Balaji Srinivasan explains how Bitcoin is driving a supply shock and outlines a blueprint for a new decentralized, digital civilization.
Balaji Srinivasan weaves a sweeping narrative linking the collapse of the U.S. dollar, the rise of Bitcoin, and the disintegration of American empire, arguing that "dollar inflation is global taxation" and the U.S. now exports inflation rather than goods. He sees Bitcoin as the antidote to this unsustainable, push-button empire, a decentralized, incorruptible form of money, and likens America’s internal unraveling to the Soviet Union's fall. While both left and right offer only reactive rage, Srinivasan envisions a future of voluntary, digitally-native network states built on shared values and economic sovereignty. Amid political stagnation, exponential forces like AI and Bitcoin are quietly transforming global power structures, setting up a new world order, CCP vs. BTC, where freedom and centralization become the defining fault line of the 21st century.
“Dollar inflation is global taxation.”
“It’s a thousand times easier to destroy than to build.”
“Bitcoin didn’t arise overnight, but to future historians, it will look like the dollar just collapsed the moment Bitcoin appeared.”
“The internet is more capitalist and more progressive than America.”
“The future is Bitcoin vs. CCP.”
“What remains after a fiat collapse? Your house, your skills, and your Bitcoin.”
“You can’t out-manufacture China. You can’t out-print Bitcoin.”
“The network state is society-as-a-service.”
“AI took the jobs. Bitcoin took the money. The tech guys will take the blame.”
“We need to go from sovereign individuals to sovereign collectives.”
This episode offers more than a forecast, it presents a blueprint for navigating the collapse of centralized empires and the rise of decentralized, voluntary civilizations. Balaji argues that the future won't be shaped by tariffs or nostalgia but by those who embrace frontier technologies like Bitcoin, AI, and network states. In a world where exponential change hides behind political stagnation, Bitcoin becomes the signal amid the noise, a tool for those ready to exit failing systems and build anew. The supply shock has already begun, and the time to act is now.
0:00 - Intro
0:58 - White conservative sympathy
15:06 - Cut silence
27:25 - Bitkey & Opportunity Cost
29:04 - Nothing ever happens except for the singularity
37:14 - Unchained
37:40 - Tariffs and energy infrastructure
45:00 - AI productivity
51:21 - Digital borders
1:03:45 - Asymmetric warfare
1:18:38 - Network states
(00:00) It's just setting it up for this crazy kind of supply shock. The current strategy is reducing, in my view, the life expectancy of the dollar. You don't become global number one in every category unless you are intentionally going and setting up the global empire.
(00:12) In return for maintaining that, they had the right to print money. And in that printing, dollar inflation was global taxation. Billions of people were basically taxed in order to pay for the upkeep of this giant empire. That arguably was a net benefit to them. That's way more profitable than working for a living. They bought one trillion249 billion999 million990,999.
(00:29) 39 worth of mortgage back bonds. So to make a thousand dollars in profit on a billion people in a second, that's what push a button and get a trillion dollars is. December 2024, I saw for the first time Americans thought of the world as their competition and wanted to protect their home market.
(00:46) Seemingly easy solutions of like imposing 45% tariffs have not been in my view thought through. And what that did is it undercut the pro-American voice in every single one of these countries globally. Logi, it's been too long. It's good to see you, sir. Good to see you, too. Yeah, we were just talking about jumping off points. You have one here. I had one that I wanted to pull up.
(01:11) We'll pull it up and post, but just referencing your tweet from last night uh about your sympathy to the white American conservative. And I think I think this is a good jumping off point because I think this particular topic sort of involves everything that we've been talking about. That's right.
(01:30) I mean, so as context, you know, 5 years ago, I moved to Singapore and India. I basically split my time between them and I was public about that. And um, you know, I was just talking to some of my friends and the thing is there's there's a zillion different mixed emotions. and some of them contradictory or what have you. It's kind of like uh that that that people have about the state of the world and the state of the US now.
(01:55) And uh there's some fraction of people who are like, "Oh, everybody who's an immigrant should just go home." Blah blah. And then another group is like, "I can't believe you left. Why didn't you stay and fight?" And sometimes it comes from like the same person, you know, like in different conversations where they've got a different mood, you know? It's like, I'm thirsty now and I'm not thirsty at this, you know, later point almost, right? And that post was sort of by way of explanation why, you know, I I I grew up in the US. I spent four years in
(02:21) America. I have obviously many American friends. I have an American accent. Uh I built many American companies. I employed many Americans. I invested in Mary Americans. Blah blah blah blah. Right? And um it was really a great country. And uh I know I'm saying was in the past tense. I know, right? But basically, I I totally get where a lot of people who are MAGA or Trump voters and so on are coming from.
(02:53) And I'm not even saying that as like a leftist who's like condescending or something like that. I'm saying that as I would consider myself a centrist or classical liberalish, libertarianish, sympathetic, whatever person. So I totally I think I totally get where they're coming from. Um, you know, one of the things I have in there is like, especially for somebody who was born in like the year 2000, right? You and I are a little bit older than that.
(03:15) So, we remember like, actually, when were you born? You born in the 80s, '90s, 91. 91. Okay, fine. So, if you remember the 80s, you remember the '9s, remember the early 2000s? It's a pretty amazing country. But for a kid who was born, let's say, in the year 2000, who's now 25, right? They're one year old when 911 happened. You're seven years old when the financial crisis happened.
(03:39) When they came of age, 18 years old, was like in the middle of me too, right? You know that thing where the guy walks in the room and everything's on fire. That meme. Mhm. Right. I can only imagine growing up with like ubiquitous social media surveillance and everybody trying to cancel you and yell at you and all the teachers saying like as a white male you're super evil and all this crazy stuff through your formative years, you know, and you know, you're just like looking back like what happened, right? They didn't they don't even have a memory of what like the good times were,
(04:08) right? And um so so I get all of that and I get why people are angry, but being mad is not necessarily the same thing as implementing the optimal strategy if that makes any sense. Right? And uh being mad may give you the courage or energy to do something, but is it the optimal thing? And uh you know in general I think you can emotionally align people against something but economically align them for something like as a as a I may have mentioned this before but if you took a hundred people and you said go and burn down that building they could do that easy right
(04:49) it completely paralyzes one guy you know grabs a rock guy grabs some matches it's dust in you know a few hours that's like a lot of stuff happening in LA you know San Francisco other places around. Um, but if you say to those 100 people, go and build that building, that's much harder.
(05:07) They may not have the skills, right? Cuz you know, you need a foreman and you need an architect. You need even forget like even regulations and code and permissions or whatever, even without any permissions, even just moving the speed of physics. Is there a crane to lift the, you know, the wood? That's a very coordinated serial process where those 100 people may not even have the skills, right? You, you know, you plumbers, you have electrical work. and stuff.
(05:32) So, it's like a millionx easier to destroy than to build. And also, less obviously, the people who are destroying don't have to coordinate with each other. This guy smashing a window or whatever, their guy is like beating the side of the brick. They could hate each other as well. They just hate this other thing more.
(05:50) You know what I mean, right? So, a big chunk of the, you know, Trump or MAGA coalition are people who are against what Trump is against, but not necessarily for what he's for. Um, and uh, it's like, you know, they're all against wokeness, which maybe does deserve to get blown up. Now, maybe it does, but then what are they for, right? And the close analogy that I had was um, right after the election, in fact, was to the fall of the USSR because in 1991, there was a libertarian and nationalist coalition.
(06:19) Both the capitalists and the nationalists were against the godless communists, right? The capitalists and nationalists, the religious patriots, and all these different people. And um it was an economic thing because communism was economically inefficient. We know that part.
(06:40) What people don't know is that the Russians actually had gotten down to 51% of the Soviet Union in the year two years before. Do you know that? No. Yeah. So in 1989 there was a census that was published that showed Russians, wait a second, they're down to 51% of the Soviet Union. Because the Soviet Union, the USSR was a lot like the USSA. It was an officially multithnic celebrate diversity global empire that even stretching across Eurasia.
(07:09) It had like everybody from central Asian like you know uh Kazakhstan like you know kind of types to you know middle eastern types to eastern European types to um you know Russians right and Russians when people refer to it as Russian that was the majority ethnicity but it was just becoming it was dropping below 50%.
(07:30) So that among other things was one of several factors that led to the ethnic dissolution of the Soviet Union. Long repressed ethnic nationalisms bubbled up after Gorbachev had um allowed for lazos which is you know free speech and paristoka which was free markets and the Russians felt that they were being exploited by the non-Russians because they were the ones who were bleeding in all the wars and so forth.
(07:54) The non-Russians felt they were being splitted by the Russians because the Russians were taking over their territory and imposing the Russian language on them over their local language. And so both parties felt they were getting a bad deal ethnically as well as economically. And the whole thing burst apart into smitherines. But for a for a small period of time, everybody was super happy.
(08:13) And it reminded me a lot just that that period just reading the contemporariness accounts reminded me a lot of the honeymoon from right after Trump's win to a few weeks later, right? There's a period where there was like the most positive spirit I had seen on Twitter and X in a long time.
(08:39) The left was just even if it was a onepoint victory 4948, it was like a 50point victory on Vibes. Mhm. Right. And so it was something where um it was this remarkable remarkable thing and the tech guys and the conser everybody was high-fiving, backs slapping, everybody was great. But I knew that wasn't going to last because people had just such a very different vision of what America was, what the world was, what the future was going to be, and so on and so forth.
(09:05) And you know, just to talk about that for a second, one of the things that happened was right around the time that the Luigi left arose. And by the way, you know that you know why that was predictable? Why? Because what once the left well BLM Yes. But BLM was on a was on a leash, right? Luigi is not on a leash.
