Balaji on Tribalism, Cloud Cartography, Internet Values [New Content]

I have 2 hours for you guys, which should be plenty. It'll be a start. Let's call it a start. Okay.

A first course.

We got, we got some new shit today.

Oh yes, we do. We do have totally new stuff. The tribal lens is also the digital lens. Okay. If red is the past, the conservatives, and blue is the present, they want to stop it from going back to the Trumpist past. Also want to stop the tech future. So gray is the future. Red is the past. Blue is the present. So blue stands against both the past and the future. They're against both the self-driving cars and they don't wanna go back to the '50s. They prefer OnlyFans, MeToo, BLM, Ukraine, whatever right now. Okay. Once you apply the tribal lens, it's like a virtual reality filter. Every single thing can be tagged as gray or blue in the city. I mean, like literally the Greta Thunberg mural is blue. Why is it there? The Greta mural in San Francisco says blue controls this territory. Blues who live in the same city in San Francisco don't share your values. They're a different tribe, right?

Right.

They want to get paid by the government to get poor people addicted to drugs. It's like the new Opium Wars, just domestically. Governments pay the blue NGOs to get people addicted to drugs. They want chaos and poop on the streets to stick a thumb into the eye of these tech guys. They want to ban self-driving cars but allow car break-ins. An addict smashes your window. In the next election, you vote to, quote, solve the homeless problem. That increases the budget for the homeless industrial complex. And then you get more addicts, right? It's literally this loop. And by the way, it's the same loop, by the way, as they did in Africa, they did in India. All of the, quote, foreign aid is really just a jobs program for white saviors, right? For basically blues who want meaning in their life and they want pets. They wanted pets in India. So the moment that all of these blue journos let us into their paywall for free, Tear down that paywall. Tear down that wall, right? The moment they do that, we might listen to them about it being bad for Grays to have a paywall to their community. Since they won't, we don't. Gray is not blue. Blue is the enemy of gray. This is the fundamental mindset. Polarization is good. Polarization means organization.

You know, the, the people are accusing me of having a, a fake background over here. Like they don't—

oh yeah.

They don't think the books are real. Should I, should I, I'm gonna, I'm gonna take them, my headphones out here.

Flex on 'em. Pull a book out. Pick the BAP one. Exactly. There we go. Haters will say it's fake.

Yeah, but no communism in this house. In this house, communism is not allowed.

Yes. Is— do you have your, um, your kids on steady anti-communism baby books?

We don't actually have good anti-communism baby books. And, and I was actually just reflecting on that. I think with your family, communism is fine. Yeah, that's great. It's just I don't want that as my government policy, right? That's like the famous Naval thing. It's like I'm a communist with my family, socialist with my friends, democracy at my local level, and then like libertarian with the federal government or something like that.

Yeah. That was Nassim Taleb, but him and Naval, you know.

Oh, did I just quote Taleb?

Oh man. Yeah. Taleb has some good quotes. I mean, he has a lot of L's, but he's got some good quotes.

Yeah, but like major Gilman amnesia, man. Like I start to see his takes on things I know stuff about. It's like, it's like don't meet your heroes. Zion, like Taleb, like 2015 era, 2017 era Dan is not happy that all of the people he thought were smart are actually kind of, at least on the areas that he has a little bit more perspective on, not so sophisticated.

Yeah.

I do appreciate Taleb's block game.

I mean, like, you know, normally people don't like him for his style, but you appreciate a little bit the style, the unhingedness.

Sure. I mean, he's, he's kind of doing his own thing. You know, he's got his books, but like, is he actually like that much skin in the game and a lot of this stuff? You know, he is what he is and take, take the, the ideas that he presents and, you know, separate the, the art from the artist and decide what you want to do with that in your model for the world. I think everyone is kind of searching for like the grand unified theory of how the world works. And that just doesn't exist. I think there's pretty multifaceted and you have to be able to weigh, I think, a bunch of different kind of inputs at any one time. And I don't think truth, like people who seek truth, like you're never going to find it. You're only going to have like a model for it and like an expected value distribution on like what's the most probable thing to happen. It's actually an area I probably disagree a little bit more with Balaji is that I think Balaji has a tendency to seek a little bit of the grand Balaji theory of everything. They're quite compelling. I have to give him that. But I think I'm a little bit, at least publicly, and maybe I shouldn't speak for him, but my sense is I can have competing things in my head and I'm at peace with it.

Yeah.

I think where Balaji will drive is like he is going to actually try his best to come up with the best unified theory of something. I think, I mean, look, to be fair, like the network state is an impressive ideological framework argument, fundamentally something new. And I have nothing to hold my hat on in that regard, right?

Yeah.

I'm just parroting other people's ideas. So, if we wanna really say who's in the intellectual arena here, and I'm just on the sidelines, right? I'm just a podcaster.

All right.

Oh man, Balaji, we're recording. So we were just talking about you.

Okay.

I'm hoping you know what I was about to say, Balaji.

What's that?

You, you have, you have a characteristic similar to Muhammad Ali is you find the right phrase that like, you know, rumble in the jungle, thrill in Manila. Like, whatever we're talking about du jour, you can figure out the like quip that like ties in nicely. Sure. That's a talent. That's good.

Well, I appreciate that. I'm kind of compressing everything down. Okay. All right. All good. I have, let's see, I have 2 hours for you guys, which should be plenty. I think.

I don't know if 2 hours is enough for you, Balaji.

Well, well, uh, well, let's say hopefully let's, it'll be, it'll be a start. Let's call it a start. Okay. Um, a first course. First course. There we go.

We got, we got some new shit today.

Oh yes, we do. We do have totally new stuff. And well, should I just jump right into it or what do you guys want to do?

Well, let's just give the audience a little preview. I woke up this morning, Erik's like, do you want to talk to Balaji? He's got a whole bunch of new material. That was an obvious yes. We're going to have the conversation. So I think I've been looking forward to this all day.

Yeah. And usually we have the pleasure of hearing it on a private call and I'm always telling Balaji, I'm like, Balaji, We gotta save this for the pod. So finally, uh, you know, we, uh, we convinced him to do it.

So, uh, so lots of stuff, lots of stuff to download. Been thinking about some things, just been kind of working offline for a while as, as one does. Right. Um, and, uh, so here's, here's the kind of macro thing I've been thinking about. And this is both, this is one of those things that's completely obvious. And also very old. Yet I think that we can take a fresh take on it in the digital era, and I'm calling it the tribal lens. Okay, so what I mean by the tribal lens, let me give a few takes on it. So the first is that, uh, you know, we're used to thinking about the world in terms of being cut up by piece of land into countries. We talk about diplomatic relations of the US and China and Russia and India and so on and so forth, right? But as I've mentioned in like the Network State book, the other way of cutting up the world is not by the lands, but by the minds, okay? So you take all the nodes in a social network, okay? Like imagine the global, imagine Farcaster has all 8 billion people, okay, right? But it's, let's say, right? And the thing is, in this global social network, you take Facebook, you take Twitter, you take all of them combined, You can color nodes by their tribe. Okay? And this is the cloud view of the world as opposed to the land view of the world, right? This is looking at the minds, not the lands, right? And so you're dividing up the minds into people who are near each other socially, cognitively. Okay? Even if they're far apart in physical space, like, like us right now, right? We're near each other cognitively. We're near each other in social network space, even if we're far apart physically. And you can, of course, have the opposite. If you have a bunch of people who live in an apartment building, they're near each other physically, but they're far apart cognitively. They literally wouldn't even recognize each other if they walk down the street. This is a very common thing in city apartment buildings, right? So it is possible for all 4 things. You could be near each other mentally and near each other physically. You could be near each other mentally and far away physically. You could be near each other physically and far away mentally, and you could be far and far. So once you start thinking about that, the thing is that like we take for granted that we have a map of the lands. Okay. But that was actually a huge technical achievement for most of, you know, human history. We didn't have a map of the world. You know, it's like dragons, there be dragons here. You know, like you've seen like the old maps of the world, like 1492, we didn't even know, or Europeans didn't know that, that North America even existed. Right. So cartography also, if you think about it, is actually very difficult. Because it's one thing to look on a map and draw like a straight line, like the Wyoming-Colorado border. But in, in real life, if you did an overflight, that's like all mountains. And you, you wouldn't just, you wouldn't just see that and be like, oh, that's a straight line, right? Surveying, cartography, that's actually a very difficult science that we totally take for granted today because we have GPS and we have satellites and we have drones. But creating maps of the lands was actually a very non-trivial thing. Once we had those maps, then people started fighting because they could see it. Okay, so for example, do you remember 54-40 or fight? So basically there's a point where the U.S. and Canada were going to go to war because, uh, there were Western Americans that wanted the border between the U.S. and Canada to be at the 54-40th, uh, you know, latitude line. And I think they, they actually got like the 49th parallel or something like that, not 54-40, right? But basically they wanted, um, you know, a farther northern part of Canada. Why is that? Actually, most of Canada lives near that, that border with the US, if you've ever seen the map of population density. So they wanted more of the habitable region of Canada. Okay, what is that? The point is, without a map, they wouldn't— they certainly wouldn't be able to fight over a longitude. Okay, what's my point? We have— you've sort of seen these social network maps, right? You've seen these graph diagrams of Facebook and so on. But it's not a public dataset until Farcaster, right? Until Bluesky, we are still in the very early stages of cloud cartography, okay? Where the distance metric, and I mean that in the mathematical sense, is not the great circle distance between 2 points on the Earth, but the social network distance, like number of degrees of separation in the cloud, okay? And that's actually a distance metric. It satisfies the so-called triangle inequality. And you can create a proximity matrix and you can project that down into a so-called planar graph, just like you can for distances on the surface of the Earth, right? That's like topology, okay? You can do that. And so once you actually start realizing, hey, we're very in the earliest stages of the maps of the cloud, right? Decentralized social networks. This is why I've been posting on Farcaster, hey, does somebody have a script that will download every node? Okay. And every connection. And then from that, you build the N by N matrix of who is connected to who, right? A is following B, B is not following A. That's one of the things about digital space. It's asymmetric potentially, whereas physical space, if you're close to me, I'm close to you. Given that graph, you can literally make a map. You can see this tribe is here and they control this cognitive territory. And this tribe is here and they control this cognitive territory. With me so far? And the cognitive territory is really important because if you don't control the cloud, if you don't control people's minds, eventually you don't control the lands. Example, take Korea, right? Does Korea exist? Well, North Korea exists and South Korea exists because the communists controlled the minds of the North Koreans, what are now the North Koreans. That was never a historical division within Korea until modern history, right? And the capitalists controlled the minds of the South Koreans. And eventually that difference, what we call polarization, became so large cognitively. They weren't just in separate social networks and considering themselves part of the same country. They literally became 2 different countries, and you couldn't do cross-border trade. You couldn't even do cross-border travel. They were literally at war with each other, right? So when you have a tribal separation in the cloud, that presages a serious conflict on the land.

Yeah.

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Do you feel like the polarization can be measured? I mean, you have a famous, you have a famous article within crypto measuring the Nakamoto coefficient. So, the kind of decentralization of cryptocurrency networks. And I'd be curious, do you have an equivalent in your mind that you would say, okay, these 2 tribes are polarized? And actually, one thing I want to call out, by the way, you brought up, I think Bluesky is a great example of— people have already done this mapping on Bluesky.

Yes.

No one's really done it on Farcaster. We should try to you know, put a bounty out there and get someone to do it. But one thing I found really interesting is early on, they were able to kind of do, you know, very basic heuristics, language clusters. And it's kind of, there was like a Farsi or Persian language cluster. There was a Portuguese language cluster outside of the Teapot, which is not actually a cultural thing. It's kind of like more just like online San Francisco people. But I found that really fascinating that it's like these cloud communities that sprung up on a pretty nascent social network. And to your point, the only reason you can do that is you have full read access to the entire graph, which to date no one has had on centralized social networks outside of the people who work at those companies.

That's exactly right. And actually, it's funny you say that. So actually, I just— basically what I'll do is I'll paste in some of these links. Maybe, Erik, you can project them or something like that, right? So yeah, language is actually really important because that is That is the de facto barrier. Like, languages are the borders. The de facto borders of the cloud. Like, languages are to the cloud what rivers and mountain ranges are to the land.

With the one thing that translation has gotten really good with AI. So you can break that down to be a product, but culture and kind of like the nuance of the language, maybe not so much.

That's right. So those are like bridges, right?

Okay.

