Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA

00:00:00.000 | "Donald Trump was probably the biggest person ever

00:00:02.600 | "to be removed from social media."

00:00:04.840 | Do you understand why that was done?

00:00:06.820 | Can you still man the case for it and against it?

00:00:09.680 | - Everybody who's watching this around the world

00:00:12.220 | basically saw, let's say, US establishment

00:00:15.600 | or Democrat-aligned folks just decapitate

00:00:19.600 | the head of state digitally, right?

00:00:23.320 | Like just boom, gone, okay?

00:00:25.440 | And they're like, "Well, if they can do that in public

00:00:27.800 | "to the US president, who's ostensibly

00:00:29.520 | "the most powerful man in the world."

00:00:31.480 | What does the Mexican president stand against that?

00:00:34.360 | Nothing.

00:00:35.760 | Regardless of whether it was justified on this guy,

00:00:39.400 | that means they will do it to anybody.

00:00:40.960 | Now the seal is broken.

00:00:42.040 | Just like the bailouts, as exceptional as they were

00:00:44.280 | in the first year, everybody was shocked by them,

00:00:46.440 | then they became a policy instrument.

00:00:48.720 | And now there's bailouts happening,

00:00:51.000 | every single bill is printing another whatever,

00:00:53.040 | billion dollars or something like that.

00:00:55.000 | - The following is a conversation with Biology,

00:00:59.240 | Srinivasan, an angel investor, tech founder,

00:01:02.480 | philosopher, and author of "The Network State,

00:01:06.400 | "How to Start a New Country."

00:01:08.880 | He was formerly the CTO of Coinbase

00:01:11.800 | and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

00:01:15.920 | This conversation is over seven hours.

00:01:19.480 | For some folks, that's too long.

00:01:21.840 | For some, too short.

00:01:23.800 | For some, just right.

00:01:26.120 | There are chapter timestamps, there are clips,

00:01:29.040 | so you can jump around or, like I prefer to do

00:01:32.120 | with podcasts and audio books I enjoy,

00:01:34.840 | you can sit down, relax with a loved human,

00:01:38.360 | animal, or consumable substance, or all three if you like,

00:01:43.360 | and enjoy the ride from start to finish.

00:01:46.160 | Biology is a fascinating mind

00:01:48.000 | who thinks deeply about this world

00:01:50.000 | and how we might be able to engineer it

00:01:52.840 | in order to maximize the possibility

00:01:55.080 | that humanity flourishes on this fun little planet of ours.

00:01:59.840 | Also, you may notice that in this conversation,

00:02:03.080 | my eye is red.

00:02:04.720 | That's from jiu-jitsu.

00:02:06.400 | And also, if I may say so, from a life well lived.

00:02:10.800 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.

00:02:13.720 | To support it, please check out our sponsors

00:02:15.820 | in the description.

00:02:17.040 | And now, dear friends, here's Biology Srinivasan.

00:02:20.520 | At the core of your belief system

00:02:23.080 | is something you call the prime number maze.

00:02:25.800 | I'm curious, I'm curious.

00:02:27.160 | We gotta start there.

00:02:28.360 | - Sure. - If we can start anywhere,

00:02:29.480 | it's with mathematics.

00:02:30.720 | Let's go. - All right, great.

00:02:32.120 | A rat can be trained to turn at every even number

00:02:37.120 | or every third number in a maze to get some cheese.

00:02:40.680 | But evidently, it can't be trained to turn at prime numbers.

00:02:44.480 | Two, three, five, seven, and then 11,

00:02:47.520 | and so on and so forth.

00:02:48.480 | That's just too abstract.

00:02:49.520 | And frankly, if most humans were dropped

00:02:51.360 | into a prime number maze,

00:02:53.440 | they probably wouldn't be able to figure it out either.

00:02:55.640 | They'd have to start counting and so on.

00:02:57.200 | Actually, it'd be pretty difficult to figure out

00:02:58.360 | what the turning rule was.

00:03:00.820 | Yet, the rule is actually very simple.

00:03:02.880 | And so, the thing I think about a lot

00:03:04.600 | is just how many patterns in life

00:03:07.520 | are we just like these rats

00:03:09.120 | and we're trapped in a prime number maze?

00:03:10.720 | And if we had just a little bit more cogitation,

00:03:14.640 | if we had a little bit more cognitive ability,

00:03:17.060 | a little bit more, whether it's brain-machine interface

00:03:20.220 | or just better physics,

00:03:21.480 | we could just figure out the next step

00:03:23.120 | in that prime number maze.

00:03:23.960 | We could just see it.

00:03:24.800 | We could just see the grid.

00:03:26.900 | And that's what I think about.

00:03:28.040 | Like, that's a big thing that drives me,

00:03:30.880 | is figuring out how do we actually conceive,

00:03:32.820 | understand that prime number maze that we're living in.

00:03:35.240 | - So, understand which patterns are just complex enough

00:03:39.680 | that they're beyond the limit of human cognition.

00:03:41.680 | - Yes.

00:03:42.800 | - And what do you make of that?

00:03:45.160 | Are the limits of human cognition a feature or a bug?

00:03:49.500 | - I think mostly a bug.

00:03:51.200 | I admire Ramanujan.

00:03:52.320 | I admire Feynman.

00:03:55.160 | I admire these great mathematicians and physicists

00:03:57.880 | who were just able to see things that others couldn't.

00:04:02.120 | And just by writing it down, that's a leap forward.

00:04:05.800 | People talk about it's not the idea, it's execution,

00:04:09.200 | but that's for trivial ideas, for great ideas,

00:04:11.640 | for Maxwell's equations or Newton's laws

00:04:14.080 | or quantum electrodynamics

00:04:16.120 | or some of Ramanujan's identities.

00:04:17.880 | That really does bring us forward,

00:04:19.940 | especially when you can check them

00:04:21.140 | and you don't know how they work, right?

00:04:22.900 | You have the phenomenological,

00:04:24.480 | but you don't have the theory underneath it.

00:04:26.220 | And then that stimulates the advancement of theory

00:04:28.020 | to figure out why is this thing actually working?

00:04:29.660 | That's actually, StatMech arose in part

00:04:33.440 | from the kind of phenomenological studies

00:04:36.180 | that were basically being done

00:04:37.080 | where people are just getting steam engines

00:04:38.500 | and so on to work.

00:04:39.540 | And then they kind of abstracted out thermodynamics

00:04:41.780 | and so on from that, right?

00:04:42.660 | So the practice led the theory rather than vice versa,

00:04:45.700 | to some extent that's happening in neural networks now,

00:04:47.420 | as you're aware, right?

00:04:48.620 | And I think that's,

00:04:50.660 | so just something that's true and that works,

00:04:53.760 | you know, if we don't know yet, that's amazing.

00:04:55.760 | And it pulls us forward.

00:04:56.600 | So I do think that the limits

00:04:58.020 | are more of a bug than a feature.

00:04:59.520 | - Is there something that humans will never be able

00:05:01.160 | to figure out about our universe,

00:05:03.140 | about the theory, about the practice of our universe?

00:05:06.460 | - Yeah, people will typically quote

00:05:08.060 | Cordell's incompleteness for such a question.

00:05:10.480 | And yeah, there are things that are provably unknowable

00:05:14.120 | or provably unprovable.

00:05:16.360 | But I think you can often get an approximate solution.

00:05:18.520 | You know, the Hilbert, you know, Hilbert's problems like,

00:05:21.900 | we will know, we must know.

00:05:23.300 | At least we should know that we can't know.

00:05:26.360 | Push to get at least an approximate solution.

00:05:28.760 | Push to know that we can't know.

00:05:29.980 | At least we push back that darkness enough

00:05:32.440 | so that we have lit up that corner

00:05:34.000 | of the intellectual universe.

00:05:35.600 | - Okay, let's actually take a bit of a tangent

00:05:38.080 | and explore a bit in a way that I did not expect we would.

00:05:42.040 | But let's talk about the nature of reality briefly.

00:05:44.320 | I don't know if you're familiar

00:05:45.480 | with the work of Don Hoffman.

00:05:47.400 | - No, I don't.

00:05:48.240 | I know Roger Penrose has like his road to reality series

00:05:51.280 | for like basic physics getting up to everything we know.

00:05:53.600 | But go ahead, tell me.

00:05:54.440 | - It's even wilder.

00:05:55.760 | In modern physics, we start to question

00:05:57.400 | of what is fundamental and what is emergent

00:05:59.960 | in this beautiful universe of ours.

00:06:01.760 | And there's a bunch of folks who think that space-time,

00:06:05.840 | as we know it, the four-dimensional space, is emergent.

00:06:08.680 | It's not fundamental to the physics of the universe.

00:06:11.840 | And the same, many argue, I think Sean Carroll

00:06:14.480 | is one of them, is that time itself,

00:06:17.120 | the way we experience it, is also emergent.

00:06:20.260 | It's not fundamental to the way our universe works.

00:06:23.400 | Anyway, those are the technical term,

00:06:26.480 | I apologize for swearing,

00:06:27.840 | those are the mind fucks of modern physics.

00:06:31.640 | But if we stroll along that road further,

00:06:35.200 | we get somebody like Donald Hoffman,

00:06:37.360 | who makes the evolutionary case

00:06:39.280 | that the reality we perceive with our eyes

00:06:41.960 | is not only an abstraction of objective reality,

00:06:45.760 | but it's actually completely detached.

00:06:48.120 | We're in a video game, essentially,

00:06:50.280 | that's consistent for all humans,

00:06:55.280 | but it's not at all connected to physical reality.

00:06:59.160 | It's an illusion.

00:07:00.000 | - It's like a version of the simulation hypothesis,

00:07:01.400 | is that his--

00:07:02.360 | - In a very distant way, but the simulation says

00:07:06.920 | that there's a sort of computational nature to reality,

00:07:09.760 | and then there's a kind of a programmer

00:07:11.520 | that creates this reality, and so on.

00:07:13.680 | No, he says that we humans have a brain

00:07:16.120 | that is able to perceive the environment,

00:07:18.680 | and evolution is produced from primitive life

00:07:22.200 | to complex life on Earth,

00:07:24.520 | produce the kind of brain that doesn't at all

00:07:26.800 | need to sense the reality directly.

00:07:29.960 | So like this table, according to Donald Hoffman,

00:07:33.120 | is not there.

00:07:34.120 | - Well, so--

00:07:36.120 | - Like, not just as an abstraction,

00:07:38.720 | like we don't sense the molecules that make up the table,

00:07:41.400 | but all of this is fake.

00:07:43.360 | - Interesting.

00:07:44.200 | So I tend to be more of a hard science person, right?

00:07:49.200 | And so just on that, people talk about qualia,

00:07:54.280 | like is your perception of green

00:07:58.200 | different from my perception of green?

00:08:00.800 | And my counterargument on that is,

00:08:03.460 | well, we know something about spectrum of light,

00:08:05.960 | and we can build artificial eyes.

00:08:07.960 | And if we can build artificial eyes, which we can,

00:08:10.240 | like they're not amazing, but you can actually,

00:08:12.120 | you can do that, you can build artificial ears, and so on.

00:08:14.200 | Obviously, we can build recording devices,

00:08:16.040 | and different cameras, and things like that.

00:08:18.480 | Well, operationally, the whole concept

00:08:21.280 | of your perception of green,

00:08:22.240 | you see green as purple, I see green as green,

00:08:23.920 | or what I call green, doesn't seem to add up,

00:08:25.880 | because it does seem like we can do engineering around it.

00:08:29.080 | So the Hoffman thing, I get why people more broadly

00:08:33.240 | will talk about a simulation hypothesis,

00:08:34.760 | 'cause it's like Feynman, many others have talked about

00:08:37.840 | how math is surprisingly useful to describe the world.

00:08:42.840 | Like very simple equations give rise

00:08:44.520 | to these complex phenomena.

00:08:45.360 | Wolfram is also on this, from a different angle

00:08:48.920 | with the cellular automata stuff.

00:08:50.560 | - It's almost suspicious how well it works.

00:08:54.600 | - Yeah, but on their hand, it's like,

00:08:56.440 | yet we're still also in a prime number maze.

00:09:02.040 | There's things we just don't understand.

00:09:03.640 | And so--

00:09:05.480 | - Also, within the constraints of the non-prime numbers,

00:09:09.200 | we find math to be extremely effective,

00:09:12.320 | surprisingly effective.

00:09:13.680 | - Yeah, exactly.

00:09:14.560 | So maybe the math we have gets us through

00:09:17.160 | the equivalent of the even turns and the odd turns,

00:09:19.120 | but there's math we don't yet have

00:09:20.480 | that is more complex, or more complex rules for other parts.

00:09:22.760 | - This is probably all RH, or just rats in a cage.

00:09:25.680 | - I know that gets very abstract,

00:09:27.320 | but there are unsolved problems in physics.

00:09:30.840 | Like the condensed matter space,

00:09:31.920 | there's a lot of interesting stuff happening.

00:09:33.280 | My recollection, I may be out of date on this,

00:09:35.760 | things like sonoluminescence,

00:09:36.960 | we don't know exactly how they work.

00:09:38.560 | And sometimes those things that are at the edges of physics,

00:09:42.120 | in the late 1800s, I think Rutherford,

00:09:45.280 | somebody, I think it was Rutherford said,

00:09:48.120 | basically all physics is being discovered, et cetera.

00:09:50.280 | And that was obviously before quantum mechanics.

00:09:53.280 | That sort of edge case, people are looking at the bomber

00:09:55.360 | in the "Passion" series and seeing this weird thing

00:09:59.400 | with the hydrogen spectrum, and it was quantized.

00:10:02.240 | And that led to the sort of phenomenological

00:10:06.400 | set of observations that led to quantum mechanics

00:10:08.400 | and everything.

00:10:10.000 | And sometimes I think the UAP stuff might be like that.

00:10:13.400 | People immediately go to aliens for UAP,

00:10:15.960 | like the unidentified aerial phenomena.

00:10:17.840 | People have been, there's surprising amount of stuff

00:10:20.520 | out there on this.

00:10:21.360 | The UK has declassified a bunch of material.

00:10:24.360 | Harry Reid, who's a senator, has talked about this.

00:10:26.280 | It's not an obviously political thing, which is good.

00:10:30.600 | It's something that, is there something happening there?

00:10:34.280 | And people had thought for a long time

00:10:35.520 | that the UAP thing was American kind of counter propaganda

00:10:40.520 | to cover up their new spy planes that were spying

00:10:43.440 | over the Soviet Union to make anybody who talked about them

00:10:45.800 | seem crazy and hysterical or whatever.

00:10:49.840 | But if the UAP thing is real,

00:10:52.960 | it could be atmospheric phenomena,

00:10:55.120 | like the aurora borealis or the Northern Lights,

00:10:58.000 | but some things we don't understand.

00:10:59.680 | It could be something like the Bomber and Passion series,

00:11:03.800 | which were the observations of emission spectra

00:11:06.440 | before quantum mechanics.

00:11:07.840 | So that's another option as opposed to doesn't exist

00:11:10.540 | or Lilligreen men.

00:11:12.380 | It could be physics we don't understand yet.

00:11:14.600 | That's one possible.

00:11:15.440 | - Do you think there's alien civilizations out there?

00:11:18.080 | - So there's a lot of folks who have kind of written

00:11:20.320 | and talked about this.

00:11:21.160 | There's the Drake equation, which is like multiplying

00:11:24.100 | all the probabilities together.

00:11:25.420 | There's perhaps more sophisticated takes,

00:11:27.620 | like the Dark Forest, which says that if the universe

00:11:32.240 | is like a dark forest, we're the dumb ones

00:11:34.040 | that aren't hiding our presence.

00:11:36.640 | There's one calculation I saw,

00:11:37.920 | and I haven't reproduced it myself,

00:11:39.140 | but basically says that the assumption

00:11:42.240 | that other civilizations have seen ours is wrong

00:11:44.240 | because when you have like a spherical radius

00:11:46.560 | for like the electromagnetic radiation

00:11:49.280 | that's leaving our planet,

00:11:50.280 | as that sphere gets larger and larger,

00:11:51.880 | it gets like smaller and smaller amounts of energy.

00:11:55.200 | So you get farther out,

00:11:57.000 | you're not getting enough photons or what have you

00:12:01.880 | to actually detect it.

00:12:04.240 | I don't know, I actually haven't looked into the math

00:12:06.800 | behind it, but I remember seeing that argument.

00:12:08.560 | So actually, it is possible that it's so diffuse

00:12:11.260 | when you go past a certain number of light years out

00:12:14.240 | that people, that an alien civilization

00:12:16.560 | wouldn't be able to detect it, right?

00:12:17.640 | That's another argument.

00:12:18.640 | - That's more basically about signals from them,

00:12:21.200 | from us to be able to, signals colliding enough

00:12:25.160 | to find the signal from the noise.

00:12:28.080 | - Right, exactly.

00:12:28.920 | - Intelligent signal.

00:12:29.920 | - Yeah, Hanson has an article called "Grabby Aliens."

00:12:34.320 | Have you seen his thing?

00:12:35.160 | - Yes, I've seen it.

00:12:35.980 | - And so there's--

00:12:36.820 | - He's been on this podcast.

00:12:38.040 | - Oh, great.

00:12:38.880 | - He's brilliant.

00:12:39.700 | - I like him, he pushes boundaries in interesting ways.

00:12:42.720 | - In every ways, in all of the ways.

00:12:44.480 | - In all the ways, that's right.

00:12:45.560 | I like him overall.

00:12:46.720 | He's an asset to humanity.

00:12:49.440 | - Grabby Aliens, so he has this interesting idea

00:12:52.840 | that the civilizations quickly learn how to travel

00:12:57.840 | close to the speed of light,

00:12:59.720 | so we're not gonna see them until they're here.

00:13:02.160 | - Yeah, that's possible.

00:13:04.520 | I mean, one of the things is, so here's, for example,

00:13:06.680 | a mystery that we haven't yet done, right?

00:13:08.720 | Which, or we haven't really figured out yet,

00:13:10.520 | which is abiogenesis in the lab, right?

00:13:15.200 | We've done lots of things where you've got,

00:13:18.280 | you can show macromolecules binding to each other,

00:13:20.880 | you can show evidence for the so-called RNA world,

00:13:24.360 | abiogenesis is to go from non-life to life, right,

00:13:29.360 | in the lab, you can show microevolution,

00:13:31.960 | obviously with bacteria,

00:13:33.320 | you can do artificial selection on them,

00:13:35.140 | lots of other aspects of fundamental biochemistry origins

00:13:40.140 | of life stuff have been established.

00:13:41.760 | There's a lot of plausibility arguments

00:13:43.340 | about the primitive environment

00:13:45.060 | and nitrogens and carbons snapping together

00:13:47.440 | to get the RNA world is the initial hypothesis,

00:13:51.900 | but to my knowledge at least,

00:13:52.980 | we haven't actually seen abiogenesis demonstrated.

00:13:55.440 | Now, one argument is you need just like this massive world

00:13:59.360 | with so many different reps before that actually happens.

00:14:03.520 | And one possibility is if we could do atomic level

00:14:08.520 | simulations of molecules bouncing against each other,

00:14:11.960 | it's possible that in some simulation,

00:14:13.560 | we could find a path, a reproducible path to abiogenesis,

00:14:16.120 | and then just replicate that in the lab, right?

00:14:19.200 | I don't know, okay?

00:14:21.960 | But that seems to me to be like a mystery

00:14:24.180 | that we still don't fully understand,

00:14:25.720 | like an example of the prime number maze, right?

00:14:27.480 | - One of the most fascinating mysteries.

00:14:29.400 | - One of the most important, yep.

00:14:30.440 | - Yeah. - Yeah, and again,

00:14:31.960 | there may be some biochemist who's like,

00:14:33.760 | oh, Vald, you didn't know about X, Y, and Z

00:14:35.600 | that happened in the abiogenesis field.

00:14:37.520 | I freely confess, I'm not like, you know, au courant on it.

00:14:41.600 | The last thing I remember looking at is--

00:14:43.360 | - What's au courant mean?

00:14:44.480 | - Like up to the moment.

00:14:45.520 | - Oh, nice, that's a nice word.

00:14:47.240 | - That's a-- - Au courant.

00:14:48.560 | - I'm probably mispronouncing it, but--

00:14:49.760 | - Yeah, we'll edit it in post

00:14:52.280 | to pronounce it correctly with AI.

00:14:54.080 | - Yeah, yeah. (laughs)

00:14:55.760 | - We'll copy your voice,

00:14:56.960 | and it will pronounce it perfectly correctly in post.

00:15:00.120 | - One thing that I do think was interesting is

00:15:03.160 | Craig Venter a while back tried to make

00:15:05.520 | a minimum viable cell where he just tried to delete

00:15:09.960 | all of the genes that were not considered essential.

00:15:13.600 | And so it's like a new life form,

00:15:15.120 | and this was like almost 20 years ago and so on.

00:15:17.000 | And that thing was viable in the lab, right?

00:15:20.200 | And so it's possible that you could,

00:15:22.080 | you kind of reverse engineer.

00:15:23.520 | So you're coming at the problem from different directions,

00:15:25.300 | like RNA molecules can do quite a lot.

00:15:27.720 | You've got some reasonable assumptions

00:15:30.640 | as to how that could come together.

00:15:32.800 | You've got sort of stripped down minimum viable life forms.

00:15:36.440 | And so it's not there isn't stuff here.

00:15:38.760 | You can see microevolution,

00:15:40.000 | you can see at the sequence level.

00:15:41.520 | You know, if you do molecular phylogenetics,

00:15:42.800 | you can actually track back the basis.

00:15:44.320 | There's actually, so it's not like there's no evidence here.

00:15:46.120 | There's a lot of tools to work with.

00:15:47.600 | But this, in my view, is a fascinating area.

00:15:49.400 | And actually also relevant to AI,

00:15:51.240 | because another form of abiogenesis would be

00:15:53.600 | if we were able to give rise to a different

00:15:56.040 | branch of life form, the silicon-based

00:15:57.760 | as opposed to carbon-based, you know, to stretch a point.

00:16:00.700 | You give rise to something that actually does meet

00:16:03.040 | the definition of life or some definition of life.

00:16:05.400 | - What do you think that definition is

00:16:07.400 | for an artificial life form?

00:16:09.400 | 'Cause you mentioned consciousness.

00:16:11.400 | - Yeah. - When will it give us pause

00:16:13.200 | that we created something that feels by some definition

00:16:18.200 | or by some spiritual, poetic, romantic,

00:16:24.240 | philosophical, mathematical definition

00:16:26.600 | that it is alive. - Right.

00:16:28.400 | - And we wouldn't want to kill it.

00:16:30.120 | - So, couple of remarks on that.

00:16:31.660 | One is Francis Crick, of Watson and Crick,

00:16:36.040 | before he died, I think his last paper

00:16:37.840 | was published on something called the claustrum, okay?

00:16:40.600 | And the thing is that, you know,

00:16:41.880 | sometimes in biology or in any domain,

00:16:44.600 | people are sort of discouraged from going after

00:16:46.440 | the big questions, right?

00:16:48.480 | But he proposed the claustrum is actually the organ

00:16:51.740 | that is the seat of consciousness.

00:16:53.040 | It's like this sheath that covers the brain.

00:16:56.880 | And for mice, if you, and again,

00:17:00.120 | I may be recollecting this wrong, so you can look,

00:17:02.120 | but my recollection is in mice, if you disrupt this,

00:17:06.400 | the mouse is very disoriented, right?

00:17:08.760 | It's like, it's the kind of thing which, you know,

00:17:11.600 | Watson and Crick were all about structure implies function,

00:17:14.200 | right, they found the structure of DNA, this amazing thing.

00:17:16.560 | And, you know, they remarked in this very understated way

00:17:19.840 | at the end of the paper that, well, obviously this gives

00:17:23.240 | a basis for how the genetic material might be replicated

00:17:25.600 | and error corrected because, you know,

00:17:27.520 | helix unwinds and you copy paste it, right?

00:17:29.200 | So he was a big structure function person,

00:17:31.440 | and that applies not just at the protein level,

00:17:33.280 | not just at the level of DNA,

00:17:35.320 | but potentially also at the level of organs.

00:17:37.540 | Like the claustrum is kind of this system integrated level,

00:17:40.440 | right, it's like the last layer in the neural network

00:17:42.840 | or something, you know?

00:17:44.640 | And so that's the kind of thing

00:17:47.160 | that I think is worth studying.

00:17:48.720 | So consciousness is another kind of big,

00:17:52.760 | abiogenesis is a big question, the prime number

00:17:54.560 | remains consciousness is a big question.

00:17:56.520 | And, you know, then definition of life, right?