(09:24) And that's the difference. The thing is BLM the BLM riots were organized by, you know, basically the leftist establishment and they could be told to stand down. Like there's that article in Time magazine where they actually told the riers stand down, right? So they were like, you know, rent a rent a mob or whatever.
(09:42) But after the Democrats lost control of the state, they basically have two options. A, Luigi leftism, and B, what's coming next, which is Chinese Communism, right? So you've got the violent anarchists who are just shooting and blowing things up. These are like the the Tesla firebombers, the Luigi left, right? Who are just, you know, schisos, right? And that's decentralized violent anarchism because it can't do their violence through the the American state anymore. And then you have like Gavin Newsome and Tim Walls who are going to be siding with Chinese communism, right?
(10:16) Like Nome went to China, said he wants to be China's long-term stable and strong partner and Walls asked China to intercede in the Iran dispute. So, um, after around the time that happened, actually all the Democrats went to blue sky off of X and that actually had an underappreciated result, which is it meant that X because the left moved to blue sky, the center of mass on X shifted like 25 or 30 points to the right.
(10:45) And you saw that with the Vake tweet in in December 25th, right? when a tweet that would have been considered like a seemingly promit tweet or something like that a few months earlier was seen as now an attack by the right and uh whereas you know when when the left had been there it would have been seen as a centrist kind of thing but then it got seen as something that is actually on the left now because the spectrum had moved over so many points and the the thing about it is we have to like recalibrate sometimes because as we were just talking about before we got
(11:18) online. Um, we're in this weird superp position of all of these exponentials going through the to the sky at the same time and nothing ever happens, right? So, it's a bizarre combination of like you have AI and you have Bitcoin and you have you have things like for example from from I think it was June 2023. Okay, so just about two years ago if I'm not mistaken, let me just double check.
(11:47) June 2023, Elon had to personally intervene to allow what is a woman to be asked on X. And this is and this is right around the last time we recorded this, right? Exactly. So So like it took $44 billion and the personal intervention of the wealthiest man in the world cuz his first round of firing people at Twitter wasn't sufficient.
(12:15) He needed to go in and personally fire the people who were censoring the question about what what is a woman, right? Like he had to personally intervene. That's how far gone the whole thing was. That was controversial two years ago on X, right? That was the that was where the center of mass was on controversy. Okay.
(12:36) From that to now over two years is a move of 50. I don't even know how many points. You know, you'd have to actually quantify that, but it's like 50 points to the right. I can't even, you know. Right. I mean, you had Grock unleashed a couple of nights ago. Right. That's like off that's like way off out there, right? So the um so we're in this weird time where uh again you have to kind of study historical times where um for example, there's a woman I think she there's a book called I think it's like four Germanies or something like that. Um yeah, four Germans.
(13:10) four Germanies and it was like uh hold on uh let me see if I can find it was like yeah so so essentially uh there's there's there's a book called four Germanies and there's another one which was name I'm forgetting now but you know essentially if you lived in a certain part of Germany during the 20th century right you lived through the Vimmer Republic and then Nazism and then East Germany and then if you lived long enough through German reunification and liberal democracy, right? So, you just experienced it all. You know, you just had the same territory had just these
(13:49) radical shifts in ideology on top of it, right? And that's kind of how I think about like X where it kind of, you know, or Twitter, right? Actually, Twitter no longer exists. Twitter, the Tower of Babel moment is there. It's actually very fitting that it got renamed X because Twitter's gotten shattered into a bunch of pieces and there's Blue Sky and Mastedon and Truth Social and Tik Tok and Threads and so on on the left and then there's X and Gab and Truth and Noster and what have you on on the right, right? And um
(14:24) anyway, that that concept of like the same territory and having different ideologies sweep across it nowhere more so than Germany in the middle of the through the 20th century and in a real sense formerly Twitter now X is kind of like that. It's like this central point around which the angle phone internet swivels and turns and so whatever the next transformation is, it'll probably be seen there.
(14:54) though it's also in a some sense losing some influence to other sons of Twitter around you know the world. Anyway, there's more I can say but I just want to like nothing ever happens yet we're also in the middle of the singularity. It's a bizarre superp position of those two things. Actually, that's a great tweet, right? The singularity is happening but nothing ever happens. Yeah. Okay, come on. I'm gonna I'm gonna post I'm going to do that one in real time.
(15:12) Go do it in real time and I'll um you tweet that because I've been thinking a lot about this. Like I was telling you before we hit record, I wrote a newsletter a few weeks ago about nothing ever happens. And it was right before the US bombed Iran. And while we were bombing Iran, I was like, "Oh my gosh, it's something happening.
(15:29) " No, let's wait a few days. Nothing's happening. But to your point, we do have the super position. And I think through my reflection on this this juxtaposition, it's really I think nothing ever happens at the political level like you want.
(15:50) Like obviously like you mentioned this election people were very optimistic in November, December, Trump gets in in January, we get Doge, we're uncovering US aid rift and waste and there's a lot of fervor around the potential to to fix that. And then eventually it's like no, we're going back to um business as usual. And I think a big driver of that is just the debt situation. Like there's no way out of it.
(16:12) And so the politics has to stay that way. But what's happening with AI, Bitcoin, I've resigned myself to like nothing ever happens in that world. I'm just going to focus on Bitcoin, building tools, investing in companies, writing about it, and hoping that um something happens outside of the political system where nothing ever happens.
(16:31) And I can give I can give a lens on that if you want that um suggests why that's probably the right thing to do. um which is here's here's a couple of well so first let me close that original thread that original thought right essentially I am really I'm sympathetic to um a number of the conservatives and libertarians and so on who are MAGA especially the ones who feel they have been forced to be meaner than they want to be right they didn't want to like they they tried being Mr. nice guy. They tried playing by the rules. They tried uh being charitable
(17:06) and empathetic and seeing their guy. And what did it get them? It got them just more and more abused by all these crazy wolves, right? Fine. So, I get all that. However, I think that the current strategy of like a throwback, I'm not sure there's any strategy that could work honestly because of the debt, right? But the current strategy is arguably not arguably is reducing in my view the life expectancy of the dollar and thus the empire. And just to give you my quick mental model um dollar inflation is global taxation.
(17:38) And so what that means is over the course of the 20th century the US set itself up as American empire. And why did it do that? There's actually a great book by Steven Worerheim called Tomorrow the World that documents the exact moment that with memos that the US made the decision to go for empire and it was not actually uh what what people would think it is. It was not 1945.
(17:58) It was actually 1939 1940 when the Nazis appeared on the verge of complete winning in Europe and the battle of Britain. Britain seemed on the ropes because up to that point, America was fine with letting the British go and do the empire thing while America was at home just building its strength because empire is expensive. But they understood they they were smart.
(18:23) They understood what a what a cost and time sync global empire was, right? But then they also understood, wait a second, if we don't do it, well, the Nazis will do it or then maybe the Soviets will do it and then they will capture all this territory. They'll cut us off from trade. They'll cut us off from natural resources.
(18:40) They'll choke us out and okay, well, we don't want to do it, but they were almost forced into it. That's how they saw it, right? You can agree or disagree with that, but that there was actually a decision that was made. And that's how the US started playing for global I mean, here's the thing. You don't become global number one in every category by accident.
(18:58) You don't have a McDonald's in every continent and like the FDA setting regulations for, you know, Myanmar and Uruguay with harmonization. You don't have like the dollar as a reserve currency and Harvard Kennedy School training dozens of foreign heads of state and the UN headquarters in New York, NN, the World Bank, 500 other things that all got set up. That just does not happen by accident unless you are intentionally going and setting up a global empire.
(19:22) And while it's it's very uh common on the left to say empire was bad because Americans were oppressing others and it's increasingly common on the right like the Buchanan argument we want a republic non-empire or to say empire is bad because Americans were dying in Iraq for no reason.
(19:41) Right? So the left argument is you know empire is bad because Americans were oppressors. The right argument is empire is bad because Americans are being exploited. Right? very similar to the end of the Soviet Union where the Russians felt that they were being exploited and the non-Russians felt that they were the Russians were exploiters and there's some truth to both those and some falsity as well.
(20:00) But the counterargument to that is actually empire for a time was good both for the world and for Americans because the US military was the greatest military the world ever seen and it maintained order on the high seas and eventually beat down the communist menace that killed so many people. And actually the American left, the the State Department were the greatest diplomats the world had ever seen.
(20:24) And just to give them their credit because they definitely do a lot of stuff terribly over the last 10, 20 years, but when they were working, I mean, it's hard. Look, you've you've done investments, right? You've like you've got companies, you've had investors, if I'm not mistaken, right? Yes. Okay. Like think about how hard it is to do a deal where there's like 10 people signing.
(20:44) It's hard, right? Now imagine there's 196 people signing. Okay, that's even harder. Now imagine it's 196 countries signing. That's the level of right that's the level of skill of the American diplomat. They got 190 plus countries to sign on the line that was dotted for things like you know the World Health Organization or something like that.
