Pomp Podcast #295: Balaji Srinivasan On The Argument For Decentralization - Part 1

alright guys bangbang I have Balaji here with me thank you so much for doing this um mom super excited to talk to you cool good to be here for sure for those that don't know who you are you've got a lot of relevant experience and I know that you are not a fan of credentialism but they just give us a couple of data points just on your background and training so that people can understand the perspective you're coming from sure so my background you know Stanford PhD in electrical engineering also have an MS in chemical engineering I taught computer science and stats Stanford for several years started a genomics company which have a CTO and co-founder that ended up that kind of being sold for three hundred seventy five million i was angel investor in soil and superhuman land school Kameo Bitcoin early in theory m/c cash other kinds of things also it was a venture capitalist interested Horowitz multi-billion dollar venture capital firm helped boot up what became parts of our bio and crypto funds I taught a MOOC course with 250,000 students worldwide back in 2013 so you know in an educator as well and then within crypto I did done a bunch of stuff I'm an investor in lots of crypto companies and coins and whatever but most recently I took over one of our portfolio companies long story which I wrote about I've turned that around turned into earn comm got that to profitability so let's go in base with CTF coinbase while a coin base did a bunch of stuff but in particular you know one a few headlines to earn and integrate into coin basic wing base earn which has done several hundred million dollars in sales from 2018-2019 you can it's on the homepage accordingly so if you if you tried it right so and help launch us TC are stable coin which has done very well drove all the asset addition and so on there all this is obviously with the team folks and without brought on billions of dollars in assets for custody and and basically just did a bunch of stuff there and then since last June I've finally taken the first time off that I've had in more than ten years or whatever and because that you know I can't like I'm not wired like a normal person to take a vacation just because there's you're either doing something you're not doing it and if you're not doing it it's much easier then you don't have it's like a homework assignment or whatever when you're a kid and you have something do on a Christmas break and you know so I can never take like a normal vacation but took time off first time in a long time and basically just you know did math I do math and I program and I angel invest and whatnot and that brings us to the present day you know and I know I can take from here for sure before we get into the fun stuff what's the biggest surprise or learning you've had from taking time off with the thing you didn't expect to walk away with or learn during that time um I think I was surprised at how easy it is to like like the time passes fast actually you you wouldn't kind of think that so yeah I just it's it's uh it's like a learning or anything like that but rather unless you go after things with the same discipline that you have when you're an operating executive it's easy to just lose a week lose two weeks or whatever which is fine you don't always have to be super efficient on everything but that was just something which I hadn't had time off in such a long time that I hadn't realized that yeah that's awesome you were one of very few early on that identified the potential issues with the coronavirus and we're quite vocal about hey this is serious this may come here here's potential implications and you know frankly we all now know many people one laughed to literally disagree publicly there's articles written in kind of the whole nine yards you've been vindicated kind of in a weird way of nobody wanted this to happen but but at the same time you were able to to kind of warn people if you will what is your evaluation as we sit here kind of mid-may of just what's transpired right we want to go in tons of detail you know people obviously know a lot of this but but just kind of what's your general evaluation of that health crisis so you know I've treated some of this and I'm writing a bunch of long-form stuff for tribal which I will drop at some point but act one was and is the virus crisis which is ongoing Act two is the financial crash and Act three I think is a crisis of our institutions and I really think that we are in for some crazy stuff and I you know I think I called some of these aspects actually pretty early on but I think the new political axis or you know whether you want to call it trade-off axis or what-have-you will worldwide is you know antivirus and pro-freedom okay so those are like kind of like the two polls you might call it the total state versus market anarchy okay and the so what's what's kind of going on here so we're in the middle of this huge political realignment where old issues just don't matter as much and things are rotating and new coalition's are forming even if there's some old party labels or things like that and I think you can identify those two camps as centralization versus decentralization as modern monetary theory versus BTC as you know the the state versus the network as you know kind of mandatory versus free and you know health versus wealth okay so it's actually interesting to think of those as kind of opposite poles in the sense that the state is you know the actor that is now pushing quarantine xand it's you know it's enforcing stay-at-home orders you know masks being mandatory all the type of stuff and there's a genuine argument for it in the sense that you know many many predispositions or presuppositions rather that people have about okay you know my neighbor can do their thing and it doesn't matter so long as it doesn't affect me completely break down in a coronavirus world where if your neighbor is not taking precautions your variable could get sick and so you have an interest in their health in a way that you just didn't before now in a sense arguably that's good because you know okay well I have an interest in their health I will help them stay healthier and keep myself healthier at the same time there's you can make an argument from a skin in the game or a lineman standpoint that you know community people who care about each other's health will probably be better you know just like you know you're part of a fitness club or whatever you know and and you know people lift together and that's actually good right so but let's call this one axis right the total state and that's you know the lockdown of Wuhan that is the you know surveillance of folks who you know with yellow and green and red codes not just in China but other places that's price controls etc okay now on the other side is market anarchy and this is essentially the polar opposite of that and this is to caricature in extremis it is you know don't wear a mask but or I should have the choice as to whether to wear a mask it is you know like the laws are necessarily bad everything the state is doing is wrong etc and you know in and but the good aspect of it is look we're gonna need to decentralize we're going to need to encrypt we're going to need to protect privacy and we're going to need to have a free market because the state may protect health at the expense of wealth to such an extent that folks are giving silly orders you know to seize masks seize hand sanitiser to impose price controls to ban people from selling things at Walmart target to stop uber eats from doing things you know as well as weren't even proposed like banning em and A's or whatever over a certain size those things have nothing to do with controlling the virus whatsoever and they're things and of course printing trillions of dollars right um and so there's legitimate abuses and failures on the side of the total state that the kind of Anarchy pole will little correct and push against and I think either of these two poles is probably bad but what's it and that probably is bad what's interesting is how many different permutations and so on there are in the center it's like a very you know there's there's a number of different combinations and things you can do okay and I'll give some of them so lots of many different countries it's almost like the ideologies that they had almost didn't matter and now they've just executed in totally different ways for example Sweden and New Zealand you would have clustered them together ideologically before this but they've taken polar opposite policies you know where Sweden has basically taken the let it rip policy and New Zealand has controlled a virus you know the u.s. in Australia you might have clustered them and Australia's contain the virus and the u.s. is you know not right but then even more than that you know to give some sense of where society ends up you could have a Chinese authoritarian state you could have a Taiwanese democratic state that didn't even have a lockdown but is managed to mostly keep the virus under control or actually not mostly seemingly totally you could have you know a New Zealand policy which is democratic but also did a lockdown and got the virus under control you could have Sweden's policy which had no lockdown and is letting the virus go crazy or he could have America's policy which is kind of a cargo called half half-assed lockdown and then combined with letting the virus corral so it's like at least five different combinations you know Taiwan China New Zealand the US and Sweden and then there's a sixth which I