Balaji Srinivasan on the Rise of the Tech Counter Elites

On Upstream this week, I sat down with Balaji Srinivasan for his take on the distinct vibe shift in Silicon Valley after Trump's assassination attempt. We discussed the core tensions at play between incumbents and the rise of the tech counter-elite and his views on January 6th. Please enjoy.

Balaji, the, the vibe shift has been insane the past couple weeks. Did, did tech just take over the Republican Party or what's, what's happening right now between Peter Thiel, you know, having picked JD Vance, JD Vance now being the VP between a16z and Elon and others endorsing Trump? What's, what's going on here?

So there's a combination of several different things happening. Where there are some people who have been— first of all, there's left, center, and right within the American spectrum. And then there's also other spectrums outside. Like, for example, you know, there's people who are nationalists of their own countries and they're Hungary first as opposed to America first. And of course, China is its own thing, right? So American left and right don't span the whole spectrum of global ideologies. Even American left, center, and right don't, With that very important proviso, and the reason I think that's important is we're going to see a breaking into many ideologies soon. There's like several different things going on at the same time, I think. First, there are a group of people within tech who have been on the, let's call it libertarian right, for essentially 30 years, right? That's Sacks, that's Thiel, right? That's other folks associated with them, right? And they've been not just influential in tech, that understates it. They have created a lot of what modern tech is, you know, the PayPal Mafia and so on. Now, of course, some of them like Reid are on the left, right? But mostly they're center-right libertarian or what have you, Palantir. And there's a libertarian and statist interplay there because there's an internal tension on the right between libertarianism and statism in the same way there is on the left between The activist who's like burning things down and the regulator who's papering things up, right? And so that tension exists on both sides, you know, the statist and libertarian, right? So one is there's just been a long— that there's been a demographic there that's been like that. The second is that historically tech was Democrat, so Democrats liked it, and capitalist, so Republicans liked it. I'm talking Pre-2013, and tech was not even seen as really its own faction or something like that. It was seen as really a subunit, if anything. It's like, what's a good way of putting this? I don't know. Toaster manufacturers, gadget manufacturers, right? Like you're not thinking that much about the politics of like who the car company CEOs are or something like that, right? And you can see an argument of Republican because made in America, but Democrat because it's union, or I don't know, something like that. But they are, they just aren't influential or powerful or doing things in the same way that, I mean, Tesla's a car company, but it's a tech company because it's built, you know, new from the internet, right? So the hypergrowth of tech out of basically nothing from 1991, because the internet commercial traffic was legalized on the internet in 1991, this counter elite started in 1991. That's actually around the time that Sacks and Thiel and so on published their stuff. So the first dynamic is there being people who have been, let's say, critics on the libertarian right for a long time. The other thing though to remember is that those folks are also in a sense, and this is much less obvious because we take this for granted now, but it was certainly not the case in the '80s. Like, you know, maybe the majority, maybe the supermajority of people who are in tech are Immigrants or Asian or gay or Jewish or some combination thereof, right? It's probably like 50-plus percent if you, if you add a, if you do an OR function on all those categories, right? Like you and I satisfy like 1.5 out of 2, whatever, you know, woke math there is on that, right? So the reason I say that is that's actually genuinely significantly to the libertarian left of the 1950s consensus. You know, like what tech looks like today is not what Shockley Semiconductor or Fairchild looks like, even if we respect them, and I do. Demographically, it looks very, very, very, very different, right? Even if there is a torch that's being passed every year, right? So that's the other part that's subtle, and that, you know, if you think about it, being a gay billionaire is both far to the left and far to the right of the 1950s consensus. Does that make sense?

Yeah. Yeah. That's why I was so meaningful that Thiel said that he was gay at the RNC convention. Like that would—

Yeah. And I'm not even saying I didn't— I mean, like, obviously Thiel is maybe the most prominent one of that category. But when I say that now, there's actually like maybe 10 of them we can think of who are, you know, like out and it's fine and so on and so forth. And they can be both gay and a billionaire and it's fine. Or they can be brown and a billionaire, or they can be whatever, they can be anything. And wokeness is considered to go so far that it's not simply tolerance, but it is going way beyond that into, oh, you're gay or you're brown or you're this or that, so you're special and you're better. It way overshoots equality and tolerance and goes into this own insane kind of thing of pulling out intersectional credentials. But we should realize, the reason I say this, I'll get to my point, is that actually the tech guys are not just to the capitalist right, but also to the internationalist left of what the US was in 1950. The second part is more subtle because it's not really stressed. But for example, 90% of tech's users plus are from overseas. Probably 80, 90% of the revenue for big tech companies at this point, depending on which one you look at, is probably overseas, right? Because the US is only 4% of the world. So even if it's 5x overrepresented in your revenue share, that's 20%. If it's 10x represented, that's 40%, but still the majority is from outside, right? So users are overseas, revenue is overseas, and headcount is also often from overseas, right? Like either immigrant or child of immigrants. And the reason I say all that is it is not enough to just calling it tech right. Yes, we are focusing on the fact that it is to the capitalist and pro-progress right of the people, Democrats today. But after this election, it is quite possible it will be to the internationalist left of Republicans tomorrow. It's really the tech center. And let me explain what I mean by that. The most obvious one is skilled immigrant visas, right? Like basically, you know, if you, if you were told that you had quotas and it went from left-wing quotas of DEI to the right-wing quotas of hire only US citizens, that right-wing quota does exist, for example, in some national security kinds of things. And it's a genuine hiring barrier, right? It doesn't stop everything, but it is a hiring barrier. It means you can't hire remote anymore. It means like you're limited in your pool from 90, 100% of the world to 4% of the world, right? So that's like one obvious thing. Like you can't hire skilled immigrants, you can't hire remote. There will be that backlash, number one.

Okay.

Number 2 is just in terms of making things in the USA, People are sort of saying that in the abstract, and there's a building consensus that that should be done. But you know how expensive a phone would be if it was entirely made in the U.S.? If people just tried to do that overnight? See, the thing is, they want to try to order a supply chain off Amazon like it's a product you can order off Amazon. That's not what it is. You know another word for a supply chain, like at the scale they're talking about it? An economy. Okay, right. Like the China supply chain. is a million people in factories grinding on screws and bolts and nuts and sleeping on cots and doing stuff that Americans did 50 or 70 or 100 years ago but aren't doing today. So point being that if you tried to also force tech companies to make things in America, you can get— I mean, on a long-term basis, maybe there's something there. I do think there's something there with robotics and so on and so forth. I'll get to that point in a second. But on a short-term basis, no, you just like, you're talking about, it's just a delusion. You, you, people who are saying that have not actually looked into, for example, there's actually a, do you know the Free Libra? Do you know what that is?

What is the Free Libra?

The Free Libra phone. Gosh, it's the made in USA. Hold on one second. It's a made in USA smartphone. I think I think it's like the Librem or something like that. Librem 5 USA. Okay. Without looking at it, these guys actually did it and I give them a lot of credit for actually doing it. They actually went through and they basically made everything in the USA. How much do you think the phone costs? First of all, how much does an Android phone cost?

How much does an Android phone cost? A few hundred dollars?

Yeah. How much does this cost?

$2,000?

With the sunscreen. Yeah, exactly. Right. So that's the reason I say that is let's anchor this in like actual reality, right? If people don't like inflation, you're talking for some things, 10x price increases.

Yeah.

Okay. So, so that gets the second way in which tech is to the internationalist left of Republicans in where they're going, which is they are global free trade kind of folks like You do have global supply chains. You are investing abroad. You have investors from abroad. And if you saw, for example, the recent— I'm not saying anything negative about anybody, okay? Without naming the person, there was a prominent Republican who gave an interview that it seems like it was actually a quote and it could be fake news and so on, but it does jive with other things where he said, we're going from America first to American citizens first.

Okay.

And there's a very strong emphasis effectively on the set of people who hold the same passport. Okay. But that set of people includes the people who are burning self-driving cars in San Francisco. And it does not include like the German engineer or something, or the remote worker who might be in your Slack. Okay. So it'll be a genuine hindrance from a labor and manufacturing standpoint. Okay. What's my— and then I'll bring it all home in a second. And the third thing is, this is not exactly internationalist, but certainly technologist. Tech guys love AI. They don't like just employing random people to do random jobs. They want productivity. They don't want to create lots of union jobs and whatnot. There's a sort of right-wing socialism as well, which is you should be giving your money to US citizens after you're going to see a lot more of that. Right. And. You can go from quotas from somebody because they're a minority group to quotas because they're a US citizen very, very easily. You could see a bizarro flip world, right? And it'll result in similarly bad things because you're not going to be getting the best people in the world, right? Now, will it be, I should say similarly bad? It won't be as bad, but it may be somewhat bad, right? Like you still have a large pool to draw on and so on. It's still, you know, it's a, It's about the size of the pool. It's not extreme quotaism, but it's still quotaism, right? So the reason I say all that is I think it's overstated how much the tech right is on the right. I think the tech right is in the center because capitalism is the center, nationalism is the right, and communism or socialism is the left. Capitalism is the center, nationalism is the right, okay? And a capitalist nationalist coalition seems reasonable to us, but you've of course also— we've also seen in history Nationalist-socialist coalitions, and even actually with woke capital, socialist-capitalist coalitions, surprisingly, right? Because they're both internationalists. Go ahead.

So why is tech taking over the Republican Party to the extent that that's happening, or trying to infiltrate the Republican Party, as opposed to— should tech be trying to infiltrate the Democrat Party and take over?

