Is The Internet The Successor To America Balaji Srinivasan Keris And Silicon Ep02

TITLE: Is The Internet The Successor to America | Balaji Srinivasan | Keris & Silicon EP02 CHANNEL: Keris & Silicon DATE: 2026-06-25 ---TRANSCRIPT--- The end of the American Empire is going to result in a lot of chaos, and we’re going to need frameworks for peacefully creating new communities. After Rome ended, Christianity endured. And after America ends, I think the internet will endure. Lenin has a saying, “You may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.” What happened was we got successful enough in tech that Google and Facebook revenues all went vertical, and newspaper revenue crashed. So, we took over the classified business, the advertising business, and so strongholds of the Democrats, the internet disrupted. That is what made them mad. Tech is the newest of new money. My father came from a dirt floor in India. Very few of the tech zillionaires have inherited [music] wealth. So, on the one side, you have the land, and let’s call that civilization state, the past. Then, on the other hand, early, we have AI, we have crypto, we have drones, we have robotics. It’s both the land and the cloud. I’ve always admired the innovation of the new world. But, I always wondered, is there a way of doing that without colonialism? You know, people say, “Oh, you’re a tech bro.” But, like, I am for the tech dad and the tech mom, and the tech kids, and [music] the tech couples. We’re going to be announcing the Network School Replit Global Merit Scholarship. They come to Network School to take an in-person test, and if they do well, then we get them a tech job. Do I intend to offend anybody? Absolutely not. Right, in Malaysia, I intend to abide by all Malaysian rules, all Malaysian regulations. I’m one of the very earliest people to invest in the Arab world. I was attacked for doing that by people who were saying, “Oh my god, they’re all primitive and and whatnot.”

Today’s conversation is with Balaji Srinivasan. He’s a Stanford [clears throat] PhD, former CTO of Coinbase, former GP at Andreessen Horowitz, and the author of The Network State, a book that argues in all seriousness that the nation-state is being gradually superseded by digitally native communities backed by crypto. He’s not just theorizing, though. He’s building a prototype in Johor, Malaysia, which happens to be my country. I wanted to talk to him principally because he sits at the intersection of everything this show cares about. Technology, sovereign power, capital, and the question of who gets to redesign the rules. But I wanted to speak to him also because as someone with strong opinions who dares to articulate a vision of the future quite radically different from today, he divides opinion. There are things he says that I find sharp. There are things he says and things that I find problematic. He’s no stranger to controversy whether in the US or in Southeast Asia, recently being the subject of attacks online after a Malaysian minister visited the network school in Forest City, Johor. For some, he’s bringing the future to a sleepy town in southern Malaysia funding and mentoring local founders, and we should be happy to have a serious member of the Silicon Valley tech class in our backyard. But for others, he is exactly the example of the detached tech bro elite who has designs on the world that we should be wary of. I went into this conversation with curiosity, and I left it with a deeper appreciation of how people are never just one thing. Just like tech isn’t one thing. I hope you enjoy listening to this conversation as much as I did having it. Balaji Srinivasan, welcome to Grace in Silicon. Thanks for having me. What’s this thesis on the network state? Give us a 2-minute version, please. Sure. I can give you the one-sentence version if you go to thenetworkstate.com. Um but briefly, there’s kind of four ways of thinking about network state. The first is uh every immigrant wants a new country. That’s like almost the definition of what an immigrant is, right? An immigrant is in a country, they’re seeking another one of the 193 states in the world. If you go and study abroad, you’re looking for a new country. If you’re emigrating for work, you’re seeking a new country. If you wanted a 194th, 195th, the billions of people around the world that want better states, that’s like one way of thinking about network state. It’s like, can we get new countries? But also new cities, new communities, new this and new that, right? Like basically, we we see how much benefit there was in starting new companies. That’s where all the economic growth comes from. New currencies or reformed banks, can we do things with new cities and new communities and so on. Okay. Second point is that Never see is in large part um Never see is in large is in large part a response to the decline of the West and the failed states of the West as opposed to the functional states of the East, right? So, Malaysia, Singapore, China, India, these states are actually all on the rise. And so, like governance here basically works. Voice within the system basically works. Part of why I’m here is to learn from the fact that Malaysia, Singapore, China, they can build new cities and take some of that learning back to the West, okay? So, the East, you know, in the civilization states, governance basically is working on balance, right? Upward. In the West, it’s not. And so, we need alternatives. Okay, that’s the second reason. The third thing is that a global level, American empire is ending and the successors are China and the internet. China takes over the military and manufacturing might from the Republicans and China takes over the media and money from the Democrats. And so, just like when the British empire ended, the French empire ended, the Soviet empire ended, all kinds of new states arose, many peacefully actually, right? Not always not always violently. Like the Soviet empire mostly broke down peacefully at least in the immediate aftermath. Um in the same way, the end of the American empire is going to result in a lot of chaos in a lot of the world and we’re going to need frameworks for peacefully creating new communities in places the American empire suddenly pulled out of or vacated or refused to protect or what have you, right? Um and fourth and finally, at a technological level, we’re in the middle of a complete internet media disruption of of everything, right? From dating to manufacturing with robots, military drones, communications, currencies, right? So, we need to, you know, realize that the paper-based bureaucracies of the 20th century were simply not built for the internet. We need to rethink the relationship between network and state. And that may mean, for example, by the way, state that adopts the network, right? So, for example, tiny Estonia or gigantic China, internet India, or now increasingly um digital Malaysia, right? These are states that have actually adopted the internet, infused with it, and done things for the public good for everybody, right? So, that’s another definition of network state. I’ve got many definitions in the book. So, it’s kind of a it’s a it’s a term that has multiple meanings, and one of them is cooperation between the network and the state. Let me pause there. That’s the thesis of the book and it goes for definition. I mean, I I think it’s quite clear where you’re coming from in terms of your prognosis of the moment. What’s not quite clear in your answer is what exactly is your solution to this? Yeah. So, my solution is um and this is again, this comes out of a Western context where I think the West can learn from the East. Um in the Western context, there’s a reason they call it the New World because those states were all created relatively recently, right? So, after the end of the Western nation-state because I think some of the things you and I have, you know, talked about is, you know, the inflation crisis and the debt crisis in Western states and, you know, that that that kind of stuff. Um I think many Western nation-states are basically bankrupt. So, what comes after that? Well, one answer is the Eastern civilization state, China, Iran, India, maybe Russia, right? Like North Asia, East Asia, South Asia, right? These are places that have had, you know, people living in these locations, living in Malaysia, living in, you know, the the ASEAN region for thousands of years, right? So, it’s kind of a return to the past, the civilization state. That is one answer and it’ll be one big part of the answer. But the other big part of the answer in my view is going to be the internet-based network states, Right. Tell us more about that. What does that mean? What does that mean? Well, you know, after Rome ended, Christendom endured, okay? And after America ends, I think the internet will endure. That is to say, the internet was actually built initially to resist a nuclear attack. Even in war-torn places, the internet remains up. And so, the internet is the thing you can rely on when everything else goes down. It gives you your communications, it gives you your transactions, your cryptocurrency, it gives you information, it might give you a job, it might get get you a ticket out of there, right? And so, you know, that saying restore from cloud backup, when these Western states melt down, when the American empire withdraws, many things that people took for granted are going to evaporate. And we want to have a code-based order that does what that rules-based order used to do. Otherwise, we enter a period of every state for themselves fighting for themselves, and it’s all nationalism and all socialism, and I think that’s an unfortunate, you know, future. And so, I believe in peace, I believe in trade, I believe in internationalism, capitalism, diplomacy, and I think that the internet can restore some of those things cuz there are a lot of good things that America did. There’s tons of bad things America did. I could, you know, I would agree with many of the criticisms, but a lot of good things America did as well. And we’re going to miss Uncle Sam when he’s gone. And so, maybe afterwards comes Uncle Satoshi. And I think we have to tackle head-on some of the criticisms that I think you would have Sure. Sure. Um, and I want to give you an opportunity to to respond cuz one of the charges leveled against you from here, um, is that ultimately you’re trying to extract sovereignty from existing nation-states. Uh, you write in your book, “A startup society with sufficient scale should eventually be able to negotiate for diplomatic recognition from at least one pre-existing government [snorts] and from there gradually increase sovereignty, slowly becoming a true network state.” Those are your words. And obviously, it would make a lot of people uncomfortable. Tell us why we shouldn’t be. Well, so, first I don’t think it should make anyone uncomfortable because one of the keywords there is negotiate, right? And, um, consensual negotiation. There’s kind of two dimensions to this. The first thing is there’s 193 countries in the world and many many smaller provinces. I mean, these countries want these kinds of deals. Right? That is to say, they they’ve passed DAO laws, they’ve passed digital nomad visas. They want to The land is already negotiating with the cloud to attract business, to attract talent, to attract capital, and so on and so forth. They’re setting up special economic zones. They’re setting up charter cities. They’re setting up all these things, and they are saying, “Hey, we will change the laws to attract capital.” This is a known thing. This is how China reformed. China built Shenzhen and they went away from ultra-communism towards capitalism. Many countries have seen this model work with, you know, varying levels of success, but it’s definitely something which which which is a known strategy that has produced results, right? And that means changing some laws to bring in capital, to bring in talent, to have entrepôts that the rest of the world can come to, right? Um so and the key thing is it’s done voluntarily, right? That’s something where you know, there’s rule of law, there’s a country that makes a decision, we want to bring in capital, we want to bring in talent, and does that. Now, to give a sense of this also, by the way, that’s you can think of that at the individual level where an immigrants come in, but at the company level, for example, Tuvalu or Colombia did deal with GoDaddy for the .tv or .co domain extension. Whenever you register like twitch.tv, you’re giving a payment to Tuvalu. That didn’t cost anything. There was no natural resources given up. They just get a straight cash flow, right? The country of Palau set up rns.id. So you have a digital identifier online, right? Uh the state of Nevada did a deal with Tesla and installed a gigafactory in their state. This is bringing economic development and so on to their state and in return they give some degree of um you know, like a like a slice, like a regulatory license to that internet company, that internet, you know, community. Um another example is what Nayib Bukele and the King of Bhutan did where they’ve gone very heavy on Bitcoin. They’ve done Bitcoin mining uh in in Bhutan. El Salvador has adopted Bitcoin as the national currency. So these are all examples of where the land has done negotiations with the cloud for mutual benefit. And when it’s consensual and it’s negotiated, then both parties are strengthened as a consequence. That’s why it should make people comfortable. That’s That’s the first answer. The second answer is very importantly, I didn’t invent the internet, you didn’t invent it. Like that’s already there, right? Billions of people are spending billions [clears throat] of minutes a day on the internet, right? One way of thinking about it is here’s Earth and then here’s the cloud up over here. And if people spend half their time on the internet, they’re