Balaji on How the Tech Tribe Can Save Our Cities [Part 2]

I can't understate or overstate rather how much resistance there's going to be to this insane levels of howling, howling resistance to having streets that are clean and hobos that are kept out. The Fed was able to spend so much money so quickly because it has a unique power. It can create money out of thin air whenever it's. See, they admit it. Do you know, I mean, all of these shell games were played in, in the early 2000 and tens to pretend that this was not what they were doing. But then they actually admit it. They would decide to buy a bond, they'd push a button on the computer and voila, money is created. Okay, we got them, ladies and gentlemen, right? We just called them mid Morph, you know, the shape shifter. Stake it to the wall, right? It's like premium bonds are good because they're hard to understand, right? Trillion dollar coins are easy to understand. So bad, boom, they printed the money. So all of this is essentially a way for blues to prey on reds and grays while telling themselves that they're helping. Right now this gets to San Francisco. Blues have a business model. And that business model is whether it's BLM or whether it's the homeless crisis or whether it's climate, it's essentially causing some sort of religious, like quasi religious fracas on the streets, getting people agitated and then setting up either a government agency or a set of nonprofits or both to funnel money from the public to their causes. I mean like a huge win would be a great pride parade with 50,000 grays that would be massive, that would start to say whose streets? Our streets. Right? You have the AI flying spaghetti monster. You have the bitcoin parade. You have the drones flying overhead in formation with, you know, whatever song you want, right? You have bubbling genetic experiments on beakers. You have the laser eyes, you know, bitcoin maximalist. I mean you could do this whole thing. That itself would be an awesome goal. The gray Pride Parade, planning and executing it. You have the police at the great Pride Parade. They're flying the Anduril drones. They are there. And ideally you even design the police uniforms. Foreign.

Well, excited to start round two.

All right.

But even before getting into the the weeds, it's worth addressing some, some follow ups I know listeners have, which is a couple things. Biology 1 is a lot of people don't identify as part of a tribe. You know, 40 of the country is independent, 30 is Democrat, 30% Republican. So like most people don't identify on a strict political party line. So how should they make sense of your tribal lens.

So it's funny you say that because, you know, a lot of people start with the constraint of this has to be for normies, right? And then you, you're so constrained that you only have to start with the lowest common denominator thing. But you can found a tribe just like you can found a startup. I mean, that's what Joseph Smith of the Mormons did. That's what Abraham did. That's what Jesus did. That's what Satoshi did. That's what George Washington did. That's what Lee Kuan Yew did. Right. You know, they all. That's what her. Well, okay, you could argue whether Herzl founded a tribe, but. Or he founded the V2 of a tribe, like the more conscious version. Right. You know, what I'm really calling for is something like tech Zionism and there's different versions of that which are reform in place and immigrate. And the Network State is about the. The book is about the bare land version of it, right. Which is already being tried. You're seeing it in Northern California, you know, this thing, this project. You're seeing it with creator cabins and Prospera and Cul de Sac and Praxis. You know, there's like 50 of these projects now around the world. There's, you know, the Network State dashboard. There's a bunch that I'm going to be announcing at this, this upcoming conference, by the way. Put that on screen. Then networksate.com conference short version is you can found a tribe and you can find a tribe. And those people who think they don't need a tribe right now, it's totally fine. And in the sense of there's a decision tree, basically you can first branch on whether there's a big problem or whether there's no problem. And a good chunk of people will say, not really that big a problem. Come on, Doomer, everybody's always overstating things. I'm just going to go back to work and ignore the fires and riots and bottle rockets being launched on the bridge and broken windows and poop and syringes and political polarization. That's all just Twitter noise. I'm just going to focus and grind. Right? I actually understand that. I do. Because for many people, there's no point in even acknowledging that. That's negative vibes, man. You know, so they'll basically say, you know, there is no problem. It's always overstated. People have been saying the end of the world forever. Who cares? Just another political cycle, whatever. Okay? Get back to working on whatever they're working on. That's a good chunk of people. This is not for them. If they don't believe there's a problem, then obviously they don't care. They shouldn't even care what I'm saying. Right, fine, go ahead then. Now you so that, I don't know, maybe it's 50% of people, 30%, I don't know what fraction, some fraction of people. Then you get to those people who, who believe. Yes, the post war order is creaking. The verities, the certainties we grew up with. The constants are becoming variables and in many, many sense of the term, like fiat currency is now fiat and cryptocurrency. Are you doing a meeting? Okay, Is it remote or in person? How many genders are there? You know, what is the default ethnicity of somebody in a TV show? All of those things, whether from the tech or the woke side are changing constants and turning them into variables. And you know, who's, who's dominant. Is it just the USA for lesser or is it the US and China, or is it multipolar? All of these things like the things that you grew up with and you took as constants and you just thought the way of the world was those things, those are in flux. And there's various responses. And you can try to assert that the change is bad, but you can fix it within the political system. You can try to assert that the change is not really happening that much. This is a version of the denialism. It's a problem, but it's not a big problem. Right? Or you can look for a solution that is at least partially outside the political system. And that's where I am. And so, so now just, just to recap that, first, is there a problem or not? Second, can the problem be solved within the political system or not? And specifically I'm talking about like basically our circle of people, the kind of folks watching the show, roughly Gray Tribe ish, Not necessarily Americans, but Westerners. And I'll come back to that point. Great tribe thinks it's American, but it's not really American. It's a great tribe is as American as Americans were British. Right? The Internet is in. Is as American as the Americans were British. That is certainly the antecedent culture. You respect that culture, it's the originating culture. You take a lot from that culture, from language and other byways and so on and so forth. But this is becoming something new in the same way that America was, you know, if the British had the Magna Carta. And they had the rights of all Englishmen, the Americans had the Constitution and for a long time the rights of all Europeans. Okay, eventually all, you know, in theory all people and, and in practice in many ways, but that was all paper laws. And now the next step is the Internet where first of all you have way more Chinese and Indian influence, way more Asian influence, way more influence of this new world, but there's a synthesis of it. And then you go from, you know, common law, like the British and Constitution America to smart contracts. You go from the rights of Englishmen to the rights of Europeans to the rights of everyone. You go from like basically, you know, one island to one continent to the whole world. In many ways this is like the version 3.0. And in many ways when you talk about the conflict between like the US and China or between the west and Brics and so on and so forth, that's actually already being resolved. The thesis antithesis, synthesis is the Internet where westerners and Chinese ancestry people and Indian ancestry people all work together productively already. That actually, that is the fusion where you can't. I mean, how many tech companies do you know that don't have significant Asian influence? Right? Not, not that many. Even if it not like directly at the person level, often at some level of the stack or what have you. I mean, are they using Google, right? Are they using some technology like are they using an iPhone manufactured in China or some software written by an Indian guy? Probably right, at some level of the stack. So that rapprochement already exists where these rising two civilizations have met the west in a productive and useful and like attractive manner. We just haven't seen it as a civilization in its own right. We're still focusing on the offline, the visible stuff we can see and not the online. This is actually the union unification. Right? But we have to take that little flame and we have to on this and we have to actually consciously scale like gray tribe values. This is part of what I'm talking about. But first, that means winning in one's backyard. So just to recap, I know that was digressive, but A, is there a problem or not? If there's no problem, go watch. I don't know, I was going to say go watch friends, but that's 30 years ago. What's the show that people tune out of? I don't know.

No, Friends is back in.

B, it's back in.

Everything in the 90s is now now cool again.

Okay, exactly. Right, whatever. Go, go watch. What is the. What is the extreme, I don't know, sports, wwf, you know the Grill meme.

No. Oh, yeah, the Conservatives of the Grill.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can you bring that up on screen? Did you catch the game last night? Yeah. That's crazy, man. Did you catch the game? Do you know?

Yeah, yeah.

It's a good guy. Totally good guy. So basically you're never going to be able to shift this guy off of anything. That is not the immediate here. And now it's almost like you're seeing the Truman Show.

Yep.

Yeah. You know those actors, actresses will try to go back on their script when Truman tries to push them off script. It's like an NPC in a video game. And you know, whatever you say to them, they're like, I have 15 swords for sale. You know, like they'll come back to their script on that. I, I know that's a negative way of putting it. Right. But they have a certain script they're running and it's good that these people have a script they're running because society would break down if they were all, you know, ruminating on political philosophy all the time.

I mean, at a high level, I feel like a few years ago we were much bigger on Exit. You're still big on exit, but you're also seems more believer on reform. I think Elon presented a model at the company level, like he just totally reformed Twitter, changed its name to X and it's totally new regime now on, on in. In almost every sense. And you know, I know a city or a state is harder than a thank you than a company, but it feels like things, you know, have been changing a little bit in San Francisco. There's certainly a lot more energy and the form of a, of a new tribe. And so it feels like it's both. And it's not just, hey, you can't change the things in your, in your city and you know, start a new one. It's hey, you can start a new one and they're happening like you're talking about. But also, maybe you can take back San Francisco or some other city or some other state.

Exit is the recourse of the powerless. It should be the default for those who are in a broken system and are don't have huge amounts of resources to burn on. War. War of some sense. Right? Elon is the richest man in the world. Right. Who went all in and spent $44 billion so that people could once again ask the question, what is a woman? Okay. It took that level of energy. All right. It took the richest man in the world, spending all of this money for us to be able to say that XX and XY were different again. Okay, so that's the level of power that was required to do reform, right? Once we are honest about that, about first the level of breakage, just to get back to normal in a sense, right. Was so insane that. And we're not talking about just like, you know, bought it and then decreed it. We're talking about enormous amounts of time, energy, social and political capital that he spent in an ongoing fight. I think he's winning. But it was not like a, like a trivial thing to do. And you know, it's kind of like, you know, people talk about, for your first startup, do this, and then for your second startup, maybe you can be more crazy. You know, people talk about that, right? And you know, people will say, oh, you know, why are you doing SaaS? Or why aren't you doing something important like hardware? You know what, Hardware is really, really hard, so why don't you book a win on something? You know, Elon did zip two or whatever beforehand, as Gary pointed out. But, but lots of people had a base hit, you know, startup early on. And that's. This is not to say, by the way, that you can just do a startup and have it be successful. What I'm saying is of your YouTube, have to have a passion for it, but of your opportunity set doing a relatively less ambitious one, getting the exit of it and then getting the resource to do something more ambitious. This relates to also exit and voice, essentially. Exit is. I mean, these are tactics, right? One of the problems is actually I, I'll. I'll give a meta thing to tell you about the westest.

The westest? No.

Okay, so imagine that you had a group of people, okay, and they called themselves west. Why? Because they wanted to go west. They had the romance of California, all right? And they made their way all the way west and they got to California, but then some of them wanted to keep going west into the Pacific Ocean. Why are you an. East is cuck, right? That is essentially the problem with. Does that sound funny? Right? That sounds very familiar. All right, basically you take a winning strategy and you take it too far till it becomes a losing strategy. And the problem is that any one word, it's like one instruction in a computer program, even one phrase, you can take a truth and push it so far that it becomes an untruth. You know, you take a truth and you push it outside of its envelope of applicability. You think that's the only Truth, Right. And so you need some provision for steering. Anything that somebody says is a function of its context and the current state of the world. You know, it's a, it's a provisional instruction. And then when you achieve your goal or you achieve something, then you have to steer again. Right. And so this is, by the way, the difference. You know, that thing about the west is think about how many ideologies match that, how many things you can think of that instantly pattern match that. Where people are so fixed on a, on a slogan that, that they're, they're not thinking about results, they're thinking about direction, not results. Right? Okay. In the same way, exit is a tactic, voice is a tactic. And those are just like, that's, you know, exit, voice and loyalty is just one set of tactics. You know, the concept of leader versus tribe and so on. That's a different axis of tactics. Right. It's like your software stack. You know, you've got the database level, you've got the application level, you've got, you know, what language you're writing in, all these different things that you have, you have a, you have a series of things from across history, you've got the problem that you're trying to solve, and you select these subroutines that work within this context. And I think that most people don't understand how much energy and money and how difficult reform actually truly is, especially against the will of the people in the system and how frequently it fails and how hard a turnaround is. And that's why I usually argue against it, because they're going into it with like a naive approach. But if you're going into it with an eyes wide open, determined approach, like Elon was, and of course, you know, that's to some extent a degree of retconning because he was going to buy it and he wasn't going to buy, you know, like, so it's degree of retconning. But net net, he was determined enough to go and get it done and he understood how big a deal it would be and he pulled in a bunch of his capital to do it. And he also timed it right, not quite selling at the top, but, you know, he took all of the money from 2021 and he sold in early 2022, before the crash of the market, and he turned that into a takeover, all of those kinds of things. It's like, you know, the moon aligned and he struck right then in this relatively small window of opportunity when the laws hadn't been changed and he could still formally do it. A lot of things had to line up for that, right? So with that said, sure, it can be done. It's just hard. Most people don't acknowledge it to be hard. That's a big thing. Hey.

We'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors.

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That's different. So that's funny. It's interesting you say that. I would say there's. So that's actually going back to our initial branching. The people who didn't understand what's what level the problem was, they didn't understand again, now that we're post 23 and 23 post Elon, you know, do you know Orwell's classic example of two plus two equals five?

Yeah, it's funny how that became literal like a few years ago or when. When that was like a literal drama.

Yeah, that was his go to example of Newspeak. This obvious trivial physical fact about the world that two plus two make four. That, you know, the party could tell you that, that basically, you know, your senses were wrong and that two plus two equals five or three or whatever. And you know what? You know, you can, if you're clever enough with math, for example, you can come up with some crazy argument on this. Maybe not two plus two equals five, but you could say one plus one equals zero. You know why? In base two, it wraps around dog. Oh, you're so ignorant, so bigoted. You didn't know about that. That shows you obviously failed 101, right? You can do this for anything. Oh, the sky is blue. Well, actually 50% of time the sky is black. You're erasing, okay, the varied colors of the sky. Moreover, it's polluted and it's red and it's yellow. Thanks to environmental racism. It's not everybody gets a blue sky. That's privilege that you had, right? Or. Or there's 50 states, right? Well, there weren't always 50 states, LOL. What side of the bed. You know who, which school did you go to? Right? And guess what? You've erased the Northern Marianas Islands and you know, all of the colonies, the history of colonialization, imperialism by the USA. Right? So, so any statement literally, you know, one plus one equals two, or the 50 states or the sky is blue can be problematized. And then the trick is, by the way, this is like kind of the. You ever seen Indiana Jones where they kind of pull the idle out and swap in a new one, right? So the trick is to say that this general truth has certain exceptions to it, you'll notice. And then the swap is therefore the general truth is false. That's the trick. Once you see that, and you can see it more easily in those areas like the sky is blue or whatever, where we can just laugh at it. Right? But with, oh, are there people, for example, who have chromosomal abnormalities? Of course there are. Right. Therefore nobody has chromosomal. There's no such thing.

As normal.

Right. Now, if I want to get into. I can show you a zillion karyotypes and you know, you know what a karyotype is?

Dear, dear listener, it's. Our esteemed guest here did start a genetic testing company for people thinking that's.

Actually my true area of expertise. Like, I don't really know crypto.

So if the FDA hadn't radicalized biology, he would just be a happy scientist working on genes.

That's probably right, actually. But so here, this is like. This is like a karyotype. You can actually see, you know, chromosomes under a microscope. You can dye it and you get information about, like, you know, different. Different pieces of the chromosome and so on and so forth. Right? And so you can see XX under a microscope. You can also see xy and you can see aberrant karyotypes where you've got XXY or, Or. Or things like that. Right. And those barren karyotypes are infrequent. They're. They are edge cases. Right? And fundamentally, what has happened over the last 50, 60, 70 years? And. And this has happened at other times in history. People have pathologized the normal and normalized the pathological. They've taken the center. They've said it's bad, that you're bad for being white and male and straight and whatever. And then they've said that the edge case is actually good, that the criminal is the victim. Right. That the extremely atypical situation is what you need to spend most of your attention on. No, you actually don't and shouldn't. Right. But this inversion, because it has a grain of truth. Yeah, it is true that some of these edge cases do exist. The general truth is sometimes false. Makes you feel smart for knowing that edge case. Right. That leads to the falsehood that the general truth is generally false. Right. So, you know, once you can kind of sort of block that tactic, it's just. It's like an abstract tactic that gets materialized in many different cases. You can at least rebut it internally, but it's another thing to rebut it at the level of society. Basically, what Elon did with X was sort of like digitally planting the flag at Iwo Jima, being able to rename. See, people don't understand how important. I mean, they kind of understand it. They don't really understand it. Okay. And the best way I could analogize that, that's like New York. Okay, so how many windows are there in this? And you'll see where I'm getting to in A second. How many windows are there? Lots. Yeah. Okay, in each of these windows, right, you zoom in on, like, this window, you know, down over here or whatever. Okay, each of these windows over here. Behind them. Imagine that a Google flag arose if a person behind that window had used Google. What fraction of the windows in this city have Google flag behind them?

Virtually all of them.

All of them. Exactly. So when you actually visualize that, you see the true scale of what it is we're building online, you see the true scale of the Internet when you see every single window. If the rise of Google involved flags being hung out windows, if the rise of Facebook involved, you know, like, flags being mounted in public, people have a completely different reaction to it because they would realize that this thing is actually much, much bigger than they realize. It's the absence of peripheral vision, which means that they don't truly perceive how big it is.

Well, Balaji, this is also one of the books I think you recommended to me years ago. Seeing like a state, and prior to the Internet, the state during the 20th century had developed the most modern version of being able to surveil and count and take count of and monitor the population for all the things that it cared about. And the Internet happened so quickly. It took the 10 years. It went from, oh, use Twitter. You're showing what you're having for breakfast, to this is an existential threat to democracy. And now we need to take down all of the tech companies and regulate them and control what content is being put on there.

That's right. And basically from. See, I mean, from seeing like a state to learning like a machine. So now let's see, like, the Internet here is, you know, 50 people. 100 people, right? 150 to 50. That's a pretty big crowd, right? 500 in person would be considered a big crowd. Okay, but 500 people seeing a tweet is not considered a lot. Here's a thousand people. Here's 3,000 people. Here's 10,000 people in an auditorium. 20. 20,000 people is a lot. Okay, that's a. That looks packed. And 30,000.

What you're trying to do is explain the significance of Elon taking over X at the level of like, SpaceX. Tesla.

Exactly. This is what 180,000 people looks like. That's a stadium. Okay, now you multiply that by a thousand x 2000 x 2000 packed stadiums. Like, this is about 300, you know, 30. 360 million people roughly. Right. All those people are now seeing X every day, which is a new flag. That's been planted. It indicates that Gray Tribe in the arm wrestle has won a major victory over Blue Tribe on something they truly cared about. Now, maybe by the way, you, like, whether it was a strategy or whether Elon was being, you know, Rain man about it, or whether it was, you know, like, like, you know, have you seen those things where people perfectly park and they go scree like this into the parking space? That's kind of how Elon bought Twitter, where the reverse psychology of saying, oh, I don't want to buy it meant that the whole period of the acquisition when people would have been fighting him with Lawfare to make him not buy it meant they were fighting with Lawfare to make him buy it because they thought essentially he. He was able to get people to shift blues, to shift from thinking what hurts grays to what hurts this gray. But it didn't really. Right. It actually turned into something that spread his message more broadly. I used this tactic later where they were like, oh, how can we make biology lose some money? Well, guess what? A billion people, like, I counted the views. A billion people saw all the stuff on de dollarization, okay? Like, it was. It was like, far cheaper than, you know, any NYT ad or anything like that that could have been bought. And we completely shifted the narrative on it. Where it went from, oh, the Fed spotted that these banks were going bust to actually. Wait a second. There's fundamental cracks in the whole system. I'll come back to that point later. That's. That's possible to do. It is possible. It's just really hard. Tactics are tactics. They're. They're not eternal truths. They are truths that are situational and contextual, and they're useful today, and they may not be useful over time. Sometimes you attack by air, sometimes by land, sometimes by sea. Sometimes you beat a tactical retreat. Right? That's how I think about ideology. What's our goal? Our goal is to get to Mars to see the stars, right? I put it in my bio. Infinite frontier, immutable money, eternal life. Right? That's our goal. And then with that as our goal, there's a thousand different tactics we can take towards that. You know what? India is working towards that goal? It's got a probe on the dark side of the moon. That's pretty amazing. People are working on longevity, even if they have a different cognitive frame, even if they're more woo and crystals and astrology, but they're working on longevity. That's great. I'll work with that person. I'll set aside differences to get There, Right.

And that's what's happening right now in San Francisco, is you've identified that there are people who are irrational and willing and going to stay no matter what, and they have a lot of resources. And it feels like the culture has shifted over the last few years, and partially thanks to Elon. And so there's a real opportunity for gray to unseat blue.

Yes. The one thing, though, I want to attack on this before then we talk about how gray could unseat blue is people have this metaphor, which is so bad, of the pendulum will swing back. Why is this so bad? That presumes that, like, societal stability, that clean streets and so on are just a natural way of things. And, you know, it swings left, it swings right, it'll swing back. And so now you think about any of your companies, okay? Especially the companies you're running and sales are down. Imagine if that CEO or that sales rep is like, yeah, the pendulum is going to swing back. That actually, the only way that that might be a good answer is if it's a highly seasonal business, okay. If you have a known pattern of up and down. If it's like crypto winter, and that comes every four years. If you're. If you're selling Halloween masks and there's a known kind of seasonality to it, okay. There's some, you know, there's some answer for that. And then that would be people's rebuttal. They'd say, well, politics has a seasonality to it. And I'd say, yeah, sometimes, but often, otherwise, I mean, yeah, I mean, eventually the Soviet Union, like, undid its bad regulations, but it took more than 80 years. Right. Or almost 80 years from. From 1917 to. To 1991. 74 years. Okay. So yeah, the pendulum did swing back, but not within like a human lifetime. So rather than the pendulum swing back, you've got to move the pendulum. I mean, think of it more like, I don't know, Sisyphus or more like launching a startup, the Deep. I mean, actually, you know, a good metaphor. I'll take one from Paul Graham, San Francisco is default dead. All the stuff that you're hearing about, hey, we recalled Chesa and stuff like that. That's like a failing startup. Which is correctly pointing to the fact that someone looked at their website yesterday. Right. Is it true that someone looked at their website yesterday? Absolutely. Did they get a single conversion yesterday? Sure they did. Are they still on fire and headed into the ground at a thousand miles per hour? They absolutely are. They may have some new guys they may have a new venture round, they may have some chance of winning, but they're default dead. You know, of course it's not the only mechanism. You can look at both the qualitative and the quantitative. But if you go to Twitter and you look at the videos of San Francisco, like the reason that is important and not just a Twitter thing is every city has sunsets. Supposedly a sunset doesn't have any evidence to me whatsoever. But not every city has the scenes that you see in San Francisco of a car flying off, you know, a thing and people getting out and no police. Right. Of guys launching bottle rockets on the, on the Bay Bridge next to an oxygen tank. I don't know if you saw that one. Okay. Of obviously the random syringes and all the stuff that you know about. Okay. That's a qualitative. And the quantitative is something like 20% of the tax base is left stripe is left all these boarded up storefronts. Thomas Hawk did that survey where he found something like 204 lease signs in an hour or something like that walking around. He named Kazuko Morgan is like the agent who's like on all of these signs. She must be making some commissions if anybody's buying anything. So both the qualitative and the quantitative, if you're absolutely real and you're a venture capitalist and you put yourself into that mindset, an investor, right. Who's saying, do I buy real estate in San Francisco? What are you thinking? Well, you're. I mean, by default, it's not going to be a winning thing. I'm now going to propose a strategy to buy real estate in San Francisco and how you could not just wait for a pendulum to swing back, but to grab the pendulum and push it back, to muscle it up. Right. To. To, you know, to realize San Francisco's default. Dead. Okay, but how can we have the Nietzschean will to power to turn that around? Because agency of people matters. Right? This is not the, you know, the Curtis narrative of one single leader. I'm not saying that doesn't work at times that seem to work for X. Right. Certainly the heroic narrative has a part. It's a tactic. Right? Heroic is a tactic. The heroic founder and so on and so forth. But notice there's multiple heroic founders. People play their part. So it's a combination of centralization and decentralization. There's centralization within a company, within an organization, and there's decentralization across them. So if any one of them is killed, another hero arises. Okay, that's really Important because if you put it, if you go too far on the hero side, they can decapitate your whole team. Grays are better at that aspect of decentralization than Reds are. Reds are too much into hero worship. And that's why everything's focused on their one political hero. Whether it's, you know, Trump or Desantis or Vivek or it'll be tomorrow, you know, who's gonna, who's gonna fix everything, right? And, and I get, I get where that comes from because, boy, that's easy. All right, Just put all my faith in one guy and he'll fix everything, right? But, but you need both. You need, you need faith, but you also need your own individual agency.

My take is slightly different in that. I think an analogy for San Francisco is actually Twitter in the sense that whether Elon is running Twitter or whether, you know, whether the spiritual kind of spirit animal of Twitter is AOC or Elon, to take that sort of, you know, humorous rivalry. I think Twitter is just, network effects are too powerful. Like nothing. You know, Twitter is just going to keep existing and maybe on the margins there'll be, you know, some drop off. But it's like the journos who left Twitter thinking that there would be a, you know, something new and better only to come back because network effects are really strong. That's how I felt. Going to Miami basically is like, sure, you could try to create something and at some point on some time dimension there will be. Right? But whether San Francisco is being run by the AOC or Elon equivalent, like network effects are really, at least in the short to medium term, maybe in like 50 years or something or decades. Like it can, it can degrade, but I think, you know, Curtis said it would degrade like Brazil over a hundred years, like just very slowly. I think if network effects are that powerful, people might as well come back and make it so that it doesn't degrade and it in fact compounds and it, it, it becomes, you know, what, what it could have been with, with excellent governance and this agglomeration of the smartest, you know, tech people in the world.

I understand that view. And that is the, that is the sophisticated version of there is no problem. Right. Basically it says we have such strengths. I would call that network Zion. Okay? We have such strengths that we can screw up everything in terminally forever and it doesn't matter.

Well, maybe 20 years or something on some time dimension.

