32 - Network State Conference 2026 - Niall Ferguson and Balaji on Reinventing Education

So, so British Empire meetup just got Neil just got off a plane and got here. Yeah. >> Yeah. Go ahead. >> I just got off the flight uh from London which some of you will know. Uh so don't expect high levels of coherence from me. I'll do my best. >> No, you uh you are the you know British gentleman from Central Casting. Um and >> I'm not a gentleman at all. I'm from Glasgow. >> Okay. Okay, fine. Well, you're you're like Sean Connory, who's you know, well, I guess he's Scottish, but whatever. Okay. So, we have had a conversation over the years >> which is similar to one I've had with others, but you have a interesting twist on it because being a Brit, you're, you know, a little a little bit more distance from America than some of my American friends um on institutions, Western institutions, whether they're going to be stable, whether they're going to make it. And I and I know you've invested in uh the UAT not invested, you've put your time into UATX and kind of rebooting similar in some ways to what I'm doing in network school. Maybe you want to talk about that. You and Joe and others are working on that. >> Well, it's great to be here that the network state might seem like a contradiction in terms and we'll get to that. Uh but one of the many points of contact we have and we've known one another for quite a few years is that we're trying to reinvent education and that's desperately needed because there's such a chronic malaise in the established educational institutions and that extends all the way down from the elite universities where I've spent most of my life teaching to the most uh basic public primary school. Uh the the problem can be encapsulated simply. For ideological reasons, educational institutions stopped prioritizing excellence, stopped having meritocratic uh systems and uh instead favored ideas of so-called uh diversity, equity and inclusion. And as a result uh they also started to downgrade academic freedom. And this is actually toxic for any educational institution. As soon as you make decisions based on something other than excellence, potential or realized, then you are very quickly going to slip uh into uh I think oblivion. I don't think you can fix an institution like Harvard or Yale or Princeton. I think the problem by the way extends right across the Anglosphere. You can find woke madness on Australian campuses too. I don't think you can fix this because of the way that universities are designed particularly with the institution of tenure. You have unfireable key employees. So we decided Joe Londale and I and Barry Weiss too 5 years ago to create a new university in Austin. And uh whereas some people are inventing completely uh separate institutions that don't seek to be universities, we decided we wanted to have at core a university that was accredited that would award degrees in other words was recognized by the system as a university. But with that proviso we do everything differently. So we've tried to reinvent the university without losing the identity of a university. Last thing I'll say, universities are very long lived institutions. They date back uh as far as the 11th century and they're therefore quite technology indifferent. they've continued to function much as they did in medieval Italy despite waves of technological innovation. So there's something about this model of intergenerational transfer of knowledge which is very resilient and it seems to me is unlikely to go extinct. And that's why we decided it would be [clears throat] at its root a traditional university in its structure in the way that people thought about it in the core experience that students had. But we would reinvent as many different aspects of university organization and of pedagogy as we could. I'll just give you one example. Lectures are terrible. I'm giving one now. I'm going to stop in a second. lectures are boring and after a certain amount of time the audience drifts off. The best education is a Socratic dialogue. We're about to uh illustrate that. And that's how people learn. So at UATX we don't have lectures. The classroom is a dynamic place where you can expect to be cold and engage in dialogue with the professor. >> Okay. So here is I have I'm very sympathetic what you guys are doing and I actually think that our streams will cross in a productive way in the future but I I disagree with I think the diagnosis of the upstream of the situation. Here's my capsule as to what's happening. Um I would argue that DI and woke and so on are actually at least in their current pathological versions. It's not like leftism or liberalism hasn't been around for some period of time. But I think the upstream cause of a lot of this disruption, really all of it is the internet. The internet's rise in the 2000s basically put all of these journalists and others out of work. And the normal phrase is go woke, go broke. But it was actually in reverse. They went broke. $50 billion wiped out of newspaper revenue. And then given that economic stress, they went woke. Why? they had to be super conformist in order to keep their job and they tried Occupy Wall Street and that didn't work because there were antibodies to communism. So instead they went to like a racial Marxism instead or you know and so that was the origins of woke in the early 2010s the economic origins why at that time did it become did it go from a low-level kind of thing to a an extreme thing and similarly I would say that um the reaction to woke which is MAGA also stresses the wrong thing which is it stresses the American flag and so on and it's become in my view almost like a you know an an American maximalism or what have you to the point that Canadians are intervention and you know like Greenland should be invaded