Dive Deep into NETWORK STATES with Balaji Srinivasan

24:50It's like a moving pick in basketball. So it's like this guy will just break the rules and move in front of you. So it's an analogy in that sense of all, because moving picks and illegal defensive move. But they just don't like what you're doing. They'll come up with some reason to block you. And they'll often get you on some other axis as opposed to the one that they don't like you for. Going back again to the TSA example, it's called a retaliatory wait time. The TSA, the retaliatory wait time is you miss your flight. The FDA retaliatory wait time is you lose your company because guess what? You get choked out and your approval for your drug or whatever has gone from three months to 15 months.

25:27You don't have venture capital to fund during that time period. And suddenly your approval has just gotten uncertain, no one's going to re-up, you're dead, right? Or you're bought for a fire sale by a big pharma company who will pick up the pieces and they can afford to negotiate with the FDA forever, right? So there's this incentive for incumbency, this incentive for bigness, this incentive for stasis and whatnot. Okay. Now, I think in the fullness of time, COVID will be to the FDA and the CDC. And also, by the way, it's not just, I mean, FDA is a big part of it, but it's also AMA and CPT and this entire insurance-based system where you have a third-party payer, a fourth-party pricer, and a fifth-party regulator.

26:08It's not just you and the doctor. The doctor doesn't know how much they're charging you. Someone else is saying the prices. Someone else is paying a fourth party and a fifth party is regulating. It's like there's a bunch of people in the room with you effectively with that doctor-patient relationship that means capitalism doesn't work because it's not capitalism. It's not willing to - It's been very interesting to see Mark Cuban doing what he's doing. I've been writing about this for maybe 10 years. After the Indian generics industry rise, I saw that and I was like, well, this is going to solve a lot of problems for particularly the US where drug prices are too high and generics are going to be the answer.

26:39But obviously the FDA, everybody else was completely anti it because there's this whole systemic pocket picking where everybody gets rich. But Mark's finally gone around it, which is great to see. Yes. And it might be one of the best things he does. And one of the biggest things that is actually enabling that, which is non-obvious, is actually Twitter. You know why? Because he has a megaphone. That's right. You've got zero marketing costs. I don't know if you saw that amazing thread on Tesla about this. Yeah, zero marketing. How they don't have to pay money. Yes. Yeah, it's amazing. You're right that from the dollars and cents standpoint, it's like low marketing costs, but it's something even more than that, which is it is his own newspaper.

27:19That's ridiculously important because another aspect of this whole thing, why did you never, you know, the angle I just gave on the FDA, again, I gave these citations and so on, but it's a lens on the FDA that you probably hadn't heard before, or many people hadn't heard. Normally what you hear is instead, you know, they're basically like the biotech police, right? They're protecting you from these evil pharma companies that want to, poison your food and drink and just cut corners and sell you impure drugs and so on and so forth. And the government's going to protect you from that. Which is clearly nonsense, right?

27:54Because the incentive system is not to kill your customer because you don't have a customer in the free market. So here's where it gets tricky. So the way I think about it is V1, V2, V3. It is true. And this is an important thing where I think there's a sophistication here. It's very important. It is true that, for example, in China, there's like the melamine scandal, right? Where there's like contaminated milk, right? Like baby formula. It is true that people actually do want, this is the subtlety, they do want to regulate a marketplace in the sense of they want some actor that's writing star ratings of the various vendors in the marketplace.

28:32And they want that person to kick out bad actors. Why? Because your average person does not want to be able to go and put a dipstick into every drink to see whether it has mercury or something in it. They don't want to be paying that quality cost all the time. They just want to effectively, implicitly pay one regulator and then have them take care of it. Now, the main thing that I propose as a V3 is choice in regulators. To give some context on this, you can choose between Uber and Lyft for your taxi regulation. They have different rider ratings and different reviews and so on and so forth. And this is like the CFTC versus the SEC in crypto, right?

29:12Sort of, yes. In theory, though, in practice - We don't have the choice. Yeah, yeah. The fight is going on. Who's going to get the monopoly? Who's going to get the monopoly? That's right. But yes, maybe a better example would be if you're building a building and you really could build in any of the 50 states, you pick which regulator you're choosing, okay? And some states make it easy to build a building and some states make it harder, right? You have to weigh other costs like market and so on and so forth. But once you start thinking about it, not as like abolish the FDA or end the Fed, but exit the Fed, exit the FDA, you actually set yourself the harder task of building something better.

29:48Now, don't forget, I live in a country that is built on exactly this premise. So the Cayman Islands premise is tax neutrality. It's not like in this day and age, you don't get to evade taxes because everything gets reported, but it's tax neutrality. But the idea is you've created a good enough regulatory system that has the English rule of law that ends up going to the English, the Privy Council. Therefore, you've got legal redress. And therefore, what happens is companies around the world will look for where is the jurisdiction that gives them the right regulatory framework with the right protection, but not too much.

30:21And it works phenomenally well. So you can choose to set up your business in Cayman, the US, Singapore, Europe, and you'll make that choice. That's right. And so once we think about it this way, actually some of the most profitable companies and countries out there are effectively vendors of regulatory services. Harmonization is starting to break up. So that huge 20th century arc of the US where it basically ruled huge parts of the world is starting to actually break apart and countries are starting to break away. You can do some stem cell stuff in Germany and there's some drone stuff in parts of the world.

30:58There's like self-driving cars in Singapore and financial innovation in places like Dubai or Singapore, right? And Cayman. And so the US regulatory thing is starting to break up. And I think in the fullness of time, as I mentioned, what the financial crisis was in terms of bootstrapping Satoshi and crypto, COVID will be that in terms of bootstrapping the exit of the FDA and the CDC and so on, right? Okay. Putting it all together, why is crypto an enabling technology for this? having thought about this stuff for a long time, is because it is the exit. For example, at a stroke, rather than going and trying to figure out, modify subpart F of schedule D on law X, people could spend their entire lives just trying to get in one modification.

31:47And then what does it come down to? It's like some senators mood on the morning, whether they had coffee and they slip in a clause into a 1100 page omnibus bill. Like that's how legislation is made in the United States. It's like, oh, you know, this, could you imagine like, you know, if you're an engineer pushing 1100 pages of new code without testing it to the entire code base that affects 300. It's like, you know, at the last minute with 500 people adversarily coding, it's like the stupidest possible thing. We will honestly look at this system. Like we looked at the middle age monks or whatever, Or, you know, like, I don't know, Christian flagellants.

32:27Just think of the craziest antiquated, you know, it's like the indulgent system of the Catholic Church. You know, crazy systems that don't make any sense for like future peoples. This is what that system is. Okay. What's the alternative then? What's the alternative to that? Well, can you get actually a new zone, right? Can you get a new space that's bare of law, right? That's just all the people who are there have now come to this new space and opted in to be bound by the rules of those who came before. Just like, for example, someone sets up a server. They have a piece of digital land, a domain.

33:02And the people who come there, hey, the first guy there set up the service and he's the system administrator. And then people come there, he might hire more folks. And then it becomes Reddit.com where whatever billion people are there. Or it becomes the Ethereum blockchain. One person sets it up. Now, crucially, when they make those electrons dance, when they have that little spot of cyberspace, they are taking nothing from anybody. Nobody cared about it before then. It's provable that there's no value there. They truly did create something from nothing because they just twiddled some electrons.

33:34They made a more pleasing configuration of electrons, and other people were attracted to that glow, and they all migrated there. And can we replicate that? Because that's a frontier spirit, fundamentally. It's like getting a piece of free land and being able to build on it. We have a digital frontier. Can we actually use that digital frontier to create a physical frontier? This is really the fundamental thing. And when people say, oh, crypto is about illegal things, one way of thinking about it is portraying it as when the Puritans left England or the UK to come to the US, they were looking for something where they could do things that were illegal in the United Kingdom.

34:15in the sense of they wanted a new community that was independent of this jealous government. Yeah, I've always called it a parallel financial ecosystem. That's right. So it is parallel, but not constricted by the same issues that we have with the current system. That's right. And so the thing is that when we had territory in the world that wasn't completely claimed, or that before the modern, cased in iron, concrete nation state system, you could get physical separation to get social separation. When they went overseas, practically speaking, it was harder to be ruled. And now today, when every inch of earth is spoken for and satellites track everything and the slightest border thing is like a war or whatever, how could you possibly get a zone of freedom?

35:05So I actually have an answer to that. And that's what this book is about, The Network State. Before we get into The Network State, There's another part of this thread that we need to bring together. So we understand where crypto fits into this. The other thread is the evolution of the internet itself and how it's allowed people to coalesce in communities, transnational borders, because those two ideas come together into the network state. So let's go through your understanding of the internet, the evolution, and what it enabled in a way that was different to the nation state. Because it's something, again, I've been talking about for a long time.

35:36I think it's really important. I'm going to sum up the previous thing and then go into this one, right? So just to give the very quick answer to your point, why crypto? A, constants were turned into variables. The banks after the financial crisis, the dollar is now the dollar and Bitcoin. There's a choice, just like meetings, there's an in-person or digital. B, harmonization is one of the most important problems to solve, maybe the most important problem to solve. And the way to get out of harmonization is not to edit laws on the margins, but to figure out how to get to an entirely new zone where everything starts at zero.

36:07and all new laws, just like a new code base, you're starting at zero. A new company, you're starting at zero. A new piece of land, you're starting at zero. Being able to start from scratch is insanely important. And that's what crypto gave us. It's like a new piece of land, but in digital space, just like a new domain. And then finally, the concept of globally unbanning transactions, which is related to number two. Basically, willing buyer, willing seller, you start from there. You start from the concept that all is permissible, and that you need to actually add every band back. Do you see what I'm saying?

36:42It's like the sunset laws, right? Where like a bad law gets sunset. Sunset the whole thing. And in this new zone where only those people who care to enter it first do, because most people don't have to, right? Like nobody has to. They can just go and live their life in non-crypto world. Just like most people did not have to immigrate to America. If they wanted to go to the wild west, they could, but most people chose not to do that. You can go to the wild cloud of crypto, but most people do not have to do that. But those people who do that, they take the risk, they reap the reward. The earlier the adopter, the higher the risk, the higher the reward.

37:17And people learn from their examples. Also within the community, they learn from each other's examples. Interesting enough, I've even talked about crypto and Web3, the whole space as the discovery of the Americans. I think it's new GDP as well. It's not recycling of GDP. It's entirely new GDP. For example, world GDP changed significantly as America became part of the globe. That's right. And actually, so now that gets to the second thing, which is, I think we can actually make that analogy even more than an analogy, like a mathematical analogy. And I'll just throw some stuff. So you talked about the internet, right?

37:54One thing I talk about in the book, and I'm going to actually significantly expand this chapter with some visuals and code and what have you. 1890, the American frontier closed. 1991, it reopened because the NSF Foundation, National Science Foundation, rather, repealed the so-called acceptable use policy. Do you know what that was? So that actually banned commercial traffic on the internet. Why? You're like, that seems weird. I mean, we think of the internet as synonymous with dot-com, right? So what the AUP was, was something because the internet started as like a military and academic and government network, right?

38:34And it was originally set up to like have communication systems that would survive a nuclear attack. That's foreshadowing. That's Chekhov's gun. Let's come back to that in a later question. Okay. So the internet was set up to survive a nuclear attack. Okay. So it was this military academic thing and they didn't want commercial traffic because they said, look, that's going to get us spam and it's going to get us porn and malware and all this like stuff. And you know what? They were completely right. All that stuff did happen. But we got enough benefit to offset that cost and more than that. I think that's fair to say.

39:07That's literally all the economic growth of the last whatever 20 years is thanks to the internet. So that's the reopening of the frontier because you could register a domain name. That's really what it boiled down to. You could register the free land existed. You could build from scratch. And think about how ridiculously important this is. So it wasn't a government-controlled land. it became a publicly available land. I mean, exactly. Because the thing is that on a piece of land, I mean, you can build a billion dollar business online, but you need a billion permits to build a shed in San Francisco.

39:40Okay. That's the difference is, it's literally easier to build. And I've done this myself. It is literally about as much effort to get a company to a$50 million valuation as it is to get a duplex built in San Francisco. It's like the same amount of just energy that you have to spend. So that's just deadweight loss, obviously. And so what happens is, and this is a problem with one of the things that's happened over the last 20 some years, the entire US government was set up under the premise that the best and the brightest would go in. I know that's like a Halberstam thing, but let's take it actually seriously, that the most talented would go into the US government.

40:26And that was something that was true from roughly FDR's brain trust to, let's say, Apollo. There was a golden age of the US government, which by the way, was atypical. Most of the time, you didn't have this massive centralized government in this way. If you go backwards and forwards in time, it was more decentralized. There were great areas of America that didn't, right? Okay. What's my point? Point is once you had this Leviathan that was set up assuming a lot of talented people, and then you had this door to the frontier that opened, right, of the internet, a lot of talented people just started going there instead.

