 If a company or a country is in decline, you can try Voice or you can try Exit. Voice is basically changing the system from within, whereas Exit is leaving to create a new system. In 2013, the serial entrepreneur, Abology Srinivasan, gave a widely discussed talk at the tech incubator Y Combinator on a paradigm derived from the work of the economist Albert O. Hirschman. There are two paths to reform, he explained, to speak up and remake a system from within, or to leave and build something new that might one day take its place. That latter concept of Exit is the framework through which Silicon Valley solves problems. And it captures the worldview of Srinivasan, who venture capitalist Mark Andreessen has said has the highest output per minute of new ideas of anybody I've ever met in my life. In his new book, The Network State, How to Start a New Country, Srinivasan makes the case for exiting today's nation-states as they exist and migrating much, though not all, of our lives onto the internet. Ever-improving digital tools give humans an unprecedented and always-accelerating ability to create opt-in, fully-voluntary communities where people choose to meet work, live, and love. From existing countries that are changing themselves by attracting immigrants with the promise of a better standard of living, to blockchain communities that draw participants by laying out clear-cut, contractional rules, responsibilities and obligations, Srinivasan articulates a future that is profoundly democratic and consensual, thus liberating us from a status quo in which self-determination is usually little more than a pipe dream. Srinivasan holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford. He co-founded the genetic testing firm, Council, and he served as the first chief technology officer of Coinbase, the popular cryptocurrency exchange. He's been a fierce critic over the years of the FDA, which might account for his being shortlisted to head up the agency under Donald Trump. What if this coronavirus is the pandemic that public health people have been warning about for years? He tweeted in January 2020, as Vox and mainstream outlets were busy attacking Silicon Valley venture capitalists for taking the crisis too seriously. He would accelerate many pre-existing trends, he wrote. Border closures, nationalism, social isolation, preppers, remote work, face masks, distrust in governments. Reason talked with Srinivasan about the network state, the rise of China as a tightly centralized global power, why Peter Thiel is part of the descending class, and the future of freedom both online and off. Apology, thanks for talking to reason. Good to be here. The book, the new book is, or the book is, the network state, give me the elevator pitch or given the kind of utopian dimension and reach of this, what's the space elevator pitch? Sure. Space elevator. Well, I actually have something, you know, if you go to thenetworksstate.com, the full book is online and they actually have a one sentence, one image, 1,000 word version. A thousand word version, yes. Yeah. That's right. The one sentence version is, a network state is a highly aligned online community capable of collective action that crowd funds territory and eventually attains diplomatic recognition. And you know, it's just to take that definition, right? Highly aligned online community. That is not a signal group, a WhatsApp group, a Facebook group, you know, a Twitter following, even a Discord is really not a highly aligned online community. Why? Because if you have a million followers and you tweet a thousand likes, it might be a lot and that's a 0.1% conversion. Whereas if you're a CEO and you call it in all hands and you have 100 employees, you'll have a hundred people attend, it'll be double digits at least, right? So that's not a 0.1% conversion rate, that's closer to 100%, certainly way more than 10%. And so a highly aligned community is actually one that it has, it's capable of doing things together, it's capable of collective action. It's also highly aligned in another sense, which is it shares common values. The people on Facebook don't think of themselves as Facebookers. The people on Twitter don't think of themselves as Twitterians. Whereas there are people who hold Bitcoin who think of themselves as Bitcoiners, okay? Right. Or Ethereum who think of themselves at the top of their identity stack is this, right? So highly aligned means that the online community that they belong to is at the top of their identity stack. They identify as that first, perhaps above the city or the country that they live in, okay? Right. So highly aligned community, capable of collective action, as I mentioned, they can all do things together. And the very basic is, if you put out a notification to a group of a thousand, all 1,000 people should like a tweet. That's like a baseline. That's the simplest thing, that's one bit. But once you start- Is Bitcoin a fully realized network state yet for you? It's not and it won't be. And the reason is it's just not- there's lots of things that are, that have aspects of a network state that are not what I'm calling a network state. And the reason is, you know, our currency is a part of the country, but it is not a country in its own right, you know? There's aspects of Facebook. Facebook certainly has large sums of people. It shows you can achieve country scale on the internet. But it was not- people did not join Facebook with the concept that Zuck is their president, right? Right. They did not sign a social smart contract going in. It has become quasi-government in some ways. But that's like this uneasy hybrid transitional phase. As opposed to something where you go in, eyes open, and you literally sign, digitally sign a social smart contract, we can make that more than a metaphor, you know? We take the Rossoian concept of the social contract and the crypto concept of the smart contract. We put those together. So just to, to, you know, come back to your thing, the definition, highly-aligned online community. So it's really got shared beliefs, top it into sec, capable of collective action, so it can do a thousand likes. That crowdfunding territory. So that's a much higher bar for collective action. That's not simply a thousand people liking something. That's thousand people who pooled our funds and crowdfunding territory, not necessarily in one place. There can be ten people who get a group house and a hundred people who buy a cul-de-sac and, you know, fifty people who buy a ranch in different parts of the world, and then they're networked together and they think of themselves as part of the same community in the same way that somebody living in Hawaii or Guam, you know, or Alaska, thinks of themselves as part of the United States, despite living far away from the continental United States. I'm telling you, the people who live on the islands of Indonesia, they're separated by ocean. Well, what if you have islands that are separated by internet, but still think of themselves as part of the same country psychologically? Fundamentally it is just about the software installed on people's heads. So how important, how important is that it, you know, that it exists online and also in meat space? Does it have to have both of those things? So I define the book various intermediate stages, and there's intermediate stages like a so-called network union, which is just a highly aligned community that does online things. And that can be useful, just like not every small business needs to become Google. There's lots of intermediate waypoints, you know, that can produce value for themselves or community in the middle. In the same way, you could have a network union that's purely digital and it does collective action. And the next step is what I call a network archipelago. And that is something that's crawled under these islands around the world, right? And the last step is a network state, which has achieved diplomatic recognition. And there is, there's some measure of sovereignty that it has, because one of the neighboring jurisdictions has said, okay, you can actually have the police or the military or the laws or the special economics owners, something like that over here on the sound. And this is a part, by the way, people are sort of with me, they're like, okay, I can imagine you could increase the click rate from 0.1% to 50% or 100%. I can imagine you could even crowdfund territory. Obviously, Starbucks exists and they've got properties all around the world. Google exists and you can swipe your Google badge and be in a piece of Google around the world. You know, things like WeWork real estate things exist and you can be, you know, part of these things around the world. Hotel chains exist, okay? So you have both things that are like commercial and like residential real estate around the world. Chinatowns exist, Ethnic Diaspora exists. So far they're with me. The part that people get, you know, hung up on is they're like, okay, how do you go from that network archipelago to actually achieving diplomatic recognition and becoming a network state, okay? So here I'll have to give several, you know, things to anchor this. First, do you know Tubaloo, like the dot TV domain? Yes. Okay. So you have Reason.TV actually, in fact, you might actually use it, okay. So Tubaloo did a deal with Godet. That was a sovereign, sovereign country that deal with the company. And they get only about, it's not that much money in the grand scheme, things like 10 million something a year for Tubaloo for this deal, okay? El Salvador has Bitcoin as its national currency. Wyoming has allowed Ethereum DAOs to have legal status, okay? Nevada did the deal with Tesla for the Geige factory. Amazon has done that HQ2 deal. Boeing did a deal with South Carolina and so on and so forth. There's actually quite a lot of deals between sovereigns, whether it's city, state, or country, and between companies and now currencies, okay? And so the key question is, can we go to a digital country, to a crypto country, that can negotiate in a similar way? And the reason I believe this is the case is, do how many countries are in the event? 180 something? It's like 190 something, depending on how you count, right? Yeah, you're close, right? So what fraction of those have less than 1 million people? Right. Yeah, I mean, do you have a great section in the book? And I forget that most countries are small countries. Most countries are small countries, exactly. More than 50% of the UN is less than 10 million people, about 20% is less than 1 million people. About 5 to 10% is less than 100,000 people. You have these tiny places like Curabody, they have legal status. They're considered sovereigns. You're crossing an international boundary. They are quote, heads of state. They have flags. They might be even at the Olympics and so on and so forth. There is sort of this, what do you call it, a fiction or this convention, that all nation-states are quote, equal. And Curabody, which is like 100,000 something people, and China, which is a billion, are the same in a sense. And actually a lot of multinational corporation stuff is based on this. And based on the fact that Cayman is a sovereign, or BVI is a sovereign, British Virgin Islands, Switzerland is a sovereign, even if it's much smaller than these other sovereigns. So these small countries, first, because most countries are small countries, you can build digital communities that are at or above that scale. We've seen many of them. We've seen billion personnel in them, or several in 10 million. Second, because they're small, you can negotiate with them. You can do deals, as I've just shown, with TubeBlue and other places. Third, it's relatively small amounts of money. So like 10 million a year is enough to get a dot TV deal. What is the deal? How much money is necessary? It's not just money, of course. I'll come to something else in a second. But how much money would be required to say, buy an island, in an island country kind of chain, and have a special economic zone there? Where it's like an uninhabited island, or it's a patch of desert. Nevada's trying this also with the private city's laws. It's got lots of patch of desert, no one's doing anything with them. There's some kind of deal that works where you're generating revenue, tax revenue, subscription revenue, whatever you want to call it, for the rest of your citizens, and you're effectively either selling or seeding some portion of land. Just like the Louisiana Purchase, just like Seward's Folly, where Russia sold the territory. It's not always a folly, sometimes it's a smart thing. I mean, France was smart to actually do the Louisiana Purchase. And now, you've got some measure of sovereignty. It's not all the way. You're not saying that you're a nuclear weapons state and all this type of stuff. But maybe you could have a self-driving car zone. Maybe you could have stem cells. Maybe it's something like that. You have one regulation that you can actually change. And that's huge. What is the impetus for a network state? Or I guess let me go back a little bit. Your thought in general, and certainly the book, is deeply indebted to the late 90s book, The Sovereign Individual, Mastering the Transition to the Information Age, which was by James Dale Davidson and William Riesmaag. And they kind of prophesied, or they were talking about the end of the nation state, as we know it. And that things were shifting, power and agency were shifting to smaller units than the nation state. And this is a very powerful, kind of exuberant, although not without warnings, but kind of end of history track, where the Cold War is over and we don't need the same scale of social organization that had been provided by nation states, particularly in a kind of state of low energy war and whatnot. Your book is indebted to that. Can you talk a little bit about how that influences your thinking and then what you're building on? Because I want to get to the question of why do we need this? Why do we need the network state? And all of this stuff you're talking about is already kind of taking place. Right. So I think The Sovereign Individual is an important book. I think it's an influence. But I would actually say that if there's a more important inspiration, not the only inspirational, so but a more important one, it's actually a book in 1897, 100 years before The Sovereign Individual. That is Dirk Judenstadt by Theodor Herzl, which translates as The Jewish State. And that was a book that led to the formation of Israel. And he was a guy who saw the events of his time. He was like, do the Jewish people do they assimilate? Or some people think communism is a good thing. That turned out to not be a good thing. And he's like, what if we take a third path and we actually create a state of our own? And look, I'm generally pro-Israel, but I also recognize there's lots of controversy there. Backing in to all of that, the main thing is that he wrote a book. Everybody thought he was crazy. He organized a conference. He helped or there was a fund that got started up. And then over 50 years, you eventually literally got a state of Israel. And in fact, part of how it started was they crawled into territory there. They got some measure of sovereignty from the Brits and it was a gradual process over the years. Now, that's one inspiration. Another inspiration is India with its nonviolent independence movement. Another inspiration is Singapore and Lee Kuan Yew with the CEO founder of this city-state. And of course, America's inspiration in too many ways to name him from the Constitution and common law and so on and so forth. And frankly, the true aspect of democracy, which is consensual government. The consent of the government is what democracy really is at a root. And a big part of the network state is not about, it's about 100% democracy, not 51% democracy. That is to say, everybody who's in a network state has agreed to be there and can't agree to leave. And you have consensus. As opposed to a 51% democracy where 51% outflow to the 49% beats them up, takes their corn flakes, and then maybe 2% is what's next. And could even say, and you can't leave. And you can't leave, exactly. So once one. The other ghost kind of floating around here is Albert Hirschman and his concept of exit voice and loyalty. Yeah. Yes, so go ahead. Well, just continue with that idea of 100% democracy versus 51%. Right. So a 51% democracy, that is something where it's raw, bare, majoritarianism. It is the minimum amount of democracy where, yeah, it's the consent of the government, but it's only the consent of 51%. 