Episode 34: From Rule of Law to Rule of Code | Ben Horowitz - The Network State Podcast

0:00
Ben, thank you for speaking at the Network State Conference. Good to see you Balaji. Ready to go? Awesome. So you know, Ben, you've been, you know, a mentor and I think I'd say a friend hopefully for for many years now. And you know, one thing is in the hard thing about hard things in that book you wrote about your time at Netscape and Netscape in many ways was like the first Internet company and because it had downloads and so on and so forth, and it went viral and you guys went public and you had an acquisition and all, all the maneuvers, right. And then we work together on the rise of Bitcoin, which is first Internet currency and obviously been very heavily involved in that with a16z crypto and everything and Coinbase and all that stuff. And now we're building Internet communities. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. As you know, I, I think of them

0:45
as the third kind of thing. Start societies, Internet communities, network states. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Do you think they're the next big thing or could be? Yeah. So, so I think they're very kind of parallel in the development and that, you know, kind of before Netscape, which was the first thing that kind of brought all of the Internet pieces together. You know, there were there were many pieces. You know, there's FTP and TCPIP and Gopher and this and that, but you needed something to unify all the technologies. So it, it, it was a little deceptive and that a lot of people deep in the tech kind of saw it as well. What's new here? You know, like, it's just like you're just putting an interface on it. And I think that what the network state is, is in network

1:30
school is, is very much like that. And that we have all the primitive building blocks of community. We've got, you know, Discord and WhatsApp groups and, you know, we've got, we have Bitcoin now and we have many kind of different currency stablecoins and so forth. But and you know, nobody's brought them all to a VR, but nobody's put the whole package together. And that's really when it gets unleashed. I mean, my in my experience, that's kind of where you hit the knee in the curve when is at the integration. And it doesn't seem in a way it doesn't seem like a lot because all the pieces were already there, but the pieces as pieces just aren't that, you know, it's not, it's not actually the thing.

2:15
It's not the product. It's funny because you're right, the system integration. And The thing is, that actually has to happen after all the other pieces are mature, because if any one piece of those is wiggly, then the whole thing doesn't work. You have to wait for that to be there. So only when all those pieces are mature can you snap them together. Right, Exactly, exactly. and that's kind of the deceptive thing because in until that point, you know, people might have tried it and failed or, you know, it's kind of like this. I know that doesn't work, right? You know that kind of thing. Yeah, same with, same with Bitcoin, right? Like it put together like a lot of techniques, you know, peer-to-peer cryptography, etcetera, that had been around, but they weren't put together in a way where you could actually have money.

3:00
Right, because ECDSA existed. Yeah, hash functions existed, hash cast existed. And in a sense, I think somebody exactly as you said. Yeah. Remarked as just an it was quote, it was a clever integration of existing things, but they all existed before and they didn't innovate on cryptography, They integrated on the on the system, Right, right. And you know, it's funny you say that because I myself actually had not thought of that before in quite that way as the analogy to the web browser. But once you do sample this piece together, then that itself becomes a platform for other things. Yes, exactly. Exactly. And then you have web apps and you had everything else because then you could write. And So what we're starting to see is these sharp societies, I call them like the parallel physical, are each usually inspired by the parallel

3:49
digital. For example, there's sharp society that is like a cul-de-sac, which is based on all the micro humility stuff and it wants to be a walkable community, right? And then there's, you know, Próspera, which has mini circle and it's inspired by the biotech innovations. And then there's another one that's booting up which is inspired by all the educational innovations. And so, so the digital's inspiring the physical. Yes, Yeah, No, exactly. And I, and I think that's going to, I, I think the number of ideas around that is really going to multiply because you know, one of the things that if you look at the primitive version, it's all kind of, you know, a community around an idea. But what about a community around the interSECtion of many ideas?

