Rebuilding Civilization from First Principles: Inside Balaji's Network State Vision | E2145

Today's show: Jason sits down with Balaji Srinivasan in Singapore to explore how he's turning years of theory into reality with Network School—the first node of a broader vision for internet-native, decentralized societies. Balaji explains how these "sharp societies" combine education, co-living, and startup culture to create physical communities aligned by values, not geography. From digital nomads to aspiring founders, people are opting into these new systems as an alternative to broken traditional governance. They discuss everything from Starbase and sovereignty to the future of democracy, Bitcoin, and America's place in a multipolar world. Timestamps: (0:00) Introduction of Balaji Srinivasan and the impact of Bitcoin(1:39) The concept of Network School and Network State, including startup societies(4:05) Benefits and historical context of network effects in communities(7:08) Economic and social benefits of Network School(9:35) Global appeal and diverse motivations of Network School participants (10:22) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www. Squarespace.com/TWIST(12:30) Media perspectives on new societies and the challenge of self-determination (19:35) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist(24:00) Personal experiences with US state migration and critique of California politics(27:11) The right to exit, thousand city system, and the two-party system (29:44) Vouched - Trust for agents that's built for builders like you. Check it out at http://vouched.id/twist(31:09) Choosing a country like choosing a college and impressions of new cities(34:03) America's global reputation, politics, and the decline of empires(39:25) Dollar devaluation, Bitcoin's future, and global currency dynamics(41:26) Global power struggles: China versus the Internet and US demographics(44:01) Trump's tariffs, MAGA, and international trade realities(48:12) China's manufacturing dominance and US diplomatic legacy(54:39) The Internet's counterbalance to China and Bitcoin's future risks(1:00:31) Role of cryptocurrencies, quantum computing, and Bitcoin security(1:02:12) Cryptocurrency challenges and the resilience of Bitcoin(1:03:27) Network school state community and opportunities for investors(1:04:01) Closing remarks and final pitch for Network School Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Thank you to our partners: (10:22) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www. Squarespace.com/TWIST(19:35) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist (29:44) Vouched - Trust for agents that's built for builders like you. Check it out at http://vouched.id/twist(0:00) Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Actually, you wrote, or at least launch, one of the best-

• 0:02Jason Calacanis?

  I wrote it, yeah.

• 0:03Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 0:04Jason Calacanis?

  It was my article.

• 0:04Speaker 00

  That was honestly one of the best early articles on Bitcoin. I know you troll people on Bitcoin, but we should, we should put that up on screen.

• 0:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 0:11Speaker 00

  Where actually, there are a lot of things that, that were, it was-

• 0:13Jason Calacanis?

  I said it's the most dangerous open source project I've ever seen because it could destabilize the entire world. Because the sovereignty of countries is, you know, military and their currency. And this could change history forever. Yeah.

• 0:31Speaker 02

  This week in startups is brought to you by Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to squarespace.com/twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Vanta, compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report fast. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com/twist. And Vouched, turn your AI infrastructure into production-grade software with Know Your Agent from Vouched. Check it out yourself at vouched.id/twist.

• 1:14Speaker 02

  Trust for agents built for builders like you.

• 1:18Jason Calacanis?

  Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the show. I am super excited because friend of the pod who, gosh, I don't know when the last time we did a pod was, a couple of years ago.

• 1:26Speaker 00

  Couple of years ago, yeah.

• 1:27Jason Calacanis?

  Balaji Srinivasan is here in Singapore, and I'm in Singapore. I'm a little bit jet lagged, but you're a great podcast guest because you've got a lot of ideas. And so I got to go visit you in Malaysia, just north of Singapore, about 45 minutes.

• 1:47Speaker 00

  Slightly west, slightly west of Singapore.

• 1:50Jason Calacanis?

  And you have started the network school, the network state. All the stuff you've been talking about for years, there's now a there there. Six months ago, you found- A place where there are apartment buildings and space that is, I guess, relatively cheap and available. And you've got your fan base of tech bros from around the world and ladies joining you to build what? What is the vision here for people who've heard of Network State, Network School, and this sort of project you're working on, which seems to be your life's work? What exactly are you building?

• 2:30Speaker 00

  What am I building? So basically, so this is, so Network School is the first node of a network society where it serves several purposes. But, you know, the United States was started, actually, not just with the Massachusetts Bay Colony, but with Harvard. It was like literally a single room schoolhouse when it started, right? And the Midwest, the land-grant colleges, like, you know, Texas A&M was like agricultural and mechanical. And so that was meant to build up the Midwest, like, so you had a college and a town kind of, you know, side by side. You trained the engineers and the humanists to help build the society. And of course, the Bay Area, Stanford and Berkeley helped build Silicon Valley, right?

• 3:11Speaker 00

  So those are three examples in the American context where a university and a town and a society kind of all, you know, went together, right? And so that's what we're doing. We are building a society ourselves. We're building a startup society that's also a template for other startup societies. And the way I think about it is, this is the third type of thing, internet company, internet currency, and now internet community. If you go to like ns.com, that's, you can see what we're doing. If you go to ns.com-

• 3:38Jason Calacanis?

  Pretty good domain name, ns.com.

• 3:40Speaker 00

  ns.com, right?

• 3:41Jason Calacanis?

  Network State.

• 3:42Speaker 00

  So, right, so it's Network School, but it also stands, of course, for Network State and Network States, plural, right? And that's, that's important. So we have, if you go to ns.com/dashboard, right, front slash dashboard, you'll see more than 100 startup societies around the world. And the reason for this is, we have these online communities. People sense, if you're watching this, you're spending a lot of time online, right?

• 4:00Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 4:00Speaker 00

  Like you're not-

• 4:01Jason Calacanis?

  By definition.

• 4:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, by definition, that's right. And so all our transactions are online, all our communications are online, but many of our friends are online and we don't see them in person. We'd like to do that, right? So bringing those online communities together in person actually has a physical network effect. I mean, duh.

• 4:16Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 4:17Speaker 00

  But also not duh, right? So we've unbundled the world onto the internet and everybody's alone at home. Now we re-bundled the world into the physical world. And when you do this, suddenly you actually solve a lot of problems. You actually, you reinvigorate democracy because when people vote with their feet and move to a location. Now, look at, for example, Starbase, right? Starbase Texas, which just incorporated, Elon's new thing, right?

• 4:38Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, where Starbase is located decided to take that town and rename it Starbase. And the people who are engineers at SpaceX voted, as well as some of the locals, to create a new city or town.

• 4:51Speaker 00

  New city or town.

• 4:52Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 4:52Speaker 00

  And they won 97% of the vote, right? 97.7%, okay? And it was like 212 to 6 or something like that, right?

• 5:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 5:00Speaker 00

  And the thing about this is, that is actually reinvigorating democracy. It's internet democracy because you're voting with your feet to move to Starbase. You're voting with your wallet to help build up this community. And then you're voting with your ballot to ratify what you just did. You're combining all three. You have skin in the game because you actually moved physically, you're physically there, you're putting capital in. And then as a consequence that you're also voting to build something. And so it's something where you have a lot of alignment in the community, right? And that aspect of the frontier and the physical world, obviously that built America, right? A big part of what built America is you had all these people from the old world who came out. Actually, there's a, you know, in the mid 1800s, people would just, if they didn't like it on the East Coast, they would go further in and they just build their own society, right?

• 5:44Speaker 00

  And even the earliest Americas, Americans, those were, you know, the European colonists and they set up the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Virginia Colony. The whole point was that you had a new jurisdiction to do things. Now, of course, people say, oh, the Native Americans were there. That's true, but in many ways, they were warlike. And so these new tribes came in, so you had- And Native American tribes, now you have N plus one, N plus two, N plus three, they all slugged it out. And actually, the Native Americans were like brave warriors that, you know, lost battles. But, you know, for example, in Mongolia, they make statues to Genghis Khan and so on. They should make statues to Sitting Bull and all of these, you know, kinds of warriors. But leaving that aside, that's actually like a war that was lost, a war that was won. That's just what happens all around the world. Nobody has controlled any territory forever.

• 6:29Speaker 00

  And so ideally, though, you want to be able to do that today without any wars, without any conflict, right? How do you do without any conflict? Because everybody thinks all the land is taken, but it's actually not. There's all kinds of empty space.

• 6:38Jason Calacanis?

