The System is Collapsing | Balaji Srinivasan

Western civilization's over. Uh, America's over. Western Europe, as we know, is over. But the internet is just beginning.

If tax revenue is a few trillion a year, but compounding debt is at 175 trillion a year, obviously, it's unsustainable. It's going to go to zero. But is taking the L then admitting this and and allowing the separation to happen.

Taking the L is admitting that that you you can't throw good money after bad. You can't also throw your spiritual energy behind a lost cause. Instead, when you write it off and write it to zero, the west is going to zero. America is going to zero as we know it, right? Then you say, "What can we rebuild?" Much more important than allocation is location. Choose your location. Just like the pole came to the UK, maybe the Brit goes to Poland or to Dubai, which a lot have done. One of the best things you can do is liquidate, immigrate, accelerate, and reduce your cost structure. AI isn't taking your job. AI is turning you into the CL.

Balaji, good to see you. How are you?

Good. Good to see you too, Peter.

These are very interesting times. Uh I'm trying to understand at once this collapse in trust which has been accelerated with everything that we're seeing around Epstein. uh the rise of AI which feels like it's accelerating right now and the potential bankruptcy or insolvency of the state. I messaged you the other day and you said there's a a potential for Silicon Valley to go to zero. How what's your mental model for the world over the next 10 years?

Well, it's hard to model out 10 years because a lot of things happen. Um I mean you know the earth will go around the sun and the moons will go around the earth. Uh I know that sounds trivial but that you can plan things like space you know like space launches and you know like rocket launches and satellites and stuff on that basis. Um but many aspects of human behavior I think are going to change. Uh just on the points you just mentioned why do I say it's possible that Silicon Valley goes to zero. So there's an important graph. I will actually uh I will share it with you. Uh Zero Hedge tweeted it and so on. It shows the uh cash flow of free cash flow of the Magnificent 7. And because they're spending so much on these AI data centers like these which are some of the most profitable businesses in existence, you see a huge hit visible in their in their cash flow because they feel that AI is so existential and it's so expensive and billions and billions and billions of dollars are going into it's this gigantic gigantic spend. And the thing about that is obviously AI is really important. Um, but the weird thing is that this multi-t trillion like it's clearly an invention on the scale of a multi-t trillion dollar innovation because it disrupted Google search, right? Disrupted search, it disrupted summarization, disrupts email, disrupts CRM, it disrupts image making, video, movies. It really is a big deal, right? It's a genuinely genuinely big deal. It disrupts, you know, robot guidance, blah blah blah blah, all kinds, you know, endless industries. And yet it may actually end up being part of what disrupts Silicon Valley itself. And the reason is there's several things that are aiming for Silicon Valley the place. There's the anti-tech backlash with like, you know, many Democrats. They've been disrupted by the internet. Like we talked about in the last podcast. The internet disrupted blue America. It took away their control over media and money. Um so speech, you know, went to social media, media went to AI, and money went to crypto, right? So they fought really hard and in 2024 2025 Democrats lost control of speech, media and money, right? They with social media, with AI, video with cryptocurrency, their strongholds have been destroyed. They lost not just control but also control of their jobs or livelihoods and so on and so forth. And they're really mad, really mad, incandescently mad. I can't express how angry they are in words at the tech guys that they feel did this to them, who also, by the way, took control of their beloved government, right? which gives them all kinds of jobs and so on and so forth, right? And so if you look at Blue Sky, you look at threads, these are people who, you know what it is? They're blue MAGA.

You know why?

Yeah, I do know why.

Yeah. It's like you see them on the street and these protests and it's actually all older Democrats now. the proxies have gone away, you know, the the proxy of BLM and and all these other things that, you know, the various proxy war movements that they had, domestic proxy war, all gone away. And it's all just essentially older white boomers, right? Blue blue American Democrats, and they're so mad, so mad, unbelievably bad. Their NOS's, their universities, budgets are getting cut. uh their their media jobs are facing competition from AI basically the you know with with a few exceptions like you know NT still has its subscriber numbers up but they've lost a lot of cultural power really I'd say irreversibly so these guys essentially blame the internet for all that on their side the you know, the red Americans blame China and the red Americans haven't fully accepted defeat yet but they have also been defeated just like blue America lost their control over speech media and money red America has lost the trade war proxy were in the cold war to China. Why? They lost a trade war because China won on rare earths among many other things. Like China's, you can't fight your factory, right? China, the US military is made in China. You go and look at the Tomahawk, the JDAM, and the parts are made in Chinese factories. The proxy war, you know, basically Russia is likely to win the proxy war in Ukraine. It certainly hasn't lost. And so China really, who's the winner of the Ukraine war? China and then everybody who stayed out of it to right who's illusions of the Ukraine war obviously Ukraine and America and Europe but actually also Russia because Russia became a Chinese colony right like Russia's price uh because Russia essentially went in with you know like this insane kind of um thing they thought they were just going to win in a few days like they did with CAMA 2014 and they went in and without Chinese support they'd be toast but the Chinese charge a pretty penny for that support and so power of Siberia goes to China and China also sells drones to the Ukrainians which just to make the Russians happy. So China basically plays both sides and China comes out the winner, right? So China won the Ukraine war or like it's it's maybe there's something that's going to change things. You know, history is uncertain, but at least it doesn't look like NATO is going to pull out a win and the US is talking about winding down support in Europe. And finally, China won the cold war because the national security strategy that came out in November 2025 is um is something where it talks like he said talked about everlasting peace with China and the US is pulling out of uh basically Asia and they're doing so in such a way they're like um you know we want Japan, we want other countries to pay for their defense and actually do actions. We can't shoulder everything and so forth. So it comes across in a seemingly hard-nosed way. But think about how different that is from John F. Kendes pay any price and bear any burden to defeat communism. Right? Instead, the national security strategy literally says American elites overestimated America's ability, not simply willingness, but ability, and they use that word ability, to fund a giant welfare state and all these wars and so on and so forth, right? So that means to summarize, Democrats lost to the internet, Republicans lost to China, and so the future is China versus the internet.

So if you take the Ray Dalia thesis for example um which says the US empire is going to zero and uh China is a successor. You take the sovereign individual thesis which says the west is going to zero because of debt and so on and the internet is the successor and you superimpose those two and you say they're both right. Then you get the future China versus the internet AI versus ZK, right? Total surveillance versus total encryption. you know the total state versus the sovereign individual and so on and so forth. Now a new faction factor in this that I've sort of realized more and I kind of knew about it but it's interesting to see everything happening and fast forward is it's possible that Silicon Valley also goes to zero in this process and I mean Silicon Valley is a physical place. So historically you know if you talk about the internet you would think of that as being the same as Silicon Valley but actually the internet is gradually gradually decentralized. There's now 420 cities that have at least one unicorn, right? So there's 419 of them that are not San Francisco or 418 that are not San Francisco and San Jose, right? So that means you don't need to build a billion dollar company in the Bay Area or even in America anymore. You can just do it from the internet. Cryptocurrency is decentralized. Most crypto holders are global. Certainly most social media users are not in America. Um, you know you have apps like Tik Tok that are globally competitive that are not in America. AI is also decentralized where most of the downloads of open source models are Chinese models and the big thing I think that's the last step right physical AI has already decentralized do you see the Chinese harvest festival the 226 right yeah their robots work right why do they work their speed of iteration is faster why is their speed of iteration faster among other things they have every single producer of screws and actuators and whatever within a you know one mile radius right they have the same density of physical talent and manufacturing plants than America's digital stuff. Can America do that? No. Why can't it or not easily? Why? Well, first of all, like a supply chain doesn't just mean you can't like order it off Amazon. A supply chain means you've had thousands of companies go through years, sometimes decades of natural selection. the strongest survive and then the other ones go bust and then those strongest are like really good at making hair dryers or you know rotors or something like that and then they just supply them to the entire world at China scale and they have enormous in like every you know for example just like uh the US has Detroit for cars and it has Hollywood for movies and so and so forth China has like small cities that specialize in haird dryers, washing machines right every possible variant of that you will find within in a few miles radius. And so if you you don't normally give that much thought to household objects, but you know, the heating coil in a haird dryer, the fan, like does it look like a you know, is it a home hairdryer? Is it a commercial one? Is blah blah blah. Like there's all these different variations of it just like there are for a camera, right? And so all that stuff, all the expertise and all the stuff is in China. And nonobviously, you know, someone made the point the other day that, you know, Japan makes, you know, toilets, but guess what? the ceramic from that the same same guys who do that that's actually also used in like semiconductors and and so on and so forth the manufacturing of semiconductors so it's not obvious sometimes something that seems really trivial can become very important we know this in the digital context why video games led to GPUs led to AI social media led to training data led to AI right so it might seem oh we've got some hair dryers or whatever what does that matter you know well maybe hairdryers lead to rotors and rotors help you lead to drones and drones let you lead to, you know, large drones, military drones and so on and so forth. I don't know. I'm just giving an example. I'm making that particular one up, but you get the concept, right? The mechanical engineering, the civil, not the civil engineering, but the mechanical engineering, the chemical engineering, all the stuff to to make these physical objects work is at high density in China. So now they've put it together in arguably the most complicated kind of device ever made, a humanoid robot, right? Why is it more complicated? Because, you know, a car like obviously a car is hard to make. but it's nowhere near the level of flexibility and configuration and so on. If you do the math for uh like a like a hand, right, or a gripper or something like that. So, you know, more than 15 years ago, I built a clinical genomics lab with a six so-called six degree of freedom robot arm, right? So, that's like X, Y, and Z. And also theta, Fi, and S like the angle of the arm, right? So, it moves to location and it orients itself and whatnot. And it has other things like is the is the hand open and closed and so on. This kind of arm can actually do a lot. It's almost like tweezers on a um I don't know how to put it. It's like a Yeah, it kind of looks like almost like allig an alligator like this, right? And it goes and it grabs something and it moves it there and whatnot, right? I can show a video. Those kinds of arms can do a lot. Uh but actually it's quite non-obvious to program their exact path like how it goes from here and it moves to here. This is something which is called inverse kinematics. Like you've got a hand that's here and you want to move it to here, right? We know. Imagine there's a bunch of obstacles over here. We just do that in hardware. Like our brains know how to do that. It's actually a hard thing to program that, right? That's like one of many hard problems in robotics. Now you have to do that when the environment is changing. And you know that's what athletics is to be very athletic is to be able to do that. So anyway, the point is um why does Silicon Valley potentially go to zero? They have uh so crypto is decentralized and gone global. The unicorns and how to make software companies decentralized gone global. The talent has been stopped from coming to America by the bans on H-1Bs and research visas and so on. And I understand why Americans are doing that. But it just does mean that um like all these high IQ people that used to come to America for free are no longer coming there anymore. they're going to other place, going to Dubai, going to Singapore, staying in their own countries, billing them up. Um or or just billing on the internet. Um you have the wealth taxes. That's a huge one. That's really maybe the most obvious that's driven.

Do you know about this?

Yeah. What a stupid idea.

Well, is it stupid? It is stupid. So there's there's a sense I'll give the V1, the V2, and the V3. So these wealth taxes basically it's like if you have it's a the billionaire tax, right? They actually proposed something like this years ago in 2020 where it was targeting the 30,000 high netw worth people in California. They've reduced the number of people it was targeting to just 200 billionaires to remove the political base to oppose it and to make it sound less sympathetic. Right? 30,000 people could probably organize 200 people. It's harder. And they made it a much higher tax on a much smaller number of people. Okay, that's you know that was a big change from 2020. They got the Democrats got smarter about it. And this billionaire tax basically says if you are a billionaire in the sense of a billion dollars in net worth in some stock at some definition um then you have to fork over and it's supposed to be one time of course it it's never going to be one time a 5% uh tax on your assets as of I believe December 31st 2026 but it goes up 10x if you have 10x voting control so it could be like 50% of your assets now this meant that Zuck Paige Brin Teal and Elon Elon a while ago have all left California bezo has actually left Washington state. Guess what? That's that's the founder of Facebook, the founders of Google, the founder of X, the founder of Amazon, right? And of course, founder of Apple is dead, right, which is Steve Jobs, right? So, who's left? Actually, only Nvidia, right, is still in California. I don't think Jensen Huang can move. He's also liquid due to Nvidia stock. He has he has different circumstances than the others. That means um Facebook, Amazon, Google, Tesla, right? Out of the state, right? Apple CEO is not a founder. Doesn't have as much stock. Maybe he can't move. Um Nvidia, they're they're still there. Um and maybe there's someone I'm forgetting, but basically that's uh that's a lot right there, right? And uh the thing is that means that the most I mean these are people who literally founded Google and Facebook and Tesla and Amazon some of the most resourceful well-resourced people in the world right genuinely can run through brick walls and build multicontinental supply chains and solve unsolved problems in computer science you know and they couldn't solve California okay that's a really important point it's like when Elon you know in May 2025 He replied to someone on X. He said, "Did my best right?" You know, there's a saying, not saying, it's like a poem. Uh, Casey at the bat. Do you know this poem?

Nope.

It's a famous American poem. It's a little depressing, but it's like basically um it's from the 1900s, I mean the 20th century America. And so when baseball was actually a big part of America's pastime and so on. And it talks about how there's this guy mighty Casey at the bat and um you know the whole team was down and they all relied on Casey to pull him out and then Casey struck out right and even Casey couldn't pull it out at the end right and I think you know like after the 2024 election I'd been down to.1% or something like that probability that America could pull it out but Elon could land you know he could land a rocket on a drone ship he could literally like the chopsticks cash they did before the election right genuinely Elon is N of one and broke just to talk about that for a second and I'll come back up there's many rules that we have as venture capitalists investors CEOs founders and so on some of those rules include focus right focus on just one thing number two actually have as boring a personal life as you can right Why? If you have all kinds of things going on in your personal life, um then you that's also something that takes away from your focus, right? Um number three, hardware is hard and so and so. These kinds of things we have is different rules. And by the way, really, really ridiculously smart and talented people who can just, you know, do quantum mechanics for breakfast and have incredible self-discipline and drive, still fail after following these kinds of rules. Okay?

Like, you know how hard it is. You you built a company yourself. You know how hard it is, right?

It's hard.