like telecommuting up to the cloud working here in this cloud continent and then telecommuting back down to the Earth. And they’ve got totally different neighbors up over here. Their neighbors might be in New York and San Francisco and London as opposed to their physical neighbors here on the Earth. And so the diplomatic relationship between cloud and land is something that actually will reduce friction. Because right now this whole thing has arisen and we don’t really have a framework of thinking of it as co-equal to the land. It’s as I think of it as, you know, with the new world with the let’s call it, you know, what do you call it the discovery of the Americas, the colonization of Americas, people in Americas, the new world changed the old world, right? Because this was a whole thing where people had to rethink, you know, what what everything was. And this is the new new world with the cloud and billions of people in the cloud and billions of people who identify either implicitly or explicitly as internet-first, what is their relationship to the land, right? What is the cloud community cloud community’s relationship to the land community? And I think that can and should be put into writing, thought about explicitly. Like there’s many people who identify more as Bitcoin holders or Ethereum people than they do with their national governments, especially in the West, right? In the East again, there’s families, there’s language, there’s culture. I think there’s stronger societal bonds in the East. But in the West, um governments have failed to such an extent that many people identify much more with the internet communities than they do with their offline governments. So, uh so I think that formalizing that relationship could be actually friction reducing and it should be actually um something to look forward to. I wonder Balaji, this criticism whether it speaks to something that’s a bit deeper, which is there might be more than one reality here. And for people who would say, “Even if it’s voluntary, I just simply can’t sit well with the idea of a completely new currency or completely new set of regulations or some special treatment to the internet community when my everyday reality is still very much offline. And my everyday reality is still very much with local politics or with the state writ large. Mhm. Do you not accept that when you come and preach the idea of the network state as a successor to a configuration that in your mind is failing you are speaking ultimately to a minority of the world population? I’m absolutely speaking to a minority of the world population. Um but when we’re thinking about that is only 4% of the world came to America, right? Maybe only 10, 20% of the world lives in the new world. But that changed the world. Right? So since America never went mainstream, 96% of the world is not American. But the exit of a small group of people from Europe, from others created all these innovations and granted all the wild west crazy stuff there as well. But in this risk-tolerant jurisdiction, a lot of very impressive things came out of it. A lot of technology, you know, the the tools, many of the tools that you and I use on a daily basis. So um you know, why am I speaking to a minority? Because I believe in minority rights. Right? I believe in reconciling both the majority and the minority, right? I do think that, you know, there’s there’s obviously, you know, democracy has both of those issues, right? You want to have, you know, like 51% majority rule and so on, right? At least. But you also want to protect minority rights. And sometimes the smallest minority is one person, an individual they’ve got a good idea or say can start a company and do something. And I think that we should have protected ways for people to go and experiment with different modes of operation, especially given all the technological disruption that’s arisen. Like many old ways of doing things, there’s like a probably a better way of doing it. Do we need to fill out all this paperwork for bureaucratic things? Maybe AI can help with that. That kind of thing, right? And these kinds of reforms are easier to do if you have a small city or town where everybody agrees that we should do these reforms. And then the rest of the world can copy them if it turns out well or not if it doesn’t, right? This is actually in some ways the Chinese strategy. How did China reform? They saw that things were working in different ways in Taiwan and Hong Kong and and Singapore and the Chinese diaspora and that Chinese people could do well in capitalism. That helped reform China. In India, very similar kind of thing. A small minority of Indians went abroad and that helped bring India from socialism to capitalism cuz they could see if they could do well abroad, right? And that helped reform India, right? So this way even if the majority is uncomfortable with it now, we’re not asking them to change at all. We’re just saying, “Here, let this let have a solution for the small minority. Let them go and experiment. Maybe it doesn’t work. Lots of new experiments don’t. But if it does, then everybody can benefit from it.” But I think Balaji, where the maybe analogy breaks down is that when we speak of minorities here, these are generally quite powerful, influential, well-off minorities. And the majority that we’re speaking of are people who’ve not benefited in the same way that maybe you and I have from the technological revolution that preceded this or is coming. But I think your your general point about not forcing the network state or anything any set of these ideas onto a majority that may not be ready or desiring of it. I I I I completely understand your your your point. I want to say one thing though, which is on everybody’s complicated and you’ve got multiple axes, right? So yes, on one axis one might be a successful capitalist. On another axis, you could be an Indian American in America where you know, maybe your existence is actually quite tenuous now, right? Like you’re a second class citizen if you’re on a visa or something like that, no matter how successful you are, you know, economically, right? So people are complicated and they could be, you know, an elite on some axis and they could be very marginal on another axis, right? And I think like why why have entrepreneurs been driven out of California? Why did Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Travis Kalanick and and Elon and Peter Thiel? Why they Mark Zuckerberg, why did all these guys leave? Why did Jeff Bezos leave Washington? Clearly they weren’t powerful more powerful than the Democratic establishment. Right? As powerful as they were in some axes, they’re very weak on other axes. They’re very politically weak even if they’re economically strong, right? And so I think thinking of it as in math terms as a vector rather than a scalar with multiple variables rather than one variable. We’re all strong in some areas and weak in other areas. And protecting minority rights doesn’t just mean protecting somebody when they appear sympathetic, but it means rule of law which does protect minority rights regardless. I want to move on to another controversy. Sure. Um that’s defined a bit of your time here in Malaysia. Uh you caused the stir when people started to realize or dig up a a comment you made a few years ago I think which is when you use the term tech Zionism. What did you mean by it? And and do you see whatever you mean by it how for Malaysia and for many parts of the world that’s just not a term that people can sit well with. Sure. So um so first context of this is this is from years and years ago. Um this is a time period where it looked like so first the context was I’m talking about countries or communities that were started by a book, right? So the Holy Quran has obviously helped start many communities which have the crescent on the flag, right? The Bible has started many communities that have the cross on the flag, right? The Mormons were started by a book. Arguably the Puritans were started by a book. Arguably America was started by letters and so and so forth. And I was talking to a friend of mine in a podcast who made an offhand comment where okay yes you could think of this as like you know the Zionism, right? But I but I also mentioned Mormons. I mentioned the Amish. I mentioned the Puritans. This was meant to be this was not meant to be like the core of the argument in any way. It was meant to be a a book and not about taking something that’s not yours. Absolutely. That’s right. And the thing is, like I you know, as an Indian, I believe in non-violence, like as an Indian Hindu, right? That’s a core part of, you know, what I believe. I believe in consent, I believe in peace, I believe in trade, I believe in capitalism. Um I think there’s I’ve always admired the uh the innovation of the new world. But I always wondered is there a way to doing that without colonialism, right? There obviously there were people in the Americas. So so I’ve always been attracted things like seasteading or Mars. There’s no people there, but you have the innovation without the the colonization, right? And uh reclaim land is actually close to seasteading in a sense, right? Because the the earth didn’t exist before. So it’s the you know, there’s various inspirations for Network State. I’ve written about this. Like for example, the Amish, that’s a community that lives nearby in America. They live in the past. They just stopped technology at like 1800. So I said, what if we have an inverse Amish that lives in the future peacefully nearby? Um another example that I gave were kind of diasporas around the world. What if all the Chinatowns of the world were networked together, right? Like basically all the little Silicon Valleys and they were networked together, right? Um and you know, when you’re describing something unfamiliar, for example, Bitcoin talks about this concept of Bitcoin mining. It’s not literally mining out of the ground. It’s just like an analogy where pieces of it hold and other pieces don’t. So that’s the context of the comment. So I’ll say something else, which is at that time, it looked like uh Israel was making peace with Saudi Arabia, peace with the UAE. The Biden administration said peace is breaking out in the Middle East. It looked like peace was breaking out for the first time in two decades. All of the misfortune of the last few years, I nobody have I didn’t have a crystal ball on that matter. I wasn’t, you know, I had I didn’t know things were were happening at that time. And um I think this is this is an area where um when in Rome, do as the Romans do, right? Like you asked you know like do I intend to offend anybody? Absolutely not, right? In Malaysia, I intend to abide by all Malaysian rules, all Malaysian regulations, all that kind of stuff. Um I think one way that we have thinking about this is um Malaysia has decided and that’s completely its right as sovereign country that you know 10 million people of Israeli passport shouldn’t be able to come to country, fine. But there’s 2 billion Americans, Indians, Europeans who may have at some point made a positive comment or some remark about Israel, okay? I think they should be able to invest in Malaysia because Intel is here and Microsoft is here, Meta is here, Google is here and so and so forth. And I want to focus on the 95, maybe 99% of things that people agree on versus that 1% because I’m against, you know, war and conflict and so on. Last thing I would just say on this is that um I’m one of the very earliest people to invest in the Arab world, the Muslim world and so and so forth. In fact, I was attacked for doing that by people who were saying, “Oh my god, they’re all primitive and and whatnot.” This was like, you know, 10 plus years ago. So Wamda Capital for example, like Lana Alamat at Wamda Capital, uh Amjad Masad who’s the founder of Replit, one of the perhaps the most successful Palestinian tech has been a friend of mine for 10 years as one of his very first investors. He also headlined Never Say Conference just last year here in in in Singapore. So clearly, Never Say is pro-Muslim, pro-Arab, pro-Palestinian because one of the most prominent prominent Palestinians in the world has been a friend and and and colleague of mine for many years. Um so the way I see the world is minimal conflict, maximal trade, peace, technology and so and so forth. And I’ve been a consistent opponent of war for many years. And this is a faction by the way within America that’s agreed with me. The Ron Paul kind of peace and love kind of faction, right? Actually goes all the way back to the Quakers. It overlaps with Hinduism. So that’s where I come from. There’s a lot to unpack there, but I do I think it’s on one level encouraging that you’re supportive and friends with people like I’m Judd. But in some ways that’s a separate question from the one I’m interrogating here because investing in brown founders is not the same as engaging with the politics of brown countries. I think I mean this is like this super complicated matter that you could spend like many many many hours on. But um fundamentally there’s a lot of shifting opinions on this particular issue now, right? Um you asked something else so earlier which I wanted to kind of directly address which is you know my involvement in the politics of any country. My goal is to be not involved in the politics of any country. That’s your job and or basically right Malaysian politicians pass whatever laws, rules, regulations that they have and then I abide by them as a guest. They pass laws to bring in foreign investment. They have MM2H and digital nomad visas. They have Malaysia digital. They have laws for data centers and to encourage foreign investment into the country and that’s where I see my role, right? I put tens of millions of dollars into the country already like more than you know probably close to a close to 100 million MYR actually, right? And