Balaji and Dan Wang: The Engineering State vs Lawyerly State

Balaji Srinivasan speaks with Dan Wang, author of Breakneck, about China's industrial rise, America's competing strengths in software and finance, and what happens when an engineering state and a lawyerly state collide. The conversation covers manufacturing dominance, the future of the dollar, why both superpowers keep making costly mistakes, and where builders fit into what comes next.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Balaji Srinivasan?

  Digital borders and physical borders are like the same thing, right? The Great Firewall will be seen in some ways as a very far sighted thing because it is digital hard borders.

• 0:11Speaker 01

  I think that the US can very credibly point to these amazing strengths that the US has. I think China can also point to these amazing strengths, namely these drone armadas, which are very powerful.

• 0:21Balaji Srinivasan?

  Chinese robotics are actually really good. And for the first time, Tech America is actually taking China seriously.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  I am going to let no one talk me down from my stance of manufacturing as almost everything.

• 0:34Speaker 02

  What does it take to industrialize a continent in a single generation? In 1978, then Xiaoping kept the communist branding, but rewired everything underneath. Special economic zones became Shenzhen, the eastern seaboard industrialized. By 2025, China led the world in cars, solar, ships, and advanced manufacturing. That growth is real, but so are the crafts. Political purges, a property implosion, youth unemployment, and a wave of entrepreneurs leaving for Singapore, Dubai, and beyond. Meanwhile, America's trillion-dollar tech companies remain unmatched. The question is whether software valuations and financial engineering can sustain a great power, or whether the US needs to rebuild its industrial base to compete. And if it does, who builds it?

• 1:17Speaker 02

  Previously aired on the Network State Podcast, Balaji Srinivasan speaks with Dan Wang, author of Breakneck, about the engineering state versus the lawyerly state, and what builders on both sides of the Pacific should understand about what comes next.

• 1:32Balaji Srinivasan?

  Dan, welcome to Network State Podcast. And I think, you know, we hung out several years ago in the before COVID times, I think, at some Stripe thing, if I recall, that Collison organized, something like that, one of these.

• 1:47Speaker 01

  Frontier Camp, we played a very, my favorite board game together.

• 1:53Balaji Srinivasan?

  Yeah, what was it? It was... It was one of these things, was it Werewolf? No, what was it?

• 1:58Speaker 01

  Something close. It's called Avalon, in which there are roughly seven of us around the table. Three people are evil. They know who each other are, and the four good people don't in general know who anyone else is. And the aim of the game is for the evil people to assert themselves as good, and for the good people to deduce who the evil people are. I've been playing this for many years now. I play it in different cities, and I'm glad to have been able to play it with you in the woods of Northern California.

• 2:30Balaji Srinivasan?

  That's right. And I think, as I remember, I was, because this is the first time I played it, and I was thinking, what if we wrote the state space matrix on a whiteboard, which was either the really smart thing to do or really dumb thing to do, and like Gurn got annoyed at that or something, as I vaguely recall. This is like many years ago. Yes, that's right.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:53Balaji Srinivasan?

  But I still think there's something to that. I have to go back and play that, and I feel like you might be able to, maybe it'd be bad to write it on the board, and it takes away the mystique of it, but there's something to that, the process of elimination. Anyway.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  I remember you doing that, and I think I was evil, and I managed to deduce who was like, who the Merlin was, based on your, based on your calculations.

• 3:11Balaji Srinivasan?

  Yeah, there's something, there's something about, like, there's an underlying data structure behind the thing, some kind of process of elimination, you know? Sort of like the Monty Hall problem in stats, where you actually write out the decision tree, and then you can actually understand it better. At least, I wanted to see what would happen. Anyway. Maybe it took some of the fun out of it, but it was fun, for me at least, or maybe hopefully for you. Anyway, so, so we first traveled in some of the same circles, and, you know, I liked your book, which we'll get into in a second, so break neck, and we'll put it on screen.

• 3:41Balaji Srinivasan?

  And I liked it because, so, you know, what's funny is, maybe this conversation will be a little different than some of the other ones you've had, because it says a lot of things that I think are.

• 3:54Balaji Srinivasan?

  That Americans should understand, but are super obvious to anybody who's paying attention to Asia. And in fact, I actually think you go easy on the US. I'm much more of a bear perhaps on the US than you are. Maybe you pull some bunches in that or what have you. Because I'm actually, I'm messaging, I'm talking to you right now from Singapore. And so let me see if I can, you know, obviously others have summarized the book, but essentially China's an engineering state, America's a lawyerly state. China actually is on the right in many ways because Xi is all about the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, even if he's kept the communist symbols. You know, Mao went after the four olds and went after filial piety and so on and so

• 4:37Balaji Srinivasan?

  forth, and Xi completely reversed that, where it's really a nationalist conservative revival of 5,000 years of history and so on and so forth. And in many ways, when Deng Xiaoping took over in 1978, you know, a rebranding changes the logo, but not the guts. And Deng Xiaoping did a reinterpretation where he kept the logo but changed the guts completely. It was basically, in my view, a coup, which is funny because now the Communist Party, nor Democrats, nor Republicans admit the extreme discontinuity between Deng and Mao. Because like, I know I'm butchering the pronunciation, but Huaguan Feng and the Gang of Four were supposed to be like the successors to Mao, and Deng managed to take over and shifted

• 5:20Balaji Srinivasan?

  it towards the capitalist road, even after he'd been perched three times and a sudden been thrown through a window. And, you know, the famous, you know, black cat, white cat, doesn't matter if it catches mice, and the Zhao Gang contract where those villagers, at least that was the, there's the idea of it. Maybe that was just a legend, but there's villagers that had a contract to do capitalism, and they weren't actually executed unlike everybody else. And that was kind of like, held up a hand, Deng Xiaoping held up a hand and said, okay, capitalism's legal in these regions, the special economic zones, and thus began Shenzhen and the things that are on the eastern seaboard. And that's how China modernized and go to capitalism all at once, right? So. I may be getting some of that wrong, but was that roughly accurate? Kind of a quick capsule history? Go ahead.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, the only thing that I would quickly add is that I think Deng had a lot of the governing styles of Mao. He certainly purged a lot of people. He was really ruthless against some of his enemies. He got rid of several of his successors. And I think he was, in the words of one party historian, half a Mao. And so I don't, I don't think he's, no saint there. I mean, he was, he was as ruthless, I would say, even though his ends were much better, for sure.

• 6:26Balaji Srinivasan?

  He started out as communist, right? And he was in the, he was in the party for a long time. And actually, somebody said that even the war in Vietnam, which was one war that was, you know, was that Deng held it, I had read this book, I'll see if I can find it, to distract the generals from, because he was, he was doing a lot of changing of the guard in Beijing at that time. So he just sent them all to go and fight Vietnam again, so he could go and do some reforms or whatever in the capital. I don't know if you ever heard that.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was to get the army's support, to give them a really fun war. And then he will, and then he'll have their support forever.

• 7:02Balaji Srinivasan?

  Yeah, something like that, right? So, and then, you know, that began sort of the tradition of, or maybe I'm wrong about this, maybe that predated Deng, but there were like, there's like three posts that the head has, which are, you know, the titular head of the state, the head of the party, and then also like the head of the military or something like that, right?

• 7:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:17Balaji Srinivasan?