Short answer, starting— you can argue when it started, whether it's the '60s or the '30s, or you can put it earlier. But basically for a while, IQ has been flowing to Harvard and MIT and institutions like this. Like the best kids get picked by the SAT or whatever college, you know, high school grades and go to, you know, elite schools. And those are ideological choke points where they come out manufactured. I mean, there aren't that many times in somebody's life where they're going to sit down and listen to lots of political and historical content and absorb that and come to a view around the world. For the vast majority of people, that happens basically when they're teenagers, and then they get that install in their head, and then they go out into the world and they never think about those things again. They never question their base premises. Their worldview is basically formed. Once in a while, they're mugged by reality. Some serious personal event happens to them and they have to reconcile that, and they realize what they've been taught is a lie, and then they come up with a new thing. But most people just take that Windows Premium Ultimate install that they get at Harvard or MIT and they just go with it. And that's been a Democrat install for many, many, many years. And so gradually educated people have been shifted to the left, right? They've been taught a worldview where whites are privileged and men are patriarchy and so on. It was funny that Pew actually ran a thing recently calling that, amazingly, you know what they called that? Racial conspiracy theories. Unbelievable. What a great term. Just like, honestly, how much do people discuss this stuff? With those 3 words, racial conspiracy theories, where, where they basically say, oh, that race is conspiring against you. Where's my check from the conspiracy? Like, they, you could use all the same lines, you know what I mean? Right. How are they coordinating? Is there the man in charge who's telling all the men what to do? Right. So they, they are taught to give credence to these, these conspiracy theories, the, the, the Blue Anon type theories. Right. And that's their worldview and they come out with them. And then what happened was in 1991, because the internet commercial traffic was legalized on the internet, I, I, you know, this is one of the most important events in human history that just doesn't get the press and, and attention it deserves. Essentially, you know, commercial traffic was not legal on the internet before 1991. You know why?

No, why?

Because it was only for .edu and .mil users. It was like a military and educational network. And they said, hey, you know, look, if we let commercial traffic on the internet, There's going to be scams and spam and malware and porn. And they were right, completely and totally right, that there's quite a lot of that out there, right? But there's also the rise of Google and, and dot-coms and all this, all this amazing stuff, right? And so what happened then was the frontier reopened and all these elites that were at Harvard or what have you, there's suddenly a new terrain they could go to and they could start defecting. So, Bezos left, right? Gates left. Zuck left. Marc Andreessen left UIUC. Paul Graham, who could have had a career certainly as a Harvard computer scientist, he left. Peter Thiel could have been a jurist on the Supreme Court. He left. Mike Moritz could have been a journalist. He left. All of them left for the internet, for this new frontier. And so, the top talent that in another life without the internet would've been Elon would have been running NASA and Peter Thiel would have been a Supreme Court judge and Paul Graham would have been a Harvard computer scientist. And I don't know, Patrick Collison would be running the Department of Commerce or whatever it is, right? In an alternate reality. In fact, in the 1950s, this giant federal government had all these people who are today at the caliber of tech CEOs and founders. They were the guys running all these agencies. And so if there was some stupid rule, the equivalent of Patrick Collison would call up Elon, would call up Zuck, And they'd be like, okay, it's a stupid rule. Let's just do it this way. Okay. And when you had the network effect of all these really talented people, it didn't really matter what the written laws were. They'd make it work somehow. And they got to the moon and they built this amazing country. Right. But after the magic leaves, after the founders leave, okay. And it wasn't visible to us because there's this giant bureaucracy. Once in a while you hear about— I don't know, Vannevar Bush, or you hear about guys like that. You know, actually, James Watson, for example, is on the, the lagging tail of that, but that's like an example of a founder bureaucrat where he joined the Human Genome Project and by force of will actually made that work. Okay, where he's like a founder bureaucrat, which is not a concept we normally think of today, but there's a network effect there where if all those guys now leave and they go to the frontier Then you only have these idiots in government, and what a pain! Like if there's if there's nobody you can call and nobody who has any idea of how to get anything done, and they're all just there for the status, and you know give you know they have no page nothing nothing. Then why would you be there? You you also leave. So you have a negative you have a network effect going in, but you have a network effect coming out. Okay, and so I think the main concept is it's not that tech. is the tech right or the tech left or the tech center. It's the tech counter-elite.

Yeah.

That's the most important thing. It is not left, right, center, whatever. It's a counter-elite that obviously Elon is a better leader than Biden. Biden, Biden doesn't even exist as a human. I said that before to you. You remember, like a year or two ago, like, whatever, 3 years ago, 4 years ago, Biden doesn't exist as a human being. It is literally like a committee vote who's named Biden. He only sca— like, go ahead.

No, I'm just laughing because people are like, I'd literally support someone dead or in a coma over Trump because it's like, there's— how big of a difference is there? It's like, uh, well, that's—

well, that's the thing is, I mean, like, think— I mean, to put it like, I mean, Christianity, Jesus Christ is dead. And, you know, Catholicism— let's say Protestantism has a dead, you know, Jesus Christ has passed away, but there's a live Pope, right? So Catholicism has a live leader. and Protestantism doesn't. So there's precedent for that, many precedents for that, where people will prefer a, quote, decentralized ideology over one that has a leader they disagree with. Right?

Yeah. And you question that dichotomy a bit between sort of Democrats as this sort of this, this party that's decentralized versus, you know, individuals who can actually make a difference.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So, so I think it's very important to understand the difference between communists, like of old school, and Democrats, Versus, for example, what'll happen is people will use 20th century things and they'll call each other communist, fascist, blah blah, versus what what these things are today, right? So communism was centralized left. There was a Stalin, there's a Mao, there's a Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, right? It all folded up to one guy who you know had this giant you know there was a leadership structure, right? And what beat communism centralized left was ultimately centralized right. So it's Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan, and it's obviously Reagan, it's Thatcher, and so on and so forth. Ultimately, after a long struggle, was— and actually, I shouldn't even say centralized right, it was centralized center as well, because it's really the far right also got beat. The Nazis also got beat, but the capitalist nationalists who were center-right, they had the right fusion that they could beat communism. And actually, do you know why I think the center or center-right was able to beat the left, but the right wasn't?

Why?

Because if you're far right, you're such a nationalist that you're like, Aryan supremacy, and there aren't that many Aryans in the world, right? And so, for example, Germany had like 70 million people, and I forget, I think it was like 50 million, 70 million, but the combined US, UK, and Soviet Union were like 4 or 5x that number. You can look up the exact numbers, but I think it was something like 50 to 200 million or 70 to 280. Forget the exact numbers, in that ballpark, right? So even despite all the madness and badness and craziness and all the murders and all the bad stuff they did, they also didn't actually build a coalition. In fact, if they'd built a bigger coalition, then they might not have— they'd have been a completely different thing. They may have looked more like— it's funny to put it this way. Let's say it. Let's say a different German leader had arisen. You would've had maybe a different outcome in the early 20th century. It might've been more capitalism pushing back on communism than far right. And so America had the right formulation, which was capitalism plus nationalism, center, center-right versus far right. And the reason is that with capitalism, you can actually do deals across borders. Nationalists all fight each other. Actually, one of the things about, for example, the Axis is it wasn't a real alliance. Like, like, like Germany and Japan didn't team up and attack the USSR. That's actually the most important fact of World War II in some ways, right? Like Stalin's War by Sean McMeekin is about that. Why didn't they do that? Whereas the Soviet Union and the USA and the UK did team up and attack and pincer from both sides. The reason is leftism, communism lets you cooperate across borders, workers of the world unite, and capitalism does because of international trade. but nationalism doesn't. Example, do you see how Trump kind of took a shot at Bukele?

Yeah.

Right. So that's something which is a preview, I think, what is partly, I think it's because Bukele and DeSantis are competitors within the right as he sees them. So he can see them getting a lot of mindshare. He just wants to make them, you know, kind of give them a hit and then have them, you know, fold into the hierarchy, you know, under Trump or something like that. But part of it is also that nationalists are so proud That they find it hard to cooperate across groups. Poland first, Hungary first. Ah, well, Poland first. No, Hungary first, right? And they fight back and forth, right? And so the tech counter-elite, I don't think, realizes how dumb that can get. A small example was like what— actually, here's another way of putting it, okay? Left, center, and right. The left thinks America is for racists. The center or tech thinks America is for winners, and the right thinks America is for Americans. Yeah, those are three very different visions of the world, right? You know, the left thinks America is bad and evil, and you know, so on and so forth. But the center and the right actually have very different visions. America is for winners versus America is for Americans. Like the way— what they are proud of, they both identify the flag with something. And so long as Americans are number one, then that's fine because they're saying the same thing. But you can definitely start to see a tension there where what is necessary for their companies and their personal projects as a platform for them to win is in tension with, you know, the citizens who want some sort of redistributive thing. Like, for example, jobs for just US citizens. There'll be a tension there. What's my point? Coming all the way back up, I don't think it's correct to think of it as the tech right. I think what happened was the Democrats were totally dominant. They had a counter-elite that went out to this internet frontier. The counter-elite built leadership skills, either capital allocation as investor or capital and talent allocation as CEO. And those are really the 2 skills you need, by the way, to run a political unit. You know, you need to be able to make judgment calls depending on what scale you're operating at. Either you're managing the personnel or you're managing the managers or some combination, right? At a large enough scale, a CEO is almost like a VC, you know, because you're running multiple conglomerates. Like Elon's job, he is actually very, you know, down in the guts of it, right? But at least Larry Page, for example, he tried to set up Alphabet so he was almost like the VC in charge of the whole thing. That didn't really work all that well, but it did work for For Berkshire. Okay. Point being, those skills of VC and CEO, people are like, oh, let's hear what the VCs have to say about this or that, as if you don't have a general job where you're looking at, I mean, after you've disrupted media and taxis and hotels and genetic testing and space and cars and this and that, yes, you have a global purview and you can actually look at anything and you can say, let me handicap that business. How can we use technology to go after it? So this counter-elite, essentially the vacuum was on the Republican Party side. And also the fact that all this IQ had drained out of the administration meant just the system itself is headed down. And that's not— it is, I'd say it's mostly a Democrat thing, but it's not entirely a Democrat thing because a good chunk of the wars and a good chunk of the printing and a good chunk of the spending were under Republican administrations. And even if there is a permanent regime, which I do agree with, that is mostly Democrat and that's there, it is still something where Republicans are in denial that they were responsible for that or that that can just continue indefinitely. For example, in the speech, Trump was like, we'll cut taxes and we'll also end the debt with this, that, and the other. And I'm like, there's a good graph on immigration, right? That was a good graph. Show me the graph on how you actually solve the debt because I don't actually believe that. And I mean, not to say I don't believe him specifically, but I just don't believe that it can be done. I've never seen any actual plan for even bringing it down. I don't think it can be done quantitatively. So my view is that it is just, it's sort of, it's almost like a SPAC. It's like there's this shell of a party over here that lost IQ and talent and so on and so forth. And now it's had this infusion of fresh blood, and now it's able to stand up and do amazing things potentially, right? And that's that can be good. I'm not saying that that's everything; that's just one of several different angles. Another angle certainly is lots of tech people were attacked in San Francisco by crazy people, drug addicts on the street that Democrats loosed. Another part is BLM burning things down. Another part is just seeing the internet censorship. There's many, many drivers here. I'm not you know. I'm certainly not putting, it's not monofactorial. It's a combination of Democrats doing a terrible job, overall decline, movement to counter-elites, preexisting people who were on the right, but they're also on the internationalist left. And then essentially this counter-elite emerging. Let me pause there.