00:18:01.280 | There's folks, gosh, there's, I think,

00:18:03.240 | so this one is something I'd have to Google around,

00:18:06.080 | but there was a guy, I think at Santa Fe Institute

00:18:08.040 | or something, who had some definition of life

00:18:10.040 | and like some thermodynamic definition.

00:18:12.960 | But you're right that it's gonna be

00:18:15.080 | a multi-feature definition.

00:18:17.800 | We might have a Turing test like definition, frankly,

00:18:20.000 | which is just if enough humans agree it's alive,

00:18:22.600 | it's alive, right?

00:18:24.020 | And that might frankly be the operational definition.

00:18:26.800 | 'Cause, you know, viruses are like this boundary case,

00:18:28.840 | you know, are they alive or not?

00:18:30.160 | Most people don't think they're alive,

00:18:31.640 | but they're on, they're kind of,

00:18:34.120 | they're more alive than a rock in a sense.

00:18:35.960 | - Well, I think in a world that we'll talk about today

00:18:39.920 | quite a bit, which is the digital world,

00:18:42.360 | I think the most fascinating, philosophically

00:18:45.280 | and technically definition of life

00:18:47.800 | is life in the digital world.

00:18:50.480 | So chatbots, essentially creatures,

00:18:54.600 | whether they're replicas of humans

00:18:57.200 | or totally independent creations,

00:19:00.640 | perhaps in an automatic way,

00:19:02.660 | I think there's going to be chatbots

00:19:05.840 | that we would ethically be troubled by

00:19:08.720 | if we wanted to kill them.

00:19:10.680 | They would have the capacity to suffer.

00:19:12.860 | They would be very unhappy with you trying to turn them off.

00:19:17.860 | And then there'll be large groups of activists

00:19:21.080 | that will protest and they'll go to the Supreme Court

00:19:24.680 | of whatever the Supreme Court looks like

00:19:27.320 | in 10, 20, 30, 40 years.

00:19:29.640 | And they will demand that these chatbots

00:19:33.400 | would have the same rights as us humans.

00:19:35.680 | Do you think that's possible?

00:19:37.120 | - I saw that Google engineer who was basically saying

00:19:39.680 | this had already happened.

00:19:40.880 | And I was surprised by it because it just,

00:19:45.880 | when I looked at the chat logs of it,

00:19:48.080 | it didn't seem particularly interesting.

00:19:50.960 | On their hand, I can definitely see it.

00:19:53.160 | I mean, GPT-3 for people who haven't paid attention

00:19:57.040 | shows that serious step-ups are possible.

00:19:59.600 | And obviously, you've talked about AI

00:20:02.320 | in your podcast a ton.

00:20:05.040 | Is it possible that GPT-9 or something is kind of like that?

00:20:09.120 | Or GPT-15 or GPT-4, maybe?

00:20:12.100 | But--

00:20:14.800 | - Yeah, for people just listening,

00:20:16.900 | there's a deep skepticism in your face.

00:20:19.260 | - Yeah, the reason being because,

00:20:22.160 | you know what's possible?

00:20:25.220 | It's possible that you have a partition of society

00:20:27.920 | on literally this basis.

00:20:29.300 | That's one model where there's some people,

00:20:32.420 | just like there's vegetarians and non-vegetarians, right?

00:20:35.340 | There may be machines have life

00:20:40.340 | and machines are machines, you know?

00:20:42.580 | Like, or something like that, right?

00:20:44.740 | You could definitely imagine some kind of partition

00:20:48.900 | like that in the future where your fundamental

00:20:51.260 | political social system, that's a foundational assumption.

00:20:55.620 | And, you know, is AI, does it deserve the same rights

00:21:01.380 | as like a human or, for example,

00:21:02.860 | a corporation is an intermediate?

00:21:05.580 | Do you see the thing which is how human

00:21:08.380 | are different corporations?

00:21:09.500 | Have you seen that infographic?

00:21:10.980 | It's actually funny.

00:21:11.820 | So it's like-- - There's a spectrum.

00:21:12.940 | - There's a spectrum.

00:21:13.760 | So for example, Disney is considered about as human

00:21:15.980 | as like a dog, but like Exxon,

00:21:18.340 | I may be remembering this wrong,

00:21:19.620 | but they had like a level with like human at one end

00:21:21.620 | and like rock at the other.

00:21:22.460 | - Does it have to do with corporate structure?

00:21:23.860 | What's the--

00:21:24.700 | - I think it's about people's empathy for that corporation,

00:21:26.660 | their brand identity.

00:21:28.160 | But it's interesting to see that, first of all,

00:21:31.360 | people sort of do think of corporations as being more,

00:21:35.440 | like the branding is really what they're responding to.

00:21:37.360 | - Well, that's what, I mean, they're also responding.

00:21:39.840 | You know, I have a brand of human that I'm trying to sell

00:21:43.920 | and it seems to be effective for the most part.

00:21:46.120 | - Sure.

00:21:46.940 | - Although it has become like a running joke

00:21:49.000 | that I might be a robot.

00:21:50.520 | - Right.

00:21:51.360 | - Which means the brand is cracking.

00:21:53.440 | - Could be.

00:21:55.400 | - It's seeping through.

00:21:56.500 | But I mean, in that sense, I just, I think,

00:22:00.360 | I don't see a reason why chatbots can't manufacture

00:22:05.360 | the brand of being human, of being sentient.

00:22:09.760 | - I mean, that is the Turing test,

00:22:11.320 | but it's like the multiplayer Turing test.

00:22:12.760 | Now that actually a fair number of chatbots

00:22:14.240 | have passed the Turing test,

00:22:15.360 | I'd say there's at least two steps up, right?

00:22:18.240 | One is a multiplayer Turing test

00:22:21.280 | where you have chatbots talking to each other.

00:22:25.000 | And then you ask, can you determine the difference

00:22:27.980 | between in chatbots talking to each other

00:22:30.820 | and clicking buttons and stuff in apps

00:22:33.020 | and humans doing that?

00:22:34.340 | And I think we're very far off,

00:22:35.620 | or I shouldn't say very far off.

00:22:36.740 | At least, I don't know how far we are in terms of time,

00:22:40.220 | but we're still far off in terms of a group of in chatbots

00:22:44.260 | looking like their digital output

00:22:46.020 | is like the group of in humans,

00:22:47.180 | like go from the Turing test

00:22:49.140 | to the multiplayer Turing test.

00:22:50.060 | That's one definition.

00:22:51.240 | Another definition is to be able to kind of swap in

00:22:56.240 | and you're not just convincing one human

00:22:59.600 | that this is a human for a small session.

00:23:03.000 | You're convincing all humans

00:23:05.120 | that this is a human for end sessions.

00:23:06.800 | Remote work actually makes this possible, right?

00:23:09.080 | That's another definition of a multiplayer Turing test

00:23:11.280 | where basically you have a chatbot that's fully automated

00:23:16.280 | that is earning money for you

00:23:18.040 | as an intelligent agent on a computer

00:23:19.860 | that's able to go and get remote work jobs and so on.

00:23:22.040 | I would consider that next level, right?

00:23:23.920 | If you could have something that was like that,

00:23:25.980 | that was competent enough to,

00:23:28.480 | I mean, 'cause everything on a computer can be automated.

00:23:30.960 | Literally, you could be totally hands-free,

00:23:32.200 | just like autonomous driving.

00:23:33.600 | You could have autonomous earning.

00:23:35.240 | As a challenge problem,

00:23:37.320 | if you were Microsoft or Apple

00:23:39.200 | and you had legitimate access to the operating system,

00:23:42.760 | just like Apple says,

00:23:43.720 | "Can you send me details of this event?"

00:23:45.920 | A decentralized thing could, in theory,

00:23:48.480 | log the actions of 10,000 or 100,000 or a million people.

00:23:53.480 | And with cryptocurrency,

00:23:55.960 | you could even monitor a wallet that was on that computer.

00:23:59.220 | And you could see what long run series of actions

00:24:02.760 | were increasing or decreasing this digital balance.

00:24:05.340 | You see what I'm saying?

00:24:06.540 | So you start to get, at least conceptually,

00:24:09.300 | it'd be invasive and there'd be a privacy issue and so on.

00:24:12.740 | Conceptually, you could imagine an agent

00:24:15.180 | that could learn what actions humans were doing

00:24:18.100 | that resulted in the increase

00:24:19.660 | of their local cryptocurrency balance.

00:24:21.940 | There may be better ways to formulate it,

00:24:23.380 | but that I consider a challenge problem

00:24:25.440 | is to go from the Turing test to a genuine intelligent agent

00:24:28.580 | that can actually go and make money for you.

00:24:30.220 | If you can do that, that's a big deal.

00:24:31.260 | People obviously have trading bots and stuff,

00:24:33.100 | but that would be the next level.

00:24:34.340 | It's typing out emails, it's creating documents.

00:24:36.220 | - So mimic human behavior in its entirety.

00:24:39.060 | - Yeah, that's right.

00:24:39.900 | And it'll schedule Zooms, it'll send emails.

00:24:42.620 | It'll essentially, 'cause if you think about it,

00:24:45.260 | a human is hitting the keys and clicking the mouse,

00:24:47.180 | but just like a self-driving car,

00:24:48.940 | the wheel rotates by itself, right?

00:24:51.340 | Those keys are effectively just,

00:24:53.100 | it's like the automator app in Apple, right?

00:24:56.500 | Everything's just moving on the screen.

00:24:58.980 | You're seeing it there and it's just an AI.

00:25:00.740 | - It's kind of hilarious that the I'm not a robot

00:25:03.460 | click thing actually works.

00:25:05.980 | 'Cause I actually don't know how it works,

00:25:09.500 | but I think it has to do with the movement of the mouse,

00:25:13.460 | the timing, and they know that it's very difficult

00:25:17.220 | for currently for a bot to mimic human behavior

00:25:19.940 | in the way they would click that little checkbox.

00:25:22.260 | - Yeah, exactly.

00:25:23.100 | I think it's something, I mean, again,

00:25:25.140 | my recollection on that is it's like a pile

00:25:27.780 | of highly obfuscated JavaScript with all kinds,

00:25:29.900 | it looks like a very simple box,

00:25:31.620 | but it's doing a lot of stuff

00:25:32.780 | and it's collecting all kinds of instrumentation.

00:25:35.140 | And yeah, exactly.

00:25:36.180 | Like a robot is just a little too deterministic

00:25:39.420 | or if it's got noise, it's like Gaussian noise.

00:25:42.020 | And the way humans do it is just not something

00:25:45.140 | that you'd used to be able to do

00:25:46.900 | without collecting thousands and thousands

00:25:48.620 | and thousands of human traces doing it.

00:25:50.660 | But it is a predator prey on that.

00:25:52.140 | - Well, and then the computer--

00:25:53.780 | - Or millions of human traces, I don't know.

00:25:55.100 | - The computer just sees the JavaScript.

00:25:56.780 | It needs to be able to look outside the simulation

00:26:01.140 | for the computer, the world is like,

00:26:03.660 | it doesn't, the computer doesn't know

00:26:04.940 | about the physical world.

00:26:05.820 | So it has to look outside of its world

00:26:08.060 | and introspect back on this simple box,

00:26:11.700 | which is kind of, I think that's exactly what mushrooms do

00:26:15.340 | or like psychedelics is you get to go outside

00:26:18.220 | and look back in and that's what a computer needs to do.

00:26:21.060 | - I do wonder whether they actually give people insight

00:26:23.380 | or whether they give people the illusion of insight.

00:26:26.060 | - Is there a difference?

00:26:27.300 | - Yeah, because, well, actual insight,

00:26:29.700 | actual insight is, again, Maxwell's equations.

00:26:33.860 | You're able to shift the world with that.

00:26:35.660 | There's a lot of practical devices that work.

00:26:37.980 | The illusion of insight is I'm Jesus Christ

00:26:41.460 | and nothing happens, right?

00:26:43.660 | So I don't know.

00:26:45.140 | I think those are quite different.

00:26:46.860 | - I don't know.

00:26:47.700 | I think you can fake it till you make it on that one,

00:26:50.420 | which is insight in some sense is revealing a truth

00:26:55.220 | that was there all along.

00:26:57.100 | - Yeah, so I mean, I guess like I'm talking

00:26:59.180 | about technical insight where you have,

00:27:02.700 | this is the thing we were talking about actually

00:27:04.900 | before the podcast, like technical truths

00:27:06.340 | versus political truths, right?

00:27:07.800 | Some truths, they're on a spectrum

00:27:10.100 | and there's some truths that are actually entirely political

00:27:12.940 | in the sense that if you can change the software

00:27:15.340 | in enough people's heads,

00:27:16.500 | you change the value of the truth.

00:27:18.540 | For example, the location of a border

00:27:20.860 | is effectively consensus between large enough groups

00:27:23.700 | of people.

00:27:25.100 | Who is the CEO?

00:27:26.700 | That's consensus among a certain group of people.

00:27:29.640 | What is the value of a currency or any stock, right?

00:27:32.020 | That market price is just the psychology

00:27:34.620 | of a bunch of people.

00:27:35.460 | Like literally, if you can change enough people's minds,

00:27:37.220 | you can change the value of the border

00:27:39.060 | or the position of the hierarchy

00:27:40.540 | or the value of the currency.

00:27:41.380 | Those are purely political truths.

00:27:43.220 | Then all the way on the other end are technical truths

00:27:45.660 | that exist independent of whatever any one human

00:27:48.900 | or all humans think, like the gravitational constant, right?

00:27:52.660 | Or the diameter of a virus.

00:27:54.500 | Those exist independent of the human mind.

00:27:57.860 | Change in a few minds doesn't matter.

00:27:59.100 | Those remain constant.

00:28:00.860 | And then you have things that are interestingly

00:28:03.740 | in the middle where cryptocurrency has tried

00:28:05.780 | to pull more and more things from the domain

00:28:07.580 | of political truths into technical truths,

00:28:10.140 | where they say, okay, the one social convention we have

00:28:13.860 | is that if you hold this amount of Bitcoin,

00:28:17.780 | or that if you hold this private key,

00:28:19.140 | you hold this Bitcoin.

00:28:19.980 | And then we make that very hard to change

00:28:21.340 | 'cause you have to change a lot of technical truths.

00:28:23.100 | So you can push things to this interesting

00:28:27.020 | intermediate zone.

00:28:27.860 | - Yeah, the question is how much of our world

00:28:31.020 | can we push into that?

00:28:33.340 | - Right.

00:28:34.180 | - And that takes us in a nonlinear fascinating journey

00:28:39.180 | to the question I wanted to ask you in the beginning,

00:28:43.140 | which is this political world that you mentioned

00:28:46.860 | in the world of political truth.

00:28:49.100 | As we know it, in the 20th century,

00:28:51.300 | in the early 21st century, what do you think works well

00:28:55.140 | and what is broken about government?

00:28:57.700 | - The fundamental thing is that we can't easily

00:29:01.900 | and peacefully start new opt-in governments.

00:29:05.940 | And--

00:29:06.780 | - Like startup governments.

00:29:07.860 | - Yeah, and what I mean by that is basically,

00:29:10.440 | you can start a new company, you can start a new community,

00:29:15.460 | you can start a new currency even these days.

00:29:17.420 | You don't have to beat the former CEO in a duel

00:29:20.580 | to start a new company.

00:29:22.700 | You don't have to become head of the World Bank

00:29:25.780 | to start a new currency, okay?

00:29:28.120 | Because of this, yes, if you want to,

00:29:32.960 | you can join, I don't know, Microsoft

00:29:37.240 | or name some company that's a GameStop

00:29:40.200 | and you can try to reform it, okay?

00:29:42.360 | Or you can start your own.

00:29:44.160 | And the fact that both options exist mean that

00:29:47.200 | you can actually just start from scratch.

00:29:50.560 | And that's just, I mean,

00:29:51.400 | the same reason we have a clean piece of paper, right?

00:29:53.080 | I've mentioned this actually in the "Network State" book.

00:29:55.800 | I'll just quote this bit,

00:29:56.720 | but we want to be able to start a new state peacefully

00:29:59.240 | for the same reason we want a bare plot of earth,

00:30:01.440 | a blank sheet of paper, an empty text buffer,

00:30:03.660 | a fresh job or a clean slate,

00:30:05.400 | 'cause we want to build something new

00:30:06.280 | without historical constraint, right?

00:30:08.120 | For the same reason you hit plus and do docs.new,

00:30:10.440 | you know, like create a new doc.

00:30:11.920 | It's for the same reason, right?

00:30:13.280 | Because you don't have to backspace,

00:30:14.680 | you don't have to have just like 128 bytes of space,

00:30:17.560 | 128 kilobytes and just have to backspace the old document

00:30:19.800 | for creating the new one.

00:30:21.200 | So that's a fundamental thing that's wrong

00:30:23.040 | with today's governments.

00:30:24.320 | And it's a meta point, right?

00:30:25.780 | Because it's not any one specific reform,

00:30:27.400 | it's a meta reform of being able to start new countries.

00:30:30.200 | - Okay, so that's one problem,

00:30:32.280 | but you know, you could push back and say,

00:30:34.240 | that's a feature,

00:30:36.240 | because a lot of people argue that tradition is power.

00:30:39.560 | Through generation, if you try a thing long enough,

00:30:43.360 | which is the way I see marriage,

00:30:44.880 | there's value to the struggle

00:30:47.040 | and the journey you take through the struggle

00:30:49.120 | and you grow and you develop ideas together,

00:30:52.280 | you grow intellectually, philosophically together.

00:30:54.520 | And that's the idea of a nation that spans generations,

00:30:57.700 | that you have a tradition that becomes more,

00:31:02.440 | that strives towards the truth

00:31:06.740 | and is able to arrive there, or no, not arrive,

00:31:09.680 | but take steps towards there through the generations.

00:31:12.640 | So you may not want to keep starting new governments.

00:31:15.940 | You may want to stick to the old one

00:31:19.620 | and improve it one step at a time.

00:31:23.240 | So just because you're having a fight inside a marriage

00:31:25.760 | doesn't mean you should get a divorce

00:31:27.000 | and go on Tinder and start dating around.

00:31:29.840 | That's the pushback.

00:31:31.480 | So it's not obvious that this is a strong feature to have

00:31:35.320 | to launch new governments.

00:31:36.840 | - There's several different kind of lines of attack

00:31:39.600 | or debate or whatever on this, right?

00:31:41.800 | First is, yes, there's obviously value to tradition.

00:31:46.040 | And people say, this is Lindy and that's Lindy.

00:31:49.120 | It's been proven for a long time and so on.

00:31:52.320 | But of course there's a tension

00:31:54.240 | between tradition and innovation.

00:31:56.200 | Like going to the moon wasn't Lindy, just, it was awesome.

00:32:01.200 | And artificial intelligence is something that's very new.

00:32:05.800 | New is good, right?

00:32:07.360 | And this is a tension within humanity actually itself,

00:32:10.080 | 'cause it's way older than all of these nations.

00:32:12.800 | I mean, humans are tens of thousands of years old.

00:32:15.360 | The ancestors of humans are millions of years old, right?

00:32:17.800 | And you go back far enough,

00:32:19.440 | and the time that we know today

00:32:20.880 | of the sessile farmer and soldier is,

00:32:24.800 | if you go back far enough,

00:32:25.640 | you wanna be truly traditional,

00:32:27.640 | well, we're actually descended from hunter gatherers

00:32:29.640 | who were mobile and wandered the world

00:32:32.080 | and there weren't borders and so on.

00:32:33.480 | They kind of went where they want, right?

00:32:35.320 | And people have had done historical reconstructions

00:32:39.200 | of like skeletons and stuff like that.

00:32:41.160 | And many folks report that the transition to agriculture

00:32:45.160 | and being sessile resulted in diminution of height.

00:32:49.960 | People had like tooth decay and stuff like that.

00:32:52.040 | The skeletons, people had traded off upside for stability.

00:32:56.200 | Right, that's what the state was.

00:32:57.320 | That was what these sessile kinds of things were.

00:32:58.960 | Now, of course, they had more likelihood

00:33:02.760 | of living consistently.

00:33:04.760 | You could support larger population sizes,

00:33:06.440 | but it had lower quality of life, right?

00:33:08.520 | And so the hunter gatherer,

00:33:10.320 | maybe that's actually our collective recollection

00:33:12.400 | of a Garden of Eden where people,

00:33:14.120 | just like a spider kind of knows innately how to build webs

00:33:18.160 | or a beaver knows how to build dams.

00:33:20.400 | Some people theorize that the entire Garden of Eden

00:33:23.240 | is like a sort of built-in neural network recollection

00:33:27.600 | of this pre-sessile era where we're able to roam around

00:33:31.120 | and just pick off fruits and so on,

00:33:32.320 | low population density.

00:33:33.880 | So the point is that I think what we're seeing is a V3.

00:33:37.760 | You go from the hunter gatherer to the farmer and soldier,

00:33:40.640 | the sessile nations are here

00:33:42.480 | and they've got borders and so on,

00:33:44.160 | to kind of the V3, which is the digital nomad,

00:33:46.960 | the new hunter gatherer.

00:33:48.000 | We're going back to the future

00:33:49.200 | because what's even older than nations is no nations, right?

00:33:53.520 | Even more traditional than tradition

00:33:55.160 | is being international, right?

00:33:58.160 | And so we're actually tapping

00:33:59.360 | into that other huge thread in humanity,

00:34:01.800 | which is the desire to explore, pioneer, wander, innovate.

00:34:06.800 | And I think that's important.

00:34:08.000 | - So the way to make America great again

00:34:09.560 | is to dissolve it completely into oblivion.

00:34:12.880 | No, that's a joke.

00:34:13.720 | - Yeah, yeah, I know it's a joke.

00:34:15.240 | - Humor, I'm learning this new thing.

00:34:18.200 | - Yes, a new thing for the road.

00:34:19.880 | The chatbot emulation isn't fully working there.

00:34:21.920 | - Yeah, yeah, glitch.

00:34:23.360 | That's where in the beta.

00:34:24.880 | - And let me say one other thing about this,

00:34:26.440 | which is, you know, there are,

00:34:29.360 | I mean, everybody in the world,

00:34:32.520 | okay, let's say, I don't know what percentage,

00:34:34.080 | let's say 99.99% or it's rounds to that number

00:34:39.160 | of political discourse in the US

00:34:42.120 | focuses on trying to fix the system.

00:34:44.720 | If those folks, I mean, 0.01% of the energy

00:34:47.520 | is going towards building a new system,

00:34:49.320 | that seems like a pretty good portfolio strategy, right?

00:34:52.040 | Or 100% are supposed to go and edit this code base

00:34:54.760 | from 200 something years ago.

00:34:56.400 | I mean, the most American thing in the world

00:34:58.280 | is going and leaving your country

00:35:01.120 | in search of a better life.

00:35:02.400 | America was founded 200 years ago by the founding fathers.

00:35:05.120 | It's not just a nation of immigrants,

00:35:06.800 | it's a nation of emigrants, right?

00:35:08.640 | Emigration from other countries to the US

00:35:11.440 | and actually also emigration within the US.

00:35:13.640 | There's this amazing YouTube video called,

00:35:15.960 | it's like 50 states, US population, I think 1792.

00:35:19.940 | It says 2050, so they've got a simulation.

00:35:21.740 | So you just stop it at 2019 or 2020.

00:35:23.920 | But it shows that like Virginia was like number one

00:35:26.400 | early on and then it lost ground and like New York gained.

00:35:29.640 | And then like Ohio was a big deal in the early 1800s.

00:35:32.920 | And it was like father of presidents in general,

00:35:34.720 | these presidents and later Illinois and Indiana.

00:35:37.320 | And then California only really came up

00:35:38.960 | in the 20th century, like during the great depression.

00:35:41.720 | And now we're entering the modern era

00:35:43.080 | where like Florida and Texas have risen

00:35:44.600 | and New York and California have dropped.

00:35:46.560 | And so interstate competition,

00:35:48.120 | it's actually just like inter-currency competition.

00:35:50.380 | You've got trading pairs, right?

00:35:52.120 | You sell BTC by ETH, you sell, you know,

00:35:57.120 | Solana or Z, you know, sell Monero by Zcash, right?

00:36:00.680 | Each of those trading pairs gives you signal for today

00:36:04.200 | on this currency is down or up

00:36:06.360 | relative to this other currency.

00:36:07.920 | In the same way, each of those migration pairs,

00:36:10.800 | someone goes from New York to Ohio, Ohio to California,

00:36:13.360 | gives you information on the desirability

00:36:16.000 | of different states.

00:36:16.840 | You can literally form a pairs matrix like this over time,

00:36:19.800 | very much like the link matrix.

00:36:21.200 | That's shaped America in a huge way.