  And Deng began the tradition of holding all three of those crowns to run China, if that's correct, if I'm not mistaken, or maybe Mao had.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  Was the state president, but he was, I'm not even sure he was head of the Communist Party, but he was head of the Central Military Commission.

• 7:32Balaji Srinivasan?

  CMC, right, yeah, this is why, this is why I'll get some of the details wrong, but there's like three things that he had, and he was kind of running, it's like a, you know, uniting the three forces, to be, okay, fine, so I may as well flash up what I, what I got wrong, okay. So the reason I say that is, here is what I will stipulate, well, so I want to play your, your book back to you, and you tell me if I got it wrong, and then I want to actually debate with you what comes next.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 7:56Balaji Srinivasan?

  Okay, so first, everybody should read Break Neck, awesome book. And I think in many ways, you sort of explain stuff, because so many Americans.

• 8:06Balaji Srinivasan?

  Are in cope mode, less so perhaps in 2025, but for the last 10 years, they've had extreme cope where they've been pretending, you know, the Peter Zeihan kind of argument that China is going to get old before it gets rich, is going to fall into a ditch, it's actually weak and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that keeps not happening. And instead it's number one in cars and number one in solar and number one in all kinds of industries, especially the post-COVID burst of energy into advanced manufacturing and so on by 2025 seems to have really worked. And it's also number one in surface ships and it's signing all these trade deals and and and and down the list, all kinds of things seem to be working for China, whereas the US keeps struggling in many ways.

• 8:50Balaji Srinivasan?

  I would, I mean, one way I put it is your book is kind of explaining these sort of obvious things. I'm not, to be clear, I wouldn't say they're obvious to everybody, but it's like you're very gently kind of breaking reality, Tino. Let me, let me know your thoughts. Go, go.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that all of those things are true. Everything is real. And I think, but there is, there is more to this, a little bit more to the story, which is where I feel like you're doing a really good job of summarizing the business pages of the Wall Street Journal or whatever, Bloomberg. But I think we could also flip a few pages into the economics and the politics pages, in which I think the situation there does not look really good, that, you know, the concurrent with China's rise in EVs and solar, all of which is real. You know, there's also crazy politics, the Xi constantly purchased his generals, purchased

• 9:46Speaker 01

  his defense minister, purchased his foreign minister, a lot of strange party politics that none of us really, I think, can understand outside of a few folks in Beijing. Economic growth has definitely weakened in some severe ways. Property implosion is real. The youth unemployment is real. There's a lot of folks who have decided to leave China. I'm sure a lot of them are washing up at your doorstep in Singapore. A lot of amazing Chinese entrepreneurs who have thrown up their hands at the political environment in China. A lot of Chinese have decided to fly to Ecuador, where they don't need a visa, and try to walk across to the American border. And so last year, Customs and Border Patrol

• 10:27Speaker 01

  were apprehending something like 40,000 Chinese nationals every single month. And so that's a lot of people who want to take leave of the great retribution of the Chinese ethno-state, right? So I think that there are real economic issues. I think there's a lot of political uncertainty in addition to amazing technological growth. So we had to reconcile all of these.

• 10:49Balaji Srinivasan?

  So the Ecuador part, I've certainly heard those reports.

• 10:55Balaji Srinivasan?

  That is the part that I don't fully understand because the other interpretation is China is just sending a bunch of people to go and embed in the US or what have you, military-age males crossing the border, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the other piece of it, so let me discuss those other pieces because I'll give maybe, obviously, a lens you probably considered.

• 11:21Balaji Srinivasan?

  Xi goes and purges Jack Ma because he doesn't want something like Elon to happen in China, where the tech zillionaires of China get their own ideas and they control these giant networks and they can turn against the state, right? We sort of see like two paths there with network versus state and state over network in my parlance.

• 11:42Balaji Srinivasan?

  And in some ways, this is provocative, but in some ways, China is the best for the most and the internet is the most for the best.

• 11:52Balaji Srinivasan?

  Where if you're up to, let's say, the 98th percentile in China, you have clean streets and no crime and 24/7 delivery services and at an upper-middle class up to that level, you're fine. But once you start getting to the top 1% or 2% of society, now you better watch carefully. You're basically constantly surveilled to make sure that you're in line with the party and what you could be hailed for a year or two ago, suddenly you're on the outside of something and that's too sinuous a twist for a good chunk of people. So they head overseas to Singapore or Dubai or something like that. Would you say that's roughly right?

• 12:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the great contrast, I think you're exactly right in all of these. And I think the great contrast, one of the great contrasts between the US and China is that... America works really, really well for the rich. If you're rich in America, you really don't have to suffer too many of the problems in, let's say, New York and California. You don't worry about the housing crisis. You have a giant home in Atherton. You don't worry about taking the New York subway to work every day, which is screechingly loud and dirty and doesn't work very well. You get to live in these skinny skyscrapers in Manhattan. I think that there's nowhere else in the world that's better to be enormously rich than in the United States.

• 13:11Balaji Srinivasan?

  I disagree with that now. And the reason I say that is, I think that maybe was true. The reason I smiled is just like, I think that was true and I think there's several bad parts about that now. The first is, it's fine to be wealthy if other people are doing okay. But a good chunk of American wealth is Keynesianism, which is really, like, you know how China's actually capitalist, but they call it communist? America's actually Keynesian, but they call it capitalist, in the sense of the money printing is actually a gigantic redistribution of, it's basically, inflation is taxation without legislation, if you've heard that one by Milton Friedman.

• 13:56Balaji Srinivasan?

  So when they print trillions of dollars, it's like diluting down the currency for everybody, and they're doing that a lot, both overtly and covertly. And then the plunge protection team, have you heard that thing from Greenspan, the plunge protection team? Okay, that's a useful thing to look up. That is why, one thing you mention in the book is, like, American stocks have done well and so and so forth, and Chinese stocks are flat. But part of that is because there's almost a social contract in the US, which is the upper middle class and upper class have all these index funds, you know, stakes in index funds, so they expect the stock market to go up. And that's actually the metric, the number go up of the society. And so the plunge protection team at the Fed will actually print to make sure that

• 14:41Balaji Srinivasan?

  in extreme circumstances, the stock market doesn't go down. Some of that was explicit, like, obviously, the mortgage-backed securities that were bought in 2008. Some of that is implicit, where they'll spot Goldman or Morgan, like, or for example, the BTFP program that they just did, where treasuries weren't actually mark-to-market, they were valued on what they were bought for, not what they were sold for. So all kinds of manipulations they do to just keep the market nominally going up. But in real terms, versus gold, or digital gold, it's going way down. Like, for example, if you just saw, as of today, gold has actually outperformed the S and P over the last, you know, right? So, in my view, the US is actually a fake economy, a Keynesian economy, and actually, you know, actually, you know, your thing on the engineering state versus the lawyers state, I think we could do a lot of iterations on that,

• 15:26Balaji Srinivasan?

  and I'll give you the ball in a second, but I love your book so much, I wanted to say so much, so jump in.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  But, yeah, I mean, can I say, I want to tease you a little bit about this. You sound like Xi Jinping, man. This is, he has this term that the Communist Party calls this the American economy, the fictitious economy, and also the bubble economy, not like a financial bubble, but just something that can pop very easily. And I think there is certainly something to this. I mean, a lot of Americans would tell me, "Dan, what are you talking about? This country has no problems. Look at these giant trillion-dollar corporations that we can create and the Chinese cannot, and no one else can." And I don't, and so, again, coming back to just to slightly put a close to the sluke, which is that I think the US works extremely well for the rich, and I think it cannot stay a great power if it works only well for the rich. And there is something strange about China where,

• 16:16Speaker 01

  if you're an elite, let's say you're some sort of an elite in Beijing, you're working in tech. Who knows if your tech company would be smashed by Xi Jinping, as he did a couple of years ago.

