The Breakdown - Balaji Srinivasan on Communist Capital vs. Woke Capital vs. Crypto Capital

Episode Date: December 19, 2020

Balaji Srinivasan is an angel investor and entrepreneur, the former CTO of Coinbase, a former General Partner at Andressen Horowitz and more.  In this wide-ranging conversation with NLW, he discusses: How networks are taking a power role once reserved for god and the state Why pre-internet institutions will not survive the internet  Why bitcoin at $1 million is a global government Woke capital vs. communist capital vs. crypto capital The Breakdown is produced and distributed by CoinDesk.com   Follow on Twitter: NLW: https://twitter.com/nlw Breakdown: https://twitter.com/BreakdownNLW

Bitcoin at 10,000 is an industry. Bitcoin at 100,000 is a world power. And Bitcoin at a million is a global government. It's just not the one that anybody expected. It's funny to put it that way. A lot of people thought about a global government in different ways. And essentially, there's being two factions, those people who are pro-freedom and don't want a global government, and those people who are, let's say, pro-order or pro-state who do want a global government. But Bitcoin at a million is like a pro-freedom global government, which seems like a paradox thing that neither group really understands. Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. The breakdown is sponsored by crypto.com and nexo.io and produced and distributed by CoinDest. What's going on, guys? It is Friday, December 18th, and today I'm thrilled to welcome Balaji Shrinivasa to the show. At this point, I'm nearly positive you know Bologi. He is an angel investor and entrepreneur, the former CTO of Coinbase after they acquired his company Earned.com. He was a co-founder of counsel and teleport and was also a GP at Andresen Horowitz.

But if you've been paying attention at all this year, you probably know Bology as one of the first people to sound the Clarion call on COVID-19. Because of that, because he was so early, he ended up in a lot of fights with the media establishment, who were for a very long time parroting whatever the popular line was rather than actually figuring out what was going on. Along the way, Bologi has shared about a billion ideas, and I have to say that following him is like getting a preview of the future. So I really hope you enjoy this conversation. It is, as you might expect, extremely wide-ranging, perfect for a Friday heading into the holidays. So without any further ado, let's dive in.

All right, biology, welcome to the breakdown. It's really exciting to have you here. Good to be here. So I'm really excited for this conversation. I think, you know, a lot of what I am at root interested in with this show and exploring on the show is how the world is changing and in particular how power is shifting. And I think that in today's world, that is a conversation that is inherently in part about technology, perhaps. primarily about technology, but we find ourselves in this strange moment. And I guess my first question to kick this off is, how did America fall out of love with technology?

There's a great site called, like, I think it's WTF happened in 1971. I'm not sure the exact URL, but if you Google that, you should come across it, which fingers that exact moment right around, right after the moon landing. It feels like, you know, that was the mission accomplished moment for the general public's excitement about technology. And what's interesting about it is so after that, it's not like technology didn't happen, but the personal computer sort of personalized the ability for individuals to pursue technology. Technology is no longer a public sector thing. And really an interesting way of thinking about it is it re-personalized the pursuit of technology

because, you know, you could, you could kind of say that the grand era of American tech roughly is, you know, rather I should say state tech. It's roughly from like 1933 to 1969, you know, like Hoover Dam to, you know, including the Manhattan Project in the middle to the moon landing, right? That was the period where, you know, centralized technology, technology is that favored centralization, mass media, mass production. those led to the creation of these gigantic centralized states, you know, the USA, the USSR, the PRC. And as you go forward and backward in time from 1950, you get more decentralized in both directions. You know, if you could talk about 1950, you're roughly talking about one telephone company and two superpowers and three television stations. You know, you have AT&T and you have the U.S. and the USSR, and you have ABC, NBC, and CBS, and you have this extremely, centralized world in many ways. There's not much choice. And you don't just get there by accident.

What that means is an enormous destruction of diversity, intellectual diversity, ideological diversity, an enormous homogenization process as you go into 1950 where all these other schools have thought, all of these other, you know, newspapers and other, you know, media sources, information sources, all just shut down in favor of, you know, this sort of 1950. environment. So if you go backwards in time and forwards in time, backwards at time, of course, you start getting, you know, to the Wright brothers who could do, you know, an airplane, I mean, with bicycles. Like, if you think about it, by the, that technology still works, you could go and build an airplane in your garage today. You could do that. It would just be illegal to do it,

but you could. Like, physically, if the Wright brothers could do it, like more than 100 years ago, with, you know, didn't have Amazon, didn't have, you know, like really light composite materials or anything like that. It is physically possible to fly with stuff in your garage, okay, which is kind of crazy to think about, but it's absolutely true. It's dangerous, sure, but it's totally doable. And, you know, those plans are on the internet. Everything is there.

It's just that it's not thought of as something you can do. You go further back in time, and of course, there's individual inventors doing all kinds of stuff. And, you know, you get to the Wild West, you get to the era of private banking in the U.S. And you go far enough back in time. And, you know, you have pseudonymous people starting a new country, like that's the Federalist Papers and that's Publius and whatnot, right? All the, all the founding fathers who published under pseudonyms and argued with each other about the philosophy and start a new country. And so what happened was as you go into 1950, you have this huge centralization process. And you exit 1950 and you start decentralization.

And you have cable television and you have the internet and then suddenly have all the blogs. Then you have Twitter and you have a thousand million websites all around the world. And we're, you know, that's just going to continue. Like there's a huge backlash against it, attempt to re-centralize. But I think in the fullness of time, this technology is just fundamentally decentralized because everybody has this personal computer. We haven't yet done is use that sort of unlock our brains to innovate in the physical world. And one thing that happened is, first, technology wasn't as necessary to the U.S. because it got too strong.

By the 70s, you know, the U.S. really, you know, it took another 20 years to win the Cold War. It wasn't something that they were totally content and fat and happy until maybe the early 90s. But, you know, there's that saying that necessity is a mother of invention, you know. And in the absence of that stressor, in the absence of that pressure, The U.S. didn't have to invent, especially it didn't have to innovate physically, number one. Number two is it got into printing money. It got into things where it was all about political truths, right? There's a difference between political versus technical truths.

I tweeted about this several months ago, but a political truth is something like, where's the presence of a border or who's the president or how much money does somebody have? And those are things that are fundamentally and really entirely determined by the software in people's heads in the sense that if you can push an update to that through media, push new software into people's heads, you can change the position of a border. And you might think, well, don't you have a fight of war? I mean, no, actually, you know, for example, South Sudan or East Timor, you know, if enough people agree, a border can be moved or enough of the right people agree, I should say. So it's both quantity of distribution and very, even more importantly, quality of distribution, the nodes and the network. work that you can persuade with these arguments. So, you know, what that leads you to is a sort of postmodernism where everything is just a social construct. If with enough power, you can bend people's perception

of reality. You can make people say the border was here, now it's there, that kind of thing, because it's all social contract. And that's true for political truths. Technical truths, though, are like, you know, the diameter of the coronavirus, you know, under an electron microscope or whether or not a like this physics equation describes what is actually true. Like Navier's jokes, that's a physical truth, a technical truth. And so that's totally on the other side of things. You're talking about something which is true regardless of what humans think. And then you've got something like crypto, which is interesting,

which starts using technical truths to constrain political truths. Normally you can just make up who has what money. Well, you know, guess what? The Fed can hit a button and make it all happen. But now it's constrained. It's constrained via technology, via cryptography. So you start using technical truths to constrain political truths to a greater extent. So how to fall out of love with technology?

