The Pomp Podcast - #1042 Balaji Srinivasan On The Network State

Episode Date: July 11, 2022

Balaji Srinivasan is the author of the new book "The Network State". In this conversation, we break down Balaji's thoughts on the Network State, the history of nation states, the decline of the United States, Bitcoin vs. fiat currencies, and how long the Network State will take to come to fruition. To see the video with the corresponding images referenced throughout the interview by Balaji, go to my Anthony Pompliano YouTube Channel. ======================= Bullish is a powerful new exchange for digital assets that offers deep liquidity, automated market making, and industry-leading security. Combining the innovations of DeFi with the regulated environment of traditional finance, Bullish empowers users to trade with certainty and earn passively at scale across variable market conditions, in an environment backed by multibillion-dollar liquidity contributions from the Bullish Treasury. Visit bullish.com/pomp today to learn more.   Note: Bullish is licensed by the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission. Virtual assets and related products are high risk. Consult your investment advisor and trade responsibly. Bullish is available in select locations only and not to U.S persons. Visit bullish.com/legal for important information and risk warnings. ======================= Since 2018 Copper has been at the forefront of institutional digital asset development.   From award winning custody solutions, to creating the first truly off-exchange settlement function, Copper pioneers technology, products, and services, in lock-step with a rapidly changing world.    No other infrastructure provider covers as many assets, across as many exchanges, with the speed and security that Copper can offer. To learn how Copper helps the world’s largest institutional investors secure their digital assets, head over to copper.co   Copper - the unfair advantage. ======================= Exodus is leading the world out of the traditional financial system by building beautiful and user-friendly blockchain products. With its focus on design and user experience, Exodus has become one of the most popular and loved cryptocurrency apps. It’s supported on both desktop and mobile, allowing you to sync your wallet across multiple devices so you can have access to your funds anywhere. You can instantly exchange around 100 different cryptocurrencies straight from your wallet. Interactive charts let you view an asset’s price history and your portfolio’s performance over time. And maybe the best part, Exodus is integrated with the Trezor hardware wallet - making advanced security easy for everyone.  Visit exodus.com/pomp for your free download or search Exodus on the App Store or Playstore. =======================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Balaji Srinivasan, he's the author of a brand new book, The Network State. In this conversation, we do a little bit of a history lesson. We talk about the network state, how it works, why it's so important, and how Balaji anticipates this coming to fruition. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I could have talked to Balaji for many more hours. Before we get into this episode, though, I first want to talk about our sponsors. Today's episode is brought to you by Copper. Since 2018, Copper has been at the forefront of institutional digital asset

development. From award-winning custody solutions to creating the first truly off-exchange settlement function, Copper pioneers technology, products, and services in lockstep with a rapidly changing world. No other infrastructure provider covers as many assets across as many exchanges with the speed and security that Copper can offer. To learn how Copper helps the world's largest institutional investors secure their digital assets, head over to copper.co. Again, Copper, the unfair advantage. Check them out at copper.co today. Today's episode is brought to you by Exodus, the world's leading desktop, mobile and hardware crypto wallet. They offer beautiful user-friendly blockchain products that sync across all of your devices, making it easier to send,

receive and exchange over 150 or more crypto assets in one place and with world-class customer service available to you 24 7 exodus always has your back but the fun doesn't stop with staking and trading they recently launched a new nft marketplace where you can buy and sell your favorite nfts on the solana network by partnering with the popular nft platform magic eden they're offering the full monty on verified collections with more added every single day ready to check it out for yourself, run, don't walk, over to Exodus.com slash Pomp for your free download today. Again, if you want the world's leading desktop, mobile, and hardware crypto wallet, go to Exodus.com slash Pomp today. This episode is brought to you by Bullish. Bullish is a powerful

new digital asset exchange built for institutions that delivers the innovations of DeFi in a regulated environment. The Bullish Hybrid Order Book pairs the high performance of a traditional central limit order book with the automated market making. Powered by deep Bullish liquidity pools, backed by the multi-billion dollar bullish treasury so you can trade with certainty and at scale across variable market conditions you can learn more at bullish.com or follow bullish on twitter because the future belongs to the bullish now this is not investment advice digital assets and cryptocurrencies are high risk products consult your professional advisor before dealing in them bullish services are available in select locations only and not to u.s persons visit

Bullish.com slash legal for important information and risk warnings. Go check them out at Bullish.com or follow at Bullish on Twitter. Let's get into this episode with Blaschi. I hope you guys enjoy it. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, everyone. I'm very excited about this. Balaji is here, the network state. I feel like I could just turn it over to you and you could

give us a lecture, but maybe we could just start with this idea of the network state itself. How does this happen? How do we go from where we are today to one of these being created and actually scaled on a global basis? Okay. Great question. So the book's at thenetworkstate.com. And so I think one way of talking about it is first, how does this thing happen? And then second, what happens after it happens, right? So how does it happen? Well, there's a bunch of... So first, what are we even talking about? So The Network State, I've got both a short informal definition than a longer definition. So the informal definition is a network state is a highly aligned online community with the capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory

around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states. Now, the thing about that is a network state does not yet exist. One of the points I make in this is there's a lot of adjacent things. There's a lot of things that are similar to network states in a sense, but Google is not yet a network state. Bitcoin is not, a DAO is not. They're adjacent, but they're not the same thing. And the reason is that there's various ways in which they fall short of the definition. For example, Bitcoin has, obviously it has the reserve currency, but it doesn't have a government, doesn't have land. Bitcoiners don't agree with each other on many things. It doesn't have the national consciousness that is what really

defines a country. Even the term, by the way, nation state, I talk about this a fair bit in the book. You've heard that term before, but do you know what the difference between the nation and the state is? No, what is it? So most people don't think about that, right? In fact, there's a reason for that because nation comes from the same root word as like natality. So it's like common birth, right? Common descent, common ethnicity, like the Japanese are, the Japanese nation is a group of people, the Japanese people. And then, you know, by the distinction is the Japanese state is like a government that sits over those people. And, you know, that Japanese nation could have many different kinds of governments. It used to have, you know, the

empire, like Imperial Japan. Now it has like, you know, liberal democratic Japan, but it's like this very thin layer of like a government on top of this enormous body of people. And that is the nation, right? So there's the nation and the state on top of it. And the reason that we don't usually think about that distinction is actually our language and our culture tries to ally the distinction because the state, you know, it legitimizes itself as a representative of the nation. For example, when you talk about national security, or this is happening at the national level, right, or international relations and whatnot, right? Much of that is really interstate relations. When you talk about a multinational corporation, it's really like a multi-jurisdictional

corporation because it's operating in multiple jurisdictions. And just to clarify, what is a nation? For example, I mentioned the Japanese nation, but the Kurds are a nation. The Catalonians are a nation, right? That's a group of people with sort of a common language and culture and history. But notice that the Kurds and the Catalonians are stateless nations. They say groups of people that are nations, but they do not have a state. How important is having a state for a nation like is it oh it's huge huge okay it's huge right i mean the thing is uh there's actually a funny quote um so just to kind of go after this word nation a little bit you know you've obviously heard the proper noun united nations really it could be called more like the

selected nations or the selected nations that happen to have states okay and when you think about it that way you're like oh wow there's a bunch of ethnic groups that are really legitimate it and have a lot of culture and history behind them that in the game of musical chairs, that was sort of the mapping and settling of the world. They just kind of lost out. They didn't get a chair, you know, the music stopped and they didn't get a piece of land to call their own. And so they are stateless nations, you know, and there's a book called Invisible Countries by Joshua Keating that talks a lot about these kinds of folks. And there's groups like this all around the world. And there are varying sizes. Some are small, some are large. And the thing is that it was

actually funny, like the president of Kazakhstan recently, he actually spoke against the concept of self-determination. You know why? No, why? He said, if the principle of self-determination is endorsed, we will go from something like 190 UN member states to something like 600. okay so there's this enormous jack-in-the-box pressure for people who want their own state and you know it would just go like this and you just have this enormous energy of suddenly folks who were not able to self-govern being able to self-govern right is this why you get like people like the kurds and uh involved in so such deep conflict which appears to be over land and kind of this statehood that you're mentioning? That's part of it, for sure. It's part of it,

right? And, you know, many, many conflicts like this are over land and that seems like impossible to solve. How would you, you know, fix this issue? And one of the key concepts behind the network state system that I'm proposing is if you know enough history, see lots of things today that we grew up with as constants are becoming variables, right? So, So, Pomp, you were born in early 80s, late 70s-ish, right? Late 80s. I just look older than I am. All right.