that’s just getting started, okay? And we’re backing white collar and blue collar people. We’re backing tech startups in Malaysia which help build I think digital sovereignty in Malaysia. We’re also like the number one just like a small example like the laundromat or the hair cutter, the food service and so and so forth. All kinds of small businesses in the vicinity of you know where we set up Network School are where they’re number one customer, right? So we’re backing Malaysians at every level and we haven’t asked for a cent of government money and we won’t we don’t we don’t intend to, right? Because we’re just here under the rule of law that you guys have set up. If you know like Malaysia decided at some point, “Okay, we don’t want Intel to invest, we don’t want Meta to invest, we don’t want Google to invest, and so and so forth.” That’s your decision as a sovereign, and I would also abide by that, right? However, it seems to me like on balance, Malaysia has actually been a crossroads for trade with the world, the Straits of Malacca, and so on. You have Chinese investment, you have Indian investment. That’s a win-win for Malaysians, for everybody, right? Um so, that’s how I see it. I want Basically, I just take the laws and the culture as they are as a given. I’m not trying to change that at all. I’m here for mutual win-win. All we want basically is a sunny place with coffee to code. All right? And Malaysia doesn’t have the drug addiction problem that San Francisco does, it doesn’t have the violence problem that San Francisco does. It has stable families, it has family values, right? I That’s That’s the kind of stuff actually that I respect. I have um I really no interest in getting involved in local politics anyway. I think we’re not going to be able to resolve this entirely in one conversation, but I do take your point about striking the balance as a country of making one’s politics clear and values clear, but also recognizing that to be a participant of the global economy, it’s not compromises, but it is coexistence That’s right. that’s required. And that’s a difficult balance to do or to to have, Palagi. It’s not entirely obvious as you speak to policy makers, especially on camera, but even off, what that balance is, because I think with some purpose, you name dropped a couple of big companies that are big investors in this country, who perhaps in their other activities or in their politics, a lot of Malaysians will find more problematic than whatever your remarks were. Absolutely. I I take your point. That’s right. And I guess that set of bargaining or that set of finding that journey of finding the right balance is not just a Malaysian one, but it is one that many countries are increasingly grappling with. I Yeah, I agree and I and I get it. And I mean, another way to think about it is think about Malaysia’s relationship with India, right? Malaysia and India get along pretty well, I think, right? Um you know, one of the reasons I I mentioned this before to you offline, but um you know, I I speak Tamil. That’s my, you know, ancestral tongue, right? And there’s 2 million odd um Hindu Indians uh Tamil speakers in this area, right? Tamil is an official language in Singapore, but it’s constitutionally protected in Malaysia. So, this is a place where I thought no one could say, “Oh, Balaji, you don’t belong.” Right? I mean, if Tamil Hindu Indians don’t belong in Malaysia and Singapore, where do they belong, right? You know, okay, maybe in India, but, you know, um whereas in America, people say, “You don’t belong here.” And they would say that with a straight face, right? Unfortunately, increasingly, right? So, one of the reasons that I’m here is that uh this is I think a very tolerant and welcoming country. This is a country that, you know, in passportindex.org, if you look at the most welcoming countries in the world, Malaysia’s thing number four. Globally ranked, right? And um so, that’s that’s what attracted me to the place, that it’s tolerant, that it’s cosmopolitan in a certain sense, that it’s internationalist, that it’s sort of hewing against the ultra-nationalism, ultra-socialism that I’m seeing in America, right? Now, granted, there’s always a balance between the land and the cloud, between, you know, I I I think there’s positive patriotism is good, negative nationalism is bad, roughly, right? Pride in your own people and your own culture and so on, totally fine, good, laudable. Being mad at others, you know, that can go wrong, especially in in my view, on the MAGA side. Um so, that’s where I’m coming from, right? Like, basically, I thought, okay, this is a great place that has lots of data centers, it’s warm, it’s peaceful, good family values, lots of Hindus, Indians, Tamils here. It’s open to the world and has great airports. It’s a country on the rise. It’s got all these regulations for foreign investment. It’s got tons of local talent. CoinGecko, Etherscan, there’s tons of Malaysian people that we plan to employ, invest in and so forth. We already begun on that by the way. Um That That’s what attracted me to of all the places in the world cuz I could have gone anywhere in the world, right? I picked Malaysia as literally the number one place. And so I just want to say that that’s a testimony to what you guys have built here. And that also is my respect for the system that’s here. Right? I don’t intend to change it. It’s a better system in my view than San Francisco is. And we’ll come back to Malaysia and why you chose it and what your plans are a bit later in the conversation. I want to move on to kind of zoom out to the network state again as an idea. And notwithstanding this complicated moral or ethical dimension that we’ve had a back and forth on around whether it’s about taking away sovereignty or not, you clearly believe otherwise. Is the question of practicality and relevance. Earlier on in one of your remarks you sort of pointed to the fact that there are community communities that gel together and feel a sense of solidarity perhaps more strongly with each other on the internet than they do with their physical neighbor, right? What I see is slightly different but what I see in the world is a hardening of ethnic loyalties, religious polarization, polarization writ large typically along the lines of blood, soil, and nation. Mhm. I’m not seeing the network state. I’m not seeing internet bubbles being the main locus of loyalty when I look outside now. So I would say both are happening at the same time. We’re seeing the land and the cloud both accelerate. And that’s the end of American empire is kind of accelerating both these options. So, on the one side, you have the land, and let’s call that the civilization state, the past, it’s China, it’s blood and soil, and so on and so forth, right? China also has a tech aspect to it, of course, as well, but it’s thousands of years culture, it’s Iran, it is, you know, it’s basically the old world in a sense, right? It’s going back to the basics, the proven, it’s like physical gold, for example, right? It’s military, it’s all this kind of stuff. But then on the other hand, you know, clearly we have AI, we have crypto, we have drones, we have robotics, we have more people using social media. I mean, for example, did you use WhatsApp today? Probably, right? Like, do you use WhatsApp every day? Probably you did, right? If you If you use screen time, you know, your your iOS thing, I’ll probably every single person watching this, how are they watching it? They’re watching it on YouTube, they’re watching it on the internet, right? Which means they’re spending hours on the internet. So, we have both happening at the same time, and it’s both the land and the cloud. And I think of this in a sense as, you could think of it as the left and the right of the future, but it’s actually both at the same time. Why? The land is often socialist, and the cloud is capitalist. But, the land is nationalist, and the cloud is internationalist. So, you could say the land is still to the left cuz it’s socialist, or to the right cuz it’s nationalist. Do you see what I’m saying? You could say the cloud is to the right cuz it’s capitalist, you could say it’s to the left cuz it’s internationalist. Similarly, you could also say the land is, you know, rooted, and it’s here in the base, and the and the cloud is, you know, up here in the sky, and so on. But, you could also say, well, the cloud is just the people and the land is the state. Cuz the cloud is individuals connecting to each other in the network voluntarily, and the and the state is top-down, right? So, you can also you also argue which one is top-down versus bottom-up, right? And my view is that is the dyad that’s going to define this century. In the same way that a very, very, very roughly you can map it to Eurasian communism and Anglosphere capitalism. And Malaysia’s right at the border of the two, right? At the border of China and the internet, right? It’s English speaking, it’s a former British colony, it’s obviously very pro-tech and internet and so on. You’ve got a lot of the free internet here. But clearly it’s also something which has a lot of trade with China, right? And I think an important thing for Malaysia Malaysian sovereignty is to balance between China and the internet. And I represent like think of me as like an ambassador from the internet side, right? Like I have just just like you, you have a large online following. I have a decent size online following. I’m here in humility. Oh, I I I [laughter] Oh, I’m I mean I I I I am I’m very aware of my limitations, you know, like I know exactly how many people are better than me at math in my year and and in school and so and so forth. So, the greatest strength is to understand one’s own weakness. And so, please know that at least I’m very self-critical of myself, okay? So, and if there’s a joke on my part Okay, okay. So, I know you well enough now. Fine, fine, fine. Okay. So, so think of me as like an ambassador of the network. And the network wants to work with the state. Literally just wants a place to build hardware, you know, for example, maybe the next Ozempic could be invented here, right? And you know, Ozempic produces so much revenue for the Netherlands, right? It’s like some significant fraction of their GDP. Why couldn’t we have a Ozempic for longevity here in Malaysia? Like a few researchers that can’t get visas to America could come here, right? And especially Palestinians, Iranians, people from the Muslim world, like all that opportunity has been cut off in America where they no longer want that talent, I want to find other places to assemble that talent. That’s something I’ve been talking about for 10 plus years. I call it the dark talent world. We can we can talk about this scholarship program we’re doing. And Malaysia could be a welcoming place to assemble that talent and it would benefit them and it benefit Malaysia and benefit the world. That’s the kind of thing I’m I’m interested in. Let me let me go back to your question. Go ahead. Yeah, I just wanted to transition to um this sense of decline of American Empire. I don’t want to defend the longevity of the American Empire. That’s definitely not my politics or my sense, but just for conversation’s sake, Balaji, I want to challenge the idea that decline is inevitable. Because I think it’s not to say that America is fine. The political system is dysfunctional. Uh institutional trust is collapsing. I agree with your thesis directionally more than I might sound, but the best technology stack or so much of the technology stack, the best of it is still American. The chips are American. The fab may be Taiwanese. The lithography machines may be Dutch, but both of them operate within American export control leverage. The best tech talent may be slightly less now, but still for the most part want to be in America and not China. The best frontier models are American. The cloud infrastructure that most of the world’s AI functions on is American. So when you say America is finished or in terminal decline, which America are we talking about? Because the fiscal picture might be troubled, although I might have some different reading of what sovereign debt is, but I take your general point. The soft power and the moral authority that once they could pretend to have, I think they absolutely cannot anymore. Absolutely. They can never lecture the world again after what complicity they were in with Gaza and all the rest and what most serious lawyers would consider an illegal war in Iran. But the technological stack that underpins the next three decades of global growth, that’s still overwhelmingly American. Well, so now it’s funny. You You Now Now we’ve almost switched sides in some ways because now you’re saying the internet is important, right? Okay, but so so I think the most important question here is is the internet American? And so if you say yes, of course internet’s American, you get an answer that many of my colleagues in the US because I’m the minority report, right? You know, we talked about minorities earlier on. Um many of my friends in in the US think of me as the you know, eccentric perhaps. That might be one way of putting it. Advanced scout, another way of putting it. That’s a nicer way of putting it where you know, but basically I am zagging when other people are zigging. A lot of them have doubled down on trying to save the USA and so and so forth. They agree, you know, okay, it’s not inevitable in terms of decline and so on. And I’m the 1% who thinks actually maybe we need parachutes. Maybe we need lifeboats. Okay. But on this question of is the internet American? The first answer is of course it’s American. It arose out of DARPA grants and it arose from you know, like the American military and the American educational system and the the internet until 1991 was actually all a US military educational network and until the NSF acceptable use policy was repealed which