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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And that is not the case for your frozen assets on a stock exchange for your valueless dollars, your chair that you can't move across borders and so on and so forth. There's a shelling point that has been built up, which is probably going to be Bitcoin. Now, why is it not gold? Well, the thing is, there's either physical gold or you have some certificate which has counterparty risk. So if it's a certificate, you're back to square one where it can be seized. And even with physical gold, executive order 6102 showed that a sufficiently motivated central government can defeat gold. We have not yet seen that Bitcoin can be so defeated. It is in question.”
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
“Years later, the Federal Reserve Chair saying the dollar's role in international finance is being reexamined and cryptocurrencies are part of the mix of policy responses. That actually shows we are, whatever you want to call it, winning, certainly affecting and changing things. So the thing is, only those assets that can't be frozen or seized are your assets. Bitcoin has a root system that extends way outside the United States to hundreds of millions of people around the world that value 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
“Want to have so much exposure to things that the U.S. government has root access to. Powell actually had a speech on the dollar's role and competition just a few weeks ago where he mentioned actually stablecoins. You can probably find a better version of this, but it's basically rapid changes are taking place in the global monetary system that may affect the international role of the dollar. A central bank digital currency is being examined to help the dollar's international standing. So that is not some random person. That's the chair of the Federal Reserve mentioning A that the dollars international standing is being called into question. And B, that cryptocurrencies and stablecoins are related to the preservation of that standing. So when you zoom out, signal and noise, that's remarkable relative to where Bitcoin was in 2010.”
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
“As to say, all stocks can be seized by hitting a button, as was done with the truckers, the Canadian truckers, or as was done with the Russian sanctions on 145 million people, billions, billions, hundreds of billions of dollars, I think, was just frozen because those assets existed on servers that the US establishment had root control over. And I say the US establishment, that's not exactly the U.S. government. There's a government, but there's also the network of people who are loyal to the U.S. establishment. Those are certain tech CEOs, certain newspaper publishers, and so on. It's all the folks who are basically supporting the current order. If those folks can hit a key and freeze your assets, you don't really own your assets. In a wartime scenario, as what happened with Russia just now, the assets aren't theirs. Now, outside the US, this has meant that a lot of countries are re-examining whether they...”
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 here's the fundamentals argument for that, right? Sometimes there's certain things where the correlations only are visible over the very long run, you know, like the interest rate graph we were just talking about. In this case, we haven't seen a long run of Bitcoin, but what we have seen a long run with is gold, and the fundamental thing is Bitcoin's core value proposition is seizure resistance”
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 basically, what I see is serious inflation, you know, Bitcoin mooning, and then the US government trying to freeze or seize the Bitcoin with something that's similar to Executive Order 616102.”
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
“You are able to cancel and silence those people who are saying things that are contrary to your view and so on and so forth. It is essentially something where because you are constrained from using physical violence, since what are you going to do? Invade a cornfield, invade a city, that doesn't actually work, you're winning digitally. It's digital warfare. Now, when I say constrained from using physical violence, as we've seen, that's actually, we're starting to see stochastic digital violence. The Proud Boys and Antifa and so on punching it out in the street, that's actually an extremely unusual thing in the 90s and 2000s America. You just never saw left and right wing militias punching it out in the streets. But you see that now. That's actually something which is de rigour. I don't know. We're on the 100th or 300th. It's like an event. You wouldn't be totally shocked that that's happening, that political violence is happening in America, but it is. And it's on a ramp. And so you put all that together.”
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
“So, when you see that graph, you're like, oh, okay, so in physical space, people are cheek by gel, but in digital space, they're far apart. And that's where the battlefront is. And you can reconceptualize the last several years as a social war. Because if in a physical war, the goal is to invade territory. In a social war, the goal is to invade mines. And now when we think about cancellation, de-platforming, hashtags, et cetera, et cetera, the point is that what you're trying to do is get a node on their side to flip from blue to red or red to blue.”
