“How to prompt AI like a tech millionaire” – Balaji Srinivasan

Prompts are just higher order programs in a hidden API. And so the smarter you are, the smarter the AI is. There's a good argument that it'll be challenging for AI to prompt itself, but until we get there, and I'm not saying it's impossible, it might be 10 years before we have a billion robots. Until you have a billion humanoids, I think you're gonna have to have something along those lines before prompting in its modern sense is superseded. So that's a prompting side. But the side that's even more important is.

This is Balaji, a tech visionary who has made hundreds of millions of dollars with his startups. He was also the CTO of Coinbase, and he's one of the most interesting thinkers of our time. In this podcast, we talk about how smart people are using AI, why the American empire is about to fall, and Balaji's plan to build a new country. I love your idea of the smart get smarter. And I think this is one of the most unique ideas in terms of how AI will impact people. Can you elaborate on that?

So I think of AI is actually, among other things, amplified intelligence more than artificial intellig artificial intelligence. Because the bottleneck on AI is prompting and verifying. And prompts are just higher order programs in a hidden API that say you, your vocabulary determines what the API is. Right? And so the smarter you are, the smarter the AI is. And you can see that where if you ask code me a website is one thing, but if you say, use this framework, use this database, use these libraries, I don't want you to do this on the front end, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? The more specific you can be and the better your vocabulary, the, the result. Right? So that's a prompting side, but the side that's even more important is a verifying side. You know, in theory, AI can do advanced math, in practice, it'll spit back a bunch of symbols at you. And you at least need to be smart enough to understand what the symbols are. And AI in particular, you know, they'll say 9.11 is greater than 9.8, that kind of stuff. Famous one, right. My general rule of thumb is that for anything that's visual images, if it's video, it's front end mockups, well then we can instantly detect that by eye. So Karpathi and I were talking about that on X the other day. We have GPUs in a sense built in, you know, vision. We do that in hardware. So you can very quickly detect that a face is off, a hand is Off a user interface is off. That's why AI excels for things that are visual.

Yeah.

Once it's like backend code, once it's smart contracts, once it's systems programming, then you have to go to system two thinking. You have to go gradually and really understand what it's doing. It's possible, and I put this as a research direction, that you might be able to convert some of those kinds of problems into visual problems. As a toy example, if you generate an audio file, you can't see that MP3 by eye, but you could generate a spectrogram and then you can see that there are some frequencies in there that you didn't expect to be in there. But recursing back up the top, your intelligence is the prompting and it is the verifying. So really what AI does is just amplifies a gap that already exists. It's amplified intelligence, not artificial intelligence.

Real quick, we're giving Vectel Ultra to everyone who joins the new society, which comes with all of the smartest AI models in the world, plus full access to every single feature inside of Vectel. However, this offer is only available during July, so make sure to join the new society today. It's the first link below the video. Yeah, I've heard the podcast with Terence Tao on Lex, and he mentioned the math smell. Right. Like for math, if someone is bad, it's like obvious that they wrote a bad proof, for example, but it makes it really convincing. And then, as you said, the verifying is the hard part. So maybe that's like the argument for humans still being needed in the short to medium term to like check these important problems. Whereas we cannot rely on the LLMs until there is like a major architectural breakthrough, I guess.

Yeah, exactly. I think that unless AIs can prompt themselves, then you're going to need humans for a while. And perhaps that's the most important thing of the last two and a half years that prompting has endured.

Yeah, a lot of leaders were predicting it would go away, like Sam Altman was famously saying.

Yeah, that's right. And the reason I don't think prompting is going to go away easily is imagine you had a really fast spaceship and it could get you anywhere you wanted to go. You still have to point in, you know, three dimensional coordinates where you want to go. Right. So if you imagine like the surface of a sphere, you have to specify phi in psi on the surface of a sphere. Right. Which is your heading in three space. Right. So those two parameters, those two floating point things, then your spaceship Moves really fast, even like whatever, some fraction of the speed of light in that direction. And then you have a third parameter, which is the radius, like how far out you go, right? So you've got phi, psi and R. But now if you think about what a prompt is, okay, just take ascii, okay, You've got A through Z, you've got capital A through Z. You've got punctuation marks and numbers. So let's say there's 128 choices, okay? Per character. So even just a few characters is basically way more dimensionality than just two or three floating point numbers. Yeah, right. You might argue, well, sure, but I'm not going to mash random characters there. I'd say, fine, but if you write a sentence that's actually a very, very high dimensional direction vector, extremely high dimensional. Because of that, even if you think of this LM as a spaceship that gets you very quickly to your destination, you still have to point where it's going. And that's what the prompt is. The prompt is a vector in a very high dimensional space. A direction, heading, and then the speed of the eye takes you in that direction. That initial thought can vary so dramatically. You can ask about chemistry, you can ask about Roman history, you can ask it to write some code for you, you can ask it about, I don't know, video production. Those are all direction headings. And no matter how good the AI is right now, let's even say it's neuralink and it can read your mind. Okay? Even still, you need to have interesting thoughts. Yeah. You know, you need to have interesting thoughts. There has to be something in there, like maybe that saves you the time to type. Okay. Perhaps for some people, they can think it, but they can't express in words. Okay, right. But is that going to actually be that much bigger an improvement than we think? You know, neuralink works. There's some bandwidth now that you can get out of just pure thoughts. But while it's a miracle, it's also not a miracle. Meaning it's a miracle that it works, but it's not a miracle in the sense of it's not going to solve the problem of having interesting thoughts in the first place.

By the way, I'm doing a world tour, so if you want to meet me in person, make sure to follow me on Instagram plus, it's the easiest way to message me. The link is going to be below the video.

So we get back to amplify intelligence. There's a good argument that it'll be challenging For AI to prompt itself, I'll give a sketch of an argument. Okay.

Okay.

You know, like a time varying system is. No, there's time invariant systems, which they don't change as a function of time derivative with respect to T is zero.

Okay.

And there's time varying systems that do change as a function of time.

Okay.

Okay. So for example, the rules of chess don't change over time, they're constant.

Yeah.

Okay. The mapping for the most part between images and words doesn't change over time because like a cat is a cat, a dog's a dog, and has been for hundreds, if not thousands of years.

Okay, Makes sense.

Once, once in a while new words come about, like I guess, chopped or whatever now, but for the most part, you can think of that mapping as basically time invariant. So whenever something's time invariant, you can put it in there, you can run training on it, you can learn coefficients and then you can learn a mapping. Right. But when something is time varying, for example, markets or politics. Right.

Yeah.