Well, I think the U.S. founded could print lots of money. It had fewer competitors. There's this process of re-decentralization where, you know, the U.S. as the state was no longer the driver, but it was back to individuals. And that's all happening now. And, you know, we're having a generation now that's born that doesn't even remember a time. You know, you can only see it in movies, right? A time when the U.S. government was actually competent.

And, you know, the thing about this is there's all these myths that are told, but it's not necessarily good. It's not something where people are, it's not 100% good for this period where the U.S. government drove all technology and innovation because it's actually during that time that you had a lot of slowdown in some areas. You know, the great stagnation as Teal talks about. Why is it that with all this rise in science funding and federal funding, we seem to have had a total fall off in physical innovation? One argument is it's being bottlenecking.

It's basically meant that any innovation has to be de facto state approved at the grantmaking process, in the sense of just a bureaucracy or collective has to sign off on it. So individual initiative has been deadened except in the area of personal computers and the tech sector, where an individual just gets started. of the so-called founder, you know. And so we're sort of fighting against that great stagnation through the mechanism of the personal computer, which was sort of a place the state couldn't fully control. But I think the short answer is, why did it fall out of love? It didn't need technology seemingly to maintain power.

It centralized enough power that it couldn't see what it was missing. And it also meant that due to political truths being so important, people were selected for the top ends of media and politics that could just persuade other people as opposed to actually being able to understand true facts. It's kind of a long answer, but I think that's a big part of it. Basically got fat and happy. So one of the things that are threads that I want to pick up on is in some ways, part of the argument there is you have this period of centralization of technology that allows states to consolidate power, but then technology starts to sow the seeds of the state's own irrelevance in some ways, right? And it feels to me a little bit like, you know,

that might be part of the moment that we're in where the technology is advancing in areas that have been the previous purview of the state entirely. And now there are credible alternatives and exit options that make people question what the role of the state should be at exactly the time the state is trying to reassert itself in some way. So that's something that I think, I mean, is that part of it? Absolutely. And the thing is that the more incompetent the state is, the more people build alternatives, the more the state feels threatened, the more it lashes out, the more alternatives get built.

I think that's the cycle that we're in in the West. I think that it's very, now, it didn't have to play out this way. It doesn't have to be this way. One of my macro frameworks, I think of, you know, the network is the next Leviathan. And what I mean by that is in the 1800s, people really, you know, why didn't you steal? People really believed in God. God was like a force in the world, which people really thought it existed. And they almost like a physical force.

They really expected they were going to go to hell if they did X or Y or Z. So it was like a decentralized law, a decentralized judge, which would scare the crap out of people. And they would obey in certain ways. And then by the late 1800s, once people, you know, didn't believe in God, Nietzsche, you know, wrote God is dead. And really what he was saying was that enough educated elites didn't believe and he could see the writing on the wall. Well, now you needed a new force to make sure that people didn't steal. And that was the state.

That was the boys in blue. So by the 1900s, why don't you steal? Because the state would punish you. What's the most powerful force in the world? It's no longer God. It's the U.S. military. It is physical force that is delivered by uniformed officers of the state. And now in the 2000s, you know, what is the most powerful force?

Well, we have a new contender, a new Leviathan, not God, not the state, but the network. Why don't you steal because the network won't let you? Either you're mobbed on social media or you don't have the password to the cryptocurrency network. And that's a genuine alternative to God or the state in the sense of what is the most powerful force in the world. And this is something that underpins so many conversations. It's a deep driver of things that people don't understand how deep a driver it is. For example, the difference between, let's say, the technological progressive and the, you know, let's call it the political progressive, is that, you know, on a problem like, let's say, you know, climate change, the technological progressive says, let's do fusion energy and the political progressive says, let's go fusion energy and the political progressive says, let's go. go and, you know, do, do, you know, carbon taxes or stop people from doing extra wires.

You subsidize this, ban this. On the topic of traffic fatalities, the technological progressive says, let's do self-driving cars and, you know, get people off the road that way, or at least out the driver's seat. And the political progressive says, let's, you know, ban cars from entering, let's ban this and that, let's make streets walkable and so on. And, you know, on the topic of COVID, the technological progressive says, let's do vaccines, let's do drugs. And the political progressive says, let's do lockdowns, let's prevent people from doing this, mandate that. And, you know, the pattern there is it's not that there's that much disagreement necessarily on the problem.

Sometimes there is. But, you know, in each of these cases, people are agreeing, you know, that on, on, let's say, climate or on the COVID or on, you know, like traffic fatalities being bad. You know, these, at least traffic fatalities being bad, it's relatively apolitical kind of thing. It's one of the few we have left, right? Yeah, one of the few we have left. But, you know, the point is it's not that folks are disagreeing on that. It is the mechanism of how to solve it is so fundamentally different. You know, the people of God are like the people of the South, you know, in the U.S.,

and they'll go to thoughts and prayers stereotypically. the people of the Northeast are like the people of the state, and their go-to, they'll scoff and laugh at thoughts and prayers, and they'll say, well, we should pass a law, right? We should ban this. We should mandate that. We should forbid this. We should subsidize that. That actually does something because the state exists. GOD exists, but GOV does not. Or rather, GOV exists, but GOD does not, right? And so that's their logic. But then you have the people of the network who say, well, actually, that is illogic because, you know, these laws don't actually achieve what they're intended to achieve. They're very high level. And just writing something down with the intent is not how it's actually enforced. You know, it's not the idea. It's execution. And so actually, rather than thoughts and prayers or pass law, we should write some code.

We should start a company. We should do it open source. And you go from what would God to, to what would the state do, to what would I do through the network. And that's a very different. It's a third model. And that's the people of the West. Okay. And the fundamental thing is about, you know, where do you resort to?

What is your first resort? Is your first resort to the state? Is the first thing you think about when solving a problem? Let's get a coalition. Let's go and basically acquire a piece of the state, you know, a piece of state power. And then with that hammer, we will hammer people into doing this and hammer people into doing that and that'll solve it because there's bad people out there and if only I had effectively guns, I could force people to do this or do that.

And you know, here's the thing, is though that's certainly not my first inclination, I recognize that there is some room for the use of, you know, like a competent state, you know, one of the reasons that the East has controlled COVID to a much greater extent than the West. I mean like the Pacific Rim countries, including, by the way, Australia and New Zealand, which have sort of imitated those Pacific Rim countries. So they aren't, it's not necessarily just a Euro thing or an Anglo thing. What they've done is they've done immigration controls in an intelligent way.

