Balaji Srinivasan on his past and future predictions and why tech can't escape pollitics

Wokes are focused on moral innovation. Techs are focused on tech innovation. In fact, both tech and woke are like 2 sinusoidal parallel movements that both arose after World War II. Whether it's desegregation for the wokes and the transistor, you can kind of see moments. Internet boots up in the '60s protests and then the microcomputer and PCs in the '80s and some of the protests over the Clinton era PC stuff. Both PCs were in the late '80s and early '90s, right? And so on and so forth. Tech and woke have sort of been growing out of the post-1945 dispensation. And tech is actually very opposed to communism and woke is very opposed to fascism.

I'm Erik Torenberg, and this is Upstream with Erik Torenberg.

Balaji's an accomplished entrepreneur, exec, investor, and intellectual.

While he's built big companies with Coinbase and Council, his biggest impact is opening the aperture of what's possible intellectually in tech and understanding not just how tech works, but also how culture and politics works. He's most recently in the news for his bet that Bitcoin will hit $1 million in 90 days, a bet he knows he'll lose, but he's doing it to warn people about the oncoming banking crisis.

We recorded this episode before we made the bet, but it's actually a great time to release the episode because in it we talk about his past predictions as well as his future predictions, like how the left will transition from wokeism to statism, how the right will transition from conservatism to Bitcoin maximalism. And how we'll organize digital communities into IRL sovereign network states over the next few decades.

Those things may seem crazy, but Balaji has said a lot of things that were once crazy that now sound mainstream, whether it's the advance of genetic engineering or how crypto will create a trillion dollars in market cap within a decade, or that COVID might go viral and we might enter massive lockdowns.

So without further ado, here's Balaji.

Balaji, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for coming on.

Great to be here, Erik.

Always great. So, Balaji, you've made a lot of predictions in the past decade, you know, some of which I don't think you've gotten sufficient credit for. And so I want to kind of revisit and talk about some of the predictions you made that have panned out, some that haven't yet panned out, or some maybe that you've changed your mind on. And so maybe I'll start by framing it, There have been like technological predictions, right? Like there was crypto, there was, you know, bio and gene editing stuff. There was, you know, it's kind of like transhumanist stuff. Like we said, you know, the world has become more biology-like, you know, remote. So there was technological stuff. There was kind of more like trends. There was, I think you predicted a lot of like what was happening between tech and media early on. between just like the political nature of activism and how it was incorporated, you know, into companies. You know, Conor from Rome, you know, once tweeted, the scariest words in the English language are biology was right. So maybe let's start by unpacking that quote. Why is that one of the scariest phrases in the English language? And then let's talk about some of the things you've predicted that have panned out and some that haven't yet.

Well, so first, very kind. Obviously, I do make errors and there's lots of things I've gotten wrong in my life. I actually wouldn't even consider my primary identity a predictor per se. But I think that insofar as there's any truth to that observation, I think What I am good at predicting is I look for large secular trends that if they do get extrapolated all the way out, cause significant consequences, often discomforting consequences in the sense of things that upset something that's there today. That's why people are not thinking them all the way through. They are often resistant. They have some mental block on them. It's taking a very obvious thing and then taking what the internet does, which is it takes the obvious thing and it scales it all the way out to 1,000x, and it often does so faster than people expect. Then seeing what happens when that obvious thing at small scale becomes obvious at large scale, which is where people are often in denial about it. Now, that doesn't always happen. It's basically like the trajectory of a startup.

Right.

But it happens often enough that if you can see some of those things and extrapolate them out, you might make some correct predictions. The other thing is also that I think there's really only 2 predictions that I find useful or classes of prediction. The first are vague directional trends, in which case you make an investment of some kind. I I am not a good trader, T-R-A-D-E-R. I'm a seed investor, and there's a big difference. A trader is good at somehow predicting the vagaries of market sentiment. You can do this with quant things and historical data and Soros-like— Soros has a concept of reflexivity. There's people who are good at just predicting short charts. You might argue, are they really good at it? Or maybe they're good at time series analysis and not psychology, but there's people who are good at that. I'm not good at that. What I am good at is predicting that something that's at 1 today might be at 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000x in 5 or 10 years. But that's like a high-level trend prediction where you go long on something. Going short on something is very difficult to do unless it's a long-short, meaning it's hard to go short on Blockbuster, but you could go long on Netflix. you don't know exactly when Netflix will disrupt Blockbuster, just that Blockbuster is going to be disrupted at some point. You don't need to nail the timing, just need to be directionally right and bet on those things that are directionally right. That's one class, like the financial prediction. The other class is the very microscale technical prediction, like this drone will land on this ship. You have to get the Xs and Ys and thetas and phis all correct. for your trajectory prediction. This diagnostic test, it's giving off A and C and not T and G. That's a second prediction, which is extremely micro. If you get it wrong, your plane crashes or your test doesn't work or your intrusion isn't detected or something like that. That's more of a physics or machine learning style prediction. Those are the 2 predictions I think are useful. Things I don't think are useful are things like, what will be the value of this government statistic in a few days? Or predict this binary variable and this one outcome, and then everything is levered on whether that is predicted correctly or not. That's not really good. You actually want to have 50 or 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 binary outcomes and look at your calibration of probabilities. If you predict 60%, then you should see 60 1s and 40 0s. So anyway, those are the 2 kinds of predictions I think are valuable. The long-term trend prediction and the short-term micro-technical prediction.

So go ahead. I was going to say, one thing I appreciate is that you're also willing to change your predictions based on how the facts change. What happened in China in the past year has somewhat modified your view of what's likely to happen there. I'm curious for the moments that changed your mental model And I have a question as to if one of your beliefs is that it's difficult to recapture institutions and instead you just have to create new ones. And I'm curious if Elon and Twitter is either an exception to the rule or that proves the rule, or is it a genuine additional approach?

Violation of the rule. Yeah, good question. So starting with that, I think a slightly more precise framing is The older the institution is, the harder it is to reform and recapture, and the better it is to build a new one. Tech companies are way younger and have still much more of a genuinely hierarchical structure than US government institutions. As such, I've said actually for a while, I think they are more amenable to take over and reform than government agencies. But even still, you would typically do a startup to disrupt rather than take over and reform. TikTok was started well after Twitter and it's bigger than Twitter. That's one example. Nikita Beer has Gas and that seems to be doing really well. Those 2 things can be true at the same time. You'd probably usually do a startup to compete with a giant company, But it is also easier to take over and turn around a giant company than it is to turn around a government agency, let alone the whole government.

Yeah.

So that's the second part. And then the first thing is, again, on the predictions and stuff, Ben Horowitz and many others have made this observation that a batter who bats .300 is crushing it. They're missing 70% of the time. And I kind of think I've built devices that have worked like diagnostic tests and robots that move into the right position, the inverse kinematics you can implement it and the hand moves to the right position. The micro predictions, I've been able to do them okay. The macro predictions, I've been a fairly successful investor with many different investments. Again, I wouldn't call myself like a seer or something like that. I just want to qualify that.

Go ahead. One of your models that has been interesting to me and has been recent events, FTX and Twitter Files, have kind of shown a bit more true, is that your observation that when people are talking about saving journalism, they're really talking about saving journalists, or when people talk about saving democracy, they're really talking about saving the Democratic Party. And this broader observation you have that ideas like Christianity, capitalism, democracy, socialism have often meant very different things and even contradictory things depending on who's using them and what their interests are at any given time. Which begs the question, are ideas kind of just like weapons for people to use at each other?

Ideologies can be. Just to be concrete, Christianity both justified tearing down the Roman Empire and building up the much later Holy Roman Empire, which oftentimes you have that thesis and antithesis that form a synthesis. Christianity and the Roman Empire were at hammers and tongs. And then whatever, 100 years later, there's this fusion entity that justifies itself as the successors of the Roman Empire, but of course, they're also all good Christians.

The Christian king.

Nietzsche talked about this.

The Christian king.

The Christian king. Exactly. That's right. I talk about this in the Network State book that you have, for example, in China, you have the communists who are against the capitalists, but then you have, by the 1990s, you had the capitalist member of the Communist Party, the CCP entrepreneur. Or another example in China, you have the communists fighting, Mao's communists fought Chiang Kai-shek's nationalists. And now, The communists are ultra-Chinese nationalists, and they defend themselves on the basis of being the inheritors of traditional Chinese culture. And actually, Chiang Kai-shek is more celebrated in some ways on the Chinese mainland than he is within China—than within Taiwan, rather. Right? And you know, so the communists have become nationalists. And you know, this is something you'll actually see frequently: is these two sides just go at each other, and then you know, like a few years later. Maybe a decade or so later, they just figure it out. The neocons and many Democrats were hammer and tongs in the 2000s, and now suddenly they're on the same side on Ukraine and many other kinds of issues. This is just something which is just a human thing. You can see it many, many different times. But the thing that you mentioned, which is that an ideology can mean both X and its opposite, well, when you have scripture, if you have sufficiently complicated scripture, you can go and quote a passage that means turn the other cheek, or you can quote it to mean some fire and brimstone damnation of somebody. And any sufficiently complicated body of literature can either be quoted out of context or selectively in this way to achieve whatever objective. And this relates to the concept of Russell conjugation, which Eric Weinstein talks about and many others have talked about. Bertrand Russell introduced it. I dox, you leak, but the New York Times investigates. And anyway, so that's cynical, but that's also different than saying something that is Euler's formula, e to the i pi plus 1 equals 0.