(21:08) Right? when these organizations were working when that was an absolutely unprecedented level of global nonviolent cooperation and of course you want that 99% of the time 99.999 whatever percent time you want diplomacy rather than the military force right so to give the state department their due when they were functional that was actually genuinely amazing and you can understand it from a business negotiation standpoint how difficult that was to get those deals done right and because those deals you had global market access for Americans everywhere. And you know, one of the things that actually it took me a while to like put my finger on that I thought
(21:45) was so surprising to me about December 2024 is for the first time like you know my whole life all of the Americans especially the white American men that I had worked with and built big businesses with and expand like essentially our question was only okay when do we expand into Turkey when we expanded to Brazil when do we expand into Japan right when I work with Armstrong at Coinbase or you know all the people I worked with ACZ and venture capital, startups, tech, the world was America's market. That was just obvious, right? The glo, you know,
(22:16) it was not even considered to be something where you were afraid of overseas competition, right? December 2024, I saw for the first time a critical mass of people after, especially after the fake tweet where Americans thought of the world as their competition and wanted to protect their home market rather than obviously think that they would be able to expand into global markets, right? And it it took me a while to realize, oh wow, gravity had inverted and they feel insecure and they don't feel they can win a global competition. So they want
(22:47) to exit that, right? But we have to understand that the US built that game of global techno capitalism, right? Like that is all these multinationals, all that stuff was built by by America and that American empire was monetized with the dollar because if we ask the deep question of so so the shallow question, well actually you can ask the question a few different ways. to take Trump and the tariffs, right? Let's take Vietnam. Vietnam is sending it shoes to America. America is sending back basically
(23:13) printed database entries for those shoes. That's that's what the trade deficit is. And it keeps going into further debt. And those are IUs. But why does the world accept that? The world accepts it because America is the center of the global empire. And as the database administrator, as the CEO of the world, they have root access.
(23:33) And in return for maintaining the global financial system with both all the diplomatic agreements and financial agreements from the left and all the military safety and CLAN security on the right in return for maintaining that they had the right to print money because basically they managed the ledger and that was how they monetized this enormously expensive global apparatus right and in that printing dollar inflation was global taxation.
(23:58) Billions of people were basically taxed diluted in order to pay for the upkeep of this giant empire that arguably was a net benefit to them because it kept the sea lanes and it kept the peace and countries didn't invade each other and they all had access to these giant markets and phones and you know later Google and all this kind of stuff fine. So you have to kind of make the case for it before you can make the case against it.
(24:24) I think you know and one of the things that happened though is that empire uh is not the way that people talk about it right most Americans you know the best way I can prove it is have you seen the map of like the 750 you know military bases the US has globally yeah like that's not the posture of a people who just wants to sit behind their borders right that is like the the conservative today is only really seeing like one side of the puzzle they're not really thinking about in their own way they're kind of ahistorical right they're not thinking about the enormous benefit that
(24:59) America got from taking essentially a slice of every transaction globally to be clear they gave value as well taking the stability of the world is no small thing to build this global common market is no small thing I mean again think about how hard it is to just get like a deal done between two parties let alone 190 countries right so all that peace and prosperity they monetize it with dollar inflation and but then of course that's the greatest business model of all time and they started abusing it, right? And they found that they could push it much
(25:32) farther than anybody thought after 2008 especially, right? And so it went from this unprecedented 787 billion print something that was highly precedented. 2008 was unprecedented but then it was highly highly precedented, right? and the mechanism of printing was set up.
(25:52) Similarly, by the way, with 2020, you know, like COVID lockdowns and like, you know, there are lots of crazy things that happened during CO like hard borders between US states, you know, like Rhode Island, New York checkpoints and stuff like that or like April 2020, the US stopped issuing passports in case of acceptance emergencies, LA township.
(26:10) So, all that stuff is actually set up for like a digital lockdown in the future. It's now precedented when it was unprecedented, but anyway. So the point being that once you kind of see dollar inflation is global taxation what America's business model was well that's way more profitable than working for a living right like one way of putting it is the US did at one point work for a living it manufactured all this stuff there's this great cartoon of you might bring it up it shows uh Uncle Sam in 1897 and it's like the Philippines are a stepping stone to China you might google that and bring that up So you go to Google images, you'll see that it shows Uncle
(26:48) Sam laden with all these goods. He's going over to China and China then is the passive market. It's like we want 40,000 trains and 10,000 planes or whatever, right? And uh and America is a manufacturing superpower and America grew starting as a as a trade superpower, right? And then because it exported so many goods, all these countries um used the dollar to buy those goods and then gradually it went from a trade to a trade and finance superpower and then purely a financial and tech superpower which is what it's become. But the thing is that that is a way more profitable business model.
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(28:26) It's called Opportunity Cost, and it helps you see the true cost of everything in Bitcoin. Convert prices to Bitcoin as you browse the web. Opportunity cost automatically displays fiat prices in Bitcoin or SATs, helping you think in a Bitcoin standard. It works on Amazon, Zillow X, your bank account, QuickBooks. You can convert everything to Bitcoin. It's really cool. It's also 100% open- source MIT license.
(28:48) We don't collect any data. All of the conversions happen in your browser on your local device. It's a great way to recalibrate your life and begin thinking in SATS. Go check it out at opportunitycost.app. That's opportunitycost.app. Yeah. And I think just to build on that, I think going back to the angst of the uh white conservative, which yes certainly fall in that bucket.
(29:14) Sure. I think it's like the lack of diversification of that that resulted from that empire where you have high finance, high-tech, and then you watched middle America get completely hollowed out in the process. And I think the cost of the quality of life of a large portion of the the country is what's driving this sort of struggle that we're going through right now. Yes, that's right. And I'll show you some graphs that actually, you know, somewhat speak to that.
(29:47) Um, so see if you can put this on screen. Yeah. So that was like when Uncle Sam was just exporting stuff all over, right? And look at that. That's 1897 like and the Chinese guy is portrayed as just your typical Chinese guy. But see, it says like wanted like 100,000 bridges, engines, cars, rails, right? Like China's portrayed as just a passive market.
(30:15) Amazing history running in reverse aspect of things, right? Go ahead. Bringing in education, steel rails and Yeah. Exactly. Right. So now, of course, that's that's run completely in reverse. And so what what happened was uh to to take like a century and a half the um Oh, here's the NPR article. And then let me show you one more thing. Right.
(30:40) So, this is a rare article where they actually like admit what um what's going on. How to spend 1.25 trillion. Is that a plugin that you have? Yeah, it's a plugin I built called opportunity cost. Hilarious. Unbelievable stuff. Was funny. That's only half the amount of BCC. Okay. So, that's August 2010. Okay. Now, this is basically how the Fed did these mortgage back securities.
(31:07) So, if you scroll down, um, keep going. Blah blah blah blah blah. Keep going. Okay. Wait. So, can you zoom in on this? Yeah. Just top left. Right. In the end, they came very close. First of all, these guys are just like hitting buttons. But this is amazing quote. In the end, they came very close to their target. They told us they were just 61 cents short.
(31:27) In other words, they bought 1 trillion249 bill999,999,999.39 worth of mortgage back bonds. Incredible. The Fed was able to spend so much money so quickly because it has a unique power. It can create money out of thin air whenever it decides to do so. So, Zena explained the mortgage decide to buy a bond. They push a button on the computer and voila, money is created.
(31:45) Okay, just a level set. What's a trillion dollars? By the way, even in 2015, 2025 rather, like that was 15 years ago. So, that's like two or two and a half trillion or whatever it is today. Okay? But like just take a trillion dollars. That's an insane amount of money.
(32:10) Okay, that is imagine you sold a $1,000 iPhone to a billion people in China. Okay, that's what a trillion dollars is. You know how hard I mean, you know, it's insanely hard to sell something that's worth $1,000 to one person, right? Sell it to a billion people for that's also just revenue, right? You know, you're going to have there's no discounts.
(32:28) You know, like what's your profit margin on that? Maybe you're making 80 bucks per iPhone or something, whatever, 200 bucks. So to make a $1,000 in profit on a billion people in a second, right? That's what push a button and get a trillion dollars is. It's an absolutely it is the most insane business model ever invented of all time in terms of when people talk about a money printer, you know, like your business is printing money, right? Like there's a reason that it's very hard for America to diversify off of the money printer because it is the greatest business of all time, right? A trillion
(33:02) in pure profit by hitting a button. That's crazy. And they tax the entire world to pay for it. Dollar inflation is global taxation. Right now, you can start to see why I'm very skeptical that the the the Trump two strategy of re-industrialization is going to work. Because how many screws do you need to sell to make a trillion dollars? A lot.
(33:26) I mean, like a screw is what, like, I don't know, a cent fra. Actually, it's going to be a fraction of a cent depending on maybe it's like a big bulky screw like some of these drywall screws. How many screws, how many bolts, how many nuts, how many, you know, ships, planes, tanks, trains? Like you're talking absolutely gargantuan manufacturing which only China really has a scale for now at this point. You there's only 77 million NAG of 1.4 billion China.
(33:55) And the thing is that the US is accustomed to office jobs and retail jobs. They're not accustomed to like working in the mines and working on the factory similar. There's a reason. Look, I'm not saying that you can't do those jobs without pollution. I'm not saying you can't do those jobs without injuries.
(34:15) I agree that you can automate and so on and so forth, but they're physical jobs, so they're going to have a higher level of risk than hitting keys in an office, right? And sipping coffee in office. There's a reason that lots of people who are bluecollar, they're happy that their children became white collar, right? So, there's an honor in blue collar jobs.
(34:33) I'm not saying they're bad. I agree. There's, you know, I actually did a lot of stuff, not in the factory exactly, but the clinical laboratory with robots and stuff like that. So, I've been very hands-on. I do a lot of real estate nowadays. I do think there's a lot of good in working with hands. I I grant all that.
(34:52) Nevertheless, those are tougher jobs in many ways that pay less, right? Often backbreaking jobs. Even repairing robots is actually not not, you know, that easy to do. So the the romanticization of the 20th century economy without realizing just how much more profitable the push button economy is is a point of extreme unrealism. Right? It's a little bit like somebody who's inherited some gigantic fortune and is accustomed to a certain standard of living and then sort of envies the, you know, like the Vietnamese worker who's like grinding away making making Nikes, right?