banned commercial traffic in the internet it was all American. And also the American the big tech companies are American and Silicon Valley’s American and and and and all this kind of stuff, right? Those are the obvious points. Then the counter argument is, well, clearly though there’s a non-American internet because there’s a Chinese internet, there’s a Spanish internet, there’s a Russian internet and some of those are walled off. Moreover, if we look more closely at those American tech companies, they’re more than 50% immigrants. Right? They’re Indian and Chinese and Persian and you know, Korean and so and so forth and you represent So did you get my isn’t that the point that America still attracts the best global talent? In the past, but it’s now cut off that flow. You can’t get in anymore, right? So everything is you know, it’s like called a lagging indicator in in in finance, right? So, it’s very difficult. Like all that talent is not going to the US anymore. And where’s it going to go? Maybe it comes to places like Malaysia. Silicon Valley is decentralizing now. Also, um when you look a little bit further at those American internet companies, it’s not just the workforce that’s like more than 50% immigrant, um it’s their user base. Like WhatsApp, let’s say it has 3 billion users. There’s only 300 something million Americans. That means definitionally almost 90% of their user base is non-American, right? So, and how about their revenue? If you look, depending on the country the company, more than 50% of the revenue is non-American, right? So, these are internet companies where in my view the internet is to America as America was to Britain. It’s a version 3.0. It’s a successor. But, most people don’t see it that way yet, or they only half see it that way. They say these tech guys are not real patriots, right? Or, you know, they’re not loyal to America or what have you, right? And uh you when you asked earlier, which America? Everything you said that was a bull case for America was tech tech tech tech tech. It was semiconductors, it was cloud, it’s this and that. Everything that’s managed by Democrats or Republicans. Which is all of America. Well, that’s the thing. So, blue America, red America, tech America. Blue and red America are just totally Blue America is totally dysfunctional domestically. Red America is completely dysfunctional globally, right? Red America’s idea of trade is insane tariffs and trade war, insane war with Iran. These are insane things, right? The Democrats are similarly insane domestically. And it used to be that it just used to be different within my lifetime within your lifetime in the ’80s and ’90s it just wasn’t like this, right? So, they’ve just lost their way. And that might be 90% of Americans have lost their way or or some fraction. The tech group is competent. They can build from scratch, but they can’t build in the physical world. They can only build in the cloud. Network state is a way of resolving that tension. There’s a still a slice, as you you just agreed of competent Americans that are world-leading, but they’re prohibited from building in the physical world by a thicket of regulations that would be so crazy you wouldn’t even believe if I if I told you them, right? These are things where like you have to get you know, for example, there’s like a gas station in San Francisco where it was like a 5-year question as to whether to renew their 5-year lease and that had to be voted on by the supervisors and this is a level to which it’s like impossible to build in many parts of America. Totally the opposite of how it used to be, right? It’s become so encrusted by regulation that you need you need a a new start. And when you dive into that, you say, “Why do those regulations happen?” Regulations happen because there isn’t local physical consensus. Some people want to keep their house prices high, so they’re NIMBYs. Other people want to build and there’s just no way of reconciling those two economic things. So, you have to go and find a new territory where you have some sovereignty that you’ve negotiated consensually in order to finally build in the physical world. That’s where I come from on this, right? So, a lot of my stuff comes out of the observation of the decline of San Francisco and California and Blue America and Silicon Valley, the decline of America as a place for talent, for capital. And also recognition that it used to be a great place. And maybe there could be a sequel to it, but it’s going to be somewhat different as different from America as America was from Britain. The Internet is version 3.0. So, the second challenge to your thesis, I think is is different. Which is not to suggest that America’s decline is not happening. Say we accept that at face value, say you’re right. Let’s say America really doesn’t have much more to give that will reverse this terminal decline. Even on those terms, your conclusion doesn’t necessarily follow because the world that’s emerging from a collapse of American empire as you put it It be a more contested, more sovereign future. Uh one that’s more strategically active for other nation-states. Look at who’s actually filling the void that is being created by this prospective collapse. It’s not the network state. It is countries like India being more strategically active than they have since independence, arguably. Uh the Gulf states figuring out how they leverage energy and other set of resources to be more geopolitically adept. Or countries in ASEAN positioning themselves between the two poles. So, what I’ve just described is an emerging multipolarity of more sovereign nation-states and not the decline of nation-states to be replaced by this 3.0 internet 3.0 network state that you are envisioning. So, again, I would agree with you, but I’d say it’s both, and here’s why. Within the US, we have seen, for example, the replacement of the US Postal Service by email, right? The replacement of NASA by SpaceX, the replacement of taxi medallions by Uber, uh the replacement of the Fed gradually by Bitcoin, the replacement of the SEC and Wall Street by Ethereum, right? These are things where I can give many more examples, but those are network alternatives to functions that were previously performed by the American state. Then outside, at you as you absolutely say, you have China in particular taking over many functions the American state previously performed. It’s a manufacturing, and it may become the military, you know, for for much of the world. Like, um if there’s going to be peace in the Strait of Hormuz, it’s probably going to be China involved in some way, right? But we’ll see what happens. It’s also possible that China just absents itself from the conflict and just ships electric panels and uh electric cars and solar panels around the world, right? Um my only may maybe caveat in what you’re saying is I think uh and this is this is one of those comments where who knows where it’ll be in like 4 years or something like that. But, if you were to nowcast it, you know, nowcast is a forecast based on, you know, I think the the winners of World War III insofar as this is World War III, a weird kind of World War III where it’s mostly economic, are probably like Russia, Iran, China, North Korea, maybe India in a sense. So, India’s not really fighting because those four countries, Russia, Iran, China, North Korea, have US independent supply chains. But, Western Europe, the Gulf States, um, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, all these countries that depended on America to to ship oil or to guard their seaways, they’re in big trouble, right? So, those countries I think are actually going to become less sovereign. It’s very possible that Iran becomes the power in West Asia. Russia becomes the power in North Asia and Europe, especially given that Western Europe now is cut off from both Russian and Middle Eastern oil. Very possible China becomes the power in East Asia. And India probably is doing going to do okay in South Asia, but India’s kind of in the middle. It’s somewhat dependent on America, but it’s not as dependent as as other other countries. Um, I think so I think it’s it’s situational. It’s it’s country by country, but the more America independent they are, like China, the better off That’s the That’s the ultimate example because they’ve got full stack everything. The better off they will be, the more sovereign they’ll be. But, other countries may see their sovereignty recede. And so, they will actually turn to the internet to balance China. I don’t think you can beat China. But, I think you can balance China. What do I mean by balance China? The only thing in the world with global economic scale comparable to China is the internet. That itself is an interesting observation, right? Because China, like, if we look around this room and we look around every desk and table and chair and window and so and so forth, then we track back who the manufacturer’s manufacturer is, it’s probably something in China, right? You know it’s funny? The same thing is true for the US military. Did I show you that graph? No, I haven’t seen it. Yeah, the US military is made in China. The Tomahawk, the JDAM, if you go to their supplier, supplier, supplier, it’s a Chinese factory. So, that’s put this graph in the in the show. Let’s put this graph in the show. It’s a It’s a study from Govini, uh $400 million study the Pentagon itself commissioned. The Pentagon’s own data, okay? That’s hilarious, unfortunately, resoundingly. So, what that means is China can just turn off the US military. It’s already over. That’s what people don’t get. Like all of this stuff the military industrial complex is all basically fake. I’m sure someone would challenge you on that, but yeah, go on. Well, I I they will challenge me, but basically it’s one of these things where That’s why the rare earth showdown China could just win, right? They know that they have manufacturing, like you can’t fight your factory. You know? And there’s a delusion within America that Like imagine a 98-year-old man and 80 years ago it was 1945 and he could bench press 300 lb. And now, 80 years later, he thinks he can just go out to the bench press and bench press 300 lb. That is how Uncle Sam thinks of itself. That it was the same guy who bench press 300 lb in 1945. And it is true, that is a true statement. In 1945 he was very strong. And that was their potential back then and so on. It’s a 41-year-old that hits home. Yeah, that hits home, exactly, exactly, right? You know? And uh so, the thing is that um they’re trying to kind of flex as if they’re in the 1945 America, but they’re not and global economic conditions are completely different and China is much closer to what 1945 America was. [sighs] So, um for all of those reasons, I would say A, you’re absolutely right that some civilization states are going to see their sovereignty increase. B, other states that were America-dependent are going to see their sovereignty decrease. C, the internet has already taken over aspects of sovereignty from the American state. Um and D, I think we’re going to see an interesting phenomenon that happens. So, what happens in the new world, right? What I think happens in the new world is it’s going to be communist first maximalist. Okay, so the Democrats basically uh the Biden Democrats did put up a fight against China, but the post-Biden Democrats basically are going to be essentially China subsidiaries. Mark Carney in a sense is the most important American Democrat even though he’s Canadian, and his model of Canada just aligning with China is going to be I think what Gavin Newsom and Mondani and Tim Walls and other blue state governors follow, especially given this Iranian uh war energy they’re going to need solar panels, electric cars, all that kind of stuff from China. So they’re going to just basically just not accept American tariffs on China, and that’s how blue states will trade in a line with China. And there’s said I think the MAGAs are going to basically turn Bitcoin maximalist and focus on Latin America. And so uh they are going to essentially have it’s it’s not just Venezuela, but it’s it’s essentially Texas, Florida, Suarez, Bukele, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Argentina, delay. There’s there’s a much more interest of MAGA in Latin America, and much more interest of Democrats for communist. And it’s a very ironic thing because Democrats for many years kept talking about how they were for democracy and against, you know, authoritarian this and that. And then they’re just going to become basically subsidiaries of China, I think. And the MAGAs for many years were like, “Oh, we’re going to stop the invasion of Latin America.” And they’re just going to give up and invade Latin America. I mean, which is, you know, like the darkly humorous in a sense, right? Um cuz they already kind of did with Venezuela, they’re going to do it for more, right? So that is how I see the new world going, but um and so that what that means is some countries increase sovereignty, some decrease, and others will turn to the internet as a balance against these other forces. I want to push you something delicate here for the next block. Sure. There’s something meta I think at the heart of our conversation and other conversations like this. When we have this creative tension Mhm. uh about what constitutes development and the future. And I think it’s about the self-conception of wealthy, successful tech titans. It feels like there’s a class of people in tech who’ve done, in some ways, incredibly amazing things, successful things, and at least in a narrow sense, are highly intelligent in the sense of IQ scores. And somewhere along the line, they felt like that set of intelligence and achievement gives them the right and credibility to act on behalf of the rest of society and imagine a future for society that is not within the usual democratic paradigm. Now, in some