The Pomp Podcast - Why The World Is Moving Towards Bitcoin, India, & Networks | Balaji Srinivasan

Episode Date: September 17, 2025

Balaji Srinivasan is an entrepreneur and investor. He is also the author of the Network State and the founder of the Network School. In this conversation we talk about geopolitics, what is going on with China, US decline, why India is so important, bitcoin, gold, land, guns, and what is going on with the Network School.  (https://ns.com/) (https://thenetworkstate.com/) ======================Pomp writes a daily letter to over 270,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at: ⁠⁠https://pomp.substack.com/⁠⁠======================Check out my NEW show for daily bite-sized breakdowns of the biggest stories in finance, technology, and politics: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://pompdesk.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠======================Simple Mining makes Bitcoin mining simple and accessible for everyone. We offer a premium white glove hosting service, helping you maximize the profitability of Bitcoin mining. For more information on Simple Mining or to get started mining Bitcoin, visit https://www.simplemining.io/======================Bitlayer is taking Bitcoin beyond just a store of value. For the first time, you can put your Bitcoin to work, earning yield while staying true to its core principles of security and decentralization. Bitlayer is making Bitcoin DeFi a reality. Learn more at https://x.com/BitlayerLabs======================TimeStamps:0:00 - Intro2:00 - US decline and China strength?7:09 - What US environment and regulation should look like16:34 - The rise of India and improved infrastructure24:05 - Geopolitical landscape and the role of India45:16 - The war for talent and digital nomad visas51:29 - America is the greatest empire of all time56:24 - Bitcoin, gold, the dollar, and guns1:08:40 - What is the Network School?

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. 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. The purpose here, imagine if Bitcoin had been built from the very beginning to be something that would give birth to a thousand cryptocurrencies you design it somewhat more differently right and that's what network school is i know i don't have all the answers some people will do vegan network states and some people will do carnivore network states and some people do like latin immersion and you know there'll be mennonites and there'll be catholics and there'll be janes and sikhs and all different kinds of different groups people

Catalonians, Basques, language groups, cultural groups, ethnic groups, all kinds of stuff that I can't even predict. What's going on, guys? Today, we got a great episode with Balaji Srinivasan. He's back and he delivers. We talk about geopolitics. What's going on with China? Why are they getting stronger? What's going on with the U.S. decline? How is India as a chessboard piece going to actually play both with China and the U.S.? We talk about Bitcoin, gold, land and guns. And Balaji explains what's going on with the network school and what he's actually been building all the way out there near Singapore. This conversation is great. I always enjoy talking to my friend Balaji, and you guys will enjoy this one as well. Here's my latest conversation

with Balaji Srinivasan. Is this Pomp coming on the Network State Podcast, or is this Balaji going on the Pomp Show? I guess it's a doubleheader. All right. Balaji, we got a lot to talk about. Let's start with the U.S. decline and China's strength. You had a great tweet thread where you talked about the fact that the country that positions itself as the most powerful is doing that on purpose. They want to show strength to the world. China, who people deem is behind, actually wants to appear weak while it grows strength. Explain the dichotomy between these two countries that really seem to be the leaders of what seems to appear to be this multipolar world we're headed towards yeah so so basically the thing is that i you know like you i

believe in american values and i believe in the america that we both grew up in and so i just want to preface everything by saying that i am a reality show right so say i am a shill for observable physical reality right so where the numbers are i try and figure out where the numbers what the actual reality is. And then I kind of shape my worldview accordingly as opposed to vice versa. Right. Okay. So that in mind, let me show you some numbers from the, from the post that you're mentioning. So this post over here, okay. Shows what some people call the skull graph. Right. And can you see the screen there? Yes. Okay. So this shows that on a number of different kinds of charts china has passed the u.s okay so it's past us in energy consumption it flipped

over here in about 2010 it passed in manufacturing value add that it also flipped in about 2010 it recently actually pat recently actually passed in the nature index of highly cited papers around 2022 um and uh you can argue with that you know measure but within academia that is it's one of the better measures we have, because there's a lot of subjects like, you know, especially in material science, in the physical world, where it's just very hard to build in America. And so China's pushing ahead civil engineering on a scale that humanity's never seen, you know, just giant bridges and tunnels and all this kind of stuff, right? So some of it at least is plausible that they're pushing forward areas of applied science, you know, and then you can argue with some of the

others. And if you, you know, there's more charts like this, this is their chart. Do you see this one of robot stock yep right this is another one of the electricity generations from our world and data this is cars right they just went vertical starting in about 2020 they've they've basically they beat japan and germany who are no slouch in cars you know like the place you know japan does honda nissan germany has mercedes-benz and bmw those countries are known for craftsmanship they're known for automobiles for generations but the flip to an electric car meant that china could flip them because it you know as you know changes architecture car and actually even as amazing as elon is byd is that now outselling tesla in many markets right which is a chinese

you know competitor and i can show many graphs like this but the point is that in some ways um you know like like a lot of the stuff on china that said oh china's uh you know it's it's going to fall into a ditch it's going to get old before it gets rich i think of that as like the the stealth on the chinese stealth bomber which is to say during the cold war the u.s never underestimated the soviet union it if you if anything you could argue it overestimated the soviet union and in the 80s it said you know it thought that they were closer to being a peer than they were and then it collapsed and so on and so forth um i think that with china there's there's a reversal maybe because with the soviets they had also fought in world war ii it was tangible that

they had military strength you know like you're going head to head against them you know with the chinese the competition is entirely economic fortunately there hasn't been a direct physical confrontation you can argue russia ukraine is actually not russia ukraine you can argue russia ukraine is actually china versus us you know why because china supplying you know the russian side and the u.s is supplying the ukrainian side so that's like vietnam it's like a proxy war right between between china and russia right um or china and america and you can argue that because china is also supplying the ukrainian side but it's also supplying the russian side okay point being that um when when all of these graphs on undeniable things in the physical world are all just pointed

like this right because the number of cars that's something you can test you go to a neutral market you go to a market that's even pro-american like in south america or something like that i can show 50 more graphs like this where China's just flipped the U.S. on many different metrics. And you just look at observable physical reality and you see these Chinese cars whizzing around and you see, you know, just lots of signs in Chinese and Panama and stuff like that. It's clear they're building, right? Oh, what happened there? Oh, yeah. So let's start there. Basically, on a lot of metrics in the physical world, China is number one or very quickly becoming number one. Let me pause there.

I can say more. So let me give you a real world example of a conversation I had recently. I was talking to one of the founders of a humanoid robot company that's based in the United States. And we were talking about a whole bunch of things. But one of the things he started to talk about was in China, the safety standards that are required are much lower. So they have a robotic strategy in China.

