Balaji Srinivasan

California's security situation is deteriorating. Making money in that failed state is like picking up quarters in front of a bulldozer. And the combination of targeted violence and untargeted anarchy will get much worse. A laptop works anywhere. You don't need California. While the California gang above is targeting on race, this one is targeting on class. Though it truly doesn't matter if they're going after you because they're racist or because they're communist. You just need a secure location. Meaning: not California. https://t.co/in1oNPQ1pN

Ten years in the making. The Saifedean/Balaji crossover. Bitcoin Standard meets Network State. 0:38 - What is the Network State? 7:03 - Keynesianism as Communism for wimps 38:08 - Chinese Bonds, Gold, Digital Gold, Tech 1:05:09 - The Great Inflation 2:05:42 - Technodemocracy https://t.co/gy8IJdHYTh Oh, and here's the podcast with me and @saifedean on YouTube: https://t.co/Fdi9u4kv8q

How did the left go from pro-tech communists to anti-tech primitivists? Three theses. (1) Tech redecentralized. Communism replaces G-o-d with G-o-v, putting the centralized state above all. And 20th century tech was centralized, while 21st century tech is centralized. Think mass production and mass media vs smartphone/cryptocurrency/internet. And because the centralized state has less power over the decentralized network, the statist far left hates the network, and by extension tech. (2) Tech remarried capitalism. In the Soviet Union, thought control extended to all areas of life except science, engineering, and mathematics. Logical reasoni…

Kaczynski is the Marx of the 21st century. Because anti-technology will be the new anti-capitalism. When printed out into the real world, Marx’s philosophy led to the organized murder of the gulag. It was centralized, authoritarian. When printed out into the real world, Kaczynski’s philosophy led to the disorganized murder of the Unabomber. It was decentralized, anarchic. And just like Marx’s anti-capitalism made the lives of ordinary workers far worse, in the name of targeting top-hatted capitalists, Kaczynski’s anti-technology will make the lives of ordinary users far worse, in the name of targeting hoodie-wearing technologists. Yeah. T…

INDIA, INTERNET, INTERNATIONAL If you're Indian, don't move to America. Because the US left hates technocapitalists. And the US right wants no more immigrants. Moreover, as the sovereign debt crisis worsens... It only gets worse. Possibly murderously worse. So: Indian immigrant technocapitalists need alternatives. And there are three options: India, Internet, and International. 1. India India itself is the world's fastest growing economy, with the #1 growth rate in the world over the last 10 years. Every major company is investing in India. So you can do well in the Indian economy: 2. Internet The Internet is taking over from a fading NYSE…

AI quantifies the cognitive cost of context switching. It’s only a metaphor, and our biological brains may work differently, but much of the work with AI is loading in the context first and only *then* expecting it to reason. And AIs, like humans, get confused if you are switching context constantly mid-stream.

Popups are the new startups. And IRL is the new URL. https://t.co/shz1ICWBmJ https://t.co/1G1XoMH9lv

The conventional wisdom is: substance over optics. And that is generally good advice. But sometimes optics is the substance. Example: your code works, but it’s unusable until a good UX is built. Example: your policy works, but it’s unpopular unless it’s explained properly. Example: your medicine works, but you need to give it a catchy name to get it prescribed. These are really all the same problem. Making it work is the backend, making it pretty is the frontend. Do both or fail. That said: it’s easier to add frontend optics than to invent backend substance, which is why the advice to focus on substance first actually is good advice.

Towards the Solana network state. https://t.co/C6L4UF95Zk Fun times with @arifkazi_, Superteam, and the entire Solana ecosystem.

The man who wants to be CEO, because he gets to be important, should not be CEO. The man who does not want to be CEO, because he gets the importance, should be CEO. I’d argue the will to power is often misunderstood. It means power over oneself — self-discipline — not really power over others. Also: Nietzscheanism is useful as a defense against Bolshevism. But that’s aimed outside the tribe. Within the tribe you should be cooperative, not Nietzschean.

Too many are interested in “tech” (by which they mean money) but they aren’t interested in tech (by which I mean math).

