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

“That's different, right? So it's something about it, it kind of gets back to the competitive environment and so on. There's no dearth of folks who are writing Critical coverage of these three men, right? And so if I felt that that was insufficient, then you might need more of it, right? Just like, for example, nowadays with Stalin, there are a lot of articles and books”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tankies are those who are, you know, they may call themselves tankies. Let's say they're anti imperialist left and mega right. Okay, for different reasons against the US establishment and for Putin or G or something like that as an agent against the U.S. establishment, right? So leaving those aside, the point is that most of your audience is sort of on guard, vaccinated in a sense, right, versus Z and Putin and Trump, right? Like they have, they know the counter-arguments and so on and so forth. In which case. I wouldn't think interviewing them would be like that big a deal relatively because there's so much other coverage and so on out there it's it's I think it's probably okay however for something like what John Reed was doing and so on when he was the sole source of information about the Russian Revolution”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, all this stuff is complicated, but today, so the specific issue of the folks you were talking about, like Pyudin, Z, Trump, right? For those folks, they are very clearly outgroup for both the US left and right, which is, it'll say the Western left and right, which are your audience. There's folks who are tankies and there are folks who are MAGA who are sympathetic.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Faux Universalism was basically a mask for Russian nationalism or at least Soviet nationalism, where in particular Russians were pushed into many territories and Russian speakers were privileged in the Eastern Europe and the Baltics. Of course, Russians themselves were oppressed at home as sultan rights. They were both victim and victimizer of the regime. churches were crushed and so on as compensation they were agents of empire it's a tragedy all around i'm not you know i think Russians have been hard done in many ways. They've had a very hard, hard century. They've also done hard by others. It's complicated.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the nationalist is very obvious in the sense of they're for the Aryans. They're not even for the Slavs or whatever, right? Like, you know, basically, had Hitler constructed a different ideology than he might have gotten more support in Eastern Europe or whatever, right? But he also called the Slavs inferior, not just, you know, basically everybody was inferior to Darians, okay, except maybe the English or whatever. But that was it, right? Oh, and the Japanese are honorary Aryans or something. So the nationalist declares the supremacy of their own race or culture or what have you and doesn't understand people's other interest. But he also pumps up his own guys. Same with, you know, in some ways China today, same with Japan back in the day, whereas the communist has a message that sounds more appealing. It's a universalist message ostensibly, but it's actually a faux universalism because actually particularism. Like during the Soviet Union, communism, this”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or Edgar Snow and Mao, or David Haliburstam and Ho Chi Minh again of the New York Times. You start to see a pattern here where the guys who are being platformed and given a voice are these guys who end up being like far left lunatics, right? And I think part of the issue here is, you know, the thing about how communists don't understand self-interest. Nationalists don't understand other interest. And so nationalists are more obvious. Isn't that good? I thought it was good.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“37. There's another one where I think the date is wrong, but it's essentially these titles are like we're Hitler dreams and plans. He lives simply. And there's another one, Hare Hitler at Home in the Clouds, okay? The thing about this is absolutely there are folks who are hey geographers of the far right, but whether you're talking Lenin and John Reed or Stalin and Walter Duranti of the New York Times or Castro and Herbert Matthews again of the New York Times.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's, oh yeah, this is auto detacious. This is actually a guy that Ashley Rinsberg writes up in The Great Lady Winged”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so my point is. These are five examples that are on the far left that should be balanced also against the times running profiles of Hitler on the far right. We know that the Times actually also ran a whole thing which was Hitler's mountain retreat or something like that. Do you know about that story?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just to recap, John Reed brought Lennon's message to the world. Melon's dead. Durante helped Stalin starve out the Ukrainians. Millen's dead. Edgar Snow was Mao's biographer. And Herbert Matthews was like Castro's. This guy, David Halberstam in Vietnam, who was effectively Ho Chi Minh's. He basically went and took leaks from a communist spy. I'll give you the exact name. FOM, I'm going to mispronounce this, but it's perfect spy, the incredible double life of PHAM FOM Zwan On, Time magazine reporter and Vietnamese communist agent. That guy was the source of many fabricated stories that David Halberstam printed in the New York Times that led to the undermining of the South Vietnamese regime. And, you know, for example, stories of Buddhists being killed and so on, Ashley Rinsberg in the Great Lady Wink writes this whole thing up at length so you can go and read it.