Claire, welcome to the Network City podcast.
You're the editor and founder of Colette, which was for a while
combating, you know, the craziness on the left.
Now you actually also combat to a large extent, the craziness on
the right, basically enlightened centrism for a long time.
And, you know, we don't agree on everything.
We agree on a lot of things. Do you want to give the quick
spiel on Colette and everything you've done over the years?
Sure. Well, thanks for having me on
Bellagio. It's a real honor to be talking
with you. So I founded Colette about a
decade ago. And at the time I was reacting
mostly to what I perceived to be increasingly hyperbolic sort of
left wing narratives, particularly in media that were
untethered to any kind of evidence or statistical reality.
So I was studying psychology at the time, and I had been trained
to look at sociological questions through a quantitative
viewpoint. And, you know, I was reading
stuff in media, particularly on the issue of gender that was
simplistic, I knew was false. And so I just had a reaction.
I was politicized by the early work narratives that I saw in
media and doing a little bit of digging and reading made me
realize that in academia, certain fields had been
distorted by political a political drift to the left.
So in my field of psychology, certain sociological social
psychology questions were sort of inflated in importance, you
know, such as like stereotype by it or implicit bias that those
questions were inflated and there was not much evidence to
support them, whereas other findings were sort of
suppressed. So I became more aware of the
fact that left wing orthodoxy and dogma, particularly around
issues of race and gender were sort of disfiguring both
academia and the media. And so that motivated me to
launch Quillette. And it just so happened that it
coincided with the 2016 election of Donald Trump.
And So what happened was, particularly in the United
States, a lot of left wing institutions and people on the
left sort of went insane. And so we had this huge wave of
cancel culture, people being sacked from their jobs in tech
industries, in the tech industry, people being sacked
from their jobs or cancelled in academia, in artistic
communities, sort of swept through the culture between 2016
and sort of peaked in 2020, I would say with the George Floyd,
Floyd riots. And so we sort of have ridden
this what cultural wave of increasing workness.
And we were, we were just early in criticizing workness, I guess
you could say. But now that workness is sort of
receding slowly. We're becoming more sensitive to
the liberalism that is emerging on the right.
So that's been our our journey. And you know, our values, myself
and my editors that I work with, our values haven't changed
dramatically. We've always considered
ourselves small L liberals slash small C conservatives, but we
are reacting and responding to waves of a liberalism, whether
they come from the left or the right.
Yeah. And I do think that they call
the right reactionary because it reacts, it does move second.
And so I do put some blame me much of the blame on the left
for creating today's right because the reasonable, you
know, like like the Romney style reasonable center right kind of
person or even the Bloomberg Democrat center left or what
have you. That person was just given a
hole in their head. And essentially it was like a
natural selection process of antibiotic resistance to select
for an unreasonable right. And and now of course, that
right is unreasonable. So there you go.
That's happened, unfortunately, many times in history.
And the result is just two things that just start punching
each other with the left magics into existence, the thing that
it constantly preaches against and the rights.
Like there's actually a meme that talks about this.
It's like all these young kids are told they're the bad guys
are like, I guess I'm the bad guys and they put on the mask
and they're all bad together. You know, that kind of thing,
right? So this happened in, you know,
in Europe in the mid 20th century, where communism led to
communism came first, and fascism arose in part reaction
to communism. And of course, they just punched
it out in Go ahead. The communists not only describe
liberals as being fascists, in the 1920s and 30s they described
slightly watered down communists as fascists.
You know, the, the, the extreme left has always demonized their
enemies as fascists. And then they create support for
a genuine fascist movement. And then, you know, lots of
people are by that stage, they're exhausted.
They can't fight the extreme left anymore.
So I would agree with that analysis.
That's. Right now, the thing about that
is, of course it is an unreasonable right.
And so now you're caught between.
It's kind of like in physics, there's this concept of an
induced dipole moment. Do you know what that is?
So basically, when you've got like an external electrical
field, then you can have like you push the charge over to one
side, like the positive charge and then the negative charges on
this side. And now suddenly The thing is
polarized, right? And so like in the presence of
an electoral field, this thing can the polarization that didn't
exist before can now exist, right?
And you know, there's a, there's all these graphs that can show
on, you know, how it's in the US in particular, it's not one
country, it's two parties and how only 4% of Democrats marry
Republicans and how that's visible at the level of
congressional votes. And that's visible at the level
of social networks and how it's actually been coming further
apart because it used to be that it was basically like 1 country,
red, white and blue. And now it's red and blue and
red is in their own social networks like Truth Social and
Gab and X and blue is in Threads and blue sky and Mastodon or
what have you, right? And the thing about that,
though, is that actually happened in most of the world in
the 20th century. You know, we've talked about
that before, right? Or should you know?
Do you want to? You can refresh me.
Sure. So like in the 20th century, you
had South Korea and North Korea, you had East Germany and West
Germany, you had, you know, Hong Kong and, and Taiwan on the one
hand, and you had the PRC on the other hand.
And what people sort of kind of forget is that both capitalism
and actually communism and actually fascism all arguably
originated at least in part in America.
And this is something that Yarvin is written about, but
other people have written about it like the the right version of
it is or, you know, left wingers correctly say, oh, a lot of
Hitler's ideas came from the Confederates and from eugenics
and so on. The the right will say, well,
the progressives were eugenicists too.
And the right will also say, actually, Trotsky raised money
in New York. And, you know, the ideas of
communism came out of the West and they went East and they
basically were, you know, were exported there.
And so the left says that fascism was due to impart the
American right. And the right says communism was
impart to the American left. They're actually both correct.
And of course, capitalism also an American thing.
So the ideologies that the rest of the world fought against were
sort of cooked up in the wet lab that was America, you know, so
to speak, speak those ideologies in the Koreas, for example, tore
that apart. The germ.
You know, there's this really interesting book called, I think
4 Germany's. And I remember actually looking
for a book that had to be written by somebody who was like
this. I was like, you know, if you
live in a particular spot in Germany and you're long lived
enough, you could have lived through Weimar, Hitler, East
Germany and then democracy after 1989, right?
Like if you're long lived enough, you could have made it
all the way through and you wouldn't have to be that long
lived because Weimar was like the 20s.
And you know, but if you're 70 ish, 80 ish, you would have, you
were done with normal human life, could have actually
experienced 4 Germany's. And there's this, this book on
that, right? So the rest of the world was
sort of just thrashed back and forth by these sort of
ideological currents that emanated in the West.
And now it's the West itself that is being thrashed by this
stuff. And so in in many ways, you
know, there's this concert I have which is history is running
in reverse. And so all the countries in the
yeah, go ahead. No, I'm familiar with your, your
that that thesis that history is running in reverse.
I would just push back just a little bit on this, on the idea
that the, you know, fascism and communism.
I mean, there's of course there's some American
connections, you know, Ho Chi Minh was in New York and so on.
But we can't forget the influence of the French
Revolution as well, which is obviously, you know, obviously
LED straight, you know, straight line to communism.
Yes, but, but the but the architects of the French
Revolution cited the American Revolution as inspiration
because France had helped America.
Yeah, right. Yeah.
So yeah. It go ahead.
No, no, no. It's, I think, I think it's good
to acknowledge the American influence, but not, not be, not
be like Chomsky and place America at the center of the
universe, you know, You know what I mean?
It's it's not, it's, yeah, I know what you're saying.
It's not monofactorial, but I do think it's interesting to cause
of course, you know, French people bear responsibility for
the French Revolution. You know, the Russian Revolution
happened in Russia and all the people involved bear
responsibility, you know, but it is, it is something which is
like, it is interesting the extent to which a lot of these
ideas that at least in part and to to, to a degree that's not
usually acknowledged, right? So that they, they originated
both far right and far left in America, that they got exporter
the rest of the world and they did, they laid waste to huge
swaths of the world. And now the rest of the world
has immunity to that herd immunity in in whole or in part,
right? Not completely, but like Eastern
Europe has gone through communism, right?
China has gone through communism, India has gone
through socialism. They're all tired of that stuff.
There's kind of basically want to do business, go ahead.
Yeah, they've got. Yeah, they're tired because
they've had contact with reality.
Yes, but you know, it's funny, I think it's possible that
Australia this century is again, as you guys call it, the lucky
country. You know, you want to know my
case for Australia, so I'm going to make the case for Australia
and you tell me how wrong I am or whether it's an interesting
angle. You'll have local color on this.
OK, Do you see this post? Like, did you know Australia
almost paid off its national debt, something I didn't even
know was possible for a Western government by right before the
financial crisis, the Australian government had gotten its debt
down to 4.7% of GDP. All the way from like this crazy
number in, you know, World War right after World War 2, right?
So all the way down to 4.7%, which shows it's possible.
People don't even think it's possible.
And if you look at this again, this is 2021, right, right after
the pandemic, like Australia and New Zealand are sort of air
gapped relative to, you know, the the rest of the G7 that has
significantly higher, you know, gross debt and net debt.
And then this is a percentage GDP.
And then if you look at the millionaire migration map, do
you see this chart over here, Australia and New Zealand
consistently are up there with Singapore and the UAE for where
global millionaires want to relocate.
And, and that's kind of like a distributed diligence, right?
Because all these different millionaires are like, okay,
this is a pretty good place, all things considered, one of the
best in the world to go to. And So what are they doing
differently? And my, and you tell me how
wrong I am, or maybe maybe I'm right, which is my very rough
impression. This is from like 2 years ago
that it's a bizarro world where the right and left are actually
somewhat effective. So the conservatives actually
cut deficits and the liberals actually oppose wars.
Lol what a concept right? Go ahead.
Yeah. No, got you.
You go on, you go on. OK, I'll make my case and you
tell me I'm wrong. All right.
So then I was like, how do they actually do this?
How'd they pay their national debt?
They remained A technologically modern Western country.
They didn't go to autocracy or Mad Max.
And I was like, how do they actually do this?
And it, it appears that it's partly asset sales like they did
sales of the Sydney airport and so on and so forth.
Right. And one of my views is also that
maybe Australia is a little more on the right and New Zealand
more on the left. That's like a functional left
and right within the Anglo world that continues down under
because it's far away from all the shooting and craziness of
North America. And you know, for example, New
Zealand also like they tried to constrain inflation with the
famous 2% target. Do you know about that?
