#17 - Claire Lehmann

Summary

The Network State Podcast #17 — Claire Lehmann (July 16, 2025)

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Balaji Srinivasan speaks with Claire Lehmann, founder and editor of Quillette, about ideological extremes, the decline of American influence, Australia's unique position, shifting geopolitical and cultural landscapes, the future of tech, and the rise of new digital societies. The conversation traverses the cultural, political, and economic history of the past century, examines the West's current polarization, explores Australia's societal model, and discusses possible futures for the Anglosphere and the world—including a world after American hegemony.

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Founding of Quillette & Critique of Orthodoxy

• Lehmann recounts the origins of Quillette as a response to increasingly hyperbolic and unsubstantiated left-wing narratives, especially around gender in academia and the media.
  • “I was politicized by the early woke narratives that I saw in media”—Claire [00:44]
• The publication has maintained “enlightened centrism,” critiquing illiberalism from both the left and right as polarization has increased.
  • “We are reacting and responding to waves of illiberalism, whether they come from the left or the right.” —Claire [02:59]

The Left, the Right, and Reciprocal Radicalization

• Balaji observes that political radicalism is a feedback loop, with the unreasonable right arising as a reaction to the unreasonable left.
  • “It was like a natural selection process of antibiotic resistance to select for an unreasonable right… Now, of course, that right is unreasonable.” —Balaji [03:44]
• Historical analogies are drawn to the interplay between communism and fascism in 20th-century Europe.
  • “The extreme left has always demonized their enemies as fascists and then they create support for a genuine fascist movement.” —Claire [04:34]

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America as the “Wet Lab” of Ideologies & Global Consequences

• Balaji and Claire discuss how both far-right and far-left ideologies often have American roots before being exported globally.
  • “The ideologies that the rest of the world fought against were sort of cooked up in the wet lab that was America.” —Balaji [07:11]
• The notion that “history is running in reverse” is examined—after the rest of the world endured ideological tumult, now the West is experiencing it.
  • “Now it's the west itself that is being thrashed by this stuff.” —Balaji [07:54]

The Role of the French Revolution

• Claire argues that American exceptionalism should not be overstated; she highlights the influence of the French Revolution on later developments, including communism.
  • “We can't forget the influence of the French Revolution as well, which obviously led straight in a straight line to communism.” —Claire [08:40]

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Australia: The “Lucky Country” and a Case Study in National Balance

Fiscal Responsibility and Economic Structure

• Balaji marvels at Australia’s ability to almost eliminate its national debt and attract global migrants, crediting effective left and right governance.
  • “The conservatives actually cut deficits and the liberals actually oppose wars. Lol. What a concept.” —Balaji [11:53]
• Australia’s resource economy offers highly paid working-class jobs (in mining), bluntly described by Claire:
  • “We're the custodians of the dirt…There isn't this sense of massive inequality between people who are educated and who are knowledge workers and the working class.” —Claire [13:51]

Social Cohesion and Competition

• The conversation highlights the robust social fabric and competitive migrant influence, particularly in education.
  • “In Sydney… it’s a tiger parent culture, like heavy investment in children’s education and it flows on to the Anglo parents as well.” —Claire [18:17]
• Australia’s balanced approach—pragmatic, somewhat insulated, and less polarized—stands in contrast to the US and UK.

Cultural and Economic Ties to Asia

• Australia and New Zealand’s geographical location and economic pragmatism (especially with China) are highlighted as stabilizing forces.
  • “They just dig stuff out of the ground and sell to China. So they have a real economy.” —Balaji [13:22]

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American Decline, Grief, and Cultural Exhaustion

The American “Grief Cycle”

• Lehmann references historian Andrew Roberts’ framing of American decline through the “stages of grief”—with the US recently moving from denial into bargaining/negotiation.
  • “He likens it to phases of grief… Americans are currently in the denial phase of its declining empire.” —Claire [28:54]
• Balaji relates the emotional resonance, comparing it to grieving for a beloved elder.
  • “It brought a manly tear to my eye. The metaphor of Uncle Sam as a beloved elder who's passing away.” —Balaji [32:12]

Cultural Confidence, Soft Power, & Hollywood’s Stagnation

• Claire laments the loss of American cultural vitality, as shown in the creative stagnation of Hollywood and the dilution of America’s global soft power.
  • “The exhaustion of Hollywood… They can't come up with anything original… the feeling of alliance or sympathy with American culture is sort of eroded…” —Claire [33:06]
• Balaji argues that cultural innovation has shifted online, leaving “physical America” behind as a museum.
  • “All of the innovation and culture has moved to the Internet… Physical America by itself is like baseball and hot dogs…” —Balaji [38:06]

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Anchors of Identity, Privilege, and Unravelling of Norms

The Myth of the 1950s and American Privilege

• Both discuss the mistaken nostalgia for the 1950s as the norm. Balaji explains that postwar Western (especially US) prosperity was an extreme global outlier.
  • “This is a rebuttal… the US is anchored on a story of the past, which is an illusion.” —Balaji [47:29]
• Claire notes that the baby boom era was also a historical oddity enabled by public investment, with marriage and fertility patterns unlike either earlier or later decades.
  • “The baby boom generation was a massive outlier… That was a historical anomaly.” —Claire [41:09]

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The Future: Toward China, the Internet, and Network Societies

The Death of American Empire and Emergence of Successors

• Balaji predicts the world is transitioning from an “American century” to an era where both China (as a vertically integrated power) and the Internet (as a global network) are the two main pillars.
  • “The Internet is to America what America was to Britain.” —Balaji [37:42]
  • “If… the successors to American empire are China and the Internet, then the more leveraged you are on either China or the Internet, or both, the better off you are.” —Balaji [77:46]
• The Internet is analogized to Christianity—initially a “place-less” idea that scripts the physical world.
  • “An important enough idea does actually script things in the physical world.” —Balaji [75:34]

Civilizational Intranets and Digital Borders

• China’s digital borders (“Great Firewall”) are reframed as control not just of speech, but of security in an age of robots and cyber threats.
  • “The great firewall, I think will be seen for all its faults as actually… digital borders.” —Balaji [81:23]
  • “If malware crosses your digital border and it can open up a drone or a robot, it can do terrorism.” —Balaji [82:02]
• Future global order may see “civilizational intranets” separating digital spheres as city walls once did.
  • “It’s walls. And that’s like a very old school definition of civilization.” —Claire [82:11]

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Quillette’s Model, the Rise of Audio/Video, and Global Community

• Quillette’s revenue now relies on subscriptions, but much content is open or temporarily paywalled. YouTube and audio content are fastest-growing channels.
  • “There’s just a bigger market for audio and… video. People don’t like to read.” —Claire [49:36]
• Lehmann sees reading as becoming a more elite marker, returning to its pre-mass-literacy status.

Community Building and the Global Anglosphere

• Quillette’s audience is majority US-based but globally Anglophone. The Australian share is just 4%.
  • “50% of our audience is in the United States. About 12% is in Canada, 14% in the UK… only 4% Australian.” —Claire [54:50]
• Australia’s relatively depolarized, apathetic politics is seen as both strength and weakness.

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The Collapse of Traditional Power, Virtue and Anarchy, and Looming Anti-Tech Sentiment

• Balaji worries the US is poised for inflationary collapse, but even more so, posits that “tech” as a class (not just a sector) will become a target for red and blue populists, referencing Amy Chua’s “market dominant minority.”
  • “Tech is a class. Race and class co-vary… And so the first backlash is the one we already saw… The second is the Elon Trump Tech alliance… we’re about to see… red and blue against tech.” —Balaji [94:25]
• Lehmann notes troubling early signs of anti-tech violence (e.g., Tesla firebombings, Luigi memes).
• Balaji suggests tech should prepare for scapegoating and possibly violent backlash as economic distress rises.
  • “AI takes all the jobs, crypto takes all the money, and tech takes all the blame.” —Balaji [96:43]

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The Network State and New Forms of Education

Network School: An Emerging Model

• Balaji describes his “Network School” in Malaysia (near Singapore): a low-cost, pro-tech, physical community for remote workers, founders, and creators. Scholarships are offered for AI-first artists and “screenwriters for global cultures.”
  • “For like 18,000 per person per year, you can live in Network School and you get everything.” —Balaji [88:19]
• He sees being outside of Silicon Valley/SF as an intellectual and entrepreneurial advantage.
  • “The alpha is being outside SF, outside Silicon Valley. It’s so expensive there and it’s so consensus there.” —Balaji [90:02]

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Predictions & Advice for the Coming Era

• Those most physically, culturally, or economically dependent on the US or on anti-tech, anti-China stances will struggle most as global dynamics shift.
  • “The more you’re into China, the more your economy and your people… have some connection to China or the Internet, the better off you are.” —Balaji [84:00]
• The “rest of the world might not do badly,” at least initially, as China exports goods and prices drop, but Westerners and especially Americans will face the greatest instability and loss.
  • “If you have, I think, Bitcoin,…if you’re not located in the US, I think you’ll probably be okay.” —Balaji [98:50]

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Notable Quotes

• “We’re the custodians of the dirt.” —Claire [13:51]
• “Now it’s the West itself that is being thrashed by this stuff.” —Balaji [07:54]
• “The Internet is to America what America was to Britain.” —Balaji [37:42]
• “AI takes all the jobs, crypto takes all the money, and tech takes all the blame.” —Balaji [96:43]
• “I think reading is becoming a marker of elite status… I mean, I guess it always was.” —Claire [49:50]
• “All of the innovation and culture has moved to the Internet… Physical America by itself is like baseball and hot dogs… whenever anybody defends and says, oh, the US is still doing great, they’re always pointing to the tech companies.” —Balaji [38:06]

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Memorable Moments & Timestamps

• [00:44] — Claire describes her politicization and founding of Quillette
• [03:44] — Balaji and Claire on reciprocal radicalization left/right
• [10:19] — The “lucky country”: Australia's resilience and economy
• [18:17] — How “tiger parent culture” in Sydney affects education
• [28:54] — America’s grief cycle and the psychology of decline
• [33:06] — Hollywood’s creative exhaustion as a symptom of cultural decay
• [41:09] — The abnormality of the 1950s; debunking nostalgia
• [77:46] — The rise of China & the Internet as new global orders
• [94:25] — Amy Chua’s “market dominant minority” and anti-tech sentiment
• [98:50] — Practical advice for living through de-dollarization and American decline

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Tone and Style

• Direct, analytical, intellectually rigorous yet conversational.
• Balaji uses analogy, historical context, and technical metaphors (physics, economic history, force diagrams).
• Claire brings a comparative, empirical perspective, highlighting historical outliers and global nuance with a calm, reflective demeanor.

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Takeaways for Listeners

• Australia is portrayed as a pragmatic, reasonably run outlier in an increasingly polarized and unstable Anglosphere.
• The world is facing the decline of American—and perhaps “Anglo-liberal”—dominance, with China and the global digital society rising in its place.
• Cultural, economic, and digital adaptability will determine who thrives in the coming decades.
• “Network societies” and new forms of community and education will be vital as the traditional structures erode.
• The next wave of populist resentment may target tech as a class—potentially in violent ways.
• Both speakers suggest looking beyond national loyalties—toward global skills, connections, and digital assets—to weather the coming turbulence.

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Transcript

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Claire, welcome to the Network City podcast. You're the editor and founder of Quillet, which was for a while combating, you know, the craziness on the left. Now you actually also combat to a large extent the craziness on the right, basically enlightened centrism for a long time and, you know, we don't agree on everything. We agree on a lot of things. Do you want to give the quick spiel on Colette and everything you've done over the years?