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the French Revolution had already happened. So people kind of knew that this sort of psychopathic killing in the name of equality could produce bad results. But it's more than that, right? So as John Reed, it's Herbert Matthews. It's Edgar Snow. So these are all people who should be extremely famous, right? So Edgar Snow is Mao's journalist. So he wrote, there's actually an article in this house.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Made these guys out to be the good guys when they were actually genocidal psychopaths. He got their point of view out of the world, and it was a totally misleading point of view.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where basically NYT's article was crucial positive press that got Castro's point of view out to the world and helped lead to the communist revolution that actually impoverished Cuba, led to gay people being discriminated against there, led to people fleeing and drowning trying to escape, right? That's an example of where platforming somebody led to a very bad outcome. In fact, many of the communist dictators in the 20th century had like their own personal journalist, right? For example, there's a guy John Reed. He's an American. He's buried, you know, if I get this right, I think he's buried at the Kremlin Wall, okay? Why is an American buried there? Because he wrote a book called Ten Days That Shook the World that whitewashed the entire Soviet Revolution and the Russian Revolution in 1970. October Revolution.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, but now let's talk about that. All right. So basically, I think a more interesting example than Hitler in this context is Herbert Matthews. So, Fidel Castro, before he became the communist dictator of Cuba, was on the run. He was like Osama bin Laden at the time. He was like a terrorist that the Cuban regime had seemingly defeated. And what Herbert Matthews did is he got an intro to him. He went to the place where he was hiding out. He gave an interview and he printed this hagiography in the New York Times with this photo of Castro looking all mighty and so on. And he's like, Castro is still alive and still fighting. And there's this book on this called The Man Who Created Fidel.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and you know, like people say, oh, how many people are calling Israelis? You know, like these things, right? And so the problem with argumentum ad lurum is it just, I mean, people will say Obama's a Nazi. Everyone will say everybody's a Nazi, right?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Therefore, this must be done. So, that is all kinds of regulations, all kinds of things are kind of justified on that basis, right? There's a version of that, which is punch and outsi. I decide who is a Nazi, you're a Nazi.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Course, that's the ultimate edge case, right? In the sense of that saying something must be done, this is something, therefore, this must be done, right? Heard that one before No, but I love it. So, this is just”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Digitally, right? Like just boom, gone. Okay. And they're like, well, if they can do that in public to the US president, who's ostensibly the most powerful man in the world, what is the Mexican president stand against that? Nothing, right? Like these U.S. media corporations use tech companies are so insanely powerful. Everybody's on Twitter or what have you other than China leaving them aside. They've got their own root system. If somebody tried to deplatform Xi Xin off of Sine Away Bo, they'd probably just fall through a trapdoor. Their whole family, right? But for the rest of the world, it's on that is hosting their business, their politics on these US tech companies. They're like, regardless of whether it was justified on this guy, that means they will do it to anybody. Now, the seal is broken, just like the bailouts as exceptional as they were in a first year, everybody was shocked by them. Then they became a policy instrument. And now these bailouts happening. Every single bill is printing another.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Corporate power, okay? And so we gave the forecast for Trump de Platforming Protecting Democracy. The Trump supporter case against, which is on the secret history of the shadow campaign, the safe 2020 election, basically that article, the left libertarian or libertarian case against. And then to me, what is, you know, like I am more sympathetic to... The libertarian/slash left libertarian against. And then also, maybe the fourth group, which is the non American case, which is to say, you know Amlo, he was the head of state of Mexico, I think, at that time. Amlo, Macron, other folks, everybody who's watching this around the world basically saw, let's say, US establishment or democrat aligned folks just decapitate the head of state.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Mission accomplished was obviously, you know, the thing is Russia lives next door to Ukraine. And so, I mean, just like Iraq lives next door to Iran and Afghanistan is next door to Pakistan and China. And so if the US eventually gets tired of it and leaves, those guys are next door, right? And so, you know, who knows what's going to happen here. One of the problems is like, you know, the whole Afghanistan thing or the Iraq thing is the lesson for people was the uncertainty. They're like, is the U.S. going to fight? Don't know. Will the US win if it fights? Don't know. Therefore, roll the dice. That uncertainty is itself tempting to folks, you know, like Putin or whatever, right? So point is coming all the way back up, we were talking about how history, futures are past and FDR, like the business plot failed, but like the tech companies were able to de-platform Trump, right? And the left libertarian would say, do we want them?”
