55 - Network State Conference 2025 - Closing Address by Balaji

All right, so Network City 2025, let me give some closing remarks and we'll do Q and A. So I think that was pretty amazing. Hopefully you guys enjoyed that. And we had CEO of Coinbase, CEO of Binance, founder of Ethereum, we had Solana, we had Ben Horowitz, we had Polychain, we had Dragonfly, we had Telegram, we had Replit, we had Huberman, we had Brian Johnson, we had Ranveer, we had Nasir. I mean pretty, pretty good group of people that are all behind startup societies and network states and interested in either doing them or funding them. And so now the question is, what next, right? We deal with great content, great, great stuff. So I think there's at least two steps for you folks, for some of you, for some small fraction if you want, you can found your ideal society. And there is a, maybe a partial playbook in the network state. And this is provisional, it's 2022. So you know, think of it as a version 1.0 and I want to write another version. So you can found your own or you can find your ideal society. And you know, we're building, you know, whether that be an existing society. So there's things like Czinex or Bizznship or Henley Global, some of these are by friends of mine and so on. There's a bunch of things like this. So you can find your ideal society or you can go and an existing one, or you can go and join and help build a new one like one of the ones listed at our NetworkStates Internet dashboard. And in particular, if you want to, that's what we're all about. So you can come and join Network School because we're about the consent to the government, choice, freedom and liberty. We're about also cooperation, equality of opportunity, techno democracy. I've given talks on that before, but I didn't want to give another 30 minute talk at the end, you know, wanted to, you know, wrap it up, but I'll send it to you guys in Luma, extra credit. Okay? And so I think what we just talked about today was the third kind of thing, you know, so Internet company, Internet currency, Internet community, right? If you come away with one takeaway, it's that this is the third kind of thing and the first two are pretty big. And so this is just a new way of thinking, which is not what company would I start or what currency would you start, but what community would you start. It's a different kind of founder, different kind of person, different kind of quote user because more like A citizen than a holder or a customer. And we're going to find out if we can start new communities. If you're interested in working with us, you can apply to ns.com, help build the next society. It's right across the causeway in the Johor Singapore Special Economic Zone in Far City. And that's our first node. We're going to do more around the world, this network school. And so that's it for now. Thank you very much and I'll take questions in a bit. All right, so is there like a microphone for Q and A that you can. Okay, you want to have people come up over there? Okay, great. Form a line. All right, great. Q and a line will form over there and people can speak their questions. And I'll do this for about 15 minutes or so and then we will all disperse. Yeah, Q and A line right over there. Lady in black right there. Yep. All right, good. Hi, my name is Thi. My question was I know your former colleagues at A16Z are really big in American dynamism, and there's also Joe Lonsdale and his investments. I know you stated that you're fairly bearish on the US and its decline. Do you feel like their work there is a potential that it could fix things, or are they pouring water in a tub with a bunch of holes in the bottom? I hope my question makes sense. I understand what you're saying. So I. All of those people are my friends and colleagues. I wish them well in everything they're doing. And sometimes there's two different paths, sometimes they're both right in different ways. For example, Google took a cloud path and Apple took a hardware path and they both turned out to work. Sometimes there's two paths and neither of them work. Sometimes there's two paths and only one of them works. And so my view is that I wish them the best in what they're doing and I think there's parts of it that are succeeding. Certainly Anduril is a very successful company. And I think that even if some of those things don't work in the short run in the 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 year time frame, they have their hearts in the right place. And I think that it's a tricky thing because you only have so many units of life force and you can only put them along a vector that you personally. That I personally believe in, I think part of it is I have more contact with Asia, being an Indian American, blah, blah, blah, blah. So. So I have more peripheral vision to see that it's Real what's happening out here, what's happening in India, and so on and so forth. And that's a life experience that's difficult to simply communicate in words. If you think about it, the difference between prompt engineering and context engineering, I could explain it in words, but It'd be like 500 gigs of high def video and experiences where I'd say, actually, I think there's a lot of potential out here. And so maybe that's what tipped the scales. It's more my positivity on Asia that isn't shared context by some of my friends in the us. Thank you, Balaji. Congratulations for today. I