Modern Wisdom - #519 - Balaji Srinivasan - Legacy Media Is Lying To You

Episode Date: August 29, 2022

Balaji Srinivasan is an entrepreneur and essayist, he was co-founder of Counsyl, former chief technology officer of Coinbase and former general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Our information diets are making us mentally fat. Whether it's fake news, mis or disinformation, state propaganda or conspiracy theories, the world is very difficult to navigate. Balaji also wants to start a new type of country, he has views on how to optimise your working day and he generates more new ideas than almost anyone. Today we get an insight into his thought process behind all of this. Expect to learn why socialism always continues to arise across the world, how Balaji tracks all of the ideas he has in his head, why Singapore is a powerhouse of a new country, how immigration will deal with remote VR workers in India, why everyone should use a dashboard to track what's going on in their life, the key trick that the legacy media uses to manipulate you and much more... Sponsors: Get $100 off plus an extra 15% discount on Qualia Mind at https://neurohacker.com/modernwisdom (use code MW15) Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Read The Network State - https://thenetworkstate.com/  Check out Balaji's website - https://balajis.com/  Follow Balaji on Twitter - https://twitter.com/balajis  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

former general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Our information diets are making us mentally fat, whether it's fake news, myths or disinformation, state propaganda or conspiracy theories, the world is very difficult to navigate. Balaji also wants to start a new type of country, as views on how to optimise your working day and he generates more new ideas than almost anyone else. Today, we get an insight into his thought process behind all of this. I expect to learn why socialism always continues to arise across the world, how Balaji tracks all of the ideas he has in his head, why Singapore is a powerhouse of a new country, how immigration will deal with remote VR workers in India, why everyone

should use a dashboard to track what's going on in their life, the key trick that the legacy media uses to manipulate you, and much more. If you're on you here or if you're a long time listener, don't forget that you might be listening, but not subscribed, and that means that you will miss upcoming episodes, which you do not want to do. So head to Spotify, and there is a follow button in the middle of the page, or if you're on Apple podcasts, there's a plus button in the top right hand corner. If you press that, you will never miss another upcoming episode and it supports the show and it makes me very happy indeed. So please go and do it. Thank you.

But now ladies and gentlemen, please welcome... Balaji. Balaji Shrinavasa. Welcome to the show. Good to be here. Mark Andreessen said that you're the person with the highest output per minute of new ideas of anybody I've ever met in my life. Let's see, Matthew. Well, I think he said new good ideas, new ideas alone, but I think he qualified was good or useful or something like that.

But yeah, no, it's a high compliment from Mark who's a friend and colleague going way back. What's going on there? Is there some formal system that you're following a space repetition or semantic networks or something exotic? How are you resurfacing all of these ideas and holding on to them?

No, it's good. I probably should do some formal system and that might be like a four-small player or something. I'm definitely interested in, like quantum.country has a good implementation of so-called namanic media and whatnot. I think what it is is that I have a single, a few, let's call it a single threaded world view, right? I have a certain vision of the future. And then everything that I see, I sort of attach to that in some way. And so, oh, that's a little subroutine of this piece, and this little subroutine of that

piece. So if you've got like a clothes line of world view, you can attach pieces to it, and that helps you remember things. And then, if you have that world view, you're like, okay, this is gonna be a piece of the future because I have this projection of this macro concept, here's a micro concept. For example, let's say you believe the future is

the apocalypse, but with the internet, okay? Which is kind of what I think a big piece of the future is, all right? And so the apocalypse with the internet, your pro-soilent, your pro-coin base, your pro-cryptocurrency, your pro-remote work, your pro-digital nomads, you have this vision of the future. Your bearish on Fortune 500, your bearish on suits and ties,

your bearish on legacy commercial office space, your bearish on the West and your bullish on Asia and so on and so forth, right? Like just that thing alone kind of gives you a certain set of plus on these, minus on these, that right there kind of summarizes big piece of worldview, right? And then of course there's exceptions to that because I'm bullish on Estonia, even though that's part of the West. minus on these, that right there kind of summarizes big pieces of worldview. And then of course, there's exceptions to that because I'm bullish on Estonia, even though

that's part of the West. And I'm bullish on Miami, even though that's part of the West. So you have second order corrections to those first sort of things. And I'm bearish on aspects of China, even though that's part of the East and so on. So that's kind of what I do. And it's very hard actually to do more than one thing. You can do one big thing and you can attach lots of subroutines to that. But if you're doing more than one thing,

then you have to decide for every single moment of the day, am I spending it on A or B, which is why a lawn's life must be very difficult. Because yes, a constantly choose between SpaceX and Tesla, because they're not really the same thing. And so when push comes to shove, Tesla probably gets second, you know, if he must be at some meeting for one of the two, he'll probably be at the SpaceX meeting because gang to Mars is more important and it's on a shorter time scale than the cars.

Anyway, go ahead. I heard while Bezos was at Amazon that he had a single unifying principle for the all decisions got filtered through as well. And it's, does this make the customer experience better? Everything goes through that. I'd heard that Elon's was, does this get as close to Mars? But there's some things that he does with Tesla that I guess, I don't know, maybe autonomous driving is going to give us some kind of insight

around the way that lies on our love. You already see the tension, right? Those are important missions. It's amazing that he's gotten as far as he has, but they really are two different kinds of things that somewhat pull away from each other. You can't really think of them as part of the same company. I hope that's...

I love the idea of you hanging it off of a clothes rail, all of these individual elements. You've got this single thread, which is connecting stuff. And I suppose that that must help to make the things that you keep a hold of and the things that you don't relatively lean, because you say, look, this is the thing that I'm focused on. Am I concerned with something? Does this map onto it? Does this hang onto it?

Is there a peg for this to fit on? No, okay, well, it's fun, maybe, or entertaining, but broadly irrelevant. That's right. And I think it's kind of like if you talk to anybody who's like, uh, who's teaching people programming or something like that, they'll tell you that it's hard to just learn to code. You have to learn to code to do something, right. For example, it could be as simple as, I've got my sales data and I want to create some charts and graphs,

or I want to rename 100 music files. Something really simple like that. Then you have a reason to learn to code, and it's a difference between learning French in school, where you're memorizing lows and lows, and actually trying to order something at a restaurant, where you're tryingizing laws and laws and actually trying to order something at a restaurant where you're trying to put a sentence together for a purpose with a sort of unforgiving French waiter on the other side, okay, who will sneer at you and be like,

like speaking least please, you know, right? And so that's like the difference between coding something where the market is demanding it versus just doing some little script. So in the same way, when you're learning with intent to reuse, it does filter down the world and you kind of can snap to grid these things. And that's why I think the purpose-driven life is good. You have a purpose and you think a lot about what that purpose is. And then that's your vector.

And then the things, you know, for example, let's say, you know, your purposes get as jacked as possible. And that's like a pretty good short-term goal. That was actually my goal in my 20s. And I was actually as jacked as as possible to be given a South Asian physiognomy, okay? I know that you're currently, you know, that's a, that's a probably a big thing for you and for the watchers that would have you, right? And I'm gradually getting, you know, back to Jacked in my slow way or whatever. I got to became a real fatso during the start because you basically have two babies, right?

You know, you have your body and then you have the startup. And this is similar to the tension I was talking about before because let's say you have 150 people reporting to you, right? Then the thing is, like, you feel guilty when you're like, oh, I should go work out because guess what? That means this deal that affects 150 people. They don't care, at least as your thoughts going through your head, they don't care if you work out or not, because like what they care about is that deal comes through and you can have a deal that affects all of their lives. And so as a senior executive, your personal life and your health gets compacted back if

you have a sense of responsibility, it's like serving two masters. Now, over time, what I was able to articulate is perhaps an obvious thing, which is you have to actually tell your team that everybody needs to work out, including yourself, and that you will actually bucket time for that, you'll actually put that on the calendar because there's a sustainability aspect. If you're powering yourself with donuts or cookies, it'll get you through that sugar for the day,

but it's like health debt. It's like technical debt that will cause you to crash in the medium to long run. You won't be as productive as if you're lifting and running and whatever, right? But that's a good example of the serving to master's thing where you need to kind of, you know, you basically are reducing one hour a day

and you're blocking it off, but you're explaining to people why and it's an investment towards the future. And of course, if you really need to break class in case of emergency and you really need to skip the workout day, okay fine, but it's like a significant cost to both you and everybody else, right, as well as the just to them. So anyway, why was I saying that? So the purpose driven life would mean now when you're kind of scrolling through the randomness of the internet, you're like, oh, that's some like

bro science thing. Let me let me file that away for later, right? And it's actually like a useful thing versus you might just, you know, scroll past that if you didn't have a purpose to map it to. Go ahead. Doesn't Aristotle quote where he says, if a man knows not where he sales, no wind is favorable? Exactly. That's right. Without a vector. And in fact, actually, this is a huge part of Web 2 is, it's entropic. And that's a big part of what this book is about. What's changing's entropic and that's a big part about this book is about what's changing by entropic. So, entropic in the sense of entropy, like for example, if you know

it's just seen heat and work, heat is like all the particles are moving in different directions and work is like force along a distance, yeah. And so the difference is if you go and look at hacker news or Reddit or Twitter or Facebook, any of these things, there's something in common among all those sites, if you just refresh them that you'll see now that you probably won't be able to unsee after I say it, which is it's 30 random things. It's literally 30 random links

and it is optimized for novelty, but what that means is every day, you're like, let me start up, okay, I'll get a little bit of this and a little bit of that and a little bit of this. And what happens is in this high dimensional space, you are just being pulled in a bunch of different directions and not really making progress. Progress would be, I do some math today and I do some more math in the same area tomorrow and some more math. So a little bit of compounding progress along a direction vector each day adds up to something,

but these entropic sites add up to nothing, right? Or maybe you're kind of aware of what the community is thinking. I'm not saying they're at zero value. There's some value to serendipity. Don't get me wrong, okay? But I think we are overconsuming novelty and underconsuming purpose. And that gets us into the concept of the information diet, just like the diet, right? You know, you diet with a purpose, you eat these things and not those things because you have a,

you know, a classifier function you're putting on the food, this good, this bad, right? And you know, it might be low carb, it might be one meal a day, you only eat within this window and not otherwise, right? So it could be one meal a day, it could be, I don't know, you have some metabolic restriction, you can't have like some particular compound, right? You have some filter that you're putting on food, and so you know, this good, this bad.

And that same kind of thing, a filter that you're putting on information, this good, this bad is like a very valuable thing where you're doing it, not it's the opposite of quit censorship, it's self-control, right? It's directiveness, you know. It is, it's direct consumption of information. No external parties imposing it on you. You are blocking out this cookie-like junk information, and then you're actually going for the good stuff.

