#639: Dollar Collapse and Network States with Balaji Srinivasan

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free.

(00:10):
You talk about a Fed just gone nuts.
All the central banks going nuts.
So it's all acting like safe haven.
I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency,
Bitcoin wins.
In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.
I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.

(00:31):
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.
Laji, 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.
We'll pull it up in post.
But just referencing your tweet from last night about your sympathy to the white American conservative.

(00:54):
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. I mean, so as context, you know, five years ago, I moved to Singapore and India.
I basically split my time between them and I was public about that.
And, you know, I was just talking to some of my friends.

(01:18):
And the thing is, there's there's a zillion different mixed emotions, some of them contradictory or what have you.
It's kind of like. That people have about the state of the world, the state of the U.S. now.
And there's some fraction of people who are like, oh, everybody who's an immigrant should just go home, blah, blah.

(01:39):
And then another group is like, I can't believe you left. Why don'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 later point almost.
Right. And that post was sort of by way of explanation why, you know, I grew up in the US.
I spent four years in America. I have obviously many American friends.

(02:03):
I have an American accent. I built many American companies.
I employed many Americans. I invested in many Americans, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Right. And it was really a great country. And I know it 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.

(02:28):
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 liberal-ish libertarian-ish sympathetic or whatever person.
So I totally – I think I totally get where they're coming from.
One of the things I have in there is like – especially for somebody who was born in like the year 2000, right?

(02:50):
You and I are a little bit older than that.
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, remember the 90s, 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?

(03:11):
They're one year old when 9-11 happened.
They're seven years old when the financial crisis happened.
When they came of age, 18 years old, it 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?
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 and forth like what happened.

(03:43):
Right. They don't even have a memory of what like the good times were. Right. And.
And 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 being mad may give you the courage or energy to do something, but is it the optimal thing?

(04:09):
And, you know, in general, I think you can emotionally align people against something, but economically align them for something.
And like, as I may have mentioned this before, but if you took 100 people and you said, go and burn down that building, they could do that easy.
Right. It completely paralyzes. One guy grabs a rock.

(04:32):
Their guy grabs some matches. It's dust in a few hours.
That's like a lot of stuff happening in L.A., you know, other places around.
But if you say to those 100 people, go and build that building.
That's much harder. They may not have the skills. Right.
because you know you need a foreman and you need an architect you need even forget like even
regulations and code and permissions or whatever you know without any permissions even just moving

(04:56):
the speed of physics is there a crane to lift the you know the wood that's a very coordinated serial
process where those hundred people may not even have the skills right you you know you're plumbers
you have electrical work and so so it's like a million x easier to destroy than to build and
also less obviously the people who are destroying don't have to coordinate with each other

(05:17):
this guy smashing the window, 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. 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

(05:40):
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 both the
capitalists and the nationalists were against the godless communists right the capitalists and

(06:03):
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 what people don't know is that the
Russians actually had gone down to 51% of the Soviet Union in the year, two years before.

(06:23):
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 multi-ethnic, celebrate diversity, global empire that even stretching
across Eurasia, it had like everybody from Central Asian, like, you know, Kazakhstan,

(06:50):
like, you know, kind of types to, you know, Middle Eastern types to Eastern European types
to, 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%.
So that, among other things, was one of several factors that led to the ethnic dissolution

(07:11):
of the Soviet Union, long repressed ethnic nationalisms bubbled up after Gorbachev had
allowed for plasnost, which was, you know, free speech and perestroika, 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 and all the wars and so on and so forth. And the non-Russians felt

(07:31):
they were being exploited 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 smithereens. But for a small period of time, everybody was super happy. And it reminded me a

(07:53):
lot, just that period, just reading the contemporaneous 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
It was like the most positive spirit I had seen on Twitter and X in a long time.
The left was just, even if it was a one point victory, 49, 48, it was like a 50 point victory on vibes.

(08:21):
Right.
And so it was something where it was just a remarkable, remarkable thing.
And the tech guys and the concern, everybody was high fiving, back 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.

(08:44):
And 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 why that was predictable?
Why?
Because once the left – well, BLM – yes, but BLM was on a leash, right?
Luigi is not on a leash.
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.

(09:12):
Like there's that article in Time magazine where they actually told the rioters stand down.
Right. So they were like, you know, rent a mob or whatever.
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

(09:36):
like the the tesla fire bombers the luigi left right who are just you know schizos right and
that's decentralized violent anarchism because it can't do their violence through the american
state anymore and then you have like gavin newsom and tim walls who are going to be siding with
chinese communism right like newsom went to china said he wants to be china's long-term stable and

(09:58):
strong partner and walls ask China to intercede in the Iran dispute. So 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. And you saw that with the

(10:24):
a vague tweet in December 25th, right? When a tweet that would have been considered like a
seemingly pro merit 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 was actually on the left

(10:47):
because the spectrum had moved over so many points. And the thing about it is we have to like
recalibrate sometimes because as we were just talking about before we got online um we're in
this weird superposition of all of these exponentials going through this 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

(11:13):
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
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 right exactly so so like it took

(11:40):
44 billion dollars and the personal intervention of the wealthiest man in the world because his
first round of firing people at Twitter wasn't sufficient. He needed to go in and personally
fire the people who were censoring the question about 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

(12:05):
on X, right? That was where the center of mass was on controversy, okay? From that to now,
over two years is a move of 50, a hundred. 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 Grok unleashed a couple of nights ago, right? That's like off,

(12:27):
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, uh, I think she
it's a book called, I think it's like four Germanies or something like that. Um, yeah,
four Germanies, four Germanies. And it was like, uh, hold on, uh, let me see if I can find it.