[Claire Lehmann]

Sure. Well, thanks for having me on Balaji. It's a real honor to be talking with you. So I founded Colette about a decade ago, and at the time I was reacting mostly to what I perceived to be increasingly hyperbolic sort of left wing narratives, particularly in media, that were untethered to any kind of evidence or statistical reality. So I was studying psychology at the time, and I had been trained to look at sociological questions through a quantitative viewpoint. And, you know, I was reading stuff in media, particularly on the issue of gender, that was simplistic, I knew was false. And so I just had a reaction. I was politicized by the early woke narratives that I saw in media. And doing a little bit of digging and reading made me realize that in academia, certain fields had been distorted by political, a political drift to the left. So in my field of psychology, certain sociological, social psychology questions were sort of inflated in importance, you know, such as like stereotype bias or implicit bias, that those questions were inflated and there was not much evidence to support them, whereas other findings were sort of suppressed. So I became more aware of the fact that left wing orthodoxy and dogma, particularly around issues of race and gender, were sort of disfiguring both academia and the media. And so that motivated me to launch Quillet. And it just so happened that it coincided with the 2016 election of Donald Trump. And so what happened was, particularly in the United States, a lot of left wing institutions and people on the left sort of went insane. And so we had this huge wave of cancel culture. People being sacked from their jobs in tech industries, in the tech industry, people being sacked from their jobs or canceled in academia, in artistic communities. Communities sort of swept through the culture between 2016 and sort of peaked in 2020, I would say, with the George Floyd riots. And so we sort of have ridden this cultural wave of increasing wokeness. And we were, we were just early in criticizing wokeness, I guess you could say. But now that wokeness is sort of receding slowly, we're becoming more sensitive to the liberalism that is emerging on the Right. So that's been our journey and you know, our values, myself and my editors that I work with, our values haven't changed dramatically. We've always considered ourselves small l liberals slash small C conservatives. But we are reacting and responding to waves of illiberalism, whether they come from the left or the right.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Yeah. And I do think that the call the right reactionary because it reacts, it does move second. And so I do put some blame, maybe much of the blame on the left for creating today's right because the reasonable, you know, like the Romney style, reasonable center right kind of person, or even the Bloomberg Democrat center left or what have you, that person was just given a hole in their head. And essentially it was like a natural selection process of antibiotic resistance to select for an unreasonable right. And, and now of course that right is unreasonable. So there you go. That's happened unfortunately many times in history. And the result is just two things that just start punching each other where the left magics into existence, the thing that it constantly preaches against and the rights. Like there's actually a meme that talks about this. It's like all these young kids are told they're the bad guys, are like, I guess I'm the bad guys and they put on the mask and they're all bad together, you know, that kind of thing. Right. So this happened in, you know, in Europe in the mid 20th century where communism led to communism came first and then fascism arose in part as a reaction to communism. And of course they just punched it out in. Go ahead.

[Claire Lehmann]

The communists not only described liberals as being fascists in the 1920s and 30s, they described slightly watered down communists as fascists. You know, the, the extreme left has always demonized their enemies as fascists and then they create support for a genuine fascist movement. And then, you know, lots of people are, by that stage, they're exhausted. They can't fight the extreme left anymore. So I, I would agree with that analysis.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

That's right. Now the thing about that is, of course it is an unreasonable right. And so now you're caught between it. It's kind of like in physics there's this concept of an induced dipole moment. Do you know what that is? So basically when you've got like an external electrical field, then you can have like you push the charge over to one side, like the positive charge, and then the negative charge is on this side. Now suddenly the thing is polarized, Right. And so like in the presence of an electrical field, this thing can the polarization that didn't exist before can now exist. Right. And, you know, there's a. There's all these graphs that can show on, you know, how it's in the US in particular, it's not one country, it's two parties, and how only 4% of Democrats marry Republicans and how that's visible at the level of congressional votes and how it's visible at the level of social networks and how it's actually been coming further apart. Because it used to be that it was basically like one country, red, white and blue, and now it's red and blue. And red is in their own social networks, like Truth Social and Gab and X, and, you know, blue is in threads and, and Blue sky and, and Mastodon or what have you. Right. And the thing about that, though, is that actually happened in most of the world in the 20th century. You know, we've talked about that before. Right. Or should I, you know, do, do you want to.

[Claire Lehmann]

You can refresh me?

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Sure. So, like, in the 20th century, you had South Korea and North Korea, you had East Germany and West Germany, you had, you know, Hong Kong and, and Taiwan on the one hand, and you had the PRC on the other hand. And what people sort of kind of forget is that both capitalism and actually communism and actually fascism all arguably originated at least in part in America. And this is something that Yarvin has written about, but other people have written about it like the right version of it is, or, you know, left wingers correctly say, oh, a lot of Hitler's ideas came from the Confederates and from eugenics and so on. The right will say, well, the progressives were eugenicists too. And the right will also say, actually Trotsky raised money in New York and the ideas of communism came out of the west and they went east and they basically were exported there. And so the left says that fascism was due to, in part, the American right. And the right says communism was in part due to the American left. They're actually both correct. And of course, capitalism is also an American thing. So the ideologies that the rest of the world fought against were sort of cooked up in the wet lab. That was America, you know, so to speak. Those ideologies in the Koreas, for example, tore that apart. The germ. You know, there's. There's this really interesting book called I think four Germanies. And I remember actually looking for a book that had to be written by somebody who was like this. I was like, you know, if you live in a particular spot in Germany and you're long lived enough, you could have lived through Weimar, Hitler, East Germany and then democracy after 1989. Right. Like if you're long lived enough, you could have made it all the way through and you wouldn't have to be that long lived because Weimar was like the 20s and, you know, but if you're 70ish, 80ish, you, you would have, you would have done a normal human life. Could have actually experienced four Germanies. And there's this, there's this book on that. Right. So the rest of the world was sort of just thrashed back and forth by these sort of ideological currents that emanated in the west. And now it's the west itself that is being thrashed by this stuff. And so in many ways there's this concept I have which is history is running in reverse. And so all the countries in the. Yeah, go ahead.

[Claire Lehmann]

No, I'm familiar with that thesis that history is running in reverse. I would just push back just a little bit on this, on the idea that the fascism and communism, I mean, there's, of course, there's some American connections. You know, Ho Chi Minh was in New York and so on, but we can't forget the influence of the French Revolution as well, which is obviously, you know, obviously led straight in a straight line to communism.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Yes, but, but the, but the architects of the French Revolution cited the American Revolution as inspiration because France had helped America. Yeah, right. Yeah, go ahead.

[Claire Lehmann]

No, no, no, it's. I think, I think it's good to acknowledge the American influence, but not, not be, not be like Chomsky and place America at the center of the universe, you know? You know what I mean?

[Balaji Srinivasan]

It's, it's not, it's. Yeah, I know what you're saying. It's not mono. Factorial. But I do think it's interesting to. Because of course, you know, French people bear responsibility for the French Revolution, you know, the Russian Revolution happened in Russia and all the people involved bear responsibility, you know, but it is something which is like. It is interesting the extent to which a lot of these ideas that at least in part to a degree that's not usually acknowledged, Right, So that they originated both far right and far left in America, that they got exported to the rest of the world and they laid waste to huge swaths of the world. And now the rest of the world has immunity to that herd. Immunity in whole or in part. Right. Not completely, but like Eastern Europe has gone through communism, right. China's gone through communism, India's gone through socialism. They're all tired of that stuff. They just Kind of basically want to do business. Go ahead.

[Claire Lehmann]

Yeah, they've got. Yeah, they're. They're tired because they've had contact with reality.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Yes. But I, you know, it's funny. I think it's possible that Australia this century is again, as you guys call it, the lucky country. You know, you want to know my case for Australia?

[Claire Lehmann]

Go for it.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

So I'm going to make the case for Australia and you tell me how wrong I am or whether it's an interesting angle. Okay. Because you'll have local color on this. Okay. Do you see this post? Like, did you know Australia almost paid off its national debt? Something I didn't even know was possible for a Western government. By right before the financial crisis, the Australian government had gotten its debt down to 4.7% of GDP, all the way from, like this crazy number in, you know, World War. After World War II. Right? It's all the way down to 4.7%, which shows it's possible. People don't think it's possible. And if you look at this again, this is 2021, right? Right after the pandemic, like, Australia and New Zealand are sort of air gapped relative to, you know, the, the rest of the G7. That has significantly higher, you know, gross debt and net debt. And then this is a percent of gdp. And then if you look at the millionaire migration map, do you see this chart over here? Australia and New Zealand consistently are up there with Singapore and the UAE for where global millionaires want to relocate. And that's kind of like a distributed diligence, right? Because all these different millionaires are like, okay, this is a pretty good place, all things considered. It's one of the best in the world to go to. And so what are they doing differently? And you tell me how wrong I am, or maybe I'm right, which is my very rough impression. This is from like two years ago. That it's a bizarre world where the right and left are actually somewhat effective. So the conservatives actually cut deficits and the liberals actually oppose wars. Lol. What a concept.

[Claire Lehmann]

Right?

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Go ahead.

[Claire Lehmann]

Yeah, no, you go on. You go on.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Okay. I'll make my case and you tell me I'm wrong. All right? So then I was like, how do they actually do this? How do they pay their national debt? They've remained a technologically modern Western country. They didn't go to autocracy or Mad Max. And I was like, how do they actually do this? And it appears that it's partly asset sales. Like, they did sales of the Sydney Airport and so on and so forth. Right. And one of my views is also that maybe Australia is a little more on the right and New Zealand more on the left. That's like a functional left and right within the Anglo world that continues down under because it's far away from all the shooting and craziness of North America. And you know, for example, New Zealand also like they tried to constrain inflation with the famous 2% target. Do you know about that? Do you know what I'm talking about?

[Claire Lehmann]

No, I don't. Yeah, go on.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

So central banks around the world in theory at least try to keep inflation at 2%. Why? Because newly New Zealand actually set a number. Now actually inflation arguably should be 0% or even negative because of you should prices should decrease as technology improves and then people will say oh, liquidity trap. And then my response to that is something called subdivision. But we can, we can go back to that. The, the point though is that New Zealand pioneered this concept of 2% caps on inflation. This small country underneath and even though it's nominally on the left, that was actually like a center right policy that got adopted by the world. Right. And so it's like a functional Anglo world is how I think about it. And I'll be brief. Basically what is my case? Why, why are these maybe the best run countries in the Anglo world? One argument for this is that their small size and proximity has result. Proximity to China has resulted in a totally different economy than America. They don't have illusions of having the strongest military. Australia doesn't have illusions of the reserve currency. They just dig stuff out of the ground and sell to China. So they have a real economy.

