Bitcoin Will Shift The Global World Order | Balaji Srinivasan

The purpose here. Imagine if bitcoin had been built from the very beginning to be something that would give birth to a thousand cryptocurrencies. You design it somewhat more differently, Right? And that's what Network School is. I know I don't have all the answers. Some people will do vegan network states, and some people will do carnivore network states, and some people do, like, Latin immersion. And, you know, there'll be Mennonites and there'll be Catholics, and they'll be Jains and Sikhs and all different kinds of different groups people, Catalonians, Basques, language groups, cultural groups, ethnic groups, all kinds of stuff that I can't even predict.

What's going on, guys? Today we got a great episode with Balaji Srinivasan. He's back and he delivers. We talk about geopolitics, what's going on with China, Why are they getting stronger? What's going on with the US Decline. How is India, as a chessboard piece, going to actually play both with China and the U.S. we talk about Bitcoin, gold land and guns and Blush. He explains what's going on with the network school and what he's actually been doing. Building all the way out there to your Singapore. This conversation's great. I always enjoy talking to my friend Baji, and you guys will enjoy this one as well. Here's my latest conversation with Blaji Shrinivasan.

Is this. Is this Pomp coming on the Network State podcast, or is this biology going on the Pomp Show? I guess it's a double header.

All right, bl, we got a lot to talk about. Let's start with the US Decline and China Strength. You had a great tweet thread where you talked about the fact that the country that positions itself as the most powerful is doing that on purpose. They want to show strength to the world. China, who people deem is behind, actually wants to appear weak while it grows strength. Explain the dichotomy between these two countries that really seem to be the leaders of what seems to appear to be this multipolar world we're headed towards.

Yeah, so, so basically, the thing is that I, you know, like you, I believe in American values, and I believe in the America that we both grew up in. And so I just want to preface everything by saying that I am a reality shill, right? So say I am a shill for observable physical reality, right? So where the numbers are, I try and figure out where the numbers, what the actual reality is, and then I kind of shape my Worldview accordingly, as opposed to vice versa. Right, okay, so that in mind, let me show you some numbers from the, from the post that you're mentioning. So this post over here, okay. Shows what some people call the skull graph. Right. And can you see the screen there?

Yes.

Okay. So this shows that on a number of different kinds of charts, China has passed the U.S. okay, so it's passed the U.S. in energy consumption. It flipped over here in about 2010. It passed in manufacturing value. Add that, it also flipped in about 2010. It recently actually passed. Recently, recently actually passed in the Nature Index of highly cited papers around 2022. And you can argue with that measure, but within academia that is, it's one of the better measures we have because there's a lot of subjects like, especially in material science in the physical world, where it's just very hard to build in America. And so China's pushing ahead civil engineering on a scale that humanity's never seen. Just giant bridges and tunnels and all this kind of stuff. Right. So some of it at least is plausible that they're pushing areas of applied science, you know, and then you can argue with some of the others. And if you, you know, there's more charts like this. This is their chart. Do you see this one of robot stock? Yep. Right. This is another one of the electricity generations from our world and data. This is cars, right. They just went vertical starting in about 2020. They've, they've basically, they beat Japan and Germany, who are no slouch in cars. You know, like the place, you know, Japan does Honda and Nissan. Germany has Mercedes Benz and BMW, those for craftsmanship. They're known for automobiles for generations. But the flip to an electric car meant that China could flip them because, you know, as, you know, it changes architecture, car. And actually, even as amazing as Elon is, BYD is now outselling Tesla in many markets, right. Which is a Chinese, you know, competitor. And I can show many graphs like this. But the point is that in some ways, you know, like, like a lot of the stuff on China that said, oh, China's, you know, it's, it's going to fall into a ditch. It's going to get old before it gets rich. I think of that as like the, the stealth on the Chinese stealth bomber, which is to say during the Cold War, the US Never underestimated the Soviet Union. It, if you, if anything, you can argue it overestimated the Soviet Union. And in the 80s, it said, you know, it thought that they were closer to being a peer than they were and then it collapsed and so, and so forth. I think that with China, there's a. There's a reversal maybe, because with the Soviets, they had also fought In World War II, it was tangible that they had military strength. You know, like you're going head to head against them. You know, with the Chinese, the competition is entirely economic. Fortunately, there hasn't been a direct physical confrontation. You can argue Russia, Ukraine is actually not Russia, Ukraine. You can argue Russia Ukraine is actually China versus us. You know why? Because China's supplying, you know, the Russian side and the US Is playing the Ukrainian side. So that's like Vietnam, it's like a proxy war. Right, between. Between China and Russia. Right. Or China and America. And you can argue that because China's also supplying the Ukrainian side, but it's also supplying the Russian side. Okay, Point being that when all of these graphs on undeniable things in the physical world are all just pointed like this, because the number of cars, that's something you can test. You go to a neutral market, you go to a market that's even pro American, like in South America or something like that. I can show 50 more graphs like this where China's just flipped the US on many different metrics and you just look at observable physical reality and you see these Chinese cars whizzing around and you see, you know, just lots of signs in Chinese in Panama and stuff like that. It's clear they're building, right? Oh, what happened there? Oh, yeah. So. So let's start there. Basically, on a lot of metrics in the physical world, China is number one or very quickly becoming number one. Let me pause there. I can say more.

So let me give you a real world example of a conversation I had recently. I was talking to one of the founders of a humanoid robot company that's based in the United States. And we were talking about a whole bunch of things. But one of the things he started to talk about was in China, the safety standards that are required are much lower. So they have a robotic strategy in China, they have a safety standard that is conducive to building these humanoid robots. They have a government that is actually subsidizing the adoption of these humanoid robots. So they're going to companies and saying, hey, if you buy these robots, we'll actually pay for them or pay for a part of them. And then also we started talking about the fact that in China they've already had a marathon or like a half marathon of the humanoids running. They've had a competition of them Fighting each other. They've had like all these kind of like sport type things that obviously are trying to drive innovation around humanoids. Well, the United States, like, you know, if a humanoid company wants to sell their robot, like OSHA shows up and is like, hey, let me see, you know, like the robot's work permit essentially, right? Let me see what the working conditions are. So I do believe that there is, you know, kind of a different environment. But take humanoids maybe as a, as a direct example. Everyone is being come has become convinced this is going to be a big market, this is going to be very important. What can the United States do to not get their ass kicked on the global stage when it comes to something that know really everyone's kind of starting out at an even playing field of we got to go invent the technology and then we got to go and sell these products into the market.