(35:29) It's it's like a weird eat your cake and have a two kind of thing. And sometimes people will say to me in comments, "Oh, you don't get it. We we're we love these highpaying factory jobs." I'm like, "Highpaying? Why would you say they'd be high paying? like they have to do them at they they have to be high quality.
(35:48) They have to be at a competitive price globally for you to be able to export them to the world. Like in a neutral market when you can't impose tariffs in Turkey, in Uruguay, in Hungary, you know, Japan, when American products are on the shelf next to the Chinese product and the German product, and there's no ability to coers somebody into buying something or not, they just have to compete on on value, right? Same as on the internet, by the way. Anybody can click to anything else.
(36:12) In such an environment which is actually 96% of the world because most of the world is not American, only 4% is American. In such an environment where it's a genuinely competitive market, high pay is only going to be useful in so far as it results in high quality and high competitiveness. And the cost of living is so high in America again thanks to all the inflation and money printing.
(36:31) That's very hard to do relative to places that are much lower cost of living. So there's like a boxing in over here where the sort of seemingly easy solutions of like imposing 45% tariffs to get back to 1945 have not been in my view thought through at all. I there's 50 other things I could say about these tariffs or whatever and I think they're just radically underd discussed.
(36:55) It's one of these weird things where, you know, what people detect is change. Not like, for example, Dropbox today is used way more than the early 2010s, but it was probably talked about way more when it was rising than when it's just used all the time.
(37:14) You know, like Uber is probably used a lot more today than it was in 2015, but nobody really talks about Uber anymore. Serious about your Bitcoin? Start acting like it. Unchain just launched the financial freedom bundle, a curated pack that includes a premium Bitcoin book, a new hardware wallet guide, and access to a private macro event with Tur demesterend. It's time to take control of your generational wealth. Go to unchained.
(37:34) com/tc to request yours. That's unchained.com/tc. Pretty hot package, freaks. Go pick it up. Yeah, I was going to say, yeah, that makes sense. And like to your point on tariffs like with the energy like yesterday the copper tariffs cuz I I just recorded a podcast with Jordy Visser and we were talking about the energy expansion.
(37:57) He's saying I don't think people really appreciate the amount of copper that we're going to need to pull out of the ground to electrify the US economy to catch up with China's energy generation. And then after we post that Trump's like 50% tariffs on copper. It's like well we need to expand energy generation. Copper is a critical part part of that. It is it is completely insane and unrealistic stuff. It is magical thinking.
(38:20) It is uh okay let me I could I could say like 10 things about the tariffs in particular. The first is a lot of these tariffs are on like raw materials, you know, they're they're on like inputs, not outputs, you know, so you're talking about like materials that may not exist in some quantity in the US or you know, number two is what should have happened was deregulation as opposed to tariffs. Deregulation reduces costs for American producers.
(38:44) Tariffs increase costs. So basically tariffs are like taxes they have to pay at the port or your goods are seized, right? and their surprise taxes which you can't budget for in advance. Um, and it's like a cash expense that went from zero up to like, you know, on a million dollar shipment.
(39:03) It might be $490,000, some crazy amount of money. You can't there's no like lawsuit where it might wait for a year or something like that. That's a tax you have to pay right now or your shipments impounded at the port. And in many ways, it's kind of like imagine I like increase the price of your iPhone by like 45%. Then I said now you have an incentive to go and build Apple.
(39:23) I mean in a sense you do. I increase your prices by 45%. Now you have an incent. But in a sense of course you don't because the capital cost to go and do that is so extreme. And that many of many of these American companies are just they just want a little bit of maple syrup. They don't want to go and plant a whole ton of maple trees, right? And to do that for everything in the economy at once in this bl broad broad brush blunderbust kind of thing. It's really this crazy crazy thing.
(39:51) It's it's like completely divorced from reality. And it's also having really important effects abroad that people aren't understanding. Like basically the guys in like Malaysia or in Uruguay whatever you know just name whatever neutral country you want. um Spain, anywhere, right, that were exporting to America. Those were some of the most pro-American people in those countries.
(40:16) Those were like CEOs, entrepreneurs, right? Businessmen who had American friends, American customers, American contacts, understood, you know, they must have flown back and forth to set up, you know, like business relationships. And every single one of those guys globally just got like a bullet in the head, right? Basically, they were just rocked.
(40:38) They thought this was going to be like a free trade procisism administration and uh or even you know basically like Trump won they were just completely taken off guard by this and many of them were just bankrupted destroyed or really harmed and what that did is it undercut the pro-American voice in every single one of these countries globally and so you know who won the argument is winning the argument instead unfortunately China the pro-China voice in all those countries so what China You can go and look headline after headline. China went
(41:09) to Malaysia and they lit up the Twin Towers in Chinese cultures. China went and signed all kind. They made China look like the global champion of free trade. The communists were able to appear to be more capitalist. Now, does that have a a stinger in the tail? Of course it does.
(41:28) You know, there'll be what our debt trap diplomacy or something like that. You know, there'll be some there's some price you have to pay for entering the Chinese economic union in the future. No question about it. But in the short run, these countries which many of them for example, especially Southeast Asia, places like that, the US had courted them and said, "Hey, you know, we're you should be with us.
(41:46) " They they were like a swing vote between China and the US, right? They had plenty of issues with China with like, you know, local regional disputes and so on. And this was like a rubber band snap where they just had to go flying in their direction. They understood their economy couldn't depend on the US anymore because the reciprocal tariffs basically say they punish countries for exporting to the US.
(42:05) And they also start a fight with every country in the world at the same time. Right. Go ahead. Do you find any credence in the idea that's just a purely a bargaining tactic? Get people No, because they're actually there it's not a bluff, right? These are actually imposed.
(42:25) You know, there's some there's some skew up and down and it's true that like it was only at the end of the day it was only 10% on some countries, but that's a lot, right? to go from a when you go from zero to 10% on a shipment. You know, the thing is also people don't understand how these supply chains work. You'll import you know this piece from here and this piece from there like you know I know this with with with biochemistry.
(42:47) It's not uncommon to have a test tube where you have you know some reagent from the UK and some reagent from Canada and something from like you know the Philippines. Like you could have a lot of different then something from New England BioLabs. you all you have that allin-one test tube right and if you're tracking country of origin of all of this stuff first it's a huge amount of overhead and second is you can just radically make it much more expensive and then all kinds of things break in ways that people don't understand like lab tests become more expensive just spare parts become more expensive everything becomes more expensive at the same time
(43:21) that you're uh you know what they want to cut rates to 1% I mean it's just setting it up for this crazy kind of supply shock you Well, other hand, I don't know. I I think um point being basically that the the idea of replacing the money printing economy with the manufacturing economy has not like with the idea that that's going to increase US living standards is I think simply not quantitative.
(43:54) Um the only reason like you if the US is no longer accepting foreign trade, if it's no longer accepting foreign talent, uh not even foreign tourism, if it's also not letting remittances go out because there's tax and remittances that's coming. If it's not, it's very lukewarm about foreign military intervention and keeping its end of military commitments that's made over decades in treaties, you know, NATO and other kinds of things.
(44:18) If it's threatening to invade Greenland and, you know, fighting with Canada, if it's sending form letters to Japan and Korea, imposing arbitrary tariffs on them when there's got 0% the other way, it's telling the Europeans they need to deal with Russia on their own. And it's while at the same time the administration is fighting with the Democrats and the tech guys domestically and even to the point of like the Canadian conservatives are alienated like Pierre Paul was basically undercut and you know Canada went to the left over the last you know uh four or five months right
(44:53) uh I don't think that's a good setup right when you put it like that no no go ahead again going back to like the juxaposition of the singularity and nothing ever happens. Like it's so much opportunity. Like I feel like that that extension that I just showed you. Like I vibe coded that in an afternoon.
(45:16) Like it was one of the one of the like most exciting like revelations I've had since Bitcoin. It's like oh my gosh. Isn't that cool thing? I use Replet and Chat GBT and and I'm a seed investor in Replet. Oh well Amjad is uh he's really great. He's a mench. He's an incredible dude and and it's like Amjad's like a perfect example of the type of immigrant we want came from Georgia. I think so doing something incredible.
(45:45) And I I think I think Replet is just this amazing contribution that really has genuinely expanded the scope of what people can do on the computer and it it's really given um a sense of delight again to like kids and people who weren't coders and you can just prototype anything. you could kind of, you know, it's really I think it's really cool. Um, go ahead. You're going to say it. I mean, it's got to go.
(46:09) No, but to that point, it's like it seems like the opportunity set is so wide wider than it's ever been to go and be productive, particularly on the tech side. Um, and it would be a great shame to just shoot ourselves in the foot with all this domestic squabbling. Well, that's the thing is I think both are happening at the same time.
(46:30) like that is to say to to reconcile those two lenses. Um the internet is to America what America was to Britain and you can even go you know you can say Greece, Rome, Britain, America internet. And uh the analogy I think is pretty strong because America started out British and obviously owes a huge debt to Britain but it became something else you know it became something about 10x bigger right with people from all of Europe not just Brits and you can have a progression where the internet started out American but it's like 10x bigger and in many ways for
(47:10) example Britain pioneered you know the Magna Carta and equal rights reveal, but it also pioneered capitalism. America was simultaneously more progressive and more libertarian. It pushed both democracy and capitalism further. It went from the common law, you know, British common law to the constitution. And now we go one more step.
(47:31) So the internet is even more progressive and more capitalist than America. Everybody from every race, religion, etc. is on the global internet. Anybody can speak to anybody, say anything, encrypt their messages, essentially do whatever they want for the most part on the internet. But at the same time, it's the most capitalist thing to ever exist.