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Why don't you say more about what the elites and counter-elites actually disagree on, right? If you put on the elite bucket, the, you know, Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates, Marc Benioff, these are, you know, very smart, successful people. And the counter-elites, Sacks, Andreessen, Elon, they're very successful people either too, and smart, very smart. What is the core disagreement?

So it's funny you posed it that way because that's posing it as an intra-tech disagreement. But if it's between factions, between the factions of elites as a whole and the counter-elites, I would basically say for Benioff, who are the other ones? Reid, who are the other ones you named? Probably the guy who funded The Intercept was his name.

Bill Gates, maybe that's too high level, but Reid Hastings, Reid Hoffman. I mean, we could address the larger elite, you know, counter-elite thing, but that Also the tech—

so I think, I think those— well, first of all, Benioff himself has just said fund the police.

Yeah, I saw that. That's interesting.

Right. So he's also like, I'm not even sure we'd count him in that category. Right. But I would say a good chunk of those folks believe either they— there's some combination of A, they still believe in the existing institutions. B, they still believe that they can work through the existing institutions to achieve their goals.

Okay.

C, they just have so much sunk cost socially and tribally in them that just old dog doesn't learn new tricks, you know. D, it's ideology, you know, sometimes. Like, there's certain things that sometimes— let's say somebody had, I don't know, let's say they went to— let's say they, they had a run-in with the law, or they had a relative who had a run-in with the law early on. That's the kind of thing— they saw how bad police were, and then they became sympathetic to that their whole life, you know what I mean? Certain— there's certain kinds of things you never know the whole human being. Is it saying like, you know, if you get mugged by reality, you become a conservative, but if you have, you know, bankrupt— medical bankruptcy, you become a liberal? You know, that kind of thing, right? It's like when you're— when you're weak, you go on the left, and when you're strong, you're on the right. And when you're harassed by the government, you're a libertarian, and when you're scammed by business, you become a regulator, regulatory statist, you know. So there's— I have some sympathy for that. But those are the people who we would consider rational actors. I don't think we can question, even if we question the specific decision-making, their business competence of Reid and Reid and Benioff, we can't question that. They're very, very good at what they do. We respected that. I think they would also have to say, people on the tech right or tech, whatever you want to call it, tech counter elite, are also pretty good at what they do. So call that part a wash. I think though that if you take the bigger set, those folks like Reed and Reed and so on, one thing that's interesting about this administration that I think is being underreported is that in 2020, Democrats— see, for many years, Democrats had eaten their cake and had it too, where Hollywood talked about equality and hired beauty. The New York Times talked about egalitarianism and actually practiced brutal elitism when hiring. Harvard would say, we are all equal, and also you're rejected. And also they're highly selective. So Hollywood, New York Times, Harvard, they could have this double standard of talk left, act right for many, many years. And that allowed them to broadcast all these nice messages to the world and also actually cut down all their rivals. Nobody else can administer standardized tests besides Harvard and also the US military, but no normal employer can. Nobody else can hire on the basis of beauty, but Hollywood could. So they did talk left, act right for a long time, but starting in 2020, the Andrew Yangs and the Reid Hoffmans and so on and so forth. Have you noticed, why is Matt Yglesias writing on Substack? Why is Noah Smith writing on Substack? Why aren't they Those are the best guys basically the Democrat Party has, right? Why is— why did they alienate Jesse Singal? Why did they alienate Nate Silver? Why'd they trade— you saw Nate Silver got an argument with like the DNC chairman or something like that. Trading that guy, trading Nate Silver for that guy is like, I don't know, trading like Steph Curry for like some journeyman shooting guard or something. You know what I'm saying? Right?

Yeah.

You literally traded one of your best guys for just Just like somebody doesn't even know what's going on. It doesn't have sophistication. And even the responses of that guy when he was arguing, do you know the thread I'm talking about? It's basically the thread where it's like Nate Silver arguing with the DNC chairman. He's like, I'll trust my lawyers and my legal team and their experience. And you just see right there the current Democrat blind trust in credentials and groups and committees and so on and so forth. And An almost instinctive distrust of excellence, heroism, leadership. To the point, by the way, they keep saying, oh my God, a dictator, a dictator, a dictator. What they're actually against is not dictatorship, but leadership. And so they've gone so far in the opposite direction, they've implemented a receivership. You know what I mean by receivership? A receivership is a perfect term for what the Biden regime is. A receivership is when a company is actually dysfunctional and it's controlled from the outside.

Yeah.

And who's controlling it? Well, it's usually like a committee or it's like, it's like under a consent decree or something like that. Basically, it's like, you know, it's controlled by the trustees for the beneficiaries, blah, blah. The point is there's no one leader in control anymore. It's like, it doesn't— it looks like a company, but it's in receivership. Makes sense, right? And, and that's what the US is under Democrats. It doesn't have a leader and they fear a leader coming in who would punish them for Iraq and punish them for The thou— like Russiagate and like the $100 billion train scam. They've done so many crimes and so many scams. Like, that's where, that's where all the money is going, right? And some of them are petty scams, and some of them, some of them, they just, uh, you know, they feel guilty conscience. Others, they just feel correctly that they would lose power if, you know, a new counter-elite came to power, you know. And so that's a huge part of what they're fighting about. And you can actually see that more clearly with the Biden thing because they're no longer saying, oh, Trump's a Russian or Trump's a racist. They're just saying Trump's a Republican, and so therefore he's bad. They're not even making the pretense of an ideological argument this time. Okay, that's enough. He's in other tribes, you know. And then within the Democrats, like, there's a scissor over Ukraine, there's a scissor over Israel. Those are ideological scissors that have cut the party internally to shreds. But with the Bidenists versus the post-Bidenists, There isn't really the layer of ideology there. It's just a pure, raw power struggle between members of the party, and you see what they actually are in that. You know, they're not—they're not saying—they're not claiming any ideological deviation, right? Normally they would, but they can't do that here because for—for a variety of reasons, he's given enough to the—I mean, they'll call him Genocide Joe or whatever, but. They're not going to be able to push him out and appoint AOC or something like that, right? There isn't a constituency for doing that. It's almost a center-left on center-left warfare. And you start to see the face of what the Democrat Party really is because it's an internal fight that exposes, oh, you know, like the same day the New York Times is saying it's a conspiracy theory, Axios is reporting that the Obama faction is pushing Biden out. But the entire point, you know, I should write a whole article and just quote the term conspiracy theory. Because, you know, don't tell me about a conspiracy theory is evolutionary theory. Conspiracy theory, tell me about your conspiracy practice. Conspiracy theory is conspiracy reality, right? You know, the, you know, what they'll often talk about is foreign agents, right? There's a, there's foreign agents, uh, you know, it's a, it's, it's a, it's a Russian plot. Well, a Russian plot is a conspiracy theory. The whole point of a conspiracy theory is there's some group that is not your group that is working against your group. The existence of other countries be called a conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theory is country theory, like, you know, in the sense of within the US there are 2 nations, Democrat and Republican, that are hostile to each other, and of course they're conspiring against each other. I mean, duh. That's what— like, in the same way that, like, China versus the US, Democrat versus Republican is like that, because it's not a US, it's a disunited state.

What is basically the core disagreement between the counter-elite and the elite?

The core disagreement is Who should run things? It really boils down to that. Should it be Elon who can get to you know whatever hundred rocket launches on a fraction of the budget of NASA, or should it be those people who've always done it? Right? Who is who is the better leader? Zuck Zuckerberg or Salzberger? Right? It's it's it's literally that, right? Who is better? The new counter elite that have risen and. Built money and media and music and getting to Mars and so on and so forth, built all that from nothing, the new money, or should it be the old institutions and so on and so forth? And the thing about that is it's not obvious. The new is more meritorious, but you know that saying like, gosh, I think it's Alex Rampell's, at least he's said it. And I think about it a lot. It's like the race is between whether an incumbent gets innovation before the Disruptor gets distribution. Now with the Republican Party, the disruptor has distribution, arguably, or it's getting there.

Yeah.

Does that make sense? Right.