51% democracy is 49% dictatorship. That 49% did not get, did not want the current leader that they have. And they are subject to something that they did not vote for. Moreover, there's many other implementation details or really serious ones. For example, when you vote for somebody, their campaign promises are not binding. So you can vote for them, and they can decide to do something completely different. Or there's issues where Iraqis enfranchised. I don't really think so. 30 million people are invaded, and they didn't have a vote or say in that. There's many, many aspects of the current system where folks don't really practically have a say, or are outset. And so you have the very barest level of justification for it. And instead of something like that, nor, and also against, by the way, the other extreme would be to reject the idea that the government have any consent at all and just impose raw authoritarianism. That's like the CCP model. I think a V3, a third version, a different version, is to say consent. Consent first, consent at the highest level. And you can even consent to a commitment device. You might consent to something, so long as you go an open-eyed, you say, OK, I'm joining, let's say, this digital Sabbath community. And they turn off the internet at 9 PM to 9 AM every day. Why? Because while I'm lucid, I have self-control. But I know at some points, I'll surf the internet too much, so I want to join the society that gives me some help in self-control. So you can sort of consent to give up some sovereignty. Just as when you join a company, you give up some sovereignty. You're now reporting to a manager or what have you, in return for something that benefits both parties. You join the military. You're a private in the military. You're a being in general. Both of you are doing that to win a war or whatever. But you've given up some sovereignty in return for potentially something great. And so that's why I like The Sovereign Individual. I think it's an important book. But I also think that really what I think we're going to have is The Sovereign Collective, where it is a group of folks that self-determine together. And the thing is that The Sovereign Individual is a very farsighted book, and it foresaw the decentralization. But what has happened is you've got the counter decentralization. You have the US establishment and the CCP are trying to mash this genie back in the bottle with the platforming, with censorship, with surveillance, with unbanking, with all this stuff. In my view, the Chinese will succeed in the counter decentralization, and the US establishment will fail. But it won't fail in an easily resolved fashion. You'll just have this period of American anarchy where no faction, no one faction has enough strength. In that kind of environment, historically, this is why there's aspects of libertarian thought I'm certainly sympathetic to, but I never call myself a libertarian because I've considered myself a pragmatist. You know, for example, in Chinese history, they have the saying, the empire long united must divide, long divided must unite. That's a cycle of centralization, decentralization, and then the most unpopular but important word in the world, re-centralization. Okay, re-centralization is an unpopular word. Why? Those who are the fans of centralized power, let's say the US establishment and CCP, are saying, why did you re-centralize? We're the good guys, we're already there, right? Those who are, let's call them anarchists or just maximalist, decentralists would say, why did you re-centralize? The whole point is to break away from this thing over here, right? But the thing is that when you have, let's say a fire alarm rings and everybody runs out of the building, there was a gathering spot for them to meet up again. You know? Because everybody on their own, totally on their own, it's actually pretty hard to totally fend for oneself. I don't know if you saw that Steve Jobs email that just came out where he said, you know, he doesn't grow his own food and he doesn't, do you know what I'm talking about? And, you know, this is something where not in the, you didn't build that way, right? But more in the enlightened self-interest way. We are in the same- I mean, this is division of labor, do you recognize, even Steve Jobs, maybe he would have been the greatest thing, he would have been the greatest farmer in this and that, but it doesn't make sense for him. That's exactly right. And you can't do everything in one life, right? Now, yes, AI robotics, this does expand the scope of what can be done. The internet teams are becoming smaller. We're having a correction, but that correction isn't going from a billion to like zero people. It's going to smaller groups, but not zero or one person, right? So can I ask just as, you know, and you talk about this, that the book is a toolbox, not a manifesto. So in a way you're taking for granted on a profound level that the status quo, and I don't know, maybe we want to say it's the status quo of the past 50 years or whatever, including the nation state, that the nation state, if that was people's primary identity for a good chunk of the 20th century is no longer really delivering the goods in terms of people want to swear loyalty first above all other things to America or to China perhaps, or to India or to wherever. So they're looking for, you know, other identities that become primary to them or sources of value. Can you talk a little bit about what went into the breakdown of the status quo that led to this, you know, the original moment of decentralization. And at various points you can talk about it as unbundling and we're going through a period of rebundling. Yeah. What happened that, you know, what's the pretext for where we're like, okay, we need something more in our lives? What was working 20 years ago or 50 years ago doesn't seem to be delivering to us. Totally. So one thing I'll say is, I don't actually think all nation states will fail but I do think something new will arise. A rough analogy might be the Reformation. You know, Protestantism arose. There's a counter-reformation of Catholicism. But both Protestantism and Catholicism are both still around today, right? You have this force and you have the counter force and they're both still around. And they fought and allied and whatever at various points over history, right? And in kind of the same way, I think some states will manage to make it through what we've got but I think many won't. And why is that, right? You can start the modern period at, you know, depending on how you started, 1648, peace of West Valia, after the 30 years war, triggered by the printing press in part because you have the Reformation, okay? War is religion. And at the end of this long bloody war where people were fighting over silly things like, in theory, silly things like whether... To you because you're not a believer. I know, at the time, but basically whether, you know, the wafer was actually the body of Christ. This was like a huge deal. But I didn't understand at the time. Now I understand it more because that was a religious thing but it's also a political thing because who's gonna be in power? That's where we're fighting. Is the church gonna be our power or are these new guys gonna be in power and so on? Look, you know, the coming war between proof of work and proof of state may be almost as bloody and it's almost as symbolic. So crypto in fast forward has... I mean, people don't yet understand this but the Bitcoin wafer, it is like the Bible or the Quran or the communist method. It is something which is such a powerful document that it's giving rise to splits and splits and splits and splits and so on. It's not just document, of course, it's a code base and whatnot, right? But the modern era, like lots of things we think of as constants as flat are becoming variables, okay, let me give some examples. It used to be just currency and now it's cryptocurrency or fiat currency. It used to be a meeting and now it's an in-person or remote, okay? It used to be that 77% of Americans went to church almost flat for many years and now it's just collapsed to like 47% going to church synagogues that are according to people. And declining. And declining, that's right. There's many other things if you think about it that were constants that are now variables. One of the most important is that the Westphalia assumption was that people who live near each other geographically shared culture and therefore could agree on the same laws. This seemed obvious. Obviously, someone who you live next door to you're gonna be talking to them, you're gonna probably be going to the same store and so on and so forth. Not anymore. Now, you are using Snapchat, you're using Facebook, using Signal, whatever. All these messaging apps, social networks, you're connecting with people 3,000 miles away. You're sharing intimate moments with them. They're your friends. You're shopping online and you don't even recognize your next door neighbor. If you're in a urban environment, there's an apartment complex with all closed doors. You would not even recognize the human being many times who's living 50 feet, 100 feet away from you, right? The person living 50 feet above, 50 feet below, okay? That is actually, in my view, an unnatural state of affairs that will not persist indefinitely. The reason being because it's not useful space around you. One way to think about it is in a computer, you set it up so you've got the CPU and you've got the cache and you've got like L2 cache and you have RAM and then you have the hard drive and then you have the internet and you split up computations in such a way that things that are very frequently accessed are close in memory space and you only hit the internet for really, things where you can tolerate that huge lag of round trip to the Netherlands and back. And right now your life is set up in such a way that much of the space, especially if you're in an urban environment around you, is not useful space. You don't know those people, right? You can't knock on their door for the proverbial cup of sugar. They can't help babysit for you or something like that. You don't know people around you, okay? And that's an unnatural way to live where your true community is in the cloud and not the land, okay? So recognizing first that that current geographical community no longer reflects your true neighbors of mind, but also recognizing that people are physical beings and want those kind of walkable communities. For example, you know, college people like it. Why? At least they used to like it because it was a selective environment where not everybody got accepted. Only those people with shared values, et cetera. And then you had this sort of walkable campus where if you recall, college around the time perhaps you or I went to college, it was an open door policy. People could walk around and so on and so forth. That's actually why people have great memories of college, at least in the 90s, the 2000s. Well, that is a very specific, I mean, that's a four-year residential college. True, true. Which is not necessarily even what most people experience. I mean, I guess what I want to challenge with you, because I think I'm about to accuse you of misreading your book is that we want different types of communities and we want to be able to access them simultaneously. And so I moved to New York after years away because I could and because I wanted the physical proximity to people who are doing similar things to me. But I don't want to have to get all of my food from Manhattan or Brooklyn or a day away in New Jersey. My thought processes, I don't want all of my TV. Like I can pipe in, I'm living as are you obviously in like multiple different communities all the time. And the physical space does matter. I mean, when you say it's dead space, I'm not sure, I like my little neighborhood here. Sure, sure. But I don't want it to be my entire world. I understand. And the way I think about it is, of course, to your point, I do believe in many different kinds of communities that make different trade-offs on these axes, right? Absolutely do believe in that. What I'm saying though, is that I think if you have, for example, a building where it was, I don't know, a reason and Kato and tech founders and YCB, like essentially your community all lived in one building or one town. That'd be a pretty awesome town, right? It doesn't have to be a college. I'm just using the example of a college because. I mean, it could be Silicon Valley. It could be Silicon Valley. That's right. But basically even Silicon Valley is a little spread out, right? The advantage of having folks within walking distance is you just have serendipity. You have something where, as I said, like babysitting or something like that, right? When during COVID, these home pods and stuff like that, people are within walking distance or like a short drive or something like that. It's just easier to have informal bonds, right? And so people want that, but there's kind of a few different ways to think about it. Some folks think that you can kind of go back to exactly the 1950s. That's very difficult to do to wind back a clock, but you can wind it all the way around. And what I mean by that is you could get all the people who think they want this and just go in crowdfund territory in Nevada or someplace like that, right? There's an app called CoStar. It's a real estate search engine. It's a little bit expensive, but you can literally use that to search the properties of the world and you can find some spot that you can all go and live together and ta-da, you can live that existence. And the internet allows you to filter that and find that and go and build that and execute on it. And so it's not just a LARP online. You might have to figure out, well, what exactly do people want? Do they actually want the trad life? Do they want some unarticulated hybrid where there's a different threshold for each person? Turning it from sort of this gauzy fantasy into an actual reality, you have to make pragmatic decisions. The difference in the idea and the execution is a thousand micro decisions you have to make when you're executing something. Some of them not obvious when it's just an idea. And so that's what I encourage is people have some vision of the good, you know? You'll also find, for example, quite a few like Brooklyn media types have this sort of fantasy of going to the farm and giving up the capitalist rat race and just milking the cows or something like that, right? Now, it is certainly possible to live like this. Their ancestors did. It is also actually a much lower standard of living in many ways and it's not easy to run a farm, right? You're talking to somebody whose grandparents moved to the city after a thousand years in the countryside in Ireland and Italy. And like, I think it's gonna be a thousand years before my ancestors or descendants go back to the farm. And obviously a version of this happened in the 60s, say, like the kind of whole earth catalog vision of going back to the land but with better technology and things like that. And that is, I mean, part of what