This is a map of primary trading partners, US vs China, and how it has evolved over the last 20 years. Think about it, and realize this probably reflects your experience. I know there was a similar panic about Japan in the 80s, but Japan by population has always been 3x smaller than the US, whereas China is 3x larger. In addition, we had and have military bases in Japan. This is not the same situation. The US, since I have been born, has been coasting. The main product made by the US is the dollar, and it used those manufactured dollars to outsource everything. Most jobs in the US are now basically fake. It’s basically an economy in which five people stick a pipe in the ground, but that pipe is the fed and the oil was the good will built up over 1870-1970. In 2008, with the bailouts, it was made clear that the US has no interest in reform. The next decade, in perhaps a spitting in your face move, the fed made the interest rate 0. Known as ZIRP, this had never been done before. This led to insane perversions. When I got into business, I didn’t understand that business in America was mostly a total scam. Sure, you might look at a single business, and be like, oh, that sounds reasonable, but then you zoom out and look at the entire system, and it doesn’t really make sense. It’s scams feeding other scams. Wanna each start a business, pass dollars back and forth over and over again, and drive both our revenues super high? Sure, we don’t produce anything, but we have companies with high revenues and we can raise money based on those revenues. We’ll both be rich! Let’s do it with a bunch of extra steps so people don’t catch on though. They’ll only see it reflected in the lack of movement of real macro metrics. You see, the US is a “developed” country, which means real growth is over? You do understand that guns and boats are made of steel, right? Oh, airplanes aren’t, they are made of aluminum. Oh…right, yea, it’s not just steel it is absolutely everything. The future is chips you say? All the good chips are made in the Republic of China you say? This 2021 article lays it out clearly, and it also explains why nothing I saw in Silicon Valley made any sense. I’m not going to go into the personal stories, but I just had an underlying assumption that the goal was growth and value production. It isn’t. It’s self licking ice cream cone scams, and any growth or value is incidental to that. It isn’t until you understand this that people’s behavior starts to make sense. America really is at a fork in the road. In one world, they abandon all hopes of being an empire, becoming a regional power with highly protectionist economics. This happened before, and it’s called Europe. I know it’s hard to believe now, but Europe used to be the seat of power for the whole world. The sun never set on the British empire. Now they put you in jail for memes. Protectionist America is a boring place and not somewhere I want to be. It kicks the can further down the road of poverty, basically embraces socialism, is stagnant, is stale, is a museum…etc, again there’s a contemporary example of this. When I said on Lex they were gonna nationalize NVIDIA, look at the AI Diffusion Framework, and notice how Trump hasn’t repealed it. It allows export of GPUs to only 18 countries. Nationalization with American characteristics. It tells the other 177 countries that they should plan on purchasing their AI infrastructure from China. The other path, which is the exciting path, is the attempt to maintain an empire. An empire has to compete on its merits. There’s two simple steps to restore American greatness: 1) Brain drain the world. Work visas for every person who can produce more than they consume. I’m talking doubling the US population, bringing in all the factory workers, farmers, miners, engineers, literally anyone who produces value. Can we raise the average IQ of America to be higher than China? 2) Back the dollar by gold (not socially constructed crypto), and bring major crackdowns to finance to tie it to real world value. Trading is not a job. Passive income is not a thing. Instead, go produce something real and exchange it for gold. The first will bring the value of “American” labor in line with its global market value. It is a particularly unique advantage of the US over China, the US has a potentially much larger pool of talent. Non ironically, diversity is our strength. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of resistance to American labor finding its market value. The second will prevent a lot of the scams. The reason the banking industry is so big is that it is close to the source of the made up dollars. If currency is gold backed, you could imagine something similar happening to the mining industry instead. However, the mining industry is real! It uses steel and aluminum to build physical things. And imagine when we start to mine space. That’s a way better reward function than scamming politicians out of fake dollars. Unfortunately, I doubt either will happen. They very much both can, but people haven’t been demoralized enough yet.