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Well, so the thing is, the incumbent getting innovation was the attempted woke— like, one way I sort of think about a lot of these things is sometimes it's useful to analyze things at the level of individual human beings. But another way of analyzing things is in terms of metaorganisms. Okay, so let me just— bear with me as an analogy. Okay, you have cells in your body. You are made of multiple cells. Does your, like, skin, your epithelial cell, your skin cell, Does that know what's going on? No, but it's part of a global coordination, even if it doesn't have a brain of its own. You can coordinate it back and forth. We know that that kind of magic happens. Evolution has created that. Now, actually, it operates at one level higher. Why? You've seen ant colonies, right? You've seen a flock of seagulls. You've seen a school of fish. You've seen a pack of hyenas. There are multi-organism coordination mechanisms. Humans in particular are social animals, Right. And there are lots of papers on swarm intelligence and whatnot, lots of research on this where ants, for example, use actual pheromones and chemicals and stuff like that to signal to each other. And, you know, like Deborah Gordon at Stanford has this great talk, which is ants are dumb, ant colonies are smart. Okay. And with relatively simple signals, just like the simple bits and bytes of our, you know, computers. very, very simple chemical signals, you can get very complicated swarm intelligence and emergent behavior. But you can also mess it up if you put the wrong chemical there. The swarm gets confused and so on. So you can mess up a swarm, you can split a swarm. There's interesting things that happen. A swarm isn't invincible, but it is robust to any one node being lost. What's my point? Point is, once you start visualizing parties like the Democrat Party, the Communist Party, the Republican Party, the this party, the that party, as ant colonies or swarms, which are animated by an ideology. So imagine their eyes all glow with the ideology that possesses them. And these ideologies are competing with each other to uninstall the other ideology and install themselves. So it's almost like you're competing— WhatsApp wants to displace Signal out of your installed apps category, right? We already know that. Imagine they're all like phones and you're an app and you're trying to displace this other app and push it out and you're the better app. And there's a million tactics you could use to do that. You can have virality, you can spread between things, you can try and go and be default install and get a deal with Apple. You can get the other guy banned from the App Store. There's a zillion, zillion things you can do, right? And now just imagine that happening with humans and all the tactics you could have. So you have this competition in ideology space. You're going up a level from human. And the reason I find that a very valuable analytical lens— you've seen the NPC meme, right? So maybe you could put the NPC meme on screen.

Yeah, of course. I need an ad blocker.

Okay, read that headline.

FBI lost count of how many paid informants were at Capitol on January 6th and later performed audit to figure out exact number.

How about that? Okay, now put this one on screen. The Gretchen Wilmer kidnapping plot— Greenwald reported on this as well— was basically a Fed op, right? There were more informants or something than there were actual bad guys or something in the thing. And the reason is the— so take a look at that. FBI lured men for Michigan kidnap plot, right? So there is absolutely smoke around this whole affair. Where there appears to have been. Remember, these are the guys. You have to take the whole thing into account. The 51 intelligence agencies lied about Russiagate. We know that to be a lie. The 70 or sorry, the 17 intelligence agencies lied about Russiagate. We know that to be a lie. The 51 intelligence officers, they influenced the election with a fake report that the Hunter Biden story was Russian disinformation, and they got it censored to change the election. That's absolutely. indisputable that it— the Hunter Biden story was true. It was published in New York Post. It was censored via corporations, and it was done so at the behest of former intelligence officials or what have you, the 51. So we know that this kind of stuff is happening. We've got multiple examples of them lying about Russiagate. They lied about the Hunter Biden story. FBI did the Grusch and Vroman entrapment. These are things that are now admitted and on the public record. And we have quite a few reports, and you can look at this, On Fed involvement in J6, including congressional testimony. By the way, the Republican congressional testimony has people being read in, like Ray Epps. You can read about all that. So it's simply not the— to first order, Democrats were heavily involved in organizing BLM, and a lot of Feds, which overlap but are not the same as Democrats, were involved in J6. And the third bit is that J6 doesn't happen without months and months and months of BLM riots. Really, the thing that actually their blue team is mad about, and I think Curtis said this, is J6 was the first mob that happened to them. That's what they're mad about. All previous mobs had been blue mobs. This was the first partially red mob, even if Fed-inspired, right? Even if, you know, it was something that struck fear into them, but Because see, you know, if you put this article on screen, very, very important article. Okay, let me show you this. This is the most important one. Anybody who's talking about the J6 thing or whatever needs to read this article front to back and actually really understand it before they're saying anything. And I find that most people haven't done so. Put this one on screen if you haven't.

Okay.

This is ridiculously important article. This is basically like O.J.'s If I Did It.

Okay. Yeah.

And it's published just a few weeks after the Biden inauguration. Okay. And it's meant to like rub people's face in it, but it was basically for all these people to be able to brag about all they, all they had done now that Biden was safely ensconced and the money was starting to roll out to Democrats. Right. You know, the, the, these folks wanted to brag about what they had done. So look for Ctrl+F Zoom.

Yeah.

See, suddenly the potential in his apartment, Podhorzer, this is AFL-CIO guy, that he's an important ringleader intellectual on that side. He's one of the school of fish, really important nodes in the school of fish that you don't see. He started hosting a weekly 2.5-hour Zoom, right? And the labor movement, the institutional left, Planned Parenthood, resistance groups, progressive. So it was a conspiracy. In fact, they even say that in this. Okay. If you You know, here, look, look what it says. It's not a conspiracy theory, it's conspiracy reality. Control F for this conspiracy.

Conspiracy.

Yeah, they even admit this.

This one?

Uh, no, go up to the top. It's at the very top, first hit for it. Yeah, so scroll up a little bit. Yeah, from there.

There was a conspiracy unfolding behind this.

Yeah, in a way, Trump was right. There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprised. This is exactly what everybody saw happening, okay? Where there's basically a ton of Zoom calls and a lot of coordination, okay? And an extraordinarily shadow effort. And what they do is they admit everything they're doing here, and then they just cast it in verbiage and marketing spin to be The opposite of what it was they were doing. You know, they're basically swinging the election and they say we were fortifying it, right? So they admit it while lying about it. Does that make sense? Right? They just Russell conjugate in a certain way. And and the most important thing of this whole thing is stand down. Control F for stand down. So this whole article really should just be read front to back. But control F stand down. So. In context, what that shows is, why weren't there riots after the election? People actually expected them. Answer, the riots were on a string. I mean, after all, like, how hard is it to get 10 people to show up for a birthday party? It's actually really hard. Okay, have you done that? We've all organized parties, conferences. It's hard to get people to show up in one place. Do you know how hard it is to get tens of thousands of people to fight the police for days and days and weeks and weeks on end in multiple cities across the country? That's like a military operation. They're they're hand. What I mean by that is it is a military operation. They're handing out water bottles. They've got organizers with bullhorns and clipboards. They're being given instructions. There's tons of coordination that goes into something. Who's who's giving? I mean, who's paying these people's rent or whatever while they're out there doing this stuff? You know, like it's it's like what who are all those people, right? What who's organizing them? And this is the answer, right? It's this giant. Democrat school of fish that was organized. But crucially, Podhorzer was actually like a master node in this, or this group on the Zoom call, and he could tell them, stand down. So that means the riots, they could turn them on and they could turn them off. Very, very, very— the fact that they could turn the riots off means Democrats essentially terrorized America during the months of BLM into vote for us or else we'll burn down the country. And many people just voted for peace. Do you see what I'm saying? Moreover, something that's been completely memory holed were the June 2020 attacks on the White House, like the fires burn. I just want to show you this because it's been so memory holed, right? June 1st, 2020, J1 versus J6. Okay, look at that. Put that on screen.

Dude, your, your knowledge of these links is encyclopedic.

I just— I'm not— I'm— this way, people know way more about this than I do. I'm just Yeah.

Okay.

But if protesters set fire to vehicles, buildings near White House, does that sound like an attack on democracy? Okay, how about this? Fires burn near White House in violent U.S. protests. Fires flare near White House amid rising tensions with police. And then, and then this is how NYT reported it, okay? As protests and violence spill over, Trump shrinks back, right? Not violent protesters Attack on democracy and the president is forced to leave the White House. Like, it was such a tragedy. They portrayed it as so tragic when legislators had to leave the Capitol. But Trump is shrinking back and running and cowering when he has to leave the White House.

Right.

Right. So, like, look, just put that one on screen just to show you how they portrayed it. Trump shrinks back, right? Oh, there's a giant mob setting fires for the 3rd day outside with every journalist in the country. rooting them on, hoping for them to mash down the fence and tear Trump limb from limb on national television so they can say that they got their French Revolution. Okay. Oh, that was an attack on democracy. Right. So all this stuff has just been completely and totally— here's the archive link, so you can just use the archive link. Yeah. All this stuff has been completely memory holed. Okay. And see, nervous for his safety, Secret Service agents abruptly rushed the president to the underground bunker used in the past during terrorist attacks. Was that an attack on democracy? Scroll down, first paragraph. Even NYT admitted it, right? Look, look at the first paragraph.

Yeah.

Nervous for his safety, Secret Service agents abruptly rushed the president to the underground bunker used in the past during terrorist attacks. So put it together. Democrats on a Zoom call, which Time magazine admits was a conspiracy in which they could make the rioters stand down, attacked the White House and got Trump to run for his life.

Oh man, we don't hear a lot about this, huh? It's memory holed.

It's completely memory holed. And we're talking like giant fires, right? Like, huge fires burn in DC, June 2020. Like, look at— so just put this back on the screen because it's been completely freaking memory holed. But we're talking about something where—

But they, they were mostly peaceful, right?

