Balaji on Decentralized Democracy and Yarvin on American Monarchy (Network State Conference 2026)

So, thanks for coming all the way up. Um, so, American monarchy, decentralized democracy. We've had a conversation for a while. Um, I want you to well, there's 15 different things we can go back and forth on, but let me throw out a few statements and then you tell me whether you agree, disagree, and so and so forth. Um so first you still do believe America can be turned around. It can be fixed. >> Absolutely. Amazing property. >> Okay. And as its current institution or as like a the reboot. >> Well, what a reboot means I think varies a lot. I think the level of a reboot that's needed is um certainly goes much farther than we've seen with the Trump administration and much deeper. Uh you know, is it possible? It's absolutely possible. But, you know, when I when I tend to think about reboots in order to um simultaneously describe the level of seriousness I'm talking about and also not frighten the horses, one of the examples that I use is the reboot of Germany in 1945. where essentially it was assumed that every existing German institution was completely contaminated with Nazism and how do you restore that and how do you create a new Germany even without any like violence like so obviously the war is very violent but people expected a lot of like you know this is a very propagandized population they really believe in national socialism and people expected that this would be a very tough problem after the war to reprogram the Germans and it turned out to be actually a much easier problem than people thought. >> That's because they had gotten beaten down to such an extent that any wet wear could be installed in their heads. [snorts] >> Sure. You know, they'd gotten beaten down, but also, you know, the condition, I mean, they got beat down in World War I as well. And it's more like the sort of the completeness of the transition kind of flips a switch in people's heads. And you know human beings are natural power followers to an extent that most of us don't like to admit. So one thing on this by the way uh is you know with the whole one thing we're seeing today is people whether it's Hassan you know they're going back to oh invoking Stalin or others you know like oh you know the Hitler thing and so um and I think part of that is people on the far left or the far right think that going more extreme leads to in the far left's case more money for workers or in the far right's case more power for the country. But empirically, World War II and Hitler's Germany led to less power for the country. And I would argue the reason for that is, you know, with the far left, uh, we understand that they don't get self-interest, right? They don't understand capitalism. They don't understand this. But I'd say the far right doesn't understand other interest. They don't understand diplomacy. They don't understand the other guys point of view. and they want to reduce everything to pure power relations, but by not building a large enough coalition, they want power, but they don't do enough diplomacy to acquire it. Sort of like how the far-left wants wealth, but doesn't trade enough or uh, you know, respect the other guy's self-interest um, in order to do it, right? So, like the to caric catcher, the far left wants money without working for it and the far right wants power without working for it. And I'd argue that's why part of why Germany got defeated is that they valorized a very tangible physical punch him in the nose kind of thing. um as opposed to diplomacy and actually you know building coalitions to contrast versus let's say Reagan's way of resisting communism which did build large coalitions and and do things and this is why I would say center right or center is better than far right even on its own terms of generating the maximum power just like center left is better than far left in terms of its own terms of generating the max amount of wealth for wealth for workers. Let me pause there. Well, there's a there's a lot of history that you went into there and a lot of definitions of what you know what what defines far left and far right or what even defines left and right. I would say generally speaking when I look at World War II, I think um just to sort of agree with you there, what you notice is that the powers on the other side of World War II were not fighting a world war. They were not thinking of themselves as an alliance to gain control over the world. Germany is fighting a race war. Japan is fighting a very traditional uh kind of European, you know, sort of they're they're behaving like European great powers in the 18th and 19th century. And they don't realize that the age of local great powers is over. That's an age that they're actually fighting to restore. And so what you see is that collaboration between these groups is actually very very poor. Yep. >> And and and that's sort of mirrored in you know it's a sort of common saying that there's no right-wing international etc etc etc. I think that actually where that comes from is maybe a slightly different place than you think though. I think that, you know, part of the part of the reason why these groups and powers had no global vision is that they were constantly accused of having a global vision. They were constantly accused of sort of aiming for world domination in a way that they really weren't. And so when you're accused of something falsely, your natural instinct is to deny it. And so that's one of the reasons why there's sort of no man in the high castle world Eurasian order that the Germans and Japanese are aiming for. And the consequence of that is that the Soviet Union is basically supplied by America directly under Japan's nose from 1941 to 1945. So, so there's there's kind of there's there's essentially I'm agreeing with you to a certain extent. There's no axis basically, but that comes from a smallalness of vision in my mind. >> So on that, right? So Sean McMeakin's, you know, Stalin's war talks about maybe the most important unrecognized theater in World War II, which is the Soviet Japanese theater. The dog that didn't bark is why Germany and Japan didn't attack the Soviet Union from both ends. You know, you can talk about battle of Kelk and Gaul and so on at the beginning, but you know, the there's still a strategic reason to go north um for Japan and his argument is that Soviet spies actually made Japan, you know, go and fight the Americans and and vice versa. But I think there's another deep point which is the Germans and the Japanese just because they were ultraists and you know they're they're a visual culture, not a verbal culture. They're a nationalist culture, not an internationalist culture. So because of that, there weren't like lots of people who knew both German and Japanese. There weren't persontoperson bridges there. There weren't, you know, like there were basically against communism, right? They're both part of the anti-common pact, which was a formal name as you know. Um but they weren't for the same thing. And so this is I in my view the far right or the nationalist, let's be less porative, the nationalist failure mode especially and especially the fascist failure mode. The nationalist failure mode is that they're only thinking about their own tribe. And then conversely, the communist failure mode in theory is thinking about everybody. So they're great at recruiting and great at taking territory, but then they can't operate because they have no sense of self-interest. So the nationalist overdo does it on the self-interest. The communist underdoes it. And then the capitalist in the center, the democratic capitalist can build the largest possible coalition, which is arguably why the democratic capitalist beat the right and beat the left in the 20th century. So like I mean go ahead >> to to throw a couple of monkey wrenches into that. When we look at basically the Cold War, we actually see that a Stalinist society is much more right-wing in just about every way than the than its uh than its opponents or really its rivals in the West. It's a monarchy. It basically goes, you know, from Bolevik free love in 1921 or whatever, >> she's got a tax on childlessness, >> you know, to to to a very strong level of of cultural conservatism that existed in the Soviet Union. And so it actually it's sort of, you know, >> it repeats fascism in in many ways. And so Americans are taught really it's very confusing to Americans because they're taught that this is an ultralleft-wing power and this is its historical origins you know because the communism of course does not originate in in Russia. It's a it's a it's a western belief system and uh and yet we sort of oppose it when we think about the stodgginess the traditionalness even the like failure to integrate capitalism of late stage of the latest stage USSR um these are not really you know left-wing things in a phenotypic sense conversely you know capitalism which most Americans have been taught to see as very very right-wing. It takes a while of getting outside