Their public sector is actually functional. And yes, there's things that are mandated. And yes, there's things that are forbidden. But they're done by competent bureaucrats, competent technocrats. So I want to clarify that I'm not against. you know, like the state in every respect. However, as as the go-to, you know, these folks are sort of going to the state, the political progressives, without thinking about whether it actually works or whether it's functional. It's like pulling a lever and there's no nothing connected to

on the other end. It gives you power, but doesn't give you results. Whereas the technological progressive is thinking, okay, when you say, how should I do something? How can I, you know, take responsibility for this problem by starting a company or doing a website or open source or even tweeting or whatever. It's an individual thing with individual responsibility. And then you very quickly realize it's hard to persuade people to do things. You know, money persuades, power compels. And while it's hard to persuade people, it's also more effective often. If they're all persuaded to do it, rather than you get a piece of the state and you point a gun at them, And in a really interesting sense, the political progressive and technological progressor are both ambitious.

The political progressive wants a piece of the state, which gives them the power to tell people to, you know, do this and do that. And the technological progressive wants a piece of the network, whether it's a domain name or, you know, it's a piece of the crypto network. And, you know, maybe you can build that into a Reddit or an Ethereum, right? You take your domain name, which is nothing. And it's like getting a piece of a homestead, a piece of land. and you build it up and you know now it goes from a piece of land to its gigantic farm with all these people on there and you know becomes a city and so on that's like what ethereum became that's what red it became went from literally a dominium registration to this gigantic international community

and everybody's there of their own accord and have opted in you know and so you persuade but you persuade 300 million people to do something it's actually very very impressive so my sympathies are certainly with technological progressives or other than political progressives because a lot of political progressives are technological conservatives. And, you know, again, like there's many things that I would agree with them on, like, you know, for example, that COVID is bad. But I think the mechanism, and I'm using it, by the way, in a very narrow sense of if you think of the state as the first resort on everything, as opposed to the network, your first resort

is implicitly to use the gun. I think that's one of my macro frameworks, which helps, uh, structure, what is going to work and what isn't going to work. What is the network approach to this as opposed to the state approach, as opposed to the God approach? So nothing against that, but that's something where the God approach depends. It's a coordination mechanism, which depends on people believing in a deity. And the thing about our modern era is people only believe it if you can put numbers on it.

What's really interesting about crypto is you can now put numbers. on the strength of belief. A belief can be publicly traded. So, you know, the price of a coin is like a measure of the strength of belief. How many people are holding it versus not? The strength of their belief that it's going to keep going up, that it's going to get strong and so on and so forth. And I think it's only a matter of time before that's applied to other kinds of social

movements where, you know, you could have essentially a publicly traded, if you don't to call it a religion, let's call it an ideology. And now that the basic mechanics of, scarcity and issuance and so on, you know, those are fundamental technological breakthroughs, right? But once those things now are kind of out there and they're productized, such that anybody can issue a token or coin, you can use that to measure the strength of any movement and you can see how much people actually believe in it. Doja coin is sort of like one of the very first kind of meme coin like things like this, but I think you're going to see way more.

This episode is brought to you by crypto.com, the crypto super app that lets you buy, earn, and Spend crypto all in one place and earn up to 8.5% per year on your Bitcoin. Download the crypto.com app now to see the interest rates you could be earning on BTC and more than 20 other coins. Once in the app, you can apply for the crypto.com metal card, which pays you up to 8% cashback instantly on all purchases. Reserve yours in the crypto.com app today. Many investors want to be a part of the next bull run. Others seek to build their dream home, finally launch that startup or fund their education. Try NXO's instant crypto credit lines and borrow against any major cryptocurrency with no minimum or maximum withdrawal amounts, no fees whatsoever, no credit checks, and flexible repayment.

Not to mention the APR starts at just 5.9%. Stay on top of your investment game with nexo.io. And remember, it's your crypto, your credit, your choice. Get started at nexo.io. So in some ways, I feel like part of the political progressives issue, is, you know, so the way that you're framing this is they see the state as the first resort. And in some ways, it's kind of a theory of change thing, right? It's like, what is the mechanism by which you think change can be applied in the way that you

find fairest or most desirable, right? And the political progressive tends to take the view that without the power of the state, the application of the fix will inherently flow to the already powerful or something, right? This is kind of a classic theory. And I think the thing that's interesting and why it's, you know, I wonder to what extent they are actually better recognizing on some level the threat that technology or sort of the, I guess the network is a better way to put it. These networks actually pose to the power of the state, be it in the context of specific crypto asset networks, which we're now seeing, I think, you know, we're having, we are about, I think, to have a grand national conversation about stable coins in the shadow banking system, which is wild, right? And it's going to be driven by political progressives who rightly see

potentially it as a threat to their ability to apply, you know, modern monetary theory. And so it's just, it's fascinating to me to some extent that, you know, there is this emergent threat and this power transition that you've identified, a new Leviathan. And I wonder, it feels sometimes to me that the progressive political conversation, rather than asking how that can create a new mechanism to deliver the end goals that they achieve, just are reading the threat that it imposes to their theory of change itself. The reason the network is, in a sense, a threat to the state. So those three, like, forces identified.

Oh, now I remember how we got in it, by the way, we're talking about did it have to go this way? So I'll come back to that point. Right, right, right. I mean, if you have a million people in one physical location, that's Estonia. That's a state. If you have a million people in a social network, that's not considered to be anything. That's just like a large Twitter following. But could it be more?

Could it be something that has a sense of national consciousness? Could it be something where they've got a digital currency and a digital economy, perhaps a virtual reality? Now you start to actually have something where, you know, thanks to remote work, more of work can be done in the cloud. Maybe everybody can be pseudonymous, but they're checking in here, just like, you know, they would check in to, you know, a video game every day. And now the state, the land starts to become a parameter and the cloud starts to become primary. And what that would mean is a flippening, the cloud flippinging.

In some sense, that's already happened in 2020. The cloud, thanks to remote, thanks to COVID. and so on with lockdowns, you know, the land is just a parameter and most of your life is now digital. That's happened for a lot of tech people already. It's like a lagging thing. Of course, there's folks who are still, you know, offline for various reasons. In the same sense, you can open your laptop anywhere in the world and get onto Gmail, get onto Twitter, get onto this, get onto that, right? The land is a parameter, but the cloud is a constant.

That's a new thing. and if that happens and that extends and that happens more, the network is the constant your login. That's your actual society. That's your economy. That's your people. And then the place you're actually living, well, okay, you know, when you're in Caesar's realm, you know, pay unto Caesar what is due,

but you have no emotional attachment. It's like a hotel. And so in that, that's one of many different axes in which the network, you know, does challenge the state because it is possible to essentially build polities in the cloud that are like alternatives to the state. Now, with that said, I think that you get a Hegelian synthesis. So, you know, I mentioned God's data network is sort of like three pure things, right? But you can start making syntheses.

For example, the pure state would be like the USSR in the 20th century. Just the untrammel state, they, you know, they killed priests. They were against God. and certainly the internet hadn't even been invented. The USA in the 1900s was like God plus state. You know, if you look at the Marine Corps, they were like, you know, for God and country, right? So that's like a God state hybrid. If you think of something like the Islamic State, that's actually like a God state network,

like a triple hybrid where basically, you know, the Islamic State, Godin State, and then they recruit from the Internet as like a bad version. If you think about like a pure network, well, that's like crypto or Bitcoin. Pure God would be just like a religion that didn't have any state power whatsoever. You know, maybe something like Fallen Gong or something like that. I don't know that much about it, but, you know, I do know that they certainly don't have state power or Judaism prior to Israel. Right. So that's like a pure religion.