and so on and I you know I I know there's a deal for Greenland but let's say there's been too much stress on America to the exclusion of others in my view and I think the other big disrupting factor is China disrupted the Republicans on military and manufacturing disrupt the Democrats on media and money and so UAT X in my view and to be clear I'm saying this in a in a way where I I love what you guys are are are doing but I'd argue UATX sort of thinks of the issue as a deficit of not putting America at the center of things like it's got a giant American flag and so on and so forth but I actually think the issue is not putting the internet at the center of things because all these old institutions were disrupted by the internet. I'll give one more which is you know you're at Stanford Hoover Institution it's also you know where I where I went to undergrad and did my PhD and if as you know you know you're right universities are long lived Harvard was founded before the United States but it was found in a very specific way which is as a one room schoolhouse to build the Massachusetts Bay Colony and train um you know preachers which then built Massachusetts which built the United States which won the Civil War which built America which won the World War I, World War II, Cold War. And that's why in 1991, Harvard over 300 years had exported the dominant organizational paradigm for the whole world. It had proven whatever wetwware it was generating was the dominant form of wetwware. It just generated more power, more money, more whatever you want, right? But then over the next 30 years, Harvard was disrupted by Stanford. Why? Because the rise of the network over the 20th century state. Stanford is an intermediate form. It was all STEM. It was all internet. And that was that was pulling Bill Gates out from the east coast to the west. That pulled Zuckerberg out from the east coast to the west. That pulled a lot of people out of academia into the internet. And so Stanford though I think of as a transitional form because it's still got one foot in the state and the old world of fiat and it's got one foot in internet. And I think we need a version 3.0 that's pure internet to give. I'll get one more thing. Go say go say. I was going to say we're now having a really interesting discussion about history. >> Yeah. >> And I'm going to disagree with the historical argument just made >> because I don't think it's true that wokeism or whatever you want to call it was a consequence of the internet disrupting legacy media business models. I think that's actually wrong. >> Okay. Because where woke originated was not in the marketplace of failing newspapers and magazines. It originated on campuses. And campuses are the least exposed institutions to market forces uh of any institutions in the United States except perhaps the US military. I think something different happened. And let me give you the alternative and correct historical version of events. uh communism, socialism, leftism in all its forms suffered a catastrophic defeat in 1989. It was entirely crushed with the failure of the Soviet model and the libertarian liberal revolutions that swept it away in Europe, not of course in East Asia. And that left uh leftwing intellectuals with a problem. The entire project of socialism had been an unmistakable failure. What could they do? The answer was to come up with a cultural Marxism that moved away from debates about the commanding heights of the economy into debates about victims, victimhood, hierarchies of intersectionality. That all happened in universities and was then exported from the campuses into any institution that was not resistant. Here I think we do agree those institutions which had strongish antibodies did not succumb. Although even Wall Street got occupied through the human resources department after a certain amount of time. But Andrew Sullivan wrote the best essay about this 10 years or more ago when he said we we all live on campus now because it began on campus. The pronouns thing did not begin in New York magazine. The pronouns insanity began at places like Stanford and it wasn't because they were under economic pressure. The opposite. They they were rolling in money. You have no idea how rich the American universities became in the course of the 80s and 90s because their endowments were managed like hedge funds. >> Totally. >> And with all that money, you can hire 100 diversity, equity, inclusion officers. And when you hire a 100 of those people as Stanford and Harvard did, what do they do? What are they going to do with their day? The answer is persecute conservative academics. And that's what they did. So that's I think the sequence of events that makes sense to me. >> So I'll agree with all of that, but let me expand. So I think you can pull back woke even further to say Fuko deconstructing and then Martin Luther King constructing like basically the old order is racist and sexist homophobic. And what is good is to not be that. So like an Indiana Jones swapperoo of the old virtues with the new and that was like in a 60s thing. And if you go further back, communism, it valorized the white the the working class, you know, Stockenov was the hero of the Soviet Union. But by the 60s, late60s after the hard hat riot and when the white working class was actually on the right in America, the left needed a new victim class. So Stockenov became Archie Bunker, the racist, sexist homophob, the guy who they had celebrated the virtues of the working man. Suddenly the working man became everything that was wrong with the world. Right? So they swapped out and they got a new proletariat which was the racial and cultural Marxist you know kind of base. So you can pull it back even earlier to the to the 60s when that started. And then I think you're absolutely right that