YouSaid · the spoken record

Balaji S. Srinivasan

lines on the record: 222
first: 2022-07-04
most recent: 2022-07-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Just normal fun stuff 99% of the time will just share each other's content, launch each other's products, advise each other, 1% of the time we'll have to defend each other online. And it's like a guilt. So that moral innovation, crucially, that group is not saying change the traffic laws. They're not saying change everything else. They're just innovating on one focus dimension. It's very similar to a startup, right? A startup is all about focus. One thing you're changing. Let me give a second example of the One Commandment. Carb's bad. So this is something, if the first, you would need what I call a network union, like a digital only thing. Carb is bad. You'd need actually some physical component. You need what I call a network archipelago. So you've got like a physical network of spaces. It could be small cul-de-sacs or gyms, things that your community is crowdfunded around the world. And what do you do with the moral premise Carb's bad, that moral innovation? Well, you basically implement keto kosher at the border.”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's say I give several examples, but there's different tiers of how aggressive that moral premise can be. It could be something like cancellation is bad. You know, cancel culture is bad. So that's something that you could do purely online. How'd you do it purely online? You form a guild where people are there and they're helping each other out in just some general work matters. But if one of them is canceled at one point, which is a rare event, that group all defends them as one. So that's something where there's a moral innovation relative to society at large where society at large is sort of neutral to negative on cancellation, but isn't actually able to stop it. This group actually says that is a danger to our life. It's a big enough deal that I'm going to join a society that's like an anti-cancellation society. I'm going to pay some percentage of my income effectively in cancellation insurance by being part of this society. And I have a thousand people and I will work with them on just...”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what is the alternative, right? So the thing is, and this is, I think, one of the more important concepts in the book, these abstractions I pulled out, one of the concepts I have there is the one commandment. Okay, so I mentioned God's data network and how you can make hybrids of them. So the network state actually requires a one commandment. So you actually have something that's like, it's not just technology and politics, but something that's similar to faith. Okay. So what do I mean by a one commandment? I mean, you take society at large and you have one focused moral innovation relative to society at large. And then you have an opt-in startup society. It could literally be you buy some land in rural Pennsylvania or Minnesota. It could start as a digital community that crowdfunds land around the world. Okay, so it could start digitally. It could start physically. I recommend starting digitally for a variety of reasons. But you have this community where you have a moral premise.”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's not like a reality. And once you actually live through that in World War II or the Korean War or something, you don't want any more of it. And you go back to like kind of a peace mode. You understand how things conspiral in a bad way. But having had that goal for 70 years, people are now being drawn to these ideologies of conflict.”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People than others. That's it. That's all he does, trudging through your town back and forth. Your town's not your town now. It's a Godzilla trudging zone. That's kind of what it's like. And that is, I mean, if you think about BLM or Giant Riot, it's not like some surgical, you know, kind of thing. It's just like burning things down, blowing things up. It's in the name of some higher cause. That's why people do it. But it's extremely non-targeted. It is simply, you know, that's why friendly fire happens worse. Like people get blown up, people get blown to smoothings. Immense damage and destruction on both sides. War really, really sucks. And I know that's super obvious to say, but all the wars that, you know, with the exception of the military class that's actually gone overseas and fought, the US hasn't actually had experience with that in living memory. It's got all these violent video games. I like some of these games and so on, but it's all fantasy.”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. It's true, like those people who were caught in between that vice, nobody ended up well off, right? And so there's this false, it's like the Iran-Iraq war, you know, who wants to be in the middle of that? That's like Shiite versus Sunni. My answer is neither. I do not want to be involved in this false dichotomy, this giant conflict. David Hines had a good thread, which I quote on this, which is like what political violence is actually like. I'm just going to quote this at length. It's from like seven years ago. No, sorry, five years ago. He was like, people have a fantasy of how political violence works. You smite your enemies in a grand and glorious cleansing because, of course, you're better. But grand and glorious smiting isn't actually how violence works. I'm not sure how to really describe it so people get it, but this is a stupid comparison. But here, imagine that one day Godzilla walks through your town. The next day, he does it again, and he keeps doing it. Some days he steps on more”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For example, if you were unfortunate enough to be in Eastern Europe between 1939 to 1945, all these guys had to choose between like the Nazis and the communists. That is an absolutely horrible. The answer is GTFO. Both those are dead ideologies on the Ashy, what are you going to say?”