(12:53):
It was like, yeah. So, so essentially, uh, there's, there's a book called four Germanies
and there's another one, which was name I'm forgetting now, but, uh, you know, essentially
if you lived in a certain part of Germany during the 20th century, right. You live through the
Weimar Republic and then Nazism and then East Germany.

(13:15):
And then if you live 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 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.

(13:38):
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 has gotten shattered into a bunch of pieces. And there's Blue Sky and Mastodon and
Truth Social and TikTok and Threads and so on on the left. And then there's X and Gab and Truth and
Noster and what have you on the right. Right. And anyway, that that concept of like the same

(14:06):
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 Anglophone intranet
swivels and turns. And so whatever the next transformation is, it'll probably be seen there,

(14:28):
though it's also in 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 superposition of those two things
actually that's a great tweet right the singularity is happening but nothing ever happens

(14:49):
yeah okay come on i'm gonna i'm gonna post i'm gonna do that one in real time go go go
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 it was right before the US bombed Iran and while we were bombing
Iran I was like oh my gosh it's something happening no let's wait a few

(15:09):
days nothing's happening but to your point we do have the superposition and I
think through my reflection on this this juxtaposition it really I think nothing ever happens at the political level like you want like obviously like you mentioned this election people were very optimistic in

(15:29):
november december trump gets in in january we get doge we're uncovering usaid 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
We're going back to business as usual.
And I think a big driver of that is just the debt situation.
There's no way out of it.

(15:50):
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 something happens outside of the political system where nothing ever happens.
And I can give I can give a lens on that if you want that suggests why that's probably the right thing to do, which is here's here's a couple of.

(16:20):
Well, so first, let me close that original thread, that original thought.
Right. Essentially, I am really I'm sympathetic to 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 tried being mr nice guy they tried playing by the rules

(16:42):
they tried uh being charitable and empathetic and seeing their guy and what did it get them
it got them just more and more abused by all these crazy folks 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 reducing, in my view,

(17:08):
the life expectancy of the dollar and thus the empire. And just to give you my quick mental model,
dollar inflation is global taxation. And so what that means is over the course of the 20th century,
the U.S. set itself up as American empire. And why did it do that? There's actually a great book
by Stephen Wertheim called Tomorrow the World that documents the exact moment that with memos that

(17:30):
the U.S. made the decision to go for empire. And it was not actually what people would think it is.
It was not 1945. 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,

(17:51):
while America was at home, just building its strength because empire is expensive.
But they understood they were smart.
They understood what a cost and time sink 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.

(18:12):
They'll cut us off from natural resources.
They'll choke us out.
And OK, 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 there was actually a decision that was made.
And that's how the U.S. started playing for global.
I mean, here's the thing.
You don't become global number one in every category by accident.

(18:33):
You don't have a McDonald's on every continent and like the FDA setting regulations for, you know, Myanmar and Uruguay with harmonization.
You don't have like the dollar is a reserve currency and Harvard Kennedy School training dozens of foreign heads of state.
and the UN headquarters in New York and then the World Bank, 500 other things that all got set up.

(18:56):
That just does not happen by accident unless you are intentionally going and setting up a global
empire. And while it's very 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, not an empire, or say empire is bad because Americans were dying in Iraq for no reason,

(19:17):
Right. So that 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 Russians were exploiters.
And there's some truth about this and some falsity as well.
But the counter argument 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 has ever seen.

(19:46):
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 State Department,
were the greatest diplomats the world had ever seen.
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,

(20:07):
I mean, it's hard.
Look, you've done investments, right?
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.
It's hard, right?
Now imagine there's 196 people signing.
Okay.
That's even harder.
Now imagine it's 196 countries signing.

(20:31):
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.
Right.
When these organizations were working, that was an absolutely unprecedented level of global nonviolent cooperation.

(20:53):
And of course, you want that 99% of the time, 99.999%, whatever percent of the 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 of those deals, you had global market access for Americans everywhere.

(21:19):
And one of the things that actually, it took me a while to put my finger on that I thought
was so surprising to me about December 2024 is for the first time, my whole life, all
of the Americans, especially the white American men that I had worked with and built big businesses
with and expanded, essentially our question was only, okay, when do we expand into Turkey?

(21:41):
When do we expand into Brazil?
When we expand into Japan, right?
When I work with Armstrong or Coinbase or, you know, all the people I've worked with,
A&Z and venture capital, startups, tech, the world was America's market.
That was just obvious, right?
The, you know, 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

(22:05):
after the Vague 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 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 to exit that. Right.

(22:27):
But we have to understand that the U.S. 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 the shallow
question, well, actually, you can ask the question a few different ways. So take Trump and the
tariffs, right? Let's take Vietnam. Vietnam is sending its shoes to America. America is sending

(22:51):
back basically printed database entries for those shoes. That's what the trade deficit is,
and it keeps going into further debt. And those are IAUs. But why does the world accept that?
The world accepts it because America was the center of the global empire.
and as the database administrator, as the CEO of the world, they had root access.
And in return for maintaining the global financial system with both all the diplomatic agreements

(23:15):
and financial agreements from the left and all the military safety and ceiling 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.