• 16:26Balaji Srinivasan?

  Like the gaming companies got just sent to zero.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  Online tutoring, you know, they really declared to be nonprofits. You know, let's say you're working in something like finance, and then Xi announces a salary cap, as he did two years ago, $300,000, and maybe you need to give your back pay. If you're within the party, military, state elite, you never know when your patron might be taken down by some sort of an anti-corruption purge, and then your entire network will fall. And so, you know, there's something really precarious about being rich and powerful in China, in which, and in the US, if you're rich, you can more or less transmute a lot of your wealth into political influence. And maybe that's bad, but it's much easier to be rich here. But I fully agree with you that there is something like very strange and fictitious about the American economy.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  The contrast that I like to set up is, let's think about Apple. Something like $3.5 trillion market value now. Spent 10 years debating whether it could produce an electric vehicle. And after 10 years.

• 17:25Balaji Srinivasan?

  And Xiaomi did it.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  And what is Xiaomi's market value? Something like $200 billion, last I checked. So the Apple is worth something like 15, nearly 20 times more than Xiaomi. And what would you rather have? A company that is able to build cars within four years of announcing it, as Xiaomi did? And for these cars to go win major racetracks in Norberg Ring and in Western Germany? Or to be kind of Apple and just not, you know, debate this for a while and then give up? Now, I think I would rather take Xiaomi. And I think this is less an indictment of Apple than an indictment of the financial system in the US, which assigns these crazy valuations to highly profitable companies, but these mostly software companies.

• 18:10Balaji Srinivasan?

  Yeah, so Apple is a hardware company also, but yes, your point is correct. So my view on this is, looking ahead to 2035, 2040, maybe even 2030. You know, I've written about this, but to briefly summarize, I think, I wouldn't even, I don't even think of it as the United States. I think of it as the disunited states. Because, like, for example, there's no Korea. There's only North Korea and South Korea. Right? Like, it's not actually, you can't talk about Korea and Korea's position on this and Korea, because North Korea and South Korea literally have different foreign policies. They're opposed to each other. They have different mores. They both might write in Hongkong, but they're saying totally different things. They have different vocabularies, you know, premises, all that kind of stuff, right? So there's no America.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  For the most part, only one Korea matters to us. You know, only one Korea is in the global economy, producing in memory chips, right?

• 18:59Balaji Srinivasan?

  That's right, South Korea, exactly, right? But North Korea, obviously it's pointing missiles and so and so. But yes, correct. So we can't talk about Korea, we have to talk about South Korea and North Korea. In the same way, I don't think we can talk about America. We can talk about blue America, red America, and actually tech America.

• 19:14Balaji Srinivasan?

  And those are like three separate groups. And whatever you would hear a defense of America, it's almost always coming from tech America talking about the trillion dollar companies. Or sometimes red America talking about, well, we can still re-industrialize and we still have the 1945 spirit and so on and so forth. And blue America is sort of not really, you know, that animated in terms of its defense of democracy and so on and so forth nowadays, but they were a few years ago. And my view, at least, maybe you'll disagree, is like tech America is actually the internet.

• 19:53Balaji Srinivasan?

  And it overlaps with European tech and Indian tech and especially crypto, which is, which I know you don't love crypto or you're probably skeptical about crypto.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 20:05Balaji Srinivasan?

  But the way I think, you know how like when Rome fell, what survived was Christianity?

• 20:09Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 20:10Balaji Srinivasan?

  In my view, like, like America is going to go to zero. And what will survive is the internet. And the bad version of the American legal system is the one you mentioned, which is obstructing and constricting and so on and so forth. And it's been abused by all these lawyers and so on and so forth. But the good version is the internet legal system, which is a predictable order. And it's rule of code as opposed to rule of law. And it protects property rights and has the best monetary policy in the world and has smart contracts and so on. And even if Americans and Chinese can't trust each other's legal systems, actually lots of Chinese people do appreciate Bitcoin. And BTC is actually the genuine balance to CCP as opposed to USA, which is going to zero. Let me pause there.

• 20:55Balaji Srinivasan?

  I have a lot I can say about that.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  That's a crazy idea, man. That was a BTC is going to be the alternative against CCP when USA goes to zero. I think that's a, that's a great phrase. You should tweet that if you haven't yet.

• 21:07Balaji Srinivasan?

  I have tweeted that. I have to, that's actually the, so to, just to explain, it's more than just a meme. It's like a compact phrase, but it, right? Like in the 20th century, the contestation was symmetrical between Eurasian communism and Anglo-spiritual capitalism. It was like tank for tank, plane for plane, USA versus USSR, you know, and so on and so forth. But I think in the 21st century, it's asymmetric. It's between China and the internet. China is like Apple vertically integrated with the nation, you know, the Han Chinese language, culture, thousands of years of culture, the party state. And then, of course, the network, which is the firewall and the apps and all the Chinese technologies, that's vertically integrated and something like 97% of people of Han Chinese descent are in this sort of vertically integrated, very functional Voltron, this

• 21:52Balaji Srinivasan?

  meta-organism that coordinates all these people in this really, really powerful way. And the other something 7 billion people are gonna initially and perhaps for a long time be the weaker of the two sides. And that'll be the internet, which is messy, android, chaotic, but also more free. And that's how I think things square up after the fall of the dollar.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  Balaji, I think we're, this conversation is going to be amazing when it's published. I hope everybody watches this on video because you'll see me smiling this entire time because I love your catchphrases. I love these on tweets. I'm still hung up by this idea of BTC being the alternative against USA and CCP. But then let me rephrase this, which is that, oh, well, it seems like USA and CCP must both hate BTC. And so because it is representing the alternative order, what if they crush BTC? I don't know if BTC is powerful enough.

• 22:48Balaji Srinivasan?

  Oh, that's the question. So basically, the way I put it in the network state is actually I say CCP, NYT, BTC. The party, the paper and the protocol are sort of like a rock, paper, scissors kind of thing. And when I wrote it, NYT still hadn't been defeated. But with Elon, X has basically defeated NYT. I think NYT has lost its hegemony and so and so forth. So it's sort of like, you know, in the mid 20th century, there was communism, fascism and democratic capitalism, and two of them teamed up on the third, and then the other two fought amongst themselves and so and so forth. So I feel NYT is just being knocked out of the box as a shadow of what it was. I don't think it's going to be coming back. And because it depended on being ideologically hegemonic.

• 23:33Balaji Srinivasan?

  So CCP versus BTC, you're right that there's like, that is the genuine polarity because, you know, for example, in the early 20th century, the swing vote in Germany was like the German worker. Like, the Soviets would appeal to them as a worker and the Nazis would appeal to them as a German. So one was appealing on the basis of like class and the other was appealing on the basis of race, right? And that was like the swing vote. With this last election, somebody like the black American or female American or gay American, the wokes would appeal to them as black or female or gay, and the MAGA's would appeal to them as American, right? That was like the swing vote, right, in the center, okay? And I think in the dispensation that is to come, the swing vote will actually be the Chinese technologists.