4:35
You know, just for, for my own sake, it would be great if there was a tech hip hop community. But you you, you know, you, you could imagine many, many dimensions, You know, just sort of if you think of every policy that you might be interested, anything you might be interested in or any policy you might vote on. If you took the interSECtion and found all the like minded people in the world and put them in a community, that would be a kind of very powerful thing. Yes, and you know, one thing is some of the other folks were having speak the conference, for example, the CEO of Angel List read the network state book and they've just opened this Angel List Founders Cafe in San Francisco and he said he was kicking himself for not doing it three years ago because it on the one hand it seems an obvious

5:20
thing, but it's also like a non obvious thing because people drop in, they give customer feedback so you can materialize the cloud into land. So many, many digital things that we have that we think that's purely digital have some physical manifestation that might actually be non obvious. Yeah, I know that for sure. And then when you add the physical it, it does add the whole another dimension of possibility for sure. Yes, that's very interesting. So you know what, one way that we've we we start to establish a few templates in the SPACe. For example, the pop up, which is somewhere in between, let's say a conference, which is like a one day thing and what we're doing in network school is a permanent where it's like a permanent setup.

6:07
Yeah, exactly. That's right. So a pop up like a like a one month thing ish, right. And so it's longer than a conference because people, you know, they have to bring, you know, change clothes, laundry to you know, it's more than that. So do you have any kinds of things that you've been, So you mentioned a tech hip hop thing and obviously we're used to thinking about, OK, we could solve this with a new tech company, we could solve this with a new currency. Have you thought about communities that you'd like to see? Well, there's so many, you know, like that. There's the kind of I, I'm part of like a mini primitive communities in, you know, the form of WhatsApp groups and so forth. And it would be really like this. Nice to see those be much more highly dimensional, maybe have a physical incarnation.

6:53
You know, it's everything from like, you know, the LLM community to, you know, the various different kinds of things. But they're all so primitive because there's no money in them there. You know, there's no, there's no crypto in these communities. There's no physical dimension, there's no virtual reality dimension. There's, you know, all you can really do is chat, which is, you know, one of the things she'll do in a community. But then there's many, many, many more ideas that you could have. Yeah, you know, it's funny you said because the WhatsApp and Signal groups, what I like about them is you have a lot of busy CE OS and investors and so on and we can remain kind of lightweight contact with a lot of people.

7:40
And then you have the physical like, you know, maybe there's a coffee and you put in an invite there, a Luma invite and 20 of the people or 10 of the people from the group show up there and you can just pick up right where you left off with this long running group chat conversation. So there's definitely this amazing thing there. But you know what, what, what's interesting is when you, when you, when you say what you just said, you kind of want to be able to boom, hold a meet up within the chat or like hit a button and, and create a meet up or boom, hold a meet up and do maybe like a quick VR talk or something like that. I don't know, maybe the chat chat interface will get there, or maybe we'll need something completely new. Yeah, yeah. Because right now, you know, you can do that, but it's a little bit of a heavy cognitive and, like, social lift, right?

8:26
Like it's a little more risky to say, hey, let's all get together. You don't want people to go. Nah. Yeah, yeah, right. Well, you know, there's something, you know, one thing that's interesting about that is, you know, with WhatsApp, you know, a very modern question is where are you? Because it, you know, if it probably if you analyze text in the 1800s, for example, it's very rare for someone to ask, where are you? Where are you? I'm on I'm on the other side of the table from you or happy, you know, because there's not that many times, you know, maybe you sent a telegram, but the telegram, you know, or or you know, you send send a postal message, but it's rare that you

9:12
wouldn't know that a person's physical education. Yeah, you, you would certainly know where they are if you're sending a postal message. Yes, that's right. So, but one thing that's interesting, you know, WhatsApp itself is location aware, but an interesting thing that happens is people cycle around the globe and they're kind of, you know, they're in the Spain airport or they're here and they're just kind of sending messages. And, and we sort of take for granted the level of mobility there, even though they're in one place in the chat world, they're moving around the physical world. So maybe there's something that would suggest, you know, to reduce the social overhead, as you mentioned that, oh, these people are nearby, you guys should meet up, but you need to allow it to do that location tracking. That's like 1 concept for example. Yeah, that would be that.

9:57
That would be super convenient because then you, you'd also not have to worry. Oh, hey, let's meet up. Oh, I'm in France. Right, Right. that's going to be hard. OK, well that was a waste of a message for me. Yes. The thing is that the people would have to also want to be location tracked. It has to be done in exactly the right way that they feel they feel good about it. So, OK, so Internet communities, I mean, there's another angle on this, which is for example, things like self driving things like many of the biotech things that we are interested in, we can potentially have those within special economic zones. And you know, do you see my post from a few months ago on the Special Elon Zone? Oh, I didn't see that. I got to look at that. That sounds good post.