Do you know what I'm talking? About.
No, I don't yeah, go on. So central banks around the
world in theory at least try to keep inflation at 2%.
Why? Because newly New Zealand
actually set a number now actually inflation arguably
should be 0 percent or even negative because of you should
prices should decrease as technology improves and then
people say oh liquidity trap and then my response to that is
something called subdivision. But we can we can go back to
that. The the point though, is that
New Zealand pioneered this concept of 2% caps on inflation,
this small country underneath. And even though it's nominally
on the left, that was actually like a center right policy that
got adopted by the world, right? And so it's like a functional
Anglo world is how I think about it.
And I'll be brief. I'll basically what is my case?
Why? Why are these maybe the best run
countries in the Anglo world? One argument for this is that
their small size and proximity has result to proximity to China
has resulted in a totally different economy than America.
They don't have illusions of having the strongest military.
Australia doesn't have illusions of the reserve currency.
They just dig stuff out of the ground and sell to China so they
have a real economy. Yeah, that, that's basically,
that's basically it. We just dig.
We're the custodians of the dirt.
We have this big chunk of land which has lots of valuable
resources in them and we dig them up and there's, there's,
you know, it means that we have an unsophisticated economy.
We don't innovate and we don't have a lot of depths when it
comes to our tech industry. But it also means that we have
this huge tax revenue base. It also means that working
class, you know, there's all of this conversation happening in
in the United States about bringing back manufacturing jobs
for working class men. Well, you know, Australia has
very high paid jobs for working class men.
They're in the mines. So we don't have this sort of
disaffection between, you know, the working.
There's not this sense that the, the middle class has been
hollowed out. Like I can go up to Queensland
and my cousin who didn't, 2 cousins who didn't finish high
school will be earning more than my cousins who have gone all the
way through university and who have become medical doctors.
So there isn't this sense of massive inequality between
people who are educated and who are knowledge workers and the
working class because we have, we have these huge industries,
you know, in regional places where people dig up stuff out of
the ground. So that part maybe, maybe
that's, I mean, one way I've thought about it is in the 20th
century, there was an overcorrection towards, you
know, obviously to communism, socialism in much of the world,
including in China. But the parts that were saved
relatively were those that had Anglophone influence.
So Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan, insofar as Chiang Kai
shek was certainly funded by the Americans, right.
And so the, and then of course the Chinese diaspora.
And that's how sort of the, the Chinese world continued.
And people knew that. In fact, the fact that it
continued in that way is what led to the reboot of China.
Because Deng Xiaoping, he saw how successful all three of them
contributed. He, he was scared by how
successful or concerned by how successful Taiwan was getting.
They had a GDP comparable to China.
He emulated Singapore's strategy of basically building a modern
country with Chinese characteristics.
And then he also had Hong Kong right across the border and then
he built Shenzhen there. So all three of those Chinese
islands of sanity and of course the Chinese diaspora was
important in terms of building Chinese trade around the world.
All four arguably were important to rebooting China.
And I wonder, and here's a thesis and I'll give some more
data on it if you want. I wonder if that's history
running in reverse this century, where this century, China's
island of stability and America is Grand Theft Auto.
It's American anarchy, all the shooting and all the shouting,
all the 1st Amendment and the Second Amendment, the shouting
and the shooting. And of course, you know, The
thing is, of course, I'm supportive of the 1st Amendment,
the Second Amendment, but they're meant for virtuous
people that have self-discipline, right?
And not people who are just screaming obscenities at each
other and, you know, blasting at each other on the street.
And it's like, you have rights, but you have responsibilities
and maybe there's no responsibility.
And so therefore, you know, the right is just this abstract kind
of thing. And so it doesn't necessarily
lead to a good society. You know, like, if people are
migrating to countries that they don't have a First Amendment or
Second Amendment, they're voting with their feet against at least
how that's being implemented in practice.
And of course, because it's so sacrosanct, it'll never go away.
And so which is fine. But then you're going to have
like a shooting gallery and a shouting gallery.
So maybe the Anglo world has just over indexed on individuals
digital freedom to the level of anarchy.
And that's the thing that everybody's shouting about.
We actually want is when anarchy is in access, you want order.
And so the parts of the Anglophone world like China or
like Australia and Singapore and New Zealand, those are the ones
that have some signic influence where there's Chinese trade or
Chinese mining or Chinese exports, which keeps the sort of
pragmatic level head on their shoulders relative to the
craziness of where North America is going.
Let me know if you, if you agree with that, distribute that.
That's a thesis. I'm not endorsing it, not
disagreeing with it. That's the thesis that I that
I've contemplated. I think it's an interesting
thesis. I would just add some anecdotal
experience that could be one data point to support it.
I mean, it's too big a thesis for me to really say yes or no
that I agree with it. But at least where I live in
Sydney, we have a very strong migrant influence and migrant
population in the education system, which makes the
education, our education system, our selective schools and
universities more competitive, at least that the at the level
where your your children are going through school.
I mean, in the universities, there's issues with lots of
international students and there's some concerns that
standards have lowered. But at least in the selective
schools that I'm familiar with in Sydney, there's intense
pressure. So there's a lot of pressure to
succeed. You know, these kids who come
from migrant families, we have, you know, the, the, the product
of tiger parents. And so we have, you know, at
least where I live in Sydney that it's a tiger parent
culture, like heavy investment in your children's education and
it flows onto the Anglo parents as well.
So I mean, that could be 1 aspect of this influence that
you're describing that can be beneficial.
I mean, some people complain about it, but there's also this
benefit to it, which means that, you know, there's no, you know,
when Vivek did that tweet, yes. Where he was that famous tweet,
yes, let's talk about Vivek's tweet yeah, go ahead, I.
Was just going to say, well, that's if you live in Sydney in
a fairly affluent area, like there's no escaping that reality
and you just have to compete in that environment.
You have to, you know, your kids are competing with the kids of
tiger parents. And if they're not studying hard
and if they're not excelling, then they don't, you know,
they're not in not in the race. So.
I think there's a little bit more acceptance of the reality
here in Australia simply because, you know, we're a
smaller population and we realize that we do have to
compete. And, you know, there is, you
know, we can't just shut ourselves off from the world.
That's my perception anyway. It might be.
It might other Australians might have a different, a different
perspective. Yeah.
So I want to I actually put the I haven't actually discussed the
vague tweets. I want to actually so this one.
So you know the vague tweet from December 27, 2024, right?
So the thing about this is, first of all, do you have any
views that Scott? I can see from from looking at
121. 100 a 120 million is a lot, but it's enormous for X.
It basically means like essentially almost it's like
half the platform saw it. It's like it was absolutely
massive, right and it like to just to just to level set.
There are many, many calls to murder on X that get far less
outraged than this call to study.
OK, so like, this absolutely hit a nerve.
People freaked out. And The funny thing is, you
know, when I read this, at first, I'm like, this is just
like what any Asian or Indian parent would tell their kids.
It's like it's, it's the most bog standard lecture I've ever
heard, you know, and, but, but I think that people freaked out
about it for several overlapping reasons.
The 1st is maybe the obvious, which is that during, so when
they came on the scene in early 20, I mean, he had been around
before. And I, you know, I like Vivek,
just, you know, Full disclosure, I like Vivek, but I don't agree
with him on everything. But, you know, I think we're
friendly. When Vivek came on the scene, he
hit the window right as Elon was opening up X, right?
Like late 2022, early 2023. And he was basically just saying
obvious things like XX and XY chromosomes are real, that kind
of stuff, right? Meritocracy is good.
Exactly.
And The thing is that because he was, you know, frankly, it was
like personal color, dark skin, whatever he could say things
that a white guy on the right would get hit for.
And so that was an important kind of thing in 2023 and up to
the election of November 2024. But then by December 2024, what
happened was two things happened.
First, at the beginning of December, you had all the left
on on X just went on Moss to blue sky.
So like 20 million people or some crazy number like that,
right? Which meant that now the
spectrum on X had the deleted, the left part was deleted.
So now the center was the left and the right was like, you
know, the right. So the center of arguing for a
racial global meritocracy became the left and the open borders
left at the moosed right. So suddenly, unbeknownst
anybody, that the entire political spectrum has shifted
3040 points over to the right. And the exact same words that
would have would have seemed center right or even right two
months earlier now seemed like they were on the left because
they were coming, you know, now to the left of a big chunk in in
X. Does that make any sense?
Should I draw that? You know it's.
Like, no, it makes perfect sense.
It makes perfect sense. And you predicted that would
happen. I remember a conversation with
you saying and you said people like me, the sort of centre
right will be the left soon because the whole Overton window
is going to shift. It's all going to shift and and
so yeah, exactly. I could serve myself centre,
maybe centre right in this context.
I'd certainly be centre left, perhaps in the Chinese context,
so, and probably dead center, I would say globally.
So A was just that backdrop meant that something that was
considered center right or even right was suddenly on the left.
Number one, that kind of same kind of statements B was now
that the election was over, a lot of white guys on the right
didn't feel the need for a proxy to speak for them, saying the
things that they wanted to say. They would just say it
themselves. They'd yell it.
They scream it. OK, so they got on the wrong
side of that. See is up to that point, they
had basically spoken in a sense, you know, for like, you know,
the right or for mag and so on. And in this context, I don't
think he was doing that. It seemed like, oh, he was
speaking for Indians or he's speaking for immigrants or he's
speaking for this. So it seemed like, Oh my God, he
now he sounds like an ethnic activist.
People pattern match. I don't think that was the case.
I think he was actually speaking for merit, but that's that's
what it was D And this was another aspect of it.
The, you know, the the show references he brought up were
like saved by the bell and stuff like that.
And the problem with that is, and I'm not trying to be over
clicked, but I'm just explaining now while the dust is settled,
why people got mad. And what I think was correct
about it was what that was like the last functional era of
America, like the 90s, right? And so saying that that was a
bad era that you know, went wrong.
However, had he said only fans culture me too.
If he had said that, then he would had very little argument
in terms of the baseline, I think where he was arguing from,
right. And then the next aspect is, and
this was something that I had to struggle to put into words at
1st, and then I realized what I was looking at until roughly, I
think, after the 2024 election, I had never before seen a
critical mass of white Americans.