00:36:22.800 | And so, you know, you ask, A, if this nation of immigrants

00:36:26.520 | that was founded by men younger than us, by the way,

00:36:28.640 | the founding fathers were often in their 20s, right?

00:36:31.220 | Who, you know, endorsed the concept of a proposition nation

00:36:35.160 | who've given rise to a country of founders and pioneers

00:36:40.160 | who've literally gone to the moon, right?

00:36:42.560 | Those folks would think that this is the end of history,

00:36:46.200 | that that's it, we're done.

00:36:47.840 | Like, we've done everything else.

00:36:49.760 | I mean, there's people in technology who believe,

00:36:51.840 | and I agree with them, that we can go to Mars,

00:36:53.680 | that we might be able to end death,

00:36:55.360 | but we can't innovate on something that was 230 years old.

00:36:58.720 | You know?

00:36:59.880 | - So there is a balance, certainly, to strike.

00:37:03.120 | The American experiment is fascinating, nevertheless.

00:37:07.160 | So one argument you can make is actually

00:37:10.120 | that we're in the very early days of this V2.

00:37:12.800 | If this is what you describe as V2,

00:37:15.520 | you could make the case that we're not ready for V3,

00:37:18.400 | that we're just actually trying to figure out the V2 thing.

00:37:22.600 | You're trying to like skip-

00:37:24.480 | - When are we ever ready?

00:37:25.720 | - Now again, we'll go back to marriage, I think,

00:37:28.960 | and having kids kind of thing.

00:37:30.780 | I think everyone who has kids

00:37:31.920 | is never really ready to be kids,

00:37:33.440 | this whole point, you dive in.

00:37:35.080 | Okay, but the...

00:37:37.240 | I mean, you mentioned the U.K. and Washington.

00:37:40.040 | Is there other criticisms of government

00:37:41.880 | that you can provide as we know it today?

00:37:43.680 | Before we kind of outline the ideas of V3,

00:37:47.520 | let's stick to V2.

00:37:48.760 | - I'll give a few, right?

00:37:49.600 | And so a lot of this stuff will go into the version.

00:37:52.360 | So I've got this book, "The Network State,"

00:37:54.680 | which covers some of these topics.

00:37:56.440 | - Does "Network State" have a subtitle?

00:37:58.920 | - It is "The Network State, How to Start a New Country."

00:38:02.280 | - How to start a new country.

00:38:03.520 | - But I just have it at thenetworkstate.com.

00:38:05.560 | - I should say, it's an excellent book that you should get.

00:38:09.080 | I read it on Kindle, but there's also a website.

00:38:12.360 | And Balaji said that he's constantly working

00:38:15.880 | on improving it, changing it.

00:38:18.660 | But by the time the whole project is over,

00:38:21.840 | it'll be a different book than it was in the beginning.

00:38:25.800 | - I think so.

00:38:26.640 | - It's getting its old skin.

00:38:29.200 | - Well, I wanted to get something out there

00:38:31.040 | and get feedback and whatnot, just like an app, right?

00:38:34.120 | Again, you have these two poles of an app is highly dynamic

00:38:37.200 | and you're accustomed to having updates all the time

00:38:39.480 | and a book is supposed to be static.

00:38:40.680 | And there's a value in something static,

00:38:42.240 | something unchanging and so on.

00:38:44.200 | But in this case, I'm glad I kind of shipped a version 1.0

00:38:48.720 | and the next version, I'm gonna split it

00:38:53.320 | into like tentatively motivation, theory and practice.

00:38:57.360 | Like motivation, like what is the sort of political

00:38:59.920 | philosophy and so on that motivates me at least to do this,

00:39:02.900 | which you can take or leave, right?

00:39:04.720 | And then theory as to why network state is now possible

00:39:08.600 | and I can define it in a second.

00:39:10.120 | And then the practice is zillions of practical details

00:39:13.080 | and everything from roads to diplomatic recognition

00:39:15.160 | and so on, funding, founding, all that stuff.

00:39:18.760 | A lot of the stuff actually I left out of V1

00:39:20.360 | simply because I wanted to kind of get the desirability

00:39:23.240 | of it on the table and then talk about the feasibility.

00:39:26.200 | - I should actually linger on that briefly

00:39:28.640 | in terms of things we can revolutionize.

00:39:30.920 | Like one of the biggest innovations I think that Tesla does

00:39:35.320 | with the way they think about the car,

00:39:37.200 | with the deploy the car is not the automation

00:39:39.880 | or the electric to me, it's the over the air updates.

00:39:44.880 | Be able to send instantaneously updates to the software

00:39:50.800 | that completely changes the behavior, the UX,

00:39:54.080 | everything about the car.

00:39:55.320 | And so I do think it would be interesting

00:39:58.000 | 'cause books are representation of human knowledge,

00:40:01.820 | a snapshot of human knowledge.

00:40:06.400 | And it would be interesting that if we can somehow figure

00:40:10.080 | out a system that allows you to do sort of like a GitHub

00:40:13.840 | for books, like if I buy a book on Amazon

00:40:16.640 | without having to pay again, can I get updates

00:40:20.000 | like V1.1, V1.2 and there's like release notes.

00:40:25.000 | That would be incredible.

00:40:27.560 | It's not enough to do like a second edition

00:40:30.040 | or a third edition, but like minor updates

00:40:33.400 | that's not just on your website,

00:40:34.840 | but actually go into the model that we use to buy books.

00:40:39.840 | So I spend my money, maybe I'll do a subscription service

00:40:44.120 | for five bucks a month where I get regular updates

00:40:46.960 | to the books.

00:40:47.960 | And then there's an incentive for authors

00:40:50.200 | to actually update their books such that it makes sense

00:40:53.280 | for the subscription.

00:40:54.440 | And that means your book isn't just a snapshot,

00:40:57.760 | but it's a lifelong project.

00:40:59.640 | - Right.

00:41:00.480 | - If you care enough about the book.

00:41:01.400 | - So I think there's a lot that can be done there

00:41:03.720 | because actually in going through this process,

00:41:05.360 | in many ways, the most traditional thing I did

00:41:07.960 | was a self-publish ebook on Kindle, right?

00:41:11.700 | Why?

00:41:12.540 | Because basically like, if you actually ink a deal

00:41:14.680 | with a book publisher, first they'll give you some advance.

00:41:17.360 | I didn't need the advance or anything.

00:41:19.120 | But second is all these constraints.

00:41:21.560 | Oh, you wanna translate into this,

00:41:23.440 | or you wanna do this other format, or you wanna update it,

00:41:25.480 | you have to go and now talk to this other party, right?

00:41:28.240 | And also the narrowing window

00:41:32.560 | of what they'll actually publish, it gets narrower and narrower

00:41:34.760 | you see all these meltdowns over young adult novels

00:41:38.320 | and stuff on Twitter, but it's more than that.

00:41:40.880 | So actually having an Amazon page,

00:41:44.080 | it's just like a marker that a book exists.

00:41:46.680 | - Okay, and now I've got an entry point

00:41:50.440 | where if someone says, okay, I like this tweet,

00:41:53.480 | but how do I kind of get the,

00:41:55.400 | that might be a concept

00:41:57.000 | from like the middle of chapter three, right?

00:41:58.800 | How do I get the thing from front to back?

00:42:00.320 | I can just point them at thenetworkstate.com

00:42:01.920 | that is import this, right?

00:42:03.520 | This one entry point, okay?

00:42:05.400 | And you mentioned like subscription and money

00:42:10.000 | and so on and so forth.

00:42:10.840 | And I think people are paying for content online now

00:42:12.960 | with newsletters and so on, but I've chosen to,

00:42:15.520 | and I will always have the thing free.

00:42:17.600 | And I want it on, you can get the Kindle version on Amazon

00:42:20.880 | simply because you have to kind of set a price for that.

00:42:23.480 | But then networkstate.com, what I wanna do

00:42:25.840 | is have that optimized for every Android phone.

00:42:28.760 | So people in India or Latin America or Nigeria

00:42:32.280 | can just tap and open it.

00:42:33.920 | Gonna do translations and stuff like that.

00:42:36.240 | Greg Fodor of AllSpaceVR, founder of AllSpaceVR,

00:42:39.560 | he sold that and he coded the website

00:42:42.280 | and I worked with him on it.

00:42:44.360 | And there's another designer who, Elijah,

00:42:47.800 | and it was basically just a three-person group.

00:42:49.880 | And we thought we had something pretty nice,

00:42:51.800 | but one thing I was really pleasantly surprised by

00:42:55.240 | is how many people got in touch with us afterwards

00:42:57.120 | and asked us if we could open source the software

00:42:59.840 | to create this website, right?

00:43:02.240 | Because it's actually, you can try it on mobile.

00:43:03.840 | I think it's actually in some ways

00:43:05.760 | a better experience than Kindle.

00:43:07.480 | And so that was interesting because I do think

00:43:11.360 | of the website as like a V1 version

00:43:13.160 | of this concept of a book app, right?

00:43:15.440 | For example, imagine if you have the Bible

00:43:18.360 | and the 10 commandments aren't just text,

00:43:20.600 | but there's like a checklist and there's a gateway

00:43:23.320 | to a Christian community there.

00:43:25.000 | And the practice is embedded into the thing.

00:43:29.020 | Like, did you know brilliant.org?

00:43:31.760 | Amazing site, I love this site.

00:43:33.240 | Brilliant is basically mobile-friendly tutorials

00:43:36.600 | and you can kind of just swipe through,

00:43:38.280 | you're in line at Starbucks or getting on a plane

00:43:41.160 | or something, you just swipe through

00:43:42.400 | and you just get really nice micro lessons on things.

00:43:46.760 | And it's just interactive enough that your brain is working

00:43:49.520 | and you're problem solving.

00:43:50.920 | And sometimes you'll need a little pen and paper,

00:43:53.400 | but that format of sort of very mobile-friendly,

00:43:57.920 | just continuous learning,

00:43:59.280 | I'd like to do a lot more with that.

00:44:02.520 | And so that's kind of where we're gonna go with the book app.

00:44:05.120 | - So there's a lot of fun stuff

00:44:07.640 | about the way you did at least V1 of the book,

00:44:10.240 | which is you have like a one sentence summary,

00:44:13.760 | one paragraph summary, TLDR, and like one image summary,

00:44:18.760 | which is, I think honestly,

00:44:23.880 | it's not even about a short attention span,

00:44:25.640 | it's a really good exercise

00:44:27.400 | about summarization, condensation,

00:44:29.600 | and like helping you think through what is the key insight.

00:44:34.360 | Like we mentioned the prime number maze

00:44:36.920 | that reveals something central to the human condition,

00:44:41.280 | which is struggling against the limitation of our minds.

00:44:46.040 | And in that same way,

00:44:46.880 | you've summarized the network state in the book.

00:44:49.720 | So let's actually jump right there.

00:44:51.840 | And let me ask you, what is the network state?

00:44:55.160 | - What is the network state?

00:44:56.080 | So I'll give it a sentence

00:44:57.120 | and also give it an image, right?

00:44:58.760 | So the informal sentence,

00:45:00.600 | a network state is a highly aligned online community

00:45:03.400 | with a capacity for collective action

00:45:05.400 | that crowdfunds territory around the world

00:45:07.560 | and eventually gains diplomatic recognition

00:45:09.440 | from preexisting states, okay?

00:45:11.620 | So just taking those pieces,

00:45:13.560 | highly aligned online community,

00:45:15.160 | that is not Facebook, that is not Twitter.

00:45:17.400 | People don't think of themselves

00:45:18.360 | as Facebookers or Twitterians, right?

00:45:21.240 | That's just a collection of hundreds of millions of people

00:45:23.280 | who just fight each other all day, right?

00:45:25.160 | It's a fight club.

00:45:26.280 | A company is highly aligned where, you know,

00:45:28.600 | you'll put a task into the company Slack

00:45:30.520 | and if you do it in all hands,

00:45:33.000 | about 100% of the people in a company Slack will do it.

00:45:35.560 | So they're highly aligned in that way.

00:45:37.320 | But online communities don't tend to be highly aligned.

00:45:39.520 | Online communities tend to be like a Game of Thrones fan

00:45:41.600 | club or something like that.

00:45:42.920 | Or, you know, on a Twitter account,

00:45:44.320 | you might get 0.1% of people engaging with something.

00:45:46.240 | It's not the 100%.

00:45:47.520 | If you combine the degree of alignment of a company

00:45:50.960 | with the scale of a community,

00:45:52.680 | that's like what a highly aligned, you know,

00:45:55.080 | online community is, right?

00:45:56.480 | Start to get a thousand or 10,000 people

00:45:57.960 | who can collectively do something as simple

00:45:59.640 | as just all liking something on Twitter.

00:46:01.700 | For example, why would they do that?

00:46:02.880 | They're a guild of electrical engineers.

00:46:05.000 | They're a guild of graphic designers.

00:46:06.800 | And you've got a thousand people in this guild

00:46:09.320 | and every day somebody is asking a favor from the guild

00:46:12.520 | and the other 999 people are helping them out.

00:46:15.320 | For example, I've just launched a new project

00:46:17.720 | or I'd like to get a new job.

00:46:19.520 | Can somebody help me? And so on.

00:46:20.680 | And so you kind of give to get.

00:46:22.040 | You're, you know, you're helping other people

00:46:24.120 | in the community and you're kind of building up karma

00:46:25.760 | this way and then sometimes you spend it down.

00:46:27.620 | Like Stack Overflow has this karma economy.

00:46:29.720 | It's not meant to be an internal economy

00:46:31.620 | that is like making tons and tons of money off of,

00:46:35.000 | it's sort of to keep score, right?

00:46:36.600 | That's a highly aligned online community part.

00:46:38.440 | Then capacity for collective action.

00:46:39.760 | I just kind of described that,

00:46:41.000 | which is at a minimum,

00:46:43.600 | you don't have a highly aligned online community

00:46:46.440 | unless you have a thousand people

00:46:48.200 | and you paste in a tweet and a thousand of them RT it

00:46:50.920 | or like it, okay?

00:46:52.520 | If you can't even get that, you don't have something.

00:46:54.960 | If you do have that, you have the basis

00:46:56.820 | for at least collective digital action on something, okay?

00:47:00.520 | And you can think of this as a group of activists.

00:47:02.620 | You can think of it as, for example, let's say,

00:47:04.860 | I mentioned a guild, but let's say they're a group

00:47:06.600 | that wants to raise awareness of the fact

00:47:09.280 | that life extension is possible, right?

00:47:11.440 | Every day there's a new tweet on, I don't know,

00:47:15.200 | whether it's a Metformin research or Sinclair's work

00:47:18.760 | or David Sinclair, right?

00:47:20.160 | Andrew Huberman has good stuff here, you know,

00:47:22.080 | or there's a Longevity VC.

00:47:24.440 | There's a bunch of folks working in this area.

00:47:26.080 | Every day there's something there.

00:47:27.120 | And literally the purpose of this online community

00:47:29.160 | is raise awareness of longevity.

00:47:31.600 | And of the thousand people, 970 go and like that.

00:47:34.880 | That's pretty good, right?

00:47:36.140 | That's solid.

00:47:37.160 | You've got something there.

00:47:38.000 | You've got a laser, right?

00:47:39.720 | You've got something which you can focus on something

00:47:41.580 | because most of the web to internet is in tropic.

00:47:44.280 | You go to Hacker News, you go to Reddit, you go to Twitter,

00:47:47.100 | and you're immediately struck by the fact

00:47:48.480 | that it's like 30 random things, random.

00:47:51.080 | It's just a box of chocolates.

00:47:53.160 | It's meant to be, you know, we're-

00:47:55.920 | - Some of them look delicious.

00:47:57.120 | - Some of them look delicious.

00:47:58.240 | Novelty, we can over consume novelty, right?

00:48:01.160 | So, you know, where we're talking about earlier,

00:48:02.640 | the balance between tradition and innovation, right?

00:48:04.880 | Here is a different version of that,

00:48:06.360 | which is entropy going in a ton of different directions

00:48:10.760 | due to novelty versus like focus, you know?

00:48:14.520 | It's like heat versus work, you know?

00:48:16.760 | Heat is entropic and work force along a distance.

00:48:19.560 | You're going in a direction, right?

00:48:21.640 | And so if those 30 links on, you know,

00:48:25.160 | the next version of Hacker News or Reddit

00:48:26.800 | or something like so brilliant,

00:48:28.200 | it's just, that's leveling you up.

00:48:30.200 | The 30 things you click,

00:48:31.520 | you've just gained a skill as a function of that, right?

00:48:33.860 | So these kinds of online communities,

00:48:35.260 | I don't know what they look like.

00:48:36.100 | They probably don't look like the current social media.

00:48:38.840 | They, just like, for example, I know this is a meta analogy,

00:48:41.520 | but in the 2000s, people thought Facebook for Work

00:48:44.080 | would look like Facebook.

00:48:45.360 | And, you know, David Sacks, you know,

00:48:47.160 | founded and sold a company, Yammer,

00:48:48.440 | that was partially on their basis.

00:48:49.600 | It was fine, it was a billion dollar company.

00:48:51.520 | But Facebook for Work was actually Slack, right?

00:48:55.600 | It looked different.

00:48:56.440 | It was more chat focused,

00:48:57.560 | it was less image focused and whatnot.

00:48:59.800 | What does the platform

00:49:00.800 | for a highly aligned online community look like?

00:49:02.920 | I think Discord is the transitional state,

00:49:04.960 | but it's not the end state.

00:49:06.400 | Discord is sort of chatty.

00:49:08.200 | The work isn't done in Discord itself, right?

00:49:11.720 | The cryptocurrency for tracking or the crypto karma

00:49:14.760 | for sort of tracking people's contributions

00:49:16.760 | is not really done in Discord itself.

00:49:18.000 | Discord was not built for that.

00:49:19.540 | And I don't know what that UX looks like.

00:49:20.880 | Maybe it looks like tasks, you know,

00:49:23.240 | like maybe it looks something different.

00:49:25.520 | Okay.

00:49:26.360 | - Wait, wait, wait, let me linger on this.

00:49:28.480 | So you were actually,

00:49:29.480 | there's some people might not be even familiar

00:49:32.360 | with Discord or Slack or so on.

00:49:34.760 | Even these platforms have like communities

00:49:38.480 | associated with them.

00:49:39.680 | - Yes.

00:49:40.920 | - Meaning the big, like the meta community

00:49:43.560 | of people who are aware of the feature set

00:49:46.400 | and that you can do a thing,

00:49:47.600 | that this is a thing and then you could do a thing with it.

00:49:50.400 | Discord, like when I first realized it,

00:49:52.520 | I think it was born out of the gaming world.

00:49:54.880 | - Yes.

00:49:55.840 | - Is like, holy shit, this is like a thing.

00:49:59.640 | There's a lot of people that use this.

00:50:01.520 | - Right.

00:50:02.360 | - There's also a culture that's very difficult to escape

00:50:04.840 | that's associated with Discord

00:50:06.440 | that spans all the different communities within Discord.

00:50:09.500 | Reddit is the same,

00:50:11.120 | even though there's different subreddits,

00:50:14.000 | there's still, because of the migration phenomenon maybe,

00:50:17.520 | there's still a culture to Reddit and so on.

00:50:19.560 | - Yes.

00:50:20.400 | - So I'd like to sort of try to dig in and understand

00:50:23.720 | what's the difference between the online communities

00:50:27.720 | that are formed and the platforms

00:50:30.080 | on which those communities are formed?

00:50:32.200 | - Sure. - Very important.

00:50:33.160 | - Yes, it is, it is.

00:50:34.120 | So for example, an office,

00:50:36.040 | a good design for an office is frequently you have,

00:50:38.600 | the commons, which is like the lunchroom

00:50:42.880 | or the gathering area,

00:50:44.080 | then everybody else has a cave on the border

00:50:46.240 | that they can kind of retreat to.

00:50:47.320 | - Cave in the commons, I love it.

00:50:48.640 | By the way, I was laughing internally

00:50:50.280 | about the heat versus work.

00:50:51.800 | I think that's gonna stick with me.

00:50:53.800 | That's such an interesting way to see Twitter.

00:50:55.920 | - Yeah. - Like is this heat

00:50:57.600 | or is this thread,

00:51:00.120 | 'cause there's a lot of stuff going on.

00:51:02.920 | - Right.

00:51:04.000 | - Is it just heat or are we doing some,

00:51:06.040 | is there a directed thing

00:51:07.580 | that's gonna be productive at the end of the day?

00:51:09.320 | - That's right. - I love this.

00:51:10.160 | I've never seen, I mean, anyway,

00:51:12.000 | the cave in the commons is really nice.

00:51:15.440 | So that has to do with the layout of an office

00:51:18.200 | that's effective. - That's right.

00:51:19.280 | And so you can think of many kinds of social networks

00:51:23.960 | as being on the cave in commons continuum.

00:51:27.440 | For example, Twitter is just all commons.

00:51:30.360 | The caves are just like individual DMs

00:51:32.480 | or DM threads or whatever,

00:51:33.560 | but it's really basically just one gigantic,

00:51:35.360 | global, public fight club for the most part, right?

00:51:38.640 | Then you have-- - Or love club.

00:51:40.480 | - Well, some would love the mostly fight.

00:51:42.640 | Or actually it's-- - I love aggressively,

00:51:44.360 | that's all. - Yeah, I mean,

00:51:45.400 | the way I think, I mean, Twitter is like a cross

00:51:47.680 | between a library and a civil war.

00:51:52.680 | It's something where you can learn,

00:51:55.560 | but you can also fight if you choose to fight, right?

00:51:59.160 | - Yeah, well, I mean, it's because of the commons structure

00:52:04.160 | of it, it's a mechanism for virality of anything.

00:52:09.200 | - Yeah, so-- - You just describe

00:52:11.320 | the kind of things that become viral.

00:52:13.440 | - Yeah, meaning no offense to Liberians.

00:52:15.360 | It's like a library and Liberia.

00:52:17.080 | Liberia was wracked by civil war for many years, right?

00:52:20.960 | - Libraries is one of my favorite sets for porn.

00:52:25.360 | Just kidding, jokes.

00:52:26.680 | I'm learning as that's probably crossing the line

00:52:29.440 | for the engineers working on this humor module.

00:52:31.640 | Maybe take that down a notch. - Yeah, gosh.

00:52:34.640 | We're just talking about--

00:52:35.480 | Oh yeah, so continue, go ahead, continue.

00:52:36.320 | - Twitter is the commons. - Yeah, so Twitter

00:52:37.960 | is the commons, then Facebook is like,

00:52:39.760 | it's got all these warrens and stuff.

00:52:41.880 | Facebook, it's very difficult to reason about

00:52:45.040 | like privacy on that.

00:52:46.920 | And the reason is I think it's easy to understand

00:52:48.760 | when something is completely public like Twitter

00:52:51.280 | or completely private like Signal.

00:52:53.600 | And those are the only two modes I think

00:52:54.960 | in which one can really operate.

00:52:56.720 | When something is quasi private like Facebook,

00:53:00.040 | you have to just kind of assume it's public

00:53:02.000 | because if it's interesting enough,

00:53:03.880 | it'll go outside your friend network

00:53:06.120 | and it'll get screenshotted or whatever and posted.

00:53:08.400 | And so, Facebook is sort of forced into default public

00:53:13.520 | despite its privacy settings.

00:53:15.320 | For anybody who says something interesting,

00:53:17.400 | if it's like, you can figure out all their dials

00:53:20.440 | and stuff like that, but just hard to understand

00:53:22.360 | unless it's totally private or totally public.

00:53:24.560 | You have to basically treat it if it's totally public,

00:53:26.440 | if it's not totally private.

00:53:27.440 | Okay, at least under a real name.

00:53:29.040 | I'll come back to Soonim.

00:53:30.080 | So you've got Twitter, that's total commons.

00:53:32.320 | Facebook, which is like a warrens,

00:53:34.560 | it's like rabbit warrens or like a ant colony

00:53:36.600 | where you don't know where information is traveling.

00:53:39.240 | Then you've got Reddit, which has sort of your global Reddit

00:53:42.360 | and then all the subreddits.

00:53:43.280 | That's a different model of cave and commons.

00:53:45.880 | I think one of the reasons it works

00:53:46.960 | is that you have individual moderators

00:53:48.400 | where something is totally off topic and unacceptable

00:53:52.720 | in this subreddit and totally on topic and acceptable

00:53:55.320 | in another, that's like kind of a precursor

00:53:59.720 | of the digital societies I think that we're gonna see

00:54:01.960 | that actually have become physical societies,

00:54:03.520 | like lots and lots of subreddit like things

00:54:06.160 | have become physical societies.