(47:48) More capitalist than any country. You can accumulate arbitrary amounts of money. You can, you know, own cryptographic property. You can start a business, become a zillionaire, trade whatever you want. Right? So, it's actually even more America than America, just like America is more Britain than Britain. And it was born out of America.
(48:05) And if I say, "Is the internet American?" And it's like saying is America British? Well, on the one hand, of course, it is. It started in America and like you know grew out of DARPA and all that kind of stuff. You big tech companies are American many of them and you know Silicon Valley is in America and so of course what what do you mean is the internet American? But on the other hand you can also talk about the non-American internet for example there's the Japanese internet and there's the Russian internet. So they have their own zones. So that's one
(48:30) piece. But a second big piece is are those American tech companies are they actually staffed by Americans? Actually, depending on which one you look at, more than 50% of their employees are usually non-American or they're immigrants that are naturalized. Certainly more most of their users are non-American.
(48:48) Like when you've got something like Facebook or Google with billions of users, there's only 300 million Americans. So definitionally 90 something% plus of their users are non-American. You got three billion users, only 300 million Americans. um most of their revenue depending on the company is non-American right most their traffic is non-American their data centers are non-American their offices are mostly non- etc etc right they they started out there but they're they become something else right similar with Bitcoin um that's also it's probably Satoshi I would not be surprised if
(49:20) Satoshi was an American he could have been something else as possible but it certainly feels like American culture in many ways but then also something which is greater than because I mean the big thing is you know the constitution as amazing as it is only scaled to the US but bitcoin scales to everyone right and this is a really amazing thing where there's so much argument over the judges and are the judges biased for this group or that group but you know you go to a crypto conference in Dubai and people from Africa Latin America the US Europe Asia
(49:58) India, nobody's arguing Bitcoin's biased against it, right? That's a really big deal, right? We've managed to achieve global rule of code. That's a huge deal. Enormous, enormous kind of thing, right? And you know with smart contracts, with identity, we have property rights, we have encryption, encrypted messaging, we have capital formation.
(50:29) that's actually the basis for economic union, an internet economic union that's as that's comparable to the European Union or the United States and so in the fullness of time, right? There's a lot that has to be built, but like everything, you know, once you've got payments on chain, you can do accounting on chain. If you do accounting on chain, you can have companies on chain because you also have contracts on chain.
(50:47) If you have companies, contracts, and accounting on chain, you can have a stock market on chain and you can have trading on chain. All that stuff has happened, right? And that's what I mean by the internet is what comes after America because it scales in a way like you know it's funny I you know I'm not an open borders person in the physical world but and even the digital world I think you need to have digital borders like you know for example your there's some kinds of things that are social networks messaging apps for example you're not going to let every single person into every group chat or whatever right But again to argue
(51:23) against something before you argue for it, do you want the steelman case for open borders? Why not? Let's give it why not. Okay. So the steelman case is when you set up a a tech startup like Facebook or or Google or something like that, you want a billion users. You want everybody from the X wants every single person from the whole world to use X, right? They in a sense have open borders.
(51:53) Anybody from anywhere can go and sign up, right? And what they're relying on is the fact that their state which is this digital you know this set of algorithms can scale up enough to give everybody their plot of digital land their account to mediate their interactions between people to tax them when they do commerce there to do dispute resolution and so on and so forth. Right? So you start thinking about these giant tech companies as like digital states with open borders.
(52:20) you can start to see well certainly you know they've managed to get to billions of users and be functional despite the fact that they're pulling them in from all over the globe. They sort of managed to get the libertarian ideal of tough but fair law or at least close to that. Go ahead. When I think of Twitter too, I've been using Twitter for 14 years now.
(52:39) You can draw your own borders with things like list. That's what I do. That's that's how I consume Twitter is list. I've listed Bitcoin, finance, oil and gas, energy, comedy, and those are like the borders that I've set for my consumption of Twitter. That's probably good. It's just it's funny. It's funny to put it this way for all the time one spends on Twitter.
(52:58) It's actually effort to make the lists, but you know, that's actually it's probably people do make lists. You can share lists. But anyway, so let me show you a couple of graphs just to anchor why I think, you know, the internet is what comes next. Um, so if you can put this on screen. Yeah.
(53:20) And while you pull these up, like while you're saying that, I want to say ironically, um, Bitcoin being the way it is and Americans having adopted Bitcoin in the way they have in its first 16 years, like ironically, Bitcoin may be the saving grace for for America or Americans at the very least. Mhm. Bitcoin. Well, yes, for sure.
(53:43) And the reason is let me okay let me show you this if can you see the screen there. Yeah. Okay. So I'm I'm going to show two graphs that that are part of my kind of role model, right? There's two simultaneous disruptions and then let's get back to how Bitcoin is a saving grace. So if you click into the first one, so that shows that essentially blue America and it's it's more than just the media, but let's use the media as one of the most important pillars of Blue America basically was doing fine up until the year 2000. They made almost $70 billion and then they, you know, they fell after the
(54:17) docom crash. It was okay. And then starting in essentially the late 2000s their revenue just fell off a cliff right from 67 you know 60 billion dollars down to 16 billion like a drop of like 75% at the same time that Google and Facebook are just going vertical right so the internet disrupted blue America now if you go to the next graph at the same time almost the same time China suddenly rose and disrupted uh the Republicans right if I reverse burst the colors on the graph. The they they they disrupted red America, right?
(54:54) So starting in the late 2000s, right after the financial crisis, the internet disrupted blue America and China disrupted red America, right? And what that led to if you think about the world as not just Democrat, Republican, but four factions, internet, Democrats, Republicans, and China.
(55:13) Okay, so like a four group thing. Well, um, the Democrats got radicalized by the internet's disruption of them and they they felt a shrinking pie. They lashed out at Republicans with wokeness and they lashed out at the internet with the tech lash. Okay, starting in early 2010s around 2013, the Republicans were mad understandably.
(55:47) So they elected Trump to lash out at the Democrats and also lash out at China with the trade war. Right? So it's actually a forefront conflict that erupted in the mid2010s as a consequence of the disruption of blue America by the internet, disruption of red America by China, right? And now we're like 10 years into that conflict.
(56:14) And essentially what happened was the tech guys were taken back because they thought that Democrats like them or whatever, right? And um it took them a while to understand what was going on but eventually they toughened up and you know they they started hitting back right and disrupted media. It took like five years to adapt and so on. A lot of guys were cancelled.
(56:31) A lot of companies are bankrupted. Then they realized okay they're not Democrats are basically fighting um fighting to kill right because they're they feel they they can't build search engines or scale social networks but they can write stories and shape narratives and they're making the tech guys into the bad guys. Okay fine. and we're going to build our own media.
(56:49) And that culminated with Elon taking X, which is like flipping Istanbul to Constantinople. It was like, you know, X day was like D-Day, you know, it was like boom, we we got all of our forces, all the tech because it wasn't just Elon, right? $44 billion. That was like Larry Ellison. It was like every centrist, center right, center left guy in tech and finance all threw in. I mean, 44 bill is a lot.
(57:14) So for a lot of people a mill was a lot but everybody just threw in into that ticket and they're like okay put it all behind Elon that was like boom D-Day right X day X day open up this beach head like the invasion of Normandy and then troops started moving out and actually uncensored Facebook and an uncensored Instagram unset you know right and you you notice those different things because X is like the center of the English language internet right so the internet basically did strike back and it took some time for them to adapt adapt, reorganize and go on hit
(57:47) and actually unfortunately probably for freedom uh China also was actually completely taken back by the trade war. You see there's this graph that shows Chinese FDI and under Obama and Clinton and so on that basically it was just soaring ramping right here. Let me show you this graph. You click that.
(58:09) Mer by the way is a very good think tank with lot it's a German think tank. got good graphics. M R I c.org. So going into 2016, Chinese FDI was just going like this, right? And then Trump began the trade war and just, you know, in in in tech, you generally bet on individuals and exponentials. And once in a while, you have an individual that stops an exponential rather than starts one, right? So like Altman basically started an exponential with AI but Trump arrested an exponential over here with Chinese FDI right anyway. So China was
(58:46) actually totally taken back by this just like the tech guys you know China had thought America was their partner or whatever they had just they didn't think Trump was going to win or what have you. Um and so they just took a bruising for a while. But then what they did was they eventually uh changed their revenue mix.
(59:05) Um and now basically they are let me show you this. Scroll down. So you see that if you click into that v that that graphic right notice uh North America go down a little bit. North America is like further down. A little bit further down. Yeah. see 16% right so 84% of Chinese revenue is not from the US so entire con even if they lost 50% of their revenue to the US I mean like it hurts but it doesn't kill them right so the entire concept that you can just tariff the US to stop China is incorrect because what they did was
(59:45) after 2016 they that's why they did all the belt and road stuff that's been signing all these deals they've been building up these other markets right They intentionally reduced their dependence on red America just like the internet tech guys reduced their dependence on blue America. They basically built their own markets just like you know the uh the tech guys built their own media.
(1:00:11) Right? So now um you have blue America fizzing mad at the tech guys. They hate Elon. They hate us so much you can't even imag. And you also have red America understandably I'm more sympathetic fizzing mad at China right and so blue America is trying things like well first they tried Gensler to block the Bitcoin ETFs and all this kind of stuff and now actually relatively under reportported all of these journalists have these unions which are anti-AI unions right are they really shock no but it doesn't shock me at all yeah so they have these unions at many
(1:00:48) of the major you know publications which are being you know, they're falling on hard times. Their traffic is falling off a cliff since Elon's choked off links and so on and so forth, among other things. But these publications, the the journals are really concerned that their jobs are going to get wrecked by AI.