40:57First, a trickle, and then a flood, right? And now what's happened is anybody who has any quantitative skill, okay, any technical skill who's capable of doing basic arithmetic and math and logic and is positive sum, a very large proportion of those people have not chosen to go into the civil service. Why? Because they'd spend, again, 10 years, 20 years of their life editing subpart F or whatever, right? And that's just a waste of their life, literally a waste of their life. Instead, they could go and just have total control over a piece of land called their own. How could you be against that, right?

41:32That's creative freedom. Same thing has happened to Hollywood. Same thing with people going and becoming influencers rather than Hollywood stars and trying to get extorted by studios. Same thing is having the media. People are doing substacks instead, right? So the old world is just, same thing's happened, by the way, in academia, professors going and starting companies as opposed to being a professor. So the old world of academia and media and Hollywood and government, like, it's just losing all of these brains. Problem is, this is not a comparative advantage scenario because those who remain in the government have power over those outside.

42:11Right the rules. Yeah, exactly. It's not like, okay, I decided to go make oranges and this guy is making apples and we trade. I'm making oranges and this guy is collecting guns to point at me to take the oranges. Okay? So something that was an individually rational thing to do. And by the way, you could also imagine just a thought experiment. If you had like the thousand top tech CEOs, all part of the federal government, it would work way better. Why? Because A could put it, you know, if there's some stupid regulation or whatever, he could They put a call to B and it'd be like the 1950s where it's like, oh yeah, that's a stupid law.

42:45Forget about it. Just go and do this. They just executive order it or they just work around it. They have some interagency agreement. That's how the government used to work where there were these guys who were just practical enough to know that this was what was written and this is what the thing actually was. It was in the startup phase of the US government in a sense, the whole thing that FDR set up. It had to be nimble enough to win these wars and fight the Soviets and what have you. Then it became ossified and all the best left. And now it's just like this machine that was built for another age.

43:12Yeah. So there is this thing where I don't fault any of the folks who left. It's kind of a funhouse mirror way, by the way, of thinking of like folks saying, oh, my God, these guys are selfish. It's not selfish. It is. It's basically something where you're asking someone to like literally sacrifice their one life, you know, on pushing around paper in a way where there's a there's actually like the curve is against it. Right. because the government isn't getting any better. But the net consequence of this is that you have something where all this energy has now gone to the frontier. And this is now happening not just in the US.

43:48It's happening, obviously, in all these other places around the world. Now, India has got like a billion people online. You have folks in Nigeria, folks in South America, folks in the Middle East, folks in Europe, and so on. All of them are connecting to this skyhook and getting pulled up by the internet into this new cloud continent that has descended. It's literally like Atlantis, except in the cloud. And a lot of people are essentially telecommuting from their spots on earth to the cloud. Just to make this a little bit more than just a picturesque metaphor, here's a question for you and also for your audience.

44:21Just think for a second. What percentage of your waking hours do you spend looking at a screen? Of my waking hours, probably 70%. There you go. So most of your life and most of the rest of your life is being spent in the matrix, is in the cloud. There's enormous consequences to all of that, right? First, what that means is, of course, physics and math is very important. That describes a physical world. In the digital world, it's computer science and statistics because it's algorithms and it's databases. It's a constructed environment, right? So that's different than if you're just sitting at a desk and typing things, or even if you've got a VR headset, the laws of digital worlds are what the programmers have made them.

45:08And so you can have very interesting, constructed, interesting to human environments in there that just have whiz-bang physics as opposed to the offline world. So first of all, our intuitions of the physics literally change. Number two is the geography of physical space and digital space are fundamentally different. And this is actually like, I could literally write a whole book on just this because actually you take a simple concept, you can take it very far. For example, in physical space, the most important metric is a great circle distance, like the distance between two points on the surface of the globe.

45:41And you can modify this and you can say, okay, it's not just two points on the surface of the globe. It's like the actual travel time from one to the next. For example, between South Africa and Argentina, it's actually not that long a flight, but for humans to make that migration would have been like this insane overland journey all the way up through Anchorage, all the way down. Humans did make that journey, but that's maybe the longest journey on earth by foot. Basically, that point is a physical distance, though, even if it's constrained in some way by actual capability of traveling, is very important in the physical world.

46:16In the digital world, the most important distance is the distance between two points in a network, right? The six degrees of separation type distance, okay? And moreover, you can teleport around in the digital world. You can break ties here and then reform them there, okay? Just as an example, Ethereum is, let's say it's 100 million people or something like that. Let's say it's 50 million people. There's about 300 million global crypto users. Okay, let's say it's 50 million. I don't know the exact number, okay? it. It's just sitting over here. And then one day, Solana rises up out of the ocean, and it's next door to Ethereum.

46:52And the Sol ETH trade begins, and Sol ETH rises, and it's taking nodes away from this cloud continent of Ethereum or what have you. This is completely different to how our intuitions work in the offline world, where there's eternal verities of geopolitics. Here's Russia, and it's near Japan, and it's near Iran. and it doesn't move around the map. Russia is not next to Argentina one day and then next to Australia another day. Go ahead. Although they try by politics. Yeah, yeah, sure. It's true. Geopolitics is exactly the shifting alignment between network states and nation states. Well, yes. It is true that, yes, nation states, obviously, they can expand.

47:35And the Soviet Empire, the Senate had guys in Angola and it had guys in Cuba and it was trying stuff. It's true, Yes. But that's kind of like there's a core of Moscow and Kiev. There's a core of where that thing was. And that core, unless that ethnic group just loses their territory and it's like the, I don't know, the guys in the Bible, their ethnic groups just got totally wiped out. Unless they completely lose their territory and get wiped out, they basically have a home base and their neighbors are pretty much constant over the centuries, right? And even as they shift ideologies, like the Russians under the Tsar, Japan was their enemy because the Russo-Japanese War.

48:19And even when Russia went to communism, Japan was still their enemy because now Japan was ultra-nationalist. And so this is something where even if the ideologies had changed, the geopolitics remained the same. And so they just had that enmity there, right? The Russo-Japanese relationship. What's the point? The point is the offline world's boundaries and border conflicts are much more static, whereas the online world is like, voo, people teleport here. Then they're all fighting, voo, they teleport somewhere else, right? And you can have mass blocks and you can have a totally new thing coming out of nowhere.

48:53The digital geography is different. And when I say geography, by the way, in math, there's this concept of a distance metric and you can literally do cloud cartography. Yeah, for sure. I mean, you can map the entire thing out and you can see the shifting borders and everything. That's exactly right. Yep. And so one way of thinking about it, you can almost imagine the 2D surface of the earth as being like a network where the distance is between two nodes, it's like between two intersections of a city or between two cities, right? And then you take that and now you've got something like that in digital space, but it's just much more complicated.

49:25Okay. So once you start thinking about things in terms of digital space, right? You realize that things like Facebook, things like the internet itself, what they basically did is it's like, here's the earth, okay? And it's like, we created a parallel earth of nodes, okay? And Jack Butcher did a great visual of this. What the internet did is it like cloned the earth, right? We have physical space and we have digital space. And the distance between two people in physical space can be wildly different from their distance in digital space. Like you and I are now adjacent to each other in digital space, but we're whatever thousand miles apart in physical space.

50:06Conversely, there's folks who are, I don't know, a mile away from me in physical space that I will never meet in digital space. They're much farther away, right? And I'm sure the same is true for you, right? So our social networks and our physical neighbors are just very different right now. Hey, everyone. We're going to take another quick break and hear a word from our partners. And then we'll be right back.

51:01loss and is offered to U.S. customers through Payward Interactive, Inc. For more information, go to realvision.com backslash kraken OTC.

51:12Yeah, we might live physically, I might like physically in Cayman, the people I interact with all day are all around the world, whether it's on Twitter, in which case I don't even know where, or whether it's on Zoom and it's people in the U.S., people in Singapore, we not constricted by physical boundaries, except in the physical jurisdiction we live in because we choose to live here for the reasons that we choose to live. But we choose to live in digital network states. Well, let's call them communities first before we get into the network state because it's a broader con. We live in digital communities that have no physical proximity, but have mental proximity, let's say, or ideological proximity.

51:52Yes, that's right. And the thing about that is that is a intermediate phase that will eventually resolve like a rubber band snapping, right? Because you have... You know what the least popular word in the world is, but maybe the most important word in the world by 2030, 2035? Okay. Re-centralization. Okay. Why? Centralization, decentralization, re-centralization. Why re-centralization? Because you unbundle and then you bundle. Example, you have the CD with the songs and you unbundle it into MP3s and then you re-bundle it into a playlist. You have the newspaper and you unbundle it into individual web pages and you re-bundle it into a Twitter feed.

52:38Well, even nation states do this as well. They bundle, unbundle, re-bundle. Yeah. Bundle, unbundle, re-bundle. And don't forget, World War II was essentially the unbundling. Well, it was the re-bundling again, once you set up the rules-based global order system that followed it, which was a re-bundling. And now we're looking at multi-polarization again. So this is the unbundling. I mean, in our example, you have the individual authors. You have authors at a magazine. They get unbundled into individual substacks and blogs. And now they're re-bundling into like group substacks and like group blocks, right?

53:13And so this is the empire long centralized must, you know, or long united must divide, long divided must unite, right? That's just this constant cycle. Now, the thing about that is it doesn't mean we end up in the same place, okay? So there's an aspect of both cyclist and progress. This is what I call the helical theory of history in the book, okay? So there is progress in the sense of, you know, playlists of songs are actually better than CDs, even if they've got a similarity to them because they're more dynamic. And the heliocentric is what you're talking about is an improvement that goes like this.

53:43Yes. I've read the book as well. And it's the improvement that increases, but most of the time, you don't realize it's increasing because you think you're going around in circles, but in fact, you're improving. That's right. And moreover, the thing about that is it's not guaranteed to increase, but we have a shot at increasing. So this is meant to sort of push back on the concept that re-centralization just means new boss, same as the old boss. So it's not, yeah. And I believe this, The world is not, there is a cyclicality, but it's not mean reversion. It's not mean reversion. That's right. So if you want to do a parametric curve, like X of T could be cos of T and Y of T could be sine T, but Z of T could be T.

54:19Okay. So it's like, it is a circle on, look down on this axis, but it's rising up. It's like a helix, right? Okay. Yeah. So that is one model for what the world is. And it's a useful thing because otherwise you find people arguing, is it the linear theory of history? Is it the cycle theory? Why not both? Sometimes point of view is worth 100 IQ points. Gosh, I forgot who said that. I think it's Alan, famous computer guy. His name is blanking right now, and I'll remember him after we finish. But not Turing, but it's... Alan Kay, that's what it is. Okay. So point of view is worth 100 IQ points. And so why bring up that cycle?

55:03Because centralization, decentralization, recentralization, centralization in legacy nation states, which have the implicit assumption that those people who are nearby physically share culture. And because they share culture, they agree on law, right? And that assumption has been broken with the internet, where Snapchat is on a straight line with the dissolution of the nation state, because people are sharing intimate moments with folks 3 ,000 miles away, but they don't know their next-door neighbor. When that's happening, the geography no longer reflects the ideology. And that's something which won't endure forever because it means much of the space around you is actually wasted space.

55:48Why? Because you're just silently hustling past the hallway. You walk out of your hall and there's like 50 closed doors if you're in an apartment. You don't know any of those people, you do not recognize any of them, but they live 10 feet from you. You can't knock and borrow sugar or they can't leave their kid with you or something like that. There's zero network effect, so to speak, from this incredibly high value space that's right next door. Why do I say that that's a very high value? The closest thing to this, like a real community that cosmopolitan-ish people have experienced is college. College, you have a community that's actually highly selective.

56:30You know it's one of the most ruthless at enforcing borders in the world? It's the most ruthless border control, Harvard. Absolutely ruthless. And one of the things, Stanford also, in the 2000s, there was this case of a girl named Asia Kim, I think. And she actually snuck into Stanford and pretended to be a student. And she just slept on the beds or whatever. It's like some window that was open. And she was an illegal immigrant to Stanford. So Stanford kicked her out or whatever. But the point is, for those things that the establishment really cares about, they're not letting anybody in the New York Times company slack.

57:10They're supposed to leak your slacks. You're not supposed to leak their slacks. right? It's all Leninist who whom or Carl Schmitt's friend enemy, right? It's basically just, they are particularist even in the guise of universalism, okay? And when you see that and you realize, okay, some sort of selective membrane is responsible for some of the institutions in the world that are thought of as high quality, or at least were high quality. I think Harvard and so on, Stanford have all dropped off dramatically over the last few years. A lot of the talent has has left, especially at the prof level and so on.

57:43But once you realize that that selective membrane is actually really important to building those institutions, I mean, crucial. The whole point is that people apply, people get rejected. They brag about the rejection, the admissions rate, I'm sorry, the rejection. That entire thing is a whole foo-fraud that everybody's used to working hard, maybe getting rejected. That's accepted. That border control is accepted. So if you think about how a college does it, why should only the richest and most powerful groups? I mean, these tax-exempt institutions, Harvard is this multi, multi, multi, multi-billion dollar endowment.