00:54:07.880 | Then you start going further into like Discord

00:54:12.100 | where it's more full featured than,

00:54:15.720 | as you go Twitter, Facebook, Reddit,

00:54:19.840 | now you jump into Discord and Discord

00:54:21.680 | is a bunch of individual communities that are connected

00:54:25.240 | and you can easily sort of jump between them.

00:54:27.640 | And then you have Slack and yes, you can use Slack

00:54:32.400 | to go between different company Slacks,

00:54:33.960 | but Slack historically at least,

00:54:35.520 | I'm not sure what their current policy is,

00:54:36.640 | historically they discourage public Slacks.

00:54:38.720 | So it's mostly like you have your main Slack

00:54:41.640 | for your company and then you sometimes may jump into like,

00:54:44.400 | let's say you've got a design consultant

00:54:45.740 | or somebody like that, you'll jump into their Slack.

00:54:47.480 | But Discord is, you've got way more Discords usually

00:54:49.880 | that you jump into than Slacks, right?

00:54:51.800 | - Well, and let me ask you then on that point

00:54:53.920 | because there is a culture, one of the things I discovered

00:54:57.040 | on Reddit and Discord of anonymity or pseudonyms

00:55:01.520 | or usernames that don't represent the actual name.

00:55:03.800 | Now Slack is an example of one.

00:55:05.720 | So I think I did a, I used to have a Slack

00:55:08.480 | for like deep learning course that I was teaching

00:55:11.080 | and that was like very large, like 20,000 people, whatever.

00:55:14.960 | But so you could grow quite large,

00:55:17.040 | but there was a culture of like,

00:55:18.320 | I'm going to represent my actual identity, my actual name.

00:55:21.400 | And then the same stuff in Discord,

00:55:23.640 | I think I was the only asshole

00:55:24.960 | using my actual name on there.

00:55:26.640 | It's like everybody was using pseudonyms.

00:55:29.400 | So what's the role of that in the online community?

00:55:33.120 | - Well, so I actually gave a talk on this a few years ago

00:55:35.460 | called "The Pseudonymous Economy," okay?

00:55:38.400 | And it's come about faster than I expected,

00:55:41.680 | but I did think it was going to come about fairly fast.

00:55:44.000 | And essentially the concept is obviously we've had,

00:55:45.920 | so first, anonym, pseudonym, real name, right?

00:55:49.440 | - Can you describe the difference in that?

00:55:51.240 | - Anonymous is like 4chan where there's no tracking of a name.

00:55:56.000 | You know, there's zero reputation

00:55:58.520 | associated with an identity, right?

00:56:00.280 | Pseudonymous is like much of Reddit

00:56:02.180 | where there's a persistent username

00:56:04.240 | and it has karma over time,

00:56:06.960 | but it's not linked to the global identifier

00:56:10.000 | that is your state name, all right?

00:56:11.760 | So your quote real name,

00:56:13.020 | even the term real name, by the way, is a misnomer

00:56:14.960 | because it's like your social security name,

00:56:17.400 | like social security number.

00:56:18.660 | It's your official government name.

00:56:20.240 | It's your state name.

00:56:22.100 | It is the tracking device.

00:56:23.820 | It's the air tag that's put on you, right?

00:56:26.040 | Why do I say that, right?

00:56:27.160 | Another word for a name is a handle.

00:56:29.200 | And so just visualize like a giant file cabinet.

00:56:31.600 | There's a handle with Lex Friedman on it

00:56:33.480 | that anybody, the billions of people around the world

00:56:35.660 | can go up to and they can pull this file on you out.

00:56:40.120 | Images of you, things you said,

00:56:42.320 | like billions of people can stalk

00:56:44.360 | billions of other people now.

00:56:45.400 | That's a very new thing.

00:56:46.480 | And I actually think this will be a transitional era

00:56:49.200 | in like human history.

00:56:51.120 | We're actually gonna go back

00:56:52.120 | into a much more encrypted world.

00:56:53.760 | - Okay, okay, okay, let me linger on that

00:56:56.160 | because another way to see real names

00:57:00.720 | is the label on a thing that can be canceled.

00:57:04.480 | - Yes, that's right.

00:57:05.320 | In fact, there's a book called "Seeing Like a State"

00:57:07.720 | which actually talks about the origins

00:57:09.800 | of surnames and whatnot.

00:57:11.800 | Like if you have a guy who is,

00:57:15.120 | that guy with brown hair,

00:57:16.240 | that's like an analog identifier.

00:57:17.560 | It could mean 10 different people in a village.

00:57:19.880 | But if you have a first name, last name,

00:57:21.880 | okay, that guy can now be conscripted.

00:57:23.640 | You can go down with a list,

00:57:24.960 | a list of digital identifiers,

00:57:26.680 | pull that guy out, pull him into the military

00:57:28.800 | for conscription, right?

00:57:30.080 | So that was like one of the purposes of names

00:57:32.560 | was to make masses of humans legible to a state, right?

00:57:37.440 | Hence seeing like a state, you can see them now, right?

00:57:39.920 | See, digital identifiers,

00:57:41.080 | one thing that people don't usually think about

00:57:43.080 | is pseudonymity is itself a form of decentralization.

00:57:47.020 | So, you know, people know Satoshi Nakamoto was pseudonymous.

00:57:50.200 | They also know he's into decentralization.

00:57:52.120 | But one way of thinking about it is,

00:57:54.920 | let's say his real name, okay,

00:57:56.880 | or his state name is a node, okay?

00:58:00.080 | Attached to that is every database,

00:58:03.840 | you know, his Gmail, his, you know, Facebook,

00:58:07.800 | if he had one, every government record on him, right?

00:58:11.440 | All of these databases have that state name

00:58:16.360 | as the foreign key, right?

00:58:19.900 | And so it can go and look things up

00:58:21.960 | in all of those databases, right?

00:58:24.800 | And so it's like, think of it as being the center

00:58:27.200 | of a giant network of all of these things.

00:58:29.360 | When you go and create a pseudonym,

00:58:31.000 | you're budding off a totally new node

00:58:32.620 | that's far away from all the rest.

00:58:34.600 | And now he's choosing to attach BitcoinTalk and Bitcoin.org

00:58:38.720 | and the GPT signatures of the code,

00:58:41.280 | if he should choose to do that.

00:58:42.800 | All those things, the digital signatures

00:58:45.120 | are all attached to this new decentralized name

00:58:48.560 | because he's instantiating it, not the government, right?

00:58:52.080 | One way of thinking about it is the root administrator

00:58:54.180 | of the quote real name system is the state

00:58:57.520 | because you cannot simply edit your name there, right?

00:59:01.000 | You can't just go, you can't log into USA.gov

00:59:03.200 | and backspace your name and change it.

00:59:05.000 | Moreover, your birth certificate,

00:59:06.920 | all this stuff that's fixed and immutable, right?

00:59:09.160 | Whereas you would take for granted

00:59:10.640 | that on every site you go to, you can backspace,

00:59:12.740 | you can be like, call me Ishmael, you know,

00:59:14.500 | walk into a site, use whatever name you want.

00:59:16.740 | You just have to use the same name across multiple sites,

00:59:18.460 | you can do that.

00:59:19.320 | And if not, you don't have to.

00:59:20.800 | One thing that we're seeing now actually

00:59:22.400 | is at the level of kids, you know, the younger generation,

00:59:26.400 | Eric Schmidt several years ago mentioned that, you know,

00:59:29.320 | people would like change their names when they became adults

00:59:31.560 | so that they could do that.

00:59:33.280 | This is kind of already happening.

00:59:34.440 | People are using, I remarked on this many years ago,

00:59:37.520 | search resistant identities, okay?

00:59:40.280 | Why?

00:59:41.120 | They have their Finsta,

00:59:41.940 | which is their quote fake name Instagram

00:59:43.840 | and Rinsta, which is their real name Instagram.

00:59:46.080 | - Oh, this is cool.

00:59:46.900 | - Okay, and what's interesting is on their Rinsta,

00:59:50.000 | they're their fake self

00:59:51.120 | because they're in their Sunday best and, you know, smiling.

00:59:53.920 | And this is the one that's meant to be search indexed, right?

00:59:56.600 | On the Finsta, with their fake name,

00:59:58.920 | this is just shared with their closest friends.

01:00:01.080 | They're their real self and they're, you know,

01:00:02.720 | hanging out at parties or whatever, you know?

01:00:05.060 | And so this way they've got something

01:00:07.720 | which is the public persona and the private persona, right?

01:00:10.880 | The public persona that's search indexed

01:00:12.920 | and the private persona that is private for friends, right?

01:00:16.440 | And so organically people are, you know, like Jean Jacobs,

01:00:19.600 | she talks about like cities and how, you know,

01:00:21.640 | they're organic and what I like.

01:00:23.840 | Some of the mid 20th century guys,

01:00:25.920 | the architecture they had removed shade from, you know,

01:00:30.120 | like awnings and stuff like that got removed.

01:00:32.120 | So this is like the restoration of like awnings and shade

01:00:35.320 | and structure so that you're not always exposed

01:00:37.820 | to the all seeing web crawler that I have sore on,

01:00:40.920 | which is like Google bot just indexing everything.

01:00:43.280 | These are search resistant identities

01:00:44.720 | and that like I just sort of passes over you,

01:00:47.520 | like, you know, in the Terminator,

01:00:48.480 | like in the Terminator,

01:00:49.320 | I just kind of passes over you, right?

01:00:51.000 | So search resistant identity is not pulled up,

01:00:52.680 | it's not indexed, right?

01:00:54.440 | And now you can be your real self.

01:00:56.160 | And so we've had this kind of thing for a while

01:00:58.800 | with communication.

01:01:00.200 | The new thing is that cryptocurrency

01:01:01.400 | has allowed us to do it for transaction,

01:01:03.220 | hence the pseudonymous economy, right?

01:01:05.680 | And should go from anonymous, pseudonymous, real name.

01:01:09.920 | These each have their different purposes,

01:01:11.760 | but the new concept is that pseudonym,

01:01:16.080 | you can have multiple of them, by the way,

01:01:17.360 | your ENS name, you could have it under your quote,

01:01:19.400 | real name or state name, like Lex Friedman.eth,

01:01:22.080 | but you could also be punk6529.eth, okay?

01:01:26.320 | And now you can earn, you can sign documents,

01:01:28.920 | you can boot up stuff,

01:01:30.700 | you can have a persistent identity here, okay?

01:01:33.720 | Which has a level of indirection to your real name.

01:01:36.840 | Why is that very helpful?

01:01:38.280 | Because now it's harder to both discriminate against you

01:01:41.480 | and cancel you.

01:01:42.980 | Concerns of various factions are actually obviated

01:01:46.520 | or at least partially addressed

01:01:48.000 | by going pseudonymous as default, right?

01:01:50.240 | It is the opposite of bring your whole self to work,

01:01:51.920 | it's bring only your necessary self to work, right?

01:01:54.400 | Only show those credentials that you need, right?

01:01:56.120 | Now, of course, anybody who's in cryptocurrency

01:01:59.200 | understands Satoshi Nakamoto and so on is for this,

01:02:01.280 | but actually many progressives are for this as well.

01:02:03.120 | Why?

01:02:03.960 | You don't ban the boxes.

01:02:05.860 | It's like, you're not supposed to ask about

01:02:07.840 | felony convictions when somebody is being hired

01:02:10.520 | because they've served their time, right?

01:02:12.520 | Or you're not supposed to ask about immigration status

01:02:15.800 | or marital status in an interview,

01:02:18.420 | and people have this concept of blind auditions

01:02:21.420 | where if a woman is auditioning for a violin seat,

01:02:26.420 | they put it behind a curtain so they can't downgrade her

01:02:30.900 | for playing, so her performance is judged

01:02:35.060 | on the merits of its audible quality,

01:02:37.220 | not in terms of who this person is.

01:02:40.380 | So this way they don't discriminate

01:02:41.540 | versus male or female for who's getting a violin position.

01:02:46.660 | So you combine those concepts like ban the box,

01:02:48.620 | not asking these various questions, blind auditions,

01:02:51.140 | and then also the concept of implicit bias.

01:02:52.900 | Like if you believe this research,

01:02:55.540 | people are unconsciously biased towards other folks, right?

01:02:58.740 | Okay, so you take all that, you take Satoshi,

01:03:01.220 | and you put it together, and you say,

01:03:02.740 | "Okay, let's use pseudonyms."

01:03:04.420 | That actually takes unconscious bias even off the table,

01:03:07.060 | right, because now you have genuine global equality

01:03:11.260 | of opportunity.

01:03:12.140 | Moreover, you have all these people,

01:03:13.340 | billions of people around the world

01:03:14.820 | that might speak with accents,

01:03:16.440 | but they type without them.

01:03:17.940 | And now if they're pseudonymous,

01:03:19.260 | you aren't discriminating against them, right?

01:03:21.800 | Moreover, with AI, very soon, the AI version of Zoom,

01:03:25.500 | you'll be able to be whoever you wanna be

01:03:28.820 | and speak in whatever voice you wanna speak in, right?

01:03:31.780 | And you'll be, and that'll happen in real time.

01:03:35.060 | - So I mean, this is really interesting,

01:03:36.380 | but for Finsta and Rinsta,

01:03:41.380 | there's some sense in which the fake Instagram

01:03:46.740 | you're saying is where you could be your real self.

01:03:49.920 | Well, my question is under a pseudonym

01:03:54.040 | or when you're completely anonymous,

01:03:56.500 | is there some sense where you're not actually

01:03:59.080 | being your real self, that as a social entity,

01:04:04.080 | human beings are fundamentally social creatures,

01:04:10.560 | and for us to be social creatures,

01:04:12.400 | there is some sense in which we have to have

01:04:14.480 | a consistent identity that can be canceled,

01:04:18.320 | that can be criticized or applauded in society,

01:04:23.320 | and that identity persists through time.

01:04:28.080 | So is there some sense in which we would not be

01:04:31.760 | our full, beautiful human selves

01:04:34.440 | unless we have a lifelong, consistent, real name

01:04:38.280 | attached to us in a digital world?

01:04:40.080 | - So this is a complicated topic,

01:04:42.140 | but let me make a few remarks.

01:04:43.960 | First is real names, quote-unquote state names,

01:04:46.680 | were not built for the internet.

01:04:47.680 | They're actually state names, right?

01:04:49.920 | It's actually a great way of thinking about it,

01:04:51.120 | a social security name, right?

01:04:53.400 | So your state name, your official name,

01:04:55.960 | was not built for the internet.

01:04:57.560 | Why?

01:04:58.400 | They give both too much information and too little, okay?

01:05:02.080 | So too much information because someone with your name

01:05:05.700 | can find out all kinds of stuff about you.

01:05:07.960 | Like for example, if someone doesn't wanna be stalked,

01:05:11.160 | right, their real name is out there,

01:05:13.320 | their stalker knows it, they can find address information,

01:05:16.000 | all this other kind of stuff, right?

01:05:18.400 | And with all these hacks that are happening,

01:05:20.120 | just every day we see another hack, massive hack, et cetera,

01:05:23.920 | that real name can be indexed into data

01:05:25.720 | that was supposed to be private, right?

01:05:26.840 | Like for example, the Office of Personnel Management,

01:05:28.920 | like the government, the US government,

01:05:31.120 | many governments actually, are like a combination

01:05:33.720 | of the surveillance state and the Keystone cops, right?

01:05:37.040 | Why?

01:05:37.880 | They slurp up all the information

01:05:39.160 | and then they can't secure it.

01:05:40.680 | So it leaks out the back door, okay?

01:05:42.960 | They basically have 100 million records

01:05:45.480 | of all this very, 300 million records,

01:05:47.080 | all this very sensitive data,

01:05:48.280 | they just get owned, hacked over and over again, right?

01:05:51.440 | And so really there should be something

01:05:52.720 | which just totally inverts the entire concept of KYC

01:05:55.160 | and what have you.

01:05:56.200 | And of course, comply with the regulations

01:05:58.200 | as they are currently written.

01:05:59.880 | But also you should argue privacy over KYC,

01:06:03.360 | the government should not be able to collect

01:06:04.720 | what it can't secure.

01:06:05.880 | It's slurping up all this information,

01:06:07.800 | it's completely unable to secure it,

01:06:09.800 | it's hacked over and over again.

01:06:11.640 | Like China probably has the entire OPM file.

01:06:14.040 | And it's not just that, like Texas is hacked.

01:06:16.600 | And some of these hacks are not even detected yet, right?

01:06:19.600 | And these are just the ones that have been admitted.

01:06:21.640 | And so what happens is criminals can just run this stuff

01:06:26.320 | and find, oh, okay, so that guy

01:06:28.440 | who's got that net worth online,

01:06:30.320 | and he merges various databases,

01:06:31.520 | they've got a bunch of addresses to go and hit, okay?

01:06:33.960 | So in that sense, real names were not,

01:06:36.240 | state names were not built for the internet,

01:06:37.560 | they just give up too much information.

01:06:38.720 | In our actually existing internet environment,

01:06:41.360 | they give up too much information.

01:06:42.640 | On the other hand, they also give too little, why?

01:06:44.720 | If instead you give out lexfriedman.eth, okay?

01:06:49.280 | Or a similar crypto domain name or urban name

01:06:51.640 | or something like that.

01:06:53.160 | Now that's actually more like a DNS, okay?

01:06:56.280 | First, if you've got a lexfriedman.eth,

01:06:58.960 | what can you do that?

01:07:00.680 | Some you can do today, some you'll soon be able to do.

01:07:03.920 | You can pay lexfriedman.eth,

01:07:05.680 | you can message lexfriedman.eth,

01:07:07.320 | you can look it up like a social profile,

01:07:10.800 | you can send files to it, you can upload and download.

01:07:14.600 | Basically, it combines aspects of an email address,

01:07:17.880 | a website, a username, et cetera, et cetera.

01:07:23.840 | Eventually, I think you'll go from email to phone number

01:07:26.160 | to ENS address or something like that

01:07:28.320 | as the primary online identifier,

01:07:30.520 | because this is actually a programmable name, right?

01:07:34.120 | Whereas a state name is not.

01:07:36.080 | Think about it, like a state name will have apostrophes

01:07:38.080 | perhaps in it, or is that your middle name

01:07:40.320 | or this and that?

01:07:41.160 | That was a format that was developed for the paper world,

01:07:43.360 | right?

01:07:44.200 | Whereas the ENS name is developed for the online world.

01:07:46.520 | Now, the reason I say ENS or something like it,

01:07:49.400 | you know, somebody in a village,

01:07:52.480 | their name might be Smith because they were a blacksmith

01:07:54.840 | or Potter because they were a Potter, right?

01:07:57.000 | And same, I think your surname,

01:07:59.040 | right now for many people, it's .eth

01:08:01.560 | and that reflects the Ethereum community.

01:08:03.320 | Your surname online will carry information about you.

01:08:06.520 | Like .solve says something different about you.

01:08:09.040 | .btc says yet something different.

01:08:11.400 | I think we're gonna have a massive fractionation

01:08:13.240 | of this over time.

01:08:14.240 | We're still in the very earliest days

01:08:15.640 | of our internet civilization, right?

01:08:18.040 | 100, 200 years from now, those surnames may be

01:08:20.040 | as informative as say Chen or Friedman or Srinivasan

01:08:23.360 | in terms of what information they carry,

01:08:25.480 | 'cause the protocol, it's the civilization fundamentally

01:08:27.560 | that you're associated with, right?

01:08:28.880 | - Right, so there's some improvements to the real name

01:08:32.800 | that you could do in the digital world.

01:08:34.360 | But do you think there's value of having a name

01:08:36.600 | that's persists throughout your whole life

01:08:39.240 | that is shared between all the different digital

01:08:44.040 | and physical communities?

01:08:44.880 | - I think you should be able to opt into that, right?

01:08:47.560 | - At which stage?

01:08:48.560 | - At which level, in terms of the society

01:08:50.320 | that you're joining.

01:08:51.520 | - Wait a minute, so can I murder a bunch of people

01:08:54.560 | in society one and then go to society two

01:08:59.000 | and be like, I'm murder free.

01:09:01.560 | My name is-- - No, no, I don't mean it

01:09:02.880 | like that, no, no, yeah.

01:09:03.800 | So here's why that wouldn't work.

01:09:05.360 | - That's the application I'm interested in.

01:09:07.160 | - Okay, well, I'm not interested in the murder application,

01:09:09.760 | but what do you think?

01:09:10.600 | I don't know, I'm just kidding.

01:09:11.440 | - I would like you to prevent me,

01:09:14.600 | a person who's clearly bad for society, from doing that.

01:09:17.440 | - Sure, sure, sure.

01:09:18.280 | Murder is gonna be against the rules

01:09:20.000 | in almost every society.

01:09:21.720 | And I mean, people will argue--

01:09:23.760 | - Most likely, yeah.

01:09:24.600 | - Yeah, most likely, right?

01:09:25.680 | And the reason I'm thinking-- - Except animals.

01:09:28.200 | - Well, I'm thinking of like the Aztecs or the Mayas

01:09:30.560 | or something like that, there's various,

01:09:32.520 | you know, Soviet Union, there's weird edge case,

01:09:35.680 | unfortunately. - Broad words.

01:09:36.520 | - Yeah, there's societies, unfortunately,

01:09:37.800 | that have actually, that's why I asterisked it.

01:09:40.280 | But let's say murder is something that society one

01:09:45.280 | probably has effectively a social smart contract

01:09:48.200 | or a social contract that says, that's illegal,

01:09:51.000 | therefore, you're in jail,

01:09:52.320 | therefore, you're deprived of the right to exit.

01:09:54.120 | But upon entry into that society, in theory,

01:09:57.640 | you would have said, okay, I accept this, quote,

01:10:00.160 | social contract, right?

01:10:01.680 | Obviously, if I kill somebody, I can't leave, okay?

01:10:04.000 | So you've accepted upon crossing the border into there,

01:10:07.440 | right?

01:10:08.280 | Now, as I mentioned, you know, like, what is murder?

01:10:12.240 | Like people will, I mean, there's an obvious answer,

01:10:15.240 | but as I said, there's been human sacrifice

01:10:17.160 | in some societies, communism, they kill lots of people,

01:10:19.160 | Nazism, they kill lots of people.

01:10:20.720 | Unfortunately, there's quite a lot of societies,

01:10:23.440 | you know, I wanted to say it's an edge case,

01:10:25.600 | but maybe many of the 20th century societies

01:10:28.840 | around the world have institutionalized

01:10:29.960 | some kind of murder, whether it was the Red Terror,

01:10:31.480 | you know, in the Soviet Union,

01:10:32.760 | or obviously the Holocaust, or, you know,

01:10:34.560 | the Cultural Revolution, or Year Zero,

01:10:37.200 | and so on and so forth, right?

01:10:38.680 | So my point there is that who's committing all those murders?

01:10:43.040 | It was the state, it was the organization

01:10:45.400 | that one is implicitly trusting them to track you, right?

01:10:48.760 | And how did they commit those murders?

01:10:49.920 | Well, how did Lenin, you know,

01:10:52.560 | do you know the hanging order?

01:10:53.600 | You know what I'm talking about,

01:10:54.440 | the hanging order for the Kulaks?

01:10:56.080 | - Yes.

01:10:56.920 | - Okay, the famous hanging order,

01:10:57.760 | which actually showed they were actually bloodthirsty,

01:10:59.680 | the key thing was he said,

01:11:00.680 | "Here's a list of all the quote rich men,

01:11:02.840 | "the Kulaks, go and kill them."

01:11:04.360 | The real names, the state names

01:11:06.240 | were what facilitated the murder.

01:11:07.960 | They didn't prevent the murderers there, right?

01:11:11.000 | So my point is, just in the ethical weighting of it,

01:11:14.600 | it's a two-sided thing, right?

01:11:16.560 | You're right that the tracking can, you know,

01:11:19.400 | prevent disorganized murders,

01:11:21.120 | but the tracking facilitates,

01:11:22.440 | unfortunately, organized murders.

01:11:24.200 | Lists of undesirables were the primary tool

01:11:27.400 | of all of these oppressive states in the 20th century.

01:11:29.800 | You see my point?

01:11:31.520 | - I see your point, and it's a very strong point.

01:11:34.520 | In part, it's a cynical point,

01:11:38.320 | which is that the rule of a centralized state

01:11:44.240 | is more negative than positive.

01:11:50.320 | - I think it is like nuclear energy, okay?

01:11:54.560 | It's like fire.

01:11:57.320 | It is something which you're gonna keep having it reform

01:12:01.640 | because there's good reasons where you have

01:12:03.560 | centralization, decentralization, re-centralization,

01:12:06.280 | but power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely,

01:12:09.600 | and you just have to be very suspicious

01:12:11.800 | of this kind of centralized power.

01:12:13.760 | The more trust you give it,

01:12:14.880 | often the less trust it deserves.