you're talking about is that all of this is enabled both by the internet as well as by kind of human action, right? We are now in a place where we can more fully envision and build the communities that we say that we want. We can run those experiments. That's right. So basically, I think the decentralization and decentralization that the internet allows, it's the unbundling and rebundling. That will mean that you probably have some, one or more communities where you can find your place. And just like you have to choose, as you choose your job, you might be interested in both space travel and you're interested in, I don't know, search or something like that. You're choosing between SpaceX or Google, like in the same way you choose a community that fits your values. And then conversely, they choose you. There's an application process. This is the difference between the early 2000s. Like in the early 2000s, the goal was to get everybody online. I think in the 2020s, the goal is to get everybody aligned. Right. Meaning, that's right. So what that means is just, within a community, you have to agree on just absolutely basic premises, like just private property exists, okay? Like you have to agree on those basic premises before you have conclusions from there. Endless disputation over basic premises doesn't work. So instead, you recruit those folks, and here's the thing. I can believe that there are, for example, a vegan village or a carnivory community. I think those could both be positive deviations from the McDonald's America, right? Basically, both those could be positive, even if they're mutually incompatible, right? So what's the underlying operating system? Because in a way, what I think you're talking about are the way that I tend to interpret and kind of translate into what I already know of what you're talking about is, this is kind of what liberal, classical liberal politics are this, where it is a backdrop, it's kind of like a coral reef or a structure that is designed to say, we recognize that different people have different desires and we wanna create a system where as many people can do what they wanna do in groups or individually, as long as they're not fucking up other people, they're not using coercion and as long as what they're doing doesn't completely crash the system. What are the core values besides consent, which is a huge one? You know, that's one of the values, but then what is the technology or what are the bits that go into the operating system that will allow all of the different experiments you see taking place? Sure, so in many ways, it pulls from different areas on the political spectrum, right? For example, libertarians think about new countries, but libertarians don't usually get the concept of diplomatic recognition. A lot of them were very surprised that I made a big deal of that in the book because they're like, why can't we just do it ourselves, like Liberland or Sea Land, right? And like, well, you and what army, right? The whole point of like, the reason a country works is that there's enough other people that recognize it mutually. There's this whole web of things which are fundamentally diplomatic recognition is like a non-binding commitment to not invade. You know, the reason I say it called non-binding is the US might invade anybody at once, but at least it's an international incident if it does, right? Russia might invade anybody at once, right? But it's an international incident when they cross sovereign boundaries, but if the British Navy were to go and scoop up Sea Land or something like that, everyone would laugh, no one would care, no one recognizes it as an actual country, right? So. And Liberland, it depends on the tide and the river, right? Like maybe it's there, maybe it's there. I have nothing against, I think some of the people of Liberland, like I'm, you know, I'm sympathetic. Oh, I love them. I think they're, I think it's great. But what you're saying is that, and they are actually working for, you know, diplomatic recognition. Yes, so the thing is that's as important. The crypto country, fiat country bridge is as important as the cryptocurrency, fiat currency exchange. In fact, it's the same thing, right? Just like we have a relationship, a complicated one, between your fiat currency and your cryptocurrency. Mm-hmm, okay, let's, all right, okay. Where should I start again? What was the word? But there's a lot of signs, there's a lot of signs right here. Yeah. Oh yeah. It's they say it's on fire. I mean, it's Rome in like, you know, 400 a day. It really is. It's burning down. Just to talk about this for a second, like this is a big real estate. I mean, coming to the US, the first time I've been here for two and a half years, right? Since the beginning of the pandemic. And my observation is, I can- Wait, I'm sorry, you said, are you coming to DC, you mean? Not to the US? To the US, to the US. The first time I've been to the US. Where were you were out of the country for two and a half years? Singapore, I moved to Singapore a long time ago. So, so this is the first time I've been to the US since like February 2020, actually, since I talked to you, right? Yeah. And so I've been remote, whatever. I mean, that's the thing is no one even knows or cares really because you know, I'm in the cloud, right? So, but the thing is that what I noticed is something that I predicted, but I can also see A, why people aren't denial about it, but B, why I think I'm also right, which is the San Franciscoization of much of, you know, what's called blue America, right? The, you know, like the zombified people in New York and in DC kind of walking around, like there's a person who's like screaming out of their mind like outside like the dinner yesterday reminded me of, I was like, okay, you know, this is reminds me of San Francisco in the early 2010s. And so it's, it's not going to be a stable polity in my view, right? Like something like that, just the incipient signs are there on their hand. There's a, it's come out of, it's funny, you know, people say California is the future of America and it is San Francisco, the San Francisco model has been exported to Seattle and to LA and to New York and to DC and so on and so forth. And so that's bad because it's something which NetNet, the way you score a city is are people going there or are they leaving, right? NetNet, all of the decisions that you can score as liberal or progressive or libertarian or what have you, there's a complex of decisions and NetNet, do you produce something that people want to move to or not, right? And these blue cities are not producing that anymore. They're actually losing people to both red cities and to the rest of the world. That's a new thing actually. That's kind of a flippening, I think, really post-2020 that it's really accelerated on that. Have you been to any growing cities in the United States? So like, have you been to places like Miami or Austin or whatever? Yeah, I have. And do you see them as, you know, are they going to grow in the long term or is this merely they're getting people who are just fleeing, you know, bad parts of America who will end up going elsewhere? It's hard to say, but I am tentatively bullish on them. However, it's something where, I think where I'm interested in is the sub-national and the international. Meaning the sub-national is Wyoming and Texas and Miami and actually Colorado, I think it's a JAR police, a Democrat there, but it's very pro-crypto, right? And I'm also bullish on the international, you know? UAE, Thailand, Singapore, a lot of these countries are now implementing programs for talented immigration. And in fact, there's a graph, I think BCG put together a graph on this, but the US is no longer the top destination that immigrants want to come to. It's actually Canada's number one. And then what's risen into the top 10 overnight is Japan, Australia, Singapore and New Zealand and a lot of European countries have fallen out of the top 10. And part of the reason I would argue for that is that most of the world economy is Asia and these are sort of Western friendly countries in Asian time zones or in Asia, South Japan is Asia proper, where you can do business and so on, right? Is that also because they are making immigration easier? I mean, the United States has a terrible immigration policy both for low skilled workers but also high skilled workers. Canada makes it easier. Because this goes to the question of Singapore is kind of a great place to live, especially if you're a high wage or a high skilled immigrant. But if you are at all a kind of social deviant and you don't have cultural or political capital there, maybe you don't want to live there. Yeah, I mean, the way I think about it, the US immigration policy is anarcho tyrannical. It's actually like San Francisco. You know, San Francisco, San Francisco is optimized for the drug trafficker, American immigration policy is optimized for the human trafficker, haha. Okay, so what I mean by that is like in San Francisco, you have something where the working class guy who's driving an Uber is hit with a $200 ticket for the guy who like smashes the window, nothing happens to him, right? So that's the tyranny and the anarchy. And American immigration policy is like that where you have kind of a lawless situation where you have these scenes at the border and so on. But you also have something where those folks who obey the law are hit with insane levels of regulations, 10-year delays on visas and so on and so forth, right? And I do actually believe in a skilled, talented, organized immigration policy which is kind of like a company, right? If you're hiring, that right answer is usually not hire no one or hire everyone. It is hire in a conscious and determined and forthright and intelligent way, right? That is actually what these other countries that I mentioned do. They're looking for wealth, but they're also looking for talent. You know, not just the people who have made their fortune, but who are high potential and maybe they're in the arts or stuff like that. So this may not have made the news or may not have seen this but for example, title and noun is a new program where you can apply online at Thailand's website. And they're looking for a million people over the next five years to come and move to Thailand. They basically, at first they were, a lot of digital nomads went to Thailand and the Thai government was like mad at them. But now they've leaned into it and they're like, you know what? We've got these amazing beaches. We've got, you know, this amazing internet now. It's massively undervalued globally. A lot of people wanna come here. Guess what? We're gonna do a 10-year pass. You have to fill out this rigorous application. We want a million people over the next five years. That's 200,000 people a year. That's on the year of a thousandish, five hundred, two thousandish people a day, okay? Which means they'll get, you know, 10X more than that probably in applications, okay? So they are gonna be able to pull in a lot of folks who could not come to the US because the visa delays are crazy things that are happening, right? Or don't wanna come to the US. And, you know, the UAE has programs like this Singapore has something new called OnePass. And then within the US, you have Miami and Austin and so on competing. So the sort of thing where all the talent and so on came to SF, that is now suddenly inverted where it's redistributing within the US and outside the US. People are not only leaving, they're not coming in the first place, they're picking other destinations. And I think this is net good. And the reason is, look, I mean, San Francisco is a catastrophe, but the decentralization of tech around the world is a good thing because you don't want it all concentrated in one place, in one state, in one country, which is vulnerable to regulations and, you know, people are looking at things. Yeah, you want a more resilient network. And, you know, it's good for the planet, right? It's good for human civilization. It may not be great for the United States. And of course the United States, yeah, and the United States, of course, can change its immigration policy if it defaulted into, you know, just a horrible kind of semi-closed borders situation. It's a worst of both worlds policy, right? And it might be. So, let me, you know, let me ask you though then, like, what about China? Because China is a place, and in the book, it's interesting because you talk about China a lot, obviously the United States, and you also talk about India, and I want to get to that in a second, but what does China do? Because they are, as you were saying, you know, they are the, you know, they're the last bastion, or rather the leading indicator of kind of centralization in a very strict way. Or people, and you mentioned in footnotes Peter, like Peter Nejas, who believe that, you know, China's awesomeness or fearsomeness is overrated. You tend to take China as a, you know, as a type of non, it's not a network state, it is very much a physical polity that has centralized control and is maintaining borders, it might be expanding borders conceivably as very successful. What are they doing that allows them in your mind to continue to centralize in an age where it seems like decentralization and certainly voluntary, you know, interaction and consent is kind of the currency of the future, but China is not any of that. Right, so China is, you know how in the U.S. and the U.S. in the 20th century was the exception to many rules. It was large and religious and capitalist and so on, right? You know, it was, it was the big country that was outside of the European wars. You know, it was the exception to many rules. You had a bunch of countries and then you had the U.S. as an exception, right? Right. That's China, I think, in this century. It is, you know, as I mentioned before, I think the counter, you know, there's the decentralization of the internet. There's the counter decentralization of the U.S. establishment and CCP. And I think the counter decentralization wins in China. I think it loses in America. Why does it win in China? Because they took the hit early on to implement the Great Firewall. They banned social media, foreign social media, and they built their own. The thing is that, there's certain kind of, like, this is not to say that China is omnipotent or they get everything right, or so-so. And you're not saying morally this is a preferable schemer. That's right, that's right. But they are, there are things that they execute well on. Recently they've been doing really dumb things with just like infinite COVID lockdowns. It is possible, you know, the thing is, I think 90%, that's probably a bad idea. I think I remember in the late 2000s, I thought their banning of foreign social media was the dumbest thing. It turned out to actually have a logic to it where now they have root control of everything there. They cannot be deplatformed by Silicon Valley. They have Sino-Weibo. They have a whole homegrown ecosystem where they have total root control over everything. You know what I mean by root? Like a, you're like a guest user system manager. China has root over everything. That's why China, some people compare China to like Japan in the 80s and say, oh, the U.S. was scared by Japan. You know, they shouldn't be concerned about China. They're totally different because Japan is a U.S. protectorate, right? Japan is ultimately under the aegis of the U.S. military. And there are various things that the U.S. could sort of force Japan to do, like, you know, build plants in the U.S. and buy treasuries, but not buy companies. Michael Hudson, who's like heterodox Marxist writes about some of this, I don't speak Japanese. So I haven't like poked around but my strong hunch and somebody maybe watching this can do the forensics is that there were various levers that