Yeah.

That is an idea. It's not an ideology. That's neutral. I don't believe that everything is political. I talk about this in the book. There's that spectrum between technical truths and political truths. It is a deep insight that history is often written by the victors, but it's also true that if that was the only thing that was there, then we wouldn't have a history of, I don't know, of— Like star— we wouldn't have star charts. We wouldn't have, um, you know, functional agriculture. It would basically say, you know, go and worship the sun god and you'll grow the agriculture. There had to be some technical facts that were passed down without political interference for us to maintain our civilization. That's like this struggle in humanity.

Yeah. Hey everybody, I want to recommend a couple other shows that we also run. One is Moment of Zen, which I co-host with Dan Romero and Antonio Garcia Martinez.

We talk about everything from tech to history, philosophy.

We've also featured Marc Andreessen and Balaji on those podcasts, so I recommend you checking them out. My other show is Cognitive Revolution.

It's an AI show that I co-host with Nathan Labenz.

I recommend listening if you want to stay up to date with all things AI.

SecureFrame is the leading all-in-one platform for security and privacy compliance. Get SOC 2 audit ready in weeks, not months. I believe in Secure Frame so much that I invested in it, and I recommend it to all my portfolio companies. Sign up for a free demo and mention Upstream during your demo to get 20% off your first year. Now more than ever, startup founders need a safe place to put their cash. Mercury protects your money and also provides the streamlined user experience that great founders expect. Through partner banks and their sweep networks, Mercury offers up to $5 million in FDIC insurance, Which is 20 times the per-bank limit. They also make it easy to invest any cash above the FDIC-insured amount in a money market fund. 100,000 startups trust Mercury with their finances. I've been a happy Mercury customer and have found their team incredibly helpful and responsive. They even got an important wire out of purgatory on Christmas Eve. After all, your Christmas is my opportunity. Visit mercury.com to get started. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank and Trust, members FDIC. MarketerHire is one of my favorite resources for startups looking to hire marketers. With thousands of pre-vetted marketers across a dozen roles, MarketerHire matches you to your perfect marketer in 48 hours. Whether you need help with growth marketing, SEO, lifecycle content, or any other aspect of your marketing strategy, MarketerHire has you covered. So if you're a founder looking for top-notch marketing talent to help grow your startup, Head over to marketerhire.com to find your perfect match. Sign up with referral code Upstream and you'll get $1,000 credit on your first hire.

One of your other observations is that in the early 2010s, or, or from, you know, for most of the past couple decades, you could build a tech company and not have to think about politics at all. Right. But something happened in, in the last few years that now people have to be a lot more cognizant of politics in a way. It's part of like building your, your whole stack. Your concept there. Why don't you unpack that?

Yeah, sure. I don't think you start with a tech company anymore. I think you start with a tech community.

Say more about that.

Okay. And why do I say that? Because what are countries? You can think of them as platforms that you target, just like you target iOS or Android. And that's part of your strategy. You're thinking about, are you using React Native or using iOS or Android tools? And you're like, Android is used by many people in the world, but it's lower dollar value. That platform that you're targeting goes all the way up to the product itself. And it's a huge decision. Instagram was just iOS only, which was controversial early on, but turned out to be right. Then they did Android. Do you target the web? Are you doing enterprise? These are decisions that affect the product. Clearly what platform you're targeting matters. Clearly what country you're targeting matters because just as an example, do you start with all your content in English or are you starting out of Poland, in which case you need to build probably internationalization into the website from the very, very beginning? Europeans, Indians tend to think international from the very beginning because they don't have the large domestic market in the same way. It's starting to change for India, but Then of course they've got the EU, but in terms of at least languages, people think about translation earlier there. The point is that basically those are things which we know are variable. We know the tech platforms vary, iOS and Android are different, the countries vary. What's happened thanks to the internet over the last 20 years, I think there was a good reason to connect people. Lots of new friends were made, but you know what else was made when you connect lots of people? Enemies. Lots of new enemies. Essentially, the offline world pre-1990 was a result of an enormous number of fights where all these people eventually got pulled into various regions. For example, post-World War II, there was massive ethnic cleansing of all these Germans. Everybody was mad at the Germans, and ethnic Germans got pushed into Germany or just killed or whatever at the end of it. Of course, Germans themselves killed a bunch of people before it. A lot of those borders in Europe and in other places today are peaceful or were peaceful and quiescent for a long time, but reflected a whole fractious process running up to that. What was happening before the internet is you might have had some, I don't know, Archie Bunker warehouse worker type, Thinking what he's thinking, cracking his jokes to his friends, and then some very hoity-toity, you know, college professor thinking what they're thinking to themselves, you know. And then they're put on Twitter, and now they just can't stand each other. They're not— ignorance was bliss, right? Now each of their insane comments basically is pushed into their guys', not, not just into their, like, sphere, into their literal face. They're holding up their phone in the most—

Yeah, I was laughing. Yeah. Yeah.

The most insane possible thing from someone who's just so polar opposite to you is stimulating and just pushed into your face, push notification, and they're attacking you. I'm going to push back against this guy. What's happened, one way of thinking about it from a border standpoint, groups that had just been separated by all kinds of processes, the good fences make good neighbors. They had self-selected, they had migrated, They had language borders, country borders, practical borders. They were suddenly all pushed into one gigantic room, or one gigantic continent rather. It's like this cloud Atlantis descended from the heavens. If you think about how many hours a day you spend on the internet.

All day.

How many hours a day do you spend on the internet?

In front of a screen all day.

All day. Many people, it's like 8 hours a day or something like that. So you can imagine yourself, you wake up and you telecommute up, you know, 8 hours in the cloud, and then you come back down and you're spending your time on the land. And when are you on the land? When there's no screens. There's no Apple Watch, there's no iPhone, there's no laptop, there's no big screen, there's no screens of any kind. You're just in the physical world, and the only proximity you have is to other physical people. Okay. For many people, that's a minority of their time now. Their proximity is not their physical proximity, it's their digital proximity to people up in the cloud. Oh, and by the way, even when you're disconnected, people are still taking swings at your avatar up over here. So you might need to just basically— you did your daily commute, might have to do a nightly commute to come back up and enter the arena once again, put on the helmet.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay, so this Cloud Atlantis is something where, with the exception of China, it doesn't mirror all the borders of the world that existed before it. You have billions of people just put into this gigantic arena and they're all just slugging it out in the cloud and new borders. I mean, A blocks B is the most like pathetic bilateral border. Of course, there are borders in sense of silos between tech companies and stuff like that. But, you know, those are genuine communities like Pinterest and Instagram and LinkedIn have different cultures, but those are like offline countries. in the sense of there's more common culture in a sense within than between. We're still at the earliest days of this with the New World, with the various colonies in the New World. People thought of that as English and Spanish and French and so on and so forth. They didn't yet think of them as their own countries. But eventually over time, those settlements started to take on a sense of national sentiment of their own and became America and all the countries in Latin America and Canada and what have you. We're in the early stages of that, but I think that's going to happen, cloud nationalism, internet nationalism, internationalism, where people within these networks up here start feeling closer connections than to other people who were maybe their countrymen offline, but are certainly not part of their states of mind online. That's basically what's happened is all the connections. Now, bringing it back up, What that means is, just like you can't just take your platform for granted, you can't take your country for granted, you cannot take your cloud community for granted. You are selling into that market just as much as you are deploying on iOS or Android, just as much as you are operating in the US or the EU or India or Japan. Once you realize that, It's intrinsically political to say, I am operating in the US versus I'm operating in, I don't know, the Middle East or something like that. You're operating in Dubai. It has different laws. There's different things. Things that are legal here are illegal there and vice versa. Do we think of that as political? Well, when people say something is political, what are they really getting at? Just to poke at that. It's like, do you know? Do you know how market depth works in in crypto? Not not an exchange. Okay, so there's if you go to any crypto exchange, you will see an order book which looks like a sort of two triangles like this, like a V. All right, and here's all the buy orders are triangle on this side, and here's all the sell orders. That's a triangle on this side, and the mid market over here between you know just imagine these two triangles like it's almost like an M like do do do do right. The mid-market right over here is the current price. Now, there's lots of buy orders, that price moves up. There's lots of sell orders, that price moves down. All right. Now, most people in the offline world, you're a price taker. When you go to the supermarket, you go and you get some orange juice, you're paying, I don't know, $3 or whatever it is for a quart of orange juice. I don't even know what the prices are on orange juice. I hate orange juice, but I'm just giving you an example.

Okay.

It might be $50 in Inflation America now. OK. But so if you're just buying 1 quart or whatever, you're paying a certain amount of money. So let's say it's like $4 a liter. All right? OK, fine. Let's just give an exact price. So fine. So you're paying $4 per liter of orange juice, OK, if you buy 1. But now let's say you go clean out all the shelves. You buy all 100 units of orange juice at that store for $4. Now, you walk over to the next store, they've heard when you're coming. Now, you're paying $4.50 for their 50 units of orange juice. Then you go to the next store, they've heard you're coming. Now, you're paying $5 per unit for the next 70 units of orange juice you can get. You started to buy so much, you started to shift up the mid-market price. You're no longer just a price taker, you're actually affecting the price of the market. That's like, oh, shoot, we're seeing volatility in the market.