01:12:17.560 | It's like a weird feedback loop, right?

01:12:18.880 | The more trust, the more it can do.

01:12:20.400 | The more it can do, the more bad things it will do.

01:12:24.000 | So, okay, there is a lot of downside to the state

01:12:29.000 | being able to track you.

01:12:31.360 | And history teaches us lessons, one at a large scale,

01:12:36.280 | especially in the 20th century, at the largest of scale,

01:12:38.960 | a state can do, commit a large amount of murder

01:12:41.800 | and suffering.

01:12:42.640 | - And by the way, history isn't over.

01:12:43.920 | If you think about what the Chinese are building on this,

01:12:47.520 | that surveillance state, it's not just tracking your name,

01:12:51.360 | it's tracking everything on you.

01:12:53.840 | Like WeChat is essentially like,

01:12:55.680 | it is all the convenience and none of the freedom.

01:12:59.920 | - So that's the downside, but don't you,

01:13:03.320 | the question is, I think probably fundamentally

01:13:05.920 | about the human nature of an individual,

01:13:09.680 | of how much murder there would be

01:13:12.920 | if we can just disappear every time we murder.

01:13:16.680 | - Well, I mean-- - At the individual level.

01:13:18.760 | - So the issue is basically like,

01:13:20.920 | once one realizes that the moral trade-off

01:13:23.280 | has two poles to it, right?

01:13:25.040 | And moreover that basically centralized organized murder

01:13:27.840 | has, I mean, if we add up all the disorganized murder

01:13:31.000 | of the 20th century, it's probably significantly less

01:13:33.920 | than the organized murder that these states facilitated.

01:13:38.320 | And probably by, R.J. Rommel has this thing

01:13:40.400 | called democide, right?

01:13:41.760 | And the thing is, it's so grim, right?

01:13:43.360 | Because it's saying like, one death is a tragedy,

01:13:46.680 | a million is a statistic, right?

01:13:48.360 | These are just like, just incalculable tragedies

01:13:51.200 | that we can't even understand.

01:13:54.600 | But nevertheless engaging with it,

01:13:57.800 | like, I don't know, is the ratio 10X?

01:14:00.080 | Is it 100X?

01:14:00.920 | I wouldn't be surprised if it's 100X, right?

01:14:02.120 | - Yeah, but have you seen the viciousness,

01:14:04.720 | the negativity, the division within online communities

01:14:09.240 | that have anonymity?

01:14:11.120 | - So that's the thing, is basically,

01:14:13.180 | there's also a Scylla and a Charybdis.

01:14:14.960 | I'm not, when you see what centralization can do,

01:14:19.840 | and you correct in the direction of decentralization,

01:14:23.120 | you can overcorrect with decentralization

01:14:25.440 | and you get anarchy.

01:14:26.260 | And this is basically, then you want to re-centralize, right?

01:14:28.760 | And this is the, I think it's the romance

01:14:31.560 | of the three kingdoms, the empire long united must divide,

01:14:34.600 | the empire long divided must unite.

01:14:35.920 | That's always the way of it, right?

01:14:37.160 | So what's gonna happen is,

01:14:38.920 | we will state certain verbal principles, right?

01:14:42.120 | And then the question is, where in state space you are?

01:14:45.000 | Are you too centralized?

01:14:46.000 | Well, then, okay, you want to decentralize.

01:14:47.840 | And are you too decentralized?

01:14:49.320 | Then we want to centralize and maybe track more, right?

01:14:51.800 | And people opt into more tracking

01:14:53.440 | because they will get something from that tracking,

01:14:55.360 | which is a greater societal stability.

01:14:57.160 | So it's kind of like saying, are we going north or south?

01:15:01.040 | And the answer is like, what's our destination?

01:15:02.800 | Where's our current position

01:15:04.220 | in the civilizational state space?

01:15:06.320 | - Well, my main question, I guess,

01:15:08.360 | is does creating a network state escape

01:15:13.360 | from some of the flaws of human nature?

01:15:15.800 | The reason you got Nazi Germany is a large scale resentment

01:15:20.760 | with different explanations for that resentment

01:15:22.920 | that's ultimately lives in the heart of each individual

01:15:26.160 | that made up the entirety of Nazi Germany

01:15:28.560 | and had a charismatic leader

01:15:30.320 | that was able to channel that resentment into action,

01:15:34.200 | into actual policies,

01:15:35.920 | into actual political and military movements.

01:15:40.000 | Can't you not have the same kind of thing

01:15:41.920 | in digital communities as well?

01:15:44.200 | Have you heard the term argumentum ad Hitlerum

01:15:46.400 | or like Godwin's law or something?

01:15:47.720 | Like, it's something where if the reference point is Hitler,

01:15:51.000 | it's this thing where a lot of things break down.

01:15:54.520 | But I do think, I mean, look, is there any,

01:15:56.940 | did Bitcoin manage to get where it was

01:15:59.540 | without a single shot being fired to my knowledge?

01:16:01.840 | Yes, right?

01:16:03.260 | Did Google manage to get to where it is

01:16:04.680 | without shots being fired?

01:16:05.920 | Absolutely.

01:16:06.760 | And-

01:16:08.760 | - While a lot of shots were being fired

01:16:11.760 | elsewhere in the world.

01:16:13.120 | - Sure.

01:16:13.960 | - And-

01:16:14.800 | - But who's firing those shots?

01:16:16.080 | - The states.

01:16:16.920 | - The states, right, yeah.

01:16:17.740 | - But that's because Bitcoin and Google

01:16:20.200 | are a tiny minority of communities.

01:16:22.360 | It's like the icing on the cake of human civilization.

01:16:25.440 | - Sure.

01:16:26.280 | Basically, any technology, I mean, like you can use a hammer

01:16:30.480 | to go and hit somebody with it, right?

01:16:31.880 | I'm not saying every technology is equally destructive

01:16:36.560 | or what have you, but you can conceive of,

01:16:38.920 | it's kind of like rule 34, but for technology, right?

01:16:43.240 | Okay, right, you can probably figure out some-

01:16:45.480 | - Your ability to reference brilliant things throughout

01:16:48.160 | is quite admirable, yes.

01:16:50.280 | But anyway, sorry, rule 34 for technology.

01:16:52.440 | - Rule 34, but for abusive technology,

01:16:54.560 | you can always come up with a black mirror version

01:16:56.720 | of something.

01:16:57.560 | And in fact, there is this kind of funny tweet,

01:16:59.240 | which is like a sci-fi author.

01:17:02.080 | My book, "Don't Invent the Torment Nexus,"

01:17:05.420 | was meant to be a cautionary tale on what would happen

01:17:09.900 | if society invented the torment nexus.

01:17:11.420 | And then it's like, "Tech guys, at long last,

01:17:15.040 | we have created the torment nexus."

01:17:16.680 | (laughing)

01:17:17.520 | Or whatever, right?

01:17:18.360 | And so the thing is that simply describing something,

01:17:22.460 | some abuse, unfortunately,

01:17:24.620 | after the initial shock wears off,

01:17:28.080 | people will unconsciously think of it

01:17:29.960 | as sort of an attractor in the space, right?

01:17:32.160 | It's like, I'll give you some examples,

01:17:33.680 | like "Minority Report" had the gesture thing, right?

01:17:37.400 | And the Kinect was based on that.

01:17:38.840 | So it's a dystopian movie, but had this cool kind of thing,

01:17:40.900 | and people kind of keyed off it, right?

01:17:43.240 | Or people have said that movies like "Full Metal Jacket,"

01:17:47.440 | that was meant to be, in my understanding,

01:17:49.200 | is meant to be like an anti-war movie.

01:17:50.960 | But lots of soldiers just love it,

01:17:53.680 | despite the fact that the drill sergeant

01:17:55.320 | is actually depicted as a bad guy, right?

01:17:57.400 | For the sort of portrayal of that kind of environment, right?

01:18:01.280 | So I'm just saying, it's like giving the vision

01:18:02.720 | of the digital Hitler or whatever.

01:18:04.640 | It's not actually a vision I want to paint.

01:18:06.760 | I do think everything is possible.

01:18:09.320 | Obviously, ISIS uses the internet, right?

01:18:11.520 | - Yeah, we're not bringing up Hitler in a shallow argument.

01:18:17.480 | We're bringing up Hitler

01:18:18.680 | in a long, empathetic, relaxed discussion,

01:18:22.200 | which is a different-- - Sure, sure, I understand.

01:18:23.640 | - Which is where Hitler can live, in a healthy way.

01:18:27.160 | There's deep lessons in Hitler and Nazi Germany,

01:18:32.560 | as there is with Stalin, yes.

01:18:33.960 | - Okay, so in many ways,

01:18:35.960 | and this is a very superficial way of talking about it,

01:18:39.080 | but this is, exit is the anti-genocide technology, right?

01:18:43.400 | Because exit is the route of the politically powerless.

01:18:46.480 | Exit is not, people always say,

01:18:48.120 | oh, exit is for the rich, or whatever.

01:18:49.760 | That's actually not true.

01:18:50.600 | Most immigrants equals most emigrants are not rich.

01:18:54.640 | They're politically powerless.

01:18:55.920 | - You can describe exit.

01:18:57.340 | - What is exit?

01:18:58.180 | So there's this book, which I reference a lot,

01:19:00.840 | I like it, called "Exit, Voice, and Loyalty"

01:19:03.720 | by Albert Hirschman, okay?

01:19:05.600 | And he essentially says,

01:19:07.680 | and I gave this talk in 2013

01:19:10.240 | that goes through this at YC Starb School,

01:19:14.480 | but just to describe these,

01:19:16.520 | voices reform, exits alternatives.

01:19:18.520 | For example, in the context of an open source project,

01:19:21.080 | voice is submitting a bug, and exit is forking.

01:19:25.360 | In a company, voices, you're saying,

01:19:30.200 | hey, here's a ticket, okay, that I'd like to get solved,

01:19:34.400 | and exit is taking your business elsewhere, okay?

01:19:37.640 | You know, at the level of corporate governance,

01:19:39.320 | voices, you know, board of directors vote,

01:19:41.080 | and exit is selling your shares, right?

01:19:42.920 | In a country, voice is a vote, and exit is migration, okay?

01:19:47.080 | And I do think that the two forces we talk about a lot,

01:19:51.920 | democracy and capitalism, are useful forces,

01:19:54.680 | but there's a third, which is migration, right?

01:19:59.160 | So you can vote with your ballot,

01:20:00.600 | you can vote with your wallet, you can vote with your feet.

01:20:02.560 | Wallet has some aspects of exit built into it,

01:20:06.320 | but voting with your feet actually has some aspects

01:20:08.000 | of voice built into it, because when you leave,

01:20:10.300 | it's like an amplifier on your vote.

01:20:11.760 | You might say 10 things, but when you actually leave,

01:20:14.800 | then people take what you said seriously,

01:20:16.520 | you're not just like complaining or whatever,

01:20:18.000 | you actually left San Francisco

01:20:19.800 | because it was so bad on this and this issue,

01:20:22.240 | and you've actually voted with your feet.

01:20:23.680 | It is manifest preference as opposed to stated preference.

01:20:27.240 | So voice versus exit is this interesting dichotomy.

01:20:29.480 | Do you try to reform the system, or do you exit it,

01:20:31.440 | and build a new one, or seek an alternative?

01:20:33.640 | And then loyalty modulates this,

01:20:35.560 | where if you are a patriot,

01:20:38.120 | as part of the initial part of your conversation,

01:20:40.560 | like, "Are you a traitor?

01:20:44.040 | "You're giving up on our great thing," or whatever,

01:20:47.080 | and people will push those buttons to get people to stick.

01:20:49.880 | I shouldn't say the bad version, let's say a common version.

01:20:53.120 | Sometimes good, sometimes bad.

01:20:54.580 | But then there's the good version, which is,

01:20:58.600 | "Oh, maybe the price is down right now,

01:21:00.940 | "but you believe in the cause."

01:21:02.500 | So even if they're on paper, you would rationally exit,

01:21:06.360 | you believe in this thing,

01:21:08.240 | and you're gonna stick with it, okay?

01:21:10.100 | So loyalty can be, again, good and bad,

01:21:12.160 | but it kind of modulates the trade-off

01:21:13.800 | between voice and exit, okay?

01:21:15.860 | So given that framework, we can think of a lot of problems

01:21:20.200 | in terms of, "Am I gonna use voice or exit

01:21:23.120 | "or some combination thereof?"

01:21:24.200 | 'Cause they're not mutually exclusive.

01:21:25.160 | It's kind of like left and right,

01:21:26.440 | sometimes you use both together.

01:21:28.540 | I think that one of the biggest things the internet does

01:21:31.460 | is it increases microeconomic leverage

01:21:34.400 | and therefore increases exit in every respect of life.

01:21:37.200 | For example, on every phone,

01:21:40.800 | you can pick between Lyft and Uber, right?

01:21:44.280 | When you're at the store, you see a price on the shelf

01:21:47.120 | and you can comparison shop, right?

01:21:49.440 | If it's Tinder, you can swipe, right?

01:21:51.440 | If it's Twitter, you can click over to the next account.

01:21:54.020 | The back button is exit.

01:21:55.360 | The microeconomic leverage,

01:21:58.320 | leverage in the sense of alternatives, right?

01:22:01.280 | This is like one of the fundamental things

01:22:03.740 | that the internet does.

01:22:04.580 | It puts this tool on your desktop

01:22:06.020 | and now you can go and talk to an illustrator

01:22:08.740 | or you can kind of build it yourself, right?

01:22:10.580 | By typing in some characters into Dali.

01:22:13.460 | - And that makes the positive forces of capitalism

01:22:15.740 | more efficient, increase in microeconomic leverage.

01:22:19.060 | - And it's individual empowerment, right?

01:22:21.020 | And so our sort of industrial-age systems

01:22:24.100 | were not set up for that level of individual empowerment.

01:22:26.140 | Just to give you like one example that I think about.

01:22:28.380 | We take for granted every single website

01:22:30.240 | you go and log into.

01:22:31.260 | You can configure your Twitter profile

01:22:33.780 | and you can make it dark mode or light mode

01:22:36.100 | and your name, all this stuff is editable, right?

01:22:38.600 | How do you configure your USA experience?

01:22:40.700 | Is there a USA.gov that you edit?

01:22:44.380 | Can you even edit your name there?

01:22:45.980 | - Dark mode for USA.

01:22:48.140 | - But I mean, just your profile.

01:22:49.300 | Is there like a national profile?

01:22:51.180 | I mean, there's like driver's license.

01:22:52.620 | Point is that it's assumed

01:22:54.460 | that it's not like individually customizable

01:22:56.860 | quite in that way, right?

01:22:58.220 | Of course you can move around your house

01:23:00.060 | and stuff like that.

01:23:00.900 | But it's not like your experience of the US

01:23:04.040 | is like configurable, you know?

01:23:07.120 | - Let me think about that.

01:23:08.840 | Let me think about sort of the analogy of it.

01:23:11.580 | So the microeconomic leverage, you can switch apps.

01:23:15.880 | Can you switch your experience in small ways,

01:23:21.120 | efficiently, multiple times a day

01:23:23.420 | in inside the United States?

01:23:25.320 | - Well, the physical world--

01:23:28.120 | - You do, yeah, under the constraints of the physical world,

01:23:31.440 | you do like micro migrations.

01:23:33.560 | - So this is coming back to the hunter-gatherer,

01:23:35.360 | farmer-soldier, digital nomad kind of thing, right?

01:23:38.440 | The digital nomad combines aspects of the V1 and the V2

01:23:43.680 | for a V3, right?

01:23:44.800 | Because digital nomad has the mobility and freedom

01:23:47.520 | with the hunter-gatherer,

01:23:48.600 | but some of the consistency of the civilization

01:23:52.380 | of the farmer and soldier, right?

01:23:54.320 | But coming back to this,

01:23:55.560 | one other thing about it is in the 1950s,

01:23:58.280 | if a guy in assembly line

01:23:59.440 | might literally push the same button for 30 years, okay?

01:24:02.960 | Whereas today, you're pushing a different key every second.

01:24:05.960 | That's like one version of like microeconomic leverage.

01:24:10.480 | Another version is, in the 1980s,

01:24:13.480 | I mean, they didn't have Google Maps, right?

01:24:15.420 | So you couldn't just like discover things off the path.

01:24:17.880 | People would just essentially do home to work

01:24:20.960 | and work to home and home to work

01:24:22.520 | and a trip had to be planned, right?

01:24:25.200 | They were contained within a region of space

01:24:27.680 | or you do home to school, school to home, home to school.

01:24:30.840 | It wasn't like you went and explored the map.

01:24:33.040 | Most people didn't, right?

01:24:34.260 | They were highly cannalized, okay?

01:24:36.460 | Meaning, it was just back and forth, back and forth,

01:24:39.520 | very routine, just like the push the button,

01:24:41.360 | push the button, trapped within this very small piece

01:24:46.280 | and also trapped within this large country

01:24:48.140 | 'cause it was hard to travel between countries and so on.

01:24:50.020 | Again, of course there were vacations,

01:24:52.620 | of course there were some degree of news and so on.

01:24:54.480 | Your mobility wasn't completely crushed

01:24:56.640 | but it was actually quite low, okay, relatively speaking.

01:24:59.680 | Just you were trapped in a way

01:25:02.440 | that you weren't even really thinking about it, okay?

01:25:04.640 | And now that map has opened up.

01:25:06.640 | Now you can see the whole map.

01:25:08.040 | You can go all over the place.

01:25:10.160 | You know, I don't have the data to show it

01:25:11.560 | but I'd be shocked if people,

01:25:14.480 | the average person didn't go to more places,

01:25:16.400 | wasn't, you know, going to more restaurants

01:25:19.600 | and things like that today than they were in the '80s

01:25:21.760 | simply because the map is open, okay?

01:25:23.640 | - And the map is made more open through the digital world.

01:25:27.080 | - Through the digital world, exactly.

01:25:28.200 | So we're reopening the map like the hunter-gatherer, okay?

01:25:31.020 | Because you can now, think about every site

01:25:33.360 | for very low cost that you can visit, right?

01:25:36.320 | The digital world, you can, I mean,

01:25:37.520 | how many websites have you visited?

01:25:39.480 | I don't know, hundreds of thousands probably

01:25:41.240 | at this point over your life, right?

01:25:42.800 | How many places on the surface have you visited?

01:25:44.520 | You're actually unusual.

01:25:45.360 | You might be like a world traveler or what have you, right?

01:25:47.400 | But still, even your physical mobility

01:25:50.320 | is less than your digital mobility, right?

01:25:52.560 | You can just essentially, I mean,

01:25:54.240 | the entire concept of like nations and borders and whatnot

01:25:57.640 | didn't exist in the hunter-gatherer era, right?

01:25:59.560 | Because you couldn't build permanent fortifications

01:26:03.440 | and whatnot, even nations as we currently think of them

01:26:06.640 | with like demarcated borders, you needed cartography,

01:26:10.420 | you needed maps, right?

01:26:11.880 | That stuff didn't exist for a long time.

01:26:13.400 | You just had sort of a fuzzy area

01:26:14.960 | of we kind of control this territory

01:26:16.960 | and these guys are on the other side of the river, okay?

01:26:19.160 | - I think just to--

01:26:20.600 | - I don't wanna digress too much, but yeah.

01:26:22.240 | - We're to digress away.

01:26:23.840 | I think entirety of life on Earth is a kind of a digression

01:26:28.040 | which creates beauty and complexity

01:26:30.480 | as part of the digression.

01:26:31.700 | I think your vision of the network state

01:26:35.440 | is really powerful and beautiful.

01:26:37.040 | I just wanna linger on this real name issue.

01:26:40.160 | - Yes, really.

01:26:41.120 | - Let me just give you some data.

01:26:42.480 | - Go ahead.

01:26:43.560 | - Personal, anecdotal experience data.

01:26:45.640 | There's a reason I only do this podcast in person.

01:26:49.120 | There is something lost in the digital space.

01:26:52.640 | - Oh, sure.

01:26:53.640 | - And I find, now I personally believe

01:26:57.360 | to play devil's advocate against the devil's advocate

01:27:00.360 | that I'm playing, I personally believe

01:27:02.480 | that this is a temporary thing.

01:27:03.720 | We will figure out technological solutions to this,

01:27:06.000 | but I do find that currently people are much more willing

01:27:09.760 | to be on scale cruel to each other online

01:27:13.000 | than they are in person.

01:27:14.900 | The only, the way to do that,

01:27:16.640 | I just visited Ukraine, went to the front.

01:27:18.900 | The way you can have people be cruel to each other

01:27:21.880 | in the physical space is through the machinery of propaganda

01:27:25.260 | that dehumanizes the other side, all that kind of stuff.

01:27:27.960 | That's really hard work to do.

01:27:31.480 | Online, I find just naturally at the individual scale,

01:27:34.700 | people somehow start to easily engage in the drug

01:27:39.700 | of mockery, derision, and cruelty

01:27:45.600 | when they can hide behind anonymity.

01:27:47.940 | I don't know what that says about human nature.

01:27:50.920 | I ultimately believe most of us want to be good

01:27:53.880 | and have the capacity to do a lot of good,

01:27:56.220 | but sometimes it's fun to be shitty,

01:27:58.540 | to shit on people, to be cruel.

01:28:00.440 | I don't know what that is.

01:28:01.400 | - It's weird because I think, you know,

01:28:03.780 | one of my sayings is just like the internet

01:28:06.080 | increases microeconomic leverage,

01:28:07.720 | the internet increases variance.

01:28:09.400 | For anything that exists before,

01:28:11.060 | you have, you know, the zero and 100 versions of it.

01:28:15.000 | I'll give some examples, then I'll come to this.

01:28:16.480 | For example, you go from the 30 minute sitcom

01:28:19.320 | to the 30 second clip or the 30 episode Netflix binge.

01:28:23.080 | You go from guy working 95 to the guy who's 40 years old

01:28:28.080 | and has failed to launch, doesn't have a job or anything,

01:28:33.880 | and the 20 year old tech billionaire.

01:28:36.120 | You go from all kinds of things that were sort of Gaussian

01:28:40.000 | or kind of constrained in one location

01:28:41.360 | to kind of extreme outcomes on both sides.

01:28:44.200 | And applying that here,

01:28:47.120 | you are talking about the bad outcome,

01:28:49.000 | which I agree does happen where the internet,

01:28:51.340 | in some sense, makes people have very low empathy

01:28:54.160 | between others.

01:28:55.040 | But it also is the other extent

01:28:56.720 | where people find their mental soulmates across the world.

01:29:01.440 | Someone who's living in Thailand or in, you know,

01:29:04.440 | like Latin America who thinks all the same stuff,

01:29:07.500 | just like them.

01:29:08.420 | Wow, you'd never met this person before, right?

01:29:11.560 | You get to know them online, you meet a person

01:29:13.640 | it's like, you know, the brains have been communicating

01:29:16.040 | for two years, three years, you've been friends

01:29:18.000 | and you see them in person and it's just great, right?

01:29:20.300 | So it's actually, it's not just the total lack of empathy.

01:29:24.000 | It is frankly, far more empathy than you would be able

01:29:28.720 | to build usually with an in-person conversation

01:29:31.580 | in the 80s or the 90s with someone on their side of the world

01:29:34.360 | 'cause you might not even be able to get a visa

01:29:35.520 | to go to their country or not even know they existed.

01:29:37.720 | How would you be able to find each other

01:29:39.240 | and so on and so forth, right?

01:29:40.480 | So it is kind of both.

01:29:41.840 | It is tearing society apart

01:29:43.600 | and it's putting it back together, both at the same time.

01:29:46.040 | - My main concern is this.

01:29:47.880 | What I see is that young people are for some reason

01:29:52.800 | more willing to engage in the drug of cruelty online

01:29:56.640 | under the veil of anonymity.

01:29:59.000 | - That's what you're seeing publicly

01:30:00.160 | but you're not seeing the private chats.

01:30:02.160 | Like there's, it's kind of, it's a, you know,

01:30:05.560 | the sensory distribution. - Well, I work

01:30:06.600 | for the intelligence agency so I'm seeing the private chats.

01:30:09.280 | I mean, I'm collecting all of your data.

01:30:11.920 | Yeah, yes, but you can intuit stuff

01:30:15.600 | and I don't think I'm being very selective.

01:30:17.440 | I mean, if you just look at the young folks,

01:30:21.480 | I mean, I am very concerned about

01:30:24.760 | the intellectual psychological growth

01:30:30.400 | of young men and women. - I agree.

01:30:31.880 | So I'm not disagreeing with you on this.

01:30:34.120 | I am saying, however, there is a positive there

01:30:36.800 | that once we see it, we can try to amplify that.