They have a safety standard that is conducive to building these humanoid robots. they have a government that is actually subsidizing the adoption of these humanoid robots so they're going to companies and saying hey if you buy these robots we'll actually pay for them or pay for a part of them and then also we started talking about the fact that in china they've already had a marathon or like a half marathon of the humanoid running they've had a competition of uh them fighting each other they've had like all these kind of like sport type things that obviously are trying to drive innovation around humanoids while the united states like you know if a humanoid company wants to sell their robot like osha shows up and is like

hey let me see you know like the robot's work permit essentially right let me see what the working conditions are so i do believe that there is um you know kind of a different environment but take humanoids maybe as a as a direct example everyone is being come it has become convinced this is going to be a big market this is going to be very important what can the united states do not get their ass kicked on the global stage when it comes to something that, you know, really everyone's kind of starting out at an even playing field of we got to go invent the technology and then we got to go and sell these products into the market. So the short version, I wrote a post on this. The short version is special Elon zone. Okay. So like a special economic zone where you

have different regulations, except it's a special Elon zone. Okay. Texas should zone some part of texas around starbase where elon can move at the speed of physics not permits okay and the reason is that there's this enormous overhang of pre-internet laws you know larry page actually said every law you know has to be re-examined in the presence of the internet because it just changes so many fundamental assumptions about you know obviously about currency but also about you know for example with product safety you can scan something and it should be able to tell you ever reviewed that anybody's ever had in the world on it, right? Just that alone changed the nature of what regulation is. You don't necessarily need pre-market approval. With a good enough

camera, you can get every single review of a device post-market, just as one example of many, okay? So now, on the other hand, that doesn't mean that you need to start totally from scratch. You don't have to rewrite the laws for assault. You don't need to rewrite the laws around graffiti or something like that, right? You just actually need the minimal edits to the laws. For example, If you had a zone where human-driven cars were not legal, only self-driving cars were legal, think about how that completely changes the topography of that city. That's like cul-de-sac, for example, in Arizona, like a walkable community, because once you assume self-driving cars exist, you can have like a very green central area. You can have, you know, maybe ugly tunnels or parking lots that the self-driving cars go and, you know, park themselves in. And even the parking can be quite tight because self-driving cars park perfectly, right?

Humans make errors. Humans will, you know, crash into each other. They won't always perfectly parallel park. self-driving cars can do very complex parking arrangement like you know like ants or whatever right so you could have and they could all be underground because it can it can be like a long dark tunnel that they go through a single file or whatever right the point is self-driving cars can park and store themselves in ways that humans wouldn't tolerate humans need to walk up to it and open it right so you completely redesign towns neighborhoods even cities around the

self-driving car just now when i say it's one law actually it's changing quite a few laws because there's quite a few laws on speed limits, and there's laws on seatbelts, and there's laws on this and laws on that, right? Like, should your hands be on the steering wheel? Well, what if there's no steering wheel in the car, right? Like a lot of these laws are predicated on a 20th century gas-powered, you know, human-driven automobile, right? Once you have a different set of laws or a different edit to the laws, you have a totally different zone, okay? So when I say special Elon zone, really what that means is a special economic zone with a recognized founder who has plenary authority to edit those laws and that authority is given to them by

the local government who has some patch of land that they're not doing anything with because there's tons of barren land out there tons and tons and tons of it right i mean look at european to dubai uh no okay you should okay here is my checklist for you okay and i actually think this would be the highest value trip you could take simply to calibrate also for anybody in your audience there's maybe six cities that i would see say you should probably visit um maybe seven okay so warsaw and poland just to see how much eastern europe has improved it's far enough away from the ukrainian war zone that you know it's fine okay uh dubai riyadh uh i went to riyadh last year okay fine for fii maybe um no i went for a different event but i was blown away

by uh one how safe i felt yes two is um how much my uh mental like preparation for what the western media had told me about riyadh and then the cognitive dissonance of being there and realizing this is nothing like what I had been told it was. And so just like that flip was very eye-opening. This is the thing is lots of Republicans know that the media has been lying to them about so many things, large and small, about whether men and women even exist. It's just one like huge, but, you know, the limited example, right? What they haven't put together is that it's also really misrepresenting what's going on abroad.

other countries like one of the issues i think this is kind of uh i'm i i don't i don't hope to convince anybody with this but i think lots of people in maga correctly observe that democrats brought a lot of legal aliens across the border but then incorrectly think that means the rest of the world is their enemy but they're not really like there's billions of people out there just living their lives the vast majority of people are not flooding into the u.s or what have you And also a lot of the media reports in those other countries are incorrect in ways that you'd only be able to understand how they're incorrect if you're on the ground there, right? So that's why it's good that you're in Riyadh. So I'd say Warsaw, Dubai, Riyadh, Bangalore, Ho Chi Minh City, Singapore, Shenzhen.

Okay. And on the last one, Trump has said he's visiting China. and um you know uh i think uh one of the uh trump sons was recently in hong kong i think eric trump was in hong kong so it's okay if trump is visiting china it's okay to visit china like i'm not saying you become chinese or whatever you know right but like it is okay to go and travel and simply see what the country is like and just see it with your own eyes and see the scale of their manufacturing plant just to calibrate right because there's some things that can only be understood if you're actually on the ground there. I mean, for example, for me, um, you know, my parents are from India

and I grew up in the U S and, uh, in the eighties and nineties, when we visited India, it really was just like, you know, really desperate poverty, desperate poverty, like, like of a, of a shocking variety. And, you know, there are people, it was flies and there was, you know, really poor people all over and the roads were incredibly dirty and on and on and on, right? And, you know, then I was working for a long time in the 2000s. I didn't have that much time to go back. I went back occasionally. And then after a long gap, I went back in the mid-late 2010s and I was stunned at how much everything had improved. I was just agog like this, okay? Like they had 5G internet and the airports were beautiful and the the roads were were like radically radically improved i mean

traffic lights and you know all these things you take for granted but it was all like fresh new blacktop and um there were hiltons and there were starbucks's and there was uh every internet service i could imagine and on and on and on there's upi and other all the identity services all the type of stuff which i could i could go through and i was just like i i wouldn't have i honestly just wouldn't have believed it unless i had seen it with my own eyes and i would i just was not calibrated because i had reasonably you know it's like show me something bro right you know you want people will say something online but then you actually have to see it you know the execution is everything right and the execution of india in the 2010s was just beyond belief for

me so that's when i really started tracking it very very closely i can show you graphs and charts i can show you let me show you a video that i took of an indian airport let me show you one sure i I actually went to India in – I think it was 2017, and I went to Mumbai, Goa. I went to Delhi, Agra, Jaipur. I went to a bunch of different cities. I spent like two and a half weeks in the country, and it was very interesting to see in the country itself like, hey, these are the places that are undeveloped, and then here are the places that are 10 years ahead, 15 years ahead. And you could just see like it was sweeping through the country. it's moving very very very fast also and um the the reason i just say that is even 2017 just think

about how much the u.s has changed in 2015 that's pre-covid and and so on and so forth right um so i want to just show you uh this here's one from 2023 just play this video yeah here let me put this here to the chat can you see the screen there oh here we go yep pretty nice bangalore this is quite a few airports in india are like this now right now you know i can show you more you know kind of visuals and stuff like this i can show you charts like um here's a chart on infrastructure for example um and this shows like look at the huge increase that's 2012 and

2021 look at the number of lights that have come online right you know or the highway network look how much denser it is over here right here's airports there's like you know 20 30 percent more airports here's water connections like all kinds of stuff like this public infrastructure is just going like this how much of this is the government just wakes up one day it's like hey we got to do this and they start to fund this stuff versus it's entrepreneurs who are doing it or like what's driving the change well well that's the amazing part it is both but the thing that is amazing to me is the government is actually very competent there modi's government prime minister modi's government is actually very very competent and they're like they're you can

there's lots of things that india does which you can argue is two steps forward one step back and And in the moment, it's like, oh, my God. But on balance, it is two steps forward. And the country is just radically, radically improving. Now, the reason I say this is it's important to kind of I think you can be too far. You can also be too close. What I mean by that is if you're too far and you've been in, you know, America or, you know, Canada or I don't know, some other place. Let's say it's U.S.