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
“In physical space, these two nations are cheek by gel. But in digital space as that graph I showed you show, those two social networks are just clustered apart in digital space. They are separated in digital space. Did I show you that graphic? Did you see 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
“Coincide. You have the north and you have the south. And we take for granted that the victory condition was for the north to just invade the south because by invading their capital and burning and so on, they didn't just destroy their supply chain. They also killed their morale. And eventually they got the entire South to concede and they could flip them ideologically and emancipation proclamation and reconstruction. They uninstalled the software in their heads and installed software with new moral premises. Same in World War II. invade Nazi Germany, denazify them, capture the capital. the ideological and geographical coincided and that's how we think of wars as working. Now today though if you go and look at a map of the US and you look at Republican Democrat it's not in clean states it's very fractal it's at individual county level you've got a little red here a little blue here purple here it's extremely grouped together it's fractal and so what that means is 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
“If that does happen, if physical goods are hard to come by and inflation's destroyed your currency and so on, and you have a country where people are heavily armed and they're yelling at each other on social media and you've got 50 governors like you've got a very potent cocktail for bad things and we've sort of seen this in lots of other countries that frankly America is involved in partially destabilizing like look at Libya or something like that or Mexico or what have you but that People just really do believe on some level quote it can't happen here but I think American anarchy unfortunately is sort of where we're heading and what exactly does that mean you know try and paint a picture so first of all in 1861 if you go and look at the map in 1861 you have the union and you have the confederates and it's the ideological and the geographical”
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 summarize it, basically, we have more money, they're eventually going to need to print again. We have literally fewer goods where China's cutting off supply, there's sanctions, there's wars like Ukraine, there are COVID lockdowns, there's stuff like slow steaming, which is this huge self-inflicted wound by the ESG thing where every single container ship in the world has to slow down now. So you have a lot of things that can sum up into something where it gets nonlinear fast. If that happens and you do have not just the inflation we have now, but genuine serious inflation or even hyperinflation, that is when society comes apart in the US because, I mean, people have been so freaking angry at each other during the 2010s in a relatively booming market. Like in the 2010s, up until 2019, things were like decent economically, but man, were people mad at each other. And when there's like actual genuine scarecrow.”
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
“Basically, like you know, some ESG thing. This is a great example of how moral flipping, I'm getting this second hand, so I might have it wrong, but I believe it is reducing the speed of cargo ships to cut down carbon emissions.”
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 it shows is essentially that the US economy, we have run out of juice, the Federal Reserve being able to print money and so on. It just keeps going down on this trend like interest rates. And if you notice, every time they try to jack it up, it has to be pushed back down and kept down for longer and longer and longer. If you're seeing that in that graph. And now, the next time when they're going to be forced, probably, to bring interest rates all the way to the floor, maybe before the 2024 election, and I think you will see very serious inflation as a function of that, because they'll print money and will actually have genuine goods shortages because we have all these supply chain things that are heading. You have China doing its crazy stuff with the ports and the COVID lockdowns. You have the slow steaming regulations.”
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
“Longer than the cycles that were intuitively familiar with. For example, you're familiar with the cycle of your breath. That's a few seconds, right? You're familiar with a day. You're familiar with basically the seasons of a year. And that's actually what most people are familiar with. Beyond that, maybe the election cycle, you know, in four years, or the longest thing somebody might be familiar with, frankly, are venture capital funds or startups, which are like 10-year cycles. That might be the longest thing where you can run an experiment and see a few reps of it in a five or ten year timeframe over your life, right? A venture capitalist might see hundreds or thousands of five or ten year long experiments that most people don't really track things over that time frame. And any normal human cannot really track things over 40 or 50 years. You have to kind of dedicate your life to that, right? Same thing that's happening over multiple decades. You really need really good charts and stuff to see what the heck is happening. This graph is one of the best and most important because it's so unambiguous.”
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
“Okay. And so, what do you see? You essentially see something where over a 40 year time frame, you have a trend which is very much down into the right. Yeah. And what that is basically this is something where one of the things I write about is And Dahlio has actually also talked about this. There are trends that affect humans that are”
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 United States interest rate, United States Fed funds rate at trading economics.com, right? And they click max on this chart.”
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
“We should put in the show notes because I just want to find this graph long term chart. So if you go to this graph and you click max”
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
“In terms of there will be mobs that are gathered online, it's like stochastic network warfare between two groups. Is it five years? It might be 10 years. I don't know the exact time frame. It could happen faster. It could happen slower. But fundamentally, I think the catalyst is if you look at interest rates and you look at the graph, have you ever look at like the long-term graph of interest rates?”
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
“Just the right cycle of being like strong, and it's not just the left cycle of being zealous, and it's not just the libertarian cycle of having an innovation. You kind of need all of those at the same time to actually go all the way around the cycle to fight that establishment.”