the U.S. essentially used its root access to sort of keep Japan down or whatever. And why is it plausible? Well, the U.S. is certainly trying to stop China from exceeding it now. Think about all the sanctions and other things that are happening, right? And but China has root. It's a different thing. They have root over their entire country. They also have a vast domestic economy that they can, I mean, they can spend filling in for a century and they're gonna be, they don't need the rest of the, I mean, everybody needs trade but they're like the United States in the 19th century. They have a lot of room to grow internally. This is why, I mean, I don't know beef with him but this is why I disagree with, I don't know about 78% of what the Xi hand, Peter Xi hand says because, look, I mean, the U.S. is picking a fight with its factory. Okay, like net net, China makes a lot of stuff. They have giant factories. They make drones, you know, for example, some premises like, oh, the U.S. Navy is super powerful and it's got all these aircraft carriers in China's week. You know, I saw a stat that China has 23 million, you know, tons of ships built a year and the U.S. has something like 200,000. This is about like a hundred X difference. That's the same kind of thing. That's, whether that's sure or not, that's plausible looking at the construction, looking at other kinds of things. You saw that gate stat from a few years ago that China poured more concrete in a few years than the U.S. had in the entire 20th century. They can and do build in the physical world. They ship to every country in the world. They are good in the physical world. You have to just acknowledge reality on that. The U.S., however, is, I think, where the U.S. strength is, is not actually where people think it is. I think the U.S. is almost becoming like desiccated in the physical world. For example, the $300 million bus lane that took 20 years in San Francisco, what that is going to become is the $3 billion bus lane that takes 100 years. Like it's not improving, okay? It's been getting worse in 2010. In 2010, Teal observed that we couldn't innovate. In 2020, we find it very expensive to simply maintain. And this is New York subways. This is power outages in California. This is the water in Jackson. You're starting to see basic infrastructures type stuff in the U.S. not work. Because how many people do you know who talk about civil engineering all day? Right. Right? How many folks? It is a community that I voluntarily choose not to engage. Yeah, right. Sure. But the thing is that basically the talent has not been going into physical world infrastructure in part because, A, it's just assumed to work. B, it's something which is very difficult to innovate on or do anything new on or make a profit on or what have you, okay? And hence the brain power that might be going into that is going to search or going to various kinds of software design. That's right. What the U.S. is, if it is anything, is a digital power. It's a cloud power. And actually I tweet about this and here's a contrarian or interesting thing. And I'm not saying I fully embrace this view, but let me just float it. This is new. I was just thinking about this. So historians, they talk about the division between land powers and sea powers, like teleocracy and teleocracy and a Dallasocracy, like a land and a sea empire. And a land empire would be like, you know, historically German or like Russia, right? To some extent, China, okay? Giant swats of land. Whereas a sea power is like Japan or like Britain, right, Great Britain. And the sea power is the Navy and the land powers are, right? The sea power is commerce and trade and so on. And the land power is conquest. Not the sea power doesn't, you know, get its hands dirty at times, it certainly does. But it's more like wily and clever and agile and so on. Whereas a land power is sort of distributed. And it's distributed. It's distributed. Yes, exactly. That's right. So it's decentralized or centralized and so on. And the thing is that the new version of the sea power may be the cloud power. Because, you know, the term port, you know, it's funny just to play on words, but there's a port in every harbor, but there's also a port on every device. And now on every site. Exactly, that port is how you connect on the internet, right? It's an interesting term, which actually does have something there about it, which is how could Portugal, for example, get to Brazil? It didn't have to go over land through all these places. It had a peer-to-peer connection to Brazil. The oceans were the original internet in that sense. You could send goods and packages, just put something on there, you push it, it floats, right? And so Portugal could connect to Brazil. It could connect to Macau. It could run this network where the ocean was this sort of demilitarized zone and they could connect things. Now, a cloud power is, and one other thing, by the way, about the sea powers is often they were, they arose on islands like Britain or Japan, they just obligate. They had to learn how to fish. That's why, you know, a lot of Japanese cuisine is sushi. It's like fish, right? Obviously Britain is all about the Navy. That was like a big thing for them, right? Trade, maritime stuff. So the sea powers, often their home islands are only so-so and sort of by necessity, they need to learn to kind of go abroad and to trade and to do these things, okay? And you can say this is a greater or lesser extent for different sea powers, but this is, I think, being true. And so in a sense, this is the super contrarian and it's almost too clever. So I can't say I fully endorse it. I just throw it out there. But the total like physical world like collapse slash desiccation, et cetera, the US is something that's pushing the cloud power to actually have to be like even more ambitious and international and so on, right? So it's as if you turn your bounteous land into this rocky outcropping that doesn't produce anything. So you have to just go pure cloud for everything. And where the US is still very strong in men's strength and perhaps arguably gaining strength and it's hard to quantify, isn't it's cloud power. You know, it's funny. It's like the other MAGA, Microsoft, Apple, Google and so on, ha ha. But it's also a lot of the tech and so on and so forth, right? So that is how I kind of see it like the US and it might be the disunited states rather than the United States, but that region, that group, the Americans, the post-Americans versus the Chinese, the Chinese, Chinese control totally centralized, crackdown, AI surveillance state, and American anarchy, decentralization, et cetera. And I think something in the middle of decentralization, neither total centralization nor total decentralization, but decentralization, voluntary decentralization is I think where we want to aim for. And that's kind of what the book is about. Right. Let me ask you about, there's a particularly, I think kind of intriguing passage where you talk about how, because I want to talk more about Bitcoin or cryptocurrency and blockchain and both the technologies, but then also the kind of mentalities or mindsets that undergird what you're talking about. And you write at one point, social media is American glassnose and cryptocurrency is American perestroika. So as the internet scaled and Americans actually got the rights to free speech and free markets that they were nominally promised, the establishment started to feel threatened. Let's talk a little bit about that. Social media is American glassnose. Cryptocurrency is American perestroika. Right. So just to define those terms, in the 80s, Mikhail Gorbachev tried to open up the Soviet Union. And glassnose was like more free speech and perestroika was more free markets. And what he's not... And he was doing that because he recognized, I mean, that the Soviet Union, even, you know, this is post-Afghanistan invasion or while it's still kind of lingering on, but the Soviet Union was declining in material terms. Yeah. They were not able to deliver what people wanted. He kind of wanted to be the Ding Xiaoping of the USSR and like pivoted towards something that was a little more open and whatnot, right? And what he found was he unleashed forces that were too strong. And the thing is, I mean, remember the Soviet constitution in theory, it guaranteed all these rights, right? Right. It guaranteed, you know, votes and human rights. Yeah, it was better, it's better on paper than the American. Yes, and on paper is about it because they would just shoot you in the back of the neck or disappear, you could log you, whatever, right? Yeah. So in kind of the same way, the internet was American Glasnost or it's social media is American Glasnost and cryptocurrency is American, fair story good because before social media, yeah, you nonly had the right to free speech. Okay, but could you start a newspaper? Could you own a television station? Could you broadcast for it? Maybe you're a radio license, TV license? That stuff was heavily locked down. To get a sense of how locked down it was, if you remember the Unabomber, the Unabomber went and killed a bunch of people. Why? So you could get an op-ed in the post. Yeah, well, he got it in the New York Times. He really hit the trifecta. Right, exactly. Or well, the daily double, I guess. If he had gotten the Wall Street Journal, that would have been the trifecta. Yeah, right. And so that's how Scare's distribution was back then. Yeah. That he had killed for the distribution. Now you have crazy people on Twitter who, you see the continuum, right? No, no, where Alex Jones having the most fascinating or one of the many fascinating things about his trial recently, his defamation or libel trial, whatever it was, is how much money he was making despite being de-platformed everywhere. He was still pulling in tens of millions of dollars a year as a person who is not on YouTube, is not on Twitter, is not on Instagram or Facebook. Right, it's something where, so that's a bad part, like you, but it's complicated. I don't think, whatever, Jones, I don't think he should be de-platformed, but I also think, you know, it says a lot of things that I screwed, many things. But the- Yeah, he's a batshit, crazy, insane person, and that doesn't mean that he should be de-platformed. Yeah, the fundamental issue is, we're talking about a lot of these things at one bit resolution. And basically, we're talking about de-platforming because there was mass platforming. Right, that's what happened before de-platforming was platforming. And so Bill and his people were suddenly given a platform. And so it's like a stock that went up 10 or 100 or 1,000 X, now it's dropped 50%. And when people feel that voice that they were just given being taken away, or taken away by somebody who's there, or even two or three or four hops in the social network, they're like, am I gonna be silenced for this thing that I just got, my voice, right? And so that's what I mean by de- But it's also, it's part of the re-bundling or the re-centralization of like Twitter rises and then it says, oh, you know what? Maybe we don't want all of these people talking here and it doesn't mean they can't go elsewhere, but they're not gonna be talking on Twitter. Well, so yeah, so fundamentally, here's the thing. If you administer any service, you have to immediately make decisions about spam or porn or malware or stuff like that. That lets the, I mean, because that's just like universal, everybody agrees on that, okay? Right. That lets the camels snap into the tent. Now you have the ability to filter, you need to filter, and now you have to decide where you're gonna draw the line on many, many different ideological things, right? Because of this, and also because technology has made it easier to build these kinds of social networks, you're just gonna eventually see in my view that every social group of sufficient scale will have its own social network, its own cryptocurrency, its own batch of territories, its own passport and so on around the world and its community norms that sort of govern the use of all of that, such that these become like written laws. We're sort of in like the pre-Homorabi, you know, the Homorabi thing, you know, where things like the first code of laws, the first written code of laws. We're sort of like the pre-Homorabi era for digital due process, okay? Where it's all just kind of good. There's going to be, it's kind of like the Protestant explosion of Protestant sex where there's gonna be an infinite number of proper office, right? Yeah, that's right. Exactly. Coming in and out where they're writing their own codes, you know, legal codes, customs and all of that and some of them will flourish, some of them will. That's right. And the thing is that, you know, today they've converged in a lot of ways Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Apple. But, you know, back in the day, Microsoft was run by Gates and Apple was run by Jobs and Google was run by Page and Amazon was run by Bezos. These were strong personalities. They had different cultures. If you had taken 25% of each company and done a round robin switcheroo on them, they wouldn't have worked, right? Obviously Microsoft guys would have used Office and Google guys would have used Google Docs, right? Right. Obviously Google guys would have used Android and Apple people would have used iOS or whatever, right? That's the obvious. But there's also a thousand other cultural things, abbreviations, ways of doing things. Apple is highly secret. Google's highly, or was highly public, et cetera, et cetera, right? Now today, now that they're founderless, they started to converge into kind of this massive big tech that's actually become a thing, you know, people move between those two, three years here or three years there, et cetera, just like the big four of accounting, okay? They're in the post-founder era. But the thing is that when they did have sort of distinct cultures, it wasn't, they weren't fully interchangeable. And so that's gonna, I think, happen with a bunch of these different cultures. They're all gonna be, they're gonna have an appeal to at least some fraction of humanity, and then there's a place you might wanna visit but not live there as the saying goes, right? And I think that's good. That's certainly better than just endless conflict over basic premises, you know? Or endless restriction of just saying, no, you never get a platform. I mean, to go back to the Unabomber world where there's a couple of newspapers and a couple of networks that matter, that's not optimally. Yeah, exactly, and the thing is, if folks who agree with each other have their own land and territory, you'll get the Sistine Chapel and you'll get a Taj Mahal, right? Those are different. They can both kind of respect each other's accomplishments and whatnot, but if you have 50-50, like, you know, then you're never gonna build anything and just people are just gonna fight or be- And ideally in that world, like both the Sistine Chapel, and here's the Marxist semi, you know, both the Sistine Chapel and the Taj Mahal were also kind of built or, you know, Portuguese in Brazil or, you know, in Macau was built on slave labor in profound ways or in voluntary servitude. So what you're talking about is like a world of proliferating- Volition. Communities, country, states that are effectively voluntary. Voluntary, absolutely voluntary. That's the ultimate- And consent. Yes. So now, let's, I wanna come back to crypto in a second, but then, but you're saying that China, you think, at least for the foreseeable future, because of the way they've architected their state and they took the hits early on by not participating in the open internet and whatnot. You think that they have the ability to kind of really hold down a different version of a kind of a centralized state that