You've just been there your whole life. You've never actually come to India. You'll have some vision of India that's just from the media. Okay. fine. And then if you come there, you'll see all the things that are flawed about it and whatnot. Conversely, if you grew up completely in India, you take for granted the change every single day and it's so gradual, you don't notice it. But if you come back 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, like that, every year or two years and so on and so forth for a few weeks or a month, then you have sort of the

right frame where you can see the change. Oh, all those buildings went up since the last time I was year. It's not so infrequent that you don't really have a model of it, but it's not so frequent that you take the change for granted. Does that make any sense? Right? So that's why I suggest that trip in particular, because, uh, it actually, and here's where we're putting it. I'm not saying, and one thing I want to be very clear about, I'm not saying all of India is amazing or anything like that. I'm not saying that there's still, there's still, there's a lot of poverty. There's a lot of things to fix and so on. But the best analogy I give is India is like California in reverse okay let me explain so in california you got to go through california there's beautiful

old buildings but everything new is a homeless encampment it's a safe injection site it's somebody od'd on crack on or meth or whatever on the side of the road it's like a burned down building like you know pacific palisades or you know it's like a bridge to nowhere like this uh this hundred billion dollars that they they allocated for the train it didn't build anything right so everything new in california in the physical world is a disaster even elon couldn't put a sign elon the most resourceful man in the world couldn't get a sign up on top of the x.com building and had to take down the sign remember that right now so everything old in california is amazing and beautiful and everything new is terrible india is a reverse lots of stuff that's

old is shanty towns and you know it's like it's like filth and so so but everything that's new it's like an apple store it's like a beautiful airport it's a highway it's a this it's that right so india is getting fractally better and california is getting fractally worse does that make any sense right so both of them yeah and so that that is a way for me to make sense of it because if you just take snapshots people can find all kinds of things that are good and bad about each thing but the the the thing is that india and california are converging or even have converged uh in ways that i would never ever have expected when i was growing up and i as i said i'm a reality show i just call it like i see it because i'm a global investor you know if

um if i didn't think it was real i wouldn't you know i'm not i don't see an opportunity in i don't know bolivia or something like that but if if i if i did i would i would pay more attention to it i think they're actually they're adopting tether now uh did you see that i did see yeah it's like the the the currency that's the last i heard of bolivia nothing against bolivia i just not on my radar maybe there's something happening there anyway my point is uh they're like i would prefer to i'm in singapore you know i'm in the special economic zone now and yes i would i'd still take singapore over bangalore but i would definitely take bangalore over la today's episode is brought to you by simple mining have you ever been interested in mining bitcoin as a miner myself

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to get started today with simple mining they make it simple now let me ask this question um we've seen this multipolar world where you've got the u.s kind of on one side you've got china and russia I think you've kind of been on the other side in India to me was it's kind of like a tip off of an NBA game. Yeah. They like, you know, we throw the ball up like who's going to get it. There's been viral videos and photos in the last couple of weeks of the three leaders of those countries outside the United States all hanging out, having fun, you know, kind of look like they're getting pretty chummy with each other. But also, I think that, you know, Trump and Modi and the U.S. India relationship is still strong and seems to be positive as well. And China, to me, feels like the part of the conversation, though, that usually gets left out when people are talking about the geopolitical landscape because they want to talk about the Russia-Ukraine stuff. They want to talk about the fact that Russia is sending the oil to China and then China is selling it to the rest of the world, whatever.

But India never stopped buying oil from Russia. India never stopped buying wheat. India said, hey, we got to look out for our people. We got to do what the right thing is here. We got to be able to build this infrastructure. Like, they took a very nationalist approach, I think, to a lot of things over the last five years or so. And so, you know, what happens if India says, you know what, actually, hey, U.S., we're going to go the other way. Like, you know, we'll still be friends, but actually we're going to align ourselves with Russia and China.

Well, I want to show you something, which is actually maybe the – you may not see the immediate relevance, but i'm going to show you something which i think is a very very important um graph with respect to that okay do you see this yep bin laden's compound okay this is a map okay when assam bin laden was found he was found in pakistan and his compound was literally down the street from the pakistan military academy over here you see that and you know how like um like trump renamed the gulf of gulf of mexico to gulf america right india should really rename pakistan to bin ladenistan okay simply to remind americans that they're sending billions to bin ladenistan right the country that harbored the guy that killed 3 000 americans and probably a lot more

international terrorists right in fact they've launched terrorist attacks in india they've launched obviously they were harboring look it's right next door to afghanistan you know so there's a very porous border there that's not a real border in many ways right and so look there's many individual pakistanis who are really great people and they're good at math and so and so i have no beef there's lots of lots of great pakistanis but the regime has basically been like a terrorist regime and so that i the reason i bring that up is america is doing something that is, that's seen by India as ridiculously hostile, which is funding this terrorist state on India's border that launched the Mumbai attacks, that constantly, you know, because Pakistan doesn't

have economic growth. It's not like Dubai or Riyadh, right, which has, you know, there's Muslim-majority countries that have very friendly relations with India. You know, like the UAE has, you know, a giant Hindu temple, and India's on great terms with them, and Hindus and Muslims can work together well and you know so saudi arabia much of the gulf coast countries and indians work together really well right but pakistan is just this kind of cuckoo you know kind of state they don't have economic growth so keep launching terrorist attacks in india and here's the thing both the u.s and china fund pakistan okay so china funds them to try to keep india in check and the u.s funds them for god only knows what reasons maybe for like a military base

or something near like you know afghanistan but clearly this is billions for bilanistan right so when you think about that that's why india is a swing vote because america now i i don't think most americans are are aware of that how much money has gone to pakistan how many soldiers have gone there it would be i don't know it would be the equivalent of funding like ms-13 on on on america's border you know it'd be an extremely hostile act right and despite that Indians still want to because, you know, Indians speak English and there's lots of Indian Americans. And I broadly think I understand, you know, it's funny for me to put this way. I think MAGA is in a phase right now where they're kind of lashing out at everybody.

But I think in the long term, like a 10 year time frame, and I think it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. But I think over the long run, we're going to see, for lack of a better term, what's called the Indo-European world. What is that? The Indo-European world is basically India becomes an equal. India and Indians become an equal to Europeans and Americans and so on. A rough example of this is, you know, in the 1800s, you know, prior to the 1800s, the Jewish community was not emancipated. That is to say, you can argue this, they were emancipated in France and so on. That meant they didn't have the rights as citizens.