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. So it's Nietzsche and Band of Spartans that go and build a great society and then these degenerates take it down and then we have to like from the chaos and ashes rebuild again and so on, right? What's funny is the left has their own version of this which is the zealous revolutionaries managed to fight the man and overthrow it and then a Stalin-like figure comes and compromises the revolution and the new boss is the same as the old boss and then it comes back to this right and then the tech libertarian has a version that's also like this which is the startup founder goes and rebels against the bureaucracy. They managed to build an operational thing that is actually much more egalitarian and it's got a flatter hierarchy and takes care of all the bureaucracy and it's actually more competitive. And then what happens is the bureaucracy encrusts us and the libertarian founder rebuilds the state. And one of the points I make is all three of those cycles are the same cycle because it's 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
“From the surveillance state, why would you ever want to rebuild something like that, right? So the thing is that recentralization has the smallest constituency right now, but I think it's the right constituency. And the reason is I believe the helical theory of history. So the linear theory of history is we're just progressing. We're just improving. We're getting more equal. We're leveling up. Everything's getting better and so on and so forth. There's something to be said for this. On some axes, on some measures, humans have been improving, like our knowledge of math, for example, that is like a roughly cumulative chart. It has drops when you have the dark ages and stuff like that. It's not all the way up, but it's like up and to the right. Okay. Then you have the cyclical theory of history, which is, and actually one of the things I talk about in the book is both the left and a right and a libertarian cycle of history. But the right cycle of history is strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times, hard times create strong men, where it's basically like, you know, this Nietzschean band of Spartans built...”
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
“What you're seeing is actually extremely important because so much I could say. Let me see if I can download it. First is one of the chapters in the book is centralization, decentralization, recentralization. And the thing is when you say recentralization, what happens is both the centralized and decentralized guys look at you like you've got four eyes. The centralized guys say, wait a second, we're running America. We're running China. The US establishment exists. CCP exists. Why would you want re-centralization? We have an operating centralized system here. And the decentralized guy would be like, why would you want recentralization? We're talking about taking power away from these totally illegitimate establishments with Bitcoin. We're talking about breaking the state and defunding the government and so on. We're giving them defunding the police. We're defunding everything, right? And we're talking about breaking these tyrannies and getting away.”
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
“Well, the thing is that from the outside, people would think I'm a Bitcoin maximist, but it's a log scale to a truly devout Orthodox Bitcoin maximalist, I'm a status cuck. Okay, so I'm because I'm fundamentally like a pragmatist, basically, right?”
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
“So, I think Bitcoin maximalism is the most important ideology in the world that people don't know about. And why do I say 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
“In 2020, that came down, yeah, 2021, 2022 is more peaceful than 2020, but it's way more anarchic than 2017, which is itself more anarchic than 2012. So American anarchy is on the rise. And what does that actually look like? There's lots of ways it can play out. I happen to think it's going to be something like maximalness versus wokes in the US. There's lots of different triggers. Okay, this is just a sci-fi scenario right now. I'm just spitballing.”
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
“Egypt, a bunch of these countries have essentially, we've sort of seen them go from reasonably okay to kind of anarchic. And there's a playbook for how that looks. And if you before and after, if you just teleported somebody from 2005 or 1995, 97, essentially, to today, you can track it back and be like, well, Oklahoma City happened in 1995. And there's a Unibomber. It's always something that you can say was a trend line all the way through. But visual capitalist, for example, has a graph of riots and shootings and bombings and stuff like that. And it's up into the right. It is something where it's like surged in 2020 and it came back down, but it's rising. And it reminds me a lot of crypto, where what happens is it surges and it crashes and then people write it off and they're like, it's over, you know, like that crypto thing is done. But it's not done. It's coming back. And that surge of energy.”
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
“Bitcoin on top of it basically, it's like the physical world is very chaotic, but you have a digital world and digital property rights that are there, right? So some kind of structure online. But the issue here is we have sort of seen what the transition to anarchy looks like in many countries around the world over the last couple of decades. There's a book by Barbara Walter called How Civil War Start, which is a lot of things I disagree with her on, but I actually give her credit for essentially pointing out that many American interventions and other interventions overseas NATO and other stuff over the last few decades, they've been in the intent of spreading democracy and they've caused anarchy. Like Mexico is way more chaotic than it was Ion Grillo has this book called El Narco where he talks about how Mexico's democratic transition attended this huge burst in the narco-terrorism and violent gangs and so on and so forth. Tunisia, Libya.”