Right, right, right. And, but, but basically does. It doesn't matter. Right. And I understand the appeal of This I do and I actually agree that it's often right. Okay. In the sense of, you know, people can screw things up if, when they've got a certain, you know, altitude, they can screw it up for longer and worse than often people think.

I think slightly differently, which is it's not that you can screw it up and it doesn't matter, it's that you can't screw it. You screw it up and it matters so much that it's hard. You shouldn't leave and just try to start something new necessarily. Unless you can like what's happening in California or like if you have some real momentum. But actually like this is the prize, like this is worth fighting for because it's so powerful.

That's different that then you're saying that. Well, so I, I'd say those two different things. Subtly different perhaps. The first is it truly doesn't matter what happens because the network effect is so strong, the dollar is so strong, the geopolitics are, the geography is so strong, the city has such strong network effects that literally nothing can affect it and, and everything else doesn't matter and so so forth. The second is, yeah, things are getting worse, but we have enough resources to potentially be able to fix it. The third is we're default dead, but we potentially have enough resources to fix it. When you talk about the network effects of SF or California or the USA or the US dollar, you know, there, there's different views of how strong an asset that is, right? Think about like a company's balance sheet. You know, you talk about goodwill or intangibles, right? Is that asset just so ridiculously strong that you can pretty much screw up anything and it just doesn't matter. It's just people will keep coming back to it. Is it strong? And it's strong enough that people will fight for it and so you've got a chance of winning. Is it strong and people will fight for it, but by default you're dead. So that is to say you, you're not ascending, you're not flat, but you're actually declining. But you could turn around, right? Or is it finished? Right? Those are kind of four different things. Is it ascending? Is it flat? Is it declining gradually, but you could turn around or is it actually finished? In the absence of travel, a lot of people are overestimating the network effect thing. And the reason is actually go, go to YouTube and look at walkthroughs of Chinese cities. Just have you seen that thing like, like night, night walking tours of Chinese cities? Or look at like Brics's Flip G7, right. Those things that we're talking about happening over decades, a lot of them have happened past tense bricks more has more GDP than the US All. I showed you those graphs of history running in reverse.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course, yeah. You're calling BS on the network effect argument, basically.

I think one thing that's worth delineating because I think SF gets used to represent a bunch of different things. So to use biology's framework, I think SF is as close to finished on that framework. Maybe the kind of, if you were like, believe in Gary 10 and what he's doing there, which I think it's admirable that he's trying to fight for it, is that the city is seriously declined, at least as a place for building the next stripe, the next coinbase, the next square, Airbnb. You know, maybe these AI companies stay there, but I mean, the city has shown that anytime someone creates anything of value there, rather than try to clean up the city, they're just going to come up with stupid taxes to try to tax these companies that are inherently cloud based. But relative to the rest of California, I think the Bay Area is probably neutral, right? Like Palo Alto is. It's insanely expensive. But Palo Alto doesn't have any of these major problems, you know.

Ah, okay, well, so that's a version.

Of it, but can I just finish the last part? Balaji, is that I think the thing, and this probably frustrates you a little bit in the sense that you're like, hey, there are a zillion other places people can go move. But the thing that California has going for it is it's the only place with Mediterranean coastal weather in the United States. And so despite all of the dysfunction, it has a monopoly on this really impactful thing in terms of quality of life. And basically people are willing to deal with a lot of dysfunction at the state level, right? Prop 13, all the stuff, you know, algebra is racist, all the stupid stuff that California does, because the weather and nature there is really nice.

A lot of things I could say about that. But one is Britain didn't have great weather, but they built the British Empire, right? Seattle didn't have great weather. They're all rainy. And they built Microsoft and, and so on and so forth, right? Israel didn't have a great climate, but they built Israel. Singapore was a muggy. Well, I'm not saying this as a joke or I'm just saying it as like, weather is neither a. And then conversely, South Africa had an amazing Climate, that's amazing country in that sense of the term. But it's absolutely in decline. You know, Argentina had tremendous natural resources in geography and, and so on and so forth. By the way, maybe South Africa joining brics, maybe it's going to be managed by the Chinese and maybe it's actually going to be okay this century. Who knows? We'll see. China's managing a lot of countries in Africa and China actually there. I think probably the reason that they had admitted Argentina into BRICS is because they've got all these raw materials in this amazing climate, they've got terrible government and in the next collapse it'll be run by, you know, Hangzhou Fishery Corp or whatever and you know, they'll go and install the Chinese stack and run Argentina on the Chinese stack. I think that's quite likely because they want to pump the natural resource out of it. Point being, great weather was not necessary for the rise of the British Empire, for the success of Israel and it wasn't, it wasn't helpful to South Africa and Argentina which have amazing weather. Obviously it's, it's a plus, right? It's nice to have sun, sunrise and so and so forth. But it's also the kind of thing where I do remember. I mean, look, you and me and Eric, we're all, you know, Dan, we're all on startup X or whatever. But I do remember that in the 2000s, I mean I'm still grind most of the time. I don't really even see the sun on many days. You know, so the weather is like, does it exist? Is it raining? Is it. What time of day is it? I don't even know. I'm just coding. Right. So, so that's, I mean there are people. If you're there for the weather, you're not there to. I mean that's not something that can really be that screwed up by bad government. But even then you've got the wildfires, right? You've got all this other stuff. But let me, let me, I'm sure you some visuals from this new slide deck for a second. Just to give a overall thing. I think I've talked about this History is running universe. Some of this is from the network state book. Basic concept. What do I mean by history is running universe? I mean things that happened in the past are happening now, but in like reverse order. For example, back then the western frontier closed. Turn in your arms. Now the Internet frontier opens. 1991. Okay, back then Spanish flu today COVID 19. Back then we had the captains of industry you know, the, the so called robber barons and so on. Today we have the tech founders, okay? Back then the journalists beat the founders. This one I'm not sure we've talked about, but Ida Tarbell, she doggedly pursued Rockefeller and demagogued him. And the rise of quote, what we call mainstream media out of yellow journalism, the neutral seeming media. This is how they busted the trusts and this is how they built the consensus for essentially, you know, later, you know, regulated industry and eventually, you know, communism in the east. But managed capitalism in the west was because all of these journos tore down the entrepreneurs, okay? Ida Tarbell versus Rockefeller being one of them. But now founders are beating journalists. Elon's Twitter is still banning journalists simply for doing their job. And what is their job? Their job is essentially corporate espionage, right? That is to say they will try and get somebody's hacked emails or they'll try to spy on someone, go through their garbage and they'll print that to make money. That is their job. Their job is like a, for like a private CIA. Right, right. But now the founders, though, it's a huge fight. We're beating the journos, okay? So back then we had private banking and today we have cryptocurrency, okay? The private banking era, if you don't know about this, in the 1800s all these banks issued their own scrip, Stonington bank and so on, okay? And they floated at some exchange rate and what. And lots of crashes and crazy things happen. Now we have the cryptocurrency era. Back then we had a populist left movement against goals. So William Jennings Brian's famous the Cross of Gold speech, he's basically saying, oh, you know, we shan't be crucified on a cross of gold. Meaning we can't have a really strict inflexible monetary policy. We need to print money so we can. He didn't quite say print money is like you want silver, but he want a loose monetary policy so that, you know, the poor could, could, you could have, you know, welfare subsidization and so on and so forth. We shouldn't be crucified on this inflexible thing. Right? But today we have the opposite. We have a populist right or libertarian right movement for digital gold, where. And you can argue whether it's right or not. There's centrist aspects. You can argue whether this is left, let's say a populist movement for gold, where it's against the state because you want to constrain the state you want the strict monetary policy. Okay. Back then we had gold vertical against Fiat. Today we have digital gold vertical against Fiat. And it's gained several orders of magnitude. And the only question is whether it's going to gain one or two more back then. This is an amazing cartoon. Have you seen this before? And it's America shipping goods to China. Okay, That's a caricature of a Chinese guy, you know, stereotype of the era. But back then, America was seen as the giant manufacturing power. This guy is tired from how much physical stuff he's taking. And China was just seen as a giant market. Now it's totally flipped around. And today China ships goods to America and that's the trade imbalance. This is, this is an amazing visual because it just shows you how much things have reversed in like a hundred something years. Right.

Okay.

Back then, you know, a British ancestry man ran India. Today an Indian ancestry man runs the uk. And I'm not saying this in a triumphalist way. I'm just saying it's like an incredible inversion that people wouldn't have thought would have happened back then. Russia was a senior partner with China. You know, you're Stalin and Mao. And today China is a senior partner with Russia. Okay. There's Z and Putin. Okay. And you can even see in sort of the posture of these two particular images. Right? And so all of this I just showed qualitatively, but you can see it quantitatively. For example, this is the graph I showed earlier which shows that the world economy was actually the geocenter of it was in Asia. And the last hundred something years were actually very atypical. Where it was in Europe and then it was centered over the North Atlantic. And this entire period, which we think of as the way things are, this has become variable and it's rocketed back towards Asia. So this is why, you know, this has something to say about earlier, like, well, the network effects are so strong that it doesn't matter. And it only matters over the scale of decades or 50 years. And I'm like, you're right, but those are. That's already happened. Right? This was the part where you could screw it up. And now it's, you know, basically. And in a sense, it's not just that the west screwed up like the east screwed up so dramatically because they were under socialism in India and communism in China. Once they got the right operating system for their society, they sh. You know, they shucked that off. Those were actually Western ideologies that were important, right. Imported. They were not native Socialism wasn't native to India. Communism wasn't native to China.

To summarize, basically, like a few years ago, you know, you pioneered this concept of network states and people should exit. You're heavy on exit. And a bunch of people responded by saying, hey, why would we exit when we can change what's happening here? And what you say is that's really hard to do. But what we found out is rationally or irrationally, and you believe it to be irrational. People aren't leaving or a lot of people are staying. Some people are leaving.

Yeah. Yeah. So here's what's happened. Crypto did leave, right? So crypto has globally decentralized. And I know we're in the crypto winter right now and people don't think of it as important, but crypto decentralizing and AI remaining centralized is actually similar to the bitcoin civil war where a lot of people went to Ethereum and they went to now Salon and all these other chains, but a lot of people stayed in bitcoin and remain maximalists. We have SF maximalists and global technologists. Right. Similar to how we have single coin maximalists and multi coins. We have single city maximalists and then multi city, multi jurisdiction.

And so you're saying, hey, if there's going to be SF maxis, and maybe you'll say the same thing, America at some point, but there's going to be SF maxis. Well, here's a plan for how to, how to win, because you're pro great tribe and people thought you were sort of anti American, but where you said, no, no, I'm just anti blue. I'm pro gray, pro red, anti blue.

That's right. I'm pro gray American. I'm positive ish on right Americans. And I can say that today because we've, you know, like a lot of the old taboos have collapsed. And I used to be much more friendly to blue Americans. I was a blue American because in the 90s and the early 2000s, blue America delivered the best quality of life on earth. Like Stanford or New York City under, you know, like Juliana and Bloomberg were not thought of as highly partisan at that time. You know, they were basically good government guys. One was Republican, one was a Democrat. It's like New York City, San Francisco, those places at the time, you know, Stanford, you know, like the, the universities of the 90s and the early 2000s. You can see in retrospect perhaps the rot within it. Okay. But they delivered the best combination of, let's call it left cosmopolitan, intolerance and. Right. Meritocracy and capitalism and so on. So it's not like, you know, again, when you talk about tactics and so on, it's not like, oh, I'm anti blue forever and ever and ever. Right. It's kind of like, you know, why am I against North Koreans? Unfortunately, they have the bad ideology right now. They have this mind virus of communism that's turned them. They could be South Koreans. I wish they'd be South Koreans. They, we have like 50% more K pop, you know, and, and, and, and more Samsung and so on and so forth. They're wonderful, wonderful people. Right? But they're under this horrible ideology and this totalitarian regime. In the same way that you can distinguish, for example, routine, let's say the Iranian regime and the average Iranian, the, the blue ideology, really, most fundamentally is what I'm against. What it is today, it's syringes and it's poop and it's so on and so forth. Right? So distinguishing between, just like you're against communism, but not against an individual Russian or Chinese or Vietnamese who's a victim of communism, I'm against blue. Not even against the blue American per se. I'm against the ideology. Okay? What it is today, in 2023. All right, but let me show a few more graphs and let me come back to how we win. All right? And then they're only going to focus on that, you know, essentially the west has lost domination of gdp. Okay, this shows that, you know, the, the income tax and so on. It required a constitutional amendment to pass it. Did you guys know that most of American history there was no income tax? You know, they call it the Internal Revenue Services. It was mostly external revenue. Most federal revenue came from tariffs, not taxes. Okay. So this entire complicated system basically is like a U shaped. You, you have to squint a little bit because it went down and up and so on, but. And it went up and down over here. But overall it's like a U, where basically mid century, The Soviets had 100% marginal tax rates because they were communists. They took all the money. The capitalists, quote, unquote, only had 90%. They only took 90% of the money. Right? And yeah, you'll say it's a marginal tax rate. But the point of this is that the regime would clip the wings of anybody who got too rich. Right. In the Soviet Union, they would execute Trotsky or Kirov, you know, like, who killed Kirov? He's less famous than Trotsky, but go Google it. Right. Stalin would Chop off the heads of anybody who was adjacent to him. FDR did the same thing. He would go after Andrew Melon and Huey Long, but he would do so without, you know, blood, right? He would just take all their money, he would sick the state on them and so on and so forth. Right? So it was a way of kind of consolidating power and chopping the heads off of anybody who contested the state. Which is why you can't think of, you know, mid century capitalists who are, you know, really adverse to the regime. But now what's happened is because this is run in reverse. So as wealth, wealth is redecentralized back to individuals. And this is often portrayed as oh my God, inequality is rising. Oh, that's so bad. And so on and so forth, right? But actually in three senses, inequality is decreasing. First, power inequality is decreasing because any individual is an Elon, a Zuck, et cetera, can now actually contest the state, whereas they couldn't before. Second, consumption inequality is decreasing because your phone gives you essentially the same information experience as Warren Buffett. Many, many, many services, Netflix, anything that's digital is actually now much more comparable to even a billionaires kind of thing than, than what it was before. They don't have as different a life online. You can, you can reply to them on Twitter. It's all flattened out digitally. And third, global inequality has decreased because of this graph. Essentially the rise of Asia, the rise of all these other countries. Inequalities decrease. So in three respects. I don't have the graphs on this right now, but I just described them in three respects. Inequalities decreased. The respect in which people always talk about, but that also has a good part, is that individuals now have more power again. They were totally crushed down. And that's why mid century was the century of, you know, the Hoover Dam and the Manhattan Project and Apollo. There was a small period in time where all the talent had to go and work in the state because you couldn't start a business. You know, Patrick Collison would have been some assistant program. I mean, okay, he's a very competent guy. Maybe he would have been a senior program manager, but, or I don't know how, how senior he would have been, but he would have been forced to join NASA or something like that. He wouldn't have been able to start stripe, okay. In the Soviet Union, that's why they were so good at math and science. All the ambitions of all those people who would have been Sergey Brin were channeled into building, you know, I Don't know, something like the AK47, right? So all of the ambitions of all these people, they were all forced and canalized into just serving the state in this period of time. And you might say, well that's good. I'm like, there's good aspects to it. There's also a trade off which is these folks weren't able to necessarily achieve their own dreams. They're all anonymous. Who took all the credit for it? It's jfk. But you don't know necessarily the folks who actually the engineers behind the moon landing. I mean if you're really into it, you might know it, but they weren't front and center. They were actually the ones who accomplished it. But you know, the President got the credit for it. Now the CEO's actually in front. Now actually, you know, you have more return on reward. The downside of this is there's less in the commons over there. The upside is other countries have made a rapprochement where they have both the CEOs and the, and the state and so on and so forth. Anyway, point is this is a U shape as well. History is running in reverse. Here's another one where, you know, in the 70s the US was 10x Chinese steel production. Now it's 10x the other way. And China is more than the rest of the world. And whenever anybody quotes, oh, biology is just like the 70s. Don't worry, we had inflation then and we pulled it out. I'm like, historical analogy must be constrained by time series similarity, okay? Otherwise if you're verbal enough, you know, people at the beginning of the Iraq war, they're like, Iraq will be just like Germany and Japan. No it wasn't, it was totally, totally different. And you know when people say, oh, it's going to be like the 70s, I'm like, show me the graphs because these graphs show this is a very different time than the 70s. Again, those 50 year changes, those huge network effects you talked about. The US has blown that lead, completely blown that lead on every dimension of hardware. And you know, stuff like this when you look at it, the US has blown that lead. So China's 10x America there.

The counter to that would be that Japan had a massive rise in the 80s and there was all the mania about Japan owning Rockefeller center and the Japanese were taking over and then they went into a lost couple of decades based on demographic decline. Not, not because they had a major cultural shift. It just, you know, the system was fueled with debt internally, not necessarily foreign debt. And they then had major demographic issues and basically haven't grown since. So I'd be curious how you, you would respond to those, those examples.

Great question. So this is actually very important, right? Marcus also brought this up. Japan was just, just to kind of steel man the case before I, you know, catch arguing. Japan was supposed to be this rising Asian tiger. There was a point at which like the Imperial palace was valued more than the state of California. And then America just needed to get its boots on. And when it competed, then Japan vanished and now it's had a few lost decades. Right? Now the thing about this is there's a different view, which is that Japan didn't just go away by itself. Instead there was something called the Plaza Accords. Japan was defeated in trade war and the US won because the US did a lot of brass knuckle tactics to handicap Japan Inc. And one way of thinking about this by the way, is Japan and Germany are colonies of the usa. Like the US literally has tens of thousands of troops in there. They wrote their post war constitutions and they have immense influence, formal and informal, through every level of society. Whereas China actually has root control over its society. And I, I was thinking about how to illustrate that difference. And here is actually a great example of this. Okay, Killing CIA informants. China crippled US spying operations. All right, so this is from, this was admitted in, this is like an old article was from 2017. Okay. And this happened in like 2010. Point is, Japan sure wouldn't be killing US spies. Japan wouldn't be rolling up US spy networks and so on and so forth. It didn't have that level of sovereignty. China could find and execute those guys who are leaking information about what the Chinese government was doing. And then so, so basically in a trade war, for example, many other contexts, if, if the US knows every single thing that the, if they have their spies in Japan, for example, and they know every single thing that the Japanese government is going to do and what their offers are and where their internal weak points are, of course they can win. If however, that's opaque and you don't know what the Chinese are doing, you might not win. Right. It's a difference between, you know, Japan didn't have root over their society and China does. Okay, a great example of this. Do you see what just happened like, like last week with Gina Raimondo and Mate 60. So the Chinese, in an understated kind of way, they timed the release of a new phone, the Mate 60. Maybe it's Mate. I don't know how to pronounce it. That seems to have busted through US sanctions on the day that Gina Raimondo arrived in China. And Gina Raimondo a year or two ago had said, we need to work with other countries to slow down China's innovation rate. A quote that was played over and over again in China because it was a frank admission of something that the US sometimes denies, which is that it's trying to contain and slow down China. Right? And they released this phone because Chinese culture is more like actions speak louder than words. Didn't want to say they were doing it, they just want to ship it. Right? And they didn't actually make a big deal, but they allowed the Internet to make a big deal out of it. And this was something where that level of stealth would not have been achievable had they not executed like the US spies within China. Right. And that's like the only, the only reason. By the way, if you notice, that NYT article came out in 2017, it was about events that happened seven years earlier. Right. We're talking about in 2023. There's lots of this type of stuff that's like, almost like a flash of lightning that illuminates a landscape and then it goes away. You're actually seeing the true under the table punching that these things are doing with each other that gets illuminated years or even a decade later. You see what I'm saying, right? Events that happened 13 years ago, we're talking about now. But that clarifies why China is just a completely different beast than Japan. Japan is under the thumb of the usa. And also actually other things happen. You know, evidently because Japan was under the thumb, there were actually a lot of patent lawsuits. I have to. So I, I may be wrong about this, but here's what I've heard and so somebody can Google and find out about this. What I've heard is as part of the trade war stuff in the 80s against Japan, lots of IP lawsuits and patent lawsuits were greenlit against Japan. And it had to cough up some of the trade secrets that it had on semiconductors and other things. And so US could like slurp out that IP back and that helped intel and others get back on top. So it's actually the reverse of normally how people say, oh, Asians will, you know, do copy the usa. This was actually kind of the reverse. Now you can go and look at that. But certainly if you read, you know, only the Paranoid Survive, you know, by Andy Grove and you read High up at Management, he's certainly talking about the threat from the Japanese in dram and so on in the, in the 80s. And the argument that I've heard, and again I'm not, I'm just, you know, I have to go and research this and so on, is that that didn't just wasn't just pure execution that the Americans won. They managed to use lawsuits to get IP out of Japan and they won that way. Point being, this wasn't a pendulum swing back. This was active measures. This was taking your, your ally who's getting too big for their britches, using your special sovereignty buttons and pushing buttons. And the way to actually see that this is plausible is the US operated on free speech and free markets until free speech allowed Trump to win in 2016, at which point the regime started coming with all of this stuff reasons to censor. Right. All that root control that they had, they hadn't deployed earlier, they didn't think they needed to deploy, they deployed it and it's a massive fight or last few years. Similarly, so that, you know, the Democrats started turning on free speech and the Republicans saw that they were losing to China and they started turning on free markets. And now Republican protectionism, trade war and so on is arguably the mainstream. Right. So you, you've seen something similar where the peacetime principles where you kind of hang back and just let the machine operate in when, when people feel threatened, when blue felt threatened by red domestically and red felt threatened by the Chinese globally, they suspend those principles and they start using root to try to, to punch. Right. So that's why I think China is highly different than Japan. I can give more examples, but let me pause there.

Well, the, I would say that the US is one thing that's been consistent under both Trump and Biden now. Right. Departure from Obama is the trade war policy that they are implementing and Biden has ratcheted up actually pretty significant in terms of asml. Right. So the Dutch lowest level machines used to build the kind of semiconductor, kind of whole value chain process. The Biden executive orders that have come out where they took all the Americans out of China who had the specialty around semiconductor stuff, the limiting of additional Sequoia spun out Sequoia China as a result of this. Right. So I mean the US is definitely taking a set of tactics. Whether they're effective remains to be seen. But I don't think China's coming up with the next 3 nanometer chipset like that. That's going to be happening from Apple and manufactured in Taiwan. Right. So now Taiwan is taken. That's, that's a different story. But it's it is a, you know, Nvidia and Apple are the leading edge of, of semiconductors and they are manufactured, yes, in Asia, but they are manufactured in Taiwan, not, not in China. So I do think the thing I would push on is like, you know, the Chinese have, have made big strides, but I don't think that they have moved to the frontier, maybe on some of the genetic stuff, but certainly did not have the vaccine stuff work out nearly as well. And I mean, I don't really want to get into a whole vaccine thing, but I think that the thing I would give them credit for is they have, at least at a society level because of the way the CCP is structured, intense focus on key areas, whereas we with our messier process don't arrive at consensus on those areas as easily. But I mean, like, you know, SpaceX is 80% of, of kilograms loaded into space. So you know, despite China doing a bunch of launches and stuff like that, like Americans have found our savior in the private market.

Right. I'm not saying China's invincible or anything like that. I would agree with you. At the extreme technological cutting edge, there are areas where the, the west or the rest, depending on how you want to frame it, is ahead of China. Absolutely. However, there's a risk and actually a reality that the west is like Xerox park and invents the stuff and then China scales it. Okay. Which is happening for a lot of things. And, and that's, and especially in the physical world, they have root over their whole society. So you can just like this, build bridges and so on and so forth. Once you've got the idea, they definitely have the execution. So you might have that initial idea edge, but they can ship it and scale it really, really fast. And that's a real threat because that actually does matter in the real world. Number one. Right. Number two is, I think, and this is really a fundamental thing and I have to figure out the right words for it. But basically it's a mistake to identify gray America with America in the same way that like know Iraq has Kurds, Sunni and Shiite. Those three tribes, like Iraqi is not really the right level of analysis anymore. You know, the Kurds, Sunni and Shiite actually have independent foreign policies. Like the Kurds will negotiate with the Americans, but the Shiites will work with the Iranians. You, you have to actually look at it at the tribal level, not the individual level. And when you look at the USA and you look at the Blue American, the Red American, the Gray American, the, the, for example Red Americans have Different foreign policy than Blue Americans. Red Americans want to settle in Ukraine. Blue Americans don't yet. Or maybe they're only getting around to it. Gray Americans, at least some of them, like Elon and Tim Cook, are still taking meetings in China even as blue and red Americans are against it. Gray Americans are globally competitive on technology. Blue Americans, when you take away gray, are absolutely not. And in fact they hate global technology and they, they're basically fighting it. And so once you disaggregate and you start thinking about tribes and you stop thinking about a country and start thinking about it as a tribal war zone, I think it's a much clearer way of thinking about it because.

But someone could respond and say, why not unite the tribe? Like we're blue and red, like why not come together?

Why not come together? So that gets me to. This is why the history is running in reversing is a background framework that I have because back then America was ideologically unified. FDR did unite the tribes. It took enormous force. It wasn't just the war, it was lawsuits against his competitors and so on. But he basically did create the uniparty. And then over 70 years, this is not like a one off, it's like a 70 year process. Basically. By 2011, Democrats and Republicans were essentially voting party line. And that was at the legislator level. You have a very similar graph at this, at the level of Twitter and so on. By 2017, red and blue came apart and, and now by 2023, they fully come apart. They're their own social networks. You have Macedon and Blue sky for the blues and Gab and Parlor and Truth Social for the reds and so on and so forth. So the, the concept of let's just reunify, I think doesn't. It's a good strategy. But these graphs that I'm showing anchor my worldview. Right. You know, it's kind of like, it's like think about a car that has a lot of momentum and you just take a photo of it and you can't tell from that still image how easy it is to stop that car. You need the extra context of its velocity and acceleration and mass. And you need the video. Right? And what I just showed is like a series of curves that basically show quantitatively and qualitatively that Asia is rising. India and China specifically the US is in relative decline as a unit, that it's ideologically disintegrating, that individuals are coming back. That doesn't mean that all is lost. It's just a series of huge macro trends. Now the counter argument, by the way, have you seen the fracking graph? Like, basically this is one of the most surprising graphs of all time. Okay. This is like the Hubbard curve, okay? And this is like where the green is like empirical and red is the kind of theoretical. Looked like a bell kind of curve.

