06 - Network State Conference 2024 - Fireside with Naval Ravikant and Balaji Srinivasan

So Neville is maybe one of my.

Best friends in tech and a mentor.

To me for many years. And we both share belief in self improvement. And one of your most viral tweets of all time was the how to.

Get rich without getting lucky. And maybe you can talk about that for the audience. Yeah, so that was a random tweet.

Storm that I put out at 4am almost exactly like you see it.

And it was just kind of my.

Own principles of wealth creation. I was a kid, I was poor.

I went into the American dream. I moved to the United States when I was young.

I was lucky enough to. And obviously I wanted to be successful. If you solve your material problems, it's.

Kind of the base layer of your.

Functioning and then you can go solve.

All the other problems in life. And I just kind of wanted to.

Lay out what I felt like were.

The long term principles of wealth creation.

That I had concocted, internalized, absorbed in the world. I like Twitter. Twitter is a good place for failed poets. If you're good with words, but you don't like to write a lot, you don't like to write very long documents.

That'S a good place to synthesize your thoughts.

And these were my own thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head for a while.

And they seem kind of obvious to.

Me, to be honest. And I think they are.

And I just wrote them down in.

A way in which I think every word counted.

Twitter was very good at that because back then Twitter was 140 characters. And so it just, I was reinstituating.

It definitely took away a core little superpower of mine.

I went to 280 and now it's.

Just weird selling everywhere.

I've actually put up threads on how to tweet.

Well, I would ignore them, but there's.

Just a few simple rules that you know that Wells.

But you want to speak honestly, you want to say, well, you want to see something that's novel. You want to write for yourself, not for other people. You want to make each street stand alone. You want to shave off every extra word. You want to use common words, but not so common that they have no meaning. And you want to be a big.

Fit and you want to take a.

Point of view but always tell the truth.

And so that's kind of it.

And so how to Get Rich without Getting Lucky. It kind of in viral, it got famous podcast on it afterwards and God picked it up in a book.

And it's really a very high level, right, like 10% of what you and I actually know to be true. You said seeing there which was.

You thought it was obvious and I did too.

But I saw that I was like everybody really knows this.

Why is it getting like 120,000 lot or whatever it was. But there's.

And I actually dug back to. I mean you were coming out of business when I was coming out of academia and profit was like supposed to be a function of sufficient malevolence. If you're mean enough, you can make a high profit.

Right.

Capitalism exploitative.

And if you, if you have money.

You took it from somebody.

Which is obviously false.

Look at the caveman.

People were dividing up the carcasses from pre storm time.

So obviously we create things. I will say I think the east coast has that model because it's actually more true for them.

Absolutely. The more it's about dividing up the spoils and about using regulation and network.

Effects and all that stuff to kind of keep what you have.

And this is a common phenomenon you.

See in society even see with individuals which is after they've made it then.

They become either extractive or they become.

Faster with these systems.

And so for example, the current meme among the last billionaires are evil. Well yes, some of them may be right.

Depends how you got it.

I'm always amazed that the monarchy still exists in England.

That looks very good. One of my big points is San Francisco's budgets.

We both know it's like 12, $13 billion heirs on the earth. I think 12 supervisors and one mayor.

So they're all political billionaires.

The hell can't budget on their billion dollars of beans. Right. And actually what that means is that's actually far wealthier. People in government are far, far, far.

Wealthier than the mere tech billionaire who's actually poor by comparison.

That's as hard.

Most tech billionaires are poor.

Why? Because if you have a billion dollars.

Net worth, then you might have 50.

Million 100 million liquid most equity holders.

And that's over one's entire lifetime versus they're spending a billion in cash each year. They're like 100x.

Yeah. Obviously Elon Musk is the wealthiest man.

In the world and rightly so because.

He'S probably doing the most for humanity of anybody. But to say that he's worth $250 billion is not correct for him.

Cash that out on taunting cash at.

All for him to disappear.

What he instead has is he is the best hope for humanity to become a multi stellar species to go to the stars. And so the $250 billion of his.

Net Worth really represents the value of Giovanni's spacelift capability. That's where we are today.

And if you were to try to extract that from him, and he used keeper to scatter be worth precisely zero.

So it's much more a bet on us going to the stars thanks to.

What he's organized and he's got money that he's running on spending on his little more.

Generally, so much wealth is actually about.

Expectations of growth and the future and everything that's being done with de growth and so on is actually not just slowing the rate of growth, but being less wealthy.

But this is where I think defining wealth is important. People think of wealth as hoarded money, but really wealth is a byproduct of knowledge. If you look at wealth, it's a.

Combination of two things. And David Deutsch is a great definition of what he says.

Wealth is the ability to transformations, to transform things from one thing to another.

So if I can turn electricity into.

Cars, or if I can turn labor into oil or whatever, to turn money into other stake, if I can swap it, that is the transformative ability is wealth.

But now if you look at what.

Allows us to transform one thing to.

Another, some of it is capital stuff, but most of it is know how.

The caveman had access to all the.

Same resources that we could do that to them. Uranium wasn't even saying.

Oil is just like a sticky substance that they used to stumble across once in a while. So the vast, vast majority of wealth is actually knowledge. Right. So most people who are knowledgeable, actually.

Incredibly wealthy, they just choose not to.

Use it, or maybe they do choose.

To use it down the road. And I think that's very encouraging, especially.

