Summary

The Offline Network's very first episode. Aakrit Vaish (IndiaAI) on India's AI strategy — why India should be the world's application factory rather than competing on infrastructure. Arjun Vaidya (V3 Ventures) on the Indian consumer brand boom, health & fitness trends, and what it takes to build durable D2C companies. Balaji Srinivasan (Network School) on network states, geopolitics, the declining American world order, and why Indians should use the internet as a global equaliser.

Full Transcript

[Utsav Somani]

Hello, and welcome to the very first stream of T.O.N. Now, before I tell you what T.O.N. is, let me thank my hardworking team that's made this show possible for us to do this live today with you, and also to our amazing supporters who've been with us since day zero. And you will hear from them as we go along in this show. Now, what is T.O.N.? You might think of us as CNBC, you might think of us as All in Podcast, or you might think of us as Saturday Night Live for T.O.N. founders. We're not. We're T.O.N. for India. We're inspired by the media format that TVPN showcased earlier this year to the world.

And we're bringing that for a vibrant Indian startup ecosystem. And we create our very own identity in this world of crowded content that's always negative, that's always, I mean, geared up to make you clickbait, make you feel ragey. So we're trying to put this fresh spin, where we do this every week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday with you, 45 minutes each time, 4pm.

We bring some of the best operators who've made headlines that week. And we don't do these origin stories on a podcast. We don't do therapy style talks.

We try to go one level deeper and two levels deeper sometimes behind the headlines, like what truly inspired those headlines and what transpired behind the scenes. And we'll do this with a fun set of guests. We'll bring on five to six top operators every week.

And you'll hear them talk about high signal stuff that's truly valuable. So the 45 minutes that you spend with us will be knowledge dense and high signal. So you will have fun with us.

You will also learn with us. And we'll go along as we make this show happen. So thank you for tuning in.

And on that note, we have got a solid list of guests today, Arjun Vaidya to talk about consumer investing. We've got Akrit Vaish to talk about the world of AI. And we've got Balaji to talk about literally anything under the sun.

And to make this show happen, I have an amazing co-host Dhruv Sharma. We work together at AngelList India and we built a solid bond. And I hope some of that is reflected as we have fun on the show with you.

So Dhruv, welcome.

[Dhruv Sharma]

Thank you. So it's always fun to work on projects with you and experiments with you and this time around with a phenomenal team. I mean, to all our friends who are tuning in, we'd all know what this is in due course of time.

Of course, as I've said, this is going to be the D.O.N. of India. But here's what we're going to do. Thrice a week, we invite newsmakers of the day.

We'll invite people who have a sharp take on things. We'll invite deeply original thinkers to help us make a sense of the world around us and what's happening around us. And all of this in their voice, not their LinkedIn voice.

Do your friends sound in real life like they do on LinkedIn? I know mine don't. And so this is going to be minus AI slop, minus course writers, minus any PR readouts.

And we'll try and keep the segments short and stack them in such a way that you're getting the most out of the time you choose to spend on D.O.N. And if we ever sell you a course, please answer private leave.

[Utsav Somani]

We're not here to sell you anything. With that, let's dive into the stuff. Real money gaming.

Monday to Friday, it was all done. What's your take on this whole thing that played out?

[Dhruv Sharma]

Well, it depends on which side you view this from. And so, I mean, if you view this from the side of the government in general, they're not great fans or I would say they're averse to speculative economic activity as opposed to productive economic activity. And we've seen this entire story play out, by the way, in a regulated space like F&O trading.

And some would say that, you know, even the gaming industry should have seen this coming. I mean, this time they took the legislative rule and just, you know, tabled a bill in parliament. But we've also had things on the taxation side, which were early warning shots.

And regardless of that, it's happened now. How are you seeing the key players respond to the situation?

[Utsav Somani]

So a lot's been discussed about this. I know it's been a couple of weeks since this has happened, but I think some of them are pivoting. Some of them are targeting new geographies.

Some of them have said that they'll not contest this ban. So I think there might be short term effects. And some of that, I think I read on Twitter, this post by Kushal Bhagia, where he actually goes two levels deeper.

What's the second or the third order consequence follow? And one of the surprising ones was that payment gateways will, of course, have a 50 percent drop in traffic. Many of them had built exclusive tools and tooling for these time to companies.

And then, of course, cricket is religion in this country. So IPL, I mean, all of those sponsorship money, cricketing jersey in India was Dream Eleven. So all of that going away, we'll see how that plays out when the next IPL comes up as well.

So all in all, I think, I mean, the overall undertone that I'm sensing from the ecosystem is that it's a positive move because loans that went into powering all of this activity and just that this Indian manufacturing boom makes it abundantly clear that it's not against gaming, it's against speculating, you know, fantasy gaming and betting and things like that.

[Dhruv Sharma]

In fact, the bill also talks about creating enough space for what it's calling what it's calling productive or I think constructive digital reaction. I read this ministry is going to start payments for gamers. That'll be a first of its kind move.

[Utsav Somani]

Net net will be positive. Of course, some short term pain is expected, but let's see how this all plays out. Switching gears up a little bit.

E.T. Startup Awards, one of the most prestigious award ceremonies in the startup world. Things we should celebrate. There have been different milestones and they've recognized different categories like best on campus, social enterprise, comeback kid, all these things we should celebrate.

You read these headlines about 10 startups, but what truly is going on behind the scenes in the ecosystem? I think that's exciting. And we've got one of my favorite companies, a startup of the year, Urban Company.

Yeah, I use them at least five, six times in a month, if not more.

[Dhruv Sharma]

Yeah, as do I. And look, I can only imagine how hard it must have been the jury to pick because we also we also read the names of the contenders and each better than the other. But in the end, only one could could have gotten the award.

But the Urban Company is it's it's a phenomenal company. It's no it's no surprise why they don't they don't have like blanket competition, maybe in one or category. They've been very disciplined about which category they they open and which category they stay in.

And the service levels are just very, very consistent. Yeah, I mean, the Midas Touch Award this this year.

[Utsav Somani]

Ashish of Peak15.

[Dhruv Sharma]

Yes, he's an invest and grow.

[Utsav Somani]

Yes, one of the companies that should go for an IPO soon. And Reliance and Meta, their AGM, I think was amazing. They've announced that they'll be going for an IPO next year, that 100 billion JV in the world of AI.

I think it's looking pretty exciting. I mean, with Meta's heft up in their AI talent that they've gone through recently with Alexander from Scale AI leading that initiative and then a whole bunch of different things happening in Meta. But Jio with their distribution, I think it should be exciting.

What do you expect from this?

[Dhruv Sharma]

You know, I was actually talking to a friend who works over there and I was like, OK, well, what is happening in this AGM? By the way, the AGM was the closest anything over here at home gets to those legendary Berkshire AGMs, don't you think? I was like, even the production of it.

[Utsav Somani]

Mark Zuckerberg, Bob Iger, everyone coming on show. I think it was nice.