• 24:17Balaji Srinivasan?

  Because the Chinese will appeal on the basis of, China will appeal on the basis of race, and the internet will appeal on the basis of class, right? So that's often a kind of thing, like, you see what I'm saying, right? Like, sometimes it's the left that appeals on the basis of, in the case of the wokes, they'd appeal on the basis of race or genetics, and the MAGA's actually were appealing on the basis of class in the sense of a membership in the American class, you know, which is like a software thing, whereas race is like a hardware thing, you know? Let me pause there.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe. I mean, I wonder, I mean, first I would wonder about your idea that Elon has defeated MIT. I think Elon has certainly defeated someone, and that someone is himself. And I think Elon has been extremely adept at defeating himself. I mean, he got himself out of being co-president. How's Tesla doing? I don't know. It doesn't look great. How's X doing? I'm not sure. I think MIT's winning this round.

• 25:05Balaji Srinivasan?

  But you think so? Okay, go, go, say, say. It's up to you, go.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, I'm, I don't know, I'm almost mostly off X at this point, but I'm reading more on MIT, so maybe I'm not the target audience, maybe I'm defeating myself. But I would also say that, you know, I think the only force that is more powerful than the USA, the only force capable of defeating the USA is the USA. And the only force capable of defeating China is the CCP. And I see that both of these nation-states. Have become extremely powerful at beating the shit out of themselves. And I think these humiliating self beatings will continue until morale improves. But I think that Biden did a terrible job. Trump is doing is being kind of apocalyptic.

• 25:51Speaker 01

  And I think they have a good chance of unraveling the United States. Yes. And I think the Chinese have been driving a lot of its smartest people, a lot of its most entrepreneurial people, a lot of its best creatives out of the country. And I think the CCP will also defeat the Chinese ethno state. They'll defeat the great rejuvenation. So that's my model. I'll pause there. What do you think?

• 26:12Balaji Srinivasan?

  OK. So what I think is, I think Xi is a lot like FDR in the 30s, where he was the least bad in the sense of like, there's lots of things. I mean, FDR interned the Japanese. FDR basically did the gold seizures. You know, FDR essentially pushed, I mean, he used the government against all of his enemies. He went after Andrew Mellon. He pushed the great fortunes into foundations. People credibly allege that he, you know, pushed the Japanese into World War II and so on and so forth. All kinds of stuff. He ran for four terms, which broke all previous norms, blah, blah, blah. All kinds of stuff FDR did, right? People think he made the Great Depression great. He prolonged it. But net, net, when all the dust settled,

• 26:56Balaji Srinivasan?

  ultimately, the US was in the strongest relative position and it screwed up the least. Not that it didn't screw up. Go ahead.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  Yes, go ahead.

• 27:05Balaji Srinivasan?

  Right? It screwed up the least out of the Soviet Union, which has gotten killed. Nazi Germany, which has gotten itself blown up. The Japanese got nuked. The US, both through competence and through luck or whatever, screwed up the least out of them and was therefore the most powerful in that dispensation. And I think China's big instinct, the cause of the century of humiliation, you know how like a great founder will take a lower valuation but always preserve control?

• 27:33Balaji Srinivasan?

  Right. My view, and you can probably fill in the gaps on this, is especially also seeing what happened to Japan with the Plaza Accords in the 80s, right? Lots of people, our friends, will say something like, "Oh, you know, people were saying Japan was gonna beat us in the 80s, and therefore it'll happen exactly like that, and we're gonna beat China the same way." But Japan didn't just lose, it was basically killed, because it's like a US-occupied country, right? There's a military base there, you know, tens of thousands of troops. Japan's constitution is written by the US, and most importantly, Japan's not a sovereign. One way of putting that, in 2017, actually, NYT released an article that said in 2010, China had killed a bunch of American spies in China, right?

• 28:15Balaji Srinivasan?

  Japan could never do that. That means China has deliberations that America can't see in a way Japan couldn't. And so Japan, with the Plaza Accords, it was handicapped, it was forced to buy US treasuries, its whole decade of stagnations, you know, began at that point. And China's hyper-conscious of not going through that. So China, at all stages, it took less money to preserve more sovereignty. It took worse terms in some ways to preserve, right? So because of that instinct, that wall-building, you know, for example, it took all these hits when it banned foreign social media and it built its own, right? All these PR hits constantly, and it was willing to do that to preserve sovereignty. I think that's gonna end up being the far-sided decision, for better or worse, in this century. For example, you see what happened with the Ukraine, where they're scripting drones on

• 29:00Balaji Srinivasan?

  Russian soil? No, what does that mean? So, like, a few months ago, the Ukrainians managed to, like, have some exploding drones activate within Russia and go blow things up, right? So they could, they could control things remotely, right? So in my view, that means, and I talked about this actually 12 years ago, but now it's actually becoming real, digital borders and physical borders are like the same thing.

• 29:25Balaji Srinivasan?

  Right, the Great Firewall will be seen in some ways as a very far sighted thing because it is digital hard borders. People won't be able to script drones on Chinese soil, they won't be able to script humanoids on Chinese soil. They won't be able to also send in destabilized memes, destabilizing memes into Chinese soil, right? Whereas the unmoderated anglospheric internet will just be filled with all of these scissor statements and crazy things that are all driving everybody crazy as we're seeing.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:57Balaji Srinivasan?

  And so China's also insulated against that because people only speak Chinese. So, and Xi has taken English out of the schools. So they've got like multiple levels of firewall and they can just like sip green tea and everybody is shooting each other, you know, in other countries as the dollar goes away.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  I think that is a reasonably compelling idea. I think that...

• 30:19Balaji Srinivasan?

  I have a solution for this, but go ahead. Yeah, go.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  I feel like the Chinese are, they've really taken Napoleon's maxim to heart, that the game goes to he who does not lose. Now, obviously, Napoleon...

• 30:33Balaji Srinivasan?

  The do nothing win meme.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  Napoleon won like nearly all his battles, but he just lost Waterloo and a couple of others, right? And then he lost, and he lost, he lost badly, right? And so I think the Chinese are very intent on not losing. And there is certainly some good things that I see that the Chinese are doing. I mean, I agree that the Great Firewall in retrospect looks like a good decision. You take a lot of PR hits. But as I wrote in one of my letters, it becomes really difficult to say that the Chinese really wanted the internet in the late 2010s when Congress was regularly dragging Zuckerberg and Twitter and everyone else into Congress to say, "Your products suck, you're destroying us, you're killing us, man." And so, you know, I think like you can't tell the Chinese, "You really need these products in your state."

• 31:19Speaker 01

  And I think that is, that makes a lot of good sense. I take a look at what is going on with AI today. You know, last week we have Sora 2 and we are able to produce like hyper-realistic slop. That like friends have told me that their family members were not able to distinguish that this was an AI-generated cameo, right? And I think that's kind of incredible. Like, why are we so focused on releasing this stuff? And this seems like crazy decisions being taken by the AI labs without any real consideration for how the state, how the people might actually use it. And so, you know, there is a sense in which I think that China just wants to be totally stable and then, you know, close the doors on the celestial empire and then let the

• 32:02Speaker 01

  barbarians tear each other apart and eat some mochi balls and then drink green tea. Yeah, I mean, that sounds good. But, but I think that there is a problem here, which is that the only force capable of hurting China is the CCP, which, I mean, in my book, I write about how they-

• 32:21Balaji Srinivasan?