know this is a celebration of techno optimism in some sense, but when it comes to the Internet currency, specifically Bitcoin, one of the things that I don't hear talked about very much is the looming security budget issue and threats. What is your view on the resolution of that? Specifically on physical security, on the dwindling security budget with the halvings every four years and therefore the lower rewards for the miners and therefore the risk to the, to a 51% attack on the chain. Oh, so are you asking. So what you're saying is. Let me see if I can paraphrase correctly. You're asking Bitcoin security budget, given that the block reward halves every four years, there will not be enough money to pay for bitcoin security. That's what you're asking? Correct. Okay, so my view on that is. Well, first is if the price of bitcoin at least doubles every four years, it remains constant in real terms, it has done significantly more than that so far. Right. Number two is I actually think this, you know, quite a likelihood that bitcoin becomes at least in part something that other chains hash their chain state to, which is kind of already happening, depending on how you look at it, with some of the, the uses of op return and what have you. Number three is if bitcoin really is adopted as a Fed wire replacement. I mean, it's funny because it kind of, it's already scaling, Right. That's to say it's already scaling off chain and on other chains. You know, that's why transaction fees aren't that high. But you can imagine a world where even the on chain traffic would really spike if it's really adopted. You know, and I, I don't know. There's a, there's a third or fourth possibility, which is, you know, Satoshi did something incredible, which is he designed an algorithm that could make it 16 years and even with some maintenance is Pretty much the same algorithm they developed. And most kinds of things aren't open loop in that sense. That's to say if somebody knows the algorithm, then they can attack you and knowledge of the algorithm. They could, they could, you could, they could break. May turn out that it gets big enough that it serves its purpose of ending the Fed and then there is a successful counterattack on it. Perhaps it's a non profitable 51% tech, perhaps something else. And, and then you have to take a ledger and you have to back it up across one of 20 other chains and you get a tower of Bitcoin like a Tower of Babel. That's another possibility. It's hard to say because you're projecting out. I don't think though that the sort of quote, naive extrapolation of oh, it's halving every few years, therefore the security budget goes away is necessarily correct because the price increases faster. Or if the social significance increases faster, then people might be non economic minors simply to keep the world economy going, for example, part of their defense budget. So there's various kinds of outcomes there and it's hard to handicap all of them. Maybe I'll write a longer post on this. Yeah, thank you. Hello, Balasi. My name is Matipe Trasak, I'm from Prague, Czech Republic, Central Europe. I came for this conference. Thank you for organizing it. It was amazing. The question I have, we are. I see an opportunity in all this chaos that is happening in the world. And I feel like it's a big challenge for the governance model of the nation states right now happening like you said it. But I also see it as an opportunity for the nation states that they can get their ACT right because then they can attract a lot of talent and they could support the network states as well and be partners like we see with Singapore, for example, becoming partner for, for network school in a way. I'm sorry, I think, I'm so sorry, but your accent is strong enough that I can't actually understand your question, if you can. Okay, let me, let me rephrase that. So my question is, do nation states have opportunity to get their ACT right and actually reform? Oh yeah, some of them like. Sure, sure, yeah. So. So one thing I want to clarify is I think the future is a decentralized west and a centralized east. Let's say in the east, in Singapore, in Vietnam, in China, in India, in actually Eastern Europe, broadly. With some exceptions, states are, you know, in Riyadh, in Dubai. Right. States are largely functional in a way that they weren't 3040 years ago, potentially. Right. And the west, it's the opposite. So I'm ultimately a pragmatist and I'm really, you know, a pro civilization person. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. You know, if centralization works, you don't need decentralization. Until centralization is not working, then you need decentralization. And so I think absolutely Eastern states and many small states, like small countries like El Salvador's in the Western hemisphere is doing well. So just the concept of, you know, necessarily oppositional, I don't think it's true. I think sometimes you can set up two poles like a dyad and then you can do thesis, antithesis, synthesis, and then you can repeat that a few times. So yeah, I think there's plenty of protect states and in fact we saw some of them today. Thank you. Great. Hello, biology, my name is Sergey. Thank you for the, for the job you're making, for making this happen. Very interesting conference. And my question is nowadays states are using passports, like biometric passport, for making their citizens accountable and to build