  No, there's all kinds of spaces around the world. And when people see cheap space, plus they're nomads and they're digital nomads, they have a high salary, low cost of living, which means more opportunity. And if you put like-minded people together, now you've got a bunch of people who are not under economic pressure to live in the Bay Area, which we both saw what that did to people. It made people miserable.

• 7:02Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 7:02Jason Calacanis?

  And their entire lives were filled with this anxiety of not being able to keep up with other people. And even the people who were supposedly keeping up felt like they were under massive pressure to spend a hundred thousand dollars a month on a crazy lifestyle. And all the venture money that we were deploying into companies was going to four thousand dollars a month in rent for a developer to have a one or two bedroom.

• 7:24Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 7:24Jason Calacanis?

  It was insane.

• 7:25Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 7:25Jason Calacanis?

  In the network school, you have these buildings that were built and not being utilized. And there's a whole backstory there, but it's not important. You found this incredible opportunity and people can go live there for fifteen hundred dollars a month.

• 7:39Speaker 00

  All in.

• 7:40Jason Calacanis?

  All in. Food, gym, exercise and their apartment and then be part of a community.

• 7:48Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 7:48Jason Calacanis?

  So as Paul Graham would talk about that whole like ramen break even, you know, ramen funded, it actually exists here. And there were a hundred and fifty people there all grinding on a Saturday. I don't know if they all came out because I was touring, but it's.

• 8:03Speaker 00

  We have more than that. A lot of people are actually in their apartments and so.

• 8:05Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And so these people are coming from a hundred different countries to hang out with each other and.

• 8:13Jason Calacanis?

  Go to talks, to learn, to build. What is their motivation? Because I understand your motivation.

• 8:18Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 8:19Jason Calacanis?

  You think there's a new mode of society, a new mode of governance. We have other people in our industry who believe in this. Peter Thiel's done seasteading. Obviously Elon is doing this town in Texas and people move to Texas because there's less regulation. So I understand your motivation and other people's motivation. Create new societies, higher function, but the individual's coming.

• 8:38Speaker 00

  Great question.

• 8:39Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, get me into their mindset.

• 8:40Speaker 00

  So several different, think of this as kind of like early cryptocurrency had various different kinds of people that all came together.

• 8:47Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 8:48Speaker 00

  And

• 8:48Jason Calacanis?

  There's a whack pack of people, yeah.

• 8:50Speaker 00

  Lot of different people. There were

• 8:51Jason Calacanis?

  Weird people.

• 8:52Speaker 00

  Well, yes, but but successful.

• 8:54Jason Calacanis?

  Libertarian, technical, anarchist.

• 8:57Speaker 00

  Exactly, that's right. So some people were ideological, right? Some people just were in it for the tech, right? Some people thought, okay, this could be very valuable someday, right?

• 9:06Jason Calacanis?

  Business opportunity.

• 9:07Speaker 00

  That's right. And, you know, there's a mix of different types of things. So some people came just because it's cool, right?

• 9:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, weird.

• 9:12Speaker 00

  Weird, cool, etc., right? And so today, for example, at Network School, what kinds of people do we have? The number one demographic are those folks who are remote workers and who often can't get a visa into the West.

• 9:24Jason Calacanis?

  Ah.

• 9:25Speaker 00

  So these are people can't or won't, don't want to go, right? They think it's over and so on and so forth. But they're they're internet-first people, right? So that's how it expresses our ideology, internet-first. So obviously, I'm friendly to, you know, people in the US and I'm friendly to many people who are conservatives and so on and so forth. But I think America first, America is only 4% of the world and red America is only 2% of the world, right? But if you say internet-first, you include many of those people. And you also say, hey, if you're Canadian, Australian, you know, from the New Zealand, UK, that's the term Kanzuk. If you're Indian, if you're European, Japanese or American, the internet is where you're all equal. All nodes are equal in the internet. You can have the same monetary policy. You can have the same contract law, smart contract law.

• 10:10Speaker 00

  You can have the same transaction certification. Basically, what the blockchain represents is not rule of law, which is breaking down in some ways with Delaware and all the crazy things in the US. It's rule of code. So everybody's a peer here.

• 10:24Jason Calacanis?

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• 11:06Jason Calacanis?

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• 11:46Speaker 00

  So, you know, the thing is, a lot of the sort of progressive values of, you know, equality, democracy, science, media, I actually believe in those things, just not the recent corrupted versions, right?

• 11:59Jason Calacanis?

  So the people who are coming, their motivation is to be around like-minded people.

• 12:03Speaker 00

  Like-minded people, that's right.

• 12:04Jason Calacanis?

  And they want to build companies or build a life.

• 12:08Speaker 00

  So right.

• 12:08Jason Calacanis?

  Meet people, find a mate. What's the motivation when you talk to them? Because it's only been six months.

• 12:14Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 12:15Jason Calacanis?

  But you've got hundreds of people and yet thousands apply. So it struck a nerve.

• 12:19Speaker 00

  It struck a nerve, that's right. So I think this is something where people want to build communities in the physical world. We spend so much time online, we want to build things offline, right? So some of them are coming because they're remote workers and they... They they they're tired of being by themselves. They want to be with the community, right?

• 12:36Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. So it's alone or with people who are also remote workers. And we've seen that this nomadic lifestyle. There was like in kind of different Airbnb type startups and office sharing startups that try to organize these people. But you've got such a big profile socially and with the crypto community that you can kind of be a beacon or a lighthouse.

• 12:54Speaker 00

  That's right. And I'm just a shelling point, right? My, you know, the the purpose is crucially to, this is just like the first one of these. And I fund vegan ones and I fund carnivore ones. I fund Hindu, you know, startup societies and Christian ones and Jewish ones. All of these different kinds of, there's there's some in Brazil, there's some in, you know, Honduras, there's some in Switzerland and so it's all different kinds of startup societies. That's quote, true diversity, right? Many different kinds of things. There's like Sanskrit immersion, Latin immersion. Many different kinds of startup societies have a different thesis on what would be a cool kind of community to build and you'll see where they work. It's again, just like a tech company, you know, if if we thought about early X or early Twitter. It seemed like the silliest thing in the world. Why would anybody want to tweet their breakfast? But it became really important, right?

• 13:37Speaker 00

  And so in the same way, there's many different concepts of what a startup society is. Okay. So just to answer your question also again. A, remote workers, B, people who can't get visas to the US, C, a lot of people who ideologically want to build startup societies, just like they wanted to build cryptocurrencies.

• 13:50Jason Calacanis?

  That's very meta.

• 13:51Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 13:51Jason Calacanis?

  So they're looking at this vision and saying, the society I'm in is not fulfilling to me. It feels broken in some way. It feels suboptimal and this seems exciting.

• 14:02Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 14:03Jason Calacanis?

  And this is why maybe the press, when they look at you as an individual and crypto, they kind of look at it like these people are crazy internet people who don't want to pay taxes. They want to like skirt governments and create their own world and they're kind of leaving the real world. It's not that. It's they're builders who want to build something that fits their sensibility.

• 14:26Speaker 00

  That's right. And the thing is, everybody here pays taxes, everybody here obeys regulations and so on. And same thing like when I see you have Coinbase, I built a genomic company and so on and so forth. We dot every I and cross every T, right? But many, many countries actually want these kinds of people there.

• 14:41Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, desperately.

• 14:43Speaker 00

  Right? Because most countries aren't rich countries. Most countries are small countries. In fact, most countries have actually less than 10 million people. And so if a network school node or a startup society node is open there, suddenly all this talent and capital from around the world floods in. All people want to do is be able to like drink coffee, hit keys on their laptop, build cool stuff, right?

• 15:02Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, workout, workout.

• 15:03Speaker 00

  Dinner. Yeah, exactly. Like really, exactly. It's really not that hard, you know? And this is a crucial thing. You don't just need tax breaks. You don't need subsidization. People are happy to pay, in a sense, a subscription fee to a society where, you know, the roads work, the traffic lights are on and so on and so forth. That's fine. What they just don't want is to be like attacked for being a tech worker or a technologist. Then there's also people, some who want to join a startup societies and others who want to join with the intent of eventually building one, right? So early Coinbase, for example, has a Coinbase diaspora of all these people who've created lots of crypto companies. So many of the people at Network School are learning the template that we're building.

