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- [00:00]
A
Corey, welcome to New York City podcast.
- [00:02]
B
Thank you for having me. I don't really like being on podcasts, but here we are. And so I thought I'd maybe interview you and maybe it could be, you know, back and forth.
- [00:09]
A
Love it.
- [00:09]
B
Let's go. But maybe just to set the virtual stage, maybe you can just summarize in like two minutes what we just talked about on our tour. And then from there I'll dive into some of the questions that I was thinking about in our walk.
- [00:24]
A
Totally, yeah. So briefly, as we know, it was easier to start Netflix and reform blockbusters, easier to start Bitcoin than reform the Fed. And I believe it's easier to start a new city than to form San Francisco, and may even be easier to start new countries than to reform America. And at least with 99.99% of people working on the reform path, we should have some small fraction of people working on the path for building alternatives, which tech is good at. Right. Peaceful reform by just building an alternative. And then the customers of the old come to the new, the parallel institutions. And in a sense, what we've done here at Network School is just like you take a Google Doc and you print it out, or you take, metaphorically, an Amazon shopping cart, you print it out to your doorstep, right? Like it comes to your door. You take Uber in the app and you print out an Uber to your door. In the same way we're taking a cloud community and we're printing it out in the physical world. And we're showing we can do that here at Network School. And if we prove that here, we can scale that out to other Network School nodes around the world. And eventually we can do that where we have many students and many people who come to school, start their own startup societies, and pop ups become the new startups. And so that's it.
- [01:36]
B
And so how's it going?
- [01:38]
A
I think it's going great. I don't know. Give me your impressions. You were here. I think it's pretty cool.
- [01:41]
B
Yeah. Yeah. So I just got here, you know, less than an hour ago, and my, you know, Instagram versus reality is I thought, you know, it was going to be a little quiet and not that many people, but in fact, when I arrived, it seemed to be like a bustling sort of place.
- [01:56]
A
Yes.
- [01:56]
B
And so I was surprised in a very good way to see that. And so I guess, how do you think about success in KPIs for this place? Remind me, how long is it? How long has it been?
- [02:09]
A
Just a year. Just a year. Or so how long has been. I think this has been a place for about a year. We opened Network School September 24, 2024. Right, cool. So it's just a little bit over a year, but a year and a month. Yeah. And I think we have succeeded in bringing people from more than 100 countries here. And basically I think it feels like SF. I think like the good parts of SF. Right. You know, like it's like the tech kind of like walking into a tech.
- [02:32]
B
Cafe, which surprisingly they're limited in sf where you can walk into a tech cafe past certain hour.
- [02:37]
A
Yes, that's right. So we keep ours open late and we are essentially something where there's a recognition that there's many cities around the world that have unicorns, so on. Now tech is decentralized out of sf. I'm sure you see that in your founders. The Internet is obviously outside of sf. Most billionaires are not American and so on, as we were just talking about. So can we just print out the values of the good parts of SF and California and tech? Can we print them out somewhere else? And that's what we're doing here.
- [03:07]
B
Understood. On our walk we were. You, you mentioned about some of our friends being in denial in the United States. Yes, talk to me about that. And what else do you think people are in denial of?
- [03:17]
A
Sure. So the issue is basically that. Think about, for example, during the Biden administration, to many people it was obvious that Biden was senile, yet he managed to make it through the 2020 election and four years of a presidency and even the Democrat primary and then even six months of like the general, you know, election period until at the very final moment, like three months before the election, it was finally mark to market and acknowledged, okay, yes, he was CNN all along. And it was this is this thing where you can see on Polymarket like Biden's chance of being the nominee or so, and it just then collapsed like this. Right. So. And Polymarket was maybe the best tracker we have of objective sentiment because you weren't necessarily doing a real time poll on that. And, and so that's the mark to market. Right. The west right now is in this weird stage where whether it's SVB or it's FTX or it's Biden, they are denying that rather than a gradual decline like this where it's sort of acknowledged all the way down that they are quote, taking the L. Right. They deny. And then it's just digital death.
- [04:25]
B
Correct.
- [04:25]
A
It's like a square wave drop off.
- [04:26]
B
Correct. All those Things you mentioned happened. What do you think it is today that they're in denial? It hasn't happened yet, but.
