Legacy Media Is Lying To You - Balaji Srinivasan

1. 0:00 – 0:17

   Intro

   1. BSBalaji Srinivasan0:00

      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, socialism is like the lowest skill way to put yourself at the head of a mob. (wind blows)

   2. CWChris Williamson0:16

      Marc Andreessen

2. 0:17 – 11:43

   Mental Information Management

   1. CWChris Williamson0:17

      said that you're the person with the highest output per minute of new ideas of anybody I've ever met in my life. That seem accurate?

   2. BSBalaji Srinivasan0:25

      Well, I, I think he said new good ideas. New ideas alone, but I, I think he qualified with good or, or useful or something like that. But yeah, no, it's a high compliment from Marc who's a, is a friend and colleague going way back. Um...

   3. CWChris Williamson0:41

      What's going on there? Is there some formal system that you're following? Are you spaced repetitioning or semantic networks or something exotic? How are you resurfacing all of these ideas and holding onto them?

   4. BSBalaji Srinivasan0:53

      Uh, no, it's good. I probably should do some formal system, um, and that might be like a force multiplier or something. I'm, I'm definitely interested in, uh, you know, like quantum.country has a good implementation of so-called mnemonic media, um, and whatnot. Uh, I think what it is, is that I have a single... A, a few, let's call it a single threaded worldview, 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 is a little subroutine of that piece." So if you've got like a, a clothesline of worldview, you can attach pieces to it and, um, and that helps you remember things. And then, you know, if you have that worldview, 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 internet, okay? Which is kind of what I think a big piece of the future is, all right? Um, and so the apocalypse but with internet, you're pro-Soylent, you're pro-Coinbase, you're pro-cryptocurrency, you're pro-remote work, you're pro, uh, like digital nomads. You have this vision of the future. You're bearish on Fortune 500, you're bearish on suits and ties. You're bearish on, um, legacy commercial office space, you're bearish on the West and you're 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 that right there kind of summarizes big pieces of worldview, right? And then of course there's exceptions to that because I'm, I'm bullish on Estonia even though that's part of the West, and I'm bullish on, you know, 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, and so on, right? So, um, so that's kind of what I do and uh, you know, 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 like Elon's life must be very difficult, 'cause he has to 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, uh... If he must be at some meeting for one of the two, he'll probably be at the SpaceX meeting 'cause getting to Mars is more important and it's on a shorter time scale than the cars. Anyway, go ahead.

   5. CWChris Williamson3:35

      I heard while, uh, Bezos was at Amazon that he had a single unifying principle for all decisions got filtered through as well. And it's, does this make the customer experience better?

   6. BSBalaji Srinivasan3:47

      Mm-hmm.

   7. CWChris Williamson3:47

      Everything goes through that. I'd heard that Elon's was, uh, does this get us closer to Mars? But there's some things that he does with Tesla that I guess, I don't know, maybe autonomous driving is gonna give us some kind of insight around the way that LiDAR and blah blah-

   8. BSBalaji Srinivasan3:59

      It's hard. You, you already see, you already see the tension, right?

   9. CWChris Williamson4:02

      Yeah.

   10. BSBalaji Srinivasan4:02

       The te- Those are, 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, you know, that, that somewhat pull away from each other, you know?

   11. CWChris Williamson4:12

       Hmm.

   12. BSBalaji Srinivasan4:12

       That you can't really think of them as part of the same company, you know, whereas-

   13. CWChris Williamson4:16

       I love, 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, uh, the things that you keep a hold of and the things that you don't relatively lean because you say, "Look-"

   14. BSBalaji Srinivasan4:30

       Yeah.

   15. CWChris Williamson4:30

       "... this is the thing that I'm focused on. Am I concerned with something... D- Does this map onto it? Does this hang onto it? Is there a peg for this to fit on? No? Okay, well, i- i- it's fun maybe or entertaining, but broadly irrelevant."

   16. BSBalaji Srinivasan4:43

       That's right. And I think it's kind of like if, if, 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 co- 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," right? Or, um, "I wanna rename 100 music files," something really simple like that. Then you have a reason to learn to code and it's the difference between, I don't know, learning French in school where you're memorizing les and las 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, you know, French waiter on the other side, okay? Who will sneer at you and be like, "Les speak English please," you know? Right? And uh, you know, so, so that's like the, 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, um, 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 purpose is get as jacked as possible. That's like a pretty good short-term goal. That was actually my goal in my 20s and I was actually as jacked as is possible to be given a South Asian physiognomy, okay?... I know that you're currently, you know, that's a, that's a p- probably a big thing for you and for e- the watchers or what have you, right? And I'm gradually getting, you know, back to jacked in my slow way or whatever. I got, I became a real fatso during the startup, 'cause you, 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, i- at least this is y- 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, you know, like, have a deal that affects all of their lives. And so as CEO or 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, you know, y- everybody needs to work out, including yourself, and that you'll actually bucket time for that and you'll actually put that on the calendar, because there's a sustainability aspect. If you're powering yourself with, you know, like, donuts or cookies, it'll get you through that sugar for, like, the day, but you're... 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, the serving two masters thing, where you need to kind of, you know, you, 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 glass 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 it is to them. So anyway, why was I saying this? So a 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, um, you might just, you know, scroll past that if you didn't have a purpose to map it to. Go ahead.

   17. CWChris Williamson8:22

       There's an Aristotle quote where he says, "If a man knows not where he sails, no wind is favorable."

   18. BSBalaji Srinivasan8:28

       Exactly. That's right. Without a vector... And I mean, in fact, actually, this is a huge part of Web 2.0, is it's entropic, and that's a big part of what this book is about, is changing-

   19. CWChris Williamson8:37

       What do you mean by entropic?