Mostly peaceful protests. No, I mean like mostly peaceful protests. You know, mostly, mostly, I was gonna say, what's the word for it? Mostly awake president, something like that, right? Mostly, mostly peaceful protests, mostly alive president, something along those lines, right? So take a look at— yeah, look at this. Washington, D.C. These are not small things. I mean, can you imagine? I mean, look, the whole point about fire is it spreads, right? The reason they're setting fires outside the White House is to try to light the freaking thing on fire. That's the whole point. Right? And we're talking like huge angry mobs. What they wanted was a color revolution in America, right? Like, you know, when Gaddafi is attacked by a mob and so on, that's like the perfect thing for all these journos. They would stir up the population, some agitated psychopath would go and do something, and then they'd neutrally report on it as if they weren't responsible for it, right? But you know what? You know when a journo wants to take responsibility for something?

When?

When it's Pulitzer time. My reporting led to an investigation by the FCC or the this and the that and so on. So when they want to, they will gladly claim cause and effect between their writing and some action in the world when it's prize time, right? But when, when they're encouraged, when they're basically— one way of thinking about this, by the way, how is the media responsible for this? Think about after 9/11. Did you see the dead bodies that fell off the towers? I mean, there's a lot of gore, unfortunately, in New York after that, right? You didn't see those.

No.

And in fact, it's been a convention in American media for many, many years to not actually show dead bodies, snuff films, that kind of stuff. The one exception was when there was that kid who was dead on the beach that was shown. And that was used to drum up support for the whole Syrian war.

Mm-hmm.

Okay? The reason is, and this is actually very subtle, but not subtle, but it's like not obvious but important. So this kind of imagery, right, the imagery of someone being killed by the police, the whole Floyd video, and showing that in its full clip as uncomfortable as it was and blasting it everywhere and so on, why was that snuff film shown? Not the 1,000 other murders that are shown. There's absolutely editorial judgment there, number one, because the 1,000 other murders tell a very different story. Okay. Number one. Number two, the— when, when something like that is shown, it's actually, it's like pornography, but it doesn't make one aroused. It makes one violently aroused, angry to defend the person who you're seeing. Right. It has a very predictable effect on the person who's seeing it. The reason is, like, military has studied this. This is why going back generations, there's a book called Atrocity Propaganda and so on, that the best way to get people to fight is to tell them stories of atrocities being done to their population, right? It's— there's this whole thing on it, the atrocity story, right? Atrocity propaganda. Even Wikipedia has an article on this, right? But the use of atrocity stories in war, right? So this is something which has been known for many, many, many years. Is they got our guys. Let's go get them. You know, they're like all rules are off. They you know got they did that to us. Then we don't have to you know no holds barred this time, right? And so so what the journalists did, and actually Twitter was also very responsible for this. Twitter also helped unfortunately organize BLM, and you know even the pound BLM hashtag had like the fists and stuff associated with it. And now, by the way. How much do Democrats talk about BLM? Blue people don't care about black people, only blue people. Right. Like, you know, go ahead. What are you going to say?

No, no, no. I was just saying they don't talk about it anymore.

Yeah. And that's why, like, a huge chunk of especially, like, black men have shifted over to Trump. I'm not just saying that's going to be a panacea for them, but it's definitely something where they didn't get the benefit that they were promised or whatever. Anyway, point is, once you look at it in total, right, once you look at BLM in particular, right, which was much more ridiculous than, than people remember it. One of the weirdest things, by the way, is why no Republican has really gone and done the BLM documentary, you know, in all these years, right?

Yeah.

It's so documented. Nobody's done it. In fact, they prefer to complain about like COVID.

COVID lockdowns.

Right.

And COVID lockdowns are bad. Don't get me wrong, they are. But like, it's not as bad as like, you know, nationwide murder, arson, looting, rioting, terrorism, and so on and so forth. The, you know, it's just something where there's a mental block around that. Anyway, point is, once you take that in total, the only thing they're mad about is not that there was an— they're not mad. They don't even remember the attack on the White House. Why don't they remember the attack on the White House? Because it's not shown. over and over again. They don't realize, oh, a Democrat mob forced Trump to flee, right? How is that different? What's the difference between the White House and the Capitol? The only difference is a blue mob that attacked the White House, and it was a red mob with feds that went after the Capitol building, right? And one other thing I'll also point out is the sentences for the BLM rioters were very, very, very, very incredibly lenient, right? So just to give you an example, okay, look at this stuff here. Put this— okay, I'm like, oh my God. All right, 56 former prosecutors write to appeals court in support of bail for lawyers accused of throwing Molotov cocktail at police vehicle. What? What's going on here? Wait a second, a Molotov cocktail at a police car is like a very serious crime, right? During a riot where already the police are distracted and so on and so forth. Because it's not just that the car gets destroyed, you set a fire that can catch other things, right? Arson is always considered one of the worst crimes because it has such unpredictable results. Okay. These people are caught for this and the prosecutors write in to get them off. Why is that? Because If you color everything blue, the prosecutors are blue, the Washington Post is blue, they're blue, and the police are red because the prosecutors went to law school and the police are like, you know, often high school graduates or something like that. Okay, so come from a different party, social class. Yeah, so the blues in a blue outlet got blues off for attacking reds by bending the law hard. When have you seen 56 prosecutors— why would they write in Because it's no ordinary Molotov cocktail. It was part of blue-on-red violence. Let me explain this actually, which is if, let's say, a Japanese guy went to Korea and just started randomly shooting people on the street, Korean men on the street, both the Japanese government and the Korean government would be outraged. He would be jailed. He'd be sent back to Japan. imprisoned, harsh, harsh punishments, right?

Yep.

But if that had happened during World War II, like when, you know, like there's various episodes on the Korean Peninsula where the Japanese were present, right? It would have been sanctioned by the Japanese state. There would be no punishment. Maybe he would have gotten a medal. Okay, so when there's interstate violence, sanctioned violence between 2 tribes, All like murder, you know, if you shoot somebody in peacetime, you're a murderer. If you shoot somebody in wartime, you're a hero, right? Because it's tribe on tribe, you know, the actions that would be completely unthinkable are the things that you get a commendation for firing with courage on the enemy and, you know, marching on them and so on and so forth, right? Like, if again today, if like some English guy were to go and shoot some random German in the street, that would be considered completely beyond the pale. But in wartime, they would get medals for doing this. Right. And remember, they're shooting a stranger. They're shooting a guy who is nothing other than he's wearing a uniform of the other team. They don't know that person, you know, and so on. Right. They're literally killing a stranger. And then here, um, it's one of my favorite visuals of a school of fish. Ah, here we go. I just want you to have this in your head.

Yep. This?

Yes.

Just click that image if you want to zoom in on it. It's fine. But there we go. Okay. So that's what I visualize when there's a human being who's being attacked by the journos, right?

Yep.

Like all the journalists, all the swarm, the blob, right? The colony, the school of fish all says the same thing at the same time and all attacks on Moss. And going after any— this is like, remember the 17 intelligence agencies that made up Russiagate? or the 51 officials that all signed the thing saying the Hunter Biden story is fake, right?

Yep.

When they attack as a school of fish, as NPCs, the strength is that it doesn't need— not only can you not single one out, even if you did, it doesn't matter because there's 16 intelligence agencies left. You know how big a deal it is to take out one of them, right? How, you know, like meaning in the sense of defund one of them, right? You know how big a deal it is to like get one of those 51 former agents, like, accountable? And how can you single out one of them? All the other ones did the same thing. So whatever energy you have is diffuse over a whole mass, right? By contrast, they can cancel you because you're an individual. So the NPC is their weakness as an individual, but it's their strength as a collective.

Right.

As a collective. And the interesting thing about it is every member of the woke collective, every member of the blue collective— Biden is actually the ultimate example of this. He's President NPC. He himself is completely— he's the most obviously replaceable president we've had in our lives, maybe perhaps in American history. Literally can't complete a sentence, reading off a teleprompter, $55 when it's 5%, doesn't know his own policy, probably doesn't know what time of day it is. Most replaceable ever, but he thinks he's essential. So the gap between Like how replaceable he is and how essential he thinks he is, is this amazing thing where now imagine all the people in that school of fish had this incredibly high ego and would just stick onto whatever status they got tenaciously. You know, as a small example, remember there was that woman on the school board that was so hard for Garry Tan to dislodge, right?

Yeah. Yeah.

And I remember watching that. I'm like, How could this person think they're doing a good job? Wouldn't they resign in shame at some point, right? Isn't there any shame whatsoever? And you realize they're selected for zero shame, absolutely zero shame. Biden is the best example of this. They literally— the only thing that'll make them step down is not shame at a job poorly done. Who stepped down over Iraq? Who stepped down over Afghanistan? Who stepped down over Ukraine so far or over the Houthis in the Red Sea? Even literally the Secret Service thing. Colossal, colossal failures are not punished. There's no shame, but you say one word wrong, one word, and you're fired. Yeah. Right. This is, this guy actually made this. Many people have made this observation, but this guy was, what's his name? He's Pete Buttigieg's avatar. It's like, I'll find it. Hold on. Let me see. It's this one. I'll find it. It's, it's, hold on. Maybe it's in here. It's actually a really good post. The reason the school of fish analogy— while I bring this up, the reason this is really important is it explains a lot of things. It explains why they can, quote, attack you, but they are never held accountable. It explains why the NPC is selected for. It also explains why, for example, firing Chesabudin did nothing, right? Firing the school board head did nothing. This is a colony metaorganism. And taking out any one person is really difficult and doesn't do anything at all. And the problem is their egos are so high that they fight, fight, fight, kick and scream. So you think you're getting something out of it. It's like they're dug in on that position. Then you dislodge them and it still doesn't do anything, right? Because you're operating at the wrong level of abstraction. You have to deal with the level of the school of fish at the ideology level. And the individuals just simply don't matter. With a few exceptions, right? Newsom, for example, is not an NPC. He's actually a player character who can steer the school of fish in a different direction. He's like Deng Xiaoping in that sense. Maybe he's like an evil Deng Xiaoping. He could actually steer the school of fish to do an alliance with the communists, okay? Obama also, arguably, a player character in that way, okay? And in their own way, actually, even— who is— Hillary Clinton. You know, Bernie or AOC are slightly like that. Not, not fully. They're mostly NPCs, or 95%, but like they've got 5% independence some of the time, right? Point being that once you see this, you're like, oh, of course, the issue isn't Biden. The issue isn't Chesapeake Dean. The issue isn't any one blue. The issue is blue. Just like the issue was the Nazi Party or the Communist Party. The issue is the party. That's actually what your quarrel is. Or more specifically, the issue is the ideology. The goal is to completely uninstall that ideology, just salt it from the face of the earth in the same way that Soviet communism is basically done. Nazis is basically done. And the only way to do that is with a counter school of fish. See, because if you're coming as an individual, you can get cancelled. But have you noticed that now the attacks bounce off because they're also targeting 15 people at once? And it's like, and you know, look at all the tech evil, you know, tech fascists or whatever. And they have to like go on for 15 pages to list all the fascists and they're all Jewish and Indian and gay.

