YouSaid · the spoken record

Balaji Srinivasan

lines on the record: 605
first: 2022-10-20
most recent: 2022-10-20
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

“Younger self. You know, my friend Novel is a lot of what he puts out is the very practical brass tacks next steps. And I tend towards the macro. Of course, we both do sort of, you know, both kind of thing, right? But let's talk brass tacks next steps because I actually am practical, or at least practical enough. To get things done, I think.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the 1980s, sorry, eyeballs in the 1990s, to daily active users in the 2000s, to holders in the 2010s. So you go from just like, oh, I'm just a lookie loo to unlogging it every day to I'm holding a significant percentage of my net worth. And then this decade is when the online community becomes primary. You're a netizen, the digital passport is your main identity. And so this is not, see the problem with Facebook or Twitter is it's a bunch of different communities that don't share the same values fighting with each other. This brings us back to the network state where you have one community with shared values, shared currency, and it's full stack. It's a social network and it's a cryptocurrency and it's a co-living community and it's a messaging app and it's this and it's a that. And it's like Estonia with a million people you can actually build a lot of that full stack. That starts to get to what I call a network state.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“AI and social media, that's AR and social media. But really, one last thing I'll say, which is the non-technological part, is I think we'll go from Very broad networks, which are hundreds of millions or billions of people like Twitter and Facebook, which have many small communities in them, to much smaller networks that have a million or 10 million people, but are much deeper in terms of their affiliation, right? And this is the long-term trend in tech as you're going from eyeballs.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“AR glasses are an incredibly predictable invention that you can start thinking about the future of social is in part in person. And it also means people might go outside more. Why? Because you can't see a monitor in the sun, but you could hit AR and maybe you have a, you know, full screen thing and you just kind of move your fingers or something and you can tap. You have to figure out the gesture. You don't want to have gorilla arms. Maybe you do have a keyboard outside or just even like. You could even have a desk like this. If you had, if you can touch type, you could imagine something where you look down and you can see a keyboard with your AR glasses and it registers it and then you can type like this, right? And probably you could have some AI that could figure out what you meant rather than what you were doing, right? Okay.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This means basically a lot of these things which are like individual pieces get synthesized and you eventually have a digital, just like you have a digital currency or digital currencies unify concepts like obviously gold, stocks, bonds, derivatives, every kind of financial instrument, plus Chek Echi's tokens, karma, everything that's fungible and transferable. The digital passport unifies your Google style login, your private keys, your API keys, your NFTs, your ENS name, your domain name, all those kinds of things, and your keycard for your door and so on, right? So the AR glasses are what probably, I don't know, it'll be Facebook's version three or version four. Apple is also working on them. Google's also working on them. You might just get a bunch of those models at the same time. It's like predicting the iPhone, just like, you know, Dorsey knew that mobile was going to be big. And that's why he had 140 characters for Twitter, because it was like an SMS code limitation and Twitter was started before the iPhone.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. And then here is another thing which shows you another piece of it. And this is using ENS to unlock a door. So this is an NFT used for something different. So the first one is using the NFT effectively to see something. And the second is using the NFT to do something. So based on your on chain communication, you can unlock a door. That's the door to a room. Soon it could be a door to a building. It could be the gates to a community. It could be your digital login.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So this is a really important, just visual concept. That right there shows with ARKit, you can see a globe floating outside. Secret societies are returning. This is what NFTs will become. The NFT locally on your crypto phone, if you hold it, you can see the symbol. And if you don't, you can't.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so AR glasses. What are AR glasses? So you take Snapchat spectacles, Google Glass, Apple's AR kit. Facebook's Oculus Quest 2, right? Or MetaQuest 2, whatever. Okay. You put those together. And what do you get? You get something that has the form factor of glasses that you'd wear outside, which can, with a tap, record or give you Terminator vision on something, or with another tap go totally dark and become VR glasses. So normal glasses, AR glasses, VR glasses, recording. It's as multifunctional as your phone, but it's hands-free. And you might actually even wear it more than your phone. In fact, you might be blind without your AR glasses because one of the things I've shown in the book early on are like floating sigils. Did I show you that?