  Zero COVID.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  Had zero COVID and they had the one-child policy, in which they were really dumb and they were really autistic about thinking in such literal-minded terms. Oh, there's going to be ecological doom if we have overpopulation. The solution is one child per couple and then, you know, conduct 300 million abortions over this period. Or, oh, you know, we don't care about people who need chemotherapy or need dialysis treatment. The only thing that we care about is preventing the spread of the COVID virus. And so, we are going to, you know, prevent the spread of the virus at all costs. And so, you know, here is where I think the engineers with their literal-mindedness will not be able to leave the people alone.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  I think the best-case scenario for China is if the CCP decides to spend all day sipping green tea and then just leave the people alone. And I don't, I don't think they're going to do that. I think they're going to figure out new and novel ways to destroy the country themselves. What do you think?

• 33:18Balaji Srinivasan?

  So, it's interesting because I want to make the case for China and then I'll make the case against China, right? But that's to say- Um, let's say there's like V1, V2, V3, V4 of an argument. You know what I mean? I think maybe you and I are on V4, but let me, let me, let me do the V1, V2. Just get to our progression, right? Because you go to the un-sophisticated arguments, you get to the sophisticated one, right? Okay, so the V1 is kind of the naive, like, that's the Chinese Communist Party. They're, you know, and people think they're all Maoists and it's slave labor and so on and so forth. And that's also, that's a, or that's still the ideological Maoists. They've got a very outdated view of what China is. They see the Chinese cities and their response is, oh, my God, there's LEDs on the cities.

• 34:01Balaji Srinivasan?

  They don't realize the point is the cities didn't exist 30 years ago, right? And they're actually very clean and beautiful or whatever. Then the V2 is, I'm not attacking him, but let's say somebody like Arno Bertrand on X, right? Or Carl Zoh, which is basically, you know, I welcome our new Chinese overlord. Someone, someone who will say something like that, right? And it's like, their case is something like, America's been blowing up the Middle East. China's been building up Africa. America just has a bailout economy for the wealthy. China has shared prosperity for everybody. China hasn't started any wars. America's starting all these wars. China's internally united. America's entirely divided. And actually, also with these tariffs, China's been doing trade deal after trade deal.

• 34:42Balaji Srinivasan?

  And by the way, that also is why I think Xiaomi or, you know, BYD, DGI, their market caps will probably rise because Chinese market, Chinese market access has expanded as a function of all these trade deals that, you know, Xi has recently inked as a function of the reverse thing on the tariffs. Okay. Then the V3, so that is like, the first is, you know, USA is still 1945. It's going to win. China sucks. The second is actually China's super strong and it's good. Everything will be fine. The V3 argument is basically, the US was on balance better than the Soviet Union from 45 to 91. But then after it won, it became by degrees worse and worse and worse behaved and started bombing people and abusing its power and so on.

• 35:25Balaji Srinivasan?

  And one way I think about it is at home, China is a one-party state, but abroad, it's a two-party state because it's checked by America. Conversely, America at home is a two-party state with Democrat, Republican, but abroad was a one-party state where it'd blow up everybody because it wasn't checked.

• 35:42Balaji Srinivasan?

  It's an interesting way of thinking about the last 30 years or so, right? And now, America's coming home because, you know, it's the national defense strategy, if it's real, says pulling troops back from Asia. Like, it's becoming a country, not an empire. It's giving up the imperial burden, like the end of the Soviet Union. And so the bad part, the V3, is China will expand in such a way that it actually has unchecked power. And even, for example, zero COVID would never have actually been undone in China without the signal from other countries. Because the Chinese diaspora knew that zero COVID wasn't working elsewhere, because other countries were, you know, that that external signal was certainly filtering into China in some ways. And people were aware that Chinese people didn't have to live like this, and that was part of the signal.

• 36:26Balaji Srinivasan?

  I think another part of it is Xi just wanted to win his reelection in 2022, and zero COVID was sort of a way to winkle out anybody who wasn't super loyal to him. And then, right after, you know, I think the November 2022 Congress, then they unlocked everything. So it wasn't really about zero COVID, it was about third term, or fourth term, whatever, you know, and the term. And so then, the V4 would basically say, okay, the USA is going to zero. It's not 36 trillion debt, it's 175 trillion debt. The dollar's being devalued against gold, it's dropped by 100 million X against Bitcoin, it's pulling back its troops, people are shooting each other domestically, it's telling

• 37:10Balaji Srinivasan?

  NATO to go fight for itself, it's basically sanctioning itself on trade, essentially withdrawing itself from world affairs. It's like, you know, have you seen a steel cage match? Yeah. Yeah. So imagine, I imagine like a new iron curtain, like a steel cage UFC octagon thing descending over America, and all talent is told, go home, all the researchers are told to go home, all the wealth is getting, going to the internet, where it's S&P 7, or the digital asset treasury companies, S&P 493 is flat, US treasuries are down to zero, and conversely, all the manufacturing and military is in China because of the robots and drones there, and all the media and money is on the internet. And now, North America is just this gigantic steel cage match with all the shouting and all the shooting.

• 37:54Balaji Srinivasan?

  And it's like basically what the Eurasian continent was under communism, unfortunately, in the 20th century, all kinds of crazy people shooting each other, warlord era, collapse of Soviet Union, Tajikistanian civil war, all that kind of stuff, I think is coming to North America. So then the V4 is basically, okay, in that world, something needs to balance the Chinese drone armada. Because China will be insanely, insanely, insanely, insanely, insanely powerful. It'll be like 5 or 10x America at its peak. It will be, because it's actually hitting more steam. Chinese overproduction just means like so many widgets popping out of, you know, the ground. They're still gaining steam, right? Like, the country still hasn't been fully developed. And so China will just be the most powerful physical force to have ever existed.

• 38:38Balaji Srinivasan?

  And right now, many Americans aren't mentally living in that world, because they still think like the US military exists, right? But the US military has been unfortunately beaten by the Houthis. NATO's been beaten by Russia. If NATO can be beaten by Russia, to the point that there's peace treaty talks with Putin, China's like 10x Russia, easily. You know, Hegseth has said Chinese hypersonics can sink all US aircraft carriers, right? The Secretary of the Navy said one Chinese shipyard makes more ships than the whole US Navy combined, right? Raytheon CEO has said you can't decouple from China. So what can possibly balance the Chinese drone armada? I think the entire American mentality of like fighting with your fists and so on and so forth is a very romantic 20th century thing that can't be done against China.

• 39:18Balaji Srinivasan?

  So you actually need something totally different, which is Gandhian nonviolence, decentralization, agility, invisibility, something totally, totally different against this enormous force. So that's where I'm at with like V4. Let me pause there, because that was a lot, I'll give your thoughts.