I really feel emotionally that the world was their their
competition rather than their market because like, all of the
guys who I've ever worked with in tech have basically been
like, yeah, it's this one. There we go.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is honestly like these
are these are all the tech Cos and tech guys, frankly that I
worked with, right? They were like until literally
2024, just about every guy who had ever worked with at Stanford
at in venture and startups in tech like, you know, I grant, of
course, that's a select sample of people, but I never, I mean,
the discussion was OK, after we win in the US, how do we expand
into Turkey? How do we open up Japan, right?
We're going to need to recruit a Japanese person over there or
what have you, right? We literally had and many
companies I've had, we've had the global expansion
prioritization and we think about what markets to move into
and so on and so forth, right. This is a positive some
attitude. It's a positive, some attitude
of someone who feels they can win in the game of global
capitalism, right? And the completely new thing to
me was that like, and, and I heard this not simply from
people on X, but I heard this actually, to my surprise, from
people who I knew were globally competitive in tech.
And they started sounding like whiny and like beaten in their
heads. And, and like, for example, one
guy who's like a nice guy and you know, he was like, he's
like, oh, you, you Indians are very, you know, connected and
you have ethnic nepotism and so on and so forth.
I'm like, what you want, you want to do a diversity report on
the company, like, because that's literally what I'm like,
how would you quantify that? He's like, Oh, you're hiring
more of your own people. I'm like, how is that not
exactly like saying white privilege and you're hiring only
white people and and whatnot, right.
And he just, he hadn't thought of it that way, But I'm like,
you know, every, the, the flip side of that, by the way, is if
you have any affinity group of any kind to get somebody to take
a risk on a company in an early stage or any company, it's going
to be enriched for people from your own social group of
whatever that is. And especially a first Gen.
immigrant doesn't know that many people within the country.
So are going to get other people, you know, who, who know
them, who will take a risk to work for the business.
And then by the time you get to second or third generation
people assimilate. And that's what happened to
Italians and Poles or what have you.
So there's a very reasonable explanation for for all that.
But the but the macro of it wasn't Even so much specifics of
that. It was just that they actually
felt that these like relatively new arrival Indian people were
like more we're more connected than they were.
And I was just scratching my head.
I was like, you know, when I grew up, I didn't know anybody,
right? I was the least connected.
I was just like the most nerdy UN like like like it was a graph
with 0 connections, literally 0, right?
And, and I was like, you know, what I realized and, and maybe
like your thoughts on this is like what wokeness did to a
generation or a group of people is even if they like reacted
with sort of the opposite of woke at the at the surface
level, they sort of internalized certain patterns which were like
emotional and histrionic whining, basically feel it like
learned helplessness, right? The softer it got messed up.
Go ahead, let me let me know your thoughts because you may be
you may be thinking some of the things.
I completely agree with the internalization of the
victimhood culture. That's definitely a thing.
On the right, too. Now that's crazy.
Yeah. Absolutely, I think.
I think what you're touching on though, with the observation
with two and the reaction to Vivek's tweet and the
observation of, you know, people that you know, is there's
something really deep going on. And one of the more interesting
analysis I've read has actually been in Colette.
You might be familiar with Andrew Roberts, who's a British
historian who has chronicled Winston Churchill.
I think he's probably Winston Churchill's most celebrated
biographer anyway. He he has written a couple of
pieces for us. They're just short pieces, just
about the decline of the British Empire.
And he says that the British Empire, the culture, went
through phases. He likens it to phases of grief.
So a few years ago, I think it was 2021, he wrote a piece for
us. You know, this is before Putin
invaded Ukraine. This was just that, you know,
COVID was happening. But he said that Americans are
currently in the denial phase. I think it may have been after
Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan.
He was saying America is in the denial phase of its declining
empire. And I thought it was a bit, you
know, it was a provocative argument at the time, but I see
it now like I, I see what he's saying now.
You know, the years have gone on and I can see, I can see the
denial. And, you know, when people are
in denial, they will have cognitive dissonance.
So they'll react strongly to evidence of the, of whatever it
is that they're denying. So if if people are in denial
that China is becoming a superpower or the biggest
superpower in the world, and if they're in denial about
America's declining global hegemony, then any evidence that
is in support of that thesis is going to cause cognitive
dissonance and people will react against that to keep the denial
going. But now we, you know, Andrew
Roberts wrote a follow up piece and he's he's arguing that Trump
is speeding up this phase. You know, it's pretty clear now
with the, you know, the trade war that we're entering into the
negotiation phase. What's what's the title of that
one? That would probably be America's
Grief Cycle that was published a couple of weeks ago.
Oh, the negotiation phase. Good, good.
Follow up It's a it's a metaphor.
Maybe, maybe. Should I do a podcast with
Andrew? Yeah, probably agree a lot,
yeah. It's a it's a metaphor and it's
a provocative one. But you know, I think, I think
it's I think when you get when you're getting these sort of
irrational emotional responses from people, you can understand
it. It helps to understand it
through this context. Like there is a people agree,
you know, there's this you have to come to terms with the fact
that the American empire is dying at some point and it and
it will cause grief. And how you deal with that grief
is going, you know, you will go through phases.
Like I've had to go through stages of grief myself about it
and I'm not even American. Well, it's funny you say that
because it's true. Like when I was writing the
Network State book, there's actually a paragraph that I
deleted because it brought a manly tear to my eye.
And it was essentially about like the metaphor of Uncle Sam
as a like a beloved, you know, elder who's passing away and,
you know, he's passing away and he's not going to always be
there. And you need to prepare for the
next step. And then a bunch of people are
like, why do you want Grandpa to die?
Like I don't want grandpa to die and you know, but he's not going
to be around forever. And I can look at all these
signs of incipient this and that.
And then they don't want to plan for it at all, right?
They want to be in denial about it and they want to say that you
saying it is like a bad omen and it's demoralizing.
It'll further and speed it up and so and so forth.
And and I get that. I actually do get that.
Sometimes I look at the look at history through the lens of art
and how much you can sort of see how confident a culture is by
their output of and I've been thinking for a long time that
the exhaustion of Hollywood, you know, with all of their remakes,
they can't come up with anything original.
There are there are no, there's very few new hero movies that
really truly depict a new sort of, you know, the hero journey
in it in an original and new way.
I mean, there's still good stuff being made and there's, there's
some great stuff being made for TV, but it doesn't, it's not
like it was in the 90s where there was just dozens and dozens
of classic films coming out from Hollywood.
And so as an Australian, you grow up on American culture,
you're sort of marinated in American culture and you develop
a very strong sympathy and alliance with a nation that
you've never even like. I didn't visit the United States
until I was in my 30s, but I had grown up on American culture.
And that's soft power. So that the American culture has
had that impact globally for general, you know, for a couple
of generations at least. But it's now receding.
And the woke stuff has a lot to do with why it's receding,
because people look at the insane, you know, most people
aren't woke and and people are looking at the insane insanity
and, you know, the trans stuff, the hyper, you know, the focus
on racial politics, the erosion of meritocracy.
And so there's the, the feeling of alliance or sympathy with
American culture is sort of eroded and it erodes gradually
over time. And then when you've got this
lack of cultural confidence coming through with, you know,
fewer great films being made, fewer, like less music coming
out, that's, you know, getting kids excited like it or it's
like a a tide going it back out to sea.
Like you just you feel less connected to this culture that
you once grew up on. And, you know, and and I think
it does tie in with like the lack of confidence ties in with
the military defeat. So you know you've got the loss
in Vietnam, Afghanistan. I I see, I see.
That's taking it back too far because the win in the Cold War
felt felt like it. But go ahead.
Yeah, I agree. The true, true, true.
But, you know, the, the Vietnam War dragged on for very long
time. You know, you could, you could
argue it was the first salvo in, in, in in a ongoing conflict
between China and the United States.
That's interesting. I would not, I, I because I
think there was such a discontinuity in 1978 in China
due to like Deng Xiaoping taking over China.
But but I do agree that basically that was like the
Nadira for Vietnam and then they've rebooted and so on since
then. I want to respond to something.
Actually, I want to there's a few loops from here, right?
So first is to to add to your point on stuck Hollywood, right?
You know, clothes have become relatively constant.
Like you can't point. Maybe maybe, you know, somebody
who's a real fashionista could do it.
But to point to the styles of the zeros versus the 20 tens
versus the 20 tens. The one thing that's really very
obvious maybe is like the rise in tattoos, right?
But but otherwise you wouldn't be able to, it wouldn't be like
grunge of the 90s or like, you know, big hair of the 80s.
That's some standout kind of thing.
And the reason I think is that fashion or things, all of the
innovation and cultures move to the Internet because you can
instantly tell a 90s website, 2000 website, twenty 10s, twenty
20s, you can tell AI art that's genuinely new AI, like whether
you like it or not, it's genuinely a new thing in the
twenty 20s. That is the visually distinct
characteristic of this, you know, and it's literally when
you think about what you're looking at, what's changing
rapidly is what's on the screen and America is becoming a
museum. Like for example, we don't go
ahead. No, no, that that's just a fun,
that's a funny play on the description of Europe that we
often. Yes, that's my point exactly.
You got it right. Because we don't think of like,
you know, obviously there's French entrepreneurs and I'm
not, there's actually a lot of great things happening in
Europe. I'm not beating up on Europe.
But you don't think of like French culture is constantly
dynamic and evolving and whatever.
There's like the baguette and there's like the Eiffel Tower
and the Louvre and and you know, Arc de Triomphe and whatever,
right? Go ahead.
No, no, no, no. I get what you're saying.
Yeah. It's it's sort of stuck in a
moment of time. Exactly.
So like American culture got stuck because in my view the the
the version 3 point O there's Britain, then America, then the
Internet. Like, the Internet is to America
what America was to Britain. And that's a deep thing.
And there's a lot I can say about that.
But that means that all of all of the everything has gotten
uploaded, right? So for example, how much of your
communication do you do on the Internet?
All of them, Yeah, Right. How about your transactions?
Basically all of it, Right. And how about your friends?
How about, you know, everything is?
And So what is America minus the Internet?
Physical America by itself is like baseball and hot dogs and
and so on and so forth. When everybody defends and says,
oh, the US is still doing great, they're always pointing to the
tech companies. I think that's right.
I think that's really interesting and and you can kind
of see it like the, you know, the public infrastructure is not
up to date. Obviously.