10:44
Yeah, that's all Elon tech gets to work for free. Or exactly? Yeah. Exactly, that's right. So my, my thought was what is the sort of westernized version of the Asian cause of the special economic zone? The special Elon zone, or more generally, the special founder zone would be find some swaths of territory. Maybe it's in the US, maybe it's Elon Salvador. OK, so Elon gets, you know, because Tesla's a global business and so on. So some country gives or some state carves out a piece of territory and says, OK, Elon, you can move the speed of physics rather than permits. You can crank out all the humanoids you want. You can mine stuff out of the ground. And what they would do is they'd

11:29
import existing regulations on, I don't know, graffiti and stuff. You don't have to rewrite every single law. You just allow however quick changes to existing laws. And the crucial thing being that it's like an essentially an uninhabited territory, as close to Burning Man as possible. Yeah. What are your thoughts on something like that? Yeah, No, I think that's AI, by the way. I think it's very doable. There's so many states in the US that would want to do that. I know Nevada would want to do that and I'm going to have Burning Man. They they would certainly rather have something that was productive. So so I think that's super viable. You know, there are certain sites, of course you could never do it, but for sure. And then I think it could be, it could only be really productive,

12:16
but it would also kind of create a very special community almost of kind of both like minded people and then people who knew how to build things. That's right. And actually, the thing about this if it worked for Elon, then it could work for Palmer Luckey to have the drone zone and right. And you could have, you know, different. Kind of, you know, like a more mundane thing, manufacturing. Exactly. So on that point, rare, my view mining. Exactly. That's right. So like, if you know about how Deng Xiaoping reformed China when he took over the country was like all brainwashed total communists and he couldn't like reform at all at once.

13:02
So he just set up a few special economic zones, especially Shenzhen near Hong Kong. And actually he didn't allow everybody in. They actually there was like a membership process or an admissions process where only the most capitalist sympathetic people were allowed in and they weren't going to make trouble. They weren't still diehard Maoists, right? and of course that became this gigantic, you know, Chinese city there. And this way they could gradually reform communism rather than try to change it for the whole country at once. They could experiment with new laws and so on and so forth. So for manufacturing all of the OSHA, you know, EPA type stuff, right? You could suspend that in this one zone. And everybody who came in signed a new social smart contract that would basically say, guess what? I'm coming into this totally desolate peace territory and I'm

13:49
coming because of new rules. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I, I think that, but I think that's a great idea that would be very good for the, IT would be amazing for the US if we could do it here. Yes, so. Here, not there where you are. Well, well, we were there too. We could do it in Singapore. Yes, so, so I'm, I, I want to, of course, it'd be amazing for you to do it in the US And in a sense, if you can do it in the rest of the world, then that gives you a template to bring into the US potentially, right. So, so we can we can parallel path potentially. So, OK, on the on that topic, actually relatedly, there are a bunch of countries that are pursuing interesting kinds of protect legislation like digital nomad laws, crypto laws, Dow

14:37
laws. I'd love to know your thoughts on the progressive. For example, in Wyoming, they had they did the first outlaw Tennessee had followed up with the Dow law. I'd love to know your thoughts on the jurisdictions, politicians, etcetera that are kind of pursuing the most progress technologically progressive interactions with not just tech companies, tech currencies, protocols, sharp communities. You you must have some thoughts on this. Yeah. So, so I mean, you know, in the US it does tend to be the like the states that want to do that do tend to be the red states or the purple states at least. So, you know, Wyoming, Nevada, Florida, Texas to some degree, a lot of the southern states are very kind of open to manufacturing and in these kinds

15:23
of things, you know, around the world. It's been interesting. So like Worldcoin, I think they're most kind of active country per cAPIta is Argentina. And I think half the citizens of Buenos Aires are are active users on Worldcoin. And then they also made a lot of progress, surprisingly with Malaysia, which is pretty good. You know, of course, in the UAE, Dubai has been very, very aggressive. And so they've been good. So I think countries are now seeing kind of tech policy as a way to really compete. But it tends to be the, you