Right.

Similarly, if you dumped a bunch of orange juice, you'd start to see prices crash. Now, in the same way, that's called market depth. That's like the price evolution in cryptocurrencies and stocks. A very similar thing happens with the so-called Overton window. What happens there is you've got a window of what is politically radical on both sides and what is conventional wisdom as of right now. What happens is that if market depth is about price, this is about political support. Imagine you have vote banks on either side, and this side wants to make the policy more stringent, and this side wants to make the policy more relaxed. If all that happens, or rather at some point, what could happen is, One side gets the advantage, and they can push the policy over. Policy starts moving in real time, just like a price starts shifting. Wait a second, I thought orange juice was $4. No, it's $4.50. It's $5. It's $10. What the heck is happening? I budgeted for this. That's when people are like, wait, they don't like volatility in prices. When people say things are getting political, they're talking about volatility in policy.

Interesting.

It's exactly the same thing. If you can amass enough money, you can move a price because you can, right? If you can amass enough votes, you can, or support more generally, you can move a policy.

Yeah.

When people feel, wait a second, this thing I thought was constant is becoming a variable, that's what they're reacting to when they say it's getting political. Now, if it moves and then it's constant for a long time, now people can adapt to it. You wouldn't call it political. that there are differences in law between the US and Dubai or the US and, uh, uh, I don't know, Japan or something like that, right? That's not considered political. Oh, they're just— they're different political units. But it doesn't feel like it's shifting in real time. It's when within a country, policies are shifting in real time and you're like, what the heck is going on? That's when people say it's political. And that's what's happening due to the internet because you're now having this support over here or over here that's pushing something down or up.

And that's what people are reacting to. And not only policy, but also sentiments around customer sentiment or investor sentiment or your social supply chain, your idea there where people might, these movements could be the equivalent of a pump and dump that could affect, the sentiment could change quickly in a way, or even employee sentiment.

Yeah, the current thing is like a social scam. If you go and punch into Google Trends, Any of the hot-button keywords over the last 10 years—

Defund the police.

You see a ski slope graph that looks exactly like a pump and dump of a stock. It just goes soaring up and then crashes down like this. Now, the thing is, a pump and dump of a stock is bad, but at least everybody who's part of it opted into it. They all You can't con an honest man or whatever. Somebody thought they were going to get fast gains, they bought into this stupid thing or whatever. Not to say those things are good, but at least the damage is limited to those who got into the arena.

Yeah.

The social scam is much worse, because all these people who scream this thing, they get tons of followers on the way up on the social scam. And then it goes down, and everybody who's just affected by the misinformation are the ones that are hurt by it. They can't opt out of that. Because all of these critters say the same thing at the same time, then there's like 1,000 people who all said it and everyone's like, oh, that guy, that guy. There's nobody to blame. This is what I call the school of fish strategy. The school of fish strategy is basically, it's like, just say the same thing everybody else is saying. If everybody's wrong, anybody's wrong, everybody's wrong. Who could have known? Then if there's one person who sticks out, You can all gang up on them if they're ever wrong on something.

It feels like in the last few years we've built up more cultural immunity to current things because I guess we've just become so familiar with them. Maybe it's like a boy who cried wolf, but it feels like it's harder today to have something that would happen in 2020, for example.

Yes, but there's a cost to that, which is the immunity to the current thing means just a lower trust society. Right? So what happens is the the firebreak, right? It used to be that if A told you something and B told you, just pass like this, right? Because you're in a high trust society where people would exploit that to just you know spread these stupid messages. Now you have an adaptation, as you said, which is it's a low trust society, and so then it's like I don't trust you; you're in the other tribe, right? But that has other consequences where yes, it does stop the current thing, but it also stops. many good things. The scale of cooperation in society, you know, if you don't trust somebody to tell you the news, do you trust them to, like, I don't know, like, grow your food, right? Or do lots of other sensitive things? Maybe not over time. Pass your laws, enforce your laws? I don't know, right? And so then, so that adaptation leads to eventually, like, a fissioning and separation, I think.

Yeah.

So we're only at the beginning of this, I think.

Yeah, that's really interesting. One of your other theories is that the logic of, you know, sort of the Sovereign Individual one, the logic of technology determines the logic of violence, or this idea of like—

Well, that's his thesis in The Sovereign Individual. And I think that's true, but I think there's things that I would update from the book.

Yeah, say more.

Go ahead.

Well, let me frame it. I was basically just going to say, In the middle of the 20th century, you talk about peak centralization and how technology favored that, and now technology is favoring decentralization. But I'm curious if you still think that's true in a world where both China and America are willing to use the latest technology to censor or even lock down its citizens, and in a world where OpenAI is starting to really gain some steam. Is it both decentralized and centralized? How do you see that playing out? And also, I want to hear where you want to update the book.

Yeah, yeah. Well, so first, the Sovereign Individual book is a very good book and worth reading. For when it was written, it got a phenomenal number of things right. But what happens is everything that you get really, really right, like a huge trend, often arouses a counterforce. The Reformation arouses a Counter-Reformation. Decentralization has aroused the counter-decentralization in both the US and China. And in China, that's taken the form of, you know, the Great Firewall and all the top-down control. They've just taken the hit to retain control. And their fundamental premise is when they say, you know, the system with Chinese characteristics, you know, what they mean is they retain root control. They retain the private keys. They retain ultimate control. Okay. The wisdom of that is being seen today. Wisdom, what should I call it? Let's call it at least the farsightedness. You know, there are people who For example, The Atlantic, there was this guy, I think Jack Goldsmith wrote, internet speech will never go back to normal. In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct and the US was wrong. There's a fair number of folks in the US establishment who regret not having controlled social media more aggressively than they did, because now they allowed all of these proles to get freedom of speech. That's what happened. That's the thing is these people are like, oh my God, Twitter and Facebook are a threat to our democracy, blah, blah. The reason they're mad is that Twitter and Facebook are ultra-democracy. They're giving all these people a say who didn't have a say before.

Yeah.

The reason they're mad is because they're actually granting the freedom of speech that was nominally promised to people that was not actually available to them Because you only have freedom of speech if you own a media corporation and paid for a very expensive TV or broadcasting or radio license. When they say, our democracy, it's a little bit like people talking about, oh, communism was so great for the workers, while the USSR put workers in gulags and broke the strike of solidarity. The last thing they want is democracy in the sense of individual rights and being able to speak for yourself. Now, the Chinese are at least straightforward about this. They're like, yes, we do not want individuals to say something. They're making the argument that the greater good is better than the individual. In a sense, that is straightforward, and it is just more down the middle. Because of that, they have just implemented top-down controls and all this stuff.

Okay.

That's not to say that they aren't somewhat responsive. It seems that they've loosened up on all the COVID stuff recently. After all this, I mean, massive protests caused it, but it does seem like they don't have a total death wish or whatever on it. On the other side, the other kind of counter-decentralization is not state directives in China, but what's emerging is something where you have like— the exact balance, I don't know, and it's TBD, and there's many possible outcomes, but you have a weird corporate-state fusion in the US with a bunch of different factions, of which in many ways, the corporations are the most agile in terms of deplatforming, unbanking, silencing, censoring, etc., people who disagree with the regime. Then you have the third faction, which is the re-decentralization, and that is Satoshi and Web3 and cryptocurrency and so on. That's like the third faction. The first thing is that it's not as straightforward as just a straight shot decentralization wins. I think decentralization gives rise to counter-decentralization, gives rise to re-decentralization. Now we have at least 3 factions globally, which I call in the book NYT, CCP, BTC. That's just catchy. Of course, they're reductive, but they're catchy titles for what they are. That's one aspect of the sovereign individual. How could it have gotten that right? That's like taking this extremely non-obvious thing, playing it all the way out, and then finding non-obvious conclusions. It was pretty impressive where they got to despite that.

Okay.

The other thing on the logic of violence that they got, I wouldn't say wrong, but incomplete, is they gamed out crypto, but not drones and not the VR. OK. And why is that? So with drones in particular, one way of thinking about it is if the state, because of encryption, cannot seize the money, like in Venezuela, then it cannot pay the conscripts. It can't pay the police. It can't pay the soldiers. And therefore, it can't simply— if it loses legitimacy, it can't just enforce laws because it's not able to even pay its own military or police to go and do and beat up people. That's part of the sovereign individual thesis. Do you know what the counterargument to that is?

No, what?

Well, you don't have to pay a drone, you just have to charge it. The entire concept of the principal-agent problem, where you have a principal— a principal is like a VC and an agent is a CEO. Or the principal's like the CEO and the agent is like an engineer. Whenever you've got a principal-agent problem, you've got a 2x2 matrix where the principal can win or lose and the agent can win or lose. For example, a VC and CEO, there's a win-win quadrant where both of them win when there's an exit and both of them make money. There's win-lose where the VC sells But the CEO doesn't get money. Conversely, there's lose-win where the CEO sells at a valuation where the VC doesn't make money. This is one example. Depending on the terms, both those situations can arise. So an example of where you could have a sale where the VC makes money and the CEO doesn't is 3x liquidation preferences. And the VC makes money and then the founding team doesn't get it. Or the CEO could sell and the VC might not make something in a variety of other circumstances. Or it might not be a significant return for the VC, but it's life-changing for the executive. And then of course there's lose-lose where both go bankrupt.