(23:37):
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 i think

(24:02):
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 u.s 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

(24:25):
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 a historical, right? They're not thinking about
the enormous benefit that America got from taking essentially a slice of every transaction globally.
To be clear, they gave value as well. Maintaining the stability of the world is no small thing.

(24:46):
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.
But then, of course, that's the greatest business model of all time.

(25:07):
And they started abusing it, right?
And they found that they could push it much 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 similarly,

(25:29):
by the way,
with 2020,
you know,
like COVID lockdowns and like,
you know,
there are lots of crazy things that happened during COVID,
like hard borders between us States,
you know,
like Rhode Island,
New York checkpoints and stuff like that.
Or like April 2020,
the U S stopped issuing passports in case of accepting emergencies,
LA town.
So all that stuff is actually set up for like,

(25:50):
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's 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 u.s did at one point work for a living it manufactured all this stuff there's

(26:14):
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 right so you
go to google images you'll see that it shows uncle 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

(26:37):
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 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

(27:01):
is that that is a way more profitable business model because you know there's this article by
npr like how to print 1.25 trillion did we talk about that last time i don't remember if we did
I don't think we did.
So here's the 1897 Uncle Sam Philippines thing.
You can put this on screen if you want.
Yeah.
And I think just to build on that, I think going back to the angst of the white conservative, which.

(27:28):
Yes.
Yes.
Go ahead.
I certainly saw in that bucket.
Sure.
I think it's like the lack of diversification of 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 country is what's driving this sort of struggle that we're going.

(27:55):
Yes. Yes, that's right. And I'll show you some graphs that actually, you know, somewhat speak to that.
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 stereotypical Chinese guy.

(28:18):
But see, it says like wanted like one hundred thousand bridges, engines, cars, rails. Right.
Like China's portrayed as just a passive market. Amazing history running in reverse aspect of things. Right.
And bringing in education, steel rails and. Yeah, exactly. Right.

(28:39):
so now of course that's that's run completely in reverse and so what what happened was uh 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 so this is a rare article where they actually like admit what um what's going on

(29:03):
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 it was funny that's only half amount of bcc okay so
that's august 2010 okay now this is basically how the fed did these mortgage-backed securities
so if you scroll down um keep going blah blah blah blah keep going okay wait so can you zoom in on

(29:29):
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 an amazing quote in the end they came very close to their target they
told us they were just 61 cents short in other words they bought 1 trillion 249 billion 999
million 990 thousand nine hundred nine nine dollars and 39 cents worth of mortgage back bonds

(29:51):
incredible the fed was able to spend so much money so quickly because there's a unique power
can create money out of the air whenever it decides to do so so zina explained the mortgage
team decide to buy a bond. They push a bond on the computer and voila, money is created. 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.

(30:14):
Okay. But like, just take a trillion dollars. That's an insane amount of money. Okay. That is,
imagine you sold a thousand dollar iphone to a billion people in china okay that's what a trillion
dollars is you know how hard i mean it's insanely hard to sell something that's worth a thousand
dollars to one person right sell it to a billion people for that's also just revenue right you know

(30:39):
you gonna have you there no discounts you know like what your profit margin on that maybe you making 80 bucks per iPhone or something whatever 200 bucks So to make a thousand dollars in profit on a billion people in a second right That 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

(31:03):
people talk about a money printer, you know, like your business is printing money, right? Like
And 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 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.

(31:25):
now you can start to see why i'm very skeptical that the the the trump to strategy of re-industrialization
is going to work because how many screws do you need to sell to make a trillion dollars a lot
i mean like a screw is what like i don't know a cent fraction actually gonna be a fraction of a

(31:49):
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 know there's only 77 million mag of 1.4 billion china and the thing is that the u.s

(32:13):
is accustomed to office jobs and retail jobs they're not accustomed to like working in the
mines and working on the factory. 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. I agree
that you can automate and so on and so forth, but they're physical jobs. So you're going to have a

(32:36):
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 blue collar, they're happy that their children became
white collar, right? So there's an honor in blue collar jobs. 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 this. I've been very hands-on. I do a lot of real estate

(32:59):
nowadays. I do think there's a lot of good and working within sands. I grant all that. 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

(33:20):
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 it's it's

(33:46):
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 high paying factory jobs i'm like high paying
why would you say they'd be high paying like they have to do them at they have to be high quality
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,

(34:12):
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 coerce somebody into buying something or
not, they just have to compete on value, right?
Same as on the internet, by the way, anybody can click to anything else.
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 insofar as it results in high quality and high competitiveness.

(34:41):
And the cost of living is so high in America, again, thanks to all the inflation and money printing, 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 and there's 50 other

(35:06):
things i could say about these tariffs or whatever and i think they're just radically under discussed
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 20s but it's probably talked about way more when
it was rising than when it's just used all the time you know like uber is probably used a lot

(35:28):
more today than it was in 2015 but nobody really talks about uber anymore does that make sense
right people don't talk go ahead yeah i was gonna say yeah that makes sense and like so you're
pointing on tariffs like with the energy like yesterday the copper tariffs because i just
recorded a podcast yeah jordy visser and we were talking about the energy expansion he's saying
i don't think people really appreciate the amount of copper that we're gonna need to pull out the

(35:51):
ground to electrify the u.s economy to catch up with china's energy generation and then yeah after
we post that from it's like 50 percent tariffs on copper it's like well we need to expand energy
generation copper is a critical part of that it is it is completely insane and unrealistic stuff
It is magical thinking. It is. OK, let me I could I could say like 10 things about the tariffs in particular.