your bubble to see the closeness of capitalism and communism, both of which originate in early 19th century English liberalism and both of which are sort of somewhat foreign to the preodern classical understanding. >> So let me make a few remarks there. So um you know socialism in one country you know the Stalinist version and national socialism the Hitler version there is the horseshoe. Um there's a couple of maybe obvious references you know Estonia put out a movie called the Soviet story which actually shows like 20 of their propaganda posters next to each other. You can see you know like the guy with the fists and so on. There's a Nazi version and a Soviet version. Um, and you know, part of this is also like a, you know, Larry Ellison has this great saying, which is choose your competitors carefully because you become a lot like them. And so the Nazis were competing for the German worker who is a swing vote. And the Soviets were appealing on the base of being a worker and the Nazis on the base of being a German. So they ended up resembling each other in propaganda and in substance because that was like their number one competitor. Uh, and you know, for that vote bank, right? All the stuff, you know. The reason I say this is that um you know actually in the Soviets you probably know this as well but post World War II there was a tax on childlessness like you know women who didn't have children could be taxed at a higher rate and so on. And conversely America had 90% marginal tax rates rather than 100%. So it was just like less centralized but it's still very centralized. So those forms in the 20th century all grew to resemble each other because they were fighting each other and they were competitors. So they had to add features for lack of a better term to kind of compete. But I think my core point is even on its own terms the center generated more power than the right. And so the right basically valorized power over everything and more military power was generated by the center. And even on its own terms, the center generated more money and welfare for workers and people than the left, which promised the workers paradise and deser delivered the goolog, right? So the right promised like, you know, the or the the Nazis promised the thousand-y year rich and they delivered a bombed out Germany. And the far left promised, you know, the workers paradise. They delivered like the defeat of the Soviet Union. And the center, for its faults, at least at that time, was better able to coordinate more people than either the left or the right. This is not like naive. >> Yeah. I I think you need to distinguish in a way between mass market ideologies and institutional power structures. If you look at the kind of core institutional foundational power structures that are driving the AngloAmerican world between 1900 and 1950. Uh these are these are power structures that go very deep in 1900. They're very much centered in England in as much as there's a sort of center to the whole sort of international community world. Well, exit hole is earlier. That's sort of liberalism, but um really a lot of these institutions date back to one man, Ceil Roads. >> And so you have, you know, the roads scholarships, but you also have the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chadam House, and the CFR, both founded by basically roads sympathizers on both sides of the Atlantic. Uh the elder brother before World War I is London. The elder brother after World War I is Washington, New York. And you know when you look at how these people related to um kind of public philosophies and public beliefs I'm not sure that centrist is exactly the word because I think they were very concerned with power and but they were concerned with power at a sort of at a higher level in a way. It's like it's sort of when you compare um you know I think you're getting at something with the attitude of Hitler especially toward power because of course he's not at all coming from he has no sort of personal familial he's not an aristocrat and so he sort of has this somewhat nuvarish uh approach to power if you analogize power to money in a way whereas um you know the the kind of the deep institutions of the west were very very comfortable in a hereditary way with power and so they're not sort of doing the equivalent of like driving up in a Lambo and throwing money around. Well, so on this right like I think um in the late 1800s you have basically four things happening at the same time that I think are mirrored today which is you have the industrial revolution. You have German unification which as you know came much later in European history than most people realize. You had Jewish emancipation where Jews came out of the shuttle and that was a gradual process but you can argue that it reached its culmination late 1800s and and then you also had a dominant but declining Anglo Empire which is the hereditary power that you're talking about and I think all of those are sort of mirrored today where you have uh the internet revolution you have Chinese accession to the WTO and Chinese global trade you have Indian immigration or internetification, whatever you want to call it, like Indian access to global markets and you have a declining American empire that you know all of those things are kind of lining up and what happened with all the chaos of the early 20th century is that the place that Germans, Jews and Anglo could work together was America. It was the land overseas, right? So that talent that was coming up, the German talent, Jewish talent and the Anglo talent could all cooperate in this new land with the industrial revolution. And the talent that's coming up today, the Indian talent, the Chinese talent and then the American talent can cooperate in this new sphere of the internet which is it has contributions from all these groups because it's actually built from the internet rather than disrupted by it. Just like America in the 20th century was arguably Britain updated for the industrial revolution, whatever comes next will be America updated for the internet revolution, which may be as different from America as America was for Britain. This is one of my macro frameworks. I'd love your thoughts. >> Well, you know, it's a there's a there's a lot of broad analogies there. I mean America in the 19th century remains uh sort of a very much a third world annex in some ways of England and in fact it's really London that in in which a lot of this sort of cultural mange is taking place because let's not forget that after 1815 the world enters a unipolar order you know after 1815 England has no rivals no direct competitors And of course the philosophy of England is cosmopolitism. If you take Markx for example, Marx is a German Jew. Um he's estranged from Judaism. Um he becomes political and like many Germans he leaves Germany around 1848. I forget the ex I think it's a little earlier for but he leaves because of reactionary political persecution in Germany. Many of those people came to the United States uh and became an important factor in the US civil war for example. But you have this huge liberal diaspora. You also have a situation in which countries are starting or populations are starting to take an interest in other countries affairs which is a very strange and unusual thing to that date. So for example in the revolutions of 1848 a huge factor in the revolutions of 1848 is just the sort of almost literally like the fan audience >> in in England like they they definitely England cares very much who's in charge in Vienna and Budapest and so forth which is a historically strange unprecedented thing. So I want to talk about that for a second which is it might seem strange but if you have one ideology that evangelizes and another one that doesn't the first will mathematically just out compete the second. >> Yeah. basically and and the the I mean you know even even Hitler used to say that national socialism is not for export and it's like well exactly if your thing is not for export and their thing is for export basically you're parochial against something universal and so there were certainly attempts by right-wing intellectuals at the time of the um World War II, World War I and even the US Civil War actually to sort of articulate a a sort of a a broader and bigger truth there. You know, that's I think it was um I'm not sure which right-wing intellectual said, you know, the purpose of our of our fight is to re is to repeal the French Revolution, right? And so and so we're living in a world which is you know very much sacriized the French Revolution which is very much the uh injection of English political ideas into France. >> Yeah. But so yes, but one thing two comments on that. One of the things about the French Revolution is it it had a lot of interesting we remember the guillotine and we remember all of that. But there's at least two parts of it that I think people write a center today should contend with more. The first is that even after all of that chaos, what emerged was this unified hexagon, this power that