   20. BSBalaji Srinivasan8:39

       So, um, entropic in the sense of entropy. Like, for example, if you know the difference between 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, 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 off. 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 should be, "I do some math today, and I do some more math in the same area tomorrow, and some more a-" 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, y- 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 over-consuming novelty and under-consuming purpose. And that gets us into the concept of the information diet. Just like the diet, right? You know, you, 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, you know, one meal a day, you only eat within this window and, and not otherwise, right? Um, so it could be one meal a day. It could be, um... I don't know, you have some metabolic restriction. You can't have, like, some, 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 "censorship." It's self-control, right? It's directedness, you know? It is, um, it's directed 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, right? Boosting your, you know, truth, health, wealth, right? It's your knowledge. It is your, you know, like your physical fitness or something like that, um, 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, it's something where you click it and you're enraged about something in some distant part of the world that you have no control over, and, uh, you're not, like, leveling up these, like, critical

3. 11:43 – 18:08

   How to Become More Discerning with Media

   1. BSBalaji Srinivasan11:43

      variables.

   2. CWChris Williamson11:43

      The problem that you have with information diets is a lot of the time it's KFC masquerading as an apple.

   3. BSBalaji Srinivasan11:49

      Mm-hmm.

   4. CWChris Williamson11:50

      You can't tell healthy information from unhealthy information. Well, I don't know. I mean, the way that orification and, uh, food diets have now been designed is almost as obfuscated as you could say the internet is. But m- maybe it's a little bit more messy. Like, there's no ingredients, right, on the back of an article that you've read or something in the same way that a little bit of, uh, understanding of what goes into food could tell you about that. So how do people become more discerning there?

   5. BSBalaji Srinivasan12:16

      ... it's a great question. So I'd say three things about that. First is, you know, there's a one-liner which is, the most nutritious food is the stuff that doesn't have nutrition facts on it, right? Because it's the lettuce, it's the tomatoes, you know, it's the stuff like that, right? 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 calorimeter and getting those numbers out of it, right? So that's just kind of a, an amusing observation, right? Um, the, uh, the second thing is that, um, I think there's two ways of dealing with that information content thing. Uh, the first is, maybe someone can develop a Chrome plug-in which basically pre-reads the stuff for you and will flag it. For example, you know, all the words on the page that are meant to enrage you can actually be flagged, okay? And that's called, you know, for example, there's this concept called Russell Conjugation, and it's like, uh, it's actually by Bertrand Russell. And the idea is, uh, "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, you know, give a positive spin on it or a negative spin, right? Like, uh, you know, "You are righteously angry. Um, he is spluttering with rage." Right? And, you know, so the same concept can be Russell conjugated in different ways, and with machine learning, you can detect that. So one thing you could imagine is a Chrome plug-in that would just sort of be like a buddy alongside that would sort of pre... 'Cause the thing is, you might think you're a super rational person, but when that hits your eye, uh, you're, you're gonna see it. Whereas if it's highlighted in red, you're like, "Oh, okay. Yeah, you're right. I didn't even realize that was there trying to get to-"

   6. CWChris Williamson14:02

      I need to down-regulate my response against this particular term a little bit more.

   7. BSBalaji Srinivasan14:06

      Yeah, exactly, and-

   8. CWChris Williamson14:07

      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."

   9. BSBalaji Srinivasan14:14

      Exactly, and in fact that's what they've added to it also in a different sense, is they've added a pinch of salt, a pinch of sugar to the page. Straight news is boring. So instead they sugar it up, they salt it up with all of these things, you know?

   10. CWChris Williamson14:28

       Ah. So you're saying that the limbic hijack of semantic overload online is basically the same as-

   11. BSBalaji Srinivasan14:34

       Sugar.

   12. CWChris Williamson14:34

       ... carefully designed sug- sugar and fats?

   13. BSBalaji Srinivasan14:36

       Yes, it's, it's, it's exact... Think about a failing restaurant, right? A failing restaurant will start throwing all kinds of sugar and other stuff into its food. Why? Because, um, it does, like, people like it. It's a short-term optimization, you know? And you know, people saw fruit yogurt, "Wow, that's selling," right? It's like, you know Coca-Cola where they put cocaine in the, 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, okay? We will see it-

   14. CWChris Williamson15:20

       I can't believe they used to put that in their bodies.

   15. BSBalaji Srinivasan15:22

       Yeah, exactly. Like, and that's why people were so fat, and that's why diabetes was such an epidemic, and why people are up 30 pounds. Like it's actually like this, it's very difficult to escape. It's like secondhand smoke. Sugar is basically in almost everything, right? You have to really try to not eat that, you know? And, um, and it probably starts messing up your, uh, your, uh, your gut microbiome and other kinds of things. This is why... Have you seen the GIF on the obesity epidemic? Have you ever seen the GIF?

   16. CWChris Williamson15:49

       Mm, I'm not sure. You should do-

   17. BSBalaji Srinivasan15:51

       Yeah, here.

   18. CWChris Williamson15:51

       ... a screen share and we can, uh-

   19. BSBalaji Srinivasan15:53

       Yeah, I'll just, I'll just paste 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.

   20. CWChris Williamson16:05

       Dean, make this pop up when you, uh, when you do the edit, please. Thank you. So this is... Oh, wow.

   21. BSBalaji Srinivasan16:12

       This is just the US, but it's global. You can see that, you see, when... The thing about...

   22. CWChris Williamson16:18

       (laughs) 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?

   23. BSBalaji Srinivasan16:34

       It's obesity. Yeah, it's, it's basically like, exactly, it's like, uh, percent of people who are above... Oh, oh and obese BMI, right?

   24. CWChris Williamson16:40

       Okay, yeah. And it just, over time you're getting to... What's that at the top? Is that over 30% in some places now?

   25. BSBalaji Srinivasan16:47

       Yeah.

   26. CWChris Williamson16:48

       Yeah. Predominantly... Well, everywhere.

   27. BSBalaji Srinivasan16:49

       This was 10 years ago.

   28. CWChris Williamson16:50

       Almost everywhere. Yeah. (laughs)

   29. BSBalaji Srinivasan16:51

       It's just gotten worse since then.