Of.

Lower 48 states oil production. And it just basically looked like it was just going to go down and then suddenly fracking was invented and kaboom. And this is actually part of why the US doesn't care as much about the Middle east as much, because it can produced domestically, albeit at a high cost and so on and so forth. Okay, so this, that kind of, that's a deus ex machina.

Well, hold on, hold on, hold on. That's American engineering ingenuity, private market, not public sector.

That is gray and reds, really reds. And it's opposed by blues who are doing Keystone. They're trying to block Keystone Excel.

We're in agreement there. But it wasn't like it just like fell into their laps. I mean it's like real engineers figuring out how to.

I should be, I should be more clear. If you weren't close to fracking, right. If you weren't somebody who.

But this way, biology, I would agree. There's a deus ex machina for the blues, even though they fight it, that they've benefited from all of the policies that have come.

Exactly. Okay, so now, now we're talking even, even better.

I mean, obviously everyone loves to tell you that Trump got him out of the Paris climate accord despite the US actually having record drops in emissions. Why? Because of fracking and natural gas.

Right.

So the thing that they want to run their stupid executive order to ban at the first day of the Biden administration, the result of American base load power because we don't build nuclear, has decreased carbon emissions is because natural gas fracking has made it cheaper to convert coal plants to natural gas, which has half the carbon and overall greenhouse emissions. So Dan's Arc, knocking out for the blues, who, who are opposed to it.

You're absolutely right, actually. And here's the thing. It is the reds and the grays have had, have been bailing out the blues for the last decade. So the reds in what you just said with fracking, the gray chart, right, is toys like computer software. All of this stuff has been hyper deflated, all the tech stuff, but everything that blues have control over with regulation, so healthcare, tuition, right, all of these physical things have gone up, right? Because these are highly regulated industries where you can't Housing. Right. All these things have become more expensive, but all the tech stuff has become less expensive.

It's so bad that even Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and Noah Smith write about how the blues make everything more expensive when they touch it. And we can't build anything.

Let me show you this last bit and then let's come back to that. Right, so this is one of the most important graphs out there. What, what are, what are, what are we showing here? So this is basically GDP by congressional district. Okay. And this axis is, you know, this is a 10, $10 billion, $20 billion. This is how wealthy the district is. So these are the poor districts down here, wealthier up here. The solid line outline is the distribution of those districts in 2008. So the solid line shows that in 2008, blue and red districts were roughly equally matched. You see lots of poorer blue districts in the solid line. Okay. But somehow by 2018, the, the filled in dots show where blue got to. Okay. And there's an animation of this where you see the distribution of blue just shifting up in 10 years and red shifting down such that by 2018, the median of red was about 30 billion GDP for their district, but the median for Blue was like 50 billion. And all the money, all the, all the richest districts are blue.

It's great. I remember you showing me this biology like the. Because the Wall Street Journal has a whole bunch of these articles. Favorite dinner party trick. Because I think the average educated midwit thinks of the Republican Party as the party of the rich. And there is no empirical data, you know, some outliers, sure, but, but the, the stock wealthy group of people in the country are Democrats. The, the wealthiest places in the country vote Democrat. Democrats are the party of the rich.

Yes. And now. But here's the thing. You're right, here's the thing that's really interesting. You know, when I grew up like, and you guys are about the same age, but basically in the 80s especially, but 80s, 90s, early 2000s, Republicans were conceptualized as a suit and tie wearing. How did they go from the suit and tie wearing Republicans to the trucker hat wearing pros of the Trump era in 10 years? Answer. That graph shows a giant redistribution of wealth from red to blue. Republicans paid for 2008. Because in 2008 these two groups were roughly the same. Then a gigantic amount of money was printed. And the Cantillon effect says that because what happens, let's say there's a trillion dollars out there. Blues print another trillion dollars. Everybody's being devalued by 50%. And who gets those trillion dollars first? Blue banks in New York, right? These are, you know, equities get bit up. Basically. The guy who gets the dollar bill last is some, you know, cashier in Oklahoma who doesn't understand how they're being screwed. It's like this counterfeit money of, you know, the $787 billion bailout. The guy in Oklahoma gets the bill last and he doesn't realize it's been devalued 50% by the time it gets to him. So the Cantillon effect at the level of a country was Blue Tribe essentially stealing enormous amounts of money from Red Tribe, the other group that, you know, it's still from everybody around the world who use the dollar. Basically, the uk, Japan, the Republicans, they're all Blue Tribe's blood boys, okay? The dollar is a vampire, right? And anybody who uses a dollar system is effectively taxed in many ways. And the inflation devalues you and over time you just find yourself just getting poorer while the imperial capital just retains. That's why. Have you noticed how badly the UK is doing recently? Right. Japan, Everybody who operates within the dollar system is at the mercy of. I mean, this is actually the deep truth and insight of the Bitcoin maximalists, right? They may not articulate it quite the same way, but the dollar is a network. And Powell is the system administrator. And all of the banks in, you know, bank of Canada, bank of Japan, they're all like sub networks that fold into it. Sort of like how Zuck administers Facebook, but he also administers Instagram and WhatsApp and threads and so on, right? So Powell administers the USA and indirectly administers Canada and the bank of Japan and every bank within this network. He can order the assets frozen, you know, like they did in Canada, right? He can order a bank to not receive a license. Like, like for example, Caitlin Long, you know, she's trying to apply for a banking license, isn't getting one, said she control every payment within this network now that they've rolled out FedNow. So this giant dollar network is something which has immense control over the world. And everybody who operates within that dollar network is effectively being taxed both visibly and invisibly to pay for the imperial capital for the blues. Now how do you get outside of the network? Reds are basically mostly dummies. I, I'm sympathetic to them, but they just got massively robbed and they don't even understand how they got robbed. And blues don't even admit to themselves. They've robbed them. See, the thing is, the advantage of Keynesianism over communism is the communists in the, the 20th century, they would go house to house with a gun and take your farm and they call it land reform. But they'd, you know, kill your husband and send you to a gulag and, you know, they would just, they would just like, physically do it. Okay? Keynesianism is communism for wimps, where basically you hit a button and you steal. All I mean, to go and rob somebody at like a convenience store, okay? You'll get a hundred bucks, right? The level of robbery the Keynesians can do is like hundreds of billions of dollars.

Trillions of dollars.

Trillions of dollars. Right? So. So, I mean, what do you think about it? Think about like the, the animal kingdom, okay? A lion, you see it coming at you, all right? You get your energy up. Fight or flight. Pull out your spear, your gun, whatever, you're fighting it, okay? That's like the communists, they're like coming at you to take your stuff, right? Pull out your gun. The mosquito or the snake uses camouflage. Camouflage has evolved many, many, many times, right. In the animal kingdom. And in fact, like, guys like Krugman will actually talk about, you know, for example, just like a small example of this. Remember the thing a while back with the premium bonds and the trillion dollar coin.

Wait, biology. I do want to bring up one point. I would say that I think that the average red person does know that they're getting screwed. And I actually think that that is. That's Trump, right? Trump is the f. You saying I don't have any agency over getting screwed. DC in all the counties around it now, the wealthiest part of the country from like, you know, all that people, people feel that because they're watching their, their kind of middle America towns getting hollowed out, fentanyl, all these things, and not feeling like they're, you know, participating in the upside of the great globalism stuff. And so I do think Trump is. Is a response to we are getting screwed, but we don't really have much that we can do about it.

It is at best a part of a broader response, because it's a response which says, america first, we're going to win, you're going to lose. But it's not a alternative win win model to the lose lose model of the blues. But I'll come back to that, which is a very good point, though.

And it's also to the point of it's not building something new. It's very much about kind of just attacking the thing that is in power and kind of owning them rather than, you know, offering a shining city on the hill to use.

Reagan. Yeah, there's. Well, okay, let me come back to the Reds, but I just want to close off one point, then let me come back up a sec. So this is an article from, like a few months ago in defense of debt gimmicks by Krugman. Okay. And I might just highlight this particular line. Premium bonds are harder to explain, which may make them a more likely route simply because, in other words, if you say trillion dollar coin, it's obvious to the average person that they're being screwed. And you know that. That there's some crazy thing happening where, you know, huge amounts of money is being printed and funny money is being played. If you say they're creating premium bonds, it is engineered to be hard to understand. He's literally saying, because it's harder to explain, it's better. And he says false narratives. But really what he's saying is, let me make the contract so insanely complicated that these Reds don't know how we're screwing them. Right there. That's capturing the micro evolution of ideology. If you took the branch of a. Of a trillion dollar coin, you get staked. It's like a snake that you can see. It doesn't have great camouflage. It doesn't reproduce, right? But the premium bond, that's a direction that could reproduce. But because the red can't see it coming, okay, it's optimized to be invisible. It's optimized for camouflage. Multiply that by a thousand X and that's how you have a financial system that is set up to have amazing camouflage and set up to be hard to understand. You know, the Big Short actually talked about this. It's like, you know, tranches, CEOs. Are you confused? Well, it's supposed to be confusing because the finance guys want you to seem stupid and. And get you to go away so that you don't understand how they're screwing you. The thing about this is this gets back to red and blue. And gray is, by the way, it's also optimized for blue to think they're doing good because people don't actually want to consciously think I'm getting paid by the government to addict vulnerable people to drugs. Instead, they're like, we're handing out syringes for harm reduction, Not I'm waging the opium wars on the streets of San Francisco against our own population for money for my nonprofit. Right. That's what's actually happening. It's a non result, by the way, not a nonprofit. Dan isn't smiling because he knows this is actually what's happening, unfortunately. Right. You know, they don't want to say, oh, that poor proletarian in Oklahoma. I mean, it's. It's like comic, but it's also tragic. Right? They don't want to say that. That poor proletarian Oklahoma that I'm enslaving them in visually, you know, invisibly with the dollar, so I can have a better life in. In Maryland, where the property values are going up. And so they say the Federal Reserve road to the rescue with, you know, tons of liquidity. Where's that liquidity coming from? Oh, they just printed it, right? Oh, so they diluted everybody down. So who, who took the dilution? Well, the whole system. It's not on a blockchain, right. So you can't just see a trillion dollars of liquidity getting created. Instead, you have to wait later. They will admit it, right? Right. Once in a while, they will admit it. So how to spend a trillion dollars. Okay, this is. That's a word of the day. How to spend 1.25 trillion. Okay, August 2010. All right? And here's this, this amazing thing, right? The Fed was able to spend so much money so quickly because it has a unique power. It can create money out of thin air whenever it's. See, they admit it. Do you know what I mean? All of these shell games were played and in the early 2000 and tens to pretend that this was not what they were doing. But then they actually admit it. They would decide to buy a bond, they push a button on the computer, and voila, money is created. Okay, we got them, ladies and gentlemen. Right? Okay, so. So we just caught them. Point is, we just caught them mid morph, you know, the shape shifter, stake it to the wall where it's like, premium bonds are good because they're hard to understand. Right. Trillion dollar coins are easy to understand. So bad, boom, they printed the money. So all of this is essentially a way for blues to prey on reds and grays while telling themselves that they're helping right now. This gets to San Francisco, fundamentally. And this actually, it took me a little while to kind of encapsulate this. Blues have a business model, and that business model is whether it's BLM or whether it's the homeless crisis or whether it's climate or whether it's. I mean, almost anything else you can think of, it's essentially causing some sort of religious, like quasi religious fracas on the streets, getting people agitated, and then setting up either a government agency or a set of nonprofits or both to funnel money from the public to their causes. For example, here's how it works in San Francisco. I used to ask myself, who would want like, poop and urine and these crazy addicts on the streets, who would want that? Right? And of course, you couldn't even say this, by the way, in the 2010s. Why? Because journalists would attack anybody who even talked about the homeless problem in the twin tens. Greg Gottman, Peter Xi tech guys who talked about this. Pour out some liquor for them, put up memorials to them, okay? Like, these are our fallen. You know, I mean, look, if you can build a memorial to George Floyd, you can definitely build, you know, like a thing to. To Peter, she who tweeted or whatever. Okay? So the. And, and try everyone who wants to yell at me for that, go ahead and yell because basically it's 2023. You can't do it anymore. Point being that everybody in tech who would even mention that there was a homeless problem back when it could, you know, perhaps have been nipped in the bud, was attacked. Oh my God, you lack compassion. You're so evil and so and so forth. Right? How dare you be rich when someone else is poor. As if some backend engineer from Bangalore who can't even vote, who's in an apartment there is responsible for the, the blue. Who's sticking in a needle into the arm of some guy on the street. Right? At the, At. What do they call them? The trans. The. Not the transition zones. The navigation centers and the other things. Right, the, the safe injection zones.

Okay, Safe injection sites.

Safe injection sites. Right. Um, and, and people may not even understand this if you, if you Google K, N O W. No Overdose. Okay.

Yeah, we, we, we did this in the last episode.

Yeah, it's not a metaphor or an exaggeration. It's literally government funded drug dealing. Like the billboards say you should snort or smoke crack rather than inject it. Or, or something like a snort or smoke drugs rather than injecting them. Let's, let's take, you know, let's use responsibly together. San Francisco. Okay. Where does that come from? And actually, it's kind of like the Opium Wars. You can make a lot of money off of drug dealing, unfortunately, because it's addictive. So basically the loop is this. It's a little bit more subtle. It's evolved like the snake to be camouflage. A crazy guy goes and poops on the street or smashes your window or attacks a woman on the street, okay? Then you San Francisco guy next election, you go and vote to solve the homeless problem. We need more money for the homeless problem. This was Prop C. Look at Benioff Singer there, okay? That money goes to the homeless industrial complex, which is really. Even the term homeless isn't correct because it's the addict addiction complex, right? So it's addiction, but it goes to the homeless industrial complex, which then goes and creates more addicts, brings them to the city, addicts people to it and so on. So it's like to feed the pigeon society. And they're like, look at all these pigeons. We need money for more pigeons, right? And this loop goes, and more and more people are addicted to drugs and kept on the streets. And blue makes money the whole way, right? Now are they making exit amounts of money? Are they making giant. No, it's a giant base. A giant bureaucracy of middle to upper middle class people who are getting salaries for, for making society worse. This is similar to blm. Remember now the, the woman who did BLM and got enough money to live in a mansion that was tangible to people. Clearly, you know, this, this Marxist was somehow making enough money to go and live in a mansion, right? But billions of dollars were allocated for blm and many of those people weren't living in mansions. It was this giant blue bureaucracy of all of these workers who are paid. That's their exit, right? Their exit is like for us, quote, going public means a tech company goes public on the public markets. That's, that's a gray form of an exit for blues. They also have a form of going public. It means now you're on the public teat. Okay, whatever, you know, like nonprofit. You had post blm, now it's funded by the government. It's like written into the budget. You're like an unofficial arm of the government. You have $50 million a year for grants and programs. And that goes to a thousand people who get 50,000 a year. It's not one guy, right? It's a horde of NPCs. It's a different strategy, right? Similarly like this, this IRA Inflation Reduction act, right? Orwellian name, just like Heroes act, right? You know, other Patriot Act. It's always the opposite of what it is. So this is yet a third thing where gigantic amounts of money, it's like, you know, remember Solyndra? What was Solyndra? It was like this Obama again. It was, it was one of those things where were so dramatic that it was a headline okay, the Obama era stimulus program resulted in an investment in this company that was making solar stuff and went to zero. But now that's fallen out of memory just enough that like the IRA is creating how many Solyndras, God only knows, right? Billions and billions of dollars. And one of two things is happening. First is like all kinds of solar or whatever stuff is getting incentivized. And the problem is people, they'll say, oh well, they're doing it. That means it's good because I approve of that. And there's obviously there's good aspects of some, you know, renewable stuff, but there's a couple of things that are happening. First is a lot of it is being spent incredibly inefficiently. And when I say incredibly efficiently, I mean like make work type jobs. The second is some of it, quite a bit of it is going to China directly or indirectly. Where and this has been reported, I haven't gone and individually confirmed the supply chain stuff. Let's call it a reasonable hypothesis that a lot of the friends shoring, you know, like people talk about moving production off is just China shipping things to Southeast Asia. And then they slap it on it and say, okay, it's product of Malaysia and maybe they do the final assembly or something like that and they ship it off. And so China gives up some margin to Malaysia or whatever. I'm just saying Malaysia. And then they repackage it and they send it out and it's, and it's marked as country of origin, Malaysia. Okay, it's like, like a vpn, it's packet forwarding, right? It's like Russia selling oil and it gives up some margin and it sells it to an intermediate country and then it resells it back to Europe. So point is that that IRA is yet a third version of this. So there's the homeless version, the a BLM version, this IRA version where all of these climate jobs arise. And of course, if you actually wanted to solve the problem, you do nuclear energy, you don't have this gigantic climate bureaucracy with all this like nuclear scales. Okay, but that's not what the. I mean maybe there's like a little slice of it that's actually going towards the real thing, but, but that's not where most of the money is. So once you see this pattern, okay, which is the blue business model, whether it's homeless, whether it's blm, whether it's this, what this means is they employ enormous numbers of people, right? They have a, they have a literal business model. I mean one way of Thinking about it, Grays have an explicit, I talk about this in the Network State book, okay? But Grays have an explicit business model. You have an up and coming ambitious entrepreneur, okay, whose ambitions of building the next Google or whatever, right? The venture capitalist signs a deal with them and puts in money. And it's very hard, but maybe sometimes the entrepreneur actually succeeds, builds a large business and venture capitalist has, you know, some fraction of shares right, in the company and they both make money together and both parties have more money than they did before. The venture capitalist is taking, is investing capital and the entrepreneur has, is, is putting in time and energy, sweat equity, okay? The equivalent of this in the for the blues is the philanthropist and the like nonprofit founder or the, or the activist, right? So the venture capitalist is like the philanthropist and the market entrepreneur is like the political entrepreneur. Okay? So I'm going to describe this a little more slowly because it's a little less familiar. Okay? So you know, I talked about this in the Network State book.

There's a few ways to respond to blue. I'll give you some examples. Like, Elon Musk is explicitly kind of anti blue. He's like, he's willing to be an enemy of the blue. He's willing to be called all these bad names, et cetera. That's one side of the spectrum. Like Gary Tan is, is willing to be called racist by blue. But he still says I'm blue. Like, he's like, I'm, I'm blue and I'm going to make blue better. And then Mark Zuckerberg, I'm just guessing there, there's a set of founders who are secretly anti blue but can't really say anything. And so they just, I guess, pretend to be blue. And then there are people like Ezra Klein or Jesse Pollock. You know, they're like really smart people, builders who are blue. They really truly believe it and they're trying to like make it sustainable because they're, what they say is, hey, blue people care the most about these poor people or people are struggling, they're just doing it the wrong way. And I'm going to reform blue from within. And so I'm curious, what, what is the, like, what do you make of that? And what's the pitch for, for blue people who care most about the, the, you know, poorest people to go to go gray as opposed to just reform blue from within?

Well, I mean, it's a, it's a spread spectrum strategy, right? There's those who are actually anti American, let's say. I don't Know, the Iran or something like that. Okay. There's those who are anti only blue American. There's those who are anti blue, pro gray, and there's those who are pro blue and want to reform from within. Right. There's a whole spectrum on this. Right. But the main thing is blues lose basically like blues as they currently are. The fundamental thing is, I think up until maybe mid-2022, somewhere between, let's say, March 2021 and mid-2022, you could argue blues are winning. Right. As we mentioned, maybe on the previous episode, like Hanania actually wrote a post which I would say is, you know, like Assam Bin Laden said, there's. When there's a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, people will like the strong horse. Okay, so Hanania wrote a post like the media is good or something like that, which I compared to the blue is the strong horse. Mid 2022, it looked like blue was a strong horse that had defeated everybody, et cetera. But actually that was, I think, in retrospect, you know how you seen those maps of Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan when they're at their zenith and then everybody piles on them and they get pushed back really hard. Right? So I think Whether it's early 2021, mid-2022, blue was at their zenith. And it looked like, I mean. Cause they've been fighting. Once you. Once you analyze it as colors, right? Blue been fighting tech and Trump and Russia and China, right. They've been fighting gray and red and Russians are whites. And also the. The yellow peril, okay, the second yellow pearl abroad, right. So blues have been fighting all these other cars colors. And it looked in mid 2022 like they were actually arguably winning, okay. Because all these guys had been beaten back. Like the ferocity of Blue in early 2021, mid-2022, depending on how you pick, it looked like it was actually winning. But blue doesn't actually have staying power. And it's lost a lot of iq. It's lost a lot of IQ to graze. It's a loss of political energy to Reds. It looks like it's literally losing militarily to Russians. And I think it's also probably going to lose the trade war with China and already lost and doesn't realize that. And again, we can argue about those points for mid mid war, but at least you can't. You can't argue blue is just winning on every front at the same time. It's a little bit like, again, it's like Germany fighting the Soviets and the British and You know, the Americans, all at the same time. There's too many wars at once. And they lost, right? Blue fighting tech and Trump and Russia and China and Israel and India and Hungary and then. And all these other countries. And you can argue, okay, Blue is trying to make nice or whatever with India. India is smart in this sense, right? India is also. India is a whole separate thing. And we can talk about India, but India isn't a pawn, right. Teal, a while back, and I love Peter, right, he basically said something like, India isn't going to be like a reliable ally. Like, you know, Japan is. I'm like, because India isn't a pawn, right? It's not a colony. It's not. Doesn't have tens of thousands of troops in the country like Germany and Japan, where, you know, Germany can just be like, told to. To. You could literally conduct an act of terrorism, blow up Nord Stream, and Germany won't say anything. Right? Germany's just like, you know, gelled it and in the corner, Right, right. Japan, you can do the Plaza Accords, destroy their economy, the uk, the special relationship. You can, you know, bleed their economy with the dollar. And they won't do any. Right? Those are pawns. There aren't allies. Right. And whereas India is actually like a fairly, you know, strong, independent thing. And the whole strategy of Blue of fighting all these different wars at the same time with everybody, they decided to, for a few years to stop saying, oh, my God, Modi is a fascist or whatever and realize, okay, they need at least some allies. Okay? So you're making tactical outreach here at the same time, though, other Blues are still yelling at India. And India is smart enough to understand that, okay? Blue is like, you know, schizophrenic and can change its mind at any time and will stab it the moment it feels it has advantage for it. So it's a very tactical kind of thing. What I've got on screen, this is just a part from the network State Book. It's. It's one subchapter, the market for. For revolutionaries, right? So this whole chapter, I'm just going to, you know, summarize it, but basically, you know, if you hear the saying, like, afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.

Yeah, that's the point, the purpose of journalists, the reason. To try.