You know, if you ride the subway in New York, it's like 100 years
old. You know, it's, it is, it is not
just a museum. It's in decay.
The reason for that I think is so, so, so from some earlier
threads, you know, this is a graph that I think is very
important related to the grief thing that we were talking about
earlier, right? This is a graph that is super
important for at least my mental model of the world.
OK, right. So essentially what this is
saying is basically that for thousands of years, the economic
geocentre of the world was basically in, you know, Eurasia.
And to be clear, that doesn't mean like the you know, the
economic center was literally in Afghanistan or whatever or, or,
you know, this, this this this is Iran, this is Pakistan,
Afghanistan. I think it's not saying it was
literally here. What it's saying is if you took
the average of Indian economic strength and and Chinese
economic strength of Middle Eastern European and you waited
them the the centers, you'd get something around here, right?
So it's basically EUR Asian and that makes sense because the
Mongols were able to invade Europe and you know, like Islam
was able to invade Europe and vice versa.
There's some degree of balance and Marco Polo, where did he
seek out he sought out China and Columbus risked his life to come
to India, right. So clearly there was stuff
happening, you know, east of the the, the Caucasus, right.
But then with the industrial revolution, Europe just.
Got way ahead of everybody else, right?
And the center of the global economy rocketed out to Europe,
and basically Europe was just the center of everything and
nobody else mattered. And then they started beating
the crap out of each other with World War One and World War 2.
And 1950 was basically peak westernization, peak
centralization. And this is basically the time
when everybody else was bombed to smithereens.
China was communist, India was socialist, Russia was communist,
Japan was atomic bombed. And this is also the moment that
all these post war institutions were set up.
We literally called them post war institutions.
They were set up at the time of peak America ever right.
The only other time you can argue might be 1991 right when
there wasn't even a Soviet Union around.
But this period is like peak America.
And the problem is that people are calibrated on the all time,
all human history high as being the normal.
Yeah. Right.
Yeah. And that and that's the issue.
The issue is they think this is normal, that complete and total
global American dominance is normal, when it's incredibly
historically abnormal. Even on a socio sociological
level it was an abnormal decade. Like people look at family
formation in the 1950s, but people got married very young in
the 1950s compared to the the historical norm of Western
society. So like in the 18th and 19th
centuries in Western Europe, in England, women wouldn't get
married until their late 20s. They weren't getting married at
the age of 21. It was quite an unusual late age
of marriage for women. And birth rates were actually
slowly but gradually coming down in the West as well.
The baby boom generation was a massive outlier and there are
various different reasons for that, but you know, in, in
Australia at least, and I'm pretty sure in America as well,
the Gov because of World War 2, the government's thought, well,
these young men are coming back from war.
We've got to build a lot of housing, we've got to give them
a house. And so there was this massive
public investment into housing infrastructure and it enabled
couples to marry young and start having babies.
Young women started having babies young.
So we get the baby boom generation, but that was a
historical anomaly. It wasn't We haven't like birth
rates were trending down. We haven't this idea that the
the 1950s was sort of like, it was a strange generation for
many, for many regions, for many reasons, not just the fact that,
you know, it was peak American empire and also for, like
technological reasons. You've got the proliferation of
household appliances. You've got washing machines,
dryers, toasters, vacuum cleaners.
Like we forget how much technology was invented in the
late 19th century and then the first half of the 20th century
and how it changed people's lives.
So here is my thesis on this in a nutshell is if you look at the
20th century, technology favored centralization.
And so every country, all, basically all kinds of giga
states arose, right? China, modern India, the Soviet
Union, the USA giga states that just had the scale to beat the
heck out of their rivals, right? This is something that Orwell
also talked about Eurasia and East Asia.
He was observing the trend towards bigness, right?
Because you had mass media and mass production and just extreme
centralization. Technology drove that and, and
never argue with the man who buy zinc by the barrel and you can't
fight City Hall and and so on and so forth, right?
And the peak of that was basically like in many senses,
you know, yeah, the Soviet Union had 100% marginal taxation, but
America had 90%, right? So you could not get rich mid
century in America. You could serve your country and
it was the most free in the world, but it was still 90%
marginal taxation, right? And so at the same time, by the
way, you know, in the Soviet Union, do you know they had a
childlessness tax I. Didn't know that I didn't.
Yeah, so the Soviet Union was way more conservative than we
think socially right here, the bachelor tax, because after
World War 2, they're like, you need to have kids, right?
I was just familiar with Lenin Introducing.
Abortion. Yeah.
Yes, so this is when it started going reverse, right.
Stalin encouraged adult people to reproduce increasing because
they had lost so many. They lost 10s of millions of
people in World War 2. They're like you have to.
It was symbolic, but it was like a status thing and most
childless married women. And you know, essentially the
point was, I mean, in many ways in the Soviet Union, your money
was more like your allowance, but it was like a social
penalty, right, for not doing that.
What was my point? My point is that mid century
America was being more communist than we think of it, and mid
century Soviet Union was way more socially conservative than
we think about it. Like those were actually not
just right. OK, so so now we've moved
totally in a different direction.
And the problem is everybody is in the in America is anchored on
1950. And in fact, the world, in a
weird way, is anchored on America in 1950.
And they've, because they haven't, I mean, unless they're
in China or in some other country, they haven't been told
really that many stories of what their life was like at that
time. India now has some stories about
partition, right? China has some stories about,
like, you know, the Chinese Civil War, or at least the
Korean War, where the Chinese soldiers were, you know, like, I
mean, they're fighting on the North Korean side, but, you
know, they're portrayed as heroes in China.
But most of the world doesn't really have that many good
movies about how horrible their 20th century was.
Let me pause there. Go ahead.
Yeah, that's an interesting point.
I hadn't thought of that. You know, it speaks to the
power, the power of America's export culture.
How just how influential it has been.
Yes, and actually, you know, what's funny is I'm going to
share a graph here which is kind of like that Most countries in
the world actually had like -100% returns.
Not most, like many countries had -100% returns in the 20th
century. And Australia, Canada and
America are the only three that like, escaped that.
Australia is actually the real lucky country.
US, Canada, Australia escaped, but Russia -100% China over this
window. Negative 100% Germany -100%.
It's not, it's not over the whole, it's not over the whole
century. I was like, what?
But I get over a 20 year window. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yes. So the point is basically what
people don't understand is like this was a rebuttal to.
So this guy had a reasonable post.
I wasn't attacking him. But it was this post by like
Vanguard, which basically said the stock market always goes up
like persistent dollars, right? Yeah.
And so this post by Vanguard basically says the stock market
always goes up and you know, if you sell, you lose money.
But the two problems with that are right.
So A, the reason it goes up is the Fed prints and that can't
can't do that forever. And B it is like essentially
betting on a trend to continue indefinitely, which is the
shortest way to lose your shirt. Yeah, doesn't account for tail
long tail events. Correct, right.
So the reason I say this is the US is anchored on a story of the
past, which is an illusion. And that story is something
like, oh, what's the normal way of the world is supposed to be
that a guy with a high school degree can have a house and two
kids? And, you know, and that is
neglecting the fact that somebody who's much smarter and
harder working in Poland or Vietnam or something like that
was like, starving to death, right?
Or getting shot in war or under communism.
And now that person is actually competing in the global economy.
You know, it's, it's kind of ironic because we could, we can
use the, the sort of the work language here and describe that
perspective as being privileged, you know?
Yes, that's right. It's funny, ha ha.
I want to ask about what are the plans for Colette?
What are you doing? You turned into like a
subscription only thing or something like that, Is that
right? Well, our business model is, is
based on subscription. So we're putting more stuff
behind pay walls, but not everything's behind a pay wall.
So if you go to our front page now, everything should be open.
We'll we'll put stuff behind pay walls only after That's great, a
few days. OK, so so cool it is open again.
Yeah, yeah, we've, we've been open.
We're always open. It's we will put up paywalls
after a couple of days and sometimes people will land on
our page and discover a paywall, but it's not actually a paywall.
It's just asking people to put in their e-mail address so we
can send them a newsletter. But it's free, so, and our
YouTube channel is completely free and we're putting a lot of
stuff up on YouTube, some stuff that doesn't go on the website.
So I encourage any of your listeners to check out our
YouTube. I'm finding that a lot of people
actually like listening to narrated versions of our
articles, so. Do you have a thesis on that?
Well, I mean, I have a negative thesis, which is that we're
moving into a post literate society, which is not great, but
there's just a big, there's just a bigger market for audio and,
and video. People don't like to read And,
and the, the truth is, I listen to a lot of audio myself when
I'm doing housework, you know, when I'm doing stuff.
So if I'm commuting or I'm doing chores, I like to listen to
interesting podcasts. And I think that's a, you know,
a reasonable substitute because you can't be reading all of the
time. But I do think it's sad that
people are reading less. And reading is sort of becoming
a marker of elite status in a way.
I mean, I guess it always was. I guess it always was right.
You know, there's there's a theory that the mass literacy of
the 20th century, like why are the Soviets so into that?
Because otherwise people couldn't read their propaganda.
Yeah, Yeah, right. Interesting.
Right, Like, so it was almost like a port in their head that
they could install Bolshevik propaganda or whatever into, you
know, So otherwise why were they doing it?
You know, they were really into mass literacy.
So you could read Pravda, right? Know what the party line was,
right? Yeah.
But my theory is A, there's
technological Dr. obviously, which is Airpods plus 5G plus
good phones, plus also the pandemic shock.
You know, many people did this B is what I don't know.
And I, I made some data on this. Is it a compliment or is it a,
is it a replacement right. That say, are you are people
reading and then they're also listening while they're walking
or on the treadmill or doing chores or driving or sleeping
like, you know, they, they get, you know, someone to read them
to sleep effectively. Or is it literally something
where rather. Because I mean, just sitting and
reading something is so much faster than listening to.
I know, at least for you and me, right.
Yeah. That's why it took me a while to
appreciate that people actually wanted this.
Read to them, you know? Go ahead.
Exactly. Every podcast we do gets about
30,000 downloads. If we have a video that does
well on YouTube, it will have get over 100,000 views.
Our top performing essays. We do get essays that get over
100,000 views, but that they're rare.
We'd only have a handful of those.
We'd have many more videos that get that many views than we do
essays. It's much easier for a video to
get 100,000 views than it is to get an essay that many views.