• 39:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think my problem is that I'm on like V73, and it has a remarkable convergence with V1. And I think I'm, I've kind of horseshoed my way back into the start of this snakes and ladders. I think this is, I think, I mean, you're right that there is kind of this... Negative element with both of them. And this is where I would think about how you say that MAGA was appealing to the gays as Americans rather than as gays. I think there is something to that, but there is also, you know, MAGA is also very interested in defining who the internal enemies are. And probably they're throwing, they would like to throw more of the gays in jail.

• 40:16Balaji Srinivasan?

  In 2025, yes. In 2024,

• 40:20Speaker 01

  Maybe.

• 40:20Balaji Srinivasan?

  It was, it was a very different message up until the election. And then shifted 34. Yeah, go ahead.

• 40:25Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, when you hear these terms like heritage Americans, first I think of like, when you say heritage American, I think of like a giant Thanksgiving dinner that's with a big turkey in the middle. And, you know, I think that is just these very strange sort of terms. I agree that there is kind of this iron curtain that the Americans are self imposing on themselves. And that feels really strange. And maybe, maybe it's good for the troops to withdraw from the rest of the world and give up the imperial burden. But I think it's not good to deport a lot of South Korean engineers, or let's just call them Korean engineers, who are trying to build

• 41:01Balaji Srinivasan?

  Yeah, the batteries.

• 41:02Speaker 01

  Heritage Americans. That's right. And humiliate them in chains. That is like totally a horrible own goal. I'm just always very conscious of the ability for the Chinese to impose own goals for themselves as well. You know, it would be great if they spent all day sipping green tea, but they can't leave anything alone and they just constantly have to meddle in everything. Is America Keynesian? Yeah, sure, maybe. But the Chinese are, according to Adam Tooze, just so much more Keynesian. They Keynes everything, right? And I think that there is kind of just this endless meddling mentality. And let me just make a broader point, which is that I think the US and China are in competition. And rather than one country having all of the structural advantages on its side,

• 41:46Speaker 01

  I think I wouldn't agree with that characterization. I think that the US can very credibly point to these amazing strengths that the US has. I think China can also point to these amazing strengths, namely these drone armadas, which are very powerful. But there's also, if you wanted to focus on the most ugly parts of America, you can definitely paint a horrible picture, just as the same with how you can do that with China. And so my mental model for all of this is that this is a long-term competition. There will be no country that completely implodes and fails to get back up in the way that Gorbachev did really kind of drive the Soviet Union.

• 42:22Balaji Srinivasan?

  Okay, so that's a big difference of opinion. Finish your saying and I'll say something. Go.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  I think that when one country is ahead, it is going to get overconfident and make a lot of mistakes. Because I felt like I lived through this in China when at the end of 2020, at the start of 2021, Xi Jinping felt like he was at the top of the world. He was able to control COVID, in which the US was not. January 6th just happened and China looked like it was a super-stable, economically prosperous place. What does he decide to do? Smash a lot of tech companies, destroy the real estate sector, and then also hold on too tightly to COVID. I think that is a classic mistake of overconfidence.

• 43:02Balaji Srinivasan?

  But was it? But was it? Because let's analyze it now from 2025.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  Okay, go ahead.

• 43:08Balaji Srinivasan?

  The three red lines essentially were sort of a controlled demolition of the real estate bubble. It didn't actually fully crash the economy. He went after the video games. He went after after-school tutoring, which there is a Red Queen phenomenon after school. He definitely hit all kinds of people, entrepreneurs and so on. But advanced manufacturing, the transition into it, did work. I know you mentioned the little pinks in your book say this, but maybe they're actually right. Because he avoided the FIRE economy, you know, finance, insurance, real estate of the US. He avoided going too far into it, popped it. Doesn't seem to have, it caused some damage. I mean, one way of thinking about it, if the country, rather than talking about it in very ideological terms,

• 43:52Balaji Srinivasan?

  if the country is like the platform and the companies are like the apps on that platform, right? Sometimes Zuck will make like a breaking change.

• 44:02Balaji Srinivasan?

  To the Facebook APIs and break Zynga, for example, if you remember when they did that, right? Because it was spamming the feed too much. Nothing against Zynga or whatever. You're just making that decision the greatest good for the greatest number. Like Zynga is working in its own way, but long term, this is spamming too many people with zombies or whatever it is. So actually, no, we don't want to have Zynga. We're going to push Zynga into its own archived inbox, like a spam inbox and so on and so forth. And so in the same way, if he's like, he's got root over the Chinese platform. He's like, actually, we don't want these apps.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:34Balaji Srinivasan?

  We don't want any more than we want the advanced manufacturing stuff, which seems to have worked.

• 44:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, if the only thing that matters to your economy is advanced manufacturing, and I am going to let no one talk me down from my stance that manufacturing is almost everything. And so I think that manufacturing is really important. But, you know, he didn't only hurt a lot of the video games. And maybe, yeah, you should control the video games. You should control the social media. You should control the short form video apps. You should control the AI slop. Frankly, the Americans ought to do more on all of these different things. He also smacked around people like Jack Ma, people like John

• 45:08Balaji Srinivasan?

  Yeah, real guys.

• 45:08Speaker 01

  And other people, right? And so that's pretty important, too. And so this is where I think that it is still important to flip a few more pages, pass the business pages of the Wall Street Journal into the economics pages. Because youth unemployment is real, pumping is real. You talk about inflation being, what's the Friedman line? Inflation is a taxation.

• 45:27Balaji Srinivasan?

  Inflation is taxation without legislation.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  Without legislation. And I think, you know, yeah, inflation is back. But the only thing that might be worse than inflation is deflation, which the Chinese are not quite able to get out of. And Xi is kind of this boomer who says, why do people dislike deflation? Don't people like lower prices? Well, not if you're in a

• 45:44Balaji Srinivasan?

  Well, so here's where I want to argue with you. Go, go first, you're saying all.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  All right, well, let me, let me just make one more point. Which is that I think that, you know, the country that's going to be ahead is going to make all sorts of mistakes driven by overconfidence and hubris, which is what I think, for the most part, Xi did. I think that the controlled demolition of the property sector destroyed a lot of confidence in housing. And construction activity is still not back. And we're, we still might like get some sort of a weird financial crisis. Because of the supposedly controlled demolition of the of the property sector. I think that this was not as controlled as we'd like to believe. And arguably, you can say that the United States grew overconfident, which is how it imposed this octagon upon itself to make it to make people destroy each other. That's a mistake of overconfidence.

• 46:32Speaker 01

  But the more that you're ahead, the more you'll make these sort of mistakes. The more that you're behind, the more that you're interested in patching up your deficiencies, which is why I think this is going to be kind of a neck and neck race for a very long time, because we can't just look at a race based on structural advantages. As it goes on, you know, people will trip up and stumble and fight harder.

• 46:51Balaji Srinivasan?

  Okay, so here is my worldview, and where I disagree with you on is basically a few things. First is, I don't know if the US has that much longer to live as like a coherent political entity. I think we're on the verge of a end of USSR type scenario. Dalio describes as a debt heart attack. Elon thinks the government isn't going to last very long. You're seeing gold flipping US treasuries. For example, if you saw that graph, gold is flipping US treasuries as reserve asset of states. And certainly Bitcoin has risen more than 100 million X against it. There is, you know, the US has not become the like, the US used to be the number one destination for global millionaires up to 2019, plus 10,000 millionaires.

• 47:35Balaji Srinivasan?