Okay, fine. Fine. So, you are, you know, basically my contemporary, I'm 1980. So, the thing is that the stuff that we grew up with, for example, just take the US dollar, right? That was a constant up until basically 2009, and suddenly it's become a variable with Bitcoin, right? And various things like the US world order or the things that people thought of as apolitical,

when they say it's getting political, suddenly there's like factions back and forth on something that you never even thought there'd be a different opinion on, that you thought was just so like fixed that no one would care. And that's now a point of contention, right? And so once you kind to realize this, that that order that was constant is becoming a variable. You apply that to the nation state system itself. And, you know, this has been around for so long that if, you know, anything that you were born into is just kind of the way the world has always been. And you don't necessarily seek to question, especially if it stayed constant for 30 years or 40 years or 60 years or 70 years. But, you know, what preceded the nation state system? So there's a country

called San Marino. You're Italian descent, right? Have you ever been there? Do you know San Marino? Have you ever heard of it? Yes. It's like this tiny little thing that's almost like a duck-billed platypus, like a missing link between the past and the present. And San Marino, I may be getting the history wrong, probably an Italian historian might correct me, but when Garibaldi was unifying Italy, you know, San Marino granted him like a refuge. And in gratitude, he kind of left them out of his, you know, unification thing. Right. And most people don't know that, like, you know, the French Revolution basically created France and Bismarck created Germany and Garibaldi created Italy. And these were giant feats of social construction. And in fact, nationalism was

something that actually in some ways came from the left, at least with the French Revolution. Now it's identified with the right, but it came from the left as a way to make all people in this jurisdiction equal. And a lot of the people who we think of as, for example, speaking French, I think, gosh, what's his name? Eric Hobsbawm has a stat. I forget the exact number, but it's like small double digits, but it was 10 or 20 percent or something of the territory of France actually spoke French. what we think of as a language French at the time of the revolution. And a bunch of other people spoke different dialects that got erased by the sort of imperializing campaign of the French revolution to turn it all French, right? Now, I don't know enough about the linguistic history

to know how different those dialects were from French itself or whether they're truly mutually unintelligible and so on. I'm relying on Habsbaum's account, but I've seen similar things about the formation of Italy, the formation of Germany. So essentially what happened was that there's whole thing you can look at called the German question on whether Prussia, who is to take the lead in a united Germany? Was it going to be like Prussia or Hanover? And all of this stuff happened well before people today were paying attention or alive, right? But let me see if I'm getting that right on the German question, Prussia versus Hanover, right? The best way to achieve unification of all and most lands, and, you know, like little Germany versus greater Germany,

right? And the, you know, I may be getting some of the details wrong, but the fundamental point is that all of these giant states, and they're actually pretty big, right? Like Germany is like 80 million people, like France is like, you know, 60 million people, like all of these giant states were constructed over the last few hundred years by guys like Bismarck, like Garibaldi, the, you know, the, you could, you know, the French revolutionaries, and, you know, you can argue that Napoleon consolidated that revolution. And, you know, obviously, the American revolutionaries, the Russian revolutionaries, you know, folks like Mao, who unified China, even India was never a unified nation until basically living memory, like the, you know, late 40s, early 50s, like 1947,

1950, India, actually, it wasn't just they got independence from the British, there were 562 princely states that um got merged into india okay modern india so i've used india's like go ahead i have a question about this exact uh time period where a lot of this started to happen is it driven by individual uh greed and ambition there was one person said hey i want to unify all of this because then i can control this land is there something around a piece of technology the invention of corporations like why is it that we didn't have this until a certain point in time And then it feels like the entire world kind of got unified in these almost like subcultures or sub states. And it happened very sequentially and, you know, in the grand scale of things very quickly, one after the other.

So, you know, The Sovereign Individual, which I think is a good book, I actually have one thing is, you know, the book that I've released, The Network State, think of it as a V1. I actually have, you know, maybe under 300 or 400 pages of content that I've got, you know, that I want to put in the director's cut. Okay. So it's only 460 pages right now. So it'll be like a thousand pages. I'm actually, I'm completely serious. I've got graphs, I've got charts, appendices. I do not doubt it at all. Okay. So it's very much the V1. But one section I've got in there are, you know, arguments and counter arguments to the sovereign individual thesis because the sovereign individual thesis I think is quite good, but there's also counter arguments against it, which we can digress on or double-click on, but just the sovereign

individual thesis itself is that centralization increased, that is to say, technology favored centralization for several hundred years. And you had, for example, like join and die in the French and Indian war, you had the telegraph, you had railroads, you had mass production, you had mass media, you had these gigantic militaries that came from these centralized bureaucracies, all this stuff up until roughly 1950 favored centralization. He built these Giga states, absolutely gigantic empires, the American empire and the Soviet empire, the Nazis, the Japanese empire, all slugging it out over giant quantities of territory because there were huge returns on scale. Moreover, because the communications networks were so

centralized, people couldn't argue peer-to-peer. It became very expensive to set up a newspaper or to get a TV license. It was highly regulated, highly constrained. So the whole thing got choke pointed through and a few people could basically control massive tens, hundreds of millions of people. And then they just slugged it out in these huge wars in the 20th century. And the ideologies they propounded were those ideologies that could basically script massive numbers of people, you know, and then put them into war basically. And the best of those was democratic capitalism relative to, you know, communism and Nazism, but it was still a mass ideology that actually did blow up a lot of people. It was the least bad of them, I think I

would agree. But if you read like Human Smoke or something like that by Nicholson Baker, you'll see it actually had a lot of negative things. It's not just the Japanese internments, gold seizures, it's all the stuff that FDR did, all the stuff Woodrow Wilson did, blah, blah, blah. Okay, fine. So point is, the sovereign individual thesis says that centralizing force or centralizing technologies, you know, brought that together, and then decentralization has taken it down. I think that's true. I think it's also something where there's both sort of left and right wing forces that, you know, as we would conventionally think of them that happened during this time that were aided and perhaps, you know, only even feasible because of technology, but had a

feedback effect with it. And there's sort of the left egalitarianism of, let us all be citizens, you know, in the nation of France, nationalism was egalitarian relative to the monarchy. and then later was nationalism as a right thing which is we all need to band together in terms of defense and basically you know german nationalism in part uh you know and again maybe getting this wrong maybe a historical correct but my understanding is the napoleonic wars in part led to the rise of german nationalism because people are like we need to band together against this insane you know french colossus like at the time you know under napoleon France was not considered the surrender monkeys or whatever. They were the military power of

Europe and Germany was actually the one that needed to get its act together. So there were various forces. It was technology, it was left ideologies, right ideologies. Net-net is you had returns on scale for a long time. And now we are seeing with the advent, I think technology is probably the primary driver of it. We're seeing just massive negative returns on scale, diseconomies of scale, and the whole thing is decentralizing. It's decentralizing much, much, much faster than it's centralized. So it's like a centralizing ramp up over multiple centuries and it's like decentralizing over the span of like one century. Okay. So maybe 5X or 10X as fast. Is this the idea of like de-globalization? That's kind of how some people try to talk

about this phenomenon, but you're basically presenting a different lens on it, but it's this idea that like, we're going to go back to a nationalistic viewpoint and there's less globalization. Yeah. So it's interesting. Uh, I think, uh, so deglobalization is interesting because I'm not sure it'll happen in exactly that way. So Zaihan and other guys talk about that, right. And, you know, Zaihan, I think, you know, I, I, I probably agree with him like 30%, 20%, something like that. Probably very much discreet on other pieces, but here's Maithi's son, like globalization, deglobalization, et cetera. First is I think globalization continues online, but it goes in reverse offline. So you have like physical nationalism, but you have digital

globalization. And that's actually the tension of this century. It is the cloud versus the land. you have this global community of um you know remote working because on the one hand you've got all these trends pushing towards total internationalism right you have cryptocurrency you have remote work you have starlink you have this massive global community of startup entrepreneurs and folks who are more connected than they've ever been you know uh you have encryption which is cross borders um you have uh you know you have all of those things you have the metaverse coming. You have billions of people with smartphones. You have transnational companies. All of those are huge pushes on the digital side for continued globalization and

accelerated, in fact, in some ways. On the other hand, you have the land pushing against that, where various countries, various politicians want to retain their control over their jurisdiction. They want to use the state against the network, right? And so it's actually more complicated than simply deglobalization. This is a political axis of state versus network. And what's interesting about this is centralization and decentralization, you can actually cut that where in some sense, the state is decentralized because you'd have lots and lots of little pieces around the world if you deglobalized. On the other hand, within any jurisdiction, it's centralized. It's a centralized power, right? Conversely, the network in a sense is globally centralized because you

have a central administrator of a Google or something like that that goes across the whole world. But it's also in a different sense, decentralized because you can have Bitcoin or Ethereum or something like that where your private keys are local across different countries, right? So there's like an interesting aspect of this where you can start slicing this. And I think it's more complicated than simply the world de-globalizes. One other aspect of this, which I think is quite important is my mental model is a centralized East and a decentralized West. And then what we want is actually a re-centralized center. Okay. And why do I say it that way? So a centralized East and decentralized West, the sovereign individual thesis is quite

good, but anything that's like a huge piece of the future, people often tend to just extrapolate that trend out and they don't account for the Soros concept of so-called reflexivity. Have you heard about that concept? Do you know what that is? One of the key concepts of finance. Yes. It was key. Okay. Why don't you explain it then? Yeah. The whole idea basically is the further that things can move in one direction, they basically can reflexively move back in the other direction just as fast. And there's a balance, I think, and human psychology becomes a huge component of that balance and kind of the reaction. There's a reaction to every action in some way. And especially in financial assets where right when people are ready to sell,

to walk away, to give up, that's usually the time where there's a snapback, if you will, of those assets. That's right. And the thing is, of course, sometimes things really just do go to zero. Sometimes things actually like venture capital's model, if you think about it, is buy the all-time high and hope it goes higher, right? That's what it is to be a series A or series B investor. You're basically, in a sense, buying the all-time high of that stock and then hoping it goes even higher. And you can make money that way, frankly, you can, but it is something which is, it's certainly atypical relative to how a hedge fund person will think about it. The reason I just bring up reflexivity is, especially when it's a human trend,

it may not go to infinity, right? The fact that it's rising often arouses bandwagoning against that trend, right? And so with respect to the sovereign individual, I think there's at least three counter trends. And those are what I call the individual sovereign, the sovereign collective and the autonomous robot, okay? So the individual sovereign is like somebody like Xi Jinping or Putin or somebody, you know, Elon, somebody like that, who has like enough influence over the future that they can turn, you know, even if the trend is towards, you know, decentralization, it's also a trend towards individual empowerment. And someone like Xi Jinping has pushed the entire country towards centralization of a billion people, right? So paradoxically,

the sovereign individual talks about how individuals get super empowered. And here's a super empowered individual who is pushing the disempowerment of other individuals, which is very meta. Okay. Um, so that's like, you know, the, the individual sovereign is a fly in the ointment. The second is a sovereign collective, because I think it's challenging for, I do think that the size of groups that you need to get something done reduces, but it doesn't like, um, it doesn't mean that you don't need other people for anything. It just means it gets smaller. You can do more things with autonomy. You can have things like Minecraft or Bitcoin with like one person or Instagram and WhatsApp with double digit numbers of people. That's all

true. And I do think the size of groups, you know, shrinks and you have many more CEOs and many more smaller companies. And so I'm already seeing something like that, many smaller countries as well. But that doesn't mean it goes to like, I think everybody is just one person or even that there's a group of people that are just like one person. I think people want community and so on. And so I think the sovereign collective is another important counterweight to that because the state will push back on you if you're just an individual on your own, you represent no constituency, the smallest minority is one person, I think is like Rand would say. And that's actually why a pragmatist realizes, hey, if I can group with other people, I can

probably achieve objectives maybe by sacrificing some individual autonomy. But I think the sovereign collective is going to be a big thing, is a big thing, right? And that's crowdfunding, that is Facebook groups, that is Signal, but it's also a big part of the network state. And the third is the autonomous robot, because a lot of the logic of Bitcoin and of the sovereign individual is, well, the 20th century was about these gigantic wars where the states could seize all the money, and they could seize the money, and they could use that for these planes and tanks and kill each other, and they could also inflate the currency.