And so there's just a bigger audience for audio and video.
And it took me years to figure this out because I have a very
strong preference for text and reading because I can, I am a
fast reader, but I find with listening to podcasts, like, you
know, people aren't precise with their language because
everything is just spoken. When you're writing an essay,
you have to be very careful with the words that you use and be
careful about the facts that you're introducing into your
essay. So you go and check and it's a
much more. So when you're reading an essay,
it's a much more refined piece of work and you can, you know,
the your ability to absorb information that is correct or
which has been edited and vetted is, you know, for me, the return
on investment is so much higher when it comes to reading that it
took me a really long time to understand that audio and video
is the way of the future and that we need to be leaning into
those mediums. But now that we have, I'm really
happy because we're reaching a bigger audience.
YouTube is our fastest growing vertical.
Well, OK, so now on Colette itself, actually a couple things
I wanted to ask you since you're actually the very first, you
know, really online media creators really doing an
independent thing. There's a lot more folks who are
doing sub stack like things and so on now, but you were one the
first. Do you do like, you know, how
are you thinking about your mix of energy on Colette meetups
versus subscribers versus like digital versus physical?
Because that's something I think a lot about obviously is like
bring digital communities into the physical world.
Like is there, would there be a Coletteville or something in, in
in Claire's future like the Colette community, you know,
with AQ in in Queensland maybe, I don't know.
Yeah, we've been hosting events in cities around the world over
the years and they're they are a lot of fun and we get a lot out
of them. I over, you know, if I'm doing
too many events, though, I personally, I get quite
exhausted because I get so many people coming up to me and
trying to talk to me and it can be a bit overwhelming.
But I think if we focus more on hosting events where people can
just meet each other and I, you know, I or my colleagues don't
have to be active participants as much.
You know, I have. One of the things I was a little
surprised by was the relatively less overlap than I had thought
between Colette and tech, given that a fair number of tech
people did, especially in the early days, read Colette a lot.
And And yet your community has more letters than numbers.
Is that right? Yeah.
Yeah, that's right. Yeah.
And is it, is it you know how Australia is it or is it just
global Anglophone or how you know?
It's definitely global Anglosphere, so it's we're only
4% Australian. Only 4%.
Yeah, the events. That's probably above.
Yeah. The events that we have here are
pretty big and are always sold out.
You know, we'll, we can easily just fill out a, you know, a big
event space, you know, within a week or so.
So our biggest, so 50% of our audience is in the United
States, that 12% is in Canada, 14% in the UK.
So we're spread out over the Anglo sphere.
That's, I'm actually a little surprised by that, that you
have, because Canada's about the same size as Australia.
Maybe what it is, is the political radicalism.
Maybe this is a diagnosis of what we were talking about
earlier. The political radicalism that we
were talking about is actually more of a problem outside
Australia than within it. Australia's not a very
polarized, we don't have a a very polarized political
environment. It's if anything.
My thesis is getting proven, go ahead.
If anything, our problem is the opposite of polarization that we
have. We have broad scale apathy,
political apathy. People do not care about
politics. They don't want to know about
politics. It's good, but it's also bad
because then people just start, you know, they're not familiar
with policies they're voting for because we have compulsory
voting. I, I sort of a feeling, you
know, sometimes there's like countries that are in an
ideological superposition, then a rubber band snaps and they
just go all the way in this direction.
And I think what happened with the, before the tariffs,
Australia was sort of caught between China and America.
And there was like AUCUS, which is basically, in my view, fake.
You know what I'm talking about, AUCUS, as soon as all this was
announced and it was fake. Yeah, yeah, give.
Me your thoughts on Arcus, I'll tell you why I think it's fake.
I can understand why someone would think it is fake because
we don't we're, we're meant to be giving over $300 billion to
the United States to build us some nuclear powered submarines.
And I mean, it'd be great. It'd be absolutely great to have
some nuclear powered submarines. I wish we already had them.
But the, you know, the time frame is very stretched out.
We can't necessarily rely. We, I don't think Australians
feel confident anymore that the United States is going to be a
reliable defence partner. I mean, we are historically
incredibly intertwined with the United States when it comes to
defence and we have a very important military base in the
Outback called Pine Gap, which has is is a very important
signals directory connected to satellites and so on.
So we have this long history, but given the extreme just
political dysfunction in the United States and how seemingly
how domestic politics is now shaping foreign policy, which
wasn't the case for generations, you know, foreign policy was
sort of separate from domestic internal squabbles in the United
States. But now that that foreign policy
is being dictated by domestic issues, we can't, you know, we
can't, we don't know what the United States is going to be
doing in 20 years from now. We can't tie our long term
strategic defense, you know. Yeah, exactly.
Like exactly. So when I, when I saw the
here's, here's just my outsider perspective.
As soon as I saw this thing announced, this is like during
the Biden administration, I was like, OK, well, first of all,
August is not the Quad because you can argue maybe the Quad.
The Quad at least has Australia, India, Japan and the US, which
are India and Japan have a legitimate real security
interest because China borders them and they've had issues with
China in the past. Australia's OK, maybe bringing
the UK into it, which is all the other side of the world and
hasn't been an Asian power since the handor of Hong Kong is just
silly. Number one, it's not a world.
It's not even a domestic power. It's not even like arguably #1
#2 is like the whole point of like any military anything is
you need like replenishment rate.
If it takes you 20 years and four 300 and something billion
dollars to build like 3 to 5 Subs and they could get sunk in
10 minutes, that is like that is like the dumbest thing I've ever
heard, right? That's like so obviously dumb.
And moreover, it's like obviously China has now the
largest Navy in the world, the fastest shipbuilding.
So all Australia did was they spent hundreds of billions of
dollars to piss off China. They didn't even buy the
submarines. They basically like, you know,
paid a political and economic cost kind of being in the middle
here or what have you. And I was just like, this makes
absolutely, I mean, you know, there's going to be a war with
China in 2027. OK, Australia gets your first
sub in 2039. What?
It doesn't make any sense at all.
Right. So so the whole thing just
struck me as very dumb. It was, it was, it was like
paying huge amounts of money for like cavalry in 1912 and it's
going to arrive in 1932, something like that, right.
And of course, World War 2 is just World War One is just
right. If if there was a World War, I
actually think you know, can I tell you a feature of the
tariffs rather than a bug? Sure.
This, you know, look, nothing's 100%.
It's a volatile world. All kinds of crazy things may
happen, but I think there's a possibility that this was
virtualized World War Three and the US just lost and it's it's
just like, go ahead. Well, that yeah, that would be,
that would be a positive interpretation rather than it
being the the the start of World War 3.
Yeah. And so, so here is the argument
on that, right. Basically first is you know the
whole Thucydides trap argument. Yeah.
But it's it's interpreted in so many different contexts that
sometimes I'm not, I'm not sure how it how it sort of applies,
but yeah, go go fine. Sure.
So like the, the, the there's this Graham Allison article.
We can put that on screen from like from I think mid decade,
which said China and the US are both rising.
Are they destined for war and so and so forth.
Right. And I actually think the the
cities trap has actually already happened.
It was called Ukraine where Ukraine was AUS proxy and Russia
was a China proxy effectively, even though most people don't
think of it that way. But Russia's only on its feet
because China like at least supplied it with stuff, right?
It wasn't sanctioned by the world.
In fact, 80% of the world did not sanction Russia by
population. And Ukraine is only on its feet
because the US supplied it with weapons.
So those guys are duking it out, right?
And the US lost whether like exactly what terms TBD, right?
I'm not saying there's a like certainly it was a disastrous
war. Putin shouldn't have done it.
Millions of people were displaced, all kinds of people
dead for a few miles in Ukraine disaster.
But the US probably it's like it's just negotiating the terms
of how it's going to surrender, right?
And and that's a defeat for NATO.
And that's like Putin will probably plant his flag and say
Cold War avenged, you know, I win or whatever.
And what it also shows is that all of NATO combined couldn't
beat Russia with China supplying Russia just a little bit.
So obviously they can't beat China, right?
So that's. It.
Right. Then B is like the Houthis and
Iran is funding the Houthis and China is allied with Iran.
So China's proxies, proxies just blockaded the Red Sea for 18
months, whose military has gotten defeated there.
C you have Heg Seth talking about how China's hypersonics
that can sync every aircraft carrier.
Our whole power projection platform is aircraft carriers
and the ability to project power that way strategically around
the globe. And yeah, we have a nuclear
triad and all of that, but a big part of it.
And if you know 15 hypersonic missiles can take out our 10
aircraft carriers in the 1st 20 minutes of a conflict, what does
that look like? You have the Raytheon CEO saying
you can't decouple from China. So while we talk about pulling
supply chain out of China, resourcing out of China, I would
tell you it's very impractical. We've been de risking for a
couple of years making sure that we have second sources for
critical componentry. But unlike Russia, where we
pulled out two weeks after the invasion last year, we shut down
our factories, we pulled our people out, and we completely
cut off any contact with our Russian customers.
You can't do that with China. Too big, too important and too
necessary. You have the Secretary of Navy
saying that one Chinese shipyard is more, you know, ships and all
of our shipyards combined, they have 13 shipyards.
In some cases, their shipyard has more capacity.
One shipyard has more capacity than all of our shipyards
combined. You have all this kind of stuff,
which, you know, I, I, I, I mention it.
You also have this graph which shows the US military is made in
China, right? So all this stuff, I repeat it,
but do you know what I'm talking about?
Have you seen that graph? No, no, it doesn't surprise me
at all. But yeah, yeah.
Yeah, like the Tomahawk missile, if you go to the vendor's
vendor, it's made in China, like hundreds of Chinese vendors or
anything, right? So, so you Add all that up and
the US military just doesn't exist in the same way, right?
And so like, what is Australia buying?
I don't even get it. And you know, it's, it's
something where I think people in Australia sort of now it
might be like a rubber band snap, right?
Like Vietnam, Malaysia and so on are all go ahead.
I think that's going to be bad in it's own way.
And I'll come back to that. Go ahead.
Yeah, I mean the, I think up until quite recently, up until
quite recently, people were feeling good about our alliance
with the United States. But just since the escalation, I
think since the the meeting in the Oval Office with Zelensky
and then followed by the tariffs, like if you turn on the
the local news, you'll have independent politicians,
politicians on both sides of the aisle saying we need to, we need
to sit down and think about our long term defence strategy.