And what's the good stuff? I argue it is that stuff that is helping you boost measurable variables, boosting your truth health wealth. It's your knowledge. It is your physical fitness or something like that, or it's your bank account balance, or some combination thereof, right? Those are things which are the dashboard variables you should be like trying to level up each day

for you and your family and so on and so forth. And then you're really making progress versus a lot of the other stuff is kind of like cookies. It's like drugs. It's something where you click it and you're enraged about something and some distant part of the world that you have no control over.

And you're not like leveling up these like critical variables. The problem that you have with information diets is that a lot of the time it's KFC masquerading as an apple. You can't tell healthy information from unhealthy information. Well, I don't know. I mean, the way that verification and food diets have now been designed is almost as obfuscated as you could say the internet is,

but maybe it's a little bit more messy. Like there's no ingredients on the back of an article that you've read or something in the same way that a little bit of understanding of what goes into food could tell you about that. So how do people become more discerning that? It's a great question. So I'd say three things about that.

First is, there's a one liner, which is the most nutritious food is the stuff that doesn't have nutrition facts on it. Because it's the lettuce, it's the tomatoes, it's the stuff like that. It has to be a little bit of a chemistry experiment to have the nutrition facts on it. Someone's putting it into a par bomb caliburimidera and getting those numbers out of it.

That's just kind of an amusing observation. The second thing is that I think there's two ways of dealing with that information content thing. The first is maybe someone can develop a Chrome plugin, which basically pre reads the stuff for you and will flag it. For example, all the words on the page that are meant to enrage you can actually be flagged. That's called, for example, this is a concept called Russell conjugation, and it's actually by Bertrand Russell.

The idea is, I sweat, you perspire, but she glows. Okay. The same concept can be communicated with a totally different tone on it, depending on whether you want to give a positive spin on it or a negative spin, right? Like, you know, you are righteously angry, um, he is spluttering with rage. And so the same concept can be Russell Conjugate in different ways. And when machine learning you can detect that. So one thing you could imagine is a Chrome plugin

that would just sort of be like a buddy alongside, that would sort of, because the thing is, you might think you're a super rational person, but when that hits your eye, you're gonna see it it whereas if it's highlighted in red, you're like, oh, okay, yeah, you're right. I didn't even realize that was the difference. It needs to down-regulate my response against this particular term a little bit more. Yeah, exactly. And if you open up a page which is covered in red, you think I probably need to take this with a little bit of a pinch of salt. Exactly. And in fact, that's what they've added to it, also in a different sense, as they've added a pinch of salt, a pinch of sugar to the page.

Street news is boring. So instead, they sugar it up. They salted up with all of these things. So you're saying that the limbic hijack of semantic overload online is basically the same as sugar-friendly designed sugar. Yeah, it's exact. Think about a feeling restaurant, right? A feeling restaurant will start throwing all kinds of sugar and other stuff into its food. Why? Because it does, like people like it.

It's a short-term optimization, you know? And people saw fruit yogurt. Wow, that's selling, right? It's like, you know, Coca-Cola where they put cocaine in the cola and like, now today we're like, wow, that's so bad.Cola where they put cocaine in the cola and like now today we're like, wow, that's so bad. Like at some point in the future, when everybody has continuous glucose monitors and you can actually see your blood sugar, jangle and so on, we will see this time period when people

had sugar for breakfast, sugar for dessert, when kids were eating sugar, when sugar was in everything, as similar to like that time when drugs were laced in everything. I can't believe you used to put that in their bodies. Yeah, exactly. And that's why people were so fat and that's why diabetes was such an epidemic and why people are up 30 pounds. It's actually like this, it's very difficult to escape.

It's like second hand smoke, sugar is basically in almost everything, right? You have to really try to not eat that, you know? And it probably starts messing up your microbiome and other kinds of things. This is why have you seen the GIF on the obesity epidemic? Have you ever seen the GIF? Mm, I'm not sure. You should be able to hear.

Yeah, I hear a screen share and we can... Yeah, I'll just, I'll just pace this in. Just for your, you know, this is actually 10 years ago and people have gotten even fatter since then. Okay. But take a look at this. If you put that on your thing, Dean, make this pop up when you, when you do the edit please, thank you. So this is, this is just a US, but it's global. You can see that. You can see the thing about... So for the people that are just listening, it's a map of all of the states in the US, and it's beginning in about 1985, beginning with no data,

and then it gradually gets darker and darker all of the colors over time. And it is... What's that at the bottom? Is that BMI? So BST? Yeah, it's basically like exactly. It's like a percent of people who are above, oh no, BST BMI, right? Okay, yeah. And just over time, you're getting to, what's that? Is that over 30% in some places now?

Yeah. Predominantly. Well, everywhere. This is 10 years ago. It's just gotten worse since then, right? Yeah. And the thing is, and this is important, even though it's BMI, BMI is a function of height and weight, which are both so-called ratio-scale variables, and those are good variables.

The reason is six feet is six feet in 1980 and in 2022, right? 150 pounds is 150 pounds in 1980 and in 2022. So ratio-scale variables are the highest quality of data because they can be compared across time and space. By contrast, dollars are not, because that you have to inflation adjust them, and so on and so forth, right? And other kinds of metrics, like SAT scores and stuff are not, because scales change,

and sort of less comparable across time and space. So ratio scale variables like this, or functions of ratio scale variables, are something where we can really, truly say people have gotten fatter over time, significantly fatter. And is it partly due to a microbiome maybe because ulcers were thought to be completely from stress and so on in the 70s and then people found it. I won a Nobel Prize for it actually showing that it was partly due to the micro.

It could literally be something that's partly due to the micro, but it's probably some kind of combinatorial thing where it's like both the diet and the sedentaryness and the microbe and so on and so forth. Anyway, since 1980, men have lost an average of 1% of their testosterone. testosterone, yeah. I got a thing sent through from Rob Henderson the other day.

Eight out of 10 young Americans are ineligible to enlist in the US military, primarily due to obesity factors, but medical issues and criminal records also contribute. Yes. So, the thing about this is, is it the plastic? Is it the, you know, being fat? Is it being sedentary? It's some, is it, you know, I don't know, is it like basically messages that you're getting on social media?

Is it some combination of all these? It could also be just a single factor like lead that we don't even know, like the plastics, right? Like the Romans were posing themselves and didn't even know. And I mean, certainly we've have a lot more compounds that are out there that we're, you know, like exposure to plastic is way higher than it was 100 years ago. And we don't know what we need actually are better metrics.

And so with better metrics, like the equivalent of a CGM, you take this out of guesswork and you turn it into something that approaches empiricism, right? So what you want is a stream of data coming out of you that, and this is one of my big topics is, we know what's going on in Budapest or Bangalore, but we don't know what's going on in our own body, right? You hold up your phone and it's like, Bing, here's this alert on the outside of the world. You know what you want alerts on?

Your blood sugar, you want alerts on all this other stuff. That's what you can, those are most important metrics, right? And this is actually another concept I have, which is kind of related to this. You know, it's going to, I think, replace the daily newspaper. Yes, because I've read it and I can't remember what you said it was. I can't remember. The personal dashboard. Yes. Okay. Why do I say this is actually really important and pulls you through some of these concepts. The personal dashboard is actually something that if you're a tech executive,

this is actually the first thing you look at each day. It's not totally personalized, but it's like, here's our revenue, here's it, here's the GitHub tickets that are closed, and what you do as like CEO or an executive at a tech company is it's like you're steering an airplane, but you're putting different dials, you're responsible for figuring out what those dials are

and pulling them into the cockpit, right? So, as companies like Looker, for example, that just provide these sort of dashboard services. Why is this extremely important? You're in control of those dashboards, right? So, the first thing you see as CEO each day, for example, was our revenue yesterday, was our revenue over the last 30 days,

what's our expenditure, who's doing what, for example, was our revenue yesterday, was our revenue over the last 30 days, what's our expenditure, who's doing what, et cetera, et cetera. And you don't necessarily need to be like immediately reactive on every single aspect of that. But you see these metrics and you're looking for whether something is out of spec or whether it's going well, and then you kind of intervene on those parts of the company, which are functional or non-functional, right? And so the crucial thing here is that is news you can use.

The locus of control is you. You can do something about it. Now you imagine that where it's not just your corporate dashboard, but it's your personal dashboard for your own fitness and so on and so forth. You've diet, you sleep, your Fitbit-style thing, and then maybe a family dashboard and you have like checklist, like, you know, the pet needs X and the kids need, you know, Y, they need like vaccines or whatever it is, right? And if you, I don't know if your audience is like super anti-vaxx or whatever if you don't, you know, but, okay. All right. So, the point is, you know, people need shots, they need pets, need food or whatever it is.

All of those things are just in like your personal dashboard and you're tracking these things, you know, and you have, maybe it's your bank account balance, et cetera. This is more useful to you than daily checking Twitter, daily checking Facebook, you know, Fitbit is actually a much better app in many ways than those. And so you can imagine some combination of Fitbit and Brilliant and your bank account and so on. That's like Brilliant.org. I love that. That's like truth. That's like what you know, right? Fitbit is your health, truth that's health, and then your bank account thing or your crypto is your wealth, right? So that's like the you know, the right app to check each day in my view.

And then mediated by that, you can take other actions. And then everything else is actually seen as junk food, you know. And so rather than a social app, it's like a personal app. This is a kind of thing which, I mean, nothing I'm describing doesn't exist, you know, like, or I say, everything I'm describing exists, right? But the concept of it replacing the news is really important because the news is like, you know, think about, you know, opening your daily newspaper first thing.

The more people have built that habit, I'm going to, you know, drink some coffee and read the newspaper first thing. That's not what you should read first thing. Random events on the other side of the world are not what you should care about first thing. That precious, precious space of like what you load into your brain the first thing, frankly, perhaps your first few hours when you get up should be offline. You know, they should be like pen and paper,

writing things out or write it up the night before. You should go and work out first. All that type of stuff, some offline time is good, so you don't just immediately just jack into the internet, right? When you're getting out of your, some focus time. But when you do, then it should be dashboard in my view. And you can set that up yourself, by the way. You can just set up your own home page,

you can set up your own thing, you can set up your own dashboard. The apps exist, deprioritize other people pinging you. So now you have at least a few hours each day where you're moving the ball forward in your own self-determined direction. Okay, let me pause there. You said one of the things to look at would be that the foods which have the fewest number of ingredients on the back of the ones that are the healthiest, they're the ones that have been kind of molested the least, then you need to be looking at the sort of inflammatory language which gets used on the internet, perhaps it could be a Google Chrome plugin for this longer term. What else are you doing to ensure that your information diet is, I don't know, as lean

or as healthy or as natural as possible? Because the bottom line is that right now people want to know about the world around them, whether that's a cognitive bias, whether it's completely useless or not. People want to find out what's going on. The dashboard is great, but you're going to have to step out into the... Shops. ...child's chaotic world at some point. So, what I do, I certainly, now here's the thing, I definitely do read a ton of stuff. but you're going to have to step out into the we're child's chaotic world at some point. So what I do, I certainly, now here's the thing,

I definitely do read a ton of stuff, right? But what I try to do is I try to get all the important stuff out of the way first thing in the morning. And one is always successful in this, right? But you do your workout, you do your... What's a typical morning? Take it through your typical morning.