Just to calibrate, tech unicorn founders are much rarer than pro athletes. https://t.co/Fauk5QXhYA Fundamentals over founderitis. A few decades ago, the concept of becoming a tech founder wasn’t even understood as something you could do. In the 80s and the early 90s, you saw businessmen on TV, but there was no well-understood playbook for starting a company. Kids were encouraged to graduate and get a salary-paying job. This started to change by the mid/late 2000s. And since then, the Internet has done a good job of encouraging entrepreneurship. Perhaps too good. Perhaps we’ve overcorrected. Perhaps we have to start discouraging it, or at l…

If frontier AI models plateau, then on-device inference and open source models could catch all the way up. Great for consumers and developers. Amazing for getting intelligence too cheap to meter, for AI-enabled hardware, and for the garden of intelligent things. But bad for business models premised on continuing exponential AI capex spend…including the US economy itself.

If a country stay smalls to remain true to its roots, it eventually gets absorbed by an empire. Conversely, if a country plays for empire, and truly achieves world domination, it absorbs so many that its subjects eventually outnumber the imperial core. And thus the empire, too, loses touch with its roots. Stay small and get conquered. Get big and get diluted. I like Switzerland and agree that it was arguably an exception to the rule. But it isn’t anymore and hasn’t been for some time. It capitulated to Obama in 2009 on financial privacy, and so Swiss bank accounts don’t really exist. The Swiss (perhaps understandably) sanctioned Russia af…

2020: blue and tech against red 2024: red and tech against blue 2028: blue and red against tech

In the 90s, the worry was that only the rich would have digital products. That was called the digital divide. And it turned out to be completely wrong. Because digital is cheap. Physical is the premium product. It’s quite possible that robotics eventually hyperdeflates the cost of physical products, too. Then the physical premium will disappear like the digital divide did. https://t.co/DHbzhr6L7l https://t.co/ztTkfRFimj

The cost-of-living crisis is really a sovereign debt crisis. You can only print and borrow for so long. It causes problems in the long run. And the long run is here. https://t.co/e4XPpyVt7r

For years, the conventional wisdom was to put 100% of your energy into building, and to ignore politics. The problem was that those who put 100% of their energy into fighting, particularly politicians, would then take everything you’d built. Like the video game Civilization. If you put everything into science and commerce, while the next door tribe puts it all into swordsmen and slogans, they’ll waltz over and walk over you. The temptation is then to respond in kind, by putting 100% of your resources into fighting. This does work to ward off the initial assault. But without building you become just like your violent and unproductive neighb…

Animal evolution: survival of the fittest Digital evolution: survival in the market I’d add to @karpathy’s point that LLMs are also optimized for being downstream of humans rather than upstream. Like domesticated dogs or horses, they have been bred for alignment, to do what humans tell them to do.

The lesson of deals is that if you have two, you have one. And if you have one, you have zero. In other words: the second bidder sets the price and ensures the deal goes through. If you only have one bidder, the price floor is zero. And the deal may not get done at all. Also holds for supply chains. If you have at least two independent vendors, you have one reliable supply chain. But if you have only one vendor, you may end up with zero margin. So: if you have two, you have one, and if you have one, you have zero. Caveat: optionality isn’t everything. The best long-term relationships (commercial and otherwise) are actually with just on…

No one is explaining the joke, so I will. It’s multi-layered. First, there was a fun Oct 2017 Twitter exchange about the right way to render a burger emoji. Obviously this was trivial, but Sundar said “we’ll drop everything else we are doing and address on Monday” as a joke. The new post uses that old reference to show off Gemini 3’s image rendering capabilities. Normally, AI models struggle with spatial orientation, particularly with respect to the relative position of objects. They also struggle with text (though less so these days) and with precision in general. But this image (if rendered by Gemini 3) seems to resolve that issue, as th…

Different people are wired differently, but I basically agree. Salesforce and Oracle were indeed built by money-motivated men. But Apple and Twitter were art projects. SpaceX and Tesla were engineering feats. And Bitcoin and Zcash are ideological campaigns. So: money is a metric, but not the only one, and the “capitalism” part of technocapitalism has been stressed a bit too much in recent times. Because the drive to make great art, to advance science, to win in a just cause, will always produce more peak energy than the merely pecuniary. But then, on a daily basis, you have to eat too. I think of it like cross country skiing. Sometimes you…