So the short version, I wrote a post on this, the short version is special Elon zone. Okay? So like a special economic zone where you have different regulations, except it's a special Elon zone, okay? Texas should zone some part of Texas around Starbase where Elon can move at the speed of physics, not permits. Okay. And the reason is that there's this enormous overhang of pre Internet laws. You know, Larry Page actually said every law, you know, has to be reexamined in the presence of the Internet because it just changes so many fundamental assumptions about, you know, obviously about currency, but also about, you know, for example, with product safety, you can scan something and it should be able to tell you every review that anybody's ever had in the world on it, right? Just that alone change the nature of what regulation is. You don't necessarily need pre market approval. With a good enough camera, you can get every single review of a device post market, just as one example of many. Okay? So now on the other hand, that doesn't mean that you need to start totally from scratch. You don't have to rewrite the laws for assault. You don't need to rewrite the laws around graffiti or something like that, right? You just actually need the minimal edits to the laws. For example, if you had a zone where, you know, if you had a zone where human driven cars were not legal, okay, only self driving cars are legal. Think about how that completely changes the topography of that city. That's like cul de sac, for example, in Arizona, like a walkable community. Because once you assume self driving cars exist, you can have like a very green central area. You can have, you know, Maybe ugly tunnels or parking lots that the self driving cars go and, you know, park themselves in. And even the parking can be quite tight because self driving cars park perfectly, right? Humans make errors. Humans will, you know, crash into each other. They won't always perfectly parallel park. Self driving cars can do very complex parking arrangement like, you know, like ants or whatever, right? So you could have, and they could all be underground because it can, it can be like a long dark tunnel that they go through, a single file or whatever, right? The point is self driving cars, cars can park and store themselves in ways that humans wouldn't tolerate. Humans need to walk up to it and open it. Right? So you completely redesign towns, neighborhoods, even cities around the self driving car. Just now when I say it's one law, actually it's changing quite a few laws because there's quite a few laws on speed limits and there's laws on seat belts and there's laws on this and laws on that, right? Like should your hands be on the steering wheel? Well, what if there's no steering wheel in the car? Right. Like a lot of these laws are predicated on a 20th century gas powered, human driven automobile. Once you have a different set of laws or a different edit to the laws, you have a totally different zone. So when I say special Elon zone, really what that means is a special economic zone with a recognized founder who has plenary authority to edit those laws. And that authority is given to them by the local government who has some patch of land that they're not doing anything with because there's tons of barren land out there. Tons and tons and tons of it. Right? I mean, look at European to Dubai.

No.

Okay, you should. Okay, here is my checklist for you. Okay. And I actually think this would be the highest value trip you could take simply to calibrate. Also for anybody in your audience, there's maybe six cities that I would see, say you should probably visit, maybe seven. Okay, so Warsaw and Poland, just to see how much Eastern Europe has improved. It's far enough away from the Ukrainian war zone that, you know, it's fine. Okay. Dubai, Riyadh.

I went to Riyadh last year.

Okay, fine for FII maybe.

No, I went for a different event. But I was blown away by one, how safe I felt.

Yes.

Two is how much my mental, like preparation for what the western media had told me about Riyadh. And then the cognitive dissonance of being there and realizing this is nothing like what I had been told it was. And so just like that, that flip was very eye opening.

This is the thing is lots of Republicans know that the media has been lying to them about so many things large and small about whether men and women even exist. It's just one, like huge but, you know, limited example.

Right.

What, what they haven't put together is that it's also really misrepresenting what's going on abroad other countries. Like one of the issues, I think, and this is kind of, I, I don't, I don't hope to convince anybody with this, but I think lots of people in MAGA correctly observe that Democrats brought a lot of legal aliens across the border, but then incorrectly think that means the rest of the world is their enemy. But they're not really. Like, there's billions of people out there just living their lives. The vast majority of people are not flooding into the US or what have you. And also a lot of the media reports in those other countries are incorrect in ways that you'd only be able to understand how they're incorrect if you're on the ground there. Right. So that's why it's good that you see if you're in Riyadh. So I'd say Warsaw, Dubai, Riyadh, Bangalore, Ho Chi Minh City, Singapore, Shenzhen. Okay. And on the last one, Trump has said he's visiting China. And you know, I think one of the Trump sons was recently in Hong Kong. I think Eric Trump was in Hong Kong. So it's okay if Trump is visiting China, it's okay to visit China. Like, I'm not saying you become Chinese or whatever, you know. Right. But like, it is okay to go and travel and simply see what the country is like and just see it with your own eyes and see the scale of their manufacturing plant, just to calibrate. Right. Because there's some things that can only be understood if you're actually on the ground there. I mean, for example, for me, you know, my parents are from India and I, I grew up in, in the US and in the 80s and 90s when we visited India, it really was just like, you know, really desperate poverty. Desperate poverty like, like of a, of a shocking variety. And you know, there are people, it was flies and there was, you know, really poor people all over and the, the roads were incredibly dirty and on and on and on. Right. And you know, then I was working for a long time in the 2000s. I didn't have that much time to go back and went back occasionally and then after a long gap, I went back in the mid late 2010s and I was stunned at how much everything had improved. I was just agog like this, okay? Like, they had 5G Internet and airports were beautiful and the. The roads were. Were like radically, radically improved. I mean, traffic lights and, you know, all these things you take for granted. But it was all like, fresh new blacktop. And there were Hiltons and there were Starbucks and there was every Internet service I could imagine and on and on and on. There's UPI and other. All identity services, all this type of stuff which I could. I could go through. And I was just like, I. I wouldn't have. I honestly just wouldn't have believed it unless I had seen it with my own eyes. And I would. I just was not calibrated because I had reasonably. You know, it's like, show me something, bro. Right? You know, you want. People will say something online, but then you actually have to see it. You know, the execution is everything, right? And the execution of India in the 2010s was just beyond belief for me. So that's when I really started tracking it very, very closely. I can show you graphs and charts. I can show you. You want me to show you a video that I took of an Indian airport? Let me show you one. Sure. I actually went.

I went to India in. I think it was 2017. And I went to Mumbai, Goa. I went to Delhi, Agra, Jaipur. I mean, to a bunch of different cities. I spent like two and a half weeks in. In the country. And it was very interesting to see not in the country itself. Like, hey, these are the places that are undeveloped. And then here are the places that are, you know, 10 years ahead, 15 years ahead. And you could just see like it was sweeping through the country.

It's moving very, very, very fast also. And the reason I just say that is even 2017. Just think about how much the US has changed in 2017. That's pre Covid and so on and so forth. Right? So I want to just show you this. Here's one from 2023. Just play this video. Yeah, here, let me put this one.

Here to the chat.

Can you see the screen there? Oh, here we go.

Yep.

Pretty nice Bangalore. This is hydro. This is quite a few airports in India are like this now, right now. You know, I can show you more, you know, kind of visuals and stuff like this. I can show you charts. Like, here's a chart on infrastructure, for example. And this shows, like, look at the huge increase that's 2012 and 2021. Look at the number of lights that have come online. Right. You know, or the highway Network. Look how much denser it is over here. Right? Here's airports. There's like, you know, 20, 30% more airports. Here's water, connections. Like, all kinds of stuff like this public infrastructure is just going like this.

How much of this is. The government just wakes up one day is like, hey, we got to do this. And they start to fund this stuff versus it's entrepreneurs who are doing it. Or like, what's driving the change?

Well, well, that's the amazing part. It is both. But the thing that is amazing to me is the government is actually very competent there. Modi's government, Prime Minister Modi's government is actually very, very competent. And they're like, they're. You could. There's lots of things that India does which you can argue is two steps forward, one step back. And in the moment, it's like, oh, my God, I can. But on balance, it is two steps.

Forward.