at the end of the Soviet Union because the sort of capitalist liberal arguments had won the day the authoritarian centralized communist thing was no longer appealing even to many on the left. And the CIA had done the abstract expressionism thing and others, you know, where it was splitting the left between the authoritarian and libertarian segments. And that basically worked. And the left needed a decentralized left rather than a centralized left because the centralized left of Stalin and and Mao gave way to Gorbachev and Dung who, you know, compromised the revolution at least in part. You're right, the communism didn't collapse in East Asia, but it went mostly capitalist with the exception of maybe North Korea, right? And so so I'll agree with all of your points up to that point. However, the the academic setting was, you know, even with the mainstreaming of higher education and so on in the 80s and the 90s, it was like a virus that was latent. You know how like a a human body can can harbor a virus that's latent but then under stress it like pops out you know and or like a you know many many kinds of things are like this where there's a underlying condition and then there's like a stress of some kind and then it bursts the surface. So I'm I'm completely with you that the origins of Voke are in academia and the origins of Voke are the replacement of you know the victim of of communism which is a working class with the victim of of woke which is you know women and minorities and so on. But why did it go vertical? And there's a graph that um uh David Rosado has made which shows that you know patriarchy, white privilege, all that stuff went literally vertical in 2013. Exactly. The second Obama term in the New York Times. There's an editorial decision to have it go vertical then. So why did it happen then? I argue that's when it went from latent to expressed. So that's what I'm saying. I mean I think what what happened was that people who had been indoctrinated with Fuko and S at elite colleges then pitched up in as as new hires at institutions like the New York Times. And very quickly they discovered that the tactics of intimidation that they had learned at camp and campus worked even better when you directed them at the the lame liberals of the the 1968 generation who were in positions of power. Now critically you have to understand generational shifts here where liberals will be inclined to hire progressives and then the progressives will hire the outright Marxists until finally or you hire Paul Pot sequence of events in which each hiring phase moves the university further to the left >> and and this eventually spills over into all institutions because they're all hiring from these elite schools and then to their horror They discover that the red guards are in the building and they're going to accuse the editor-inchief of microaggressions or harassment. And this is how it all kicked off. And it was around 2013 2014 that people outside the campus began to have these experiences. One last thing to remember, massive expansion of the numbers of people going through college played a part. So more and more larger and larger shares of young people were exposed to these ideas. Previously remember originally universities were for really quite small elites. But this massive expansion of higher education everywhere in the world. The belief that somehow everybody or nearly everybody should have a degree meant that a little bit of fukco got into every brain even even at relatively low levels of the system. >> Absolutely. And actually, you know, one way I think about it is, you know, academia, especially humanities academia, all these guys, it was like they were in jail and, you know, creating verbal shs to just stab each shank each other. And then with the rise of Twitter and the 140 character kinds of things, lots of people are basically using Fuko's tactics or you know say tactics like some of the oneliners, white privilege, you know, mansplaining and so on. Those all have roots in academic literature that people were using and didn't even know that they were using it. It's like Stinger missiles being handed out in Afghanistan or something and nobody knows who the Stinger missile designer is, but those words have that lineage that goes all the way back to those academic journals and then they just have a if you contested them, some people would then say, "Oh, here's all the literature that supports them, right?" So, so I agree with all that that basically this was a faculty lounge thing stabbing people in the faculty lounge that then got put into the environment of Twitter and and so on and so forth. But just the timing of why it proved so compelling because you know an idea whose time has come right why did it go vertical then it's because the blue masses I think were under economic stress and needed an ideology that could let them get money without working for it like the whole NGO explosion also began post 2008 where all of these so you're right within academia itself it had piles of money it had these crazy endowments that compound and so on and so forth. But that's the endowments. The the actual, you know, administrators or the employees of the NOS's some of them are fail sons. They're like, you know, these nepotists with, you know, the trust funds and so on. Many others were sort of the the blue proletariat, right? Like the adjunct professor, the you know, like the the freelance journalist, right? Those kinds of people I think were struggling to a greater extent post 2008. So it's you know any kind of thing like this is multiffactorial but the reason I say that is you know a phenomena that I saw where a lot of the go those guys were on the elevator down when tech guys were on the elevator up and that bred a hatred of them for us you know and of course there's