[Claire Lehmann]

Yeah, that's basically it. We just, we're the custodians of the dirt. We have this big chunk of land which has lots of valuable resources in them and we dig them up and there's, there's, you know, it means that we have an unsophisticated economy. We don't innovate and we don't have a, a lot of depth when it comes to our tech industry. But it also means that we have this huge tax revenue base. It also means that working class, you know, there's all of this conversation happening in, in the United States about bringing back manufacturing jobs for working class men. Well, you know, Australia has very high paid jobs for working class men. They're in the mines. So we don't have this sort of disaffection between, you know, the working. There's not this sense that the, the middle class has been hollowed out. Like I can go up to Queensland and my cousin who didn't. Two cousins who didn't finish high school or will be earning more than my cousins who have gone all the way through university and who have become medical doctors. So there isn't this sense of massive inequality between people who are educated and who are knowledge workers and the working class because we have, we have these huge industries, you know, in regional places where people dig up stuff out of the ground.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

So that part maybe, maybe that's, I mean, one way I've thought about it is in the 20th century there was an overcorrection towards, you know, obviously to communism, socialism in much of the world, including in China. But the parts that were saved relatively were those that had Anglophone influence. So Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan, insofar as Chiang Kai Shek was certainly funded by the Americans, right? And so the, and then of course the Chinese diaspora. And that's how sort of the, the Chinese world continued. And people knew that. In fact, the fact that it continued in that way is what led to the reboot of China. Because Deng Xiaoping, he saw how successful all three of them contributed. He, he was scared by how successful or concerned by how successful Taiwan was getting. They had a GDP comparable to China. He emulated Singapore's strategy of basically building a modern country with Chinese characteristics. And then he also had Hong Kong right across the border and then he built Shenzhen there. So all three of those Chinese islands of sanity. And of course the Chinese diaspora was important in terms of building China's trade around the world. All four arguably were important to rebooting China. And I wonder, and here's a thesis and I'll give some more data on it if you want. I wonder if that's history running in reverse this century where this century, China's island of stability and America is grand theft auto. It's American anarchy. All the shooting and all the shouting, all the First Amendment and the Second Amendment, the shouting and the shooting. And of course, you know, the thing is, of course I'm supportive of the First Amendment and the second Amendment, but they're meant for virtuous people that have self discipline, right? And not people who are just screaming obscenities at each other and, you know, blasting each other on the street. And it's like, you have rights but you have responsibilities. And maybe there's no responsibility. And so therefore the right is just this abstract kind of thing. And so it doesn't necessarily lead to a good society if people are migrating to countries that they don't have a First Amendment or Second Amendment, they're voting with their feet against at least how that's being implemented in practice. And of course, because it's so sacrosanct, it'll never go away, which is fine, but then you're going to have a shooting gallery and a shouting gallery. So maybe the Anglo world has just over indexed on individual freedom to the level of anarchy. And that's the thing that everybody's shouting about, we actually want, is when anarchy is in excess, you want order. And so the parts of the Anglophone world, like China or like, like Australia and Singapore and, and New Zealand, those are the ones that have some sinic influence where there is Chinese trade or Chinese mining or Chinese exports, which keeps a sort of pragmatic level head on their shoulders relative to the craziness of where North America is going. Let me know if you, if you agree with that, disagree with that. That's a thesis. I'm not endorsing it, not disagreeing with it. That's a thesis that I, that I've contemplated.

[Claire Lehmann]

I think it's an interesting thesis. I would just add some anecdotal experience that could be one data point to support it. I mean, it's too big a thesis for me to really say yes or no, that I agree with it. But at least where I live in Sydney, we have a very strong migrant influence and migrant population in the education system, which makes the education, our education system, our selective schools and universities more competitive, at least at the level where your children are going through school. I mean, in the universities there's issues with lots of international students and there's some concerns that standards have lowered. But at least in the selective schools that I'm familiar with in Sydney, there's intense pressure, so there's a lot of pressure to succeed. You know, these kids who come from migrant families, we have, you know, they're the product of tiger parents. And so we have, you know, at least where I live in Sydney, that it's a tiger parent culture, like heavy investment in your children's education and it flows on to the Anglo parents as well. So, I mean, that could be one aspect of this influence that you're describing that can be beneficial. I mean, some people complain about it, but there's also this benefit to it, which means that, you know, there's no, you know, when Vivek did that tweet.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Yes.

[Claire Lehmann]

Where he was.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Vivek's famous tweet. Yes. Let's talk about Vivek Street. Yeah. Go Ahead.

[Claire Lehmann]

I was just going to say, well, that's. If you live in Sydney, in a fairly affluent area, like, there's no escaping that reality and you just have to compete in that environment. You have to, you know, your kids are competing with the kids of tiger parents. And if they're not studying hard and if they're not excelling, then they don't, you know, they're not in. Not in the race. So I think there's a little bit more acceptance of the reality here in Australia simply because, you know, we're a smaller population and we realize that we do have to compete. And, you know, there is, you know, we can't just shut ourselves off from the world. That's my perception anyway. It might be. It might. Other Australians might have a different. A different perspective.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Yeah. So I want to. I would actually put the. I haven't actually discussed the vague tweets. I want to actually. So this one. So, you know, the Vague tweet from December 27, 2024. Right. So the thing about this is, first of all, Germany views. This got.

[Claire Lehmann]

I can see from, from looking at120.100.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

120 million is a lot, but it's enormous for X. It basically means like essentially almost. It's like half the platform saw it. It's like it was absolutely massive. Right. And, and like to just, just a level set. There are many, many calls to murder on X that get far less outrage than this call to study. Okay. So like, this absolutely hit a nerve. People freaked out. And the funny thing is, you know, when I read this at first I'm like, this is just like what any Asian or Indian parent would tell their kids. It's like, it's the most bog standard lecture I've ever heard, you know, and, but, but I think that people freaked out about it for several overlapping reasons. The first is maybe the obvious, which is that during. So when Vic came on the scene in early 2020, I mean, he had been around before and you know, I like Vivek, just, you know, full disclosure, I like Vivek, but I don't agree with him on everything. But, you know, I think we're friendly. When Vic came on the scene, he hit the window right as Elon was opening up X. Right. Like late 2022, early 2023. And he was basically just saying obvious things like XX and XY chromosomes are real, that kind of stuff. Right.

[Claire Lehmann]

Meritocr.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Meritocracy is good. Exactly. And the thing is that because he was, you know, frankly, he was like personal color Dark skinned whatever, he could say things that a white guy on the right would get hit for. And so that was an important kind of thing in 2023 and up to the election of November 2024. But then by December 2024, what happened was two things happened. First, at the beginning of December, you had all the left on X just went en masse to blue sky. So like 20 million people or some crazy number like that, right? Which meant that now the spectrum on X had the deleted. The left part was deleted. So now the center was the left and the right was like, you know, the right. So the center of arguing for a racial global meritocracy became the left and the open borders left at the most right. So suddenly, unbeknownst to anybody, the entire political spectrum has shifted 30, 40 points over to the right. And the exact same words that would have seemed center right or even right two months earlier now seemed like they were on the left because they were coming now to the left of a big chunk in X. Does that make any sense? Should I draw that?

[Claire Lehmann]

No, it makes perfect sense. It makes perfect sense. And you predicted that would happen. I remember a conversation with you, you saying, and you said, people like me, the sort of center right will be the left soon because the whole Overton window is going to shift.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

It's all going to shift. And so, yeah, exactly. I consider myself center, maybe center right in this context. I'd certainly be center left, perhaps in a Chinese context and probably dead center, I would say globally. So A was just that backdrop meant that something that was considered center right or even right was suddenly on the left, number one, that kind of same kind of statements. B was now that the election was over, a lot of white guys on the right didn't feel the need for a proxy to speak for them saying the things that they wanted to say. They would just say it themselves. They'd yell it, they scream it. Okay, so they got on the wrong side of that. C is up to that point, VEC had basically spoken in a sense, you know, for like, you know, the right or for mag and so on. And in this context, I don't think he was doing that. It seemed like, oh, he was speaking for Indians or he's speaking for immigrants or he's speaking for this. So it seemed like, oh my God, he now he sounds like an ethnic activist. People pattern match. I don't think that was the case. I think he was actually speaking for merit. But that's, that's what it was. D and this was another aspect of it. The, you know, the, the show references he brought up were like, saved by the Bell and stuff like that. And the problem with that is, and I'm not trying to be over click, I'm just explaining now, while the dust is settled, why people got mad. And what I think was correct about it was that was like the last functional era of America, like the 90s, right. And so saying that that was a bad era that, you know, went wrong. However, had he said onlyfans culture, me too. If he had said that, then he would have very little argument in terms of the baseline, I think, where he was arguing from. Right. And then the next aspect is. And this was something that I had to struggle to put into words at first. And then I realized what I was looking at until roughly, I think, after the 2024 election, I had never before seen a critical mass of white Americans really feel emotionally that the world was their, their competition rather than their market. Because, like, all of the guys who I've ever worked with in tech have basically been like, yeah, it's this one. There we go.

[Claire Lehmann]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

So this is honestly, like, these are, these are all the tech CEOs and tech guys, frankly, that I worked with, right? Yeah, they were like, until literally 2024, just about every guy who had ever worked with at Stanford, at Inventure, in startups, in tech, like, you know, I grant, of course, that's a select sample of people, but I never, I mean, the discussion was, okay, after we win in the U.S. how do we expand into Turkey? How do we open up Japan, right? We're going to need to recruit a Japanese person over there or what have you, right? We literally had, in many companies, I've had, we've had the global expansion prioritization, and we think about what markets to move into and so on and so forth, right?

[Claire Lehmann]

This is a positive sum attitude.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

It's a positive sum attitude of someone who feels they can win in the game of global capitalism. Right? And the completely new thing to me was that like, and I heard this not simply from people on X, but I heard this actually, to my surprise, from people who I knew were globally competitive in tech. And they started sounding like, whiny and like beaten in their heads. And like, for example, one guy who's like a nice guy and, you know, he was like, he's like, oh, you, you Indians are very, you know, connected and you have ethnic nepotism and so and so forth. I'm like, what, you want, you want to do a diversity report? On the company, like, because that's literally what he said. I'm like, how would you quantify that? He's like, oh, you're hiring more of your own people. I'm like, how is that not exactly like saying white privilege and you're hiring only white people and whatnot. Right. And he just, he hadn't thought of it that way. But I'm like, you know, every. The flip side of that by the way, is if you have any affinity group of any kind to get somebody to take a risk on a company in an early stage or any company, it's going to be enriched for people from your own social group of whatever that is. And especially a first gen immigrant doesn't know that many people within the country. So you're going to get other people, you know, who know them, who will take a risk to work for the business and then by the time you get to second or third generation people assimilate, and that's what happened to Italians and Poles or what have you. So there's a very reasonable explanation for, for all that. But the, but the macro of it wasn't even so much specifics of that. It was just that they actually felt that these like relatively new arrival Indian people were like more, were more connected than they were. And I was just scratching my head. I was like, you know, when I grew up, I didn't know anybody, right. I was the least connected. I was just like the most nerdy. Like, like, like it was a graph with zero connections, Literally zero. Right. And I was like, you know what I realized? And maybe like your thoughts on this is like what wokeness did to a generation or a group of people is even if they like reacted with sort of the opposite of woke at the surface level, they sort of internalized certain patterns which were like emotional and histrionic whining. Basically feel it like learned helplessness. Right. The software got messed up. Go ahead, let me, let me, let me know your thoughts because you may be, you may thinking similar things.

[Claire Lehmann]

I completely agree with the internalization of the victimhood culture. That's definitely a thing on the right too.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Now. That's crazy.

[Claire Lehmann]

Yeah, absolutely. I think, I think what you're touching on though with the observation with two and the reaction to Vivek's tweet and the observation of, you know, people that, you know is there's something really deep going on. And one of the more interesting analyses I've read has actually been in Quillet. You might be familiar with Andrew Roberts, who's a British historian who has chronicled Winston Churchill. I think he's probably Winston Churchill's most celebrated biographer. Anyway, he, he has written a couple of pieces for us. They're just short pieces just about the decline of the British Empire. And he says that the British Empire, the culture, went through phases. He likens it to phases of grief. So a few years ago, I think it was 2021, he wrote a piece for us. You know, this is before Putin invaded Ukraine. This was just that, you know, Covid was happening. But he said that Americans are currently in the denial phase. I think it may have been after Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan. He was saying America is in the denial phase of its declining empire. And I thought it was a bit, you know, it was a provocative argument at the time. But I see it now. Like I, I see what he's saying now. You know, the years have gone on and I can see, I can see the denial. And you know, when people are in denial, they will have cognitive dissonance. So they'll react strongly to evidence of the, of whatever it is that they're denying. So if, if people are in denial that China is becoming a superpower or the biggest superpower in the world, and if they're in denial about America's declining global hegemony, then any evidence that is in support of that thesis is going to cause cognitive dissonance and people will react against that to keep the denial going. But now Andrew Roberts wrote a follow up piece and he's arguing that Trump is speeding up this phase. It's pretty clear now with the trade war that we're entering into the negotiation phase.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

What's the title of that one?