16:09
know, it tends to be countries that want to grow as opposed to, you know, what's going on in Europe or, you know, some, some other places are in, you know, California even where they kind of are like, well, we're rich enough and now we need to divide up the pie and, and protect our, our children, the people. That's right. They they're basically unfortunately, they're taking prosperity for granted and then they're the you you mentioned this thing about a place that want to grow. One of the things I've been most pleasantly surprised by over the last five years or so is small states putting themselves on the map like El Salvador, but also like small cities like Palau, Marshall Islands, You

16:58
know, they've taken very pro crypto kinds of, you know, approaches. And my, my general pattern on this actually that, you know, there's 190 to 193 UN members and it's there, it's a little bit like a reverse merger or digital asset treasury company where you've got kind of a listed company and it's got a symbol and you've got a coin that wants to be listed. And there's a deal they can do to kind of list the coin. And then this guy has a symbol and a sense of political legitimacy, but not capital. And it says capital but not legitimacy. And then they merge together. That's a digitalized treasury company or reverse merger. And that cannot be done at the level of the state or whether sovereign state or like AUS state. Yeah.

17:45
Now that is a it's a very, very smart move. I think by by those states, I mean, I think it's it's really interesting that you can differentiate just by thinking about how to grow and how to maintain prosperity that there are whole societies that have given up on that idea. Yeah, we, Mark and I just had dinner with the one of the kind of potential candidates for Prime Minister of the UK and she was going through like, you know, like what's your differentiation? She's like growth, like we can grow the economy. And I was like, wow, that's a very interesting differentiator. It's interesting also because you know, historically people have said natural resources the

18:31
differentiator, but I actually think it is, you know, human resources, so to speak, or capital like basically. Letting the human resources do their thing, yeah. Yes. and we, we should come up with a term for that, but I'd like to at some point organize a conference of small countries and pro growth jurisdictions. And that's kind of like one side of A2 sided market. And we have all the tech founders and venture capitalists is the other side of the two sided market and put, put them together. I mean, network state conference is like the V1 of that, right? And we've got a bunch of, you know, folks here who are who are, who are doing that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Know for sure. I like think that goes together. You know, people who want the network state in their territory are probably the exact countries

19:16
that are interested in kind of pushing forward into the future. Yeah, because we can bring talent and capital there just like crypto, just like, you know, just like tech itself. So now are there, what has, you know, what has surprised you about the last five, 10-15 years in terms of tech and policy or or did nothing or maybe maybe there's so many things, but what have you found to be to be interesting or something that we should look at, pursue, pay attention to? Well, so I think the big wake up call for me was first kind of how interested, you know, nation states got in technology policy, which is very like all of the

20:07
sudden because we ran my whole career, nobody cared. I mean you know, like what were the issues? Stock option accounting. H1B visas like real like relative fringe stuff compared to, you know, the like, we're going to ban crypto or we are going to call Google and Metand tell them what they can publish. You know, that was a real change. And I think that, you know, my big conclusion is what the state cares about his power. And Aztec kind of rose in power to the level of the state. Then they got very, very

20:55
interested. So like, you know, it's always under the guise of safety, but it's really power. And, you know, it's been it's been quite interesting. I mean, like, it took us a long time to unravel, like, why the Biden administration was so keen on banning crypto and like, taking the US out of a whole technological SPACe, probably, you know, one of the two most important kind of technology platforms for the next 25 years. They are also anti AI. Yeah, yeah. Why are we calling it? Yeah, anti AI? Well, both of them, right? Yeah. Why would you withdraw from

21:41
that? And it really has to do with, well, you know, control if we can, if we can't control the money, then we can't control the speech. And if we can't control the speech, then we can't control the people. And, you know, both AI and crypto are like, well, we better shut them. We better have control of those things. Like they better not be in control of somebody else. And that's, yeah, it's just a really interesting learning that's I, I guess I had to grow up and learn how the world works. but that is how it works, yeah. It, it is interesting because you know, for, you know, you're, you're a little bit older than I am actually. I mean $15. And you know, during the period where for many years we had to convince people that tech was important and then suddenly

