this whole Sonia narrative does the world know this about India or is it just Indians just Indians nuclear weapons were not in the Mahar what do you saying I'm kidding to simplify it the American mindset right now is China bad India good why is India good India good because India is not China and India is like maybe America's friend against China in India the geopolitical narratives are that China's trying to do a lot of naughty in the world suddenly being Indian has become a huge plus we considered intellectually sexy because of people like yourself the podcast that we did with Dr J Shankar he's a external affairs minister he didn't paint brain drain as something bad in the US the US has usedful demographics and China is getting old before it's going to get rich is the fact that the one child policy is actually going to lead them to a bit of a demographic downfall we're entering an era where it's robotics over demographics how far are we from that reality it's already happening I don't think I've had a single person on this podcast who's broken it down in this much detail as well which is why I think you're valued in the podcasting space Please go on good I don't need to talk much about Balaji shasan for anyone who's consuming podcasts regularly he's a legend of the podcasting space but he's also a legend of the tech World he's a legend of the Twitter verse or the X verse as it's known now this is a conversation that's focused on geopolitics for regular Balaji s listeners you're going to have fun for people who don't know about who Balaji s is you're welcome thank me at the end of this conversation because I'm introducing one of the most epic Minds from the world of intellectuals in the modern day please enjoy today's episode it's completely loaded it's a very very dense episode you're going to have to listen to it multiple times but if you enjoy geopolitics this is a perspective on geopolitics from a very different place it's Balaji shasan on TS [Music] honor of my life good sir welcome to Mumbai welcome to India well I'm glad to be back back to bar this is the this is where it all began certainly our germ line began here at least right goe you're a bit of a cult figure even here like things are spoken about Balaji Shri noas and in Mumbai in Bangalore in Delhi well I I appreciate that and hopefully I hope to be a more of an in-person leader over here and invest in people and so on locally so yeah I find that pretty crazy that you're kind of coming back I don't know if that's the right phrase I think I mentioned this before but the first so I was born in the US right uh you know born on Long Island grew up in New York and and so on and for the first 20 years of my life being Indian was not it was something I put in the liabilities column right being like the only Indian kid in a school of like 400 you know Caucasian kids who you know you know they'd call you Gandhi and you'd have to run around and be like that's not an insult but they didn't care and you know they sh so like for the first you know 20-some years of life that wasn't like a that was that was a negative factor um also there's pretty internet this was like 1980 to 1997 198 like um there's no internet um you're basically like in kind of jail right uh because you're you know like you could be region locked yeah right so you're like geography locked your information locked because you can only read like very baby books or whatever then the next 20 years being Indian was kind of neutral being in Tech and so you I went to Stanford you know taught at Stanford taught stats and CS started a genomics company did crypto stuff like that it was neutral nobody cared whether positive or negative that was totally fine by me you know what's happened in the last few years what like just the last five or six especially but you know suddenly being Indian has become a huge plus and I feel like oh wow I had liability and then neutral and now it's a huge asset right in the sense of um we considered intellectually sexy because of people like yourself well I mean India's accomplished a lot in the last 40 years right uh I I I you know I think in so far as the diaspora has made a contribution it's to show the world that yeah you know Indians can play at a top level and that India was just sort of temporarily had a temporarily unpleasantness the last few hundred years which is actually a small amount in you know India's history as a civilization and now that India's back or coming back on the world stage um a lot of things are happening at the same time and so suddenly you know if you if I had been born Gustav Von gustavson okay like my friend you know is a Swedish guy who runs a crypto hedge fund named Olaf uh you know his tweets might be of interest in Sweden but there's like a limited kind of demographic there right and Sweden is fine it's fine country but IND is at a certain moment at its history and so a lot of the stars are kind of lining up at the same time um where you know I've you know being fortunate enough to have some Capital India has this talent and so I'm going to be investing a lot in India all in on India for you know the months and years to come okay do people know this whole Soni Chia narrative which effectively translates to the golden Sparrow narrative that in medieval times we used to be the and then we were colonized and money got taken away resources got taken away our education system broke down right uh so does the world know this about India or is it just Indians uh just Indians kind of right and the reason is that um okay there's a sarcastic this is uh this is a sarcastic phrase used on right-wing Twitter that I don't endorse but it's basically it says like we was kangs okay and basically it's meant to sarcastically refer to any group of people that's saying oh we were important back in the day and now they're you know they're they're basically talking about how oh we had Kings and we were queens and so on you're like well you suck today right and and it was fake what you're saying in the past because it doesn't even exist and so on now the thing about this is um I sort of understand where that sentiment comes from but I actually disagree with it because it isn't true that all of the achievements of the past were fake you have to actually go back into the past and feel like okay what parts of it were real and what parts for example um nuclear weapons were not in the mahab okay but you know some people what are you saying about I'm kidding go you know so so people will make these sort of like insane claims you know about the past and then you'll have to you know India was so great we were Nuki people you know that right and um but you have to be able to disentangle that from what you can actually see and um you know the way the way I kind of think about it is uh history is running in reverse and I've got a whole like slide deck or whatever on this but try and briefly some please feel free we have all the time okay great so um the short version is that uh like there's lots of events that were happening in the past that are happening today but in the opposite outcome okay you can roughly think of let's say 1950 as a mirror moment and going into that time period everything is getting more centralized and more westernized and then as you kind of go away from that it gets more decentralized and de westernized okay and uh you know so let me just first give some examples to understand what I'm saying and then like get the pattern so for example um in 1890 the US frontier meaning the Western frontier where you know you'd go wild west and so that the 1890 the US Frontier closed but in 1991 the internet uh Frontier opened Because the Internet became open for business if you go backwards in time you have Spanish Flu forwards in time you have covid-19 you go backwards in time and you have China as the junior partner in the Russia China relationship forwards in time you have Russia as a junior partner in the Russia China relationship okay backwards in time you have a British anry man um ruling India forwards in time you have an IND anry man running the UK right and it even gets to the point of like you had British guys talking about the partition of India and now you have uh an Indian anry guy and a Scot and a Pakistani anry guy running Scotland talking about the partition of the UK if you saw that right that was a huge you know viral meme that Meme is not just one thing there's like 50 other examples like this a hundred other examples I've written up in this book one of the chapters uh in the network State and it's it's essentially I'll just give a few more right so back in time in the 1930s the New York Times sided with stalinist Russia against Ukraine I don't know if you know this no okay well this is a bit of History that's being covered up sure but the New York Times in the US was on the side of stalins Russia to choke out the rebellious provence of Ukraine right okay today it's the opposite the New York Times is on the side of Ukraine against Russia right lots of flips like that have happened okay and um another huge one is back in back in the day the US was a massive exporter of goods and China was just a market and it had the Opium Wars and it was you know um it was addicted to drugs and so and so forth now that's kind of happening in Reverse right it's China that's a massive exporter of goods the US is a market and the US is a massive