A lot of smooth brains on Hacker News about the last post. I’m sorry if you spent your whole life worshipping money, but hey, the Bible warned you about false idols, don’t shoot the messenger. “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” – Mark Fisher It’s actually very easy to imagine the end of capitalism. Imagine capitalism as a game of sharks, where eventually the biggest shark ends up gobbling up all the fish, and that one shark is the last player left standing with all the money. When one person (or company) has all the money, do you see how the money would be worthless? I’ll spell this out clearly. Money is a map, it is not a territory. Please understand what I mean by this before continuing to read. You can erase the mountains from the map, but you still have to climb over them in real life, and even worse, now you don’t have a map! “Everything around you that you call ‘life’ was made up by people who were no smarter than you” – Steve Jobs So, if money is the map, what territory is it attempting to capture? Presumably something having to do with value, but increasingly, as we are buying and selling baskets of derivatives of memecoins, nothing. A map that doesn’t accurately capture a territory is not a Schelling point. It’s not a useful map. And maps are only as good as their usefulness. Useless maps die out. Do you agree or disagree that money is supposed to be a map of value? If you disagree, that’s an ought and I can’t use logic to convince you otherwise, I can just call you a moron who refuses to burn paper $100 bills for warmth on a deserted island. Many capitalists I meet are as stupid as communists, trying to give a moral justification for their system. This is my money, I deserve it. I should be able to passively deploy my capital into the markets and live off the returns. “Moral victories are for minor league coaches.” – JAY-Z A economic system is only good in so much as it effectively deploys capital for real growth. If real economic growth is only 3 percent, any time you are earning beyond that, somebody else is losing. And yet somehow, today, you can put your money in money market accounts and earn a “risk-free” 5 percent…hmm something doesn’t make sense. Who is losing? You will eventually be unable to squeeze the productive people any further. The worst was an e-mail I got with someone who supposedly agreed with me. “Value creation (for all stakeholders) is at the core of the organization/ business model I am putting together…Anyway I wanted to let you know others out there who share your vision.” – anon email Fuck your stakeholders. Fuck your business model. You don’t understand me at all. Stop worrying so much about the distribution of the pie. Start thinking about how to make the pie bigger. With exponential (what 3 percent year over year is) growth, the latter outstrips the former by so much. The right distribution is simply: From each according to his ability, to each according to his ability to effectively deploy capital to achieve real economic growth. Communism is dumb cause it goes to the poor (who routinely demonstrate that they poorly deploy capital). Capitalism is dumb cause it goes to the rent-seekers (who frequently deploy capital to increase their moat). Acceleration is the way.

Intellectual property is a really dumb idea. “But piracy is theft. Clean and simple. It’s smash and grab. It ain’t no different than smashing a window at Tiffany’s and grabbing merchandise.” - Joe Biden, 46th president of the USA Except it isn’t and Joe Biden is a senile moron. Because when you smash the windows and grab the stuff, Tiffany’s no longer has the stuff. With piracy, everyone has the stuff. It’s a lot more like taking a picture, which Tiffany’s probably encourages. Win-win cooperation. Wealth is being increasingly concentrated. What’s shocking to me is how much everyone still cares about money. Even the die-hard complain about capitalism type deeply cares, because the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference. I hate scammers, but I’m pretty indifferent to money. The best outcome of AI is if it delivers huge amounts of value to society but no profit to anyone. The old days of the Internet were this goldmine. The Internet delivered huge value but no profit, and that’s why it was good. Suddenly we had all these new powers. Then people figured out how to monetize it. It was a race to extract every tiny bit of value, and now we have today’s Internet. Can this play out differently with AI? Let’s build technology and open source software that market breaks everything. Let’s demoralize the scammers so hard that they don’t even try. Every loser and grifter will be gone from technology because there’s nothing to be gained there. They can play golf all day or something. If I ever figure out how to channel power like Elon, I will do this. Spin up open source projects in every sector to eliminate all the capturable value. This is what I’m trying to do with comma.ai and tinygrad. I dream of a day when company valuations halve when I create a GitHub repo. Someday.

Pulled up at a stop light Imagine flying an x-wing down a corridor, having to turn the plane sideways to fit, a missile on your tail and closing, hitting the turbo, feeling the g force, coming up on the end of the corridor, pulling back hard on the stick the second the corridor opens, turning 90 degrees and watching the missile continue straight. Tingles. Adrenaline. Release. Or if you don’t want sci-fi, imagine winter circa 1645 in America. Several of your group almost dead from lack of food, tracking a deer, spotting it, shooting it with your bow, hitting but the deer is trying to run, fast twitch muscles charging and leaping, plunging a knife into its heart and knowing at that moment everyone is going to be okay. Heart rate calming laying on the warm deer. The modern world doesn’t have any real experiences like this any more. Survival has become a technocratic plod, making the right boring and careful decisions. There’s only fake experiences like the above, video games, sports, and drugs. And things like reckless driving, which are just kind of stupid. As we march toward ASI, this will only get worse. What the unabomber describes as Type 2 experiences, ones where you can achieve results with serious effort, will vanish. All that will be left are things you can have for no effort (like food) and things you can never have (like world peace). Even when humanity goes to Mars, we will be going as cargo. I was told recently I’m not engaged in my life, and it’s pretty true. Until I see a solution to this problem, even a sketch of a solution, what’s the point? Why sprint if you aren’t sure where you are going? I’m trying my best with comma and tiny corp, how do you make technology itself more accessible, not a