It's hard, right? And Elon shatters all of those rules. Elon does whatever. You know, he's such an amazing recruiter and motivator, but he's also highly technical. is in the details that he could do SpaceX and Tesla and Neurolink and Boring Company and XAI and Graedia and and things I'm probably forgetting, right? Oh yeah, by the way, running the entire political campaign tweeting more than you or I do, right? Like it's genuinely insane. He's end of one while having as I put it end children by K women, which is funny. You know, Elon, please don't get mad. Uh, it's funny. I think it's funny. Like that is like again many many men look at how much of a bite like Bezos's divorce or Gates's divorce took out of them, right? Elon is just a machine. I just don't even know how he possibly does it. It's uh like more he's more productive, more creative despite having an incredibly non-trivial personal life. Let me put it like that, right? So anyway, Elon was our absolute best best best guy, right? His tolerance for parallel processing is he is to us he's like, you know, like Jensen Huang is like Elon is the only guy who could do this, right? Larry Page thinks Elon is the best. Elon is the best of the best by the best of the best. No, you know, everybody knows he's just the absolute best. And Elon said, did my best. Okay, he could not solve the US government just like the founder of Google and the founder of Meta and the founder of Amazon couldn't solve the governments of California and Washington. I can actually tell you why. And let me get back to why I don't I this you can argue it's stupid. I think it's actually evil. But let me explain why. Um what first what is the policy we're talking about? What is the wealth tax? As I mentioned, it's 5% on billionaires just mark on their assets, 50% if they've got 10x voting rights. There's more to it. There's this article by the tax foundation that goes on all the other bad details around it, but this would essentially be something where Larry Page or uh Bin or Zuck would it's targeted at them like it's meant to essentially take majority control of their stock like to take away their force liquid 50%. This by the way would tank like if the CEO and founder has to liquidate 50% of a stock that's a lot that tanks a market that brings the price down, right? It's not simply that it's sold and you get cash and there's no effect. It's like a hit of confidence and so it's a hit of control. And so if you look at it simply as a revenue raising measure, that would actually be off base. This was something that was written by Democrats that hated quote oligarchs as a weapon against those oligarchs quote unquote really against the founders.

Okay.

And uh the

So it's revenge.

It's Yeah, it's revenge. That's right. It's revenge. And it's also because remember the internet disrupted blue America.

Yeah.

Right. So the entire thing that the internet did is and by the I predicted this 13 years ago, I could tell the internet was getting too big for its bridges. That with what we were doing with tech, we were disrupting Hollywood, disrupting music, disrupting media, you know, like recepting money. We're going after every single institution of America, especially Blue America, and reinventing it. I would argue mostly for the better, but we can get to that part. Better for the long run. But it didn't matter. You're upturning so many Apple carts at once. And guess what? All the tech guys are what? They're immigrants. either from Asia or India or Iran or Eastern Europe or something like that, Russia or actually immigrants from within the US like from Kansas and you know Ohio all coming to the Bay Area and that meant they had no roots in the Bay Area right even the like the the Americans there Americanborn people there even the white Americans there were often not from the Bay Area they were just there to work they're just there to grind okay and these jobs are very demanding so you essentially have people who have no roots in the area who are just typing on their keys who by the way they're not making their income really from the area either. You are seeing credit card swipes around the world that go into you know the servers and that's what brings the revenue in. It's like you're you know you're getting a credit card swipe in Britain and you know Bangalore and Brazil and that is what is funding your company in PaloAlto or San Francisco. It's not like you're making money from PaloAlto or San Francisco, right? So you're making money remote from the cloud. So your expenses are global or rather your revenue is global but your spending is local, right? And because your revenue is global, the tech guys really didn't build any political muscles. It's not like they had to build those muscles in order to it like it's not like they own um okay some guys do actually now own the Golden State Warriors but it's not like uh they're making money from selling sourdough pretzels or running cable cars or um you know doing all the classical San Francisco California type stuff. It's not like they've got you know a billion dollar company that does surfing you know or uh any of that stuff. The the revenue is not connected to the land. Another way of putting it is there's no silicon in the hills of Silicon Valley, right? So you have okay it's it's completely not something where we're mining it out of the ground. Okay. So as distinct by the way from many other kinds of societies where coal was a thing in Appalachia like there were geographical features that tethered those companies to the land. They had to be there right fracking you needed the shale oil in you know like the Dakotas, right? There's like a geological feature of the land where it was like a one of one deal, non-negotiable. Point being, there's no Silicon hills of Silicon Valley. The revenue comes from the cloud. The the the tech guys are themselves immigrants. They're both internal and external immigrants. They are focused on code. They're working, you know, 16 hours a day. They have no local political connections. I knew that they were going to be defeated politically, obviously, right? like all of this stuff that we're doing now in tech. It's actually amazing how much it's being able to improvise, but it is something which is late breaking kind. I shouldn't say too little too late because I think we're actually going to figure out something in the medium run, but it's not going to look like reforming California. It's going to look like losing California. And why? We don't need California. That's the thing. The California Democrat needs California. Why they need California? And this is a real key sentence. The state is their startup. The state is their startup. What does that mean? This encompasses a lot. Okay. The the California Democrat, the American Democrat, essentially, you know, the hundred billion dollar California train to nowhere.

Yes.

Okay. The point of that was not to actually build a train. It was to employ Democrat unions. Okay. That's if you look at the Twitter feed for the California train, the highspeed rail train, it talked about jobs, jobs, jobs. And it's jobs in the sense of like communism. Why? They, you know, they pay them to do nothing. Okay, it is a once you see it that way, Democrats gain control of the state to route money to interest groups that vote for Democrats to gain control of the state. That is everything. That is the hundred billion dollar California train to nowhere. That is the billion dollars a year homeless industrial complex in San Francisco alone. So the money goes to these NOS's. The NOS's hand out the syringes, more people get addicted to drugs, then there's more vote to solve the homeless problem, which in in turn results in more budget for them, right? They don't intend to do well and it was just a mistake. They intend for their budget to go up. If their budget went down, that they would actually pay attention to, but everything else they've convinced themselves are helping the homeless, blah blah, but it's a fee the pigeon society, right? They're just increasing the number of pigeons and farming it. Okay. Another example, Podesta. This is national, not California, but $370 billion for like climate graft. Okay. And by the way, like it's not like solar isn't real. You know who's done it? China. China actually put the billions of dollars into actually making solar work, actually making nuclear work, actually making electric. I mean, so Elon did EVs and solar as well. So Elon is not Elon is real and China is real. That's actually real clean tech. And I think there is something to it. You who wants pollution, right? Renewable energy is good. It has to be done in in the right way where you have to supplement with something like nuclear or or or something that can uh provide energy even when there isn't sun or wind. But the point being that the $370 billion for uh climate that Podesta had was all just Democrat graft, right? Same for BLM, right? Same for just about every NGO, every cause, every Democrat cause that you can think of. the the part you're not seeing as much is that when they've been their win their vote, there's the appropriations that go to sometimes academia in the form of grants, often NOS's in the form of grants, often new government agencies and who gets the jobs there, career democrats, more regulatory powers mean more jobs for them and so on and so forth, right? The state is their startup. Okay? And what that means is philanthropists quote unquote like Soros actually have their own way of going public, right? Like you know how does a VC go public? They find the the venture capitalist finds an entrepreneur who starts a company and that company goes public and it gains money from the public and then it's a public company. It's publicly traded. the quote philanthropist like Soros finds some NGO, puts in some money, and then that NGO figures out a way when there's some giant BLM, everyone's losing their mind to write a law or write themselves into a block grant or into some flow of funds. So, they start getting a stream of money from the taxpayer either indefinitely or for a long period of time. That is their version of quote going public, going on the public tit. Once you see that, you realize the left-wing philanthropist is not actually giving away their money. They are compounding in another way. They put in 1 million into an NGO and eventually it can get into this stream of funds and now they've got a pocket of 5 million bucks a year or whatever it is to play with. This show is brought to you by my lead sponsor, Iron, the AI cloud for the next big thing. Iron builds and operates next generation data centers and delivers cuttingedge GPU infrastructure, all powered by renewable energy. Now, if you need access to scalable GPU clusters or are simply curious about who is powering the future of AI, check out iron.com to learn more, which is irre.com.

You see what I'm saying?

Yeah, but this is unsustainable.

Of course, it's going to destroy the whole system. Nevertheless, once you realize it's like a cancer that hijacks the resources to perpetuate itself and grow malignantly, it's like the most I mean, the cancer is really motivated to get those resources. the state is their startup, right? The same energy that those tech guys are putting into figuring out every line of code, these uh Democrats are putting into figuring out every line of law and every workaround and they've got all the connections in the government and they all plot on how to This is also by the way you know um Zuck did internet.org, you know like tech guys right we generally believe that increasing internet connectivity is good so it's smartphones it's cheap smartphones for the developing world it's satellite internet it's all this kind of stuff right why do we believe that well we actually do believe in it but it also happens to be good for technology as you go from 10 million to 100 million to a billion to 8 billion people globally on the internet that's more users that like that's just good that grows the network that grows the base for everything we're doing right learn to code we want to do The equivalent for the Democrat is, and someone came up with this great phrase, their net long taxation. That is to say, even if they're taxed at an individual level, a big tax on billionaires gives them more money to work with in their um in their NOS's or what have you, or they think it does. And so therefore, they're willing to take the $5,000 a year hit to their personal taxes or what have you since they're often middle class, whatever, to get the $5 million for their NGO. and then they top themselves up or whatever on the personal or they don't even care, right? Because they've got more money to play with, right? So net long taxation, the state is their startup. They want everything to be taxed until you get to really communism, right? Just like we want 100% of people to be on the internet, they want essentially 100% government control of the economy. Okay? Now, there's different ways of getting there. There's communism, Soviet communism, which is the obvious way. Lenin and his guys come with a gun and to go and seize his 10% of the farms. They go house to house. They kick in the door. They rape the mother. They kill the father. They take the son to a goolog. And then they they take over the farm. That's what happened. That's what communism was. The euphemism is collectivization. Right now with AI video, we can finally make movies on this kind of thing. Okay? Actually make movies of what it was. I should start putting up some prizes for this. By the way, I want to start doing this. Um, but like every kind of famous episode in communist history, you could actually dramatize it, make videos of it, show what actually happened, how horrific it was, right? Which has not been shown. And to be clear, of course, it's good that we have movies that show the horrors of Nazism and the right like it can go overboard. But we need to also balance that by showing what the far left did because it was much more murderous than the far right. It has much better camouflage. The far right, you can see it coming. The far left, like it's a completely different thing. It's actually because it believes itself to be good, it's actually much more evil. Anyway, so point being that the way that the Soviet communists stole 10% or let's say of the farms, they actually would have to go house to house with guys with guns kick in the door and do it right. That's how communists did it. Keynesians do it by hitting a button and printing 10% of the money supply. Silent, right? Evolved camouflage in the same way that a mosquito evolves camouflage. Drains your blood without having to attack you like a cougar, right? A snake has evolved camouflage, right? So the Keynesian is of all camouflage to steal all this money without people seeing it. And so that is a sense in which the American Democrat as a Keynesian has basically stolen enormous amounts of money from the population via inflation and taxation and other things. And and and this is now a huge percentage maybe the majority of Americans are directly or indirectly on the government te right for example 40 million are on SNAP alone. Okay, which is like a kind of welfare program. You had welfare, you had Medicare, you had Medicaid, Social Security, disability, SNAP, you had NOS's, you had universities, the media, Hollywood and and uh uh and the New York Times are arguably upstream rather than downstream of the state, but they're still heavily involved with the state. Like, you know, the Pentagon would work with Hollywood on shoots and uh the New York Times get leaks from the government and so on and print those leaks and make money on that, right? So, but all of that that entire thing they need they need the government they need to get control in order to like that's their profession right the state is their startup so it's win or die for them okay this is what tech guys don't fully understand right we understand see tech guys are basically pretty love and let live they're basically pretty chill you know like you do your thing I do mine but there is one area where they Do you play to win? You know what that is?

Shoot.

Startups.

Yeah.

Startups. You play for world domination. Billion users, right? Bankrupt the competition. You know, like the you know the Drago thing. If he dies, he dies, right? Like you know what I'm talking about?

Yeah. If he dies, he dies. Look, that's like it's like UFC. You know, you get in the ring with someone who's a CEO, founder, ambitious founder of a tech company. They are playing to win, you know, and you know what? They might acquire your company if they win, right? But like they're making a better product at a lower price. They're going to ship it faster, ship it cheaper. This is the same way the Chinese do it, by the way. Everybody whines about Chinese overproduction, right? Chinese overproduction means they're making tons of stuff at low cost that lots of people are buying and it's like it's like complaining about American overproduction during like World War II or something like that. Like that's what having an industrial machine is, right?

Go ahead.

Well, this is all like I get it, but this is all completely unsustainable.

Um, it is.

And so then my question for you is, uh,

how does it end?

Where does it get to steal?

Well, there's two questions. Can America recover? Can it save itself? And when I say America, I'm asking, can the West, because we have the same problems here in the UK and in Europe. If so, how? And if it can't, then how does it end? Do we just become third world countries?