A typical morning? Well, I'll give the ideal morning, okay? Not the typical morning, right? It's like I have the ideal, okay? Because one always falls short as being a human, but at least you have an ideal to strive for, right? So the ideal morning is you wake up, you just grogally go to the treadmill

and you just start jogging, okay? And you have your eye, the tiger, or whatever it is over there. And actually, the Atomic Habits style Q, right? Of just, all right, this is what I'm supposed to do at this time. It actually does help on the margins, right? You've got your shorts and your socks

and shoes all there next to treadmill, so you just walk up to it and start going. And why is it good to actually have it like at your house? I mean, it's not that expensive in the Grand Ski of Things, you know, if you have the space for it, it's good to have it there because you're not off to wait in line. You don't have an excuse. It's right there. You can do it anytime. And if you're really tired, then you just walk in the morning or whatever, but you just do that, right? Okay, having done that,

you have now won a victory over yourself at the very first thing. Then lift, if you can do that, if you have a little home gym or whatever. Now, one hour into the day, like you're actually on top of things, right? Do your morning of blutions, blah, blah, blah, you know? And now, you know, like go and like if you have offline stuff, if you have printouts, just go and work on that, like I

write a lot of stuff longhand. And why do I do it longhand? It's because I'm in second. The reason I do a lot of stuff longhand is because it forces focus, right? And it's just like zero interrupt. You know, you write it out and you can scribble and you can move things around and so on. I take those pieces of paper, it's like a draft of a book chapter or something like that. I'll take yesterday's printout, write up long hand, type it in, type it, oh, something else is actually quite handy by the way. There's certain cookie jars, okay. You know these timer cookie jars?

Yeah, I've seen them of mobile phones before. Yeah, exactly. So you can use them for mobile phones. You can also do something where you like drill a hole in the back and so you can put do something where you drill a hole in the back and so you can put your router in there or the plug to your router, okay? So that you can basically just, okay?

Why do this? Right? So the reason you do this is, you just kind of, if all your phones in there, you also have the plug to your router there and you just lock it up and you set the timer for like three or four hours. Okay. So say you get up at like seven or eight, you work out till nine, you are now

offline till like 1 p.m. And you have just done deep work for like four hours straight, no one in the world can bother you, no one can get in touch with you, no one can tweet at you. You are just offline to the entire world. Okay. And that's good because if you are able to do that and just push forward with like your priorities, you know, now what this means by the way is you actually need a good printer, you need like, you know, some like a desk.

It's not super expensive or anything, but you're printing actually more than you might otherwise. Or you need offline apps or something like that, right? Like, which a lot of things work offline, you know, pages.app or Emax, you know, Emax like a terminal based app, those things work offline. So you do all this stuff offline to your pen and paper offline. And then like for us, and then you connect and you synchronize you push all your updated stuff. Now you're on the attack, right? Now you're responding to emails and you know sending things out. You're looking at your signal, you're looking at your WhatsApp, you're blam blam blam blam blam blam responding to people. Looking at investments, you know all the CEOs who are like, hey, you know, I need some help with something or whatever, get on the phone with them.

And then you have just flex. There's like, that's like a few hours and then you can't play in the full day, right? So then you do whatever with the rest of the day. Maybe it's more work, maybe it's like you tired, maybe you're seeing the sun, whatever it is, right? And then at the evening, whatever it is. And then, like at the evening, again, an ideal day, again, this is not everything,

but you try to write down those one to three things you wanna get done the next day, and then you knock off. And one thing that's also kind of important, and again, it's not done all the time, but I find it, people say, oh, don't look at a screen before you go to sleep. But people are also addicted to having some sort of information as they go to sleep or whatever.

So the way to square that circle is probably like audio books. So something like that where you have, whether it's like the smart speakers, people are pro and con on them. The con is of course that they're listening to everything and whatnot, right? And so it is security vulnerability. The pro is, they're not shining in your eyes. You know, so that's one option

if you're willing to take that security risk and you can just say play that audio book instead of time for 30 minutes, it'll probably knock you right out. Or you can take your phone and you can, you know, have that and just have that low low by you, right? For those people who have to have, who want to wean themselves off as like a nicaret, if people are used to like surfing their way to sleep, at least audible your way to sleep and you'll find its way better, right? And without the light, it'll put you to sleep, you know, and that's like a

pretty good day. That's you got your workout, you got your your focused energy on the thing that's most important. You didn't schedule the whole day, you have time to react, you have time, obviously, you know, if you have family or things like that, if you want to see that thing that I call outside, you know, there's a sun I hear, people sometimes see it. You can go and do that. The main thing about it is you just spend those first hours on the most important stuff and drive that forward. Before the rest of the, it's kind of like a tank where the water is held back and you know it's going to rush in, but you hold it back to drive forward as much as you can

and then let the water the day rush in. Okay, go ahead. Couple of things that I would add into that in terms of tools, so I just bought a bike desk, so it's a static bike with a desk built in, it's purpose built, and this thing is so comfortable. Insane. It's got a brand or whatever.

I will be able to send you a link, and it'll be linked in the show notes below for the people that want to check it out. The one that I got is only available in the US at the moment, but you'll probably be able to get it shipped. It was about $350, I think. So not cheap, but not very expensive. Okay.

And dude, it is outstanding. The backrest means that you can really set in, links up with Bluetooth on your phone. It'll do pre-done programs. If you've got a whoop strap or anything that broadcasts Bluetooth heart rate, it'll pick up the heart rate and give you a full readout at the end of it.

And you're just turning over, reading something or answering emails. It's got this really big desk. It's got two cup holders. I'm completely in love with this moment. That sounds cool. Yeah, it's all this way. Send me this, what's it in there?

I'll have to send you afterwards. It's one of those very strange names. I'll send you afterward. The other thing that I would get is YouTube Premium. So YouTube Premium allows you to continue to hear audios. To know ads. No ads, super good. Yeah.

And you can hear the audio of whatever you're listening to offline. So you can make yourself a little playlist throughout the day. Oh, this is cool. Someone sent me this. I should listen to that later on. And I've been listening to World War II in Numbers, which is a British history documentary series of which there are quite a few with some of my favorite historians. And it just sounds great. And you're hearing about Hitler went three hundred and forty five days before he could invade

Stalingrad. And you're like, this is cool. Now, now, and now I'm asleep. And so going back to your way that you ensure information diet, you're reading a lot, you're consuming a lot, outside of your deep work sessions, what are the principles that you're following to ensure that you don't get cognitively fat? It's hard because again, what I'm describing is, like the most, I'm not trying to be like,

oh, the CEO gets up at 5 a.m. and they're on the extra, I mean, maybe Tim Cook is like that 2.0 human being who just like hits it out of the park every single day and has that level of self-discipline where he is like, he's managed to robotize himself as a human, right? But I do think that at least setting an ideal, even if one falls short of it, is useful to do, you know? And then so at least you know what you're striving for. So, in terms of information diet, I actually do think that there are good aspects of Twitter. The weird thing about Twitter is you can learn a lot from it, and it is an important water

cooler for technology, you know, there are kinds of things. It is just something where there's references where, you know, you'll talk to people and you'll be out of the loop if you're not on it and so on. So there's a utility to being on Twitter. And then you can follow some interesting accounts that will teach you about stuff that you've never heard about, right? But and you can also, you know, when you when you tweet or whatever, you can have people come and DM you, I found lots of great investments on Twitter,

I've met lots of folks that way. So all of that is to the good. But it's like the serendipity part of the day, which is easy to overdose on if you do it too much. So, for example, just like taking some time off Twitter, which I do every once in a while, and just focusing on getting out the book logistics and so on, it was a very, very good thing to do because-

Are you talking about maybe a week at the time, or a couple of weeks at a time where you just log out and don't check? Well, actually, I took months off. I took, I took like almost four months off, just to get all the final details in the book, kneel down and get that shipped. And you know, the thing about that is in a sense, you know, win off Twitter to win on Twitter. You know, so that is to say pretty much anything that you want to do, you cannot actually win on Twitter itself.

You have to win off Twitter and announce on Twitter. Now Twitter itself is underappreciated by people because it is the public war zone. It is where the intelligentsia slugs it out. It is the consensus mechanism of the English speaking internet. It's like where society now, it is like the true government. I don't think people realize that yet, right? It's a parliament because it's up stream of governments. It's very hard for a government to go against Twitter, where Twitter's public opinion is, right?

And it's a parliament where there's people from the English-speaking internet across the entire world who are elected by their constituents, right, who follow them. And so, and of course they can get unfollowed and blocked and whatever, right? And there's no borders in terms of, I mean, yes, there's national borders and stuff like that, but I mean, you're in the UK. I'm in Asia or where'd have you. But we're still kind of in at least adjacent, so-called, if you're the term, newosphere? No. Newosphere, it's like a cognitive sphere. It's like our mental

social networks are not so far apart, right? Whereas, let's say the Chinese social network is its own thing. Its own Galapagos Islands, but not a small thing. It's like a billion person Chinese internet that is just air gap from the English internet, which is the biggest thing. It's like a billion-person Chinese internet that is just air gap from the English internet, which is the biggest thing, right? And once we'd actually just, digress on this topic for a second that I was just talking about recently, the English speaking internet and the Chinese speaking internet are actually like the two most monitored and surveilled internet in a sense, right? The English internet is also like the public war zone of the world. It's got a few different aspects. When you go outside English and Chinese to even Spanish,

which is actually a pretty large community, it's much less monitored. People can speak much more freely because the platform operators mostly speak English or Chinese. And so therefore, they're not going to basically like surveil, they don't care as much about thought crime and other languages. Isn't that interesting? That's fascinating. Yeah. And so, and it's funny, I tweet about this and a bunch of people were agreeing with me on that. And they just hadn't put two and two together on that observation. They're like, oh wow, you're right. If I say the same thing in Hindi, nobody cares. I can tweet this raging tweet that I want to get out there, but thank you. But, you can put out in Hindi exactly. Nobody cares.