Especially when it's adversarially time varying like markets or politics. If you make the same trade, then eventually somebody sees that on the other side, they say, oh, he's making that trade, I'm going to make a different trade. And the thing that was winning before is suddenly losing. And in particular, okay, using an AI on this side, then someone will use an AI on the other side. I mean, because you've got, you know, AI versus AI, this polytheistic AI rather than monotheistic. So I think that if you think about what prompting is, it's really almost the human acting as a sensor for the environment, for this time varying environment and for this person and, and resource and you know, constrained environment. Right. And this local context and is distilling that down into a series of characters. And that is simply a non trivial thing to do because I'm not saying it's impossible, but you need to have goals and desires for the AI. Right? Now, eventually, if you have humanoid robots, you could actually have the Terminator scenario of humanoid robots that will actually be able to build data centers and create power for themselves, to power themselves and replicate themselves and so on and so forth. Then replication could be a goal of robots. Right? That would, then that would, that would keep going. Right? That's, that's something that's proven by evolution. But until we get there, and I'm not saying it's impossible, it might be 10 years before we have a billion robots. Like it took 10, 15 years before we had a billion phones. IPhone came out 2000-2009-2010-2007 actually, but it was about mid 2010s, late 2010s, before we had a billion phones until we have a billion humanoids, and maybe we will by the2030s. I think you're going to have to have something along those lines before prompting in its modern sense is superseded.

I guess what stands out is the importance of taste, right? Like as you said, a lot of different inputs, a lot of different possibilities. Even if you go in the high dimensional space a bit off, you can go to a place that you don't want to get to, right? For example, code based design. If you don't know what you're doing, you can shoot yourself in the foot later on, right? So I guess the importance of having that judgment or decision making is something that in the short to medium term I see like being the differentiator, because everybody will have access to all of the best AI agents, but the top 0.01% of people will be able to get infinitely more work done than if you give it to an average person and they use it. Like Google, as Balaji says, the smart get smarter. And while most people use old, outdated productivity apps, the smart people use Vectel. Vectel is an AI powered task manager that will save you hours every single week. It can help you brainstorm, organize your tasks, complete your projects and make you far more productive. The people who use Vectel genuinely love it because it saves them so much time. Just try it yourself, go to Vectel AI and sign up.

Sure, that's right, yeah. I mean, but the thing is, in a sense, that was also true before AI, right? Because you had all the world's information at your fingertips. You could write code and communicate with any human being. You could move arbitrary amounts of money around the world. Essentially, a computer has turned a very large class of things into what I call types faster problems, right? So what's a types faster problem? It's a problem that can be solved by typing faster. Now, not everything can be solved that way. For example, you can't necessarily get a deal to close by typing faster, right? You can't necessarily build a building more quickly by typing faster. Sometimes you can, because you can make the blueprints and the designs faster. You can iterate, right? But a larger and larger class of problems can be reduced to type faster type problems, right? But then the bottleneck is now between the computer and you. It's you, it's your brain, right? So the bottleneck doesn't go Away, it just gets moved to something else. Right. And if you think about it, what do computers do before AI, they can do really complicated calculations that, you know, humans used to have whole rooms to do the calculations for, you know, things like the Manhattan Project or for airplane design. Huge rooms of people manually calculating. People used to do spreadsheets with accounting by hand. Before there were spreadsheets. Yeah, bookkeeping, all that stuff. But then human lifetimes, that was like the 70s, you know, spreadsheets only became mainstream in the 80s, right. So like people who are in their 50s or 60s absolutely did this kind of stuff by hand. Right. And so computers then sped all that up. But it's not obviously that we entered some grand age of quantum physics or something at that time. Just that you could do quantum physics calculations much faster did not necessarily mean that like quantum mechanics advanced that much faster. You might be able to argue it, but it wasn't like if there was an effect. It wasn't like something that's. That's visible to somebody who's not a specialist in the area. Put it like that.

I guess that's the Peter feel view of the world, right? Like the world of bits has improved a lot, but the world of atoms hasn't. Do you agree with that or do you not agree with that?

Well, let me. Okay, let me qualify what I just said a little bit. There are some areas where obviously computing has advanced a lot. Like bioinformatics wouldn't exist without computing. Right. Other is quantum computing obviously doesn't exist without computing, modern machine learning, AI doesn't exist. So in that sense, obviously computing has sped up a lot. But I mean, our understanding of basic physical processes. I don't know. And I say I don't know. I mean, I'm rationally, I could be. I could be persuaded otherwise, but it's not obvious to me that it radically improved when we could compute those physical processes faster. In fact, actually a lot of textbooks are not really written around simulating things. You know, they're still written on pen and paper equations, which are important for sure. Right. But they're not like premised on the computer, you know. Anyway, the teal thing is interesting because I think it was very useful as a provocation in the 2010s to say that tech was moving slow because everybody thought it was moving fast. I think it is true that it's moving very fast in bits. I think that is fair to say. I think it's impossible to say it's not moving fast in bits. I think my resolution, my Thesis into synthesis is that we use the progress in bits to unlock progress in atoms. We use all of our capital and distribution in the cloud to make the arguments that unlock the regulations, that unlock innovation on the land. And then you get the self driving cars and you get the biotech zones and so on and so forth. Right. So you have these synthesis, synthesis in this way that's how you get the flying car, that's how you get, you know, the, the longevity treatments and so on and so forth.

Yeah, I guess so we're only beginning to see that, right? The benefits of you know, these different tools that use AI to measure all your health stats and like point out you might have this disease or self driving is like literally the last few years is only being available to the average person and only in a few cities across the world. So I guess in the Next, you know, five to 10 years we'll see more and more of that. Especially after the humanoid robots or other drones and robots are mainstream. Then we'll see the effects of the bits translating into the atoms.

The thing is the number of deaths due to the delay in the rollout of self driving cars from the regulators. It's hard will be quantified. Yeah, it's, it's like. So that's thing, it's like drug lag, right? The fact the FDA holds back these drugs that could treat or cure people. See the thing is the time at which like these self driving car applications were submitted versus when they're approved, the only thing holding it back is really regulations. And even if people say the tech is holding it back, that is true to some extent. But that tech would have progressed further without.

If you could experiment more.

Yeah, if you could experiment more. If you could have. And crucially if people like if there were zones where people were risk tolerant, right. And they understood, you know, no plane crashes, no planes, no train crashes, no trains, right. Without somebody who consciously takes a risk, right. Is a test pilot of some kind and is a pioneer and a frontiersman. Right. Without somebody who does that at the frontier of technology, like the kind of astronauts who went to the moon and so on and so forth.

But like Edison's Menlo park, you know.