is calling the shots and they don't need the buy-in of their people. In the way that these new communities- It's complicated. Here's why this is complicated. So I actually do talk about other interpretations of the term network state. Estonia is like a state that's fused with the network in a certain way. They've got X-Rode, you know, their system, right? Singapore is, China is a state that's fused with the network. They have, you know, whereas the U.S. is actually really fighting the network. It's doing antitrust and so on. China has just decapitates Jack Ma, takes control of Alibaba, decapitates it, and it's not, you know, in the U.S. the same kind of thing is trying, they're trying to do it with antitrust and whatnot. It's more of a fight. We'll see what actually happens. Well, it remains to be said. I mean, you know, one of the things is that, you know, going back to at least 2018, you had people like Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg and a variety of other leaders of big tech companies saying, hey, you know what? We want to be regulated. It's time to regulate. What I think- And they very much seem to me to be like the railroad barons at the end of the 19th century who were like, hey, you know what? Our profits are kind of ladder declining and we want to lock in this marketplace and we'll, you know, let's sue for peace with the regulators. It's quite possible something like that happens where antitrust really means that the MAGA becomes or fuses with the U.S. software. It's the most, you know, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon are the most competent people that are now establishment aligned because a lot of the decentralized have left those companies and have become founders and whatnot. And so it's this weird thing where it used to be like media or establishment versus tech and now it's centralized tech and media versus decentralized. Sometimes owned by tech, right? I mean, you don't want to read too much into, you know, the Washington Post or whatever being owned by- Well, he doesn't actually, yeah. Bezos, I mean, Bezos owns the Post but he doesn't actually, you know, I mean, he probably just bought the Post as insurance. So, you know- Sure. These organizations, as you're well aware, they don't just digress on this topic. The quote, investigative journalists doesn't investigate their boss, they'll investigate yours, okay? No one at the New York Times is going through Salzburgers garbage or even naming Salzburger in any articles but they'll name Zuckerberg a million times, right? And so it's not so much that their owners get great coverage, they get no coverage, right? They're just airbrushed out as if they didn't- Well, and then you have that also the alternative of like NBC universal spectrum, you know, which is a different type of kind of- Yes, that's just a conglomerate of all these things where just somehow there never happens to be an investigation into like Comcast's stuff, you know, isn't that interesting? Because Comcast is like the parent of it, right? Right. And so it's often the absence of coverage rather than the presence of it. It's not like there's Pozzanas for it, that'd be too obvious. It's just like, you know, that'd be a career-limiting move to go and investigate your boss, boss, boss. So why don't you go and poke at this tech guy or whatever, right? So it's happened is actually, I think, you've had defectors from media go to sub-stack. You've had defectors from tech become founders and funders. That's now a group, right? And you have the folks who are joiners are still at, or joining, I mean, the kind of person who's joining Google in 2022 or whatever is completely different from the kind of person who's joining in 2002. Just totally, totally different person. Now it's like kind of a person who joined like McKinsey or Bain or whatever, it's like a barrier. Or IBM or General Motors in 1955 or something. I mean, they are organization men rather than mavericks. And some of them I assume are good people. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? And I've got many good engineers and folks there but they're fundamentally not there to take a risk, right? This is the opposite of risk, you know? And so all the risk tolerance folks have come out. Now, where was I? It was basically, gosh, you got me on this. So does crypto, you know, how does crypto or blockchain allow for, I mean, because you're not arguing that the establishment people in America, whether they're in the government or in tech are necessarily going to win. Partly because- No, I think- It's in them perestroika. They'll have more power over fewer people. Because the US establishment is currently fighting simultaneous conflict against conservatives, tech guys, Russia, China, to a lesser extent, Israel, India, France, Hungary, Brazil, the Brexit guys in Europe, and more probably that I can't name, you know, just like outside my head, right? And that's a lot of like simultaneous battles to be waging, you know? Even if you're, you know, number one or whatever, you're just picking the fight with everybody at the same time. You're fighting your factory, you're fighting a hot war with a nuclear power in Russia, you're fighting 50% of your population, you're fighting the tech guys at Interest, you're fighting all kinds of different groups at the same time. I kind of don't think that they can actually win all of those fights. We'll see. The reason being is that winning all of those fights would be hard even for a really confident group of people. But this is now a group of people that rejects the very idea of confidence, right? The thing is, you know, excellence is not what the US establishment prioritizes at all. They'll deny that excellence even exists. And so, you know, you just can't be number one if you disagree with getting the people who are, you know, like number one in their class, right? If that's no longer the kind of person you're recruiting, you're not gonna remain the number one most dominant, world power, blah, blah, blah, et cetera, right? It's kind of obvious to me. I don't know how long it takes because there's a lot of momentum in something. But I'm seeing that, whether it's five years or two years or 10 years or 20 years, eventually it's something where it's like a gigantic company versus a startup and you know that giant company doesn't have as good a product and it doesn't have as good talent but it does have that inherited distribution. How long does it take for them to lose? I don't know. It's a slow, it could be fast. It could be fast, it could be slow decline. Yeah, it's really hard for me to say. And the reason it's hard is because, you know what I'm saying? Like bankruptcy, how does it happen? It's like gradually and then sudden. I can have models where it's sudden. You can imagine some crazy stuff over 2024, even 2022 election. You can also imagine a gradual type of thing where people just, you know, for example, when did people really recognize that the British Empire was over? Maybe it's post Suez, that's how people normally did it. But that's actually like probably 11 years after it actually happened. Oh yeah, yeah, I mean, you would think that people would have understood that at least after World War II, before World War II, but, and I actually, I think that America may be in a moment where our quality of living isn't gonna go down, our standard of living, but we are not as powerful as we once might have been because the world is radically altered and there's just multiple poles of power. Right. Which is part of what your book is about. Can I ask with China, part of the, you know, okay, there's a non, yeah. I was just gonna say one thing, which is, when I see this, some people will be like, oh my God, you're so anti-American, et cetera, et cetera. And the thing is, there's more vantage points than being just anti-American or like, you know, Jingoist, you know, like, for example, are you anti-British or pro-British? Well, in a real sense, America is post-British, right? India is post-British, Israel is post-British, Singapore is post-British. That doesn't mean that they're negative on Great Britain. In fact, there's a lot of respect for Great Britain and all of its accomplishments and so on and so forth, right? And I have a lot of respect for all of the accomplishments of the US in the past, potentially in the future and so on and so forth. Nevertheless, I do think that post-American kind of world is there because you have a billion Chinese, you have a billion Indians, you have all these people coming online and India doesn't have a seat at the UN Security Council. China wasn't part of that world order. This is not a world order that, you know, they're gonna just simply accept. And so that's why they're pushing on in different ways and there will be some kind of new thing. What form that takes, I hope, and what I'm trying for, is one which has room for liberal values, right? And the issue is that those kinds of values are often the first things, Jettison, when people feel a sense of loss or threat. Sure, yeah. I mean, this is kind of not just Trump, but also kind of Hillary Clinton's platform in 2016. It's like it's about controlling and rolling things back to a past where we felt more comfortable. And that's an obvious loser. Exactly, the thing is, you know, some people want to go back to 1950 or 1980. I understand that. But then, a big part of the US establishment, Democrats want to go back to, let's say, 2007. Sometime when these, this internet stuff wasn't disrupting everything, right? And the farther in the future we go, the farther back that Halcyon era comes. And in many ways, they've stolen many issues from Trump. Like, you know, for example, they're as hawkish on China, for example, right? You might agree with that, but basically like that was sort of a silently stolen issue. In 2015, a lot of people were mocking Trump. He was saying China, China, China, like that, right, that video, right? That was like a subject of mockery. In 2019, Obama, you heard that? Yeah, no, no, I totally agree with you. Like Biden is like, oh, he's great, because he's the China hawk, right? Right, so, you know, in 2019, for example, just to give you a sense of how recent this is, Barack and Michelle Obama put out a film called American Factory, which was sort of the old school multilateral economic, you know, liberalism where American Factory is talking about how, you know, Chinese money came in and helped restore an American Factory and put Americans to work. It was talking up cross-border trade. That's like, you know, like Q3, Q4, 2019, really not that long ago, feels like a completely different era, right? Yeah, it's like from 1919 or something. Yeah, exactly, right, so you go back and just watch that, watch like, you know, like the Obamas talk about this and how, you know, they're still coming from that era of like multilateral trade and whatnot. Now, I think, by the way, unlike some people who think it's all nationalism from out here, it's all, you know, retreat to this, I agree that's a trend. I think there's also the counter trend. That's to say, you have the nationalist socialism, you know, or socialist nationalism on the land, but you have the internationalist capitalism in the cloud. Okay, that's the people of the state and the people of the network. You have, really, this is actually the, this is the communism versus capitalism of the 20th century is centralized, decentralized, you know, land versus cloud, you know? So let me ask quickly, because I want to get to those, the stack of identities and how that will play out in the, you know, when you're in the cloud, meaning you're also in land somewhere, but the Chinese Communist Party kind of, and as it rebundles, as it centralizes control over the past decade or so, one of the ways, even though it doesn't have to ask permission because it can round people up and put millions of people in concentration camps, right? Which they seem to be doing. They can lock down, you know, they can nail people into their apartments because of zero COVID. One of the ways they've been doing that is by promising massive increases in living standards and economic growth. And they've delivered on that since dang. Yes, but they're not living on it as much anymore. Yeah, that's what I mean is so like, is that where the Chinese centralization model goes to die the minute that productivity growth, you know, drops to, you know, one, two, three percent, much less negative. And then suddenly they've sent a lot of people abroad who go to colleges all over America and are like, why am I going back to a country where I might be put in prison or jail when I can hang out here and have like a fucking really easy and good and fun and exciting life. Yeah, so this is complicated in several different ways, right? Basically, it's absolutely true that, you know, China's a big country, obviously, and they've got their own partisan divide. It's just, here's why we're expressing it. Within Apple, there's gonna be a difference of opinion as to, let's say, I'm making this up, because I actually don't know what Apple's internal politics are. But let's say there's some people who really wanna do the iCar, right, the Apple car. And these are people who are like, we just need to double down on the phone or whatever, okay? And you're gonna have executives in charge of both these groups. Now, what you don't see, or you haven't seen, maybe we will see it, is these guys get out on Twitter and try to demagogue, you know, John Smith is so stupid, you know, we need to do the Apple car. If you're an Apple, you know, loyal Appleist, you know, thumbs up me, right? They don't run a public campaign on this because what that would do is it would polarize Apple's customer base against each other, and this would eat the seed corn, you know, that dissension, everybody's throwing mud at each other, there's less economic value in the whole pie and so on and so forth. Instead, their mental model is, all right, let's settle this behind closed doors, let's figure it out, and ultimately the whole thing is disciplined by exit. People will, you know, buy or not buy Apple products or whatever, right? Right. Now, in China, they've actually made which is kind of what happened at, I guess like Fairchild Semiconductor, right? And Silicon Valley Fixies. Yeah, so the quote trader's aid where they all left and kind of went, yeah. So, this is somewhat similar to how things work in China. Basically, just like, you know, somebody on the outside sort of has to guess about Apple's corporate politics. It's not something that is parsed in desk. Maybe there's some magazines that talk about it, but unless you're on the inside, you don't really know, it's speculative, right? It's certainly not somewhere where the executives are going out and declaring, I'm an iCar and I'm an iPhone or whatever, like that partisan divide is not a public divide, right? This is similar to kind of the dynamic within the Chinese Communist Party. There are factions, but they don't go out and declare themselves, I am the international scaplice, I'm the, you know, the Hu Jintao, you know, dang, jang, wing of the party, or I'm the Xi Jinping wing or whatever. I mean, some people know this, but it's not like a publicly labeled thing. It's not broadcast. This is the internal knife fighting or whatever, you know, that they do behind closed doors. And the rest of the population has to sort of speculate on that, all right? So, there is a partisan divide. It's just not as explicit. It's more like corporate politics. With that said, there's lots of people who are now just finding their, you know, first is the COVID lockdowns, but second, it's also the random bankruptcies of companies. And third, it's the common prosperity doctrine, which is kind of like a quasi-return to communism, and all in all, it's actually becoming, it reminds