and all of that goes away when you have cryptocurrency, right? You've heard this thesis. I have. Okay. And along these lines, one key piece I think that people don't quite yet understand. I have a catch argument. Go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. Sorry. Okay. But just to kind of hit home on this. So in the physical world, obviously, if you have the most powerful offense, you are the military dominant kind of nation state group, et cetera. When you push up into the digital world, there's still a lot of people who say, hey, atoms matter, right? It's not all just bits. Obviously, if somebody comes and takes your computer, put you in jail, whatever, that's a problem. But there is this concept of like, actually, in the cyber world, defense, the

strongest defense means that you are more powerful. How do you evaluate offense versus defense in the physical world? And then does that change the evaluation of the digital world? Yeah, so I think the way I kind of connect the two is I've got a section in the book called rubber hoses don't scale. Okay. So, you know, people always say, oh, the rubber hose attack, ha ha, lol. You're just some moronic crypto guy who doesn't understand that I can find and beat you up and take your private keys. And then my counter argument against that is, okay, but can you do so at a profit? What I mean by that is the state is not, you know, it doesn't have infinite resources. It needs to first take that Bitcoin address or whatever address, and it has to map it to a physical

person and find that person's current location, and then have the search warrant or whatever that is valid in that jurisdiction, because they might be in whatever country. They have to be able to then land the SWAT team. They have to go kick in the door. They have to find that guy's private key, and they have to hope it's got enough money to pay for that entire process. And then you have to repeat that over and over again. Right. And if that, you know, like a SWAT team is actually kind of expensive, it costs, I don't know how many, but like certainly tens of thousands of dollars. And you better hope that like that coercive seizure is making you more money than it's costing you. Um, and, uh, that it's not resulting in film that will actually make a lot of people think, okay, screw these militarized police, abolish the police, you know, defund the police, you know, resist the police, whatever, whatever.

Right. And, uh, because if you do use force, sometimes it's the use of force is really complicated because often the use of force, if it's considered illegitimate can arouse significant backlash that is more, you know, it's just stupid to use force, you know? Um, and so that's why, like, that's why rubber bullets exist. That's why nuclear bombs just didn't grow to infinity. Why did, you know, for example, a while back, there's this guy, uh, Eric Swalwell, he, he was like, uh, talking about how the U S government has nukes. And so therefore nobody can fight back against it. Do you remember, remember this post or tweet

for a few years? I don't, but that sounds like something that would be on the internet as an argument and detached from reality. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so the reason that's actually a really bad argument is if you actually, um, think about like the point is not to just like randomly kill lots of people. If you nuked just to take this stupid thought experiment, but it's actually useful as a thought experiment in this sense. If you actually went and like nuked Dallas or something like that, you'd kill lots of, uh, his tribe as well. Right. And it's not a surgical tool. Because it's not surgical, it can't actually be deployed because his goal is to try and bring the other tribe to heal. And that means basically going and killing or attacking or censoring or

deplatforming their guys without hitting his own guys. And so in fractal America, where if you look at the map, it's all these red and blue cheek by jowl, one side can't really like go and strafe and bomb the other side, because in physical space, they're so cheek by jowl that anything is going to hit the other person, right? And so that won't get political support from that side. And so instead, the warfare is online. It's very different than the 1860s. In the 1860s, you had these two tribes and they weren't just ideologically separated, they're geographically separated. North and South were separated, right? You can look at the map. Whereas here, let me show you some visuals so maybe you guys can. The first is, that's a map of blue and gray,

how they're separated in 1861. And if you go to the second one, that's how it looks in 2016. So physically, there's no way you can invade or bomb the Swalwell Tweed on New King. New King just doesn't work. You're killing too many of your own guys, whatever tribe you're in. And then you go to the third, in the digital space, they're separated. That is actually now that looks like the 1861 map And that's why it's so insane online because you have, you know, this, this front of two groups that are ideologically separated, but because the physical space is so fractal, any kind of conflict is going to look like, you know, a network war, net war, as opposed to 20th century or 1900, you know, 1800s war. And what does that mean? That's like, go ahead. One of the things that I think

is really interesting about this is when I think of just from personal experience, right? So in Iraq in 2005 through like 2010, there was a program called Sons of Iraq. And what they essentially did was, it was partially in the analog world of we need physical soldiers. We need people to kind of patrol

their local communities, et cetera. But there was also a psychological aspect of it, which is you are an Iraqi citizen. you probably have some sort of military experience or you have some sort of combat training or whatever it is. And we, as the United States, said to these individuals, we cannot patrol your whole country. We cannot be in every single local community. You have to take responsibility. You have to have pride in your country.

You have to have a feeling of kind of responsibility for your local community. And so what we're going to do is we're going to try to empower you. We're going to empower you in the analog world. But in some ways, that program was never recognized for the psychological component of trying to say, hey, if you don't want these people who you deem to be bad in your local community, you as the sons of Iraq, you are responsible for setting up checkpoints and keeping people out of your communities, et cetera, and we as the United States will help. Now, people will argue over the efficacy of the program, but it was trying to combine the analog, we will give you weapons, we will give you training, we will, you know, do all these things kind of in the physical world. But also psychologically, there had to be a kind of a step function change, if you will, in the way that people thought about their responsibility or their interaction in their communities. And, you know, the proponents of this program would argue it was the turning point, right? It literally changed the kind of battlefield because now all of a sudden you were able to multiply the number of soldiers.

And it goes back to this idea of they weren't necessarily enemies coming at you, right, because they were kind of more so agnostic and just saying, hey, like, I just want to live my life. I'm not on either side. But the United States was able to use these individuals to then be helpful for their cause, which, you know, I think is a past example. But now you're making the argument that that's going to happen on the digital front, not just in the physical world. We understand kind of what has happened in history, right, in terms of how we've kind of got here. Some people understand better than others. But where do we go from here in terms of what these network states, like what do you anticipate will happen? Sure. Okay. So fundamentally, what we are having is a situation where because in part of the internet, but also because of trends that predate the internet, this broader decentralization thing, you have people in physical jurisdictions where that latent difference is now popping up,

right? America is no longer really just a, it's not a nation state, it's a minimum, a binational state, right? Because you've got red and blue, but you've also got lots of sub ethnicities and so on under that. We're not used to thinking of red and blue as ethnicities, but if you look at marriage patterns, for example, people will now marry outside their race. It's actually very, very common, at least as expressed to pollsters, but they won't marry outside their party. Okay. Democrats won't marry Democrats and Republicans increasingly, or Democrats will only marry Democrats and Republicans increasingly will only marry Republicans. That's been trending way up. And the thing is in a generation, that kind of ideology becomes biology. It becomes at a minimum

Democrat Republican becomes like, you know, Protestant Catholic or Sunni and Shiite, right? The ideology becomes a biology. If you're only going and finding a spouse within that group and telling your kids, I only marry within that group and so on. Right. So that happens very fast. And then that becomes like ethnic, right. And that becomes like, I shouldn't say intractable because it can be, it can be solved, but it's difficult, harder to solve, right. It's more, it's not really about policy it's tribe versus tribe and so the thing is that that is uh like happening in a lot of places worldwide and a lot of people don't realize that uh you know they don't know garibaldi they don't know bismarck they don't know what happened the french revolution they

don't realize like how much centralized force in different ways and and propaganda okay the combination of both right and left in that sense you know um was required to like flatten out these huge regions and centralize them under certain things. They kind of think that's the way the world always was. There's an enormous amount of force and an enormous amount of propaganda that leveled all that out, that kind of erased all these other dialects in favor of official French or wiped out all these other small jurisdictions in favor of what we now know as Italy, right? And that was obviously cataclysmic in some ways, but it also resulted in what we think of as a modern world. And now we're getting, I think, the V3, right? So I mentioned San Marino and it's like

this duck-billed platypus. It's like this missing link where if you look at the history of San Marino, it actually shows why we exited the city-state age and went to the nation-state age. And a big thing, by the way, is city-state, nation-state, network-state is a progression that's sort of similar to like gold, fiat or dollars and digital gold. You know why I say that? Should I explain that? Explain. So the key thing is that like Bitcoin is a V3. We talk about it as digital gold, and it has some of the properties of gold, like the immutability and so on. In fact, it improves on some of those properties, the custodial aspect and whatnot.

But actually, and we sort of take this for granted, it has many of the same properties as fiat. You can send it electronically. You can represent it on a screen. You can write programs with it, all that type of stuff, right? And if it didn't have those properties, it wouldn't really be a contender. It would not be, see, it's not a throwback. It's not a V1.

it's a v3 that combines aspects of both v1 and v2 and the idea there is if it only had the aspects of v1 in a digital form uh you would either miss parts of v2 which wouldn't make it competitive or people would uh view it as inferior uh given that they could send it digitally uh fiat but if bitcoin was somehow physical in nature or something then obviously it wouldn't work in this digital world yeah so well so let's say it was just v1 let's say it's basically like you You know, by the way, I have nothing against Peter Schiff. I respect him for calling the mortgage crisis on, but he does like to troll Bitcoin. OK, fine.