drug overdose and and feny problem right so many things like this are happening where um like that 1950 is moment is like this mirrror moment and why is it a mirror moment well one reason is that as you go into that you know thing for hundreds of years technology had been centralizing like mass media and mass production but also Telegraph and the railroad and and so on but then you have the invention of the transistor and things start decentralizing you the transistor the personal computer um you know the internet smartphone cryptocurrency and so all of the centralized structures that got built up over here you know including like you know just a few Empires controlling the whole world like the US and the USSR all of that centralization has just started metabolizing and breaking down and um in the west at least and so that's why you're getting more and more chaos there meanwhile in the East you know if if you take that 1950 moment the us at the time was very highly unified it was the interstate highway system and so on 1947 1949 you have China and India uh coming off of Civil War and partition right and um and they were basically just in the least unified right Civil War and partition very disunified the US was completely unified under basically one even if it was two parties it was really one country right and now 70 years later those are almost like in an opposite phase right India after struggling through for a while through socialism and so on is now the most unified it's ever been in its history it was never one country before right and China is also very highly unified the US is more and more disunited right so that's like a macro frame I have on the world and so you know we don't have to talk about how I mean we should know about it for sure we should know within India how great Indian civilization was but what makes people believe that is not the past you know what makes people believe it is landing something on the moon it's the future what we're doing right now in order to build a more effective future yes so within you know within India The Narrative of we we did do well in the past and we were only temporarily down the golden SP narrative and so on that you mentioned has Merit outside it sounds like whining or fake until you land something on the moon and then you can say guess what you know we put this on the moon for $75 million that's less than the cost of making a movie about it in the US that's impressive that's globally impressive right um you know like the airports are impressive you know like the Mumbai airport Bangalore airport they're worldclass airports the hotels now they're like world class like you you just you can't ask for something I mean you can always do better right but it is at the same level as a Singapore or like a you know any first world country or what have you even the term first world I think we should start to deprecate it just like you know may maybe India goes to Barth or whatever we'll see what happens with that right you know what I used in said what we we talk about the ascending world and the descending world right because that talks about rates of change see first and third it initially referred to like first world of you know capitalist country second world communist third world non-aligned but it became a ranking that kind of implies a static aspect so does developed and developing world that's like the more euphemistic way of talking about it but even that is patronizing because it says the developed world is just where things are and everything just converges to that right it's binary it's not just binary it is binary but it's not just that it also says developed world has developed it's done ah okay and it can't get any better than that right actually what's happening is that the quote developed world or first world many big parts of it are declining it's a declining World okay I got to stop you there you spoke about the ascending and the descending aspect could you quantify that a little bit in terms of timeline T timeline yes um boy well so I would say I mean many people date it to 1991 for liberalization of India and 1978 for ding XA Ping's uh liberalization of China right that's kind of when the ascent phase began for both China and India when did The Descent phase begin for the USA um you can date it to different I mean everybody will put the date like decline happened at at different moments um how can you quantify that look at for example percentage of uh us share of global GDP I mean that's a pretty good one you know brics is just flip that or what have you um and there's counter arguments on this people say well American tech companies are still doing well what do you mean there's no American decline whatsoever this is a whole separate topic but the short version is I think the internet is to America as America was to Britain it is like the internet is about as American as America is British wow okay okay go which is and actually India is a big part of that like America had British influence and it started out British but eventually it realized it wasn't British it was its own thing and it was a big battle and eventually it broke free and it had its own government and then it had you know uh because initially it had its own people and it had its own land but it didn't have its own government right and eventually it had its own government I think the internet is to America in a similar way where the internet has way more than Americans on it in fact even just among English users the majority of English speakers on the internet are going to be Indians Indians just because of the size just because of the size this means now up until this point Americans were the single largest group of English speakers and so in any English-speaking environment on you you assume that the majority is American a lot of the things just kind of assume that the world revolves around it right soon that's just not going to be the case right so just like there was a mass immigration of all these other European ethnicities into the USA and it wasn't just like British Isles descended people similarly all these other english- speaking people on the English internet are going to completely change the character of it or already changed the character of it and so it become something quite different from America and so you've got a people and you've actually got a government because blockchains are digital governments they give you property rights and contract law and and this kind of stuff but you don't need have a land right so it's opposite you know America had had a people and had a land but not a government the internet has a people and it's starting to have a digital government doesn't have yet doesn't yet have land and I think that's what's comes next anyway okay go that's the whole network State concept right you crowdfund territory offline but coming all the way back up um I think you know the US doesn't have to decline of course for others to ascend and and I don't want it to it just so happens that it is okay um It's The Shanty towns the you know the homeless encampments in San Francisco it's the drug overdoses it's the drop in life expectancy it is the political polarization and the violence and just the general lack of you know and and it's also the financial situation the banks they are getting downgraded and that's going to be very bad right has written about all the I w't recap all that you you can briefly though because I don't think too many people watch Rio's content in India there's a lot of Indians watching this which is why I'm kind of while I'm speaking with you I'm tied between tying you down and saying hey could you explain this further and just letting you go on and cater to the Balaji s audience okay okay okay okay sure sure so let me let me say everything I said in a simple simpler kind of form um one indiy has a glorious past that's relevant within India sure it is only to something that people around the world will listen to when they see India actually leveling up today and in the future and driving the future right Moon probe that's really impressive India having enough clout to be a player on the global stage and suddenly you know some somebody who's influential enough that other countries want their opinion nobody cared about India's opinion on let's say Iraq right back then India was not a player on the world stage even during the financial crisis uh 10 years ago you don't remember at least I don't remember um oh you know India's Central Bank being a major player in terms of global you know developments on that right even five years ago like actually five years ago Americans were still not in full alignment that China was an issue right um until really Trump in 2015 2016 there's just only Europe existed like there was just Blissful ignorance about China and India growing then there was anger towards China and then more recently there's been friendliness towards India though India should also be very cautious about that friendliness right which I'll come back to that point and um the the decline of the US is so significant that you know it's just safer walking around here it just it's just you you feel that this is a civilization on the ascent that's a fundamental thing people are go ahead no go on I'm just I'm visualizing everything you're saying but go on yeah it's it's um for all right so what are the that really jumped out to me as