• 15:44Speaker 00

  And for example, there's small things. It's actually, it's surprisingly hard to get to San Francisco quality coffee. It's not that hard, but it's like harder than you would think, right? And other kinds of things like parts of what we call the daily loop. So for example, you wake up, work out, coffee, you know, office pod, you know, conference room and so on and so forth. Once you actually start calculating that out and minimizing all of the transit times, it's like almost like a factory like thing, right? So then you can rack and stack more office pods, more coffee stations as a function of demand and so it's over. So you can just save people so much time, whereas normally if they're in a big city, they're like, oh, my gym is like 30 minutes across from me and that's like a huge tax on you every single day and so on.

• 16:27Speaker 00

  So you can start optimizing daily life that gives them more time to just learn or sit on the beach or what have you, right?

• 16:33Jason Calacanis?

  Which is kind of like if you, if you think about what we do when we build products or services in technology at our best, we're removing friction, delighting customers and lowering the cost of it.

• 16:43Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 16:43Jason Calacanis?

  And if you, what I saw today was a bunch of people who are really happy and who are around like-minded people and who feel like they have a stake in it, which is also super interesting because you, you look at what happened in America over our lifetime, the last 40 or 50 years. People feel disconnected from it. They feel like they have no agency. They feel like they're like victims in the machine or cogs in the wheel. Some Something more dystopian and they feel like the government doesn't represent them. But what I saw was a lot of agency, like you guys built a gym and you guys are building the schedule and you have speakers. So, you know, I, I think it's pretty easy to be cynical when people look at it. And I was watching some of the press coverage of, I guess there was somebody also doing this in middle of America.

• 17:28Jason Calacanis?

  They bought a lodge somewhere in Wyoming and your name was mentioned over and over again that they were like inspired by you. Do you know who I'm talking about?

• 17:35Speaker 00

  There's, there's some articles and stuff.

• 17:36Jason Calacanis?

  There's actually somebody who was like a Berkeley guy who left.

• 17:39Speaker 00

  Wyoming thing?

• 17:40Jason Calacanis?

  The Wyoming thing. Cause they're into DAOs or whatever.

• 17:43Speaker 00

  But that's good.

• 17:43Jason Calacanis?

  And I was like, I don't understand why they're so upset. And these are like woke people from like Wired magazine or whoever who are criticizing this, or I don't know if they were being sensationalistic, but there seemed to be some animosity towards people saying, I would like to build my own society.

• 17:59Speaker 00

  I can put, I can put it in one sentence, right?

• 18:02Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 18:03Speaker 00

  They don't want us to have self determination.

• 18:08Speaker 00

  Right? Fundamentally, they basically have replaced GOD with GOV. They worship these failing Western states and they are in a sense imperialist where they want them to have bureaucratic power over the entire world and everybody in it. Right? And so because of that, if you say, thank you very much, you guys do your thing, but we want to do our own thing, right? We want to basically say, hey, we want to have our own society and we want to be able to determine our own rules and we want to be able to live together and so and so. Even by the way, if you're just co-living, forget even, you know, there's different stages, by the way, there's like co-living, then you might negotiate a special economic zone. And then all, you know, eventually, eventually, eventually, maybe you've got, you can get

• 18:53Speaker 00

  an island, get sovereignty or what have you. Okay.

• 18:56Jason Calacanis?

  When's the last time did that ever happen that a, an actual government, new country was formed in the world on planet earth?

• 19:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was the last time?

• 19:04Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 19:05Speaker 00

  Oh, well, let me show you something, right? So actually there's so.

• 19:07Jason Calacanis?

  Cause I understand you're making these like communes, kibbutzes, I don't, you know, little societies, pods, however you would describe what you're doing in this nascent state. But the idea of like going and finding an island and saying, hey, we have sovereignty. Nobody can tax us.

• 19:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, take a look, ready? Okay. So before I show you this graph, right? What is your mental model of how many, like going back, let's say to 80 years, right? What's your mental model of how many new countries were formed?

• 19:37Jason Calacanis?

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• 20:19Jason Calacanis?

  So here's your call to action. Whether you're closing your first deal, or you're gearing up for growth, Vanta is going to make compliance easy for you. Join over 8,000 companies, simplify your compliance, and get $1,000 off at vanta.com/twist. That's V-A-N-T-A.com/twist. Wow. I'm trying to think of like, countries that seceded from their mothership would be the primary source of that. I'm thinking of all the colonies of the British Empire would be the first group, just logically, or other countries in the Middle East, like, I don't know, Qatar, and those kind of countries were part of UAE, and they were forming and unforming. Here's a graph. So you tell me. Okay, there it is.

• 21:04Jason Calacanis?

  It's four Xed. It's four Xed since the, yeah, since 50 to 200. Yes. And the thing is, I can show you this graph. Well, those are UN member countries, so they were accepted to the UN, but they maybe existed as countries. Well, no, I mean, the thing is, if you define, what is a country that's actually an important, if you define a country as a UN member, the first thing, most people are surprised it's almost four X over 80 years, right? The second thing is, exactly as you point out, the British Empire, the French Empire, and then over here, this big bump is the Soviet Empire breaking down. All right. And new countries arise, right? Sure. Now, there's two important features of this. First, if you go backwards in time, this is actually the most centralized the world has ever been. When you go backwards in time, I'll show you some graphs in a second, and maps in a second. The number of, you

• 21:49Jason Calacanis?

  know, independent jurisdictions in like, Germany, India, it just rises rapidly like this. You have thousands and thousands of little, like, you know what San Marino is? You ever been there? No. Okay. It's like a little statelet. Let me show you something. So San Marino.

• 22:02Speaker 00

  In Italy, right, is like this, uh, this tiny, tiny thing. It's a microstate that is like a piece of the past that still sits in the present. It's like, it's like a little city there, but it's its own sovereign country. Okay. Yeah. It's a UN member, right? And the thing about that is Garibaldi, when he was unifying Italy, San Marino gave him refuge. So he didn't unify, he, he let it keep its sovereignty. Okay. So that's like a duck billed platypus, like this evolutionary missing link. And it tells you, oh, all the things we think of as countries like Italy, France, you know, China, India, they're rollups of lots of smaller city state ish like things that used to exist. That's what the world used to be. It used to be like fragmented like that. And it got rolled up into these

• 22:45Speaker 00

  big things for the purpose of conscription and taxation. Cause you basically build these giant, you know, nation states, which have as many people as you can pack in there, like the Soviet Union and so on. And they all didn't fight each other. And that's the century of giant wars and conflict and whatever, right? I'm not saying everything about that was bad, but a lot of it was bad. Right? Okay. So now we're going in a sense back to the future where, um, just like we went from gold to fiat to digital gold, right? We're going from city state, nation state, network state.

• 23:13Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 23:14Speaker 00

  I'm not saying everything goes to network states, but I think that will arise. And the big difference is network states are decentralized. So they're everywhere and nowhere. So cities is only in one place, but network state is decentralized, just like Bitcoin is decentralized. You've got nodes everywhere and you unify them as an archipelago.

• 23:26Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. So there'll be these little outposts in different countries of network state ers.

• 23:31Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 23:31Jason Calacanis?

  People who believe in the network state concept that you've created. And then if any one of the nodes goes offline, like when China was like, yeah, no more Bitcoin, uh, or Korea had no cryptocurrency for a bit. I think then they relented the, the distributed network heels because people could just leave.

• 23:48Speaker 00

  That's exactly.

• 23:49Jason Calacanis?

  And go to another place. And this seems to be sort of interested on your take on this, even in the United States, where you think moving from one state to another would be your right and would be a, a great choice for a human being to make. Like maybe I like the weather or the people or the culture.

• 24:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:08Jason Calacanis?

  More in a different state, or I just want to change a pace. I've lived in three different states and four different major cities in my life. And I, it's one of the great joys of my life is to discover those new ones. But I've never had as much vitriol or questioning of my decision to go to Texas.

• 24:24Speaker 00

  From California.

• 24:25Jason Calacanis?

  From California. It seems like there's a group of people who are like, you're doing this for nefarious reasons and. And then even deciding to live on a horse ranch as opposed to living in the city was also like, people were a little critical, like, why are you doing that? Well, I can have my cake and eat it too. I can go to California and New York anytime I want. And then Keith Raboy was also derided for going for the sin of going to Miami.

• 24:51Speaker 00

  You know why? I had to argue why. It's because California has been under one party Democrat control since 2011. So California is not a democracy.