So let's say it's gold. It's Peter Schiff's beloved thing. And actually, by the way, gold may may have its own little boomlet or what have you. OK, but, you know, the thing about gold is gold was defeated by the state. Right. Executive Order 6102, gold was seized. Gold is something that you can detect with metal detectors. Gold is something that is very heavy to transport.

Gold is something where you can't easily chip off a flake and just use it at Starbucks, right? Gold is not a very easily negotiable instrument. It has lower liquidity than BTC, which is actually quite liquid. And so because of that, is Bitcoin as liquid as fiat? And can you pay with it as easily as you can a dollar? Not really, because there's various constraints on that. There's transaction limits and block size and all that type of stuff. Yes, you can use lightning and what have you, and there's workarounds, I agree. But point is that like gold V1, if you just tried V1, you wouldn't get that far because literally physical blocks of gold are hard to actually pay with. You can use them as emergency storage mechanisms, but they're hard to transport.

They're heavy. If you wanted to transport a million dollars of gold, I don't know how many pounds that is off the top of my head, but it would probably be a fairly large amount of weight to carry, right? So V1 has a lot of downsides, which is why people go with V2. And so before Bitcoin, when people would just sort of be like, we need gold, we need to go back to sound money and so on. It was directionally accurate in some ways. There was a solid critique in some ways of the problems of the present, but there wasn't like the practicality of how does this new thing account for the fact that the present beat the past. If you have, you know, the present beat the past. So whatever you propose as a future, it needs to be able to beat the present.

It's almost like combining in some ways, the policies of V1, right. Or kind of the structure of V1, but the technology of V2 and you put those two things together, you get V3. Exactly. Specific fusion may differ in different domains, but the V3 has to be kind of better than both. Right. And often, you know, so I'll give several examples of this and then let me talk about the network state itself. So, you know, you have physical paper and then you have a scan document, like a scanner, and then you have like a digitally native file, which never even exists in the physical world, right? Or you have, you know, in a different way, you have a paper currency, then you have like a bank interface, like PayPal, or really that's a layer on top of a bank

interface, but you see your dollars in a bank interface. Then you have cryptocurrency, which is natively digital, or you have, um, you know, you have a, uh, movie that you see offline and then you have like a Netflix, you know, streaming thing where, you know, you've got a film that's in Hollywood. Then you have internet native content that was authored on the internet. And it's not like streaming from some like Hollywood library. Right. And you can kind of think of a lot of things have this progression where there's like physical, there's a physical digital hybrid, like a scan version, then there's a purely digital version. And so that's a progression just within the internet. If we take a longer timeframe, we say city-state, nation-state,

network-state. The reason that city-states, the V1, were beaten by nation-states is that nation-states had scale, right? That's why San Marino is this duckbill platform. Nation-states, they just scooped up all of these small principalities into this huge thing because it had massive scale. And And the problem with people who are like, go back to city-states or I want my small liberal land, like my sea land, my small country, and so on and so forth, it's sort of like the appeal to gold, where I understand why they want it. You know, hey, let's have lots of small governments and so on. But those small governments, the past was beaten by the present for a reason.

The present has scale. Those nation-states have scale. They have offensive capabilities. City-states were defeated by nation-states. Network states, though, are a V3 in my view. And why? Because they combine some of the aspects of both nation and city-state. So they have the scale or potential scale of a nation-state, since in theory, you could

have an international network that had millions of members. In fact, take a look at, I've got a little gif here because sometimes a picture tells What you're basically talking about here, it's fascinating because even if you look at something across industries. It really is the analog world was a game of scale. And so naturally people would push into the digital realm. And if you take, I don't know, books, right? There's physical bookstores that usually were mom and pops. Then there got scale by then going to the chains of the Barnes and Nobles, whatever. Then Amazon came along and said, Hey, we have a digital version that gives us more scale. And then eventually what people realized is like, we don't

even have to create the actual physical book. We can just literally have a digital file. And so you can kind of see this progression across industry after industry after industry and whoever basically gets to the the end state the fastest uh and does it in a sustainable way they tend to have the advantage it appears you know over the long run taking a look at this right let's keep this gif on loop for a second so this probably tells the story like in a few you know frames faster than i could in words so this is an example of a hypothetical network state that starts with one person in Tokyo. And they recruit other people and they connect them together. And notice in the top right, they're crowdfunding territory, square meters of territory around the world

to live together. And how are they doing it? In the top middle, the annual income is how much they're booking in, let's say provable, it could be crypto income eventually or partially crypto income, but they basically have some proof of income in the middle. right and one of the things i point out in the book is that the census uh was actually did you know the census is part of the u.s constitution like the post office i did not know so it's actually you know it's actually something that they thought of as actually being very important from the very beginning they needed information about their young republic in order to do something it was a huge undertaking which is why the census only done every 10 years you know

because you have to take all this paper and you know i don't know if you've ever seen what a million pieces of paper looks like. That's a lot of pieces of paper, right? And you didn't have Excel. You had to add up all of that by hand. Every crosstab had to be done by hand. Just imagine the warehouse and how people had to set it up, right? So now our census, you know, you can do something, not a million people every 10 years, but like Facebook in theory could compute and does actually have a real-time census on 3 billion people in a second. Okay. So that's like several orders of magnitude. If you go, just think it out, right? 3,650 days is 10 years. And then you're doing that not in an hour, but in a second. That is like six or seven orders of magnitude

improved in terms of your speed to go from 10 years to one second, right? And the point about that is now the problem is not the speed of the computation, but the reliability of it, okay? how do you know? Before it was something where, okay, is the US government going to fake their census? Okay, maybe you trust them, maybe you wouldn't. But now anybody can put whatever number they want online. So this census for a network state, you're going to need a lot of the proof of X, proof of Y techniques we've talked about, like proof of human, proof of income, proof of real estate, all those things actually, the cryptographic proof that that transaction occurred with many different overlapping points of evidence, any one of which could be fallacious,

but combined together, you get statistical inference, right? You have some estimate of how probable is it that this number is correct, right? It's not going to be deterministic. It's going to be statistical. Even Bitcoin, for example, the calculation that Satoshi put in the white paper is a statistical calculation of how likely it is that you're going to have finality after like six blocks. And so you do the statistical calculation, you're like, how reliable are these population and income and real estate footprints. And if that census is reliable, if you have managed to build a community that's like this, and there's more details that I talk about in the book, but if you can build something at this scale of all these people

who think of themselves as being part of the same nation and who actually crowdfund territory and live together in it. And if you notice the buildings, if you put the GIF back on screen, those, the buildings on the left-hand side sort of increase in complexity. So, you know, right. The footprint starts getting larger in each of these cities, right. It starts as like just one guy in his house and eventually it becomes cul-de-sacs and ranches and small towns and maybe even small cities. And they're all networked together. And when I say they're all networked together, well, you know, the, the advent of augmented reality glasses, which I talk about coming that's like the most predictable next thing in tech you know like the iphone was this

convergence device the ar glasses that let you tap and then just boom you you can just see ghosts from the internet in in real life those are going to make it much easier to network all of these different physical regions together into something that feels like the same country right just to give you let me ask you a question about this because i think the number one critique i was trying to think of like what are the biggest critiques i've heard of uh people saying around this network, uh, state thesis. And the number one thing that, uh, I've seen people talking about is okay. Theoretically, this makes a ton of sense, but you still have to have the physical location, whether it's a building, whether it's land, whether it's whatever,

how do those individuals in that building or land defend themselves from the existing nation state structure? So if you participate in a network state, how does that interface with the nation state and do nation states view this as a threat or abrasive or do they embrace it like like how do you think about those two uh or maybe the line between the nation state and the network state blurring in the physical world where the network state still needs physical space great question so actually i've got a whole section on this that i will add and then tweet out called diplomatic relations right between because i talk about diplomatic recognition as this core part of right? So diplomatic relations between network states and nation states is actually, you know

what it's similar to? It's similar to the crypto fiat interface. Because it's like the interface between cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, and fiat currency, the US dollar, was not something that actually, to my knowledge, at least Satoshi wrote about originally. He sort of thought that the crypto economy could bootstrap itself kind of completely on its own. He had like the poker thing that was built into the app at the beginning. But it turned out that the BTC-USD interface, that exchange rate, once that exchange rate occurred, and you could argue it occurred implicitly with the Pizza Day transaction, but the exchange rate between BTC and USD, future historians will see that as something that almost looks like it went zero to one. It looks infinite or like it just goes vertical

because it's over it's very fast over a short period of time but while we're living through it as you know it has ups and downs and it retraces and so on and so forth um before you know like maybe it'll go to infinity i i don't we'll see okay but the thing is that um ah so this this image by the way here this shows a visual of what i'm talking about where if you scroll down right that's that's apple's ar kit which is a preview of what you'll see with your AR glasses. So if you hold a certain NFT, you see a glowing sigil, you're part of this secret society, this Freemasons or what have you. And all the people who have that NFT can see that sigil and nobody who doesn't can. And that means that you have a layer over the world where citizenship

becomes like single sign-on. You have a private key, you have an NFT that is your digital passport, it. And you can literally see aspects of the world that others can't. It's like your physical login, right? And so you can start to see how with something like that, you can take all these territories around the world. And brand is kind of an unfortunate term because it seems very corporate. But think about if you walk into the Google offices anywhere in the world, they're basically very similar. They're meant to be similar. It's got the Google logo. Maybe there's like a little ethnic touch for that country, like the Google Doodle, but they're fundamentally very similar. And that's intentional. It's like a little piece