- [04:33]
A
Well, several things. One that's happening right now is the death of the dollar. Right? Gold is appreciated by. It's doubled against the dollar in the last two years. And bitcoin has quadrupled against the dollar in the last two years. Which means really what's happened is the dollar has dropped 50% against gold and 75% against digital gold. And so that's like we're in the middle of this. But people, you know, there'll be a point. I don't know exactly the point. Maybe it's $10,000, you know, an ounce for gold, or maybe it's, I don't know, $200,000 Bitcoin. I don't know the exact number. There'll be some number where people realize I'm not getting wealthier, it's the dollar that's getting weaker. There's a loss of confidence. You know, Powell is talking about stimulating into an already, you know, kind of high inflation economy because they might need that for the 2026 midterms or something like that. Dalio has written about this. Elon went into the government. Our best guy who could literally land a rocket with chopsticks and do electric cars and brain machine implants and genuinely have more. I mean, Tesla humanoid robots, Tesla diner, the kinds of things he can manage in parallel, as you and I know, we know a lot of people in this space. It's remarkable how many things Elon said it can't be done, right? So our best guy went in and said the US Government can't be reformed after going all in, in an Elon way. There's been essentially, though it's not been called this, a surrender to China. That just happened where essentially Hegseth and Trump said everlasting peace with China. After this meeting and the new national defense strategy, when it's published, it is reported to essentially be withdrawing American troops from East Asia back to the Western hemisphere. And then of course, there's the political, ongoing political fighting within the U.S. and so what they're in denial about is simultaneous economic, military and political decline. And it's not just confined to the US it's happening in all the G7. If you look at yields, for example, they're spiking in the us uk, Germany, Italy, France, Japan, Canada. And there's headlines like the UK may need an IMF bailout, France may need an IMF bailout. But isn't the IMF Composed of these countries. Right. So you're seeing essentially the simultaneous collapse of the major countries that fashion, whether you call it the.
- [06:50]
B
The.
- [06:51]
A
The international community, the rules based order, the western world, including Japan, the American empire, whatever you want to call it, that's all going down at the same time. And the issue is that people have seen lots of movies on, let's say invasions by aliens or, or killer robots, and it's actually easier for them to envision a post apocalyptic world like this than a world where actually there's simultaneous military, economic, political collapse in all western countries at once. Similar to what happened with Biden, but even more severe. Right. That is what I think we're in the middle of. But there'll be maybe some moment where it's recognized and it's very dramatic. The way that social media works is like this and then snap. I can say more, but let me pause there.
- [07:33]
B
Cool. And I guess my follow up to that would be like, gonna take this in a bad way.
- [07:39]
A
But.
- [07:39]
B
But so what? So what people that are in the western culture and that are in America right now, you know, do you think it'll be a sudden flee or do you think it'll be a gradual sort of recognition of this? And I guess more more specifically like, so what for the person that's living.
- [07:56]
A
Extremely good question. And you know, Dalio, actually, I think if you read Dalio's book, he thinks the US or the empire. American Empire. By the way, I say American empire in a. In a. Most people will say it in a negative way, like it's imperialism or a republic, non empire. Both the left and the right will say those things. But there was a good version of American empire, which was certainly a better empire than the Soviets or the Nazis. And the central left and center right version had diplomacy that was the best in the world and signed all these trade deals to everybody. And a military the strongest in the world and generally maintained the peace in the high seas. And blue jeans, rock and roll. There are lots and lots of good things about American empire. Right. So I'm actually somebody who. I write in praise of it. You know, it is at a minimum mixed. So that's. You can't say it's completely negative. There's a lot of positives about it. There's, you know, the Internet itself came out of that, the human Genome Project, blah, blah. We could go on and on. Right. So I want to just calibrate and make sure that that's being understood. I'm definitely not a hater. I am, I am However, a realist, right? And sometimes when you look at a company and you see its balance sheet, you realize this one isn't going to make it. Yeah. And you have to give the hard news to the people in that company that their salary is there. And so. But you know what? Life is going to be different. They're going to have to find a new job and so on and so forth. However, we don't have is. And by the way, you know this overseas as well. Once in a while you'll flip the channel and you'll see some country where you know it's a failed state. Everybody's yelling and shooting each other and you'll say, well, that sucks. And you'll flip the channel because what are you going to do? Are you going to go and parachute over there and say that? Right. And now I increasingly have that feeling when I look at America. Everybody's yelling and shooting