Okay, great question. So, let me give the my view of course just my view. My view is um Western civilization's over. Uh America's over, Western Europe as we know is over, but the internet is just beginning and the internet is the rebirth that will be able to happen within the lifetimes of many of those now living. But it will take years if not decades to fully rebuild on what I call internet first principles. Okay? And the analogy I'd say is I'd say the internet is to western civilization as western civilization is to christryendom or the internet is to America as America was to Britain. Or you could say internet America, Britain, Rome, Greece if you go back far enough in time. Okay, let me just kind of give explain those analogies. So the first Europe used to refer to itself as Christrysendom, right? That delineated not just a geographical thing but an ideological thing. God was at the center of the whole thing, right? And it was something where like they that was Christendom as distinct from Islam or as distinct from you know East Asia like the Orient and so Christianom is how Europeans self-conceptualize themselves. with the enlightenment, with the rise of science, you moved gradually from God to the state as a primary organizing principle, right? Where you had, you know, the French Revolution, you had the American Revolution, all of those are fundamentally secular revolutions, right? We take that for granted. The American Revolution, the French Revolution, the like what Bismar did in Germany, um like the Russian Revolution, those were secular revolutions about law, not religion, right? Right? They were not really fundamentally the the 30 years war was arguably the last big religious war. Protestant versus Catholic and then all of these were wars of different modes of organizing government. Right? So God moved you know away from the center and the state started to move towards the center. N talked about this in the late 1800s where he said God is dead. And what he observed was that basically um educated people didn't believe in God. So what moved into place rather than God punishing you with the lightning bolt, it was the policeman coming after you, the state would punish you and the and and throw you in jail, right? And that was the rise of the total state in the 20th century, democracy and Soviet communism and Nazis and so on. Okay? So western civilization as you move from Christendom to western civilization, it was a geographical shift. So America started to be included. But it was also a ideological shift where you move from Christendom and God to the west which is you say what is western civilization? It's like you know various sorts of liberal enlightenment values like individual free inquiry and individual rights and um you know free speech and and all these kinds of things right and people will have a different list of them but really it's about the rights of the individual as opposed to you know the collective let's say right which distinguishes the the west from you know like like much of Eurasia right okay and uh it was also a technological shift as you go from christrysenum to the west you go from battle axes and swords and medieval Europe and maybe you know wooden ships to guns and you know a much more modern civilizational stack right so it was a geographical shift it was an ideological shift it was a technological shift from christryendom to the west that is similar to the shift from the west to the internet right but there's a continuity of course the west is like owes a debt to Christianity and Christendom, right? Certainly the internet owes a debt to the west and indirectly to Christianity and Christendom like the plus symbol, right? Goes all the way back to the cross in some ways, right? And so, but it's also a shift, right? In the same way, what's the shift? So, the shift is geographical. You go from America and Western Europe to what? Decentralized. So, Bitcoin is it's decentralized, right? So, we go globally. Um, population-wise, you go from just Europeans. America had Europeans majority but many others the internet is really all anglophones I would say right of course there's a Chinese internet a Russian internet but at least as I'm defining it to and you can you can argue this but let's say the English speakaking internet is really what I'm talking about when I talk about the internet okay and meaning you know all the AIs will translate to English even the parts of the Chinese internet that can translate to English are what I'm calling the internet here right the angophone internet let's call it that and that has open source right that has peer-to-peer that has encryption that is decentralization that has anybody can start a company. You can see a continuity between that and western civilization. Right? Just like you can see the egalitarianism of western civilization is a continuity between that and Christendom. Right? So, so there's a geographical shift there's an ideological shift as well. So from God to state to the network as the organizing principle Christ was defined by God and belief in God. Western civilization is what are what can the state do what can it not do like the 10th the ten amendments or you know the the French revolution it's all about you know what the state does and doesn't do right and now we get to the third phase which is the network what the network does and doesn't do right so you shift the central force the most powerful force in the world is it almighty god is it the military and the police the US military and the police or is it encryption right so you shift geographically from Europe to the west to descend you shift ideologically from God to state to the network. Uh you shift demographically from Europeans to Europeans and Americans to basically all let's say English speakers on the English internet. And of course you shift technologically. You go from horses and and guns and wooden ships to um railroads and cars and and so on and so forth and guns, right? Um so says horses and swords and wooden ships. that's a Christian era to um you know assembly lines and and cars and and so on and so so forth and now the information revolution is as big as industrial revolution why it's all drones robots right like manned combat is over like I mean we're still in a transitional era but like as China scales up the Chinese drone armada will obviously clean the clock of any still human military that's just obvious right like they can just crank them out I talked about this in the state book in20 things where robotics was going, right? You know, right? But of course, now we think of like the US Marine as like, you know, brrawy and brave and whatnot. But a good chunk of what the Marine does has been offloaded to the machinery, right? They pull the trigger. It's not a punch, but it's a bullet, right? They hit a button. It's not a punch, but a bomb that rains down, right? Like so much of it is about high-tech and the human is pulling the trigger. But why would you want the human to pull a trigger? You want to be sitting and sipping, you know, a latte or whatever and hit a button and you just do it Starcraft style, right? You do it like like a video game. Every kid has been trained on war video games, right? So decades of video game war has trained people for robot war, right? So western civilization doesn't continue but internet civilization does because it's superior at war right it also takes over it goes from like gold to paper money to digital gold, right? You can have a table like this as you go from christenom to the west to the internet right so now the bad thing about this is like another way of putting it is when I say western civilization is going to zero I don't I don't I actually you know people often take that as oh

My God, why do you hate, you know, America so much? Why do you hate the West so?

Not at all. It's like saying Christendom doesn't exist anymore. That's an observation. That is not like, "Oh, I'm against that," or "There are a lot of great things Christians did." I appreciate lots of, you know, I appreciate cathedrals. I appreciate egalitarianism. I, you know, as someone from a Hindu background, I try to see the best in every culture. That, like, any culture that made it to the modern day often has something going for them.

>> You're just being realistic.

Go ahead.

>> You're just being realistic.

This is the >> realistic. But you're saying there is nothing that can save the West? There's no board case?

>> No.

Yes. Exactly. I don't think there is. And the reason is, well, the thing is, what do people mean by "the West"? It's like saying, "What can save the Soviet Union?"

>> Okay.

What, what can save America?

America doesn't exist. Like, what I mean by that is, like, it's like saying, "What can save Korea?" Korea doesn't exist. There's North Korea and South Korea, you know, and those are different Koreas. So, America doesn't exist. There's blue America and red America and tech America. It's the disunited tribes of North America, not the United States of America. By the way, that's not, that's not that might seem like a fun or fun, whatever. That might seem like a wordplay or what have you, but there's a reason that it's that they gave it the name the United States of America, just like the European Union, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, right? The United Arab Emirates. Um, one of India's names is the Indian Union. It's because building a union state is really, really hard. It's, it's like doing a merger of all the tech companies together under one leader is really difficult to do because everybody's like, "Who should be the leader? Should we be together? I want 50 individual states." So the reason that they put it in the name and they made people to repeat it five billion times, trillions of times, really, to the point that you don't even realize you're repeating "united" is that it was really hard to unit. It's really hard, right? Civil war, all kinds of things. There's constant centrifugal, decentralizing forces. Okay, this is the Chinese proverb: "Long united must divide, long divided must unite." Right? When it's long united, everybody wants to break apart, do their own thing. Then there's a period of chaos and anarchy. Then they want to come act together and they want, "Okay, can someone restore order?" That is the unbundling, rebundling cycle. So I think the question is framed wrong, which is like, "How to save the Soviet Union?" is "How to save America?" is "How to save the West?" But if you ask, "How to rebuild Russia?" right? "How to rebuild startup societies?" "How to rebuild, let's say, red America?" right? Like, you know, "How to rebuild in an internet-first way?" I think that's a better-posed question.

>> Okay. So what's the answer to that question?

So the answer to that question is, I think it starts with the concept of internet-first. Okay. What do I mean by internet-first? So anybody who's looking at this is probably internet-first. Why is that? You know, as a kid in an American school, we would say the Pledge of Allegiance every time in the morning. "I pledge allegiance to the flag, United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one country, indivisible, under God, with liberty and justice for all." See, I can say that by heart, right? That's, remember the thing we're saying with God, state, and network? Like, that was like a prayer that I said every single morning as a kid. It was a prayer to the state, not to God. Okay. Now, what do you do every time when you make? There's a certain point in life, I don't know exactly when it was, when I probably started spending more time each day on the internet than saying the pledge, right? Probably as I exited high school, went to college, and so on and so forth. And, you know, prompting repetition is really important, right? You go from the state at the center of your worldview, the first thing you say every day is the Pledge of Allegiance, right, to, you know, the internet, right? And so it's not like people are saluting the flag first thing in the morning. It's not like they're going and engaging their communities. They're logging onto the internet. Now, this is a very complicated thing because it's both the unbundling and the rebundling. Okay? If you know about how Rome fell, Rome is actually a lot like America. A lot, lot, lot of people make this parallel, but I actually had a long post on this recently. You can bring it up. But Rome started as a group. I mean, this is a massiveation of like thousands of years of history and so on and so forth. Okay. But like, because history isn't just one like clean arc like this, it's got a lot of zigzag like this, you know? Okay. But like, to oversimplify radically, starting as a group, you know, the, like out of, um, influenced by Greece, obviously, radiating out of, you know, the, the area that is Rome and and and Italy, um, what we call Italy, to take over essentially the entire Mediterranean basin. And they built this gigantic empire. And they actually, they were more benevolent than the civilizations before them because they didn't genocide everybody. In fact, they conquered lots of people. They kept them as slaves. And eventually, those slaves got integrated into the empire. Actually, there was demographic change in the Roman capital. Their currency over time got devalued. And then they tried, like, these last-ditch moves at the end, like the Crisis of the Third Century and so on and so forth. And there were like three things that are actually very similar to present-day America. Several things. First is they had denatured their currency and then they introduced the silica and the solidius in this really hardcore attempt to introduce hard money at the end. They didn't introduce hard money. When they introduced hard money, now suddenly all the invisible taxation, the Keynesian type stuff became visible, which resulted in a huge tax burden on merchants since they had to pay in hard currency, which meant that they didn't want to be part of the empire anymore. Right? Another thing was there was a disruptive ideology, far-left ideology that grew up on the edge of empire called Christianity. Because Christianity at the time of the Romans was the original communism. "The first shall be last, and last will be first." "Sooner a camel will go through an eye of a needle than then a rich man make it to heaven." Like all these kinds of things, you know, where, where essentially, like the slave religion, right? Taking the worst and saying that, uh, the worst are the first and, you know, like the he is, you know, the first should be last, last should be first, not the worst. You know what I mean? Um, and this basically delegitimized Rome. And eventually, when Constantine converted to Christianity, that's a little bit like, you could argue, you could say it's like Obama being the first black president, or you could say it's like the first, you know, Trump being the first crypto president. It was something where what the regime was fighting for so long flipped and won, you know, and that destabilized it because now Constantine flipped the direction of persecution. Now people, Rome, Rome was no longer persecuting Christians. It was persecuting the people who had persecuted Christians, right? And all the Roman gods, everything that they had thought was good was now bad or is questionable. Everything they had built Rome, they had a crisis of confidence. They didn't know who they were. And then also from the outside, the Germanic barbarians were gaining strength, right? And so Christianity was a disruption, ideological disruption from the inside. The intangible. The barbarians were disruption from the outside. The whole thing fell down. And Byzantium, which was like the Eastern Roman Empire, continued, right? Okay. So what does that apply to present day? The money printing and then the sudden surge into hard money is like what happened at the end of Rome, right? Where they did lots of money printing, then they surged into hard money, the burden of taxation became apparent, and actually, you know, people didn't want to be part of it. The disruptive force is like Christianity. I would call the internet because the internet, like, I mean, disruption is in a sense like a slave religion. It's like flipping over Apple cards. The guy who has nothing is suddenly a CEO. The guy who is, you know, running Blockbuster or Kodak is suddenly nothing, you know. So flipping over all these Apple cards is disrupting the institutions. Okay. The equivalent of the Germans are like the Chinese. They're like the barbarians outside. Okay. Who are just militarily strong. Um, and maybe the equivalent of Byzantium might be like India or the overseas Anglosphere, which was the thing. The reason that Byzantium continued is it was sort of, it, it fully understood Rome, but and it spoke a lot of, you know, it understood the laws and so on, but it wasn't as dependent on the capital. So it could kind of continue. And it also, it could tolerate. Byzantium was complicated. I mean, you know, Byzantine politics is a reason for it. So all these different subgroups and new religions and ideologies and so on. Byzantium was more tolerant of that than Rome itself. Sort of like India is better equipped. I would say India and China, in different ways, are better equipped for the age of the internet than the West. Should I speak on that for a second?

>> Yeah, please do.

Like, if you look at Western nation-states, they tend to be in the 10 to 100 million person range, you know, like Germany, France, Italy, the UK, Poland, you know, and you got the smaller ones, but they're kind of in that range, right? If you take that and you push it to the extremes, China is the centralized Sino-billion person superstate that is bigger than the EU and US combined, 1.4 billion people under one guy, right? Just this gigantic Voltron meta-organism where there's like one town like with a million people making hairdryers. It's so specialized yet so competent at just that, right? There's like a San Francisco for hairdryers there. All right, so that's like the internet in its total centralization mode. Signing centralization. Then you have India, which is like a Dharmic decentralization. So India historically had all these different subgroups that would manage to live next to each other, and they worked out their own form of tolerance, harmony, pluralism, right? Hinduism. And they speak lots of languages. They have an eye for all the political complexity of South Asia. Also, you know, the really good Indians are highly verbal, like very, you know, one way of thinking about it, when East Asian culture goes global, Japanese anime, Japanese video games, Korean K-pop, Hong Kong cinema, Chinese films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and now Chinese TikTok, the aesthetics of Chinese cities and Chinese dress, you know, and like their style and aesthetics. Their characters don't translate, but their aesthetics are very good. When East Asian culture exports, it's visual, spatial, typically, right? And, um, because Chinese, the Chinese language doesn't translate well into English, nor vice versa, their language doesn't sound charismatic abroad. But in all these regions like, you know, where people speak neither English nor Chinese, their visuals are very compelling, right? So China is like non-verbal, highly visual. And that's like basically where East Asia broadly, when it exports culture, it exports visual, spatial. India, when it exports culture, and India, let's say broadly South Asia, is opposite. It's verbal, right? The Upanishads. It's like, you know, for example, Ramanujan, India's greatest mathematician, was all algebra and analysis, not geometry. Right? The three branches of mathematics. You look at Indian math Olympiad winners, the one area they're weakest in is geometry. They're amazing verbally and they're amazing, you know, on formulas and so on and so forth. So, like one-D characters and so on and so forth. That's where Indians are strong. So in the age of AI, the Chinese do the physical AI, like robots, and Indians are the prompts, you know, the age of the phrase, right? Like, so 140 characters in social media, or the AI prompt, or, you know, the the 14 or 13 or 12 words for a for a crypto passphrase, right? And, of course, there's many other people besides Indians who are like that. I'm just giving broad characteristics, right? And so in the age of the internet, you can go totally centralized, which is China, or totally decentralized, which is the internet, which is India, which is Israel, which is, um, the tech kind of cluster, lots of small startups and and doing things, right? And I think that's the future is a billion-person Chinese superstate and a thousand million-person network states.

>> Okay.

And go ahead.

>> No, I see. I'm following it. I'm following it. So, right. Go ahead.

Okay. So, but going back to the rebuilding.

>> Yes.

Can it be done? And what, and transitionally, what does it look like?

So the first thing is, in my view, the greatest strength is to understand one's own weakness. Okay. Um, and what I mean by that is, uh, let me see if I can give an example that people won't be mad about. Okay, let's say it's a basketball team. All right.

>> Just make them mad.

There's a point.

>> Huh?

Just make them mad.

>> Make them mad.

All right. So, make them mad. Let me start with one which I just get the point across before I make a mad, right? So, like, take, take a basketball team, right? A basketball team, the point guard is, you know, US basketball, like, um, the point guard is tends to be shorter than the center, but the point guard is usually more agile. So if the point guard knows their strengths and their weaknesses, they know that they can dribble, they know they can pass, they know they're set up to play. They don't have to be the one who tries to dunk. The center knows they're the opposite. They're bigger. They're often a foot taller or seven feet tall. Right? So the center's job is to dunk, and and the point guard's job is to pass and to shoot. Right? So this division of labor, understanding one's strengths and weaknesses, right? Everybody isn't the same, but nor is one superior to the other. Right? Those are, I think, the two Western failure modes. Either everybody's complete equal in all respects, like insane egalitarianism of communism or wokeism, or supremacism. "We're the best," you know, Aryans or what have you. Right? If instead, there is the acknowledgment of difference and the appreciation of division of labor, that's a different view. That's yet a third view, right? The thing of balance, whether call it Yin-Yang or Dharma, whatever. Okay. So, and I think that kind of lens on the world is going to rise with the rise of China and the rise of India and the relative decline of the Abrahamic style. Um, why do I, why do I say that? If the greatest strength is to understand one's own weakness, let me give you another example, and then I'll get to the West. You know, Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft.

>> Yes.

Okay. Before Satya Nadella took over Microsoft, Microsoft was in bad shape. Steve Ballmer had been running it for 10 years and was in complete denial about the fact that Microsoft was losing on the server to Linux. It was losing on mobile to iOS and Android. And it was losing in the browser to Chrome and Firefox, right? It was just losing in the next-generation things. And his response was like, you know, to compete with the Zune, like, you know, which is like a terrible iPod, and to to say that Windows, everything has to be Windows and Office, Windows and Office, to just try and defend their monopoly and so on and so forth.

