The Pragmatic Apocalypse with Balaji Srinivasan

 
 

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“What’s to come, is, I think, very different than 2008 because 2008 was just a financial crisis… and the central bank was able to print and bail out the banks. With this fiat crisis, there’s no other level to bail it out. That’s why it’s a self-bailout. It is a mass seizure of assets. It makes the entire hidden part of the government come out and show its truncheon.”
— Balaji Srinivasan

SHOW DESCRIPTION

Balaji Srinivasan is an angel investor, tech founder, and author of ‘The Network State’. In this interview, we discuss the idea of starting new countries ("network states”), based on social networks built around a shared ideal that can monetize effectively. We also talk about how and why the media ignores major global news stories, and how to prepare for the coming collapse.

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In the past 14 years, we have seen a powerful global community built around a shared ideal. Bitcoin is obviously much more than a technical innovation: it is a vision of building a new economic paradigm from the bottom up, which shifts the centre of power from the state to the individual. Being open-sourced, leaderless and decentralised, it has proven that there are new ways for people to connect, contribute and collaborate to build new systems.

Balaji Srinivasan’s latest book takes this revolution one step further, and explores the idea of starting new countries, or what he calls "network states." These network states can be formed by a group of people connected through a social network, with their own income, real estate, and even their own ideological platforms. It's like a political party, but working outside of the limits of national boundaries.

The measure of success for these network states lies in their ability to materialise their online presence into the physical world: “You do meetups and eventually you go from crowdfunding brunches to crowdfunding buildings.” It challenges the traditional notion of what a country is and opens up possibilities for new forms of governance and community-building.

As legacy nations resort to ever more authoritarian methods to protect the fiat system, the importance of allocation, location and organisation to individuals will become more apparent. But, this is more than a theory. Balaji is allocating a material amount of capital to funding startup ‘Network State’ communities. The aim is to create frontier societies, providing alternatives to failed states and attracting ambitious individuals seeking a new kind of society.

TIMESTAMPS

00:02:26: Introductions
00:03:08: TFTC 425: The Fiat Crisis
00:16:38: Shift in the world order
00:29:44: Digital glasnost and digital perestroika
00:43:12: The Bundesbank bankruptcy
00:46:53: The real cause of the Great Financial Crisis
00:58:28: 20 years of government deceit
01:06:16: Recentralisation, tribalisation, and the imminent fiat collapse
01:22:27: The end of the lies?, and cancel culture
01:34:40: The American partition: blue vs red
01:42:56: Media blackouts, and controlled news feeds
01:57:36: Russia-Ukraine, and China-Taiwan
02:20:08: War on Terror: a Retrospective
02:29:46: Preparing for the next economic collapse
02:41:41: Startup communities, and network states
03:03:39: Final comments

 

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SHOW NOTES

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Mentioned in the interview:

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