each other and so on. So it's getting more and more intense and agitated, but I think it's only a shadow of what's going to be. And the reason is dollar inflation is global taxation. What I mean by that is it's not just Americans who are taxed by inflation. It's the entire world who is is part of the US financial system directly or indirectly. For example, all these countries that buy Treasuries and they save in Treasuries if they hold US stocks. Even until the mid 2010s, Alibaba and other Chinese companies were going public in the U.S. right. If they have Delaware companies and so on and so forth. There's so many ways in which they're dependent upon the US financial system. Right. Which is why treasury is able to sanction all these countries and you know, and so on. But now we're seeing simultaneous run. And I'll get to your point in a second. Assemblies run from US Treasuries into Chinese Treasuries whose yields are at all time lows, by the way. And China is bigger than the G7 combined. So if their yields are low and all the G7's yields are high, that means neutral global investors who are not mandated to buy Treasuries because some people have that in their charters. They have to buy Treasuries. Right. So those who are not forced to buy Treasuries, if you were forced, by the way, you lost your shirt over the last few years, you're completely dead. It's like one of the worst times ever for bonds, maybe the worst time ever. There's some charts that show that. I think Charlie Bialio posts things like this. You can find the exact chart, but it's definitely a bad time, if not the worst time. So they're going out of US Treasuries and they're going into Chinese Treasuries, they're going into gold, and they're going into digital gold. So this whole thing, this financial system is going to zero. And you're seeing that with, for example, seizures of companies. You're seeing that with the government taking equity stakes in companies, you're seeing that with the tariffs, you're seeing that with the wealth taxes on the left, you're seeing that with the remittance taxes on the right, you're seeing that with the property taxes where inflation is boosting property values. The pie is shrinking. And even as the numbers are going up, the actual real value is going down, which is why the political fighting is getting more intense. When that pie collapses, then the last piece of paper holding blue America and red America together was green like a tattered piece of paper, the dollar. Because blue Americans certainly don't vote for red Americans. They don't socialize with them anymore. They're in blue sky versus X. And. And they don't actually even marry them. Only 4% of Democrats are married to Republicans. Right? So that's not actually a country, it's an economic zone to reverse. You know, you've seen the tweet saying it's not an economic zone, it's a country. Right? It's actually an economic zone, not a country. Because these are two tribes like Sunni and Shiite, right? Protestant and Catholic during the thirty Years War that don't get along. So green is the last thing holding them together. When that tears, the whole thing is going to come apart because the economic union comes apart. And the extent to which American living standards are subsidized by dollar inflation, every time the trillion dollars is to give just a very rough calculation, let's say there's 3 billion people out of the 8 billion that are in the American dollar economic union globally, right? If that contracts back to just the 300 million of the U.S. for example, what are the tariffs doing? They're telling other countries, don't send your shoes from Vietnam to America for print dollars. Right? Don't send your valuable goods to America for print dollars because ultimately that's all America is sending back. That's what the trade deficit means. Right? So you're saying dollars are not valuable outside America anymore. Fine. This is something which means the scale of American empire is going to contract just like the Soviet empire contracted. Right. It went from this thing which had military bases in Cameron Bay and in Vietnam and Angola and had bases in Cuba to all the way back, or like informal base in Cuba to all the way back to just Russia. And it lost Ukraine and it lost, you know, the war south pack countries and it lost Central Asian countries. That's what's happening. And what does that mean? Well, first is it means living standards plummet to. And how much do they plummet? If you go from 3 billion people to 300 million people, your printing is spread over 90% fewer people. So your inflation is way up. Right. Number one. Number two is there's starting to be retaliation against the US by the rest of the world. The US passport has just dropped out of the top 10. It's collapsed in terms of number of countries you can go to because places like Brazil, for example, have reciprocity rules. If America makes it hard to get in, they make it hard for Americans to get in. Right. So U.S. identity is actually plummeting along with U.S. currency. U.S. currency has been del. U.S. identity is being devalued, so it becomes hard for Americans to get out. Taxes go up, violence increases, the shootings of CEOs, shootings of Charlie Kirk and so on. And basically, I think the issue is most Americans don't. I mean, they know 1945 and they know 1865. They know 1776, but they don't really understand 1917 or 1991 or 1949 or 1947 that say they don't understand the history of, let's say, Russia or the history of India or the history of China. And those countries have histories where America's in a current state that's more like a, like, state space theory.