58:17And bully for them, I think the endowment guys are very talented. I have nothing against the endowment guys. But I do think that other communities should be able to set membership rules just like Harvard does, just like Stanford does. right? If the really rich can do it, shouldn't the average person be able to do it? Okay. And if you do that, now suddenly you've got people in an environment who share your values. And you can have an open door policy. You can walk down the hall in college and freshman year, you can walk down the hall and you can say, hey, blah, blah, blah. And people can just go and hang out.

58:54Also, what I find really interesting is we can be members of... So right now, it's very difficult to be members of many states. Yes, I'm a British citizen. I've got a person of Indian origin, and I've got Cayman. But that's quite rare. In the digital world, we can live in 10 different communities all at the same time on very discrete things. Some can be broad, like financial Twitter. Others can be super narrow, like Rottweiler Owners Club. And it's very, very different because you can micro serve community. That's right. And I think we will eventually have, maybe actually quite soon...

59:41Most people have like one or a few passports. Actually, most people have just one. Then some have a few. But many people today have hundreds, if not thousands of logins, and maybe dozens of cryptocurrencies. And I do think the crypto passport will be a huge thing, massive thing, not just the concept of the crypto passport. NFTs are like that. You can log into a site. So we're thinking of digital identity on the blockchain, essentially. Yeah. And the reason that has to be there is it's a bearer instrument. It's literally like a key, just like a bar of gold, this is like a key in your possession.

1:00:18Those who don't have that key cannot enter the door. Only those with the key can enter the door. Yes. So we're setting up slowly here what we're talking about, which is the whole network state. And you need a passport, and you've got border control. One of the things I just want to ask you about, because you're one of the few people who will understand it, because everybody looks at me, everybody I speak to in Silicon Valley goes, what are you talking about? Like India. So India built out a lot of this. It was centralized. But India Stack and their KYC that I can do with a fingerprint, I can buy anything with a fingerprint.

1:00:47I can have my medical records, my college certificates, all identity. Why the fuck has nobody else realized what they've done? And it's not like all oppressive state Chinese version. It's just pretty regular. So let's talk about India for a bit. So first is there's some blog posts or stats and stuff that are maybe useful for your audience to orient. By the way, your comment stopped me in my tracks, which was the future of the English-speaking internet is Indian. Yes. I mean, I kind of knew that, but it really stopped me in my tracks. It's not priced in. It's not priced in. People don't understand the diaspora.

1:01:26Yeah, they might be saying we're biased because we have Indian heritage, but it's not. It's just mathematical. Exactly. It's just mathematical. And the thing is, the degree of it, we're not just talking about those people in India who already speak English. We're talking about all these people who speak Kannada or Telugu or Malayalam, and now they're getting phones. And so they will learn English really fast. And it'll be like five or 10 years, but now they will just pick it up. And so the majority probably of the English speaking internet will be non-American. The plurality will be Indian. And of course, you're going to have huge Nigerian representation, Filipino, all of these other places.

1:02:05The assumption has been that if you're on the internet speaking English, you're basically likely to be an American. That assumption, America is going to be de-centered in that sense. Most of the users and stuff will be Indian, like most of the followers. And I wonder if, just as an adjunct, because you'll enjoy this, is English people have seen the English language being taken by Americans and changed. Yeah. And you'll appreciate English Indian, right? Sure, sure, sure. It's hilarious. It's a whole different thing. And that's going to be likely a predominant version of English in 30 years time.

1:02:43Well, so it's really interesting. So I'm not sure exactly how it plays out. And here's why is one of the things that's happened over the last five years where your followers are aware of this. That's why they're subscribing to Real Vision and so on. But if you just pay attention and it's hard to... Actually, it's easier nowadays, but the mainstream press, or actually, I call them the downstream press. You know why? The mainstream media is downstream of the internet. Things happen on the internet and then they register in the mainstream media. Okay. I'll probably tweet that or whatever afterwards.

1:03:17Absolutely correct. They are now commentators of what happens in these other social networks. That's exactly right. And so they are downstream. They are no longer... Especially post-2010, 2020, 2021, that was like their sort of last hurrah kind of thing. And I feel like just a switch flipped and we just entered a different era, basically post 2021. It's like sub-stacks, few things that all hit at the same time, right? So if you listen to the downstream media, you will only hear about intra-American stuff. The degree to which they've become so inward looking, they only comment on other countries as hate objects or threats to democracy, et cetera, etc.

1:03:56And it's amazing how many threats to democracies are. Tech is a threat. Trump is a threat. Crypto is a threat. Web3 is a threat. Hungary is a threat. India is a threat. China is a threat. Hungary is a threat. Brazil is a threat. Brexit is a threat. I'm sure there's more. Whatever. Every country in the world that is not under the thumb and basically Canada or whatever is a threat to democracy. But those people who, like Canada, are unbanking or surveilling or deplatforming or otherwise defenestrating their citizens. Well, it's okay because they're doing it to protect democracy. And so the word used in this way is actually being used to define a party and not a process.

1:04:39Let's first take the example of China, because this is a ridiculously important point. So from an outsider's point of view, communism is whatever the Chinese Communist Party says it is. Guess what? Today, capitalists, they can be in the Communist Party. Oh, guess what, Bo Xi Li, he's like a Maoist, but he's out. So it's not what's written down in the words, it's basically whatever this network, it's literally a subgraph, it's very quantitative. You could literally take the 1.4 billion Chinese people - It's an adaptive mythology. It is. So unlike, let's say, Catholicism for hundreds of years was a non-adaptive mythology until churches split and stuff like that.

1:05:21China seems, and many of these are, they have the myth, which is the organizing set of principles. I will say Protestantism was a... Well, okay, Protestantism was more universal than Catholicism, but let me come back to that one in a second. Here's a very quantitative way of thinking about it. If you take the 1.4 billion Chinese people, it's actually 95 million of them, roughly, who are CCP members. It's actually a much larger group of people. It's not just the government. It's like they're through all of society and so on and so forth. It's a prestigious thing in China to be part of CCP. It's a little bit like being part of the Democrat Party plus having an Ivy League degree, kind of like that, because only 6 % of society is CCP, but you're encouraged to be part of it.

1:06:01Okay. So you have this 1.4 billion, then you have the 95 million, then you kind of go inward, inward, inward, and then you get the core, the governors, and then the standing committee, and then you have like Xi at the top, right? Okay. And one way of thinking about it is that is literally, you can visualize all those nodes in that digital space that we talked about. And communism is whatever that central network, which is, it has concentric circles, right? There's the most in group and then something outside and something outside. And then there's the CCP members. And then there's like all the Chinese society that means a diaspora.

1:06:36And then there's the rest of the world outside, right? Communism is whatever they need it to be. Okay. And so what's in yesterday might be out today. And some stuff that Hu Xintao said, we're not going to be talking about that anymore. We're going to stress what Comrade G has said, announce common prosperity doctrine. We're not as much about who's harmonious society. Okay. Communism is whatever they need it to be. And the thing about it is it's full spectrum. You hear about, for example, the Hong Kong protesters. But if you think about all the different crackdowns, right? They crack down on Bojie Lee, okay, in 2012-ish.

1:07:12They crack down on Hong Kong. They don't like Taiwan. They don't like the US military, of course. They don't like the Chinese tech billionaires now, like Jack Ma and Pony. Like all the Chinese tech guys are getting a horse head in their bed. Many of them are leaving the country as a function of that. They actually even don't like, and this is more visible within China, there's some people who are so traditionalist that they're still mad about Mao, which is actually a good thing to be mad about. But there's folks who are like, oh, he was really bad. So there's a deviation from a different angle.

1:07:43That's not like a universalist human rights angle. It's not as visible to us outside. There's a deviation in, obviously, the Uyghurs are getting hit very hard. You have Falun Gong, yet another. So there's many different kinds of ideological deviation. You know, the tech libertarians, the human rights people, the Uyghurs, but all of them are basically disaligned with that central group, right? CCP. And so it's not really accurate to say, oh, you know, left, right, et cetera. The center is CCP. And then anything that is outside of that is a threat to communism, right? It's a threat to the Chinese people and so on and so forth.

1:08:22Okay. Now, when you think about the American system, okay, there is very similar. You take all 300 million Americans and you kind of graph and it's like, then there's like folks who are government employees, like 6 million government employees. And then you go over and there's like the most prominent journalists and academics and professors and bureaucrats and of course, elected officials or whatever. But those are, in fact, in some ways less powerful than the unelected officials, which is a good term by the way. The unelected officials are the control circuitry outside the US government that controls the US government, in the sense of the press holds them accountable.

1:08:55And if it holds them accountable, it's upstream of them because it can get them fired, but not vice versa, right? Okay. So you have the control circuitry and you have the government itself. And basically, I argue that anything this group does is by definition democracy. That's how it's operationally used. For example, you can invade Iraq. Well, it's still democracy. You can blow up Syria, still democracy. You can surveil the entire world against their will with the NSA, basically repealing search and seizure, the fourth one, still democracy. You can bail out the banks. You can have the Fed chair is not elected.

1:09:28You can have unelected bureaucrats, still democracy. You can have 700 military bases throughout the world. You can have John Bolton admitting that they launched coup after coup in different countries. You can have all of these declassified documents saying this stuff. And you can even argue, by the way, that some of this, and I would actually agree with this, some of this was necessary to fight off the Soviets during 1945 to 91. I would agree with some of that stuff, at least during the Cold War. I would use two terms. One is democracy. The other is, which is a very American term, only ever used in America is freedom.

1:09:56Well, I'll come back to the freedom. So that's going to be another network in a second. Point is, when you get somebody on the spot, you name all of these things, nothing that this network does, it defines whatever it does as democracy and whatever is not it as threat to democracy. Once you understand that, that is a party, right? And it's like, you know, let's say it's mostly Democrat, but there's lots of Republicans there. There's like Frum and now Cheney and, you know, like the neoconist, like they're all there too. A lot of the statist Republicans and so on, right? And you have to sort of necessarily be political to talk about some of this stuff.

1:10:33So point is that that group, anything they do is democracy. And now anybody who is building a power outside them is a threat to democracy. So tech, threats to democracy because it's its own network. Trump and MAGA, threats to democracy. Putin, threats to democracy. China, threats to democracy. India, threats to democracy. All the fascist authorities, Saudis, Hungary, France, Brazil, basically anybody that is not either within this social network or basically their allies. So Canada or Western Europe, anybody who doesn't, one way of thinking about it is - Sounds like the Bitcoin state to me. Well, it's coming.

1:11:13So I'm coming to this point, right? So do you see the map of who denied Snowden asylum? Okay, so here's a good question. So there's a bunch of countries that sanction Russia over Ukraine, right? Off the top of your head, about what percentage of the global population in those countries sanctioned Russia over Ukraine? In those countries of the global population, full stop. So basically, if you take all the countries that sanction Russia, and you add up their population, what fraction is that of global population? I would say as a fraction of the world's population, 5%. Last I look is about 16 % is like the golden billion.

1:11:50So it's essentially all the Western European countries. I didn't rise that high. Yeah. But it's like a big chunk of world GDP. But it's like all the Western European countries and understandably, and Japan and it's Korea, but it's basically the places that the US has military bases. And one way of thinking about it is, and I never think about it, can you name a country that is considered a democracy that does not have a US military base or was not like a British colony at some point? It's pretty hard to do so. I can name one, right? But if you try, you'll see it. Go ahead. It's not easy. It's not easy.

1:12:29Germany, that's got a US military base, Japan, US military base. India was a British colony. Israel's a British colony. And Indian leaders are pulling away in some ways. So they're flawed democracies. They're getting downweighted. And so you can literally order all of these social networks by their distance to the US establishment social network. And that is the degree to which they're talked up as being examples of democracy. Would you suggest that the rules-based global order system is just the US network extended? Exactly. That's right. The number one rule of the quote rules-based order is that the US makes the rules.

1:13:06That is the rule of the rules-based order. The US has admin rights. It's a super user. It has root control. This is exactly the reason that China does not want it. That does not mean China is good. And just for me to say that these other groups are at odds with the US establishment does not mean I endorse all of these groups or any of these groups necessarily. I'm just observing that. With China, their big thing was, and it looks very smart in retrospect, it looked really stupid at the time they did it, was censoring or blocking all foreign social media and building their own, right? Blocking all these foreign services.

1:13:43They basically had that sort of instinctive communist or nationalist or whatever you want to call it sentiment that the state, Chinese state should have root, right? That was valid over any short-term economic consideration, despite Zuck offered to name his son or his child. I forget after... Z was getting naming rights on his child to let him his child. Didn't work, okay?