And the country's just radically, radically improved. Now, the reason I say this is it's important to kind of. I think you can be too far, and you can also be too close. What I mean by that is if you're too far and you've been in, you know, America or, you know, Canada, or, I don't know, I don't know, some other place, let's say it's us. You just been there your whole life, you never actually come to India. You'll have some vision of India that's just from the media. Okay, fine. And then if you come there, you'll see all the things that are flawed about it and whatnot. Conversely, if you grow up completely in India, you take for granted the change every single day, and it's so gradual, you don't notice it. But if you come back 2017-2018-2019-2020 like that every year or two years and so on and so forth for a few weeks or a month, then you have sort of the right frame where you can see the change. Oh, all those buildings went up since the last time I was here. It's not so infrequent that you don't really have a model of it, but it's not so frequent that you take the change for granted. Does that make any sense? Right. So that's why I suggest that trip in particular, because actually, another. Here's the way I'm putting it. I'm not saying. And one thing I want to be very clear about, I'm not saying all of India is amazing or anything like that. I'm not saying that there's still, still, there's a lot of poverty, there's a lot of things to fix and so on. But the best analogy I give is India is like California in reverse. Okay, let me explain. So in California, you go to go through California, there's beautiful old buildings, but everything new is a homeless encampment. It's a safe injection site. It's somebody OD'd on crack on or meth or whatever on the side of the road. It's like a burned down building, like, you know, Pacific Palisades or, you know, it's like a bridge to nowhere like this. A hundred billion dollars that they allocated for the train and they didn't build anything. Right. So everything new in California in the physical world is a disaster. Even Elon couldn't put a sign. Elon, the most resourceful man in the world, couldn't get a sign up on top of the X.com building and had to take down the sign. Remember that right now? So everything old in California is amazing and beautiful and everything new is terrible. India is a reverse. Lots of stuff that's old is shanty towns and you know, it's like, it's like filth and so. But everything that's new, it's like an Apple store, it's like a beautiful airport, it's a highway, it's at this, it's a that. Right? So India is getting fractally better and California is getting fractally worse. Does that make any sense? Right, so both of them. Yeah. And so that, that is a way for me to make sense of it. Because if you just take snapshots, people can find all kinds of things that are good and bad about each thing. But the, the, the thing is that India and California are converging or even have converged in ways that I would never ever have expected when I was growing up. And I, and as I said, I'm a reality show. I just call it like I see it because I'm a global investor. You know, if, if I didn't think it was real, I wouldn't, you know, I'm, I'm not, I don't see an opportunity in, I don't know, Bolivia or something like that. But if, if I, if I did, I would, I would pay more attention to it. I think they're actually, they're adopting tether now. Did you see that? I did see. Yeah. It's like the, the, the, the currency that's the last I heard of Bolivia. Nothing against Bolivia. I just. Not on my radar. Maybe there's something happening there. Anyway, my point is there, like I would prefer to. I'm in Singapore, you know, I'm in the Special Economic Zone now. And yes, I would, I would still take Singapore over Bangalore, but I would definitely take Bangalore over la.

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The last couple of weeks of the.

Three leaders of those countries outside the United States all hanging out, having fun. You know, kind of look like they're getting pretty chummy with each other. But also I think that, you know, trump And Modi and the US India relationship is still strong and seems to be positive as well. China, to me, feels like the part of the conversation, though, that usually gets left out when people are talking about the geopolitical landscape because they want to talk about the Russia, Ukraine stuff. They want to talk about the fact that Russia sending the oil to China and then China selling it to the rest of the world, whatever. But India never stopped buying oil from Russia. India never stopped buying wheat. India said, hey, we got to look out for our people. We got to do what the right thing is here. We got to be able to build this infrastructure. Like, they took a very nationalist approach, I think, to a lot of things over the last five years or so. And so.

Yeah.

So you know, what happens if India says, you know what, actually, hey, us, we're going to go the other way. Like, we, you know, we'll, we'll still be friends, but actually we're going to align ourselves with Russia and China.

Well, I want to show you something which is actually maybe the, you may not see the immediate relevance, but I'm going to show you something which I think is a very, very important graph with respect to that. Okay. Do you see this? Yep.

Bin Laden's compound?

Okay. This is a map. Okay. When Osama bin Laden was found, he was found in Pakistan. And his compound was literally down the street from the Pakistan Military Academy over here. Do you see that? And you know how like, like Trump renamed the Gulf of Gulf of Mexico to Gulf America? Right. India should really rename Pakistan to Bin Ladenistan. Okay. Simply to remind Americans that they're sending billions to bin Laden. Right. The country that harbored the guy that killed 3,000Americans and probably a lot more international terrorists. Right. In fact, they've launched terrorist attacks in India. They've launched. Obviously they were harboring. Look, it's right next door to Afghanistan, you know, so there's a very porous border there that's not a real border in many ways. Right. And so look, there's many individual Pakistanis who are really great people and they're good at math. And so, and so I have no beef. There's lots of, lots of great Pakistanis, but the regiment has basically been like a terrorist regime. And so that. The reason I bring that up is America is doing something that is, that's seen by India as ridiculously hostile, which is funding this terrorist state on India's border that launched the Mumbai attacks that constantly, you know, because Pakistan doesn't have economic growth. It's not like Dubai or Riyadh, Right. Which has, you know, there's Muslim majority countries that have very friendly relations with India. You know, like the UAE has, you know, a giant Hindu temple and India's on great terms with them and Hindus and Muslims can work together well. And you know, so Saudi Arabia, much of the Gulf coast countries and Indians work together really well. Right. But Pakistan is just this kind of cuckoo, you know, kind of state. They don't have economic growth. So keep launching terrorist attacks in India. And here's the thing, both the US and China fund Paka, okay? So China funds them to try to keep India in check and the US funds them for God only knows what reasons, maybe for like a military base or something near like, you know, Afghanistan. But clearly this is billions for Bin Ladenistan. Right? So when you think about that, that's why India is a swing vote. Because America now, I, I don't think most Americans are aware of that. How much money has gone to Pakistan, how many soldiers have gone there. It would be, I don't know, it would be the equivalent of funding like MS.13 on, on, on America's border. You know, it'd be an extremely hostile act. Right. And despite that, Indians still want to, because, you know, Indians speak English and there's lots of Indian Americans and I broadly think, I understand. You know, it's funny for me to put this way. I think maga's in a phase right now where they're kind of lashing out at everybody. But I think in the long term, like a 10 year timeframe and I think it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. But I think over the long run we're going to see, for lack of a term, let's call it the Indo European world. What is that? The Indo European world is basically India becomes an equal India and Indians becoming equal to Europeans and Americans and so on. A rough, a rough example of this is, you know, in the 1800s, you know, prior to the 1800s, the Jewish community was not emancipated. That is to say, you can argue this, they are emancipated in France and so on. That meant they didn't have the rights as citizens. So for example, the Jewish community in any, any kingdom, they would pay taxes as a group is like a corporation, they wouldn't be able to pay taxes. Individuals, right, say they couldn't hold property, they couldn't vote, they couldn't marry and so on and so forth. They had to be within own community and so on. Okay? But then when they're emancipated, they could connect peer to peer, and then suddenly they rose very quickly and they just hadn't been that big a force in Europe prior to the 1800s. And suddenly they just kind of came out of nowhere. All these really smart people leveling up in the professions and so on. And then there was a huge amount of consternation over where are these people coming from? I can't believe they're taking our jobs and so on. And they're working on weekends. You know, the Sunday law firms didn't want to work on weekends. And there was a lot of consternation about that in the early 1900s and many different reactions from all. But eventually after, like simplifying an enormous 20th century with obviously the, you know, the, the Germans and that whole thing, right? But simplifying an enormous 20th century, the Jewish community proved itself right. They proved that they could do math, they could do computer science, they could found their own companies, they, they could execute, right? They, they could found their own countries, right? And there were left wing versions, there were right wing versions, there were centrist versions. You know, that's a whole topic, right? The analogy today is, but, you know, if you go back further in time, obviously the Jewish community had thousands of years of history, right? You know, going all, you know, millennia, right? So there's some evidence of them having staying power, some talent there that then, you know, right. And so in the same way, Indians and India is a huge, huge, huge place. And many different kinds of Indians and so on and so forth, many different kinds of, you know, subgroups and what have you. But it's comparable because until the last, you know, few decades, most Indians were basically in India. Just like, you know, just mean something, you know. You've heard the term the shtetl?

No, what is that?