- [14:37]
B
Sure.
- [14:37]
A
More. Okay, in. In control theory, in math. Right. Like, for example, a car, you don't summarize its current state by just its position or its velocity or its acceleration. You have all three of those in a vector. Right. And each of these are themselves vectors. And then you have all these other variables, like much fuel does it have in the tank. Right. What is the state of each of the tires? So it's like this big vector that has all of these components on it. Right. And then given all of that, there's a system in the car that says, given all this stuff, okay, we'll spend this much fuel to accelerate. And, you know, you can have a very sophisticated kind of mechanism here where perhaps, okay, we're running lower on fuel, so we're going to Reduce the velocity and so on and so forth. So to. To optimize fuel mileage, for example. Right. What it means is that the state of many complex systems is not univariate. You can't just point to an interest rate, for example, but it's multivariate. It's interest rate, it's unemployment rate, but it's also how many people in the country know math and how many of them are married to each other versus childless. And so all these other variables, Right. So if you think of a country as having a vector of variables, I think the vector of variables that the US is most similar to now is not 1945, certainly, which is very highly homogeneous aligned, integrated country with the rest of the world collapsed. It's three examples. The Soviet Union in 1991, when it was on the verge of collapse, because it had both ethnic nationalism in the Union and basically the economic system was at the end of its legs. India during Partition, okay. So India had essentially two. What are today? Bangladesh and Pakistan flanking India. And essentially the borders were announced and people just ran across the borders. Right. And the Chinese civil war between communists and nationalists. And so you're actually seeing people pattern recognize at least the last one of these now, where they're like, wow, okay, after this Mamadani election, it's communist first nationalists in America. Okay? So that's one piece. The second piece is Indian partition. The geography is very similar to the east coast or the, you know, west coast is blue, northeast is blue, heartland is red. That's actually very similar to how Indian partition looked. If you go and look at the map, right? And. And the migration back and forth is similar to Hindu Muslim migration with partition, where reds are going to red states and blues are going to blue states. And finally the end of the Soviet Union. People understand the economic issues. They don't really understand the ethnic issues. In 1989, a census came out that showed that the Russian ethnic group was down to 51% of the Soviet Union. Many Americans just think of the Soviet Union as Russian, but actually had like, you know, Turks and Uzbeks and Koreans. It was this huge Eurasian empire that spanned every kind of thing. There had Eastern Europeans. And all these different ethnic groups started to feel oppressed by the Russians. And the Russians in turn felt oppressed by them. The Estonians felt oppressed by the Russians because Russians moved in and made their country Russophone and then vice versa. The Russians felt they were carrying the weight of the Union. And so the whole thing broke about in ethnic terms, not just economic terms. Both Those kinds of factors are there in the US today. Why Wokes and Magas both feel that each other is oppressing them ethnically, number one. Right. And. And number two, Keynesianism is a lot like communism. Should I explain that? I know, I'm just like, rattling off. Go, go.
- [17:53]
B
No, no, no. One thing I want to kind of shift to is kind of talent pipelines. Yes. And so there's maybe a clear distinction whether you're in America or out of America, of where to go if you are super young and ambitious or just period ambitious.
- [18:09]
A
Yes.
- [18:10]
B
Let's talk about America. The ones that end up on the coast, most likely New York, San Francisco or Boston. Where do you think that will be in the future? How do you kind of think about talent pipelines here, where we are today. Sure. And then kind of more broadly, if you're like 16 to 22.
- [18:26]
A
Great question.
- [18:27]
B
What should you do now, given everything that you just said?