[Claire Lehmann]

That would probably be America's Grief Cycle. That was published a couple of weeks ago.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Oh, the negotiation phase. Good, good.

[Claire Lehmann]

It's a, it's a metaphor.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Maybe, maybe. Should I do a podcast with Andrew? Yeah, I agree with that.

[Claire Lehmann]

Yeah, it's a, it's a metaphor and it's a provocative one. But, you know, I think, I think it's, I think when you get, when you're getting these sort of irrational emotional responses from people, you can understand, helps to understand it through this context. Like there is a. People agree, you know, there's this, you have to come to terms with the fact that the American empire is dying at some point and it, and, and it will cause grief. And how you deal with that grief is going, you know, you will go through phases like I've had to go through stages of grief myself about it, and I'm not even American.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Well, it's funny you say that because it's true. Like, when I was writing the network state book, there's actually a paragraph that I deleted because it brought a manly tear to my eye. And it was essentially about, like the metaphor of Uncle Sam as a. Like a beloved, you know, elder who's passing away. And, you know, he's passing away and he's not going to always be there and need to prepare for the next step. And then a bunch of people are like, why do you want grandpa to die? Like, I don't want grandpa to die, but he's not going to be around forever. And I can look at all these signs of incipient this and that, and then they don't want to plan for it at all, right? They want to be in denial about it. And they want to say that you saying it is like a bad omen and it's demoralizing, it'll further and speed it up and so and so forth. And. And I get that.

[Claire Lehmann]

I actually do get that sometimes I look at the. Look at history through the lens of art and how much you can sort of see how confident a culture is by their output of art. And I've been thinking for a long time that the exhaustion of Hollywood, you know, with all of their remakes, they can't come up with anything original. There are. There are no. There's very few new hero movies that really, truly depict a new sort of, you know, the hero journey in an original and new way. I mean, there's still good stuff being made and there's. There's some great stuff being made for tv, but it doesn't. It's not like it was in the 90s where there was just dozens and dozens of classic films coming out from Hollywood. And so as an Australian, you grow up on American culture, you're sort of marinated in American culture, and you develop a very strong sympathy and alliance with a nation that you've never even like. I didn't visit the United States until I was in my 30s, but I had grown up on American culture, and that's soft power. So the American culture has had that impact globally for gener, you know, for a couple of generations at least. But it's now receding. And the woke stuff has a lot to do with why it's receding. Because people look at the insane, you know, most people aren't woke. And people are looking at the insanity and, you know, the trans stuff, the hyper, you know, the focus on racial politics, the erosion of meritocracy. And so there's the, the feeling of alliance or sympathy with American culture is sort of eroded and it erodes gradually over time. And then when you've got this lack of cultural confidence coming through with, you know, fewer great films being made, fewer, like, less music coming out, that's, you know, getting kids excited, like, it all. It's like a, A tide going back out to sea. Like, you just. You feel less connected to this culture that you once grew up on. And, you know, and, and I think it does tie in with, like, the lack of confidence ties in with the military defeat. So, you know, you've got the, the loss in Vietnam, Afghanistan.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

I, I'd say that's taking it back too far because the win in the Cold War felt, Felt like it, but go ahead. Yeah, I agree.

[Claire Lehmann]

True, true, true. But, you know, the, The Vietnam War dragged on for a very long time. You know, you could, you could argue it was the first salvo in, In. In. In an ongoing conflict between China and the United States.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

That's interesting. I would not. I. Because I think there was such a discontinuity in 1978 in China due to, like, Deng Xiaoping taking over China. But, but I do agree that basically that was like the nadir for Vietnam, and then they've rebooted and so on since then. I want to respond to something, actually. I want to. There's a few loops from here, right? So first is to add to your point on stuck Hollywood, right? You know, clothes have become relatively constant. Like, you can't point. Maybe, maybe, you know, somebody who's a real fashionista could do it. But to point to the styles of the zeros versus the 2000 and tens versus 2000 and tens. The one thing that's really very obvious maybe is like the rise in tattoos, right? But. But otherwise you wouldn't be able to. It wouldn't be like grunge of the 90s or like, you know, big hair of the 80s, not some standout kind of thing. And the reason, I think, is that fashion or things, all of the innovation and culture has moved to the Internet because you can instantly tell a 90s website, 2000 website, 2010s, 2020s, you can tell AI art that's genuinely new. Like, whether you like it or not, it's genuinely a new thing in the 2000 and twenties. That is the visually distinct characteristic of this. You know, and it's literally when you think about what you're looking at, what's changing rapidly is what's on the screen. And America is becoming a Museum. Like, for example. We don't. Go ahead.

[Claire Lehmann]

No, no, no, that's just a fun. That's a funny play on the description of Europe that we often.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Yes, that's my point exactly. You got it right. Because we don't think of, like, you know, obviously there's French entrepreneurs, and I'm not. There's actually a lot of great things happening in Europe. I'm not beating up on Europe. But you don't think of, like, French culture is constantly dynamic and evolving and what have. There's like the Baguette and there's like the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre and, you know, Arc de Triomphe and whatever. Right, go ahead.

[Claire Lehmann]

No, no, no, no, I get what you're saying. Yeah, it's. It's sort of stuck in a moment of time.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Exactly. So, like, American culture got stuck because in my View, the version 3.0, there's Britain, then America, then the Internet. The Internet is to America what America was to Britain. And that's a deep thing, and there's a lot I can say about that. But that means that all of the. Everything has gotten uploaded. Right. So, for example, how much of your communication do you do on the Internet? All of it.

[Claire Lehmann]

A lot. Yeah.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Right. How about your transactions? Basically, all of it. Right. And how about your friends? How about, you know, everything is. And so what is America minus the Internet? Physical America by itself is like baseball and hot dogs and. And so on and so forth. Whenever anybody defends and says, oh, the US is still doing great, they're always pointing to the tech companies.

[Claire Lehmann]

I think that's right. I think that's really interesting. And you can kind of see it like the, you know, the public infrastructure is not up to date, obviously. You know, if you ride the subway in New York, it's like a hundred years old. You know, it's. It is. It is not just a museum. It's in decay.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

The reason for that, I think, is so. From some earlier threads, you know, this is a graph that I think is very important related to the grief thing that we were talking about earlier. Right. This is a graph that is super important for at least my mental model of the world.

[Claire Lehmann]

Oh, okay. Right.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

So essentially what this is saying is basically that for thousands of years, the economic geocenter of the world was basically in, you know, Eurasia. And to be clear, that doesn't mean, like the, you know, the economic center was literally in Afghanistan or whatever or, you know, this, this. This re. This is Iran, this is Pakistan, Afghanistan. I think it's not saying it was literally here. What it's saying is if you took the average of Indian economic strength and, and Chinese economic strength, Middle Eastern, European, and you weighted them, the, the centers, you'd get something around here. Right. So it's basically Eurasian. And that makes sense because the Mongols were able to invade Europe and you know, like Islam was able to invade Europe and vice versa. There's some degree of balance. And Marco Polo, where did he seek out? He sought out China. And Columbus risked his life to come to India. Right. So clearly there was stuff happening, you know, east of the Caucasus. Right. But then with the Industrial Revolution, Europe just got way ahead of everybody else, Right. And the center of the global economy rocketed out to Europe and basically Europe was just the center of everything and nobody else mattered. And then they started beating the crap out of each other with World War I and World War II and 1950 was basically peak Westernization, peak centralization. And this is basically the time when everybody else was bombed to smithereens. China was communist, India was socialist, Russia was communist, Japan was atomic bombed. And this is also the moment that all these post war institutions were set up. We literally call them post war institutions. They were set up at the time of peak America ever. Right. The only other time you can argue might be 1991. Right. When there wasn't even a Soviet Union around. But this period is like peak America. And the problem is that people are calibrated on the all time, all human history high as being the normal. Yeah, right, yeah. And that's the issue. The issue is they think this is normal, that complete and total global American dominance is normal when it's incredibly historically abnormal.

[Claire Lehmann]

Even on a sociological level, it was an abnormal decade. Like people look at family formation in the 1950s, but people got married very young in the 1950s compared to the historical norm of Western society. So like in the 18th and 19th centuries in Western Europe in England, women wouldn't get married until their late 20s. They weren't getting married at the age of 21. It was quite an unusual late age of marriage for women. And birth rates were actually slowly but gradually coming down. In the west as well, the baby boom generation was a massive outlier. And there are various different reasons for that. But you know, in, in Australia at least, and I pretty sure in America as well, the gov, because of World War II, the governments thought, well, these young men are coming back from war, we've got to build a lot of housing, got to give them a house. And so there was this massive public investment into Housing infrastructure. And it enabled couples to marry young and start having babies young, women started having babies young. So we get the baby boom generation. But that was a historical anomaly. It wasn't. We haven't like birth rates were trending down. We haven't this idea that the, the 1950s was sort of like, it was a strange generation for many, for many reach for many reasons, not just the fact that, you know, it was peak American empire and also for, like, technological reasons. You've got the proliferation of household appliances, you've got washing machines, dryers, toasters, vacuum cleaners. Like, we forget how much technology was invented in the late 19th century and then the first half of the 20th century and how it changed people's lives.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

So here is my thesis on this in a nutshell, is if you look at the 20th century, technology favored centralization. And so every country, basically all kinds of giga states arose, right? China, modern India, the Soviet Union, the usa, giga states that just had the scale to beat the heck out of their rivals. Right. This is something that Orwell also talked about. Eurasia and East Asia. He was observing the trend towards bigness. Right. Because you had mass media and mass production and just extreme centralization. Technology drove that. And. And never argue with the man who buys ink by the barrel and you can't fight city hall and so on and so forth. Right. And the peak of that was basically like, in many senses, yeah, The Soviet Union had 100% marginal taxation, but America had 90%. Right. So you could not get rich mid century in America. You could serve your country and it was the most free in the world, but it was still 90% marginal taxation. Right. And so at the same time, by the way, you know, in the Soviet Union, do you know, they had a chalice in stacks?

[Claire Lehmann]

I didn't know that. I didn't.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Yeah. So the Soviet Union was way more conservative than we think socially. Right. Here, the bachelor tax. Because after World War II, they're like, you know, you need to have kids. Right.

[Claire Lehmann]

I was just familiar with Lenin introducing abortion. Yeah.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Yes. So this is when it started to go in reverse. Right, Right. Stalin encouraged adult people to reproduce, increasing because they had lost so many. They lost tens of millions of people in World War II. They're like, you have to. It was symbolic, but it was like a status thing. And most childless married women. And, you know, essentially the point was, I mean, in many ways in the Soviet Union, your money was more like your allowance, but it was like a social penalty. Right. For not doing that. What was my point My point is that mid century America was way more communist than we think of it. And mid century Soviet Union was way more socially conservative than we think about it. Like those were actually not just. Right. Okay, so now we've moved totally in a different direction. And the problem is everybody is in the, in America is anchored on 1950 and in fact the world in a weird way is anchored on America in 1950. And they've. Because they haven't, I mean, unless they're in China or in some other country, they haven't been told really that many stories of what their life was like at that time. India now has some stories about partition. Right, right. China has some stories about like, you know, the Chinese Civil War or at least the Korean War where the Chinese soldiers were, you know, like, I mean they were fighting on the North Korean side. But you know, they're portrayed as heroes in China. But most of the world doesn't really have that many good movies about how horrible their 20th century was. Let me pause there. Go ahead.

