Lex Fridman Podcast - #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA

Starting point is 00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Bology Sirnavasan, 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 Harwitz. This conversation is over 7 hours. For some folks, that's too long. For some, too short. For some, just right. There are chapter times stamps, there are clips, so you can jump around or, like I prefer to do, with podcasts and audiobooks 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.

Starting point is 00:00:49 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. And now, a quick few second mention of the sponsor. Check them out in the description, it's the best way to support this podcast. We got policy genius for life insurance, blinkus for nonfiction, notion for team collaboration and on it for supplements. Choose

Starting point is 00:01:30 wisely my friends. And now onto the full lad reads, as always no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by policy genius, a marketplace for finding and buying insurance. It's basically a modern take on life insurance and life insurance to me was always a fascinating thing. I think a lot of people live life kind of aware of their mortality and the mortality of those they love, but not really deeply aware. Of course, there is a surface layer at which you could plan for your mortality.

Starting point is 00:02:11 That's where life insurance comes in. But you can really deeply contemplate it. That's something that the Stoics espoused. Really meditate on your death every day. There's something about the way that the human mind perceives time that is made more clear through the process of meditating and your mortality. Somehow, the child-like fear of the unknown turns into the acceptance of us, of you you of me being one with nature. Yeah, it's

Starting point is 00:02:49 really interesting. But yeah, one of that is to actually do all the wise financial planning and life insurance as part of that with policy genius, you can find life insurance policies that started $17 per month for $500,000 of coverage. Head to policygenius.com or click the link in the description to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you could save that's policygenius.com. This show is also brought to you by Blinkist. My favorite app for learning new things. Blinkist takes key ideas from thousands of non-fiction books and condenses them down into 15 minutes that you can read or listen to. It's kind of amazing that even for the books I've read, going through the way that Blinkist cond ways, a deeper perspective on the book, I do highly recommend that whether you look at Blink as first and then read the book after

Starting point is 00:03:51 or read the book and look at Blink as after, I think both of those really give you a deep understanding of the book. If that's something you're interested in, if you don't have much time and you really just want to get a sense of what the book is about, then just go with Blinkist. I highly recommend it. Obviously, you do not have time to read all of these books. So a lot of these books are part of the public discourse. You should be at least aware of the insights they're exploring. If you understand that to be a gap in your knowledge that you would like to alleviate,

Starting point is 00:04:24 then you can always go and read the full book. But Blinkist is a heck of a good start. You can claim a special offer for savings at Blinkist.com slash Lex. This shows also brought to you by InNotion, a note-taking and team collaboration tool. It's one central customizable and powerful workplace that can be tailored to fit any team. Obviously, if you look around the productivity forums and stack exchange, Notion is going to show up time and time again as the recommended no taking tool.

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Starting point is 00:05:44 for my focus. So I would say the deep work sessions in the morning. Well, first of all, I start the day with a mantra, but then when I visualize the rest of the day, and I start to take on the day with a cup of coffee, well, first, first some water with electrolytes, so with element, and then coffee, and then I sit behind the computer. Oftentimes I prefer a difficult programming task. There's something about my morning mind that prefers the design type of thinking, the design

Starting point is 00:06:23 challenges of programming. So during that time, usually I don't need a boost. I think my ride in my mind, unless I didn't sleep a lot, but even in that case, I'm just ready to go. But in the later, sort of like two, three, four hours in, then it can really help to have a boost. If I'm still working on something very difficult, that's what I'll take an alpha brain. You can get a special discount on it if you go to lexfreedman.com slash on it. This is a lex treatment podcast to support it. Please check out our sponsors in the description and now to your friends, here's biology, Srinivasan. At the core of your belief system is something you call the prime number maze.

Starting point is 00:07:27 I'm curious. We got to 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

Starting point is 00:07:40 get some cheese. But evidently, it can't be trained to turn it prime numbers. Two, three, five, seven, and then eleven, 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. You know, they'd have to start counting. And so it actually would be pretty difficult to figure out what the returning 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

Starting point is 00:08:09 are we just like these rats and were trapped in a prime number maze. And if we had just a little bit more, you know, cogitation, if we had, you know, a little bit more cognitive ability, a little bit more, whether it's, you know, brain machinery interface or just better physics, we could just figure out the next step

Starting point is 00:08:24 in that prime number maze. We could just see out the next step in that primary amazement. We could just see it. We could just see the grid, right? And that's what I think about. Like that's a big thing that drives me. It's figuring out how we can actually conceive, understand that primary amazement we're living in. So understand which patterns are just complex enough

Starting point is 00:08:41 that they are 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 Ramanagin, 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, you know, that's a leap forward.

Starting point is 00:09:07 You know, 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 Ramonjian's identities, that really does bring us forward, especially when you can check them, 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 work? And that's actually, you know, Statmec, you know, 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?

Starting point is 00:09:44 So the practice led the theory rather than vice versa. Just some extent that's happening. Neural networks now is 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 that pulls us forward. So I do think that the limits are more of a bug than a future. Is there something 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, cradels and completeness for such a question.

Starting point is 00:10:12 And yeah, there are things that are probably unknowable or probably unprovable. But I think you can often get an approximate solution. 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 know. I know Roger Penrose has like his Roach reality series for like basic physics getting up to everything we know. But go ahead. Tell me.

Starting point is 00:10:55 It's even wild there. Yeah. In modern physics, we started 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 Carell 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

Starting point is 00:11:37 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. Like we're in a video game essentially that's consistent for all humans, but it doesn't, it's not at all connected to physical reality. It's a version of the simulation about this is Is that is 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 program that creates this reality and so on.

Starting point is 00:12:15 Now, he says that humans have a brain there, it's 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.

Starting point is 00:12:45 So I tend to be more of a hard science person. And so just on that, people talk about qualia. Is your perception of green, the different from my perception of green? And my counter argument on that is, we know something about spectrum of light, and we can build artificial eyes. different from my perception of green. And my counter argument on that is, well, we know something about spectrum of light, and we can build artificial eyes.

Starting point is 00:13:09 And if we can build artificial eyes, which we can, they're not amazing, but you can actually do that. You can build artificial ears and so on. Obviously, we can build recording devices and for 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 a green,

Starting point is 00:13:26 doesn't seem to add up because it does seem like we can do engineering around. Right? So the often thing I get why people more broadly will talk about assimilation hypothesis, because you know, it's like finding many others have talked about how math is surprisingly useful to describe the world, you know, like Very simple equations give rise to these complex phenomena. Well, from is also on this, from different angle with the cellular automata stuff. But... It's almost as vicious how well it works.

Starting point is 00:13:55 Yeah, but on their hand, it's like, you know, it is, yet we're still also in a prime number of mace. There's things we just don't understand. And so... So within the constraints of the non-prime numbers, we find math to be extremely effective, surprising effective. Yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 00:14:16 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 projects. This play all our rage was just rats and occasionally. I know that gets like very abstract, but you know, there are unsolved problems in physics. You know, like the condensed matter space is a lot of interesting stuff happening. My recollection, I may be, you know, out of date on this, like things like sonal luminescence,

Starting point is 00:14:38 we don't know exactly how they work. And sometimes those things that are like at the edges of physics, you know, in the late 1800s, I think Rutherford, somebody, I think is the edges of physics, you know, in the late 1800s, I think, Rutherford, somebody, I think, I think, was Rutherford said, you know, basically all the physics is being discovered, et cetera, and that was obviously before quantum mechanics. You know, that sort of edge case, people are looking at the bomber and the passion series and seeing, you know, this weird thing, you know, with the hydrogen spectrum, and it was quantized, and, you know, that led to like the sort of phenomenological set of observations that led to quantum mechanics and

Starting point is 00:15:10 and everything. And, you know, sometimes I think the UAP stuff might be like that, right? People immediately go to aliens for UAP, like the unidentified aerial phenomena, right? And people have been, uh, there's surprising amount of stuff out there on this. The UK is declassified a bunch of material, you know, Harry Reid, who's a sender, is talking on this. The UK has declassified a bunch of material. You know, Harry Reid was the sender who's talked about this. It's not an obviously political thing, which is good. It's something that is there something happening there, right? And people had thought for a long time that the UAP thing was like American kind of counter-prop

Starting point is 00:15:42 candid 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,

Starting point is 00:16:10 which were the observations of emission spectra before quantum mechanics. So that's another option, as opposed to doesn't exist or low-green 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 the Drake equation, which is like multiplying all the probabilities together. There's a lot of folks who have kind of written and talked about 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 myself, but basically says that the assumption that other civilizations with C-Nhars is wrong because when you have a spherical radius for the electromagnetic radiation

Starting point is 00:16:50 that's leaving our planet, as that sphere gets larger and larger, it gets smaller and smaller amounts of energy. So you get farther out, you're not getting enough photons or would 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, you know, that an ailing solution

Starting point is 00:17:18 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 signal colliding enough to Find the signal from the noise right exactly intelligence signal. Yeah, Hanson noise Hanson has a article called grabby aliens Maybe seeing his thing. Yeah, right and so there's been on this podcast. Oh great. He's brilliant I like him. He pushes you know boundaries and interesting ways and interesting ways in all of the ways in all the ways. In all the ways that's right.

Starting point is 00:17:47 I like Morales. He's, you know, he's an asset to you, Andy. 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 going to 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? We haven't really figured out yet, which is a biogenesis in

Starting point is 00:18:15 the lab, right? We've done lots of things where you've got, you can show macromolecules binding to each other, you can show, You can show evidence for the so-called RNA world, A-biogenesis, to go from non-life to life in the lab. You can show micro-evolution, 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 nitrogen and carbon snapping together to get the RNA world is the initial hypothesis.

Starting point is 00:18:53 But to my knowledge, at least, we haven't actually seen a biogenesis 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 reputable path to a biogenesis, and then just replicate that in the lab. I don't know.

Starting point is 00:19:23 But that seems to me to be like a mystery that we still don't fully understand like an example of the prime number base. One of the most fascinating mysteries. One of the most important. Yeah. Yeah. And again, there may be some biochemist who's like, oh, Valdu, you didn't know about X, Y, and C that happened in the A-Biogeist field. I really confess I'm not like at, you know, O'Carront on it. The last thing I remember looking at is... What does O'Carront mean? Like up to thing I remember looking at is. It's still corent, mean. Like up to the moment. Oh, nice. That's a nice word.

Starting point is 00:19:48 It's a corent. I'm probably mispronounce against it, but yeah. We'll edit it in post. So pronounce it correctly. Would they? Yeah, yeah. We'll copy your voice and it will pronounce it perfectly correctly. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:20:01 In post. One thing that I do think was interesting is Craig Ventor, a while back tried to make a minimum viable cell where he just tried to delete all of the genes that were that were not considered essential. And so it's like a new life form. And this was like almost 20 years ago. And so and that thing was a was was viable in the lab, right? And so it's possible that you could, you kind of reverse engineer, so you're coming out the problem from different directions.

Starting point is 00:20:27 RNA molecules can do quite a lot. You've got some reasonable assumptions as to how that could come together. You've got, you like sort of stripped down minimum viable life forms. And so it's not there isn't stuff here. You can see micro evolution, you can see at the sequence level,

Starting point is 00:20:43 you know, if you do molecular phallogenics, you can actually track back the bases. So it's not like there's no evidence, 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 a biogenesis would be, if we were able to give rise to a different branch of life form, the silicon based, as opposed to carbon based, to stretch the point, you give rise to something that actually does meet the definition

Starting point is 00:21:05 of life for some definition of life. What do you think that definition is for an artificial life form? Because you mentioned consciousness. 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 is alive. Right. And we wouldn't want to kill it. So a couple of remarks on that.

Starting point is 00:21:33 One is Francis Crick of Watson and Crick. Before he died, I think his last paper was published on something called the Cloudstream. Okay. And the thing is that, you know that sometimes in biology or in any domain, people are discouraged from going after the big questions. But he proposed the cloustrom is actually the organ that is the seat of consciousness. It's like this sheath that covers the brain. And for mice, again, I may be recollecting this wrong,

Starting point is 00:22:02 so you can look, but my recollection is, in mice, if you disrupt this, the mouse is like very disoriented. It's like, it's the kind of thing which Watson and Crick were all about, structure implies function. Found the structure of DNA, this amazing thing, and they remarked in this very understated way

Starting point is 00:22:21 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, he looks on wines and you got paste 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 classroom 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 that's the 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

Starting point is 00:22:48 that I think is worth studying. So consciousness is another kind of big core, A-biogenesis, a big question, the primary or main consciousness is a big question. And then definition of life, right? There's folks, gosh, I think, so this one is something that I'd have to Google around, but there's 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 going to be

Starting point is 00:23:16 a multi-feature definition. We might have a touring 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, because viruses are like this boundary case, are they alive or not? Most people don't think they're alive, but 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 chat

Starting point is 00:23:52 bots essentially creatures, whether they're replicas of humans or totally independent creations, perhaps in an automatic way. I think there's going to be chat bots that 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 will be large groups of activists that will protest and 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 humans. Do you think that's possible?

Starting point is 00:24:38 I saw that Google engineer who was basically saying this had already happened. And I was surprised by it because 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, GP3 for people who haven't paid attention shows that serious stepups are possible. And obviously, you've talked about AI and your podcast a ton.

Starting point is 00:25:12 Is it possible that GPT nine or something is kind of like that? Or GPT 15 or GPT four maybe? But for people just listening, there's a deep skepticism in your face. Yeah, you know, the reason being because, you know, it's possible is possible that you have like a partition of society on literally this basis, you know, that's one model where there's some people, just like there's vegetarians and non-vigitarians, right? There may be machines have life and machines are machines, you know, like or something like that, right? You know, 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.

Starting point is 00:26:06 Do you see that thing which is how human are different corporations? Have you seen that infographic? It's actually funny. There's a spectrum. There's a spectrum. So for example, Disney is considered about as human as like a dog. But like, I may remember this one, but they had like a level with like human at one end and like rock at the other. This has to do with corporate structure. What it was 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. Well, that's what I mean, they're also responding. You know, I have a brand of human that I'm trying to sell.

Starting point is 00:26:45 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 there's the brand is cracking because it's seeping through. But I mean, in that sense, I just, I think I don't see a reason why chat bots can't manufacture the brand of being human, of being sentient.

Starting point is 00:27:11 I mean, that is the churring test, but it's like the multiplayer churring test. Now that actually a fair number of chatbots have passed the churring test, I'd say there's at least two steps up, right? One is a multiplayer churring 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 and apps and humans doing that? And I think we're very far off, I shouldn't say very far off. At least, I don't know how far we are in terms of time.

Starting point is 00:27:41 We're still far off in terms of a group of N chatbots looking like their digital output is like the group of N 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 a small session, you're condensing all humans that this is a human for end sessions.

Starting point is 00:28:08 Remote work actually makes this possible, right? That's another definition of a multiplayer touring 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, because

Starting point is 00:28:30 everything on a computer can be automated, right? 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 can even monitor a wallet that was on that computer. And you could see what long run series of actions were increasing or decreasing the digital balance. You see what I'm saying, right? So you start to get

Starting point is 00:29:09 at least conceptually, it'd be invasive and, you know, there'd be a privacy issue and so on. Conceptually, you could imagine an agent that could learn what actions humans were doing that results in the increase of their local cryptocurrency balance. Okay. There may be better ways to formulate it, but data considered 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, you know, the next

Starting point is 00:29:35 office typing out emails, it's creating documents, it's actually. So mimic human behavior in its entirety? Yeah, that's right. And it can schedule zooms, it'll send emails, it'll essentially, because 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.

Starting point is 00:30:00 You're seeing it there, and it's just an AI. It's kind of hilarious that I'm not a robot click thing. It actually works. I actually don't know how that's 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

Starting point is 00:30:31 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.

Starting point is 00:30:52 But it is a predator prey on that. Well, and the computer, billions 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 isn't no about the physical world. So it's the look outside of its world

Starting point is 00:31:09 and introspect back on this simple box, which is kind of, you know, 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, you know, actual insight is, again, Maxwell's equations.

Starting point is 00:31:35 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 that's sort of 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, you thing, we were talking about actually before the podcast, like technical truths or some political truths, right?

Starting point is 00:32:09 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? That market price is just the psychology of a bunch of people. Literally, if you can change

Starting point is 00:32:37 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, our technical truths that exist independent of whatever one human or all humans think, like the gravitational constant, right? Or the diameter of a virus. Those are just, those exist independent of the human mind. Change in a few minds doesn't matter.

Starting point is 00:33:00 Those remain constant. And any of the 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, um, 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, you have to change a lot of technical truths. So you can push things to this interesting intermediate zone.

Starting point is 00:33:29 Did the question is how much of our world can we push into that? Right. And that takes us in a non-linear 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 and 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 start-up governments. Yeah. And what I mean by that is basically you can start a new company, you can start a new

Starting point is 00:34:15 community, you can start a new currency even these days. You don't have to beat the former CEO and a dual to start a new company. You don't have to become head of the world 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, it's a game stop and you can try to reform it, okay? Or you can start your own. And the fact that both options exist mean that

Starting point is 00:34:49 you know 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 to bear plot of Earth, a blank sheet of paper, an empty text buffer, a fresh tarp or a clean slate, because we want to build something new without historical constraint, right? For the same reason, you hit plus and do docs.new, you know, like created a new doc. It's for the same reason, right? Because you don't have backspace, you don't have just like 128 bytes of space, 128 kilobytes

Starting point is 00:35:19 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,

Starting point is 00:35:46 there's value to the struggle and the journey you take through the struggle and you grow and you develop ideas together, you grow until actually flows off a clear together. And that's the idea of a nation that spans generations, that you have a tradition that becomes more 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.

Starting point is 00:36:31 That's the pushback. So it's not obvious that this is a strong feature to have, sure, to launch new governments. There are several different kinds of lines of attack or debate or whatever on this, right? First is, yes, there's obviously value to tradition and, uh, you know, 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, you know, like going to the moon wasn't Lindy, just it was awesome. And like artificial intelligence is something that's very new. New is good, right?

Starting point is 00:37:09 And this is attention within humanity actually itself because you know it's way older than all of these nations. I mean, humans are tens of thousands of years old. Answers to humans are millions of years old, right? And you go back far enough, and the time that we know today of the Cecil farmer and soldier is if you go back far enough, you want to be truly traditional, well, we're actually sent 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, you know, had done historical reconstructions

Starting point is 00:37:40 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 first ability. 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

Starting point is 00:38:10 hunter gatherer, you know, maybe that's actually our collective recollection of a garden of Eden, where people, you know, just like a spider kind of knows innately how to build webs or a beaver knows how to build dams, you know, some people theorize that the entire Garnavitin is like a sort of built-in neural network recollection of this, you know, pre-cessile era where you're able to roam around and just pick off fruits and so on, low population density. So 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

Starting point is 00:38:50 to the future because it'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, you know, anything that's important. To make America great again is to dissolve it completely into oblivion. No, it's a joke. I see. I know it's a joke.

Starting point is 00:39:16 Well, humor. I'm learning this new thing. Yes, the new thing for the role. The chapot emulation isn't fully working. 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 to, okay, let's say, I don't know what percentage. Let's say 99.99%

Starting point is 00:39:38 or it's brown 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, you know, leaving your country in search for a better life.

Starting point is 00:40:03 America was founded 200 years ago by the founding fathers. It's not just an immigrant, it's an nation of immigrants, right? Immigration from other countries to the US. And actually, also immigration within the US. There's an 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 in like New York gained

Starting point is 00:40:30 And then like Ohio was a big deal in the early 1800s and it was like father of presidents and general these presidents and later Illinois and Indiana and then California only really came up in the the 20th century like during the Great Depression And now we're entering the modern era, where like Florida and Texas, and Arizona, 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,

Starting point is 00:40:57 you know, Salon or Z, you know, sell a, Monero by Zcash, right? Each of those trading pairs, gives you signal for today on this currency is down or up relative to the Southern currency. you know, sell a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, shaped American a huge way. And so, you know, you ask, 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 endorsed the cons 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.

Starting point is 00:41:47 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

Starting point is 00:42:07 Fascinating over the less so one argument you can make is actually That we're in the very early days of this V2 if so 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 has kids,

Starting point is 00:42:33 there's never really ready to be kids. That's the whole point you dive in. Okay, but the, I mean, you mentioned that you can't launch, is there other criticisms of government that you can provide as we know today before we kind of outline the ideas of V3? Let's stick to V2.

Starting point is 00:42:50 I'll give you a few, right? And so a lot of the stuff will go into the version. So I've got, you know, this book, The Network State, which covers some of these topics. Does Network State have a subtitle?

Starting point is 00:43:00 It is the Network State, how to start a new country. How to start a new country. And, 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. A blogger said that it's constantly working on improving it, changing it. By the time the whole project is over, it'll be a different book than it was in the beginning.

Starting point is 00:43:27 I think so. Always shedding its old skin. Well, I wanted to get something out there and get feedback and one, just like an app. 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. There's a value in something static, something unchanged and so on. But in this case, I'm glad I kind of shipped a version 1.0 and you know, the next version, I'm going to 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 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

Starting point is 00:44:13 zillions of practical details and everything 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 the 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. Right. Be able to send instantaneously updates to the software that completely changes the behavior, the UX, everything about the car.

Starting point is 00:44:56 And so I do think it would be interesting because books are a representation of human knowledge, a snapshot of human knowledge. And it would be interesting that we, 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. Right. That'll be incredible. It's not enough to do like a second edition or a third edition, but like minor updates.

Starting point is 00:45:35 It's not just on your website, but actually go into the model that we use to buy books. Right. So I spend my money. Maybe I'll do a subscription service for five bucks a month where I get regular updates to buy books. Right. 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. And then there's an incentive for authors to actually update their books such that it makes sense

Starting point is 00:45:54 for the subscription. And then that means your book isn't just a snapshot, but it's a lifelong project. Right. It's so care enough about the book. So I think there's a lot to come in on there because actually in going through this process and maybe is the most traditional thing I did was self-publish ebook on Kindle. Right. Why? Because basically like, you know, if you actually ink a deal with

Starting point is 00:46:16 the book publisher first day, you know, they'll give you some advance. I didn't need the advance or anything. But second is all these constraints. Oh, you know, you want to translate into this, so you want to do the other format, or you want to update it, you have to go and now talk to this other party, right? You know, and also the narrowing window of what they'll actually publish, it gets narrow now, or you see all these, you know, meltdowns over young adult novels and stuff on Twitter. But it's more than that. So, you know, actually having an Amazon page, it's just like a marker that a book exists. And now I've got an entry point where someone says, okay, I like this tweet, but how do I kind of get the, that might be a concept

Starting point is 00:46:58 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 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.

Starting point is 00:47:25 But the number xeat.com, what I want to do is have that optimized for every Android phone, so people in India or Latin America or Nigeria can just tap and open it, going to do translations and stuff like that. Greg Foder of all space VR, founder of all space VR, he sold that and he coded the website and worked with him on it. And there's a designer who Elijah and is basically just a three person group. And we thought we had something pretty nice. But one thing I was really pleasantly surprised by

Starting point is 00:47:56 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 actually, you can try it on a mobile. I think it's actually, in some ways, a better experience in Kindle. And so that was interesting because I do think of the website as like a V1 version of a, this concept of a book app, right?

Starting point is 00:48:16 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, you know, the practice is embedded into the thing, you know, like 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 know, you're in line at Starbucks or, you know, getting on a plane or something. You just swipe through and just get really nice micro lessons on things.

Starting point is 00:48:48 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 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 going to go with the the book app. So there's a lot of fun stuff about the way you did at least V1 at the book,

Starting point is 00:49:11 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 helping you think through what is the key insight. Like we mentioned, the prime number of maize that reveals something central to the human condition, which is struggling against the limitation of our of our minds and that's the way you summarize the network state in the book. So let's actually jump right there and let me ask you, what is the network state?

Starting point is 00:49:56 What is an everc 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 crowd funds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing 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 Tutarians 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'll put a task

Starting point is 00:50:31 into the company slack and on the, if you do 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, in a Twitter account, you might get point 1% of people engaging with something.

Starting point is 00:50:47 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 electoral engineers. They're a guild of graphic designers. And you've got 1,000 people in this guild. And every day, somebody is asking a favor from the guild. And the other 909 people are helping them out.

Starting point is 00:51:17 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 your helping other people in 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 sort of keeps 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

Starting point is 00:51:49 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 there are a group that wants to raise awareness of the fact that life extension is possible.

Starting point is 00:52:13 Every day, there's a new tweet on, I don't know whether it's a metformin research or some Claire's work or David some Claire, right? Andrew Huberman has good stuff here, or there's a longevity VC, there's a bunch of folks working this area. Every day, there's something there, and literally the purpose of this online community is where there's a risk of longevity and of the 1,970 go in like that, that's pretty good, right?

Starting point is 00:52:37 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 traffic. You go to hack or 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, we were talking about earlier, the balance between tradition and innovation, right?

Starting point is 00:53:06 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 for so long 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 Red or something like so brilliant,

Starting point is 00:53:29 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 found in solar company Yammer those partially on the basis was fine as a billion dollar company But Facebook for work tended was actually slack Right it looked different. It was more chat focused. There's less image focused and whatnot What does the platform for a highly aligned online community look like?

Starting point is 00:54:03 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 is not built for that. And I don't know what that UX looks like. Maybe it looks like tasks, you know, like built for that. And I don't know what that UX looks like. Maybe it looks like tasks, you know, like maybe, maybe looks something different. Okay. So we are, let me, let me, let me link on this. 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, meaning the, the big, like the meta community of people who are aware of the

Starting point is 00:54:46 feature set and that you can do a thing. This is a thing and then you can do a thing with it. This chord that when I first realized that I think it was born out of the gaming world, is like holy shit, this is like a thing. There's a lot of people that use this. 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,

Starting point is 00:55:15 they're still because of the migration phenomenon maybe. They're still a culture to Reddit and so on. Yes. 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. I think it's important.

Starting point is 00:55:35 Yes, it is. So for example, in 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 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.

Starting point is 00:55:53 I think that's going to stick with me. That's such an interesting way to see Twitter. Yeah. Like, is this heat or is this, is this thread that good? Because there's a lot of stuff going on. Right. Is it just heat? Or were doing some like, is it, is there's a lot of stuff going on right? Is it just heat? Are we doing some like is there a directed thing that's gonna be productive at the end of the day? That's right love is I'm never in seed. I'm gonna be right 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 and commons

Starting point is 00:56:28 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 four 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

Starting point is 00:56:53 civil war, you know? 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 common structure of it, it's a mechanism of virality of anything. Yeah, so you just described the kind of things that become viral. Yeah, meaning no offense to librarians. It's like a library and library. Library was racked by Civil War for many years, right?

Starting point is 00:57:22 The library is one of my favorite sets for porn, just kidding. Jokes, I'm learning, that's probably crossed in the line for the engineers working on this humor module, maybe take that down. Yeah, gosh, we're just sorry. Oh yeah, so continue, go ahead and continue. Twitter is the comments. Yeah, so Twitter is the comments,

Starting point is 00:57:40 then Facebook is like, it's got all these warrants and stuff. Facebook is very difficult to reason about 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 screenshoted or whatever and

Starting point is 00:58:09 posted. And so, you know, Facebook is sort of sort of forced into default public, despite its privacy settings. You know, for anybody who says something interesting, you know, 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 suit them. So you've got Twitter, that's total commons, Facebook, which is like a Warren's, you know, it's like, it's like Rabbit Warren's or like a Aunt Colony where you don't know where information is traveling.

Starting point is 00:58:40 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, 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 going to see. That actually have become physical societies, like lots and lots of subreddit, like things, you know, have become physical societies. Then you start going further into like Discord, where it's more full feature

Starting point is 00:59:16 than, you know, 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, right? 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 where their current policy is. Historically, they discourage public slacks.

Starting point is 00:59:40 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 we more discord is usually that you jump into then then slacks, right? Well, and let me ask you then on that point because there is a culture one of the things I discovered unread it and discord of anonymity or pseudonyms or user names that don't represent the actual name. I'll slack as an example of one because I think I did a I used to have a slack for like deep learning

Starting point is 01:00:11 course that I was teaching and I 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 same stuff on Discord. I think I was the only asshole using my actual identity, my actual name. And then the same stuff on 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 gonna come about fairly fast. And essentially, the concept is obviously we've had,

Starting point is 01:00:47 so first, Anonym, Sudonym, real name, right? You need to discover the difference, difference. Anonymous is like 4chan, where there's no tracking of a name, you know, there's zero reputation associated with an identity, right? Sudonymus is like much of Reddit, where there's a persistent username

Starting point is 01:01:05 and it has karma over time, but it's not linked to a 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,

Starting point is 01:01:21 it's your state name, It is the tracking device. It's an air tag that's put on you. Why do I say that? Another word for a name is a handle. And so just visualize like a giant file cabinet. There's a handle with Lex Freeman on it that anybody, the billions of people around the world can go up to and they can pull this file on you out.