Yeah, exactly. That's right. And the thing is we have bungee jumping, we have skydiving, we have people dying futilely in wars, right. We have people who take, you know, hard drugs and so on and so forth and all of that does nothing, honestly. Right. So why can't we have people consciously take a risk for that's valuable Right. And treat them as medical heroes or treat them as technological heroes who tried a new thing before it, before it worked. Right. I think that's, that's an important frame set shift that, that we want, you know. Anyway, why don't you keep going?

Another thing like on the same concept is like the number of deaths due to the delay of nuclear reactors because that is around even longer than self driving. You can say self driving is like, you know, 10 years, maybe like 2013, it would have been ready the first versions, whatever. But nuclear reactors like 50 plus years. But because of like two disasters and a lot of politics, so much energy is still coal and other like way more dangerous and obsolete sources purely because of politics.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I've seen some stats which say that like radiation, there's more radiation caused by coal plants and by nuclear plants. And I believe that and think it's interesting is China's building nuclear, India's building nuclear, Russia's building nuclear, America's not building nuclear. Have you seen that graph?

No, but I'm not surprised. Yeah, it's like so frustrating having this technology that, you know, 100, 200 years ago people would only dream of and then we're just not using it.

Yes, well, it's going to rise in the east, so that's a good part. It's going to be built somewhere.

So you think the west kind of has that ego, like the success from the past is preventing it from experimenting?

Yes, I think what happened was it's almost like a startup kind of thing where a company gets big and then it gets risk intolerant and then the greatest risk is taking no risk. Right. So China, India and actually Russia are building nuclear.

Okay, interesting.

And so yellow is operating, red is under construction, gray is planned, white is proposed. Right.

So you know, the US in the usa, that's great.

Yeah. So what's, what matters is, you know, red and gray. Right. Or a yellow. Red and gray, let's put it like that. Right. Yellow is actually in there, red is they're building it, gray is it's actively planned and budgeted and white is proposed. Right. So that's actually, you know, pretty interesting in many graphs like this, by the way. China is global number one, but India is often a pretty strong number two or number three and like very tech unicorns, for example. Right. And so the RIC, you know, Russia, India, China are the RIC of BRICs. Right?

Yeah.

And so just like the camera is sort of moving. Even, even Brazil actually is at least building one, you know, over here. And the U.S. is, is building none. Right. So the problem is that prosperity. France, at least to its credit, by the way, built almost as many reactors as the US And France is, you know, they, they do a lot of things wrong, but they do have nuclear power that powers the whole country and it just shows it could totally work. And it's just this crazy thing that Germany shut off all its nuclear reactors. It's not even on the map over here, you know, but at least France, France has some degree of sovereignty. They're able to do some things that other people aren't. So they're interesting. Depending on where Europe goes, they might. You know, somebody once said that France could go in a lot of different directions. But anyway, keep going. I'm listening.

Yeah, I was about to say, like, from this chart, it almost looks like India would be like China 15, 20 years ago.

I don't know. India basically went and liberalized in 1991. China went to capitalism starting around 1978. So roughly, India is about 13 years behind China in some, some, many different metrics. I'm not saying that India will ever fully catch China. I think India and China, different strengths and so on. I think China is very strong in the physical world, but it is, like, doing pretty well. Like, India is just, in my view, underpriced on the world stage. Kind of in the same way that in the 2010s, a lot of people were like, oh, China will just make plastic crap forever or whatever. And they underestimate China in the physical world. I think they underestimate India and Indians in the digital world. And they think, oh, they're always going to have accents and all. It's going to be call centers and, you know, sloppy outsourcing code and so. But the current generation of young Indians coming up is pretty, pretty talented in my view. And I think that's going to be an important phenomenon that's going to rise over the next 10 years. We'll see, though.

But don't you think, like, the best talent is leaving? I feel like a lot of these countries have the same issue where, like, the people move to the more prosperous countries.

Well, so there's some of that, but basically I think it's complicated because when the country is really poor or really wealthy, you actually have the minimum amount of immigration. But once it gets to, like a moderate level of wealth, for example, take Poland, right? Poland, when it was rising in the 90s and early 2000, actually threw off a large number of immigrants, right? There's a Polish plumbers in the UK and So on and so forth. And now that's actually started to decline. And a lot of them have come back home or what have you. Right. Because they've now converged with or arguably surpassed living standards of the uk. Right. And so that's a paradoxical thing that as a country starts improving from, from a. From a low base, it actually has a lot of people immigrating because the country has now grown enough that those people can say, hey, I can travel abroad, I can expand my horizons, the country is growing, but my growth rate might be even faster if I go abroad. And then you have a diaspora that then, you know, eventually brings back things home. And so, and so forth. Like, I don't think Ireland was ill served by Irish Americans. There's more Irish people outside of Ireland. I don't think Poland was ill served by its Polish diaspora. And so I don't think, you know, Japan, for example, when it was rising, it sent a lot of Japanese students around the world to go and study and figure things out. And it was kind of, in a sense, humble. Right. And because you just don't get from here to there, from poor to wealthy, like overnight. It's a gradual process that requires people to learn and you don't have all the answers as a country. So you go abroad and you learn. Right. So I don't think it's necessarily brain drain, but brain circulation is a term that people have used. That's kind of one thing that is. But I'd say that is distinct when a country is rising and people are immigrating from it because now they can afford to see the world and explore. That is distinct from when a country's gone to the far left or sometimes the far right or fundamentalists and people are escaping. That's a different kind of thing. And so it's really about the trajectory of the civilization because there's a difference between going abroad for work and getting away from a terrible government. Right. A pull versus a push.

I guess also the difference is total numbers aren't really as important as the millionaire migration map. Right. Like the famous map of the countries that are getting.

