized as a country i'm coming to that yes okay so you have a hundred thousand people they're spread over let's say a hundred legacy countries right so first of all you don't just have four directions to expand you have 400 because you can go northeast south and west on all 100 of these clusters okay just like google's offices google has offices all around the world you walk in it's a piece of google you swipe a card you can see it right it's like an embassy yeah it's like an embassy starbucks all around the world you're in the same place in different places right right we take that for granted right so is that i mean

there is probably countries where there's like a thing dividing the i mean alaska what's like alaska hawaii right yeah hawaii is 2 000 miles away from the united continental u.s but we think of it as the same place because the people there think of themselves as part of the u.s and the people in the u.s think of why he's part of it yeah so really it's that software install in people's heads that merges them as well as people outside say okay that's u.s territory versus not right so it's that software install in people's heads that merges them as well as people outside say, okay, that's U.S. territory versus not, right? So it's really just writing the right bits to people's heads that turn something, these borders, real. And you are more connected with the people in your online networks in a lot of ways than you are your neighbor.

With those neighbors? Exactly, right? Okay. So now, you know, Indonesia, for example, if you've ever seen a map of Indonesia, lots of islands separated by ocean. Okay. But they're the same country. Okay. What if you have lots of islands separated by internet?

Yeah. Now they can be the same country. At least think of themselves as such. Of course, for the first one or five or ten or whatever years, they'll be made fun of. Everybody will laugh at them. Right. And is there like, is it the UN or something that says like, okay, fine, you're a country? I don't think the UN as a whole. How do you apply to be a country? Because do you apply to be a country because once you apply to be a country i guess you could leave this like i moved to america like i could be like yo i'm not a resident of america i'm a resident

isn't that the whole sovereign citizens thing well so sovereign citizens is yeah okay go ahead they all they just they always get tased yeah exactly that's right every video is just them getting tased that's right because because a citizen can't be sovereign right you need a collective to be sovereign right you and what army equals you in what country yeah right that's a fundamental so you know the thing is i think to you know to caricature the progressive doesn't get the concept of starting new countries but the libertarian doesn't get why you need diplomatic recognition you kind of need both you need both the individual and the collective and you need to fuse them in an interesting way, right? This is, you know, crypto has also done

this. Crypto has made progressives more libertarian and libertarians more progressive. Why progressives more libertarian? Well, you can start new currencies. It actually, this is a big thing. It's like an undeniable movement. Conversely, it makes libertarians more progressive because if you start any kind of crypto thing, you'll immediately realize, well, I need some kind of identity verification. I need some anti-fraud. I need to rebuild something that looks much like a state, even if it's a V2, and it's an improvement on it, I need to rebuild certain the aspects of the old world, right? So, you know, in the best case, both parties kind of learn something from that the old guy, you know, the old world learns the new world as possible, the new world realizes why

the old world had certain things their way, right? Sometimes you can only learn it by trying it yourself okay um i still think progress happens i don't think you come all the way full circle i think it's more like a helix where you you go up a level it's it's cyclical on the x and y plane but you know the z-axis you're going up okay but coming back to the sovereignty thing first let me give some precedence okay tuvalu dot tv domain did a deal with godaddy if you've ever registered something.tv, Tuvalu is getting some money. The country? The country. Yeah, I've never even heard that country, but I remember the.tv thing.

That was a country. Yes. Columbia, probably heard of Columbia. .co domain, they get some money for that. That's a deal that a country did with a company. It's digital property. It's.co is generating revenue for it. It's TLD. It's dot CEO is generating revenue for it. It's, it's TLD.

It's, it's got the rights to that. Nevada did a deal with Elon Musk for the Geiger factory. Okay. El Salvador has listed Bitcoin as a, or recognized Bitcoin as sovereign currency. Wyoming has recognized Ethereum based companies, so-called DAOs or not companies.

I have one of the city DAO. Okay. Lots of land. Awesome. All right. So like deeds or whatever. That right so just like just like countries have put their uh some of their processes online now they're starting to put some you know sovereigns are starting to put some of their processes on chain right both currencies and incorporations of so

those are examples i just gave several examples of quote diplomatic recognition between a state or a country and a company or a currency right so it is not unprecedented this has happened these kinds of deals have happened there's more i can rattle off you know for example boeing in south carolina for example or amazon hq2 right not that these are without controversy but disney world's almost like it's disney world was like this and they had conflict with DeSantis and so on and so forth on this, right? So the thing is that once you realize, okay, these kinds of deals are possible between cloud and land entities, right? Between companies and currencies and communities over here and cities and states and countries over here, right? Given that those deals are possible, that's like the crypto fiat exchange.

That concept goes from just cryptocurrency and fiat currency to general interface between cloud entities and land entities. Okay. And that actually now, how does that, brass tacks, how does that happen here? Okay. So you have this community, as I mentioned, you've got 100,000 people worldwide. They're spread out over 100 legacy countries, fiat countries. Okay. And what happens is you've got

effectively dual citizens everywhere right they're a citizen of but only a resident oh yeah yeah so it's a resident of right they're a citizen in well they're citizen of let's say fiji or uh el salvador or the u.s or whatever you but they're a netizen of this netizen right of this proto network state right and so the thing is like i'm a netizen of like netizen right of this proto network state right and so the thing is i'm a netizen of like the foreign hub like country well yeah so some you'd be proud of maybe some not so well i'm a it'll be like one of those ones where you go yeah don't put a stamp in that passport yeah yeah whatever but i'm actually a netizen of forjanistan something like that okay so so you're a citizen of x and you're netizen of y just

like you've got um fiat currency and cryptocurrency you have a fiat passport and a crypto passport now at first these are like parallel systems right the crypto passport is not recognized offline it's just some losers larping you know whatever right if you can build the number of simultaneous larpers into something that's not just one person or 10 or 100 or 1000, but 10 or 100,000. And doing so over a long period of time. Well, here's what I think is interesting. Do you know how many countries in the UN are less than 100,000 people in size? Oh, no, but I would guess 17. It's about 12. Pretty good. Pretty good. It's pretty good. Right? How many are between 100,000 and a million?

What, like 50? It's about 26. Okay. Right? So, and then if you say between a million and 10 million, it's like another 60. Okay? So, most countries are small countries. Yeah. Okay?

There's only 14 countries in the UN that are over 100 million people. Okay. Most people live in big countries, but most countries are actually small countries. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, now, phrased this way, it doesn't seem that hard to build something in the cloud that has the number of people the amount of land because the tax base of one of these small places one of these small especially when you're having like big crypto billionaires come in or what have you right exactly you have talent though not just wealth that's very important that was i think that was this sorry that

was the smartest thing that he that like i resonated so much because you're like the same thing that happened in canada it's like everyone just has to leave like you know so much of like the town does go outside the industry right now and that describes like in canada they leave the country in entertainment they leave the industry in like silicon valley they're leaving the like mainstream tech industry like everything you think of all of the best people you can think of that are doing the best things are like leaving the like main system well yeah oftentimes this but also like canada i remember i don't know what exactly when but there was they were floating around the notion that they were gonna like take turks and cacos and it was gonna become a part of canada oh really i don't remember that it was like probably 15 years ago i don't think it was going to become a part of Canada. Oh really? I don't remember that.

It was like probably 15 years ago. I don't think it was far enough but I think everybody yeah get rid of Quebec but everybody they were like we'll have a warm place that we can go

and it'll just be like Hawaii. It'll just be like Hawaii. Yeah. Like exactly what they do in Hawaii except not by force. Right. But so could that

theoretically what you're saying with this nation state where this this cloud based nation state or network state, sorry, would just go and say, hey, we have the resources now. If there's a country that would like to volunteer for this. Yes, but here's the thing. You could become this country with the physical, we use your physical. Oh, especially if it's like the, imagine it was like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and you and like guys like that.

And then you go and you're like, yo, Bermuda, we have, or like whatever or like whatever like you know we have a deal that you can't refuse we're gonna so so i would i would i think something like that could work but there's an important very important asterisk or edit on that which is one of the reasons that bitcoin ethereum have the success they do is they have dual citizens in every country okay you have american bitcoiners and you have chinese bitcoiners and you have uh you know French and you have you know Brazilian ethereumers and so on and so forth right so these are people who are native to that country who understand that culture who speak that language who are friends there and can argue on behalf of Bitcoin ethereum as Brazilians or as Americans or what have you in the in the native idiom of their local culture. The fundamental concept is they're dual citizens. Okay, this is also the same thing about any

network state it those hundred thousand people have subgroups all around the world, right? And so the ideal would be that let's say you have 1000 Fijians, okay, people, people who are in small countries are particularly good to join network states. Why? Because if you have a thousand Fijians making the case for why Fiji should recognize this network state, that is actually- I see what you're saying because you have like, let's say you have like 100,000 people there and like 60,000 of them are like, yo, we want to have this.

Yeah, exactly. Crucially, if the more of them that are members of the country that you're seeking diplomatic recognition from the better it will be because it's not just some rich guys from out of town coming in and plunking down right you want it's not like bitcoin imperialism yeah exactly that's right so so the thing is bitcoin is everywhere and nowhere and so as such there's people from all walks of life in all different countries who have identified with it, right? Okay. So this is key for diplomatic recognition is you need effectively dual citizens, like a citizen slash netizen, who is making the case for why this benefits.

Now, the thing about diplomatic recognition, by the way, is we don't usually think about it just like, I mean, 10 how much thought did you give to currencies not much it wasn't like a dynamic thing right now everybody at least everybody in crypto knows that a currency has you know three properties it is medium exchange uh you know store value unit of account okay and in the same way if the question of the 2010s was what is currency the question of the 2010 2020s is uh either what is a country or even better what is a nation like what is that unit because that thing in the cloud even before it has any land is a nation it's a group of people that think of themselves as a people that's what really this morning ideologically yeah ideologically culturally exactly you know like the entire concept of nation by the way i mean on you on the internet you talk about all the time like a community a community that's right

most people probably that's more important to them than whatever else yes the thing is that a community is like um it is if you take community and you put it on steroids you get a nation okay yeah and and the reason is a community could be like i don't know a game of thrones fan club or something like that it's a loose affiliation okay we all kind of like the show something like that right whereas a nation is basically um for example you've heard the term nation state yeah okay song by propaganda well yeah it's some it's a song with some punk okay okay yeah so right so so all right so the term nation state actually nation and state are different did you guys know what the difference is no okay so the the nation it's like the same root word as natality um it's it's the people it is uh like for example the japanese nation they have shared language and culture ethnicity

they're they're like a group right and the state's the government the state's the government so they're as different as labor and management okay okay so you could have the state over the japanese people be like america in 1946 was like occupying you know japan after world war ii so there's an american state above the japanese nation okay this is an old nation state when they're both the same yeah so the old concept of the nation state was different ethnic groups should be able to have their own government oh that is what it used to mean, right? And that's what gave rise to what we now call France,

and we now call Germany, we now call Italy. France was when they were like, gay people should have their own government. Well, so France actually, you know, the thing is that basically the, what we now think of as France, most people in what we now think of as France did not speak French before the French Revolution. Really?

Yeah, they spoke other languages, like other dialects, things that are kind of adjacent to french and what happened was uh the unified government of france installed new software effectively into everybody's brains and just uniformized it this is that but here's the curriculum for all schools and just yes exactly so just leveled it out and there's both good and bad at that obviously these old cultures were kind of like erased the good was you now had a large unit of people who all spoke the same language all had the same values because all being educated since early okay they all um you know transact in the same currency and so then france could go and crush all these folks so that actually led to german

unification led to italian unification and so this was like the kind of, you know, get big sort of imperative of the 1700s, 1800s. And you have that as like a company culture in Silicon Valley probably too, right? Right. Because if these small little groups didn't group up into a nation state, they would get crushed or they'd be forced. Or infighting. Yeah, or infighting, right? they'd get crushed or they'd be forced or infighting yeah or infighting right to be but so so this uh this stopped in a sense civil war because now you had these giant states but it meant more intra interstate war because these guys could fight each other and they're bigger and

they're bigger you know and when we have seen that there's this uh there's a un country called san marino it's this tiny thing of 30 000 people that's in what we think of as italy and you're like what is this thing why does it exist on the map and the answer is it sheltered garibaldi during italian unification and so they garibaldi like said okay i don't have to fold you into all of italy you can just kind of be your own thing so they maintain their sovereignty to the present day they're like one of the three enclaves in the world the other is like vatican city and lesotho how many people live there 30 000 people oh crazy see how small that is yeah right so that's tiny that's tiny. That's like, you know, there's a town on Long Island, it's probably bigger than that, right? Yeah. And so we get that's a UN country. So my point is that these

UN countries are often many of them are quite small, much smaller than you might think they have their status for historical reasons. And so a sufficiently motivated cloud community, will it'll get told no the first time, the second time, probably the fifth time, the tenth time, right? Yeah, and told no when you say, like, they're going to, what, make some sort of formal pitch to the UN? Well, not to the UN as a whole. So, assume the UN as a whole is very slow moving. But any individual country has a list of those other entities that it diplomatically recognizes. Now, the reason we don't think about this too much is, just as I said, with currencies, we thought of currencies currencies basically being fixed and now they've become incredibly dynamic you know these constants

have become variables over the last 10 years it's not just currency it's fiat or cryptocurrency okay things can conceivably go from nothing to becoming a global currency that's happening in our lifetime as hard as it is so in the same way um diplomatic recognition we usually think of as a zero or one thing either something is recognized by all the 190 something countries un countries of the world or none of them we think of a zero one but there are countries in the middle like israel like taiwan right which have some diplomatic recognition from some places but not others oh that's pretty good point yeah because you're just like taiwan doesn't see themselves as like not recognized like yeah yes but china leans on countries oh you're not a country and be like we are though that's right so china leans on places to not recognize them right and so um what you

might do is basically um you would you'd actually there's actually this book called uh uh invisible countries and another one called imagine communities both worth reading right invisible countries talks about all these like quasi countries that are kind of hanging out they're less recognized in israel and taiwan but they're more recognized than something out of nowhere so like abcasia catalonia the basques kurdistan all these different groups catalonia is a big one right they're like constantly trying to right exactly and so the catalonians like at least some of the catalonian nationalists like the cons of the network state why historically, you've only really had two options.

