E228: Balaji Srinivasan: “The Dollar Is Already Dead” and What Comes Next

Balaji Srinivasan (0:00)

You know, just like Rome succeeded Greece, and Britain succeeded Rome, and America succeeded Britain, I think the internet eventually succeeds America. And so, how does that work? Let me be a little more specific. Right now, what's happening, when you think of democracy, there's different definitions of democracy. You can think of one definition of democracy is, let's call it blue democracy, and that is Democrat democracy. Republicans have their own version, and they'll say, it's not a democracy, it's a republic. Partly because, republic for republicans, in fact, I'm sure that's some subconscious aspect. But partly because they say, oh, for example, the Senate is important and the courts are important, it's not just populist majority rule and so on and so forth. There's a third very important version of democracy in the world, and that's Indian democracy. That's like a dark horse that's rising, and it's becoming more and more relevant at the world stage. India is that democracy is a really big word.

David Weisburd (0:55)

Balaji, you were the former CTO of Coinbase, the general partner at A16Z. You're also Wall Street Journal bestselling author of The Network States, which I did actually read over the Christmas break. So welcome.

Balaji Srinivasan (1:08)

Great to be here. And that's The Network State, by the way, behind me on my shoulder over there. So you can kind of see it.

David Weisburd (1:15)

And you're working on the version two of the book. Tell me about that.

Balaji Srinivasan (1:18)

I got the first version of The Network State out July 4th, 2022, auspicious day, of course, for starting new countries. And just as a pure Kindle book, and I basically became a book publisher and had to figure out all the Kindle formats and so on and so forth. It's actually, it hit number two globally on Amazon, and I tweeted that out at that time. You know what number one was? So it's one of the most popular categories on Amazon. It's billionaire romance. I was competing for the number one spot with the, I think it's like the most eligible billionaire. That book, I think is, so it was a best seller, but it really is sort of, I feel it's catalyzing movement. There's a lot of people talking about network state as a noun, as a phrase, sort of like Googling or Ubering or something like that.

David Weisburd (2:04)

What gets lost in a lot of people on network state is it's a little bit esoteric or a little bit in the clouds. Can you give us an example of a network state that you believe will be built in the future?

Balaji Srinivasan (2:15)

Well, I'll give you one example of something that's close to a network state that was built in the past and that's Israel. In the sense of it was a group of people without a land that got a country. Now, of course, I recognize that Israel is quite controversial and so on today. But there's other precedents for the network state, like, for example, Singapore, startup country founded by Lee Kuan Yew. Obviously, America itself, maybe the original startup country. And actually, India, which got its independence non-violently. So if you add up those four precedents where you have the Israeli concept of a diasporic group of people that then assembles on a piece of territory, the Singaporean concept of a charismatic CEO founder, the American concept of a bill of rights and negative rights and all the amazing things that the founders of the US came up with, and then the Indian concept of independence through non-violence, that starts to get at the concept of what I think of as a network state, where in a sentence, we've started new companies, we've started new currencies, can we start new cities or even countries? And that's a premise.

David Weisburd (3:24)

How do you start a country? Something like in Israel or Singapore was started historically.

Balaji Srinivasan (3:30)

Sure. So both of those are quite different, where Singapore was, you know, it got its independence involuntarily from Malaysia, whereas Israel was something which started with a book, and Der Judenstaat, which was Theodor Herzl's book, was something that inspired a lot of people, and they thought Zionism was crazy in the late 1800s. And he actually didn't just do a book, he also did a conference, he did a fund, and that conference is still going today, the World Zionist Congress, and he had a fund that actually today, the descendant of it, the Jewish National Fund, owns a big chunk of Israel. So he was actually, if you go back and read The Jewish State, Der Herzl was like a startup entrepreneur, but he was like a tech founder. He talks about the death of distance due to the steamships that were carrying people abroad and so on and so forth. He reads in a very modern kind of way about, here's a vision of what's possible. Can I get the people and the capital to make it happen? I think that the amazing aspect of Israel going from a group of people to reviving an ancient language and building a land, there's something really interesting about that. I'll show you a visual of how the Network State might work. If you understand this visual, you basically get the whole thing. So the whole Network State book is online at thenetworkstate.com.