could smash its way through Europe. So you'd normally think that like within a company for example there's lots of infighting let alone guillotining or something that it wouldn't be able to coordinate and organize right but somehow on net the French revolution created a metaorganism of France that could out compete all of these smaller >> That's right that's right that's right and you see this also with Cromwell in England in many ways the English state is created by Cromwell not by the kings but Cromwell is really more a king than has more unitary leadership than any English monarch in the um in in the the the 17th century, right? So, you know, he's like he's not a king, he's a commoner, but he's more a king than the kings. And the same is true of Napoleon. So for example when the bourbons the bourbons are restored after um you know the uh the fall of Napoleon basically um you know Napoleon has or the French revolution basically destroyed the traditional regional framework of France and res and replaced historical regions with historical communities with like geometrically drawn departments. and somebody comes to the, you know, the Bourbons and is like, "Well, we're going to, you know, restore these these old aristocratic structures." And the Bourbons are like, "No, actually, we kind of like these departments, right?" You know, because he created this, I mean, he really, I mean, the French old French state was completely destroyed. There was no alternative but to to sort of create this clean slate reboot in France. And so much of Napoleon's operating system has lasted until the present day. really almost nothing has happened in France since the fall of Napoleon. Well, so so one lesson from is that I there's and let me give two other thoughts off of it which are a that the the French Revolution for all of its faults all the things Carl has written about all these things did actually generate power even though it was a leftwing thing it somehow generated power a lot of these left-wing ideologies are things that neither the left nor the right thinks of as power generating per se but they are number one number two is which is interesting the nationalism of France. Normally a rightist today will call themselves a nationalism, but the nationalism of France at that time was a leftwing thing, which is a little bit of another example of conservatives being, you know, liberals in slow motion where nationalism was a more universalist thing than provincialism or tribalism at like a subnational level. So it did have this abstraction of the nation which we take for granted today, but you know there were all these French dialects that were not French. You know, people have written that only like 20% of people in that region spoke French. So, I get I'm getting the number wrong, but Benedict Anderson has written about this. So, point being that this was a left-wing idea of nationalism that is now the rights the right is reclaimed or thinks it thinks it thinks of it as rightwing. But ultrarightwing is actually tribalism of small tribes that doesn't generate power. You know the meme with the um where like the far-left person thinks rocks and the whole universe you know >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The the heat map meme. >> The heat map. >> Yeah. Yeah. So So the thing is you have to isolate like nationalism is a very tricky concept historically because there's a lot of nationalism that actually is not really national at all. You know, it's like if you look in the um in the 1960s, both Vietnam and Algeria have movements called the FLN, the National Liberation Front. And I'm like, "Wow, did the Algerians get the idea from the Vietnamese or the Vietnamese get the idea from the Algerians?" No, it's actually the least nationalist thing in the world. It's completely internationalist and it is basically flying for that reason under the flag of nationalism. you know, nationalism, you know, Ireland has this long tradition of nationalism and Irish nationalism today is this completely, you know, it's they have >> just opposition, you know, just it's just opposing things and it's not really even really for Ireland. >> Well, yeah, the thing is it was sort of easy to sell as something that was for Ireland at one time, but after the English left, its true nature was revealed. And you know this is this is something which I think there's a a negative nationalism and a positive patriotism. And I think that people too easily go to hey that's not what we are which is you know like it's relatively easy to say for example who is non-American. It's a Chinese person in China speaking Chinese like a true outsider. Okay fine. But the hard part is what you are for not what you're against. And it's too easy for Bill to like drama hatred and try to say that a tribe is what it's against because they can't agree on what it's for. And I think that's what happened with Irish, you know, nationalism in some ways because it wasn't Irish patriotism, let's say. You know, >> well, there have been many I mean, everybody claims to be a patriot, but uh, you know, [laughter] it's to some extent an objective question. And uh you know I think it's hard from my perspective to argue that today's Irish nationalism is very >> patriotic at all but uh of course different people have different perspectives. So let me let me switch gears for a second which is let's bring it to the present day because we've done a lot of history right okay so American monarchy decentralized democracy like you know we we've just kind of talked about the past let's talk about present and talk about future let me give a worldview and then I want to hear your worldview my worldview is that the west dominance in 1950 was a historical aberration there's like a boomerang graph that shows that the world economy was centered in Asia then It went west after the industrial revolution and in World War II everybody else was blown up and it got centered in America and you had the fewest number of countries at that time and the maximum amount of centralization and since then it's boomeranged back much faster than it's come uh and so the world economy has moved out to Asia. The stuff is made here. The engineers are made here and so on and so forth. And the other successor, so one big successor to America is China, which has taken over the manufacturing and military might of the Republicans. And the other successor is the internet, which has taken the media and the monetary power from Democrats, which is the internet disrupted Democrats, China disrupted Republicans. And so that those are the successors in my view. And what is coming next? Even though people want order in some ways in America, they don't actually want to follow anybody. They're not for something. They're against something. And so I think the future of America is more like American anarchy than American monarchy because I think you have people on the far left and they're imagining this 20th century communism, you know, Hassan and guys like that. They they're in ma suits. They're they're they're you know they're using the hammer and sickle to get a reaction from people and they think they're going to have like some giant workers march and take all the money and so on. But the assembly line is gone for at least Westerners and men do not wake up every morning and coordinate in a ballet in the physical world. So what western men on the left are only doing is they're hitting buttons on a phone. So whatever the next political movement comes from looks like hitting buttons on a phone. does not look like marches. It does not look like 20th century anything because just that habit isn't there. It's not like you wake up in the morning and you go under a foreman and work in a factory unless you're in Vietnam or China. Conversely, the right has a mirror image of this which is a narcoascism. And then these are the guys, 4chan guys who have the Hitler memes and so on. It's a mirror image of Hassan with the Stalin memes and the Mao memes. And these guys also think that some giant march is going to happen. And what both of them I think misunderstand is organized. The organized part of organized violence is the hard part. It's easy to do violence. All these guys are like they they keep yelling, you know, we're so mad. Look at how mad we are. And they kind of think it's like some video game where they go into rage mode and rage mode means they win. But actually cooperation mode is how you win. Yeah. Yeah. Let me just agree with you. actually uh you know to engage in organized violence you need actually two very separate things. You need the capacity for organization and the capacity for violence. >> And the first part is so much more >> and yes and and the well they're both they're both hard and you know a lot of the sort of the the political axioms of America, you know, are very lari designed for the very real American populations of the 18th and even the 17th century. And we remember the 17th century America much less well than 18th century America. But it's like even more intense. So let