also the geographical differences a lot of those guys are in New York or Boston a lot of tech guys were in in San Francisco and then you know not to put it too fine point a lot the tech guys are immigrants or or Asian or you know like they're different demographically as well. All these things together that's why you have media versus tech. Go ahead. I can say more. I >> I was going to say that to me the surprising thing was how readily Silicon Valley folded. Oh >> when when the woke uh red guards turned up previously the culture in Silicon Valley uh 1990s early 2000s had been robustly libertarian. I can see a lot of it >> and and that really folded incredibly quickly and the big tech companies began to replicate campus structures. Google started to become a kind of mirror image of of Stanford in the way that it worked and the way in which this these sorts of tactics that that are actually highly effective in intimidating people were deployed. I I remember thinking when I really ran into this at Stanford personally, how strange it was that patterns of behavior that I had associated with totalitarian regimes, for example, anonymous letters of denunciation, uh investigations and commissions outside uh the rule of law, uh sudden disappearances of individuals and transgress. I had thought that only happened in places like Stalin's Soviet Union or or Mao's uh People's Republic of China. It had never occurred to me when I was studying those systems as a graduate student that one day these patterns of behavior would replicate themselves at elite universities in apparently free societies. That that I never expected. And it had never occurred to me until I saw it in action how gratifying it is to a certain kind of person to be involved in the denunciation, show trial, disappearance pattern of behavior. It's shocking to see it in action and it still makes me cringe because I didn't expect to experience it firsthand. I thought that had all gone away in 1989 911 and I never expected it to surface and of all places elite American university but it did. It's interesting, you know, I think of it like a path that, you know, like these movies where the bad guy dies, but then at the very last scene like the hand comes up over the ledge, you know, so like a lot of these things, these mind viruses are like viruses and they evolve so that their epitopes are no longer recognized, right? you know like uh your immune system actually it's a very good analogy I think because your immune system isn't you know sequencing a virus and looking at every base pair and figuring out is this good is this bad it's basing its recognition on target sequences that it can use to quickly determine this is bad this is good [clears throat] let this through this is not and if that virus can evolve enough to get past this sensor it can get in right so if it looked like communism if it looked like economic leftism then enough antibodies, you know, had evolved to to recognize that. But when it looked like racial Marxism, then it looked, oh, okay, it can just fly right by, right? And so I think that's part of it as well. There's something else which is um the uh you know like the way that these people behaved you you analogize it to the Soviet Union and to mouse China and it is it's funny because cancellation you know in those countries they call it purging, right? And it's interesting because in those countries you'd lose life, liberty, and property, right? Fortunately, in America or the West, when you were cancelled, you weren't jailed. You weren't you didn't have your bank account seized. Um, and uh, you know, you weren't robbed, right? But you did lose your future income. You lost it was certainly painful. You lost future income. You lost friends. People lost positions. But what it did, which is interesting, is um you know this these incomplete purges basically meant a a large class of very able men were incompletely purged and then mount did a whole comeback later. Sort of like how Dung Xiaoping was purged three times, but Ma didn't kill him and he even has sun thrown out of window as you as you probably know, but then he came back to run the whole thing. Very similar in some ways to like Trump and all the people who were canceled like coming back, right? And so it's like a it's like communism but for wimps, you know, fortunately. Right. >> Yeah. No, the stakes were definitely lower and the people cancelled didn't end up in in labor camps in in you know, right? >> But but the the the possibility of of of there being financial consequences was enough. And the other thing that's important here is reputational damage. I mean Smith wrote two books. Everybody knows the wealth of nations. Few people read the theory of moral sentiments. But one of the key points Smith makes is that we're motivated by the esteem of our peers as much as we are by the profit motive. And that was what cancel culture was really all about. Destroying reputations so that people became social outcasts. And if that led ultimately to the being bank accounts declined, we were on the path to that. Remember, we're on a path where cancellation, censorship, and then the out social credit. that was evolving and around 2020 2021 it came close to breaking through. >> Can we take a step back and think about this broader problem of network states because I think we have two different >> broader interpretations of history that extend beyond what's happened in education. >> [snorts] >> I think in your account the internet creates the possibility for a a a kind of state a network state that is really distinct from the traditional state or has only vestigial relationships to it. I I I wouldn't say that. I would say I would say that it is the um in the same way the state evolved with the industrial revolution to become an industrial state, right? With