With modern technology, you can build bridges over rivers, you can fly over mountains, right? But in a sense, like, once you actually really start thinking, taking the internet seriously, part of the reason people can't take it seriously or don't take it seriously is they don't have good visuals of it, right? All right, so first, this is a great visual, okay? I'll zoom in a little bit here, all right? What is this graph? Basically, each node is a congressman, okay? Each node is colored blue or red by whether they're Democrat or Republican. And each edge between them is whether they voted the same way on the same bill. They voted yes together, they voted no together, okay? In 1951, as you can see, it was a uniparty, right? They all kind of voted together on the same things, right? And Democrat, Republican didn't matter as much as American. FDR had essentially succeeded in forming a national unity government, of a sense, by basically crushing all of his opposition. And by 2011, 60 years later, this is like mitosis. The two had split apart. They're basically just straight party-line votes almost all the time, with a few rare things in between. And this was actually 12 years ago. And the thing about this is, If you look, can you see this visual here? You can literally see every 2 years, the groups getting further and further and further apart. And again, that was 12 years ago at the leadership level. Here's a totally different dataset. This is 6 years ago at the social network level. Now, each node is not a congressperson, it's just like an individual, individual American, individual Twitter user. Okay, and blue is Democrat, and— or I should say Twitter account. Blue is Democrat, red is Republican. And some of the big circles are like media outlets, and edges between them are whether they follow each other or interact with each other, and so on and so forth. Okay, and what can you see? Well, you can see that this is also coming apart, right? And this was 6 years ago, mind you, right? Since then, Reds now have their own social networks. They have their own Gab and their Truth Social and their Parler and so on. And blues have their own. They have their Mastodons and their Blueskies, right? There's one called Telepath. And so there's basically this mitosis process at the leadership level. You know, mitosis, like a cell, cell division, right? That cell division has also been happening at the level of the public, right? And people will say to me, oh, Twitter isn't real life. Of course it's real. I mean, like, It's upstream of real life, for the cognitive separation will precede physical separation, okay? So, the thing is that when you can see the same phenomenon reflected in 2 totally different datasets, right? This is, again, congressmen and vote patterns, right? This is the average public and their social networks, okay? You're seeing that this, it's not red, white, and blue, it's red and blue, okay? It's not one country, it's 2 parties. As I'll get to, it's actually more than just 2 parties, it's multiple tribes. You'll add the gray tribe and so on in there. Okay. But are you with me so far on this as like a quantification of what we've been talking about?

Yes. But let me just jump in to speak for the audience for a second, because when they say that Twitter is not real life, what they mean is, hey, most of the people in the world are not on Twitter. They have no idea of what's happening on Twitter. And of course, the counter there is, okay, but they get their information from TV or, you know, or sort of, media, you know, New York Times or whatever. And the people who make that media are on Twitter and kind of figure things out in real time. So Twitter is, is a minority of the world, to be sure. But it just so happens to represent all the people who make the news that reaches everybody else in the world.

Yeah. And I mean, the thing about it is the 300-something million people on Twitter are disproportionately the leadership of the world. Right? Like, Basically, I'm not saying that other channels aren't important. YouTube is important. All these kinds of channels are important. But for some combination of cultural and other reasons, Twitter— do you remember in the 1800s, like 1700s, there was a scramble for America and then the scramble for Africa, right? Like all the European powers, like there was this new world that opened up and all these powers like the English and the Spanish and so on, they all contended for that.

Yep.

Right? It became like a battleground. That's what Twitter is. It's like the place where the equivalent of the English and the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Russian, everybody's slugging it out. This is like the nexus point. It's the network of the networks, right? Okay, I should say X. And it is the public war zone, right? It is where basically we've all been teleported up into the cloud and all the physical borders and all the conventions that kept people in their own lanes For literally decades or generations. All the wars of the 1700s, 1800s, and 1900s. You know, like the term nation-state, right? We've— one of the reasons people don't understand what it means is we've abused the term nation. Like, people talk about, like, national security or the national government to mean all, right? But that's not actually what it means. Nation comes from the root word of natality, like, like common descent. Okay, so nation was meant to be like a group of people like the Japanese who have the same genetics and the same language and the same ancestry and have descended, right? People used to talk about like the nation of Israel, right? Or they talk about the nation of the English and so on as distinct from, let's say, the Welsh or the Scottish, right? It was like a group of people of common descent. I'm not saying there aren't intermarriages and stuff like that. Of course there are, but this was like the concept. And the concept of the nation-state was that these nations should have their own state. Every nation its own state. Every tribe its own state. Okay? That was the premise. Today, we've taken that to the opposite extreme where we're talking about the US as a nation-state. It's not a nation-state. It's a different thing. It's an empire where it has lots of different nations, lots of different nationalities, which have totally cognitive separation, genetics. You know, there's there's very little in common beyond like an economic union nowadays, right? So, it's not a nation-state, it's an empire. It's like the Roman Empire, right? It had lots of ethnicities. It's like the British Empire, it had lots of ethnicities under it, right? Now, there's a different— there's yet a third thing, which is like a civilisation-state. So, that's like arguably the EU or China or India are things where there's lots of differences between, let's say, Spanish and Finnish people, or between Tamil and Gujarati people, or between the Han and the Hui or whatever. But you can get to a civilizational-level unity between Europe and India and China. And that's a way to think about those. They're like civilisation states where there's some lowest common denominator unity despite lots of lower-level differences. My point is that much of the 1800s, 1900s, was warfare, ethnic cleansing, purges back and forth. Like, after World War II, all of the Germans in like Eastern Europe were like basically forcibly deported out of there because everybody was mad at the Germans for obvious reasons. Lots of people died. And, uh, you know, that's how you got essentially almost linguistically uniform areas. They weren't like, uh, you know, an organic kind of thing. It was something that there's a lot of warfare and bloodshed and and purging, right? This, by the way, um, do you remember that we just showed with the, the graph in 1951 where the US was totally unified, right? You know what was having the total opposite of that at that time?

The former British colonies?

Well, yeah, right? So let's say take China and India, right? China was in the middle of the Chinese Civil War, right? Or just finished with it, 1949, okay? Which was like 20 years of cat— more than that, like decades of cat and dog fighting between— I mean, that's, that is, that understates— between the Communists and the Nationalists, and they were allied against the Japanese. Okay, but it was like a temporary truce. But basically, China was not unified then, right? It was just massive confrontation, fighting, bloodshed, killing back and forth for years and years and years. And India was also not uni— I mean, it basically— some guys know what partition is? This is actually an important thing.

With Pakistan and East Pakistan?

Yes. Well, right. So basically, before it became Pakistan and East Pakistan—

Which is now Bangladesh, right?

Right. You see partition. Why was British India divided 75 years ago, right? So this is something that all Americans should actually learn about. And the reason they should learn about it is I think this is a much better model for what's coming to the US. than civil war. Okay? So first, what is partition? If in 1951, the US was highly unified, 1947, the US was highly unified, the Uniparty. 1947, India was the total opposite. Basically, after the British left India, they left, so basically the federal government vanished in a sense, and they announced that there were 2 countries now, India and Pakistan, because Jinnah wanted a country for Muslim people, Mm-hmm. And Gandhi and Nehru went along with it for various reasons. And basically, the British only announced the borders 2 days after independence. So, all these people near the border, Hindu and Muslim, who had been living near each other for generations in peace, suddenly woke up and they're like, whoa, I'm in the Muslim-only country? I'm in the Hindu-majority country?

Oh, boy.

And basically mobs of Muslims and Hindus essentially started, you know, it was tit for tat, and basically Muslims were driving Hindus into India, and then, you know, there was like retaliatory stuff, and Muslims, you know, fled into Pakistan. And basically, this was this absolute chaos and pandemonium where these 2 tribes that were far apart mentally, partly because of the British, the British had encouraged people to vote by their own religion and so on. They had taken these latent differences and exacerbated them. I'm not saying they didn't exist before the British, they did, but they had become like reified, and it was something that people were made conscious of on a daily basis. So this was essentially when the British left and that form of identity went away, okay, you went to religious identity. And this led to like basically millions of people dying, being displaced, Just absolute chaos for months and months and months. Now, here's the thing. Notice that Pakistan has this green area and also this green area, okay? Now, the thing about that is, if you were making a new country, you would never, from a, like a map standpoint, why would you ever have like 2 wings that are separated by the country that you, you know, the other country that got born at the same time that you just fought with, right? I mean, this is before remote work, right? How are you gonna get there? You have to sail all the way around.

Yeah.

you know, Indian waters to get there. You don't have the internet or anything like that. Like, this, this geography makes absolutely no sense. It's the total opposite of like Wyoming or Colorado with the straight lines, right? This, these borders, this geography makes absolutely no sense except as a reflection of cognitive differences.

Yeah. Wasn't there also a major genocide in East Pakistan?

Yeah.

Later.

Yes.

Okay.

So the thing is that this obvious, like, just look at the map. You can tell that this is not like a sustainable kind of thing. Eventually, East Pakistan broke away, and that was a whole war in, you know, the War of Independence of Bangladesh, and India helped on that. That was a whole mess, okay? And there was genocide, you know, and so on, of the people fighting for their independence. So India is, like, more friendly to Bangladesh than it is to Pakistan. Okay, what's the point? Do you know what this looks a lot like to me?

I'm curious. You're going to show a map of the US with blue and red voting?

Yeah, exactly.

Exclaves, basically, of blue in a sea of red?

Well, if you were to go and look at the map, okay.

By the way, for people paying attention at home, exclave, completely surrounded geographic country.

Yeah, exactly. Here we go. This is blue and red at the granular level. And then you also take a look again at that map of partition, right? And the thing about it is, notice how there's like West Pakistan and East Pakistan here flanking India. Okay. This, like the flyover, you know, states are like the Hindus in this analogy. The Republicans are like the Hindus and the blues are like the Muslims in this analogy. And it looks a lot To me, like the setup for partition, especially because there's so many other things that are happening. Like, you know, for example, blue states are becoming bluer and red states redder, right? I'm not sure if you're tracking this, but it's like, you know, even NYT has been admitting this. Like, here, see this? In a contentious lawmaking season— oh, geez. I don't want to pay for this crap. Red seats got redder and blue ones bluer.

Okay.

We're putting on the cold open.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Uh, and then here is, uh, you know, this book that came out years and years ago. Okay. This has been going on for decades. It's been building for decades, right? The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded Americans Is Tearing Us Apart. This came out like, you know, uh, like 15 years ago. Okay. All right, 2009. All right. And so, you know, the migration of reds, you know, from blue cities to red states, right? Why people are fleeing blue cities for red states. All of that is happening, right? And the thing about this is, why do I, you know, why do I bring up the India example? The reason that civil war doesn't seem realistic to people, even though that's part of American history, of course, civil war was like highly organized.

Okay?

You had guys in uniforms, they had militaries, and they had generals. They were conquering territory. And before the Civil War, like the North and the South weren't just ge— like the geographic and cognitive separation corresponded, like slavery was legal in the South and it wasn't in the North, right? So everybody's lined up for something that Looks like a perceptible sort of border conflict. Okay. Today it's not like that. Blue and red are like cheek by jowl. It was like Hindu and Muslim in India. Okay. And also it's disorganised. Okay. Like American partition would be like BLM, but the right shoots back.

Okay.

Chaos. Tribe on tribe. Where there's not even the pretense. Blue people don't even pretend to care about Black people. They just hate red people. Right. And, you know, vice versa. Right. Red people are no longer apologizing for racism or Russia. They just hate blue people. Right. And, and all the pretense, if you notice, all the stuff about Trump is a racist, Trump is a Russian, that's all just gone away. Right. Like for the last 4 years now, it's just Trump is a revolutionary. He's against the current state. He's against blue. Right. Trump is red.

Right?

That's what matters. Not that he's racist, not these Russian. Trump is red. That's what matters. And blue is blue, and red is red. Just like you know basically the radicalism that led to partition. And the reason I say this is I'm not saying they have converged. Okay, I want to be careful about what I'm saying. I'm not saying they've converged all the way. But as I mentioned before, like to a greater extent than I ever expected, you know when I was born, India and the U.S. are converging. Okay, what I mean by that is that India today is more like the U.S. of the 1950s, where, uh, it— you know, the 1950s, remember those like old World War II movies that had like the Polish guy and the Italian guy and, you know, all these guys basically in a foxhole together? And, you know, whatever their differences from the old world, they were all, you know, American and they were Christian, or they're American and Judeo-Christian, right? They basically had like this Sort of common lowest common denominator thing, and what that did is that was e pluribus unum. That was a melting pot that was putting people together into like an American nation, an American ethnicity. Teddy Roosevelt, all these guys campaigned against so-called hyphenated Americans in the early part of the 20th century. There's a whole immigration cutoff in the 20s. It's like a hiring freeze to let your culture gel at the company. Okay, it's actually you know a nation's immigration policy is like its hiring policy. You know, you don't want to hire everybody and you don't want to hire nobody necessarily. You want to hire skilled people. And that's what a lot of other countries do. It's not necessarily what the US says, but leave that aside. Okay. Point is though that 1950s America took all these different folks and put them together with a common ideology. And it had its flaws, of course. You know, there were like, there's all these criticisms of the '50s, X and Y minorities were disenfranchised and so on. Those are all real things. That's also the time that people go back and think about, okay, the US was really powerful then, it was really unified and so on and so forth. Let me speak in favour of centralisation. There's there's advantage to that too if you can make that work, right? And and that was a country that could build because there's a uniparty. People agreed on things. You could build the interstate highway system. There weren't constant lawsuits. There wasn't constant fighting. It had low rates of crime. All that kind of stuff, right? That is kind of where India feels like to me today. That's why I'm all in in India. That's why I'm investing in India. That's why you'll see some videos and stuff of me doing things in India. What's happened with India is again for better or worse. it has developed an ideology that has unified its people, right? Basically, to first order, I mean, people will attack it as Hindu nationalism, but there's actually like 3 levels to it. For example, you know, the guy who came up with the Indian nuclear bomb, the chief physicist, Abdul Kalam, is of Muslim descent, but he is a hero to to many people who are Indian nationalists because he helped build the Indian nation, right? And so there's different levels of concentric circles. That's roughly the equivalent of, I don't know, Colin Powell, right? He's a Black American, but he was a general, and so he's a hero to people of all colors and so on and so forth, at least before the WMD thing, okay? Point is, India has come up with a unifying ideology that is, For the most part, with and and you'll always look at edge cases and so on. But if you look at the degree of people reporting unity, their satisfaction with government and so on, the infrastructure infrastructure is a good diagnostic of how unified your country is. India can build trains, the Vande Mataram train. India can land something on the moon. India landed Chandrayaan on the moon, dark side of the moon, for one fourth the cost of a San Francisco bus lane. Seventy five million versus three hundred million.