   30. CWChris Williamson16:52

       Yeah.
4. 18:08 – 19:43

   Men Are Losing Testosterone

   1. BSBalaji Srinivasan18:08

      and, and so on and so forth. Anyway, go ahead.

   2. CWChris Williamson18:09

      Since 1980, men have lost an average of 1% of their testosterone.

   3. BSBalaji Srinivasan18:15

      Testosterone, yeah.

   4. CWChris Williamson18:15

      Yeah. I got a, a thing sent through from Rob Henderson the other day. Eight out of ten young Americans are ineligible to enlist in the US military primarily due to obesity factors, but medical issues and criminal records also contribute.

   5. BSBalaji Srinivasan18:27

      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 k- 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? Um, it could also be just a single factor like lead that we don't even know, like the plastics, right? Like, you know, the, the Romans were poisoning themselves and didn't even know, you know? And, um, I mean, certainly we have a lot more, um, compounds that are out there that we're, you know, like, exposure to plastic is way higher than it was 100 years ago. Um, 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, um, empiricism, right? So what you want is a stream of data coming out of you that, um, and this is another one, 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, it's like, bing, here's this alert on the other side 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 care... Those are the most important metrics, right? And this is actually another concept I have which is kind of related to this.

5. 19:43 – 23:38

   The Death of Legacy Media

   1. BSBalaji Srinivasan19:43

      You know what's gonna, I think, replace the daily newspaper?

   2. CWChris Williamson19:48

      Yes, because I've read it and I can't remember what you said it was. I can't remember what it is.

   3. BSBalaji Srinivasan19:52

      The personal dashboard.

   4. CWChris Williamson19:54

      Yes.

   5. BSBalaji Srinivasan19:55

      Okay. Why do I say? This is actually really important and pulls together 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, it's partly, but it's like, here's our revenue, here's the, 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 there's companies like Looker, for example, that just provide these sort of dashboard services. Why is this extremely important? You are in control of those dashboards, right? So the first thing you see as CEO each day, for example, is, what was our revenue yesterday? What 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, right? That, 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, um, fitness and so on and so forth, your diet, your sleep, like your Fitbit style thing. And then maybe like a family dashboard and you have like checklists like, you know, uh, the, the pet needs X and the kids need, you know, Y, they need like, uh, vaccines or whatever it is, right? Um, and y- y- if, if y- I don't know if your audience is like super anti-vax or whatever if you want-

   6. CWChris Williamson21:31

      No, thankfully not.

   7. BSBalaji Srinivasan21:32

      You know, but... Okay, all right. So, the point is, you know, people need shots, they need, they need, uh, you know, pets need food or, 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, uh, 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, you know? And so you can imagine some combination of like Fitbit and Brilliant and your, you know, your bank account and so on. That's like brilliant.org, I love that site. 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, is your wealth, right? So that's like, 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 the kind of thing which, I mean, nothing I'm describing doesn't exist, you know? Like, or I should 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 in the morning. People have built that habit. I'm gonna, 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, you know, frankly, perhaps your first few hours when you get up should be offline, you know?

   8. CWChris Williamson23:03

      Yep.

   9. BSBalaji Srinivasan23:03

      They should be like pen and paper, writing things out or write it up the night before. You should go and work out for s- 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 up. You have 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.

6. 23:38 – 34:27

   Maintaining a Healthy Information Diet

   1. BSBalaji Srinivasan23:38

   2. CWChris Williamson23:38

      You said one of the things to look at would be that the foods which have the fewest number of ingredients on the back are the ones that are the healthiest. They're the ones that have been kind of molested the least.

   3. BSBalaji Srinivasan23:47

      Mm-hmm.

   4. CWChris Williamson23:47

      Then you need to be looking at the sort of inflammatory language which get, which gets used on the internet. Perhaps there could be a Google Chrome plug-in 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 gonna have to step out into the weird-

   5. BSBalaji Srinivasan24:14

      Sure, sure.

   6. CWChris Williamson24:15

      ... wild, chaotic world at some point.

   7. BSBalaji Srinivasan24:17

      So what I, 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. A- and, you're, one is not always successful in this, right? But you do your workout, you do your, um ...

   8. CWChris Williamson24:35

      What's a typical morning? Take us through your typical morning.

   9. BSBalaji Srinivasan24:38

      My typical morning? Um, let, I'll give the ideal morning, okay, not the typical morning. Right? So kind of 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, uh, you wake up, you just groggily go to the treadmill, and you just start jogging, okay? And you have your Eye of the Tiger or whatever it is over there. And actually, you know, the, the Atomic Habit style cue, 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, you know, shorts and your, like, socks and shoes all there next to the treadmill, so you just walk up to it and start going. And why is it good to actually have it, like, at your house if you c- I mean, it's not that expensive in the grand scheme of things, you know, if you have the space for it. Um, it's good to have it there because you never have to wait in line, you don't have an excuse, it's right there, you can do it any time, 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, well, the very first thing. Then lift, if you can do that, if you have a little home gym or whatever. Um, now, one hour into the day, like, you're actually on top of things, right? Do your morning ablutions, blah, blah, blah, you know, and now, um, you know, like, go and, uh, y- like, eh, eh, if you have offline stuff, if you have printouts, just go and work on that. Like I write a lot of stuff longhand. Um, and why do I do it longhand? It's because, um ... Hold on one second. Uh, 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, if it's, like, a draft of a book chapter or something like that, I'll take yesterday's printout, write up longhand, type it in. Type ... Oh, something else that's actually quite h- handy, by the way, uh, there are certain cookie jars, okay? Um, you know these timer cookie jars?

   10. CWChris Williamson26:46

       Uh, yeah. I th- I've seen them for mobile phones before.

   11. BSBalaji Srinivasan26:49

       Yeah, exactly. So, you can use them for mobile phones. You can also do something where you, like, uh, drill a hole in the back and, um, so you can put your router in there or th- or the plug to your router, okay, so that you can basically just ...

   12. CWChris Williamson27:06

       (laughs)

   13. BSBalaji Srinivasan27:06

       Okay?