And Satya Nadella, when he took over, did something very important, which is he, uh, he took the L. You know how people say "take the L," right? He took the L on the server and he said, "You know what? Linux is there. It's not going to go away." Microsoft initially called Linux communism and so on in the 2000s, a famous thing on it. Linux is not going to go away. In fact, we're going to run Linux on Microsoft hardware. Couldn't believe it. Okay. Then he said, "Mobile is not going away, and nobody's installing the Microsoft mobile OS. It's just not good enough. So, we're going to allow Word and PowerPoint and, uh, and Excel to run on iOS and Android devices, and we're going to put all Microsoft apps and serve them on someone else's operating system." Again, unheard of. And third, the browser isn't going away. So, we're going to make Office 365 work in the cloud, and we're going to actually charge SaaS. And in fact, we're also going to even acquire GitHub, which is an open-source web app that runs in the browser, right? And which was like, like a complete and total reversal. Could not be more reversal. And because of that, because he took the L, Satya, Microsoft is set up for the W.

>> Right. Because.

Which is cloud, which is AI, which is GitHub. Like, like, look at the, I mean, he's crushed it, right? Over.

>> You know, you can't argue with Satya's track record. And actually, now you can't argue with Sundar's either. Sundar managed to turn around Google with AI. And people had a question around Sundar, but Gemini is really, really, really good. It's really good, right? Net, he was when.

Go ahead.

>> Well, it's really good. Well, I mean, I flipped from, uh, ChatGPT to Google Gemini about 3 months ago. We use it here on this podcast, and it's fundamentally changed what we do. It told us what we're good at, and it, like, it understood us.

Yes. Gemini also because you can paste in PDFs and it analyzes that. It's less, uh, you know, it doesn't have the same cloying style to the same extent as ChatGPT does. You know, its tone is better. To be clear, was a huge breakthrough when it came out, you know, and and took Google operating on full cylinders to to do something better. And who knows what'll happen in the future. But anyway, point being, took the L, took the L, took a huge L, admitted defeat in order to pursue victory. It's called cutting losses, right? And so many of my American friends are stuck in a mindset where they're like, "Well, you're saying we should cut and run. We, we accept defeat. These colors don't run, right? Like, you know, we're, we're always going to fight to the end and blah, blah, blah." And they actually aren't even thinking about, like, their ancestors who, for example, left the English Civil War to come to America, right? Like the Cavaliers and the Virginians, or the Roundheads in Massachusetts. Like, those colors ran. They didn't want part of the way they put it is they didn't want a part of Europe's endless wars. Why did the Germans come after the revolutions of 1848? Why did Italians come? Because the Mezzogiorno didn't have opportunities. Why did the Irish come to America? Because of the Irish Potato Famine, obviously. The Jews in the Holocaust. Why did Persians come after the Iranian Revolution, or Chinese, you know, Koreans, Vietnamese after communism in Southeast Asia, etc., etc., etc. All kinds of groups came to America because their home countries had been destabilized because they didn't have the political resources to fix them within their lifetimes. They cut and ran, right? So, you know, there was some, like, Irish-American guy who I like, and I was like, "Was your great-grandfather a traitor to Ireland? Like, why didn't he sign up for the Irish Republican Army or whatever, you know?" Right. And he had no response because he had genuinely never thought about it.

>> Yeah, but hold on. Are you saying taking the L is for the good Americans to leave and go elsewhere, or is it to know?

>> For example, or at least have as an option?

Yeah, that's an option. But, but what if you love your country and you want to stay? What is taking the L and rebuilding America internally?

There's many different ways, right? But basically, like, so the first thing is to take the L to admit that it's over.jpg. Okay. And like Elon said, "Did my best." As I said, it was at 99.9%. Elon pushed. When Elon said, "Did my best," Elon is our best guy. Okay, maybe if you think you can do better than Elon, fine. Okay, great. Knock yourself out. In my view, that flipped it over into full Elon could not fix the US government. Okay, full Elon land a rocket on a drone ship. Uh, full Elon brain-machine interface, full Elon do, you know, basically everything. He could, he could win the election 49-48. Couldn't, couldn't, couldn't fix the government. Partly maybe he didn't have root control, but honestly, it's just $175 trillion in compounding debt is what the US government's actual debt burden is. It's not 30-something. It's 175. Why? When you cure Medicare?

>> Yeah, exactly. That's right.

The financial report of the US government, like if you saw that thing, I had this thing like "America's $175 Trillion Problem." They admit somewhere on like page 270-something that the actual debt is 175.3 trillion. You know what's funny is there's like 50 headlines on the Kardashians and like zero on this stuff, right? This is not really discussed in the same way, right? Anyway, if tax revenue is a few trillion a year, but compounding debt is at 175 trillion a year, obviously it's unsustainable. It's going to go to zero, right? There's, and the tech guys until recently would tell me, "AI will fix it. AI is going to fix it," because it was a Deus ex machina, right? Remember God, state, network? Like the network is their god. And, you know what? I get it, right? Like, it's true that AI and and robotics could unlock enormous productivity, but that's going to be in China, and it's going to be outside America, largely, or at least outside America as we know it because you can't build in America. You can't build the robots in America. Elon might be able to, but guess what? Left and to some extent right are turning on Elon. So, like, you need huge, you need supply chains working with you, not against you, to do this, right? You, everybody cooperating with you. You don't need Elon walking around with private security. Like the Chinese robots guys don't have to deal with any of that stuff. They have other problems. They don't have to deal with that, right? So also Elon has like one, the, you know, America's like only 300 million people versus 1.4 billion and so on and so forth. All kinds of issues. So you look at it numerically, right? And there's no way the debt gets paid off without a bankruptcy, right? So another way of putting it is work out the math. Really work out the math. And, you know, this is my venture capitalist friends, my CEO friends. Like, if I don't know, 10 years ago, I'd said, "Oh, Bolivia is going to have a sovereign debt crisis or something." They'd say, "Oh, really?" And, you know, we'd just pull out the spreadsheets. We'd look at it dispassionately. Okay? They've got a company in their portfolio. It might be doing well, might be doing not. They just are dispassionate investors. They look at the numbers and they're like, "It's going to happen or it's not, right?" And they don't throw good money after bad. All of that numerical dispassionate precision completely goes out the window for many of them until recently, I think. But many of them, when they talk about the state of America or California, they're like, "We got to win." They've got a romantic attachment to it. And I get that. There's actually a good to that, by the way. Not everything can be pure calculations and numbers and so on. Sometimes you need heart, you need passion, you need drive, you need irrationality. There's a rationality and irrationality. If you can signal that you're going to be committed more than anybody else, then you can win, right? The problem is the state is not their startup. The state is not their startup. They have other options. The best guys at the end of the day can build companies outside California. They can move elsewhere. It's not win or die, right? But it is win or die for the other guys because win or die for the other guys. Um, they're going to win. They're going to win control of California. They're gonna win control of Seattle and Washington State and win control of New York. Win control of Illinois. And basically win control of Canada. And what, uh, what one of the things, by the way, what Trump did where he was posting about how he's going to invade Canada, may be seen as one of the worst foreign policy mistakes of all time. You know why?

>> Tell me.

Because the Canadian conservative Pierre Poilievre is actually up >> in the Canadian polls. He was cruising to a victory on Trump's coattails. Basically, you know the term coattails, like the president, right? Once Trump decided to start and MAGA, start started to start humiliating Canada for no reason, right? With these stupid tweets that would be seen as sort of bullying jokes by MAGA. Yeah, we're so big and strong, and Canada's we're wimpy, weak. But within Canada, the Canadian Conservatives were humiliated by this and undercut. Why? Because of course, the blue Canadians and the blue Americans already hated Trump. But now the red Canadians were forced into opposition because they're proud nationalists too, right? So what happened was Trump basically, rather than having a friendly country on the northern border by just giving some words of support to, uh, Pierre Poilievre, or even just being quiet, instead he got Mark Carney, who's actually very smart, but, uh, he became, became the leader of Canada. And what did Mark Carney do? Mark Carney realized, well, after DC, he needs she. Okay. Newsom has made the same calculation. Mandani's made the same calculation. Probably Keir Starmer has made the same calculation, right? Pritzker's made the same calculation. Walls of Minnesota's made the same calculation. And they've all been fairly public about it. Hassan, who's like a, you know, leftist podcaster, has posted how he's China-maxing, right? Um, essentially Democrats, they were, by the way, in opposition to China for a long time because the Democrats wanted to operate the world's most powerful state and they fought them pretty hard during the Biden era with sanctions and tariffs and not tariffs, but sanctions and, you know, like all kinds of stuff, human rights, blah, blah, blah, blah, all kinds of stuff they went, went after them on. But now they've lost. And because they've lost, they're like, "You know what? The enemy of our enemy is our friend." And Democrats hate Republicans, and the enemy of their enemy is the communists. And so Democrats and communists are linking up. And Canada is the land bridge across the West Coast, the Great Lakes states, and the Northeast. So that's like communist America. And then the southeast of Texas and Florida and Belli area and right, that's like Latin America versus communist America, right? Or capitalist maximalist, you know, technocapitalist America, right? So there's a map I did where just like, you know, Germany got split down the middle between communist and capitalist in the 20th century, America is getting split between the communist side, which is going to be essentially China-backed, and the technocapitalist side. Let's say technocommunist versus technocapitalist, right? Which is the technocapitalist side is weaker, but it's got the assault rifles, it's got the, um, muscles, the sunshine, uh, Bitcoin, it's got, um, ETH stake, you know, "F the government," tribal, ultra-masculinity, and so on and so forth. Men are men, and women are women, right? Like, it's kind of a corrido, you know, like Latin American feel to it, right? And so, but in a functional way, okay, there's Becerra, there's Francis Suarez, there's Rubio, right? There's a new generation of actually competent, you know, there's Malay, right? That this is this is actually a culture which is continuous with, um, where Republicans are today, right? And then similar, but, you know, the thing is that culture was lower status among Republicans, but now it's achieved about equal status. Their peers, right? Similarly, the Chinese communists were lower status relative to Democrats, now their peers are even superiors. Okay? So, like, what I'm saying there, it's really kind of already happened. Why? Democrats and Republicans don't talk to each other. They don't marry each other. They've already digitally seceded. Democrats are in Blue Sky and Threads. Republicans are in X and Truth. They don't talk to each other. They don't marry each other. They don't vote for each other. The only thing they barely do is trade with each other. And then two, they don't even want to do that. They want to, you know, like, you know, all the anti-CE protests, right? You saw this stuff in Minnesota.

>> Yeah, of course.

Democrats actually agree with Republicans on one deep thing. You know what that is? They want control of their borders, and they also want to deport people. They just want to deport Republicans, right? ICE out, right? Means.

>> No Republicans.

No. Go ahead.

>> It's MAGA out.

Exactly. That's right. So, they want to, Democrats basically want the other tribe out, >> right? That's what it boils down to. Reds want blue. Now, the thing is, Republicans are just dummies on this. Very roughly, like the Republican looks at the Democrat like their arranged wife that they want to get back together with, as you put it, "Save Western Civilization, save America, save the marriage," whatever, whatever, right? The Democrat looks at the Republican as their like abusive husband that they want to get away from, right? Like restraining order, go away, blah, blah. And it's only when they remarry Xi that the Republican will finally have their laser eyes glow and realize America is actually over. I'm not saying this, by the way. I'm saying this in a flip kind of way, but I'm saying that, you know, Republicans only perceive things in an explicit kind of way, right? Like, even the term "America First" is a misnomer. Why? It says Elizabeth Warren is an American, and so is Trump, so in the same set. And Becerra is non-American, so he's in a different set. But Becerra and Trump are on the same team, and Elizabeth Warren and AOC are in another team, obviously. Right? Like, to put it in a different context, it would be like saying "Eurasia First." What does Eurasia First mean? Eurasia includes everything from like Amsterdam to Tokyo to like Abu Dhabi, right? Eurasia First is not a useful category. That's such a broad category. Has many different subgroups in it. Like this just giant geographical area. Think of it. It's like saying "North America First," right? If you, if you want, right? "America First" is is basically, it's it's conceptually incoherent because blue Americans are the primary enemy of red Americans. So, you know, another way of putting this is, you know how Democrats would say for years, "It's against our democracy, it's against our democracy," right? That's because Democrats define democracy as rule by Democrats, and Republicans define America as red America. So Democrats are always surprised that that 50% of the votes are from Republicans, and Republicans are always surprised if 50% of Americans are blue Americans.

>> And there's no fixing this.

There's no fixing this. There's no fixing. There's North Korea, South Korea, like Protestant, Catholic, East Germany, West Germany, right? Like, you know, Taiwan, China, Pakistan, India, right? Like people split. Like you can look at, like Turin has graphed these things. Dalio's graphed this stuff. Uh, there's a Fourth Turning which did this sort of like on vibes and has gotten pretty far. There's like 50 different graphs I can show you like this. Just look at social networks, friending relationships, and so on and so forth. Look at migration, right? All kinds of people are refugees fleeing the blue states to red states. That's a lot like India before partition and after partition, you know, like people getting the heck out and getting to. Right. So, but is taking the L then admitting this and and allowing the separation to happen? Taking the L is admitting that that you, you can't throw good money after bad. You can't also throw your spiritual energy behind a lost cause. It is instead when you write it off and write it to zero. The West is going to zero. America is going to zero as we know it. Right? Then you say, "What can we rebuild?" You know what we can do? YouTube was built from nothing into literally billions of people in like 20 years. Right? Look at how rapidly ChatGPT grew. Look at how rapidly like OpenAI just grew, right? Just a contemporary kind of thing. If you start with a mindset of internet-first, I mean, think about your podcast, right? You like, you've got whatever hundreds of thousands of people. What did you build that from? You built that internet-first.

>> Yeah.

Yeah. You built it from zero, right? Because you didn't say, "How can I fix a BBC?"

>> You said, "How can I, you know, use TCP/IP?"

Right. M.

>> And so that's a mindset where all of your energy is constructive and it's pointed a direction where you have the property rights over it. You have the private keys to your DNS and your deployments. You have the passwords. You have control. Digital rights, digital property rights, you have control. I mean, of course, it's true YouTube and others censor and so on. But we've gotten to a reasonable state of affairs on that right now, right? Maybe there'll be a pushback on that and a pushback to the pushback. We'll see what happens. But internet-first, you know, the state is their startup, but the network is ours, right? We will actually push hard on the internet. And, you know, by the way, the reason, you know, once you realize the Democrats, for Democrats, the state was their startup, you realize how remarkable it was that there was a 49-48 victory because that was what it was, by the way. The Trump-Kla victory was 49-48. It felt like a 50-point vibes victory, but it was literally a one-point victory. Like a gust of wind goes the other way. Obviously, a bullet goes the other way. It was very, very, very, very, very close. And I think what that victory did is it shattered the left coalition so that you have instead of tyranny, you have anarchy. Anarchy is better than tyranny because at least you can get to freedom. Right? Only half of North America goes communist. And by the way, when I say that, you have, have you heard the saying "communism with Chinese characteristics"?