me give you an example of this. So, for example, when um there's a revolution uh the so-called glorious revolution in England, um as soon as they hear of this in Boston, they're like, "Aha, we can get rid of this thing called the Dominion of New England, which James II imposed, which combined New York with Massachusetts, which was a little uncomfortable for both because they were very different places at that time." And as soon as they hear about the Glorious Revolution, the Yankees of Boston just rise up, arrest the royal governor, and restore their Puritan republic that was their crazy religious state. This was almost automatic. And so the sense of of an institution being able to form spontaneously form a political body, spontaneously form, you know, people would form like Sons of Liberty or whatever. They would, you know, this is the old American idea of like the militia. These things are totally gone. Okay? and and the fact that we have a a system that basically mythologizes the existence of these forces when in fact they don't exist is one of the contradictions of our time. But but let me let me respond to you with a perspective that you haven't seen. Okay. >> Um this is in a way comparable to the decline of the Roman society from the republic into the empire because of course the ancient Roman Republic which our founders loved to LAR had both of these qualities in abundance. And what happened to Rome was that by, you know, the 1st century BC, the Roman civilian population had largely lost the capacity for organized violence. They could still kind of mob up to some extent. That's really the last thing to go. But the Roman army had both of those capacities in spades. And so it became very logical that you know there's a wonderful line of Napoleons where he said that every government is safe in which the most capable people are in power. And so you know the sort of the the replacement of republic just as the replacement of the old kings of Rome with the Roman Republic was sort of obvious in retrospect so was the coming of the Roman Empire. And one of the things that basically people don't really realize in America on the right and on the left and I think the the the sort of the factor that is most underappreciated that can most easily lead to the sort of the reorganization and reformation of America. Everyone models these forces very very strong whereas it's actually very very weak. And so people on both sides, whether they're Hassan Nick Fuentes, are like, "We're going to rile people up. We're going to get and we're going to get the new new regime by riing people up, etc., etc., etc." And it's just laring. It's they're just internet entertainers. It doesn't work. But but what everyone assumes is that because they assume this capacity for organi or organization and organized violence is still there. They're like well it's absolutely impossible to reorganize the American state because people will rise up. And I will like I'm like no they will not rise up. And one of the things that we saw, for example, when almost accidentally Trump destroyed USID is that people are like, "Wow, he could just do that. I expected an uprising in the streets of Washington DC." And I'm like, "He could abolish the State Department and there would not be an uprising in the streets of Washington DC." You know how many people, you know, work at the State Department? It's like 30,000. You ever see 30,000 people in one place, even unarmed? They're terrifying. armed. They're terrifying. Would they organize? Would they arm? No, they would just go home. >> Okay. Well, okay. So, I So, there's several things I want to respond to there. The first is that I do think that Trump is Trump 2 is the ender. Um, and that in the future, like let's say this whole period will end is ending Democrats faith in democracy and Republicans faith in America. I do think that's where this whole thing goes. not not really Trump, but just this whole debt crisis, sovereign debt crisis. We're at the the end of an 80y year, 100redy year, however you want to call it, Keynesian bubble. And I I I do think that um just laying off those people is something that causes blue MAGA where now it's the Blues who feel their livelihoods have been overturned, that the country they grew up in is gone away. And while you may not see an immediate reaction, you have something similar to what happened with Saddam and the Baists where the Baist party didn't know how to organize and when they were no longer allowed to be in power, they formed a thing called ISIS. And I do see, you're right, that in some ways that energy is low from an organizational standpoint. What I see coming is Luigi's on the left and Brentton Trarant types on the right. I hate that I know these people's names, but these basically anarco-communist shooters on the left and anarco-fascist shooters on the right and they go and shoot and kill and then it gets millions of views and then it's like a you know a slow chain reaction where another guy's inspired by it and continues with it and because America has the first amendment and the second amendment all the shouting and all the shooting but without the ten commandments underlying it like the ten commandments as you said these rights were for a virtuous people that's long gone. And the ten commandments, the first amendment is first commandment is thou shalt not kill. But the second amendment is I can have a gun. And the eighth commandment is thou shalt not bear false witness. That's funny, right? Yeah. >> It's an interesting mix of commandments and amendments. >> Yeah. Right. >> I never heard that one before. >> Okay. And and the eighth eighth commandment is uh thou shalt not bear false witness about others. And the first amendment is I can say what I want. And so those responsibilities were underpinning the rights. They were meant for virtuous people that were sort of assumed to be Christian or Judeo-Christian or however you want to call it. And now all those are gone. But only the rights remain. But Americans will cling to those rights because they correctly, if they're conservative, they think anybody who's against the first or second amendment wants to silence them and disarm them. And they're correct about that in the American context. Democrats want to do that. And conversely, if you notice after the Luigi shooting or the, you know, when Luigi killed Brian Thompson, the CEO, shot him in the back, first time ever, Democrats didn't say anything about gun control. They have now gone to the Second Amendment as well and because and now they're actually, you know, they'd veered from pro- first amendment in a in a superficial way to anti when they were in power and now pro again because they're actually out of power in some ways. So now you have anarco-communist, anarco leftists that are in favor of shouting and shooting and anarcoitists that are as well. And you have in my view the opposite problem of the 20th century where the 20th century was the horseshoe of totalitarianism where centralized technology led to total control. And in this century at least one problem. I'm not saying the surveillance state doesn't exist. I'll get to that. the but the problem of America is American anarchy where you have these shooters on both sides that are very difficult to stop because the ideology is distributed and they're going to be more and more dangerous with drones and all these weapons that are coming out and so you just have constant terrorism in North America. Um and it's very difficult to stop because there's no cultural formula for moderating the internet in any way. And [snorts] uh I think that's why the east has an advantage this century because whether it's the Russian sphere of sarism, Chinese collectivism, uh West Asia's religion or South Asia's Dharma, there's some formula within Asia where you can have order on top of uh the internet, but it's not force. And that's I think you know one of my biggest points of divergence perhaps and you you tell me if I'm wrong is I feel that people on the right in America and the West correctly feel things falling off a cliff and the response is to pull out a gun or threaten violence but that doesn't restore order that actually furthers the the thing because the people on their side get even more threatened. And so what you actually have to do in my view is figure out nonviolent ways of cooperating. That's easier said than done because you've got these crazy shooters, crazy people there. So you have to find a new realm, a new space where you can peacefully cooperate. Then I'll link it to one other thing you said than give you the ball. You mentioned the 1600s in America. I've I'm actually I've been studying that time. I mean perhaps not as intensively as a true scholar, but you know, Albian Seed and all of that kind of stuff. And it's a very interesting time because it's very similar in my view to the current time we're in now because you know Albian seed talks about how uh the ancestors of the Puritans ancestors of the cavaliers ancestors of the Quakers and of the uh Scots Irish