We need to reassess, we need to. I think there's just greater
awareness that I think Orcas is going definitely going to be
back on the table after the next election.
I think what's called social license won't be there.
The population of Australia is going to be sceptical.
You know, our economy is based on selling stuff to China.
I think Australians just don't want to be bullied.
Like we don't, we don't want to become a vassal state of China.
We don't want, we, we want to keep, keep our way of life and
our freedoms at the same time. We've seen how Trump has tried
to shake down Ukraine for their minerals.
And we're thinking, well, how is that not going to happen to us?
Like, you know, our, our country is full of all of this, all of
this, all of this valuable natural resources.
Are we got just going to end up being a protectorate or do we
want to? I mean, China had, China has
bullied us a little bit, but they haven't, you know, they're
not completely shaking us down. So yeah, so here's my view on
what's going to happen. So first is I very much disagree
with the policy of like basically I think people got
more woke than they expected and now they're getting more MAGA
than they expected, and then they're going to get more China
than they expected. Right, OK.
You mean inside the United States?
No, I mean like every when the US, Yeah, exactly.
Like China will probably play nice for a few years to scoop up
the whole world into the Greater East Asia Co Prosperity Sphere
version 2.0, because they're doing all these trade deals with
all these countries and it's all they're recentralizing as a
global logistics hub. They're saying lots of nice
things. And The thing is, what the US
did is they attacked every country at once and they said,
oh, it's about China. And that's like a gang member
shooting into a crowd, wounding everybody and saying I'm just
trying to get that guy on their side, help me get him or.
Right. Do you think they did?
Do you think they did that to to pretend that it wasn't about
China or just out? Of it's and I I know where it
comes from, though it actually relates.
OK, so here's here's what it boils down to.
For all their talk about the friend enemy distinction, like
the Carl Schmidt thing, or as Lennon puts it, who whom right?
Or as Bush would put it, with us or against us, right?
For all their talk about that, mag actually implements a friend
enemy distinction wrong. You know why I say that?
Because they think it's like, they think it's like American,
non American. And the problem is that there's
many Americans who are not their friend, like Elizabeth Warren.
There's many non Americans who are not their enemy, like
Buchelli or Pierre, Paula Bray or Nigel Farage, really not
their enemy, right? Maybe they don't agree with them
on everything, but they're basically conservatives or
libertarians or whatever abroad. And then of course there's
billions of people who are basically neutrals, right?
Who are essentially neither friend or enemy, but just
neutral trade partners. Citizens of other countries like
most Vietnamese basically don't really care that much or what
have you, but they do care about the trade.
They're making hats and suddenly that that could send to 0.
So what happened was the Trumpet men and basically Americans in
general think only America exists.
So because they had been fighting, fighting, fighting,
the Democrats see they couldn't align around race, right,
because that's very taboo. So they couldn't say Trump is
for white people or whatever, you and he's not because
actually he's for Americans. But the problem is America,
there's at least two Americas. There's red American, blue
America. And so in the same way the
Democrats didn't want to say we're for Democrat rule, they
said we're for democracy. The Republicans didn't say we're
for red American rule, They said we're for America.
So the Democrats would conflate democracy itself with Democrat
rule, and the Republicans would conflate American with red
American, and both would forget. Democrats were shocked that they
would lose 50% of a Democratic vote, and the Republicans are
stunned that 50% of Americans aren't real Americans.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, right.
So that's one fundamental thing where they're, they're in an
identity crisis where the thing they think is 1 is actually 2.
And it's like their enemy is included in the set.
The red Americans, Republicans are included in democracy and
the blue Americans are including the definition American.
So they're, they're like messed up #1 and that's actually very
deep because since they can't draw the boundary and say who
they are and who they are not, they, for example, they can't
secure territory, right? Why is the Luigi left shooting
CE OS? Why?
Why are Tesla things getting fire bombed?
Because those people actually consider Republicans enemies,
right? Or CE OS enemies or whatever.
And normally you'd have like a North Korea, South Korea, like
boundary and friends would be on one side and, and, and aren't
just like random murders on that side or murder would be
considered a big deal blowing up something.
So the problem is red and blue are mixed up like this, but they
consider themselves enemies like the Balkans right now.
OK, now you go one step further. Now what somebody, and again,
I'm saying sympathetically, from the red perspective, they're in
like Maui or they're in North Carolina.
There's some giant national disaster.
It tears through the town. They get like a $700.00 check
and they're seeing 100 billion for Ukraine.
So now they think all the foreigners are ripping us off.
And I understand why they think that, right?
But what actually happened was the people in charge of empire
were arguably either ripping off or taxing the rest of the world
and they weren't giving it to red Americans in the cut that
red Americans were used to. Right?
So the red Americans see their cut falling correctly and then
they think the foreigners are ripping them off.
But really the blue Americans were arguably ripping off the
foreigners too. So now we have is this very
short sighted thing where oh you get like 10% less on tariffs
with some country. Great they exported what 50
million a year? You save $5,000,000 but they
destroyed 3330 trillion dollars in market cap and all the trade
relationships of the US and the financial relationships of the
US dollar. So they gave up like 1000 XA
million X to make 1X. It's like the most crazy
numerical deal ever. Let me pause there.
Go ahead. Well, I, I don't, I don't see a,
a way out of this, this economic situation in the US unless, you
know, I, I see someone like Bernie Sanders or AOC coming
along and saying that we've got to tax everyone more.
We've got to tax the upper quintile, you know, 50% more or
whatever it is. Like I just don't see any way
out of the, you know, when you look at the, the debt to GDP
ratio, how is that? How is that going to be dealt
with in any other way? Well, it's, so here's the issue
is I do well, first of all, I don't think it will be dealt
with. I think there's going to be
enormous inflation that just the US fundamentally hyperinflation
is when like a government just finally defaults on everything,
every, you know, just like it's defaulted on its security
contracts. And, you know, it's security
treaties and it's trade treaties.
The last step is the dollar itself, right?
And the dollar really is a metonym for the global financial
system that the US used to run or still arguably runs, but not
for long. Go ahead.
Yeah. Well, what I mean, what Trump is
seems to be doing is accelerating to that point,
right? Yes, and and part of the issue
is also you ever done any physics you know, you know force
diagrams in physics. Not smart enough to have done
physics. OK, you're very smart.
You're very smart basically. So OK, so in physics, like let
me try and give a good example. Like take let's say a helicopter
or something like that. There's a force pointing down,
which is the force of gravity. There's also clearly some force
pointing up because otherwise it wouldn't be remaining in mid
air, right? That's like balance of forces,
and you can calculate from any. And it's more than just those
two. There's other kinds of forces
like tail rotors and other stuff, OK.
But for any kind of big object, you take the balance of forces
on it and you figure out where it's going to go.
And sometimes when you actually write out every force, it moves
in a more complicated and surprising thing than you would
have guessed, but by default. So let's say we apply that to
the world, right? So what are the four forces?
And there's a very, this is what I realized in November and it's
playing out kind of how I expected after November 2024.
So red America wanted to take down the the deep state, but
blue America wants to oppose the Trump administration and Tech
America opposes the regulatory state and China opposes the
American state. So all four forces are pointed
down on American empire, right? That is, that is very unusual
where basically the red, the blue, the Gray and the Chinese
are all pointed down. Now when all the forces are
pointed down, there's nothing pointed up.
The only thing that kind of maintains the system in its
current position is it's like initial position.
And it can move much faster than you might think because at best
red Americans are conflicted about empire and sometimes they
like the power of it. Basically, they want to be,
somebody said this, and I think this is good.
They want to be the man of the house without the
responsibility, right? They want.
To watch Top Top Gun but not not pay for it.
Yeah. Or it's like it's, they also
have a kind of a misunderstanding of where power
is. Like if it was adamantium under
the Appalachians, you know, if there's some like, mineral that
was actually in physical America and that's what made them, you
know, super MAGA fine. But that's not what it is.
It's that what, there's only 77 million Trump voters and there's
more than a billion people. If you add up America, Canada,
Australia, New Zealand, UK, Europe, Japan, South Korea,
that's what Putin calls like roughly the golden billion,
right? Here's a problem.
The problem is we're then going to get way more China than
anybody wanted. Because think about how the USSR
was bad and it fell and the USA was basically the good guy up
until 1991. And then when it was unopposed
and it was a hyper power, it actually by quickly became the
bad guy. Right.
Yeah. Yeah.
So I have a few predictions as to what will happen.
The 1st is China will act good for a while and then it it's
China. So you know like nothing can
push back on it now, right? Like a truly unopposed China
with its drone Armada with like the head of steam it's got will
be very, very, very, very powerful.
And I think there's actually only one thing that and people
it's both obvious and non obvious.
There's only one thing with the economic scale to oppose or
balance. Let's say it doesn't have to be
necessarily adversarial, but it should be balanced.
There's only one thing with the economic scale to balance China.
And you know what? I think that is the.
Internet. The Internet.
Exactly. And everybody will say, oh, come
on, biology, it doesn't have hard power.
You don't understand hard power. The Internet doesn't exist.
It's just metaphysical or whatever.
I'm like, OK, it's. Good cash flow.
It's got cash flow, but actually here's one way I put it.
It's like Christianity, it's not a place, but there are Christian
places, right? There's lots of countries with
the cross on the flag. There's like Brazil and it's
got, you know, Christ the Redeemer.
There's lots of Christian countries.
So it's an idea, but it can also clean territory, right?
And certainly the Internet. Just think about the the the
monasteries in Ireland after the collapse of the Roman Empire,
right? That's where literacy survived
for I don't know how many generations, but you know, the
monks in Ireland kept producing their Tran, you know, that kept
producing their manuscripts of, of the, of Christian texts for,
you know, throughout the dark ages.
That's right. And so like the monasteries, the
cathedrals, the countries, right.
Like a good, like an important enough idea does actually script
things in the physical world, right.
Yeah, exactly as you're saying. And so the Internet will if when
American empire ends as sending its two heirs are China and the
Internet and China inherits the military and the manufacturing
and all the basically a lot of the treaties, the markets,
right. And the Internet inherits the
people, the language of English and the values.
I think because, you know, the Constitution doesn't scale
beyond America, but Bitcoin does.