[Dhruv Sharma]

Yeah, but what he was saying is that Reliance is in the middle of this dramatic pivot now into a deep tech company with global ambitions. And this will not be the first time we've seen them do such a thing. And it used to be known as an oil company.

And then look, Jio happened. And that transformation is underway. And we might think, by the way, like all of these partnerships are just so that customer facing services across the Reliance umbrella get better.

It's equally for their own internal transformation as an industrial conglomerate. So pretty cool.

[Utsav Somani]

World of Venture. We can't talk about the world of tech startups in India without the World of Venture. So elevation capital, 400 million late stage fund.

That's been happening for a while, right? Across the world, these kind of vehicles.

[Dhruv Sharma]

It's a it's a trend. I think Sequoia may have been the first to do something in this regard. But I believe Rulof Potha had this idea for a permanent capital vehicle.

The idea is, I mean, if you take Google as an example, right? I don't know what the listing day price was. Maybe it was like worth a billion dollars.

It's a trillion dollar company today. And so so the point being that these companies, a lot of the value they create during the course of their life happens after that moment they go public. And why should BC sit that out?

[Utsav Somani]

Powerful strategy, early stage specialized stuff, late stage capital accumulators, like you rightly described it before. All right. With that, let's welcome the very first guest on T.O.N. Aakrit Vaish, who's going to talk about the world of AI in India. I think something that all of us have been thinking about for a long time. Aakrit, welcome.

[Aakrit Vaish (IndiaAI)]

Man, I'm so honored.

[Utsav Somani]

First guest. You're literally our first guest.

[Aakrit Vaish (IndiaAI)]

Did you, are we going in alphabetical order by first name?

[Utsav Somani]

No, we're going by people who have less hair. No, I'm just joking, man. What's happening?

[Aakrit Vaish (IndiaAI)]

Lots, man. That's never, never a dull day in the world of, I guess, AI and India. Too much action.

Very excited to see you guys here. All the best for the show. And I was just listening into some of the, some of the stuff before and seems super exciting.

[Utsav Somani]

No, no. Thank you for tuning in and thank you for signing on. So, I mean, let's dive in.

Like, I mean, there's been so much noise that's been happening, right? In the world of AI, like US has private led AI, China has state led AI. Where does India fit into this whole picture?

Do we have a third model in play? Will there be, I mean, you've been closest to the mission. So, let's read on where does India fit into this world of AI.

[Aakrit Vaish (IndiaAI)]

I think much like every other wave of industry or technology, India defines its own way, which is always unique. I think whenever we have tried to compare, although we have failed, whenever we have figured our own innovative way out, we've done well. I mean, look, I have very strong views on some of this stuff.

And some of this might be not usual or not popular, but I actually think that we need to play the game in a very different sphere. I don't think we can play the same war as US or China, which is on the infrastructure side, right? Which is basically saying that, hey, look, who has more GPUs?

I mean, that's not India's play. Who has the best model? I don't think that's India's play.

And the reason is, you know, aside from being dreamy and aside from being like, hey, India should lead and all that. The truth is GDP per capita, right? As a country, where we are today at 23, $2,400, you know, if you take out $150, $200 billion and invest in building infrastructure, just as in, it's not in the right scheme of things in terms of timing, right?

That capital is required to build many other things. Now, yeah, now, let's not go into whether that's means for other things or not, but let us theoretically first principles say that, look, that CapEx is better served to do other stuff. So, but India, we can absolutely play the game on and we can absolutely try to even win, which is our talent base, right?

And I think of talent base as three types where India can really play in AI. First and foremost, which has always been the case for us is entrepreneurship. We have, you know, the first wave of over the last 15 years has created a captive set of great product people and engineers who can now build very exciting AI companies.

A lot of them are what we call born in AI. A lot of these companies will be built for the world, right? So, India has the opportunity to become what we call the application factory for AI from India for the world.

So, that's one talent access. The second talent access, I have now been counting, this year itself, in August, let's say there are 100 AI unicorns, 100 of the best AI unicorns in the world. More than 50% of set up offices in India.

Not necessarily for India go to market for engineering.

[Utsav Somani]

And is that specifically in data sets? I mean, a lot of tagging work is happening in India as well, right?

[Aakrit Vaish (IndiaAI)]

That was going to be my third access, right? So, this I'm referring to as specifically engineering and product, which is you're hitting the cap in the Bay Area, you're hitting the cap in Europe, where else do you go? And India has such a large talent base and very high quality, right?

And then the third is, it's up to your point, right? Which is a lot of the world's data tagging, AI-led services work, annotation work, workflow automation, human stitching in is all happening here. In fact, ironically, Gujarat is probably one of the largest states that's doing some of this whole AI back office work.

So, if you just think across these three, I think that for me is the way that India has.

[Dhruv Sharma]

So, with your work at India AI, what are some outcomes that have really come to life and some of the ways in which Indian companies have already started taking advantage of that phenomenal effort? And also, is the org something or is it an end of one kind of org?

[Aakrit Vaish (IndiaAI)]

Yeah, no, look, I mean, India AI mission is a division within the Ministry of IT. It's led and run by the government of India. And so, in that sense, it's an end-to-end government division association within Meti.

I would say the work that I think all of us feel most excited with is the benefit grant and the investment that we're going to give to foundation model companies. There have been four companies selected so far. Hopefully, more companies which are going to get GPU credit.

Because it gives rise to this R&D culture in a country where these four or five companies are going to have some of the hopefully best researchers working on thinking about how to build some of these models, which just gives rise to the entire ecosystem. So, that's already in play. The four companies that are announced are public.

Hopefully, a few more coming.

[Utsav Somani]

And is there a general sense of fear in the Indian business world when it comes to AI, like in terms of adoption, in terms of job replacement, or in terms of just being obsolete? Is there a general sense of fear in the Indian businesses or business community, especially the knowledge-based ones? I think it's more FOMO than fear.

Interesting. Would you like to elaborate on that?

[Aakrit Vaish (IndiaAI)]

I think, sir, your point fear is more, I'm going to get replaced, or what's going to be my purpose. FOMO is, am I missing out?

[Utsav Somani]

Interesting.

[Aakrit Vaish (IndiaAI)]

And I think that's different is, I think if you're truly fearful, you will act faster because that's an existential crisis. Versus FOMO is more, am I being ahead in life or not? So, where I'm going with that is, I don't see people acting as fast enough as they should be.

Right? So, there's not as much paranoia as I believe there should be in large Indian companies. And the other day, we were having a conversation, even amongst product and tech units, right?

I mean, I can count on my fingers that I think are truly disengaging themselves with AI. And a lot of it has to do, again, like I said, FOMO versus fear is that listening to be relevant. Versus, look, am I going to exist?

What does the business model mean in five years from time? I think if those questions were being asked, then you would have seen very different things happen. And actually, you would not even be asking this question.