- [18:31]
A
So at a minimum, you should visit Dubai. So visit Warsaw in Poland. Dubai, Riyadh, Bangalore, Singapore. If you're here at Singapore, come visit NS Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam and. And then go to Shenzhen in China, but then also go to, like, the number 52 city in China. Now you'll finally be calibrated on where the world is. Right. And what you'll see is that Poland, which is where war, you know, so Warsaw and Dubai and Riyadh and even Bangalore actually, and certainly Shenzhen and Ho Chi Minh City in Singapore and some, you know, number 50 city in China you've never heard of, have higher living standards than much of the U.S. and so they're not third world countries, they're not backwaters, which they were in 1991. Right. Over the last 30 years, history's run in reverse. And in many ways, the former First World is becoming, quote, Third World and vice versa. The reason I'd say that's the first thing to do is you have to calibrate on where the world is. And media reports of this kind of thing. There aren't Hollywood movies on this, the New York Times. Anglo media is more and more and more insular. Focus on the civil war within or cold civil war or quasi cold civil war, whatever you want to call it. And they're not showing images, really, of what's happening outside because it's depressing to people who are still caught in that Anglo kind of world. And our friends will. They'll tell me the cool enough, we're building, we're building. And I love them. I love them so much. Right. But to me, it's as if, imagine, you know, they're on the Titanic, okay, And they're like solving the Reman hypothesis on the Titanic, right? They're mashing the keys, they're having breakthroughs in math, computer science, whatever. All this stuff's happening, it's real, it's genuinely real. But the vector on which they're accelerating is not the vector on which they're decelerating. And so the physical platform that people are taking for granted, the reason I brought those historical examples is nothing that most Americans have experienced, certainly most 10th generation Americans, right? The longer you've been in America, the less you've experienced genuine catastrophe. And whereas if you're an immigrant, you have. That's the other part of it. If you're from Cuba, if you're from China, if you're from India, which went socialist, if you're obviously from Russia, and certainly the Jewish community came from obviously Germany. They've got maybe the most memory that things can go wrong in America right now. But the people who've been there for a very long time think it will always get better. You know, it's a usa, don't count us out. They'll basically quote homilies like this, right? And that's similar to people thinking, oh, real estate always goes up, you know, and so unless you look at the history of other countries, you don't have a sense of how far it can go down. Like, actually, I'll put it a different way in tech, you know, that just the fact that something has never happened before doesn't mean it can't happen. Example, air flight, right? Like for thousands of years humanity could not fly. And you were crazy to think if you could fly and then one day we could, right? Like AI is like that, right? You know, space travel is like that and so on and so forth, right? These things literally were not possible. And then it happened. So that's in a sense a positive surprise. But now you have to visualize a negative surprise like this, like, like what Covid was, like what the collapse of the Roman Empire was. That's, that's what I think. And so let's see, for talent, right?
- [22:00]
B
Yeah.
- [22:00]
A
Talent calibrates by going outside the US number one. Yeah. Then they're going to see it's actually possible to build in the physical world. The reason we've been confined to building in the digital world is because of regulations and rules in the western world. Outside of that, those don't exist. And at the one silver lining to the American empire receding Is that regulatory harmonization also recedes. Do you know what that is?
- [22:23]
B
Share it for those who don't.
- [22:24]
A
Sure. Okay, so fda, sec, all these three letter agencies, some anonymous bureaucrat in Silver Spring, Maryland is setting essentially the health rules for the whole world. Because like until recently the Czechoslovakian FDA or the Chinese FDA, even the Chinese FDA would respect the American FDA's decision. In fact, even the fact that there was a cognate of them, that those countries were structured in such a way that they had a FDA equivalent, SEC equivalent, they basically were copying the American political system and how it was set up. So the reason that both the government and pharma companies like this is pharma could get its approvals in the US and then could ship around the world. It was a homogeneous market in a sense, right? This is called harmonization. All those countries essentially sing together in harmony. The big problem with this is some anonymous bureaucrat who you've never heard of, who was not elected and can't be fired. So neither electoral nor market theories of accountability actually deal with this. They're saying the rules for the whole world and if they make a mistake, then whole swath of technology are knocked out. And this has happened with biotech, which is area very familiar with. And there's various kinds of holes on the side of the system. For example, right, to try laws or LDT and CLIA for clinical laboratory tests or compounding pharmacies for mixing drugs or off label prescription or medical tourism. Those are five different workarounds to get outside of the FDA system. And, and we saw with, with, with the first with Uber and Airbnb, how much regulation was holding back innovation in the physical world. And then with crypto at 100x scale, how much the SEC and, and FTC and so on, CFTC were holding back innovation, the digital world. I think now we're going to see how much innovation the physical world has been held back by regulatory harmonization.
- [24:05]
B
Right?
- [24:06]
A
So the major opportunity for talent is be mobile, be global and realize that there's actually advantages of being outside 20th century regulatory spheres. And that doesn't mean, by the way, no regulation, it just means better rules.