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 not like the point of a military. The point is, you know, there's a million ways to smash Humpty Dumpty into pieces and unleash the blood drenched tides, right? And have people all shooting each other and killing each other. It's really hard to maintain stability. That's what competence is, is deterrence and stability. There's not like a success in any way. It's like an absolute tragedy for everybody involved”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can you pick battles or whatever? It's like you don't have to fight Russia and China at the same time. It's like kind of insane to do that. Okay. Plus even with Ukraine, some people are like, oh, this was like a victory for the US military policy or something. There's a guy who I'm not trying to beat him up or anything. He's like, this is in March. Threat on US security assistance to Ukraine. It's working. Ukraine might be one of the biggest successes of US security assistance. And the reason is, you know, U.S. didn't focus on some high-end shiny objects, but on core military tasks that focus should remain. And it's like, how is this a success? The West gave massive arms to Ukraine only after the invasion, but not enough before to deter. And now Ukraine is like this Syria-like battleground with, you know, a million refugees or whatever the number is, right? The country is blown to smithereens. Thousands of people.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make sure nuclear exchange didn't happen the whole mutually sure destruction thing and communicating that out and like the balance of terror. There were smart guys on both sides who thought through this and there were near misses, right? The Soviet colonel who didn't order a nuclear strike because he thought it was just like an error in the instruments. Okay, what's the point? Point is, for example, Pelosi going to Taiwan that didn't strengthen Taiwan that didn't like that if you're going to go and provoke China. I thought Scholar Stage as a Twitter account had a good point, which is you should, if you're actually going to do it, then you strengthen Taiwan with like huge battalions of arms, material, and you make them a porcupine and so on and so forth. Instead, her kind of going and landing there and mooning China and then flying back in the middle of a hot war with Russia, that's absolutely, you know, in the middle of an economic crisis or it just”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Escalates to here in the room, of course, right? And the thing is, people have this belief that because something hasn't happened, it won't happen or can't happen. But there were a lot of measures people took during the Cold War to”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doing these things like Pelosi going to Taiwan and trying to cause something. Like, look, again, this is one of these things which is complicated because obviously there's more than one perspective on this, right? Again, you've got the US establishment, the US conservative, the Taiwanese perspective, the Chinese perspective, all the bystanders over there. There's more than one perspective on this. If you're, you know, China's one of China's many neighbors, you look at China with apprehension. Like Vietnam, for example, has sort of fallen into or not fallen into is partnering with India because they're mutually apprehensive of China. China is not making great friends with its neighbors. It's kind of, you know, it's demonizing Japan. It's so ultranationalist nowadays. And so if you're a Taiwanese, you're like, yeah, I do not want to be under the Chinese surveillance state. I completely understand it. Some people are pro-reunification. Others aren't, but there's more trend in some ways for independence.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Anyway, so my main thing about this is basically trying to fight your factory in the physical world is probably not going to work. People are, I think, overconfident on this stuff, right? With that said, I think we want to at all, you know, the future is not yet determined. At all odds, we want to avoid a hot war between like, I mean, a hot war between the US and China would be.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, actually, they copied a lot of stuff from each other. There's this movie called The Soviet story. It basically shows a lot of Nazi and Soviet propaganda things next to each other. And you can see guys almost in like the same pose. It's almost like, you know how AI will do like style transfer? You can almost see because the socialist realism style of like the muscular brawny worker is very similar to like the style of the Aryan Superman, you know, like pointing at the vermin or whatever.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Russians armed by Americans fought the Germans. It's a Soviet Union. They're not actually able to make high quality stuff. There obviously are individual people in Soviet Russia who were innovative, right? I'm not taking that away. There's a tradition of amazing. I just want to be like, there's individual Russians who obviously I admire Mendeleyev and Klamogrov and so on. There's amazing Russian scientists engineering. So I'm not saying that.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In terms of building ships, here's a quote China's merchant shipping industry is the world's largest building more than 23 million gross tons of shipping in 2020. U.S. yards built a mere 70,000 tons the same year, though they typically average somewhere in the 200,000. That is 100 to 300 X ratio, just in shipbuilding. Pretty much everything else you can find in the physical world is like that. We're not talking like 2x. We're talking they can put together a subway station in nine hours with prefab and the US takes three years. When you have a thousand X difference in the physical world, the reason the US was one against, you know, Nazi Germany in a serious fight is they had this giant manufacturing plant that was overseas and they just outproduced, right? And they supplied the Soviets also with Lindleys. And the Soviets talked about how they would not have won the war without the Americans. People are like, oh, the Russians, you know, fought the Germans.