them of the battle days, you know, where there's an arbitrary state and they weren't able to make money. When people like Jack Ma affectively disappeared or, you know, the founder of Apple News or, you know, actresses suddenly kind of disappear and then, you know, make contrite statements and things like that. Yeah, it's something where, if in the US to first order, you can't be woke enough in China, you can't be nationalist enough, right? Like, you know, for example, there was a professor who criticized this recent movie called the Battle of Lake Changjin. And that was a movie where it shows like the brave Chinese fighting the Americans during the Korean War and winning, okay? And a lot of Chinese movies nowadays, Wolf Warrior II, Battle of Lake Changjin show Chinese individuals or soldiers beating Americans either implicitly or explicitly coded as such, right? And China's become the largest box office of the world. In many ways, they're sort of running the American playbook of the 20th century, just bigger, I mean, you know, American dream, Chinese dream. American movies, giant Chinese movies. American armada, giant Chinese drone armada, right? So they're kind of running the American playbook of the 20th century, just like a huge scale, okay? It gets complicated though, too, if the American, you know, if the American Hollywood ideal is the rugged individualists who triumphs over things. That may not work well, and you know, it's a great story, but it's telling a different message to Chinese people. What you should do is, yeah, well, so what they do is they take, it's sort of disorienting. You should watch Wolf Warrior II or Battle of Lake Changjin. What they do is they take a lot of the filmmaking convention, some things I wouldn't be able to even verbally articulate, but it feels like Rocky or Rambo or something, but, or saving Private Ryan, right? But it's, you know, a Chinese hero and an American villain, right? The reason it's different is, obviously there's American movies that show the American military or whatever as a villain, but usually it's also an American on the other side as a hero, like the brave activist who stands, right? It's a problem that's a problem within the culture, right? Versus this does feel disorienting because it's playing like Yankee Doodle Dandy as like the villain music, you know? It's just like, what? You know, right? So to your point, they take a lot of the Hollywood aesthetic, and, but they've swapped out some of the themes for like the Chinese nationalists. Anyway, so the thing is that a lot of Chinese liberals, internationalists and capitalists and so on, are, you know, there's this thing, there's like three things you can do in China. You can, it's like rat race, lie flat, or run zoo, run philosophy. So rat race joins rat race, whatever. Lie flat is sort of, in the US they call it quiet pudding. They just kind of, you know, don't do anything certain. And then run philosophy is exit, right? And there's a GitHub thing called run philosophy where it's in Chinese and it's like, how to get to Australia, how to get to this, how to get to that, right? And so that's very appealing to a bunch of, you know, Chinese youth, and so China's just not a monolith, right? They're obviously a huge country with a lot of internal differences. But I do think that if there's one thing they are set up for, it is to maintain territorial integrity and to like surveil the country and so on. You said, will there be dissension and so on? The thing is they control the educational system, right? So all the premises that people have installed into their heads at an early age are fundamentally Chinese national's premises. They're taught Mao is seven parts good and three parts bad. They're not taught really that he killed millions of people, whatever, right? They actually, you know, Chiang Kai-shek is being rehabilitated. He's more popular to some extent in mainland China than he is in Taiwan. Do you know that? No, that's fascinating. Because, you know, sometimes there's folks who fight like cats and dogs. And then like 50 years later, there's a rapprochement, like for example, Protestant and Catholic, right? They fought like cats and dogs. I agree that France and Germany are like allies, right? That's kind of amazing. It's kind of amazing, that's right. And so the Communist Nationalists obviously fought viciously, but now it's something like, well, you know, Chiang was actually still pretty good because he fought against the Japanese. He was just misguided. People eventually reunified Taiwan. That's like the messaging, right? Yeah, yeah. And so where are their civilizations at? Like you just watched their movies to get a sense of where their head is at. It's just totally different than where... I'm confident that mass media sends so many disparate messages. And I'm a big believer in reception theory or response theory. And so I'm reminded of, you know, supposedly Stalin during the... When he was in charge in the Soviet Union brought over the grapes of wrath movie because he wanted everybody in Russia in the Soviet Union to see the depredations of capitalism. And the final scene is the... Yeah, and the final scene is the Oaks leaving the Dust Bowl and moving to California in cars and supposedly the takeaway was, wow, in America even poor people have cars. Right, right. So you never... You know, and it might take longer or shorter and clearly China has a more systematic indoctrination process. Their education system is probably better than ours in that sense. Japan's was like that, Germany's was like that, but you know, you fuck up. Especially once people get a little bit of wealth, you know, when they start, they want to call their shots. So the interesting thing is perhaps, you know, this is one of my theses also in the book is that perhaps in this Cold War, the third world comes in first, right? The third world is actually a Web three. It's not the non-aligned movement, the aligned movement. It's the American, you know, let's call them classical liberals, you know, true liberals, you know, basically the post-assessment or anti-assessment and the Chinese liberals, and you know, folks from India and Israel and all these folks in the middle who neither want to be kind of ruled by like US media and tech corporations, nor they want to be, you know, dominated by like, you know, WeChat surveilling everything, right? Right. And those are basically, you know, at least the two options on the table right now. Right? Yeah. Because for many countries that are in the middle or border zone, if you're in Africa or something like that, is your software stack the American stack or the Chinese stack? And both of them come with positives and negatives. That's right. So can we talk about, because you talk about in the book, Web three and that's, you know, a buzzword which you know, always needs clarification whenever it's in both. And you're talking about it now. How is, you know, how when you talk about Web three and about this alternative position, yeah, what is it? And then I want to talk about identity stacks as opposed to kind of technical stacks. So there's different ways of talking about Web three. One of them, there's an illustration which is Web one is login with username and password. Type it in. Right. Web two is you click and you log in with Facebook or Twitter or Rehab. Web three is you're logging in with your private key or your Ethereum wallet or Rehab. And the difference is that that combines certain aspects of Web one and Web two. You have the local password and the local credentials and so on. But you're logging into a global service. Another way of thinking about Web one versus Web two versus Web three. I've talked about this, you know, at some length is, you know, Web one and also really the early internet was genuinely peer-to-peer. Client and server were basically equal. You could send email back and forth, et cetera. Okay. And it was open source and programmable and all this. Then with Web 2.0, this is a little bit of a retcon because at the time, Web 2.0 was thought of as a front-end thing, but let's talk about the back end. Web 2.0, you had the rise of Facebook and Twitter and Dropbox and the centralized services where see the thing is every time you refresh Facebook or Twitter, if you had to send your entire profile information and everything you did to somebody else, that'd be very redundant. So instead, both you connect to a hub and you pulled information from there. And so then you just sell it and send small updates, right, that hub is very efficient and it gives you so-called global states so all these nodes have something global they can write to. But it's also a place where you can make huge profits because you can serve the ads there and so on and so forth. So this is basically the backend architecture of the last 20 years. Web 3.0 takes the best in my view. If I may, just on the front end of that though, what Web 2.0 or social media or user-generated content, something like Facebook allows you, your content conceivably or YouTube is maybe a better example to be seen by lots of people but it's no longer peer to peer because you're going to an intermediary who is then distributing it and then also, they can serve ads against it, they can also censor it, et cetera. But validate it and verify it in a positive way. It's not all negative. That's right, that's right. So the Web 3.0 version is that central hub and spoke, the hub of the hub and spoke is now replaced by a decentralized database and many of them, there's different, you know, there's Ethereum and so on, right? And Bitcoin, and that decentralized database has aspects of both Web 1 and Web 2. Why? It is open source, it's programmable and it's transparent and so on like Web 1. But it also has that central hub which actually allows for a great deal of profit. It offers global state. There's a global database that's now available but yet it's also peer to peer. And that is really what a blockchain is. It's a data structure that basically is a, anybody is a root user of a blockchain. That's a fundamental new thing of a blockchain. It's a massively multi-user database, right? For any user is a root user. Whereas, for example, for Twitter or Facebook, the password to Twitter or Facebook's database is not on the internet, right? With a blockchain, everybody can read every row that's in the Bitcoin or Ethereum database. It's public on the internet. That's a fundamental difference, right? It's not open source, it's open state. Now, I know that might sound technical but it's just a true shift in what the backend architecture of a system is. It can belong to all the folks who run the nodes or run the stakers or run the miners and so on in that community. And they can, by mutual consent amongst themselves, host whatever content they want and the development of these blockchains creates huge amounts of money, okay? Which is important because it funds the whole thing. So now you have a model which combines some of the good aspects of web one and the good aspects of web two and that's web three. And this, by the way, is something I think about a great deal. It's like the helical theory of history where you sort of wind upwards, you know? It's cyclical, x of t equals cos of t and y of t equals sin t on one plane but z of t equals t and so you have a parameter curve that kind of spirals upward. Cyclical in some ways is progressive in other ways, right? And so for example, you have gold then you have fiat currency and then you have Bitcoin, right? Or you have the paper document and then you have a scanner and then you have the fully digital document, right? And I think one of the things I talk about in the book is you have the city-state and then you have the roll-up of a bunch of city-states into a nation-state where all these independent little principalities get rolled up into one big thing that has a huge amount of scale. That's why, just like gold was sort of defeated by fiat currency, the city-state was defeated by the nation-state. And so then the V3 is, in my view, the network-state which combines some of the scalability and defensibility of the nation-state with the agility and independence of the city-state, right? So like the V3. This is like a common theme in a lot of stuff. So, you know, let's talk about identity in this newer state and in the network-state world. Because, you know, one of the things that I found most interesting, because we talk here in the United States, a lot about intersectionality and, you know, which, but it's kind of, you know, what I think people, the positive version of intersectionality and I think it's something we all recognize is that we are an amount, each of us is an amalgam of, you know, a dozen or maybe a couple of hundred or a couple of thousand identities, sub-identities. You know, and it's like we might define ourselves as male, male and female, we might just, you know, as American or not American, we might, you know, I was raised in New Jersey, so I'm a New Jersey, I'm a libertarian, that's part of my identity and these all things stack up and then, you know, and then, but where will those, I guess, two things, one, where do those identities come from in this newer world? And then also you talk, particularly in a, interesting and kind of funny section where you were talking about how, like, you would complain to people about San Francisco and how fucking shitty it's getting. And then people who are San Francisco patriots would be like, fuck you and they didn't wanna hear anything, even though they obviously know there's a lot of truth to, you know, like if, you know, there's human feces all over the place, like something's gotta be done, but where do those primary, like patriotic identities which ultimately become the kind of root level identity in this world and how, you know, what is a way to create a, you know, I guess kind of like an awareness and a recognition and a comfort with these multiple identities and then also to make sure that people understand that they, you know, they are forming them whether they explicitly do or not and how do you, you know, how do we work with that patriotic identity which is resistant to criticism, critique, change, and adaptation that gets in the way. Great question. Let me answer it. Let me talk about intersectionality for a second. So, the section you're referring to in the book is where, you know, I was talking to someone about SF and I was, eventually I realized that some people are patriotic about their city, others about their country, others about their company, still others about their cryptocurrency. So the guy who's like, identifies as a New Yorker, for them the job doesn't, I mean, the job is a way to pay the bills, what they really care about is Central Park and the bagels and the lifestyle of New York and so on. And that's like primary to them. They just non-negotiable as New York, New York first, right? Then there's somebody who doesn't care that much to say about their city but they really care about their country. They're a patriot, you know, they fly the flag, you know, they have the independence age, they've got generations of certain military or something like that, right? They're a patriot, okay. Then there's folks in TAC who often identify very much with their company. This thing I founded, this is my baby, I'm building this and so on and so forth. The country is a parameter because they've got a multinational if it's successful and, you know, there are many different jurisdictions. The city is also a parameter because they might have to hop city to city. I'm based here today, I'm based there today, right? But the companies are constant and that's the thing they really, truly care about. And then finally, you have folks nowadays who identify with their cryptocurrency, right? They actually, like Bitcoin maximalists who will hate many companies