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Either you have this great phrase before you're like a tech enabled Jason Bourne. And actually, I thought about it after him, like, that's much more you than me. I'm not going to be doing all the stunts in the movies in the same way that Tim Ferris is, right? But the thing is, if you have very high sense of agency, if you're like a CEO or you're a founder or your president or you're very driven and so on, then you can kind of find your footing on something. You're not a joiner of a movement. But if you need to have, if you don't feel like that, and most people don't for lots of good reason, you need to have a movement that kind of supports you in some way where you can't just create one from scratch. That's actually one of the things I want to help build. So that brings me to your next question. Basically, if it's not these ideologies of conflict, because in an era where everything is cracking, people like these ideologies, these ghosts are set up to recruit. They're set up to pull you in and you're like, you know.”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Boys in blue, they believe in the state. Okay, what if you don't believe in either? You're not just an atheist, but you're an atheist. Then you believe in the network, then you end up in something like maximalism or cryptotribalism. So the thing is that that dispute, you know, Carl Schmidt wrote this book called Political Theology. And he's like, all these religions, I mean, he himself, you know, was like a Nazi jurist or whatever, right? So, but basically Nazism, communism, et cetera, these are all many people have observed. These are all effectively like religions. They're either religions themselves or they're God replacements. And they animate huge numbers of people to fight as if a religious kind of thing. So therefore, we're not just having like a scientific discussion. It's like a fundamentally religious discussion. Just something that one should think about when you're talking about this kind of thing. There's some folks who look at it dispassionately. And why would you be able to look at it dispassionately? It's because you may not realize this. You have some island of stability on your own.”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Constitution as similar to the Bible. And so one of the issues is that those people who are really asserting that the reserve currency won't fail are often the ones who kind of suspect on some level that maybe it could and they just can't imagine a world without that and they don't want you to undermine their God and you're kind of a traitor or you're like unpatriotic and so on and so forth and sometimes if you talk to somebody who's very religious, they'll say, well, if you didn't believe in God, people would just commit all kinds of crimes and so on, right? There's actually, by the way, there's more argument for that than you might think because if you actually believe in hellfire, then it's like decentralized law enforcement. You know, the law might only catch you at some probability. But if you actually believe in hell, then doing this little crime, even if the law doesn't see you, well, you're going to hell and that's more of a penalty than it's like scalable law enforcement if you can get people to really believe in it. It's actually like a meta-logic to it. But okay, people who don't believe in God, what they believe in, they believe in God.”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The mid century US, for example, was like half God, half state because it was like for God and country will fight the godless communists. But it was like mostly state, but with a god, you know, dosing. So you can make hybrids not just pure forms. But God state network is actually a really useful lens to start looking at movements. Because the reason that guy is saying to you that the reserve currency can never go away is he worships the U.S. government in a sense, even if he doesn't understand it. He really thinks it can never go away. You know, there's a series of books or a series of essays when communism didn't work out. And it was called The God That Failed. People put religious level faith into that. You know, people, you probably heard the term America's civic religion, you know?”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“State. Maximal is not a religion, but it's a doctrine because they worship a network. Vulkness is sort of like partially state, partially network, where they live on the network, but they animate the state. Communism is actually also partially state, partially networked because they had this international network of communists, but they were primarily state.”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's people who say, Oh, the reserve currency can't fail, and so on and so forth. They're actually like the inverse of the maximalist, you're not having a rational argument with them. You're having an argument about faith. And the reason is one of the chapters or subsections in the book is, I call it God State Network. The question is, what is the most powerful force in the world? Is it an almighty God? Is it the US military? Is it the government? Or is it encryption? Or in the past, you might have said capitalism, peer-to-peer networks, and so on. God state network, the thing is, it's a generalization of religion. Religions worship a god, but a doctrine, if you look at that in the dictionary, it could be a political or religious or other movement. A doctrine, you know, you have as your Leviathan, it could be a god, it could be the state, or it could be a network, right? So communism is not a religion, but it's a doctrine because they worship a”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Coin, but a flat coin, you're tracking oranges, you're tracking bread, you're tracking milk, and you've got a coin that remains flat against those things. That's what actually people care about maintaining their That mainstream is kind of Web3 and BTC. I know that sounds like, oh my God, that's terrible, right? And there are bad aspects to it. No question about it. One of the things that I'm talking about with this book is anticipating that level of instability. What do we build on the other side?”