• 25:00Jason Calacanis?

  No.

• 25:01Speaker 00

  Right? And that's actually why all of the stealing for the NGOs, for the homeless encampments, the homeless industrial complex has been out of control because they destroyed democracy in California. There's no democratic accountability for Democrat Party basically looting the car fridge. That's how I'd put it. And so because that the only true vote against that is to leave.

• 25:18Jason Calacanis?

  Which is why Elon.

• 25:19Speaker 00

  Which is why he left. That's right. And so that's why Elon left, right? He couldn't even build a sign in San Francisco, right? And there's like some signs of life or what have you. I know some people.

• 25:27Jason Calacanis?

  I don't think it's falling into the Pacific, but I do think it is in a very.

• 25:32Speaker 00

  It's a downward.

• 25:33Jason Calacanis?

  It's a spiral.

• 25:34Speaker 00

  It's, yeah, I think, I think it is at a minimum, it has lost a lot relative to what it could have been.

• 25:39Jason Calacanis?

  It's a doom loop.

• 25:39Speaker 00

  And I think so.

• 25:40Jason Calacanis?

  I consider it a doom loop and I consider Austin, what you're doing here, what I'm seeing in Dubai, in the Middle East, Abu Dhabi, is kind of like a boom spiral.

• 25:49Speaker 00

  I think that's right.

• 25:50Jason Calacanis?

  Where it's kind of working its way up.

• 25:52Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 25:52Jason Calacanis?

  The energy seems to be people who are interested in it. So, okay, so we know that those people feel like they're losing control and they also feel like they're losing high earners who are creators. And I think this is like a very pernicious thing.

• 26:05Speaker 00

  They think of you as a slave, right? Like basically California.

• 26:07Jason Calacanis?

  But I'm a creator and capital allocator.

• 26:09Speaker 00

  I know, I know, but they want you, they basically, they, like East Germany, see everything, every communist state was like this. North Korea, East Germany, the Soviet Union, Cuba, and actually also Nazi Germany. They all didn't want people to leave. They put exit taxes or they shot people for leaving. They built the Berlin Wall because their citizens were basically slaves. That's what communism is. It's slavery, right? It means 100% taxation is slavery, right? You get there by being so far left for the workers paradise that all the workers are in gulags, right? So they don't want you to leave because they basically want you to just work for them, right?

• 26:44Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 26:45Speaker 00

  And so exercising, I mean, the thing is, one thing that's good though, is the right to exit is actually a fundamental right. It's in like the UN Charter of Human Rights, right? In a sense, the right to exit is the thing that distinguishes, quote, leadership from dictatorship, right? The leader lets you leave.

• 27:00Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 27:01Speaker 00

  Right. That is, if people can't assume it's a two, the difference is dictator doesn't. It's a prison state.

• 27:05Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 27:05Speaker 00

  But leadership is you voluntarily opted in to be there and you can voluntarily opt to leave.

• 27:11Jason Calacanis?

  Right. And they, and they have to earn you being a citizen.

• 27:14Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 27:14Jason Calacanis?

  And they're of service to you, which is how it didn't feel for a lot of us in California, New York. And that's when this great migration happened. People felt like, well, why am I buying into this society which feels dangerous and deranged at times? And I could go somewhere where it's more constructive or more in line with my ideals.

• 27:34Speaker 00

  This is right. And this is also actually the counter argument. People are like, oh, Elon, it's techno monarchy. It's not techno monarchy. It's actually techno democracy. Why? Every single person who's gone to Starbase chose to be there.

• 27:45Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 27:46Speaker 00

  And any person there can leave.

• 27:47Jason Calacanis?

  They opted in with their presence. And I think that's like, actually, if you think about voting.

• 27:52Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 27:52Jason Calacanis?

  Your vote doesn't matter in California, New York, to a certain extent. But voting where you live, that is the ultimate vote, I believe.

• 28:00Speaker 00

  Yes. And, and actually, this is a important paradigm shift because if you go to the root of democracy, it's the consent of the governed. And the problem with 51% democracy is that 49% have not given their consent to the current, you know, rulers, right? So, and that's what you keep getting. You get a 49%, 50% of this back and forth. And the guys who win by 50% try to govern like they've got a 99% majority. And that produces backlash. And we've seen that back and forth, right? And then the elections become more and more hard fought and the 2% flips the other way. And then you get a huge seesaw this way. The alternative to that, to the two-party system, is the thousand-city system.

• 28:34Jason Calacanis?

  Migrate to the one that fits you best and have consensus in that society that 80, 90, 97% in the case of Starbase.

• 28:42Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 28:42Jason Calacanis?

  Agree that rocket ships going to Mars and the noise pollution caused by them is not pollution, it's joy.

• 28:49Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 28:49Jason Calacanis?

  And every time we hear that noise, we are excited and thrilled.

• 28:53Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 28:53Jason Calacanis?

  At progress. Whereas another person might consider that noise absolutely why they didn't move to that area. They wanted quiet.

• 29:00Speaker 00

  And here's the thing, is let's say that you take that as an important cost, right? Because the frontier is a filter. The frontier filters for a certain kind of person who's willing to take some. Paying for some gain. We see that all the time in startups. Sure. It's not a big company employee, right? So take that example of Mars. So let's say you you say, OK, we want to get to Mars. We want to tell it the rocket lunches. So everybody just has ear protection stuff at home. Sure. Fine, you can solve that. Maybe there's better soundproofing at home. There's there's ways you can solve that. When you set this as a goal of getting to the stars, then you can use technology to mitigate the downsides, right? But it's whether people have that can do attitude. They're aligned on the goal, right? So my view is that the thousand city system, as opposed to the two party system, is how you get genuine diversity. And actually, you know what? There's already a prototype of this. We've actually been doing this for 20, 30, 40 years. You know why?

• 29:46Jason Calacanis?

  All right, listen, I'm going to level with you. We already know AI agents are using your websites. They're using your products, even if you're not aware of them. Agents are about to change how we handle all kinds of online transactions. But there's really a big problem, isn't there? How do we separate the real, authentic agents that represent real people from spam bots? And even worse, bad actors. You wouldn't book a trip with a sketchy travel agent or a flight on an airline you've never heard of or trust a new employee who didn't have an EIN or a social security number, right? That's why our friends at Vouch developed their Know Your Agent platform. This is brand new technology. With KYA from Vouched, now you have everything you need, identity service that help you verify the human beings behind AI agents,

• 30:31Jason Calacanis?

  permissions and delegation enforcement, giving you the master controls you need over what you've built and legal grade compliance. And know that.ai, a living directory of pre-verified agents, right? Agents are going to be talking to each other. That's starting to happen, folks. So you need to know the other side of the transaction, the other agent who's working with your agent. So turn your AI infrastructure into production grade software with Know Your Agent from Vouched. Here's your call to action. Check it out for yourself at vouch.id/twist. That's vouch.id/twist. Trust for agents that's built for builders like you.

• 31:10Speaker 00

  Imagine if at age 18 or age 21, you picked your country like you pick your college.

• 31:15Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 31:15Speaker 00

  But that's actually already the case for millions of people from Asia. Why? Asia, India, at age 21, they would apply for their master's degree at MIT or Stanford or what have you. And they would have the F1 student visa for college. They'd have the H1 visa for their company. And then they'd get a green card or permanent residency and then eventually citizenship at the country level. So college, company, country were like, it's a labyrinth that an immigrant, tech immigrant has to navigate.

• 31:42Jason Calacanis?

  But it was a stack.

• 31:43Speaker 00

  It's a stack. That's right. So college, company, country, right? And the thing is, nobody has packaged that together. That's one of the things we're doing with Network School. Part of the reason to come to like a crypto society or a network society is to improve your fiat passport. So lots of people who come from countries, they're meritorious, they're smart, right? We can get them worker visas, we can get them maybe Dubai golden visas, things like that. We can let them see the world, right? Because people don't understand that if they're born without what people call passport privilege, they're basically like in prison. They're locked, right? It's very hard to see the world, to get to other countries. And so we can upgrade that, we can get them, you know, employment passes and so on and so forth. And they're hardworking and they deserve all of that, right? And they'll do a good job with that, right?

• 32:24Jason Calacanis?

  I think we're talking about where intelligent people and ambitious people will go. And, you know, it's, this is my first trip internationally. Well, first time in Singapore.

• 32:35Speaker 00

  Okay. What do you think?