the information revolution, it's going to need to evolve again. >> So this is quite close to the argument Philip Bobbit made >> interesting five years ago. If you read the shield shield of Achilles, Bobbit makes this argument about market states as a new phenomenon. And I think you're you're quite close to his thinking in this respect. I want to offer a different go ahead >> uh perspective which has more I think to do with artificial intelligence and the return of industry of industrial policy and the return of of atoms the need for vast quantities of electricity and computational power. I think we are entering a world of of new empires. Empire is the dominant political order throughout most of history. In fact, most of history is just the history of empires. And I think we've been through a phase in which it seemed to be over. This was what postc colonialism was all about in the academy. What I don't think people realize is how much empire is back. The United States and China are the AI empires and nobody else is even close. And I think this is going to make the 21st century feel much more like the high cold war with two rival superpowers in positions of of real dominance in the frontier technologies. This is going to I think feel very different and and surprising. Most people in the post 1945 era assumed that the nation state was the dominant political form and everybody should have one and until finally you end up with a huge proliferation. You get up towards 200 nation states some preposterously small. But I think this age of the proliferation of the nation state is over and a substantial number of nation states are in effect heading for insolveny leaving these two AI empires in positions of dominance even greater I would argue than the United States and the Soviet Union. So that's my alternative framework. >> All right. So let me say why I agree with some of it and disagree with other pieces. So I do agree with you that many nation states are going to go insolvent due to the sovereign debt crisis. There's going to be a lot of land for sale. But I disagree on the AI empire framing for the following reasons. First is I don't think it's the United States. I really think it's the disunited tribes unfortunately. Um basically blue sky threads Tik Tok versus X truth social gab there's already been a digital secession, a digital separation, a fragmentation. >> I think this is profoundly out of date. This is 10 years old. The the reality of American ideology today is no longer polarization along a spectrum. It is a horseshoe in which the far left and the far right now agree on practically everything from economic policy to the the role of Israel. >> Okay. So I'll get to that. >> So So I I actually don't think the United States is any longer all that polarized. There's massive convergence. >> So the blue and the red I agree that they hate. So there's three phases. I actually tweeted about this which is 2010s blue and tech against red 2020s red and tech against blue. And now, and I tweeted this before the Bernie Bandon thing. I saw this coming a years ago 2020. Now it's blue and red against tech. Now what that is is it's molotov ribbon. It's like but it's a narco communist and a narcoascist versus the center. And uh it it is not that Bannon and Bernie actually agree. It's just that um they hate the same people who are the tech guys, right? And anti-tech is the anti- capitalism of this century in my view. And so that's why I don't think the US is a quote AI empire. I think there's at least three groups which are Democrats, Republicans, and technologists. And the technologists being demographically different, being visible, being people who've disrupted both left and right are highly vulnerable. The Molotov cocktails at Samman's house, the the you know, Elon's cars getting set on fire, his dealerships getting set on fire. This is something where and there's so many more things like this that aren't public that we can talk about, but to be a technologist like an especially an immigrant technologist in America today is like being, you know, like a Jewish capitalist in Eastern Europe like in in in my view in the 1930s. It's something where you're on the leading edge of the industrial and ethnic changes that are happening and so you're a target. And so, you know, if you look at the demographics of these AI labs, right, and you tweet them, both ma maggas are going to be mad, but wolves will also be mad. The wolves will say, "Oh my god, there's so many white people. They're all men." And so on. And the magaz will say, "Oh my god, there's they're not American. They're all foreigners." Right. >> Yeah. But but this is how the United States has always worked. I mean the exactly the same things were said in the guilded age about the billionaires of the time the the robber baronss uh anti-semitism was a part of populism in the late 19th century because it was so easy to identify Wall Street uh with Jews because they were over represented in the financial sector on both sides of the Atlantic. I think you're overindexing to politics here and perhaps al to to social media. The thing about the United States is that there there will be assassinations and assassination attempts. There will be anarchists. Uh there will be uh far-lefts on campus. But the business of America is business. And just as in the 1890s and 1900s, it didn't fundamentally derail the business model. So in our time I think all of this noise for example we need to regulate AI we need to stop the data centers it's mostly noise I don't think it's actually going to stop the buildout in any meaningful way the buildout will only be stopped by the financial crisis that nearly always happens when you have this kind of capex but I don't think the United States is in such a profound crisis as you think or it's