   14. CWChris Williamson27:06

       (laughs) Yeah. Yeah, I understand.

   15. BSBalaji Srinivasan27:08

       Why do this, right? So the reason you do this is you just kind of h- have 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, l- say you get up at, like, 7:00 or 8:00, you work out till 9:00, you are now offline till, like, 1:00 PM, 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, uh, that's good because if you'd, if you were 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. Uh, or you need offline apps or something like that, right? Like, um, which a lot of things work offline, you know. Um, in Pages.app or Emacs, the, you know, Emacs is like a terminal-based app, those thing- things work offline. So you do all this stu- stuff offline, your pen and paper offline, and then, like, four hours in, then you connect and you synchronize, you push all your update 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, responding to people, um, looking at investments, y- you know, all the CEOs who are like, "Hey, hey, you know, I need some help with something," or whatever, get on the phone with them. Um, and, uh, you know, then you have just flex. There's like, that's like a few hours, and then y- you can't plan the full day, right? So then you do whatever for the rest of the day. Maybe it's more work, maybe it's like, you know, you're tired, maybe, maybe you're, you know, seeing the sun, whatever it is, right? Um, and, uh, and then, like, at the evening, again, an ideal day, again, this is not everything, but, uh, you try to write down those one to three things you want to get done the next day, and then you, you know, knock off. And one thing that's also kind of important, and again, it's not done all the time, but, um, I find it, you know, people say, "Oh, don't look at a screen before you go to sleep," right? Um, but people are also sort of addicted to having, like, some sort of information as they go to sleep or whatever, so the way to square that circle is probably, like, audiobooks, right? So something like that where you have, uh, you know, whether, um, it's a, like, uh, uh, you know, the smart speakers, people are pro and con on them. The con is, of course, that they're listening to everything and whatnot, right? Uh, and so it is a security vulnerability. The pro is they don't, they're not shining in your eyes, you know? So that's one option if you're willing to take that security risk, um, and you can just say, "Play that audi- audiobook and set a timer for 30 minutes," it'll probably knock you right out. Um, or you can take your phone and you can, you know, have that and just have that lullaby you, right? For those people who have to have, who want to wean themselves off, it's like a Nicorette. If, i- if people are used to, like, surfing their way to sleep, at least audible your way to sleep and you'll find it's way better, right? And without the light, it'll, 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 this sun, I hear people sometimes see it, okay, you can go and do that.... you know, so it's, it's- but the main thing about it is, um, you just spend those first hours on the most important stuff and drive that forward. Before the rest of- it's kind of like a, a tank where the water is held back and you know it's gonna rush in, but you hold it back to drive forward as much as you can and then let the water of the day rush in. Okay, go ahead.

   16. CWChris Williamson31:00

       A 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-

   17. BSBalaji Srinivasan31:08

       Ah.

   18. CWChris Williamson31:08

       ... bike with a desk built in. It's purpose-built. And this thing is so comfortable. Insane.

   19. BSBalaji Srinivasan31:14

       Interesting. What's the-

   20. CWChris Williamson31:15

       It's got a-

   21. BSBalaji Srinivasan31:15

       ... what's the, what's the brand or whatever?

   22. CWChris Williamson31:16

       Uh, 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. Uh, it was about 350 bucks, I think. So not cheap, but not very expensive.

   23. BSBalaji Srinivasan31:32

       Okay.

   24. CWChris Williamson31:32

       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, uh, 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-

   25. BSBalaji Srinivasan31:48

       Hmm.

   26. CWChris Williamson31:48

       ... turning over, reading something or answering emails. It's got this really big desk. It's go- it's got two cup holders. I'm completely in love with it at the moment.

   27. BSBalaji Srinivasan31:54

       That sounds cool.

   28. CWChris Williamson31:54

       Yeah, it's awesome.

   29. BSBalaji Srinivasan31:55

       Yeah. S- send me this, send me this. What, what's the name of it?

   30. CWChris Williamson31:57

       Uh, I'll f- I'll have to send you afterwards. It's some-
7. 34:27 – 39:20

   Balaji’s Social Media Habits

   1. CWChris Williamson34:27

      maybe a week at a time or a couple of weeks at a time where you just log out and don't check?

   2. BSBalaji Srinivasan34:30

      Well, actually, I took months off, right? I took, I took like almost four months off just to get all the final details on the book nailed down and get that shipped. And, you know, the thing about that is, uh, 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, you know? Now, Twitter itself is underappreciated by people because it is the public war zone, right? It is where the intelligentsia slugs it out. It is the consensus mechanism of the English-speaking internet, okay? And 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 upstream of governments. It's very hard for a government to go against Twitter, um, 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, um, who are elected by their constituents, right? Who follow them. And, uh, and so, and of course, they can get unfollowed and blocked or whatever, right? And, uh, 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, you know, like Asia or what have you, but we're still kind of in at least adjacent so-called, have you heard the term noosphere?

   3. CWChris Williamson35:59

      No.

   4. BSBalaji Srinivasan36:00

      Noosphere, it's like a cognitive sphere. It's like, it's like, like our mental social networks are not so far apart, right? Uh, 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-gapped from the English internet, which is the biggest thing, right? And one tweet actually just, you know, 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 internets in a sense, right? The English internet is also like the public war zone of the world. It's, 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 gonna basically, like, surveil- they don't care as much about thought crime in other languages. Isn't that interesting? Right?

   5. CWChris Williamson37:01

      That's fascinating. Yeah.

   6. BSBalaji Srinivasan37:03

      And so... And, and it's funny, I tweeted 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." It, it-

   7. CWChris Williamson37:16

      (laughs) I can tweet this, this raging tweet that I, I wanna get out there. But thankfully-

   8. BSBalaji Srinivasan37:22

      This banger you can put out in Hindi, exactly.

   9. CWChris Williamson37:24

      (laughs)

   10. BSBalaji Srinivasan37:24

       Nobody cares. Nobody will care. Nobody even thinks of it as, like, offensive really, right?