Yeah, exactly. Well, actually, from one vantage point, that's similar to buy low and sell high. Why? Okay, you're supporting something when it's low, okay? Because you're comforting the afflicted and you're shorting it, when it's high, you're afflicting the comfortable. Now immediately, of course, the counter, I mean is, the mood is very different, right? Buy low, sell high is like an amoral market thing that's arguably good. This is supposed to be like a moral imperative, okay? However, sometimes people do make moral imperatives for buying low and selling high. It makes markets more efficient, right? And the thing is that if buy low, sell high is financial arbitrage. Afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted is like political arbitrage, okay? Fundamentally what you're doing is you're looking for some group that is, and they don't phrase it this way, but there's some group that has potentially latent political power or political utility and you're siding with them against those who have maybe too much political power relative to their actual social status or their media distribution. Right? You know, so, you know, I talk about this in the book, but basically in the early 20th century, for example, the afflicted were the working class and everything was about, you know, the working man. The working man. And you know, how, how do we, you know, that was, that was what communism was about. Everything. All these poems, all these intellectuals believed that working man, you know, the working man was so oppressed and the best, you know, like the Jungle by Upton Sinclair and you know, Spanish Civil War, all these poems, all these intellectuals really convinced themselves that they love the working man and they ran, ran these revolutions in the name of the working man, okay? But then by the 1970s, the working man in the west at least had been co opted enough by, you know, Christianity and capitalism that there was something called a hardhat riot. And the union workers actually beat up the hippies during the Vietnam War. And around this time the left switched from having the working man as their main ally and main source of political arbitrage to the current thing of women and minorities and gay people. Because after all that working man, well, he was white and he was sexist and racist and homophobic. So basically it went from stocking off, which is like the Soviet, you know, muscular worker of like the early 20th century who was working all the time and so on to Archie Bunker, who is like a Homer Simpson, you know, predecessor, like this, but, but less lovable, this fat, dumb, you know, racist kind of thing, right? So this, the left basically swapped it out and they went from the working class to the wokest class as the form of their political arbitrage. And as communism kind of receded, this became bigger and bigger and this became essentially what they Switched to completely after the early 90s. Okay. Because, you know, the working class is no longer something that they could pretend to support, and now it's their primary enemy because it's on the side of Trump. And what have you. Point being, that's an example of like a political arbitrage trade where they feigned or genuinely believed they were sympathetic to these workers. They rode them to power in the Soviet Union. They wrote to head of socialist parties, they wrote to heads of labor unions, and so on and so forth all through the 50s and 60s until eventually that illusion couldn't work anymore. And then they sold, right? So you buy, you hold, it rises, then you sell and you reallocate into a new form of political arbitrust. Because all of the new demographics, who had maybe gotten enfranchised in the 20th century, they were new forms of votes. By the 60s and 70s, they'd kind of built up and now you could switch over to them. There was a latent form political arbitrage. If you catered to them, it's a whole new form of votes. Okay. So I know it's a very cynical way of thinking about things, but if you take the long view, people have always done this with, oh, that's a political demographic we can support. Let's side with the, the Catholics who are coming to the US against the native Protestants, because the Catholics are going to rise in, in demographics and it's going to get us more votes over time. People all the time make those kinds of political calculations and it's considered less moral than making market calculations. Right. If, you know, the equivalent might be all these people are coming to the US So we're going to sell a lot more signs for billboards that are in this language rather than that language. Right. That's a market calculation. That's less people can do that more openly, more publicly. Right. Point is, once you kind of start to see this, you start to see how these movements are built. It's not just slogans. The, you know, why, why did they not side with the Kazakhstanis? Because that wasn't a significant Democrat. That wasn't a latent source of, like, political energy. Another interesting question is why not Native Americans? Native Americans aren't really on the radar. Again, not as large a demographic or not as energetic a demographic in various ways, you know, they've been. They used to be much more prominent in the Western, you know, imagination, but less so. Okay. And energy is just in the, you know, like in the sense of political energy for change, you know, isn't isn't there for a reason. Right now, the market entrepreneur recognizes some opportunity. Market opportunity. They find the venture capitalist who goes and invests in their company, and then there's an exit. The political entrepreneur sees a political opportunity. They find some philanthropist or the State Department, which is also like a philanthropist, and they get an investment of political capital and then they try to conquer. Okay, and what are the. What's the ultimate version of this? If the most successful founder can become the next billionaire, the most successful political entrepreneur can become the next president or prime minister or ruler of a country. Okay, and I've got some examples here. These are really high profile ones, but they'll make the point. Okay, so the market for revolutionaries. Okay, so basically, if you think about the careers of Aung Sang Suki, Victor Orban, V. Hamid Karzai, Ahmed Chalabi, Joshua Wong, Lu Xiabao, okay, this is, you know, Myanmar, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Hong Kong and China, right? All of these basically have had Western resources that back them to try to come to power and build pro Western governments in the region or fund them. That didn't mean that they always won. Joshua Wong is in jail. Xiaobao is, if ever it happened to him. But I think he's. He's definitely not doing well. Like Karzai and Chilabi. Like, the countries got conquered, Afghanistan and Iraq got conquered, but they, they weren't able to like run it. And, you know, Aung San SUU Kyi and Orban didn't stay west aligned indefinitely. You know, she. She won like the Nobel and she was so praised by people, and now she's, you know, attacked by them. Orban famously actually worked with Soros to help overthrow the Soviets. Okay. And then you. Now he's on the right, you know, and this is a thing, you know, this episode where Soros was funding Orban and both are on the same side as revolutionary forces against Soviets. See, the reason I point this stuff out is similarly like on Suki, the reason it's actually quite similar. The philanthropist activist relationship is quite similar to the venture capitalist entrepreneur relationship because these philanthropists back these guys to get to political power, right? And sometimes by the philanthropist, they can be private like Soros, but they can be public like the State Department or some combinations. Often a combination. The public aspect is different than the tech version, but it's a little bit like a venture capitalist might invest in you, but a sovereign fund might as well flip the, you know, frequencies or whatever, right? Maybe it's more frequent for sovereign funds to invest in. In These activists, right? Even the term non profit, for example, or ngo, like why do you have to call them a non governmental organization? Because they're often at the same table as a government. And so you have to actually distinguish them. The reason this is important to understand is there's a whole sophisticated blues have a whole sophisticated, sophisticated infrastructure for essentially capturing governments, getting money out of them, and using that money to fund the next generation of activists. And it's not just money, it's power. Right? Power is money, right? Like what, what is a tech exit? Oh, it's a billion dollars. Well, that's great. Good for you. The IRA is like whatever, $100 billion, right? Stimulus Act, $787 billion. If you can control the levers of government, you're controlling 100x a thousand x the amount of money. That's why, like all the people in San Francisco, they're political billionaires. Okay, why? Because they have a $12 billion annual budget. If you take the mayor and the, whatever, the number of supervisors, and you divide it into the budget, each one of them is spending like a billion dollars a year. Collectively, they have, they have budget authority over a billion dollars a year. By the way, that's way more than a normal billionaire. You know why spending a billion in cash a year is. I mean, a tech billionaire has a billion in net worth over their entire lifetime, of which, I don't know, maybe 10% of that and it's high is liquid, right? So maybe 100 million in cash over their lifetime. The political billionaire is spending a billion in cash every year. Okay, so the scale of money is like a hundred or a thousand x more. Like in a real sense, the supervisors and the mayor are far, far richer than you.

This is why seizing the wealth of Jeff Bezos or Elon doesn't really affect the government budget because. Yeah, it's like.

That's right. So there's been a total inversion here where this is what I was saying earlier about the, you know, power inequalities decreasing. Essentially, individuals now have a tiny slice of money. A billion dollars is a tiny slice of money relative to what the state has as its disposal, what these political billionaires have right now. It is true that the political billionaires are, are not like the political billionaires of old. Like, you know, you know, the Robert, Robert Moses power broker. Yeah, yeah, power broker. Worth reading for an example of like a true political billionaire where he had the power to. He basically had political power centralized in him and he could make bridges and roads and all this stuff happen. And so on and so forth. Right. And it is true that blue doesn't feel as powerful as gray because they often they have multi sig on their accounts. Okay. They have to get a bunch of sign offs to move budget to here and there. Whereas gray has capital that's under the control of one person. Okay. And so $1 billion that's allocated by committee or even 13 that's allocated by committee may be much less effective than even million dollars that can be allocated on one person. Say. So so gray has a motorbike, blue has a battleship. And sometimes that's, that's actually, that's, that's one of our advantages. Okay. But the reason I let me just recap what I've, what I've just been saying for the last, you know, hour or so. Let me see if I can summarize it first, is that last 10 something years, 15 have been gray and red bailing out blue, gray with text deflation versus blues inflation, red as, as Dan mentioned with fracking, but also by being diluted with the, with the printing to pay for blues hijinks. Other countries like Japan and the uk Everybody who's in the dollar network are the blood boys of blues because the dollar is a vampire and every transaction you have on it because you're inflated away. It's like Keynesianism is like stealth communism. Rather than taking 100% of your money right now with a gun to your face, go to the gulag, do not pass go, do not collect your hundred dollars, okay? They take 90% of your money over time with stealth dilution and inflation. And the whole thing is this complicated shell game as illustrated by Krugman Singh with the premium bonds. The whole thing is as complicated shell game where nobody knows exactly where the money went, it's not on chain, it's all optimized to be deniable and even it's supposed to be helping the people where the blues are stealing from. Right. And this gets us to the broader concept of the blue business model where whether it's inflation, whether it's. And Keynesianism, whether it's the homeless industrial complex, whether it's all the money that went to blm, whether it's all of the climate stuff, the blue business model is have some religious ish cause quasi religious and I should say it's a doctrine. Right. You know Yarvin, a bunch of other people have talked about how you know, wokeness is a religion or whatever and there's definitely a lot of truth to it, except it's not exactly a Religion, they've replaced God with gov. I have this concept of like God state, a network. What do you think is the most powerful force? Is it almighty God? Is it the US military, the US government, or is it encryption? And based on that, that actually is your doctrine. And so blues have replaced worship of God because the church used to serve this kind of purpose. It could have tides. People believed in it, it had religious police, you know, all the kind of stuff right now, when people didn't believe in the church, they switched to God. And this is, by the way, similar to, you know, you were saying there's a continuum of opinion among blues. Right. Some people want to reform blue. Some are anti blue but want to claim the blue mantle. Some are anti blue but don't want to claim the blue mantle. Some are all the way on the outside. Okay. And some are, of course, totally pro blue and don't think it needs to be reformed and everything is going great. That's a little bit similar to in the early 20th century. There were a lot of Christians in FDR or Wilson's administration and they believed in God, but they were actually strengthening the state. They didn't fully. You know, they didn't. They would never say they weren't Christian, but they were strengthening. And they may not even think they weren't Christian. They were strengthening something that was more powerful than God at that time. Right. Or became more powerful. Why'd I say more powerful? Because, you know, religious law wasn't the base of law. It wasn't the basis on which money was allocated. It was. It was the state that was prime in the 20th century. As Nietzsche said, you know, people didn't believe in God, so what are they going to believe in? They believed in the state. Point being, once you understand blue as a business model, that this applies in many ways, you start seeing the world in a totally different. These people have gigantic quantities of money that they have access to. They have these philanthropists that fund the political entrepreneurs to gain control of these sums of money. And the ones that I mentioned, like Joshua Wong on saying Su Kyi and so on, those are like the most ambitious projects on the edges of Blue Empire. Yeah. Like some folks, I think, J.D. vance, others have said, why are we fighting on, you know, Ukraine when rather than dealing with the border with Mexico. And the reason is that for red Americans. Yeah. The borders with Mexico, for blues, the border is with Russia. The border's in Ukraine. Right. That's the border of the Blue Empire. The part where the dollar vampire ends is there. Right. That's not to say Russia is good, but Russia is just not under their control. Mexico doesn't matter to blues. The border between Texas and Mexico to Blues matters as much as the border between Texas and New Mexico. Meaning it doesn't. It's some stupid administrative internal thing. It doesn't affect them. People flowing back across like they're not paying for it. You know, the people in the border regions are. And they, and, and this is the fundamental thing that I don't think reds get blue Americans don't really think of red Americans as being, quote, famous fellow Americans. And the way, you know, to see that, that's only admitted some of the time. But you know, this, there's this good article in the Atlantic, America is growing apart, possibly for good. Okay, the great convergence. He's seeing some of the things I was talking about with history running in reverse. Right, the anomaly thing. All right, And Michael Pederser. Okay, and we'll come back to this name important character strategist for liberal unions, corporations, collaborator progressive groups that study selections right. In a private newsletter. The two blocks as fundamentally different nations uneasily sharing the same geographic space, we make the essential error of imagining a single nation. But we are, we are more like a federated republic of two nations, Blue nation and red nation. This is not a metaphor. It is a geographical and historical reality. In other words, blue tribe and red tribe, Blue American and Red American are at least as different as North Korean and South Korean and North Korean and South Korean. Yeah, they're both Korean in a linguistic and lineal sense. But they are really different countries, right? There's different. And, and the reason I say north and South Korean is North and south modifies Korean enough that you have two totally different varieties of Korean, right? Blue and red. And of course, I'll get to gray in a second, which he doesn't include and I think is very important. Now this guy, by the way, Podozer, is not no normal character. Very, very important article, if you haven't read this. The secret history of the shadow campaign that saved the 2020 election. Right. And he is basically the guy who organized the conference call that helped, you know, do the protests and stuff in 2020 and even gave the stand down order. So all the riots were basically on a string. And you know, basically the conversation that followed was a difficult one. After the election, the, the conference call told the potential rioters that they would not be activating the mobilization network. Right. And you know, progressives wonder what was going on. Why wasn't anyone trying to stop the coup. Where are all the protests, the activists for their restraint? So this is not just some random guy with an opinion. This is a fairly central node on the blue side who's coordinating conference calls, who helped organize the riots in 2020 and the BLM ones, not the J6 ones. That's other guys. And who's saying that? It's actually two different groups of people. Okay, another. Another version of this, just to understand this is on Sleeping Giants. Okay, and what is this? This is. This is basically a Twitter account that organized boycotts in the mid 2010s, right? Just look at how the f founder of it describes this. Sleeping Giants quickly became popular because we brought some good news every day. Each day, advertisers would drop Breitbart or some other horror show. We built a community for Internet supporters who helped us lose Breitbart 90% of its ad revenues, put Bill O'Reilly out of a job, and de platform hate figures like Alex Jones of Maya Annapolis behind that flow of daily wins. I was creating actions for our community, testing email addresses. This became a core tactic that helped us move fast. In other words, this is a group of 400,000 blues whose daily wind is helping harm Reds. Blues on a daily basis are waging a non violent social and financial war against Reds where she's speaking about how calculated and intentional it is for her us to make these people lose money, make this guy lose a job, and make these people lose their ability to speak. Okay, now you may say, oh, they're all evil or whatever, but is Bill O'Reilly quite as evil as the others? I don't know is, you know, it's 2023, so you'll make your own, you know, decisions on this. The main point is this is social war. It's essentially right. It's tribal war where this tribe is making money and gaining followers and gaining energy by essentially harming Red every day. This is not a normal business with me so far. And it's also a lot of effort. Right. Testing email addresses privately became a core tactic. This is. She's like a tribal leader who has a sub tribe of blues who are just attack, attack, attack, attack every day. Okay? This is a small example, by the way, of the blue business model. It's not quite at the scale of the IRA where billions and billions of dollars. It's not scale of the homeless industrial complex or the BLM monies or the. Or Keynesianism. Right? Those are billions, hundreds of billions or even trillions. This is probably hundreds of thousands, but quite effective. Millions of dollars are definitely moving on this. All right? And so the fundamental issue, what I've just shown is podoras are saying blues and reds are different nations. I'm showing a blue tribal leader that is making money and getting followers by attacking red and depriving it of money every day. And the thing is that red still doesn't really get it. Right. Red just. That's why I'll talk about great. Red really just doesn't get it because red is like, they, they don't. They. They sort of still think, okay, it can be solved at the level of an election. Okay. Which assumes that the other side and them are settling a dispute by some mutually agreed upon kind of thing. What we just saw with the, with the sleeping giants thing, that's not an election. That is blue punching red as hard as they could every single day way before the election. Right? That's. That's a daily win. That's not a biannual gamble. That's not gambling every two to four years. Oh, you know, we'll see what, how the numbers come up. That is taking territory every single day. That is what blue does. Right? Right. It's actually, when you put it like this, it's a miracle that red even exists. Red has no business model. Right. Maybe there's some, you know, like guys on Twitter who now make a thousand dollars a month from Elon's ad revenue or something like that. Okay. The Twitter grifters or whatever. The thing is, I mean, blues grift is on this, a civilizational scale, it's. It's like hundreds of billions of dollars, trillions of dollars. The. Again, all these different things, and I just mentioned four. The, the inflation, blm, homeless industrial complex, and, and, and the ira. But there's so many more. Right? All, all the nos that were in India that kept India dependent and on its back for so long. Like in the 80s, there's this woman, Sally Strothers, who'd asked for donations to India. Okay, just to digress on this for a second. Charity is dependency. Investment is independence. Right. Why you're walking past a guy in the street, he's passed out. Okay, let's say that he's, you know, he's not addicted to drugs or anything like that. He's just actually truly down in his luck. Okay, this kind of. Okay, you're making a hundred thousand dollars here. Just a toy example. Would you give that person $10? Some people might. Would they give them a hundred dollars? That's a lot. But let's say, okay, would they give them $50,000 and actually achieve equality. No, no, blue who burbles about equality would actually do this. Right? Why? Because maybe, by the way, some of the effective altruists who actually take this kind of rhetoric seriously, maybe they would do it. Okay, I know effective altruists are actually good, but most Blues wouldn't. All right? Vast, vast majority. Why wouldn't they? They give all kinds of reasons, but fundamentally, what they want are pets, not peers. They wanted Indians to be pets. They want Indians to be in a form of dependency. How do we know this? Because when India just landed something on the moon, all these people were like, why are we giving India aid? Like, blah, blah, blah. What you saw was envy. Wait, how come India is in front of us? We're giving them aid? Blah. Right. You know what you. What they basically wanted was for these people to just be in their place. They didn't want them to exceed. Okay? Now you might say that's a big ask to want somebody else to get ahead of you. But. But for all their faults, venture capital and angel investing does exactly this. Why, for example. And this. I'm just taking a famous example. There's many much smaller examples. When Peter Thiel invested in Mark Zuckerberg in 2000, 2003, 2004, put 500,000 into the Facebook, Peter Thiel was here in wealth, and Zuckerberg was much, much less wealthy. Ten years later, that was reversed. Zuckerberg was way wealthier than Teal, but both of them became wealthier as a consequence. SA was rooting for Zuck to get ahead, even to get ahead of him. So that's how investment creates a slingshot effect where you're actually rooting for the people you invest in to become successful, because you will become more successful in an absolute, even if not a relative, basis. Thiel became poorer relatively, than Soc, but he became richer, absolutely by a lot. So he was still rooting for it. Okay? So investment is actually the true charity, because unless you want that person who's receiving the money to become richer than you, it's not actually charity. It's dependency. Okay? And you can see this now, like, what I just talked about with, like, the strings on aid to India. For example, Uganda did some bill that Blues didn't like, so they're trying to pull aid from them. Aid isn't aid, it's dependency. That's why you want trade, not aid. Okay? Easterly and Levine have written about this, okay? So this. This money is just dribbled out, and it gives blues jobs, right? It Allows all these blues to be, you know, if you're like, I'm not the kind of person who thinks, as I said before, I don't. I'm not the kind of person who thinks white is an insult. But the term white savior for all of these woke whites who think, you know, who both hate white people, at least dominantly, and then go. And they think of themselves like the woman in Game of Thrones who's carried by a bunch of grateful brown people for handing out things like Africa was so fulfilling to me and so and so forth. You know what the model of actually finding an African person and investing in them and taking shared risk with them, or finding an Indian person, that's actually real because you're actually building up, you're taking risk with them. Joint risk, joint reward, joint. You want them to actually build something. You're not patronizing them. So the thing about the reason I say this is the blue business model is not simply optimized to just capture giant amounts of money and funnel it to them. It's also optimized to keep all the recipients of that money in a state of permanent and expanding dependency. And that's both domestic and abroad, right? That's addiction domestically, like all these poor victims of blues in the cities, right? Cracked out on drugs with blues running billboards, handing out syringes, setting up safe injection sites to do it. And globally, right? And so the actual answer is all of these countries that are now doing well have, you know, maybe they didn't go quite to the extent of China and actually like killing the spies and so on, but they threw the NGOs out of the country, right. El Salvador blues, you know, just got thrown out. Deport blues, right. India threw blues out of the country. Or Morbon through blues out, right? And you just throw them out because if you don't, you've got something like, remember Chavez for life. So basically, before he helped destroy San Francisco, Chesa Boudin was destroying Venezuela, Chavez for life. There are at least three reasons why the world should congratulate Venezuela's Hugo Chavez on his recent success abolishing term limits. Right? So it's all one piece, right? Right. The foreign and the domestic are all one piece. Essentially. This was like, you know, 2009, when they were still saying that, you know, Shavismo, right? 21st century socialism. They're praising this whole thing before. They didn't take any credit for it, right? So then of course, he comes and brings the war home, right? And so the only real answer is to realize Blue is this ideology, okay, that has a business model. It convinces their people. And by the way, we can see this in other contexts in time, people are totally okay with realizing lots of Christian missionaries thought they were doing good, but there was a justification for colonialism. Right. We're accustomed to that. They thought they were doing good, but they were actually justifying imperial conquest. Right. We're very comfortable. Is basically what blues do, right. They've convinced themselves they're doing good, but the justification is for imperial conquest abroad and at home. Okay. The spread of democracy by what they mean doesn't I mean there's four different kinds of democracy, right? There's blue democracy, red democracy, gray democracy, Indian democracy. Just to talk about that for a second. Okay, let me come back up to San Francisco. I know, but I'm installing these subroutines or whatever and we'll pull on all of them. In many ways, when blues talk about, oh my God, that's, that's against democracy and so on, a useful question to ask them is, would you ever vote for a Republican? And usually they'll say no, of course not, that their Republicans are against democracy. So blues have put themselves into this epistemic loop where democracy means a one party state. And that's not just rhetoric. A one party state is California, it is Chicago. It is many of these places that have been like blue only zones for years or decades. Right? That's what it looks like. Then the actual election is this smoke filled room contest between who's going to be able to run in the Democrat primary and then somebody stamps off and the Republicans are allowed to run for office, but they always lose by 20 or 30, you know, or 40 points. That is also, by the way, similar to how it works in other non democratic states. They have elections, but the ruling party wins by 20 or 30 or 40 points. Okay, right. So, so one version of this is blue democracy. And what they mean is democracy is ruled by American Democrats. Whatever an American Democrat does could be sanctions, surveillance, drone strikes, literal assassinations, coups, you know, invasions, proxy, whatever. That, that the, the American Democrat does is okay because it is to protect democracy. But if you win an election they don't like, that is an attack on democracy. If Orban wins election, they don't like. If Modi wins an election, they like if Brexit happens, if Trump happens. Right. They define democracy as electing blues and blue aligned people. Right. Trudeau is blue aligned. Right. In Canada. Okay. Those people who essentially toe the party line are blue aligned. Right. And so blue is a Global kind of movement. Now red democracy is, you know, that's Desantis in Florida. Right. That's Orban, that's El Salvador, and so on and so forth. Okay. And that's basically working still within the political system, but it's achieving red outcomes. They're winning elections. Right. Unless you're going to say all those elections are fake also. But they're winning elections, they're doing it within the political system, they're achieving just red results. That is not what blues define as democracy. Right. The third is gray democracy and this is intuit. But I actually think it's very important to. What follows? Well, snapshot.org it's like on chain voting, okay. Basically all the Ethereum Dows and stuff are managed here and you can see every single board of directors vote equivalent. Okay, great. Democracy is also upvotes on social media. Don't you upvote a lot more than you vote? Arguably your right to upvote is maybe more important than your right to vote, arguably. Right. Because the likes and RTs every day, those are the daily wins, those are the hourly wins, those are the bi minute wins that shift the discourse way before the formal election. Right. So gray democracy is techno democracy. It's cryptographically verifiable voting. It's on chain voting currently it's upvoting. But all of that stuff, I think people have been habituated to upvoting in a low consequence kind of way, but not an extremely low consequence way. It's important if you RT something, right? Like there's whole articles, you know, in many ways the, you know, New York Times is a wrapper around tweets, just like many sports articles are wrappers around box scores and many financial articles or rappers around, you know, tickers. Right. Many political articles are just wrappers around tweets or tweet threads or X's, whatever the heck it is. X's posts. X posts, Right. The reason I say that is gray democracy has a lot of potential. The reason is red democracy is just fundamentally in a sort of subservient position to blue. But gray is more sophisticated intellectually. Right. Cryptographically verifiable voting is hard to argue with as a way to improve the system. And in fact Estonia does it. Like they actually have cryptographical verifiable blues, however, have set up a system where you can be asked for your ID for taxes or to get on a plane or certainly for KYC at every crypto exchange and so on and so forth. But it's supposedly racist to Ask for ID when voting. You know, as a person of color, why was it not racist to ask me for all this stupid paperwork when I was, you know, doing 500 other things with the government? But it's racist to ask me when I'm voting? Of course, the answer is that they don't want those checks. Right? There's probably borderline people and so on. Just that. That tell alone that the ID is only asked in one situation versus another. And also, by the way, blues have lost enough control over the discourse that you and I can talk about this and others can hear us, and blues can't really retaliate against us. This is crucial in 2023, that it wasn't even there two or three years ago. This is what I mean by, like, Nazi Germany getting pushed back. Like Nazi Germany, like, losing North Africa and so on, and then know, a beach head opened. Blues have lost X. Right. They've lost significant terrain. You can feel them, you know, receding. And so we can actually speak a little more freely. Right. As can everybody who's seeing this. Right. Lots of investors aren't going to cancel you for saying true things. Okay. That doesn't mean you should be needlessly offensive for the sake of it. But, you know, the mix of truth to offense, that ratio should be, you know, pretty, pretty good. But sometimes there's needful offense. Okay. If you're offended by this. All right, the fourth is Indian democracy. Very underrated. Why is it underrated? Indian democracy ships, as I said, chandra Nayan for $75 million for 1/4 the cost of a San Francisco bus lane. India put a probe on the dark side of the moon. Pretty good. Amazing to me, honestly, still shocking to me. You know, I made the analogy. I'm like, imagine a guy was named Bob Salvatore, okay, rather than Balja. And, you know, he came back to Italy after a long time being away from the old country. And he just saw girders going up everywhere. And he was like, whoa, this is like, amazing, right? That's kind of me going back to India. And it's not. I've never been anti India, but I was never an India booster either, right? Because I was just like, okay, it's a place, you know, I came from. It's. But now, clearly it's. It's open to the right. And. And so India democracy, the reason I think that's underappreciated is it's actually all the rest of the people in the world are voting less than Indians are. You know, like, for example, when. When people like, oh my God, Modi, you know, democracy. Modi is much more popular as a leader than Biden is. Moden has many more votes than Biden does. By like orders of magnitude. Right. And I mean, like, I actually say orders. Let's say on the order of 10x. Right. India's got 1.4 billion people. Right. Even if you say Biden has 80 million votes, Modi has like several, several fold that number. I forget the exact number. Okay, so Modi's more democratically legitimate than Biden. He has more votes. And there are more people of color voted for Modi. They voted for Biden. Right. By a lot. Right. More poor people voted for Modi than voted for Biden. Right. You have to sort of displace the blue claim on democracy. Right. There's red democracy, there's gray democracy, there's India democracy. And each of these are different flavors. Red is sort of within the regime, gray is in the cloud, and India is like a different country. So it's like being attacked in from three different directions. Right. From sort of like within the system, from the, like the digital system and from a different system. When I say attacked, I mean in the sense of alternatives. Right. In the same way I'd say like Google Docs is an attack on Microsoft Office. It's a better alternative. Right. Okay. The, the equivalent of this, by the way, is in some ways, you know, when Soviet, I mean Soviet communism for most of its history was a leading brand of communism, Maoism and most other communist systems were downstream of Soviet communism. Right. When you said you were communist, you usually meant you sided with the Soviets. Except with the Sino Soviet split, the split between China and the Soviet Union, Maoism became its own secondary variety of communism. And it was the also ran variety through the 60s and the 70s and the 80s, but through the 80s it actually had quietly reformed and had an Asian pragmatism to it. You know, communism with Chinese characteristics, you know, Deng Xiaoping and so on. And then in the 90s and certainly by the 2000s and certainly by today, Chinese communism has become the world's leading brand of communism. Right. Now, is it communism? You can argue it's actually more like, you know, right wing nationalism in a sense. It's Chinese, you know. Right. But they do, I mean, like the hammer and sickle is flying on a Chinese warship in the South China Sea, 10,000 miles away from where Marx invented it in, in Germany. It's this amazing memetic thing. So Chinese communism, the Asian version, which took a lot of the language and it kept some of the things. Right. Because it's still centrally controlled. Right. It's still the, this, I mean the one aspect of communism they, I'm not one many aspects of communism they kept was total control by the party over the state. Right. And they use a lot of the words, the slogans that legitimate communism, they use a lot of those words domestically. What this is similar to is how, and I've mentioned this in the network state book, but like Christianity was, was a revolutionary left wing ideology that overthrew the Roman Empire and then it served as the ruling class right wing ideology that legitimized what the later Holy Roman Empire that took the name of the Roman Empire but actually had Christianity. You know, it's a different, it was a different entity but it took the name of the Roman Empire and it put Christianity as legitimating hierarchical thing. Right. So just like Christianity would overthrow something and then it became the justification for it communism overthrow and then it became the justification for the ruling order. And the same thing has happened with democracy or whatever. Okay, so what's my point on Indian democracy then coming back up? Just like Soviet communism was the leading brand of communism and then it face planted and the Asian version that was chugging along had reformed and actually exceeded it. I think there's a very high probability that that happens where Indian democracy is like the leading brand of democracy in five or 10 or 15 years as Western democracy face plants from the spending and the internal conflict. That's not to say that I want, I mean my ideal would be India does well and America does well and so on and so forth. I'm not cheering for any of these outcomes, I'm just saying, I mean like when I was a kid it was the opposite. India was doing extremely poorly in America. You know, I would have wanted both to do well, but I do think that flippening is going to come. And so the term democracy is wrested out in three different directions. Okay. These are like important software modules to install. Why? Because it's very simple to describe an action within the existing system. Go out and vote. Everybody knows what an election is. They know the rules of the election, they know the polling station, they know that this, they know that, that you don't have to install a lot of software. You're giving just a few words. It's like the, the code is already on your computer and you're sending a packet over there to activate it. Right. If you want a new set of tactics though, you have to install a lot of software. Right. So the modules we've installed are A, the tribal lens. Thinking of this not as red, white and blue as a unified country, but as red, gray and blue as three tribes like Kurd, Sunni and Shiite, like North Korean, South Korean. B, the fact that blue is just at total war with everybody. They're at war with Tech, Trump, Russia, China, everybody else. See that prosecution of that war involves like, things like the sleeping giants thing where they just had daily were making money by taking away money from Reds, right? By getting them fired, like that was their business, while hundreds of thousands of people daily would wake up to try to harm a Red. Okay. D, that that understanding is shared by prominent leaders in the blue space that talk about how there's a blue nation and a red nation, a blue America, Red America. They're just different tribes in the same region. And that's not just some random guy. That's a guy who's like, organizing BLM riots and stuff like that in 2020 and telling them as that article in Time, the secret history of the shadow campaign that saved the 2020 election that, you know, so it's a conscious thing. And then e, that all of this accumulates in Blue having a business model like the Christian Missionary, where they think they're doing well, but they're actually justifying imperialism to steal gigantic quantities of money to use it to fund their NGOs and their programs and to keep their victims in a state of dependency and their enemies on. On the back foot with all this propaganda. Right? Because people actually believed in Christianity for a time. They believed in Communism for a time, and they believe in blue democracy for a time less so. Right. That doesn't mean we reject democracy, just like it doesn't mean, you know, the Chinese didn't reject communism and the Indians haven't rejected democracy. They've just taken the chassis, they've taken the code base. They forked it and taken in one direction. Grays have forked it and they've taken the direction of cryptographic verification. And Reds have forked and they've taken the direction of like, Florida home rule or El Salvador and so on. As mentioned, Blues have a business model. And the importance of this can't be understated. What that means is they're not primarily just doing politics day in and day out, whether something's exciting on Twitter or not. They're being being paid by their nonprofit, they're being paid by their government agency. They're being paid by their NGO to affect. To. To take territory for Blue to put somebody out of work. Right. To deplatform somebody, to censor somebody, to sanction somebody, to. To do something that advances Blue. They believe in this. Again, like the Christian missionary. Whether it's true or false doesn't matter. They think they're doing it. Red doesn't have that kind of business model. There's a few guys on Twitter who get a thousand dollars a month, as I mentioned. There's a few. There's a few shows, Daily Wire or something like that. But if you toed it up, it's not even a fraction of what Blue has. Okay. Democrat counties represent 70% of U.S. gDP, 2020 election shows. That was like a few years ago. Right. And basically, like, Blues have all the money. Right. Reds are pearls by. By contrast, it's amazing that Reds are even in the game because what does the Red want to do? The Red wants to wake up, go to work, you know, come home, maybe go and play with the kids or, you know, like, go for a walk or whatever. Something like watch sports, watch a game on the weekends. They are. They're small c. Conservative. They're just not that ambitious. Right. They just want, like, a decent life. What's. What's the big deal about that? The Blue wants to change the world. The Blue wants to make a difference. The Blue wants to feel like they're doing good. Right. They're driven morally. They're actually willing to tolerate some low salaries or hardship, to feel like they're exercising power, that they're changing the world. Right. And that level of ambition recruits a. A different kind of person than the Red and the Reds. You know, the Red's business model is Dunder Mifflin Paper Company. The Blues business model is capturing the San Francisco government to send billions of dollars to NGOs. Right. Okay. So the Red really just isn't in the game because the Red is still thinking about it in terms of markets and, you know, companies. And for example, a lot of Reds will say, because they're not Blue, say, we're not going to do crony capitalism. Right. We're not going to take over the government and direct it towards Reds. That's exactly what Blues do. And whether Blues think of it that way, that's. That's what they're focused on at all times is getting budget for the NGOs and nonprofits. And if Reds try to do this, by the way, if they try to do exactly what Blues are doing, they get their hand slapped. For example, I remember the Tea Party. Yeah. It was like a big force in 2010. You know, why it wasn't a big force in 2012 because it got slapped. Well, the government, basically. There's this woman, Lois Lerner. The government, you know, IRS denied them, you know, not. They basically harassed them. Right. The. All the 501C3 applications. Red tried to do what Blue did to set up, like, a network of nonprofits and so on and so forth. But Blue controls that system, so it basically harassed Red. And Red wasn't a factor with the Tea party in the 2012 election. Later, this was admitted, Right. Like there was like an apology, you know, apologizes for aggressive scrutiny of conservative groups. Right. Expresses sincere apology for mistreating an organization called Lynchings of Liberty. Right. 427 other groups were suing. Okay? So all these guys. Now, first of all, by the way, why was there even an admission that this happened? Because it was 2017, and so now Reds were in control of the federal government. So they read, probably greenlit that apology. Right. But it wouldn't have happened without an actual event. Second is, the apology comes five years later after the 2012 election. So the tactic worked. Right? And how much it worked on the margins, we'll never know. But 427 groups seems like a lot. Okay. Point is, Reds will hit diminishing returns if they try to do just what Blues do. But within their system, you can try doing it, but it's fundamentally something where you're just playing on their turf. You know, they have home field advantage and in many, many different respects. Like Red's trying to do January six riots after Blues did BLM riots doesn't work. Blues burned down. I mean, like, you know, Libs of TikTok actually tweet about this. This, like, plus literally burned down cities and. And are let out of jail and, okay, entire cities, no buildings, for sure. And Reds who, you know, were, you know, were thrown in jail for doing much less. Right. That's a double standard. In the same way that, you know, being a Communist in the Soviet Union, you have one level of justice and being an opponent of communism, another level of justice. Right.