You would have actually seen the results in front of you. And this question would be moved.

[Utsav Somani]

Interesting. And in terms of, I mean, we've seen a public-private partnership succeed at India Stack, right? I mean, where we created this world-leading trails for payments, other things as well, data sharing as well.

Will we see something like that come out of India AI? Are you propagating some of that?

[Aakrit Vaish (IndiaAI)]

I think within each different scheme and policy that the India AI mission creates, each one of them is its own sort of way of doing things. Some of them might be public-private. Some of them might be completely privately enabled.

Some of them might be completely government-owned and controlled. I think AI is so broad. It's not a vertical or a theme.

It's a horizontal that's going to disrupt everything, right? So depending upon what you're doing, like for example, if there's an initiative to back or invest startups, then I would say with that, it's probably best done by the private sector entirely.

[Dhruv Sharma]

But the clusters, the GPU clusters, how are you putting those together?

[Aakrit Vaish (IndiaAI)]

Yeah, that's all public. And it's been a fairly good exercise where India AI has created a marketplace where we have empaneled a number of different AI cloud providers and AI cloud vendors and discovered the price. So basically, they ran a tender process by which a cloud provider would specify how many GPUs they have and what price are they willing to give it at for each different specification.

So that's completely as an exercise. So if you go to the portal, you'll see that, okay, here are the providers with a number of machines. And now on the flip side, on the demand side, startups and companies can come and apply for getting these GPUs.

And on a case-by-case basis, India AI will subsidize them by 40%.

[Dhruv Sharma]

Right. And then from there on out, it's just plug and play. They can come train their models and that way you're not even letting any capacity go waste.

[Aakrit Vaish (IndiaAI)]

That's right. And I mean, look, the way to think about it is the cloud providers can do whatever they like, right? So which means they can easily, they should be selling the capacity they've built directly to the market as well.

And then whatever comes to India AI will get passed on to them.

[Utsav Somani]

Awesome, Akrit. I think, thank you for being the very first guest and running us through these models and the world of AI. And speaking of models, now we've got the capital model and the business model in play.

The prince of startup investing in the consumer world. Arjun, please, welcome.

[Dhruv Sharma]

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[Utsav Somani]

Yeah. So, I mean, tell us what's happening in the world of venture investing. What's consumer focus?

What's new in 2025? What's keeping you busy?

[Dhruv Sharma]

Utsav, before we get Arjun talking about venture, Arjun, are you doing the High Rocks in Bombay?

[Arjun Vaidya (V3 Ventures)]

I am doing the High Rocks in Bombay on Sunday.

[Dhruv Sharma]

This is going to be your third High Rocks event.

[Arjun Vaidya (V3 Ventures)]

It's going to be my third back-to-back High Rocks. One second, just give me one.

[Utsav Somani]

So I think the description that I have for Arjun is that he's a paddle player by the day and a venture capitalist at night. Man, literally, it's like five stories about paddle with like, yesterday he was with the number 10 in UK playing paddle. So the paddler needs to chill.

[Arjun Vaidya (V3 Ventures)]

The last time I saw Dhruv, Dhruv was wearing a white sleeveless t-shirt and killing the run in High Rocks, Delhi. So that's the last time we were together.

[Utsav Somani]

Nice.

[Arjun Vaidya (V3 Ventures)]

Doing my third one this Sunday. So hoping for the best.

[Utsav Somani]

All the best.

[Arjun Vaidya (V3 Ventures)]

Yeah, yeah, hoping for the best. But it's been, how many times did I tell you? Yeah, let's talk about work a little bit.

[Dhruv Sharma]

Or maybe through the lens of High Rocks, right? Like Arjun, it's always great to get your take on where the Indian consumer's mind is at. What has High Rocks taught you about how the Indian consumer's thinking?

They surprise you in interesting ways every now and then.

[Arjun Vaidya (V3 Ventures)]

Yeah, look, I think I've been pleasantly surprised by the move towards health and fitness. And I'm including a work angle here because otherwise we can talk about sport forever. But I've been pleasantly surprised at the rapid change that we have had with the perception as well as the practice of health and fitness, right?

And so maybe the way I want to start this is with the lens of a sport that paddle players will not be so happy hearing about, which is pickleball. I think that sport actually has showed of sport and fitness in India. So I get messages and stories from founders in three cities of India as well saying, hey, we want to pitch our business to you on pickleball.

So practicing in like Jabalpur and Jammu and Anantnag and Infal and Trichy. And that to me has been very exciting.

[Utsav Somani]

So the quickest way to pitch Arjun is always invite him for a game of pickle or paddle. I think that's the takeaway.

[Arjun Vaidya (V3 Ventures)]

This whole entire IP of pickle and pitch came from founders saying, hey, if I'm not getting your time during the workday, can we catch you before or after the workday on the pickleball court? But if I may just talk about numbers, what's absolutely startling to me is the scale of decathlon in India. Look, people have said that sport, fitness, health, wellness, was a elite, urban, rich person thing, right?

The rich people were doing gym. The rich people were running marathons. The rich people were playing all these sports.

When you look at this company, to like 50 something stores, they're doing 4,500 crores in sales. Puma is doing 3,000 crores in sales in India. The top five companies, Puma, Asics, Adidas, Decathlon and Skechers do 12,000 crores of sale in India, which means that there's a lot of people in our country that are buying their first pair of running shoes, their first paddle racket, their first gym bag, their first gloves to lift weights in.

And that signals a trend that is very, very sick of India is getting involved in this health and fitness wave. Now that doesn't just include sport. It includes beauty, personal care products as well.

They're buying a lot of sunscreen. They're taking care of themselves. It also includes food, right?

Like my friend Rewa has now made a large population in our country read labels. When we talk about reading these labels, it means that a startling figure for me was low-cal, zero-sugar ice cream, on QuickCommerce, and I'm an investor in a company called Go Zero, is close to 10% of all ice cream bought on QuickCommerce, which means 10% of ice cream bought, which is 1,000 crores of ice cream that's bought on QuickCommerce per platform every month, 100 crores of that is low-cal, zero-sugar ice cream, a category which did not exist five years ago, right?

[Utsav Somani]

And so- One of my favorite brands, and I think I remember this LinkedIn post that you made about SuperU. What a phenomenal brand, right? Their protein, that fermented protein, one of its kind, low cost as well.

And man, those chips, they're heavenly. Like I probably consume like four packets of that pudding-flavored chips every week. But that post that you made, the price point and the taste, they're not trying to replace the taste in India.

Like you try to sell somebody unflavored whey protein in India, that's going to be a hard task. But you give them like malai, kesar pista, chocolate-flavored protein, they're more likely to latch that up in a good habit package.

[Arjun Vaidya (V3 Ventures)]

You know, that post that I made on LinkedIn was a phenomenon I've seen specifically in the food space in India.

[Utsav Somani]

Yeah.