NO PUBLIC UNDISCLOSED AI That's my new heuristic after the last few years of seeing AI in practice. As context, there's a Laffer curve[a] for AI. The optimal amount of AI in most things is not 100% nor 0%. Because if you use 0% AI, it's slow, but if you rely on 100% AI, it's slop. The exact number is situational. But just knowing it's not 100% or 0% is actually a useful heuristic. That said, a few hard-and-fast rules are useful. So here they are: (1) Rule 1: don't use AI-generated text in public. Don't use AI-generated text in outbound emails, in DMs, or on websites. Because AI text is the new lorem ipsum, namely lorem aipsum. It's fine as…

If you can do it from scratch, you can take shortcuts. But if you can only take shortcuts, you can’t do it from scratch.

@InevMay (1) The only two globally competitive exports of the US (really, the Disunited States at the current moment) are tech and the dollar. Domestic US production (minus the dollar) is not even close to matching domestic consumption. Like, the US isn't cranking out enough high-margin widgets to barter for all the high-margin widgets it imports. It's trading printed dollars for those things. (2) In other words: the household demand mostly isn't real without the money printing. Would the US be able to support 40M+ on SNAP alone without the money printer (granting that the former is technically fiscal policy)? Extremely doubtful. Would the …

Western politics is zero-sum. For every 51% election winner, a 49% loser. However, the intensity of the competition actually turns it negative-sum. Each succeeding 51% election winner weaponizes (and thereby destroys) legacy institutions to fend off the 49% loser, leaving less for both parties after each cycle. The political conflict is so intense because the West is in relative economic decline. Unfortunately, intense conflict further accelerates that decline. Roon (@tszzl) is correct that the still largely positive-sum culture of Silicon Valley and the zero-sum culture of Washington DC couldn't be more different. I'd argue the next step…

There’s an alternate history where Russia didn’t go communist. In 1911, a man named Pyotr Stolypin was Prime Minister of Russia. Staunchly anti-war and traditionalist, he was nevertheless also an energetic reformer. He suppressed violent revolutionaries, but gave peasants their own land to farm. He was the path to a peaceful capitalist reformation in Russia. Lenin hated him, and called him the hangman-in-chief. Then he was assassinated. Historians still debate whether it was a conspiracy or a lone gunman. But three years later, Russia entered the kind of war Stolypin opposed. Six years later, it fell to Bolshevik revolution. Ten years later…

Imagine someone solving the Riemann hypothesis on the bridge of a sinking Titanic. They're genuinely making progress — historical progress, even! — but they aren't solving their most important problem. This is how I think about doing high tech in highly unstable jurisdictions. CA is bankrupt. The wealth seizure has started. And it will only get worse. It's not wise to be publicly successful in the bluest city in the bluest state in the union, when blues think you're automating their jobs, and when political violence is rising. https://t.co/wKiL0YwXwU

Individually alpha is collectively beta. That’s actually the centrist argument against the sort of exaggerated ultra-masculinity that’s in vogue today. I understand how that ideology arose, but it actually makes you weak, because it inhibits scaled cooperation. Essentially: in almost every context in life you can’t and shouldn’t be the leader. Even Elon isn’t running the water supply or sewing his own clothes. In those contexts, he’s just an individual like any other, operating in a context where he isn’t the boss. Even the greatest CEO of all time can’t be CEO of everything, all the time. Steve Jobs understood this too. Also a superalpha …

Here's the new podcast with @mert. 2:12 - Dubai v Canada 4:02 - East v West 7:11 - Western decline (1492-2025) 10:02 - An empire, not a republic 12:41 - China is vertically integrated like Apple 15:35 - China v the Internet 18:45 - After Rome, Christianity 24:11 - Communism after Mao, Christianity after Rome 27:28 - Restore from cloud backup 29:23 - The code-based order 30:33 - Ideology over money 32:31 - From Bitcoin to smart contracts 36:37 - Closing thoughts YouTube: https://t.co/QYltqW8AW2