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you talk about inflation and you're undercutting the stability of our society, and so therefore they publish public inflation stats that are fake, and then you have to actually have stats outside of Argentina that are real. And so now we are faced with the issue of that's something which the 2000s or whatever you could tut, tut at Argentina, banana republic, blah, blah, blah, you know. Once you need shadow stats that can have to sit outside not Argentina, but outside America shadow stats on inflation that are powerful enough to resist attempted censorship by the US government, I actually wrote this post last year with the spec on this at 1729.com for a slash inflation that actually goes through the whole problem, which actually quite a non-trivial problem because you need censorship resistant hosting, you need to scrape lots of prices, you need to have maybe some instrument that is like an actual, not a stable.”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so he likes sort of casually tweeted something which was like Mandel was like, Ohio must be pro-God, profamily, and pro Bitcoin. And the thing is that, look, as I said, I think Bitcoin will draw significant support from the working class Democrats because of the inflation thing. I mean, the fundamental thing about that is it doesn't matter what the establishment says, how good their propaganda is when you're seeing your money crumble underneath. In fact, the more they say it's transitory, the more they say things like, you know, one of the things that's going to be a big message, unfortunately, censorship is going to increase dramatically if inflation happens. Do you know why? Because in Argentina, in other countries where inflation has happened, the government argues that talking about inflation causes it because you're causing people's price expectations to rise. Therefore, you're disloyal.”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are tribes picking left tactics? Point is this concept of like a ghost that's like inhabiting a politician is also happening with maximalism. For example, the guy who is running against JD Vance in Ohio, Josh Mandel. Did you see his tweets on Bitcoin?”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Image, right? And here's why I see that if you look at Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden and you look at what they were saying in the 90s or 70s or something, like they're saying completely different things. These are, in a sense, a politician is like inhabited by a ghost that speaks through them. In fact, a lot of things, this is actually a very powerful model for thinking about a lot of things. When you think about ideologies are like ghosts that occupy a huge number of hosts and then they animate them and their eyes glow a certain color to fight each other. Often, you know, for example, like Russia versus Germany in the 1940s, we think of that as communism versus Nazism. But now it's like flipped and the Germans are liberals and the Russians are nationalists, but they're still fighting. So the ideology is flipped, but the tribes are still fighting. And sometimes one tribe picks left tack as their tribe picks right tactics. And then it flips and one tribe is picking right tactics.”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yourself, you build up power there, and then you can come back. That's kind of what the Maximalists have done, though not super conscious necessarily. Maybe some of them are conscious. Fundamentally, their innovation, lots of everybody else is thinking zero knowledge and all this stuff, you know, and I think that's good. That's the network innovation. The maximalists are actually taking some of the state's playbook and using it. So the El Salvador thing, various Bitcoin bills, their innovation is actually on the political level, not technological. They're basically like a quote political party, but really a political network. In this sense, they're like the wokes. The wokes exist really as a network thing. They exist in academia and so on. They're like a ghost that can animate a Democrat sometimes and make them do something.”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you have the state coming after you, you can double down on the network, meaning internet type technologies, but also peer-to-peer network of people and so on. And you can do things like Zcash, which encrypts all transactions. You can do digital nomadism. You can move overseas. You can do all these run and escape and exit things. And those can be good. But it's a tactic and ultimately you can't just only exit. Sometimes what you're doing is you're exiting with a tactical retreat and you then get to higher ground. You get to a more secure position than you can push forward. Like the Puritans made it all the way to the US and escaped persecution. And then 170 years later, the power they had built up, they were able to invade Europe, you know, or Google, they escaped this corner, which is search, and they built up their resources there. And then they had billions of dollars they could invade Microsoft's territory with Google Docs. So sometimes you retreat to a corner, you fight hard enough so that you're not being invaded.”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, exactly. And sometimes things are like that, you know. I can't prove it, but my strong hunch is people will bring the BTC locally. They will transform it into something like WBTC or Ren BTC or something like that in a DeFi thing and then do something with it, right? There's several different operations that are like that. I don't have probably somebody like Dune or Nansen or something could support my hypothesis shoot me down or confirm it. Anyway, coming back up. The thing is the Bitcoin seizure resistance point. Many holes in the story in the sense that there's many things that people can and will press on from central exchange seizures to lower capacity on the chain and whatnot. But the pushback to that, and this is kind of an important and subtle thing I'll try to articulate it.”