(36:17):
The first is a lot of these tariffs are on like raw materials.
You know, 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.

(36:37):
tariffs increase costs.
So basically tariffs are like taxes.
They have to pay at the port
or your goods are seized, right?
And they're surprise taxes,
which you can't budget for in advance.
And it's like a cash expense
that went from zero up to like,
you know, on a million dollar shipment,
it might be $490,000,

(36:57):
some crazy amount of money.
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 are 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. I mean, in a sense you do, I increase your prices by 45%. Now you have an incentive, but in a sense, of course you don't because the capital cost to go and do that is so extreme.

(37:27):
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 broad brush blunderbuss kind of thing it's really this crazy
crazy thing it's it's like completely divorced from reality and it's also having really important

(37:51):
effects abroad that people are understanding like basically the guys in like malaysia or in
Uruguay, whatever, you know, just name whatever neutral country you want, Spain, anywhere, right,
that were exporting to America. Those were some of the most pro-American people in those countries.
Those were like CEOs, entrepreneurs, right, businessmen who had American friends, American

(38:14):
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. They thought
this was going to be like a free trade, pro-capitalism administration, or even basically

(38:38):
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

(39:00):
china did you can go and look headline after headline china went to malaysia and they lit up
the twin towers in chinese colors china went and signed all 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 you know there'll be what our debt trap diplomacy or

(39:22):
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,
these accorded them and said, hey, you know, you should be with us. They were like a swing vote
between China and the US, right? They had plenty of issues with China with like, you know, local

(39:45):
regional disputes and so on. And this is like a rubber band snap where they just had to go flying
in their direction. They understood their economy couldn't depend on the U.S. anymore because
the reciprocal tariffs basically say they punish countries for exporting to the U.S. 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 it's just a purely a bargaining tactic? Get people. No, because

(40:08):
they're actually there. It's not a bluff. Right. These are actually imposed. You know, there are
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 as 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

(40:30):
import you know this piece from here and this piece from there like you know i know this with
with the biochemistry 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 than something from New England biolabs.

(40:52):
You all you have that all in one test tube. Right. And if you're tracking country of origin
of all 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 that you're uh you know what they want to

(41:17):
cut rates to one percent i mean it's just setting it up for this crazy kind of supply shock you know
on their 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's going to

(41:38):
increase u.s living standards is i think simply not quantitative um the only reason like you
if the u.s 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 attacks and
remittances that's coming if it's not it's very lukewarm about foreign military intervention and

(42:03):
keeping its end of military commitments that's made over decades in treaties you know nato and
other kinds of things 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 zero percent the other way it's telling europeans they need to deal with russia on their own

(42:25):
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 of ray was basically undercut and you know canada went to the left over the last
you know uh four or five months right uh i don't think that's a good setup right

(42:50):
when you put it like that no no that's good again going back to like the juxtaposition of
the singularity and nothing ever happens.
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.
And like,
that was one of the,
one of the like most exciting like revelations I've had since Bitcoin.

(43:15):
It's like,
Oh my gosh.
Isn't that cool?
I can get on this thing.
I use replet and chat GBT.
And I am a seed investor in replet.
Well,
Amjad is,
he's really great.
He's a man.
she's an incredible dude and it's like i'm just like a perfect example of the type of immigrant
we want came from jordan i think so he's doing something incredible and i i think i think replet

(43:39):
is just this amazing contribution that really has genuinely expanded the scope of what people can do
on the computer and 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 can kind of you know it's really i think it's
really cool um go ahead you're gonna say i mean to go no but to that point it's like it seems like

(44:01):
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
like that's to say to reconcile those two lenses um the internet is to america when america was to

(44:29):
britain and you can even go you know you can say greece rome britain america internet and
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. It became something about 10x bigger,

(44:53):
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 example,
Britain pioneered the Magna Carta and equal rights reveal, but also pioneered capitalism.
America was simultaneously more progressive and more libertarian. It pushed both democracy

(45:15):
and capitalism further. It went from the common law, British common law, to the constitution.
And now we go one more step. So the internet is even more progressive and more capitalist than
America. Everybody from every race, religion, et cetera, is on the global internet. Anybody can
speak to anybody, say anything, encrypt their messages, essentially do whatever they want for

(45:37):
the most part on the internet. But at the same time, it's the most capitalist thing to ever exist.
more capitalist in 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 was more britain
than britain and it was born out of america and if i say is the internet american it's like saying

(46:01):
is america british well on the one hand of course it is it started in america and like you know i grew out of DARPA and all that kind of stuff Big tech companies are American many of them And Silicon Valley in
America. And so, of course, what do you mean is the internet American? But on the other hand,
you can also talk about the non-American intranet. For example, there's the Japanese
intranet and there's the Russian intranet. So they have their own zones. So that's one piece.

(46:25):
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 percent of their employees
are usually non-american or they're immigrants that are naturalized certainly more most of their
users are non-american like when you've got something like facebook or google with billions
of users there's only 300 million americans so definitionally 97 plus of their users are

(46:49):
non-american you've got three billion users only 300 million americans um most of their revenue
depending on the company is non-american right most of their traffic is non-american their data
centers are non-american their offices are mostly non-american etc etc right they they started out
there but they become something else right similar with bitcoin um that's also it's probably satoshi

(47:13):
i would not be surprised if satoshi was an american he could have been something else as possible
but it certainly feels like american culture in many ways but then it's 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 u.s but bitcoin scales to everyone right and this is a really amazing thing where

(47:37):
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, India. Nobody's arguing Bitcoin's biased against them.
That's a really big deal. We've managed to achieve global rule of code. That's a huge deal.