of Google, a slice of Google around the world, but that's within the context of commercial real estate. These are all fundamentally commercial buildings, office space. What if you extended that to residential real estate and industrial, and you had all of those linked together and it wasn't a company, but a community that owned them, right? That you could do. And then the branding would be more like you have a bunch of Chinatowns, for example, or little Indias around the world, but they're networked together. And now you actually start having something, which nothing I'm describing is like technically infeasible. You know, all these little subroutines exist, right? Chinatowns exist, Little Indies exist, Google exists, Single Silent exists, all those

pieces exist, right? What I'm kind of talking about is the system integration of bringing them together into this, you know, community that is physically distributed, but digitally connected in one place. And one way of thinking about this, by the way, is if you live in Hawaii, many people, I mean, they think of themselves as part of the same country as somebody who lives in New York. Okay. They're not driving to New York. Um, in fact, they probably don't go off the island of Hawaii that frequently. So that gift that I just showed is actually not that different from how people live already. You know, like the, you don't need that much contiguous space in the middle. It's not fly over country. It is probably, there's probably some clever one-liner you could

have, but it's like teleport over a country, you know, because you're just sending the packets over, you know? And so these other regions are as, you know, so long as your individual pockets are large enough. And that depends, you know, a person in just like one place on their own could kind of think of themselves as like a, just like an American expat living overseas thinks of themselves as American, even if they're surrounded by a lot of foreign nationals, right? Like a building that had just one person from a network state, that person would LARP themselves into thinking of themselves as part of this larger community. And once it gets to on the order of 100,000 to a million people, if and when it gets there, it's actually not that unreasonable LARP. And the

reason for that is that most countries are small countries. Actually, here's another graphic from the beginning of the book that I'll show you. I mean, in some way, what you're describing, there are, um, crumbs of it already occurring. Uh, Google is a good example, right? In terms of like, you think of yourself as, uh, I adhere to this, uh, community, which happens to be a for-profit company. There's physical space. Uh, there's a single sign on to get into the, uh, the internal, uh, systems. Uh, but you also can kind of extrapolate that out and you see, uh, people doing this in a variety of different ways. Um, it's just, no one's done it from an actual nation state, transitioning to a network state, if you will. Right. And so if you take a

look, for example, at this, just here's a way to calibrate the reasonableness of this. If you go and look at this link, I just pasted in and scroll all the way down to the bottom. Most countries are small countries. Okay. Only 14 countries are a hundred million person countries. And the reason that that is counterintuitive is probably most people live in big countries, but most countries are small countries, right? And so the thing about that is most of the countries at the United Nations are like, you know, like sub one, sub 10 million, right? And as you know, we can build social networks at that scale. You know, I mean, it's not trivial to build, you know, a 10 million person social network, but it's definitely doable. And there's definitely a lot of people who have

built, you know, 100K, 1 million person followings online, like you and I are, I think are at that level. That's not like that exceptional, right? And so now, of course, there's a huge difference between like clicking a button and following somebody versus actually going and having a much higher level of commitment to think of yourself as part of the country. But in terms of the horizontal scale, we're there, right? Like we've got massive horizontal scale for like joining Facebook. And now, you know, the next level up from that, from spending hours and hours a day on something, which is actually a pretty big commitment, by the way, I should say. The next step up from spending hours a day on a social network is starting to invest huge chunks

of your net worth, like even 1% of your net worth, I would consider a huge chunk into a cryptocurrency. And so we may have billions of people spending hours on social media. We have hundreds of millions of people putting big chunks of their net worth into cryptocurrency. And so the next question is, will we have some significant fraction of people putting their lives into a crypto country when you think when you think of this right so use me as an example i live in the united states of america many people would say uh it's a great place to live uh people from all over the world want to constantly come here there's the american dream there's democracy there's capitalism there's all these kind of unique blend of things um and let's say that that's on one end

of the spectrum then there's going to be individuals who uh are in a place where they're trying to leave right and they have a unique blend of uh both advantages and disadvantages as to why somebody may want to stay or leave in that country but if you put that spectrum out like what changes for somebody in a western developed nation if they want to kind of uh transition into one of these crypto states and what changes for the individual who is not in a western developed nation but wants to transition into a crypto state like do they end up in the same place they just came from two different uh kind of starting points it's a good question so the thing is uh well so the way there's a lot of things i can say there so the first is uh the u.s is becoming less attractive as a

destination for you know so-called high net worth individuals it's down about 86 since 2019 henley global has a report on this they're also leaving china because you know it's like the common prosperity doctrine over there. They've cracked down on Jack Ma and all the tech founders and so on. They're leaving Russia, obviously, that's got the massive global outflux. They're leaving India, though they're getting replenished within India by like new founders, but I think it's like net zero. But where are they going? They're going to small countries. And this has been a trend that's been going on for some time. And I think, so it's not, you know, the other thing is also like the concept of the developed world and the developing world, this is something which I think it's now

probably worth deconstructing that. And the reason is that the way I talk about it is the ascending world and the descending world, or the ascending class and the descending class, that's the individual version of it. So the reason I say that is, so here is, do I want to call this an unfair comparison. I think it's, um, it's partially fair. Uh, but take a look at this. Um, this is an underrated Twitter account by the way. Underrated account. Yeah. So, so look at her comment, right? So at first glance, I thought this was India, right? Now, here's the thing. A lot of people jumped, jumped on her for that. Right. And the thing is India, you know, there's parts of India that did look like that, that do look like that. But then if

you go forward here is here are some of the new indian train stations like that's clean and that's not it's not that's like a random train station that people use go to the next one right like the thing is i'm not saying that all of india looks like this and so on but parts of india do and parts of america now look like the previous thing and so the the distributions that were totally disjoint you know in the 80s uh that were basically like the richest indian was poorer than the poorest american those are you know those are now like converging right or is it you know an equilibrium is found where like um i don't really know how else to describe it other than like the united states uh was on this epic rise at some point it just can't keep going up higher

and higher because people get complacent people get comfortable uh and so naturally you would expect decline at some point these other countries now are the u.s you know 100 years ago 200 years ago they're now on ascent and so you get that crossover point where uh the u.s doesn't keep improving and growing these other countries catch up and then you actually get the reverse like is there a point in the future where india is you know the new u.s and america is the old india yeah so right so basically when i when i talk think about india by the way i'm i'm only moderately bullish on india as a country but i'm very bullish on indians as a network yes like around the world uh including indians within india but basically indians in general are just

like leveling up and they're they're having an impact on the world i mean it's like they run every tech company i mean they run like every major tech company right or at least 60 of the top ones. Yeah. And this is, well, I mean, they've done very well there and they've also, you know, Indians have done well in media and other places. And this is, this is this huge new phenomenon where I think, you know, so one way of thinking about it is if you look around your room and you're like, okay, how much of this physical world was made by, you know, effectively Chinese people in factories, right. Or, you know, Chinese entrepreneurs, I think you're going to see over the next 10 years, a very large fraction of the digital world will be made directly or

indirectly by Indians. Interesting. Okay. So like an interesting kind of way of thinking about it, right? And that's obviously like at the CEO level and so on, but I think an underrated thing is micro work, you know, outsourcing and like, you know, machine learning labeling of like cat and dog, you know, the digital assembly line, the new, the digital blue collar on Android phones for cryptocurrency, but basically what we're doing at Earn, but like, you know, 10, 100, a thousand, a million X bigger, that is going to be a big thing where you just open up your phone and you can do micro work anywhere for cryptocurrency, like a Twitter feed. And I think a lot of that is going to happen in India because it just kind of fits how people just

think about things there. They're willing to do these sort of drudge type tasks. They've just got Android phones, they've got information, but like a dollar a day is still like a big deal for people there. So they will actually do a good job for something like that. And also I think this is a part that's not appreciated. You know, my, my friend Akshay, who actually, you know, I think he coined this term as basically like Indians used to need the H-1B visa, but now they have the TCPIP visa. Okay. So as this podcast, that's pretty good, right? Yeah, that's pretty good. And the thing is like H-1B visas, you know, they're, they're down and up and, you know, it seems like down and harder to get recently. But the thing is now you have, you know, this, these graphs,

Again, this is stuff that hasn't really been reported in the U.S., but if you look at the adoption of 4G or 5G, rather, this is something which is just really kind of not on people's radars. While the U.S. was kind of fighting this domestic civil war during the Trump years and all attentions on the domestic kind of thing, almost a billion people got online in India from 2017 to 2021, and that's continuing, right? So what that means is all those folks are lurking in the comment section. They're all reading, right? And so a good chunk of your upvotes are Indian. A good chunk of your readers and listeners are going to be Indian. And in fact, most of the English internet is going to soon be Indian. because that's one of the best examples i have of this is in uh 2015 or 2016 um i went to india i did like a two-week um trip and went to multiple cities and i kept meeting entrepreneurs and uh they'd come up to me and they'd say you know hey we've built x product uh we have a hundred thousand users and i've been like holy shit like a hundred thousand users and after like the ninth or tenth time i turned to somebody who was there and i was like how the hell are these people so

good at growth. And he was like, no, no, no, no, no. Like a hundred thousand users in India is like 5,000 in the United States. Right. He's like, it's just a bigger country or whatever. And so I remember like, that was one of these things where I was like, Oh, literally the scale of the opportunity just to get people in your local economy onto these products is going to be massive. Imagine if they're then able to scale them globally, like they are just used to building for scale and getting users at a, in a way that is, uh, probably more difficult in the United States. And so it was just like this one little thing that just stuck out to me of like, man, this

is so different than, uh, kind of the United States in the way that we think about, you know, consumer products and growth. Right. And, and the thing is that basically the integration of India with the global economy via the intranet is a massive pro-globalization force. Going back to our earlier thing, there's a billion people who really, really, really, really want to work online for money and are willing to do so and can do art and computer programming and social media and blah, blah, blah, like lots and lots of white collar digital labor kinds of jobs. They don't need an H-1B visa anymore and they're