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, the most predictable innovation in the world, in my view, is the AR glasses. Have you talked about this on the podcast before? AR?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, and I saw this funny thing, which was a riff on Peter Thiel's line, which is AI is centralized and crypto is decentralized. And somebody was saying, actually, it turns out crypto is centralized with the CBDCs and stablecoin and so on. But AI is getting decentralized with stable diffusion. Ha ha, right? Which is funny. And I think there's centralized and decentralized versions of each of these, right? And finally, the third pole that actually teal, he talks about AI and crypto, but the third pole is actually sort of underappreciated because people think it already exists, is social. That just is keeping on going, right? And obviously the next step in social is AR and VR. Why is it so obvious? Because it's meta. You know, it's Facebook. Now, I saw this very silly article. It's like, oh my God, Facebook is so dumb for putting a $10 billion into virtual reality, right? And I'm like.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're biasing AI. All right. So the amount of stuff that can be done with AI now, like it also helps the pseudonymous economy, as I was talking about with the AI Zoom. So you have totally new sites, totally new apps that are based on that. I think it may I mean, it changes, you're going to have new Google Docs, all these kinds of things. You might have, you know, once you can do things with just a few taps, you might have sites that are focused more on producing rather than just consuming because, you know,”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that's very clear with the AI bias arguments, where it just so happens that it's so powerful, Lex, this technology is so powerful in the wrong hands it could be used. So we will charge you $9.99 for every use of it. How's that? How altruistic is that? Is that amazingly altruistic? It's really good, right? So once you kind of see that, as I said, whenever they're positioning in economics, you can go in culture when they're positioning on culture, you can go in economics if they're so woke, why are they rich? If they're so concerned about representation, why is it centralized? Answer, they're not actually concerned about it. They're making money. Right? Okay. So that is, I think, in a few words, blows up a lot of the AI bias type stuff, right? Okay.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the Soviet Union, Denunciation was used as a tool to, for example, undercut Romantic rivals. There's a great article called The Practice of Denunciation in the Soviet Union, which talks about all these examples where the ideological argument was used to kick somebody into the 300-like pit that existed at the center of the Soviet Union. Anybody could be kicked into the pit at any moment. And ta-da, well, Ivan's out, you know, and now, you know, hey, Anna, you know, whatever, right? Okay. That same thing is going to be used by Woke Capitalist is being used by Woca List, where the woke argument is used to justify pushing their competitor out of the app store or down-racking them in search. Well, again, you wouldn't want a bigot to be in search who could compete with us or whatever, right? And conversely, so the wokeness is used to make money. And the money is used to advance the ideology. It's like this kind of back and forth. Sometimes right now you think of those as independent things, but then they fuse.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Centralization is inherently unrepresentative. Fundamentally, like you can mathematically show it, it's not representing the world. The decentralization allows anybody to pick it up and make it their own, right? And centralization is almost always a mask for that private corporate interest, where it's like one of the things about the vocabulism thing, by the way, is the deplatforming of Trump was political. Other things are political. But do you know what deplatforming started with in the late 2000s, early 2010s? All the open social stuff was when de-platforming was being used as a corporate weapon against Meerkat and Zynga and Teespring, right? These were companies that were competing with features of TweetDeck, et cetera. They're competing with features of Twitter or Facebook and the API was cut off. And that was when actually Progressives were for net neutrality and an open internet and open social against the concentration of corporate power and so on. Remember that, right? And so what's going to happen is both those two things, the political and the corporate, are going to come together. Why?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Only decentralized AI is truly representative. You cannot be faux representative. You cannot claim that Google is representing Nigerians and Indians and Brazilians and Japanese like, those folks need to have access themselves. So that's a fundamental ethical argument against centralized AI. It's unethical. And it's like this faux thing where you might have faux diversity in the interface, but you haven't actually truly decentralized it. This is the woe capitalism, right? You justify it with the bogueness and you make the money by centralizing it. But the actual way of doing it is letting it free for the world and letting people build their own versions. If people want to build an Asian Lord of the Rings, they can do that. They want to build an Indian one, they can do that. Whatever they want, right?