- [24:22]
B
And so what I mean, I guess the be mobile part kind of go visit the cities, you go and see like how do you think about accelerating if you're someone that's 20 years old today and you go visit, insert one of those cities, you've spent a lot of time in San Francisco, do you think one will find the communities there yet?
- [24:40]
A
So San Francisco is interesting because it is possible San Francisco could go. It depends if like someone like either Zuck or somebody like Zuck who has yet to show themselves, you know, like we're in a time where someone can come out of nowhere politically, like Bukeli or Madani or something like that. You need somebody who has the drive of a Zucker and Elon and I don't know who that person. It would have to either. Zuck is the only person in the Bay Area who kind of has that level of, of drive.
- [25:10]
B
Go ahead, go for it. Say influence, drive, etc.
- [25:13]
A
Influence, drive, capital and so on. To like what Elon is doing at Starbase. Right. What actually Republicans are doing in Florida. It is possible that someone could do that in the Bay Area. But it's also. I don't think most people in the Bay Area understand the severity of their situation. Should I explain why?
- [25:30]
B
Please.
- [25:31]
A
They're building AI and other things, but especially AI and the bluest city and the bluest state in the union and saying very publicly they're gonna make billions by putting lots of blues out of work. Right, because who are they putting out of work? They're putting, or they say they're putting them out of work. I don't think they actually are, by the way. I think AI, as I've said, does it middle to middle, not end to end. But they're saying they are and that's being believed by other people. So lawyers, doctors, bureaucrats, journalists, artists, like filmmakers, all these people who are already being hit by inflation are seeing these people making billions by putting them out of work in a state where the tech guys are massively outnumbered. So when they're setting self driving cars on fire in San Francisco, shooting CEOs calling for wealth taxes, they propose, by the way, a 5% wealth tax in California. Did you see that?
- [26:17]
B
I haven't yet.
- [26:18]
A
Okay, so it's only targeted at 200 billionaires and it's only a one time tax, but it's already retroactive. So if it's passed in 2026, if the quote billionaire was in the state in 2025, they are taxed. Here's how it works. It's like it's a tax on the value of your stock in 2025. So that means is they've got some probability that this bill passes in 2026. Right. And it's a referendum or something if it passes. And the worst thing would be if they had, let's say a billion in stock and it declined in 2026. That means they need to liquidate at least 5% of their stock this year in order to cover the tax bill next year. Or they have to budget for some giant lawsuit to fight this if it does go through because the retroactive tax or what have you. The point is, tech is in an extremely precarious situation in San Francisco and they've been lulled into a false sense of security by this. It's kind of like a stock that's dropped 90% and it's come up 30%. We don't have the metrics to look at how badly San Francisco fell and rose. Like, yes, Lurie is better than before, right? But think about, you went from de Blasio to Eric Adams, who was better, and then you went to Mamdani, right? So it can get worse. And so I think San Francisco is in its Eric Adams era, so to speak, and it could get much worse if economic conditions deteriorate and especially if tech guys are doing okay or even great as those conditions. Because the Internet is fine. The future in many ways is not blue America versus red America, but the Internet versus China. And so if it's. Because that's where capital and wealth and so on are going. And so talent should be mobile, tech talent should not centralize in the Bay Area. It should understand how well the rest of the world is doing. In the same way they're, they're buying Bitcoin, right. They're at least hedged against the dollar. Right. You should at least hedge against serious political instability in the usa. So basically, second passport is much more important than your first home for many people, by the way, you don't may not even need a passport. You can get visas, right? Why? You can get like, for example, if you're of Jewish descent, you make a Leah to Israel, they'll give you a passport. If you're of Indian descent, you can get an OCI card. Overseas citizen of India. If you're of Irish descent, if you're of European descent, there's procedures. If you're like Italian American, you can get something, right? Many of the old world countries have some provision for like citizenship by blood, not by law. Right. You can also, there's lots of digital nomad visas around the world. It's like three dozen countries with digital nomad visas. China just opened up a K visa.
- [29:00]
B
Super interesting. So I, I, you know, I, I meet with a bunch of people that are just starting their careers that are, you know, all over the world. And like the, the thing that they're looking for, the thing that I can kind of sense is that they want to be in San Francisco, like trying to get a plane ticket out to San Francisco. So you think, you know, passport should be, you know, second passport should be kind of number one thing. What other things you think people should strive for when they're not in San Francisco but trying to further their careers?