Actually, that's actually something that's like God plus network because you had an international network of people who, were part of the same community and wrote letters and so on to each other. And that helped lead eventually to the formation of Israel and they believed in the same religion, but they didn't have a state. And then there's other versions. So, you know, we talked about the pure network, but one of the most interesting and one of the things I think about the most is a particular fusion I call the network state. And there's two ways of getting there. That's a fusion between essentially the technology, the internet, and the physical state. One way of getting there is from below, where the state fuses with the network. So that's happening with China most predominantly. That's a big, that's the

exception that proves a role. It's one humongous state that has merged vertically with the network. It's sort of become this fusion of the land in the cloud. And they've got the, they've got AI and they've got, you know, like blockchain government and, you know, they're rolling that in Beijing. If you've seen that, and they're using technology as a fundamental tool of policy. They're running their country in this fashion. Estonia, Israel, Singapore in different ways are also networking, or becoming network states in this sense. Estonia is probably one of the furthest ahead where they run their country like a software company, and they do so in a way that preserves liberal values and, you know, in the sense of, you know, freedom and what have you.

But then there's another model, which is not the state gaining the capabilities of the network, gaining the capabilities of a software company, of a software CEO, but the network gaining the capabilities of a state. That's going from the cloud down to the land. And that's like a new form, which I think about a lot. And I've got some writing that's coming out on that. Follow me on Twitter if you want to see more. And the fundamental idea is, well, you start grouping large enough numbers of people online, and you can start doing crowdfunding of territory.

You can essentially achieve consensus on the society you want to build in the cloud, then start materializing it on the earth. So it's entirely a consensual opt-in process. But I think that actually starts to lead to innovations and governance. And any innovation is not initially always popular with incumbents, but sometimes there are smart incumbents who recognize the value of that innovation. So I do think that the, you know, I hate to pose it as the threat that the network poses to the state because that phrases it as inherently confrontation or negative.

But the reform that the network will bring to the state, I think is very important. And there's going to be some folks who may not be fond of that reform, often because they don't understand it. And I think that's something how I think about things will go. Some of how I think things will go. Do you think that there will see as part of that transitional process, different jurisdictions, particularly those that haven't necessarily been the global leaders in the past, like speed up to leverage. the fact that this change is happening inevitable but not necessarily has no foregone conclusions about how it's going to go to try to compete and win devotions of new networks? I mean, I guess Estonia is kind of an example of that to some extent. Absolutely. Any country with an internet

connection could make itself incredibly wealthy by simply putting, assuming the government has enough control to make this happen. It's not like a failed state or something. By simply putting a through some old regulation and saying entrepreneurs welcome. You know, hey, drones are legal here. Knock yourself out, right? Or they're fully legal within this zone. Go to it. Or, you know, that drones are, you know, a local thing for a global thing. You'd say, crypto is fully legal here. Whatever you want to do with defy, knock yourself out, you know, or whatever you want to do with this or that technology, life extension, you know, boom, go ahead, right? And life is such being a very important one, maybe the most important one.

And so the reason is that the way cities used to be built was around rivers or coal mines or things like that, natural geographies. You know, why particularly rivers? Why were they built around rivers or oceans? You know, why is Manhattan where it is? Well, the ocean, the sea, was the original peer-to-peer network, right? You're Portugal and you can just go and send stuff directly to Brazil or to Macau, you know, And you don't have to go overland.

You don't have to go through 15 other countries that can deny your passage. You can send your goods across the ocean. So the ocean was the original peer-to-peer network, which connected every port to every other port to first order. Of course, there's, you know, like getting through the Black Sea or whatever, you're, you know, the Caspian Straits, you know, Turkey is not necessarily going to let you through. But to first order, you can get through. And that's why it's so important to not be landlocked. That's why, you know, for Russia, for example, a huge national security thing for them for many, many years is being, do they have warm water ports? That's one of the reasons they, you know, wanted Crimea.

You know, they've got like a warmer port. You know, that's why Vladovostok is very important to them. So, like, the geopolitics was critical, like having access to these ports. But today, everybody's got a different kind of port, namely the port on your computer. It's actually very well-named, right? And that port, you know, that lets you send traffic back and forth over the internet is a very different kind of port, but it's available everywhere. And so you might be landlocked, but you're not cloudlocked. You know, you are able to send and receive packets.

And that actually radically improves the bargaining power of pretty much any country because, you know, it doesn't need to be near natural resources anymore. even being near the ocean is fine, but now everybody's near the cloud. You're one hop away. I mean, one thing we don't really think about too much is how shallow in a particular sense the internet is. With basically 20 keystrokes, you know, the username and password, you can get into anybody's email or Facebook or Twitter or whatever, right? I mean, 2FA does prevent that, okay?

But let's say if you're just doing username and password, the internet is incredibly shallow with just like a series of keystrokes, you could bring up a billion different people's accounts on one machine. It's really actually insane when you think about that. Google is like that. Just, you know, hit in a few keystrokes and you can go to anywhere. And it's like this, it's actually insane. It's almost like a teleportation mechanism.

It's like a library where, you know, the library, imagine the shelves moving in front of you with autocomplete as you hit enter. You know, it's like insane how shallow it is. rather than having to go and spend, you know, even 15 minutes to go to the library and get a book or whatever, there's like a depth of effort that's there. You can just, boom, hit a few keys and have it to come up. And so because of that, everybody has this port to the intranet. Every country that wants to could attract entrepreneurs. And I think what just hasn't happened yet is sort of the collective bargaining effort to put the asks of the entrepreneurs on one side to like sort of solidify them,

to get people behind a policy platform. And then to go and take that to all the countries of the world and see who, and in states, you know, who's the taker for this? Because it doesn't have to be necessarily at a national level. So many governors who are quite powerful, many politicians in different countries. You sort of have like a two-sided marketplace of entrepreneurs and policymakers. And you bring the policy to them that you propose and you have it back and forth. And the critical thing that makes us possible is mobility because those founders, those entrepreneurs,

those VCs, investors, engineers are immigrants, they're migrants. You know, they're willing to snap shut the laptop and open it up somewhere else. You know, once, you know, knock on wood, the vaccines are looking pretty good. If they're deployed and they're deployed at scale, if they work, which are all ifs right now, but looking good, knock on wood, okay, then I think, you know, in a year, a year and a half from now, you may see a lot of revenge travel, you know, like this pent up demand, everybody in lockdown, boom, the golden age of digital nomadism dawns because right now we have this tension where, you know, the virus has boosted both centralization and decentralization.