1:14:09Bold move, right? But point is that with China, their strategy was fork the route, right? Whatever worked in the West, they would copy it and it'd fork the route. This, by the way, is completely different from Japan, right? Some people said, oh, Japan didn't beat the US, so why would China beat the US? Japan has always been a vassal state for the last 70 years. You've got US military bases there. I haven't dug into all of this, and there's probably somebody who, as part of Real Vision or your audience, that would know more that could speak Japanese. There was a guy, Michael Hudson, who has a very interesting history of Japan in the 80s and early 90s.

1:14:46Essentially, he argues that the US used its super user powers to its root control over Japan to force them to set up factories in the US and buy treasuries and so on and so forth. Basically, the US has certain switches at a top level where it's like, okay, we're going to cut off military aid or we're going to do X, Y, and Z, which Japan can't retaliate against. And when we have seen - Yeah, because the game of geopolitics is the game of creating dependencies. Yes. Once you create a set of dependencies, nobody can leave. So one of the things, like the US's network that's most powerful is obviously the network of money.

1:15:25So now we're seeing - Yeah, come back to that one. Yes, yes, yes. Global swap lines as a weapon. Yes, yes. So I agree money is - So you can produce, you can cut it differently. It's money, morality, and Marshall. So money network, Marshall network, right? Okay. So the money network, you're totally on point that. The moral network is the network of NGOs and human rights activists and so on and so forth. But if you read Easterly and Levine or various kinds of studies on charity and aid, there's a good study on priceonomics, Chris Blattner's written this up. One of the most effective, perhaps the most effective aid thing in the world was a business plan competition in Nigeria.

1:16:06Why? Because charity and investment are both structurally similar in the sense of there's a queue of people competing to get some rich guy to give them money, okay? Or rich institution, whatever, right? The difference is that with charity, each person's incentive, let's say there's a hundred people, each of those hundred people are incentivized to be the most pathetic, to be the most sympathetic, right? To get to the front of the line by either exaggerating or creating or imagining or talking up their various maladies and so on so they can get that charity. And in extremists, this leads This is a scene in Slumdog Millionaire where the guy chops off the limbs of that kid so they're a more attractive beggar.

1:16:47It's like learned helplessness. Which happens in India. Which terrible things like that do happen. Exactly. So the point is that basically it's like learned helplessness. It's like be as pathetic as possible because that's the incentive structure that set up the most pathetic wins. The one that seems to be the quote most deserving of the charity. Congressly, with investment, if you have those 100 people and they're competing for venture capital, it's a completely different dynamic. They're all competing to be the strongest, fake it till you make it. And if you think about the... There's one kind of instant bio which stresses that somebody is depressed and bipolar and they're a victim of this and that other group, that's the chariot's woke bio.

1:17:27The tech bio is, I have two degrees from MIT and I founded a company at this and It's like the Instabrag, right? So this is like the narrative of marginalization, and this is the narrative of just execution, okay? And I could probably come up with a better kind of thing, but the Woken tech narratives are the narrative for winning the charity game and winning the investment game. And they're just totally different if you think about them. It's literally just like self-abasement and self-actualization, just totally different, okay? Okay. Here's the thing is in the charity model, those hundred, and what I'm talking about, by the way, is organized charity, as opposed to like, you know, people talk about institutional religion as opposed to like personal religion, right?

1:18:11Institutionalized charity. I'm not talking about you see your neighbor and they're down to their luck and you help them out. That's good because you have local information on the situation. You know, the neighbor is not malingering. And you probably have an ROI. It's measurable. Yeah. And even if you don't have an ROI, if that guy is genuinely down on his luck and you know them and you know they're not a malingerer, they're not like a professional victim and so on, of course, you have local knowledge, you can go and help them, help them out. It's a tough time. Oh, lightning hit their house. Of course, you're going to go and get a bucket and throw fire.

1:18:38Okay, right? That's different. Institutionalized charity is grants and forms and all that type of stuff, which we're familiar with, the NGO industrial complex that creates dependency. Investment creates independency. Because those 100 guys, even if only one of them gets the investment. The other 99, it's like running a 400 meters around the track. Even if you don't win the medal, the other 99, at least they get a workout. They were strengthened through the process. They made one more sale. They closed one more deal. They shipped one more product to try to get this investment. They didn't. You know what?

1:19:12They're stronger as a function of it. They've leveled up. This is a strengthening process. And so the same money, that same thousand dollars or a hundred thousand or a million dollars that you give out, those two processes, this one creates dependency and gain status, this one creates independency and gains money. It's like these dual ways of looking at the world. Now, the thing about this is the dependency thing, just to really put a point on it, the only true charity is actually investment. Why? Because let's say there's some person, you haven't met them, they're homeless on the street. Okay.

1:19:46Are you going to give them 1 % of net worth, 2%, 50? If you gave them... I mean, Most people aren't going to give them 1 % of net worth. That's already a showstopper. I've never been able to find a single person who says they believe in global equality, et cetera, who'd give 50 % of the net worth to some random person. That would be a blow for global equality, but they don't actually want to do it because charity decelerates. The closer that guy rises to them, the more they feel, hey, I was working here and they weren't. I want to give them some drips to make myself feel good, but I'm not actually going to going to lift them up.

1:20:23It's very difficult to lift up another human being. They need to have their own independent lift. What they get are pets. That's what the NGO industrial complex is or was in India, in Africa, in South America. It's they wanted pets. This is like Sally Struthers, if you remember her in the 80s, treated Indians as pets because, oh, they're starving and I'm the white savior coming in and petting them. The alternative is to treat them as human beings and do a manly handshake or a personally handshake, whatever. And now you're doing a deal with them and you're investing in their business. And now you treat them like a human being where, obviously, of course, they might make a mistake or something, but you expect them to lift themselves just as you will lift yourself.

1:21:10And both parties work to get that business off the ground. And so investment actually also crucially allows that person to potentially surpass you. As one very famous example, when Thiel invested in Zuckerberg, both got richer as a function of that, but Zuck became much richer than Thiel. Thiel started out richer than Zuck, invested in him, Zuck became much richer than Thiel. That's just a famous example. That same thing happens all the time when you invest in somebody's business and they do really well. You want them to become a zillionaire and then you have a cut of that zillion. It doesn't have to be, by the way, on the scale of venture capital.

1:21:43You could invest in somebody's, I don't know, you give them a loan or you give an equity investment in their farm or something like that, and you can do well at that. All these different kinds of finance, depending, you have made the economics work, but you can make it work. So the point is, I mean, this is really the give a man a fish versus teach a man to fish proverb, just kind of explained out a little bit. But once you realize that the entire US NGO network is to foster dependency in the name of charity. You can actually see this more clearly. For example, India was doing something. And I remember there's this viral thread on Twitter where some British people were mad that they were doing it.

1:22:21And they were like, we're going to cut off their aid, right? 50 million a year, like the UK was paying. And Indians laughed for two reasons. First is it showed that charity was actually a hook, right? To keep them as pets. It showed the mass kind of dropped, right? You're doing something we don't want you to do? No, we're going to pull the money. Okay. They wanted pets. They didn't want actually independent agents, number one. And number two,$50 million, that's, lol, keep it Britain. India doesn't need it. That's like one VC round. That's like a country to country aid. That's something that's like the change out of the back pocket for the Indian economy.

1:22:53Now, we don't need it. We stand on our own two feet, right? That's how they become authoritarian, oh my God, threat to democracy, because they are independent. Once they're a threat to this social network's dominance, they're independent, right? So applying this filter though, which is kind of interesting, the fundamental thing I'm just, the point I'm making is communism is not about like seizures of farms or the revolts of the products, whatever the Chinese Communist Party says it is. Democracy is whatever the US establishment says it is, no matter how much surveillance invasions they do. And if the other guy wins an election they don't like and does everything, that's still a threat to democracy, right?

1:23:29Once we understand this, that's actually particularism in the name of universalism, communism, democracy, these are nominally universalist ideologies, but they actually serve a particularist tribe, which is the CCP and the US establishment respectively. That's a totally different filter on the world, and it's got a lot of predictive value. Because just like I mentioned that graph you can make of China and the Chinese establishment, you can literally parse Twitter and make a social graph of the US establishment. And there's some nodes that are very central and others that are more marginal and those that are at the border.

1:24:01And then those that have some linkages in, but really would be their own thing. And then you start getting now, what's happened to the US is it's actually got not one subgraph, but two. So this brings us to a key concept of the network shade. But hold on, before we get there, I just want to just sum for people, because we're talking a lot of stuff. We established why crypto was the parallel financial system, was the foundation stone, along with the internet. We talked about some of the issues of the existing sovereign state. This is the FDA, how the incentive system is actually rigged against the ability for the state to move.

1:24:38And in fact, ideology, which is supposed to be universal, are not that particular. We didn't really cover digital ID enough. We started it and didn't do it. But digital ID is another huge area. So I think digital ID is one because it gives us sovereignty over our own identity. I think that's the essential point. And what that then unlocks is when you put all of these together, you end up with Web3, which is a broad term for the ability now to coalesce communities in large numbers with their own system of currency, value exchange, identity, and whether it's mythology, organizing set of principles, or whatever it may be.

1:25:18And that leads us into what seems to be a fourth turning moment, which is the rise of the network state. Right. So what's interesting is - Does that make sense? Is that roughly the right line of thought? I think that's right. I'd say, let me make one more kind of sum up comment on the last bit, and then let's go to these things. The concept of something that is particularist, but looks universalist is like a common morph through history. When the Soviet Union was actually the dominant version of communism, basically communism was whatever the Soviet Union wanted it to be. And if communism meant that you were allied with the Nazis, which they were in 1939 to invade Poland together under Malta Ribbentrop, suddenly communism was pro-Nazism.

1:26:04For two years, it was pro-Nazism. So communism was whatever they wanted it to be. It could be the new economic policy. When Lenin allowed some capitalism, it could be the Red Terror. It's whatever they wanted it to be. right? Christianity under, you know, Catholicism, the Holy Roman Empire, I mean, obviously, this is a long period of history, and there's lots of different things that happened, but it's pretty plastic too, you know? Over a thousand years, it went from being the, Christianity went from being the slave religion that overthrew the Roman Empire to the master religion that ran, you know, the Catholic Church in the Holy Roman Empire, right?

1:26:38Like, basically, you had this oxymoron thing of the Christian king, you know? And so, this concept of something that What sounds universalist but is particularist is very useful because you can just kind of... People fool themselves and others with the words, right? But if you look at the actions, it's like in-group, out-group. And that in-group, out-group today, at least, we can think of it as subgraphs of a social network. This brings us to the concept of the networks and digital identity and the network state, right? This is the true map of the United States. It's a dis-United States. Yep. Okay?

1:27:09And there's basically three maps. The first map is of the US in 1861. And what you see is that the two sides in 1861 are physically and ideologically separated, both at the same time. So the Union and the Confederacy, and the thing we take for granted is that the geographical separation and the ideological separation coincide. What that means is that the victory condition in that civil war was for the North to invade the South and take their capital. And then the South surrendered because basically their communication structure, government structure is all broken and they just give up. Now, if we go forward 150 something years to the next figure, the 2016 election, 2020 election is very similar, but counting by counting, it's fractal.

1:27:59The blue and the red as opposed to blue and the gray are cheek by jowl in lots of different states. And so there's no physical invasion plan or battle that's possible, what you have is instead, you're going to invade a cornfield in Nebraska or San Francisco. And even then, it'd be 30 % Democrat or 30 % Republican. You can't actually wage a physical fight. But if you go forward one more, you now see that in the digital space, which is what we talked about earlier, in that second world that's being created alongside, that blue and the red are actually quite disjoint. That's very clear. That's the polarization that was allowable by the internet.

1:28:37The internet actually allowed the separation of political ideology and lack of centralization, right? It was accelerating even before the internet, right? But the internet accelerated. That is to say, it was happening, but the internet accelerated because cable news preceded the internet and the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine. Essentially, what happened by 1950 was like peak centralization, where it was this massive centralizing force over many decades and centuries, mass media, mass production, telegraph, telephone railroad. That level of centralization, we sometimes think of history as a beginning in 1945, because the current era did.

1:29:14If you ask them for the history of what happened before, they actually get pretty hazy. They're like, Great Depression, Prohibition, then the Civil War, 1776. okay and then go back to like christianity right they basically just don't have any right memory of that right but there's some really interesting incidents for example in the 1600s it's a very important one um you know the puritans uh or the answers are what we now call the puritans or roundheads lost a battle in you know what is say the united kingdom and they went out to the northeast of america and settled there in like the early 1600s and the mid 1600s, the Roundheads and their allies beat the Cavaliers.

1:29:56And the Cavaliers came out to the Virginia area in 1640-ish, if I remember correctly. And so what happened was two different sides on a civil war migrated out to the US, set up colonies, and 200 years later, those same two groups got into another civil war. That gives a completely different lens on the civil war. People say, outstate rights or it's slavery. No, maybe it's roundhead versus cavalier. It's like literally, you know, that's like this insane thing where this group, these cultural, these like mind viruses or what have you are just things that are just powerful things that just, we don't understand them fully yet.