Now with the Internet, you, knowledge is so readily accessible.

Now, of course, the right kinds of.

Knowledge that I call specific knowledge by tube store is very important knowledge on the edge of what humanity knows and wants. And if you work hard enough at it, if you're obsessed with it, you figure it out. That kind of knowledge can be monetized much more than certain knowledge, which is now common.

For example, if ChatGPT gets spitted out to you saying you're not going to.

Monetize it, everybody else can get access to it too.

It's funny because AI really does show the bandwidth, but not the pursuits. Like, you know, just if you're doing something in the physical world, or if you're doing something genuinely innovative, then you're good creativity.

Like people confuse creativity with oh, I'm painting or I'm writing books. Creativity is solving Problems, it is solving problems in new ways, in new ways that aren't just simple extrapolations or interpolations of existing ways. And that's something that still I think.

Here it's uniquely new. AI does not do.

I think AI is a little overdate, but you know, it's natural language computing is very effective. It's not solving new problems that we didn't know how to solve. But that said, most of our lives.

Are spent in drudgery. They were spent in physical drudgery.

And physical automation has gone a long.

Ways to getting rid of that.

Dishwashers, washing machines and all that in cars. But now a lot of it's spent in intellectual drudgery. So they have forms, writing reports, essays, emails for things that aren't obvious. So a lot of work is busy work.

And the promise of natural language computing and artificial intelligence is to take that.

Over from us and to leave us for true creativity, which is solving problems that we don't yet know how to solve. And it's where all the value is. So on that topic, like just on AI for a second, I think of AI at least what it is now as amplified intelligence. And so the smarter you are, the better your prompts are, the greater you'll.

Cheat together these tools, the more of.

A multiplier is in your intelligence.

F loves to agency outside of human. We have.

That part isn't really there. You can work it up on you.

And say drones have agency on something. You can track it back to someone's giving that direction. And I have a technical argument as to why I think it's going to be at least a new technical breakthrough to get there.

But like here, your thoughts.

Do you think it's just, you know, a matter of scaling and then you look at agency as an immersion?

I don't think scaling alone will do it. I'm not saying it's impossible. I think absolutely AGI is possible, which.

Is what I think you're referring to, But I think it requires different technical approach of the company. I don't know what it is, but.

I do think the current AI is.

Incredibly good at a list of things. In my head it was like six things and translation is what it was usually designed for. Transcription.

Or driving assist coding.

Coding is just a more valued problem.

Than general creativity generation like art and.

Video and then finally categorization and summarization kind of extrapolation. So all the word games, none of.

That is solving problems and new ideas.

Now humans do that uniquely, but they.

Don'T do that often.

It's still rare amongst humans. If you made one fundamental, truly creative.

Breakthrough in your life, that would probably.

Be enough to get to all the.

Material rewards that you want. But that is really the products of human beings. Will AI get there? I think it'll require different technology on basis or computer. Yeah.

So my typical argument, and I'm sure.

One of my colleagues will argue with.

Me on this, is everything that you described.

There is training on a time invariant.

Target, like the mapping for example.

The rules of chess are time invariant.

They don't change over time. The mapping from the string dog to an actual image of a dog doesn't change that much. But if you're in the realms of politics or markets where past performance doesn't predict future results, it's a non ergotic kind of thing. You might not just be able to train things and people have actually shown something that that's how you can get.

That material on AI.

AI that's trained on something you've got how to sample and it's actually engineered to go after that.

There's no reason why it's theoretically impossible.

It's theoretically absolutely possible.

We are walking in AGIs and we.

Create AGIs and I am super creator AGIs.

So it's absolutely doable.

And this is how we want to approach the AGI.

But fundamentally what we are is we.

Are doing toward complete universal computers. We're universal explainers and we can get.

There in other ways. Not sure are we going to get.

There in some low timescale by throwing compute at it?

I don't know. I don't see that at the same time is what's going on today very important? Impressive. Absolutely. If you've been in a Waymo or a Tesla FSD vehicle, or if you.

Use AI to compute research or math.

Or if you use a search large natural language databases, I think it's incredibly valuable.

But it doesn't have its own agency. It's a contradiction.

It doesn't have its own desires. And this whole idea that we can somehow make AI safe is nonsense. Because creativity by its nature is unbounded. Any thought can lead to any other thought.

You can keep the entire search space.

Of possibilities in your mind.

And so because of that I'm saying.

Like look at AI that is somehow.

Brilliant and independent, but yet other constrained.

The way it thinks is a logical contradiction. It's like sitting at a computer that.

I know the next place the thing.

Is going to go. Even though the code is opaque to be it's probably level halting problem all.

That'S a different discussion.

Well, you know, one of the things.

We'Ve been thinking a lot about is how the cloud takes a hit and embodied AI is taking drones.

Whether it's taking it or it's being put into it as best level four. Right. So it's being put into drones and self driving cars and humanoids and so on. And what we're doing here is we're taking these social networks and we're materializing.

Them in the physical world. Right. And I'd like to know, you know.

You'Ve actually, you know, you're about 10.

Years old, you could be, you've seen ingenuities even more cuckoo that it is now, are people taking the Internet seriously enough or not? That's my opinion. What do you think? Yeah, the future is very highly distributed. I think one of the things that.

We are constantly surprised by in the tech industry is just how technically illiterate people are. The real problem our society is not illiteracy.