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can I have 120 seconds to just finish up a few more thoughts on social media? Please. Okay. AI and AR. Okay. Massive impact, obviously, of AI and social media. You're going to have completely new social media companies, gestures, other things. You know, TikTok having some of the AI creation tools in there is just like a V1 of that. There's a whole thread with everything stable diffusion is unlocking. But basically, this is going to melt Hollywood. U.S. media corporations that took a hit in the 2010s were now going to be able to have everyone around the world able to tell their story. And all the stuff about AI ethics and AI bias, the ultimate bias is centralized AI.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Crypto phone becomes insanely important because you have a local set of private keys. Those are the keys to your currency and your passport and your services and your life. So become something you just hold on you with your person at all times, like your normal phone. You might have backups and stuff. But the crypto phone is an insanely important thing. And so that search, that social, that's messaging. Operating systems that's a phone. That's a lot right there.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I kind of described search, social messaging, operating systems, the phone. Solana's doing a cryptophone. Why do you want that? Again, digital property. Apple was talking about running some script to find if people were having CSAM, like child porn or whatever on their phones, right? Even NYT actually reported that Google ran something like this and found a false positive. Some guy had to take a photo of a kid for medical diagnosis. It got falsely flagged as CSAM. He lost access to his account. Total nightmare. Imagine just getting locked out of your Google account, which you're so dependent on, right? As more and more of your digital life goes online, is it really that much ethically different if it's the Chinese state that locks you out or an American corporation? Basically it's operationally very similar. You just have no recourse. You're unpersoned, right?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's operating systems, there's web browsers. A blockchain is the most complicated thing since an operating system or web browsers because it's a kind of operating system. Why? It's got something like Ethereum has an EVM. It's got a programming language. It's got an ecosystem where people monetize on it. They built front-end apps and they build back-end apps. They interoperate between each other. This is the frontier of operating systems research. People haven't thought of it that way, right? It's also the frontier of a lot of things in databases. You will get a crypto LinkedIn where there's zero knowledge proofs of various credentials. Basically every single Web2 company I can probably come up with a Web3 variant of it, right? Like Ethereum is, I mean, and this is high praise for both parties, but Ethereum is like the crypto stripe or the Web3 Stripe. And you will see versions of everything else that are like this.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You suddenly see, oh, the entire social web that Google couldn't index, it could only index a worldwide web and not the social web. Now it's actually the on-chain signed web, because every post is digitally signed, it's a new set of signals. It's way easier to index than either the World Wide Web or the social web because it's open and public. So this is a total disruptive thing to search in the medium term because a new kind of data set to index, right? So that's how it's a threat to social to search. It is a threat to messaging. Why? Because or disrupt eventually because of the ENS name, as I mentioned, is like a universal identifier. You can send encrypted messages between people. That's a better primitive to base it on. WhatsApp is just claiming that they're end-to-end encrypted. But with an ENS name or with a crypto name, you can be provably auditably end-to-end encrypted because you're actually sending it back and forth, right? Because the private key.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have the private keys for your ENS, you have apps like Farcaster. You basically have decentralized social media where there's different variants. Some you just log in with your crypto username. Others, the entire social network and all the likes and posts are on chain, like DSO. But there's several different versions. Search. Once you realize block explorers are an important stealth threat to search. They're very high traffic sites like blockchain.com and either scan that Google has just totally slept on. They don't have a block explorer. You don't have to do anything in terms of trading or anything like that. Google does not have a block explorer. Why? They don't think of it as search, but it is search. It's absolutely search. It's a very important kind of search engine. And once you have crypto social, you now show that you're not just indexing in a block explorer like on-chain transactions, but on-chain communications.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are using the blockchain, right? They can agree on a system of law that is completely international and that code so each party can diligence it without speaking Portuguese and Bengali, right? So that's why I am a long-term bull on crypto. I just described the finance case. Let me go through the others, right? Social.