22:28
they're like, it's too important. And that happened right in the mid twenty 10s or thereabouts, after about 30-40 years of building the Internet. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. Crazy it is it is it's just so so we're probably, you know, it's the same with all the I mean the first thing the first sign I got of it was, you know, the big push for like women in tech and like, which was always surprising to me because it was like, well, you guys are discriminating against women. There's not enough women in tech, but like nobody wanted to go into tech. Like going into tech was like a weird ass thing When I went into

23:13
like I, I got like ridiculed and my friends like, what are you doing that for? Like, you know, like really computers this and that, you know, it's so hard and like, you know, there's not that much money in it and this and that and the other. And like all you do is work and, and so like going in that world and then all of the sudden, you know, Google and Meta hit and people are getting so rich. and then people all of a sudden it's like, well, you guys are discriminating. You're not letting people in. And it's like, oh, OK, you walk in. OK, no. One cares about the demographics of plumbing, for example, right? Like they haven't yes. So now. But the other part about that is tech is actually in a real sense and very globally meritocratic

23:58
because we've got people from just about every country that are participating in tech in some sense. Well, that's how we always thought of it, right? Like it's like, oh, there's all these Jews, Chinese, Indians, like all these people are coming from all over the world. They're doing tech, you know, like it's, it's not the, you know, kind of canonical white man or whatever who's doing it. But, but it was all self selected. You know, it wasn't like there was no, no, nobody ever cared. Like there was never a conversation in any of the companies that I worked at. Like that would get you to think anybody cared what race or gender you were like. Like it just was never a thing. But nobody wanted but nobody. Applied. You know this. Is one of those things.

24:43
And look, if you were kind of not Jews, Chinese or Indians, you would definitely feel low on the outside because that's what most people were. I mean, it's just like that, yeah. Well, yeah, the thing about. The Midwest too, I guess. Yes, that's right. So we, I mean, basically we have many different demographics. But you know, the thing about this one thing I've been formulating is thesis of the Internet is to Americas America was to Britain, like the version 3 point O, it's like 10X bigger. And in particular, lots of traditional American values like freedom of speech or protection against search and seizure, You can protect them on the Internet with encryption in a way that is stronger than the protections of a law, for example, right. And so like a smart contract is

25:32
rule of law. You know, for example, Delaware is melting down, but small contracts are booting up, Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We just actually moved the we reincorporated the firm into Nevada. And that's an opportunity, right, for many countries. I mean, I know you guys are like are in Nevada now, but the fact that, you know, Delaware was was a stable jurisdiction for decades, maybe centuries, depending on, you know, how long you think the chance to record was, was the main event. And so now I think there's sort of a jump ball where if you know, there's some jurisdiction that could say, hey, guess what, we've got a better Dow law and we're better than Delaware because we allow you to port your company from place to place. We've got the crypto stuff. It feels there's a real opportunity in Rule of law integrated with rule of code. If it may, maybe you'd agree

26:18
with that. Well, I definitely think so, because the thing that we've seen, you know, in the US over the last, probably mainly over the last five years is, you know, we've always kind of a huge strength of the US has been rule of law and the amount of case law and like the predictability of the law. But that kind of presumed that you didn't have people who were above the law who are judges and, you know, proSECutors and these kinds of things. And so then what's happened in the last five years is, you know, particularly in the Delaware Chancery Court is the chair of the Delaware Chancery Court just chose to completely ignore the law and make up her own law, which, you know, it was quite stunning. You know, like the board of

27:09
directors didn't have a say and then even the shareholders didn't have a say in how the company. Is the Tesla case. Whatever she imagined would be the right thing. And, you know, like, it took a lot of us by surprise. It's like, OK, wow. So Delaware doesn't have rule of law anymore, which it doesn't. Like. It absolutely doesn't. And it's hard to even get to a point where you think it does. But yeah, there was also, if you look at yeah, there was the proSECution of Trump over the real estate deal, which was also, you know, like, forget about the law. Like I, the proSECutor and I, the judge will just go like the law about, you know, what it means to have an agreement with

27:57
the bank to get a loan is no longer the law. It's what I believe. And because I believe that they shouldn't have given you a loan because I don't like you then therefore you were cheating other people. But it, it's like, well, if I go to borrow money, I disclose the thing, you kind of evaluate my collateral and I lend you the money. That's not legal in New York or it wasn't legal for that case. So, you know, you get into this, we're we're in a different world where the law has been very politicized, I would just say. And you know, as a result of that, you're kind of we're in like uncharted territory a bit. So I do think that creates an opening.

