 Hello, everybody. So I think this will be really interesting today, because this is not a room that I'm normally in. I called this blue collar in the network state, because I have this idea in my head of, if we are going to achieve this thing, which is a decentralized world, this network state idea, I think we need dirty fingernails and calloused hands just as much as we need big, huge brains. And that's kind of what I'm gonna talk about today. I think when I was first thinking about this talk, a lot of people here might think you don't need blue collar to have decentralization. And then your next thought might be wondering why someone like me who's mostly known for laundromats and car washes and investing in boring businesses that are mostly run by 65-year-olds or plus, who really think crypto is a Dan Brown book, or maybe think that this has to do with air conditioning. Why am I here? Why would I come speak in an event like this? Well, the reason is, Balaji and I became friends, and we realize we have this oddly shared mission. And the mission is essentially, I come from an industry, finance, that I spent 15 years doing investment banking and asset management and private equity. And I realize, probably like many of you, that finance is one of the most unnecessarily over-regulated industries out there. We're not saving lives in finance for the most part. And yet, we're so over-regulated. And I don't know about you all, but when I was younger and coming out of college, they told us Wall Street was where you wanna be. That was where all the money was, and that was where the big minds went, actually. Way before where we're at today in Silicon Valley was really the play. And then I went to the data over the last couple of years as we've built this big business. And if you can see, what it turns out is traditional paths, AKA Wall Street Consulting, compared to acquisition through entrepreneurship or laundromat ownership, amongst other things, actually has an asymmetric upside to ownership. Employment does not. Very hard to make incredible amounts of wealth as an employee. And so once I started thinking about this, I realized, do we have to have Wall Street to do acquisitions? I've spent the last three years taking what I think is a relatively complex subject, acquisitions, and not using the word acquisitions. Using the word buying boring businesses online, because I had this belief that actually everyday normal humans could buy businesses. And what's happened since then is kind of interesting. We get about 100 million views a month talking about how to acquire our neighborhood community stores. We have five million followers across social. We've had 5,000 students learn boring business acquisitions, and we've had 500 people we actively tag as having bought businesses that have done more than $150 million in profit. These are normal humans. Teachers, engineers, a bunch of people that got laid off at tech companies and then decided that they wanted to own instead of be employed. And I think this is really, really important because if many of you are fans of Taleb, like I am, what does he always talk about? He talks about skin in the game and incentive alignment, and that that is how to decide if a decision is good or bad. And what I realized is it's really bad if we don't actually own our communities. And it's really bad if you don't own the things that you frequent, that you're employed at, and that you spend at. But here's a problem with that. We don't own our communities or the businesses they're in. The big they own and we buy. Three companies own the entire soft drink market. KKR, Blackstone, Carlisle, big institutions bought one in every four homes in the U.S. in 2022, one out of every four single family homes in 2022. Groceries owned by about 10 companies in the U.S. So they own what we drink, they own where we live, they own what we eat. And they even own the companies that build the houses that we live in. And so increasingly we have had this insidious creep of Wall Street into owning everything and could you imagine living in a neighborhood or a block where there was a McDonald's house and there was a Walmart house and you were living in between in the Target house? We actually wouldn't stand for it in our homes but we've stood for it in our businesses. And how many of you have been at a Starbucks and felt the difference between a Starbucks and your local coffee shop? The difference is visceral and that's because one, you might know the owner, they might even remember your order and the other, they don't fucking care and the CEO has never stepped in the store. Now I am a capitalist to the max, I do believe that. But I think that there is a difference between making things not simplified so that the many can own as opposed to helping other people get rich alongside us. I had a private equity CEO that I worked for for a number of years who I thought very highly of and he told me something that I've never forgotten. It's probably why I'm public on the internet now. Which is he said, do you know what we do in private equity Cody? And I was like, well, we buy businesses, we lever them, we sell them and he's like, we get rich quietly. We get rich quietly. And that just never sat that well with me because I think we've seen the second and third order effects of a very small amount of people having all the wealth and it's not good for anybody. And yet that's what's happening. One out of every three transactions in the US in M&A was done by private equity firms. The big guys keep getting bigger and the little guys hurt and because of that, our world looks like logos and not faces and it's actually worse than this. If you were to follow the puppet strings up, you would see that these companies by and large are held by a few holding companies and a few private equity funds. This is what I stand against and what I think we've started to normalize. Now, what happens when you normalize things, when you simplify things? Do people love that? No, they want it to be complex because then we sound sophisticated and intelligent but complex doesn't help