You know, the states have printed tons of money, but crypto has gone through the roof. Lockdown means you can't go anywhere. Remote work means you can work from anywhere, right? So it's like this rubber bandish kind of tension. if the vaccine actually works, boom, everybody will want to travel everywhere and they can with, you know, with the remote work, but governments will also restrict transit because they don't want to spread the virus. And so a lot of the, you know, sort of vaccine-based, so I think that tourism, we'll see if tourism comes back. I don't know. I'm not sure if they'll ever come back to the same level or not for a generation, maybe, we'll see. It's possible. But I think permanent inter- relocation or semi-permanent will become much, much, much more common, where if you do need to do a two-week quarantine, well, you want to amortize that over a two-year stay. And you'll just go and work from a place. It's another one of these areas where the last decade has shown lots

of examples of almost previews of the future with this. You know, think about startup programs in Chile, right? Startup Chile that literally got entrepreneurs to come down to do their version of Y Combinator. But instead of it being like really exclusive, it was basically anyone willing to do it, you know, and they gave a bunch of resources and all these sort of things. And you've obviously seen in the crypto industry, Malta and Puerto Rico and, you know, a variety of other places try to kind of create these hubs. And then you have just the generic side, you know, these remote work type things, like these fellowships where you go for a year and you do whatever, right? But these are all kind of like the early flirtations. And I think one of the pieces that, one of the

things you're saying that I tend to agree with is that it feels unlikely to me that the burden and risk of the same way that we traveled before will be worth it to the same set of people. And so in that context, you have to imagine that these places that have had a fundamental demand destruction around tourist revenue are going to be looking to attract a deeper form of revenue generation and the form of people actually being there, paying taxes, you know, doing whatever it is that makes sort of that money shift. But it does feel like, you know, we're potentially poised for a very different level of of international mobility.

The question part of it is like, you know, how much is this simply a factor of enough people having enough interest and now ability to go work from anywhere that a place could plausibly attract them for two years versus there needing to be some fundamentally new set of infrastructure to actually relocate in a meaningful way? I think both. I think the infrastructure thing, that's a pure tech question.

What you want is for it to be as easy to relocate as calling an Uber. And how do you get there? Well, maybe you make it such that you have an inventory of all your possessions and you can just like get your clothes and all the other stuff on demand, but you just, boom, hop into a new country and the whole room is set up exactly like you want, you know? I think that's like imagine Hotel 2.0, you know, which is like personalized. but it's like a residence and everything is set up that way. That's one way of doing it.

Maybe people just have fewer possessions as you go from your bookshelf to your Kindle, for example. But they're decentralized, right? So you have the private keys on your phone. So it's not like you don't have the property and it's all in the cloud. And I think that there's a lot of ways the technology can make it, the technology can make it cheaper and easier for people to internationally relocate beyond where we currently are. Actually, we did teleport.org a while back.

There's Nomad List. And these are things which allow international relocation. And I think you're going to see much, much, much more of that. And, you know, NomadLis is not my company or anything like that. It's just by a guy I know, not even know from the internet guy named Peter Lovellis. But it's kind of a compliment to teleport.org, also a good company. We sold Teleport. I co-founded that.

We sold that to a relocation company. several years ago. But I think both those companies are sort of ahead of their time in terms of digital nomadism. I think that's going to explode. And I think we can do way, way, way more in terms of assisting permanent international relocation. I want to come back to, we're on to talk about Bitcoin and where we find this moment. You know, we kind of have gone very big, but, you know, we're in the midst of this industry sort of winning by hook and crook a whole new set of devotion following. And certainly we've seen the prices rise. And so, I want to maybe dig in with you, like, what is this next bull run going to mean for Bitcoin

and for the crypto industry as a whole? So, you know, I tweet this a while back. Bitcoin at 10,000 is an industry. Bitcoin at 100,000 is a world power. And Bitcoin at a million is a global government. It's just not the one that anybody expected. It's funny to put it that way. You know, for a lot of people, a lot of people thought about a global government in different

ways. And essentially, there's been sort of two factions, those people who are pro-freedom, don't want a global government. And those people who are, let's say, you know, they might phrase this pro-order or pro-state, you know, who do want a global government. But Bitcoin at a million is like a pro-freedom global government, which seems like a paradox thing that neither group really understands. And essentially the reason it's like a pro-freedom global government is Bitcoin at a million

becomes digital gold, truly digital gold. And it constrains states in the way that gold used to constrain states, which we can only really understand by reading history books and reading what, you know, those periods were actually like. And what it basically meant was that you couldn't just, you know, the century of total war, the 20th century is in part of function of the fact that these states could mobilize millions of people just go and shoot and kill each other, mobilize people to put people in gulags and concentration camps.

you know, there's something where the failure mode of getting, yes, you can get lots of people to cooperate, then cooperate to kill lots of people and do very bad things, you know? And so instead, the alternative here is something where there's a limit on state power and governments don't limit themselves. You know, that's like this fundamental issue of, oh, limited government or whatever, governments don't limit themselves. You know, the whole point of a government is it's force. It's got a monopoly of force.

So anybody who's in a territory where the government can shoot you fundamentally, you know, there's a sense in which you're not going to actually be able to limit it because it can shoot you. And of course, there's various social blocks that people put in there. A lot of people are very, they don't like to, it's sort of like not thinking about what meat is. They don't want to think about what the government is. Meat is killing an animal and the government is a gun, you know, that's what it is. it is a gun. You may argue it's good or bad at certain times, but it's a gun. And so limiting the use of that gun by the people who the gun has pointed at, you know, or that is say, the people who are going to point to that don't really have the ability to limit the use of it. They may think they do.

And maybe they do in some levels where, you know, if it's actually going and attacking somebody, then, you know, it looks bad for them and so on. I'm not disputing that. There's some aspect of optics and PR and whatnot. Someone has to pull the trigger, you know, when, when, you know, when, the state is enforcing something. But I think it's more interesting the thing about limiting it from outside with constraint, with exit, with other groups constraining the use of force, either implicitly or explicitly. And Bitcoin at a million means that you can't print very easily. Put another way, you know, a corporation issues fiat.

And that fiat is just called equity. And there is a limit to how much equity they can print. they may print equity in a new financing round or whatever, but if they dilute down existing investors too much, this investor is either A, won't approve the round, or B, if they can't exit, they may, if they can't stop the dilution, they may just sell their stock for dollars,

so they can, you know, they have that backup plan that if there's too much printing, too much dilution, they can exit. And now that applies, if Bitcoin's at a million, that applies not just for a company, printing too much stock, it applies for a country printing too much fiat. So there's now a way to exit without counterparty risk for anybody worldwide that is like gold and that you possess it, but it's digital and that it's portable and it's got all those things. Now, of course,

there's all kinds of scalability things that would need to be solved for this. But I'm actually much more bullish on that now if you're looking at, you know, have you seen WBT? Have you followed that? Absolutely. Yeah. So WBTC is working. And it's like, it's not that complicated. It's just literally depositing BTC with somebody. And then you get WBTC tokens and they're, you know, on the Ethereum chain. And then you can do stuff with them. And now any scalability, you know, things that come, you can deal with that. And eventually, if you want to, you can redeem it. And that radically reduces the number of on-chain transactions.

And I think that's essentially what happens. What you might have is a company at the time of boot-up, it pays, I don't know, in a few years, maybe it pays $1,000 a transaction for Bitcoin, which is not something you're going to do very much, but it moves $5 million of Bitcoin into something, which then you do a wrapped BTC thing around it and you can do micropayments on it.