That's like the area in like, you know, Eastern Europe, Poland, where it was, it was like the ghetto where many Jewish people lived. And so a similar kind of thing in India was the Kalapani. It was essentially this belief that the black water surrounded India and if you left India, you crossed, went overseas, then you wouldn't get reincarnated. Okay? So it's a belief that kept Indians sort of region locked there, okay? Similar to how like the Jewish community was in the shuttle and in the modern era, just like, you know, Orthodox Jews shaved their beards and they assimilated and then they leveled up in a huge way. Only in the last 20, 30, 40 something years has even a small number of Indians actually in a sense entered the modern world. And that's like the 7 million or so Indian Americans and what have you. And they've done, I think pretty well. But like, in many ways they're kind of the advanced scouts. Because, you know, why Sundar and Satya, why are they CEOs of Google and Microsoft? Well, they actually had to start as H1BS because they weren't, they weren't starting as citizens. They had to start as employees. Their children are like unlocked phones, right. Because they have the full rights of citizens. And so as a good analogy, right, like locked versus unlocked. So if you're an Indian immigrant, you have to join a mega corporation and say, sir, yes sir, three bags full, sir, and work your way up. Right? But if you run their children, you're unlocked and you can do, you know, you have more security in what you can do. So you can be a founder. Right. So lots of the new generation tech founders are of Indian descent. Anyway, what's my point? I can show you. Actually, you know what, let me just calibrate, just because I'm saying this stuff, but I want to calibrate so you can see I'm not just totally, totally crazy person. Only partially crazy. Okay. Okay. So can you see the screen there?

Yep.

Okay, so in lots of graph, lots of graphs look like this, okay. Where China's just dominating the entire world. Okay? But if you zoom in closer on this graph and do the world minus China, India is above qs. Yes. India is a distant but real number two on many of these graphs. And crucially, look at the growth there. That's real growth. Right? So that's steel. Okay, let me show you another one. Here's nuclear. Okay, so this is, you know, the, the white boxes are proposed, gray is planned, and then red is under construction. So China has the world's largest nuclear build out, but India is actually number two, Right? It's a distant number two, but it's a real number two. Right. Russia's number three over there. Okay. The US unfortunately has no new at the time this is made known in nuclear power plants under construction. There's a new regulation that the Trump administration promulgated that maybe we'll see something. But I'm just saying at the time this was made, right? Okay, then here is electricity generation and the same graph we saw before where China is just crushing everybody. But look there. India's actually going to flip the EU soon, right? I mean, the EU is doing all the stupid degrowth stuff. You know, they're hurting themselves. Still for India to flip the eu, that's not nothing. You know, that's a real. Look at this. That's a healthy, healthy growth rate there, right? I'll do a few more smartphones. India's gone from about 1% to actually making 20% of global phones. It's now the second largest producer in the world. It's still a distant number two after China. But 20 is not. It's not nothing, you know, and then cement. Okay, China is number one again by far. But India said a healthy number two in Forex United States. I mean, it is, it is pretty.

Crazy to think about the fact that India is number two. And I guess the question then is, becomes, is it because they have so many people? Is it because of the economic policies? Is it because actually there's an entrepreneurial energy that isn't met with all of the regulation and kind of like headwinds that the United States has? Why do you think India is number two?

What I'm saying, basically my case I'd make is for not total losers. We're. We, like some Indians can play, right? And I think that on the other side of the next 10 years, and so Indians and India will prove themselves that actually they can do stuff in the physical world. They can code, they can do math and so on and so forth and prove themselves as a peer in much the same way the Jewish community did in the 1900s, if that makes any sense. But the reason there's a lot of shock on that right now is there's a. Over. There's kind of the reaction of who are these guys? Where they all come from? Why is everybody named. Why is everybody suddenly named Vivek and this, that and the other. You know, it's like, it was one thing when there's like one or two of them, but now there's so many everywhere. What's going on? You know, this is this our country is. I get that. I get. Totally get where that comes from, right? And so now that brings to the. The. The thing about, you know, Trump and, and India and so and so forth. So one thing that happened in 2015 was the trade war, right? And actually, in some ways, you know, let me show you a couple of graphs. This is my mental model of the world. There are two things that happened in the early 2010s, late late 2000s, okay? The first is this graph. Do you see this one where it shows Google and Facebook just going vertical and newspaper revenue just cratering to 16 billion, right? So that's a drop of, you know, more than 75%, basically, in a few years from like, you know, 60 something billion to about 15. Let's on. There are 15 billion, right? Maybe you can say 20 billion. Okay, that's, that is the Internet disrupting blue America. Okay. The other graph is this one where it shows. So that's Internet disrupting Democrats. And this graph shows right around the same time China disrupting Republicans. Okay. So once you see that, you actually realize, oh, this is actually a four faction conflict. The Internet, Democrats, Republicans and China, as the Democrat pie shrank, go broke, go woke. This is what radicalized them. They lost a lot of money. Suddenly, you know, their lifestyle changed from writing four or five or six articles a year for Time magazine to having to write an article every day for some, you know, like, like, you know, gossip outlet. Their lifestyle, you know, eroded and these tech guys got rich. So they got really mad at us and they started the tech lash. But they also started wokeness to take some share from red because they got desperate. Red was at the same time being attacked by China economically. And so red basically fought back against a blue with Trump and fought back against China with the trade war. Okay, so you had this four faction thing. Blue is fighting the Internet with a tech lash, Blue is fighting red with wokeness, Red is fighting blue with Trump, and Red is fighting China with the trade war with me so far. Okay, so if we just focus though on that second theater or you know, it's really four theaters, but if we focus on the, you know, the Republicans versus China. This is why Trump was saying China, China, China, China in 2015, when it wasn't on the radar of blue Americans, because red Americans were feeling the competition with me so far. Yep. Okay, so what happened? China at first was completely taken aback by what Trump did because for example, he managed to complete crater a graph. There's a graph showing Chinese FDI into the US and it just went kaput after. Yeah, so this one, this graph, it.

Just completely fell off of a, off a cliff.

It completely fell off a cliff because this was the Trump effect. Right. So Trump essentially like this thing was just going absolutely vertical. And so Trump essentially just cratered China's ability to invest directly in the U.S. okay.

The other thing that happened here, just.

As like a real world anecdote, is.

In the early 2010s in New York City, there was tons of foreign buyers of real estate. They were buying apartments, and especially luxury apartments, et cetera. As that capital flooded into the market, builders in New York City said, oh, wow, look at all these Chinese buyers. Let's go build a lot More apartments to feed that demand. And then what was very interesting is you don't just snap your fingers and build a tower in New York City. Takes a number of years. So as all these guys got wrecked basically in the 2018 time frame, a bunch of that supply came online. And this chart, one of the parts that I remember talking about some of the real estate guys when this was happening is China also put a lot of capital controls in place because they saw that people were getting the money out and going, buying us real estate, whatever. And so now all of a sudden you basically have a bunch of supply coming online, no foreign demand coming in for it. And so now you have real estate developers that are like, well, I thought those foreign buyers were going to be the market. And so for a period there actually there was a lot more supply than there was demand, which meant that rents were kept that in an affordable rate. Right?

Yeah.

Fast forward seven years or so to today, completely different story. And guess what?

Rents are through the roof.

All time highs in New York City, you know, complete mess. And there's this feeling of hey, foreigners are taking, you know, the apartments, there's rent control. I mean it's just a complete, you know, very complex but very, very big mess. But seven years ago it was the exact opposite where there was tons of supply coming online and that foreign demand wasn't actually there.

Yeah. So basically at that time the Chinese and the real estate developers lost their shirts and that kept the growth in rent somewhat, you know, not elevated. It meant it, it couldn't suppress to the.

Yeah, it got suppressed.