1:30:37It's kind of like not fully understanding human biology. We don't fully understand human sociology. You know, we're still at the phlogiston theory there, like the mind viruses that mass and move large groups of people. And so these two groups are again fighting now, another 150 something years later. And so that's why the US is not really a nation state, even though we use that term. Do you know the difference between the nation and the state? Can you rattle it off? No. Over the last 10 years, we've all learned to rattle off what the properties of a currency are. Currency has, it's a store of value, it's a medium exchange, it's a unit of account.

1:31:18You've heard that a bunch of times probably. And we didn't really have to think about that in the 2000s. I couldn't rattle that off then. But now, once we thought about what is a currency, you have things that are currency-like, but not quite currencies. That was the big thing of the 2010s. What is a currency? Hold on. I'm going to guess this nation versus state. So nation, I'm thinking is the physical place where you live that is guided by a certain set of rules, and the state is the set of rules. Close. The nation is the people, and the state is government. And the land is yet a third thing or whatever, which we can come back to.

1:31:56So for example, it's a little bit old-fashioned that people talk about. So one of the things about that nation has the same root as natality. So common birth, so common descent. So the Japanese nation, and that's the Japanese people and culture and language and so on and so forth, has distinct from the Japanese state, which is this creamy layer of administrators above them, which could be the Japanese empire. And then 1945, 46, it's actually the American state above them. The state was not the people. The Japanese nation was different than the state. And then eventually they got the kind of democratic Japan installed there, right?

1:32:36And somebody who lived in East Germany actually lived under four different states, right? They were under Weimar and then the Nazis and then the East Germans. And if they lived long enough, they got to German reunification, right? So one very long life. There's a good book on my four lives, somebody who lived through all four of those eras in Germany. If you lived for about 80 years, you managed to make it all the way through, okay? World War and communism and so on. And so when you understand the difference between the nation and the state, you can actually start like decoding certain amazing things.

1:33:05So, for example, the United Nations, so it's actually best not thought of as the United Nations, it's best thought of as the selected states. Why? Because there's 193 countries in the United Nations. But as the president of Kazakhstan recently acknowledged, if all the stateless nations, if all the Catalonians and Basques and Kurds and Armenians and so on and so forth, if all of them got their own states, he said there'd be 600 or 700 countries in the United Nations. So that's another interesting term, the stateless nation. Oh, okay. To sometimes understand what something is, you need to understand what it is not.

1:33:44And ideally something that's just on the boundary. It's like math, right? you have a definition and you probe that definition with something that has like four of the properties, but not the fifth. And then you can often get very interesting objects that are close, but not the same thing. And you only understand something when you understand the decision boundary for what is inside and outside the set. Yeah. And so when you see this, you realize, okay, a nation state, it's supposed to be, and this was the original concept, there's a group of people of common descent, and then they have the right to self-termination, meaning a government over them.

1:34:19That's what it used to be. Now, it actually turns out today, there's actually arguably relatively few countries in the world that satisfy the nation state definition. Japan does, Israel does, arguably, but China and India are a little different. They're more like civilization states because they're so big that they actually have multiple nationalities under them. India has Gujaratis and Tamilians and Malayalam, all these different ethnicities. China is actually 97 % Han, so you can argue it's like one ethnic group, but they also do have like 10%, still like 100 million people from various other different ethnic groups.

1:34:55There is a feedback effect here because the state can actually homogenize and create a nation. For example, at the time of the French Revolution, Hobsbawm mentions that only a small percentage of what we think of as France today spoke French. They spoke dialects of other things at that time, And then the revolutionary administration, revolutionary France and its descendants basically smoothed all of that out into the French of the Académie Française eventually. And that's why they're so prescriptive about it. They just homogenize this whole area. So France is a social construct. So is Italy. Garibaldi united it.

1:35:34So is Germany. Bismarck united it. And so essentially, in the language of private equity or something, these roll-ups occurred where all these little principalities and city-states were all rolled up into these giant empires that we call France and Germany and Italy. And there's fragments, small fragments of the old world that survives the present day. Do you know what San Marino is? A small country off the coast in Italy. It's probably the smallest principality in the world, right? Yeah, something like that. Exactly. I'm not sure it's the very smallest, but it's one of the smallest. It's like 30 ,000 people or something like that.

1:36:07Okay. And you look at it and you're like, why is this a country? I don't understand. And the answer is that it sheltered Garibaldi when he was unifying Italy. And so he spared it and guaranteed sovereignty. And it managed to kind of just keep that all the way to the present day. So it's like this duckbill platypus, this missing link that tells us what the old world used to look like. Okay. The thing is that there used to be lots and lots of these city states, but they didn't have the defense capability to stand up against these nation states. So you teamed up in these large units, right? I mean, German nationalism and the whole German question arose in part as a result of Napoleon and all the invasions.

1:36:49The Germans had to team up or else the French were going to stomp them. That was actually what a big part of the 1800s was about, right? And in more recent history, the Indians and the Chinese have within living memory basically unified their respective billion people. India, as you're probably aware, maybe some of your viewers don't know, they have essentially two independence days. They have Republic Day and they have Independence Day. And the difference is there's a difference between the independence from the British and the fusion of the 562 princely states that made up India at the time of independence from the British into the Indian Union, right?

1:37:33So you're like, wait a second, the princely states, I've realized that this is something that people in India know, but that most people outside India don't know even existed. Do you know about the princely states? Yeah? Yeah, yeah. I spent a long time in India, yeah. Okay. Why don't you talk about this? Because I'll keep going. Go ahead. The history of India was, in fact, it was never one unified country. They were either tribal or or principalities or kingdoms and split, and also religious ideologies, everything was split. And all of the history of India is not India as a nation. It's the history of the ruling factors, who grew, who didn't, the Guptas, all of these people that moved around the state.

1:38:12And the most famous of all, even though they're probably the least significant, were the Rajasthani kings, because that's what we know, because that's where you go on holiday and you go to Udaipur and Jaipur and that kind of stuff. But yeah. That's right. And they were all, the Brits kind of gave them fake power. So they said, well, you are monarchs, like our monarch, and therefore you can meet the king when he comes and this kind of stuff. But they basically took their power away. And then the Indian state took all of their land away as well, essentially, and all of their money and all of their power.

1:38:42Yeah, exactly. It's a complicated process, but they did a bunch of deals with them and they're like, okay, we're doing a deal with all the guys surrounding you. And if you don't join the Indian union, we're going to roll you up too, very similar to the Plata Diplomo deal that was offered to lots of the states in Europe, silver or lead. Point is that that unification of India is something that happened within living memory. If you're 80 something, people are actually around for when there are seven or 10 or something like that at the time that that happened. So just slipping out of living memory.

1:39:13And so China also, I think it's very much a retcon, but within China, Mao was three parts good and seven parts good and three parts bad. It's about as negative as they can afford to be with the pretense that the Communist Party was continuous. What actually happened is Deng Xiaoping ran a coup against Mao in the 70s and turned the whole thing around and changed it. But he kept the logo, right? He kept the branding in our terminology because he wanted to preserve the illusion of continuity since there had been so much chaos and so much revolution and so on in China. They didn't want yet another one.

1:39:52He didn't want to change the flag. He wanted everybody to think it was the same thing. And he just reinterpreted it to be like communism is whatever Deng says it is. That's kind of the same thing we were talking about earlier, universalism, particularism in the guise of universalism. Anyway, point is, both those two things were just unified as of recently. and the state has tried to essentially equate itself with the nation and to varying levels of success, I think very high level of success in actually both of these regions. Nationalism is a big thing. These are two cultures that are very much on the rise.

1:40:21This is why the sovereign individual thesis, which I think is important, has a lot of qualifiers because I think the future is a centralized East and a decentralized West. The Sionic and Dharmic civilizations are on the rise and the Abrahamic civilizations are broadly in decline. And these are just these gigantic cycles. When you learn enough history and you see these arcs, you're like, wow, this is this mega wave that I'm just in the middle of when it was going in the opposite direction. And we're at this turning of a lot of different things at the same time, right? The rise of India, the rise of China, relative decline of the West, rise of information technology, rise of artificial intelligence.

1:41:05It's actually insane how many different things are flipping at the same time. It's like - A quick side question to that is, can the cynic conglomeration of people actually rise with an aging population? Ah, great question. So you're probably talking about Zihon's type arguments and so on and so forth, right? Well, yes. I mean, I study a lot of demographics and I understand that demographics can be solved by technology. The question is, is will it? Because the Chinese state is so focused on the mass of the people as opposed to solving it by technology. I don't know. Well, yeah. So what do I think about that?

1:41:46So - Without getting too deep down another rabbit hole, but it's just something - It's a great question. So my short answer is A, robotics over demographics, right? Yeah. B, I think the whole thing is actually somewhat overstated because - Hold on. Let's just stop that a sec. I don't think most people understand. I took it for granted because I've been thinking about this for a long time. Robotics are demographics. People need to understand. Yeah. So let me explain that. Robotics over demographics. What does that mean? That means like - No, robotics are demographics. Well, they are. As is AI. These are demographics.

1:42:16Yes. These are new people. It's new people. That's right. And so it's both, right? So robotics over or robotics are demographics are both different ways of expressing the fact that you can do more and more with fewer and fewer or nowadays in the limit zero people with AI. And that just gives you a scaling that people just, they're not thinking about it because you weren't able to just crank up new people like that. Just to think about what that curve looks like, 10 years ago, 14 guys did Instagram. I forget the exact number, but it was on that order. And Kodak had like a thousand X that number of people and went bankrupt.

1:42:57Okay. So lots of people is not necessarily an asset. It's more like a liability. It's mouths to feed. It's folks who are stuck in old ways of doing things, right? It's just like America's aircraft carriers are, I mean, we'll see, but it's a 1940s technology, literally 1940s technology. I mean, it's being upgraded and whatnot, but drones and other things can hit it. And unmanned is better than manned in any situation that you can do unmanned it's usually better to do unmanned unmanned space flight that's how space was doing it right unmanned warfare is easier to do for militaries that don't have uh that aren't like don't have a culture that's built around um like a guy in the tank or a guy in the plane right what are we putting on screen we're putting top gun on screen that's the best-selling movie people are like yeah fighter pilots you know that's equivalent of it's like cheering some horseback movie before the start of world war one okay like horseback cavalry no the point is to be like you know if you're if you're actually fighting to win the point is interesting enough in top gun they even mentioned this oh really it's like this is the last hurrah of the fighter pilot right because the drones the drones win yeah drones win right i mean like but the thing is that basically uh so i haven't watched the movie yet or whatever you You know, and look - It's not worth watching, but you know what the movie's about.

1:44:20Yeah, I'm not trying to be a buzz killer or anything. Like, look, I appreciate that nostalgia kind of thing as much as anybody else or whatever, but you have to sort of envision the future to be able to build it. And one of the biggest problems actually with a lot of cinema and so on, there's a key stolen base. Do you know what's in common among all these dystopian sci-fi things? Is the stolen bases, they implicitly assume the present was like, okay, good enough, right? And some tech guy, whether it's like Miles Dyson from Terminator or it's like the evil scientist is unnamed in Gattaca, but the technology is...

1:45:00There's some tech guy who came in, black mirrored it all up, okay? And disturbed our Garden of Eden. It's like literally the Christian fall. We had this sort of Edenic present. It was okay. It was fine. And now it's screwed up. And so the stolen base is that the present is good. But the alternative kind of stories that I want to tell, and I think the different way of thinking about it is, what if it is the present that is dystopian? What if it's a present which has supply chain shortages and rising nationalism and anarchies - And it's also the helical structure you were talking about, right? It's not mean reversion.

1:45:36We're seeing this. It's a particularly prevalent narrative in the Republicans right now, which is, and the conservative party in the UK, which is to go back to the 1950s. Yeah, exactly. That's right. And you want to kind of turn the clock all the way around, right? That's actually the smarter way of doing it is identify the changes that are happening and figure out how to ride the lightning and pull it all the way through, right? And that's difficult to do, by the way. And it may, it's just the kind of thing where it may be somebody who's placed in a certain way can do and see that and others can't.

1:46:08Civilizations have a life cycle as well. It's like, breathe in, breathe out, right? Just like that. What's interesting now to get us back into the network state is once you have a group of people who have kind of a joint vision, it can get there without a single person getting it there. So this is complicated. I think you need both the founder and the community. You need both. I agree. But we can see it with some elements of cryptocurrency and we've seen it with technology, open source technology, where it just kind of happens because the genie's out of the box and it sets the direction because it exists.

1:46:47Well, it's interesting. It's one of these things where it is true. There's something to the Victor Hugo concept of nothing can stop an idea whose time has come. There is something to that. Okay. But one way I reconcile this is let's call it reconciling the great man theory of history with the impersonal forces theory of history. Okay. Because there's kind of two different ways. So, oh, it's great men. They steer it. No, it's impersonal forces. Anybody could have done it. Right. Sort of a good natural experiment for resolving this is like, I'll give two arguments, but like the Newton-Leibniz argument.