So you essentially work around the fact that this is a very, high transaction value, high value blockchain by doing very infrequent transactions and then doing wrappers around that for different kinds of workloads, whether it's micropayments or other payments or so on. And I think that's one way in which BTC actually can't achieve its goal of being digital gold. And there's a thousand different platforms where you can wrap BTC in different ways. And that's, you know, I think that the more pragmatic BTC people will understand that that's a big victory condition for BTC, and then I think hopefully we'll understand, okay, all these other chains add value to BTC. BTC is a king of coins.

And all these other folks are in a sense paying tribute because you can wrap it and use it and so on and so forth. But it's not anti-BTC. The crypto economy is centered around it, but you don't have a crypto economy without those other chains that do other things like giving freedom of speech via social networks or decentralized finance or decentralized DNS, et cetera, etc. So, you know, a little bit off topic, but the point is, Bitcoin at a million, the next price run, I mean, when does Bitcoin get to a million? It could be this run. It could be the next run. It might never get to a million. It might be 100, something,000, between 100,000 million. I have no position on where that actually levels out. Okay, so I'm not giving something like that.

But I am saying that at a certain point, another 10x means this is a very big deal. Another 100x means it's one of the most powerful forces in the world, if not the most powerful force. And that'll be combated There'll be a lot of people who are going to push on whether it's actually decentralized enough. You're going to see lots of different kinds of attacks on it. But I think at the end of the day, long term, there's enough cryptocurrency technology like, you know, ZK. Snarks and other kinds of things that something like Bitcoin will constrain states by 2050 or thereabouts. It's a long time period. But I think that's probably true.

Well, and this is interesting, too, because there's been so much conversation. It's like as this price has heated up and as sort of the. macro folks have come into the space. There's been a lot more debate and discussion, at least in the Twitter sphere, on this idea of whether Bitcoin is inevitably going to be co-opted in some way by Wall Street or governments coming in. Well, so have you seen that thing? Like, you're not locked up in here with, I'm not locked up in here with you. You're locked up in here with me. Have you seen that one? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a meme that people did with BTC in late 2017 when all those people are like, yeah, now Wall Street's going to get in and short.

Bitcoin. And so remember that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it used the scene from Watchman where, you know, the skinny guy goes and beats the hell out of the prisoner who's going to attack him. And so maybe that's what happens. I think essentially the compromise that is being offered there, the quasi-truse is, okay, you know, you're a crypto holder. You get to preserve your gains, but you don't have your freedom. You don't have the ability to move your currency. You just get the, you know, a million Fiat bucks or whatever it is, you can trade it in for that, but you can't move it around. And I think actually it is a, I shouldn't say smart, it's a clever truce because what it actually

does, undermines the long-term value of the thing itself. It just turns it into an investment, but that investment is based on the fact that it is actually free. And so, you know, the investment may hover in mid-air for a while. You know, there's various coins I don't believe in that have hovered in mid-air for a very long time, but it really undercuts the long-term value proposition of that. I think that that truce may be offered. I don't think it should be or will be taken for lots of reasons.

The most important being there's no one person to take that truce. The thing about BTC and cryptocurrency is the ledger is replicate. It's not even the mining nodes or have you as important as they are, but the ledger itself is replicated on millions of computers at this point. It will, it's one of the most valuable things on Earth. it'll probably, I shouldn't say never be deleted, but it's pretty hard to delete it. And so as such, any new chain that can get booted up, you can just say, all Bitcoiners, you get coins on this chain.

Maybe it's 100% of the coins, maybe it's 50%. But you can import the ledger into a new chain. And so, and that chain may have security guarantees or decentralization guarantees or privacy guarantees or technologies we haven't invented yet. And so the ledger will never die. And because the ledger never dies, I don't think digital currency will ever die. And so that's something where even if there's like a truce or a compromise or something like that, which says, hey, you get money, but you lose your power or whatever, you lose your freedom, your ability to transact, your personal rights. I don't think that'll actually stop this long term.

I think it would be a short term thing, even if it's taken. I'm not sure who would take it. Or individuals might take it, but the system, I couldn't take it because the system isn't. capable of accepting something. It's millions of individuals. This is a slightly different topic, but I feel like it's connected in terms of if nothing else that sort of, you know, a germ of optimism in that sort of contention, which is a tweet that you had from, I guess, a couple months ago now, where you discuss the future is communist capital versus woke capital versus crypto capital. And it feels to me a little bit like what you're describing is the sort of, you know,

the preservation mechanism of crypto capital. But I'd love to maybe we can kind of talk just for a minute about what this sort of versus set up that you have in mind here is. So what do I mean by that? Communist capital versus woke capital versus crypto capital. That's PRC versus MMT versus BTC, right? So people's travel go China versus modern monetary theory versus Bitcoin. And essentially what we're seeing is in many ways, you know, like we're seeing this certainly in the U.S., but also within China, it's become more illiberal.

That is to say, due to the fact that the Internet has led to all of these new voices and so on, states have cracked down both the U.S. and China by essentially pushing much more in the way of ideology. It's not really just policy. In China's policy, but in the U.S. and China, it's ideology. For example, there's a great graph which shows a number of mentions of Zizh Jinping in, you know, Chinese SEC filings. And it was basically nothing in like 2015 and it started going vertical. And now every single document in China has, like a SEC filing has to talk about how this is boosting, you know, like Zizien Ping thought, right? And a similar kind of thing happened in the U.S. with Polygram posts this graph where it showed.

that woke language at the New York Times has just gone vertical since 2013. And so if you think of this as, all right, well, if everybody can speak, let's brainwash them or push this ideology that means that what they speak is immaterial because they're still coordinated, right? If everybody can speak, everybody might have a different opinion. So we push this ideology that coordinates them, snaps them into line, cancels anybody who steps out of line. And so we can still have a coordinated polity, even in an intranet age, when anybody

but in theory can speak freely because they could decentralize and then we won't agree with each other and bicker endlessly. And so what these are, it's almost like an adaptive thing. It's, you know, if there's freedom of speech and every ideology can flourish, well, the ideology that gives arguments to knock down other people's freedom of speech is the one that actually is adaptive because you don't want to control them, but they want to control you, so they'll control you. You know what I mean? It's like, you may not want to shoot this guy, but he wants to shoot you who gets shot. you, right? Because they've got the gun. And this is something that Paul Graham and I actually had a Twitter discussion on, which was, it was very counterintuitive that, or PG thought it was counterintuitive,

and I agree it was counterintuitive, that here, let me see if I can find this discussion. So, you know, PG said, he quoted somebody, pretty wild that we transitioned to broadcast whatever is top of mind with zero friction. And any opinion that reflects values not held by the most radical 10% will ruin your career at the same time. You know, so you can broadcast server's top mind and any opinion that reflects values not held by their most radical 10% will ruin your career at the same time. And, you know, what I said is it's three phases. It's number one, gain ability to broadcast whatever is top of mind with zero friction. Number two, the most radical 10% also gain ability to broadcast what is top of mind for them. And what is top of mind for them is making

it high friction for you to broadcast whatever is top of mind. So the paradox. So the paradox of a free society, if it's really free, it may allow ideologies to flourish, I want to stamp out that free society. And, you know, that's what PG replies. Like, it's a more bizarre phenomenon. Making speech easier ends up decreasing freedom of speech for the reasonable because it gives unreasonable a way to attack them. Obviously in retrospect, but I wouldn't have predicted it. And so this is actually something where effectively society had evolved to an equilibrium where it had de-platform the de-platformers. So it is not that, you know, deep platform, I mean, like a, like a weapon or anything, you know, like a tool,