some kind of trust between them. What do you think? What should startup societies build? Should they build their own ID system or should they use the state's passports for this? I'm sorry again, the accent was very strong. So I. Okay, okay. My question is, should startup societies make their own identity system? Ah, should start. Okay, okay, so I'm hearing passports of the current states. Yeah, okay, now I understand. So the question is, should start societies make their own identity system or use passwords from existing states? And I think the answer is going to be some combination of both because you're, it's, it's just like the, the fiat identity crypto identity interface is much like the fiat currency cryptocurrency interface. The answer is you're going to need both in many different kinds of combinations. Fiat currency cryptocurrency. There's USD for btc, there's USD stablecoins, there's USD stablecoins traded for btc, and so on and so forth, many different kinds of things. So you'll have fiat identity, you'll have crypto identity, you'll have fiat identity which is hashed or otherwise proven and put on chain, you know, as like a proof of human, like proof of passport, like thing attached to an ENS customer record. Many things of this nature. So there'll be an interplay there. It's not simply one or the other. Thank you. Next. Next question. Okay, can I write to. Let's give the question. Let's Give the microphone to the next person. That's all right? Yeah. And actually, well, maybe no, can we move the line in a little further here so I can face the rest audience? Is that all right? Yeah. Okay. Okay, that's fine. I'll stand for a little bit. It's fine. It's good. Go ahead, sir. Hi, Balaji, my name is Ali. I had a quick question for you. So. Hi. Hypothetical. Suppose a community like the Catalonians were to establish a network state in a small crypto friendly country like Estonia. If those Catalonians were to create enough digital pressure that thus resulted in physical pressure, how could that network state protect itself from, let's say, the Spanish government putting pressure on Estonia as a country to clamp down on that network state? Well, I mean, the question is, what is the goal of the Catalonians if their goal is to preserve their culture? Right. Right now, and that's a complicated issue, and so on. I, I use as an example that in the Anglosphere world, they don't get too agitated about. Obviously in the Spanish language world, someone's going to be mad. Oh my God, he said this, that. So please, I'm not taking any position on the issue. Okay. But so on that right now there's a tension where the Catalonians want their ancient culture and, you know, so and so forth and the Spanish around want them to kind of conform. And one resolution to that is the Catalonians find territory somewhere else. And I'm not sure they would want to do it in Estonia, which has their own kind of, you know, but I don't know, maybe Brazil or someplace else. I don't know. The world is big. There's lots of uninhabited places. Also that they could get uninhabited would probably be the best. I mean, the awesome thing about the UAE is it's basically built on, it's like baby Mars, right? Because it's built on this like completely godforsaken desert. I mean, of course they love it, they've made it great, but it wouldn't be the first place you'd pick when looking down with a satellite photo. So the less desirable the physical location, maybe the more desirable the physical location, because the less desirable it is to other people, the more desirable it is to your people. So the answer would be an upfront question of pick something that other people don't want rather than something that people like to endure some hardship. Buy low so that you can build high. That's how I think about it. Thank you. Hey, Balaji, just quickly, thanks so much. This has been really interesting and I think I'm already part of a network state. But I just have a clarifying question just in terms of spirituality. And you had three presenters talking about Christianity. I guess just wanting to clarify. I mean, is that kind of part of the. Part of the setup that you're trying to establish is kind of a. I think of it as. So what I think never see it is like a, like a chassis. Okay. And like, you know, a car, you can add a spoiler and you can add the wing doors and so on and so forth. But there's like a basic concept of something that moves on four wheels and so on and so forth. And for some people, I don't know, self driving is such a critical feature. They wouldn't be a car without it, and so on and so forth. So my goal is to try to figure out what that template looks like for a network state for startup society, which starts like never say before sovereignty, let's put it like that. And then people can make all kinds of additions and subtraction. Sort of like a web framework like Django or Rails. Right. That's kind of how I think about what we're doing. And so then if you want to make, as some people said, some people wanted the Catholic democracy, some of the Christian network state, like meaning in the sense of Protestant, and those are actually mutually incompatible. But that's fine, that's great. I mean we have all of these as nation states. I mean, in a sense it's a neutral, it's a container for something. Right. How do you stop it from becoming a cult? Go ahead. How do you minimize the risk of it becoming a