(48:06):
Enormous, enormous kind of thing. And with smart contracts, with identity,
we have property rights, we have encryption, encrypted messaging, we have capital formation.
that's actually the basis for economic union and internet economic union that's as that's
comparable to the european union or the united states and so that's in the fullness of time

(48:28):
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 if your company's 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.

(48:52):
Because it scales in a way, like, you know, it's funny.
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, you're if you 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.

(49:14):
Right. But again, to argue against something before you argue for it, do you want the steel man case for open borders?
Why not? Let's give it. Why not?
OK, so the steel man case is when you set up a tech startup.
Like Facebook or Google or something like that, you want a billion users.

(49:34):
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.
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 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 dispute resolution, and so on and so forth.

(50:06):
right so you start thinking about these giant tech companies as like digital states with open
borders 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

(50:27):
when i think of twitter too i've been using twitter for 14 years now 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
list when finance oil and gas energy comedy 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

(50:50):
way for all the time one spends on twitter it's actually effort to make the lists but you know
that's actually it's probably good 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 and while you pull these up like

(51:10):
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
hopefully Bitcoin may be the saving grace for America or Americans at the very least.

(51:33):
Bitcoin, well, yes, for sure. And the reason is, let me actually, let me show you this.
Can you see the screen there? Yeah. Okay. So I'm going to show two graphs that are part of my
kind of world model, right? There's two simultaneous disruptions. And then let's
get back to how Bitcoin is the 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

(51:58):
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 dollars and then they you know they fell after the dotcom
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 dollars like a drop of like 75

(52:24):
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 the colors on the graph the they they

(52:46):
they disrupted red america right 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 in china okay so like a four group thing

(53:08):
well um the democrats got radicalized by the internet's disruption of them and they they
felt a shrinking pie so they lashed out at republicans with wokeness and they lashed out
at the internet with the tech clash okay starting in early 2010s around 2013 the republicans were mad

(53:33):
understandably 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 mid-2010s as a
consequence of the disruption of blue america by the internet the disruption of red america by china

(53:58):
right and now we're like 10 years into that conflict and essentially what happened was
the tech guys were taken aback because they thought that democrats liked 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 about five

(54:22):
years to adapt and so on a lot of guys were canceled a lot of companies were bankrupt and
And they realize, OK, they're not Democrats are basically fighting trying to kill.
Right. Because they're they feel they can't build search engines or scale social networks, but they can write stories and shape narratives.
They're making the tech guys into the bad guys. OK, fine. We're going to build our own media.

(54:42):
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's like boom.
boom we got all of our forces all the tech because it wasn't just elon right 44 billion dollars
that was like larry ellison it was like every centrist center right center left guy in tech

(55:05):
and finance all threw in i mean 44 bill is a lot so for a lot of people a mill was a lot but
everybody just threw in into that ticket and they were like okay put it all behind elon that was like
boom d-day right x-day x-day open up this beachhead like the invasion of normandy and then
troops started moving out and actually uncensored facebook and an uncensored instagram unset you

(55:27):
know right and 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, reorganize, and go unhit. And actually, unfortunately, probably for freedom,
China also was actually completely taken aback by the trade war. You see, there's this graph that

(55:50):
shows Chinese FDI. And under Obama and Clinton and so on, basically, it was just soaring,
ramping, right? Here, let me show you this graph. You click that. Merix, by the way,
It's a very good think tank.
It's a German think tank.
It's got good graphics.
M-E-R-I-C-I stutter.

(56:10):
So going into 2016, Chinese FDI was going whoop like this, right?
And then Trump began the trade war and just, you know, 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.

(56:32):
But Trump arrested an exponential over here with Chinese FDI.
Right.
Anyway, so China was actually totally taken aback 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.
And so they just took a bruising for a while.

(56:54):
But then what they did was they eventually changed their revenue mix.
um and now basically they are let me show you this scroll down so you see that if you click
into that that that graphic right notice uh north america go down a little bit north america is like

(57:16):
further down a little bit further down yeah see 16 right so 84 of chinese revenue is not
from the u.s so entire cons even if they lost 50 of their revenue to the u.s
i mean like it hurts but it doesn't kill them right so the entire concept that you can just
tariff the u.s to stop china is incorrect because what they did was after 2016 they that's why they

(57:43):
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 reduce their dependence on blue america they basically built their own
markets just like you know the uh the tech guys built their own media right so now um you have

(58:07):
blue america fizzing mad at the tech guys they hate elon they hate us so much you can't even
imagine and you also have red america understandably i'm more sympathetic fizzing mad at china right
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.

(58:28):
And now actually relatively underreported.
All of these journalists have these unions, which are anti-AI unions.
Are they really?
Do you know this?
No, but it doesn't shock me at all.
Yeah. So they have these unions at many of the major publications, which are falling on hard times.
their traffic has fallen off a cliff since Elon has choked off links and so

(58:49):
and so forth among other things.
But these publications,
the journos are really concerned that their jobs are going to get wrecked by
AI.
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 as a major workflow optimization used poorly.
It makes things bad,
but you know,
like anything,
any tool is tool.