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“DeFi. DeFi, because you can only engage with it through like a decentralized wallet for the most part, I mean, there are centralized exchanges that let you do it, but regulations make it hard. Because of that, people have moved funds more and more funds locally. There's been a financial incentive to pull funds locally. And that, I mean, incentives ultimately are what works. So it's a funny thing where DeFi may actually, the thing that lots of maximalists hate may actually have pulled more funds. Okay, that's a hypothesis.”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's other attacks that could happen firewall attacks where you try to block the packets they're going through, and then the people pipe them over Starlink or they try to do port randomization or they try to encrypt the traffic. So it looks like you're saying an email when you're sending a Bitcoin transaction. People could try, oh my, there's so many things people try. One of the issues is the Bitcoin network itself is not extremely high capacity for on-chain transactions. So it's hard for everybody to use it on-chain all the time, but people can go and hold large amounts of money with one transaction. I am seeing stats which show coins coming off exchanges since, I think, early 2020 or thereabouts. I am seeing those numbers. I think Glassnode has some of those numbers. So you can see, I think, a decline in this. Why? Because actually, you know, one of the funniest things that's hilarious, it's actually pulling money off of exchanges. You know what it is?”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Few other things that can hit. Quantum computing could hit. It is possible that the Chinese who are working heavily, this is the thing about the book. I talk about there's so many different billiard balls in this theater. It's like a World War, you know, in the sense of there's all these different theaters happening and you could just be absorbed with the American theater, but there's like the Asian theater and there's this theater and there's that theater, you know, the Chinese are working very aggressively on quantum and there's a scenario I'm not an expert in quantum computing. I know enough to be dangerous, but there's a scenario where quantum decryption advances fast enough and quantum encryption isn't there or it's expensive and you can do decryption with these high qubit systems that are in one location but encryption you can't do outside or something like that quantum safe algorithms just don't get distributed in time I've seen people argue about this I'm not saying I'm strongly on one side or the other but that's like a wild card that”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Probably be able to get that through in a fair number of US states. Maybe not the full constitutional amendment ratification process. Like you may not get the quorum that's necessary, but I think you'll get that ratified in some states. And then those states that are ratified, it can point to that and say, we ratified it. Therefore, it's a law of our state. Therefore, we're not seizing the Bitcoin and companies could put their servers there. I mean, this is the level that I think things are going to get to. They're going to get really intense. Or they keep them in El Salvador, or they keep them somewhere else, right? And then the question is, you know, like the Andrew Jackson thing, the court has made its judgment, let them enforce it. So in 2010, would it have seemed insane to say that billions of people would care about the position of some bites on a server in Virginia where Trump has access to tweet or not? You know, like that would be insane. I'm telling you, people are going to really care where that money is in five or ten years. They're really going to care if they can freeze or not.”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every possible edge case and failure mode will happen, but maximalism is not simply a technological thing. Really, it's mostly a political thing now. So first, what are all the things that will happen? Okay. I think you will see freeze and seizure orders given to centralized exchanges. They may have, however, the moral support from their community to not comply. They may be located in red states where the governor says this is a sanctuary state for crypto. Because if you think about the concept of a sanctuary state for immigration or for abortion or for gun laws, all of that groundwork has already been laid. One of the things I predict in the book I talk about is I think that maximalists will introduce a constitutional amendment for no seizures of Bitcoin, just like free speech or right to bear arms can't seize Bitcoin. Fundamental right. And I actually think you'll.”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, so now let's talk about that. So, practicalities. These practicalities really matter. Why do they matter? Well, the question of whether Twitter could censor somebody's account and so on was an abstraction because people just assumed that, you know, they wouldn't hit it. You should assume every single thing gets weaponized in crazy ways. We have not yet had total cyber war. We're going to see some crazy things as a function of that. And that's going to push people to truly not your keys, not your coins type stuff. Problem is right now, Yes, a lot of coins are on exchanges. What I think we're going to see is.”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More people of color than not than on the other side. And then you have, well, it's still our flag, it's still our country, it's still our state. That's now set up for something that's much closer to a 50-50, right? That's actually something where a lot of people would be torn between those two groups. And when it's 50-50, unfortunately, that's when conflict is maximal. So that unfortunately is how I anticipate things to go.”