So that map is very important. You might put that on screen, the millionaire migration map. Right. If you put that on screen, that map is important because until 2019, the US was the number one destination for global millionaires. It had plus 10,000 net millionaires versus, you know, from baseline. And then after the pandemic, it dropped like 86% to like plus 1500 net millionaires. And Dubai became number one and Singapore number two for global millionaires. China also drove out a large number of millionaires because of, you know, the Shanghai lockdowns and zero COVID policy. Right? And then of course, the Russia, Ukraine war drove out a lot of people, right? So since that low point of 2021, 2022, when the US was down 86%, the US recovered somewhat like 3,000 net millionaires. But now it's going to crash again in 2025 onward because they've cut off the EB5 visa, they've cut off other kinds of things. It's very hard as a tourist, worker, investor, student to get a visa into the US they don't want foreign trade. They're cutting off trade with the tariffs. You know, every country, by the way, every single country that had people exporting or trading with the U.S. those are some of the most pro American people in those countries. They were relatively powerful local entrepreneurs, relatively, I mean, not super, but relatively influential. And every single one of them would advocate for more trade with the U.S. they'd have customers in the U.S. they'd HAVE friends in the U.S. you can't sell into the U.S. without those relationships. And suddenly they all got hit at the same time with these giant crazy tariffs out of nowhere. And so they all got undercut. And so essentially everybody around the world who traded with America in any way was penalized for that. All right? And so what that's going to mean in the medium term is essentially a rerouting of all global trade to basically to not have your supply chain transit the U.S. right. Since you have just random taxes on it as you cross borders. Because very few things are like just completely made in one country and shipped to another country. You know, supply chains are global and they often cross borders multiple times and going from like 0 to 30% tariffs complete change your business model. If you, you had 0% tax on moving $1 million of parts and now it's a $300,000 tax, you're going to think about whether you want to move those parts across the US border at all. Maybe at the very end. And this is only a market as opposed to a place to produce things in, right? So they have a very simplistic understanding with the tariffs of like how goods are actually made. And, and then when you bring this up, they'll get mad and so on and so forth and say, oh no, everything needs to be made in America, blah, blah, blah, which is only 4% of the world, right? And so anyway, so TLDR is coming, coming back though, because of all that because of bans on foreign trade or let's say taxes on foreign trade, on tourism, on workers, on students, on investor visas. This is going to drop probably quite a lot again in 2025 when the year is up. I wouldn't be surprised. I saw some numbers saying it was net negative. Immigration, immigration to the US and especially if you're like an immigrant entrepreneur, right? Let's say you're like, let's say an Indian founder, Indian technologist. Well, immigrant technologists. If you're in the U.S. now, there's a lot of people on the Luigi left that want to kill you because you're a CEO. And then there's a lot of people on the mega, right that don't want you around either because you're an immigrant, right? So because of that, the money has already moved outside the US and it's also also moved to the Internet. And it's moved even though it's not shown on this graph, a lot of it's moved to China. China's weird because it's generated so much capital that it can even lose all these millionaires and still be in the black. Right. Though this is China's greatest weakness. That they've lost a lot of smart people, right, Remains to be seen. You know what happens there. In a sense they've lost the Chinese capitalist party, you know, because they, the crypto Chinese kind of people have gone overseas. But the point being that having all this capital go out means all this talent is likely to follow and we're going to actually need like a new location for that talent. Actually that brings me. You want to, do you want to put up NS.com for a second?

Yeah, just.

I'll show you, I'll show you what we're doing. What I'm doing, this is what we're doing is basically we're building a startup society and you can just keep that video on screen. This is actually in the Singapore Johor Special Economic Zone. So just like 30 minutes outside Singapore, you can drive to it. And we've basically taken over this giant property and we've got 10 that's Vitalik and Brian Johnson there. We've taken over this giant property, built a gym, we built co working space, we built cafe, library, we have all kinds of services there. So this is a new thesis on hey, if all you need is a laptop, coffee, co working, there's an auditorium there. If all you need is that, then why not do that somewhere outside the US and so therefore you're basically taking San Francisco type thing and doing it Outside, of course, that already exists. You know, there's startups, there's more than 425 cities around the world that have at least one tech unicorn which is actually quite distributed. So of course that already exists, but we haven't actually done it like from scratch. Right. And now we're doing that. Right. So that's ns.com. so if you're interested in this kind of thing, if you're interested in type stuff I'm talking about, if you're like a global technologist, come and visit ns.com because we're doing AI, we're doing crypto, we're doing drones, we're doing robots, we're having fun bonfires and beach parties. It's a drone shot at the end with me and Brian Johnson. That's the island that we've taken over. That's pretty cool, right?

So basically creating a state based on beliefs, ideology, productivity, rather than where you were spawned on the map.

Yes, but I'd say we're building a society. Okay. To start. Right. And the way I put it is it's a third kind of thing. So there's Internet companies, then there are Internet currencies, and now we've got an Internet community. Okay.

Yeah.

And Internet community is a community first and foremost. Right.

If you think about it, the new society is my version of the network state. It's the place where you can surround yourself with some of the smartest people at the cutting edge of AI. Plus you get access to all the exclusive content we have inside, including this eight module workshop on prompt engineering, which will take you from a complete beginner to an expert prompt engineer. And again, if you join during July, you will get a month of Vector Ultra for free. So don't miss out and join the new society today. It's the first link below the video.

Way long before it has any diplomatic recognition. We have no illusions of that for a long time. Right. We're just building a community. That's it. Right. It's kind of like think about how long it took Bitcoin before it became recognized as the currency of El Salvador. 12 long years of building. Yeah, right. And then that was a peaceful process that was just a signature by naive Bukele. Then a few more years, four more years before it became recognized as reserve asset by the US. So it was both fast and slow. It's like 12 years, 16 years. So it's fast in the historical timescale, but slow on a day to day timescale. So we are planning for the long term we're patient, we're peaceful, obviously, and we just build a community. And then we'll eventually try to crowdfund territory and we'll eventually talk to some jurisdiction of the more than 200 around the world, and we'll say, hey, do you want to give us a special economic zone similar to what like the Amish have. Similar to, you know, the many special economic zones. In fact, if you go to another site, go to open zone map. So open zone map, you click view the full map or something like that. There's a lot of special economic Zones. We scroll down a little bit. Yeah. I mean, not all of these are really cool. Some of them are just like tax or whatever, but some of them are pretty cool. There's a lot of Special Economic zones globally. And this is a very important piece of the future. This is what I call the fractal frontier. The frontier is not in one place. It's not in America. It's on the Internet. And with the Internet, you can find these zones and you can move there and you can build there. And we're building the template to do that. And I do think in five or 10 or 15 years, there will be as many Internet communities, startup communities, as there are startup companies or startup currencies.

So network state, almost like the protocol.

Yeah, I mean, you know, you can call it a protocol, I would call it a template maybe, because it's not purely a software thing. It's like a set of cultural patterns. And like, for example, you know, was pretty important for us was building our cafe. Why? Because like a daily thing that everybody checks in on. You get your coffee there, you see your friends, you're sitting down with your laptop. Building that ambiance seems like a small thing. It's actually a big thing. It's kind of like, you know, getting. It's a good user interface on top of really sophisticated piece of backend technology.

Right, Good example.

Yeah, yeah. So we're building a bunch of things like that that are the template for a startup society. Okay. And then once we get ours to a certain scale, then others can use it. And of course, other startup societies already exist globally. Right. So anyway, I think we are early, but we're not. We're doing, I mean, a lot of good things happening. A lot of good things happening. You know, there's the don't die Network State by Brian Johnson, and there's Z Luke by Vitalik, and Solana's doing Forma, and Brian Armstrong's talked about network states, and Elon's working on the Mars Technocracy and so on and so forth. But to be clear, a network state is like the ultimate ultimate. That's like Bukele recognizing Bitcoin as a sovereign currency. Right. You don't have to go to that level if you don't want to go to that level. You can just have a peaceful community that is interested in veganism. Right. Or it's interested in carnivory or something like that. Right.