But that's what Gary Tan is trying to do. He's. He's saying, I'm a Blue. I just have different opinions than the other Blues. But he's making sure to say, I'm still Blue, but he's trying to kind of use their tactics against them.

He's.

He's saying, you're the racist.

I love Gary. He's an. He's a. He's a great person. He's a good guy. He's like, he's like an honorable good guy, right. Insofar as Gary or more generally, Gray has won. So now let's talk about Gray. Okay? Red is your play, Starcraft. Actually, you watch Alien vs. Predator?

Yeah, a long time ago.

Red are like the humans. Okay. Blue are like the aliens, and gray are like predators or protoss. Okay? So basically, humans are just prey for aliens. Okay? Aliens are just set up to devour humans. Humans might fight back with, like, guns or something like that, but this zerg NPC generating thing, I mean, the thing is what Reds will try to do, they'll try to be like, oh, yeah, we got. We got Chesa Boudin out of office. Yay. Right? We. We found something on Hunter Biden. Because Reds think of things in terms of individuals and heroes and blues. The entire NPC thing, it's an insult, but it's also their strength, right? Blues. Every single node is completely dispensable. Knocking at Chesapeake didn't even slow down the. The entire blue movement in sf. It's a. It's a decentralized left, right? And, you know, Biden is completely swappable. That's why now you're starting to see negative coverage, right? Maybe they swap him out for Newsom. Doesn't even matter. He's not even like. He's not an agent. He's not an actor, if what I mean. Or he's an actor in a different sense. You look at the 90s, Biden sounds really conservative, right? He sounds like Clinton. Clinton Democrat in the 90s. He's. He's like an. He's like an actor who's a vessel for the blue ideology, will say whatever Blues. Blue. The ideology needs him to say at that time, right? He's not like a. A human being who will have strong different opinions, right? Maybe on the margins, but for the most part, not. So Reds are, like, trying to go blam, blam, blam, blam, blam, like this against, like, individual aliens, right? They think of it in terms of individuals because they think we've got an individual hero, but they have to actually think of it in terms of a tribe. The problem is their tribe is weak, and their tribe doesn't have the money, as we just showed, right? And their tribe, you know, is fundamentally trying to fight within the system, that, meaning hold an election or something. And, you know, at the state and the local level, Blues don't see that in the same way they don't care about it, the same way they care about the national. And they haven't paid as Much attention to the state and local. And Reds may have some success at state and local level and they. And, and that's where they've gained some. They've also had like federal society. I'm not saying Reds haven't had any victories whatsoever, but for the most part it's amazing that they've done anything because they don't have a business model. Politics isn't their life, right? They don't worship gov like God like Blues do, basically. The Reds don't have a business model. The Reds don't have money. The Reds are stuck in a psychic prison where they think that the answer is within the system. And it actually reminds me of that, you know, that nine dot puzzle with the, with the lines and, and connect it with four lines. So basically the problem is given these nine dots, okay? Connect the dots with four lines without taking your pen up from the paper. So if you try it in a naive way, you'll go like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Like that, right? And you can try this in a bunch of ways. And the actual solution is this where you go one, you know, you go one, one, two, three, four. And the key is you're actually working outside the system to win. Win within the system, right? It's like a trivial analogy, but it's actually a pretty good one where you literally couldn't have won if you just operated within those nine lines, right? Or nine dots with me so far, right? So basically red is like that. They're within a psychic prison where it's a comedy. It's also pride, right? It's combination of ego and pride. They think America is the biggest and strongest. And anybody who talks bad about it is anti American. And you know, you can't possibly say that we're in a tough spot because what, you want us to fail? Huh? You know, traitor, right? Like this kind of module gets activated and they think of it as an internal dispute or something like that. But you know who is like more patriotic than probably any Red? It's Ben Franklin. And Ben Franklin understood that the American revolutionaries were weak. And he allied with France against Britain. And he understood that you had to work outside the system. You had to work outside the nine dots to win, right? And most Reds simply just don't get this, okay? They don't understand that you have to figure out new tactics. And it's not just an election every couple of years where, you know, right? But you know who does get that? Who? Grace. Okay, now who are Grace? Because usually, of course, you can go to four tribes, five Tribes, six tribes. As you add every tribe, it adds granularity. Right. But it also adds analytical complexity. Okay, but let's talk about gray for a second. So Scott Alexander named Gray tribe offhandedly several years ago. Right. He said, you know, there's a blue and red tribe, and then you could talk about a gray tribe. Right. So I'm going to use this terminology, but modify it a little bit. The most important thing about Gray tribe is they are the best of the blues. They're defectors. Almost all the leaders of gray are people who did extremely well within blue organizations. For example, Peter Thiel, Stanford Law. He could have been probably a Supreme Court clerk. Right. Paul Graham, he could have been a Harvard professor of computer science. Larry Page, Sergey Brin. They were Stanford PhDs. They could have done very well there. Zuckerberg got a 1600. He went to Harvard. He dropped out. He rejected blue and the college dropout gray. That stereotype is somebody who could have succeeded in the blue world but was so good that they. That they were going gray. Okay? Going gray in a good sense. There's many more examples of this. You know, like lots of, you know, CS or biotech founders were CS or biotech professors or grad students. You have Mike Moritz, who was one of the very first journalists that became a venture capitalist. Now you have many more journos that have gone to substack or become investors and civilize themselves in a sense, as they go from blue to gray creators, content creators that are now finding that rather than working within Hollywood, they're. They're going online. Okay? You know, people who are interested in economics or monetary policy are realizing, actually, I can create economies and I can run monetary policy on chain. Okay? So piece by piece, we have figured out niches within gray that appeal to the smartest blues, and we've gotten them to defect. You know, the thing about this, you know, like the socialist professor and the tech CEO actually have a deep psychological similarity. You know what that is? They both feel that they should be in charge. Yeah, okay, that's the similarity. And the difference is the tech CEO actually is the dog that catches the car. They are put in charge of something. They're. But they're given a budget and they're now held responsible, and they can't blame somebody else. And this is why, you know, Ben Horowitz has in his book How Communists Became Venture Capitalists, Right? And quite a few of the tech founders and so on that, you know, certainly in China, obviously, communists became capitalist, but around the world, quite a few of them had parents or grandparents that were leftist or socialist revolutionaries. And now they've become capitalist revolutionaries in technology. This is why gray is threatening to blue, because gray is the best of blue, the defectors. And that's something where there's been a brain drain of iq. It's a reverse of basically what happened in the early 20th century. In the early 20th century, something called the brain trust, okay? And all these smart people went into the US government under FDR because the centralizing state was rising. Centralizing technologies, rising. Mass media, mass production. Since the 1950s, decentralizing technology, the transistor, the personal computer, the Internet, the smartphone means that now people have found more opportunity outside with the collapse of the Soviet Union, so on capitalism, technology are winning. And so that thing about the political arbitrage, you buy and then you sell, the smarter people are now have a brain drain out of the federal government. And so blue is left with a husk, right, of this thing that still has a lot of scale and a lot of institutional stuff, but it's lost a lot of the IQ and the brains that made it work. So are piloting this thing like a, like a giant machine which has lost its pilot. And so they're crashing it into walls and, and so on and so forth and they're messing things up. Like one small example, you know, they, they just admitted this a few days ago. But do you see the trillion dollar budget mistake? The only thing that's interesting about this is that it's actually being admitted. Okay? Finally the establishment is starting to admit it's not a good economy. This is similar to, you know, how they were like, inflation is a right wing conspiracy and it doesn't exist. And so on in, early, in early 2021. Right. You know, officials are saying, you know, they're saying, stop worrying about inflation. Inflation fear lurks, right? Powell downplays inflation risks yell, right? All this stuff, they were saying that and then they completely flipped on it, right? So in the same way they were saying, oh, the economy is good, the kind is good. And, and now they're admitting the economy isn't. There's weird things that are happening, right? So he's like, wait a second, we've only had higher deficits as a share of GDP in World War II, in the financial crisis and during the coronavirus, right? And we only had larger deficit increases in those years. And he's like, in May, the Deficit was projected 1.45 trillion deficit, 4.8 trillion revenue now looking like 2.1 trillion and 4.4 do you know what this is? That means 600 billion more of spending and 400 billion less of revenue, which is a trillion dollar gap that manifested in three months. This is what I mean about the IQ has been drained from Blue. Like they basically have. They're not the founders of the system. They've inherited the system. They don't have the numerical people. I mean, one of the things that happened after 2021 is guys like Reed Reid Hoffman, who did a lot of work for Blue. Many of the tech guys and finance guys in 2021 were not allowed into the Biden administration. Like there, there was a certain kind of center left, Larry Summers, Rahm Emanuel, Andrew Yang ish kind of person that was still there in the Obama administration. These are people who could add and divide, subtract and multiply, right? I know that seems like a high bar or the low bar rather, but it's actually a fairly high bar because you have folks like, you know, Lorena Sanchez who said that Mike Solana was a billionaire, right? Or Bernie Sanders saying millionaires and billionaires, or the New York Times editorial board member and Brian Williams who thought that Bloomberg could get everybody, you know, take, take $1 billion and divide it by the population of the U.S. to give everybody a million. Like basically those are folks who literally can't do math. They actually think that a billion is just a big number, right? And that Mike Solano is a billionaire. And so the bar, you think, you might think, oh, like people in administration blues are they may not be able to do differential calculus or they may not be able to, you know, do gradient descent, but sure, they can add, multiply subtract and divide. They can't. They like, they literally don't, you know, at least some of them, like I said, these public examples where you can see they don't know the difference between billion and million, there's quite a lot of legislators who are just not since we're not giving them a math test, we can't see just how bad they are at math. And if they're really bad at math and they're running and they have bad ideology and they're running the largest budget in world history, that's how you get a trillion dollar forecasting. Ms. So that's what I mean about when you guys were talking earlier about, you know, the network effects are so strong and nothing will matter. And so I'm like, you know, I don't know about that, right? Like a lot of these things have already reversed, right? You know, who is good at math? Like People who are running China and India are actually pretty good at math. And you know, it's good math, grays are good at math, blues aren't. The IQ of blues has been drained and gone to, gone to grace. Right? It's Teal, it's Paul Graham, it's Larry Page, it's Sergey Brin, it's Zuckerberg. It's a thousand founders who've, rather than becoming professors, have become tech founders. That was like the first wave. It's creators rather than go to Hollywood that are on YouTube. It is journalists who are becoming substackers or investors and so on. And the next step is actually to recruit the politicians themselves. And that's the whole concept of the network state. Right? Basically. And now we'll get to San Francisco rather than go and run for mayor of South Bend. South Bend's population is a hundred thousand people. Okay. You can instead have a community of a hundred thousand people. First 10, then 100, then a thousand, then 10,000 subscribing to you online. You hold meetups offline and you know, as you crowdfund brunches, you can eventually crowdfund buildings. And this is actually. So what I mean by that is you are anybody can do this right now. You can take a tribe, you take your online following, your substack or what have you. You say we're going to start holding meetups, you collect funds and you organize those meetups and you make those meetups good. You make them worth coming back to. People will come for the first one. Will they come to the second and the third and the fourth? If they're good enough, you've got paying subscribers. And the goal of these meetups ideally should be, you know, you know that saying from Pride and Prejudice, very old fashioned, but again, 2023. So we can start seeing this stuff if it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in one of a wife. Right? You've heard this. Okay, so it is a truth universe acknowledged that a group of men or group in, you know, must, must be one in one of territory. Okay, so the purpose of your digital tribe is to take territory, cloud first, land last, but not land never. That territory doesn't all have to be in one place. It can be that one of the biggest things about the Internet, what key insight is that Enclaves are much more valuable. You can have a patch here, a patch there, a patch here, a patch there. And just like Indonesia is a bunch of islands separated by ocean, that's considered one Country. This is a bunch of islands of territory separated by Internet. That's like one tribe. The thing is that once you collect funds and you collect, I don't know, $20 from each person and you deliver a good brunch or. Or a lunch or. Or. Or bowling alley thing, or hike, whatever the heck it is. Okay, here's the thing that might seem trivial, but now you go up and you're collecting more money to create a little community center where people can go and meet up, and you collect more money. You do something more ambitious. We're building a statue. We're doing it. This. You set those goals. Here's the thing. You have become the de facto mayor of that tribe, because what's the point of a mayor? The point of a mayor is all these people, they pay taxes, and then the mayor is supposed to be a trustworthy member of the community that will allocate the money for the community better than the community members can themselves. There's lots of economic theory around why this goes wrong in terms of public choice and so on. But there's also economic theory in terms of why it goes right, which is there are certain things where it makes sense to collectively fund them, to crowdfund them, to have public goods. Right? And it can go right, but it can go right if you've got the right personnel. The selection system we currently have with elections is. Has been corrupted to the point that you're electing actors, Right? Like, you know, for example, people are blaming Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of. Former mayor of South Bend, for, like, the trainer elements or something. And the thing about this is, like, I'm not like a, you know, Pete fan or anything. It's not really his fault. Why is that? It's not like the, you know. You know, who's like a real Secretary of Transportation who knows something about transportation. Elon Musk's. Elon Musk knows something about transportation. He can build a car. He can build a rocket. He. You know, if all of the CEOs of all the railroads reported into Elon and had been reporting into Elon for five years or 10 years, then it would be legitimate to hold him responsible for some, you know, train derailment or something like that, because he would actually have been the CEO or the. Or the executive in charge of that portion of the country appointing some ceremonial guy that, you know, has absolutely no knowledge or, you know, understanding of the industry, hasn't laid rail or. Or packed a shipping container, hasn't run a railroad, or, you know, like, obviously he doesn't know what he's doing. It's literally just something where. Oh, yeah, you did. You did well during the election. You've got a constituency of 2 or 3%. We'll give you a cabinet position. It's all ceremonial right now. I'm not saying that that social support, that political support is important. We need to marry that to the ability to technologically execute. You need not just the legitimacy, but the competency. Elon has both. Legitimacy is the social following. You need that, but the competency is actually being able to be Secretary of Transportation. Right, right. Coming back. Point is, Grays are the best blues, right? We've taken their best professors, we've taken their best creators, we've taken their best writers, and we're going to take more, right? Why? AI is going to destroy Hollywood, right? They're striking. But you know what? AI is going to give every Indian and every African and every Latin American and every Arab and every Eastern European and Japanese person and so on the ability to tell their own story. And you know what? I do want to see the Middle Eastern take on the forever wars, right? I do want to see their perspective because they got bombed to smithereens. And I want to see that perspective, you know, as. As sad as it will be. We should watch, right? We should see the Eastern European perspective on what happened during communism and how the west abandoned them, you know, you know, with. With Yalta and Potsdam, FDR abandoned them. We should see the Latin American perspective on, you know, how they've had all these currency crises and how they've basically been the pawn under the Monroe Doctrine. We should see India's perspective. We're starting to finally see it, right? And all of that only becomes possible with decentralizing technology away from the blue choke points like Hollywood, towards everybody, right? And the good thing is Grays are doing that, right? Grays are the best of blues. We figured out niches for the entrepreneurs and the founders. We figured out niches for the professors and for many of the journalists and for the creators. The next one is politicians. And that's what the network state is, right? And what I just described, with a tribal kind of organization, there's no upper limit crowdfund a brunch, then crowdfund buildings. You prove yourself as somebody who can collect a thousand dollars and deliver a good result. $10,000 deliver a good result. A hundred thousand dollars deliver a good result. And you do ten hundred dollars things before you do the first thousand. And you do ten thousand dollars things before you do the first ten Thousand, right? And maybe you take a percentage where, you know, at a certain scale, you have a small group of people with you as a tribal leader, and that's a tribal government. Again, this is taking some of the processes that discord and blockchains and so on have built, right? All these. All these crypto communities. The fundamental thing is the physical materialization, right? Because humans are still physical beings. Cloud first, land last, but not land never. You start doing this, and you're building the shadow government, okay? So this is actually, you know, something they talk about in Britain, right? The shadow this, the shadow that. So what's the point? The point is you don't just have a. Like a defense minister. You have the shadow defense minister who's the opposition party who says what you should have done. Okay, but what's the difference between being a Monday morning quarterback and having a true alternative? This is a way of becoming the shadow mayor of South Bend. The shadow mayor of San Francisco is you build a tribe that has subscribers that show up in person, that, you know, whether it's brunch, you know, the activities are tbd, but they should be in person and they should be involved. Taking territory, marking territory. This is the pub that we show up at, right? The. The bar that we show up. This is the part of the waterfront where we have our statues. Right here's where our murals are. Right here's where our people live, okay? And you take the digital and you start projecting it down to the physical world. And here's the thing. Reds. Reds can be part of this, by the way. Reds just. And maybe even some reds will produce leaders that. That become gray, right? In general blues, because they have their hammer lock on the institutions and so on and so forth. A lot of people who would be good at computer science would be good at programming a lot of the. The mechanics of executing this. The technical skills will come from former blues going to gray. Okay? Okay. But they could also potentially come from reds. All right? There's some. There's some talent certainly among reds. As I said, blue has a business model. Red doesn't have a business model. Red are basically just downstream. They've just got. Red gets robbed. Blue does business. Right? Gray, however, now blue is taking on something its own size. Now we got a fight. Okay? Blue versus red is a wipeout. Blue versus gray. Blue fears gray. Because gray is actually. I mean, one way of thinking about it is John Stewart is blue. And for years and years, all you would do is you, you know, Stephen Colbert, you know, guys like that, all they would do is just crap on the south, you know, condescend to these Reds. They're so dumb. And, you know, because they, they're, they're, you know, they're basically. They essentially say the Reds are illiterate. Okay? In, in many sense the term. The thing is Grays, not that the goal should be to condescend, but Grays can condescend to blues because they're computer illiterate. So there's like a higher IQ level still, right? The, the blues. Basically, you know, one way of. Let me use a sports analogy. So I. Steph Curry, you know, Golden State wars. He's like, I think about 63. There's a fair number of people who are 63 and they're equal on height. But can they shoot like Steph Curry? They cannot, Right? So lots of blues are, like, comparable to Grays verbally. But can they code like Vitalik? They can't. Can they code like Zuck? They can't. They're not even close. They're orders of magnitude away. And so the thing is, they perceive themselves the physical equality of a 6, 3 guy. And Steph Curry, if you just had them standing side by side motionless, you could convince yourself that we're basically the same. But then Steph is hall of fame, you know, three point shooter, and you can't even reach the rim. I mean, have you ever been to the three point line? It's really far, actually. It's really far, okay. Like, feel an airball. You won't even hit the backboard or whatever. Fly over the edge of. Right. Like. And by the way, you know, a jump shot is really hard. You know why? You're shooting it only with your arms. You can't. Most people don't actually do a jump shot. They do a set shot where they're like pushing with their legs, you know? So, like that stuff that Steph makes look so easy and smooth, like, dribbling is hard, okay? People know that they suck at sports because it's cheap to try. You can pick up a basketball and you can quickly see that what looks so easy on TV is really hard in real life. People can pick up a mirror and they can see if they're as good looking as an actor or actress. They can try to sing and they can see if they're the next Taylor Swift. They can hit the piano and they can see if they're, I don't know, the next Trent. He's not really a, you know, pianist, but you know what I'm saying, right? So when it comes to athletics, when it comes to acting, when it comes to art and music, people are accepting of the fact that they have much less talent than those stars. And more of that talent is inherent to the person. Right. When it comes to business, a lot of people will say, oh no, you know, that business, they think the CEO just puts their feet up on a desk because they're, they're giving directions to other people. So it appears the other people are doing the thing and the CEO is dispensable. To make this more complicated, the very best and the very worst CEOs have something in common. You know what that is? The business can function without them. Ah, the very worst. Because the very worst CEO is adding no value. The very best because they set up such a machine that they can take some time off and it'll still continue to execute. They built such a machine that it can work on its own. Right? Even Elon Bezos set up such a machine that Elon can tweet and play Elden Ring and it's still going crushing it, right? That's really hard to do. You have to recruit founder quality people and motivate them to be executives and motivate them to listen. And so that's really, really, really hard. Right? Point is though, that management, because it's intangible, is not considered a skill. This is the core thing that Marxists go after. They're like the fat cat boss has his feet up on the desk. It requires no skill to manage, therefore there should be no premium to management. Therefore the workers should run the factory and so on and so forth. The moment you actually try to do this, you realize that actually management does have value. The Marx professor that becomes a manager, that becomes a CEO realizes that management does have value. The other way though, that you realize that the CEO is actually adding values if they're a tech CEO, why? Because going back again, the blue nose remembering from school, just like they remember they could they dribbled off their feet. Remember that they weren't that good at math or computer programming, right? This is the discernible, the legible thing they're worse at than the tech guy, right? Even if most of the tech CEOs are doing management on a daily basis and not coding, they are usually good at coding or math, right? And sometimes it actually is quite direct in the sense of, you know, Vitalik wouldn't have been able to do Ethereum without being the ACM champion coder. He is right. Elon isn't going to be able to put rockets there without being A, you know, Stanford PhD. Right. Like or as soon as. Without being a Stanford, without having the skills of what a Stanford PhD once had. I think the Stanford PhD has dropped off a lot. I say this as a Stanford PhD, but the thing is that at every point in time, you know, there, there was like some elite credential and it was actually genuinely hard to get that right. Grays have certain axes of. On which blues feel inferior to them. Like it's money. Certainly in part though certainly not all grays are wealthy and, but and blues actually have most of the money if you think about like the control of the state. But it is math and programming and technology. You know, it's almost like there's this, it's apocryphal. But you know, the Diderot Euler story was a philosopher and he was like an atheist and he would go around telling people, know God doesn't exist, etc. And this queen was really annoyed with him, so she asked Leonard Euler to deal with Diderot. So Euler said something like A to the X plus B equals one, therefore God exists. What say you, sir? Right. And Diderot was like, oh, you know, he didn't even know what to say because he didn't know any math. Right. Supposedly it's an apocryphal story, it didn't actually happen and so on. But there's truth in the concept of math and programming being garlic to the blues. You know, vampires, right? Like this is something they don't understand. They feel. Right. Okay, so first is gray has talent, that bluestone. Second, it has sort of a disposition, that bluestone, a skill, that bluestone. But it's actually much broader than this at the very broadest lens. God, state, network, right? What's the most powerful force, Almighty God, The US government or encryption. Reds are people of God, blues are people of the state, grays are people of the network. You know, I'm sympathetic to reds. One way to think about it also past, present and future reds, the conservatives are the past, blues are the present. The post war order hanging onto it against all of these things pulling in either direction. You know, reds want to return and grays want to accelerate. Right? And other grays want to decentralize and you know, other, you know, like folks abroad want to de$ize. Right? All these things are pulling on the post war order in these different directions and blues are just trying to keep it together. And what the thing is, as the post war order gets older and order in a sense they become like reds, like Is, are Biden and Trump really that different from, let's say, China's perspective? Right. Or from, you know, many other. They're, they're kind of, they're both guys of a certain age, you know, who still think the US is always number one and they inherited the system. And while they fight like cats and dogs, they are economic nationalists who are handsy around women and you know, like that's, that's a nice way of putting it. And any one side would say, oh my God, you're massively understating it or whatever. Right. They're basically guys of a certain age who are very, very similar, but getting into their 80s. And that's clearly a model that is, that is ending. Right. And so, so the present becomes the past as we go further into the future. So, okay, so once you. The reason this is actually a really important lens, like sometimes a 50,000 foot view is actually very useful, is it suggests tactics. Okay. And then we'll get back to Gary Tan and, and YC and City in a second. The tactics, the red, like they can, you're seeing more like amplification of, you know, God tells us to do this Christianity and so on and so forth. Or more generally religious stuff. Right. That is an alternate source of morality than the state. I don't think it can beat the state on its own, but it is an alternate source of morality. And this is actually a really deep point because blues can't tell the difference between something that is popular and something that is true and something that is morally good. Those are actually three different things. But the reason it's actually non trivial to tell the difference is if it's popular enough, it's the law. So isn't the law good by default? Right? No. A law can be immoral, but it's hard for them to give a principle because they just worship the state. Right. It's just government that, that it is. Even if they say that government is bad, it's by reference to their own government, the democratic blue government, which is good. They don't have like an absolute reckoning outside the system. Reds have the Bible or the Torah or they have the, I mean there's now Muslim, you know, Republicans and Reds and so on. They have some book that is independent of any given government that says this is good and this is bad. The government is just downstream. You know, grays have, I would say independent. It's less articulated. But satoshi's values are gray values. And those are like grays are actually the true internationalists and the True capitalists, the true globalists. Grays are much less American than reds, than blues or reds, right? Blues are faux internationalist, Grays are true internationalists. This is a deep difference. Just to talk about that for a second, then we'll come back up. Blues really do think where they don't say America first, but they do think, you know, democracy should be number one. We should provide global leadership. We should maintain the post war, the rules based order. When Biden says, oh, you know, white supremacy is our biggest issue, I think I mentioned this like he's the supreme white, how could he be against white supremacy? I, I'm saying that just to invert how they'll normally attack white people. But what is he talking about, right? He's supposedly the quote, most powerful man in the world President isn't anymore. But let's just say how could be against it? What he really means is he's against red supremacy, he's for blue supremacy abroad. He sure isn't checking white privilege, he's trying to check China's rise. If you want to check white privilege, why don't you let the non white people rise, huh? If you, you know, all the stuff that he was saying at home that blue was saying at home about how the US is institutionally racist and needs to apologize and so, so forth, all, all that was rhetoric against the Reds, against the Republicans abroad, against the Russians and the Chinese. Blue is the bestest. And you know, all African Indian countries need to get behind the champion of democracy to fight the autocracies and, and so on and so forth, right? So the point being that blue is less crudely, less obviously, less obviously even to themselves. But they're also, at the end of the day, you know, whether you call them American exceptionalists or others would say American supremacists, right? They want to be number one always, right? And they also will play win lose politics and even get their allies to go and suicide bomb themselves against the, the Russians, you know, Ukraine, you know, basically it's gotten crumpled up and used against Russia and now they're even, even in the nation here is talking about, okay, maybe we do a peace, right? Germany and Western Europe spent a trillion dollars in energy subsidies and got their economies crushed. And now, okay, we'll do a piece with Russia, right? So basically blues will use everybody else. Everybody else must sacrifice themselves to remain for blues to remain dominant. Coming back to grays, why, why does this framework actually help and why does it explain things? God alone, the Reds, God is not, I mean the state beat God. What I mean, that has all the stuff that secularization, taking prayer out of schools, but putting, let's say, the LGBT flag in schools, putting BLM to schools. Right. Has taken out the red God and replaced it with, you know, the. The blue God. Okay? But there is something more powerful potentially than, you know, the U.S. government, the U.S. military, and that is encryption. So what Assange says, you know, and others have said is, you know, encryption is something that no army, like, strong encryption is something that no amount of violence can solve. Right. So modulo, like quantum decryption, Basically, this means that Grays implicitly have a theory of what the. The prime mover is that Blues don't. It's not just encryption, though. It's the global Internet. Right. Grays are cloud people, people of the network. Right. Blues are people of the state. Reds are people of God. Grays are people of the network. So coming back to, let's say, Gary, others, when they are saying something about San Francisco, where are they doing it?