>> I have.

Yeah. So, what that means is it's really nationalism, right? Or it's, or it's like, you know, they have the surveillance cameras and so on, but they have the tradition of harmony. They have the red. Actually, a good way of looking at it, you know, those robots that were doing the dance?

>> Yes.

They were doing like a traditional harvest festival with young boys running around as well. It was techno-traditional.

>> Right.

So it wasn't like Terminator with guns and so on and so forth. It was a fusion of the new future with the respected past.

>> Yeah. But when you watched that, you know, it looked nice, but I'm pretty sure everyone like was like me and looked at it and thought, "Yeah, but what happens when you do give them guns?"

No, exactly. That's right. So, the point is within China, that's technocommunism with Chinese characteristics. There's a, like, basically the guy who's underneath the surveillance camera often knows somebody who's over the surveillance camera, right? There's lots of informal channels. I'm not saying it's perfect, but like, it's worked for them much better than Maoism did. It's a, someone called it an alloy of, you know, just like, you know, the, um, the Europeans took Christianity, which was the original communism, and after it destroyed the Roman Empire, they rebuilt the Holy Roman Empire in, you know, it's kind of a fusion of Christianity and, you know, was in northern Europe, so it's in Germany, right? And what we call today Germany, and they called it the Holy Roman Empire, right? And people say it was neither holy nor Roman or the empire, but at least it felt the need to replicate the brand name of the Roman Empire, right? So, um, like communism with Chinese characteristics is like saying nationalist socialism. It's like a fusion of right and left. It's, or like Stalin would put it, "Socialism in One Country," or the Holy Roman Empire. It fuses the left and the right, the left of Christianity and the right. Okay? And of course, there can be bad fusions, good fusions. I'm not saying all of them is good, but China is really much more of a fusion of the two, right, than really a pure communist state within China. Outside of China, we'll have to really see what happens because they will just export their drones, they'll export their cameras, they'll export their surveillance equipment, and it won't have any of the harvest festival type stuff. There won't be any Chinese people underneath the cameras who can appeal to the Chinese people over the cameras. Um, instead, it's just sold on Moss to Carney or Newsom to repress the Republicans or the conservatives.

>> See, or armor.

Yeah. And look, I mean, this is a, you know, you, you're not giving it high odds that this, uh, can be saved or rebuilt or fixed. And what you're really talking about is, uh, there's a potential, but you also, al- also talk about the gray team, right?

>> The excess. So, like, like the way I put it is, um, you know, I think we have to understand more history to understand the good guys don't always win, especially in the short run.

>> Right.

Communists won in Russia, like the Bolshevik revolution happened. Eastern Europe was enslaved, right? Like for generations. Communists won in China. Vietnam felt communism. North Korea felt communism, right? Bad guys do win at times, you know. And, uh, and yes, there's like a spirit that, you know, can, like, overall in the very long run of humanity, yes, we managed to rebuild and and so forth, but not every battle is won. And I think this century, roughly, everybody who had a great 20th century has a bad 21st, and vice versa, because the, the Chinese, the Russians, the Indians, um, they had a ter- the Vietnamese, they had a terrible 20th century that socialism, communism, third world people shooting each other, killing each other, just massive chaos in that side of the world, right? And the first world was Western Europe and America, and they were rich. But wealth led to complacency and then degeneracy, and now they've been declining very rapidly, and the East has been rising, even given its problems, on balance, it's rising.

>> And we're seeing your and we're seeing your Mandamis and your here in the UK, we've got Palansky, this kind of rise of socialism.

Right. And the reason is, people are, look, I can't say how it's going to play out everywhere. The internet means that nationalist and libertarian movements will be able to resist communist movements, but it'll be a constant predator-prey. Like Starlink is this ridiculously important technology because with Starlink, you can beam in freedom and a V, you know, like even if Starmer or whatever is trying to censor the internet, you can beam it in via Starlink, and you can still be on X, right? And so Starlink is a much more important technology than people realize, right? Satellite internet that's hard to block out of outer space, right? Elon is our, we need to keep him alive, right?

Um, he's very attuned to security and so and so, but very, very important. The, my view is the reason I say this is, first, recognizing that the sovereign debt crisis, the political crisis, also the military, the manufacturing L's, all these kinds of things mean this long Keynesian era of borrowing and printing and so on is coming to an end. And there will be a giant correction, which is like gold going vertical, the US military is withdrawing, alliances breaking up, like China's winning, Russia may be winning, um, the internet is disrupting old things, and, uh, and China basically essentially takes over the Democrats, right? And like the Republicans lose control of their nation, you know, that's say, like their borders, which is the most precious thing. The Chinese actually now establish a presence there as Trump called it, a drop-off point for all the Chinese gear and equipment there. If you notice, by the way, what is Carney talking about in Canada? He's like, "We're going to electrify the whole country." Or he's like, you know, if, if, uh, America invades Greenland, we have a response. Why is he suddenly so confident? Because China's going to do it for him. In his statement, he didn't just say Chinese electric vehicles are coming. If you read more closely, he said the EV supply chain. So, Democrats can't build. And more generally, Western leftists can't build, but China can. And so, that's a Chinese bailout of Canada, California, and so on. So getting back to, are they stupid or evil? The effect of these wealth taxes is to a rob or deport the tech guys from California. And then once that's done, yes, the economy will crash, but the Democrat party will be in total control. Just like, you know, Raul Castro, like Fidel Castro is in total control of Cuba, right? Democrats, you know, destroyed democracy in California and other blue states. Why? They built a one-party state where elections are held, but the Democrat always wins, right? That one-party state is how the graph got to such a level. Like the last Republican in California was Schwarzenegger, this many years ago, right?

So, once they built a one-party state, that's when the stealing began. The state is their startup. They started to steal. And so they drive out the tech guys who are their one competition for power there with this wealth tax, where it's win-win already. They managed to drive out Zuck, Page, Thiel, Bren, Elon, Bezos. Those. What a win for them, just by even putting it, not even getting it passed, right? Huge win because they have political power. They're pointing a gun. They're saying, "We're going to take your money." Then what happens?

>> But it was control. It was also at a part there was like a time when things started to flip, like when Mark Andreessen started doing interviews and saying he couldn't go to dinner parties anymore because he was agreeing with the Republicans, and and Zuck started going like training with Muay Thai and changed his out like they'd all started to turn. I don't want to say MAGA, but certainly Republican.

>> They are not leftists.

>> Yeah.

>> Right. However, they are, in my view, um, they're caught. There's not a natural fit in America, but there is on the internet. I'll come back to this point. Right? Basically, the internet is to the right of the left and to the left of the right, to the, which means they're in the center, right? Um, you know, we're the internet is international capitalism. That's what the internet is. If you took every tech company and you said, "You can't sign up foreign users, you can't have foreign talent, you can't open foreign offices, you can't sell to foreign markets," 96% of their, I mean, only 4% of the world is American, right? It's like 20% of the market or something like that. Like, you know, the US is, the US is just much less central to the world than it used to be. If you can't sell into glo, like, you're not going to have billions of users, etc., etc. You can get pretty big in the US. It's true. Amazon got pretty big in the US. Amazon's the most Americentric of them, but like, you know, imagine if AI could only be trained on American training data, right? Like, you wouldn't have all the training data from Reddit. If you didn't have global markets, you would have the scale. That, by the way, is actually the defense of the left. The left's egalitarianism helps form gigantic markets for capitalism, right? Ultra-nationalism that restricts a market to just quote your people gets you this small market of a few million people max, right? And the only, there is one exception to that. You know what that is?

>> Cool.

China.

>> Okay. Yeah.

China is the only state in my view that can actually afford nationalism because it's a civilization, right? MAGA and Europeans can't really afford nationalism because they like the leftists cooperate across borders, and the rightists don't as much, right? So you don't have scale, you don't have a market, and so on and so forth, right? So that's why historically in the 20th century, the capitalist center can also cooperate across borders and they beat the communist left. But the nationalist right couldn't because it couldn't cooperate across borders. This century, though, China is the exception to the rule because it's so big. China is the one country that can actually afford nationalism. Everybody else has to be internationalist because you don't have the scale. That's just like, by the way, that is a rightist argument for leftism, >> right?

>> Yeah.

Because it's an argument on the basis of power, right? Another version of that is that's also the partial argument against, you know, like, I understand without endorsing.

Or not. I understand how, like Andrew Tate and all that, arose. And as you know, for if let's say you're a young man in America and you're told you're like this evil white supremacist, blah, blah, blah, kid in school, and so on and so forth. And here comes Andrew Tate, who's like, you know, telling you can be muscled. And and so there is a good to that in the sense of self-discipline, lifting weights, you know, strengthening yourself, and so on and so forth.

The problem, and Tate himself is actually a very smart guy. He's, you know, he's a son of a chess master. He, he wouldn't be where he is without having some intelligence. And I think he plays a persona. I, I, I think he says a lot of things with a grain of salt, almost like a, you know, WWE wrestler or something like that. Like a lot of people are internet personas in this way. The problem is a lot of people don't get the joke. And the issue is that individually alpha is collectively beta. What that means is if if you have one Andrew Tate, he can probably beat up like one individual Chinese guy. But if you have a thousand people who just watch Andrew Tate stuff and try to act like Andrew Tate, Tate himself is probably capable of some degree of cooperation. But a thousand people who don't get the joke and just watch the show, they get beaten by a thousand Chinese guys who cooperate.

Have you seen like the cooperation game where they all dribble the ball in unison around, you know, like basic? >> Yeah. Google the Chinese cooperation game. Okay. It's got like 50 school children and they bounce a ball like this, right? Like they dribble and they move over and they bounce the next ball and they move like this around in a circle. So it is teamwork. So you just have a giant circle outside. So let's say for example, there's 50 people. There's 51 giant like beach ball kind of things. They go like this and they move over one. They go like this. And the whole point is to anticipate the guy to your left, the guy to your right. Keep the rhythm going, the harmony going. Move over, boom, like this. Right? So the games they play are about harmony and synchronization.

One way of thinking about it is, you know, in the 20th century, technology was centralizing. It was mass media. It was mass production. And America, because it had its tradition of freedom, was a good balance to the centralizing technology of the 20th century. Whereas Russia was a tradition of Tsarism, or China was a tradition of harmony. You know, it went too far. It was like, you know, a centralizing or collectivist culture on top of a centralizing, collectivist technology. So it went all the way bad, right? Whereas America had the balance of mass media, mass production, but also tradition of freedom. Right? Okay.

This century, with the internet being this incredibly decentralizing technology, layering that on top of all the American freedoms and so forth gets you what I call American anarchy, right? But the Chinese, with their tradition of um harmony and so forth, balance that, right? Other cultures, the tradition of leadership or kings or whatever, balance that, right? The way that we balance that, I think, with the West and with network states and sur societies is we keep the democracy, but we call it, we, we allow you to become president of a network state. You actually run an election on-chain, just like we put capitalism on-chain, we put democracy on-chain, and you can vote on-chain. And the same way you send one Bitcoin on-chain, you can send one vote. And every vote counts because you can count all the votes. And you get back basically an NFT that's also the key to your door and to the property. So you can't enter the property without it. I gave a whole talk on this whole topic. But the point being that you can have legitimate and competent leadership. The left focused on legitimacy. The right focused on competency. But you can have both if you go internet first, right? You essentially elect your leaders on-chain with the same technology we used to guard Bitcoin, but we use it for votes.

So this brings me back to that point. Basically, take the L, right? The West, like, you know, is one of the things Americans will say, "Europors," right? You know, have you heard that? But the thing is, actually, Europe is richer than America in one very important thing. You know what that is? >> They have history. >> Well, it's history. But actually, they do have um more functional infrastructure and lower crime because like they just have like, I'm not saying Europe is going in the right direction. It's going in the wrong direction. Western Europe at least. Eastern Europe is much better. Western Europe is going in the wrong direction. Nevertheless, their public sector is much more functional than like blue America's, where you don't have the same shanty towns, homeless. It's bad, don't get me wrong, but it's not as bad, right? You have to a greater extent functional public infrastructure zone. It's getting worse, but it's not as bad as what it is in America. So, that's not seen in the individual income levels. Europeans can tolerate to some extent lower income levels because their commons is better. Americans need high income levels to escape insane levels of crime, dysfunction, and so on and so forth, right? >> Yeah. But that's breaking now in Europe. Like, yeah. We're like, we, I would say we're just on a lag from the US because it's breaking here. People are feeling poorer. We have new political parties. We have nationalism. It, it is like we've hit our limit. >> Absolutely. And Americans are also becoming poorer because of inflation and so on and so forth. Aside from tech, right? So the idea that, you know, basically both Americans and Western Europeans are getting poorer privately and publicly together. Okay. Just the, unfortunately, okay, Eastern Europe, different. This century, I think a lot of people will go and, you know, much more important than allocation is location. Choose your location. Just like the Pole came to the UK, maybe the Brit goes to Poland or to Dubai, which a lot have done.

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So you're, you're basically saying even though you've said there is a chance of recovering the West in the US, uh, it's such an, you know, it's so unlikely that really, if you have the opportunity and the chance to make the decision, you should be changing your location and accept like, of, do I need to take the L? I think here's my argument as to why, and everybody will disagree with this, but I'm, I think I'm one of the very few people who are making the, in the moral intellectual case for leaving. First of all, exit built America, right? Like it's a, people who left who had the bravery to leave. See, the thing is, staying in one place is not actually courage, it's just inaction, right? In a sense, staying is surrendering because, guess what, you're paying tax revenue to the state that hates you, right? And how are you going to court for it? It's surrendering if you don't do anything. But if you become politically active to, well, say you become politically active, you join what feels like a revolutionary party to change something. >> Maybe. But okay, so let's talk about that. Does that actually have to be done from within the country? No. Why? You're posting on the internet. They can read it from within the country, right? So much of what you're doing is internet first, right? Um, and, you know, the exact techniques TBD. But for example, if you develop a startup society that's outside the UK that actually has all the British values that you seek to emulate, right? And, uh, you bring in a bunch of the high IQ people there, and they're underneath those values. You drain the resources out of Britain. You're posting, posting, posting. You can essentially hold a plebiscite on-chain prior to re-entering, right? You just, you start the new thing and you drain, like how Netflix drained the resource away from Blockbuster. It didn't reform Blockbuster. It basically just pulled the customer base away. >> So you're >> You're stronger out. You're stronger on the outside because you're stronger on the outside. >> You're giving less of your resources to the state. Uh, Karma can't throw you in jail for a misdeed. Uh, and you can prove your case. >> Yeah. You're, you're more free in Dubai. >> By building up that network externally. Yeah. >> Yeah. Okay. >> Yeah. You're more free in Dubai than you are in the UK. I, I think in many ways, right? Um, yeah, not every way, but a lot of ways you're more free to walk down the street, right? And so the thing is, every society has a line. And what I think a lot of Westerners don't get is they'll see the explicit lines in the East. In the East, the lines are very explicit, which are basically like, don't criticize the ruling party or or the government by name. Just keep them out of your mouth. View, like, if you have a criticism, first of all, you know, discuss it in private or do it through official channels or something like that. Don't cause a fuss, right? Many Westerners just lose their minds over this, okay? But they're actually are conversing with something else, which is don't criticize the ruling ideology.