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Other communities, and it has a different user base than your typical tech app. And in fact, he's gone and talked about that, given talks about that and tweets about that. And so he's probably seeing this in the numbers that inflation is hitting this group harder. So because of that, the moral legitimacy of the establishment is called into question because they define themselves, if you read again, like something like Barbara Walter's book or something. She imagines that this future, civil war or conflict will be between a tolerant, diverse establishment and some 4chan Nazis. But that's a wash. That's an easy win. That's a 90-10 win, right? That's 95, 99 won or whatever, right? When you rotate it and instead it is basically all pro freedom people who are Bitcoin orange and against inflation and probably maybe”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Versus bottom, it's like the authoritarian is dollar green and the libertarian is Bitcoin Orange. And that rotation is a pretty big shift. You know, I'm not sure what percentage of both parties shift. It might be that orange is like 60% Republican and 40% Democrat or something. But one of the most underappreciated aspects is many, many non-white people will shift to Bitcoin Orange. And the reason is that inflation hits African Americans, Latinos, Asians, and whites all at the same, you know, and if you look, you know, the more equities and other assets you hold, in some ways, you're kind of more buffered from this. At least you can have some ups as well, some downs. But inflation is absolutely crushing people of color. And that is something I think, you know, for example, Jack Dorsey, who has square cash, that's actually very popular among the African American community, among”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of the security state people, military people, neocons, folks who basically side with, at the end of the day, they will choose the American flag and they'll choose the US government and so on. And on the other side is Bitcoin Orange. And here are actually lots of Democrats will actually choose this side. And for example, like Jack Dorsey, like Glenn Greenwald, like a lot of the substackers, like a lot of the tech founders, these are folks who would never fold into Trump, but they also are just fundamentally anti-establishment. They have that rebel DNA, that fundamental rebel DNA, just like a lot of those Republicans who will side with Dollar Green don't really like the current US government, but fundamentally it's my country right or wrong. So it's a rotation of the spectrum. You know, if the normal political spectrum is left versus right, this is like top.”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Zeal is the difference between selling when it's low and zeal is the difference between selling never. Zeal is the difference between talking to it all the time and making it your life and just having it be one component of an otherwise healthy life. Zeal means putting it at the top of your identity stack, putting it in your profile, having it be part of your existence. Like, you know, the top of your identity stack, that's really precious space. You know, what you identify yourself as you might live in Missouri, but you might not identify yourself as a Missouri and you might identify yourself as a Bitcoiner or as a Christian or as a Republican or something. That top identity thing is really important and that's something that Max must have. And so what I think is actually going to happen is the political spectrum will rotate. I think imagine adding yellow, a splash of yellow so that red, blue becomes orange versus green. And orange versus green rotates it. And so it's Bitcoin orange versus dollar green. And on the dollar green side are actually quite a few Republicans.”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally. So the answer is one of the things I've learned over the last 10 years, 15 years, is the value of irrationality. All the other people in Web3 are in it for technology or finance or something like that. Maximalists are in it for fundamentally political slash moral slash social slash ethical kind of things. I think there's a continuum where, as I said, Some of the words I agree with, but a lot of the actions and behavior I don't. Still, I recognize the zeal. And zeal really, really, really matters. Zeal matters.”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it reminds me of it's like somebody who's a progressive and they would agree with many statements about how you need to have equity and not discriminate against people and so on. But then they see people saying those things going and burning down black businesses. And that's like completely the opposite of what you actually seem to want ideologically, right? This is harming these people that you're claiming to help, right? So the words don't match the actions necessarily. If the words are, in this case, for greater freedom and so on, why are you arguing for governments to crack down? Why are you arguing for willing buyer, willing seller to stop? Why are you trying to pathologize capitalism? That doesn't seem to make any sense. And that's because I think it's gotten sort of maximalism's gotten twisted in this ideological knot, which unfortunately is going to be very helpful. That's the paradox.”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To me, that's insanely obvious, but the thing is that the 21 million, again, there's an aspect of it that's zero sum, like the communists, which is one person's gains and other person's loss. If you're getting Bitcoin, I must be losing Bitcoin. One of the ways you see this is in the Bitcoin community, you don't see that many crowdfunders. You see actually fairly large crowdfunders in Ethereum and so on, right? Now, what does the Maximus community have? I've criticized it, but let me actually say certain things that it's very complicated because maximalism has many of the things that they say are things where I agree with some or all of it.”