• 32:37Jason Calacanis?

  I am really fascinated by places that are like startup cities. Because this is a 60-year-old city, they're having their 60th anniversary in August. I found out and I was like, this is one of the few times I've gone to a country that is younger than America. Usually when Americans go abroad, they're going to a country that's, you know,

• 32:56Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 32:56Jason Calacanis?

  much older typically. And, you know, same thing, I have the same experience when I go to the Middle East, which is, you know,

• 33:02Speaker 00

  Dubai.

• 33:03Jason Calacanis?

  Dubai and like, these are new cities that in 1950 were deserts, right?

• 33:07Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 33:07Jason Calacanis?

  So it's fascinating to see those countries and the enthusiasm that people have for them. And also, it was also a little bit sad for me because as an American, as a high-profile American who has an opinion that sometimes people listen to, or at least they hear it. Yeah, they hear it and they listen to it, they don't have to agree with it. But, you know,

• 33:30Jason Calacanis?

  There were a lot of people asking me to explain what's going on in our country. And asking me to explain it because they're perplexed and saddened by how America is interacting with the rest of the world. So putting aside my belief system, just the candid feedback I got, I would say I've been heartbroken, crestfallen at how people were talking about America. And it's the first time in my life I've ever had it. It's actually kind of heavy on my heart the last three days because people were saying, "Why don't you want..."

• 34:04Speaker 00

  Why is it doing this stuff?

• 34:05Jason Calacanis?

  "Why are you doing this to us? Why can't we come to the country? Why don't you want us to come to America on vacation?" Mike, I was talking to some folks who are extremely successful. These are the most, the 0.1% of the 1%, the 1% of the 1% were telling me, "My kids can go anywhere and on vacation, they want to go to China because they believe it's the future. They want to go to college in, they don't want to go to America for college and they don't want to go to America because they feel like they might get harassed at the border." And then, "We want to do business with your country." And we thought that the new administration would be embracing the rest of the world, getting rid of regulation and that we'd have this great era of interoperability and we'd

• 34:49Jason Calacanis?

  have like an acceleration in business. And now you're just rattling the cage constantly and we want to do business, but you're sending us to go do business in other places and we can't rely on you anymore. And that actually, I think, maybe is the heart, most heartbreaking thing is that they feel like we're not a reliable partner, is what they were telling me. This is not my position. This is the input from people in Singapore who I think represent a certain level of globalists and sophisticated, globalistic, world savvy people. And so maybe you tell me how, as a, you know, an American?

• 35:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, so yeah, I'm born in the US.

• 35:30Jason Calacanis?

  Born in the US, so you're an American who lives abroad now, like... You, what do you think of what's happened? You know, and we can't get away from politics. We can't get away from Trump because it's it's defining a lot of what's happening in the world right now.

• 35:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:44Jason Calacanis?

  So, so. Tell me the perception and your perception.

• 35:47Speaker 00

  Here's how I think about this. Um, and I actually did shed a single manly tear.

• 35:53Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 35:53Speaker 00

  When writing the Network State book.

• 35:55Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 35:55Speaker 00

  Because I had some of the same emotions on that you're talking about. The way I look at it is Britain, America, the internet. Right? Britain was an amazing, amazing thing, honestly, for the world. The British Empire, a lot of people attack it and they had a lot of faults. But it did on net advance civilization. There's a lot of good things Britain did. But eventually the British Empire exhausted, handed the torch to America. And it's no longer an empire. The British Empire is just.

• 36:22Jason Calacanis?

  A country.

• 36:22Speaker 00

  UK, it's just a country. That's right. And the start of the American empire was arguably 1939. There's this great book called Tomorrow of the World by Stephen Wertheim. It actually documents that the fall of France was actually the moment. It wasn't actually post world wars at the beginning. The fall of France was a moment that the Americans at that point, they were, they had been happy to let the British do all the empire-ing and just build their country.

• 36:45Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 36:45Speaker 00

  But once they saw that the Nazis or maybe the Soviets could build an empire that was bigger than the British. And like, oh, we have to do this. So that moment was when America turned truly into a global empire and they set out to to be a global empire. That's why there's 750 military bases worldwide. That's why the headquarters of the UN is in New York. That's why, like, for example, Harvard Kennedy School of Government alone has 20 heads of state that were trained there. Right? That's why the US has regulatory harmonization. All these countries around the world use US regulations. There's like a Hungarian FDA. That's why there's US multinationals everywhere. And I could go on and on, right?

• 37:20Jason Calacanis?

  The, the number of internet searches being done at Google. Google is the number one search engine in every country.

• 37:26Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 37:26Jason Calacanis?

  Except for like Korea, China, Russia.

• 37:30Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 37:30Jason Calacanis?

  And maybe still Japan. And maybe it's 50 50 Japan now.

• 37:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 37:34Jason Calacanis?

  But. So I think it's maybe four countries.

• 37:36Speaker 00

  It's like four countries. That's right. The issue with empire, any empire, is. You get this global footprint, but it also ends up sort of eating away the core of the empire, right? And it does so in two ways. The left is mad because they feel that your people are oppressing people around the world, which is sometimes true. And the right is mad because they feel that your people are bearing a burden of the rest of the world, which is also sometimes true. So eventually, the left and right basically get tired of empire and shut it down, and then they often regret it, right? So that happened with the British Empire. It happened with the French Empire. And it happened within our lifetime with the Soviet Empire. Everybody thought that the aftermath would be something great, and it was actually, it was mixed. The, you know, Eastern Europe was free and it did well and so on. Estonia did well.

• 38:18Speaker 00

  Russia itself did very poorly for a long time, and then it's like somewhat started to recover, but, you know, fine. Point being, we are in the last stages of American empire. Okay? Because four forces, you know, the red America doesn't, is against the deep state. Blue America is against the Trump administration. Tech America is against the regulatory state. And China is against US hegemony. So all four of those vectors are pointed down. So nothing is keeping the current establishment up. Every day, there's another hit to it going down. That's never, it's like a solar eclipse. It's never happened in our lifetime before, right? And you can't cut off foreign trade and foreign travel and foreign tourism without also eventually cutting off foreign capital flows into the dollar.

• 39:01Speaker 00

  And then without the reserve currency, American salaries a living will fall very rapidly. I don't know how much, 50%, 90%, 99%? But this is similar to what happened after the fall of the Soviet Union. The ruble hyperinflated. Now, one thing, we're actually in the middle of something. Have you ever, you know, in a Tesla is actually a very noticeable acceleration. Have you ever been in a bullet train? Yeah. So if you're in a bullet train, it can accelerate in such a seamless way that you don't even realize how fast you're going. Right. Right? So do you know how much the US dollar has devalued against Bitcoin since inception? 100 million X because Bitcoin started 0.1 cent.

• 39:35Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 39:35Speaker 00

  Actually, you wrote, or at least launch, one of the best.

• 39:38Jason Calacanis?

  I wrote it, yeah.

• 39:39Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 39:39Jason Calacanis?

  It was my article.

• 39:40Speaker 00

  That was honestly one of the best early articles on Bitcoin. I know you troll people on Bitcoin, but we should, we should put that up on screen.

• 39:47Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 39:47Speaker 00

  Where actually, there are a lot of things that, that were, it was.

• 39:49Jason Calacanis?

  I said it's the most dangerous open source project I've ever seen because it could destabilize the entire world because the sovereignty of countries is, you know, military and their currency, and this could change history forever. Yeah, I was, I was shook when it was at 12 cents.

• 40:07Speaker 00

  As soon as Bitcoin appeared, capital started flowing into it.

• 40:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 40:12Speaker 00

  And it's gone up 100 million X against the dollar. And there's only like another 10 X to go or 100 X. But that last 10 X will be felt in a different way. See, the thing is, at $100,000 for Bitcoin, everybody's happy, but $1 million for Bitcoin, people understand like empire's over. That there's something about that as like a round number and so and so, people are like, wait a second. And what we're thinking about it is like, normal inflation is supposed to be like 2% a year. That works out to like 0.2% a month. It's an arbitrary figure, it comes from New Zealand, it should really be 0%, but let's say, okay. Hyperinflation is 50% a month, right? So 0.2% a month, normal inflation, hyperinflation 50% a month. What if we define superinflation as 5% a month, right?