Nobody will care. Nobody even thinks of it as offensive, really. That's that bilingual privilege that everyone's got. Something, well, so it's interesting because obviously most of the world is neither English nor Chinese speaking. So now, machine translation and other things complicate this in a heart of game outweighs. The most obvious implication, or perhaps the one that will happen, is that it makes all of those other internet legible to the English and Chinese social network platform operators

and then the surveillance and the thought police can move in there. On the other hand, it may also mean the re-babilization of the world, and then the surveillance and the thought police can move in there. On the other hand, it may also mean the rebabilization of the world, just like the Israeli's revived Hebrew, which is a dead language. Machine translation may make it easier for communities to basically build their own secret languages or forked off languages, which are at variance with the main society. And especially if you take the machine translation models and you add some new language on them that the main society doesn't have. There's different ways of doing this.

But point being that I think this concept is a useful one where you realize the importance of Twitter, you realize it's both more important than people who say it's unimportant to say and yet you can't win on Twitter itself. You just can't. You have to do things off Twitter to win on Twitter. Now why is it important to win on Twitter? As I said, it's basically like the government of governments. Sort of like Bitcoin is also a government of governments, right?

Twitter is the government of governments socially. Bitcoin is government of governments. Sort of like Bitcoin is also a government of governments, right? Twitter is the government of governments socially, Bitcoin is the government of governments financially, right? So like Jack Dorsey is actually, in some ways, like the ender of this world and the, and the beginner of the next, right? Twitter and Bitcoin are the end of like basically all post-war institutions and the beginning of what comes next.

Speaking of tweets, there's a famous tweet that says, Bellagy was right might be the most terrifying phrase in the English language. And you were teaching a Bitcoin course pretty much before, anybody talked about it, you predicted the exit of Silicon Valley and remote work pre-COVID, and then you predicted most of COVID's implications in January of 2020, which are probably three of the biggest trends

that we've seen over the last decade. Yeah. Have you got a crystal ball? What's going on here? Well, so what do I do? So I mean, the thing is that it's a funny, that's the same, like, I also predict a lot of good things

and I invest and bet on those things. But those are everybody's kind of happy that I was, you know, a riot or whatever. For better or worse, you're seeing Slumdog Millionaire. Yes. Yeah. And she know how he gets all the answers right not because he like got the answers fed to him or it was because like his life experience just managed to make him like well suited for the moment, right?

And in some ways like, you know, so I certainly have a mental model of the future and as I said, like, you know, my clothes line kind of things hang onto that, right? And, you know, sometimes you have a productive mental model that just keeps chugging out result after result. It's kind of like how if you're good at math, you can do a lot of physics. You know, once you're good at math, you can be like, I can go into fluid mechanics, I can go into, you know, electrodynamics, I go to astrophysics, I can start generating useful results, right? Similarly, you're good at computer science and stats,

you can go into airlines, you can go into manufacturing, you can go into retail, you can give useful results, because everything has algorithms and it has databases, so computer science is useful in the algorithms and stats is useful in the databases, right? Okay, so, you know, how do I predict myself?

Well, first is, like the SlumDog millionaire thing, the world is sort of just getting more biology-like. Okay. What I mean by that is, if you were, what's the opposite? The opposite is you're like a 1950s, very conformist person that wants to wake up nine to five each day and do exactly the same thing each day that doesn't want any change and wants to work the same job for 30 years. That's both nationalistic and socialistic, you know, in a sense, right? Like you're a farmer slash soldier slash manufacturing slash manufacturing, slash physical in person, kind of person.

You don't care that much about the life of the mind, your go team when it comes to sports. That's like you're kind of seer typical like 1950s-ish kind of thing, right? Every aspect of that is getting inverted, right? So what do you have now? You have this mobile internet based, you have very fluid day, you have high upside and you have

high downside, you have far less certainty in everything and far less constraint in everything. You're in a time of flux, a time of change, you can code something and go vertical, you can, you know, get wrecked or go viral, right? And the camera is shifting to Asia. Like all of these things superimposed is this bizarre kind of thing where it's like, okay, I've just now sort of accepted that anything that I'm into today will in five years or 10 years

become much, much, much more popular. Okay, example, and this is a small example, but like Yeah, Christy X is also said this is like whatever quote nerds are into on the weekend Everybody cares about in 10 years right for example Palm pilots in the late 90s airbases using iPhones 10 years later Right world of workraft well Oculus is pretty big now, and I think VR will eventually get pretty big. Netscape Navigator, people are on the internet in the early 80s and the web in the early 90s, everybody's on the web today.

Social media, it was like Facebook and Twitter was among the San Francisco Literati, Technoradi and then everybody's on it, right? And so, you know, cryptocurrencies and other version of that. Like for a less high profile version, from 2005 to 2007, Google Maps existed, but the iPhone didn't.

So what's the kind of thing I did, I had my laptop and I would look up directions of Google Maps and it's screenshot the turn by turn. And then I'd have the laptop on the passenger seat as like a whole roll. Yeah, exactly, right? So I mean, of course, I'd pull over at times or whatever to look, but, you know, of course, that's a preview of Google Maps on the iPhone,

right? So whenever I'm kind of hacking together something like that, now, I know that's an investible opportunity. Because that is a problem which is yet to be solved, which you can kind of gerry rig into a solution, which means that downstream it's going to be made into a much more cohesive solution. Yes, exactly. So what kind of stuff is that today? So digital nomadism, right? So digital nomadism, right? A full crypto life where you're basically crypto first on things and like your bank account is like your crypto wallet and other bank accounts

are like kind of downstream of that. Obviously, like so much crypto stuff. I couldn't even go into all of them, but like from crypto credentials to crypto social networks, to ENS names, all of that type of stuff will be huge. ENS just passed like two million names and thereabouts. All the AI stuff, especially AI content creation. So AI, audio, like synthesis engines will succeed search engines. A synth like, so do you know what I mean by that? No.

Okay, so have you heard of Dolly? Yes. Okay, so the difference between, Illy? Yes. Okay, so the difference between I made this point on Twitter, but like if you type a query into Google, you're optimized for making a very short, often single word query, and you go to Google images, right? Whereas with Dolly, you type out this long involved sentence with lots of clauses and modifiers and whatnot, and you get a better result as a function of that. You're optimizing for precision on the Dali as opposed to brevity on Google. Yeah. And so essentially, basically, like people have been trained in how to search,

and they have to be completely synthesis engines have the opposite instincts from search engines. Right? The way of thinking about that is, here, I'm going to give this tweet that you can use here. If you take a look at the left image there, see it says Docker, could go images and you see a little whale with the stuff image there. See it says Docker, Google images, and you see a little whale with the stuff on it. Okay. If you go to the right image, it's blue whale with stacks of shipping containers on its back, CG society, art station trending 4K, and you get something very different.

Right. Much more. Right. Yeah. Okay. And now, that is the difference between a search engine and a synthesis engine. Like prompt engineering is just on the total opposite extreme of like a extremely long detailed sentence. One word just never works. Whereas with search, one word is really kind of what you want to reduce it to. Right? So people have to completely retrain to think about synthesis engines, because it's not

just going to be synthesis of images, it's going to be synthesis of audio, video, code, like longer pieces of text, maybe full video games, maybe full apps even, right. Synthesis engines are going to be absolutely massive. And the right keywords unlock them. It's like open sesame, you know? Like we're entering like a world of magic, where if you know lots of words, okay? For example, if you look at this one, CG Society, Artstation, what the heck is that? Oh, those are like, that's a specific like 3D graphics community. And by adding those there, the algorithm knows now to make it look like the kinds of things

that are generated by that, okay? And 4K, you know, right? So knowing obscure bits of art history, that's now an applied subject. Okay, you can say, do it in the style of Picasso and do it in style of Monet and do it in style of Rembrandt and you'll get different looking images as a function of that. The exact same, so here is another one that I had on exactly that, right? So now, of course, you know, I actually, I used to be at the cutting edge of ML slash AI. I was like, you know, 10 years ago.

I'm not as into the subject as I was, but I'm getting back in. It's funny, like, because I was doing computational genomics for many years. But now what's gonna happen is from a content creation to say, but all this stuff is now working. So synthesis engines, you know, it's not just obviously me that's using them as a bunch of other people. They're using them bunch of people who felt them. That is that is something where pretty much anything you can describe with a few sentences.

Like Dolly shows that there's like the limit on that is much higher than we thought. It breaks through beyond what we thought was possible. Natural language is now a programming language. So that's like it. So I mentioned what are the pieces of the future that are being lived today? So I mentioned digital nomadism. I mentioned crypto everything. I mentioned since the Sengens.

I think also the shift of the camera to Asia is pretty important. The level up of India. That's, you know, there's something I tweet about, but one of the most underpriced things in the world, like in the sense of just nobody's budget for it, there's no news articles about it, nobody knows to expect it, is a billion Indians have gotten online with some of the cheapest, you know, internet service in the world. And that means that the plurality, if not the majority of English speakers online,

will be Indian by 2030. Okay. Yeah, that's wild. That's wild. Now, just think about the apoccal implications that has for culture, for society, for example, like every creator who's smart will start trying to appeal to Indians. That's where your following is coming from, right? That means that Indian culture will merge

with Western culture in ways we haven't seen before, right? In many ways, it's actually like, ways we haven't seen before, right? In many ways it's actually like it's like emancipation because Indians can now connect to others directly rather than going through the whole nation-state to nation-state process. Yes. Right? Every note, this entire gigantic Atlantis is just sort of like risen up and now can connect to everybody peer to peer. And you know, the full impact of that, I think, it's just not something that there's news articles, it's not people preparing you for this, people aren't like, people know there's gonna be an election, people know,

I don't know, there's gonna be an Olympics or whatever. There's no foreshadowing of this. Nobody's even aware this is happening, frankly. Most people are shocked when I mention this, right? And that's like just one huge kind of, I think, penny that's gonna drop. Let me pause there. Well, you can say I had a Peter Zion on recently.