and they're internationalists and, you know, they certainly don't have that much affection for the city, but they are Bitcoin only, right? Cryptocurrency. And so kind of once you see this, once you realize, oh, almost everybody's a patriot about something and that's often the thing, it's the thing they think of as non-negotiable where a critique of it is often treated as an insult and they have to get out of their own head to realize that people are sort of critiquing the thing and not themselves, right? For example, as a founder of a company, you will often take negative feedback extremely personally. And what you have to do is, you know, once you kind of get older, you realize, okay, it's basically like, in the same way you see a product that you don't like, you say it sucks. You doesn't mean you hate the founders and you hate all the people behind it or whatever. It was like a casual observation, right? You end up making those kinds of observations much less after you've built a product because you're like, wow, that was actually really hard to do, okay? And what you also do is you write down those comments or you have somebody else write them down and they filter out all the negative actions and they try to turn them into bugs. And what you often find is somebody who is negative about something isn't really that negative, they just wanna fix something. They tried to use it and it didn't work and then they want you to fix something, okay? So coming back up, basically once you realize that people are patriotic about something, you can marry this to the concept of the identity stack, which is, what is your top level identity? That say, when you describe yourself to others, to yourself, to, you know, on forums, whatever. Are you an American? Are you a New Yorker? Are you a... And in a particularly sad, but illustrative example, you talked about a Twitter bio for a guy named Jim, who's a Steeler fan. It's like basically a Pittsburgh Steeler fan. Yes. It's like his highest level identity. That's right. People used to do in like the 2000s or what have you. And now they've switched to like, you know, more ideological and tribal, pound BLM, pound BTC, pound this, pound that. And what that is is something where people will attack somebody over their Twitter bio, not infrequently. You know, you'll comment and be like, oh, dumb name, bunch of numbers or something like that. And so what that means is whatever you put in your identity, people are forced to deliver, they've chosen it and they're forced to deliver, repeated apologetics for that identity. Okay. So if you have pound Bitcoin, you're gonna defend Bitcoin 10 times a day if you comment on Twitter. If you have pound this, you have pronouns, whatever it is, right? And so that is something where it becomes something where when you've vocalized that defense over and over again, where you're fighting for it, you've made that choice, you've identified those things. You know those moral premises. This is an identity formation process. Okay. And those identities don't necessarily map to geography. And so, you know, what you're gonna have, this is related to the network shape concept, those identities I think some of them are conducive to the formation of functional communities and some of them will be distilled out of the internet into these functional communities. Okay. The other thing you mentioned is intersectionality. So I think I may have this in the book or this may be in the V2, but here's kind of a little bit of observation of that. Intersectionality turns us all into oppressors. And what do I mean by that? So you know how communism, it promised liberation for the workers and the peasants, the workers' paradise, right? And actually it delivered them to slavery, right? They, communism was a gulag, that Trotsky's white seed labor canal, people had to dig a canal with their fingers until they froze off and then they just shot them. So it was absolutely not better than what they had before. It was far, far, far worse. But it was justified in the name of the workers and the peasants forever for 70 years, right? This totalitarian state. And you know intersectionality is comparable in a way, which is it promises, you know, like gains for women on minorities and so on, but several observations. First is it's rare to find an ultra-woke person who's actually a fan of a female or minority CEO. They want in theory them to become CEOs or leaders and hate all the ones who actually become successful because now they're rich and powerful and successful, so therefore they should be torn down, number one, okay? Number two is with intersectionality, everybody's an oppressor on some axis. For example, like 50% of the world is male and 20% is, so let's say 20%, 10% of the world is white and 50% is male and 90% is straight and 99% is cis and you know, 100% is wealthy and so on and so forth are successful, blah, blah. You know, there's a bunch of different axes and you're probably white or male or straight or cis or something else, right? And what you find is when you realize this, okay, whenever the establishment wants to attack somebody, what they will do is an algebra where they'll find on what category is this person an oppressor, okay? Are they a white woman? Well, there are whites, blam, hit them on that, right? Are they a black man? Well, toxic masculinity, right? There is a word, a phrase on the shelf to delegitimize them, to call them an oppressor and therefore victimize them on any axis, right? So everybody who kind of buys into the intersectionality thing, it's actually very similar to communism where all these workers thought, hey, it would strike from building collective power and there was short-term gains because the strike basically meant that they got redistribution of wealth within a company, you know, their wages went up. It just made the company less competitive and it collapsed over the long run or they all fell into the Gulag in the Soviet Union. With the woke, basically for them, the equivalent of the strike is actually, it's not the factory floor, but it's the social media app that's the site of the collective action and it's cancellation and the redistribution is not a wealth but of status. Instantly you get a bunch of likes for saying that somebody is mansplaining or that they're, you know, white supremacy, whatever it is, one of these phrases. And what that does, though, is it means that, you know, the person who's saying, oh my God, you're mansplaining today, can be attacked as white supremacists tomorrow, can be attacked as, you know, ex-phobic robbers. And you've created, I mean, because if the whole point is to constantly be showing oppression, the minute somebody becomes successful, then they have to be taken. I mean, it's like there's an old Monty Python sketch with a roadside bandit who steals from the rich and gives to the poor and then like once he redistributes the income, it's like, oh, well, you're rich, so I have to take that back and give it to the formerly rich, et cetera. I mean, it's a- Exactly, exactly, that's right. And so once you kind of see this, it's basically something that's very structurally similar to communism in that it promises the world and delivers oppression, right? It promises freedom and delivers oppression. And so- Let me ask you, okay, go ahead. Now the alternative though to intersectionality, I don't believe is sort of the kind of conservative mentality of basically saying, okay, everybody needs to stay in their place and go back to 1950s and so on and so forth. I think there's an alternative, like again, a V3, which is almost become excellent, okay? This is actually coming out in the V2 of the book and whatnot, but basically, I think a lot about ascendance, transcendence, okay? How do we become the best version of ourselves? And there's so much you can throw at that because when people say they quote, want equality, very few people say that they actually want a reduction in their standard of living such that the world can become more equal or a reduction in their status. When they say they want equality, they're always looking up at some guy, some person who's got higher money or higher status. And they're thinking they're gonna take some money from this rich guy, take some status, they'll finally be respected. They're almost never saying, look, I'm a US citizen, therefore I'm among the richest few percent in the world, therefore I'm gonna, I mean, maybe the effective altruists do this, okay? But the vast majority of people who think about equality think they're below 50th percent howl and something they think they're gonna gain from it, right? Now, if we just identify the goal being the gain, the alternative to a promise of equality that actually leads to oppression is excellence, right? That is to say, to allow people to become the best version of themselves, okay? So what is this? This is transhumanism, okay? This is, I know some people don't like that word, okay? You could call it transcendence, you could call it optimism. There's a positive... This is like actualization, where you're giving people the resources to develop themselves as they want to develop. Exactly, it is the most knowledgeable, fittest, healthiest, wealthiest, most successful version of yourself, right? And to push the locus of control back to the individual, and it's what I call the win and help win kind of philosophy. And this is not live and let live, okay? Just to go through this, right? You know, the traditional conservative is stay at home and they're not ambitious, and they're just taking care of family and what happened, right? The progressive is ambitious, but they're often very zero sum. Your win is somebody else's loss we must take from the rich kids, right? The libertarian is live and let live, which is a little house on the prairie kind of thing. And then the, I think the technologist or the optimalist should be win and help win, okay? And that's neither of the previous three. It's not conservative because it's highly ambitious. It's not progressive because it is positive sum, but it's also not libertarian because it's a collective. It is a group of people, you are winning and then you are investing in the next person. It's not simply everybody just on their own isolated, because you'll lose, but they live and let live is usually lose because you're just on your own, right? Go ahead. I would like to point out that even Galt's Gulch, I don't know what the fire department situation in Galt's Gulch was, but it was a community, but I liked the way that you're talking about that. And it leads me to maybe a final point of conversation. What does the global poor look like in a network state world? Because a lot of what you're talking about and I think a critique of it or and I've seen people talk about this is like, well, look at you, your heritage is Indian, right? Asian Indian, you grew up in Long Island, which is obviously a hell on earth, but you escape Long Island and go to California, then you leave the United States, but you are mobile, you're a rootless cosmopolite, you're an internationalist, you have the means and the ability to do whatever you want. You talk about the Indian diaspora and it's like most of the people who leave India are doing pretty well, but what about the people, what about the poor in India or the poor in the de-industrialized Midwest of America? Like, how will they function in a world where the rest of us, and I'm including myself in this camp, perhaps strongly of like, well, I can actualize. I've got the means, the motive and the opportunity to be partly in America and partly in the cloud and all of that kind of stuff. Totally, so a few things. First is, let me actually contest the label of rich and poor in the following sense. I think it's actually interesting to talk about the ascending class and the descending class and then also the ascending world, the descending world, right? Why ascending class, descending class, right? First of all, that gives the sense of dynamism, that some are going up and some are going down, right? Many of the folks, for example, the Brooklyn wokes who hate tech, right? I would not, of course, I would include you in this category, but they're actually fairly well off, but they're in the descending class, right? Conversely, an Indian, you know, who just got a 5G LTE smartphone and is on the internet for the first time, they're in the ascending class, right? They may be poor, but they're in the ascending class, but you can be rich in the descending class. And it is ascending versus descending, I think, more than the absolute value of rich versus poor, that people emotionally key on, right? Because if you tell somebody who's like upper middle class in the US, but now their expense account that they had, a Time Magazine in the early 2000s has gone and now they're clickbait and they have to move in back with their parents at age 40, they don't like this tech thing that has resulted in their view it's correlated with the material reduction in standard of living, whereas the Indian or the Latin American or what have you who is fortunate enough to have gotten a phone and also is in a country that's gone up in its wealth over the last several years, decades, they feel this tech thing is awesome because they're in the ascending class, even if there's still an order of magnitude or more gap in GDP per capita, right? So that's first, that's ascending class, descending class. Then, and this is related to like church's concert or the leap over production, but it's a little different because it also identifies the ascending part, right? Number one. The second thing is you can take this from individuals and you can map it to, or smaller groups like classes or silo groups and you can talk about the ascending world and the descending world, right? And these, you know, the Dickens thing like it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The ascending world and descending world exists within every country now. They exist within every apartment building. You have some person who's doing great online and there are person who's just gotten canceled and that can literally happen 30 feet away, right? People's fortunes are less tied to each other by geography, they're tied by the social network. So the ascending world and descending world, the good part about it is anybody has this phone which is becoming a sky hook, you know, to opportunity, right? Billions of people have gotten this, that's a good part. The bad part is if you were relying implicitly or explicitly on geographical protections for something, if you were a average-ability person in a wealthy country, now you've got global competition and you've got something where, you know, lots of monopolies and stuff around you, not just individual level, but the, you know, for example, Hollywood and others, they've got massive competition now from AI. Hollywood's gonna get melted, I think, in the next few years from AI. That individual is subject to competition. The company that employed them is subject to competition. The country, or the city that surrounds them is subject to competition from many different directions, from technology, from new people online and the way they haven't had it before. So that's the, you know, that's the ascending world and descending world, the ascending class, descending class. And that, I think, is a much better lens to talk about than, quote, rich for support, because, you know, I've been reasonably successful, but certainly if you go back one or two generations, I doubt my family was in the top 50th percentile of the world, right? Like, we weren't, you know, like I'm at, you know, if it's an exponential, if you graph there, whatever net worth, it's like this, right? And so I'm part of the ascending class, you know? And that's something where, you know, I own a debt to all my ancestors and whatnot, but it's