   11. CWChris Williamson37:28

       That's that bilingual privilege that everyone's got.

   12. BSBalaji Srinivasan37:31

       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 hard to game out ways. The most obvious implication, and perhaps the one that'll happen, is that it makes all of those other intranets legible to the English and Chinese, uh, social network platform operators, and then the surveillance and the, you know, thought police can move in there. On the other hand, it may also mean the re-babilization of the world. Just like the Israelis revived Hebrew, which was 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, you know, the main society, okay? And, um, especially if you take the machine translation models and you add some new language on them that the main society doesn't have, right? So you're... Uh, there's different ways of doing this, okay? But point being that, um, I, I think this concept is, uh, is a, is a useful one where you realize the importance of Twitter. You realize it's, it's both, it's both more important than people who say it's unimportant say, and yet you can't win on Twitter itself.

   13. CWChris Williamson38:47

       Hmm.

   14. BSBalaji Srinivasan38:47

       You just can't, right?

   15. CWChris Williamson38:48

       Yeah.

   16. BSBalaji Srinivasan38:48

       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. Uh, 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.

8. 39:20 – 51:11

   How does Balaji Predict the Future?

   1. BSBalaji Srinivasan39:20

   2. CWChris Williamson39:20

      Speaking of tweets, there's a famous tweet that says, "'Balaji 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.

   3. BSBalaji Srinivasan39:43

      Yeah.

   4. CWChris Williamson39:44

      Have you got a crystal ball? What, what's, what's going on here?

   5. BSBalaji Srinivasan39:48

      Well, so, uh, what do I do? So I mean, the thing is that, it's a funny... Uh, that statement, like I, um, I also predict a lot of good things, and I, and I invest in and bet on those things. Um, but those, those everybody's kind of happy that I was, you know, right or whatever. Uh, for, for better or worse, um... Have you ever, you ever seen Slumdog Millionaire?

   6. CWChris Williamson40:12

      Yes.

   7. BSBalaji Srinivasan40:13

      Yeah. And so you know how he gets all the answers right, not because he, uh, 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, um, you know, so I certainly have a mental model of the future, and as I said, like, you know, my clothesline kind of things hang onto that, right? And, uh, you know, sometimes you have a productive mental model that just keeps chugging out result after result. It's kind of like how, uh, if you're good at math, you can do a lot of physics. You know, if... Once you're good at math, you can be like, "I can go into fluid mechanics. I can go into, you know, electrodynamics. I can go to astrophysics. I can start generating useful results," right? Similarly, if 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 am I... How do I predict myself? Well, first is, like the Slumdog Millionaire thing, the world is sort of just getting more Balaji-like, okay? Uh, what I mean by that is, if you were... What's the opposite? The opposite is you're like a 1950s, uh, like, 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 at the same job for 30 years, that's both nationalistic and socialistic, you know, in a sense, right? Like, you're, you're a farmer/soldier/manufacturing/physical in-person kind of person. Um, you know, you don't care that much about the life of the mind. You're a Go team when it comes to sports. Um, you know, that's like your kind of stereotypical, like, 1950s-ish kind of thing, right? Every aspect of that is getting inverted, right? So what do you have now? You have, um, this mobile internet-based... Uh, 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. Um, you can code something and go vertical. You can, you know, get wrecked or go viral, right? Uh, you know, and you know, the camera shifting to Asia. Uh, like all of these things superimposed is this bizarre kind of thing where it's like, "Okay-"... I, 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? E- example, and this is a small example, but like, um, you know, Chris Dixon has al- also said this. It's like, whatever, quote, "nerds" are into on the weekend, everybody cares about in 10 years, right? For example, PalmPilots in the late '90s. Everybody's using iPhones 10 years later, right? World of Warcraft. Well, Oculus is pretty big now, and I think VR will eventually get pretty big. Netscape Navigator. People were on the internet in the early, you know, uh, '80s, and the web in the early '90s. Everybody's on the web today. Um, social media. It was like Facebook and, you know, Twitter was among like the San Francisco literati, technorati, and then everybody's on it, right? And so, you know, cryptocurrency is another version of that. Um, 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 would like, I had my laptop and I would, um, look up directions on Google Maps and then screenshot the turn by turn, and then I would have the laptop on the passenger seat as like a mobile-

   8. CWChris Williamson43:59

      And just swipe through it.

   9. BSBalaji Srinivasan44:00

      ... yeah, exactly, right? So I, of course I'd pull over at times or whatever to look, but, uh, you know, of course that's a preview of Google Maps on the iPhone, right? So whenever I'm kinda hacking together something like that now, I know that's an investible opportunity, right?

   10. CWChris Williamson44:18

       Because that is a problem which is yet to be solved, which you can kind of jerry rig into a solution, which means that downstream it's going to be made into a much more (overlapping)

   11. BSBalaji Srinivasan44:28

       Productize.

   12. CWChris Williamson44:28

       ... cohesive solution. Yes.

   13. BSBalaji Srinivasan44:29

       Yes, exactly. So what kind of stuff is that today, right? So digital nomadism, right? Um, 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. Um, obviously like so much crypto stuff I, 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 or thereabouts. Um, all the AI stuff, especially AI content creation, so AI audio. Like synthesis engines will succeed search engines. A synthe- like so do you know what I mean by that?

   14. CWChris Williamson45:12

       No.

   15. BSBalaji Srinivasan45:13

       Okay. So have you heard of DALL·E?

   16. CWChris Williamson45:15

       Yes.

   17. BSBalaji Srinivasan45:16

       Okay. So the difference between... And, and I made this point on Twitter, but like if you type a query into Google, you're optimized for making a very short, often a single word query, and you go to Google Images, right? Whereas with DALL·E 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, right?

   18. CWChris Williamson45:35

       Uh, you're, you're optimizing for precision on the DALL·E as opposed to brevity on Google.