So the benefits start to happening even before the ultimate goal.

Yeah, of course, just co living is useful, right?

Yeah, for sure.

However, with that said, like the idea that you might. It's a little bit like, you know Elon, by seeing the goal of Mars he was able to get Starlink, right. And he's able to get SpaceX and I think he'll achieve that goal. He's achieved a lot of other goals. But even if he didn't, that long term goal got him a very important short term goal. Right?

Yeah.

And I think that the fact that Bitcoin is out there as digital sovereignty allows lots of things to sort of triangulate off of it. For example, stablecoins are not full sovereignty or certainly a little micro nft is not full sovereignty is because Bitcoin is out there that you can interpolate against it. Does that make any sense? Right? Yeah.

If someone does something impressive like the four minute mile, then people compare against that.

Yeah, exactly. That's right. So network state as a concept says hey, we've started new companies, we start new currencies, can we start new cities or even new countries? I think we can. I think that's the next step. The cloud will take land. Right. We will shift things over to window. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, but shift over to. Exactly. It's like this is possible. Here's a recipe. It's basically gather a cloud community, crowdfund territory, eventually obtain diplomatic recognition and you can do all that peacefully, you don't have to win a war, no revolution, nothing. Right. It's not even technologically that difficult because you don't need sea setting, you don't need Mars. Right. It's just executing with the tech stack we have available which is, you know, it's like WhatsApp and cryptocurrency and remote work and whatnot. You're just organizing people. As easy, as hard as that sounds. It's funny because Elon wants to build a Mars colony and Brian Johnson, my friend Brian Johnson wants to live forever and Sam Altman wants to build a super intelligence and I just want to help start new communities and eventually a new country that's been done hundreds of times before. So I'm actually in a sense the boring enterprise SaaS of crazy tech projects. You know what I mean? Right. But yet in some ways, starting the new country is considered the most radical. Like let's say people are willing to think about AGI, they're willing to think about all of these things. They're really thinking about Mars and whatnot. But they're like, oh, but you couldn't possibly start in your country. It's funny because that's the one that's considered the most difficult when I think it's actually maybe the most feasible in some ways. Let me pause there.

Yeah, maybe that is because of, you know, like in some ways, I mean, this is going to sound really like egotistical, but in some ways, like you can become rich and a billionaire with relatively low friction. But if you started like changing political systems or educational systems, you will encounter violence, you will encounter like pressure, you know, maybe jail and stuff like that. So historically, maybe that's why the perception is like starting a new country, new state is, you know, not possible or very difficult. Whereas there has been countless examples people becoming rich because nobody like really tries to stop you.

Well, I would definitely not say today that you can just easily become rich without people trying to stop you. I understand the point you're making. I would say that bitcoin shows that you could start a new currency without a single shot being fired. Basically.

Right.

Trillions of dollars were protected. So it's a new model for doing it completely, non, violently, peacefully. Right. It's cloud first, land last. And that I think is paradigm shifting because obviously you can crowdfund territory, you can organize it online, computer, you can crowdfund territory. Both those things have been done Just you're combining, grouping people together, crowdfunding territory, and then in a sense throwing a long conference there. All doable, all peaceful, all being done before individually, just not all done together and stacked.

So what would you say is the biggest bottleneck to this idea spreading faster? Because I know many entrepreneurs that would be supporting this. But it's not as prevalent as, you know, bitcoin, for example.

Oh yeah. I mean, everything always starts slow at the beginning. You get more proof points. But if they're interested, have them come to ns.com and have them come and just click apply and come by. Because basically we're going to be doing a lot later this year. We've got funding, we've got, if you scroll down a Little bit further. That's just, you know, network school, go a little further. So learn, burn, earn fun. And we got it relatively inexpensive. 1500amonth for everything. Right. Food included, gym, co working classes, WI fi, everything there.

Right.

And I think that's very reasonable. And if you just want a place to get remote work and lock in and focus, it's pretty good. Then also we're going to be holding NetworkState Conference 2025, October 3, 2025. I'm gonna post that. And so if you just click over there, for example, you can click to apply if you see that underneath the thing. Yeah.

So in terms of growth, would you say the biggest bottleneck is people not knowing about it or nation states not be being too willing to go?

Nation states don't care. I mean, why would they care? This is just like, you know, basically the. It's just like, this is just like a. You can almost think of it as residential co working. Right?

Yeah.

You know, we're just bringing a bunch of cool people together, I think bottleneck we haven't even really tried to scale yet. Right.

Okay.

I think the product, in a sense the community has gotten now dialed in enough that I feel very productive at network school. I think the people there, what we're doing is very productive now and I think that will change a lot. Or rather I feel we're probably going to start doing more publicly. Think of it as almost being in beta up until this point. That's roughly a good analogy, right? Yeah, yeah. And now we're going to do more publicly. But you should come check it out. I think it's cool. And if you like, basically if you like tech, if you like remote working, if you like focus, quiet and just great people, that's what it's like.

So the main location is in Singapore.

It's right off the coast of Singapore. Right. So it's in this thing called the Singapore Johor Special Economic Zone. And it is like 30 minutes outside the coast of Singapore. So if you know where Singapore is, it's like basically you can see Singapore from it.

And is there like any criteria for applying or who you reject or stuff like that?

Yeah, put in an application. I mean, we want to know that you're like, first, that you can support yourself. It's not that expensive. We want you to support yourself. And second, that you're like a culture fit. So we don't want people who are too politically radical in one direction or the other, if they're, if they're too woke or too maga or they're yeah, yeah. You know, if we think they're crazy or something like that. Because we're both capitalists and we're internationalists. Right. We have people from, like, 100 countries, every race, religion, creed, and so sort of. But they're all chill tech people. Right.

So focus is on tech and productivity and not politics.

Yeah, I mean, it's definitely tech and productivity. It's sort of. I consider it. It's simultaneously deeply political and deeply apolitical. Right. Because it's political in the sense of it's dissatisfied with the existing world, with the debt crisis and all that kind of stuff. And it's also apolitical in the sense of you don't want to get involved with that. You want to just build a better system outside. Right? That's the whole point. Build a better system outside, exit and build a better system. So that's how I think about that.

Okay, so on that point, how much do you think, like, the geopolitical things that are happening, you know, current events matter compared to the progress of AI and other technologies? Like, do you think that's, like, as relevant, or do you think, like, the tech will simply outscale it and we shouldn't even worry about the short term?