culturally acclimated. So, you know, they, they may speak with an accent, but they kind of know all the memes, right? They're, they're fluent in the memes. They've been growing up with the same memes. They've been lurking for the last five years and kind of learning all of that stuff. So, you know, the first time I realized this was actually in the early 2010s when I, I taught this huge online course, massively open online course, actually when the first, um, uh, first, I think courses on Bitcoin, uh, here, let me show you this. I'm not sure most people even know about this. But in 2013, when Bitcoin was at double digits, I taught this course and actually hit 250,000 people worldwide. So yeah, this is 2013, right? Bill of Bitcoin

profit. So 250,000 people, when Bitcoin was at like 10 bucks or something, not 10, but it's like double digits, like I think it was 60 bucks or something at that time. So point being that But what I realized with that course is that the internet was to America as America was to the UK. It is like the more global, the more internationalist. The UK had all these innovations, like obviously common law, like all Englishmen are equal and many civilizational innovations. And then the US leveled up and it said, hey, we're actually going to have a written constitution. And it's not just all Englishmen are equal, but all Europeans can come and immigrate and so on. And, you know, that built this amazing country. And then, you know, the next level, I think, is to go from common law to constitution to, you know, cryptocurrency or to a smart contract where it's not just like a written law with some judge who could enforce it, you know, as they see fit, but something where there's a compiler that's enforcing it. there's a chain that's enforcing it. It's actually more difficult to abuse and it's more impartial,

a computer enforcing the law. And it's also something which is not just limited to those people who can get a visa in or something, but it is anybody with an internet connection, which is basically everybody. We've enfranchised billions of people. The phone is the next franchise in a real sense, because you've given all these people who didn't have a voice, a voice, you've given them all a way to make money online to build things. And when you started putting all that together, you're like, okay, like the internet is to, you know, the Americas, it's like this, this new, new world, um, like what the new world was for the Europeans. And it is, uh, it is something that I don't think people have realized its full potential and how large it is yet. As

much as we talk about it, we still haven't really conceptualized it as such because, you know, the, the new world was seen, uh, but for many years by the European powers as just being a place for them to go and send boats. And of course, you know, obviously the native Americans and South Americans, Mayans, and cause, you know, I actually talk about that in the book, like, um, there was a lot of warfare and, uh, you know, there's different ways that one can, can think about that, but the internet is different where, you know, there's nobody on the other side. It's like, you know, there's nobody who's sitting on that server before you, it's a piece of just bare digital territory. So people think of it as just a place that America or Europe or India or China

or what have you is just going to, quote, settle and build American tech companies or Chinese tech companies. But over time, I think it takes on a logic of its own and has its own internet native nationalism where things like Keto, for example, or CrossFit or Bitcoin are internet native things that are in a sense, genuinely international because they cut across all international boundaries and will eventually be able to acquire territory and form new nations of their own. And that's a big part of what the book is about. Well, it's the adjustable market is much bigger. I also think a lot about, you and I have talked about media, you know, a bunch of times, but I think there's many industries where I call it like the boardroom expansion plan,

which is like i build a company in the united states and i you know work really hard for three or four years and then at some point i sit down with the board and i say okay board i think now is time for international expansion and we all debate sure we pick like let's go to england right or let's go to you know mexico or like wherever we want to go and it's like this very kind of methodical you know global expansion plan and some of that's because you know if you're doing manufacturing or supply chain related things there's a physical element uh but we the regulation certifications. Yeah. But we've even seen this with just tech companies, right? I mean, there was a big deal when like Airbnb said, Hey, we are now are going to go and go

into a certain geography. And I think what has happened now, uh, is just like people turn it on. It's a global, you know, effort. Uh, and look, I was at Facebook when, uh, internet.org was a, a big focus of, uh, the business and they were trying to bring internet. And the joke always, you know, kind of was like, Hey, we're running out of people on Facebook. So like, let's go get more people on the internet to get them on Facebook. Uh, and there probably was some hint of truth to it, but, but I do think that most of the effort was genuine in like giving people internet access is, is a, a net positive. Google at the same time was flying, you know, hot air balloons and yeah, do all this stuff. But if you fast forward now and you say like those internet

companies are going to actually lose that internet race to Starlink and SpaceX. And it was, you know, it was somebody who started in a completely different industry realized i have an advantage now i'm going to be able to put this satellite constellation out there and like how impactful will starlink be to getting more people on the internet which then leads to more economic productivity in this digital world like you can just see the pieces starting to come together and sure there could be external shock or kind of something catastrophic that drastically slowed internet adoption or you know economic productivity on the internet but like that's pretty hard to see right now it the writing is on the wall it seems and we're only headed in one direction

which is more people on the internet more people coordinating and doing economic commerce there and so naturally you would think that that's where kind of power influence wealth etc all gravitates as well if that's what people spend all their time doing yeah you know i want to i want a word that's like like disenfranchised but for taking away internet it's like disinternetized or something like that i could probably come up with something because all these folks who have now gotten their phones, who've gotten their laptops, who've gotten their voices and their crypto and so on and so forth. States will want to take that away. And that's actually why you're seeing this push in the US and in the CCP for censorship, for crackdowns, for deplatforming,

for demonetization, for disinformation. All that stuff is an attempt to kind of shove the genie back into the bottle, to take away speech from people and so on and so forth. and to kind of stop this internet thing from getting somewhere. And, you know, I'm not saying those will be completely necessarily failed. I actually, unfortunately think it might actually work. The so-called counter-decentralization could work in China, but I don't think it's going to work in the West. And actually, you know, to your question of will it get like stopped or what have you, do you want my scenario for kind of like my, okay, here's my base case model. And one thing I want to say about the book, I'm going to actually edit it to kind of make

it more obvious. The way I think about it is it's set up as problem and solution. Okay. So the problem is based on kind of my worldview, which is, if you take my reading of past, present, and future, I think we're headed for American anarchy and Chinese control. That is to say that the US is going to be potentially falling into some conflict between uh, Wokes and Bitcoin maximalists, um, who we could talk about, but basically I think, I think that is sort of where things are headed. And, uh, I think that, um, so that's like what

I call American anarchy and, uh, it'll get pretty crazy, potentially an attempted. One of the things I talk about is an attempted Bitcoin seizure, um, like an executive order 6102 that, um, puts half the, you know, puts the state in a collision course with the network. And, uh, and that's the way they can finance the government after years more of printing and inflation and so on, they try to do some kind of Bitcoin seizure. And states resist this. There are states that have passed anti-seizure bills. This is one scenario. That's the American energy scenario where things get kind of crazy there. On the other side is Chinese control. And whether it's in response to... Roger Garside has this book called China Coup, where he basically talks about how he thinks

there'll be a coup in China and democracy will take over. Whether that coup happens organically or is attempted by, you know, or the U.S. like helps back it or whatever, just like, you know, Biden saying Putin must, you know, leave power or, you know, the various regime change things that have been tried, whether it happens organically or it's U.S. backed or who knows, some combination. If something like that is attempted and Garside and others are kind of advocating for it, Soros has kind of talked about something like this, the China crackdown will be insane because that's the thing they're set up to go against. They'll use AI to rip civil society out by the roots. Anybody who's near anybody who is possibly related to somebody involved in some

kind of crazy coup attempt, it'll just be ripped out by the roots. You might see Chinese nationalist mobs running around on the internet or even in person against this. They will have a total potential crackdown, Chinese control. And in that scenario, that software to control basically the entire population then gets exported to every country that China has hard power in, all these African countries, but also lots of countries in sort of the border zone that could swing in the American or Chinese direction. And so between these two things, between American anarchy and Chinese control, you kind of want neither. Anarchy is really bad. Anarchy is, in my view, something that people think is good, but even crypto anarchy is certainly

better than nothing, but it's not that great. And the reason it's not that great is there's many goods that cannot be reduced to like a peer-to-peer transaction. Yes, I can buy bread or milk or something like that potentially from you, but what I can't buy is a high trust neighborhood and a peaceful walk through the street without bullets whizzing through past my head, right? If you have a guy in Syria and he's got $10 million in Bitcoin, you know what he wants? He wants a ticket out of there or he wants peace. Those are collective goods, maybe obviously, but this is something where the totally peer-to-peer model of the world doesn't account for those kinds of collective goods where people all have to sort of sacrifice some autonomy for

a collective good that everybody has. It's almost the opposite model of the communist who cannot see the need for individual self-interest, and they only talk about the collective. This is the exact opposite of that, which is only talking about individual peer-to-peer transactions and not talking about anything that's collective or whatever. Between these two things, between anarchy and tyranny, between American anarchy and Chinese control, I think we need to build a re-centralized center. And the reason I say re-centralized is it's like the least popular word on the planet. Okay. Why? Because they're centralized and then there's decentralized, right? So centralized is the US establishment and the CCP, the CCP, like with their crackdown

and the US establishment saying, hey, we may have printed all these dollars. We may have screwed all this stuff up, but we're still the legitimate representative of the flag. Why do you want to going to this maximalist anarchy, that's questionable as to what's going to happen. It could be really bad. This is our country. We want to fight for it, et cetera. And that, I think, is what I call the green faction. If you take red versus blue and you splash yellow on both sides, green versus orange, orange versus green is, I think, where it lines up, dollar green versus Bitcoin orange. And that's the green faction's narrative is centralization, just like the CCP. Then against both of those is the orange faction, BTC, which says

decentralization. It says, screw you. You guys did the China virus and you faked all the news and you printed all this money and you've minted all these cantillionaires and you've basically built this entire fake system. There's a lot of merit to this, right? There's a lot of merit to the concept that there has been a ton of fakery and whatnot. And then the issue is that gets taken to the point of no leaders ever, right? All hierarchies are illegitimate. And what's the saying, like slay your heroes or something like that, which is basically, you've heard this kind of term now, right? So what that is, is something where the maximalist actually overlaps with the woke, where they actually start to sound very similar. The woke says civility is tone policing

and the maximalist says toxicity is good, right? Or the woke wants to abolish the police, the maximalist wants to abolish the state. And whether it's we are all equal or you ain't the boss of me, even though there's tonal differences between them, the vector sum is nobody's in charge, right? Total anarchy, no leadership. And the thing is that the woke will constantly talk about fascism, fascism, fascism, fascism, and they'll define themselves as anti-fascist against the upper right corner. They signal against that push to the lower left of the political compass. And what you're seeing to a greater extent are folks who define themselves as anti-communist, right? And of course, I'm against communism, but they define themselves

as being against the upper left corner and point into lower right direction as ultra, ultra, ultra libertarian. And when you take those two vectors, when you take things that kind of point like this, the left and right kind of cancel out, but you have the sum is to the bottom, right? Have you done like vector math? Do you know what I'm talking about? Nowhere near what you've done, but I know what it is. You know what it is, right? Once you think like, oh, actually these things, they do disagree on many aspects, but they both agree on is nobody should be in charge and the current order is illegitimate and rotted and should go away. Let me let me ask you about this. And we're going to wade into an area where I think there's plenty of people who have lots of opinions, both on the woke side and also on the Bitcoin maximalism side. How much of this is the Bitcoin maximalists care more about being a maximalist than care about the success of Bitcoin?