On Twitter or on group chat or on.

Yeah, on X. Right. Or on Twitter. Right. They're saying it on the network. Where are they accumulating the support for what they're saying?

Also on the network.

Also in the network. Where is the talent for their tech companies coming from?

The network.

And where is the capital coming from?

The network.

Exactly. So Grays are a global force. They're a cloud power. And you have to think of your. You have to know where you're strong and where you're weak. You know, it's a Sun Tzu thing. Like, if you know yourself and you know your enemy, you shall not lose a thousand battles. If you have illusions, though, right? You. You will lose because you think you're strong where you're weak. Reds have arrogance and pride. They think of themselves as being. We're big and strong America. Why you're saying we can't win. You're saying the country's over. How dare you. But, like. And a lot of people are just stuck in there, and they'll. You know, what they're like is they're like the Soviet conservative, right? Towards the end of the Soviet Union, there were a lot of guys who were natural conservatives but had grown up with the Soviet state. And they really liked the idea of being an empire and being big and strong. And despite all the things the government did to them, as much as they would complain, they didn't truly think, how do I color outside the lines? And how do I beat this state? Some of them did. And those are the ones who allied with the Americans against, you know, the Soviet government, those are the ones who, you know, reached out to the West. But a lot of others were like, ah, that's being a traitor or whatever, right? And they just couldn't figure out how to work outside the system. And the only solution was outside the system. And everybody at the end agreed that it was an oppressive system, but at the time they couldn't. Right? And even today, some of those Soviet conservatives regret the passing of the Soviet Union. Stalin. Well, at least we were big and strong back then, right? And this is, this is actually really the core thing. Some Reds, some will tolerate an unlimited amount of abuse so long as they can be second class citizens of a global empire. And there's others who are third class. They, they, you know, this is really the deep core point. Like for example, there's this guy who had, you know, he's got some good tweets or a growing. Daniel here is like a post by him. He was like, I genuinely think you're a weak person if you think we should give up the world to foreign dictatorships. You think America is lost to the libs or something, so might as well give up leadership to Russia and China. Then you're weak and probably stupid person. Okay, so first is, this is very similar to in the early 2000s, unpatriotic conservatives. Okay? You see this like, basically, you know, many people are too young to remember this, but the beginning of the Iraq war, all the conservatives that opposed the Iraq war were called unpatriotic. Now, of course, 20 years later, right, 20 years later, it's a total disaster. The War on Terror was a complete and utter disaster, strategically and tactically. Trillions of dollars lost, many Americans died, and yet the entire region is basically being lost to, certainly, certainly lost to the US and maybe lost to bricks. And you can argue it's because of fracking, the US retreated, but you can definitely not argue as a win. You definitely can't argue the people opposing it were, quote, unpatriotic. Right? And so the problem is the other part of that phrase. So first is it wasn't unpatriotic to oppose an imperial expansion. And the second is the phrase give up leadership. Right? Focus on that. That's saying that America is an empire that runs the world and you want to hand it over to somebody else. By the way, that's not the only alternative. You could have a multipolar world where there's different powers that compete. That's actually what it used to be. Right? This is, however, a lot of Reds Will just like a lot of, you know, Soviets just don't want to lose power in some sense and they will accept whatever level of abuse and they will endorse the current system because they would rather have that than freedom. But a different world order. Right. This is actually a really deep point and I understand where that comes from. I not even saying that that's if it's done, eyes wide open. It's like choosing to be a slave, right? I can't say I would choose make that same choice, but a lot of Reds maybe would if, if they're like, you know, for example, think about Russians, you know, well, okay, today of course Russia is very unpopular, but let's say Russia in the late 90s, early 2000s and so on, okay? Before the current unpleasantness in many way. So you can argue this point, right? Okay. A lot of Soviets were definitely better off after the Soviet Union fell. Poland, Estonia, so Poland was Warsaw Pact. And so Warsaw Pact and Soviet countries, they were better off after the Soviet Union fell. Their GDP is improved, life expectancy improved, all kinds of things improved. Other countries, Central Asian, you know, they did sideways or worse. Russia did far worse for a while, and then it did better in the 2000s and so on. And that's roughly, I think, analogous to Red America is more like the Poles and the Baltics. They'll do better in a, in a national divorce or a split. Blue America is like Russia. They'll do worse when they don't have all these countries around them to prey on. And gray America are like the Russian mathematicians who left after the fall of the Soviet Union and who emigrated and whatnot. Right?

Is I want to steel man the blue thing a little bit. Because what some people will say is blue people also cause a lot of the social progress, whether it was like, you know, gay rights or just any social progress that you think we've made is probably caused by blue people. And then also blue people just care the most, right? And so it's hard for people to leave the blue tribe because they don't want to be seen as not caring the most.

I mean, communism gave Sputnik, right? Christianity gave cathedrals. And these are big and complicated ideologies that can contain both X and its opposite, right? Christianity was both revolutionary and ruling class, right. Communism was both totally destructive. And it's become, at least under China, the version has become the factory of the world. You can argue it's bad in other ways, many other ways. You can argue it's net bad, but it still had some good, right? You know, the way I put it is insofar as. As a, quote, person of color or woman or so on, that you got, you know, more rights. The framing on that is to turn you into somebody who's, like, politically grateful. This is inflammatory, but it's sort of like Indians were supposed to be grateful for colonialism. Oh, we got so many more rights the British afforded and so on and so forth. We wouldn't have been able to do it without those grateful, you know, with the blues, who gave us those rights. Right. It's kind of like, you know, the blues cast themselves still as the white saviors, you know, and. And the thing about this is it's like they don't actually intend you to become independent. They don't want you as true peers. And the way we can see that is how they treat India now, now that it's a peer. Well, they tried to make it a pawn. They still want to keep trying to make it a pawn. But they yelled at Modi that he was, you know, evil for years and years and years. They sanctioned India when it did nuclear tests. Right. Blues don't really want people of color to be equal, certainly not to surpass them, but they want them as vote banks. Right. Think about BLM. Do they care about black people in 2023? Are you still hearing about it? No. It was useful to cause a giant riot and to pretend that they cared about black people and to burn down a lot of black businesses, but I.

Think it's a little bit of the boot Baptists and bootleggers, because, like, there are true believers and they really care. And they tried to do like, the people who did really care are blue, but it's also that people are taking advantage of it.

Yeah. So, okay, so, all right, let me be more charitable.

Okay.

Let me more cement. Like, was there a time generations ago when there was a genuine social risk to say this person should be treated by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin? Absolutely. There was a time when there was a genuine social risk. Right. Was there some good that came out of that? Yeah, there was. Is that what is happening today? No, it isn't. And it is using the language of an older revolution to justify really the opposite of it today in many ways, you know, racialization of society and, you know, it's kind of like every movement eventually becomes a scam. Have you heard that? Point is, this is like, just like, I can give Sputnik, you know, to. To the Russians. Like, they did actually advance a lot of science and Technology still, I thought that they did do some good things. Communism was bad. Is, was bad. I'm happy to see it go. Right. I am told as a person of color that I'm supposed to be grateful to Democrats because without them I wouldn't have civil rights. But you know what, India was a proud civilization. I'm not being like, you know, Indo nationalist or whatever, but India was a proud civilization for centuries, right? And you know, like even Columbus in like 1492 was he wanted to sail to India to trade with India, right? And you know, he went to the USA and, or the Americas and he called people there Indians because he thought that he was going to India, right? So like the natural order of things is that India is a great power on the world stage. It's not like I should be grateful to American Democrats for giving me civil rights. You know, it's that actually India was doing really well for a long time and then it lost some wars and you know, then it ran terrible socialist software for 70 years, 60 years, whatever. And okay, 40 years until 1991, arguably. And now it's kind of pulled out of that and you know, blues fought that the whole way. So am I supposed to be grateful for that? Okay. I mean, and they'll say, well, we did pass the 1965 Immigration act and so Indian people could come to the usa. Like true, that's true. But A, those people who came had skills, you did skilled immigration and they definitely worked hard. And B, why did they come in the first place? Why? You know, nobody ever asked this question of why did all these brilliant people come to the, to the West? Because their homelands were crushed by socialism or communism, which were basically blue ideologies that are exported there, right? Fabian socialism came from Britain, wasn't indigenous to India, and communism was certainly not indigenous to China. That, that whole, you know, set of photos of like Marx and Lenin and Mao, you know, it's like Engels, Marx, Lenin and Mao and it's called the History of Shaving because they get more and more, you know, Mao is clean shaven or whatever. That shows that it was like, you know, a Western import, right? So I guess maybe that's like one of the last things to clip, right? I'll happily sign a contract, do a fair trade and a fair deal with anybody, right? But I'm not grateful to blues. I think that arguably they got the better part of the bargain because what they did was exported socialism to India. Had. And when I say blues, I mean the global blues, right? Like Fabian socialism is like the British version of that. It's not as bad as communism, but it's pretty bad. Kept India in a submissive position for a long time. When India tried to get out of it, Clinton sanctioned them, you know, with the. After the Pokhran nuclear test. And then when India managed to finally rise, and when, you know, you know, when some Indians got out of India and were able to do okay and they rated some of the best talent, then they're saying, oh, you should be grateful. I don't know about that. Right. This is a very different critique than, oh, my God, you're racist. Like, I'm not saying. I'm not quite saying that. Right. What I'm saying, though, is this is like the NGO who wants their pawns to be grateful to them forever. It's another form of defendancy. They want a political client. It's the last thing to snip. Another. Another way of putting it is Zuck, when he was early on, needed venture capital. Once he got that venture capital, he was independent. That venture capitalist got some money out of the deal. Good deal for both parties. That doesn't mean. And Zuck may maintain a good relationship with them. There may be further deals in the future. Doesn't have to hate them, but he's also not forever in their debt. Right. And Blues gained an enormous amount of political power and money over the last 70 years as a consequence of all the civil rights activism. An enormous amount, hundreds of billions of dollars, trillions of dollars. Arguably, they got the better part of the deal for people for whom the natural state of the world should have been freedom. And so they've definitely gotten paid. Put it like that. Right. I consider that more than paid in full. You know, I had a thread a while back which was 1942, ally with Russia against Germany. 1972, ally with China against Russia. 2022, ally with India against China. Right. And essentially this is the concept of offshore balancing inherited from the British. It's like the US Allies with number three against the number two. Right. So the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany, and then China against the Soviet Union, and now India versus China. And this is similar to the domestic version of allying with the world working class against, you know, the capitalists, and then alling with women and black people and gays against, you know, the working class and so on and so forth. Right. There this is an alliance, and there's political profit that is booked and gained out of it. And then that group is then denounced if they get out of. Out of place. And then a New alliance is formed. Right. You know, so, so, so like just like the Zuck analogy where the profit was booked, profit was paid, and now we've got a new deal and let's figure it out going forward. That's kind of how I'm putting it. I mean, by the way, one version of this, and let's talk about San Francisco is it's sort of similar to people say grays should be grateful to the US government because without the US government, you wouldn't have gotten the Internet and you wouldn't have gotten GPS and you wouldn't have gotten all of this stuff. So get on your knees and thank the US government for its beneficence. Praise be to to gov, AKA God. Okay, this is like Mariana Mazzucado has this book called the Entrepreneurial State on this. Okay. Now the reason this is false is first of all, physics and math all existed before the National Science foundation in mid, mid 20th century. Right. Automobiles, aviation. Where did aviation come from? It wasn't some government funding. It was Orville and Wilbur Wright in a bike shop. Right. Like thermodynamics actually came out of people building steam engines, just mechanically working with things. And then the, the physics, the abstraction came out of that. So you pulled the camera further back before the post war era and actually science and math, of course, they've predated the US scientific establishment. A B is much science and math is being choke pointed by the establishment, as is much more obvious today in terms of respect the science or whatever, where masks don't work before they do. And C is that, you know, this is sort of like saying be grateful. Every, every American needs to thank the British government for all of their contributions to America. And without the British it wouldn't exist and you wouldn't be speaking English and you wouldn't have laws and so on and so forth. And there's some like truth to it, but it's also something where. Does that mean I'm supposed to submit to Great Britain? No, I don't think so. Right. That's great. I'm, I'm thankful. For what? For that, in a sense. But also we've done, we're doing our own thing uncoerc. Gratitude is good. Okay. And the US and Great Britain had a positive relationship once they were at a distance. India and Great Britain have a positive relationship once they're a distance. Many of Great Britain's former colonial things have a neutral to positive relationship with Great Britain once they're at a distance. But to keep you in a state of Dependence and say, you've got to be grateful forever. Well, I'm, I'm not grateful for being in the state of dependence. Right. Basically what I want is for blue people to run their own cities into the ground or whatever. Everybody who's there should be there because they're blue and everybody who's not is doing something else. Right. I don't actually think that their ideology can. I think it's like communism. Keynesianism is like soft communism. Not that soft anymore. But I don't think their ideology can last without reds and grays and others to pray from. You know, China was grinding in the sweatshops and red was doing fracking and gray was, you know, technologically hyper deflating the cost of all the software so that blue could run the roost. You know, everybody else is grinding for blue. So I'm not that grateful in that sense. Blue got a lot of. Okay, now let's talk about how gray actually wins. Why is San Francisco important? It is not local politics. Okay? Why is it not local politics? San Francisco is the clash of cloud fronts, of the gray tribe and the blue tribe, right? It is like the Korean War or the Spanish Civil. It's like basically a clash of ideologies over this city. Okay? It's not yet conceptualized as that. Gray is just getting its boots on. Gray is just forming now. Right. Gray is just discovering a sense of itself as actually a self conscious tribe. Just like, you know, for example, Britain was a maritime power, right? It had navies, not navies. It had a navy and ships and so on. And everything was thought of in terms of what they were strong on, okay? Whereas Germany was like a land power. They weren't really that great at the navy, but they were amazing on land. Okay? Different countries have different strengths, different tribes have different strengths. They need to know what their strength is and know what their weaknesses. Okay? Israel, for example, with the Mossad, they know that they're, they just, they don't want to get in a straight up physical fight, right? They're too small, they're surrounded by hostile neighbors. So they have to do everything stealth. With India, they try to attack everything nowadays from the perspective of software, software, software, software. Because Indians have a cultural knack for software, right? So what you're strong on, you want to figure out, how can I? You know, it's, it's the opposite of the hammer nail kind of thing. It's like, go to your strengths, right? Okay, so what is gray? Gray is a cloud power. What is blue? Blue is a land power. Or really, gray is a network power and blue is a state power. So anything that is in the domain of elections, lawyering, rule interpretation, courts and so on and so forth generally favors blue. Blue has home court advantage. Anything that's in the realm of code, software, you know, like online agility, anything online favors gray. So that alone is where you're strong and where you're weak. Like, if the election was being, if control of San Francisco was determined by Gary's Twitter feed, it'd be, it'd be done right. By the way, it's, it's important though, that Twitter, I'm not, I don't dismiss that Blue had made such inroads that they'd actually captured a gray stronghold, namely social media. Right? That's one way of thinking about it. Think about how, you know, remember when Nazi Germany had expanded to the maximum zenith, it even captured France and like North Africa and big chunks of like Eastern Europe and so on. Imperial Japan had gone as far south as, like bombing Darwin, right? Sort of gone way outside of its normal zone. And so that's like blue at its zenith. Blue at its zenith had actually captured social media and all of the gray values of like, you know, the early tech values of the 90s and early 2000s, freedom of speech, you know, screw the RIA, you know, no copyright, anti patent, Linux, open source, all of that kind of stuff had been submerged under Blue. But now that those gray values are coming back and Elon's example has given actually energy to YouTube and Facebook and others to do less censorship, everybody can kind of feel that. So gray has ejected Blue from at least some of its strongholds, which is really important. Really, really, really, really important. So then the question is, can gray now use that to go and take back territory? Just like, you know, the Nazis went and they took France and it looked like they were winning. Then they got rolled back in France and then they got rolled back in Germany, right? So territory switches hands. So how to graze, first of all, by the way, graze, like, and this is actually, this is the part where I say, I'm not sure this is going to work. Most Grays don't. You know, David Voy, who's a Red, has this great saying. He's like most people, they just don't know what time it is. Remember that that branch where the beginning, oh, there's no problem, the problem would solve itself. Pendulum will swing back, all of these, you know, the network effect, I'm not attacking you, but the network effect is so strong, it doesn't Matter. All of those things are cope, right, or denial. Maybe they're actually, maybe they're actually right, by the way. Maybe I, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe, maybe everything will be fine and everything will end up roses without a lot of effort. That's not usually how things go. But fine, maybe that is the case, right? Once you've dispensed with all of that, once the grays, you know, many grays watching this show realize that they are at social war with blue. And what does blue want? Blue wants for gray. The same thing they want for red. They want your company's bankrupt, they want your technology regulated into oblivion and they want you to donate to their nonprofit, give all your money to their non profit, right? They want to tax the billionaires and take away their fortunes. I mean, as I've said before, right? Why do they care about self driving cars but not car break ins? Self driving cars are gray. Car break ins are by blue pawns. Why do they care about Elon's sign on a building but not the syringes on the ground? The sign on the building is gray. The syringes are by blue pawns. These people, they've gotten addicted. The only, you know, why did they care about, you know, a tech millionaire, but they don't care about the billions wasted by San Francisco? Because that's gray money. But they don't care. But the other money is in blue hands. The only thing they want to do is use the city to drive out grays. Basically, blues want to ethnically, I mean, it's funny to put it this way, but those things on, you know, telephone poles which say, tech bro, get the hell out, right? You've seen that type of stuff, right? Is, you know, remember the rocks were thrown to the window of the Google bus, right? And journos blues, not in San Francisco, but far afield in New York and in London and so on, were all cackling about this and saying, oh, it's so great that, you know, these tech guys are, are getting rocks through their buses, right? And I'm not exaggerating at all, you can go and look there or, or they reported as a rock went through a window signaling great discontent with what technology has been doing to the city, you know, so they framed it in such a way as a passive voice thing, as something that Grays had brought about on themselves and so on and so forth, right? So you put all that together. Basically what blues want is to ethnically cleanse grays out of the city. They did it to me. It worked okay. Chesa Bedean. And all these woke whites managed to drive me out of the city. It worked, okay? And they. They got these mostly Asian. And that's the thing is, by the way, like, blue, for all of their caterwauling, is wider than gray. Tech journalism is less diverse than tech. Right? Here's all these blue outlets, right? Nyt, et cetera. Here's tech companies, right? Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, et cetera. Again, I'm not the kind of person who thinks white is an insult, but blues do. And I know the colors are orange and green here, so, you know, imagine this was blue and gray. Okay, May redo the graph. But this reflects the composition of nonprofits. This reflects the composition of most of those organizations. Whereas grays are much more Asian. Greys are diverse. They've got folks from all around, but grays have a lot more Asians, East Asians, South Asians, Iranians, people from all over. Right? Grays are actually more immigrant. Right? Grays are new money, and blues are old money. If you notice, the people who are the toughest opponents of this stuff are those who often have mansions in San Francisco and they don't care, right? They basically want to drive out the newcomer. Now, I'm not saying, by the way, of course, there's overlaps. You know, like, Benioff is in between. He's a very successful entrepreneur. Normally would be gray, but he sided with the blues, with Prop C and so on. Even he is being maybe driven out of San Francisco with Dreamforce. Okay? And of course, I'm sure there's old money that is sympathetic to. To tech and is invested in it. Essentially, blues want to drive grays out of the city. They want to take their money. They want to ban or regulate their technology. They want. Want grays to bend the knee. That's like, in the same way that that woman was talking about how every day she's, like, getting money away from red. She's like, we, we took 90% of Breitbart's revenue away, and we deplatformed this red. And we, like, in the same way, blue is waging war against reds, and they are happy when reds lose. They're waging war against grays every day, and they're happy when grays lose. This is not how grays think. When grays wake up in the morning, they don't think, how can I cause harm to this blue? This is how blues think. Blues think of you as evil as an evil tech, bro. They want your head on a spike. Remember, this is what florent talked about. Florent was like, the events of the weekend change things. The bank run isn't the biggest thing. The reaction is. It's making me and a lot of people realize the media's coordinated anti tech campaign has been a lot more effective than we thought. Having actual honest to God hammer and sickle communists hating tech and actually wandering our heads on the spike. You know, underestimate how bad the situation was. The site most under attack. Gray Tribe doesn't even realize that they're at war. We're all being reasonable and tiptoeing the issue. Looking at reasonable conversation with bloodthirsty communists foaming at the mouth. I'm not sure what to do. Techcom community needs to have a conversation about it. We can't remain oblivious unfair attacks hoping everything will just solve itself as long as we keep building. Now the only person doing something closest is Mike Salon with Pirate Riders. We need a thousand more such voices. Unapology Protect realizing they're at war. Exactly right. Couldn't have said it better myself. That is why I'm like, I'm not sure if we're going to win this. I think we can, but I think we have to kill the cope. Kill the cope. Not winning. Pendulum is not swinging. Turn turning around. The city is becoming a shithole. Tech is getting regulated. They are attacking with full force. And yeah, you do have this beachhead of tech, but like step one, the greatest strength is know your own weakness. You have to start at zero to get to infinity. Right? Eliminate all illusions. Realize what you're up against. A hostile tribe that controls $12 billion in the city budget that wants you driven out of the city. That's what it is. Okay? That's actually a pretty big deal. They control the police force. They have federal, state and federal support because they can whistle for backup from California and the US government. They can order police to not enforce on broken windows and to enforce on putting up a sign. So you're almost, I mean you're just like, yeah, you're allowed to live there. Okay. But you're clinging to the edge. You've got the cloud, but you have essentially no power on the land. That's why Collison was driven out of San Francisco. Multi billionaire who created all this stuff normally would be a celebrated son of the soil was driven out of San Francisco. Blues got what they wanted, which was more control over San Francisco. Maybe a little less money, sure, but more control, right? They don't want Gray in town. They don't want tech billionaires in Town billionaires should not exist. Right? This is what they say they would prefer. You know, it's saying like a evil man will destroy society in order to rule over its ashes. Once you realize, okay, you are. Another way of putting it is an ethnic group. Tech is like an ethnic group. It is. One way of thinking about it is. I think I showed you that graphic Democrats only marry other Democrats. 96% of Democrats are married to other Democrats. Did I show you that only 4% of blues are married to reds. 96 aren't. Okay, so ideology becomes biology in one generation, right? Oh yeah. You'll marry people from any race, but not from any political party. You'll only. You might marry black people, white people, whatever, but you won't marry red people. Okay, so blue is only at marry of the blue. So what that means is ideology becomes biology in one generation. The difference between class and ethnic group and so on. It's like Protestant, Catholic, you know, in, in Northern Ireland, that's, that is a, you know, it's made less serious state, but it was a barrier to marriage and, and trade, not simply, you know, a difference of ideas. Okay, so tech starting to think of itself as an ethnic group or a class or a tribe is a useful thing because it's got a different root structure. Right? You know, if you imagine you see two plants and they're next to each other, but if you take the X ray of the ground, they have a totally different root structure. The root structure of Blue is. Goes to like essentially Washington D.C. you know, goes through California and the Democrat party of California and Washington D.C. and it's connected to, you know, Trudeau and Canada and BoJ and in Japan and, you know, the Fed, all these things. Okay. The root structure of Gray is the international tech community. It's venture capitalists, its founders, its investors, its programmers, it's GitHub, it's open source, it's social media. It's all this stuff. You know, I say root structure, but it's like cloud structure. It's kind of in. In the cloud, right? So you have these two very. Like your support network, your people are a different kind of people. This is why I say, you know, I'm not sure if, if Gray will win because Gray doesn't realize that it's global. It's not really just American. It has a projection into America. Just like there are Catholics who are American, but Catholic is like a global identity. That doesn't mean you can't be both Catholic and American, but it is a global identity. Tech is a Global movement and it has an American component to it. Right. And unless you call on the strength of that global movement, you're not going to win. It's not local politics because Blue for sure is not simply fighting with local budget. If it got seriously defeated locally, it would whistle up for the state and if it gets look whistle defeated at the state level, whistle up for the feds. So you're fighting something that doesn't just have $12 billion in budget and control the police force and that hates you and a good chunk of its people literally want to kill you and take your money and drive you out of the city. But something that has reinforcements. Obviously this will not be solved with an election. If you have a failing company, right. Is is like the climactic board vote, how it all turns around. I mean maybe sometimes, I'm not saying never ever. Okay. Of course there's been important elections, important board votes, but really the company itself isn't executing, you know, the body of the company isn't. The directions given to it are bad. But also often there's fundamental problems with the company. Right. Another version of this is like if, if you took over Facebook tomorrow, you could give an order to Facebook to go and build a data center. You'd have the money, the muscles, the moxie, all that to go and do that. People there would know how to do that. If you just took up over a random startup and told it to go and do that, it wouldn't be able to do that. It wouldn't be able to build a dissertation. There's nobody. In the same way, if you took over a functioning government and you told it clean up the crime, clean up the streets and so on, it would be able to do that. This, however, this is a government that doesn't know how to do those things. And one way you can see this is it can't even open toilets. They held a press conference for opening a, a two stall bathroom. Remember that?