We've conquered illiteracy, it's in literacy. Most people are incredibly uncomfortable with even basic mathematics. And that's kind of an indictment of the educational system.

But if you have basic literacy and.

Basic computer literacy, you are living in the future.

You're way ahead of the vast majority of people.

And so the Internet is here. But I forget who famously said it's the future. It's bad to be ignorant, but it's.

Acceptable to be ignorant. Right. And I would argue numeracy is almost more important. It's almost impossible to be a literate in modern society.

If you've got YouTube attentions and if you kind of just pay attention a little bit, you'll catch more literacy.

Numeracy is not only harder to acquire, but it's sort of more acceptable to dodge.

It's okay to say, well, I'm not a math person.

Well, if you want to be big money, if you want to be functional, if you want to understand how to navigate modern society, I would argue that basic mathematics probably more important than anything.

Else at that time.

So somewhat going back to the original.

Thing so you know how to get.

Rich without getting lucky. One of the things that they aren't teaching people, for example, is this has.

Been said many times, they don't teach kids in school compound interest.

They don't teach about credit cards, they.

Don'T teach about taxes, they don't teach.

Them about all of this kind of stuff.

And so to what extent a lot of what you talk about is something.

I also believe in.

Of course, our Community, all these, everybody here believes I wish it's some getting better.

And.

How much of that some of it is skilled, heavier, the term skill, you know, the phrase whatever skill issue.

Goes to your head.

So that is sort of the inverse.

Most of what I think you talk.

About, we talked about how to get better in a, hey, you should improve yourself. And the flip side of that is.

Okay, you didn't get better, you didn't improve yourself.

It's skill issue, it's on you. Right. And so I think that's true to an extent.

But I also think there's other things.

Where you might need a sovereign collective and not just a sovereign individual. I'd like to know your thoughts on that. Yeah, I mean, I think the only real improvement is self improvement. As you know, I don't really believe in groups other than as a vehicle.

For the individual to prove themselves. All rights to fundamentally individual rights.

All seeking is an individual thing.

Curiosity is an individual thing.

Groups are effective for getting things done.

Humans are an organized species. We're not high in mind like ants.

Or bees, but we are meant to.

Kind of rally together, use our ideas, tell stories to each other, inspire each other, and then use collective efforts to get what we want.

But if you're looking to improve yourself.

Or if you're looking to figure out the truth, you're probably much better off as an individual following your own natural curiosity. And that's really what it boils down to.

His curiosity and sort of commitment to learning the correct answer. And I think if you have that.

Then you can fulfill almost any desire.

All the tools are there, guys.

I've talked before on Twitter, like the.

Mutual learning or abundance is a desire to learn that's scarce and that's truly within me. Most of the time I'm exhausted.

I want to learn, I just want to relax that I'm already good at. But at the same time, if I look back on my life, almost like everything great that I've managed to pull off, which is great by my own definition, not by the world's definition, following.

My own natural intellectual obsessions. So I think if you can get obsessed over something and if you can.

Dive into it and sort of just.

Let yourself go and just learn everything.

About it with no motivation other than.

Just you want to know the answer. I think that is the kind of.

Basis for all of the so called.

Self improvement out there. You have Brian Johnson here somewhere. He's obsessed with 9 and AJ. Well, he's obsessed, he's following his intellectual obsession and we all get to learn from that.

You're following your obsession on the network stage. There are people out there following their obsession on AI, on crypto, and people are following their obsession on history, Roman.

History, whatever it is. But if you get obsessed with something.

You can figure it out to a detail that other people don't. It can satisfy yourself.

If you go deep enough into anything, you find the same commonality, if you.

Find the same philosophies. As a weird aside, I've gone into photography recently.

I'm young, kids don't ask me why, but it is a way of combining.

Art and science, being social and antisocial.

To be something utilitarian. But sure enough, I'm obsessed.

All the philosophical photography blogs where the author is talking about what is the meaning of life and what is art, what is science, et cetera.

If you go deep into anything, you'll find the same kind of common threads. And so I think that self improvement really just comes from letting you be.

Yourself, follow the things that you really want to follow, figuring out the things that you want to figure out, not worrying about what other people want or other people think.

And then you kind of find yourself in the same place at the end.

No matter which route you.

So that's really good.

So you've had.

There's one thing that I. Well, let me actually poke a little bit on something, right, which is having.

To think about this more.

And here's a frame that maybe look.

At me, I'll just do.

So, you know people who are capitalists.

Who are kind of markets and so on. We see a lot of people who say, oh, I'd love to.

Making money is easy or creating wealth is easy, or they think that Elon.

Is dumb or something like that.

We see lots of people who see things like this and they're like, if.

You only knew how hard it was.

Why don't you get in the ring and try it?

Right? Yeah.

And here is.

It's not completely true, but somewhat symmetrical thing.

It's not completely symmetrical is a lot of people in tech feel why is.

The government, you know, why are regulations.

Hitting me and so on and so forth, but haven't actually said, okay, what does it take to actually get serious about getting political power?

Like the people who are good at politics are often bad at markets. The people who are good at markets are often bad at politics.

But you need to kind of play both your left and right hand and.

That'S what you're going to think about more and more. That's what I think about the sovereign politics and markets are very different politics and my definition of politics is the.

Exercise of power without merit.

It's basically you get to allocate resources, you get to control things that you create.