Yes.

So all 4 quadrants are possible. We've seen all 4 quadrants. And the goal is to try to make the win-win so much more valuable than the off-diagonals that people just go for then. Now, the thing is, there's different ways of resolving the principal-agent problem. One is the concept of alignment that we always talk about in tech. Aligning means diagonally aligning it. Lose-lose and win-win are the only 2 things that are common. What happens is once you have not just 2 people, but 3 people, what happens to 3 people? It's not just 2 by 2, it's 2 by 2 by 2.

Wow.

Because you could do win-win-win, Win, win, lose, all 8 possible outcomes, 2 to the 3rd. If you have n people, you have 2 to the n possible outcomes. You have a whole hypercube of possible outcomes with n people. That's why you have equity. It's like everybody wins when the whole company exits or everybody loses if it goes to zero. Don't even think about all the off-diagonal cases where half the team could gang up on the other half of the team and loot internally. That's one way of doing it, which is alignment. Another way of doing it is minimize the number of people in the org chart because every edge in the org chart is a principal-agent problem. Do you know what the limit case is of minimizing the number of people in the org chart?

No.

One person who has AI and drones doing everything. That may be where people go. That's maybe where states go when humans refuse to do the job. They just have drones that they can plug in and charge. Now, of course, it's not as simple as that because the drones have screws and batteries and parts and factories and supply chains. But net-net, it may turn out that they need fewer humans to maintain consent. It's the opposite of the 20th century, where it was mass media and mass production, and you needed ideologies that appealed to the masses of democracy and communism and fascism. All of this had mass appeal, right? Lowest common denominator. Here, all that may matter is your AI and crypto engineers.

Yeah.

The robots to build the robots and the crypto to encrypt the communications, or cryptography to encrypt the communications and send the money. And so it's like a totally different model than the 20th century in terms of how you protect the treasury and the military and so on and so forth.

Right.

Now, I'm not saying you just jump directly to that. People had horses in World War I. They started out with that as a transitional phase. Okay. But that's where one might go. What that means is the logic of violence is not as simple as in the sovereign individual, because the autonomous robot challenges the sovereign individual.

Yep.

The autonomous robot is basically— it allows the individual to be sovereign, but that individual— that's the other paradox, by the way. I mentioned there's a few different factors. One is the autonomous robot. The second is when I say the individual sovereign, the logic of the sovereign individual is that one person can become super powerful. Well, guess what? What if that one person is Xi Jinping? Well, then he makes you not super powerful. That's the individual sovereign. When one person gets really powerful, they can reduce the power of others. The third wrinkle— so the autonomous robot, the individual sovereign, and the third wrinkle is the sovereign collective, because very few individuals are truly, truly sovereign. Remember that post by Steve Jobs that just came out? It's like, I don't grow my own food.

Yeah.

do my own chairs. He's basically giving credit to all these other amazing people around him for whom he totally depends on all kinds of things. It's a distributed computation system. As strong as his ego was, and he is a great man, he truly brought Apple all the way back from the brink, he's also self-critical enough to know that he is still dependent upon others. Hard to think of a more sovereign individual than Steve Jobs, And yet he also understood that there was a collective aspect to it. This is why I've never called myself a stereotypical libertarian, because you can overcorrect on that. I think society as a whole currently probably undercorrects in terms of thinking about individual impact and so on, but it is possible to overcorrect on that. That's the third corrective, which is a sovereign collective. It's pretty difficult to maintain a civilization or a high standard of living and so on as a single individual. Even with the robots, you're going to have to sleep. We're not yet genetically engineered to require no sleep. Someone has to patrol. So you need a collective to be able to do things. The numbers of people are reducing for sure. Technology is giving a massive amount of leverage. Notch and Satoshi did so much with just one person. But those are my edits to the sovereign individual. The autonomous robot, the individual sovereign, and the sovereign collective.

Go ahead.

By the way, I might put this as a blooper in the beginning. I just Tell the producer, but just to confirm, you're in a secure location, right? Perfect. The okay, there's a few points I want to jump on there. One is there's this idea that that tech has had a hard time kind of coordinating as an industry. Like people say, oh, tech is so powerful, blah blah blah. But you know one example, like tech is powerful but in a scattered direction. Like tech can't even get like a couple thousand votes in San Francisco to you know be able to build in its own city. And it makes sense that Facebook's not going to coordinate with Apple. They compete with Apple, right? And so there hasn't been this unifying vision. You mentioned a few years ago that Bitcoin perhaps should be the flag of technology, but maybe Bitcoin maximalists thwarted that attempt. How do you think about that now? What is the flag of technology, or what can or should tech unify around that's feasible?

I think I think Bitcoin is still going to be the flag of technology in a sense. Because by 2030, I don't know when it happens, but at some point, there's going to be a sovereign debt crisis. What I mean by that is just sovereigns who are printing too much money won't be able to pay it and will start defaulting. This has already happened to places like Argentina and so on. But we're starting to see the monetary system break, these insane inflation rates. At the same time, you've got insane interest rates. All this, you know, the people are like, oh, we're going to have the Roaring Twenties. Well, you know what the Roaring Twenties was? It was the teens with all the printed money, right? I don't know if— I don't know what this decade is, but it might be— might, I don't say for sure, who knows, it's all very highly volatile— might be like the Great Depression, except the great inflation. That might be this decade. And at some point, it's probably going to come down to something like USD versus BTC. At which point you're going to ask, fundamentally, are you a nationalist? Do you believe in the flag and the state and all of these things? Or do you believe in, let's say, American values more broadly? Do you believe in freedom of speech? Do you believe in free markets? Are you a fundamentally internationalist who believes in the equality of man across borders? and not simply within one country? Do you actually believe in the rules-based order and not simply think that the only rule is that your fellow countrymen should remain number one? The thing is, I actually think you can make a consistent argument on either the nationalist or the capitalist side. You can make a consistent argument on either the socialist or the internationalist side. And those are respectively the right and left of the debate. Either you have the right arm capitalist and left arm internationalist going together, or you have the right arm nationalist and the left arm socialist going together. But that's different than how the parties were set up in the 20th century. That's a realignment. This guy, Duranimated, made actually a pretty good thing, which shows that realignment happening.

I'll put it in the show notes.

Just to drill into this for a second, Again, just like we were talking about earlier, sometimes cats and dogs fight, and then they become the same thing. Let me make an observation. In 2015, or 2014, before 2014, China was just considered the back office of the US. It was not like a huge topic of controversy, etc. In 2012, Obama had said, oh, Romney, you're stuck in the past. Russia is not an issue for us in foreign policy. Then 2015, when Trump came down the escalator, he started saying China, China, China, China, China, and people made fun of him for that. That was a huge thing where the entire internationalist capitalist sentiment of the US for decades had been not necessarily extremely pro-China, but certainly pro-China enough to do billions and billions and billions of dollars of business each year. Yep. Even as late as 2019, Obama put out a documentary called American Factory, which was basically playing up the concept of international multilateral capitalism with China. But by 2021, the Democrats had now moved basically to Trump's right or the Republicans' right on China. And part of this is post-COVID, China was now not just a threat to Trump's blue collars, but to Biden's blue checks.

Okay.

Yeah. Do you see what I'm saying there? It was not simply a threat on like, oh, it's just taking manufacturing jobs of guys in the Rust Belt that the establishment doesn't care about. It was now becoming a peer competitor and a genuine threat to the empire's power. That's why suddenly they quietly moved to Trump's right without ever saying that they were doing that. Republicans in their own way have taken many of the words and phrases of the anti-war left during the 2000s, the free speech left. There's individuals that have probably been consistent all the way, like Glenn Greenwald. But that reflects more the Republican Party today than the 2000s Republican Party. There's been that switching, the flipping that I talk about in the book. Just to game that out and push that forward a little bit, another flip like this that I think is possible to happen, I would probably bet on this. I don't know exactly the timeframe, but just like the Democrats moved to the right on China, but did so quietly, I think the Democrats may move to the right on immigration.

Interesting.

Why? Because it's no longer a surefire vote winner. Latinos are moving to the cultural right. That seems to be a consistent trend across multiple elections. Roy Texeira, who wrote The Emerging Democrat Majority, has basically repudiated his thesis on Substack and saying, no, no, no, this is not necessarily going to be the case. Muslims are allying with Christians in Michigan on cultural issues. You see in the— you know that tweet with Elon showing the post-Elon Twitter team?

Yeah.