ways, this is no different to the tradition of old, where you have old barons and the rich class running for office. In some other ways, I think it’s different, though, in the sense that, because it’s tech, the entire idea here is to change the world. It’s not just to make money. And I wonder if it’s right to say that in some ways, what we’re seeing is the desire of tech giants and tech CEO class to imprint their worldview onto the world. Uh, they become almost the new philosopher kings, and they’re not content being part of the wealthy capitalist class and leaving politics to the politicians. They want to be, uh, ac- actively engaged in how politics operates and how, uh, the world is governed, as it were. So, that’s how I understand Peter Thiel when he says he no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible, and then he funds political careers that put that worldview into government, arguably, or when Andreesen publishes and manifesto saying that sustainability, social responsibility, and tech ethics are enemies and declaring we are the masters. Or when Elon does what he does in Doge, um I I don’t think this is about self-interest only. This is something more. This is about imprinting their view onto the world. And this is about the tech class telling everyone, we know better and we’re the masters. What do you think of that? So, um several several points here. So, first is uh I personally actually am very pro-democracy. I’ve actually published a talk on this called techno-democracy. Um I plan to be one of the largest supporters of open-source tools for democracy, media, equality, rule of law, and so on. I’ve already funded quite a lot of that. I’m going to fund a lot more publicly. Um and uh you know, the basic idea behind techno-democracy is just like we have on-chain currency, we can have on-chain votes where every vote counts cuz you can count all the votes. Um so then on on the specifics this is uh well, I need to give a little bit of context, all right? The The first context is tech is the newest of new money. It we are all immigrants or gay or whatever, gay immigrants or something like that, right? Like tech is very very very new money. My father came from a dirt floor in India. Marc Andreessen came up very very poor. Very few of the tech zillionaires have inherited wealth, you know, like Alex Karp is, you know, half black, half Jewish, and so on. Like many of them came from, you know, backgrounds that were not extremely central, you know, to to American society. They were not WASPs, right? Nothing against WASPs, but these are people who came from from, you know, non-traditional backgrounds. Let me put it like that, right? Um And so so we didn’t have like when I was growing up, you could not imagine somebody who was more marginal to the American experience than biology Sree Nivas and you know right like people would mispronounce my name you know I was like really a minority of a minority right definitely was not the tech baron or anything like that I was just a kid who was only brown kid in the school of 400 white kids and I just get beat up all the time and attacked all the time right? Um you know I they used to call me Gandhi and I’d say that’s not an insult and run. But it didn’t matter right? So uh so that the first thing is this is extremely extremely extremely new money and one way of emphasizing that in the 2000s there were articles in New York Times published saying Google’s toughest searches for a business model. The 2010s Facebook will never make a significant profit. Bitcoin will go to zero. All these things basically everything will fail Uber will fail everything is going to fail right? And these tech guys are such losers because they’re wasting so much money on these fripperies these fads these bubbles social media is a bubble cryptocurrencies are fads it’s all going to go to zero. What a waste why don’t they do something important right? That was basically the narrative for 20 years. Suddenly it completely flipped to why are they so important? Right? So it went from why do why don’t they do something important? Hey guys do something why don’t you do something of ambition and substance? Why do you keep doing these stupid cotton candy apps and so on to oh my god you’ve become too important. Right? So the only consistency is the negativity. All right? First we’re you know all losers and then we’re too successful. First we’re not doing things that are important then we’re doing things that are too important. Okay. I think the fundamental issue is that tech is new right? Like tech well Silicon Valley tech is it’s obviously geographically separate from where DC was. It’s um intellectually distinct because programming computers and math that’s numerical as opposed to to purely verbal right? It’s a different kind of person. But third, it’s demographically different. As I mentioned, there’s there’s many immigrants in tech, right? Indians, Chinese, Persians, and so on, Russians, that do not look like and do not have a lineage that maps to the northeast quarter of the United States, right? So, like that’s a demographic difference, right? And a big part of this is essentially anger, implicit anger over the rise of Asia, the rise of India, the rise of China, and the fact that, like in 1950, the global elite was entirely, basically, white Americans and somewhat Europeans, and now it’s not. And there’s a huge psychic anger on this in America, and it is especially among Democrats, but also Republicans, and it is manifested in, “Oh my god, who are these rich guys to tell us what to do?” Well, who are they to tell us what to do? Right? How did How did, like, Europeans, like, win control of all this stuff? By by basically having giant militaries and conquering everybody, right? The internet has not done that. The internet has persuaded, right? It’s literally people click buttons, completely voluntary, completely consensual. These billion-person networks, Bitcoin and and and so and so forth, they were built by individual acts of consent, zero coercion. Right? So, just in that sense, I think there’s already more legitimacy for the internet way of doing things. All the sort of idealistic libertarian nostrums of peace and trade and so and so forth have actually become more feasible with the internet, right? A million individual acts of consent can actually create something cool. So, then the next point is um tech guys did not want to get involved in politics. You should know this this is so important to understand. I can give you so many citations on this. Thiel is extreme exception, okay? And I’ll come back to Peter for a second, but um all we want to do is build things. I I, you know, until age 33, I never gave a single public address. Until age 30, I had $0 in my bank account. Did I tell you that? Yeah, until age 30, all I did every day is I woke up home and then meditate on mathematics. That’s all I did, right? I was just a career academic. I liked math. And uh and the only reason I got into tech was um So I was in biotech and you know, like DNA sequencing was was something where the more rows of data you have, the more signal you get for understanding complex diseases for example. And I realized one day, oh, if I get a grant and I have to spend a thousand dollars per row of data, I can only get a thousand rows of data for a million dollars. But if I can make a profit of even fifty dollars a row, then I could get a hundred thousand rows. There’s no upper limit. And so actually to do the best I could for public health, I need to actually start a private company. That was a non-obvious conclusion that I was led to logically, that’s why I started my first company. And then I learned a lot of things on route in that. I learned how much the regulatory state was an obstacle, the degree to which so many things from regenerative medicine stem cells are being held back by regulations, and that’s how that’s how I got into tech. And then I realized that the political system was a barrier and so on. Okay. My point is um Tech guys were not political. In fact, the entire narrative for many years was leave politics to politicians, just build. Don’t argue, just build, right? Then what happened was, you know, Lenin has a saying which is you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you, right? What happened was we got successful enough in tech that Google and Facebook revenue, especially after the financial crisis, the iPhone and so on, all went vertical and newspaper revenue crashed. So we took over the classified business, the advertising business, and so strongholds of the Democrats the internet disrupted. That is what made them mad. It’s not that we got involved in politics for the sake of it, it’s that our businesses became successful enough purely over things nobody built Facebook to disrupt the media. Nobody built Twitter to disrupt politics. They built it for like tweeting your breakfast. Okay, it was not built for that purpose, right? It was It’s like imagine a kid in an elevator who just gets super strong and like, you know, his muscles are crushing things up against the wall or whatever. That’s what happened, right? It was not an intentional kind of act. It was just like, let’s build something cool see where it goes. The nature of internet is it could compound and scale and so on and so forth. So it got much much much bigger than anybody realized. [sighs] Then what happened is by the mid-2010s, suddenly we found ourselves made into the villain. Like all of these people who had come from all around the world were suddenly called evil, racist, Nazis, whatever, whatever. And you look left and be like, this is, you know, I mean, it’s all immigrants. What what are we talking about here? These are These are some of And And honestly, to be very honest, these are computer programmers. They’re really not alpha males, okay? In general, right? This entire tech bro stereotype, these were not muscular guys. These were not people who are stuffing other people into lockers. These were nerds, right? As we’re recording this, Balaji, we’ve been reading what’s happening in the US between Altman and Musk. Ah. And it does uh speak to your point about maybe they’re not alphas after all. And there’s a lot of apparent pettiness between some of these guys. Yeah, I mean, like the thing is, put it like this, like tech guys were not uh They’re just not They just weren’t physically aggressive or anything like that. They were really the people who were interested in books, right? They were interested in math. So what happened is in the late 2010s, tech was under constant attack, right? Travis Kalanick was canceled, who’s the CEO of Uber, Tom Preston-Werner, CEO of GitHub, you know, Steve Jurvetson, Dave McClure, all kinds of people were canceled, canceled, canceled, canceled because the Democrats were so mad that we had disrupted their advertising and classified business. That’s really the I think the core of it, right? There’s more to it than that, but that’s a big part of it. And so only then And then in the Biden administration, they declared total war on cryptocurrency, on AI. Like there’s a Biden regulation that said you can’t have more than this amount of compute for AI. There there all kinds of Biden prosecutions against cryptocurrency companies. So, tech guys who had wanted to be completely apolitical were backed into a corner. And they’re basically told, your business will die or again, involve in politics. Because you may not be doing politics, but politics is doing you. So, it’s completely the most involuntary involvement I can possibly imagine, okay? And I can give 500 references on this and show this, okay? That’s That’s it. Now, B. On the specific remarks of these folks, let me take them in in in order, right? Why did Elon want to do Doge? Because he sees a $175 trillion compounding debt of the US, right? Yes, you’re absolutely right that he could be like a million other capitalists and just sit on the beach and drink mai tais. But he didn’t do that. He had a public spirit. He wanted to try to save the country and save the budget from this impending fiscal cliff. Did he Did he do it? No. In fact, he said, “Did my best.” Even Elon couldn’t do it. Even our best guy, in a sense, like the best techno-capitalist perhaps ever, could not cut the US federal budget, which is one of the reasons I think America’s decline is inevitable. But he tried, and no one’s ever happy when you do budget cuts, by the way. It’s like losing weight, right? It always sucks. It’s always painful, right? the problem with LG is not that he didn’t succeed in reducing the debt or the deficit. It’s what he cut. And the many lives that have been lost because of some of those cuts. I mean, I I I know people say that, like USAID and so and so forth. But I think the reason they say that is many Democrat jobs that were lost. I I wouldn’t be surprised if it net saved lives. Because the the meddling of the US empire in many parts of the world has been net very negative. They cause all these crazy color revolutions and so and so forth, right? So, like I think American involvement in the Middle East has been a total disaster, right? I’ve talked about this I mean, I’m this is obvious, right? But like what they did in Libya, you know, all across Middle East, right? So, I’m very skeptical that there’s a clear cause-effect of cutting the American foreign service. In certainly last 20 years all of a sudden has caused a lot of wars in my view, right? Um, so that at least let’s put that into question as to whether that was bad or good or not, right? Um, certainly they’re complaining at a loud volume whether it was actually bad or not. I think more to the point it was ineffectual in its desired goal of cutting the federal bureaucracy didn’t even make a dent in spending which means the thing is going to go to zero. It might have an inflationary collapse where they print away the debt but it’s still going to default on its debt