Oh, I think it's extremely relevant. I think it's extremely relevant because think of the state as a platform, just like Apple iOS is a platform, Right? And so, like, when you incorporate, that's like a state API you're calling. Right. When you set up a bank account and you wire money and it's using, obviously, Right. So there's a set of APIs you're calling for incorporation, for payments for your identity, like your driver's license or your passport. You know, you just, like you might report to security at Google. When there's an attacker on your website, you'd report to the police. That's another API you're calling. It's a series of APIs that you pay for. And just like when you run an app on Apple or Android, you're paying a 30% tax to them.

Yeah.

You pay this tax so long as you're deploying your life on that state platform. Right now. The problem is if you've put a lot of effort into an app and the platform gets hostile to you, it can start jacking up prices, it can turn off APIs, it can break your business or the company can go bust or can start to get mismanaged. There can be bugs, malware. Now you have to ask yourself, is it worth paying this price for this Right. If the platform's insecure and they've abolished the police, so to speak, on the platform, there's lots of bugs. You're like, is it worth me hosting my software here if the back end is going to get hacked? And so on and so forth. Right? And that's an individual question that everybody has to ask for themselves. And my view is all of these tech companies, insofar as they're incorporated on the state and their bank accounts are owned by the state and their people are regulated by the state and so on and so forth, they're running their entire business on the state's platform and they're seeing that it's breaking down and they have, it's true that they have the correct intuition that the Internet is taking over state services. They are correct about that. The cloud is taking over things land is doing. Example, email is taking over from the postal office or self driving cars are taking over in a sense from driver's licenses and taxi medallions because the state is no longer regulating who is driving and who is riding. Instead the self driving car is because the star ratings and so on of that. It is, it is true that Starlink and Space X are taking over from NASA and the Internet is literally funding trips to space. It is, it is true that Bitcoin is taking over from the Fed and that Ethereum and Smart contracts and Salon and so on are taking over from Delaware in terms of contracts. But it hasn't completely happened yet, right? For example, we need to get fully on chain and corporation of corporations.

We need to fully also government.

Yeah, yes, but start with corporations, right? Start with corporations. Because first you had Bitcoin so you could do transactions, then you had stablecoins, you could do fiat transactions. Now with a bunch of fiat transactions you can do accounting. Once you can do transactions and accounting, you can do your financials. Because you can also have the cap table on chain and you can have all the investor money on chain, right? And so then that collection of cap table financials, investments, contracts, right? That is what a company is. A company is an on chain entity. It can be thought of in such a way. And now eventually you can dock that in a new jurisdiction just like you can dock your laptop in a new jurisdiction and you just get on the Internet and it's the same thing, right? It's like a mobile data structure which is essentially living on Ethereum or Solana. Right? And that should obviously happen, right? That is going to happen over the next few years. Once you've done that, now you've got a corp because people are moving out of Delaware. Where should they move? Move from Delaware to the Internet. That's the obvious next step, but we haven't built that yet, right? So on chain incorporation from Delaware to the Internet should happen. And how does, what does that mean from Delaware to Internet? It means you have an on chain data structure which is locally legally recognized in the same way. For example, let's say your marriage is locally legally recognized, typically, right.

Or.

Your money, like your bitcoin is locally recognized in some way, it's still legal to have it. Right? So you have an on chain data structure which is off chain recognized. And so you flip it. So the primary is digital and the secondary is non digital. So that I think is an important next step to start reducing further the dependence on the state. And of course there'll be a lot of back and forth, but we're moving in that direction already with Dow laws and so on and so forth. So on chain incorporation, I think then that you get eventually on chain equity issuance, on chain stock markets, this genius act. If and when that goes through, the next step after that, which I think it will, then the next step, after you've done on chain currency, it's time for on chain equity. Right? And I'll have a whole talk on that.

So basically the chain is going to make the companies more decentralized, more robust, so that in the future, hopefully, if a government turns oppressive, you can just move to the other side of the world and your company and everything is still working. Whereas in the past, if you had 50 workers in a physical house company, you couldn't leave the country because your entire business.

That's exactly right. So the on chain company, see thing is in Soviet Russia, right, In communist China, Maoist China, the businesses were sessile, right? They were fixed to the ground their farms. So what did it mean in Soviet Russia? What did land reform mean? It meant that like the Bolsheviks would kick in your door, they kill the father, they raped the mother, they take the kids to a gulag, they seal the farm, and they do that hundreds of thousands of times. There's a thing called Lenin's hanging order. You can Google that, where Lenin says to strangle the kulaks. And the kulaks were basically like the small, you know, they were the quote, rich farmer who had two cows, okay? Lenin's hangover. And so the problem for those kulaks is their property was sessile. So when the communists came, they could just kill them and take the farm. Right? And yeah, this Lennon's hanging. Exactly. By the way, don't use Wikipedia. It's terrible. Use. It's all fake and, you know, it's terrible. You can use Britannica or something like that. It's probably better at this point, anyway. Point is, now we have Bitcoin and hopefully we have on chain companies now when they come for the property, you can just scatter and then reassemble overseas in any jurisdiction that respects that. I'm not saying they'll be trivial. Okay. You know, like. But what happened with the communist countries is that capitalist countries did not treat. I mean, communist countries treated their citizens as effectively, prisoners, Slaves. Right. That's to say when you go far right or far left, you actually end up in slavery. And the reason is, obviously, the far right gets slavery, slavery, but the far left gets 100% taxation, which is also slavery. 100% taxation is slavery. That's what communism is. Literally, you don't have private property. Right. You don't own the teeth in your head. In Maoist China, if you don't have private property, you're a slave. And so essentially, communist countries would try to shoot people for trying to leave. That's what the Berlin Wall. The guns were pointed inwards. Yeah. It was literally like the fugitive slave laws in the south, where they would shoot slaves for trying to leave. Right. If you got out of. You know, so they were not demanding.

Basically, monetary is exit task, exit tax, the monetary version of that. Like trying to shoot the entrepreneurs trying to leave the country with like 50%.

So basically, for example, the Soviet Union had something called a diploma tax.

Okay.