So, see, the thing is, in, in the West, right, you can go after the puppet, like Biden or whatever. But until Elon decentralized or like took control of X, you couldn't criticize the ideology that backed Biden. Biden himself was a piñata, like a, almost not even a human being meant to take a million hits. He's basically dead, like while he's president, right? Um, so being able to criticize a ruler is actually not as important as, you know, the level of indirection that the West had evolved was like a decentralized ideology of wokeness that you couldn't criticize, right? Until 2023. By the way, go ahead. >> But also in the East, the line is pretty visible. You know where it is. It's pretty fixed. Whereas here, here it isn't. It's like moving all the time and it's coming towards you and you're not sure if you're stepping over it. >> Correct. That's right. And it's like, you know, uh, the thought crime that Orwell talked about is literally speech crime in the UK. Like you can literally get arrested, you know. And so something like that, I prefer to know what is permissible and what is impermissible and it be obvious and bright line than to have it ever evolving and unsaid and unspoken and so on and so forth, right? That just allows for a greater degree of predictability, right? So, uh, and by the way, that's going to happen in, in the former West anyway. You know why? >> Go on. >> Do you think Carney is ever going to criticize Xi again? >> Of course not. >> No. You think New Gu is? >> No. >> No. He put out the red carpet for and cleared up all the crackheads. >> Exactly. That's right. So Democrats have destroyed democracy. The Labor Party, the B, say Democrats, I mean in the broadest sense. Labor, you know, the the leftists in Canada and so forth. They're not going to criticize Xi. Like all of that was basically when they thought they could still fight, you know, China or whatever, right? The, the same trick that people use on LeBron, right? They're like, "LeBron, criticize, you know, the Uyghurs or whatever, right? Remember that?" Like he was he was talking about BLM, but he wouldn't talk about the Uyghurs. Why? He didn't want to hurt his revenue in China, right? Um, so now you can use that, you easily use that on everybody on the left, and it'll show their true boss. It used to be the ruling ideology, but now it's actually the Communist Party. And what's funny is now, the thing about this is interesting, and this is there's a subtlety to this. There's like the 50 IQ conservative and then the 150 IQ conservative. Okay? You know the 50, 100, right? >> It's the bell curve. The >> Yeah, it's a bell curve meme. The 50 IQ conservative is the communists are behind the Democrats. Then there's like a much smarter version, which says, look, wokeness came out of America and the West, like with the exception of Foucault, who's French, almost all the craziest wokes were American, right? Like all the far-left ideologies came out of American universities, were funded by America. It's not like they came out of Chinese rice paddies during the Cultural Revolution. No seminal texts of wokeness are in Chinese characters. How could the communists be upstream of the Democrats? That's so stupid. The Chinese, if you've read their propaganda, they, they like, they they're not good at arguing in English, right? They're good at many other things. That's not their forte, right? But then the 150 IQ is actually, yes, the communists are behind the Democrats now, not in the, not really in the past, but they will be. And the reason is, um, Democrats are so dysfunctional. They're DI Democrats. It's DI Democrats versus Republicans, right? That's like, >> Okay. >> Okay. So because both sides have become idiocratic, you know, like the IQ is drained out to China and the internet, and like, in a sense of, uh, the Democrats now today, it is true the communists are behind them because the Democrats can't execute anymore. They don't, they used to have guys like Rahm Emanuel, Larry Summers, Andrew Yang, Elon was a Democrat, Trump was a Democrat, right? Like many tech guys were Democrats. They had a whole base of guys who could execute. Now they're so against tech and finance and so on that they've just become like, anybody with any technical, mathematical, quantitative, numerical acumen whatsoever is probably a white supremacist or whatever. So they think, blah, blah, blah. Now the funny thing about this is like, this is another idiot ridiculous aspect of today's, uh, Western politics. It's the woke whites versus the dark right. Okay. So you have Elizabeth Warren and you have Newsom and you have many, many, you know, like the, the Minnesota types who are protesting ICE and so forth, actually are, are whites. And then a lot of the ICE agents are like, black, Hispanic. A lot of the people who are, you know, like some of the people on the quote far right, you know, Tate, Fuentes, you know, Kanye, blah, blah, they tend to be Latino or Mexican or, you know, or, uh, black or what have you. So the woke whites versus the dark right is this really interesting political spectrum. Like people yelling at Marco Rubio for example for, you know, saying, you know, capitalism is good and so on. And it's like a white leftist who is yelling at at Marco Rubio, right? This is something which is almost comical, right? Because the woke white feels guilty for being white. And the, like ICE might be close to 50% non-white. It's certainly like more non-white than many of these Democrat rallies, right? When actually there's a color, you know, inversion or confusion. It's like a bizarre kind of aspect to it, right? Getting out of that frame entirely is a valuable thing, right? And you can only have the luxury of being out of that frame if you've changed your location, right? Like one way of putting it is in the 2000s. Okay, you and I probably both had the experience of, I don't know, going through an airport at some point and seeing some television screen and something is like blowing up in Iraq or Afghanistan, Syria, right? And you'd say, "Sucks for them, right? Like that's terrible. Oh my god." And then what are you going to do? You just kind of go back to, you know, you just go back to your coffee and you've got your work to do or whatever. It's like an airport lounge. See, literally it's televised this explosion or something like that. You know, 33 were killed in a bombing attack in, in, you know, Fallujah or whatever it is, right? And you're like, "Sucks for them." And you just kind of go back to your work, right? Now, being here in Asia, I feel like that when I look at America. Okay. I see the chaos on the X feed and of course I think it's bad. I say, "Sucks for them." And then you kind of go back to peace and quiet out in Southeast Asia, which 70 years ago had its own time obviously of huge problems with communism and shooting and so it's almost like chaos moves around the world and it's coming, it has come to the US and Western Europe. Okay. >> And it's, and, and I guess one of the issues is it's like it's very difficult to accept the reality of it. It's a bit like you're in a shitty relationship and you want out, but you stick around for a couple of years because you think it might get better and eventually you leave. It's a bit similar to that, cuz, you know, I love the UK. I don't want to leave the UK, but I know it's Balaji. I know we're screwed. Like, what am I sticking around for? Well, here's the thing. Part of the tradition of the Anglo, more than almost anybody else other than maybe the American or the internet, is to travel the world. Like you got all the way down to Australia and New Zealand and Hong Kong, like the British Empire. Like, you see, you're, you guys are different than the Germans or the Russians, who are much more land powers, right? The Germans were the last to colonialism, I think they only did like Namibia or something like that, right? The Anglo and the French, due to being maritime powers, especially the English, who were 100% maritime since, you know, the nature of England and the nature of, uh, of the UK, you, you basically in a sense, were started. I, it's funny, this is a backronym or not backronym, this is a, this is a retcon, okay? But you guys, there, there is a similarity between the ocean and the internet, you know, like you go port to port. Okay, like that's like the, the thing on your computer that opens up packets and sends to another thing. You can, you know, that's the thing about being an ocean power. You can send goods directly from this port to Hong Kong without going overland through all these other hostile countries, right? So you almost can teleport goods. The law of the sea, right? The, the ocean is decentralized. Nobody, no state controls it, right? So maritime law and the law of the sea, which is actually that's literally a thing, the law of the sea. It's like what happens if tankers collide each other? The law of the sea is the best precedent for the internet. And the Anglo, the Americans, internetans are actually pretty good at this world, right? Pretty, pretty good. You're actually pretty strong on the internet. Like this was, you know, it's like your grandchild, you know, Anglo gave birth to America, gave birth to the internet. So you'll be pretty strong internet first. I mean, you're good at arguing in English, like, you know, it's made the second most successful, you know, like tech place and so, so all the things people beat up on the UK, it still has a lot of good things like the people, there's a lot of, lot of good there. So, given that you have a tradition of being able to strike out and do things on your own, right? You know, like a cultural tradition is not, um, it's not just one thing, right? Like, uh, you know, that meme that I, that we showed, you know, that, that I thought was very funny, which is how Americans see the Brits, and it's all like, you know, very, very well-dressed, eaten Oxbridge guys, you know, eating a, you know, cup of tea, you know, drinking tea in a, you know, foyer. And how the Europeans see the British was like some drunk chav who's passed out on the street, right? A culture has many strands into it, right? And certainly one strand is the farmer and Little England and so on and so forth. Another strand is London and the Metropole, right? But a third strand is like, you know, the thing with the guy looking over the mountain into the distance and so and so, it's like the famous painting, right? Actually, I don't know if it's actually a British guy, but the third pillar is the explorer, right? The pioneer. That's definitely a British thing, right? So lean into that aspect of the culture. Go internet first. Go abroad. It's a big world. Build new London abroad because we're giving the tools to do that. Okay. Just like obviously Dubai exists, right? Like the East has built all these new cities. It's possible to do that. It's hard. I mean, look, you actually did a lot. You know, you organized, um, this whole soccer club. >> Yeah. Right. >> But that anchors me a bit. >> Go ahead. It kind of anchors me. I think there's a bigger question though with this. Look, I'm an internet anchor. Yeah. But you, you and I are doing this, right? This is the first time I've done a remote show. But in the end, as beautiful as this studio is, as much as we love it, if I'd had done this from my bedroom on a laptop and you done from your bedroom from a laptop, the people who watching it would have come for the content. And yeah, a studio looks great, but the impact on the monetization is is a rounding error. They're like, and so as much as I want a beautiful studio and I want to do this in person and maybe fly to Singapore and hang out with you, I don't have to. This is a >> This is a business I can do anywhere in the world. It's internet native. I have Bitcoin. Okay, but that's me. Somebody watching this might be looking and going, "Well, that isn't me. I'm Steve. I live in, uh, I don't know, I live in Rodale and I'm a plumber and I've got three kids." You know, even worse, I'll give you a worse note. I think Steve's better positioned than say John who's a lawyer who's looking at AI and knows his job's potentially going to go within 12 to 18 months and his wife is an art director in an advertising agency and she's already lost her job and they've got three kids and they're thinking, "Well, what do I do? And how long have I got? What do I do? And how long have I got?" So here's I'd say to that, and I'm not being callous at all when I say this, okay? Like, um, many, many, many Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian, etc. immigrants, like certainly my parents' generation, would say, like Russians, you know, and so after the end of the Soviet Union, they, you've often heard them say something like, "I came to America with a dollar in my pocket." >> Yeah. >> Right. These are people who are, for example, physicists or something at the end of the Soviet Union, or like engineers, like fairly senior people, and they had to tolerate an enormous late career step down. Sometimes they had to become a cab driver or something like that to give their children a better life abroad. I see what you're saying. It's like, take the L on an individual level. You might picture yourself as a middle-class couple with two six-figure salaries, but they're going, if you want to do the best for your kids, you need to realize you're the immigrant who has to travel to Dubai and maybe become the taxi driver. >> That maybe. Right now, the thing is that the sooner you self-disrupt >> the, and obviously that's a very hard thing to say, right? But the only reason I bring it up is that's why why are there so many Chinese people who are running laundromats or Indians who are running hotels or whatever motel, and their kids do really well as physicians or something like that? These are people who had a lot of skills in the old world, and because of communism, because of socialism, they were crushed. And many people stuck there. And a few really resourceful ones managed to get out, and they just bit their tongue and swallowed their pride and grinded away, and then their children could have a better life, right? Like my father literally came from a dirt floor in India, right? Like, you know, it was something where India was at its nadir civilizationally, and, uh, you know, he just grinded his way through. You know, now part of it is, it is in, it's funny to put it this way, but if you start at zero, it's much easier to get to infinity. It's much harder to start high and then accept such a drop and then come back. >> I recognize most people >> There's a long period of cope. >> Yeah. And some people will really like, they'll just get abs, like just so mad at somebody or something that they blame for it, and it might even be partially true. Like, um, basically the Republicans will blame China, and there'll be some truth to that. But it's also true that China executes. China's really competent, really smart, really hardworking. If you've been to China, have you seen the Chinese cities? >> Yeah. Unbelievable. >> Yeah. They, they actually are smart, right? It's not, it's not something where, like the Republican narrative is, everything was given to them, they stole things and so forth. And, you know, the problem is people can't keep two things in one head at the same time. Absolutely. Do the Chinese clone and copy and so on and so forth? Yeah. But they also executed like crazy. And, you know what? If you look at the 1800s, the Americans do that to the Brits. Like American industry was at first copycat and me too and so on and so forth. And then it became respected on its own right. But that actually took a while. You have to actually copy before you can innovate. So the point being that like, similarly, the Democrats will blame the internet in part, and they'll be right. They'll be right that that did disrupt them. But like, you know, you, you have there's a few possible options. People can just be angry for the rest of their lives. And by the way, you can now sort of understand. It's funny to put it this way. When I say understand, I do not mean sympathize with or whatever. I just mean understand the worldview of like someone like Bin Laden, right? Who's like, "Oh, we lost Andalusia. Our civilization has declined. We need to strike the Crusaders who did this." Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? If you just go too far into never taking the L, then you end up like that, right? Just like this resentful kind of person who just, you know, hates everybody and so on and so forth, right? But, but there's a bigger reality to this because I watched the CEO, the AI CEO of Microsoft saying, "Yeah, all these jobs are going to be gone in 12 to 18 months." And, >> I don't know about that. There's friction on that. Let me, let me argue that point in a second, but go ahead. Yeah, >> but, but even so, like, uh, John and Kathy with their three kids and their, uh, $800,000 house, uh, facing some challenges because Kathy can't get another job in advertising at the moment because there's no need for art directors. And he's looking down the barrel of the gun with his law job, but whatever. Like, they're in an okay position, but they could sit and go through this kind of like slow decay where it's like, "Oh, we couldn't really afford the mortgage, or we sell the house, we move to a smaller house, we, or rather than leave, liquidate." >> Liquidate, immigrate. Go ahead. >> And, and they've got more than a dollar in their pocket, they could go to Thailand and be wealthy. >> Exactly. That's my view. Liquidate, immigrate, accelerate. I tell you what, when I tell this to my son, he's going to be like, "Where are we going?" >> Yeah. Right. Like, here's the thing. Liquidate, immigrate, accelerate means before the sovereign debt crisis fully hits, before like gold moons, and also before it's hard to get out physically. >> And confiscation, mass confiscation. >> And confiscation. It's going to be the thing is there, like if you know enough history, you know, the Berlin Wall was only set up in 1961, right? Is I'll get the exact date. Hold on. I believe it was 1971. Let me double confirm that. >> Yeah. 1961. Con check. >> Yeah. So that's like 16 years after the end of the Cold War, right? Why? Because there was a loophole where people from the communist region could get out to the capitalist region from West Berlin. And the Berlin Wall was set up because all these engineers, doctors, skilled people were leaving the communist zone for better opportunities in the West, and it was an embarrassment to the communist regime to set up a Berlin Wall. They called it an anti-fascist barrier, and they point to the guns inward. Okay. So, when a regime is embarrassed enough, the wealth taxes will obviously be followed by exit taxes. In fact, they've tried to pass those as well, right? They, and, and the thing is, the worst regimes in, in world history, the Nazis had a right-flight tax that stopped you from leaving. The Soviets had a diploma tax that stopped their, uh, educators from leaving. The Cubans shoot you for trying to leave. The Germans built the Berlin Wall. North Korea has had people in gulags and they shot them for trying to leave. Basically, communist states are prison states. And Keynesian states, you know, the thing is, if you quote, stay and fight, right, you're staying and surrendering to essentially a future where, pro, if you're in a, in a Western European country or in a blue American state where probably your kids and you will be in debt slavery forever, or for, for certainly your lifetime. Since what, what happened in Latin America? What, like, unless you understand the history of other countries, why are they third world countries? Right? Often they basically got into what's called financial repression, and the combination of inflation, taxation, and also by the passport sucks. So it's hard to get abroad, right? By the American passport is cratering, you know, all of these, uh, trade wars and stuff with other countries. They, you know, and, and visa things, they retaliate by saying, you know, Brazil says, guess what, no more visa-free travel. That's a huge part of BRICS that's cut off, right? So American passport has plummeted out of the top 10. And it's going to keep plummeting like this because sort of chest-thumping nationalism has made them so antagonistic, needlessly so, to Uruguay and Thailand and all these other neutral places, that lots of countries are just going to treat Americans like Americans are treating them, which is to say, it's going to be hard for them to get out. Okay. Now, it hasn't, it's like a crashing asset. Just like, you know, the dollar is declining against gold, the US passport is declining, Western passports are going to decline. We'll see. You know, maybe the US passport declines faster. Okay. This thing kind of stuff happens fast. And, um, but it's got some friction to it. The point is, liquidate, immigrate, accelerate means it took 16 years for the Berlin Wall to get up, and you would be smart to get out before that happened. That's, you know, some some period of time. And, you know, move fast or escape things, right? Like the, the way I put it is, um, the people who are both really helpless and really cynical never make a move. The people who are really helpless don't even know what to do. People who are cynical have convinced themselves nothing can be done, right? But the bold take a calculative risk at the right time. They numerically assess the situation. Liquidate, immigrate, accelerate, right? And immigrate, by the way, if you do take that capital and you do move, there's a lot of places you can do really, really, really well still. >> And they'll treat you nicely. >> And they treat you nicely. Dubai, obviously, you know, that's fine for, for the Brits. Thailand, you know, like, you know, network school. We've got network school. We've got, you know, that's ns.com. There's a bunch, but you can come here if you want. But there's many places, right? El Salvador, you know, and the thing is like, money isn't everything. You know what's more important? >> Safety, health, right? Like a smile from your neighbors. They don't hate you. You're, you know, right? Duh. You know, you just don't want to be the, it's so much better to be part of what I call the ascending world than the descending world. That's the OP. See, it's not developed and developing world. Developed and developing world is a terrible term because it assumes the developed are here and developing are catching up, right? This is a finished product done. It's like small C conservative in a sense. These are catching up. That's not what it is at all. It's the descending world and the ascending world, right? The ascending world is China, India, Vietnam, Eastern Europe, and so forth. The ascending world is like the US and Western Europe, right? And or much of blue America at least. There's pockets in red America that are doing okay, like Miami and Texas and so on and so forth. They have some health to them. And I think if, if you had to be in America, you'd be in Texas or Miami. And, uh, if you had to be in Western Europe, I guess Switzerland, but, you know, Switzerland ain't what it used to be. You know, like if you have your EU passport, I'd get to Eastern Europe. If you're going to go, if you're going to go, you got to go somewhere where the sunshine. >> Can we, can we talk about a bit about AI because we, I've already taken up a lot of your time and I'm conscious of time, but I do, I do have some AI things. I, it's felt over the last three or four weeks, it's almost felt like we've gone through a period of acceleration. All of a sudden, everything seems to be moving really quickly and there's different claims about, uh, there's bull cases for the job market, bare cases for the job market. We already have a difficult economy here. What's your take? What do I think? Well, so AI is AI is a big thing obviously that does many different things. One way of doing it is you can start splitting it down into like AI for code, AI for images, AI for video, AI for subsets of it like comics, right? It's a subset of images, right? AI for robotics and for drones and so on and so forth. So it's like it hits so many different areas at the same time, right? Um, my rough view is China and the internet benefit from AI and there'll be tons of jobs. Like let's say for example, obviously physical AI, the, uh, the humanoid robots, the drones and so on. One of the, one of the things, uh, you know, I have a post called, um, polytheistic AI rather than monotheistic AI. You can, you can see that, right? So I make 10 points in the post, but one of the points is, um, AI doesn't do it end to end. It does it middle to middle because you still need the contextualization and the initialization and the verification, right? You need the prompting, you need the verifying. It does all the middle steps fast, but you still need to tell it what to do and verify that it did what you told it what to do. No matter how long the agent is until it can prompt itself, which I think it won't be for for a while, but, um, prompting and verification are very human steps. Okay. And what it actually means is the, it pushes it to the harder and harder and harder parts. Those are actually the harder parts, right? It's like, okay, maybe there's, I, I don't even know if this is true, but let's say there's less engineering jobs. There's more engineering manager jobs because you have to be like a higher skilled person, you know, I think you have to have a higher skilled engineer to be an engineering manager in general. That's a generally true thing, right? You need to be able to find errors in the code, right? Which means you have to be a more skilled engineer. And, um, orchestrating these agents is like managing software engineers. It's a lot like that. It's not exactly like that, but it's a lot like that. So another way of putting it is when we went to chair factories, artisans who who are good at, you know, carving chairs with a knife, basically split into the people who set up the tool chains and the and the machines for carving the chairs, and the technicians who maintain them. And both of these people need to know something about chairs, right? So you go from artisanal coding to technicians who are going into details of why the AI is getting it wrong, and the engineering managers who are setting up the AI to crank out the code, right? It, it means you do train somewhat differently, but it, it's like it means you sort of flank it, you know, okay, and this is the prompting, and this is a verifying. Now, there's many other scenarios for how things this can transpire. For example, let's say there's somebody abroad who makes $2,000 a year, and an American lawyer who makes $200,000 a year, and AI converges it. So AI plus this, this person can get it to $20,000 a year. That's a 10x increase for them. Amazing. 90% decrease for American lawyer. Terrible. That's the kind of thing I think will happen. Okay. So that's not necessarily quote taking the jobs. It is in a sense redistributing them. So it's like AI plus human. Other kinds of things, yes, will be done purely by AI, and there's no need for it. Um, you know, and the thing is, sometimes it takes five or 10 or 15 years to really nail all the end points. Like finally self-driving actually works. Like Waymo actually shows that you can get it to work end to end, and you literally don't need a driver. You still need people to maintain the vehicles and so on and so forth, but you don't need a driver. Okay. >> But this, this is all a bigger argument for leaving, uh, somewhere like a Western country because, uh, it's going to decimate large, you know, sectors of the job market. >> It's possible. >> But, but liquidate, immigrate, and you can accelerate in countries which are >> you know, ascending with this technology. >> Exactly. That's right. So ascending with AI, like India, China are broadly going to benefit from AI, from robotics, and so they're optimistic on it because they have nowhere to go but up. >> Right. Yeah. Like Indians with AI can do all these kinds of things, and, you know, you're coming from a dirt, or this is a significant improvement in your life, right? Within your life. So the, um, and when I say liquidate, immigrate, accelerate, it also means do it faster, right? Do it now because it's a pain. It's like a huge pain to do it, right? You don't want to do it. And sometimes the thing you have to do the most is the thing you don't want to do. And the faster you do it, the faster it'll get done. And also, you'll probably get out just in time before the, you know, UK exit. You know, like all the non-dom stuff they're doing in the UK, right? They're trying to implement global taxation. Why are they doing it? Because it's bankrupt, >> right? Yeah. >> It's like, >> Yes. So, it's ultimately like the, like Keynesianism ends up like communism, which is a prison state that robs you and doesn't let you leave and enslaves your descendants and so on and so forth. If you can see that coming in slow-mo, it will liquidate, immigrate, accelerate, okay? And get to an ascending world country which is benefiting from AI because, you know, like Silicon Valley going to zero benefits everywhere that's not Silicon Valley. You know, if you were on the left, you'd say, haha, it's decentral, it's, it's global economic equality, right? If, if you're on the right, you'd say, well, great, it's not an economic, it's a country, not an economic zone, right? I mean, I'm, I'm like somewhat being sarcastic, but the point is, there's aspects of left and right theory that say, hey, it's great to send all this stuff away, we can just do it all ourselves, who cares, right? Fine. So there's an aspect of disruption. There's also an aspect of redistribution. There's another big part of it which is AI disrupts many of the, so let's say AI, the digital part of AI goes after blue America, the left. And the physical part of AI, the, uh, China goes after red America, like the manufacturing and military and so right? So digital AI means Hollywood can be done by anybody. They're in big trouble. Obviously, media, like media is corrupted from inside and outside by this because you just set up, boom, you know, like news sites and so on. Um, you have, uh, bureaucrats, lawyers, doctors, artists, the entire blue base of symbol manipulators, college educated, you know, whether you call them midwits or blue beer, you know, that's all just toast, right? They're way overpaid for what they are arguably, but obviously they don't like that. However, if you go from one American doctor getting $200,000 to a billion people having a doctor on their phone, obviously that's a good trade-off, you know, like >> for the world, right? So, it's wealth increasing even though it sucks for let's say the AMA or the USMD or something like that, right? Lots of things are like that where, uh, I think they're radically wealth increasing for the world, but they do suck for that demographic that's being disrupted, who will then fight them. You know, it's like, but are there any elevator operators anymore? No. Right now, up to this point, the argument would be, okay, you're just kind of analogizing this to all past industrial disruptions, and it is true that after a period of political chaos, there was a rebalancing, but this is different because it's actually brains, right? It's actually like human beings, and that people could be long-term unemployed and so on. It's possible, but we do have VR. We do have, uh, you know, drones that are doing farming and construction and so on and so forth. So the cost of actually living may be less and less and less, right? I mean, in a sense, like we've rebalanced to the point that most humans, they're not farming, they're not mining, they're not manufacturing, they're not like doing construction. I don't know what fraction of, but most people in Western countries, I don't know if it's, it's definitely not even close to 10% that are doing farming. It's all automated, right? So then you kind of move up the value chain, other kinds of things. Maybe there's a lot of people going into space exploration, right? Maybe there's oceanic exploration. Maybe there's people working on math. There's, um, you know, what kinds of jobs exist after that? It's always difficult to say. But I do think there's going to be a lot of jobs are in proctoring and verification. So like AI, it increases productivity in many areas, but also increases the fake fakeness, right? Lots of fakeness, many different kinds of fakes. So, you're going to need much more effort on proctoring, on verification, on having people check up on things like someone goes to a house and checks, is that house actually exist or was an AI image that was uploaded, right? That's like almost like a security guard type job. Proctoring and verification, I think we'll see a 10x. It's kind of a combination of KYC and captures and so forth, but