Someone suppressed. That's right. But though the structural factor that's boosting rent is the Fed buying mortgage backed securities by printing, diluting everybody down and then taxing you twice or thrice. Because you've got the income tax and the corporate tax, but it's also the inflation tax. Then it bids against you in the market with the money it just taxed away from you with inflation. Right. But I want to share a second graph. Okay. And then I'll get to my point on India. So this graph shows that how China reacted to the trade war. Right. Essentially at first they were, they were shocked by it because they just didn't expect that to happen. That came out of completely left field that, you know, all of these investments suddenly got marked down. Suddenly China became America's enemy. What this is now 10 years ago. So you have to remember that time period. But I don't know if you, you and I are roughly comparable age, but if you remember the 2000s or even the early 2010s, it was very common for Goldman and Morgan type people to say, oh yeah, China will become the world's largest economy, and so on. But they'd say it in a casual way because it was so far off that it wasn't like something that someone said, you traitor, I hate you so much. You know, why are you a CCP agent? They didn't say it like that. Right. Because they're just making. It was like an abstract observation of like, you know, someday of trends.

They just looked at trend line and extrapolated it.

Yes, but it was so. It was so far in the future that nobody considered it a serious threat. After China suddenly flipped, US Manufacturing then suddenly start. People started reacting a very different way to these projections because now objects in mirror are closer than they appear. You know the thing they say on. Right. So. So China was totally taken aback since the sentiment shifted very radically against them. And what did they do? So they actually reacted by radically expanding their share in other markets and reducing their share in the U.S. so now as of 2022, the North America was down to 16 of China's revenue. It used to be a much, much larger share. Okay. And they've intentionally been moving away from the US as a market that's actually 2022, which is already three years ago. And things are moving. It's like saying, where is AI in 2022? This stuff is. This stuff moves really, really, really fast. Right. And so the point being that the way that China reacted to the cutoff of U.S. markets for its trade was to find other markets. And it just basically proved itself. What do I mean by prove itself? It's like if a, if a venture capitalist says no to you on a deal, then what do you do? Do you cry? Some people cry and they die and they give up. Other people are like, okay, well, I'm just going to find somebody else and I'll find somebody else and I'll find somebody else and get the deal done without that person. Right. And so essentially America's bet was China was weak and couldn't actually really survive with that. And still people think that it's very dependent on US Demand and they're the consumer of last resort. That's a very outdated model of the world when things are changing really fast. Did I give you my, my fastball analogy?

No.

It's like if you've got a ball and it's rolling slowly across the ground and you look at it and you look away and you look back, it's Basically in the same place that it was. But if someone's pitching a fastball and you look away for even a second, it's in a totally different place, you know, a second later. So when things are moving really fast, like China relative to the US or Chinese markets, you can't rely on some outdated media image in your head from the 2010s of what China is. You have to like intentionally go and refresh today. Does that make it. It's like, it's like, imagine if your picture of AI was from 2010. Like, obviously it'd be wildly, wildly out of date. That thing is moving so fast. Right. The difference is the AI stuff comes to you in your feed, but the China stuff or other stuff won't unless you actually go and seek it out. Okay, what's my point? Putting it all together, the TLDR is China diversified away from the US as a market for its trade. And India and Indians are going to have to, for about 10 years, diversify away from the US as a market for talent. That say one of the things, I wrote this long post on this, but I don't believe that you should go anywhere that you're not welcome. And I also think for other reasons, the US is going to have a lot of infighting for the years to come. There's like blue versus red just keeps amping up and so on and so forth. At the same time, India itself is doing really well. Indians are doing really well on the Internet, which is pure crypto and other kinds of stuff. And finally, there's actually dozens of countries with digital nomad programs. So, you know, for example, if you look at this graph over here, the war for talent, basically, you see this country's offering digital nomad visas.

Yep.

So El Salvador, Mexico, Cyprus, Greece, all of these countries offer digital nomad visas. Right. And the UAE in particular, and also, you know, Malaysia, slash Singapore are very, very friendly to Indians and more generally, anybody around the world. But the reason is, as the US has in my view, incorrectly, but I understand why. As the US has decided that it doesn't want these tech guys, dozens of other countries have decided we need tech guys. We want these people because these are the highest earning mobile capital in the world. And if you can build a tech cluster, that leads to compounding economic growth. So you actually want to recruit them and attract them to your country. And you know, the thing is, of course, everything's a balance. Right. Whenever you say something like that, people will always take it into some extreme direction one way or the other. They'll say what, you hate the country? You want to flood it with foreigners? No, no, no. We're a country non economic centers. Or they'll flip to the other extreme and they want just totally open borders. Right. But you know, for example, Dubai and Singapore show that you can have. It's like saying hire no one or hire everyone. Obviously you want to be selective in your hiring. Duh. And also, depending on what kind of company you are, you hire some people and others and maybe you have a hiring freeze at times and maybe you go into hiring spurt at other times. Right. So. And then by the way, the other flip side of is exporting. Like, just like you can export trade, you can export talent. You know, the funny thing is, by the way, a lot of Americans don't think about this, but much of the world, okay, so there is a term that people will sometimes use that I'm going to repurpose in a certain way. Okay. Much of the world is actually American occupied government. Okay, why do I say that? For example, do you know what the Harvard Kennedy School is? Yes. Okay, so the Harvard Kennedy School alone, Germany, heads of state, it's trained.

Oh, it's like some crazy number. It's like a, like a factory. Basically.

It's a factory for cranking out heads of other countries. Right? So here's like an example. Just, just this one, one school alone. President of Mexico, President Mongolia, Prime Minister Somalia, Prime Minister Singapore, you know, President of Ecuador, President of Costa Rica. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Government administrators. This is just like one list. Look at how many administrators there are just on this list. Elected federal officials.

And.

Go ahead.

No, no, it's just hilarious when you pull it up and you start scrolling through it is literally a factory. This episode is brought to you by Bit Layer. Bit Layer is taking bitcoin beyond just a store of value. For the first time, you can put your bitcoin to work, earning yield while staying true to. To its core principles of security and decentralization. Bit Layer is making bitcoin defi a reality. Learn more@x.com Bit Layer Labs Again, that's x.com Bit Layer Labs is a factory.

That cranks out heads of states that are not in the United States. Many of them, some of them are and some are not. Right? And you know, like royalty, right? You know, they've got, they've got. Some of these people are in the US but, but a lot of them, a lot of them are just global. Right? And that is just one school. Okay? And if you add it up and you say, how many foreign heads of state, how many foreign bureaucrats, either they trained, you know, they got their education in the U.S. or their children are in the U.S. how many foreign. How many American multinationals like Starbucks, McDonald's and so on are there overseas? How many foreign entrepreneurs raise capital in the US or go public on the US Stock market? Even Alibaba went public in the United States. I mean, of all things, right? How many? You know, like there's something called harmonization, which is where US Regulations are used. In other countries, they export regulations just like you'd export a product. Why do people want to do that? Well, the FDA wants its laws to be used or regulations to be used by everybody. But also Pfizer and Merck want that as well. You know why? It's probably cheaper, because then they can get. Yeah, exactly. They get approval in the US and then the same laws or regulations apply everywhere else. They just export it everywhere. It does make sense. Right, but the problem is it's like standardization.

They basically want standardized rules across the world if they could get it.