• 40:54Speaker 00

  If you work it out, the compounded rate at which the dollar has been devaluing against Bitcoin is like 10.41% a month for 16 years.

• 41:04Speaker 00

  Okay. So we're actually already in the middle of the global run on the dollar. It's like that bullet train that's been accelerating without people seeing it. The alternative is already here, and you're seeing BlackRock saying Bitcoin is an alternative to the dollar, right? The other alternative, by the way, is gold, physical gold, that's also at all time highs. So gold and digital gold are the things that'll be obvious warning symbols in retrospect that this order is changing, right? And so then what comes on the other side, right? My, my view is that the future is China versus the internet. And the heirs to American empire, China has the military and the manufacturing. And it's, it's like, you know, it's one of these things where you know, guys like Peter Zihun will say, oh, China's going to fall into a ditch, it's going to get old before

• 41:46Speaker 00

  it gets rich, US can blockade China, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And in actuality, a lot of those things are happening in reverse. For example, China's blockading the US, China's proxy Iran, has its proxy the Houthis, that's blockading Suez, right? In many ways, US demographics are worse than Chinese demographics. Why? Because you've got this polarized society, everybody fighting each other, you have all this ethnic conflict, you have young minorities expected to pay for old people's social security, and on and on, you have men and women hating each other and whatnot, right? So US demographics are a cauldron of ethnic, gender, political, economic conflict and resentments waiting to bubble over, right? China, for its falls, has like homogeneous society, right? So the problem is China's very strong, right?

• 42:28Speaker 00

  I think of the people who downplay China as the stealth on the Chinese stealth bomber, right? They're not doing anybody any favors. China's extremely strong, and it's very competent, and if we can't build an alternative, then it will just be dominant.

• 42:41Jason Calacanis?

  You believe the, what Trump is doing in terms of shutting the borders and changing this sort of tariff regime is

• 42:52Speaker 00

  So this is tariffs.

• 42:53Jason Calacanis?

  An isolation, and the isolation and then getting rid of immigration largely, this is a very dangerous strategy.

• 42:59Speaker 00

  It's a very dangerous strategy, it's not going to work.

• 43:01Jason Calacanis?

  At this time.

• 43:02Speaker 00

  Well, it's, it's like, it's not even like, it's like, you know, the thing like, a nice strategy cotton, let's see if it works for them, right? Just take the tariff thing alone, okay? Those were simultaneous tariffs on the entire world, right? So Vietnam got hit, Cambodia got hit.

• 43:17Jason Calacanis?

  Strays.

• 43:18Speaker 00

  Go ahead.

• 43:19Jason Calacanis?

  They're strays.

• 43:20Speaker 00

  They're strays. Exactly, like, I analogize it to like firing into a crowd to like get China, right? Everybody who got hit by the stray is not going to care that you were trying to get China, they're going to care how careless and random you are with the lives of all these people. And just to talk about the tariffs for a second. First, Everybody who is pro-American in all these countries, they're the ones with American customers, with American vendors, American suppliers. All those people who were the political faction of those countries that pushed for good relations with America, that pushed to travel to America, to trade in America, all those people just got discredited.

• 43:51Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 43:51Speaker 00

  They just got economically harmed, they got absolutely nuked because they trusted in the stability of the United States of America. They trusted in the stability of the trade system, they trusted in the stability of-

• 43:59Jason Calacanis?

  Predictability, yeah.

• 44:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly, that's right. And when you add it up, it's basically the US no longer wants to be the hub of this global financial empire. They don't want the foreign workers, they don't want the foreign trade, they don't, there's a faction of MAGA that is incorrect, in their own way is economically irrational as a far-left, that actually thinks that 77 million MAGA can compete with 1.4 billion China, let alone the entire world. It's simply not true. Go ahead.

• 44:25Jason Calacanis?

  Well, no, I was gonna say, the idea that Americans want to rush in and make iPhones in a factory is like so farcical. It's not that iPhones can't be made in America, they could-

• 44:34Speaker 00

  And you know what happens, when you bring this up on X, people will say, they'll get really mad, and then they'll say, "Well, I want someone else to be able to work in a factory."

• 44:40Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 44:41Speaker 00

  Right?

• 44:41Jason Calacanis?

  But you can't find anybody in your family who said, "Wow, wouldn't it be great if I could do that?" Now, listen, we do make Teslas in factories in America, it can be done, we're making rockets in America. It's not the question of if we can make them there, but if we're going to close the border and we have 4% unemployment, who's gonna work in these factories?

• 44:58Speaker 00

  Yes, but let me give also the steel man case for MAGA, because I understand where their worldview comes from. So, first is, they would say, "Okay, sure, maybe I as a white-collar worker, whatever, don't want to work in a factory," they would say that, "but it's way better that a blue-collar worker has opportunity to work in a factory than dying of fentanyl or whatever." True, okay. Number two, they'd say, "Factory work produces skills and stuff, there's all kinds of mechanical maintenance and whatnot, which you don't want to over offshore and send overseas." I'd agree with that as well. Third, they'd say, "As a red American, they've gotten a hard time from blue Americans, red Americans have been sent overseas to die, and so and so with blue Americans have exploited them." There's some truth to that as well. Okay. I could go and I could say quite a few things, another thing they'd say is, "We're running these trade deficits for so long, we can't run them endlessly, and we need to be able

• 45:43Speaker 00

  to make things at home, we'll be too dependent on others, we're too dependent on China, too dependent on the rest of the world." There's some truth to that as well, okay. But, what they get wrong is, they're in a huge hole, and they think that they can just get out with some sudden move, right? You cannot get out of 45 years of deindustrialization with 45% tariffs. There's no overnight fix for this, right? Two, maybe, yes, blue America and red America have been fighting. That doesn't mean Vietnam is the enemy of red America. It also doesn't mean like Canadian conservatives are the enemy of red America. What they managed to do by threatening to invade Greenland and, and Canada and, and doing these tariffs and so on, is just like the Wokes built the anti-woke coalition, the MAGA's have built the post-American coalition.

• 46:26Jason Calacanis?

  If we are this unpredictable to the rest of the world, the world will look for more predictable partners to partner with, and it's happening as we speak.

• 46:35Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 46:35Jason Calacanis?

  And we're five months into this presidency and already you have China, Singapore, Russia, India, and, and everybody in between going, well, if we can't figure out how to work with the Trump administration, if we can't figure out how to work with America, I guess we should just work with each other.

• 46:54Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 46:54Jason Calacanis?

  And that's a very dangerous place to be, like perhaps we're overplaying our hand and

• 46:58Speaker 00

  Absolutely overplaying our hand.

• 46:59Jason Calacanis?

  How important we are to China, how important we are to India, like how important are we? Do they have other customers? I think they have a lot of other customers.

• 47:06Speaker 00

  They have a lot of other customers. And in fact, China, look, in 2015, China was taken aback by the trade war. But over the last 10 years, they're now prepared for it. And like a lot of Trump tactics don't work anymore. They're not surprised anymore. It's just the same kind of thing. And they reduced their share of revenue for the US. It's only 15%, 16% of Chinese trade goes to the US, 85% is overseas. They've built up these other markets. Let me tell you a little story, right? So in the late 2000s, around 2008, with the Beijing Olympics, you remember that, right?

• 47:34Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 47:34Speaker 00

  So there was pollution in Beijing. Now they've actually solved it, but there was heavy pollution for a long time, right?

• 47:40Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it was terrible. The runners would not want to run a marathon there.

• 47:42Speaker 00

  That's right. So China basically went, they knew all the people who are polluting, and they went to them like a few weeks before, and they told them to shut all their stuff down so they'd have clear skies for the Beijing Olympics. Okay. So I was operating the clinical lab at that time. There was a global shortage of a specific kind of chemical precursor that was used in various biomedical reactions. And the price like skyrocketed like 100x for that time because one of those factories like China was just the the scale supplier of like the whole world. That meant like research, clinical testing and so on ground to a halt for anything that used this compound. Or you had huge spikes in costs just for a few weeks.

• 48:22Speaker 00

  Now, look, this wasn't the end of the world because it did resume, but a lot of people had lab test interruptions, research interruptions and so on. And that was 20 years ago and that gave me a sense of what China is, right? It is just upstream of the physical world, like the US military is made in China, like Tomahawk missiles. You know, there's a report, $400 million Pentagon paid Govini to go and study the US military supply chains. Tomahawk missiles, JDAMs, the supplier suppliers in China, right? The former Secretary of the Navy, Carlos Dill Torre, in 2023, he says, "One Chinese shipyard can build more ships than the entire US Navy combined." Okay, you have Hagseth recently on a podcast, Sean Ryan podcast, and he said, "Chinese hypersonics can sink every US aircraft carrier." You have basically this US Navy chart that shows China's 200x US shipbuilding capacity.