I'm not sure if you're familiar with him. It's about like Zehan looks like on the line. Yeah, yeah, I guess. I disagree with him on a bunch of things, but I have no personal beef with him. I just disagree with him on a bunch of things. Yeah, but one of the things he said was demography is destiny, and that's repurposed from somebody else. But I do think that when you're looking at India,

you could also see technology as destiny or technological adaptation as destiny too. And that does help you to predict further out what's going to go on. I have a friend, George Mack, and he said, remote work is the best thing to happen to skilled people in developing worlds and the worst thing to happen to unskilled people in developed worlds. So if you were to think that you're going to have all of these Indians

that are potentially online, that have relatively good levels of education, fast internet access, all this sort of stuff, that how will getting onto talking about states and the way that they develop? How will immigration ever deal with remote work if somebody far away can put a VR headset on and start working in some jobs, some manual labor jobs somewhere with an autonomous robot that they're controlling? Yeah, that's so first of all, in 2013 I actually gave a talk that talked about this. I'm like, you know, with telepresence, your immigration policy becomes your firewall. So like 10 years ago, oh, Jesus Christ.

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. So, so because if and only if you can introduce that remote connection, can you stop somebody from telepresently animating a robot? Right? Go ahead. Dude, it's just, it's funny.

It's funny to think about the fact that of you considering the new challenges that are going to be faced by anything which is virtual and people are going to optimize for a way to find a solution to this. You have an unbelievable motivation for people. And the other thing is that you could spend in the equivalent of pesos, you know, it's going to be significantly more incentivized for countries

in the developed world to use this developing talent. So it's interesting because it also, like, it's a, I think it's net good, also like it's a, I think it's net good, but it also cuts right and left in complicated ways, right? On the one hand, you have, in a sense, far more potential immigrants. On their hand, they also don't have to pick up stakes and leave their home country for a job anymore. So the cultural influence in some ways is less and it's more. And less of a burden on infrastructure, on utilities, on. But more economic competition because anybody can do it, right? So it's like arguably it's more perfect competition, you know, from an economic standpoint, right? But what I think

happens, so first of all, there's lots of different pieces of this just to decouple them. The first thing is, where people will often say, and I actually, of course, I have some compassion for that unskilled worker in the developed world, but I don't even actually use the term developed and developing world anymore. I called them the descending world and the ascending world.

And the reason I do that is not just a word game, but like developed world, in place of a satisfied end of history, we're done, it's over, and developing, you're just kind of catching up, right? But descending and ascending world, imply, well, first of all, there's places that can descend,

like San Francisco, descending world, right? LA, descending world, okay? These are places that have gotten far worse over the last 10 years, despite or arguably because of the billions of dollars, right? You know, San Francisco may be the single worst managed city in the world. It shows what American politicians are capable of.

If only they had the budget, which is to say, capable of just like basically destroying, you know, civilization. And so the... So, you know, but on the other side, you know, and of course there are some, I mean, Francis Juarez is an American politician. I think he's great. He's able to draw people into Miami, right? But the, you know, so on the one hand, like SF is Descending World, but on the other side of the world, like, you know, places in India, places in Southeast Asia, places in Nigeria, places in Brazil, these guys are getting sky hooks to the internet.

They're ascending world, right? You can see the energy there, right? These folks have that, you know, for the first time, a quality of opportunity because they have the internet connection and they ever work and they can get paid in cryptocurrency or with something like, you know, transfer wise or something like that. Things are starting to get level. You're starting to have a globally fair uniform market, right? And so the thing about this is nationalism and capitalism and socialism and internationalism, like, you

know, the socialism and international, those are two different ways of kind of thinking about the moral obligation and the nationalism and capitalism are two different ways of thinking about the self-interest, and you can have different combinations. And what I think you're going to, so in the 20th century, it was basically the nationalist capitalist versus the international and socialist, that was kind of what the early part of the 20th century

at least was, and arguably the middle. Now I think it's the international and capitalist and the national and socialist, the cloud in the land. Okay? Why? Because, um, so, you know, if you go back to 1950 and you talk about that, American factory worker who, on a single guy with a high school degree, could provide for, you know, their family and have a house and so on. That's like romanticized. That's like this Halcyon period in all kinds of stuff. That was such a great time. But during that time period, of course, the rest of the world was bombed out, ruined,

right? Japan had been atomically nuked. China is in the middle of it's like just finishing this communist first national civil war. India, I think it just got an independence and it obviously had been involved in World World 2. Europe was totally bombed out. Soviet Union was bombed out after a giant war with Germany. Basically, most of the world was just absolutely in ruins.

So, America had more relative power, right? It could get by. And all of those, see, the opposite of the unskilled person in a wealthy country is the skilled person in a temporarily unwelty country. This person who's like really smart and hardworking and frankly would beat this other guy in a fair competition was not even in the game.

This Chinese PhD physicist was just like executed by Mao or something like that, right? And I'm just saying PhD as an example, let's say a very talented person, right? And so, you know, with having nothing against this other person, they had a huge artificial boost up, right? And fine, they had a great decade. Maybe they had a great century in some ways. But now, the wins of time, the chains, things are shifting. This is basically where nationalism versus internationalism, the moral case comes in. And the nationalists will argue, and I want to try to be fair to both points of view, right? Nationalists argue, well, don't we have an obligation to somebody who's

in our own country and there, you know, somebody speaks our language, waves our flag, and pays our tax and serves in our military, and so forth. You know, how come you're, you want to give a job or work with this guy from the other side of the world, right? And then the capitalist will say, well, from the other side of the world, right? And then the capitalist will say, well, are you going to pay, you know, why should I give a job to this less talented person over here when there's a more talented, hardworking person over there who doesn't have the same entitlement? And are you going to pay his salary? You're not. You want me to pay his salary so you can feel good about, you know, the nation or whatever, you want me to basically pay for your stuff, right? And so, both parties, I think have a logical argument where they're calling the other guy a free rider. You see what I'm saying?

The nationalists are saying the capitalist is free riding on the country and so on they provided. The capitalist saying the nationalist is free riding on their budget and the business that they provided, right? And, you know, I'm not sure, I'm actually trying to faithfully represent both views because I can, I think I can, there is attention there. And similarly, like the socialists and internationalists will have a very similar conversation, but with a more inflected kind of thing, right? The socialists will say, because now they'll talk about the state, oh, I can't believe you're outsourcing those jobs, you're pushing them overseas, you're impoverishing our people and so on. And the international will say, well, our people are actually richer and they've had a richer

century and a richer maybe like half millennium, whereas these people are, you know, have been underprivileged or whatever for a long time and they're hard working. So by the doctrine of all people are equal, then we should give them a job first, right? So again, those are two like, so both the self-interest and the moral stuff, you can kind of line it up, which is our duty is to those people in our community versus our duty is to those people who've had it tough or who are currently weaker and are more meritorious on some axis. Because those are, you know, because those are internally consistent, I, that's why I see them becoming the land in the cloud.

Right? That's like the primary political axis of this century is not right left, but it is the land in the cloud. It is the nationalist, socialists, and the internationalist capitalists. Yeah, that's interesting. Well, I mean, it's, one of the things we've been talking about a lot on the show recently has been declining male achievement and a global sexual marketplace and the fact that it is higher

rates of young people are struggling to get together whether that be for a short period of time or even for a long period of time the number of people under the age of 30 reporting no sex in the last year has tripled in the the last 10 years, so on and so forth. So if you are some guy in Idaho who couldn't get a date and now can't get a job because VR has made not only the sexual marketplace more opened up, but it's also made the job marketplace more opened up, I would be interested to see what sort of unrest downstream from that potentially happens domestically.

It's possible. I mean, the thing is also though, if it's low T, it's the low testosterone, like are people going to fight? That's going to domesticate everybody in any case. Yeah, good. I don't know, right? Like, but, you know, what I think you actually get is Disorganized rather than organized violence so everybody thinks about like war, you know Or they think about the 20th century would like uniform guys with

tanks and planes like that's like a super organized type of thing, you know and I think something that is upstream of that is implicit that people aren't really thinking about. And that is that in the 20th century, everybody was accustomed to coming to a factory, taking orders from a foreman, and then all mapping out and turning screws, cranking, wrenches, et cetera, and then coming back, right?

And that's actually the same as sort of platoon level combat. It's actually the same as football, where you all huddle around the quarterback, take the orders, go, spin out, boom, dude. The civilism school. Civilism school, exactly, right? But that is simply not how people operate today in the West. You're looking at a screen, and it's very much async and it's like attached,

detached, do something, information work come back, right? So here's the thing that that factory experience meant that all kinds of things, even union-organizing, leaned on the factory experience. Okay, so I have a thread on this basically. So that's kind of, you know, my is, the assembly line trained people for the top down mass politics of the 1900s. And so because today's workplace is network based, with the crucial exception of China, any viable political ideology will scale up what people are doing on their devices.

Okay, so in the in the 1900s, they were at the assembly line. Today, they're on their phones and their computers. And so what that means is whether it's politics, whether it's wars, it will start with the device. That's what it looks like, right? That's actually, you know, whether it starts with a meme, whether it starts with a hacking somebody, whether it starts with yelling at them online, even if it's like a drone or like a bomb dead, like all that is just device-driven stuff, right? So it's network, not, you know, it's giant networks hitting each other and like it's stochastic as opposed to huge

way fronts of like armor, uniformed tanks and planes and guys with uniforms hitting each other. So the real world is becoming more virtual like? Yeah, exactly. That's right. And the thing is that our models of what conflict looks like are based on this, people think, oh, when there's a war, it's gonna look like the history channel thing you were mentioning earlier, Hitler of Estalen on the bloodlette, right? And so they think it's gonna look like that,

but it's actually gonna look like what we've seen in the last 20 years, which is terrorism, social media memes, hacks, cancellation, de-platforming, unbanking, assassination. Like that's what conflict looks like in the network age. And there's both a good and a bad aspect to it. The good aspect is it's probably less destructive of property and lives than like nukes and stuff like that. It's also worse because like

the battlefront is like everywhere and nowhere. It's decentralized, right? Like how do you take down or stop a thousand individual groups of actors? Yeah, exactly. So it's just, it's something which is more like, I don't know, the 30 years war, it just goes on forever because where is the battlefront, you know, and it's not even declared, it's just like escalating hostility. And that's actually what, you know, in the book I talk about American energy versus Chinese control. And this is a sci-fi scenario,

okay, and it's possible that, you know, these don't actually come to pass in quite this way. But American energy, essentially,, essentially, my premise there, and you're talking about the guy in Idaho in this kind of a piece of that, right? Have you seen the political compass? Yes. The box, right? So top left, communism, top right, fascism, bottom left,

I'd say, wokeness, bottom right, anarcho-capitalism, or let's say, maximals. Okay. So people are used to saying the top left and the top right loop into the same thing that's called horseshoe theory, right? They say, you know, Stalinism and Hitlerism, basically there's this great movie called The Soviet Story,

okay, which actually shows the propaganda posters of the communist and the fascists and how similar they were. And you actually already see this today where you see memes from one side being copied and repurposed on the other side. So I was actually a conscious thing because Hitler called this group the National Socialists, the National Socialist German Workers Party. He stole a bunch of lines from the left and vice versa, Stalin stole nationalism and so on, say, became kind of similar, right? So that's horseshoe theory. And people think that's the only way that the left and the right

can overlap is in this fascist total state or this really authoritarian total state, which could be their communist or fascist, right? Orwell is written about this, everybody's warned about this, etc. So that's the thing that are basically immunized up, they have that image in their head, okay? But rather than simply horseshoe theory, I propose figure eight theory, where you take, again, that political compass, and now let's talk about the lower left

and lower right quadrants. Low left quadrant is wokenness, it's antifa, you know, all the stuff, and lower right is maximumism and arcopyalism, et cetera. So like ultra libertarian right, ultra libertarian life. So ultra libertarian life will say, everybody's equal. And ultra libertarian right will say, you ain't the boss of me. And where does that add up to?