[Claire Lehmann]

Yeah, that's an interesting point. I hadn't thought of that. You know, it speaks to the power, the power of America's export culture, how just how influential it has been.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Yes. And actually, you know, it's funny is I'm going to show a graph here which is kind of like that most countries in the world actually had like negative 100% returns. Not most, like many countries had negative 100 returns in the 20th century. And Australia, Canada and America are the only three that like escape that. Australia is actually the real lucky country. U.S. canada, Australia escaped, but Russia, negative 100%. China over this window, negative 100%. Germany, negative 100%.

[Claire Lehmann]

It's not over the whole, it's not over the whole century. I was like, what? But I get a 20 year window. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Yes. So the point is basically what people don't understand is like this is a rebuttal. So this guy had a reasonable post. I wasn't attacking him. But it was this post by like Vanguard which basically said the stock market always goes up, like persists. Right? Yeah. And so this post by Vanguard basically says the stock market always goes up and you know, if you sell, you lose money. But the two problems with that are, right, so A, the reason it goes up is the Fed prints and that can't, can't do that forever. And B, it is like essentially betting on a trend to continue indefinitely. Which is the surest way to lose your shirt.

[Claire Lehmann]

Right? Yeah. Doesn't account for tail, long tail events.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Correct. Right. So the reason I say this is the US Is anchored on a story of the past, which is an illusion. And that story is something like, oh, what the normal way of the world is supposed to be, that a guy with a high school degree can have a house and two kids. And that is neglecting the fact that somebody who's much smarter and harder working in Poland or Vietnam or something like that was starving to death. Right. We're getting shot in war or under communism, and now that person is actually competing in the global economy.

[Claire Lehmann]

You know, it's. It's kind of ironic because we could. We can use the sort of the woke language here and describe that perspective as being privileged, you know?

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Yes, that's right. It's funny. Ha ha. I want to ask about what are the plans for Colette? What are you doing? You turned into like a subscription only thing or something like that. Is that right?

[Claire Lehmann]

Well, our business model is based on subscription, so we're putting more stuff behind paywalls. But not everything's behind a paywall. So if you go to our front page now, everything should be open. We'll put stuff behind paywalls only after a few days.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Okay, so Kullet is open again?

[Claire Lehmann]

Yeah, we've been open. We're always open. We will put up paywalls after a couple of days, and sometimes people will land on our page and discover a paywall, but it's not actually a paywall. It's just asking people to put in their email address so we can send them a newsletter. But it's free, so. And our YouTube channel is completely free, and we're putting a lot of stuff up on YouTube, some stuff that doesn't go on the website. So I encourage any of your listeners to check out our YouTube. I'm finding that a lot of people actually like listening to narrated versions of our articles. So.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Do you have a thesis on that?

[Claire Lehmann]

Well, I mean, I have a. A negative thesis, which is that we're moving into a post literate society.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Right.

[Claire Lehmann]

Which is not great. But there's just a bigger. There's just a bigger market for audio and vis. And video. People don't like to read. And. And the. The truth is I listen to a lot of audio myself when I'm doing housework, you know, when I'm doing stuff. So if I'm commuting or I'm doing chores, I like to listen to interesting podcasts. And I think that's a re. You know, a reasonable substitute because you can't be reading all of the time. But I do think it's sad that people are reading less and reading is sort of becoming a marker of elite status in a way. I mean, I guess it always was.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

I guess it always was. Right. You know, there's a theory that the mass literacy of the 20th century. Like, why were the Soviets so into that? Because otherwise people couldn't read their propaganda.

[Claire Lehmann]

Yeah, yeah, right, Interesting.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Right. Like, so it was like, it was almost like a port in their head that they could install Bolshevik propaganda or whatever into, you know, so otherwise why were they doing it? You know, they were really into mass literacy so you could read Pravda.

[Claire Lehmann]

Right.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Know what the party line was. Right.

[Claire Lehmann]

Yeah, yeah.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

But my theory is a, there's technological drive, obviously, which is AirPods plus 5G plus good phones, plus also the pandemic shock. You know, many people did this. B is what I don't know. And I made some data on this. Is it a compliment or is it a. Is it a replacement? Right. That say, are you. Are people reading? And then they're also listening while they're walking or on the treadmill or doing chores or driving or sleeping. Like, you know, they get, you know, someone to read them to sleep effectively. Or is it literally something where rather. Because, I mean, just sitting and reading something is so much faster than listening. I know, at least for you and me. Right, yeah. That's why it took me a while to appreciate that people actually wanted this read to them, you know, Go ahead.

[Claire Lehmann]

Exactly. Every podcast we do gets about 30,000 downloads. If we have a video that does well on YouTube, it will have get over 100,000 views. Our top performing essays. We do get essays that get over 100,000 views, but that. They're rare. We'd only have a handful of those. We'd have many more videos that get that many views than we do essays. It's much easier for a video to get a hundred thousand views than it is to get an essay that many views. And so there's just a bigger audience for audio and video. And it took me years to figure this out because I have a very strong preference for text and reading because I can. I am a fast reader, but I find with listening to podcasts, like, you know, people aren't precise with their language because everything is just spoken. When you are writing an essay, you have to be very careful with the words that you use and be careful about the facts that you're introducing into your essay. So you go and check and it's a much more. So when you're reading an essay It's a much more refined piece of work and you can, you know, your ability to absorb information that is correct or which has been edited and vetted is, you know, for me, the return on investment is so much higher when it comes to reading that. It took me a really long time to understand that audio and video is the way of the future and that we need to be leaning into those mediums. But now that we have, I'm really happy because we're reaching a bigger audience. YouTube is our fastest growing vertical.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Well, okay, so now on Colette itself, actually there are a couple things I wanted to ask you since you're actually one of the very first, you know, really online media creators, really doing an independent thing. There's a lot more folks who are doing substack like things and so on now, but you were one of the first. Do you do like, you know, how are you thinking about your mix of energy on Colette meetups versus subscribers versus like digital versus physical? Because that's something I think a lot about obviously is like bring digital communities into the physical world. Like, is there, would there be a Quilletteville or something in, in. In Claire's future, like the Quillet community, you know, with a queue in, in Queensland maybe. I don't know.

[Claire Lehmann]

Yeah, we've been hosting events in cities around the world over the years and they're, they, they are a lot of fun and we get a lot out of them. I over, you know, if I'm doing too many events though, I personally, I get quite exhausted because I get so many people coming up to me and trying to talk to me and it can be a bit overwhelming. But I think if we focus more on hosting events where people can just meet each other and you know, I, or my colleagues don't have to be active participants as much.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

You know, I have. One of the things I was a little surprised by was the relatively less overlap than I had thought between Colette and tech, given that a fair number of tech people did, especially in the early days, read Colette a lot and. And yet your community is more letters than numbers, is that right?

[Claire Lehmann]

Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

And is it, is it, you know, how Australia is it or is it just global Anglophone or how, you know.

[Claire Lehmann]

It'S definitely global Anglosphere. So It's. We're only 4% Australian.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Only 4%.

[Claire Lehmann]

Yeah. The event that's probably above. Yeah, the events that we have here are pretty big and are always sold out. You know, we can easily just fill out a, you know, A big event space, you know, within a week or so. So our biggest. So 50% of our audience is in the United States. About 12% is in Canada, 14% in the UK so we're spread out over the Anglosphere.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

That's. I'm actually a little surprised by that, that you have because Canada about the same size as Australia. Maybe what it is is the political radicalism. Maybe this is a diagnosis of what we were talking about earlier. The political radicalism that we were talking about is actually more of a problem outside Australia than within it.

[Claire Lehmann]

Australia is not a very polarized. We don't have a very polarized political environment. It's.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

If anything, my thesis is getting proven. Go ahead.

[Claire Lehmann]

If anything, our problem is the opposite of polarization that we have. We have broad scale apathy, political apathy. People do not care about politics. They don't want to know about politics. It's good, but it's also bad because then people just start, you know, they're not familiar with policies they're voting for because we have compulsory voting.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

I sort of have a feeling, you know, sometimes there's like countries that are in ideological superposition, then a rubber band snaps and they just go all the way in this direction. And I think what happened with the, before the tariffs, Australia was sort of caught between China and America and there was like Aukus, which is basically in my view fake. You know, I'm talking about Aukus. As soon as was announced, I knew it was fake.

[Claire Lehmann]

Yeah, yeah.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Give me your thoughts on Aukus. I'll tell you why I think it's fake.

[Claire Lehmann]

I can understand why someone would think it is fake because we don't. We're, we're meant to be giving over $300 billion to the United States to build us some nuclear powered submarines. And I mean it'd be great, it'd be absolutely great to have some nuclear powered submarines. I wish we already had them. But the, you know, the time frame is very stretched out. We can't necessarily rely. We. I don't think Australians feel confident anymore that the United States is going to be a reliable defense partner. I mean we are historically incredibly intertwined with the United States when it comes to defense. And we have a very important military base in the outback called Pine Gap, which has, is a very important signals directory connected to satellites and so on. So we have this long history. But given the extreme political dysfunction in the United States and how seemingly how domestic politics is now shaping foreign policy, which wasn't the case for generations, you know, foreign policy was Sort of separate from domestic internal squabbles in the United States. But now that that foreign policy is being dictated by domestic issues, we can't, you know, we can't, we don't know what the United States is going to be doing in 20 years from now. We can't tie our long term strategic defense, you know.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Yeah, exactly. Like, exactly. So when I, when I saw the arc, here's, here's just my outsider perspective. As soon as I saw this thing announced, this is like during the Biden administration, I was like, okay, well, first of all, Aukus is not the quad. Because you can argue maybe the quad. The quad at least has Australia, India, Japan and the US which are. India and Japan have a legitimate real security interest because China borders them and they've had issues with China in the past. Australia's okay. Maybe bringing the UK into it, which is all the other side of the world and hasn't been an Asian power since the handover of Hong Kong is just silly. Number one, it's not a world, it's not even a domestic power. It's not even like arguably not number one. Number two is like the whole point of like any military anything is you need like replenishment rate. If it takes you 20 years and 400, 300 and something billion dollars to build like three to five subs and they could get sunk in 10 minutes. That is like, that is like the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Right? That's like so obviously dumb. And moreover, it's like, obviously China has now the largest navy in the world, the fastest shipbuilding. So all Australia did was they spent hundreds of billions of dollars to piss off China. They didn't even buy the submarines. They basically like, you know, paid a political and economic cost kind of being in the middle here or what have you. And I was just like, this makes absolutely. I mean, you know, there's going to be a war with China in 2027. Okay. Australia gets your first sub in 2039. What? Yeah, it doesn't make any sense at all. Right. So, so the whole thing just struck me as very dumb. It was, it was, it was like paying huge amounts of money for like cavalry in 1912 and it's going to arrive in 1932, something like that. Right. And of course, World War II is just. World War I is just right. If, if there was a World war. I actually think, you know, can I tell you a feature of the tariffs rather than a bug?

[Claire Lehmann]

Sure.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

This, you know, look, nothing's 100. It's a volatile world, all kinds of crazy things may happen. But I think there's a possibility that this was virtualized World War III and the US Just lost. And it's just like. Go ahead.

[Claire Lehmann]

Well, that. Yeah, that would be. That would be a positive interpretation rather than it being the. The start of World War iii.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Yeah. And so here is the argument on that. Right. Basically, first is, you know, the whole Thucydides trap argument.

