Balaji Srinivasan: The Digital Investor's Guide to American Anarchy

**Balaji Srinivasan** (0:00)
For Bitcoin's price to go up, it has to conquer more mines. And so it's literally like expanding territory. You could visualize all 8 billion mines, and you could see Orange starting with Satoshi, and then getting to where it is now. You'd see it taking this enormous swath of territory from CZ to Pavel Durov to people in the Middle East. Just every ethnic group, racial group, religious group in the world, this message has spread.

**Brandon Green** (0:34)
Hey, everybody, and welcome to The Bitcoin Magazine Podcast. My name is Brandon Green. I'm the host. I just had a terrific conversation with Balaji Srinivasan. It was a wide-ranging conversation. He's, of course, the author of The Network State. He's created The Network School now, The Startup School, and is really just one of the most prolific Bitcoiners out there. And we talked about everything from his school to his view on America and Bitcoin and AI and this trifecta of AI networks and location and Bitcoin. And I really think you're going to love the conversation. So without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, Balaji Srinivasan. Balaji, how are you?

**Balaji Srinivasan** (1:24)
Good. How are things?

**Brandon Green** (1:26)
Things are doing great. So it's March 5th. And if I'm correct, Network School has just opened on March 1st. Is that right?

**Balaji Srinivasan** (1:36)
That was actually last year, March 1st, 2025, we reopened. So actually, it's been one year since our second thing, and we're hitting record numbers, actually. And I think we have shown that just like it's possible to build new currencies, it's possible to build new communities and cities and perhaps even countries in the long run. So come and visit Network School, ns.com, come check it out. You can play this little YouTube clip, you can see what we're doing.

**SPEAKER_3** (2:03)
This guy is building the next San Francisco.

**Balaji Srinivasan** (2:06)
I am.

**SPEAKER_3** (2:07)
He found a massive empty city on a ghost island and rented thousands of rooms and then invited tech people from around the world to come and build their startup here.

**Balaji Srinivasan** (2:20)
My name is Balaji and this is the Network School.

**Brandon Green** (2:23)
Obviously, you've talked a lot about Network State on many different shows and you spend a lot of time just explaining what it is and its basic form. But I'm curious, what's the aspect of the Network State and Network School that you don't ever get to talk about because you're so busy just explaining the basics to people?

**Balaji Srinivasan** (2:43)
I think the basics are just that Cloud First, Land Last is a new way to start a new society, which is to say you don't go and just try to get a piece of land first. You build a cloud community and then that's capable of crowdfunding the land all over the earth just like there's all these Bitcoin data centers all over the earth. So if any one of them goes down, they don't all go down. So a decentralized country is a new concept just like a decentralized currency. That's the basics. What is the less obvious part is that it's not pure libertarianism. That is to say, like Singapore is a very well-run country. Have you ever been to Singapore? Yeah.
So, like, you know, I'm sympathetic in many ways to American libertarianism, but Singapore is not really that. There's aspects of it that overlap, like, you know, you can do business. It's got, you know, very reasonable regulations, low taxes, low, basically, non-existent crime, all that kind of stuff. But you can't do drugs. You can't, you know, spit on the street and, you know, personal freedoms. In some senses, I don't personally consider it a big limitation, but if you're the kind of libertarian, you know, like, certain New Hampshire libertarians, like, they don't want to put on seat belts, right? That kind of person who just genuinely chafes at any state whatsoever, as opposed to an illegitimate state, which are distinct, right? You could, in theory, have a legitimate state, meaning one that did the greatest good for the greatest number. In America, that's been a long time since one has had that, arguably, right? But in other countries, and certainly in the American past, there are more functional governments. And so, in a sense, network state is, is statism for the anarchist and anarchism for the statist, as somebody put it.

**Brandon Green** (4:39)
I love that. I love that. It's a great sort of juxtaposition. And it's something that I think we crave, or at least I crave in the Bitcoin community, is not simply just casting off the yoke of outdated systems, but it is, in fact, building a new system with the right values at its core, with the right ideologies.