somehow. Okay. So that’s that’s what Elon did to Dodge. Why did Mark say, you know, sustainability and so on or This is a really deep point and I wanted to see if okay. You know how communism would promise all kinds of goodies for the people and the workers but they’d actually end up in a gulag? Right? So you use the words of like, you know, the Soviet Union the Bolsheviks, right? Would say land peace and bread and then people would believe them they’d end up like dead in a gulag or whatever they’re starving to death unfortunately, right? And obviously, you know, like I know Chinese communism and so on has changed that and whatnot but but let’s just say historically that was a that was a good thing. One of the trickiest parts is that what happened in America was something similar. Democrats took words that I believe in like public service, equality, democracy, sustainability and so on and they corrupted them to just turn them into graft for the party. For example, John Podesta $370 billion climate fund. Did Did anything come out of that? No. All the solar stuff is coming from Elon or or China. Okay. All the electric cars are Elon or China. Nothing is coming out of $370 billion for this climate fund, right? The $100 billion California train. Total graft. There’s not even a mile of track laid it just went to Democrat unions. The billion dollars a year in San Francisco for the homeless industrial complex. All these NGOs get hundreds of millions of dollars and they hand out literally syringes to drug addicts. It’s like the opium wars but waged on San Francisco streets. They hand out the syringes to drug addicts because the more drug addicts the more their budget, right? So the point is that those words that I believe in that I think you believe in, public service, the public good, these were corrupted and turned into a scam by essentially Democrat Party activists and it was all graft. And that’s now becoming obvious to people that they didn’t care about the people, they care about the party. That doesn’t mean that those words aren’t good words. But what Andreessen is saying in that post is he was against the corruption of those words, right? In in practice, does he back Elon for sustainability? He absolutely does, right? Does he believe in like capitalism and rule of law? Of course he does, right? But what those words had come to mean in the American context, it’s like um it’s like the Soviet Union talking about the people and they meant the party, right? So, people Now now I will grant this. Unfortunately, some good chunk of people on the right overreacted to the left’s corruption of words to reject them entirely. So, now you have two groups where the first would pretend that they were interested in the developing world or what have you and then they would just like publish them. And the second doesn’t even pretend. Okay? [laughter] That’s bad, right? And the reason that’s bad is uh for many reasons it destabilizes, but I think we can redefine a center which is um win-win and enlightened self-interest. The reason you want rule of law, the reason you want rule of code is so that everything isn’t violence, right? That’s why I believe in smart contracts, that’s why I believe in cryptocurrency, that’s why I believe in decentralization and these kinds of things. I think those reflect the best of American values, the center. Okay. Then finally on what Thiel said was freedom and democracy, I think that’s been also taken out of context. What he’s talking about is majoritarian trampling of minority rights. Like if you have 85% of people vote for something that that oppresses 15% of people, then you know, the democracy of 85% can be against the freedom of the 15%. It’s the tension between majority and minoritarian rights. There’s a way of reconciling that, which is you let both get what they want. With exit, the minority can exit and leave and build their own society, and the majority gets majority control, right? So, I I don’t think these guys are What I think what’s happened is the companies they’ve funded, the companies that we’ve built, have disrupted much of the 20th century Democrat and in some case Republican Americans, and they’re just mad. And because they’re mad, then we’re the villains. One last thing I’ll say, you you said, “Why are we philosophers and so and so forth?” Okay, I’ll actually give an answer, and you you may be susceptible to this as well. The The tech founder starts as chief engineer and ends up lead psychologist. Okay, why is that? Because at first you’re telling computers, you know, like, “Hey, do this, do that, whatever.” And then eventually you’re managing teams of humans, which are much more emotional than computers are. So, you actually start reading all the great philosophers, and you know, you start sounding like a stoic or, you know, something like that, because you’re dealing with humans. And humans, like, human nature hasn’t changed in thousands of years. So, that’s why the interest in philosophy, because you’re basically running micro experiments in community, or in some cases macro. For example, Amazon has literally a million employees. That’s bigger than dozens of sovereign states, and he built that whole organization from scratch, right? Google, Meta, these are bigger than many sovereign states, and certainly our revenue is bigger than many sovereign states, right? Um if you were to take the top tech companies, they are comfortably in like the top 30 countries globally in terms of revenue, and it’s not taxation either, it’s it’s it’s revenue. So, I think that’s my last point. I think these guys are not simply delusional or what have you. There’s a global meritocratic search to find an Elon Musk, a Sundar Pichai, right? To find like the Cauldron founders, a Nigerian tech founder, right? Like Nigeria, unfortunately, wouldn’t have given them that opportunity, but the internet did. So, we have Thomas Jefferson’s natural aristocracy. We search the world, we find this talent. That talent demographically doesn’t look like the old America. That’s part of what the conflict is. It doesn’t There’s obviously some who are still drawn from the old America, don’t get me wrong. Old America still has a lot of smart people, but it’s not 100% looking like that. So, that’s a big part of where the conflict is. What you’ve described in these last few minutes touches on the psychology of these tech titans. But, I’ve heard a slightly less charitable reading of what occurred. And I’ve heard it said that to understand the shift of the tech class thinking of all politics over the last 10 years, you have to understand what happened in the last 10 years. And what essentially happened was that these were people who felt that they had a implicit deal with society. And the deal was, you build transformative things, you get very rich, you donate, you support DEI, and in return, you get wealth, but equally importantly, you get social capital and recognition. You get to be the good guys. And for a while, it felt like that bargain worked. And then sometime in 2010s, the bargain broke. Employees pushed back, taking confrontations public, the media turned, regulators investigated, the Democratic Party which they funded, and maybe this is where my thoughts are somewhat aligned with yours, put people in charge that saw them as the problem, not the solution. They were no longer the good guys. And the response wasn’t to ask whether some of these criticisms were merited. The response was one of anger, betrayal. And along comes someone that says the problem isn’t you, the tech class. The problem is them. And that’s where the bargain broke. Tell me what you think about that reading. So, what you’re referring to is I think Mark and Ben’s podcast where they talk about the deal and so and so forth. And there’s some truth to that, I think. Um the Okay, several things I can say. First is, earlier, when you were giving a defense of America, the defense was entirely in terms of its performance in tech. You weren’t saying, oh, Democrats built great cities. You weren’t saying, Republicans have managed the budget well. You can’t defend it. You weren’t saying Republicans have conducted themselves with decorum on the world stage or that Democrats have, you know, managed to to to kind of promote democracy abroad and so and so forth. Democrats probably have failed. The only people who succeeded are the tech guys. That we’ll start there in America, right? That’s the only leadership class that’s done anything. Um and when I mean anything, I mean like reusable rockets and electric cars. Elon himself has done like half of it or what have you, right? But totally ubiquitous and free international payments, communications, AI. I mean there there there’s a lot of stuff that people have done, right? Like in in it’s it’s pretty substantial, I think. Um and so and moreover they did that without any tax revenue, right? That was completely opt-in and volitional. It was also in a sense a much more globally diverse talent base, right? So I I want to take that earlier point and then put it here because it’s not like the tech guys were totally delusional to think that they were actually okay at being CEOs because they were chosen as CEOs. Every single worker that works for Elon or Mark or somebody chose to be there and can leave and is quite highly paid. In fact, those are some of the best jobs that were created and those jobs didn’t even exist 10 or 20 years ago, right? And plus, by the way, like tech this may be an obvious point. There’s no smoke stacks. There’s no carbon or coal for the most part, right? Like this is something which is the cleanest of industries. Literally hitting keys on a keyboard, right? You can’t say there are natural resources taken or anything like that, right? Yes, it’s true data centers are being built now, but even those data centers are typically clean energy and so and so forth. I know people get mad at them anyway, but fine, okay? So it’s not like emitting smoke and coal and emissions, okay? So putting all that all together, uh had See, you actually have a very different outcome in this side of the world, I think, right? Why? Because here you actually have competent governments. When I come to Malaysia, when I come to Singapore, when I come to India, when I visit China, in general, public infrastructure has been improving every year, right? So, here, I think there’s a much better deal or bargain, where you can just be an entrepreneur, and then you walk down the street, and you don’t need to get involved in politics, cuz the politicians, yes, they took tax revenue, but they didn’t steal it, right? Like, in America, the Democrats just stole the money. Unfortunately. I think there will be many people in the global majority and in Asia who would challenge you on that point, that there is some theft. Yes, fine, [clears throat] but it’s a lot Maybe so, but it’s like For example, the hundred billion dollar California train is a perfect example. That didn’t get built at all, right? It’s one thing if even 50% was stolen, but the train still got built. It just didn’t get built at all, right? So, the graft in America, unfortunately, and it’s legal graft, by the way. It’s not necessarily like And this is the thing, when the West When the West falsifies something, it it it has like a hundred thousand union guys paid a hundred thousand dollars, right? It’s all legal and papered up, and so on and so forth. It’s not like one guy is just stealing all the money in a in a in a below board way. It’s worse than that. It’s an above board It’s a political coalition, which is paid to do nothing, right? And um So, so that is the issue, right? The issue is Uh and part of it, by the way, these two things compound each other in the following way. When the government is so incompetent, or or, you know, the Democrats have stolen so much money, you don’t want to work with those people. So, instead of what happens, you go into tech. So, all the quantitative and rational people go into tech, and then that makes the government dumber still. You see what I’m saying? It’s a negative feedback effect. They go to the cloud rather than the land. [sighs and gasps] So, this is they go to the network rather than the state, right? Again, the East has a much more functional relationship. Um you know, when I talk to ministers here, I’m struck by how tech-savvy they are, right? Like, you know, you are I would call myself a very actually a very state-friendly network person, and you’re a very network-savvy state person. Very roughly, right? It’s very roughly generalized, right? Um because I’m not an anarchist. I believe in rule of law. I believe in respecting an elected government and working with them. And do when in Rome, do as the Romans do. America’s so this gives some context. Now, the the deal thing let me talk about that for a second. What you’re referring to is the sort of center like tech used to be a wing of the Democrats. Like pre if everyone Steve Jobs died in 2011, even during Occupy Wall Street, they held up their iPhones for Steve Jobs. Why was that? Because tech wasn’t considered to be like oil or or or gas or or these mining, logging. These are Republican industries. Tech was clean. Tech was out of academia. Tech was all academics and so forth. Just hitting keys. And most importantly, it was just like a tiny thing within the Democrat Party of unions and feminists and so and so forth. Just like one small little little wing there, right? Um what happened was because after the financial crisis, everybody was looking for ways to save money. And so all the budget shifted out of newspaper advertising and classifieds into the internet. And Google and Facebook went vertical. The iPhone went vertical. So, by 2013, the adaptation happened where the newspapers and the Democrats said, “Wait a second. I don’t care if tech calls itself Democrat. We’re going to push them out because they’re coming for too much.” Tech was disrupting