think is emerging in the u.s. which is the snow crash strategy and I think this is actually where the u.s. is probably going to land up where some combination of snow crash and ready player one the state has failed it is actually not capable of doing the blocking and tackling if it had any you know tricks up its sleeve we would have seen them already at this point right um there's no crack military unit there's no you know Special Forces or you know super vaccine there's nothing like that there's no area 51 there's no Manhattan Project no one's coming to save us um and so once you realize that that's actually it's something where it's completely the opposite of the movies you know in contagion or in you know any movie you know there's a I mean that's the biggest thing that contagion the movie got wrong with the CDC it was going to be competent right and I'm not saying the CDC is completely incompetent that they have something done some things right you know some of the studies you've done are fine but they are not actually able to control a disease and there's the Center for Disease Control right so where I think we land up is some combination and I'm not endorsing this by the way but I think you know there's a few possible scenarios where the US lands up so one is and these are not mutually exclusive but let's call it Snow Crash ready player one and then someone else actually said ask mobs like naked Sun or the Salaria is also another one right but let me go through these so Snow Crash should basically be where the state can't protect people you know for example Amazon is doing like mass testing of all its employees it's developing all these technologies to essentially turn Amazon's camp this into a green zone and potentially that becomes an export where they can export that to other corporate campuses and other communities you know it's like the natural extension of raying and some of the other products that they sell right where you you basically keep the virus out with multiple layers of defense for everything you know the most extreme would be like negative pressure air rooms but hand sanitizer gloves all the type stuff then you know so so basically what that is is as a corporate individual and community imposed order that control virus and keeps it out out of your campus but you know the Commons are our tragedy okay then second is ready player one where there's proposal serious proposals to print two thousand dollars a month for everybody if you've seen that right and if that proposal goes through and I think it might you have a scenario where everybody is sitting at home and they're receiving two thousand dollars a month and that's money which see the thing is I think we're gonna see both deflation and inflation deflation in the price of all the things that people don't want anymore like like you know air travel or well actually air travel is tricky I'll come back to that let's say concerts events things of that nature right people will slash prices to try to bring folks in but then you look at price inflation and things people do want like masks hand sanitizer other type of things right and once you get soaring prices here's where the crypto stuff comes in or one of the many angles you have soaring prices for masks for hand sanitizer and you know pulse oximeters all the type of stuff to deal the disease as well as for things like food consumer staples because you've suddenly injected a huge amount of printed money and capacity supply is usually flat or down because people are staying at home because supply chains have being disrupted because folks overseas aren't shipping as much stuff and so on so you have like much more money and flat or down supply well and and you know you have demand right prices are gonna increase which we've seen you know fur masks enhance Santa's right so then once you have prices soar many states will impose price controls which will cause shortages and or they will prevent the sale of some of these things in eBay and other places I've actually already prevented the sale I believe of masks and hand sanitizer and and again and I'm using as a placeholder for a lot of other things that people would buy at which point markets go dark and you start to get the crypto economy you know things like open Bazaar and so on become important because you can't buy the stuff on an above-ground market like a mask or whatever is like hard five masks and you know you can make the argument like people shouldn't be able to buy those masks it's only by a surgical mask or every I understand right but the demand will be there that people will want to buy those things they'll want to buy food and they'll want to buy consumer staples and whatnot and so you know essentially this printed money that they get will be I think useful for three things you know one maybe it'll pay the rent maybe there'll be some price control imposed on the rent or something like that - maybe it'll buy food and three it'll pay for internet stuff which is probably the most you know like something like Dropbox is probably gonna have the least problem when you know there's if there's significant inflation because their margins their gross margins are so high that the marginal cost of delivering another you know Dropbox thing to somebody is not not that high right but then you have this ready player one world where people are basically staying home and being paid to play video games or just surf the internet right and they just don't go out but consumption is dropped off a cliff and then the third model is this naked son model where you know folks go out to rural areas and work remote from there and they kind of have a natural social distancing built into it and you know they just socialize over the internet for the most part other than being with you know like obviously they're probably with family members maybe there's some friends who move out there but it's like more like a rural life like a lot of people used to live in the eighteen hundreds in the US you know you're just relatively low population density and you you know maybe you put on your VR headset or you you otherwise connect that way but you have just you know greenery and so on around it's kind of a beautiful landscape right um so I'm not saying all of those I mean those are not mutually exclusive all of those could happen at the same time but we start to get a future that in the u.s. it looks very different than what is happening in green zones that have managed to keep the virus under control well anyway let me pause here because I that was a long kind of burst but but I want you to get Norden god no I I think keep going the the big thing that I would just if you can clarify so I think part of what you're talking about is like a decentralized response and then the state response right those two things are somewhat counterbalance to each other but it's not also I don't believe you think that it's a complete blanket in even a country right so right now I think most people would say hey the East has been very very good from a centralized standpoint and part of that is because the population buys into those centralized governments here in the West there's a little bit less of that kind of buy-in and so people are maybe somewhat wary and also kind of have this democratic view of like the government is one voice but we also have a voice and so that has been somewhat of a more decentralized response I've seen you talk a lot though like it isn't just country by country you actually may get a break down even further than that yeah at the state county you maybe even the city level so kind of keep going on that thread but just totally yeah yeah sure should address those funds yeah so so one very important high-level thing I think is so two important hi lot of things in my personal preference stack rank and other people may differ on this but at least I think I am consistent you know or or what I see is consistent given this implicit value set right which is more not even implicit I'm being very explicit about it which is I would rank like a competent centralized state like Singapore I think that delivers the best quality of life I know Singapore is trying to get you know corona under control and so on but a Singapore Taiwan a South Korea and now discuss my second point and New Zealand in Australia right they have managed to get the virus on control so it appears so Slovakia I think Estonia has I think Israel has right these are places which you know I think will provide those are like that's the best answer like a competent centralized state for something like this then a distant second is the decentralized response the snow crash response where in the absence of a competent centralized state if you have an incompetent or even worse a malicious state the decentralized response at least allows you your community your company to get together right if you have a hapless government um what what's happened is the government is now by not doing a good job of keeping the Commons free of this virus it's like a tax on every transaction that's happening it's basically like an out-of-control fire that's burning because the fire department can't put it out because the CDC can't control disease because the FDA hasn't approved tests we have this viral fire burning that has imposed attacks in every transaction right okay so at least allow individuals to put out the fire in their own little zones that's a decentralized response and the worst is like the incompetent or malicious and you know you can always argue which which is which but I do think there's a distinction you know malicious is like you know