01:30:39.280 | - Yes, with technology. - Yes, that's right.

01:30:41.000 | And I'm just saying the very, very basic technology.

01:30:44.200 | I give stuff I caught up over the weekend kind of thing.

01:30:47.480 | I think if I throw an anonymity on top of that,

01:30:51.360 | it will lead to many bad outcomes for young people.

01:30:55.360 | - Anonymity, yes.

01:30:56.400 | Pseudonymity, maybe not.

01:30:57.560 | 'Cause Reddit is actually fairly polite, right?

01:30:59.860 | - The entirety of Reddit just chuckled as you said that.

01:31:03.720 | - Well, within a subreddit, it's actually fairly polite.

01:31:06.880 | Like let's say you're not usually seeing,

01:31:09.320 | it depends on which subreddit, of course.

01:31:10.920 | - There's a consistency.

01:31:12.120 | I think definition of politeness is interesting here

01:31:17.000 | because it's polite within the culture of that subreddit.

01:31:21.000 | - Yes, they abide by, let me put it a different way.

01:31:22.680 | They abide by the social norms of that subreddit.

01:31:24.880 | - And that's the definition of politeness.

01:31:27.000 | - Yeah, or civility, is that right?

01:31:29.120 | - So there is an interesting difference

01:31:30.760 | between pseudonymous and anonymous, you're saying.

01:31:33.680 | It's possible that pseudonymity,

01:31:38.320 | you can actually avoid some of the negative aspects.

01:31:41.640 | - Absolutely, we're re-Dunbarizing the world in some ways.

01:31:45.000 | With China being the big exception or outlier.

01:31:47.240 | You know, the Dunbar number, 150 people.

01:31:49.640 | If you know, that's like roughly

01:31:51.200 | the scale of your society, right?

01:31:52.880 | Or that's the number of people that a human

01:31:56.000 | can kind of keep in their brain.

01:31:58.600 | Whether apocryphal or not,

01:31:59.560 | I think it's probably roughly true.

01:32:01.640 | And we're re-Dunbarizing the world because,

01:32:07.460 | A, we're making small groups much more productive,

01:32:10.200 | and B, we're making large groups much more fractious.

01:32:13.480 | Right?

01:32:14.320 | So you have an individual like Notch,

01:32:16.880 | who can program Minecraft by himself.

01:32:18.600 | Or Satoshi, who could do V1 of Bitcoin by himself.

01:32:20.720 | Or Instagram, which is just like 10 people,

01:32:23.240 | or WhatsApp is just like 50 people when they sold.

01:32:25.960 | But on the other hand, you have huge, quote,

01:32:27.880 | countries of hundreds of millions of people

01:32:30.240 | that are just finding that the first and second principle,

01:32:32.800 | or they're just splitting on principle components.

01:32:36.440 | Scott Alexander thinks of them as scissor statements.

01:32:38.620 | You know, statements that one group thinks is obviously true,

01:32:41.540 | one group thinks is obviously false.

01:32:43.380 | You can think of them as political polarization.

01:32:45.340 | You think of it in terms of game theory.

01:32:46.500 | There's lots of different reasons you can give

01:32:47.780 | for why this happens.

01:32:49.140 | But those large groups now are getting split.

01:32:52.520 | And so you have both the unsustainability

01:32:56.100 | of these large sort of artificial groups,

01:32:58.220 | and the productivity of these small organic ones.

01:33:01.140 | And so that is kind of, it's like sort of obvious,

01:33:03.200 | that's the direction of civilizational rebirth.

01:33:05.380 | We just need to kind of lean into that.

01:33:07.540 | - Scissor statements.

01:33:08.380 | There's so many beautiful, just like,

01:33:11.580 | you know, we mentioned chocolates,

01:33:13.700 | right, advertising themselves.

01:33:15.360 | Your entirety of speech is an intellectual

01:33:18.860 | like box of chocolates.

01:33:20.600 | But okay, so I don't think we finished

01:33:23.900 | defining the network state.

01:33:25.440 | Let's like linger on the definition.

01:33:27.780 | You gave the one sentence statement,

01:33:29.840 | which I think essentially encapsulated

01:33:32.220 | the online nature of it.

01:33:33.420 | I forget what else.

01:33:35.520 | Can we just try to bring more richness

01:33:40.520 | to this definition of how you think about the network state?

01:33:43.000 | - Absolutely.

01:33:43.840 | So that informal sentence is,

01:33:45.800 | "A network state is a highly aligned online community

01:33:48.320 | with a capacity for collective action

01:33:50.500 | that crowdfunds territory around the world

01:33:52.320 | and eventually gains diplomatic recognition

01:33:54.020 | from preexisting states."

01:33:55.440 | So we talked about was the alignment of online communities

01:33:58.680 | and the capacity for collective action.

01:34:00.960 | Well, one collective action,

01:34:02.240 | it could be a thousand people liking a tweet, right?

01:34:04.720 | If you can get a thousand of a thousand people doing it.

01:34:06.680 | But a much higher level, much higher bar

01:34:09.100 | is a thousand people crowdfunding territory

01:34:11.220 | and actually living together.

01:34:12.460 | Just like people currently--

01:34:13.300 | - In physical space.

01:34:14.120 | - In physical space.

01:34:15.160 | And not all in one place.

01:34:16.760 | That's critical.

01:34:17.600 | Just like Bitcoin is a decentralized currency,

01:34:20.020 | the network state is a recipe

01:34:21.040 | for a decentralized state-like entity, okay?

01:34:23.920 | Where it starts with, you know, for example,

01:34:27.320 | two people just get, you know, they become roommates.

01:34:29.640 | They meet in this community, they become roommates.

01:34:31.840 | Okay, they get a place together.

01:34:33.360 | Or 10 people get a group house.

01:34:35.000 | Or eventually a hundred people

01:34:36.480 | just buy a small apartment building together.

01:34:38.440 | And guess what?

01:34:39.280 | They start getting equity and not just paying rent, okay?

01:34:41.280 | These are all people who share their values.

01:34:43.340 | And now they can crowdfund territory together.

01:34:46.200 | Now, of course, they don't just jump straight

01:34:47.880 | from a thousand people liking something

01:34:50.080 | to a thousand people crowdfunding something.

01:34:51.920 | What I described in the middle is you do a lot of meetups.

01:34:54.600 | You get to know these other people

01:34:55.800 | before you decide to live, you know,

01:34:57.640 | collectively with them.

01:34:58.760 | But once you live with them,

01:34:59.840 | you start to get a network effect.

01:35:01.120 | For example, if those hundred people want to learn Spanish

01:35:06.120 | or Turkish or Vietnamese,

01:35:09.260 | they could all have a building

01:35:10.880 | where they're doing Vietnamese immersion, right?

01:35:13.900 | And that's something which they get a benefit

01:35:16.220 | from being physically around the other people

01:35:17.880 | that the pure digital wouldn't give them

01:35:19.260 | to quite the same extent, right?

01:35:20.860 | And so crowdfunds territory around the world,

01:35:24.000 | crucially, not just one place,

01:35:25.560 | they're all connected by the internet.

01:35:27.560 | Just like Hawaii is 2000 miles away

01:35:29.600 | from the continental US,

01:35:30.720 | but both sides think of them as American,

01:35:33.080 | but the people on Hawaii

01:35:33.920 | and people in the continental US.

01:35:35.120 | - What's the role of having to have territory?

01:35:38.600 | - Why? - If most of the exchange,

01:35:40.600 | so presumably as technology gets better and better,

01:35:42.880 | the communication, the intimacy,

01:35:44.520 | the exchange of ideas all happens in a digital world.

01:35:48.040 | What's the importance of being able to crowdfund territory?

01:35:50.840 | - Well, because we're still physical creatures.

01:35:52.480 | You can't reproduce yet digitally, right?

01:35:55.140 | There's still lots of things.

01:35:55.980 | - So it's all about sex.

01:35:57.160 | - Well, that's gotta be part of it.

01:35:58.120 | You're gonna wanna, you know, reproduce, right?

01:35:59.440 | - Are we talking about a cult?

01:36:01.000 | - Well, it's not a cult.

01:36:01.840 | (laughs)

01:36:02.660 | It's not a cult.

01:36:03.500 | - Why can't you just like take a trip?

01:36:04.720 | Why is it not a cult?

01:36:05.600 | - It's not a cult because a cult is very internally focused

01:36:09.680 | and it tries to close its members off from the outside world.

01:36:13.080 | This is much more how America itself was populated,

01:36:15.240 | where there were lots of towns,

01:36:16.600 | like Penn is named after William Penn,

01:36:18.240 | or the founder of Texas, like Sam Houston, right?

01:36:20.640 | Lots of towns like the Oneida Commune

01:36:22.480 | in Northern New York, they recruited

01:36:25.420 | and they became a town

01:36:26.320 | and they became actually the Oneida Glassware Company,

01:36:29.840 | kind of, you know, makes glassware out of it.

01:36:32.000 | All of these communities that were opt-in,

01:36:33.680 | voluntary communities were not simply like cults

01:36:37.160 | that were closed off from the world.

01:36:38.000 | They were meant to set an example to the world

01:36:39.320 | of what virtuous living looked like

01:36:40.520 | and they were trying to recruit from the rest of the world

01:36:42.160 | and they were exporting goods to the rest of the world, right?

01:36:44.240 | So it is, yes, reproduction, it's, you know,

01:36:48.200 | marriage and kids and so on,

01:36:49.640 | but it's also just hanging out

01:36:51.680 | and it is just, the physical world is very high bandwidth.

01:36:54.760 | There's lots of stuff, you know,

01:36:55.720 | it's fun to just go and have a dinner in person,

01:36:57.360 | just to hang out, to build things.

01:36:58.980 | Moreover, there's also lots of innovation

01:37:00.560 | that can only take place in the physical world.

01:37:03.200 | You know, look, I'm, you know,

01:37:04.520 | one of my sayings in the book is,

01:37:05.960 | "Cloud first, land last, but not land never."

01:37:09.120 | Okay? - Right.

01:37:09.960 | - In many ways, one of the problems the book solves

01:37:13.000 | is Thiel's problem of, you know,

01:37:15.480 | we have innovation in bits, but not in atoms, right?

01:37:17.900 | We can build a billion dollar company online,

01:37:20.600 | but we need a billion permits

01:37:21.680 | to build a shed in San Francisco, right?

01:37:23.920 | How do you reconcile that?

01:37:25.040 | Well, what is stopping the innovation in atoms?

01:37:28.280 | It is a thicket of regulations.

01:37:30.480 | What are those regulations?

01:37:31.660 | Ultimately, a social construction.

01:37:33.520 | If you lean into the, you know,

01:37:35.960 | whole deconstructionist, you know, school of thinking,

01:37:39.200 | you can deconstruct and then reconstruct the state itself,

01:37:42.120 | given sufficient social consensus online, okay?

01:37:45.080 | If the population of Nevada had 100% consensus,

01:37:48.060 | you could just dissolve every law in Nevada,

01:37:50.480 | in theory, and then build new ones, okay?

01:37:53.000 | So the online consensus of getting people

01:37:55.580 | to agree on something is upstream of what happens offline.

01:37:58.680 | So once you have consensus in bits,

01:38:01.800 | the human consensus, also, you know,

01:38:03.560 | cryptographic consensus, cryptocurrency consensus,

01:38:06.320 | then you can reshape the world of atoms.

01:38:08.720 | The reason we can't reshape the world of atoms right now

01:38:10.920 | is because you don't have that consensus of minds, okay?

01:38:13.960 | For example, in SF, anything you do,

01:38:16.200 | there's gonna be 50% of people who are against you.

01:38:18.920 | Like, so that's just a recipe for gridlock.

01:38:21.580 | Whereas if you have a bare piece of land

01:38:24.120 | that everybody agrees on, you can get, you know,

01:38:26.000 | 70,000 units get set up in Burning Man in just a few days.

01:38:28.960 | Okay?

01:38:29.800 | That's the power of what,

01:38:31.920 | when you actually have human consensus.

01:38:33.360 | And one way I talk about this,

01:38:34.720 | also in the book a little bit,

01:38:35.880 | and this I'm gonna go much more into detail in the V2,

01:38:38.440 | I think of this as 100% democracy,

01:38:41.400 | as opposed to 51% democracy.

01:38:43.040 | 51% democracy, which is the current form of government,

01:38:46.200 | is 49% dictatorship.

01:38:48.800 | Because the entire premise of democracy

01:38:50.400 | is about the consent of the governed, right?

01:38:52.100 | That's the actual legitimating underpinning principle.

01:38:54.740 | And insofar as 49% did not consent

01:38:59.740 | to the current, you know,

01:39:01.740 | president or prime minister or whatever,

01:39:04.120 | let's say presidential system first past the post, okay?

01:39:08.780 | Insofar as 49% did not consent,

01:39:10.700 | or in a prime minister system,

01:39:12.660 | it could be like 60% or more didn't consent

01:39:14.740 | to the current leader,

01:39:16.200 | those folks are having something imposed on them

01:39:18.660 | that they literally did not vote for.

01:39:20.800 | Moreover, campaign promises are non-binding.

01:39:22.880 | So whatever they voted for,

01:39:24.760 | they can effectively be defrauded.

01:39:26.080 | You know, the actual voter fraud

01:39:27.600 | is when a politician promises X, but does not do it.

01:39:31.120 | It's as if you bought a can of orange juice

01:39:33.120 | and it actually drinking its milk, or it's nothing, right?

01:39:36.200 | So all of that is routinized, all of that is accepted.

01:39:38.680 | We have this thing, which is just the minimum possible

01:39:41.760 | amount of democracy, a 51%, okay?

01:39:44.440 | And what happens is then that 51% tries to ram something

01:39:47.360 | down the 49% throat, and then the next election,

01:39:50.460 | it's now 51, 49 the other way, and then they ram it back.

01:39:53.600 | And that's how you get the seesaw

01:39:55.500 | that is just splitting countries apart, right?

01:39:58.280 | The alternative to that is you build a consensus online,

01:40:01.360 | you go and get some God-forsaken patch of territory.

01:40:03.940 | Actually, the worse the territory, the better.

01:40:06.060 | Why?

01:40:06.900 | Because it's like Burning Man, nobody cares, right?

01:40:09.060 | The nicer the piece of land,

01:40:10.620 | the more the people are gonna argue about it.

01:40:12.300 | But Starlink has repriced the world.

01:40:14.860 | Basically all kinds of piece of territory

01:40:16.860 | that were previously, they're far away from natural ports,

01:40:21.180 | they're far away from natural resources,

01:40:23.300 | all kinds of piece of territory around the world

01:40:24.980 | now have satellite internet.

01:40:27.020 | And so what you can do is, again,

01:40:28.500 | the map has been reopened, right?

01:40:30.020 | What we were talking about earlier,

01:40:30.860 | the map has been reopened,

01:40:31.860 | you can gather your community online,

01:40:33.640 | they're now capable of collective action,

01:40:35.400 | you can point here, this place has great Starlink coverage,

01:40:38.980 | you go there like the Verizon guy,

01:40:41.180 | can you hear me now?

01:40:42.020 | Good, right?

01:40:42.980 | You see that the coverage is good there,

01:40:44.140 | you drive out there, you test it out.

01:40:45.820 | Maybe you do it with mobile homes first, right?

01:40:48.500 | This by the way is its own thing.

01:40:50.580 | There's Yimby and there's Nimby and there's Yimby,

01:40:52.820 | but I actually also like Himby, okay?

01:40:55.060 | Do you want that?

01:40:55.900 | - Let's go, Nimby, Yimby, Himby, what are those?

01:40:58.340 | - So Nimby is not in my backyard, don't build in cities.

01:41:01.540 | Yimby is let's build high density buildings,

01:41:04.460 | really tall buildings and so on in cities.

01:41:06.300 | There's a third version, which is Himby,

01:41:09.340 | it's my little coinage, which is horizontal sprawl is good.

01:41:12.120 | Why horizontal sprawl?

01:41:13.140 | Because to build a skyscraper,

01:41:14.940 | to build a tall building in a city,

01:41:16.820 | you have this enormous permitting process,

01:41:19.260 | all of this stuff, which has to get done,

01:41:21.020 | it's expensive, it's time consuming.

01:41:22.860 | The way that cities were built,

01:41:23.980 | if you go back to the V1,

01:41:24.880 | what does the startup city look like?

01:41:26.620 | It looks like something like Burning Man,

01:41:28.260 | it looks like the cities of the Wild West.

01:41:30.340 | They were not multi-story buildings, right?

01:41:33.100 | They were basically things that were just like one story

01:41:35.880 | and someone could have it there in the dust

01:41:38.060 | and then you build roads and stuff between them

01:41:39.500 | and they can move them around.

01:41:40.700 | It was a much more dynamic geography.

01:41:42.720 | And so when you have that as a vision

01:41:44.300 | of what a startup city looks like, right?

01:41:46.980 | Now you've got something,

01:41:47.820 | there's a company I found called Kift,

01:41:49.300 | which is like van life.

01:41:50.580 | There's a lot of stuff in construction

01:41:52.900 | that makes this feasible.

01:41:54.260 | There's so-called man camps for fracking,

01:41:57.560 | where people can just do like,

01:41:59.180 | companies like Agreco, they have private power,

01:42:01.340 | you can bring water, all this stuff on site.

01:42:03.020 | So it's easy to actually snap this stuff to grid,

01:42:05.520 | relatively speaking, if you've got horizontal space,

01:42:08.020 | you pick this space, you crowd from the territory,

01:42:09.820 | now you've got a city.

01:42:10.660 | Okay, and the last bit is,

01:42:12.180 | eventually gains diplomatic recognition

01:42:13.900 | from pre-existing states.

01:42:15.220 | And this is the part that people,

01:42:17.420 | different people will be with me up to this point

01:42:19.940 | and then they'll say, okay,

01:42:20.780 | that's a part I disagree with

01:42:21.980 | or how are you gonna ever do that, right?

01:42:23.500 | They'll say, yeah, you can build an online community.

01:42:25.580 | I believe you can get them to do collective action.

01:42:27.340 | Of course, people have crowdfunded land

01:42:29.880 | and moving together and doing it a larger scale.

01:42:31.820 | All that I believe,

01:42:32.720 | how are you possibly ever gonna gain

01:42:34.120 | diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states?

01:42:35.820 | You dumb delusional tech bro, right?

01:42:37.920 | That's a common thing.

01:42:38.920 | Okay, that's about the tone of it as well, right?

01:42:42.160 | And so first I would say,

01:42:44.060 | sovereigns are already out for business.

01:42:46.700 | They're inking deals, okay?

01:42:48.900 | Nevada inked a deal with Tesla to build the Geiger factory.

01:42:51.720 | El Salvador has Bitcoin as its national currency.

01:42:54.320 | Wyoming has done the Dow law

01:42:56.100 | where Ethereum is now recognized,

01:42:58.060 | where you can have on-chain incorporations

01:43:00.240 | that are recognized by Wyoming law.

01:43:01.980 | Virginia and New York negotiated with Amazon for HQ2.

01:43:06.660 | Tuvalu signed a deal with GoDaddy for the .tv domain.

01:43:09.940 | Columbia signed a deal for the .co domain

01:43:12.400 | and on and on and on.

01:43:13.240 | Sovereigns are open for business.

01:43:15.800 | Sovereigns are doing deals with companies

01:43:18.280 | and with currencies.

01:43:19.920 | Sovereigns at the level of cities like Miami or New York

01:43:23.640 | where the mayors are accepting their salary in Bitcoin.

01:43:26.400 | States like Wyoming or Nevada

01:43:29.960 | has its new private cities legislation

01:43:31.920 | or entire countries like El Salvador.

01:43:34.320 | So-

01:43:35.160 | When you say sovereigns, by the way,

01:43:36.160 | you mean the old school-

01:43:37.280 | Governments.

01:43:38.480 | Physical nation states, governments.

01:43:40.800 | Fiat states.

01:43:42.040 | Fiat states.

01:43:43.120 | Okay.

01:43:44.520 | But the fiat isn't the thing that makes a state.

01:43:47.920 | What makes a state is geographical location.

01:43:50.280 | It is something where, they're both, right?

01:43:53.760 | So basically it's a play on words.

01:43:55.120 | So just like fiat currency is cryptocurrency,

01:43:57.280 | we will have fiat country and crypto country, right?

01:44:01.640 | And in fact, you can think of the fiat

01:44:03.680 | and crypto version of almost anything.

01:44:05.920 | One thing I'll come to later is a big thing.

01:44:08.640 | The big thing I think comes

01:44:09.480 | after digital currency is digital passports.

01:44:12.120 | Mm-hmm.

01:44:12.960 | Okay.

01:44:13.780 | So, and that's a big part of this whole network thing

01:44:15.720 | which we'll come back to.

01:44:16.880 | But, so that last bit,

01:44:19.560 | the reason I just mentioned all those deals

01:44:20.960 | between sovereigns, whether at the city,

01:44:24.240 | US state or UN listed country level, okay.

01:44:28.440 | And on the other hand, so that's on one side of the market.

01:44:30.760 | On the other side are the companies and the currencies.

01:44:35.200 | Why could we not have online communities, right?

01:44:37.600 | So let me--

01:44:38.560 | Making those deals, signing those deals.

01:44:39.520 | So diplomatic recognition,

01:44:42.440 | but aren't you still attached to the responsibilities

01:44:47.440 | that come from being a member of a sovereign,

01:44:54.800 | old school nation state?

01:44:57.800 | So--

01:44:58.640 | Can you possibly escape that?

01:45:00.040 | So yes, and let me give you a concrete example.

01:45:02.700 | Israel, okay, why?

01:45:05.120 | You know, people talk about,

01:45:07.040 | a lot of people are like, "Oh, Bolles,

01:45:08.160 | he just, he took this from Snow Crash

01:45:09.960 | or some sci-fi book they'll reference."

01:45:11.880 | Right, actually, if,

01:45:13.720 | there's many different references to the book.

01:45:15.160 | This is not the only reference.

01:45:16.640 | But a very important reference

01:45:18.300 | that I think is much more important to me than Snow Crash,

01:45:20.480 | which is good, a good book, whatever, but it's fictional,

01:45:24.040 | is "Der Judenstaat" by Theodor Herzl,

01:45:26.340 | which translates as "The Jewish State."

01:45:28.080 | And that led to the foundation of Israel.

01:45:29.480 | And that's very real.

01:45:30.720 | It's worth reading because it's amazing.

01:45:32.800 | Theodor Herzl was like a tech founder, okay?

01:45:35.640 | In the book, he was writing

01:45:36.480 | about the death of distance in 1897.

01:45:38.840 | Why?

01:45:39.660 | Because steamships could take you across countries, okay?

01:45:43.280 | And he like, he's just, you know,

01:45:46.480 | amazingly smart and practical guy,

01:45:49.240 | where he just handled all these various objections.

01:45:51.480 | And he said, "Look, you know, the Jewish people,

01:45:54.320 | you know, our choices are either A,

01:45:56.360 | assimilate and give up the culture,

01:45:57.820 | or B, some people are thinking communism's a good idea.

01:46:00.000 | I disagree with that.

01:46:00.960 | We should do C, build our own country, right?"

01:46:03.640 | And that was considered totally crazy.

01:46:05.640 | But what he did was he A, wrote a book,

01:46:07.800 | B, started a fund,

01:46:09.260 | C, organized a semiannual conference,

01:46:11.400 | the, you know, World Zionist Congress,

01:46:13.200 | and the fund and the Congress are still going today.

01:46:15.360 | Crucially, there were a bunch of intermediate stages

01:46:18.560 | between the book and the idea,

01:46:20.760 | and then the actual state of Israel in 1947.

01:46:24.100 | For example, the, you know,

01:46:26.760 | the folks who were committed Zionists got together

01:46:28.960 | and started crowdfunding territory

01:46:30.640 | in what is now Palestine.

01:46:31.800 | And in fact, though, Palestine was only one choice.

01:46:34.040 | In the book, they also had Argentina as a choice.

01:46:36.840 | So this is my concept, cloud first, land last,

01:46:39.360 | and the land's a parameter, you can choose, right?

01:46:41.400 | Other places that were considered at various points,

01:46:43.040 | like Madagascar, Birobidzin in the former Soviet Union,

01:46:46.000 | right?

01:46:46.840 | So the land was a parameter.

01:46:47.880 | Palestine went out because of its, you know,

01:46:49.920 | historical and religious importance.

01:46:51.420 | Now, by the way, one thing,

01:46:52.840 | I'm sure there's some, like, some fraction of viewers

01:46:54.720 | are gonna be like, "Oh my God,

01:46:55.600 | like all the bad stuff that happened."