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Well, I was going to say, so this is really going to be a problem for if you're 45 to 55 years old, because how do you become an AI native? If you're 25 years old, you just need to become an AI native.

>> Yes.

Well, I am 46, by the way.

>> I'm 47.

>> All right, there we go. So, we're we're able to adapt somehow. But yeah, I mean, look, we see it coming.

>> Huh?

>> We see it coming. It's part of it's part of what we do anyway.

>> That's right. We process the stuff for a living. It's not like I'm unsympathetic to it. Of course, I'm sympathetic. And I like I also think, by the way, um, in a sense, the reason red America, blue America, gray America, which is tech America, are all just going to basically blow each other up is blue America is targeting um tech America with wealth taxes. And it's targeting red America by basically like allying with China, right? Like the nationalism tax. They're literally giving land to China, which is the thing that...

So, the tech guys prize their technology and wealth the most, and the red Americans prize their country and their borders the most, and blue Americans are trying to take away the wealth and the tech from the tech guys, and they're trying to take away the land and the borders from the red Americans. I think they'll probably be successful in that. The red Americans are targeting the blue Americans' NOS's and their international standing and all of these organizations like Trump is basically withdrawing America from all kinds of stuff, from like this UN body and that alliance and all this stuff. The diplomats, the American diplomats of blues, when they were competent, set up this whole web of global alliances and, you know, it's like to get 180 countries to sign off on something is not a trivial thing at all to do. It's like imagine getting 180 investors to sign something. Not easy. American diplomats twisted arms and got all kinds of things to happen and set up the American empire, and Trump is just dismantling that. He's also dismantling the US universities and so on and so forth. And I get that, you know, like I get why. But he's going after red America is going after the things blue America holds most precious. And tech America is doing the same to blue America. Why? The part that we just talked about.

So, um, what what red America is doing is they're doing the nationalism tax on blue America. They're saying America is a country. It's not an empire. And they're taking away all the blue American diplomatic relationships and the research universities and and soft power and presses blue's prize. And tech is taking away, as I said, the media, the money, right? And so it's AI tax on on blue America, right? And then finally, um, red America's taking away the talent that streams into the US from tech America because it is imposing, you know, visa bans and and so on and so forth, right? And, um, tech America is outsourcing jobs and and re-centralizing around the rest of the world. And so it's the internationalism tax on red America. Like, you know, opening up, why? Because there's there is a lot of talent in India. There is like it's not there's a lot of smart people there who are finally online, you know, if you don't get that talent, your competitors will. And, um, we're, you know, then then people will lose money. And, you know, as as a capitalist, I will tap that talent, just like I will hire, you know, I've got guys here from Indiana and I have guys here guys from India. I just like as a meritocrat, I just take people globally. Yeah.

So all all three of these factions, blues are wealth taxing tech, and they are, um, communism taxing Republicans. Republicans, reds are nationalism taxing blues, and they are, um, talent taxing tech. And tech is internationalism taxing reds, and they are AI taxing blues. Right? It's like think of it as a jobs tax that tech is just like blue is attacking tech with a wealth tax. Tech is attacking blue with a jobs tax.

>> Okay.

>> Right. Like is disrupting their jobs. Right.

>> So go ahead.

>> Well, but doesn't all of this just shine a bigger light on the 175 trillion of debt, and that's going to be the major problem?

>> That's right. So what's going to happen in my view is like, I mean, when the Soviet Union fell, see, one of the problems is Americans just truly don't know the history of anything other than like 1945, 1865, 1776, and like that's about it.