Madison Avenue. They’re disrupting, you know, Hollywood. Disrupting everything with Netflix, right? And I gave a talk actually anticipating this at that time, by the way. 13 years ago, I saw this coming. Uh a talk titled Silicon Valley’s ultimate exit. Where even 13 years ago, I could see that because we were all minorities with funny names and we didn’t have generations in America, that we were going to win economically and we’re going to lose politically. And that we’d eventually have to go and find our own like, you know, jurisdictions, right? Like our own safe places, basically, right? And that’s kind of played out as I expected because now in 2026, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Zuck, Thiel, Musk have all had to leave California. Like in 2013, I can’t tell you how unusual a call that was for me to say at the height of Silicon Valley seeming power that it was actually going to go to zero and we needed to find our own thing. But I could see the stress tensions not getting resolved in this way. And that’s that’s why the deal evaporated. The deal evaporated because tech guys were disrupting too much of the Democratic power base, disrupting Hollywood, disrupting the New York Times, disrupting Madison Avenue, and so therefore it didn’t matter if you donated. If you donated, you’re still a villain because you’d uh then the net effect of tech was reducing Democrat power. That’s fundamentally what it was. Last one on this block. I wonder what your thoughts are if you cast your mind forwards. And what would you want to make sure happens in the way that tech conducts itself [sighs] so that you have less of this tension. And this tension may not now come from a democ- democratic establishment but it may come, say, globally, forget America on its own. People protesting about data centers, which is happening in America, is happening in Malaysia. Uh or people starting to question the ethics of social media and all the rest of it that you, I’m sure, have heard. How can tech respond in a way that feels empathetic to their actual concerns? So, I think about this a lot. And um so, first is we are, as I said, new money. But uh we can and should do a lot more in the way of public works. And so, let me tell you what I personally plan to do and then also what I think we should do globally, right? So, uh with with Amjad, my my friend Amjad, we’re going to be announcing the Network School Replit Global Merit Scholarship exam where anyone from anywhere can take a test online, then they come to Network School to take an in-person test, and if they do well, then we get them a tech job, right? And we start with tech cuz we understand that well, we can move it to content, we can move it to others. I want to have people who are good software engineers in supply chain. I understand you were actually CEO of an oil company, right? For a while, right? So you understand the oil and gas, you know, space. I’d like to have tech people go into much more need rather than want, right? So oil, fertilizer, farms, all this kind of stuff is going to need it due to the supply chain crisis, right? Energy, the the the real economy, right? So that’s a combination of A, talent search, B, education, C, jobs, also microtasks, like $1,000 tasks so cuz that’s often a good job interview. If you can code this, then we can hire you. If you can If you can make a good explainer video on this, we can hire you, right? And then putting people into the real economy. So that is, you know how Leland Stanford was he endowed Stanford University with his fortune. I have been fortunate enough to to have enough capital to do that. So that’s what I’m going to do with Network School. I want to provide an education for the people of the world. As I said, for the first 30-something years of my life, I was an academic, right? It’s basically been a surprising detour to do what I’ve done, right? And in a sense, I sort of want to get back to basics on that. I want to train grad students, educate them, teach them what I know. I You know, I have a PhD in electrical engineering and MS in chemical engineering. I taught computational genomics and stats at Stanford. And the the unfortunate thing is Stanford itself is no longer the right place for this. Why? You can’t get student visas to the US anymore. It’s hard to even get worker visas, H-1B. It’s the entire path of I, you know, immigrate to America, I study at Stanford, you know, with the F-1 student visa, get an H-1B, you know, at a at a company, then I get my citizenship or green card, I start a company in Silicon Valley, incorporate in Delaware, headquarter in California, go public in New York. Every single piece of that pipeline is being broken. And why? Because like for example, Delaware is no longer a reliable place for incorporation. That’s why Elon and Eyal Glice can see they’ve all left. California as I mentioned, the tech billionaires have left. New York, it’s I think it’s doubtful that Mumtaz is going to persist with NYSE and NASDAQ if he’s going after Ken Griffin and other kinds of things there. Um Trump has gone after student visas, work visas. So it’s both the right and the left basically breaking the flows of talent and capital that made America what it was. What I think we need to do is open up those flows of talent and capital for the world and actually have So something like Network School is something where we have one in Malaysia, we have one in perhaps in in Bangalore, we’ll have one in, you know, maybe the Middle East. Like I wanted to do one in the Middle East. Obviously this whole war is going on, but once one, you know, once that, you know, dies down, um you know, Poland, Latin America, and so and so forth, where the opportunities that my father had and that he was able to give to me, I can give to others, right? That’s what I can do personally. That’s where the rest of my time is going to be spent. Okay. So uh so that is And just to be credible as an entrepreneur, that sounds fantastic, but maybe share with the listeners what’s the model there for your commercial Oh yeah, sure. Sure. So NS.com scholarship, the the reason it’s sustainable, so this is another definition of sustainable, is we place people at companies and then um if they get a job, those companies pay referral bonuses, right? So it costs nothing to the person, but you know, a good engineer is worth 10,000 to 8,000 in a referral bonus. And so we take the risk of training that person, and then if we place them, then ta-da, right? So that costs nothing to the person we’re bringing in, and the company is happy to pay it. So I think that’s a win-win, right? Um and that’s why we can continue doing it, right? Like Samuel Gompers once said um that and this is like a union leader. He’s like the biggest mistake any CEO can make is not making enough of profits to pay the workers. Right? So, you know, you That’s That’s a funny way of putting it, right? So, you know, you profitability is sustainability, right? With that said, I think um we can charge much much much much much less in both time and money than American academia, which has gotten wildly expensive, right? So, by having it free and global, that’s a lot better than you know, $50,000 a year and and America-based and taking 4 years, right? Okay. So, I think this is what I mean by internet-based improvements. So, that’s one piece of what I’m doing. Another piece of what I’m doing is um we’re going to be launching ns.com media for citizen journalism, okay? So, uh I don’t believe that what is true should be mediated by some families in New York that have inherited newspapers, the Sulzbergers, the Newhouses, right? Like they they publish this stuff in the passive voice, where it’s like The New York Times has this, New York Times has that, New York Times has obtained. And that’s just a corporation that was inherited by the Sulzberger family, okay? I think that we need to decentralize um the collection and dissemination of truth. So, citizen journalism, what does that mean? That means um crypto prizes for uh somebody where I can pay them anywhere in the world. That’s why I use crypto. So, anybody who’s got a phone, I can I can pay them to, for example, uh give me a summary of everything that happened on in robotics in China this week, right? Tell me about all of the um special economic zone programs that Malaysia has set up. Uh tell me about the um you know, the new program that India is doing with thorium and how maybe other countries can adopt nuclear energy and so on. Especially the things that are, you know, addressing the supply chain crisis and whatnot. And that is a model where uh I think the part that’s going to be very novel about that, it’s like totally obvious but also novel, is that tech is much bigger than America. There’s so many more Anglophones, so many more English speakers outside America than Americans even realize. And global tech is actually at least 50% attack and it’s radically under covered. Arguably it’s more than 50% because all the Chinese hardware stuff is not being covered. India’s UPI is not being covered. All the stuff that’s happening in ASEAN not being covered. So we’ll cover that. And we’ll cover that in such a way that the average Malaysian could just go to ns.com media, click a button, boom, report something, get 100 bucks in in cryptocurrency, right? Which is a pretty good amount here. It’s like 400 MYR. Not not too bad, right? And I can carry out that on for a long period of time, right? Because we have done well, right? So So we can we can actually do a lot, right? As I said, we put tens of millions of MYR into Malaysia. We’re going to put a lot more. What that does, by the way, is that creates a new class of people who are telling their own stories, right? With the i video, you can tell Malaysia’s story. You don’t have to wait for Hollywood. When is Hollywood going to make a biopic about, you know, how Malaysia became independent and knit together the country? It’ll never do that. But we can fund locals to that. And we can also keep it positive. That’s very important, right? I think too much of social media is if it bleeds, it leads, and it’s negative. We want this to be positive and constructive. And it’s something where people are proud, positive patriotism, not negative nationalism. Every country has a story and many of those Hollywood has not told those stories. They just portray like, you know, oh India’s a third world country and Muslims are fundamentalist and Chinese people have, you know, like like whatever. There’s all these stereotypes people have of different cultures, right? Hollywood has done that because Hollywood’s in its own bubble. We can now decentralize Hollywood. So that’s NS media. So it’s both citizen journalism, citizen media. Third thing with NS media, you’ve got the scholarship. Yes. And you got a third thing. Third thing is democracy, right? So techno-democracy. This is particularly relevant in America, less so in the East, okay? In India, for example, they managed to count all the votes in one day, okay? Over a billion person country. Great. Amazing. India doesn’t need that much about what I’m about to say. But America does. Techno-democracy is essentially the same technology that that we can use to securely send one Bitcoin, we can use to securely record one vote. For what I call the social smart contract. And this is a way of um if let’s say a company has a piece of territory both physical and digital, this is a way of having limited government over that. Like uh this is a little bit technical, but you know, when you click in Google OAuth and it says give your email and these permissions to another website, that’s giving a third-party app a limited set of permissions. You could do that for a third political party. You literally read the terms of service and you say, “I’m giving these permissions but not these.” You click yes, and that’s what a digital vote would be. It’s like signing a social smart contract. That’s a way of restoring trust in consensual democratic government. And it’s actually the opposite of oh, the tech guy can do anything. This is literally, logically, digitally constrained government, right? Cuz that’s the thing is when we talked earlier, like I think there’s a incorrect view that you know, like tech guys want to just be completely unconstrained everything. Actually, um they’re constrained by physics, they’re constrained by math, they’re constrained by rule of code. That’s why tech guys love cryptocurrency because the system of constraints around the world that binds everybody including themselves is reliable, it’s programmatic, right? Um and when we’re proving that, it’s actually establishes a system which binds both the CEO and the worker, both the resident and the proprietor in a written set of rules that everybody can verify, right? So it’s the third major thing. So it means I’m funding education, funding media, funding democracy cuz I actually believe in those things. And because I I I started out in that area things only because the Democrat Party became corrupted, but I still believe in what those old values were. Okay. Now, more broadly, I can’t speak for everybody in tech. It’s it’s a huge community. Um different people are doing their duty as they see it, right? A good chunk of them, for example, think of themselves as extremely multi-generationally Americans. They’re trying to repair America. You know, there’s a uh a valor in that as well, okay? Um others have for example gone back to India, right? And they’re built up India like a lot of my, you know, colleagues, relatives, and so on and so forth have done that. And India’s rising. Um, I think you’re going to see you know, Malaysia may consider something. Do you know what the OCI card is? Overseas citizen of India. Um, I’m not sure if Malaysia has this, but there’s 1.8 million Malaysians abroad, roughly, right? And I and I wouldn’t be surprised to see more come back to Malaysia as the country is rising. You