(1:01:06) So, they have unions that like are banning their editors from using AI and so on and so forth, right? Of course, AI used well is a major workflow optimization. Used poorly, it makes things bad. But, you know, like anything, a tool to tool is a tool. So they are in their own way trying to impose protective tariffs, right? In their own way, they're like, "No, you can't bring AI into our controlled zone.
(1:01:29) We will ban it from our zone." Right? But they're losing control of media to AI and they're losing control of money to cryptocurrency, right? Especially Bitcoin. On the other side of things, the red America is trying to stop China's incursion with this trade war and the tariffs and so on.
(1:01:47) But as I said, I think that's not likely to work for all the reasons we just got into, right? It like if it the real version I and I and just not to be a negative person. I published a bunch of stuff. I mean, you don't have to listen to me or whatever, but um like a you do deregulation, you'd reduce costs as opposed to increasing costs, right? B you for those things that were really critical, you could you'd identify the 10 customers, for example, in the US of some Chinese part and then you'd say, okay, what factory is making that? Okay, then we make our own factory. That's was was the so-called seitech model which
(1:02:17) worked in the 80s and 90s when Japanese competition was ramping up. They made an American second supplier alternative to the Japanese one and everybody liked it because it brought down the price of that component and it brought it into the US.
(1:02:36) Right? So there's like a smart way of doing this that is not simply just, you know, attacking, you know, you don't need to have if China's a national security threat, you don't need to put tariffs on Canadian maple syrup and French wine. You know what I mean? It's a completely unargeted new king of everything. Anyway, point is China's scaling up in robots on the manufacturing side and drones on the military side.
(1:02:53) And I can show graph after graph. It's depressing, but it's like they have 200 to 300x the ship building capacity and the world's largest navy. and tomahawk missiles have Chinese parts and the US military is made in China by this you know goveni study that uh the US military commissioned with million um and and on and on like Rathon says you can't decouple from China the co of Rathon said that and the secretary of navy Carlos Delour in 2023 said China's you know one shipyard is more ships than the entire US Navy combined and HGet who's a
(1:03:23) defense secretary on the Shan Ryan podcast said something like um China's hypersonics can sink all US aircraft carriers And you can show each of those things. But putting that all together, that means that unfortunately China's going to win versus right America. In fact, it's already won. I mean, just one this one alone will kind of make the point.
(1:03:46) Elon was tweeting about this yesterday. I think one of his frustrations with the defense budget, it's like we're spending money on manned flights and planes that uh when you need to be building drones. And I think Ukraine's attack on Russia a couple months ago or last month was like a sort of transition moment where it's like, "Oh, this is asymmetric drone warfare is here." That's right. And so if you look at if you look at the tweet I just shared, right? Um just put that on screen.
(1:04:14) If you zoom in on that, so famous US armaments like the Tomahawk missile or the JDAM, you click in the supplier supplier is in China, right? So, China can just hit a button and when it wants to, it can just essentially shut down the US military or at least big parts of it.
(1:04:35) We don't know how many parts by the way because like um if you look at how many look click into that next one that's like look at all those things, right? So, um anyway, point being that uh in a sense it's kind of all kayabe. It's almost like if you're really cynical, you'd say the defense contractors are getting money out of this for a possible war with China when they've already lost, right? Like they're just getting the spend on it, but the weapons will never can never be used.
(1:05:02) Not that, you know, not that war would be good obviously or be terrible, but like there's no there's no realistic deterrent because China knows that it's got all the parts and all the screws and it can just cut off the screws and you can't make anything that could screw you on the screws. Anyway, point being that means that the pie is going to keep shrinking because like the disruption of blue America by the internet has only just begun and China's really ramping on the robots and drones.
(1:05:24) So, blue and red America are going to see their pies shrink further unfortunately and that's going to radicalize them. And the other piece of it is losing the reserve currency. Bitcoin has appreciated by 100 millionx against the dollar. Did I Did I share that calculation with you? Mhm. Yeah. I mean, I saw a tweet about it, I think. Yeah, that's right.
(1:05:42) So like I just hadn't seen that number quoted in that way. But Marty Malamy had the first trade which is 0.1 cents per Bitcoin in 2009 late 2009 and now it's $100,000 plus per Bitcoin. That's 100 millionx. That's actually in insane you know did you see my thing on super bitcoinization? I don't think so.
(1:06:06) So normal inflation is defined as like 2% a year right which is like 0.1 point2% a month right and hyperinflation is defined at 50% a month but those that's a big gap what if you define superinflation is 5% a month okay so if you take the 100 millionx appreciation BTC to USD and you take the 16 years over which that appreciation happened from 2009 to 2025 and you work out the compounding Right.
(1:06:32) It worked out to about 10.41% devaluation of the dollar against Bitcoin month over month every month for 16 years. That's insane. That's insane, right? You know what that is? I mean, you're a business guy. So, that means super inflation is already here, right? Bitcoin is this it's this incredible thing because it's invisible.
(1:06:56) People really don't understand what it means for something to go up a 100red millionx in 16 years. It means like you know I think I've said this before on other podcast but it's like you know future historians will have to tell children that Bitcoin did not arise overnight like it wasn't just like a step function that just went up that it was actually like there are lots of setbacks and stuff in the middle but on on like a historical time scale it's just like as soon as Bitcoin appeared the dollar collapsed. That's like what future historians will say.
(1:07:28) That's that's why we that's why we built this extension to help people internalize this as they're going to the internet. It's like you should be pricing things in Bitcoin and observing how they're changing over time and observing how they're changing. Exactly.
(1:07:44) Because it re that's why your your your your uh your hat says SATs, right? The SATs hat, right? So yeah, like it's it's something where as soon as Bitcoin appeared on the scene, the hardest money around started attracting the smartest money around, right? Smart money has been going into Bitcoin for 16 years in larger and larger and larger quantities and it's still, you know, it's still going to go.
(1:08:02) So, if you combine the internet disrupting blue America with China disrupting red America with the loss of reserve currency and Bitcoin going to the moon, you have a situation where man, the blue Americans will be really mad.
(1:08:19) They'll be really mad because they'll say, and I actually don't love this framing, but I'll just say they'll say AI took all the jobs and Bitcoin took all the money and the tech guy should take all the blame, right? And uh the, you know, a lot of the Republicans, former Republicans, I do think after MAGA maximalism, after orange man, orange coin. Haha. Okay, I think that's funny. Whatever. Right.
(1:08:43) And you know, the the reason for that is that's not, you know, being anti-Trump or anything, but it's just basically saying Trump is such a unique figure that I don't think you're going to be able to hold that coalition together after Trump, right? He has such a unique charisma that appeals to people of all different ethnic groups and men of all different stripes and you know what have you that whatever comes after him I think will be actually a bunch of different leaders who are essentially pro Bitcoin leaders of different kinds like Dantis or Elon or you know like folks like this of different kinds right
(1:09:16) um and I think that uh a lot of the fighting is going to be over um you know like do you have to surrender your bitcoin to what's left of the federal government you know and so that's why like being in like my that's that'll be what it is in the US I think I think actually it's worth doing you know it's worth actually thinking this through and then let me talk about you know NS or what have you um you know there's tons of movies you've seen on like aliens invading the earth and like killer robots and stuff like that and those are like popcorn you know there's like they're post-apocalyptic scenarios
(1:09:53) on one level. Zombie movies, alien movies, killer robot movies, they're genres in their own right. Oh, that's a killer robot movie. And you can kind of look at those kinds of scenarios with some degree of detachment because you've seen them before a few times, right? You're like, "Oh, it's a twist on the Killer Robots, but you've actually never seen a fictional um thought process on how like the devaluation of the dollar could unfold." Right. To my knowledge, I don't think I've seen a movie on that. I may
(1:10:23) not if you've seen it. Mandibles is a book. The Mandibles is a good book. That's right. It is a good book. Right. So, that actually should be turned into a film, right? But still, like people have to use some you know mental model on that, right? And uh you know the the way I think about this is if you visualize the surface of the earth, do you know what a neutron bomb is? Mhm. Yeah.
(1:10:48) Yeah. So, a neutron bomb was invented supposedly to kill people, not buildings, right? Like, okay. So, a financial neutron bomb doesn't kill people or buildings, but it just kills like fiat currency, right? So, imagine you're like an alien. You're looking down surface of the earth. You see all these people walking around there.
(1:11:08) They've all got a little dashboard above their head, which is their score in fiat currency, cryptocurrency, etc., etc. Okay? And what happens is then like the dollar either goes to zero or it's hyperinflated or superinflated whatever over time to a valuelessness nature.
(1:11:27) And it's tricky to forecast when because the thing is that you have stable coins which are expanding the scope of the dollar. We have tariffs are contracting it. So there's it's like springs with where you know you don't know when. Okay fine. But let's just say that does happen and then Bitcoin becomes a larger and larger larger percentage of the purchasing power. Well, at if if it happened overnight, what would happen is um like like you know, Biden was, you know, he was he was uh uh the president the president president and then he was finally judged scenile and it just he just marked to
(1:11:54) market overnight. So that's that's the overnight because it it could also be gradual, right? So if it happened overnight, what would happen is all those people on surface earth like ants it would just suddenly stop moving because every package that was midair every person who's going to work was like wait a second I'm not being paid anymore because I'm not being paid in dollars my this contract is no longer valid you know every dollar denominated contract implicit or explicitly and by this I include Canadian dollars and JPY
(1:12:19) lots of things are in indirectly dollar dependent and probably lots of fiat currencies are indirectly dollar dependent if they're holding US treasuries all kinds of economic relationships, coordination relationships just break down and people are like, "What do I do next? How do I put food on the table?" Right? And lots and lots of things break at once.