North Korea right or something like that and you know incompetent is simply just much of much of the u.s. unfortunately right and frankly the UK France Italy Spain even Germany right basically Western Europe the US and Canada have actually had some of the worst responses to this which I can get into and and so when you've got an incompetent centralised state they're doing things like infinite lockdown with no plan right and that's not that's that's also that's stupid right like one way of thinking about it is every country that is doing lockdown whether they admit it or not is copying China because China did it first and was like oh my god I can't believe they're doing this and you know at first there was a lot of oh they would only do this in autocratic and you know crazy Society etc then people basically ignored the virus while it was spreading through China and then Iran it was only when it hit Italy that that actually people are like wow you know like it could actually hit here not in a third-world country and I'll come back to that point by the way China is not a third world country that's well I think one of the biggest issues that people you know in the u.s. especially I think on the East Coast um had is they still have a time work model of China from like the 70s as you know primitive country or oh it only happened over there you know blah blah blah and it's it's simply not right it's a very sophisticated place in many ways I'm not saying it's all good but I'm just saying to appreciate that um anyway once it hit Italy and Italy went into lockdown then in mid-march the US copied Italy and so you're copying a copy without admitting you're copying and whenever that happens I mean you being not being you you're in tech right like as a product manager if you're copying a feature from another company without admitting you're copying that feature ah you get like a Zune kind of experience remember the Zune versus the iPod right or you get like just I mean early Bing Bing is actually okay today but like Bing versus Google you're just just having an ersatz you know version of the same right and you know one mental model is you have this you have this very agile state uh you know that is able to execute this kind of lockdown and then you have this lumbering American you know or westerner who tries to follow the same gymnastics and simply can't do it right and so it might you know when you're talking about like how the Chinese executed lockdown or how you know it's being executed in other places um it's not just Oh everybody go stay at home it's like a hundred things they were doing for example you know centralized quarantine right they set up these field hospitals but you know they built these things in in you know ten days and the hospital they built in ten days wasn't like the thing in the Javits Center it was a hospital that had negative pressure rooms I mean the Javits Center I mean look it's fine that they built it I'm not taking anything away from it but the lie shanshan hospital those built in China had negative pressure rooms it had telemedicine for doctors to come in remotely it had drone delivery BOTS um and it was basically set up so that you could remote operate the hospital and and the patients weren't you know exposing like doctors to the virus because healthcare workers were dying over there right um you know it was it was stuff like you know drones with thermal-imaging cameras it's it's stuff like you know mobile CT scanners that are very high throughput that can just scan a bunch of folks it's simply a technological feat where all the levers of both technology and policy were applied at the same time I wrote a blog post on this by the way you know I treated it like you know a piece of it was you know Chinese government's guide to containing the viruses like in v7 and again to be clear I'm not saying you know Oh China is good and moral or anything like that I am saying that insofar as you're copying a copy you should at least understand what it is you're copying and what is you're doing and what happened was in in China the lockdown was executed and I've tweeted about this also you could see my tweets in March on this but in China the lockdown was a top-down thing that was executed by the technocrats running the Chinese state you know in in the US lockdown was like a bottom-up cry from Twitter you know from like all these academics or engineers or whatever like Tomas poyo like you know I wrote a great article like this hammer and dance he's like a random guy right and he's fine he's smart right like I'm like I'm glad you wrote the article and so on but this is something where it's rear-wheel drive the smart people are not in our press and state you know these people literally can't divide you know like I don't know if you saw that that thing where you know like everyone blew Bloomberg could give everybody a million dollars to the US it's true and Brian Williams nods at this right like like you know and obviously our you know whether it's the mayor or the governor or the president like these these folks are not like do not do a great job right and so you have something where it's not just the idea it's execution right and ID Rizzo have people see at home and then execute all these complicated series of steps to control the virus well you know we we simply don't have the talent in our state to do that and so so that's a huge divergence and a branch point especially relative to the past because you know 1950 1968 you know the US - depalo right within the living memory basically about 52 years ago right the US was number one right it could do things that nobody else could do it was the best at coordinating huge projects right it could bring men material everything together to get things done right and what's happened is that the state capacity of the US since since basically the you know like Apollo project has just fallen off a cliff and the state capacity of China and actually India and other countries has risen over that period and now there's like a crossing point right you know there's just no way that China and 1968 would have out executed America 1968 but China 2020 has out executed America 2020 as has frankly Taiwan and New Zealand and Australia and Slovakia and Vietnam and and and all these other countries is a website called n coronavirus org front slash countries that goes into this right and so like it's really important to to recognize that in the same way that it was important for for example Steve Ballmer to understand that Google it out executed them before you can actually you know that Apple it out executed them right like you know he was famously in in denial about this for a long time you know and there'd be this sort of corporate nationalism you know that happened in Microsoft where he'd say oh you know I I tell my kids you don't you don't use an iPhone and you don't use Google and it's a great way of basically blinding yourself to what's happening in the rest of you know the industry again not saying that you copy it directly and naively I am saying that you understand when someone's ahead of you and what they're doing and and you if you decide to clone it or you build something better fine but don't don't be in denial about it right um another example of this tweeted was you know with Yeltsin you know in the late 80s came to the US right so this was around the time of the thawing of US and Russian relations right after towards the end of the Cold War and Yeltsin came and he visited and he saw like a NASA control panel or whatever right and you know he was like we've got Rockets in in the Soviet Union as well not a big deal but I read but you know what he was really impressed by was that it was there was a random stop that they made on the trip home to a supermarket and when he saw like this brand old supermarket ok Randall's was just the name of the chain he was awestruck there's a famous photo of him like just holding up his hands and dismay and basically he's like because the thing is that an American supermarket had so much plenty relative to the drab Russian supermarkets and at first he thought this was some special showroom supermarket and a fake one that you know he'd been brought to because that's what the Soviet Union did it faked everything right he's like you know this is fake or whatever and then once he realized it was real he realized that even the leaders of the Soviet Union of which he was one right he was a very exceptional person who was allowed during the time of the USSR to travel abroad not just anywhere but to America right so even the leaders of the Soviet Union had fallen for their own propaganda about how you know the capitalist West was was behind and and and so on and so forth and the leaders of the Soviet Union didn't have the quality of this market experience that a random working person in in Texas would have had right uh and so he said you know look if people at home knew about this there'd be a revolution right and so you know this is something where it's so so so important to not have excessively nationalistic or corporate nationalism or whatever nationalist blinders on you know I'll give a third example what the Meiji Revolution was I do not ok so um that's how Japan modernized in the mid-1800s you know they'd be an isolated Society for a long time and to shorten a longer story in the mid eighteen hundreds they came into contact with you know the the West right and you know these boats arrived and open up Japan as a market and so on it's famous kind of story and the Japanese realize they were behind you know they had been isolated for so long and you know