The woke care more about the the kind of camaraderie of everyone is woke together more than like the actual impact of achieving their goal. Like, is it a replacement for religion? Is it like the community and cultural aspect of it ends up transforming someone's identity and the identity to this set of ideals is almost more important than the actual intended outcome? Or like, how do you think about that? Because to me, that feels like they both it's very important to them that they are identified as part of the group. Yeah. So I actually have this tweet thread from a little while ago that you might have there. So basically, people who think they're supporting an issue online, I'm just going to read this for a second and discuss it. Many folks who think they're supporting an issue online are really just taking direction from Twitter's algorithm. There's an unmistakable stylistic convergence of many different ideologies. What is rewarded is Twitterism. And what is Twitterism? The sick burn,

the public feud, the sarcastic meme, the purity test, the hysterical mob. Some ideologies claim to be for tolerance. Others preach order or moderation, but Twitterism is none of these and is what actually happens. And even if you personally try to resist Twitterism, it doesn't matter. The most sarcastic tweets go viral. It can be 1% of your output, but 100% of what the world sees from you. And so there are good parts of Twitter, but the internet increases variance. it amplifies the extreme good and bad. And, you know, Twitter is like a dispatch mechanism for our attention, the same way that Uber dispatches drivers to riders. And so the thing is that people are kind of hill climbing. So you've heard of like number go up technology, right? Well, what are the

wokes about? They're about status quo, right? Wokes are, you know, like kind of very roughly speaking, and this is just rough, right? But if you take the left-hand side of the political compass, they are more concerned with status and academic position and political rank and politics and so on. And the right-hand side of the book comes more concerned with economics and money and markets and so on and so forth. Very high level, right? And so status go up technology is, the Wilkes developed this entire set of verbal armaments in academia where they could just stab you online as you're a white male. And what happens is it's like redistribution of status in real time. And one way of thinking about it is if communism was about the factory floor and it was about the

strike, and that was the collective action where you could get the hated boss to finally hand over all that money that had been hoarded. Now, what happened was it meant that you suddenly actually had a second boss, which is the union boss. And you actually had a whole second group of managers who are the, you know, mid-level managers. And now you actually had two managers and you had to pay union dues. And it's not like the original company went away. It's just like this vampiric thing got attached to it, which is a union and it sucked off, you know, some of the money and it made the company less competitive, but it had the optics of like liberating the workers. Even if it made, it was like this barnacle that attached and didn't produce anything. It didn't

take any risk, just kept asking for more money and made the company less competitive. Fine. Okay. But that was the thing though, is that in the very short run, the group of union workers were convinced that those strikes were making them money. Even if in the medium to long run, it was debiting in an invisible way from the competitiveness of the company, even if it was actually making them poorer in the medium to long run from the union dues and the fact that the union was then going to be controlling their speech and the union was going to be controlling their promotions and all that stuff. Like even if all that was true, in the very short run, it gained them money.

and that's actually one of the reasons that unions proliferated. It seemed to give people a tangible good until in the long run, it didn't, right? And wokeness is kind of like that. Wokeness, it's not the factory floor that's the setting anymore because people aren't on the factory floor as part of their workday. Where are they on? They're on the internet, right? They're on the internet, they're on social media. And so what is wokeness? It's a collective action by all the people who accept those woke premises to go and gang up on somebody. And they're taking not their money from the boss, but the status from the oppressor. And when they're debiting, go ahead. When people do this, is there a defense mechanism? Is there a way for the non-woke to

either resist, to fight back, to just ignore? Like, how do you look at the other side of the equation? Extremely good question. And, you know, I've thought about this a lot and whatnot. And in some ways it's, it's actually like a virus in its own way, where it had to partially like go through the population for, for you and me to both know what wokeness is for the audience to know what it is for us to have a word for it. I mean, one thing, by the way, the wokes themselves didn't come up with the word woke. In fact, they hate it. They try to scratch off the label all the time. Right. And it's funny because everybody else is labeled with something like wokeness is all about coming up with labels for everything else, pathologizing it, problematizing it, and so on

and so forth. Everything else is labeled and named and analyzed and verbalized to very verbal, except for wokeness itself, right? Which is sort of the, you know, um, you ever seen Indiana Jones, like the scene where he like swaps out the idol, um, you know, in, in, do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah. So wokeness is like the combination of Foucauldian deconstruction with civil rights ideology where it like takes away it's at first says everything is relative there's no morality and then this is what's good right and it's basically like a radicalized version of civil rights you know kind of stuff but it's not even uh equal rights it's just a it is to equal rights what communism is to treating your workers well you know it is something that claims to be for

that but is actually not that um you know communism claimed to treat workers well but put them in the gulag, right? Wokeness claims to treat people equally, but you get BLM burning Black businesses down and so on, right? And so hopefully I can say this because it's true. And it's something where if you look at the history of communism, it was actually terrible for workers. By the end, you had this situation with solidarity where the solidarity was trying to strike. was actually part of what brought the Soviet Union down is that they were cracking down on the group that they were supposed to be for. The workers' paradise, the Soviet Union is cracking down on the workers. This, I think, is also going to be the big problem with woke capital and why it's

not going to live very long is all this inflation that's happening, all the dollars that are being printed, it's hitting non-whites the hardest. If you look at inflation numbers, the Hill actually has a study like inflation hitting non-white people the hardest. So what's going to happen, what's already happening is it's hitting the coalition that they claim to be enriching and speaking for is just like the workers under communism were actually impoverished and harmed. The printing under woke capitalism is going to hit and hurt non-white people very, very badly, much worse than they were under the previous system, the pre-woke system, which had its flaws, but was better than wokeness. And so that I do think is delegitimizing, but then that doesn't

mean that anything that replaces it is necessarily good. I certainly agree with the maximalist critique of inflation or things, but I also do think that the answer is not just total decentralization and crypto anarchy, but rather recentralization under opt-in leaders. And some maximalists, by the way, would, I think, agree with me on that. But it's a spectrum. It's just like with wokeness um you know where does woke end and simply just somebody who's liberal or progressive whatever where does that begin and it is that's the reason it works right the reason it works is you have somebody who is genuinely tolerant and then somebody who says all the same things but uses it to be intolerant the last thing i'm gonna say here and i know we're running

out of time a little bit, but I always go back to this idea of so many of the problems in the world and whether it's a Bitcoin maximalist or a kind of a fed critics or whoever, they all kind of arrive at the same conclusion, which is we don't have free markets and free markets have kind of been co-opted and taken over by ideologies, by these social focuses, by everything other than free market capitalism, right? And if you believe in free markets and their ability to self-correct and kind of eventually find the answer, optimizing for anything other than let the free market do its thing is obviously intervention and would prevent the free market from operating. And so So what I think is a unique way to present Bitcoin or other types of technologies that follow similar ethos is that it's trying to implement free market dynamics again, but do it in a way where they cannot be co-opted.

Like, yes, somebody can go and manipulate the Bitcoin price, right, if you're just a large holder or whatever, but they cannot change fundamentally what Bitcoin is. they cannot take over the network. They cannot change the programmatic monetary policy. They cannot do these things. And so it goes back to like the classic Google, like don't be evil, can't be evil, right? Type nomenclature. If we were successful in implementing free markets where people could not take them over, would the world be a better place? It's up for debate, but I think that there's a strong argument that the free market would definitely leave Okay. So let's say that I probably, I probably agree with almost, you know, with much of that, right? The only thing is, um, do you know the difference between open loop versus closed loop

control? No. Okay. So like in control theory, um, let's say that you, uh, you had a car, okay. and uh you close your eyes and you just hit the gas okay that's like open loop control there's no feedback okay but closed loop control you have your eyes open and you're looking at the road and you're making micro corrections and steering the wheel left and right and and so on and so forth and so you're making micro corrections um constantly sometimes a little bit left sometimes a little bit right and uh and that's keeping you on the straight and narrow to get there and if it's a complicated and long direction, you can't just keep the thing veering left or keep the thing veering right and hope to get there. As a second metaphor that I think is also related, imagine

that somebody was a Westist. Why are they a Westist? Because they liked the idea of California. okay so just kept going west and they then they got to california and then they they had people in the group say we have to keep going west what are you some kind of cuck you don't want to be you know we got to keep going west aren't you a westist right you're going east now you're in california and so then they keep going west they land the pacific ocean okay and so the point is that an ideology that is just a direction is going to insist on a purity that is actually a stupidity because you really want to optimize for destination, not consistent direction. You can go too far left. You can go too far right. You have to actually be able to steer.