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What crypto gives you, obviously it's every financial thing in the world. You can do stocks, bonds, et cetera. It's not just like the internet wasn't just a channel. It wasn't like radio and TV and internet. It was internet radio and internet TV and internet this and internet that everything was the internet. All media became the internet. Crypto is not an asset class. It's all asset classes. It's crypto stocks and crypto bonds, et cetera. In a real sense, like private property arguably didn't exist in the same way before crypto. International law didn't exist before crypto. How are you going to do a deal between Brazil and Bangladesh if a Brazilian company wants to acquire a Bangladeshian company, they usually have to set up a US adapter in between because otherwise what are the tax or the other obligations between the two? You set up a US adapter or a Chinese adapter to go between, but now that Brazilian and Bangladesh can go peer to peer.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first, crypto is fundamentally a new way of building back end systems. So if you think about how big a deal it was to go from AT&T's corporate Unix to Linux, it's permissionless, right? When you went from as much as I admire a lot of the stuff that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman have done at OpenAI, I mean, phenomenal in terms of research, they've pushed the envelope forward. I give them a ton of credit, right? Still, it was great to see stable diffusion out there, which was open source AI, right? And so, from a developer, from a power user standpoint, whenever you have the unlocked version, like an unlocked cell phone, it's always going to be better, right?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a continuous theme, right? The V1 was offline. I've got a key, I own it, I've de facto control. V2 is the cloud. Someone else managed it for me. It's hosted. I get collaboration, so on. V3 is the chain where you combine aspects of those, right? You have the global state of the cloud, but you have the local permission and controlling of the private key. So that's why I'm a medium to long-term ultra-bull on crypto. And I've actually, there's a podcast I gave with A Simcoe where I talk through how crypto actually doesn't just go after finance. So it's gold and it's wire transfers and it's crowdfunding and it's all finance with DeFi. But it's actually also search and it's social and it's messaging. It's actually even operating systems and eventually cloud and whatnot. Do you want me to talk about that briefly?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the good part is ta-da. You actually have property rights in the Hernando DeSoto sense. You have something you own, ownership, digital ownership. The cloud is great, but crypto gives you some of the functionality of the cloud while also having some of the functionality of the offline world where you have the keys. So it's a V3.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And now what that also means is once you have property rights and you have decentralized social media, it'll be like the explosion of trade that happened after China went from communist capitalist. Literally billions of people around the world are no longer giving everything to the collective. They own the teeth in their head now, finally. Okay, it's funny, right? So your lexfriedman.eth, you own it. The keys are on your computer. The bad part is, of course, they can get hacked or something like that. Then you can deal with that with social recovery. There's ways of securing keys.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your money and your digital property is by default yours. And there has to be a due process for someone to take that away from you. All work is online. All your money is online. Your presence is online. If that can just be taken away from you with a press of a key that just gives bad governments, bad corporations so much power that that's wrong, right? That's why I'm a medium and long term bull on crypto simply because to check on this thing and that if you think about it in terms of just abstract decentralization is one thing, but you think about it in terms of property rights, it's quite another.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be able to unperson somebody at the touch of a key and take away everything in their digital world when we're living more and more in the digital world, we need to check on that power. And the check on that power is crypto and its property rights and its decentralization, right? And when I say decentralization, I mean...”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're still in kind of the communist era of social media almost, where whatever you earn on social media, like Google takes its cut, Twitter takes 100%, you're nothing for all your tweets or anything like that. Not only do you earn nothing, you might get a little rev share on TikTok or YouTube. You can do okay, right? But not only do you earn either nothing or a little bit, you have no digital property rights, even more fundamentally. You are at the just the whim of a giant corporation can hit a button and everything you work for over years gone. Even if that is, quote, the current state of events, the state of affairs rather, that is not the right balance of power.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whereas for all those countries that don't want to either be dominated by the US media corporations or social media that can just censor Trump, nor do they want to be dominated by China, this is an attractive alternative, a platform they can make their own, right? So that's where I think, you know, I wrote an article on this in foreign policy on here's two articles that talk about this a little bit. It's called Great Protocol Politics. And then here's another one on the sort of domestic thing, Bitcoin is civilization for barrier-wise, okay? I want to just come up the stack a little bit and just return to that original point which I diverged on, which was why I gave the whole example of how we got into China because I talked about how China had gone from communist to capitalist and letting people have just a share of what they owned. With social media.