1:47:19Okay. If there was somebody else who was doing the same thing at roughly the same time, you can argue that great man theory is less applicable because the idea was in the air. If it's something that basically nobody else was working on, and arguably Satoshi was like that, there wasn't anybody else who shipped something just like Bitcoin around the same time. It took five years before Vitalik shipped Ethereum. And he was certainly, I mean, he's amazing and deserves all the credit, but it was inspired by Satoshi's work and would not have happened without Satoshi's work. So it's not like there were lots of other people working on it.

1:47:51So the way I'm thinking about it is the way I integrate the impersonal forces of history and the great man theory is the tech tree model from civilization. There's all these things that are known. Let's call it our knowledge base. And that's the base of the tree. And then you can decide to extend it in this direction or this direction, like the branches. As an individual, you can go to one of these branches and you push the frontier forward on that branch. You see what I'm saying? So that has room for both structural constraints. As great as Satoshi was, he wasn't going to invent internal combustion engines and mining and aviation and rocketry.

1:48:29He wasn't going to invent all that from scratch. He did need to stand on the shoulders of giants. Even Newton had to stand on the shoulders of giants. There's all of these prerequisites that existed before. That's like the base of the tech tree. But then you can choose to extend it in one direction. And that, I think, is sort of like the helical theory where it acknowledges both points of view as legitimate and gives you an overall framework in which you see it that leads to interesting deductions, which is it means, for example, that you can literally enumerate the tech tree. This is actually one of the things I do as an investor.

1:48:58I'd literally enumerate the tech tree for an area as much as I can. And I add to it. And I'm like, we should see a guy there. And then you hunt. And if you can't hunt, you incubate. right? And this is like a useful way of thinking. It's a little more like Thiel's model of the optimistic and determinate future. He has pessimistic, optimistic, indeterminate, determined. So there's two by two, right? This is in a sense, optimistic and determinate, but decentralized where it's like, I know there should be a solution in this specific determined area, but I don't know exactly what it is. However, I have narrowed it down.

1:49:35I'm not searching the entire possible set. It's like, there's an identity thing that should look like this. And you write up a spec and you put it out into the world. And you're not just the idea guy, you're the idea plus capital guy. And then you see if you can fund it. Okay. So what's my point coming back up? So basically, can these things, these networks you asked, can they exist totally independent of a founder? I think the founder's energy is needed to get them started. And then then that pulls the Triforce together. Then they can decay over time, but it might take a long time for them to decay.

1:50:13They still maintain some initial shape that the founders set, but eventually they don't resemble what that happened. Well, founder mythology generally needs to maintain. The founding fathers is one of the mythology of the United States. They don't exist anymore, and they probably would not fit into the current present state, but it's a mythology that helps organize people. Same with Steve Jobs. He's now a mythology and it still organizes people around - Mid 2020, the fact that George Washington statues and so on were all pulled down. And then yet six months later, the Capitol. So, you have something where it's a little bit like the Soviet Union where the Orthodox Church, you know, some of these big churches were like dynamited, blown up, turned into swimming pools, desecrated to show that there was a new boss in town, like a new state.

1:51:06The state was respected, but not the cultural institutions, right? That's very common, right? Almost every civilization does this. Yes, at some point. That's right. But, you know, the thing is that when you do that, you're cutting ties with that, with a huge part of what your society thinks they had signed on for. So your other remark, you talked about freedom. This is the emerging, that blue and red cluster that we saw there in that graph. The emerging second cluster, which is not emerging, but a lot of things come together. It is Bitcoin maximalist plus very stridently anti-lockdown and anti-vax, plus don't tread on me, plus pro-gun, plus this and And a lot of that stuff is coming together in a crypto anarchist kind of worldview.

1:51:59Now, there's aspects of this that at least the words I'm sympathetic to. Just like I'm actually sympathetic to some of the words that the US establishment uses. Do I want equal treatment under the law? Of course, I want equal treatment under the law. But that is very different than operationalizing it as legitimizing riots and stuff like that. And in the same way, with this sort of freedom cluster, do I think that there's too much money printing? Of course. Do I think that non-pharmaceutical interventions and lockdowns and stuff were basically done in this destructive and hypocritical way? I do.

1:52:34In fact, actually, I tweeted at the very beginning of COVID on the potential severity of COVID, and it has killed something like 7 million people worldwide. So it's one of these weird things where people want to either say, it's not the Spanish flu, fortunately. We didn't know it was not the Spanish flu at the beginning, but it's also not zero. But people kind of put it in this weird zone where they want to say it's either zero or infinity, and they just can't say, okay, it's one of the worst diseases we've had, but it's not the Spanish flu because, in part, we have the vaccines, right? That's where I think a reasonable position is, which is not - We're not allowed reasonable to say - We're not allowed reasonable positions because the problem is public health has - Because we're thrown out of the tribe.

1:53:20Yeah, exactly. The thing is, you cannot talk about... The biology of a virus is simply not something that you can reason to the right answer based on being the opposite of the other team. But if we think about the reversals, just talk about it for a second during 2020. First, it was the China virus and it was anybody who brought attention to it in Silicon Valley in tech, you were called a racist for saying that this could be a big thing. And, oh my God, you're so paranoid, you prepper, you loser, et cetera. Recode ran all these series of articles, all these journos were attacking. That was in like January, February, 2020.

1:54:01Okay. Then when Trump basically said, oh, I think we should, this is not a big deal. Everybody switched sides. Okay. And suddenly the press was actually extremely, oh, I can't believe you're against COVID testing, blah, blah, blah. And then Trump was like, oh, let's slow the testing down and so on. And then there's a few months where it was not known how severe the thing was. Because one hypothesis, by the way, is that, and if you look at the graph on Google of coronavirus deaths, it is an exponential going up into about April 2020. And we're very lucky that if you go to COVID deaths, you look at global worldwide statistics, It's like an exponential going into April 2020.

1:54:48And then it kind of tops out at about 6 ,000, 7 ,000-ish deaths per day, which is actually quite a lot. We're very lucky. It's just an empirical fact that it topped out there. It could very well have topped out at like 60 ,000 or 70 ,000 deaths per day. And that could be, and again, it's not really the conversation for it, but it could have been a function of masks and lockdowns, the hammer and the dance strategy. Yeah, exactly. But it comes with the price. Yeah. But basically, COVID is a complicated topic. But basically the point is, it's quite possible that it hit guys like Li Wenliang, who is a healthy 30-year-old in China, just because they had a bad roll of the dice immunologically.

1:55:24We don't know all of the immunogenomics of the COVID response yet. People are studying this. But imagine that there's some percentage of the world that has a higher... You have a spectrum of those people who get infected first, and they're also the ones who have the highest severity cases. And so the virus burns through those at the beginning, and then it flattens out. Okay. So it kills all the ones that are the most susceptible in it, right? But where it gets to, it was very much an empirical question. Anyway, point is, this is something that should have been resolved with a good public health establishment who is rational.

1:56:00But because they said, oh my God, they put the Green Reaper guy on the beach with the hammer, with the sickle, and said, oh, you have to go inside. And then a week later, everybody was rioting. That essentially meant a whole group of people very justifiably lost complete trust in anything the government was saying on this, right? They just thought it was... They may not be able to understand virus biology or vaccines or what have you, but they could tell that this government was lying to them on everything else. So they're probably lying to them on this. And how can you argue against that without me going to like GenBank and showing like virus sequences?

1:56:37I understand this because I've actually studied that science myself. And I can understand, yes, the state is actually false on one, two, three, four, and six out of these seven things, but not every single one. Because you can actually go in and you're like an investor, you're a researcher, you're a scientist, you can diligence that. You're like, yes, they're generally untrustworthy. I completely understand where you're coming from, but I can partially trust. And this is the problem. So just to move us forwards a bit, we've got this construct that the state is less trusted, right? That's obvious everywhere.

1:57:10It's polarizing society because people don't know where the answer lies. But people don't want to partially trust. And technology is enabling that polarization. Well, that's the thing. People don't want to partially trust. They want to just either trust or not trust. And that's what happens. How does your nation state play into this? And how's it defined? Your digital nation state. What happens? Basically, putting all the pieces together, A, people are more friendly with folks 3 ,000 miles away. They're closer in digital space than they are culturally to those people who are their next-door neighbors increasingly.

1:57:47B, the US is no longer a single nation state. Arguably, it never was, but let's say post-1950, it had kind of been fused into a nation, the Poles and the Italians and so on. And everybody was kind of like one country, arguably, is the most unified it had been. Okay. But now it's a bi-national state at a minimum. it's blue versus red okay these it's like literally like suny versus shiite or hoodoo versus tootsie because democrats only marry other democrats and republicans only matter the republicans people will marry across race but not across party and what that means is that in one generation ideology becomes biology yeah right so it becomes ethnic and eventually maybe even racial or whatever if you iterate it out enough right it's like um christians and muslims every every race you know like can be either Christian or Muslim, but there's a boundary there, right?

1:58:39Yeah. I want to bring it together because I've read the book. I've followed your work for a long time. I've had a lot of similar thoughts. So it's a big leap of faith getting people to understand, I mean, because there's a huge amount, you know, and the book lays it out and your conversations with Tim lay it out and all of this stuff. There's a lot to this, but talk me through what the digital network state is. What is this new network state? How this idea has come and what it means? Okay. So I have a short definition, which is a network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from preexisting states.

1:59:23Yeah. Maybe I'm just jumping into the middle here. Sure. Why does it need a physical location? Because we've just assessed that it doesn't need it. I know humans quite like it. So they like get together. So like the crypto crowd, they love going to an event because they all get together and have physical proximity. Right. So why does it need that? Well, because it's the recentralization part, right? We have these physical jurisdictions and we have the fact that all our friends are just scattered all over the world. it would be a massive boon to be able to like re-centralize them in a physical community where we actually have root, not San Francisco, where we did not have root, right?

2:00:02We didn't have root because basically like there's some, you know, like terrible mayor and political system and so on. We need a from scratch territory where we can re-centralize. And then guess what? The streets are paved with self-driving cars. Every street is built from the beginning for self-driving, for example, or there's no streets and it's walkable or it's keto kosher and there's low carb, right? Like humans are still physical beings and we can do a lot online, an amazing amount, right? The communication, a lot of culture and stuff like that can be built online. But ultimately to innovate in the physical world, to build like real, you know, you know, relationships and so on and so forth, you're going to need a physical community.

2:00:45And so that's a recentralization part. Now, to be clear, not every one of the societies that I describe needs a physical component, but the nth version of them, the most interesting versions of them do. It's just like not every company needs to become multi-billion person scale or go public and so on, but some of the most interesting ones have that level of ambition. Okay. And so what I propose and I put out in the book is essentially a seven-step plan to go from a single person with a laptop to a state in the United Nations, as crazy as that sounds. Yeah. And it doesn't sound crazy to me, but I also think there is a lot of learnings for everybody else in the rump of this, right?

2:01:36We don't need to follow it through to the full physical state with United Nations, right? Because even at Real Vision, we think of this community and think, okay, now if we thought of ourselves as a digital state, how would we act? How would we make our states attractive? What are the organizing set of principles and rules? There's a lot of stuff that you talk about within how to organize these societies that I think is super interesting as well, because it applies to many, many things. That's right. And one big thing that I talk about, I spend a huge part of the book on it. And one thing also I should say is the book is very much a V1.

2:02:13On my own personal scale, I'm like, okay, let me get something out there and so on. There's tons of stuff I need to edit and add and whatnot. And the V2, I think hopefully will be much improved. With that said, a big part of the book is about history. Why is it about history? Because I'm proposing certain configurations of human beings. Why am I proposing that? Where does that theory come from? Well, we have one life. but 100 billion human beings live before us. And so if you study enough history, you can get a sense for other configurations of human beings. For example, the ancient Greeks, democracy for them meant sortition.

2:02:51It wasn't election, it was sortition. They randomly just drew lots and one guy was just, or some subgroup of people was randomly selected to be in power. This eliminated the entire campaigning. It meant that everybody in the group had to be of high enough virtue that they could potentially be a leader. It had a lot of interesting effects. That's a system that might seem crazy to us today, but we can study what that looked like a thousand something years ago for somebody who tried it out. They tried a whole human lifetime on it. They could see what happened. The point is, history gives us these experiments, 100 billion lives that we can look at.

2:03:26Not every one of them is documented. I draw from the kibbutzim. I draw from the intentional communities of the 1800s US, the so-called communistic societies that Charles Nordhoff wrote about. I draw from the experiences of Singapore's founding, Israel's founding, India's nonviolent independence, obviously lots of things from America, how could one not, from corporate foundings and from corporate shutdowns, from the unification of Germany, France, Italy, from early Christianity. There's a lot of different things, different eras where you can be like, okay, that's an interesting subroutine. That's how humans behaved in this particular configuration.