But those add up to, even though they've got obvious differences, they've got a left and right component that annihilates. They've got a component that sums, and the component that sums is against all forms of authority. All authority is illegitimate, all hierarchy is illegitimate, this order is illegitimate, burn it all down. That's what everyone is equal

and you ain't the boss of me add up to is the current order is illegitimate. And so despite their differences, just like the comments and not so obvious they have real differences, they have real similarities in terms of their degree of total organization totalitarianism, right? Wolpeness and Maximism have immense differences, but they are aligned on basically being against the current order, whether they're calling it insuutually racist or they're calling it, you know, clouse Schwab in the great

reset. And you know, you can argue there's like aspects of both whatever, or you know, you can take pieces of that, right? And people, most people aren't like, some folks are very ideological and they will take X and not Y and so on. But for a lot of people, they will kind of take both in weird compartmentalized way. They'll agree with both, right? And there'll be people who will nod,

yeah, it's racist and I hate the great reset and so on. Do you know what I'm saying? And it's kind of like something where, that's why I mean there's a sum as well as a cancellation of terms, right? So if communism and fascism lead to challenge, here's an internee, the bottom left and the bottom right corner are sum to anarchy. Given the fact that you've been focused on network states a lot recently, and your

current new adopted homeland of choice has been Singapore What have you looked at from Singapore? What have you learned in terms of effective ways to build a state last few decades for that country has been? pretty phenomenal. Yeah, like yeah pretty unprecedented. So what what did you learn or what are the lessons that should have been taken away from Singapore's ascendancy? Well, so I am splitting time between Singapore and India. And actually, I'm trying to spend a lot more time in India in particular, just because there's amazes. Like that's also like the last five or 10 years in India have been phenomenal.

And I mean like on the ground you've got the Starbucks, you've got the internet and so on and so forth. But on your question on Singapore, I mean, you know, they had, Singapore is I think an important model for this century, you know, because they had a CEO founder, right? Which was Lekwanyu, who was perhaps the single greatest leader of the 20th century. A lot of the other guys who are great leaders are wartime leaders. They killed a lot of people, or they ordered troops into battle.

And look, there's an aspect of humanity, which is we respect conquerors, we respect winners, we respect that kind of thing, right? But Lee Kwan, you did not kill lots of people. It wasn't a communist dictator, it wasn't a wartime leader and so and so forth. He just leveled up a country, right? And in some ways, like,

what do I think about it is, there's sort of like four levels of leadership. If you ask yourself, why does socialism keep arising over and over again? One way of answering that question is, it is the easiest way to become a leader of men. Why? Because in any functional society, is it is the easiest way to become a leader of men. Why?

Because in any functional society, you can just start yelling that 51% is oppressed by 49%. And that will always work. Like you can find some access and just start sandpapering that, okay? And, you know, a conflict is attention and attention is currency. And you just, if you attention and attention is currency. And you just, if you're shameless, you just level up.

And basically socialism is like the lowest skill way to put yourself at the head of a mom. It'll just always work in almost every country. And the variance of this, let's call it demagoguery, right? We're pitting some fraction versus the other. Then you go one step up and you have nationalism. And nationalism is, okay, unify all of us against these other guys on their side of the border, you know, like the English versus

the French or whatever, you know, Wawgs begin at Kalei or something, I think was the ancient, you know, saying or whatever, right? No offense to the French, I'm just quoting like the, you know, English guys. So nationalism, the good part about nationalism is it stops the conflict internally. People are aligned internally. They've got a common cause. That's a good part. The bad part is it often starts worse, you know, because people are so proud that it

goes from, you know, nationalism or patriotism into jingoism or chauvinism or imperialism or whatever, right? And again, to all these wars of people, and then eventually they get pushed back or whatever, right? Okay, so then you go one level up from that, and now you get to capitalism, and now you're unifying people on the basis of a common market cause. And now defeating the other guy doesn't mean killing them or starting the war. You're defeating them in the market in a voluntary way where they can submit and be acquired or would

have you virtualizing the conflict. And it's also positive some. You're creating something of value, but you can lead a very large group like Jeff Bezos leads like a million people. The scale of capitalist enterprise can be very, very large, right? And I don't think actually we've seen the limits of them yet. And then like the highest level, I'd say, is to be a technologist leader where you're like a lawn and you're masking all these people. And it's not just positive sound.

You're not just building something non-violently. It's not something in the market. You're literally moving humanity forward by you're not just building an organization that ships chairs, for example, which are valuable in the market, but that's building spacecraft that doing something that's never been done before. So the level of difficulty, which are valuable in the market, but that's building spacecraft that Doing something's never been done before. So level of difficulty as a leader there is the highest, right? She go from demagogue to Nationalist to capitalist to technologist and like the degree of difficulty of being a leader of men of

You know taking these folks this capital these resources pulling them together and doing something taking these folks, this capital, these resources, pulling them together and doing something, gets harder but more valuable to society in the medium to long run, because you're actually shipping something that pushes all of humanity forward. Then of course, every other group can benefit from the technologists doing that.

Then they take for granted 30 years later that planes work, the trains work, that they take all of that stuff for granted, that that small group pushed that forward and scaled it. But it was a small group that did that, right? And so from that sort of ranking of leaders, then like LKY is like capitalist technologies is basically like kind of there, right? Somewhere in between, but very, very high, perhaps one the best of the 20th century, perhaps the best of the 20th century.

Because what he did for Singapore, he pushed them forward. He did innovate actually on several things like, you know, with sovereign funds, with how he, you know, he micro-optimized things like the approach from the airport. You know that? No. He really cared about the fact that visiting dignitaries when they hit Singapore, that they would drive through and it's, everything was clean and spotless. They'd be like, wow, okay, this is the spot in Asia for us to build our HQ.

He understood, we would call it the importance of user interface. Okay, you have a clean user interface and it signals something about the site, right? Why is it that you want like a clean UX? It's like, okay, they polished it, right? And so that means like lots of things are correct about it.

And so he understood that that basically the guys who are coming in to put capital into the country expected it to be a quote third-world basket case and they would be surprised to the upside. And so he would like drive back and forth and that route and be like put a tree there, put a tree there. That needs to go away. This should not be done at this time and so and so forth, right? And that's just like one thing, but you know, he set up Singapore Airlines, he did all kinds of stuff. He was basically the CEO of the country, you know. And the thing about that is what I talk about in the network state is something where it takes aspects of at least four different countries, more than that, but it takes aspects of America, India, Israel, and Singapore.

So part it takes from Singapore is the concept of a CEO founder of a country. Where it takes for America is almost too many to enumerate, but the concept of our constitution and of an immigrant, like a nation of immigrants, but a nation of immigrants, EMI, GRNTS. What it takes from Israel is the concept of a country founded by a book. Theater Herzl wrote a book called The Jewish State in the late 1800s, right around the turn of the century, proposing that the Jewish people have,

that they were a nation without a state, a stateless nation proposing that they have their own country. And people thought he was totally crazy and they built towards it and 50 years later, Israel actually, you know, happened. Now, that gets us the fourth thing, which is India has nonviolent independence, right?

And so, let's say with Gandhi, you had the nonviolent independence, right? So you take those fourth things, right? You have, you know, like America's constitution and all their contributions. You have Singapore's concept of the city state run by a founder CEO. You have the concept of nation started with a book,

with a strong moral cause, right? And you have the concept of a nation started nonviolently that managed to bind together folks with lots of different ethnicities like both India and the US have done, right? And actually all four of those are really multi-ethnic states, right? Israel has Jews from around the world. Singapore has four different ethnicities.

India and America have millions and millions of people from all around. I mean, India is like Europe, by the way. It's like North and South India are like Finland and Spain or something. There is different as that, but they're all in one giant union, right? So those also, they have something else. You know what's in common among those four countries? They're all forks of the UK codebase, right? Because like the American fork is like, what if we took all Europeans and most Americans

are no longer of Anglo descent, but the UK code base became the Constitution and so on. Israel used to be a British colony and Singapore used to be a British colony and India used to be a British colony. So all of the... So are you saying the Brits that we got it right? Is that the lesson to take away from that? I definitely respect the British people.

I mean, like, the thing is, one way I actually talk about the network state is, when we can talk about it, but people will, so if you think about America, India, Israel, and Singapore, they're not anti-British or pro-British, they're post-British, right? So that's say, on a daily basis, people are not scoring every event, as to whether they're four or against the British. But that's actually freed them to build their own societies. And then over time, India doesn't hate Britain anymore. Like America doesn't hate it. Like everybody, take a lorry to the Lou,

like you got me. I just, I just, look, lads, like, you know, whatever, you guys have contributed so much to humanity that, you know, I, I, of course, respected you've gotten new to it. And I mean, whatever, you can, we could, we could do the entire thing on just England and or really more of the UK's contributions to humanity. And it's funny, I was saying England for a second, because the American way of doing it often equates England with the UK. But of course, in England, like Scots of people, Irish, well, well,

will be very unhappy if you start to do that. Yeah. Exactly. That's right. So the UK's contribution to the world is, you know, dramatic. And Aaron and I will say, oh, imperialism and so on. And I grant certainly, like, you know, I'm glad India's independent, America's independent, etc. But there are a lot of empires that were much worse, you know, if you look at Timmerlin or something like that, you know, there's a lot of folks who just put everybody to the sword and whatnot. Relatively speaking, you know, relative to most other, you know, giant empires, I think the British, you know, we're if you're going to be imperialized. Okay. Um, we should not say one wants to be, but now that we've got some distance

and the fullness of time and so on, I respect Britain from a distance, so I do not want to be imperialized by the Brits, right? And that's something where, you know, I think that's a reasonable point of view, right? And you can have a firm handshake and do a deal and respect each other as equals and commercial partners and so on, right? Anyway, my point is in the same way that these societies evolved to be post-British, right? I think a useful way of thinking about it, especially if the US descends into what I call American-Anarchy is to be neither, quote,

certainly not anti-American, but not also, quote, reflexively pro-American, but post-American, but also, quote, reflexively pro-American, but post-American. Right? Meaning, like, people will be, there will be a huge attempt to pull everybody into the endless American civil war. Okay. But, if I ask you it this way, who's Cider-Yoon and Huda versus Tootsie?