All these Jewish Nazis. All these Jewish Nazis.

Yeah, exactly. The Jewish Nazis and the, you know, whatever, right?

Yeah.

So they have to go pages and pages and pages to do this. And so that's a school of fish. So their tactics of cancellation, they don't understand why they're not working anymore because they're no longer facing a heroic individual. See, the thing about the right as opposed to technology, the left is decentralized but headless. It's in receivership. Okay. The right puts all its faith in a single hero, Trump, you know, and that's why that bullet was so high stakes. Right? Because one hero and they put all their faith in one man. But tech has a good balance of decentralization and centralization where we have quite a few leaders and centers of power. And even though it's a huge hit, if somebody like Travis Kalanick is taken out, we can still regenerate that thumb.

Yeah.

You know what I'm saying? Right? So you have a good balance of leadership. It's semi— it's partially decentralized.

Yeah, let me ask you something. So one downside, let me steelman a critique here, which is basically one downside of this blue sort of bureaucratized, decentralized lack of accountability. One downside is you can't really ship things. Like, this isn't how you'd run a company, right?

Oh, yeah.

That's a downside. An upside is maybe less instability or more peaceful. If one person can't do great things, it also means one person can't do bad things. So maybe there's some stability in sort of the sclerosis. Whereas if you have what they see in Trump as like an erratic, wild person who did something like January 6th, is that not a risk to the system? And if we're a late-stage startup, maybe we're just optimizing for stability here. And should people here are trying to think about who they should vote for, how should they evaluate? On the one hand, you won't get a lot done with sort of the blue school of fish. On the other hand, there's less chance of a sort of threat to democracy as they would describe it. What do you say to that?

So I'd say a few things. First is it's a complete mistake to think that the world is like stable and constant and just doing the same thing is going to get you the same good outcome, right? Like we're in a highly time-varying system. China has risen. The internet has risen. AI. Like these massive internet, basically the 3 major shocks in the world, I think are 2 obvious, one less obvious, but it'll become more so. The rise of the internet, the rise of China, the rise of India, or really I should say Indians. Okay. Actually now Indians becoming a little more visible at the, at the, you know, remember my thing? I said it for years, Democrats and communists, Republicans and Indians. And now on like, that's much more visible on stage, right? Do you see that? Yeah.

Right. Yeah, that's right.

So it's funny, right? So, but those 3, and the reason I say this, China versus Indians, China is the home game. Indians, China plays a really strong home game. Indians play a strong away game. Okay. Let me come back to that point. Point is, those are 3 massive shocks in the world of 2 billion people with multi-thousand-year-old civilizations that are rising, plus the internet and people who think they can just do what they've been doing. I mean, here's a graph. Let me show you this graph. I've shown this before, but it's one of the top graphs I keep in my head, at least. See if you can open that one. So if we put that on screen, this is one of several U-curves.

Yep.

This is one of several U-curves that shows that history is running in reverse. Basically, if you take The old civilizations, China, India. I mean, remember Columbus was trying to get to India when he was getting spices and Marco Polo was going to China, right? Those were considered trade centers back in the day before the Industrial Revolution. So the rough average geocenter of the world economy was somewhere in Eurasia between like India, China, and the West. With me so far, right?

Yep.

Yeah. So that's like for thousands of years, that's what it was. Then it moved Out with the Industrial Revolution to the West, and then after World War II, you see peak West was 1950. That was the point at which the world economy was maximally Westernized, the most it had ever, ever been in human history, extremely atypical point in history. And then as these countries started getting, especially after 1990, when they went from communism and socialism to capitalism, when the internet arose, The world economy rocketed back to the East much faster than it came. Okay. And we're in 2025. It's actually further out than it was. That was actually a projection a while ago, and it's just moved even further out. And so for thousands of years, it was in Eurasia. For like hundreds of years, it moved to Europe and the Atlantic. And then in tens of years, it moved back. And the point being that if you're modeling the world on the behaviors that worked in 1950, Let alone, you know, 1990 or so. Like, it's just completely wrong. Your world model is wrong. It's like, it's not going to produce a stable outcome. It's, it's a, it's like, I don't know, imagine if you're driving and you just keep your foot constant on the accelerator and there's a huge wall in front of you. Yeah, you're, you're, you've got NPCs steering. They're doing the same thing. It's just worked for 20 miles. Bam. just going to run into the wall at 100 miles an hour because you can't steer. And that's the thing that NPC, the NPC mob cannot do. It cannot steer. Makes sense, right?

Yes.

So basically, like, we have this radically— I mean, I can show graph after— like, the thing about tech people is they understand how many things have changed. I mean, like, when were you born? You were born '90, '80, '89?

'90.

'90. Okay, fine. So you remember a time when people licked envelopes, just barely, like in your childhood, right? There was a time when that was happening. I remember the offline world. And now, like 99% of communications and transactions, like when's the last time you paid physical cash for something? When's the last time you sent a snail mail? I'm not saying it's never, but it is, it's like less than 1%. Of the messages and transactions we send. And what people don't get is that it's not just going to be communication and transaction, but election and legislation that are going online, right? It's not just going to be companies and technology, but the presidency, the currency, the military will be fundamentally online. The military is drones, the currency is cryptocurrency, even the president will be techno-democracy, which I'll come back to. It's a start your own currency, hold your own elections sneak preview.

Okay.

And so because of that, the entire concept of our institutions are fine, we just need to double down on them and so on, is like just putting your hands over your eyes and pretending that it's— and it's, it's just so— I don't— it comes from a state of denial or ignorance or, or something. Um, it's not how I'm wired. because I try to look at the data. On the other hand, I understand why people don't want to look at it, because it does suggest that the world order changes.

So I also want to hear you address, just for the steel man, because some people really have a hard time getting past this January 6th. I know you're not like a diehard Trump guy. You're more a higher-level, global thinker. But how should people get comfortable with the January 6th thing? Is it that the other side is doing things that are even worse that people don't appreciate or don't fully understand? Or—

Yeah, well, so look, you know, this is, this is one of those topics that, you know, could take a— there's people who are like experts in just J6 and so on and so forth. But let me give a few remarks. First is the, the secret campaign. So I'll summarize. A, there's significant evidence that feds were involved in January 6th. B, the BLM riots targeted the White House directly with multiple days of attacks, fires lit outside, and Trump actually had to go into hiding. That was also an attack on democracy that Democrats supported, right? C, the book was thrown at all the J6 people, but Kamala Harris is bailing rioters out of jail for BLM, and BLM was much wider spread with much more destruction across the entire country. And went on for weeks and months, and was actually done by—it was basically organized or resumed by Democrats—as this article, The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign, talks about—and wasn't punished. Right? And so, and then D is obviously J 13th, which just happened, like the attempted shooting at Trump was an attack on democracy, and obviously the attempted coup on Biden. by his own party after the primaries is an attack on democracy, right? So the system is just seizing up right now. And, you know, the people who are like, oh my God, like, I, I actually wonder how they're calibrated because I think it's really because they only watch TV or, or they just, they're just not curious enough to go like one level deeper. And they probably haven't seen, for example, like, for example, you know, put this article up there. Ready?

I think that your most powerful idea is that when people talk about threat to democracy or threat to institutions, they're really just talking about threats to Democrats or democratically run institutions.

And that—

Exactly. Things like Project 2025.

Don't ever say democratic. It's just Democrat Party.

Yeah, you're right. Democrat Party, right? Yeah. The blue institutions. When, when the right tries to, you know, use those institutions, it's a threat. Project 2025 is this great threat when it really just means just put people who are not blue in those same institutions.

Yeah, exactly. And that's exactly right. I mean, basically they define, just like the Communist Party defines communism as ruled by the Communist Party, the Democrat Party defines democracy as ruled by Democrats. Therefore, you know, they'll say, oh my God, you know, I would never vote for a Republican, they're against democracy. What does that mean? So, okay, democracy is a one-party state. You'd never vote for a Republican ever because Republicans are against democracy. So now you've redefined democracy as a one-party state. But actually, Democracy includes competitive multi-party elections. If they're not competitive, it's not a democracy. By that measure, California is not a democracy. It's a one-party state. It has been for like 15 years. I've put up the— that's why it's so dysfunctional. You have Democrats that have gerrymandered the whole thing, and that's how they can loot billions of dollars for trains. And, you know, it's, it's how you get La Sombrita, the bus shelter that doesn't shelter anything. It's how you have the toilet paper ribbon cutting. You know, and you have the poop on the streets and the syringes. It's because there's zero political— go ahead.

No, I'm just laughing at how ridiculous it is.