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 is the case, then it's the thing that is not conceptualized that we're actually driving towards. The consensus is for anarchy. Because the left and the right can agree that the hierarchy is illegitimate in some way, that the institutions are illegitimate, whether it's institutionally exist or if it is all the deep state. Both of them are tugging on it in a certain way where there's a vector sum towards taking it apart. And the thing about that is American anarchy is like the ultimate in liberty and equality. Everybody's equal because there's no bosses. Everybody's free because there's no laws or hierarchy. There's an aspect of this that is the ultimate of democracy and the ultimate of capitalism. Everybody's doing whatever they want. And that strain exists in American culture on kind of both sides. There is a deep liberty kind of thing. And then you've got folks who will, you know, actually say anarchy is good. And they might say it as good as anarcho-communism or they might say crypto anarchy where you're imposing something like”
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
“Fascism or communism or something like that, respectively. Essentially right or left authoritarianism. And they are reacting to that, and they're like, Oh my God, you know, and you're seeing this every single day on social media. People are pushing back against this. And the thing is that while those two groups all share, you know, they've got huge differences. One thing that is true verbally, rhetorically, conceptually, cognitively, is even if there's left and right vectors that point like this, they're both pointing anti-authority. They're pointing against hierarchy. And so the left might say we are all equal and the right might say you ain't the boss of me. But both of them point towards this kind of concept of you can't control me. No hierarchy is legitimate. I do not trust authority and so on and so forth. That is a subtle vector sum on one axis, even if the left and right cancel.”
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
“So let me start with the first part first. This is just a scenario analysis. Do I want to say it's a base case? Let's say I think it's probable. I can't say it's 100%. And there's always things that happen that are reactions to trends you predict, but it's hard to predict exactly what that reaction is. But here it goes. I call it American anarchy Chinese control, the international intermediate, and the recentralized center. Okay, this is my sort of base level worldview for what happens the next five, ten years. So what is American anarchy? So I actually wrote about this for Barry Weiss's newsletter last year, how we changed our minds in 2021. But the short version is some groups think everything will basically be as it is the so-called Book Tyler Cone calls base raiders. They just think everything is going to be the same. Everybody's kind of agitated or paranoid or whatever, and it's just all going to be okay, whatever. And then you've got folks who think that the US is descending into either”
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 old thing that just doesn't exist anymore, it'll be something that does not acknowledge the reality of the situation. It's like closing the barn door and then expecting to get all the horses back inside when there were forces that were more powerful than that thing that spread them all out, that those entropic forces, you have to kind of go to where those horses are and loop them up and maybe have new ranches or whatever there to extend the metaphor.”
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, exactly, right? So Atlantis is real. Digital Atlantis is huge island. What the heck? And it can then disappear and vanish. And you can also vanish. Your thinking kind of be like, hey, we want to cut off those network relations and we want to move our island somewhere else. So the thing is that I'm downloading one of about, I don't know how many, 10, 15 different things that turn constants into variables. One of them is the nation that we take for granted, the single group of people, is breaking up into multiple nations that are defined by networks. Another is the currency is breaking up. A third is the geography is changing. A fourth is the moral principles that underpin society are changing. And so when like all of those things are in flux, you kind of need something to catch it on the other side because otherwise what people will do is they will sort of try to assert”
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
“Network of people, or the Solana network, suddenly this network can be adjacent to another network. Solana can start taking users from Ethereum. It's like this huge island of like 30 million people just surfaced out of the ocean next to Japan and started like pulling people from them.”