And this was imposed on Soviet Jews who tried to leave in particular. And it was something like 20 years of salary or something, something insane like that for trying to leave. And they said, oh, we paid for your education, so you have to give us back the money, or something like that. And the Soviet Union didn't even really have true salaries. It was more like an allowance or something like that. So there's something called the Jackson Vanik Amendment that America passed that actually said at the time, you know, they considered themselves a confident country. And they said, well, you know, no one wants to leave America for any reason, but they want to leave the Soviet Union. So the Soviet Union would lose most favored nation status if they impose this tax. The Nazis had something similar, it's called a Reich flight tax, where if you left and you were, you know, a minority or Jewish or something, they would try to take all your money before you left. The Cubans wouldn't let you leave. You know, they still don't. They try to shoot you for leaving. Obviously North Korea doesn't let you leave. Every one of these, you know, fundamentalist, fascist, you know, communist states, they treat their citizens as slaves who can't leave. Right. And because they, they're, you know, that's how, that's how they're getting money. They're milking it out of these people. And what happened with East Germany in particular is lots of the educated or doctors, professionals, they crossed the, you know, the, the, what became the, the place that they built the Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie. They crossed the border between east and West Berlin because they could just, that was a loophole to get to the West. So whether it was exit taxes, whether it was like shooting people trying to leave these, that's a symptom of a state that's. I mean, another example is, you know, the New York Times. It's amazing, they complain about all these tech companies. They themselves have one of the most dark patterns ever. You can't just cancel your subscription, you have to call them to cancel your subscription. Right. Well, because they themselves, you know, there should be some FTC probably investigation. But the point is that is a small version of an exit tax where they make it really difficult to cancel. Right.

Some chips have that, but you have to come in person to cancel.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oracle does this. It's so like you can understand it from a corporate standpoint and you start scaling it up and as a, as a country enter sovereign debt crisis. And the us, Canada, Western Europe, they're all at the ends of a Dalia is called like, you know, whether it's an 80 year or 400 year cycle, depending on how you count it, where all these countries have spent way beyond their means. And what pays for their debts? The answer. And by the way, their debts are not just like abstract things. What does it mean? It means that they've made promises to military allies, they made promises to Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries, Social Security beneficiaries, they made promises to police, to teachers that there's going to be resources for them. There's all these state employees and state dependents in different ways. It's not just debts to like rich guys that they could write off without any consequences. It's like debts that they have owed for, you know, entitlements and so on. And so they're going to default on a lot of that. Which is part of why like the US is saying, it's almost pretending that it's saying Europe, pay for your own defense, you weaklings. But it's really saying you just can't afford to pay for that anymore. Right. It's like from a macro standpoint, you might also say when it's blocking trade from other countries, oh, you know, we want to make everything in America. But it's also because they're looking at their huge trade deficit that's being sustained for many years. They're like, we don't want to go further into debt. We want to stop buying things from abroad. We're going to start making things at home. There is a good to that, there's like a good spirit on that at some level. But the bad part about it is they don't understand that you can't just go totally cold turkey. Or maybe there's actually honestly no solution. But the money printing is what's funding America right now. Dollar inflation is global taxation. And by cutting off that flow of global trade, they also cut off the ability to print money. So it actually means the eventual Correction is like 50, 90, 99% since what the US exports is not goods but dollars. And they lose the ability to export dollars if they're not the center of the world financial system, which is what they're ending right now anyway. So putting all that together, I think you're going to see the next step by the 2000 and 30s will be that. And they're already starting to do this in the UK that it's not about illegal immigration, but illegal immigration. Well, you can't leave.

Yeah. Canada as well. Right. I know friends who like wanted to move from Canada to Dubai that to pay like crazy exit tax.

Is that right? Yeah. Well, so I mean the thing about it though is they're going to make it harder because they're more and more bankrupt. Right. And I think many Western countries are in that situation and you know, all the people who leave, they will be attacked, they will be slandered. Oh my God, you're so evil. Like why would you do this? You're such a bad person. Blah, blah, blah, blah. But, but of course, what was America built on? Did the Irish who left the Irish potato famine, did they betray Ireland actually? Did the Roundheads and the Cavaliers, they left England in the 1600s to build Massachusetts and Virginia respectively. Did they betray England? Did the Germans who left the Revolutions of 1848, did they betray Germany? Did the Vietnamese who left the Vietnam War, or the Chinese left the Chinese civil war, or the Poles who fled various instability there, or the Jews left the pogroms, the Persians who left the, you know, Iranian fundamentalist revolution or the Indians who left socialism? Did any of them betray their countries by coming over? No, I don't think they did. Did you betray Iowa by moving to California to, you know, like, Robert Noyce or what have you? Like, I don't think he did that. I think basically that was just him moving for opportunity. Right. And I think Robert Noyce was. Yeah, Iowa Tintel. That's right. So I think we're going to see that tension between the cloud and the land, between the people who, you know, the land will pathologize moving as. Why are you moving? You should stay and fight, right?

Yeah, yeah.

They'll say, you're a coward, you need to stay and fight, and so on. And they're anthropomorphizing something that's really abstract because how do you stay and fight a sovereign debt crisis? That's like staying and fighting a volcano or an earthquake. It's not like there's some guy running up to you and if you punch him, the deck goes away or like a group of guys. It's not like you can shoot your way out of that. It's a giant web of structural obligations that's going to result in a lot of default and a lot of chaos, which is more like your house collapsing on you and it's like an earthquake or a volcano and just punching all of the rubble as it falls on you. Doesn't make any sense. You might say, well, okay, fine, maybe you can't fight an earthquake, but you'd rebuild after the earthquake when you stay and fight. And I'd say, okay, let's say you do rebuild after the earthquake. I grant you that that's a useful thing to do. How are you going to do that? You're going to rebuild, like, with the timber falling on your head? Or wouldn't it have been smarter to make a tactile withdrawal from the scene of the earthquake beforehand so that you could get resources from outside the quake zone to go and rebuild? Duh. Okay, but seemingly. But not duh. Right. That to me is super obvious. Right. Go ahead.

Yeah. I mean, it's crazy. Like, a lot of these things we talk about are about the obvious things that the people, the entrepreneurs are the ones that create jobs. Right. Like, it touches so many things. The network state, the US Trying to prevent skilled immigrants coming in, like, oh, let's protect American jobs. When in fact, if an entrepreneur comes in, creates a company, creates 20 jobs, that's a net positive to the country. Like, why is this thing that's obvious to me and you and, you know, entrepreneurs, that someone who creates products, services, companies is a net positive society. Somehow it's not obvious to the politicians and the ones creating policies.