And so it's kind of an awful thing.

I think a lot of people who are creative don't want to play the political game. But the problem is politics minds you.

And then people get dragged into it.

In an ideal world we wouldn't have to spend a lot of time on politics.

But as you know, the sovereign thesis.

That violence under everything. So here's why I'm sucking right now is if at least I've started thinking about politics as the market for votes.

And like any market, a market can't be corrupt, it can't have oligopolies, it can have pollution, especially if it's cold.

Market and so on. So but in other markets.

And so it was time. Yes.

I mean all the car manufacturers colluded and so on. We want to figure it out a.

Way, if you're something that is market.

For bullets, we might be able to figure out a way to reframe it.

Into something that actually we can put our minds to work on. That's why there's two very different things.

Here that I think might be getting mixed up, which is there's the mob and there's markets. And most of them seem like, oh.

It'S just groups of people and it's with them up crowds of different things. A market is when you have a bunch of independent actors who are making.

Their own decisions and being punished or succeeding based on their predictions. But it is a crowd.

But it is the wisdom of crowd.

So a mob is murdered.

That's right.

Angels will think exactly the same instead of think different.

So a group of people thinking disease.

Cooperative is the market.

A group of people who are thinking.

The same is a mob. And mobs are inherently very powerful. They can be very violent. You don't want to be in the.

Way of a snap getting hurt. But at the same time that's not.

A cheat seeking mechanism.

That's not going to give the correct answer.

So you can call it democracy, right? But democracy, one person, one vote. True democracy is the third majority, that's.

51% controlling other 49.

But a market based democratic voting like.

It is was a very different saying. That's where it's saying I have the right to exit.

I would like to vote with my money or my time or with my effort. That's going to lead to a very different outcome.

That is probably depending on the situation.

That may be a better political system. The reason I think about the certain circuits over the very long scope, there's certain words that are so big that they contain both like ex antomus and.

Like Christianity as both the religion that.

Tore down the Roman Empire and then.

Basically sort of justification for the later Holy Roman Empire.

You know, there's both the slave religion.

And the religion of kings and there's many things that are like that. And it's meant very different things, you.

Know, since like the agrarian democracy to the industrial era democracy turned our information era democracy. So the market for votes, including states.

Competing for citizens is. Of course you've written about something like.

This with your securitizing citizenship thing a while back as I was having this blog post a long time ago. I love it, it's called securitized citizenship. But what it was pointing out was that right now immigration is a zero.

Sum game where a couple of people.

Get to decide how much immigration there is and whether they enforce the laws and who comes in and so on.

And mostly the natives just lose out on it.

Although a few of them went out.

On it or they wouldn't do it.

Maybe it's politicians importing voters at the.

Post cynical side, or maybe it's just importing cheap labor.

But the problem is that then being immigrants, they compete with the locals. And so you have this issue like.

Is immigration good or bad?

Well, if you could just bring in Elon Musk's immigration would be great. We would all be incredibly wealthy. So I think what's important is to have separate legal from illegal immigration, to.

Separate high skill from low skill immigration and to give people a stake in it.

So like extreme thought exercise.

What if you meet every person, enter a passport to blind passport and then.

They can sell it off. They can choose the immigrant who comes in as well.

Then you'd go looking for the next Elon Musk and say, hey man, I want 10%, 10% of whatever you're in the future.

And you get to come in.

You have to make it so it.

Doesn'T create slavery and it's enforceable and all that good stuff.

But you could literally sell off America and retire.

You could give every American extra passport.

They could choose who comes. Anything extreme.

It would be like a recurring bonus.

We laugh at it in the country context. If you're running a company, that's exactly how you would do it. Tourism is saying, hey, you get to recruit somebody and this person either works.

For you or works with you. And then it reflects upon you whether this person you're really good or not.

And if they're bad, you have to fire them.

And if they're good, then you get.

A piece of whatever they create or.

They create equity value for all of us. I'm not sure if Paul Davison Clubhouse had heard you talking about that.

Because they implemented Clubhouse, people may notice inspired Twitter spaces and had a really big surge.

But one of the things that they implemented was something you were talking about where you could see who had invited.

Who in the app and often you've forgotten about that.

You installed an app five years ago and where would you get the invite from?

It's also.

How humans probability work.

If you go to a foreign inventor.

Party and you bring someone who's born short in trouble. The systems that we're using for these large governments now, for these oversized bloated governments, they require trust, but they don't have trust. It's the very heterogeneous society.

Nuclear families extend their families. So kind of trust based mechanisms broken down.

And we have low trust societies. So then you have top down enforcement. Okay, there's one health care system for everybody, there's a police system which is.

Kind of like random, that treats everybody.

As a criminal up until a point.

So you need to have trust. And so the nice thing about the Internet is you can actually create trust based accountability. You can do it based on who invited who, who's got what reputation and.

What rights, who's got in crypto.

That is putting money at stake and it can be slashed if you don't actually follow through with your commitments and so forth. So I do think that the Internet marrying into local governance allows you to.

Do much more clever governance. And as you saw in a bit of layer slides earlier, where you have basically come up with a way to do voting, adjudication, policing and taxation, all volunteering with exit rights through the Internet. And voting is like, yeah, I pledge my vote to this slate of this candidate and this set of policies.

I pledge my money, my taxing, my tithing to these sets of people who.

I trust to administer it.