Either A, they could be sort of dominated by Spain, right? Or B, there's some like insurgency, like Irish type thing. And it's, you know, that's super messy in its own way, right? So how do they preserve their language and culture and so on? Well, one possible alternative is C, a network state where Catalonians start crowdfunding territory around the world, and they give up on this land and this state, but maybe they have some land and some state of their own. Okay? Now, this is actually the motivation for the network state comes from Theodor Herzl's book. Theodor Herzl wrote a book called Der Judenstaat, which translates as The Jewish State.

And he actually, that was a book that led to the formation of israel he was basically making a very similar case to the jewish people and he said look you know we are a nation we're a group of people but we don't have a state right we're a stateless nation and how can we get one and he was actually like you know look we're in modern parlance he'd be like a tech founder he was talking about how even in 1897 he's talking about the death of distance he's like we have steamships we can move across large distances so we should pick from the best spot should we do in argentina or palestine and other places that were considered later were like madagascar or biribidzin you know so they were go ahead no i was just gonna say you should have picked argentina well maybe yeah exactly so so there's we got a lot smoother. Might have gotten smoother, right?

Exactly. So, but, you know, it's hard to know what happened. Maybe there would have been some local backlash or whatever, you know, but... Too many Nazis. They go, no, we gave up. Who knows? Who knows, right? But that was definitely a hinge point in history, right?

Point being, you know, this is something where the cloud community went and found land, right? Now, I'm not saying, I'm not a utopian. I'm not saying that everything always goes well or what have you i am saying you know one of the things about the network state is i try to take inspiration from the best of different kinds of states right so israel was started by a book and it had this kind of reverse jasper that found land and was flexible on where they went to so long as they could get a state somewhere okay um india was started non-violently okay you know it got independence on buying that's definitely something to emulate um singapore has like a ceo founder and they built like this amazing economic engine for nothing right and america of course too many influences name but of course it's got

its constitution and that's you know and all this tradition of jurisprudence and so on so when you start yeah whenever you're starting something from scratch it's so much easier to just like import yeah because you you just like get all this, like whatever you're doing, you get all these clutter, you know? Even if it's like a company of like an employee that you're like, ah, he's been working here,

we can't really fire him. Whatever it is, it's so much easier. Yeah, you guys can't fire each other. What do you do about like a military, like when you need force? Good question. Because I imagine that's a question that probably...

So this is something people ask. I'll write about this in the V2, but two or three things about this. First is, Bitcoin and Ethereum that probably so this is something people ask i'll write about this in the v2 but two two three things about this first is bitcoin ethereum have guard hundreds of billions of dollars without a military right they managed to do that via pure encryption mainly because a military isn't actually valuable to steal from them you can point a tank at something but no amount of violence can solve certain kinds of math problems that's the san Sanjay's line, right? So to decrypt these networks and take the money from all these people around the world, right? When you take a look at that image of the network state, right? It looks like Bitcoin miners or Ethereum, you know, stakers or what have you for a reason, it's decentralized.

If you have, take my example of a hundred thousand people in a hundred pockets around the world, how are you going to nuke that? Yeah. Yeah, you can't. You can't. And this actually goes back to... You have to just nuke their servers or something. But you can't. They don't have a server.

It's on just individual computers all over the place. Yeah, exactly. So the thing is, I mean, why was the internet built? Going all the way back to the very, very, very, very beginning of the internet, why was it built? Was it a military thing? Yes. Just in case there was a nuclear bomb, just so they can communicate? It was meant to have a communication network that could resist a nuclear attack.

Gotcha. Okay? So that was the original motivation. So it's almost like Vietnam or something where it's hard to win those wars because everyone's just everywhere in little tiny pockets. There's no central things. Like that. Like that. And in some sense, sometimes a technology is so important that it shapes the state itself.

For example, the Great Wall of China is this gigantic thing, right, that you can see it from space that is like an actual gigantic physical border, right? And, you know, the invention of oceanic navigation allowed states to become like, you know, ocean-spanning empires. The British Empire was not possible before you had ships that could, you know ocean spanning empires the british empire was not possible before you had ships that could you know go across oceans that was a pretty hard thing to build right so sometimes technology changes the shape of a state itself and as the internet rises and unfortunately you get more and more showdowns between nuclear powers right you're having the u.s versus russia the u.s versus china you're having the risk of not the risk the the presence of hot war between nuclear powers that was unthinkable when we were growing up right yeah the issue is if you just flip a coin you keep flipping a coin you know you

keep rolling the dice eventually something bad will happen and so uh or could happen let's put it like that right and so on the other side of that, a network state is nuke resistant for several reasons. First is it's just distributed, okay? And most people don't think about it this way. They just think of a nuke as the biggest, baddest gun. And so therefore, someone will submit, right? But that'll only work if it's like a concentrated group of people in one known place, right? If it's a group of folks that are distributed all around the world, if you nuke them, you're nuking a bunch of your allies too, right? If it's a group of folks that are distributed all around the world, if you nuke them, you're nuking a bunch of

your allies to write, you're nuking a building in the middle of nowhere, you're killing all these other people around who are your allies, number one, so it's not targeted enough. Number two is a network state doesn't need to actually have every node on the map being revealed. It can be encrypted. Okay, so the secret state, and in fact, you go from secret site is secret states, because you can't hit what you the secret state. And in fact, you go from secret society to secret states because you can't hit what you can't see.

And so now it's something where your private key is. Everyone's like a ninja, basically. Well, right, so you go from private property. I mean, basically, put it like this. If you go to the top of some skyscraper in New York, and you look over all of those windows, how many of them have you ever been in? Yeah, very few.

Very few, right? In a sense... Maybe 40, 50. This guy's bragging. All right, sure, sure, sure. I guess I didn't get the invite because I've been to none of them. Sure, sure, sure.

So most folks, only a small fraction, okay? Perhaps for us in companies. So your passport actually to the US only allows you to really walk the streets of New York. And maybe you're really on the ground floor. Most of what you're seeing is inaccessible territory. You need a second private passport, whether it's a hotel room key or an apartment key card to get in or an office card to get into those little spots there. So most of that territory is actually off limits.

It's invisible to you. You don't even know what's behind that. Extend extend that right i do but he doesn't yeah you know okay right so so with so if we take the premise that most of what is in cities nowadays is digitally gated private space digitally gated because it's a key card private space because you can't see in it it already is yeah right if that's true if most of what's in cities is digitally gated private space we can invert that and say digitally gated private space constitutes most of what's in cities dude it's it does make so much sense because if you're like yeah when you walk by and you see oh look at that big thing that's google like why wouldn't you be like oh look at that big thing

like you know sty town is like legitimately where i was gonna there's five thousand units you just be like oh that's part of like you know whatever 8chan world or whatever exactly right and or or you don't even have a logo you've you've intentionally made it yeah yeah yeah you have like a key thing yeah you have a key thing and it's just opaque to the world because why why showed off it's just like a blank facade attracts no attention right and many i guess if people move their girls in they probably won't make leave it blank facade for a while. Well, it really depends. Try to soup it up a little. Yeah, it depends.

It depends. Start out when it's just the boys. So the entire San Francisco culture of being a slob has a benefit, right? Which is it's like you can't tell the difference between a really wealthy person and just like an average guy. You're walking down the street and you're just wearing really the same clothes yeah it's the opposite it's inconspicuous consumption as opposed to conspicuous consumption why you're almost like visually encrypting okay in the cloud you might be 50 feet tall right but on the land why attract attention yeah especially in an untrusted zone you know if there's folks who might want to mug

you or whatever right they don't even know you if there's folks who might want to mug you or whatever, right? They don't even know you have anything. So it's like, you know, like you're invisible to predators or things like that. Right. And I actually think that the world that we're in today is actually an atypical world in the sense of how visible it is. Okay. Signal and WhatsApp are just a harbinger of us moving back into encrypted, illegible environments.

All the kids nowadays you know what do they do they have a finsta and a rinsta have you heard that term finsta yeah like the fake instagrams exactly so on their fake instagram they use a fake name and they're the real self on the real instagram they use a real name and they're their fake self so the real instagram they're in there it's like the one where if you know you're getting a job and your employer goes what's your instagram here you go here you go exactly and it's in sunday best you know etc etc right yeah and on you know finsta is you know all the stuff that is uh but but crucially one things they do is they use a search resistant identity on finsta right why because what does that mean

like like no name something that can't be googled yeah it can't be linked to them via googling only their friends know about it's a 12 follower account just for their friends it's like a private account no no name like okay that's right and or or if the name it's like a made-up name it's this satoshi nakamoto style name right yeah who is uh i i have a guess yeah um but nice he's probably he's probably not alive um but really yeah uh in the community people think he's hal finney um who's hal finney if you don't know who al finney is i don't yeah okay so he's amazing cryptographer who unfortunately passed away and so on the thing is i can say that and nobody like nobody will believe me it's actually great you know and one thing that's interesting is um

satoshi's pseudonymity was it actually itself a form of decentralization you know why and that's the guy who started uh ethereum right no no that's metallic that's with how of italic yeah i've seen italic on a lot of things yeah yeah so so you guys are having a good laugh no no no the youtube comments are just lighting up you guys got a nice little chuckle is this live it's not live no no no all right but we're keeping that in okay okay so so this guy doesn't even know all the big and every bitcoin no no whatever it's fine it's just it's funny um the um so so you know the whole concept bitcoin right is like the mining and the stuff is everywhere so it's everywhere and nowhere you can't shut it down very easily a non or less obvious point is that satoshi nakamoto

choosing to be pseudonymous rather than using his, quote, real name. A better term than real name, by the way, is like state name, right, or official name. It's like government name. Government name. Exactly right. Because the non-obvious part is pseudonymity is itself a form of decentralization because your government name is like a global identifier. Okay. Given Ryan Long.

Okay. like a global identifier okay given ryan long okay someone can punch that into a database like google or anything else and pull up all of these records on you now your name is not unique there's going to be others who have that name right there's a bit of an issue with this jeopardy champion that jeopardy champion's screwing up my seo is that right okay fine but the thing is that never before in human history has it been possible to pull up every snippet of info. Anybody can stalk anybody given their real name, right? Yeah. And so that is something where, you know, another term for a name is a handle, if you ever heard that term.