(59:12):
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 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

(59:35):
stop china's incursion with this trade war and the tariffs and so on but as i said i think that's not
likely to work for all the reasons we just got into, right? Like if the real version,
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 like A, you do deregulation, you'd reduce costs as opposed to increasing costs,

(59:56):
right? B, for those things that are really critical, 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?
OK, then we make our own factory. That was the so-called Semitech model, which 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, right?

(01:00:24):
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 untargeted nuking of everything.
Anyway, point is China's scaling up in robots on the manufacturing side and drones on the military side.

(01:00:47):
And I can show graph after graph.
It's depressing.
But it's like if 200 to 300x the shipbuilding capacity in the world's largest Navy and Tomahawk missiles have Chinese parts.
And the U.S. military is made in China by this Govini study that the U.S. military commissioned with Fort Miller.
And on and on.
Like Raytheon says, you can't decouple from China.

(01:01:07):
The CEO of Raytheon said that.
And the Secretary of the Navy, Carlos Del Toro, in 23 said China's, you know, one shipyard has more ships in the entire U.S. Navy combined.
And Hegseth, who's a defense secretary on the Sean Ryan podcast, said something like China's hypersonics can sink all U.S. aircraft carriers.
And you can show each of those things.
But putting that all together, that means.

(01:01:29):
that unfortunately china's gonna win versus right america in fact it's already won
i mean just one this one alone will kind of make the point
i was tweeting about this yesterday i think one of his frustrations of the defense budget it's
like we're spending money on manned lights yeah plans that uh when you need to be building drones

(01:01:51):
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
if you zoom in on that so famous u.s armaments like the tomahawk missile or the jdam

(01:02:13):
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 u.s military or at least big parts of it 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

(01:02:39):
all kayfabe 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 ever be used
Not that war would be good, obviously, or it'd be terrible, but 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

(01:03:02):
screws and you can't make anything that can screw you on the screws. Anyway, point being,
that means that the pie is going to keep shrinking because the disruption of Blue America by the
internet has only just begun and China's really ramping on the robots and drones.
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

(01:03:25):
bitcoin is appreciated by 100 million x against the dollar did i share that calculation with you
yeah i mean i tweet about it i think yeah that's right so like i just hadn't seen that number
quoted in that way but marty malami had the first trade which is 0.1 cents per bitcoin
in 2009 late 2009 and now it's a hundred thousand dollars plus per bitcoin that's a hundred million

(01:03:47):
X. That's actually insane. You know, do you see my thing on super Bitcoinization?
I don't think so.
So normal inflation is defined as like 2% a year, right? Which is like 0.1, 0.2% a month,
right? And hyperinflation is defined at 50% a month. But that's a big gap. What if you define

(01:04:08):
superinflation as 5% a month? Okay. So if you take the 100 million X 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 rate it worked out to about 10.41 percent devaluation of the

(01:04:30):
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
people really don't understand what it means for something to go up a hundred million x

(01:04:56):
in 16 years it means like you know i think i've said this before another part 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

(01:05:18):
soon as bitcoin appeared the dollar collapsed that's like what future historians will say
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 that's why your health your
your hat says Sats, right?
The Sats hat, right?

(01:05:39):
So, yeah, like,
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.
So, if you combine
the internet disrupting blue America

(01:05:59):
with China disrupting bright 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 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 guys should take all the blame right and uh the you

(01:06:26):
know a lot of the republicans former republicans i do think after maga maximalism after orange man
orange coin. Ha ha. Okay. I think that's funny, whatever. Right. And you know, 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

(01:06:47):
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 DeSantis or Elon or, you know, like folks like this of different kinds. Right.

(01:07:11):
And I think that a lot of the fighting is going to be over, 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 u.s i think
i think actually it's worth doing you know it's worth actually thinking this through and then let

(01:07:34):
me talk about you know ns or whatever 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 on one level zombie movies alien
movies killer robot movies their genres in their own right oh that's a killer robot movie

(01:07:54):
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
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

(01:08:17):
movie on that i mean 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 you know what a neutron bomb is there yeah so a

(01:08:41):
Neutron bomb was invented supposedly to kill people, not buildings.
Right.
Like, OK, so a financial neutron bomb doesn't kill people or buildings, but just kills like
fiat currency.
Right.
So imagine you're like an alien.
You're looking down at the surface of the earth.
You see all these people walking around there.
They've all got a little dashboard above their head, which is their score in fiat currency,

(01:09:05):
cryptocurrency, et cetera, et cetera.
OK.
it 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 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 it's like springs with where you know you don't know when okay fine but let's

(01:09:28):
just say that does happen and then bitcoin becomes a larger and larger larger percentage of the
purchasing power well at if it happened overnight what would happen is um like like you know biden
was you know he was it was uh uh the president the president president and then he was finally
judged senile and it just he was just mark to mark it overnight so that's that's the overnight

(01:09:49):
because it could also be gradual right so if it happened overnight what happened is all those people on the surface earth like ants have just suddenly stopped moving because every package that was midair every person who going to work was like wait a second I not being
paid anymore because I'm not being paid in dollars. This contract is no longer valid.
Every dollar-denominated contract, implicitly or explicitly, and by this I include Canadian

(01:10:12):
dollars and JPY, lots of things that are indirectly dollar-dependent. And probably lots of fiat
currencies are indirectly dollar-dependent if they're holding U.S. Treasuries. All kinds of
economic relationships, coordination relationships just break down and people are like, what do I do
next? How do I put foot on the table? Right. And lots and lots of things break at once.