So, for example, the Jewish community in any kingdom, they would pay taxes as a group. is like a corporation they wouldn't be able to pay taxes individuals right say they couldn't hold property they couldn't vote they couldn't marry and so on and so forth they had to be within their own community and so on okay but then when they're emancipated they could connect peer-to-peer and then suddenly they rose very quickly and they just hadn't been that big a force in europe prior to the 1800s and suddenly they just kind of came out of nowhere all these really smart people leveling up in the professions and so on and then there's a huge amount of consternation over who are these people coming from? I can't believe they're taking our jobs

and so on. And they're working on weekends. You know, the Sunday law firms didn't want to work on weekends. And there was a lot of consternation about that in the early 1900s and many different reactions from all sides. But eventually after like simplifying an enormous 20th century with obviously the, you know, the Germans and that whole thing. Right. But simplifying an enormous 20th century, the Jewish community proved itself, right? They proved that they could do math, they could do computer science, they could found their own companies, they could execute, right? They could found their own countries, right? And there were left-wing versions, there were right-wing versions, there were centrist versions, you know, that's a whole topic, right? The analogy

today is, but, you know, if you go back further in time, obviously the Jewish community had thousands of years of history right you know going all you know millennia right so there's some evidence of them having staying power some talent there that then you know right and so in the same way indians and india is a huge huge huge place and many different kinds of indians and so on and so forth many different you know subgroups and what have you but it's comparable because uh until the last you know few decades most indians were basically in india just like you know the something you know you've heard the term the shtetl no what is that that's like the area in like you know eastern europe poland where uh it's like the ghetto where many jewish people lived and

so sort so a similar kind of thing in india was the kalapani it was essentially this belief that the black water surrounded india and if you left india you crossed went overseas then you wouldn't get reincarnated okay so that's a belief that kept indians sort of region locked there okay similar to how like the jewish community was in the shuttle and in the modern era just like you know orthodox jews shaved their beards and they assimilated and then they leveled up in a huge way only in the last 20 30 40 something years has even a small number of indians actually in a sense entered the modern world and that's like you know the seven million or so indian americans and what have you and they've done i think i think pretty well um but but like in

many ways they're kind of the advanced scouts because uh you know why sundar and satya why are they ceos uh google and microsoft well they actually had to start as h1bs because they weren't they weren't starting as citizens they had to start as employees their children are like unlocked phones right because they have the full rights of citizens and so it's a good analogy right like locked for sunlock so if you're an indian immigrant you have to join a mega corporation and say, sir, yes, sir, three bags full, sir, and work your way up, right? But if you're one of their children, you're unlocked and you can do, you know, you have more security in what you can do. So then you can be a founder, right? So lots of

the new generation tech founders are of Indian descent. Anyway, what's my point? I can show you actually, you know what, let me just to calibrate just because I'm saying this stuff, but I want to calibrate. Uh, so you can see, I'm not just totally, totally crazy person. Um, only partially crazy okay okay so can you see the screen there yep okay so in lots of graphs lots of graphs look like this okay where china's just dominating the entire world okay but if you zoom in closer on this graph and do the world minus china india is above the u.s yes india is a distant but real number two on many of these graphs and crucially look at the growth there that's real growth right so that's steel okay let me show you another one here's nuclear okay so this is um you know the

the white boxes are proposed gray is planned and then red is under construction so china has the world's largest nuclear build-out but india is actually number two right it's a distant number two but it's a real number two right russia's number three over there okay the u.s unfortunately has no new at the time this is made no nuclear power plants under construction there's a new regulation that the Trump administration promulgated that maybe we'll see something, but I'm just saying at the time this was made, right? Okay. Then here is electricity generation and the same graph we saw before where China is just crushing everybody. But look there, India is actually going to flip the EU soon, right? I mean, the EU is doing all the stupid

degrowth stuff. They're hurting themselves. Still, for India to flip the EU, that's not nothing. You know, that's a real look at this. That's a healthy, healthy growth right there. Right. I'll do a few more smartphones. India has gone from about one percent to actually making 20 percent of global phones. It's now the second largest producer in the world. It's still a distant number two after China, but 20 percent is not it's not nothing, you know, and then cement. OK, China's number one again by far. But India's a healthy number two in Forex United States. i mean it is it is pretty crazy to think about um the fact that india is number two and i guess the question then is uh becomes is it because they have so many people is it because of the economic policies is it because actually there's an entrepreneurial energy that isn't met with all of the regulation and kind of like uh headwinds that the united states has like why do you think india is number two what i'm saying basically my case i'd make is we're not total losers we're we like some indians can play right and i think that on the other side

of the next 10 years and so indians and india will prove themselves that actually they can do stuff in the physical world they can code they can do math and so on and so forth and prove themselves as a peer in much the same way the jewish community did in the 1900s if that makes any sense but the reason there's a lot of shock on that right now is there's a over there's kind of the reaction of who are these guys where they all come from why is everybody named why is everybody something named vivek and this that and the other you know it's like uh it was one thing when there's like one or two of them but now there's so many everywhere what's going on you know this is this our country is i get that i get totally get where that comes from right um

and so now that brings to the the the thing about you know trump and and india and so and so forth so one thing that happened in 2015 was the trade war right uh and actually in some ways you know uh let me show you a couple of graphs this is my mental model of the world there are two things that happened in the early uh 2010s late late 2000s okay the first is this graph do you see this one where it shows google and facebook just going vertical and newspaper revenue just cratering to 16 billion right so that's a drop of you know more than 75 basically in a few years from like you know 60 something billion to about 15 less on the order of 15 billion right maybe you can say 20 billion okay um that's that is the internet disrupting blue america okay the other graph

is this one where it shows so that's internet disrupting democrats and this graph shows right around the same time china disrupting republicans okay so once you see that you actually realize oh this is actually a four faction conflict the internet democrats republicans and china as the democrat pie shrank go broke go woke this is what radicalized them they lost a lot of money suddenly you know their lifestyle changed from writing four or five or six articles a year for time magazine to having to write an article every day for some you know like like you know gossip outlet their lifestyle you know eroded and these tech guys got rich so they got really mad at us and they started the tech clash but they also started wokeness to take some share from red

because they got desperate red was at the same time being attacked by china economically and so red basically fought back against blue with trump and fought back against china with the trade war okay so you had this four faction thing blue is fighting the internet with a tech lash blue is fighting red with wokeness red is fighting uh blue with uh trump and red is fighting china with the trade war with me so far okay so if we just focus though on that second theater or you know it's really four theaters but if you focus on the uh you know uh the republicans versus china this is why trump was saying china china china china in 2015 when it wasn't on the radar of blue americans because red americans were feeling the competition with me so far yep okay

so what happened china at first was completely taken aback by what trump did because for example he managed to completely crater a graph there's a graph showing chinese fdi uh into the u.s uh and it just went kaput after yeah so this one look at this graph it just completely fell off of a off a cliff it completely fell off a cliff because this was a trump effect right so trump essentially like this thing was just going absolutely vertical and so trump essentially just cratered china's ability to invest directly in the u.s okay the other thing that happened here just as like a real world anecdote is um in the early 2010s in new york city there was tons of foreign buyers of real estate they were buying apartments and especially luxury apartments etc