28:42
I mean, yes, my, my view on that is if you imagine like a house and there's two factions and they're fighting over the territory, that house is now a battleground and it can have a window blown up here or some guys can take it and shoot down from here. And so all of these formerly neutral institutions are now political battlegrounds, you know, one side and then maybe another will will weaponize. You know what I mean? I think it's on now, right? Like I think we've got we've we've gone through a bit of a one way door on this because I think that once one side does it, like I don't think the other side is like morally higher on higher ground. I think they'll it's going to be the same kind of thing but in reverse for sure.

29:27
Exactly so. So that is why my view is with crypto, with the blockchain, with the Internet, with the special economic zones, we can potentially rebuild a new Internet first version of those things, which now puts more of the OR as much as possible of the rule of law into rule of code. So that, for example, the property can't be seized since the private keys, you have to break encryption in order to seize the property. For example, to break the contract, you have to break the smart contract. Yeah, So what's? Your contract then a little bit. By definition, there's no room for a judge to say the contract was invalid, which is which is kind of the case in both the Delaware courts and in the kind of Trump New York real estate case where there was a contract.

30:16
And that's all of a sudden, for whatever reason, that contract, the state decided the contract was invalid. And OK, that, that's, that's interesting. But if it was a smart contract, then there's no, you know, there's not third party. That's right. And you know, one of the things I think about a lot is when I'm at a tech conference in, for example, Dubai or in Singapore, the vast majority of people there are not American, often not white. They're from Africa, they're from the Middle East, they're from, you know, Asia. But they all trust Bitcoin, they all trust smart contracts. And so that is something which actually addresses the concerns

31:02
of both the left and the right because clearly people of every race, religion, ethnicity and so on trust Bitcoin and smart contracts and so on. But it's also fair certainly to the right, because it's now like it is, it is sort of provably fair, which is new. And that's like a new standard that can you know, outweigh what you know what, what is what is no longer thought to be fair by by both sides. Yeah, I the, this actually one of my kind of favorite ideas of yours is, you know, they are called consensus protocols and they are a way of getting kind of mathematically strong consensus to the point where everybody in the world agrees to the penny who owns every bit of the whatever it is $3 trillion

31:49
Bitcoin market cap. Like that's a hell of a magic trick if you think about it. I mean, everybody in the world to agree to a thing like that is, is quite spectacular. And I think that the, I think it's probably the only future that works given, you know, what's what we're seeing now with the US in terms of the law. I think that's so. And the reason, part of the reason also is everybody from every culture can read code, can diligence code, can do the math, can determine for themselves it's correct whether they're, you know, Pakistani or Indian, Japanese or Chinese, right, Democrat or Republican. And so that is, I think part of

32:34
the goal of Network State is to come up with a series of templates that can serve restore order from the cloud. You actually, you know, you guys pioneered this in some ways like reboot from the cloud. Yeah, yes. Right. Like in a in a data center, you know, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know for sure. So restore from cloud backup is kind of how I think about a big chunk of what we're doing, but not simply the state of a server, but the state of a society. You know, we can, we can do that. And you know, an interesting question is how far we can take that. Because you can, you can have like -1 and plus one Bitcoin and you can have a smart contract that governs identity, But actually many other kinds of contracts.

33:20
For example, you could have a marriage and a birth registry on chain people. People have started to do things like that. You can even have a jury of peers where people all turn their keys like Claros and you know, things have done things like that. So I think a really interesting question to see how creative we can get, how much of the old world we can replace or at least partially replace with Internet first variance. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. Yeah. I, I mean, I think that I think we have to get the infrastructure deployed more broadly first. Like, so I do think Step 1, you know, that the, the biggest challenge right now, you know, a big challenge for the world is like we did crypto is not pervasive. Like not everybody has a wallet, not everybody has keys, but it's really important that they do,

34:06
you know, first of all, just from a SECurity standpoint, like having all of your PII in the cloud and 400 different websites is the most dangerous thing. People are going to look back on that and go like, that was crazy. That was much worse than driving without seatbelts and smoking 3 packs of cigarettes a day like that. Fucking insane. Like what are you guys doing? But we we have to get that underpinning in order, you know, and I think that needs to be the way that money gets distributed to citizens and the way people vote and the way. And then, you know, when you have that basis, then there's a basis to move the law on chain. But I think it's the trickiness of it now is it's just not pervasive.