So think of it as like literally a handle on a file, you know, file cabinet. People can just pull out the file, right? And so the alternative to that, to having this name that's at the center of a thousand databases that's the primary key to look up all this information is to start totally fresh right have a node over here satoshi nakamoto that is nothing attached to it yeah okay and now any attachments to it are those that you have consciously sought out you know satoshi nakamoto set up bitcoin talk and he set up a you know like his code base and so and so forth now of course the what butted off of that and butted off of that became this gigantic

network and all this energy this you know is swirling around this but the man walks unscathed yeah because there was no nothing linked it to him there's nothing linked these are two totally you know the the pseudonym network avatar i remember something vitalik saying when he they gave him all the what was the shiba inu or something when they tried to promote their thing and then so he had to he donated it all yes he didn't want it but he's like i heard him talking about it he's like i had to to go access it he's like i had to call my parents up yeah and then he's like they had half of my key and i had to go buy a laptop that had never been online before and then he's like i go online for the one second, like do this stuff. He's like, throw out the laptop, like all just to maintain that, like, I

guess, air gap where you're like, there's no connection ever. Right. Yeah. So that's like, if you want to be, I do think about this sometimes because if Vitalik takes that kind of precaution and I also take, you know, some of your impressions, we do need to work on crypto usability you know like I did I co-hosted the show once in Toronto

and one of the Ethereum guys I think Anthony D'Onofrio D'Orio D'Orio yeah I might be pronouncing it no no I think you're right

he was on the show and he was like he was talking and he had like four bodyguards with him yeah and he's just like yeah this is my life

because or you could just like basically be in high security locations yeah and he's just like yeah this is my life because or you could just like basically be in high security locations yeah and just not disclosure like anyone that has a lot of money i guess to somebody yeah or asia asia is really reasonably high on the topic of like what you just said which was one thing we were talking about before you came in here like the when you're talking about like some of it does feel a little too you know like uh i don't know if out of reach for normal is just like here's an example like i know a lot of people there's a lot

of money in crypto and they're like hey we want to have like all of these uh you know make movies in that space and we want like and i've been approached a lot of times right but and there's all these people that are have all these versions of things that exist like an entertainment right but like none of them actually in reality anyone kind of uses them to any like real extent yeah so it's like they're all theoretical well yeah it like really i just all these people they're like we have money we want to do things and i think from my perspective it's like it's not that i'm just not like i'm not after like a cash grab that yeah yeah so it's like right there's no like what will be the first one where you're like yo everyone's actually like watching this thing in there do you think and then yeah

that's like the first part sure so well first is i don't know do you remember the dot-com bubble yes yes okay so in the late 90s early 2000s basically uh i mean this huge surge of energy going into internet companies um many of them crashed and ended up with nothing. The things that really did keep growing, though, the main thing was just Internet connectivity. People were just getting online. That itself was like a thing. And then over time, a few years after the dot-com bubble, really 2004 was when Google's IPO was. And then people were like, wait a second second you can make money on the internet for four years no one had believed you could make money on the internet because of

the dot-com crash and everyone's focused on 9-11 and iraq and all this stuff and um google showed you could make money on the internet and then but google was like the only one that was doing so for a long time is that even how like myspace like never really figured out how to make money yeah yeah yeah exactly. Well, so Facebook and Twitter got started in the mid 2000s and they were looked at as total frou-frou, stupid things where, you know,

they're also never going to make money. People use them, but for, you know, they're not going to make money. And it was really only 2008, 2009, after the iPhone and the financial crisis and so on, that the modern internet really took off. That is when Google and Facebook really went vertical in terms of ads. Why do you think that is?

Several reasons. One is that... iPhone? Well, the iPhone was huge. That was huge. But was there something about crashing out all the bad stuff to start again or something? Yeah. There's just a lot of stuff that got built over the 2000s.

Open source became better. A lot of stuff that's invisible to the public. A lot of backend infrastructure's invisible to the public, right? Like a lot of backend infrastructure where something that might have taken a thousand lines of code to do was one line, right? A lot of that type of stuff is invisible. It's backend stuff, you know? So open source stacks got good.

Social and search had proved themselves out. AWS had finally worked. A lot of companies tried to do what has become Amazon Web Services, like data center in the cloud before Amazon executed on it. You know apple obviously did the iphone and uh mainstream media basically everybody who had been running ads in 2008 mainstream media suddenly had a cash crunch and need to look for more efficient channels so necessity brought them to the internet

and even yeah that's a like a big part of it now right that's right so even in 2008 2009 like you know joel stein other folks have written like in that era lists of like the power centers of the u.s silicon valley was not on those lists and how many people were on the like the list it was like 10 it was like it was like uh you know the pentagon hollywood new york madison it was like you know kind of what the older institutions of the U.S. were. They always miss it. Well, so here's the thing. This whole internet tech thing is basically like about 10 years old.

It's very, very young, right? Yeah. Right? And, you know, Uber, Airbnb. And it's already like moving on to the next thing, apparently. It's moving on to the next thing. So Uber, Airbnb, Stripe, they're all basically like 0809 you know 2010 founded right this whole internet era is very very recent people's memories have sort of

been rewritten but if you go back and look it was not like that before the iphone the internet i mean it was just thought of as gadget i guess i do like guys well it's like the blackberry which even now like at the time was the most amazing device because that's, you know, the gold standard. And then the iPhone came out and all of a sudden you're like, this thing is a piece of shit. Yeah. I stuck it out for a while. I know. Ryan was like, I remember that.

You're like, I love the keyboard. That's right. So now. That's the last man standing on that. Keyboard warrior. Tim Allen. So now let's take that and play it to crypto, right? So, you know, the internet represented a fundamental improvement on just how we deal with information, right?

Things we totally take for granted. You can copy-paste, okay? I mean, that's computers, but just general. You can copy-paste. You can send instantly to people, you know, via an email. You can search index. You can, you know, everything you can think of that you can do with information, you can do with a few keystrokes. Just to put that in perspective, again, within human memory, xerox was invented like in the 1900s i mean but i mean not 1900s but

like i think it's like 1950s or 60s i don't remember exactly when the photocopier was like invented within living memory okay yeah um you couldn't just change the font on a document with one tap you had to go and like reprint out the whole thing. Okay. So you couldn't change fonts. You couldn't copy paste. You couldn't search. You couldn't, um, like, you know, change color tones, like all of these things, stuff that's just nothing now, stuff that's just nothing now was a massive effort back then. Okay. And, and like, we don't really think about that too much because we're sort of, you know, something is awesome. And then within a few months, it's taken for granted as part of your workflow, if it works.

Right. So, but, but the, the improvements you're talking about orders and orders of magnitude on like the speed of transmitting information. I mean, like nine orders of magnitude in some, some cases, just to give you one example. Okay. As you go. Upload speeds. Go ahead.

Upload speeds. Upload speeds. Yeah, sure. So exactly. Right. So, but give you one example. Okay. As you go, it's good upload, upload speeds. Yeah, sure. So exactly. Right. So but give you one example. Let's say if you go from sending a physical mail to sending an email to saying a group email to a Facebook thread, okay, each of those is incremental, but the combination is ridiculous. Okay, so saying a physical mail saying an email,

well, you send an Express, you know, FedEx or something, the highest price thing, and arrives in maybe like 24 hours, okay. But you send an email and know fedex or something the highest price thing and it arrives in maybe like 24 hours okay but you send an email it arrives in seconds or minutes the thing is at that time you have to spend a huge amount of money up front and the other guy had to spend money so it's like okay well yeah it's faster but i have to spend five thousand dollars for a computer system an internet system and this guy does too uh am i really going to send that many emails to this person as a one-off? It seems kind of stupid.

So corporations did it for intranets first. Then corporations were sending between. Or not just corporations. Academia was doing it, and then corporations were doing it. And out of that, eventually it started to come to the home user in the 90s. So there's physical mail to email. Then you go email to group email. Now you can send a reply all thread.

Now you go from reply all to a Facebook thread where people can reply and post messages, thumbs up, whatever. Bug you all day. Yeah. Okay. Right. So now you take this and I haven't posted on Facebook in a long time, but Twitter, whatever. Take a Facebook thread.

You compare how expensive that would be to do with physical mail. Okay. Let's say you've got 300 people on your Facebook thread, right? Yeah. Okay. people on in your facebook thread right yeah okay imagine taking 300 picture postcards licking setting stamps to 300 people two of them come back one set and each one them when they want to make a comment okay they come back to you with lol unfollowed unfollow or something like that right they mail it back and then you have to rebroadcast that out to the other 300 people

and get and and just keep doing this all right like what is it the polaroid i mean to think about something like even this right now like the people are watching this on youtube and then there's that comment section below yeah on top of essentially like a network tv station come to your house and yell at you that's right that's right so so and like just within living memory i mean you know the unabomber right yeah the unabomber do you know why he okay you know why he killed all those people uh yeah that uh it was something with i watched it it was the government he he killed all those people to get an op-ed in the washington post in the new york times i did not so he he had the this a different bomber yeah okay different so so the unabomber killed for the distribution

but then the unabomber have the big manifesto that oh yeah that's the same guy okay that manifesto wanted to post this big manifesto okay yeah so in the early 90s distribution of your concepts your words etc was so scarce that he had to kill multiple people so he thought to get the distribution yeah okay now you could just have a podcast we know a lot of people with a manifesto probably that are posting online every day and they're still thinking like do i have to kill a guy well well right so the thing is of course too easy of course it's both bad and good right essentially there's a lot of people who won't kill somebody but they certainly will troll somebody and that's a lot of people on twitter there might be a thousand x as many people who will do something insane and stupid and mean and angry for distribution on twitter

versus those who actually go and kill somebody so that's obviously the bad part the good part is that distribution has opened up in a dramatic way and now everybody can have a podcast a tv show etc etc right what's my point putting it together yeah how does it look like on in the future on the decentralized world so once we have seen just like the degree of the exponential on the internet and computers within our lifetime you know it's like as i said this thing is 10 years old and even during the 2000s the internet was basically mostly dismissed like people were on the internet but it was not the center of all government and so on and so forth like you know politicians who they thought of

the internet as kind of this swampy thing that's sort of below them and you know they were on the dark web no it wasn't even the dark web but that's how they viewed it almost like no it wasn't it wasn't it wasn't yet coded as malign because even in 2008 and 2012 this is like clunky and like it's like a hobbyist facebook yeah facebook helped obama get elected if you remember in 2008 and 2012 this is like clunky and like it's like a hobbyist facebook yeah facebook helped obama get elected if you remember in 2008 2012 and facebook was really good considered good by the press in 2008 and 2012 because it did so right so the internet was either harmless or cute whatever it wasn't like the real affairs of state which is the wrong guy elected and well okay right so now but actually even before then even in 20 um uh 2013 is

when the attitude shifted because by 2013 you can no longer deny that the internet was it was crushing old media revenues dropped from like 67 billion to like 17 billion in like you know five years this graph by mark perry like uh print media disruption so Google and Facebook took all this revenue. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple just all went vertical, right? And, you know, that caused them to be unhappy. And so these guys who, you know, in the mainstream press, I call them now, you know, I don't call them the mainstream media. You know what I call them? Downstream media.

You know why? Because they're downstream of the internet, downstream of you guys, right? And they're literally just reposting tweets and so on. Lists. Listicles. It's like not your grandmother's media. It's like literally your grandmother's media.

Yeah, my dad doesn't even get to the paper anymore. Yeah, exactly. So the downstream media, basically, at that time, they couldn't. Downstream media, love it. It's good, right? So they couldn't build search engines or social networks, but they could write stories and shape narratives. And you know the difference between a story and a product release?

Like one's by the person that did it? Well, this is kind of a one-liner, but the story has a bad guy. Oh, okay. And so it was a bad guy. It was tech guys. How about that? The guys who just bankrupted and disrupted all these media companies. Suddenly, they were cast as the villain and so from 2013 and 2019 2020 all of these journos were just looking for knows it's funny

because it sounds like pedos like it just sounds bad yeah yeah so these journos right basically were going after all these people in tech whether they were the an engineer who just made some off color comment whatever it was yeah exactly and you know i mentioned yesterday it's like more accountability for somebody's old tweets and all the wars in the middle east right you know so it's just like hunting these guys right for clicks and uh that carried on for basically about seven years and what it led to among other things was the wokefying of microsoft apple google amazon that's actually magGA versus MAGA. That's other MAGA.