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and the thing is, it is fundamentally, in a sense, unprincipled, right? It is basically something where it's like there is a rationale for it, which is number go up technology. Anything that seems to make the price of Bitcoin goes up is good. And if that means banning every other coin, the only coin people can buy is Bitcoin, well, that's good. Again, though, this is like the communist zero-sum mentality, because if the Web3 crypto economy didn't exist, I don't believe that Bitcoin would be where it is. You need all of this infrastructure around it to build the thing up. I think that's super obvious.”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do get the sense, oh, there's something up here. They're not being totally straightforward with me. And then that pushes it. It's like this trampolining. And then in the maximalist attack it as, ha, it's actually equity in disguise, like an illegal crowdfunding or whatever. And the thing is, that same maximalist is typically anti-fed, yet pro-SEC, right? They're like the most selective crypto-anarchist ever where it's against the Federal Reserve.”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Incentivize people to build out a company and a digital asset incentivizes people to build out a network. Now, the problem is that the SEC, you've got a pincer attack of the journalists and the maximalists, basically, okay, the bureaucrats and the maximalists, because on the one side, you have these guys who are stuck in the past with orange groves and how we, the SEC guys who are trying to pathologize the issuance of digital assets and saying, ah, we're going to go after that. That's like unregulated issuance of assets. And the crucial thing, by the way, is they're not going after the bad actors in the space. They're going after, for example, they went after kick, you know, which is like a fairly reputable company. They just randomly targeted them for enforcement. They're just going after not the bad actors, the actors they can get the maximum headlines on. What that does is it forces Web3 people to not make the analogy to equity. When they can't make the analogy to equity and they have to like shy away from it with all kinds of stupid word games and so on and so forth, people”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maximalist, yeah, because they've gone their head into a religious fundamentalist mode where, and by the way, some of the faultier lies to the SEC as well. Fundamentally, we have not been able to make the analogy between digital equity and paper equity. Why? Because the SEC, and these has tried to say, oh, they're all unregistered securities, and so we're going to throw everybody in jail and so on and so forth. So what does that mean? That means that, look, do I think that a digital asset is the same as an equity? No, I think it's like a horseless carriage versus a horse-drawn carriage. At first, you make the analogy, but it's also got fundamental differences with a digital asset, you can issue it to all of your users. They can use it in programs. It's on-chain. It does, all it slices, it dies, it does tons of things. The paper equity does not. But it is similar in one sense, which is that a paper equity is something that...”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can boost the value of that equity in a way that you cannot really boost the value of the dollar, your elasticity. The dollar economy is so massive that your individual efforts will be a drop in the bucket relative to a million other people who are doing things, right? So your effort results in results, effort and results. That's capitalism. That's the thing that Deng Xiaoping's key insight, the reason that China boomed. Does he allow the farmers to keep some of their green, that their effort led to results? So effort leads results. That's what equity is. It gives you a shot. I know I'm explaining like super basic things, but honestly, this community has gotten its head into this sort of religious fundamentalist mode.”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The net present value of the future dividends that would go to that share. And so, you know, basically buy a stock and then you assume that in 10 years or 15 years, Facebook goes public and it pays out dividends and you pay $10 down, you get $50 in dividends in 15 years. And that's actually a win, right? Now, of course, in practice, for tax reasons, other reasons, companies will do buybacks. And there's lots of ways where that Econ 101 or micro econ 101 concepts of the dividend has been abused, granting all that. But fundamentally, there is an income stream there. And the reason that you don't just have somebody just give dollars to everybody at a company is that through their efforts, they can go and close sales. They can close deals. You can go and close the sale for $10 million. That brings in revenue into the company. In theory, that could be dividended out to the shareholders. And therefore your individual efforts”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The shares of the company for the founders that's like an accepted thing to do. Every single company is like that. You're pre-mining the shares. Oh my God. And the thing is that you get people to buy into it or not. And it's your own efforts. Why do you?”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everything is Because any rate of interest is unreasonable in some religions. Islamic finance, for example, or very religious Christian groups were against interest of any kind at all. Then what happens is every single financial model breaks. You cannot figure out, okay, should I allocate money into this building project or this like basically the power user tool goes away? You might say, and I might agree with you, that the average Joe should not be buying all this stuff on credit and debt and they're getting screwed by it. And I might agree with you on that, but I don't think you can take away the power tool because it just breaks the economy. And then we go to issuance, right? If the communists pathologize profit and the fundamentalist pathologizes interest, the maximalist pathologizes digital issuance. They're okay with the issuance of equity, paper equity. That is to say, you know, you can go and incorporate a company and pre-mine.”