It's like, you know, common law. Common law was was only among
the British. The Constitution was among the
Americans, but the smart contract, Bitcoin,
cryptocurrency and what the Internet represents like a
peer-to-peer network. You and I are equals on the
Internet. On the global Internet,
everybody's an equal. We have the same monetary
policy, property rights, smart contract law, you know,
basically it's like the same rules based order becomes a code
based order. So that's like the successor to
what America was staring us in our face.
And we're going to need that because an unopposed unbalanced
China, it's actually bad even for the Chinese people, just
like like the hyper power America after 1991 actually
ended up, as many Americans will say, bad for Americans, right?
Like they're now regretting that a completely unbalanced China
would be bad for even Chinese people.
And actually, you know, it's funny, Chinese people, I don't
think they respect American strength, but they do respect
the Internet because Chinese people hold Bitcoin, Chinese
people want VPNs to access the global Internet.
Chinese people respect AI. Chinese people use Anglophone
software, right? They wouldn't be able to manage
without all of that. That would actually be
something. They're not a target on the
digital world. They are a target on the, I
mean, they're partially a target in the digital world.
You can argue the Chinese Internet exists, but at least
they have significant gains from trade with the outside Internet
world. They don't really have it with
the physical world to the same extent.
They're much more a target in the physical world.
Let me pause there and get your thoughts.
No, I think it's a compelling thesis.
I'm just wondering what happens during this process?
Like what and what happens to us in the physical world in in real
life? Do we keep our standard of
living or or or do we have to start stashing stuff away?
Here's my view and I may be wrong but this is my view.
My view is the more if the successors to American empire
are China and the Internet, then the more leverage you are on
either China or the Internet or both, the better off you are.
And if you're both extremely anti China and extremely anti
Internet, then you're screwed. So if you are like, for example,
a fair number of Americans are are working themselves into like
an anti tech Luddite posture. And of course they're going to
be very mad at China. Those people are in very big
trouble because they're going to lose physical prosperity if
China sanctions or trade wars them, right?
And they're not going to have digital prosperity either.
They're not going to have crypto, they're not going to
have this, they're not going to have that.
So they're going to be super angry, extremely, extremely
angry. That's like, those are people
who I think are going to have the worst outcome.
And one way of thinking about it is that history of running in
reverse, like the people who sort of had the worst fall from
grace outcome in the 20th century.
Arguably the Chinese, which went from the Qing dynasty to the
what they call the century of humiliation.
And people don't understand what a degree of regression that was.
To go from like essentially a fairly civilized country to like
backyard blast furnaces and like eating grass to survive under
Mao and then dying in like that was a terrible outcome obviously
for them, but it was a regression.
They weren't always primitive. That's what people don't get.
The Russians weren't always primitive, right?
So. So I think America Poss,
probably Canada may you know are going to have the worst of it,
right. I think, I think Western Europe
will be the second worst off. They're going to take a massive
hit because of how many assets they have that are American, how
much dependence they have on the US for security.
They basically be in American colonies and you know what their
outcome is? I don't know.
With the with the absence of America, some of those countries
will go nationalist, but the absence of America, some of them
will go towards China, will go communist.
And I can't tell what the outcome will be.
It might be varied on the continent, but they at least do
have better public infrastructure, arguably better
demographics in some ways than than the US.
And so I think they'll be less badly off.
I think Eastern Europe will be better off still than Western
Europe. I think Russia will actually be
better off, you know, because the winner of a war gets like a
boost of energy and so on and so forth.
And and so a lot of people in Eastern Europe, if and when
Russia wins, leadership will change and people will be
basically accept Russia as one. And it'll be a shift in
attitude, I think. Not to say that's good.
I'm just saying like just just how the way the cookie crumbles.
I'm actually very sympathetic to where the Estonians and the
Balts are on this, you know, because they just got conquered
by Russia and they just got free.
But you know, now the old boss is back, Maybe.
Who knows, I actually think. Dubai, Saudi Arabia have a
potentially very good century ahead of them.
I think. Iran, let's see what happens.
Maybe there's going to be a giant war.
The world is volatile. Lots of the stuff is just, you
know, as an outcast. It might look stupid in a few
years, maybe not. I don't know.
Iran is like if they're just allowed to trade with the world,
that could be like the next Vietnam because in the sense of
they have a lot of really smart people, a lot of Persians in,
you know, the US that did really well.
Again, they're not like a primitive, you know, people or
anything like that. They have a long history, the
Zoroastrians, all the stuff going back.
So I think like in a Chinese world, Iran might actually do
way better, much better than we might think.
I think China's going to have the best century, probably
because they're just, they're like Apple, right?
Vertically integrated, you know, the Han Chinese nation, the CCP
party state and the Chinese network.
The Great Firewall, the apps in many ways a Great Firewall, I
think will be seen for all its faults, as actually people frame
it in terms of free speech. But generally, I think they're
going to frame it in terms of. Well, they're protecting,
protecting themselves from mind viruses and so on.
Digital borders. Yeah, yeah.
Right. So if it's if it's digital
borders, yeah, well, it's quarantine, but it's also like
stop a drone from being controlled within China, right?
Stop a robot. Once you have robots, it's no
longer speech. That speech can
probabilistically script a human to action, but code can
deterministically script it to action.
So it's less deniable, right. If malware crosses your digital
border and it can open up a drone or a robot, it can do
terrorism, right? So that alone will justify
something like the great firewall around every large
enough civilizational sphere. Like, have you heard the saying
the Internet is an untrusted network?
Well, basically that's what it sounds like.
It's like any packet anybody could write.
So I think what you get is almost the equivalent of
civilizational intranets potentially.
Well, it's walls and that's it's like an very old school
definition of civilization. You put up walls around your
city. And you define what it is That's
right. Exactly.
And it might turn out that physical goods move across
borders more than ideas do. And like, there's more of a
digital, you know, digital borders than we might think.
Digital borders correspond to civilizational borders.
I think that's going to be more, more of a thing.
I think India is actually going to do probably fairly well.
And and the reason I say that is it's just my sense of where a
civilization is. Like for example, it's a distant
#2 But India's number 2 on steel after China just.
So much human capital. Yes.
So The thing is, I, I don't want to feel like the way I usually
say it is I'm moderately bullish in India, extremely bullish in
Indians. Yeah, yeah.
Because China is a state, India is a network.
Yeah, but but India has managed to do a lot well over the last
20 years. And whenever I go there, I'm,
like, stunned by how good it is and how much it's improved.
So I think India is like, you know, they're saying India
disappoints both the optimists and the pessimists.
OK. So I think on balance, just
being a big stable quote, democracy, I think it's it just
like sort of it's a funny way to put it, but you know what, China
was like the second rate communism to Russia or to the
Soviet Union for a long time, and then it became right.
I think India is like the second version of democracy.
And then after all the Western European countries and the US
face plant in terms of this, it'll be like the world's
leading democracy because lots of things will kind of say, oh,
communism was right, or they'll go all the way to Bitcoin
maximalism. So my, my, my basic view is the
more physically, socially, financially, militarily,
culturally dependent you are on the USA, the worse off you'll
be. And the more you're into China,
the more your economy and your people and so on have some
connection to China or the Internet.
It's kind of like the US and the USSR were the big two survivors
of like, you know, right. So China and Internet, I think
are the big two. Now I want to ask, OK, so I in
our last few minutes, I want to discuss network school and what
we're doing here, right? OK.
So your school is not Is it in Singapore or close to Singapore?
Good question. It is right next door to
Singapore. It's in, it's in the Singapore
Johor Special Economic Zone, which is in Malaysia.
But, you know, the vast majority of people like basically will
fly in through Singapore and they'll travel across a bridge
there because they know Singapore on a global map.
Yeah. And you're offering, I, I say
kids, but you're offering people a grant to come and study with
you, a scholarship. That's correct.
Yes, that's right. So we have $100,000 fellowship
for for creators, for founders. So anybody from Colette who's
watching this who thinks they could be an AI first filmmaker
or comic book creator or something like that, some kind
of creative who's AI 1st. And when I say AI first, by the
way, I don't mean AI slop, right?
I mean, like, yeah, it's very important.
It's like it's go ahead. We have some fantastic people
who work from us, who work for us, for from countries around
the world. So we've got this fantastic
video editor based in Vietnam. We've got an amazing audio
editor in Argentina. So, you know, the people who I
hire for Colette who aren't my core editors who have to edit
the text are, it's dispersed all over the globe.
And what I find as an employer is that the talent is so you,
you get such a depth of talent in.
How did you hire for them? Upwork.
Upwork really interesting. So you did, you basically have
bounties and they did them and then you hired them full time
from that? Yeah, yeah.
Interesting. I do that too.
I call it the market is the greater.
Go ahead, go ahead. Yeah, no, it's just you.
You can find so much talent outside.
You know, I find, I find so much talent outside of Australia,
outside of the US, outside of the Uki mean you need people
locally to do some things. But when it comes to creation,
whether it's video or audio, there's an there's an amazing
pool of talented people out there who are very willing to
work and who are very reliable. So, so you're recruiting people
who aren't just like STEM people, but who are sort of, you
know, creative as well. Absolutely.
And in fact, actually that's right and I'll tell you why.
It's because prompting is programming.
And if if you have a vocabulary which, like art history, is now
an applied science. Yeah, right.
Yeah, yeah. Right.
Because if you know your Cezanne and your Picasso and your, you
know, your Monet and Rembrandt and so on, you can actually
summon that style on demand, right?
If you know architecture and you can distinguish, I don't know,
modernism from, you know, Jane Jacobs and all this stuff, you
know, I'm certainly no architect or art historian.
I know like just like the slice. So somebody who has that
vocabulary, like, you know, for example, there's a whole film
makers vocabulary. There's a whole that kind of
person can direct the AI to do the right thing.
And so we're definitely, I mean, one of the things I really want
to do is I think you and I share this interest, but there's many
stories of the 20th century that have not been told, like the
story of communism or, you know, the story like what happened in
Poland, like even the story of Australia or something, right?
I'd love it for people from various cultures to be creators,
screenwriters for their culture and then to sort of market that
in their native tongue. And it's, it's like completely
fresh, like, you know, Hollywood's in a rut because
it's told 5000 stories where America's at the center of the
universe. What about one where Vietnamese
people are at the center of the universe?