Other MAGA. Right? And Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon. Right? Is that good? Right? So MAGA versus MAGA is what we're shaping up, right? Yeah, with no accountability, too, because it really is, that's one of the things, is

once things get big enough that people can be wrong as many times as they want and it doesn't matter. that people can be wrong as many times they want and like doesn't matter where it's you know in any sort of newer thing it's you're actually like graded on your uh accomplishments or whatever but i guess i thought solving for the wrong they're like solving for one thing without caring about all the other things i thought about this a lot actually and i was like how is it that these journalists could be so wrong about everything they're wrong about bitcoin they're wrong about iraq i mean there's this book actually everybody who's watched the podcast should read this by ashley rinsberg it's called the great lady winked and just goes through the

new york times history and you're like wow they you know now they're all staying with ukraine you know what they were doing in 1932 1933 choke out ukraine really well yeah i think it's almost like the ukrainian famine because it's like well tell me if you agree yeah i think it's almost like the ukrainian famine because it's like well tell me if you agree with this but it's almost like we're saying that the journalists are wrong about everything but it's almost like the politicians and like those people are kind of wrong about everything and they're like their press it's both and it's both yeah yeah maybe they work together yeah so it's like it is something where at different times in u.s history you can argue that one was prime and the other wasn't, right? Nowadays, I think, you know, the term the U.S. establishment is better, I think,

than the term the U.S. government, because first, people can't deny that a U.S. establishment exists. You might deny that a deep state exists. You cannot deny an establishment exists. An establishment does exist. Second, the term establishment is inclusive of but not coterminous with government, right? The government is part of the establishment but there are establishment grandees who are not actually government employees grand days that's great yeah right and so these are an establishment grande right yeah so you have you know the dean of harvard is definitely like you know part of the establishment the salzburg arthur salzburg the publisher of the new york times absolutely part of the establishment albeit not the u.s government right yeah so these are one way of thinking about it is the control circuitry for the formal government lies outside of the formal

government, and is itself resistant to the democracy it claims to support. For example, Salzberger has like dual class stocks, so he can't be actually, you know, there's no hostile takers are very difficult, right? Or you have a tax exempt foundation like like Harvard, right? Or you have something where it's a regulator, and they've got career tenure, or you have a tax exempt foundation like like harvard right or you have uh something where it's a regulator and they've got career tenure or you've got a professor and they've got tenure right so these guys can't be you know they're not electable to the electorate or the market they've got these you know protected positions in different ways whether it's tenure or it's tax exemption or it is dual class or something they're actually successful if you

just understand what they're optimizing for. They are. Exactly. And they're optimizing for power, not for being correct. And if you own the New York Times, right? Like you have the power to kind of just dispatch the people who don't agree with you. Well, so just on this topic, right? Like, you know, Mark Zuckerberg, you may agree or disagree.

I don't agree with every decision he's made. But I do admire him because he is the son of a dentist, right? There's a lot of people who went to Harvard. He's way more successful than basically a lot of folks combined. And he built the whole thing, you know, so Zuckerberg built his fortune. Okay. And people all recognize his face. Okay. If I say Arthur, Arthur G. Salzberger, do you recognize his face? No. How interesting is it? Yeah. Or his name. Exactly. So Salzberger inherited the New York times company and it is a company. It is a publicly traded company. It has dual class stock. And when you look at inherited the New York Times company. And it is a company. It is a publicly traded company. It has dual class stock.

And when you look it up in the New York Times, if you go and Google, for example, how Punch protected the Times, you'll see Joe Nassera in like 2012 talk about how great it is that the New York Times has dual class stock. If you then Google how you can't fire Mark Zuckerberg's kids' kids, you'll see a different New York Times writer talk about how horrible it is that Mark Zuckerbergberg has dual class stock right yeah so dual class stock is good when they have it and bad when they don't have it this is when i remember the thing i was saying where it's like basically whatever is good is that that supports the social network and or as bad as that which is against it right so dual class itself is it is essentially what it is is a it's an old tactic it's a universalist argument for particularist ends this is the same that the russians did during you know the the soviet union the universalist argument was communism the particular send was the expansion of the russian empire yes and so this you can generalize it as talk left act right okay let's say you're evil elon musk okay evil elon musk all right what would

you want to do he would want to eat well okay do you want to do? He would want to eat? Well, okay, sure. But evil Elon Musk would want to export strikes to General Motors and Ford and stuff, right? All of them would be riven by internal dissension at each other's throats. You know, they're not shipping anything, you know, like, blah, blah, all this labor unrest, right? Well, his company practices a Nietzschean variety of aligned capitalism. Okay okay and if you look at someone like salzberger right you know his newspaper talks endlessly about like white

privilege white privilege this is like the ultimate privilege white you know he's got this giant mansion um which somehow is not in the paper his face isn't in the paper okay and you know this thing about oh people are bad for going to you know taking their kids out of public school these guys all go to private school right yeah they don't even know what a public school is yeah exactly and so the thing is that it is um it's something where you really need to like play the man not the ball you know yes and because what they're saying they'll talk left they'll export left but they will practice the most like ruthless capitalist kind of thing like out of a out of a caricature that you'd ever find right and uh you know this is something where now now people

in tech in particular are seeing this because people in tech are basically self-made right Zuckerberg built his fortune Salzberger inherited his the thing about like these old media Grand days right these these they're basically I called them the meritless nepotists right because they have no merit they literally inherited their fortunes their newspapers etc they it's not that they get great coverage they get no coverage plus they're in charge of the coverage they're encouraged and i'm sure if some other like uh paper magnate want to start some war it benefits nobody so then they both keep each other's names out of the but zuck for all yeah just keep each other's names zuck for all his faults and all the tech people for all their faults have given everybody a voice right that is what the establishment hates so much right it is not that oh this is a threat democracy what they hate is what we would call democracy the

voice that people have now all these people around the world have a voice they hate that they're not against filter bubbles they're against the plural filter bubble they want only one filter bubble which is like old media whatever right the halcyon age of i guess 2007 you know if the guys want to wind back the clock to 1950 these guys want to wind back the clock to like 2007 or something like that when they were still dominant and tech was just making gadgets right um but there's there's so many more shoes to drop you know have you seen the ai content creation they're like the dolly dolly we were just talking because i saw your tweets uh yesterday yes and well we were just

saying well because yeah i have dolly and it's really cool the whole thing is is amazing and i can't imagine like how much better it's going to be in a year from now but we were kind of talking about like where what other stuff is this going to yeah it's like how does like uh that look like kind of moving forward do we have any sort of career as comedians and podcasters oh absolutely i think they become tools more than competitors yeah it's like i mean think about you have photoshop and you have copy paste and so i mean photoshop actually does some really amazing ideas for what would be an ai thing forever that i didn't have the idea to do it but i always thought a music video app where and i'll say this in five seconds but like yeah imagine like if you're a kid you take the music video it takes forever to people learn how to edit and edit and like all this stuff but they're all

formats so basically you film yourself singing the song four times then you film b-roll of yourself like doing a move and then it just makes you a music video. Yes. Yeah. Like those, like that kind of stuff could be like, what if I just did this and then my thing edits it for me or you, or you could just do like in the style of spike Jones or something. Take a look at runway ML.

Okay. So that's doing kind of what you're saying. You type. And it's like, I thought about this concept a long time ago, actually have a spec for it called the screenplay compiler, where you write a screenplay, you hit enter, and it's like lights, camera, action, and so on. And I had thought of it as instructions for something like Unity,

which is like a 3D engine or whatever, right? The new AI stuff is way better than that. It just makes it. It just makes it, right? Because it turns it into like a natural language description of the thing, okay? And what that does is it doesn't... Terrible news from Jim from The Office. Well, so here's what it does. It decentralizes Hollywood, right?

Like if old media- And it's already been happening. That's right. If the downstream media was sucking wind before, this is just going to finish it, right? But now what's going to happen is a kid from Nigeria, a kid from Brazil, a kid from India, people from anywhere in the world can now tell their own stories in their own language, in their own voices without going through like, you know, basically American media corporations. Right. So this is this powerful decentralizing thing where that's what they actually hate. You know, and so they'll always talk about how, oh, AI ethics requires us to centralize it and have some like token diversity

for example um there's one ai company which is actually a really got a lot of smart people there and i respect what they've done in other ways but they make it so when you type something in and it's like a you're asking for a fireman they'll just add like black hispanic asian as as words to the end of it that you can't see or edit out and it just generates like images for you because now you're diverse it's like forced diversity right that's so funny that they coded it in yeah they coded in but it's like it's like the most cartoonish you know like caricatured version of it because let's say you're in japan you you might want uh japanese people and i knew right yeah or or you know there's different people in different cultures have a different

notion of what's inclusive of course but like imagine you're like hey i want like a race car driver and then gives you a girl you're like you know what i meant well like stop it yeah danica patrick ryan's yeah so basically essentially what it is is it's something where true non-discrimination requires decentralization right this way basically everybody can have something that reflects their own culture without it being like centralized you know yeah and i think that is really the sort of winning argument on this because otherwise what you've got is these people who will argue that for the benefit of the world we need to centralize all the power right to defend equality which is like almost natural people with the power well exactly nobody is without the power that's right

and always it's like also i should be the one that has it. Exactly. Exactly. AI ethics. That's exactly right. AI ethics as it's currently construed. Of course, even the term is basically a stolen base. Who are you against ethics? Are you unethical? Right? So, you know, I instead I call it or you call Scott AI bias, not as the study of how AI is biased, but the study of how to bias ai okay and so ai bias is basically something which argues that in order to maintain equality everything must be centralized at google or a few of these companies but of course that degree of centralization of power is itself unequal not everybody has that power right to influence the ai that's right so power and exactly that's right so power inequality is maximal when it's centralized right so the decentralized argument is like there's things like so-called stable diffusion which actually is open source anybody can run it right that is i think the winning argument on this and as opposed to i can find it humorous i think you're so right because even if

you look at just from a moral argument it would be be like what you're saying, they're saying. It's like, well, we need to have all these things. But it's like, okay, well, why wouldn't it be like you said, like anyone living in India? And they're like, well, it has to be diverse people in America. You're already, even by that definition, broadened it at one more level and you're wrong now. That's right. And so here's the thing. I actually do respect people who are like talk left, act left. I think they're actually consistent.

I may not agree with them all the time, just like I don't agree with people who are like talk left act left I think they're actually consistent I may not agree with them all the time just like I don't just say agree with people who talk right act right but at least I think they're they're consistent and so in this context like V1 would be like an American guy who's like why can't we have Rocky and Rambo and so on and so forth V2 has a superposition of two kinds of people there's a genuine person who's like why can't we tell more inclusive stories and then there's in my view a non- genuine person who's like, why can't we tell more inclusive stories? And then there's, in my view, a non-genuine person who's saying, why can't we tell

more inclusive stories in order to centralize the power and the money at that company? Okay? Now, how can we give the genuine person here and the conservative

what they want? And there's a third one of the person that's like doing it but for someone else and they don't realize it. Sure, sure. Like a pawn or something, right?

Yeah. So the thing is, for the talk right, act right and talk left talk left act left person i'm sympathetic to both of them and i think the v3 is decentralized you can be both exactly so the conservative can get their rockies and rambos and so on and so forth but we can also tell the stories allow people around the world to tell the stories because i don't think conservative actually doesn't want that to happen they just also want their own stories right and then the other people could get the girl Rambo or whatever. Yeah, exactly.

Because if you were growing up in the U.S. and you didn't see yourself represented, I actually am sympathetic to that, though I don't think that means you have to shit on white guys for that, right? We can solve this problem by giving everybody their own compiler and letting them tell their own stories, right? Yeah, because it doesn't really end up that way. But then they would say, well, not everybody can tell their own stories and then i'd say that's patronizing well they start playing that whole game that's why i always like say that i'm like

such a fan the way you talk because it's like he's like they're like well not everyone can tell your stories he's like well here's how like it's not it's like yeah you're right and that's what i'm like changing like but i like being a victim and they're like yeah well you're right because they are just like all right well we actually like being able to say this. Yeah, yeah. So, right. Exactly. So, I think, you know, insofar as, I think a lot of things are like this, by the way, where there's sort of like a V1 that kind of assumes an American default.

Then there's this kind of intermediate stage of whether you call it woke capitalism that is faux inclusive, right? And then there's true inclusivity, which is decentralization, which actually gives the genuine people here and the genuine people here something while taking power away from the centralists. Kind of like sports, really. It's like who's the best, you know? Yeah, go ahead. Tell me about that. No, I was just saying that that's the most decentralized industry

in terms of like, you know, who's equal. Well, it's interesting you say that. If you go running, like to some degree, it's like, I think it's going to be hard to find another one that's like probably closer in terms of like the talent.

I think golf is a good one. We're like, you know, when golf, whoever's the best that day like was the best. No, because then no one,

people don't play golf, you know? Well, I guess that's true. It's funny you say that. So I mean, like historically, golf was considered

a very hoity-toity thing because you need a course and that's expensive and so on. Yachting and golf. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yachting and golf are very inclusive. Running is definitely very inclusive. But the thing that's interesting is you use the term sports for that. And that's why I was like kind of, you know, because I would call that athletics or something.

I think the whole era of spectator sports of like fat people watching fit people is ending in some ways or it's declining watching people right it's funny yeah and so it said we want us like the participatory stuff right like where people go running together they go lifting together and you know now it's uh it's something where i mean whether it's like a run keeper or you know apps like this i i sort of want to see things where, I don't know, like a fantasy football league, but it's a fantasy fitness league where folks are competing to kind of, I don't know, reduce body fat or things like that. And so they're actually getting some benefit from it rather than just drinking beer and

cheering somebody on the couch. I'm not completely against that. I mean, that can be fun or whatever at times, right? But it's also something where it's not actually benefiting the person who's doing it, whereas this is actually compounding their fitness. That's true. I guess a lot of people, like I have a lot of friends that like that's just their event that they get together and do. And if it wasn't that, it would be whatever else it was. I'm not against that.