Whether they were actually on H-1B visas, or whether they were immigrants who were naturalized or children of immigrants, it was true that that group of people include a lot of folks from Asia, a lot of folks from India, and so on. So maybe H-1Bs and Elon himself being a tech immigrant, They're no longer reliable Democrats either, just like Latinos and just like the Muslims in Michigan. Obviously, Chinese people, the Chinese government isn't going to let talent come over as easily, and the US establishment doesn't want them to come. They're under suspicion, unfortunately, people of Chinese ethnicity in many places, often of no fault of their own. Similar in some ways. How far does that go? I don't know. But I do know that It's it's starting to be like in the 2000s if you were Muslim in the U.S., people were just like you know side-eyeing people, you know, and you can give all kinds of arguments for maybe that's good or whatever. But I'm just saying that if you were Chinese American or especially a recent Chinese national, water suddenly turned cold, you know, and you might want to go back home simply to be treated better. Of course, there's other problems with that. So maybe you go to Taiwan or Singapore, right? or some other place to the Chinese diaspora. And you may not have seen this, but evidently, The Hill has reported that the border wall, Trump's wall, is being built. And the babies in cages thing is still happening. It's just called— what's it called? It's like minors— hold on, I want to get the exact phrasing. They're calling it something different. Migrant children detained at border. Right? Okay. Border shelter for teens. See, under Trump, it was babies in cages, but under Biden, it's border shelters for teens.

Border shelter. That makes it sound positive.

Okay. I mean, like, literally in the NPR headline, it says, fact check, Biden reopens border shelters for teens, but it's not kids in cages. Okay. Right? Like, they're, they're like, Amateurishly Russian conjugating in the headline. Now, maybe both of those are— I mean, it's just actually kind of amazing, right? If you put all that together, it's actually pretty— yeah, here we are. Here's The Intercept. Ready? Joe Biden—

Yeah, I'll add it to the shot.

Resumes construction of the border wall. Okay, so wait a second. So you add all that stuff up, right? It's Latinos moving to cultural right. It's Muslims seemingly moving to cultural right and allying with Christians, which, by the way, this is actually a flip back to the '80s. You know why?

Why?

In the '80s, you had the Mujahideen in Afghanistan with the Reaganites versus the communists in the Soviet Union. If you live long enough, you start to see 2 gang up on the 3rd and then flip and then flip again as you push the timeframe out.

Right.

Of course, there's different Muslim people and so on there. But point being that a Christian-Muslim alliance against something on the secular left is not unheard of in history. It does happen. You add up all these things and then you also add the fact that world patterns of wealth migration and talent migration are not choosing the US as the first place. They're going to Switzerland, they're going to Portugal, they're going to Israel, they're going to Singapore, they're going to Dubai, they're going to Australia and New Zealand, even Canada, but not the US. Inbound millionaires to the US is down 85% since 2019. Talent, even in 2020, before BLM and all the riots and all the chaos of 2020 and 2021, had not indicated the US as their number one choice. It was Canada. And all these places in in Asia, Japan and Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, because the world economy is in Asia. You don't have to go as far.

Yeah.

You add up all that stuff, and there's less political and economic gain from immigration. There's less power gain. Their biggest rivals, and this is really the biggest factor of all, the biggest rivals for the US establishment are not really the American conservatives. American conservatives are just barbarians. They just lack the IQ. Let me put it like this. In that photo of Elon in his conference room at Twitter, how many Southern good old boys were there? Zero. Zero, probably, right? Maybe one. Okay. No offense to them, but that's not where global engineering talent is coming from. It is the best engineers in the world versus the US establishment versus the Chinese establishment. That's what BTC, NYT, CCP. That's what that's about, right? And so this is why I think Elon wins as a global technologist and he loses as an American conservative. He wins with code, loses with words. There's just something to keep in mind for him as he does things. And conversely, for the US establishment, they'll win where they're using the state and they'll lose when it comes time for the battle of international markets or the network. Great example, by the way, is this CHIPS Act. Just to digress and rant about this for a second. You know about this thing?

I've heard the policy towards— yeah, go for it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So essentially, the idea is, oh, we're number one. We're going to ban our way to the top, freeze things in amber. China's never going to figure it out. Okay. Now, here's the thing. Could it slow down China a bit? It's possible. Okay. But in the medium term, here's this guy, Philip Pilkington, had a good essay on this. And he points out the following. First, and it's a combination of things, there's the CHIPS Act, and then there's a ban on American semi companies selling into China. Now, there's at least a few consequences of this. The first is, if you are a company that has— a non-American company, of which, by the way, most of the world is neither American nor Chinese. Important to keep in mind, something like 75% of the world is neither American nor Chinese by population. If you're part of that 75% of the world, the majority of the world, supermajority of the world, and you have some ambition of somebody selling into China, it is not in your interest to hire an American semiconductor engineer. In theory, before, that American semiconductor engineer might have gotten an offer from Siemens or Intel. Afterwards, he doesn't get the offer from Siemens, only from Intel, which means his effective salary has gone down. 2 bidders went to 1 bidder, which means his salary has gone down, which means his career earnings have gone down, which means this profession is less attractive to him than, let's say, software, which means just that provision alone did not make a whole rush of Americans run into semiconductor engineering, but quite the contrary. If you're making a rational decision, like net lifetime earnings just dropped, who knows how much, but a fair bit. 75% of the world 95%, if you include China, will no longer employ you, number one. Number two, American software companies can no longer sell into China. Now, look, there's people who may dispute these figures, but I think they're probably directionally accurate. David Goleman estimates that something like for every $5 that American companies were selling into China, they're now getting $1 in subsidies from this CHIPS Act. First of all, that's a significant reduction in money. But second is the quality of the revenue is far different. An American company that's managing to sell into China is actually very, very, very globally competitive because they're beating all of this, you know, all that pressure, domestic pressure there as well to, you know, buy Chinese or build Chinese, and they're managing to do that. That's high-quality revenue in a very, very competitive market. That's revenue that keeps you sharp. Yeah. By contrast, a dollar of subsidy revenue All you need to do is lobby the politician to keep it going. The chip doesn't actually have to work. You just need to have news reports and politicians who are invested enough in saying that it works. And you make it taboo enough to say it doesn't work.

Yeah.

That's much lower quality revenue. Now, what you've done is you've made the American semi companies have less revenue and less quality revenue, and American semi engineers have less availability of jobs and lower-paying jobs. What do you think that's going to do? That's not going to vault you to the front of anything.

Right.

That is just a very short-sighted thing. And the way to show this, by the way, is you can't ban your way to number one. If the US establishment actually cared about leading in semiconductor engineering, it would be a week of solid-state physicists tweeting from the White House account, on band gaps and BJTs, on MOSFETs and microelectronics.

Yeah.

You basically have electrical engineers, solid-state physicists, all this stuff. Look, I'm not a semi-engineer, but I did do a bunch of this in my PhD at whatever master's student level a long time ago. You don't see any of this. Are they like, get into quantum mechanics? No, they're saying, Math is white supremacy.

Okay, just to push on that for a sec, like, um, should China not be banning, you know, American social media networks? Like, what is sort of the— what are good bans versus not good bans?

Well, here's the thing. It's not just that China banned. It's China banned and they banned us. Okay? And here's— and that's really, really, really hard to do. I was skeptical, for example, that India could pull it off. India also managed to pull it off. Do you remember Free Basics?

Free Basics. That sounds familiar.

Free Basics in the mid-2010s, Facebook was going to do this deal where they offered really low-cost internet to deal with Facebook. A bunch of Indian tech people and so on fought that. At the time, I didn't have a strong opinion, but I was like, okay, well, fine. You're asking for the ball, you better dunk the ball. To India's great credit, they did. Only if you can deal with it, basically. Yeah, exactly. Build is a more important component, part of it. That's the thing is to just ban, at best buys you time. Why do you have to ban? Because that other guy is so far ahead of you that you have nothing domestic. So you're not just playing catch-up, you have to play catch-up at such a speed that you eventually become competitive. That's really difficult to do, by the way.

Yeah.

So it's kind of like every CEO, I mean, A lot of this stuff is made very moral, but every CEO has a build versus buy decision on something. In general, you build those things that are core to your business, and you buy the stuff that is not. You don't have to go and chop down your own lumber for chairs, but login is something that you could conceivably either build in-house or outsource to Facebook or Google.

Yeah.

Or insource at some point. That's an important strategic decision. And then there's other things that you just have to build, like maybe your own software. But even then, you may want to use open source components. That's just a decision you have to make. But without the capability to build, you're not making a decision. You're just eating down the seed corn, spending down what you have.

I want to return to what you were saying about immigrants because it's really interesting. One concern of the right about immigrants for a while is that they won't assimilate. But now that's potentially one hope of the right. If you think of assimilation of American values less as free speech or, you know, free markets and more as kind of like, you know, justice, equality and kind of like, you know, extreme social progressivism. You know, it's funny, the, the Russian guy who got out, Viktor Bout, the first thing he did when he went back to Russia was complain about, he said, in the US they have 72 genders. Like, that was the thing that was most striking to him. And so, yeah, when America exports its values, is it exporting free speech and free markets, or is it exporting, you know, something else? Is an interesting framework.

Right. Well, there's 2 different Americas, at least, right? You have woke America and tech America, you know, and I mean, there was in the 20th century as well. You had communist America and capitalist America, and there were a lot of communists in America. Trotsky raised money in New York, you know.

One thing that's so striking is that the highest IQ people, or a lot of them, were communists. And similarly, like, you know, you mentioned that there's no conservatives, you know, at, you know, coding at Twitter, or Southern conservatives at least. Like, why are the highest IQ—

With no offense, by the way, I'm not dissing them.

Why are the highest IQ people sometimes susceptible People who are so technical or so deeply smart about building their company, sometimes susceptible to more radical ideas around politics or culture?