01:46:57.440 | I'm obviously not denying

01:46:58.960 | that there's enormous amounts of controversy and so on

01:47:00.800 | that attends Israel.

01:47:01.800 | I consider myself generally pro-Israeli.

01:47:03.880 | I'd also consider myself pro-Palestinian.

01:47:05.320 | I fund lots of Palestinians and so forth.

01:47:07.120 | So I'm leaving that part out, that huge conflict,

01:47:09.880 | or, you know, for now, okay?

01:47:11.480 | And you might say that's airbrushing it.

01:47:13.600 | I don't mean it to do that.

01:47:14.620 | I'm saying, here is the positive things they did.

01:47:17.680 | Can we take the positive and not have the negative?

01:47:20.480 | And I'll come back to how we might swap those parts out.

01:47:22.960 | But let me just talk about this a little bit more.

01:47:24.800 | So one of the things that happened was

01:47:26.880 | committed Zionists went and crowdfunded territory

01:47:29.480 | in what is now Israel, and they knit it together, right?

01:47:32.920 | Why?

01:47:33.760 | Because when you're physically present on territory,

01:47:35.780 | yes, in theory, like the British Empire was in control.

01:47:39.760 | They were the sovereign, okay?

01:47:41.320 | In practice, who were the boots on the ground,

01:47:43.560 | the facts on the ground, right?

01:47:45.000 | These are the people who are actually tilling the land

01:47:47.060 | and building the buildings and so on and so forth.

01:47:49.480 | Like, who had the claim there

01:47:51.120 | is like the people who are present, okay?

01:47:52.800 | Now, this territory, this network of territories

01:47:57.080 | eventually became the basis for,

01:48:00.360 | or part of the basis for what became Israel.

01:48:02.080 | Now, I'm fully aware that the exact configuration

01:48:06.540 | of what territory belongs to Israel,

01:48:07.960 | what territory belongs to Palestinians,

01:48:09.440 | this is an enormous topic of dispute, okay?

01:48:11.660 | But I just point this out to say

01:48:13.760 | the process of going from book to crowdfunding territory

01:48:16.720 | to a sovereign state where people

01:48:18.400 | were now citizens of Israel,

01:48:19.700 | as opposed to the British Empire,

01:48:21.320 | is not some fictional thing, but did happen,

01:48:24.200 | and within the lifetimes of some of the older,

01:48:26.640 | you know, they're in their 80s now,

01:48:28.200 | but in the lifetimes of some older people, okay?

01:48:31.040 | So it's not impossible.

01:48:32.880 | In fact, it has happened, right?

01:48:34.900 | - But for that step, perhaps, hopefully,

01:48:37.840 | is a better example, because in this particular,

01:48:41.480 | like you said, land last, if I were to say,

01:48:45.400 | if I was an alien and arrived at Earth

01:48:48.520 | and say, choice of land, maybe if you were interested

01:48:53.080 | in choosing a land that represents a network state

01:48:58.080 | where ideas that unites a people based on ideas,

01:49:03.480 | maybe pick a land that doesn't lead

01:49:06.600 | to generational conflict and war.

01:49:09.920 | - Yes, so I'll get to that point.

01:49:10.760 | - And destruction and suffering and all that.

01:49:13.000 | - All the stuff, that's right.

01:49:14.120 | So now that I've said what are the positive things

01:49:18.320 | about Israel, and I think there's a lot to admire

01:49:19.880 | in Israel, as I said, I think there's also a lot

01:49:21.400 | to admire in the Palestinians and so on.

01:49:23.120 | I'm not taking any position on that.

01:49:25.040 | There's other inspirations for the network state.

01:49:27.800 | The second major inspiration is India,

01:49:30.240 | which managed to achieve independence nonviolently, right?

01:49:34.560 | That's very important, right?

01:49:35.740 | So can you fuse these things, right?

01:49:37.840 | A state started with a book

01:49:39.320 | that achieved independence nonviolently, okay?

01:49:42.300 | And that managed to build this polyglot,

01:49:44.860 | you know, multicultural democracy, right?

01:49:47.880 | That does, you know, like, you know,

01:49:50.200 | India has its flaws, but it does manage to have,

01:49:53.160 | you know, human rights of lots of people respected

01:49:54.980 | and what have you, right?

01:49:56.880 | And has managed to, you know,

01:49:59.040 | there were times like emergency in the 1970s

01:50:01.520 | in the Aragondi declared emergency.

01:50:02.960 | There were times when it seemed touch and go,

01:50:05.040 | but overall with fits and starts,

01:50:06.700 | this flawed thing has kind of made its way through.

01:50:09.320 | And, you know, the third inspiration is Singapore

01:50:12.600 | with Lee Kuan Yew, who built a city state from nothing.

01:50:17.040 | You know, I shouldn't say from nothing.

01:50:18.040 | Okay, there was something there,

01:50:19.000 | but let's say built one of the richest countries

01:50:21.340 | in the world without like huge amounts

01:50:23.760 | of natural resources in the middle of a zone

01:50:26.560 | where there was lots of communist revolution going on.

01:50:29.920 | And so he was the CEO founder essentially

01:50:32.260 | of this amazing startup country, right?

01:50:35.280 | And, you know, finally, of course, America,

01:50:37.900 | which has too many influences to name

01:50:40.680 | things we talked about, the nation of immigrants,

01:50:42.740 | obviously the constitution and so on.

01:50:44.840 | And you think, okay, can we go,

01:50:46.280 | you think of these inspirations.

01:50:48.240 | What's interesting about these four countries, by the way,

01:50:50.760 | Israel, India, Singapore, and the US,

01:50:53.080 | they have something in common.

01:50:53.920 | You know what that is?

01:50:54.760 | - What is that?

01:50:55.580 | - They're all forks of the UK code base.

01:50:57.900 | We think obviously, you know,

01:51:00.160 | the UK was sort of the ancestor of America,

01:51:02.360 | but Israel was a former British colony, right?

01:51:06.120 | India was a British colony and so was Singapore, right?

01:51:08.560 | - For people who don't know what fork and code base means,

01:51:12.400 | it's a language from versioning systems,

01:51:15.520 | particularly Git, represented online

01:51:18.240 | on a website called GitHub.

01:51:20.020 | And a fork means you copy the code

01:51:23.800 | and all the changes you make to the code

01:51:26.040 | now live in their own little world.

01:51:28.200 | So America took the ideas that define the United Kingdom

01:51:31.580 | and then forked it by evolving those ideas

01:51:36.000 | in a way that didn't affect the original country.

01:51:39.480 | - That's right.

01:51:40.320 | And what's interesting about this is,

01:51:41.680 | and of course I'm saying that

01:51:42.520 | in a somewhat playful way, right?

01:51:44.080 | But I think it's a useful analogy, interesting analogy.

01:51:46.200 | So you have the Americans who forked the UK code base,

01:51:50.760 | and then you have the Indians, Israelis,

01:51:53.760 | and the Singaporeans who also made their own modifications.

01:51:56.640 | And in some ways, each society has pieces

01:51:59.020 | that you can take from them and learn from them

01:52:01.800 | and try to combine them, right?

01:52:03.320 | So you have a state that is started by a book

01:52:07.460 | that non-violently assembles,

01:52:11.280 | that crowdfunds territory around the world,

01:52:13.480 | that is led by a CEO founder,

01:52:16.400 | and that is also governed by something

01:52:20.200 | that's like a constitution.

01:52:21.900 | But just like you went from,

01:52:23.240 | you know, I talk about the V1, V2, and V3 a lot, right?

01:52:25.900 | Like V1 is gold and V2 is fiat and V3 is Bitcoin, right?

01:52:29.740 | Or V1 is hunter-gatherer and V2 is farmer-soldier,

01:52:32.440 | V3 is digital nomad or sovereign collective, okay?

01:52:35.280 | Which is not just an individual, but a group.

01:52:37.540 | Here, V1 is UK common law.

01:52:40.280 | They don't have a constitution.

01:52:41.160 | It's all precedent going for many years, right?

01:52:43.840 | V2 is the US constitution and V3 is the smart contract,

01:52:47.960 | the social smart contract, which is a fusion, obviously,

01:52:50.440 | of Rousseau's concept of the social contract

01:52:52.760 | and the smart contract.

01:52:53.600 | The social smart contract is like written in code, okay?

01:52:56.840 | So it's like even more rigorous than the constitution.

01:52:59.160 | And in many ways, you can think of going

01:53:01.360 | from the United Kingdom of England, Wales,

01:53:06.240 | you know, Scotland, Northern Ireland,

01:53:07.640 | the United States of America,

01:53:08.920 | the network states of the internet, okay?

01:53:11.080 | Where you go from the rights of Englishmen

01:53:13.760 | with the Magna Carta to Europeans, African-Americans,

01:53:17.760 | all the immigrants to the Americans or the North America,

01:53:22.440 | then you go to all the people of the world.

01:53:24.400 | And so you basically are more democratic

01:53:28.080 | and you're more capitalist

01:53:30.140 | because you're talking about internet capitalism,

01:53:31.940 | not just nation-state-locked capitalism.

01:53:33.600 | In a sense, it's the V3, right?

01:53:35.800 | In other ways, the V3, only about 2% of the world

01:53:39.440 | is over 35, native-born American,

01:53:43.640 | can qualify to be president of the United States.

01:53:46.160 | But 100% of the world,

01:53:47.440 | you could become the president of a network state.

01:53:49.360 | There might be a, you know, a Palestinian Washington

01:53:52.920 | or a, you know, Brazilian Hamilton, right?

01:53:56.420 | And now, rather than say, okay,

01:53:58.600 | maybe you have a small percentage chance

01:54:01.200 | of immigrating to the US

01:54:02.040 | and a small percentage chance of your descendant,

01:54:03.880 | you know, becoming like, you know, president,

01:54:06.520 | now we can just say, you can start online.

01:54:08.840 | And you know what?

01:54:09.680 | Maybe this person is so exceptional,

01:54:10.720 | they have Americans coming to their,

01:54:12.880 | you know, network state, right?

01:54:14.160 | - You don't think that kind of thing is possible

01:54:15.800 | with like the rich get richer in a digital space too,

01:54:20.040 | that people with more followers

01:54:21.880 | have friends that have followers and they like-

01:54:25.640 | - I don't think it's the rich get richer.

01:54:26.640 | I think what happens is,

01:54:27.840 | so this is an important concept.

01:54:30.760 | It is, it's multi-axis, right?

01:54:32.940 | That is to say, for example,

01:54:35.360 | just the introduction of the Bitcoin axis, right?

01:54:38.820 | And those, 'cause it didn't exist pre-2009, now it exists.

01:54:43.460 | Those people who are rich in BTC terms

01:54:47.160 | are only partially correlated

01:54:48.440 | with those who are rich in USD terms.

01:54:50.280 | There's all these folks, essentially-

01:54:52.480 | - BTC is Bitcoin and USD is US dollar.

01:54:55.240 | - Yes. (laughs)

01:54:56.720 | So that's a new axis.

01:54:58.200 | And ETH is yet another axis, right?

01:54:59.960 | You- - Ethereum.

01:55:00.800 | ETH is Ethereum.

01:55:01.920 | - Right.

01:55:02.760 | So you are essentially getting new social systems

01:55:07.200 | which are actually net inequality decreasing

01:55:10.160 | because before you only had USD millionaires

01:55:12.760 | and now you have a new track

01:55:14.680 | and then another track and another track, right?

01:55:16.960 | You have different hierarchies, different ladders, right?

01:55:19.840 | And so on net, you have more ladders to climb.

01:55:24.020 | And so it's not the rich getting richer.

01:55:25.560 | In fact, old money in some ways

01:55:27.160 | is a last to cryptocurrency.

01:55:28.840 | Old money and old states, I think,

01:55:31.480 | those people who are the most focused on,

01:55:33.640 | you might call it reform, I would call it control, okay?

01:55:36.660 | The most focused on control of the old world

01:55:38.280 | who have the least incentive to switch,

01:55:40.700 | the rich will get poorer

01:55:44.320 | because it will be the poor

01:55:46.040 | or those who are politically powerless,

01:55:48.120 | politically poor, who go and seek out these new states.

01:55:50.880 | - Yeah, I didn't mean in the actual money, but yes, okay.

01:55:53.800 | There's other ladders.

01:55:54.760 | I meant in terms of influence,

01:55:56.440 | political and social influence

01:55:58.160 | in these new network states.

01:56:01.760 | You, I think, said that basically anybody

01:56:04.480 | can become president of a network state.

01:56:06.360 | - Just like anybody can become CEO of a startup company.

01:56:08.240 | Of course, whether people follow you is another matter,

01:56:10.880 | but anybody can go and found one.

01:56:12.080 | Go ahead, sorry.

01:56:13.000 | - Oh, from the perspective that anyone can found one.

01:56:16.160 | Anyone could found, I see.

01:56:18.960 | - We don't think it's implausible

01:56:20.440 | that somebody from Brazil or Nigeria,

01:56:22.640 | I mean, most quote billionaires in the world

01:56:25.480 | are not American.

01:56:26.320 | And in fact, actually, here's another important point.

01:56:28.800 | It's far easier to become a tech billionaire

01:56:31.160 | than become, or a billionaire period,

01:56:32.760 | than become president of the United States.

01:56:34.240 | There's less than 50 US presidents ever, all time, okay?

01:56:38.000 | It is a much more realistic ambition

01:56:40.640 | to become a billionaire than become president.

01:56:43.000 | There's like thousands of billionaires worldwide.

01:56:44.800 | In fact, 75% of them are outside of the US.

01:56:47.160 | And many of those have been,

01:56:48.880 | some of them are like energy and oil,

01:56:51.120 | which is often based on political connections,

01:56:53.200 | but a very large chunk of the rest are tech, okay?

01:56:56.280 | And that's something where you're mining,

01:56:58.680 | but you're mining online by hitting keys

01:57:00.680 | as opposed to with a pickaxe, you know, in granite, right?

01:57:03.540 | So the point is that we think it's

01:57:05.680 | totally understandable today for there to be a, you know,

01:57:10.120 | huge founder who comes out of Vietnam or, you know,

01:57:14.560 | South America, like that,

01:57:15.920 | like you can name founders from all over the world, right?

01:57:18.360 | Exceptional people can rise from all the world

01:57:20.200 | to run giant companies.

01:57:21.840 | Why can they not rise to run giant new countries?

01:57:24.880 | And the answer is we didn't develop the mechanism yet,

01:57:26.640 | right?

01:57:27.900 | And just as another example, I talk about this in the book,

01:57:30.480 | Vitalik Buterin is far more qualified than Jerome Powell,

01:57:35.480 | right, or anybody at the Federal Reserve.

01:57:36.760 | He actually built and managed a monetary policy

01:57:40.460 | and a currency from scratch, okay, as a 20-something, right?

01:57:45.400 | Obviously that's a more accomplished person

01:57:48.060 | than somebody who just inherited an economy.

01:57:50.120 | This is a- - A lot of people

01:57:51.360 | can push back at that and say that the people

01:57:54.000 | that initially build a thing aren't necessarily

01:57:57.560 | the best ones to manage a thing once it scales

01:57:59.920 | and actually has impact.

01:58:00.920 | - Sometimes, sometimes, but Dzuk has done a good job

01:58:03.360 | of both, I think Vitalik has done a good job of both, right?

01:58:05.600 | - But that's not an inherent truth.

01:58:07.800 | - Well, so actually I have- - If you built the thing,

01:58:09.800 | you will be the best person to run it.

01:58:11.560 | - I will agree with you on that,

01:58:12.720 | and actually I talk about this in the book,

01:58:14.860 | or I've got an essay on this called

01:58:16.000 | Founding vs. Inheriting, okay?

01:58:18.040 | And the premise is actually that, the classic example,

01:58:21.360 | you know the saying, "Shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves

01:58:23.640 | "in three generations."

01:58:24.960 | It means the guy who starts out poor and builds a fortune,

01:58:28.920 | his son maintains it,

01:58:30.120 | and his dissipate grandson dissipates it, right?

01:58:34.520 | - Why is shirt sleeves a symbol of poverty?

01:58:37.960 | - Back in the past, it was kind of like,

01:58:39.200 | you know, you're just working with your,

01:58:40.600 | you're not white collar,

01:58:42.040 | you're back to working with your hands,

01:58:43.360 | you're just- - Oh, so it's a blue collar

01:58:44.800 | to blue collar in three generations.

01:58:45.880 | - Yeah, yeah, or working class or something like that, right?

01:58:48.440 | So essentially that the grandson squanders it, right?

01:58:52.040 | And, you know, in sense, by the way,

01:58:54.720 | just to talk about that for a second,

01:58:56.360 | if you have two children and four grandchildren

01:58:59.320 | and eight great-grandchildren and 16 and so on,

01:59:01.760 | and in older families, you know, they were much bigger,

01:59:04.120 | right, six, you know, children is not uncommon.

01:59:06.800 | Whatever fortune you have is now split six ways,

01:59:09.000 | and then six ways and six ways again.

01:59:10.800 | So with the exception of premature,

01:59:13.000 | where the oldest son inherits all the way down,

01:59:15.360 | the majority of descendants just a few generations out

01:59:17.960 | have probably inherited none of that fortune,

01:59:19.680 | unless it has compounded to such an extent

01:59:21.880 | that it's like up six X over 20 years, right?

01:59:25.800 | So it's actually hard to maintain a quote ruling class

01:59:28.680 | in the sense that this person

01:59:30.360 | who's like four generations down has, you know,

01:59:34.200 | like 1/16 of the DNA, you know,

01:59:37.360 | one over two to the fourth, right,

01:59:39.560 | of their scion who built a fortune.

01:59:42.240 | So it's not even like the same,

01:59:43.400 | is it the same family even, right?

01:59:45.480 | Is the fortune actually in the family?

01:59:46.640 | So most people don't think a few generations out,

01:59:49.080 | they just kind of think, oh, Marx is right,

01:59:50.800 | there's always been a rich and a poor.

01:59:51.920 | It's actually much more dynamic than that,

01:59:53.600 | 'cause you literally, like, what is even the family

01:59:55.480 | when it's diluted out, you know, 1/16, right?

01:59:58.760 | If you're 1/16 of Rockefeller, are you a Rockefeller?

02:00:01.400 | Really like 15, 16, something else,

02:00:03.140 | would you have the Rockefeller fortune?

02:00:04.400 | Probably not, right?

02:00:05.580 | Now, are there, again, premature,

02:00:07.880 | where the guy who inherits the name all the way through,

02:00:10.520 | that would be one way to pass it down.

02:00:13.400 | But even that person doesn't necessarily have the qualities

02:00:15.840 | of the guy who, you know, the cultural qualities,

02:00:17.640 | other qualities of the guy who's like four generations past,

02:00:19.600 | so they tend to squander it, right?

02:00:21.120 | So this actually brings us to,

02:00:23.160 | you know, coming back up to governance,

02:00:25.200 | the system, the guys who built the United States,

02:00:27.960 | you know, like Washington and Hamilton,

02:00:30.240 | these are giants, right?

02:00:31.240 | These are founders.

02:00:32.700 | And the folks today are like, not the grandson,

02:00:37.000 | but like the 40th generation heir of a factory

02:00:41.000 | that somebody else built.

02:00:42.400 | Like, think about a factory and you have, you know,

02:00:44.400 | this grandchild or great-grandchild inherits a factory.

02:00:47.480 | Most of the time, it's just cranking out widgets

02:00:49.320 | and the great-grandson is cashing checks.

02:00:51.560 | They have been selected as legitimate heir

02:00:54.080 | because it's the, you know, the founder,

02:00:57.280 | passes it down to his son, passes it down to his grandson,

02:00:59.440 | to his great-grandson.

02:01:00.280 | So legitimacy is there.

02:01:01.280 | They've got title, they can show, I own this factory, okay?

02:01:04.520 | They can cash the checks.

02:01:05.640 | There's professional managers there.

02:01:06.800 | Everything seems fine.

02:01:08.040 | Until one day, that factory has to go from making,

02:01:12.080 | you know, widgets to making masks for COVID

02:01:14.240 | or something else.

02:01:15.080 | It has to change direction.

02:01:15.920 | It has to do something it hasn't done before.

02:01:17.760 | None of that capability for invention and reinvention

02:01:21.120 | is present anymore.

02:01:22.560 | These people have inherited something

02:01:24.520 | that they could not build from scratch.

02:01:26.040 | Because they could not build from scratch,

02:01:27.200 | they can't even maintain it.

02:01:28.160 | This is an important point.

02:01:29.520 | The ability to build from scratch is so important

02:01:31.240 | because if some part breaks

02:01:34.240 | and you don't know why it was there,

02:01:35.960 | can you even maintain it?

02:01:37.000 | No, you can't, okay?

02:01:38.960 | Unless all the replacement parts

02:01:41.040 | and the know-how to fit them together is there,

02:01:42.560 | you can't repair this.

02:01:43.880 | So in 2009, Mother Jones had a story

02:01:45.560 | that said that the US military had forgotten

02:01:47.680 | how to make some kinds of nuclear weapons

02:01:49.880 | 'cause there was a part where all the guys

02:01:51.920 | who knew how to make it had aged out or left.

02:01:54.480 | Okay?

02:01:55.320 | And this was some aero gel or something like that.

02:01:57.000 | It was rumored, okay?

02:01:58.320 | Thing is, you're seeing increasingly, for example,

02:02:02.760 | you've got wildfires in California.

02:02:05.240 | You've got water that's not potable in Jackson.

02:02:08.960 | You've got power outages in Texas.

02:02:12.040 | You're seeing a lot of the infrastructure of the US

02:02:15.200 | is just less functional.

02:02:17.080 | I think probably part of that is due to civil engineering

02:02:19.720 | not being that sexy a field, people aging out,

02:02:23.480 | and just domain knowledge being lost,

02:02:26.680 | and the heirs who win the role of mayor

02:02:31.520 | or whatever of this town

02:02:33.080 | don't have the ability to build it from scratch.

02:02:34.800 | You're just selected for legitimacy, not competence, okay?

02:02:37.520 | So once you think about this concept

02:02:38.880 | of founding versus inheriting,

02:02:40.120 | and I've got the whole essay which talks about this,

02:02:42.400 | of course, the alternative to somebody

02:02:44.800 | who's legitimate but not competent

02:02:47.000 | where people will say is,

02:02:47.840 | "Oh, we need an authoritarian

02:02:49.960 | "to be in control of everything."

02:02:51.200 | And then their hope is that that person is competent,

02:02:55.040 | but they don't have legitimacy

02:02:56.560 | because if they're just installed

02:02:57.800 | as just like a authoritarian ruler,

02:03:00.000 | 50% of the population is really mad at them.

02:03:01.720 | They don't have title.

02:03:02.560 | They just grab the title.

02:03:04.040 | Maybe they can exert enough force,

02:03:05.880 | but that's the problem with the authoritarian dictator

02:03:08.600 | takeover, right?

02:03:09.720 | So the alternative, the third version,

02:03:11.360 | is the founder who combines both legitimacy and competence

02:03:14.160 | 'cause they start from scratch,

02:03:15.320 | and they attract people to their vision,

02:03:16.960 | they build it from scratch,

02:03:18.240 | and so you need is the ability

02:03:19.480 | to constantly do refoundings, rebirths.

02:03:21.960 | - So if you imagine a world

02:03:24.080 | that is primarily network states,

02:03:28.760 | can you help me imagine what that looks like?

02:03:33.360 | Now, there's several ways to imagine things,

02:03:36.200 | which is how many of them are there,

02:03:38.840 | and how often do the new ones pop up?

02:03:42.680 | - There could be thousands.

02:03:43.760 | - Given seven billion people,

02:03:45.040 | eight billion people on Earth.

02:03:46.240 | - Yeah, yeah, so there's network state

02:03:48.280 | in the precise definition I have in the book,

02:03:51.000 | which is a diplomatically recognized entity,

02:03:53.360 | and there's network state in sort of the loose definition

02:03:55.040 | where, you know, one thing that's interesting is

02:03:57.200 | this term has become a lowercase term really fast, okay?

02:04:00.840 | - Network state.

02:04:01.680 | - Yeah, like in the sense of Google

02:04:03.880 | became lowercase Google for like Googling,

02:04:05.680 | or like Uber became lowercase Uber.

02:04:07.360 | Like if you go to the networkstate.com/reviews,

02:04:10.440 | or you go to search.twitter.com and put in network state,

02:04:13.680 | you'll see it's just become like a word or a phrase, okay?

02:04:16.280 | So that means it's sort of, whatever I intend it to mean,

02:04:19.260 | people will use it to mean what they want it to mean, right?

02:04:21.720 | Okay. - Internet.

02:04:23.000 | - It's internet, right?

02:04:23.840 | - I think internet.