Yes, and there's, there's a reason you have to be able to defend something before you can critique it. There's a reasonableness to that. The unreasonableness is if the FDA messes up and it's not accountable to either electoral or market correction, it can't be voted out. And it also can't go out of business in a normal way. So one person, unelected person who can't be fired and isn't even known to you in Silver Spring, Maryland, can choke point, chokehold all global biotechnology in any space. It's like Gensler, but invisible. Okay, all right. Putting that all together, my point is much of the world actually has Americans exported there. American companies, American regulators, American bureaucrats, American train, this and that. And that wasn't a completely negative something. It was a positive something for both Americans and for those other countries that built the greatest empire the world has ever seen. There's a lot of good to that. That's a country that we both grew up in, Right? And when people say the word empire, they often. I mean, one of the things that happened is American empire, unlike the British Empire, spent a lot of effort on invisibility. Right? So British Empire called itself an empire. And then everybody's like, I'm declaring my independence from Britain. The American empire never called itself an empire. But have you seen the map of 750 military bases around the world? Right. Obviously. Like, you know, just, just not to, you know, not to Be too thinking about. But like, this is not, this is not the posture. Let me share. Put this on screen. Okay. Can you see that map? Yep. Oops. Where is it? This one? This one? Yeah. Okay. This is not the posture of a people that just wants to humbly sit behind its borders. Okay.

All the, all the red dots are bases.

Yeah, exactly. Like, you know, MAGA should just understand what America is. It is the greatest empire of all time. Of all time. Right. Like, not even the British Empire had, you know, there was a period in the 90s, 2000s, even early 2010s where all the Russians and Chinese were sending their best guys to the U.S. even the nominally sovereign enemies or whatever. You know, Russia was part of the G8. China was just like essentially, you know, basically just a very quiet back end. They even took the bombing. Their embassy in Belgrade got blown up. They didn't say anything, you know, like it was just the most dominant empire of all time. And the reason I say that is clearly Americans emigrated around the world to build that American emigration. American sending bodies, sending people, sending businesses. Unless you're saying everything America did was bad. Americans sent a lot of people around the world and that actually did a lot of good in my view. There's a lot of good stuff that came out of that. Right. So why do I say that? Because Indians are going to be doing that. Indians are doing that. They are sending a lot of people around the world. And as I showed, India is actually number two in nuclear plants. India is number two in steel Indians. I mean, there's a lot of graphs. The problem with this is if you don't say anything like Indians are now for some, you know, one way of putting it is China kind of started modernizing in 1978 with Deng Xiaoping taking over. And they had about a 37 year honeymoon until 2015. 2016, let's say 38 year honeymoon. 37, 38 until 2016 when Trump took over. And then China became public enemy number one. Right. India started liberalizing. Many of your viewers may not know this, but 1991, when, when Soviet communism fell, two other things also happened. Capitalism got legalized on the Internet because until that point you couldn't do dot coms, you know, you couldn't take payments on the Internet and so on. The NSF acceptable use policy prevented that. It only allowed academic and government use. The other thing that happened is that India liberalized. It went away from socialism towards capitalism. So now about 34 years later, 35 years later, 2026, almost exactly the same period China had 38 years. India had, like, 35 years of kind of growing before suddenly there was, like, a reaction to it, where this thing is getting too big for its britches. Does that make any sense? Right. This is one perspective on it. Right. And so China went. The thing is, you can only grow to a certain point within the system, and then you have to become the system.

Mm.

You have to actually, like. Because the system will. Will say, okay, it's. It's kind of like, you know, Zynga, the company. Zynga, yeah.

Gaming company.

Yeah. A long time ago, they were gaining so many users on Facebook that Zuck was like, you know what? I don't really like that. And so you just hit a bunch of buttons and they just fell through a trapdoor. Because they were very dependent on the platform. Right. And that's when a product and a platform come into conflict. Sometimes a platform wins because just push a bunch of buttons and the product gets, you know, just gets dis. Black hole. Yeah. Disappears. Yeah. But sometimes that product becomes strong enough that can build its own platform. For example, when Facebook was initially growing it, a lot of its growth came from Gmail. And eventually Google was torn about whether to allow that for a long time, because obviously people have a right to send and receive their own emails. And how can they block us from doing, you know, block our users from doing what they want and so on. And eventually somebody made the decision to say, no, no, no, Facebook can't do that. But too late. Facebook already had 500 million users. It had its own platform. Makes sense. Right? So this is a very common thing we see in tech where when the product and the platform compete, the product becomes too big for its British. Because nobody cares. Facebook doesn't care if it has a million users. When it has 100 million users, it cares. Right. So now India, like, people actually Americans care about India. Nobody, like, if India was actually a third world country, blah, blah, blah, blah, Nobody would care. Yep. Does anybody. Does anybody care about. I won't name any other country that is in that position now? Because there might be unfortunate. But like, you know, the. The Scott Adams concept, like Elbonia. Right. Which is like a fictional country. Why would. Why did Peter Navarro. Why would he ask, why would he make such a big thing about India can't buy Russian oil. If it wasn't a player. Oh, it's. If it wasn't a player, would it be. Would it be worth yelling at? No, it's definitely. It's definitely a player. Yeah.

I want to switch topics. Real Quick, because we got to talk about this. And then we're going to talk about network school. Bitcoin, gold, $. Those three things seem to be in this, like, centrifuge being tossed all around the world. Central banks are, you know, they're holding treasuries and dollars. Then they're buying up a lot of gold. People want them to buy bitcoin. You see the bitcoiners online, they've got views on gold and dollars. The dollar holders, they golden B. I mean, it's just like those three assets are married together.

Absolutely.

I keep saying that we're entering what I call a crazy uncle market, which is like when you sit down to Thanksgiving, you know, dinner, and your crazy uncle says, gold, bitcoin, guns, and land, like, those are the four things. Right. Probably going to do pretty well. But how do you look at the gold bitcoin stuff?

Can I give the. So I will half agree with you and half really disagree with you.

All right, perfect.

So, all right, so first of all, I love the crazy uncle thing. It's very, very, very funny, I would say. So. Gold and bitcoin. Yes. Here's why I would be lukewarm to new, lukewarm to negative on guns and land.

Okay.

At least within the West. The reason is, I think what you'd substitute there is passport, second passport. Okay. The reason. Here's. Here's my argument as follows. First, stipulating that I'm friendly to the second amendment. Like, I understand why it exists. And it's not simply self defense against a crime. It's to overthrow, you know, a bad government. And, you know, the, the, the. The tree of liberty is watered from time to time with the blood tyrants. I understand all that stuff. I'm not, you know, okay with that said. Like, using a gun is very much a last, last, last, last, last resort, especially in modern America, where you could have. You can get ridden, housed for that. Right? Like, the process is the punishment. And you're dragged through this calf guest thing. And Rittenhouse wins by like one juror sympathy on, like one day. You know, it's a very, very close run thing. And, you know, Daniel Penny is also just like, I was just gonna execute it.

Daniel Penny is the exact same thing. One person basically said, I ain't doing this.

Yeah, that's right. But. But he, you know, was dragged through the mud for, you know, he almost went to jail for the rest of his life. Right. And so the, the problem is that if you need to, you know, the whole try that in A small town thing. You know that song and so and so forth. If you need to whip out a gun, that actually means the state has failed. Yeah.

Oh, I don't, I don't say gun, by the way. I don't say gun in terms of to use the gun. I say, I say it from the perspective like ammunition prices go up in 2,010 and in 2,020. As we head towards uncertainty. You get, it's almost like people perceive the thing that they may need, so they start to buy it before they need it. Like markets are forward looking, but then I know we always somehow like sidestep. They don't actually need the gun, it's just that the ammunition prices all, you know, significantly go up.