here were these Westerners with all of this technology that you know was like just a level of magic almost like like a UFO landing level level thing right um but they were very pragmatic and very smart and they said look we're gonna we are going to change our national slogans right and you know gosh I'm gonna find a term for this on there's a there was a yes they they changed the slogan so it was the new slogan was enrich the country strengthen the military but the whole I want to find the they have different slogans for different eras see if I could find it it was it's sort of like a mission statement but for the country right I think it was something like expelled to barbarians and Revere the Emperor right and and then and then the new one was like enriched I'm probably butchering this but the new one was enrich the country strengthen military so point being that going from expel the barbarians and Revere the Emperor to you know enrich the country strengthen the military that's that's actually very different right the first is um you know a slogan which is about status right expelled a barbarians revered the Emperor right and the second is a slogan which is about growth right you know enrich the country you know strengthen the military and that's that's a radical actually right it's a change in mission statement and so and so Japan modernized and they became you know that's why they you know they're the first you know non-white country to actually be a European power that was actually a very big deal the russo-japanese war in the early 1900's right which is the first time that a non-white country had beaten a white country you know you know or European majority however you want to call it in a war and it was a huge thing for like colonialism - it was one of the big things that helped colonize people realize they could win right and I'd you know like that gets to all kinds of historical stuff but my main point on this was uh whether it was sathya turning around microsoft whether it was yeltsin looking and seeing how behind russia was whether it was the japanese going and doing the meiji you know restoration um this was something where folks who were smart realized they were behind and rather than get all outraged about someone pointing that out they're like okay we're behind how do we get ahead right and this actually brings us to china which is you know 1978 when Deng Xiaoping you know took over China it was very difficult by the way for him to take over China that's a whole story most Americans it's it's actually kind of interesting to me um you know this this is actually one of the more important things to know like how to china become rich right how did india become rich just like you'd read a Harvard Business School case study on on Netflix right or Amazon how did these countries turn around you agree about how companies turn how do you turn on a country that's even harder right many much harder um and I think there's a lot of lessons for business and management and so on even if again you know like I'm sure the comments oh my god China is evil okay got it right fine III may agree with you on on many of these premises um just like you know the Soviet Union was evil in many ways and yet we can discuss it in a dispassionate way that you know like they did do Sputnik right and that was something that helped put out the space race and so on and so you know we can kind of separate those two bits right okay coming back to ding shopping for a second he also turned around the country right so it's a fourth example of these turnarounds right so Thea turning around Microsoft you know Russia at least partially turning themselves around I mean they had a horrible go of it in the 90s with the transition to capitalism but a former Soviet Union countries like I Sonya did extremely well Poland has done well and so and so on net it's probably you're not probably it is a win and certainly Japan did well okay so how did how did ding Jia ping turnaround China well he had a few things which have become slogans now you know the famous one you know black cat white cat doesn't matter if it catches mice another one was let some people get rich first which basically said look I know that we're gonna go from everybody equally poor to some degree of quote you know income and wealth inequality but that's okay so long as you realize you'll get you know wealthier later and these are very compact slogans right let's um get rich first doesn't mean you'll never get rich it just says by been injecting the word first it's like okay fine they go first I'll go second but it's fine right um later there's another slogan that the Chinese have which is the backwards will be beaten okay that's very important where you know there's a this guy called scholars I think scholar staged on Twitter I may be butchering that but um he has a good article on this but the backwards will be being basically means that you know China you know it's a proud country and during you know the opium wars and you know during the how the Japanese invaded them during World War two you know they were they were brought low right by folks outside with superior technology and so China itself has a balance between rationalism and nationalism right so and these are an intention okay so nationalism is you know like be proud China is the best you know etc and rational them says hey we may not be the best in something what are we not the best in let's learn about that those are in tension game and you know when you combine them you have something where you can both advance science and you know strengthen the military and the country and so on and so forth you know another place that rationalism and nationals are in tension that you're actually very familiar with where crypto because every crypto tribe there's the nationalism of boosting my coin and there's the rationalism of the technology and the science and the features of other coins that might be worth adopting we're thinking about or looking at you know obvious example being let's say privacy right you know anybody in in a Bitcoin should know about Z cash and zero knowledge and that's that's just important right that makes Bitcoin better right and um if if you're in the mode of oh everything's ship going or whatever you know that's just excessive nationalism right and not enough rationalism now with that said something I have learned over the last six seven years is there's more value to nationalism than you might think you know because you can the the tribalism of crypto is in a sense an extension of Mac versus PC or you know Emacs versus VI there's something about it where it's not just a technology but a community and it's a sunk cost and there's something where a community gains value from expanding because if you have a billion people using iOS it's better for you as an iOS user than if there's only a million people right which is kind of why this technology evangelism takes place on a I'm not saying it's like always that quote self-interested or whatever but it's it's I think it's one of the reasons right and that reaches its apotheosis or maybe not maybe it's not yet maybe there's there's more forms yet right with with crypto where there's a financial incentive to bring other people into your coin etc right so that that irrational nationalism is actually helpful to fight off price drops right say this is the I don't care what it says on the screen I don't care what you say couldn't close my ears never gonna sell cetera it's actually kind of good to have some of those folks in the community but not too many because there's too many then you can't improve or react to anything you'll never admit flaws of any kind right so uh all right let me pause there because that's that's a lot of history a lot of stuff yeah so I want to go back to the China thing in a second but staying on this nationalism versus rationalism it sounds like what you're saying is if you have nationalism without the rationalism it's almost like everyone feels like hey we're in this together but we're all the poor people in China back in the day right like there's no ability to actually improve or change or recognize what needs to be done it's just you're all bought into this blind belief yeah it gets even worse than that though because um it turns into there's no growth right the rationals is what provides a growth the Nationals is what provides a tribalism and in the absence of any growth people fight over a zero-sum pie because it doesn't just stay as nationalism it becomes nationalist socialism where you know right like like those tribes you know one way of putting it is you know you see this dynamic on Twitter whatever ideology somebody may claim to have on Twitter it becomes Twitter ism where the most extreme version of that ideology is selected for likes and cliques and so on and the folks who promulgate that are reinforced in that by other people's social reinforcement and it just like is this feedback loop that is kind of a radicalizing sort of thing right this is all the time no matter what your ayala is if it's whether it's tolerance well you get fu right whether it's a non-aggression principle it ends in fu right these things well that's interesting non aggression is fu now of course people say oh well that's just violence or every but actually means civilization as well you know like you know there's there's a the point of the non-aggression principle is not to go around saying fu to everybody the point is to maintain a civilized society and you know like it's it's something where like civilization is good even if people take it for granted right and