as that capital flooded into the market builders in new york city said oh wow look at all these chinese buyers let's go build a lot more apartments to feed that demand and then what was very interesting is you don't just snap your fingers and build a tower in new york city takes a number of years so as these guys got wrecked basically in the 2018 time frame a bunch of that supply came online and this chart um one of the the parts that i remember talking about some of the real estate guys when this was happening is china also put a lot of capital controls in place because they saw that people were getting the money out and going and buying US real estate, whatever. And so now all of a sudden, you basically have a bunch of supply coming online,

no foreign demand coming in for it. And so now you've got real estate developers that are like, well, I thought those foreign buyers were going to be the market. And so for a period there, actually, there was a lot more supply than there was demand, which meant that rents were kept at an affordable rate, right? Fast forward seven years or so to today, a completely different story. And guess what? Rents are through the roof, all-time highs in New York City, complete mess. And there's this feeling of, hey, foreigners are taking the apartments, there's rent control. I mean, it's just a complete, very complex, but very, very big mess. But seven years ago, it was the exact opposite where there was tons of supply coming

online and that foreign demand wasn't actually there. Yeah. So basically at that time, the chinese and the real estate developers lost their shirts and that kept the growth in rent somewhat l you know not elevated it meant that it couldn't suppress to the yeah it got suppressed someone suppressed that's right but uh though the structural factor that's boosting rent is the fed buying mortgage-backed securities by printing diluting everybody down and then taxing you twice or thrice because you've got the income tax and the corporate tax but it's also the inflation tax then it bids against you in the market with the money it just taxed away from with inflation right but i want to share a second graph okay and then i'll get to my point on india

so this graph shows that how china reacted to the trade war right essentially at first they were they were shocked by it because they just didn't expect that to happen that came out of completely left field that you know all of these investments suddenly got marked down suddenly china became america's enemy what this is now 10 years ago so you have to remember that time period but i don't know if you um you and i are roughly comparable age but if you remember the 2000s or even the early 2010s it was very common for goldman and morgan type people to say oh yeah china will become the world's largest economy and so on but they'd say it in a casual way because it was so far off that it wasn't like something that someone said you traitor i hate you so much

you know why are you a ccp agent they didn't say it like that right because they're just making it was like an abstract observation of like you know someday of trends they just looked at the trend line and extrapolated it yes but it was so it was so far in the future that it nobody considered it a serious threat after china suddenly flipped u.s manufacturing then suddenly start people started to react in a very different way to these projections because now objects in mirror are closer than they appear you know the thing they say on right so uh so china was totally taken aback since the sentiment shifted very radically against them and what did they do so they actually reacted by radically expanding their share in other markets and reducing their share in the

u.s so now as of 2022 the north america was down to 16 of china's revenue it used to be a much much larger share okay and they've intentionally been moving away from the u.s as a market that's actually 2022 which is already three years ago and things are moving it's like saying where is ai in 2022 this stuff is this stuff moves really really really fast right and um so the point being that uh the way that china reacted to the cutoff of u.s markets for its trade was to find other markets and it just basically proved itself what i mean by prove itself it's like if a if a venture capitalist says no to you on a deal then what do you do do you cry some people cry and they die and to give up. Other people are like, okay, well, I'm just going to find somebody else and I'll

find somebody else and I'll find somebody else and get the deal done without that person, right? And so essentially America's bet was China was weak and couldn't actually really survive with that. And still people think that it's very dependent on US demand and they're the consumer of last resort. That's a very outdated model of the world. When things are changing really fast, did I give you my fastball analogy? No. It's like, if you've got a ball and it's rolling slowly across the ground and you look at it and you look away and you look back it's basically in the same place that it was but if someone's pitching a fastball and you look away for even a second it's in a totally different place

you know a second later so when things are moving really fast like china relative to the u.s or chinese markets you can't rely on some outdated media image in your head from the 2010s of what china is you have to like intentionally go and refresh today does that make it it's like it's like imagine if your picture of ai was from 2010 like obviously it'd be wildly wildly out of date that thing is moving so fast right the difference is the ai stuff comes to you in your feed but the china stuff or other stuff won't unless you actually go and seek it out okay what's my point putting it all together the tldr is china diversified away from the us's market for its trade. And India and Indians are going to have to, for about 10 years, diversify away from the

U.S.'s market for talent. That's to say, one of the things, I wrote this long post on this, but I don't believe that you should go anywhere that you're not welcome. And I also think for other reasons, the U.S. is going to have a lot of infighting for the years to come. There's like blue versus red just keeps amping up and so on and so forth. At the same time, India itself is doing really well. Indians are doing really well on the internet with just pure crypto and other kinds of stuff and finally there's actually dozens of countries with digital nomad programs so you know for example if you look at this graph over here the war for talent basically you see this country's offering digital nomad visas yep so el salvador mexico cyprus greece

all of these countries offer digital nomad visas right and the uae in particular and also uh you Malaysia slash Singapore are very, very friendly to Indians and more generally anybody around the world. But the reason is, as the U.S. has, in my view, incorrectly, but I understand why, as the U.S. has decided that it doesn't want these tech guys, dozens of other countries have decided we need tech guys. we want these people because these are the highest earning mobile capital in the world and if you can build a tech cluster that leads to compounding economic growth so you actually want to recruit them and attract them to your country um and you know the thing is of course everything's a balance right whenever you say something like that people will always take it into some extreme direction one way or the other. They'll say, what, you hate the country?

You want to flood it with foreigners? No, no, no, we're a country, not economic zone or something. Or they'll flip to the other extreme and they want just totally open borders, right? But, you know, for example, Dubai and Singapore show that you can have, it's like saying hire no one or hire everyone. Obviously you want to be selective in your hiring, duh. And also depending on what kind of company you are you hire some people and others and maybe you have a hiring freeze at times and maybe you go on a hiring spurt at other times right so uh and then by the way the other flip side of is exporting like just like you can export uh trade you can export talent you know the funny thing is by the way a lot of americans don't think about this but much of the world okay so there is

a term that people will sometimes use that i'm going to repurpose in a certain way okay much of the world is actually american occupied government okay why do i say that for example do you know what the harvard kennedy school is yes okay so the harvard kennedy school alone do you have any heads of state it's trained oh it's like some crazy number it's like a uh like a factory basically it's a factory for cranking out heads of other countries right so here's like an example just just this one one school alone president of mexico president mongolia prime minister somalia prime minister singapore you know president of ecuador president costa rica blah blah blah blah blah government administrators this is just like one list look at how many

administrators there are just on this list elected federal officials and go ahead no no it's it's just hilarious when you pull it up and you start scrolling through it is a literally a factory this episode is brought to you by bitlayer bitlayer is taking bitcoin beyond just a store value. For the first time, you can put your Bitcoin to work, earning yield while staying true to its core principles of security and decentralization. BitLayer is making Bitcoin DeFi a reality. Learn more at x.com slash BitLayer Labs. Again, that's x.com slash BitLayer Labs. It is a factory that cranks out heads of states that are not in the United States. Many of them, some of them are and some are not right and uh you know like royalty right you know they've got

they've got some of these people are in the u.s but but a lot of them a lot of them are just global right and that is just one school okay and if you add it up and you say how many foreign heads of state how many foreign bureaucrats either they trained you know they got their education in the u.s where their children are in the u.s how many foreign how many american multinationals like starbucks mcdonald's and so on are there overseas how many foreign entrepreneurs raise capital in the u.s or go public on the u.s stock market even alibaba went public in the united states i mean of all things right um how many uh you know like there's something called harmonization which is where u.s regulations are used in other countries they export regulations

just like you'd export a product why do people want to do that well the fda wants its laws to be used or regulations to be used by everybody but also pfizer and merc want that as well you know why it's probably cheaper because then they can get yeah exactly they get approval in the u.s and then the same laws or regulations apply everywhere else they just export it everywhere it does make sense right but the problem is it's like standardization they basically want standardized rules across the world if they could get it yes and there's there's a reason you have to be able to defend something before you can critique it there's a reasonableness to that The unreasonableness is if the FDA messes up and it's not accountable to either electoral or market correction, it can't be voted out, and it also can't go out of business in a normal way.