Starting point is 01:01:41 Images of you, things you said, like billions of people can stock 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 going to go back into a much more encrypted world. And okay, let me link around 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

Starting point is 01:02:11 of surnames and whatnot. If you have a guy who is that guy with brown hair, that's like an analog identifier. It could be in 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, you know, 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 you can see them now, right? See, digital identifiers, one thing that people

Starting point is 01:02:43 don't usually think about is, Sudon and D is itself a form of decentralization. So, you know, people know Satoshi Nakamoto was pseudonymous, he also knew he's decentralization, but when we're 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 Gmail, his Facebook, he had one, every

Starting point is 01:03:10 government record on him, all of these databases have that state name as the foreign key. It can go and look things up in all of those Databases, right? And so it's a thing that is 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 Bitcoin talk and Bitcoin.org and the GPT signatures of the code if you choose to do that. All those things digital signatures are all attached to this new decentralized name because he's instantiating it, not the government, right? When we're 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.

Starting point is 01:04:06 Moreover, your birth certificate, all these 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, you use whatever name you want, you site 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,

Starting point is 01:04:30 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've marked on this many years ago, search resistant identities. Okay, why? They have their Finsta, which is their quote, fake name in Scram, and Rince Da, which is their real name in Instagram. This is cool. Okay. Why? They have their Finsta, which is their quote, fake name in Scram and Rinsta, which is their real name in

Starting point is 01:04:47 Instagram. 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're hanging out at parties or whatever. And so this way they've got something which is the public persona and the private persona, the public persona that's search indexed and the private persona that is private for friends.

Starting point is 01:05:18 And so organically people are, you know, like Gene Jacobs talks about cities and how they're organic. And when I like some of the mid-20th century, guys, the architecture they had removed shade from, you know, like, 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 webcrawler that I have saw on, which is like Googlebot, just indexing everything. These are searchers and identities and that like I just sort of passes over you, like you know, the terminator, like the terminator, I just kind of passes over you, right? So searchers and 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 is allowed to do it for transaction, hence the pseudonymous economy, right?

Starting point is 01:06:06 And she 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 can have it under your quote real real name or state name, like lexfreban.eth. But you can 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. 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?

Starting point is 01:06:51 It is the opposite of bringing your whole self to work. It's bringing only your necessary self to work, right? Only show those credentials that you need, right? Now, of course, you know, anybody who's in cryptocurrency understands such Nakamoto and so on 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 like felony convictions when somebody is being hired because they've served their time,

Starting point is 01:07:13 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 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

Starting point is 01:07:50 for who's getting a violent position. So you combine those concepts like band the box, not asking these various questions, blind editions, 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.

Starting point is 01:08:19 And now if they're synonymous, 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 want to be and speak and ever voice you want to speak in, right? And you'll be, and I'll happen in real time. So, I mean, this is really interesting, but I... For Finsta and Rynsta, there's some sense in which the fake Instagram you're saying is where you could be a real self.

Starting point is 01:08:51 What my question is under 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, it is 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

Starting point is 01:09:36 unless we have a lifelong consistent real name and to attach 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, we're not built for the internet. They're actually state names, right? It's actually a great way of thinking about social security

Starting point is 01:09:53 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 want to be stalked,

Starting point is 01:10:12 right? The real name is out there, the 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 really can be indexing to data that was supposed to be private, right?

Starting point is 01:10:28 Like for example, you know, the Office of Personal Management, like the government, the US government, many governments actually, are like a combination of the surveillance data in 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?

Starting point is 01:10:44 They basically have, you know, a hundred million records of all this. They basically have 100 million records of all this very sense of data. They just get owned, hacked over and over again. And so really, there should be something which is 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 argue privacy over KYC, the government should not be able to collect what it can't secure. It's slurping up all this information,

Starting point is 01:11:09 it's completely unable to secure it. It's hacked over and over again, 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, you know, okay, so that guy who's got that network online and emerges various database that they've got a bunch of addresses to go and

Starting point is 01:11:34 hit. Okay. So in that sense, real names were not state names, were not built for the internet. They just give up two-manage information. And are actually existing in an environment they give up two-manage information. the other hand, they also give too little. If instead you give out lexfremend.eth, 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 it,

Starting point is 01:11:59 let's lexfremend.eth. What can you do that? Some you can do today, some you'll soon be able to do. You can pay, Lexroom.Eat, you can message Lexroom.Eat, 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, etc., where you, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Eventually, I think you'll go from email to phone number

Starting point is 01:12:27 to E&S 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 a postrophys perhaps in it or is that your middle name or this in that, that was a format that was developed for the paper world, right?

Starting point is 01:12:45 Whereas the ENS name is developed for the online world. Now, the reasons that ENS or something like it, you know, somebody at a, in a village, they'll, their name might be Smith, because they were a blacksmith, or Potter, because they were a Potter, right? And so you might think your surname, right now for many people with a lot of teeth, and that reflects the Ethereum community. Your surname online will carry information about you. Like .sol says something different about you.

Starting point is 01:13:10 .bTC says yet something different. I think we're going to have a massive fractionation of this over time. We're still in the very earliest days of our internet civilization, right? A hundred, two hundred years from now, those surnames may be as informative as a Chen or Friedman or St. Vossan in terms of what information they carry.

Starting point is 01:13:27 Because the protocol is the civilization fundamentally that you're associated with. 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 persistent throughout your whole life that is shared between all the different digital communities. I think you should be able to opt into that. Right. At which, at which level, in terms of the society that you're joining.

Starting point is 01:13:53 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, I don't mean like that. No, yeah. So, but you just why that wouldn't be the application. I'm murder-free, my name is... No, I don't mean to like that. No, no, no, yes. But, you just buy that one. That's the application I'm interested in. Okay, well, I'm not interested in murder-rapplication,

Starting point is 01:14:11 but I don't know, I'm interested. I would like you to prevent me, a person who's clearly bad for society from doing that. Sure, sure. Murder is going to be against the rules in almost every society. And, I mean, basically, people are... Yeah, most likely, right? And there's something that animals.

Starting point is 01:14:29 Well, I'm thinking of like the Aztecs or the Mayas or something like that. There's weird edge case unfortunately. Yeah, there's societies, unfortunately, that have actually, that's why I asked Rister. 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

Starting point is 01:14:56 entry into that society in theory you would have said, okay I accept this quote social contract, right? Obviously if I kill, I can't leave. Okay, so you've, 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, I, there's the obvious answer, but as I said, there's been human sacrifice in some societies, communism, they kill lots of people, not in season, they kill lots of people. Unfortunately, there's quite a lot of societies. I wanted to say it's an edge case, but maybe many of the 20th century societies around the world

Starting point is 01:15:30 have institutionalized some kind of murder, where there's a red terror in the Soviet Union, or obviously the Holocaust, or the cultural evolution, or a year or zero, and so on and so forth. So my point there is that who is 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?

Starting point is 01:15:51 Well, how did Lenin, you know, you know, the hanging order, you know, I'm talking about the hanging order for the kulaks. Yes. Okay, the famous hanging order, which actually showed they were actually blood thirsty, the key thing was he said, here's a list of all the, quote, rich men, the cool locks 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 waiting 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.

Starting point is 01:16:26 Lists of undesirables were the primary tool of all of these oppressive states in the twin century. You see my point? I see a point, and it's a very strong point. In part, it's a cynical point, which is that the rule of a centralized state is more negative than positive. I think it is like nuclear energy. It's like fire. It is something which you're going to keep having it reform because there's good reasons where you have centralization, decentralization, re-centralization, but power corrupts, absolute power corrupts, absolutely.

Starting point is 01:17:11 And you just have to meet very suspicious of this kind of centralized power. The more trust you give it, often the less trusted 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. Right.

Starting point is 01:17:33 And history teaches us lessons, one at a large scale, especially in the 20th century, at the largest of scale as they 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, right, that surveillance state, it's not just tracking

Starting point is 01:17:51 your name, it's tracking everything on you, you know? Like we chat 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 that would be if we can just disappear every time we murder at the individual level. So the issue is basically once one realizes that the moral trade-off has two polls to it.

Starting point is 01:18:25 And 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, you know, R.J. Rommel has this thing called democide. And the thing is, it's so grim, right? Because, you know, it's saying like one death And the thing is, it's so grim, right? Because, you know, 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, you know, understand.

Starting point is 01:18:56 But, you know, nevertheless engaging with it, like, you know, I don't know, is it ratio 10x? Is it 100x? I wouldn't be surprised if it's 100x. 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 sila and insuribness. When you see what centralization can do, and you correct in the direction of decentralization. You can over-correct with decentralization and you get anarchy. And this is basically, then you want to decentralize, right?

Starting point is 01:19:30 And this is the, you know, I think it's a remand of 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 going to happen is we will state certain verbal principles, right? And then the question is where in state space you are. Are you two centralized? Well, then, okay, you want to decentralize. And are you two decentralized? And then we want to centralize and maybe track more, right?

Starting point is 01:19:53 And people opt into more tracking because they will get something from that tracking, which is a great use of 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

Starting point is 01:20:06 civilizational states base? 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 losing the heart of each individual that made up the entirety of Nazi Germany and had

Starting point is 01:20:30 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 hitler or like Godwin's Law or something like, you know, it's something where if the reference point is hitler, it's this, it's a 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 shop being fired to my knowledge?

Starting point is 01:21:03 Yes, right? Did Google manage to get it to where it a single shop being fired to my knowledge. Yes. Right. The Google man should 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? I guess they say it's right. Yeah. But that's because Bitcoin and Google are tiny minority of communities. That's it's like the the icing on the cake of human civilization.

Starting point is 01:21:26 Sure. Basically, any technology, I mean, you can use a hammer to go and hit somebody with it, right? I'm not saying every technology is equally destructive or have you, but you can conceive of, it's kind of like rule 34, but for technology, right? You can probably figure out some. You're believed 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,

Starting point is 01:22:07 was meant to be a cautionary tale on what, you know, would happen if society invented the torment nectus. And then it's like tech guys. At long last, we have created the torment nexus. 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,

Starting point is 01:22:35 like a minority report had the gesture thing, right? And the connect was based on that. So the 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 Jack, that was meant to be in my understanding, it was meant to be like an anti-war movie, but lots of soldiers just love it, you know, despite the fact that the drill sergeants actually depicted as a bad guy, right? For the sort of portrayal of that kind of environment, right?

Starting point is 01:23:02 So I'm just saying, it's like giving the vision of the digital Hitler or whatever, is not actually a vision I want to paint. I do think is it possible? Obviously, ISIS uses the internet, right? Like, is it? Yeah, I'm not bringing up Hitler in a shallow argument. We're bringing up Hitler in a long, empathetic, relaxed discussion, which is a different,

Starting point is 01:23:24 which is where Hitler can live in a long empathetic, relaxed discussion, which is a different, which is where Hitler can live in a healthy way. We, there's deep lessons in Hitler and Nazi Germany as there is a 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.

Starting point is 01:23:48 Exit is not, people always say, oh, exit is for the rich or they're, they're actually not true. Most immigrants, most immigrants, equals most immigrants are not rich. They're politically powerless. And describe exit. What is exit? So there's this, you know, book which I reference a lot. I like it called exit voice andty by Albert Hirschman.

Starting point is 01:24:07 And he essentially says, I give this talk in 2013 that goes through this YC Start School, but just to describe these voices reform exit alternatives. For example, in the context of an open source project, voices submitting a bug and exit is forking. In a company, voices, you're saying, hey, here's a ticket that I'd like to get solved and exit is taking your business elsewhere. At the level of corporate governance, voices board directors vote and exit is sung your shares.

Starting point is 01:24:44 In a country, voices of vote and exit is shut sung your shares, right? In a country voices of 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 your feet. Wallet has some aspects of exit built into it. But voting with your feet actually has some aspects of voice built into it because when you leave, it's like an amplifier on your vote. You might say 10 things, but 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

Starting point is 01:25:24 with your feet. It is, um, manifest preference as opposed to state of 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 find, seek an alternative? And then loyalty modulates this where if you are a patriot as part, the initial part of your conversation, right? Like, you know, are you, are you your trader? You know, you're giving up on our great thing your conversation, right? Like, are you your trader, you know, you're giving up on our great thing or whatever, right?

Starting point is 01:25:48 And people will push those buttons to get people to stick. That's like, you know, I should say the bad version, let's say a common version, it's sometimes good, sometimes bad. Then, but then there's the good version, which is, oh, you know, maybe the price is down right now, but you believe in the cause. So even if they're, you know, on paper, you would rationally exit, you believe in this thing and you're

Starting point is 01:26:10 going to stick with it. So loyalty can be, again, good and bad, but it kind of modulates a trade-off between voice and exit. Given that framework, we can think of a lot of problems in terms of am I going to use voice or exit or some combination there? Because they're not mutually, it's kind of like, you know, left and right, so I'm just going to use both together. I think that one of the biggest things the internet does is it increases microeconomic leverage and therefore increases exit in

Starting point is 01:26:37 every respective life. For example, you know, on every phone, you can pick between lift and uber, right? When you're at the store, you see a price on every phone, you can pick between lift 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

Starting point is 01:27:05 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, you know, characters into a dolly. And that makes the positive forces of capitalism more efficient increase in microeconomic leverage. And it's individual empowerment, right?

Starting point is 01:27:22 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?

Starting point is 01:27:44 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 drivers license. Point is that it's assumed that it's not like individually customizable quite in that way, right?

Starting point is 01:27:59 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 micro-economic leverage, you can switch apps. Can you switch your experience in small ways, efficiently, multiple times a day in the United States. Well, the physical world, yeah, under the constraints of the physical world, you do like micro

Starting point is 01:28:34 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 the digital nomad has the mobility and freedom of the hunter gatherer, but some of the consistency of the the civilization of the farmer and soldier, right? But coming back to this like one or the 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.

Starting point is 01:29:09 That's one version of microeconomic leverage. Another version is in the 1980s, I mean, they didn't have Google Maps. You couldn't just 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. You know, it wasn't like you went and explored the map. Most people didn't, right? They were highly canalized. Okay? Meaning, you know, it was just back and forth, back and forth,

Starting point is 01:29:40 very routine, just like the push the button, push the button, trapped within this very small piece and also trapped within this large country because 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, 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 would be shocked if people, the average person

Starting point is 01:30:16 didn't go to more places, wasn't, you know, doing more, you know, going to more restaurants and things like that. Today, then they were in the 80s, simply because the map is open. Okay. And the map is made more restaurants and things like that. Today, then they were in the 80s, simply because the map is open, okay. And the map is made more open through the digital world. To 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?

Starting point is 01:30:37 The digital world, you can, I mean, how many websites have you visited? I don't know. Hundreds of thousands, probably at this point, or your life, right? How many places on the surface of your business? You're actually unusual, you might be like a world traveler or have you, right?

Starting point is 01:30:48 But still, even your physical mobility is less than your digital mobility, right? You can just, essentially, I mean, the entire concert like nations and borders and whatnot didn't exist in the hunter gatherer, right? Because you couldn't build permanent fortifications and whatnot. Even nations as we currently think of them

Starting point is 01:31:08 would like demarcated borders, you needed cartography, you needed maps, right? That stuff didn't exist for a long time. You just had to 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 the... I don't want to digress too much, but yeah.

Starting point is 01:31:23 The word digress away. I think entirety of life on earth is a kind of a aggression which creates beauty and complexity as part of the aggression. I think your vision of the network state is really powerful and beautiful. I just want to linger on this real name issue. Yeah, really. Let me just give you some data. Go. A 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. But 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

Starting point is 01:32:08 do find that currently people are much more willing to be on scale cruel to each other online. Yes. And they are in person. The only way to do that, just as a 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 like hard work to do. Online I find just naturally the individual scale people somehow start to easily engage in the drug of mockery, derision and cruelty when they can hide behind anonymity.

Starting point is 01:32:49 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 in my Kraken Island, Glowbridge, the internet increases variance. For anything that exists before,

Starting point is 01:33:12 you have the zero and 100 versions of it. I'll give some examples and 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, right? You go from guy working 95 to the guy who's the 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 constrainable in location to kind of extreme outcomes on both sides, okay? And applying that here, you are talking about the bad outcome, which I agree does happen with the internet. In some sense, makes people have very low empathy between others.

Starting point is 01:33:56 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've never met this person before, right? You get to know them online, you've been person, it's like, you know, the brains have been communicating for two years, three years, you've been friends, and these human persons, 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

Starting point is 01:34:31 with an in-person conversation in the 80s or the 90s with someone on their side of the world, because 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

Starting point is 01:34:54 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 a, it's a I work for the intelligence agency 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 I if you just if you just look at the young folks, I mean, I am very concerned about

Starting point is 01:35:30 the 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. I'm not discriminating 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. Technology. Yes.

Starting point is 01:35:44 I'm just saying the very, very basic technology, I give stuff I, I caught up over the weekend kind of thing. I think if I throw in an in the end top of that, it will lead to many bad outcomes for young people. An enemy, yes, pseudonym maybe not, because Reddit is actually fairly polite, right? The entirety of Reddit just chuckled as you said that. Well, well, within a subreddit, it's actually fairly polite. Like, that's a, you're not usually seeing, it depends on which subreddit, of course.

Starting point is 01:36:12 There's a consistency. There's a, right, that, 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. 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?

Starting point is 01:36:30 So there is an interesting difference between pseudonymous and anonymous you're saying, is possible that pseudonymity, you can actually avoid some of the negative aspects. Absolutely, we're redone barizing the world in some ways. With China being the big exceptional outlier, the Dunbar number, 150 people, that's like roughly the scale of your society. That's a number of people that a human can kind of keep in their brain.

Starting point is 01:36:59 Whether it's a rock, full of knot think I think it's probably roughly true. And we're redone-barizing 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 not, you can program Minecraft by himself. For Satoshi, you could do a V1 a Bitcoin by himself, or Instagram, which is just like 10 people, or what's WhatsApp is like 50 people when they sold. But on the other hand, you have huge countries of hundreds of millions of people that are just finding that the first and second principle, or that they're just splitting on principle components. What Skoll examiner thinks of them as

Starting point is 01:37:39 scissors statements, statements that one group thinks is obviously true, one group thinks is obviously false. You can think of them as political polarization. You can think of them in terms of game theory. It's a lot of different reasons you can get 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. So there's so many beautiful just like, you know, we mentioned chocolates, right, advertising themselves, your entirety of speech is an intellectual

Starting point is 01:38:20 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.

Starting point is 01:38:45 So, that informal sentence is, a network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowd funds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states. So we talked about was the alignment of online communities and the capacity for collective action. Yep. 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.

Starting point is 01:39:08 But a much higher level, much higher bar is a thousand people crowdfunding territory and actually living together, just like people in physical space. In physical space. And not all in one place. That's critical. Just like Bitcoin is a decentralized currency, the network sees 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

Starting point is 01:39:30 roommates. They meet in this community, they become roommates, okay, they get it, they're placed together, or ten 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,

Starting point is 01:39:51 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 100 people want to learn Spanish or Turkish or Vietnamese, they could all have a building where they're doing Vietnamese immersion.

Starting point is 01:40:15 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. And so crowdfunds territory around the world, crucially, not just one place, they're all connected by the internet, just like Hawaii's 2,000 miles away from the continental US, but both sides think of them as American, but the people on Hawaii and people into continental US.

Starting point is 01:40:36 What's the role of having to have territory, 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 crowd fun 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. Well, that's going to be part of it. You're going to want to reproduce. Are we talking about cult?

Starting point is 01:41:03 It's not a cult. Why can't you just take a train? Why is it not a cult? It's not a cult because a cult is very internally focused and it's, it, it, 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 Anaita commune inita Commune in, in Northern New York, they recruited, and they became a town,

Starting point is 01:41:27 and they became actually the Anita glassware company, kind of, you know, makes glassware out of there. All of these communities that were opt-in voluntary communities were not simply like cults that were closed off the world. They were meant to send an example to the world about virtuous living look like, and they were trying to recruit from the rest of the world.

Starting point is 01:41:43 They were exporting goods to the rest of the world, right? So it is, it's, 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 that's 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 and build things. Moreover, there's also lots of innovation that can only take place in the physical world. One of my sayings in the book is, cloud first land last, but not land never. In many ways, one of the problems the book solves is Teal's problem of, we have innovation in bits, but not in atoms. We can build a billion dollar company online, but we need a billion permits to build a

Starting point is 01:42:23 shed in San Francisco. Right? How do you reconcile that? Well, what is stopping the innovation in Adams? It is a ticket of regulations. What are those regulations? Ultimately a social construction. If you lean into the whole deconstructionist, you know, school of thinking,

Starting point is 01:42:40 you can deconstruct and then reconstruct the state itself, given sufficient social consensus online. Okay. If the population 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.

Starting point is 01:43:01 So once you have consensus in bits, the human consensus, also 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 going to be 50% of people who are against you. So that's just a recipe for gridlock. Whereas if you have a bare piece of land that everybody agrees on, you can get 70,000 units get set up in Burning Man in just a few days. Okay. That's the

Starting point is 01:43:31 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 one's going to go much more into detail in the V2, I think that this is 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 government, right? That's actually 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 pass the post, okay. Insofar as 49% did not consent,

Starting point is 01:44:12 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 what what are they voted for? They can effectively be defrauded. 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 drink it its milk or it's nothing. So, all of that is routineized. 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% trust 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.

Starting point is 01:44:55 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 and get some God for Seeking patch of territory. Actually the worst of territory, the go and get some God for seeking patch of territory. Actually, the worst of territory, the better. Why? Because it's like Burning Man. Nobody cares, right? The nicer the piece of land, the more the people are going to argue about it.

Starting point is 01:45:14 But Starlink has repressed the world. Basically, all kinds of pieces of territory that were previously, you know, they're far away from natural ports, they're far away from natural resources. All kinds of pieces of territory around the world now have satellite internet. So what you can do is, again, the map has been reopened. 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.

Starting point is 01:45:38 This place has great starland coverage. You go there like the Verizon guy. Can you hear me now? Good. 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 DMB and there's NIMBY and there's NIMBY, but I actually also like HIMBY. Okay. You know, that's cool. NIMBY, NIMBY, HIMBY, what are those? So NIMBY is not in my backyard. Don't build in cities. NIMBY is,

Starting point is 01:46:03 let's build high density buildings, really tall buildings, and so on in cities. There's a third version, which is Nimbi, 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

Starting point is 01:46:27 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. 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?

Starting point is 01:46:48 Now, you've got something, there's a company I've found called Kift, which is like Van Life. There's a lot of stuff in construction that makes this feasible. It's so-called man camps for fracking, where people can just do like, like, companies like Agreco, they're probably 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,

Starting point is 01:47:11 now you've got a city, okay. And the last bit is, eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states. And this is a part that people, you know, 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.

Starting point is 01:47:27 I believe you can get them to do collective action. And of course, people have crowdfunded land and moving together, 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.

Starting point is 01:47:40 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 they're inking deals. Okay. Nevada, Inc. to deal with Tesla to build a Geiger factory. El Salvador has Bitcoin as its national currency. Wyoming has done the Dow law where Ethereum is now recognized where you can have on-chain incorporations that are recognized by Wyoming law. For Jinya and New York, negotiate with Amazon for HQ2. Tovalu signed a deal with GoDaddy for the .tv domain. Columbia signed a deal for the .co domain. And on and on, sovereigns are open for business.

Starting point is 01:48:17 Sovrons are doing deals with companies and with currencies. Sovrons at the level of cities, like Miami or New York, where the mayor is 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, physical nation states, governments, fiat states, fiat states. Okay. But the fiat isn't the thing that makes a state,

Starting point is 01:48:49 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, 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.

Starting point is 01:49:13 Okay. So, and that's a big part of this whole network, I think, which we can 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 that other hand, so that's on one side of the market, and there are side are the companies and the currencies. Why could we not have online communities? Right. So let me making those deals, I think.

Starting point is 01:49:41 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, you know, a lot of people are like, oh, biology, he took this from Snowcrash or some sci-fi book, Bill reference, remember?

Starting point is 01:50:13 Actually, if there's many different references in the book, this is not the only reference. But a very important reference that I think is much more important to me than Snowcrash, which is good, good book, whatever, but it's fictional, is Djurjudan's dot, but the Djurhurtzul, which transits as the Jewish state, and that led to the foundation of Israel,

Starting point is 01:50:31 and that's very real. It's worth reading because it's amazing. The Djurhurtzul 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, you're just, you know, amazingly smart and practical guy, we just handle all these various objections.

Starting point is 01:50:52 And he said, look, you know, the Jewish people, you know, our choices are either A, assimilate, and get up the culture, or B, some people are thinking communism's good idea, I'd describe that. We should do C, build our own country, right? And that was considered totally crazy. But we did it as he wrote a book, B, started a fund, C organized a semi-annual conference, the World's Zionist Congress, and the fund and the Congress are still going today.

Starting point is 01:51:16 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 folks who were committed Zionists got together and started crowdfunding territory in what is now Palestine. In fact, 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 lands of parameter you can choose. Other places that were considered at various points like Madagascar, Buribidzen, and the former Soviet Union, so the land was a parameter.

Starting point is 01:51:49 Palestine went out because of its historical and religious importance. Now, by the way, one thing, I'm sure there's some fraction of viewers would be like, oh my God, like all the bads have that. I'm obviously not denying that there's enormous amounts of controversy and so on, that attends Israel. I've conserved myself generally pro-Israeli. I also consider myself pro-Palestinian. I fund amounts of controversy and so on, that attends Israel and I would consider myself generally pro-Israeli.

Starting point is 01:52:05 I'd also consider myself pro-Palestinian. I fund lots of Palestinians and so on and so forth. So I'm leaving that part out, that huge conflict for now. 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.

Starting point is 01:52:24 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

Starting point is 01:52:40 was in control, they were the sovereign, okay? In practice, who were the boots on the ground, the facts on the ground? There's the people who were actually telling the land and building the buildings and so and so forth. Who had the claim there as the people who were present? 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,

Starting point is 01:53:10 this is an enormous topic of dispute, okay? But I just point this out to say the pros are 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, within the lifetimes of some older people. Okay. So, so it's not impossible. In fact, it has happened, right? Okay.

Starting point is 01:53:37 But for that stuff, then perhaps hopefully is a better example because in this particular, like you said, land last, if I were to say, it was a thousand alien and arrived at earth and say choice of land. Maybe if you were interested in creating choosing a land that represents a network state, where ideas that unites people based on ideas may be pickle land that doesn't lead to generational conflict and war. Yes, so I'll get to that in destruction and suffering and all that. All of that. 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

Starting point is 01:54:27 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 can you fuse these things, right? A state started with a book that achieved independence nonviolently, And that managed to build this polyglot, multicultural democracy, that does, India has its flaws, but it does manage to have human rights of lots of people respected and what have you. And has managed to, there were times like emergency in the 1970s, and they were declared emergency. There were times when seam touch and go, but overall with fits and starts, this flawed thing is kind of made its way through.

Starting point is 01:55:10 And 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 huge amounts of natural resources in the middle of a zone where there's 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

Starting point is 01:55:42 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? They're all forks of the UK code base. We think obviously, the UK was sort of the ancestor of America,

Starting point is 01:56:03 but Israel was a former British colony, right? India was a British colony, and so it was Singapore, right? And so for people who don't know what fork and codebase means, it's 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, the defining the United Kingdom, and then forked it by evolving those ideas in a way that didn't affect

Starting point is 01:56:38 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, an interesting analogy, right? So you have the Americans who forked, you know, the UK code base. And then you have, you know, 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

Starting point is 01:57:03 and try to combine them. 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.

Starting point is 01:57:39 Here, V1 is UK common law. They don't have a constitution. It's just 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, you know, fusion obviously of Rousseau's cons 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 in the constitution. And in many ways you can think of going from the United Kingdom of England, Wales, Scotland and North Ireland, the United States of America, the networks of the Internet, okay, where you go from the rights of Englishmen with the Magna Carta to Europeans, African-Americans,

Starting point is 01:58:19 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, law capitalism. In a sense, it's the V3, right? In other words, the V3,

Starting point is 01:58:38 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, Palestinian Washington or a, you know, Brazilian Hamilton, right? And now rather than say, okay, maybe you're, maybe you have a small percentage of chance of immigrating to the US and a small percentage of your descendant becoming 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

Starting point is 01:59:13 there, you know, in networks state, right? You don't think that kind of thing is possible with the rich get richer in a digital space too, the people with more followers have friends that have followers and they, like. I don't think it's a rich get richer. I think what happens is, so this is a porn concept, it is multi-axis, right? That is to say, for example, just the introduction of the Bitcoin axis, right?

Starting point is 01:59:40 And those, because 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 your dollar. Yes. So that's in new access and eth is yet another access, right? 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?

Starting point is 02:00:21 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, the old world who have the least incentive to switch, they will, the rich will get poorer because it will be the poorer or those who are politically powerless, politically poor, who go and seek out these new states.

Starting point is 02:00:52 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 come see you of a startup company.

Starting point is 02:01:09 Of course, whether people follow you, it's another matter, but anybody can go and found one. Go ahead, sorry. Oh, from the perspective that anyone can found one. Anyone can found, I see. We don't think it's implausible that, you know, somebody from Brazil or an age,

Starting point is 02:01:24 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 U.S. presidents ever all time. Okay. It is a much more realistic ambition to become a billionaire than become president.