It's how— it's ridiculous, right? So it's a one— it's not a democracy. It's a one-party state. Call it what it is. California is a one-party state run by blues. That's it. There's like— there are elections that the party always wins. Democrats destroyed democracy in California. It's just like the Soviet Union. There's elections, but the communist always wins. How about that, right? It's just like Democrat versus Democrat. You've got a real choice, right?

Right.

And so, so once you see that clearly, you're like, oh, their goal— and they can't actually back away from it, right? See, if their goal was democracy, see, they would actually— I mean, the only defense they'll give of this is they'll say, when you point it out, oh, Republicans are doing it too, right? I'm like, well, first of all, I actually agree. Republicans are also building one-party states in Florida and other places in response to what Democrats are doing. You know, If Democrats define democracy as ruled by the Democrat Party, Republicans say a republic, and by that they mean ruled by Republican Party. Okay. They don't actually mean represent. They don't actually care. It's one of those things. Go ahead.

No, no, I'm just laughing.

It's funny, right? So I would actually agree Republicans are building one-party red states. And you know who else built a one-party state? China. China's built a one-party state, right? So actually Democrats, Republicans, and communists are all building one-party states. Actually, the only large country that's a genuine competitive democracy is India. India is actually, in my view, and this is a longer topic, but I think India is actually going to be the place where the light of democracy continues in some sense with competitive multi-party elections. I think most states in both the US state sense and the European state sense will swing to either one-party blue or one-party red over the next 10 years or so, and federal governments in the EU will weaken dramatically. And even if they're calling it democracy, like, think about how they doublethink their way. What is, for example, you know North Korea's official name?

No. Republic of North Korea or something?

Go Google it. What's North— yeah, it's the DPRK, the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea. Okay, they spend 3 of their 4 characters On calling themselves democratic over and over again, right? So this is actually a pathology. This is a known mind virus, right? Where you know how like there's different strains of a virus. You know there's like the original COVID and then like Omicron or whatever, right? So this is just a variant of leftism that still calls itself democratic, actually much as the old left of communism did, right? But it's democratic where the same party is always in power. Right. And what's good about this, by the way, is when you point it out, they actually can't really wriggle out of it. Like you say, look, if democracy— forget about what the Republicans are doing for a second. Okay. Forget about— if you're saying that a one-party state, that democracy is good, then you're agreeing that competitive multi-party elections would be good. Why aren't you fighting to restore them? Why aren't you fighting to give Republicans a shot over here? Right. If you actually believe competitive multi-party elections are good. they don't believe they're good. They don't believe in democracy. So you can trap them in this, and they deserve to be trapped because they actually can't wriggle if they literally want only their party to always rule. Or sometimes they'll do a dodge, oh, the Green Party. Yeah, well, that's Dem and Demmer. It's like Bernie is an ostensible independent, but he's basically just a Democrat. So if you've narrowed the scope of political choice intentionally and then gerrymandered to make sure it's not there, They've, they've, they've attacked democracy. Another way of doing it, by the way, is what they did with the primaries, where it is now clear that Democrat Party elders lied to their own party members and the country about Biden's senility in order to, uh, you know, like, um, just basically hold a railroaded primary. Do you want to call it— some, some Democrats actually have called it rigged, right? If, if you're literally lying to the entire country about Biden's state of mind and they know that They're selling— it's like fraud, right? They sold a product to the Democrat Party voters that was fraudulent. It wasn't what it said on the tin. You know, Morning Joe, he's like, this is the best version of Biden ever. You know, you know the one I'm talking about, right?

Yeah.

And you know what it is, is he's actually literally contorted himself into like a Soviet commissar where he believes what he's saying in the moment. You know, he loves Big Brother, right? He loves Big Biden. And so, but point being that that's another way they've destroyed democracy, which is they've even taken away the Democrat Party's say. And for a few weeks there, or really frankly, even now, we're in a period which is really interesting where the position in the media is that Biden's unacceptable and Trump's unacceptable, which means they're against the choices of both Republican Party and the Democrat Party. So the anti-democratic faction is the establishment, right?

Deep state coup.

That's a whole— I mean, and by the way, this is also a point which, you know, others have made, Curtis has made, but the elected positions in the federal government are actually in some ways the— or any of the governments, are actually in some ways the weakest positions because it's surrounded by academia, where you have tenured professors, and the bureaucracy, where you have tenured bureaucrats, and media, which is owned by newspaper nepotists like Sulzberger, and NGOs, which are funded by nepotist philanthropists like Alexander Soros, right? And when you've got tenure, tenure, nepotism, nepotism, those aren't subject to markets or to elections, right? So the control plane for the state is outside the state. These guys beam signals in, they write the papers in academia, they're reported on by the media, they're implemented as rules by the bureaucrats, and then the NGOs get budget to go and implement them. And all of that is— I mean, the state funnels money to them, or it funnels information, it funnels leaks to the journos, the media, it gives funding to the academics, it gives funding to the NGOs, and it gives power and money to the bureaucrats, but the, the control plane is outside the state. Now, DeSantis has realized this and he's actually taken the state and used its formal power to go and liquidate universities and actually have them be now Republican universities. And he doesn't give quotes or information to any blue media. He only strengthens Republican media and posts on X and so on and so forth. And he's also defunded NGOs in the state. So he's gone after NGOs and he's also got bureaucrats that are loyal to him. And he's basically using state control over various things, right? Right? So DeSantis is actually going after the permanent government in a very systematic way. And once you visualize those 4 nodes, academia, media, universities, NGOs, all policy for anybody in any red state should be targeted on removing the funding of those things. Because the thing is, you'll actually have the same sort of political conflict, but you'll have a compounding result. Right? Use your scarce political capital to go and actually smash this blue university and turn it red, and they'll yell and scream, but now you've got a red university and it's cranking out reds. And that's probably the same amount of, whatever, 1 point, 2 points, whatever it is in political capital that you'd spend on something else that has much less compounding returns over the medium to long run. So that's, by the way, the third way in which Democrats have destroyed democracy is they put the control plane outside the electorate.

Right.

So the first way is they built a one-party state. The second is they basically railroaded the Democrat primary. And the third way, over generations, they put the control plane outside the elected state. And you can see this when they say how bad it is. Go ahead. You're going to say something.

I don't know.

That's a compact way of seeing it, right? So, you know, the point is there's a book that was written a while ago called The Party Decides. Right? That's what they want. They just want the party to decide. And here's the thing, if they made good decisions, I actually wouldn't care. Right? Like, in the sense of, do I really care what Apple's org chart is? Whether it's a Tim Cookism or, you know, like, like Nvidia's org chart is different from Tim Cook's, is different from Zuck's, is different. Like, these are—

You just want a good product.

Yeah. Like, I don't actually care about their internal process. I care about the external result, right? And would I recommend, let's say, how Jensen Huang manages NVIDIA to most of my founders? No, I wouldn't, because there's sort of a conventional way of doing it that works pretty well with one-on-ones and direct— billion-dollar businesses have been built that way, right? That's conventionally of doing. If you're one of the greatest CEOs and founders of all time, you can do it your own way. And maybe that works for Jensen, and there's probably something to learn from him. But I'm not going to say Jensenism is terrible. And, you know, like, the result speaks for itself. You know, the result justifies the process and the lack of results doesn't, right? So the Democrats have lost the mandate of heaven. You know, one other way, by the way, of visualizing this is visualize like, you know, we think about the map of the world, the map of the land. That's not the only map of the world. You know, there's 2 maps. The second map is a map of the cloud, the map of the networks. So map the land, you take all the land, the half a billion square kilometers of the Earth, and you divide it up into states. The map of the cloud, you take the 8 billion people and you divide them into networks, and you color those networks. And those networks look colored just like states on a map, except they're networks in the cloud, right? You take these networks in the cloud, the blue network since the early 2010s has been at simultaneous war with Tech, Trump, Russia, China, right? Also a lot of smaller states: Hungary, El Salvador, Saudi, right? And it's conflicted at best with Israel, India, and other ostensible allies. And the only people it really likes are like Justin Trudeau or Castro. But I repeat myself. Okay, right? You get you get that one, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. His son, right?

So.