[Arjun Vaidya (V3 Ventures)]

Deep dive a little bit on that. So as a consumer investor, I don't look at the world of investing from my lens of consumption. The biggest mistake we can make in these AC conference rooms and boardrooms of urban India is that our behavior is the behavior of most people.

And the problem with consumer investing as compared to AI or SaaS or B2B is that you are also the consumer, so is your grandmother, your cousin, and your daughter. That bias keeps coming in. And what I realized is that India in food specifically, while we talk about health, health is very different from the definition of health at scale in India.

And what is working at scale, and what I mean scale, I mean like large businesses, is healthier, which means that there is a beautiful example of a company that we made the mistake of not investing in. And the company is called Let's Try. It's a product you probably wouldn't have heard of as well.

It's basically a namkeen's business. It's a snacks business. It was beating BKG and Vika on e-commerce as well, the time when we were evaluating the company one and a half years back.

The company does more than 200 crores of sales now in ERR. And their insight is instead of palm oil, they're using groundnut oil. The products are the same.

It's bhujia, it's biscuits, it's makhana, it's all the products are the same. It's all the products that...

[Utsav Somani]

Literally just a very small change and boom, it's a new company.

[Arjun Vaidya (V3 Ventures)]

Similarly, it tastes good, it's just not got sugar, but it tastes good. You don't get taste right in food, you'll die.

[Dhruv Sharma]

It's almost what we're hearing is ever since Indian consumers started paying attention to labels, now more build brands and be disruptive and change up brands and so on.

[Arjun Vaidya (V3 Ventures)]

And the other thing I will say, in general, in the consumer space in India is that the consumer is smarter than you think. With access to lots of information, with access to social media, with access to eye bottles, with access to everything with the touch of the fingertips, you cannot cheat this consumer anymore. If you use liquid glucose in your product and you see no added sugar, you will be called out.

Buy this consumer on Twitter, on Reddit, someone will call it out and that conversation will become mainstream.

[Utsav Somani]

Interesting. But after... I mean, one quick final question to wrap things up.

After the 2021 boom, what are you seeing different? How are brands adapting to this? Is it becoming more competitive?

More brands getting started, having an eight-month, six-month compared to a competitor popping up. How are they trying to stay ahead of the pack?

[Arjun Vaidya (V3 Ventures)]

See, I think the 2021 boom was in general for the startup space. I think indeed to see or in consumer brands, that boom has continued. We are seeing brands...

In seven months, they reached 100,000 ERR. That is unheard of. Yeah.

The world is 5X more competitive than when I was building my company, right? I built my company from 2016 to 2021. And so in this world, you have to have a serious right to win and that could be product, it could be convenience, it could be content strategy, it could be community.

But without that right to win, on Amazon, you'll get stuck in a cutoff of 50 brands. And in those 50 brands, if you don't have a way to differentiate yourself, you'll get lost all day. And so I think in this competitive world, you have to really come up with some mode.

And the modes could be various, but without a mode, it's going to be very hard to succeed.

[Utsav Somani]

Awesome. Thank you for coming on the very first stream of UN, Arjun. And we'll catch up soon.

Hopefully, Dhruv will beat your score at Hirox as well when you see him soon. Thank you.

[Arjun Vaidya (V3 Ventures)]

Very excited for you and for this new product and all the rest.

[Utsav Somani]

Thank you so much, Arjun. Now, we have our guest for the final segment ready with us. Balaji, welcome to the show.

And thank you for giving us this time and trusting us. This is our very first stream and we hope you like the product and the set of questions that we bring for our audience to you. Sure.

Do you guys hear me? Yes, absolutely. Super clear.

Great. Dhruv, can you kick things off?

[Balaji Srinivasan (Network School)]

Sure. And Utsav, so you're running AngelList India, correct? That's right.

Dhruv is running AngelList India. Dhruv is running AngelList India. That's correct.

[Utsav Somani]

We had connected when Naval had introduced us, I think in 2021, when I was still at AngelList India. I've moved on and now I'm building a couple of media companies, a couple of community businesses by the name of offline and also investing in startups on the side.

[Balaji Srinivasan (Network School)]

Okay, great. Cool. Okay, good.

I remember you had been at AngelList India. So now, good to see both you guys. Okay, so how can we get...

Let's get started.

[Utsav Somani]

Two of my colleagues at TON now, Tanisha and Yashwi, they're with you at the network school right now. Tanisha has come back after a small break. So small world.

Yes, it's great. Awesome. Dhruv, you want to kick things off?

[Dhruv Sharma]

Yes. How would you describe the network school to our audience?

[Balaji Srinivasan (Network School)]

There's several lenses on it, but briefly, it's a startup society. And so imagine if you could have San Francisco without the downsides of San Francisco, which is actually run by technology. And so we have, I think, San Francisco quality coffee, a San Francisco quality gym, San Francisco quality co-working and so on, but not at San Francisco prices, much less than that.

And also all the way over here in Asia. So just a quick hop for Indians in particular to come to. And it is sort of the international outpost for the international technologist.

So in one sense, it's simply just the cloud materialized into land. It is co-working, it's gym, it's coffee, it's obviously, it's residence. It's all of that for 1500 a month.

Let me pause there. Go ahead.

[Utsav Somani]

And if you were to do this experiment in India, I know you have this special corner for India, like novel as well. Would you, what part of India would you do this in network state? And how would you go about it?

[Balaji Srinivasan (Network School)]

Sure. So, so network school, I would probably set up a node in Bangalore or possibly gift city. You know, one of those two places, maybe somewhere else, but those are the two.

There's a third place, which is interesting, which is Gelofu. It is actually a Bhutan startup city that's right on the border with India in like Northeast India. And that's interesting because the King of Bhutan is actually very interested in Bitcoin and startup cities and has talked to me about, you know, going to Gelofu.

So, so Gelofu is interesting because it's not exactly, obviously it's not in India, but it's literally on the border with India. So those are three places that I'm thinking about. And we may actually set up the first few sites outside of the first node as places where there's cafe and coworking, but also proctoring.

Because I think like we're going to need to proctor tests in a big way in the AI age, because people will otherwise, you know, fake tests online. Anyway, I can get to more of that, but go ahead.

[Dhruv Sharma]

And Balaji, in designing the network state, what elements of the civilizational state and the nation state and the multinational state and the city state have you drawn on?

[Balaji Srinivasan (Network School)]

Sure. So one thing I want to clarify is, I think on balance, India is pretty, pretty well run. It is doing extremely well over the last 10 years, you know, fastest growth rate in the world of any large economy.

I think in general, the countries that were badly run in the 20th century are well run in the 21st and vice versa. That is to say, those countries that were communist and socialist became capitalist and like the minimum necessary level. And as such have posted amazing growth rates.

And that's China, that's India, that's Vietnam, that's actually Russia, actually, you know, they're doing very well now, surprisingly, even with the war. That is a lot of the BRICS countries. And by contrast, those countries that were, and I'll get to my original point in a second, those countries that, you know, the US and Western Europe that were rich in the 20th century, that wealth, they've just inherited it.