Or Sunni versus Shiite? Right? How about, like about Protestant versus Catholic? Answer, I'm not really on either side. In fact, I want to stay out of the war zone. And I hope they come to peace. And certainly at various points in history, you've had these folks fight.

And when you take some distance from it, I don't want to be involved in that conflict. And I actually think in retrospect, people will find the conflicts over stupid things and tribal things that are not the greatest good for the greatest number, right? But I also recognize there's sometimes an arrow of history and you can't just be naive and be like,

hey guys, work it out or whatever. And you'll just get bullets flying at you from from both sides, right? So, you know, my premise is that, um, I think it's quite likely, not 100%, but I think it's quite likely that, uh, neither blue team nor red team in the US has the strength to totally control events. And both can be a spoiler for the other. That's one of the things we've learned over the last year or so. And they're both heavily armed.

And it's America has like more guns and people or what have you, right? And the critical thing also is there's mutual disrespect, right? Neither part, neither group wants to defer to the other. That's a big change. There isn't common ground or whatever. These are all things millions of people have written about this. I think where I perhaps differ is, I don't think there's going to be any easy reconciliation.

I also think that the manner in which it happens will not exactly be blue versus red. I think it's quite possible it's green versus orange. Do we talk about this? No, is this spiral dynamics? No, it's not to my knowledge. Basically, there's actually, here's an animation that you can put on there that will... That should... show it. Oh, okay.

Can you explain for the people that are just listening? Can you explain what I'm looking at? Sure. So this is showing a projected transformation of the US political compass or kind of political landscape from the traditional left-right alliance of Democrat Republican into dollar-green versus Bitcoin orange or really centralization versus decentralization.

And what you're seeing is basically the top two quadrants are actually becoming the same thing and essentially American status and the bottom two quadrants are going towards Bitcoin maximumism and or cryptocurrency and or decentralization. And so you can call the top is the land. And the bottom there is the cloud. The top are the nationalists and socialists. And the bottom are the internationalists and capitalists. The top is the centralized state. The bottom is a decentralized network.

And the top is green. And the bottom is orange. And the big thing about this is a good chunk of the like sort of you know military police state type of people nutrition and thinking about as the right will go with the dollar and a good fraction of the internationalists, the left libertarians, Glenn Greenroll types, etc. will go with Bitcoin, right? Jack Dorsey, Glenn Greenroll will go with Bitcoin. So you'll see a lot of folks on blue and red actually switch sides, and that's a different coalition. It may only be, I don't know, 20% or 30%

that switches sides, but it's enough for it to feel like a new thing, right? Because Dorsey, Greenwall, the substack, journalists, and so on. A bunch of intelligentsia go to Bitcoin Orange, and a bunch of the security state goes to Dollar Green. Why do I say that these are the two sides? Because if you think about the US establishment right now, what are they doing? They're printing trillions of dollars, passing these 100, I don't even know how many hundred billion dollar bills there are right this act that blah blah

I wouldn't even name them. They're so dumb They're starting simultaneous fights with Tech Trump China Russia and also to a lesser extent like Israel India hungry Brazil some extent Britain over Brexit, some extent, France over some Macron's comments. And, you know, like, their ambitions in some ways are going through the ceiling, right? Fighting proxy wars with multiple nuclear powers

and like a cold civil war with half their own population and fighting all the tech guys and fighting Web 3 and BTC and yelling at like everybody's even slightly out of line like hungry or whatever, right? And fighting them all at the same time, right, with an ideology of, you know, what we call it, wokenness or what have you that says that merit doesn't exist. So not even taking the best Americans anymore for the government, like they were, you know, under Clinton or Obama, you actually had a fair number

of smart people going into the government, but now that's a liability because, you know, let's say you're in tech, you've had a discussal cure, they won't even let you into the government now because they, you know, they's say you're in tech, you've had a discussal cure, they won't even let you into the government now because they, you know, they want to crack down on it. That looks like conflict of interest, et cetera, right? So lots of folks with skills are not being allowed in. And, so you have to ask, right?

Like, you sum all of that up. And this is why you're seeing, you know, whether it's China, whether it's Trump, whether it's Russia, whether it's India, whether it's like people don't respect the US establishment anymore. And without deference, you don't have, you know, like you have had a minimum disregard where people push the envelope and so on. And so lack of deference means soft power isn't there. So in software isn't there. The establishment is trying to use hard power. But hard power means even more

disrespect. You know, unless you're unless you're at the point that you're like, you know, able to atomic bomb somebody into submission like the US did to the Japanese or, you know, invade them and de-nautify them like they're into the Germans, hard power to the absolute limit, you can eventually regain soft power and so on and so forth. I don't feel that's necessarily going to come about. The wild card is what I call digital hard power. And so the one thing that the US establishment has in its back pocket, and I talk about this

is basically I was thinking about how to think about digital power. And I just kind of make this comments from a few months ago, it was like digital power, it's not really soft power, right? Meaning being de-platformed, seeing all your money frozen, that's much more than just influence, okay? But it's also not traditional hard power

because invisible, it's intangible. You can use it against a hundred million people and no one sees it. There's no bruises, no explosions, right? So what is it? And the way I was thinking about is actually it's like, you can cut the thing in two. So four part classification analog soft power, analog hard power, digital soft power, digital hard power, right? Analog soft power, that's culture and influence. Analog hard power, that's bombs and bullets.

Digital soft power, that's ranking, recommendation, okay, digital hard power, that's de-platforming, freezing, seizing. And the difference is, soft power is probabilistic and hard power is deterministic. Okay, so once you kind of cut it that way and parse it that way, that's like a useful way of just kind of making this make sense

Analog self power digital self power. So culture and influence are like ranking and recommendation You're just kind of putting a thumb on the scales, right? Bombs bullets deplapering freezing season. I am not asking anymore, right? You're just you know that Bernie Sanders me I'm doing I'm saying yeah, I am no longer asking, right? Okay, so they're just freezing. They're just freezing. They're just freezing your account. You're an unperson or whatever, right? And so the big wild card, like, you know, the thing I disagree very much with like Peter

Zahehan, for example, is he puts a lot of weight on like America's aircraft carriers and it's nukes and other stuff, geopolitics, blah, blah. And the thing is that, yeah, okay, is it true that that matters to some extent? Yes, but it matters less than it ever has. Why? Because you have this entire new cloud world where so much stuff is happening first,

and then it's getting printed out into the physical world if at all, okay? And so the, you know, for example, the Ukraine, all the bombs and bullets are downstream of this huge cloud campaign that Ukraine ran to recruit the rest of the world into it and sympathize with it, right? Where if it had not done that, if it had not done this PR, no one would care about it, right? Zelensky too Zelensky, at least from a leaving aside all the other stuff, from just a military PR strategy thing, he went and gave addresses to all these different parliaments to kind of bring them into the world.

He was constantly recruiting from the outside using the network, right? Expanding it beyond the borders of Ukraine to this giant digital kind of thing, right? And that's how he got the physical resources. They were printed out from the digital thing that was up in the sky. He printed out those resources and brought them in to Ukraine, okay? There's lots of other things that are kind of like that,

but point being that insofar as US establishment managers to hang on, if you look at things like, I don't know, you know what the F- is the fight to jet. Yeah. So if you look at stuff like the F 35, the zoom wall, the literal combat ship, the Ford class carrier, like, I mean, these are just gigantic, like multi billion dollar in some case, multi trillion dollar catastrophes, right?

It's the same US government that's like spending 300 million dollars in a bus lane. They're wasting billions of dollars on this military stuff. And people are just, you know, like, they're just like, yeah, I know, but we waste lots of money and lots of stuff. It doesn't matter. But it's, you just can't blow like a trillion of trillion, you know, just like that money starts to add up, especially if, like for example, the Chinese play an asymmetric physical game, you know, they're smart. They're like the world leaders and drones and other stuff. Their doctrine says, yeah, America sends these aircraft cars, we'll send drones and blow

them up asymmetrically. And the entire, you know, F-35, it's like a manned, you know, like airplane, even top gun, like this recent movie has some line on it, which is like, we're the last manned aircraft. Why are you doing manned aircraft now? Like, it's, it's literally like having, you know, cavalry in World War One. It's just going to get cut to ribbons by machine guns, obviously, right? So this entire physical military build out is, I don't quite say it's obsolete. That's not exactly right.

But a lot of it's based on premises that are no longer, you know, in effect, it's not necessarily, it might need to get defeated by a startup military, by a military that does not have such assumptions for people to reevaluate it because it's just like a corporation where you have divisions that define themselves by being like man-fighter pilots or like we're the guys in the tanks. We don't want guys in the tanks. You want to remote control the tanks. You don't want the humans in there,

but they are like, oh, it's brave or whatever, right? Anyway, look, I'm certainly not, as folks who know more about the military for sure than I do, but everything I've dug into on this with like, you know, this is a book called The Kill Chain. There's a book called 2034. We'll talk about this. And those are guys who have either seen military budgets and approved them,

or they've actually been Marines or, you know, the sky was like the chief staff of a bunch of stuff. Gosh, so premalied commander, right? Okay. So, see, have folks who are, you know, if you read the kill chain, and there's two different books by the way called the kill chain, I'm talking about the one by Christian Bros. Okay. If you read those or read 2034, you'll see that folks who are inside the military are saying, you know, there's actually a lot of issues here.