Totally understood. So, okay, fine. So let's just say at least what I think just to close that out and merge the two things together. I think there's, and bear with me because I'll give one or two remarks and go to the next. Like there's, there's a left wing version of like abolish the police, which is totally crazy. There's the Republican version of second amendment, I'll defend myself with my gun. Then there's a tech guy version of I will get a private security force like Uber for private security and so on and so forth. Right. But the problem with actually all three of those is that there isn't such really a thing as private security. There's only public security. The reason is unless you're, unless you're Trump, your private security detail cannot go ahead of you and like clear buildings and clear snipers and throw people in jail and so on, so forth. It can just be a bunch of guys that like surround you or something and look big on the sidewalk, right? You're not, you don't really have the ability to clear the streets. Right. Only there's no such thing as private security, only public security. If you keep that in mind, then you actually go from guns and land to a passport to a country that actually has a stable government. So I'd say passport and community would be my number three and number four. Right. So that's on the fourth thing. Land. I am so think about the Pacific Palisades, right? That fire that burned down California. What was the market price, the nominal price of those houses a few days before that fire? It was like whatever, millions of dollars, right? But if you look closer, you would see that they were not priced properly. Why? Because California hadn't like, like insurance companies, for example, wouldn't be able to insure those properties. Right. California was still charging property taxes on these exorbitant, you know, houses, you know, they, they, you know, but, but insurance, which is a private actor, was the clue that these things actually were not, you know, there are too many fires, you know, that these guys who are paid to do this kind of risk calculation couldn't make the numbers work anymore, so they just got out. Okay. Obviously, that's not limited to Pacific Palaces. That's a huge swath of California real estate. And when you have, like, real estate is dependent on the state. If you've got to give you a few more examples, you know, the squatters in New York, like, there's crazy squatter laws. Have you followed this at all, Jim? Talking about.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Okay. So if you're a real estate guy, like, you know, the same kind of thing that allows a homeless drug addict, you know, to pass out in the stoop of your shop, right. And you can't remove them, it's only one step further for them to do it in your garage. Right. Or they're squatting in your house when you've gone on vacation and you somehow there's like squatters rights, this insane thing that people only realize when they get through this Kafka system where the state is a failure. And so much of it just depends upon, like, large numbers of people not realizing that they're squatters rights. Right. If you had flash mobs that went around and tried this in states that had, quote, squatters rights or cities that didn't enforce evictions, you just have a total disaster where you don't actually own as a landlord or a real estate developer, the property that you think you do. Again, I'm not saying anything as a real estate guy. You know what I'm talking about, right. But you started stacking it up. It's abolish the police. It is the. It's a lack of insurance. In lots of blue cities, it's the squatters rights, homeless encampments. So I don't believe in land. Unless you believe in the government which is guarding that land. I'll give you one more example. London. Okay, so London for, you know, as you may recall, Russia used to be part of the G8. Right. For a while it looked like it was integrating with the west, similar to that China graph. Lots of Russians had apartments and lives in London and so on and so forth. Lots of other people from lots of different countries did. They thought, as you were saying, that land was like a safe kind of thing. Like, you know, and then suddenly, just even if they didn't agree with Putin's war, even if they had left Russia 20 years ago, you know, if they're like fluent in English and blah, blah, blah, they were suddenly punished for being Russian nationals through literally. No, they didn't order the war. They had anything to do with it. Right. And. And their property was seized or there, there were sanctions put on them or, you know, banks wouldn't serve them. And so it's over. And suddenly realized, wait a second, that thing I thought was. Was secure, that land was actually not secure. And so actually that's why London prices have actually fallen a lot similar to that thing that would happen with the Chinese overseas developers. Right. That you mentioned. So I believe. Now then, let's get to your first point with gold. Gold. Physical bricks of gold. You know, it's funny, I actually don't think the TSA detectors do much of what they are intended to do, but they do have a possibly intended, possibly unintended side effect, which is it's really hard to get a gold bar through a TSA detector. And actually there's also some kind of thing which says, like, if you have more than $10,000 on your person, then you have to declare it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Right. So the state is set up to intradite flows of gold, like physical gold. And then if you've got gld, like the Speeder Trust or something like that, nothing against them, but in my view, that defeats the point of gold because you've got the counterparty risk. The whole point of gold is like a physical gold brick. Right. So if you're a government, you can afford the armored cars. And even then, like Germany, it took them, cost them a lot of money to get their gold bricks back from the US Back to Germany. Did you see that thing?

Yeah.

It took them like seven years and like millions of dollars. And somebody pointed out they could have done that with one bitcoin transaction for like a fraction the cost fraction of the time.

Right.

So that brings number two. So of gold, digital gold, guns and land. I would say gold only if you're a government. Physical and only physical gold. Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. Absolutely. Second passport and find a good community. So second passport. One thing that's not being tracked by a lot of people. Caribbean passwords, for example, have doubled in price. Do you know that? I've.

I've been paying attention. There's this company a bit citizenship and.

Citizenship.

Yeah, Bitters and.

Yeah.

And they. You basically can invest in these funds but they're only doing it in Portugal and Italy, I think. But there's tons of countries now that are introducing these programs that seem to. One, the price keeps going up, but to the volume keeps going up. It's like the volume, you know, one.

Of the price and yet demand.

Yeah, one of the charts that always blows my mind is in 20, I think it was 18 when we put the tariffs on China made solar panels in the U.S. if you look at the demand chart and the adoption chart, there is no change. But, you know, whatever. 25, terrified to get started with. And just.

It just kept.

Like the demand was so strong, it was basically complete price elasticity. Like, people just like, whatever you charge, I'm buying. Same thing with these passports.

That's right. And. And the way I think about it, actually, there's bitizenship, there's Citizen X and there's Henley Global. So just disclosure, I was. I was a seed investor in two of them, and I'm friendly with the Henley people, but I want to see a bunch of these kinds of services because I think there's gonna be a lot of demand for it. I think people are gonna save up not for their first house, but their second passport. Okay. I think that's actually more valuable because it will exit and being able to move because there's. There's. The thing is, there's actually two major. This, this insight is not original to me, but I think it's an important one. There's two major ways that human beings operate. The first way is one that's familiar to us, which is like the farmer, soldier, sedentary. You live in a, you know, in a. In a state, and it's almost like. Imagine you had like a. Like a spring or a wire on the back of your neck, like a. Like a stretchy cord, you know, like those stretchy cords they've got at the gym and so on. Right? So imagine you had something like that and as you. And there's like a peg in the middle of Nebraska or something like that. And so you could travel around the world as an American. You could be here for 30 days or 90 days or whatever. But it's a stretchy peg. That point pulls you back, right? You're sort of like anchored to that point. You can't really go too far away. You have to come back to your zone. And if you have a bad passport, like from a country that doesn't have a good passport, then your stretchy kind of thing can't even go that far. There's A great cycle passport index or where you can look at this. Okay. And I think this is going to be a big deal for people. I've got a talk coming up which is crypto identity is the next big of the piece of the puzzle after cryptocurrency. It's not just your, you know, what do you leave the house with. You leave your house with your wallet keys and ID and the wallet part and the private keys part and the ID part all become your cryptocurrency, crypto entity. All one thing like ENS and so on like that. Okay, so rather than the first house, get the second passport. Save up for that because I think it's going to unlock more opportunity globally. And you know, you're only seeing that right now if you're like a digital nomad. But the cost of living is so much less outside the west in many cases that you can live on a thousand bucks a month. You know, for example, we've got a network school@ns.comns.com Check it out. Come to ns.com apply, apply. Okay, fine. But if you come to a network school, we've got down to 50, 100 bucks a month all in for gym, co working, you know, fitness, you know, coffee this, that and the other because explain.

There's a lot of people who are going to watch this who have no clue what network school is. It's very cool what you guys are doing. So describe like what is network school and then this. 1500 bucks a month and what they're getting.