cult? Oh, because it's contacting the outside world. The cult wants to close you off from the outside world. But we want to, we want to contact us. We want to, we want to sell things, build things, ship things and so, so forth. We're not cloistered. Yeah. Hi, Biology. I'm from, from China. The time I realized the power of communities during the pandemic times that in Shanghai alone there are more than 3,000 community people are buying groceries together in the community, which means they are solving a very real problem. Collective. Collective purchasing. Yeah, yeah. For example, I see there's a comparison between Bitcoin and network state. But Bitcoin is trying to solve a very real problem. Point to point payment system or store of value. So the question is what the problems that network state really want to solve? Oh yeah, the problem state. I mean there's two ways of thinking about this, which I call the Plus 100 and the Minus 100 version. The Plus 100 version is just we need jurisdictions that are built for self driving cars from the beginning, that are built for biotech innovation for what's called the low altitude economy. You know, like you would architect a city completely differently of self driving cars exist, existed from the beginning. Like all the garages would be hidden and the whole thing would look walkable on the surface. Right. So you know, LA was built around the car. What would the LA of the self driving car be? It looked completely different. Right. So that kind of premise influences all aspects of architecture. So simply just something like that where you can get legal innovation, that's what I call the Plus 100 version. And you can, you can be in favor of strap size network seats just based on that. Now if you add to that what I call the minus 100 version, which is Dalio Turchin fourth turning Elon, everybody who has forecast, I think correctly, that essentially, you know, there's going to be a, that we're kind of already in the middle of a sovereign debt crisis for western governments. Now that becomes even more urgent. It's both the extreme plus and the extreme minus. It's like a lot of existing societies are going to have big problems and there's a lot of potential technologically and otherwise in new ones. So that goes to a plus 200. You know, plus 100. Minus minus 100 is plus 200. Right. So you can have a plus 100 view or the plus 100 minus 100. So plus 200 view. That's my view. Hi Balaji, first of all, thank you so much and congrats on putting such a high quality event. It's really, I think the event I felt I've learned the most in this whole week. So thank you very much. I'm going to put an outlandish question out there. Assuming that network states growing and not only the location, but the people are getting more adopted and growing, let's say it's growing exponentially. Right. What happens when it becomes, let's say, comparable to Singapore in terms of size and what happens in terms of governance? And if you have some different views with the Singaporean government legislation, how do you think that clash works out and how would you extrapolate it to other network states that could be colliding with different countries? Yeah, so. Well, the first thing I'd say is render under Caesar, what is Caesar's right Like abide by the laws of every country in which you're domiciled. That's number one. Minimize clashes because the thing is, honestly, relatively few things, you have to pick your battles. There's relatively few things where you really need to, like, fight the government over. Okay. In my view, you know, you don't like. For example. I'll give you an example, the Free State Project, which I'm sympathetic to at a macro level, that a bunch of libertarians moved to New Hampshire, and one of the first things one of the guys did is of all the things they decided to spend their political capital, time, energy on was fighting seatbelt laws. Okay? So. So that's an example of, like, not picking your battles. It's a complete avoidable clash, right? If the, you know, gosh, which was the guy. The guy who talks about Gosh, he's from the Daily Show, Ronnie Chang. Okay? Look up Ronnie Chang on Singapore Keening, okay? And he's like, oh, my God, imagine if you were to come to Singapore and spit gum on the floor. He's like, well, don't do that. You know, I guess, you know, that's probably not allowed in this jurisdiction. So just, you know, abide by those reasonable laws, right? And then when it's unreasonable, then figure out how to either work with the system or exit the system and then do it somewhere else and then rebalance the network state towards that other state. Right? How many people are in one? I mean, it depends. Everyone is going to have a different goal. I mean, like some. I mean, in theory, you could. I mean, Hilton, for example, has a million beds worldwide, right? That shows that's like 8,000 properties. A million beds. That shows that quota network state is logistically possible already. Right? WhatsApp has 3 billion users. In theory, they could all be, you know, they could be digitally coordinated. So there's no. I don't think there's any logistical cap. It's just about what you'd want to do in a given community. Let me go to the next person. Thank you. Hi, my name is Maria Wim. I'm from Spain. So whoever wants to discuss Spain and Catalonia, I'm here to do it. I took no position in that. That's an abstract kind of thing. Yeah. Good. So