[Claire Lehmann]

Yeah. But it's re. It's interpreted in so many different contexts that sometimes I'm not. I'm not sure how it. How it sort of applies, but. Yeah, fine, sure.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

So like, the, the this is Graham Allison article, we can put that on screen from, like, from I think, mid decade, which said China and the US Are both rising. Are they destined for war? And so on and so forth. Right. And I actually think the Thucydides trap has actually already happened. It was called Ukraine, where Ukraine was a US Proxy and Russia was a China proxy, effectively, even though most people don't think of it that way. But Russia's only on its feet because China, like, at least supplied it with stuff. Right. It wouldn't sanction by the world. In fact, 80% of the world did not sanction Russia by population. And Ukraine is only on its feet because the US Supplied it with weapons. So those guys are duking it out. Right. And the U.S. lost, whether, like, exactly what terms or TBD. Right. I'm not saying it was a. Like, certainly it was a disastrous war. Putin shouldn't have done it. Millions of people were displaced. All kinds of people dead for a few miles in Ukraine disaster. But the US probably, like, is just negotiating the terms of how it's going to surrender. Right. And that's a defeat for NATO. And that's like Putin will probably plant his flag and say, cold War avenged, you know, I win, or whatever. And what it also shows is that all of NATO combined couldn't beat Russia, with China supplying Russia just a little bit. So obviously they can't beat China. Right.

[Claire Lehmann]

Yeah, yeah.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Right. Then B is like the Houthis, and Iran is funding the Houthis and China is allied with Iran. So China's proxies proxy has just blockaded the red Sea for 18 months. The US military has gotten defeated there. C, you have Hegseth talking about how China's hypersonics that can sink every aircraft carrier. Our whole power projection platform is aircraft carriers and the ability to projection, project power that way strategically around the globe. And yeah, we have a nuclear triad and all of that, but A big part of it. And if, you know, 15 hypersonic missiles can take out our 10 aircraft carriers in the first 20 minutes of a conflict, what does that look like? You have the Raytheon CEO saying you can't decouple from China. So while we talk about pulling supply chain out of China, resourcing out of China, I would tell you it's very impractical. We've been Derek risking for a couple of years making sure that we have second sources for critical componentry. But unlike Russia, where we pulled out two weeks after the invasion last year, we shut down our factories, we pulled our people out, and we completely cut off any contact with our Russian customers. You can't do that with China. Too big, too important and too necessary. You have the Secretary of the Navy saying that one Chinese shipyard is more, you know, ships in all of our shipyards combined, they have 13 shipyards. In some cases, their shipyard has more capacity. One shipyard has more capacity than all of our shipyards combined. You have all this kind of stuff which, you know, I mentioned it. You also have this graph which shows the US Military is made in China. Right. So all this stuff, I repeat it, but you know, I'm talking about. You see that graph?

[Claire Lehmann]

No, no, it doesn't surprise me at all.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

But yeah, yeah, yeah, like the Tomahawk missile, if you go to the vendors, vendor, it's made in China, like hundreds of Chinese vendors, everything, right. So, so you add all that up and the US military just doesn't exist in the same way. Right. And so like, what is Australia buying? I don't even get it. And you know, it's, it's something where I think people in Australia sort of now it might be like a rubber band snap, right? Like Vietnam, Malaysia and so on are all. Go ahead. I think that's going to be bad in its own way. And I'll come back to that. Go ahead.

[Claire Lehmann]

Yeah, I mean the, I think up until quite recently, up until quite recently, people were feeling good about our alliance with the United States. But just since the escalation, I think since the, the meeting in the Oval Office with Zelensky and then followed by the tariffs, like if you turn on the, the local news, you'll have independent politicians, politicians on both sides of the aisle saying we need to, we need to sit down and think about our long term defense strategy. We need to reassess, we need to. I think there's just greater awareness that I think ORCAS is going definitely going to be back on the table after the next election. I Think what's called social license won't be there. The population of Australia is going to be skeptical. You know, our, our economy is based on selling stuff to China. I think Australians just don't want to be bullied. Like, we don't, we don't want to become a vassal state of China. We don't want, we, we want to keep, keep our way of life and our freedoms at the same time. We've seen how Trump has tried to shake down Ukraine for their minerals, and we're thinking, well, how is that not going to happen to us? Like, you know, our, our country is full of all of this, all of the, all of this valuable natural resources. Are we just going to end up being a protectorate or do we want to. I mean, China has, China has bullied us a little bit, but they haven't, you know, they're not completely shaking us down.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

So. Yeah. So here's my view on what's going to happen. So first is, I very much disagree with policy. Like, basically, I think people got more woke than they expected, and now they're getting more MAGA than they expected. And then they're going to get more China than they expected.

[Claire Lehmann]

Right. Okay. You mean inside the United States?

[Balaji Srinivasan]

No, I mean like every. Oh, when the U.S. yeah, exactly. Like, China will probably play nice for a few years to scoop up the whole world into the Greater East Asia Co Prosperity Sphere version 2.0. Because they're doing all these trade deals with all these countries and it's all. They're decentralizing as a global logistics hub. They're. They're saying lots of nice things. And the thing is, what the US did is they attacked every country at once. And they said, oh, it's about China. And that's like a gang member shooting into a crowd, wounding everybody and saying, I'm just trying to get that guy on their side. Help me get him. Or. Right.

[Claire Lehmann]

Do you think they did, do you think they did that to, to pretend that it wasn't about China or just out of.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

It's anal. I, I know where it comes from, though. It actually relates. Okay, so here's, here's what it boils down to. For all their talk about the friend enemy distinction, like the Carl Schmidt thing, or as Lennon puts it, who. Whom. Right. Whereas Bush would put it with us or against us. Right. For all to talk about, that mag actually implements the friend enemy distinction. Wrong. You know why I say that? Because they think it's like, they think it's like American, non American. And the problem is that there's many Americans who are not their friend, like Elizabeth Warren, and as many non Americans who are not their enemy, like Bukele or Pierre Paul Ivre or Nigel Farage. Really not their enemy. Right. Maybe they don't agree with them on everything, but they're basically conservatives or libertarians or whatever abroad. And then of course there's billions of people who are basically neutrals, right, who are essentially neither friend nor enemy, but just neutral trade partners. Citizens of other countries, like most Vietnamese basically don't really care that much or what have you, but they do care about the trade. They're making hats. And suddenly that that gets sent to zero. So what happened was the Trump admin. And basically Americans in general think only America exists. So because they had been fighting, fighting, fighting, the Democrats see, they couldn't align around race, right? Because that's very taboo. So they couldn't say Trump is for white people or what have you, and he's not, because actually he's for Americans. But the problem is America, there's at least two Americas. There's red America and blue America. And so in the same way the Democrats didn't want to say we're for Democrat rule, they said we're for democracy. The Republicans didn't say we're for red American rule, they said we're for America. So the Democrats would conflate democracy itself with Democrat rule, and the Republicans would conflate American with red American, and both would forget. Democrats were shocked that they would lose 50% of a Democratic vote. And the Republicans are stunned that 50% of Americans aren't real Americans.

[Claire Lehmann]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

So, so that's one fundamental thing where they're, they're in an identity crisis where the thing they think is one is actually two. And it's like their enemy is included in the set. The red Americans, Republicans are included in democracy and the blue Americans are included in the definition of American. So they're, they're like messed up number one. And that's actually very deep because since they can't draw the boundary and say who they are and who they are not, they, for example, they can't secure territory, right? Why is the Luigi left shooting CEOs? Why, why are Tesla things getting firebombed? Because those people actually consider Republicans enemies, right? Or CEOs enemies or whatever. And normally you'd have like a North Korea, South Korea, like boundary and friends would be on one side and there aren't just like random murders on that side. A murder would be considered a big deal. Blowing up Something. So the problem is red and blue are mixed up like this, but they consider themselves enemies like the Balkans right now. Okay, now you go one step further. Now what somebody. And again I'm saying sympathetically from the red perspective, they're in like Maui or they're in North Carolina. There's some giant national disaster. It tears through the town. They get like a $700 check and they're seeing 100 billion for Ukraine. So now they think, oh, the foreigners are ripping us off. And I understand why they think that. Right. But what actually happened was the people in charge of empire were arguably either ripping off or taxing the rest of the world and they weren't giving it to red Americans in the cut that red Americans were used to. Right. So the red Americans see their cut falling correctly and then they think the foreigners are ripping them off. But really the blue Americans were arguably ripping off the foreigners too. So now we have is this very short sighted thing where, oh, you get like 10% less on tariffs with some country. Great, they exported what, 50 million a year, you save $5 million. But they destroyed 33, $30 trillion in market cap and all the trade relationships of the US and the financial relationships of the US dollar. So they gave up like a thousand X, a million X to make one X. It's like the most crazy numerical deal ever. Let me pause there. Go ahead.

[Claire Lehmann]

Well, I don't, I don't see a way out of this situ, this economic situation in the US unless, you know, I see someone like Bernie Sanders or AOC coming along and saying that we've got to tax everyone more, we've got to tax the upper quintile, you know, 50 more or whatever it is. Like I just don't see any way out of the, you know, when you look at the, the debt to GDP ratio, how is that, how is that going to be dealt with in any other way?

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Well, it's. So here's the issue is I do. Well, first of all, I don't think it will be dealt with. I think there's going to be enormous inflation that just the US fundamentally hyperinflation is when like a government just finally defaults on everything. Every, you know, just like it's defaulted on its security contracts and you know, it's security treaties and its trade treaties. The last step is the dollar itself. Right. And the dollar really is a metonym for the global financial system that the US used to run or still arguably runs, but not for long. Go ahead.

[Claire Lehmann]

Yeah, well, what I mean, what Trump is seems to be doing is accelerating to that point, right?

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Yes. And part of the issue is also, you ever done any physics, you know, you know, force diagrams in physics.

[Claire Lehmann]

Not smart enough to have done physics.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Okay, you're very smart. You're very smart, basically. So, okay, so in physics, like let me try and give a good example. Like take let's say a helicopter or something like that, there's a force pointing down, which is the force of gravity. There's also clearly some voice force pointing up because otherwise it wouldn't be remaining in midair. Right. That's like balance of forces. And you can calculate from any. And it's more than just those two. There's other kinds of forces, like tail rotors and other stuff. Okay. But for any kind of big object, you take the balance of forces on it and you figure out where it's going to go. And sometimes when you actually write out every force, it moves in a more complicated and surprising thing than you would have guessed by default. So let's say we apply that to the world. Right. So what are the four forces? And there's a very. This is what I realized in November, and it's playing out kind of how I expected after November 2024. So Red America wanted to take down the. The deep state, but blue America wants to oppose the Trump administration, and tech America opposes the regulatory state and China opposes the American state. So all four forces are pointed down on American empire. Right. That is. That is very unusual where basically the red, the blue, the gray, and the Chinese are all pointed down. Now, when all the forces are pointed down, there's nothing pointed up. The only thing that kind of maintains the system in its current position is its, like, initial position. And it can move much faster than you might think. Because at best, red Americans are conflicted about empire. And sometimes they like the power. Basically, they want to be. Somebody said this, and I think this. They want to be the man of the house without the responsibility. Right.

[Claire Lehmann]

They want to watch Top. Top Gun, but not. Not pay for it.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Yeah. Or it's like it's. They also have a kind of a misunderstanding of where power is. Like if it was adamantium under the Appalachians, you know, if there's some, like, mineral that was actually in physical America and that's what made them, you know, super maga. Fine. But that's not what it is. It's that there's only 77 million Trump voters and there's more than a billion people. If you add up America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UK Europe, Japan, South Korea, that's what Putin calls like roug, the golden billion. Right. Here's the problem. The problem is we're then going to get way more China than anybody wanted. Because think about how the USSR was bad and it fell and the USA was basically the good guy up until 1991. And then when it was unopposed and it was a hyperpower, it actually by turn quickly became the bad guy. Right?