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
“You have to kind of remap how you think about geography because in physical space, for example, two people, you know, they're near each other. There's a physical distance metric and so on. In digital space, it's like a bunch of islands that can snap too. Like I can be near you as I am right now and then snap away and be really far. And that applies not just for individuals, but for entire continents. So for example, in the physical world, Russia is basically always going to be adjacent to Japan and Ukraine and Iran and so on. Like Russia, the country doesn't move around that much. I mean, its borders can expand and contract with the Soviet Union. It's bigger when it's the Russian Federation and smaller. But it's not like it's suddenly adjacent to Argentina. It's not suddenly adjacent to Mexico. It was involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis at the height of its power, but it's not like projecting power all over the world. By contrast, somebody like Vitalik of Ethereum, his”
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
“Set and all the Facebook's data set, you could compute this. Here's the thing nobody has access to both. So nobody can compute it. Or you can estimate it and so on, but unless Twitter and Facebook got acquired, they wouldn't be able to literally find out who was on the border region. They could do sampling and stuff, but there's a cloud that has descended. These gigantic networks cannot really see their borders that well. They can see themselves, but they can't see what people are doing outside. They have less control, in a sense, and less visibility. And so instead, they'll fight over are the visible things like the use of the network and so on and so forth, but they're going to fight over border regions less. Only way they can fight over a border region is to make their product so attractive.”
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
“Is the border between Twitter and Facebook? Well, Twitter has like 330 million users. Facebook has 3.6 billion. And for each person, you could define the border as for their time spent on, so let's say that's 3.6 billion Facebook users, 330 million Twitter users. The total is 3.93 billion max. It might be like 3.7. There might be an overlap there. For each person, you can define a zero to 100% in terms of the time that they would spend on either their 100% Twitter or 100% Facebook. The border region would be those people who are 50-50. And that might be a group of 70 million people in the world who spend exactly 50% of their time. And there's people who are farther from the border who are 370 and people who are really far from the border near the capital who are 100 and vice versa. What I'm describing there is literally something that you could compute. It's not an abstract thing if you had access to all of Twitter's data.”
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
“First is the map was actually not always visible in pre 1492, much the world was unmapped. The entire New World was not mapped. And maps actually just got better and better. And, you know, for a long time, there was like there be dragons. There were parts of the world that were unmapped. What's called Terra Incognita? And there was this time of mystery. It was the frontier, but it was a frontier to the nth power because you didn't even know the land existed. And it kind of seems like we'll never actually have that again until we get to space. But I argue it's actually existing again already in a non-obvious way, and that is on the internet. Point is when people can see something, they will fight over it. You know, the concept of mimesis, right? If they can see it, they'll fight over it. So they can see Hans Island, they fight over it. They see a border, they fight over it. And you can see, for example, the Franco-German border between France and Germany. You know, the border, you can't see is the border between Twitter and Facebook. And what I mean by 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
“Okay, so 5440, your fight was basically this mid 1800s conflict over the boundary in the Pacific Northwest. And the thing is, is basically like the Americans wanted the border with what we would now call Canada to be at 5440, or they would fight a war. Now, in actuality, it wasn't, I think it turned out to be like the 49th parallel rather than 5440. But the thing is, think about that. The latitude and longitude, this thing, this map construct that everybody could share became something that lots of eyes were on and then they were fighting over it. Now here's, you might say that's like the most obvious thing in the world, which of course they'll fight over a map. They can see a map, et cetera. But let me complicate that picture.”
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, Hans Island. Okay, here's the thing why would they fight over something like Hans Island if you go and look at it? Okay, it's this uninhabited frozen island in the middle of nowhere. The non-obvious thing, very non-obvious, I think, is that they can see it on a map. In the 1800s, there was this fight in the conflict that was called 5440 or Fight. Are you familiar with this?”
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
“Step they take is the wrong step. Why? Because land is the most contentious zero-sum, insanely fought over thing. I mean, you know, like Russia and Japan are fighting over like the corals and like, you know, this little islands in the Mediterranean, the Turkish and Greek states are fighting. People fight over land so much over the stupid, you know, Canada and Denmark were fighting over this stupid, uninhabited piece of land. Did you know what I'm talking about? Like this.”
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
“It's so strong. It's ridiculously strong because they agree on the basic premises. And then they can crowdfund that you don't have politics in the same way because they don't have internal disagreement. They have alignment. They agree on what the good world should be. And then they can crowdfund things. They can appoint leaders. They are essentially organically aligned for a cause. That filtering of the internet into these network nations is actually the first step. What it's not, and the reason this, the whole, you know, the definition is all these clauses, to give you some examples of failure modes, right? If you go to YouTube and you look at like how to start a new country or whatever, you know what all the things start with? Like they're kind of joke videos, but they're kind of funny. You know what they all start with? Get some land. And they're like, but all the land is spoken for, blah, blah, blah, blah. So it just immediately, like the first.”
