Balaji Srinivasan & Steven Glinert: What If the Internet Replaced the Nation State? | MTS Live

Balaji Srinivasan (0:00)

On the left, there's a lot of people who think you can just push a button to like end homelessness, end poverty, just take all of Elon's money. And they just don't do any math, and they don't have any understanding of scarce resources, scarce resources in the physical world. They don't understand scarce resources monetarily, right? They just think it was a cornucopia, a bounteous mother, government is GOV is GOD, government is God, but the bounteous mother form of God, which can just hand out everything, right? And the rightist, while more realistic often, is subject to a different but symmetrical, somewhat symmetrical version of this, where they think if the leftist thinks there's infinite money, the rightist thinks there's infinite power. The rightist does not viscerally understand, oh, I need to work for votes.

I need to get political support. Just like the leftist doesn't understand scarce resource in the physical world, the rightist doesn't understand scarce resource in the digital world, that they actually need to get all these people to agree with them that this is a good thing, and you can't just point a gun at everybody, right? And there's limits to just brute force.

SPEAKER_2 (1:02)

We are live in the Situation Room. Today is Thursday, May 28th.

Balaji Srinivasan (1:06)

All right. So, can I show some slides or should I get started? Go ahead.

Steven Glinert (1:10)

You should probably talk about where this came from and why we're both, what the hell you've raised online the last couple of days too, right?

SPEAKER_2 (1:18)

What's the deal with you and the Hellman helmet guy?

Balaji Srinivasan (1:21)

You know, the thing is, so like this guy actually had a decent TikTok, which I'll talk about in a second, by the way, which is funny. Basically, he has like a million followers on TikTok since 2022 He has never been a jingoistic nationalist on TikTok. In fact, I actually can't think of a single pro-American thing, or anti-Chinese thing he's ever posted on TikTok, right? So all the patriotism, uber-patriotist, whatever kind of thing, uber-nationalism is only on X, right? The persona on TikTok is a completely different person.

I didn't actually understand that until actually a few hours ago or whatever.

He has something where he's like, oh, Edie Amin did nothing wrong, basically. Right?

SPEAKER_2 (2:06)

That one was crazy.

Balaji Srinivasan (2:08)

But the problem is, a lot of people said, why are you being so nice, blah, blah. And the way I approach things is, you know, tit for tat in game theory?

SPEAKER_2 (2:18)

Yep.

Balaji Srinivasan (2:19)

Like, basically, there's a version of tit for tat where, like, you start out nice.

Right? I will basically cooperate with someone who will cooperate with me. I always start out nice. Steve, I mean, whatever. You've seen me in business over the years. I always, always start.

Steven Glinert (2:36)

You're also like a genuinely nice person. Like, you're not that argumentative in person.

Balaji Srinivasan (2:41)

I'm not, and I try to, like, basically, I'm always looking for the win-win. That is to say, how can that person win? You know, like, empathy, it's funny. The problem is, you know, Woke's weaponized the word empathy, and they use it to mean, give me all your money and die or whatever, right? In your evil, whatever. But the thing is, empathy in the sense of understanding the other person's incentive structure and how they get a win is important, even if you're just a completely cold-blooded business person.

In fact, the first thing I do in any slide deck, any conversation before you go and do a presentation is, how does that person win? How did they get a promotion?

How does their business make money? How did they advance in life? They have like three, sometimes they haven't even thought through their KPIs or whatever, right?

As an example, a concrete example, an academic, what is their number one thing they care about? They care about getting a first author paper on a study. What do they not care about so much? Maybe the IP licensing or something like that. So, there's a win-win where you can give them a grant, they do a study, they get a great new first author paper, and then you have IP license, obviously subject to whatever other rules the university and so on has, right? As an example. Anyway, so coming back up, I always try to enter every discussion as win-win as possible, and try to seek common ground.

And that was basically impossible here. I was just, you know, but anyway, what I want to do is I want to actually show you what I'm thinking about here. Are the slides on screen or not?