Yeah.

Right. So this is becoming idiocratic where the only thing they know how to do is win these political games and get budget allocated. But it's not simply a question of win the election. And it's fine. Personnel is policy. You have to essentially replace the tribe that is controlling the city with your own tribe. Gray Tribe has to beat Blue Tribe for control of the city. This is really difficult. The only way it's even possible is to realize your route, network is different, your tactics are different, the scale, the problem you're up against and then have the right strategy. Given this and elections are just the cherry on the cake. Elections are the reflection of your total control of the streets. You, you win the election after, you have total control, not before. Elections don't give you total control. Total control gives you elections. Actually, that's a good way of pointing out the causality is reversed, Right? Because right now, Blues have a lot of their people in the city. They bust in. All of these addicts, right, they bust in lots of NGOs and lots of crazy communists and so on. They actually have a lot of people there. Grays have folks, but where are the Greece folks on. They're focused on. I mean, look, I love AI, okay? But AI is totally different. It's, it's distant. You know, AI is not local. That's why Collison could build this enormous cloud community and have no power on the land. Right? So the fundamental question, which has been an unsolved problem as yet in our community, and I've got a proposed solution, is how does cloud power start taking control of territory now? You know, a couple of good precedents for this are actually Israel and India. So Israel was a community of people who didn't have a country as, you know, for a long time, right? And they consciously, if you read about early Israel, they turn themselves from just rabbis and merchants into farmers and soldiers, right? They consciously butched up. India is actually kind of similar where, you know, lots of Indians love disputing religious texts and arguing in English and so on. You're starting to see that in the US the presidential stage. India is like arguing, right, Great. But now Indians have sort of butchered up and learned to build as well, which is new. Right? And how did they come to it? They, they came to it in, you know, they use their strength of software and like, abstract symbol stuff, and they were able to come into the physical world from that plane. Okay. Still being strongest in the cloud. Okay. Similarly, like, you know, the Israeli military is like, you know, the Mossad is what it's famous for. That's very high IQ signals intelligence in Israel's very high IQ stuff. So they're, they're coming in from that perspective of, you know, their strength. And they're, they're, they're. They're butching up in the physical world, but it's still a tendril from what they're already strong on. Does that make sense? It's like, it's like when Google went and got into email, they, they had their strength in search, and then they went into mail and Gmail in 2004. The distinguishing factor was Search. This is a long time ago, 20 years ago. Okay, so how does. How does gray take territory? So in the network state book, I proposed one version that still works and is working. It's cul de sac, it's Prospera and so on. It's basically getting territory in the middle of nowhere or in the middle of existing places, buying it up, networking it together, and not thinking of any one territory as special. Okay, because it's all dispensable. Because it's like Chinatowns. Remember all the Chinatowns around the world. Imagine if they were networked together. Okay? Did it really matter whether chinatown was on 7th street or 10th Street? Didn't really matter. Maybe it mattered at the time, but doesn't really matter from the perspective of the global network of Chinatowns. Okay. What I've talked about in the network state book is where the land is dispensable and the cloud community isn't. Okay, now let me adapt that for San Francisco. Where the San Francisco maximalist really wants to win that territory back from blue first is just to start thinking about the daily win. Okay? We're used to daily wins in the cloud. What's a daily win in the cloud? It's another sale on stripe. It's another user, it's another follower, it's another click, right? All of these things, the incremental thing, that's what we put into our dashboards, into segment and mix panel and what have you, right? We, we. And then you have tons of stuff on that. You have con, you have entire companies that are just optimizing the conversion, right? So the call to action, we understand what that is digitally. We need a similar set of things that are like that physically, that are the equivalent of the sale, the click, the page view, you know, the follower, etc. And then once we have those, we're tracking those metrics and we're improving those metrics every single day. Okay, what are those, what are those kinds of metrics for the physical world? The meetup. Someone actually coming to a physical meetup in person. The square foot. How much of the, the. The territory in SF is owned by Gray, like literally add up and there's leased and owned, right? Some. Some sort of gathering, like whether. Not a conference. Exactly. Conferences are like the V1 of that. But, you know, there should be a great Pride Parade, okay? And you know, Solana should be at the head of the great Pride Parade, where it's got AI floats and, and just saying that, of course it's funny, right? Of course there'll be Gay people at the great pride parade. But it's a great pride parade. Everybody's in gray shirts and you're celebrating technology. Okay. That's like an example of like a physical coordination event where simply pulling it off will be something that the city probably tries to fight. Like actually Elon doing his X sign is kind of like that. Right. So I'm not sure whether you call them events or protests or stunts or content marketing or. Or signage. I don't have the right term for them yet. Right. But that's also a thing. It's not just a meetup. It's actually doing something. And you can. Then another one is. Which is related to this is members. Okay. So red tribe, okay. Doesn't ask anything from people. It doesn't. It asks so little. It's like show up to vote every two to four years. But people spend so much freaking time on this online. They identify as Republican but nothing is asked of them. There's no direction given to them beyond just vote for somebody and they'll take care of it. The exceptions to this are like, you know, the gun rights movement, NRA and so on. But not just nra. Those guys actually go and meet up and shoot at gun ranges. There's much. There's like a financial and also social commitment where they all go and shoot together or whatever that gives them a degree of cohesion on the right that can match the anti gun organizations on the left. So that's the exception that proves the rule. Another exception proves rule. The Federalist Society. Right. Which did lots of in person meetups and actually demanded something of its members. And that's why it has some judges and so on and so forth. But for the most part, the right isn't composed of gun rights and federalists. It's just like guys who want to drive back and forth to work, you know, cool. You know, watch. Oh, that's crazy, man. Catch the game. Grays do have communities. We have communities in the cloud, but we. What we need to do is in person membership. Right. So the meetups and the square feet are all a function of party membership. Whether you call it party, whether you call it tribe. Great. Tribe membership should cost money. It should be SaaS. Again, we're doing it cloud first. Right. In our right. It's a SaaS thing whether you buy an NFT. Okay. And do it like with token gated. Right. But you have a monthly cost to be a great tribe member, you have to be an active user. We have a bunch of digital metrics on whether you show up for the meetups and whether you complete the tasks that are assigned to you and you're actually doing things right. And what are those tasks? Now, this is where the creativity comes in. You could read Beautiful Trouble and other kinds of things, but the macro task is to take back the city. The micro task or the meso task is to take back individual streets and buildings and clearly mark them as under great control. Okay, now how do you, you know, how do you take that big thing and make it into small things? For example, if you had gray owners of every single building in San Francisco, or even every single building on a block, you could set it up such that gray login will get you into the building. I mean, this already kind of happens. You have to swipe your key card to come in because the streets are so dangerous, like near Twitter hq, for example, that you like or run inside and you swipe your key card and you go up the elevator or whatever. Sometimes I've seen people do that. So that's already something that exists. But the difference is you network it between buildings and you have something where Great Tribe membership gets you into the buildings, gets you into certain floors. That is already legal and already practical under current law. Okay, so that's good. Where you have a foothold of private property and you have a group membership of Great Tribe membership and private property, you also issue T shirts, and T shirts are, let's say, the similar gray color and they've just got different logos and patches on them. You know, as I said, Salon is another. Now, the hard part is to take control of the streets. So you might be able to set up all the memberships you can in in your buildings. The creative part will be how can you fence off a street and make clear that it's under great control? So first you can. You know what a smoke test is? Smoke test. It's like you kind of put a smoke test trial balloon. You, like, put out a little test. You even expect to see it fail. Okay, so like, elon sign is useful. You know, people talked about bait cars. Like, you put out a car and you see it getting broken into as a. Right. Like all. All the stuff with the law enforcement stuff, that's all downstream of whether gray is control of the street. Okay, so you put up some kind of, I don't know, like a sign which says Y combinator on it or a bitcoin sign or something like that. It's meant it should look cool, but it's also meant to lose because someone's going to come some Crazy guy addict will come and smash it. Or a blue will come and spray paint it, or they'll try and the city official will come and tell you to take it down because it's unlicensed or something like that. Okay? Blue, almost like a will try to organ reject gray symbols and put blue symbols in their place. The syringes on the street, Greta Thunberg on the wall, those are blue symbols. That blue signals control a territory. So it's like a dog pissing and marking its territory. After you've got a building, you need to start figuring out how to control the streets. You can do these smoke tests where you put gray symbols. And when you see them getting beaten back, that signals you do not have control of the street. And on your map, you need to mark it blue. Do you see what I'm saying? Right? Like you have to admit defeat when you're defeated and when you don't control a street, Elon doesn't even control his roof, okay? Like his roof should be marked blue because blues can make him take stuff off his roof. The richest man in the world doesn't control the roof of his own building. So again, admitting defeat is how you get strength because now you know you, right? So now the key bit here is there is division within the city because the police and the small businesses are generally red. Not always, but generally. And grays can appeal to. To reds. And as a. I think I mentioned this before earlier in the pod, but basically everything that is legal that grays can do to not f the police, but to fund the police, the different f they should do. For example, I think I mentioned this, but you should have, if possible, if legal, get a lawyer to. Blues are the strongest in lawfare and they're going to try to pathologize this. So make sure you go and look at it. So I'm proposing these things and there's like 10 tactics like this and you can figure out others and maybe another 10 that are legal. And you might subtract two that you can't do for no reason. Every. Every week or every month, ideally every week, have a policeman's banquet, okay? All gray sympathetic policemen are. Are allowed to come to this banquet. Those that are not gray sympathetic. And you do need to filter. You don't just because there's some. There's some policemen who are full Soviets, right? They actually believe in the system and, you know, whatever, especially now, right? So you have to figure out whatever that filtering criteria is, okay? There's different versions of it, but it might be like, would you have taken the sign off of Elon's bill? Did you want to take the sign off Elon's? But you can talk to them one on one. That's probably a good thing. You can look at what their actions or their posts are online. And if they're silent, they're often ready or gray and. Or gray, sympathetic. And if they're not, they're often blue. But even then, sometimes they have core speech. Many Soviets had to mouth support of the regime, even enthusiastic support. So you hold weekly or monthly, ideally weekly banquets for policemen. And now guys like, you know, whether it's Solana Tandler, they're all hearing from the policemen about the many abuses that are happening in the city. Okay, There's a policeman for the first. Because, you know, what's happening is blues are so insane that they're telling policemen you can't even go to a donut shop. Did you see that stuff? No. Like, SF policemen denied, you know, access to here. SF Bakery won't serve cops. Police union claims store says about the guns, not the cops. Of course, this is, like, completely different than after, you know, 911, when, you know, the NYPD was given not just free donuts, but people, you know, donate and all this stuff. So SF Bakery won't serve cops. Right. That's not surprising to you. Many blues truly, truly hate cops. Right? That's an opportunity. Blues hate cops. Grays should embrace the police. Okay, all in on the police. What does that mean? That's, as I said, banquets. That means every policeman, son, daughter, wife, cousin, you know, sibling, whatever, should get a job at a tech company in security. And again, you tap the gray root network, right? Yeah, you're fighting in San Francisco, but they've got a son in, you know, South Dakota or whatever, you know, in San Antonio. And you get them a job somewhere, okay, this is legal. But you. You also do things like you donate to the Policeman's Benevolent Union or what have you, right? And Grays publicly donate. They don't just donate. They tweet out that they donated. Okay? They get PPU patches and they put them on gray shirts with the same policemen on their who are responsible for patrolling their block. They know their names. They bring them to their houses. This alone does a lot of the work. Okay? You start to actually merge the gray and police social networks, which have been totally disjointed because essentially, and I understand this many people, their encounter with the policeman is usually negative. Sometimes the policeman gets a cat out of a tree, but it's like, usually it's negative, right? However, I've actually seen precedent for positive interactions with at least the local police. You know, at crypto exchanges there are actually, you know, reasonable and smart policemen who just want to do their job and, you know, actually enforce crime and not, you know, go after innocent people and, and you can work with them. And since you're talking to them and helping them solve crimes, you can have like a personal relationship with them. This wasn't something I did. But there are other people who I know at crypto exchanges that work in security that do this kind of stuff. Right? Then what you also do is all of the kind of military stuff that tech is funding. You know, the, the American dynamism, the, you know, stuff. Palantir Andrel, you bring those folks in as speakers and the policemen can look at this stuff and they love that. Right? Policemen think of military sort of like, I don't know, a startup thinks of Google or whatever. Like, oh, that's like the leveled up version of what we're doing. You're also beating up the bad guys. And many police are ex military and there's, there's like a relationship between them. Right? They think of themselves as domestic and foreign protectors of order. There's some truth to that. So the point is the, these are just some of the tactics. But you start to build social, financial, physical meetups and relationships with the police. And you should know all the policemen on your block and this scales and paralyzes. You can do it centrally and do it at ychq, but any Gray who takes initiative can start actually reaching out to their local police, donating to. And the police will be very suspicious at first, like, what the heck is this about? Right? But donate to the pbu, reach out, have a group adopt a policeman or something like that. Every tech company adopts a policeman along those lines. Okay, so, and by the SFPD has a huge staffing crisis and whatnot. So you could help recruit. There's about 1856 police officers in the city. And if Gray starts recruiting SF police officers from around the country who are Gray sympathetic, your hiring policy is your immigration policy. So that's the other thing you can do. I mean, how is Gray even in the city? Because Asians came to the city, because immigrants from the rest of the country came from Texas or Florida or whatever to the city. You can also, once you've gotten enough energy with the police department, they've got a huge staffing crisis to start recruiting ex military and other guys from around the country. Who are gray loyalists to come in. This is what is called building a serious political machine. It's completely legal, but you're consciously starting to do to blue what blue did to you, which is every single day blue got up and strategized for how to abolish billionaires, regulate technology. As Altimore said, one side doesn't even realize it's at war. You know, blue has this thing called the Emerging Democrat majority. Do you know what this is? Right. So this is this book, really important book worth reading. And it's like one man's emerging Democrat majority is another's great replacement theory. Right. So basically this book in 2004, essentially said by John Judice and, and Roy Teixera. Teixera has repudiated some of this recently. He thinks it's actually been a mistake in some ways. But essentially the point was it was a response to Kevin Phillips's book, the Emerging Republican Majority. So they thought of themselves as fighting back, but they basically said immigrants are going to turn America non white, therefore they're going to turn it blue. And so therefore blue will win forever and ever. And so therefore it's in the political interests of blues to bring in more immigrants and so on and so forth. Again, this is why I don't feel grateful to blues. Blues were getting political advantage out of what they were saying and therefore they were aligned with you. And when they're not aligned with you and they're not getting political bench, they'll oppose you. And now you're seeing, you know, remember under Trump it was called like babies in cages. Remember, like, like the immigration policy. Yeah. So do you know what they, they call it under Biden? Border shelters for teens. And so, yeah, so, so Trump it's babies in cages, but under Biden it's border shelters for teens. So blues are, because they're seeing Latinos maybe turning to red because they're seeing Muslims protesting the trans stuff in Michigan, Blues are thinking that actually maybe this immigration thing may not be to their advantage as much anymore. So they're starting to pull back on it. Blues are starting to flip. You know, when you're seeing Indian immigrants, like vague on the right. When you're seeing Muslims in Michigan who are, you know, protesting trans. When you're seeing Latinos going to the cultural right, maybe the immigration of all these people isn't so good for blues anymore. So they may cut it off. And then that also cuts off some of the red energy against them. This hasn't fully materialized yet, but I call it something that I, I think could happen, right? I give, I give some probability of it happening. It's no longer to their political advantage. Point is. So just to recap, Gray has private Bill. First Grade thinks of itself as a tribe. Second, Gray gets real and it realizes it's fight. It's basically facing a government, a tribe that controls $12 billion and the police force hates them, wants to drive them out of the city, take their money and destroy them globally. Okay. Third, once Gray realized this, it's buying buildings near each other or renting them or leasing them and starting to concentrate gray tribe members near each other. So by the way, that itself is a useful thing. Do a gray census. Gary has the power to do this, but actually so does Solana. You know, you don't have to wait for one leader to do this, right? You can do this. If you live in San Francisco, you've got a following in San Francisco. Hold a meetup of your followers, get some subset of them to sign up for great tribe meetups and just start doing that. You need to make it a serious part of your identity to be a great tribe and to take the city back. Right? Okay. Then you start actually crowdfunding things together. And the crucial thing about this is those daily wins, those weekly wins, monthly wins, yearly wins. Getting an apartment building together in SF is actually useful anyway. It's not just something you do for the sake of controlling territory. It's like, oh, you know, I could hang out with my friends there. Actually, you know, a lot of people already do the group housing, co housing type stuff. Apartment costs are so high you might do that anyway. Okay, but the new thing is you start thinking yourself not just as a group of friends, but a group of grades. You have a identity across the city. And how do you do that? You do it decentralized, where there's no central organization of grays. But anybody can buy a gray T shirt, anybody can issue a gray T shirt. Maybe there's a few colors and you see another gray on the street and you know that, you know, you do the nod. You're right. They're a fellow gray. Okay, this is like, remember the thing about the Google flags going up in windows? You could maybe, I mean, like a huge win would be a gray pride parade with 50,000 grays that would be massive. That would start to say, whose streets? Our streets. You have the AI flying spaghetti monster. You have the bitcoin parade. You have the drones flying overhead in formation with, you know, whatever song you want. Right? You have bubbling genetic experiments on beakers. You have the laser eye, bitcoin, maximalist. I mean, you could do this whole thing. That itself would be an awesome goal, right? The Gray Pride Parade, planning and executing it. Right. You have the police at the Gray Pride Parade. They're flying the Anduril drones. They are there. And ideally, you even, you know, design the police uniforms. Essentially. Gray is the reason gray has not had any power on the land is for a lot of good reason. We've been focused on our businesses, which are in the cloud, and you think about every single item of that. But. And it was totally reasonable to imagine, look, we're working on these businesses, we're paying our taxes. Can I just walk down the street? I mean, that's a reasonable. It was a reasonable thing to ask, right? Can I walk down the street and get some coffee at Starbucks and come back and go to work? Cause I'm working 24 hours a day, right? You know, I'm an immigrant. I can't vote. So can. Can I do that? It actually turned out that something that looks easy is actually really hard. So to keep a city from descending into anarchy and chaos and so on is actually a whole balancing act. And unfortunately, by neglecting that, the elite of the city were all focused on the cloud and not the land. So now we're focused on the land. We've got the buildings, we've got the mobile social network. And also, by the way, different gray sub tribes will have their own diplomatic relations. Ideally, every gray knows every other gray, but you'll also have like sort of sublogins. For example, at Google, there'll be teams, and one team can get into the data centers and most other teams can't. In the same way, you've got lots of sub tribes within gray. And one group, for example, can get into their own building, but they can't get into other people's buildings. But they can get into a gray community center that three gray tribes have co crowdfunded with each other. The Solana tribe and the Tandler tribe and the Tornberg Tribe all teamed up and they got something together with 300 people that they couldn't get with 100. Now, small businesses, basically, not all small businesses. Small business in San Francisco are gray. Some of them are blue. Like this shop that's saying, you know, screw the police. So what you want to do is all those guys who want to open ice cream shops. I mean, here is the key step, right? Remember the thing, the smoke test, where you keep putting things on the street and seeing if once you have enough police support you get non enforcement in the reverse direction. You know how amazing and insane it is when tourists come to San Francisco and their windows are broken and there's no enforcement of the law. And they can literally see people breaking the windows. And the cops do nothing, right? Guys firing bottled rockets, right? That's because the cops have been given a stand down order by the blues to allow the anarchy to proceed. But they're told to go and jump on a sign. Okay? This is because it's, it's illogical if you think of it as a city where everybody's looking out for each other. When you think of it as like the occupation, you know, like the blue occupation of the city, that's, that's like a different thing, right? And so the, the cops don't necessarily want to not enforce a law, but they're forced to. And some of them, unfortunately, are Soviet enough that they, that they are, they're doing it in a, in a enthusiastic way. Thing is, reverse non enforcement is how you start to know you've started to control a street. Reverse non enforcement is you can festoon the whole street with gray symbols. You could build something. You could, you could go and do renovations on your apartment there and the city wouldn't come. As small and as big a thing as that is, it's reverse broken windows, right? Right now any blue pawn can smash a window and the police don't come. What if you could build something and the police don't come? It's, it's, it's taking that joke. You know, there's a joke a while back, which is the purge happens in real life. All crime is legal for 24 hours. I immediately legalize a three person duplex in Berkeley. It's taking that joke literally where you say, if enough police are sympathetic to gray, law enforcement is what you say it is because that's what blue has done. Law enforcement is what they say it is. They don't enforce the law on drug dealers or broken windows. Thefts, murders, rapes, robberies. Hanukkah wave is literally murdered, right? Unfortunately, you know, this guy, the shopkeeper, is literally murdered. They do enforce a law on self care, on anything gray. Gray inverts that. And that's, that's a signal of significant power. The moment you can go and put up a sign on the top of the Twitter building and it's not taken down, I mean, that's a point of putting down a flag, right? Like, what is the flag of Iwo Jima? What did that mean? It's not like the Flag itself itself is a defensive fortification. A flag signifies control of territory. If it's not taken down, it indicates you control that territory, especially the longer it stays up. Right? A gigantic bitcoin mural on a wall. Especially if you can take over the Greta building and you whitewash her out and you put bitcoin up there. It's not even so much that it makes Gray incredibly happy. It makes blues extremely unhappy, demoralizes them. It tells them that's not under their control. Elon, whether consciously or not, gets this. That's why he stripped the blues of blue checks. That's why he renamed Twitter to X, right? It's the same as what they were trying to do and did do in 2020, where all these schools were renamed because, oh, they had slave owners. Why isn't the United States of America renamed because it has slave owners? Because that's blue controlled, right? Why isn't Yale renamed? He's a slave owner. Also blue controlled, right? Maybe eventually they'll have enough crazy blues that they start eating themselves, right? But the point of doing those renamings was to show that they had power, right? It's like a small fight, but if you can get the other guy to concede, they have. They have social power. So all these blues, rename all these buildings, rename all these schools, deplatform people, cancel them, strip them of status. And Elon, in sort of classic gray fashion, does the scalable version where he captures Twitter and then at one stroke wipes out millions of blue status by wiping out the blue checks. And nervestroke, you know, where it does cause some damage, renames Twitter to X, showing that he has true control and it's his vehicle and that the old regime isn't going to be restored. Right. Curtis has talked about this, and this is where I think some of Curtis's ideas are there, whether consciously or not. And, you know, like an analogy of that, be starting to rename the streets Newton street, right? Oppenheimer Street, Einstein Street, Ramonagen street. Okay? Like, change the street signs in San Francisco to tech symbols. Okay? Again, any individual thing is just an example here, but the guerilla version of that, you expect it to be taken down, and then you push for enough control over law enforcement that you have inverse broken windows. All right, now let's go to small businesses. Small businesses, again, some of them are, you know, screw the police, and. And they'll throw the police out of their donut shop or whatever. But many of them are under attack by the city government. And the moment there are gray zones where the police aren't harassing small businesses. The police are also keeping the vagrants, the addicts, all out of those zones. Right. That's actually one of the biggest things about this, being able to fence off those streets, whether literally or metaphorically. Right. Whether it's bollards that are there, whether they become, you could call it walkable streets, whatever you want to call it. There's no, you might say, for example, in this part of the sunset, no human driven cars allowed. And every car that gets in has to get past a bollard and, and log in. That fencing also prevents hobos, vagrants, addicts from getting in. Right. And by the way, we need to rectify the language. If you call them the unhoused or whatever and use this baroque language, the point of that is linguistic aggression where a blue is forcing you to use their terminology. When you say they're actually addicts, that's sympathetic. Hobos and vagrants use that, let's say, for the criminals. But essentially they're. Many of these are not good people. They are people who are assaulting, raping, robbing, murdering, smashing windows, setting things on fire, setting arsons, and just even be able to say that requires some degree of, I mean, you, you'd get fired five years ago, right? Now we can actually say that. And people might get mad, but it's true, right? Like the good people are the working class people who are the Uber drivers who get their window smashed by a blue pawn. The good people are the small business owner who just can't get his ice cream shop license renewed because of an oppressive blue government. The good people are the policemen who'd like to enforce a crime and stop this person from getting assaulted, but can't because of a blue government. Right? So let's identify the good people now. Again, many of the addicts are victims of blue also. They are literally addicted. The syringe is being pushed into their arm almost literally at these safe injection sites. But once you control not just buildings, but streets, once you have enough police support to control sub, sub regions, you start again taking all that capital from around the world, right? Because you can raise money from Texas and Florida, but from Canada, from Israel, from India, like money can come from around the world to do a seed investment or take a stake, 10%, 20% stake in some small business and relocate them to a gray controlled zone. Why would that small business do that? Well, first of all, they no longer have somebody urinating on their front doorstep. Second, all these crowdfunded gray buildings there Know, to patronize this small business. Just like, you know how YC has a lot of companies that build things for other companies. These are small businesses that have bought into gray. And so they go and they live in a gray zone and suddenly their problems are solved. The law. I mean, now they have normal business problems, right? Like they have to sell enough pizza or whatever, right? They don't need to buy locks for their front door, their window isn't smashed. You know, they don't have crazy licenses. This is a zone where the law is enforced in a smart way, right? It's like a sanctuary city, right? It's a sanctuary part of the city, but for gray. And now the thing about this is, once this is attempted, the level of pushback and energy will be so insane. I mean, what you're trying to do is do the Chaz, but in reverse, right? You know, the Chaz. Remember that? That's a blue zone of total lawless anarchy and mayhem and so on. This is the zone where police get free donuts, they get free coffee, everybody loves them, everybody's donated to the ppu, everybody knows their name, and the police actually enforce the law here. And if the police are, you know the saying top cover? Have you heard that term? You have to. You have to be like, you know, Toyota has the five whys to mix the five. Top cover means there's. There's a guy on the ground who's doing something, but he has top cover from powerful guys will cover his back because he's doing something that might. He get. Might get some flack. That's the point. You know, the shit umbrella versus a shit funnel or whatever people talk about with management, right? So the point of the grays in the gray zones is to provide the top cover for policemen who are actually enforcing the law. And what is, I mean, the real law, like the law against, like, smashing windows and attacking people, not the fake law of Byzantine licenses. And the thing is that basically, what does top cover mean in this context? It means if a policeman is attacked by a blue, all gray is back, the police, like mean. I mean, the police needs to wear body cameras and so on and so forth. That's all good. Just to make sure that, you know, policeman is in the right, and they usually are. In many of those situations, the body cameras typically did the opposite of what the blues thought they were going to do. They often exonerated the policeman and showed that what they were doing was legitimate. Not always, but often. But grays also need to give some benefit of the doubt to the police, because a policeman's every action is second guessed. You know, they're being paid whatever amount of money per month and they're literally under physical attack and often. And yelled at and, and they deal with people who are often the worst of sight or people at their worst moments, right? You know, the drunks or liars, addicts, violent people and so on and so forth. So you have to give some slack to these guys who are on the front lines and you know, with better technology and so. And sometimes if they know the cop, you're basically rebuilding the neighborhood cop. They're put in less stressful situations. Otherwise what happens is you get the warrior cop mentality where the policeman feels okay, you know, they're the thin blue line and everybody else is against them and so on and so forth, which is bad in other ways. So you rebuild the neighborhood cop. You rebuild the neighborhood again. I can't understate or overstate rather how much resistance there's going to be to this insane levels of howling, howling resistance to having streets that are clean and hobos that are kept out and especially blues that are kept out. And so now you have to do the. Use the private square to raise the cost on Blues again. Elon did this. He made Twitter an unwelcoming place for traditional mass media, made it a welcoming place for new media. Gray zones need to be unwelcoming places. And now suddenly blues are for the first time in their life paying a social penalty for supporting absolute chaos. Right? One way you can do this is every surcharge on blues goes to, as I've mentioned, the Hanukkah Abe Reparations Memorial Fund. Because Hanukkah Abe was killed by Chesapedin. Not just by the person who ran her over, she was killed by, by these people. The. The man who is recently, unfortunately beaten to death, Johannes Tewolde. Okay? Beloved store owner, Richmond community member, beaten with a baseball bat by a suspected thief in life. So that's. The other thing is Gray shouldn't just have pro tech stuff. They should have murals and busts and sculptures of the blue victims of crime in the city. Right? Put that sculpture up there. This person was murdered here by a blue. Not by the addict. The addict is downstream of Peskin or Preston, right? They're the ones carrying the knife, carrying the bat effectively, right? They're the ones who made it happen. It's Hamasaki. It's all these critters, right, who legalize crime in the city and allow criminals to prey on women and minorities and gay People. And so, so you put all that together and you have a, a movement supported by a global network to take back territory in the city. Floor by floor, street by street, block by block, policeman by policeman, person by person, tribe by tribe, small business by small business. What have I not mentioned basically once in all of this so far?