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right, right? Obviously, the wokes have control of lots of institutions. They've got the U.S. establishment, they've got the tech companies, they've got the media companies, and so on. But crypto is basically everybody else. And crucially, crypto has inroads in China and America where it's hard to demonize it as completely foreign because there's many, many, many huge proponents of the universalist values of crypto in America and China because it is true global rule of law and free speech and so on. It is genuinely universalist in a way where America can no longer be the number one rule of the rules-based order is America is always number one. And China doesn't even pretend to maintain a rules-based order, right? Yes.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Way of putting it, right? Yeah, but it's also true. And so you can say it's unipolar, you could say it's bipolar, you could say it's just multipolar. And everybody is kind of there, you know, India, Israel, all these groups are out there. But I actually think it's going to be tripolar. And the reason it's tripolar is these three pools are the groups that have enough media and money and scale and whatnot to really kind of be self-consistent civilizations. Obviously, China is like the vertically integrated, like Apple or whatever, just like one country.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Them plus enough Americans plus enough Chinese can set up another poll that is not for Cold War or military confrontation, but for peace and trade and freedom and so on and so forth, right? That's the center as opposed to the left of the woke American US establishment or the right of the ultra-nationalist CCP. That's what I think about. What I would say here is the reason I think these are kind of the three poles. You can argue against this, right? You can say it's unipolar world. America's totally dominant. That's one argument. You can say it's a bipolar world. It's just the US versus China. Everybody else will have to be forced to align with one or the other. JSHankar, you know, actually explicitly rejected this. He's like, look, there's a billion people in India. It's coming up on, it will eventually be like the number three economy. It's on the rise. He's got the history and culture. He thinks he's entitled to have India's entitled to have its own side, right? In such a thing.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Israel is similar where it's maintaining diplomatic relations with China, it's more friendly towards China than the US's. India and Israel, I think, are two sovereign states that have a lot of globally mobile tech talent that obviously have ties to the West with the large diaspora that are hard to demonize or in the sense of Willing to argue on the internet. In English, right? It's very important.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quadrants in the political compass I talked about. You take the liberal Chinese, you take the Israelis and the Indians. Why? Because both of them are have a lot of tech talent. They're the number one and number two demographics for tech founders. And they want to, while they are generally sympathetic to the West, and they're more tied to the West, they also are more cautious about national interest rather than just starting fights, you know, where that's how they would think about it, right? They just, you know, India thinks Brazil is a poor country, Israel thinks of itself as a small country, and so therefore it needs to not just get in every fight just for the sake of it. And so need to maintain a cautious distance with China, but not do what Pelosi is doing and try and start like a big thing. Okay.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, but you can exit if you're there, you're kind of knuckling under or whatever, but you can exit, right? And so I mentioned those three poles. CCP is obviously a billion people, 1.4 aligned under the digital yuan and so on, right? NYT is the entire, you know, it's the tech companies, it's the US dollar, it is. And then crypto capital is everybody else. But I actually think that over time that third world is Web3 this time and that's the third pole and that's India and it's Israel and it's lots of American conservatives and left libertarians and libertarians and it's also lots of Chinese liberals. All the folks who are trying to get out of China because it's come so nationalist and crazy and difficult for capitalism. And so if you take basically non-establishment Americans on both left and right the bottom two”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anyway, yes Yeah, so basically just like, you know, they didn't need a turnaround, but they did endure to the present day. They didn't die from Google App. I mean, for the massive attacks on them, they didn't die. They are less powerful, but they make more money, right? And I think that might be something that, I mean, our best case scenario is establishment or CCP has more power over fewer people.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fine. I mean, they actually now post Cetthia, they do make some good stuff, right? Microsoft Teams is good, right? Yeah, there's a lot of good.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. I think it's kind of like Microsoft where Windows is still around, right? Microsoft is still around, still a multi-hundred billion dollar company.