2:04:08It's like positioning charges and then the forces act on them and they move, there's certain dynamics. Compacting all that together, here is a process that I propose. A, what's the seven-step process to go from an individual with a computer to a country in the UN? You don't have to go all the way. As you said, the rump has some value to it. First, found a startup society, not a startup company. The difference is it's a community, not a company. The product is that someone is joining the community. That's right. The community is the center of everything. Yes. So it's community first. That's not a company.

2:04:43It's a very important thing. And now there's an aspect of it, which is company-like in that you're selling subscriptions, but those subscriptions are to join the community. And so the product is the people. So everything is about selective migration, just like Harvard. As I said, if Harvard is allowed to do it. If the New York Times is allowed to do it, you are allowed to do it. I grant you, I bless you with that. Anything they can do, you can do. If they are very selective in their admissions, literally just copy their text word for word. They might yell at you, oh my God, you're being selective, and you just quote it back to them, and they no longer have any moral legitimacy to tell you that you cannot be selective.

2:05:18That selectivity is very, very important because it means you can build a culture for your organization. You found the startup society, And the second step is to, this is a very high bar actually, organize it into a digital group that is capable of collective action. Okay. What do I mean by collective action? So if you have a million people in like a Game of Thrones group, okay, and someone puts a post out there, people are just there for recreation. Maybe one out of a thousand people in that group will like thumbs up that post. Okay. So you have a very, very low engagement or activation rate.

2:05:51Collective action means that if you have a thousand person group and you ask them to do something, all 1 ,000 of those people basically do it. It's more like a company or like a military or it's like a serious habitat for humanity. When you show up, you're there to work and actually there to put together a house or something. You're not there to just lollygag around. Capacity for collective action is actually an insanely high bar. What it means is just a first order, okay? If you have a Discord and you paste it and you have a thousand people in that Discord and you paste in a link, which is from a community member and they've got an important launch, that if you've got a true network union, which is the structure I described, that should get 1 ,000 likes.

2:06:40It should not really get less than that. Every single person should be doing it. And if they're not doing it, then they're not part of the community, right? They're not taking it seriously. It's not part of their identity stack. It's not top of their identity stack, right? And of course, that's like the hard-ass version. You could imagine it's like 80 or 90%, okay? But you should really aim for 100%. This is something where the power comes from the engagement and the collective action and people taking it seriously. Now, the thing about that is that means this small group can punch way above their weight.

2:07:09They feel like a million-person group online because their engagement is so high, okay? Collective action is the difference between heat and work. You know like in physics, heat all over the place. Work is like force along a direction. And the thing about that is this group that is capable of collective action, it is sort of like a subreddit combined with a DAO, but those are the mechanics. You need the purpose. I talk about this a little bit later in the book, The One Commandment. if your startup company has to have a product that is differentiated from the market, like a one-line pitch. It's online file storage, but it actually works.

2:07:54That was Dropbox. There's different pitches like this, that key differentiation. The differentiation of your startup community from society at large, I call that the one commandment. What is the thing that society at large thinks is bad that you think is good or vice versa? That is what you're recruiting people on the basis of. I gave an example of a book like Digital Sabbath. We're offline 12 hours a day. Just boom, all internet connection shuts off. Why? So you can be with your spouse. So you can be offline from 9 p.m. to 9 a.m. So you don't check email. So you have time to focus so that your kids don't play video games all night, blah, blah.

2:08:31The community is giving you help with willpower. That's just like an example of a one commandment. You're not saying, by the way, change all the other laws in society. You're saying change one thing at a time, just like a startup company changes only one thing at a time. Why do I think this works? Again, this pulls from history. These intentional communities that worked had a key focus, and they've recruited people on that focus. And they set aside all the other stupid political things because they were not single issue voters, they were single issue movers. They moved to a jurisdiction on this basis.

2:09:01And that meant because it was atop their identity, conflict got reduced. Everybody there now had something in common. They had all sacrificed and come here to build this ideal society together. So you've moved away from this fragmented society where the commonality is now decreased and recreated societies where commonality is now the grounding basis. That's exactly right. That's right. And so you need that. I say this in the book, it's like a proposition is not a nation, but it can become someone. So you're actually taking the proposition nation rhetoric and actually making it real. You're starting with a proposition and the nation is the group of people who opt into that.

2:09:38It does not have to be a nation of common birth. It can be a nation of common values that eventually they'll intermarry and become a nation of common descent. But it starts as a nation of these people who are just a nation of minds. So founders of society, organize into a group of capable of collective action. If you can do that and you can have it do 100 collective actions for 100 days, you're ahead of the game. That's amazing. If you're doing that, if you're close to that, I want to fund that, DM me, basically whatever it is. And a lot of these can be online only. Just give some more concrete examples.

2:10:10A guild for graphic designers or for electrical engineers, for data scientists, and you are accepted. The membership is very important. There's got to be common. You're accepted into this guild and there's maybe an apprentice, another structure. And 99 % of the time, what are you doing? You're posting in the guild on just data science things, graphic science things, whatever it is. 1 % of the time, maybe somebody from the group is under social attack. They're being canceled. And then that is brought to the group leader who assesses the situation. And they have some sort of pre-written rules of engagement.

2:10:44If somebody literally went and committed murder in broad daylight, okay, the community, it's got something for that. It's like a true crime. But if it's that they, I don't know, they're just getting ganged up on for something stupid, you have a pre-written set of rules. You have rule of law. And by that community's rule of law, the 999 people swarm out of that beehive to go and defend their guy who is under attack at that crucial moment. And now they've got cancellation insurance. So again, 99 % of the time, this guild serves as just a professional organization that you'd want to join anyway, like IEEE or something like that.

2:11:21The Institute for Electronics and Electrical Engineers or ACM or these professional societies used to exist. They've gotten all hollowed out of meaning. They now just become money grab email lists basically. They don't have a real culture. I'm just saying the truth, right? So the new IEEE, the new AMA, where the people actually know each other. It's not just some random anonymous email list, okay? So you rebuild these guilds. This is actually the sort of voluntary society that, gosh, the French observer of the US, Tocqueville. Yeah. So Alexis Tocqueville observed that one of the things that made America amazing at that time was this.

2:12:00Again, I'm taking a piece of history that worked. Americans just would get together and just make groups to do things. Okay. They would just, boom, like droplets coalescing to do things. Okay. They were the get things done people. and that's because there was no state to stop them from doing that, from making these values. And so online now we have the tools to that. We got Facebook groups, we got this, we got that. So you can find your culture, boom, join it, build something. Okay. So found a startup society, organize it into a group capable of collective action. Okay. Again, there's a lot of history to draw on for this.

2:12:31You can look at the Boy Scouts. You can look at all these 1950s style organizations, which worked at that time, and then figure out what the updated internet thing is, or you create something from scratch if you want and figure that out. Okay. Now, this itself, by the way, could be useful. This is a stopping place for many people. These guilds, those guilds alone are useful. And we have, by the way, versions of this, like many companies nowadays, like Figma has a Figma community and so on. This stuff kind of exists, it just hasn't been thought of in a first class way as the product itself necessary.

2:13:03Third step, build trust offline and a crypto economy online. So you start holding in-person meetups in the physical world, okay? Because you've got your 1 ,000 members and you've got a map of them in the physical world. And once they've met each other online enough, they start meeting up in person, okay? And nothing can really substitute for that. That's something which a lot of the online stuff is great. Hang out in person, I don't know, play basketball, do whatever, right? Have a dinner, go and see a movie. You start actually building peer-to-peer clusters, subclusters within these groups, right?

2:13:36And maybe you start having an annual or biannual conference where all the people come and meet up, okay? You don't have to have an agenda. You could have an agenda, okay? But you're starting to actually start knitting these nodes together into something. And it's not just founder. It's not just a one-to-end broadcast. You're building organic relationships, right? Okay. At the same time, you're building a crypto economy online because you've issued a digital currency, you've issued a digital passport or an NFT of some kind, which like the Bored API Club, all the members of this hold that. And that's how they enter the organization.

2:14:12Now, offline, you can do really awesome things. One of the things I talk about in the book is the use of mixed reality. So take a look at this visual. Isn't that cool? Yeah, I've seen this is starting to come really fast at us, right? Yeah. So the concept is - The AR world. Yeah. You have an NFT. And if you have that NFT and you hold up your phone or eventually your AR glasses, you can see a glowing sigil that no one else can. The new Freemasons, the new secret societies, right? That symbol glows in the air. And it's actually really awesome. You're starting to bridge digital login. So an otherwise featureless building, you can see something that nobody else can on that building, which is actually pretty cool.

2:14:58Because you're a member of that society. You're a member of that society. And actually, one of my predictions for when AR glasses actually happen, AR glasses are, I think, the most predictable invention since the iPhone. What are AR glasses? It's basically the combination of Snapchat Spectacles, Oculus Quest, Google Glass, Apple ARKit. You put all of that and more together into something that is the functionality and form factor of little glasses. And now what happens is, you know, with the iPhone, like the screen of a phone, like all the buttons went away and all became programmable, all kinds of signs around the world will actually disappear.

2:15:34Okay. The world goes encrypted. And the reason is if you have featureless buildings, no one is going to go and break the windows. They're not provoked by anything. Okay. It's something where lots and lots of signs will just go blank and it's just a featureless thing and you don't even know what's there. But it also can be dystopian, right? So if you are - There's aspects. So those are the untrusted zones. A certain type of person, you will not see a certain type of - you will see a different sign. Let's say I keep getting stopped for speeding. My signs are going to be different than your sign.

2:16:06Yes. So these are - There's all sorts of shit that can be used here. That's right. That's right. So think of it as there's the low trust fragmented zones where basically people are, you have unmarked buildings and so on. And the high trust zones are those where people are, in a sense, unmasked. They are with their friends or with people they trust and so on and so forth. This is what I think the medium to long-term dynamic is, is there's zones which are high trust, where all the people of your community, which hold your crypto passport are there, and zones that are low trust. And the scale of those is TBD.

2:16:44I think the US may have actually weird things happening there, where there's lots and lots of fragmented zones, I think China will be like one gigantic centralized thing. It just retains its central. I think India also remains fairly centralized. And I don't know what happens to other pieces of the rest of the world. It might be a crapshoot depending on different places. The first step was found to start a society. Second, organize into a group capable of collective action, very high bar. Third, build trust offline in a crypto economy online. And so people are trading with each other. And one way of doing that, by the way, is like something where the members of the guild are investing time or they're investing capital.

2:17:22So if they're asking for a favor of other people in the guild, then you have some history of how many times they did their guild dues. They either liked the tweet or they gave feedback on the product or they edited a doc, whatever. They did some guild task. So they put in labor or they couldn't do that, so they put in capital instead. They put in 100 or 500, whatever the going rate is, and they bought maybe the coin of that community. You see what I'm saying? That coin is not meant necessarily to be a billion dollar coin and blow the doors off. It's just meant to be like internal tracking for the community.

2:18:03It's not necessarily meant to be a profit center. Maybe it could become one, but at the beginning, it's just like karma and so on for within the community. Okay. So you're building trust offline and a crypto economy online, so you're building different kinds of links between these people. And this all takes time. You can't just do it overnight. It's something where everybody has to build up these orientations or relationships. Now, once you have sufficient trust, you've got sufficient physical community and so on, you start crowdfunding physical nodes. What that means is the collective action is no longer simply liking something.

2:18:37It is crowdfunding something together to live together. And those physical nodes, by the way, if you have five people in the Kansas City area and 20 people in the San Diego area, the five people could get a group house, the 20 people might get three houses next to each other. And what do you get when you have 20 people of similar values next to each other? Well, you start getting network effects where, for example, you could drop off your kids with an extra neighbor because you actually know them. Oh my God. How about that? You can just go and knock and hang out. You can do a barbecue, whatever.

2:19:13They're actually your friends that live nearby. When I say next door, I don't mean in the room. There's still some degree of house boundaries or whatever. But the point is, if everybody's within walking distance and they all know each other, you get network effects within the community. That's why you asked about the physicality. It's actually, if you had all the people on Real Vision in one town. RAOUL PAL It's interesting. We're about to do almost all of these things. We have a mythology of who and why we exist. We have an organizing set of principles, which we're working on. We're also introducing a system of currency.

2:19:53We will have a tokenized network plus the value transfer internally. We've already got that. We're then doing now, we're moving away from doing centralized events and doing decentralized events, so where the community organizes their own events at scale, so we can have events in 20 different cities all around the world at a fraction of the cost. We're doing that kind of element. And now we're thinking, oh, we've got a bunch of offices in New York City, which nobody uses. So why don't we create a Real Vision community hub where people can go work from there so they can be around like-minded people, which is the first step into creating physicality.

2:20:29Who knows? Maybe we can create a WeWork for Real Vision, which is a place where people can get together and network in a way that hasn't been done before, which where we're not really at the center of it. We're just a service provider to the community. The one thing I would just say about that is, I actually, WeWork has gotten hit and people have yelled at. I respect Adam Neumann for building a product that people actually use, regardless of whether it worked out financially and so on and so forth. It's a product people use, which as you know, is a very high bar. You need a lot of polish to actually, to make it work.