Well, I think intelligence correlates with ambition. And if you're just doing the same thing, you're not going to make a difference usually. Basically, what is the outlet for that ambition? If you have some moral critique of society alone, well, it's like if you've ever written a review of a book, maybe for school, maybe just done on your own, the straightforward thing is just to do the down-the-middle interpretation. I don't know, Moby Dick, it's a book about a guy chasing a whale. But if you can come up with some crazy interpretation that you can somehow support with a bunch of very novel citations from the book, right? For example, with Macbeth, all the way back in the day, I remember this essay where maybe I had to write it for school or something like that, where a very high-scoring essay on how actually Lady Macbeth everything in the book was talking about how it was good to kill and be a warrior and so on. And she wasn't able to do that because she was a woman. So she killed in the only way that she could. And so actually it's a feminist kind of thing, right? So she's actually the good guy and she was held back.

Exactly.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And had she been able to slay him in battle, she would've done that, right? And so this is a little bit like, have you seen the Reinterpretation of The Lord of the Rings, where Sauron is a good guy and the hobbits are bad guys.

I haven't seen it, but I get the idea.

The Last Ringbearer or something like that. The point being that if you're intelligent enough, you want often— if you're intelligent and ambitious, you want to make a difference, you want to make a mark on the world. Doing the same thing won't do that usually. And so people look for innovation. And there's at least 2 routes. The first is to say or convince yourself or have someone convince you that society is morally lacking on some dimension. Abolish the police.

Exactly.

Or technological innovation. I mean, to get to Mars. One of the things I've realized relatively— I mean, not very, very recently, but it just sort of took me some time to put that concisely like that. Wokes are focused on moral innovation. Techs are focused on tech innovation. In fact, both tech and woke are like 2 sinusoidal parallel movements that both arose after World War II, whether it's desegregation for the wokes and the transistor.

Right.

You can kind of see moments. Internet boots up in the '60s protests and then the microcomputer and PCs in the '80s and some of the protests over the Clinton era PC stuff. Both PCs were in the late '80s and early '90s, right? And so on and so forth. Tech and woke have sort of been growing out of the post-1945 dispensation. And tech is actually very opposed to communism, and woke is very opposed to fascism.

Yeah.

Woke is obviously opposed to fascism because you have the Antifa and so on. Tech is obviously opposed to communism, maybe less overtly so, but it's not socialist nationalism, it's internationalist capitalism. It's not communism in one country, it's the opposite of communism in one country. It's capitalism in all countries. What you have is basically the atom smashers of these various eras. As the 20th century ends, these are the 2 network ideologies of the West that are going to battle. And there's a 3rd, which is the CCP thing, which is yet different. So those are, I think, those 3 factions. So basically, the wokes are moral innovation, the techs are tech innovation, and that's why they're susceptible to it, is because they're looking for something that channels their energies. And simply working at Dunder Mifflin Paper Company doesn't.

Right.

Right? Now, once you realize this though, you're like, okay, the techs to win need to have some degree of moral innovation as well. They also need a moral critique of society. But guess what? You know what's interesting? The wokes have come up with such bad moral innovations on so many dimensions, they've managed to break society in the name of fixing it. So it's not too hard to come up with moral innovations that X is bad and Y is good and to rebuild society in a different way on that. This is the concept of the one commandment I talk about in the book, like startup societies that address very specific moral issues with society.

One thing that's interesting, there have been ideas in the past decade that you've shared, and sometimes people will look at you, askance. I remember we were at a dinner before, like in 2019, 2018, with our friends and collaborators, And you said, you know, something— or it was a presentation you gave at a friend's house. You said like, hey, tech America and woke America have been aligned against Trump, but in a post-Trump world, once Trump loses, you know, they're going to become more at odds. And, you know, you said something like, you know, we got to watch out for that.

I think that— I think that was basically pretty— that was pretty dead on.

And you said we got to watch out for the New York Times. And he said, what? We should love the New York Times. Like, what's wrong with the New York Times? And of course, most recently, a lot of people have been more sober about that. And so similarly, some things you've said recently that I think people might look at you askance on or just surprised is the idea— you have a couple ideas. I mean, one is your belief that Bitcoin maximalism is going to take over the right. That hasn't even close to happened yet. It's a long-term prediction, but huge if true. And the other is that The left may actually—

I feel even more confident in that.

Yeah. The left may even turn against diversity, like the thing that they were proponent of.

Well, so first is, let me do the second one first. Okay? So by 2030-something, it's possible that the— just like, for example, think about the Soviet Union, right? In the '80s, it was officially communist, but by The '90s or early 2000s, it was rebuilding Orthodox churches. Like a rubber band just snapped back into that previous thing, repudiated the whole past and so on and so forth. Think about how many people today are actually supportive of all of America's Middle East wars in the 2000s. Who thinks that was a good idea?

Very few.

Very few people. Has there been any reparations paid by the US? Was BLM about that? Was BLM about Iraq? No, it wasn't.

No.

Though that was actually something that a lot of living people were guilty of and implicated. But it's such a large set of people who was implicated in that, that, okay, well, we're not going to talk about that. So we're going to talk about this 1619 from 400 years ago. And so the thing is that that's an example of a storyline shift. The 2000s was all about terrorism. ISIS did continue into the 2010s, but the real storyline of the 2010s starting early on was wokeism, and that's dominated. Now there's still tendrils of wokeism that are continuing, but I think this decade for the left, the pivot is from wokeism to statism, from abolish the police to fund the Capitol Police, to trust the police, they'll definitely get the right decision. For example, in mid-2020, you had these people burning things outside the White House. Do you remember that? That's actually being talked about less, but they're burning things out the White House. They were tearing down George Washington. They go 6, 7 months later to tearing up over the Capitol. Tearing down George Washington, tearing up. How could anybody attack these symbols of America? Go ahead.

I'm just laughing. Yeah.

It's like obviously 2 different meanings of the same phrase, right? Or same word. And so J6 was a good moment where when the state was sort of recaptured, now it became holy again and even more sanctified than it had been before. Now the previous anti-war Democrat is cheering for the fight with Russia. Who cares? Oh my God, Trump was so bad for possibly starting a nuclear war. We could never have him there. nuclear war might just be the price we pay for freedom, or something like that.

Exactly.

Price we pay for democracy, rather. You see people say this in earnest this year, like, hot war with Russia, who cares? You're just a coward. Then you see this latest thing with SBF where it's like, of course I trust the police to get the right answer. The guy who 2 and a half years ago was literally setting police stations on fire. You have this bizarre thing where the transition from wokeism to statism is underway. Now, to just put this in context, these unprecedented things are, of course, precedented. In the 1910s and 1900s, the communists in Russia, they would talk about how they're for land, peace, and bread. They were against the death penalty on principle. Even for hardened criminals and so on and so forth. And then what happened when they took over? Blam. You get shot in the back of the neck, no due process or anything like that. They weren't for peace. Trotsky built the Red Army. They weren't for the workers. They put them to work in the White Sea Labor Canal just digging the frost with their bare hands. Poor guys. So that transition from this we're just all vegan, peaceful, whatever, to just this fanged monster has happened before. This actually also, I mean, in a different way in China, communist rhetoric was used to capture the entire country. When Deng Xiaoping turned the country to capitalism, it's not like he gave back the country to a bunch of different warlords or something like that. The lies that they used to gain power did not result in like that territory being taken away. They just pivoted the territory to something else. Okay, this is a non-obvious point, is that like, uh, you know, it's not like America now feeling that it's, uh, you know, it's changed its mind about all the Middle East stuff, has it— has it gone and taken the bases out of the Middle East? Okay, maybe it's not in Afghanistan anymore, maybe it's not in Iraq, but there's still all kinds of aircraft flying all over the region, right?

Right.

And, uh, Guantanamo is still around, all this stuff. The thing about this is that territory earned under slogan A is kept when it switches to ideology B. In the pivot from wokeism to statism, the establishment is actually coming back about 30 points to the right. From the far left, they're coming back somewhat to the center. You're seeing that on some dimensions. It's stabilizing back. General Mills did this Lenin The New Economic Policy. Do you know what that was?

No.

After the Soviets— after the communists won the Russian Civil War, 1917 to 1921, from '21 to '29, Lenin put in place the so-called New Economic Policy, which is like, capitalism of some kind is okay. That took the boot off the neck of some of the small businessmen. It quelled some of the unrest and allowed the communists to consolidate power during the '20s. Then of course, Stalin dialed the Red Terror back up in the '30s. This is a common thing. You acquire power under just terrorism, like 1917 to 1921 in the Soviet Union, or frankly, 2020 in America, and then you ease up.

Yep.

You ease up a bit and you allow people to get comfortable and so on and so forth. Coming back 30 points to the right. Starting foreign wars and confronting not just Russia, but Russia and China at the same time. There's a bunch of folks who are just happy that the US is just fighting guys abroad, and they're not attacking people at home. They're burning down other countries, not burning here. They don't care that it's a fight with 2 nuclear powers, that Pelosi is trying to cause a fight on the base of Taiwan. for no reason in the middle of a war with Russia. They don't care about that stuff. It's just like America. And the thing about this is that unfortunately will work. There's a fair fraction of people who, once it's no longer BLM, but it's bombs away overseas, will shift back. They will come back to the state. Now, so that's a pivot from wokeism to statism. Then by the end of this decade, it'll probably take the form of, unless you hold US dollars, you are a traitor, or something along those lines. If you leave America, you're a traitor, if you do X or Y or Z. The nationalism and socialism are merging, just like the move from the Democrats to take the China issue, just like I previously mentioned, they'll probably take the immigration issue. The most unpredictable perhaps thing is they'll eventually flip on race by the 2030s. Why? Because they're going to be— all the blue checks are going to be competing with, uh, essentially global technology, which is mostly non-white.