Starting point is 02:01:44 It's like thousands of billionaires rule what? In fact, 75% of them are outside the US. And many of those have been, you know, 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 the pickaxe, granite. So the point is that we think it's totally understandable today for there to be a huge founder who comes out of Vietnam or South America, like you can name founders from all over the world. Right? Exceptional people can rise from all the world to run giant companies.

Starting point is 02:02:23 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 an example, I talked about this in the book. The talent we're tearing is farmer qualified, then Jerome Powell, right? Or anybody at the Federal Reserve, he actually built a car, he and managed a monetary policy and a currency from scratch. Okay. As a 20 something, right?

Starting point is 02:02:46 Obviously, that's a more accomplished person than somebody who just inherited an economy. This is 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, I think, once it scales and actually has impact. Sometimes, sometimes, but Zuck has done a good job of both. I think Vitalik has done a good job of both, right? That's not in a herent truth. Well, so actually, I have a few builds

Starting point is 02:03:10 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. And the premise is actually that the classic example, you know the saying shirt sleeves, to shirt sleeves in three generations. It means the guy who starts out poor and builds a fortune,

Starting point is 02:03:30 his son maintains it and his disciplined grandson dissipates it, right? For a little while. Why is shirt sleeves a symbol of poverty? Well, back in the past, who's kind of like, you know, you're just working with your, you're not, you're not white collar, you're back to working with your hands,

Starting point is 02:03:44 you're just, Oh, it's a blue collar, the blue collar in three generations. Yeah, yeah, we're working working with your, you're not, you're not white collar, you're back to working with your hands, you're just, you're for the blue collar, the blue collar and through generate. Yeah, yeah, we're working class or something like that, right? So essentially that the, 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 an older family is, you know, they were much bigger, right? Six, youchildren, and 16 and so on. And older families, they were much bigger. Six children are uncommon.

Starting point is 02:04:08 What our 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 his all the way down, the majority of his 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 rule in class in the sense that this person who's like four generations down has, you know, like one sixteenth of the DNA, you know, one over two to the fourth, right? Of their, their cyan who built a fortune.

Starting point is 02:04:43 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. Because you literally, like, what is even the family when it's diluted out, you know, one-sixteenth, right? If you're one-sixteenth 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.

Starting point is 02:05:14 But even that person doesn't necessarily have the qualities of the guy who, you know, the cultural qualities, other qualities, the guy who's like four generations passed, they tend to squander it, right? So, this actually brings us to, you're coming back up to governance, the system, the guys who built the United States, like Washington and Hamilton, these are giants, these are founders. And the folks today are like not the grandson, but like the 40th generation air of a factory that somebody else built. Think about a factory and you have this grandchild or great-grandchild

Starting point is 02:05:47 in the heritage of factory. Most of the time, it's just cranking out widgets and the great-grandson is caching checks. They have been selected as legitimate air because it's the, you know, the founder passes it down to his son, passes it down to his grandson, his great-grandson. So, legitimacy is there. They've got title. They can show, I own this factory, okay? They can cash the checks.

Starting point is 02:06:07 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.

Starting point is 02:06:24 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

Starting point is 02:06:44 repair this. So in 2009, Mother Jones had a story that said that the parts in 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 because there was a part where all the guys who knew how to make it had aged out or left. Okay, and this was some like aerojail or something like that, it was rumored. 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 U.S. is just less functional.

Starting point is 02:07:18 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, you know, the role of mayor or whatever of this town don't have the ability to build it from scratch. So just select 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,

Starting point is 02:07:49 oh, we need like 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 know, maybe they can exert enough force, but that's a problem

Starting point is 02:08:07 with the kind of the authoritarian dictator takeover, right? So the alternative, the third version is the founder who combines both legitimacy and competence because they start from scratch, and they attract people to their vision, and they build it from scratch. And so you need a disability 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 they, the new ones pop up? There could be thousands.

Starting point is 02:08:45 Given seven billion people, eight billion people on earth. Yeah, yeah. So there's a network state in the, like the precise definition I have in the book, which is a diplomatically recognized entity, and there's never seen sort of the loose definition where, you know, one thing that's interesting is this term

Starting point is 02:08:59 has become a lower case term really fast, okay? No, it's a state. Yeah, like in the sense of Google became lowercase Google for like Googling or like we were became lowercase Uber. Like if you go to thenevrxc.com, front-sash reviews or you go to search.twitter.com and put it in network state, you'll see it just become like a word or a phrase. Okay. So that means it's sort of whatever I intended to mean, people will use it to mean what

Starting point is 02:09:22 they wanted to me, right? Okay. So with that, it's interesting, right? It's interesting. You've become, well first of all, your meme and this book is meme. Am I a meme? Okay, maybe I'm a meme. But the book is, the book is, the book is a good meme.

Starting point is 02:09:32 That's actually why I wanted to make it free. I wanted people to take it out there, 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. You're not Iron Rand. No, I'm not. And basically, the whole point

Starting point is 02:09:57 of this actually is it's polytheistic, polystatastic, polynomistic is genuinely... Is it polyamorous? It's not polyamorous. Okay. Um, though somebody might love it. Love advice in the book. I didn't I didn't see it. So did you talk about love in love? I do not talk about love. I rather maybe not to you. Not that I don't believe in love. Love is great. All right. I will accept you offer to write a guest chapter in your 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, because it seems like more and more can be done in the digital space. Yeah, but as I said, we work, for example.

Starting point is 02:10:39 But you're not going to build a self-driving car city in digital space. You're not going to be able to do all cars at all. Well, sure, but let's say you're not going to be able to get to Mars in a purely digital thing. You need to build, you know, you have to have a little rocket launch pad. You're not going to be able to do all the

Starting point is 02:10:55 innovative biomedicine, whether it's, you know, all the, you know, if you've seen bioelectricity or there's stuff on regenerative medicine, stemps all the stuff. You just can't do that digitally, right? We're still physical beings, you know? So you need physical space, but how do we get that, right? So this is meant to win its way through various roadblocks

Starting point is 02:11:16 in the so-called, you know, actually my term from many years ago, the idea may as it's meant to win its way through the idea may as to find how do you spits to re-unlock innovation atoms. The idea may is within the bigger prime number of Mays. We're going back to visualizing the number of states and how often are they born. So let me first, 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

Starting point is 02:11:41 border like Taiwan or Israel, right? Where the not, I mean Israel is a country, but it's not recognized by every country or would have you, right? It's 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. Um, 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

Starting point is 02:12:06 and 1 million, 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. 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.

Starting point is 02:12:30 You have a following this bigger than 100,000 people. You have a following that's bigger than, you know, a small country like Kieribadi 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 countries or smaller than social networks that you've built. Okay, number

Starting point is 02:12:46 one. Number two is the number of UN listed countries, even though it's been flat-ish for the last 30 years, with like, you know, 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 universe set up to 197 today. There's been a steady increase in particular with all the decolonization, all the countries that got their independence from first from the British Empire, and then from the Soviet Empire, that imperial breakup led to new countries. And so, the question is, is that flat forever?

Starting point is 02:13:25 Well, the number of new currencies similarly increased for a while, roughly one per country or thereabouts, and that 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.

Starting point is 02:13:42 Now, you can define, you can argue where the boundary is for 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?

Starting point is 02:14:01 Somewhere in between, you might say, how many currencies are above the market cap of an existing previously recognized Fiat currency? Which got onto the leaderboard? There's a website just like CoinMarketCap.com. That's a site for cryptocurrency tracking. It's very popular. There's a fund site called FiatMarketCap.com, which shows where Bitcoin is relative to the Fiat currencies of the world. It's's like, last I checked, like number 27, somewhere in between the Chilean pezzo and the Turkish lira or something, okay? And it'd previously be in close to crack in the top 10,

Starting point is 02:14:32 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 I probably should have said at the very beginning. If you go to the network state in one image, that kind of summarizes what a network state looks like in a visual.

Starting point is 02:14:55 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, 100 people here, a thousand people there, they're all connected together. The total population of the people in this social network is about one million people. So 1.7 million people in this example. And some of the buildings are, some of the people are just singletons.

Starting point is 02:15:20 They're just folks in their apartment who 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

Starting point is 02:15:40 just like Chinatowns exist, right? Just like, you know, intentional communities existed, they just basically, you know, go and crowdfund lane together, right? And these are all network together, you know, just like the islands of Indonesia are separated by ocean, these are islands of this network state that are separated by internet, okay? So conceptualize themselves as something.

Starting point is 02:16:02 And it's 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 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 100,000 or a million person countries. One of the new things, contributions and networks, it has is say that you cannot just exceed in population, you can exceed in real estate footprint. Because one way of thinking about it is, I don't know exactly know the numbers on foreign ownership in Estonia, but let's say to first order the million something Estonians own

Starting point is 02:16:37 and could afford Estonia. 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's 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 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 for print. So it's also in real estate for print with the countries of the world. So you start ranking and you're bigger than these UN listed countries in your population

Starting point is 02:17:15 and you real estate for print. And the third is income. 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 you know the essay the never seen a thousand words the post office in census were actually important enough to be written into the US Constitution, okay? Partly because it was like for a portionment of representatives partly because there's 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, the hard part is proving it. Because how will the world believe that you actually have 100,000 people

Starting point is 02:18:07 spread across countries? Could there be bots? Could there 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 going to rank this digital state on the leaderboard of the Fiat states. Okay. And so that means that people will start to, yeah, first of all, just laugh at it. Once you start claiming you have 10,000 citizens, people are going to start poking and be like, is that real?

Starting point is 02:18:34 Prove that it's real. Okay. So I have a whole talk on this. Actually, I'm giving it this a chain link conference, but essentially, how do you prove this? Right? The short answer is cryptooracles plus auditing. The sum of longer answer is,

Starting point is 02:18:49 you put these assertions on chain, these proof of human, these proof of real estate, et cetera, assertions on chain. 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.

Starting point is 02:19:05 It just says you can prove not that the, 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 their timestamp. So you can establish those things in metadata of who, what, and when was written.

Starting point is 02:19:20 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, OK? As a function of that, blackstone.eth signs an on-chain receipt that says this Lexreadman.eth bought this piece of property from us.

Starting point is 02:19:44 And it has, you know, like, it's 1,000 square meters. And this is put on chain. They sign it, okay? That's a 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,

Starting point is 02:19:59 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. You let's say there's 47 different real estate vendors. I know vendors in atypical turn 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

Starting point is 02:20:22 was bought and it's square meters, it's location, or whatever they'll say want to 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 is 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. If people are doing this type of stuff,

Starting point is 02:20:47 they're putting the 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 end 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.

Starting point is 02:21:04 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 reliably score for blackstones reporting of its real estate square footage. Who does the, so that's the auditing stuff? That's the auditing stuff. So the crypto Oracle is the auditing stuff. That's the auditing stuff. So the crypto oracle is the auditable. Auditable.

Starting point is 02:21:27 Auditable. Auditable. Auditable. Auditable. Auditable. Auditable. Auditable. Auditable.

Starting point is 02:21:34 Auditable. Auditable. Auditable. Auditable. Auditable. Auditable. Auditable. Auditable.

Starting point is 02:21:42 Auditable. Auditable. Auditable. Auditable. Auditable. Auditable. Auditable. 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 cash flow and. We keep them in check from corruption. I'm just imagining a world full of network states. Yeah, it's a good question.

Starting point is 02:21:57 So, you know, at a certain point, you get to who watches the watchers, right? Yeah. And, oh, well, the government is meant to keep the accountants accountable and you know Arthur Anderson actually did have a whole flame out in you know the around time the Enron thing. So it is possible that there's corrupt accountants or bad accountants or would have you. But of course the government itself is corrupt in many ways and prints all this money and

Starting point is 02:22:20 ceases all 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 going to digitally sign a report and put it on chain. Okay, so they're going to say, we believe that X, Y and Z's reports are on chain where this reliable and here's our study. If they falsify that, Y, and Z's reports are on chain where this reliable, and here's our study. If they falsify that, well, if somebody finds that eventually, then that person is down

Starting point is 02:22:51 weighted, then you have to go to another accountant. Is there waste to mess with this? Let me just breathe in and out. As I mentioned, some of the heaviest shit I've ever read, but because I've visited Ukraine, I've read, Red Famine by Ann Applebaum, Bloodlands. Yep. And it's just a lot of coverage of the senses.

Starting point is 02:23:13 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 senses, to hide the fact that sort of a lot of people died from starvation. And did that with the cooperation of Arthur G. Selsbergers, New York Times company, like Walter D. D. falsified all those reports. Several parties involved.

Starting point is 02:23:35 Is there 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 are involved in falsifying something, the more defections there are. So that's why you basically have another level of auditing, you know, fundamentally the answer, right? And really, I think what it comes back to is, if you're showing your work, right, this is a difference between crypto economics and the economics, you know, the Bitcoin blockchain, anybody can download it and run verification on it. Okay.

Starting point is 02:24:12 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 auditability is. And so then to your question, it's hard for some group to be able to collude because the blockchain is public

Starting point is 02:24:38 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, Ben Ferdzell. Yes. Right. It's something where the digits in like a real, if you take the last digit or the forever of the last digit of first digit. I think it's the first digit, right. So you take the first digit in an actual financial statement,

Starting point is 02:25:06 you look at the distribution of like how many ones and how many twos, how many threes, the percentages. It has actually a, 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 certain distribution that it has. And fake data doesn't look like that, but real

Starting point is 02:25:26 data does. It's weird. It's interesting, right? Benfer'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 percent, will have a leading digit of one. Yeah, so that's a great example of what we're talking about earlier, the observational leading to the theory.

Starting point is 02:25:48 Oh, there's a Benfer's Law of Controversy. I'm looking that up. Benfer's Law of Controversy. Benfer'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 society.

Starting point is 02:26:10 Can I just say how much I love Wikipedia? That 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. I remember I think earlier on like technical truths versus political truths. On technical truths, it's great. On political truths, it's like a defamation engine.

Starting point is 02:26:36 Just as one example, okay. There's something that, you know, I was going to write up, but there was a scam called HPZ token that managed to edit Wikipedia. Nobody detected it. It said that I was like the founder of HPZ token. They do or the founder. Yeah. I had nothing to do with this.

Starting point is 02:26:55 And people were scammed out of it because Google just pushes Wikipedia to, you know, to hire Google and people like, well, it's in this Wikipedia, therefore it's real, right? Wikipedia has the bio-eviliving persons thing. They should just allow people to delete their profile because 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 like undetected.

Starting point is 02:27:27 I wasn't paying attention to this. This was like there for like, I don't know, 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,

Starting point is 02:27:44 it used to be something in the early 2000s, mid 2000, people said, oh, it's Wikipedia, how trustworthy can be, botanic is reviewed. And that's being forgotten, and now it's become over trusted, right? Remember the thing like the more trust something gets, the less trust worthy it often becomes, it kind of abuses the power, right?

Starting point is 02:27:59 So what I'm interested in, Google actually had a model a while back called K&L. K&L Null 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 words, you'd have forks, right? And they would all kind of, you know, coexist. And then people could

Starting point is 02:28:42 review them. And now you can see different versions of something versus the thing that just kind of rewards dog-ed persistence or being an editor or something like that. There are things 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 want to see some data though. I want to see some data because we often highlight

Starting point is 02:29:23 small anecdotal cases. Hold on a second. There 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 want to know on net how much positive is being added to the world because of it. My experience that I try

Starting point is 02:29:46 to be empathetic and open-minded, my exploration of Wikipedia has been such that it is a breath, breath of fresh air in terms of the breath 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 the 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.

Starting point is 02:30:35 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 has, 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.

Starting point is 02:31:02 So there's a site called Wikipediaocracy, 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 Tenebreh who people alleged was a news day reporter or writer that put a piece into news day that Dead named tenor that den 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 when people alleged it was the same guy, okay? Now that is not an uncommon thing that that's what I wanted on okay. I know many articles I'm not who's auditing, I'm dancing with you not against you.

Starting point is 02:31:47 Sure, sure. Okay, 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?

Starting point is 02:32:01 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, you know, so and so on, it's called the Wikipedia Reliable Sources Perennial Sources, okay? And if you go to this page, okay, which I'm just going to send to you now, right? You will literally see every media outlet in the world and their colored gray, green, yellow, or red, okay?

Starting point is 02:32:37 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. You will, instead you have to cite a mainstream media outlet that puts the tweets in the mainstream article and only then can

Starting point is 02:33:06 it be cited in Wikipedia. By the way, to push back, this is a dance. Sure, sure. Sure, sure, sure. Those are rules on the sheet of paper. I have seen Wikipedia in general play in a gray area that these rules create. Oh, well, if you are an editor, then you can get... You can use the rules, because there's a lot of contradictions within the rules, you can use them in the ways you said to achieve the ends you want.

Starting point is 02:33:35 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, same with Stack Overflow, can do an incredible amount of good editing and aggregation of good knowledge. Now, as you said, that works seems to work much better for technical things over which there's not a significant division. So some of that has to do less with the rules and more with the human beings involved. Well, but here's the thing.

Starting point is 02:34:18 So first, let me finish off this point, I'll show you the liable source perennial sources, right? So if you go to this, you'll see that Al Jazeera is marked green. But let's say the Kato Institute is marked yellow, right? The nation is marked green. Oh shit. Oh snap. Okay. Okay. Sure. Yes. Right. The nation is marked green, but national review is marked yellow. Okay. You could probably go and do, say, what's good about this is make 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,

Starting point is 02:34:57 and what things are starting to get marked as green. And I'm pretty sure you're going to 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, coin desk, okay, was marked as being like a gosh, I think it's marked as red, coin desk, which is actually like... I get a lot of useful information from coin desk. That's right, but it's marked as red. Why?

Starting point is 02:35:29 Because there's some Wikipedia editors who hate cryptocurrency. As a cryptocurrency and 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 coin desk, 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.

Starting point is 02:35:51 This is the manipulation of consensus. I want to know how many articles are affected by it. And hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. You could just say that randomly. I can't, I can't. Because all the affected, there's different levels of effect in terms of it actually having a significant impact on the quality of the article.

Starting point is 02:36:10 Let me give you an example. Let me cut a good 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 source of policy is a structural shift on every single article to make Wikipedia aligned with US mainstream media corporations. 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.

Starting point is 02:36:52 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 of this, but it did not seem biased to me. Here's like, as compared to mainstream media in the United States. So now I'm going to sound extremely woke. Yeah, okay. If you go and look at this,

Starting point is 02:37:46 all right, times of India is yellow, but Mother Jones, Jackamon, okay, they are green, right? So a niche, mostly white, western, like partisan left outlet is marked green, but a billion people, left outlet is Mark Green, but a billion people, you know, like the times of India is Mark 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 just loved to see in terms of the actual article, what ideas are being censored, altered, shifted. I would love to, I just think it's an open, I'm not sort of, uh, so the edit logs are there. The edit logs are public. Yeah. I think here's a way. It would be fascinating. Yeah. Is there a way to explore the way

Starting point is 02:38:38 that narrative is shifted because of short? So a very simple one is if you were to pull all the ad logs of Wikipedia, you could see how many times are social media links disallowed. Okay. Like, first of all, think about like this. How many, I mean, just the fact that social media is not allowed to like be cited on Wikipedia or inconsistently. You think that's a problem.

Starting point is 02:39:01 It's a huge problem. You can't cite, let's say Jeff Bezos is on tweet. You have to cite some random media corporations. Of course she hears a thing. And sorry, sorry if I'm interrupting. Please. Hopefully I'm adding to it. I think they're trying to create friction

Starting point is 02:39:16 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, Roof, you know, like said, oh, we'll only cite mainstream media

Starting point is 02:39:39 as a way of boosting its credibility in the early 2000s, okay, when its credibility was low. Now, it's become merged with the US establishment, and at only sites these things, have you seen that graphs on trust in mainstream media that's plummeted, that's down to 10% or something like that? So the most trusted sources for Wikipedia are untrusted by the population.

Starting point is 02:40:04 Yeah, true. That feels like it's a fixable technological problem. 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. Okay. I think I have a gut sort of developed feeling about which articles not to trust the Wikipedia. I think I need to make that explicit also.

Starting point is 02:40:29 I have an understanding that you don't go to Wikipedia for this particular topic. Don't go to Wikipedia for an article on Donald Trump or Joe Biden. 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? We could be is great for that. On many topics that do not have a single consensus truth, it's structurally shifted towards basically white western liberals, Wilkweitz, right? Fundamentally that's a demographic of the Wikipedia.

Starting point is 02:41:17 What kind of articles do you think are affected by this? Let's think about like, what are the... Everything that's not math and technology. I think that's too strong a statement so we can Like I said Warren Ukraine. I Sure I think that's too strong a statement. I there's so much Effect I guess I'm saying affected to a large degree

Starting point is 02:41:40 even his Major battles in history battles Stalingalingrad, or that's not math. So you think all of that is affected to a point where it's not a truss source? Absolutely. If you look at the edit wars, for example, on Stalin versus Hitler, Hitler's, 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 added out mention of genocide from the first few paragraphs.

Starting point is 02:42:13 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 want to use the word truth, but for some level the wisdom that is there, for the knowledge that is there. I don't want to 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 right now in Wikipedia. I think you're being very consistent and eloquent in the way you're describing the issues Wikipedia,

Starting point is 02:42:48 and I don't have enough actual specific examples to give where there is some like 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 of knowledge

Starting point is 02:43:18 that leads to an apathy and the 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 like, it's not even just Wikipedia. I just think Wikipedia was at least for 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

Starting point is 02:43:55 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 not this is not you But I often see that people will detect

Starting point is 02:44:36 cynicism especially when it is phrased as eloquence yours and we'll look at a natural dumbass like me and think that Lex is just being naive. Look at him, trust him with competing. Let me argue your face. Let me argue your side. Okay. Can you please do that? Cause you could do that better than me. No, no, no, Lex, I enjoy talking to you. And I'm doing devil's advocate. Look, because I do really want to be, I am afraid about the forces that, like, are basically editors of authority, of talking down to people and censoring information. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:45:12 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. And I think that there's two possible deviations from, you know, let's say that the mainstream, you know,

Starting point is 02:45:43 obviously people talk about like QAnon, for example, as this kind of thing where people just make things up. They just go totally, quote, supply chain independent from mainstream media. 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 Blue and on mainstream media, but Satoshi Anon Okay, which is an upward deviation. Okay, not a downer 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

Starting point is 02:46:23 Okay, so how does the decentralization of what could be the, it look like? Great question. It's this concept 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.

Starting point is 02:46:38 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,

Starting point is 02:46:59 what they're getting consensus on are basically bites that determine who holds what Bitcoin. This is exactly the kind of thing people would fight wars over. For hundreds of billions of dollars 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

Starting point is 02:47:24 Bitcoin somebody has to 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. Basically the premises if you go from consensus on one byte by induction you can go to consensus on invites depending on the cost of getting that consensus right and almost anything digital can be represented you know or everything digital can be represented as bytes, right? So now you can get consensus on certain kinds of digital information, Bitcoin,

Starting point is 02:47:51 but then also any kind of financial instrument. And then the next generalization is, what I call the leisure 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

Starting point is 02:48:23 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. This is how you get consensus. As opposed to having a white Western Wikipedia editor or most 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

Starting point is 02:49:01 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 a technical, vertical truth spectrum. Yeah. But even the earth, like, well, that one is yeah never mind 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 for the sophomore one that that will have a lot of debates historical stuff about About the different forces operating within Nazi Germany and

Starting point is 02:49:49 Stalinist Soviet Union, I think there's probably a lot of They yeah, the like the historians debate about a lot of stuff like Blitz the book that talks about the influence of drugs and that they're right, right? They're not math or something. Yeah, they are there's a lot of debates about how influence of drugs in the third Reich. Were they on math or something? Yeah, there's a lot of debates about how true, what is the significance of math 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?

Starting point is 02:50:23 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, yeah.

Starting point is 02:50:46 Clearly, Queen Brittany was a very powerful monarch. We can see how many girls around the world worshiped her like a god. And so I'm, 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. And it's a very thought-provoking article because it says, well, to what extent is that us

Starting point is 02:51:21 picking over Pompeii or the pyramids, or even the 1600s or the 1700s, like a few hundred years ago, were basically sifting through artifacts. And some of Berger actually has his concept like which is obvious, but it's also usually have a name for it. It's like I think he calls it like dark history, which is, and again, it might be getting this wrong,

Starting point is 02:51:42 but it's like only a small percentage of what the Greeks wrote down, it's come to this wrong, but it's like only a small percentage of what the Greeks wrote down, you know, 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. Don't like gobeckly tepias. Everything I know about that is from Rogan

Starting point is 02:52:05 because he's a huge fan of that kind of stuff. Yeah, so that rewrites. And then there's a lot of debates there. There's a lot of debates. And basically it's like the discovery of this site in Northern Turkey that totally shifts our estimate of when civilization started, maybe pushing it back, many thousands of years further in the past.

Starting point is 02:52:22 The past, it's like an inverse problem in physics, right? We are trying to reconstruct this from limited information, right? It's like extra-acrystallically. It's an inverse problem, right? It's Plato's cave, you know, we're trying to reconstruct what the world looks like outside from these 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, 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 far than we thought. That one discovery just changes it. You want to try to give in all the gaps in the data we have. You want to try to remove bias from the process of trying to fill the gaps.

Starting point is 02:53:02 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 going to change,

Starting point is 02:53:25 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, you know, the in theory digital stuff will persist in practice, you have lost data and floppy drives and stuff like that. In some ways, digital is more persistent, some is physical is more persistent.

Starting point is 02:53:52 But assuming we can figure out the archival problem somehow, then this future record, at least it's internally consistent, you can run a bunch of the equivalents of check sums, 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, 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.

Starting point is 02:54:24 It's a really a new tool in terms of a robust history that is expensive and technically challenging to edit an alter. And that is the alternative to the Stalin-esque rewriting of history by centralize power. Yeah, I'm going to 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, because I basically use it very similarly to stack overflow. And even there, it doesn't have unit tests.

Starting point is 02:54:56 For example, one thing... I think I'm going to put it here. Right, so one thing I remember, again, it might be wrong on this, but I recall that the Kelli criterion, it's actually quite a useful thing to know. It's like how to optimally size your bets, okay? And you can have, given your kind of probability that some investment pays off or assume 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.

Starting point is 02:55:22 You're so sure this is a good outcome that you should actually spend more than your current bank role because you're going to get a good result. So it's a very sophisticated thing. And as I ever call, 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 caliciterian for a while. It's funny. Okay. And so without unit tests, see math is actually the kind of thing that you could unit test, 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, on their sites like golden.com, for example, like, you

Starting point is 02:55:58 know, there's a bunch of things I'm funding lots of stuff across the board, you know, on this. And, you know, I'm not lots of stuff across the board on this. And I'm not capitalizing these companies or capitalizing independently, but I'm trying to see if, you know, not just talk about a better version, it's hard to build something better, so actually go and build it. And where you want assertions that are actually reproduced,

Starting point is 02:56:16 you don't just have the equation there, you have a written out 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 hard 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

Starting point is 02:56:47 write those articles, and I've seen this also in Stack Overflow, 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, right? So absolutely, there's some good there. I mean, again, I think Wikipedia is a huge step up from what preceded it in some ways on the technical topics. Yes. However, you talk about the editing environment, right?

Starting point is 02:57:12 Like the markup for Wikipedia, it's very, you know, mid-2000s, right? It is not Craigslist. Yeah, exactly. At a minimum, for example, it's not WizzyWig, right? 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 a market language where there can be

Starting point is 02:57:34 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 would 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, sorry, one time it's written, it is important to actually have the mathematical things unit tested if they can be,

Starting point is 02:57:56 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 in every side for the editor, even just for the editors to check that there for say the editor wants to get right, we make it we want to make it really or not easy, but easier to check their work like debugging like a nice ID for the for the that's the fact that the editing experience. That's right. And the thing about this is, as I said, because the truth is a global constant, but like in correctness, you know, right? Go ahead. Every happy family. I love.

Starting point is 02:58:33 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, uh, let's say you did have a unit tested page for everything that's on, we could be, 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 academia and nonprofits, the Wikipedia discussion actually relates to how you improve

Starting point is 02:59:14 on academia. 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 that the answer to trust no one, right? And I think the alternative is decentralized cryptographic trust or verification. And how does that apply to academia? First observation is we are seeing science being abused in the name of quote, quote unquote science, okay.

Starting point is 02:59:42 Capital S science is Maxwell's equations. That's, that's the good one. That's a, science, okay? Capitalist science is Maxwell's equations. That's, that's the good one. That's a good one, right? Quotal quote, science is a paper that came out last week. And the key thing is that capitalist science, real science is about independent replication, not prestigious citation. That's the definition, like all the journal stuff,

Starting point is 03:00:04 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, maxill equation, I mean, there's trillions of replications. Every time, speaking into this microphone right now,

Starting point is 03:00:35 you know, we're testing, you know, our theory of the electromagnetic field, right? Or electrical and magnetic 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,

Starting point is 03:00:54 yet it is being cited publicly as prestigious scientists from Stanford and 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 Goodheart's Law. OK, I'm just going to quote it. When a measure becomes a target, it sees it to be a good measure. So for example, backlinks on the web

Starting point is 03:01:22 were a good signal for Google to use when people didn't know they were being used as a signal. Yeah, you were talking about quality versus quality and pager rank was a pretty good approximation for quality. Yes, such a fascinating thing, by the way, but yeah. It's 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

Starting point is 03:01:41 game it. And so then you have this cycle where, you know, 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

Starting point is 03:01:59 didn't allow people to game the game. Yeah, but we're brilliant way to put it, yeah. Which is one of the reasons that's brilliant is that it's 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. It'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. Um, gosh, it is called something. No, Mick. Okay. And oh, I see. And no, Mick is a game where the rule of the game is to change the rules of the game.

Starting point is 03:02:35 Yeah. At first, that seems insane. Then you realize that's Congress. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Literally what 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 Jerry mandering and other stuff. Right. That's a bad version. We have thing. Bad way of thing that the other way of thing about it is this is what every software engineer is doing. You are constantly changing the rules by editing software and pushing code updates and so on. Right? So, you know, many games devolve into the meta-game of who writes the rules of the game, right? Become essentially the games of Nomec. 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.

Starting point is 03:03:27 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. Related.

Starting point is 03:03:39 Yeah, Wikipedia, media, and academia are all related to the question of independent replication versus prestigious citation. Sure, so that 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 worth of the data

Starting point is 03:04:11 I have a mechanism worth of the data and the reproducibility is what dominates the discourse. That's right. And so one way to think about this is, I've said this in, I think I tweeted this to them, but Western civilization actually has a break glass of incase of emergency button. It's called decentralization, right? Martin Luther hit it. When the Catholic Church was too ossified and centralized, decentralized with a Protestant reformation, okay? He said, you know, at the time, people

Starting point is 03:04:32 were able to pay for indulgences like that is to say, they could sin. They could say, okay, I sined five times yesterday. Here's, you know, 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 more. Okay, there's a little bit by the way out of sin. Now people debate as to how frequent those indulgence were, but these are one of the things he invades against in the 95 Theses. So decentralization, boom, break away from this ossified church, start something new, right?

Starting point is 03:04:57 And in theory, the religious wars of the 1600s that ensued were about things like, where the wafer was a body of Christ or or would 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 prosism also exists, okay. And similarly here you've got this ossified central institution where, you know, forget about, I mean, there's complicated studies, they're difficult to summarize, but when you have the science saying, masks don't work, and then they do. Okay, which everybody saw.

Starting point is 03:05:32 And this is not like, you know, 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, you know, the next day, right? I remember because I was in the middle of this debate. And I think you could justify masks early in the pandemic as a useful precaution.

Starting point is 03:05:55 And then later, you know, 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, you, people were basically lying in the name of science and public policy wasn't a public health, it was political health. So something like that, you're just spending all the credibility and institution for basically

Starting point is 03:06:17 nothing. And so in such a circumstance, what do you do? Break glass, decentralized. What does that look like? Okay. So, let me describe what I call crypto science by analogy to, you know, crypto, just like there's fiat science, crypto science, right? Fiat economics. Okay.

Starting point is 03:06:35 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, as 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 set for now, I'll come back to that, right? Just a purely digital part. What does the ideal, quote, academic paper look like in 2022, 2023?

Starting point is 03:07:08 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? John Claire Boo and David Donahot stand for 20 years ago, pioneered this in stats because the text alone often doesn't

Starting point is 03:07:34 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, repurchaseable 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 repurchaseable research.

Starting point is 03:07:55 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 27 years. There's various levels of this like green and gold open 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

Starting point is 03:08:18 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 problem, 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,

Starting point is 03:08:38 the PDF from the code and the data on-chain, guess what, you can have citations between two papers turn it to import statements. That's fine. That's cool. Now you're not just getting composable finance, like DeFi, where you have one interest rate calculator calling another. You have composable science. Now you can say this paper on this, especially an ML, you'll often cite a previous paper in its benchmark or its method, right? You're gonna want to scatter plot sometimes your paper, your algorithm versus theirs on the same data set. That is facilitated if their entire paper is reproducible research that is generated.

Starting point is 03:09:19 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 these shows. It's better science. Okay, now I talk about this,

Starting point is 03:09:40 but actually there's a few folks who have been actually building this. So there's usescolar.org, which actually has a demo of this, like just a V1, like 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 called, I think, desi.com, which is trying to do this, all right, decentralized science. So this itself changes how we think about papers.

Starting point is 03:10:06 And actually, by the way, the inspiration for paydrake was actually citations. It was like the impact factor out of academia. That's where a library page and so you're bringing God 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

Starting point is 03:10:23 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, their antecedents don't terminate or the original source says something different or it's kind of got garbled like a telephone game. And there's this famous thing on the spinach,

Starting point is 03:10:47 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's just copy-pasted and it's a fact that's not actually a fact because it's not audited properly. This allows you to cheaply audit in theory

Starting point is 03:11:04 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.

Starting point is 03:11:16 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.

Starting point is 03:11:29 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 Benfreds law stuff we were just talking about. You can internally check the consistency

Starting point is 03:11:44 of these tables and graphs, and often you'll find fraud or things that don't add up that way, because all the code and the data is there, right? And now you've made it so that anybody in Brazil, in India and Nigeria, they may not have an academic library access, but they can get into this. All right.

Starting point is 03:12:02 Now, how do you fund all of this? Well, good thing is crypto actually allows tools for that as well. Andrew Huberman and other recipes started doing things like with NFTs to fund their lab. I can talk about the funding aspect. There's things like research hub.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.

Starting point is 03:12:24 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 of 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

Starting point is 03:13:09 are reporting in your paper when you put it on sheet. Basically, you think of this 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 this website called NCBI, National Center for Biotechnology Information, you can see the experiment metadata on very sequencing runs. It'll tell you what instrument and what time it was run and who ran it and so on and so forth.

Starting point is 03:13:39 Okay. What that does is 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 significant difference between your two results, but it was just to actually batch effects. 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.

Starting point is 03:14:08 For anything that's really, and you might say, well, 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 going to 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 and you need to be able to interrogate that. And again, this is, anybody who's a good scientist will embrace this. Right?

Starting point is 03:14:35 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 or sharing the data.

Starting point is 03:15:04 You said like, I think it was a surprise people how often. It's hard to get data. It did the actual data or specifics or a large number of the parameters. You'll share one or two parameters that were involved with the running the experiment. You won't mention the machines involved, except maybe at a high level, but the versions and so on. The days when the experiments were on, you don't mention any of this kind of stuff.

Starting point is 03:15:32 Right. 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 just even the act of sharing the code, sharing the data, maybe in a way that's not

Starting point is 03:16:10 perfectly integrated into a larger structure is already a very big positive step. Yeah, saying like if you don't do this then this doesn't count and because in general, I think my worry I you know as somebody who's a programmer, who's OCD, I love the picture you paint that you can just import everything and automatically checks everything. My problem is, is that makes incremental science easier and revolutionary science harder. Oh, I actually very much just screwed that. I would love to hear you all give you guys.

Starting point is 03:16:42 Let me just kind of elaborate. Sure. screw that. I would love to hear your argument. Guys, let me just kind of elaborate why sometimes you have to think in this gray area of fuzziness and you're thinking on 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. Like you're kind of sketching stuff and that could be errors, but like I stand 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 GAN paper, you're often thinking

Starting point is 03:17:17 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 the size. Sure. Like you shouldn't feel that pressure, I guess, early on. Well, I mean, there's, there's different, each, each of the steps that I'm talking about, right? There's like the data being public and everything, just that, 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.

Starting point is 03:17:48 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

Starting point is 03:18:09 and adds to complexity, but it also adds the audibility and the verifiability and the reproducibility. But, you know, one thing I'd say, I wanted to respond to you that you said was that you think this would be good for incremental but not innovative. Actually, it's quite the opposite. I think academia is institutional and it's not innovative. For example, NIH has this graph,

Starting point is 03:18:30 which is like, I think it's age of recipients of RO1 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. Now I'll see if I can find the gift. Why is this, let me see if I can find it actually. Look at this movie, just for a second. It's ridiculously powerful movie and it's 30 seconds. I just sent it in WhatsApp. The name of the video is age distribution of a NIH principal

Starting point is 03:18:59 investigators in medical school faculty. And it starts out on the excesses age with the distribution and percent of PI's. And from early 1980s, moving one year to time, and the mean of the distribution is moving slowly, approximately as Elijah said, about one 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, you know, become an NH, NHPI. Second is, it's a core of guys, people who are just awarding grants to each other.

Starting point is 03:19:39 Yeah. That's clearly what's happening, you know, that's, that's the underlying dynamic. They're not awarding grants to folks who are much younger Okay, because those folks haven't proven themselves yet, right? So it is this 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 high bound, right? And so the thing is the the structures that Vannevar Bush and others set up, the entire post-war

Starting point is 03:20:06 science establishment, one thing I'll often find is people will say, Balji, the government hath granted us the internet and self-driving cars and spaceflight 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.

Starting point is 03:20:36 The conservative will think of the US government as like 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, broad and the progressive will think of it as the benign, all powerful, you know, like nurturing parent at home, okay? But in this context, they're like, how come you as, you know, 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, right?

Starting point is 03:21:01 And the answer to this is actually say, well, what if we go further back the 1950s? Did science happen before 1950? Well, I think it did. Bernoulli and Maxwell and Newton, were they funded by NSF? No, they weren't, right? 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 discovery students was before, I believe, is before the American, let me just find the exact, it's actually less old than people think.

Starting point is 03:21:43 So, noon died 1727, right? So, I knew that, you know, it was like in the 1700s. So, noon 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

Starting point is 03:22:07 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 a Apollo. That generation was acclimatized to a centralized US government that could accomplish

Starting point is 03:22:32 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, Saren and Andrew will just talk about this, but very roughly, you know, you go up into the 1950 and you have mass media and mass production and just centralization of all kinds, giant nation states slugging it out in the world stage. You go out in 1950 and you get cable news and personal computers and 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.

Starting point is 03:23:08 And it might have 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 the huge innovations coming out of the boat, Satoshi Nakamoto was not to our knowledge, a professor, right? 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

Starting point is 03:23:31 for the coronavirus possibly having been a lab leak when that was a very controversial thing to discuss, right? Alina Chan, to her credit, you know, Matt Ridley and Alina Chan have written this book, you know, 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's certainly, it is a hypothesis where the discussion, okay, though of course it's got political overtones. Point being that the pseudonymous online publication at Project-Evidence.Gitup.io happened

Starting point is 03:24:03 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 sold a problem and so on 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?

Starting point is 03:24:31 And so, I do disagree that this is the incremental stuff. This is actually the innovative stuff. The incremental stuff is going to be the institutional gerontocracy that's academia where it's like, do you know who I am? I'm a Harvard professor at the science. I don't, I think I agree with everything you said, but I'm not going to get stuck on technicalities because I think I was referring to your vision of data sets and importing code. Sure.

Starting point is 03:25:02 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 desentivize this 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 CloudStream or there's our 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 counter argument is rather than a thousand people reading

Starting point is 03:25:40 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 what you know, like Python has this concept of batteries included for the standard library, right?

Starting point is 03:25:59 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 paintings the 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 the All the computer science world, but whether you can do that for all right, you can think biology

Starting point is 03:26:41 Seems to yes, I think so chemistry. I think so and then you start getting to weird stuff like psychology, which some people don't even think of the 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, that are like hard technical fields, it starts getting tougher and tougher and tougher to have like the importable code. Okay, so let me give the strong foreign version, right? So there's a guy who I think is a great machine learning guy, creator of actually Keras,

Starting point is 03:27:18 who he disagrees with me on Francois Shillin. Yeah, he's been on his podcast twice. Okay, great. So 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 them like you. Here is something which I totally agree with them on.

Starting point is 03:27:35 And he actually got like trolled or attacked for this by completely agree. Within 10, 20 years, nearly every branch of science will be for all intents and purposes of branch of computer science, computational physics, computational chemistry, computational biology, computational medicine, even computational archaeology, 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 digital step and then it's all digital.

Starting point is 03:28:05 Then you're flying, you're in the clock, right? You put a date, the, say, how long or 10, 20 years, you think? 10, 20 years. I mean, I think arguably it's already there, right? And here's the thing, you, you were saying, well, you know, you might drop off when you hit psychology or history. Actually, um, I think it's the software sciences that are going to harden up. Why?

Starting point is 03:28:25 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? Yeah. Okay. So at first, it's kind of a funny thing to say, a computer scientist term for history is the log files.

Starting point is 03:28:44 Until we realize 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 the individual record of like one server's action, 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 going to move from merely online to on chain and then cryptographically verifiable.

Starting point is 03:29:25 So that soft subject of history becomes something that you can calculate things like Google Trends and end-grams 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 if someone who has an archive of it,

Starting point is 03:29:48 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 and they say it's yes. They me on that topic topic ask you about Trump.

Starting point is 03:30:08 You were considered for position as FDA commissioner in the Trump administration. And I think one of 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. He made 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 form the Fed, right,

Starting point is 03:30:47 reforming the Fed basically still hasn't happened, right? 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. You can describe, sure, regulatory harmonization. Regulatory harmonization is the mechanism by which Regulatory harmonization is the mechanism by which US regulators impose their regulations on the entire world. So basically you have a monopoly by US regulators.

Starting point is 03:31:32 This is not just the FDA, it is SEC, NFAA, and so on and so forth. And for the same reason that a small company will use Facebook login, that will outsource their login to Facebook. A small country will outsource their regulation to the USA 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? Yeah, 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 you know people will talk about quote our democracy and so on

Starting point is 03:32:14 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 sales Burgers that near 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.

Starting point is 03:32:41 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. Right? I understand where that comes from as a corporate executive. It's such a pain to get access to one place. 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.

Starting point is 03:33:16 There are cracks in this now. The FDA did not equit itself well during the pandemic. For example, there's so many issues, but one of the things that even actually near 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, you know, 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

Starting point is 03:33:50 with threat of federal penalties, because 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 and FDA kind of gets spanked, right?

Starting point is 03:34:09 And it's not, you know, 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.

Starting point is 03:34:24 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. That person who's named and their face is known, just as an example, you know Zuckerberg's face and name. Most people don't know Arthur G. Salzberger.

Starting point is 03:34:40 They couldn't recognize him. Did he's a guy who's inherited the New York Times company for his father's father? That is unaccountable power. It's not that they get great coverage, that they get no coverage. You don't even think about them, right? And so it's invisibility, right? There's some aspect why Fouchy was very interesting.

Starting point is 03:34:57 In my recent memory, there's not been many faces of scientific policy, of science policy. Yeah. He became the face of that. And, you know, as there's some of it as meme, which is, you know, basically saying that he is science or some people represent science. But in the public. Or quote-unquote science or whatever. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:35:19 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 fact that the example shows you why a lot of these folks do not want to be public because they enter a political, you know, in Media Mind Field. I'm actually sympathetic to that aspect of it.

Starting point is 03:35:32 What I'm not sympathetic to is the concept that in 2022 that the unelected, unfyrable, anonymous American regulator should be able to impose regulatory policy for the entire world. We are not the world of 1945, you know. It is not something where these other countries are even consciously consenting to that world. Just as a given example, you know, there's a concept called challenge trials, okay. The Moderna vaccine was available very, very early in the pandemic.

Starting point is 03:36:01 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 or whatever kind in any country, not just US. But those healthy volunteers could have gone. And at the early stage of the pandemic, we didn't know exactly how lethal it was going to be because, you know, Lee Wenliang and, you know,

Starting point is 03:36:30 30-year-old, 30-somethings in China were dying from this. It seemed like it could be far worse. How lethal the virus would be? Yeah, and it may be, by the way, that those who were the most susceptible to the virus died faster earlier. It says, 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

Starting point is 03:36:58 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 gone for that. Basically, in a challenge trial, somebody would have been given the vaccine

Starting point is 03:37:16 and then exposed to the virus and then put under observation. And then that would have given you all the data because 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 and that could be gathered expeditiously with volunteers for challenge. You think there would be a large number of volunteers?

Starting point is 03:37:40 Absolutely. What's the concern there? Is there an ethical concern of taking on volunteers? Well, so I 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 we're generally first responders and others, you know, I do believe there's folks who would have stepped up, you know up to take that risk. The heroes walk among us. Yeah. That's right.

Starting point is 03:38:09 If military service is something which is a ritualized thing, people are paid for it, but they're not paid that much. They're really paid in honor and in duty and pictures. 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 we the volunteers would have been there. There's probably some empirical test of that, which is a 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. But but something like that could have just

Starting point is 03:38:49 But something like that could have just shortened the time from pandemic to functional vaccine, right, to days even if you'd actually really acted on it. The fact that that didn't happen and that the Chinese solution of lockdown, that actually, you know, 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-farm circle and prevention really turned out to work that much, right? And actually, at the very beginning of the pandemic,

Starting point is 03:39:11 I said something like, look, is actually February 3rd about a month before people, you know, I was just watching what was going on in China. I saw that they were doing digital quarantine, like using WeChat codes to like 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,

Starting point is 03:39:29 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 quarant's nationalism centralization. And this may actually work to stop the spread, but once under control states will not see

Starting point is 03:39:52 their powers so we decentralize. And I didn't know whether it was going to stop the spread, but I knew that they were going to try to do it, right? And you know, look, it's hard to call every single thing, right? And you know, I'm sure someone will find some errors, but in general, I think that was 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, where we should have had were different regimes around the world to some extent Sweden defected, you know, from this, right? They had like no lockdowns

Starting point is 03:40:22 or have you. But really the the the axis that people were talking about was lockdown versus no lockdown. Um, the real action should have been challenge trials versus no challenge trials. We could have had that in days. Okay. And that 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 FDH stands for. I have to get handstand for it. Or something like FD, right? Ah, so let's what FDH stands for. Right, FDA can stand for it. Or something like FDH, right? Ah, so let's talk about that, right?

Starting point is 03:40:48 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 before. FDA, V. Well, right. So what was before FDH, right? So there was both good and bad before FDH, because people don't necessarily have the right

Starting point is 03:41:03 model of the past, okay? So you know, if you ask people what was there before the FDA, they'll say, and by 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... 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 peaks interest. It's kind of like in L.A. people say the 101 or the, whereas in Northern California, they'll say 101,

Starting point is 03:41:44 or people from Nevada will say Nevada, right? Just instantly marks you as like insider or outsider, okay, in terms of how the language works, right? And that's, go ahead. That means just makes me sad, because that language 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. Don't talk about it. No, but it's good.

Starting point is 03:42:14 You can't just just to censor you. This is like a book, it could be a podcast, like a Wikipedia. You can't cite Quentin Tarantino films. No, okay, okay, okay. Sorry, so basically like English start going like one, two, three, four, five. And I believe it's like the German start with like the thumb, something that you'd never know,

Starting point is 03:42:34 right? I may be misremembering it, but I think that's right. Okay, so that's like. The FDA has got the link. All right, right, so FDA has got the link. So coming back up, basically, just talk about FDA and then come back to your question on the de-platforms. So V was V0 FDA was V1 What's so what does the future look like V1 V1 was quote patent medicines? Okay, that's something so be sorry

Starting point is 03:42:54 But V1 was also banting and best. Okay, banting and best they won the Nobel Prize in the early 1920s, right why? They came with the Agir for insulin supplementation to treat diabetes. And they came 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

Starting point is 03:43:20 and a mobile app, maybe a command line app, you could have a drug that's administered orally or via injection or a cream or, there's different formulations, right, dosage. All that stuff, they could just like iterate on with willing doctor, willing patient. These folks who were affected just sprang out of bed, then since the patient was working for them.

Starting point is 03:43:42 And within a couple of years, they had won the Nobel Prize and Eli Lilly had scaled production for the entire North American continent. So that was a time when Farma moved at the speed of software, when it was willing buyer, willing seller, because the past is demonized as something that our glorious regulatory agency

Starting point is 03:44:00 is protecting us from. But there's so many ways in which what's really protecting you from is being healthy. 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 put in the show notes if you want,

Starting point is 03:44:33 this goes through like a dozen different examples of crazy things the FDA did from the kind of stuff that was dramatized in Dallas Byers Club where they were preventing people from getting AIDS drugs to their various attacks on, you know, quote, raw milk, where they were basically saying, you know, here's a quote from FDA, you know, filing in 2010. There's no generalized right to bodily and physical health.

Starting point is 03:45:04 There's no right to consume or feed children in any particular food. There's no fundamental right to bodily and physical health. There's no right to consume or feed children in 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 there like a written kind of thing.

Starting point is 03:45:19 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 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.

Starting point is 03:45:45 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,

Starting point is 03:46:07 and how would you actually build something like that? So with the Fed and with, you know, SEC and the entire, you know, 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?

Starting point is 03:46:34 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, clear labs and laboratory developed tests, compounding pharmacies, off-little prescription by doctors and countries that aren't fully harmonized with FDA. For example, you know, Kobe Bryant before he passed away, went and did stem cell treatments in Germany. Okay. Stem cells have been pushed out, you know, I think in part by the Bush administration, 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. Clear labs and LDTs, that means that's a path

Starting point is 03:47:18 where you don't have to go through FDA to get a new device approved. You can just run it in a lab. Compounding pharmacies, these were under attack. I'm not sure 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. Offlittle prescription by MDs. So MDs have enough like weight in the system that they can kind of push back on FDA. And offlittle 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, you know, whole new drug approval process.

Starting point is 03:47:49 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 going to die. We're going to poison us with non FDA approved things or whatever. Right? Like those exits this, 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, it's actually relatively easy to test for. There's very few drugs that are like, there's TGN-1412.

Starting point is 03:48:24 That's a famous example. Something that was actually really dangerous to test for. There's very few drugs that are like, there's TGN1412, that's a famous example, something that was actually really dangerous to people, 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?

Starting point is 03:48:40 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. Let me describe some of them. First, have you got any drugs or something like that recently? I mean, like prescribed drugs, prescription drugs, and it was like that.

Starting point is 03:48:57 I know that you clarify the answers. No. Yeah. prescribed drugs. No. Okay. So, not long, antibiotics a long time ago maybe. All right. So you know how you have like a sort of like a wadded up chemistry textbook,

Starting point is 03:49:10 the package insert that goes in the right. Okay. It's a wadded up chemistry textbook. I love it. That's what it is, right? That terrible user interface. We don't usually think of it that way. Yes. Why is your user interface so terrible? That's a web of regulation that makes it so terrible. And you know, there's actually guys who try to innovate just on user interface called, I'll 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 that 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.

Starting point is 03:49:49 So it's like, here is, 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. whether you had opened it for that specific day. Okay? This is way better than other kinds of so-called compliance methodologies like there 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 a drug regimen dramatically, right?

Starting point is 03:50:18 And I think they got acquired or would have you for a lot of money. And hopefully utilized effectively. Utilized effectively, right? Well, sometimes, sometimes these companies that do incredible innovation really makes you sad when they get acquired that at least 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?

Starting point is 03:50:36 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 you know like people of sir I in my view some a quote out of context are like oh biology thinks you should replace the FDA with the help for 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 which basically says I've had a bad experience with a drug. Well, like, there's put four drugs.

Starting point is 03:51:10 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, is this the dog gov? Yes, form 3,500 B. Well, I love it. It's HTML. It's going to be like from the 90s,

Starting point is 03:51:33 it's going to have an interface designed by somebody who's a cobalt slash 4chan programmer. Right, here we go. So here we go. So basically the 3,500 B. I hope to be proven wrong in that by the way, but so 3,500 B consumer voluntary reporting when do I use this form? You were heard or had a bad side effect use a drug which let's unsave Used to point is FDA already has a terrible Yelp for drugs. Yeah, it has a terrible version of it Yeah, what would the good version look like the fact that you've never I mean this fact

Starting point is 03:52:04 You have to fill out a PDF to go in submit a report. How do you submit a report at Yale, Uber, or Airbnb, or Amazon, you tap, and they're star ratings, right? So just modernizing FD8 3500B and modernizing FACE4, okay. It's 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 for one possible creating actual help. Yeah, here's, here's, here's, here's how that would work, right? You go to, you know, the pharmacy or, you know, 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

Starting point is 03:52:45 your biology or 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. So really you want a global kind of thing just like, you know, Amazon book reviews. That's like, that's a global thing. Other things are aggregate the global level. Okay. So what you want is to see every patient, report, and every doctor around the world on this drug.

Starting point is 03:53:19 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 capitals and sounds. You could do it by capitals. It would have to be a company. Yeah, you can definitely do, see these. But we don't have a world where a company

Starting point is 03:53:36 is a lot to be in charge of that kind of thing. Well, I don't know. Health won't endow. 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 on DEFTA is actually bad.

Starting point is 03:53:52 You can 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.

Starting point is 03:54:07 A lot of people don't want to criticize FDA. Yeah, because they will retaliate against your biotech or farm a company. Yeah, and the 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.

Starting point is 03:54:22 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. Okay.

Starting point is 03:54:39 You got kicked out. For the, I think the first time in my life, for making a joke with a a balancer and because I had a camera with me and you're not allowed to have a camera and 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 and he was like, you're out. I don't care who you are. I don't care who you're with. He and the heat proceeded to list me, the famous people he has kicked off. But there is, I mean, all of those, the reason I made the joke is I sensed

Starting point is 03:55:14 that there was an entitlement to this particular individual, like where the authority has gone to a certain- That's my authority. Yeah, right. I almost wanted to poke at that. Right. And I think the poking the authority, I'll a certain my authority. Yeah, right. I almost wanted to poke at that right and I think the poking the authority I'll quickly learn the lesson Well, no you I have now been rewarded with the pride I feel for having poke the authority

Starting point is 03:55:34 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 Vegas, which is not a unique Vegas experience Sure 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, you know, just to extend the analogy, when you're in line at the TSA, right, you don't want to miss your flight. That could cost you hundreds of dollars.

Starting point is 03:56:02 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 six ounce bottles with a terrorist technology called mixing. Okay, advanced, right? And the thing about this is everybody in line,

Starting point is 03:56:20 actually some fairly high, you know, let's say, call it influence or network, whatever people fly, right? Millions and millions and millions of people are subject to these absolutely moronic regulations. It's all what, you know, I think a security theater is, is, is Shryer's term, right? A lot of people know this term. So millions of people are subject to it.

Starting point is 03:56:40 It costs untold billions of dollars in terms of delays and what if you just walk up to, right? It, um, it irradiates people. and there's another FDA thing, by the way. This is an FDA TSA teamup, okay? In 2010, the TSA body scanners, there were concerns expressed, but when it's a government-to-government thing, see a.com is treated with extreme scrutiny by FDA. But it's another.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 apply to millions and millions of people and this huge kind of opt in experiments.

Starting point is 03:57:12 Almost, I think it's quite likely by the way that if there was even a slightly increased cancer risk that the net, you know, morbidian mortality from those would have outweighed the deaths from terrorism or whatever they were prevented, right? You can work out the numbers, but under you can just get the math under reasonable assumptions. It's probably true. If it had any increase in rebellion and mortality, I've not seen the recent things, but I've seen that a 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,

Starting point is 03:57:51 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 because 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, it's 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 the yellow thing for your feet,

Starting point is 03:58:26 they force you to adjust it even slightly if you're off. Just even, I mean, it's like 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 walk in through there because it's really just deeply absurd. But the whole motivation of the mechanism becomes distorted by the individuals involved.

Starting point is 03:58:53 The initial one was to reduce the number of terrorists 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,

Starting point is 03:59:07 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 sure to be trained to have compliance, it's like the Soviet Union, right, where, you know, just,

Starting point is 03:59:28 crudgingly, R.I. go along with this extremely stupid thing. What's my point? The point is, this is a really stupid regulation that has existed in play inside 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, there's a lot of things you could potentially do, different paradigms for a 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.

Starting point is 04:00:02 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 a runway to get funded right so

Starting point is 04:00:38 It's imposed more wait time. Guess what we want another six months, you know data is gonna take another six months You come you doesn't have the time you die, right? If you live, you have to raise around at some diluted valuation. And now the price gets jacked up on the other side. That's a one thing that can give by the way in this whole process. When when you push out timelines from days to get a vaccine approved with or a vaccine evaluator rather via challenge trials to months or years, the cost during that time when you, when you, it just increases non-linearly, right? Because you can't

Starting point is 04:01:11 iterate on the product. It, all the normal observations, if it takes you 10 years to launch a product versus 10 days, what's the difference in terms of speed of duration, your cost, etc., 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. 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, I'm going to just quote this because it's an amazing, amazing book. It's written by a guy, Daniel Carpenter, a smart guy, but he's an FDA sympathizer. He fundamentally thinks it's like a good thing or would have you.

Starting point is 04:01:51 Nevertheless, I respect Carpenter's intellectual honesty because he quotes the CEOs in the book, you know, 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, I've been tortured. Okay. That is the style. When you read Carpenter's book, you read the quotes from these, from these CEOs. Oh, let me see if I can find it. Do you recommend the book? It's a good book. Yeah. Or it's, it's now a little bit outdated. Okay. Because it's, it's like, you know, almost book. Yeah. It's now a little bit outdated, okay? Because it's like, you know, almost 10 years old.

Starting point is 04:02:27 Still, as a history of the FDA, it is well worth reading. And by the way, the reason I say it's 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 want to read his little blurb for it, right? It's just 2010. The US Food and Drug Administration is the most powerful regulatory agency in the world. How do the FDA become so influential? And how does it wield its extraordinary power? Reputation

Starting point is 04:02:52 of power traces the history of FDA regulation of pharmaceuticals, revealing how the agency's organizational reputation is being the primary source of its power is also one of its ultimate constraints. Carpetor describes how the FDA cultivated a reputation for confidence and vigilance throughout the last century and how this organizational image has enabled 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

Starting point is 04:03:26 a reputation, it's power, resisting efforts to curb its own authority, right? The thing is, now you're kind of through the looking glass. You're like, wait a second, this is kind of language that 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 want to do? They want to expand that company. They want to 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. But is that always obvious and so to interrupt? But for the CEO of the company, I know the philosophical

Starting point is 04:04:05 ideal 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 want to do a lot of good in the world? Sure, but the fiduciary duty will push people to get the ambitious, you know, the profit maximizing expansionist CEO is selected for. Right? Basically, they believe crucially, they're not just this important. They're not just, I mean, some of them are grant a photo, make as much money as possible, but they believe in the mission. Okay. They've come to believe in the mission, and that is a person who's selected. Chomsky actually

Starting point is 04:04:37 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 have constructed 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 and television and media movies of the evil corporation and the greedy CO. We have some concept of what CO failure modes

Starting point is 04:05:09 are like. Okay. Now, when have you ever seen an evil regulator? Have you, can you name a fictional portrayal of an evil regular? Can you name an evil CEO? Yeah, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot. But that's so interesting. I'm trying to, I'm searching for a deeper lesson here. You're right You're right. I mean there is 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 a the regular the story of the regulator, but yeah, it's not as plentiful. And it's also

Starting point is 04:05:47 doesn't have, often doesn't have a face to it. It's a bureaucracy. Is this amorphous thing that results anyone individually? You see, they're just obeying somebody else. There's not a face to it. I'll be 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.

Starting point is 04:06:17 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

Starting point is 04:06:35 is whatever. If you just always ride with the school of fish and turn them, 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 basically can never be proven wrong. And this is actually, of course, someone who believes in truth and believes in innovation and so on, just physiologically can't ride with a school of fish. You just have to say what is true or do is true.

Starting point is 04:06:56 Still, you've described correctly how it's faceless. So I will give two examples of fictional portrayals of evil regulators. One is actually the original Ghostbusters. Okay. Not exactly like 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 esteem as this evil regulator that

Starting point is 04:07:19 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 contaminated and the whole thing spreads. A second example is Dallas Spiris Club, which is more recent. And that actually shows the FDA blocking a guy who, with a life-threatening illness, to release the Xamarin and the whole thing spreads. A second example is Dallas Byers Club, which is more recent. That actually shows the FDA blocking a guy with a life threatening illness with AIDS from getting the drugs to trees' condition and from getting to other people.

Starting point is 04:07:56 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? They have no mental model of this. They kind of think of it as, 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. 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 CO 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?

Starting point is 04:08:35 These folks are power hungry They want to have the maximum scope and sometimes regular trades and sees collide with each other right even though FDA is under HHS Sometimes it collides with HHS and they've got regulations that conflict. You know, 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 the HHS

Starting point is 04:09:02 as thing being targeted at the hospitals and FDA being targeted at the personal genomic companies, 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 want to see if I can find this quote.

Starting point is 04:09:24 So let me 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 Genentex Executive G. Kirk Garab, right? Rob would describe regulatory approval for his products as a fundamental challenge facing his company. And he would depict the administration, 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 ceramics and

Starting point is 04:09:51 for Pfizer. I hadn't seen my family for eight or nine months. They're flying into South Pole, and I was flying down for some little village on the Amazon to Manus and then to South Pole. 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's a quonset hut in front of just a little dirt strip with a single engine plane to fly me to menus.

Starting point is 04:10:10 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 speak in pretty good Portuguese by that time. I said, my god, my plane, my family, I got 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,

Starting point is 04:10:31 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.

Starting point is 04:10:45 If you're a pharmaceutical firm, they own you body and soul. Okay, that's the CEO of a successful company, Genentech. He says, 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

Starting point is 04:11:11 tell your story. It was assumed that you were some sort of, you know, corporate criminal that they were protecting the public from, that you were going to put poison and milk, you know, 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, right? That's why I mentioned those fictional stories, those templates.

Starting point is 04:11:32 Even if Star Wars doesn't exist, how many times have you heard of Star Wars metaphor or whatever for something, right? Breaking bad, you know, go ahead. Yeah, but the pharmaceutical companies have stuck between rock and a heart 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?

Starting point is 04:11:50 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

Starting point is 04:12:12 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?

Starting point is 04:12:38 This is partially what's just happened with Microsoft Apple, Google, Amazon, the other MAGA. Okay. They have been, that's funny. Well done. Yeah. I didn't even think about that. Well done.

Starting point is 04:12:53 Right. So, I have this tweet, it's like MAGA Republicans and MAGA Democrats. Okay. Oh, damn it. So many things you've said today. We'll just get stuck in my head. They changed the way you think catchy Something about catchy phrasing of ideas is makes me even more powerful

Starting point is 04:13:11 So yeah, okay, so that's happening in the tech it's happening tech So Facebook is the outlier cuz 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. And if you look at its budget approvals, it's saying, we find this many guys, we found this many violations, right?

Starting point is 04:13:41 They have an incentive to exaggerate the threat in the same way that a prosecutor or, you know, a policeman has a quota, right? Like these are the police. You know, one way I describe it also is like, you know, like a step down transformers, you have high voltage electricity is 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

Starting point is 04:14:29 where you get one star, two star, three stars, four stars, five stars, and eventually, 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

Starting point is 04:14:52 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, Amazon talks about being customer obsessed, right? What Rob did was rational for that time, right? Would G-Chip Rob did was saying, our customer is the FDA, that's our primary customer, nobody

Starting point is 04:15:18 else matters. They are satisfied first. Every single trade-offs that has to be made is FDA, right? And really, that's why the two most important departments at many pharmaceutical companies argue that all are regulatory affairs and IP, not R&D, right? Because one is 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

Starting point is 04:15:44 have been a good concept, but the price is just risen and risen and risen until it's at the limit price and beyond. Okay. So what has changed, what's changed is in the 2010s, the late 2000s and 2010s and so on, with the advent of social media, with the advent of a bunch of millionaires

Starting point is 04:16:03 like who are independent, with the advent of a bunch of millionaires, like who are independent, with the advent of Uber and Airbnb, with the advent of cryptocurrency, with the domination of trusted institutions, it used to be really taboo to even talk about the FDA's potentially bad in like 2010, 2009, okay. But now people have just seen faceplant after faceplant 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 a, you know, you probably see some tracking pull or something like that, but wouldn't be surprised if it's like a 20 or 30 point drop after the CDC failed to control

Starting point is 04:16:39 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 Q&N on and people 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 3,500 B where you like scanned. Go ahead.

Starting point is 04:17:07 No, and yeah, yeah, right. That just makes me laugh. I could just tell the form sucks by the fact that it has that code name. Sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, right? UX is broken at every layer. Yeah, so they have a bad help for drugs. Could we make it better?

Starting point is 04:17:21 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.

Starting point is 04:17:37 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 FT 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?

Starting point is 04:17:56 People do want a regulated marketplace. They want a quality ratings, like on a one to five star scale, and B, bands 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?

Starting point is 04:18:22 Because they want to 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. You don't want to go to Starbucks and put a dipstick into every coffee to see if it's poisoned or something like that. You sort of want to 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 regulators taking care of it. And they've baked in the regulatory cost into, you know, some subscription fee of some kind, right?

Starting point is 04:18:54 So the thing is the model we've talked about is the land regulator of a nation state and a territory-bounded thing. But the cloud regulator, what's the cloud regulator? That is but the cloud regulator, what's the 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 priority inbox,

Starting point is 04:19:22 right? With Google itself, they ban malware links, right? So the bad actors are out and they're 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, you know, they've got a reputation there. Every single web service that's at the scale of like tens

Starting point is 04:19:41 of millions or hundreds of millions of people has had to build a cloud regulator. And the crucial thing is that 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 that 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.

Starting point is 04:20:07 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. If you have below a certain star rating on either side, you get deplatformed and so on to protect either a rider or a driver. And on and on. What does that do? Think about how much better that is than taxing medallions, rather than a six month or annual inspection. You have reports from every single rider.

Starting point is 04:20:33 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. Taxiwriters had nothing in common, didn't even know each other. Some, you know, New York, some guy gets an attack scene or a 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

Starting point is 04:20:56 and medallion prices just kept going up. And this was this 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,

Starting point is 04:21:15 and Uber drivers are the drivers, Lyft is the competing regulator and Lyft drivers are the new drivers. So you have a regulator driver fusion versus another regulator driver fusion. You no longer have a monopoly. You have multiple parties. Okay?

Starting point is 04:21:30 You have a competitive market. This is the concept of like polycentric law, right? Where you have multiple different legal regimes in the same jurisdiction overlapping that you can choose between with a tap of button, right? All these concepts from like libertarian theory like, you know, polycentric law or italic see, all these things are becoming more possible now that the internet has increased microeconomic leverage. And because that exit is now possible. Now, you may argue, oh, well, lift a new bird, they're not profitable anymore. And there's two

Starting point is 04:21:59 different criticisms of them. One is, oh, they're not profitable or, oh, they're charging too much. And I think part of this is because of certain kinds of, the regulatory status 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, Gojack, lift, DD, like ride sharing as a concept is now out there. And whatever the next version is, what it's self-driving,

Starting point is 04:22:34 like, well, 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.

Starting point is 04:22:52 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 cons of the cloud regulator now, let's apply it here. Once you realize regulation is information, the way you would set up a competitor to FDA or SEC or FAA or something like that is you just do better reviews. You just start with that. That's pure information. You're under free speech. That's still the most defended thing, literally just publishing

Starting point is 04:23:19 reviews. And not just reviews by any old person. it turns out that FDA typically will use expert panels, or other expert panels. It's like professors from Harvard or things like that. So that is this concept of a reputational bridge. What you want to do is you want to have folks who are, let's say, biotech entrepreneurs, or their profs like Sinclair would have you, you do want to have the reviews of the crowd. Okay.

Starting point is 04:23:45 We also want to have, especially in medicine, you want to have the reviews of experts of some kind. So there's going to 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, they weren't profs, they were grad students, right? And the same thing, 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

Starting point is 04:24:08 have come into cryptocurrency and helped legitimate it, right? Just like there's folks who left cellsberger to come to Substack, okay? You know, we have, 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 the 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, what do you have? You have like the most entrepreneurial and innovative MDs. You have the most entrepreneurial and innovative professors

Starting point is 04:24:36 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 crowd for 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

Starting point is 04:25:01 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 Vita Dow is very interesting. Things like molecule Dow are very interesting. It'll start with things like longevity, right? And why is that? Because the entire model of FDA, this 20 century model, is way 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?

Starting point is 04:25:35 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's this article called The Measured Man in the Atlantic where this guy, physicist Larry Smarr, okay.

Starting point is 04:26:02 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 that turned out to be an early warning of like a serious condition that he had to, I think, go for like, you know, 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 pre-germeteria of disease, but it is pre-continuous diagnostics. Okay. Continue diagnostics just to talk about this for a second.

Starting point is 04:26:41 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 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 you know a few millimeters away

Starting point is 04:27:11 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 is very important They're starting to give you readouts people are seeing seeing, wow, this is spiking my insulin, or 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, banana isn't a big deal for others. It's actually quite

Starting point is 04:27:37 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 integral, where he just, through 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've got the exacturation. And he's able to do things where he could see,

Starting point is 04:27:55 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. You can 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. Moreover, I don't think he did this, but if you took treatments,

Starting point is 04:28:29 if you took drugs, right, 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, you know, like steady state was, right? So that, and that steady state, you know, your expression levels across all these genes, your small molecules, basically everything you can measure, that's going to vary from person to person, right?

Starting point is 04:29:00 What's healthy and natural for you, maybe 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?

Starting point is 04:29:16 Take like actually significant vitamin D infusions, okay? That's like a small example of where baselines differ between people, okay? So continuous diagnostics, what could that mean? That could mean, you know, things like the continuous glucose meter, it's quantified self, it's like continuous blood testing, right? So, you have a so-called mobile phlebotomist. This is something which, phlebotomist takes blood, right? Mobile phlebotomist would come to your office, come to your remote office.

Starting point is 04:29:41 This is a great business for people, I think, you know, you can revisit this in 2022. People tried this in the 2010s, but I think it's worth revisiting. Molephalbotomist comes every week or every month, takes blood, runs every test, right? Maybe that's, you know, 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, that's what I mean. It's amazing. So there's a bunch of companies that do this and actually would love to learn more about them. One of them is a company called Inside Track or the sponsors of this podcast. They do that.

Starting point is 04:30:13 But they're, they're the first ones that introduced me like how easy this, 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. Yes, and actually also sadly, even with inside tracker as I collect that data, how not integrated that data is with everything else. Right. If I wanted to opt in, I would like I can't just like riffing off the top of my head, but I would like Google Maps to know what's going on inside my body.

Starting point is 04:30:50 Maybe I can't into it at first. Why that application is useful, but that could be incredible. Like, that's where the entrepreneur's build builds is like, what can I do with that data? Can I make the trip more less stressful for you and adjust the Google Maps thing 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 Dernos.

Starting point is 04:31:11 OK, that's one of the reasons why people have sort of been scared off from doing diagnostics to some extent. OK, why? Because Vistigr like, oh, there's just another Dernos. Like the diligence and everything everyone's looking at it, oh, blood testing, one drop of blood, huh? It hurts the recruiting.

Starting point is 04:31:27 Essentially, a lot of the media and stuff around that, basically it's pathologized, the thing that we wanna have a lot more entrance in, right? Now, you know, one way of thinking about it is, FDA is 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

Starting point is 04:31:50 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 probably find quite a lot.

Starting point is 04:32:05 Alex Tabarok 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 EUA's for the test and didn't do challenge trials. That's like, you know, they're not, that's like a million American dead that could have been orders of magnitude less if we had gotten the vaccine out to a vulnerable population sooner, okay? could it be in orders of magnitude less if we had gotten the vaccine out to vulnerable population sooner? Okay.

Starting point is 04:32:25 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 manifold itself,

Starting point is 04:32:44 but it's a more reputable regulator, just like, you know, Uber is a better regulator than the tax medallion. Right? Yeah, I mean, you're painting such an incredible picture. You make me wish you were FDA commission. 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 that possible? Like, if you were just given, if you became FDA commissioner,

Starting point is 04:33:07 could you, 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, though I'd be funny if you're like, the short answer is no, the long answer is yes. Ha, ha, ha. So, so basically, see, a CEO of a company, it's well, it's very difficult.

Starting point is 04:33:27 They can hire and fire, right? So in theory, they can do surgery on the organism. And like 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?

Starting point is 04:33:55 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 the Douglas factors? It's like the Miranda writes for federal employees. Okay, you have the right to me and says it. 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.

Starting point is 04:34:22 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 is trying to fire me, 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 of will do is sometimes they'll just transfer somebody to the basement or something so they don't have to deal with them

Starting point is 04:34:51 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

Starting point is 04:35:11 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 it's 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

Starting point is 04:35:39 there. And say, have 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 what have you, then the whole agency will basically be like, okay, you're bad and you can be disciplined or sometimes with the rarex, you can be booted. But what that means is that FDA commissioner is actually a white elephant.

Starting point is 04:36:03 It's a ceremonial role, really, right? You know, you know, term white elephants, like, uh, basically, you know, the Maharaja gives you an L 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

Starting point is 04:36:33 monster of the flame for these titles of the establishment, I want to be head of this, I want to 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 going to, like, crumble potentially, right? In many ways it's becoming, you know,

Starting point is 04:36:58 folks were just totally sad to success, 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, attack or crypto or what have you, right? So even if these agencies were hollow before and some of these are 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. You can't really fire. B, a lot of the talent has left the building, what was there. See, we're entering the decentralizing era.

Starting point is 04:37:29 And D, you know, like, be like Satoshi. Satoshi found a Bitcoin because he knew you could not reform the Fed. There's everybody is trying to go and reform, reform, reform. The reason you're trying to reform is we haven't figured out the mechanism to build something in you. And now perhaps we have that. So I've named a few of them, right? I'll name one more. Relate to the Lederance. Fitness is actually

Starting point is 04:37:47 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 lines of fitness is the ultimate drug. Maybe not today when people are saying, oh fat phobic or whatever, but not too many years ago, you would see somebody, um, people saying fitness is the ultimate drug. If we could just prescribe fitness in a pill, that would improve your cardiovascular function, your enlargement, your depression. By the way, in that case, the, the use of the word drug means medicine. So medicine. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Uh, fitness is the ultimate medicine. Yeah. Yeah, the ultimate medicine, right? So, if they could just prescribe the effects of it,

Starting point is 04:38:23 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?

Starting point is 04:38:39 They have on the wall, exhortations, like your body is your responsibility, right? You, am I right? Yeah, yeah. And, you know, you go. No, it's just, it's hilarious. Yes, yes, yes. It's funny, it's true, right?

Starting point is 04:38:52 Yeah, it's funny because 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, your doctor is doctor Google. Well, your doctor must be a moron. You're going and trying to take care of yourself,

Starting point is 04:39:10 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, there, and then they've got an ego about it, they're undermined. And if you're wrong, they're like and then if they've got an ego about it, they're undermined.

Starting point is 04:39:28 And if you're wrong, they're like, you know, ha ha, you know, arrogant. But either way, they have, 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?

Starting point is 04:40:08 The decentralization of responsibility from somebody thinking themselves merely as a patient to enact a 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 continuous glucose monitor as a V1, but other things, right? Who is as fit as they can possibly be? Like these are kind of obvious things, but why is this the back to retimedicin?

Starting point is 04:40:35 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 because FDA doesn't have as tight a reign on that. But all of the Fitbit, CGM, Conscious Glucurit Mews are 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

Starting point is 04:41:11 quitting them to diagnose or treat, you know, a disease. See, 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, right? So that's actually the back door and you can do tons of things there where obviously being healthier is also protective.

Starting point is 04:41:40 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 US medical system, well, I'm on it. So you got me on this topic. I love this. So this is the most eloquent exploration

Starting point is 04:41:55 of the US medical system and how to improve it, how to fix it, and what the future looks like. Yeah, so. 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 other broken parts of the US system, right? There's like AMA, there's CPT, there's CPOM,

Starting point is 04:42:15 there's this, you know, like all these regulations, which see normally in capitalism, you have a buyer and a seller, right? Daw. 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?

Starting point is 04:42:43 Fifth-party payment, it's the insurance companies, all right? And just to discuss these bits of the system, first, why are some people against capitalism and medicine? I actually understand why they're against it because they, 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 bankrupt of medical bills Therefore the concept of adding more capitalism medicine scares them and they think it's horrible and you're some like awful greedy

Starting point is 04:43:19 Tech-bro kind of thing, all right Let me let me say I understand that concern. And let me, you know, 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 a place is 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 priceless, I can pay cash, right? If I don't like it, I go to another dermatologist.

Starting point is 04:43:55 There's few dermatological emergency. This way, dermatologist 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 would 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.

Starting point is 04:44:23 People are okay with a dermatologist basically turning you down because you don't have enough money and you go to their 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 want to be turned down and I understand why, okay? But 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?

Starting point is 04:44:54 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 just started after World War II. So, auto insurance isn't a much more competitive market. You don't whip out your auto insurance card at the gas station to pay for your gas. You only whip it out when there's a crash. That's what quote, health insurance should be. And the Singapore model is actually a pretty good one for this,

Starting point is 04:45:22 where they have sort of a mandatory HSA. You have to 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, so for savings to pay for 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 want to shift people more towards ambulatory. Guess what?

Starting point is 04:45:47 That's in their interest as well. Now that brings us back to the monitoring. The continuous monitoring, where there are eventually its Mike Snyder's integral, the V1 is the quantified self and the Apple Watch and the continuous glucose meters. The VN is the Mike Snyder integral. There's a site called Q.Bio, which is doing this also, right? Eventually, this stuff will hopefully just be in a device. There's measures, tons and tons of variables on you, right?

Starting point is 04:46:11 There's ways of measuring some of these metabolites and 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 Measure 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

Starting point is 04:46:40 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 radialis 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 brake stage Right where you actually want to do you have your MD is at the the upstream stage Okay, so you want this amazing amazing doctor there, right? How could we get that? What you actually want to do, you have your MD, is at the upstream stage. Okay. So you want this amazing, amazing doctor there, right?

Starting point is 04:47:07 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, tele-radiology 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 diagnosed. That should exist, right?

Starting point is 04:47:47 Answer is there's a combination of both American doctors and the FDA that team up to prevent this or slow this. And 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, 90% of time. Another argument is the software has to go through design control.

Starting point is 04:48:10 Now, basically, once you understand how FDA works, basically imagine the most bureaucratic, frozen process for code deployment at any company ever. That is the most nimble thing ever, relative to FDA's designer view. So just to review, A, talked about how FDA was blocking all this stuff. B, talked about why ambulatory medicine is capillars medicine,

Starting point is 04:48:38 ambulance medicine is social medicine. C, talked about how with the diagnostics 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 and an app that you kind of quickly self-diagnosed. Some of this is happening now. The 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 milk, this is my last name, two more, and then kind of move on, okay? I mentioned like AMA and CPT, okay? Those are two regulatory bodies.

Starting point is 04:49:14 AMA American Medical Association, CPT, current procedural terminology, okay? Basically, you know Marx's labor theory value, where people are supposed to be paid on their effort. Of course, the issue with this is that you'd be paying a physicist to try to dunk and 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 invasive results. 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.

Starting point is 04:49:53 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 cyst fibrosis or a test for this or a test for that. God help you if your medical billing is erroneous.

Starting point is 04:50:36 Why? The insurance company will reject it because it doesn't pay for that. This is this giant process of trying to encode every possible ailment and condition into these CPT codes, and you can literally get degrees in medical billing just for this, okay? This is an enormous inefficient industry, like literally medical billing is a whole field, okay? Now what do you wanna do when you go up?

Starting point is 04:51:00 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 repot the treatment. Okay, like a car, you sell a car, you can theory repo the car.

Starting point is 04:51:16 So patient has a treatment. Now, what happens? Well, the insurance company, that treatment is perhaps right, look, it's a lab test right by a company, right? The company builds the patient. The company is supposed to charge a high price. Why?

Starting point is 04:51:31 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, when a diagnostic company is stiffed by an insurance company, it has to jack up the price

Starting point is 04:51:49 of everybody else. Everything boils down to the fact that you don't have 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 that'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 because they've bought insurance. The insurance company doesn't want to pay for it. Everybody is trying to push the price onto somebody else

Starting point is 04:52:17 and not actually show the sticker price of anything and hide everything and so and so forth. Oh, their 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. You might have, for example, a drug that only cures 1,000 people, but doesn't have any

Starting point is 04:52:49 side effects versus one that cures a million people, but that has 10 really serious side effects a year. The second one probably not happened because those side effects would be so big. How do you attack a name a few examples, but I actually think the reform is going to 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.

Starting point is 04:53:17 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.

Starting point is 04:53:38 They've got a telemetal 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 jurisdiction of the license, become the back end doctors of the world. Some extent that's already there with tele-radiology 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 who have a different attitude towards medicine. For example, it's a lot more cash payment over there.

Starting point is 04:54:05 For example, India's big on generic drugs. For example, during COVID, it had something called, it has something called a Rogues' Seat Thru, which is a national telemedicine app. Okay? The US was able to ship that. And somebody's India's digital infrastructure, again, you'll have to read a post called The Internet Country by TigerFathers.substac.com. And you'll see that actually India's

Starting point is 04:54:25 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?

Starting point is 04:54:44 Telemedicine is now more legal in the US and you have 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 only doing some medical tourism and other things that's another exit from the FDA. You have a parallel market that starts evolving. There just starts from fundamentally different premises. It 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

Starting point is 04:55:20 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 that they can serve 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. You could see medical tourism, medical migration, to where it gives Indian opportunity to basically

Starting point is 04:56:13 let go of the constraints of the FDA and innovate aggressively. It's such a huge opportunity to define the future of medicine and make a shit on a 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.

Starting point is 04:56:37 Yes. We fix the FDA by exiting the FDA, right? And then 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, the gang orders from Canadian pharmacies.

Starting point is 04:56:52 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 seeing a panacea. It's going to be something which will require like American and Indian collaboration. I think there's going to be

Starting point is 04:57:15 a lot of other countries and so on that are involved. But you can start to see another poll 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. And it has enough for a bridge to the US that it can be that simulation, which you need, which is kind of something that outside poke, right? I want to talk about India, but let me just kind of wrap up on this big FDA biomedical

Starting point is 04:57:44 kind of thing, right? With the book, The Network State, the purpose of the network state, you know, I want people to be able to build different kinds of networks. I want people to build the vegan village. I want people to be able to build a, you know, if they want to do the bendic option, like a Christian network state, if people want to 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 need to start a new currency Bitcoin. I was easy to do that then reform the Fed. I think it's easier to start a new country than reform the FDA. So I want

Starting point is 04:58:20 to do it to get to longevity, 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 maybe hopefully try to convince you it is, crypto is to finance sort of what longevity is to, you know, the current state of medicine. Why? It inverts certain fundamental assumptions. Okay.

Starting point is 04:58:44 So at first, crypto looks like traditional finance. It's got the charts and the bands and you're buying and selling 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? Intitutial macroeconomic worldview, it's good that there are custodians, banks, that you know, kind of intermediate the whole system, right? Intitutial

Starting point is 04:59:14 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, 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?

Starting point is 04:59:41 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 cryptocurrencies 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?

Starting point is 05:00:10 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 high brow way of defending it is the US dollar trades off temporary short-term price stability for long-term depreciation.

Starting point is 05:00:50 And Bitcoin makes the opposite trade-off. In theory, at least, long-term appreciation at the expense of short-term price instability. Because 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 to 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 assumes that a quick death is bad and early death is bad, but also that living forever is either unrealistic or impossible or undesirable

Starting point is 05:01:33 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 concert of life extension and you know, David Sinclair and you know, what you call, you call it health span, says rejects that fundamental premise. And it says actually the way to defeat cancer is to defeat aging. Aging is actually a program biomedical, biological process. And we can, we have results that are showing stopping or even reversing aging in some ways. So now, just like with the other thing, you say, a quick death is bad. And so is actually death itself. We actually want significant life extension. This is similar to what the rejection of the fiat system says, a little inflation is good.

Starting point is 05:02:26 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 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 diagnostics, how do I, you know, take control of my own health, but the decentralization

Starting point is 05:02:51 of medicine, all the stuff that I've been describing sort of fits like longevity as traditional medicine as crypto is to traditional currency. Well, 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 to that would be what we want is to keep death and maximize the quality of life up until the end. Like so that you write into the sunset. Well, healthy.

Starting point is 05:03:33 Somebody who is listening to the whole podcast would say, well, Balji, 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. And now you're talking about making people live forever. So there's never any new blood to watch about. Ha, ha, what a contradiction, right? It's And now you're talking about making people live forever. So there's never any new blood to watch about. Ha ha. What a contradiction, right? It's funny that you're so on point across all the topics we covered and the possible

Starting point is 05:03:53 criticism. I love it. Well, just try and anticipate. You know, some of them. So I'm good. Well done. So the, I think the argument on that is so long as you have a frontier, it is okay for someone to live long. 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 want to get to Mars, if you want to become Star Trek and what have you, probably going to need to have, you know, like, you know, just to survive a long flight, so to speak, you know, multiple light, your flight, you're going to need to have life

Starting point is 05:04:33 extension. So to become a pioneering, you know, interstellar kind of thing. I know that's, like, it's, it's the kind of thing which sounds like, okay, yeah, and when we're on the moon, we're going to need shovels. You know, 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 optimism-slash-transhumanism. Either we are shutting down civilization as degrowth, it's, you know, unibomor, etc. Or it's the stars and escaping the prime number base.

Starting point is 05:05:08 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 it, we'll at anyone which is currently most people that Didn't think of this future didn't anticipate this future work towards this future as as a lot of it's like as people who Didn't totally didn't get it. It would become obvious right now It's impossible and then they will 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 longevity in some form. I mean, there could be a lot of arguments

Starting point is 05:05:45 of the different forms of longevity could take. But in some form, longevity is almost a prerequisite for the expansion out into the cosmos. Yes, right. Expansion of longevity. There's also like 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

Starting point is 05:06:03 as a big thing, right? Life expectancy 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.

Starting point is 05:06:22 Then you have ordinal where there's only ranks and plus and minus means something, but there's no absolute zero. Then you have ordinal where there's only ranks and plus and minus or 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 call, 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 three thousand years ago, you can compare the height of people from many, many years go

Starting point is 05:06:51 different cultures in times, right? Whereas their currency is much harder to value, that's not like a ratio of scale variable. Other things are harder to value across space in time, right? So life expectancy is good because as a ratio scale of error, it was a very clear definition, right? Like when someone born and died, those are actually relatively clear. But most of the things aren't like that. You know, that's why murder or death, that, you know, it can be scored. It's unambiguous.

Starting point is 05:07:19 You know, it's done when it's done. Whereas when does somebody get sick? Oh, they were kind of sick. 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, uh, when you just crudely look at it, it incorporates, uh, child mortality mortality at age of one or age of five. And maybe it's

Starting point is 05:07:49 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 During Ray, right? And the concept is sell your soul to ensure that the picture rather than he will age and fade, right? And so the concept is that the thing on the wall just reflects his age and you can see it, OK?

Starting point is 05:08:20 So there's a premise that's embedding a lot of us from culture that to gain something you must lose. If you're Icarus and you try to fly, then you will, you know, you'll fly too high and they'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 Nietzsche and so unusual relative to the dystopian

Starting point is 05:08:46 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 newotropic 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, the other planes that crash and we land, right? Okay, so why do I mention the picture during great? 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, you know, that, that,

Starting point is 05:09:14 Q.Bio or inter-Grome 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

Starting point is 05:09:33 on millions and millions of people, where you could probably start having AI, predict, okay, what does somebody's life expectancy given their current face and other kinds of things, right? Because you have their name, your birthday, they passed away if they've already passed away, and you have photos of them through their life. So just imaging might give a reasonably good longevity buyer marker, but then you can supplement that with a lot of other variables. Now, you can start benchmarking

Starting point is 05:10:02 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. And so what this does is 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

Starting point is 05:10:34 generation, we may be too late, it may work for the next generation. Then that make you sad. Well, I've got something. To the last generation. Could be, but I've got something free. Which is, I call it genomic reincarnation. Okay, this one you probably haven't heard before.

Starting point is 05:10:49 I've tweeted about it, okay. So. By the way, good time to mention that your Twitter is one of the greatest Twitter's of all time. So people should follow you. Well, Lex Friedman has won the greatest podcast of all time. You guys should listen to the Lex Friedman podcast, which you may be doing, right?

Starting point is 05:11:04 Which you may be doing right now. Yes. Yeah. Well, thank you. So what was the term again? Sorry, genomic. So I call it genomic, not resurrection, but genomic reincarnation.

Starting point is 05:11:14 So here's the concept. You may be aware that you can synthesize strands of DNA. 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 Ventor

Starting point is 05:11:38 made? So, people have synthesized entire bacterial chromosomes and they work. 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 part of, right, yeast or part of this kingdom and so on, it becomes harder because the chromosomes are more complicated. But folks are working on eukaryotic chromosome synthesis.

Starting point is 05:12:06 If you spot me that sci-fi assumption, that eventually will be able to take your genome sequence. 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, because you have 23 and 46, but I already 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 because there's epigenetics and other stuff, okay? But let's just say to 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, you know, the karma part. Your crypto

Starting point is 05:12:52 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 legs Who can then watch Everything that happened in your past life and you can tell them something Everything I described there. I mean if you spot me you care at a chromosome synthesis That's the only part that like you know, I think I think will be possible right Folks are working on it. I'm sure it's someone multiple. Right. It would be a clone.

Starting point is 05:13:28 It's like a clone, right? But it is, it is you in a different time. You in a different time, but you don't unfortunately have the memories. Well, you could probably watch the, like, 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 it, you need to show that mind to align it very well

Starting point is 05:14:00 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 like in a very simple version of it, you know, by the time one is age 20 or 30 or something to me in your 20s, you'll sort of learn your own

Starting point is 05:14:30 personal operating system. You're like, oh, alcohol really doesn't agree with me or something like that. You just like trial and error, you know, things that are idiosyncratic to your own physiology. You're like, oh, you know, I'm totally rectify, I get seven hours of sleep versus nine hours or whatever it is, right? You people will have different kinds of, you know, things like this. That manual can be given to your next self. So you can know, don't do this,

Starting point is 05:14:53 do this, don't do this, do this, right? To some extent, personal jumps already gives you some of this where you're like, oh, I'm a caffeine nut, you know, or slow metabolizer. Oh, that explains X or Y, you know, or I have a weird version of alcohol, dehydrogenous, oh, okay, that explains X or Y, you know, or I have a weird version of alcohol

Starting point is 05:15:05 dehydrogenous, oh, okay, that explains, you know, my alcohol tolerance. So, you know, 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 site, and it is curing deafness with, you know, the, you know, artificial eyes and artificial ears. It is, the super-sulzer serum, did I show you that? So like my statin, no, it's weird about this. Basically, X-men are real. So here is a study from any jam from several years ago, okay.

Starting point is 05:15:42 Why not, 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. Extraordinary muscle. Like very muscular, at a very young age. Yes. So the child's birth weight was in the 73% alley, appeared extraordinarily muscular, very muscular, at a very young age. Yes. So the child's birth weight was in the 73% alley. He appeared extraordinarily muscular, protruding muscles in his thighs, motor and mental

Starting point is 05:16:10 development has been normal. Now at 4.5 years of age, he continues to have increased muscle bulk and strength. And so essentially, my standard mutation associated with gross muscle hypertrophy in a child. So this is like real life X-Men. Okay. And um, And those X-Men. Okay. And. And this picture of animals. Yes.

Starting point is 05:16:29 So it's coming called variant bio that is looking at people who have exceptional health related traits. And it 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

Starting point is 05:16:44 artificial immunity to COVID, right? If you, perhaps, we can give other people artificial immunity to COVID, right? If you scroll up, you see my kind of tweet, Super Soldier's Serum is real, where it's like wild type mouse and a myostatin' null, and look at the chest on that thing, do you see the before and after? Wow. Okay, this is what's possible, you know,

Starting point is 05:17:01 this could be us, but you're regulating, you know, right, you know what I'm saying? Like this could be us, but you play, this could be us, but you're regulating. You know, right? You know, the same like this could be us be playing. This could be us, but the FDA regulating. Right. All this. Okay. Oh, yeah. Unstewards. But it's not that's the thing is it's not. Well, that's the thing is people, when people, again, you get back to the Icarus thing, they think, oh, steroids. Well, that's definitely going to give you cancer, screw up your hormones, et cetera, et cetera. And it could, but you know what?

Starting point is 05:17:29 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?

Starting point is 05:17:48 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 under explored area, rather than people drinking caffeine all the time, that's like a very mild enhancing drug. Okay, nicotine is also arguably kind of like that. You know, some people will have it even without the cigarettes, right? Why can't we research this stuff?

Starting point is 05:18:10 One way of thinking about it is, you know, 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, you know, his chemists, and I say this somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but also his chemists are candidates for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Because they brought a band back

Starting point is 05:18:30 from like Testicular Cancer, to like winning tour de France's against a bunch of guys who probably, a bunch of them were also juiced or whatever, right? Whatever it 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 serious.

Starting point is 05:18:54 Yes, except, again, just like the Theranos stuff, all this pathologist, oh, it's a Balco 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, 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, etc. etc. Longevity, yeah. That's beautifully, beautifully done. You have two questions. One was on Trump in deplatforming and the other was on crypto and the state of crypto and the third is

Starting point is 05:19:35 on India, which one should we do? All right. Since we talked about how to fix health medicine FDA longevity Let us briefly talk about how to fix social media perhaps sure since we kind of talked about it from different directions But it'd be nice to just look at social media and if you 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?

Starting point is 05:20:21 Can you steal man the case for it and against it and if there's something broken about that, how do we fix it? Steal man the case for is kind of obvious in the sense of you are seeing a, would be dictator who was 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

Starting point is 05:21:05 that at least this guy's megaphone is taken away and that his supporters cannot organize more rights. That's basically the case for the de-platforming. Okay. Would you agree with that? That's like really still manning it. I'm just, I'm guessing, yes, the seal band. So I'm giving the four-case, yeah.

Starting point is 05:21:22 Well, I think is, I guess I would like to separate the would be dictator. Oh, I guess if you're storming the capital, you are 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, you know, significant step.

Starting point is 05:21:47 Yeah, it's not just their actions, awards in a particular situation, but broadly, the first and the first. The fact that everything that led up to this moment and so on, right? Yeah. So that's a four case, right. Now, the against case, there's actually several

Starting point is 05:21:59 against cases, right? There's obviously the Trump supporters, you know, against case, there is the sort obviously the Trump supporters, you know, against case. There is the, sort of the libertarian slash left libertarian, you know, against case. And there is the rest of world against case, okay? Especially three because 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 4, 2021. And essentially, the Trump supporter would read this as basically saying, in the name of defending democracy, they corrupted democracy, you know, whether it was actually vote counts or just

Starting point is 05:22:46 changes of all the rules for mail and 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. That's a quote from this article where it's like, the word went out, stand down, protect the results announced that it would not be actively in the entire national mobilization network today, remains ready to activate of necessary.

Starting point is 05:23:14 Hotos are credits to activists for their restraint. So basically the activists re-arunched the protected results protest towards a weekend of celebration. So point being that the fact that the Trump's word would say, the fact that they could tell them to stand down meant that the previous unrest was in part coordinated and said, okay, so that makes it illegitimate in a different way, right? Plus, you know, while there's one riot on Jan 6 versus the attacks on the White House and

Starting point is 05:23:44 stuff, you know, there's a storming of the White House in mid 2020 and then actually stormed 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 slash left libertarian would 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, um, the quote people are electing a figurehead and actually it's the heads of network that are more powerful than the heads of state.

Starting point is 05:24:26 Right? That the fact that the CEOs of Facebook and Twitter and Google and Apple and Amazon all made the decisions at the same time, to not just de-platform Trump from Twitter, which literally billions of people around the world saw, but also sensor or stop on Facebook, and to have Google and Apple pull Parler out of the App Store and Amazon shut down the world saw, but also sensor or stop on Facebook. And to have Google and Apple pull parlor out of the app store and Amazon shut down the back end, 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,

Starting point is 05:25:02 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, you know, sicked the government on all of his enemies from Huey Long to Andrew Mellon. Obviously, he in turn 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 of you will know this one. He led a whole Navy thing to entrap gay sailors. And do you know about this one?

Starting point is 05:25:36 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. 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. That's like all these agencies are whatever. In some sense, there's been a rising trend of centralization. Woodrow Wilson obviously centralized, Lincoln centralized, right?

Starting point is 05:26:10 Even actually, you know, 1789 was a degree of centralization over the more, you know, like loose thing that was 1776, 1789. So he's on that trend line, but he's definitely a huge kind of dog leg up. So the thing is that because of all the lawsuits that we're flying, many, you know, forks like Amish Lays, you know, has written a book, The Forgotten Man, and essentially hurt these, these of many others at that time, like John T. Flynn, who's this journalist who, you know, 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.

Starting point is 05:26:45 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 could are bad. I think they were bad, but how could I prove it? I'd need to actually be able to fork the economy.

Starting point is 05:27:01 Crypto actually allows you in theory to do that. Like where folks could actually shift balance, 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.

Starting point is 05:27:16 We can talk about that. Point is though with FDR, there's a thing because he had, we had such a war on private industry at that time and justified it with this narrative quote bold persistent experimentation. There was someone called the quote business plot. We're all of these captains of industry that he had been being up. And again, Teddy Roosevelt had also been doing this with, you know, the trust buster, the journals at the time, Ida Tarbell had gone in,

Starting point is 05:27:40 you know, basically ran all these articles on Rockefeller and knocked him down, would have Wilson and his gun control. But FDR, the CEOs were thinking, oh, bad, this is so terrible. There was a so-called business plot to try to take over the government and stop FDR from pushing the country and what they thought was a bad direction. Spendly 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 this guys, you know, the whole plot was broken up. All right.

Starting point is 05:28:14 Now, when we are thinking about today, or the whole aftermath of Jan 6 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 pulled all the push 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, you know, for example, 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

Starting point is 05:29:00 commerce, okay. 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. There's so many examples of this. Another one is backwards in time, New York Times is allying with Soviet Russia to choke out Ukraine. Now today, they have reinvented themselves as cheerleaders for Ukraine against, you know, nationalist Russia, right? 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 hall to more. You know, the Oxelsberg family literally profited from, you know, denying the hall to more to now make themselves cheerleaders for Ukraine as actually this insane thing, which

Starting point is 05:29:43 we can talk about. A tiny tangent on that. Yeah. 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.

Starting point is 05:30:02 Like, basically, you know, I was actually one of the first 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 want to be forcibly reintegrated into a place that they just escaped from, you know. 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, right, then there's like a fourth

Starting point is 05:30:32 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 of descending. 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 people to starve. So we're going to 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 it's like a fourth point of view. And a fifth point of view is China, which is like,

Starting point is 05:31:04 guess what, we're going to be the Iran of the Iraq war, you know, where like who won the Iraq war? Iran, arguably, for example, extended their influence into Iraq, right? So China is like, guess what? We're going to turn Russia into our gas station and build a pipeline. They're building, there's a power sebiars like the name of the eastern Russia pipeline, just like Nord Stream is, you know, Nord Stream one and Nord Stream two. I think they're building a new pipeline, you know, through Mongolia. So Zezion, Ping, and Pudin and the Mongolian head of state, Royal Photographed kind of thumbs up in this pipeline.

Starting point is 05:31:31 We'll see if it goes through, but it's ironic that, you know, Russia wanted to make Ukraine their, you know, colony, but the outcome of this war, maybe that Russia becomes China's colony, you know. So that's at least like five different perspectives. 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 country's perspective, and there's China's perspective, and then of course there's the Russians. So just respect to that, by the way, that's another example of history happening in reverse. This is the sinusoviet partnership, except this time, China is a senior partner and Russia is a junior partner.

Starting point is 05:32:12 And this time they're both nationalists rather than communists. And there's so many flips like this, and I'm going to 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 never-exha-book, it's in the chapter called fragmentation, frontier, forth-turning, futures are passed, right? So, I give this example of like a fluid unmixing, all right? Just watch this for a second, all right? This is from Smart Everyday Unmixing. Just watch this for a second. This is from a smart everyday unmixing column machine, ultra-lambitor reversible flow smart everyday to 17. And so you can mix something,

Starting point is 05:32:54 and then this thing that you don't think of as reversible, you can unmix it, which is insane, that it works. The physics of that situation just works, right? So for people just listening, that there is whatever the mixture this is, this is ultra-lambar reversible flow. So this probably has to do something to do with the material. Were used to mixing not being a reversible process. Exactly. And that's what that shows. And then he then reverses the mixing and say, we'll do it perfectly. That's right. So that's like the futures are past these. It shows that free wills and illusion just kidding.

Starting point is 05:33:31 Well, basically there's some environments where the equations are like time symmetrical. So you get it, right? And this is one model, sort of just an interesting visual model for what's happening in the world as we've re-decentralized after the centralized century. Right? So, basically, you know, I mentioned the ancient frontier over reopens back then, the Western frontier closed. Today, we experienced COVID-19 back then, we experienced the Spanish flu, tech billionaires

Starting point is 05:33:57 and any other capital industry, right? Today, founders like Alon and Dorsey are starting to win against the establishment journalists back then. I had a tar bell demagogued and defeated Rockefeller. I think net net founders win this time versus the journals. Back then, the journals won over the founders. Okay. So we have cryptocurrencies. Back then, we had private banking.

Starting point is 05:34:17 Today, this is an amazing one. We have a populist movement of digital gold advocates. Back then, because Bitcoin maximalist and so on, where gold has become populist because it's against the printing money and so and so forth. Back then, we had a populist movement against gold in the form of William Jennings Bryan in 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 Vimar like America. Back then we had the inflation and cultural conflict of Vimar, Germany. Today in Vimar America, we have

Starting point is 05:34:53 right and left fighting in the streets, same, unfortunately in Vimar, Germany. Peter Church is written about, you know, today we have what Church and considers anti-bellum, like polarization, like pre-war pro-lization. Back then, you know, if you go further back in time, we had what we now know to be anti-bellom polarization, right? Today, we have Airbnb, back then we had flop houses. Today, we have Uber, back then we had Gypsy Caps. So today we see the transition from neutral to yellow journalism, back then we saw the transition

Starting point is 05:35:17 from yellow to neutral journalism, right? And today figures like Mike Moritz, you wrote about China's energetic in America's Leconic, but back then Bertrand Russell actually wrote this whole long book, actually the mathematician, Bertrand Russell, 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 it's China-Laconic at that time, because everybody was in opium dens and so on and so forth.

Starting point is 05:35:49 Okay? 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 junior partner. Today, I think in the second Cold War, there will also be a third world,

Starting point is 05:36:02 but this time I think that third world might come in first, because it's not the non-aligned movement. It's the align movement around web three protocols. That's fascinating. Yeah. That's where India 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 has first tech unicorn. And I'm investing there. And I think, you know, it's one of these things where China's risen, India's like about 10 years behind, you know, China, but I think this is the Indian decade in many ways, we can come back to that point.

Starting point is 05:36:34 But there's absolutely, you know, sparks of light in Africa. I mean, it's a huge continent. It's like the more behind side to interrupt, the more behind you are, the more opportunity you have to leap for all. Sometimes, that's right's right and pays a is a classic example where they did this in in each Africa But but I think there's more possibility there So what is the fact that this? There's a kind of symmetry

Starting point is 05:37:00 History right what is that how do how did that take us from Trump is that? How did that take us from Trump? The different perspective you took, the libertarian perspective of it doesn't really matter. Yeah, because the libertarian perspective or the left left libertarian perspective would say, is it really a good idea to have total corporate power against the, quote, elected government, even if, you know, you may disagree, do you want to open the door to total, you know, corporate oil, a car key? 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 futures are past thesis and there's more,

Starting point is 05:37:41 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, right, 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 card. Other cities, other states are doing this.

Starting point is 05:38:18 And that's a force of decentralization saying that parallels in reverse. In reverse, right? So you're having before make America states again Nice, okay, that's what's I think happening right with I'm not saying I well I think there's aspects that are good. There's aspects that are bad, but um just like that's kind of the the angle right But then that's I mean from your perspective that's probably not enough right that's that's not um It's part of the future. Let's just say whether I... I think you suggested all kinds of ways

Starting point is 05:38:49 to build different countries. I think that's probably one of them. You said, start micro countries or something like this. I forgot the terminology. Yeah, micro nations. Yeah, that's not my... I actually think of them as... It's better term is micro states,

Starting point is 05:39:01 because they're actually not nations. That's why they don't work. But micro states are better, right? Coming back to the difference between the nation, 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 as like natality.

Starting point is 05:39:14 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? 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?

Starting point is 05:39:33 Right. Also, you weren't talking about tradition, you know, that doesn't matter. Tradition. Tradition. 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?

Starting point is 05:39:49 It's a reversal there as well, okay. Yeah, so I mean, one way of thinking about it is, 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, there's separate things. There's this article from 2017 showing how, you know, shares on Facebook

Starting point is 05:40:20 and Twitter are just separate subgraphs. There's 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 in one gen, what that means is in one generation,

Starting point is 05:40:39 ideology becomes biology. These become ethnic groups. It takes on the character of Huda 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 or so they said 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 identity of individual states. Well, I think that's a good or bad thing. I think that's unfortunately, you know, whatever

Starting point is 05:41:03 is the hour of history, right? On the opposite side of things, India is actually was 560 princely states at the time of Indian Unification in from 1947 to 1947 and it got independence from the British. It was 560 princely states. Most people don't know that part and it got your outside India don't know the part. It got unified into a republic only by like 1950. And India is like actually a modern, 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.

Starting point is 05:41:32 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 would have you whereas the US is decentralizing you go okay Few more things there are flips and I'll finish this off today

Starting point is 05:41:53 We're seeing the rise of the pseudonymous founder and starbs societies back all the way back in the 1770s We saw pseudonymous founders of starb countries namely the US right the Federalist papers Today we're seeing so far unsuccessful calls for wealth seizures in the US, right, the Phytois 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, in digital 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,

Starting point is 05:42:25 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 beat the ethnic nationalists abroad and they beat the quote, secessionist 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.

Starting point is 05:42:56 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 seem 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

Starting point is 05:43:27 that are advocating for freedom, the opposite of slavery. See what I'm saying? Boy, that's dark. You're looking for major things in history that don't yet have a... Cognate going for. 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 I'm as a sci-fi scenario. It's just like a scenario one could contemplate. Where the new version has... The Chinese Communist do not think of themselves as Aryans.

Starting point is 05:44:04 But they are ultra-nationalists. And, you know, the Hitler comparisons, people talking about Hitler endlessly, you know, like, Saddam is the new Hitler, everybody is the new Hitler, etc. If there is a comparison to quote, non-C Germany, it is, you know, CCP China, in a sense, why? They are non-English speaking, CCP China, in a sense, why? They are non-English speaking, manufacturing powerhouse, with a massive military buildout, under one leader, that is a genuine peer competitor to the US on many dimensions, and in fact, exceeding

Starting point is 05:44:36 on some dimensions of technology and science. Right? That is, the problem is it's a boy who cried well, if people will say this is zillion times, right? Yeah. And that is, I zillion times, right? And, you know, that is like, you know, I'm not saying this by the way, crucially, I'm, there's like, I think China is very complicated and there's hundreds of millions of people,

Starting point is 05:44:57 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 Ding 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 what that's coming from this way. You want

Starting point is 05:45:24 to 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 outnumbered the US four to one. This is going to be a fun century. Things are going to get China out numbers the US, four to one. This is going to be a fun century. Things are going to get under this model. Under this model, things are going to be potentially crazy.

Starting point is 05:45:51 Plus, people are like, oh, I think this is, you know, again, I have nothing personal. There's a guy, Peter Zahane, he writes these books, right? I probably agreed about 20 or 30 percent, 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 I think there's absolutely problems in China and the current management is actually messing

Starting point is 05:46:19 a lot of things up, we can talk about that. But I do think that the US is like fighting its factory. So one thing, Zion will talk about is how America has this blue water navy, all the aircraft carriers, and China has nothing, it's got boobkiss, etc. Well, China ships things all around the world. It probably has one of the most active fleets out there in terms of its commercial shipping. 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.

Starting point is 05:46:52 USCards 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.

Starting point is 05:47:13 Okay. When you have a thousand X difference in the physical world, the reason the US was one against Nazi Germany and 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 lendlies. And the Soviets talked about how they would not have won the war without the Americans. People are like, oh, the Russians, you know, fought the Germans.

Starting point is 05:47:39 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 don't want to be like,

Starting point is 05:47:56 there's individual Russians who obviously I admire, Mendelayev and, you know, Klamogrov and so on. There's amazing Russian side to center. So I'm not saying that. I mean, in general, from from, from, uh, brilliant folks like yourself that criticize communism, it's too easy to say, nothing communism produces as good, which of course is not true. Yes. A lot of brilliant people in, and then a lot of even, you know, there's a lot of amazing

Starting point is 05:48:23 things that have been created. Yeah. so they have some amazing mathematicians, amazing scientists and so on, right? However, great branding on the, you know, red and yellow, just the branding is stellar. So, Nazi Germany to excellent branding, with the flag and so on, you know. So, Sponsor, and there in terms of compliments.

Starting point is 05:48:44 Yeah, well, actually they copied a lot of stuff from each other. 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, because the socialist realism style of like the muscular, brony worker, very similar to like the style of the Aryan Superman, you know, like pointing at the vermin or whatever.

Starting point is 05:49:08 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 shitty or so. Right. Anyway, so I mean, thing about this is basically like, try and have fight your factory in the physical world.

Starting point is 05:49:24 It's probably not going to 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 want to 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 get a war? We're doing these things like Pelosi going to Taiwan and trying to, 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,

Starting point is 05:49:59 the US conservative, the Taiwan East perspective, the Chinese perspective, all the bystanders over there, there's more than one perspective on this, okay? If you're, you know, China's, one of China's many neighbors, you look at China with apprehension. Like Vietnam, for example, sort of fallen into, or not fallen into, is partnering with India

Starting point is 05:50:17 because they're mutually apprehensive China. China is not making like great friends with its neighbors. It's kind of, you know, it's demonizing Japan. It's so alternationalist nowadays. And So if you're 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 trend 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.

Starting point is 05:50:53 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 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 sure 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 were, like, that story about like the Soviet colonel who didn't order a nuclear strike

Starting point is 05:51:31 because he thought it was just like an error in the instruments, right? Okay, what's the point? Point is, you know, for example, policy going to Taiwan, that didn't strengthen Taiwan, that didn't like that. If you're gonna go and provoke China, I thought scholar stage is Twitter account had a good point, which is you should,

Starting point is 05:51:49 if you're actually going to do it, then you strengthen Taiwan with like huge battalions of like arms and material and you make them a porcupine and so on and so forth. And instead her kind of going and landing there and moaning 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

Starting point is 05:52:06 or 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's a guy who, I'm not trying to beat him up or anything, he's like, this is in March. Thread on US security assistance to Ukraine, it's working. Ukraine might be one of the biggest successes of US security assistance.

Starting point is 05:52:34 And the reason is, you know, US didn't focus on some high-end Chinese 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 it's a deter. And now Ukraine is like this Syria like battleground with a million refugees or whatever the number is, right? The country is blown to smithereens, thousands of people dead, whatever $1,000 gas in Europe

Starting point is 05:53:02 would 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, you know, there's a million ways to smash Humpty Dumpty into pieces and, you know, unleash the blood-drenched tides, right, and have people shooting each other and killing each other. It's really hard to maintain stability. That's what competence is, it's deterrence and stability, right? There's not like a success in any way. This is like an absolute tragedy for everybody involved, right?

Starting point is 05:53:32 Yeah, I mean, deterrence, of course, is the number one thing, but there, 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 only thing about this is the whole mission accomplished thing during your vote. Mission accomplished is what I meant, yeah.

Starting point is 05:53:51 Exactly, mission accomplished was obviously, the thing is Russia lives next door to Ukraine. And so, 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, you know, who knows what's going to happen here, okay? But one of the problems is like, you know, the whole Afghanistan thing or the Iraq thing is the lesson for people was the uncertainty.

Starting point is 05:54:21 They're like, is the US going to fight? Don't know. Is will the US win if it fights? Don't know. Therefore, roll the dice. That uncertainty is itself like tempting to folks, you know, like like Putin or whatever, right? So point is coming all the way back up. We were talking about how history futures are passed and FDR like the business plot FDR failed, but like the tech company is we're able to de-platform Trump, right? And the left libertarian would say, do we want them at corporate power? Okay. And so that's, so we gave the four case for Trump de-platforming, protecting democracy.

Starting point is 05:54:52 The Trump supporter case against, which is on the secret history of the shadow campaign, the save of 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, you know, you know, Amlo, he's the, he was the, you know, head of state of Mexico, I think at that time, okay? Amlou, Macron, you know, other folks, everybody who was watching this around the world, basically saw, let's say,

Starting point is 05:55:30 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 tech companies are

Starting point is 05:55:54 so insanely powerful, everybody's on Twitter or would have you other than China leaving them aside. They've got their own root system. If somebody tried to de platform Zezion paying off of sign aof-way bow, they probably just fall through a trap door, you know, their whole family, right? But for the rest of the world, it'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

Starting point is 05:56:25 in a first-series were shocked by them, then they became a policy instrument. And now this bailouts happening, every single bill is printing another whatever, billion dollars or something like that, right? You can ask on your thoughts and advice on this topic. If I or anyone were to have a conversational Donald Trump, first of all, should one do so? And if so, how do you do it?

Starting point is 05:56:53 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, 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? 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.

Starting point is 05:57:20 Well, I love it. So this is just, can I just use that as an explanation with confidence for everything I do? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no see, I decide who's not see, you're not see. Therefore, I punch you and that's justified. Yeah. And, you know, like people say, how many people are calling Israelis, you know, like these things, right? And so, the problem with argumentum at Hilaram is, it just, I mean, people look say Obama's a not see. Everybody's say everybody's a not see, right? But there is a social consensus about who, let's set the Nazi aside, but who is dangerous for society. Okay, but now let's talk about that.

Starting point is 05:58:11 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 a sambin lawn at the time. He was like a terrorist that the Cuban regime had seemingly defeated. And when Herbert Matthews did, as he got an intro to him, he went to the place where he was hiding out.

Starting point is 05:58:34 He gave an interview and he printed this hageography in New York Times with this like photo of Castro looking all 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 revolution that actually impoverished Cuba led to like gay people being, you know, like discriminating against there led to people fleeing, you know, and drowning trying to escape, right? That's an example of where platforming somebody

Starting point is 05:59:18 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 Cremlin Wall, okay? Why is an American buried there? Okay. Because he wrote a book called Ten Days That Shook the World that Whitewash the entire

Starting point is 05:59:42 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. He got their point of view out of the world, and it was a totally misleading point of view. Do you think what will you think he was thinking? He's like, he saw the psychopath,. You know, sometimes it's not obvious. Well, the French Revolution had already happened. So people kind of knew that this sort of psychopathic killing

Starting point is 06:00:10 in the name of equality could produce bad results. Right. But it's more than that, right? So as John Reed, it's Herbert Matthews. It's Edgar Snow. Okay. So these are all people who should be extremely famous. Right.

Starting point is 06:00:23 So Edgar Snow is Maoist journalist. Okay. So he wrote You know, here's the there's actually a article in this how 1930s reporter from Missouri became China's ideal ideal journalist Okay, and he wrote various books including like red star over China, okay, and it's just a haze geography of Mao right yeah, 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, Malin's dead. Duranty helped Stalin starve out the Ukrainians,

Starting point is 06:00:57 Malin's dead. Edgar Snow was Malin'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. Phom, I'm going to mispronounce this, but it's perfect spy. The incredible double life of Ph.A.M, Phomzwan on, Time Magazine reporter

Starting point is 06:01:26 and Vietnamese Communistation. 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, you know, for example, stories of Buddhist being killed and so on. Ashley Rinsberg in the Great Lady Winged writes this whole thing up at length

Starting point is 06:01:42 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. 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, you know, times actually also ran a whole thing, which was, you know, Hitler's like mountain retreat or something like that. Do you know about that story? What year was this?

Starting point is 06:02:15 I'll tell you one second. Hitler at home in the clouds. Oh boy, please tell me it's like early thirties. I think it's, oh yeah, this is auto-detolishous. This is actually a guy that Ashley Rinsberg writes up in the Great Lady Bank, right? 1937. There's another one where I think the date is wrong, but it's 30, not, you know, but essentially,

Starting point is 06:02:35 these titles are like, we're Hitler dreams and plans. He lives simply, you know, right? And there's another one, Hare Hitler at home in the clouds, okay? The thing about this is absolutely there are folks who are hajographers of the far right? But whether you're talking Lenin and John Reed or Stalin and Walter Duranty of the New York Times or Castro and Herbert Matthews again of the New York Times or Edgar Snow Mao, or David Halberstam and, you know, Ho Chi Minh

Starting point is 06:03:06 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, saying about how communists don't understand self-interest, nationalists don't understand other interests. And so, nationalists are more obvious. Isn't that good? I thought it was good.

Starting point is 06:03:30 That'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 the slabs or whatever, right? Basically, head-hitler constructed a different ideology, then he might have gotten more support in Eastern Europe or whatever, right? But he also called the Slavs inferior,

Starting point is 06:03:50 not just basically everybody who's inferior to the Aryans, except maybe the English or whatever, but that was it, right? Oh, and the Japanese are 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.

Starting point is 06:04:13 Whereas the Communist has a message that sounds more appealing. It's a universalist message ostensibly. But it's actually a faux universalism because it's actually a particularism. Like during the Soviet Union, communism, this faux universalism was basically a mask for Russian nationalism, or at least Soviet nationalism, where in particular Russians were pushed into many territories, and Russian speakers were privileged in the Eastern Europe and the Baltics. Of course, Russians themselves were oppressed at home as Sultanate's rights here,

Starting point is 06:04:47 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, right? I'm not, I think Russians have been hard-done in many ways. They've had a very hard century. They've also done hard by others.

Starting point is 06:05:01 Okay, it's complicated. Those journalists you mentioned, just to elaborate, maybe you disagree with me, I wonder what you think. But I think conversation, like not to sort of glorify any particular medium, but there's something, one of the reasons that 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 There is that podcast made it much more popular in common is it's somehow

Starting point is 06:05:38 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 out with Hitler in 1940, 1941, 1942, and the podcast actually serve a purpose in 41 and 42, mid-World War two, a man World War two, a purpose of one which is very important, get good information for the future. So history can study it. And to reveal to the world the way a man thinks that is beyond the propaganda. So all this stuff is complicated, but today, so the specific issue of the folks you were talking about, like Puyden, Z, Trump, right? For those folks, they are very clearly outgroup for both the US left and right, which is, you'll say the Western left and right, which are your, your audience. There's folks who are tankies and there are folks who are maga, who are sympathetic. I'm sorry, what are tankies?

Starting point is 06:06:42 Tankies are those who are, you are, they may call themselves tankies. Let's say they're anti-imperialists left and mega-right. Okay. For different reasons are against the US establishment and for putin or G or something like that as, you know, as an agent against the US establishment, right? So leaving those aside, the point is that most of your audience is sort of on guard, vaccinated in a sense, right? So leaving those aside, the point is that most of your audience is sort of on guard, vaccinated in a sense, right, versus Z and Pudan and Trump, right? Like they have,

Starting point is 06:07:12 they know the counterarguments and so on and so forth, okay? In which case, I wouldn't think interviewing them would be like that big deal, relatively, because there's so much other coverage and so on out there. It's, I think it's probably okay. However, for something like, um, you know, when what John Reed was doing and so on, when he was a sole source of information about the Russian Revolution. Yes. Right. That's different. That's different. Right. So, so it's something about, it kind of gets back to the competitive environment and so on. There's no dearth of folks who are writing critical coverage of these three men, right? And so if I felt that that was insufficient, then you might need more of it, right?

Starting point is 06:07:54 Just like, you know, 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, right? That's why I brought those guys, right? Because often it's kind of like, have your stock shelves at a supermarket and so seem totally out of left field?

Starting point is 06:08:13 No, but choose, but the same thing here that you used to work with here. The thing that is the most popular is the thing that's not in the shelf because it's been sold out. Yeah. So in some ways, this is similar to that famous photo that people have, or an image that people have on Twitter

Starting point is 06:08:29 of the plane and the parts that are shot versus not, 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 do? That's why you think of them bad guys or possible bad guys or controversial guys or whatever, are those you've already got some vaccinations, dude. That's why you think of them at all. Whereas the folks that I mentioned, the regulators, invisible, you don't, right? Salisberger, you know

Starting point is 06:08:53 Zuckerberg, you know his pros and cons, you know who he is as a person. You don't even know Salisberger exists, most people, right? Despite the fact that he's like, certainly as powerful, you know, he owns the New York Times, he inherits it, he also got dual class stock, just like Zuck. But it'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?

Starting point is 06:09:24 And you can assume they are, they do exist there, and then you can start to infer. human's existing in places that wield power. And you can assume they do exist there and then you can start to infer and ask questions. So this is kind of what I try to do is like what is the dark matter? What is the question that is not being asked or what happens? And so that's not to say that you need to be so anti-mimetic

Starting point is 06:09:43 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, whereas 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?

Starting point is 06:10:09 As harsh as one can be a critic of the current system, it is really incumbent as difficult as it is upon one to come up with a better version, just like academia, as much as I think current science has corrupted, what I propose is a way to actually improve on that. And actually any true science is to say, yes, I want my work to be reproducible. Yes, I want citations to be in port statements and so on and so forth. And we don't have to get everybody to agree that, but it's just enough to build that better version and not regress. Yeah, there's an implied optimism within the V1, V2, V3 framework.

Starting point is 06:10:41 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, I'm going to really think of this, quick 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 you know, 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 that your scratch book?

Starting point is 06:11:11 I think it's good, but basically like, if I say that's 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, you know, 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? I don't know. Is it possible? Well, my tweet is a good question. I think the network state will be, I think, important, or I hope, well, the book, the book

Starting point is 06:11:46 of the concept. Good question. The movement. Right. In the sense that Zionism shows that it is possible to have a book and 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, you know, as I mentioned earlier,

Starting point is 06:12:05 a lot of countries are small countries, but I didn't mention there's a guy who's the head of Kuzoxin 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 you don't have the option, one of the, there's many opposites of a nation state,

Starting point is 06:12:23 but one of the opposites is the stateless nation Mm-hmm And sooner or the network state is popular in places like Catalonia Catalonia nationalists in Catalonia guys are committed Catalonia nationalists So Catalonia in this region of Spain, right? The 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 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.

Starting point is 06:12:50 So Catalonia or the Basque region, these are underneath the nation state of Spain, but many Catalonians think of themselves as a part of a separate nation, not all, except many, okay? And so they want a state of their own. Who doesn't, if you're a nation, you know, meaning that they've got a legitimate claim from history, language, culture, all that stuff, right? The baskets do as well, the curds do as well, okay? Lots of ethnic groups around the world do.

Starting point is 06:13:18 So in the game of musical chairs, 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 histories are 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, etc. What this Catalonia Nationalist said, he's like, look, well, we can't give up on our existing

Starting point is 06:13:48 path. The network state is a really interesting third option. I mean, by the way, I didn't talk to this guy, V Partal, okay, and he's got this cycle, VioWeb, and VILA, VILA web, 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.

Starting point is 06:14:13 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 going to be able to get a state. But just like there's more Irish people who live outside of Ireland, right? Just like the Jewish people didn't actually get a state in Poland or have you. They had one in Palestine. Perhaps the Catalonians could crowd-faint territory in other places and have essentially a state of their own that's distributed.

Starting point is 06:14:47 Okay. Now, again, what people are merely gonna say is, well, that's gonna lead to conflict with the locals necessarily and so 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. It's like multiple Chinatowns

Starting point is 06:15:07 You could have multiple Catalonia in 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 there's a region called new, Caledonia And that's in the South Pacific. So maybe maybe New Catalonia is somewhere else, right? So if you're flexible in that, now of course, a bunch of people will immediately say, there's 50 different objections to this. They'll say, oh, you don't get it.

Starting point is 06:15:33 The whole point is the land and so on. They've been there for generations. They'll 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.

Starting point is 06:15:55 I mean, it's a good question whether Elon Musk, SpaceX and Tesla will be successful without Twitter. Yeah, I don't think that's 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 is certainly probably helped must with Tesla sales.

Starting point is 06:16:14 The engineering, no, that's not what I mean. Oh, good. The best people in the world solve the engineering problem. Yes, but he hires the people to solve them and he knows enough about engineering. He hires us. That's the point I'm making on Twitter, the legend of Elon Musk has created.

Starting point is 06:16:30 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-platelet and the planetary species. Here is a remark I had just before the pandemic relates to this, okay, but Twitter helping a lot

Starting point is 06:17:03 and just beyond that for a second. Maybe centralization is actually also under explored in the design space. For example, today's social networks are essentially governed by a single CO, but that CO is a background figure. They aren't leading the users to do anything. What if they did? One example, it could have lawn mucs,

Starting point is 06:17:18 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 infants. You can see piece 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

Starting point is 06:17:34 that can be very useful to the software for future network states, operational transformation, that's how like Google Docs coordinates edits. Conflict-free replicated data text is another soul turn of easier to code in some ways, an operational transformation, micro tasks like mechanical church, scale AI, and urn.com before we sold it. Blockchains in crypto obviously, the polymath project,

Starting point is 06:17:54 where a bunch of people parallel processed and we 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 Alon could use, right? What works and what doesn't about Twitter, if there's something that's broken, how would you fix it?

Starting point is 06:18:15 The only 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 reman hypothesis, that would be amazing. Yeah.

Starting point is 06:18:31 Okay. Yeah, well, that's kind of funny, right? That's funny. And so now the joke landed on like five people. Sure. You want to explain the joke? Well, there's a lot of problems, the siteability, where the truth, that's what proves in math is the truth of the thing is actually exceptionally difficult to determine. And that's just a really nice example.

Starting point is 06:18:54 Right. The problems that persist across centuries, they've not been solving those brilliant minds, they're essentially true or false problems. That's right. And so when people are 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 check thing? Yes, but it has to be decentralized and open source. You could imagine an interesting concept of coding true goal, like a Google that return

Starting point is 06:19:28 was true. It's like a modified version, right? It's 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, you know, you know, you know, you know, you wouldn't actually, whether you have it as RDF or like a, like a triple store kind of thing or some of the representation,

Starting point is 06:19:52 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 true goal would have both deterministic and statistical components. 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

Starting point is 06:20:37 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.

Starting point is 06:21:05 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, but there's some flesh on the bone so to speak.

Starting point is 06:21:32 So basically, there's a good book I'm reading because I think a lot of documents became public recently. And so there's a window when it opened up now. It's probably closing back down again, but you know great biographies because of that were written like, I'm currently reading Miles Great Fam and by Frank DeCoder, which is, who 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?

Starting point is 06:22:02 I mean, that's what communism was, right? It was literally the same China that has like the CC, you know, the entrepreneurs and Jack Ma and so on and so forth. Forty-something years ago, capitalism was punishable by death. What, to put, to give you a concrete example, this is a famous story in China. Maybe apocryphal, but it's what, you know, the folks have talked about. There's a village in Xiao Gang. And basically all the grain that you were produced was supposed to go to the collective. And even one straw belonged to the group. And one meaning with Communist Party officials, a farmer asked, what about the teeth of my head? Do I own those? Answer? No, your teeth belonged to the collective. Okay. Now, the thing is that when you're taking

Starting point is 06:22:39 100% of everything, okay, work hard, don't work hard, everyone gets the same so people don't want to 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 the grain, they've got something. We'll be able to keep some of it. And if any of us are killed for doing this,

Starting point is 06:23:08 then the contracts had that the others would take care of their children. Okay. To keep some of what you earned. I mean, just think about how it's... They formed a mini capitalism society within the company. A secret capitalism society. So what happened? Amongst five people.

Starting point is 06:23:23 Right. So now that they could keep some of what they earned, it keeps them as 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, right?

Starting point is 06:23:41 And in, you know, a few years earlier, they might have 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, you know, raped your wife and took you off to a prison camp and so on and so forth.

Starting point is 06:24:00 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, I forgot this right, Hollywood's missing movies. This is basically here. I'll paste this link so you can put it in the show notes. This is worth reading. It's still applicable today, but now that we have stable diffusion, now we have all these

Starting point is 06:24:22 people online, now that Russia and China are America's national bad guys, you know, 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 you know, vaccinate people against that as well as against Nazism, which they should be, okay. The point of this, go ahead. No, because I'm congratulating myself on the nice because you're sending me excellent links on WhatsApp

Starting point is 06:24:51 and I just saw that there's an export chat feature. Yes. Because we also have this appear messages on. So I was like, all right, this is great. Great. I'll be able to get it. Your ability to reference sources is incredible. So thank you for this. Anyway, otherwise, if I say something, it sounds too surprising. So that's why I want to make sure

Starting point is 06:25:10 I have it on this top. Yeah. So like, yeah, I mean, people would be like shot for holding some grain. So what happened though was ding-jopping said, okay, we're not going to kill you. In fact, we're going to 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. And said 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.

Starting point is 06:25:41 It grew so fast that 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. What he did was the opposite of a rebranding. He did a reinterpretation. A rebranding is where the substance is the same, but the logo is changed. You know, you're now, you were a Facebook, you're not metta. 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.

Starting point is 06:26:21 It's deniable. 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. Go ahead. Put it. Really good. Yeah, yeah, really good. I'm enjoying your metaphors and way of talking about stuff. Yes, I get, yeah, yeah, swap, yeah, rebranding, swap the front end,

Starting point is 06:26:42 interpretation, 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 want to do something on the front end, sometimes I'm under the back end, sometimes it's explicit, and sometimes the user doesn't need to see it, and so on the backend.

Starting point is 06:26:56 Lots of political stuff is arguably, not just best done on the backend, but always done on the backend. One of the points I make in the book is, left as the new right as the new left, is if you look through history, the Christian king, the Republican conservative, the CCP entrepreneur,

Starting point is 06:27:17 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 and extend 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 in the late 1800s.

Starting point is 06:27:43 You wouldn't want a Democrat Confederate trader as the head of your railroad company, would you, right? So all the Confederate traders that were boxed out from the plumb 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

Starting point is 06:28:04 not as a party of the Southern rac races, but the poor, right? And, you know, the cross of gold speech by William Jennings Brown was part of that. There's a gradual process that reached its apathy, not aposities, but 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 major flip to 70% to the Democrats. Now they had repositioned as the party, the poor, not the party of the South. Republicans had lost some economic authority. They had moral authority, they had turned into economic authority. They started to lose some moral authority. The lost moral authority was complete by 1965. That was actually mop-up. People dated the civil rights movement as the big way where the Republicans lost moral

Starting point is 06:28:52 authority. It's not really, that was the mop-up because 1936, 30 years earlier, was when Black voters switched the Democrats, okay? So, in 1965, it was another 10 points moving over of Black voters to Democrats, Republicansins 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. Because now you wouldn't want a Republican bigot as a sea of your tech company anymore, would you? Right. So by 2015, now you have, it's like two sign 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

Starting point is 06:29:31 the, the Democrats, you know, have, you know, 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 in your anti-capitalist, how come you seem to be raking in the money, et cetera, right? If you're so woke and it's all about being good in your anti-capitalist, how come you seem to be raking in the money, et cetera, right?

Starting point is 06:30:06 This is an argument which I'm not sure how long it will go. It might take years to play out, might take decades to play out. I think it's probably on the order of a decade. You're going to see in my view the repositioning if the Democrats are the woke capitals, the Republicans will eventually become, are becoming the Bitcoin maximalists. Why? Because, you know, if one guy picks left, they're 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 Maximals will essentially, where this guy says centralization, they say decentralization, where they defend the right of capital to do anything. The Maximals will say, actually, you're all can-tillionaires. You're all benefiting from printed money. You don't have anything that's legitimate. You don't

Starting point is 06:30:48 actually own anything. It's all a handout from the government and so on and so forth. And so that's a counter positioning that will basically attack the woes by how much money they're making. They're not contesting the ideology. So when one guy signals economics, you signal culture, when there are guy signals economics, you signal culture when there are guys signals culture, you signal economics, that's actually, that's a whole thing I can talk, we should talk about that first thing. Sure. Is this integrated into the forces that you talk about? You've talked about the three forces that try effective forces that affect our society, which is the wokes, let's say...

Starting point is 06:31:26 Woke capital, communist capital. You've talked so fast. It's, 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 would be nice to bring them together

Starting point is 06:31:47 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 what capital, Communist Capital, Crypto Capital? And Communist Capital is the simplest it is,

Starting point is 06:32:04 you must submit. The Communist Party is the simplest it is you must submit. The Communist Party is powerful, CCP is powerful and you are not. If you're in China, you're just... CCP is an embodiment of Communist capital. Well, yeah. So basically, and by the in China, they call it CPC. So basically they don't like it usually if you say CCP, right? So the Communist Party of China is supposed to Chinese government over there. Basically, that is capitalism that is that is a Chinese pool of capital, that billion-person pool. Okay? That's we chat and it's you know, it's Ali Baba and it's the entire kind of thing that is one just social network with currency. The whole thing is vertically injury. When we say communist,

Starting point is 06:32:43 what do you mean here? Why is the word communist important? Why don't you just say China? So it's communist and important. It's just, it's, well, it's just a catchy label. It's a catchy label by things also important because it seems, it's paradoxical, right? So I had a thread on this. The future is communist capital,

Starting point is 06:33:01 versus will capital, versus cryptic capital. Each represents a left-right fusion that's bizarre by the standards of the 1980sTedays consensus. It's PRC, Versa-MMT, Versa-BTC. And why is it bizarre by the standards of 90-Tedays consensus? Well, in the 1980s, you wouldn't think the communists would become capillaries, but they did. You wouldn't think that the woaks, 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 think it's the American nation, right? So rather than the conservative American nationalists

Starting point is 06:33:47 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 look, if you take the long lens, you have these poles that kind of repel each other, okay? So just on the CCP NYTBTC thing, and right T by the way is Walt Capital. Yeah, what is NYT? So it's formula is a little interesting. If CCP is just, you must submit because they're powerful, okay? And then you formula is a little interesting. If CCP is just, you must submit because they're powerful. Okay. And then you bow your head because of Chinese Communist Party is strong.

Starting point is 06:34:28 What capital is, you must sympathize. Why do you bow your head, Lex? Oh, because you're a white male. Therefore, you're guilty. You sympathize. You must bow your head because you are powerful. Mm-hmm. Yet, notice that it ends in the same place in your head looking to the ground, right? In China, it's because they are 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?

Starting point is 06:34:59 Right. Okay. But it ends in your headbout. It's an ideology of submission. It's not that subtle, but it's like somewhat subtle. And then finally, crypto capital is head held high. You must be sovereign. Okay.

Starting point is 06:35:11 Which, 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, you know in the middle shoplifting, you know All these all these goods and nothing happens, right a society where you know You have the vocal level of sympathy where you get to the kind of insanity of math is white supremacist and whatever

Starting point is 06:35:43 You know nonsense is is having today is terrible. But a society that's totally stripped of sympathy is also not one that one would want to be part of, right? That's just like the, you know, whether it's 4-chans actual culture or it's faint culture or something like that or some weird combination, that's also not good. It's like Russian in the 90s. Like nobody trusts anybody. That's also bad. And, you know, being totally sovereign, that sounds good. And there's a lot that is good about it. And 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 kind of, you just go kind of too crazy into that corner.

Starting point is 06:36:28 And then of course, though, the other extreme of, you know, 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 is kind of, has badness when it's there, but also it's total extreme opposite is bad. And so you want to kind of carve out like an intelligent intermediate of these three poles,

Starting point is 06:36:48 and that's the decentralized center or the decentralized center I call. Now with that said, I think there is a repositioning in particular of vote capital that is happening. And I think if the 2000s was the global war on terror, and then the channel just changed to vocalist in the 2010s. So 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.

Starting point is 06:37:13 Okay, yeah. And so here is this graph. Okay, David Rosado is a 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. Program, tweets, hypothesis, although some newspapers can survive the switch to online subscriptions, none can do it and remain politically neutral, called newspaper record. You have to pick a site to get people to subscribe and there's a bunch of plots on the x-axis years on the y-axis is the frequency of use and sexism has been going up misogyny has been going up sexist patriarchy, mass planning, toxic

Starting point is 06:38:03 masculinity, male privilege. All these terms have been going up very intensely in the past, 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 dollars over the four years from 08 to 2012. Yeah. Tech helped Obama get reelected and media was positive on tech until December 2012.

Starting point is 06:38:42 They wrote like the nerds go marching in in the Atlantic. Then after January 2013, once Obama was discussed, 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

Starting point is 06:39:09 that essentially took all of these weapons that had been developed in academia to win status competitions in humanities departments. And then they just deployed them, right? And essentially, somebody observed that wokeness is the combination of fecalty and deconstruction and civil rights, where deconstruction takes away, you know,

Starting point is 06:39:30 the legitimacy of the old order and then civil rights says, okay, the only thing that's good is this, right? Which is, says the old order is also bad in a different way, but this is what's good. And that is the underpinning ideology, that all these words have embedded in them like an ideology, right? And everybody if thinking about it is This is not my reference, but I'll cite it anyway the glossary of the Greek

Starting point is 06:39:53 Military Huntah, right the creation and or use of special terms are employed by the Huntah's propaganda tools Because essentially the word itself embeds a concept you can Russell conjugate something one way or the other right Russell conjugation is a concept that I sweat, you perspire, but she glows. You can always take something, you know, you are uncontrollably angry, but he is rightfully indignant. Okay. You have a thin skin, they clap back. Right. So once you kind of realize that these words have just been chosen in such a way as to de-illegionize their target and they all went vertical in 2013 and they were suddenly targeted against their erstwhile alleys, you know, in tech but also just across the country, you can see that this great awakening, that's what

Starting point is 06:40:38 Eglaceus called it by plan where it's the great awakening, right? 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 super set of religion and political doctrine. These words went vertical, and all the terrorism stuff you just know is kind of fell off the cliff. That was the obsession of everything in the 2000s. And just channel change, right? It's amazing how that happened.

Starting point is 06:41:08 It's not like getting the pieces got picked up. Some of those wars are still raging, of course. And there's victims to this walkism movement. But in a weird way, even though some parts of it, just like, you know, there's wars in the Middle East that still keep raging, there's certainly active fronts of wokeism, you know, but in a sense, the next shift is already on, you know, why? It's a pivot from wokeism to status. In many ways, NYT is sort of, and more generally, the US establishment is

Starting point is 06:41:38 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 linen after the revolution implemented the new economic policy, which you may be aware of, right? Which is just like, X percent more capitalism. You 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, you know, oh, okay, fine, he's going to 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 it.

Starting point is 06:42:09 Then it went extremely intense again, right? Similar to like, Mao's like a hundred flowers thing, let a hundred flowers bloom and 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 establishment is somewhat tacking back to the center where, you know, they're not talking BLM and abolish the police. They're saying, fun the capital police, right? They've gone from the narrative of 2020, which was meant to win a domestic contest where they said America's a systemically racist country,

Starting point is 06:42:42 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 is calling itself the same guy, by the way, saying it's so institutionally racist,

Starting point is 06:43:03 a systemically racist, and you're saying, well, we're the leader of the free world and the number under obviously there's an inconsistency between the domestic propaganda and the foreign propaganda, right? There's a contrast between abolish the police and put two billion for the capital police. 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 Republican or rightist, but fund the FBI, fund the Capitol police who tend to be just like in the Union,

Starting point is 06:43:32 the national things like the KGB, they're for the state, but there are always 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 going to get, I think? I think you're going to 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 going to see the signaling on American stateism as opposed to wokeism, okay, which is 30 degrees back towards the center, right? Conversely, on the other side,

Starting point is 06:44:15 you're going to 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 quote, libertarians, right. And here is the, here's the visual of that. So that's why I like, you know, as I wrote the book and after I showed, it's like, you know, I'm already seeing this

Starting point is 06:44:51 shift happening from War on Terror to Bokehzum 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, dollar versus crypto. That's right. And some folks switch sides, right? Because you have folks like, you know, Jack Dorsey and a lot of the tech founders in basically the lower left corner, right, who were blue, but are now going to become orange or orange and your 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 re-aligning as you call it.

Starting point is 06:45:36 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. Right.

Starting point is 06:46:15 Right. I was in Port Point. Right. Yes, it's a very important point. Yes. Because you're seeing essentially, yes. Right. So the choke pointing on energy is pushing a price

Starting point is 06:46:26 is across the board for a lot of things. The supply, you know, China's not doing as 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? You know, you have,

Starting point is 06:46:43 I mean, when China, Russia and the US are all, and Europe is, you know, like there's folks who are just insane about degrowth and they're against, you know, 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 way strengthening against certain other things because 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 maximums would just say infinity over 21 million. And so therefore you print all the dollars

Starting point is 06:47:25 really 20 million Bitcoins and Bitcoin goes to infinity. But it can be something where lots of other currencies die and the dollar is actually exported via stablecoins. Okay. But I do think- So still moves, yeah, still moves somehow into the crypto crisis. Yeah, yeah, I think it's kind of like Microsoft where Windows is still around,

Starting point is 06:47:45 right? Microsoft is still around. It's still a multi-hundred-billion dollar company. It has. It doesn't mean it. It doesn't mean it. Don't worry. All my machines are windows and they're still a boot. Yeah. Okay, okay. I don't know a single Mac. Really? Okay. You are unusual on that. Yeah. So at least for hours. It's not ideology. Just convenience. Fine. I mean, they actually now post-Sethia, they do make some good stuff. Microsoft Teams is good. There's a lot of stuff in it. New CEO has done a lot of innovative things.

Starting point is 06:48:13 Like GitHub. Yeah, well, there's an acquisition, but still. There's an acquisition. The acquisition, the pivoting of vision and motivations and focus and all that kind of stuff. So anyway, yes. Microsoft does an analogy metaphor for something? Well, yeah, so basically just like, you know, they didn't need a turnaround,

Starting point is 06:48:30 but they are, 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 establishment or CCP has more power over fewer people.

Starting point is 06:48:47 Okay, I see and so you know but you can exit if you if you're there you're kind of nuckling under or whatever but you can exit right. And so I mentioned the those three polls CCP is obviously a billion people 1.4 aligned under the digital you on so on, right? NYT is the entire, you know, it's the tech company, it's the US dollar, it is the US dollar. And then crypto capital is everybody else. But I actually think that over time that third world is web 3 this time and that's the third poll and that's India and its Israel and it's lots of American conservatives and left libertarians and libertarians and it's also lots of Chinese liberals. 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, you know, the, like, you know, it's come so nationalist and crazy and difficult for

Starting point is 06:49:34 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, want to, while they are generally sympathetic to the West, right? And they're 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, Indian thinks of as a poor country, Israel thinks of itself as a small country, and so

Starting point is 06:50:18 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's. Indian Israel, I think, are two sovereign states that have a lot of globally mobile tech talent that obviously have ties to the West with the large diaspora that are hard to demonize, you know, in or in the sense of willing to argue on the internet. It's put it like in English, right? It's very important.

Starting point is 06:50:55 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 and so forth. That's the center, as opposed to the left of the, the, the, the, the bulk American US establishment or the right of the ultra national CCP. Right. 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,

Starting point is 06:51:26 you can argue against this, right? You can say it's unipolar role. America's totally dominant. That's one argument. You can say it's a bipolar role. It's just the US versus China. Now, everybody else will have to be forced to align with one or the other.

Starting point is 06:51:36 J. S. Shanker, 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, 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?

Starting point is 06:51:51 In such a thing. It's a funny way of putting it, right? But it's also true. And so you can say this unipolar, you can say this bipolar, you can say it's just multiple polar. And everybody is kind of, there are, you know, in India, Israel, all these groups are out there. But I actually think it's gonna be tri-polar.

Starting point is 06:52:03 The reason it's tri-polar is, these three pools are out there. But I actually think it's gonna be tri-puller. The reason it's tri-puller 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 a main company. It's a stable ideology. A stable ideology, that's right.

Starting point is 06:52:20 Obviously, the Boaks have control of lots of institutions. They've got the US establishment and 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? Yes, whereas for all those countries that don't want to either be dominated by the US media corporations that can, or social media that can just sense or trump, nor do they want

Starting point is 06:53:06 to 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 very wise, okay? But I want to just come up the stack a little bit and just return to that original point,

Starting point is 06:53:31 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 capitalists and letting people have just a share of what they owned, right? But social media, we're still 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,

Starting point is 06:54:08 even more fundamentally. You are at the, just the whim of a giant corporation can hit a button and everything you work for over years gone. Okay. That is, even if that is 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 when we're living more and more in the digital world,

Starting point is 06:54:33 we need to check on that power and the check on that power is crypto and its property rights and its decentralization, right? And 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 a, with a press of a key that just gives, you know, bad governance, bad corporations so much power that's wrong, right? That's why I'm a medium and long-term bull on crypto simply because they check on this thing, and that if you think about in terms of just abstract decentralizations, one

Starting point is 06:55:14 thing, but you think about 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 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?

Starting point is 06:55:40 So you're lexfremend.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, this raise of secure and keys. But the good part is tada. You actually have property rights in the Hernandez Soto sense. You have something you own, ownership, digital ownership.

Starting point is 06:55:58 It's, the cloud is great, but crypto gives you some of the functionality of the cloud, while also having some of the functionality offline world where you have the key. So it's a V3. It's continuous theme. The V1 was offline. I've got a key, I own it, I have de facto control. V2 is the cloud, someone else managed it for me, it's hosted, I get collaboration, so on. V3 is the chain where you combine aspects of those.

Starting point is 06:56:20 You have the global state of the cloud, but you have the local permission and controlling of the private key. 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 Aceymco where I talk 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 search and its social and its messaging. It's actually even operating systems and and eventually cloud and whatnot. Do you want me to talk about that briefly? Yeah, yeah, if you can move you see so very big how broad you see the effect of good. So first crypto is fundamentally a new way of building back end systems, right?

Starting point is 06:57:00 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, you know, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman have done at OpenAI. I mean, the phenomenal in terms of research, they've pushed them to look forward. I give them a ton of credit, right? Still, it was great to see StableDefusion out there, which was OpenSource AI, right?

Starting point is 06:57:24 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 the, 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.

Starting point is 06:57:44 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, etc. In a real sense, like private property, arguably didn't exist

Starting point is 06:58:00 in the same way before crypto. International law didn't exist before crypto. How is, how are you going to 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 tags or the other obligations between the two?

Starting point is 06:58:16 Set up a US adapter or a Chinese adapter to go between. But now that Brazilian and Bangladesh can go peer to peer, because they're using blockchain, right? They can agree on a system of law that is completely, you know, 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

Starting point is 06:58:50 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 D so, 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 either scan, that Google is 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? They don't think of it as search, but it is search. It's absolutely search. It's a very important kind of search engine.

Starting point is 06:59:25 Once you have crypto social, you now show that you're not just indexing in a block explorer on chain transactions, but on chain communications. Now you suddenly see, oh, the entire social web that Google couldn't index. It could only index a World Web and not the social web. Now it's actually the on-chain signed web because every postage is usually signed. It's a new set of signals. It's way easier to index than either the World Wide Web or the social web because open and public. So this is a total disruptive thing to search in the medium term because the 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.

Starting point is 07:00:08 Why? Because, or it's disrupt eventually, because 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.

Starting point is 07:00:21 But with the ENS name or with a crypto name, you can be provably audibly int and encrypted because you're actually sending it back and forth because the private key is local. That itself, given how important that is, you could man in the middle signal or WhatsApp because there's a server there. So int and encrypted messaging will happen and with payments and all this other stuff. So you get the crypto messaging apps. You get operating systems. Why? Well, the frontier of operating systems, I mean, look, Windows, Linux and macOS have been around forever. But if you actually think about, what is a blockchain?

Starting point is 07:00:56 Well, there's operating systems, there's web browsers. A blockchain is the most complicated thing since an operating system will work. Because it's a kind of operating system. Why? It's got something like Ethereum, it 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,

Starting point is 07:01:13 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 Web2 company, I can probably come up with a Web3 variant of it,

Starting point is 07:01:33 right? Like Ethereum is, I mean, and this is high praise for both parties, but Ethereum is like the crypto stripe, right? Or the Web3 stripe. And you will see versions of everything else that are like this. But I kind of described search, social, messaging, operating systems, the phone, right? Salona's doing a crypt of phone.

Starting point is 07:01:55 Why do you want that? Again, digital property. Apple was talking about running some script to find if people were having C-sam, like, child porn or whatever on their phones, right? And even NYT actually reported that, like, Google ran something like this and found false positive. Some guy had to take a photo of a kid for, you know, medical diagnosis.

Starting point is 07:02:17 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.

Starting point is 07:02:40 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. So it becomes something you just hold on you with your person at all times, like your normal phone. You might have backups and stuff, but the crypto phone is an insanely important thing. So that's search, that 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

Starting point is 07:03:15 meetings? Please. Okay, AI and AR, okay. This massive impact, obviously, of AI and social media. You're going to 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 hit in the 2010s,

Starting point is 07:03:41 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, 2010s, we're now going to 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 some that Google is representing Nigerians and Indians and Brazilians and Japanese like those folks need to have access themselves, right?

Starting point is 07:04:03 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 bognus 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 want to build a Asian Lord of the Rings, they can do that. They want to build an Indian one, they can do that.

Starting point is 07:04:31 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 the AI decentralization fixes the bias problem and AI, which a lot of people seem to. Yeah, centralization is... Talk about and focus on. Yeah, centralization is inherently unrepresentative, fundamentally. You can mathematically show it.

Starting point is 07:04:56 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 that private corporate interest. One of the things about the woke capitalism thing, by the way, is the deplatforming of Trump is political. Other things are political. But do you know what deplatforming started with?

Starting point is 07:05:17 In the late 2000s, early 2010s, all the open social stuff was when deplatforming was being used as a corporate weapon against mere catat and Zingha and T-Spring, right? These were companies that were competing with features of, you know, a tweet deck, etc. They were 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 going to happen is both those two things, the political and the corporate are going to come together. Why? In the Soviet Union, denunciation was used as a tool to, for example,

Starting point is 07:05:55 undercut romantic rivals, right? There's a great article called 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 the center of the Soviet Union. Anybody could be kicked into the pit at any moment. And Tadah, well, Ivan's out, you know, and now, you know, hey, Anna, you know, whatever, right? Okay.

Starting point is 07:06:19 That same thing is going to be used by, well, capitalist is being used by well, capitalist, where the woke argument is used to justify pushing their competitor out of the app store or downracking them in search. Well, again, you wouldn't want to 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,

Starting point is 07:06:45 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. Technology is so powerful in the wrong hands, it could be used. So we will charge you 99 for every use of it. How is that? How altruistic is that? Is that amazingly altruistic?

Starting point is 07:07:03 It's really good, right? So once you kind of see that, as I said, whenever they're positioning an economics, you can go ahead and culture. When you're positioning on culture, you can go ahead and economics. If they're so woke, why are they rich? If they're so concerned about representation wise, it's centralized. Answer. They're not actually concerned about it.

Starting point is 07:07:20 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. So the amount of stuff that can be done with AI now, like it also helps the pseudonym's economy, as I was talking about with the AI Zoom. So you have totally new sites,

Starting point is 07:07:39 totally new apps that are based on that. I think it may, I mean, it changes, you're going to have new Google Docs, 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, like a, for example, the image to image thing with the Seattle diffusion where you make a little cartoon,

Starting point is 07:08:11 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 wanted to do, right? So, and I saw this funny thing, which was a riff on Peter Teal's line, which is AI Centralized and crypto is decentralized. And somebody was saying, actually, it turns out crypto is centralized with the CBDCs and stablecoin and so on.

Starting point is 07:08:34 But AI is getting decentralized with stable diffusion, ha ha, which is funny. And I think there's centralized and decentralized versions of each of these, right? And finally, the third poll actually, you know, Tiel, you know, he talks about AI and crypto, but the third poll is actually that's sort of underappreciated because 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.

Starting point is 07:08:57 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 VR, of course, a lot, but the AR is not as obvious actually. Okay, so AR glasses, what are AR glasses? So you take stamp-shed spectacles, Google Glass, Apple's AR Kit, Facebook's Oculus Quest 2, right? Or meta-quest 2, whatever you- okay.

Starting point is 07:09:30 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 says 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 floating sigils. Did we talk?

Starting point is 07:10:06 Did I show you that? So this is a really important, just visual concept. That right there shows with ARKit, you can see a globe floating outside. 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

Starting point is 07:10:35 created globe is floating in the air. Yes, but it's invisible if you're not holding up the air kit phone. Yes. Right? So only you have a window into this artificial world. That's right. And then here is another thing, which shows you another piece of it. And this is using E and S to unlock a door.

Starting point is 07:10:56 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 can be a door to a building. It could be the gates to a community. It could be your digital login. Okay, and so... Amazing.

Starting point is 07:11:20 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 currency's unified 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 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 is 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, you know, Dorsi knew that mobile was going to be big, and that's why he had 140

Starting point is 07:12:11 characters for Twitter, because there's like an SMS code limitation and Twitter restarted 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 kind of move your fingers or something, and you can tap. You have to figure out the gesture, you don't want to have gorilla arms. Maybe you do have a keyboard outside, or just even like a... You can even have a desk like this.

Starting point is 07:12:47 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. 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 AI and social media. But really one last thing I'll say, which is the non-technological part, is I think we'll go from very broad networks, which are hundreds of millions or billions of people, like Twitter and Facebook, which have many small communities in them, to much smaller networks that

Starting point is 07:13:23 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 because you're going from eyeballs in the 1980s, sorry, eyeballs in the 1990s, to daily active users in the 2000s, to holders in the 2010s.

Starting point is 07:13:42 So you go from just like, oh, I'm just a lucky loo, to unlocking 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

Starting point is 07:14:06 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 this and it's a that and it's like Estonia, you know, 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 is 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 them multiple times to really think. And thank you for that, especially in this time, where the lessons learned from the pandemic are unclear to

Starting point is 07:15:02 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 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,

Starting point is 07:15:33 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 we have you. So, yeah, maybe to your younger self, advice to your younger self. You know, my friend Novel is, you know, he, this is a lot of what he puts out is the very practical, you know, brass tax next steps. And I tend towards the You know macro. Of course we both do sort of, you know, both kind of thing, right?

Starting point is 07:16:11 Let's talk brass tax next steps because I actually am practical or at least practical enough, you know, to get things done I think it's just like you said you're breaking up the new book into three. Yes. Is motivation, theory, and practice? Motivation, theory, and practice. That's right. And so let's practice. So let's start practice. OK.

Starting point is 07:16:30 Set in Visual Scale. Right. So first, what skill do you learn as a young kid? So let me just give what the ideal full stack thing is. And then you have to say, OK, 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

Starting point is 07:16:50 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.

Starting point is 07:17:07 And you might need to use a lot of that continuous math with AI nowadays, right? Because a lot of that is actually helpful, right? Great descent and whatnot. But computer science and stats are to this century what physics was the last why. Because, for example, what percentage of your time do you spend looking at a screen of some kind?

Starting point is 07:17:27 Large percentage of the time. Large percentage of the time, 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,

Starting point is 07:17:55 which is more interesting in some sense in the offline world, because we look at it more, it changes faster, it's, right? And where the physics are set by programmers. What that means is physics itself is obviously very important for the natural world. Computer science and stats are for the artificial world. Why is that? Because every domain has algorithms and data structures. Whether it's aviation, you go to American Airlines, right?

Starting point is 07:18:25 They're going to have, you know, planes and seats and tickets and so on. So it's data structures and you're going to have algorithms and functions that connect them. You're going to have tables that those data is run to. If it's Walmart, you're going to have SKUs and you're going to have shelves and you're going to have, so you have data structures and you have algorithms 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.

Starting point is 07:18:52 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 basic stuff like bigot notation and whatnot and you need to understand all your probability distributions, okay? You know, good exercise by the way is to go

Starting point is 07:19:14 from the Bernoulli trials, right? To everything else. Because 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?

Starting point is 07:19:29 And computer science includes not just big O, but software engineering. Well, computer science is theory, software engineering is practice, right? You could argue, probably in stats is theory, and then data science is practice, right? And so you include all of that together. I put all those packages that's

Starting point is 07:19:46 you're in 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, uh, that could be true. It could not be true. I don't know.

Starting point is 07:20:04 I, I share about that because, well, could not be true. I don't know. Are you sure about that? Because you should have been... You should have been... You might be able to get quite far standing on the shoulders of giants. You can, but it depends. You couldn't build... Well, okay. Somebody of you could.

Starting point is 07:20:20 Maybe you could. However you were going to finish that sentence, I could push back. You could probably push back, right? But here's what I was going to finish that sentence. I could push back. You could probably push back, right? But here's what I was going to say. I was going to 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, you know, layout of memory and, you know, the era of compilers. But you might want to see the thing is,

Starting point is 07:20:45 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, you know, for example, at least a while back, Facebook.com, like it was literally, it's just a single C++ compiled binary.

Starting point is 07:21:03 Or so, it was not super close. It was like hip hop. They had a PHP compiler where they had just one giant binary. I mean, it became this wrong, but that's whatever call, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's, it should be simple. It should be simple. And then you have guys like John Carmack,

Starting point is 07:21:20 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 are 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 ten years. Yeah, or maybe even more than that. This is the great man theory of history versus the determinist waves of history or pushing things along.

Starting point is 07:21:54 The way I reconcile those is the tech tree model of history. You know, like civilization, you're playing games, civilization. Yeah. So like, civilization, you've got the tech tree and you can go and be like, okay, I'm going to get spearmen or I I'm gonna do greenery 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 tectrine.

Starting point is 07:22:14 So he's a great man because there wasn't other, there wasn't a leab-ness, leab-nits, to Satoshi's newden, right? Like Vitalik, as you know, amazing as he is, was five years later, or thereabouts, right? There wasn't contemporaneous, like, another person that was doing what Stescher was doing is truly sweet generous. And that shows what one person can do. Probably Steve Jobs of that pull, given how the company was dying before he got there and he built it into the most valuable,

Starting point is 07:22:39 or put on the directory, becomes the most valuable company in the world, it shows that there is a great man. Maybe more than just being 5 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 pretty soon 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 so it is always a tension between the individual and society on this, right? But coming back, so CS and Stats, that's where you want to learn. I think physics is also good to know because you go one level deeper and of course all these devices,

Starting point is 07:23:15 you're not going to be able to build, you know, lidar or things like that without understanding physics, right? You mentioned that as one side of the brain, what about the other? Right, so CS and Stats is that side. or things like that without understanding physics. You mentioned that as one side of the brain. What about the other? Right. So CSSXS is that side. Okay. And then you can go in any domain, any company, kick butt, add value.

Starting point is 07:23:31 Right. So now the other side is creator, becoming a creator. First, online, 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 changed everything,

Starting point is 07:24:05 just like the introduction of property rights and 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 investments, you can do all this sort of stuff, right? So in many ways, I think anybody who's listening,

Starting point is 07:24:24 who's like, I wanna build a billion dollar company, 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, tech and media actually, it's funny,

Starting point is 07:24:46 they, there's this collision and sometimes there's an ad mismatching event and there's like a repositioning, right? And media tech, 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 versus decentralized tech and media and centralized tech and media is

Starting point is 07:25:07 NYT and Google which have all become moccified the the establishment companies but decentralized tech and media is like sub-stack all a lot the defectors from you know from the US establishment from the NYT have gone to sub-stack but also all the founders and funders are much more vocal on Twitter, whether it's Mark Anderson, Jack Dorsey, Jeff Bezos, Zuckerberg, Zuckerberg is just cutting out the establishment and just going direct to posting himself or posting the jiu-jitsu thing, which you recently did, or going and talking to Rogan, right? And so you now have this sort of Adam Smash and kind of reconstitution.

Starting point is 07:25:45 Why is that important? Well, look, once you realize US media companies are companies and their employees, Sultzburgers employees are just dogs on the leash, right? They're hitmen for old money, a staccents for the establishment. They're never gonna investigate him, okay? There's this thing right now,

Starting point is 07:26:02 like some strike that, or possible strike that's going at the near times. The, obviously, the most obvious, rich corporate zillionaire, the epitome of white privilege is, you know, and again, another kind of person with things white is an insult, right? But the, you know, the guy who inherited the company from his father's father's father,

Starting point is 07:26:21 in NFL, right? You know, you're supposed to have the Rooney Rule where he's supposed to interview diverse candidates for the top job? You know, you're supposed to have the Rooney Roller, you're supposed to interview diverse candidates for the top job. You know, the other competitors for the top job of the publisher in your TimesR? Two cousins of Salzburg. So it's three CIS straight white males in 2017

Starting point is 07:26:36 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 says white man who has makes millions of dollars a year

Starting point is 07:26:53 and it makes like 50X 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 wider than the tech company's mean denouncing. Okay, and again, there's a website called Texture Nellism is less diverse than tech.com

Starting point is 07:27:18 which actually shows the numbers on this, right? Here I can look at this numbers, right? So why do I say this? Well, Centralized US media has lost a ton of clout. Engagement is down, you've seen crypto prices down, like stock prices have crashed. That's very obvious and quantifiable. Less visible is that media engagement has crashed, right?

Starting point is 07:27:38 By the way, yeah, there's a plot that shows in the X axis percent white and then the Y axis of the different companies. And the tech companies are basically below 50 percent white and all the different media tech journalism companies are way above you know 70 80 90 90 plus 90 plus percent white hypocrisy, ladies and gentlemen. I mean, again, I'm not the kind of person who thinks white is an insult, but these guys are.

Starting point is 07:28:11 And they are the wokest whites on the planet, right? It's like ridiculous, right? I, you know, it's like anyone, 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, it's funny you say that because there's this guy, Am Rosenthal, on his

Starting point is 07:28:35 Gravestone, we kept the paper straight, and actually, he essentially went, and this is a managing editor of the New York Times for almost, you know, from six, nine to 77, executive editor from seven to 86. And it was a history. Oh, oh, Lord. Yeah. History of basically keeping, you know, gear reporter shots. So essentially, the way I think about it is,

Starting point is 07:28:57 New York Post reported that just to talk about this for a second, it's so insane, all right. New York Post reported, and I've got some of this in the book, okay, but a brawz and the Rosenthal managing editor of the New York Times from 1969 to 1977, executive editor from 1997 to 1986. It's Graves Don't Read, he kept the paper straight. And then here's Jeet here on this, he kept the paper straight. As it happens, Rosenthal was in Torres, homophobic, he made it a specific policy to paper

Starting point is 07:29:28 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 5 million Ukrainians to death. And now it's reinvented themselves as like a cheerleader to stand with the Ukraine. Right. They were four, you know, Abrozenthal's homophobia before they were against it. Right. They were like, if you saw the link, I just paste it in. Okay. During BLM, you know,

Starting point is 07:30:00 it's credibly reported that I haven't seen this refuted. The family that owns in your times were slaveholders. Somehow that stayed out of 1619 and BLM coverage. We're literally getting the profits from slavery to help bootstrap, what was the times or went into it. They actually did this article on the compound interest of slaveholders in Haiti and how much they owed people. If you apply that to how much money they made off of slaves,

Starting point is 07:30:24 can you even name one of Salisberger 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?MDs like, you know, the whole truth, 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.

Starting point is 07:30:58 So giant or well-earned billboards, right, which say, you know, the truth is essential here. It looks like this. This was one. 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. This is like, yeah, this is 1984 type of stuff. Yeah, and here's the thing. Do you know what other truth?

Starting point is 07:31:40 Yeah. What 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 Prada? Yeah, yeah. There you go, that's right. What is the Soviet translation?

Starting point is 07:32:01 What's the Russian translation of Prada is? That's truth. Yeah. That's sorry, that're doing the correct thing. My head, yes. Yeah, truth. An ironically, huh? And again, it just so happens as...

Starting point is 07:32:14 Is this an uninartical? What's that? Right. So like, you know, it Provdo, like at least you were calm. These guys have figured out how to get charged 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?

Starting point is 07:32:30 Basically, legacy media has delegitimized themselves, right? Every day that those quote, investigative journalists don't investigate Salzberger 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,

Starting point is 07:32:55 okay, well that means I have to think about these media corporations as competitors. They are competitors, they are competitors for advertisers, influencers, influencers, 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're given 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?

Starting point is 07:33:25 And many kinds of tactics that 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,

Starting point is 07:33:47 and that's not considered stalking, right? That's not considered spamming. They are allowed to this and make money doing this. Whereas if you so much just criticize them, oh my god, it's an attack on the free press. Well, blah, blah, right? But you are the free press and I am the free press, like we're the free press. Again, it goes blah, right? But you are the free press and I am 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 corporations thing. It's everybody's right.

Starting point is 07:34:11 And what actually happened with social media, what they're against is not that it is an attack on the rock sheet, that it's the ultimate democracy because people have a voice now that didn't use to have a voice. You know what I'm saying? Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one. You're right, that old one, right?

Starting point is 07:34:24 We're never, 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, 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 Buffalo, New York, right?

Starting point is 07:34:45 You maybe you can gather some friends around. You didn't have the licenses to get, 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. So that's what this counter-decentralization is meant, both in the US and in China, this crackdown. But as if like a stock went up like a hundred X and then dropped like 30%, all the deplatforming

Starting point is 07:35:17 stuff, yes, it's bad. It's a rear-ward 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 going to succeed outside it, because you're trying to retrofit speech and thought controls onto an ostensibly free society, right? Now that check got cash, people actually have a voice, it's not going to 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?

Starting point is 07:35:55 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 established immediate corporations are your competitors. 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 when you realize that,

Starting point is 07:36:27 you're like, okay, I need to build my own voice. If you're Brazilian, you're Nigerian, you're in the Midwest or the Middle East, right? If you're Japanese, whatever 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

Starting point is 07:36:49 is just not gonna be in one's own interest. You don't have to even agree with everything I'm saying or even all of that 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 for words is actually very important, right? So that's the second big thing.

Starting point is 07:37:04 And this is the thing 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 statisticians, something like that, electro engineer, etc. 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.

Starting point is 07:37:34 Okay, as kind of a funny way of, you know, putting it, right? Yeah, chicken and egg. Yeah. Contropositive, 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, you know, legacy institutions, right?

Starting point is 07:37:53 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 MPA. I mean, there's some good people there, but everybody should have their own movies. You know, there's people should be able to tell their own stories and not just wait for it to be cast through Hollywood and Hollywood was just making remakes anyway,

Starting point is 07:38:28 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 with AI and crypto for property rights.

Starting point is 07:38:57 You'll also need alternatives to all the major tech companies. That was the list that I went through with decentralized search and social and messaging and operating systems and even the crypto phone. Finally, you need alternatives to US political institutions and more generally and Chinese political institutions. What are those? That's where the network state comes in. The fundamental concept is, as I mentioned,

Starting point is 07:39:26 only 2% of the world can become president of the United States about the number of Americans who are 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 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, 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,

Starting point is 07:39:56 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 with 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 about the party line and so on. The V1 of this is like folks like, you know, Francis Suarez or Nayy Baccheli of El Salvador, but you know, Suarez is a great example where

Starting point is 07:40:28 while not a full sovereign or anything like that, he has many ways, and maybe is the skills of a tech CEO, where he's 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 Swars is a V1, I love friends, Swars, I love what they're doing. The next iteration of that is to actually build a community

Starting point is 07:40:56 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

Starting point is 07:41:14 and you have the content creation and you build your own distribution, your 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 can build the vision of the good talking about 8 billion people. I mean, there's no more inspiring.

Starting point is 07:41:36 I mean, sometimes when we look at how things are broken, there could be a cynical paralysis, 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 with the Americas were to Europe. A new world, okay. In the sense of this cloud continent has just come down,

Starting point is 07:42:08 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's ever far in the physical world and vice versa, right?

Starting point is 07:42:22 And so this will, because it's this new domain, it gives rise to virtual worlds that eventually become physical. And the same way that most people don't know this that well, but the America has 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?

Starting point is 07:42:44 There are many, many movements that came back to the old world that started here. And the same way, you know, I, I don't call it the mainstream media anymore, you know, 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, there are things 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 going to be India.

Starting point is 07:43:20 Okay. They're all, they just got 5G L, 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, don't figure it but to communicate. I actually have real lists 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 Corsair course,

Starting point is 07:43:51 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, you know, like this lady from

Starting point is 07:44:06 Brazil. And they knew scumbags, 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, this YouTube video where there's an 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 it in Indian accent, everybody laughed, everybody knew what he meant. And you're like, wait, that is a piece of what people think of as American internet slang

Starting point is 07:44:42 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, Italians, Jewish people, African Americans, you know, everybody, right? And the same way the internet is much more represent of the world than the USA's. You may have started America and they got forked by the rest of the world. That's right. And it is, it gives a global equality of opportunity.

Starting point is 07:45:16 It's even more capitalist than America. 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, that, so I want to be very clear about something. But when I say this kind of stuff, people will be like, oh my god, you hate America so much. You know what I'm saying? And that's not at all what I'm saying.

Starting point is 07:45:38 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 where, I mean, look at the Queen and so on. People respect the UK and so on. Everyone's coming there to pay their respects. I might not be the greatest example, but yes, go on. Well, put it like this broadly speaking. They're not like burning the British flag in FG or anything. 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 where they're pro-British or anti-British,

Starting point is 07:46:10 right? 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, you know, run by them, right? And then you can have like a better, you know, kind of arm's length-length relationship. 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. And you know, happy that Britain is doing its own thing. I'm glad they're doing well. They're actually doing some special economic stuff now. In the same way, if you think of it as not being pro-American or anti-American,

Starting point is 07:46:48 because that's a with us or against this 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 it perhaps, obviously example, like is longevity pro-American or anti-American? You know, no, it's like it's

Starting point is 07:47:16 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 too, but different from. That's totally possible to do. We've got examples of that. When I talk about this, I'm talking about it as really in many ways, US and Western ideals, 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, are global values, which is freedom of speech, private property, protection from search and seizure. And actually, so that's all the Bill of Rights

Starting point is 07:47:58 types, 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 V2 of the book, a digital bill of rights. And so this was a really good, decent first cut at a digital bill of rights. He talks about the right to encrypt, the right to compute, the right to repair,

Starting point is 07:48:19 the right to portability. So encrypt is perhaps obvious, e know, e-commerce and everything. Compute like your device, it's not like you can't just have somebody intercept it or you know, 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. Do you see this? No, it's hilarious. But click the tweet that I sent you just before this one. I was like, in Volkamerica, they're abolishing accelerated math because math is quote white supremacist.

Starting point is 07:48:57 Not to be outdone, Europe seeks to regulate AI by regulating logic itself. You can't reason without a license. Article 3, for purpose of this regulation, the following definition apply. AI system is software that's developed with one or more of the techniques and approaches, listen, annex one. And you know, it's an annex one and annex one logic can knowledge based approaches. 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.

Starting point is 07:49:32 The entire web has been aglified 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, with the private keys are local. No, 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. It's a struggling how to define the digital bill

Starting point is 07:49:59 or rights, I suppose, and doing it so extremely clumsily. It's funny, you know, like I heard this thing, which is like, you're up to say, well, look, the US and China are way ahead of us in AI, but we're going to be a leader in AI regulation. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And something we haven't mentioned much

Starting point is 07:50:15 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 isn't many stories of the pursuit and happiness and the thing that isn't many stories that we humans conjure up, which is love. 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,

Starting point is 07:50:53 make love, make beautiful things together as human beings. Bologgy, 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 and lightning. Thank you. Thank you, brother, for everything you do. Thank you for inspiring all of us. Well, thanks. This was great. And. Thank you for inspiring all of us. Well, this was great. And we didn't get through all the questions. We didn't.

Starting point is 07:51:31 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,

Starting point is 07:51:53 however long we started the conversation. This was incredible. It was really brilliant. You were brilliant throughout on all those different topics though. Yeah, thank you again for talking to me. This is great. I really appreciate being here.

Starting point is 07:52:06 Sir. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Bolognese Navasan. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you some words from Ray Bradbury. People ask me to predict the future. When all I want to do is to prevent it,

Starting point is 07:52:24 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. you

Lex Fridman Podcast - #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA

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