so so gosh I lost my try thought so let's keep going down that path of how does that apply to China which I think okay well let me finish before I just remember go ahead so so the thing is that um all these ideologies become Twitter ISM and Twitter ISM become zero-sum because once you have try ballistically managed to shoo off everybody show off all growth sure if anybody that wants to improve it and so on then you fight among other people for who is the most tolerant of them all who is the maximalist of the maxilla you know like this this kind of stupid thing right like in this in this very closed loop of people where you try and find some flaw that this person had and then just attack them right you know and and that's actually the trap that you know China was certainly stuck in for many many years right purge after purge after purge internal political rivalries and so on and so forth so so you get tribalism without the growth mentality and then you know the flip side of it is you can also have excessive rationalism right excessive rationalism I think is less pathological than excessive nationalism but it basically results in you having you know a bunch of science and a bunch of engineering and a bunch of cool stuff but you know somebody will come and take away all your toys it's like it's like in Civilization you know the ear play the game of course yeah so civilization the game if you put all your money into technology in commerce and and nothing else the guy next door were the one Spearman can just come in and take all your stuff right so if you if you go excessively rationalist you do not survive either right so so clearly there's some kind of balance here and I think that that trade-off is something that we're going to need to negotiate as a society because it's a real adaptation and unfortunately feel we're moving in the wrong direction on it where people are becoming more irrationally nationalistic just at a time when it's actually more important to be open-minded yeah so on this piece I guess part of this is is that balance where we talk about negotiating the balance is that driven from the state level or is that something that's more bottoms-up and driven by the people and who they elect into office and kind of the people actually end up controlling that and in some way it's it's all the above I mean in a sense of you know the state just as one example right World War two the the state had women go off to war and not to actually fight but to like they were working in factories and so on and then afterwards there was a new normal and women were working more more frequently right so something where a centralized thing came in from above changed behavior and preferences and then even when that force was removed there was still a permanent Delta right there's still a change so soon were top-down and bottom-up like you know even when top-down left bottom-up retains some imprint of the top-down force and then kind of went on its own right and so so I don't think it's you know it's just one example like you know tariffs matter right like you know the the trade policy really matters immigration policy matters those are things that are set you know somewhat top-down and just say some was obviously outcry matters and so on as well but uh you know those definitely influence what is feasible bottom-up right so I wouldn't I wouldn't be able to divide it necessarily but what I would say is certainly in if you feel you're in a technology space right um it behooves you to look at every green zone that's out there and understand what they're doing right and then also think through okay what's going to happen in red zones and so just let me define terminology here because I'm just using it for my Twitter a river but a green zone is basically a place that's gotten the virus under control and in you know you can be more precise and say it's a it's a region with comprehensive testing that has no new cases in let's say you know two weeks or four weeks right some time period and the reason both those are important comp region so it's a spatial region with comprehensive testing so because if you're not testing then I don't believe you're a green zone right and no new cases meaning you have extended a streak right you're being just sampling I'm gonna have you and and you really have called a virus right okay and a red zone is everywhere else right both the places without testing because you don't know if the virus is there and certain the place that I've testing and that IV let it go vertical so one of my PCs is that green zones will actually in general be able to sort of let up on the the state will be there but in general they're gonna have better health better wealth and less of a state presence okay the reason being because you've sort of managed to keep society like lick wobbling on a new normal right rather than just have it crash right conversely in a red zone I think you're going to get huge strain pressures on where you get a series of things where viral destruction leads to economic disruption leads to viral destruction leads to like did they actually you know stack on top of each other right so for example right you have the serious virus okay then folks you know they do lockdown or in you know a cargo cult lockdown okay then they all get mad understandably because people are going bankrupt and so on they come out and some of them unfortunately are like oh the virus isn't a big deal or you know just the flu bro or whatever right don't wear masks boom that leads to another level of viral destruction right Oh actually yeah I mean I kill you but it might significally diminish lung function for the rest of your life or for weeks or months who knows right and who knows the percentage on that yeah we don't have good bidadi stats we have good mortality stats or I should say okay mortality stats like we know case fatality rate and and so on we don't yet know like what percentage of normal people you know have eight week convalescence 'iz or permanently decreased lung function we don't know the long-term effects of this thing all right so so folks who just rushed out there oh oh actually BAM they just walk right into this virus which is going crazy by the way in 50 states uh and then then that leads to yet another pullback where demand goes back and you know like people go back at home and so on and at least some more unemployment and more unhappy people and and that kind of stuff stacks now you don't have the money to go and pay for you know like masks or hand sanitizer so people get the virus more you know that that type of stuff right so you can have this really negative feedback loop actually not a negative feedback loop it's a positive feedback loop in a sense of amplifying it right on that leads to [Music] more unrest potentially and you know so Iran actually had some civil unrest and whatnot right um and I mean the biggest thing is Americans should understand that it can happen here I mean it just as one example Michigan evidently are do you see this thing I did see it and I think that uh actually Michigan was real guns and I don't know if you saw Raleigh North Carolina where I grew up there was people who walked around with fake guns so they literally took like a piece of wood and made it look like a 50 caliber they had an inner tube that they made look like an 84 you know rocket launcher and they were basically doing a play on Michigan was real we're pissed off we're not gonna go walk around with the 84 for real but like here's our almost social unrest display and it's just very interesting to see that happening in locations exactly and so I mean look it's this whole situation is bad on like a number of different levels but it's it's something where you're getting more sci-fi movie almost every day right and the problem is that you know there's at least two analogies for what the virus is doing and the littles talked about some of the crypto implications of it one analogy is to analogize it to an invasion okay so people have talked about this they're like oh is this a recession or a depression and that's because um you know those are the things that come to mind as is this like the 2008 crisis or not because everybody lived through that it's a reference point right um but I think that a better analogy I mean this is not fundamentally an economic event it's not fundamentally a political event it's it's a biological event it's a physical event right and it's like imagine this thing floating in space and then you project it down into the XY plane okay it's basically red Dom interviewers on the movie right they look out the window and also they're getting invading people parachuting into the the parking lot right that's it it's not biological incident that's exactly I think it's so with the very very important caveat it's just because I know some of the little mystery odors I'm not saying it's a bio weapon or anything like that okay I'm not okay it's a naturally occurring virus probably with everything we know it's possible it could have escaped from the lab whatever people have talked about that I think that's it's a possibility but um you know like there's no evidence indicates a bioweapon okay with that said the entire US military and NATO were basically imaginal I'm Joan that is right yeah so good yep well so you know in France after World War one they're like oh we're gonna build a system of fortification so the next time the Germans come with their trench warfare we'll be ready for them and the Germans just completely invalidated that where the Nazi blitzkrieg just went around you know and it was like a classic example