  After 2020, it dropped 85%. It hasn't recovered. And global millionaires, capital has relocated to Dubai and Singapore, number one and number two. They've left China as well, a good chunk of those millionaires, but China regenerates them so fast in, you know, that it's actually, it's basically seemingly fine for them. And China's view, I think, is that the new up and coming generation of 20-somethings speaks purely Chinese, they have purely Chinese apps, they'll be Chinese nationalists. And unlike the 40-somethings that have some sympathy for the West, you know, a lot of these Gen X or older millennial entrepreneurs, he's like, you know what, why don't you guys go and it's fine, Jack Ma can be a teacher in Japan or something like that, what he's,

• 48:19Balaji Srinivasan?

  you know, doing, and somebody else in China can run that. We've got a billion Chinese people here, right? That's essentially Xi's bet, that he can do without these sort of older Chinese entrepreneurs. And now he just wants those, the younger ones who have grown up on Xi Jinping thought and all the Chinese apps and think China is number one and Luckin is better than Starbucks. And maybe they're right. BYD is outselling Tesla in neutral markets. Xiaomi is able to ship a car when Apple wasn't. TikTok needed total state intervention and the combined efforts of Google and Facebook and so on and so forth couldn't beat TikTok. And DJI is the cheapest and largest scale drone manufacturer in the world. And then, and then, you know, like essentially, the US can't compete with China abroad,

• 49:04Balaji Srinivasan?

  with the exception of maybe Elon, and even Elon is having a tough time. In any neutral market, Chinese products win. And so the US has retreated to just trying to tariff and build tariff barriers around the US, which is going to fail in the medium to long run because the Democrats may defect from that. Like Newsom has said, hey, maybe he'll import goods from China if he saw that, right? Like, that's why I say America, it's not the United States, it's the disunited states. Blue America has its own foreign policy distinct from red America. And Newsom and Walz and Hillary Clinton have all signaled that they may want to align more with China than the Republicans do. Like, you know, you saw the thing with Newsom and how it wasn't just that they cleaned up San Francisco for Xi, it was that Newsom was the only Democrat to get the meeting with Xi. Do you remember that? Yeah.

• 49:48Balaji Srinivasan?

  My view on that is, again, a lot of Americans don't know this, but like, within China, you can't just jump straight to the presidency like Obama or Trump. You have to go from like, you know, mayor of a village and then governor of a province and all the way up and you make it to the central committee. And so Xi recognized Newsom as having a similar path, going from San Francisco mayor to California governor to possibly president, so recognized him as a credible, possible person. And when Newsom was in China, he said he wants to be China's long-term, stable and strong partner. My view is that after the dollar ends, that's the last strand that's holding blue and red together because blues, only 4% of Democrats marry Republicans. Democrats certainly don't vote for Republicans. Democrats don't even talk to Republicans anymore.

• 50:33Balaji Srinivasan?

  They're in their own blue sky versus X, you know, kind of thing. Digital secession is already here. They're now starting to shoot each other, blow each other up. There's a new killing, crazy, blowing up thing on X every single day nowadays, unfortunately. And it's the last piece of paper that's holding this thing together. It's not, you know how people say it's not a, it's a country, not an economic zone? You've seen that kind of post on X? Yes. It's actually an economic zone, not a country.

• 50:59Balaji Srinivasan?

  Because the only thing holding it together is this piece of paper called the dollar. And when that tears, unfortunately, there's nothing keeping blue and red together. And Democrats will side with Xi if they don't have DC.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I don't know. I mean, why would Xi want to meet Governor Newsom? This is a guy who looks exactly like the lead actor in American Psycho. It's kind of dangerous for me. That's just weird. And I think there is someone who is more willing to give a bear hug to Xi Jinping than Governor Newsom. And that is President Donald Trump. I mean, I was digging up these quotes for an article I was writing, in which Trump told the Wall Street Journal, Xi is so smart, brilliant, everything nearly perfect. There's no one in Hollywood like this guy, as if Xi Jinping had Tom Cruise levels of handsomeness, which I find not.

• 51:49Balaji Srinivasan?

  But Trump is unpredictable because he'll say that about someone, then he'll insult them, then he'll come back and say it.

• 51:55Speaker 01

  Well, right now, he's trying to bear hug Xi Jinping. And so, you know, I think you're right. I mean, maybe there is more than one thing that unites Democrats and Republicans. That's the paper. Rather, it's like a love of Xi Jinping. What do you think about that?

• 52:08Balaji Srinivasan?

  What's interesting is, a few years ago, people were saying that one bipartisan issue was being anti-China, right? My view is Democrats were only anti-China because there was a contestation for who would run the most powerful state. Like, basically, first, China disrupted manufacturing, so disrupted red America. Then, post-2020, it seemed to become the most powerful state, so then blue America really fought it. And now, recently, finally, tech America, which always had a sense of superiority versus China, has finally started to see, wait, Chinese AI models are actually giving us a run for the money. Chinese robotics are actually really good. And for the first time, tech America is actually taking China seriously, not just one-off like TikTok, but actually, whoa, actually, the Chinese engineers aren't just copycats, they're actually innovators, and so on.

• 52:53Balaji Srinivasan?

  That's always been the thing which tech has, you know, American tech has felt they've had the edge. And now, that edge is maybe slipping.

• 53:01Balaji Srinivasan?

  So I think, though, at almost a genetic level, I think red Americans at the base, not Trump, have a more visceral aversion to China, whereas Democrats, it's funny to put it this way, this is a one liner, okay, but Democrats and China are both natural communists, so they'll be, that's a joke, okay, but they're statists, right, Democrats are willing to be administrators in a multi-ethnic empire, and so they could find something under the Xi dispensation, sort of like, you know how Venezuela is like this dysfunctional kleptocracy, but it's sort of bailed out with Chinese goods. China's willing to, as you know, it's willing to work with Iranian fundamentalists, and Singaporean emeritocrats,

• 53:46Balaji Srinivasan?

  and Venezuelan kleptocrats, and Russian Orthodox, so long as they don't interfere in Chinese internal affairs, right? And so I think they will support the Democrats and just ship them goods, and support them in this way, as, have you seen this thing on soft secession that the Blues are doing?

• 54:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 54:06Balaji Srinivasan?

  Right? So in that soft secession, they just get goods from the West Coast ports, from China, they don't enforce the tariffs. I think it's very likely something like that happens. Newsom has talked about it, I'm not even inferring this, go ahead.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  I don't know. Biden, Democrats, this guy from Delaware, another potential port town, there's a port of Philadelphia, didn't get a lot, didn't do a lot of good for Joseph Biden when he was president, and-

• 54:29Balaji Srinivasan?

  But Biden, Biden is born 1942, and Trump's born 1946, or something like that, so they're actually both, if you zoom out, they're both like, you know, coarse, handsy guys from the northeastern US, born at the time of like, peak America, who grew up thinking the USA is number one on everything effortlessly, and Biden would say things like, we're the United States of America, for Pete's sake, like, essentially, they just think USA number one, go ahead.