And so they forgot what it is to build wealth. And so they're kind of, they're degenerating and so on and so forth. So it's a reverse of the 20th century.

And so network state is, as distinct from network school, network state is for me, a reform movement for those parts of the world that are badly governed. In those parts of the world that are well-governed, you only need to build startup societies. And that's a big difference, right?

In those parts of the world that are well-governed, there's no need to have another government, right? So you just have a startup society, you just have a node there, which is almost like an embassy or an outpost. It's like a Chinatown.

Chinatown is not China itself, right? Chinatown is just like a cultural kind of center. So those startup societies are like clusters of tech, and those I think will exist all over.

But then the government aspect of it is only for really competing with governments that are failing. And I don't think Eastern governments are failing. I think actually India's government is actually on balance very much succeeding.

Let me pause there.

[Utsav Somani]

And in terms of geopolitics that's happening, right? I mean, 4D chess across the world. I mean, spending time with China and Russia as we speak.

And I mean, US, of course, imposing tariffs overnight on India. What's your read? Like if we just zoom out, like how should founders or builders think about all of this chess being played where they literally have no say on how this happens?

[Balaji Srinivasan (Network School)]

Great question. So I actually have a long piece coming out on this, which is- Nice. Can we get a sneak peek?

India, Indians, and the internet. And so let's distinguish India from Indians. So the state from the network.

The Indian state is actually handling this whole thing very well because in many ways, I think what's happening now is actually going to be a blessing in disguise for India, the state, and most Indians. The reason being because you want to, at this moment in time, minimize your dependence on America, American institutions, the American dollar, and so on and so on and so forth. For example, if you depended on Delaware, there's a reason that Elon and A6NZ and so on have moved out of Delaware.

That's been melting down. This thing that was a constant, the American piece of the world order has melted down. So every Delaware corporation, it is only because you haven't transitioned out of it yet that you're still there, right?

To hold US dollars. Basically, the US dollar has depreciated by 100 million X against Bitcoin since inception, right? There's a reason that Elon has moved out of California.

All the people who are there who are doing AI have decided to go after blue jobs that say they're disrupting Democrat jobs that are like journalist, artist, lawyer, doctor, bureaucrat in the bluest city, in the bluest state in the American Union, which is a huge risk in the medium to long run to be very publicly rich and be publicly a billionaire in San Francisco while disrupting blue America in the middle of the bluest city in blue America is a huge risk for them.

So American institutions from Delaware to California to the dollar to many other things are melting down and the American world order is melting down. And so in a sense, this giant trade war and so on is doing a favor for the rest of the world and for India. And the reason it's kind of, it's telling all these countries back away because this thing is going supernova, okay?

That's not the intent of it on the American side, but that is the result of it is it's basically saying, don't depend on the U.S. for military support. Don't depend on the U.S. as a market. Don't send your people to the U.S. as students because they're not gonna get visas at the university. But don't send them as workers either because they're not gonna get H1Bs. And also don't send them as tourists because if you're European or Australian or something like that, even you might get strip search at the airport. And even if you're a conservative or a libertarian, for example, do you see what happened with Pierre, I'm probably mispronouncing his last name, Pierre Paulebrey and Mark Carney in Canada?

Yeah. Yeah. So the conservatives in Canada basically were up 20, 30, 40 points versus the left in Canada.

And then Trump started tweeting about Canada being the 51st state or what have you and went on and on about that. And that just ruined the conservative chances. And then Mark Carney just flipped him in just like a few months.

The US got absolutely nothing for this. And instead, what Trump got was a hostile blue power on his northern border. Okay, and he undermined because MAGAs have actually memed themselves into a mindset where conservatives, libertarians and other countries are also their enemies because they've got such a narrow conception of America first.

Actually, there's a mental illusion that's similar to the Democrats. Democrats define democracy as ruled by Democrats. And Republicans define America as red America.

So each of them is always confused when 50% goes the other way. The Democrats are like, wait a second, I thought democracy was Democrat. Why am I losing this election?

Because obviously Republicans can also vote. And Republicans define America implicitly as red American. And then blue Americans are traitors to America and so on and so forth, right?

Okay, so then why are 50% of Americans not red American? And so by defining it in this way implicitly, and it's an optical illusion in their head, where when they say American, they visualize a red American and not just any red American, often a white red American or a conservative white red American or whatever, right? And so that starts to subset and subset and subset to this tinier and tinier slice of the world.

There's only 77 million MAGA voters. And now they've already gone and alienated a good chunk of tech by getting Elon alienated. And obviously they're fighting a domestic cold civil war against the Democrats.

They're also fighting a global trade war against every country at once. They're fighting with Uruguay, they're fighting with Vietnam, they're fighting with Indonesia, right? Okay, so you put all that, go ahead.

[Dhruv Sharma]

But if I can maybe ask you a question. And so with everything that's happening with the trade war, if that leads to a refolding and reshaping of alliances around the world, how do you think that's going to reflect in a new change world order?

[Balaji Srinivasan (Network School)]

Yeah, so I mean, there's so many tectonic plates moving. But the main thing is, you know, there's the Singapore PM actually had a good phrase, world minus one. Globalization and international free trade and so on continues just minus America.

And the new two poles of that are China and the internet. China for everything physical and the internet for everything digital. And the reason that this is, I mean, there's a graph that there's a few graphs, but one shows the G7 percentage of the world economy in GDP terms going down like this.

And BRICS going up like this. And that flipped like a few years ago, right? So BRICS actually has more of the world economy, the real world economy than the G7.

G7 is just headed down. The second is a boomerang graph that shows essentially that the geocenter of the world GDP was in Eurasia for almost 1000 years. And then only with the industrial revolution did it go out to Europe.

And then after the end of the Cold War, it rocketed back out to Asia much faster than it came. So most of the world economy is in Asia. Most of the billionaires, most of, certainly most manufacturing, most production and so on is here, right?

And so the only thing that the US makes are actually A, the dollar and B, tech. And the dollar is now, go ahead. What's up, you're gonna say something?

[Utsav Somani]

No, no, I was just laughing at the point that you make.

[Balaji Srinivasan (Network School)]

It's actually so true. It's true, right? So the issue is that MAGA is acting as if there's adamantium under the Appalachians.

That physical America is where it's at. And if they wall off the rest of the world and they block all tourists, they block all talent, they block all trade, they block all student workers and researchers and visas. They also are a flaky military partner where they're pulling support even from NATO.

By the way, if they're pulling support from NATO, obviously Taiwan isn't gonna get support, right? Obviously, no other country. If NATO, their long standing set of alliances, if they're mad and the Europeans should pull their own way, right?

Then Japan isn't gonna get support. They're blocking, they've alienated Japan with trade deals and so on and so forth. So the MAGA mentality is incorrect because they don't understand the extent to which America is actually an empire, not a country.