these four British tribes left at different times. You know the some of them saw this English civil war coming some of them left in the middle. Um, and they left for different places in America because in England they were trying to superimpose the left vision of the good, the Puritan vision and the right vision of the good on top of each other. But in America they could just build them on their own, right? And today I see the mirror of those tribes in the crypto tribes which whether it's Bitcoin, Ethereum, Salana, Zcash have all broken away from what the American fiat order is and they just need to print themselves out in the other side of the world and they can't actually reform that existing system, but they still have the values. And so that's that's why I think the 1600s period you know you know the talk bill thing and you know he was still writing about when America could self-organize in the 1800s the thing you mentioned civil society existed that doesn't exist in America but exists on the internet like the internet American is capable of self-organizing they organize hackathons they organize you know like like open source projects they they do self-organized group chats all this kind of stuff internet Americans are capable of self-organizing. They do have we do have a civil society. But just like it took a while for Americans or rather the colonists to think of themselves as American rather than British, it's taking a while for the internet to think of themselves as internet natives as opposed to quote American or whatever their legacy fiat country was. So I think we're in the process of that identity formation. Let me pause there. >> Yeah. Well, you know, we're both we're both Gen Xers, right? And so we both >> maybe on the border. Yeah. [laughter] >> A border 1980 1980. Does that count? >> I think that's I think that's the border, but uh I don't know exactly, but I'm certainly a Gen Xer, but you know, we both um you know, in many ways came of age in the '9s and uh you know, I first I think the first time I ever used the internet was uh 1986 or something like that. So uh you know basically I remember the way we thought about the internet in the 80s and '9s very very clearly and we thought about it much in this way as like a different place that was separated from the societies that we live in. must remember John Perry Barlo uh the cyerspace declaration of independence you know which is sort of a really pure expression of '90s internetism and you know as those things like basically you know it's like I spoke at this event um earlier this year called web summit and I'm just like why is this called web summit it has nothing to do with the web and it originated in a time when the web was like a thing and I remember when the web was like a thing and that web having become everything in a way also becomes nothing and it becomes something that's sort of common to everyone you can't really organize like for example you know in the internet um in San Francisco 25 years ago uh a little more than 25 years ago there was this wonderful service where all the cool people in San Francisco were on it you trying to buy or sell something or announce an event or whatever, it was the place to be. And it was called Craigslist. >> And you know, as soon as the internet became everything, you know, Craigslist, which is now seen as a sort of default hive of scum and villain, basically was like chic in a way that's almost impossible to imagine. And so I think that that as the digital world becomes more commonplace, it becomes more benal and it becomes hard to it's like one test I use for identity is whether people use uh a noun for something. Let's say the people who go to Burning Man for example have >> burners. >> They call themselves burners, right? And so they have this very deep level of identity which is not quite at the level of religion. I would say that that and if you want to understand the sense of community and identity that the early Puritans had in the 17th century, take the energy of being a burner and like multiply it by a hundred or a thousand or something like that. At that point, you're really very much in in in cult territory. So, so say crypto is that Bitcoiners, Ethereum. So, I mean, >> yeah. So, people people will use that. >> It's an intermediate step towards what I think is coming. That that's my argument. I mean, >> yeah. And I and and I think where we disagree is that I basically see modern man as very much like the citizen of the Roman Empire. I think he's very incapable of forming these kinds of deep social ties. I think that that's actually like very when I look at, you know, the digital, you know, nomads, you know, in the room here, I'm tempted I won't do this, but I'm tempted to um ask people to raise their hand and say how many how many people in this room have kids, right? Let's not do that, but um >> Well, so so actually on this topic, >> I mean, we can do it if you want. It's >> Yeah. Yeah. So, so uh well, actually at at Network School, we actually have NS.com families >> and we actually had our first wedding at Network School. We actually had nine more weddings queued up. And so I actually I have some empirical data for you which is as follows. I think the east had sort of inherited I'm going to say the east in the very broadest sense of like let's say east of Europe, right? So the east basically has you know culture, tradition, intact families and so forth. you know, on the edges in in places that have been American occupied for a while less so, but broadly speaking, the East has has intact families and um sort of inherited social bonds and as you correctly point out the the West, especially America, is very atomized, you know, and so on. But an interesting phenomena that I've observed is if you took you know Americans and others from around the world and you have them in a place like never school or like a startup society it's a permanent they start snapping to grid and actually like all of those civil society things actually do happen and you know the the concept that I have is uh you know I call it print out the internet okay you have this crypto tribe it doesn't have to be a single crypto tribe like salana it can crypto friendly people. They have connections with other people via social networks. They have money. They have agility because they've got their laptop and they're seeking community. And so you just have to kind of have the right physical location for that to happen and for the social bonds to reemerge in America. In many ways, a left, someone on the left would talk about cars keeping people apart and lack of walkability. Someone on the right would talk about crime. Others would talk about cost. For many reasons, it's difficult to have informal, walkable, friendly, zerorime neighborhoods in America, which is why people are so atomized and they're on the internet. But if you print them out in just some other location, it starts to work. This is an empirical observation. Let me pause. >> Well, what you what you see is that there's actually like among these I'm going to agree in part and disagree in part. uh what you see among these young people is that there's very much kind of a thirst for community of various kinds. And so you will see them for example they graduate from college and they're expected to live as atomized individuals and it's like no let me find roommates let me find a co-living space let me form even dare I say a polycule right you know sorry and and and so you know there's a reason I mention this in a way because one of the communities that I'm not part of but I'm sort of most geographically close to is sort of the East Bay rationalist scene. Oh yeah. Who have essentially taken um >> they they really have gone the next step in a way and found something very quai religious to believe in which is this strange cult of AI safety, right? And um you know worshiping the powers of the AI is one thing. We all we can disagree on like the the the talmudic doctrine of uh of of of alignment etc etc etc. But in a way it's a sort of perfect case because you see first of all there is this demand for community. They reproduce to some extent. They probably have a TFR of about 0.2% 2% but uh you know there's there is reproduction that does happen. Uh Scott Alexander has kids I believe. Um and so you know but if you compare them to the early Puritans and the the sort of the like the intensity of especially pre-technical life I don't know how you get back there technological society. >> Okay. So I have some thoughts on this. Um first is one huge difference is they don't have elbow room or space. Um Kazakhstan for example actually has one of the highest fertility rates among a high HDI population there. They've got like a 3.1 or something like that. And that's a country that's tied for number one in the physics Olympiads because they've got low population density. It's 3,000 times the size of Singapore with only 3x the population. So I think one dimension is being really cooped up with very expensive Bay Area real estate makes it