somebody who's has a 40-year visual on India okay when I came to India in the 80s and 90s uh early 90s before liberalization had like fully kicked in or whatever I was a kid then okay what I remember honestly I'll just be can I be honest please I remember uh filth flies like you know animals in the streets like totally non-functional roads where you could go with like this huge crowds of people like just you know you you know it was just um um it was just obviously there was tradition there's culture there was religion all of that was always there and that's great right but like I couldn't somehow Square this I was like the Indians that I know in the US are pretty good engineers and they're good at software they're doctors you know this and that of course it's a select group but how' they you know how they let the country get like so in disrepair like this you know is it really not possible to put it together and of I was just kids so I didn't have the vocabulary to talk about this or or think about this I was like okay well that's just how it is you know I'd basically been pretty cynical about oh will the government ever get something done and it did and then you know just the recent Spade of successes whether it's government it's really public private really India stack successes you know with UPI and a and so on it's a space program but it's not just the software it's also the physical infrastructure all of that has improved enough that it's visible it's clear that it's improving and that really matters it's not the base you know as an investor you know what you care about is the rate of improvement or the rate of decline if something is declining even if it starts from a high point over here you don't know where it's going to get but if nothing is arresting that CL nothing is arresting San Francisco's decline it has gone from this beautiful city to something that's a byword for just filth and Chaos right there's more poop on the streets in San Francisco than there is in India like or okay let me India is a big place all right let me put it like this I be more precise there are the parts of India that I've been to are cleaner than San Francisco really okay so you have to actually go back and forth there's now starting to be an overlap there there was we were talking about something that was on two different planets right San Francisco was like clean and so and so forth India was over here the fact that there is overlap now right where there are definitely parts of India that are better off and more modern and so on and there are parts of San Francisco that are filthy and terrible indicates that these distributions that were completely disjoint now have overlap that's a more precise way of saying it right not that a is cleaner than b or B is cleaner than a but rather that these now have overlap in a way that they never did okay anyway let me so so that is just my my general feeling is of civilization in ascent and descent the doo thing I mentioned the doo thing just watch Ray Doo's principles of the changing world order it's a 40-minute video that recapit that it tells you a lot that I won't be able to just sum all over here but he from a totally different angle he didn't doesn't even mention India in that video he is starting to now right again as said the kind of American mindset has sort of had picked up nothing because it was Europe then China and now just recently India okay they've just registered these two particles moving fast in their kind of field of view right and it's to simplify it the American mindset right now is China bad India good why is India good India good because India is not China and India is like maybe America's friend against China it's kind of like that stupid and simple right um let me pause get your thoughts okay I have so much to say yes uh and again as a podcaster I'm content driven and I know that there's an American audience watching this as well which is why I kind of feel asking you questions about the Indian government because with my American friends sometimes if I'm sharing things about the Indian government a bunch of them switch off a little bit and I don't blame them sure uh because I I think they don't care about local politics that's what they think about it right I mean they can they care a lot about what's happening in America but the impression I get is they're not too bothered about what's happening in the world until after covid-19 yes I feel things have changed I've not been to America since 2018 or 19 right so I and I think that they're a little more interested in what's happening in the world right now especially considering where the geopolitical world is at uh in India the geopolitical narratives are that uh China's trying to do a lot of I mean I'm I'm really condensing thoughts here but China's trying to do a lot of naughty in the world yeah I mean my view so right so basically This is complicated right um the the thing is that the US was so powerful in 1991 that an entire generation after won the Cold War right that an entire generation of people has grown up thinking that being totally World dominant in is is their Birthright right and um because of this uh until about 2015 nobody really you know gave any credit to the rest of the world didn't think anybody this in the US they they just I unless you were bombing it or was a terrorist or something like that right blowing it up um the rest of world okay that's fine over there and the rest of world was basically okay maybe you you're immigrating from there now you're an American and you know okay you came from India you know you came to our colleges great you know and maybe you can level up here right but for the most part just wasn't a topic of active concern for the average person it still isn't really for the average person I'll come back to that um obviously the US you know foreign policy Elite would would move back and forth and would care about these countries in in a certain way uh and they wanted to make sure they were all under like the US control and umbrella but for the most part the US just felt it was Secure as kind of the global hegemon right that started change around 2015 where um essentially what Trump you know perceived was that uh something that people talk about for a while which is that China was a real threat to bluecollar workers right from the US perspective it's a very simplified way of talking about it it was taking all these jobs that's how they think they taking all their jobs and uh so he in 2015 do you remember those clips where he would say China China China China right that was mocked at the time for his emphasis on China why because still among Elite American sen but they're like why are you getting mad at that they're just making plastic stuff at Walmart they're not a big deal what what you know are you racist here dummy you know why why are you making such a big deal out of this right that was still the mentality in 2015 2016 that this is stupid xenophobic protectionist blah blah blah now you know what happened three even three years later by the way even in 2019 uh Obama put out a documentary called American Factory where he advocates for like us China cooperation and so and so forth then after covid in 2020 the US flail to such an extent see that was the first disaster that I can remember in my lifetime maybe you know see if when there's a hurricane in like Haiti or something like that you'll see video of bronny Marines going and helping people out of ditches and so on and the US was always assumed to have the state capacity to not just take care of itself but take care of everybody else even if it blow up some people and it would help some people it would have the state capacity to that it's very organized and so on right with covid the US was just flailing very publicly for everybody to see in fact um rolling stone for example reported that supplies had to be airlifted from China to the US because of course all the physical stuff has made in China right and so there was a huge blow to the uh it's not articulated as such but to the sense of America's standing in the world right and after 2020 China in particular no longer respected the USA because they thought they had nailed Co of course they they had messed up in their own way you know with um like infinite lockdown and so so forth but but they thought that they had a better model for society and this is really fundamentally what broke in my view after 2020 is that China had been kind of looking up to the US and and thinking of it as like a society that there there's a good chunk of people within China even if not at the CCP leadership level but many of their daughters and sons who had gone and been educated there uh that that kind of looked up to the US still right thought of as a better Society in some ways that was totally shattered after 2020 and the fact that China no longer looked up to the US and is now like kind of you know making its own way champ and number one contendo well yeah right so here's the thing at that point now it wasn't just the blue checks it wasn't just the blue collars that were threatened by China it was a blue checks so it wasn't just the working class but the journalists I mean you know the elite of American society they were like wait a second our Empire is being challenged by this other Empire who's no longer listening to us because they don't the the part they haven't gotten