my question to you is, in the network state framework you mentioned, to have a recognized founder, what if instead of a recognized founder, it's a collective of ideas, inspiration, philosophies? Do you think that's something that can still gain. Be legitimate, or do you see a need of having a single person? So in the digital world, the great question is, do you need a recognized founder? And I think in the digital world, you can get away without one. Now that we have decentralization, you could in theory have a smart contract that you figured out all the details of it, you put it online, you never needed to upgrade it. You have to be very smart to figure that out because it's hard. This stuff is hard when humans are mashing on some. But in theory you could do that. You could have open source, something like that. No one needs to operate it. Right. In the physical world, however, I think necessarily there's dispute resolution and you know, there's this essay by somebody who. I disagreed on a lot of things politically, but it's still interesting. It's called the tyranny of structurelessness. Right. And essentially what it means is when there's no visible org chart, there's an invisible org chart because there's always some way that resource allocation decisions are made. Right. So the recognized founder is a way to avoid the invisible org chart and have a visible org chart. Because I think in the digital world you could have that be visible, where it's an algorithm and you're looking at the opcodes. But in the physical world, we're not there yet. You want to keep going? Yeah, let's keep going. Yeah, I've got plenty of. A lot of people here at Arthur. Yeah, let's go. Hi. Hi. I'm Ben and I'm happy to report that here on this conference, I raised 1000 USD for quantum gravity. Okay. Donation. Great, great. Good job. Okay. Is that question. Well, congrats. Okay, I'm glad for him. I'm not making fun. Great job. The group is. Yes, it sounds like a scam, but the group is from Oxford. I'm just a fundraiser. Oh, you've got a QR code Fundraiser. Okay, that's cool. Well, that's great. Let's just go to the next if that's all right. Thank you. Okay, great. Thank you. Hi, Balaji, this is Sinan. Thanks for the great event. I was wondering regarding your term, that the term you mentioned, techno democracy that you mentioned a few times today as well, as well as before, with the rise of LLMs and agenting AI, do you think it would be reasonable for the network states to. Instead of giving limited access to the founders of the network estate or a special group to their wallets to train LLMs and some sort of have agent to Democracy, Ltd. LLMs for the decision making for the whole network. Yeah. So I wrote an essay on this. So basically what you're asking is to what extent can you delegate decision making to LLMs? And I think currently, not to very large an extent. That may change over time. But the issue is that as others have said, LLMs don't have role models. LLMs can get easily confused. LLMs can fail, especially on adversarial time varying inputs. And there's a post I have which is 10 thoughts on AI that I did recently. And one big thing is AI is not really agentic AI. It is, it's not agentic intelligence, it's amplified intelligence. So it really can't do. It can't come up with a goal independent of you. Right. It just sits there until you prompt it. You have to give it that instruction and then it quickly gets off track if you don't keep prompting it and redirecting it towards something. Right. Maybe eventually we're going to get longer and longer on track kind of things. But then I think you need a true world model. And that's why I'm actually more bullish on some of the robotic stuff, the physical stuff, because spatial tracking has a degree of consistency. Like, you know, if somebody observed, maybe it's not, you know, simultaneous location and mapping called SLAM is basically spatial world model inference. So I think the cleaning robots will probably be more agentic in my view and be able to do more tasks for us to. Because it's easier to learn the world model of 3D space than the social model, which is very complex. Hi. Yeah, hi, I'm Inavamsi from India. So quick fictional question. How do you see, as humanity starts growing beyond Earth and galactic distances start coming, how do you see network states and crypto specifically changing? Because latency of things. This is, this is what in VC we call a helicopter problem. That's a problem that you look at once you've got a helicopter. Okay, so I don't have a good answer on that right now. Yeah, thanks. Hi, Balaji. John from Rome. Might be a similar helicopter problem you mentioned. Of course, the hierarchy, not the progression. Rather like company currency community. It's three years since you wrote the natural state book. Stronger that experience. What could be the next step in that progression? What would you. So that's a great question. So, well, step four. Yeah, well, I think before we get to step four, let's, let's. I mean there's 10,000, 100,000 Internet companies, there's 1,000 Internet currencies, let's get 10, 100 Internet communities. I think that's. We're still in step three. Yeah. Great. Stanislav, thanks Blay, for pushing this topic up to the air and to the future. I think replacing nation state with network state is unavoidable future. It is all digital intents. How about creating the common infrastructure for all