Elections.

Elections, exactly. Take total control of your neighborhood. Push out all blues. Tell them they're as unwelcome as. Just as blues ethnically cleanse me out of San Francisco, like push out all blues and then you'll easily win. They can go and like poop on the street or actually they themselves don't poop on the street. Of course. You don't want them to addict anybody to drugs anywhere. Of course. Right. They can all go to Venezuela. I mean, I want to say go to Venezuela. I actually feel bad for the Venezuelans. They can go to North Korea, they can go to Cuba, you know, you know, Homeward Bound. You know what Homeward Bound is? Homeward Bound was a program that SFU's where other cities would send their homeless on a one way bus ticket. Right. You should literally pay to relocate blues out of the city. Activists, not addicts. Activists are much worse than addicts. Addicts are victims of. Activists basically pay. Get the F out. Like, you know, they'll say, tech bro, get out, woke white, get out. And, and if you do that, that's how El Salvador turned around. They got all the NGOs out. That's how India got the NGOs out, Orban NGOs out. I don't know where they go. Get them, get them to go somewhere, but get them out of the city. And in a sense, by the way, Reds are also doing this in a totally different way. You know, why, like for Reds, like abortion policy isn't really about abortion, it's about immigration policy. They don't get to have a hard border around Florida or something like that. But they want to deter people from moving to their city. Right. Now personally, I'm pro choice, pro IVF and so on and so forth. And so I wouldn't pick that particular combination. But there are Reds who say, you know, don't, don't. California, my Texas. Right. You know, don't, don't bring that culture that crash your own place over here. And so using this as sort of a litmus test for those people who are willing enough to, to convert to red, to move to red and not bring blue with them. And so that's like, you know, another version is basically all blues should go and experience the fruits of blue government. They should live in Washington, D.C. right? They should have Keynesianism. Like, if everybody was outside the dollar and only those people who believed in the dollar were in the dollar. If only the. If. If the blue part of San Francisco and the gray part of San Francisco were near each other, it'd be like North Korea and South Korea. The moment you can control even one street or one block for gray, and you can actually have, like, those are the pristine areas. Right. And by the way, you could say this is implicitly the case right now because you do have portions of San Francisco. Like, like the Presidio is under federal land. Like, that is cleaner because there's different law enforcement there. You can't have, you know, someone should videotape it and probably you're seeing federal cops take people off the Presidio if they try to set up camps or something there. Right. I haven't videotaped it, but I wouldn't be surprised. There's some process that is keeping the rest of the city's filth from. From getting there. Right. So there's de facto gray zones already, and you'd start from there. But if you don't do this, you know, like, I heard another bit of Cope earlier in the podcast from. I'm not sure. Again, obviously you guys are my friends, so don't take this in the wrong way. Right. But I'm not sure if it was you or Dan, and he was saying, like, oh, the Peninsula is still okay. It's okay for now. Because here's, for example, council meeting in affluent Bay Area town descends into chaos as residents protest turning hotel into homes for 100 homeless people. So in other words, once blue wins in San Francisco and Seattle and la, it's only a matter of time before they come to the suburbs. There's a gigantic commercial real estate crash coming, arguably already here. All the interest rate hikes and so on. Lots of stuff was bought at low rates in 2021, and now a lot of that stuff is coming up for refinancing at extremely high rates. Sachs talked about this and all in. So there's this enormous commercial real estate crash. And again, normally I would say that's bad and it is bad. Okay? A lot of people are going to lose a lot of money. The, you know, blues basically have jerked the stick up and down again. They printed the money and they crashed the economy and hiked the rates. They're basically. It's. It's like communist nationalizing a company and they don't know how to run it. Right. The, the blues have taken control of a system that they just don't know how to run. All right? That's why you get the trillion dollar misses or whatever issue is though, that the commercial real estate crash is actually a tradable event, just like the big short. And how would you trade it? Well, most people would not be buyers of San Francisco real estate. But if Gray can actually get control of enough of the 1856 Police in San Francisco and. Or recruit people from around the country. I mean, that's, you know, Gray is great at recruiting. Right. You could get Gray loyalist policemen to come in, hundreds of them. You could. There's, there's 15 different tactics. You bring in new ones. You, by the way, any blue sympathetic policeman, if you want to, you could pay them to retire. Blue sympathetic people, the true keynotes. Pay them to go and sit on a beach somewhere. Right. You can use whatever tactic you want. Just get blue leadership out of the city. Okay? Total smash mouth. The moment that you can recapture, you have a tactic to recapture a street such that Gray can do whatever it wants there. Well, by the way, this is amazing because you've just massively increased the property values there. Any commercial, any failed kind of business that had to leave the city, you could, if you can restore law and order, you can rebuild it. It's kind of like, you know, the turnaround of New York. Right. You know, there's something called debauthification. It didn't. Or denazification after World War II. Right. Lustration was the equivalent in communist countries where former communists were drummed out. Deblification is the goal. Lose out. Right. And if you do that suddenly, I mean, that's the only problem on the street. It's that, I mean, it's not hard to fix a pothole. It's not hard to like pick up a. I mean, the addict isn't in control of themselves, let alone in control of the city. The blues are. Okay, put that all together. That's how you trade this. See, I remember I said blues have. From an earlier part. Blues have a business model. Reds don't. Grays don't get up every day. They don't think about how to harm blues. But what degrees get up every day and think about it.

How, how to grow their business.

How to grow their business. So the moment you have 50 or 100 or 200 gray tribe members that pick a spot in the city, coordinate with other Gray tribe members, buy up that block or that business, Gray now has a serious incentive. That tribe is protecting that block. Right. I mean, in a sense, it's like Crips versus Bloods for control of the city, you know, except it's, you know, blue versus Gray, not blue versus red. And it's not with shootings. It's just all non violent political machine warfare. But the moment that Gray has a financial interest in it, suddenly all the customer acquisition stuff kicks in. All of those Grays are taking a financial risk personally in the land. And traditionally, by the way, landowners have had a lot of clout in local politics. Right. Gray has not been a landowner, it's been a cloud owner. Okay? Gray going from the cloud and buying land means they have to get good at local politics. And it also means, by the way, the cope goes away. You know, why? Those gray tribe members who are actually committing to the city and buying a block and having significant personal financial risk, even with the financial downturn, by the way, it's still a lot of money for five years or 10 years. They need to be absolutely real about whether there's a chance to turn the city around. They can't lie to themselves. They also now have a playbook that's not waiting for elections. Whose streets? Our streets. By the way, the moment you control one of those streets, you start holding those great pride parades as I mentioned there. Right. And that's like a good place. That's like a victory kind of thing. Right? Right. And you should also, by the way, have, of course, reds should be welcome there and people should wear their tribal colors. No, blue should be welcome there. And you should also, in addition to celebrating, celebrating gray and celebrating red, you should have movies shown about blue abuses. For example, there's this guy who's addicted to drugs, who, who was addicted to drugs, who posts on Twitter about how the blue government helped him get addicted to drugs. You should have an interview with him. There should be lots of stories about what blues are doing that is bad. Like, that's one of the great things. I mean, Pirate Wires, you saw Sanjana Friedman's article. So Sanjana Friedman, I may be mispronouncing their name, but I think that's right. Wrote an article at Pirate Wires where essentially, where he said the system is basically working as intended. See, the thing is that, gosh, what was it trying to find? It's like a recent article, but essentially he points out that this is not like, oh, the unintended consequence, it's like what the blues think they want is for every drug addicted person to get a free city funded apartment for life, which is actually like an exit, by the way, you know, it's like to have just an apartment for life is like financially winning, you know, you don't have to do anything else. Anybody else pays for it. That's great, right? That is their ideology where they've mixed together two totally separate things, which are A, housing crisis, which they also caused with regulations, and B, the addiction crisis, which they caused, is two separate things. They've mixed the. The coverage in pirate wires and all in on Twitter, on Gary's tweets, Elon's tweets and so on is important, but it's only a victory in the cloud. Blue has lost some territory in the cloud. That. That is something that is tangible and that you can see it, but you have to see it the right way. They still control the land. It is once Gray starts taking back control of the land that they're really going to howl. Now, last thing I'll just say is, how do they howl as they start losing? They're going to whistle for backup from California and eventually D.C. okay? They're going to try to get executive orders or things like that, which means you're going to need to have sympathizers at the level of California and D.C. who will side with you enough to block those actions, number one, number and. Or number two, you actually get to the level of a sanctuary city. You say, I dare you. We've got police force here locally. You know, the was the Andrew Jackson thing. The court has made its decision, now let it enforce it. Now, you need a lot of tribal alignment for that, right? Because Blue at the lower, for example, let's say you control many blocks of streets, okay? And by the way, this could happen very fast. You know why? Because when Gray gets something to work, it scales the out of it, right? When Gray gets something to work, you can scale it. And what I've described is a totally paralyzable business model. Groups of Grays can acquire territory, network with each other and start flipping streets and buildings. And if that works, and if Grays can parallel spread out and you get, I mean, even 500 police on your side out of 2000 is a lot. Lot, okay? And you probably get more than that. If, if that actually happens and that happens relatively fast, it might take years, by the way. I'm not saying it will happen fast. It might take. Might take years. It's sort of like the sanctuary city concept from the state California will want. I mean, because here's the thing. This is why, like, would I pick this battle? I wouldn't Pick this battle. Nevertheless, guys have picked this battle and sort of like, you know, you're given a chessboard and the pieces are in a certain position and you're like, you know what? I wouldn't have wanted to put the pieces in that position. But you're asking me to play how to win. Here's how I play to win. Given the pieces in that position, right. Things have gone far enough that you can't win in other ways. You have to be very aggressive in certain respects. Just, just beating San Francisco is a major boss of itself. But here's the problem. The problem is you have a lot of money and a lot of very visible non blue people in San Francisco that are doing things, especially AI, that put a lot of blues out of work. Because what is AI? It's automating lawyers, it's automating doctors, it's automating screenwriters, it's automating all of these verbal and or state oriented professions which blues have, have done very well on and they have make money on it. And you know, like a lot of legal work is not that hard. It's, it's just asking you what the law is. And now you can ask AI and it's actually already helpful. Right? So doctors, lawyers, journalists, screenwriters, all of these folks are getting automated by AI And California is the blues state in the union and they love crazy taxes and crazy regulations and all of these very visible grays in San Francisco have suddenly found a sense of themselves and are taking territory. So it's very predictable that California will try some insane tax and or regulation stuff. Especially because lots of the blues in the state will blame in the next downturn, which is coming their unemployment on gray Hollywood. Hollywood, striking screenwriters are already doing that. And that's because that's one of the less regulated professions. So doctors and lawyers at least have MDs and JDs to hide behind. But screenwriting isn't drawn, journalism isn't okay? And all this stuff about you need to pay for quality journalism. Blah, all this stuff. And of course, you know, quality journalism is arguably the stuff you, you know, if I'm paying for it, it's on substack and it's otherwise free on social media. And the corporate journalists aren't actually journalists. They're agents of Salzburger's family office. You know, they're like, they're not actually independent, right? You're independent. Then show me that you can say Salzburger's an epitous. If you can't say Salzburger is an episode by the way these are certain good shibboleths, right? Salzburg. Just. Just to click on, Salzberger is an epitous. Should be shouted from the rooftops. It should be a slogan that everybody chants during the great pride parade. Okay. Why? Because it encodes so much. First is, Zuckerberg built his fortune. Salzberger inherited his. Second is most people don't even know. Everybody knows Zuckerberg's face, right? Mark, for his. His strengths and weaknesses is out there taking the hits. And I respect that. Right? I don't agree with every single decision, but he built it from scratch, and I respect that. Salzberger inherited his. His fortune and nobody even knows his face. You've seen a thousand photos of Mark Zuckerberg. You've seen nothing of Arthur G. Suer, a guy who inherited the New York Times. It's just a fact that Salsburger is an epist. But fourth is it's unsayable for almost any blue that wants to remain in his good graces because they want to get a job at nyt. Even people who I like know, like Hanania, wants to actually go and write for the nyt. He still hasn't removed the chip in the back of his brain. A lot of Reds haven't removed that chip. They still want to someday write for Salsburger. Right? And so saying very publicly tweeting Salsberger is an epist says, I'm burning that bridge. I don't respect that blue. I'm. I'm full gray. Right. I don't respect the existing establishment. I don't think of them as neutral journalists. I think of them as agents of the. This guy's family office. I think that he's now making money off of saying that he's for the Ukrainians when, you know, 80 years ago, like Oxalzberger family made money from choking out Ukraine by publishing durante and on and on and on. Right. And. And Ashley Rinsberg is very good on this with the great lady rig. Get that book. And so the thing is that basically these are really good shibbolettes or slogans that cut in a certain way. No blue can say them, but they're obviously true, right? XX does not equal xy. That's another good one. If you can get people to do that, after you beat the city, you have to fight the state. And after you fight the state, you have to fight the feds. The more successful you are, the angrier they're going to be in. Honestly, the same way they're mad at China and India and Bricks and so on. Not because, like, people are more angry at foreign countries. Like, they're more mad at Saudi today than they were 20 years ago when they were much worse. Right? So the, you know, they're more mad at, like, China today than they were when they were doing the Cultural Revolution of the Great Leap Forward. Right? Not to say China is good. China actually does a lot of bad stuff. But people are more angry at them because they've gotten stronger and not so much. It's not the substance of what they're doing. That's just a proxy, you know, for. For the actual, you know, tribal animus. So people are gonna be really mad at Gray if it's successful doing this. So Gray will need allies, and Gray needs allies in all the other tech capitals of the world, and Gray needs allies at the state level, at the federal level. And the reason I said I'm not sure I would pick this battle is because the level of anger that Florent saw for he saw a lightning flash, right? And he saw line up the landscape and he saw a bunch of blues holding knives, grinning and saying that they're coming for him. Right? And they want to actually kill him and take. And not, no joking, literally wants to kill him and take his money and doesn't. Right. It's not where I would choose to fight because I do think you're going to have two more bosses and it's not obvious how to beat the state and the feds. Maybe they just won't be. Maybe you can literally have like, the sovereign city of San Francisco and secede effectively or. Or something like that. If you have true, total great control of the city, maybe. Right. It's possible. Stranger things have happened. You know, the Kaliningrad region, you know, of Russia or like Estonia broke away and so on. Many crazy things may happen over the next weeks and not weeks, but let's say months and years and certainly decades. As you know, when you miss a trillion dollars in a few. Few weeks, when their projection in May was trillion dollars off from their projection in September, that adds up very quickly, right? They're vectored way off where they think they are. Economically, things should be very different in a year or two. With that said, though, if Gray can win in San Francisco, it can win anywhere. It's the opposite of the New York saying. You know, the saying, like, New York, you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. Right?

Yeah. It's a good impression.

I used to say that when we were growing up. It's good, right? You know, when I go back to New New York, I talk like this. How you guys doing? Get over here. Right? So if the Gray model works in sf, as I mentioned, and you can. The thing is, you're not just winning, you're winning at a profit. All of the Gray Tribe members who took financial risk on buying those buildings also enjoy the reward if San Francisco comes back. And all these people around the world who support this can contribute to the crowdfunding of that real estate. So you have a sympathize because elon has whatever 100 million followers, and many of them are reading about how screwed up San Francisco is, and they want to fight it. And Grays and Reds do boycotts, while Blues do boycotts. Blues deny resources, but Reds and Grays contribute them. Grays want to do so at a profit. Okay? I mean, Reds also. So you can get people from around the world funding this, and now you actually have a real fight. And if Grays can flip blues in San Francisco, which is the stronghold of where this ideology was, they can flip them in Seattle, they can flip them in Los Angeles, they can flip them in New York, they can flip them in Austin. They just run the same playbook because it's sort of like if you can beat them in their strongest stronghold, it's incredibly demoralizing for the Blues that they lost control here. And not just lost control, by the way, because for Grays to win, you have to tell the story of why blues were bad, and you have to tell it over and over again. And, you know, like all of these people, you. You know, you need to know the names of all these people who were victimized by blues, and you need to know the homeless industrial complex, and you need to know Hanukkah Abe, and you need to know this. This entire story. And so what that does is it's actually. It's like a network effect of its own, because you went in San Francisco and you have the territory of San Francisco, but you also have the ideology and the machine that you built to take over San Francisco. And now you start rolling up the map that worked there, and then it works elsewhere. Okay? I would invest in this simply to back a good cause. The main issue is how. How likely do I think this is it's going to work? It's not zero percent, but the main issue is I kind of think grays and reds are probably too wimpy to do it, but we'll see.

I was gonna say, I think that's an inspiring note to. To wrap on kind of a call, a challenge friendly challenge.

What this is, is it's actually being real about the scale of the problem, the level of energy, commitment, risk, drive that's required to do it. It is not going to be showing up in two years or four years in a ballot because elections didn't get you. Nobody voted for this. Really. They didn't really vote for the state of the city. And it is not, it's not something that's going to be solved by just, by just a vote. It's going to be solved by control of the streets leads to a result in the election, not vice versa.

Biology. Thanks for thanks for sharing the the roadmap with us. And to be continued.

To be continued.

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