What about one where Australian people are or something like
that, Right. So I'd love to see creators
apply to Network School Fellowship for that.
That's awesome. And and do people go and live at
the network school? Yes.
So here's my my One of my goals for this was we wanted to
radically reduce the cost of living for at least how I lived
in San Francisco. I was there because of tech and
I'd wake up and I'd work out and I'd work and that was it.
And it costs like some ridiculous sum of money per
month. And I was like, what am I?
It's like insanely expensive and it's like unsafe and there's
syringes and like the gym was really far and you know, like
coffee was super expensive. And I was like, why is this so
expensive for what I'm doing, right?
I'm just all I needed was like a small community and like a daily
loop that was optimized. And so now I've built that
product and so essentially lots of startups basically for like
18,000 per person per year, you can live in network school and
you get everything. You have room, you have
breakfast, lunch, dinner, you have gym 24/7 gym, you have
fitness classes, coworking, office pods, blah, blah, blah,
everything right? And so basically that takes your
like now your burn is 18 KA year.
That's the roommate. It's 36K solo, but that's still
way cheaper than West Coast tech.
We want to bring it down further over time, but I think that's
already pretty, pretty good. And if you have a decent remote
work job, you're just now banking money because you know,
you're just leveling up, right? And I think most people don't
even really understand what their expenses are.
They only know their rent. But the way to do it is take
your bank account statement over the last year or two years and
ask if it is more than 1500 a month out.
And it probably is. And if so, you'll probably save
money at network school. I mean, that's not the only
reason to do it. You should come for the kind of
pro tech community. But I think that's that's that's
one of the principles. You just mentioned that you
worked in tech in San Francisco, but you're not from San
Francisco originally, yes. That's right.
I'm from, you know, parents are from India, grew up on on Long
Island. That's what we say back there
and moved out to Stanford for my undergrad.
And that's why basically tech for a while sort of forced you
to work in SF And now I almost want I actually think the alpha
is being outside SF, outside Silicon Valley.
It's like so expensive there. It's like so consensus there.
I'm not saying there aren't good things that happened there, but
that's why part of why I'm doing every school.
And you're a very prolific Angel investor.
You've invested in lots of fledgling companies, including
Orchid, and so you've been a huge supporter of founders for a
long time. Yes, that's right.
I have and, and, and you know, what's funny is I do that
basically as a hobby, like it because it's just nice to
frankly, I like talking to those folks to, to the founders and,
you know, entrepreneurs and what have you, because you always get
a bounce. You always learn something.
And then, you know, I have, I have a little money riding on
them. So if they win, then I feel
like, you know, it, it, it, it, it makes a little more
interesting, right? And it's almost like a form of
socialization in a sense, right. And so I've got north of 500
probably closing, you know, 1000, you know, Angel
investments around the world. And it's like.
You're like Y Combinator, but as a person.
I guess, yeah, that's right. I mean, I I just try to fund
people who are classically liberal or pro freedom in a, in
a, in a balanced way. I don't know my own vision of
the good. Just one last question.
You said that you think it's beneficial to be outside of
Silicon Valley or outside of San Francisco.
Do you think that being outside of the US has given you a more
detached met a perspective on the political situation?
And do you think that, you know, because there's this whole thing
of the tech rights sort of aligning with Mega, do you think
that being geographically away, like not in the United States,
has sort of allowed you to be a bit more circumspect?
Yes, I think there's some to that.
You know, I would even dispute the term tech right, because I
think it's the tech center. It's to the right of the left
and it's to the left to the right, because tech is tech is
fundamentally internationalist and capitalist.
It wasn't as woke as it had memed itself into in the 20
tens, and it's certainly not as mag as it meme itself into
because right. And so the problem is that I
think we're going to see the third configuration, like the 20
tens was blue plus tech against red, and the twenty 20s was tech
plus red against blue. I think the twenty 30s is going
to be blue plus red against tech and it's going to be just like
that. It will be the premise of it
will be an anti tech movement and it'll be potentially
violent. Especially because do you know
what Amy Chu's thing about the market dominant minority
concept? No, but I'm, I, I'm watching,
I'm watching Steve Bannon and sort of agitating against Elon
Musk. And I see him sort of like
parroting some of the same same ideas and talking points as AOC.
And I just see this socialist. Nationalist Socialist yes,
exactly. That's right.
And I think I think that's very predictable and in fact, I
actually saw this coming 10 years ago, more than 10 years,
12 years ago. So this is really this key
paragraph. OK do you see this bit with Chua
outlines right. So first what is a market
dominant minority? OK.
Market dominant minority, like she talks about it in terms of
ethnic groups like the Jews of Europe, the Indians of, you
know, Uganda, right, Whites in South Africa and so on and so
forth, right, Overseas Chinese. So basically if you have
democracy and capitalism and one group is winning at capitalism
and another group is much larger in democracy, there's a conflict
and the market dominant minority is somebody who or group that is
winning in the market but losing the vote.
So the backlash if they become too public and too wealthy.
The first is a backlash against markets targeting them, right?
The the second is a backlash against democracy by force
February to market dominatory. The third is violence, sometimes
genocidal, directly against market dominant minority itself.
So now her whole book is about race, racial groups that are
market dominant minorities. But most of violence in the 20th
century was not on the base of race.
It was on the basis of class. Yeah.
So tech is a class.
Yeah. And as any sociologist will tell
you, this is one of the few things they're right about race
and class covari, right? And so tech has a lot of Jewish
people, Chinese people, Indian people, white people and
migrants, immigrants. And there's various groups that
say there's too many white people, there's too many Jewish
people, too many Indian people, too many Chinese people, too
many immigrants. And they're different groups,
but they're overlapping into like, a resentful brew, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And and so the first backlash is
the one we already saw. This was the tech lash starting
around 2013 where the the journalists, the media were mad
at tech, right. And that then the second, I
would not actually call it an anti democratic backlash because
it was winning an election, but it is how some people would,
would, would call it like the Elon Trump tech alliance is this
second kind of thing, right, which is basically wealth,
right, pushing back. And we're about to see, in my
view, the third. Yeah, yeah.
That's this is red and blue against tech that is, that is,
that is basically presaged by people setting self driving cars
on fire in San Francisco, hammer attacks, Tesla fire bombings,
shooting CEOs. They're just getting mad.
Like there's crazy memes that are like calling for like an
army of Luigi's and so on and so forth.
That is just. Yeah, I just can't understand
the the sense of having Bezos, Zuckerberg, Sundar, Pichol
standing at Trump's inauguration.
They. Don't have?
A choice like in a in a line, OK, but that image, that picture
will be used by the socialists for years and years and years to
come. Well, here's the problem.
The flip side was used basically, remember all of these
guys were with Obama and they were donating to Biden, right?
So so the problem is that literally these these are people
who just want I know many of these guys, right?
They're really not ideological radicals at the core.
Fundamentally what they slash we want to do is have a lab where
we can advance robotics and DNA sequencing and aviation and so
on and so forth. And you know, they're too white
for some people and they're too non white for other people and
what have you. But it's actually like a
generally pretty good group of people that is kind of building
a lot of wealth, right? And and now they're just going
to be hated because nobody wants people like what the narrative
will be. AI takes all the jobs, crypto
takes all the money and tech takes all the blame.
So. And and scapegoated for the for
the mess caused by printing too much.
Correct. That's right.
And so the fact that we'll have Bitcoin, Bitcoin will moon and
it'll be like those tech guys, they got all the money get them.
And I wouldn't be surprised to see some BLM, Hamas, J 6th
Graper, Antifa, Luigi kind of fusion blocking roads
ideologically hard to classify, just kind of anarchic, right?
American anarchy is how I think about it.
And just like anti tech guys. So that's I know that sounds
bad, but actually that's why I think it's important for people
to if like in a sense, what's happening now is a good warning.
It's like, don't go to the US, like leave if you're there, you
know, get go back home where you came from.
The signals are being sent. Don't trade with the US.
Don't set up a business in the US.
Don't invest in the US. Like, it's almost as if they're
doing everybody a favor by saying back away, we're out of
money, stop trading with us, we're out of guns, Don't rely on
our military. Back away.
And it's almost like jumping on the grenade before it blows up.
Yeah. And the full force of it.
Go ahead. No, I think, I think that's,
that's a interesting way of describing what's going on.
And it's one of the less pessimistic.
You know, it's, it's an you're at the acceptance stage.
I'm at the acceptance stage and, and, and you know, one thing I
will say is I think that at least for a few years, it's
possible that the rest of the world actually doesn't do that
badly. And the reason is there's all
kinds of crazy quantities of goods that are going to be
exported from China. They're going to drop prices all
around the world. So consumers will actually have
now they'll have other problems, producers will go bust or
whatever. Maybe there might be, you know,
quote anti dumping laws, China's to limit how much market share
they get in a given country or something like that.
But I think actually a lot of prices around the world may go
down even as. You might have cheap E VS.
You might have cheap EVs. There's there's there's
potentially like it's really a question of how much in the way
of US assets you have. And if you have, I think
Bitcoin, if you have like maybe physical gold, if you have your
currency and local bank accounts rather than U.S. bank accounts,
if you don't have U.S. stocks, right.
I think. And if you're not located in the
USI think you'll probably be OK that the large, the large to the
percentage of that is non-us. Which is totally, again, the
opposite of the 20th century. But that's, that's my view.
Now, of course, I hope I'm wrong.
I hope there's a miracle that happens, but I think I'm right.
And we and we can hedge. We can sort of, you know, hedge
a little bit. Yes, you could read domicile
also. We'd have to figure out how to
do that. I think what happens is
eventually it's all on China, in China or on chain.
So it's either Hong Kong soccer chains or it's on the Internet
and so on and so forth. OK, I have to.
Jump, I'm going to let you get to your yeah, other interview.
Yes. And if there's anything, any
closing words? Well, thanks for having me on
the pod and. It's lovely to chat with you,
very stimulating as always, and I'm really in admiration of the
work you're doing with the school.
I think it's a really positive thing for humanity, so well
done. I I love Colette.
It's great and thank you for doing that and and I'm.
You've got to come to Sydney and hang out.
I I you know what we should do that we should do a we should do
a meet up and we we'll see, see see who comes by.
All right, the Colette community with the queue.
OK, see you. Awesome.
Thank you. Bye bye.