Yeah.

Which people don't really understand yet, right? It's mostly non-white. It's Indians, but it's South Americans. It's, you know, it's, it's Arabs, it's East Asians, it's everybody, okay? Africans, Nigerians, and so on. Like, you're, you're competing with global technology, and, uh, that is bringing your earnings down in competition, which you never had to have before. for. I think it's quite possible that they flip on that. The immigration thing, flipping on China is like V1. Flipping on immigration is thinkable once you flipped on China. Then flipping on even race, just like— Again, the precedent is, it's hard to see that today. The concept that in the 2000s, when Republicans were going after the terrorists, that by In 2001, Republicans were going after terrorists. By 2021, Republicans were being called terrorists by the government.

Yeah.

So the government run by Republicans was going after terrorists and now the government was calling the Republicans the terrorists. The same laws that they passed were now being used against them. That's quite a flip in 20 years from these people who were so gung-ho about protecting America. And then of course in 20 years everybody's a terrorist.

People in Asia or Africa are going to use the same kind of progressive redistributionist language against elite Black and Hispanics in the US.

Well, because that's the thing is if you go overseas, basically America is privileged. If you apply You know, woke whites in the US do not apply that lens to themselves typically, right? And now, if you just apply the lens of privilege, who's been privileged for a long time, and what does it actually look like to, quote, check that privilege? It is the rest of the world actually coming up and becoming economically competitive, not simply getting handouts and NGO charity stuff. Charity is dependency. Investment is independence.

I'm laughing at the idea of check your privilege combined with the new MAiD laws that Canada is adopting.

It's like, Well, I don't actually— what are the main laws?

They're like, uh, assisted suicide. Um, it's like, uh, yeah, people, they're like, uh, young people who are dealing with depression and want to kill themselves.

Oh yeah, it's very sad.

Yeah, it's tragic. They're letting them kill themselves without like their parents' supervision, you know, uh, like overriding their parents. And so you could imagine it's like, in order for me to check my privilege, I'm going to kill myself.

You know, it's like, you know, that sounds like a caricature now. But honestly, like, you can imagine it getting to that insane level, right? Because there's no recipe on what do you do to make amends for your imagined sins or whatever, right?

Yeah.

So basically though, by 2030-something, it's quite possible that China's the number 1 economy, India's number 3, right? The US is number 2, but clearly declining. And white privilege doesn't feel so privileged anymore, right? You're already seeing a resentment of like foreigners and whatnot. As that grows and lots of folks are no longer picking the US as a place to invest in or the place to immigrate to, or even leaving the US and going abroad, you'll see a resentment and anger. That will be reflected in the same way that the bumptious nationalism of the last administration was like America, FBA.

Yeah.

There's a version of that that's only slightly more refined, which is, we're the democracy and human rights and all of you brown countries, don't have human rights and democracy. That's just a slightly more sophisticated version, but it just so happens that if you go and make all these maps, Sweden's maps of democratic freedoms and so on, it's all the rich white countries with the exception of the few that the US has military bases in, like Japan and South Korea and so on. So it's essentially synonymous with that. All that patronization, Once there's actually rejection and other countries, other people from around the world are able to go their own way, that'll curdle into resentment. That combined with relative economic decline will lead to, I think, rising nationalism and socialism. Basically, the prediction is just like it was unthinkable that the Republicans would go from being against terrorists to actually in 2021 being somewhat sympathetic to the Taliban and feeling like they were the ones who are now being called terrorists.

Yeah.

I could see a flippening on that as well with wokeism, where it just turns into a curdled, resentful chauvinism, at least. If not racism, maybe racism against Chinese nationals, but certainly American chauvinism, I can absolutely see, just against non-Americans. Then the other side of it, not opposed to it, probably also somewhat summing with it, somewhat opposed to it. It's like a vector which has some parts that sum and some that are against. is Bitcoin maximalism taking over the Republicans. Why do I think that happens? Because just like wokeism is like a network that's above the Democrats and also somewhat contemptuous of them, it's like a ghost that inhabits the party but is really an independent thing. It's a network that stands outside the state. So too, Bitcoin maximalism is like a network that stands outside the Republicans. It's like more radical and more principled in a sense than any mere elected or official could be. And the thing about it is Bitcoin maximalism rejects the— I mean, it rejects lots of things. It starts with rejecting the Fed, but it goes on actually towards— it's like a left-right combination because it rejects every fortune that was created in America because they're all Cantillon heirs, aren't they? Do you know what the Cantillon effect is?

Yeah.

Yeah. Cantillon effect, the first people who get access to the printed money buy more assets with it. And then the poor guy in the Midwest who gets the money last, it's like a hot potato and it has no buying power by the time it gets to them. Everybody's got assets. They're all cantillionaires. All the banks are corrupt. All the governments are corrupt. Everybody's corrupt. See, that's the thing is there's a truth to this. Just like, why did communism get a lot of traction in the early 20th century? Because industrial age working conditions were tough. I mean, if you've seen those mines, those factories, they were tough. Were they probably better on average than what preceded them, like more stable in terms of outcome? Yes. But in that adaptation, you did have unscrupulous factory owners. You had things like the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. You had those things. Now, of course, the solution to that is to come up with a system of checks and balances where employers treat employees better and better competition and so on. The non-solution is communism, where both worker and boss end up in a gulag.

Yeah.

It's lose-lose. But there was a problem. Similarly, a lot of things that maximalists say are true, the money printing, the political corruption, and so on and so forth. What's going to happen, though, is basically once they just lose faith in the electoral process entirely, which is starting to happen, It might be one of those delayed reaction things where maybe it's 2024 and DeSantis is— it's some contentious election and Florida basically pushes for a Quebec-like solution. You know Quebec?

Yeah, in Canada.

Quebec has quasi-home rule in Canada. It's part of the union, but it's also not. It's got its own special things. Lots of things that Florida is doing is it's setting up its own National Guard. It's got its anti-CDC. It's saying that it's not going to enforce federal laws. This is all continuous with actually a lot of the stuff the left started with sanctuary cities. But sanctuary cities, it's gun laws, it's drug laws, it's abortion laws. It's states suing the feds on education. 17 states sued the feds on the 2020 election and on many other things. All of that probably leads to something where Bitcoin maximalists Maybe they operate at the state level, maybe they're just rejectionist crypto-anarchists entirely, but that is sort of to the Republicans what I think wokeness was to the Democrats. And it's building this dichotomy.

Yeah.

One way of looking at that is it's just totally different from 1950s conservatism in the same way that wokeness is very different than communism. There's aspects of it that seem similar, but for example, it operates on the network, not within the factory. It's a network ideology, not a state ideology, fundamentally. It's got a different demographic. It's for women and minorities, not for workers and peasants. And it is about status redistribution, not money redistribution. There are similarities, but also differences. In the same way, the nationalist Republican conservatism is replaced by this militant ultralibertarianism, What's funny about that is for me to say that, people are like, what do you mean? Aren't you an ultra-libertarian? But I'm actually a pragmatist. I'm actually pro-civilization. I'm not against all states. I'm for consensual government and opt-in. Fundamentally pragmatic in that sense. It is actually possible for there to be a caricatured libertarian who's just genuinely— The Free State Project had a lot of good stuff in principle about it. But all these people moved there and some of them, the first thing they did is they started to fight seatbelt laws.

Yeah.

And it's like, okay, is that the first thing you want to fight with your political capital over there or do you want to reform other things? So it's possible to have an insane ultralibertarianism that is as insane in its own way. It's so low trust that it's so libertarian that it's anti-capitalist, that no CEO is to be trusted, that every new tech is actually a scam or a fraud. It's so cynical that it leeches all the trust out of the public sector as a way to say, okay, now the wokes can't cheat us anymore. True. But you also can't build anything anymore. You need some trust to have a society. So those are 2 things I can see arising, sort of an American chauvinism and a statism that kind of, you know, wokeism transitions to statism, and then Bitcoin maximalism, which is like a rejection of all institutions. And those come to a head, I think, if and when there's an attempt to seize Bitcoin.

Yeah.

Because that then fractures society right on that axis that is not the Democrat-Republican axis of left-right, but it's the top-down, bottom-up axis, I think. I don't know when that comes, but I think it eventually comes.

Those are interesting polls. What about Elon taking over the right-wing party or someone like Elon? It's interesting, just to zoom out for a second, sometimes you're a fan of the agree and amplify strategy. One example might be the combination of tech and progressive, like, end genetic privilege by encouraging gene engineering or editing or something like that. There's synergy there. And other times you're like, let's reject the frame completely. Whereas like, just transition, like, don't fight something head-to-head, just transition to the next platform or next thing. And Elon is, I don't know if he's greening or amplifying, but he's certainly fighting just head-on. And there's a possibility of him like, There's people taking over conservatism, right? And it seems, or the based billionaire, Peter Thiel has done this.