   19. BSBalaji Srinivasan45:44

       Yeah. And so, so essentially basically you're... Like people have been trained in how to search, um, and they have to be just completely... Synthesis engines have the opposite instincts from search engines, right? And, um, the, you know, the way of thinking about that, uh, is... Here, I'm gonna give you this tweet that you can... So if you take a look at the left image there, see it says, "Docker, Google Images," and you see a little whale with the stuff on it, okay?

   20. CWChris Williamson46:17

       Mm-hmm.

   21. BSBalaji Srinivasan46:18

       If you go to the right image, it's, "Blue whale with stacks of shipping containers on its back CG Society ArtStation Trending 4K," and you get something very different, right? Much more-

   22. CWChris Williamson46:31

       (laughs)

   23. BSBalaji Srinivasan46:32

       ... right?

   24. CWChris Williamson46:33

       Yeah.

   25. BSBalaji Srinivasan46:34

       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 gonna be synthesis of images, it's gonna be synthesis of audio, video, code, um, 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 the style of Monet, and do it in the style of Rembrandt, and you'll get different looking images as a function of that. The exact same. So here's another one that I had on exactly that, right? Um, so now of course, you know, I, I, actually I used to be at the cutting edge of ML/AI, but that was like, you know, 10 years ago. I'm not as into the subject as I was but I'm getting back in. Um, it's funny, like 'cause I was, I was doing computational genomics for many years. Um, but now what's gonna happen is for- from a content creation standpoint, all of this stuff is now working, so synthesis engines, um, you know, i- it's not just obviously me that's using them. There's a bunch of other people that are using them. A bunch of other people who have developed them. That, that is, that is something where pretty much anything you can describe with a few sentences... Like DALL·E shows that there's like, the limit on that is much higher than we thought.... right? It breaks through beyond what we thought was possible, right? Um, natural language is now a programming language, right? Um, so, okay, so that's like a... So I mentioned what are the pieces of the future that are being lived today, right? So I mentioned digital nomadism, I mentioned crypto everything, I mentioned, um, synthesis engines. I think also the shift of the camera to Asia is pretty important, um, the level up of India. Uh, that's... You know, this is something I, I tweet about, but one of the most underpriced things in the world, like in the sense of just nobody's budgeting 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.

   26. CWChris Williamson49:40

       (laughs)

   27. BSBalaji Srinivasan49:42

       Okay?

   28. CWChris Williamson49:44

       Yeah, that's wild.

   29. BSBalaji Srinivasan49:45

       That's wild. Now, just think about the apocryphal implications that has for culture, for society. For, uh, for example, like, every creator who's smart will start trying to appeal to Indians. That's where your following is coming from, right? Um, 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, um, it's like emancipation because Indians can now connect to others directly rather than going through the whole nation state to nation state process.

   30. CWChris Williamson50:20

       Yes.
9. 51:11 – 1:00:50

   How will Immigration Deal with Remote Working?

   1. CWChris Williamson51:11

      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, um, technology is destiny or technological adaptation is destiny too. And th- that does help you to predict further out what's going to go on. Uh, I have a, 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 gonna have all of these Indians that are potentially online that have relatively good levels of education, fast internet access, all this sort of stuff, like, 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 as a, uh, uh, in some jobs, some manual labor jobs somewhere with an autonomous robot that they're controlling?

   2. BSBalaji Srinivasan52:05

      Yeah, exa- That's... So, 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." It's like 10 years ago, I was-

   3. CWChris Williamson52:16

      Wow. Jesus Christ (laughs) . Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

   4. BSBalaji Srinivasan52:21

      Right? So, so because if and only if you can interdict that remote connection can you stop somebody from telepresently animating a robot, right? Go ahead.

   5. CWChris Williamson52:32

      Dude, that'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, uh, motivation for people. And the other thing is that you could, uh, spend in the equivalent of pesos, you know? You're, it's going to be significantly-

   6. BSBalaji Srinivasan52:59

      Yes.

   7. CWChris Williamson52:59

      ... more incentivized for countries in the developed world to use this developing talent.

   8. BSBalaji Srinivasan53:05

      So it's interesting because it also, like, it's a, it's a cu-... I, 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 the other 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.

   9. CWChris Williamson53:32

      And less of a burden on, um, infrastructure, on utilities-

   10. BSBalaji Srinivasan53:39

       Yes.

   11. CWChris Williamson53:39

       ... on-

   12. BSBalaji Srinivasan53:39

       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, lots of different pieces of this, uh, just to decouple them. The first thing is, you know, what people will often say... And I actually... Uh, you know, of course I have some compassion for that unskilled worker in the, quote, "developed world," but I don't even actually use the term developed and developing world anymore. I, I call them the descending world and the ascending world. And the reason I do that is not just a word game, but, like, developed world, i- implies sort of a satisfied, end of history, we're done, it's over. And developing, you're just kinda 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. Um, and (laughs) ...... and so the- (laughs) So, you know, but on, on the other side, you know, and of course there are some, I mean, Francis Suarez is an American politician. I think he's great. He's helped to draw people into Miami, right? But, um, the, you know, so, 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, these guys are getting sky hooks to internet. They're ascending worlds, right? You can see the energy there, right? These folks have that, you know, for the first time, equality of opportunity because they have the internet connection and they have remote work, and they can get paid in cryptocurrency, um, or with something like, you know, TransferWise 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, socialism and international, th- those are two different ways of kind of thinking about the moral obligation, and the nationalism, capitalism are two different ways of thinking about the self-interest, right? And you can have different combinations. And what I think you're going to... So in the 20th century is basically the nationalist capitalist versus the internationalist socialist, right? That was kind of what the early part of the 20th century at least was, right? Um, and arguably the middle. Now I think it's the internationalist capitalists and the nationalist socialists, the cloud and 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 and so forth, that's like romanticized, that's like this halcyon period in, you know, all kinds of stuff. Like, you know, that was such a great time, blah, blah. During that time period, of course, the rest of the world was bombed out. Ruined, right? Japan had been atomically nuked, you know, China's in the middle of its like just finishing this communist first national civil war. India, I think it just gotten independence, um, and obviously it had been involved in World War II. Europe was totally bombed out. Soviet Union, you know, was bombed out after, you know, giant war with Germany, like 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, you know, wealthy country is the skilled person in a, you know, temporarily un-wealthy country. You know, 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. You know, 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? Um, 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, okay? But now kind of the, the winds of time, the chains, you know, things are, are shifting and, you know, it, th- this is basically where nationalism versus internationalism, the moral case comes in, right? And, you know, the nationalists will argue, and, and I, 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 they're, you know, someone who speaks our language and waves our flag and pays our taxes and serves in our military and so on 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, uh, then the capitalist will say, "Well, uh, are you gonna pay... You know, wh- 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 gonna pay his salary? You're... No, 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 nationalist is saying the capitalist is free riding on the country and something they provided. The capitalist is saying the nationalist is free riding on their budget and the business that they provided, right? And, uh, you know, I'm not sure, I'm actually trying to faithfully represent both views because I can, I think I can... There is a tension 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 internationalists will say, "Well, our people are actually richer and they've had a richer century and a richer maybe like m- 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 basically 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, you know, who, you know, are currently, you know, weaker, right? Uh, and, and are more meritorious on some axis, right? And, uh, you know, because those are internally consistent, uh, that's why I see them becoming the land and the cloud.