harder to contemplate having a large family. >> It's a traditional reproductive depression effect. >> Yes, that's right. Exactly. So So step one is hyperdelation of cost, but that's actually not sufficient. That's necessary but not sufficient. A second thing is you know I I actually have a I should write this up as an essay but there is a solution for the birth of Darth that is not the state but the network and I call it after a billion dollars and a million followers what's next a thousand heirs become a thousand air here's how you do it not in the I'm going to leave them unnamed but colleagues that we know who have n children by k women I'm not talking about that I'm talking about with one you know one one spouse. If just as a thought experiment, if you start at age 18 and you have 10 children and then they start at age 18 and they have 10 children and then they start again at age 18 and 10 children, if you work out the math, by age 80, you have a thousand descendants like Mitt Romney plus, okay? Nothing there is illegal. Nothing there is even impossible. You're not even close to human limits. But it means a completely different life cycle where you're actually getting married and having children much much earlier in life to get a high compounding rate. And you know when I say that as a thought experiment someone says well why would you want to do that? And I say well if why would you want to scale Everest? It's the same kind of personality that would want to do that. But that means by the way a thousand,000 errors if they each have a thousand then you can build a nation in one generation. You can build an Estonia, which is a million people, a thousand thousands, and they'll want their sons and daughters to marry each other. And that's roughly what America was, right? Was it actually 10 children per person? No. But it was a a new open terrain from their perspective. Obviously, they were Native Americans, right? A new open terrain that they wanted to populate. They had space to do it. They had a manifest destiny and a belief that they were growing. And there were other frontier-like people who came into that domain. and looked at from the perspective of a genetic business model, meaning did it acquire the resources for reproduction, chopped down trees, gained space, and it went from a few million people in the 1700s to 300 million people by today on par with, you know, Russia, which has 100 million, with China, which has hundreds of millions. Like those that gigantic exponential population growth was a function of the space and and and the opt-in community. And so to me, a big thing is figuring out how to reopen the frontier. And now that we've got Starlink, now that we've got all of this empty space around the world, we've actually got a population crash. There's 9 million empty homes in Japan. You can work from anywhere. Now with robots and drones, we're going to be able to print out towns, villages, and cities. I'm going to hold actually a prize for this. The self-building home as a sequel to the self-driving car. Like, you know, driverless truck pulls up, robots come out, build something. So all of that is possible where we can reopen the frontier and have the 1600s again but in a peaceful way. >> Well, let me let me push back on this because one of the things economically that you saw in early America was that early America was a land of labor shortages. And so it was a land of high wages and labor shortages. And you were compensated by for the expense and difficulty and danger of coming here by participating in the society that was very non Malfusian. And the thing is uh you know the one one of the things we haven't really talked about in here is of course everybody's favorite subject which is AI. And you know there are people that feel that AI will destroy the world by making it into paper clips. This is not at all one of these people. Um but what I see instead is the um that AI is essentially the economic equivalent of the resource curse because the resource curse is any source of GDP that has very low demand for human labor. And what you get in a, you know, nation cursed by resources is you get an environment where six guys can put a pipe into the ground and pull out the entire G&P of Saudi Arabia, which has very easy oil to extract, as you probably know. >> Yeah. >> And everybody else is useless. And and and the thing is for me, the definition of a third world system is a world in which most people are useless to the economy. You will go to these third world countries, you will see people milling around. They're just standing there. They're not doing something. They basically find a way to eat because this economy is throwing off money, but they are fundamentally not economic. They're not useful to the state and the society economically or militarily. >> So, here's why I'm not that concerned about this actually, at least empirically, how things have played out. First AI is um you still have to prompt it and over the last four years we've had you know AI for it it's it does some amazing obviously math you know and if you're coding you can prototype things fast at the same time has Uber gotten transformally better has has Airbnb have you know have you seen transformative improvements in most of the software you use and other things not yet right yes you can make videos better but um because you still have to prompt it and verify the output. It's actually bottleneck to a much greater extent than we think. Number one, it actually makes smarter people smarter. It's amplified intelligence rather than artificial intelligence. number one and number two is um and this I think a really important point AI because it increases the rate of malware spams uh scams basically mass messaging you know mass messaging people for marketing and sales it actually reduces trust between digital tribes and it's going to radically increase the amount of proctoring and verification work that we have to do with fake resumes with people standing over your shoulder and making sure you're a human as you do something that is semi-skilled or even unskilled work. Uh I'm already seeing this where you know proctors, we hire proctors for tests at network school. They don't have to be skilled, they just have to be a human who's like somewhat trustworthy and reliable. And you know, Ben Harts has talked about this where it's easy to see the jobs that a technology takes away, but it's really hard to forecast the jobs it creates. >> I think that's cope. And let me tell you why. >> Oh, really? Okay. Go. >> I think that's cope. Because essentially one of the things that you know if you're looking for empirical evidence basically the simplest equivalent of the AI shock on the economy has been the outsourcing shock in the US economy. And we heard all of the same things. We heard oh this is a Ricardian optimization. We heard people will find new jobs and new purpose in life. And mostly they didn't. And you know, if you go to the Midwest, I don't know how recently you've been to the US, you go to the Midwest, you know, it's basically like everything is rotten and hollowed out and falling apart. And you know that, you know, outsourcing has not led to like a prosperity across America. It has led to a few go to Ohio and what is thriving in Ohio. >> Okay. Okay. But but but my point I but I disagree and here's why >> at uh and now this we will probably disagree quite a bit >> other countries have risen much more than America's declined on this axis. It's a little like saying has the internet led to Blockbuster's prosperity? No. But Netflix rose more than Blockbuster declined. There's a larger consumer surplus from that. Right? And so America just like Britain before it. Britain, let's call it what they invented the game of global capitalism. You can say maybe the Dutch did it and so on. Whoever you say invented it, America perfected it. America opened up all these markets. America um created the empire with all these military bases. It basically it's like you know James Naymith who created basketball. James Mason created basketball but over time it turned out that you know he wasn't you know like Canadians weren't the best at basketball necessarily, right? Serbians, African-Americans very good. And so in the same way, Americans created this game of global capitalism. They did very well at it for a long time and now there's new players who can play. And so that's what's happening. It's not that, you know, that the the logic of it was bad. It's that they're losing some games now. Now, I think the worst conclusion out of this is for, you know, like American conservatives and libertarians to think a I can't win this game. Um, and B, I shouldn't play or I should try to isolate or have tariffs and or or or this kind of argument recently we've been seeing where people say, "Oh, an American is supposed to win effortlessly and it's not supposed to be a grind. You're not supposed to be a stver and so on." And the thing is academic success leads to technological success leads to economic success leads to military