So one person, an unelected person who can't be fired and isn't even known to you in Silver Spring, Maryland, can chokehold all global biotechnology in any space. It's like Gensler, but invisible. Okay? All right. Putting that all together, my point is much of the world actually has Americans exported there, American companies, American regulators, American bureaucrats, American trained this and that, and that wasn't a completely negative-sum thing. It was a positive-sum thing for both Americans and for those other countries that built the greatest empire the world has ever seen. There's a lot of good to that. That's a country that we both grew up in, right?

and when people say the word empire they often i mean one of the things that happened is american empire unlike the british empire spent a lot of effort on invisibility right so british empire called itself an empire and then everybody's like i'm declaring my independence from britain the american empire never called itself an empire but have you seen the map of 750 military bases around the world right obviously like you know just just not to you know not to be too think about but uh like this is not this is not the posture let me show put this on screen okay can you see that map yep oops uh where is it this one this one yeah okay this is not the posture of a people that just wants to humbly sit behind its borders

okay all the all the red dots uh are bases yeah exactly like you know manga should just understand what america is it is the greatest empire of all time of all time right like not even the british empire had you know there was a period in the 90s 2000s even early 2010s where all the russians and chinese were sending their best guys to the u.s even the nominally sovereign enemies or whatever you know russia was part of the g8 china was just like a essentially you know basically just a very quiet back end they even took the bombing their embassy in belgrade got blown up they didn't say anything you know like it was just the most dominant empire of all time and uh the reason i say that is clearly americans emigrated around the world to build that

american immigration americans sending bodies sending people sending businesses unless you're saying everything america did was bad americans sent a lot of people around the world and that actually did a lot of good in my view there's a lot of good stuff that came out of that right so why did i say that because indians are going to be doing that indians are doing that they are sending a lot of people around the world and as i showed and he's actually number two in nuclear plants he's number two in steel indians i mean there's a lot of graphs the problem with this is if you don't say anything like indians are now for some you know one way of putting it is china kind of started modernizing in 1978 with deng xiaoping taking over and they

had about a 37 year honeymoon until 2015 2016 38 year honeymoon 37 38 until 2016 when trump took over and then China became public enemy number one, right? India started liberalizing, many of your viewers may not know this, but 1991, when Soviet communism fell, two other things also happened. Capitalism got legalized on the internet because until that point you couldn't do dot coms, you know, you couldn't take payments on the internet and so on. The NSF acceptable use policy prevented that, only allowed academic and government use. The other thing that happened is that India liberalized. It went away from socialism towards capitalism. So now about 34 years later, 35 years later 2026 almost exactly the same period china had 38 years india had like 35 years of kind

of growing before suddenly there was like a reaction to it where this thing is getting too big for its britches does that make any sense right this is one perspective on it right and so china when you think is you can only grow to a certain point within the system and then you have to become the system you have to actually like because the system will will say okay it's it's kind of like um you know zynga the company zynga yeah gaming company yeah a long time ago they were gaining so many users on facebook that zuck was like you know what i don't really like that and so you just hit a bunch of buttons and they just fell through a trap door because they were very dependent on the platform right and that's when a product and a platform come into conflict

sometimes the platform wins because just push a bunch of buttons and the product gets just, you know, um, just gets this black hole. Yeah. Disappears. Yeah. But sometimes that product becomes strong enough that can build its own platform. For example, when Facebook was initially growing it, a lot of its growth came from Gmail and eventually Google was torn about whether to allow that for a long time, because obviously people have a right to send and receive their own emails and how can they block us from doing, you know, block our users from doing what they want and so on and eventually somebody made the strict decision to say no no facebook can't do that but too late facebook already had 500 million users it had its own platform make sense right so

this is a very common thing we see in tech where when the product and the platform compete the product becomes too big for its britches because nobody cares facebook doesn't care if it has a million users when it has 100 million users it cares right so now india like people actually americans care about india nobody like if india was actually a third world shithole country blah blah blah blah nobody would care yep is anybody let me care about i won't name any other country that is in that position now because there might be unfortunate but like you know the the scott adams concept like elbonia right which is like a fictional country why would why did peter navarro why would he ask why did he make such a big thing about india can't buy

russian oil if it wasn't a player oh it's if it wasn't a player would it be would it be worth yelling at no it's definitely debauchee it's definitely it's definitely a player yeah i want to uh switch topics real quick um because we got to talk about this and then we're going to talk about network school um of course bitcoin gold dollar those three things seem to be in this like centrifuge being tossed all around the world central banks are you know they're holding treasuries and dollars then they're buying up a lot of gold people want them to buy bitcoin you You see the Bitcoiners online, they've got views on gold and dollars, the dollar holders, they have views on gold and big.

I mean, it's just like those three assets are married together. I keep saying that we're entering what I call a crazy uncle market, which is like when you sit down to Thanksgiving, you know, dinner and your crazy uncle says, uh, gold, Bitcoin guns and land. Like those are the four things, right? Uh, probably going to do pretty well, but how do you look at the gold Bitcoin stuff? Okay. Can I give the, uh, the, so I will half agree with you.

and half really disagree with you all right perfect so all right so first of all i i love the crazy uncle thing it's very very very uh funny uh i would say so gold and bitcoin yes here's why i would be lukewarm to new lukewarm to negative on guns and land okay at least within the west the reason is um i think what you'd substitute there is passport second passport okay the reason here's here's my argument as follows um first stipulating that i'm friendly to the second amendment like i understand why it exists and it's not simply self-defense against a crime it's to overthrow uh you know a bad government and you know the the the tree of liberty is watered from time to time with the blood tyrants i understand all that stuff i'm not

you know okay with that said like using a gun is very much a last last last last last resort especially in modern america where you could have you can get ridden housed for that right like the process is the punishment and you're dragged through this kafkas thing and ridden house wins by like one juror sympathy on like one day you know it's a very very close-run thing and you know daniel penny is also just like i was just gonna say daniel penny is the exact same thing one person basically said i ain't doing this yeah that's right but but he you know was dragged through the mud for you know he almost went to jail for the rest of his life right and so the the problem is that if you need to you know the whole try that in a small town

thing you know that song and so and so forth if you need to whip out a gun that actually means the state has failed yeah oh i don't i don't say gun by the way i don't say gun in terms of uh to use the gun so i say i say it from the perspective like his investment like ammunition prices go up in 2010 and in 2020 right so like as we head towards uncertainty you get um it's almost like people perceive the thing that they may need so they start to buy it before they need it like markets are forward looking but then i know okay we always somehow like sidestep they don't actually need the gun it's just that the ammunition prices all you know significantly go up totally understood so okay fine so let's just say at least what i think just to close that out and merge the two