yet is at last bit they don't understand that China doesn't respect America right that is actually the key driver everything is talked about in terms of military force and so on and so forth but fundamentally it is China doesn't feel America as a better model anymore that is a difference post 20120 go what do you feel what do I think um I think that most Americans don't know anything about China and if you explain something about China then often they'll be like what are you on you're you're on the side of the Chinese you CCP agent you're shill or something like that and so like you know but but it's important to know like basic facts it's kind of like uh imagine you're playing another basketball team you should know you know that that guy's a good three-point shooter you're not like a oh you're a you're a Nicks shill you know you're you're advocating for him I'm like no I'm just saying he's a good three-point shooter over here and he's had a good tracker of that what you hate us you want us to lose right that's like uh you know the mentality is something where people have gotten to the point we're making even factual observations on China they'll kind of lose their mind right so with that out of the way let's you know here's some factual observations about China um they are about to flip Germany and Japan for you know being the number one car exporter you know because of the electric vehicles okay they're by far number one in steel production they are the number one exporter to most countries in the world they have um basically built a bunch of beautiful cities over the last you know 20 30 40 years and of course they've done all of this while having a total state that Brooks absolutely zero you know descent outside of you know the the party basically all of these different possible contenders where it's Fong gong or it's you know the the Wagers or it's the Hong Kong protesters or it's the tech guys like Jack ma or anybody you know or Boi Lee is this guy who's like a who was like a left guy you know in the in 2012 he was like a maist all of these different you know things and there from different parts on the political Compass some are libertarian some are left none of that matters only the CCP right so all political descent at at a certain level is is crushed that's true the the thing is that their machine has been building most of the physical Goods of the world you have to acknowledge that that is true because it also impacts the relative military strength for example the US Secretary of the Navy just admitted um you can probably pull that play that clip okay that one Chinese Shipyard has more ship building capacity than all us shipyards combined did you know that no okay that you know the US Navy has a slide showing that China has 200x the ship building capacity of the USA of course they've also got 200x the capacity of building almost everything else right so it's the peacetime manufacturing that translates into the wartime the problem is many Americans are so invested in this image of themselves as Top Gun and and so on and so forth that you know totally Invincible military there's a thousand movies that have said this this is their self-image that they just don't understand the level of strength that China has built right they kind of understand on the manufacturing side but somehow there's like a it's hard for them to say oh and actually also all the guns too right because that now is like whoa okay the full logical application that is a very big deal however you have defense manufacturers like Ron American defense maners saying publicly they can't decouple from China okay so the American defense ecosystem is saying publicly that it's made in China right so um so in a sense uh there's a lot to criticize about the Chinese model but has it built an immense amount of power for modern China it has built an immense amount of power for modern China that is absolutely true go ahead uh one of the geopolitical narratives about China in India is the fact that the one child policy is actually going to lead them to a bit of a demographic downfall oh yeah this is the Zan thing uh yeah so I mean and the reverse narrative is true in India that we have a young population which is going to build the next phase of India it's going to be a huge working class yeah and there's some truth to this okay you don't think it's entirely true no I don't think it's entirely true so you think that even though they have an aging population uh doesn't matter as much as the geopolitical commentators saying that it does yeah so so basically there's this guy man you know I should basically just write do one video that just kind of encodes this as a rebuttal or whatever and then so I don't have to I can just site that okay this is that video this is that video okay okay okay great well I have to put up the slides and stuff I'll give you the links okay all right but essentially um so on the demographics point so first is it good that all else being equal you'd want a younger population versus an older population yes all else being equal however there's there's definitely countries that have huge young populations um Nigeria Indonesia Etc uh that I mean they have they're showing some economic growth but um let's say Estonia or Japan do not have huge young populations however they're highly modernized right it's not the entirety of it to say just sheer quantity in youth okay um there's more to it than that so for example often that that comparison between let me do First China versus US demographics and let's talk India demographics the um it is not simply the quantity sure quantity people it's also the quality of people and it's in the US you know some sometimes people say uh oh the US has useful demographics and China is getting old before it's going to get rich and so it's finished Etc okay this is COPE in my you know you know the term cope like yeah I mean I I can kind of understand what you mean by okay cope it's like it it is taking um you're you're just seeing the stuff that suits your own n yeah exactly it's it's taking like one true fact but actually things point in the opposite direction because in the US um the so first of all you have the things I mentioned you have soaring rates of drug overdoses you have soaring rates uh or you have high and and flat but still high rates of outou of bloodlock births okay so like broken homes divorces um you have and we're talking like huge numbers okay um you've got uh plummeting life expectancy it went like this right which is a signal of something very catastrophically wrong in a society that life expectancy is falling off a cliff because the so-call deaths of Despair right um You have due to drug overdoses and car crashes and other crazy kinds of things okay you have um huge amounts of uh you know the uh obviously political polarization and you also have ethnic polarization where racial groups are taught to hate each other okay and that if you take that demographic pyramid it's not just oh there's a lot of Young Americans the Young Americans are mostly for example you know Latino immigrants or or children of immigrants or or recent immigrants and the older one generation are like Boomers and supposedly these you know young immigrants are going to pay the Social Security of retiring Boomers when Social Security is bust that's not going to happen so that's actually just a recipe for racio economic conflict between two groups that see themselves as different because the entire press and Academia are telling themselves to think of themselves as different not like one unified Young country where the only variable that matters versus youth in America you need to go a little more granular than that right so actually the US has just set it up for like massive ethnic racial economic conflict and you know it's it's something where they're just telling it's like an illusion to say oh youth is good because that youth has to feel itself aligned with the elderly not if it's being taxed to pay for the elderly and the elderly will say wait a second I paid in Social Security I I should get it the entire social security thing do you know what Social Security is like pension it's like a pension but it's it's a Ponzi okay okay so it's not actually solvent okay so maybe to explain this you can take the example of a 65y old in USA right now and what they were doing in the ' 90s 2000s and 2000s yeah so so essentially through your entire adult life in the US you pay into a fund called Social Security and there's like supposed to be some money there for you in retirement but the US government is terrible at accounting and terrible at actually having that money and so there's a shortfall coming in terms of what it actually owes retire es it taxed and then spent the money and then doesn't actually have it for the retirees and if you had just had that money and had it in the stock market you would have done much better anyway put in an index fund so it's like a double loss it was taxed from you when you could have used it um as a young person or something like that it was taken from you and even if they just forced you to invest it you could have invested in something better so they took it from you they wasted it and then you depend on it and it's not there right and then so all of these older people will be mad where is my Social Security check and then the state will either have to tax or it'll have