deplatforming is a tool. And you don't want to platform Lenin. You don't want to platform Stalin or whatever. You know, these are like, or Osama bin Laden, those are people who are terrorist revolutionaries who are capable of or, you know, dictators who, you know, really are doing incitement to murder, right? The issue, of course, is when you say, you don't want to, well, who makes that decision and so on and so forth. And so there's a, there's a seemingly recursive loop where the people who are pro-freedom won't de-platform, and the people who are anti-freedom will, and so they de-platform the people who are pro-freedom. Okay. So that, you can just work out the math on that, you know, that has a stable equilibrium,

which is a non-freedom equilibrium. And so I think that the solution to that is, you start thinking of this not as moderation or platforming or what have you, but as community governance. Because one of the big issues with Twitter, for example, is some people think Twitter isn't moderating enough of the hostile comments, angry comments, et cetera. And some people think it's censoring too much. And some people think both are true at the same time. And I'm actually in that camp where, you know, there's incredible hostility and hatred on Twitter and there's a lot of censorship.

And it's like, it's like this, you know, worst of both worlds environment in many ways. And I think the reason for that is what people are really saying implicitly is they don't feel there's community governance over this thing. It's important enough that they want to say in it. But it is governed, you know, by essentially people at Twitter HQ. And so you're trying to get them to do X or Y or Z, but it's not, there's no governance mechanism where the community can have a say, you know. And so an alternative is you start actually designing platforms that have community governance and community moderation. And so now, you know,

you have like a coin or something like that. You have token voting. There's a thousand different models. I'm not saying any one of them works. But I do think crypto governance will allow for lots of experiments with communities that have speech norms, have behavior norms, have, you know, transaction norms or whatever that everybody in that community has mostly exceeded to. And so there is an expectation of what is reasonable and what is unreasonable in that community. And you can exit if it's not pro-freedom enough for you. So with Communist Capital and Woh Capital, they have essentially evolved ideologies that have the, in the case of Woke Capital, the decentralized censorship of speech. In the case of communist capital, the centralized censorship of speech. And these three ideologies

communist capital, woke capital, crypto capital. What do I mean by these? Because the first people didn't know what I meant by communist capital. Communist capital is the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party. That's capitalism, but it's checked by the centralized power of the Chinese state. And, you know, there's different ways of thinking about that. First order is, oh, of course it's communist. They've got the hammer and sickle.

It's in the name. Of course they're communists. They call themselves communist, et cetera, right? And what's funny is that the people who say, of course they're communists. There's three groups. first those are Chinese themselves. Second, there is the far left in the U.S. so-called tankies, you know, or what have you.

You know, it's a derogatory term, but these are the people who, you know, think China's communist and they believe in China because it's communist. And there's people on the right in the U.S. who think China's communist because they hate China for being communist. So there's actually three groups of people who want to say, well, yeah, of course they're communists. Then you have second order, which is the sort of sophisticated internationalist who's like, look, dude, they're not really communist, they're capitalists, there's lots of free trade,

there are lots of billionaires, they're just kind of saying it, they're not really doing it, you know, okay. Then you have third order, which is as of 2020, they kind of are. And the reason is because no company can become large enough to do something that the government doesn't want it to do. Like the way to think about the CCP is it's like Agent Smith from the matrix. Your chair can morph into an agent if you're doing something they don't like. And so it is something where it is absolutely constrained capitalism.

It's capitalism constrained by this ideology and of something which at the root level, the state reserves the right to do whatever it wants. And they come up with some legal justification for that. You can see Jack Ma with the Alibaba thing, like they shut down this financial IPO, the largest IPO in history because he made some comments that were critical of regulators. you know. And so that's communist capital. Now, it is, it's not, you know, I've pointed out the bad aspects. It's not completely dysfunctional as much as people would like it to be so. In many ways, it is maybe the best executing large country in the world because, you know, with COVID-19,

it was first at bat and China really innovated. You know, they, they are not the China of 1950. The China of 2020 is not the China of 1950, just like the America of 2020. is not the America of 1950. All these people have this mental model of the U.S. of 2020 being like, oh, we'll do the right thing after we do everything else. It's like a 70-year-old guy thinking they can walk over to the bench press and just knock out 225 for reps. It's something where they haven't been working out recently,

so they're not just going to be able to just do that, that they haven't been doing. Whereas China can still and does innovate in the physical world. So, for example, they could just build. build a hospital in a few days. That's a subroutine for them. Why was that even a possibility? Why was that even a menu option? Because they'd mean building buildings and days for years.

I've been posting stuff like that, right? They can build a subway station, a train station rather, in like nine hours. You can't build that in the U.S. in nine months, right? Cal train station, wherever, is just constantly under construction. It's like it's orders of magnitude, 100x,000 X, depending on how you counted. in terms of a difference of speed. And so they are in many ways, I mean, they really are in the future. You know, they were using drones for taking people's temperatures.

There's WeChat. There's drone delivery at your hotel room where people would send up a drone with food. So it's sanitary. They would have, you know, contact list surfaces for everything. So you never hit a button, you know, hygienic entry. They're pushing all kinds of innovations in the physical world. that people in the U.S. are just completely unaware of. So it would be nice if this was a totally dysfunctional ideology. It's not. It does work in many ways. You may think it's bad, but it is absolutely

driving technology. It's generating power. And it is, at least within the Pacific Rim area, fairly attractive to a number of folks. They've essentially adopted versions of the Chinese model in different ways, and with Belt and Road, you know, which very few Americans know about. the Belt and Road is? Yeah, sure. The program by which China extends its economic influence and political influence through economics. Yeah.

You know, I think an interesting question would be over the last four years, how many NYT or WSGA front page headlines mentioned Belt and Road? It's got to be a small handful at most. It's a small handful, right? Like, this is my intuition. You know, I would be surprised. I may be wrong. Okay. So that's why, like, you know, we'd have to look at the analysis. But I'd be very surprised if it's more than the Trump or Facebook or Putin or whatever headlines, you know. There's essentially like a real ignorance of what is going on in important parts of the world. I mean, educated people frequently I talk to them and they don't know what the Belt and Road is, right? There's a huge thing in China. Now, you may think it's stupid or whatever. At least you should know what China is doing, what their internal models are. So point being that a lot of people want to try to

write off China and be like, oh, you know, their demography, they're going to crash. This is a whole Zihon model, which I think is basically cope. And, you know, Zihon has some good stuff in his book, Z-E-I-H-A-N, you know, the Accentsal Superbrothers. He's been on the show, yeah. You know, he has some good stuff, you know, in the sense of, I think, what parts do I agree with? I do think that it's interesting to think about shale oil and its impact on the U.S., you know,

in the long term that basically the entire Middle East is sort of the centralizing force in world affairs. I think it's not just shale oil, though, but it's also electric vehicles and so on. You know, less dependence on oil from the Middle East means that, you know, countries, especially with nuclear power and so on, electrical cars, electric cars, it's a, maybe people can go their own way to a greater extent if you've got your oil deposit and so on. So I think shielo is a piece of it. I think it is true that energy independence is interesting. So shale oil is only feasible at very high price points. And, you know, as all the marginal demand for air travel and so on has crashed, oil also crashed.