   13. CWChris Williamson1:00:37

       Mm.

   14. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:00:38

       Right? That's like the primary political axis of this century is not right, left, but it is the land and the cloud. It is the nationalist socialists and the internationalist capitalists.

   15. CWChris Williamson1:00:48

       Yeah. That's interesting.

10. 1:00:50 – 1:09:24

    Technology’s Impact on Conflict

    1. CWChris Williamson1:00:50

       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, uh, 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 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-

    2. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:01:19

       (laughs)

    3. CWChris Williamson1:01:19

       ... 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, uh, unrest downstream from that potentially happens domestically.

    4. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:01:37

       It's possible. I mean, the thing is also, though, if it's low T, if it's a low testosterone, like, are people gonna fight?

    5. CWChris Williamson1:01:44

       That's gonna domesticate everybody in any case. Yeah. Good point.

    6. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:01:47

       I don't know, right? Like-

    7. CWChris Williamson1:01:48

       Good point.

    8. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:01:48

       ... but, you know, what I, what I think you actually get is a disorganized rather than organized violence. So when everybody thinks about, like, war, you know, or they think about the 20th century with, 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, uh, is implicit that, uh, 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, you know, turning screws, cranking wrenches, et cetera, and then, like, 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, span out, boom, do the same thing as-

    9. CWChris Williamson1:02:38

       Similar to school.

    10. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:02:40

        Similar to school. Exactly, right? But that is simply not how people, uh, operate today in the West. You're looking at a screen and it's, it's very much async and it's like (snaps fingers) attach, detach, 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, just kind of... You know, my thesis 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 politicalology, 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 hacking somebody, whether it starts with yelling at them online, uh, even if it's like a drone or like a bomb de... Like, all that is just device-driven stuff, right? So it's network, not... You know, it's, it, it's giant networks hitting each other and, like, stochastic as opposed to huge wavefronts of, like, armored uniformed tanks and planes and guys at, with uniforms hitting each other, right?

    11. CWChris Williamson1:04:19

        So the real world is becoming more virtual-like?

    12. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:04:22

        Yeah, exactly. That's right. And, you know, the thing is that, um, you know, th- this is... Like, our, our models of what conflict looks like are based on this... You know, people think, "Oh, when there's a war, it's gonna look like the History Channel thing you were mentioning earlier, Hitler versus Stalin on the..." You know, bloodlet... Right? And so they think it's gonna look like that, but it's actually gonna look like what we've seen over the last 20 years, which is terrorism, social media memes, hacks, um, cancellation, deplatforming, 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.

    13. CWChris Williamson1:05:14

        It's decentralized, right? Like, how do you take down or stop a thousand individual groups of actors?

    14. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:05:21

        Yeah, exactly. So it's just, it's something which is more like, I don't know, the Thirty Years' War. It just goes on forever because where's the battlefront, you know? And it's not even declared. It's just, like, escalating hostility. And, um, that's actually what... You know, in the book I talk about, uh, American anarchy 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 anarchy essentially, you know, my premise there, and you're talking about the guy in Idaho and this kind of a piece of that, right? Uh, you know, have you seen the political compass?

    15. CWChris Williamson1:06:00

        Yes.

    16. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:06:00

        Do you know the box, right?

    17. CWChris Williamson1:06:01

        Yeah.

    18. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:06:02

        So top left, communism; top right, fascism; bottom left, uh, I'd say wokeness; bottom right, anarcho-capitalism or let's say Marxism, 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, uh, this great movie, uh, called The Soviet Story, okay? Which actually shows the propaganda posters of the communists and the fascists and how similar they were, right? And you actually already see this today where you see memes from one side being copied and repurposed on the other side.

    19. CWChris Williamson1:06:40

        Yeah.

    20. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:06:40

        So that was actually a conscious thing because, you know, Hitler called his group the Nationalist Socialists, right? The National Socialist German Workers Party. He stole a bunch of lines from the left and vice versa. Stalin stole nationalism and so on. So they 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, this really I should say authoritarian, totalitarian total state which could be either communist or fascist, right? Orwell's written about this, everybody's warned about this, et cetera. So that's the thing that our base is immunized of. 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. Lower left quadrant is wokeness, it's Antifa, you know, all, all, all this stuff, and lower right is maximalism, anarcho-capitalism, et cetera, so like ultra-libertarian right, ultra libertarian left. So ultra libertarian left will say, "Everybody's equal," and the ultra libertarian right will say, "You ain't the boss of me." And where do those add up to? What add, what, what 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, right? All authority is illegitimate. All hierarchy is illegitimate. This order is illegitimate. You know, burn it all down, right? 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, obviously had real differences, they have real similarities in terms of their degree of total organization, totalitarianism, right? Wokeness and maximalism have immense differences, but they are aligned on basically being against the current order, you know, whether they're calling it institutionally racist or they're calling it, you know, Klaus Schwab and 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, um, some folks are very ideological and they will take X and not Y and so on, but for a lot of people, they, they will kind of take both in this weird compartmentalized way. They'll, like, agree with both, right? You know, and, uh, you know, 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, it's kind of like something where, um, that's why, I mean, there's a sum as well as a cancellation of terms, right? So if communism and fascism lead to totalitarianism and tyranny, the bottom left and the bottom right corner sum to anarchy.