(01:10:32):
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 you're if you're in china china's factories remain right if you have bitcoin your hard
currency remains and in a deep sense what remains are like btc and ccp right like that's to say like

(01:10:59):
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

(01:11:24):
bank it'll just take money out of it like lawlessly or what have you because they've got
okay you know i just need something to pay for these roads this you know the government 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
so btc also being intangible it's like a cloud whereas china is like the land and that's how i

(01:11:46):
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 it's like this weird thing where the
singularity happens and nothing ever happens it's like this supposition as we were saying

(01:12:08):
administration even sees it i mean just the way yeah this is shifted frame and is saying we're
going to grow out of the sort of like hand waving like we're going to turn it on yeah 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 spendthrift kind of thing right um so what happens is essentially

(01:12:31):
like what happened with weimar 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 it was rebooted. However, in other countries, the social
fabric was not tightened enough. And so it all fragmented into pieces like what happened in South

(01:12:53):
America and other places with money printing. And unfortunately, in the US, the social fabric of,
you know, gender polarization, racial polarization, 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. 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

(01:13:18):
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
count. Denaturalization is like taking away your passport or citizenship. So that's what happened
like you know north and south korea right east germany and west germany east germany basically

(01:13:40):
denaturalized those people who went to west germany and vice versa so there's that whole 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

(01:14:01):
walking distance or driving distance of cars being lit on fire which is happening in la
happening in san francisco 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 fire
bombing of teslas and so on there it's probably like on balance here in the u.s better i think
el salvador will actually be a place where in a reversal of the 20th century a lot of americans

(01:14:24):
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 uh 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
you know was trying to expropriate or persecute or whatever right so those are becoming centers

(01:14:48):
there's various places that are that are rising 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 billion person super state with this really powerful military and manufacturing base

(01:15:14):
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 lesson which is that
centralization is a problem and we need freedom right and so ccp and btc will take completely

(01:15:39):
different lessons very similar to by the way like the us and the ussr taking different lessons from
the fall of nazi germany and then the world gets split between them 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 battle
ground isn't europe but it's america and you know the germans got split into the west germans siding

(01:16:02):
with the um with the american capitalists and the east germans with the soviet communists 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 newsom and wallace are siding with chinese communists but
republicans are bitcoin maximalists or much more pro-bitcoin so you can see the sort of foreshadowing

(01:16:25):
of that happening. Let me pause there. That's I know it's a lot. That's like kind of forecast
five, 10 years or what have you. No, no, just reiterate what I said earlier, like if that
does become the juxtaposition of the polarization, the spectrum that exists after Orange Man,

(01:16:46):
like I actually, again, I think it's a saving grace for I don't know if it's America,
americans individual states in the united states because uh fortunately americans own on a per
capita basis more bitcoin yeah and as the price goes up like that then this is i mean it used to

(01:17:07):
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 you're 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 the way.
I think it's the thing about it is I think so.
Between Chinese control and let's call it American anarchy, right?

(01:17:31):
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.
However, anarchy or crypto anarchy
is worse than crypto civilization.

(01:17:55):
Like what you want is voluntary opt-in societies.
You don't want tyranny,
but you don't want anarchy either.
Yeah.
And so hence network state.
Right? Like essentially, if Bitcoin unbundles the world, then what re-bundles the world?
Right? We've re-bundled the world in the same way that you find your friends online.

(01:18:16):
Like through billions of voluntary actions, we've formed all of these online communities.
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 both better than the McDonald diet right

(01:18:36):
They're an improvement on that diet.
And then they can just be at a distance from each other
because obviously their moral codes are incompatible, right?
But they're 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.
You could have the Scottish society and the Welsh and the French or whatever, right?

(01:18:59):
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.
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 it's like sort of mandatory

(01:19:24):
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 a.m or something like that so students can't just play video games
all night right it's actually good it's kind of like mandatory lights out it's good help someone
self-control or whatever right so so that's kind of the concept of network state right and maybe

(01:19:47):
put that on screen if you want um the network state.com 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 million x against the dollar
and only has 10x more to go what next right well we've started new currencies can we start new

(01:20:10):
cities or even new countries right it starts with community city country right and um you know i
talk about this in the network state book never seen one image basically this graphic shows
what a network state looks like it's like a physical social network right and um

(01:20:33):
a physical social network.
Let me just send a quick message to the next person.
So.
While you're doing that,
I'll mention to something I've been passionate about,
think 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.

(01:20:59):
I think that's a root cause.
one of the oh yes 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

(01:21:23):
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 of friends
that crowdfunds territory. And it has, in this case, a million, seven, nine, nine thousand,

(01:21:47):
three and fourteen 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 a 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

(01:22:10):
example shows something that's actually at the scale of a traditional nation state, just like
Bitcoin's 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, 1.7 million. And so you can literally start it from your

(01:22:35):
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, 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
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 literally

(01:23:08):
that's brian johnson there with me right so can you see the video on screen yeah so uh so this is
something where we've basically taken over big pieces of uh a you know ghost on yes it's vitalic
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 co-working

(01:23:33):
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 flexboard we have guest
speakers and um basically we have uh you know just like you know we have fun outside we have beach

(01:23:56):
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
call it like a startup society society as a service right and it is essentially um you know