(1:12:38) But then what is not zeroed out, right? So the knowledge in your head remains, right? Your house or your your physical goods remain like the shirt on your back remains, you know? Um your if you're in China, China's factories remain, right? If you have Bitcoin, your hard currency remains.
(1:13:00) And in a deep sense, what remains are like BTC and CCP, right? Like that's to say like hard money and, you know, hard power like factories, you know, and then hard currency. And the good thing about BTC is lots of Chinese people, they they don't respect or fear America anymore, but they do like Bitcoin and they actually think of Bitcoin as a protection in part against their government because the Chinese government will just use like a local company's um bank account as like a piggy bank. It'll just take money out of it like
(1:13:32) lawlessly or what have you because they've got root. Okay, you know, I just need something to pay for these roads. This, you know, governor will take the money out. So Chinese people, the Chinese people their protection against communism is the strongest form of capitalism ever known and property rights ever known which is Bitcoin.
(1:13:49) So BTC also being intangible it's like the cloud whereas China is like the land and that's how I see things shaping up like you know the cloud and the land you know the internet versus China. That's what I see happening after you know this this whole very predictable meltdown that Dalio sees coming that Elon sees coming that everybody sees coming.
(1:14:06) It's like this weird thing where the singularity happens and nothing ever happens. It's like this superposition as we were saying. The administration even sees it. I mean just the way Yeah. has shifted frame and is saying we're going to grow out of the sort of like hand waving like we're going to turn. Yeah.
(1:14:31) It's completely I mean the level the problem is first of all it's not even possible because any growth would be swallowed up by this incredible spend thrift kind of thing, right? Um so what happens is essentially like what happened with VHimar right which is one of the precedents is the currency got inflated but there was enough cohesion among the people that it was rebooted into a manufacturing power in the 30s of course for ill purposes but but it was rebooted.
(1:14:53) However in other countries the the social fabric was not tightened enough and so it all fragmented into pieces like what happened in South America and other places with money printing. And unfortunately in the US the social fabric of you know gender polarization, racial polarization, um political polarization is so so so so polarized. Democrats don't even marry Republicans. They don't vote for Republicans. They don't talk to Republicans on social media.
(1:15:16) They're in their own social networks. They've already digitally seceded. The only thing they do is they still trade with Republicans via the dollar. They're still economic in you for now, right? So when that last piece of fabric phrase then you have basically mutual denaturalization where blue Americans just like debanking is like taking away your bank account denaturalization is like taking away your passport or your citizenship.
(1:15:43) So that's what happened in like you know North and South Korea right East Germany and West Germany. East Germany basically denaturalize those people who went to West Germany and vice versa. So there's that whole messy messy messy process where the last strands holding it together. And I think that you know the like basically my diagnosis is are you how far are you from cars being lit on fire right if you're if you're within walking distance or driving distance of cars being lit on fire which is happening in LA happening in San Francisco.
(1:16:13) If you're within distance of like the Luigi left which is in New York and so on that's bad right Miami or Texas is probably better though they're doing some firebombing of Teslas and so on there. probably like on balance here in the US better.
(1:16:30) I think El Salvador will actually be a place where in a reversal of the 20th century, a lot of Americans are going to seek, you know, safety, right? Um, Dubai is becoming huge for Brits. More than 500,000 Brits have gone to, uh, the UAE, Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Lots of Chinese people have come to like the Chinese capitalist party has come to, in a sense, come to Singapore because those are people that Gi, you know, was was trying to expropriate or persecute or whatever, right? So, those are becoming centers. there's various places that are that are rising.
(1:16:59) Um, and you know, so that's kind of that's you know, pieces of how I see the world. Like the future will be China versus the internet. And for a while, China will be really, really, really strong because they just have this totally unified 1.4 4 billion person superstate with this really powerful military and manufacturing base with ships all over tanks planes drones robots you know and the lesson they will take from this dollar collapse is that the Chinese system is the best that's the lesson they will take right and the Bitcoin maximalist will take the exact opposite
(1:17:38) lesson which is that centralization is a problem and we need freedom right and So CCP and BTC will take completely different lessons very similar to by the way like the US and the USSR are taking different lessons from the fall of Nazi Germany and then the world gets split between them.
(1:17:57) CCP and BTC are also in a sense communism and capitalism. So it's like a the 20th century again, right? Except this time the battleground isn't Europe but it's America. And you know the Germans got split into the West Germans siding with the um with the American capitalists and the East Germans with the Soviet communists.
(1:18:15) I think this time what happens is the Democrats side with the Chinese communists, the Republicans become Bitcoin maximalists. So it's again communist versus capitalists but in a different continent, right? Um you can already see that I said Newsome and Walls are siding with Chinese communists but Republicans are Bitcoin maximalists or much more pro Bitcoin.
(1:18:30) So you can see the sort of foreshadowing of that happening. Let me pause there. That's I know that's a lot that's like kind of forecast 5 10 years or what have you. No, I was just going to reiterate what I said earlier that like if that does become the juxtaposition of or the polarization the the spectrum that exists after orange man like I actually again I think it's a saving grace for I don't know if it's America Americans individual states United States because uh fortunately Americans own on a per capita basis more Bitcoin million.
(1:19:08) Yeah. And as the price goes up like that, then this is I mean it used to be talked about like behind the scenes, but I think people are being more overt about it now, but there's a ton of Bitcoiners, particularly in the United States, who are just waiting for the price to go up and then that point it's like we're so wealthy that we can begin to exude influence on on the way here.
(1:19:28) It's the the thing about it is I think so between Chinese control and let's call it American anarchy, right? What I want to help establish is the internet intermediate or the international intermediate, right? Because certainly of the two I am more sympathetic to American anarchy than like you know Chinese communism.
(1:19:54) Um, however, anarchy or crypto anarchy is worse than crypto civilization. Like what you want is voluntary opt-in societies. You don't want tyranny, but you don't want anarchy either, you know? And um so hence network state, right? Like essentially if Bitcoin unbundles the world, then what rebundles the world, right? We've rebundled the world in the same way that you find your friends online. Like through billions of voluntary actions, we formed all of these online communities.
(1:20:27) We materialize those into the physical world. And crucially, we can in a smart way agree to disagree. You can have the vegan society and the carnivore society. They can both have a million people and they can both be internally consistent. As I may have said before, they're both better than the McDonald's diet, right? An improvement on that diet.
(1:20:45) And then they can just be at a distance from each other because obviously their moral codes are incompatible, right? But the probably people are healthier in both of those things than eating McDonald's slop or whatever, right? And similarly like you could have the Sanskrit society and the Latin society.
(1:21:04) You could have the um Scottish society and the Welsh and the French or whatever, right? Catalan and Basque, all these different cultures could have their own startup societies and then they could just trade amongst themselves, but they could have their old cultures or new cultures or what have you. And you could have totally new concepts for things.
(1:21:22) For example, I think uh society that was like 50% offline where like the internet just shut off for 12 hours a day could be a very valuable kind of society where just like sort of mandatory offline time. Actually, a lot of colleges do that. Uh, in Asia, they shut off the internet from like I think it's like midnight to 8 am or something like that.
(1:21:42) So students can't just play video games all night, right? It's actually good. It's kind of like mandatory lights out. It helps them with self-control or whatever, right? So, so that's kind of the concept of network state, right? And maybe I could put that on screen if you want. Um, the networkstate.com.
(1:22:04) So this book I think is I think it picks up where like the Bitcoin revolution is 16 years old and it's risen 100 millionx against the dollar and only has 10x more to go. What next? Right. Well, we've started new currencies. Can we start new cities or or even new countries? Right? It starts with community, city, country, right? And um you know I I talk about this in the network state book network state in one image.
(1:22:31) Basically this graphic shows what a network state looks like. It's like a physical social network right and um a physical social network. Let me just send a quick message to the next person say while you're doing that I'll mention too something I've been passionate about thinking a lot about too is I think particularly here in the United States the focus on the nuclear family needs to be really driven back home.
(1:23:07) I think that's a a root a root cause one of the root cause a lot of the strife is absolutely for sure I mean you need to have um like strong family ties you know but like the whole male female bond has to be rebuilt and so on right and that's obviously gotten crazily generally I do feel bad for the young guys like who have just as I said like they just kind of came of age in this post-apocalyptic social landscape And you know, so I'll come back to that point. So this is kind of the concept of the network state, which is a social network that is actually a real network
(1:23:46) of friends that crowdfunds territory and it has in this case a million 729,314 people and it has piece of territory around the world, but those piece of territory are separated by internet. Yet just like you know for example Hawaii is not part of the mainland US but it's still part of the same country right you can have piece of territory separated by ocean be part of the same country so this is a piece of territory separated by internet they consider themselves part of the same country the same community and so this example shows
(1:24:16) something that's actually at the scale of a traditional nation state just like bitcoins at the scale or beyond the scale of most traditional fiat currencies right and I have a visual here of how a network state builds out. So you start with like one and then you know you go to 17 172 17,000 170,000 1.
(1:24:40) 7 million and so you can literally start it from your computer and expand it out like this. Okay, now this was the theory and I was thinking about writing the second edition of the book but you know what I did instead. So I held a conference and then I was like you know theory and theory theory and practice are the same in practice they are not.