the network states that needs Web3 identification, marketplace, voting system management system. It's all very IT intensive. Maybe it should be open source so that everybody can use it. But this probably may be this next step towards global network state arising. Global network state arrangement. Could you rephrase the question? The question is maybe it is a time to create the common infrastructure for network updates. I don't, I know people always want to jump to that, but I don't think it's there yet. I think the reason is in general you can only abstract out a pattern after you have like 10 working examples of it. So we want to have like, you know, Prospera grow and Network School grow and Edge City and these other examples and then you'll. The patterns will come obvious from that. That's how I think about it. Yeah. Hi, my name is Federico, I'm from Costa Rica. I was thinking about network states and network states are going to need. Network cities are going to need network public services, but the host country is usually very bad at providing them because basically they have no competition. Right. So how do you make public services interoperable while respecting local nuances? Right. So this conference made me think about local water boards. In Costa Rica, for example, they run water port rural areas as a cellular level institution. They maybe have one employee, provide five services. But collectively there's almost 700,000 local water boards around the world and they provide water for 2 billion people. So is there such thing as a network service and how do we unlock that? So let me see if I can understand your point. You said there are local resources like water boards that are scarce and how do networks interact with that? Is that right? No, go ahead. Network states, network cities will require public services. Network cities require problems. Okay. Host countries are very bad at providing them, Right? Not always. That's about, that's. That's a skill issue. Yeah, because. Meaning that's a skill. Like where you choose to set up is actually not like an afterthought. That's a very important decision where you want to have some thought as to what the infrastructure is going to be like, what the political stability is going to be like, and so on and so forth, forth. So it's not something where you don't start in hard mode. Do you see a scenario in which something like Singapore's digital tech services become interoperable and they can provide services or fork their. It's hard to move fork their services, I don't think I mean digital things you can provide, but physical things are hard to ship across long distances. I think my answer is pick a good first platform to start. Hi, Balaji, I'm Om so CEO of sns. Let's make the XMX places so technologies requires CPU resistance and also on chain sensors. So you mentioned ENS SNS so as well could act as that primitive. The question is not just if now but what could be hardcore next to create the leverage and also make it the new quality that run on chain unignorable. So what would happen to next for Solana name system to do what exactly? Or to also enhance the techno democracy and also make the new polity unignorable? I think so I have a talk called so the question is how to make a polity unignorable. Right. So I have a talk called the network State census that I gave to Chainlink a few years ago. And the general concept is a proof of human is like let's call it a 01, but it's really probabilistic. So it's 0.7, 0.8, 0.9. And in a sense you can make this more rigorous. The sum, let's say you have n, you know, I was going to call it people, but N ensids and you have a bunch of proof of humans on them probabilistic. Then the sum of all that is the rough number of humans in the thing. Right. Actually, you need another thing which is not just proof of human, but proof of unique. So if you've got a proof of unique human because they can be human, but appear many times in the data set, you need these two different proofs that you can start getting a cryptographically provable census that starts to make the polity unignorable. Yeah. Thank you. Hello everyone. My name is Lin Da. I'm from Shenzhen, China. It's my first time to meet so much foreigners over the past years. So thank you, Balaji and I read your Balaji prediction and that's why that's where the book brought me here. Yeah. So I have two questions. Okay. Just one question. Okay. How do you. How do you think. How do you see the future of Chinese economy, especially its Internet economy? And would you mind rephrase? Could you make up what you said? How do I see the future of Chinese how do you see the future of China's economy, especially its Internet economy? Internet economy, future of Chinese economy and the future of the Chinese economy? It's going to be. The Chinese economy is absolutely gigantic and it is actually radically underpriced relative to what it is. And it makes everything in the world and it is just an absolute juggernaut that it's a weird thing and I've talked about this where America still wants to think China's weak and China for various reasons is still sort of in hide your strength, bide your time mode almost and still is okay with letting other people think it's weak. But it's really, really, really strong and very competent in my view. And that's just being a reality, you know, a reality shell as people would say. Right. So not China show. I'm just a