fucking packaged product like when the default world talks about making technology more accessible. That’s just hiding complexity. But it’s so hard. Companies don’t work like how I thought they did, they just…exist. Which I guess in retrospect is obvious, there’s no adults in the room. Knowing the future doesn’t help you change it. I am continually shocked at how little people understand about anything, they don’t even understand that they don’t understand. Am I the same way? I try extremely hard to constantly test myself, if my predictions are wrong it’s clear I don’t understand. If I can’t build it I don’t understand. I’ll frequently read comments saying I don’t understand, but when I engage with these people they can’t explain what my world model gets wrong. A different meta world model? Or are they just idiots? To anyone who wants to supersede rationality, you better understand how to steelman every rationality argument. If I want to succeed, I believe I have to change who I am, and I’m not sure if that’s possible. I believe I’ve been making efforts in that direction, but I haven’t seen results yet. Working on AI is both the only thing that matters and also so demoralizing because of the above. I believe you have to give individuals control over the technology. And not by setting permissions in AWS that can be revoked, I mean in a nature sense. The ghost gunner is the real second amendment. This ideology holds me back so much in business, to the point I struggle to be competitive. But if you abandon that ideology, what’s the point to doing it at all? I have to win with a hand tied behind my back. We only make products for spiritual tops, not the majority of the world which is spiritual bottoms. Now, perhaps I have an ace in the hole. With the rise of AI, the spiritual bottoms will soon have no cash, because AI is the ultimate spiritual bottom. It would take a highly skilled terrorist to build spiritual top AI and even I’m not that crazy. So we’ll only have bottom AI, and it will outcompete all the human bottoms. Advertising will vanish once the hypnodrones have been released. Those humans will likely wirehead themselves out of the picture. This is the world I’m building for. Have you ever unconstrained your mind and thought about where the world is going? This won’t be like the steam engine replacing the horse, because all horses were bottoms. Ever seen a horse riding a human? Humanity bifurcates. Humans will retain control for the foreseeable future, the only question is, how many humans? If it’s 10, I’m out. If it’s 10k, 50/50 I’m in. If it’s 10M, I’m definitely in. My goal is to make this number as large as possible, it’s my best chance of survival. Give control of the technology to as many people as possible in a deep nature sense, not a permissions sense. In my opinion, this is what Elon gets wrong. Of course, he’s likely to be one of the 10, so maybe that’s why he doesn’t care. But what if he isn’t? Tesla and SpaceX are huge silos begging to be co-opted. I don’t think building silos like this is a good idea, compare the fate of the Telegram founder to the Signal founder. Build technology and structures that are inseparable from the narrative you want, as opposed to ones you think you can wield for good. On a long enough timeline, it will always end up in your enemy’s hands. Imagine if the only thing they could do with it furthers your goals.

I’m getting on a plane back to America tonight, been away for over 3 months. It sort of fills me with dread and anxiety. I remember going to the Apple store before I was leaving, the uhhhhhhh from the sales people was awful. 0 pride. Nobody cares. So different from the sales people at the Hong Kong Apple store. America has had its social fabric torn to shreds. I’ll be back for a month, and I will see if it’s how I remember it, but I’m really not bullish. Wokism is really just Protestantism evolved, it’s not an aberration. I don’t think still fundamentally religious US society will fair very well with AI when it becomes clear just how unspecial people are. Sidenote, I’m in 7th place on Advent of Code thanks to AI, and it is progressing so fast. A capability that was unknown to the world a few years ago. This is the only real issue that matters. It will change society more than you can possibly believe. I’m predicting Chinese religion, a “combination of Buddhism and Taoism with a Confucian worldview” will fair much better with AI. You can already see this in surveys of AI acceptance. In 2016 it was clear Trump became a kingmaker for the Republican party. While he couldn’t guarantee an election win, he could hand victory to the Democrats if he went against whoever the Republicans nominated. All three Republican nominees since have been Trump. Elon represents a similar force, but it’s easy to imagine him supporting the Democrats next election if things don’t go well this cycle. It’s possible Elon now actually has the complete power to choose the winner. I know I’m an Elon swing voter. While there’s things I don’t agree with him on, it’s hard to imagine the clowns in the political establishment offering something remotely compelling against him. If the Democrats want a chance next election cycle, they pick someone like Mark Cuban and get Elon’s support. I predict they won’t. Anti-Elon will not be a tenable political position, and this is a good thing. Godspeed to those who try. Even if I stay in the country, I’m leaving California. They need to turn around and get pro Musk people in government, or the mass exodus will continue. Also looking into moving my companies out of Delaware. Dead end. Now, within a everyone is pro Elon (pro-growth) political framework, there are still choices. Isolationism, tariffs, abortion, infrastructure spending, social safety net, etc… Once we are in that framework, politics can return, and there’s hope for America from a political standpoint. But if being anti-growth remains in the Overton window, there’s little hope. Does anyone think there’s hope for Europe? Culturally, there’s a far deeper problem. The soul isn’t real, and this will be a very hard pill for many westerners to swallow. There’s already so little social fabric and this will only make it worse. In rich Western society people’s expectations exceed their abilities. AI will pummel this even harder. All the clowns who worked jobs that were detrimental to society for fake money. The money is the map, not the territory! If you pervert a map you don’t change the territory, you are just lost. We’ll see how it is being back, but I’m leaning towards leaving and applying for residency here. Btw, how does the US still tax nonresidents? Will be nice when the empire decays to the point it can no longer do that, the influence of the US on the payment rails of the world needs to go.