not in a new kind of crisis it's in the kind of crisis that we've seen before what's brilliant about the way the founders designed the constitution is that it's really really hard to take it over entirely. The federal system makes that very difficult. Trump obviously wanted to be an emperor, but he's clearly failed to become an emperor and will soon be gone. He's already in the lame dark phase of his second term. I think you're exaggerating how much American politics has fundamentally changed. I think it's business as usual in the republic. The issue in my mind is what does everybody else do? >> Okay. Well, the middle powers, it seems to me, are deluding themselves if they think they have power at all. >> Let me make one counter argument and then I'll give you the last word. My counterargument is I I love the Calvin Kulage quote, the business of America's business. But I think that the the lots of things are happening similar to those instance in the late 1800s, early 1900s like shooting of Henry Clayfrick and so on, you know, propaganda the deed, but they're happening in my view in the descent phase rather than the ascent phase. Right? that ascent phase was becoming a superpower. This is losing power. But let me give two quick data points. >> I mean, I wish I could see evidence that the US has declined. I know it's doing exactly the opposite. It share of G7 GDP has gone up in the last 25 years. >> Yes. Of G7, but not of not of global PPP because of China. And and the question you have to ask yourself is can you really run a network state with a one party communist party regime? which is the more vulnerable of these two empires and I would argue it's the Chinese system that's the more vulnerable because they still have this terrible Stalinist operating system >> perhaps but let me let me make I'll make two three points I'll give you the ball you get the last word so um Larry Page Sergey Brin Zuckerberg Elon Teal all having to leave California bezos having to leave Washington state Ken Griffin having to leave Cibil >> but they go to Florida I mean it's not like they're leaving the United States they go to a red state >> but but then but but then that's my next point. Record numbers of Americans are leaving the United States. The American diaspora is now here and these are wealthy people. In the some of the earlier talks you may have seen investment migration, all these things, these numbers are up and to the right. And if over the last 15 years with cryptocurrency, it showed people had a huge hunger for getting out of USD. It went from 0.01 cents per Bitcoin to almost $100,000 for Bitcoin or more than that at one recent point. That's a 10 millionx you know devaluation. Second passports are zooming and many other great civilizations have also gone through tough times and seen a diaspora. So that's my view. Last I'll just say China has its great firewall. It's protected from the internet. Um it has vulnerabilities. It's fragile in some axes but it's been executing very well over the last 40 years. And so I my view is I love western values. I think the next generation is from, you know, Britain to America to the internet, from Christendom to the west to the internet. It's like version 3.0. So I I share the goals many in many ways. I I differ on implementation, but let me give you the last word. >> Well, as always, it's been a a fascinating conversation. Uh we slightly overstayed our welcome on this stage. I'll keep it very brief. uh as we're in Singapore the probability is that quite a substantial number of people in the audience like you have have voted with their feet but it's still really quite a trivial number if you look at uh the global population trends uh I mean the big challenge facing the nation state is is a fiscal challenge which has to do with aging and fertility collapse and this is this is such a big phenomenon that most people can't get their heads around the thought that the population of China is going to more than half probably quite a bit more than half between now and the end of the century. So the interesting thing to me is where on net of people going where is youthful energy going and particularly where is entrepreneurial talent going and it is overwhelmingly still to the United States. It is not to China. There is literally no measurable inflow of talent to China. And this means that one empire has the advantage. It can draw on the entrepreneurial ambitions of people all over the world because all the entrepreneurial people wherever you go want to get to the United States. As long as that's still the case and it is the case despite now a decade of Trumpism, as long as that's still the case, I think American politics can be performative. You're going to performative figures like Trump saying, "I'm going to do tariffs. I'm going to do immigration restriction or I'm going to do easy money." All of which is the late 19th century political playground. But in reality, what's going on despite the tariffs, despite the immigration restriction, despite Trumpism, is the business of America as business and the inflow of talent, which of course is part of what has made the AI revolution happen. That shows no sign of stopping. So for every one who leaves, there's probably like three who arrive. And that's why I remain fundamentally bullish about where the United States goes. as an AI empire. I mean, the internet was invented in the United States. The United States and the internet are entirely interdependent on one another. They they're not rivals or alternatives. They're basically two facets of the same thing. That's how I think about it. The United States is the network state. It's the network states, plural. 50 of them. >> Okay. You have the last word. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Let's talk more. Great. Great. [applause]