know, it’s doing doing well now, right? And um, so you might consider something like the Malaysian version of the OCI. It basically means it allows anybody of Indian descent to kind of come back to Malaysia or what have you. Um, other things tech guys should do. Fundamentally, I think we want to have provable legitimacy, not simply competency. Competency is can you execute? That’s the capitalist side of the house. I think that’s important. Legitimacy is the democratic side of the house. Do people support you? And you kind of need both. And we need to focus on this part of things. For me, that’s education, media, democracy. [snorts] You shared a lot about the exciting things that you’re planning to do in NS in your first iteration of NS in Johor. How much of that has come to fruition? Good question. So, as I said, we’ve already we we’ve invested I mean, we’re 18 months old, right? So, it’s it’s it’s still new. We brought you know, Brian Johnson, Vitalik Buterin, Jason Calacanis, David from the All-In podcast. So, all these tech zillionaires are coming to Malaysia, Make sure they come on this podcast. I I will I will have them come on this podcast. I’ll definitely invite, right? Um, but but even then, they’re they’re I mean, they, you know, just having people come through the country and they’re like, “Oh, this is a pretty nice place, right?” You know, many Americans, I’m not saying those four, but many Americans just never see images of anything other The only country outside America they think is developed is Japan, maybe South Korea, right? They really think everything is a third world country. Their their memory is like set in the ’80s or the ’90s partly because of Hollywood shows how nice the rest of the world has gotten, it makes Americans feel even worse at their, you know, kind of satellite client, right? So, just having global people come here, I think is that’s one one piece. So, that’s something we’ve definitely done. We’ve had dozens of of speakers and stuff come through. Um number two is we’re starting to build this up as uh an alternate place for global businesses to set up. So, Coinbase set up an office at Never School, uh Solana, and uh you know, the uh some noble noble derby con startups like a quantum computing startup has set up there. So, this is a place where they’re hiring Malaysians for jobs, and they’re also building global businesses out of out of uh Never School. So, that’s over time. I mean, those take time to grow, but that’s already there. That’s pretty good, I think, first 18 months. The third thing is we’re actually I mentioned the white-collar stuff. So, we’re also funding, you know, Malaysian entrepreneurs, right? Uh making angel investments across the ecosystem because as I said, there’s CoinGecko, there’s Etherscan. There’s a lot of great talent here that’s in my view underpriced on the world stage. And once I invest in somebody, typically other people tend to also say yeah, they they tend to follow on, right? So, I can be sort of a catalyst investment, right? Um and uh the the cool thing about that is um we’re also sort of a meetup point because a lot of these I mean, Kuala Lumpur is great, Cyberjaya is great, but there’s something special about Malaysians interacting with the world, interacting with Singapore and everything all in kind of one ecosystem. So, we have peo- we have Russians here, we have, you know, Latin Americans, we have Indians, we have we have people from all over. You’ve been there, right? It’s pretty pretty cool place in that sense. People from more than 100 countries come to Never School. So, you cross-pollinate just with the Straits of Malacca is, you know, you have all these ships coming through. There are the all these internationally flagged ships. Now you have internationally flagged people. That’s always been, I think, for hundreds of years a part of Malaysian culture has been that openness to the world as an entrepre- for physical goods. Now it is for digital goods. So, it’s almost exactly at same position on the on the map as well. Um other things. Oh, yeah. So, as I mentioned, we support the white-collar side of things, but also the blue-collar side, right? So, we are the number one customer of There’s a There’s a local lady who does laundry, and we became her number one customer. We’re basically like almost all of her business. So, like we’re the number one customer of various, you know, like food service providers. And um you know, there’s there’s hair cutters. The entire local economy of that particular location of Forest City, which had been quite, you know, let’s say that uh it had been built as a reclaimed island, and there hadn’t been a lot of people there, right? Us arriving there I see you’re quite you’re quite adept at language now. Well, I’m getting better. I’m getting better, right? Let’s say, you know, by the way, one of the reasons we chose Forest City is um you know, 10 years ago that was ocean, right? Like maybe maybe 2015, 2014. If you go to Google Earth, you type in Forest City, and you rewind the time time thing. It’s a great visual to show. You go to 2014, it’s just ocean there, right? So, it’s as close to sea setting as you could get, right? Like truly reclaimed land, denovo land, right? So, there’s no historical claim on it in in some sense. And it’s a cool prototype in that sense as well, where if you wanted to create a new city without any property rights issues on it, guess what? You can apply this playbook off the coast of any other country potentially, right? So, that’s a very interesting. It’s almost like an IP export from this area as well. Anyway, Forest City was let’s call it under-occupied, right? And uh so that all these empty apartments opposite problem of San Francisco, which had lots of demand, but not supply. So, we came in, and it was kind of like pouring water on parched soil, where all kinds of local businesses we just became their number one customer, right? And so uh and this is how I think we’re providing global revenue, talent, and so on for white-collar and blue-collar workers. And this is I think a success of the Malaysian government’s policies, because they set up the incentives to bring in MM2H and D rental and tech companies and it’s bearing fruit. It’s actually a testament to the Malaysian government overall. And so anyway, I just say I’m I’m a I’m a guest here and I plan to conduct myself as a guest, but as a value add guest, right? And uh that’s it. But I do have enjoyed this conversation a lot. I wonder if you could kind of close with something a bit more reflective or self-reflective. Sure. I know that there’s a lot of our conversation is about our slightly different understanding of words and what sovereignty actually means and what emotions get triggered when certain words are used. I wonder if you could reflect on your time, not just here, but across your career. What have you learned about communication and how important it is to convey what you actually mean so that it doesn’t get misunderstood. Well, I think one of the things the internet does is it takes a comment that made sense in an American context five or 10 years ago and it makes it seem like very current in a totally different cultural context on the side of the world. Like as an example, like like a thumbs up is polite over here. It’s like cool, right? But in some countries that’s like a profane gesture. And so if the bright, you know, you didn’t mean anything by it, but it can be perceived completely differently in a different country in a different context without that person understanding that you didn’t mean anything by it, right? So part of it is that the internet has facilitated context collapse. This by the way is another piece of things I’ll actually be critical of tech in a different way, right? As much as I like tech, um there is definitely too much emphasis on screen time, on digital, on artificial and so on and so forth. And I think we need a big correction back to the real world, right? Less time online, less AI, more human, um less fake, more real and so on and so forth. Never tool is actually part of that in terms of being an in-person kind of community. Um but I will agree that part [snorts] of the context collapse is definitely due to the internet making it possible for people to throw things around like this. In general um though, I think in a long career, I’ve been very consistent in what I stand for. Like people kind of know I stand for peace, trade, internationalism, capitalism, and you know, I think I’ve stood up for those values over a long period of time. Uh and sometimes people will say, “Oh my god, why aren’t you, you know, why why why why aren’t you fighting for America? Why aren’t you loyal enough to this?” Or like, “Why are you against tariffs?” And so and so forth. Or you know, you know, like and whatnot. Um and I I will I just try to be honest and and consistent in terms of how I I approach things. I I can’t always succeed, but at least my consistency, I hope, makes people know where I’m coming from. And do you find that as you grow older, you become more empathetic to people who may disagree with you? Or do you get more hardened? I think definitely uh so empathetic I think is definitely the case, but um the thing is that nobody cared what TechCrunch thought 10 years ago, right? I said we’re like the newest of new money. We We were losers. Facebook’s going to zero, right? It’s a bad fad. It’s a bubble, right? So, uh the position of um I think the most important thing that I want to do is build win-win coalitions that extend beyond companies to communities into cities and such that people know that they don’t have to trust what I’m saying. They can actually look at their own personal balance in many senses of the term. Like they’re getting fitter every day, right? They are They’re having more time with friends because they’re hanging out with them in person. They have more leisure time because robots are doing things for them. Their bank balance is going up. Generally, their life is getting better. I you know, we can’t promise everything is happening well every single day, but in general, life is getting better. That is So, what I want to do is apply the same formulas that we have applied successfully at our companies to our communities and to our cities. Last question, Balaji, as always, what’s one thing you’ve changed your mind on? What have I changed my mind on? Oh, could be completely Yeah, unrelated to everything we talked about. Sure. Um I have realized that actually So, this was this is something that was a 10% thing that’s coming up to a 100% thing. So, it wasn’t at zero before. Um but I’ve realized that families are going to be the core of Network School. Okay. So, we have ns.com families, right? And um So, I am a you Okay, you know, people say, “Oh, you’re a tech bro.” But like I am for the tech dad and the tech mom and the tech kids and the tech couples and so on and so forth. And really, obviously, I’m for people who aren’t tech as well, but I just start with that because then if it works for that, then it works for other groups typically. Um and what we’re doing at NS, what I found is very interesting is that we now have dozens of families and children there and and babies and whatnot. And we’re trying to build the best society in the world for young families to raise kids where, for example, we have um So, let me let me give a little bit cuz you asked, right? The first thing we did is we optimized the daily loop for the tech worker to wake up, get coffee, lift weights, go to the cafe, you know, maybe take a nap, work again, you know, go to a conference being and you’ve seen how close the loop it is. And so, a lot of people get a lot of work done. Like Peter Young, you know, Mr. Money thought it was like he got more done in like 3 days and 2 weeks. He said something like this, right? Okay. But now what we’ve done is we’re starting to do that for young mothers. That mother is also often a tech worker. And now we add, oh, she can drop off the baby at at daycare or drop-off, right? And they can take care of it. Then she can go and work for a while. She can come back, play with the baby. Um or then she goes and her younger child or older child, rather, is learning math, learning Mandarin. And she can track with a digital report card and see that he’s getting the questions right. And because it’s so close and because she knows the nannies, um she feels confident that she can flip to her phone and just see that everything is fine, then flip back to work and whatnot. And so the same proximity that we did for the for the tech worker, we can have for the tech mother, right? And that’s proving to be a big hit. And so you know, there’s two different kinds of ways startups size were created in the past, or the Wild West and the Puritans. The Wild West was all single men, the Puritans was like families coming. And so um families as the core of these new this new city, I think is something which I knew I wanted to do, but I’ve been surprised at how well that’s working. Uh so that’s like something that I I somewhat changed my mind. I’m not completely, it wasn’t like it wasn’t like, “Oh my god, oh wow, I suddenly realized families are important.” But rather that the product we’re building for families is so vastly superior to what exists in SF or Seattle or LA, where it’s actively anti-family. So even getting to baseline is like good. And getting to great is like 10x better, if that makes any sense, right? So TLDR is I’m spending a lot more time thinking about how to optimize a young mother, young couple, young families’ daily lifestyle uh so that they can raise a family at at relatively inexpensive cost. Which I think is what I did. Thank you very much. This episode of Curry in Silicon was recorded at the AICB Center of Excellence in Kuala Lumpur. A world-class venue designed for corporate dialogue and business conversations. [music] [music] [music] [music] [music]