to print and dilute and then younger people will get mad that they're being taxed to pay for the older people so I mean this is the type of stuff let's be absolutely real right these are these are recipes that is a great way of getting the young to hate the old Social Security insolvency right and that's absolutely going to blow up okay that's is one of like 15 different things the point is that it you know the even the term United States it's like the disunited states yeah that's the impression I get from the outside when you listen to America podcast or even if you meet Americans it's extremely strong political opinions which is fine but they absolutely hate the other side yes um and and you kind of almost look down on someone for just one of their tiny opinions that doesn't represent like everything that they think of and honestly that's happening a little bit in urban India because Urban India is incredibly inspired by America subconsciously unfortunately so that's a big thing yeah so let's come back to that go ahead uh you don't see that happening in the rest of India right and for a lot of urban Indians who want to build big businesses or big careers they look at interior India as like the marketplace because that's where the money is actually increasing so it kind of makes me think that hm it's exactly what you said about the descending world and the ascending world yes it's complicated so you know obviously you want to be able to sell into the us so you need to understand the culture and so and so for without bring the bad aspects of the culture you know back over there I also just I don't mean any offense to Americans because uh often when you're speaking to Americans it's very rare that you get Steelman arguments unless you're listening to like a Jo Rogan or Lex Freedman sure right and so so the thing is that basically um I hopefully I don't think any offense intended you know the the thing is that um I mean people recognize degree of polarization the demographic thing though is something where once you understand okay actually those demographics are not that great right let's talk China's demographics okay they first of all every Math and Science competition just go and take a look look usually China was programming it's math science they do pretty darn well right a um B is uh they um they don't have they have their own issues okay but they don't have um massive ethnic riots in cities and so and so forth in fact it's the opposite they're using the state to totally Crush that kind of thing um more importantly the um when it when it comes to so so they're the opposite of fractious and disunified right they are unified under an iron fist which is different right the other thing is that the demographic issue the Chinese are I mean remember you this is a population of 1.3 billion yeah it's a decline it's a relatively gradual decline and this is a much smaller population and it's got its internal problems that you know we're talking about this is the us over here 300 something million versus 1.3 billion so it's this weird thing where we're like oh my God China's demogra like demographics have been one of China's strengths forever their sheer quantity has does have quality there with that said they recognize that the country is getting older that you know the one child policy was a mistake and so on so forth so what have they been done doing basically anything that is possible for a state to do they're going to try they've got the three child policy now they're doing subsidized IVF they're shutting down they have shut down all of these expensive after school education things that were making parents feel they had to spend so much money um so trying to shut that down uh they have launched a total attack on like real estate prices they're trying to bring down real estate prices so that people can get married and have kids and and have homes they actually want to crash real estate prices G has talked about you know H should be for living in not an investment Etc and so all The Regulators went out there and started trying to actually try to bring down home prices um they're doing you some of the most interesting things it's worth that's not being widely reported outside of China but South China Morning Post tracks some of this subsidize IVF do you know what IVF is yeah right in vitro fertilization right so that is something that's at like a a few percentage points in terms of you know I don't know the exact number between 1 to 10% but probably like four five% but it's been creeping up in terms of the percentage of births with that right um maybe maybe five is a high number I have to look at the exact number but but it's on the order of that right I love how you get into the details and I think this is why people listen to you but go on because usually people take tiny narratives and generalize massive uh predictions based on those tiny narratives but you're getting into the details and then drawing out geopolitics I try to I try to and if I may be wrong but at least I've got I can I'm explain my reasoning I don't think I've had a single person on this podcast who's broken it down in this much detail as you have and I don't even hear these kind of geopolitical narratives on American podcast which is why I think you're valued in the podcasting space Please go on good okay okay good good good so the thing is that um you know I mean what does China excel at China excels at taking a technology that works and taking it apart and figuring how to just scale it right just to scale it that's a China model right and um to make it cost effective uh or really C you know like very cheap very scalable and just mass mass mass produce right they given that technological bit of fire they just improve it IVF Works IVF has worked for a long time all the there's there's a lot of there's a whole Tech stack around IVF maybe and what China is looking at is maybe every Chinese woman just gets free IVF and so they get to two children three children per person where they just mass-produce them right this not actually totally crazy for them to do that if they lean into that the society level um knowing their past tendencies that if they see a problem they'll solve it and grow really fast yeah exactly you know have you heard of this guy Cass sunstein no in the US this guy policy guy he wrote this book called you know what the equivalent in China would be it'd be shove like force people into helping your geopolitical problems yeah well because for example like you have um we just had the whole covid thing where you had to show a pass to show your vaccination status um to like open a door or something like that is it that big a step to say to show your pregnancy status how many kids you've had and you get to the front of the bus front the line right actually a lot of countries are experimenting this kind of thing for example I think I maybe misqu this but I believe um in Hungary if you have a certain number of children uh that woman is like taxfree for life okay and you could probably pencil it out and it probably does work out mathematically you know like in the sense of okay this number of children well they will produce Z dollars in taxes over their lifespan and this person will produce less than that so we'll take more money in the future for Less day it probably works out economically right something like that could could also work so China will just throw the kitchen sink at this whether that actually and then they've also got Chinese nationalism which is a powerful force in its own to to motivate people so whether that actually works is TBD because you know you they they threw this powerful State at covid and that wasn't actually what solv Co it was vaccination and and you know perhaps just natural immunity from the virus just having its way with the population and getting all the people who were vulnerable to it and then you know going away like a like a summer storm it just burned through everybody who was vulnerable and then you know was finished right um people had immunity plus vaccination so so putting people locking them down and so on was just the state doing things that didn't act the So-Cal non-pharmaceutical interventions didn't have an effect so what I when I say if State intervention does have an can have an effect that's not obvious that it will but if it is possible for a powerful state to get the birth rates up then China will will be doing that um and so it's not and then last and maybe the most important is we're entering an era where it's robotics over demographics right damn okay so and the reason is you have robots themselves you have AIS so you can substitute techn capital for human capital in more and more more things go ahead how far are we from that reality it's already happening right yeah I mean like you can already have support Bots support chat Bots are better than human chat bots in many context right okay please correct me if I'm wrong uh the one thing I've learned about geopolitics is that whoever is richer wins the geopolitical game on many fronts oh I so disagree with this okay you can I want be schooled honestly so I'm going to I'm going to lay out a lot of the geopolitical narratives I've learned on the show and these are the narratives of my audience and a lot of people around the world as okay uh the countries that are richer win geopolitical races that's one uh as in geopolitical