I'm not like I'm not anti that. I do, however, think that going from that sort of era of like circuses to one where it's like individualized fitness and it's actually gaining you some benefit while doing it, um, is, is better, right? I guess always.

Yeah. But, um, and if you've got spare time, you'd rather spend an hour on this versus that this compounds for the individual versus this is just entertainment. It's entertainment. I know you're kind of running late for dinner.

It's fine. One thing I want to talk about is your woke versus racist video because I think it's way deeper than you might think okay okay well yeah like well tell me what you think all right great great i'm sure that everyone like watching this knows it sure so so uh you know this video if you guys want to watch i mean i was extremely well done actually both of you were in it okay it's pitch perfect i laughed i cried no i'm just kidding but uh the reason I thought it was actually perhaps even more deep than you might think is have you seen the political compass yeah right you know so it's got like authoritarian left authoritarian right libertarian left libertarian right okay now to first order what you can do is you can say that's like uh communist fascist woke

That's like communist, fascist, woke, anarcho-capitalist, right, in terms of the extremes of each of those four quadrants, okay? Yes. And one way of thinking about the last 150 years or so is almost like a Z, okay? Communism happened first. In part, as a reaction to communism, fascism arose. At least it styled itself as a problem to communism. communism fascism arose at least it styled itself as a communism and then in part as an opposition to fascism in large part anti-fascism antifa wokeness whatever is down over here and as an opposition to communism you have ultra capitalism down over here and also as an opposition to antifa you've got so this is the next shoe to drop like bitcoin maximalism ultra anarcho-capitalism is

kind of like an opposite oh i see what you're saying so if you look at just by virtue of like a pat like just some straight up like pattern recognition you're like it even then it even looks like it's going to where i'm saying yeah so it's it's something where the if you take the political compass the diagonal axis here the the woke and the fascists are obsessed as you point out with the same things and often come to the many of the same conclusions or but from the premise you know the fascists will say white people are the best and the woke will say white people are the worst but they they're just obsessed with race and biology categorization exactly that's right and then conversely the other axis of their diagonal is the economics axis right

the political power axis right and you know the communist and the ultra bitcoin maximalist think for example and you do you know what bitcoin maximalists are you're going to hear a lot more about they're just like they think that what that's the coin is just the only currency yeah if the if the communist has replaced he's exposing me with these questions yeah so so let's say you know basically each of these four corners you can kind of see right the uh the communist has replaced um okay this will be let me put it like this there's some folks who have replaced god with gov okay the maximalist has replaced gov with btc what's gov government okay okay so some have replaced the you know uh like god with the government oh okay yeah 100 and others have replaced it with um bitcoin

government with bitcoin and if you if you really want to be flip it's like the uh the communists have replaced god with gov the fascists replaced god with dna the wokes replaced god with blm and the maximalists have replaced god with btc yeah gotcha like michael saylor yeah that's right and so the thing is of course like blm the organization is different than black people because basically you know lots of black people don't support you know like riots and stuff like that and just like you know like the fascist claim to speak for white people but obviously lots of white people don't support fascism right so these are things where they are like these extreme corners that are kind of focused on there's basically two

buttons you can push to make humans insane and those are like the race buttons and the economics buttons right the race buttons is i'm being discriminated if you just think about it right in this corner i'm being discriminated against or i am like the supreme you know race or whatever these things make people insane if you push these buttons right and doesn't have to be like you know uh white people alone pushing those buttons in many ways china yeah a lot of it's just like a single like you know uh palatable answer for why you're having problems right now yeah exactly and so china's pushing this button of we are the supreme han race or whatever you know pretty hard up over there right um obviously the communists and the maximals this is less discussed but you're going to see this happen more and more

okay if you think about what wokes are doing, they're going and accusing everybody of being racist, sexist, homophobe, etc., without any evidence, because there's no penalty for a false accusation. They're just like, blam, blam, blam, just like firing bullets at people. And if it connects, great, they've got a kill, they gain status. And if not, who cares? There's no penalty for a false accusation, right? What you're seeing now is you're starting to see the emergence of a community that doesn't call people racist sex they call people fraud scammer charlotte and shill grifter grifter exactly you're starting to see that ramping yeah you totally are okay and that's a good point so rather than accusing people and then you see the right who's always like the left four years

ago calling them being like you're or like you're actually sexist or like uh yes that's right that's right uh like the pedophiles or like they're just trying to get they're always like four years behind like doing their exactly so so just like if somebody goes left you go right if somebody is pushing on the race button people pushing the economics button was pushing the economics button they push on the race button fuck okay so when the communists push the economics button the nazis push the race button when the wokes push the economics button the nazis push the race button when the wokes push the race button the maximists are going to be pushing the economics button okay yeah and maximus and communists you may not know about how does how to maximize push the economics button is

that how is it by saying you're a fraud to try to take your like they're saying the fiat money's worthless well so okay so both the maximus and communists what do maximus and communists both believe they both believe that most ceos are fraud, that, you know, that everybody's out to kind of, you know, like defraud you, that your money is everything, that you need to be distrustful and so on and so forth. OK, the communist thinks the answer is for the government to take all the money. The Maximus thinks the answer is for the government to control none of the money okay but they overlap on lots of things um for example uh because there's only 21 million bitcoin many maximalists believe deeply that one person's gain is another person's loss if you're getting bitcoin like so you don't see crowdfunding very much in the maximalist community right because there actually is a zero sum there's

actually also because yeah they're always like because they'll always say like hey you can in very much in the maximalist community. Right, because there actually is a zero sum. There's actually a zero sum. And also, because they'll always say, like, hey, in El Salvador, you can buy a cup of coffee with Bitcoin. And they're like, why the hell would I want to buy a cup of coffee with Bitcoin? Well, it is something where you'll frequently see maximalists will talk up some product

because it uses Bitcoin, but not actually buy with it. They want people to sort of be billboards for Bitcoin. But they're just accumulating only. By the way, I say only but i say this is pretty similar okay so i say this as somebody who's like a huge bitcoin proponent in the same way i can get along with a liberal i can't in fact in many ways i am a liberal i can get along with liberal i can't get along with the woke right a liberal is somebody who's like you know donating their time to um you know like people and actually doing good deeds a woke is someone who's burning down you know black people and actually doing good deeds awoke as someone who's burning

down you know black businesses because of what they saw in the news right like and a lot of ways you're like a yeah because you're like a builder not like a terror down yeah exactly like like you know can i get behind equal treatment under law absolutely can i get behind that like perversion of it which is which is like in the lower left corner no i can't right and so in the same way like uh so i didn't mention one which is a zero sum another is the premise that all companies all banks are scams no matter what the communist and maximus both believe this for different reasons the communist believes yeah that's fuck yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah okay so you know the communist obviously believes it because you know these are corrupt capitalists and so on they believe the government's bailing know, the communist obviously believes it because, you know, these are corrupt capitalists and so on.

They believe the government's bailing them out. The Marxist believes it because the government is bailing them out and giving them money. Yeah, they get to... They call them... They can't lose. Yeah, all millionaires... Games rigged, yeah. Games rigged.

All millionaires are cantillionaires. Have you heard that term? What's that? No. A cantillionaire is somebody... So, the cantillon effect is a real thing where when the government prints money, it doesn't land in everybody's pocket equally. Some people are close to the spigot and benefit from it first oh yeah there's oh i said you were talking about how it depends on where you are placed in the economy because sometimes by the

time you get it it's been four months and now the price has gone up exactly that's right and in fact actually this is a big part of the impoverishment of the red states over the 2010s if you there's a uh this actually came out before the pandemic oh all the red states because it was they didn't get the money they didn't get the printed money okay because all the money goes to the like you know finance people that they're like operating like that and so so here's what happened here's here's like this is see thing is we can't it's not like a blockchain where i can actually track it and do the forensics on i can I can't prove this yet, but maybe somebody, you know, can put together the numbers and show us. Call this a hypothesis, right?

But basically if there's an article in actually the journal, Wall Street Journal, which is like, I think it's like Democrat and Republican live in different worlds. Here's the numbers like 2019. What it showed was that like in the 2000s, there were roughly equal numbers of prosperous and poor democrat and republican districts over the 2010s by now something like 26 out of 27 of the most prosperous districts are democrat there's been this enormous shift right where the districts that are the wealthy districts are democrat districts and not over here okay like essentially republicans suddenly just collapsed and went down scale. Why did that happen? One thesis is that the printed money of DC went to financiers who also invested some in tech. It's only a trickle in tech, by the way,

because like venture capital is only a tiny fraction of what's in the old, old money world, but some did go into tech. Okay. And so you had New York and DC and tech Silicon Valley and so you had new york and dc and tech silicon valley and so on those were actually rising in as zip codes over the 2010s whereas all these guys in the center uh you know all these red states were getting effectively diluted down without even understanding what was happening it's as if you had a cap table with a million shares and like 10 million more were printed but nobody could see it happening really and then and it got awarded in such a way that it diluted this guy down who had 50 down to like five percent and he didn't even know about it till four months till his prices were going up and suddenly the

dollar is going less and so on and so forth and it's not even it's not visible to him and it's deniable because it's all happening it's not on a blockchain you can't actually see what's going on okay now this was actually up to 2019 now in the 2020s we've had even more insane amounts of money printing that make that look like you know one one tenth of what is happening now oh yeah okay there and so uh so i think you're going to see this even exacerbate to a great extent so what happens is you have maximalists who will argue and again i as i said i'm sympathetic to these arguments that all millionaires are cantillionaires why because they just benefited from this printed money all banks are bailout bailed out banks they're not

legitimate right all these fortunes are illegitimate all these uh companies are scams etc etc right uh and the entire economy is zero. Would the argument for them be like, hey, if I was going to, you know, it's like if you enter an industry and then you enter another industry

where they're like, yeah, the argument would be like, yeah, that's part of the game. You fucking lobby the government and get them to give you free money. It's like,

you're like, that was part of the game like going in and now you're saying like, oh, they have an unfair advantage. You go, yeah,

that's why we went to the same... You know what I mean? It's too big to fail stuff where it's like... Yes. They're like, yeah, it's good over here. Become a bank. So I am generally... I'm not saying I necessarily think that.

I'm just saying... I understand that argument. I think the problem is basically, I would argue that the government has so much power that lobbying has ROI. That's like actually the problem. It's like 500K of lobbying gets whatever million of ROI, right? That's actually the bad part, I would argue.

So just continuing. So the maximalists, A, zero sum. B, they think every millionaire, every bank and so on is corrupt because of this. C, they think they will call everybody fraud,lton shill scammer grifter one other thing is maximalists even more than they hate um like you know in some ways fiat currency they hate so-called shit coiners right what's a shit coin the luna guy well so that's the thing is see okay so let's talk well okay right perfect i thought the max say, anything that's not Bitcoin is a shit coin. See, you guys gave, it was perfect.

What you just did was perfect. You know why? Because. He lost his house in Luna. Right. The second one. Well, because what would somebody define a racist as? Somebody would say a racist is a genocidal Hitler, et cetera.

Okay. Some would say it's a person who asks you curiously what country you came from. Uh-huh. Yeah. Where are you really from? No, but not even that. Not even that. Just like making conversation on the bus or whatever right all right right where is the use it's the equivalent is someone says a scammer is the guy that like nefariously

like you know takes grandmother's money or somebody who likes ethereum yeah yeah okay all right so so like part of the this is actually pretty interesting right i love it the spectrum is intentionally something where it's so wide to encompass the most innocuous of behavior i mean look we've seen all these articles like you know buzzfeed or specializes it i you know cheerios is racist or whatever like you you could probably just do you should do a show by the way where you just take 100 headlines 200 headlines oh you have that. That was like a pretty viral one. All right. Okay.

I'll go watch it. Basically the most ludicrous things, any one of them that charge, maybe you can read the argument. I did a how to blogging too. And you like take all the things, but I showed all the articles and be like. Here's how to argue something is racist.

No, it'd be like, you have like a one wheel that's like a noun, one wheel that's like the verb. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, is this the Buzzfeed, like throw the darts thing? Was that you guys? No, it was, but it's like a, it's like a game, but basically's like the verb yeah yeah yeah oh is this the buzzfeed like throw the darts thing was that you guys no it was but it's like a it's like a game but basically at the end of it i used all the real like okay yeah yeah okay so so the thing is that part of the game here for

them even though it's not like conscious is the spectrum is so wide that encompasses all normal behavior and then you can get tagged as racist and then boom, you're in the same bucket as like Hitler or whatever over here, right? So in the same way- When I'm maybe Himmler. Well, yeah, okay, right? So that's like the biological attack or the race attack.