I think Elon's win strategy would be having all servers in red states relocating to Florida or Texas and not leaving there at this point, right? And I think you could maybe win that way. For some definition of win, if you have a win scenario. But it's really hard because you're basically— the problem is it's hard to be a man that fights a movement. Okay? This is— you could be a man that fights a man or a movement that beats a man, but it's hard for a man to beat an entire movement. That movement needs to be exhausted in some way. Right. Or that man needs to create such a business model that he can align millions and millions and millions and millions of people behind it, right? Elon has part of that, but he doesn't have all of it. He doesn't have like a full parallel economy where everybody who believes in Elon can get a job in Elondia, right? And, uh, you know, that's, that's where crypto could come in handy eventually. But what is the plan to win, right? You know, you Basically, it's like the, um, you know, it's, it's over— it's overused, but the Sun Tzu thing, you know, successful. I mean, look, Elon's one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time. I'm not gainsaying that. And he is a genius and he can figure things out. By the way, just to talk about that for a second, why is Elon so respected among our community? Well, we all say, which is true, hardware is hard. Hardware is really hard. And to simply ship like a Like a beige box that sits on a desktop is pretty hard to do given all the ridiculous supply chain stuff and dealing with China and, and, and you just can't iterate on it. And even if you can ship it, it's got low margins and it gets copied and blah, blah, blah. All that is true. And for him to not just ship a beige box, but to ship Tesla and SpaceX, which are not just, you know, an internal, you It's not like one beige box. It's like how many different pieces of electronics are in something like that? It's not something which you can crash and then reboot. It's a good piece of hardware, but like a Dropcam. Dropcam is a pretty good company, great company, in fact. But that is a much less ambitious piece of physical hardware than a Tesla. In fact, there's essentially Dropcams within Teslas among many other components. And then forget about SpaceX, it's yet another level beyond that. So to do not one incredibly difficult hardware company, but 2 to the level of success he's done them during the crazy supply chain stuff that would kill most normal companies, I don't even understand how it's possible, honestly.

Right.

It's just something where so many companies got killed in 2020 and 2021 where just Supply chains just got choked off, right? And to go to record highs, even in the printed money environment, I don't even get it, right? This is like— that's why greatest of all time or what have you, just on Tesla and SpaceX. And then to add on top of that, Boring Company and Neuralink and PayPal and Zip2. There's a reason that everybody thinks he's the greatest, right? By a lot out there, right?

Yeah.

And those are unrelated companies as well. It's not like Google where you have one code base and you can kind of run search or everything. You get some compounding value.

Right.

Engineers can move across the code base. You can ship and iterate. None of that is there. You have to stick the landing. So it's ridiculously operationally demanding, incredibly unforgiving in multiple businesses. So given all of that, it is true, however, that all you are dealing with at some level is the laws of physics. The car has to work, the spaceship has to work, whereas a social network is more the laws of man. That's not something where you can just solve the equation and it's done, and then you just need to sell it. It is something where it'll just keep adapting on you, it never stops. I don't know. What I think is, gun to my head, it's a very low probability prediction, but it feels like— Uh, best case, um, this is just, you know, song and dance and it'll go on forever, just like, you know, Trump, you know, whatever went on forever. And people will break off of Twitter and do their own mini Twitters, and that's actually good. You know, there's Farcasters and Posters, and, you know, uh, like there's things on the left like, uh, Tribal, and there's, uh, you know, of course there's Parler and Truth Social and Gab, and there's a zillion of these now, which is good. It is good to have lots of Twitters and Discords and Reddits and to break away from this giant war zone and for people to find their own communities. And then I hope that just Elon has great physical security and maybe just lives in an area where people are not booing him. California is a bad place to be for Twitter's offices and for him physically. It's like being a Sunni in Shiite territory. I mean, I'm serious, right? Republican-Democrat is an ethnic conflict now, like Sunni-Shiite.

This idea of the based billionaire, you know, we've seen a lot of billionaires kind of follow in this like Davos elite class, like even SBF, right? You know, a 30-year-old billionaire, but like, you know, classic Davos elite. Like, do you— when it's just ironic that, you know, billionaires who are so contrarian in the professional life become so like homogeneous. Um, you know, once they become billionaires, like, do you imagine a world, it was almost like Galt's got like Bezos and like these others just like kind of move over to the Elon side? Or do you think Elon and Thiel will always be like the, you know, just this very small, do you foresee a real counter elite?

Well, yes. I mean, but the thing is that it is, here's the important thing. These people may be seen as being on the right in the U.S., but they're on the left in China.

Interesting.

Which means they're in the global center because woke America is the farthest left entity in the world and Communist China is the farthest right country in the world. In woke America, as I've said, whites go to the back of the line for vaccines. Whites are the worst. That's the official ideology. In Communist China, Han Chinese are the best. That's the official ideology. Ethnomaskism and ethnic nationalism. In the middle, you have the pseudonymous economy. You have global meritocracy. You have the American centrist or conservative, and you have the Chinese liberal. You have the Israelis, and you have the Indians, and you have South Americans and everybody who's outside of the binary, Erik. We're contesting the binary.

Non-binary.

The thing is that the based billionaire or centrist billionaire or decentralist billionaire. One of the reasons Bitcoin becomes a flag of technology is, you know that saying like, you know, billionaires are a policy failure, billionaires should not exist? Well, before Bitcoin, arguably billionaires did not really exist. And what I mean by that is bigger instrument like that amount of money to carry on your person or securely outside the reach of the US and Chinese government. did not really exist. I think we're going to see the limit case of that in 2030. In Greece, in 20— or Cyprus rather, in 2013, do you know what the— you've heard of bailouts, you know what bail-in is?

No.

When your deposits in the bank are used to bail out the bank. The haircut of like 25% in Cyprus in 2013, Zero Hedge reported on this.

Almost like FTX, or not even because FTX.

Yeah, yeah, it's like FTX. Basically, the depositors. Okay, Cyprus 37.5% depositor haircut upgraded to 47.5% Brazilian wax. So basically, the something like. 47.5% of their deposits were just used to bail out the banks or bail in the banks. One day you wake up, half your money is gone, and it's being used to get worthless equity in some stupid Cyprus bank. That thing has happened in developing countries all the time. That may come to the developed world. We're seeing the truckers getting their funds frozen.

Yeah.

This is one of those things. It's not like there's one fire alarm that rings. Honestly, 2020 was the fire alarm. If 2020 did not wake people up, if the insanity of mid-2020 and literally a month of arson, riots, armed robberies, crazy glassy-eyed people walking around the streets, people with automatic weapons and masks, cars being pulled over, mobs screaming, the police standing aside and doing nothing, or cowed, or defeated. 2020 was a preview, I think, of 2030 in the same way that 2008 and the bailouts were a preview of the bailouts of 2020, unfortunately.

Yeah.

I don't know. Look, who knows? Maybe it's just all— maybe I'm wrong. Maybe all the people are like— it reminds me of The Onion, the Counterpoint No.

No.

So basically, this was this great thing here. Just look at that. This war will destabilize the entire Mideast region and set off a global shockwave of anti-Americanism versus no, it won't.

Right.

Right? And this was March 2003. And basically, Trust me, it's all going to work out perfect. Nothing is going to happen. It's all under control. Okay, maybe that's true. Maybe you can really just base rate the whole thing to infinity, even when all these other indicators are down and to the right. Maybe it'll last much longer than we think. Maybe there'll be some amazing person who comes in and turns around the whole thing, a Napoleon or something, and you won't have to do anything.

Yeah.

Could be, very much could be. But, uh, but it's on my bet. Yeah.

It's on my bet. Well, uh, we'll, we'll find out. Uh, Balaji, I want to let you go. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast. It's been a great episode.

Great.

Awesome. Talk soon. Oh, by the way, go and read thenetworkstate.com.

Yes, exactly. Free, free online.

Free online. Okay.

See you guys. Take care. SecureFrame is the leading all-in-one platform for security and privacy compliance. Get SOC 2 audit ready in weeks. Not months. I believe in Secure Frame so much that I invested in it, and I recommend it to all my portfolio companies. Sign up for a free demo and mention Upstream during your demo to get 20% off your first year. Now more than ever, startup founders need a safe place to put their cash. Mercury protects your money and also provides the streamlined user experience that great founders expect. Through partner banks and their sweep networks, Mercury offers up to $5 million in FDIC insurance, Which is 20 times the per-bank limit. They also make it easy to invest any cash above the FDIC-insured amount in a money market fund. 100,000 startups trust Mercury with their finances. I've been a happy Mercury customer and have found their team incredibly helpful and responsive. They even got an important wire out of purgatory on Christmas Eve. After all, your Christmas is my opportunity. Visit mercury.com to get started. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank and Trust, members FDIC. MarketerHire is one of my favorite resources for startups looking to hire marketers. With thousands of pre-vetted marketers across a dozen roles, MarketerHire matches you to your perfect marketer in 48 hours. Whether you need help with growth marketing, SEO, lifecycle content, or any other aspect of your marketing strategy, MarketerHire has you covered. So if you're a founder looking for top-notch marketing talent to help grow your startup, Head over to marketerhire.com to find your perfect match. Sign up with referral code Upstream and you'll get $1,000 credit on your first hire.