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Under this model, things are going to be potentially crazy. Plus, people are like, oh, I think this is, you know, again, I have nothing personal. There's this guy Peter Zahan. He writes these books, right? I probably agree with about 20 or 30%, but I disagree with a lot of the rest. And a bunch of it is basically about how China is really weak and America is really strong and the rest of the world is screwed. And, you know, I think there's absolutely problems in China. And the current management is actually messing a lot of things up. We could talk about that. But I do think that the US is like fighting its factory. One thing, you know, Zion will talk about is how, oh, America has this blue water navy. All the aircraft carriers and China has nothing. It's got bookcasts, et cetera. Well, China ships things all around the world, right? It probably has one of the most active fleets out there in terms of its commercial shipping.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very complicated, and there's hundreds of millions of people, probably half in China, that disagrees with the current ultra nationalist kind of thing, right? And so I kind of hate it when innocent Chinese people abroad or whatever are just like attacked on this basis or what have you. Plus, the other thing is that many Chinese people will say, well, look, relative to where we were when Deng took over in 1978, we built up the entire country. We're not starving to death anymore. And the West wants to recolonize us. And so I understand where that's coming from. This way, you want to be able to argue different points of view. With that said, There's one huge difference. And the US was 150 million, and the Soviet Union was 150 million, and the UK was like 50 million. So they were outnumbered like five to one”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“CCP China, in a sense why they are non English speaking, manufacturing powerhouse with a massive military buildout under one leader that is a genuine peer competitor to the US on many dimensions. And in fact, exceeding on some dimensions of technology and science. The problem is it's a boy who cried wolf. People say this a zillion times, right? And that is like, you know, I'm not saying this, by the way, crucially. I think China is...”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is only one model, and any mental model or something like that. That's why I say as a sci-fi scenario, it's like a scenario one could contemplate, right? Where the new version has, I mean, the Chinese communists do not think of themselves as Aryans, right? But they are ultranationalist. And the Hitler comparisons, people talk about Hitler endlessly, you know, like Saddam is a new Hitler. Everybody's a new Hitler, et cetera. There is a comparison to quote Nazi Germany, it is”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A possibility that the US loses to the ethnic nationalists abroad, except this time they're Chinese communists, non-white communists, as opposed to Aryan Nazis, which seem like the total opposite. And there's a possibility that there is a financial secession at home where Bitcoin maximalist states that are advocating for freedom, the opposite of slavery. See what”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The story that you hear is the victories in 1945 and 1865 legitimate the current establishment. That is, being the Nazis, being the Confederates, right? So you beat the ethnic nationalists abroad, and they beat the quote secessionists at home, right? And the ethnic nationalists were, you know, Aryan Nazis, and the secessionists were slave owners and against freedom and so on and so forth. I'm not disputing that. I'm just saying that that's just the way people think about it. A possibility, and I'm not saying it's 100% at all. But if you're a sci-fi writer,”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Today we're seeing so far unsuccessful calls for welt seizures in the US. Back then, we saw FDR's executive order 6102, which was a successful seizure of gold. I expect we may see something like that, an attempted seizure of digital gold. And I think that'll be one of the things that individual states like Florida or Texas may not enforce that. And I think that's actually the kind of thing where you could see a breakup potential in the future, right? One other thing that kind of rhymes is in many ways, like the modern US establishment.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Northern South India, or like Gujarat and Tamil Nadu are as different as Finland and Spain. But India has moved in the direction of much more unification, like much more centralization or what have you, whereas the US is decentralizing. You go, okay, a few more things. There are flips and I'll finish this off. Today we're seeing the rise of the pseudonymous founder and startup societies back all the way back in the 1770s. We saw pseudonymous founders of startup countries, namely the US, right? The Federalist Papers.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These become ethnic groups. It takes on the character of Hudu and Tutsi or Protestant and Catholic, Sunni and Shiite. It's not about ideology. If you think about all the flips during COVID, right, where people were on one side versus the other side, it's tribal. It's just tribe on tribe. And so it's not universalist that identity of American makes less sense than the identity of Democrat and Republican right now, or perhaps identity of Israel states. Where I think that's a good or bad thing, I think that's unfortunately, you know, whatever it is, era of history, right? On the opposite side of things, India actually was 562 princely states at the time of Indian unification from 1947 to 1947, they got independence from the British, it was 562 princely states. Most people don't know that part. Outside India, you don't know the part. It got unified into a republic only by like 1950. And India is actually a modern, India is like Europe. It's kind of like the European Union in the sense that we didn't have a unified India in the past. It was something a lot of different countries like.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So, I mean, one way of thinking about it is, you know, one nation under God indivisible is no longer true. America is at least two nations, the Democrat and Republican, in the sense of their own cultures, where I can show you graph after graph. You've seen the polarization graphs. I can show you network diagrams where there's this graph of polarization in Congress where there's red and blue. They're separate things. There's this article from 2017 showing how shares on Facebook and Twitter are just separate subgraphs. They're just separate graphs in the social network and they're pulling apart. Those are two nations. They're not under God because people in the US no longer believe in God and they're very much divisible because 96% of Democrats won't marry Republicans in a high percentage other way. What that means is in one generation ideology becomes biology.