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, when China, Russia, and the US are all, and Europe is, you know, like there's folks who are just insane about degrowth and they're against, they're pushing for burning coal and wood, right? So a lot of prices are going up in a really foundational and fundamental way. And with that said, also, the dollar is in some way strengthening against certain other things because a lot of other countries are dying harder, right? And you've got riots in Sri Lanka and riots in Panama and riots in all these places, right? So it's very complicated because you've got multiple different trends going in the same way. Bitcoin maximists would just say infinity over 21 million. And so therefore you print all the dollars, there's only 21 million Bitcoin. So Bitcoin goes to infinity, but it can be something where lots of other currencies die and the dollar is actually exported via stablecoins. Okay. But I do think.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of the choke pointing on energy is pushing a prices across the board for a lot of things. China's not doing us any favors with the COVID lockdowns. Putin's not doing the world any favors with this giant war. There's a lot of bad things happening in the physical world.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think it's possible, and the reason I think it's possible is I think a lot of things might go to a million dollars because inflation isn't inflation.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. And some folks switch sides, right? Because you have folks like Jack Dorsey and a lot of the tech founders in basically the lower left corner who were blue but are now going to become orange or are orange. And you have folks in the upper right corner who are going to at the end of the day pick the dollar and the American.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's why, like, you know, as I wrote the book and after I showed, I was like, you know, I'm already seeing this shift happening from war on terror to wokeism to American statism. And here, just take a look at this visual.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what are you going to get? I think you're going to get this rotation where a fair number of the folks on the sort of authoritarian right are kind of pulled back into the fold a bit. These are the cops and the military and whatnot, some of them, because as this decade progresses, you're going to see the signaling on American statism as opposed to wokeism, okay, which is 30 degrees back towards the center, right? Conversely, On the other side, you're going to have the left libertarians and right libertarians who are signaling crypto and decentralization and so on. And so the next one isn't red versus blue. It's orange versus green. It's the dollar versus Bitcoin. And so you have the authoritarians, the top of the political compass versus the quote libertarians, right? And here is the visual of that.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, obviously, those are inconsistent. If you're in India or you're in Nigeria and you just heard that America is calling itself the same guys, by the way, saying it's so institutionally racist, systemically racist. And are you saying, well, we're the leader of the free world and the number one? Obviously, there's an inconsistency between the domestic propaganda and the foreign propaganda, right? There's a contrast between abolish the police and put $2 billion for the capital police. You can reconcile this and you can say the U.S. establishment is pro-federal and anti-local and state. So abolish the local police who tend to be Republican or rightist, but fund the FBI, fund the capital police who tend to be, just like in the Soviet Union, is the national things like the KGB, right? They're for the state, but there were all these local nationalist, ethnic insurgencies in Estonia and other places, right? So you can reconcile them, but nevertheless on its face, those are contrasts.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not talking BLM and abolish the police, they're saying fund the capital police, right? They've gone from the narrative of 2020, which was meant to win a domestic contest, where they said America's a systemically racist country, tear down George Washington, we're so evil, to the rhetoric of 2022, which is we're the global champion of democracy in every non-white country is supposed to trust us.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In many ways, NYT is sort of, and more generally, the US establishment is sort of kind of coming, you may not believe this, they're kind of coming back to the center a little bit. And the same with that Lenin after the revolution implemented the new economic policy, which you may be aware of, right? Which was just like X percent more capitalism. He kind of boot on the neck, take control, but then ease up for a bit and the so-called net men during the 20s were able to eke out something. There was like, you know, oh, okay, fine, he's going to be easier on us. Then it intensified again because basically by loosening up, they were able to consolidate control. They weren't putting as much pressure on, right? Then it went extremely intense again, right? Similar to Mao's like 100 flowers thing, let 100 flowers bloom. And everybody came out and then he found out all the people who were against him and he executed a bunch of them, right? So what's happening now is NYT is, and more generally just establishment is somewhat tacking back to the center where, you know,”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a weird way, even though some parts of it, just like there's wars in the Middle East that still keep raging, there's certainly active fronts of volcism. In a sense, the next shift is already on. You know why It's a pivot for mochism to statism.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source