(1:24:59) So I went and started ns.com and so that is a startup society right and so essentially what we have is you know we we literally that's Brian Johnson there with me right so can you see the video on screen mhm yeah so uh so this is something where we've basically taken over big pieces of uh a you know goan yes it's metallic I know you guys are Bitcoiners, but he is a friend, you know, right? You got, you know, but I'm pretty I think I'm pretty more pro Bitcoin than most. We've got a gym, we've got um uh we've got uh
(1:25:39) co-working space, we've got uh you know, folks basically from all around the world, more than 100 countries. Um we've got kids, uh we have talks, and we have uh this Ryan Peterson of Flexport. We have guest speakers and um basically we have uh you know just like you know we have fun outside.
(1:26:07) We have beach, got a really, you know, beautiful uh like kind of forested island here, right? And we have cafe, people play chess, and just, you know, cool things happen, right? And essentially this is, you know, we've got like, you know, outdoor seating, we've got buffet, and it basically takes care of that's why I call it like a startup society. It's society as a service, right? And it is essentially um you know we just work hard, play hard, bonfires, parties, right? This is a cool drone shot. Boom. ns.
(1:26:38) com, right? So um basically the the concept there is just like Bitcoin, you know, we know how to do internet companies and we know how to start an internet currency. Can we start an internet community? Right? And so I'm trying to develop a template that can be used to bootstrap a community from the cloud, right? And if you are like a Presbyterian or you're Catholic or you are um you know you're I don't know like you're into just about any subculture. You're Mormon or something like that, right? I know Mor's more than a subculture, you know what I mean, right? So you know you could have
(1:27:20) a religious sub community. You could have something that was based on language like, you know, French Canadians or something like that, right? And uh any kind of theme you have for a community, you could take this template that we're building at network school and then you could apply it to your your subculture.
(1:27:40) Now, you know, I I'm I think very clear about who I am and what I stand for. So, I'm a tech guy, right? uh but I'm sympathetic to many you know smallc conservative values and so on and so while what I care about is like human self-improvement and neotropics and robots and drones and math and science and so and so forth you can take many aspects of what we're doing and you can be like a cafeteria Catholic you can take some pieces and swap out other pieces you know and you can turn that into a traditionalist seeming society
(1:28:13) that has minimum necessary technology and so on and so forth. or you could you could dial it up even further. You know that you could you could make it speak a different language. It's like a chassis which you can customize. Um and so that's why I'm doing network school.
(1:28:34) And so uh you know for those people who are watching if they're in Asia or they want to visit go and apply at ns.com and it's my way of trying to have a constructive solution for the disorder that I think is coming and crucially it's entirely voluntary right this is how we rebuild site like bitcoin essentially takes away all the coercion of the fiat system as which you and I all know is there right so But then once you're free men, right, once you're sovereign individuals, I think we want to start forming sovereign collectives. The reason is it's like there's a burning building, there's like a fire
(1:29:10) alarm, and that's what Bitcoin is, and we all get out and we don't die, right? But then you don't just stand out shivering in the rain forever. You want to rebuild that building or a building of some kind. Maybe not the exact same one. Maybe not with one with exactly the same fire hazards and so on.
(1:29:28) We want to rebuild a building, right? or or a few buildings. And so that rebuilding process is what I'm focused on and trying to build a template that then, you know, it's open source. Anybody can clone and copy it. And you know, I want to uh I want to prove it out first before I say, "Hey, this formula works.
(1:29:48) " But if we can get it even to like several thousand people, read several hundred already. So if we get to like several thousand people, let alone tens of thousands, that's a formula for creating a city from the cloud, which I think is a pretty pretty important thing. That's what I mean, look, you know, if you if you're really wealthy from Bitcoin, especially if you and a group of friends are really wealthy from Bitcoin, that's a that's a valuable thing to do.
(1:30:12) That's what the early Americans did, right? That's how the Massachusetts Bay Colony was founded. That's how the Virginia colony was founded. That's, you know, Sam Houston. adds, you know, the land grant colleges in the Midwest, right? There's that pioneering spirit of building something from nothing where you have your group of guys and you go and do it. And there's actually all these abandoned ghost towns in the US that are being de-industrialized.
(1:30:29) There's all these abandoned college campuses in the US where this has happened. And then further in other places like Japan because the declining population, there's all these abandoned farms and abandoned towns, right? So the falling population and the rising bitcoin mean that basically there's a lot of territory where if you're willing to go in with a frontier mentality and you have starlink and so on you can go and set up there. Now I will say one thing you know the single most important thing that I learned in doing this
(1:30:56) what's that the network state is about real estate about as much as um cryptocurrency is about fiat currency. What I mean by that is the USD BTC ratio is like the metronome of the whole space. Even though cryptocurrency is supposed to be sort of in a sense transcending fiat currency, that is also a metric of its progress against the legacy establishment, right? And Bitcoin exchanges and banking interface and and all that kind of stuff.
(1:31:26) The political aspect was actually much a bigger deal than you thought, right? And so the network is about real estate basically means that I'm an electrical engineer, but I'm also an electrician. I'm a chemical engineer, but I'm also a plumber. Like the amount of real estate stuff that I've had to do or last 15 months, 18 months or is a lot, right? Which is great. I'm learning new stuff.
(1:31:50) Uh but it's it's about it was a in retrospect, it's not surprising, but it's kind of like when I was at Coinbase, I was amazed at how much time I had to spend on fiat banking and AC wires and so on and so forth, right? But that was necessary. Fine. We do it because it's necessary. We get pretty good at it, right? So, and also one other thing I'll say is that basically with ns.com we're incredibly pragmatic.
(1:32:09) We don't need you know first you have a community then maybe you have a special economic zone and then maybe some country somewhere not necessarily on the first node probably not on the first node maybe it's a Marshall Islands maybe it's Palao maybe it's you know Maitius who knows like some country somewhere has some deserted island some peninsula and they may sell it to you for however many Bitcoin right that's a dream right but that could take a long time that could take years or decades that's fine first you just build the community you don't need to jump all the way to the end in one step, right? And crucially, it's a more friendly vision in some ways
(1:32:41) than the citadel vision because you're you're not talking about like defending a citadel against hordes of zombies like Mad Max, right? At least hopefully you're not. Instead, you're actually recruiting from the world over there, people who share your values. And there's a lot of people who share your values.
(1:33:05) The key thing is also that this is um in a fundamental way, just like I think we reclaim free speech, we can reclaim democracy. That's the last thing I'll just say there, which is um do you see what happened with Starbase? They're right on the edge of the border and it seems like they want to I mean they made their own city. They made their own city, but basically seceding yet. I heard rumors of secession.
(1:33:24) I don't know if they're secinged, but they incorporated. So go and uh go and click this and look at this. Right. So in Starbase, Texas, you have a model for democracy that is 97% democracy, not 51% democracy, right? Because they combined voting with the feat to move to Starbase, voting with a wallet to build up Starbase and then voting with a ballot to incorporate Starbase. Right.
(1:33:54) So that is, you know, have you heard the term effort post? Mhm. Right. So that's an effort vote. That's like a real vote, right? That's not like a okay, you know, let me let me spend a lot of time online complaining and then hit a vote once or that's like that's like the true true true vote where um you are voting with your feet, your wallet and your ballot and that is how we start to move from the two-party system to the thousand community system. Yeah. No.
(1:34:25) And I I really like this last sentence because it's something I read a piece a year ago and I've reread it like three times uh about like the great decentralization and return to uh borders like the Holy Roman Empire. Um yeah, and I I could definitely see that happen. I guess my I don't want to call it skepticism, but like my like does that have to happen via the sort of creation of these digital communities that then go meet and meet space or going back to my point about the nuclear family and like local community and physical space going from there? Is it just having families, extended families, communities
(1:35:02) in the same physical location coming to the conclusion that they need to sort of not inoculate themselves but be more independent from the the federal government, state government, get all the way down the city. I think I think there's a value to that decentralization, but I also think and I'll close on this, which is in many ways, Bitcoin is a version 3.
(1:35:26) 0 0 that combines the best of gold with the best of fiat because it's got the best of gold in terms of the immutability and so on but like fiat it can be sent electronically you know it's like liquid and so on it's like global right um you've got you know you've got a lot of advantages of both and so in the same way I think we want to have with network states some of the advantages of both city states and nation states and some of the advantages of decentralization where you've got local tribes but some of the advantages of the global scale of massive markets and audiences Right? Because you do ultimately you prosperity comes there's many kinds of things where
(1:35:57) you know there's maybe an audience of 100,000 people around the world for your product. But if you your critical scale to produce that product you you know if you're limited to just one country you know or just one tribe you wouldn't be able to produce that product.
(1:36:18) Right? So there's lots of things that there's a there's a value to scale and I think that we can sort of rebuild that with the concept of like a federation a loose federation of startup societies and network states what I call the network states of the internet and I think that could be like the vision for rebuilding over 10 20 30 years after this fiat crisis. Yeah. Yeah. I mean this and it's crazy.
(1:36:40) It's all coming together like the sovereign individual thesis and I think Starbase the Starbase example is one example. We got our own city. Like we want to attract talent in this own city. Like and if that begins to replicate that's essentially what Reemog and Davidson wrote in the '9s was eventually it's going to get to a point where you have cryptocurrency. You have asymmetric drone warfare. You have artificial intelligence.
(1:37:03) You have a hyperpolarized population that's mad about immigration, all this stuff. And eventually what's going to happen? Capital is going to flee because it can because it's protected by cryptography. and you're going to sort of have these concentrations of capital in physical locations um that understand what's going on and try to attract that capital. That's right.
(1:37:24) Um so on that note, let's wrap. This is really good. You've got to go. We're 15 minutes over, so I appreciate you. Okay. Thank you very much, sir. Talk a pleasure. Peace and love. Okay, freaks. Thank you for listening to the show. I hope you liked it. If you did like it, please make sure you subscribe, rate, review the show.
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