something where it's not like, oh, you're born with this huge fortune or something like that. I think there's a huge difference between born rich and built rich. You know, the word rich needs that prefix, right? Born rich is like a neptis, like Arthur Salisberger, inherited the New York Times Company. And as all these employees, they call everybody else rich and never write about his mansion and, you know, the fact that he inherited it from his father's, father's, father's, father's father. Zuckerberg is the son of a dentist. Whatever else you can say about him, he built that fortune. And yes, he went to Harvard or, thousands of people have gone to Harvard and haven't built what he built. Lots of other people have the same opportunity to not do that, right? And there's an enormous moral difference between the born rich and the built rich. And much of the people who are complaining about quote rich are the born rich complaining about the ascending class, okay? So that's like, I mean, it's also called old money versus new money, et cetera, et cetera. So let's take that one thing and that's a moral point where basically, you know, let's take that as one filter, okay? Second is, a lot of the built rich, what we're doing is we're investing in letting everybody learn to code, giving everybody tools, right? It's Figma, which is sold for 20 billion. That's a relatively cheap online tool. It is a universal communications device, right? It is cryptocurrency. It is basic global equality of opportunity, global freedom of speech, opening up an investing so that anybody can invest in anybody else. You know, for example, this is a very high profile example, but when Peter Thiel invested in Mark Zuckerberg, Thiel was much wealthier than Zuckerberg. Now, Zuck is much wealthier than Thiel, but Thiel also gained out of that deal. That is a genuinely positive sum. The reason I bring this up is, this is actually the fundamental difference between investment and charity, okay? With charity, it is portrayed as, what I'm talking about by the way is organized charity. Let's factor out, you know, your neighbor's house burns down from a lightning strike. Of course, go and organize, you know, like community donations and so on and so forth, right? Just like people talk about religion versus organized religion, right? So organized charity, industrialized charity, is constantly, it's basically a, you know, both charity and investment, there's like a rich person and there's a queue of people who are there to get either grants or investments. They're there to get money from the rich guy, okay? And with charity, they have an incentive to be as pathetic, as sympathetic as possible. In extremists, this leads to the scene in Slumdog Millionaire, where the guy chops off the limbs of the beggar to make them more pathetic. But you'll see all these people, you know, online who have developed, you know, I'm depressed, I'm ex, I'm YMZ, I'm a victim, and this and that way, they've internalized all of this. Why? Because it's a way to win the oppression Olympics and thereby get either the status of like a life or a RT or something, or a grant, you know, in charity when they're applying to an agency or something like that. And what that does is for every one person who, quote, wins the grant, the other 99% have learned helplessness. Abroad, this is the NGO industrial complex, which basically wants pets in all of these countries. They want, you know, that money is not sufficient to do anything other than create dependency, and that's what it does. And then it allows these people to feel like, you know, that they did some good or whatever, but it crowds out local investment and would have, it doesn't generate any productive capacity, right? This is why Easterly and Levine have written about like stop to aid and sort of what you talked to, you know, folks about this, right? The alternative to this is investment, okay? And investment, you have the same queue of 100 people competing for the investment, but now you have like, you know, in tech, there's like the Instabrag, right? I did Warden this and, you know, like Stanford that or I, you know, founded a company and sold it for X, blah, blah, blah. It's like a one line bio that is the opposite of the woke, you know, self abnegation. This is all my accomplishments in like one compact sentence. It's like the intro, right? And now you have these hundred people who are competing for an investment and it's like a hundred people running, you know, a 400 meters around the track. One person might win, but the other 99 get a workout in the process. Okay, you might not want a hundred people running around a 400 meters, you know, a hundred people running around, you know what I'm saying? So even if the 99 don't win, they get a workout. The strengthening, the self strengthening process that goes into competing for that investment. Those folks are just pushing to close one more deal, right? Now, sometimes that can be fake until you make it, but sometimes that can actually be make it. Net, net, it's learned resilience, right? It has learned resourcefulness as opposed to learn helplessness, okay? And so with that- Are we also getting to a world though too where it's like merely to say, well, I have a BA for Stanford. It's like- No one cares about that, exactly, right? I mean, that's like saying I was saved, you know, I accepted Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior- Absolutely. In 1977, but what have you done? Exactly, that's right. So those credentials, I mean, I think that college credentials were more of a signal 20 something years ago. And nowadays, you know, I don't hire from Harvard or Stanford, I hire it from Twitter. I hire it from GitHub. Like literally you're looking for someone's portfolio, either the content as a writer, as a Twitter, or their code on GitHub, or their designs on Dribble, your portfolio is your resume. And that allows people from around the world, you know, the Middle East or the Midwest, right? Inside the US, outside the US, you might not have a name brand, but you've got a really legit portfolio and you're smart in social media, that's absolutely somebody who you'd interview and hire. That's a good chunk of all the folks that we hire now. In fact, being at an expensive college, it's sort of going back to what it used to be, which is like a gentleman's finishing school, right? It's like, you know, it's not something that's actually, you know, pushing people on technical education. It's like, you know, it's the most privileged people who are just having this useless kind of thing, right? Time wasting. So my point on all this is, charity weakens, investment strengthens. And an interesting thing is, the folks who are sort of attacking charity, you know, the folks who yelled at Zuck for building that hospital in San Francisco, right? In a weird way, they're actually, you know, they think that by doing that, they're arguing for total state control over all billionaire fortunes, et cetera, et cetera. What's actually happening is, those billionaires are like, you know what? I actually get a lot less flack for making an investment in a biotech company than I do for a nonprofit donation to a hospital. So guess what? They're actually investing now in scalable things, right? Because you can argue that biotech may actually benefit more people globally than in a hospital. Or you invest in a hospital chain. You start doing investment rather than charity. My point in this is, A, when you think about ascending class versus descending class, a lot of the folks who call biotech rich are really born rich people attacking the built rich number one. So it's internally. B, what we do is we invest in people, right? That's what we do. We are trying to level you up, you know? We're trying to give you tools and so on and so forth. C is, you know, with the internet, you have like this incredible equality of opportunity, this global opportunity. The world really is your oyster. If you're in a first world country, quote unquote, and you know, I now call them not first world or developed world, but, you know, ascending world, ascending world. If you are, let's say, if you've got a laptop and you've got a quiet room and you're not in the middle of civil war or riots or something like that, you have unlimited opportunity in front of you. If you hit the right keys in the keyboard, okay? Now, I think that's good. Overall, net, net, I think that's good. Now, does that mean that every single person is gonna come out ahead of where they were before? No, I can't. But do I think we could have something which is broadly win-win for individuals and society at large? I think we could. We should have to get into that mentality of self-strengthening and resilience and investing in each other, as opposed to tearing each other down and trying to say that everybody who's coming off is taking something from us and so on and so forth. That's what I think about. So, are you, you know, I just wanna slightly point out, so Peter Thiel is actually part of the descending class. That's what I think, I don't know what you're talking about. Well, it's interesting, so he obviously has a, well, okay, it's complicated, right? I mean, that might explain why some of his political vets these days seem to be in kind of controlling things rather than growing things. Well, it's complicated. Peter's an old friend and collaborator and investor and so on and things, okay? I think, first of all, he is absolutely built rich as opposed to born rich. So in that sense, you know, he's pure merit in that sense. I think he looks at it as his responsibility, because he immigrated to the US and so on. He looks as a responsibility to turn around the ship, okay? That's what he thinks he's doing. And I understand where that comes from and I understand different people have different views of where the ship is going and how to turn around and so on. But I think ultimately it comes from a good place of the America that he admired, that could put a man on the moon. He wants to build a country that's capable of doing that, okay? One may agree or disagree with his methods, but I think that's where he's coming from. And others may want, you know, the America of the 50s. Paul Krugman actually likes the America of the 50s. He's like, it was very deep in the social head. 97% tax rates. Other people idealize it for different reasons. Whereas an alternative view is that was great, just like the UK was great, just like Rome was great, just like other empires were great. And you know what, there may be some turnaround that is possible, I cannot fully discount that. But I also see all this stuff happening both internationally and sub-nationally. I see all these other things that I think, you know, it's probably unlikely that we're gonna put together something that looks exactly like what we were born with. Just like, for example, you know, the 20th century did not look like the 1800s of kings and queens. It looked completely different, right? And what does that look like if we were building it from scratch? You know, you would not have, I mean, just for example, anything you're building from scratch today, you're building it off the laptop, you're building it with code. The way that laws are put together, just as one example, a thousand page bill that's written at the last minute and someone slips in an amendment and that's pushed to 300 million people across the entire country. Anybody's written any code of any, and then it's tested in production, okay? Anybody's written any code of any kind, thinks that's insane. If you have a million person web service, you test the hack, you have small bits of code, you push them out one at a time, you test whether it works, you gather feedback, and then you have a reversion otherwise and you do that, right? That's like just one small example of how totally obsolete in many ways, the legislating, the operating system, and so on is within the US. And so therefore trying to kind of turn that into something that is gonna work, maybe it's possible, good luck to everybody who's trying. Yeah. But I think we should also try to build from scratch, and that's what the network says about it. I guess as a, well, let me ask you about the, kind of that mindset of leveling people up and of actualizing. You are in Washington to accept, or you were in Washington to accept the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Julian Simon Award, and Julian Simon was in the mid-90s, was dubbed the Doomslayer by Wired Magazine because he believed in kind of humans as literally the ultimate resource and in a world which was ever-expanding and ever-growing, and you know, that could just go at infinitum. Do you think we are in short supply of an abundance mindset? And how do we get more people oriented around the idea not of zero sum or that everything in our lives is degrading, but rather, no, this is, we can make more stuff with fewer inputs and everybody can be better off. Yeah. So the way I think about that is, you know, you can have, again, a V3, right? There's the sort of naive optimist, right? And they are attacked by the cynical pessimist. And I would actually, at least personally, I never call myself an optimist or a pessimist. I call myself a pragmatist or somebody who knows how much one individual can do. Abundance doesn't just come out of nowhere. The Super Abundance book is a good book because it shows it as possible, right? But you will need entrepreneurs, you will need investors, you will need engineers, you'll need people to actually build that future. And that future- Which I might point out is the brilliant point, Isaac, at the end of Peter Teal's Zero to One, is that the future does not just happen. It's happened by specific people trying specific things, not just waiting for it. To talk about it just for a second, basically, that's really the great man theory of history, right? Like, one person can make a difference. Standing against this is the concept that it's the tides of history we're all carried beyond it. And I've actually come up with, I think a synthesis of those two views, which is the tech tree model of history. Have you ever played the game Civilization? Yeah. Yeah. So you know there's a tech tree, and you can decide to explore this branch or explore that branch, right? So in the tech tree model, there is all that is known. Okay, all that is discovered. And then you as an engineer can branch over here or found over there. And what Satoshi did is he took a branch and he pushed it out. And he really was a great man because there's nobody else, there wasn't even a Leibniz to his Newton, right? As great as Newton is, there was a Leibniz, you know, in our personal event, he calculated this roughly contemporaneously. But Satoshi was really, there was nobody else who was kind of doing the same thing, you know, it took five years before Ethereum and whatnot, right? And so that's something which reconciles the two views. I mean, look, one person is not going to be able to rebuild technological civilization from scratch as per that CROB's email that we mentioned. Nevertheless, one person can push the tech tree in a very important direction. And then you can generalize the tech tree concept to the political tree or what happened. You're not going to be able to say, rewrite everybody's software from scratch, but you might be able to make a big difference. And so the abundance mentality, the Julian Simon mentality is, I think you can overcorrect into it to just say everything, you know, like be a Pollyanna and things, everything's just going to keep getting better or whatever. But I think the better version of it is, it is possible to make things better. It's our responsibility to do so. All right. I think we're going to leave it there. Apology. Thank you so much for talking of reason. And congratulations on the Julian Simon. Thank you.