So Justin Trudeau or like, I don't know, some, even Macron was actually a little too much for them, right? He was just a little too independent and he got some negative headlines because he, he, he said something negative about wokeism. So they slapped him with some negative headlines, right? South Africa, because they said something nice about Putin, they got slapped with it. You know, they could do far, you know, terrorize farmers for literally decades, but they said something negative, something positive about Putin. And finally, there's some negative coverage about NYT about South Africa. Right. Right after, which is not to say that Putin is good. I'm just saying that like the coverage happened as punishment for them going off the reservation. Right? So the point is that because they inherited such power, the Blues for a long time were able to like fight this ridiculous like seven front war and win. And one of the things they did very important is they stopped their rivals from ganging up on them. For example, when Travis Kalanick. Talked to Trump in late 2016 and went on this President's Council, right? And there was like, you know, signs of it. They went so hard after him and decapitated him as a signal to all their tech CEOs to not align with Trump, right? When some tech CEO like talked to Saudi, they went so hard at that and denounced. And they also went so hard at Saudi on the Khashoggi thing. And so, I mean, you know how many people like the fundamentalists Saudi Arabia has executed over the years? You know don't know any of their names. Okay. MBS actually converted the country to a less fundamentalist thing. Point is, for a while, blue was winning this simultaneous war against tech, Trump, Russia, China. Everybody was just getting pushed back by this insane blast of psychosis, especially from 2016 to 2020, right? Because they were so backed into corners, so threatened, and so on. Now what's happened is their enemies, Took a breath, were not defeated by that, and have linked up and are pushing back, right? So Russia and China linked up and are hitting. Tech and Trump linked back and are hitting over here. It's literally like Nazi Germany made too many enemies at the same time. In 1933, they peaked in like 1941, and then they just were totally destroyed by 1945. And that's kind of what wokeism did. It just made so many enemies and attacked every other tribe in the world. And it seemed like it had just taken over the whole thing in 2021. Then it's collapsing under its internal contradictions. It's losing in Ukraine. It's losing to Trump. It's losing to tech guys. It is also crucially internally divided and conflicted over Israel. It's losing Latin America because Bukele and Milei are basically— that's not— you know what they're declaring? They're declaring independence from America. That's what that is. They're now no longer under the State Department's thumb. Right. The they're losing Hungary. They're losing half the EU. The the Central European EU is under you know like Orbán's whole peace thing. I don't know if you're watching that. Like he's got the rotating chair of the EU and he's using the whole thing just to try and get peace, right? They lost Saudi. They lost all these countries to BRICS, and the reason is they're DI Democrats now, right? So they don't have to to they don't have Reid Hoffman and Rahm Emanuel and Larry Summers and Iglesias and Andrew Yang. And all these people who would have been like high IQ people calling the shots anymore, right? They're all just quota, you know, dummies basically, and, and hacks and time servers that just all repeat the same thing, which is how you get to the point where everybody thinks somebody has a plan for Biden's senility. And since nobody has any courage, no one can step out and do something. And they're all careerists and they're all, they have no patriotism. They're, you know, like. People say country first. You know what the opposite is? Party first. They actually— Democrats, Democrats are nationalists for Democrats. They're only loyal to their tribe of blues. They're not for red, white, and blue, only for blue. Everything can be explained that way, right? So they want to maintain their status within the blue patronage network. They don't salute the flag. They salute the, you know, whatever the— what's it called? The progress flag, you know, with the diagonal stripe or whatever, right? Yeah. That's their true flag, right? And so the the reason all that is important is we're very fortunate, extremely fortunate that wokeness went and promoted Ibram Kendi, and they lost Nate Silver. Okay, thank God. But communism actually promoted Leon Trotsky. I'd much rather have the MacArthur genius. of Ibram Kendi running, you know, than the evil genius of, you know, Leon Trotsky running the Red Army. You know what I mean? Right? Like, the communists were evil, but they— go ahead.

I didn't realize he was a MacArthur genius. That's so funny that—

It's so funny, right? So like, you know, we're very fortunate that the Democrats have essentially an ideology of mediocrity. And what they did did not unlock In fact, all the diverse talent, which actually does exist, was driven over to the tech side. You know that thing I like, tech journalism is much less diverse than tech? Our organizations are actually 30 points less white than the New York Times because Sulzberger is such a— Sulzberger is a slaver, by the way. His family is a family of slavers. He left that part out of 1619. He also left out the fact that they starved the Ukrainians to death and now he's championing Ukraine. By the way, that should be an act by any Republican president. I don't generally believe in reparations, but the whole— there's a lot of precedence with the Holocaust for IBM to pay reparations for the Holocaust. The New York Times company should be liquidated to pay for the damages of the Holodomor, and the money should go to Ukraine rebuilding. $8 billion. Like, obviously, right? You know, that's the reason, right? So, but anyway, point is, Democrats started a bunch of fights. with every single tribe in the world. They didn't kill them. They didn't— they canceled, but they didn't purge, right? They didn't— they didn't— they hurt but didn't kill everybody from Thiel to Steve Jurvetson to Shervin. All these people they canceled but didn't kill. They didn't kill Palmer Ludwig. Go ahead.

There was one tweet that described— it said what's happening right now is basically all of Gawker's enemies are taking over the United States, basically. Like Hulk Hogan, Thiel, like everyone, like Everyone who Gawker went against, or journalists went against, is just winning.

Yeah, yeah. Well, the thing is, what they did is they— it's Gawker, but it's also like just wokeness. They just went and victimized— they're just terrorists that victimize a lot of innocent people, right? Like, Hulk Hogan didn't care about Gawker or politics. He was just living his life, whatever. WrestleMania, you know, man, you know, like lots of people were just literally doing, you know, just living their own lives, coding some stuff. And then out of nowhere, they're terrorized by these lunatics. And for those who didn't have their careers destroyed, which was many of them, they were able to band together and fight back. At some point, we should do a memorial for all the people whose lives and careers were destroyed. You should actually go— you know what you should do? You should interview Peter Shi, Greg Gottman, Tom Preston-Werner of GitHub. I mean, Travis needs to do the comeback.

Yeah.

We need to do the full story of what happened with Travis Kalanick, the real story of what happened, go line by line and show exactly how fake the entire thing was. We need to do that for Emil and Sherp, all of our guys who are canceled, rehabilitate them, tell the true story, use our distribution to get it out there, and so on, right? Because the— I mean, in the Soviet Union, when they went after enemies of the regime, they actually had them killed. And so in this case, fortunately, again, the wokes Only had people canceled, so they didn't deprive them of life, liberty, or property. They weren't killed, jailed, or expropriated. They did lose all their friends and lots of future income and lots of status. It was definitely not nothing, but they but they did have that talent in them that allowed them to build in the first place. And many of them, not all, many of them were ruined, but many of them rebuilt afterwards. Right? So they did damage, but they didn't kill all of their opposition. So that's why they were going to lose. And I actually think what's going to happen. I think it's going to be extremely messy. I think it's going to be much harder than people think. I think that it's never just going off into the sunset. Basically, I think the economic situation in the US is so bad that— I'll wrap this up in just a few minutes, okay? And then we'll go. You know, the COVID vaccine in 2020 was held till after the election. That was admitted.

Yeah.

Just put that on screen here because people won't believe me if I I would cite something like this.

Yep. One second. Making me subscribe. But yeah, one doctor— one doctor's campaign to stop a COVID-19 vaccine being rushed through before Election Day.

Yeah. So the crucial thing is that's when people thought the vaccine would have helped Trump, and it probably would have. They admitted it. Just like the Hunter Biden story, they were holding back anything that could possibly benefit Trump. In his reelection, right? And they were willing to monkey, and the vaccine was approved very quickly afterwards, if you saw, right? And that would have given a bump of like, oh, we're coming out of lockdown, amazing, and people would have felt good. And Trump actually did Operation Warp Speed to get the vaccine through. Now, what's funny, by the way, is a lot of conservatives and libertarians now basically think, unfortunately, this is one of these very complicated topics, another hour podcast or something. But let me say this. If the Virus really did come out of a lab in China. It's like an engineered virus. It's also not— if one is mad about that, as one should be, it's also not easy to say, oh, it's just a total non-issue. It's something in between, right? It's at least serious enough that it definitely killed a lot of people. But point being that they did stop this vaccine being rushed through before Election Day. My view is that the economic collapse that they've been holding back, similar to the Biden senility news where they know it's there, but they're just lying, lying, lying, lying, lying. They're going to try to lie through it until after the election. And if Trump wins, just let it drop and pin it on him, right? And blame it on him. And then, because, you know, how can you do that, by the way? The reason is, think about the approval of the Bitcoin ETF, right? Or the ETH ETF. This was something that was held back for years. And then when the political climate shifted, it happened like lickety-split. Okay. And that was very visible because lots of people were looking at it, paying attention to it, and so on. There's a zillion other regulatory decisions like that that can happen. And it's masqueraded as if it was just process, but it's just like, okay, guess what? BTFP has expired and now everything is marked to market. All these bonds are marked to market. Now everybody's screwed. All these banks collapse, everything. And they call it the Trump dump, a huge crash. With that said, I think in the medium to long run, as nasty as it's going to get, and I think it's going to get extremely nasty, I actually do think that this century will be the opposite of the last, where in the last century, the far right was completely defeated, and it was an argument between the center and the left. That's to say, it was an argument between the capitalists and the communists. And I think in this century, the far left is thoroughly, thoroughly crushed and defeated, and that this century is an argument between the capitalists and the nationalists. And the tech counter-elite is actually more on the side of the capitalists.

I disagree with that.

That's a good place to end. Yep.

I think it's a great place to, to, to end. Balaji, this has been great as always, and we'll have to have you back as the, as we get closer to the, the election and we see how, how this, how tech, you know, will the, will tech continue to come out and support Trump in waves or will there be strong pushback? We'll, we'll see how it plays out.

Yeah. And by the way, one thing I'll also say is I am myself anti-Democrat, but I'm, I'm basically pro- Good governance. I'm pro-Bukele. I'm pro-Narendra Modi. I am pro-Orban. I'm pro-Elon. I'm pro-DeSantis. I'm pro-Abbott. I'm also actually even pro-Jared Polis of like Colorado. And, you know, even Dean Phillips among the Democrats, Ritchie Torres among the Democrats. There are still some people who are within the Democrat Party. You know, some of them, I assume, are good people, just like there's like Gorbachev within the Soviet Union. He's a communist. Right. But he really wasn't as bad as the others. Right. So I just want to make that clarification. So in general, I'm in favor of good leadership. I'm not endorsing anybody or saying anything like that. One of the reasons for that is Trump is against what many people are against. He's not necessarily for what you're for. And so being against a modern Democrat Party, in my view, is easy because they're like psychopathic kleptocrats. You know, they're handing out syringes. They're chopping off kids' body parts. They're stealing $100 billion for California trains. They're covering the streets in poop, releasing felons, abolishing the police, sending billions to Iran while tracking all your transactions, and printing trillions of dollars in the greatest theft in human history. But being against that is like just being against an arsonist. What is one for? I think that's actually a more interesting question. And You know, I've got my own answers to that, but, and I think there's, everybody's got their own answers to that. And that's why I think we need to actually have new cities and new countries versus just doubling down on the old. So.

That's a great place to close. Let's end there. And until next time.

Good. Thanks.

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