And if they're doing a bad job.

And I can read about it elsewhere.

Police say if I put money or my citizenship at stake and it can.

Be slashed by these people and adjudication.

These are just the jury of my peers that I still like to be governed by.

And this kind of model involuntary system enabled by the Internet, I think it's very powerful. I think, you know, so I give anybody here who said token 20, 49 or the donkey stuff and technology there, how to publish it online.

That's what Level is speaking about.

And I think the core, at least for me, the core insight was the same technology that's used to securely send.

One coin can be used to securely send one vote. And the main issue with Bitcoin is.

Whether people thought it was real and.

That the settlement layer was actually on chain. That's the key. It's a consciousness, I believe, whether people.

Think this election is real if it's happening purely online or on chain. And I think that's now a solvable thing. So wait for more of this.

But basically, if you can accumulate a million techno democratic votes, like basically a bunch of people essentially pledging voting for.

President, but voting for president, networks came on chain, then you actually have more.

Democratic support than many legacy governments. It's provable.

That's cryptographically verifiable.

Every vote counts as capital votes. So this is like using the Internet to deal with some of these other.

Problems, but in a third way, like a clever cloud way. Go ahead. It's incredible. I had thought that the Internet would solve a whole bunch of the problems that we see in our society today.

Like for example, I thought you recruit cameras would solve crime because then you had physical crime because you could just see the arrest of person.

But we got around that enforcement laws.

The same way you would expect that.

Okay, now we have the technology to be secure, verifiable online voting.

You can use a blockchain, you can get your audit record together with your private key. You can keep the vote anomalous and.

You can verify it as part of total technology or exist. No, instead we're going to have mailing ballots and sketchy black box boxes, or we're going to have ballot harvesting about stuff, no ID requirement. This is going to be all over the place. And it's because the political desire is not there, because people are much more.

In tune of hacking the system to.

Get into their outcome rather than having.

A quote, unquote fair system.

And so the only way to create something or the only way to do.

Something that actually uses these different technologies is to build something new for the ground up. That's right. And I think the way I sort.

Of classify the world right now is we have these. We have existing institutions that are denying while declining.

We have the people who recognize they're.

Declining and are trying to fix that.

And then actually bidding in the wings.

That are much, much stronger than anybody in the west really wants to admit. China is strong. Zion is strong.

I like Peter Zion, but China is.

Strong and they're getting stronger every day.

I like China's economy, atomic sales of very Chinese people and so on and so forth. But essentially power horse vacuum and one of the things that's happening is it's very underreported.

I'm not sure this may be on your radar but like US troops are.

Being pulled back from like Mali and.

Niger and all these places in the.

Sahel they have left Afghanistan. Russian troops are moving in Chinese.

There's a power vacuum around the world.

That'S actually being filled by China or China plus Russia. Southeast Asia is more active and so on and so forth. The reason that's important is there's an.

Illusion in the west had o we.

Could just figure it out one day and like cramming for a task will give supply chain. That's a real challenge in 1945. Again it's commonly from many of our friends actually. Right, go ahead.

Well, I mean I think militarily things are shifting a lot. The Russia, Ukraine war is turning into a drone war and drone technology. The Chinese lead everybody mostly because we.

Ban drones like to the U.S. the.

FAA is very good.

I understand their father reasons why.

But nevertheless there is no home grown US drill industry that can compete with.

The Chinese mass market branch into Japan.

Completely drill or do incredible things on the defense side.

But we don't have the mass production.

Capability of small drills or data like China does. And so I think the next war the west might be in for a very rude surprise. That well targeted drill swarm is as.

Disruptive as nuclear weaponry.

Absolutely.

Can literally take over entire nations very quickly. And so I think in a weird.

Way the US does dependent upon a very small number of innovators like Pamela.

Key, maybe Elon will get into it people who are building high quality drones. But you can see this in Ukraine.

Russia that is entirely a drone war. Now everything that is going on and the future of technological warfare is if.

You can see it, you can kill it. Drones are red bullets. And there's one last point that people.

Make this mistake where they think like oh, global DC is tougher than an empty. Now they're going to be inertial guided, self guided, maybe autonomous, as easy as people think of lasers. And the technology does not exist yet. It's really far off, it's very expensive. We'll have counter drones because of the.

Creating cyber surprise concentration and gravity other side forces. So a combination of intelligence for drones is going to be the dominant weapon system in the future.

Or already is today. And as far as I can tell.

Western militaries are completely async aircraft carriers of submarines and wasting money on those.

Kinds of big F35s or so.

And the reason for that is similar.

Is that the guys on horseback in the start of World War I they.

Just had to be cut to ribbons enforced by machine guns because they had.

Built a whole culture around being a cavalry officer. And there were a bunch of talented for that. It was noble and my grandfather did it with the mustache and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, it's absolutely right.

The cavalry recharging machine for what's going to happen.

You can already see this, that lunar rebels who are essentially.

They should be. Yeah, they should be nobody. They've basically taken over the Red Sea.

And every American carrier battle group had to flee out of the region before it got blown up.

There's some extending targets if we actually add them. I mean there's a bunch of things I'm seeing.

You're seeing a bunch of things. There's things that are happening aa the.

Houthisi basically one in the Red Sea. Like if you look at it's unusual. There's like a graph that determines the outcome like a single scalar graph on it we use in terms of outcome of a conflict. But all these ships still have to go around Suez unless they're China and.