• 49:06Speaker 00

  And people will say, "Oh, it doesn't have the aircraft carriers yet," but that's like saying Netflix doesn't have the blockbuster.

• 49:09Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it has the number of ships, but it doesn't have the tonnage, but these are semantic arguments.

• 49:13Speaker 00

  These semantic arguments because it's like saying, "How many blockbuster stores does Netflix have?" You know, they're paradigm shifting, they're going with standoff missiles and hypersonic. Anyway, the point is to the predictability part, all these countries, it's even worse than them just trading with each other. They're all re-centering around China because it's a global hub for trade. China has ships in every port, it has relationships with every country, every country needs Chinese goods, right? And so China just has more leverage and people think that the US has leverage as a consumer, but what's it giving? It's giving basically dollars. Why are dollars valuable? Now we have to ask deeper questions. The only reason the US can maintain its current level of consumption is that there was a global financial empire where the right built the US military and the left did US diplomacy, underappreciated by the right.

• 49:58Speaker 00

  Look, you and I, we've been on lots of cap deals, we've done lots of deals. Imagine a cap deal with 196 people on it. That's a huge pain.

• 50:04Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 50:05Speaker 00

  Okay. Now imagine 196 countries and how hard it is to get them to sign on the line which is dotted. That's a huger pain, right?

• 50:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, a lot of work.

• 50:11Speaker 00

  And so things like the WTO or WHO, US diplomats got 196 countries to sign on to this stuff.

• 50:17Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 50:18Speaker 00

  Okay, they got 196 heads of state, like all kinds of crazy standouts, holdouts. US diplomats were the best ever and so was the US military, the best ever. And because of this, the left and the right, state and Pentagon, work together to build the greatest empire of all time, right?

• 50:35Jason Calacanis?

  And is it just over now?

• 50:36Speaker 00

  I mean, it's just over now.

• 50:37Jason Calacanis?

  It's just over as your position.

• 50:38Speaker 00

  Or it's ending and people haven't marked it to market. Basically, hard power is China and hard money is Bitcoin, right? That's the future political axis. CCP is total control. Bitcoin is total freedom, right? Now, total freedom can also be total anarchism, right? So I'm very sympathetic to Bitcoin. I'm certainly more on this side of things. But I think you want some balance between total control and total anarchy, right? And that's where network states, that's where Dubai, that's where maybe India, that's maybe Eastern Europe and other places will have to be. And so to your point about predictability, the problem is lots of countries are now thinking of China as a less unpredictable partner than the US. Even after the Shanghai lockdowns of 2022, when China put the country, which is crazy, but it's actually really bad.

• 51:22Jason Calacanis?

  Well, a dictatorship that will put a million Uighurs into a concentration camp, a dictatorship that will put their country under surveillance, that will take the entire sector of entrepreneurship and say, we own the companies now. And Jack Ma is going to go into re-education or oil painting classes like.

• 51:41Speaker 00

  He's too tough.

• 51:42Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that's the most, that's more reliable than the United States. Like let that sink in, that people are making that choice.

• 51:49Speaker 00

  And the problem is that basically it'll be, there'll be the version 3.0, which is, the V1 is, sure, the instinctive conservative reaction, Chinese Communist Party and so on and so forth, right? The V2, there's certain kind of sophisticated international commentator who'll say something like this. And let me explain it and then I'll give a counter argument to what they're saying. They'll say, well, the US blew up. The Middle East and China's building up Africa. US gotten all these wars, killed these people. China hasn't done that. US wrecked its cities and China's built up its cities. Therefore, China's peaceful rise, China is good, right? Now, my counter argument to that, accepting that some of that is true, that China did build itself up and so on and so forth. If you think about the US, it was generally the better actor of the US versus USSR up to 1991. Like, West Germany was better off than East Germany. South Korea was better off than North Korea.

• 52:32Speaker 00

  Capitalist countries wealthier, freer than communist countries, right? But after 1991, it became so powerful that it lost its way. Hyperpower went to its head, US started blowing up these countries. It started basically like a, like a really wealthy grandkid or great grandkid.

• 52:45Jason Calacanis?

  Interventionism for no reason.

• 52:47Speaker 00

  They put the fortune up their nose, right? Like, there's this saying, shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations. Being born really, really, really rich is actually sometimes a curse because they don't understand the value of hard work, right? So, all these people inherited an empire that they could never build. And the last 30 years of management since 1991 has been some of the worst management maybe of any empire ever in history, right? Okay. Problem is that, on the current path, when China wins, right? Meaning, like, the US has its sovereign debt crisis. Because all these things on the tariff, what they're doing, they're reducing the demand for the dollar. The demand for the dollar is the only thing that's keeping US economy afloat because, you know, the Fed's plunge protection team, you know what that is?

• 53:28Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 53:28Speaker 00

  They basically buy stocks with printed money, right? It's upward registration of wealth in a sense, right? This has been going on at least since the 90s. You know, with the Fed's mortgage-backed securities, it's admitted, it's buying assets with its own balance sheet. Many of the times it uses like shell entities and so on to do that, it spots people money and so on. But it props up the market with printing, okay? When there isn't global demand for the dollar, when you have weak treasury auctions, when people aren't able to trade with the US, why would they want to hold US dollars anymore, right? They can't send their people in, they can't send their workers in, they can't, they can't even come there for tourism. Why would they want to hold US dollars again, especially because they can be frozen with sanctions, especially when there's Bitcoin and gold and so on? They won't, right? So, when that happens, you get a markdown and China just rises into the vacuum.

• 54:10Speaker 00

  People don't understand that it's like, number one in, in, in many research fields, right? It's number one in, in many manufacturing fields, it's way stronger than people think. And the problem is China will be even meaner than you think when it's dominant. Right now, what constrains China, internally, China is not constrained. So it can throw all its people in lockdown for in like Shanghai 2022. But externally, it still feared the US and and the US is almost the opposite. Internally, there was Republican Democrats, so it was somewhat constrained. But externally, it was bombing all these countries because it didn't feel constrained. Right? This absolute power corrupts absolutely. So we need a counterbalance. This completely unleashed China, and that is the internet. Right? Because with the internet, we can actually, that's the heir to American values. Right? Of course, it's it's capitalism, it's freedom.

• 54:54Jason Calacanis?

  It's a it's a manifestation of democracy.

• 54:57Speaker 00

  But it's also that, that's right. It's the libertarian values and the progressive values, right? In the non-corrupted form, right? So it's freedom, it's capitalism, it's contracts, it's cryptocurrency. But it's also democracy, equality, media, science. In a real sense, I'm one of the biggest funders of those things in the world. For example, I fund all this decentralized science, right? I fund all these decentralized media, all these decentralized citizen journalists. Things like provenance, you know, the who, what, when, where, why, how of a story? Like, the where is proof of location, right? The who is proof of human, right? And there's all these decentralized ways of doing this to get to truth, right? To get to media, to get to science, to get to equality, because that's what crypto is. It's an equal system for the whole world. Fernando De Soto has written about this, like, all these people in Latin America are artificially poor because they don't have property rights. Now, we can deliver that to them over the internet, right?

• 55:42Speaker 00

  And and this is all theoretical. 10 years ago, talking about like crypto in poor countries was theoretical. Now it's not. These people need crypto, like in in Lebanon, in Nigeria, in like Venezuela. Their phones are their lifelines. They are crypto first, they are internet first people. And when I when I'm talking to them, they it's not theory that we're talking about, it's practice, right?

• 56:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 56:00Speaker 00

  So internet first, I think that is the one thing that can build an economic union that can balance China.

• 56:06Jason Calacanis?

  It seems like the Bitcoin game that everybody's buying into was based upon it not being centrally controlled. And now you have an actor who has 600,000 Bitcoins out of the.

• 56:19Speaker 00

  Blackrock, right?

• 56:20Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and Saylor, well, Michael Saylor, I think, has 600,000 now.

• 56:25Speaker 00

  Something like that, yeah.