success. And if you're not studying like you know aviation and aereroastro you're not going to be able to build a drone that actually flies properly and therefore military strength goes away. A lot of the valorization that we're seeing now of tariffs or traditional muscle that is my view cope because um because all drones it's all robots going from here on out and um you know if if you're losing to a programmer on their side of the world then you should get good and if you can't get good then you can't like rage at that right >> well you know I mean you can but it's not >> you're losing you're losing structurally because actually China is willing to use these tools but America is not. And so China is willing to behave like a mercantalist power that understands that its fundamental national asset is its people and the purpose of life is not pleasure and and you know when you basically like GDP this is a deep discussion which we don't have you know only have 45 seconds for GDP is essentially gross gross domestic pleasure right and the thing is that when you basically perform for example you go to China and you'll find wow Now everything is very cheap here. That is because of the exchange rate. When China lowers its exchange rate, when it lowers the value of its currency, what what it's doing is China Inc.'s goods become cheaper and China Inc.'s employees are paid less and can enjoy fewer of the pleasures of modern life. >> Yeah. But Okay. Go ahead. Go ahead. And and so you know simply to equalize the trade deficit with China would be which is easily doable with financial tools is a much more effective way of doing mercantalism than the sort of many of the traditional American ways which were um you know uh not >> okay here's here's why here's why I disagree with that. It took me a while to articulate this but when China is doing the because they are you know effectively printing money to um lower their exchange rate competitive devaluation people call it I think the fundamental difference is they allocate because what is inflation it's taxation by other means as Milton Freeman said right inflation is taxation without legislation but when China inflates they're better capital allocators so the Chinese actually get roads they get bridges, they get public infrastructure. Whereas when the American Fed prints that capital is just thrown into some, you know, like uh Obama, AR rat hole or the hundred billion dollar California train to nowhere. China actually gets infrastructure for it. So the tool of competitive devaluation has a totally different result on the Chinese end, the money printing, because they're actually better at capital allocating. That's kind of argument number one. Um, number two is I wouldn't say that they are I think you know many conservatives will say China can do it so why can't we and Americans will say this right and and ethically whatever that's fine but strategically uh let's say Facebook said Google is building a search engine so why can't we and the answer is not you can't do it morally it's that it doesn't suit Facebook from a cultural or strategic level and the thing is China is more MAGA than MAGA and the internet is more America than America. What I mean by that is China is what MAGA wants to be. It's like 97% HonChinese under traditionalist leader, heavily armed, industrialized. Basically the last 10 years since Trump started saying China, China, China in 2016 because China disrupted red America. Going back to our earlier point about how, you know, the Soviets and Nazis, you know, competed with each other because red America was disrupted by China, Trump started competing with China in a way America had never done before by trying to say, "Hey, they do tariffs, we'll do tariffs, too. Hey, they're armed to teeth. Okay, we're going to do this. Hey, they care about Taiwan. We're going to care about Taiwan." But this is all mimetic. It's like the end stage of the Soviet Union where Gorbachov, you know, stopped doing the Soviet Union's own thing and started trying to be a worse version of America. MAGA is trying to be a much worse version of China. And it's not going to be that because China is 97% Honchinese and America is like 20% Wasp, right? The ship of thesius has sailed to mixed metaphors. Okay? where it's being swapped out the wasp swap from you know the the whatever 90% 99% Anglo era the colonial era to what it is today and the wasps themselves half of them are leftwing and so like whatever the self-conception of Americans is the reason there's such a thrash over the identity is there is no core identity anymore and if if you think of very very roughly the right is hardware and the left is software like the right is biology and the left is ideology, then China's going to win any hardware game because they're 97% Han Chinese. They already have vertical integration. They're like Apple, right? The software hardware vertically integrated. Whatever the rest of the world is going to be is going to have to be software and ideas because China, one more point is China has the scale like it's the only country that can actually truly afford utarchy, ultraationalism and so on because it doesn't need allies. Its policy is have no allies other than North Korea because it's a civilization unto itself. It has total utarchy. Everybody else needs diplomacy. They need alliances. They need cooperation. And that's not going to be done within America anymore for perhaps obvious reasons. But we do have the internet and we can cooperate across borders and we can actually build coalitions that I don't think can beat China nor bend China, but I do think can balance China by doing things they can't do. like Zcash is something that communism can't do, right? That's peaceful alternatives, peaceful nonviolent balance. So, this is, you know, that's a lot right there, but let me let me pause there. That's kind of I think. >> Sure. Well, you know, in a way, China has just has simply rediscovered pre- Anglo-American statecraft and pre- Anglo-American statecraft is normal statecraft. Anglo-American statecraft is something unusual. And so, you know, the thesis that you can succeed while running huge structural trade deficits uh has essentially been falsified constantly by history for many many years. I think it's still correct. And so to say that you neutralize the trade deficit is not really to say what you neutralize it with. Certainly I mean the US you know the Anglosphere in the Eurosphere more broadly invented you know even capitalism and has very much exported that to China. We're sort of no strangers to manufacturing etc etc etc. We basically just decided that the historical rules didn't apply to us and they didn't apply to us when we were on top, but now we're no longer on top and we have to live in history again. and and so you know the question of what it means to live in history is an interesting one but it is certainly true that countries you know I don't know if we can basically say well America you know let's take say Zcash well you know capital flight is a thing they're concerned about in China well we could be the destination for all your capital flight >> so that's what balances China >> but the thing is that actually importing capital is not a terribly sustainable ustainable way to say it to stay alive. I mean what balance what should balance China is, you know, I think one of the problems with the US China relationship is that we've been giving them everything that we're good at. I fundamentally like how long would it have taken the Chinese to invent X or Y or Z? How long would it have taken them to invent the large language model if that didn't come out of Google, for example? I don't know the answer to that. And and you know, neither do you, neither does anyone. But actually part of this sort of Anglo-American idea of, oh, we're going to give them all of our technology and they're going to modernize and become become part of our future. John Lennon, you know, imagine their no country is Disneyland. Clearly did not work out. I think that actually for me, you know, if I were to propose a Chinese policy, it would be a policy of cutting things off rather than connecting things. I fundamentally don't think there are good reasons for the US to even have an internet connection to China. >> Okay. So, I have several responses. First is I think Silicon Valley and the internet really should be conceptualized as an American Asian hybrid where it has Yes. the American freewilling, capitalism, innovation, but the Asian grind, get the problems right, actually study, actually know math, actually know science, you one can't handwave everything, you know, when it's hard stuff like to take to invert your question, would you know, Fuentes or Hassan's followers be able to do LMS? No. Were LM Chinese immigrants in large part? Yes. Right. And, you know, would would their, you know, would their base be able to do it? I'm not sure. And because they don't have I mean a hundred something years ago you know Bertrand Russell's thing on China like late 1800s everything was