And it has 750 military bases globally and it has the dollar everywhere. And it has US regulations have been adopted by harmonization everywhere and so on and so forth, right? In a real sense- Exactly, Hollywood and so on.

All of that is just collapsing internally. And the internet has kind of replaced America as the soft power piece. That's the media and the money.

And China has replaced America as a hard power piece because that's the manufacturing, the military. And when I say the internet has replaced America, what I mean by that is, when you think of France and you think of French culture, what do you think of? You'll think of baguettes, you'll think of the Eiffel Tower, right?

You'll think of, you know, the Louvre, right? Go ahead.

[Utsav Somani]

Croissants.

[Balaji Srinivasan (Network School)]

Croissants, exactly. You'll think of their food and their art and their architecture. Can you think of something French that's in the last 20 or 30 years?

Probably not, right? I can name some books and stuff like that and so on and so forth. But like, something distinctively French, you wouldn't think of probably in the last 20 or 30 years because French is sort of like a, it's a funny way to put it, but it's like- Airbus, would Airbus, I mean- Kind, kind of.

But I think if you just ask the world- Everything that's going on- Go ahead.

[Utsav Somani]

Yeah, everything that's going on with Boeing, I think Airbus might be the only option to fly.

[Dhruv Sharma]

Airbus is also, it's a French company in name only. It's otherwise a consortium of four or five other European companies.

[Balaji Srinivasan (Network School)]

Yes. So my point is, France is like a frozen product, right? It's like a product that's achieved.

It's like Campbell's soup or something like that. Like it's achieved perfection in a sense. It's frozen.

You go to France for that product and it's not meant to morph and change and so on and so forth. And I think the non-obvious thing is, physical America is also a frozen product. That's why you're getting Hollywood replays.

You still have the stars from the 80s. Even Trump is a star from the 80s, right? You still have movies with Tom Cruise.

You still have movies with Arnold Schwarzenegger. And with AI, you'll have those movies forever. Just like you still have photographs of the Eiffel Tower forever, right?

That culture and time is stuck, finished, done, right? In many sense of the word, done. And the internet is where all the dynamism has happened, right?

If you think of the internet in America as distinct, the internet is to America as America was to Britain. And, you know, in the sense America, it was 10x bigger than Britain and it admitted more people than Britain. And it was all Europeans, not just the rights of all Englishmen.

And it took common law and upgraded to the constitution. And it had an even bigger global empire than Britain did. And on and on, in many ways it was, it exceeded even its progenitor.

And many people who would have just been visitors to Britain were citizens in America, right? So the internet is a version 3.0. And an Indian is a second-class citizen in America, but it's a first-class citizen on the global internet. Especially with crypto, you have global rule of law, or really rule of code, because Indians have access to the best monetary policy in the world, the best contracts in the world via smart contracts.

You can incorporate on-chain. You can be pseudonymous, so you can't be discriminated against for your name, right, or your accent. You can type without an accent.

With voice changers, you can speak without an accent, right? So the internet is for Indians. I mean, it's for everybody, but Indians are equal on the internet to everybody else.

And all you need is equality, right?

[Utsav Somani]

So... But, I mean, zooming in on India as a topic, right? I think for Indians specifically, and you made some good points, like internet's a level playing field.

We're still getting there. I think everyone almost has access to internet in the country now. But where does India lead?

Like, do you think, like, AI is supposed to be the next big revolution and web, crypto are also up and coming. So where does India lead? Like, where does India become supreme?

[Balaji Srinivasan (Network School)]

So what do I think? I don't necessarily think it's always good to be number one. If you're number one, there's a target on your back, right?

Sometimes, like China is playing for number... Basically, America and China are playing to win. I think India and Indians should play to win-win, okay?

What does that mean? So playing to win means I win, you lose, okay? So the U.S. and China have gotten themselves, especially the U.S. has gotten themselves into that oppositional frame of mind where I win, you lose, right? But India should play to win-win because... Positive sum. Positive sum, exactly.

Every interaction, every relationship should be, like, for example, India... I don't think India, for a variety of reasons, I don't think India can or should seek to become supreme. I think it should seek to have positive bilateral relationships with everybody abroad.

First, because it doesn't have the strength yet and maybe ever to be, quote, supreme. But it definitely has the strength to rise and to make a really great life for itself and for others, right? And the thing is that, like, it's really lonely being number one because people keep trying to knock you off the top, right?

And so I think a better goal is to achieve equality, okay? If you just have equal... Indians will do phenomenally well if they have equal treatment, which is what the internet gets you to.

Phenomenally, phenomenally well. 7 million Indian Americans didn't have any special privileges, right? In fact, you know, the funny names, you know, whatever.

We're like the advanced scouts, in a sense, okay? But we've done pretty well, right? There's Novel, there's Kozla, there's Sundar, there's Satya, and so on and so forth.

And many of the older generation were H1Bs or what have you, so they had to actually work their way up within companies. They couldn't be founders on their own. It's like a locked cell phone versus an unlocked cell phone, okay?

Once they were unlocked, they did extraordinarily well, right? Now there's sort of a reaction to that that's trying to tamp that down. In fact, there's actually a very important article.

If I was to give you one article, it's an article by Hillel Halkin in commentary. Maybe you can just put this on screen, okay? From 2005.

I'll give you two articles, okay? Absolutely, yeah. Let me show you these two.

[Dhruv Sharma]

And while you bring these up, Balaji, another question for you. Yep. So you've previously said that India is a civilizational state, which it is, much like China is.

Do you think there are limits to democracy as a form of governance for a civilizational state with our population?

[Balaji Srinivasan (Network School)]

So what do I think about this? I think democracy is actually going to be one of India's biggest strengths. And let me explain why I say that.

I actually think, you know, if you think about the USSR, that was the leading brand of communism. The People's Republic of China was the second brand of communism for a long, long time in the 20th century. Then the Soviets got so ideological and so crazy that they wrecked the Western brand of communism, right?

And the USSR fell, and Eastern Europe fell, and all kinds of communism around the world fell. And the Chinese basically just reinvented communism to mean essentially their ancient civilization with like a modern twist to it of total state. I mean, they still had total state control, right?

In a sense, right? But it was communism with Chinese characteristics. Communism with Chinese characteristics.

So they reinterpreted communism in Nietzsche's terms as a master religion rather than a slave religion, right? What I mean by that is, just to understand what he means, Christianity started out as actually the original communism. In the time of the Roman Empire, it was a slave religion that was meant to tear down the Roman Empire, okay?

Like sooner a rich man, you know, sooner a camel go through an eye of a needle than a rich man get to heaven. The whole point, the first shall be last, and the last shall be first. The guys who were crucified, right?

The whole point of that was to delegitimize and tear down the Roman Empire, which it succeeded in doing, right? Towards the end, Constantine converted to Christianity. And then, you know, a little bit later in historical times, Roman Empire collapsed, 476, okay?

