The Pragmatic Apocalypse with Balaji Srinivasan - WBD679
The Peter McCormack Show
Peter McCormack
4.7 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 4 July 2023
⏱️ 185 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | What's to come is, I think, very different than 2008, because 2008 was just a financial crisis, |
| 0:08.7 | and the central bank was able to print and bail out the banks. |
| 0:11.9 | With this Fiat crisis, there's no other level to bail it out. |
| 0:15.2 | That's why it's a self- bailout, right? It is a mass seizure of assets. It makes the entire |
| 0:21.5 | hidden part of the government come out and show it's crunching |
| 0:24.0 | Hello Bitcoiners how are you all doing? |
| 0:27.0 | It's looking good out there. |
| 0:29.0 | The Bitcoin price starting to rise up again. I think we're over 31K. |
| 0:32.0 | I feel like all roads are pointed to Bitcoin up again. I think we're over 31k. I feel like all roads are |
| 0:34.0 | pointing to the Bitcoin right now. So today I've got a monster show for you. But |
| 0:37.8 | first welcome to the What Bitcoin did podcast which is brought to you by Iris |
| 0:41.2 | Energy, the largest NASDAQ listed Bitcoin miner using 100% renewable energy. |
| 0:46.4 | I'm your host Peter McCormack and today we've got a beast of a show. |
| 0:50.1 | Three hours of signal with Bilagee. |
| 0:53.0 | Now, Bilage is one of my favorite people to talk to, |
| 0:56.0 | and we have this show book for a while, |
| 0:58.0 | but Marlagee went out there with Mardi Ben, |
| 1:00.0 | recorded what I think is the podcast of the year, |
| 1:02.0 | four and a half hours, |
| 1:03.6 | getting a whole bunch of stuff. So if you have the time, |
| 1:06.2 | do definitely go and check out that show between Marty and Balaji, |
| 1:09.6 | because it's incredible. We didn't want to make the show, we covered a few of the same topics, but we decided to get into the pragmatic apocalypse. |
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