reality show. I, I shill for observable reality as I see it. So I think China is by far the world's strongest economy. It makes everything and it's actually in hyper growth mode. It's just crushing it on cars, solar, every other industry, nuclear, anything you look at, they're just, they're just executing. So they're very, I mean very, very formidable. And you know, I, I think the Internet is the one thing that has economic scale comparable to China. And so I think though most people don't see that yet because they can't see the Internet. The Internet is the single most important force in the world arguably. And it's constantly in front of our faces, but we don't see it. It's literally in front of our faces with the cell phones or the screens. But you don't think about the Internet in the same way. So those I think are the two poles of the world to emerge. China and the Internet. China takes all manufacturing and all military and the Internet is all media and all money. And this is asymmetric versus symmetric. It doesn't necessarily need to be conflict by the way, it can be yin and yang, it can be a balance. And so I think there's something there. Okay, thank you. I have a question is about intellect a little closer to. Okay, sure. So this question is about the future of intellectual property rights due to the use of AI. So nowadays you see a lot of IP disputes related to AI generated material, especially for non tax material because it's harder to check the origin. Right. Do you think such disputes may slow down AI adoption in the future? And would the responsibility of AI use arrest on the governments, developers or end users? So that's a great question. And so if I rephrase it, you're saying will the copyright attacks on AI slow AI? Right. And actually three years ago I actually, you know, People would post something like this is the worst AI will ever be. But that may not actually be true. And the reason is Napster was actually in some ways better than Spotify because you could just download all the files for free until all the copyright and you know, lawsuits and so on attacked it. And then you got to a truce, which is okay. Itunes and Spotify are pretty good. They're not bad, right? Everybody makes money. Fine. I'm not saying against it, but it's not true that it was the best the technology would ever be because legal attacks did nerf it. Right. And I think that given how AI, where the state of AI is in the US because it's by the tech guys who don't have any friends among the Democrats and fewer friends among the Republicans. And AI is going after artists and it's going after journalists and it's going after bureaucrats and lawyers and to some extent doctors and, and, and basically many of these predictions professions then like a lot of people are just going to. They don't care, they just want the results, they don't care about the process, want the result of knocking these AI. Plus of course AI is making a lot of money for the AI guys and other people feel times are tough for them for all these structural reasons. I think it's going to be challenging to do AI in places where, you know, copyright lawsuits, you know about the US are there. With that said, I think there's at least a few other opportunities for different kinds of AI. First is the sort of the Chinese style of robotic spatial AI in the physical world. It's not LLMs, it's embedded in sensors and so on and so forth. The second is Pirate Bay, right? So Pirate Bay Sci Hub, Libgen, right. These are like the free Internet. And it could be that the free models, the Pirate Bay models actually turn out to be the most important models. And there's some country, you know, during the whole music sharing controversies in the 2000s, before the time of many of you guys. But there's something called a pirate party that got started in Europe and it basically said everybody should be able to share any files free, no copyright, so on and so on. That's a really interesting concept for some kind of network state some somewhere if you could. That's an interesting special economic zone which just says hey, what if we just like the copyright window is one year or something like that. You can't copyright something for 99 years and Disney can't monetize forever, and so on and so forth. You have a Totally different paradigm. That is actually a really interesting framework which is as impactful digitally as a self driving car would be physically. So that's how I think about it. It might be a third kind of thing. Thank you. Thank you. Hi, Mr. Balaji, my name is Cecilia. It's such a pleasure to see you here. And I'm actually interested in longevity stuff and the don't die hat. I see it. Yes. Great. It's a little bit pity Brian is not here today. And I also noticed you talk a lot about China, like both in your book and eggs, including about today. And so I want to ask you, what's your suggestion about starting a longevity community in China? That's great idea. Longevity community in China seems great. Yeah, sure. I mean, I think it could work. It's. Everything's hard to make work, but yes, I think longevity is a good thing to do. I think that could probably work. Yeah. Great. Sure. Thank you so much for an amazing conference. We are close to superintelligence in the next five years and I've been working a lot in the mental health space more to see what would be the new emotional economics that we need to build for humanity in