Russia approved that they go along.

They have to go around the Cape and Goodhold unless China and Russia allow them to go through service. Okay, that's defeat for the US military.

B they're being forced to pull out of all these regions.

C they have graphics that I pose from time to time.

US military is made in China. Like I love Elon, I love Bomber, they're amazing. But in many ways it's like Milford is being later say and as opposed to all Soviets now history is running in reverse.

This time the US side has a.

Small group of like, you know, like a few really bright spots in technology.

But fundamentally it's an depth and say Bitcoin's the top end of the top end is dependent. They have some amazing scientists attitudes to theirs but their systems took a lot of it to scale and it's just too social. That's where I think the west ends.

On a lot of where the west.

Gets to win is a creativity. But you would have to kind of pump up a little bit because if.

Elon has factories that are making robots and then those robots are making drones.

And he was unfettered then I think we would have a Much better chance. But the current trajectory is a little bit interesting. So my view is from Gersthagen and like this, we're on the other side of the world. We're not really the west, right? But there's something continuous still.

And what it's me is a British.

Millennium tradition, the tradition of criticism, science, learning, progress in a technological sense, innovation. Version 3.0 is V1 plus UK common law, V2 constitution V3, encryption and smart contracts. Right. And so version 3.0, the Internet capitalism is more money than Angelo, like American capitalism and inside democracy, I think it's.

Going to be more powerful and so.

On and so forth. So in many ways, I think actually here's a thesis for you. I think if the world really reduces.

8 billion people to four forces right now, this is going to be my closing talk.

But China's Indians as a group are rising. Indian diaspora globally. And the Western nostalgia state is down. And Americans, if they're aligned with the network rising, if they're aligned with the state, are generally declining. And that's actually the right axis of thinking about that because there's lots of.

Americans, lots of Westerners doing very well if they're aligned to the Internet. And the more they rely on state.

The worse they're doing.

And that split, if you apply that.

Lens, you actually, I think the term.

It'S the level of freedom that's what drives innovation and creativity and learning. And freedom is a big word. It means lots of things to lots of people, but it is very much as you get larger, larger states, it.

Gets on the run.

It almost doesn't even matter who is in charge.

Once you get past a certain size, the fact that somebody is in charge and that is connected from things on the ground, you just get too much.

Control and you can stifle your freedom. Historically, the frontier was always where you.

Had a lot of city states. So you go back to Athens and Greece, that was the place to be.

During those times, because you had lots of city states. And people had the fear to move.

Around and go to wherever their intellectual.

Peers were and do whatever they could.

Do at that time that didn't have somebody else reading about the next thing. No, you can't do that. That happened with Italian city states.

That happened with even Germany and parts of Europe during the Renaissance period.

That happened with the US under federalism.

When the state's rights were dominant, the federal government was that large. And you had the frontier people who go west. So it's always a question of where is the new frontier and I think.

What'S interest interesting here is you're creating.

A series of new frontiers, condars scattered around in pop up areas, in cities, states and network states.

And they're sort of connected by the Internet.

People can move around and reorganize as needed. Elon wants to go to Mars and terraform that race. There's also interesting things going on. For example, if you go to Dubai or Saudi Arabia, they're using cheap energy.

Desalination plants to terraform and to make entire areas handable. And the Internet itself is an intellectual shift here where you can only be out on the Internet. You can deal in crypto and you.

Know, on Twitter and you can just live your life there and build your life there. So all the innovation is always going to come in the places that are freest, the places that are freest at the frontier.

Eventually the masses get them and they want to cut off the model, they want to make things predictable and safe. So they cut off the top to stop the innovation. So one of my mental models is the fractal frontier.

Right. You've got all of these pockets that we're expanding now with everybody here around the world. Right.

And such thing is physically it's distributed but intellectually it's concentrated because these are the same tenant groups and stuff.

There's a section of the whole of.

Everywhere that we hang out in.

And America was the opposite where it.

Was concentrated but extracted all these different kinds of people around the world that.

Wanted to come to that location. Right.

So you sort of improve that pattern. That's how I kind of think about the world today.

Yeah, America was very successful because we're magnet for the best people. And it just brought in the most all these institutions and all these brands.

That would have worked and they can.

Keep going for quite a while. In fact, Empire seems a long time.

To say if they can keep going for generations and generations.

Although in the age of Internet everything gets better. Now if you are an incredibly ambitious.

Person, the first thing you want to.

Do is you want to learn English.

Because that's the lingua product called the Internet.

So that gives you access to the most data.

It's like that can change.

By the way, the AI AI translation.

We think that is really, really good.

Which I think will be great for humanity. One remark on that by the way.

Is English and Chinese are arguably the two most surveilled languages. And if you step outside of that.

Into something that's like more of a.

It's harder, they just have less training data and so I think it's surveillance languages.

Are really good, even in the obscure languages.

Actually you're right. Nan Friedman's language actually works with solid AI. But I think if you're an ambitious.

Person who wants to operate Frontier today.

The first thing you do is you, you get good at the Internet.

Do that by being good in English and you're knowing how to mad we can be the less safe parts of.

The Internet, the less controlled parts of the Internet. So that's why I say Internet first as distinct from let's say first or.

Internet first is 10 words, build some oval first. Where it's both like a technical strategy, it's also a sort of social or political strategy.