Western Roman Empire collapsed. But then from the ruins, after the Dark Ages, arose the Holy Roman Empire. Now, the Holy Roman Empire, people will argue, was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

It was located north of the Roman Empire, all that kind of stuff, true. Nevertheless, they saw fit to replicate the name of the Roman Empire, and there was a thesis, antithesis, synthesis. They took the thing that had torn down the Roman Empire, Christianity, and the thing that was once great, the Roman Empire, and they fused them into, because Holy Roman Empire meant Christian Roman Empire, okay?

Thesis, antithesis, synthesis, okay? This is a pattern that replicates many times in history. For example, Republicans, the American Republicans in 1865, were the far left radicals, okay?

By 1965, they were the conservative Republicans that were upholding the US, okay? Another example, if you've heard the term WASP, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, there's a term called the WASP establishment, right? Those are people who ran America in the mid 1900s, okay?

But WASP includes the word P, Protestant. Protestant is made of protest, and in fact, the Protestants in Europe were the far left rebels against the Catholic Church, started the whole 30 Years War. So we have this constant pattern in history, I talk about this in the New York State book, where a left or far left group runs a revolution.

If they win that revolution, they become the new ruling class. And then the ideology that justified revolution now justifies a ruling class kind of thing. And then that gets disrupted again.

It's like a startup, it's very much like a startup that starts from the garage, it scales up, and then it becomes Google, and now it's like a ruling class kind of thing. And then that is in turn disrupted. So with me so far, okay.

So the point is, and I'll get to India and democracy. With China, communism started as something that was tearing down the old order. And then after Deng Xiaoping, he converted it into something that was just an all powerful state with a market economy.

Then it was something that was actually buttressing the old. And one way of looking at that is, Mao was basically destroying the four olds, like the old Chinese kind of civilization. And Xi is all about the rejuvenation of the great Chinese nation and 5,000 years of tradition.

And it's a completely opposite way from Mao, but he kept the logo of communism. He kept the brand, okay. And obviously you guys know the concept of rebranding, right?

That's changing the front end of a system. But reinterpretation is changing the backend of a system. So what Deng did is he kept the logo of communism, but he changed the backend, okay.

So now when we come to India and democracy, okay.

[Dhruv Sharma]

There's a new book, and before we do that, there's a new book about it actually called Breakneck. I don't know if you've been reading that book by Dan Wang.

[Balaji Srinivasan (Network School)]

Oh yeah, it's good, Breakneck, it's good. Yeah, I mean, I think it's a good book. I think if you've been watching China for a while, he says a lot of things which are obvious to people who've been watching China for a while, but it's good to have them articulate.

To be clear, it's a great writer. It's a great book. There's a lot of good stuff in there.

But the fundamental premise of China's an engineering state, America's a lawyer state is like well-known to anybody who's been looking at both societies for a while, right? Yeah. But it's a good book and you should get it.

[Dhruv Sharma]

But the reason why I bring that up is that author makes the same point, which is somewhere between Deng and Xi Jinping, the general secretaries of the Communist Party in China figured out that communism is a great smokescreen for us to imbibe everything that is great and working from the Western world and bring to life in our own countries anyway.

[Balaji Srinivasan (Network School)]

If you've seen the recent seizure of 10% of Intel, right? In some ways, America is communism, but call it nationalism and China is nationalism, but call it communism. Okay.

So you take 10% of a company just out of the middle of nowhere, right? That's communism, but it's called nationalism. And China is rejuvenating the great Chinese nation.

It's nationalism, but call it communism. You can argue with that, but I think it's a good one-liner. But back to our original question about Indian democracy, where are its limitations?

Just like China did communism with Chinese characteristics, India is now actually doing democracy with Dharmic developments, okay? And so it's actually working for India, right? And the reason I say that is, okay, so let me analogize to tech.

Sometimes you'll see 10 people and they're all pitching a social network, but one of them is Zuck. And so all of them have the same words, maybe even the same ambitions, but Zuck actually has the execution under it, right? So one of the remarkable things about India is I see some of the same structures and some of the same words, but it's actually able to execute.

And the US isn't. Small example, actually a big example. India is able to count all of its votes in one day in a billion person country.

And the US takes like months just for California. And then it's still disputed. It's still disputed, exactly.

Whereas in India, after the election, people didn't yell about it for months afterwards. It's basically done and so on. So in a deep sense, this is the thing.

It's actually good that everybody underestimated Indians, including Indians themselves. On many axes, India has more state capacity than America does. Did you see my thread, for example, the other day?

Sure, and this is what no one believes right now. And yet that's the best kind of thing because that means there's alpha there, right? So for example, look at this thread.

Let me put this thread on screen. I'll give you a few of these kinds of things, but.

[Utsav Somani]

And also one question that I have, like I think the general sense that we Indians have, like, I mean, especially the high earning, high tax paying Indians in India, they're not getting their money's worth. Do solutions like, I mean, you said internet, I mean, geographical boundaries don't matter, but does, and most of these Indians end up going to US. Build iconic properties, yeah.

How do you think about that? How do you think about that? Just the general unrest that they're not getting their money's worth in this country.

[Balaji Srinivasan (Network School)]

Totally, totally understood. So the thing is, when a country starts to get richer from an extremely poor base, the non-obvious fact is that actually immigration ramps up at that stage because now people can afford plane tickets. They can afford to relocate.

They can afford more ambition and so on and so forth. Only as the country becomes very wealthy does immigration start to go down, right? So immigration at the beginning, like for example, look at Japan or look at Poland.

They had similar kinds of patterns where as they started ramping up as a society, they had sent lots more people abroad than they had before because their ambitions widened, their budget widened for travel. And then now there's also a few Japanese who go abroad in the same way, right? But why are there lots of Japanese people even in Brazil? There was a time when it was kind of ramping up and some people wanted to see them. So I look at India as being in that phase.

And one of the good things about India is it's zagging when everybody else is zigging. For example, I do think just like Western communism collapsed and China became the world's leading brand of communism, they just stuck with communism and they took it farther. Now they're, in a sense, it's a funny way to put it, but that's where the hammer and sickle is replicated, right?

Western democracy is going to collapse and India will become the world's leading brand of democracy, okay? One way of looking at that is if you look at the popularity levels, right, of Western democratic states, they are basically anti-democracies. Put this on screen just to calibrate, like this image here.

Hold on, I'm gonna give you a few links to put on screen.

[Dhruv Sharma]

And does any of that, by the way, biology have to do with the high degree of individualism in Western democracy?

[Balaji Srinivasan (Network School)]

Yes, exactly, because they have... See, the thing is, look, communism versus capitalism isn't interesting, but the group versus the individual is interesting. Okay, that's always a trade-off that exists in every society, right?

And the Western failure mode is they've taken the 20th century success mode and they've taken it into a failure mode. Let me explain what I mean by that. In the 20th century, the problem was overwhelming centralization, the presence of a malign government, right?

