Balaji Srinivasan

The thing is, in the early 2000s, you could have an expense account as like a time reporter and maybe write like, I don't know, six articles a year, fly around the world.

You had a pretty high status.

You had pretty high income.

And everybody feared and respected you because you could write a negative article on some politician and nuke them.

But you didn't, you know, they weren't that unhappy, right?

They weren't that mad.

They were still, there was like peak America and so on and so forth, the 90s and 2000s.

They had these expense accounts.

So they weren't like angry enough to get you.

But then when that revenue graph collapsed from 67 billion to 16 billion, and then these nerds, the guy down the hall from them suddenly went totally vertical and became a tech zillionaire, and he doesn't know Proust or whatever.

right?

He doesn't know, you know, all these literary references.

He just knows how to do math, right?

Why is this guy doing well?

It's one thing if your house turns into a hovel.

It's another thing if the guy's next door turns into a mansion.

And yet it's the third thing if that happened because your house turned into a hovel, right?

So we should, I mean, it's funny, right?

We should be empathetic to them because I actually never wish another man ill, to be clear, right?

I always try to seek out the win-win