(01:24:23):
we just work hard play hard bonfires parties right this is a cool drone shot boom ns.com right so um
basically the the concept there is
just like bitcoin you know we know how to do intranet companies and we know how to start an
intranet currency can we start an intranet community right and so i'm trying to develop

(01:24:49):
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, 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 Mormon's

(01:25:11):
more than subculture, you know what I mean, right? So, you know, you could have a religious
subcommunity, you could have something that's based on language, like, you know, French Canadians
or something like that, right? And 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,

(01:25:33):
your subculture. Now, you know, I, I'm, I think very clear about who I am and what I stand for.
And so I'm a tech guy, right. But I'm sympathetic to many, you know, small C conservative values and
so on. And so while what I care about is like human self-improvement and nootropics and robots

(01:25:54):
and drones and math and science and so on and so forth, you can take many aspects of what we're
doing and you can be like a cafeteria Catholic and take some pieces and swap out other pieces,
you know, and you can turn that into a traditionalist seeming society 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,

(01:26:17):
which you can customize. And so that's why I'm doing network school. And so 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.

(01:26:39):
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 is which you and i all know is there right so then
once you free men right once you sovereign individuals i think we want to start forming sovereign collectives the reason is it like there a burning building there like a fire alarm and that

(01:27:05):
what bitcoin is and we all get out 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 one with exactly the same fire hazards and so on we want to rebuild a
building, right? Or a few buildings. And so that rebuilding process is what I'm focused on and

(01:27:27):
trying to build a template that then, you know, it's open source, anybody can clone a copy it.
And, you know, I want to, I want to prove it out first before I say, hey, this formula works.
But if we can get it even to like several thousand people, right? Several hundred already.
So if we get to like several thousand people, let alone tens of thousands,

(01:27:48):
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're 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.
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. That's, you know, the land grant colleges in the Midwest. Right.

(01:28:13):
There's that pioneering spirit of building something from nothing where you have your group of guys and you go and do it.
And it's actually all these abandoned ghost towns in the US that are being deindustrialized.
There's all these abandoned college campuses in the US where this has happened.
And then further in other places like Japan, because of declining population, there's all these abandoned farms and abandoned towns.
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,

(01:28:41):
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. What's that?
The network state is about real estate about as much as, um, cryptocurrencies about fiat currency.
What I mean by that is the USD BTC ratio is like the metronome of the whole space.

(01:29:05):
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 all that kind of stuff, the political aspect was actually much
a bigger deal than you thought, right? And so the network states about real estate basically means
that I'm an electrical engineer, but I'm also an electrician. I'm a chemical engineer,

(01:29:29):
but I'm also a plumber. Like the amount of real estate stuff that I've had to do
our last 15 months 18 months or right there's a lot right which is great i'm learning new stuff
um 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 ach wires and

(01:29:50):
so on and so forth right but that was necessary fine we do it because 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. 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,

(01:30:10):
probably not on the first node. Maybe it's the Marshall Islands. Maybe it's Palau. Maybe it's,
you know, Mauritius. Who knows? Like some country somewhere at 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. It's fine.
First, you just build the community.
You don't need to jump all the way to the end in one step, right?

(01:30:33):
And crucially, it's a more friendly vision in some ways than the Citadel vision, because
you're not talking about like defending a Citadel against hordes of zombies like Mad
Max, right?
Or 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.
The key thing is also that this is in a fundamental way, just like I think we reclaim free speech,

(01:30:58):
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 it seems like they want to i mean
they made their own city they made their own city but basically are they succeeding yet i heard rumors
of secession i don't know if they're succeeding but they incorporated so go and uh go and click

(01:31:21):
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 feet to move to starbase
voting with the wallet to build up starbase and then voting with the ballot to incorporate starbase

(01:31:43):
right so that is you know have you heard the term effort post 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,

(01:32:05):
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.
And I, I really liked this last sentence because it's something I read a piece a year ago and
I've reread it like three times about like the great decentralization and
return to borders like the Holy Roman empire.

(01:32:29):
Yeah.
And I could definitely see that happen.
I guess my,
I'm going 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

(01:32:50):
there.
Is it just having families, extended families, communities in the same physical location coming to the conclusion that they need to sort of not inoculate themselves, but be more independent from the federal government, the state government, get all the way down to the city?
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 3.0 that combines the best of gold with the best of fiat.

(01:33:19):
Because it's got the best of gold in terms of the immutability and so on.
But like fiat, it can be sent electronically.
It's like liquid and so on.
It's like global, right?
You've got a lot of advantages of both.
And so the same way I think we want to have for the 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.

(01:33:45):
Right. Because you do ultimately your prosperity comes. There's many kinds of things where, 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 know if your limit is just one country
you know or just one tribe you wouldn't be able to produce that product right so there's lots of

(01:34:08):
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 no i mean this and it's

(01:34:34):
crazy it's all coming together like the sovereign individual thesis and yes i think starbase the
starbase example is one example we got our own city like we want to attract talent in this city
i can if that begins to replicate that's essentially what reese mog and davidson wrote in the 90s was
eventually it's going to get to a point where you have cryptocurrency you have asymmetric drone
warfare, you have artificial intelligence, you have a hyperpolarized population that's

(01:34:58):
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 and physical locations that understand
what's going on and try to attract that capital.
That's right.
So on that note, let's wrap.

(01:35:20):
This is really good.
You've got to go.
We're 15 minutes over.
so i appreciate it okay thank you very much sir it's always been a pleasure peace and love okay

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