order to help people find purpose and meaning. We have climate change and climate sustainability as a category, but we've been working on emotional sustainability as a new category and the question would be is how do you see mental health will be affected by superintelligence? So I am in the middle on the super intelligence question because I think is in theory possible, but I do not think that straight line extrapolations of current technology will get us there for a few reasons. The most fundamental is LMS and things like them, basically transfer based models and diffusion models and maybe someone will cite a paper, but for the most part, if you have a time varying multiplayer adversarial phenomenon like a market or like politics, then these models aren't good at that. Why? Because they're trained on, let's say relatively static data sets. For example, the mapping between an image and a word doesn't change that much over time or you know, the game, the rules of a game of chess don't change that much over time. And so therefore you can just train on huge numbers of samples and then figure it out that way. But if you have an adversarial game where the rules can change, like a market rule, the same trade can get you a different result, then the model that's trained, I mean you can go and try an LM as a trading bot and it'll. It'll usually do very, very poorly. Right. So there's something very fundamental that's not there, which is sort of higher order reasoning, world model and so on and so forth. I'm not saying it can never get there, but I am saying that right now, people, it's more that they think it's a fake superintelligence and they're losing their mental health because they can't decide distinguish between sort of convincing jibber jabber out of the machine versus like, you know, a godlike thing or something like that. Right. So it's a different answer than what you might expect. That's my answer. One more. Okay, we've got a hard stop in one minute. Final question, Please be brief. So B, you mentioned us picking our battles and avoiding confrontation. And I think that's a great idea. But inevitably there will be confrontation. So if we want our network states to last thousands of years, we have to think about defense. How do you think about defense? Is it something like paying the US a fee to protect us? Is it holding a US military base? Is it joining the un? Is it banding together with other network states? Great question, great question. So the thing about this is, this is a, this is just like a hundred page answer and I'll try and give a short one. Okay. Fundamentally you have to know when you're weak and when you're strong. And like in my head, I live in 2030, 2035, 2040. And right now the US military is basically, and I'm not saying this to be mean or anything like that, but it is seemingly surrendered in Asia because the new national defense strategy is pulling troops out of Asia and moving it back to, to just the Western Hemisphere. This is a whole thing that was discussed in political and so on. And so the reason for that is the US military is made in China like the JDAM or the Tomahawk. Famous US weapons. The supplier suppliers in China, the former Secretary of the Navy, Pete Hegset or Carlos Del Toro rather, said one Chinese shipyard makes more ships than the entire U.S. navy combined. Hegsett, the current Defense Secretary, noted that Chinese hypersonics can sink every US aircraft carrier in the first 20 minutes of confrontation. The Raytheon CEO said that you can't decouple from China, it's too essential to the economy. So my view is the US can't fight China. And in fact, actually China is by far the world's strongest military power, like it or not. And there's a lot of bad to that as well. It's just a Fact, in my view. And so thus, one, I think, has to adapt to a reality where the Chinese military is the world's strongest military. And if that is the case, then you can't fight the Chinese drone army in a direct head on confrontation. You have to actually have Gandhi and nonviolence. You have to have agility, you have to have invisibility, you have to have decentralization. You have to actually, you know, there's a reason people say the pen is mightier than the sword. You have to not fight in the physical realm because you can't win in the physical realm. And in fact, you don't even want to have a fight, period, for as long as you can avoid it and try and be as win, win as possible. Right? So that's my view. All right. Do you want to take a selfie before we go? Oh, yeah. Would anyone come up and take a selfie? Never. State. Yeah, let's do it. All right. All right, come on, close. Just be careful of the equipment, please. Controversial answer there. Sure. But you know, I'm not running for office, so. All right, do you need a camera? All right. Yeah, here we go. Okay. Okay, everybody, so we're gonna say network and then you all say state. Okay? Get in over here. All right. And just be careful on the equipment, please. Okay. All right, Here, Josh, can you hold this? Hold on. Thank you. Thank you. All right. All right, ready? 3, 2, 1. Network, state. All right, let's do it another time. Okay, ready? Together. Okay. Three, two, one. Network, state. One more shot. Yeah, Right. Three, two, one. Network, state. Thank you so much, everybody, for being here. You've been all right. Tremendous, tremendous. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.