Right?

It built its parliament building, 125 million for like a third of the cost. You know what? Yeah. So these are unprecedented things for me, right? Like I, India was never able to execute as a society until like the last 10 years, 15 years. It's like finally got it together. Now what's the converse, right? Unfortunately, the US is becoming like the India of my youth because I've seen this movie before. The India of my youth had a lot of smart people. who just couldn't get together as a society. It was riven by, like, race and, you know, ethnic conflicts, religious conflicts, ideological conflicts. It had lots of socialist lunatics, and it had an impressive diaspora that went abroad. And it had flashes of greatness, individual greatness at the company level, and so on and so forth. But it was basically just held down by the inability to cooperate as a society. And That is kind of like, you know, what I'm saying. This is not like a diss. It's not an insult. I'm not attacking or, you know, I'm, I'm, I mean, India did have poop on the streets and I mean, it still does in some ways. As I said, they're converging. They haven't converged, uh, right? But it's so much cleaner than it was and vice versa for the US, right? And so like, I look at this as just like the, the sine waves of civilization. You know, in 1950, you're at peak US, like highly centralized, everybody's organized, interstate highway system and so on. China and India are completely disorganized internally. China just got off the Chinese Civil War. India just got off partition, right? 70 years later, those 2— those 3 sine waves have like inverted phase. China and India are like the most unified they've ever been. And the US is like getting— it's already far apart cognitively, and I think it'll get farther apart physically. I'm not saying this is good or bad. I'm just saying that, I mean, it's bad in many ways. I'd prefer that the US was unified and good and so on and so forth. That's the thing is, Like, observing this is not cheering it. It's like, I don't want the plane to crash. I am, however, observing that altitude is declining, and I'm trying to say what happens next, right? I may be wrong. I'm at least showing you my numbers. Let me, let me pause there, and then I'll say more.

So, Balaji, how would you respond to the fact, if you take India of your youth, the, the escape valve for the talented people I'm sure people in your family was to move to the US, right? Move to the land of opportunity. Where is that today outside of the US, right? I feel like people are still moving. We have a, you know, ham-fisted immigration policy, right? Like, we have way more skilled people who want to come to this country, work, produce economic value, and we don't allow them in. That's a side issue. But in terms of the beacon of a place for a better life, if you're a talented person anywhere in the world, people still want to move to the US despite, I would agree with you, maybe a relative decline in a certain set of things relative to the '50s compared to these other countries?

So first of all, it's a great question, and it's the most important question, right? If not here, where, right? Okay, like, who else is going to be? Okay, so I'll give 3 answers to that, right? The first is that The, uh, here, if you look at this, the US is actually, um, losing ground on high net worth and on talent relative to where it was. I'll show you some graphs on that. Okay, so you see this map, like millionaire migration map?

Yep, yep.

So this is from 2022, and the thing is, Russia, China— of course, Russia, Ukraine, they're losing from the Ukraine war. China is losing because it was under lockdown. Hong Kong as well. Who's gaining, right? Switzerland, though Switzerland, you know, I mean, it's probably best for Europe. Cyprus and, you know, Greece actually because they were, you know, letting people come in from Russia. Israel had a lot of people make Aliyah. But Dubai, Singapore, or, you know, Dubai's capital city or the biggest city in the UAE, UAE, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand are all gaining a lot. You might say, well, apology, this map still shows the US is green. It's plus 1,500. Canada is plus 1,000. But first of all, the US is way less than even Australia, plus 3,500. And second and most importantly, do you know what this number was in 2019?

10x.

Yeah, basically. That's right. So in 2019, the US was like plus 10,000. Okay. So here's the 2019 graph. Okay. Same guys, same methodology. All right. US was like plus 10,000. So pre-pandemic, the US was like plus 10,000. And the US has basically dropped 86% in 3 years, 4 years, okay? That's a lot. And these are folks who can move anywhere in the world, right? So that's an early signal that global capital has found other places. And that's Dubai, that's— Singapore. Singapore, that's Israel, that's Australia, that's New Zealand, that's Switzerland. It's not Russia, China. They're also losing people even more than the U.S.'s. Okay? But this is like the reason that's important is people think of this as a bipolar world. It's not just a bipolar world. That's one axis. There's also all these small countries that are well-run startup city types that are gaining people. Okay? That's that's my first answer. Okay? That's and now you're like okay well that's just That's just one example.

So that's millionaires, right? So where are the kind of like the up-and-coming, the future Satyas, the future Sundars?

That's a great question. Okay, so first is millionaires are important because that's like the capital for funding all those guys and so on and so forth.

And to your point, they're the first ones to be able to move because they have the means to move. And they have, you know, the ability to kind of get ahead of, of, of a trend. So to—

Yes.

Try to make your case on that side.

Exactly. That's right. So, and, and to be clear, by the way, like, I, I, I'm, I'm showing trends and I'll talk about how we could do a trend reversal. All right. So this is from August 2022, right? Canada replaces the US's top destination for talent. So here was Canada. But then the thing is also, I mean, look, that's just like one place you can argue it's noise in the rankings. The more interesting to me is Japan, Singapore, New Zealand, all rising. That's like the rise of Asia. Okay. And like Europe, you know, Germany, France, you know, Australia, Japan, Singapore, New Zealand, those are all like English speaking or English friendly in Asia time zones, right? Because, uh, you know, or closer to Asia time zones and, you know, Germany, France, et cetera, declining, right? And the reason for this is that, you know, most people don't have this as their mental model, but it's pretty important. The world economy has actually physically— this is an important graph. The world economy has moved back to Asia. Okay? So here is, you know, like most of, like, recorded human history had the geocenter of, let's say, for 1,000 years, the geocenter of the global economy, to the extent we can measure it, was like somewhere, you know, intermediate between Europe, India, China. In fact, like, why did Columbus sail to the US? What is it? Or to— he wanted to find India, right? That's why Native Americans are called Indians. India was like a big trade center. That's why, you know, people want to go to China, the Silk Road and so on. All that stuff was, you know, the great riches were like on the other side. So it was a big part of European history for a long time. The last hundred-something years have been very atypical, where essentially since you know in the 20th century Europe and the U.S. were so dominant that we just think of like the world economy being centered here. This is where we grew up. But since then it's been rocketing back over here, okay, at an incredible speed, much faster than it did. This is what one of the graphs I show for history is running in reverse. It's like literally running in reverse where. You're going back to the future, and the global center is moving back to Asia. So that is why you're seeing talent going to Asian time zones, and you're seeing money do that as well. Okay. Now, the other thing about this is—

Apology, do you mind if I just give a plug? There's a Stanford professor, Ian Morris, who wrote a book, Why the West Rules, and then the kind of postscript there is for now. And he actually does an academic treatment of Joules as kind of the universal constant of a civilization's, like, you know, government capacity, effective capacity, wealth, right? The ability for the average person, how much energy is available to you. And he actually talks about how it has shifted from the East to the West over time. But he actually talks about in that book, which is really interesting, is China got very close in his assessment from a historical record to a potential industrial revolution, like with, with coal around 1000 AD. So, so kind of just talking about how energy has been a really, you know, and Vaclav Smil's Energy and Civilization is also useful in this. But, but to your point, it has shifted and it has shifted back. And he ends with a coda at the end of the book of the rise of East Asia and the kind of East Asian economic miracle of how fast these countries went from dirt poor to just, you know, dominant, or in terms of on the global scale.

But now let me give you some new content. Okay? So everything up to this point, you've kind of heard pieces of it before or whatever, but it's like all in one spot. Okay? Sometimes the right word clarifies something. And what one thing that kind of is an umbrella term over everything we've just looked at is Western, I don't think is the right word anymore. I think it's not Western values, it's internet values. Let me explain. Just like there's a progression from like European values and people talked about Europe and Christendom and so on and so forth, and then they moved to Western as an umbrella term that included the US, that had Judeo-Christian, that had like all the people who were of European descent but scattered around the world and like the Anglosphere and so on. That was like a broader term, right? I think Western doesn't actually describe— there's, there's something that you and I and our friends all subscribe to. There's something that those countries that I mentioned there— Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore, um, you know, even Dubai in many ways, actually— uh, they subscribe to something, but that thing is not Western. I argue It's actually internet values. Okay? Why do I say that? Let me let me push on this because also relates to geography point from earlier. Fundamentally, I've got I've got a series of posts coming out, but I'll preview them with you and get your thoughts and feedback. Internet first, not America first. Okay? Why internet first? Okay. Well. The thing is that if you're really chest-thumpy America First, I understand where that comes from. I'm actually more sympathetic to the red who's like proud of their country and proud of their history and so on. I get where that comes from. That's at least better than like burning down your own country and saying, you know, we're the worst people in the world and so on and so forth. If I have to choose between the two, I'll choose the red over, you know, over, over burning down your country. The problem is when red gets too into itself, it's burning down other countries, right? Because we're the best, blow up everything, right? And the thing is also that America first actually, in a not completely obvious way, results in America last. The reason is if you say America first, Turkey says Turkey first, India says India first, everybody says that they're first. And then your free trade zone breaks down and you're admitting that the rules-based order that you set up is no longer credibly neutral, and that America First will mean that the US breaks every rule in order to benefit itself, and doesn't even exist anymore because it's red and blue, not red, white, and blue. And so, you know, basically America First is a signal that you're going to be incredibly selfish to other countries, right? And America's only 4% of the world. It's not a win-win ideology. It's an ideology that comes from being backed into a corner and feeling we've been too generous. We've given of our own blood. We've given our own treasure. We've lost in free trade. We've been the policemen of the world. It's time for us to get paid, right? It's time for us to get ours, right? The problem is that while I understand where that comes from, that is not the way to actually— I mean, for example, North Korea is North Korea first. Right? Argentina was— I mean, like, Juan Perón was all about Argentina first. Okay, let me show you something. Simply being, quote, proud of one's country is not enough to turn it around. Argentina's unprecedented economic boom to bust history. Okay, we know about the money printing, but it wasn't just money printing. It wasn't just like insane, like, left statism. It was also insane right nationalism. Okay, because here's the thing: until the middle of the 20th century, such a scenario is simply unimaginable. Rich, you know, Argentina was super rich. It had all the stuff that Zayhan thinks is really important, like the geography and you know all that type of stuff. It was growing. It had endless supply of raw materials. It was isolated from the wars of the old world. It had a great position on the peninsula. All that type of stuff, right? And and then what happened was Argentina's decline was well underway. Okay. So basically, so tripled state expenditures, you know, when nothing else worked, go into debt, print money, let inflation gallop. But they also did this. Look at this. Ready? As part of an Argentina First policy, tariff barriers were put in place to protect the country's weak industrial base, right? Gas plants were purchased as well as electric companies. A staggering number of inefficient state companies were founded. This is just like the $300 million SF bus lane or The $50 billion TSMC thing, which isn't working. You know, like basically, you know SoftBank, right? SoftBank spent you know how many how many billion dollars, right? It's not easy to turn $100 billion into $100 billion of technology. It's easy to waste the money, right? And if you go and look, you know they would not listen to us inside Arizona's trouble. Basically. Uh, you can, you can argue, oh, the media is always negative and so on, and that's fine, and I would normally agree with you, but I consider this an admission against interest. Basically, um, you know, when, when they're spending tens of billions of dollars on this chip plant, it's not getting anywhere. And in fact, you know, Taiwan has to import like 500 Taiwanese to try and make it work, and they're not getting the visas. All of the kind of permitting and regulatory things you think would go away in a national security issue aren't there. So the point is, just like Argentina, this Argentina First policy of, of, you know, tariffs and trying to bring industries home and lots of spending, that's being tried in the US now, and it looks similar. Okay, so the thing is that America First is a little bit more intuitive for sure than it's a systemically racist country, let's burn down my house. Okay, that's stupid. But like everybody was like into that 3 years ago. I mean, into it like manic break, like crazy burn down your house kind of stuff, you know? Right. They were, they were crazy for, I mean, Me Too was 2018, right? We just, we lived through an insane period of time where people had gotten completely hopped up on the Uh, far left, America is the worst narrative. Here's the thing. What happened in the 2000s? If we go back one more decade, people were completely hopped up on the neocon right, America must imperialize the Middle East narrative. Okay. And if you kind of think about this, the 1990s had a lot of PC and was left. The 2000s had a lot of war and was right. The 2010s had a lot of woke. and was left. And the 2020s are shaping up to have a lot of, in my view, irrational nationalism and right. So it's like a car going like this, like steering back and forth. You know, it's like basically you're overcorrecting each time, you know, like steering back hard to the— I mean, literally 3 years ago, blue people are saying it's a systemically racist country. Uh, you know, it's, it's, it's, uh, it's oppressed Black and brown people. They're like washing people's feet to atone for their sins and so on and so forth. And then 2 years later— not even 2 years later, 18 months later, okay, February, March 2022, okay— America is now the champion of democracy and they have to go and get the Indians and Africans need to get in line for the war with, with, you know, Russia and over Ukraine. Complete reversal, right? Wait, it's a systemically racist country. Now Black and brown people are supposed to get in line. And why did that happen? Now, going back to the tribal lens, it's because in 2020, blues were fighting reds, they were fighting Republicans. In 2022, they're fighting Russians. Let's call them whites. Because if you assign a colour like red and blue within the US, Russians, you could assign the color white because Democrats think of them as white nationalists, white supremacists, the whitest country, and so on and so forth. The champ. Okay. So when they're fighting— and actually Russian whites, that was actually a term in the early 20th century, the Russian whites versus the Russian communists, right? They were the nationalists. So it works on several levels. So when the blues are fighting whites, suddenly they have a different ideology. They pivot. And You can understand the entire thing from Tribe. When it's blue versus red domestically, America's racist. When it's blue versus white, blue versus Russian globally, America's a champion of democracy. It's incredibly transparent to me that it's like new season of the show. The bad guys are now the good guys, and the good guys— go ahead.