• 56:25Jason Calacanis?

  So he's the largest holder other than, I guess, the dead Satoshi wallets?

• 56:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, so full of stories. I'm friendly with all these guys.

• 56:32Jason Calacanis?

  Sure, of course.

• 56:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, go ahead.

• 56:33Jason Calacanis?

  I've met him, so it's not a character thing as much as, does it break the game that somebody wants to buy up that much of the supply of Bitcoin? And then, just as we wrap, like, the

• 56:48Jason Calacanis?

  I think we all expected that maybe Bitcoin would be replaced or hacked at some point. It hasn't been hacked. And I mean, I guess you can make arguments about, you know, the, I guess, layer twos, the Solanas, the Ethereum's, you know, serving a different purpose. But is Bitcoin here to stay? And does this consolidation of Bitcoin into a small number of holders jeopardize them?

• 57:09Speaker 00

  I think on balance, it's good, but it has risks. Okay. On balance wise, it's good because it allows TradFi, all these other people who could not put capital into Bitcoin, to put capital into Bitcoin and to boost Bitcoin. It is quite possible, perhaps even likely, that at some point there will be an attempt for a seizure. Okay. Because Bitcoin at 100,000, again, everybody's smiling. Bitcoin at a million, let alone 10 million, a lot of, that is the flipping, right? Somewhere, you know, a long time ago, my friend Olaf and I calculated that somewhere between 100,000 and a million dollars for Bitcoin is the billionaire flipping when most billionaires become crypto. There's about 2,000 gold billionaires. Somewhere around that range, there's a flip. Most billionaires become crypto, right? And then, of course, a million dollars isn't worth what it's worth anymore.

• 57:54Speaker 00

  Faith in the dollar is eroded and it could go very quickly from like, I don't know, maybe 300,000 to a million. There'll be a point at which there's a loss of faith in the currency and it just goes like this. Okay. Now, at that moment, see, remember 2021 when Trump was not allowed to tweet, right? After Jan 6, right? If in 2010 I told you that in 2021, the President of the United States will be defined by whether or not he's able to tweet, even given that the Arab Spring and other stuff had happened, you'd have said, Balaji, you're just exaggerating. Social media just isn't that important, right? It would seem surreal.

• 58:26Jason Calacanis?

  Literally, he was silenced by a cobble of four or five companies.

• 58:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. And now if I tell you.

• 58:32Jason Calacanis?

  D platform.

• 58:32Speaker 00

  I don't know the exact year, but by sometime plus minus, maybe 2035.

• 58:38Speaker 00

  A country will not exist if it doesn't have gold or digital gold. Like, it literally will be insolvent. Like, you're not the president if you don't have social media. You're not a country if you don't have cryptocurrency. Or maybe gold, right? I think physical gold is interesting because it's the complement to crypto. It has different failure modes. States will go with physical gold and individuals and startups will go with digital gold. The reason is, physical gold requires trucks, it requires guys with guns, it requires like,

• 59:08Jason Calacanis?

  Facility.

• 59:09Speaker 00

  Magnetometers and so on. So like, something like China, like a state can protect that because they've got little guys with guns around it. And they go and, you know, like the Korean demilitarized zone. You can imagine something like that between Russia and China where they just hand each other gold bricks every day or whatever, right? To do settlement, right? So something like that could work between countries. That basically their embassies become places for gold settlement. I think that's very possible. But that's too much fixed cost for an individual, right? And also, gold bricks can be detected when you go through metal detectors. That may be the real purpose of TSA, actually, right? Okay? So, point being though, to your point, it is possible that seizure orders do happen when Bitcoin gets to a certain level. Then what happens? All the Bitcoin that is not able to be seized, that's free Bitcoin, is actually more valuable, number one.

• 59:50Speaker 00

  Number two is, I think that even in an economy which is, Bitcoin maximalists don't, I don't, I'm not a Bitcoin maximalist, but they don't understand or they don't want to accept this point that there will be other assets besides digital gold, right?

• 1:00:03Jason Calacanis?

  Of course, yeah.

• 1:00:04Speaker 00

  Because you're, you know, Bitcoin itself is like, it's expensive to transact when you're transacting. It'll be a small number of daily transactions relatively. It's about the scale of Fedwire, by the way. Fedwire, about 500,000 daily transactions, Bitcoin's about the same. High denomination transactions that are infrequent, that's what Bitcoin is. Everything else will go to Ethereum, Solana, you know, like, privacy coins and so on and so forth, right? And other chains like this, because you just don't want to have all that traffic on just one chain. So, already you have, you know, for example, USDC, USDT on other chains, you have smart contracts on other chains, you have privacy on other chains, because Bitcoin is immutable and these other things aren't. Now, what are the risks of Bitcoin? One is seizure.

• 1:00:48Speaker 00

  Two is quantum, right?

• 1:00:50Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:50Speaker 00

  We definitely need quantum resistant Bitcoin.

• 1:00:53Jason Calacanis?

  And that's not farcical in your mind.

• 1:00:56Speaker 00

  That's not farcical, no, no. It'll happen at some point.

• 1:00:58Jason Calacanis?

  It's probable and... It's possible in the short term and it's probable in the long term.

• 1:01:04Speaker 00

  Yes, the main issue with quantum is not that there isn't a solution on the radar for Bitcoin, because with quantum decryption, you can also have quantum encryption.

• 1:01:12Jason Calacanis?

  Sure.

• 1:01:12Speaker 00

  The key question is, is quantum decryption something where we can put a quantum safe algorithm in place in time? And people think we can. The hard part is moving every coin from the old address to the new quantum safe address could take almost a year. So a lot of old coins could get raided in that time, right? So then there's various-

• 1:01:30Jason Calacanis?

  It's wild to think about that. You might even be better off just starting a new product.

• 1:01:36Speaker 00

  There might be a QBTC or something like that, right? But in a sense, even if Bitcoin only achieves its objective. Now, one thing you get, by the way, is what's called social reset, right? Social reset could be something where the community just agrees between themselves that we're just going to snapshot the chain at this point in time and move it over to this new chain.

• 1:01:59Jason Calacanis?

  Wild.

• 1:01:59Speaker 00

  Okay? So that is a non-technical but social kind of thing, which I think is absolutely going to happen at some point.

• 1:02:04Jason Calacanis?

  Wow.

• 1:02:05Speaker 00

  Right? Because Bitcoin is, there's more Bitcoiners than there are Americans, right? More, many hundreds of millions worldwide, right? And importantly, Bitcoin appeals to a lot of people in China. Why? Because money the party can't seize.

• 1:02:18Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:18Speaker 00

  So even as American culture unfortunately is becoming less appealing to people in China, internet culture is still valuable, right? They still need the free internet. They still want GitHub, right? They still want Bitcoin. They still want these things. Hundreds of millions of people in China still like these things, right? That's what I call the Chinese capitalist party. And then the years to come, every possible crazy attack on crypto is going to happen. But because there's so many coins, it'll be very difficult to take the currency of the people, by the people, for the people from this earth.

• 1:02:46Jason Calacanis?

  On that note, Gosh, congratulations on taking a lot of theories and making them into reality. You're six months into this journey, but it's clear you've struck a nerve. And I think that you're doing important work as a backstop against- You know, people being cynical and not thinking that new things can't be tried. So I wish you great success with your network school state and the believers in it.

• 1:03:12Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:03:12Jason Calacanis?

  I think that's kind of the most interesting part is that you've assembled hundreds of people in person and tens of thousands of people online who actually believe that this audacious project is worth their energy and their time and their geography. So congratulations.

• 1:03:28Speaker 00

  Thank you. I'll say one last thing, which is people, if you're watching this, apply to network school, ns.com. And also, if you're an angel investor or VC and so on, we have space. So personal runway, basically $18,000 a year, like that'll carry you.

• 1:03:43Jason Calacanis?

  $125K incubator check will go with two founders a couple of years.

• 1:03:47Speaker 00

  More than, yeah, well, so actually way more than that, right? So basically, so if you have, if you can't get to the US on a visa, if you just want to cut your burn, apply to NS. And if you're an investor, we can take your companies. We've got plenty of space and so on and so on. So come to us.

• 1:04:01Jason Calacanis?

  It's a great pitch.

• 1:04:01Speaker 00

  Great.

• 1:04:02Jason Calacanis?

  All right. We'll see you all next time. Bye bye.