competitions the second is that in order to become richer you focus on manufacturing and and in order to improve manufacturing you focus on INF structure in order to focus on infrastructure and Manufacturing in the long term you need more people like that's probably what's happened in the recent past like with China's massive population helping the manufacturing helping the infrastructure growth therefore helping them geopolitically okay uh you're the first person who's come on and said that no robotics is going to replace demographics as a requirement yes I think the only way to predict the distant future is to kind of study the distant past and in the distant past wars were won because of uh technology whoever had Superior technology would actually win the biggest Wars uh I think a repeat of that is going to happen so whoever is the technological leader in the world will probably come out in the geopolitical race yes uh please correct me wherever you disagree with this narrative okay so there's several there's a lot of there's a lot of good there but let me shoot at like about five different points there go for first is why do I say the rich guy won't necessarily win right well San Francisco is spending $300 million on a bus lane and India landed a probe on the dark side of the moon for 1/4 the price of that okay so when you're rich but they're spending that inefficiently they will become poor it's that whole Jo Rogan narrative about soft times create soft people yeah yeah exactly I mean this all the US's main export is the dollar like leave aside Tech America okay go ahead no go on go yeah so so leaving Tech America side right the main export is the dollar and if you got a printing press why would you bother dirting your hands mining coal right why would you bother digging something out of the ground why would you bother you know going and um like like actually creating value just run off another you know $50 bills and hand them out of course they don't actually physically do that but me but conceptually right so the problem is that when you do that everybody else gains the capability to make stuff China makes stuff right and um the factories are in China and then suddenly what happens one day is you're and this is USA it's just got a money printer and um and and administers a network I'll come back to that point but it's got a money printer but it doesn't have you know it doesn't have the the factory and the manufacturing assets it doesn't have the supply chain and that's all overseas and the real world is overseas so in a sense sometimes being so wealthy makes you um like a like a spoiled privileged guy who's inherited a huge fortune and doesn't know how to work for a living right they're so Rich they don't know how to work for a living right um you know the way I put it is it's like founding versus inheriting okay so think about a guy who founds a factory and that's an entrepreneur and they're like you know Henry Ford a rockfeller you know like Captain of industry and they pass it down and then the fifth generation grandson or whatever inherits a Ford or Rockefeller name so they're legitimate but if you ask him to go and build a car factory or you know run an oil DK they're not competent no offense to those guys or whatever you know not beating up with the fors of rock just an abstract example point being that that's actually what has happened with the US establishment like George Washington um you know or or the guys that did the manhand project those are all like founder level guys who did like zero to one something that had never been done before and now all the people running the US establishment are just inheritors they could never have built those things in the first place and in fact what they have inherited they've started to destroy with like the state of the Streets of San Francisco and um you know many other things that's the most visible piece okay it's where the abundance mindset goes wrong yeah it's it's it's abundance mindset becomes um arrogance mindset like it becomes Infinity mindset um and um it's like nothing no constraints you print infinite money nothing ever happens right so that's why the point about the Richer party wins the us only has Financial wealth China actually you you know has has the physical world and it does deals with the bricks countries and it's piping oil and so on there's red America still does some physical labor and gray America Tech America still definitely generates value but blue America like the administrative state is is the is the majority it's like dominant and it doesn't understand that um like the legal work that it provides to the rest of the world well actually here's one way of thinking about it think of the us as like especially after 1991 as being like the CEO of the world okay everybody else is like a worker that works and the US provides the rules-based order so to speak and and it fires or disciplines somebody who gets out of line and it takes a cut for all of these Services okay but it's it's coo who has built this giant manufacturing thing no longer wants to listen to the CEO and the COO is the one who actually knows how the whole thing works and knows where the screws are and the bolts and the nuts are and that's like kind of similar to this conflict and in many ways a lot of other countries around the world also want to fire the CEO they don't want the US to be you know like they don't want the US in control of all their Affairs they don't want them sanctioning this sanctioning that blocking this doing that the US they don't feel is a good leader anymore right and the leader the CEO is really mad about this because they don't want to lose their power right uh but they also don't want to you know it's been such a long time since they were a rank and file worker who had to work for a living and actually had to build and ship things it was like a couple Generations ago that they also don't know what to do outside of this okay that's like a rough analogy for this is that a good chunk of the world wants to quote fire the CEO which is they want to fire the us as a leader of the world there's a woman named actually Fiona Hill who is a neocon is type uh but who wrote a really good article about this a few months ago that Glenn Greenwall tweeted um and I want to say it's something like um the she she uh it was the lyard Mary lecture okay so you can probably find it from that and she talked about how um when people talk about Ukraine they're talking about Ukraine as a proxy war of the US ver Russia but she and this is an American neocon who sports that war and so on she's like actually in many ways it's a proxy war of the world using Russia against the US order wow okay okay and she's like lots of countries even if they have no beef with Ukraine you know as beef for Ukraine they don't like the US telling them okay we're going to sanction you here you can't do this human rights lecture etc etc they don't believe the US has any Authority on human rights after blowing up the whole Middle East to kill all these people right what Authority does it have it just said it's systemically racist at home right it said it hates black and brown people then it gets on you know TV like 18 months later and they're saying we're the champion of democracy and all the black and brown countries have to get behind us for Ukraine or whatever right so there's you know the reason by the way do you know why that that's a failure you know why that happened because in 2020 Democrats were running against Republicans so uh it was to their interest when they're fighting Republicans to say America's systemically racist oh my God we're so bad and then you know that they won that battle then when they're fighting Russians now they're the champion of democracy okay and so what's happened is because the internet the domestic propaganda and the foreign propaganda can be seen by the same person and the context collapses right and that's new right and we have enough memory to remember things from just a little bit away it used to be that the domestic message and the foreign message could be you you know like who would read all the local papers and all the global papers and be able to put that together and disseminate that you wouldn't be able to do that so you could narrowcast one message and broadcast another message and and that's not what's what's there anymore okay coming back to your to your thing about um you had a story about the factors of of of things that would lead to domical dominance yes and we were talking about Robotics and demographics so one is wealth alone doesn't get you there or or rather um money alone doesn't get you there because uh if you spend it very inefficiently you get you know stuff like what you're talking about number two is it's not sheer quantity of population the huge part of the Industrial Revolution was going from you know the the your strong back to effectively mining muscle out of the ground with coal and oil and so on right and that's why you know we call it horsepower right you've heard like a horsepower engine you know in a sense where it comes from is if I was to have a bunch of horses pull this cart how many would I need versus replace those horses with an engine what is a horsepower that engine like that's that's conceptually where it comes from okay so you're like mining the muscle of a horse or a human out of the ground as a rock