of fighting the last war and then the French just got defeated right and you know the US military and NATO have been m.i.a in the pandemic right and by the way you know people say oh you know Asia had SARS and they were ready and we weren't like the u.s. had an anthrax scare in 2001 right number one number two is you know there was a bola in 2014 right and number three there were actually written pandemic plans like Bush had something on this look you know DARPA stuff there's all the stuff that's written down it's supposed to be like a bio defense program or whatever it just they can't execute on it right they're literally incapable of doing it so the every rogue state every terrorist frankly every state in the world has seen that you know all the defenses of the u.s. right you know you have the Atlantic in the Pacific you have all these aircraft carriers and nuclear missiles and so on all the soldiers everything basically just completely invalidated by the virus well here's one kind of analogy that I've thought through so that I don't know if you noticed I was in the Army for a six and a half years and so oh really okay relatively intimate with both the expertise and the incompetence that goes on within those work just like any organization I'm not beating up on the military but I'm just saying that just yeah go ahead yeah well so here's one way to think about this right is a one of the most successful ways to attack the US military over the last decade or so has been actually to either use embedded soldiers so like in Afghanistan for example US and Afghan soldiers go out on a mission all of a sudden the Afghan soldiers which are deemed friendly turn and shoot a us right right you can kind of a a blue on blue type incident but yes they have a different uniform they're just around the second thing would be something like a Fort Hood shooting where literally is somebody in a US unifies yeah this radicalized shoes yeah then if you go to what aircraft carrier where I think it was a general or Colonel or whatever right so the virus extends that because you basically are capturing somebody and turning a soldier into a threat by basically yeah and so we saw this on and kind of steroids if earlier just a couple of weeks ago there was a I'll call him the captain of the ship I don't remember exactly Rozier yeah literally said look I'm basically stuck on an aircraft carrier with a bunch of soldiers and every single one of them is now a weapon against each other because they're just infecting each other and I don't have the tools to handle this right basically let me be home not ready for me let me actually cut he's stabilizing my ship so that I can protect my soldiers and we can preserve our readiness in the future and I think that that is something just people didn't understand people didn't think about and when then when you see it happened you're like whoa that could decimate an entire military force it could decimate a lot of different folks our friendship a French aircraft carrier got taken down right and you know like basically there's there's a sense I mean you know World War one started with cavalry do you know that right look I actually you're an army guy you know more military history than I do for sure but um a lot of people don't know this it that's actually you know it started with horses and horse charges and ended with you know the first mechanized warfare right uh I have a feeling that you know khava 19 may make the era of infantry and even human staffed you know boats and so on go away and it'll just all be a robot war it's all drones all drone ships all drone everything and it won't be human staff go ahead yeah and I think part of this this fits into the larger narrative just like the virus has just served as an accelerant right and I'm you know if you would talk to people a year ago and said hey in the future are we gonna have more foot soldiers or more drums right on the battlefield most people would say hey it's gonna get more automated it's gonna get more kind of autonomous evolved right now all of a sudden it becomes well not only is that technology one component of it but we actually may be rendered not as effective if there's things like this out there right I mean you know in any sort of military unit that spends lots of time together that's like the exact opposite thing you want to be doing for you know some sort of viral outbreak exactly that's right and and especially given you know a few things first is uh the I mean like it's it's actually a pretty serious virus for at least some fraction of healthy people okay we don't know the exact percentage but you know for example I posted that thing with that 45 year old former football player right or Mara gay in the New York Times has written about her story right you know Kat Gleason it's not for a very fit Elissa chef in ski you know Lauren Sugarman like these are folks who you know they've all tweeted about it and what have you there's plenty more who you know I can't even talk about but I've I've talked to a lot of kaabah 19 patients because you know in tech you know there's a saying right you look at your dashboards and you talk to customers right there's a quantitative and a qualitative and and you know it's people will often I think have a middlebrow dismissal of talking to customers or talking patient's okay oh that's anecdotal that's you know N equals one oh you know blah blah and what they don't understand is every data collection starts or not every many data collection efforts start with a conversation like that for example you're looking at your dashboards and you talk to a customer and they say oh I was able to log in you're like oh no really and then you go and you instrument that and you find 10 percent of your customers can't log in on mobile safari or whatever right and you're like I oh my god yeah you're just blind to that you were data blind because you didn't have the metric and you have the metric cuz you hadn't talked to customers right the analog of that today is folks who are looking at lethality stats case fatality rates and they're seeing correctly and this is important 92% of deaths are for people over age 50 and 75 percent of hospitalizations are for people over age 50 and I have to quote of those you know stats a lot and it's important to know those things but the wrong conclusion is okay then that means you know I'm 30 so I've got nothing to worry about right yeah you may not die right that's true but and so relative to death everything is mild okay however um relative to a cup of coffee in person you may not want to risk you know a 10-week sickness and permanently decrease lung function right so so like it's where you set that bar and the problem is people are comparing it to the death and they're thinking oh it's not a big deal of course short you know few things or big deal relative death right go ahead you're gonna say well I'm just going to ask so part of this I think in the thing that I personally struggle with the most and I think other people that I talk with there's this element of like accurate is the data right and I'm sure you got the whole conversation with I don't think it is a fair question or a fair expectation to have a hundred percent accuracy in the data in the middle of kind of the firestorm right it's kind of like you're at war and if you said to somebody how many bullets you got left maybe somebody knows but most people say well I got less than I had when I started right and ignited directionally and so I think that for this how I can give you a good answer I can give you my answer on that okay so I understand like how important you think like exact accuracy versus directional extra extra accuracy is during this yeah so so um I mean it does to pen you know if you're talking about the dosing of a drug sometimes you know like it actually can be sensitive right but um yeah in general I you know I I think directional is a way to go because we're in kind of fog of war kind of situation with that said there's some very high signal events right wuhan happened Italy happened NYC happened right like these are well documented you know they're like basically you know in late January and early February when I was fighting off the first just the flu folks right I would basically make the following point which was December first wuhan was normal City by January 23rd hospitals were overflowing and the city was shut down by the Chinese government like you know you had like uh you you basically had the thing brought to a halt right like the sickness brought the city to a halt that's not like a flu situation right the same thing what's that 53 days yeah exactly 53 is less than two months you had a city basically brought to its knees right and um you know that is that was that's not that is simply I mean every every single person in that city you there been the flu coming through before right so the flu thing by the way is it's one of these mind viruses that I think will end up killing or what it does is it increases the number of people killed by Corona because it disables the behavioral immune system it's kind of like you know this thing has a stealth mode to it where because the symptoms it produces our variable not everybody melts down in a pool of blood like Ebola right like Ebola ones like okay that's gonna kill me and you take extreme precaution on it right you know or or like you know something like 9/11 right like it was very obvious that things got blown up is very visible right is very tangible this is invisible and it's highly variable and you're basing everything I mean you're not getting close to a corona