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so what was the concept? It was basically like they take the good and true thing that debt is bad. And I would actually also agree that most Americans are in way more debt than they're supposed to be or should be. And it's like a power tool. They take the valid concept that interest can be abused, is being abused, has been abused, and they turn it into something which says interest cannot happen. But if interest cannot happen and interest is banned because all interest is usury, you break the economy.”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And a maximalist pathologizes digital issuance. So just to kind of click on that, right? Like a communist, they think of all profit as exploitative. That boss is obviously screwing somebody because he did a markup, didn't he? Why couldn't he give it away for free to the community, stealing some for himself? There's 50 arguments you can make against this, but the problem is that it's intuitively appealing to people that profit is sort of getting one over on somebody, right? It feels like a scam, right? And communists were able to get hundreds of millions of people to buy into this notion. And it was something where rather than say, look, there's good profit and bad profit and manage this, they just mythology is the whole thing. Interest is similar. Christian fundamentalists, other religious fundamentalists, there's things about Azurius interest rates. Are you familiar with this concept like usury?”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Different definitions, but I would define it as somebody who thinks that any digital asset other than Bitcoin is a sin. And it is, and people have made the comparison of like wokeness to a religion. In my book, I actually talk about as a doctrine, which is related to religion but not exactly the same, more than a technicality, the wokes, they actually don't worship God. They worship the state and or the network, you know, that is to say they are not about thoughts and prayers, they're about pass a law. And they're not all employed by the state. They're outside of it and they act through it on a network, right? Maximalists are similar in that they've got the zeal of a monotheist or of a monostatist like a communist, but they're a mononumist for a coin. And one of the things that's interesting is, you know, like a communist would be pathologizing prophet and a Christian fundamentalist or religious fundamentalist would pathologize interest.”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The reason I'm not a maximalist is many reasons, but one of them is I don't think everything can be reduced to money. I actually think maximus often in some ways sort of wokes are like the opposite of Nazis. They're both racially obsessed, but they white people are the best or white people are the worst and you but you get a lot of the same things like separate graduations and all this stuff maximums are like the opposite of communists in the sense that they're both economically obsessed and the communists thinks everything should be within the state and it's the fault of business and the maximalist is actually often the opposite. And the issue is why am I not a maximalist? Well, for example, there's many things you can't just buy. Like if you're in Syria and you have 100 BTC, what do you actually want to buy? You want to buy peace. You want to buy a walk down the street in a high trust neighborhood where there aren't bombs flying around.”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's insane from the perspective of 2010, even knowing that Twitter and Facebook had done the Arab Spring, that they've caused social revolutions abroad, that they had connected hundreds of millions of people. If you had ridden that the entire politics of the world would depend on whether the United States president could tweet, it would be an extrapolation. But that's what I'm trying to tell you is I do think that if in the 2010s social media became what all politics is about, By the end of the 2020s, cryptocurrency becomes what all politics is about. You will not be able to fund your government without it.”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Most important political issue in the world would be whether the president could tweet for a time period that literally one bit flip on a server in Virginia. You remember the thing we were talking about with mimesis and what people fight about 5440 or fight this account, like the bites on this server in Virginia, when I say Virginia is probably Amazon's servers there that Twitter is hosted on, the bytes on that server, those little bytes that record what somebody was saying. That's where the fight is whether this person can or cannot tweet is literally a matter like billions of people around the world wanted to know whether that bit would flip this way or that way.”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Executive Order 6102, for those who don't know, is FDR's gold seizure. So the very organized U.S. government at that time was able to seize the gold and then resell it on international markets at a markup. It was just this giant tax on all Americans. And something like that, I think, is quite likely to happen because it just takes all the rhetoric on abolish billionaires, tax these rich guys, blah, blah, blah, all that type of stuff, which is people won't care that someone took on risk to invest in Bitcoin or hold Bitcoin during the drawdown. They won't care about any of that. They will care if Bitcoin is a million dollars and the dollars inflated and it's 2027 or 2028 and you need this to fund the US government. I know that sounds crazy, but think about it like this. In 2010, there are people who had seen the Arab Spring and they'd seen how important social media was abroad. If nevertheless, having seen that, you projected that by 2020 or 2021,”
2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT