Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA
Guests: Balaji Srinivasan
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
Contents61 chapters
§01Transcript · 00:00–08:00§02Transcript · 08:03–15:53§03Transcript · 15:56–24:12§04Transcript · 24:15–32:12§05Transcript · 32:15–40:46§06Transcript · 40:47–48:26§07Transcript · 48:28–56:02§08Transcript · 56:04–1:03:59§09Transcript · 1:04:04–1:11:34§10Transcript · 1:11:38–1:20:06§11Transcript · 1:20:08–1:28:06§12Transcript · 1:28:07–1:35:55§13Transcript · 1:35:57–1:42:51§14Transcript · 1:42:54–1:50:23§15Transcript · 1:50:26–1:58:23§16Transcript · 1:58:24–2:05:14§17Transcript · 2:05:15–2:12:31§18Transcript · 2:12:33–2:20:08§19Transcript · 2:20:11–2:28:44§20Transcript · 2:28:47–2:38:12§21Transcript · 2:38:16–2:47:06§22Transcript · 2:47:07–2:54:10§23Transcript · 2:54:14–3:02:22§24Transcript · 3:02:24–3:09:57§25Transcript · 3:10:01–3:18:18§26Transcript · 3:18:20–3:26:15§27Transcript · 3:26:18–3:33:35§28Transcript · 3:33:38–3:41:47§29Transcript · 3:41:51–3:49:05§30Transcript · 3:49:08–3:56:44§31Transcript · 3:56:47–4:04:02§32Transcript · 4:04:04–4:10:44§33Transcript · 4:10:46–4:18:13§34Transcript · 4:18:14–4:25:47§35Transcript · 4:25:48–4:32:57§36Transcript · 4:32:58–4:40:31§37Transcript · 4:40:32–4:48:58§38Transcript · 4:48:59–4:56:42§39Transcript · 4:56:45–5:04:50§40Transcript · 5:04:52–5:13:06§41Transcript · 5:13:09–5:21:42§42Transcript · 5:21:43–5:29:31§43Transcript · 5:29:32–5:36:03§44Transcript · 5:36:05–5:43:58§45Transcript · 5:44:00–5:52:09§46Transcript · 5:52:11–5:59:58§47Transcript · 5:59:59–6:08:16§48Transcript · 6:08:18–6:15:16§49Transcript · 6:15:19–6:22:37§50Transcript · 6:22:41–6:30:27§51Transcript · 6:30:29–6:38:12§52Transcript · 6:38:13–6:46:16§53Transcript · 6:46:18–6:53:11§54Transcript · 6:53:12–7:00:27§55Transcript · 7:00:29–7:08:14§56Transcript · 7:08:16–7:15:55§57Transcript · 7:15:57–7:24:10§58Transcript · 7:24:16–7:32:02§59Transcript · 7:32:03–7:39:34§60Transcript · 7:39:36–7:47:08§61Transcript · 7:47:10–7:47:46§01Transcript · 00:00–08:00
"Donald Trump was probably the biggest person ever
"to be removed from social media."
Do you understand why that was done?
Can you still man the case for it and against it?
- Everybody who's watching this around the world
basically saw, let's say, US establishment
or Democrat-aligned folks just decapitate
the head of state digitally, right?
Like just boom, gone, okay?
And they're like, "Well, if they can do that in public
"to the US president, who's ostensibly
"the most powerful man in the world."
What does the Mexican president stand against that?
Nothing.
Regardless of whether it was justified on this guy,
that means they will do it to anybody.
Now the seal is broken.
Just like the bailouts, as exceptional as they were
in the first year, everybody was shocked by them,
then they became a policy instrument.
And now there's bailouts happening,
every single bill is printing another whatever,
billion dollars or something like that.
- The following is a conversation with Biology,
Srinivasan, an angel investor, tech founder,
philosopher, and author of "The Network State,
"How to Start a New Country."
He was formerly the CTO of Coinbase
and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz.
This conversation is over seven hours.
For some folks, that's too long.
For some, too short.
For some, just right.
There are chapter timestamps, there are clips,
so you can jump around or, like I prefer to do
with podcasts and audio books I enjoy,
you can sit down, relax with a loved human,
animal, or consumable substance, or all three if you like,
and enjoy the ride from start to finish.
Biology is a fascinating mind
who thinks deeply about this world
and how we might be able to engineer it
in order to maximize the possibility
that humanity flourishes on this fun little planet of ours.
Also, you may notice that in this conversation,
my eye is red.
That's from jiu-jitsu.
And also, if I may say so, from a life well lived.
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
To support it, please check out our sponsors
in the description.
And now, dear friends, here's Biology Srinivasan.
At the core of your belief system
is something you call the prime number maze.
I'm curious, I'm curious.
We gotta start there.
- Sure. - If we can start anywhere,
it's with mathematics.
Let's go. - All right, great.
A rat can be trained to turn at every even number
or every third number in a maze to get some cheese.
But evidently, it can't be trained to turn at prime numbers.
Two, three, five, seven, and then 11,
and so on and so forth.
That's just too abstract.
And frankly, if most humans were dropped
into a prime number maze,
they probably wouldn't be able to figure it out either.
They'd have to start counting and so on.
Actually, it'd be pretty difficult to figure out
what the turning rule was.
Yet, the rule is actually very simple.
And so, the thing I think about a lot
is just how many patterns in life
are we just like these rats
and we're trapped in a prime number maze?
And if we had just a little bit more cogitation,
if we had a little bit more cognitive ability,
a little bit more, whether it's brain-machine interface
or just better physics,
we could just figure out the next step
in that prime number maze.
We could just see it.
We could just see the grid.
And that's what I think about.
Like, that's a big thing that drives me,
is figuring out how do we actually conceive,
understand that prime number maze that we're living in.
- So, understand which patterns are just complex enough
that they're beyond the limit of human cognition.
- Yes.
- And what do you make of that?
Are the limits of human cognition a feature or a bug?
- I think mostly a bug.
I admire Ramanujan.
I admire Feynman.
I admire these great mathematicians and physicists
who were just able to see things that others couldn't.
And just by writing it down, that's a leap forward.
People talk about it's not the idea, it's execution,
but that's for trivial ideas, for great ideas,
for Maxwell's equations or Newton's laws
or quantum electrodynamics
or some of Ramanujan's identities.
That really does bring us forward,
especially when you can check them
and you don't know how they work, right?
You have the phenomenological,
but you don't have the theory underneath it.
And then that stimulates the advancement of theory
to figure out why is this thing actually working?
That's actually, StatMech arose in part
from the kind of phenomenological studies
that were basically being done
where people are just getting steam engines
and so on to work.
And then they kind of abstracted out thermodynamics
and so on from that, right?
So the practice led the theory rather than vice versa,
to some extent that's happening in neural networks now,
as you're aware, right?
And I think that's,
so just something that's true and that works,
you know, if we don't know yet, that's amazing.
And it pulls us forward.
So I do think that the limits
are more of a bug than a feature.
- Is there something that humans will never be able
to figure out about our universe,
about the theory, about the practice of our universe?
- Yeah, people will typically quote
Cordell's incompleteness for such a question.
And yeah, there are things that are provably unknowable
or provably unprovable.
But I think you can often get an approximate solution.
You know, the Hilbert, you know, Hilbert's problems like,
we will know, we must know.
At least we should know that we can't know.
Push to get at least an approximate solution.
Push to know that we can't know.
At least we push back that darkness enough
so that we have lit up that corner
of the intellectual universe.
- Okay, let's actually take a bit of a tangent
and explore a bit in a way that I did not expect we would.
But let's talk about the nature of reality briefly.
I don't know if you're familiar
with the work of Don Hoffman.
- No, I don't.
I know Roger Penrose has like his road to reality series
for like basic physics getting up to everything we know.
But go ahead, tell me.
- It's even wilder.
In modern physics, we start to question
of what is fundamental and what is emergent
in this beautiful universe of ours.
And there's a bunch of folks who think that space-time,
as we know it, the four-dimensional space, is emergent.
It's not fundamental to the physics of the universe.
And the same, many argue, I think Sean Carroll
is one of them, is that time itself,
the way we experience it, is also emergent.
It's not fundamental to the way our universe works.
Anyway, those are the technical term,
I apologize for swearing,
those are the mind fucks of modern physics.
But if we stroll along that road further,
we get somebody like Donald Hoffman,
who makes the evolutionary case
that the reality we perceive with our eyes
is not only an abstraction of objective reality,
but it's actually completely detached.
We're in a video game, essentially,
that's consistent for all humans,
but it's not at all connected to physical reality.
It's an illusion.
- It's like a version of the simulation hypothesis,
is that his--
- In a very distant way, but the simulation says
that there's a sort of computational nature to reality,
and then there's a kind of a programmer
that creates this reality, and so on.
No, he says that we humans have a brain
that is able to perceive the environment,
and evolution is produced from primitive life
to complex life on Earth,
produce the kind of brain that doesn't at all
need to sense the reality directly.
So like this table, according to Donald Hoffman,
is not there.
- Well, so--
- Like, not just as an abstraction,
like we don't sense the molecules that make up the table,
but all of this is fake.
- Interesting.
So I tend to be more of a hard science person, right?
And so just on that, people talk about qualia,
like is your perception of green
different from my perception of green?
And my counterargument on that is,
§02Transcript · 08:03–15:53
well, we know something about spectrum of light,
and we can build artificial eyes.
And if we can build artificial eyes, which we can,
like they're not amazing, but you can actually,
you can do that, you can build artificial ears, and so on.
Obviously, we can build recording devices,
and different cameras, and things like that.
Well, operationally, the whole concept
of your perception of green,
you see green as purple, I see green as green,
or what I call green, doesn't seem to add up,
because it does seem like we can do engineering around it.
So the Hoffman thing, I get why people more broadly
will talk about a simulation hypothesis,
'cause it's like Feynman, many others have talked about
how math is surprisingly useful to describe the world.
Like very simple equations give rise
to these complex phenomena.
Wolfram is also on this, from a different angle
with the cellular automata stuff.
- It's almost suspicious how well it works.
- Yeah, but on their hand, it's like,
yet we're still also in a prime number maze.
There's things we just don't understand.
And so--
- Also, within the constraints of the non-prime numbers,
we find math to be extremely effective,
surprisingly effective.
- Yeah, exactly.
So maybe the math we have gets us through
the equivalent of the even turns and the odd turns,
but there's math we don't yet have
that is more complex, or more complex rules for other parts.
- This is probably all RH, or just rats in a cage.
- I know that gets very abstract,
but there are unsolved problems in physics.
Like the condensed matter space,
there's a lot of interesting stuff happening.
My recollection, I may be out of date on this,
things like sonoluminescence,
we don't know exactly how they work.
And sometimes those things that are at the edges of physics,
in the late 1800s, I think Rutherford,
somebody, I think it was Rutherford said,
basically all physics is being discovered, et cetera.
And that was obviously before quantum mechanics.
That sort of edge case, people are looking at the bomber
in the "Passion" series and seeing this weird thing
with the hydrogen spectrum, and it was quantized.
And that led to the sort of phenomenological
set of observations that led to quantum mechanics
and everything.
And sometimes I think the UAP stuff might be like that.
People immediately go to aliens for UAP,
like the unidentified aerial phenomena.
People have been, there's surprising amount of stuff
out there on this.
The UK has declassified a bunch of material.
Harry Reid, who's a senator, has talked about this.
It's not an obviously political thing, which is good.
It's something that, is there something happening there?
And people had thought for a long time
that the UAP thing was American kind of counter propaganda
to cover up their new spy planes that were spying
over the Soviet Union to make anybody who talked about them
seem crazy and hysterical or whatever.
But if the UAP thing is real,
it could be atmospheric phenomena,
like the aurora borealis or the Northern Lights,
but some things we don't understand.
It could be something like the Bomber and Passion series,
which were the observations of emission spectra
before quantum mechanics.
So that's another option as opposed to doesn't exist
or Lilligreen men.
It could be physics we don't understand yet.
That's one possible.
- Do you think there's alien civilizations out there?
- So there's a lot of folks who have kind of written
and talked about this.
There's the Drake equation, which is like multiplying
all the probabilities together.
There's perhaps more sophisticated takes,
like the Dark Forest, which says that if the universe
is like a dark forest, we're the dumb ones
that aren't hiding our presence.
There's one calculation I saw,
and I haven't reproduced it myself,
but basically says that the assumption
that other civilizations have seen ours is wrong
because when you have like a spherical radius
for like the electromagnetic radiation
that's leaving our planet,
as that sphere gets larger and larger,
it gets like smaller and smaller amounts of energy.
So you get farther out,
you're not getting enough photons or what have you
to actually detect it.
I don't know, I actually haven't looked into the math
behind it, but I remember seeing that argument.
So actually, it is possible that it's so diffuse
when you go past a certain number of light years out
that people, that an alien civilization
wouldn't be able to detect it, right?
That's another argument.
- That's more basically about signals from them,
from us to be able to, signals colliding enough
to find the signal from the noise.
- Right, exactly.
- Intelligent signal.
- Yeah, Hanson has an article called "Grabby Aliens."
Have you seen his thing?
- Yes, I've seen it.
- And so there's--
- He's been on this podcast.
- Oh, great.
- He's brilliant.
- I like him, he pushes boundaries in interesting ways.
- In every ways, in all of the ways.
- In all the ways, that's right.
I like him overall.
He's an asset to humanity.
- Grabby Aliens, so he has this interesting idea
that the civilizations quickly learn how to travel
close to the speed of light,
so we're not gonna see them until they're here.
- Yeah, that's possible.
I mean, one of the things is, so here's, for example,
a mystery that we haven't yet done, right?
Which, or we haven't really figured out yet,
which is abiogenesis in the lab, right?
We've done lots of things where you've got,
you can show macromolecules binding to each other,
you can show evidence for the so-called RNA world,
abiogenesis is to go from non-life to life, right,
in the lab, you can show microevolution,
obviously with bacteria,
you can do artificial selection on them,
lots of other aspects of fundamental biochemistry origins
of life stuff have been established.
There's a lot of plausibility arguments
about the primitive environment
and nitrogens and carbons snapping together
to get the RNA world is the initial hypothesis,
but to my knowledge at least,
we haven't actually seen abiogenesis demonstrated.
Now, one argument is you need just like this massive world
with so many different reps before that actually happens.
And one possibility is if we could do atomic level
simulations of molecules bouncing against each other,
it's possible that in some simulation,
we could find a path, a reproducible path to abiogenesis,
and then just replicate that in the lab, right?
I don't know, okay?
But that seems to me to be like a mystery
that we still don't fully understand,
like an example of the prime number maze, right?
- One of the most fascinating mysteries.
- One of the most important, yep.
- Yeah. - Yeah, and again,
there may be some biochemist who's like,
oh, Vald, you didn't know about X, Y, and Z
that happened in the abiogenesis field.
I freely confess, I'm not like, you know, au courant on it.
The last thing I remember looking at is--
- What's au courant mean?
- Like up to the moment.
- Oh, nice, that's a nice word.
- That's a-- - Au courant.
- I'm probably mispronouncing it, but--
- Yeah, we'll edit it in post
to pronounce it correctly with AI.
- Yeah, yeah. (laughs)
- We'll copy your voice,
and it will pronounce it perfectly correctly in post.
- One thing that I do think was interesting is
Craig Venter a while back tried to make
a minimum viable cell where he just tried to delete
all of the genes that were not considered essential.
And so it's like a new life form,
and this was like almost 20 years ago and so on.
And that thing was viable in the lab, right?
And so it's possible that you could,
you kind of reverse engineer.
So you're coming at the problem from different directions,
like RNA molecules can do quite a lot.
You've got some reasonable assumptions
as to how that could come together.
You've got sort of stripped down minimum viable life forms.
And so it's not there isn't stuff here.
You can see microevolution,
you can see at the sequence level.
You know, if you do molecular phylogenetics,
you can actually track back the basis.
There's actually, so it's not like there's no evidence here.
There's a lot of tools to work with.
But this, in my view, is a fascinating area.
And actually also relevant to AI,
because another form of abiogenesis would be
if we were able to give rise to a different
§03Transcript · 15:56–24:12
branch of life form, the silicon-based
as opposed to carbon-based, you know, to stretch a point.
You give rise to something that actually does meet
the definition of life or some definition of life.
- What do you think that definition is
for an artificial life form?
'Cause you mentioned consciousness.
- Yeah. - When will it give us pause
that we created something that feels by some definition
or by some spiritual, poetic, romantic,
philosophical, mathematical definition
that it is alive. - Right.
- And we wouldn't want to kill it.
- So, couple of remarks on that.
One is Francis Crick, of Watson and Crick,
before he died, I think his last paper
was published on something called the claustrum, okay?
And the thing is that, you know,
sometimes in biology or in any domain,
people are sort of discouraged from going after
the big questions, right?
But he proposed the claustrum is actually the organ
that is the seat of consciousness.
It's like this sheath that covers the brain.
And for mice, if you, and again,
I may be recollecting this wrong, so you can look,
but my recollection is in mice, if you disrupt this,
the mouse is very disoriented, right?
It's like, it's the kind of thing which, you know,
Watson and Crick were all about structure implies function,
right, they found the structure of DNA, this amazing thing.
And, you know, they remarked in this very understated way
at the end of the paper that, well, obviously this gives
a basis for how the genetic material might be replicated
and error corrected because, you know,
helix unwinds and you copy paste it, right?
So he was a big structure function person,
and that applies not just at the protein level,
not just at the level of DNA,
but potentially also at the level of organs.
Like the claustrum is kind of this system integrated level,
right, it's like the last layer in the neural network
or something, you know?
And so that's the kind of thing
that I think is worth studying.
So consciousness is another kind of big,
abiogenesis is a big question, the prime number
remains consciousness is a big question.
And, you know, then definition of life, right?
There's folks, gosh, there's, I think,
so this one is something I'd have to Google around,
but there was a guy, I think at Santa Fe Institute
or something, who had some definition of life
and like some thermodynamic definition.
But you're right that it's gonna be
a multi-feature definition.
We might have a Turing test like definition, frankly,
which is just if enough humans agree it's alive,
it's alive, right?
And that might frankly be the operational definition.
'Cause, you know, viruses are like this boundary case,
you know, are they alive or not?
Most people don't think they're alive,
but they're on, they're kind of,
they're more alive than a rock in a sense.
- Well, I think in a world that we'll talk about today
quite a bit, which is the digital world,
I think the most fascinating, philosophically
and technically definition of life
is life in the digital world.
So chatbots, essentially creatures,
whether they're replicas of humans
or totally independent creations,
perhaps in an automatic way,
I think there's going to be chatbots
that we would ethically be troubled by
if we wanted to kill them.
They would have the capacity to suffer.
They would be very unhappy with you trying to turn them off.
And then there'll be large groups of activists
that will protest and they'll go to the Supreme Court
of whatever the Supreme Court looks like
in 10, 20, 30, 40 years.
And they will demand that these chatbots
would have the same rights as us humans.
Do you think that's possible?
- I saw that Google engineer who was basically saying
this had already happened.
And I was surprised by it because it just,
when I looked at the chat logs of it,
it didn't seem particularly interesting.
On their hand, I can definitely see it.
I mean, GPT-3 for people who haven't paid attention
shows that serious step-ups are possible.
And obviously, you've talked about AI
in your podcast a ton.
Is it possible that GPT-9 or something is kind of like that?
Or GPT-15 or GPT-4, maybe?
But--
- Yeah, for people just listening,
there's a deep skepticism in your face.
- Yeah, the reason being because,
you know what's possible?
It's possible that you have a partition of society
on literally this basis.
That's one model where there's some people,
just like there's vegetarians and non-vegetarians, right?
There may be machines have life
and machines are machines, you know?
Like, or something like that, right?
You could definitely imagine some kind of partition
like that in the future where your fundamental
political social system, that's a foundational assumption.
And, you know, is AI, does it deserve the same rights
as like a human or, for example,
a corporation is an intermediate?
Do you see the thing which is how human
are different corporations?
Have you seen that infographic?
It's actually funny.
So it's like-- - There's a spectrum.
- There's a spectrum.
So for example, Disney is considered about as human
as like a dog, but like Exxon,
I may be remembering this wrong,
but they had like a level with like human at one end
and like rock at the other.
- Does it have to do with corporate structure?
What's the--
- I think it's about people's empathy for that corporation,
their brand identity.
But it's interesting to see that, first of all,
people sort of do think of corporations as being more,
like the branding is really what they're responding to.
- Well, that's what, I mean, they're also responding.
You know, I have a brand of human that I'm trying to sell
and it seems to be effective for the most part.
- Sure.
- Although it has become like a running joke
that I might be a robot.
- Right.
- Which means the brand is cracking.
- Could be.
- It's seeping through.
But I mean, in that sense, I just, I think,
I don't see a reason why chatbots can't manufacture
the brand of being human, of being sentient.
- I mean, that is the Turing test,
but it's like the multiplayer Turing test.
Now that actually a fair number of chatbots
have passed the Turing test,
I'd say there's at least two steps up, right?
One is a multiplayer Turing test
where you have chatbots talking to each other.
And then you ask, can you determine the difference
between in chatbots talking to each other
and clicking buttons and stuff in apps
and humans doing that?
And I think we're very far off,
or I shouldn't say very far off.
At least, I don't know how far we are in terms of time,
but we're still far off in terms of a group of in chatbots
looking like their digital output
is like the group of in humans,
like go from the Turing test
to the multiplayer Turing test.
That's one definition.
Another definition is to be able to kind of swap in
and you're not just convincing one human
that this is a human for a small session.
You're convincing all humans
that this is a human for end sessions.
Remote work actually makes this possible, right?
That's another definition of a multiplayer Turing test
where basically you have a chatbot that's fully automated
that is earning money for you
as an intelligent agent on a computer
that's able to go and get remote work jobs and so on.
I would consider that next level, right?
If you could have something that was like that,
that was competent enough to,
I mean, 'cause everything on a computer can be automated.
Literally, you could be totally hands-free,
just like autonomous driving.
You could have autonomous earning.
As a challenge problem,
if you were Microsoft or Apple
and you had legitimate access to the operating system,
just like Apple says,
"Can you send me details of this event?"
A decentralized thing could, in theory,
log the actions of 10,000 or 100,000 or a million people.
And with cryptocurrency,
you could even monitor a wallet that was on that computer.
And you could see what long run series of actions
were increasing or decreasing this digital balance.
You see what I'm saying?
So you start to get, at least conceptually,
it'd be invasive and there'd be a privacy issue and so on.
Conceptually, you could imagine an agent
§04Transcript · 24:15–32:12
that could learn what actions humans were doing
that resulted in the increase
of their local cryptocurrency balance.
There may be better ways to formulate it,
but that I consider a challenge problem
is to go from the Turing test to a genuine intelligent agent
that can actually go and make money for you.
If you can do that, that's a big deal.
People obviously have trading bots and stuff,
but that would be the next level.
It's typing out emails, it's creating documents.
- So mimic human behavior in its entirety.
- Yeah, that's right.
And it'll schedule Zooms, it'll send emails.
It'll essentially, 'cause if you think about it,
a human is hitting the keys and clicking the mouse,
but just like a self-driving car,
the wheel rotates by itself, right?
Those keys are effectively just,
it's like the automator app in Apple, right?
Everything's just moving on the screen.
You're seeing it there and it's just an AI.
- It's kind of hilarious that the I'm not a robot
click thing actually works.
'Cause I actually don't know how it works,
but I think it has to do with the movement of the mouse,
the timing, and they know that it's very difficult
for currently for a bot to mimic human behavior
in the way they would click that little checkbox.
- Yeah, exactly.
I think it's something, I mean, again,
my recollection on that is it's like a pile
of highly obfuscated JavaScript with all kinds,
it looks like a very simple box,
but it's doing a lot of stuff
and it's collecting all kinds of instrumentation.
And yeah, exactly.
Like a robot is just a little too deterministic
or if it's got noise, it's like Gaussian noise.
And the way humans do it is just not something
that you'd used to be able to do
without collecting thousands and thousands
and thousands of human traces doing it.
But it is a predator prey on that.
- Well, and then the computer--
- Or millions of human traces, I don't know.
- The computer just sees the JavaScript.
It needs to be able to look outside the simulation
for the computer, the world is like,
it doesn't, the computer doesn't know
about the physical world.
So it has to look outside of its world
and introspect back on this simple box,
which is kind of, I think that's exactly what mushrooms do
or like psychedelics is you get to go outside
and look back in and that's what a computer needs to do.
- I do wonder whether they actually give people insight
or whether they give people the illusion of insight.
- Is there a difference?
- Yeah, because, well, actual insight,
actual insight is, again, Maxwell's equations.
You're able to shift the world with that.
There's a lot of practical devices that work.
The illusion of insight is I'm Jesus Christ
and nothing happens, right?
So I don't know.
I think those are quite different.
- I don't know.
I think you can fake it till you make it on that one,
which is insight in some sense is revealing a truth
that was there all along.
- Yeah, so I mean, I guess like I'm talking
about technical insight where you have,
this is the thing we were talking about actually
before the podcast, like technical truths
versus political truths, right?
Some truths, they're on a spectrum
and there's some truths that are actually entirely political
in the sense that if you can change the software
in enough people's heads,
you change the value of the truth.
For example, the location of a border
is effectively consensus between large enough groups
of people.
Who is the CEO?
That's consensus among a certain group of people.
What is the value of a currency or any stock, right?
That market price is just the psychology
of a bunch of people.
Like literally, if you can change enough people's minds,
you can change the value of the border
or the position of the hierarchy
or the value of the currency.
Those are purely political truths.
Then all the way on the other end are technical truths
that exist independent of whatever any one human
or all humans think, like the gravitational constant, right?
Or the diameter of a virus.
Those exist independent of the human mind.
Change in a few minds doesn't matter.
Those remain constant.
And then you have things that are interestingly
in the middle where cryptocurrency has tried
to pull more and more things from the domain
of political truths into technical truths,
where they say, okay, the one social convention we have
is that if you hold this amount of Bitcoin,
or that if you hold this private key,
you hold this Bitcoin.
And then we make that very hard to change
'cause you have to change a lot of technical truths.
So you can push things to this interesting
intermediate zone.
- Yeah, the question is how much of our world
can we push into that?
- Right.
- And that takes us in a nonlinear fascinating journey
to the question I wanted to ask you in the beginning,
which is this political world that you mentioned
in the world of political truth.
As we know it, in the 20th century,
in the early 21st century, what do you think works well
and what is broken about government?
- The fundamental thing is that we can't easily
and peacefully start new opt-in governments.
And--
- Like startup governments.
- Yeah, and what I mean by that is basically,
you can start a new company, you can start a new community,
you can start a new currency even these days.
You don't have to beat the former CEO in a duel
to start a new company.
You don't have to become head of the World Bank
to start a new currency, okay?
Because of this, yes, if you want to,
you can join, I don't know, Microsoft
or name some company that's a GameStop
and you can try to reform it, okay?
Or you can start your own.
And the fact that both options exist mean that
you can actually just start from scratch.
And that's just, I mean,
the same reason we have a clean piece of paper, right?
I've mentioned this actually in the "Network State" book.
I'll just quote this bit,
but we want to be able to start a new state peacefully
for the same reason we want a bare plot of earth,
a blank sheet of paper, an empty text buffer,
a fresh job or a clean slate,
'cause we want to build something new
without historical constraint, right?
For the same reason you hit plus and do docs.new,
you know, like create a new doc.
It's for the same reason, right?
Because you don't have to backspace,
you don't have to have just like 128 bytes of space,
128 kilobytes and just have to backspace the old document
for creating the new one.
So that's a fundamental thing that's wrong
with today's governments.
And it's a meta point, right?
Because it's not any one specific reform,
it's a meta reform of being able to start new countries.
- Okay, so that's one problem,
but you know, you could push back and say,
that's a feature,
because a lot of people argue that tradition is power.
Through generation, if you try a thing long enough,
which is the way I see marriage,
there's value to the struggle
and the journey you take through the struggle
and you grow and you develop ideas together,
you grow intellectually, philosophically together.
And that's the idea of a nation that spans generations,
that you have a tradition that becomes more,
that strives towards the truth
and is able to arrive there, or no, not arrive,
but take steps towards there through the generations.
So you may not want to keep starting new governments.
You may want to stick to the old one
and improve it one step at a time.
So just because you're having a fight inside a marriage
doesn't mean you should get a divorce
and go on Tinder and start dating around.
That's the pushback.
So it's not obvious that this is a strong feature to have
to launch new governments.
- There's several different kind of lines of attack
or debate or whatever on this, right?
First is, yes, there's obviously value to tradition.
And people say, this is Lindy and that's Lindy.
It's been proven for a long time and so on.
But of course there's a tension
between tradition and innovation.
Like going to the moon wasn't Lindy, just, it was awesome.
And artificial intelligence is something that's very new.
New is good, right?
And this is a tension within humanity actually itself,
'cause it's way older than all of these nations.
I mean, humans are tens of thousands of years old.
§05Transcript · 32:15–40:46
The ancestors of humans are millions of years old, right?
And you go back far enough,
and the time that we know today
of the sessile farmer and soldier is,
if you go back far enough,
you wanna be truly traditional,
well, we're actually descended from hunter gatherers
who were mobile and wandered the world
and there weren't borders and so on.
They kind of went where they want, right?
And people have had done historical reconstructions
of like skeletons and stuff like that.
And many folks report that the transition to agriculture
and being sessile resulted in diminution of height.
People had like tooth decay and stuff like that.
The skeletons, people had traded off upside for stability.
Right, that's what the state was.
That was what these sessile kinds of things were.
Now, of course, they had more likelihood
of living consistently.
You could support larger population sizes,
but it had lower quality of life, right?
And so the hunter gatherer,
maybe that's actually our collective recollection
of a Garden of Eden where people,
just like a spider kind of knows innately how to build webs
or a beaver knows how to build dams.
Some people theorize that the entire Garden of Eden
is like a sort of built-in neural network recollection
of this pre-sessile era where we're able to roam around
and just pick off fruits and so on,
low population density.
So the point is that I think what we're seeing is a V3.
You go from the hunter gatherer to the farmer and soldier,
the sessile nations are here
and they've got borders and so on,
to kind of the V3, which is the digital nomad,
the new hunter gatherer.
We're going back to the future
because what's even older than nations is no nations, right?
Even more traditional than tradition
is being international, right?
And so we're actually tapping
into that other huge thread in humanity,
which is the desire to explore, pioneer, wander, innovate.
And I think that's important.
- So the way to make America great again
is to dissolve it completely into oblivion.
No, that's a joke.
- Yeah, yeah, I know it's a joke.
- Humor, I'm learning this new thing.
- Yes, a new thing for the road.
The chatbot emulation isn't fully working there.
- Yeah, yeah, glitch.
That's where in the beta.
- And let me say one other thing about this,
which is, you know, there are,
I mean, everybody in the world,
okay, let's say, I don't know what percentage,
let's say 99.99% or it's rounds to that number
of political discourse in the US
focuses on trying to fix the system.
If those folks, I mean, 0.01% of the energy
is going towards building a new system,
that seems like a pretty good portfolio strategy, right?
Or 100% are supposed to go and edit this code base
from 200 something years ago.
I mean, the most American thing in the world
is going and leaving your country
in search of a better life.
America was founded 200 years ago by the founding fathers.
It's not just a nation of immigrants,
it's a nation of emigrants, right?
Emigration from other countries to the US
and actually also emigration within the US.
There's this amazing YouTube video called,
it's like 50 states, US population, I think 1792.
It says 2050, so they've got a simulation.
So you just stop it at 2019 or 2020.
But it shows that like Virginia was like number one
early on and then it lost ground and like New York gained.
And then like Ohio was a big deal in the early 1800s.
And it was like father of presidents in general,
these presidents and later Illinois and Indiana.
And then California only really came up
in the 20th century, like during the great depression.
And now we're entering the modern era
where like Florida and Texas have risen
and New York and California have dropped.
And so interstate competition,
it's actually just like inter-currency competition.
You've got trading pairs, right?
You sell BTC by ETH, you sell, you know,
Solana or Z, you know, sell Monero by Zcash, right?
Each of those trading pairs gives you signal for today
on this currency is down or up
relative to this other currency.
In the same way, each of those migration pairs,
someone goes from New York to Ohio, Ohio to California,
gives you information on the desirability
of different states.
You can literally form a pairs matrix like this over time,
very much like the link matrix.
That's shaped America in a huge way.
And so, you know, you ask, A, if this nation of immigrants
that was founded by men younger than us, by the way,
the founding fathers were often in their 20s, right?
Who, you know, endorsed the concept of a proposition nation
who've given rise to a country of founders and pioneers
who've literally gone to the moon, right?
Those folks would think that this is the end of history,
that that's it, we're done.
Like, we've done everything else.
I mean, there's people in technology who believe,
and I agree with them, that we can go to Mars,
that we might be able to end death,
but we can't innovate on something that was 230 years old.
You know?
- So there is a balance, certainly, to strike.
The American experiment is fascinating, nevertheless.
So one argument you can make is actually
that we're in the very early days of this V2.
If this is what you describe as V2,
you could make the case that we're not ready for V3,
that we're just actually trying to figure out the V2 thing.
You're trying to like skip-
- When are we ever ready?
- Now again, we'll go back to marriage, I think,
and having kids kind of thing.
I think everyone who has kids
is never really ready to be kids,
this whole point, you dive in.
Okay, but the...
I mean, you mentioned the U.K. and Washington.
Is there other criticisms of government
that you can provide as we know it today?
Before we kind of outline the ideas of V3,
let's stick to V2.
- I'll give a few, right?
And so a lot of this stuff will go into the version.
So I've got this book, "The Network State,"
which covers some of these topics.
- Does "Network State" have a subtitle?
- It is "The Network State, How to Start a New Country."
- How to start a new country.
- But I just have it at thenetworkstate.com.
- I should say, it's an excellent book that you should get.
I read it on Kindle, but there's also a website.
And Balaji said that he's constantly working
on improving it, changing it.
But by the time the whole project is over,
it'll be a different book than it was in the beginning.
- I think so.
- It's getting its old skin.
- Well, I wanted to get something out there
and get feedback and whatnot, just like an app, right?
Again, you have these two poles of an app is highly dynamic
and you're accustomed to having updates all the time
and a book is supposed to be static.
And there's a value in something static,
something unchanging and so on.
But in this case, I'm glad I kind of shipped a version 1.0
and the next version, I'm gonna split it
into like tentatively motivation, theory and practice.
Like motivation, like what is the sort of political
philosophy and so on that motivates me at least to do this,
which you can take or leave, right?
And then theory as to why network state is now possible
and I can define it in a second.
And then the practice is zillions of practical details
and everything from roads to diplomatic recognition
and so on, funding, founding, all that stuff.
A lot of the stuff actually I left out of V1
simply because I wanted to kind of get the desirability
of it on the table and then talk about the feasibility.
- I should actually linger on that briefly
in terms of things we can revolutionize.
Like one of the biggest innovations I think that Tesla does
with the way they think about the car,
with the deploy the car is not the automation
or the electric to me, it's the over the air updates.
Be able to send instantaneously updates to the software
that completely changes the behavior, the UX,
everything about the car.
And so I do think it would be interesting
'cause books are representation of human knowledge,
a snapshot of human knowledge.
And it would be interesting that if we can somehow figure
out a system that allows you to do sort of like a GitHub
for books, like if I buy a book on Amazon
without having to pay again, can I get updates
like V1.1, V1.2 and there's like release notes.
That would be incredible.
It's not enough to do like a second edition
or a third edition, but like minor updates
that's not just on your website,
but actually go into the model that we use to buy books.
So I spend my money, maybe I'll do a subscription service
for five bucks a month where I get regular updates
to the books.
§06Transcript · 40:47–48:26
And then there's an incentive for authors
to actually update their books such that it makes sense
for the subscription.
And that means your book isn't just a snapshot,
but it's a lifelong project.
- Right.
- If you care enough about the book.
- So I think there's a lot that can be done there
because actually in going through this process,
in many ways, the most traditional thing I did
was a self-publish ebook on Kindle, right?
Why?
Because basically like, if you actually ink a deal
with a book publisher, first they'll give you some advance.
I didn't need the advance or anything.
But second is all these constraints.
Oh, you wanna translate into this,
or you wanna do this other format, or you wanna update it,
you have to go and now talk to this other party, right?
And also the narrowing window
of what they'll actually publish, it gets narrower and narrower
you see all these meltdowns over young adult novels
and stuff on Twitter, but it's more than that.
So actually having an Amazon page,
it's just like a marker that a book exists.
- Okay, and now I've got an entry point
where if someone says, okay, I like this tweet,
but how do I kind of get the,
that might be a concept
from like the middle of chapter three, right?
How do I get the thing from front to back?
I can just point them at thenetworkstate.com
that is import this, right?
This one entry point, okay?
And you mentioned like subscription and money
and so on and so forth.
And I think people are paying for content online now
with newsletters and so on, but I've chosen to,
and I will always have the thing free.
And I want it on, you can get the Kindle version on Amazon
simply because you have to kind of set a price for that.
But then networkstate.com, what I wanna do
is have that optimized for every Android phone.
So people in India or Latin America or Nigeria
can just tap and open it.
Gonna do translations and stuff like that.
Greg Fodor of AllSpaceVR, founder of AllSpaceVR,
he sold that and he coded the website
and I worked with him on it.
And there's another designer who, Elijah,
and it was basically just a three-person group.
And we thought we had something pretty nice,
but one thing I was really pleasantly surprised by
is how many people got in touch with us afterwards
and asked us if we could open source the software
to create this website, right?
Because it's actually, you can try it on mobile.
I think it's actually in some ways
a better experience than Kindle.
And so that was interesting because I do think
of the website as like a V1 version
of this concept of a book app, right?
For example, imagine if you have the Bible
and the 10 commandments aren't just text,
but there's like a checklist and there's a gateway
to a Christian community there.
And the practice is embedded into the thing.
Like, did you know brilliant.org?
Amazing site, I love this site.
Brilliant is basically mobile-friendly tutorials
and you can kind of just swipe through,
you're in line at Starbucks or getting on a plane
or something, you just swipe through
and you just get really nice micro lessons on things.
And it's just interactive enough that your brain is working
and you're problem solving.
And sometimes you'll need a little pen and paper,
but that format of sort of very mobile-friendly,
just continuous learning,
I'd like to do a lot more with that.
And so that's kind of where we're gonna go with the book app.
- So there's a lot of fun stuff
about the way you did at least V1 of the book,
which is you have like a one sentence summary,
one paragraph summary, TLDR, and like one image summary,
which is, I think honestly,
it's not even about a short attention span,
it's a really good exercise
about summarization, condensation,
and like helping you think through what is the key insight.
Like we mentioned the prime number maze
that reveals something central to the human condition,
which is struggling against the limitation of our minds.
And in that same way,
you've summarized the network state in the book.
So let's actually jump right there.
And let me ask you, what is the network state?
- What is the network state?
So I'll give it a sentence
and also give it an image, right?
So the informal sentence,
a network state is a highly aligned online community
with a capacity for collective action
that crowdfunds territory around the world
and eventually gains diplomatic recognition
from preexisting states, okay?
So just taking those pieces,
highly aligned online community,
that is not Facebook, that is not Twitter.
People don't think of themselves
as Facebookers or Twitterians, right?
That's just a collection of hundreds of millions of people
who just fight each other all day, right?
It's a fight club.
A company is highly aligned where, you know,
you'll put a task into the company Slack
and if you do it in all hands,
about 100% of the people in a company Slack will do it.
So they're highly aligned in that way.
But online communities don't tend to be highly aligned.
Online communities tend to be like a Game of Thrones fan
club or something like that.
Or, you know, on a Twitter account,
you might get 0.1% of people engaging with something.
It's not the 100%.
If you combine the degree of alignment of a company
with the scale of a community,
that's like what a highly aligned, you know,
online community is, right?
Start to get a thousand or 10,000 people
who can collectively do something as simple
as just all liking something on Twitter.
For example, why would they do that?
They're a guild of electrical engineers.
They're a guild of graphic designers.
And you've got a thousand people in this guild
and every day somebody is asking a favor from the guild
and the other 999 people are helping them out.
For example, I've just launched a new project
or I'd like to get a new job.
Can somebody help me? And so on.
And so you kind of give to get.
You're, you know, you're helping other people
in the community and you're kind of building up karma
this way and then sometimes you spend it down.
Like Stack Overflow has this karma economy.
It's not meant to be an internal economy
that is like making tons and tons of money off of,
it's sort of to keep score, right?
That's a highly aligned online community part.
Then capacity for collective action.
I just kind of described that,
which is at a minimum,
you don't have a highly aligned online community
unless you have a thousand people
and you paste in a tweet and a thousand of them RT it
or like it, okay?
If you can't even get that, you don't have something.
If you do have that, you have the basis
for at least collective digital action on something, okay?
And you can think of this as a group of activists.
You can think of it as, for example, let's say,
I mentioned a guild, but let's say they're a group
that wants to raise awareness of the fact
that life extension is possible, right?
Every day there's a new tweet on, I don't know,
whether it's a Metformin research or Sinclair's work
or David Sinclair, right?
Andrew Huberman has good stuff here, you know,
or there's a Longevity VC.
There's a bunch of folks working in this area.
Every day there's something there.
And literally the purpose of this online community
is raise awareness of longevity.
And of the thousand people, 970 go and like that.
That's pretty good, right?
That's solid.
You've got something there.
You've got a laser, right?
You've got something which you can focus on something
because most of the web to internet is in tropic.
You go to Hacker News, you go to Reddit, you go to Twitter,
and you're immediately struck by the fact
that it's like 30 random things, random.
It's just a box of chocolates.
It's meant to be, you know, we're-
- Some of them look delicious.
- Some of them look delicious.
Novelty, we can over consume novelty, right?
So, you know, where we're talking about earlier,
the balance between tradition and innovation, right?
Here is a different version of that,
which is entropy going in a ton of different directions
due to novelty versus like focus, you know?
It's like heat versus work, you know?
Heat is entropic and work force along a distance.
You're going in a direction, right?
And so if those 30 links on, you know,
the next version of Hacker News or Reddit
or something like so brilliant,
§07Transcript · 48:28–56:02
it's just, that's leveling you up.
The 30 things you click,
you've just gained a skill as a function of that, right?
So these kinds of online communities,
I don't know what they look like.
They probably don't look like the current social media.
They, just like, for example, I know this is a meta analogy,
but in the 2000s, people thought Facebook for Work
would look like Facebook.
And, you know, David Sacks, you know,
founded and sold a company, Yammer,
that was partially on their basis.
It was fine, it was a billion dollar company.
But Facebook for Work was actually Slack, right?
It looked different.
It was more chat focused,
it was less image focused and whatnot.
What does the platform
for a highly aligned online community look like?
I think Discord is the transitional state,
but it's not the end state.
Discord is sort of chatty.
The work isn't done in Discord itself, right?
The cryptocurrency for tracking or the crypto karma
for sort of tracking people's contributions
is not really done in Discord itself.
Discord was not built for that.
And I don't know what that UX looks like.
Maybe it looks like tasks, you know,
like maybe it looks something different.
Okay.
- Wait, wait, wait, let me linger on this.
So you were actually,
there's some people might not be even familiar
with Discord or Slack or so on.
Even these platforms have like communities
associated with them.
- Yes.
- Meaning the big, like the meta community
of people who are aware of the feature set
and that you can do a thing,
that this is a thing and then you could do a thing with it.
Discord, like when I first realized it,
I think it was born out of the gaming world.
- Yes.
- Is like, holy shit, this is like a thing.
There's a lot of people that use this.
- Right.
- There's also a culture that's very difficult to escape
that's associated with Discord
that spans all the different communities within Discord.
Reddit is the same,
even though there's different subreddits,
there's still, because of the migration phenomenon maybe,
there's still a culture to Reddit and so on.
- Yes.
- So I'd like to sort of try to dig in and understand
what's the difference between the online communities
that are formed and the platforms
on which those communities are formed?
- Sure. - Very important.
- Yes, it is, it is.
So for example, an office,
a good design for an office is frequently you have,
the commons, which is like the lunchroom
or the gathering area,
then everybody else has a cave on the border
that they can kind of retreat to.
- Cave in the commons, I love it.
By the way, I was laughing internally
about the heat versus work.
I think that's gonna stick with me.
That's such an interesting way to see Twitter.
- Yeah. - Like is this heat
or is this thread,
'cause there's a lot of stuff going on.
- Right.
- Is it just heat or are we doing some,
is there a directed thing
that's gonna be productive at the end of the day?
- That's right. - I love this.
I've never seen, I mean, anyway,
the cave in the commons is really nice.
So that has to do with the layout of an office
that's effective. - That's right.
And so you can think of many kinds of social networks
as being on the cave in commons continuum.
For example, Twitter is just all commons.
The caves are just like individual DMs
or DM threads or whatever,
but it's really basically just one gigantic,
global, public fight club for the most part, right?
Then you have-- - Or love club.
- Well, some would love the mostly fight.
Or actually it's-- - I love aggressively,
that's all. - Yeah, I mean,
the way I think, I mean, Twitter is like a cross
between a library and a civil war.
It's something where you can learn,
but you can also fight if you choose to fight, right?
- Yeah, well, I mean, it's because of the commons structure
of it, it's a mechanism for virality of anything.
- Yeah, so-- - You just describe
the kind of things that become viral.
- Yeah, meaning no offense to Liberians.
It's like a library and Liberia.
Liberia was wracked by civil war for many years, right?
- Libraries is one of my favorite sets for porn.
Just kidding, jokes.
I'm learning as that's probably crossing the line
for the engineers working on this humor module.
Maybe take that down a notch. - Yeah, gosh.
We're just talking about--
Oh yeah, so continue, go ahead, continue.
- Twitter is the commons. - Yeah, so Twitter
is the commons, then Facebook is like,
it's got all these warrens and stuff.
Facebook, it's very difficult to reason about
like privacy on that.
And the reason is I think it's easy to understand
when something is completely public like Twitter
or completely private like Signal.
And those are the only two modes I think
in which one can really operate.
When something is quasi private like Facebook,
you have to just kind of assume it's public
because if it's interesting enough,
it'll go outside your friend network
and it'll get screenshotted or whatever and posted.
And so, Facebook is sort of forced into default public
despite its privacy settings.
For anybody who says something interesting,
if it's like, you can figure out all their dials
and stuff like that, but just hard to understand
unless it's totally private or totally public.
You have to basically treat it if it's totally public,
if it's not totally private.
Okay, at least under a real name.
I'll come back to Soonim.
So you've got Twitter, that's total commons.
Facebook, which is like a warrens,
it's like rabbit warrens or like a ant colony
where you don't know where information is traveling.
Then you've got Reddit, which has sort of your global Reddit
and then all the subreddits.
That's a different model of cave and commons.
I think one of the reasons it works
is that you have individual moderators
where something is totally off topic and unacceptable
in this subreddit and totally on topic and acceptable
in another, that's like kind of a precursor
of the digital societies I think that we're gonna see
that actually have become physical societies,
like lots and lots of subreddit like things
have become physical societies.
Then you start going further into like Discord
where it's more full featured than,
as you go Twitter, Facebook, Reddit,
now you jump into Discord and Discord
is a bunch of individual communities that are connected
and you can easily sort of jump between them.
And then you have Slack and yes, you can use Slack
to go between different company Slacks,
but Slack historically at least,
I'm not sure what their current policy is,
historically they discourage public Slacks.
So it's mostly like you have your main Slack
for your company and then you sometimes may jump into like,
let's say you've got a design consultant
or somebody like that, you'll jump into their Slack.
But Discord is, you've got way more Discords usually
that you jump into than Slacks, right?
- Well, and let me ask you then on that point
because there is a culture, one of the things I discovered
on Reddit and Discord of anonymity or pseudonyms
or usernames that don't represent the actual name.
Now Slack is an example of one.
So I think I did a, I used to have a Slack
for like deep learning course that I was teaching
and that was like very large, like 20,000 people, whatever.
But so you could grow quite large,
but there was a culture of like,
I'm going to represent my actual identity, my actual name.
And then the same stuff in Discord,
I think I was the only asshole
using my actual name on there.
It's like everybody was using pseudonyms.
So what's the role of that in the online community?
- Well, so I actually gave a talk on this a few years ago
called "The Pseudonymous Economy," okay?
And it's come about faster than I expected,
but I did think it was going to come about fairly fast.
And essentially the concept is obviously we've had,
so first, anonym, pseudonym, real name, right?
- Can you describe the difference in that?
- Anonymous is like 4chan where there's no tracking of a name.
You know, there's zero reputation
associated with an identity, right?
Pseudonymous is like much of Reddit
where there's a persistent username
§08Transcript · 56:04–1:03:59
and it has karma over time,
but it's not linked to the global identifier
that is your state name, all right?
So your quote real name,
even the term real name, by the way, is a misnomer
because it's like your social security name,
like social security number.
It's your official government name.
It's your state name.
It is the tracking device.
It's the air tag that's put on you, right?
Why do I say that, right?
Another word for a name is a handle.
And so just visualize like a giant file cabinet.
There's a handle with Lex Friedman on it
that anybody, the billions of people around the world
can go up to and they can pull this file on you out.
Images of you, things you said,
like billions of people can stalk
billions of other people now.
That's a very new thing.
And I actually think this will be a transitional era
in like human history.
We're actually gonna go back
into a much more encrypted world.
- Okay, okay, okay, let me linger on that
because another way to see real names
is the label on a thing that can be canceled.
- Yes, that's right.
In fact, there's a book called "Seeing Like a State"
which actually talks about the origins
of surnames and whatnot.
Like if you have a guy who is,
that guy with brown hair,
that's like an analog identifier.
It could mean 10 different people in a village.
But if you have a first name, last name,
okay, that guy can now be conscripted.
You can go down with a list,
a list of digital identifiers,
pull that guy out, pull him into the military
for conscription, right?
So that was like one of the purposes of names
was to make masses of humans legible to a state, right?
Hence seeing like a state, you can see them now, right?
See, digital identifiers,
one thing that people don't usually think about
is pseudonymity is itself a form of decentralization.
So, you know, people know Satoshi Nakamoto was pseudonymous.
They also know he's into decentralization.
But one way of thinking about it is,
let's say his real name, okay,
or his state name is a node, okay?
Attached to that is every database,
you know, his Gmail, his, you know, Facebook,
if he had one, every government record on him, right?
All of these databases have that state name
as the foreign key, right?
And so it can go and look things up
in all of those databases, right?
And so it's like, think of it as being the center
of a giant network of all of these things.
When you go and create a pseudonym,
you're budding off a totally new node
that's far away from all the rest.
And now he's choosing to attach BitcoinTalk and Bitcoin.org
and the GPT signatures of the code,
if he should choose to do that.
All those things, the digital signatures
are all attached to this new decentralized name
because he's instantiating it, not the government, right?
One way of thinking about it is the root administrator
of the quote real name system is the state
because you cannot simply edit your name there, right?
You can't just go, you can't log into USA.gov
and backspace your name and change it.
Moreover, your birth certificate,
all this stuff that's fixed and immutable, right?
Whereas you would take for granted
that on every site you go to, you can backspace,
you can be like, call me Ishmael, you know,
walk into a site, use whatever name you want.
You just have to use the same name across multiple sites,
you can do that.
And if not, you don't have to.
One thing that we're seeing now actually
is at the level of kids, you know, the younger generation,
Eric Schmidt several years ago mentioned that, you know,
people would like change their names when they became adults
so that they could do that.
This is kind of already happening.
People are using, I remarked on this many years ago,
search resistant identities, okay?
Why?
They have their Finsta,
which is their quote fake name Instagram
and Rinsta, which is their real name Instagram.
- Oh, this is cool.
- Okay, and what's interesting is on their Rinsta,
they're their fake self
because they're in their Sunday best and, you know, smiling.
And this is the one that's meant to be search indexed, right?
On the Finsta, with their fake name,
this is just shared with their closest friends.
They're their real self and they're, you know,
hanging out at parties or whatever, you know?
And so this way they've got something
which is the public persona and the private persona, right?
The public persona that's search indexed
and the private persona that is private for friends, right?
And so organically people are, you know, like Jean Jacobs,
she talks about like cities and how, you know,
they're organic and what I like.
Some of the mid 20th century guys,
the architecture they had removed shade from, you know,
like awnings and stuff like that got removed.
So this is like the restoration of like awnings and shade
and structure so that you're not always exposed
to the all seeing web crawler that I have sore on,
which is like Google bot just indexing everything.
These are search resistant identities
and that like I just sort of passes over you,
like, you know, in the Terminator,
like in the Terminator,
I just kind of passes over you, right?
So search resistant identity is not pulled up,
it's not indexed, right?
And now you can be your real self.
And so we've had this kind of thing for a while
with communication.
The new thing is that cryptocurrency
has allowed us to do it for transaction,
hence the pseudonymous economy, right?
And should go from anonymous, pseudonymous, real name.
These each have their different purposes,
but the new concept is that pseudonym,
you can have multiple of them, by the way,
your ENS name, you could have it under your quote,
real name or state name, like Lex Friedman.eth,
but you could also be punk6529.eth, okay?
And now you can earn, you can sign documents,
you can boot up stuff,
you can have a persistent identity here, okay?
Which has a level of indirection to your real name.
Why is that very helpful?
Because now it's harder to both discriminate against you
and cancel you.
Concerns of various factions are actually obviated
or at least partially addressed
by going pseudonymous as default, right?
It is the opposite of bring your whole self to work,
it's bring only your necessary self to work, right?
Only show those credentials that you need, right?
Now, of course, anybody who's in cryptocurrency
understands Satoshi Nakamoto and so on is for this,
but actually many progressives are for this as well.
Why?
You don't ban the boxes.
It's like, you're not supposed to ask about
felony convictions when somebody is being hired
because they've served their time, right?
Or you're not supposed to ask about immigration status
or marital status in an interview,
and people have this concept of blind auditions
where if a woman is auditioning for a violin seat,
they put it behind a curtain so they can't downgrade her
for playing, so her performance is judged
on the merits of its audible quality,
not in terms of who this person is.
So this way they don't discriminate
versus male or female for who's getting a violin position.
So you combine those concepts like ban the box,
not asking these various questions, blind auditions,
and then also the concept of implicit bias.
Like if you believe this research,
people are unconsciously biased towards other folks, right?
Okay, so you take all that, you take Satoshi,
and you put it together, and you say,
"Okay, let's use pseudonyms."
That actually takes unconscious bias even off the table,
right, because now you have genuine global equality
of opportunity.
Moreover, you have all these people,
billions of people around the world
that might speak with accents,
but they type without them.
And now if they're pseudonymous,
you aren't discriminating against them, right?
Moreover, with AI, very soon, the AI version of Zoom,
you'll be able to be whoever you wanna be
and speak in whatever voice you wanna speak in, right?
And you'll be, and that'll happen in real time.
- So I mean, this is really interesting,
but for Finsta and Rinsta,
there's some sense in which the fake Instagram
you're saying is where you could be your real self.
Well, my question is under a pseudonym
or when you're completely anonymous,
is there some sense where you're not actually
being your real self, that as a social entity,
§09Transcript · 1:04:04–1:11:34
human beings are fundamentally social creatures,
and for us to be social creatures,
there is some sense in which we have to have
a consistent identity that can be canceled,
that can be criticized or applauded in society,
and that identity persists through time.
So is there some sense in which we would not be
our full, beautiful human selves
unless we have a lifelong, consistent, real name
attached to us in a digital world?
- So this is a complicated topic,
but let me make a few remarks.
First is real names, quote-unquote state names,
were not built for the internet.
They're actually state names, right?
It's actually a great way of thinking about it,
a social security name, right?
So your state name, your official name,
was not built for the internet.
Why?
They give both too much information and too little, okay?
So too much information because someone with your name
can find out all kinds of stuff about you.
Like for example, if someone doesn't wanna be stalked,
right, their real name is out there,
their stalker knows it, they can find address information,
all this other kind of stuff, right?
And with all these hacks that are happening,
just every day we see another hack, massive hack, et cetera,
that real name can be indexed into data
that was supposed to be private, right?
Like for example, the Office of Personnel Management,
like the government, the US government,
many governments actually, are like a combination
of the surveillance state and the Keystone cops, right?
Why?
They slurp up all the information
and then they can't secure it.
So it leaks out the back door, okay?
They basically have 100 million records
of all this very, 300 million records,
all this very sensitive data,
they just get owned, hacked over and over again, right?
And so really there should be something
which just totally inverts the entire concept of KYC
and what have you.
And of course, comply with the regulations
as they are currently written.
But also you should argue privacy over KYC,
the government should not be able to collect
what it can't secure.
It's slurping up all this information,
it's completely unable to secure it,
it's hacked over and over again.
Like China probably has the entire OPM file.
And it's not just that, like Texas is hacked.
And some of these hacks are not even detected yet, right?
And these are just the ones that have been admitted.
And so what happens is criminals can just run this stuff
and find, oh, okay, so that guy
who's got that net worth online,
and he merges various databases,
they've got a bunch of addresses to go and hit, okay?
So in that sense, real names were not,
state names were not built for the internet,
they just give up too much information.
In our actually existing internet environment,
they give up too much information.
On the other hand, they also give too little, why?
If instead you give out lexfriedman.eth, okay?
Or a similar crypto domain name or urban name
or something like that.
Now that's actually more like a DNS, okay?
First, if you've got a lexfriedman.eth,
what can you do that?
Some you can do today, some you'll soon be able to do.
You can pay lexfriedman.eth,
you can message lexfriedman.eth,
you can look it up like a social profile,
you can send files to it, you can upload and download.
Basically, it combines aspects of an email address,
a website, a username, et cetera, et cetera.
Eventually, I think you'll go from email to phone number
to ENS address or something like that
as the primary online identifier,
because this is actually a programmable name, right?
Whereas a state name is not.
Think about it, like a state name will have apostrophes
perhaps in it, or is that your middle name
or this and that?
That was a format that was developed for the paper world,
right?
Whereas the ENS name is developed for the online world.
Now, the reason I say ENS or something like it,
you know, somebody in a village,
their name might be Smith because they were a blacksmith
or Potter because they were a Potter, right?
And same, I think your surname,
right now for many people, it's .eth
and that reflects the Ethereum community.
Your surname online will carry information about you.
Like .solve says something different about you.
.btc says yet something different.
I think we're gonna have a massive fractionation
of this over time.
We're still in the very earliest days
of our internet civilization, right?
100, 200 years from now, those surnames may be
as informative as say Chen or Friedman or Srinivasan
in terms of what information they carry,
'cause the protocol, it's the civilization fundamentally
that you're associated with, right?
- Right, so there's some improvements to the real name
that you could do in the digital world.
But do you think there's value of having a name
that's persists throughout your whole life
that is shared between all the different digital
and physical communities?
- I think you should be able to opt into that, right?
- At which stage?
- At which level, in terms of the society
that you're joining.
- Wait a minute, so can I murder a bunch of people
in society one and then go to society two
and be like, I'm murder free.
My name is-- - No, no, I don't mean it
like that, no, no, yeah.
So here's why that wouldn't work.
- That's the application I'm interested in.
- Okay, well, I'm not interested in the murder application,
but what do you think?
I don't know, I'm just kidding.
- I would like you to prevent me,
a person who's clearly bad for society, from doing that.
- Sure, sure, sure.
Murder is gonna be against the rules
in almost every society.
And I mean, people will argue--
- Most likely, yeah.
- Yeah, most likely, right?
And the reason I'm thinking-- - Except animals.
- Well, I'm thinking of like the Aztecs or the Mayas
or something like that, there's various,
you know, Soviet Union, there's weird edge case,
unfortunately. - Broad words.
- Yeah, there's societies, unfortunately,
that have actually, that's why I asterisked it.
But let's say murder is something that society one
probably has effectively a social smart contract
or a social contract that says, that's illegal,
therefore, you're in jail,
therefore, you're deprived of the right to exit.
But upon entry into that society, in theory,
you would have said, okay, I accept this, quote,
social contract, right?
Obviously, if I kill somebody, I can't leave, okay?
So you've accepted upon crossing the border into there,
right?
Now, as I mentioned, you know, like, what is murder?
Like people will, I mean, there's an obvious answer,
but as I said, there's been human sacrifice
in some societies, communism, they kill lots of people,
Nazism, they kill lots of people.
Unfortunately, there's quite a lot of societies,
you know, I wanted to say it's an edge case,
but maybe many of the 20th century societies
around the world have institutionalized
some kind of murder, whether it was the Red Terror,
you know, in the Soviet Union,
or obviously the Holocaust, or, you know,
the Cultural Revolution, or Year Zero,
and so on and so forth, right?
So my point there is that who's committing all those murders?
It was the state, it was the organization
that one is implicitly trusting them to track you, right?
And how did they commit those murders?
Well, how did Lenin, you know,
do you know the hanging order?
You know what I'm talking about,
the hanging order for the Kulaks?
- Yes.
- Okay, the famous hanging order,
which actually showed they were actually bloodthirsty,
the key thing was he said,
"Here's a list of all the quote rich men,
"the Kulaks, go and kill them."
The real names, the state names
were what facilitated the murder.
They didn't prevent the murderers there, right?
So my point is, just in the ethical weighting of it,
it's a two-sided thing, right?
You're right that the tracking can, you know,
prevent disorganized murders,
but the tracking facilitates,
unfortunately, organized murders.
Lists of undesirables were the primary tool
of all of these oppressive states in the 20th century.
You see my point?
- I see your point, and it's a very strong point.
In part, it's a cynical point,
§10Transcript · 1:11:38–1:20:06
which is that the rule of a centralized state
is more negative than positive.
- I think it is like nuclear energy, okay?
It's like fire.
It is something which you're gonna keep having it reform
because there's good reasons where you have
centralization, decentralization, re-centralization,
but power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely,
and you just have to be very suspicious
of this kind of centralized power.
The more trust you give it,
often the less trust it deserves.
It's like a weird feedback loop, right?
The more trust, the more it can do.
The more it can do, the more bad things it will do.
So, okay, there is a lot of downside to the state
being able to track you.
And history teaches us lessons, one at a large scale,
especially in the 20th century, at the largest of scale,
a state can do, commit a large amount of murder
and suffering.
- And by the way, history isn't over.
If you think about what the Chinese are building on this,
that surveillance state, it's not just tracking your name,
it's tracking everything on you.
Like WeChat is essentially like,
it is all the convenience and none of the freedom.
- So that's the downside, but don't you,
the question is, I think probably fundamentally
about the human nature of an individual,
of how much murder there would be
if we can just disappear every time we murder.
- Well, I mean-- - At the individual level.
- So the issue is basically like,
once one realizes that the moral trade-off
has two poles to it, right?
And moreover that basically centralized organized murder
has, I mean, if we add up all the disorganized murder
of the 20th century, it's probably significantly less
than the organized murder that these states facilitated.
And probably by, R.J. Rommel has this thing
called democide, right?
And the thing is, it's so grim, right?
Because it's saying like, one death is a tragedy,
a million is a statistic, right?
These are just like, just incalculable tragedies
that we can't even understand.
But nevertheless engaging with it,
like, I don't know, is the ratio 10X?
Is it 100X?
I wouldn't be surprised if it's 100X, right?
- Yeah, but have you seen the viciousness,
the negativity, the division within online communities
that have anonymity?
- So that's the thing, is basically,
there's also a Scylla and a Charybdis.
I'm not, when you see what centralization can do,
and you correct in the direction of decentralization,
you can overcorrect with decentralization
and you get anarchy.
And this is basically, then you want to re-centralize, right?
And this is the, I think it's the romance
of the three kingdoms, the empire long united must divide,
the empire long divided must unite.
That's always the way of it, right?
So what's gonna happen is,
we will state certain verbal principles, right?
And then the question is, where in state space you are?
Are you too centralized?
Well, then, okay, you want to decentralize.
And are you too decentralized?
Then we want to centralize and maybe track more, right?
And people opt into more tracking
because they will get something from that tracking,
which is a greater societal stability.
So it's kind of like saying, are we going north or south?
And the answer is like, what's our destination?
Where's our current position
in the civilizational state space?
- Well, my main question, I guess,
is does creating a network state escape
from some of the flaws of human nature?
The reason you got Nazi Germany is a large scale resentment
with different explanations for that resentment
that's ultimately lives in the heart of each individual
that made up the entirety of Nazi Germany
and had a charismatic leader
that was able to channel that resentment into action,
into actual policies,
into actual political and military movements.
Can't you not have the same kind of thing
in digital communities as well?
Have you heard the term argumentum ad Hitlerum
or like Godwin's law or something?
Like, it's something where if the reference point is Hitler,
it's this thing where a lot of things break down.
But I do think, I mean, look, is there any,
did Bitcoin manage to get where it was
without a single shot being fired to my knowledge?
Yes, right?
Did Google manage to get to where it is
without shots being fired?
Absolutely.
And-
- While a lot of shots were being fired
elsewhere in the world.
- Sure.
- And-
- But who's firing those shots?
- The states.
- The states, right, yeah.
- But that's because Bitcoin and Google
are a tiny minority of communities.
It's like the icing on the cake of human civilization.
- Sure.
Basically, any technology, I mean, like you can use a hammer
to go and hit somebody with it, right?
I'm not saying every technology is equally destructive
or what have you, but you can conceive of,
it's kind of like rule 34, but for technology, right?
Okay, right, you can probably figure out some-
- Your ability to reference brilliant things throughout
is quite admirable, yes.
But anyway, sorry, rule 34 for technology.
- Rule 34, but for abusive technology,
you can always come up with a black mirror version
of something.
And in fact, there is this kind of funny tweet,
which is like a sci-fi author.
My book, "Don't Invent the Torment Nexus,"
was meant to be a cautionary tale on what would happen
if society invented the torment nexus.
And then it's like, "Tech guys, at long last,
we have created the torment nexus."
(laughing)
Or whatever, right?
And so the thing is that simply describing something,
some abuse, unfortunately,
after the initial shock wears off,
people will unconsciously think of it
as sort of an attractor in the space, right?
It's like, I'll give you some examples,
like "Minority Report" had the gesture thing, right?
And the Kinect was based on that.
So it's a dystopian movie, but had this cool kind of thing,
and people kind of keyed off it, right?
Or people have said that movies like "Full Metal Jacket,"
that was meant to be, in my understanding,
is meant to be like an anti-war movie.
But lots of soldiers just love it,
despite the fact that the drill sergeant
is actually depicted as a bad guy, right?
For the sort of portrayal of that kind of environment, right?
So I'm just saying, it's like giving the vision
of the digital Hitler or whatever.
It's not actually a vision I want to paint.
I do think everything is possible.
Obviously, ISIS uses the internet, right?
- Yeah, we're not bringing up Hitler in a shallow argument.
We're bringing up Hitler
in a long, empathetic, relaxed discussion,
which is a different-- - Sure, sure, I understand.
- Which is where Hitler can live, in a healthy way.
There's deep lessons in Hitler and Nazi Germany,
as there is with Stalin, yes.
- Okay, so in many ways,
and this is a very superficial way of talking about it,
but this is, exit is the anti-genocide technology, right?
Because exit is the route of the politically powerless.
Exit is not, people always say,
oh, exit is for the rich, or whatever.
That's actually not true.
Most immigrants equals most emigrants are not rich.
They're politically powerless.
- You can describe exit.
- What is exit?
So there's this book, which I reference a lot,
I like it, called "Exit, Voice, and Loyalty"
by Albert Hirschman, okay?
And he essentially says,
and I gave this talk in 2013
that goes through this at YC Starb School,
but just to describe these,
voices reform, exits alternatives.
For example, in the context of an open source project,
voice is submitting a bug, and exit is forking.
In a company, voices, you're saying,
hey, here's a ticket, okay, that I'd like to get solved,
and exit is taking your business elsewhere, okay?
You know, at the level of corporate governance,
voices, you know, board of directors vote,
and exit is selling your shares, right?
In a country, voice is a vote, and exit is migration, okay?
And I do think that the two forces we talk about a lot,
democracy and capitalism, are useful forces,
but there's a third, which is migration, right?
So you can vote with your ballot,
you can vote with your wallet, you can vote with your feet.
Wallet has some aspects of exit built into it,
but voting with your feet actually has some aspects
§11Transcript · 1:20:08–1:28:06
of voice built into it, because when you leave,
it's like an amplifier on your vote.
You might say 10 things, but when you actually leave,
then people take what you said seriously,
you're not just like complaining or whatever,
you actually left San Francisco
because it was so bad on this and this issue,
and you've actually voted with your feet.
It is manifest preference as opposed to stated preference.
So voice versus exit is this interesting dichotomy.
Do you try to reform the system, or do you exit it,
and build a new one, or seek an alternative?
And then loyalty modulates this,
where if you are a patriot,
as part of the initial part of your conversation,
like, "Are you a traitor?
"You're giving up on our great thing," or whatever,
and people will push those buttons to get people to stick.
I shouldn't say the bad version, let's say a common version.
Sometimes good, sometimes bad.
But then there's the good version, which is,
"Oh, maybe the price is down right now,
"but you believe in the cause."
So even if they're on paper, you would rationally exit,
you believe in this thing,
and you're gonna stick with it, okay?
So loyalty can be, again, good and bad,
but it kind of modulates the trade-off
between voice and exit, okay?
So given that framework, we can think of a lot of problems
in terms of, "Am I gonna use voice or exit
"or some combination thereof?"
'Cause they're not mutually exclusive.
It's kind of like left and right,
sometimes you use both together.
I think that one of the biggest things the internet does
is it increases microeconomic leverage
and therefore increases exit in every respect of life.
For example, on every phone,
you can pick between Lyft and Uber, right?
When you're at the store, you see a price on the shelf
and you can comparison shop, right?
If it's Tinder, you can swipe, right?
If it's Twitter, you can click over to the next account.
The back button is exit.
The microeconomic leverage,
leverage in the sense of alternatives, right?
This is like one of the fundamental things
that the internet does.
It puts this tool on your desktop
and now you can go and talk to an illustrator
or you can kind of build it yourself, right?
By typing in some characters into Dali.
- And that makes the positive forces of capitalism
more efficient, increase in microeconomic leverage.
- And it's individual empowerment, right?
And so our sort of industrial-age systems
were not set up for that level of individual empowerment.
Just to give you like one example that I think about.
We take for granted every single website
you go and log into.
You can configure your Twitter profile
and you can make it dark mode or light mode
and your name, all this stuff is editable, right?
How do you configure your USA experience?
Is there a USA.gov that you edit?
Can you even edit your name there?
- Dark mode for USA.
- But I mean, just your profile.
Is there like a national profile?
I mean, there's like driver's license.
Point is that it's assumed
that it's not like individually customizable
quite in that way, right?
Of course you can move around your house
and stuff like that.
But it's not like your experience of the US
is like configurable, you know?
- Let me think about that.
Let me think about sort of the analogy of it.
So the microeconomic leverage, you can switch apps.
Can you switch your experience in small ways,
efficiently, multiple times a day
in inside the United States?
- Well, the physical world--
- You do, yeah, under the constraints of the physical world,
you do like micro migrations.
- So this is coming back to the hunter-gatherer,
farmer-soldier, digital nomad kind of thing, right?
The digital nomad combines aspects of the V1 and the V2
for a V3, right?
Because digital nomad has the mobility and freedom
with the hunter-gatherer,
but some of the consistency of the civilization
of the farmer and soldier, right?
But coming back to this,
one other thing about it is in the 1950s,
if a guy in assembly line
might literally push the same button for 30 years, okay?
Whereas today, you're pushing a different key every second.
That's like one version of like microeconomic leverage.
Another version is, in the 1980s,
I mean, they didn't have Google Maps, right?
So you couldn't just like discover things off the path.
People would just essentially do home to work
and work to home and home to work
and a trip had to be planned, right?
They were contained within a region of space
or you do home to school, school to home, home to school.
It wasn't like you went and explored the map.
Most people didn't, right?
They were highly cannalized, okay?
Meaning, it was just back and forth, back and forth,
very routine, just like the push the button,
push the button, trapped within this very small piece
and also trapped within this large country
'cause it was hard to travel between countries and so on.
Again, of course there were vacations,
of course there were some degree of news and so on.
Your mobility wasn't completely crushed
but it was actually quite low, okay, relatively speaking.
Just you were trapped in a way
that you weren't even really thinking about it, okay?
And now that map has opened up.
Now you can see the whole map.
You can go all over the place.
You know, I don't have the data to show it
but I'd be shocked if people,
the average person didn't go to more places,
wasn't, you know, going to more restaurants
and things like that today than they were in the '80s
simply because the map is open, okay?
- And the map is made more open through the digital world.
- Through the digital world, exactly.
So we're reopening the map like the hunter-gatherer, okay?
Because you can now, think about every site
for very low cost that you can visit, right?
The digital world, you can, I mean,
how many websites have you visited?
I don't know, hundreds of thousands probably
at this point over your life, right?
How many places on the surface have you visited?
You're actually unusual.
You might be like a world traveler or what have you, right?
But still, even your physical mobility
is less than your digital mobility, right?
You can just essentially, I mean,
the entire concept of like nations and borders and whatnot
didn't exist in the hunter-gatherer era, right?
Because you couldn't build permanent fortifications
and whatnot, even nations as we currently think of them
with like demarcated borders, you needed cartography,
you needed maps, right?
That stuff didn't exist for a long time.
You just had sort of a fuzzy area
of we kind of control this territory
and these guys are on the other side of the river, okay?
- I think just to--
- I don't wanna digress too much, but yeah.
- We're to digress away.
I think entirety of life on Earth is a kind of a digression
which creates beauty and complexity
as part of the digression.
I think your vision of the network state
is really powerful and beautiful.
I just wanna linger on this real name issue.
- Yes, really.
- Let me just give you some data.
- Go ahead.
- Personal, anecdotal experience data.
There's a reason I only do this podcast in person.
There is something lost in the digital space.
- Oh, sure.
- And I find, now I personally believe
to play devil's advocate against the devil's advocate
that I'm playing, I personally believe
that this is a temporary thing.
We will figure out technological solutions to this,
but I do find that currently people are much more willing
to be on scale cruel to each other online
than they are in person.
The only, the way to do that,
I just visited Ukraine, went to the front.
The way you can have people be cruel to each other
in the physical space is through the machinery of propaganda
that dehumanizes the other side, all that kind of stuff.
That's really hard work to do.
Online, I find just naturally at the individual scale,
people somehow start to easily engage in the drug
of mockery, derision, and cruelty
when they can hide behind anonymity.
I don't know what that says about human nature.
I ultimately believe most of us want to be good
and have the capacity to do a lot of good,
but sometimes it's fun to be shitty,
to shit on people, to be cruel.
I don't know what that is.
- It's weird because I think, you know,
one of my sayings is just like the internet
increases microeconomic leverage,
§12Transcript · 1:28:07–1:35:55
the internet increases variance.
For anything that exists before,
you have, you know, the zero and 100 versions of it.
I'll give some examples, then I'll come to this.
For example, you go from the 30 minute sitcom
to the 30 second clip or the 30 episode Netflix binge.
You go from guy working 95 to the guy who's 40 years old
and has failed to launch, doesn't have a job or anything,
and the 20 year old tech billionaire.
You go from all kinds of things that were sort of Gaussian
or kind of constrained in one location
to kind of extreme outcomes on both sides.
And applying that here,
you are talking about the bad outcome,
which I agree does happen where the internet,
in some sense, makes people have very low empathy
between others.
But it also is the other extent
where people find their mental soulmates across the world.
Someone who's living in Thailand or in, you know,
like Latin America who thinks all the same stuff,
just like them.
Wow, you'd never met this person before, right?
You get to know them online, you meet a person
it's like, you know, the brains have been communicating
for two years, three years, you've been friends
and you see them in person and it's just great, right?
So it's actually, it's not just the total lack of empathy.
It is frankly, far more empathy than you would be able
to build usually with an in-person conversation
in the 80s or the 90s with someone on their side of the world
'cause you might not even be able to get a visa
to go to their country or not even know they existed.
How would you be able to find each other
and so on and so forth, right?
So it is kind of both.
It is tearing society apart
and it's putting it back together, both at the same time.
- My main concern is this.
What I see is that young people are for some reason
more willing to engage in the drug of cruelty online
under the veil of anonymity.
- That's what you're seeing publicly
but you're not seeing the private chats.
Like there's, it's kind of, it's a, you know,
the sensory distribution. - Well, I work
for the intelligence agency so I'm seeing the private chats.
I mean, I'm collecting all of your data.
Yeah, yes, but you can intuit stuff
and I don't think I'm being very selective.
I mean, if you just look at the young folks,
I mean, I am very concerned about
the intellectual psychological growth
of young men and women. - I agree.
So I'm not disagreeing with you on this.
I am saying, however, there is a positive there
that once we see it, we can try to amplify that.
- Yes, with technology. - Yes, that's right.
And I'm just saying the very, very basic technology.
I give stuff I caught up over the weekend kind of thing.
I think if I throw an anonymity on top of that,
it will lead to many bad outcomes for young people.
- Anonymity, yes.
Pseudonymity, maybe not.
'Cause Reddit is actually fairly polite, right?
- The entirety of Reddit just chuckled as you said that.
- Well, within a subreddit, it's actually fairly polite.
Like let's say you're not usually seeing,
it depends on which subreddit, of course.
- There's a consistency.
I think definition of politeness is interesting here
because it's polite within the culture of that subreddit.
- Yes, they abide by, let me put it a different way.
They abide by the social norms of that subreddit.
- And that's the definition of politeness.
- Yeah, or civility, is that right?
- So there is an interesting difference
between pseudonymous and anonymous, you're saying.
It's possible that pseudonymity,
you can actually avoid some of the negative aspects.
- Absolutely, we're re-Dunbarizing the world in some ways.
With China being the big exception or outlier.
You know, the Dunbar number, 150 people.
If you know, that's like roughly
the scale of your society, right?
Or that's the number of people that a human
can kind of keep in their brain.
Whether apocryphal or not,
I think it's probably roughly true.
And we're re-Dunbarizing the world because,
A, we're making small groups much more productive,
and B, we're making large groups much more fractious.
Right?
So you have an individual like Notch,
who can program Minecraft by himself.
Or Satoshi, who could do V1 of Bitcoin by himself.
Or Instagram, which is just like 10 people,
or WhatsApp is just like 50 people when they sold.
But on the other hand, you have huge, quote,
countries of hundreds of millions of people
that are just finding that the first and second principle,
or they're just splitting on principle components.
Scott Alexander thinks of them as scissor statements.
You know, statements that one group thinks is obviously true,
one group thinks is obviously false.
You can think of them as political polarization.
You think of it in terms of game theory.
There's lots of different reasons you can give
for why this happens.
But those large groups now are getting split.
And so you have both the unsustainability
of these large sort of artificial groups,
and the productivity of these small organic ones.
And so that is kind of, it's like sort of obvious,
that's the direction of civilizational rebirth.
We just need to kind of lean into that.
- Scissor statements.
There's so many beautiful, just like,
you know, we mentioned chocolates,
right, advertising themselves.
Your entirety of speech is an intellectual
like box of chocolates.
But okay, so I don't think we finished
defining the network state.
Let's like linger on the definition.
You gave the one sentence statement,
which I think essentially encapsulated
the online nature of it.
I forget what else.
Can we just try to bring more richness
to this definition of how you think about the network state?
- Absolutely.
So that informal sentence is,
"A network state is a highly aligned online community
with a capacity for collective action
that crowdfunds territory around the world
and eventually gains diplomatic recognition
from preexisting states."
So we talked about was the alignment of online communities
and the capacity for collective action.
Well, one collective action,
it could be a thousand people liking a tweet, right?
If you can get a thousand of a thousand people doing it.
But a much higher level, much higher bar
is a thousand people crowdfunding territory
and actually living together.
Just like people currently--
- In physical space.
- In physical space.
And not all in one place.
That's critical.
Just like Bitcoin is a decentralized currency,
the network state is a recipe
for a decentralized state-like entity, okay?
Where it starts with, you know, for example,
two people just get, you know, they become roommates.
They meet in this community, they become roommates.
Okay, they get a place together.
Or 10 people get a group house.
Or eventually a hundred people
just buy a small apartment building together.
And guess what?
They start getting equity and not just paying rent, okay?
These are all people who share their values.
And now they can crowdfund territory together.
Now, of course, they don't just jump straight
from a thousand people liking something
to a thousand people crowdfunding something.
What I described in the middle is you do a lot of meetups.
You get to know these other people
before you decide to live, you know,
collectively with them.
But once you live with them,
you start to get a network effect.
For example, if those hundred people want to learn Spanish
or Turkish or Vietnamese,
they could all have a building
where they're doing Vietnamese immersion, right?
And that's something which they get a benefit
from being physically around the other people
that the pure digital wouldn't give them
to quite the same extent, right?
And so crowdfunds territory around the world,
crucially, not just one place,
they're all connected by the internet.
Just like Hawaii is 2000 miles away
from the continental US,
but both sides think of them as American,
but the people on Hawaii
and people in the continental US.
- What's the role of having to have territory?
- Why? - If most of the exchange,
so presumably as technology gets better and better,
the communication, the intimacy,
the exchange of ideas all happens in a digital world.
What's the importance of being able to crowdfund territory?
- Well, because we're still physical creatures.
You can't reproduce yet digitally, right?
There's still lots of things.
- So it's all about sex.
§13Transcript · 1:35:57–1:42:51
- Well, that's gotta be part of it.
You're gonna wanna, you know, reproduce, right?
- Are we talking about a cult?
- Well, it's not a cult.
(laughs)
It's not a cult.
- Why can't you just like take a trip?
Why is it not a cult?
- It's not a cult because a cult is very internally focused
and it tries to close its members off from the outside world.
This is much more how America itself was populated,
where there were lots of towns,
like Penn is named after William Penn,
or the founder of Texas, like Sam Houston, right?
Lots of towns like the Oneida Commune
in Northern New York, they recruited
and they became a town
and they became actually the Oneida Glassware Company,
kind of, you know, makes glassware out of it.
All of these communities that were opt-in,
voluntary communities were not simply like cults
that were closed off from the world.
They were meant to set an example to the world
of what virtuous living looked like
and they were trying to recruit from the rest of the world
and they were exporting goods to the rest of the world, right?
So it is, yes, reproduction, it's, you know,
marriage and kids and so on,
but it's also just hanging out
and it is just, the physical world is very high bandwidth.
There's lots of stuff, you know,
it's fun to just go and have a dinner in person,
just to hang out, to build things.
Moreover, there's also lots of innovation
that can only take place in the physical world.
You know, look, I'm, you know,
one of my sayings in the book is,
"Cloud first, land last, but not land never."
Okay? - Right.
- In many ways, one of the problems the book solves
is Thiel's problem of, you know,
we have innovation in bits, but not in atoms, right?
We can build a billion dollar company online,
but we need a billion permits
to build a shed in San Francisco, right?
How do you reconcile that?
Well, what is stopping the innovation in atoms?
It is a thicket of regulations.
What are those regulations?
Ultimately, a social construction.
If you lean into the, you know,
whole deconstructionist, you know, school of thinking,
you can deconstruct and then reconstruct the state itself,
given sufficient social consensus online, okay?
If the population of Nevada had 100% consensus,
you could just dissolve every law in Nevada,
in theory, and then build new ones, okay?
So the online consensus of getting people
to agree on something is upstream of what happens offline.
So once you have consensus in bits,
the human consensus, also, you know,
cryptographic consensus, cryptocurrency consensus,
then you can reshape the world of atoms.
The reason we can't reshape the world of atoms right now
is because you don't have that consensus of minds, okay?
For example, in SF, anything you do,
there's gonna be 50% of people who are against you.
Like, so that's just a recipe for gridlock.
Whereas if you have a bare piece of land
that everybody agrees on, you can get, you know,
70,000 units get set up in Burning Man in just a few days.
Okay?
That's the power of what,
when you actually have human consensus.
And one way I talk about this,
also in the book a little bit,
and this I'm gonna go much more into detail in the V2,
I think of this as 100% democracy,
as opposed to 51% democracy.
51% democracy, which is the current form of government,
is 49% dictatorship.
Because the entire premise of democracy
is about the consent of the governed, right?
That's the actual legitimating underpinning principle.
And insofar as 49% did not consent
to the current, you know,
president or prime minister or whatever,
let's say presidential system first past the post, okay?
Insofar as 49% did not consent,
or in a prime minister system,
it could be like 60% or more didn't consent
to the current leader,
those folks are having something imposed on them
that they literally did not vote for.
Moreover, campaign promises are non-binding.
So whatever they voted for,
they can effectively be defrauded.
You know, the actual voter fraud
is when a politician promises X, but does not do it.
It's as if you bought a can of orange juice
and it actually drinking its milk, or it's nothing, right?
So all of that is routinized, all of that is accepted.
We have this thing, which is just the minimum possible
amount of democracy, a 51%, okay?
And what happens is then that 51% tries to ram something
down the 49% throat, and then the next election,
it's now 51, 49 the other way, and then they ram it back.
And that's how you get the seesaw
that is just splitting countries apart, right?
The alternative to that is you build a consensus online,
you go and get some God-forsaken patch of territory.
Actually, the worse the territory, the better.
Why?
Because it's like Burning Man, nobody cares, right?
The nicer the piece of land,
the more the people are gonna argue about it.
But Starlink has repriced the world.
Basically all kinds of piece of territory
that were previously, they're far away from natural ports,
they're far away from natural resources,
all kinds of piece of territory around the world
now have satellite internet.
And so what you can do is, again,
the map has been reopened, right?
What we were talking about earlier,
the map has been reopened,
you can gather your community online,
they're now capable of collective action,
you can point here, this place has great Starlink coverage,
you go there like the Verizon guy,
can you hear me now?
Good, right?
You see that the coverage is good there,
you drive out there, you test it out.
Maybe you do it with mobile homes first, right?
This by the way is its own thing.
There's Yimby and there's Nimby and there's Yimby,
but I actually also like Himby, okay?
Do you want that?
- Let's go, Nimby, Yimby, Himby, what are those?
- So Nimby is not in my backyard, don't build in cities.
Yimby is let's build high density buildings,
really tall buildings and so on in cities.
There's a third version, which is Himby,
it's my little coinage, which is horizontal sprawl is good.
Why horizontal sprawl?
Because to build a skyscraper,
to build a tall building in a city,
you have this enormous permitting process,
all of this stuff, which has to get done,
it's expensive, it's time consuming.
The way that cities were built,
if you go back to the V1,
what does the startup city look like?
It looks like something like Burning Man,
it looks like the cities of the Wild West.
They were not multi-story buildings, right?
They were basically things that were just like one story
and someone could have it there in the dust
and then you build roads and stuff between them
and they can move them around.
It was a much more dynamic geography.
And so when you have that as a vision
of what a startup city looks like, right?
Now you've got something,
there's a company I found called Kift,
which is like van life.
There's a lot of stuff in construction
that makes this feasible.
There's so-called man camps for fracking,
where people can just do like,
companies like Agreco, they have private power,
you can bring water, all this stuff on site.
So it's easy to actually snap this stuff to grid,
relatively speaking, if you've got horizontal space,
you pick this space, you crowd from the territory,
now you've got a city.
Okay, and the last bit is,
eventually gains diplomatic recognition
from pre-existing states.
And this is the part that people,
different people will be with me up to this point
and then they'll say, okay,
that's a part I disagree with
or how are you gonna ever do that, right?
They'll say, yeah, you can build an online community.
I believe you can get them to do collective action.
Of course, people have crowdfunded land
and moving together and doing it a larger scale.
All that I believe,
how are you possibly ever gonna gain
diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states?
You dumb delusional tech bro, right?
That's a common thing.
Okay, that's about the tone of it as well, right?
And so first I would say,
sovereigns are already out for business.
They're inking deals, okay?
Nevada inked a deal with Tesla to build the Geiger factory.
El Salvador has Bitcoin as its national currency.
§14Transcript · 1:42:54–1:50:23
Wyoming has done the Dow law
where Ethereum is now recognized,
where you can have on-chain incorporations
that are recognized by Wyoming law.
Virginia and New York negotiated with Amazon for HQ2.
Tuvalu signed a deal with GoDaddy for the .tv domain.
Columbia signed a deal for the .co domain
and on and on and on.
Sovereigns are open for business.
Sovereigns are doing deals with companies
and with currencies.
Sovereigns at the level of cities like Miami or New York
where the mayors are accepting their salary in Bitcoin.
States like Wyoming or Nevada
has its new private cities legislation
or entire countries like El Salvador.
So-
When you say sovereigns, by the way,
you mean the old school-
Governments.
Physical nation states, governments.
Fiat states.
Fiat states.
Okay.
But the fiat isn't the thing that makes a state.
What makes a state is geographical location.
It is something where, they're both, right?
So basically it's a play on words.
So just like fiat currency is cryptocurrency,
we will have fiat country and crypto country, right?
And in fact, you can think of the fiat
and crypto version of almost anything.
One thing I'll come to later is a big thing.
The big thing I think comes
after digital currency is digital passports.
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
So, and that's a big part of this whole network thing
which we'll come back to.
But, so that last bit,
the reason I just mentioned all those deals
between sovereigns, whether at the city,
US state or UN listed country level, okay.
And on the other hand, so that's on one side of the market.
On the other side are the companies and the currencies.
Why could we not have online communities, right?
So let me--
Making those deals, signing those deals.
So diplomatic recognition,
but aren't you still attached to the responsibilities
that come from being a member of a sovereign,
old school nation state?
So--
Can you possibly escape that?
So yes, and let me give you a concrete example.
Israel, okay, why?
You know, people talk about,
a lot of people are like, "Oh, Bolles,
he just, he took this from Snow Crash
or some sci-fi book they'll reference."
Right, actually, if,
there's many different references to the book.
This is not the only reference.
But a very important reference
that I think is much more important to me than Snow Crash,
which is good, a good book, whatever, but it's fictional,
is "Der Judenstaat" by Theodor Herzl,
which translates as "The Jewish State."
And that led to the foundation of Israel.
And that's very real.
It's worth reading because it's amazing.
Theodor Herzl was like a tech founder, okay?
In the book, he was writing
about the death of distance in 1897.
Why?
Because steamships could take you across countries, okay?
And he like, he's just, you know,
amazingly smart and practical guy,
where he just handled all these various objections.
And he said, "Look, you know, the Jewish people,
you know, our choices are either A,
assimilate and give up the culture,
or B, some people are thinking communism's a good idea.
I disagree with that.
We should do C, build our own country, right?"
And that was considered totally crazy.
But what he did was he A, wrote a book,
B, started a fund,
C, organized a semiannual conference,
the, you know, World Zionist Congress,
and the fund and the Congress are still going today.
Crucially, there were a bunch of intermediate stages
between the book and the idea,
and then the actual state of Israel in 1947.
For example, the, you know,
the folks who were committed Zionists got together
and started crowdfunding territory
in what is now Palestine.
And in fact, though, Palestine was only one choice.
In the book, they also had Argentina as a choice.
So this is my concept, cloud first, land last,
and the land's a parameter, you can choose, right?
Other places that were considered at various points,
like Madagascar, Birobidzin in the former Soviet Union,
right?
So the land was a parameter.
Palestine went out because of its, you know,
historical and religious importance.
Now, by the way, one thing,
I'm sure there's some, like, some fraction of viewers
are gonna be like, "Oh my God,
like all the bad stuff that happened."
I'm obviously not denying
that there's enormous amounts of controversy and so on
that attends Israel.
I consider myself generally pro-Israeli.
I'd also consider myself pro-Palestinian.
I fund lots of Palestinians and so forth.
So I'm leaving that part out, that huge conflict,
or, you know, for now, okay?
And you might say that's airbrushing it.
I don't mean it to do that.
I'm saying, here is the positive things they did.
Can we take the positive and not have the negative?
And I'll come back to how we might swap those parts out.
But let me just talk about this a little bit more.
So one of the things that happened was
committed Zionists went and crowdfunded territory
in what is now Israel, and they knit it together, right?
Why?
Because when you're physically present on territory,
yes, in theory, like the British Empire was in control.
They were the sovereign, okay?
In practice, who were the boots on the ground,
the facts on the ground, right?
These are the people who are actually tilling the land
and building the buildings and so on and so forth.
Like, who had the claim there
is like the people who are present, okay?
Now, this territory, this network of territories
eventually became the basis for,
or part of the basis for what became Israel.
Now, I'm fully aware that the exact configuration
of what territory belongs to Israel,
what territory belongs to Palestinians,
this is an enormous topic of dispute, okay?
But I just point this out to say
the process of going from book to crowdfunding territory
to a sovereign state where people
were now citizens of Israel,
as opposed to the British Empire,
is not some fictional thing, but did happen,
and within the lifetimes of some of the older,
you know, they're in their 80s now,
but in the lifetimes of some older people, okay?
So it's not impossible.
In fact, it has happened, right?
- But for that step, perhaps, hopefully,
is a better example, because in this particular,
like you said, land last, if I were to say,
if I was an alien and arrived at Earth
and say, choice of land, maybe if you were interested
in choosing a land that represents a network state
where ideas that unites a people based on ideas,
maybe pick a land that doesn't lead
to generational conflict and war.
- Yes, so I'll get to that point.
- And destruction and suffering and all that.
- All the stuff, that's right.
So now that I've said what are the positive things
about Israel, and I think there's a lot to admire
in Israel, as I said, I think there's also a lot
to admire in the Palestinians and so on.
I'm not taking any position on that.
There's other inspirations for the network state.
The second major inspiration is India,
which managed to achieve independence nonviolently, right?
That's very important, right?
So can you fuse these things, right?
A state started with a book
that achieved independence nonviolently, okay?
And that managed to build this polyglot,
you know, multicultural democracy, right?
That does, you know, like, you know,
India has its flaws, but it does manage to have,
you know, human rights of lots of people respected
and what have you, right?
And has managed to, you know,
there were times like emergency in the 1970s
in the Aragondi declared emergency.
There were times when it seemed touch and go,
but overall with fits and starts,
this flawed thing has kind of made its way through.
And, you know, the third inspiration is Singapore
with Lee Kuan Yew, who built a city state from nothing.
You know, I shouldn't say from nothing.
Okay, there was something there,
but let's say built one of the richest countries
in the world without like huge amounts
of natural resources in the middle of a zone
§15Transcript · 1:50:26–1:58:23
where there was lots of communist revolution going on.
And so he was the CEO founder essentially
of this amazing startup country, right?
And, you know, finally, of course, America,
which has too many influences to name
things we talked about, the nation of immigrants,
obviously the constitution and so on.
And you think, okay, can we go,
you think of these inspirations.
What's interesting about these four countries, by the way,
Israel, India, Singapore, and the US,
they have something in common.
You know what that is?
- What is that?
- They're all forks of the UK code base.
We think obviously, you know,
the UK was sort of the ancestor of America,
but Israel was a former British colony, right?
India was a British colony and so was Singapore, right?
- For people who don't know what fork and code base means,
it's a language from versioning systems,
particularly Git, represented online
on a website called GitHub.
And a fork means you copy the code
and all the changes you make to the code
now live in their own little world.
So America took the ideas that define the United Kingdom
and then forked it by evolving those ideas
in a way that didn't affect the original country.
- That's right.
And what's interesting about this is,
and of course I'm saying that
in a somewhat playful way, right?
But I think it's a useful analogy, interesting analogy.
So you have the Americans who forked the UK code base,
and then you have the Indians, Israelis,
and the Singaporeans who also made their own modifications.
And in some ways, each society has pieces
that you can take from them and learn from them
and try to combine them, right?
So you have a state that is started by a book
that non-violently assembles,
that crowdfunds territory around the world,
that is led by a CEO founder,
and that is also governed by something
that's like a constitution.
But just like you went from,
you know, I talk about the V1, V2, and V3 a lot, right?
Like V1 is gold and V2 is fiat and V3 is Bitcoin, right?
Or V1 is hunter-gatherer and V2 is farmer-soldier,
V3 is digital nomad or sovereign collective, okay?
Which is not just an individual, but a group.
Here, V1 is UK common law.
They don't have a constitution.
It's all precedent going for many years, right?
V2 is the US constitution and V3 is the smart contract,
the social smart contract, which is a fusion, obviously,
of Rousseau's concept of the social contract
and the smart contract.
The social smart contract is like written in code, okay?
So it's like even more rigorous than the constitution.
And in many ways, you can think of going
from the United Kingdom of England, Wales,
you know, Scotland, Northern Ireland,
the United States of America,
the network states of the internet, okay?
Where you go from the rights of Englishmen
with the Magna Carta to Europeans, African-Americans,
all the immigrants to the Americans or the North America,
then you go to all the people of the world.
And so you basically are more democratic
and you're more capitalist
because you're talking about internet capitalism,
not just nation-state-locked capitalism.
In a sense, it's the V3, right?
In other ways, the V3, only about 2% of the world
is over 35, native-born American,
can qualify to be president of the United States.
But 100% of the world,
you could become the president of a network state.
There might be a, you know, a Palestinian Washington
or a, you know, Brazilian Hamilton, right?
And now, rather than say, okay,
maybe you have a small percentage chance
of immigrating to the US
and a small percentage chance of your descendant,
you know, becoming like, you know, president,
now we can just say, you can start online.
And you know what?
Maybe this person is so exceptional,
they have Americans coming to their,
you know, network state, right?
- You don't think that kind of thing is possible
with like the rich get richer in a digital space too,
that people with more followers
have friends that have followers and they like-
- I don't think it's the rich get richer.
I think what happens is,
so this is an important concept.
It is, it's multi-axis, right?
That is to say, for example,
just the introduction of the Bitcoin axis, right?
And those, 'cause it didn't exist pre-2009, now it exists.
Those people who are rich in BTC terms
are only partially correlated
with those who are rich in USD terms.
There's all these folks, essentially-
- BTC is Bitcoin and USD is US dollar.
- Yes. (laughs)
So that's a new axis.
And ETH is yet another axis, right?
You- - Ethereum.
ETH is Ethereum.
- Right.
So you are essentially getting new social systems
which are actually net inequality decreasing
because before you only had USD millionaires
and now you have a new track
and then another track and another track, right?
You have different hierarchies, different ladders, right?
And so on net, you have more ladders to climb.
And so it's not the rich getting richer.
In fact, old money in some ways
is a last to cryptocurrency.
Old money and old states, I think,
those people who are the most focused on,
you might call it reform, I would call it control, okay?
The most focused on control of the old world
who have the least incentive to switch,
the rich will get poorer
because it will be the poor
or those who are politically powerless,
politically poor, who go and seek out these new states.
- Yeah, I didn't mean in the actual money, but yes, okay.
There's other ladders.
I meant in terms of influence,
political and social influence
in these new network states.
You, I think, said that basically anybody
can become president of a network state.
- Just like anybody can become CEO of a startup company.
Of course, whether people follow you is another matter,
but anybody can go and found one.
Go ahead, sorry.
- Oh, from the perspective that anyone can found one.
Anyone could found, I see.
- We don't think it's implausible
that somebody from Brazil or Nigeria,
I mean, most quote billionaires in the world
are not American.
And in fact, actually, here's another important point.
It's far easier to become a tech billionaire
than become, or a billionaire period,
than become president of the United States.
There's less than 50 US presidents ever, all time, okay?
It is a much more realistic ambition
to become a billionaire than become president.
There's like thousands of billionaires worldwide.
In fact, 75% of them are outside of the US.
And many of those have been,
some of them are like energy and oil,
which is often based on political connections,
but a very large chunk of the rest are tech, okay?
And that's something where you're mining,
but you're mining online by hitting keys
as opposed to with a pickaxe, you know, in granite, right?
So the point is that we think it's
totally understandable today for there to be a, you know,
huge founder who comes out of Vietnam or, you know,
South America, like that,
like you can name founders from all over the world, right?
Exceptional people can rise from all the world
to run giant companies.
Why can they not rise to run giant new countries?
And the answer is we didn't develop the mechanism yet,
right?
And just as another example, I talk about this in the book,
Vitalik Buterin is far more qualified than Jerome Powell,
right, or anybody at the Federal Reserve.
He actually built and managed a monetary policy
and a currency from scratch, okay, as a 20-something, right?
Obviously that's a more accomplished person
than somebody who just inherited an economy.
This is a- - A lot of people
can push back at that and say that the people
that initially build a thing aren't necessarily
the best ones to manage a thing once it scales
and actually has impact.
- Sometimes, sometimes, but Dzuk has done a good job
of both, I think Vitalik has done a good job of both, right?
- But that's not an inherent truth.
- Well, so actually I have- - If you built the thing,
you will be the best person to run it.
- I will agree with you on that,
and actually I talk about this in the book,
or I've got an essay on this called
Founding vs. Inheriting, okay?
And the premise is actually that, the classic example,
you know the saying, "Shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves
"in three generations."
§16Transcript · 1:58:24–2:05:14
It means the guy who starts out poor and builds a fortune,
his son maintains it,
and his dissipate grandson dissipates it, right?
- Why is shirt sleeves a symbol of poverty?
- Back in the past, it was kind of like,
you know, you're just working with your,
you're not white collar,
you're back to working with your hands,
you're just- - Oh, so it's a blue collar
to blue collar in three generations.
- Yeah, yeah, or working class or something like that, right?
So essentially that the grandson squanders it, right?
And, you know, in sense, by the way,
just to talk about that for a second,
if you have two children and four grandchildren
and eight great-grandchildren and 16 and so on,
and in older families, you know, they were much bigger,
right, six, you know, children is not uncommon.
Whatever fortune you have is now split six ways,
and then six ways and six ways again.
So with the exception of premature,
where the oldest son inherits all the way down,
the majority of descendants just a few generations out
have probably inherited none of that fortune,
unless it has compounded to such an extent
that it's like up six X over 20 years, right?
So it's actually hard to maintain a quote ruling class
in the sense that this person
who's like four generations down has, you know,
like 1/16 of the DNA, you know,
one over two to the fourth, right,
of their scion who built a fortune.
So it's not even like the same,
is it the same family even, right?
Is the fortune actually in the family?
So most people don't think a few generations out,
they just kind of think, oh, Marx is right,
there's always been a rich and a poor.
It's actually much more dynamic than that,
'cause you literally, like, what is even the family
when it's diluted out, you know, 1/16, right?
If you're 1/16 of Rockefeller, are you a Rockefeller?
Really like 15, 16, something else,
would you have the Rockefeller fortune?
Probably not, right?
Now, are there, again, premature,
where the guy who inherits the name all the way through,
that would be one way to pass it down.
But even that person doesn't necessarily have the qualities
of the guy who, you know, the cultural qualities,
other qualities of the guy who's like four generations past,
so they tend to squander it, right?
So this actually brings us to,
you know, coming back up to governance,
the system, the guys who built the United States,
you know, like Washington and Hamilton,
these are giants, right?
These are founders.
And the folks today are like, not the grandson,
but like the 40th generation heir of a factory
that somebody else built.
Like, think about a factory and you have, you know,
this grandchild or great-grandchild inherits a factory.
Most of the time, it's just cranking out widgets
and the great-grandson is cashing checks.
They have been selected as legitimate heir
because it's the, you know, the founder,
passes it down to his son, passes it down to his grandson,
to his great-grandson.
So legitimacy is there.
They've got title, they can show, I own this factory, okay?
They can cash the checks.
There's professional managers there.
Everything seems fine.
Until one day, that factory has to go from making,
you know, widgets to making masks for COVID
or something else.
It has to change direction.
It has to do something it hasn't done before.
None of that capability for invention and reinvention
is present anymore.
These people have inherited something
that they could not build from scratch.
Because they could not build from scratch,
they can't even maintain it.
This is an important point.
The ability to build from scratch is so important
because if some part breaks
and you don't know why it was there,
can you even maintain it?
No, you can't, okay?
Unless all the replacement parts
and the know-how to fit them together is there,
you can't repair this.
So in 2009, Mother Jones had a story
that said that the US military had forgotten
how to make some kinds of nuclear weapons
'cause there was a part where all the guys
who knew how to make it had aged out or left.
Okay?
And this was some aero gel or something like that.
It was rumored, okay?
Thing is, you're seeing increasingly, for example,
you've got wildfires in California.
You've got water that's not potable in Jackson.
You've got power outages in Texas.
You're seeing a lot of the infrastructure of the US
is just less functional.
I think probably part of that is due to civil engineering
not being that sexy a field, people aging out,
and just domain knowledge being lost,
and the heirs who win the role of mayor
or whatever of this town
don't have the ability to build it from scratch.
You're just selected for legitimacy, not competence, okay?
So once you think about this concept
of founding versus inheriting,
and I've got the whole essay which talks about this,
of course, the alternative to somebody
who's legitimate but not competent
where people will say is,
"Oh, we need an authoritarian
"to be in control of everything."
And then their hope is that that person is competent,
but they don't have legitimacy
because if they're just installed
as just like a authoritarian ruler,
50% of the population is really mad at them.
They don't have title.
They just grab the title.
Maybe they can exert enough force,
but that's the problem with the authoritarian dictator
takeover, right?
So the alternative, the third version,
is the founder who combines both legitimacy and competence
'cause they start from scratch,
and they attract people to their vision,
they build it from scratch,
and so you need is the ability
to constantly do refoundings, rebirths.
- So if you imagine a world
that is primarily network states,
can you help me imagine what that looks like?
Now, there's several ways to imagine things,
which is how many of them are there,
and how often do the new ones pop up?
- There could be thousands.
- Given seven billion people,
eight billion people on Earth.
- Yeah, yeah, so there's network state
in the precise definition I have in the book,
which is a diplomatically recognized entity,
and there's network state in sort of the loose definition
where, you know, one thing that's interesting is
this term has become a lowercase term really fast, okay?
- Network state.
- Yeah, like in the sense of Google
became lowercase Google for like Googling,
or like Uber became lowercase Uber.
Like if you go to the networkstate.com/reviews,
or you go to search.twitter.com and put in network state,
you'll see it's just become like a word or a phrase, okay?
So that means it's sort of, whatever I intend it to mean,
people will use it to mean what they want it to mean, right?
Okay. - Internet.
- It's internet, right?
- I think internet.
You've become a meme.
Well, first of all, you're a meme, and this book is a meme.
- Am I a meme?
Okay, maybe I'm a meme.
But the book is, the book I think is a good meme.
That's actually why I wanted to make it free.
I wanted people to take it out there and make it their own.
And one of the things I say at the beginning,
and I'll come back to this thing,
is it's a toolbox, not a manifesto.
Even if you dislike 70% of it, 80% of it, 90% of it,
if there's something that's useful to you,
you can take that and use it, just like a library,
you know, a software library.
You might just use one function there.
Great, I'm glad I've delivered you some value, right?
That's my purpose in this, right?
- So you're not Ayn Rand?
- No, I'm not Ayn Rand.
Basically, the whole point of this actually is
it's polytheistic, polystatistic, polymystic,
is genuinely--
- Is it polyamorous?
- It's not polyamorous.
- Okay.
- Though somebody might want--
- Do you have love advice in the book?
I didn't see it.
So do you talk about love in the book?
- I do not talk about love.
Rather--
- Maybe in V2 you will.
- Not that I don't believe in love.
§17Transcript · 2:05:15–2:12:31
Love is great.
- All right, I will accept your offer
to write a guest chapter in your V2 book about love.
- All right, great.
- Because there is some aspect that's very interesting,
which parts of human civilization require physical contact,
physical, 'cause it seems like more and more
can be done in a digital space.
- Yeah, but as I said--
- Work, for example.
- But you're not gonna build a self-driving car city
in digital space.
You're not gonna be able to do--
- Oh, I do cars at all.
- Well, sure, but let's say you're not gonna be able
to get to Mars in a purely digital thing.
You need to build, you have to have a little rocket launchpad.
You're not gonna be able to do all the innovative
biomedicine, whether it's all the,
have you seen bioelectricity?
Or there's stuff on regenerative medicine,
stem cells, all this stuff.
You just can't do that digitally, right?
We're still physical beings, so you need physical space,
but how do we get that, right?
So this is meant to wind its way
through various roadblocks in the so-called,
actually my term from many years ago,
the idea maze, it's meant to wind its way
through the idea maze to find how to use bits
to unlock innovation in atoms.
- The idea maze within the bigger prime number maze,
or go back to visualizing the number of states
and how often are they born.
- So let me first anchor this,
because people, just to give some numbers, right?
How many UN listed countries are there?
Like 196, 193, okay?
And there's some that are on the border,
like Taiwan or Israel, right?
Where they're not, I mean, Israel is a country,
but it's not recognized by every country
or what have you, right?
- Is Texas a country?
- No, but it may eventually become, right, okay.
So within that list of about 200 countries,
okay, I've got a graph in the book that shows
that most countries are actually small countries.
About, there's 12 countries that have less
than 100,000 people by the UN definition of a country.
There's another 20 something that have
between 100,000 and one million.
There's another 50 or 60 something
that have between a million and 10 million.
So most countries in the UN are less than 10 million people.
There's only 14 countries that are over 100 million people.
Okay, so most countries are small countries
is kind of surprising to us
because most people live in big countries, okay?
And so now you're like, okay,
well, I've built social networks that are bigger than that.
You have a following that's bigger than 100,000 people.
You have a following that's bigger than, you know,
a small country like Kiribati or what have you, right?
And, okay, so that first changes feasibility.
You think of a country as this huge, huge, huge thing,
but it's actually smaller than many,
many countries are smaller than social networks
that you've built, okay, number one.
Number two is the number of UN listed countries,
even though it's been flat-ish for the last 30 years
with like a few things like South Sudan
and East Timor that have come online,
there's a graph that I posted which shows
that it's increased by about,
from about 40 or 50 something at the end of World War II
when the UN was set up to 190 something today.
There's been like kind of a steady increase in particular
with all the decolonization,
all the countries that got their independence
first from the British empire
and then from the Soviet empire, right?
That imperial breakup led to new countries, okay?
And so then the question is, is that flat forever?
Well, the number of new currencies
similarly increased for a while,
roughly one per country or thereabouts,
and then it was flat for a while
and then suddenly it's gone completely vertical.
That's an interesting graph, right?
Where it's like linear-ish, then it's flat,
and then it just goes voof like this.
Now you can define, you can argue where the boundary is
for quote a new currency, okay?
But I think Bitcoin certainly counts,
I think Ethereum certainly counts
in terms of just its scale and adoption worldwide.
So at least you have two.
If you take the broad church view,
you have a thousand or something like that, right?
Somewhere in between, you might say,
how many currencies are above the market cap
of an existing previously recognized fiat currency?
Like which got onto the leaderboard, right?
There's a website just like coinmarketcap.com.
That's like a site for like cryptocurrency tracking,
it's very popular, okay?
There's a fun site called fiatmarketcap.com
which shows where Bitcoin is relative
to the fiat currencies of the world.
And it's like, last I checked, like number 27,
somewhere in between the Chilean peso
and the Turkish lira or something, okay?
And it previously been close to cracking the top 10, okay?
And I think it will again at some point.
So we know that you can have a currency out of nowhere
that ranks with the fiat currencies of the world.
Could you have a country out of nowhere
that ranks with the countries of the world?
So this is maybe the fastest way,
you probably should have said this at the very beginning.
If you go to the network state in one image, okay?
That kind of summarizes what a network state looks like
in a visual, just one single visual.
And the visual is of a dashboard.
And the dashboard shows something
that looks like a social network,
except you're visualizing it on the map of the world.
And it's got network nodes all over the place.
A hundred people here, a thousand people there,
they're all connected together.
The total population of the people in this social network
is about 1 million people.
So 1.7 million people in this example.
And some of the buildings are,
some of the people are just singletons.
They're just folks in their apartment
who can conceptualize themselves
as citizens of this network state.
And they've got the flag on their wall, right?
And the digital passport on their phone
along with the digital currency.
Others are groups of hundreds or thousands
or even tens of thousands of people
that have all taken over a neighborhood,
just like Chinatowns exist, right?
Just like, you know, intentional communities existed.
They just basically, you know,
go and crowdfund land together, right?
And these are all networked together, you know,
just like the islands of Indonesia are separated by ocean.
These are islands of this network state
that are separated by intranet, okay?
So they conceptualize themselves as something.
And at the very top of the dashboard,
there's something very important,
which is the population annual income
and real estate footprint of this network state.
So the population we already discussed,
you can build an online social network.
We know you can build something
which has a population that's bigger
than these hundred thousand or million person countries.
One of the new things contributions the network state has
is say that you can not just exceed in population,
you can exceed it in real estate footprint.
Because one way of thinking about it is,
I don't exactly know the numbers
on foreign ownership in Estonia,
but let's say to first order,
the million something Estonians own
and could afford Estonia, okay?
A million people could buy a territory
that is the size of Estonia, right?
That's probably true to first order.
There might be some overseas ownership,
but it's probably true, okay?
You probably find a country for which that is true.
But that means is a million people digitally
could buy distributed territory
that is probably greater than or equal
to the size of Estonia.
Especially if they're buying like desert territory
or stuff like that.
Which means now you have a digital country
that is ranking not just in people,
not just in real estate footprint.
So it's also in real estate footprint
with the countries of the world.
So you start ranking and you're bigger
than these UN listed countries in your population
and your real estate footprint.
And the third is income, okay?
You can prove on chain that you have a income
for the digital population
that is above a certain amount, right?
This is what I call the census of the network state.
And it's actually such a crucial component
that I have it in the essay,
"The Network State in a Thousand Words."
§18Transcript · 2:12:33–2:20:08
The post office and census were actually important enough
to be written into the US constitution, okay?
Partly because it was like
for apportionment of representatives,
partly because it was a feedback mechanism.
And so that census was done every 10 years
and it's provided a crucial snapshot of the US
for the last several hundred years, okay?
Now here, this census of a digital state
could be done every 10 seconds, okay?
Conducting it is actually not the hard part.
You know what the hard part is?
Proving it.
Because how will the world believe
that you actually have 100,000 people spread
across countries?
Couldn't they all be bots?
Couldn't they be AIs?
Proof of human, proof of income,
and also proof of real estate
start to actually rise dramatically in importance
because you're saying we're gonna rank this digital state
on the leaderboard of the fiat states, okay?
And so that means that people will start to,
at first they'll just laugh at it.
Once you start claiming you have 10,000 citizens,
people are gonna start poking and be like,
"Is that real?
Prove that it's real."
So I have a whole talk on this,
actually I'm giving at this Chainlink conference,
but essentially how do you prove this, right?
The short answer is crypto oracles plus auditing.
The somewhat longer answer is
you put these assertions on chain,
these proof of human,
these proof of real estate, et cetera,
assertions on chain, okay?
And there's people who are writing to the blockchain
and they are digitally signing their assertions.
Now, of course, simply just putting something on chain
doesn't make it true.
It just says you can prove not that
what is written on chain is true,
but that the metadata is true.
You can show who wrote it via their digital signature,
what they wrote, their hash,
and when they wrote it, their timestamp.
So you can establish those things in metadata
of who, what, and when was written.
Who's the who in that picture?
So for example-
How do you know it's one human?
Great question.
So let's say you've bought a bunch of your piece of territory
from Blackstone, okay?
As a function of that,
blackstone.eth signs an on-chain receipt
that says this,
lexfriedman.eth bought this piece of property from us
and it has, you know, like, it's a thousand square meters
and this is put on chain, they sign it, okay?
That's their digital receipt.
Just like you might get an email receipt
when you buy a piece of property or something, okay?
It's just put not online, but on chain.
And it's signed by Blackstone
or whatever real estate vendor you buy it from.
It could be a company,
it could obviously be an individual, right?
And so you have a bunch of these assertions.
Let's say there's 47 different real estate vendors.
I know vendor's an atypical term there,
but just bear with me, right?
47 different real estate sellers
that you've bought all of your territory from.
Each of them put digital signatures that are asserting
that a certain amount of real estate was bought
and its square meters, its location,
or whatever else they wanna prove.
The sum of all that is now your real estate footprint, okay?
And now the question is, was that real?
Well, because they signed what they put on chain,
you can do things like you can audit.
Let's say Blackstone has signed 500,000 properties
and they've sold them and put them on chain.
And I'm not talking about 2022 or 2023, but 2030, right?
It'll be a few years out,
but people are doing this type of stuff.
They're putting this stuff on chain.
So you get that on-chain receipt.
They've got 500,000 of these.
What you can do is just sampling, okay?
You pick a subset N of them,
let's say 500 properties around the world.
You go there, you actually go and independently look
at what the square footprint is.
And then from that,
you can see what was the actual, your measurement
versus their reported.
And then you can, via Cisco inference,
extrapolate that if they were randomly selected
to the rest of the properties
and get a reliability score for Blackstone's reporting
of its real estate square footage.
- Who does the, so that's the auditing step.
- That's the auditing step.
- So the crypto oracle is the-
- Auditable oracle.
- On-chain, what did you say, assertions?
- That's right.
- Yeah, about like who bought stuff with who.
I still have to get to the proof of human,
but auditing, there's a bunch of people randomly checking
that you're not full of shit.
- That's right.
- Who is in charge of the auditing though?
- So it could be a big four, like a PWC
and basically the accountants that do corporate balance sheet
and cashflow and-
- Who keeps them in check from corruption?
I'm just imagining a world full of network states.
- Yeah, it's a good question.
So at a certain point you get to who watches the watchers.
Right?
And, oh, well, the government is meant
to keep the accountants accountable.
And Arthur Anderson actually did have a whole flame out
in the, around the time of the Enron thing.
So it is possible that there's corrupt accountants
or bad accountants or what have you.
But of course the government itself is corrupt in many ways
and prints all this money and seizes all of these assets
and surveils everybody and so on and so forth.
So, the answer to your question is going to be probably exit
in the sense that if those accountants,
they are themselves gonna digitally sign a report
and put it on-chain.
Okay?
So they're gonna say, we believe that X, Y, and Z's,
you know, reports are on-chain, we're this reliable,
and here's our study.
If they falsify that, well, if somebody finds that,
eventually, then that person is downweighted
and then you have to go to another accountant.
Right?
- Is there ways to mess with this?
I mean, I just, let me breathe in and out.
As I mentioned, some of the heaviest shit I've ever read.
So because I visited Ukraine,
I read "Red Famine" by Ann Applebaum, "Bloodlands."
- Yep.
- And it's just a lot of coverage of the census.
I mean, there's a lot of coverage of a lot of things,
but in Ukraine in the 1930s,
Stalin messed a lot with the census to hide the fact
that sort of a lot of people died from starvation.
- And did that with the cooperation
of Arthur G. Sulzberger's New York Times company.
Like Walter Grant, he falsified all those reports.
Are there several parties involved?
Can there be several parties involved in this case
that manipulate the truth as it is represented
by the crypto oracle
and as it is checked by the auditing mechanism?
- It is possible, but the more parties that are involved
in falsifying something, the more defections there are.
So that's why you basically have another level of auditing
is fundamentally the answer, right?
And really, I think what it comes back to is
if you're showing your work, right?
This is the difference between crypto economics
and fiat economics.
You know, the Bitcoin blockchain,
anybody can download it and run verification on it, okay?
This is different than government inflation stats,
which people don't believe, right?
Because the process is just, you know,
it is true that CPI methodology is published and so on,
but it is not something which people feel
reflects their actual basket of goods, right?
And so the independent verifiability is really the core
of what true audibility is.
And so then to your question,
it's hard for some group to be able to collude
because the blockchain is public
and everything they've written to it is public.
And so if there's an error,
it's easier in some ways to tell the truth than to lie
because the truth is just naturally consistent
across the world, whereas lies can be found out,
even, you know, Cisco Tesla, you know, Benford's law?
- Yes.
- Right, it's something where the digits in like a real,
if you take the last digit or the first,
I forget if it was the last digit or the first digit,
I think it's first digit, right?
So you take the first digit in an actual financial statement,
you look at the distribution of like how many ones
and how many twos, how many threes, the percentages.
§19Transcript · 2:20:11–2:28:44
It has actually, you'd guess it might be,
oh, each one will be equally random, it'd be 10%.
It's not like that, actually.
There's a certain distribution that it has
and fake data doesn't look like that, but real data does.
- That's weird.
- It's interesting, right?
- Benford's law, also called the first digit law,
states that the leading digits in a collection of data sets
are probably going to be small.
For example, most numbers in a set,
about 30%, will have a leading digit of one.
- Yeah, so that's a great example
of what we were talking about earlier,
the observational leading to the theory.
- Ooh, there's a Benford's law of controversy.
I'm looking that up.
Benford's law of controversy.
Benford's law of controversy is an adage
from the 1980 novel "Timescape" stating,
"Passion is inversely proportional
"to the amount of real information available."
The adage was quoted in an international drug policy article
in peer-reviewed social science.
Can I just say how much I love Wikipedia?
I have the founder of Wikipedia
coming on this very podcast very soon,
and I think the world is a better place
because Wikipedia exists.
One of the things he wanted to come on and talk about
is the ways that he believes that Wikipedia is going wrong.
- So on technical truths, it's great.
Remember I think earlier on technical truths
versus political truths?
On technical truths, it's great.
On political truths, it's like a defamation engine.
Just as one example, okay?
This is something that I was gonna write up,
but there was a scam called HPZ Token
that managed to edit Wikipedia.
Nobody detected it.
It said that I was the founder of HPZ Token.
- That you were the founder of HPZ Token.
- Yeah, I had nothing to do with this,
and people were scammed out of it
because Google just pushes Wikipedia links
to high on Google, and people are like,
"Well, it's Wikipedia, therefore it's real," right?
Wikipedia has the bio of living persons thing.
They should just allow people to delete their profile
'cause they have zero quality control on it.
It's literally facilitating fraud, right?
Where people will maliciously edit
and then do things with them,
and nobody cares or is looking at it
beyond the fraudsters, and this is happening.
If that was happening, that was undetected.
I wasn't paying attention to this.
This was there for weeks or months, totally undetected,
that literally facilitated fraud, right?
And fundamentally, the issue is that
Wikipedia doesn't have any concept of who's editing
or property rights or anything like that, right?
It is also something which is,
it used to be something in the early 2000s, mid-2000s,
people said, "Oh, it's Wikipedia,
"how trustworthy it can be, Britannica's reviewed,"
and that's been forgotten,
and now it's become over-trusted, right?
Remember the thing, like, the more trust something gets,
the less trustworthy it often becomes.
It kind of abuses the power, right?
So what I'm interested in,
Google actually had a model a while back called KNOL.
KNOL, K-N-O-L, was something where
when there were different versions of a Wikipedia-style page,
you had Google Docs-like permissions on them.
For example, you might have 10 different versions
of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, okay?
And each one had an editor
and folks that they could grant edit rights and so on,
but this way, you would actually be able to see
different versions of a page,
and they might have different versions of popularity,
but this way, you wouldn't have edit wars,
you'd have forks, right?
And they would all kind of coexist,
and then people could review them,
and now you could see different versions of something
versus the thing that just kind of rewards
dogged persistence or being an editor
or something like that.
The other thing is, a lot of the folks
who have editorial privileges of Wikipedia
are there from the early 2000s,
and most of India wasn't online then.
Most of Africa wasn't online then, right?
So there's this inherited power that exists,
which again, was fresh and innovative 10 or 20 years ago,
but it's now kind of outdated.
- Yeah, I wanna see some data, though.
- You wanna see what? - I wanna see some data,
because we can always, I mean, this is,
we often highlight small anecdotal--
- Okay, I'll give you an example.
- Cases, hold on a second.
We often highlight issues in society, in the world,
in anything by taking a specific example,
taking anecdotal data and saying, "There's a problem here."
I wanna know on net how much positive
is being added to the world because of it.
My experience that I try to be empathetic and open-minded,
my exploration of Wikipedia has been such
that it is a breath of fresh air
in terms of the breadth and depth of knowledge that is there.
Now, you can say there's bias built in,
there's wars that are incentivized not to produce truth,
but to produce a consensus around a particular narrative,
but that is how the entirety of human civilization operates,
and we have to see where's it better and where's it worse
in terms of platforms.
- I think Wikipedia was an improvement over what came before
but has a lot of flaws.
You're right that absolutely,
sometimes people can over-fixate on the anecdotal,
but sometimes the anecdotal illustrates a general pattern.
For example, one thing that happens frequently in Wikipedia
is there are editors who will plant a story
and then they will then go and use that story
as like a neutral third party to win an edit war.
So here's a phenomenon that happens in Wikipedia.
You have an editor who's privileged
above just random users, okay,
who will plant a story and then cite that story
as if it was a neutral third party.
So there's a site called Wikipediocracy, okay,
and it discusses the case of a person named Peppermint
who had a name that they didn't want included,
their so-called dead name on their Wikipedia profile.
And there's a Wikipedia editor named Tenebrae
who people allege was a Newsday reporter or writer
that put a piece into Newsday that dead named Peppermint
and then was able to cite it on the Wikipedia article
as if it was like a neutral third party
when it actually wasn't,
when people allege it was the same guy, okay?
Now, that is not an uncommon thing.
That actually--
That's what I want data on.
Okay, I know--
How many articles, I'm not--
Who's auditing--
I'm dancing with you, not against you.
Sure, sure.
I'm saying how many articles have that kind of war
where douchebags are manipulating each other?
So that's the question, what's the audit?
Has Wikipedia actually been audited, right?
Who are the editors?
Like, who's actually writing this stuff?
It is actually something where, again, on technical topics,
I think it's pretty good.
On non-technical topics, there's something called
the Wikipedia Reliable Sources Policy.
It's a fascinating page, okay?
So it actually takes a lot of the stuff
that we have been, you know, the world has been talking about
in terms of what's a reliable source of information
and so on and so forth.
It's called the Wikipedia Reliable Sources,
Perennial Sources, okay?
And if you go to this page, okay,
which I'm just gonna send to you now, all right,
you will literally see every media outlet in the world
and they're colored gray, green, yellow, or red, okay?
And so red is like untrustworthy, green is trustworthy,
yellow is like neutral, okay?
Now, this actually makes Wikipedia's epistemology explicit.
They are marking a source as trustworthy or untrustworthy.
For example, you are not allowed to cite social media
on Wikipedia, which is actually an enormous part
of what people are posting.
Instead, you have to cite a mainstream media outlet
that puts the tweets in the mainstream article
and only then can it be cited in Wikipedia.
- By the way, to push back, this is a dance.
We're dancing. - Sure, sure, sure, sure.
- That those are rules written on a sheet of paper.
I have seen Wikipedia in general play in the gray area
that these rules create.
- Oh, well, if you are an editor, then you can get--
- So you can use the rules and you can,
because there's a lot of contradictions within the rules,
you can use them to, in the ways you said,
to achieve the ends you want.
It really boils down to the incentives,
the motivations of the editors.
And one of the magical things about Wikipedia,
the positive versus the negative,
is that it seems like a very small number of people,
§20Transcript · 2:28:47–2:38:12
same with Stack Overflow, can do an incredible amount
of good editing and aggregation of good knowledge.
Now, as you said, that seems to work much better
for technical things over which there's not
a significant division.
Some of that has to do less with the rules
and more with the human beings involved.
- Well, but here's the thing is,
so first, let me take this,
I should finish off this point
with reliable source, perennial sources, right?
So if you go to this, you'll see that Al Jazeera
is marked green, but let's say the Cato Institute
is marked yellow, right?
The nation is marked green. - Oh, shit.
Oh, snap.
Right, okay, sure, yes.
- The nation is marked green,
but National Review is marked yellow, okay?
You could probably go and do,
so what's good about this is it makes
the epistemology explicit, right?
You could actually take this table,
and you could also look at all the past edit wars
and so on over it, and take a look at what things
are starting to get marked as red or yellow
and what things are starting to get marked as green,
and I'm pretty sure you're gonna find
some kind of partisan polarization
that comes out of it, right, number one.
Number two is once something gets marked
as being yellow or red, then all links
and all references to it are pulled out.
For example, Coindesk, okay, was marked
as being like, gosh, what was it?
- Yellow?
- I think it's marked as red.
Coindesk, which is actually like--
- I get a lot of useful information from Coindesk.
- That's right, but it's marked as red, why?
Because there's some Wikipedia editors
who hate cryptocurrency, and so cryptocurrency
on Wikipedia has been a huge topic
where they've just edited out all the positive stuff,
and these are senior editors of Wikipedia
who can control what sources are considered reliable.
So they've now knocked out Coindesk,
they've knocked out social media.
They only allow mainstream media coverage,
and not even all mainstream media,
only those they've marked as green.
This is the manipulation of consensus.
- I wanna know how many articles are affected by it,
and on that-- - Hundreds of thousands.
Hundreds of thousands.
- You could just say that randomly.
- I can, I can. - No, no, no, no, no.
- I can, because all the-- - They're affected,
there's different levels of effect
in terms of it actually having a significant impact
on the quality of the article.
- Let me give you an example.
Let me give you an example, right?
The fact that people cannot cite direct quotes
on social media, but can only cite the rehash
of those quotes in a mainstream media outlet,
and not just any mainstream media outlet,
but those that are colored green
on the Wikipedia reliable perennial sources policy,
is a structural shift on every single article
to make Wikipedia align with
US mainstream media corporations, right?
- I am, as often, playing devil's advocate,
to counter a point so that the disagreement
reveals some profound wisdom.
That's what I'm doing here.
But also in that task here, I'm trying to understand
exactly how much harm is created by the bias
within the team of editors that we're discussing,
and how much of Wikipedia is technical knowledge.
For example, the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The Wikipedia article I've seen there,
now that changes very aggressively a lot,
and I hear from every side on this,
but it did not seem biased to me.
As compared to mainstream media in the United States.
- So now I'm gonna sound extremely woke, okay?
If you go and look at this, all right?
Times of India is yellow, but Mother Jones,
Jacobin, okay, they are green, right?
So a niche, mostly white, Western, partisan left outlet,
is marked green, but a billion people,
like the Times of India is marked yellow, right?
That's a structural bias towards Western media outlets
and Western editors when much of the rest of the world
hadn't gotten online or whatever.
- I would just love to see, in terms of the actual article,
what ideas are being censored, altered, shifted.
I would love, I just think it's an open, I'm not sort of--
- So the edit logs are there, edit logs are public.
- Yeah, I would be fascinated, yeah.
Is there a way to explore the way
that narratives are shifted because of--
- Sure, so a very simple one is,
if you were to pull all the edit logs of Wikipedia,
you could see how many times
are social media links disallowed, okay?
Like, first of all, think about it like this.
How many, I mean, just the fact that social media
is not allowed to be cited on Wikipedia
or inconsistently allowed.
- You think that's a problem?
- It's a huge problem.
You can't cite, let's say Jeff Bezos' own tweet.
You have to cite some random media corporation.
- Here's the thing, and sorry if I'm interrupting.
- Please.
- Hopefully I'm adding to it.
I think they're trying to create friction
as to the sources used because if you can use social media,
then you can use basically bots
to create a bunch of sources, right?
And then you can almost automate the editor war, right?
- Here's the thing, is basically Wikipedia initially,
like said, oh, we'll only cite mainstream media
as a way of boosting its credibility in the early 2000s,
okay, when its credibility was low.
Now it's sort of become merged with the US establishment
and it only cites these things whose trust,
I mean, have you seen the graphs on trust in mainstream media?
Like it's plummeted.
It's down to like 10% or something like that, right?
So the most trusted sources for Wikipedia
are untrusted by the population.
- Yeah. - True?
- That feels like it's a fixable technological problem.
I think I'm under-informed and my gut says
we're both together under-informed.
I do a rigorous three to four hour discussion
about Wikipedia.
But hold on a second.
I think I have a gut sort of developed
feeling about which articles not to trust on Wikipedia.
I think I need to make that explicit also.
I have a kind of an understanding
that you don't go to Wikipedia for this particular topic.
Like don't go to Wikipedia for an article
on Donald Trump or Joe Biden.
There's going to be, if I did,
I would go to maybe sections that don't have room
for insertion of bias or like the section on controversy
or accusations of racism or so on or sexual assault.
I usually not trust Wikipedia on those sections.
- Like math, that'll be great, right?
Wikipedia's great for that.
On many topics that do not have a single consensus truth,
it's structurally shifted towards
basically white Western liberals, woke whites, right?
Fundamentally, that's the demographic of the Wikipedia.
- What kind of articles do you think are affected by this?
Let's think about it.
- Everything that's not math and technology.
- I think that's too strong a statement.
So we can, like I said, war in Ukraine.
- Sure.
- I think that's too strong a statement.
There's so much, I guess I'm saying affected
to a large degree.
Even major battles in history, Battle of Stalingrad.
- Sure.
- That's not math.
So you think all of that is affected to a point
where it's not a trusted source?
- Absolutely.
If you look at the edit wars, for example,
on Stalin versus Hitler,
the tone on Hitler starts out legitimately and justifiably
as basically genocidal, maniacal dictator.
With Stalin, there's a fair number of Stalin apologists
that edit out mention of genocide
from the first few paragraphs.
- I am playing devil's advocate in part,
but I also am too under-informed to do the level of defense
I would like to provide for the wisdom that is there,
for the knowledge that is there.
I don't wanna use the word truth,
but for some level of knowledge that is there in Wikipedia,
I think I really worry about,
I know you don't mean this,
but a cynical interpretation of what you're saying,
which is don't trust anything written on Wikipedia.
I think you're being very consistent and eloquent
in the way you're describing the issues of Wikipedia,
and I don't have enough actual specific examples
to give where there is some still battle for truth
that's happening that's outside of the bias of society.
I just, I think if we naturally distrust
every source of information,
there is a general distrust of institutions
and a distrust of social knowledge
§21Transcript · 2:38:16–2:47:06
that leads to an apathy and a cynicism
about the world in general.
If you believe a lot of conspiracy theories,
you basically tune out from this collective journey
that we're on towards the truth,
and that's, it's not even just Wikipedia.
I just think Wikipedia was, at least for a time,
and maybe I tuned out,
maybe because I am too focused on computer science
and engineering and mathematics,
but to me, Wikipedia for a long time
was a source of calm escape
from the political battles of ideology.
And as you're quite eloquently describing,
it has become part of the battleground
of political ideology.
I just would love to know where the boundaries of that are.
- Glenn Greenwald has observed this.
Lots of other folks, for example,
I'm definitely not the only person who's observed
that Wikipedia-- - A lot of,
let me just state, because I'm sensing this,
and because of your eloquence and clear brilliance here,
that a lot of people are going to immediately agree with you.
- Okay.
- And this is what I am also troubled by.
This is not you, but I often see that people
will detect cynicism,
especially when it is phrased as eloquence,
it's yours, and will look at a natural dumbass like me
and think that Lex is just being naive.
Look at him trusting Wikipedia--
- Let me argue your side. - For his mainstream narrative.
- Let me argue your side, okay?
- Can you please do that,
'cause you could do that better than me?
- No, no, no, no, Lex, I enjoy talking to you.
- And I'm doing devil's advocate a little bit,
'cause I do really want to be,
I am afraid about the forces that are basically editors
of authority of talking down to people
and censoring information.
- Yeah, so let me first argue your side,
and then let me say something, okay?
Which is, what you are reacting to is,
oh, even those things I thought of as constants
are becoming variables.
Where is the terra firma?
If we cannot trust anything,
then everybody's just, it's anarchy and it's chaos,
like there's literally no consensus reality,
and anybody can say anything, and so on and so forth, right?
And I think that there's two possible deviations from,
let's say that the mainstream,
obviously people talk about QAnon, for example,
as this kind of thing, where people just make things up.
They just go totally,
quit supply chain independent from mainstream media.
And if mainstream media is a distorted gossamer
of quasi-truth, these guys go to just total fiction,
as opposed to like, right?
The alternative to QAnon is not BlueAnon, mainstream media,
but Satoshianon, okay?
Which is an upward deviation, okay?
Not a downward deviation to say
there is no such thing as truth,
but rather the upward deviation
is decentralized cryptographic truth,
not centralized corporate or government truth, okay?
- So how does the decentralization of Wikipedia look like?
- Great question.
It's this concept of the ledger of record.
First, whether you're Israeli or Palestinian,
Japanese or Chinese, Democrat or Republican,
those people agree on the state of the Bitcoin blockchain.
Hundreds of billions of dollars is managed without weapons,
okay, across tribes with wildly varying ideologies, right?
And what that means is that is a mechanism
for getting literally consensus.
It's called consensus, cryptographic consensus,
proof of work.
And when people can get consensus on this,
what they're getting consensus on are basically bytes
that determine who holds what Bitcoin.
This is exactly the kind of thing
people would fight wars over.
You know, for hundreds of billions of dollars,
let alone millions of dollars,
people will kill each other over that in the past, right?
So for hundreds of billions of dollars,
people can get consensus truth on this
in this highly adversarial environment, right?
So the first generalization of that is it says,
you can go from bytes that reflect
what Bitcoin somebody has,
to bytes that reflect what stocks, bonds,
other kinds of assets people have.
That's the entire DeFi, Ethereum, that whole space, okay?
Basically the premise is if you go from consensus
on one byte by induction,
you can go to consensus on N bytes,
depending on the cost of getting that consensus, right?
And almost anything digital can be represented,
you know, everything digital can be represented as bytes,
right?
So now you can get consensus
on certain kinds of digital information, Bitcoin,
but then also any kind of financial instrument.
And then the next generalization is
what I call the ledger of record.
Many kinds of facts can be put partially
or completely on chain.
It's not just proof of work and proof of stake.
There's things like proof of location,
proof of human, proof of this, proof of that.
The auditable oracles I talked about extended further.
Lots and lots of people are working on this, right?
Proof of solvency,
seeing that some actor has enough of a bank balance
to accommodate what they say they accommodate.
You can imagine many kinds of digital assertions
can be turned into proof of X and proof of Y.
You start putting those on chain,
you now have a library of partially
or completely provable facts, okay?
This is how you get consensus.
As opposed to having a white Western Wikipedia editor
or mostly white Western US media corporation
or the US government simply say what is true
in a centralized fashion.
- So do you think truth is such an easy thing
as you get to higher and higher questions of politics?
Is the problem that the consensus mechanism is being hacked
or is the problem that truth is a difficult thing
to figure out?
Was the 2020 election rigged or not?
Is the earth flat or not?
That's a scientific one.
That's how this is--
- My technical versus political truth spectrum, yeah.
- But even the earth, like, well, that one is,
yeah, nevermind, that's a bad example
because that is very,
you can rigorously show that the earth is not flat.
But what, there's some social phenomena,
political phenomena, philosophical one,
that will have a lot of debates, historical stuff,
about the different forces operating within Nazi Germany
and Stalinist Soviet Union.
I think there's probably a lot of,
yeah, like, historians debate about a lot of stuff,
like Blitz, the book that talks about the influence
of drugs in the Third Reich.
- Were they on meth or something?
- Yeah, there's a lot of debates about how truth,
what is the significance of meth on the actual behavior
and decisions of Hitler and so on.
So there's still a lot of debates.
Is it so easy to fix with decentralization,
I guess is the question.
- So I actually have, like, basically chapter two
of the "Network State" book is on essentially this topic.
And so it's like 70 pages or something like that.
So let me try to summarize what I think about on this.
The first is that there was an Onion article that came out,
I can't find it now anymore,
but it was about historians in the year 3000
writing about the late '90s and early 2000s.
And they're like, clearly Queen Brittany
was a very powerful monarch.
We can see how many girls around the world
worshipped her like a god.
And so, and it was very funny
because it was a plausible distortion
of the current society by a human civilization
picking through the rubble a thousand years later,
having no context on anything, right?
And it was a very thought provoking article
because it says, well, to what extent is that us
picking over Pompeii or the pyramids,
or even like the 1600s or the 1700s,
like a few hundred years ago,
we're basically sifting through artifacts.
And Selma Berger actually has this concept,
which is obvious, but it's also useful to have a name for it.
It's like, I think he calls it like dark history,
which is, and again, I might be getting this wrong,
but it's like only a small percentage
of what the Greeks wrote down,
has come to us to the present day, right?
So perhaps it's not just the winners who write history,
it's like the surviving records.
We have this extremely partial,
fragmentary record of history.
And sometimes there's some discovery
that rewrites the whole thing.
Do you know what like Gobekli Tepe is?
- Everything I know about that is from Rogan
'cause he's a huge fan of that kind of stuff.
- Yeah, so that like rewrites.
§22Transcript · 2:47:07–2:54:10
- And then there's a lot of debates there.
- There's a lot of debates.
And I think it's like the discovery of this site
in Northern Turkey that totally shifts our estimate
of like when civilization started,
maybe pushing it back many thousands of years further
in the past, right?
The past, it's like an inverse problem in physics, right?
We're trying to reconstruct this from limited information,
right?
It's like X-ray crystallography,
it's an inverse problem, right?
It's Plato's cave.
We're trying to reconstruct what the world looks like
outside from the shadows,
these fragments that have been given to us, right?
Or that we've found.
And so in that sense, as you find more information,
your estimate of the past changes, right?
Oh, wow, okay, that pushes back civilization
farther than we thought.
That one discovery just changes it.
- So you want to try to,
given all the gaps in the data we have,
you want to try to remove bias
from the process of trying to fill the gaps.
- Well, so here's the thing.
I think we're very close to the moment of it.
And so that's why it'll sound crazy when I say it now.
But our descendants,
I really do think of what the blockchain is
and cryptographically verifiable history
as being the next step after written history.
It's like on par with that.
Because anybody who has the record,
the math is not gonna change, right?
Math is constant across human time and space, right?
So, you know, the value of pi is constant.
That's one of the few constants
across all these different human civilizations, okay?
So somebody in the future,
assuming of course the digital record
is actually intact to that point,
because in theory digital stuff will persist.
In practice, you have lost data and floppy drives
and stuff like that.
In a sense, in some ways digital is more persistent,
in some ways physical is more persistent, okay?
But assuming we can figure out
the archival problem somehow,
then this future record,
at least it's internally consistent, right?
You can run a bunch of the equivalence of checksums, right?
The Bitcoin verification process,
just sum it all up and see that,
okay, it's F of G of H of X,
and boom, that at least is internally consistent, okay?
Again, it doesn't say that
all the people who reported it were,
you know, they could have put something on chain
that's false, but at least you know the metadata
is likely to be very difficult to falsify.
And this is a new tool.
It's really a new tool in terms of a robust history
that is expensive and technically challenging
to edit and alter.
And that is the alternative to the Stalin-esque
rewriting of history by centralized power.
- Yeah, I'm gonna have to do a lot of actually reading
and thinking about,
I'm actually, as you're talking,
I'm also thinking about the fact that I think
99% of my access to Wikipedia is on technical topics,
'cause I basically use it very similarly to Stack Overflow.
- And even there, it doesn't have unit tests.
For example, one thing-
- That's a good way to put it.
- Right, so one thing I remember,
again, I might be wrong on this,
but I recall that the Kelly criterion
it's actually quite a useful thing to know.
It's like how to optimally size your bets.
And you can have, given your kind of probability
that some investment pays off or assumed probability,
you can have bets that are too large,
bets that are too small.
Sometimes the Kelly criterion, it goes negative
and actually it says you should actually take leverage.
You're so sure this is a good outcome
that you should actually spend more
than your current bankroll
because you're gonna get a good result, right?
So it's a very sophisticated thing.
And as I recall, many sites on the internet
have the wrong equation.
And I believe that was reprinted on Wikipedia.
The wrong equation was put on Wikipedia
as a Kelly criterion for a while.
- That's funny.
- Okay, and so without unit tests,
see math is actually the kind of thing
that you could unit test, right?
You could literally have the assert
on the right-hand side today, right?
The modern version, we've got Jupiter,
we've got Replit, we've got all these things.
The modern version of Wikipedia,
there's sites like golden.com, for example,
there's a bunch of things.
I'm funding lots of stuff across the board on this.
And I'm not capitalizing these companies
or capitalize independently,
but I'm trying to see if,
not just talk about a better version.
It's hard to build something better.
So actually go and build it.
And where you want is assertions
that are actually reproduced.
You don't just have the equation there.
You have it written down in code.
You can hit enter, you can download the page,
you can rerun it.
It's reproducible.
- So the problem with that kind of reproducibility
is that it adds friction.
It's harder to put together articles
that do that kind of stuff,
unless you do an incredible job with UX and so on.
The thing that I think is interesting about Wikipedia
on the technical side is that without the unit tests,
without the assertions,
it still often does an incredible job
because the reason it's,
the people that write those articles,
and I've seen this also in Stack Overflow,
is are the people that care about this most.
And there's a pride to getting it right.
- Okay, so let me agree and disagree with that.
So absolutely, there's some good there.
There's, I mean, again,
do I think Wikipedia is a huge step up
from what preceded it in some ways on the technical topics?
Yes.
However, you're talking about the editing environment.
Like the markup for Wikipedia,
it's very mid 2000s.
It is not--
- It's a Craigslist.
- Yeah, exactly.
At a minimum, for example, it's not WYSIWYG.
So like Medium or something like that,
you know, or Ghost,
you can just go in and type
and it looks exactly like it looks on the page.
Here, you have to go to a markup language
where there can be editor conflicts
and you hit enter and someone is over in your edit
or something like that.
And you don't know how it looks on the page.
You might have to do a few, you know,
previews or what have you.
So number one, so editing,
you talk about bearish ending, that's the thing.
Number two is, given that it might be read a thousand times
for every one time it's written,
it is important to actually have
the mathematical things unit tested, if they can be,
given that we've got modern technology.
And that's something that's hard to like retrofit into this
because it's so kind of ossified, right?
- Right, there's the interface on every side for the editor,
even just for the editor to check that they're,
say the editor wants to get it right,
we make it, we wanna make it really,
or not really easy, but easier to check their work.
- That's right. - Like debugging,
like a nice ID for the--
- That's exactly right.
- Editing experience.
- That's right, and the thing about this is,
as I said, because the truth is a global constant,
but like incorrectness, you know, right, go ahead.
Every happy family.
- I love to think that like truth will have a nice debugger.
- Well, so here's, right?
So the thing is that what you can do is,
let's say you did have like a unit tested page
for everything that's on Wikipedia.
First of all, it makes a page more useful
because you can download it, you can run it,
you can import it and so on.
Second is it leads into,
one of the things that we can talk about,
I've sort of like a roadmap for building alternatives
to not just existing companies,
but to many existing US institutions
from media and tech companies to courts and government
and, you know, academia and nonprofits.
The Wikipedia discussion actually relates
to how you improve on academia, right?
§23Transcript · 2:54:14–3:02:22
And so academia right now, one of the big problems,
this is kind of related to the, oh boy,
okay, the current institutions,
we don't have trust in them.
Is that the answer is,
is that the answer to trust no one, right?
And I think the alternative is decentralized cryptographic
trust or verification.
How does that apply to academia?
First observation is we are seeing science
being abused in the name of quote unquote science, okay?
Capital S science is Maxwell's equations.
That's- - That's the good one.
- That's a good one, right?
Quote unquote science is a paper that came out last week.
And the key thing is that capital S science, real science,
is about independent replication, not prestigious citation.
That's the definition, like all the journal stuff,
the professors, all that stuff is just a superstructure
that was set on top to make experiments more reproducible.
And that superstructure is now like dominating
the underlying thing because people are just fixating
on the prestige and the citation
and not the replication, right?
So how does that apply here?
Once you start thinking about how many replications
does this thing have, Maxwell's equation,
I mean, there's trillions of replications.
Every time, us speaking into this microphone right now,
you know, we're testing, you know,
our theory of the electromagnetic field, right?
Or electromagnetic fields.
Every single time you pick up a cell phone
or use a computer, you're putting our knowledge
to the test, right?
Whereas some paper that came out last week
in Science or Nature may have zero independent replications,
yet it is being cited publicly as prestigious scientists
from Stanford and, you know, Harvard and MIT
all came up with X, right?
And so the prestige is a substitute
for the actual replication.
So there's a concept called Goodhart's Law, okay?
I'm just gonna quote it.
"When a measure becomes a target,
it ceases to be a good measure," okay?
So for example, backlinks on the web
were a good signal for Google to use
when people didn't know they were being used as a signal.
- Yeah, you talked about quantity versus quality
and PageRank was a pretty good approximation for quality.
- Yes.
- It's a fascinating thing, by the way, but yeah.
- It is a fascinating thing, we can talk about that.
But basically, once people know
that you're using this as a measure,
they will start to game it.
And so then you have this cycle
where sometimes you have a fixed point,
like Satoshi with "Proof of Work"
was miraculously able to come up with a game
where the gaming of it was difficult
without just buying more compute, right?
So it's actually, it's a rare kind of game
where knowledge of the game's rules
didn't allow people to game the game.
- Yeah.
- But--
- A brilliant way to put it, yeah.
Which is one of the reasons it's brilliant,
is that you can describe the game
and you can't mess with it.
- Exactly, it's very hard to come up with something
that's stable in this way.
There's actually, on the meta point,
gosh, there's a game where the rule of the game
is to change the rules, okay?
It is--
- You mean "Human Civilization" or what?
- Yeah, gosh, it is called something, NOMIC, okay?
- N-O-M-I-C?
- NOMIC is a game where the rule of the game
is to change the rules of the game.
At first, that seems insane.
Then you realize that's Congress.
- Yeah.
- Right?
It is so meta because there are laws for elections
that elect the editors of those laws
who then change the laws that get them elected
with gerrymandering and other stuff, right?
That's a bad way of thinking about it.
The other way of thinking about it is
this is what every software engineer is doing.
You are constantly, quote, "changing the rules"
by editing software and pushing code updates and so on, right?
So many games devolve into the metagame
of who writes the rules of the game, right?
Become essentially games of NOMIC.
Proof of Work is so amazing
because it didn't devolve in such a way, right?
It became very hard to rewrite the rules
once they got set up.
Very financially and technically expensive.
That's not to say it will always be like that,
but it's very hard to change.
- If we could take a small tangent,
we'll return to academia.
I'd love to ask you about how to fix the media as well
after we fix academia.
- Yeah, these are all actually related.
- Yeah, Wikipedia, media, and academia
are all related to the question of
independent replication versus prestigious citation.
- Sure, so the problem is authority and prestige
as you see it from academia and the media
and Wikipedia with the editors.
We have to have a mechanism where sort of
the data and the reproducibility
is what dominates the discourse.
- That's right, and so one way of thinking about this is,
I've said this in, I think I tweeted this,
Western civilization actually has
a break-classification emergency button.
It's called decentralization, right?
Martin Luther had it.
When the Catholic Church was too ossified and centralized,
decentralized with the Protestant Reformation, okay?
He said, at the time, people were able to
pay for indulgences, like that is to say they could sin.
They could say, okay, I sinned five times yesterday.
Here's the equivalent of 50 bucks.
Okay, I'm done with my sin.
I can go and sin some more.
Okay, they should really buy their way out of sin, okay?
Now people debate as to how frequent
those indulgences were, but these are one of the things
he invade against in the 95 Theses.
So decentralization, boom, break away
from this ossified church, start something new, right?
And in theory, the "religious wars" of the 1600s
that ensued were about things like
where the wafer was the body of Christ or what have you,
but in part, they were also about power
and whether the centralized entity would write all the rules
or the decentralized one would.
And so what happened was, obviously Catholicism still exists
but Protestantism also exists, okay?
And similarly, here you've got this ossified
central institution where, forget about,
I mean, there's complicated studies
that are difficult to summarize,
but when you have the science saying
masks don't work and then they do, okay?
Which everybody saw.
And this is not like, everybody knew
that there was not like some massive study
that came out that changed our perspective on mask wearing.
It was something that was just insistently asserted
as this is what the science says.
And then without any acknowledgement,
the science said something different the next day, right?
I remember 'cause I was in the middle of this debate.
And I think you could justify masks early in the pandemic
as a useful precaution and then later,
post-vaccination, perhaps not necessary.
I think that's like the rational way of thinking about it.
But the point was that such levels of uncertainty
were not acknowledged.
Instead, people were basically lying in the name of science
and public policy, it wasn't public health,
it was political health, okay?
So something like that, you're just spending
down all the credibility of an institution
for basically nothing, okay?
And so in such a circumstance, what do you do?
Break glass, decentralize.
What does that look like?
Okay, so let me describe what I call cryptoscience
by analogy to crypto, just like there's fiat science,
cryptoscience, right, fiat economics, okay?
So in any experiment, any paper when it comes out, right,
you can sort of divide it into the analog to digital
and the purely digital, okay?
So the analog to digital is you're running some instruments,
you're getting some data, okay?
And then once you've got the data,
you're generating figures and tables and text
and a PDF from that data, right?
Leave aside the data collection step for now,
I'll come back to that, right?
Just the purely digital part,
what does the ideal quote academic paper look like
in 2022, 2023?
First, there's this concept called reproducible research,
okay?
Reproducible research is the idea that the PDF
should be regenerated from the data and code, okay?
So you should be able to hit enter and regenerate it.
Why is this really important as a concept?
§24Transcript · 3:02:24–3:09:57
John Claire Boo and Dave Donahoe at Stanford 20 years ago
pioneered this in stats because the text alone
often doesn't describe every parameter
that goes into a figure or something, right?
You kind of sometimes just need to look at the code
and then it's easy and without that, it's hard, okay?
So reproducible research means you've regenerate the PDF
from the code and the data, you hit enter, okay?
Now, one issue is that many papers out there
in science, nature, et cetera,
are not reproducible research.
Moreover, the data isn't even public.
Moreover, sometimes the paper isn't even public.
The open access movement has been fighting this
for the last 20 something years.
There's various levels of this like green and gold,
open access, okay?
So the first step is the code, the data,
and the PDF go on chain, step number one, okay?
The second thing is once you've got,
so you can, anybody who is,
and that could be the Ethereum chain,
it could be its own dedicated chain, whatever, okay?
It could be something where there's just the URLs
are on the Ethereum chain and stored on Filecoin,
many different implementations,
but let's call that on chain broadly, okay?
Not just online, on chain.
When it's on chain, it's public and anybody can get it.
So that's first.
Second is once you've got something
where you can regenerate the code,
or the PDF from the code and the data on chain, guess what?
You can have citations between two papers
turn into import statements.
- Yeah, that's funny.
- That's cool, right?
So now you're not just getting composable finance,
like DeFi, where you have like one interest rate calculator
calling another, you have composable science.
And now you can say this paper on this,
especially in ML, right?
You'll often cite a previous paper in its benchmark
or its method, right?
You're gonna wanna scatter plot sometimes your paper,
your algorithm versus theirs on the same dataset.
That is facilitated if their entire paper
is reproducible research that is generated.
You can just literally import that Python
and then you can generate your figure off of it, right?
Moreover, think about how that aids reproducibility
because you don't have to reproduce in the literal sense,
every single snippet of code that they did,
you can literally use their code, import it, okay?
People start compounding on each other.
It's better science, okay?
Now I talked about this, but actually there's a few folks
who have been actually building this.
So there's usescholar.org,
which actually has a demo of this,
like just a V1 kind of prototype
where it shows two stats papers on chain
and one of them is citing the other
with an import statement.
There's also a thing like called I think dsci.com,
which is trying to do this, right?
Decentralized science.
So this itself changes how we think about papers.
And actually, by the way,
the inspiration for PageRank was actually citations.
It was like the impact factor out of academia.
That's where Larry Page and Sergey Brin
got the concept out of, right?
So now you've got a web of citations
that are import statements on chain.
In theory, you could track back a paper
all the way back to its antecedents, okay?
So if it's citing something,
you can now look it up and look it up and look it up.
And a surprising number of papers actually,
you know, their antecedents don't terminate
or the original source says something different
or it just kind of got garbled like a telephone game.
And, you know, there's this famous thing on like the spinach,
like it does actually have iron in it
or something like that.
I forget the details on this story,
but it was something where you track back the citations
and people are contradicting each other, okay?
But it's just something that just gets copy pasted
and it's a fact that's not actually a fact
'cause it's not audited properly.
This allows you to cheaply audit, in theory,
all the way back to Maxwell or Newton
or something like that, okay?
Now, what I'm describing is a big problem,
but it's a finite problem.
It's essentially taking all the important papers
and putting them on chain.
It's about the scale of, let's say, Wikipedia, okay?
So it's like, I don't know, a few hundred thousand,
a few million papers.
I don't know the exact number,
but it'll be out of that level, okay?
So now you've got, number one,
these things that are on chain, okay?
Number two, you've turned citations into import statements.
Number three, anybody can now, at a minimum,
download that code.
And while they may not have the instruments,
and I'll come back to that point,
while they may not have the instruments,
they can do internal checks,
the Benford's Law stuff we were just talking about.
You can internally check the consistency
of these tables and graphs,
and often you'll find fraud
or things that don't add up that way,
'cause all the code and the data is there, right?
And now you've made it so that anybody in Brazil,
in India, in Nigeria, they may not have an academic,
you know, like a library access,
but they can get into this, all right?
Now, how do you fund all of this?
Well, good thing is crypto actually allows tools
for that as well.
Andrew Huberman and others have started doing things
like with NFTs to fund their lab.
I can talk about the funding aspect.
There's things like researchhub.com,
which are trying to issue tokens for labs,
but a lab isn't that expensive to fund.
Maybe it's a few hundred thousand, a few million a year,
depending on where you are.
Crypto does generate money.
And so you can probably imagine various tools,
whether it's tokens or NFTs
or something like that to fund.
Finally, what this does is it is not QAnon, right?
It is not saying don't trust anybody.
Neither is it just trust
the centralized academic establishment.
Instead it's saying trust because you can verify,
because we can download things and run them.
The crucial thing that I'm assuming here
is the billions of supercomputers around the world
that we have, all the MacBooks and iPhones
that can crank through lots and lots of computation.
So everything digital, we can verify it locally, okay?
Now, there's one last step,
which is I mentioned the instruments, right?
Whether it's your sequencing machine
or your accelerometer or something like that
is generating the data that you are reporting in your paper
when you put it on chain, okay?
Basically you think of that as the analog digital interface.
We can cryptify that too, why?
For example, an Illumina sequencing machine
has an experiment manifest.
And when that's written to,
there's a website called NCBI,
National Center for Biotechnology Information.
You can see the experiment metadata
on various sequencing runs.
It'll tell you what instrument and what time it was run
and who ran it and so on and so forth, okay?
What that does is it allows you to correct
for things like batch effects.
Sometimes you will sequence on this day and the next day
and maybe the humidity or something like that
makes it look like there's a statistically significant
difference between your two results,
but it was just actually batch effects, okay?
What's my point?
Point is, if you have a crypto instrument,
you can have various hashes and stuff of the data
as a chain of custody for the data itself
that are streamed and written on chain
that the manufacturer can program into this.
For anything that's really, and you might say,
"Oh boy, boy, that's overkill," right?
I'm saying actually not.
You know why?
If you're doing a study whose results
are going to be used to influence a policy
that's gonna control the lives of millions of people,
every single step has to be totally audible.
You need the glass box model.
You need to be able to go back to the raw data.
You need to be able to interrogate that.
And again, anybody who's a good scientist
will embrace this, right?
- Yeah, so first of all, that was a brilliant exposition
of a future of science that I would love to see.
The pushback I'll provide, which is not really a pushback,
is like what you describe is so much better
than what we currently have that I think
a lot of people would say any of the sub-steps
you suggest are already going to be a huge improvement.
So even just sharing the code.
§25Transcript · 3:10:01–3:18:18
- Yes.
- Or sharing the data.
You said, I think it would surprise people how often--
- It's hard to get data.
- It is, like the actual data or specifics
or a large number of the parameters,
not you'll share like one or two parameters
that were involved with running the experiment.
You won't mention the machines involved,
except maybe at a high level, but the versions and so on.
The dates when the experiments were run,
you don't mention any of this kind of stuff.
So there's several ways to fix this.
And one of them, I think, implied in what you're describing
is a culture that says it's not okay.
- Exactly.
- To like, so first of all, there should be,
even if it's not perfectly unchained
to where you can automatically import all the way to Newton,
just even the act of sharing the code, sharing the data,
maybe in a way that's not perfectly integrated
into a larger structure is already a very big positive step.
- Yeah.
- I'm saying like, if you don't do this,
then this doesn't count.
And because in general, I think my worry,
as somebody who's a programmer, who's OCD,
I love the picture you paint
that you can just import everything
and it automatically checks everything.
My problem is that makes incremental science easier
and revolutionary science harder.
- Oh, I actually very much disagree with that.
- I would love to hear your argument.
Let me just kind of elaborate.
- Sure, sure.
- Why, sometimes you have to think
in this gray area of fuzziness
when you're thinking in totally novel ideas
and when you have to concretize in data.
Like some of the greatest papers ever written
are to don't have data.
They're in the space of ideas almost.
Like you're kind of sketching stuff
and there could be errors,
but like Einstein himself with the famous five papers,
I mean, they're really strong, but they're fuzzy.
They're a little bit fuzzy.
And so I think, even like the Gann paper,
you're often thinking of like new data sets, new ideas.
And I think maybe as a step after the paper is written,
you could probably concretize it,
integrate it into the rest of science.
- Sure.
- Like you shouldn't feel that pressure, I guess, early on.
- Well, I mean, there's different,
each of the steps that I'm talking about, right?
There's like the data being public and everything.
Just having the paper being public, that's like V1, right?
Then you have the thing being regenerated from code and data,
like the PDF being regenerated from code and data.
Then you have the citations as import statements.
Then you have the full citation graph
as an import statement.
So you just follow it all the way back, right?
And now you have, that gives you audibility.
Then you have the off-chain,
you know, the analog digital crypto custody, right?
Like where you're hashing things and streaming things.
So you have the chain of custody.
Each of those is kind of like a level up
and adds to complexity,
but it also adds to the audibility and the verifiability
and the reproducibility.
But, you know, one thing I'd say,
I wanted to respond to that you said was
that you think this would be good for incremental,
but not innovative.
Actually, I think it's quite the opposite.
I think academia is institutional and it's not innovative.
For example, NIH has this graph,
which is like, I think it's age of recipients
of R01 grants, okay?
And what it shows is basically it's like a hump
that moves over time,
roughly plus one year forward for the average age
as the year moves on, okay?
I'll see if I can find the GIF.
What this, why is this?
Let me see if I can find it actually.
Look at this movie just for a second.
It's a ridiculously powerful movie and it's 30 seconds.
I just sent it in, WhatsApp.
The name of the video is "Age Distribution
of NIH Principal Investigators and Medical School Faculty."
And it starts out on the X-axis is age
with the distribution and percent of PIs.
And from early 1980s, moving one year at a time.
And the mean of the distribution is moving slowly,
approximately as Belagio said, about one year.
- Per year.
- Per year.
- And this is 10 years ago.
One year in age per year of time.
- And notice how, first of all,
the average age is moving way upward
before you become an NHPI.
Second is, it's a cohort of guys, people,
who are just awarding grants to each other.
That's clearly what's happening.
That's the underlying dynamic.
They're not awarding grants to folks who are much younger,
because those folks haven't proven themselves yet.
So this is what happens when you get prestigious citation
rather than independent replication.
The age just keeps creeping up.
And this was 10 years ago, and it's gotten even worse.
It's become even more gerontocratic,
even more hidebound, right?
And so the thing is, the structures
that Vannevar Bush and others set up,
the entire post-war science establishment,
one thing I'll often find is people will say,
"Baljeet, the government hath granted us the internet
and self-driving cars and space flight and so on.
How can you possibly be against the US government,
kneel and repent for its bounty?"
And really, the reason they kind of,
they don't say it quite in that way,
but that's really the underpinning kind of thing,
because they've replaced GOD with GOV.
They really think of the US government as God.
The conservative will think of the US government
as the all-powerful military abroad,
and the progressive will think of it
as the benign, all-powerful, nurturing parent at home.
But in this context, they're like,
"How come you as some tech bro could possibly think
you could ever do basic science
without the funding of the US government?
Has it not developed all basic science?"
And the answer to this is actually to say,
"Well, what if we go further back than 1950?
Did science happen before 1950?"
Well, I think it did.
Bernoulli and Maxwell and Newton,
were they funded by NSF?
No, they weren't.
Were aviation, railroads, automobiles,
gigantic industries that arose,
and both were stimulated by
and stimulated development of pure science?
Did they, were they funded by NSF?
No, they were not.
Therefore, NSF is not a necessary condition
for the presence of science,
neither is even the United States.
Obviously, a lot of these discoveries,
Newton was before, I believe he was before the American,
hold on, let me just find the exact,
it's actually less old than people think.
Okay, so Newton died 1727.
So I knew that it was in the 1700s.
So Newton was before the American Revolution, right?
Obviously, that meant huge innovations could happen
before the US government, before NIH, before NSF, right?
Which means they are not a necessary condition, number one.
That itself is crucial because a lot of people say,
"The government is necessary for basic science."
It is not necessary for basic science.
It is one possible catalyst.
And I would argue that mid-century, it was okay,
because mid-century was the time when,
the middle of the centralized century.
1933, 1945, 1969, you have Hoover Dam,
you have the Manhattan Project, you have Apollo.
That generation was acclimatized
to a centralized US government
that could accomplish great things,
probably because technology favored centralization
going into 1950 and then started favoring decentralization
going out of it.
I've talked about this in the book,
Sovereign Individual has talked about this,
but very roughly, you go up into 1950
and you have mass media and mass production
and just centralization of all kinds,
giant nation states slugging it out on the world stage.
And you go out in 1950 and you get cable news
and personal computers and the internet
and mobile phones and cryptocurrency,
and you have the decentralization.
And so this entire centralized scientific establishment
was set up at the peak of the centralized century.
And it might've been the right thing to do at that time,
but is now showing its age.
And it's no longer actually geared up for what we have.
Where are the huge innovations coming out of?
Well, Satoshi Nakamoto was not, to our knowledge,
a professor, right?
§26Transcript · 3:18:20–3:26:15
That's this revolutionary thing that came outside of it.
Early in the pandemic,
there was something called project-evidence.github.io,
which accumulated all of the evidence
for the coronavirus possibly having been a lab leak,
when that was a very controversial thing to discuss.
Alina Chan, to her credit,
Matt Ridley and Alina Chan have written this book
on whether the coronavirus was a lab leak or not.
I think it's plausible that it was.
I can't say I'm 100% sure,
but I think it's at least,
it certainly, it is a hypothesis worthy of discussion.
Okay?
Though, of course, it's got political overtones.
Point being that the pseudonymous online publication
at project-evidence.github.io
happened when it was taboo to do so.
So we're back to the age of pseudonymous publication
where only the arguments can be argued with.
The person can't be attacked.
Okay?
This is actually something that used to happen in the past.
Like, you know, someone,
there's a famous story where Newton solved a problem
and someone said, "I know the lion by his claw,"
or something like that, right?
People used to do pseudonymous publication in the past
so that they would be judged on part
by their scientific ideas
and not the person themselves, right?
And so, I do disagree that this is the incremental stuff.
This is actually the innovative stuff.
The incremental stuff is gonna be
the institutional gerontocracy that's academia,
where it's like, you know, do you know who I am?
I'm a Harvard professor.
- Yeah, I don't, I think I agree with everything you said,
but I'm not gonna get stuck on technicalities
because I think I was referring to your vision
of data sets and importing code.
- Sure.
- And so that forces just knowing how code works,
it forces a structure,
and structure usually favors incremental progress.
Like, if you fork code,
you're not going to, it decentrifies revolution.
You want to go from scratch.
- Okay, so I understand your point there, okay?
And I also agree that some papers,
like Francis Crick on the Klaustrum,
or others are theoretical.
They're more about like where to dig than the data itself,
and so on and so forth, right?
So, I agree with that.
Still, I don't, the counterargument is,
rather than a thousand people reading this paper
to try to rebuild the whole thing and do it with errors,
when they can just import,
they can more easily build upon what others have done, right?
- Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
So the paper should be forkable.
- Well, yeah, yeah.
So here's why, you know, like,
Python has this concept of batteries included
for the standard library, right?
Because it lets you just import, import, import,
and just get to work, right?
That means you can fly.
Whereas if you couldn't do all those things,
and you had to rewrite string handling,
you would only be able to do incremental things.
Libraries actually allow for greater innovation.
That's my counter.
- I think you create, I think that paints a picture.
I hope that's a picture that fits with science.
It certainly does.
It fits with code very well.
I just wonder how much of science can be that,
which is you import, how much of it is possible to do that?
Certainly for the things I work on, you can,
which is the machine learning world,
all the computer science world.
But whether you can do that for, all right,
you can think biology, it seems to, yes, I think so.
Chemistry, I think so.
And then you start getting into weird stuff like psychology,
which some people don't even think is a science.
No, just love for my psychology friends.
I think as you get farther and farther away
from things that are like hard technical fields,
it starts getting tougher and tougher and tougher
to have like importable code.
- Okay, so let me give the strong form version, right?
So there's a guy who I think is a great machine learning guy,
creator of actually Keras,
who he disagrees with me on Francois Chalut.
- Yeah, he's been on this podcast twice.
- Okay, great.
So he disagrees-
- I disagree with him on a lot of stuff.
- Yes, me too.
I think we have mutual respect.
You know, follow each other on Twitter, whatever.
- I think, yes, I think he does respect and like you.
- Here's something which I totally agree with him on.
And he actually got like trolled or attacked for this,
but I completely agree.
Within 10, 20 years,
nearly every branch of science will be,
for all intents and purposes, a branch of computer science.
Computational physics, computational chemistry,
computational biology, computational medicine,
even computational archeology,
realistic simulations, big data analysis,
and ML everywhere.
That to me is incredibly obvious why.
First of all, all we're doing every day
is PDFs and data analysis on a computer, right?
And so every single one of those areas
can be reduced to the analog to digital step,
and then it's all digital.
Then you're flying, you're in the cloud, right?
- Did he put a date?
Did he say how long or--
- 10 to 20 years, he was saying.
- 10, 20 years.
- I mean, arguably it's already there, right?
And here's the thing.
You were saying, well, you know,
you might drop off when you hit psychology or history.
Actually, I think it's the softer sciences
that are gonna harden up.
Why?
One of the things I talk about a lot in the book is,
for example, with history,
the concept of crypto history makes history computable.
One way of thinking about it is,
remember my Britney Spears example, right?
Where Queen Britney, right?
Okay, so at first it's kind of a funny thing to say
a computer scientist's term for history is the log files,
until we realized that what would a future historian,
how would they write about the history of the 2010s?
Well, a huge part of that history occurred
on the servers of Twitter and Facebook.
So now you go from like a log file,
which is just the individual record
of like one server's action,
to a decade worth of data on literally billions of people.
All of their online lives, like arguably,
that's why I say that's like actually
what the written history was of the 2010s
was this giant digital history.
As you go to the 2020s and the 2030s,
more of that is gonna move from merely online to on chain
and then cryptographically verifiable.
So that soft subject of history becomes something
that you can calculate things like Google trends
and Ngrams and stuff like that.
- Yes, beautifully put.
Then I would venture to say that Donald Trump
was erased from history when he was removed from Twitter
and many social platforms and all his tweets were gone.
- I think it's someone who has an archive of it,
but yeah, I understand your point.
- Yeah, well, as the flood of data
about each individual increases censorship,
it becomes much more difficult
to actually have an archive of stuff.
But yes, for important people
like a president of the United States, yes.
Let me on that topic ask you about Trump.
You were considered for a position as FDA commissioner
in the Trump administration.
And I think in terms of the network state,
in terms of the digital world,
one of the seminal acts in the history of that
was the banning of Trump from Twitter.
Can you make the case for it and against it?
- Sure, so first let me talk about the FDA thing.
So I was considered for a senior role at FDA,
but I do believe that, and this is a whole topic,
we can talk about the FDA.
I do believe that just as it was easier to create Bitcoin
than to reform the Fed,
reforming the Fed basically still hasn't happened.
So just as it was easier to create Bitcoin
than to reform the Fed,
it will literally be easier to start a new country
than to reform the FDA.
It may take 10 or 20 years.
I mean, think about Bitcoin,
it's only about 13 years old, right?
It may take 10 or 20 years to start a new network state
with a different biomedical policy.
But that is how we get out from
this perhaps the single worst thing in the world,
which is harmonization, regulatory harmonization.
- Can you describe regulatory harmonization?
§27Transcript · 3:26:18–3:33:35
- Regulatory harmonization is the mechanism
by which US regulators impose the need
their regulations on the entire world.
So basically you have a monopoly by US regulators.
This is not just the FDA, it is SEC and FAA
and so on and so forth.
And for the same reason that a small company
will use Facebook login,
they will outsource their login to Facebook.
A small country will outsource their regulation to the USA.
Okay, with all the attendant issues,
because I mean, you know the names of some politicians.
Can you name a single regulator at the FDA?
No, right?
Yet they will brag on their website that they regulate,
I forget the exact numbers,
I think it's like 25 cents out of every dollar,
something along those lines, okay?
It's like double digits, okay?
That's a pretty big deal.
And the thing about this is,
people will talk about quote, our democracy and so on.
But many of the positions in quote, our democracy
are actually not subject to democratic accountability.
You have tenured professors
and you have tax exempt colleges.
You have the Salzburgers, the New York Times
who have dual class stock.
You have a bunch of positions
that are out of the reach of the electorate.
And that includes regulators who have career tenure
after just a few years of
not necessarily even continuous service.
So they're not accountable to the electorate.
They're not named by the press.
And they also aren't accountable to the market
because you've got essentially uniform global regulations.
Now, the thing about this is,
it's not just a government thing.
It's a regulatory capture thing.
Big pharma companies like this as well.
Why?
Because they can just get their approval in the US
and then they can export to the rest of the world.
I understand where that comes from as a corporate executive.
It's such a pain to get access in one place.
So there's a team up though,
between the giant company and the giant government
to box out all the small startups
and all the small countries and lots of small innovation.
There are cracks in this now.
The FDA did not acquit itself well during the pandemic.
For example, it denied, I mean, there's so many issues,
but one of the things that even actually
New York Times reported,
the reason that people thought there were no COVID cases
in the US early in the pandemic
was because the FDA was denying people
the ability to run COVID tests.
And the emergency use authorization was,
emergency should mean like right now, right?
But it was not, it was just taking forever.
And so some labs did civil disobedience
and they just disobeyed the FDA
and just went and tested academic labs
with threat of federal penalties.
'Cause that's what they are.
They're like the police, okay?
And so we're sort of retroactively granted immunity
because NYT went and ran a positive story on them.
So NYT's authority is usually greater than that of FDA.
If they come into a conflict, NYT runs stories,
then FDA kind of gets spanked, right?
And it's not, probably neither party
would normally think of themselves that way.
But if you look at it,
when NYT goes and runs stories on a company,
it names all the executives and they get all hit.
When it runs stories on a regulator,
it just treats the regulator usually
as if it was just some abstract entity.
It's Zuckerberg's Facebook, but you can't name,
the people who the career bureaucrats at FDA.
Interesting, right?
- It's very interesting.
- It's a very important point.
Like that person who's like named
and their face is known.
Like you, just as an example,
you know Zuckerberg's face and name.
Most people don't know Arthur G. Sulzberger.
They couldn't recognize him, right?
Yet he's a guy who's inherited the New York Times company
from his father's father's father.
That is unaccountable power.
It's not that they get great coverage,
it's that they get no coverage.
You don't even think about them, right?
And so it's invisibility, right?
- There's some aspect why Fauci was very interesting.
- 'Cause he was a public face.
- In my recent memory, there's not been many faces
of scientific policy, of science policy.
- Yeah.
- And he became the face of that.
And you know, as there's some of his meme,
which is basically saying that he is science
or to some people represents science.
But in the--
- Or quote unquote science or whatever, yeah.
The positive aspect of that is that there is accountability
when there's a face like that.
- Right, but you can also see the Fauci example shows you
why a lot of these folks do not want to be public
because they enter a political and media minefield.
I'm actually sympathetic to that aspect of it.
What I'm not sympathetic to is the concept that in 2022,
that the unelected, unfireable, anonymous American regulator
should be able to impose regulatory policy
for the entire world.
We are not the world of 1945.
It is not something where these other countries
are even consciously consenting to that world.
Just as give an example,
there's a concept called challenge trials, okay?
The Moderna vaccine was available very, very early
in the pandemic.
You can just synthesize it from the sequence.
And challenge trials would have meant that people
who are healthy volunteers, okay?
They could have been soldiers, for example, of varying ages
who are there to take a risk their lives
for their country potentially, okay?
It could have been just healthy volunteers,
not necessarily soldiers, just patriots of whatever kind
in any country, not just the US.
But those healthy volunteers could have gone.
And at the early stages of the pandemic,
we didn't know exactly how lethal it was gonna be
because Li Wenliang and 30-somethings in China
were dying from this.
It seemed like it could be far worse.
- How lethal the virus would be.
- Yeah, it may be, by the way,
that those who are the most susceptible to the virus
died faster earlier.
It's as if you can imagine a model
where those who were exposed
and had the lowest susceptibility
also had the highest severity
and died in greater numbers early on.
If you look at the graph,
like deaths from COVID were exponential
going into about April 2020
and then leveled off to about 7,500, 10,000 a day
and then kind of fell, right?
But it could have gone to 75,000 at the beginning.
So we didn't know how serious it was.
So this would have been a real risk
that these people would have been taking,
but here's what they would have gotten for that.
Basically, in a challenge trial,
somebody would have been given the vaccine
and then exposed to the virus
and then put under observation.
And then that would have given you all the data
'cause ultimately the synthesis of the thing,
I mean, yes, you do need to scale up synthesis
and manufacturing and what have you,
but the information of whether it worked or not
and was safe and effective,
like that could have been gathered expeditiously
with volunteers for challenge trials.
- And you think there'd be a large number of volunteers?
- Absolutely.
- What's the concern there?
Is there an ethical concern of taking on volunteers?
- Well, so let me put it like this.
Had we done that, we could have had vaccines early enough
to save the lives of like a million Americans,
especially seniors and so on, okay?
Soldiers and more generally first responders and others,
I do believe there's folks who would have stepped up
to take that risk.
- The heroes walk among us.
- Yeah, that's right.
Like if military service is something
which is ritualized thing, people are paid for it,
but they're not paid that much.
They're really paid in honor and in duty and patriotism.
That is actually the kind of thing
where I do believe some fraction of those folks
would have raised their hand for this important task.
I don't know how many of them,
but I do think that volunteers would have been there.
There's probably some empirical test of that,
which is there's a challenge trials website.
There's a Harvard prof who put out this proposal
early in the pandemic
and he could tell you how many volunteers he got.
§28Transcript · 3:33:38–3:41:47
But something like that could have just shortened
the time from pandemic to functional vaccine, right?
To days even, if you'd actually really act on it.
The fact that that didn't happen
and that the Chinese solution of lockdown,
that actually, at the beginning,
people thought the state could potentially stop the virus,
stop people in place.
It turned out to be more contagious than that.
Basically no NPI, no non-pharmaceutical intervention
really turned out to work that much, right?
And actually at the very beginning of the pandemic,
I said something like, look,
it's actually February 3rd, about a month before people,
I was just watching what was going on in China.
I saw that they were doing digital quarantine,
like using WeChat codes to block people off and so on.
I didn't know what was gonna happen, but I said, look,
if the coronavirus goes pandemic and it seems it may,
the extreme edge case becomes the new normal.
It's every debate we've had on surveillance,
deplatforming and centralization accelerated.
Pandemic means emergency powers for the state,
even more than terrorism or crime.
And sometimes a solution creates the next problem.
My rough forecast of the future,
the coronavirus results in quarantines,
nationalism, centralization.
And this may actually work to stop the spread,
but once under control,
states will not see their powers, so we decentralize.
And I didn't know whether it was gonna stop the spread,
but I knew that they were gonna try to do it, right?
And look, it's hard to call every single thing right,
and I'm sure someone will find some errors,
but in general, I think that was actually pretty good
for like early February of 2020, right?
So it's my point though.
The point is, rather than copying Chinese lockdown,
we should have had were different regimes around the world.
To some extent, Sweden defected from this, right?
They had like no lockdowns or what have you.
But really the axis that people were talking about
was lockdown versus no lockdown.
The real axis should have been challenge trials
versus no challenge trials.
We could have had that in days, okay?
And those are two examples on both vaccines and testing.
There's so many more that I can point to.
- So those are kind of decentralized innovations,
and that's what FDA should stand for.
- FDA can stand for it.
- Or something like FDA, right?
- Ah, so let's talk about that, right?
Something like FDA.
So this is very important.
In general, the way I try to think about things is V1, V2,
V3, as we've talked about a few times.
- Right, so FDA, V.
- Well, right, so what was before FDA, right?
So there was both good and bad before FDA,
'cause people don't necessarily have
the right model of the past, okay?
So if you ask people what was there before the FDA,
they'll say, "Oh, and by the way,
"the FDA itself omits the, right?
"Their pronouns are just FDA, FDA."
Okay, so, but basically-
- Why is that important?
- It's just something where-
- Well, why is that either humorous or interesting to you?
- They have a sort of in-group lingo
where when you are kind of talking about them
the way that they talk about themselves,
it is something that kind of piques interest.
It's kind of like, you know, in LA,
people say the 101 or the, you know, right?
Whereas in Northern California, they'll say 101.
Or people from Nevada will say Nevada, right?
It just instantly marks you as like insider or outsider,
okay, in terms of how the language works, right?
And that's, go ahead.
- I mean, it just makes me sad,
because that lingo is part of the mechanism
which creates the silo, the bubble of particular thoughts,
and that ultimately deviates from the truth
because you're not open to new ideas.
- I think it's actually like, you know,
in "Glorious Bastards" there's a scene in the bar.
Do you wanna talk about it?
- No, but it's good.
You can't, just to censor you,
this is like a Wikipedia podcast, it's like Wikipedia.
You can't cite Quentin Tarantino films, no.
- Okay, okay, okay.
- Sorry, take me back there.
- Basically, like English start going like
one, two, three, four, five.
And I believe it's like the Germans start with like the thumb
- Something that you'd never know, right?
I may be misremembering it, but I think that's right.
Okay, so that's like--
- FDA's got the lingo, all right.
- Right, so FDA's got the lingo.
So coming back up, basically, just talk about FDA
and then come back to your question on the platform.
- So what was V0, FDA, what's V1?
What does the future look like?
- V1 was quote, patent medicines, okay?
That's something so people say.
But V1 was also Banting and Best, okay?
Banting and Best, they won the Nobel Prize
in the early 1920s, right?
Why?
They came up with the idea for insulin supplementation
to treat diabetes.
And they came up with a concept,
they experimented on dogs, they did self-experimentation,
they had healthy volunteers,
they experimented with the formulation as well, right?
Because just like you'd have like a web app and a mobile app,
maybe a command line app, you could have, you know,
a drug that's administered orally or via injection
or cream or, you know, there's different formulations,
right, dosage, all that stuff,
they could just like iterate on, okay,
with willing doctor, willing patient.
These, you know, these folks who were affected
just sprang out of bed,
the insulin supplementation was working for them.
And within a couple of years,
they had won the Nobel Prize and Eli Lilly
had scaled production
for the entire North American continent, okay?
So that was a time when pharma moved at the speed of software
when it was willing buyer, willing seller, okay?
Because the past is demonized
as something that our glorious regulatory agency
is protecting us from, okay?
But there's so many ways
in which what it's really protecting you from
is being healthy, okay?
As, you know, I mean, there's a zillion examples of this,
I won't be able to recapitulate all of them
just in this podcast,
but if you look at a post that I've got,
it's called "Regulation, Disruption, and the Future,
Technologies of 2013," Coursera PDF, okay?
This lecture, which I'll kind of link it here
so you can maybe put in the show notes if you want,
this goes through like a dozen different examples
of crazy things the FDA did
from the kind of stuff that was dramatized
in Dallas Buyers Club,
where they were preventing people from getting AIDS drugs
to, you know, their, you know, various attacks on,
you know, quote, "raw milk,"
where they were basically saying,
here's a quote from FDA, you know, filing in 2010,
"There's no generalized right to bodily and physical health.
There's no right to consume or feed children
any particular food.
There's no fundamental right to freedom of contract."
They basically feel like they own you.
You're not allowed to make your own decisions
about your food.
There's no generalized right to bodily and physical health,
direct quote from their like written kind of thing, okay?
The general frame is usually that FDA says
it's protecting you from the big bad company,
but really what it's doing is it's preventing you
from opting out, okay?
Now, with that said,
and this is where I'm talking about V3,
as critical as I am of FDA or the Fed for that matter,
I also actually recognize that like the Ron Paul type thing
of end the Fed is actually not practical.
End the Fed will just be laughed at.
What Bitcoin did was a much, much, much more difficult task
of building something better than the Fed.
That's really difficult to do because the Fed and the FDA,
they're like the hub of the current system.
People rely on them for lots of different things, okay?
And you're gonna need a better version of them
and how would you actually build something like that?
So with the Fed and with SEC and the entire,
the banks and whatnot,
crypto has a pretty good set of answers for these things.
And over time, all the countries that are not,
or all the groups that are not the US establishment
or the CCP will find more and more to their liking
in the crypto economy.
So that part I think is going, okay?
We can talk about that.
What does that look like for biomedicine?
Well, first, what does exit the FDA look like, right?
So there actually are a bunch of exits from the FDA already,
which is things like right to try laws, okay?
CLIA labs and laboratory developed tests,
compounding pharmacies, off-label prescription by doctors,
§29Transcript · 3:41:51–3:49:05
and countries that aren't fully harmonized with FDA.
For example, Kobe Bryant, before he passed away,
went and did stem cell treatments in Germany, okay?
Stem cells have been pushed out,
I think in part by the Bush administration,
but by other things.
So those are different kinds of exits.
Right to try basically means at the state level,
you can just try the drug, okay?
CLIA labs and LDTs, that means that's a path
where you don't have to go through FDA
to get a new device approved.
You can just run it in a lab, okay?
Compounding pharmacies, these were under attack.
I'm not sure actually where the current statute is on this,
but this is the idea that a pharmacist has some discretion
in how they prepare mixtures of drugs.
Off-label prescription by MDs.
So MDs have enough weight in the system
that they can kind of push back on FDA.
And off-label prescription is the concept
that a drug that's approved for purpose A
can be prescribed for purpose B or C or D
without going through another whole new drug approval process
and then countries that aren't harmonized, right?
So those are like five different kinds of exits
from the FDA on different directions.
So first those exits exist.
So for those people who are like,
"Oh my God, we're all gonna die
or he's gonna poison us with non-FDA approved things
or whatever," right?
Like those exits exist.
You've probably actually used tests or treatments from those.
You don't even realize that you have, right?
So it hasn't killed you, number one.
Number two is actually testing for safety.
You know, there's safety, efficacy, and like comparative.
Safety is actually relatively easy to test for.
There's very few drugs that are like,
there's TGN-1412, that's a famous example
of something that was actually really dangerous to people,
right, with an early test.
So those do exist, just acknowledge they do exist.
But in general, testing for safety
is actually not that hard to do, okay?
And if something is safe,
then you should be able to try it usually, okay?
Now, what does that decentralized FDA look like?
Well, basically you take individual pieces of it
and you can often turn them into vehicles.
And this is like 50 different startups,
but let me describe some of them.
First, have you gotten any drugs
or something like that recently?
I mean, like prescribed drugs, prescription drugs,
and it was like--
- Now that you clarify, the answer's no.
- Yeah. (laughs)
- Prescribed drugs, no.
- Okay, so--
- Not long, maybe antibiotics a long time ago, maybe.
But no. - All right.
So you know how you have like a,
sort of like a wadded up chemistry textbook,
the package insert that goes into the, right?
- Yes, yes, yes. - Okay.
(laughs)
- It's a wadded up chemistry textbook, I love it.
That's what it is, right?
That's what a terrible user interface,
we don't usually think of it that way.
Why is your user interface so terrible?
That's a web of regulation that makes it so terrible.
And there's actually guys who tried to innovate
just on user interface called, like, Help, I Need Help.
That was like the name of the company a while back.
And it was trying to explain the stuff in plain language.
Okay.
Just on user interface, you can innovate.
And why is it important?
Well, there's a company called PillPack,
which innovated on, quote, the user interface for drugs
by giving people a thing which had like a daily blister pack.
So it's like, here's your prescription
and you're supposed to take all these pills
on the first and second.
And basically, whether you had taken them on a given day
was manifest by whether you had opened it
for that specific day, okay?
This is way better than other kinds
of so-called compliance methodologies.
Like, there are guys who tried to do like an IOT pill
where when you swallow it, it like gives you measurements.
This was just a simple innovation on user interface
that boosted compliance in the sense of compliance
with the drug regimen dramatically, right?
And I think they got acquired or what have you
for a lot of money.
- And hopefully utilized effectively.
- Utilized effectively, right?
- Although sometimes these companies
that do incredible innovation,
it really makes you sad when they get acquired
that that leads to their death, not their scaling.
- Sure.
I mean, they did a lot of other good things,
but this was one thing that they did well, right?
So PillPack just shows what you can get
with improving on user interface.
Why can't, I mean, we get reviews for everything, right?
One thing that, you know, like people have sort of,
in my view, somewhat quoted our context.
They're like, "Oh, biology thinks you should replace
the FDA with the Elkford drugs."
Actually, there's something called phase four, okay,
of the FDA, which is so-called post-market surveillance.
Do you know that that's actually something where,
in theory, you can go and fill out a form
on the FDA website, which basically says,
I've had a bad experience with a drug.
- Not like VAERS, but for drugs.
- Yeah, so it's called MedWatch, right?
And so you can do voluntary reporting,
and you can get a PDF and just upload it, right?
- Is this a government, like is this the .gov?
- Yeah, it's form 3500B.
- I love it.
It's HTML.
It's gonna be from the '90s.
It's gonna have an interface designed by somebody
who's a COBOL/Fortran programmer.
- Right, here we go.
So here we go.
So basically, the 3500B--
- I hope to be proven wrong on that, by the way.
- So 3500B, consumer voluntary reporting.
When do I use this form?
You were hurt or had a bad side effect.
Use a drug which led to unsafe use, et cetera.
The point is, FDA already has a terrible Yelp for drugs.
It has a terrible version of it.
What would the good version look like?
The fact that you've never,
I mean, the fact you have to fill out a PDF
to go and submit a report.
How do you submit a report at Yelp or Uber or Airbnb
or Amazon, you tap, and there's star ratings, right?
So just modernizing FDA 3500B and modernizing phase four,
okay, is a huge thing.
- Is it, can you comment on that?
Is there, what incentive mechanism forces
the modernization of that kind of thing?
- Here's how it would work, or one possible.
- To create an actual Yelp.
- Yeah, here's how that would work, right?
You go to the pharmacy or wherever,
and you hold up your phone
and you scan the barcode of the drug, okay?
What does you see?
Instantly, you see global reports, right?
By the way, because your biology,
your physiology, that's global, right?
Information from Brazil or from Germany or Japan
on their physiological reaction
to the same drug you're taking is useful to you.
It's not like a national boundaries thing.
So the whole nation state model
of only collecting information on by other Americans,
really you want a global kind of thing,
just like Amazon book reviews, that's a global thing.
Other things are aggregate at the global level, okay?
So what you want is to see every patient report
and every doctor around the world on this drug.
That might be really important
to your rare or semi-rare condition.
Just that alone would be a valuable site.
- Who builds that site?
It sounds like something created by capitalism.
It sounds like it would have to be a company.
- Yeah, you can definitely do it.
- But we don't have a world where a company
is allowed to be in charge of that kind of thing.
- Well, I don't know.
- Google Health went down.
It just seems like a lot of the...
- So it depends, right?
Basically, this is why you have
to pick off individual elements, right?
There's essentially a combination of first recognizing
that DFT is actually bad.
You need to be able to say that.
Let me put it like this.
It does a lot of bad things.
It is something which you need to be able to criticize.
You might be like, "Well, that's obvious," right?
Well, in 2010, for example, there's a book that came out,
if anybody wants to understand FDA,
it's called "Reputation and Power."
- Yeah, a lot of people don't wanna criticize FDA.
§30Transcript · 3:49:08–3:56:44
- Yeah, because they will retaliate
against your biotech or pharma company.
- Yeah, and that retaliation can be initiated
by a single human being.
- Absolutely.
The best analogy is, you think about the TSA, okay?
Have you flown recently?
- Yeah. - Okay.
Do you make any jokes about the TSA
when you're in the TSA line?
- Usually you don't want to,
but they're a little more flexible.
You know what, can I tell a story?
- Sure. - Which is,
it was similar to this.
I was in Vegas at a club.
I don't go to clubs.
I got kicked out for the,
I think the first time in my life,
for making a joke with a bouncer.
'Cause I had a camera with me,
and you're not allowed to have a camera,
and I said, "Okay, cool, I'll take it out."
But I made a funny joke that I don't care to retell.
But he was just a little offended.
He was like, "I don't care who you are.
"I don't care who you're with."
And then he proceeded to list me,
the famous people he has kicked off that club.
But there is, I mean, all of those,
the reason I made the joke is I sensed
that there was an entitlement to this particular individual,
like where the authority has gone to his head.
- Respect my authority. - Yeah.
I almost wanted to poke at that.
And I think the poking, the authority,
I quickly learned the lesson.
I have now been rewarded with the pride I feel
for having poked authority,
but now I'm kicked out of the club
that would have resulted in a fun night
with friends and so on.
Instead, I'm standing alone crying in Vegas,
which is not a unique Vegas experience.
It's actually a fundamental Vegas experience.
But that, I'm sure, that basic human nature
happens in the FDA as well.
- That's exactly right.
So just like with the TSA, just to extend the analogy,
when you're in line at the TSA, right?
You don't wanna miss your flight.
That could cost you hundreds of dollars.
And so you comply with absolutely ludicrous regulations
like, oh, three ounce bottles.
Well, you know what?
You can take an unlimited number of three ounce bottles
and you can combine them into a six ounce bottle
through the terrorist technology called mixing.
Okay, advanced, right?
And the thing about this is everybody in line,
actually some fairly high, let's say,
call it influence or net worth or whatever, people fly.
Millions and millions and millions of people are subject
to these absolutely moronic regulations.
It's all what I think security theater is Shryer's term.
A lot of people know this term.
So millions of people are subject to it.
It costs untold billions of dollars in terms of delays
and what if you just walk up to, right?
It irradiates people.
And this is another FDA thing, by the way.
This is an FDA-TSA team up, okay?
In 2010, the TSA body scanners,
there were concerns expressed,
but when it's a government to government thing,
see a dot com is treated with extreme scrutiny by FDA,
but it's another dot gov,
well, they're not trying to make a profit.
So they kind of just wave them on through, okay?
So these body scanners were basically like applied
to millions and millions of people
and this huge kind of opt-in experiments.
Almost, I think it's quite likely by the way,
that if there was even a slightly increased cancer risk,
that the net morbidity and mortality
from those would have outweighed the deaths from terrorism
or whatever that were prevented, right?
You can work out the numbers,
but you can just get the math under reasonable assumptions,
it's probably true.
If it had any increased morbidity and mortality.
I've not seen the recent things,
but I've seen that concern expressed 12 years ago.
Point being that despite the cost,
despite how many people are exposed to it,
despite how obviously patently ludicrous it is,
you don't make any trouble,
nor do people organize protests or whatever about this,
because it's something where people,
the security theater of the whole thing is part of it.
Oh, well, if we took them away,
there'd be more terrorism or something like that.
People think, right?
- But it is fascinating to see that the populace
puts up with it, 'cause it doesn't,
one of my favorite things is to listen to Jordan Peterson,
who I think offline, but I think also on the podcast,
you know, is somebody who resists authority in every way.
And even he goes to TSA with a kind of suppressed,
like all the instructions, everything down to,
whenever you have like the yellow thing for your feet,
they force you to adjust it even slightly if you're off.
Just even, I mean, it's like, it's a Kafka novel.
We're living, like TSA, it makes me smile.
It brings joy to my heart, because I imagine
Franz Kafka and I just walking through there,
because it really is just deeply absurd.
But, and then the whole motivation of the mechanism
becomes distorted by the individuals involved.
The initial one was to reduce the number
of terrorist attacks, I suppose.
- Right, now it's guns and drugs.
Basically, it's like, essentially what they've done
is they've repealed the Fourth Amendment, right?
Search and seizure, they can do it without probable cause.
Everybody is being searched.
Everybody's a potential terrorist.
So they've got probable cause for everybody, in theory.
And so what they do, they'll post on their website
the guns and drugs or whatever
that they seized in these scanners.
Well, of course, if you search everybody,
you're gonna find some criminals or whatever.
But the cost of doing that is dramatic.
Moreover, the fact that people have sort of been trained
to have compliance, it's like the Soviet Union, right?
Where, just grudgingly, all right,
go along with this extremely stupid thing.
What's my point?
The point is, this is a really stupid regulation
that has existed in plain sight of everybody for 20 years.
We're still taking off our shoes, okay,
because some shoe bomber, whatever number of years ago,
okay, all of this stuff is there,
as opposed to, there's a zillion other things
you could potentially do, different paradigms
for, quote, airport security.
But now apply that to FDA.
Just like a lot of what TSA does is security theater,
arguably all of it, a lot of what FDA does is safety theater.
The difference is, there's far fewer people
who go through the aperture.
They're the biotech and pharma CEOs, okay?
So you don't have an understanding
of what it is to deal with them, number one.
Number two is, the penalty is not a few hundred dollars
of missing your flight.
It is a few million dollars, or tens,
or hundreds of millions of dollars
for getting your company subject to the equivalent
of a retaliatory wait time,
just like that bouncer threw you out,
just like the TSA officer, if you make a joke,
or they can just sit you down
and make you lose your flight, right?
So too, can the FDA just silently impede
the approval of something and choke you out financially
because you don't have enough runway to get funded, right?
So just impose more wait time.
Guess what, we want another six months.
Data's gonna take another six months,
your company doesn't have the time, you die, right?
If you live, you have to raise a round
at some dilutive valuation,
and now the price gets jacked up on the other side.
That's the one thing that can give, by the way,
in this whole process.
When you push out timelines from days
to get a vaccine approved, or a vaccine evaluated, rather,
via challenge trials, to months or years,
the cost during that time, when you,
it just increases non-linearly, right?
Because you can't iterate on the product.
All the normal observations,
if it takes you 10 years to launch a product
versus 10 days, what's the difference
in terms of your speed of variation,
your cost, et cetera, right?
So this is part of what, it's not the only thing,
there's other things, there's AMA and CPT,
there's other things, but this is one of the things
that jacks up prices in the US medical system, okay?
So now you have something where these CEOs,
they're going through this aperture,
they can't tell anybody about it,
because if you read "Reputation and Power,"
okay, I'm gonna just quote this,
because it's an amazing, amazing book, right?
It's written by a guy, Daniel Carpenter,
a smart guy, but he's an FDA sympathizer.
§31Transcript · 3:56:47–4:04:02
He fundamentally thinks it's a good thing, or what have you.
Nevertheless, I respect Carpenter's intellectual honesty,
because he quotes the CEOs in the book verbatim,
and he gives some paragraphs.
And essentially, from their descriptions,
it's like, think about like a Vietnam War thing,
where you've got a POW, and they're like blinking
through their eyes, being tortured, okay?
That is the style, when you read Carpenter's book,
you read the quotes from these CEOs,
hold on, let me see if I can find it.
- Do you recommend the book?
- It's a good book, yeah.
Or it's now a little bit outdated, okay?
Because it's like, you know, almost 10 years old.
Still, as a history of the FDA, it is well worth reading.
And by the way, the reason I say it,
like the FDA is so insanely important.
It's so much more important than many other things
that people talk about, but they don't talk about it, right?
I just wanna read his little blurb for it, right?
This is 2010.
"The U.S. Food and Drug Administration
"is the most powerful regulatory agency in the world.
"How did the FDA become so influential,
"and how does it wield its extraordinary power?
"Reputation and power traces the history
"of FDA regulation of pharmaceuticals,
"revealing how the agency's organizational reputation
"has been the primary source of its power,
"yet it's also one of its ultimate constraints.
"Carpenter describes how the FDA cultivated a reputation
"for competence and vigilance throughout the last century,
"and how this organizational image
"has enabled the agency to regulate
"while resisting efforts to curb its own authority."
First of all, just that description alone,
you're like, wait a second,
he is describing this as an active player.
It's not like a DMV kind of thing, which is passed through.
It's talking about cultivating a reputation,
its power, resisting efforts to curb its own authority.
The thing is, now you're kind of through the looking glass.
You're like, wait a second, this is kind of language
I don't usually hear for regulatory agencies.
The thing is, the kind of person who becomes the CEO
of a giant company, what do they wanna do?
They wanna expand that company.
They wanna make more profit.
Similarly, the kind of person who comes
to run a regulatory agency or one of the subunits,
that person wants to expand its ambit.
Okay?
- By the way, is that always obvious,
and sorry to interrupt, but for the CEO of the company,
I know that the philosophical ideal of capitalism
is you want to make the thing more profitable,
but we're also human beings.
Do you think there's some fundamental aspect
to which we wanna do a lot of good in the world?
- Sure, but the fiduciary duty will push people
to get the ambitious, the profit-maximizing,
expansionist CEO is selected for, right?
Basically, they believe, crucially,
they're not just, this is important,
they're not just, I mean, some of them are
grant-of-auto, make as much money as possible,
but they believe in the mission, okay?
They've come to believe in the mission,
and that is the person who's selected.
Chomsky actually had this good thing,
which is like, I believe that you believe what you believe,
but if you didn't believe what you believe,
you wouldn't be sitting here.
- Right, so they select for the kind of people
that are able to make a lot of money,
and in that process, those people are able
to construct a narrative that they're doing good,
even though what they were selected for
is the fact that they can make a lot of money.
- Yeah, and they may actually be doing good,
but the thing is, with CEOs, we have a zillion images
in television and media movies of the evil corporation
and the greedy CEO.
We have some concept of what CEO failure modes are like,
okay?
Now, when have you ever seen an evil regulator?
Have you, can you name a fictional portrayal
of an evil regulator?
Can you name an evil CEO?
There's tons. - Yeah, a lot, a lot,
a lot, a lot.
But that's so interesting.
I'm trying, I'm searching for a deeper lesson here.
You're right.
You're right.
I mean, there is portrayals,
especially in sort of authoritarian regimes
or the Soviet Union, where there's bureaucracy,
you know, Chernobyl, you can kind of see
within that there's the story of the regulator,
but yeah, it's not as plentiful,
and it also often doesn't have a face to it.
It's almost like bureaucracy is this amorphous thing
that results, any one individual you see,
they're just obeying somebody else.
There's not a face to it of evil.
- That's right.
- The evil is the entire machine.
- That's right.
That's what I call the school of fish strategy, by the way.
It's something where you are an individual
and you can be signaled out,
but there's more accountability for one person's bad tweets
than all the wars in the Middle East, right?
Because it's a school of fish.
- Yeah. - Right?
So if the establishment is wrong,
if the bureaucracy is wrong,
they're all wrong at the same time.
Who could have known?
Whereas if you deviate,
then you are a deviation who can be hammered down, okay?
Now, the school of fish strategy is,
unfortunately, very successful because,
you know, truth is whatever.
If you just always ride with the school of fish
and turn when they turn and so on,
unless there's a bigger school of fish that comes in,
you basically can never be proven wrong, right?
And this is actually, you know, of course,
someone who believes in truth
and believes in, you know, innovation and so on,
just physiologically can't ride with the school of fish.
You just have to say what is true or do what is true, right?
Still, you've described correctly, you know,
how it's faceless, right?
So I will give two examples of fictional portrayals
of evil regulators.
One is actually the original Ghostbusters.
- Okay. - Did not expect that one,
but yes. - Yeah.
So the EPA is actually the villain in that,
where they flip a switch
that lets out all the ghosts in the city.
And essentially, the guy is coming in
with a head of steam as this evil regulator
that's just totally arrogant,
doesn't actually understand the private sector
or the consequences of their actions.
And they force the,
and crucially, they bring a cop with them with a gun.
So it shows that a regulator is not simply,
you know, some piece of paper,
but it is the police, right?
And that cop with the gun forces the Ghostbusters
to like release the containment and the whole thing spreads.
The second example is Dallas Buyers Club,
which is more recent.
And that actually shows the FDA blocking a guy
who, with a life-threatening illness,
you know, with AIDS,
from getting the drugs to treat his condition
and from getting it to other people, right?
Those are just two portrayals,
but in general, what you find
is when you talk about FDA with people,
one thing I'll often hear from folks is like,
why would they do that, right?
They have no mental model of this.
They kind of think of it as,
why would the,
why would this thing,
which they think of as sort of the DMV,
they don't think of the DMV as like this active thing, okay?
Why would the FDA do that?
Well, it is because it's filled with some ambitious people
that want to keep increasing the power of the agency,
just like the CEO wants to increase
the profit of the company, right?
I use that word ambit, right?
Why ambit?
Because these folks are,
we know the term greedy, right?
These folks are power hungry.
They want to have the maximum scope.
And sometimes regulatory agencies
collide with each other, right?
Even though FDA is under HHS,
sometimes it collides with HHS
and they've got regulations that conflict.
For example, HHS says everybody's supposed to be able
to have access to their own medical record.
FDA didn't want people to have access
to their own personal genomes.
That conflicts, okay?
And both of those are kind of anti-corporate statutes
that were put out,
with HHS's thing being targeted at the hospitals
and FDA being targeted at the personal genomic companies,
§32Transcript · 4:04:04–4:10:44
but those conflicted, right?
It's a little bit like CFTC and SEC have a door jam
over who will regulate cryptocurrency, right?
Sometimes regulators fight each other,
but they fight each other.
They fight companies.
They are active players.
This "Reputation and Power" book,
the reason I mention it is,
I'm gonna see if I can find this quote.
So let me see if I can find this quote.
"Reputation and Power, Organizational Image
and Pharmaceutical Regulation at the FDA."
So Genentech's executive, G. Kirk Robb, right?
Robb would describe regulatory approval for his products
as a fundamental challenge facing his company.
And he would depict the administration
in a particularly vivid metaphor.
"I've told the story hundreds of times
to help people understand the FDA.
When I was in Brazil,
I worked on the Amazon River for many months
selling teramicin for Pfizer.
I hadn't seen my family for eight or nine months.
They were flying into Sao Paulo
and I was flying down from some little village
on the Amazon to Manus and then to Sao Paulo.
I was a young guy in his twenties.
I couldn't wait to see the kids.
One of them was a year old baby.
The other was three.
I missed my wife.
There was a Quonset hut in front of
just a little dirt strip with a single engine plane
to fly me to Manus.
I roll up and there's a Brazilian soldier there.
The military revolution happened literally the week before.
So this soldier is standing there with his machine gun
and he said to me, "You can't come in."
I was speaking pretty good Portuguese by that time.
I said, "My God, my plane, my family, I gotta come in."
He said again, "You can't come in."
I said, "I gotta come in."
And he took his machine gun, took the safety off
and pointed at me and said, "You can't come in."
And I said, "Oh, now I got it.
I can't go in there."
And that's the way I always describe the FDA.
The FDA is standing there with a machine gun
against the pharmaceutical industry.
So you better be their friend rather than their enemy.
They are the boss.
If you're a pharmaceutical firm,
they own you body and soul.
Okay, that's the CEO of a successful company, Genentech.
He said he's told the story hundreds of times
and regulatory approval is a fundamental challenge
facing his company because if you are regulated by FDA,
they are your primary customer.
If they cut the cord on you, you have no other customers.
And in fact, until very recently
with the advent of social media,
no one would even tell your story.
It was assumed that you were some sort of
corporate criminal that they were protecting the public from,
that you were gonna put poison in milk,
like the melamine scandal in China.
I'm not saying those things don't exist, by the way.
They do exist.
That's why people are like,
they can immediately summon to mind
all the examples of corporate criminals.
That's why I mentioned those fictional stories,
those templates.
Even if "Star Wars" doesn't exist,
how many times have you heard a "Star Wars" metaphor
or whatever for something, right?
Breaking bad, you know?
Go ahead.
- Yeah, but the pharmaceutical companies
are stuck between a rock and a hard place
because the reputation, if they go to Twitter,
they go to social media, they have horrible reputation.
So it's like they don't know.
- Yes, but why is that?
Because reputation and power.
FDA beat down the reputation of pharma companies,
just like EPA helped beat down
the reputation of oil companies.
And as it says over here, right?
"In practice, dealing with the fact of FDA power
meant a fundamental change in corporate structure
and culture.
At Abbott and at Genentech,
Rob's most central transformation
was in creating a culture of acquiescence
towards a government agency.
As was done at other drug companies
in the late 20th century,
Rob essentially fired officials at Abbott
who were insufficiently compliant with the FDA."
What that means is de facto nationalization of the industry
via regulation.
Just to hover on that.
That's a really big deal
because if their primary customer
is this government agency,
then it has nationalized it just indirectly, right?
This is partially what's just happened
with Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, the other MAGA.
Okay?
They have been, that's funny.
- Well done.
(laughs)
Yeah, I didn't even think about that.
It's well done.
- Right, so it's, you know,
like I have this tweet,
it's like MAGA Republicans and MAGA Democrats, right?
Okay.
- Oh, damn it.
So many things you've said today
will just get stuck in my head.
It changes the way you think.
Catchy.
Something about catchy phrasing of ideas
makes me even more powerful.
So yeah, okay.
So that's happening in the tech sector.
- It's happening in tech.
So Facebook is the outlier
'cause Zuck still controls the company.
But just like, I mean,
why had tech had a good reputation for a while?
Because there wasn't a regulatory agency
whose justification was regulating
these corporate criminals, right?
Once that is the case,
the regulatory agency basically
comes back to Congress each year.
If you look at its budget approvals,
it's saying, "We fined this many guys.
"We found this many violations," right?
They have an incentive to exaggerate the threat
in the same way that a prosecutor
or a policeman has a quota, right?
Like these are the police.
One way I describe it also is like,
you know, like a step-down transformers.
You have high voltage electricity
that's generated at the power plant,
and it comes over the wires,
and then there's step-down transformers
that turn it into a lower voltage
that you can just deal with out of your appliances, right?
Similarly, you have something where the high voltage
of like the US military or the police,
and that is transmitted down into a little letter
that comes in your mailbox saying,
"Pay your $50 parking ticket,"
where it's a piece of paper,
so you don't see the gun attached to it.
But if you were to defy that,
it's like "Grand Theft Auto,"
where you get one star, two star, three stars,
four stars, five stars,
and eventually, you know,
you have some serious stuff on your hands, okay?
So once you understand that, you know,
every law is backed by force,
like that Brazilian guy with the machine gun
that Rob mentioned,
these guys are the regulatory police, okay?
Now, see, for a time, what happened was
you had the captured industry
because all of the folks who were in pharmaceuticals
were, as Carpenter said,
a culture of acquiescence towards the FDA.
The FDA was their primary customer.
So just like in a sense, it's rational,
you know, Amazon talks about being customer obsessed, right?
What Rob did was rational for that time, right?
What GKirp Rob did was saying,
"Our customer is the FDA, that's our primary customer.
"Nobody else matters.
"They are satisfied first.
"Every single trade-off that has to be made is FDA,"
right?
And, you know, really that's why
the two most important departments
at many pharmaceutical companies, arguably all,
are regulatory affairs and IP, not R&D, right?
Because one is the artificial scarcity of regulation,
which jacks up the price,
and the other is artificial scarcity of the patent,
which allows people to maintain the high price, right?
So this entire thing is just like, you know,
college education.
These things may at some point have been a good concept,
but the price has just risen and risen and risen
§33Transcript · 4:10:46–4:18:13
until it's at the limit price and beyond, okay?
So what has changed?
What's changed is in the 2010s,
late 2000s and 2010s and so on,
with the advent of social media,
with the advent of a bunch of millionaires,
like who are independent,
with the advent of Uber and Airbnb, right?
With the advent of cryptocurrency,
with the diminution of trust in institutions,
it used to be really taboo to even talk about the FDA
as potentially bad in like, you know, 2010, 2009, okay?
But now people have just seen face plant after face plant
by the institutions,
and people are much more open to the concept
that they may actually not have it all together.
And I think it's, you know,
you could probably see some tracking poll
or something like that,
but I wouldn't be surprised
if it's like a 20 or 30 point drop
after the CDC failed to control disease and the FDA failed,
and the entire biomedical regulatory establishment
and scientific establishment
was saying masks don't work before they do.
This was just a train crash
of all the things that you're paying for
that you supposedly think are good.
As I mentioned, one response is to go QAnon,
and people will say, "Oh, don't trust anything."
But the better response is decentralizing FDA, okay.
So I will say one other thing,
which is I mentioned, you know,
this concept of improving the form 3500B,
where you like scan, go ahead.
- No, yeah, yeah, right.
That just makes me laugh that I could just tell
the form sucks by the fact that it has that code name.
Sorry. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Exactly, right?
- UX is broken at every layer.
- Yeah, so they have a bad Yelp for drugs,
could we make a better one?
We could make a better one, just modern UX.
The key insight here, by the way,
which is a non-obvious point,
and I've got a whole talk on this actually
that I should probably release.
I actually did like almost eight, nine years ago.
It's called "Regulation is Information."
Product quality is a digital signal.
Okay, what do I mean by that?
Basically, when I talk about exit, you know,
exit the Fed, that's the crypto economy, right?
What does exit the FDA look like?
Well, one key insight is that many
of the big scale tech companies
can be thought of as cloud regulators
rather than land regulators.
What do I mean by that?
Well, first, what is regulation?
People do want a regulated marketplace.
They want A, quality ratings,
like on a one to five star scale,
and B, bans of bad actors,
like the zero star frauds and scammers and so on,
and these are distinct, right?
Somebody who's like a low quality
but well-intentioned person is different
than a smart and evil person.
Those are two different kinds of failure modes
you could have in a marketplace, right?
Why is it rational for people to want
a regulated marketplace, especially for health?
Because they wanna pay essentially one entry cost,
and then they don't have to evaluate everything separately
where they may not have the technical information
to do that, right?
You don't wanna go to Starbucks
and put a dipstick into every coffee
to see if it's poisoned or something like that.
You sort of wanna enter a zone
where you know things are basically good,
and you pay that one diligence cost on the zone itself,
right, whether it's a digital or physical zone,
and then the regulator's taking care of it,
and they've baked in the regulatory cost
into some subscription fee of some kind, right?
So the thing is, the model we've talked about
is the land regulator of a nation state
and a territorially bounded thing,
but the cloud regulator, what's a cloud regulator?
That is Amazon Star Ratings, that's Yelp,
that is eBay, that is Airbnb, that is Uber and Lyft,
and so on and so forth.
It's also actually Gmail and Google, why?
Because you're doing spam filtering,
and you are doing ranking of emails
with a priority inbox, right?
With Google itself, they ban malware links, right?
So the bad actors are out, and they're ranking them, right?
How about Apple, the App Store, right?
They ban bad actors, and they do star ratings.
When you start actually applying this lens,
PayPal, they've got a reputation,
every single web service that's at the scale
of like tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people
has had to build a cloud regulator,
and the crucial thing is it scales across borders.
So you can use the data from Mexico
to help somebody in Moldova or vice versa, right?
Because it's fundamentally international, right?
Those ratings, you have a network effect.
And there's another aspect to it,
which is these are better regulators
than the land regulators.
For example, Uber is a better regulator
than the taxi medallions, why?
Every ride is GPS tracked,
there's ratings on both the driver and the passenger side.
Both parties know that payment can be rendered
in a standard currency, right?
If you have below a certain star rating on either side,
you get deplatformed and so on
to protect either rider or driver, and on and on, right?
What does that do?
Think about how much better that is than taxi medallions,
rather than a six-month or annual inspection.
You have reports from every single rider, okay?
Before Uber, it was the taxi drivers and taxi regulators
were in a little monopoly locally, okay?
Because they were the persistent actors in the ecosystem.
Taxi riders had nothing in common,
didn't even know each other.
In New York, some guy gets in a taxi,
another guy, they had no way to communicate with each other.
So the persistent actors in the ecosystem
were the regulators and the drivers.
And they had this cozy kind of thing,
and medallion prices just kept going up.
And this was a sort of collaboration
on artificial scarcity.
Afterwards, with Uber and Lyft and other entrants,
you had something interesting,
a different kind of regulator-driver fusion.
If you assume regulatory capture exists and lean into it,
Uber is the new regulator,
and Uber drivers are the drivers.
Lyft is the competing regulator,
and Lyft drivers are the new drivers, okay?
So you have a regulator-driver fusion
versus another regulator-driver fusion.
You no longer have a monopoly, you have multiple parties.
Okay, you have a competitive market.
This is the concept of polycentric law, right?
Where you have multiple different legal regimes
in the same jurisdiction overlapping
that you can choose between with a tap of a button, right?
All these concepts from libertarian theory,
like polycentric law or catalysis,
all these things are becoming more possible
now that the internet
has increased microeconomic leverage,
because that exit is now possible.
Now, you may argue, "Oh, well, Lyft and Uber,
they're not profitable anymore."
And there's two different criticisms of them.
One is, "Oh, they're not profitable,"
or, "Oh, they're charging too much," or whatever.
And I think part of this is because of certain kinds of...
The regulatory state has caught up
to try to make them uncompetitive.
For example, they don't allow people in some states
to identify themselves as independent contractors,
even if they are part-time, okay?
There's various other kinds of rules and regulations.
You know, in Austin for a while,
Uber was even banned, what have you, right?
Net-net though, like Uber, Grab, Gojek, Lyft, Didi,
like ride-sharing as a concept is now out there.
And whatever the next version is, whether it's self-driving,
like, while it's like a very hard-fought battle
and the regulatory state keeps trying
to push things back into the garage,
this is a fundamentally better way
of just doing regulation of taxis.
Similarly, Airbnb for hotels.
I mean, it's basically the same thing, okay?
And Airbnb could use competition.
I think that it would be good to have, you know,
like competition for them,
and there are other kinds of sites opening up.
But the fundamental concept of the cloud regulator now,
let's apply it here.
Once you realize regulation is information,
the way you'd set up a competitor to FDA or SEC or FAA
or something like that is you just do better reviews.
Like you just start with that.
That's pure information.
You're under free speech.
§34Transcript · 4:18:14–4:25:47
That's like still, you know, the most defended thing,
literally just publishing reviews.
And not just reviews by any old person.
It turns out that FDA typically will use expert panels,
where there's expert panels.
It's like professors from Harvard or, you know,
things like that.
So what that is, is this concept of a reputational bridge.
What you wanna do is you wanna have folks who are,
let's say, biotech entrepreneurs,
or they're, you know, profs like Sinclair or what have you.
You do wanna have the reviews of the crowd, okay?
But you also wanna have, especially in medicine,
by the way, so you wanna have the reviews of experts
of some kind.
So there's gonna be defectors from the current establishment.
Okay, just like, you know,
there are profs who defected from computer science academia
to become Larry and Sergey and whatever, you know,
or they weren't profs, they were grad students, right?
In the same way, you'll have defectors
who have the credentials from the old world,
but can build up the new.
Just like there's folks from Wall Street
who have come into cryptocurrency
and helped legitimate it, right?
Just like there's folks who left Salsberger
to come to Substack, okay?
You know, we have these folks who, by defecting,
they help, and then they're also supplemented
by all this new talent coming in, right?
That combination of things is how you build a new system.
It's not completely by itself,
nor is it trying to reform the old, it's some fusion, okay?
So in this new system, who do you have?
You have, like, the most entrepreneurial
and innovative MDs.
You have the most entrepreneurial and innovative professors.
And you have the founders of actual new products and stuff.
And they are giving open-source reviews of these products.
And they're also building a community that will say,
"Look, we want this new drug, or we want this new treatment,
or we want this new device,
and we're willing to crowdfund 10,000 units.
So please give us the thing,
and we'll write a very fair review of it,
and we'll also all evaluate it as a community," and so on.
So you turn these people from just passive patients
into active participants in their health.
That's a community part,
and they've got the kind of biomedical,
technical leadership there.
Now, what is the kind of prototype of something like this?
Something like VitaDow is very interesting.
Things like MoleculeDow are very interesting.
It'll start with things like longevity, right?
And why is that?
Because the entire model of FDA, this 20th century model,
is wait for somebody to have a disease,
and then try to cure them, okay?
Versus, you know, saying an ounce of prevention
is worth a pound of cure, right?
Why are we not actually tracking folks
and getting a constant dashboard on yourself
so you can see whether things are breaking?
And then you deal with it
just like you've got server uptime things.
You don't wait necessarily for the site to go down.
You start seeing, "Oh, response rates are spiking.
We need to add more servers," right?
You have some warning, okay?
Even 10 years ago, there was this article
called "The Measured Man" in "The Atlantic,"
where this guy, physicist Larry Smarr, okay?
What he was doing is he was essentially
doing a bunch of measurements on himself.
And he was finding that there were predictors of inflammation
that were spiking, and he went to the doctor,
showed the charts, and the doctor was like,
"I can't do anything with this."
Then it turned out to be an early warning
of a serious condition,
and he had to, I think, go for surgery or something.
And he was starting to think, "Well, look,
the way that we're doing medicine right now
is it's not quite like pre-germ theory of disease,
but it is pre-continuous diagnostics, okay?
Continuous diagnostics,
just to talk about this for a second,
this is, I mentioned one angle on which you go after FDA,
which is like the better phase four, right?
I've mentioned the concept of better reviews in general,
okay?
I mentioned VitaDow, which is like a community
that is going after longevity.
Let's talk about continuous diagnostics.
So basically, we know better what is going on
in Bangalore or Budapest than in our own body.
That's actually kind of insane to think about.
This stuff that, you know,
it's all the other side of the world, 10,000 miles away,
but a few millimeters away,
you don't really know what's going on, right?
And that's starting to change
with all the quantified self-devices,
the hundreds of millions of Apple Watches
and Fitbits and stuff, right?
You're also starting to see continuous glucose meters,
which are very important.
They're starting to give you readouts.
People are seeing, "Wow, this is spiking my insulin.
"Or rather, this is spiking my blood sugar."
And it might be something you didn't predict.
It varies for different people.
For some people, you know,
a banana isn't a big deal.
For others, it's actually quite bad for the blood sugar.
What happens when you extend that?
Well, about 10 years ago, a guy, Mike Snyder,
professor at Stanford, did something called the integrome,
where he just threw the kitchen sink
of all the diagnostics he could at himself
over the period of, I think, a few weeks or a few months.
I forget the exact duration.
And he was able to do things where he could see,
during that period, he got a cold or something.
And he could see in the expression data,
the gene expression data,
that he was getting sick before he felt sick.
He could also see that something about that viral infection
made him develop diabetes-like symptoms,
if I'm remembering it accurately.
So you could see, "Oh, wait a second.
"These are things that I can see in my readouts
"that I would only have the vaguest interpretation of
"as a human being."
And moreover, he could take,
I don't think he did this,
but if you took treatments, if you took drugs,
you could actually show what your steady state was,
if you tracked over time,
show what your disease state or sick state was.
And then this drug pushes you back into non-disease state.
You can actually get a quantitative readout
of what steady state was.
And that steady state,
your expression levels across all these genes,
your small molecules,
basically everything you can measure,
that's gonna vary from person to person.
What's healthy and natural for you
may be a different baseline than for me.
For example, people who are,
small example, people who are South Asian
or have dark skin tend to have vitamin D deficiency.
Why?
Because we need a lot of sunlight.
So often inside, you're tapping on your screen.
So what do we do?
Take actually significant vitamin D infusions.
That's a small example
of where baselines differ between people.
So continuous diagnostics, what could that mean?
That could mean things like the continuous glucose meter,
it's quantified self,
it's like continuous blood testing.
So you have a so-called mobile phlebotomist.
This is something which,
phlebotomist takes blood,
mobile phlebotomist would come to your office,
come to your remote office.
This is a great business for people.
I think you can revisit this in 2022.
People tried this in the 2010s,
but I think it's worth revisiting.
Mobile phlebotomist comes every week or every month,
takes blood, runs every test.
Maybe that's a few thousand dollars a year,
maybe eventually gets to a few hundred dollars a year.
And that's expensive in some ways,
but boy, that's better health insurance in other ways.
- Yeah, I mean, it's amazing.
So one, there's a bunch of companies that do this,
and I actually would love to learn more about them.
One of them is a company called InsideTracker
that sponsors this podcast.
They do that, but the reason I really appreciate them,
they're the first ones that introduced me
to how easy it is.
But it's also depressing how little information,
exactly as you beautifully put once again,
how little information we have about our own body
in a continuous sense.
And actually also sadly, even with InsideTracker,
as I collect that data,
how not integrated that data is with everything else.
If I wanted to opt in, I would like,
I can't, it's just like riffing off the top of my head,
but I would like Google Maps to know
what's going on inside my body.
§35Transcript · 4:25:48–4:32:57
Maybe I can't intuit at first
why that application is useful,
but there could be incredible,
like that's where the entrepreneur spirit builds
is like, what can I do with that data?
Can I make the trip less stressful for you
and adjust to Google Maps, that kind of thing.
- That's right.
So, I mean, one of the things about this, by the way,
is because there are so many movies made about Theranos,
okay, that's one of the reasons why people
have sort of been scared off from doing diagnostics
to some extent, okay, why?
'Cause VCs are like, oh, is this another Theranos?
Like the diligence and everything,
everyone's looking at it, oh, blood testing,
one drop of blood, huh?
Hurts the recruiting.
Essentially, a lot of the media and stuff around that
basically has pathologized the thing
that we wanna have a lot more entrance in, right?
Now, one way of thinking about it is
FDA has killed way more people than Theranos has,
all right, way more.
Just take drug lag alone, okay?
Whenever you have a drug that works
and reduce morbidity and mortality
after it was actually generally available,
but was delayed for months or years,
the integral under that curve
is the excess morbidity and mortality
attributable to FDA's drug lag.
You could go back and do that study
across lots and lots of different drugs,
and you'd probably find quite a lot.
Alex Tabarrok and others have written on this, right?
Daniel Henninger has written on this, okay?
That's just like one example.
I mean, I gave the pandemic example,
the fact that they held up the EUAs for the tests
and didn't do challenge trials.
That's like a million American dead
that could have been orders of magnitude less
if we had gotten the vaccine out
to the vulnerable population sooner, okay?
So you're talking about something
that has a total monopoly on global health,
and you can't know what it is without that
unless you have zones that are FDA-free,
but that have some form of regulation.
As I mentioned, it's a V3.
It's not going back to zero regulation,
everybody in a manner for itself,
but it's a more reputable regulator,
just like Uber is a better regulator
than the taxi medallions, right?
- Yeah, I mean, you're painting such an incredible picture.
You're making me wish you were FDA commissioner.
But I-
- There are a bunch of people who tweeted something like that
after the, you know, with the pandemic.
Whatever, go ahead, yeah.
- Is that possible?
Like if you were just given,
if you became FDA commissioner,
could you push for those kinds of changes,
or is that really something
that has to come from the outside?
- Short answer is no.
And the longer answer, meaning-
- The long, that'd be funny if you're like,
the short answer is no, the long answer is yes.
(both laughing)
- So basically, see, a CEO of a company,
while it's very difficult,
they can hire and fire, right?
So in theory, they can do surgery on the organism.
And like, you know, Steve Jobs took over Apple
and was able to hire and fire, raise money, do this, that.
He basically had root over Apple.
That he was a system administrator, right?
He had full permissions, okay?
As FDA commissioner,
you do not have full permissions over FDA,
let alone like the whole structure around it, right?
If you're FDA commissioner,
you are not the CEO of the agency, okay?
Lots of these folks there have career tenure.
They can't be fired.
They can't even really be disciplined.
There's something called the Douglas factors.
You ever heard of the Douglas factors?
It's like the Miranda rights for federal employees, okay?
You know, the right to remain as a,
so basically, if you've heard
that federal employees can't be fired,
the Douglas factors are how that's actually operationalized.
When you try to fire somebody,
it's this whole process where they get to appeal it
and so on and so forth.
And they're sitting in the office
while you're trying to fire them.
And they're complaining to everybody around them
that this guy's trying to fire me,
he's such a bad guy, blah, blah, right?
And everybody around, even if, you know,
they may think that guy is doing a bad job,
they're like, wait a second, he's trying to fire you,
he might try to fire me too.
And so anybody who tries to fire somebody at FDA
just gets a face full of lead for their troubles.
What they instead will do is sometimes
they'll just transfer somebody to the basement or something
so they don't have to deal with them
if they're truly bad, okay?
But the thing about this is there is only one caveat,
Douglas factor number eight,
the notoriety of the offense or its impact
upon the reputation of the agency.
There's that word again, reputation,
of reputation and power.
So the one way you can truly screw up
within a regulatory bureaucracy
is if you sort of endanger the like annual budget renewal.
Think of it as like this mini Death Star
that's coming to dock against the max Death Star
for its like annual refuel.
And it's talking about all the corporate criminals
that it's prosecuted, the quotas,
like the police quotas, the ticketing, you know,
and if they don't have a crisis, they will like invent one.
Just again, just like TSA,
just like other agencies you're more familiar with,
you can kind of map it back.
Look at the guns and drugs we've seized.
And say an incentive for, you know,
creating these crises or manufacturing them
or exaggerating them.
And if you endanger that refueling,
that annual budget renewal or, you know, what have you,
then the whole agency will basically be like,
okay, you're bad and you can be disciplined
or sometimes, you know, with rare except,
you know, you can be booted.
But what that means is that FDA commissioner
is actually a white elephant.
It's a ceremonial role, really, right?
You know, the term white elephant,
it's like basically, you know,
the Maharaja gives you a white elephant as a gift.
Seems great.
Next day, it's eaten all of your grass.
It's pooped on your lawn.
It has like, just put a foot on your car and smashed it.
But you can't give it away.
It's a white elephant.
The Maharaja gave it to you, right?
That's what being like FDA commissioner is.
It's the kind of thing where if,
and a lot of people are drawn in like moths to the flame
for these titles of the establishment.
I wanna be head of this.
I wanna be head of that, right?
And really what it is, it's like,
I don't know, becoming head of Kazakhstan in the mid 1980s
in the Soviet Union, the Kazakhstan SSR, right?
Soviet Socialist Republic,
before the thing was gonna like crumble potentially, right?
In many ways, it's becoming, you know,
folks who are just totally status obsessed
getting these positions,
but like a lot of the merit,
all the folks with merit are kind of leaving the government
and going into, you know, tech or crypto or what have you.
So even if these agencies were hollow before,
in some ways they're becoming hollower
because they have less talent there, right?
So A, you can't hire and fire very easily.
You can hire a little bit, but you can't really fire.
B, a lot of the talent has left the building,
but was there.
C, we're entering the decentralizing era.
And D, you know, like, be like Satoshi.
Satoshi founded Bitcoin
'cause he knew you could not reform the Fed.
There's everybody's trying to go and reform, reform, reform.
The reason they're trying to reform
is we haven't figured out the mechanism
to build something new.
And now perhaps we have that.
So I've named a few of them, right?
I'll name one more.
Related to the literants.
Fitness is actually the backdoor to a lot of medicine.
Okay, why is that?
You go to any, you know, conference,
it could be neurology, it could be cardiology.
You'll find somebody who's giving a talk
that says something along the lines of,
fitness is the ultimate drug.
§36Transcript · 4:32:58–4:40:31
Maybe not today when people are saying,
oh, fat phobic or whatever, but not too many years ago.
You'd see somebody, people saying,
fitness is the ultimate drug.
If we could just prescribe fitness in a pill,
that would improve your cardiovascular function,
your neurological function, it deals with depression.
- By the way, in that case,
the use of the word drug means medicine, so.
- Medicine, yeah, sure, sure, sure.
- Fitness is the ultimate medicine, yeah.
- Yeah, the ultimate medicine, right?
So if they could just prescribe the effects of it,
it's just like, boom, just massive effect, right?
Like you're fit enough, you do the resistance training,
it helps with, you know, preventive diabetes.
Every kind of thing in the world,
you see a significant treatment effect.
Yet your fitness is your own responsibility.
You go to some gym, 24 Hour Fitness, what do they have?
They have on the wall exhortations like,
your body is your responsibility, right?
Am I right?
- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- And you know, go ahead, but.
- No, it's just, it's hilarious, yes, yes, yes.
- It's funny, but it's true, right?
- Yeah, it's funny 'cause it's true.
- And so your fitness, your diet, that's your responsibility.
But when you go into a doctor's office,
suddenly it becomes lie back and think of England, okay?
Suddenly you become passive.
Suddenly, oh, your doctor is Dr. Google?
Well, your doctor must be a moron.
You're going and trying to take care of yourself,
you're Googling symptoms.
Oh, how stupid you are.
I have a medical degree.
And that doctor, see, the thing is,
if you come in and you've self-diagnosed
or you've done some of your own research,
if you're right, and if they've got an ego about it,
they're undermined.
And if you're wrong, they're like, you know,
ha ha, you know, arrogant.
But either way, if they've got this kind of mindset,
they have an incentive to resist
the patient taking care of themselves.
Isn't that the doctor's job, right?
And they're kind of taught to behave like this, many of them.
So what that means then is that intervention
of that 15 or 30 minute appointment with the doctor,
whatever drug they prescribe better hit you
like Thor's hammer to put you back
on the straight and narrow.
Because that's only with you for like a few seconds,
you know, a few minutes or whatever.
The doctor's only with you for a few minutes.
The drug is only, you know, some drugs are very powerful.
So they actually do work like this, okay.
But your fitness is your own responsibility.
And that's a continuing forcing function every day.
And again, we get back to decentralization, right?
The decentralization of responsibility
from somebody thinking of themselves merely as a patient
to an active participant in their own health,
who's doing their own monitoring of their own health, right?
And logging all their stuff, who's eating, you know,
properly and looking at the effect of their diet
on things like their, you know,
continuous glucose monitor is a V1, but other things, right?
Who is, you know, as fit as they can possibly be.
Like these are kind of obvious things,
but why is this the back door to medicine?
Because since FDA only regulates those things
that are meant to diagnose and treat a disease,
all the stuff that is meant to improve
an otherwise healthy person
is potentially out of their purview.
Supplements are one interesting aspect
that they were carved out in the mid 90s.
And that's why the supplement industry is big
'cause FDA doesn't have as tight a rein on that.
But all of the Fitbit, CGM,
continuous glucose meter type stuff,
you can crank out all kinds of things
that help people get fitter,
that will also actually have just general health value,
but you're not quite marketing them to diagnose
or treat, you know, a disease.
See what I'm saying?
You're marketing them for the purpose of fitness.
This is a market, why?
Because psychologically people,
they don't like paying to get back to normal,
but they will absolutely pay tons of money
to get better than normal.
They'll pay for fitness, they'll pay for makeup,
they'll pay for hair, they'll pay for this and that.
So that's actually the back door
and you can do tons of things there
where obviously being healthier is also protective.
You can actually show the studies on this.
So this way you build out all the tooling to get healthier
and that actually helps on this axis.
Fewer things which kind of a US medical system,
but I'll admit, 'cause you got me on this topic.
- I love this.
- Okay, so--
- This is the most eloquent exploration
of the US medical system and how to improve it,
how to fix it and what the future looks like.
- Yeah, so-- - I love it.
- So basically, so part of it is decentralizing control
back to the individual, right?
Now, I've talked about FDA at length,
but let me talk about some of the other broken parts
of the US system, right?
There's like AMA, there's CPT, there's CPOM,
there's this, you know, like all these regulations
which see normally in capitalism,
you have a buyer and a seller, right?
Duh.
In medicine, you have third-party regulation
and fourth-party pricing and fifth-party payment, okay?
So third-party regulation, FDA is regulating it,
fourth-party pricing, it is, you know, the CPT codes, right?
Fifth-party payment, it's the insurance companies, right?
And just to discuss these bits of the system,
first, why are some people against capitalism in medicine?
I actually understand why they're against it
because they are visualizing themselves on a gurney
when they're being wheeled in
and now somebody at their moment of vulnerability
is charging this insane price for their care
and many people in the US have had this horrible experience
where they're bankrupted or scared of being bankrupted
by medical bills.
Therefore, the concept of adding more capitalism to medicine
scares them and they think it's horrible
and you're some like awful, greedy tech bro kind of thing.
All right?
Let me say I understand that concern
and let me kind of, let me pull,
tease that apart a little bit, right?
Basically, the most capitalistic areas of medicine
are the most functional areas of medicine.
So that's say the places where you can walk in
and walk out, okay?
Whether that's dentistry, dermatology, plastic surgery,
even veterinary medicine, which is not human, okay?
Where you can make a conscious decision, say,
okay, I want this care or I don't want this.
I see a price list, I can pay cash, right?
If I don't like it, I go to another dermatologist.
There's few dermatological emergencies.
That's why dermatologists have a great quality of life, okay?
By contrast, when you're being wheeled in on a gurney,
you need it right now, okay?
And you're unconscious or what have you
or you're not in a capacity to deal with it, right?
And so these are the two extremes.
It's like ambulatory medicine, you can walk around and pick
and like ambulance medicine, okay?
And what that means is the more ambulatory the medicine,
the more legitimate capitalism is in that situation.
People are okay with a dermatologist
basically turning you down
because you don't have enough money
and you go to another dermatologist
because you can comparison shop there.
It's not usually an emergency, right?
Whereas if you're coming in with an ambulance,
then people don't wanna be turned down
and I understand why, okay?
What this suggests by the way
is that you should only have insurance for the edge cases.
Insurance should only cover the ambulance,
not the ambulatory.
And most people are losing money on insurance, right?
Because most people are paying more in in premiums
than they are getting out.
It's just that this huge flight of dollars through the air
that no one can make heads or tails out of.
Oh, the other aspect that's obviously broken
is employer provided health insurance
which just started after World War II.
So auto insurance is in a much more competitive market.
You don't whip out your auto insurance card
at the gas station to pay for your gas, right?
You only whip it out when there's a crash, right?
That's what quote health insurance should be.
And the Singapore model is actually a pretty good one
for this where they have sort of a mandatory HSA.
You have to like put some money in that
and that pays for your healthcare bills
but then it's cash out of that.
It's like a separate pocket
sort of for savings to pay for-
- Health savings account.
§37Transcript · 4:40:32–4:48:58
- Health savings account, right?
The thing about this is once you realize,
well first, ambulatory medicine is capitalistic medicine.
Ambulance medicine is socialist medicine, okay?
You wanna shift people more towards ambulatory.
Guess what?
That's in their interest as well.
Now that brings us back to the monitoring, right?
The continuous monitoring where
whether eventually it's Mike Snyder's Integrome,
the V1 is the quantified self and the Apple watch
and the continuous glucose meters
and the VN is the Mike Snyder Integrome.
There's a site called Q.bio which is doing this also, right?
Eventually this stuff will hopefully just be in a device
that just measures tons and tons of variables on you, right?
There's ways of measuring some of these metabolites
without breaking the skin.
So it's not, you don't have to keep breaking the skin
over and over, there's various ways of doing that.
So now you've got something where you've got the monitoring,
you've got the dashboards, you've got the alerts
and just like this Larry Smarr guy
that I mentioned, the measured man,
you might be able to shift more and more things
to ambulatory.
And one of the things about this also is
the medical system is set up in a bad way
where the primary care physician is the one who is
like not the top of their class,
but the guys who are at the bottom of the pinball machine,
the surgeons and the radiologists,
once your stuff is already broken, okay?
They're the ones who are paid the most.
So a lot of the skill collects at the post break stage,
right where you actually want Dugie Howser MD
is at the upstream stage, okay?
So you want this amazing, amazing doctor there, right?
How could we get that?
I mentioned the app that doesn't exist,
which is like a better version of the 3500B, right?
Here's another app that doesn't exist.
And this is one that FDA is actively quashed.
Why can't you just take an image of a mole
or something like that?
You know, with the incredible cameras we have,
a huge amount of medical imaging should be able to be done
at home and it goes to doctors,
whether it's in the US or the Philippines or India.
I mean, teleradiology exists, right?
Why can you not do that for dermatology,
for everything else?
You should be able to literally just hold the thing up
and with a combination of both AI and MDs, just diagnose.
That should exist, right?
Answer is there's a combination of both American doctors
and the FDA that team up to prevent this or slow this.
And, you know, one argument is,
oh, the AI is not better than a human 100% of the time
because it's not deployed yet.
Therefore it could make an error, therefore it's bad.
Even if it's better than 99% of doctors, 99% of the time.
Another argument is the software has to go
through design control, okay?
Now, basically, once you understand how FDA works,
basically imagine the most bureaucratic frozen process
for code deployment at any company ever.
And that is the most nimble thing ever
relative to FDA's design review.
So just to review, A, talked about how FDA
was blocking all this stuff.
B, talked about why ambulatory medicine is capitalist
medicine, ambulance medicine is socialist medicine.
C, talked about how with the diagnostic stuff
we can shift it over to ambulatory.
D, talked about how there's lots of things
where you could have a combination of doctor and AI
in an app that you kind of quickly self-diagnose.
Some of this is happening now.
Some of the telemedicine laws were relaxed during COVID
where now people, you know, a doctor from Wyoming
can prescribe for somebody in Minnesota.
Like some of that stuff was relaxed during COVID, okay?
There's other broken things in medical system.
I'll just name two more and then kind of move on, okay?
I mentioned like AMA and CPT, okay?
- Those are two regulatory bodies?
- AMA, American Medical Association,
CPT, Current Procedural Terminology, okay?
Basically, you know Marx's labor theory of value
where people are supposed to be paid on their effort, right?
Of course, the issue with this is that you'd be paying
a physicist to try to dunk and, you know,
they'd be trying but they wouldn't actually
probably be able to do it.
They'd be trying real hard, whereas you actually
want to pay people on the basis of results, right?
Cheaply attained results are actually better
than expensively attained non-results, perhaps obvious, okay?
Nevertheless, the way that the US medical system
has payouts, it's based on so-called RVUs,
relative value units.
And this is something where there's a government body
that sets these prices and it is in theory only for Medicare
but all the private insurers key off of that.
And AMA basically publishes a list of these so-called
the CPT codes, which is like the coding,
the biomedical coding of this,
and what each medical process is worth and whatnot.
So it's like, I don't remember all the numbers,
but it's like a five-digit code and it's like,
okay, I got a test for cystic fibrosis
or a test for this or a test for that.
God help you if your medical billing is erroneous.
Why?
The insurance company will reject it
'cause it doesn't pay for that.
This is this giant process of trying to encode
every possible ailment and condition into the CPT codes
and you can literally get degrees in medical billing
just for this, okay?
This enormous inefficient industry, okay?
Like literally medical billing is a whole field, okay?
- Yeah.
What do you wanna do when you grow up?
I wanna work in medical billing.
- In medical billing, okay?
Where everybody's mad at you at all times.
Part of what happens is when you give a treatment,
when a doctor gives a treatment to a patient,
they can't like repo the treatment, okay?
Like a car, you sell a car, you can in theory repo the car.
So the patient has a treatment.
Now, what happens?
Well, the insurance company,
that treatment is perhaps provided,
look, it's a lab test provided by a company, right?
The company bills the patient.
The company is supposed to charge a high price, why?
The insurance company wants it to try to collect
from the patient.
The patient is scared, oh my God, they see this huge price.
They sometimes don't pay.
Sometimes the insurance company doesn't pay either.
And when a company is stiffed by an insurance company,
when a diagnostic company is stiffed by an insurance company
it has to jack up the price on everybody else, right?
Everything boils down to the fact that you don't have
you know, a buyer and a seller.
The doctor doesn't know the price of what is being sold.
The buyer doesn't know the price of what is being bought
at the time it's being bought.
Neither party can really even set a free price
because there's this RVU system that hovers above.
The buyer feels they've already bought it
'cause they bought insurance.
The insurance company doesn't wanna pay for it.
Everybody is trying to like push the price
onto somebody else and you know,
not actually show the sticker price of anything
and hide everything and so on and so forth.
Oh, the other thing about it is obviously lawsuits
are over everything.
Everybody's mad about everything.
It's health, people are dying, okay?
So everything is just optimized for optics
as opposed to results, right?
Similarly, actually many drugs are optimized
for minimizing side effects and optics
rather than maximizing effects
which are totally different criteria, right?
You might have, for example, a drug that only cures
a thousand people but doesn't have any side effects
versus one that cures a million people
but that has 10 really serious side effects a year, right?
And the second one would probably not happen
because those side effects would be so big, okay.
How do you attack this?
I name a few examples but I actually think the reform
is gonna come in part from outside the system.
In particular, India is coming online, okay?
Why is that important?
Well, you may have encountered an Indian doctor or two, okay?
Maybe an Indian programmer, one or two, all right?
And I do think telemedicine could explode, right?
Where you could have an Indian doctor in India
and there's a US doctor, okay, who's like a dispatcher.
You see what I'm saying?
They've got all these other Indian doctors behind them,
they've got a telemedical app
and you are now doing something
where these relatively inexpensive Indian doctors
who are vetted by the American doctor
or the doctor in the jurisdictions of license
become the backend doctors of the world.
To some extent, that's already there with teleradiology
and other kinds of things, right?
But now that you've got literally like a billion Indians
who've just come online, okay,
you have this huge pool of folks
§38Transcript · 4:48:59–4:56:42
who have a different attitude towards medicine.
For example, it's a lot more cash payment over there.
For example, India is big on generic drugs.
For example, during COVID, it had something called,
has something called Arrogya Setu
which is a national telemedicine app, okay?
The US wasn't able to ship that.
In some ways, India's digital infrastructure,
again, you'll have to read a post called
"The Internet Country" by tigerfeathers.substack.com
and you'll see that actually India's
national software infrastructure is surprisingly good.
It's not as good as China's in some ways,
but it's like better than the US's
which is like health.gov and like non-existent.
It's like kind of impressive
how good some of India's software is.
The fact that it exists is good.
So you have all these new doctors coming online,
India cranks out generics, right?
Telemedicine is now more legal in the US
and you have a cash payment in India, right?
And in a lot of other places,
you don't have the whole insurance, employer health thing.
And this market is growing.
So you could have a sort of parallel market
that starts evolving, right?
Which is, and people are already doing some medical tourism
and I think that's another exit from the FDA.
You have a parallel market that starts evolving
that just starts from fundamentally different premises.
It's just cash, cash for everything, right?
There's downsides with cash for everything.
There's a huge upside with cash for everything.
Cash for everything means
you get customer service from the doctor.
It means the prices are actually visible.
It ideally pushes you again,
towards more ambulatory medicine
rather than ambulance medicine.
It is monitoring, constant monitoring
with the quantified self and whatnot,
as opposed to just let your system fail
and then wheel you in, right?
There's a reputational bridge
because now we've had a couple of generations almost
of Indian doctors in the US.
So people know that there's some very competent
Indian doctors.
There are a good chunk of AMA.
And so they can sort of lobby for this.
And you have plenty of Indian engineers.
Now I'm not saying India alone is a panacea,
but I do think that this is a large enough parallel market
to start doing interesting things.
- And you could see a sort of medical tourism,
medical migration to where it gives India an opportunity
to basically let go of the constraints of the FDA.
- Yeah, because--
- And innovate aggressively.
And I mean, it's just such a huge opportunity
to define the future of medicine
and make a shit ton of money
from a market that's desperate for it in the United States
because of all the over the regulation.
- That's right.
And I think basically it's something where the reason,
it needs to be--
- And that would fix the FDA, sorry to interrupt.
- Yes, we fix the FDA by exiting the FDA, right?
And then the FDA would dry out and then it would hopefully--
- It might reform, it might dry out, right?
And this is why people are, for example,
they're traveling across borders,
they're getting orders from Canadian pharmacies.
A lot of this type of stuff,
we can start to build alternatives, right?
I mean, India's generic industry is really important
because it just doesn't enforce American IP there.
So generic drugs are cheaper, right?
And it's quite competent, it's been around for a while.
So there's enough proof points there
where, again, I'm not saying a panacea,
it's gonna be something which will require
like American and Indian collaboration.
I think there's gonna be a lot of other countries
and so on that are involved.
But you can start to see another pole getting set up,
which is a confident enough civilization
that is willing to take another regulatory path, right?
And that is in some ways doing better
on national software than the US is.
And it has enough of a bridge to the US
that it can be that stimulation which you need,
which is kind of something that outside poke, right?
I wanna talk about India,
but let me just kind of wrap up
on this big FDA biomedical kind of thing, right?
With the book, "The Network State",
the purpose of "The Network State",
I want people to be able to build
different kinds of network states.
I want people to build the vegan village.
I want people to be able to build a,
if they wanna do the Bendic option,
like a Christian network state.
If people wanna do different kinds of things,
I'm open to many different things
and I will fund lots of different things.
For me, the motivation is just like you needed
to start a new currency, Bitcoin.
It was easier to do that than reform the Fed.
I think it's easier to start a new country
than reform the FDA.
And so I wanna do it to, in particular, get to longevity,
right, meaning longevity enhancement, right?
And what does that mean?
So in an interesting way,
and this will sound like a trite statement,
but I think it's actually a deep statement
or let me hopefully try to convince you it is.
Crypto is to finance sort of what longevity is to,
you know, the currency to medicine.
Why?
It inverts certain fundamental assumptions.
Okay, so at first crypto looks like traditional finance.
It's got the charts and the bands
and you're buying and selling and so on.
But what Satoshi did is he took fundamental premises
and flipped them.
For example, in the traditional macroeconomic worldview,
hyperinflation is bad, but deflation is also bad.
So a little inflation is good, right?
In the traditional macroeconomic worldview,
it's good that there are custodians, banks,
that, you know, kind of intermediate the whole system,
right?
In the traditional, you know, worldview,
every transaction needs to be reversible
because somebody could make a mistake
and so on and so forth, right?
In the traditional worldview,
you don't really have root access over your money.
Satoshi inverted all of those things, okay?
Obviously, you know, the big one is hyperinflation is bad,
but he also thought mild inflation was bad
and deflation was good.
That's just a fundamental shift, okay?
He gave you root access over your money.
You're now a system administrator of your own money.
You can room-RF your entire fortune
or send millions with a keystroke.
You are now the system administrator of your own money.
That alone is why cryptocurrency is important.
If you want system administration access at times
to computers, you'll want it to currency, right?
To be sovereign.
You know, there's other assumptions where like
the assumptions, every transaction is private
in the existing system by default,
or it's visible only to the state.
Whereas at least the initial, you know,
the Bitcoin blockchain, everything is public, right?
There are various kinds of things like this
where he just inverted fundamental premises.
And then the whole crypto system is in,
the crypto economy is in many ways a teasing out
of what that means.
Just to give you one example, the US dollar,
people have seen those graphs where it's like inflating
and so it just like loses value over time
and you've seen that, okay?
Whereas, and most of the time it's just sort of denied
that it's losing any value.
The most highbrow way of defending it
is the US dollar trades off temporary short-term
price stability for long-term depreciation.
And Bitcoin makes the opposite trade-off.
In theory, at least, long-term appreciation
at the expense of short-term price instability.
Because like, you know,
there's the whole plunge protection team and so on.
Basically, there's various ways in which price stability
is tried to be maintained in the medium term
at the expense of long-term depreciation.
You need like a reserve of assets to keep, you know,
stabilizing the dollar against various things.
So what does crypto medicine look like
relative to fiat medicine to make the same analogy, right?
The existing medical system,
it assumes that a quick death is bad,
an early death is bad,
but also that living forever is either unrealistic
or impossible or undesirable,
that you should die with dignity or something like that,
okay?
So a little death is good.
That's the existing medical system.
Whereas the concept of life extension
and, you know, David Sinclair and, you know,
§39Transcript · 4:56:45–5:04:50
what do you call it?
Healthspan says, rejects that fundamental premise.
And it says, actually, the way to defeat cancer
is to defeat aging.
Aging is actually a programmed biological process.
And we have results that are showing stopping
or even reversing aging in some ways.
And so now, just like with the other thing,
you say a quick death is bad,
and so is actually death itself, right?
So we actually want significant life extension.
This is similar.
It's very similar to what, you know,
the rejection of the fiat system, right?
The fiat system says, a little inflation is good.
Fiat medicine says, a little death is good.
Bitcoin says, actually, no inflation,
just get more valuable over time.
And crypto medicine says, actually, let's, you know,
extend life.
This leads to all kinds of new things
where you start actually thinking about,
all right, how do I maintain my health with,
you know, diagnostics?
How do I, you know, take control of my own health
with the decentralization of medicine?
All the stuff that I've been describing
sort of fits, like, longevity is traditional medicine
as crypto is to traditional currency.
- If we take those assumptions separately,
so we take cryptocurrency aside,
is that to you obvious that this,
letting go of this assumption about death,
is that an obvious thing?
Is longevity obviously good?
Versus, for example, the devil's advocate to that would be,
what we want is to keep death
and maximize the quality of life up until the end.
- Well-- - Like, so that
you're right into the sunset, healthy.
- Somebody who was listening to the whole podcast
would say, well, Balaji, just a few hours ago,
you were saying this gerontocracy runs the US
and they're all old and they don't get it, blah, blah, blah.
And now you're talking about making people live forever,
so there's never any new blood to wash it out.
Ha ha, what a contradiction, right?
- It's funny that you're so on point
across all the topics we covered
and the possible criticism, I love it.
- Well, just trying to anticipate, you know, some--
- Yeah, good, well done, well done, sir.
- I think the argument on that is,
so long as you have a frontier,
it is okay for someone to live long, okay?
So long as people can exit to a new thing, number one.
Number two is, in order for us to go and colonize
other planets and so on, if you do wanna get to Mars,
if you wanna become Star Trek and what have you,
probably gonna need to have,
just to survive a long flight, so to speak,
multiple light year flight,
you're gonna need to have life extension.
So to become a pioneering interstellar kind of thing.
I know that, it's the kind of thing which sounds like,
okay, yeah, and when we're on the moon,
we're gonna need shovels.
It sounds like a piling a fantasy
on top of a fantasy in that sense,
but it's also something where,
if you're talking about the vector of our civilization,
where are we going?
Well, I actually do think it's either anarcho-primitivism
or optimalism/transhumanism.
Either we are shutting down civilization, it's degrowth,
it's Unabomber, et cetera, or it's the stars
and escaping the prime number base.
- It's like, to me, it's obvious that we're going to,
if we're to survive, expand out into space.
- Yes.
- And it's obvious that once we do,
we'll look back at anyone, which is currently most people,
that didn't think of this future,
didn't anticipate this future,
worked towards this future as Luddites,
like as people who totally didn't get it.
It'll become obvious.
Right now it's impossible, and then it'll become obvious.
- Yes.
- It seems like, yes, longevity in some form,
I mean, there could be a lot of arguments
of the different forms longevity could take,
but in some form, longevity is almost a prerequisite
for the expansion out into the cosmos.
- That's right.
- Expansion of longevity.
- There's also a way to bring it back to Earth
to an extent, which is how were societies used to be judged?
You may remember, people used to talk about life expectancy
as a big thing, right?
Life expectancy is actually a very, very, very good metric.
Why?
It's a ratio scale variable.
There's like four different class of variables
statisticians talk about.
Ratio scale is like years or meters or kilograms, okay?
Then you have interval scale,
where plus and minus means something,
but there's no absolute zero.
Then you have ordinal, where there's only ranks,
and plus and minus don't mean anything,
and then you have categorical,
like the Yankees and the Braves are categorical variables,
they're just different,
but all you have is the comparator operator,
whether you have a quality, you don't have a rank, okay?
So ratio scale data is the best
because you can compare it across space and time.
If you have a skeleton that is like, you know,
two meters tall, that's from 3000 years ago,
you can compare the height of people
from many, many years ago, different cultures and times,
right?
Whereas their currency is much harder to value,
that's not like a ratio scale variable.
Other things are harder to value across space and time,
right?
So life expectancy is good because,
as a ratio scale variable, it's a very clear definition,
right, like when someone born and died,
those are actually relatively clear.
But most other things aren't like that.
You know, that's why murder or death,
that, you know, it can be scored, it's unambiguous,
you know, it's done when it's done,
whereas when did somebody get sick?
Oh, well, they were kind of sick,
or they were sick today, they were sick at this hour,
the boundary conditions, many other kinds of things
are not like clear cut like that, right?
- And I should just briefly comment
that life expectancy does have this quirk,
a dark quirk that it, when you just crudely look at it,
is incorporates child mortality,
mortality at age of one or age of five,
and maybe it's better and clearer to look at mortality
after five or whatever.
And that's still, those metrics still hold
in interesting ways and measure the progress
of human civilization in interesting ways.
- That's right.
You actually want longevity biomarkers.
A lot of people are working on this.
There's a book called "The Picture of Dorian Gray,"
and the concept is sell your soul to, you know,
ensure the picture rather than he will age and fade, right?
And so the concept is that that thing on the wall
just reflects his age and you can see it, okay?
So there's a premise that's embedded
in a lot of Western culture that
to gain something you must lose.
If you're Icarus and you try to fly,
then you'll fly too high and it'll melt your wings.
But guess what?
We fly every day, commercial air flight, right?
So the opposite of like the Icarus
or "Picture of Dorian Gray" kind of thing
is the movie "Limitless," which I love
because it's so Nietzschean and so unusual
relative to the dystopian sci-fi movies
where there's a, without giving, right?
I mean, the movie's kind of old now,
but there's a drug in it that's a nootropic
that boosts your cognitive abilities
and it's got side effects, but at the end,
he engineers out the side effects.
Amazing, just like, you know,
yeah, there were planes that crashed and we land, right?
Okay, so why did I mention the "Picture of Dorian Gray?"
Well, there's another aspect of it,
which is longevity biomarker.
The point is to kind of estimate
how many years of life you have left
by that Q.bio or Integrome,
or you take all these analyses on somebody, right?
One of the best longevity biomarkers
could be just your face, right?
You image the face and you can sort of tell,
oh, somebody looks like they've aged,
oh, someone looks younger, et cetera, et cetera.
And this is actually data that you've got
on millions and millions of people
where you could probably start having AI predict,
okay, what is somebody's life expectancy
given their current face and other kinds of things, right?
Because you have their name, they have your birth date,
you have their, you know, date they passed away
if they've already passed away, right?
And you have photos of them through their life, right?
So just imaging might give
§40Transcript · 5:04:52–5:13:06
a reasonably good longevity biomarker,
but then you can supplement that
with a lot of other variables.
And now you can start benchmarking every treatment
by its change in how much time you have left.
If that treatment, that intervention
boosts your estimated life expectancy by five years,
you can see that in the data.
You can get feedback on whether your longevity
is being boosted or not, okay?
And so what this does,
it just fundamentally changes the assumptions in the system.
Now, with that said, you know,
life extension may be the kind of thing,
I'm not sure if it'll work for our generation.
We may be too late.
It may work for the next generation.
- Wouldn't that make you sad?
- Well, I've got something.
- To the last generation.
- Could be, but I've got something for you,
which is, I call it genomic reincarnation, okay?
This one you probably haven't heard before.
I've tweeted about it, okay?
- By the way, good time to mention that your Twitter
is one of the greatest Twitters of all time,
so people should follow you.
- Well, Lex Friedman has one of the greatest podcasts
of all time.
You guys should listen to the Lex Friedman podcast,
which you may be doing, right?
- Which you may be doing right now.
- Yes. - Yeah.
- Well, thank you.
- What was the term again?
Sorry, genomic--
- Sorry, I call it genomic, not resurrection,
but genomic reincarnation, okay?
So here's the concept.
You may be aware that you can synthesize strands of DNA,
okay?
There's sequencing of DNA, which is reading it,
and synthesizing DNA, which is creating strands of DNA.
What's interesting is you can actually also do that
at the full chromosome level for bacterial chromosomes.
Remember that thing I was saying earlier
about the minimum life form that Craig Venter made?
So people have synthesized entire bacterial chromosomes,
and they work.
Like, they can literally essentially print out
a living organism, all right?
Now, when you go from bacteria to eukaryotes,
which are the kingdom of life that we're a part of, right?
Yeast are part of this kingdom and so on.
It becomes harder because the chromosomes
are more complicated.
But folks are working on eukaryotic chromosome synthesis.
And if you spot me that sci-fi assumption
that eventually we'll be able to take your genome sequence,
and just like we can synthesize a bacterial chromosome,
we can synthesize not just one eukaryotic chromosome,
but your entire complement of chromosomes in the lab,
right, 'cause you have 23, and 46, whatever,
you take the pairs.
What you can do is potentially print somebody out from disk,
reincarnate them, insofar if your sequence determines you.
And you can argue with this 'cause there's epigenetics
and other stuff, okay?
But let's just say at a first order,
your DNA sequence is Lex.
You can sequence that, okay?
You can do full genome sequencing and log that to a file.
Then here's the karma part.
Your crypto community, where you've built up
enough karma among them, if when you die,
your karma balance is high enough,
they will spend the money to reincarnate the next Lex,
who can then watch everything that happened
in your past life, and you can tell them something.
- Mm-hmm.
- Everything I described there, I mean,
if you spot me eukaryotic chromosome synthesis,
that's the only part that I think will be possible, right?
Folks are working on it, I'm sure someone will mention it.
- Right, it's essentially a clone.
- It's like a clone, right?
But it is you in a different time.
- You're in a different time,
but you don't unfortunately have the memories.
Well, you could probably watch the digest of your life,
and it would be pretty interesting, right?
I mean-- - Yeah, that's actually
a process for psychology to study.
If you create a blank mind, what would you need
to show that mind to align it very well
with the experiences, with the fundamental experiences
that define the original version,
such that the resulting clone would have
similar behavior patterns, worldviews, perspectives,
feelings, all those kinds of things.
- Potentially, right?
- Including, sadly, enough traumas and all that.
- Or what have you, right?
But basically, just in a very simple version of it,
by the time one is age 20 or 30,
or something to meet your 20s,
you'll learn your own personal operating system.
You'll be like, "Oh, alcohol really doesn't agree with me,"
or something like that.
Just by trial and error, things that are idiosyncratic
to your own physiology, like, "Oh, I'm totally wrecked
"if I get seven hours of sleep versus nine hours,"
or whatever it is, right?
People will have different kinds of things like this.
That manual can be given to your next self,
so you can go, "Don't do this, do this,
"don't do this, do this," right?
To some extent, personal genomics
already gives you some of this,
where you're like, "Oh, I'm a caffeine,
"or a slow metabolizer, oh, that explains X or Y,"
or, "I have a weird version of alcohol, dehydrogenase,
"oh, okay, that explains my alcohol tolerance."
So this is part of the broader category
of what I call practical miracles, right?
So it's longevity, it's genomic reincarnation,
it is restoring sight, and it is curing deafness
with the artificial eyes and artificial ears.
It is the super soldier serum, did I show you that?
So like, Myostat and Null, a tweet about this,
basically, X-Men are real.
So here is a study from NEGM from several years ago, okay?
What is this, this is like the mid-2000s.
This was in 2004, okay?
So it's now 17 years later, it's probably,
this is almost certainly a teenager by now.
So this kid basically was just totally built.
- Yeah. - Okay?
Extraordinarily muscular. - Like, very muscular,
at a very young age. - Yes.
So the child's birth weight was in the 73th percentile,
he appeared extraordinarily muscular,
protruding muscles in his thighs,
motor and mental development has been normal.
Now at four and a half years of age,
he continues to have increased muscle bulk and strength.
And so, essentially, Myostatin mutation
associated with gross muscle hypertrophy in a child.
So this is like real life X-Men, okay?
And-- - And there's pictures
of animals. - Yes.
So there's a company called Variant Bio
that is looking at people
who have exceptional health-related traits,
and is looking for essentially this kind of thing,
but maybe more disease or whatever related, right?
For example, people who have natural immunity to COVID.
Understanding how that works,
perhaps we can give other people
artificial immunity to COVID, right?
If you scroll up, you see my kind of tweet,
"Super soldier serum is real,"
where it's like wild type mouse and a Myostatin null.
And look at the chest on that thing.
You see the before and after.
- Wow. - Okay?
This is what's possible.
This could be us, but you're regulating.
You know, right?
You're not saying like, "This could be us, but you're playing."
This could be us, but the FDA regulating, right?
All this-- (Lex laughing)
Okay? - Oh, yeah.
On steroids.
- But it's not, that's the thing is--
- But it's not steroids.
- Well, that's the thing is people,
again, you go back to the Icarus thing.
They think, "Oh, steroids.
"Well, that's definitely gonna give you cancer,
"screw up your hormones," et cetera, et cetera.
And it could, but you know what?
Like, have we actually put in that much effort
into figuring out like the right way
of doing testosterone supplementation
or the right way of doing this?
Obviously, we've managed to put a lot of effort
into marijuana, increasing the potency of it
or what have you.
Could we put the effort into these kinds of drugs, right?
Or these kinds of compounds?
Maybe.
I think that would actually be a really good thing.
The thing about this is I feel this is just
a massively underexplored area
rather than people drinking caffeine all the time.
That's a very mild enhancing drug, okay?
Nicotine is also arguably kind of like that.
Some people have it even without the cigarettes, right?
Why can't we research this stuff?
§41Transcript · 5:13:09–5:21:42
One way of thinking about it is Lance Armstrong,
the cyclist, yes, he violated all the rules.
You know, he shouldn't have won the Tour de France
or anything like that.
But his chemists, and I say this somewhat tongue in cheek,
but also his chemists are candidates
for like the Nobel Prize in chemistry
because they brought a man back from like testicular cancer
to like winning Tour de France against a bunch of guys
who probably, you know, a bunch of them
were also juiced or whatever, right?
Whatever was done there,
take it out of the competition framework.
There's a lot of testicular cancer patients
or cancer patients period who would want some of that.
And we should take that seriously.
We should take that pursuit really, really, really seriously.
Yes, except again, just like the Theranos stuff,
all this pathologize.
Oh, it's a Balico scandal.
Oh, it says, oh my God, you know?
And yes, of course,
within the context of that game, they're cheating.
When the context of life, you want to be cheating death.
- Yes. - Right?
So it's just a kind of a reframe on what is good, right?
And it is just taking away these assumptions
that mild inflation is good or mild death is good
and going towards transcendence.
So that gets me done with the giant FDA,
biomedical, et cetera, et cetera.
- Longevity, yeah.
- Okay. - That is beautifully,
beautifully done.
- You have two questions.
One was on Trump and deplatforming
and the other was on crypto and the state of crypto
and the third is on India.
Which one should we do?
- All right, since we talked about how to fix government,
we talked about how to fix health, medicine, FDA, longevity,
let us briefly talk about how to fix social media, perhaps.
- Sure, very important. - Since we kind of talked
about it from different directions,
but it'd be nice to just look at social media.
And if we can perhaps first, as an example,
maybe it's not a useful example,
but to me it was one that kind of shook me a little bit,
is the removal of Trump and since then other major figures,
but Donald Trump was probably the biggest person ever
to be removed from social media.
Do you understand why that was done?
Can you steel man the case for it and against it?
And if there's something broken about that,
how do we fix it?
- Steel man the case for is kind of obvious
in the sense of you are seeing a would-be dictator
who is trying to run a coup against democracy,
who has his supporters go and storming
the seat of government, who could use his app
to whip up his followers across the country
to reject the will of the people.
And so you're an executive and you'll take actions
that while perhaps controversial are still within the law
and you'll make sure that you do your part
to defend democracy by making sure
that at least this guy's megaphone is taken away
and that his supporters cannot organize more riots.
That's basically the case for the deplatforming.
Okay, would you agree with that?
That's fair.
- So it's like really steel manning it.
- You asked to steel man, so I'm giving the for case, yeah.
- Well, I guess I would like to separate
the would-be dictator.
Oh, I guess if you're storming the Capitol,
you are a dictator, I see, I see.
So those are two are interlinked, right?
You have to have somehow a personal judgment of the person.
- Bad enough to be worth this significant step.
- Yeah, it's not just their actions or words
in a particular situation, but broadly,
this person is dangerous. - The context of everything
that led up to this moment and so on, right?
So that's the for case, right?
Now, the against case.
There's actually several against cases, right?
There's obviously the Trump supporters against case.
There is the sort of the libertarian/left libertarian
against case, and there is the rest of world against case.
There's actually three, 'cause it's not just two factions,
there's multiple, right?
So what is the Trump supporter against case?
There's an article called "The Secret Bipartisan Campaign
That Saved the 2020 Election," right?
Which came out a few weeks after the inauguration,
like February 4th, 2021.
And essentially, the Trump supporter would read this
as basically saying, in the name of defending democracy,
they corrupted democracy,
whether it was actually vote counts
or just changes of all the rules
for mail-in ballots and stuff,
there were regular meetings between the Chamber of Commerce
and AFL and the unions.
In particular, they admit that the BLM riots
of the mid-2020s were actually on a string
and they could say, "Stand down," right?
So that's actually, that's a quote from this article
where it's like, "The word went out, 'Stand down,'
protected results announced that it would not be activating
the entire national mobilization network today,
but remains ready to activate if necessary.
Hothoser credits the activists for their restraint."
So basically, "The activists re-oriented
the protected results protest
towards a weekend of celebration."
So point being that the fact that,
the Trump supporter would say,
the fact that they could tell them to stand down
meant that the previous unrest was in part coordinated.
And so they'd say, "Okay, so that makes it illegitimate
in a different way," right?
Plus, well, there was one riot on Jan 6th
versus the attacks on the White House and stuff,
there was a storming of the White House in mid-2020,
and didn't actually storm the White House,
but they're setting fires outside
and there's quite a lot of stuff, right?
So the second against case is the,
let's say libertarian/left libertarian who'd say,
"Do we really want giant corporations,
regardless of what you think about Trump,
and you don't have to be a Trump supporter,
do you really want giant corporations to be determining
who can say what on the internet?
And if they can de-platform a sitting president
and the quote, "most powerful man in the world,"
he's not the most powerful man in the world.
In fact, the quote, "people" are electing a figurehead,
and actually it's the heads of network
that are more powerful than the heads of state, right?
That the fact that the CEOs of Facebook and Twitter
and Google and Apple and Amazon
all made those decisions at the same time
to not just de-platform Trump from Twitter,
which literally billions of people around the world saw,
but also censor or stop on Facebook,
and to have Google and Apple pull Parler out of the App Store
and Amazon shut down the backend,
that would be corporate collusion by any other name.
It's actually very similar
to the so-called business plot against FDR.
FDR was a complicated figure
who can in some ways best be thought of
as the least bad communist dictator
or socialist dictator of the 20th century.
Why?
Because he nationalized the economy,
repealed the 10th Amendment, right?
Tried to pack the courts.
He sicced the government on all of his enemies
from Huey Long to Andrew Mellon.
Obviously he interned the Japanese,
which shows that wasn't really totally a good guy, right?
We don't usually think about the same guy
who did this, did that.
Earlier in his life, most people don't know this one,
he led a whole Navy thing to entrap gay sailors.
And did you know about this one?
- No. - Yeah.
Google FDR entrapment of gay sailors.
Basically he got young men to try to find folks
within the Navy who were gay
and then basically entrap them
so that they could be prosecuted and what have you, right?
FDR did a lot of stuff,
but fundamentally nationalized the economy
and set up the alphabet soup,
is what they called it at the time.
And that's like all these agencies or whatever.
And in some sense, he's like continuous,
there'd been a rising trend of centralization.
Woodrow Wilson, obviously centralized,
Lincoln centralized, right?
Even actually 1789 was a degree of centralization
over the more loose thing that was 1776, 1789.
So he was on that trend line,
but he was definitely a huge kind of dog leg up.
So the thing is that because of all the lawsuits
that were flying, many folks like Amie Schlaes
has written a book, "The Forgotten Man."
And essentially her thesis
and thesis of many others at that time,
like John T. Flynn, who's this journalist
who was pro FDR and then was against,
was that FDR made the Great Depression great.
Okay, that it wouldn't have been such a bad thing
without him mucking up the entire economy
and giving it a sickness.
§42Transcript · 5:21:43–5:29:31
It would have recovered quickly without that, right?
This is a counterfactual,
which people just argue about it
really angrily back and forth.
And you can't actually run the experiment
unless you could fork the economy, right?
Just like where the bailouts good or bad.
I think they were bad, but how could I prove it?
I'd need to actually be able to fork the economy.
Crypto actually allows you in theory to do that.
Like where folks could actually shift balances.
This is a whole separate thing
where you can actually start to make macroeconomics
into more of an experimental science
rather than simply arguing from authority.
You could argue from experiment.
Some of the virtual economy stuff
that Edward Castronova has done is relevant to this.
We can talk about that.
Point is though with FDR,
there's this thing because he had
breached such a war on private industry at that time
and justified it with this narrative,
quote, bold, persistent experimentation.
There was something called the quote, business plot
where all of these captains of industry
that he'd been beating up.
And again, Teddy Roosevelt had also been doing this
with the trust buster.
The journos at the time, Ida Tarbell had gone
and basically ran all these articles on Rockefeller
and knocked them down, Woodrow Wilson and Skid Row.
But FDR, the CEOs were thinking,
"Oh, bad, this is so terrible."
There's a so-called business plot
to try to take over the government
and stop FDR from pushing the country
in what they thought was a bad direction.
Smedley Butler was a general that they recruited
to try to help them with this,
but he turned on them and he went
and kind of broke the whole thing open
and told to Congress and so on.
And so all these guys, the whole plot was broken up.
Now, one way of thinking about today
or the whole aftermath of Jan 6th
is it's a business plot, but in reverse
because the generals and the CEOs both were against Trump
and actually the business plot happened
and now all the CEOs just,
they pushed all the buttons that they needed to.
And now the network was prime over the state.
Now, why is that an interesting way of looking at it?
Because one thing I have in the book
is you can kind of think of 1950
as like issues peak centralization.
You go forward and backward in time, things decentralize.
And you start getting mirror image events
that happen with the opposite outcome.
For example, 1890, the frontier closes.
1991, the internet frontier opens.
Internet becomes open for commerce.
You go backwards in time, you have the Spanish flu,
forwards in time, COVID-19.
Backwards in time, you have the captains of industry,
the robber barons.
Forwards in time, you have the tech billionaires.
And there's so many examples of this.
Like another one is backwards in time,
the New York Times is allying with Soviet Russia
to choke out Ukraine.
Now today, they have reinvented themselves
as cheerleaders for Ukraine against nationalist Russia.
And of course, I think you could absolutely support Ukraine
on other measures, but it's pretty hypocritical
for the guys who profited from the Haldimor.
The Oxelsberg family literally profited
from denying the Haldimor to now make themselves cheerleaders
for Ukraine.
It's actually this insane thing, which we can talk about.
- A tiny tangent on that.
You put it brilliantly.
And a reminder for anyone who listens to me
talk about Ukraine, it is possible to have empathy
for a nation and not be part of the machine
that generates a mainstream narrative.
- Yes, that's right.
Like basically, I was actually one of the first
of three Estonian EU residents, okay?
And I completely understand why Estonia and the Baltics
and all these countries, including Ukraine,
that just recently within living memory
got their independence from the Soviet empire
would not wanna be forcibly reintegrated
into a place that they just escaped from.
And so that is something which is sort of outside
the American left, right, tired kind of thing,
where when you understand it from that point of view,
then there's like a fourth point of view,
which is like India's point of view,
or like much of the developing world,
or what I call parts of it are ascending,
parts are descending, whatever.
But much of the rest of the world
outside of that border region says,
"Look, we're sympathetic to the Ukrainians,
"but we can't allow our people to starve.
"So we're gonna maintain trade."
And guess what, actually, we've got a lot of wars
in our neck of the woods and human rights crises
that Europe just didn't even care about.
So it can't be that Europe's problems
are the world's problems,
but the world's problems are not Europe's problems, right?
So that's like a fourth point of view.
And a fifth point of view is China, which is like,
guess what, we're gonna be the Iran of the Iraq war,
where like who won the Iraq war?
Iran, arguably, because they extended their influence
into Iraq, right?
So China's like, guess what, we're gonna turn Russia
into our gas station and build a pipeline.
They're building, there's a power,
Siberia's like the name of the Eastern Russia pipeline,
just like Nord Stream is,
Nord Stream One and Nord Stream Two.
I think they're building a new pipeline through Mongolia.
So Xi Jinping and Putin and the Mongolian head of state
were all photographed kind of thumbs upping this pipeline.
We'll see if it goes through,
but it's ironic that Russia wanted to make Ukraine
their colony, but the outcome of this war
may be that Russia becomes China's colony.
So that's at least like five different perspectives, right?
There's like the US establishment perspective,
there's the Tucker-MAGA perspective,
there's the Baltics and Ukrainian perspective,
there's like the Indian and like poor countries perspective
and then there's the Chinese perspective
and then of course there's the Russians, right?
So just respect to that, by the way,
that's another example of history happening in reverse.
This is the sign of Soviet partnership,
except this time, China's the senior partner
and Russia's the junior partner,
and this time they're both nationalists rather than communist
and there's so many flips like this
and I'm gonna list a few more actually
because there's so, so, so many of them.
- Do you have an explanation why that happens?
- Yes, let me just list a few of them.
This is in the "The Network State" book,
it's in the chapter called
"Fragmentation, Frontier, Fourth Turning,
Futures are Past," right?
So I give this example of like a fluid unmixing,
all right, just watch this for a second, all right?
- This is from "Smarter Every Day,"
"Unmixing Color Machine, Ultra-Limited Reversible Flow,
Smarter Every Day, 217."
- And so you can mix something
and then like this thing that you don't think of
as reversible, you can unmix it,
which is insane, right, that it works.
Okay, the physics of that situation, it just works, right?
- So for people just listening,
that there is whatever the mixture this is,
this is ultra-laminar reversible flow,
so this probably has something to do with the material.
We're used to mixing not being a reversible process.
- Exactly. - And that's what that shows
and then he then reverses the mixing
and is able to do it perfectly.
- That's right, so that's like the Futures are Past thesis.
- It shows that free will is an illusion, just kidding.
- Well, basically there's some environments
where the equations are like time symmetrical, right?
And this is one model, sort of,
it's just an interesting visual model
for what's happening in the world
as we re-decentralize after the centralized century, right?
So basically, I mentioned the internet frontier reopens
back in the Western frontier closed,
today we experienced COVID-19,
back then we experienced the Spanish flu,
tech billionaires, and we have the capital industry, right?
Today, founders like Elan and Dorsey
are starting to win against establishment journalists.
Back then, Ida Tarbell demagogued and defeated Rockefeller.
I think net-net founders win this time versus the journos.
Back then, the journos won over the founders, okay?
Today we have cryptocurrencies,
back then we had private banking.
Today, this is an amazing one,
we have a populist movement of digital gold advocates.
Back then, 'cause Bitcoin maximalists and so on,
where gold has become populist
because it's against the printing money and so on and so forth.
Back then, we had a populist movement against gold
in the form of William Jennings Bryan
§43Transcript · 5:29:32–5:36:03
and the cross of gold speech.
Gold was considered a tool of big business.
Now, gold is the tool against big business
and big government, right?
- Digital gold, yeah.
- Digital gold, right?
Today we have the inflation and cultural conflict
of Weimar-like America.
Back then, we had the inflation
and cultural conflict of Weimar Germany.
Today, in Weimar America,
we have right and left fighting in the streets,
same, unfortunately, in Weimar Germany.
Peter Turchin has written about,
today we have what Turchin considers antebellum-like
polarization, like pre-war polarization.
Back then, if you go further back in time,
we had what we now know to be antebellum polarization, right?
Today we have Airbnb, back then we had flophouses.
Today we have Uber, back then we had gypsy cabs.
So today we see the transition
from neutral to yellow journalism.
Back then, we saw the transition
from yellow to, quote, neutral journalism, right?
And today, figures like Mike Moritz,
he wrote about China's energetic and America's laconic.
But back then, Bertrand Russell
actually wrote this whole long book.
Actually, the mathematician, Bertrand Russell, right?
Wrote this whole long book,
which I didn't even realize he wrote
about these kind of topics,
about the problem of China.
And one of his observations was,
again, I'm not saying this is,
I'm just saying he made this observation.
He was saying that America was energetic
and China laconic at the time,
'cause everybody was in opium dens and so on and so forth.
More examples, the one I just mentioned,
where the Chinese and Russians are again
lining up against the West,
except this time the Chinese are the senior partner
in the relationship rather than the junior partner.
Today, I think in the second Cold War,
there will also be a third world,
but this time I think that third world might come in first,
because it's not the non-aligned movement,
it's the aligned movement around Web3 protocols.
- That's fascinating, yeah.
That's where Nick comes in.
By the way, something we haven't mentioned,
Africa, that there could be very interesting things
in Africa as well.
- Nigeria is actually, Nigeria's has its first tech unicorn,
and I'm investing there.
And I think it's one of these things where China's risen,
India's like about 10 years behind China,
but I think this is the Indian decade in many ways.
We can come back to that point.
But there's absolutely sparks of light in Africa.
I mean, it's a huge continent.
- It feels like the more behind, sorry to interrupt,
the more behind you are,
the more opportunity you have to leapfrog.
- Sometimes, that's right.
And Pesa is a classic example
where they did this in East Africa,
but I think there's more possibility there.
- So what is the fact that there's a kind of symmetry?
- There's a kind of symmetry, right?
- What is that, how did that take us from Trump?
- Trump, okay, yeah.
- The different perspective you took,
the libertarian perspective of it doesn't really matter.
- Yeah, because the libertarian perspective,
or the left libertarian perspective would say,
is it really a good idea to have total corporate power
against the quote elected government,
even if you may disagree?
Do you wanna open the door to total corporate oligarchy?
And it's like the opposite, that's why I mentioned
it's like the opposite of business plots,
and they pulled on that thread, okay?
So the macro explanation that I have for this future
is our past thesis, and there's more,
it also gives some predictions, right?
If you go backwards in time,
the US federalizes into many individual states,
like before the Civil War,
people said the United States are,
and after they said the United States is.
Before FDR, the 10th Amendment,
reserved rights to the states,
afterwards it was just federal regulation of everything.
As we go forwards in time,
you're seeing states break away from the feds
on gun laws, drug laws, sanctuary cities, okay?
Many other kinds of things, you know?
And now Florida, for example, has its own guard
that's like not a national guard, but like a state guard.
Other states are doing this.
- And that's a force of decentralization,
you're saying that parallels in reverse.
- In reverse, right?
So you're having to make America states again.
- Nice.
- Okay, that's what I think happening, right?
I'm not saying, well, I think there's aspects of that
that are good, there's aspects that are bad,
but just like that's kind of the angle, right?
- But then that's, I mean, from your perspective,
that's probably not enough, right?
That's not--
- It's part of the future.
Let's just say--
- I think you, sorry to interrupt,
you suggested all kinds of ways
to build different countries.
I think that's probably one of them.
You said like start micro-countries or something like this.
I forgot the terminology.
- Yeah, micronations.
Yeah, that's not my,
I actually think of them as,
a better term is microstates
'cause they're actually not nations.
That's why they don't work,
but microstates are better, right?
Coming back to the difference
between the nation and the state,
the nation is like,
the nation state is a term that people use
without expanding it,
but nation comes from the same root word as like natality.
So it's like common descent, common birth, right?
Common origin, like the Japanese nation.
That's a group of people that have,
come down from history, right?
- Hence nationalism.
- Yeah, whereas the state
is like the administrative layer above them.
It's like labor and capital,
like labor and management, okay?
The American state stood over the Japanese nation
in 1946 after the war.
- Right.
Oh, so you weren't talking about tradition,
and you know that that doesn't matter.
- Tradition what?
- In terms of like,
I thought you meant nation is a thing
that carries across the generations.
There's a tradition, there's a culture, and so on,
and state is just the management, the layer.
- I mean, that's also another way
of thinking about it, right?
- There's a reversal there as well, okay.
- Yeah, so I mean,
one way of thinking about it is,
you know, one nation under God indivisible
is no longer true.
It is, America is at least two nations,
the Democrat and Republican,
in the sense of their own cultures,
where I can show you graph after graph.
You've seen the polarization graphs.
I can show you network diagrams where,
you know, like there's this graph
of polarization in Congress,
where there's red and blue,
they're separate things.
There's this article from 2017 showing
how, you know, shares on Facebook and Twitter
are just separate subgraphs.
They're just separate graphs in the social network,
and they're pulling apart.
Those are two nations.
They're not under God because people in the US
no longer believe in God,
and they're very much divisible because
96% of Democrats won't marry Republicans
in a high percentage other way.
And what that means is in one generation,
ideology becomes biology.
These become ethnic groups.
It takes on the character of Hutu and Tutsi
or Protestant and Catholic, Sunni and Shiite.
It's not about ideology.
If you think about all the flips during COVID, right,
where people were on one side versus the other side,
it's tribal, it's just tribe on tribe.
And so it's not universalist that identity of American
makes less sense than the identity of Democrat
and Republican right now,
or perhaps the identity of individual states.
What I think that's a good or bad thing,
I think that's unfortunately, you know,
whatever it is, it's the arrow of history, right?
On the opposite side of things,
§44Transcript · 5:36:05–5:43:58
India is actually was 562 princely states
at the time of Indian unification from 1947 to 19,
1947 when they got independence from the British,
it was 562 princely states.
Most people don't know that part.
They got, or outside India don't know that part.
It got unified into a republic only by like 1950.
And India is like actually a modern create,
India is like Europe.
It's kind of like the European union in the sense that
we didn't have a unified India in the past.
It was something with a lot of different countries,
like Northern South India or like Gujarat and Tamil Nadu
are as different as Finland and Spain, okay?
But India is moved in the direction
of much more unification, like much more, you know,
centralization or what have you,
whereas the US is decentralized.
And you go, okay, a few more things,
there are flips and I'll finish this off.
Today we're seeing the rise of the pseudonymous founder
in startup societies back all the way back in the 1770s,
we saw pseudonymous founders of startup countries,
namely the US, right?
The Federalist Papers.
Today we're seeing so far unsuccessful calls
for wealth seizures in the US.
Back then we saw FDR's Executive Order 6102,
which was a successful seizure of gold.
I expect we may see something like that,
an attempted seizure of digital gold.
And I think that'll be one of the things
that individual states like Florida or Texas
may not enforce that.
And I think that's actually the kind of thing
where you could see, you know,
like a breakup potential in the future, right?
One other thing that kind of rhymes is,
in many ways like the modern US establishment,
the story that you hear is the victories in 1945 and 1865
legitimate the current establishment.
That is being the Nazis, being the Confederates, right?
So you beat the ethnic nationalists abroad
and they beat the quote, secessionists at home, right?
And the ethnic nationalists were, you know, Aryan Nazis
and the secessionists were, you know,
slave owners and against freedom and so on and so forth.
Okay?
I'm not disputing that, I'm just saying that
that's just like the way people think about it.
There's a possibility,
and I'm not saying it's 100% at all, okay?
But if you're a sci-fi writer,
there's a possibility that the US loses
to the ethnic nationalists abroad,
except this time they're Chinese communists,
non-white communists, as opposed to Aryan Nazis,
which seemed like the total opposite, okay?
And there's a possibility that there is
a financial secession at home,
where it's, you know, Bitcoin maximalist states
that are advocating for freedom, the opposite of slavery.
See what I'm saying?
- Oh boy, that's dark.
You're looking for major things in history
that don't yet have a--
- Cognate going forward, right?
And that's a nice way to think about the future.
- It is only one model,
and any mental model or something like that,
that's why I say as a sci-fi scenario,
it's just like a scenario one could contemplate, right?
Where the new version has, I mean,
the Chinese communists do not think of themselves
as Aryans, right?
But they are ultra-nationalist.
And the Hitler comparisons,
people talk about Hitler endlessly,
like Saddam is the new Hitler,
everybody's the new Hitler, et cetera.
If there is a comparison to quote Nazi Germany,
it is, you know, CCP China in a sense, why?
They are non-English speaking, manufacturing powerhouse
with a massive military build-out under one leader
that is a genuine peer competitor
to the US on many dimensions.
And in fact, you know,
exceeding on some dimensions of technology and science.
That is like, the problem is it's a boy who cried wolf.
People say this a zillion times, right?
And you know, that is like, you know,
I'm not saying this by the way, crucially,
I am just like, I think China is very complicated
and there's hundreds of millions of people,
probably half in China that disagrees
with the current ultra-nationalist kind of thing, right?
And so I kind of hate it when innocent Chinese people
abroad or whatever, are just like attacked on this basis
or what have you.
Plus the other thing is that many Chinese people will say,
well, look, relative to, you know,
where we were when Deng took over in 1978,
we built up the entire country.
We're not starving to death anymore
and the West wants to recolonize us.
And so I understand where that's coming from.
This way you wanna be able to argue different points of view.
With that said, there's one huge difference, right?
Which is Nazi Germany was like 70 million people
and the US was 150 million
and the Soviet Union was 150 million
and the UK was like 50 million.
So they were outnumbered like five to one.
China outnumbers the US four to one.
- This is gonna be a fun century.
- Things are gonna get--
- Under this model.
- Under this model, things are gonna be potentially crazy.
Plus, you know, people are like, oh, I think this is,
you know, again, I have nothing personal,
there's this guy, Peter Zaihan, he writes these books, right?
I probably agree with about 20 or 30%,
but I disagree with a lot of the rest.
And a bunch of it is basically about
how China's really weak and America's really strong
and the rest of the world is screwed.
And, you know, I think there's absolutely problems in China
and, you know, like the current management
is actually messing a lot of things up,
we could talk about that.
But I do think that, you know,
the US is like fighting its factory.
So one thing, you know, Zaihan will talk about is how,
oh, America has this blue water Navy,
all the aircraft carriers and China has nothing,
it's got bupkis, et cetera.
Well, China ships things all around the world, right?
It probably has, you know,
one of the most active fleets out there
in terms of, you know, its commercial shipping.
And in terms of building ships, here's a quote,
"China's merchant shipbuilding industry
is the world's largest,
building more than 23 million gross tons of shipping
in 2020.
US yards built a mere 70,000 tons the same year
that they typically average somewhere in the 200,000s."
That is a 100 to 300X ratio, just in shipbuilding.
Pretty much everything else you can find
in the physical world is like that, okay?
We're not talking like 2X,
we're talking they can put together a subway station
in nine hours with prefab and the US takes three years, okay?
When you have 1000X difference in the physical world,
the reason the US was won against, you know,
Nazi Germany in a serious fight is
they had this giant manufacturing plant that was overseas
and they just outproduced, right?
And they supplied the Soviets also with lend-lease
and the Soviets talked about how
they would not have won the war without the Americans.
People are like, "Oh, the Russians fought the Germans."
The Russians armed by Americans fought the Germans.
Like it's a Soviet Union,
they're not actually able to make high quality stuff.
There obviously are individual people in Soviet Russia
who were innovative, right?
I'm not taking that away.
There's a tradition of amazing,
I just wanna be like,
there's individual Russians who obviously I admire,
Mendeleev and, you know, Klimogorov and so on.
There's amazing Russian scientists and engineers.
So I'm not saying that--
- I mean, in general, from brilliant folks like yourself
that criticize communism,
it's too easy to say nothing communism produces is good,
which of course is not true.
- Yes.
- A lot of brilliant people and a lot of even, you know,
there's a lot of amazing things that have been created.
- Yeah, so they had some amazing mathematicians,
amazing scientists and so on, right?
However--
- Great branding on the, you know, red and yellow.
- Yeah, yeah, so-- - The branding is stellar.
Nazi Germany to excellent branding.
With the flag and so on, you know?
- So--
- So--
- And ends there in terms of compliments.
- Yeah, well, actually they copied a lot of stuff
from each other, you know?
Like there's this movie called "The Soviet Story."
It basically shows a lot of Nazi
and Soviet propaganda things next to each other.
And you can see guys almost in like the same pose.
It's almost like, you know how AI will do like
style transfer?
You can almost see, 'cause the socialist realism
§45Transcript · 5:44:00–5:52:09
style of like the muscular brawny worker,
very similar to like the style of the Aryan Superman,
you know, like pointing at the vermin or whatever.
- And then there's the crappy open source version
that tries to copy, which is Mussolini.
- Yeah.
- That just like, that does the same exact thing,
but does it kind of shittier, so anyway.
- So my main thing about this is basically like
trying to fight your factory in the physical world
is probably not gonna work.
People are, I think, overconfident on this stuff, right?
With that said, I think we want to, at all,
you know, the future is not yet determined, right?
At all odds, you know, we wanna avoid a hot war
between like, I mean, a hot war between the US and China
would be-
- Do you think it's possible that we'll get a war?
- We're doing these things like Pelosi going to Taiwan
and trying to cause something.
Like, look, again, this is one of these things
which is complicated because obviously,
if you're, there's more than one perspective on this, right?
Again, you've got the US establishment,
the US conservative, the Taiwanese perspective,
the Chinese perspective, all the bystanders over there,
there's more than one perspective on this, okay?
If you're, you know, one of China's many neighbors,
you look at China with apprehension.
Like Vietnam, for example, has sort of fallen into,
or not fallen into, is partnering with India
because they're mutually apprehensive of China.
China's not making like great friends with its neighbors.
It's kind of, you know, it's demonizing Japan.
It's so ultra-nationalist nowadays.
And so if you're a Taiwanese, you're like,
yeah, I do not want to be
under the Chinese surveillance state.
I completely understand it.
Some people are pro-reunification, others aren't,
but there's more, you know, trend, you know,
in some ways for independence.
Okay, fine.
- But there's also an increasing temperature
across the entire world.
As we sit here today, there's speeches by Vladimir Putin
about the serious possibility of a nuclear war.
And that escalates kind of the heat in the room
of geopolitics.
- It escalates the heat in the room, of course, right?
And the thing is, people have this belief
that because something hasn't happened,
it won't happen or it can't happen.
But like, there were a lot of measures people took
during the Cold War to make sure a nuclear exchange
didn't happen, the whole mutually assured destruction thing
and communicating that out and like the balance of terror.
There were smart guys on both sides
who thought through this and there were near misses, right?
There, you know, like there's that story
about like the Soviet colonel
who didn't order a nuclear strike
'cause he thought it was just like an error
in the instruments, right?
Okay, what's the point?
Point is, you know, for example, Pelosi going to Taiwan,
that didn't strengthen Taiwan.
That didn't like, if you're gonna go and provoke China,
I thought Scholar Stage, his Twitter account,
had a good point, which is you should,
if you're actually gonna do it,
then you strengthen Taiwan with like huge battalions
of like arms and materiel and you make them a porcupine
and so on and so forth.
Instead, her kind of going and landing there
and mooning China and then flying back
in the middle of a hot war with Russia,
that's absolutely, you know,
in the middle of an economic crisis or what have,
it just, you know, can you pick battles or whatever, right?
It's like, you don't have to fight Russia
and China at the same time.
It's like kind of insane to do that, okay?
Plus even with Ukraine, some people were like,
oh, this was like a victory
for the US military policy or something.
There was a guy who, I'm not trying to beat him up
or anything, he's like, this is in March,
threat on US security assistance to Ukraine, it's working.
Ukraine might be one of the biggest successes
of US security assistance.
And the reason is, you know, US didn't focus
on some high-end shiny objects,
but on core military tasks that focus should remain.
And it's like, how is this a success?
The West gave massive arms to Ukraine
only after the invasion, but not enough before to deter.
And now Ukraine is like this Syria-like battleground
with a million refugees or whatever the number is, right?
Their country is blown to smithereens,
thousands of people dead, whatever thousand dollar gas
in Europe with like 10X energy, radicalized Russians,
the threat of World War III or even nuclear war, you know?
Shooting somebody isn't, that's not like the point
of the military, the point is, there's a million ways
to smash Humpty Dumpty into pieces
and unleash the blood-drenched tides, right?
And have people all shooting each other and killing each other.
It's really hard to maintain stability.
That's what competence is, is deterrence and stability.
Right?
There's not like a success in any way.
It's like an absolute tragedy for everybody involved, right?
- Yeah, I mean, deterrence of course is the number one thing,
but there's a lot to be said there.
But I'm a huge not fan of declaring victory
as we've done many times when it's the wrong.
- Yeah, I mean, the other thing about this
is the whole mission accomplished thing during Iraq.
- Mission accomplished is what I meant, yeah.
- Exactly, mission accomplished was obviously,
the thing is Russia lives next door to Ukraine.
And so, I mean, just like Iraq lives next door to Iran
and Afghanistan is next door to Pakistan and China.
And so if the US eventually gets tired of it and leaves,
those guys are next door, right?
And so, who knows what's gonna happen here, okay?
But one of the problems is like,
the whole Afghanistan thing or the Iraq thing
is the lesson for people was the uncertainty.
They're like, is the US gonna fight?
Don't know.
Will the US win if it fights?
Don't know, therefore roll the dice.
That uncertainty is itself like tempting to folks,
like Putin over there, right?
So point is coming all the way back up,
we were talking about how history, futures are past
and FDR, like the business plot for FDR failed,
but like the tech companies
were able to de-platform Trump, right?
And the left libertarian would say,
do we want that much corporate power?
Okay, and so that's,
so we gave the four case for Trump de-platforming,
protecting democracy, the Trump supporter case against,
which is on the secret history of the shadow campaign
to save the 2020 election, basically that article,
the left libertarian or libertarian case against.
And then to me, what is, you know,
like I am more sympathetic to the libertarian
slash left libertarian against,
and then also maybe the fourth group,
which is the non-American case, right?
Which is to say every, you know, Amlo,
he's the, he was the head of state of Mexico,
I think at that time, okay.
Amlo, Macron, you know, other folks,
everybody who's watching this around the world
basically saw, let's say,
US establishment or Democrat aligned folks
just decapitate, you know, the head of state digitally,
right, like just boom, gone, okay.
And they're like, well, if they can do that in public
to the US president,
who's ostensibly the most powerful man in the world,
what is the Mexican president stand against that?
Nothing, right?
Like these US media corporations,
these US tech companies are so insanely powerful,
everybody's on Twitter or what have you,
other than China, leaving them aside,
they've got their own root system.
If somebody tried to de-platform
Xi Jinping off of Sina Weibo,
they'd probably just fall through a trap door,
you know, their whole family, right?
But for the rest of the world,
that's on the, that is hosting their business,
their politics on these US tech companies,
they're like, regardless of whether it was justified
on this guy, that means they will do it to anybody.
Now the seal is broken,
just like the bailouts, as exceptional as they were
in the first era, everybody was shocked by them,
then they became a policy instrument.
And now there's bailouts happening,
every single bill is printing another whatever,
billion dollars or something like that, right?
- Can I ask on your thoughts and advice on this topic?
If I or anyone were to have a conversation
with Donald Trump, first of all, should one do so?
And if so, how do you do it?
And it may not necessarily be Trump,
it could be other people like Putin and Xi Jinping
and so on, let's say people that are censored.
- Right.
- Like people that platforms in general see as dangerous.
Hitler, you can go, we keep bringing it up.
- Of course, that's the ultimate edge case, right?
§46Transcript · 5:52:11–5:59:58
In the sense of, that's saying like,
something must be done, this is something,
therefore this must be done, right?
I've heard that one before.
(laughing)
- No, but I love it.
- So this is just--
- Can I just use that as an explanation
with confidence for everything I do?
- Yeah, sure, there you go, right?
- Something must be done, this is something,
therefore it must be done.
- Therefore this must be done.
So that is the, like, all kinds of regulations,
all kinds of things are kind of justified on that basis,
right, and there's a version of that which is,
punch a Nazi, I decide who's a Nazi, you're a Nazi.
- Therefore I punch you and that's justified, yeah.
- Yeah, and you know, like people say,
oh, how many people are calling Israelis,
you know, like these things, right?
And so the problem with argumentum ad hilarum is,
it just, I mean, people will say Obama's a Nazi,
everybody will say everybody's a Nazi, right?
- But there is a social consensus about who,
let's set Nazis aside, but who is dangerous for society.
- Okay, but now let's talk about that, all right?
So basically, I think a more interesting example
than Hitler in this context is Herbert Matthews.
So Fidel Castro, before he became the communist dictator
of Cuba, was on the run.
He was like Osama Bin Laden at the time,
he was like a terrorist that the Cuban regime
had seemingly defeated.
And what Herbert Matthews did is he got an intro to him,
he went to the, you know, place where he was hiding out,
he gave an interview and he printed this hagiography
in the New York Times with this like, you know,
photo of Castro looking all, you know, mighty and so on.
And he's like, Castro is still alive and still fighting,
okay, and there's this book on this called
"The Man Who Created Fidel," okay?
Where basically, NYT's article was crucial positive press
that got Castro's point of view out to the world
and helped lead to the communist revolution
that actually impoverished Cuba,
led to like gay people being, you know,
like discriminated against there,
led to people fleeing, you know,
and drowning trying to escape, right?
That's an example of where platforming somebody
led to a very bad outcome.
In fact, many of the communist dictators
in the 20th century had like their own personal journalist,
right?
For example, there's a guy, John Reed, he's an American.
He's buried, you know, if I get this right,
I think he's buried at the Kremlin wall, okay?
Why is an American buried there, okay?
Because he wrote a book called "10 Days That Shook the World"
that whitewashed the entire Soviet revolution
and the Russian revolution in 1917, October revolution,
and made these guys out to be the good guys
when they were actually genocidal psychopaths, okay?
He got their point of view out to the world
and it was a totally misleading point of view, all right?
- Do you think, what do you think he was thinking?
Do you think he saw the psychopathy?
You know, sometimes it's not obvious, like--
- Well, the French revolution had already happened.
So people kind of knew that this sort of psychopathic,
you know, killing in the name of equality
could produce bad results, right?
But it's more than that, right?
So it's John Reed, it's Herbert Matthews,
it's Edgar Snow, okay?
So these are all people who should be extremely famous,
right?
So Edgar Snow is Mao's journalist, okay?
So he wrote, you know, there's actually an article in this
how 1930s reporter from Missouri
became China's ideal journalist, okay?
And he wrote various books,
including like "Red Star Over China," okay?
And it's just a hagiography of Mao, right?
And then of course you've got Duranty,
and he is like Stalin's biographer, right?
Just to recap, John Reed brought Lenin's message
to the world, Mailman's dead.
Duranty helped Stalin starve out the Ukrainians,
Mailman's dead.
Edgar Snow was Mao's biographer,
and Herbert Matthews was like Castro's.
This guy, David Halberstam in Vietnam,
who was effectively Ho Chi Minh's.
He basically went and took leaks from a communist spy.
I'll give you the exact name.
Pham, I'm gonna mispronounce this,
but it's Perfect Spy,
the incredible double life of PHAM, Pham Xuan An,
Time Magazine reporter and Vietnamese communist agent.
That guy was the source of many fabricated stories
that David Halberstam printed in the New York Times
that led to the undermining of the South Vietnamese regime.
And for example, stories of Buddhists being killed and so on
Ashley Rinsberg in "The Great Lady Winked"
writes this whole thing up at length,
so you can go and read it for his account.
But basically all of these communist dictators
had a journalist right alongside them as their biographer.
- Yeah. - Okay?
- But those are tools of the propaganda machine versus-
- Well, so my point is,
these are five examples that are on the far left
that should be balanced also against the Times
running profiles of Hitler on the far right.
We know that basically,
the Times actually also ran a whole thing,
which was Hitler's like mountain retreat
or something like that.
Do you know about that story?
- What year was this?
- I'll tell you in a second.
Hitler at home in the clouds.
- Oh boy, please tell me it's like early 30s.
- I think it's, oh yeah, this is Otto D. Tallisius.
This is actually a guy that Ashley Rinsberg writes up
in "The Great Lady Winked," right?
- 1937. - '37.
There's another one where I think the date is wrong,
but it's 39, you know,
but essentially these titles are like,
"Where Hitler Dreams and Plans,"
"He Lives Simply," you know, right?
And there's another one,
"Hair Hitler at Home in the Clouds," okay?
The thing about this is,
absolutely there are folks who are hagiographers
of the far right,
but whether you're talking Lenin and John Reed
or Stalin and Walter Durante of "The New York Times,"
or Castro and Herbert Matthews, again, of "The New York Times,"
or Edgar Snow and Mao,
or David Halberstam and, you know,
Ho Chi Minh, again, of "The New York Times,"
like you start to see a pattern here
where the guys who are being platformed and given a voice
are these guys who end up being like far left,
you know, lunatics, right?
And I think part of the issue here is,
you know, the saying about how communists
don't understand self-interest?
Nationalists don't understand other interest.
And so nationalists are more obvious.
Isn't that good?
I thought it was good.
- It's pretty good. - Right?
- Pretty good.
- So the nationalist is very obvious
in the sense of like, they're for the Aryans.
They're not even for like the Slavs or whatever, right?
Like, you know, basically, you know,
had Hitler constructed a different ideology,
you know, then like he might've gotten more support
in Eastern Europe or whatever, right?
But he also called the Slavs inferior,
not just, you know,
basically everybody was inferior to the Aryans, okay?
Except maybe the English or whatever,
but that was it, right?
Oh, and the Japanese are honorary Aryans or something.
So the nationalist declares the supremacy
of their own race or culture or what have you,
and doesn't understand people's other interest,
but he also pumps up his own guys, okay?
Same with, you know, in some ways China today,
same with Japan back in the day.
Whereas the communist has a message
that sounds more appealing.
It's a universalist message ostensibly,
but it's actually a faux universalism
'cause it's actually particularism.
Like during the Soviet Union, communism,
this faux universalism was basically a mask
for Russian nationalism, you know,
where, you know, or at least Soviet nationalism
where in particular Russians were pushed
into many territories and, you know,
Russian speakers were, you know,
like privileged in, you know,
the Eastern Europe and the Baltics.
Of course, Russians themselves were oppressed at home
as Sultan's rights here,
both victim and victimizer of the regime.
Their churches were crushed and so on.
As compensation, they were agents of empire.
It's a tragedy all around, okay?
I'm not, you know, I think Russians have been hard done
in many ways, they've had a very hard, hard century.
They've also done hard by others, okay?
§47Transcript · 5:59:59–6:08:16
It's complicated.
- Those journalists you mentioned,
just to elaborate, maybe you disagree with me,
I wonder what you think.
- Sure.
- But I think conversation,
like not to sort of glorify any particular medium,
but there's something,
one of the reasons I like long form podcasts
or interviews, long form unedited interviews,
there's been shows throughout the 20th century
that do that kind of thing, but they seem to be rare.
That podcast made it much more popular and common.
It somehow makes it easier not to do
this kind of bullshit journalism that--
- The gotcha stuff, yeah.
- I feel like asking interesting and deep questions allow,
I think you could sit down with Hitler in 1940, 1941,
1942, and the podcast actually serve a purpose.
- In '41 and '42, mid-World War II?
- Or mid-World War II.
A purpose of, one, which is very important,
get good information for the future
so history can study it.
And two, reveal to the world the way a man thinks
that is beyond the propaganda.
- So all this stuff is complicated,
but today, so in the specific issue
of the folks you were talking about,
like Putin, Z, Trump, right?
For those folks, they are very clearly out-group
for both the US left and right,
which is, let's say the Western left and right,
which are your audience.
There's folks who are tankies
and there are folks who are MAGA who are sympathetic.
- I'm sorry, what are tankies?
- Tankies are those who are,
they may not call themselves tankies.
Let's say they're anti-imperialist left and MAGA right,
for different reasons, are against the US establishment
and for Putin or Z or something like that
as an agent against the US establishment.
So leaving those aside,
the point is that most of your audience
is sort of on guard, vaccinated in a sense,
versus Z and Putin and Trump.
They know the counter-arguments and so on and so forth.
In which case, I wouldn't think interviewing them
would be that big a deal, relatively,
'cause there's so much other coverage and so on out there.
I think it's probably okay.
However, for something like what John Reed was doing
and so on, when he was the sole source of information
about the Russian Revolution.
- Yes, that's different.
- That's different, right?
So it's something about,
it kind of gets back to the competitive environment
and so on.
The dearth of folks who are writing critical coverage
of these three men.
And so if I felt that that was insufficient,
then you might need more of it.
Just like, for example, nowadays with Stalin,
there are a lot of articles and books and PDFs
and so on on it.
- But at the time, not as much.
- At the time, not as much.
That's why I brought those guys.
Because often, it's kind of like,
have you ever stocked shelves at a supermarket?
This would seem totally out of left field.
- No, but shoes, but the same thing,
Sears, I used to work at Sears.
- The thing that is the most popular
is the thing that's not on the shelf
because it's been sold out.
- Yeah. - Right?
So in some ways, this is similar to that famous photo
that people have, or image that people have on Twitter
of the plane and the parts that are shot versus not, right?
The survivorship bias, right?
And one way of kind of thinking about it is
the guys who you think of as bad guys or possible bad guys
or controversial guys or whatever,
are those you've already got some vaccination to,
that's why you think of them at all.
Whereas the folks that I mentioned,
the regulators, invisible, right?
Salzburger, you know Zuckerberg,
you know his pros and cons, you know who he is as a person.
You don't even know Salzburger exists, most people, right?
Despite the fact that he's like, certainly is powerful.
You know, he owns the New York Times, he inherits it.
He also got dual class stock, just like Zuck.
But he's invisible, right?
- Well, that's why I think studying the knowns,
the people that are known can help you generalize
to the way human nature is, and then you start to question,
are the same kind of humans existing in places
that wield power?
- Yeah. - And you can assume
they are, they do exist there,
and then you can start to infer.
- That's right. - And ask questions.
- So this is kind of, what I try to do is I'm like,
what is the dark matter?
What is the question that is not being asked
or what have you, right? - Yes, yes.
- And so, you know, that's not to say
that you need to be so anti-mimetic that you only do that.
But I think you need to do that as well as understand
what is good about the conventional wisdom.
And, you know, for example, if you notice a lot
of what I talk about is like the V1, V2, V3,
where as critical as I am of, let's say, the FDA,
I recognize that people want a regulated marketplace
and how do we do better?
As critical as I can be of the Fed,
I recognize that some kind of monetary policy is necessary.
And Satoshi came up with a better one, right?
As harsh as one can be a critic of the current system,
it is really incumbent, as difficult as that is,
upon one to come up with a better version.
Just like academia, as much as I think
current science is corrupted,
what I propose is a way to actually improve on that.
And actually, any true scientist say,
yes, I want my work to be reproducible.
Yes, I want citations to be important statements
and so on and so forth.
And we don't have to get everybody to agree with that,
but just enough to build that better version
and not regress.
- Yeah, there's an implied optimism
within the V1, V2, V3 framework.
Let me ask you at a high level about social media,
because you are one of its prominent users
to communicate your wisdom.
- I use Twitter, I wouldn't really think of it
as communicate my wisdom per se or anything like that.
I use Twitter like I might use GitHub as a scratch pad
for just kind of floating concepts.
And I've got, okay, here's a frame on things,
let me kind of put it out there
and see what people think, get some feedback and so on.
- Don't you think it has lasting impact, your scratch book?
- I think it's good, but basically like,
if I say what's my primary thing on Twitter, it's that.
It's a scratch pad for me to kind of
put some concepts out there, iterate on them,
get feedback on them and so on and so forth.
- Do you think it's possible that the words you've tweeted
on Twitter is the most impact you will have?
- On the world? - On the world.
- I don't, so-- - Is that possible?
- Is it possible?
Well, my tweets-- - What you gave me.
- It's a good question.
I think the network state will be, I think, important,
or I hope, well, the book--
- The book or the concept?
- Good question. - Sorry, just a quick, right?
- The movement. - The movement.
- Right, in the sense that Zionism shows
that it is possible to have a book and then a conference
and then a fund and eventually in the fullness of time
with a lot of time and effort to actually get a state, right?
And as I mentioned earlier,
a lot of countries are small countries,
but I didn't mention there's a guy
who's the head of Kazakhstan and he made a remark.
He's like, "You know, if we allow every nation
"that wants to have self-determination to have a state,
"we'd have 600 countries rather than 190."
Because there's many opposites of a nation state,
but one of the opposites is the stateless nation.
And so you remember the network state is popular?
In places like Catalonia, Catalonian nationalists,
in Catalonia, guys who are committed Catalonian nationalists.
So Catalonia, this region of Spain, right?
The thing is that, again, V1, V2, V3,
the nation state is V2 and it beat the city state,
which is like V1.
And the network state I think of as a potential V3,
which combines aspects of V1 and V2.
So Catalonia or the Basque region,
these are underneath the quote nation state of Spain,
but many Catalonians think of themselves
as part of a separate nation.
Not all, many, okay?
And so they want a state of their own.
Who doesn't, if you're a nation?
Meaning that they've got a legitimate claim
from history, language, culture, all that stuff, right?
The Basques do as well.
The Kurds do as well, okay?
Lots of ethnic groups around the world do.
So in the game of musical chairs,
§48Transcript · 6:08:18–6:15:16
that was the formation of current national borders,
they lost out, right?
So what did they do?
Well, one answer is they just submit to the Spanish state
and they just speak Spanish and their culture is erased
and their history is erased and so on.
The second is they do some sort of Ireland-like insurgency,
the troubles to try to get a thing of their own,
which is obviously bad for other kinds of reasons, right?
You know, violent, et cetera.
What this Catalonian nationalist said, he's like,
"Look, while we can't give up on our existing path,
"the network state is a really interesting third option."
I mean, by the way, I hadn't talked to this guy, V. Partal,
okay, and he's got this site called ViaWeb,
and, or V-I-L-A, VilaWeb, sorry.
It can be, meaning the network state
can be especially appealing to us.
Catalans are now embarking on the task
of having a normal and current state in the old way,
and this is a project that we cannot give up.
But this does not mean that at the same time
we are not also attentive to ideas like this
and we do not try to learn and move forward, right?
Meaning, you know, the network state, right?
Because that's the third way, which says,
okay, maybe this particular region
is not something where you're gonna be able to get,
you know, a state.
But just like there's more Irish people
who live outside of Ireland, right?
Just like, you know, the Jewish people, you know,
didn't actually get a state in Poland or what have you,
they had one in Palestine.
Perhaps the Catalonians could crowdfund territory
in other places and have essentially a state of their own
that's distributed, okay?
Now, again, what people are immediately gonna say is,
"Well, that's gonna lead to conflict with the locals
necessarily," and so on and so forth.
But if you're parallel processing,
you don't have the all-in-one bucket aspect of,
I must win here, and the guy on the other side is like,
I must win, you have optionality.
You can have multiple different nodes around the world,
just like there's multiple Chinatowns,
you could have multiple Catalonian towns, right?
And some places you might be able to just buy an island
and that becomes, you know, the New Catalonia, right?
Just like in, I think there's a region called New Caledonia
and that's in the Southwest Pacific.
So maybe New Catalonia is somewhere else, right?
So if you're flexible on that, now, of course,
a bunch of people will immediately say,
they'll have 50 different objections to this.
They'll say, "Oh, you don't get it.
The whole point is the land," and so on.
They've been there for generations.
Say, "I do get it."
But this Catalan nationalist who's like literally written
in Catalonian for, I don't know how many years, right,
is basically saying, "This is worth thinking about."
And so it's a peaceful third way.
- Yeah, but it's interesting.
I mean, it's a good question whether Elon Musk, SpaceX,
and Tesla will be successful without Twitter.
- Yeah, I don't think as successful.
I mean, obviously they existed before Twitter
and a lot of the engineering problems
are obviously non-Twitter things, right?
But Twitter itself has certainly probably helped Musk
with Tesla sales.
- The engineering, no, that's not what I mean.
- Oh, go ahead.
- The best people in the world
solve the engineering problems.
- Yes, but he hires the people to solve them
and he knows enough about engineering to hire those people.
- That's the point I'm making.
On Twitter, the legend of Elon Musk is created.
The vision is communicated
and the best engineers in the world
come to work for the vision.
It's an advertisement of a man of a company
pursuing a vision.
I think Twitter is a great place to make viral ideas
that are compelling to people, whatever those ideas are,
and whether that's the network state
or whether that's humans becoming
a multi-planetary species.
- Here is a remark I had just before the pandemic
related to this, okay, about Twitter helping Elon,
just beyond that for a second.
Maybe centralization is actually also underexplored
in the design space.
For example, today's social networks
are essentially governed by a single CEO,
but that CEO is a background figure.
They aren't leading the users to do anything.
What if they did?
One example, could Elon Musk's then 30 million followers
somehow get us to Mars faster?
Tools for directed collaborative work
by really large groups on the internet
are still in their infancy.
You can see pieces of what I was talking about,
the scratch pad thing,
the network state being a group
which can do collective actions.
This is kind of the thing, right?
So technologies for internet collaboration
that can be very useful to the software
for future network states.
Operational transformation,
so like Google Docs coordinates edits.
Conflict-free replicated data types
is another alternative, easier to code in some ways
than operational transformation.
Microtasks like Mechanical Turk, Scale.ai,
and Earn.com before we sold it.
Blockchains and crypto, obviously.
The Polymath project,
where a bunch of people parallel processed
and were able to solve an open math problem
by collaborating.
Wikipedia with its flaws that we talked about.
Social networks and group messaging,
all these are ways for collaborating.
They're not just simply attacking
or doing something on the internet.
This is something that Elon could use, right?
- What works and what doesn't about Twitter?
If there's something that's broken, how would you fix it?
- A million things I can say here.
So a few things.
First is fact-checking.
I had this kind of fun, I thought it was a funny tweet.
To anyone who wants to quote,
"Ban lying on social media,
"please write down a function that takes in a statement
"and returns whether it is true.
"If you can start with the remand hypothesis,"
that would be amazing.
- Yeah.
- Okay?
- Yeah, we'll put--
- That's kind of funny, right?
- That's funny.
- And so now the thing is--
- That joke landed on like five people.
- Sure, you wanna explain the joke?
Go.
- Well, no, there's a lot of problems,
decidability where the truth,
that's what proofs in math is.
The truth of the thing is actually
exceptionally difficult to determine.
And that's just a really nice example.
- Right.
- The problems that persist across centuries
that have not been solved by the most brilliant minds,
they're essentially true or false problems.
- That's right.
And so when people are saying,
when they were saying they want to ban lying on social media,
fact-check social media,
the assumption is that they know what is true.
And what do they mean by that?
They really mean the assertion of political power, right?
With that said, do I think it could be useful
to have some kind of quote fact-checking thing?
Yes, but it has to be decentralized and open source.
You could imagine an interesting concept
of coding Trugal, like a Google,
that returned what was true.
It's like a modified version.
- Yes, I like it.
- Right?
So like GPT-3,
but the stable diffusion version where it's open.
Okay.
And so now anybody,
stable diffusion shows it is possible
to take an expensive AI model and put it out there.
Right?
So you have, you know what a knowledge graph is?
Like basically, you wouldn't actually,
whether you have it as RDF
or like a triple store kind of thing,
or some other representation,
it's like an ontology of A is a B and, you know,
B has a C and it's got probabilities on the edges sometimes
and other kinds of metadata.
And this allows Google to show certain kinds
of one box information where it's like,
what is Steve Jobs's, you know,
what is Lorraine Powell Jobs's age or birthday?
They can pull that up out of the knowledge graph, right?
And so you can imagine that Trugal
would have both deterministic and statistical components.
§49Transcript · 6:15:19–6:22:37
And crucially, it would say whether something is true
according to a given knowledge graph.
And so this way, at least what you can do is you can say,
okay, here's the things that are consensus reality,
like the value of the gravitational constant
will be the same in the MAGA knowledge graph
and the US establishment knowledge graph
and the CCP knowledge graph and the, I don't know,
the Brazilian knowledge graph and so on and so forth, okay.
But there's other things that will be quite different.
And at least now you can isolate
where the point of disagreement is.
And so you can have a form of decentralized fact-checking
that is like, according to who, well, here is the authority
and it is this knowledge graph, right?
So that's like a kind of thing, right?
- Yeah, yeah.
- So that is, so that's one concept
of like what next social media looks like.
There's actually so much more.
Another huge thing is decentralized social media, okay.
Social media today is like China under communism
in a really key sense.
There's a great article called
"The Secret Document That Transformed China."
Do you know what China was like before 1978?
- I know about the atrocities.
- Sure, so. - But there.
- To put some flesh on the bone, so to speak, okay.
So basically.
- There's a good book I'm reading
because I think a lot of documents became public recently.
And so.
- There was a window when it opened up.
Now it's probably closing back down again, but.
- But great biographies because of that were written.
Like I'm currently reading "Mao's Great Famine"
by Frank Dicotter.
- Yeah.
- Which is, oh boy.
- It's crazy, okay. - Yeah.
- Here's the thing is capitalism was punishable by death
in living memory in China.
Just to explain what that meant, okay.
I mean, that's what communism was, right?
It was literally the same China that has like the CCP,
you know, the entrepreneurs and Jack Ma and so on and so forth.
40 something years ago, capitalism was punishable by death.
But to give you a concrete example,
this is a famous story in China.
It may be apocryphal,
but it's what the folks have talked about.
There's a village in Xiaogang
and basically all the grain that you were produced
was supposed to go to the collective.
And even one straw belonged to the group.
At one meeting with Communist Party officials,
a farmer asked, "What about the teeth in my head?
"Do I own those?"
Answer, "No, your teeth belong to the collective."
Okay.
Now, the thing is that when you're taking 100%
of everything, okay, work hard, don't work hard,
everyone gets the same,
so people don't wanna work, right?
So what happened?
These farmers gathered in secret
and they did something that was like,
would have gotten them executed.
They were a contract amongst themselves and said,
"We all agree that we will be able to keep
"some of our own grain.
"We will give some of them to the regime
"so when it comes to collect grain, they've got something.
"We'll be able to keep some of it."
And if any of us are killed for doing this,
then the contract said that the others
would take care of their children.
Okay?
To keep some of what you earned,
I mean, just think about how-
- They formed a mini capitalism society
within the Communist, a secret capitalism society
amongst five people.
- Right, so now that they could keep some
of what they earned, right?
Keep some of what they earned,
they had a bumper harvest.
And you know what happened with that bumper harvest?
That made the local officials really suspicious and mad.
They weren't happy that there was a bumper harvest.
They're like, "What are you doing?
"You're doing capitalism?"
- Yeah. - Right?
And a few years earlier, they might've just been executed.
And in fact, many were.
That's what it means when you see millions dead.
Millions dead means guys were shot
for keeping some grain for themselves.
Okay, it means like guys came and kicked in the door
of your collective farm and raped your wife
and took you off to a prison camp and so on and so forth.
That's what communism actually was, okay?
It hasn't been depicted in movies.
There's a great post by Ken Billingsley in the year 2000
called, if I get this right, "Hollywood's Missing Movies."
Okay, this is basically here.
I'll paste this link so you can put it in the show notes.
All right, this is worth reading.
It's still applicable today,
but now that we have stable diffusion,
now we have all these people online,
now that Russia and China are America's national bad guys,
as they were before, they are again,
perhaps we'll get some movies on what communism
actually was during the 20th century and how bad it was,
right, and vaccinate people against that
as well as against Nazism, which they should be, okay?
The point of this, go ahead.
- No, 'cause I'm congratulating myself on the nice
because you're sending me excellent links on WhatsApp
and I just saw that there's an export chat feature.
- Yes, great.
- Because we also have disappearing messages on,
so I was like, all right, this is great.
- Great.
- I get it.
Your ability to reference sources is incredible,
so thank you for this.
- This is, otherwise, if I say something,
it sounds too surprising,
so that's why I wanna make sure I have--
- Just on this topic.
- Yeah, so like, yeah, I mean,
people would be like shot for holding some grain.
So what happened though was Deng Xiaoping said,
okay, we're not gonna kill you.
In fact, we're gonna actually set up
the first special economic zone in Shenzhen.
He didn't try to flip the whole country
from communist to capitalist in one go.
Instead, he's like, we can reform in one place.
And in fact, he fenced it off from the rest of China
and it did trade with Hong Kong
and he spent his political capital on this one exception.
It grew so fast, they gave him more political capital.
Some people think actually that the Sino-Vietnamese War
was Deng's way of just distracting the generals
while he was turning China around
to get it back on the capitalist road.
And what he did was the opposite of a rebranding.
He did a reinterpretation.
Like a rebranding is where the substance is the same,
but the logo is changed.
You're now, you were Facebook, you're now meta.
That's a rebranding, right?
Reinterpretation is where the logo
and the branding is the same.
They're still the CCP,
they're still the Chinese Communist Party,
but they're capitalist now, the engine under the hood.
It's deniable, okay?
And this is a very common,
once you realize those are different things,
it's like swap the front end, swap the back end.
- Yeah.
- Go ahead. - Good way to put it.
- Right? - It's really good.
Yeah, yeah, really.
(laughing)
I'm enjoying your metaphors
and way of talking about stuff.
Yeah, so I get, yeah, yeah.
Swap, you could, yeah.
Rebranding is swap the front end,
reinterpretation is swap the back end.
- That's right.
Once you realize that, you're like, okay,
I can just like as an engineer, you can kind of,
okay, sometimes I wanna do this on the front end,
sometimes I wanna do it on the back end,
sometimes it's explicit,
and sometimes the user doesn't need to see it
and it's on the back end.
Lots of political stuff, you know,
is arguably not just best done on the back end,
but always done on the back end.
One of the points I make in the book is,
left is the new right is the new left,
is, you know, if you look through history,
the Christian King, the Republican conservative,
the CCP entrepreneur, the WASP establishment,
these are all examples of a revolutionary left movement
becoming the ruling class right.
Okay, like the Republican conservative,
just as that one example,
I go through extended description of this in the book,
but the Republicans were the radical Republicans,
the left of 1865, they won the revolution
and their moral authority led them to have economic authority
§50Transcript · 6:22:41–6:30:27
in the late 1800s.
You wouldn't want a Democrat Confederate trader
as the head of your, you know,
railroad company, would you, right?
So all the Confederate traders that were boxed out
from the plum positions in the late 1800s.
And so what happened was the Republicans
turned their moral authority into economic authority,
made tons of money.
The Democrats then started repositioning,
not as a party of the Southern racists, but the poor, right?
And, you know, the cross of gold speech
by William Jennings Bryan was part of that.
There's a gradual process that reaches a path,
not a path, let's say a crucial mark
with the election of FDR,
where it was actually not the 1932, but 1936 election
that black voters switched over to FDR, okay?
That was actually the, like the major flip to like 70%,
you know, to the Democrats.
Now they'd repositioned as a party of the poor,
not the party of the South, okay?
And Republicans had lost some economic authority,
or rather they had moral authority,
they turned into economic authority.
They started to lose some moral authority.
The loss of moral authority was complete by 1965.
That was actually a mop-up.
People dated, you know, the civil rights movement
as the big way where the Republicans lost moral authority.
It's not really, that was a mop-up because 1936,
30 years earlier was when black voters
switched to the Democrats, okay?
So 1965 was another 10 points moving over
of black voters to Democrats.
Republicans had completely lost moral authority
100 years after the civil war, okay?
Then the next 50 years, that loss of moral authority
meant that they lost economic authority,
'cause now you wouldn't want a Republican bigot
as a CEO of your tech company anymore, would you?
Right?
So by 2015, now you have,
it's like two sine waves that are staggered, right?
Moral authority leads to economic authority,
leads to loss of moral authority,
leads to loss of economic authority.
And so now you have the Democrats, you know,
have completed 155 year arc from the defeated party
in the civil war to the dominant party
in the US establishment.
All the woke capitalists are now at the very top.
And now the same repositioning is happening
where if you're so woke, why are you rich?
You get it, right?
Like, you know, if you're so smart,
why aren't you rich is the normal kind of thing, right?
If you're so woke, if you're so holy,
why is like, for example, the BLM founder,
why do they have this million dollar mansion, right?
If you're so woke and it's all about being good
and you're anti-capitalist,
how come you seem to be raking in the money, et cetera,
right?
This is an argument which I'm not sure how long it will go.
It might take years to play out,
it might take decades to play out.
I think probably on the order of a decade.
You're gonna see, in my view, the repositioning.
If the Democrats are the woke capitalists,
the Republicans will eventually become,
are becoming the Bitcoin maximalists.
Why?
Because, you know, if one guy picks left,
the other guy picks right.
It's literally like magnets kind of repelling.
They're sort of forced into the other corner here, right?
And the Bitcoin maximalists will essentially,
where this guy says centralization,
they say decentralization,
where they defend the right of capital to do anything,
the maximalists will say,
actually, you're all cantillionaires,
you're all benefiting from printed money,
you don't have anything that's legitimate,
you don't actually own anything,
it's all a handout from the government,
and so on and so forth, right?
And so that's a counter positioning
that will basically attack the wokes
by how much money they're making.
They're not contesting the ideology.
So when one guy signals economics, you signal culture.
When the other guy signals culture, you signal economics.
That's actually, that's a whole thing I can talk about.
Should I talk about that for a second?
- Sure.
- Is this integrated into the forces that you talk about?
You've talked about the three forces,
the trifecta of forces that affect our society,
which is the wokes, let's say--
- Woke capital, communist capital, crypto capital.
- You talk so fast, and I think so slow.
- No, no, no.
- Woke capital, communist capital, and crypto capital.
Can you explain each of those three?
We actually talked about each of the three in part,
but it'd be nice to bring them together
in a beautiful triangle.
- Then I will also come back up,
and I'll talk about how the CCP story relates
to social media and decentralized social media, okay?
All right, so NYT-CCP-BTC is woke capital,
communist capital, crypto capital.
And communist capital is, the simplest is, you must submit.
The Communist Party is powerful, CCP is powerful,
and you are not.
If you're in China, you just submit.
- CCP is an embodiment of communist capital
that you're talking about.
- Well, yeah, so basically, and by the,
in China, they call it CPC, you know?
So basically, they don't like it usually if you say CCP,
right, so the Communist Party of China,
as opposed to Chinese Communist Party of China.
Basically, that is capitalism,
that is a Chinese pool of capital,
that billion-person pool, okay?
That's WeChat, and it's Alibaba,
and it's that entire kind of thing.
That is one just social network with currency.
The whole thing's vertically integrated.
- When we say communist, what do you mean here?
Why is the word communist important?
Why don't you just say China?
So is communist an important word?
- It just, well--
- Or is it just a catchy label?
- It's a catchy label, but I think it's also important
because it seems, it's paradoxical, right?
So I had a thread on this.
The future is communist capital versus woke capital
versus crypto capital.
Each represents a left-right fusion that's bizarre
by the standards of the 1980s consensus.
It's PRC versus MMT versus BTC, all right?
And why is it bizarre by the standards of 1980s consensus?
Well, in the 1980s, you wouldn't think the communists
would become capitalists, but they did.
You wouldn't think that the wokes, the progressives, right,
would become so enamored with giant corporations
and their power, right?
They've seen something to liken that, right?
And you also wouldn't think that the non-Americans
or the post-Americans or the internationalists
would be the champions of capital
because you'd think it's the American nation, right?
So rather than the conservative American nationalists
being the defenders of capital,
you have the liberal Americans who are with capital,
you have the communist Chinese who are with capital,
and you have the internationalists who are with capital.
And it's the conservative American nationalists
who are in some ways against that,
which is kind of funny, right?
So it's like this weird ideological flippening
that if you take the long lens,
you have these poles that kind of repel each other, okay?
So just on the CCP, NYT, BTC thing.
- NYT, by the way, is woke capital.
- Yeah, what is NYT?
So its formula is a little interesting.
If CCP is just, you must submit because they're powerful,
okay, and then you bow your head
because the Chinese Communist Party is strong.
Woke capital is you must sympathize.
Why do you bow your head, Lex?
Oh, because you're a white male.
Therefore, you're guilty.
You must bow your head because you are powerful.
Yet notice it ends in the same place,
in your head looking to the ground, right?
In China, it's because they're powerful,
so therefore you must bend your head.
For the wokes, it's the left-handed version
where you are powerful and it's shameful,
so you should bow your head, right?
- Right. - Okay?
But it ends in your head bowed.
It's an ideology of submission.
It's not that subtle, but it's somewhat subtle.
And then finally, crypto capital is head held high.
You must be sovereign, okay?
And one of the things I point out in the book
is each of these polls is negative in some ways
when taken to extreme, but also negative in its opposite.
For example, obviously just totally submitting
to total surveillance is bad,
but a society where nobody submits is San Francisco
where people just rob stores and walk out
§51Transcript · 6:30:29–6:38:12
in the middle shoplifting all these goods
and nothing happens, right?
A society where you have the woke level of sympathy
where you get to the kind of insanity
of math is white supremacist
and whatever nonsense is happening today is terrible,
but a society that's totally stripped of sympathy
is also not one that one would wanna be part of, right?
That's just like the,
whether it's 4chan's actual culture or it's feign culture
or something like that or some weird combination,
that's also not good.
It's like Russia in the '90s,
like nobody trusts anybody, that's also bad.
And being totally sovereign, that sounds good.
And there's a lot that is good about it.
I'm sympathetic to this corner,
but being totally sovereign, you go so capitalist,
so sovereign that you're against the division of labor.
You don't trust anybody.
So you have to pump your own water and so on.
So you actually have a reduced standard
of living over here, okay?
And conversely-
- Like survivalist or whatever.
- Survivalist type of stuff, right?
And you just go kind of too crazy into that corner.
And then of course, though, the other extreme
of having no sovereignty is the,
you will own nothing and be happy.
Everything's in the cloud
and can be deleted at any point, right?
So each of these kind of has badness when it's there,
but also it's total extreme opposite is bad.
And so you wanna kind of carve out
like an intelligent intermediate of these three poles,
and that's the decentralized center
or the recentralized center, I call it.
Now, with that said,
I think there is a repositioning in particular
of woke capital that is happening.
And I think if the 2000s was the global war on terror,
and then the channel just changed to wokeness in the 2010s,
and when I mean channel change,
have you seen Paul Graham's graph
or actually David Rosado's graph that Paul Graham posted?
- No, but this is a good chance to say
that Paul Graham is awesome.
- Okay, yeah.
And so here is this graph, okay?
David Rosado's data analysis, I think,
that put this together.
So basically, this is a graph of the word usage frequency
in New York Times, 1970 to 2018.
And he's got some controls there.
- Paul Graham tweets, "Hypothesis.
"Although some newspapers can survive
"the switch to online subscriptions,
"none can do it and remain politically neutral,
"quote, newspaper or record.
"You have to pick a side to get people to subscribe."
And there's a bunch of plots.
Plots.
On the x-axis is years,
on the y-axis is the frequency of use.
And sexism has been going up,
misogyny has been going up,
sexist, patriarchy, mansplaining,
toxic masculinity, male privilege.
All these terms have been going up
very intensely in the past decade.
- Yeah, but really, 2013 is the exact moment.
You see these things,
they're flat and then just go vertical.
Mansplaining, toxic masculinity.
- What precisely happened in 2013?
- Ah, so I talk about this in the book,
but I think fundamentally what happened was
tech hurt media and their revenue dropped
by about $50 billion over the four years from '08 to 2012.
Tech helped Obama get reelected
and media was positive on tech until December 2012.
They wrote, "The nerds go marching in the Atlantic."
Then after January 2013, once Obama was ensconced,
then the knives came out
because basically these tech guys were bankrupting them.
They were through supporting them.
And so the journals got extremely nasty
and just basically they couldn't build search engines
or create social networks,
but they could write stories and shape narratives.
So a clear editorial direction went down
that essentially took all of this,
all these weapons that had been developed in academia
to win status competitions in humanities departments.
And then they just deployed them.
And essentially somebody observed that
wokeness is the combination of
Foucauldian deconstruction and civil rights,
where deconstruction takes away
the legitimacy of the old order.
And then civil rights says,
okay, the only thing that's good is this,
which says the old order is also bad in a different way,
but this is what's good.
And that is the underpinning ideology.
All these words have embedded in them an ideology.
Another way of thinking about it is,
this is not my reference, but I'll cite it anyway,
the glossary of the Greek military junta.
The creation and or use of special terms
are employed by the junta as propaganda tools
because essentially the word itself embeds a concept.
You can Russell conjugate something one way or the other.
Russell conjugation is this concept that
I sweat, you perspire, but she glows.
You can always take something.
You are uncontrollably angry,
but he is righteously indignant.
You have a thin skin, they clap back.
So once you kind of realize that these words
have just been chosen in such a way
as to delegitimize their target,
and they all went vertical in 2013,
and they were suddenly targeted
against their erstwhile allies in tech,
but also just across the country,
you can see that this great awokening,
that's what Iglesias called it
by playing words to the great awakening,
this kind of spasm of quasi-religious extremism.
I wouldn't call it religious because it's not God-centered.
It's really state and network-centered.
So I call it a doctrine,
which is a superset of religion and political doctrine.
These words went vertical and all the terrorism stuff
you just noticed kind of fell off a cliff.
That was the obsession of everything in the 2000s
and just channel change.
It's amazing how that happened.
It's not like any of the pieces got picked up.
Some of those wars are still raging, of course.
- And there's victims to this wokeism movement.
- But in a weird way, even though some parts of it,
just like there's wars in the Middle East
that still keep raging,
there's certainly active fronts of wokeism,
but in a sense, the next shift is already on.
You know why?
It's a pivot from wokeism to statism.
In many ways, NYT is sort of,
and more generally the US establishment
is sort of kind of coming,
you may not believe this,
they're kind of coming back to the center a little bit.
In the same way that Lenin, after the revolution,
implemented the new economic policy,
which you may be aware of, right?
Which was just like X percent more capitalism.
He kind of boot on the neck, take control,
but then ease up for a bit.
And the so-called net men during the '20s
were able to eke out something.
There was like, oh, okay, fine.
He's gonna be easier on us.
Then it intensified again,
because basically by loosening up,
they were able to consolidate control.
They weren't putting as much pressure on, right?
Then it went extremely intense again, right?
Similar to like Mao's like a hundred flowers thing,
let a hundred flowers bloom.
And you know, everybody came out
and then he founded all the people who were against him
and he executed a bunch of them, right?
So what's happening now is NYT is,
and more generally the US establishment
is somewhat tacking back to the center,
where, you know, they're not talking BLM
and abolish the police.
They're saying fund the Capitol police, right?
They've gone from the narrative of 2020,
which was meant to win a domestic contest,
where they said, America is a systemically racist country,
tear down George Washington, we're so evil,
to the rhetoric of 2022,
which is we're the global champion of democracy
and every non-white country is supposed to trust us.
Now, obviously those are inconsistent, right?
If you're in India or you're in Nigeria,
and you just heard that America's calling itself
the same guys, by the way,
saying it's so institutionally racist, systemically racist.
And now you're saying, well,
we're the leader of the free world and the number one.
Obviously there's an inconsistency
between the domestic propaganda
and the foreign propaganda, right?
There's a contrast between abolish the police
and put 2 billion for the Capitol police.
§52Transcript · 6:38:13–6:46:16
You can reconcile this and you can say,
the US establishment is pro-federal
and anti-local and state.
So abolish the local police,
who tend to be, you know, Republican or rightist,
but fund the FBI, fund the Capitol police,
who tend to be, you know,
just like in the Soviet Union,
is the national things like the KGB, right?
They were for the state,
but there were all these local nationalist,
ethnic insurgencies in like Estonia and other places, right?
So you can reconcile them,
but nevertheless on its face, those are contradictory.
So what are you gonna get, I think?
I think you're gonna get this rotation
where a fair number of the folks
on the sort of authoritarian right
are kind of pulled back into the fold a bit, okay?
These are the cops and the military and whatnot,
some of them, because as this decade progresses,
you're gonna see the signaling on American statism
as opposed to wokeism, okay?
Which is 30 degrees back towards the center, right?
Conversely, on the other side,
you're gonna have the left libertarians
and right libertarians who are signaling crypto
and decentralization and so on, okay?
And so the next one isn't red versus blue,
it's orange versus green.
It's the dollar versus Bitcoin.
And so you have the authoritarians,
the top of the political compass
versus the "libertarians," right?
And here's the visual of that.
So that's why as I wrote the book and after I showed it,
I was like, "You know, I'm already seeing this shift
happening from war on terror to wokeism
to American statism, right?"
And here, just take a look at this visual.
- Interesting.
So the visual is an animation transforming
the left versus right, libertarian versus authoritarian
to Bitcoin and dollar versus crypto.
- That's right.
And some folks switch sides, right?
'Cause you have folks like Jack Dorsey
and a lot of the tech founders
in basically the lower left corner, right?
Who were blue but are now gonna become orange or are orange.
And you have folks in the upper right corner
who are going to, at the end of the day,
pick the dollar and the American flag
over the internationalist ideals of cryptocurrency.
- The realigning, as you call it.
Let me ask you, briefly, we do need to get a comment,
your visionary view of things.
We're at a low point in the cryptocurrency space
from a shallow analysis perspective,
or maybe in a deeper sense, if you can enlighten me.
Do you think Bitcoin will rise again?
- Yes.
- Do you think it will go to take on fiat,
to go over a million dollars, to go to these heights?
- I mean, I think it's possible.
And the reason I think it's possible
is I think a lot of things might go to a million dollars
because inflation. - Oh, because of inflation.
- Right.
- Whatever.
- That was an important point, right?
- Yes, it's a very important point, yes.
- Because you're seeing essentially...
(Lex laughing)
- Yes.
- But sort of the choke pointing on energy
is pushing up prices across the board for a lot of things.
China's not doing us any favors with the COVID lockdowns.
Putin's not doing the world any favors
with this giant war.
There's a lot of bad things happening
in the physical world, right?
When China, Russia, and the US are all,
and Europe is, there's folks who are just insane
about degrowth and they're against,
they're pushing for burning coal and wood, right?
So a lot of prices are going up
in a really foundational and fundamental way.
And with that said also,
the dollar is in some ways strengthening
against certain other things
'cause a lot of other countries are dying harder, right?
And you've got riots in Sri Lanka and riots in Panama
and riots in all these places, right?
So it's very complicated
because you've got multiple different trends
going in the same way.
Your Bitcoin maxims would just say infinity over 21 million.
And so therefore you print all the dollars
with only 21 million Bitcoin, so Bitcoin goes to infinity.
But it can be something where lots of other currencies die
and the dollar is actually exported via stable coins, okay?
But I do think--
- So it still moves,
fiat still moves somehow into the cryptocurrencies.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think it's kind of like Microsoft where,
I mean, Windows is still around, right?
Microsoft is still around.
It's still a multi-hundred billion dollar company.
It had-- - He doesn't mean it.
He doesn't mean it, don't worry.
All my machines are Windows
and like still boot, yeah. - Are they?
Okay, okay. - I don't own a single Mac.
- Really?
Okay, you are unusual in that.
- Yeah.
- That's, so at least for our--
- It's not ideology, just convenience.
- Fine, I mean, they actually now at PostSethia,
they do make some good stuff, right?
Like Microsoft Teams is good, right?
- Yeah, there's a lot of incredible stuff.
And UCO has done a lot of innovative things, like GitHub.
- Yeah, I mean, well, there's an acquisition,
but still, they give them credit for it.
- The acquisition, the pivoting of vision and motivations
and focus and all that kind of stuff.
So anyway, yes, Microsoft does analogy metaphor
for something?
- Well, yeah, so basically just like,
they didn't need a turnaround,
but they did endure to the present day.
They didn't die from Google app.
I mean, for the massive attacks on them, they didn't die.
They're less powerful, but they make more money, right?
And I think that might be something that,
I mean, our best case scenario is the US establishment
or CCP has more power over fewer people, okay?
- I see.
- And so, but you can't exit.
If you're there, you're kind of knuckling under or whatever,
but you can't exit, right?
And so I mentioned those three polls.
CCP is obviously a billion people, 1.4 aligned
under the digital yuan and so on, right?
NYT is the entire, it's the tech companies,
it's the US dollar, it is the establishment.
And then crypto capital is everybody else.
But I actually think that over time,
that third world is web three this time.
And that's the third poll.
And that's India and it's Israel.
And it's lots of American conservatives
and left libertarians and libertarians.
And it's also lots of Chinese liberals,
all the folks who are trying to get out of China
because it's become so nationalist and crazy
and difficult for capitalism.
And so if you take basically non-establishment Americans
on both left and right, okay?
The bottom two quadrants in the political compass
I talked about, you take the liberal Chinese,
you take the Israelis and the Indians, why?
Because they don't, both of them have a lot of tech talent.
Right, they're the number one and number two demographics
for tech founders.
And they want to, while they are generally sympathetic
to the West, right?
And they have more ties to the West,
they also are more cautious about national interests
rather than just starting fights,
you know, where that's how they would think about it, right?
They just, you know, India thinks of itself
as a poor country,
Israel thinks of itself as a small country.
And so therefore it needs to not just get in every fight
just for the sake of it.
And so need to maintain a cautious distance with China,
but not like do what Pelosi is doing
and try and start like a big thing, okay?
I think Israel is similar
where it's maintaining diplomatic relations with China.
It's more friendly towards China than the US is.
India and Israel, I think, are two sovereign states
that have a lot of globally mobile tech talent
that obviously have ties to the West
with a large diaspora that are hard to demonize,
you know, in the sense of willing to argue on the internet.
(laughs)
Let's put it like that, in English, right?
It's very important.
And them plus enough Americans plus enough Chinese
can set up another poll that is not for cold war
or military confrontation, but for peace and trade
and freedom and so on and so forth, right?
That's the center as opposed to the, you know,
left of the woke American US establishment
or the right of the ultra-nationalist CCP, right?
§53Transcript · 6:46:18–6:53:11
That's what I think about.
Now, what I would say here is the reason I think
these are the kind of the three polls,
you can argue against this, right?
You can say it's unipolar world.
America's totally dominant.
That's one argument.
You can say it's a bipolar world.
It's just the US versus China.
Not everybody else will have to be forced to align
with one or the other.
Jay Shankar, you know, actually explicitly rejected this.
He's like, look, there's a billion people in India.
It's coming up on, it will eventually be like
the number three economy.
It's on the rise.
He's got the history and culture.
He thinks he's entitled to have,
India's entitled to have its own side, right?
In such a thing.
It's a funny way of putting it, right?
But it's also true.
And so you could say it's unipolar,
you could say it's bipolar,
you could say it's just multipolar.
And everybody is kind of, they're, you know,
India, Israel, these are groups out there.
But I actually think it's gonna be tripolar.
And the reason it's tripolar is these three pools
are the groups that have enough media and money
and scale and whatnot to really kind of
be self-consistent civilizations.
Obviously China's like the vertically integrated,
like Apple or whatever, just like one country.
- Maybe a stable ideology.
- A stable ideology, that's right, right?
Obviously the, you know,
the wolves have control of lots of institutions.
They've got the US establishment,
they've got the tech companies,
they've got the media companies and so on.
But crypto is basically everybody else.
And crucially crypto has inroads in China and America
where it's hard to demonize it as completely foreign
because there's many, many, many huge proponents
of the universalist values of crypto in America and China,
because it is true global rule of law and free speech
and, you know, so on.
It is genuinely universalist in a way where
America can no longer be, you know,
the number one rule of the rules-based order
is America is always number one.
And China doesn't even pretend
to maintain a rules-based order, right?
Whereas for all those countries
that don't wanna either be dominated
by the US media corporations that can,
or social media that can just censor Trump,
nor do they wanna be dominated by China,
this is an attractive alternative platform
they can make their own, right?
So that's where I think, you know,
I wrote an article on this in Foreign Policy on here.
Here's two articles that talk about this a little bit.
It's called Great Protocol Politics.
And then here's another one on the sort of domestic thing,
Bitcoin is Civilization for Barry Weiss, okay?
But I wanna just come up the stack a little bit
and just return to that original point,
which I diverged on,
which was why, I gave the whole example
of how we got into China
because I talked about how China
had gone from communist to capitalist
and letting people have just a share of what they owned,
right?
With social media,
we're still in kind of the communist era
of social media almost,
where whatever you earn on social media,
like Google takes its cut,
Twitter takes 100%,
you're nothing for all your tweets or anything like that.
Not only do you have, do you earn nothing,
you might get a little rev share on TikTok or YouTube,
you can do okay, right?
But not only do you earn either nothing or a little bit,
you have no digital property rights,
even more fundamentally.
You are at the,
just the whim of a giant corporation can hit a button
and everything you worked for over years, gone, okay?
That is, even if that is quote,
the current state of events,
the state of affairs rather,
that is not the right balance of power.
To be able to unperson somebody at the touch of a key
and take away everything in the digital world
and we're living more and more in the digital world,
we need to check on that power.
And the check on that power is crypto
and its property rights and its decentralization, right?
Then when I say decentralization,
I mean your money and your digital property
is by default yours.
And there has to be a due process
for someone to take that away from you.
Everything, all work is online.
All your money is online, your presence is online.
That can just be taken away from you
with the press of a key
that just gives bad governments, bad corporations
so much power that that's wrong, right?
That's why I'm a medium and long-term bull on crypto,
simply because the check on this thing.
And that if you think about it
in terms of just abstract decentralization is one thing,
but you think about it in terms of property rights,
it's quite another.
And now what that also means is once you have property rights
and you have decentralized social media,
it'll be like the explosion of trade that happened
after China went from communist to capitalist.
Literally billions of people around the world
are no longer giving everything to the collective.
They own the teeth in their head now, finally.
Okay, it's funny, right?
So you're lexfriedman.eth, you own it.
The keys are on your computer.
The bad part is of course they can get hacked
or something like that.
Then you can deal with that with social recovery.
There's ways of securing keys.
But the good part is, ta-da,
you actually have property rights
in the Hernando de Soto sense.
You have something you own, ownership, digital ownership.
It's the cloud is great,
but crypto gives you some of the functionality of the cloud
while also having some of the functionality
of the offline world where you have the keys.
So it's a V3, right?
It's a continuous theme, right?
The V1 was offline, I've got a key, I own it.
I have de facto control.
V2 is the cloud, someone else manages it for me.
It's hosted, I get collaboration and so on.
V3 is the chain where you combine aspects of those, right?
You have the global state of the cloud,
but you have the local permission
and controlling of the private key, okay?
So that's why I'm a medium to long-term ultra bull on crypto
and I've actually, there's a podcast I gave with Asympco
where I talked through how crypto actually
doesn't just go after finance.
So it's gold and it's wire transfers and it's crowdfunding
and it's all finance with DeFi,
but it's actually also search and it's social
and it's messaging.
It's actually even operating systems
and eventually cloud and whatnot.
Do you want me to talk about that briefly?
- Yeah, yeah, if you can briefly see
how broad you see the effect of crypto.
So first, crypto is fundamentally a new way
of building backend systems, right?
So if you think about how big a deal it was to go
from AT&T's corporate Unix to Linux, it's permissionless,
right?
When you went from, as much as I admire a lot of the stuff
that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman have done at OpenAI,
I mean, they're phenomenal in terms of research.
They've pushed the envelope forward.
I give them a ton of credit, right?
Still, it was great to see stable diffusion out there,
which was open source AI, right?
And so from a developer, from a power user standpoint,
whenever you have the unlocked version,
like an unlocked cell phone,
it's always gonna be better, right?
So what crypto gives you,
obviously it's every financial thing in the world.
You can do stocks, bonds, et cetera.
It's not, just like the internet wasn't just a channel.
It wasn't like radio and TV and internet.
It was internet radio and internet TV
and internet this and internet that.
Everything was the internet.
All media became the internet.
Crypto is not an asset class.
It's all asset classes.
It's crypto stocks and crypto bonds, et cetera.
In a real sense, like private property
arguably didn't exist in the same way before crypto.
International law didn't exist before crypto.
How are you gonna do a deal between Brazil and Bangladesh?
If a Brazilian company wants to acquire
a Bangladesh company,
they usually have to set up a US adapter in between
because otherwise, what are the tax
§54Transcript · 6:53:12–7:00:27
or the other obligations between the two?
You set up a US adapter or a Chinese adapter to go between,
but now that Brazilian and Bangladesh can go peer to peer
'cause they're using blockchain, right?
They can agree on a system of law
that is completely international and that's code.
So each party can diligence it
without speaking Portuguese and Bengali, right?
So that's why I am a long-term bull on crypto.
I just described the finance case.
Let me go through the others, right?
Social.
So you have the private keys for your ENS.
You have apps like Farcaster.
You basically have decentralized social media
where there's different variants.
Some, you just log in with your crypto username.
Others, the entire social network
and all the likes and posts are on chain like Deeso,
but there's several different versions, right?
Search.
Once you realize block explorers
are an important stealth threat to search,
they're very high traffic sites like blockchain.com
and Etherscan that Google has just totally slept on.
They don't have a block explorer.
You don't have to do anything in terms of trading
or anything like that.
Google does not have a block explorer.
Why?
Because think of it as search, but it is search.
It's absolutely search.
It's a very important kind of search engine.
And once you have crypto social,
you now show that you're not just indexing
in a block explorer like on-chain transactions,
but on-chain communications, okay?
So now you suddenly see, oh, the entire social web
that Google couldn't index.
It could only index the World Wide Web
and not the social web.
Now it's actually the on-chain signed web,
because every post is digitally signed.
It's a new set of signals.
It's way easier to index than either the World Wide Web
or the social web, 'cause it's open and public.
So this is a total disruptive thing to search
in the medium term,
because it's a new kind of data set to index, right?
So that's how it's a threat to social, to search.
It is a threat to messaging.
Why?
Because, or it's disruptive actually,
because of the ENS name, as I mentioned,
is like a universal identifier.
You can send encrypted messages between people.
That's a better primitive to base it on.
You know, WhatsApp is just claiming
that they're end-to-end encrypted.
But with an ENS name or with a crypto name,
you can be provably audibly end-to-end encrypted
because you're actually sending it back and forth, right?
'Cause the private key is local, right?
That itself, given how important that is, right?
You could man-in-the-middle signal or WhatsApp
because there's a server there, right?
If you have, you know,
so end-to-end encrypted messaging will happen
and with payments and all this other stuff, okay?
So you get the crypto messaging apps.
You get operating systems.
Why?
Well, the frontier of operating systems,
I mean, look, you know, Windows, Linux,
and Mac OS have been around forever.
But if you actually think about, you know,
what is a blockchain?
Well, there's operating systems, there's web browsers.
A blockchain is the most complicated thing
since an operating system or web browser
'cause it's a kind of operating system.
Why?
It's got, you know, something like Ethereum has an EVM.
It's got a programming language.
It's got an ecosystem where people monetize on it.
They build front-end apps and they build back-end apps.
They interoperate between each other.
This is the frontier of operating systems research.
People haven't thought of it that way, right?
It's also the frontier of a lot of things in databases.
You will get a crypto LinkedIn
where there's zero knowledge proofs of various credentials.
Okay?
Basically, every single web two company,
I can probably come up with a web three variant of it, right?
Like Ethereum is, I mean,
and this is high praise for both parties,
but Ethereum is like the crypto stripe,
or the web three stripe.
And you will see versions of everything else
that are like this.
But, you know, I kind of described search,
social, messaging, operating systems, the phone, right?
Solana is doing a crypto phone.
Why do you want that?
Again, digital property.
Apple was talking about running some script
to find if people were having, you know, CSAM,
like, you know, child porn or whatever on their phones,
right?
And even NYT actually reported that,
like Google ran something like this
and found false positives.
Some guy had to take a photo of a kid
for, you know, medical diagnosis.
It got false, you know, falsely flagged as CSAM.
He lost access to his account.
Total nightmare.
Imagine just getting locked out of your Google account,
which you're so dependent on, right?
As more and more of your digital life goes online,
you know, is it really that much ethically different
if it's the Chinese state that locks you out
or an American corporation, right?
Basically, it's operationally very similar.
You just have no recourse.
You're unpersoned, right?
So the crypto phone becomes like insanely important
because you have a local set of private keys.
Those are the keys to your currency and your passport
and your services and your life, right?
So like, become something that you just hold on you
with your person at all times, like your normal phone.
You might have backups and stuff,
but you know, the crypto phone
is an insanely important thing, okay?
And so that's search, that's social, that's messaging,
that's operating systems, that's a phone.
That's a lot right there.
- Yeah, that is beautiful.
- Can I have 120 seconds to just finish up
a few more thoughts on social media?
- Yes, please. - Okay.
AI and AR, okay?
This massive impact, obviously, of AI and social media.
You're gonna have completely new social media companies,
gestures, other things, you know, TikTok having, you know,
some of the AI creation tools in there
is just like a V1 of that.
There's this whole thread with everything,
stable diffusion is unlocking.
But basically, this is gonna melt Hollywood.
US media corporations that took a hit in the 2010s,
we're now gonna be able to have everyone around the world
able to tell their story.
And all the stuff about AI ethics and AI bias,
the ultimate bias is centralized AI.
Only decentralized AI is truly representative.
You cannot be faux representative.
You cannot claim that Google is representing Nigerians
and Indians and Brazilians and Japanese.
Like, those folks need to have access themselves, right?
So that's a fundamental ethical argument
against centralized AI.
It's unethical, and it's like, you know,
this faux thing where you might have like faux diversity
in the interface,
but you haven't actually truly decentralized it.
This is the woke capitalism, right?
You justify it with the wokeness,
and you make the money by centralizing it.
But the actual way of doing it is letting it free
for the world and letting people build their own versions.
If people wanna build a Asian "Lord of the Rings,"
they can do that.
If they wanna build an Indian one, they can do that.
If they, you know, whatever they want, right?
So that is the argument for AI decentralization
and for how that kind of links to this.
- I love that.
AI decentralization fixes the bias problem in AI,
which a lot of people seem to-
- Yeah, centralization-
- Talk about and focus on.
- Yeah, centralization is inherently unrepresentative,
fundamentally.
Like, you can like mathematically show it.
It's not representing the world.
The decentralization allows anybody to pick it up
and make it their own, right?
And centralization is almost always a mask
for like that private corporate interest, right?
It's like, one of the things about the vocabulism thing,
by the way, is the deplatforming of Trump was political.
Other things are political.
But do you know what deplatforming started with?
In the late 2000s, early 2010s, all the open social stuff
was when deplatforming was being used as a corporate weapon
against Meerkat and Zynga and Teespring, right?
These were companies that were competing with features
§55Transcript · 7:00:29–7:08:14
of, you know, TweetDeck, et cetera.
They're competing with features of Twitter or Facebook,
and the API was cut off.
And that was when actually progressives
were for net neutrality and an open internet
and open social against the concentration
of corporate power and so on.
Remember that, right?
And so what's gonna happen is both those two things,
the political and the corporate are gonna come together.
Why?
In the Soviet Union, denunciation was used as a tool
to, for example, undercut romantic rivals, right?
There's a great article called "The Practice of Denunciation"
in the Soviet Union, right?
Which talks about all these examples
where the ideological argument was used
to like kick somebody into the 300 like pit
that existed at like the center of the Soviet Union.
Anybody could be kicked into the pit at any moment.
And ta-da, well, Ivan's out, you know,
and now, you know, hey, Anna, you know, whatever, right?
Okay, that same thing is gonna be used by woke capitalists,
is being used by woke capitalists,
where the woke argument is used to justify
pulling, pushing their competitor out of the app store
or downracking them in search.
Well, again, you wouldn't want a bigot to be in search
who could compete with us or whatever, right?
And conversely, so the wokeness is used to make money
and the money is used to advance the ideology.
It's like this kind of back and forth.
Sometimes, right now, you think of those
as independent things, but then they fuse, okay?
And so that's very clear with the AI bias arguments
where it just so happens that it's so powerful, Lex,
this technology is so powerful in the wrong hands,
it could be used, so we will charge you $99 for every use
of it, how's that?
How altruistic is that?
Is that amazingly altruistic?
It's really good, right?
So once you kind of see that, as I said,
whenever they're positioning in economics,
you can go in culture, when they're positioning on culture,
you can go in economics.
If they're so woke, why are they rich?
If they're so concerned about representation,
why is it centralized?
Answer, they're not actually concerned about it,
they're making money, right?
Okay, so that is, I think, in a few words,
blows up a lot of the AI bias type stuff, right?
Okay, they're basically, they're biasing AI, all right.
So the amount of stuff that can be done with AI now,
like it also helps the pseudonymous economy,
as I was talking about with the AI Zoom.
So you have totally new sites, totally new apps
that are based on that.
I think it may, I mean, it changes,
you're gonna have new Google Docs,
new, all these kinds of things.
You might have, you know, once you can do things
with just a few taps, you might have sites
that are focused more on producing
rather than just consuming, because, you know,
you might, with AI, you can change
the productivity of gestures.
You know, you can have a few gestures,
like, for example, the image-to-image thing
with the Cable Diffusion, where you make a little cartoon,
third graders painting, and it becomes a real painting.
A lot of user interfaces will be rethought
now that you can actually do this incredible stuff
with AI, it knows what you want it to do, right?
So, and I saw this funny thing,
which was a riff on Peter Thiel's line,
which is AI is centralized and crypto is decentralized.
And somebody was saying, actually,
it turns out crypto is centralized
with the CBDCs and stable coin and so on,
but AI is getting decentralized with Cable Diffusion,
ha ha, right?
Which is funny, and I think there's centralized
and decentralized versions of each of these, right?
And finally, the third pole that actually,
you know, Thiel, you know, he talks about AI and crypto,
but the third pole is actually,
that's sort of underappreciated
'cause people think it already exists, is social.
That just is keeping on going, right?
And obviously the next step in social is AR and VR.
And why is it so obvious?
Because it's meta, you know, it's Facebook.
Now I saw this very silly article, it's like,
oh my God, Facebook is so dumb
for putting a $10 billion into, you know,
virtual reality, right?
And I'm like, okay, the most predictable innovation
in the world, in my view, is the AR glasses.
Have you talked about this on the podcast before?
- AR and VR, I mean, of course a lot,
but the AR is not as obvious, actually.
- Okay, so AR glasses, what are AR glasses?
So you take Stampshed Spectacles, Google Glass,
Apple's AR Kit, Facebook's Oculus Quest 2, right?
Or MetaQuest 2, whatever, okay?
You put those together and what do you get?
You get something that has the form factor of glasses
that you'd wear outside, okay?
Which can, with a tap, record
or give you terminator vision on something,
or with another tap go totally dark and become VR glasses.
Okay, so normal glasses, AR glasses, VR glasses, recording.
It's as multifunctional as your phone, but it's hands-free.
And you might actually even wear it more than your phone.
In fact, you might be blind without your AR glasses
because, you know, one of the things I've shown
the book early on are like floating sigils.
Did we talk, did I show you that?
So this is a really important just visual concept.
That right there shows with AR Kit,
you can see a globe floating outside.
Okay, secret societies are returning.
This is what NFTs will become.
The NFT locally on your crypto phone,
if you hold it, you can see the symbol.
And if you don't, you can't.
- By the way, for people just listening,
we're looking at a nice nature scene
where an artificially created globe is floating in the air.
- Yes, but it's invisible
if you're not holding up the AR Kit phone, right?
So- - So only you
have a window into this artificial world.
- That's right.
And then here's another thing
which shows you another piece of it.
And this is using ENS to unlock a door.
So this is an NFT used for something different.
So the first one is using the NFT effectively
to see something.
And the second is using the NFT to do something.
Okay, so based on your on-chain communication, right?
You can unlock a door.
That's a door to a room.
Soon it could be a door to a building.
It could be the gates to a community.
It could be your digital login, okay?
And so- - Amazing.
- What this means is basically a lot of these things
which are like individual pieces get synthesized, right?
And you eventually have a digital,
just like you have a digital currency,
or digital currencies unify concepts like obviously gold,
stocks, bonds, derivatives,
every kind of financial instrument,
plus Chuck E. Cheese tokens, karma,
everything that's fungible and transferable.
The digital passport unifies your Google style login,
your private keys, your API keys, your NFTs,
your ENS name, your domain name,
all of those kinds of things,
and your key card for your door and so on, right?
So the AR glasses are what probably, I don't know,
it'll be Facebook's version three or version four.
Apple is also working on them.
Google's also working on them.
You might just get a bunch of those models at the same time.
It's like predicting the iPhone,
just like Dorsey knew that mobile was gonna be big.
And that's why he had 140 characters for Twitter
'cause it was like an SMS code limitation
and Twitter was started before the iPhone.
AR glasses are an incredibly predictable invention
that you can start thinking about the future of social
is in part in person, okay?
And it also means people might go outside more.
Why?
Because you can't see a monitor in the sun,
but you can hit AR and maybe you have a full screen thing
and you just like kind of move your fingers or something
and you can tap.
You have to figure out the gesture.
You don't wanna have gorilla arms.
Maybe you do have a keyboard outside
or just even like a,
you could even have a desk like this.
If you had, if you can touch type,
you can imagine something where you look down
and you can see a keyboard with your AR glasses
and it registers it and then you can type like this, right?
And probably you could have some AI that could,
figure out what you meant rather than what you were doing.
Okay, so that's AI and social media.
That's AR and social media.
But really one last thing I'll say,
which is a non obvious non-technological part
is I think we'll go from very broad networks,
which are hundreds of millions or billions of people
§56Transcript · 7:08:16–7:15:55
like Twitter and Facebook,
which have many small communities in them
to much smaller networks that have a million
or 10 million people, but are much deeper, right?
In terms of their association, right?
And this is the long-term trend in tech
'cause you're going from eyeballs in the 1980s,
or I'm sorry, eyeballs in the 1990s
to daily active users in the 2000s
to holders in the 2010s.
So you go from just like, oh, I'm just a looky-loo
to I'm logging in every day
to I'm holding a significant percentage of my net worth.
And then this decade is when the online community
becomes primary.
You're a netizen.
The digital passport is your main identity.
And so this is not,
see the problem with Facebook or Twitter
is it's a bunch of different communities
that don't share the same values fighting each other.
This brings us back to the network state
where you have one community with shared values,
shared currency, and it's full stack.
It's a social network and it's a cryptocurrency
and it's a co-living community and it's a messaging app
and it's a this and it's a that.
And it's like Estonia,
with a million people,
you can actually build a lot of that full stack.
That is, starts to get to what I call a network state.
- I feel like there should be
like a standing applause line here.
This is brilliant.
You're an incredible person.
This was an incredible conversation.
We covered how to fix our government,
looking at the future of governments,
moving into network state.
We covered how to fix medicine, FDA, longevity.
That was just like a stellar description.
Really, I'll have to listen to that multiple times
to really think and thank you for that,
especially in this time
where the lessons learned from the pandemic
are unclear to at least me.
And there's a lot of thinking that needs to be done there.
And then just a discussion about how to fix social media
and how to fix money.
This was brilliant.
So you're an incredibly successful person yourself.
You taught, co-taught a course at Stanford for startups.
That's a whole nother discussion that we can have,
but let me just ask you,
there's a lot of people that look up to you.
So if there's somebody who's young,
in high school, early college,
trying to figure out what the heck to do with their life,
what to do with their career,
what advice could you give them?
How they can have a career they can be proud of
or how they can have a life they can be proud of.
- At least what I would do,
and then you can take it or leave it or what have you.
(Lex laughing)
- Yeah, maybe to your younger self.
Advice to your younger self.
- My friend, Novel,
this is a lot of what he puts out
is the very practical brass tacks, next steps.
And I tend towards the macro.
Of course, we both do both kind of thing, right?
But let's talk brass tacks and next steps
'cause I actually am practical,
or at least practical enough to get things done, I think.
- It's just like you said,
you're breaking up the new book into three.
- Yes, it's motivation, theory, and practice.
- Motivation, theory, and practice.
- That's right.
And each of those-- - Let's talk about practice.
- So let's talk practice.
- Especially at the individual scale.
- Right, so first, what skill do you learn
as a young kid, right?
So let me just give what the ideal full stack thing is.
And then you have to say,
okay, I'm good quantitatively, I'm good verbally,
I'm good this, I'm good that, right?
So the ideal is you are full stack engineer
and full stack influencer,
or full stack engineer, full stack creator, okay?
So that's both right brain and left brain, all right?
So what does that mean with engineering?
That means you master computer science and statistics, okay?
And of course, it's also good to know physics
and continuous math and so on.
That's actually quite valuable to know.
And you might need to use a lot of that continuous math
with AI nowadays, right?
'Cause a lot of that is actually helpful, right?
Great descent and whatnot.
But computer science and stats are to this century
what physics was to the last, why?
Because, for example, what percentage of your time
do you spend looking at a screen of some kind?
- A large percentage of the time.
- A large percentage of the time, right?
Probably more than, you know,
for many people it's more than 50% of their waking hours.
If you include laptop, you include cell phone, tablet,
you know, your watch, you know,
maybe a monitor of some kind, right?
All those together is probably, it's a lot, okay?
Which means, and then that's gonna only increase
with AR glasses, okay?
Which means most of the rest of your life
will be spent in a sense in the matrix, okay?
In a constructed digital world,
which is more interesting in some sense
than the offline world.
'Cause we look at it more, it changes faster, right?
And where the physics are set by programmers, okay?
And what that means is, you know,
physics itself is obviously very important
for the natural world.
Computer science and stats are for the artificial world,
right?
And why is that?
Because every domain has algorithms and data structures,
whether it's aviation, okay?
You go to American Airlines, right?
They're gonna have, you know,
planes and seats and tickets and so on.
So it's data structures,
and you're gonna have algorithms
and functions that connect them.
You're gonna have tables that those data are run to.
If it's Walmart, you're gonna have SKUs,
and you're gonna have shelves,
and you're gonna have, so you have data structures
and you have algorithms to connect them.
So every single area, you have algorithms
and data structures, which is computer science and stats.
And so you're going to collect the data and analyze it, right?
And so that means if you have that base of CS and stats,
where you're really strong and you understand, you know,
the theory as well as the practice, right?
And you need both, okay?
Because you need to understand, you know,
obviously the basic stuff like big O notation and whatnot,
and you need to understand
all your probability distributions, okay?
You know, a good exercise, by the way,
is to go from the Bernoulli trials, right?
To everything else,
'cause you can go Bernoulli trials
to the binomial distribution, to the Gaussian.
You can also go from, you know,
Bernoulli trials to the geometric distribution and so on.
You can drive everything from this, right?
- And computer science includes not just big O,
but software engineering?
- Well, computer science is theory,
software engineering is practice, right?
You could argue probability and stats is theory,
and then data science is practice.
- Sure. - Right?
- Yeah. - And so-
- So you include all of that together.
- I include all of that as a package.
That's theory and practice, right?
I mean, look, it's okay to use libraries
once you know what's going on under the hood, right?
That's fine, but you need to be able to kind of
write out the whole thing yourself.
- I mean, it's...
That could be true, could not be true, I don't know.
Are you sure about that?
Because- - Well, you should-
- You could, you might be able to get quite far
standing on the shoulders of giants.
- You can, but it depends.
Like, you couldn't build, well, okay.
Somebody- - Maybe you could.
However you were gonna finish that sentence,
I could push back before-
- You could probably push back, right?
But here's what I was gonna say.
I was gonna say, you couldn't really,
you couldn't build Google or Facebook or Amazon or Apple
without somebody at the company who understood
like computer architecture and layout of memory
and theory of compilers.
- But you might want to, see, the thing is,
if you just look at libraries,
you might be able to understand the capabilities
and you can build up the intuition of like
what a great specialized engineer could do that you can't.
- Like, for example, at least a while back,
§57Transcript · 7:15:57–7:24:10
facebook.com, like was literally,
it's just a single C++ compiled binary.
Or sorry, it's not C++, it was like hip hop.
They had a PHP compiler where they had just one giant binary.
I may be getting this wrong, but that's what I recall, right?
- Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it should be simple, it should be simple.
And then you have guys like John Carmack
who comes in and does an incredibly optimized implementation
that actually-
- Well, yeah, more than that, right?
Like he's, I mean, yes, right, but go ahead.
- I mean, there's some cases with John Carmack
by being an incredible engineer is able to bring to reality
things that otherwise would have taken
an extra five to 10 years.
- Yeah, or maybe even more than that.
Like, so, you know, this is the great man theory of history
versus like sort of the kind of the determinist,
like, you know, waves of history are pushing things along.
The way I reconcile those is the tech tree model of history.
You know, like civilization, you ever play a game,
civilization? - Yeah.
- Yeah, so like civilization, you got the tech tree
and you can go and be like, okay, I'm gonna get spearmen
or I'm gonna do granaries and pottery, right?
And so you can think of it as something where
here's everything that humanity has right now.
And then Satoshi can push on this dimension
of the tech tree.
So he's a great man because there weren't other,
there wasn't a Leibniz to Satoshi's Newton, right?
Like Vitalik, as amazing as he is,
was five years later or thereabouts, right?
There wasn't contemporaneous, like, you know,
another person that was doing what Satoshi was doing,
it's truly Sui Gennaris, right?
And that shows, you know, what one person can do.
Like probably Steve Jobs with Apple, you know,
given how the company was dying before he got there
and he built it into the most valuable
or put on the directory,
he becomes the most valuable company in the world.
It shows that there is quote, great man, right?
Maybe more than just being five or 10 years ahead,
like truly shaping where history goes, right?
But on their hand, of course, that person,
Steve Jobs himself wrote that email
that Priestley was first saying that, you know,
he doesn't grow his own food and he doesn't, you know,
he didn't even think of the rights that he's got,
someone else thought of those and whatnot.
And so he kind of, it is always a tension
between the individual and society on this, right?
But coming back, so CS and stats,
that's what you wanna learn.
I think physics is also good to know
because you go one level deeper
and of course all these devices,
you're not gonna be able to build, you know,
LIDAR or things like that without understanding physics.
- You mentioned that as one side of the brain,
what about the other?
- Right, so CS and stats is that side.
Okay, and then you can go into any domain,
any company, kick butt, you know, add value, right?
Okay, so now the other side is creator, right?
Becoming a creator.
First, online, you know, like social media
is about to become far, far, far more lucrative
and monetizable.
People are not updated.
They kind of think this is, it's like over
or something like that or it's old or whatever.
But with crypto, once you have property rights
in social media, now it's not what Google
just allows you to have, but it's what you own, right?
You actually have genuine property rights.
And that just completely changes everything,
just like, you know, the introduction of property rights
in China change everything.
It might take some lag for that to happen,
but you can lend against that, borrow against that.
You just, you own the digital property, right?
And you can do NFTs, you can do, you know, investments,
you can do all this other stuff, right?
So in many ways, I think anybody who's listening,
who's like, you know, I want to build a billion dollar
company, I'm like, build a billion dollar company, yes.
Also build a million person media operation
or a million person following or something online, right?
Because a US media company is simply not economically
or socially aligned with your business.
I mean, the big thing that I think, you know,
tech and media actually, it's funny,
there's this collision and sometimes
there's an Adam smashing event
and there's like a repositioning, right?
And media attacked tech really hard in the 2010s,
as well as many other things.
And now, post 2020, I think it's now centralized tech
and media versus decentralized tech and media.
And centralized tech and media is NYT and Google,
which have all become woke-ified,
the establishment companies.
But decentralized tech and media is like Substack,
all lots of defectors from the US establishment,
from the NYT have gone to Substack.
But also all the founders and funders
are much more vocal on Twitter,
whether it's Mark Anderson, Jack Dorsey, Jeff Bezos,
Zuckerberg, Zuck is just cutting out the establishment
and just going direct to posting himself
or posting the jiu-jitsu thing, you know,
which he recently did or going and talking to Rogan, right?
And so you now have this sort of Adam smash
and like kind of reconstitution.
Why is that important?
Well, look, once you realize US media companies
are companies and their employees,
Sulzberger's employees are just dogs on a leash, right?
They're hit men for old money,
assassins for the establishment.
They're never gonna investigate him, okay?
There's this thing right now, like some strike
or possible strike that's going at the New York Times.
The obviously, the most obvious rich corporate zillionaire,
the epitome of white privilege is, you know,
and again, I'm not the kind of person
who thinks white is an insult, right?
But the guy who inherited the company
from his father's father's father's father,
in the NFL, right?
You're supposed to have the Rooney rule
where you're supposed to interview diverse candidates
for the top job.
You know, the other competitors for the top job
of the publisher of the New York Times
were two cousins of Sulzberger.
So it's three cis straight white males in 2017
who competed for this top job.
And everybody in media was like silent
about this coronation.
They had this coronation article
in the Times about this, right?
So you have this meritless nepotist, right?
This literally rich cis white man
who makes millions of dollars a year
and it makes like 50 X the salary of other,
you know, NYT journalists, okay?
And, you know, lives in a mansion and so on
while denouncing, this is a born rich guy
who denounces all the built rich guys
at a company which is far whiter
than the tech companies he's been denouncing, okay?
And again, there's a website called
Tech Journalism is Less Diverse Than Tech.com
which actually shows the numbers on this, right?
Here, I can look at this numbers, right?
So why did I say this?
Well, centralized US media has lost a ton of clout.
Engagement is down.
You've seen the crypto prices down,
like stock prices have crashed.
That's very obvious and quantifiable.
Less visible is that media engagement has crashed, right?
By the way, yeah, there's a plot
that shows on the X axis percent white
and then the Y axis are the different companies.
And the tech companies are basically below 50% white
and all the different media,
tech journalism companies are all way above,
you know, 70, 80, 90 plus percent white.
And hypocrisy, ladies and gentlemen.
- I mean, again, I'm not the kind of person
who thinks white is an insult, but these guys are
and they are the wokest whites on the planet, right?
It's like ridiculous, right?
- You know, it's like anyone who's homophobic,
anyone who's, it feels like it's a personal thing
that they're struggling with.
Maybe the journalists are actually the ones who are racist.
- Well, actually, you know, it's funny you say that
because there's this guy, A.M. Rosenthal, okay?
And you know, on his gravestone was,
we kept the, he kept the paper straight, right?
And actually he essentially went and,
this is a managing editor of the New York Times for almost,
you know, from '69 to '77, executive editor from '77 to '86.
And it was a history-- - Oh my Lord.
- Yeah, history of basically keeping,
you know, gay reporters out.
So essentially, the way I think about it is,
New York Post reported that,
just to talk about this for a second
'cause it's so insane, all right?
New York Post reported,
and I've got some of this in the book, okay?
But, Abe Rosenthal, managing editor of the New York Times
from 1969 to 1977, executive editor from 1977 to 1986.
§58Transcript · 7:24:16–7:32:02
His gravestone reads, he kept the paper straight.
And then here's Jeet here on this.
He kept the paper straight. As it happens,
Rosenthal was a notorious homophobe.
He made it a specific policy of the paper
not to use the term gay.
He denied a plum job to a gay man for being gay.
He minimized AIDS crisis.
So, like, you know, the thing about this is,
this is not like a one-off thing, okay?
The New York Times literally won a Pulitzer
for choking out the Ukrainians,
for helping starve five million Ukrainians to death.
And now has reinvented themselves as like a cheerleader
to stand with Ukraine, right?
They were for, you know, Abe Rosenthal's homophobia
before they were against it, right?
They were like, if you saw the link I just pasted in, okay?
During BLM, you know, it's credibly reported
that, and I haven't seen this refuted,
the family that owns the New York Times were slaveholders.
Somehow that stayed out of 1619 and BLM coverage, right?
So they were literally getting the profits from slavery
to help bootstrap, you know, what was the Times
or, you know, went into it.
They actually did this article on like the compound interest
of slaveholders in Haiti and how much they owed people,
right?
If you apply that to how much money they made off slaves,
I mean, can anyone name one of Salzburg's slaves?
Like, can we humanize that, put a face on that,
show exactly, you know, who lost such that he may win, right?
And so you stack this up and it's like, you know,
for the Iraq war before they were against it.
And it's like, yeah, sure, Bush, you know,
did a lot of bad stuff there,
but they also reported a lot of negative, you know,
not negative coverage, like false coverage, right?
About WMDs, like, you know, the whole jihadist military.
And so it's like this amazing thing where
if some of the most evil people in history
are the historians, if the, you know,
they actually ran this ad campaign in the 2017 time period
called "The Truth."
So giant Orwellian billboards, right?
Which say, you know, the truth is essential.
Here, it looks like this.
- This was when?
- This was just a few years ago, 2017.
- This is in New York.
A billboard by the New York Times reads,
"The truth is hard to know.
The truth is hard to find.
The truth is hard to hear.
The truth is hard to believe.
The truth is hard to accept.
Truth is hard to deny.
The truth is more important now than ever."
All right, this is like, yeah, this is 1984 type of stuff.
- Yeah, now here's the thing.
Do you know what other-
- Truth, big.
Truth, period, big white board.
- So, okay, what other national newspaper
proclaimed itself the truth in constantly, every day?
You know this one, actually.
- Oh, you mean Pravda?
Yeah, yeah.
- There you go, that's right.
What is the Soviet translation?
What's the Russian translation of Pravda?
- It's truth.
- Yeah.
- That's so sorry, that didn't even connect to my head, yes.
(laughing)
Yeah, truth.
Unironically, huh?
- And again, it just so happens that-
- Is this an Onion article?
- What's that?
Onion article, right.
So like, you know, Pravda, like at least they were communist,
these guys have figured out how to get,
charge people $99 a year or whatever it is for the truth.
Wow, that's actually even amazing, right?
So the corporate truth.
So when you stack all that up, right,
basically legacy media has delegitimized themselves, right?
Every day that those, quote,
"investigative journalists don't investigate Salzburger,"
shows that they are so courageous
as to investigate your boss, but not their own.
- Yes.
- Ta-da, total mass drop, right?
That's like, just obvious, right?
And now once you realize this,
and you know, every influencer who's coming up,
every creator realizes, okay, well that means
I have to think about these media corporations
as competitors.
They are competitors.
They are competitors for advertisers and influence.
They will try, basically what the media corporations did
partially successfully during the 2010s is
they sort of had this reign of terror over many influencers,
where they'd give them positive coverage
if they supported sort of the party line,
and negative coverage if they didn't, okay?
But now the soft power has just dropped off a cliff, right?
And, you know, many kinds of tactics that, you know,
establishment journalists do,
one way of thinking of them is like as a for-profit stasi.
Why?
Because they may stalk you, dox you, surveil you.
Like, they can literally put, you know,
like two dozen people following somebody around for a year,
and that's not considered stalking, right?
That's not considered spamming.
They are allowed to do this and make money doing this.
Whereas if you so much as criticize them,
oh my God, it's an attack on the free press, blah, blah,
right?
But you are the free press and I'm the free press.
Like, we're the free press.
Again, it goes back to the decentralized, you know,
the free speech is not like some media corporation's thing.
It's everybody's right.
And what actually happened with social media,
what they're against is not that it is an attack
on democracy, it's that it's the ultimate democracy
because people have a voice now
that didn't used to have a voice.
You know what I'm saying?
Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one, right?
That old one, right?
Or never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel, right?
- Yeah.
- In a real way, the entire things that were promised
to people, freedom of speech, free markets, you know,
like a beggar's democracy, it's like, oh yeah,
you can have freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach,
because you're just talking to yourself in your living room
in, you know, Buffalo, New York, right?
You maybe you can get gather some friends around.
You didn't have the licenses to get, you know,
like a TV broadcast license, radio license, you know,
the resources to buy a newspaper.
You didn't have practical reach or distribution, okay?
What happened was all these people in the US
and around the world suddenly got voices
and they were suddenly saying things
that the establishment didn't want them to say.
And so that's what this counter decentralization has meant,
both in the US and in China, this crackdown,
but it's as if like a stock went up like 100X
and then dropped like 30%.
All the deplatforming stuff, yes, it's bad, okay?
It's a rearward move, but in the long arc,
I think we're going to have more speech.
I think the counter decentralization may succeed in China,
but I don't think it's gonna succeed outside it,
'cause you're trying to retrofit speech and thought controls
onto an ostensibly free society, right?
Now that Czech got cash, people actually have a voice.
It's not gonna be taken away from them very easily, right?
So how does this relate to my advice to young kids?
Once you have that context, right?
Once you realize, hey, look,
Apple didn't like do deals with Blackberry, okay?
Amazon didn't collaborate or give free content
to Barnes and Noble.
Netflix was not going and, you know,
socializing with employees of Blockbuster.
These employees of establishment media corporations
are your competitors, okay?
They are out for clicks.
They are out for money.
If they literally choke out the Ukrainians
before making themselves into champions
of the Ukrainian cause, they'll basically do anything.
And so once you realize that, you're like,
okay, I need to build my own voice, okay?
If you're Brazilian, you're Nigerian,
you're in the Midwest or the Middle East, right?
If you're, you know, Japanese, you know, wherever you are,
you need to build your own voice
because outsourcing that voice to somebody else
and having it put through the distorting filter,
which maximizes the clicks of the distorting kind of thing,
it's just not gonna be in one's own interest.
You don't have to, you know,
even agree with everything I'm saying
or even all of it to just be like,
well, look, I'd rather speak for myself.
I'd rather go direct if I could.
Speak unmediated, in my own words, right?
Because the choice of word is actually very important,
right?
So that's the second big thing.
You need to, and this is the thing
§59Transcript · 7:32:03–7:39:34
that took me a long time to understand, okay?
Because I always got the importance of math and science.
And in fact, I would have been probably
just a career academic or mathematician in another life,
you know, maybe statistician, something like that,
electrical engineer, et cetera.
But the importance of creating your own content
and telling your own stories,
if you don't tell your own story,
the story will be told for you, right?
The sort of flip of winners write history is
if you do not write history, you will not be the winner.
You must write a history, okay?
As kind of a funny way of putting it, right?
- Yeah, chicken and egg.
Yeah. - Contra positive, right?
And now what does that mean practically, okay?
So in many ways, the program that I'm laying out
is to build alternatives, peaceful alternatives
to all legacy institutions, right?
To obviously to the Fed, right?
With Bitcoin, to Wall Street with DeFi
and with Ethereum and so on.
To academia with the ledger of record
and the on-chain reproducible research that we talked about.
To media with decentralized social media, decentralized AI.
You can melt Hollywood with this, okay?
Melt the RIA, melt the MPAA.
I mean, there's some good people there,
but everybody should have their own movies.
You know, people should be able to tell their own stories
and not just wait for it to be cast through Hollywood
and Hollywood is just making remakes anyway, okay?
So you can tell original stories
and you can do so online and you can do so by hitting a key
and the production values will be there now
that the AI content creation tools are out there.
I mentioned disrupting or replacing
or building alternatives to the Fed, to Wall Street,
to academia, to media.
I mentioned to Wikipedia, right?
There's things like Golden.
There's things like,
there's a bunch of web three-ish Wikipedia competitors
that are combining both AI and crypto for property rights.
There's, you'll also need alternatives
to all the major tech companies.
That was the list that I went through with,
you know, decentralized search and social and messaging
and operating systems and even the crypto phone, okay?
And then finally, you need alternatives
to US political institutions and more generally,
and Chinese political institutions.
And what are those?
That's where the network state comes in.
And the fundamental concept is if, you know,
as I mentioned, only 2% of the world
can become president of the United States
about the number of Americans who are, you know,
native born and over 35 and so on and so forth.
But 100% of the world can become president
of their own network state.
What that means is,
and this is kind of related to those two points, right?
If you're an individual and you're good at engineering
and you're good at content creation, okay?
Like somebody like Jack Dorsey, for example,
or Mark Anderson, actually a lot of the founders
are actually quite good at both nowadays.
You look at Bezos, he's actually funny on Twitter
when he allows himself to be.
You know, you don't become a leader of that caliber
without having, you know, some of both, right?
If you've got some of both,
now, no matter where you are, what your ethnicity is,
what your nationality is, whether you can get a US visa,
you can become president of a network state.
And what this is, it's a new path to political power
that does not require going through either the US
or the Chinese establishment.
You don't have to wait till you're 75.
You don't have to become a gerontocrat
or spout the party line and so on.
The V1 of this is like folks like, you know,
Francis Suarez or Nagy McKelvey of El Salvador,
but, you know, Suarez is a great example where,
while not a full sovereign or anything like that,
he has many ways, in many ways, the skills of a tech CEO
where he just put up a, you know, a call on Twitter
and helped build Miami,
recruited all these people from all over.
And it wasn't the two-party system, but the end city system.
He just helped build the city by bringing people in, okay?
And that's, and when I say Suarez is a V1,
you know, I love Francis Suarez, I love what they're doing.
The next iteration of that
is to actually build the community itself
rather than just kind of taking an existing Miami,
you're building something that is potentially
the scale of Miami, but as a digital community.
And how many people is that?
Well, like the Miami population is actually not that large.
It's like 400 something thousand people.
You could build a digital community like that.
So if you have the engineering
and you have the content creation
and you build your own distribution,
you own your own thing,
you can become essentially a new kind of political leader
where you just build a large enough online community
that can crowdfund territory
and you build your vision of the good.
- And anybody could build the vision of the good.
Talking about eight billion people.
I mean, there's no more inspiring.
I mean, sometimes when we look at how things are broken,
there could be a cynical paralysis.
- Right.
- But ultimately this is a really empowering message.
- Yes.
I think there is a new birth of global freedom
and that in the fullness of time,
people will look at the internet
as being to the Americas what the Americas were to Europe.
A new world, okay?
In the sense of this cloud continent has just come down,
okay, and people are, you know,
if you spend 50% of your waking hours looking at a screen,
20%, you're spending all this time commuting up
to the cloud in the morning and coming back down.
You're doing these day trips
and it's got a different geography
and all these people are near each other
that were far in the physical world and vice versa, right?
And so this will, 'cause it's this new domain,
it gives rise to virtual worlds
that eventually become physical.
In the same way that most people don't know this that well,
but, you know, the Americas really shaped the old world.
Many concepts like the ultra capitalism
and ultra democracy of the new world,
the French Revolution was in part,
I mean, that was a bad version, okay?
But that was in part inspired by the American, okay?
There are many movements that came back
to the old world that started here.
In the same way, you know,
I don't call it the mainstream media anymore.
You know what I call it?
The downstream media,
because it's downstream of the internet.
- That's right. - Right?
- That's right.
- And, you know, there's this guy a while back
who he had this meme called
the one kilo year American empire,
that everything's American and so on.
And his, I think, fundamental category era
is he considers the internet to be American.
But you know why that's not the case?
Because, and it'll be very obviously so,
I think in five or 10 years.
Why?
Because the majority of English speakers online
by about 2030 are gonna be Indian.
Okay?
They just got 5G LTE super cheap internet recently,
the last few years.
It's like one of the biggest stories in the world
that's not really being told that much, okay?
And they've been lurking.
And here's the thing.
And this took me a long time to kind of, you know,
figure out like to, not to figure it, but to communicate.
I actually realized this in 2013,
but these folks don't type with an accent.
Okay, they speak with an accent,
but they don't type with an accent.
And all the way back in 2013,
when I taught this Coursera course,
I was like, who are these folks?
I had hundreds of thousands of people
from around the world sign up.
It was a very popular course even then, okay?
And hundreds of thousands of people signed up.
I was like, who are these folks?
And there were like Polish guys and, you know,
like this lady from Brazil.
And they knew scumbag Steve and good guy Greg,
but they didn't know the Yankees or hot dogs
or all the offline stuff of America.
They didn't know physical America.
They knew the digital conversation, the Reddit conversation
and, you know, what became the Twitter conversation.
For example, I just saw this YouTube video
where there's a Indian founder.
And he just said, just casually like,
"Oh, I slid into his DMs like this," right?
It was kind of a joke, but he said in an Indian accent
and everybody laughed, everybody knew what he meant.
§60Transcript · 7:39:36–7:47:08
And you're like, wait, that is a piece
of what people think of as American internet slang.
That's actually internet slang,
which will soon be said mostly by non-Americans.
Now, what does that mean?
That means that just like the US was a branch of the UK
and it started with English.
And certainly there's lots of antecedents
you can trace back to England.
But nowadays, most Americans are not English in ancestry.
There's Germans and Italians, Jewish people,
African-Americans, you know, everybody, right?
In the same way, the internet is much more representative
of the world than the USA is.
- It may have started American,
but it got forked by the rest of the world.
- That's right.
And it gives a global equality of opportunity.
It's even more capitalist than America is.
It's even more democratic than America is,
just as America is more capitalist
and democratic than the UK.
- The meme has escaped the cage of its captor.
- And by the way, that doesn't mean I'm,
so I wanna be very clear about something.
When I say this kind of stuff, people will be like,
oh my God, you hate America so much.
And that's not at all what I'm saying.
It's like, first, take Britain, okay?
Would you think of the US or Israel or India or Singapore
as being anti-British?
Not today, they're post-British, right?
In fact, they're quite respectful to,
I mean, look at the Queen and so on.
People respect the UK and so on.
Everyone's coming there to pay their respects.
- That might not be the greatest example, but yes, go on.
- Well, let's put it like this.
- Yes, but yes, broadly speaking.
- They're not like burning the British flag
and effigy or anything.
I mean, essentially, the point is each of these societies
is kind of moving along their own axis.
They're not defining every action
in terms of whether they're pro-British or anti-British.
Like, once you have kind of a healthy distance,
people can respect all the accomplishments of the UK
while also being happy that you're no longer run by them.
And then you can have like a better
kind of arms-length relationship, right?
And that's what post-British means.
It is not anti-British, not at all.
In fact, you can respect it while also being happy
that you've got your own sovereignty, right?
And you're happy that Britain is doing its own thing.
I'm glad they're doing well, right?
Okay, and they're actually doing
some special economics zone stuff now.
And in the same way, if you think of it
as not being pro-American or anti-American,
'cause that's a with us or against us
formulation of George Bush, you know?
Like, rather than just everything must be scored
as pro-American or anti-American,
you can think of post-American,
that not everything has to be scored on that axis.
Like, you know, there are certain things around the world
which should be able to exist on their own,
and you should be able to move along your own axis.
Like, is, like, perhaps an obvious example,
like, is longevity pro-American or anti-American?
You know, no, it's like, it's on its own axis.
It's moving on its own axis.
And new states and new countries should be able to exist
that do not have to define themselves as anti-American
to do so, they're just post-American.
Friendly to, but different from.
That is totally possible to do,
and we've got examples of that, right?
And so when I talk about this,
I'm talking about is really in many ways
US and Western ideals, you know?
But manifested in just a different form, right?
And also, crucially, integrative of global ideals.
You know, these are, in a sense,
are global human rights, they're global values,
which is freedom of speech, private property,
protection from search and seizure.
And actually, so that's all the Bill of Rights type stuff.
And I saw something that I thought was really good recently
that's a good first cut.
That's something that I might wanna include.
I credit him, of course, in the V to the book,
a digital Bill of Rights, okay?
And so this was a really good,
decent first cut at a digital Bill of Rights, okay?
And he talks about the right to encrypt,
the right to compute, the right to repair,
the right to portability, right?
So encrypt is perhaps obvious,
you know, e-commerce and everything.
Compute, like your device, it's not like,
you can't just have somebody intercept it
or shut down your floating points.
That might sound stupid,
but in the EU, they're trying to regulate AI.
And by doing that, they have some regulation
that says like logic is itself regulated.
Did you see this?
- No, it's hilarious.
- Hold on, I'll click the tweet
that I sent you just before this one, right?
So I was like, you know, in woke America,
they're abolishing accelerated math
'cause math is quote white supremacist.
Not to be outdone, Europe seeks to regulate AI
by regulating logic itself.
You can't reason without a license, right?
Article three, for purposes of this regulation,
the following definition apply.
AI system is software that's developed
with one or more of the techniques
and approaches listed in Annex 1.
And you know what's in Annex 1?
In Annex 1, logic and knowledge-based approaches.
(laughs)
So step away from the if statement.
- Right.
- Okay, and the thing is, you know,
if you've dealt with these bureaucracies,
the stupidest possible interpretation,
I mean, think about, if you think,
oh no, no, that wouldn't make any sense,
they wouldn't do that.
The entire web has been uglified
by the stupid cookie thing
that does absolutely nothing, right?
The actual way to protect privacy
is with user-local data,
meaning like decentralized systems, right?
Where the private keys are local.
- Now I'm just laughing at the layers of absurdity
in this step away from the if statement.
I mean, it's hilarious.
It's very, very clumsy.
- They wanna be-- - It's us struggling
how to define, yeah, the digital bill of rights, I suppose,
and doing it so extremely clumsily.
- It's funny, you know, the European,
like I heard this thing, which is like,
Europe's like, well, look, the US and China
are way ahead of us in AI,
but we're gonna be a leader in AI regulation.
- Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
And something we haven't mentioned much of
in this whole conversation,
I think maybe implied between the lines
is the thing that was in the Constitution
of the pursuit and happiness,
and the thing that is in many stories
that we humans conjure up, which is love.
- Oh yeah. - I think the thing
that makes life worth living in many ways.
But for that, you have to have freedom,
you have to have stability,
you have to have a society that's functioning
so that humans can do what humans do,
which is make friends, make family,
make love, make beautiful things together as human beings.
Balaji, this is like an incredible conversation.
Thank you for showing an amazing future.
I think really empowering to people
because we can all be part of creating that future.
And thank you so much for talking to me today.
This was an incredible,
obviously the longest conversation I've ever done,
but also one of the most amazing, enlightening.
Thank you.
Thank you, brother, for everything you do.
Thank you for inspiring all of us.
- Well, Lex, this was great.
And we didn't get through all the questions there.
- We didn't. (Lex laughing)
Just for the record, we didn't get,
I would venture to say we didn't get through 50%.
This is great, this is great.
And I had to stop us from going too deep on any one thing,
even though it was tempting, like those chocolates,
those damn delicious-looking chocolates
that was used as a metaphor about 13 hours ago,
however long we started the conversation.
This was incredible.
It was really brilliant.
You're brilliant throughout on all those different topics.
So yeah, thank you again for talking to me.
- This is great.
I really appreciate being here.
Sir.
- Thanks for listening to this conversation
with Balaji Srinivasan.
§61Transcript · 7:47:10–7:47:46
To support this podcast,
please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now let me leave you with some words from Ray Bradbury.
"People ask me to predict the future,
when all I want to do is to prevent it.
Better yet, build it.
Predicting the future is much too easy anyway.
You look at the people around you,
the street you stand on,
the visible air you breathe,
and predict more of the same.
To hell with more.
I want better."
Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)