2:20:58Right. The one thing with WeWork is they did advertise themselves as a community, but they weren't really a community. And they weren't. They got it wrong. They, because the issue is community is not about like, you know, coffee in a lounge and so on. Community is, I walk in and I can leave my laptop on the sofa and I know no one's going to take it. Right. That's what a community, like, so when you're within a company, I mean, that's like one version. It's not the only version. Right. But it's like when you're within a company, you know no one's going to steal your laptop or whatever, right? Like basically, that's like a high trust zone, okay?

2:21:33When you're in your house, you put your thing down, you know someone's not going to steal your laptop or whatever you put it down, okay? In a friend's house, no one's going to steal it. That's like just one measure. Another measure is you can speak to a colleague and it's okay if somebody overhears. Whereas in a WeWork or a co-working space, the lobby is untrusted space. There's like all these other startups or whatever there. And you have to like, let's go and huddle into conference room. Right. So it does not feel, in fact, it's like something where you're very conscious that it's not a community.

2:22:01Right. It's a co-working space. It's like, it's basically like a noisy Starbucks. I mean, it's fine. Okay. For what it is, but it is what it is. It's not a community. But if that co-working space happened, if they'd segregated, is like, here is the floor that does X. Here's crypto startups. And the people knew each other. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. You've got a chance of creating community. Then if you have a kind of organizing set of rules and maybe some mission or what you're all trying to do. That's right. And the way I would quantify this, like literally be quantitative, is you have those group of people on that floor, right?

2:22:35What does the social graph of them look like? If there's seven people or 20 people, is it close to a densely connected subgraph? Like a complete graph, for example, is where every node is connected to every other node. Okay? So the ideal is that every single one of those 20 people knows the other 19. That's the ideal. And they've known them for a long time. That's a true community. The farther you get away from it, the less it is a community. And eventually you get to 20 random people none of whom know each other. And so literally you can quantify that where you can plot that on screen. You can pull their Twitter or whatever, and maybe they have each other's email or contact information.

2:23:14Boom. And it's kind of like Stanford 20, 25 years ago, they used to decide who lived together freshman year. Okay, like dorm mates. They'd have people coming in from the UK and South America, whatever. And they'd be like, okay, these two people would get along well. It's kind of like matchmaking or something, right? Community matchmaking, you could help this along with software where the subgraphs of Real Vision that know each other would be put on the same floors or whatever together, build a community that way. And now, especially at least if there's... At a minimum, you need to have one person that is within one or two people that knows everybody that can introduce each other.

2:23:56Those are your hubs. So point is, crowdfunding physical nodes would start to complete the graph. The ideal is a true nation. And I give actually... One of the things I do in the book, and I'm doing more in the V2 is giving quantitative definitions for things that have been very abstract in the past. I define a nation, and there's many different definitions that people define on the basis of race or ethnicity or language or proposition. I define a nation as a connected subgraph in the social network, a densely connected subgraph. Now, what does that mean? What are the edges? The edges could be shared language.

2:24:35They could be shared ideas. They could be shared genetics. They could be shared culture, shared X, shared Y. Some social network, some subgraph, this is a densely connected group that really thinks of themselves as a people. Whether it's by language or ancestry or a bunch of overlapping things, as is often the case, they think of themselves as a people. What's good about this is it encompasses lots of other definitions. You can take every definition that philosophers have proposed and integrate it into this with a different distance metric. You see what I'm saying? And literally quantified. So what that means is if I had Facebook, if I had access to the backend of Facebook or Twitter, I could write code that would, for certain parameter choices, spit out all the connected subgraphs on there.

2:25:22You see what I'm saying? These 3 ,000 people all know each other, right? These 200, you essentially have a whole list of this. Somebody did this actually, and one of the most connected subgraphs is the US establishment. Obviously, yeah.

2:26:03Step three was build trust offline or crypto economy. Step four, crowdfund physical nodes. Now, this gets you physicality and now you can do new things. You can do the keto kosher thing that I mentioned. You can do the digital Sabbath. And if you have one, two, five, 10, 100 such communities around the world, you now have 100 times four directions to expand. You can go northeast, south, and west in 100 different places. So you're not hemmed in by one stupid San Francisco building code. Oh, you know what? 73 of these places suck at building. The other 27 are great. We're going to expand there. And then people start to, because they know the other people from on.

2:26:41This is what all religions have done, right? I mean, the Catholic, well, the Christian churches. Well, not all, but many, many, many religions have done this. Christianity has been amazingly good at this. Judaism has been pretty good. So you set up a synagogue or a church, you put it into a town, you bring the people together. There's a kind organizing set of principles and that creates a society. That's right. Chinatowns are also like this, the Chinese diaspora. Diasporic peoples, international religions have been like this for a long time. Again, the 100 billion lifetimes, we're picking configurations of humans that have worked.

2:27:15The network state draws on configurations that have worked. Yeah. Because if you look at, again, we use the various elements of Christianity or the Catholic Church, church, they've lasted 2000 years. They may not be as strong as they were, but because they were decentralized plus centralized, they weren't actually - The combination of factors, yes. They didn't need a large nation state, but they had a large physical presence spread everywhere. That's right. In fact, in some ways, the Westphalian state arose in response to the Catholic church, like the Reformation and the Protestant versus the religious wars of the early 1600s.

2:27:51This is actually back to the future where we're saying the transnational entities do have power within the states, right? So, okay. So then, so we crowdfund physical nodes and now you can do cool things. There's lots of things you can do in the physical world that you can't do in the digital world. I mentioned Keto Kosher. I mentioned Digital Sabbath. Let me give you another one. Keeping down with the Joneses. So a little catchy names for each of these things, right? What is keeping down with the Joneses? That is, those are nodes of a network archipelago that are optimized to minimize costs. So the viewers of Real Vision are mostly focused on upside.

2:28:28But if you also go and read subreddits, which are interesting, like LeanFire, or like Mr. Money Mustache, or whatever, there's folks who are optimizing for minimizing cost. And that's actually also a good thing. And you can productize that. What does that mean? So you have a keeping down with the Joneses community where the status is not spending as much as possible, it's spending as little as possible. And so the community, in an ethical way, of course, so the community will, for example, do group buying. It will wear simple clothes. It will learn to sew, for example, if that's actually something that's better than getting new clothes.

2:29:05It will do very careful product reviews and get the best quality for value type stuff. And it will essentially help to control members' costs and give them negotiating leverage in perhaps a time of high inflation or what happened, right? And so that's like a good community. That teaches self-control. That's valuable to people. It's also like relatively hard to do. And it's something where having a group of 10, 100, especially 1 ,000, 10 ,000 people in one locale, you start to have group buying power. And also what is interesting about this concept is the fact that your nationality is transferable.

2:29:43You can move easily, right? It's very hard to be a US citizen and leave the United States as everybody's learning. That's right. But in this, you've got your set of your currency, everything else, you can leave it all behind, you can move elsewhere. Now, okay, so now once we've got physicality, we can move towards getting international recognition. Now, whether the United Nations exists or not after this kind of foreturning is a different issue, but there's a relevant... Because a lot of the rules-based global order system will get overturned or rebuilt, rebuilt in whatever way it ends up being.

2:30:18And this, I think your concept, I think is a big part of that for turning, which is how we recreate nation states away from the Westphalia model and potentially, and the rules-based global order system. The final question I want to ask you - There's one thing there, basically, I just want to make this one point. A critical step in between the network archipelago and diplomatic recognition is the on-chain census. So there's a GIF or there's an image I have, if you Google the network state in one image, and then there's a GIF if you go to thenetworkstate.com front slash networkstate.gif. If you look at those two things, you'll see both the static and the dynamic version of how the network state builds out.

2:30:59And it's a large network archipelago that has a million people around the world. It has hundreds of millions of dollars in annual income or billions of dollars in your income. It has millions of square meters of real estate around the world. So it's the size of a country. It's the same as the church. The church is recognized essentially as a nation state, right? It's a transnational state. Yes, that's right. That's right. The Vatican City is interesting because it's less... I mean, it is directive, certainly, of the Catholic churches around the world. It's less powerful than it used to be, obviously, right?

2:31:39But yeah, so exactly. You've got something where the global footprint of this thing is respected because it's got oomph. And most people don't know that about 30 % of countries in the UN have less than a million people, about 60 % have less than 10 million. So if you build a global group that holds territory, that has more than a million people, that has annual income and that can tolerate the laughter. And people will mock it for years and years and years and years. People are still like, oh, crypto, blah, blah. It's funny. Crypto is both not useful and threat to democracy. Just like Facebook was a fad and a bubble and so and threat to democracy.

2:32:20It's both at the same time. The only consistency is the negativity. And that's the same for a lot of these emerging technologies. Point is, people will laugh at these startup societies for a long time. And that's actually part of the point. The more they left, it's actually, it builds the in-group kind of strength and solidarity. And eventually, eventually, that million people, if they do good enough diplomacy, they will eventually get diplomatic recognition from some countries. The reason we can show this is Tuvalu, Colombia, they've done deals for their.tv and.co domains. Nevada negotiated with Tesla for the Geiger factory.

2:32:54Wyoming negotiated effectively with Ethereum, not like Ethereum directly, but the Ethereum network, They integrated with it for the Dow law. You know, Miami's mayor takes Bitcoin. The El Salvador, you know, government and Central African government have Bitcoin as a national currency. So we've seen these examples of sovereign and tech, you know, like state and network relations, diplomatic relations. And so this just extends that, right? The census is this key part because it proves how big the thing is. The census was actually part of the US Constitution and it was done every 10 years. We could do it every 10 seconds, frankly.

2:33:27but the problem is getting people to believe the numbers are real and that's where some of the crypto oracle stuff and so on comes in. So the on-chain census turns out to be a big component for getting diplomatic corrections. Okay. The final thing, because I've got four minutes left, is space is going to play a part of this because there is no sovereignty. Yeah. So space in the sense of - And I think people are missing this. It feels like there's a sovereignty war to go on in space. Yes. Now, not between nation states, but digital states. Yeah. The thing is, what's interesting is I actually did write about this in the book.

2:33:59It's like, there's four possibilities. There's the land, the internet, the sea, and space. And there's like seven something billion people on land, right? There's like four something billion on the internet. Depending on how you count, let's say on the order of two million people on ships at any given time, this is like 2019. So it's probably less than that now. Okay. Let's say it's like sub because of cruise ships, all this other stuff, et cetera. But it's like definitely one, 1 ,000. And there's like maybe 10 people who are in space right now, right? If you include the International Space Station, right?

2:34:30So you go from - But it's not the number of people in space. It's the connectivity of everything in space. I agree. Back down to humanity without anybody being able to control it because nobody owns the sovereignty over a satellite. I'm super, I'm very pro space and I think it's great. And I think we should be doing it. And I'm glad Alana's doing it. I'm glad there's space startups and so on. Just in terms of the relative maturity of the different tech stacks, the internet tech, everything I just described is totally possible with today's technology. You don't need to invent, right? And so folks, and then even like something like C-setting, I actually think like - That's been tried, right?

2:35:07Peter Thiel and a few others have tried. I don't think it's actually, so I think that the, it kind of, C-setting is pre-Satoshi. Yeah, agreed. Right? But so the Elan of seasteading would basically, I mean, for example, you do it with cruise ships. You would not develop new kinds of things to start with. You just go and crowdfund cruise ships, right? That's actually, so you could imagine actually getting to seasteading from a network of people. And they had one called the world, right? That people could live on forever. Yeah, yeah. It was like, but basically the problem is it was done without the moral thing that I talked about earlier.

2:35:37It didn't have the one command. Exactly. There was no community. That's right. Apart from the physicality. That's right. If you have a 50 ,000 person online community, it can crowdfund a cruise ship as one of its nodes, just like it's got a cul-de-sac and it's got this ranch and so on and so forth. The cruise ship just adds as a node one of its properties. And the thing is, you don't have to learn everything about a cruise ship. Cruise ships have an API. You know what that API is? It's money, like in the sense of you can pay Royal Caribbean or something. They would love it, probably, if you booked out the entire ship for like a year, they'd go for it completely.

2:36:11I mean, they give you a massive scale discount. They don't have to fill every spot. It's like their economics are amazing with that. Then you don't need to learn how to pilot it. And now you've got whatever people that can fill that cruise ship is just one of your nodes moving around the map. So I do think you get to sea setting actually is like a subroutine of the network archipelago. And space is awesome and it's hard and we should work on it and fund it, but it's early. It's not something that, like we're at 10 people, we're at like 1969 or whatever in space. RAOUL PAL I'm interested in the fact that cloud servers can be in space now.

2:36:46There's stuff like this that actually removes a lot of the geopolitical pressure on one of these network states, because if your servers are in space and everything's served from space, it's all gone. Bladji, this is an incredible conversation. We could have gone on for another few hours easily, but A, it's late for you, and B, we'll do it another time. Awesome. This is great. Yeah, really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you.

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