Like for example, take migration problems or what happened. Well actually if you accelerate immigration, let's.

Assume that this particular policy doesn't work anymore.

With the event we can reduce the.

Power of exit so we can get.

People out and then we can also.

Recruit them somewhere else.

And almost anything if you ask what's the Internet for a solution to that.

With the Internet for a solution to.

The Fed is Bitcoin was a gentle solution to massive decline in SpaceX, etc. Right. That's how we kind of think. But I think at least I don't.

Think we can put a thumb on.

It in our community quite that way. Human creativity is nonlinear.

It's an idea space is a nonlinear domain where the right idea can be worse, almost infinite about the wrong ideas. And so it's only a small number.

Of innovators that are needed to really, really drive any endeavor, whether it's philosophy.

Or law, politics or technology or society. So just assembling a small number of.

The right people to interact with each other will drive everything.

Every revolution, whether it's scientific, political, technological or physical, is driven by a small number of like minded people who are.

Kind of at the cutting edge of.

Thought, getting together and research. That's true of Lena and Trotsky and the Bolsheviks. That's true of the founding fathers, that's.

True of the scientific revolution in the 1800s, that's true of the times of.

Medicine and all the people creating stuff in the us.

That's true of Silicon Valley. So you just need to figure out.

How to get a small number of.

Very innovative people boosting the idea space.

Together and cooperating with each other to.

Sort of create needs the next round of institutions.

And unfortunately most of the world lives in heuristics. They go into the old institutions like oh, Harvard, that's an institution.

New York Times institution. They must Be right.

Science magazine or Nature Journal, they must be right. No, these are brands that have been hijacked to a large degree. They are using the brand. Yes, there's still some legitimate accuracy, good stuff that comes out of there, but a lot of it now is politicized or not very high quality. So unfortunately, we have to build new.

Experience institutions that are highly legit, they have to be 10 times more legit.

They have to prove on chain voting.

They have to have truth, they have.

To pass out when they're wrong, and.

They have to attract the absolute best and brightest thinkers in the world to kind of be together.

Arthur Schopenhauer is one of my favorite philosophers.

And it's a great saying.

To be alone is a fate of all great souls.

If you're intelligent, at some point, the.

Thing that you crave the most more than anything else, as a company of.

Other intelligent people care about, you gotta.

Kind of get away from all the rules and all the systems that are designed by the minwits, you know, as.

You like to say, to keep the dimwits. I have no problem with obviously people.

Being intelligence or whatever is fine.

It's only if they're like arrogant and condescending and they're also ignoring that sort of.

Well, if, yeah, arrogant. Condescending is also a form of non intelligence.

Because if you're to be intelligent, you have to be curious.

And if you're curious, you care about the truth and you don't care about being wrong. I'm wrong all the time. People call me out like, oh, you provide us your views on AI. What are you all. Everything. Right.

But I'm kind of struck at the answer and I'm trying to be consistent with what the image you have of me. I've been terrorized.

So in any case, I think what.

I'm saying is that creating institutions and.

Communities that let smart people gather to innovate into a few dozen, a few.

Hundred, a few thousand people can come.

Up with the right ideas that will.

Completely change things for everybody.

And that I think is a promise.

In every school I'm not attending.

We actually have a lot of smart people in this room.

And actually how many of you have the devolved egg by mellow copies? So, okay, that's actually a pretty good joke.

So in our time remaining, what's the Almanac 2024? What should all these people be thinking about with top of mind? If you're young, you're smart, or you're young at heart, there are a lot of obviously cutting edge people what are you thinking about?

What should they be working on? 5 should be working on whatever you.

Want to work on. That's number one. Your own native obsession and curiosity will take you much where they can't follow anybody else's path.

You cannot follow anybody else's path.

That said, I view my whole life as problem solving, as David Deutsch likes to say. And I would recommend to everybody to go read the Big Data, Affinity and the fabric of Reality. They rewired my brain, made me smarter. I think that's the number one reading advice. And people will say, go off and.

Say, oh yeah, I read the book, come back later.

And you don't really read it, actually properly absorb it. There's a whole Korean philosophy in there.

That is grounded in physics, mathematics, reality.

But also teaches you how to give.

You mental frameworks for how to think.

And what is life and what is intelligence? So that's one thing, but what are the important things in life? The important things in life to me are, number one, you got to take.

Care of your material needs. You have to have some physical leverage in the physical world. So that means you have to create.

Something that society wants. And as a byproduct of $9 million and, and you can make some money. Money is a store of value in.

The speeds of your time and the.

Speeds of your time to help others.

To go do what you want. What are the other things that you.

Want out of life that you can't.

Get out of money?

My personal list is three things that you can't buy. And it's my favorite little note to.

Myself on the Internet, which is body.

A calm mind, and a house full of love.

These are the things that cannot be bought, they must be earned.

It's a constant reminder to myself there is a force which is respect. But I would argue you don't chase.

Respect because that becomes fame. And the easiest way to kind of.

Not be some unworthy respect is to chase respect.

Respect, subversion.

Respect is emergent as an emergent byproduct. But at the same time you can't.

Become a slave to it.

Otherwise you become like a celebrity and a celebrity of the most miserable people in the world. Can I share an observation?

Do you want this? Sorry, can I share an observation? Basically, I had the realization the other day of spending some time in academia.

Because I was thinking he has been.

