Legacy Media Is Lying To You - Balaji Srinivasan - #519

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Form a general partner at andreessen Horowitz. Our information diets are making us mentally fat. Whether it's fake news, myths or disinformation, state propaganda or conspiracy theories, the world is very difficult to navigate. Balaji also wants to start a new type of country. He has views on how to optimize your working day, and he generates more new ideas than almost anyone else. Today, we get an insight into his thought process behind all of this. Expect to learn why socialism always continues to arise across the world, how Balaji tracks all of the ideas he has in his head, why Singapore is a powerhouse of a new country, how immigration will deal with remote VR workers in India, why everyone should use a dashboard to track what's going on in their life, the key trick that the legacy media uses to manipulate you, and much more. If you are new here or if you're a long time listener, don't forget that you might be listening but not subscribed, and that means that you will miss upcoming episodes, which you do not want to do. So head to Spotify and there is a follow button in the middle of the page or if you're on Apple Podcasts, there's a plus button in the top right hand corner. If you press that, you will never miss another upcoming episode and it supports the show and it makes me very happy indeed. So please go and do it. A thank you. But now ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Balaji.
Balaji Srinivasan, welcome to the show.

**Balaji Srinivasan** (1:41)
Good to be here.

**Chris Williamson** (1:43)
Mark andreessen said that you're the person with the highest output per minute of new ideas of anybody I've ever met in my life. does that seem accurate?

**Balaji Srinivasan** (1:53)
Well, I think he said new good ideas. New ideas alone, but I think he qualified with good or useful or something like that. But yeah, no, it's a high compliment from Mark, who's a friend and colleague going way back.

**Chris Williamson** (2:09)
What's going on there? Is there some formal system that you're following? Are you space repetitioning or semantic networks or something exotic? How are you resurfacing all of these ideas and holding on to them?

**Balaji Srinivasan** (2:21)
No, it's good. I probably should do some formal system, and that might be like a force multiplier or something. I'm definitely interested in, like quantum.country has a good implementation of so-called mnemonic media and whatnot.
I think what it is, is that I have a single, a few, let's call it a single threaded worldview, right? I have a certain vision of the future, and then everything that I see, I sort of attach to that in some way. And so, oh, that's a little subroutine of this piece, and this is a little subroutine of that piece. So if you've got like a clothesline of worldview, you can attach pieces to it, and that helps you remember things. And then, you know, if you have that worldview, you're like, okay, this is gonna be a piece of the future because I have this projection of this macro concept, here's a micro concept. For example, let's say you believe the future is the apocalypse but with the internet, okay? Which is kind of what I think a big piece of the future is, all right? And so the apocalypse but with the internet, you're pro-soilant, you're pro-Coinbase, you're pro-Cryptocurrency, you're pro-remote work, you're pro-Digital Nomads, you have this vision of the future, you're bearish on Fortune 500, you're bearish on Suits and ties, you're bearish on legacy commercial office space, you're bearish on the west and you're bullish on Asia, and so on and so forth, right? Just that thing alone kind of gives you a certain set of plus on these, I think the biggest minus on these is that that right there kind of summarizes a big piece of worldview, right? And then, of course, there's exceptions to that because I'm bullish on Estonia, even though that's part of the west, and I'm bullish on Miami, even though that's part of the west. So you have second order corrections to those first sort of things, and I'm bearish on aspects of China, even though that's part of the East and so on, right? So that's kind of what I do, and it's very hard actually to do more than one thing. You can do one big thing, and you can attach lots of subroutines to that. But if you're doing more than one thing, then you have to decide for every single moment of the day, am I spending it on A or B, which is why Ilan's life must be very difficult, because he has to constantly choose between SpaceX and tesla because they're not really the same thing. And so when push comes to shove, tesla probably gets second, if he must be at some meeting for one of the two, he'll probably be at the SpaceX meeting because getting to Mars is more important and it's on a shorter time scale than the cars. Anyway, go ahead.