you know or or or a barrel of oil right Rock of coal or barrel of oil and that completely changed the world because we could replace muscle with something artificial now with AI we can replace brain with something artificial M right you can replace muscle with uh with coal and you can replace brain with silicon okay so that's as huge a change as like learning that you could use coal and oil to build engines right that's that's what that's how big a deal AI is that's why robotics is demographics because you can put this brain into all kinds of things where there would have been a human brain before just so you can put an engine into all kinds of things where would have been a human muscle before and um and that that that will increase our capabilities to an extent that people didn't even get yet right um it's it's a new huge factor in the geopolitical race of the world it's it's yes it's I mean yes but it's also uh it's at the scale of like oil gotcha right in terms of how it just transforms what humans do okay at coal it's it's like that right you're replacing something where you needed to have a human in the loop or you just don't right the thing is also this is not a theoretical thing you know say robotics great than demographics it's kind of already happened on the internet you know why 12 years ago um Instagram had about it's on the order of 12 people 13 people and Kodak had about a thousand xit number 13,000 people who won Instagram right so they're 1 1,000th size with 1,000x as many users for their digital photography right so that's like a millionfold differential of a small highly motivated team with the internet why is because they could hit a key and they could automate all these things right they weren't manually going in you know having a dark room where they hold up all those photos remember you know from the 80s they weren't doing all that that was doing done on servers so they had robots working we call them you know they call them online you call them Bots right you call them Bots online they had Bots automated you know jobs schedulers that would take in things from their users and they would you know signal process them and apply the filters and give them back right didn't have a huge dark room doing this because Robotics are demographics rather than have thousands of people doing this manually they had code doing it right and that's the story of the last 20 years is everything online is automated and a small team can do much much more than a large large number of people if that small team is smart enough you give the right instructions to the right robots and then you just sit back and everything is taken care of okay that fits the Indian mindset by the way yeah right we just want to kind of we don't want to crank the thing all day long we want to figure it out write the right instructions and Let It Go small and efficient yes so that's our Lea frog strategy okay so just like you know you go from nothing you know to you don't go to landlines you go directly to cell phones India if it does want to get into manufacturing should just go straight to [Music] robotics boom okay right why is this and this is part of a general thesis which is you know I did this on um on THM show a while back how India can win-win so we can link that you know in in here okay I guess you know you know him he's a friend and so I know he's another podcast you don't want to L podcast it's fine okay okay but basically um the um overall theory is India's strategy should be software first on everything so because India is really strong on software so every problem converted into a software problem so how do you convert manufacturing your software problem robotics right because the sixth degree of Freedom arm which is like you know so why six it's like X Y and Z and then it's like it's a you know it's Theta and fi it's orientation in three space okay didn't understand this didn't understand this all right point is there's a there's a robot arm a type of robot arm called a six degree of Freedom robot arm where just with software you can do a lot okay okay um and pause me anytime I'm just saying stuff that is not no this is the only Point all the thing about robotics is actually there's a lot of Indians who are good at robotics um I did robotics in my first company genomics company uh there's gray orange there's diapers.com there's like myth robotics there's um this new thing called clone that Gary tan and I just funded by Indian guy in the US there's quite a lot of Indians into robotics it's something that we you know were're good at I think at least we we're definitely competitive in it right Indians have had lower labor productivity than Chinese from a long time if you've gone and measured that right and um it's a little bit like you know it's funny to put it this way but um it's just something [Music] where there's this Russell um there's this Russell Peters clip do you know Russell Peters okay so you know he's this thing he's talking about how Indians were once slaves right and he's like uh you know but can you imagine an Indian was a slave no you pick the con and I'll make the t-shirts remember you know that part that clip you play that clip I'm I'm messing it up okay point being that the Indian stereotypically wants to just kind of figure it out conceptually and not do the manual labor if they can avoid it right so robotics fits that mindset it fits that kind of cultural groove of figuring it because actually it's quite hard by the way conceptually and mathematically to figure out exactly how you Orient this robot arm and how you script it like that's code that's math that's intellectually challenging that we like okay figure that out and then let the assembly line run okay all right so coming back so a the um so just in your narrative about what generates power first money alone doesn't necessarily do it too much money can actually be a weakness two the eye thing is as big as like coal or oil and in the past it wasn't just quanti of people is once we got to coal and oil you could mine muscle out of the ground now we can mine brain out of the ground with silicon three um the robotics or greater than demographics it's not some future istic thing where you actually have to people when I say that sometimes they have to visualize a physical robot running around we will get that okay Tesla's working on that there's a lot of this stuff out there robotics is far more advanced have you seen the have you seen the uh Boston Dynamics videos yeah yeah okay actually we'll put a clip up maybe um that I tweeted a few months ago it's like uh 10 years of progress okay and it shows over the last 10 years how like physical walking robots have gone from very slow and connected by a cable consuming a lot of power to things that can move completely on their own do back flips have you seen that kind of stuff yeah right like the Jetson like the Jetson getting closer to the Jetson yeah that's right that's right so I I think that within our lifetime everybody will have their own robotic um you know man Friday or Jeeves okay or multiple right like you'll have a house robot like your car that is coming okay so that should be a important goal like if you have a few goals for India that's a big one you know I actually wish you know uh this would be a good thing for some senior politician to do is for any area where India wants to do well technologically they should have like a custom IAT style exam that they just tweet out for example let's say you want India to do well like you you've heard the term industrial policy right everybody thinks industrial policy means spending money okay but it could just be you put together a rigorous exam on robotics you tweet that out and the top 10 scorers um get an audience with the Prime Minister damn okay what you what will you get you'll get 10 million kids across the country studying for this leveling up the country okay and in that skill set for basically free you have the curriculum online as well all right and uh then they you know the winners go and get an audience with pmo and they talk about what they're doing for like one hour of time from pmo which time is valuable of course you have this very scalable thing you have to build a curriculum and so on beforehand right and think about how much cheaper that is than spending money that's what I'd like to see India's industrial policy America's industrial policy you're doing the Indian Thing by saying come with a concept I want yes exactly right that skills that's it's smart it's smart lazy right right it is um how do you get leverage out of it and do it in the smart way right and what that does is I mean industrial policy is not about money it's about skills skill building skill building is about education the reason I know the US isn't serious about this is It's just spending money you know what it isn't doing it's not Biden tweeting out an exam about quantum mechanics right if you're actually serious about semiconductor leadership he should be talking about the B I mean not that he even knows what this stuff is okay but like you know the band Gap and Crystal structures and you know like uh you you could actually devote these political feeds to something more valuable than just stupid lowon common denominator stuff right you could have you know uh you could direct people's attention to what's important what I just described by the way with that