reversed at that time he wrote about how the there were you know the Chinese were addicted to opium they were torpid languid and the Americans were energetic and that was when one civilization was rising and theqing dynasty was its end and so on and the thing is that today the Chinese can be like a cafeteria Chinese where they can pick aspects of industry that work for them and they can reject let's say foot binding and stuff like that and they can synthesize it and fuse it with a modern scientific technological thing. But that wasn't like a simple thing. It wasn't like um it it was something that there was a ton of energy to come up with a formula that works today for them. And so I I think that too many conservatives, too many writers think of it as something that was just like given to China. But like for example, Japan got very far and then they got kneecapped with the plaza accords and the Chinese were just smarter than that and bigger and they actually one of the things they did is similar to you know how a founder a far-sighted founder won't give up control right and they'll take a lower valuation. So the Chinese did a lot of things where they kept sovereignty even at the expense like for example the great firewall that was a very long-term decision that they took tons of PR hits for and they did it anyway and it's like taking a lower analogously taking a lower valuation to maintain power right so they made a lot of good strategic decisions and so it's not just that oh it was given to them or they copied it another piece is you know like a lot of LLM stuff today a lot of American innovation. It's sort of like America is the Xerox Park and then China's the Microsoft, you know, where it's the idea, but then it's the execution. And this, by the way, as you know, when America was rising in the industrial revolution, that was Europe's complaint about America is that Europe would invent and that America was like, you know, these these just grinds that would do things, right? And so I think that's why I would say the cope is like you know the Asian model is executing better because it has a synthesis that works better for the internet era. And to the thing about cutting things off I think only China can afford to cut itself off than the rest of it's got the nuclear it can it can do everything full stack. I don't think the rest of the world can afford to cut itself off. To last point on the trade deficit then well I'll give you a few minutes we can wrap up. America got something for that because they were printing all this money in the hands of better capital allocators. The money printer could generate a trillion dollars with one keystroke. You'd have to sell a billion iPhones for a thousand bucks to even get trillion in revenue, let alone profit. So America was able to just sell database entries for, you know, bushels of shoes from Vietnam. And then became convinced recently that Vietnam was ripping off America because America is saying the database entries for the shoes. And now I grant that it's a catch 22 because if you have the money printing then you eventually don't have the weapons, you don't have the industrial base and so on. So you lose. But if you cut off the money printing at this point the only thing left tying Americans together, it's not religion. It's not ethnicity. It's not um you know like like Democrats, Republicans don't even marry each other. They're not even the same social networks. It's literally this tattered piece of paper called a dollar. It is only an economic zone, not a country. That's why conservatives are saying it's a country, not an economic zone. They're only saying it because it's an economic zone, not a country. It's like >> That's right. >> Right. It's like uh >> like some other slogans we could name, right? You know, and and the >> So that tattered piece of paper, when that goes away, the whole thing tears. >> That's right. And and and again, I want to, you know, and maybe this is worth closing with because this is I think the point >> that people understand so little. The Roman Republic, you know, toward the end of its days was also very much a tattered piece of paper. And what the silver lining of those tatters were was that a stronger republic, the republic of 200 BC would have found it actually very easy to it didn't even need the Caesars. It actually was very successful at governing itself under its old system. the Rome of the Caesars was not. And that very loss of strength was what enabled it to find a new organization and a new sense of statehood under the Caesars and and and and it's that loss of that inability. First of all, you have, you know, whatever we think of genes, plenty of great genetic stock in North America. There's a lot of again it's a distressed property. Let's be frank about this. It's a distressed property but there's a lot of alpha there and there's a lot of alpha that I think can be very much unlocked but it has to be it can't coast anymore. It has to be unlocked by an effective national government. And what you would see an effective national government do in America would I think be comparable although very different from the changes we have seen in China over the last 50 years. In some ways, China is, you know, we talked about Napoleon and Cromwell, you know, earlier. Of course, the u the Cromwell of China is Dao Ping who learned a lot from the great man of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yu. That connection is very much, you know, sort of uh understood. And it was actually the the chaos and the insanity of western communism in China as applied by Mao that has created just the way the the you know the French Revolution creates Napoleon and the English Civil War creates Cromwell, the Chinese Revolution which is just chaos and nonsense and barbarism really creates the one thing that a nation needs which is unified national direction. And once that power that is created by Mao who's a nut is handed to Dang Xiaoing who is not a nut and winds up in the hands of Xinping who is also not a nut. astounding things happen in China and the national capital, you know, the the sort of the capital of the nation, the substance of the nation, the land and the people is utterly transformed. I don't know what that what structure that transformation would take in America. It's obviously very different from bringing a nation from the third world to the first. I think this is the title of one of Lee Quin's books. It's more like we've gone past the first into the second and we have to go back from the second to the zeroth. But I I'm absolutely an optimist and I absolutely believe it is possible. But it will take about 100 times as much power as dump. >> Okay, let's let's do one more round. Five more minutes each. Okay, here's why. >> Um I think we're we where we differ is where we think we are in history. I think the American entity identity is like the Soviet identity. the Soviet identity at the end of the Soviet Union in '89, it had gone down to 50% Russian. And so both the Russians felt they were being exploited by others in the Soviet Union and vice versa. So it wasn't just the economics, it was also the long repressed nationalist sentiments. Yeltson on the side of the Russian nationalists, others on the side of their own nations. the whole thing burst apart and then everybody even though the Soviet identity had been forged in blood and all these people did have a lot of common Soviet culture everybody had to find their own way and some became Estonian tech guys and some became Polish Catholics and some like Sergey Brin or Vitalik's father went overseas and you know it went into a bunch of different directions because once they weren't Soviet they had to figure out what they were but the Soviets had one advantage which is they were only 75 years old. 1917 to 1991, 74, right? The problem is for America, it's not down to 50% Russian. It's down to 20% Wasp. Number one. Number two is it's 200 something 50 years old. So, it doesn't have some pre- ideological era to revert to. Number three, I'd say the transition between American republic and American empire already happened. It's called FDR as you've talked about. and that you know the American Empire was the greatest empire of all time and we're looking at it in the rearview mirror. Number four, a lot of the things that the Trump administration Trump 2 is doing is actually collapse in the in the guise of expansion. for example, going to a legible Greenland, Venezuela, Western Hemisphere thing is coincided with um the uh aircraft carriers being pulled out of Asia and a lot of you know territory being given up. And so that's why I think uh uh I think this is more the end of the empire. It's more like 476 or the end of the Soviet Union than the beginning. Yes. So let me pause. Give me last word question. Uh we we we do have to run. The crucial question for America is are we living in the late Roman Republic or the late Roman Empire? Yeah, obviously there's aspects of both. Yep. >> All right. Thank you, sir. [snorts] Thank you. >> Thanks so much.