things together i think um there's and bear with me because i'll give one or two remarks as i go to your next like there's there's a left-wing version of like abolish the police which is totally crazy there's a republican version of second amendment i'll defend myself with my gun then there's a tech guy version of i will get a private security force like uber for private security and so on and so forth right but the problem with actually all three of those is that there isn't such really a thing as private security there's only public security the reason is unless you're unless you're trump your private security detail cannot go ahead of you and like clear buildings and clear snipers and throw people in jail and so on so forth it can just be a bunch

of guys that like surround you or something and look big on the sidewalk right you're not you don't really have the ability to clear the streets right only there's no such thing as private security only public security if you keep that in mind then you actually go from guns and land to a passport to a country that actually has a stable government. So I'd say passport and community would be my number three and number four, right? So that's on the fourth thing, land. I am, so think about the Pacific Palisades, right? That fire that burned down California. What was the market price, the nominal price of those houses a few days before that fire? It was like whatever millions of dollars, right? But if you look closer, you would see that they

were not priced properly why because california hadn't uh like the insurance companies for example wouldn't be able to insure those properties right california was still charging property taxes on these exorbitant you know houses you know they're you know but but insurance which is a private actor was the clue that these things actually were not you know there are too many fires you know that these guys who are paid to do this kind of risk calculation couldn't make the numbers work anymore. So they just got out. Okay. Obviously that's not limited to the Pacific palisades. That's a huge swaths of California real estate. And when you have a set, like real estate is dependent on the state. If you've got to give you a few more examples, you know, the squatters in

New York, like there's crazy squatter laws. Have you followed this at all? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Okay. So if you're a real estate guy, like, you know, the same kind of thing that allows a homeless drug addict you know to pass out in the stoop of your shop right and you can't remove them it's only one step further for them to do it in your garage right or they're squatting in your house when you've gone on vacation you somehow there's like squatters rights this insane thing that people only realize when they get through this kafka system where the state is a failure and so much of it just depends upon like large numbers of people not realizing that they're squatters rights, right? If you had flash mobs that went around and tried this in states that

had quote squatters rights or cities that didn't enforce evictions, you just have a total disaster where you don't actually own as a landlord or a real estate developer, the property that you think you do. Again, I'm not saying anything as a real estate guy, you know what I'm talking about, right? But he started stacking it up. It's abolish the police. It's a lack of insurance in lots of publicities. It's the squatters' rights, it's the homeless encampments. So I don't believe in land unless you believe in the government, which is guarding that land. I'll give you one more example. London. Okay. So London for, you know, as you may recall, Russia used to be part of the G8, right? For a while, it looked like it was integrating with the West. Similar to that

China graph, lots of Russians had apartments and lives in London and so on and so forth. lots of other people from lots of different countries did they thought as you were saying that land was like a safe kind of thing like you know and then suddenly just even if they didn't agree with putin's war even if they had left russia 20 years ago even if they were like fluent in english and blah blah blah they were suddenly punished for being russian nationals through literally no they didn't order the war they had anything to do with it right and uh and their property was seized or there were sanctions put on them or you know banks wouldn't serve them and so it's sort of and suddenly realized wait a second that thing i thought was was secure that

land was actually not secure and so actually that's why london prices have actually fallen a lot similar to that thing that would happen with the chinese overseas developers right that you mentioned so i believe now then let's get to your first point with gold gold physical bricks of gold uh you know it's funny i actually don't think the tsa detectors do much of what they are intended to do but they do have a possibly intended possibly unintended side effect which is it's really hard to get a gold bar through a tsa detector and actually there's also some kind of thing which says like if you have more than ten thousand dollars on your person then you have to declare it yeah exactly right so the state is set up to intradite flows of gold

like physical gold and then if you've got gld like the speeder trust or something like that nothing against them but in my view that defeats the point of gold because you've got the counterparty risk right the whole point of gold is like a physical gold brick right so if you're a government you can afford the armored cars and even then like germany it took them cost them a lot of money to get their gold bricks back from the u.s back to germany did you see that thing yeah oh yeah it took them like seven years and like millions of dollars and somebody pointed out they could have done that with one bitcoin transaction for like a fraction of the cost fraction of the time right so that brings number two so of gold digital gold guns and land i would

say gold only if you're a government physical and only physical gold bitcoin and cryptocurrency absolutely second passport and find a good community so second password one thing that's not being tracked by a lot of people caribbean passwords for example have doubled in price do know that i've uh i've been paying attention there's this company a bit citizenship and citizenship yeah bit citizenship and they uh you basically can invest in these funds but they're only doing it in portugal and italy i think but there's tons of countries now that are introducing these programs that seem to uh one the price keeps going up but two the volume keeps going up it's like um the volume you know one of the both price and yet demand yeah one of

the charts that always blows my mind is uh in 20 i think it was 18 when we put the tariffs on uh china made solar panels in the u.s if you look at the demand chart and the adoption chart there is no change but yes you know whatever 25 tariff i think it started with and just it just kept like the demand was so strong it was basically complete price uh elastic like people just like whatever you charge i'm buying same thing with these passports that's right and and the way i think about it actually um there's bitternship there's citizen x and there's henley global so uh just disclosure i was a seed investor in two of them and i'm friendly with the henley people but i want to see a bunch of these kinds of services so things are gonna be a lot of demand

for it i think people are gonna save up not for their first house but their second passport okay i think that's actually more valuable because it will exit and being able to move because there's there's the thing is there's actually two major this this insight is not original to me but i think it's an important one there's two major ways that human beings operate the first way is one that's familiar to us which is like the farmer soldier sedentary you live in a uh you know in a in a state and it's almost like um imagine you had like a like a spring or a wire on the back of your neck like a like a stretchy cord you know like those stretchy cords you've got at the gym and so on, right? So imagine you had something like that. And as you, and there's

like a peg in the middle of Nebraska or something like that. And so you could travel around the world as an American, you could be here for 30 days or 90 days or whatever, but it's a stretchy peg that pulls you back, right? You're sort of like anchored to that point. You can't really go too far away. You have to come back to your zone. And if you have a bad passport, like from a country that doesn't have a good passport, then your stretchy kind of thing can't even go that far there's a great site called passportindex.org where you can look at this okay and i think this is going to be a big deal for people i've got a talk coming up which is crypto identity is the next bigger piece of the puzzle after cryptocurrency it's not just your you know what do you leave the

house with you leave your house with your wallet keys and id and the wallet part and the private keys part and the id part all become your cryptocurrency crypto identity all one thing like ens and so on is like okay so rather than the first house get the second passport save up for that because I think it's going to unlock more opportunity globally. And you're only seeing that right now if you're like a digital nomad, but the cost of living is so much less outside the West in many cases that you can live on a thousand bucks a month. For example, we've got a network school at NS.com. NS.com, check it out. Come to NS.com, apply, apply. Okay, fine. But if you come to network school we've got down to 1500 bucks a month all in for gym co-working you know fitness