[Claire Lehmann]

Yeah, yeah.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

So I have a few predictions as to what will happen. The first is China will act good for a while and then it, it's China. So, you know, like nothing can push back on it now. Right. Like a truly unopposed China with its drone armada with like the head of steam it's got, will be very, very, very, very powerful. And I think there's actually only one thing that. And people. It's both obvious and non obvious. Certainly one thing with the economic scale to oppose or balance, let's say, doesn't have to be necessarily adversarial, but it should be balanced. There's only one thing with the economic scale to balance China. And you know what I think that is the Internet. The Internet, exactly. And everybody will say, oh, come on, biology. It doesn't have hard power. You don't understand hard power. The Internet doesn't exist. It's just metaphysical or whatever.

[Claire Lehmann]

I'm like, okay, it's got cash flow.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

It's got cash flow. But actually, here's one way I'd put it. It's like Christianity. It's not a place. But there are Christian places. Yeah, right. There's lots of countries with the cross on the flag. There's like Brazil and it's got, you know, Christ the Redeemer. There's lots of Christians, Christian countries. So it's an idea. But it can also claim territory. Right. And similarly, yeah, the Internet, just think.

[Claire Lehmann]

About the, the monasteries in Ireland after the collapse of the Roman Empire. Right. That's where literacy survived for I don't know how many generations. But you know, the monks in Ireland kept producing their tran. You know, that kept producing their manuscripts of, of the, of Christian texts for, you know, throughout the Dark Ages.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

That's right. And so like the monasteries, the cathedrals, the countries. Right. Like a good, like an important enough idea does actually script things in the physical world. Right? Yeah, exactly as you're saying. And so the Internet will. If, when American empire ends, as it's ending, its two heirs are China and the Internet and China inherits the military and the manufacturing and all the, basically a lot of the treaties, the markets. Right. And the Internet Inherits the people, the language of English and the values. I think because you know, the Constitution doesn't scale beyond America, but bitcoin does. It's like, you know, common law. Common law was only among the British, the Constitution was among the Americans. But the smart contract, bitcoin, cryptocurrency and what the Internet represents, like a peer to peer network. You and I are equals on the Internet. On the global Internet, everybody's an equal. We have the same monetary policy, property rights, smart contract law. You know, basically it's like the same rules based order becomes a code based order. So that's like the successor to what America was staring us in our face. We're going to need that because an unopposed unbalanced China, it's actually bad even for the Chinese people. Just like, like the hyper power America after 1991 actually ended up as many Americans will say, bad for Americans, right? Like they're now regretting that a completely unbalanced China would be bad for even Chinese people. And actually, you know, it's funny, Chinese people, I don't think they respect American strength, but they do respect the Internet because Chinese people hold Bitcoin. Chinese people want VPNs to access the global Internet. Chinese people respect AI. Chinese people use Anglophone software, right? They wouldn't be able to manage without all of that. That would actually be something. They're not autarkic on the digital world, they are autarkic on the, I mean they're partially autark indigenous world. You can argue the Chinese Internet exists, but at least they have significant gains from trade with the outside Internet world. They don't really have it with the physical world to the same extent. They're much more autarkic in the physical world. Let me pause there and get your thoughts.

[Claire Lehmann]

No, I think it's a compelling thesis. I'm just wondering what happens during this process and what happens to us in the physical world in real life? Do we keep our standard of living or do we have to start stashing stuff away?

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Here's my view, and I may be wrong, but this is my view. My view is the more if the successors to American empire are China and the Internet, then the more leveraged you are on either China or the Internet or both, the better off you are. And if you're both extremely anti China and extremely anti Internet, then you're screwed. So if you are like for example, a fair number of Americans are, are working themselves into like an anti tech Luddite posture and of course they're going to Be very mad at China. Those people are in very big trouble because they're going to lose physical prosperity if China sanctions or trade wars them. Right. And they're not going to have digital prosperity either. They're not going to have crypto, they're not going to have this and they're not going to have that. So they're going to be super angry. Extremely, extremely angry. That's like those are people, I think are going to have the worst outcome. And one way of thinking about it is that history of running in reverse. Like the people who sort of had the worst fall from grace outcome in the 20th century, arguably the Chinese, which went from the Qing dynasty to the. What they call the century of humiliation. And people don't understand what a degree of regression that was to go from like, essentially a fairly civilized country to like backyard blast furnaces and like eating grass to survive under Mao and then dying in fam. Like, that was a terrible outcome obviously for them, but it was a regression. They weren't always primitive. That's what people don't get. The Russians weren't always primitive. Right?

[Claire Lehmann]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

So I think America, probably Canada may, you know, are going to have the worst of it. Right. I think. I think Western Europe will be the second worst off. They're going to take a massive hit because of how many assets they have that are American, how much dependence they have on the US for security. They basically be in American colonies. And you know what their outcome is? I don't know. With the. With the absence of America, some of those countries will go nationalist. With the absence of America, some of them will go towards China will go communist. And I can't tell what the outcome will be. It might be varied on the continent, but they at least do have better public infrastructure, arguably better demographics in some ways than the U.S. and so I think they'll be less badly off. I think Eastern Europe will be better off still than Western Europe. I think Russia will actually be better off because the winner of a war gets a boost of energy and so on and so forth. And so a lot of people in Eastern Europe, if and when Russia wins, leadership will change and people will be basically accept Russia as one and it'll be a shift in attitude, I think. Not to say that's good. I'm just saying, like, just. Just how the way the cookie crumbles. I'm actually very sympathetic to where the Estonians and the Balts are on this, you know, because they just got conquered by Russia and they just got free. But, you know, now the old boss is back, maybe, who knows? I actually think Dubai, Saudi Arabia have a potentially very good century ahead of them. I think Iran, let's see what happens. Maybe there's going to be a giant war. The world is volatile. Lots of this stuff is just, you know, as a now cast, it might look stupid in a few years, maybe not. I don't know. Iran is like, if they're just allowed to trade with the world, that could be like the next Vietnam. Because in the sense of they have a lot of really smart people, a lot of Persians in, you know, the US that did really well. Again, they're not like a primitive, you know, people or anything like that. They have a long history, the Zoroastrians, all this stuff going back. So I think like in a Chinese world, Iran might actually do way better, much better than we might think. I think China's gonna have the best century probably because they're just, they're like Apple, right? Vertically integrated, you know, the Han Chinese nation, the CCP party state and the Chinese network. The great firewall, the apps, in many ways a great firewall, I think will be seen for all its faults as actually people frame it in terms of free speech, but generally I think they're going to frame it in terms of.

[Claire Lehmann]

Well, they're protecting themselves from mind viruses and so on.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Digital borders.

[Claire Lehmann]

Yeah.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Yeah, right. So if it's, if it's digital borders. Yeah. Well, it's quarantined, but it's also like, stop a drone from being controlled within China. Right. Stop a robot. Once you have robots, it's no longer speech. That speech can probabilistically script a human to action, but code can deterministically script it to action. So it's less deniable. Right. If malware crosses your digital border and it can open up a drone or a robot, it can do terrorism. Right. So that alone will justify something like the great firewall around every large enough civilizational sphere. Like have you heard the saying the Internet is an untrusted network? Well, basically this is what it sounds like. It's like any packet anybody could. Right. So I think what you get is almost the equivalent of civilizational intranets, potentially.

[Claire Lehmann]

Well, it's walls. And that's like a very old school definition of civilization.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Yes.

[Claire Lehmann]

Put up walls around your city and.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

You define what it is.

[Claire Lehmann]

Yeah, that's right.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Exactly. And it might turn out that physical goods move across borders more than ideas do. And like there's more of a digital, you know, digital borders than we might think. Digital borders correspond to Civilizational borders. I think that's going to be more, more of a thing I think India is actually going to do probably fairly well. And, and the reason I say that is it's just my sense of where a civilization is like for example, it's a distant number two, but India is number two on steel after China. It's a distance.

[Claire Lehmann]

So much human capital.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Yes. So the thing is I, I don't want to feel like the way I usually say it is. I'm moderately bullish on India, extremely bullish in Indians.

[Claire Lehmann]

Yeah, yeah.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Because China is a state, India is a network. Yeah, right. But, but India has managed to do a lot well over the last 20 years. And whenever I go there, I'm like stunned by how good it is and how much it's improved. So I think India is like a, you know, they're saying India disappoints both the optimists and the pessimists. Okay. So I think on balance just being a big stable quote, democracy, I think it's, it just like sort of, it's a funny way to put it, but you know how China was like the second rate communism to Russia or to the Soviet Union for a long time and then became. Right. I think India is like the second version of democracy. And then after all the Western European countries and the US face plant in terms of this, it'll be like the world's leading democracy because lots of things will kind of say, oh, communism was right, or they'll go all the way to bitcoin maximalism. So my, my, my basic view is the more physically, socially, financially, militarily, culturally dependent you are on the usa, the worse off you'll be.

[Claire Lehmann]

Okay.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

And the more you're into China more your economy and your people and so on have some connection to China or the Internet. It's kind of like the US and the USSR were the big two survivors of like, you know, the. Right. So China and Internet I think are the big two. Now I want to ask. Okay, so in our last few minutes I want to discuss network school and what we're doing here. Right.

[Claire Lehmann]

Okay. So your school is not. Is it in Singapore or close to Singapore?

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Good question. It is right next door to Singapore. It's in, it's in the Singapore Johor Special Economic Zone, which is in Malaysia. But you know, the vast majority of people like basically will fly in through Singapore and they'll travel across a bridge there because they know Singapore on a global map.

[Claire Lehmann]

Yeah. And you're offering, I say kids, but you're offering People. A grant to come and study with you. A scholarship. That's correct.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Yes, that's right. So we have $100,000 fellowship for creators, for founders. So anybody from Colette who's watching this, who thinks they could be an AI first filmmaker or comic book creator or something like that, some kind of creative. Who's AI First? And when I say AI first, by the way, I don't mean AI Slop, right? I mean. Yeah, yeah. Like. Yeah, it's very important. It's like, it's. Go ahead.

[Claire Lehmann]

We have some fantastic people who work from us, who work for us, for. From countries around the world. So we've got this fantastic video editor based in Vietnam. We've got an amazing audio editor in Argentina. So, you know, the people who I hire for Quillette, who aren't my core editors, who have to edit, the texts are dispersed all over the globe. And what I find as an employer is that the talent is. So you get such a depth of talent in.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

How'd you hire for them?

[Claire Lehmann]

Upwork.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Upwork. Really?

[Claire Lehmann]

Yeah.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Interesting. So you did. You basically had bounties and they did them, and then you hired them full time from that. Yeah, yeah, interesting. I do that, too. I call it the market is greater. Go ahead, Go ahead.

[Claire Lehmann]

Yeah. No, it's just you. You can find so much talent outside. You know, I find. I find so much talent outside of Australia, outside of the us outside of. Outside of the uk. I mean, you need people locally to do some things, but when it comes to creation, whether it's video or audio, there's an. There's amazing pool of talented people out there who are very willing to work and who are very reliable. So. So you're recruiting people who aren't just like STEM people, but who are sort of, you know, creative as well.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Absolutely. And in fact, actually, that's right, and I'll tell you why. It's because prompting is programming.

[Claire Lehmann]

Yeah.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

And if. If you have a vocabulary which, like art history is now an applied science.