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Whereas the state is like the administrative layer above them. It's like labor and capital, like labor and management. The American state stood over the Japanese nation in 1946 after the war.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Micronations. Yeah, I actually think of them as a better term as micro states because they're actually not nations. That's why they don't work. But microstates are better, right? Coming back to the difference between the nation and the state, the nation is like. The nation state is a term that people use without expanding it, but nation comes from the same root word as like natality. So it's like common descent, common birth, right? Common origin, like the Japanese nation that's a group of people that have come down from history, right?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reverse, right? So you're having. Make America states again. That's what's, I think, happening, right? I'm not saying, well, I think there's aspects of that that are good. There's aspects that are bad. But just like that's kind of the angle, right?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, because libertarian perspective or the left libertarian perspective would say, Is it really a good idea to have total corporate power against the quote elected government, even if you may disagree? Do you want to open the door to total corporate oligarchy? And it's like the opposite. That's why I mentioned it's like the opposite of business plots. And they pulled on that thread, okay? The macro explanation that I have for this future is our path thesis. And there's more. It also gives some predictions, right? If you go backwards in time, the US federalizes into many individual states. Like before the Civil War, people said the United States are and after they said the United States is, before FDR, the Tenth Amendment reserved rights to the states. Afterwards, it was just federal regulation of everything.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes. That's right. MPESA is a classic example where they did this in East Africa, but I think there's more possibility there.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nigeria is actually first tech unicorn, and I'm investing there. And I think it's one of these things where China's risen. India is like about 10 years behind China, but I think this is the Indian decade in many ways. We can come back to that point. But there's absolutely sparks of light in Africa. I mean, it's a huge continent. It feels like the”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was again he made this observation. He was saying that America's energetic and China laconic at the time because everybody was in opium dens and so on and so forth. More examples, the one I just mentioned where the Chinese and Russians are again lining up against the West, except this time the Chinese are the senior partner in the relationship rather than the junior partner. Today, I think in the Second Cold War, there will also be a third world, but this time I think that third world might come in first because it's not the non-aligned movement, it's the aligned movement around Web3 protocols.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Digital goals, right? Today we have the inflation and cultural conflict of Weimar like America. Back then, we had the inflation and cultural conflict of Weimar Germany. Today we're in Weimar America. We have right and left fighting in the streets. Same, unfortunately, in Weimar Germany. Peter Turchin has written about, you know, today we have what Turchin considers antebellum, like polarization, like pre-marization back then, if you go further back in time, we had what we now know to be antebellum polarization, right? Okay, we have Airbnb back then we had flophouses. Today we have Uber, back then we had gypsy cabs. Today we see the transition from neutral to yellow journalism back then we saw the transition from yellow to put neutral journalism right and today figures like Mike Moritz he wrote about China's energetic and America's laconic but back then Bertrand Russell actually wrote this whole long book actually you know the mathematician Bertrand Russell right wrote this whole long book which I didn't even realize he wrote about these kind of topics about the problem of China and one of his observations”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Today, this is an amazing one. We have a populist movement of digital gold advocates. Back then, because Bitcoin Maximalists and so on, where gold has become populist because it's against the printing money and so on and so forth. Back then, we had a populist movement against gold in the form of William Jennings Bryan in The Cross of Gold Speech. Gold was considered a tool of big business. Now gold is the tool against big business and big government, right?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, basically, there's some environments where the equations are like time symmetrical. And this is one model sort of just an interesting visual model for what's happening in the world as we re decentralize after the centralized century, right? So basically, I mentioned the Internet Frontier of reopens back in the Western Frontier closed. Today we experienced COVID-19. Back then, we experienced the Spanish flu. Tech billionaires and we had the capitalist industry, right? Today, founders like Alan and Dorsey are starting to win against establishment journalists. Back then, Ida Tarbell, demagogued, and defeated Rockefeller. I think netnet founders win this time versus the journals. Back then, the Journos won over the founders. Say we have cryptocurrencies. Back then we had private banking.”
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 you can mix something and then like this thing that you don't think of as reversible, you can unmix it, which is insane, right? That it works. Okay, the physics of that situation, it just works, right?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source