Sure, sure. So if you go to ns.com you can see what network school is briefly. It is just like we started new currencies, we're starting new communities. So we've got an island in the Singapore, Malaysia special economic zone. It's right off the coast of Singapore and we've got lots and lots and lots of empty apartments. We built a gym, we built San Francisco style cafe and co working space and an auditorium and lots and lots of event rooms for people to hold talks and lectures and so on and so forth. And we have all different kinds of guest speakers and people from more than 100 countries have come. It's basically like San Francisco outside San Francisco, but like 1/10 the price and so on over here. And so that's like one way of understanding it's a place to hold. Actually I can put it on screen. Let me just do that. So network school start society. So you can see, can you see the video or the visuals there? Yeah, yeah. So people are coming off the Bus coming in, checking in. And you know, there's VR and drones and there's you know, like a virtual reality flag and so on. There's Talik, Brian Johnson. It's a drone shot of the outside. Bitcoin and like lectures. Content studio over here. This is one of our auditoriums. Robot dogs, just fun stuff. That's a founder of Flexport, that's Jesse Pollock of Coinbase Base. And it's just like a cool. This is one of our. This is our big gym over here. Group workouts in the morning. It's very solid commercial gym, right? And that's Jason Calcanis and me. Yoga studio. We got friendly for kids also. It's just like basically we've got this gigantic solar punk island mostly to ourselves with all kinds of empty apartments here, right? And you know, people play chess. It's just kind of cool. It's like if. If you actually had a small town that was actually, you know, tech central, right? There's, here's, you know, some of the nightlife and, and so on. People hang out. There's a cafe, you know, and we'll see, yeah, bonfire and stuff, you know, beach parties. There's a beach there. So, yeah, here's like a drone shot of part of the island, right? So. So that is NS.com right? And so that is my constructive solution, right? Rather than, you know, complaining about the world or what have you, it's useful to form a critique of the world as it exists. But ultimately you want to execute on building an alternative, right? Because the best form of criticism is not simply say that sucks, but rather here is a better version that I think works. And it's actually much harder to do that. You know, it's way easier to say something sucks than to build something better. You know, they're saying Windows sucks is easy, saying building Linux is hard, you know, and. But I think we're actually doing it. And importantly, and the reason I call it Network School, there's several reasons. One is it's a play on Network State. Have I. Have your viewers heard about Network State? I'll put that on screen just for a second as a refresher. So I wrote this book in 2022 called the Network State, and it's a Wall Street Journal bestseller and so on and so forth. And I can explain what it's about in really one image, which is this. Let me make. Maximize that. So essentially this is what a Network State is. It is a. Just like Bitcoin's a decentralized currency, a Network State's a decentralized country. It's a physical social network where in this case you've got a social network with 1,729,314 people and you've got subgroups of that network that crowdfund nodes around the world. Like here's the 166,000 person node in Tokyo and here's the node in Mumbai and so on and so forth. And these can be actually like small towns that are essentially networked together around the world. And the annual income and real estate footprint of this network state collectively can be larger than that of a legacy nation state. Just like bitcoin, though it's decentralized, can be larger in value than any centralized currency. Right. And I, you know, I also had in the book, I had a, a vision or visual of how you could build a network state which is you could literally start from a single person like this. Let me show you this GIF start for a single person, go to 17, 1721-700170-00170,000. 1.7 million. So you basically just like Zuck, starting the social network from his dorm room, you could start the social network scale it, have people crowdfund territory and then just keep going and knit them together. And eventually, just like bitcoin eventually became the national currency of El Salvador, you become large enough and eventually you get diplomatic recognition. Right. So what we're doing with Network school is related to this, which is it's a community. I wouldn't call it a country for a long time, maybe, maybe never. Okay. But what it is is something where we are starting. Can you see the screen there with that image?

Yep.

So we're starting with one large node in the Singapore area. We're going to get this to maybe 2000ish or so people. Then we'll open up nodes in probably Miami, certainly Dubai, maybe Japan, you know, other places, India, keep adding Bhutan. Yeah. And then we also, this is important, we fund other startup societies around the world like Zuzulu, which is, you know, Vitalik, like is the Ethereum network state. Don't die Brian Johnson's network state and so on and so forth. Right. And so that's what I think of Network school as it is a, it is a startup society that bootstraps other startup societies. So it, it is both an example, it's both the thing and it's an example of things sort of like how bitcoin was both the cryptocurrency and it was a template that every other cryptocurrency was based off of where they took Bitcoin. And they said, for example, Ethereum is Bitcoin, but with programmability, or zcash is Bitcoin, but with privacy. And then Solana is Ethereum, but faster or what have you. Right. And so on and so forth. Everything kind of within 1 or 2 hops References Bitcoin in its design, right? So even if it swaps out many of the components, and so they're all kind of inspired by that. And so that's the purpose here. Imagine if Bitcoin had been built from the very beginning to be something that would give birth to a thousand cryptocurrencies. You design it somewhat more differently, Right? And that's what Network school is. I know I don't have all the answers. Some people will do vegan network states, and some people will do carnivore network states, and some people do, like Latin immersion. And, you know, there'll be Mennonites and there'll be Catholics and there'll be Jains and Sikhs and all different kinds of different groups, people, Catalonians, Basques, language groups, cultural groups, ethnic groups, all kinds of stuff that I can't even predict. One of the things, after the democracy book came out, for example, you know what Catalonia is? It's like a community in Spain, right? But they're not Spanish, and they have this whole thing where they kind of fight with Spain and, you know, without getting into the back and forth of that. They're outnumbered by the Spanish.

The classic battle.

Yeah, yeah, they're outnumbered, but they want to preserve their ancient culture, which I. Which I respect. So they can take essentially the third option, which is maybe they crowdfund territory somewhere else and they build over there. There's more Irish Americans than there are people in Ireland, right? So the Irish took that approach. Maybe other people could take that approach. It's not totally crazy. So one thing that's interesting is seeing Network state getting taken up by people who are very far afield from the kinds of things I think about. So that was. There's a big story in like a Catalonian language newspaper on that and so on and so forth. So the point being, I know I don't have all the answers, but I want to develop a template that can allow people to rebuild societies, communities where they. They can build together and they can set whatever admission criteria they want, and then maybe we all value Bitcoin and we can all trade between each other with cryptocurrency and so on and so forth. And in a sense, you know, good fences make good neighbors. You know, we can agree to disagree on certain things and we have our own communities and we're proud of them, but we can also trade between them, you know, peace and trade, if that makes any sense. Right. So it's a vision for kind of rebuilding the world on a voluntary basis. All right, let me pause there. So it's both something that's useful, I think, in its own right, but it's also got an ideological purpose.

I love it. I, I look, you, you know, I'm a big fan of this. I think that it's very smart and I don't think people quite understand just how big what you guys are doing, you know, kind of at the, the, the headquarters, if you will. But if anyone wants, they can go visit, come visit. I'm going to, I'm going to come visit. NS.com is where people can go and, and learn more. Blushy. It's always, uh, fantastic to talk to you, man. I could talk to you literally for hours. I appreciate everything that you're doing. Where, where else should we send people to to find you on the Internet?

Go to ns.com and then one other thing I'll put up on screen is our conference is, is in a few weeks. So network CA conference, October 3, 2025 in Singapore. So come out here. We have, you know, Brian Armstrong, we have Vitalik, we have Arthur Hayes, we have all, all the crypto people. And Sharp Society is all speaking and it'll be promises to be a really good time.

Amazing. All right, man, well, thank you so much. We'll do it again in the future.

All right, thank you.