Then on the other side is like the economics or government attack, right? And so that is something where, okay, there's like an actual fraud or something. And there's like somebody who likes Ethereum or someone who set up a company once. Fra you know okay and might say why why will fraud expand to everybody who starts a company well now here's where you'll have to effective well it is effective but here's where you'll have to you kind of uh you'll have to believe me here or

let's take this as you know ad argumento okay every company is an internet company today by 2030 or 2040 every company will be a blockchain company because payments incorporation equity wire transfers crowdfunding every operation wild though okay yeah everyone's kids like that have some bitcoin well yeah but i just pick a bit like every operation that you can think of in finance in a sense international law didn't exist before blockchains let me explain why i say that okay if you are a company in finance, in a sense, international law didn't exist before blockchains. Let me explain why I say that, okay? If you are a company in Brazil and you want to acquire a company in Bangladesh, there aren't too many Brazil-Bangladesh acquisitions.

To even know what your compliance obligations are is non-trivial. So what happens? Lawyers will basically take a hub country like the US. They'll say, okay, Brazil, US, that law is established. US-Bangladesh, that law is probably established. There'd be some deals there. Therefore, we will u.s adapter to go between the countries okay right i didn't know that or china is the other country that does business in like both those countries

so you'll use a u.s adapter or like a chinese adapter typically okay why because now you've reduced this problem of you know end to end of every country versus every country to like one to end yeah okay so in a real sense international law i mean there's certain things that you know end to end of every country versus every country to like one to end yeah okay so in a real sense international law i mean there's certain things that you know brazil and bangladesh will have some diplomatic relations or whatever but for some complicated acquisition who the heck knows you that might be the only one that year okay so the law is verbal it's hard to understand what your obligations are especially if it's in like two different languages who speaks both you know portuguese and you know bangladesh language not too many okay um so you know portuguese and bengali is probably some but not too many okay but with the blockchain

a brazilian and a bangladesh she could just send ethereum back and forth they can interact in the same smart contract it's all code which is a universal language of all humanity so yeah that's another reason why this is replacing like the american center of and the chinese and the chinese yeah right so this is a decentralized center a re-centralized center anybody can now i mean the size of what this does for economic growth is not yet being understood a group of people from anywhere can incorporate a vehicle on chain with a very fixed and known rule of law. They can issue shares. All this stuff, you know, when I say issue shares, et cetera, the existing legal system doesn't like this.

The USSEC, et cetera, is fighting, et cetera. Eventually, eventually, as the current generation passes and whatnot, just like with the Internet, you know, the U.S. government fought encryption tooth and nail. And now HTTPS is mandatory for all websites, HTT.cio.gov it's a mandatory thing the thing that was forbidden is now mandatory okay in the same way eventually the efficiency benefits of just having everything on chain will overwhelm the kind of stick in the mud legacy regulators who want to maintain their power and so what that means is every company, just like it's an internet company, every company is a crypto company by 2030 or 2040.

It'll be like super obvious then, just like the internet thing where now people have, you know the term retcon, like retroactive continuity? People have sort of retconned it to think the internet thing is much older than it is. But when I say it's 10 years old, you're like, oh yeah, you're kind of right. You know, you kind of work- The one that we know it is, really.

Yeah, the internet world that we know relevant yeah it wasn't it wasn't like during the 2000s people were like yeah dot com that's the next thing yeah you were like you had icq but like whatever that's it yeah people could basically ignore the internet in the 2000s right so there might be a long period where you think you can ignore web3 okay but then eventually it'll be something where wait a second there's like it might be the crypto phone so from like a normal person standpoint is it is there any relevance to being like oh let me try to get ahead of this or is it just like yeah it'll come when it comes and then you almost won't even notice you'll just be like oh my tv is like a this now yeah so i'll come back to that point

okay it's a very very good point let me let me close out one point and then close that point yeah okay so the reason i mentioned every company becomes a crypto company every company is on chain because it's just it's better for international trade for wire transfers for all that stuff is just faster it's more programmable it's just better if you go and send a wire transfer and then send some money and it doesn't work very good yeah insurance and stuff right like isn't title insurance a huge thing on blockchain well so so anything that deals with the offline world is still hard okay just like it took i mean facebook and twitter had to work before uber and airbnb did okay they had to it was still hard to make

the online stuff work servers went down and so on so all that stuff had to work and you had to have rails and django all these you know like back-end tools before you could then start projecting the internet down onto the land right so? So if you're talking about the title, yes, during the mortgage crisis, a huge part of the problem was that they slice these things up into securities and lost track of everything. And in theory, blockchains could make that way better. In practice, the issue is you need some redeemer that's going to map that title to an offline physical property. So you're going to need crypto friendly jurisdiction. You need some something like a wyoming for example right that's a crypto friendly jurisdiction that marries the online you know like feasibility with the offline jurisdiction okay but i want to close at one point

then come to your point then pop off the stack okay yeah yeah no i'm glad you were able to stay a little later all right so why why are the crypto why are the crypto company how is that relevant to what i was saying before well if every company is a crypto company, and if every non-Bitcoin coin is a shit coin, then every company becomes a scam. Right, yes. You see what I'm saying? Right, because they're all scams with shit, they own shit coins. That's right.

And so this is actually similar in some ways, like, you know. I have a media, oh, I have this media company. We're not online. Yeah, we're just like an analog one, and you go, okay, so not a company. That's right. So, for example, medieval Christianity had a prohibition on usury money lending right communism had a prohibition on profit and Bitcoin Maximals have a prohibition on issuance what's that okay so more shares usury is like interest on on a loan right

um communists are against profit just profit itself it means you're scamming somebody and bitcoins against any dilution of the issuance exactly issuance of new shares of any kind right they don't even have to be against it because in bitcoin you can't but they're saying all these other ones you're just giving people fake money yes it's all pre-mined shit coins it's scam right you're like hey have this money you're giving he's like you're giving everyone fake money right now that's right so but let me explain why that's actually incorrect economically. In the same way, see, the Christian who's against usury, there's a good way of saying, hey, don't be in excessive debt.

There's a bad way of saying, hey, let's kill all the money lenders because if you don't have interest, you literally cannot compare two investments against each other. It breaks the system for a power user of money. The whole concept of net present value, all the stuff that your finance guy says. Yeah, someone else will just come along and do it too yeah exactly it's basically like you need to have interest because you you literally cannot price different investments against each other if there's no rate of the biggest yeah that's the biggest factor yeah

it is true that you don't want to get an excessive debt that part is true it is also true that you need sure that you can be predatory it's all that is true but it is also true that you need interest rates right the same way with profit right the communist takes the intuition that oh that guy's making too much margin or whatever and turns into all profit is a scam okay yeah yeah and you're like well no because like that is actually what that money's worth because it's like that's what it would have been gaining him other places so a useful way of thinking about it i finally put some words onto this there's seller profit there's also buyer profit you know what buyer profit is how much money would it take you to build an iphone from scratch uh me i could probably do it for like 15 yeah exactly right so but you know like point is that's like whatever millions of

dollars right versus infinity infinity infinity it's like if you have to build the all your own foundries and stuff i don't think i'm just five bucks short. That's right. So that millions of dollars comes down to like 400 bucks, right? Buyer profit is like your margin in that sense, right? Another way of thinking about it is, you know, obviously if you're running like a convenience store and you buy milk for $2 and you can resell it for $5, your buyer profit is like three bucks, right? But one way of thinking about it is buyer profit is the difference between your build cost and your buy cost.

This is because if you could build for cheaper than you could buy you just build right yeah but if you can't this is basically a measure of like how much it's another thing but it's also your reserve price how much would you actually pay for the thing versus how much did you pay for the thing and so if you pay 20 you got it for 10 you made 10 in a sense of value right historically buyer profit has not been visible because seller profits will they do accounting buyer profit you don't do it but whenever you've placed a limit order on a crypto exchange if you've ever done that you put a order down for you know i'll buy one bitcoin at 400 bucks right you are revealing what the max price you would pay is

do you see i'm saying yes then if Then if the market debt moves to it, ka-ching, your order is fulfilled. You have basically shown what your reserve price is. Point is, once you start thinking about it in terms of buyer profit, that both parties to the transaction are coming out ahead, it's not, oh, this guy's getting money

and this guy isn't, right? So that's a counter-argument for the communist who says that profit is malevolent, okay? Then for the maximalist, they say issuance is bad, okay? Whyuance bad and the thing is each of these sort of quasi-religious movements pathologize a different aspect of capitalism because they take the bad parts which do exist and they argue that the totality is the bad parts which is not true right so the maximalist why is it why they pathologize issuance they say anybody who's issuing a new coin must be a scammer

because look at all these scams therefore all issuances scams all issuances pre-mined you know coins it's all there's real religious vibes to it too it's really like we're the religion all these other ones they're fake evens in fact both wokeness and maximalism have taken pieces of christianity in the you know you've got this western civilization that's amidst the ruins of christianity and wokeness has taken some pieces like the doctrine of original sin. I mean, right. And you know,

you're going to a warm hell if you, you know, climate change, if you don't like give up all your stuff and humble yourself and so on. Right. And, uh, maximalism has taken other pieces.

So they love the passage, for example, about like Jesus throwing the money changers out of the temple. They love that one. Right. Those are my people. Okay, fine.

So say, got thrown out of the temple. Oh that one right those are my people okay fine so got thrown out of the temple oh yeah so yeah so they post this you know or they'll talk about you know uh the genesis block obviously but uh you know how bitcoin's founding was like the immaculate conception they'll take that concept right so bits and pieces of like you know christian theology have made their way into these nominally secular ideologies right um and uh oh there's some beeping i think it's your phone oh okay this is just your phone is that my yeah i don't know these things interact with phones weird it's super strange it's either your phone or your burner all right put this here um so with issuance just talk about that for a second i'll come come to your other point with issuance um it about that for a second i'll come come to your other point with issuance

um it seems intuitive okay well aren't these shit coins all scams whatever right the thing is but one thing they're really big on that they don't like is the concept of pre-mined coins right meaning 40 of coins are set up in this new coin for the founders and 60 go to the community they hate this why because satoshi you know mined and anybody could have been an open, you know, kind of tournament. Anybody could be part of this, right? Well, first, just on the point of, you know, Bitcoin was totally open. I think it was.

However, something like 95% of Indians and 99% of Africans were not actually online in the late 2000s, early 2010s. So they couldn't feasibly have mined Bitcoin early on. So as a fair launch, it was probably as fair as Satoshi could have made it, but it wasn't actually universally fair in some sense. Some people had internet access, some did not. But the second point on the pre-mining, whenever you set up a company, you're pre-mining equity. And why do you give out equity as well as cash to your employees? Why don't you just give out dollars? Go ahead. Because you want them invested.

Well, yes, but deeply it's because, you know, you might say, well, why aren't you just loyal to the U.S. economy? Right? You know, you work hard, you'll increase the dollars. This is the argument of the Bitcoin maximalist. Why don't you just hold Bitcoin, work hard, increase the price of Bitcoin? Right? The issue is that…

You're saying the company will go up more than the dollar. Well, yes, but why? We want them to believe that. But why? Here's why. The reason is your efforts can directly increase the value of equity. Why?

Because in theory, the price of a share is related, or the value of the company is related to the net present value of all future cash flows. If the company is making money in years three, five, six, seven, you can discount that to the present day

and that's the value of a share. It's $50 under this model. Okay. If you work hard, you can bring in a deal for $5 million, that boosts the value of those projected cash flows, then you take that to a venture capitalist, they'll buy your shares. Okay. So therefore, your individual efforts, connect to increasing the value of your shares. Okay. Whereas you cannot really increase the value of the dollar this way. That's like a drop in the ocean.

You know, you can't control Powell monetary policy. Effort at such a large scale of hundreds of millions of people worldwide does not connect with reward. So we come back to the communist thing, right? Remember in communist China, when those farmers couldn't get a cut of their own grain because they were expected to do everything for the collective. Here, you can go so far to the libertarian right that you are again against the concept of people

getting returns on their own effort right because it's all for the common coin is for the common coin exactly right so and you see all the pieces there essentially being a maximalist of anything is generally at least that's why maximalist equals fundamentalist equals supremacist equals zealot. Exactly. Right. You know, so that's why I think a better term in my view is optimist. Right. Not just in the sense of optimistic, but optimist in the sense of also like the mathematical concept of optimizing the objective function.

What is the optimal? The optimal is not necessarily the maximal. For example, imagine a group of people who call themselves Westists. Okay. mathematical concept of optimizing the objective function. What is the optimal? The optimal is not necessarily the maximal. For example, imagine a group of people who call themselves Westists, okay, because they like the idea of California. They keep going West. Then they end up in California. They actually make it there. And now there's a fission within the group.