[Claire Lehmann]

Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, Right.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Because if you know your Cezanne and your Picasso and your, you know, your Monet and Rembrandt and so on, you can actually summon that style on demand. Right. If you know architecture and you can distinguish, I don't know, modernism from, you know, Jane Jacobs and all this stuff. You know, I'm certainly no architect or art historian. I know, like, just, like the slides. So somebody who has that vocabulary. Like, you know, for example, there's a whole filmmaker's vocabulary. There's a whole. That kind of person can direct the AI to do the right thing. And so we're definitely. I mean, one of the things I really want to do is I think you and I share this interest. But there's many stories of the 20th century that have not been told, like the story of communism or you know, the story of like what happened in Poland. Like even the story of Australia or something, right? Yeah, I'd love it for people from various cultures to be creators, screenwriters for their culture and then to sort of market that in their native tongue. And it's, it's like completely fresh. Like, you know, Hollywood's in a rut because it's told 5,000 stories where America is at the center of the universe. What about one where Vietnamese people are at the center of the universe? What about one where Australian people are or something like that? Right. So I'd love to see creators apply to Network School Fellowship for that.

[Claire Lehmann]

That's awesome. And, and do people go and live at the Network School?

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Yes. So here's my. One of my goals with this was we wanted to radically reduce the cost of living for at least how I lived in San Francisco. I was there because of tech and I'd wake up and I'd work out and I'd work and that was it. And it costs like some ridiculous sum of money per month. And I was like, what am I? It's like insanely expensive and it's like unsafe and there's syringes and like the gym was really far and you know, like coffee was super expensive. And I was like, why is this so expensive for what I'm doing? Right. I'm just. All I needed was like a small community and like a daily loop that was optimized. And so now I've built that product. And so essentially lots of startups, basically for like 18,000 per person per year, you can live in Network School and you get everything. You have room, you have breakfast, lunch, dinner, you have gym, 24, 7 gym, you have fitness classes, co working, office pods, blah blah, blah, blah, Everything, right? And so basically that takes your, like now your burn is 18k a year. That's with roommates, 36k solo. But that's still way cheaper than west coast tech. We'll want to bring it down further over time, but I think that's already pretty, pretty good. And if you have a decent remote work job, you're just now banking money because you know you're, you're just leveling up. Right? And I think most people don't even really understand what their expenses are. They only know their rent. But the way to do it is take your bank account statement over the last year or two years and ask if it is more than 1,500amonth out. And it probably is. And if so, you'll probably save money at network school. I mean, that's not the only reason to do it. You should come for the kind of pro tech community. But I think that's, that's, that's one of the principles.

[Claire Lehmann]

You just mentioned that you worked in tech in San Francisco, but you're not from San Francisco originally.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Yes, that's right. I'm from, you know, parents are from India, grew up on, on Long island. That's what we say back there. And moved out to Stanford for my undergrad. And that's why basically tech for a while sort of forced you to work in sf. And now I almost want, I actually think the alpha is being outside sf, outside Silicon Valley. It's like so expensive there and it's like so consensus there. I'm not saying there aren't good things that happen there, but that's why part of why I'm doing every school.

[Claire Lehmann]

And you're a very prolific angel investor. You've invested in lots of fledgling companies, including Orchid, and so you've been a huge supporter of founders for a long time.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Yes, that's right, I have. And, and you know what's funny is I do that basically as a hobby, like, because it just nice to frankly, I like talking to those folks to, to the founders and, you know, entrepreneurs and what have you. Because you always get a bounce, you always learn something. And then, you know, I have, I have a little money riding on them, so if they win, then I feel like, you know, it makes a little more interesting. Right. And it's almost like a form of socialization in a sense. Right. And so I've got north of 500, probably closing on a thousand, you know, angel investments around the world. And it's like, it's a lot.

[Claire Lehmann]

You're like, why Combinator? But as a person, I guess.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Yeah, that's right. I mean, I just try to fund people who are classically liberal or pro freedom in a, in a, in a balanced way. I don't know, my own vision of the good.

[Claire Lehmann]

Just one last question. You said that you think it's beneficial to be outside of Silicon Valley or outside of San Francisco. Do you think that being outside of the US has given you a more detached meta perspective on the political situation? And do you think that, you know, because there's this whole thing of the tech right, sort of aligning with maga. Do you think that being geographically away, like not in the United States has sort of allowed you to be a bit more circumspect?

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Yes, I think there's some to that. I, you know, I would even dispute the term tech. Right. Because I think it's the tech center. It's to the right of the left and it's to the left of the right because tech is fundamentally internationalist and capitalist. It wasn't as woke as it had memed itself into in the 2010s and it's certainly not as maga as it meand itself into because. Right. And so the problem is that I think we're going to see the third configuration. Like the 2010s was blue plus tech against red and the 2020s was tech plus red against blue. I think the 2000s is going to be blue plus red against tech. And it's going to be just like that. It will be the premise of it will be an anti tech movement and it'll be potentially violent. Especially because. Do you know Amy Chua's thing about the market dominant minority concept?

[Claire Lehmann]

No, but I'm watching Steve Bannon and sort of agitating against Elon Musk and I see him sort of like parroting some of the same, same ideas and talking points as aoc and I just see this.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Socialist, Nationalist. Socialist. Yes, exactly. That's right. And I think, I think that's very predictable. And in fact I actually saw this coming 10 years ago, more than 10 years or 12 years ago. So this is really this key paragraph. Okay, do you see this bit with Chua outlines? Right. So first, what is a market dominant minority? Okay, market dominant minority. Like she talks about it in terms of ethnic groups like the Jews of Europe, the Indians of, you know, Uganda. Right. Whites in South Africa and so on and so forth. Right. Overseas Chinese. So basically if you have democracy and capitalism and one group is winning at capitalism and another group is much larger in democracy there's a conflict and the market dominant minority is somebody who or group that is winning in the market but losing the vote. So the backlash if they become too public and too wealthy. The first is a backlash against markets targeting them. Right. The. The second is a backlash against democracy by force. Fields remarked on Monday. The third is violence, sometimes genocidal, direct against the market dominant minority itself. So now her whole book is about race, racial groups that are marked dominant minorities. But most of the violence in the 20th century was not on the base of race. It was on the basis of class.

[Claire Lehmann]

Yeah, yeah.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Tech is a class. Yeah. And as any sociologist will tell you, this is one of the few things they're right about race and class. Co Vary. Right. And so tech has a lot of Jewish people, Chinese people, Indian people, migrants, immigrants. And there's various groups that say there's too many white people, there's too many Jewish people, too many Indian people, too many Chinese people, too many immigrants. And they're different groups, but they're overlapping into like a resentful brew. Right?

[Claire Lehmann]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

And, and so the first backlash is the one we already saw. This was the tech lash starting around 2013 where the, the journalists, the media were mad at tech. Right. And that then the second, I would not actually call it an anti democratic backlash because it was winning an election, but it is how some people would, would con. Would call it like the Elon Trump Tech alliance is this second kind of thing. Right. Which is basically wealth. Right. Pushing back. And we're about to see, in my view, the third. Yeah, yeah, that's, this is red and blue against tech. That is, that is, that is basically presage by people setting self driving cars on fire in San Francisco, Hammer attacks, Tesla firebombings, shooting CEOs. They're just getting mad. Like there's crazy memes that are like calling for like an army of Luigi's and so on and so forth. That is just.

[Claire Lehmann]

Yeah, I just can't understand the, the sense of having Bezos, Zuckerberg, Sundar, Pitchol standing at Trump's inauguration.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

They don't have a choice.

[Claire Lehmann]

Like in a line. Okay, but that image, that picture will be used by the socialists for years and years and years to come.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Well, here's the problem. The flip side was used basically. Remember all of these guys were with Obama and they were donating to Biden. Right?

[Claire Lehmann]

Yeah.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

So, so the problem is that literally these, these are people who just want, I know many of these guys, right. They're really not ideological radicals at the core.

[Claire Lehmann]

Yeah, yeah.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Fundamentally what they slash we want to do is have a lab where we can advance robotics and DNA sequencing and aviation and so on and so forth. And you know, they're too white for some people and they're too non white for other people and what have you. But it's actually like a generally pretty good group of people that has kind of building a lot of wealth. Right?

[Claire Lehmann]

Yeah, yeah.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

And, and now they're just going to be hated because nobody wants people like. Well, the narrative will Be AI takes all the jobs, crypto takes all the money and tech takes all the blame.

[Claire Lehmann]

So and, and scapegoated for the, for the mess caused by printing too much correct USD.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

That's right. And so the fact that we'll have bitcoin, bitcoin will moon and it'll be like those tech guys, they got all the money, get them. And I wouldn't be surprised to see some BLM, Hamas, J. 6th Griper, Antifa Luigi, kind of fusion blocking roads, ideologically hard to classify, just kind of anarchic. Right. American anarchy is how I think about it. And just like anti tech guys. So that's. I know that sounds bad, but actually that's why I think it's important for people to. If like in a sense what's happening now is a good warning. It's like don't go to the US like leave if you're there, you know, go back home where you came from. The signals are being sent. Don't trade with the us don't set up a business in the us don't invest in the US like it's almost as if they're doing everybody a favor by saying, back away, we're out of money, stop trading with us. We're out of guns, don't rely on our military, back away. And so it's like jumping on the grenade before it blows up.

[Claire Lehmann]

Yeah.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

And the full force of it. Go ahead.

[Claire Lehmann]

No, I think, I think that's, that's a. Interesting way of describing what's going on. And it's one of the less pessimistic. You know, it's, it's an ex. You're at the acceptance stage.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

I'm at the acceptance stage. And you know, one thing I will say is I think that at least for a few years, it's possible that the rest of the world actually doesn't do that badly. And the reason is there's all kinds of crazy quantities of goods that are going to be exported from China. They're going to drop prices all around the world. So consumers will actually have. Now they'll have other problems. Producers will go bust or whatever. Maybe there might be, you know, quote anti dumping laws trying to limit how much market share they get in a given country or something like that. But I think actually a lot of prices around the world may go down.

[Claire Lehmann]

Even as you might have cheap EVs.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

You might have cheap EVs. There's, there's, there's potentially like, it's really a question of how much in the way of US assets. You have. And if you have, I think, Bitcoin, if you have, like, maybe physical gold, if you have your currency in local bank accounts rather than US bank accounts, if you don't have US Stocks. Right. I think. And if you're not located in the US I think you'll probably be okay. The. The large. The larger the percentage of that is non us, which is totally, again, the opposite of the 20th century. But that's. That's my view now. Of course, I hope I'm wrong. I hope there's a miracle that happens. But I think I'm right.

[Claire Lehmann]

And we. And we can hedge. We can sort of, you know, hedge a little bit.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Yes, you could re. Domicile also. We have to figure out how to do that. I think what happens is eventually it's all on China. In China or on chain. So it's either Hong Kong soccer change or it's on the Internet and so on and so forth. Okay, I have to jump.

[Claire Lehmann]

I got to let you get your. Yeah. Other interview. Yeah.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

And if there's anything. Any closing. Closing words.

[Claire Lehmann]

Well, thanks for having me on the pod. And is it lovely to chat with you. Very stimulating, as always. And I'm really in admiration of the work you're doing with the school. I think it's a really positive thing for humanity. So well done.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

I love Colette. It's great. And thank you for doing that.

[Claire Lehmann]

You've got to come to Sydney and hang out.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

You know what? We should do that. We should do a meetup, and we'll see who comes by. All right. The Colette community with the Q. Okay.

[Claire Lehmann]

Yeah.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

See you. Thank you.

[Claire Lehmann]

Bye.

[Balaji Srinivasan]

Bye.