A Summary of Balaji Srinivasan’s Thoughts on the Future

May 01, 2021

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I heard Balaji Srinivasan on Tim Ferriss’s podcast the other day talking about the future and I thought his insights were so interesting they were worth capturing.

Balaji is an angel investor and entrepreneur, and was formerly the CTO of Coinbase and a general partner at Andreesen Horowitz. I’m absolutely following Balaji’s work going forward.

Here are some of the main ideas I extracted from that nearly 4-hour conversation.

  • People will want to consolidate near other people like them

  • We see this already where people ignore their neighbors but have close relationships with people thousands of miles away who share their ideologies

  • Some mayors will become more like CEO’s of a city; the late leader of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, is a great example

  • Napster and Kazaa got sued, but Bittorrent and Pirate Bay are still doing fine

  • Ideologies:

    • Conservative: Stay at home, not as ambitious

    • Progressive: Ambitious, but believes the game is zero-sum

    • Libertarian: Live and Let Life

    • Cryptarian: Win and Help Win: Progressive but not zero-sum

  • Get your coins out of Exchanges

  • Life in 2000 was basically the same as 1980, but things have changed drastically in the last 20 years

  • Central Concepts (Twitter Bio)

    • Immutable money

    • Infinite frontier

    • Eternal life

  • 1729.com: make Bitcoin by learning tasks

  • Positive vision about transhumanism

  • Space is good, life extension is good

  • Traditional healthcare is “moving gravy around the plate”

  • Reversing aging fixes most health issues

  • The East Coast Power Structure

    • Harvard

    • Old media

  • That structure is fighting back against decentralization because it’s a threat to them

  • He’s bearish on the US and the West because they’re so established that tech is a disruptor, and Crypto represents their true and early pursuit of freedom

  • China is the opposite becasue the tech has lifted them

  • Zoltan Istvan for transhumanism

  • Dave Sinclair for age control

  • Estonia, Israel, Singapore

  • Google News put all newspapers in competition with each other, which killed off all but the top few

  • Big Theme: Tech increases variance

  • Woke capital (US), Communist capital (China), Cryptocapital (Freedom)

  • COVID was a major military defeat for the US

  • China can build buildings and bridges and such, and it’s hard for us to do those things in months or years

  • The only stuff that survived COVID were built like 20 years ago

  • Leigitimacy vs. Competence

  • Old model is pedigree/legitimacy

  • Founding vs. Inheriting: so the East Coast is inheriting and the’re struggling. And now it’s the time for the Founders.

  • The Fossbery Flop of conscent is a problem because you’ll see constantly flipping back and forth between, say, AOC and Trump

  • The future of politics could be declaring yourself a leader in an area, and you start delivering actual results, and then using Ethereum you can vote and instantly get far more than a Fossberry Flop

Anyway, some really interesting stuff.

I’m especially intrigued by the stuff around different ways of organizing society. Woke Capital. Communist Capital. And Free Capital. And the idea that people will increasingly move to cities and regions that are set up with the flavor they enjoy.

Perhaps the migration from California to Austin is an instance of that. Kind of like previous examples of Californians moving to Oregon to be more Oregon-like.

If you’re into this stuff, you should follow I heard Balaji, which is pronouned BALL-igy, by the way.