And so it may be the case that at this point in time, I agree that one should steer right or steer left or up or down or something else. There's more than just two directions also. But you have to have some vision of what that destination is. And moreover, as you know, as a startup investor, just the words that somebody writes in a slide deck, there's a thousand micro-corrections that they have to make on the steering wheel, 10,000, 100,000 between that slide deck, their words and their vision and their actual destination. And so simply saying it on the internet, And it's like, you know, it's a starting place, but the execution, the implementation of that concept require many pragmatic compromises with reality. And so that's actually one of the things

I talk about in the book is basically, I do believe in moral entrepreneurship in the sense that I do believe people should. And I think tech entrepreneurs have actually only done this implicitly. It's not just about a technological innovation. It's about a moral innovation. It's not just about a failure in the market. It's a failure in society that one wants to fix. You don't just have something that is a better mousetrap. You have something that's a better world. But how do you actually prove that that's actually a good moral innovation and not a bad one? Because just like most tech companies fail, most things don't actually work in the market. Many moral innovations, like the communists had a moral innovation, which is profit bad.

Profit used to be considered good. Then they said, hey, what happens if we say profit is bad? Turned out to be a very bad door to go down, but hundreds of millions of people were enslaved, a hundred million die before you fix that. Other moral innovations like cigarettes bad or smoking bad, before cigarettes were acceptable or even good, then flipped to bad. I argue that was probably on balance of good intervention. And then yet still others like prohibition, which said alcohol bad, and then it got flipped back to alcohol acceptable. That was neutral to negative, the prohibition thing. But you can also argue that alcohol does cause still a lot of crimes, DUI, et cetera. So you can argue that point. Maybe you want not a coercive prohibition,

but a dry society, you can argue that point. Okay. So the thing is, if you have a moral innovation, if you have a strong moral position, then what you want to do, and I talk about this in the book, is build society as a service, right? Prove that you're right by actually going, let's say you're a Maximus, you go and build your citadel and you bring people in, society as a service. And the thousand things that can't fit in a tweet, all the decisions that you actually have to make about a real society, like what are the laws going to be? Are there going to be police? Is there going to be any central government of any kind? All this type of stuff, you actually will have to go and figure out in your society as a service. And you'll have to make pragmatic

concessions to reality that one does not if one is just kind of popping off. And that's kind of how I think about it is you want to give people the ability to morally innovate and technologically innovate. They build these societies as services. And the way that there's a check on their legitimacy is that people choose to come and they choose to stay. And if they don't like it, they can choose to leave and they can choose between others of these kinds. And they can tour it online. That's why the digital component is so important. They can tour it online cheaply so they can go and comparison shop and then find the best ones. But with that said, I do think there's a big difference between those folks who will build these societies and those folks who are

the consumer citizens. I do think there's a good thing about comparison shopping between jurisdictions, but that's like the difference between buying an iPhone, building an iPhone is much harder. And so the folks who are going to build these jurisdictions cannot simply be the consumer citizen. You have to be much more missionary than quote-unquote mercenary, right? So this is how I think you can actually prove that your online morality is right. Build a society oriented around that. See what it actually looks like when you materialize it. Just like a theory of math or computer science, you actually sometimes need to write the code to see if it works. And then you can show that it's attractive and you've actually made the right

trade-offs. Or it might be something that only works when you can be in the back row throwing stones or online throwing stones and doesn't work if you actually go and declare yourself president of a startup society and try and build one. When you think about these theories as they continue to come together, put a probability. I don't know, next 10 years, what's the probability that we see a network state in a 10 year period? And then what's the probability we see it in a 50 year time period? It's a great question. I mean, I want to actually bring this into fruition. So I'm playing on your rational and optimistic sides. Sure. Sure. Well, I mean, this is the thing, as we've talked about, there's actually a lot

of proof points towards this. We have billion person social networks. We have billion person crowd funds. We have massive online meetups. We have, you know, remote work and all that stuff is now mainstream. We have dissatisfaction with the establishment, blah, blah, blah. There's like many, many different things where it's quote, just systems integration. But I mean, let me put it like this. Do I think it is possible? I mean, 10 years ago in 2012, I think, you know, what was the price of Bitcoin is, it was 10 bucks or something like that, right? So a lot can happen in 10 years. A lot, an enormous amount can happen in 20 years. 20 years ago, you know, 2002, I mean, like that's, Google was around, it's true, but it was pre-Facebook, it was pre-iPhone,

it was pre a lot of things. You know, even the internet age as we normally think about it, I think only truly started post-iPhone. There's a great book on this, but until basically 2008, Google, you know, was the only company that was making money on the internet. Microsoft didn't really think of the internet, thought of Google and Apple was not solely an internet company. It was a gadget company. And that was before Airbnb and Uber. So all this stuff, this entire internet economy is about like less than 15 years old, maybe 13 years old. So an enormous amount can happen in 10 years. And do I think it is possible that you could have a startup society that, you know, my face is by the way of emergence are you have a startup society, which is a guy, you know,

person declares himself, just like you declare yourself CEO of a new startup company, you declare yourself president of a new startup society, and you're one person. Then you recruit people online for that. You build it to 10 and 100, and then you start organizing them into what I call a network union, which takes the big difference between a network union and a normal online community is the network union is capable of collective action. It seems like a small thing. It's actually a huge thing.

It basically means that they are combining to achieve a goal, and they're actually doing that thing, even if that's all just upvoting something. they start to actually get accustomed to sacrificing for the group and working together for a measurable cause where the group is stronger than the individual. Just getting 10 people to go and help some member of the network union each day is a big deal. You might start to have an internal currency of that network union because they don't just do normal union things. They might help somebody if they've got a conflict with their employer. That is a potential thing. They could also do group purchasing. They could help somebody with a launch. They could help and

crowdfund something. They're basically like an online community that helps you out, a network union. So that's digital. You get these people accustomed to doing collective actions, building trust, and so on. And eventually, that network union takes the next step to physical. And what does that mean? They start crowdfunding buildings. Maybe it's houses that two or three or five people live together in. Maybe it is apartment complexes that if you have a large network union, 100 people can buy an apartment complex. And suddenly, they all have equity in the building where they wouldn't have had it before. When you have a hundred, you know, streams of rent together, you have a different conversation with the building owner than if you have one, right? And doing all this

means they have to sort of appoint a CEO or a president of that network union. It can't just be like an online community that, you know, everybody's there for Game of Thrones. They actually have some sort of collective leadership. So you go from startup society to network union to what I call network archipelago. That is this global build-out of lots of little physical piece of territory that are knitted together. And then eventually, if you have enough population and enough income and enough real estate footprint, you can gain the diplomatic recognition from an existing state required to become a network state. And that might not be a sovereign, like you might not have a France or whatever recognize you. You might start with a small

country like a Tuvalu or a small city even, like Miami isn't that small a city, but a Texas or a Miami or Tuvalu. You don't have to have a huge national government do it. You could have a state or a city government or a small national government do it. And that first thing, that first recognition, why do I think that's possible? Because you do have Tuvalu signing deals with companies. You have Columbia signing deals with companies for the .tv and .co domains. You have El Salvador doing the Bitcoin deal, the Bitcoin as the national currency, which is a big deal. You have Wyoming doing the Ethereum DAO loss. They're integrating with the Ethereum network that way. And so you have many proof points like this, where you have states and cities and small countries

that are doing deals with corporations or with networks or with other groups. And so I do think all of those proof points are there. And I think if you have a large enough online entity that shows enough longevity. It's going to be rebuffed the first time. It's going to be laughed at for years. It's going to be thought to be crazy, but eventually five or 10 or 15 years or sooner or later, I don't know. It will have the scale, I think, to achieve diplomatic recognition, especially if it's like more than a million people and it's bigger than 20% of the countries in the UN. I mean, it would be incredible if this happens. And I think your point about there are many, many proof points and, uh, kind of mini milestones that we can plot out that this seems to

be the direction that we're going. If people want to learn more about the network state and read the book, where can we send them to, uh, to find it? And then where can we send people to find you on the internet? Great question. So, um, if you go to the network state.com, so yeah, so there actually.com. So first is that subscribe widget in the lower left, go and subscribe because there'll be more chapters, free chapters and so on. The whole thing is free online. You can read it online. You can download the PDF. If you want it on Kindle for offline, buy it on Amazon. I think it's a pretty decent experience on mobile. So, you know, your Android phones and so on. So, go there. And then otherwise, go to twitter.com. And you can follow me. And that is here. And I

will return to tweeting soon. Yes. I've just been, I've just been faving and RTing and stuff. I've been warming up but uh but it will begin um it's like it's like the return yeah yeah something like that right um so we wanted to basically uh if you scroll up by for a second in this uh in the zoom oh yeah great so that's me at biology s um yeah and uh if you go um i should actually update the url but if you go back to the networkstate.com it's upper left corner it's kind of a fun logo right get it new country haha create button create new country country yes exactly right click let's go all right listen left click this is left click left click left click okay uh listen thank you so much for uh for taking the time to do this i think that you and i could uh could literally sit here

i've actually thought that you and i one day should sit down and just go for 12 hours and just see like how how much shit could we actually talk about because i enjoyed every single time when we when we get the hardcover out there with the 600 700 pages all the charts and stuff like that we'll do a page flip and i'll just kind of call out what i think is page by page something like that there you go all right well listen thank you so much for taking the time to do this i know people will have learned a lot i learned a lot and i will definitely do it again in the future thanks so much for listening to today's episode i really hope you guys enjoyed this one make sure you're subscribed on apple spotify or your favorite podcast player and if

you're looking to try to transition to get a new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to pompscryptocourse.com. We've developed a curriculum with the top teams across the industry. It's a three-week intensive training program with over 50 events packed into that three-week time period. Go to pompscryptocourse.com to learn more and I'll meet you guys for the next episode.