11. 1:09:24 – 1:22:00

    Lessons from Living in Singapore

    1. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:09:25

    2. CWChris Williamson1:09:25

       Given the fact that you've been focused on network states a lot recently and your, um, 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? The last few decades for that country has been pretty-

    3. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:09:45

       Amazing.

    4. CWChris Williamson1:09:46

       ... phenomenal, yeah?

    5. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:09:47

       Yeah.

    6. CWChris Williamson1:09:48

       Like, pretty unprecedented? So what, what, what did you learn or what are the lessons that should have been taken away from Singapore's ascendancy?

    7. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:09:55

       Well, so I am splitting time between Singapore and India, um, and actually, uh, you know, I'm trying to spend a lot more time in India, in particular, just 'cause, um, there's, there's ama- Like, that's also, like, the last five or 10 years in India have been phenomenal. Um, and I mean, like, on the ground, you've got the Starbucks, you've got the internet, and so on and so forth. But, um, on your question on Singapore, um, I mean, you know, they had, uh, uh ... Singapore is, I think, an important model for this century, you know, because they had a CEO founder, right, which was Lee Kuan Yew, who, you know, was perhaps the single greatest leader of the 20th century. You know, a lot of the other guys, you know, who are quote, "great leaders," um, you know, uh, are, are wartime leaders. They killed a lot of people or they ordered troops into battle. And look, there's a, a, there's an aspect of humanity, which is we respect conquerors, we respect winners, we respect that kind of thing, right? But Lee Kuan Yew did not, you know, kill lots of people. He wasn't a communist dictator. He wasn't, you know, he wasn't a wartime leader and so on and so forth. He just leveled up a country, right? And, you know, in, in some ways, like, one way to think about it is, there's sort of, like, four levels of leadership. You know, if you ask yourself, "Why does socialism keep arising over and over again?" One way of a, a, answering that question 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 axis and just start sandpapering that, okay? And, uh, you know, uh, conflict is 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 mob. It'll just always work in almost every country. Invariance of this, let's ca- call it demagoguery, right? You'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? "Wogs begin at Calais," 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, old, you know, English guys. So nationalism, the, the good part about nationalism is it stops the conflict internally. People are aligned internally. They've got a common cause. That's the good part. The bad part is, uh, it often starts wars, 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 they get into all these wars with people and then eventually they get pushed back or whatever, right? Okay, so then you go one level up from that. Now you get to capitalism, and now you're unifying people on the basis of a common market cause. And, uh, now defeating the other guy doesn't mean killing them or starting a war. You're defeating them in the market in a voluntary way where, where they can submit and be acquired or what have you. You're virtualizing the conflict, and it's also positive sum. 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 capitalistic enterprises 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, a technologist leader, where you're like Elon and you're amassing all these people. And it's not just positive sum, you're not just building something non-violently, it's not just something in the market, you're literally moving humanity forward by... Y- you're not just building an organization that ships chairs, for example, which are valuable in the market, but that's building spacecraft that, uh, doing something that's never been done before. So the level of difficulty as a leader there is the highest, right? So you 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 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, you know, 30 years later that planes work, that trains work, that, you know, 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, right, um, then, like, LKY is, like, a capitalist technologist who's basically, like, kind of there, right? Somewhere in between, um, but very, very high. Perhaps one of the best of the 20th century, perhaps the best of the 20th century. Because, um, you know, 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. Do you know that?

    8. CWChris Williamson1:14:58

       No.

    9. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:14:59

       He really cared about the fact that visiting dignitaries when they hit Singapore, that they would drive through and they'd see 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, uh, so that means, like, lots of things are correct about it. Um, and, uh, so he understood that, that basically the guys who were 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 on 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 on 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, um, the thing about that is what I, what I talk about in The Network State is something where it takes aspects of at, at least four different countries, more than that, but it takes aspects of America, India, Israel and Singapore, right? So part it takes from Singapore is the concept of a CEO founder of a country, right? What it takes from America is, you know, almost too many to enumerate, but the concept of, like, a constitution and of, uh, like, an immigrant, like, people, you know, like a, like a nation of immigrants, but a nation of emigrants, E-M-I-G-R-A-N-T-S. Um, what it takes from Israel is the concept of a country founded by a book. Theodor Herzl wrote a book called The Jewish State in the late 1800s, right around the turn of the century, proposing, um, that the Jewish people have... That they were, 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 to the fourth thing, which is India has non-violent independence, right? And so, uh, let's say with Gandhi you had the non-violent independence, right? So you take those four things, right? You have, you know, like, uh, America's constitution and all their contributions, you have Singapore's concept of the city state run by a founder CEO, um, you have the concept of nations started with a book, with a strong moral cause, right? And you have the concept of nations started non-violently that managed to bind together folks of lots of different ethnicities, like both India and the US have done, right? And actually, all four of those are really multiethnic 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. Um, I mean, India's like Europe, by the way. It's like North and South India are like Finland and, and Spain or something. They're as different as that, but they're all in one giant union, right? So, so those also, they have something else. You know what's in common among those four countries? They're all forks of the UK code base, right? Because, like, the American fork is like, what if we took all Europeans and, you know, most, most Americans are no longer of Anglo descent, but the UK code base, you know, became the constitution and so on. And 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 those-

Episode duration: 1:47:06