Well, here's why. I actually think there is a reason why if you put this on screen, this graph explains a lot of the world. So this is basically showing that for thousands of years, the center of the world economy was in Eurasia. Okay? Why? That's why Marco Polo set up China. That's why Columbus sat up India. That's why the Mongols and the Huns were able to make inroads into Europe. That's why, you know, the Arabs are able to take Andalusia and so and so forth. Right. Basically, there was rough economic military parity across Eurasia. Okay. I'm not saying everybody's equal, but I'm saying that, you know, these were civilizations that wanted to trade with each other. And so the center of mass of the global economy was roughly there. I'm not saying. You know, what I mean with that is it's like a rough thing. If you take China and India, the Middle East, Europe. Yeah, yeah, roughly. Okay, fine. Then with the Industrial Revolution, the world economy rocketed out to Europe, especially Western Europe. And then they beat each other's brains in with all this advanced technology. In the 20th century, when the dust settled, 1950 was peak westernization, peak Americanization, peak centralization, where all these institutions were set up when the rest of the world was in rubble after World War II. Right. Japan had been nuked, you know, like China was in the middle of civil war. India was on the verge of partition. Like Eastern Europe was under communism, Russia is under communism. Germany had been reduced to rubble and so on and so forth. Right. Basically, Europe was just a gigantic, you know, mess. Right? And in America's the only thing that was left relatively unscathed. So everything got set up. Then the UN got set up and all kinds of institutions got set up where Americans, because they were the founder of the post war order, they, you know, all these countries are in the un, there's five on the Security Council, and the UN itself is headquartered in New York. Symbolically. Right. So it's like first among equals and the World bank and the IMF and all this kind of stuff, you know, got set up then all kinds of treaties and stuff. Basically the default was that the US was essentially organizing the world order. And then 1991, you know, about 40 years later, the US was similarly totally predominant after the Soviets fell. And so that period of time from 1950 to, let's say, 1991 was actually incredibly atypical in world history for the degree of Westernization, the degree of centralization, and the degree of Americanization. And after that point in time, once the world stopped being communist, stopped being socialist, once India went capitalist and China went capitalist and Vietnam went capitalist and Eastern Europe went capitalist and Russia went quasi capitalist, right. The world economy started rocketing back out to Eurasia even faster than it came over tens of years, which is where it is today with me so far. Okay.

Yeah. This is fascinating map.

So when you, when you have this map in mind, this is what I mean by history is running in reverse, Right. It's like a boomerang. Okay. Many things are happening that happened in the past, but are happening today even faster than they happen in the past in the 1800s. And the 1700s is a better guide to the world today than the 1900s anybody's talking about. 1950 doesn't really understand the world. It's more like 1850 in many ways. Right. There's aspects of 1950 that you can find and, you know, 1950s America is somewhere more similar to where China and India are today. Culturally, they're much more unified. There would be in their past, but America is more about the 1800s and the 1700s, like Civil War and maybe eventually like new new, new, new countries. Right. But my point being that with this boomerang, okay, that means that the west is declining in relative living standards versus the rest of the world. Okay? So they're really mad now. That doesn't mean they'd have to decline in absolute living standards, but as a consequence, they've taken on crazy ideologies like abolish the police or abolish free trade. So they're declining also in absolute living standards. And so they're super mad because of this, since they think the natural state of the world is 1950 to 1991, which is actually their peak ever. Right. So they're rating what the baseline is by the all time high. Okay. And this is why there's these stories like, oh, you know, the way things are supposed to be is a high school grad, you're supposed to have a house and, you know, wife and kids and, you know, they don't need. And that's how it's supposed to be in these evil capitalist oligarchs. They took that from us and Trump's going to take it back. And so and so forth are the evil capitalists. They outsource and offshore it. And actually the Answer is that, you know, there are Polish guys, there were, you know, Chinese guys who were all pretty smart and they were under socialism or they were nuked or they were in a gulag because of all this crazy stuff that happened in the rest of the world. And now that stopped happening. And so is it really the case that someone who's harder working and smarter in a different country should have a lower living standard? I don't think that's actually correct. And to be clear, I believe in win win, I believe everybody could have absolute progress, but I think that the decline in relative status has caused a drop in absolute status or progress in the west because people have had these terrible ideas. There's one more piece of it which is very important, which is if the US in particular, other countries can adapt, but the US in particular exports dollars. And so because of that, if it was exporting tomatoes, it could probably tolerate a relative drop. But because exporting dollars, if it has a drop even to number two in the global mark to market, then it's really exporting ledger entries in a ledger that it's running. If it drops number two, then drops more than number two, it drops several places, many places, because now it's only valued on what it can ship as opposed to the ledger. Do you see what I'm saying?

Okay.

And that's a very significant mark to market. It can't have a gradual step down to number two. It drops to like number 30 or 50 or something like that. It's a very, very significant drop. And so what's going to happen is it's very possible that you have by the 2030s, if the 2010s was blue and tech versus red in America and the 2020s was red and tech versus blue, it's very possible that the 2030s are red and blue versus tech. You have an anti. Anti tech movement.

So that's why you said it's apolitical and deeply political.

Yeah. Because basically I think, you know, if people feel that the Internet's rise corresponds to a decline in their living standards, even if it's not causal, even if it's just correlative.

Yeah.

Okay. Even if it's something where. Because the Internet's rising with living standards in the rest of the world, Southeast Asia, India, China, the Middle east, big parts of Latin America, even big parts of Africa, the Internet's correlating with rising living standards. Right. But for chunks of the U.S. canada, Western Europe and Eastern Europe is correlating with rising living standards for the US And Western Europe, it's correlated with falling living standards. They will scapegoat the Internet. They will scapegoat tech. They will escape, go immigrants. This is very possible. They'll blame AI for taking their jobs and bitcoin and crypto for taking their money. And tech guys will take all the blame. Right. So that is why I think it's not obvious to them that we are creating the jobs. They look at it as something where, wait a second, their boat isn't rising. And also another thing that's happening is all the money printing that these Western governments have been doing has been devaluing the currency. So everybody feels their prices are going up. And what they do, they vote for more socialism, which just happened in New York, for example. Right. So there it's like an alcoholic and they wake up in the morning, go ahead.

They blame the store owner for increasing the prices. When it's the like banker who printed 30% of the currency.

Yes. The central banker, it's Powell who did it. Right, yeah. And they just don't understand that because it's just a level two abstract. Right. And so as a consequence, you have something where it's like an alcoholic who wakes up, they've got a hangover and they drink more alcohol to get rid of the hangover. Right. So anyway, so putting all that together, if you take that off screen. So basically what that means is I think we're going to need societies that are premised on an Internet first premise that are built by technologists for technologists and where we actually step up into leadership roles and we have a positive vision for the future that's consensual and community driven because we're all equal on the Internet. Right. Everybody can opt in to monetary policy and smart contracts and property rights and identity and it's fair, Right. No matter what nationality you are, the blockchain is fair in a way that no Chinese or American or Japanese or European judge would be necessarily perceived by the whole world. A digital judge is fair. You can read the smart contract.

Right.

You can't say, oh, they're privileging my nationality or their nationality. So that's a new premise, a genuinely new premise for organizing affairs. And I think we could do a lot with that.

Yeah, I love the vision. Thank you for your time. Balaji, if you are interested, ns.com and yeah, hopefully it's success.

Great. Thank you, David.

Okay, have a nice day.

Bye.