patient right you know probably right you're at least not intentionally so everything is like at a distance and what I've realized is that if you don't trust you know experts or the press and you know what there's unfortunately a lot of good reasons not to trust them because they've messed up a lot yet on their hand they're not you know even if they I mean this is you know I tweeted this our day but basically expert I mean it's so obvious right but I'll just say this like you know Democrats need to learn that experts aren't always right Republicans need to learn that experts are always wrong libertarians need to learn that a state can succeed and progressives need to learn that a state can fail and those are all like almost tautologically obvious kind of things yet I think it given some of the responses to that they poked sir directly at a few blind spots there right because once you move from the menisci and ideological 0 or 100 aspect right um you say yeah ok CDC did screw up WH or describe but they don't they're not everything they publish is wrong you have to be able to read it critically and then that now here's the rub the rub is most people cannot do technical diligence if they can't do technical diligence they can only do social diligence and so they can only like trust something uncritically or say it's all fake so what's happened is because our Institute and and so one of the issues also is just as our institutions have become more noticeably unreliable they've dumped their chest harder to say how how they are the truth great example the New York Times literally runs an ad campaign about how it's the truth when it published a bunch of bad reporting on Corona early on like including things that said oh it's all xenophobic and what-have-you right and and then you know like it actually had some justice food journalism in there and then you know two months rumors they were saying it's not just the flu well who would have given them that idea right you know like Fox did and Rico did and and BuzzFeed did and wash those perspectives did and wire did and and so on who would have given that idea right and so the the issue is that there'll be a real tragedy which is folks who reasonably do not trust these institutions will find that they're not always wrong so and yeah and then press on this component right because you get into like the people in Michigan who show up it with you know with guns and right we're basically saying look we don't want to agree to the lockdown and and there's this underlying sentiment in the United States specifically around freedom the Constitution just don't tell me sure do right and that to me kind of feels like it bleeds into this idea of the countries that are the government's they're they're not always wrong but there is a some you know sense of distrust or if everything goes to I'm gonna take my personal freedom and I can you know go solve my own problem and I think you're seeing some of the extreme examples of that when people show up in Michigan etc but at what point do we get where that becomes not the extreme and starts to seep into the maing mainstream mentality and it leads to the ultimate failure of an institution right or actually it's not just a w-h-o being wrong sometimes people just point and say they're always wrong we no longer trust them unfortunately it's already there we're like this q and on stuff and you know play endemic and what have you I mean that's some true crazy stuff right and and you know it's not even it's it's no longer rational it's like arguing with like a religion or something because folks they don't they don't they're not arguing in the way that I would talk to a scientist which is here's X here's Y if a then B you know that kind of thing they're just there Shawn another planet right and the the problem is people people don't understand how much stuff is running like you know to just keep society going right and if you if you break all of that you're taking it for granted right these armed protesters and so on like look I understand that they're quote mad about the lockdowns and so it I think that they're not really but let's talk about that just for a second okay just because it's it's being turned too spidery thing and it's much more complicated that okay first the best outcome would be like a New Zealand or Australia or Taiwan you know which is a democratic country that managed to control the virus that's gonna have healthier people and wealthier people in the long run okay so it shows that a it's possible B is achievable and C is achievable without becoming a police state and so on very very important to know that that was possible okay all right said that that was possible but the u.s. hasn't achieved it so what does that mean okay so when you've got an out-of-control virus and it's a serious virus okay so let's take that as a premise because folks want to there's the folks who want to say it's like just the flu or whatever leave that aside for now okay you've gotten out of control serious virus that means so if we give the analogy of an invasion right I'm gonna give a different analogy which is the power going out okay so our society is explicitly premise on power water roads and increasingly internet right and if the power goes out you don't expect restaurant to be able to serve the same number of customers Alban doesn't work for example the lights don't go on you know all the type of stuff right okay if the water goes out you don't expect them to serve customers you expect the you know state the utility to fix that and then if it can't you realize okay I need to get a generator I need to get like a water purifier and those by the way are inefficient you know when they're not done centrally a lot of the stuff is much much much more efficient when it's done centrally from a power standpoint from a cost standpoint having 10,000 generators is just you know those things aren't as good right solar panels are different I can come back to that but let's say in general okay plus a pain in the neck right it's something where it's a tax not just on your money but it's on your time to like not be able to plug something in and have it go on okay so these are utilities that were explicitly premise Don but we are implicitly premise on the absence of serious infectious disease in the public square okay I want to linger on this point we are taking or we until Kaba 19 took for granted the public health triumphs of the 20th century so I tweeted this you know but basically there's a review from 1976 of the conquest of infectious diseases like a Bicentennial summary right I talked about all the measures and chucking an enormous it was it was thought of at that time in 1976 as a massive social and technological achievement on par with like getting to the moon was controlling you know cholera malaria tuberculosis all these infectious diseases in the United States and and this is before they had PCR I didn't have PCR testing didn't have much of the technology we have today they did a lot of it with you know training of swamps and you know like sanitation certainly vaccines and whatnot but basically they took the problem seriously and they executed on and they went and eradicated or controlled a lot of these diseases and what's happened is over the last 50 years people have just sort of forgotten that that was ever a thing and so that's how we have society or many many businesses our premise on the presence of this utility which is public health for example conferences or concerts or you know frankly any large crowd of any kind rallies right or public public transit you know restaurants bars all of these things with gatherings of large crowds are implicitly premise on the public health being being present so like the power going out you can think of the health have going out so what happens if the health is gone out just like it would be kind of crazy to say to a restaurant power through and just serve your customers if the oven doesn't work well if the health has gone out and the restaurant opens back up a bunch of things happen first some significant fraction of customers stay home second there's new costs that are imposed on the restaurant and if you saw California's reopening guidelines for restaurants but they basically expect like Joe's diner to implement bio defense mode okay all right so if Josiah nerd go ahead I was gonna say that sounds very reasonable right yeah exactly it's the state is failed so it's a Snow Crash thing alright so so number one many customers will stay home right number two new costs are imposed on a place which is at its lowest point financially it's just been two months out of revenue it's it's like sucking sucking wind businesses down and now the state expects it to like you know basically build a clean room around a dining table right okay number three workers will get sick the virus is uncontrolled right so you have much more in the way of random matches number four you have PR and liability risk the moment that like your restaurant or whatever is marked a hotspot because you know there's a report a news report of someone getting it boom business vanishes again right to show that that's not an exaggeration in South Korea 2,000 bars were shut down after one guy you know walk through five do you see that I do not okay yeah so after South Korea opened up okay because they've gone the virus under control one cob at 19 guy walked into a bar and and he went into a few bar hopped for a night and managed to in fact like all in the order of 40 to 70 people the exact numbers still being determined nineteen hundred people had to be test and traced and