Spent time in academia, that it's not just that Google page rank and backlinks are citations, it's that citations themselves are backlinks.

That is to say they don't involve.

Any replication of a paper.

They just have a social network called.

Academia and they link to each other. And if you get two links, that's.

Paper, it's like two likes on your article and it's peer reviewed. And so all you really need to.

Do to build up something so that it's the equal of these declining activity is built another social network that links.

To each other internally.

And that's a higher IQ and higher quality. And so that respect is actually emergent because people will start setting it over this.

Right? It doesn't matter who listens to you or likes you, as long as the.

Right people, the people that you listen.

To and like, like you. That's what matters. So I would rather have the respect of 10 people who I respect, rather.

Respect it the best. And this is a popularity context.

And sure, that made more sense in wonky times, but in modern times, I.

Would argue that having the right 10.

People listen to you is far more.

Important than having everyone listen to you. In terms of the checklist, it was.

In body, I know you're thinking that somewhere with network school, Brian Johnson is here and you find a secret going with the soul. You a into that. Yeah, it would be all in the shape. I think the answer there is pretty obvious. Work out hard, like doing great, building sugar. Right. We all know what to do is to have the discipline to do it, which is hard. A calm mind is a bigger problem, but I think everybody wants to have a calm mind.

Meditation, you've talked about that before. Yeah. Meditation is an overloaded word.

It means everything to every person.

I think understanding is probably a better.

Route in that what you want to be is you don't want to be meditative for an hour a day while you sit there with your eyes closed. You're being meditative all the time.

And so anything that is consistently with.

You is a byproduct of understanding.

It's a deep conviction. And you're only going to get there.

By thinking it through for yourself. In a way, reading other people's philosophy, including reading the almanac, is like reading.

The answers to a bunch of math problems. Like you got a math textbook and you stick to the end, you start reading the answers.

Well, that's not going to do anything for you. What you want is the understanding so you can get inspired by other people.

But you have to figure it out for yourself. And it is in which you have deep conviction.

They do modify your psyche, they do modify your mind, they do modify your internal system state.

And so that's the kind of meditation that you want. You also don't want to self obsess too much.

You want to find things outside of.

Yourself if you want to compromise.

Because all depressed people are victims of rumination.

They're self obsessed.

They're constantly speaking about themselves.

And you can see that people who.

Are either religious or they have children may have something that be a lot more than themselves. They're not self obsessed.

So they can kind of get out.

Of their own mind. So that sense of the modern therapy.

Where you can just sit in with a therapist at blood circles for 10 years can be a trap because you're.

Just obsessing about yourself all over again. And the more seriously you take yourself.

The less happy you're going to be. Because at the end of the day there's nothing unless Brian Johnson gets us to be forever. You exit this world the same way you came in with absolutely nothing.

You can't take your video. And then finally the house full of love is actually the easiest one for.

People who wrap themselves up in knots over it. Because you can create it anytime you want.

Just love the people in your life.

That you can express your love. It's the wanting love back, that neediness.

That craving that is the problem.

But you can create love anytime you want. So I think that if you can kind of make your money and work on those three, then you're in pretty good shape. That to me is about self improvement. Especially because, you know, people like I would have somewhat expected you to say.

In addition to all that, what areas.

For example tech you're looking at now J But that's actually all secondary to the one substrate. The tech comes and goes.

The frontier always moves around. I'm highly inspired by Elon and all the stuff he's doing. Tesla big self driving and robotics, electric cars and stuff that he's done. Solar getting cheap and viable.

And obviously SpaceX is just such an inspiration and a great effort Company tech is interesting.

AI is interesting. Maybe a little overplayed. So you can validate every company instead of saying the response where they're saying AI. But.

I think the tech is technology set of things that doesn't quite work yet.

There's a lot of things that don't quite work yet. So every time we try to build things and make them better and make them work and we try to automate.

Them, there's opportunity for technology.

One that I'm personally curious about is, and it kind of goes towards your network state philosophy is terraformation. Terraforming physical spaces.

So if we can make energy incredibly.

Cheap with nuclear power or solar and we can desalinate large amounts of water.

Then we can clean deserts. And now it's Starlink.

You've got Internet with solar panels you have power wherever you want desalination, you have incredible amounts of water available. We can start turning more and more.

Of the earth into Mediterranean from I.

Love all of this. I think one of the things I realized is everything that we're doing, we have to win the market for boats.

To handle that somehow. They look at the political packaging.

If you could take Forest island and you could turn it into Mediterranean weather, everybody would be meeting.

Everybody was telling meaning about Netherland or.

It'S a small place, but less than 1% of the Earth's land is Mediterranean climate.

That's the great old civilization.

These are either the wealthiest, most far over places in the world and frankly.

Governments that have access to those regions use them as a weapon. They use them as a way to keep people there.

For example, the Bay Area is Mediterranean weather. San Diego to eliminate corridor has the best weather in the world. And that becomes their resource curse as their oil.

So they can run it like Saudi.

Arabia used to run their country.

Can be very good. You don't leave because the weather's too.

Good, the geography is too good, the infrastructure is too good, the food is.

Too good, the climate is too good.

I think we're going to start fixing that.

I'm kind of hopeful.

I heard somebody say the other day that they're going to green Dubai.

They're going to make it like the.

Greenest city in the world by 2030. God bless.

You guys are great.

Have some lunch and we'll see you in about an hour.