So I am not very confident on America's hard power in a serious fight with China in its own backyard. Because like, America is just overconfident. They have not faced a peer competitor in a long time. They don't care as much as China does. China's backyard, China makes all the physical stuff. America has trillion dollar, like overruns on all this equipment. I mean, China cares about Taiwan, and it's right there in America has to project power

from the other side of the world. And who's gonna win a war of attrition? The guy who can wheel up, bombs and tanks, and so on right there, or the one who has to bust it in from the other side of the world, and who speaks a language and has it, like people have just been inculcated since birth to care about this versus a TV war, you know, all of these other wars in the least America's fought have basically things where people can

switch to the channel they don't have a personal cost. Now that Ukraine is actually having a gas cost, you know, it's not it's not bombs and bolts are not genuine human lives, you know, like people don't want to fight anymore. And the last thing I would just say is basically on this with COVID, you know, immediately it got polarized politically. And so with any war with China, immediately 50% of the US will be against it, depending on who's in power or whatever. And just with COVID, it could flip, it could flip multiple times, left is four, the rise against it, the rise for it, the left is against it, whatever, right?

So I am like extremely bearish on American hard power and like a serious, serious fight. And we'll also see with the Ukraine stuff, you know, we'll see, but the immediate surge, by the way, of like American anything is insane. It like goes completely vertical. This is the current thing concept. You know what I'm talking about? Yes. Yeah. So if you go to Google Trends and you go and you type in like BLM or Ukraine or so, you'll see a very common thing, which is it goes totally vertical to like 100 everybody in the world cares about this. And then it's like a ski slope drop off and it looks just like a coin pump and dump.

Okay. In fact, it's actually arguably similar for everybody is gaining status or ever by talking about this thing, and then nobody cares, right? And so if you can somehow withstand that insane level of peak intensity, which is like a tsunami, by the way, it's like an information tsunami, everybody in the world suddenly cares, it's like bipolar, right? Like a bipolar world. Entire world just goes absolutely manic off the charts,

caring about the thing that they didn't even care about two weeks ago. It's life and death to them. They're willing to go and kill and die for it or burn things down. And then three weeks later, they don't care at all again. Okay, and they will never care about it again. But the thing is already burned down

or it's blown up, whatever. If you can somehow design something that can withstand that peak intensity, which is hard, by the way, it's like, you know what a tsunami wall is? Yes. Right? In Japan, these giant walls, because the tsunami's peak energy, it's like a super tall thing. If you can design it, so it's taller than the peak, you can maybe push it back, right?

If you can design walls to keep out that information tsunami, somehow, this gets the information diet, then you can resist the current thing. And if you can resist the current thing, you'll probably win. Because in Afghanistan with the Taliban, their lesson was like fight 20-year insurgencies. Something like, this is apocryphal, but it's like, oh, you Americans may have the clocks,

but we have the time. Meaning they could just cry, they're not going anywhere, right? And eventually, like, here's where Afghanistan is, and here's where they live, and here's where America is, on their side of the world, and eventually they'll get tired, and they're going to go home, right? And that's probably the logic of Ukraine and Taiwan, which is Russia cannot give up on Ukraine and China cannot give up on Taiwan. They're right there. And so, America can eventually give up and America probably will eventually give up. Right? That's like, you know, now, with it will happen in a year or five years or I don't know, but it will probably eventually give up, just like it's given up on Afghanistan and other things,

people just get tired. And, you know, the global war on terror movie, by the way, that was playing effectively in the 2000s, which dominated everything for like 10 years. Just went off the headlines and in the 2010s was replaced by a woken Trump. It's not like there were some, I mean, I guess you could say a song and a lot of being killed, this grand finale, or something like that. But it really was something that went down like this. It wasn't like an official changing of the channel. There wasn't like a wrap up.

It wasn't like, you know, well, we did X, Y and Z, right? And there's no post mortem. The troops are actually still there in some places. They're still bombs flying. And so it's like just a mess that was left after it. There's no cleanup or anything, but they just changed the channel, right? And I think what happens is, we'll see. It's possible that there's some like crazy acting out on the international stage for a while,

but I think it's quite possible to just change the channel to like just this gigantic, domestic, free-for-all, maybe in 2024. And then, I don't know, I don't know what happens, but I do think we should prepare for a post-American age. And what that means is, we haven't had, like, you know, people say, oh, America had a civil war and so on and forth. You haven't had civil war or civil conflict or serious conflict in a place that it's like the hub of the world.

You know, you didn't have, in the civil War in 1860s, it was something where it interrupted trade, like the flow of cotton and stuff like that that was interrupted, but it wasn't like, oh, this is the Sea of the UN and this is the reserve currency of the world and this is where Google is and this is where, you know, like you didn't have the hub blowing apart, right? And even when the Soviet Union fell, all these countries that folded into the Soviet Union, they could at least now fold into the US. There was a new big daddy, right? And a few of them like North Korea and Cuba, they kept the Communist banners up or whatever and they've just kind of been like these frozen things moving in time. But most other countries, they just stopped playing all the communist music once the funding from the Soviet Union went out and they flipped over to the capitalist side basically, right?

I'm not saying this is 100% and as you said, the digital, soft-powered, digital hard-power may keep the US afloat for longer than we think. That's a card that has yet to be played, you know, freezing people out of their Google accounts, tracking them with all the Apple stuff. There's some really terrifying things that a small group of people could do if they're really pushed against the wall. And if the state essentially either takes over and or fuses with the tech companies, that's what this antitrust stuff is.

Like the resolution of it is effectively nationalization of big tech by the US government. No matter what else the justification is, even if it's an economic justification at the end of the day, FBI, CIA, NSA, will get all the backdoors that they were denied 10 years ago. Well, part of me hopes that the crystal ball Cassandra truth, saying ability that you seem to have a track record of might be a little bit less accurate with this one. Look, Balaji, let's bring this one home, brother. Let's bring it home.

Okay. So essentially, that's scenario for either American Anarchy, or which is a conflict between these groups, the Green and Orange, or kind of American tech companies having this digital control over people. And conversely in China, I see if American Anarchy, the opposite of American Anarchy is Chinese control. So, you are being irrescanned everywhere, you have drones overhead, you have the digital

you want tracking every purchase, and China's argument here will be, this is what's necessary to maintain stability. Do you want American Anarchy? And America's argument will be, this at least were free. Do you want Chinese control? Right? So because I don't actually think like China will invade the US or something. It's like this heavily armed porcupine of, you know, no one will want a piece of that.

It's just all these people like shooting each other, bombing each other. Crazy things happening there, just escalating, okay? BLM and Jansix all the time is kind of one possible model of what that becomes. Whether that's by 2024 or 2028 or 2032. I don't know, but there's a graph that visual capitalists would just show is the chaos escalating. It's like the civil unrest, you know, is to get to quantify it, just being increasing since the 2000s, right?

And it's got remission, and then it comes back. It's like crypto. It kind of has crypto-winter, crypto-summer, and crypto-winter, and crypto-summer, but it's on the way up. Just like political summer. The heat keeps coming. Okay. So between American and energy and Chinese control, those are not great choices. And China will also to many countries basically say, guess what? We've got a whole surveillance stack. It's turn key. Unless you want your country to fall into civil war and mimic America, just sign right here, sign your

life over to China, it will install the surveillance state and you'll never have unrest. Many countries will take that, but of course it's a fashion bargain because people are tracked, but people will unfortunately, I mean, in two choices between that, which is basically like AR-15 shooting each other all the time versus being iriscane, a lot of people will take the Chinese control option. Unfortunately. And so that's how China's soft power just expands all its We have something which is for the other 80% of the world, it's neither American nor Chinese. And in fact, for the 50% of Chinese and probably close to 50% of Americans that don't want a piece of either of these things,

right? Like people forget, like lots of Chinese people are, effectively Chinese liberals, they're internationalists, capitalists. They want peace, they want trade. These are the folks, I mean, look, before 2016, like the US and China were like the motors of the world, even as late as 2019, Obama was a multilateral

internationalist Democrat that made a movie called, he made a movie called American Factory about like Chinese people in Americans working in concert to build things, right? Just as America's kind of lost its mind or last few years, China's also gone ultra-nationalist. Xi Jinping has replaced all these governors. This is something that's not as reported in the US, but something like 90% of governors

and people in the standing committee and so on of all being replaced as of 2017 were like ultra-nationalists. So it has gone as far to the nationalists right and some ways as America has gone woke. So they're crazy in their own way. gone as far to the nationalist right, in some ways as America has gone woke. Okay. So they're crazy in their own way. They've got this anti-Japan, other sentiments, boiling on their own internet, right? So between those two things, what if the choice is neither, what if the choice is just in like, as in the Cold War, there was a first role, the second role, the third role, the non-line

movement, but these guys came in third. What if this time, it's not the third role, but it's Web 3? What if it's not the non-align movement, but it's the align movement? What if it doesn't come in last, but it comes in first? We're all the other piece-loving people, so the world, are able to effectively align behind crypto protocols, which give genuine rule of law, meaning you've got freedom of speech, freedom of contract, you have contracts that work across borders. You know you're not gonna be cheated, you have international reputation,

you have something that's the equivalent of Harvard, but it's on chain because your crypto credentials are there, but it doesn't have fees, it's not exclusive in the same way, but it's more meritocratic. Many of these institutions, you know, for example, with media, I've talked about this like having, if you look at my talk on the ledger of record, that talks about actually putting media on chain. You look at my talk on cryptic credentials. It talks about putting colleges

on chain. Obviously, people will talk about putting the federal reserve on chain and Wall Street on chain. So you take these American institutions and you build more fair on chain versions and you prepare for like the US hub to maybe just like explode into sparks or not be there for us, right? And that is not anti-American. In fact, you know, it's, you wish the best for these folks. And in fact, you want to help a lot of Americans that want something that's centrist. It's post-American where it just doesn't rely on something that could go down in a burst of flame, right? And it's constructive and it can be done without trying to get everybody to buy in.

You just build these systems online, right? So one piece of it is the Web3 Systems and the other piece of it is if you go to the networkstate.com, you can read that about how it's not simply about building the technology, it's also about building the community and the societies. And I won't be able to recapitulate the whole thing, but go to thenetworkstate.com. And if you're interested in what the alternative is to American Anarchy and Chinese Control,

it might be startup societies in Network States, and you can read more there. I very much appreciate the fact that the book is online. It's updatable. You're continuing to evolve all of the different elements as you go through it. There's a one-pager, a thousand-worder, a single essay, and a single line, I think, that explains everything that's going on. Dude, look, this is very, very interesting. I very much appreciate the way that you think. I love the idea that everything seems to be a little bit orthogonal,

and then it's a new way to introduce ideas. What else should people do if they like what they've heard today? Where else should they go to keep up to date with the stuff you're doing? Well, you can go to thenevrxia.com, front-sash subscribe, and you can just get notified when the V2 of the book comes out. I'm also at twitter.com, front-sash, Bologias, which is B-A-L-A, G-I-S, and it's all free.

So let me know what you think. Dude, I appreciate you. Thank you for the day. Thank you. you