two thousand bars were shut down one guy one guy yep one guy right now I'm like I'm not seeing it's his fault or anything like that he didn't know I think he was asymptomatic or a bit happy right but um this gives a sense of how the when the health has gone out a significant part of the economy is no longer economically feasible to the same extent right anything based on you go ahead so so and and the lockdown doesn't doesn't fix it is my point right unless you control the virus you have less customers two people will social distance you have like bio defense mode that you need to implement if you don't implement it then workers will get sick and people who come will get sick and there's constant PR and liability risk so what do I think actually happens right I think happens is many restaurants um will essentially just take restaurants for a second I'll go to other kinds of businesses they will have to upload themselves and clarify themselves what I mean by that so the restaurant will shut down it's the smart restaurant will shut down its physical facility sighting force majeure do cloud kitchens calm to set up a new back end which is headless and that can be by the way out in the middle of nowhere it doesn't have to be a plumb location you don't need you don't care about your tables you don't care about your chairs your decor number three your storefront becomes purely digital you're in an app and number four you basically are now just delivery only okay so you've digitized yourself you become headless you cut off the front right at the restaurant itself is shut down but this is another very important aspect you could end the lockdowns well that actually takes away leverage from businesses in an important way because now it's no longer an atypical time it's no longer a typical time they have to pay all their rent and other kinds of things but now there are 25 percent of revenue right so you've pushed them into this weird intermediate state which is also kind of likely to kill them and the the fundamental thing I think is the end of the lockdowns folks look III understand I understand where they're coming from a lot of folks I mean I've never been blase if you look at my feet even even back to early March when people were talking about shutting down South by Southwest and so on right um it almost made me like throw up to think about okay you know these people work so hard on this for a whole year I know how hard it is to organize something and then people say oh just shut down your conference well that's good you know that's that's something where those guys are just taking it on the chin for a public good you know maybe the state could reimburse them or something I was thinking you know but now it's so widespread you multiply that by a million that's what's happened in America right so I totally understand where the end lockdowns folks are coming from the issue is that even though you might risk it for to go back to work for your job you're not gonna risk it to um just go and like get a drink at the bar or if you do you may not you may not do so forever right so let's talk mmt BTC right you know it's funny I last year or for a while I've basically be talking about how the title fight of the 2020s will be mmt versus BTC and I think that's coming even faster than I expected we're we're definitely you know whether you call it mm tea or not we are definitely in the time of the unlimited government right and you know that's the opposite by the way of limited government its unlimited government so you have a government that has no limits on you know it can put people under house arrest effectively with lockdowns it can change prices it can you know shut down your business it can ban flights it can print money it's basically a wartime kind of government right the unlimited government and the thing about mmt is it doesn't make any sense in my view if you like in in in logic terms okay and just to articulate what it is for those folks who don't know what it is modern monetary theory or mmt is there's there's the observation that the state can print money and that's often accompanied by the recommendation that the state should print money okay and it should print money to pay for everything and that there's no constraint on the state doing this right and you know essentially like if they're pressed on oh won't to cause inflation they say well don't worry if inflation happens and prices start going up we'll just raise taxes to pull the money we just printed back out of the economy right now the the just to show that I'm not making this up there's a there's a video that you might be able to link or what have you by a gosh it's I I tweeted it a while back but it essentially shows the MMT folks treating the economy is like a tank of water and they pump in water and they pull it out with taxes and so on and this is a very naive view for many many reasons one of which is in type of inflation if you try to increase taxes well people you know they've already got lower consumption and they're gonna resist that number two is the economy is not a tank of water it's it's adversarial right like people will respond to incentives and one of the things they'll do is they'll move their money into BTC or to other cryptocurrencies and so on and get out of the tank where you know you're you're printing all this money and so MMT you know you can't be really understood in terms of what its people say but it can be understood from a different sense which is I have a gun right mmt is the language of the state the total state the unlimited state which says ah the state can increase taxes to 99% and expropriate everything you have right because that's what that means like print all the money means dilute you down to zero it's like being able to print trillions of shares on the cap table or what happy right and so it means that I can print all this and because it's currency within this realm I can see is any asset of anybody and do so in a quiet and stealth way right because you don't see your percentage of you know market cap right now one thing I want to be clear about it's not as simple as just straight inflation because there's huge deflation occurring in the economy as well so we're probably gonna get something where it's like pandemic deflation as I mentioned of all the all the things people don't want like concerts go to zero in terms of price or drop substantially all the things they do want rise in price okay so so in one corners mmt this language of the total state in their corner is BTC which is um you know maybe the leader of the free world right I think it's a provocative statement but um you know the u.s. itself is sort of absent globally from the pandemic crisis you know it doesn't stand for freedom it or rather I mean maybe it does but it's not like you know usually when there's like a flood in some country you have Marines land and they you know hug babies and pose for a photo op and you know it's good stuff right you know like that they're moving sandbags you probably did some of those missions or whatever um and and the u.s. is completely absent from the global stage on this they're not defending other countries because they've been invaded themselves right and so who's the leader of the free world I think it's gonna be Bitcoin or bitcoin is a leader of the free world you're kind of talking about here's MMT is a complete state initiated process you devalue the currency you get people addicted to the state being the savior and having to drive all of the value and literally it's like a child and a mother right the mother has to take care of the child or the child doesn't make Bitcoin is some weird way 180-degree difference and it is coming at it from in one area you can print as much as you want in this one you can print zero right it is completely decentralized two different and so I think a lot of people are wondering okay I buy the argument that those two worlds are going to co-exist for some period of time can they coexist wherever or do they meet in kind of that boxing match in the middle and one has to knock the other way so I think that where they sew the analogy I would give is I think BTC ultimately wins but it's gonna be a giant fight between I mean like you know think about Facebook before 2016 and then Facebook afterwards afterwards everybody's like oh my god this thing is actually extremely powerful and and you know all these attacks were launched it's still standing but it took more fire at that time than it ever had before once Bitcoin hits a hundred thousand I don't know when I mean frankly it could happen in a week from now it could happen a year from now it could happen to five years from now or whatever right but eventually it will once it hits like a hundred thousand and you know the current being what it is it could happen in a day after being nothing for a long time when it does and I've no doubt that it will eventually simply because so much money is being printed when it does then you're gonna get another level of state interest in it in all senses of the term some states will actually adopt it as like a gold like thing other states will try to stamp it out you know but as long as some states adopted and the internet doesn't go down Bitcoin will win you

Channel: Anthony Pompliano

Views: 32,814

Keywords: bitcoin, btc, podcast, pomp, anthony pompliano, crypto, cryptocurrency, blockchain, finance, investing, fintech, tech, technology, investing news, financial news, btc price, bitcoin price, markets, bitcoin news, media, pomp podcast

Id: SU6H-5kA0FA

Length: 83min 54sec (5034 seconds)

Published: Fri May 15 2020