- [29:24]
A
Yes, so I think so I recognize that it's consensus for many people, SF and but in many ways the most important things happen when they're an informed, numerical anti consensus view. It's like contrarian. But right. Example, the Thiel Fellowship, right, was the consensus was you need to go to college. Thiel had seen Zuck and he'd seen Mark Anderson, he'd seen others who had either dropped out of college, dropped out of grad school and done very well and realized that that was at least a pattern for some of the very smartest. And he started the Teal Fellowship to prove the point. It was extremely non consensus at the time. People forget how non consensus it was.
- [30:01]
B
That's why I'm kind of excited to be here since I think this is non consensus.
- [30:04]
A
Yes, that's right, exactly. So, you know, but it produced Vitalik, it produced Dylan Field, it produced a bunch of really, really, really amazing people. And he was contrarian, but right on an important trend. And he actually did the experiment. And so my view is, I like a lot of people who are going to sf, a lot of our friends there, I just think they think about technical risk, but not political risk.
- [30:28]
B
And is that it just purely kind of like.
- [30:31]
A
I mean, that's it. But that's like. It's a huge it for sure. Exactly. It encapsulates so much in it because political risk is regulatory risk, like actually given a technology. Right. If you think of the state as a platform. Right. There's often debates about what should the public sector do, what should the private sector do? Let's have a different analogy, which is, you know, like Apple's iOS or Google's Android. Right. These are developer platforms and people can build apps on the platforms. They can, they can do well. Right. But the platform maker also builds their own first party apps. And sometimes if they see 50 people who are building something, you know, let's say some location service to say, you know what, let's offer a platform level service for this. We take an abstraction that all of you guys can use. And that's actually in a sense the public sector as a platform, like a really smart, you know, rational public sector creates these kinds of services. Right. And so the platform in which you're building is ridiculously important if you make the wrong platform Chase. If someone built on BlackBerry as opposed to building on iOS or Android, they would just lose. No matter how good a coder they were, they were just trying to fight gravity. If you start with a Windows desktop app at the time that everybody's going to web apps, you just lose. And so what are examples of bad platforms building on Delaware? So many people have had problems. You know this already, right? Holding US Dollars, that's gone down a lot relative to holding Bitcoin.
- [31:59]
B
If you feel comfortable sharing what percentage of your net worth is in Bitcoin or digital assets versus the US dollar Vers versus Well, I would say this.
- [32:07]
A
I, I hold. You know, in a sense, I love Americans, I love my American friends and, and all my people there and so on. But minimum necessary America in the sense of basically US Dollars. For example, during the whole SUV kind of crisis, there's a meme that said if you have like a, if you have more than 250k in a US bank account, then it's not protected by FDIC insurance and so on and so forth. Now what they did is actually they replaced that with Fed DIC insurance in the sense of the Fed essentially said we will just print the difference or what have you. Which basically means. So this little bit technical. Banks are supposed to have a reserve ratio. They say you put in 100 million, they can only lend out a certain amount and they're supposed to keep some back. Most people don't know that in 2020, the Fed set the reserve ratio to zero. It's no longer even fractional reserve banking, it's fictional reserve banking. Okay, so banks don't actually have deposits on hand to, to support you pulling cash out. So when there was like a, an attempt to pull out those deposits, they weren't there. And also these banks actually have massively negative equity. They owe far more than they have because they bought these bonds that went underwater. So the entire thing is the zombie financial system. And what that means is only invest in US dollars what you can afford to lose.
- [33:30]
B
Is that your answer though?
- [33:31]
A
That's my answer.
- [33:33]
B
You tend to vote with your feet. You're here, you're not in America.
- [33:37]
A
And to be clear, I hope I'm wrong, but basically I just feel the platform underneath which we are at has systemic risk. Now, if, that said, if you hold fiat currency by Proselyn, what's the best fiat currency to hold? I'd say don't hold any of the G7 fiat currencies because it's not just the dollar, it's a Canadian dollar. It's you know, like the, the British pound and you know, all the, the euro and so on and so forth. All of these are kind of in the same like class, class of things that are basically in the American empire, broadly the three things that have historically been supposedly outside that. So Switzerland's supposed to be independent. It's no longer independent because they did the Russia sanctions. Obama basically essentially ended Swiss bank accounts with, you know, all this stuff. And then also the Credit Suisse debacle that happened recently where bondholders got wiped out. Switzerland in Switzerland anymore. What is Switzerland? Bitcoin.