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
“Short answer is that it says that the nation is the network that forms online, that is defined by the moral premises they share, and you literally have like a survey, which is the good, bad survey. And sometimes explicit is better than implicit. For example, you have the founder of this community actually has something which is like, I believe, capitalism is good, bad. Law enforcement is good, bad. Entrepreneurship is good, bad. Human improvement is good, bad. Two genders are good bad, and so on and so forth. You have a set of preferences, right? And some of them are going to be not the extremely hot button issues, but they're going to be things like carbs, good, bad. And so on and so forth. Okay. And I'll come to that actually. I know it sounds funny, but one of the things about this is once you define a community on the basis of what they think is good and bad,”
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
“Ideology becomes biology if your political party is so important to you that you are not going to marry outside it, then in like one generation it becomes at a minimum like Protestant Catholic or Sunni Shiite or something like that, Hudu Tutsi, whatever. It becomes something that's actually tribal as opposed to ideological. The ideology changes the biology. So these are things where they're extremely deep questions where you just didn't even have to think of them as variables because you're born into a world where they've been fixed as constants.”
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 blue nations underneath it. And you can see this there's graphs like, for example, there's a CGR article from 2017 that I link where you can actually see on social media that the red and the blue are literally like different clusters. And it pops out to you. You know, they just literally only link to each other. And one way of looking at this that's really unambiguous is if you look at marriage patterns, people typically will say that they will marry across their race but you know what”
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 police, right? Do you have a society with police? People kind of just thought of that as a constant, and then you have a significant double digit percentage of the population, less today. But that was actually saying defund the police, right? Abolish the police. And you have an NYT op-ed that says, yes, we really mean defund the police. That's a big variable. That's a huge, enormous change. That is what I call in the book that I call that a moral flipping or moral inversion where something that was good becomes bad or bad becomes good. And when you have something like that, you start to actually create different nations because you have the fundamental premises of what are good and bad in a population change. And the US is not really a nation state. Arguably it never was, but it's not really a nation state at a minimum. It's a binational republic which has the rest.”
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
“They're mad that there's more than one filter bubble, but basically, this is great decentralization, great fragmentation. So, all these constants are becoming variables on the economic side, and tech is pushing that. And then on the political side, woke is pushing that. And lots of things that people just sort of took for granted, for example,”
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
“I'll just use this phrasing, all right? But you have the woke and the tech who are both sort of indifferent ways disaligned with each other, but also aligned with each other in terms of turning all socio-political constants into variables and all economic things into variables. Let me give you the tech side because it's easier to talk about. For example, is a meeting? Is it in person or is it virtual? Now we have to actually choose, right? Oh, when you're reading that book, are you reading that book physically? Are you reading the digital copy? Simply the digital version of everything starts introducing combinatorial complexity, right? Oh, you're talking to somebody, was it on the phone, or is it one of these like 10 different apps? Are you watching the news? Well, it's no longer a CBS, ABC, NBC, but it's like whatever number of different things. Okay. Now, there's a good to that. There's alternatives, there's choice, there's all this type of stuff. Obviously, people have said there's a bad. Oh my God, you know, people are living in their own filter bubbles.”
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, let's do both. Okay, well, constant two genders variable and genders. Okay, that's a great example of a constant that became a variable where there was something that was simply an assumption in the 2000s that very much turned into a variable. And literally all kinds of backends and databases had to get rewritten turning something that was assumed as a constant into a variable. Another example is the US dollar before Bitcoin no one really thought that that was a variable And now it is it's a huge variable. It's something that a significant fraction thinks of every day as something that they can swap in or swap out to at some percentage and it's no longer you know it's no longer the thing that you must reform it is the thing that you can exit from and once you kind of start seeing this that constants are becoming variables you start seeing it across life and very roughly speaking you have”
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 people just don't think about it. You're turning a constant into a variable. And that is, when we talked about it earlier about volatility increasing, the biggest way that you can increase volatility is you turn something that you were at total consensus on and 100% of people agreed on into something that only 80 or 70 or 60 or 50% of people agree on. And when you do that, when you take that constant and you turn it into a variable, all kinds of assumptions change. If you're a programmer, for example, the difference between operating and assuming that it's just the United States or just in English versus coding your program to work in every country and every language is an enormous change. It can be done, but it's like it's a significant difference. Concretely, why do I say constants are becoming variables? Well, there are PC examples I can point out, and there's unPC examples.”
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