I'm sorry.

That's funny.

Yeah. It's— and the reason that's a good analogy is it's like screenwriting.

Okay.

Basically, the editors at the New York Times, in particular, they're one of the most influential demographics. There's others as well.

Okay.

In the same way, like, you know, Erik, have you done content marketing? You've done content marketing, right?

Yeah.

You choose what goes in your Twitter feed, right? Of the million things you could tweet, you choose, right? You choose what goes on your blog. Essentially, it's not even so much what you publish as what you don't publish that really determines the character of what's there. You could have a sports blog, you could have a travel blog, It's a— in a big country, you could go, if you want to have incidents of Group X attacking Group Y, you could find one a day for 365 incidents a year, and it would still be like one out of a million, you know, because there's 300 million people, right? So if, if you're selective in what you decide to do for editorial judgment, you can totally tell a totally different storyline, new season. And it was very clear that after February, March 2021, Now that blues were back in the saddle, back in control of the U.S. government, they reduced some of the pressure on gray. If you noticed, all the journos have pulled back on Twitter.

Okay.

Technology was even taken out as a heading on nytimes.com. Like, it used to be like a heading like science, and they literally took it away. All right. And all of the personal attacks and nastiness that was there over the 2010s is just gone. They don't even engage on Twitter anymore, right? Or X. Sorry.

Well, they all went to Threads, Balaji.

Sure. Threads. Well, I mean, you could, you know, argue that, is this a win or is this a loss, right? It's both in a sense. Blue won control of the state and was satiated. Okay. That is to say, they, you know, now they had some goodies to give out. Okay. They didn't feel as pressured. Right. Jane Gault, Meghan McArdle has this great line, which is, the party in power is smug and unconcerned. The party out of power is insane.

Okay.

That's been true for like 20-something years. Right. Maybe more. So when you're smug and unconcerned because you've got lots of bennies to give out, Billions in the Biden administration. I mean, that's what a huge part of it is about, is like how many billions were given to nonprofits over homeless and addiction and BLM and, and all this type stuff. Billions and billions and billions of dollars were looted, right? And, and it's always under the name of something that works for today. Okay? Like in, in the early 2000s, it was the Patriot Act. And then, you know, Obama, it was like Solyndra. And then last year it's like the Inflation Reduction Act and some climate stuff. And for like, you know, the what I call the cheap date Republicans, it's industrial policy. Yeah, muscle. We're building up America now with tens of billions of dollars in wasteful spending by the same government that can't build a bus lane is going to build a semiconductor plant. No, it's not. Unfortunately, it's not right now.

It's a, it's a union jobs program. Like, there's actually a great New York Times article about Chuck Schumer smacking his lips because Syracuse is getting a semiconductor plant.

Exactly.

Eastman Kodak used to have good jobs there, but they got outcompeted by the California companies. And now they're trying to recreate good jobs in upstate New York. Like, what smart person who, like, wants to make semiconductors wants to move to Syracuse? I'm sorry, if you're not from there, it's not a place you want to go live.

That's right. That's right. And, you know, I want to find you this thing. There's an optical illusion that I think about a lot. Okay. So let me see if I can find this. Um, it's, it's, uh, it's basically something where, um, words with names of colors but in different colors. Okay, so it's like very confusing. Ah, here it is.

Perfect.

Okay, you might say, what the heck does this have to do with anything? But I'll explain. What's— what is this color? It's red, but it says blue. Okay, that's yellow, but it says green. You see what I'm saying? The label is different than the substance in a way that it confuses our brain. If you just try to call out these colors, it is not actually that easy to do. You have to— it like takes a sec. It's harder. It's slower than if they were all colored the same thing as a word. Okay. And in fact, uh, like, you know, I, I'm trying to find this paper, but there was like a machine learning example of this where you had Cats that were labeled dogs, and different neurons were lighting up, and it was confusing it. It's like an adversarial example for machine learning, okay? When the label doesn't match the physical reality, so the verbal doesn't match the visual. This, I've realized, is actually a systemic thing, okay? Chuck Schumer labeling this verbally as semiconductor when it's actually a graph, right? Inflation reduction, Graft. Patriot Act, surveillance and graft. Everything is labeled as X, and it's like gift-wrapped and packaged for the kind of gullible voter at a distance who's just evaluating this by how it's packaged. And you take— it takes time and energy to open the package and see how they're fooling you and how it's actually graft. But it's, it's basically like what we just saw. It's like a color that's labeled opposite of what it is. And this is a systemic vulnerability in modern society, labeling something the opposite of what it is.

Well, have you, have you ever seen the graph of the suppliers for the F-35?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, it's, it's like the B-2 bomber.

It's literally every state. Every state has a supplier for the, this, this, you know, fighter jet that doesn't actually work. No one's happy with it. And then contrast that to Tesla and Elon, right? The person who can build in the private sector where he is constantly reducing his dependency on additional suppliers. He's like vertically integrated. He's bringing back like Carnegie and Rockefeller of saying, we're going to make an integrated system. Because if you think about, you know, that's how Apple does it. Like, it's like the best product is built by a single company that can actually maximize the whole way through, right? Like inputs into one part of the Gigafactory, and then out on the other side is, is a car, right? That's like the former era of building. And then all the other versions of build in the country are We are going to make sure every congressional district gets a little piece of this bill.

Yes. And actually, the Elon example is important for several reasons, just to digress on that. First is, you know, Erik, you and I were just talking about this other day, about how, like, look, there's— I don't agree with every single thing Elon does, but it's important to understand that hardware is hard. And to ship like a, like a beige box that just sits on your desk And doesn't, doesn't move is hard. We've seen a lot of companies, a lot of smart founders have trouble with this, fail with this. To ship a car or a rocket is so much more difficult in terms of the number, literally, of moving parts, right?

How about globally available satellite internet?

I mean, you know, forget— like, basically, you can't, you can't iterate on it when it's shipped. If one gear isn't there, it doesn't work. And, uh, like, the thing about this is so many founders I know have just gotten killed by supply chain issues, especially during the pandemic when, you know, who, who could have survived that, right? Like, literally shipments are cut off from China. Where are you going to get this magnet or something like that if you can't order it online, right? And somehow Elon didn't just build SpaceX and Tesla through that. They thrived through that. Some of the most complicated devices around. How is that even possible? Right? I mean, just think about that, right? For example, Fitbit, great company, really difficult business. I know how hard hardware is. I mean, like the level of hardware that I've done is at the level of like, you know, for example, a genetic lab. Okay? At least that's in-house and you can see all the machines and you can tinker with them, iterate on them, et cetera. And what you're sending out is an informational report. You're, you're getting in physical, You're sending out digital. It's half physical. It's more like managing a complicated data center in some ways. It's hard, but it's way harder than just pure software. But it's not insanely difficult like having a unit on somebody's desk. That's really hard.

And maybe as an aside for the audience, when I first met Balaji, he was coming off of his genetics company and then was dealing with a company he was trying to turn around from a semiconductor standpoint.

Yes.

So this guy has lived 2 hardware lives that he probably doesn't want to get into anytime soon. He likes the cloud.

Yeah. The thing about hardware, the reason it's so ridiculously hard is it's just something where you can't edit, you can't change your mind, you have to get it right the first time. There isn't room for iteration. Like all of these kinds of things that we just take for granted with software. Plus also, by the way, if you do win, It's both hard and it's clonable by China. So it's like, it's both in a weird way. Software is both easier and has higher margin, right? Hardware is hard and clonable. Okay. Now maybe in Shenzhen it's easier because you've got the local ecosystem, but Elon didn't have that. So what he did is what you just said. He basically internalized everything they could and they machined tons of their own parts and removed dependencies, and that is how they could make it work. Now this actually has a lesson for us. What Elon did is the gray strategy. I'll come to gray in a second. And this is how we win. Okay, here's the cheerful part. Here's the new concept.

Wow, we got optimistic Balaji. Let's go.

Yeah, I, I'm not actually a negative person. I think I'm a realistic— I think I'm realistic or whatever. At least I'll point to something when it's blowing up before other people do. And I'm usually, usually right about that, even if timing might be wrong. But what Elon did is he privatized the public sector and made it functional that way. And then he scaled that private thing, and then everybody imitated that, right? So he basically, rather than relying on global supply chains, he essentially built his own to the maximum extent you could, machining your own parts and so on. And if you can do that, it's insanely difficult to do that. You have to have lots of different skills. But if you can do that, it's, it's just like, it's sort of like software where, do you really want to code your own login system and your own this and your own that? Well, you know what? If you can, then you can build Google and you can build Facebook and you can build this and you can build that, right? And there's always a trade-off between build versus buy, but at least having the capacity to build makes you stronger. Okay? And the thing about this is if we look at it, the successes— now let me talk about the third tribe. I mean, you can go more and more levels of granularity, right? Red and blue are one level. I think if you go one more level of granularity, you get gray. which is our tribe. And gray is very important because first is gray, let's call it, you know, if red is the past, the conservatives, and blue is the present, because they're just trying to hang on to the present moment, the post-war order, the current institutions, and so on. They wanna stop it from going back to the Trumpist past. Okay? But they also wanna stop the tech future.

Right?

So gray is the future, red is the past, blue is the present. That's like one really useful way of cutting it. Okay? So blue stands against both the past and the future. They're against both the self-driving cars and they don't want to go back to the '50s. They prefer OnlyFans, MeToo, BLM, Ukraine, whatever right now. Okay? And they're also highly presentist in the sense of, you know how Twitter like kind of erases your memory? Like you don't even remember, like what was the big issue of July 2022.

How about the big issue last week? I don't even remember.

You don't even remember. It's like Men in Black. You know, it's like, it's actually all the movies from the '90s. Memento, right? Men in Black, Matrix, The Game, Eternal Sunshine. It's kind of like early 2000s, but let's count it, right? Dark City. A bunch of those really great movies. Truman Show were about your memory playing tricks on you. Okay, the world you thought you knew wasn't. I just forgot. Okay, from just a few years ago. And if you go back even a few years, I mean, like 2019, Obama did American Factory and he was advocating for cooperation with China. 2019. Okay. 2016, the New York Times was yelling at Trump for, for calling the Taiwan president before he called the China president. And Obama's guys were— do you remember this?

Yeah, they called it a gaffe and he didn't understand, you know, foreign policy. And now Nancy Pelosi is flying to Taiwan.

Yeah.

So basically what happened, actually, in many ways, Trump won ideologically on many dimensions, especially the nationalism stuff, right? For example, here's 2011. In 2011, to save our economy, ditch Taiwan. 2011. Okay. New York Times. Why? They wanted to sell Taiwan to China, basically for a trillion in debt forgiveness, which was actually a substantial amount at the time, about 10% of US debt. And basically, you know, here, American Factory, 2019, Chinese Americans went into this with the best intentions. Obama's movie advocating for kind of multilateral trade, right? Here's Donald Trump, you know, saying China a bunch of times, and everybody was mocking him for saying that. Here is New York Times saying Trump speaks with Taiwan's leader, an affront to China. And, and, you know, among diplomats, there was similar shock. This is a change of historic proportions, said Evan Medeiros, director of Asian affairs. The real question is, what are the Chinese gonna do? Okay? So I'm not talking ancient history. I'm talking like a few years ago, Democrats were pro-China. Okay? I'm talking a few more years back. Democrats are also pro-Russia. So, I mean, remember Mitt Romney said Russia's our biggest rival or whatever in, you know, and, and Obama made fun of him. You want your '80s foreign policy back. Even a few more years back, everybody was obsessed with terrorism in the Middle East. Nobody cares about the Middle East at all anymore in, in the US. Right? What actually happened in the Middle East, by the way, do you know, you know what the aftermath, you know who won eventually basically has won the Iraq War?

Who?

I would argue BRICS.

Okay.

I mean, Iran, yes, but basically, you know, the aftermath of all of that— here, here's kind of a retrospective. I just pulled this together. The reason I'm saying this is it's like important to do a postmortem, then I'll get to the positive part. Okay, but the postmortem in a literal sense, you see War on Terror retrospective?

Well, I mean, you could just look at Afghanistan. I think Afghanistan is the, the best symbol of the effectiveness of the War on Terror. I mean, the one, the one counterargument, Balaji, is that they basically There hasn't been a terrorist attack in the U.S., but you could argue if we had just reinforced the doors, we wouldn't need all the other stuff that we did.

Yeah, or, you know, now it's coming out about the Saudis knowing about the attack and so on beforehand. The full history of 9/11, you know, who the heck knows what really happened? Like, the fact that that thing was declassified 20 years later, that Saudi intelligence knew about the guys on the plane— there's all this, you know, basically invading Iraq when maybe the, the Saudis did it. Who the heck knows?

Okay.

Though, of course, it's a different Saudi government now. So it's sort of like getting mad at them when they've increasingly secularized under MBS, and they're actually looking up, as opposed to the previous government that did this. So it's kind of like getting mad at China today for being communist when it's less communist than it's ever been. But anyway, coming back, point is, war on terror retrospective. So $8 trillion spent. Iraq is now trading in yuan. Assad won the Syrian Civil War. Afghanistan, as you mentioned, controlled by the Taliban. Saudi and Iran aligns against the U.S. Millions then displaced. What's the conclusion? Fight Russia and China together. Okay, and just to kind of recap this, right? $8 trillion, 900K direct deaths. Okay, Iraq is trading with China in yuan. Comprehensive strategic defeat. Assad won the Syrian civil war. He's shaking hands over here. The U.S. tried to sanction people, but they normalized relations with him anyway. Taliban now controls Afghanistan. Blinken is impotently calling on them to reverse the ban on women at universities. being ignored. China brokers this huge deal between Saudi and Iran, and 2 months later, 3 months later, they both joined BRICS.

Okay?

Here's obviously 37 million people displaced. The entire Syrian refugee crisis came out of that. And after all of this, suddenly taking on Russia and China at the same time. Now, the thing about this, by the way, is that recent announcement about the new BRICS nations and whatnot. Um, the thing is that when you go and look at it, all the stuff that, like, that Zeihan talks about is, uh, is happening just in reverse. Because, uh, here, let me see if I can find this. Um, all the geopolitical stuff— who's got the choke point over Suez and what now? Who's got the oil-producing nations? Who's got, you know, all this stuff? Basically, it's BRICS, right? And so that's what I mean about BRICS won the Iraq War.

But hold on, I want to push on that a little bit.

Go ahead.

I don't think, like, push comes to shove, India and China are not friends. Like, India is going to be able— first of all, they're going to do what they need to do. And if I was to say if anyone in that region is going to control that choke point, it'd probably be India. Just they're the big power closer to it, right? Like, I don't think China's projecting power there. And I think at this point, the US is energy independent. So it doesn't really matter what what happens in the Gulf. I actually think the Europeans care a lot more about that.

So that is true. What you just said is part of the reason for the withdrawal is that the US and Canada actually have a lot of oil from fracking and so on and so forth. If you could unblock Keystone XL and all this stuff, if you could unblock nuclear, the US would do much better. A lot of the natural resources can't be exploited. Reds want to exploit those resources. Blues are preventing them from doing it, laying down in the road at Burning Man and all this type of stuff. But at least I wanted to show you the map, right? Which is, you know, the choke points: Strait of Hormuz, Bab-el-Mandeb, Suez Canal. So Iran, UAE, and Saudi, and Ethiopia—that's why Ethiopia joined—they got this straight. And Egypt just joined BRICS, right? So they just basically locked up this crucial shipping lane. They don't yet have the Straits of Malacca, but they do have South Africa. So they've got the Cape of Good Hope, and they've got. Argentina, which is you know the the path around South America. If you look at where BRICS would go next, they'd probably try and get Panama, and they try to get some of the countries around the Straits of Malacca, right? And then now you've got free shipping lanes. Now you're correct, by the way, that India has rivalry with China, but India also, you know, actually, you know, I don't. I agree with Noah on some things. I disagree with him on some things. But he did say something interesting, which is India joins these Chinese organizations to make sure that they're not too anti-India. Right? And there's there's a truth to that, right? They basically steer them in like a neutral-ish direction because India also doesn't want war in the Middle East. In a sense, what basically just happened here is Russia, Iran, Saudi, China, India have basically said we're going to step in and we just want the Middle East to be a free trade zone where everybody's at peace with each other. All the wars are now receding, right? Like arguably. You know, like, I mean, the US did blow up the Middle East. The peace in the Middle East is coming when the US is retreating from the region.

My push on that, though, is I think any organisation that has Iran and Saudi Arabia somehow on the same team is not an effective organisation. Maybe OPEC is probably the only example of that. But like, the Saudis need the US for security guarantor. I don't think anyone else is going to provide that, right? Some of the added, like Egypt, like Egypt is like a direct beneficiary of the aid. I don't know. I, I, I just— I'll— we'll see how it plays out. Like, I just, I just don't believe a version of the world where this kind of like— I, I think China and India can independently do what they want because they are big, strong countries. I don't think all these other countries can do much, so they're kind of at the whim of what China and India want.

Yes, so I do agree with that to some extent. However, I will say that Sunni-Shiite is kind of like Protestant, Catholic. It's, you know, you fight really— I mean, everybody in the Middle East has had 2 decades of war and religious fundamentalism. And there's like the tone there, if you visit there, if you've ever flown through Dubai, even Riyadh or something, it's moved in a much more secular direction. People just kind of want to make money now. I'm not saying everybody, I'm not saying there are still— of course there's still fundamentalists and so on, but they're at peace with Israel too, right? They're reaching out to Israel. These are cats and dogs fighting amongst each other. You know, the EU— Europe fought amongst itself for a long time, and then you got the EU, and it's got its faults, but it's been like relatively stable. It might be heating up again, but it was relatively stable for a while. My— where I see the trend line going is the Middle East becoming a stable gas station kind of area for much of the world, especially Asia, that wants all that raw material. And it's like a comprehensive strategic loss. Basically, the countries that are dominant there are the countries that are— it's not the US, right? Now, maybe the US doesn't need it, but let's at least say the $8 trillion was spent for nothing, right? A million people died, tens of millions of people displaced, right?

I agree with you on the war on terror thing. My point of view is I think the Middle East will stay pretty unstable because I think the Israelis want it to be kind of unstable because it benefits them. And I think the Turks probably don't want it, and the Iranians are not friends with the Saudis. So I don't know, I could be wrong.

It's possible. But I mean, the thing is, Israel, I think Israel feeling that the US is cutting it off, right? Or that it wants to cut off. Basically, Israel is sensing that both on the right and the left, you know, whether it's like Ilhan and the Squad on the left, or it's sort of the rising-ish nationalism, America First on the right, that there is an— it's not yet at consensus, but just like the China thing, you know how China, like the consensus just shifted in 3 or 4 years without any big announcement? I feel like unfortunately that is shifting on US-Israel, and Israel is looking for other partners because it doesn't feel the US is going to be super reliable. You saw Tablet's article actually recently, Jacob Siegel said, you know, end USAID to Israel. Why? Because he's like, the US has Israel on a string and it's supporting like the left-wing movement within Israel. So Israel should just cut off the aid and, you know, rip the Band-Aid now before it gets ripped later. Right. And then pivot to—

I feel like AIPAC and, you know, everyone's going to talk big rhetoric, but ultimately, and I don't know, I don't want to sound like I'm Kanye, but like, I think there's both right-wing and left-wing, you know, influential Jewish Americans who are going to make sure we're going to have a special relationship with Israel.

I understand. I understand. And basically, like you're you're Sephardic, aren't you? And actually, Eric is half as well.

So, like I'm not technically, but I do have a crypto Jew last name on the mother side of the family.

Okay, great. So look, like I've got Israel is probably like the third or fourth country I'm most invested in. I love a lot of the people there. Invest there. I I feel like we're a very big pro-Israel podcast.

Some of your best friends are Jewish.

Well, yeah, and and many many such. Some even more important. Some of my best investments are. As well. Right. So, but no, I mean, like, meaning in the sense of not, you know, the best friends thing is like, it's sort of performative, but like actually putting money in the country when other people are boycotting it or whatever.

You know, I think Erik was referring, by the way, Balaji, you might have missed this. Gary Tan had to defend that he was not antisemitic from some insane communist in San Francisco, which actually probably, you know, I want to make sure we cover your—

Yes. Oh, let's get to that. Let's get to that. Okay. So let's get to— all right, so with all of this, with all this diagnosis, how does all this intersect? Okay, so just to recap, the tribal lens is also the digital lens. Okay, rather than thinking about it as a map of the lands and the countries of the world, you think of it as the map of the minds and the social networks and the tribes of the world. And this somewhat overlaps with the offline, but not completely. China building a Great Firewall. It has the combined physical border, language border, and digital border. So it's tried to maintain one tribe, like vertical integration. India has also somewhat done this. But in the West, you have lots of tribes. Increasingly, the tribes don't necessarily match the lands. You have at a minimum blue and red within each country. And now let's talk about grey. Now, the thing is, in general, red loses to blue overall, right? Curtis has written about this, okay? But in general, grey beats blue because— now, there's ways, and one way of thinking about the last 10, 15 years, okay? Once you take the tribal lens, okay, you take— it actually integrates both domestic and foreign politics because blue Is at war with tech, Trump, Russia, and China. Okay, so it's at war with blue's at war with red. It's a war with gray. It's a war with Russian whites. And you know, like someone would say it's a new yellow peril. Okay, like basically it's like a yellow peril or 2.0. So if you must have a color for China, like some you know Strom Thurmond would pick that. Okay, so blue is basically at war. with all the other tribes of the world. It's also, to a lesser extent, it's at war with Hungary and Israel and Brazil under Bolsonaro, and actually even under Lula, and Saudi, and even France it's mad at because of Macron. And basically, blue is fighting a multi-front war against all the other major tribes of the world, like fighting Russia, China, tech, and Trump at the same time. Right now, until 2021, 2022, maybe mid-2022, you know, Richard Hanania wrote this post, which was basically like, I think of it as sort of, I, I have no beef with Richard or whatever. I mean, like, I agree with some of the stuff, disagree, but Richard's not canceled on this podcast. I, I, I don't endorse everything he says, but, but I, I think he's interesting. Um, but he had a post that to me was sort of like, buying the top or selling the bottom, whatever it is, where he's like, you know, blue will always win. That's how I translated it. Okay? Because he's like sort of buying at peak blue. And I equate that to at the peak of Nazi Germany or at the peak of the Japanese Empire, right? Have you seen the map where like Nazi Germany was at its peak in like 1941? Japan was at its peak there. That was just before everybody that they had fought bandwagoned against them and just pounded them from a bunch of different directions. Okay. And now blue is— it's lost ground to grey, most importantly losing Twitter to Elon. Okay. It is losing ground to grey. And you can argue crypto is part of grey and so on, or its own tribe. And I'll come to that. But it's losing— it's fighting, but it's starting to lose cases against grey, even though it's winning some, losing some. It's certainly losing ground to red culturally. Uh, at least in the sense of, you know, guess what? In 2023, I can say a man and a woman are different. You know when else I could say that? I could say that in like 2001 when Men Are from Mars and Women Are from Venus was like a bestseller on like the New York Times bestseller list for like decades or like years, and nobody cared about it. And Jimmy Kimmel was on the man show, and like the difference between XX and XY was not like a controversial topic. It was like a matter of scientific fact and the relatively rare aneuploidies and other kinds of things were acknowledged as medical cases to be dealt with, as opposed to like a, you know, partitioning issue. So blue has lost ground to red, where people can actually say XX and XY are different. And, you know, the only way that blue could stop that from happening was if they had control of speech, and they lost that to grey, right? And they're losing— I think, you know, if you look at some of the Ukraine coverage, It doesn't look like blue is winning versus Russia. Whether there's an escalation, it's war is unpredictable. We don't know what happens, but doesn't look like the Ukraine counteroffensive is winning. There's people in foreign affairs and other places calling pursuing for peace, so it seems like it's losing there. And then on the China thing, yes, right now, like at least at the time of this recording, there's a lot of negative economic news about China. But there's a good post by this guy at. Gavical, okay, which is like, why are people seemingly— there's a bunch of numbers essentially that look like they're in the opposite direction on China, where, uh, here, I'll just show you this post, worth reading. Essentially, he's like, why is it that, um, people seem to be moving money into China, um, and, uh, and Chinese bank stocks are doing better than U.S. bank stocks if if all this stuff is blowing up? And maybe it's actually blowing up and, um, everything is going down, and that's possible because with the Millionaire Migration Map, um, that is what happened, uh, but, uh, you know, where Russia and China also lost people, right? Um, but here is the article, just worth reading just for a different view. And also Luke Roman is good on this, right? Making sense of the China meltdown story, right? And, you know, basically Chinese bank shares do not seem to be dropping. That's one thing he says. US bank performance has lagged China and Europe. Again, just looking at the numbers here, right? Where are the sick banks today? It looks like the S&P Composite regional banks over here. You know, the commodity prices aren't going— basically, Now, China's obviously doing certain policies where they're stimulating, right? And, but it's not the same level as what the US has done. In fact, they're saying, Western experts are saying that China should print more and they're not, right? So this is basically, you know, long-dated treasuries are making negative returns. And he's like, what kind of financial crisis sees the banks of the country in crisis outperform US treasuries in, you know, by over 20%? It'd be wholly unprecedented. The other thing that's been happening recently with China is they have just risen to pass, or close to pass, Germany and Japan on cars.

Yeah, there was also a Wall Street Journal article talking about this, that basically China's electric cars are going to be flooding the market globally. And the Europeans, in their infinite wisdom around energy policy, have been slow on the uptake on making electric cars, right? So, correct, they're getting their ass kicked by Tesla and China.

That's right. And exactly. So grey is capable of competing, but fundamentally— I can share this graph, but essentially the question of whether blue is winning versus China or not, I don't think it is. I think China— it kind of reminds me of 2016 when all the news about Trump was negative and Hillary had a 98% chance to win. Then you flip over the cards and Trump wins, right? Like, if I look at the physical plant, China's getting, you know, all these BRICS deals are getting natural resource access. They're shipping tons of cars. They're— did you see that quote from the US Navy Secretary where he said China, one of their shipyards has more capacity than all the US Navy shipyards combined? Did you see that one, right? And then there's an article in The Drive that said, again, US Navy slide, China has 200x US Navy shipbuilding capacity, right? And here it's this one, the intel slide, right? So all the stuff again, all the stuff Zion talks about where he's like, the US Navy is so strong, geopolitics favor the US. I think those are important axes. I think, but it's like the Hillary-Trump thing. I think they're important axes, but they're actually in reverse. Okay. With that said, how did we win?

Okay. Let's get to the good stuff.

Yes.

Let's get to the good stuff. All right. So once you see the world map as— and this is a shift— you see it as blue fighting a simultaneous war against gray, red, Russia, China, and a bunch of other tribes. Okay. The only people blues like are other blues. Blues don't like religious Jewish people. Blues don't like religious Hindu people. Blues don't like religious Christian people. Blues don't like Black people who are red. Right. Basically, blues only like blues. They like blues. Latinos who vote red. Latinos who vote red become Latino white supremacists. Right. You know, when, for example, when Biden a few months ago, he was like, the greatest problem in America is white supremacy. What is he actually saying? Because after all, if he's, quote, the most powerful man in the world, okay, just taking that for argument for a second. If he's the most powerful man in the world, he is the supreme white. So how could he be against white supremacy? Right? Answer, he's not against white supremacy. He's against red supremacy, and he's for blue supremacy. Right? He still wants American exceptionalism. One man's exceptionalism is another man's supremacy. Right? Total dominance of the world is supremacy by another name. Right? Exceptionalism, supremacy, maximalism, they're all synonyms in a sense. Dominance. Right? For, for, for the same thing, but just different connotations. Okay? Uh, you know, at home, Biden will say, oh my God, we need to check white privilege and you know, we need to end systemic racism. And abroad, his number one foreign policy is stopping a non-white country from exceeding the US. If he wants to check white privilege, why doesn't he just let China rise, right? So it has absolutely nothing to do with the words. It's about the tribes. Blue wants to be dominant, so it'll call reds whites, okay? And it will call the Chinese all kinds of names when it's fighting the Chinese. But blue is against Republicans, Russians, tech, and China. Okay? Now, those four groups also fight amongst themselves. Right? Republicans don't like China. Republicans are torn on Russia. Some Republicans are torn on tech. Tech, you know, doesn't like China, et cetera, et cetera. Okay? So you actually have, just like you have the diplomatic relations of the world, you can make a table of U.S., Russia, China, Israel, U.S., Russia. India like this. You can make a table like that of all the diplomatic relations. You can do the same for the tribes of the world. What are the diplomatic relations of Blue with Red, Gray, Russia, China, Israel? What are the diplomatic relations of Red with them? What are the diplomatic relations of Gray with them? And once you start asking these questions, you get to really interesting things. For example, Gray's relationship with China is actually much better than Red or Blue's. Elon is actually in China, and I know that's supposed to be unfashionable talking about that, but he's selling a lot of units there. Right? You know, Jensen Huang of Nvidia is trying to say, "Hey guys, if you cut off the Chinese market, it's going to be bad for us, and it's also going to be bad for the U.S. long term because just incentivizing it to go full stack." That's what Huawei has done. They've built their own full stack thing. You know, so once you start seeing it as diplomatic relations like this, you also start seeing it as a sense of self. Okay? Basically, Gray is a cloud power, and Gray gets its power. from the internet. Gray is not really American any more than Americans were English. It's like the legacy identity. But the way I can prove this to you is if you're a gray tribe, okay? And again, this is— it's funny, Scott Alexander's like cast-off kind of one-liner in a post from several years ago is actually quite helpful just because it's just an independent person putting a name on something, okay? But if you're a gray tribe, if you're a tech tribe, ask yourself, of the last 100 people that you've communicated with or transacted with, how many of them are within like a 10-mile radius of you? How many of them are also, you know, American? And, you know, would you really be averse to an Ethereum meetup in Germany or, uh, an AI, you know, meetup in Korea? Those are your people also, basically, right? Those are people who share the same values. They're basically tech people around the world.

Right.

And blues who live in the same city in San Francisco don't share your values. They're a different tribe, right? They want to get paid by the government to get poor people addicted to drugs. It's like the new Opium Wars, just domestically. Governments pay, pay the blue NGOs to get people addicted to drugs. They want chaos and poop on the streets to stick a thumb into the eye of these tech guys. They want to ban self-driving cars but allow car break-ins, right? Um, they basically, blues don't share gray values. Blues aren't the same people as grays. That is the first key insight. Gray is its own thing. Gray having a sense of itself as a cloud power, as its own tribe, as different from blue tribe and red tribe and other tribes. That's step 1. Step 2 is taking that and starting to actually have a gray tribe strategy. Have you seen the movie Gangs of New York?

Yep.

Okay. Tribes of San Francisco. History's running in reverse. And with Gangs of New York, it started as tribal warfare, and the federal government kind of came in and broke it up and unified them and so on and so forth. If you remember the ending scene, like the Union Army shells the city and drafts the people and so on and so forth. Okay. Now history's running in reverse. The federal government is vanishing. It vanished not just during COVID with the CDC and so on, FEMA, where is it in Maui? It's not even there, right? Like, literally not there. $700 check or whatever when, you know, billions of dollars for Ukraine. Like, it's not even that it's there in an oppressive way. The, the one way of thinking about it is all the COOs, the chief operating officer types, all the logistical grinds and so on, the guys who would have been running the US military 20 or 30 or 40 years ago. They're all running large orgs at like tech companies. I should say all, a good chunk of them are, right? And even the military innovation that's happening is Palantir, it's Anduril, right? It's happening with Grays. If you look like, you know, Boeing or Airbus are getting their ass kicked by the Chinese. Comac is coming up, right? Like Boeing has its, you know, problems. DJI, Chinese drone manufacturer. But Anduril, Gray Tribe is competitive. So you have to stop thinking at the level of like the U.S. or American, and start thinking at the level of red, blue, and gray. Just like you stop thinking at the level of Soviet, and you started thinking at the level of Russian and Estonian and and and you know Kazakhstani and so on and so forth. Right? The nation, the the country. I mean, the Ottoman Empire doesn't exist. There are Turks and there are other you know kinds of people. Right? Once you start thinking of it as the federal government vanishing, and now it's tribe on tribe. The federal government hasn't completely gone away. Of course, it's still there, but it's definitely on the downtrend. Even like Matt Levine or whatever was admitting today, he's like basically saying what I said 10 years ago. The US government can't ban everything it wants to ban anymore. SEC, when it fights, it loses a lot. Right. Blue thinks of itself as being supreme. When blue actually fights, It's suddenly losing to Grays, losing to Reds, maybe losing to Russians, losing to Chinese. Okay? So once you realize this is a tribal war for the city, it's not about, like, you know, one of my friends, one of our friends was like, oh, Balaji, what are you saying? We should just get involved in local politics? And I like the person who said this. I'm not attacking them in any way. But that's a little bit like saying, oh, you want to start a small business? as like a startup. Okay, actually starting a small business, you know, or you want to go into business, you know, a startup is totalizing. It's like a totalizing thing. It's every hour of every day. It's not like do a business, right? Go into local politics assumes that, you know, you can fix San Francisco with an election. You can't fix it with an election. An election is a cherry on the top of the cake at the end. How do you fix San Francisco? So here's the plan. You basically organize Gray Tribe to take the city back block by block. And let me explain what that means. Okay. First is you actually have to conceptualize yourself as Gray Tribe. That could not have been done in a top-down way. That's kind of organic. Okay. That's happened. Second, you start having meetups where you literally have gray t-shirts with Bitcoin or Elon or other kinds of logos, whatever it is that people— Y Combinator is a good one for the city of San Francisco in particular. And you wear them in public. You also, you build a mobile social network for Gray Tribe that is selective admission, as selective as Y Combinator. Okay? Basically, you admit people who are not company founders, but community founders, and they roll up 10 or 100 or 1,000 people into dues-paying members of the Gray Tribe in San Francisco. Why is dues-paying important? Because to be a Republican, you don't have to sacrifice anything. Okay. But to be a gray, you need to actually do things. You need to show up to meetings, you need to pay dues, right? And 100 or 1,000 highly organized people can do more than 100,000, you know, randos. Okay. So gray makes demands on you. Like this community is a significant part of your life, just like Discord makes demands. Okay. Um, so first, conceptualize a gray tribe. Second, start actually getting t-shirts and logos. Third, start organizing Discord sub-communities. And San Francisco is like an 800,000-person city. So you can have lots of individual community leaders. If you again go back and watch Gangs of New York, it wasn't just the Irish gang. There were lots of sub-gangs that together— it's like, you know, the Dead Rabbits is like the main gang and they've got like a bunch of sub-gangs. That's actually like a known community structure where you allow for sub-tribal leaders that kind of go, you know, into like an overall clan, right? And we actually can map that to today's modern model where you have dues-paying people in Discord or Substack And like Michelle Tandler would have her group, for example, right? Solana would have his group. All of these people are essentially tribal leaders in waiting in SF that can hold physical meetups of their SF followers and have them all clad in gray shirts. Maybe they're all gray shirts and Solana has those with the Pirate Wires logo. Tandler has those with, you know, her blog logo, right? Gary has his with Y Combinator logo. So, it's like different sub-clans that form the overall clan, and they fold into that tribal leader, and you have a loya jirga with the tribal leaders leading, okay? Because you have to think of this as Iraq or Afghanistan. Iraq isn't a country. It's got Kurds and Sunnis and Shiites. San Francisco isn't a city. It's got grays, and it's got reds, and it's got blues. Now, once gray has a sense of itself, and it's got dues-paying members, and again, you can do this as a startup. You can literally do this as a startup where you've got people paying dues. Why do you pay dues? You pay $100 a month if you want to actually fix San Francisco. It's an ideological as opposed to a normal market goal. And what do those dues get you? It gets you meeting space, it gets you refreshments, you hold meetups, okay? And now you start doing collective action. Basically, we take 2 problems and we collide them into a solution. So what's happening in San Francisco? Hundreds of businesses are leaving the city. This guy walked around the city, Thomas Hawk, he said he saw 215 for lease signs in like an hour. Okay, there's like 20% of the tax base has left the city. Oh, and there's a commercial real estate crash that's coming. This is obviously, you know, the doom loop and so on. Okay, but in the same way that Blue printing all of this money gave an opportunity for Bitcoin, Blue destroying the real estate value of the city means that diehards with hard cash can start buying up Buildings, having them near each other, and then making them gray. Okay, what does that mean, right? It means you have a map of the city, you have like a good map, uh, and there's like, there's like a Google Map kind of map, but, um, there's like a CoStar. Do you know what CoStar is?

No.

CoStar, really good product for like real estate. It'll let you click on a building and you'll get like a view of it, like all the floors and who bought it. There's insane amounts of metadata on every building. Because real estate's a very high dollar value item. So imagine like an X-ray view of the city where you can see who paid for this building and so on. Like see the city as a real estate agent sees it. Okay. This thing called CoStar. So you have a CoStar level map of the city and you also have a survey of all your members, right? All the Solana members, all the, you know, Michael Solana members, Pirate Wires members, you have the Tandler members and so on, all the subtribes, and you have where they live. Okay. And what you start trying to do, you start trying to consolidate and take over block by block areas of the city for gray. And then you use bollards or digital stuff to fence them off so that there aren't addicts going in there. Now, let me talk about this. The moment you start doing that, the police will come, right? The moment Elon put up a sign, the police came. They didn't care about the people on the streets, right? The thing to realise is this is also a first-class problem. Now we get into the grey-red diplomatic relations. Okay? Police and small business are generally red. They are oppressed by blues within the city, but blues pay them, and blues have control over them, and greys haven't offered them anything. Greys are currently just a cloud power. And to such an extent, Antonia's remarked on how historically exceptional this is. Someone like Patrick Collison, Okay? Who is, uh, you know, a genius and billionaire and, you know, has developed all this amazing stuff. Millions of people around the world know who he is and, you know, and know Stripe and so on. Maybe not millions know who he is, but they know Stripe. Okay? He was driven out of San Francisco. Stripe was driven outta San Francisco by this Prop C tax a few years ago, which was negative sum for both parties cuz Stripe wanted to be in San Francisco. San Francisco lost all the future growth. And so he is very powerful in the cloud, but had absolutely no power on the land whatsoever. That has been the failing of our sector. I understand why, but the, basically we have been able to build everything in the cloud. We can build a billion-dollar business in the cloud, but we need a billion permits to build something on the land. Okay? We have not figured out how to project power from the cloud down to the land. But once we conceptualize ourselves as a cloud power, it's sort of like Britain was a naval power and everything they did was navy first. Germany is a land power. Everything they did was land first. Israel didn't have either of those, so it had to actually, you know, it's like Mossad and so on and so forth. They had to be more stealth. Okay? You have to know your strengths and know your weaknesses. So our strength is the cloud. Our weakness so far is the land. But how do we project power onto the land? Well, we can do meetups. We have social networks, right? And so once we start doing those meetups, first we do meetups of gray tribe members, and then we do gray-red dual meetups. Policemen's Benevolent Union. Okay. All of the police who are gray sympathetic in the city should come to— and you have to go and look at the legalities of this and so on and so forth, because blue will be trying to attack this with lawfare the entire time. Okay. So you get a good lawyer and you figure out what you can legally do for the police in the city. Can you throw them a monthly or even weekly lunch? with gray and red meeting together? Can you, uh, get all of their sons and daughters hired at tech companies as security, as well as they themselves after they leave? Can you, uh, donate to the PBU, Policemen's Benevolent Union, and say— while blue is saying fuck the police, gray is saying fund the police, and they've got the policeman's PBU badge on their shirt along with their other tribal insignia. Right, of, of Y Combinator, all right, or of Pirate Wires. And when you say fund the police and you're actually now giving something to the police, you're start— you're starting to outcompete. Because what is exactly happening in SF? It's not about elections or laws. The police are oppressed— red oppressed by blue— and is tasked with handing out tickets and, uh, you know, like doing stuff they don't want to do. They want— I mean, the guys who join the police want to fight crime. They don't want to have um, addicts attacking helpless women and breaking windows while they go and, you know, ticket some Uber driver, right? His window gets smashed.

The Twitter sign.

Yeah, exactly. That's right. You know, like your working-class Uber driver, his window is smashed in San Francisco, nothing happens. But he's 1 minute over on the sidewalk, $200 ticket, right? This is both the anarchy and the tyranny. There are some police, I'm sure, who are like corrupt and just have gone full blue. They're like the Soviets. You know, like the, the, the, the bad guys. Okay. But there's a lot that actually did want, do want to enforce the law. They just don't have any air cover to do it. Once you've got these gray-red meetups, you suddenly have a spinal column where there's tons of information on exactly how the city is dysfunctional, and you can write all these stories on that. 'Cause guess what? We've got media channels, we've got podcasts, right? The thing about this, by the way, is like, it's gonna require a lot of power to win this. Think about the Spanish Civil War, okay? The Spanish Civil War, it was between 2 tribes in Spain, but it had lots of support. Stalin was funding one side, you know, like Hitler was funding the other, right? Think about the Chinese Civil War, right? The Americans are funding one side, the Soviets are funding the other. San Francisco is a battleground between blue and gray, where national blues are fighting on one side and international grays are fighting on the other side. And when I say international blues, by the way, basically in the mid-2010s, do you remember Greg Gottman and Peter Shi? Those were grays.

Yeah.

Who talked about the homeless problem in San Francisco. Even the homeless problem, by the way, it's not the homeless problem, it's the addict problem. 'Cause it basically, homelessness has nothing to do with it. It's, it's like that's a separate problem. The housing crisis that blues also caused. Blues are paid by the San Francisco government to get vulnerable people addicted to drugs. Those people aren't in control of themselves, so they aren't in control of the city. Right? Going in, poking, you know, like, like when a, when a, when a dog that's being kicked, when a, when a person that's being beaten and abused is set upon you, then it's natural to be like, oh, I don't like that guy. But really, you don't like the blues. Okay? These people weren't addicted to drugs before. I mean, blues are the ones running billboards saying, uh, you should snort, snort crack rather than, uh, than inject it. Do you know what I'm talking about? Like the harm reduction stuff. People won't even believe these billboards unless they've actually seen them. But it's like— Hold on. Do you know the one I'm talking about? Yeah. It's like this no overdose, this insane stuff.

Okay. That's pretty crazy. Biology, by the way.

So there is actually some new stuff in California. It's called this.

It's the California Highway Patrol. So the equivalent of the state police. I think it's called the CHP, California Highway Patrol, 1199 Foundation. And it's kind of like a known thing in California that if you donate to the 1199 Foundation, which is a nonprofit that is not associated, but it's for scholarships for people who are, you know, fall in the line of duty for the CHP. It basically is a support system for people associated with, you know, police, state police families. You get a bumper sticker. You put your bumper sticker on your bumper on your car and it basically, you don't get pulled over on by CHP on the highways because you, you're basically a donor to a nonprofit that is loosely associated with it. Yes, that's right.

So, right, so exactly. So the thing is, you have to figure out what's legal. I mean, look, you know, you don't want to go full blue. Full blue is 10% for the big guy, right? Full blue is Hillary and her speaking. We can now all talk about this openly, right? Just totally public corruption by blues, right? The Pelosi tracker and so on. We're in, unfortunately, like a late-stage empire kind of thing where blues will publicly loot the treasury. Schumer's, you know, semiconductor thing, uh, Hillary's speeches, Biden's son, and, and, and all the money there. Like, blues publicly—

$100 million for Obama for his book and, and podcasts and—

Yeah, you know, Netflix series. Exactly. And they do it within the city as well. That's why the, quote, homeless budget has gone up into the right. Basically what happens is You know, an addict smashes your window. In the next election, you vote to, quote, solve the homeless problem. That increases the budget for the homeless industrial complex, and then you get more addicts, right? It's literally this loop. And by the way, it's the same loop, by the way, as they did in Africa, in India. All of the, quote, foreign aid is really just a jobs program for white saviors, right? For basically blues who want meaning in their life. And they want pets. They wanted pets in India. They hate India now that India is independent. Go ahead, Erik.

No, I'm just laughing at the, the white savior job program.

That's right. I mean, like, it's— I mean, it's basically what it is. And the thing about this is, this is also— this gets to something very important. Um, blues will fight tooth and nail for the— for their control over the city budget Because this is their job and this is their life. This is what gives them meaning in life, to get poor people addicted to drugs. This is what gives them meaning. Of course, they don't think of it that way. They don't think of themselves as doing the feed the pigeon society. It just so happens that they get way more pigeons all the time. And so we need more money to more pigeons, right? They want dependence so that they can, they can do this. They want pets, right? It's like Sally Struthers. If you remember, this is a, this is a deep cut, but from like the '80s, there was a woman called Sally Struthers and she was really fat and she talked about how they needed all this you know, money for Indians and so on. I'm sure she was taking a huge cut for herself. Okay. But basically trade, not aid, is what boosted India. It's what boosted, you know, other countries. And go ahead, Erik, you're laughing. It's funny, right?

Yeah. Just, yeah, just the details. Yeah. It's a very funny story.

Okay. So the thing about this, and this is important to understand, we're actually only possible, capable of doing this in 2022 or 2023 because a few prerequisites have happened. First, All the Grays who didn't care that much about San Francisco have left. Okay, this is important. Second, um, Grays now have a communication channel of X. Third, a Gray— conscious Gray tribe has started to form, which really wasn't the case. That the mitosis has happened. Uh, fourth, there is this commercial real estate crash, which they'll get to, provides the economics. Why is the first part important, by the way? Basically, you can't have more than one holy war in your life. Okay? Like, it's really hard to do one startup. It's hard to do two. Okay? I care about India and building up India, and I care about technology and so on and so forth. San Francisco was not the battle that I wanted to fight. Nevertheless, I'm totally willing to invest in people, and I could put in capital and so on. So rather than labor, I can put in capital. And for other people, San Francisco is the battle they want to fight, which is good to know. Flip over your cards. What do you truly, truly care about? The city, I don't really care about it that much. City is kind of a parameter. Technology, I care about a lot. But those people now, the greys who do care about SF, this is a real asset. Why? Because they now have an irrational attachment. Those who are left are irrational in some sense.

Right.

All the negatives, they're still there. Rationality is an advantage, but so is irrationality. Look at Bitcoin maximalists, right? Irrationality is an advantage of its own, okay? It's like the Stalin thing, quantity is a quality all its own. Irrationalism has a rationale all its own, okay? And, uh, so let me describe the economics. This is really important. Within Google, and again, we can speak frankly now, okay? But during the 2010s, What happened was you had an engineer there, and that engineer was suddenly faced with some new non-meritocratic woke hire. And the engineer could say nothing and take the hit of the diversity training or reeducation thing, whites are evil, et cetera, that he has to go through. And then his quality of life drops from like a you know, a 10 to an 8 or something like that, right? He certainly preferred the previous state of affairs, but now it's dropped, okay? The diversity hire there though has to, and that's really what it is, let's be totally frank about it, diversity as opposed to meritocracy hire, right? Meritocracy will take people from all over the world. Diversity will take unqualified people. That's a fundamental difference, right? But the diversity hire there If wokeness wasn't the official policy of Google, they have zero money. And if it is, they have their job. So for the woke at Google, it's win or die. If diversity is beaten back, they lose their jobs. They will fight tooth and nail. Whereas for the engineer at Google, if diversity is beaten back, they gain 20% quality of life, but it's not as big a gain for them as it is a loss for the woke. Does that make sense? Right? So now, where do you have win or die incentives? Gray is very live and let live in other contexts, but there is one context where gray plays to win. Where is that? With our companies. It's not live and let live. It's world domination, motherfucker. Right? It's get to 100% market share and get the antitrust suit. Okay, please hit me with the antitrust suit. Let me get from 0% market share and nobody knows us to everybody thinks we're too powerful. Hit with the antitrust suit, right? The goal of every startup investor is to get that big that it becomes a public utility and so on. And then you've made enough of a dent in the world. Go ahead.

Apology is the COVID of Forbes or Fortune magazine now. The FTC lawsuit, like Lina Khan sending you a lawsuit, is the new You know.

I mean, that's why you just don't go to traditional media at all. The traditional media, blue media, is a spotter, laser spotter for the establishment, right? Like basically, you know, just go direct. If you're doing blue media, you're funding blue media. Literally, you're giving them clicks, you're giving them followers, and so on. Just appear on, I hear a good podcast called MOZ. There's a few other alternatives for people nowadays, right? Okay, the thing is that basically, This approach, the tribal lens, right? With Gray Tribe. Gray Tribe is win or die with its companies because if the company goes to zero, your reputation goes to, you know, it takes a hit. Your money takes a hit. Years of your life take a hit and so if it wins, you've got huge upside. Conversely, the competition for a startup like I don't know is is a random employee at Johnson and Johnson or I don't know what's another company. I don't know. So IBM. Are they as motivated as the tech disruptor? They're not, right? They have incumbency, but they don't have motivation. So how do you— now, so that's at the level of the company. At the level of cryptocurrency, that also works, right? Reds are nowhere near as motivated as oranges are, right? Bitcoin maximalists are— Bitcoin maximalists are win or die, right? If Bitcoin wins, they win. If Bitcoin loses, they lose. So that's like what they focus on. This is— whereas the guy who's the dollar holder doesn't really care either way, right? So now it's reversed, right? This is why diversity has favored the wokes. Cryptocurrency favors the maximalists, okay? Win or die, the incentives are such that who fights harder every single day. So we talked about grays at the company level, grays and let's say oranges or whatever at the currency level. There's a third, which is the community and the neighborhood level. If grays descend from the cloud to the land and buy real estate, Crowdfund real estate, have it be gray-only real estate. And by the way, you can, uh, quote, discriminate on the basis of bona fide membership in a public, uh, in, in a club, right? A bona fide private club is a way to, quote, discriminate on the basis of access in the same way as like Equinox or something like that. Discriminate, selective, that's a different way of putting it, right? Uh, you know, elite. Um, uh, so, you know, Harvard and the New York Times obviously select who's coming into their premises. So Gray Tribe can as well. Anything Harvard does, anything New York Times does. If, you know, you know, one man's, one man's gated community is another man's paywall. So the moment that all of these blue journos let us into their paywall for free, tear down that paywall, tear down that wall, right? The moment they do that, we might listen to them about it being bad for Grays to have a paywall to their community. Since they won't, we don't. Gray is not blue. Blue is the enemy of gray. This is the fundamental mindset. Polarization is good. Polarization means organization. You know, like the Obama thing, this is not who we are. Okay, well, who are we, Obama? We're gray. All right? That's actually an identity that people get around. Moreover, what you start to do is gray, once it starts thinking about it as companies, you've got little holding companies that buy pieces of gray territory. in the city that coordinate each other at the level of trying to take control of regions, color them gray on the map. And, you know, like, uh, Paul Graham, I think, once said, like, the, the good Y Combinator founders are those that are sending updates that are filled with numbers, and the bad ones don't send updates or they've got lots of words. Okay. And a lot of people have— are fooling themselves into thinking San Francisco is making progress because you can see some words from Gavin Newsom, or you see the recall of Chesa, or so on and so forth. Once you have a San Francisco health dashboard, which is percent of the city controlled by gray, that is actually something that you can put up publicly. And every individual gray sub-tribe, the Pirate Wires and the Tandlers and the Tans and the this and that, can all optimize for that. All the people in San Francisco who are also— the other thing is there's like 10 tech companies that come out of this for tribal organization, right? Obviously there's a mobile social network, there's a crowdfunding of real estate. There is the merchandise and so on, and the badges and this stuff. That's actually kind of cool to wear those shirts and to be part of a group, right? Um, so there's a lot of different things. It could be one company, it could be several. So there's a lot of things that, that go with our strength of setting up companies, building technology, and so on to organize. It's community organization in a sort of sense, right? So you have the map, and by the way, gray doesn't need to like start in one corner and take the whole thing. You can have turf that's gray turf. Okay. The big thing about this is if you've got gray turf and you've got enough gray police, you have gray control. Basically, what is the inverse of them taking down Elon's sign but not caring about a broken window? The inverse of that is gray being able to fence off territory where only gray-approved people can enter. Now, by the way, you can do this in a building. Within a building, you can do this. Like, you go to old Twitter HQ and you can't even go up the elevator Unless you've got— or sometimes you can't get into the building without a key card, right? Being able to fence off blocks is important if it's possible, right? At least start with fencing off buildings. You want grey-controlled territory, okay? And, you know, the reason you want grey-controlled territory is there's no tents, there's no syringes, there's no addicts. Blues cannot send their addicts into that territory, all right? That is a key requirement. to be able to start to get gray-controlled territory. Now, the fight is what you're going to have. You're going to have a political fight, a legal fight, etc. But once you start buying those buildings, gray is now win or die. They need to win. See, actually, historically, guys who've held local real estate have been influential in local politics for that exact reason. They don't have exit. They must win local politics. So turning grays into landowners, going from the cloud down to land, it's sort of like Israel itself, right? They went from scholars and merchants to farmers and soldiers. They actually descended from the cloud onto the land and built a modern country. This is a workable strategy. Okay, now going a little bit further, uh, the other gray-red alliance, another important one, is with small businesses. Small businesses that are being persecuted by blue should get sanctuary in gray zones. Grays can take a stake in those businesses, relocate them to gray zones, where guess what? You can't steal. You can't shoplift. Okay? So because gray has tons of capital from abroad, that's the thing is gray's a cloud power. Again, just like the Chinese Civil War was not just waged with like pieces of sticks and stones you could pick up in China, but had funding from America and funding from the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union, namely blue, is funding the blues of San Francisco. And the global technology cloud can fund the grays of San Francisco. And go and relocate shop owners, right? I, I mean, these small businesses aren't actually that expensive in the grand scheme of things. Ice cream shops and stuff like that. And you know, there's a, there's a joke that, that was funny. It's like, uh, from a few years ago about The Purge. Did you see that?

Yeah. The movie?

Yeah. Well, it was, uh, The Purge movie, but it's basically, uh, you know, um, it's like a joke about Berkeley and The Purge. Uh, it's like, gosh, it's like, um, You know, the purge is declared, all crime is legal for 24 hours. I immediately build a 4-story duplex in Berkeley. Okay, take that literally. Get enough control, influence, alignment with gray sympathetic police forces that just like they don't throw the— they don't care about broken windows in the rest of the city, there's non-enforcement there. They don't care about building windows in your part of the city. Non-enforcement. The same kind of non-enforcement can be applied in reverse. Do you understand what I'm saying? Like, destruction is legal in blue-controlled areas. Building is legal in gray-controlled areas. So destruction is legal in blue, construction is legal in gray-controlled areas. That's a level of energy. Once you do this, by the way, once you align it on this axis, you'll be amazed at how much resistance there is. But conflict is attention, and attention is power, right? So like, this is the axis to fight on, okay? Smash all the windows you want in blue zones, construct things in grey zones, okay? And you start exfiltrating small businesses, policemen graze themselves into these, into grey control zones. Now, the thing about this is you also need the other piece that we've got now. Again, all the pieces, the prerequisites for this, why now, 2023? We have All-In Podcast. We have Maaz. We have PirateWire Substack. We have Tandler. We have gray media, right? Blue has lost control of the center, right? They've lost control of X, right? They have their own media. You can certainly read them to read why it's your fault that a blue got somebody addicted to drugs on the street. It's the fault of the guy from— the guy from Bangalore who's up in his, you know, apartment coding is supposed to be responsible for the blue who just jabbed a needle into somebody's arm on the street, right?

Brown privilege apology, come on.

Exactly, right? I mean, these people, people who can't even vote are being held responsible. And that's the other thing, by the way. Gray has lots of immigrants. Lots of immigrants can't vote, get involved in local politics, and so on and so forth. That's something which will always favor blue, right? Gray can win in the market and can win with networks. Blue can win politics and elections. And basically what you wanna do is gray does to blue what blue was gonna do to gray. Blue has put up all these signs that are like, techies, get out of the city. Self-driving cars, shut it down. Why do they care more about self-driving cars than car break-ins? Because self-driving cars are gray and car break-ins are blue. Right? Once you apply the tribal lens, it's like a virtual reality filter. Every single thing can be tagged as gray or blue in the city. I mean, like, literally, the Greta Thunberg mural is blue. Why is it there? The, the Greta mural in San Francisco says blue controls this territory. Okay. It's like putting up a huge mural of Stalin, degrowth, right? Like, you must die, right? She's glowering down at you. So the first thing gray can do is culture hack this. Okay. Have something where you take that and you use AI or use AR and you substitute it with Elon. Not necessarily that every gray loves Elon, but grays are generally much more sympathetic to Elon and blues hate Elon. Okay. So turning blue symbols—

And, and the irony in that situation is Elon is doing more to prevent climate change with actual technology than Greta has ever done.

Of course.

The only thing she did is get Germany to switch over to coal plants.

That's right. I mean, basically there's almost no issue that blues actually care about other than power, right? Blues don't care about climate because they hate nuclear power. Blues don't care about Black people. They burn down Black businesses during BLM and reduce the quality of life of Black people. Blues don't care about, uh, you know, like truth because Uh, you know, Russiagate was fake, and they don't care about free speech because they've argued for censoring the internet. Blues are like Soviets, where the only thing they actually care— I mean, communism was supposedly the worker's paradise, but the worker goes straight to the gulag, right? Um, once you see blues this way, as the tribal enemy, you realize actually they see you as a tribal enemy. Literally, when a blue wakes up every single day, they think, how can I drive gray out of the city? How can I drive these tech guys out, or those that remain, take all their money with taxes? That's what they want to do. They wake up, because people are just, young men want to fight, young people want to fight. What gives the Blues meaning is their eternal war against the Reds, the Grays, and so on and so forth. If you go and read Beautiful Trouble, beautifultrouble.org, this is literally a playbook for nonviolent war by Blues against everybody else. You'll recognize many of the things you've seen in the news from lying down on the highway and so on. Just like Uh, like, Elad Gil wrote The High Growth Handbook. You can think of Beautiful Trouble as the degrowth handbook. Oh, shucks, I've got to go to my thing.

We could also have a part 2 if you got to go.

Yes, let's just do a to be continued and continue there because I, I'll talk about it later.

Perfect.

It's new stuff.

Classic Balaji.

Comes in like a thunderstorm and out like a thunderstorm.

That's what getting a call with him is like. He, he Unloads for an hour on some pretty interesting stuff, and then he's like, oh wait, gotta go.

Okay, good talk, gotta go. I think there's a lot of, to your point, generative, um, and I think it's directionally right in the sense that we've talked about on this podcast where, um, the idea of building a machine— and there's a pejorative and negative connotation with that, right? Like boss tweed, machine politics of of the early 20th century in the big cities, but they got stuff done. And you would argue that they're much more kind of monarch-oriented running of things, right? So more akin to a startup, or to use kind of Curtis's frame. I think what's interesting is if you actually look at— Curtis has actually talked about the app, right? Like, this is how you potentially would run a modern political— Yeah. Campaign to actually get things to change against this kind of Borg and process-driven approach of these like really poorly run blue city-states, whatever you want to call it. And so Curtis has a bunch of posts on this, and then I think Balaji's take is slightly different, but I think they're both oriented towards the fact that this concept of if you can get 1,000 people who are really committed to the cause, the amount of leverage you can actually get from that is pretty significant, especially if you're dealing at a local level. And I think where the challenge is, there are a lot of people who talk about this, right? But it's actually someone who's willing and capable of actually treating solving the problem like a startup. And like to use the Elon phrase, it's like eating glass, right? Like, it's not glamorous. Like, you're really going to have to slog through it, and it's probably going to move at a slower pace than a technology company because you're not dealing with, you know, kind of deterministic computer APIs. You're dealing with humans, right? So, human APIs tend to be messier, slower, not deterministic. And so, I think That's where the challenge comes to, is finding the right person, again, who's both willing and capable. Because I think that there are willing people, but they might not be capable of running that kind of like, call it change program, in the kind of like manner of a world-class startup, right? Because the execution is world-class. Like, it's no different than— from just like the amount of work and execution of building a billion-dollar company, right? And I just think it's like, okay, if I'm going to do that amount of work, I'm probably on the margin. Most people are going to want to go build a billion-dollar company because you'd rather have a billion dollars than running San Francisco, right? It's like you get to the final thing and you're running San Francisco, and then it's like, wait, I just have to run San Francisco. This kind of sucks. And so I think that what's challenging, and then it's like, okay, well, maybe someone who's already rich, But the reality is like when you're that rich, like why would you want to go and do this like, you know, Herculean task? Very few people are willing to do that. That's why Elon, say what you want about him, there are definitely areas that I think there are legitimate criticism for. But the fact that, you know, talk about being in the arena to go from success after success and Being willing to start from the start, like the, you know, the ground floor again, work his way up, first principles on different areas. I think that's a very rare thing. I don't know, like, you and I both know a bunch of people who are incredibly successful in Silicon Valley and the work ethic for their next thing. People, they like deploying capital. They like being capital allocators. They like kind of having a little bit more of like, oh, I'm going to be chairman of this and kind of like dabbling in a bunch of different things, which is fine. They've earned that right to do it. But they're very rare for the ultra-successful on a first run, especially early, to be willing to sleep on a factory floor like he did at Tesla. And I'm sure there's a little bit of embellishment there, but— or the 20-year vision on SpaceX.

Yeah.

So I think, like, you know, people can say all they want about being in the arena, but like, to Balaji's point about hardware, there are definitely levels of being in the arena, at least as it relates to building things and technology. I mean, obviously being in like a war zone is a way different version of that.

But I wonder if someone like Elon, you know, his businesses are affected by politics, right? You know, you had to, you know, leave California for one of them. Why isn't he putting more money into getting politicians elected that would help his causes? Or I just mean that as an example, to your point, yeah, billionaires don't want to run for office. But why not put money towards that machine that will produce candidates that will be favorable to their businesses? I guess that's what lobbying is.

Yeah, I mean, I can't speak for Elon. But My intuition would say, who are you going to give the money to? Who are you going to trust with the money? Because the average person that's trying to convince you that, hey, you give me the money and I'll give it to the right people, probably doesn't align necessarily with how— like, if you're in the role of allocating political money, you're probably not as successful as Elon in having built things.

Yeah.

And so someone who is so first principles driven is going to look at that and go, why am I giving it to you? Like, What have you done to earn any of that stuff? Right? It's this classic thing where he doesn't want to deal with people who aren't engineers. It's like, give me the person that can build the system. I can level with that person. Yeah. And so I think that that's the challenge.

Yeah. Well, let's, let's wrap. That was fascinating, part 1. And we'll do another one with Balaji at some point. I think his tribal lens is really interesting. It's not a perfect mapping, but it's a new way of thinking about things. And yeah, of course, the machine stuff is interesting.

Later.