Why? Because some of them want to keep going West into the Pacific Ocean. What, are you an Eastist cuck? You know? Right? I can very much imagine that conversation playing out. Into the Pacific Ocean. What, are you an Eastist cuck? You know? Right? And so I was just going to – I can very much imagine that conversation playing out. Like literally that conversation happens on Twitter.

You should make that into a clip if you want. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like that conversation happens on Twitter a thousand times a day. And what it is, the reason is that ideologies are being used to steer. And if they're being used to steer there's no stopping criteria right so let me give you kind of three versions right the first is ideology is a steering that just are extremist and too much is never enough there's literally no stopping point you can never be maximalist enough you can never be fundamentalist enough you can just or even never be

woken up even more so it's like there'll always be someone that could do it more than you yes and there's an endless red queen competition of this about like who is the purest of them all and you just keep leapfrogging for higher and higher status using these words until you just get to like the la la zone but nobody can back off from it because they're all you know just like religious fanaticism just pushing people off the ledge right so that is kind of you know no steering okay then the second version which is the hypocritical version is like the new york times company version talk left act right okay so they're for the iraq war before they're against it yeah exactly they are you know uh for the you know the chas zone you know in seattle before they're against it yeah

yeah okay and so they steer like this and they kind of make money both ways on this, right? Yeah, a little bit. Yeah, but you're to blame, right? Like, you know, you're the bad guy, right? No matter what, you're to blame, right? Well, they sort of almost, like, agree with you after, and they were like, yeah, but, like, you should have, like, at least tried the other one first. That's right. That's right. So for many people, the safe strategy is to just stick with the party line and then reverse on it and then reverse, right?

strategy is to just stick with the party line and then reverse on it and then reverse right this is the same actually as you know the trump supporters who were uh oh you know they were prepping for the coronavirus and then suddenly the coronavirus wasn't anything and then they were for the vaccine and they were against the vaccine right they also like flipped like four times you know this is basically like it's tribal as opposed to ideological so this is but but they're using ideological words to talk about it really what it is is i do not trust the other tribe that's fundamentally what it is it's it's universalist language for particularist ends okay so this is the like so the first version is being so ideological that you go off a cliff the second is just flipping your messaging to steer like this without ever acknowledging it to yourself or to others yeah because i guess a lot of it is you see

just like you know if you were running a big company you're just like yeah people are gonna you gotta fucking say stuff so they get off your back and it's like it's almost irrelevant you know yeah you basically like once you think about a steering it's like crowd control like okay we need to go left for a while let's put out some tell whatever these fucking peasants will think and you go what about that you just said the other thing you go they're fucking stupid yeah a concrete example concrete yeah no exactly because if they have enough if they if they have distribution then you can't contradict right a great example is in 2020 america was supposedly so systemically racist that george washington everything had to be torn down rebuilt etc now in 2022 what's the message america is the global

champion of democracy and all of these non-white countries need to listen i never even thought of that one that's pretty good point ridiculous right like these two things this is domestic propaganda meant to win a domestic conflict right we need to spread them thing well maybe i guess their argument is that like we've enlightened now but ah so the enlightened the tribe that wins is also the tribe so basic but obviously of course the internet has collapsed this context and this propaganda isn't even that old right so no you know so basically we got enlightened four years ago if you're if you're saying an indian but you

started doing all this like international uh democracy spending way before that it's like yeah we started a little early we get a dead start if if the president united states is saying america is so systemically racist, blah, blah, how could like an Indian or Nigerian or something possibly say, okay, you should be the leader of the free world? You said you're a racist. We're a white supremacist country. All right, let's do some stuff in India.

I don't know. Aren't we white supremacists? He's like, not, you know, it is what it is. It is what it is, right? So think about this. Shut up. Right. So this is what I mean by like steering, right?

And it was actually, this is what Orwell also wrote about when he was like, Eurasia is now at war with East Asia. You know, basically these giant like, you know, the Soviets and the Nazis, they would put out one message one day and then they put out the next message the next day just as it turned convenient. For example, up until 1939, nazis and the communists were oh they're you know they're at odds with each other etc then molotov-ribbentrop the nazis and soviets signed a pact do you know they started world war ii allied with each other who nazis and soviets i didn't know that okay yeah they invaded poland together okay and so 1939 1941 all these communists around the world got the order to like you turn now they're pro-nazi oh and then 1940 that you turn again now they're anti-nazi right and you know this kind of these

kinds of yeah he's been pro the whole time yeah right so the point is these sort of like head snapping reversals are you know basically something that you're that you're seeing during these like ideological times right and um so why did i bring this up so so the first version is just the westest failure mode where you just go and fall into the ocean okay the second mode is sort of the hypocritical tribalism where you know it's it's both the semper racist and the global champion of democracy as as suits the moment or whatever right needs to be as it needs to be right and uh it's less effective because now those are not separate channels, right? It's not like you can just message domestically one thing and globally a different thing.

Those are all merged into one channel, okay? So there's context collapse, right? So there's a problem for the messaging apparatus on this. And the third model is what I call optimalism. Here, you admit that you have a group that you have an interest that you're trying to optimize that interest you are acting in that that self and other interest but you're not like in this insane conan the barbarian way right when we think about it people talk about how communists don't understand self-interest a lot of nationalists don't understand other interest

okay yeah what would be an example example so obvious example is you know hitler who doesn't even thinks the slobs are intervention okay so the guys next door you like kill you know lots of those people but but lots of nationalists don't assign any weight to the interests of people in other countries they just care about their own country that's right and i i understand where that's coming from the problem is that they affect you. The way to win is win-win. Like, that's the way to sustain... You don't want to make it a zero-sum game. Yeah, exactly.

You want to make it... If you go out, like, you know, like, during the Trump administration, like... But I think that, I guess, some... I think that if I was to, like, understand some of those people's points, they're just like, yeah, like, it's more important to us

to have, like like our culture to some degree i do maintain yes then these like economic battles you're like they're gonna lose out they're like we don't care i get that would be the argument i i do understand i do understand where it's coming from however i think center right beats like nationalist i mean it's complicated okay um but i think that if you can figure out how to get other people around the world to also win you can build a larger coalition and if you because what you can't have is something where you're like america if yeah you know like and and then want people from around the world to support you but you kind of need that in order to maintain that position in the world do you know

what i'm saying yeah you kind of need to or you need like a big war where you're the hero yeah i i totally understand why somebody who is attacked you know for their culture and so then they rise up like this and they're like yeah fuck you you know my my culture is great you know i totally get where that's coming from it is however a trap because rather than i mean this is sort of like the u.s versus china kind of thing like the us has become this thing that doesn't actually the only rule of the rules-based order is the us is number one china sees this and is like okay well we're just also going to act completely in our own interests as we see it and they're completely unpersuasive on the world stage as a consequence right but the third version is actually say a different tack which is yeah you're not having

the rules-based order but we want one we want one to protect both large and small countries both people in there and now of course that's much easier said than done how do you have like a muscular classical liberalism and that's where crypto comes in yeah and also all the stuff that they hate is like mostly coming from within anyway yeah yeah exactly that's right and so i think like this is something where you know is that the like meme like crypto solves this like it's i mean it's kind of kind of the meme bitcoin solves the right but but the thing is that but decentralization like even if you're does like by it just actually does solve most problems that's right that's right it does it's at least today it solves a lot of problems but it's like how do you

do it ever is like you're just it's like easier said than done is also let me give a concrete example just to be so ben franklin he's an american patriot okay it's hard to be more patriotic than ben franklin but he built bridges with the french to beat the uk okay so he was an internationalist and a nationalist he was able to see outside of his own self-interest to ally with the french you know against the common you can probably think about that in your personal life yeah the same way that's right so so like the smart nationalist is not like a chest-thump, you know, America, if yeah, but it's somebody who thinks about diplomacy

and alliances and coalitions and so on so that they advance their self-interest and other interests, you know? Yeah, or as opposed to someone who's like, you either have to only care about yourself or you have to be like the service of others and you're like, well, both, you know. Exactly.

There's an in-between kind of strategy. I mean super it's like super obvious if i say it this way but any ceo does that as well they have to care about some degree their own company's interest but if you're doing a deal the whole point is empathy and understanding where the other guy's point of view is and maybe you can give on x and y and z and you come out to a win-win win-win is so obvious yet it is like the v3 and the thing i was talking about right how can you get to win-win it's not always obvious how to do it the goal is obvious the way to do it is not okay one other thing i'll just say is i am a fan of when you have involuntary centralization then we need decentralization and i'm a fan of that but i think that the most the most important

least popular word in the world now is re-centralization. Because just like, you know, when people exit a burning building, okay, that's like decentralization, get the F out. But then they regroup at a site. Is that just like how every idea is like a packaging or unpackaging? Yeah, it is. Exactly. It's like, so, you know, you have, I mean, it's unbundling and bundling, right?

Unbundling and bundling. Unbundling and bundling, right? So you have, you know, like newspapers and they're broken up into articles and re-bundled into Twitter feeds. Or you have CDs and they're broken up into MP3s, re-bundled into Spotify playlists. There's dozens of examples. I've got a tweet thread on this. And so the goal is not totally, it's neither centralized tyranny nor decentralized anarchy, but opting out of centralized tyranny there's a period of decentralization then you re-opt and it's a rebirth of society okay you

have voluntary re-centralization you have all of these leaders around the world these various network states and you know this is the vegan one and this is the crossfit one and this one oh it's like turkish immersion you can learn turkish there or whatever. And this one, oh, it's like Turkish immersion. You can learn Turkish there or whatever. Oh, and this one, everybody dresses like they're from the 1950s. Whatever. Just like, you know, different. Every permutation. Every permutation where now you can basically pick and you get your digital passport effectively

and just go and live there, right? Fat slob. Fat slob society. There you go. Fat gay slob society. Love it. I was almost going to leave it. All right. there you go i was almost gonna leave it all right so uh you asked one other thing which is like you know how do you like you know get into this future or what have you if you if you like it and um

yeah or like if you have you're like young or whatever 25 and you're just like yeah my like there's if this new world's like happening what's the ways that it gets involved and what's it look like so um i would say so let's say let's branch on can you do math or not okay if you can do math learn computer science and learn statistics that's like the i feel like i can do math i'm not going to learn computer science okay fine fine if you if i'm not just me obviously sure sure people so so if you can do math then then learn CS and learn stats. Why? That's like the physics. What's CS?

Computer science. Okay. Learn computer science. Not going well so far. I know. So far not good. Now I got the acronym. Okay.

You got the acronym. Okay. So learn computer science, learn stats, because that's like the physics of the digital world. I got stats. Okay. Why? Like physics, physics is the physics of the physical world and that's okay why like physics physics is the physics of the physical world and you know uh like fluid mechanics and all that stuff that was also that

was all incredibly useful in the 18 that's stressful to most people though you're like yo so there's this new world what i do they're like yo get really good at math and stats and physics everyone's like i'm fucked yeah yeah well that's what i'm saying first branch first branch is that right so the thing is uh now increasingly for example what percentage of the time do you spend looking at a screen too much too way too much i don't know that i don't do my like i don't put the timer on it it's you know six hours i mean i run a fucking digital media yeah that's right that's right so you but let's say probably at close to 50 of your waking hours are spent looking at a screen of some kind if you include your phone you include your like watch and so

you know let's say at least several hours a day yeah i don't i don't factor in my computer obviously which is it's whole i was just talking about my phone okay okay fine fine fine not good you add up you have your screen time it's several hours a day right and so everything that's happening on that screen is governed by computer science which is the algorithms and then the data that's in databases you analyze it with stats okay so that allows you whether you're going into walmart or johnson and johnson you're you know you're working with an apartment complex or a youtube channel every single organization of any kind for the foreseeable future will have need of people who are good at cs and stats okay everywhere in the world right so that's like if you're good

at math get good at those fundamentals okay now uh physics are also that's also important to know etc but cs and stats will be immediately monetizable everywhere that just pays the bills good right now if you can't do math find somebody who can't i'm like half joking but it's basically like find them in your basement lock them in you know feed them girl no what do i do with my gen or her yeah or them yes exactly right so um if you can't do math you can find like a so you're saying girls are fucked you can find it you can find a co-founder you can find a friend or something work with them right or if you're good visually or verbally create content right basically many many companies content like moving in many companies content like

moving in the future is like yeah i think it's pretty big yeah exactly everyone's a content guy well yeah yeah the reason being because i feel like dentist is like his tiktok channel now like it really is yeah it is because getting there the reason is like founding influencer is going to be on par with founding engineer right or founding creator on part of founding well it's part of the whole package i mean the logan pauls of the world. Well, it's part of the whole package. I mean, the Logan Pauls of the world. Yeah, Logan Pauls. Because if you want to just think about it from a pure, I always forget if it's left brain, right brain. Left brain is systematizing, right?