people understand. So today I have no big theorems or mathematical predictions. You guys all have very strong, brilliant minds in here having a vision of the future. All I have instead is maybe a thought and the thought is this, that what if the people that are most open to your ideas today that actually are most aligned with them are being left behind a little bit? And so I thought I'd play a game. And the game was basically this, most small business owners across the world, Europe, the US, even Japan, are a baby boomer generation. What's interesting about this generation is they own most of the businesses but they're having less children, at least in developed nations than they are before and their children, they want to be on YouTube or TikTok, they don't want to run a laundromat. And so increasingly these businesses have nowhere to transition to. If anybody's been following what's happening in Japan, Japan believes that they might have the worst economic crisis that they've had in decades because of one thing, businesses closing and the next generation not wanting to own them. Imagine that for a second. There's actually so many businesses that will close that it will impact their local communities. So, I said, let's play a game. This is my small business owners, owning parents say hi to Stan and Laurie, everybody. And they are your prototypical 65 year old who plays on Main Street. And I had them do something that's probably not gonna surprise you guys that much but I had them go through Bology's account and every Twitter account that had buzzwords related to Network State. And I said, just do me one thing, just write down all the words you don't understand. And they said, mother fuck, there's a lot. And then I kind of got off my high horse and was like, I don't know half of these. There is a whole different language that you guys have. There is slang, there is terminology. There is physics language in there. There is making fun of a different type of human inside there, but guess what? There's also not. Look at how many vowels are in most of those words. And here's the problem with that. I had my mom look at, does everybody know this guy? Look at this fucking bio, incredible. She looked at it, I think she exploded. She's like, can you explain every word to me on this bio because I don't understand any of them. Now, I actually thought it was pretty good and I had a chuckle about this also. And I like the guy, hopefully he's here and he's not like, well, forget that woman. But here's my problem. If people don't understand things, what do they do? They tear them down. If people don't understand things, they're fearful of them by and large. That's just how we're wired as humans. And so if this whole group of humans thinks that what you're going to do is something they don't understand and could harm them, then that's probably not gonna be great for us long term. So if we truly want this, it needs to be filled with this. These are electricians and plumbers who don't understand Twitter bios. And in fact, I think Balaji's talked about this. He says we can't assume all these things will continue to be going on in the future. We can't assume it, but who's gonna fix it? Are the people that are going to fix these things in this room? I don't know. We employ hundreds of blue collar workers at the companies that we invest in and they own. And guess what? They're not on Twitter, they're not here. But I think you guys have a unique opportunity to change that perspective. We have an essay on my investment team and it is this. Do you wanna look right or do you wanna win? And I think often in investing, we wanna look right and not win. But in fact, the average American reads at a sixth grade reading level. The average European, seventh grade, geniuses over here. The problem with it is you can't just decentralize with tech and money. That's useful, but I think you need the popular vote too. And look what the average reading level in Europe gets you. Not very much understanding. So in order to build a city, we need all these things, but we don't have them. And Thomas Sol, does everybody know who that is? One of my favorite economists has a saying and I'm gonna butcher it slightly, but it's like the problem isn't that Johnny can't think. The problem isn't that Johnny can't write or read. The problem is that Johnny confuses thinking with feeling. And I think that's not the problem with this group. The problem with this group is actually they don't speak your language. They've totally been left behind. And so my only thought that I wanna leave this group is, is what if the most intelligent among us can speak the simplest, not the most complex? And maybe it's not the natural state of the universe increasing in complexity that we want to strive for. I get a lot of hate on the internet for simplifying things. You guys get a lot of hate for having new and novel ideas. But maybe that's okay because some of the best all the way down here on the end, Hemingway, MacArthur, like McCarthy, these writers spoke at a fourth to sixth grade reading level or wrote at that level. You wanna know who's all the way at the far end? Anybody guess? The fucking government. The really stupid have to sound really smart because they're not smart enough to simplify. And I don't think that's this room. The last thing I wanna say is, I think it's really, really important how we name things. Remember the deplorables in 2016 US phenomenon? Sounds a little bit like decels. We gotta be careful who we name and ostracize because they may be the future of determining who outlines or outlaws this movement and who doesn't. I have a theory that the winners will be those who have really big ideas, really simplified and they bring the hard workers. Because I think freedom comes when we own our communities, own our income and we own the ideological future. I love this quote. The problem with communication is the illusion that it's been accomplished. Do we wanna look smart or do we wanna win? And that's what I would leave you guys with today. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.