like robotics exam competition you can apply it for nuclear power right you can apply it for any other area of interest to the country you take India's existing exam culture because we have an exam culture right the J and and so on and so forth you take India's existing um exam creators right because you've got the people who the people who set the J right the ones who write the Je questions you just task them with doing this okay and maybe you have uh Proctor administration of the exam okay so there's some Logistics that are associated with that there you go that's your industrial policy okay um this is probably the podcast where I've spoken the least uh because you're breaking a lot of my preconceived notions about a lot of different things uh also I'm trying to download as much as I can off of you and I'm going to take this in my further podcast totally especially when I'm talking to the politicians cuz I've spoken lot of politicians in the recent past and I know that they listen uh but they're so busy that they want condensed information totally totally okay so one of my requests to the audience is I know there's a lot of Twitter users listening to this episode try making threads which will eventually Reach people like peush SMY Irani Dr J Shankar and PM Modi yeah we can do the one minute version 140 second version compressed at the end yes okay no no for sure uh I love that you're breaking geopolitical narratives Etc and you're kind of giving a strategic road map about what we are supposed to do going forward I have a lot of geopolitical questions related to India which we come to in sometime I'm going to like break away from geopolitics just for a second totally and kind of go to a bit of a human level with you okay sure of course um okay and uh again please correct me where I'm making uh wrong assumption okay um so the narrative for the longest time on the Indian internet I'd probably even go as far as saying up to the podcast that we did with Dr Shankar which was in May of this year he's a external affairs minister um he didn't paint brain drain as something bad MH that was the narrative on the Indian internet for very long that we've lost a lot of smart Indians to the rest of the world oh yeah which was true which is called the brain Rin problem brain circulation is a better term or something like that people have said and that brain Rin was the common term you in India okay I'll give you a v a visual of what it was like growing up in India for me I'm born in 1993 all my life I was told by all my relatives that my biggest goal in life should be leaving the country and by Nature I was a very rebellious person so the more I was told to leave the country the more I wanted to stay okay so I ended up staying all my friends ended up leaving most of them went to America many of them wish to come back uh I wanted to take the same rebellious narrative and put it online so I kind of fed this reverse brain drain problem I said no you got to come back and you got to help the country and then we have Dr janker on the show and he said that no no don't look at it that way look at it like the Indians abroad Nat he the Indians here help the geopolitical uh game that India is playing like we need to work together like more like a tag team okay so I'll give a framework on this okay right so China is 10x Germany India is 10x Israel okay so China is 10x Germany and then I'll get to India in a second right why I say China is 10x Germany so China today is similar to the Germany of the early 20th century where it is a manufacturing Goliath Colossus really um that is highly militarized under one supreme leader okay non-english-speaking with territorial issues nearby a beef against the anglo-american order and uh is a legit Contender for the tech and military power of the whole world which in turn is causing a bandwagoning against it okay and a unification within the country right right very similar now of course those were non-white you know those are you know in Germany they were white and on the right and in China they're non-white and ostensibly Communists and on the left but otherwise modeling China's tenx Germany as this giant manufacturing Goliath um that's just very highly organized is a good way of thinking about it conversely India is like 10x Israel okay um so uh India has so both China and India have a diaspora right but China's diaspora is starting to get pushed back abroad because all kinds of countries are I think many many in many cases very stereotypically and it's unfortunate but they're like oh every Chinese immigrant uh every Chinese Tech Guy every Chinese person in Academia especially if they got a Chinese first name which indicates that they usually came from China recently they're under suspicion of being a Chinese spy in the US right so it's becoming harder for the Chinese diaspora abroad they're getting pushed back and um I I think it'll be in those countries where China has hard power like Iran or Africa the Chinese diaspora can operate and then they're like an extension of the Chinese State over there but their soft power is eroding dramatically in in the west and so on India and the reason that's important is if you go and look at um Academia in the USA right like Stanford electrical engineering or something you know where you know 20 years ago the department it's probably even I looked at the demographic State I wouldn't be surprised if it's even more so was on the order of 35 40% Chinese 35 40% Indian and the rest other groups right those are almost like the two wings of the airplane from the gradon are propping it up and um so if you knock out one of those wings if you knock out the Chinese Tech Talent wing on something India will have to like surge to be the other part of it so whereas the Chinese diaspora is receding the Indian diaspora is accelerating okay so plus India uh General influence on the world stage is increasing so India should be able to negotiate Visa deals with many countries you know obviously Dr J Shanker is very on top very smart guy but basically any country that asks him of India you should say okay let's get a million visas a year or or whatever reasonable number there is you know every country is scared of having oh my God if we have totally open you know Transit we're going to have a billion Indians coming in but some very FastTrack e Visa kind of thing so you can do business facilitates business travel back and forth and that's a thing that's a huge pain right you just want to be able to go very quickly and go to a conference go to something without a hassle right um so so what I think is going to happen is those countries will say yes to this with the passport ask the Visa ask that's an Ask by the way that lots of tech CEOs in the US are supportive of lots of people in the left and the right in India that's something that you can get a lot a big Coalition behind is just better travel right for Indians so the Indian diaspora expands to fill the space the Chinese diaspora is receding to fill and the thing is that if China plays perhaps the world's best home game India plays perhaps the world's best away game wow wow okay okay so China has built all this ridiculous infrastructure and so on at home their cities are amazing they glow all this stuff India has exported all these Tech CEOs and presidents and prime ministers and Venture capitals that are heads of billion dollar funds all the guys like you know like my parents generation they spoke with an accent right but they planted seeds and now the 30 and 40s somethings like like myself I'm you know just like one like tiny version of this but there's a lot of folks who are my peers were just entering the power quter of our careers we speak without an accent right and we're leveling up in the World At Large right so in a sense there's about 7 million Indians that immigrated and um 78 million depending how you look and the US UK Australia Canada they did very well abroad okay and then we're like the advanced Scouts okay of this Indian diaspora that's why I said India it's like 10x Israel because Israel started with the diaspora and then got the state India starts the state and now is building the diaspora uh I've never podcasted with a guest where I've thought to myself that hm I'd love to work for this guy so I have so much to say right now and only because of a time constraint I'm holding back I've had so much to say in this whole episode but I've been blown away by everything you've brought to this which is why I've just shut up through this conversation okay uh but I appreciate you and something tells me this is not the last time we're meeting in life sure so either podcast with me more or hire me and I will see you very do some stuff together great all right great thanks thank you thank by so this was part one of a very deep very dense two-part conversation the second part will be released in 3 days I know this is one of those conversations where I didn't speak but I was totally intentional I feel with people like this you just need to extract whatever you can especially if you have the luxury of sitting in front of a mind like Balaji shasan also it was the first time that a lot of our regular TRS listeners would be introduced to this man's mind Balaji shasan is going to return on TRS in a few months time but for now anticipate the even more loaded second part of this two-part conversation [Music] Back To Top