Fascism, communism, just this top-down thing, crushing and constraining. And America had the... It was zagging when everybody else was zigging.

It was freedom, and it was the maximum level of freedom in a very centralized century. Now, the thing is, it was still a very centralized century because the top U.S. marginal tax rate was 90%. In the Soviet Union, it was 100%, but in the U.S. it was 90%. So they didn't rob and kill you to the extent the Soviet Union did, but it was still impossible to really build a fortune in the mid-20th century America. There's a book by William White, W-H-Y-T, called The Organization Man that captures that time period. The problem is victory has defeated you.

They've taken that lesson too far. And the opposite failure mode is also possible, which is anarchy, right? So if you think about left libertarian or right libertarianism within the U.S., left libertarianism is the BLM riots and we are all equal to the point there's no hierarchy or no legitimate authority whatsoever, right? That civility is attacked itself because that's tone policing and all the kind of stuff that we saw for 10 years, right? There's also a right-wing version of that, which is you ain't the boss of me. And that is the guy with the AR-15 that's the extremely distrustful, like a MAGA influencer who just doesn't trust any institution.

I understand how that arose, but if you add up we are all equal and you ain't the boss of me, there's no hierarchy, no one's in authority, it's all chaos, it's just the mobs blocking roads and so on and so forth. Everybody's got an assault rifle or a gun because there's more guns than people in America. They're all basically distrustful of each other, right?

That's where it's going, America and Afghanistan, okay? Like look at Justin Bieber in the 90s and what he is today, right? He's like a tribal creature or whatever.

He's got like tattoos, like covering his entire body or whatever. Just that before and after of what it is, right? That's like clearly somebody, that kind of reflects where the culture is gone.

It went from this clean cut kind of thing to just something totally, totally, totally different. And by contrast, India is actually in a sense, Democrats underestimate Republicans, underestimate Chinese, underestimate Indians, okay? That's good.

It's good to be underestimated, right? Basically, what I mean by that is Democrats underestimate Republicans because they thought they were these stupid pearls and so on. And MAGA was able to pull it together and beat them, right?

Republicans underestimate China. There's all these, you know, Peter Zaihan. I have no beef with him as a person.

I just think China's strong, Zaihan is wrong. China's number one in almost every physical area you can imagine. Their demographic problems have robotic solutions.

The US Navy is the one that's actually getting blockaded in the Red Sea, not the Chinese Navy. China's number one in shipbuilding by like 100X. The whole aircraft carrier thing doesn't matter because China has hypersonics that can sink US aircraft carriers.

And actually we're going to unmanned everything anyway. So manned aircraft carriers versus unmanned drones, unmanned ships and so on doesn't matter. And the US geography doesn't matter either because like the Mississippi River isn't gonna protect you from a sovereign debt crisis.

You know, lots of countries have rivers and lakes and mountains. But, you know, great political leadership is actually upstream of the geography because the Louisiana Purchase, the Alaska Purchase, that was great political leadership that led to that geography. And you know what terrible political leadership leads you to?

It leads you to the collapse of the USSR where you lose your geography, right? So right now, terrible political leadership in the US is leading to, for example, Blue America is talking about soft secession. You know, like different states are breaking away, like Newsom saying he won't obey the tariffs.

Pritzker is pushing on Chicago, right? So terrible political leadership means you don't even have maybe the full Mississippi River or the full this or that because different states on it break away. Just like, you know, Russia and Ukraine have broken away.

Yeah.

[Utsav Somani]

So India- I'll have to interrupt. We're running over time. And we want to keep our viewers- Yeah, yeah, fine.

We want to stick to the promise as well. So one final thing to exercise to just bring it all together. If you were designing the IITs of 2050, what would you do differently?

[Balaji Srinivasan (Network School)]

Well, I'm kind of doing that now. So stay tuned, but apply to, come to ns.com, right? And basically if you're, one of the things I'll just say is, if you're an Indian today, you can certainly build in India.

You can build on the internet or you can build in places like Singapore and the UAE. Just don't go to the US. Okay?

All you need is a place to have coffee, laptop, internet connection, maybe somewhat better air, right? Like India still doesn't solve certain things like air pollution and so on. China only solved that relatively recently in the last five years, right?

So there's nothing wrong with using India as a launchpad for the world, right? Basically, if you've gotten to middle-class or what have you and you feel that you're not getting value for your money within India, that's fine. Be part of the global Indian network and the Indian state got you to that point, but it has to like bring up all these other people and maybe it may not be able to prioritize the very top-end features as much.

Think of it as like a product evolution type of thing. It's building highways. It's building, like every time I come back, it's funny having a mezzanine level of affiliation.

If you're very close to something, you take it for granted. If someone's very far away, they just think India is still the dirty country it was in the nineties. But if you've got a mezzanine level and you're coming back every three months, six months, year, and you're seeing it, it's obvious how much it's improved.

Radically, radically, radically improved. Clearly, I put some links in here, but just me planning your next trip to India. Oh, I come every few months.

So I don't know, something like that. But point being, the fact that it's improved, you don't have to, I mean, the good thing about India and Indians is you can manage contradictions, thesis, antithesis, synthesis. India is improving, but there may also, that may mean that Indians can have greater opportunities on the world stage, right?

As I said before, I'm moderately bullish on India, but extremely bullish on Indians, right? Use India as a launchpad for the world. Only go where you're welcome, by the way.

Don't go to the USA. It's not welcoming you. If you're an H-1B, you know, I mean, it sucks, but basically I would just liquidate assets, minimum share America, right?

Get, you know, liquidate, sell your house because, you know, get out of your US bank account and so on. It's only going to get worse. Or go to, which wants to expand, right?

Come to, if you want to come to Singapore, go to ns.com. Maybe I can help you here, right? There's many other countries, right?

That want talent. All these countries, El Salvador wants nomadic talent. Even China is opening up the K visas and so on and so forth.

There's problems in China, but at least they're doing that. Most of the world, much of the world is actually opening up the digital nomad visas. So Indians are welcome all over the world.

But if you can contribute, obviously, just don't go to the West. That time and place is over.

[Utsav Somani]

Amazing. Awesome. So that brings us to the end of the very first thread with us in the show notes as well.

And thank you so much for tuning in. And thank you, Balaji. Hope to see you soon.

Thank you so much for tuning in. And thank you, Balaji. Hope to see you soon.

[Dhruv Sharma]

And ns.com, baby.

[Utsav Somani]

Come to ns.com.

[Dhruv Sharma]

Great. That's where it's at.

[Utsav Somani]

All right. Peace. From India's AI stack to new ways of deploying capital, rethinking governance models, rethinking business models, the through line is clear.

India doesn't want to just catch up with the world. It has a chance to rewrite the playbook. That's what TUN is here for.

To surface the questions worth asking. And this is just the beginning. Tune in with us every.