- [34:29]
B
Right.
- [34:29]
A
Crypto. That's genuinely neutral rule of law. Right. Truly neutral. It's not based on the human opinion. Right, okay. But then in the fiat world, I would say the UAE and Singapore now the, their own, the ad is pegged to the dollar and SGD is soft pegged to the dollar, but they run on their own ledgers and, and they've got very sophisticated financial managers running both countries. And so if you had to hold. And they're. They're also very large currencies by float, so lots of capital flows through. So whatever, your deposit won't even be seen in the noise of that. So if you must hold fiat AD and sgd, in my view. Now the one counterargument to everything I'm saying to take the other side of it is stablecoins, the massive expansion of USD stablecoins. It may have a weird scenario where you know how all local papers collapsed against the. When all the papers went online, the newspapers went online, all local papers suddenly lost their geographical monopoly. They're printing the same news as each other, they no longer have the trucks and so on to give them a geographical monopoly. So all of them lost to nyt, WSJ, Washington Post, which then in turn lost to Internet first social media competitors after a huge fight. Right? So imagine all global fiat currencies lose to USD, maybe the Chinese Yuan, maybe a few other kinds of stablecoins like this. And those in turn get devalued against BTC and other currencies. Right? So lots of fiat currencies are. And we're kind of already there. Like in Bolivia, for example, prices are quoted in usdt, right? So the world first dollar rises and then bitcoinizes or cryptoizes. That'll be a huge crazy kind of thing. Even crazier than the media wars of the 2000 and tens.
- [36:16]
B
The last question that was on my mind was about trust and Credibility.
- [36:18]
A
Yes.
- [36:19]
B
The thing you're doing here, what do you think the, what can you sort of take from the elite institutions, the Stanfords, the San Franciscos, the United States, the US dollar, Most people do think that is sort of trust and high trust, high credibility. What's your kind of take and what are you learning from that to bring to here?
- [36:39]
A
Yeah. So I think the Internet is to America as America was to the UK, right? So it's a version 3.0. So clearly like the Internet is as American as America was British. So obviously America was a debt to Britain. It speaks English, it was, it was populated by British columnists and on and on, all kinds of names. There are British and they've got a special relationship there. And so the Internet is as American as America's British because America eventually became something larger than Britain. It went from common law to constitution, the next step constitution to smart contract. Right. From 30 million ish, 30 to 50 million Brits, 300 million Americans, billions of Internet users. So how do we rebuild trust? The next rules based order is the code based order, right? So it is smart contracts, it is Bitcoin, which you can trust more than dollar smart contract, you trust more than Delaware crypto identity. You can't be denaturalized, you can't have your ENS or your sns, your Ethereum name system login that can't be yanked from you in the same way that perhaps your American identity can be. And so we essentially restore trust by reducing the need for trust with cryptographic trust. And so from that we can build an entire parallel, essentially legal system which we've already done. It's at multi trillion person scale. It already manages, it's like the third or fourth largest exchange in the world. NYSE and NASDAQ are about to get flipped by crypto. It already passed, I think Shanghai. Right. So I mean, you know, it's a big system, hundreds of millions of people are in it and it's growing. Right. So something that's at hundreds of millions of people and it's growing, that eventually is the successor to the rules based order. It's a code based order. So we take lots of concepts from that. And with crypto we can. When a system crashes, what do you do? You reboot from cloud backup. Right. So that's what we'll do, we'll reboot from cloud backup.
- [38:21]
B
Got it, Got it. And then, sorry, last thing. Let's say everything in your wildest dreams becomes true at this place. And first, kudos for you doing this. And there are not that many people that create teal fellowships or kind of bold contrarian bets, like what you're doing, what will be the next thing you do?
- [38:37]
A
I might do this for the rest of my life in some ways, because it's a big thing. And Zuck once said if he sold Facebook, he would just go back to doing Facebook and so on and so forth. So this is something, in a sense, I've been working on for 10 plus years. And I work on it every day. And I work on every hour of every day, because I think we need an alternative. And the same with the United States was an alternative to the wars of Europe. Right. And I think the Internet and Internet societies are going to be an alternative to what has come. All right, Cool.
- [39:09]
B
Thanks.