you know coffee this that and the other because explain there's a lot of people who are going to watch this who have no clue in network school this is very cool what you guys are doing so describe like what is network school and then this 1500 bucks a month and what they're getting sure sure so if you go to ns.com you can see what every school is briefly uh it is just like we started new currencies we're starting new communities so we've got an island in the singapore malaysia special economic zone you it's right off the coast of singapore and uh we've got lots and lots and lots of empty apartments we built a gym we built uh san francisco style uh cafe and co-working space and auditorium and lots and lots of event rooms for people to hold

talks and lectures and so on and so forth. And we have all different kinds of guest speakers and people from more than a hundred countries have come. It's basically like San Francisco outside San Francisco, but like one 10th the price and so on over here. And so that's like one way of understanding it's a place to hold. Uh, actually I can put it on screen. Let me just do that. So network school is sharp society. So you can see, can you see the video or the visuals there yeah yeah so people are coming off the bus coming in checking in and um you know there's vr and drones uh and uh there's you know like a virtual reality flag and so on there's italic brian johnson um it's a drone shot of the outside bitcoin and you know like lectures content

studio over here this is our one of our auditoriums um robot dogs just fun stuff you know that's a founder of flexport that's a jesse pollock of coinbase base uh and it's just like a cool this is one of our this is our big gym over here so group workouts in the morning it's very solid commercial gym right and um that's uh jason calacanis and me yoga studio we got it's friendly for kids also um it's just like basically we've got this gigantic solar punk island mostly to ourselves all kinds of empty apartments here right and uh you know people play chess it's just kind of cool it's like if if you actually had a small town that

was actually uh you know tech central right um there's you know there's a you know some of the nightlife and and so on people hang out there's a cafe uh you know and um let's see uh bonfire and stuff you know beach parties there's a beach there so yeah here's like a drone shot of part of the island right so uh so that is ns.com right and so that is my constructive solution right rather than you know complaining about the world or what have you it's useful to form a critique of the world as it exists but ultimately you want to execute on building an alternative right because the best form of criticism is not simply say that sucks but rather here is a better version that i think works and it's actually much harder to do that you know

it's way easier to say something sucks than to build something better you know they're saying windows sucks is easy saying building linux is hard you know um and uh but i think we're actually doing it and importantly and the reason i call it network school there's several reasons one is it's a play on network state have i uh have your viewers heard about network state i'll put that on the screen just for a second as a refresher so um i wrote this book in 2022 called the network state and uh it's a wall street journal bestseller and so on and so forth and i can explain what it's about in really one image, which is this. Let me maximize that. So essentially, this is what a network state is. It is a, just like Bitcoin is a decentralized currency, a network state is a

decentralized country. It's a physical social network, where in this case, you've got a social network with 1,729,314 people. And you've got subgroups of that network that crowdfund nodes around the world. Like here's the 166,000 person node in Tokyo, and here's the node in Mumbai and so on and so forth. And these can be actually like small towns that are essentially networked together around the world. And the annual income and real estate footprint of this network state collectively can be larger than that of a legacy nation state, just like Bitcoin, those decentralized can be larger in value than any centralized currency, right? And I also had in the book, I had a vision or visual of how you could build a network state, which is you could literally start from a single person like this.

Let me show you this GIF. Start for a single person, go to 17, 172, 1,700, 17,000, 170,000, 1.7 million. So you basically, just like Zuck starting the social network from his dorm room, you could start the social network, scale it, have people crowdfund territory, and then just keep going and knit them together. And eventually, just like Bitcoin eventually became the national currency of El Salvador, you become large enough, and eventually you get diplomatic recognition, right? So what we're doing with Network School is related to this, which is it's a community. I wouldn't call it a country for a long time, maybe never, okay? But what it is, is something where we are starting. Can you see the screen there with that image?

Yep. So we're starting with one large node in the Singapore area. We're going to get this to maybe 2,000-ish or so people. Then we'll open up nodes in probably Miami, certainly Dubai, maybe Japan, other places, India. Just keep adding. Bhutan. Yeah. And then we also, this is important, we fund other startup societies around the world,

like zeus aloo uh which is you know vitalics like is the ethereum network state don't die brian johnson's network state and so on and so forth right and so that's what i think of network school as it is a it is a startup society that bootstraps other sharp societies so it it is both an example it's both the thing and is an example of things sort of like how bitcoin was both the cryptocurrency and it was a template that every other cryptocurrency was based off of where they took bitcoin and they said for example ethereum is bitcoin but with programmability or zcash is uh bitcoin but with privacy and then solana is ethereum but faster or what have you right and so on and so forth everything kind of within one or two hops

references bitcoin in its design right so even if it swaps out many of the components and so they're all kind of inspired by that and so that's the purpose here imagine if bitcoin had been built from the very beginning to be something that would give birth to a thousand cryptocurrencies. You design it somewhat more differently, right? And that's what network school is. I know I don't have all the answers. Some people will do vegan network states

and some people will do carnivore network states and some people will do like Latin immersion and there'll be Mennonites and there'll be Catholics and there'll be Jains and Sikhs and all different kinds of different groups, people catalonians basques language groups cultural groups ethnic groups all kinds of stuff that i can't even predict one of the things after the never see a book came out for example do you know what catalonia is it's like a community in spain right but they're not spanish

and they have this whole thing where they kind of fight with spain and you know without getting into the back and forth of that they're outnumbered by the spanish the classic battle yeah yeah they're outnumbered they're but they want to preserve their ancient culture which i which i of respect. So they can take essentially the third option, which is maybe they crowdfund territory somewhere else and they build over there. There's more Irish Americans than there are people in Ireland, right? So the Irish took that approach. Maybe other people could take that approach. It's not totally crazy. So one thing that's interesting is seeing network state getting taken up by people who are very far afield from the kinds of things I think about. So there's a big story in like a

Catalonian language newspaper on that and so on and so forth. So the point being, I know I don't have all the answers, but I want to develop a template that can allow people to rebuild societies, communities, where they can build together and they can set whatever admission criteria they want. And then maybe we all value Bitcoin and we can all trade between each other with cryptocurrency and so on and so forth. And in a sense, you know, good fences make good neighbors. You know, we can agree to disagree on certain things and we have our own communities and we're proud of them, but we can also trade between them, you know, peace and trade, if that makes any sense right so it's a vision for kind of rebuilding the world on a voluntary basis all

right let me pause there so it's both something that's useful i think in its own right but it's also got an ideological purpose i love it i i look you uh you know i'm a big fan of this i think that it's very smart and um i don't think people quite understand just how big um what you guys are doing uh you know kind of at the the uh the headquarters if you will um but uh if anyone wants come visit i'm going to i'm going to come visit uh ns.com is where uh people can go and uh and learn more blotchy it's always a fantastic talk to you man i could talk to you literally for hours um i appreciate everything that you're doing where where else should we send people to to find you on the internet go to ns.com and then one other thing i'll put up on screen is uh our

conference is um is in a few weeks so never see a conference october 3rd 2025 in singapore so come out here um we have uh you know brian armstrong we have vitalik we have uh arthur hayes we have all all the crypto people and also lots of the sharp societies all speaking and it'll be promises to be a really good time amazing all right man well thank you so much we'll do it again the future. All right. Thank you.