Correct? And right brain is emotional? Fuck. I mean, you're more likely to be right than me probably. I thought left was artistic. Okay, fine. So let's just say systematizing brain, if you want to put that lens on it the

founding creator is the customer acquisition for whatever project you're doing okay every project has some need for quote marketing um but the most organic form of marketing is you've built a community and the product grows out of that community's needs as opposed to it being you know butted from on high a community for my music video app. Yeah, exactly. There you go. So you guys have a community, and probably if you did enough focus grouping or whatever in that, you would find that there were certain things that everybody said, hey, we would buy together.

Fleshlights. Auto blows. No, you're right. You have a very sophisticated clientele. No, no, no. I just did auto blow ads did that's why yeah and and so you could probably angel invest in that you could have an angel investor provide so if there's somebody either you have the capital yourself or there's a lot of angel investors

out there yeah as a content producer you figure out talk to some of your friends about doing like you know a movie and things like that but that's still in the still selling content again to the people like content as opposed to what you're talking about exactly so the thing is i think the con i mean one way of thinking about is all content becomes content marketing okay or community or community building and they build a community because the thing is look selling a youtube video or a or substack that's actually relatively cheap relative to solving a genuine problem in somebody's life like the amount that they would pay for a genuine problem solved versus this right so i know we're thinking about it you know the the social network movie okay that was it was you know you've probably

seen it like in 2010 right it did a few hundred million dollars in box office pretty solid yeah if however the movie had been free and there'd been a link at the end to invest in all the founders who came out of that that would have made way more money oh that's good like by orders of magnitude more money okay i always have ideas for apps maybe i need an app so if you guys well if you guys make what i'd call investable content right and that might seem at first but i know it's just the same as why it's like you know if you're like a get rich youtuber like your ads are worth a fuck ton more because there's a like you know exactly what those people are all looking to buy stuff and they're all

trying to get they're all trying to make money so there's yeah but also you know like if you're listening to tim ferris you're the type of guy that you know exactly what possible income or whatever yeah but also you're gonna buy something that'll help get you fit you're gonna buy something whatever exactly everyone has a version of that but certain markets like you know if you're going to buy something that will help get you fit. You're going to buy something, whatever. Everyone has a version of that. But certain markets, like if you're a girl that your audience is like 12 years old, you might, I don't know, I guess if they're rich. But there's certain demos that are worth way more than others. Exactly.

Every community has some level of stuff that they're getting that's not there. Girls are worth more, actually. Well, more household spending, I think, is by women. So that's the you know, right. But so you have, so that's, that's the second approach, right? You're a content producer of some kind. You don't have to be an elite YouTuber or something like, like you guys and you're. And then you essentially interface with like blockchain people. Not just blockchain people, just tech people in general, right?

You've got, you've got your technical side. You've got your kind of humanity side. You've got two in a box, your engineer and your creator. And that happens at like the most senior levels of any organization, but also all kinds of junior levels down even to like an individual product, or an individual feature, you'll have somebody who's making like the video or the story or whatever for it and the person is coding it. I've done a lot of

that before a fair amount of that, right. So that's, that's like those two. And then, um, as an investor, right, which is kind of a different thing. So these are active, this is where you're putting in labor, right? If you're on the math side, or if you're on the content side, so that's if you're putting in your labor, if you're putting in the future, math or content, kind of, yeah, I mean, like, interesting, of course, there's, there's more to it. But that's roughly how people cut it, right? Step, some guys not gender studies degrees, see, told you, and everyone was yelling at me last episode,

because I said that I don't care that I can't fix anything. Content is valuable. It's very valuable, right? So the, you know, code scripts, machines, media scripts, minds, you know, and so you need to kind of be able to program both. And that's why you need both. And, right. And so the third is capital. So now as opposed to labor, where you're putting in your time, capital, you're putting your money, everything is now opening up in terms of investing. That is a big thing about Web3 is you really can, you will be able to invest in basically anything. Okay. What I mean by that is if you have some bet that, I mean, one way of thinking about it,

and this is not super obvious, but many things, and I probably need to go a bit. Many, many things are a form of arbitrage. Okay. I feel bad. Many things are a form of arbitrage. Okay? So even like a little deli or a convenience store, let's say a convenience store, that's a form of arbitrage. Why?

Because they're buying water bottles wholesale and they're selling it retail. Okay? They have some thesis on how many people come into their store and what price they'll pay. They'll pay five bucks or whatever and they'll buy them for two bucks. I don't know the exact price. Let's just say something like that, right? So arbitraging that this thing wholesale is worth more retail, and they're making money on the difference of that, right?

Now, you take that convenience store, and you turn it into- Give them a TikTok. Well, wait, wait, almost. There are. There's so many bodegas in New York that are all over TikTok. Okay, so you're almost there, okay?

So, but first, but let's go step two. Step two is you take that convenience store and you virtualize it. Now it's on Uber Eats. It's a digital storefront, okay? Maybe it doesn't even exist, like, in the sense of, like, in a normal sense. Like, you think that there's a physical storefront that matches. Now more and more things are just built for Uber Eats or built for Grab. They're so-called, you know, cloud kitchens, back-end type things.

Yeah, the ghost kitchens and all that stuff. Yeah, and now they can just change the decor with a new graphic designer that content creator makes different art and this is the liquid death branded water and this is the other you know so now you can try different aesthetics different copywriting oh you know anything i mean water is by the way like almost a perfect example of just how branding can differentiate you've got evian you've got all these different things right okay so you have these different storefronts you can actually iterate on your different storefronts you can also iterate on like your store's positioning you can't move your physical convenience store that easily right though store placement is a huge consideration for starbucks

and others for your digital store you can be you know you can place your uber eats ads in all these different locations you can figure out oh people you know where they really want water at jones beach okay there they really want i want my convenience store on jones beach i want to advertise to these people here but not other places boom cold water right now okay so now you virtualize that store and now you've got a more uh focused arbitrage um like proposition right more of it has been digitized you're literally buying x and selling y with this like virtual storefront there now your tiktok guy comes in to drive people to that storefront okay and when you start thinking about this way many businesses are in a sense a form of arbitrage

they're buying wholesale selling retail almost every store that you ever retail is business model period retail business model that's like an enormous swath of stores are like this i guess unless you make it yes and and so an enormous swath of stores are like this. I guess unless you make it. Yes. And an enormous swath of stores are becoming digital storefronts, right? And so what happens is all of these things, not today, not next year, not in three years, but probably in 10 or 20 years, all those things become like Web3 bettable. Because you can now have some thesis on, okay, people are going to buy a lot more water today. And so you know buy into that okay yeah like in terms of a token in terms of a token or in terms of some kind of derivative

or some kind of asset yeah you should be able to well they have like all the betting we were talking about some betting market for what were we talking about we were saying there needs to be a betting market for like good like that's attached to you know like andrew tate became the biggest person in the world then you don't hear about him again but not that you don't hear about him again but like it's just no one is that popular for that quick futures market on on on page views i guess it would be like impressions of the name but like you know let's say we said like even uh like what would be like a i don't know what ukraine or whatever like just anything where you go just the number of mentions of the word yeah it's like basically the popularity

of someone. Like the same way you could bet on a creator. I mean, I just always said like, you know, like when you think of like an artist, I know that guy's

going to be bigger. You, I think that about the first time I heard it, I was just like, this guy I'm going to hear more from because you could just tell.

Like Jordan Peterson, I would have heard that. I remember I always say rapper six, nine. Very early on, I go, that guy's going to be the biggest rapper. I feel like i've been right so many times about things and now you can bet on that well how yeah right yeah so someone has to just take the

other side of it right well personal tokens are actually a primary sale so you wouldn't have to this is a great question so primary versus secondary sales do you know the distinction uh well primary no no okay so a primary sale like where you issue it your question is a very good one so i'll give it you know yeah so yeah exactly that's right primary sale is where you are issuing it or a company is issuing it so venture capitalists when it's a primary sale of stock is buying the stock directly from the company and putting in 20 million dollars right that is you know primary sales in general are considered good because that money is going in and then that company is spending it on products which will increase the value of stock for all parties by the mechanisms we discussed

earlier where you're increasing the npv of the stock right the secondary sale is when that venture capitalist then goes and sells the stock to somebody else that is now secondary and money is changing hands between the two parties but it's not going to the company for productive endeavors okay okay so the similar concept can be extended to the issuance of a so-called personal token which is just like the company sort of securitizes itself and sells some shares to fund current activities and the belief that it's going to become more wealth sharing in the future but basically yes there are personal token um i mean it's hard to build a startup or whatever you know there are various personal token things one of them will eventually work and you'll be able to tokenize yourself. And so you're a kid in the middle of Moldova or Mexico.

And now you can issue a token and you can get $30,000 of capital from people around the world speculating that you're going to be maybe the Mexican Jeff Bezos. So maybe not that big, but maybe it'll be fairly successful. And now you can take that money and you can actually go and maybe get podcasting equipment or whatever it is right uh and uh that's the other time people like these days it's like what do you even do with capital like you know what i mean yeah well so you might buy some equipment you might they might buy a computer do some ai stuff whatever it is right yeah and then uh then they they now are they've increased their productive capacity

and they sold you know some amount of this and now the remaining tokens are worth something more right so that's like a primary sale as you're saying people would just then start trading them to speculate on that person and you could have various lockups and stuff like that he might not want anybody to hold their personal token you might also make it so the personal token the best probably model for that is you can redeem it for like one hour of the person's time oh right so you're selling like 100 hours of your time so there is an actual utility there's a utility to it and then you might put limits on that it's like okay that's in like gary v you can't feel like yeah you can't make them like dance naked or something like that but you might make them uh be like a i won't be your butler for a week all

right different people will have different value propositions, right? Some people will be like butler coins. Like my time. Yes. What do you want me to do? Just sit there in silence. There'll be various restrictions on transfer and usage. But this way people could just sell a few hundred. I mean, it's literally like consulting.

It's micro consulting. If consulting is okay, this is just like that, right? Yeah. So sort of like speculative consulting. And if you had bought an hour of Beos's time when he was 18 and now you yes now you could cash that in that would be worth a lot and bezos might just buy you out rather than waste his time right yeah right so that's the kind of thing which the thing is an interesting now there's various issues around this which is like what if the guy just runs away with

the cash etc and one way around that is so-called or like just says i don't yeah like don't just doesn't redeem it yeah it's like you can't get a hold of them well i guess at that point the exchange would have to be culpable and then there's like well so this is this is to be worked out but probably the best bet would be they have a dot eth name like you know joe joe smith dot eth and this personal token is attached to that and so is other reputation they're like posting on social media with this and so on and so forth so if they dodge they have to sort of just abandon that entire name and you're essentially betting that they've built up some reputation under this name so that you know now you have some collateral effectively they don't have to give their quote

state name necessarily but they have collateral in the sense of this entire account and everything that's linked to it people will see that this person didn't pay back that account. And that's like the username of usernames, essentially. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Your.eth is like the ENS thing, right? It's like the ENS thing. That's right. So, you know,

a very specific recommendation for people. If you haven't got your.eth name, you should probably get that. Oh, I bought mine last year. I spent $1,000 on it. I still don't know if it's a good use of money. You'll probably be happy. Okay, I'm going to write down to get mine.

But we should all just put it. I'm starting to feel bad. You're like already an hour late here. Dude, that is very nice of you to stay an extra hour. And it was like super cool hanging out. Cool. Everyone can go to the Network State. The NetworkState.com.

Yeah. NetworkState.com. Free online. And the cool thing was you have like a one sentence, a one paragraph. And it's updated constantly. Yeah. It's updated. That's right. So I'm going to try and do it. It's like a one sentence of one paragraph and then a one like and it's updated constantly yeah it's updated that's right so i'm going to try and do it's like a new version of a book it's a living book it's a living book that's right it's actually you know what's funny is it's actually pretty hard to update on kindle so the website is actually the best version of it yeah kindle like kindle itself is actually just you update it takes like what

it's a you process it takes a long time etc so um the v2 of the book will be uh you know hopefully sometime next year there'll be a lot of stuff coming up but i'm just intermittently updating it on route so go check it out let me know yeah and then on twitter on twitter i'm at at bala gs on twitter and it's also at the network state on twitter oh yeah so you're the man all right thank you thank you thanks guys The boys cast, the lads cast, the dudes cast, the bros cast, the homies cast, the dudes cast, the boys cast.