>> American history.

>> Yeah. American history. And even then, only like a very, you know, it's like a potted plant version of American history, which is only like, you know, kind of the most propaganda-laden points, right? Doesn't like a lot of the subtleties, reversals, other kinds of lessons. And the reason to study history is the same reason, you know, people run fluid in a tank to study fluid mechanics. They just have different configurations, and you can see the eddies and the currents and the turbulence and so on and so forth. That's what history is. It's a cryptic epic of twisting trajectories. It's not just like an arc like this. There's like corkscrews and things that happen. And the reason to study historical scenarios is like, in many ways, you can think about America from the standpoint of Soviet Russia towards the end, or, um, you know, China's warlord era, or India's partition, right? Or South Africa's, you know, like Balkanization and so on. So, like the end of the Soviet Union is probably the best analogy where we think of the Soviet Union as breaking up on primarily economic grounds because communism didn't work. But actually, nationalist movements were a huge part at the end of the Soviet Union. The Russians felt they were bearing the burdens of empire, and the Estonians and Poles felt they were oppressed by the Russians. And it's a lot like white Americans and non-white Americans are wokes and MAGA's feeling each is oppressing the other and wanting to break up, right? And there's also obviously an economic reason, which is Estonia broke away first from the Soviet Union. And when they did, guess what their big gift was? They didn't inherit the debt of the Soviet Union. And it's very possible, by the way, sometimes the bad guys win. Okay? It's very possible that the Democrats secede first. There's a whole thing called soft secession, right? Like, you know how only Nixon could go to China, right? Like only Nixon, you know, a Republican had enough support in his right to go and talk to a leftist could succeed, succeed because the there'd be enough rightists who would support that that they have enough if they got leftists to go for it, then they they might be able to do it. So very possible you see blue state secession. There's a whole article that went super viral called soft the blue state soft secession. And if they did that, the big thing Estonia got is they didn't inherit the debt of the Soviet Union. Russia did. Russia had such a tough time afterwards. They were like 140 million from 280 million, and everybody was mad at them, and they had all this chaos, and they had to like rebuild their whole country amidst all of this debt and so on and so forth because the Russians are like the MAGA's, right? They were like, you know, they knew on some level that they had invaded a bunch of countries and so on. They were sort of proud of their empire, the militaristics, but they hated the leftism towards the end. They hated the fact that it oppressed so many of their people. You, they're sort of proud of it. Like this weird contradiction things like, you know, and they also hated the fact that all these Near Eastern peoples that they had dominated were now like a pain in the ass for them, but they were also mad at communism. It was a complicated thing at the end of the Soviet Union. It's not like one story. Lots of faults to go around, right? But ultimately, they were like the Russian Ivans, and this was their land, right? And so the MAGA's are like that. You know, this is America, this is our land and so on, right? Now, by the way, you can even argue it's it's maybe half their land, right? Because the Massachusetts type of person, the leftist American is also half of America. The blue American has always been half. The MAGA's like more like the Virginia Appalachian, you know, like people Albian Seed talks about four folkways. And roughly the left, modern left is from Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, you know, the the Puritans and the Quakers. And the modern American right descends ideologically from the Virginians and the Appalachians, right? The Cavaliers and the Scots-Irish or whatever, right? So, um, point being that it's very possible blue blue states break away. And if so, if they break away first, they don't have the debt of America, right? Like if if 49 states are there, the other 50, like, and one state breaks away, let's say California or something like that, all the other governments in the world will probably recognize California as not inheriting the debt. California has its own debts, perhaps, but doesn't inherit the debt of America, right? Florida is actually perhaps also very well positioned to do this because it's got its own port. Texas is positioned to do this. I don't know which one breaks away first, but I think it's likely that that happens at some point simply because the incentive to secede is actually very high economically. You've got a clean slate.

>> Right?

The other thing is I think, you know, you know the NPC meme, non-player character memes. The thing is that Democrats have one advantage, which is they just mindlessly follow whatever the party tells them to do. That is an advantage when it is the Chinese telling them what to do, because the Chinese are actually competent. And so like if the Chinese are upstream, then maybe the Democrat regions actually, it's very hard for me to predict. It might be, uh, it might be a some some work and some don't, right? Maybe cares Chinese Canada is more functional, but like Chinese California is more like Venezuela. Hard to say, okay? Very hard to say until it actually happens. But the fact that Democrats will just obey the party means they'll snap into grid. You'll need adapter layers, guys like Nuome or Carney, who speak both Canadian and Chinese, or speak both Californian and Chinese, right? But there's enough of those in the Democrat party to do it. Um, and and I think that is probably what happens on the on the Democrat side. On the Republicans side, I think they turn towards Latin America, Miami, Texas culture of, um, you know, it's the sun, it's being physically strong, it's, you know, really it's, uh, it's beauty, it's strength, it's, um, it's also an anti-intellectual culture in many ways, right? Um, there will be tech, there's techno-capitalism there, but the, it's like very focused on aesthetics, on health, on very different than the cold, rainy, you know, northeastern, like the Seattle, Canada.

>> Yeah. Go ahead.

>> Seattle. I just said Seattle.

>> Right?

>> Yes. That whole culture is going to be very different than the sunbelt kind of culture. Right.

>> Uh, why don't we get on that? We got on that because...

>> Oh, yeah. Self-disrupting, right? You said AI.

>> Yeah. I just wanted to know what you'd think of that. I just one last thing because I'm conscious of your time and we we we talked quite a lot. How much do you think about AI safety?

I think that killer AI already exists, and it's called drones, and both China and the US are working hard on that, and so are many other countries, right? And I think that the entire framework of AI safety turned out to be interestingly wrong. But wrong. So just to recap, the AI safety concept was, if we summon an all-powerful, all-knowing AGI, then it needs to be aligned with humanity because it can outthink us and destroy us. And it was essentially like, if we summon God or a demon, it'll be so much smarter than us, it'll tell us what to do and so on and so forth, right? That is actually not what was what what happened. I think that was what motivated people to to do it, but it's not what's happened. It's not what's happening. First, instead of a monotheistic Abrahamic AI, the all-seeing, all-knowing God, we got polytheistic AI with many different models being dropped all the time that each have their own style and so on and so forth. And so at first, it looked like the CAPEX do AI was so high that only ChatGPT or OpenAI would do it, and then everybody caught up in a year or two. Right? Now you have polytheistic AI. And moreover, the models are actually starting to flatten out. It's like Opus 4.6, Codex 5.3. The models themselves are not radically improving anymore. The deployment of them is. And that's still going to be a very big thing, don't get me wrong. But it's not like, um, what's the way I put this? It is not, uh, summoning something that's above you. It's summoning something that's below you, right?

The way I put it is, especially in China, the Chinese Chinese communism is much more likely to create AI slaves than AI gods. Okay. Okay.

>> Right. Their robots, like they don't let their humans get out of line. So their robots will definitely not get out of line, right? They'll have all kinds of shut-off switches and so on and so forth to make sure that's all under party control, right? They're very technically competent. They'll be absolutely sure of that. And they're going to make most of the robots, right? So killer AI is already here. It's called drones. And who makes the drones? Mostly China, right? And all going to be under Chinese kill switches or, you know, in both senses of the term. And more generally, prompting is like a harness for a horse. It's like a leash for a dog. It's like a steering wheel for a car, right? It's a control panel. It's a control plane by which you give instructions to the thing to have it go in the direction you want. For a variety of reasons, an AI that can't be prompted is not an AI that's economically useful unless you, as a human, can be like, halt, continue, stop, reverse, etc., etc. Unless you can give it these instructions, it's not actually economically useful. There will, which means there will probably always be a human owner, prompter, controller for both security reasons and economic reasons. Like the whole point of what we've been doing over the last few years, AI alignment has been making this robot do exactly what you want when you want to do it, right? So the initial fear was of AI gods, but especially because of Chinese communism, Chinese communism is more likely to create AI slaves. Okay. I know. Okay. So the fears that people have...

>> Go ahead.

>> No, no, I'm just listening. It's great.

>> It's interesting, right? So it's just turning out somewhat different that, you know, rather than monotheistic, polytheistic, rather than above, below, right? Rather than giving us direction, taking direction. Like, in a sense, there's another aspect, which is AI isn't taking your job. AI is turning you into the CEO. Actually, that's a great tweet, right?

>> You get it?

>> Yeah.

>> Turning you into the CEO. Go ahead.

>> Yeah. Because you're in charge. You're running the AI like you're the prompter.

>> You think you can be a great CEO. AI ASS. Prove it. Prove it. When do you get the first f first person like single person unicorn where everybody else who works for it is an agent? How far are we off from that?

>> Literally the means of production being put in your hands, right? If you think you'd be a great founder, a great co, it's being hyper-decentralized. The global talent search has begun, right? You don't need any money, basically. Literally, if you have a computer, if you're looking online, actually, that's a great, that's that's a great oneliner. I'm going to tweet that. AI doesn't take your job. AI turns you into the CEO. If you're ready to take it,

>> If you're ready, if you're ready to take it.

>> You're ready to be.

>> Exactly. That's that's right. Now, uh, it's just a reframe, right? You're the CEO now, in a sense. Now, should everybody be CEO? No. However, however, I do think that there's a much larger group of people, if you take away the capital cost of doing it, because there is a lot of talent out there, right? Like, look, if you look at tech, I mean, Bezos, Elon, these guys did not come from wealth, right? This is what Jefferson calls a natural aristocracy. Countly founder came into Nigeria, you know, you have founders from like, you know, all kinds of places around the world, right? Random places, right? So, you know, guys from like Midwest like Anderson, you have people, I'm sure from rural areas in England or, you know, like the UK, you have people from all over, right? So that's the internet to me is leveling egalitarianism in a good way. Equality of opportunity, the sky hook for anybody who wants to do it, right? So, uh, another aspect of things is AI doesn't take your job. It takes the job of the previous AI. Why? You had some video model. Guess what? You swap it out. Boom. Goodbye. I don't know, like Cling, Hello Se Dance, right? You know, goodbye Chatourney or whatever. And it keeps swapping out like this. These guys are in this relentless race with each other. You know, moreover, um, all the the concern about centralization of AI, it's all almost opposition, right? Another thing about this is AI safety. The people who kind of talked about it would kind of assume that AI safety meant alignment, and alignment meant under their control, right? Only they, the EAS, were going to be able to control it, and it was essentially an argument for centralized control by the US government, which they would control and be the ethicists or whatever, or whatever. But we've fortunately gotten a very different version, which is everybody has AIs. And so rather than like, um, like a like an Abrahamic god turning you into a pillar of salt or paper clips, which is kind of what people thought. Instead, you have four of the gods, right? You have this AI controlling these robots, and that AI controlling these robots, and this human, and that human, right? So you have something which is like everybody levels up. It's like everybody gets a rifle, right? Everybody has, every civilization of sufficient scale has their own social media, cryptocurrency, and AI at the core of what they do, right? The AI is almost like their oracle. It's like, what would Liecoinu do? What would Jesus do? What would Churchill do? What would so-and-so do? You can actually literally animate them and in full video and what have you, they can speak to you from their old writings and so on and so forth. Yes, it's AI version, but it's interesting, and I think something like that done in a really quality way could be interesting. Speak with ancient philosophers and so on and so forth. Um, so now the thing about it is like AI is very unpredictable, but I do think, uh, that one of the best things you can do is liquidate, immigrate, accelerate, and reduce your cost structure. Like that's the thing about China and Asia, it's cheap. If you're on like a western, I, if you manage to liquidate and immigrate before the West goes to zero, it's like getting your money out of FTX before it collapses, right? I think you'll do fine, right? The main thing is obviously that's not a solution for everybody.

>> But if the top, I don't know, 100,000 or whatever people do it, then you know, you know what foundation is?

>> What the TV show?

>> No, it's a, um, well, actually, I guess it's...

>> So, so the Isaac Asimov series of books called Foundation. They didn't, they made into a TV show, but it's much better, it's much better as books.

>> Okay. So the idea was the Galactic Empire is going to collapse. So build a a school on the edge of empire to rebuild. And why a school? Because wealth is kind of trans, but knowledge is permanent, and with knowledge, we can rebuild. I mean, one of the great things is, yes, I think there's going to be a collapse, but we will have drone construction, we'll have, you know, solar, we'll have, you know, working nuclear. This massive technological advance. So if we take the L, we might be able to rebuild at internet speed, you know, maybe in a decade or two decades. Like, if you know, if Deng Xiaoping was able to build China into what it is, right, in 40, 50 years, if Google was being able to build what it is in 20 years, right? OpenAI in 10 years, you know, Coinbase in about 10 years, you know, um, I think once we embrace internet-first, like your state may fail, but the internet will be there for you.

>> So is Foundation network state, or is network state Foundation?

>> Network school is like Foundation.

>> It's Foundation.

>> Yeah. Network school, network school. Network school is to network state as like Chinatown is to China.

>> So like, if China didn't exist, right? So Chinatown is just like a themed thing, right? So network school is like, how do we start new societies?

>> Um, so people should come and visit ns.com. We've got lots of Brits out here, lots of Europeans, lots of, you know, um, freedom people, but they're pragmatists, right? Like they're pro-civilization. You know, as I said, like I mentioned, I said this to Verhe several years ago, but I still like it. I understand crypto anarchy, but I believe in crypto civilization. That's a great place to end it. I don't know how many times we've done this over the years, five, six, seven times, but, uh, I'm always left with a lot to think about. We could have a good car journey home talking about this. Uh, liquidate, immigrate, accelerate. That's a, it's a pretty good show title as well.

>> Baji, man, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

>> That's what you go on. Go ahead.

>> I was going to say, I know how I know Heal, Elon, Bezos. Yeah. I know how you did eight hours now with Lex Freedman.

>> Well, it's always a pleasure, Peter. And, uh, you know, I want to say I wish the best for you and your audience and everybody, you know, I, I, it is, I, I, I, I want to just sound a notice of sympathy because when you or I digest all this content that's coming towards us, you know, like the endless onrush. I mean, I'm, I'm like pretty good at software. You're pretty good at media and so and so forth, and I have to like spend time and energy processing the sheer rate at which these things are going. And there's a real temptation, I can understand how many people just want to try to ignore it and just, you know, like, or or they get completely discombobulated by it. And I think we want to figure out how people can ride the lightning. And the way you can ride the lightning is get to an ascending world location. That's my view. This is the burden of the male brain. I've got a video I'm going to send you later that I think, uh, you'll appreciate. But, uh, thank you, man. I want to get back out and come and see, um, cuz I've been out to, uh, Network School in, uh, a lot.

>> Yeah. And we had a great time. We weirded out on the Thursday. We're like, what's going on here? And then within a couple of days, we're like, I don't want to leave. I love it here. So, uh, yeah, we'll come out again.

>> Come back.

>> But thank you, everyone. Check it out. Also, check out Balaji's book, Network State. It's a fantastic book. And we will see you all soon.

>> Okay. Peace out.

>> Thank you.