• 54:58Speaker 01

  I mean, look, you're focused on a lot of weird shit happening in America. And no doubt, the weird shit is real. But I am living, I'm speaking to you from San Francisco. I look out the window and I see three weird pieces of shit a day before breakfast. You know, that's just, that's just how odd things are. But if I am, you know, trying to think a little bit about China as I looked at, there's plenty of dissatisfaction. I don't know if they're regenerating all the millionaires very quickly. You know, there's a lot of this. When Xi, when the most, the biggest driver of wealth in China is the property sector. When you have a property sector collapse of 25%, and then people aren't really buying homes, it's really hard to build more wealth after that. There's a lot of uncertainties about the corporate sector. There's a lot of young people who've decided to move to northern Thailand,

• 55:43Speaker 01

  where they could smoke drugs that are legal in the state of California. And they're taking leave of, you know, the great rejuvenation of the Chinese ethno-state that's being undertaken in their name. And all of these millionaires are leaving. And there are, I mean, I don't think that, definitely the demographics is not an issue in the next 20 years. But in like 25, 30 years from now, demographics will yawn larger and larger. It seems like they're not going to be able to escape this hole very well. I understand they're deploying a lot of robots. But what if, you know, the Silicon Valley bet is real, which I don't really buy? But let's say we invent God in a Box. We get the superintelligence and they invent all these humanoid robots. And then we get to take control of these humanoid robots because we have the AI and they don't. You know, that could be bad, you know?

• 56:28Speaker 01

  Maybe finally, all of this AI slop, we should just consume all of the Sora two videos, just to support, give OpenAI a hand so that they can take charge of the robots later. And, you know, the Politburo seems pretty dysfunctional. Xi Jinping, you know, I know, I get he's like more handsome than Tom Cruise, but he has a belly. I get. I don't think so, by the way. I think that, you know, he's smoking probably too much because, you know, Xi was born in like 1952. And all of these people smoke way too much. If he falls over one day, are we going to get tanks in the streets in Beijing? I don't think so. I think they'll have an orderly transition, but what are we really going to get? And so I think there are all of these disunited Politburo comments that we can also have as soon as this guy keels over.

• 57:12Speaker 01

  And so, you know, I don't know. It's like, I think that the terrorists will be enforced. It's more likely for the terrorists to be enforced in California than for the Chinese somehow to figure out all of their own political problems, too. What do you think?

• 57:23Balaji Srinivasan?

  I think Li Chang is very competent and he is potentially the number two after Xi. I think very few Americans even know who the seven, I'm sure I'm butchering the pronunciation, but it's like L I Q I A N G, I think.

• 57:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you know who this guy was? This guy was the party secretary of Shanghai during the worst lockdown ever attempted in the history of humanity. Every other democracy was able to toss out the bastard who enforced COVID on their policies. And then, what did the Chinese decide to do? Elevate this guy into premier. That's weird.

• 57:54Balaji Srinivasan?

  Wait a second, but Trump was the one who did COVID lockdowns in the US and he's president again, right? So I'm not sure, I'm not sure that's true. Well, but yes, buddy, I mean, Republicans ultimately didn't care that much about, like, COVID is a very complicated kind of thing. Because everybody switched positions on it like four times. Like, at first, Democrats said it was racist to talk about COVID and Trump was calling it the China virus, this Jan/Feb 2020. And then Trump started saying, oh, okay, you know, we need to start, you know, covering up the testing and showing, you know, that the numbers are going up. And Democrats started saying it was a big deal. Then Democrats flipped in the US and said, actually, racism is a real pandemic and we need to go and do Black Lives Matter riots. And Trump was doing the Warp Speed vaccine.

• 58:40Balaji Srinivasan?

  And Kamala Harris said that she wouldn't take a Trump vaccine. Then, and the vaccine was actually blocked, people said that they were, you know, I think.

• 58:50Balaji Srinivasan?

  Gosh, I forgot this guy's name. There's a scientist, this is a report in like MIT Tech Review, that they were blocking the vaccine's approval until after the election to make sure Trump didn't get a bump from the vaccine, which is a big deal, by the way, because it's a close election in Detroit. Then, after the election, suddenly the vaccine became a tool in the hands of the Democrats. And fundamentally, I just looked at that as something where it wasn't a scientific issue, it was just something that was a tool in a power struggle. And similarly, in China, I think it was just a tool for Xi to get his third term. It was just that. I don't think they actually believed in it.

• 59:26Speaker 01

  Well, let me, let me give you a, an alternative view. But first of all, let me say that, you know what the Americans got and the Chinese didn't?

• 59:34Balaji Srinivasan?

  The vaccine.

• 59:36Speaker 01

  The mRNA vaccine.

• 59:36Balaji Srinivasan?

  Yeah, Sinopharm didn't work, right?

• 59:38Speaker 01

  Pretty important. I mean, the Chinese were locking people up and swabbing their noses and mouths, you know, every, every other day. And they did not do the vaccines, which is, which is really, really strange. They, they were just using police to, to keep shutting people in. I think that, after living in China, after living in Shanghai in 2022, what I observed was that, yes, politics was part of it, Xi's coronation. I feel like Xi felt like he had the coronation in the bag. And he, like, he did like the most blatant possible insult towards the Shanghaiis by elevating their most hated politician into the head of premier. And I was surprised that, I would have been surprised if Li Qiang was still vice premier, one of the four vice premiers after this. And then he was elevated

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  to be premier. Think about how that distorts the incentive structures of all of these other, you know, party secretaries who, who thought, this guy messed up big time and he gets promoted. I was living in China and I felt that the protesters did play perhaps some role in showing Xi that they are dissatisfied. I was living in Shanghai, I went to one of the protests the day after that, all of these youths staggered out of their cocktail bars and, you know, started chanting down what Xi is paying down with the Communist Party, which was kind of...

• 1:00:52Balaji Srinivasan?

  Yeah, that was very unusual. I remember, because very unusual to see that, because usually it'll be something where they're just critiquing like a local party person versus the big dog or what have you.

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  It's not their fault. They had too many of these Western cocktails in the French concession. But I think the other big thing was that I felt very strongly that the local governments everywhere throughout China, especially in smaller cities that are not as wealthy as Shanghai, they could no longer enforce zero COVID. They had just no state capacity to do onto Shanghai what Li Qiang did onto Shanghai. And they had given up. They were really exhausted. And I think when the virus started really spreading in Beijing, the central government took a look at itself and said, can we, the central government, enforce a lockdown upon the central government? And then they decided no and threw up their hands. And then they completely let this whole thing collapse.

• 1:01:41Balaji Srinivasan?

  Yeah, in 2023.

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  Here. It sounded like a mistake to me. Didn't have to happen this way. Because you know, you know what they didn't have? Vaccines.

• 1:01:48Balaji Srinivasan?

  Yeah, the Chinese vaccine did not work. So I'll agree with you on all of that, basically. And I know that the Shanghai lockdowns were actually like seriously house, you know, like house arrest type things. And people who were zillionaires or whatever were literally locked in their house and people like had pregnancies messed up, all kinds of bad stuff happened during that time period. So I will completely agree with you. I don't think China gets everything right at all. I just however, think they're messing up less. And the reason I say they're messing up less is if you take a flight from San Francisco or Seattle or LA or any Western city which has syringes and refuse and drug addicts

• 1:02:33Balaji Srinivasan?

  on the street and people attacking you as you walk down and so on and so forth.

• 1:02:41Speaker 02

  Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z Podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our Substack at A16Z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.

• 1:03:07Speaker 02

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