You know, there's a period where people would actually pay you to hold oil barrels earlier this year, if you remember that, right? So that part, I think there's something there just to be generous. But I think so much else of the rest is just very wrong where, you know, demography is why China is going to crash and so on. robotics are coming online. If you look at vicarious.com, you look at, you look at Boston Dynamics, you look at all the stuff that is happening in the space, it's happening.japagy. You know, it's one of those things that's just going to go vertical. And so just thinking about it narrowly in terms of, oh, we've got lots of people and,

you know, therefore, you know, demography, lots of young people, and therefore demography is going to be a big threat for them. No, it's just not how it's going to work. Technology is actually very important. Okay, so that's communist capital. That's a quick sketch of them. I don't think that they're just going to fail of their own accord. I think that they're actually going to be a very serious thing. What they lack, their biggest weakness is they are not convincing outside of China. They can't make their case in the English language. Their propaganda internationally is simply not very good. It's possible they could fix that. But, you know, I mean, TikTok is interesting because it is the first thing that is a consumer. app built in China that is better than anything any American or English-speaking person has done, better just in the sense of, you know, it's playing an away game, right? It's not playing a home game. They don't speak, you know, they're not, they don't understand American culture as fluently as

someone who is born in the US. I mean, just think about trying to make an app, forget about the great firewall, okay, but, you know, to make an app that goes viral in China is not that easy to do. It's a highly competitive market. You need to understand all these Chinese cultural things like red envelopes or whatever. That's a huge. huge part of having it go viral. All those cultural things, you're playing an away game and TikTok is still super viral, right? So it's not out of the realm of possibility that China gets better at the kind of exporting soft power, but they're not good at it right now. Okay. Number two, woe capital. What's woe capital? That's the ideology of much of modern America.

There's an article by Dutad in the New York Times on this, but basically, you know, it's capitalism that enables cancel culture, decentralized censorship, American Empire. It's drone strike democracy. It is Raytheon's diversity program or whatever, right? And it is something where it's interesting because whether one is on the right or the left or the center, you can sense that there's something inauthentic here. You can say, oh, like, I agree with the representativeness, but I feel that this is inauthentic that they're just saying, you know, this while like selling bombs or whatever,

you know, or you're on the right and you're like, well, I agree with a strong national defense. I agree with capitalism, but I don't like this. But there's something there that feels inauthentic to people. Yet this is also in its own way of bizarre hybrid like communist capital. Woe capital is something that would have been inconceivable to somebody in the 80s, you know, where the diversity advocates and the Raytheon people were on different sides. Now they're the same.

But there is a logic to it, which is the wokeness gives the moral justification for the bombs. And, you know, like essentially you sort of start off by like repeating this sort of catechism. It's like, you know, do the cross before eating dinner. And once you've kind of said the right woke words, any use of state power is justifiable. any use of any any de-platforming any arbitrary corporate action is justifiable with the right woke words it's very cynical but this is actually you know something we're in other times and places you know people would give religious justifications for very nasty things and so that's i think what people are sensing there and its own way is similar to sort of zischenping thought the big difference is it's decentralized

the big difference is there's no one you know agency that is saying you know be woke it is it is something which has evolved because in the U.S. you don't have. I mean, the First Amendment means that the government cannot constrain speech. So instead of what happened was a decentralized censorship regime evolved. And then the solution to that, I think, is going to be decentralized censorship resistance. So third is crypto capital. So this is, I think, is the hope of the rest of world. It's stateless capitalism. It's capitalism without corporations. It's decentralized licensorship resistance. It's principal nonviolence. And it's the youngest, but may yet prove the strongest. So that's crypto. Yeah. So crypto capital, the thing is, this is the dark horse.

People kind of might laugh, not people in crypto, but people outside might laugh at thinking it's a competitor to the U.S. or the PRC. But the fundamental thing is it's a form, it's stateless capitalism. It doesn't require you to bend to the U.S. or the Chinese empire. It allows individuals to rise. it is genuine equality on the basis of equations. It is mathematical trust. You may not trust the American or the Chinese legal system, but you can trust a smart contract because you can diligence at it's math.

And this is, I think, the best of Western values, yet it's also something that's very acceptable to many Chinese people because it's like the second choice for many Americans and many Chinese and the first choice for many people who are neither American nor Chinese, which is like 80% of the world. So in a sense, imagine if in the 20th century, you know, the so-called non-aligned movement

that was neither U.S. nor USSR, if that was actually the most powerful movement worldwide, I think history doesn't repeat, but it might rhyme, if the non-aligned movement, the decentralized movement is stronger than these two states and eventually brings everybody to peace rather than endless Cold War, you know, that could be very interesting. This is a really fascinating conversation around what the future of not just sort of economic construction looks like, but society construction looks like, which brings us all the way back to sort of the point that we started with around, you know, we almost accidentally set up a dialectic right at the beginning between sort of like a new sort of technology driven bottoms up governance and human organization as opposed to the calcified. sort of older models and how they're trying to change. I guess you used a term right at the beginning, sort of a technical progressive or a technological progressive as opposed to a political progressive and sort of your mental affiliation with that. Given that mindset, you know, as you look out across

2021, what is, and maybe this is by way of wrapping up this great conversation, what is the, you know, a source or a wellspring of optimism for? the technical progressive? Well, I mean, we're getting rocket chips and brain machine interface and GPT3 and, you know, like fast vaccines. And we're starting to actually see some awesome things happening. And so it's the duty of the technological progressive to pursue the great acceleration, neither the great stagnation or the great reset.

I mean, even the constant of great reset, I hate the term because it's like going back to the beginning or something like that. I don't want to go back to zero. I want to go to infinity. Golden Age fallacy. Exactly, right. And so, you know, the great acceleration is what we want to pursue, which is faster on physical technologies, faster on life extension, faster on crypto, faster on AI, faster on brain machine interface, and go for transhumanism, go for immutable money, infinite frontier eternal life. And what that means is basically, you know, infinite frontier of space, immutable money is critical.

crypto, eternal life is life extension and, you know, actually start setting out the superlatives as goals and we restore the arrow of civilization. And I think that's going to be very powerful. Love it. All right. Well, we're going to have to check back in in a few months on how eternal life and immutable money is going. But for now, Elizabeth, I appreciate you taking so much time today. This is a really, really fun conversation. And let's do it again. Okay, cool. Thank you. I chose to focus the title of the show you just heard on this competition biology is recognizing between communist capital, woke capital, and crypto capital. I think that this heuristic really captures a fundamental paradigm battle that is brewing.

We're seeing much more emergent conversation on the MMT versus crypto capital front. And I think that at the end of the day, all of these ideas are competing to lead a new economic era. So taking the time to dig in and understand how they are different and what their implications might be feels really important. Anyways, guys, I hope you enjoyed this show. I hope you're heading into a really fun holiday week. Until tomorrow, guys, be safe and take care of each other. Peace.