34:55
and then we really need it to be, we need it to be like the Internet and it's not quite there yet. And then, you know, a lot of that has to do with, you know, the kind of assault on it over the last four years from the Biden administration. And so it's fragmented around the world and so forth and so on. But I I think like it's definitely the future. The question is just how fast. So yeah, I think we have actually. Years of years. But by some measures we have hundreds of millions of crypto of holders at least, right. And it's funny because it is whatever trillion dollars and it's a big enough deal that it was like a camp major campaign issue and you know blah, blah.

35:40
But it's a weird thing where like on a like I use it actually quite a lot for wire transfers and other stuff. But my view on that is we're just in the first year where we have Solana and bass, which basically means you could just blast transactions on chain as well as as well as other L ones. And we have USDC and cable coins legal. We have Apple removing its issues where it's blocking a lot of apps in the App Store. Hey Apple is a huge problem. A huge problem, right? And we also have the regulatory assault has been pulled back. So there should be like, you know, a spring of a of a bunch of stuff that was pent up that should come out there and then two other things. I do think we need more developers back in the field.

36:28
So one of the IT did is it, you know, the, the combination of the assault from, you know, the administration and the powers that be. And then the rise of AI kind of shifted a lot of the, the software development energy over to AI from crypto. And we we need to get a lot of that back to rebuild. Well, so I actually think AI is going to subsidized crypto in the sense that AI makes everything fake and crypto makes it real again. Yeah. Right, right, right. So because how do you know? AI is probabilistic. As probabilistic crypto is deterministic and that wallet allows you to digitally sign something to show it came from you and then you can have and you know, essentially a content ID on everything. And I actually think exactly

37:15
we're going to have proof human social networks. I think Worldcoin could help boot something like that up, for example. So so I think that is another subsidy here and then you're on your point on privacy. You know, I've talked with some of the folks in, you know, the Ethereum community, C cash community on HTPZ, like, you know, HTPHPSHPZ, which is conceptual, whether it's literally HPZ, but it's basically zero knowledge. Zero knowledge. Very good, yeah. Yeah, I know it's clever, right? And so we could a lot of the privacy sets, another major potential subsidy for crypto is the all the zero knowledge techniques that are being built up for not just privacy, but also scaling could be applied.

38:00
For example, homomorphic encryption and SECure multiparty. All that kind of stuff is now starting to be something that you might be able to use in traditional web apps with the with the right packaging of it. And that packaging has to be done. Maybe we can put out some prizes or something. To yeah, yeah, there's definitely work that's going on the on the packaging that's getting better. I mean, I write it the usability of, of being on chain. You know, that was one of the big two things that you know when the assault started that we needed to get better at where performance and usability and they kind of are related. We made a lot of progress on performance, not as much on usability. Yeah. And I think with hopefully we can get a lot of that over the

38:45
next year or so. I think starting to see of the forecast with bass and and s.com earned. Yeah, he's back. Let's. Go It's a good idea then, It's a good idea now. Yes, you know what's funny is we're my, my view on this you know how Evan Williams, he did Blogger and they did Twitter, he did Medium, right? And his iterations on a theme. And so I think Earn 20252026 is kind of like that. It'll be iterations on a theme from everything we learned from 6-7 years because lots of stuff works now that was only just barely starting to work back in 20/17/2018. So we'll see. OK, cool. All right. So anything, so anything else that people who are building sharp societies.

39:33
So actually, if you're building sharp society intro community network state should come to interest in Horowitz and pitch interest in Horowitz. Yeah. I mean, I, I, I think that for sure we're very interested in it where you know, where, where investors in networkstate.com. Ns.com, exactly. Yes, that's right. So yes, exactly. That's right. So. No, we believe in it. We believe in it. We're, we believe in the, you know, the, the whole thing from the sovereign individual on up. So we want to be part of it for sure. Awesome. Well, thank you very much, Ben. All right. Thank you.