Balaji Srinivasan

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

After the trade war, China rerouted trade away from America towards other countries. The US actually got down[1] to 15% of Chinese exports, so China wasn’t fully dependent on the US market. Some would argue that’s a win/win — China just exports goods to other countries, and America builds up its homegrown manufacturing. Similarly, after the talent war, India is rerouting talent away from America and towards other countries. The US actually has only ~17% of the Indian diaspora[2], so Indians aren’t fully dependent on the US market. Some would also argue that’s a win/win — India just exports talent to other countries, and America builds up i…

The less desirable the location, the more desirable the location. That is: if no one cares about the land, you can quickly build up the land. https://t.co/2dC8ABM0rl Dubai takes this principle to its limit: all that matters is capitalism, not geography. https://t.co/jc0IZ8Tcbt

@levelsio Yes, but the more unpredictable the demand, the more methodical you have to be in preparing the supply. For example: flights are booked on a whim, but planes are amortized over decades.

The S&P 500 is up in nominal terms, flat in gold terms, and down in Bitcoin terms. https://t.co/RGEV6ANHTK Graph from @Aeraryum.

The Bitcoin to gold exchange rate may become the true price. How many ounces of gold for one unit of digital gold? https://t.co/Z16aTt28rH Perhaps there’s no such thing as stablecoins. Only stable metals and fiat coins. https://t.co/BNCVTb3II2

Socialists are verbal. Nationalists are visual. Capitalists are numerical. The leftist failure mode is to repeat a slogan like “mostly peaceful protests”, even when it doesn’t reflect observable reality. If they read it, it’s real to them. The rightist failure mode is to repost some video that “goes hard”, even when it doesn’t reflect observable reality. If they see it, it’s real to them. The capitalist has to deal with the world of hard numbers. The verbal and the visual are important, but ultimately secondary to the numerical.

I am sympathetic to the idea of bottom-up collaboration, and peace and trade between distinct cultures. The issue is the incentive structure. If one of those states defect and starts to build an empire, the others need to either join or build their own. The Internet does offer new tools. With cryptocurrency, a thousand network states can have the integrated market and commons of a global empire while staying physically disjoint. And China is the other extreme, where they have civilizational scale under one roof without the same need for a European-style evangelistic empire. But prior to the Internet and modern China, you didn’t have scale…

Communism shatters economic relations, but ultranationalism breaks diplomatic relations. If the far left’s failure mode is not understanding self-interest, the far right’s failure mode is not understanding other-interest. That is to say: we know the far left doesn’t viscerally get the idea of capitalism, of building products, of sometimes just not having the money to do something. The far left fantasy is of total independence from needing to work at all. They don’t understand economic scarcity. But the far right similarly doesn’t get the idea of diplomacy, of building coalitions, of sometimes just not having the votes to do something. The …

If a car is headed downhill, and swerves left, and then right, and then further left, and further to the right, it doesn't actually arrest the descent. However, all the swerving may make the car crash faster. The G7 is like that car. It's the descending world. https://t.co/nAN6ntxgPG (1) The fundamental issue is that 1950-1990 was not the normal way things are supposed to be, but actually an extraordinarily unusual period historically. That was peak Westernization and peak centralization: (2) As the center of mass of the world economy returns to Eurasia, where it was for thousands of years, the relative strength of the West has declined. …

Every time you fix a bug on GitHub, you’re solving a problem created by software with better software.

Technological change > climate change. https://t.co/D9a7wGZrIn The degrowthers were wrong all along. What we really needed was exponential growth. https://t.co/J6vJjKMlIm

NYC → Miami London → Dubai Tokyo → Singapore The new capitals of capital. Fintech, crypto, gold, and stablecoin legislation had already sharply reduced the importance of traditional financial centers. Add in wokeness and keynesianism…and there’s now less desire to live in NYC, London, or Tokyo. Instead: Miami, Dubai, and Singapore.

After cryptocurrency comes cryptoidentity. So, we'll need to understand government passports as well as we understand government paper. A key concept here is that modern passports are actually embedded devices. So you can scan them, and compute on them. https://t.co/gofYVZc1WT Just like we set up bridges between cryptocurrency and fiat currency, we'll need to set up bridges between cryptoidentity and fiat identity. Core to that is understanding the existing cryptography embedded in fiat passports: https://t.co/Pmpdiftrcf

If you are pinging someone who’s busier than you, you should have a single well-thought-out specific ask. Only ask for something you truly cannot do on your own, and where you have done everything you possibly can by yourself. For example, if you’re asking someone to send an email on your behalf, you should have a draft message ready. If you’re asking them to sign something, you should prepare a docusign beforehand with the signature blocks indicated. Or if you’re asking for an appointment, you should do it at their convenience. Asking for time is like asking for capital, so be efficient with your asks. This is another big one. Reduce thei…

Identity is community is security is territory. Show your ID to prove membership in the society to get through the gate to gain access to the property.

It’s happened. The AI flippening is here. https://t.co/SHV9SU6seA Almost three years later, how did this play out? Due to an enormous push by e/acc and Elon and the election, the genuinely dystopian threat of centralized woke AI was fought and defeated. The establishment failed to chokepoint the technology on the basis of “safety” concerns. The surprising part is that the Chinese AI and decentralized AI camps ended up overlapping, with the Chinese releasing open weights (albeit not fully open source) models. Since anyone globally can use decentralized models for any purpose, this means AI also can’t get chokepointed on the basis of “securi…

Digital telekinesis. https://t.co/ZCqt3ntHg7 A few thoughts: (1) How would you implement this? It’s easy if the devices are pre-configured to talk to each other, like a multiple monitor setup. Then it’s just a gesture recognition via cameras, on top of a copy/paste and an Airdrop. (2) Moroever, the devices would have to be pre-configured to talk to each other in *some* sense, as unless they were both logged into the same account, you could copy/paste random things into someone else’s computer just by pointing at the screen. (3) So long as both devices are logged into the same online account, then all devices connected to that account just…

This is Iran now. https://t.co/3uWU44BGjM This scene from Iran is reminiscent of Seattle in the 90s. But as Seattle fell to fundamentalist wokes (eg CHAZ), it became much more holy & much less cool. Meanwhile, as Iran secularizes away from fundamentalism, parts of it have become cooler than today’s Seattle. Blue America once produced world class music and film. Then it fell to woke fundamentalism. As we know, that ended humor. But it also ended art. All culture moved to the Internet instead.

Underneath it all, MAGA just wants to be left alone. And underneath it all, wokes just don’t want to be left out. These are both deep human drives. But you can also see how they come into conflict. Wokes wouldn’t feel the need to force their way in past the “bad guys” if they felt they got a sufficiently large slice. And MAGAs wouldn’t feel the need to push the bad guys out if they’d been left a sufficiently large slice. It all stems from the shrinking American pie, in all senses of the term. Not just the money, but the community:

A common pattern in history is when bloodthirsty communists are opposed by arguably corrupt nationalists. See: CCP vs KMT, Castro vs Batista, and Bolsheviks vs Russian Whites. Spoiler: the communists were in each case far worse. And actually more corrupt.

CZ deserves his pardon. His show trial of a prosecution was a combination of regulatory railroading and ethnic persecution for being Chinese-Canadian. Imagine if Macron was held personally responsible for every crime committed by the 67M citizens of France, and you'll get the absurdity of holding CZ personally responsible for the actions of a few of the 250M+ Binance users. Indeed, if the bureaucrats who went after CZ were similarly held accountable for every violent crime committed in their home states, they'd be in prison for eternity! But there was an insane double standard. In the physical world, the Biden admin gleefully abolished the…