02:04:24.660 | You've become a meme.

02:04:25.500 | Well, first of all, you're a meme, and this book is a meme.

02:04:27.240 | - Am I a meme?

02:04:28.080 | Okay, maybe I'm a meme.

02:04:28.900 | But the book is, the book I think is a good meme.

02:04:30.560 | That's actually why I wanted to make it free.

02:04:31.920 | I wanted people to take it out there and make it their own.

02:04:34.440 | And one of the things I say at the beginning,

02:04:35.880 | and I'll come back to this thing,

02:04:36.840 | is it's a toolbox, not a manifesto.

02:04:39.320 | Even if you dislike 70% of it, 80% of it, 90% of it,

02:04:43.120 | if there's something that's useful to you,

02:04:44.360 | you can take that and use it, just like a library,

02:04:47.200 | you know, a software library.

02:04:48.240 | You might just use one function there.

02:04:49.400 | Great, I'm glad I've delivered you some value, right?

02:04:51.400 | That's my purpose in this, right?

02:04:52.240 | - So you're not Ayn Rand?

02:04:53.700 | - No, I'm not Ayn Rand.

02:04:54.680 | Basically, the whole point of this actually is

02:04:57.320 | it's polytheistic, polystatistic, polymystic,

02:05:02.040 | is genuinely--

02:05:03.000 | - Is it polyamorous?

02:05:04.440 | - It's not polyamorous.

02:05:05.280 | - Okay.

02:05:06.400 | - Though somebody might want--

02:05:07.240 | - Do you have love advice in the book?

02:05:08.640 | I didn't see it.

02:05:09.640 | So do you talk about love in the book?

02:05:11.160 | - I do not talk about love.

02:05:13.000 | Rather--

02:05:13.840 | - Maybe in V2 you will.

02:05:14.660 | - Not that I don't believe in love.

02:05:15.500 | Love is great.

02:05:16.320 | - All right, I will accept your offer

02:05:17.160 | to write a guest chapter in your V2 book about love.

02:05:20.400 | - All right, great.

02:05:21.340 | - Because there is some aspect that's very interesting,

02:05:25.800 | which parts of human civilization require physical contact,

02:05:30.320 | physical, 'cause it seems like more and more

02:05:33.440 | can be done in a digital space.

02:05:35.120 | - Yeah, but as I said--

02:05:36.520 | - Work, for example.

02:05:37.520 | - But you're not gonna build a self-driving car city

02:05:39.880 | in digital space.

02:05:40.720 | You're not gonna be able to do--

02:05:42.200 | - Oh, I do cars at all.

02:05:43.960 | - Well, sure, but let's say you're not gonna be able

02:05:46.440 | to get to Mars in a purely digital thing.

02:05:49.440 | You need to build, you have to have a little rocket launchpad.

02:05:51.560 | You're not gonna be able to do all the innovative

02:05:54.160 | biomedicine, whether it's all the,

02:05:58.000 | have you seen bioelectricity?

02:05:59.320 | Or there's stuff on regenerative medicine,

02:06:02.040 | stem cells, all this stuff.

02:06:03.880 | You just can't do that digitally, right?

02:06:06.080 | We're still physical beings, so you need physical space,

02:06:09.680 | but how do we get that, right?

02:06:10.640 | So this is meant to wind its way

02:06:13.320 | through various roadblocks in the so-called,

02:06:15.800 | actually my term from many years ago,

02:06:17.440 | the idea maze, it's meant to wind its way

02:06:18.920 | through the idea maze to find how to use bits

02:06:21.000 | to unlock innovation in atoms.

02:06:22.800 | - The idea maze within the bigger prime number maze,

02:06:25.200 | or go back to visualizing the number of states

02:06:28.240 | and how often are they born.

02:06:29.400 | - So let me first anchor this,

02:06:31.520 | because people, just to give some numbers, right?

02:06:34.500 | How many UN listed countries are there?

02:06:36.960 | Like 196, 193, okay?

02:06:38.800 | And there's some that are on the border,

02:06:40.120 | like Taiwan or Israel, right?

02:06:42.080 | Where they're not, I mean, Israel is a country,

02:06:43.560 | but it's not recognized by every country

02:06:45.040 | or what have you, right?

02:06:45.880 | - Is Texas a country?

02:06:47.640 | - No, but it may eventually become, right, okay.

02:06:50.380 | So within that list of about 200 countries,

02:06:53.400 | okay, I've got a graph in the book that shows

02:06:54.920 | that most countries are actually small countries.

02:06:57.800 | About, there's 12 countries that have less

02:06:59.400 | than 100,000 people by the UN definition of a country.

02:07:02.100 | There's another 20 something that have

02:07:03.720 | between 100,000 and one million.

02:07:06.560 | There's another 50 or 60 something

02:07:08.040 | that have between a million and 10 million.

02:07:10.480 | So most countries in the UN are less than 10 million people.

02:07:15.200 | There's only 14 countries that are over 100 million people.

02:07:17.540 | Okay, so most countries are small countries

02:07:19.880 | is kind of surprising to us

02:07:21.520 | because most people live in big countries, okay?

02:07:24.320 | And so now you're like, okay,

02:07:26.680 | well, I've built social networks that are bigger than that.

02:07:29.400 | You have a following that's bigger than 100,000 people.

02:07:31.600 | You have a following that's bigger than, you know,

02:07:33.200 | a small country like Kiribati or what have you, right?

02:07:35.880 | And, okay, so that first changes feasibility.

02:07:38.920 | You think of a country as this huge, huge, huge thing,

02:07:41.120 | but it's actually smaller than many,

02:07:42.360 | many countries are smaller than social networks

02:07:44.120 | that you've built, okay, number one.

02:07:46.260 | Number two is the number of UN listed countries,

02:07:50.480 | even though it's been flat-ish for the last 30 years

02:07:53.280 | with like a few things like South Sudan

02:07:55.280 | and East Timor that have come online,

02:07:58.080 | there's a graph that I posted which shows

02:07:59.480 | that it's increased by about,

02:08:00.800 | from about 40 or 50 something at the end of World War II

02:08:05.040 | when the UN was set up to 190 something today.

02:08:07.720 | There's been like kind of a steady increase in particular

02:08:09.920 | with all the decolonization,

02:08:11.600 | all the countries that got their independence

02:08:12.880 | first from the British empire

02:08:14.720 | and then from the Soviet empire, right?

02:08:16.720 | That imperial breakup led to new countries, okay?

02:08:20.480 | And so then the question is, is that flat forever?

02:08:23.980 | Well, the number of new currencies

02:08:25.920 | similarly increased for a while,

02:08:27.640 | roughly one per country or thereabouts,

02:08:30.320 | and then it was flat for a while

02:08:31.400 | and then suddenly it's gone completely vertical.

02:08:33.800 | That's an interesting graph, right?

02:08:35.800 | Where it's like linear-ish, then it's flat,

02:08:38.800 | and then it just goes voof like this.

02:08:40.840 | Now you can define, you can argue where the boundary is

02:08:44.440 | for quote a new currency, okay?

02:08:47.460 | But I think Bitcoin certainly counts,

02:08:48.760 | I think Ethereum certainly counts

02:08:50.040 | in terms of just its scale and adoption worldwide.

02:08:52.440 | So at least you have two.

02:08:54.000 | If you take the broad church view,

02:08:56.360 | you have a thousand or something like that, right?

02:08:59.560 | Somewhere in between, you might say,

02:09:01.520 | how many currencies are above the market cap

02:09:04.520 | of an existing previously recognized fiat currency?

02:09:07.240 | Like which got onto the leaderboard, right?

02:09:09.720 | There's a website just like coinmarketcap.com.

02:09:12.160 | That's like a site for like cryptocurrency tracking,

02:09:14.200 | it's very popular, okay?

02:09:15.480 | There's a fun site called fiatmarketcap.com

02:09:18.160 | which shows where Bitcoin is relative

02:09:20.160 | to the fiat currencies of the world.

02:09:21.520 | And it's like, last I checked, like number 27,

02:09:23.320 | somewhere in between the Chilean peso

02:09:26.640 | and the Turkish lira or something, okay?

02:09:28.920 | And it previously been close to cracking the top 10, okay?

02:09:31.440 | And I think it will again at some point.

02:09:33.600 | So we know that you can have a currency out of nowhere

02:09:37.400 | that ranks with the fiat currencies of the world.

02:09:39.680 | Could you have a country out of nowhere

02:09:40.800 | that ranks with the countries of the world?

02:09:42.560 | So this is maybe the fastest way,

02:09:45.240 | you probably should have said this at the very beginning.

02:09:46.800 | If you go to the network state in one image, okay?

02:09:50.320 | That kind of summarizes what a network state looks like

02:09:52.920 | in a visual, just one single visual.

02:09:54.840 | And the visual is of a dashboard.

02:09:56.680 | And the dashboard shows something

02:09:58.000 | that looks like a social network,

02:09:59.600 | except you're visualizing it on the map of the world.

02:10:02.480 | And it's got network nodes all over the place.

02:10:05.000 | A hundred people here, a thousand people there,

02:10:06.840 | they're all connected together.

02:10:08.200 | The total population of the people in this social network

02:10:11.200 | is about 1 million people.

02:10:13.480 | So 1.7 million people in this example.

02:10:15.520 | And some of the buildings are,

02:10:17.760 | some of the people are just singletons.

02:10:19.320 | They're just folks in their apartment

02:10:21.120 | who can conceptualize themselves

02:10:22.760 | as citizens of this network state.

02:10:24.480 | And they've got the flag on their wall, right?

02:10:26.600 | And the digital passport on their phone

02:10:30.520 | along with the digital currency.

02:10:31.840 | Others are groups of hundreds or thousands

02:10:35.080 | or even tens of thousands of people

02:10:36.840 | that have all taken over a neighborhood,

02:10:38.480 | just like Chinatowns exist, right?

02:10:40.640 | Just like, you know, intentional communities existed.

02:10:45.160 | They just basically, you know,

02:10:47.720 | go and crowdfund land together, right?

02:10:50.160 | And these are all networked together, you know,

02:10:52.160 | just like the islands of Indonesia are separated by ocean.

02:10:56.000 | These are islands of this network state

02:10:57.640 | that are separated by intranet, okay?

02:10:59.280 | So they conceptualize themselves as something.

02:11:00.800 | And at the very top of the dashboard,

02:11:03.040 | there's something very important,

02:11:03.880 | which is the population annual income

02:11:06.200 | and real estate footprint of this network state.

02:11:08.720 | So the population we already discussed,

02:11:10.240 | you can build an online social network.

02:11:11.720 | We know you can build something

02:11:13.360 | which has a population that's bigger

02:11:14.600 | than these hundred thousand or million person countries.

02:11:18.040 | One of the new things contributions the network state has

02:11:21.480 | is say that you can not just exceed in population,

02:11:23.640 | you can exceed it in real estate footprint.

02:11:26.080 | Because one way of thinking about it is,

02:11:28.120 | I don't exactly know the numbers

02:11:29.760 | on foreign ownership in Estonia,

02:11:31.720 | but let's say to first order,

02:11:33.560 | the million something Estonians own

02:11:35.800 | and could afford Estonia, okay?

02:11:38.080 | A million people could buy a territory

02:11:40.840 | that is the size of Estonia, right?

02:11:42.480 | That's probably true to first order.

02:11:43.600 | There might be some overseas ownership,

02:11:44.880 | but it's probably true, okay?

02:11:45.720 | You probably find a country for which that is true.

02:11:47.680 | But that means is a million people digitally

02:11:50.920 | could buy distributed territory

02:11:53.120 | that is probably greater than or equal

02:11:54.360 | to the size of Estonia.

02:11:55.800 | Especially if they're buying like desert territory

02:11:57.560 | or stuff like that.

02:11:58.680 | Which means now you have a digital country

02:12:00.600 | that is ranking not just in people,

02:12:03.760 | not just in real estate footprint.

02:12:06.400 | So it's also in real estate footprint

02:12:08.000 | with the countries of the world.

02:12:09.880 | So you start ranking and you're bigger

02:12:11.880 | than these UN listed countries in your population

02:12:14.440 | and your real estate footprint.

02:12:15.280 | And the third is income, okay?

02:12:17.040 | You can prove on chain that you have a income

02:12:21.600 | for the digital population

02:12:23.200 | that is above a certain amount, right?

02:12:25.280 | This is what I call the census of the network state.

02:12:27.440 | And it's actually such a crucial component

02:12:29.000 | that I have it in the essay,

02:12:31.600 | "The Network State in a Thousand Words."

02:12:33.360 | The post office and census were actually important enough

02:12:35.320 | to be written into the US constitution, okay?

02:12:38.240 | Partly because it was like

02:12:39.320 | for apportionment of representatives,

02:12:41.000 | partly because it was a feedback mechanism.

02:12:43.040 | And so that census was done every 10 years

02:12:45.320 | and it's provided a crucial snapshot of the US

02:12:47.280 | for the last several hundred years, okay?

02:12:49.400 | Now here, this census of a digital state

02:12:52.520 | could be done every 10 seconds, okay?

02:12:56.120 | Conducting it is actually not the hard part.

02:12:57.920 | You know what the hard part is?

02:12:59.720 | Proving it.

02:13:00.920 | Because how will the world believe

02:13:03.600 | that you actually have 100,000 people spread

02:13:06.080 | across countries?

02:13:07.120 | Couldn't they all be bots?

02:13:08.120 | Couldn't they be AIs?

02:13:10.120 | Proof of human, proof of income,

02:13:12.640 | and also proof of real estate

02:13:14.120 | start to actually rise dramatically in importance

02:13:17.080 | because you're saying we're gonna rank this digital state

02:13:20.480 | on the leaderboard of the fiat states, okay?

02:13:24.440 | And so that means that people will start to,

02:13:26.080 | at first they'll just laugh at it.

02:13:27.640 | Once you start claiming you have 10,000 citizens,

02:13:30.720 | people are gonna start poking and be like,

02:13:32.120 | "Is that real?

02:13:32.960 | Prove that it's real."

02:13:33.960 | So I have a whole talk on this,

02:13:36.320 | actually I'm giving at this Chainlink conference,

02:13:38.680 | but essentially how do you prove this, right?

02:13:41.320 | The short answer is crypto oracles plus auditing.

02:13:45.000 | The somewhat longer answer is

02:13:47.440 | you put these assertions on chain,

02:13:50.360 | these proof of human,

02:13:52.520 | these proof of real estate, et cetera,

02:13:54.400 | assertions on chain, okay?

02:13:55.600 | And there's people who are writing to the blockchain

02:13:58.720 | and they are digitally signing their assertions.

02:14:01.200 | Now, of course, simply just putting something on chain

02:14:03.120 | doesn't make it true.

02:14:03.960 | It just says you can prove not that

02:14:06.400 | what is written on chain is true,

02:14:07.400 | but that the metadata is true.

02:14:08.800 | You can show who wrote it via their digital signature,

02:14:12.720 | what they wrote, their hash,

02:14:13.840 | and when they wrote it, their timestamp.

02:14:15.080 | So you can establish those things in metadata

02:14:17.080 | of who, what, and when was written.

02:14:18.840 | Who's the who in that picture?

02:14:20.160 | So for example-

02:14:21.360 | How do you know it's one human?

02:14:23.640 | Great question.

02:14:24.480 | So let's say you've bought a bunch of your piece of territory

02:14:26.200 | from Blackstone, okay?

02:14:27.800 | As a function of that,

02:14:29.600 | blackstone.eth signs an on-chain receipt

02:14:34.600 | that says this,

02:14:38.080 | lexfriedman.eth bought this piece of property from us

02:14:42.760 | and it has, you know, like, it's a thousand square meters

02:14:45.760 | and this is put on chain, they sign it, okay?

02:14:48.960 | That's their digital receipt.

02:14:50.440 | Just like you might get an email receipt

02:14:51.840 | when you buy a piece of property or something, okay?

02:14:53.760 | It's just put not online, but on chain.

02:14:56.120 | And it's signed by Blackstone

02:14:57.600 | or whatever real estate vendor you buy it from.

02:15:00.960 | It could be a company,

02:15:01.840 | it could obviously be an individual, right?

02:15:03.840 | And so you have a bunch of these assertions.

02:15:05.520 | Let's say there's 47 different real estate vendors.

02:15:08.760 | I know vendor's an atypical term there,

02:15:10.240 | but just bear with me, right?

02:15:11.480 | 47 different real estate sellers

02:15:14.920 | that you've bought all of your territory from.

02:15:17.120 | Each of them put digital signatures that are asserting

02:15:19.320 | that a certain amount of real estate was bought

02:15:21.040 | and its square meters, its location,

02:15:22.840 | or whatever else they wanna prove.

02:15:24.520 | The sum of all that is now your real estate footprint, okay?

02:15:28.000 | And now the question is, was that real?

02:15:29.880 | Well, because they signed what they put on chain,

02:15:33.640 | you can do things like you can audit.

02:15:35.360 | Let's say Blackstone has signed 500,000 properties

02:15:38.880 | and they've sold them and put them on chain.

02:15:40.640 | And I'm not talking about 2022 or 2023, but 2030, right?

02:15:44.320 | It'll be a few years out,

02:15:45.160 | but people are doing this type of stuff.

02:15:46.160 | They're putting this stuff on chain.

02:15:47.320 | So you get that on-chain receipt.

02:15:48.680 | They've got 500,000 of these.

02:15:50.080 | What you can do is just sampling, okay?

02:15:53.200 | You pick a subset N of them,

02:15:55.600 | let's say 500 properties around the world.

02:15:57.560 | You go there, you actually go and independently look

02:16:00.480 | at what the square footprint is.

02:16:03.120 | And then from that,

02:16:04.120 | you can see what was the actual, your measurement

02:16:07.400 | versus their reported.

02:16:08.880 | And then you can, via Cisco inference,

02:16:10.840 | extrapolate that if they were randomly selected

02:16:12.920 | to the rest of the properties

02:16:14.000 | and get a reliability score for Blackstone's reporting

02:16:16.800 | of its real estate square footage.

02:16:18.200 | - Who does the, so that's the auditing step.

02:16:19.920 | - That's the auditing step.

02:16:20.760 | - So the crypto oracle is the-

02:16:24.360 | - Auditable oracle.

02:16:25.200 | - On-chain, what did you say, assertions?

02:16:28.480 | - That's right.

02:16:29.320 | - Yeah, about like who bought stuff with who.

02:16:30.800 | I still have to get to the proof of human,

02:16:32.320 | but auditing, there's a bunch of people randomly checking

02:16:36.520 | that you're not full of shit.

02:16:37.640 | - That's right.

02:16:38.480 | - Who is in charge of the auditing though?

02:16:40.600 | - So it could be a big four, like a PWC

02:16:43.440 | and basically the accountants that do corporate balance sheet

02:16:48.160 | and cashflow and-

02:16:50.040 | - Who keeps them in check from corruption?

02:16:52.560 | I'm just imagining a world full of network states.

02:16:55.040 | - Yeah, it's a good question.

02:16:55.880 | So at a certain point you get to who watches the watchers.

02:16:58.800 | Right?

02:16:59.640 | And, oh, well, the government is meant

02:17:02.320 | to keep the accountants accountable.

02:17:04.280 | And Arthur Anderson actually did have a whole flame out

02:17:06.720 | in the, around the time of the Enron thing.

02:17:09.560 | So it is possible that there's corrupt accountants

02:17:12.720 | or bad accountants or what have you.

02:17:14.120 | But of course the government itself is corrupt in many ways

02:17:17.960 | and prints all this money and seizes all of these assets

02:17:20.440 | and surveils everybody and so on and so forth.

02:17:22.720 | So, the answer to your question is going to be probably exit

02:17:27.720 | in the sense that if those accountants,

02:17:31.800 | they are themselves gonna digitally sign a report

02:17:34.000 | and put it on-chain.

02:17:35.080 | Okay?

02:17:35.920 | So they're gonna say, we believe that X, Y, and Z's,

02:17:40.920 | you know, reports are on-chain, we're this reliable,

02:17:44.240 | and here's our study.

02:17:45.240 | If they falsify that, well, if somebody finds that,

02:17:48.600 | eventually, then that person is downweighted

02:17:50.520 | and then you have to go to another accountant.

02:17:52.040 | Right?

02:17:52.880 | - Is there ways to mess with this?

02:17:53.720 | I mean, I just, let me breathe in and out.

02:17:57.880 | As I mentioned, some of the heaviest shit I've ever read.

02:18:01.480 | So because I visited Ukraine,

02:18:03.240 | I read "Red Famine" by Ann Applebaum, "Bloodlands."

02:18:08.240 | - Yep.

02:18:09.760 | - And it's just a lot of coverage of the census.

02:18:12.200 | I mean, there's a lot of coverage of a lot of things,

02:18:14.600 | but in Ukraine in the 1930s,

02:18:18.040 | Stalin messed a lot with the census to hide the fact

02:18:21.040 | that sort of a lot of people died from starvation.

02:18:25.440 | - And did that with the cooperation

02:18:26.760 | of Arthur G. Sulzberger's New York Times company.

02:18:29.360 | Like Walter Grant, he falsified all those reports.

02:18:31.840 | Are there several parties involved?

02:18:33.760 | Can there be several parties involved in this case

02:18:37.160 | that manipulate the truth as it is represented

02:18:42.160 | by the crypto oracle

02:18:44.520 | and as it is checked by the auditing mechanism?

02:18:47.200 | - It is possible, but the more parties that are involved

02:18:49.600 | in falsifying something, the more defections there are.

02:18:52.120 | So that's why you basically have another level of auditing

02:18:57.120 | is fundamentally the answer, right?

02:18:58.640 | And really, I think what it comes back to is

02:19:01.240 | if you're showing your work, right?

02:19:03.240 | This is the difference between crypto economics

02:19:05.200 | and fiat economics.

02:19:06.080 | You know, the Bitcoin blockchain,

02:19:07.400 | anybody can download it and run verification on it, okay?

02:19:10.800 | This is different than government inflation stats,

02:19:13.480 | which people don't believe, right?

02:19:14.840 | Because the process is just, you know,

02:19:17.400 | it is true that CPI methodology is published and so on,

02:19:20.760 | but it is not something which people feel

02:19:23.240 | reflects their actual basket of goods, right?

02:19:26.260 | And so the independent verifiability is really the core

02:19:30.360 | of what true audibility is.

02:19:32.560 | And so then to your question,

02:19:34.240 | it's hard for some group to be able to collude

02:19:36.160 | because the blockchain is public

02:19:37.360 | and everything they've written to it is public.

02:19:39.140 | And so if there's an error,

02:19:40.880 | it's easier in some ways to tell the truth than to lie

02:19:43.080 | because the truth is just naturally consistent

02:19:45.880 | across the world, whereas lies can be found out,

02:19:48.520 | even, you know, Cisco Tesla, you know, Benford's law?

02:19:51.080 | - Yes.

02:19:52.840 | - Right, it's something where the digits in like a real,

02:19:56.460 | if you take the last digit or the first,

02:19:58.280 | I forget if it was the last digit or the first digit,

02:19:59.920 | I think it's first digit, right?

02:20:01.320 | So you take the first digit in an actual financial statement,

02:20:05.240 | you look at the distribution of like how many ones

02:20:08.320 | and how many twos, how many threes, the percentages.

02:20:11.480 | It has actually, you'd guess it might be,

02:20:14.480 | oh, each one will be equally random, it'd be 10%.

02:20:17.240 | It's not like that, actually.

02:20:19.160 | There's a certain distribution that it has

02:20:21.120 | and fake data doesn't look like that, but real data does.

02:20:25.600 | - That's weird.

02:20:26.520 | - It's interesting, right?

02:20:27.360 | - Benford's law, also called the first digit law,

02:20:29.600 | states that the leading digits in a collection of data sets

02:20:33.120 | are probably going to be small.

02:20:36.120 | For example, most numbers in a set,

02:20:39.440 | about 30%, will have a leading digit of one.

02:20:42.280 | - Yeah, so that's a great example

02:20:43.400 | of what we were talking about earlier,

02:20:44.480 | the observational leading to the theory.

02:20:46.840 | - Ooh, there's a Benford's law of controversy.

02:20:48.960 | I'm looking that up.

02:20:50.200 | Benford's law of controversy.

02:20:53.080 | Benford's law of controversy is an adage

02:20:55.080 | from the 1980 novel "Timescape" stating,

02:20:58.120 | "Passion is inversely proportional

02:21:00.040 | "to the amount of real information available."

02:21:03.080 | The adage was quoted in an international drug policy article

02:21:06.480 | in peer-reviewed social science.

02:21:08.080 | Can I just say how much I love Wikipedia?

02:21:10.280 | I have the founder of Wikipedia

02:21:12.320 | coming on this very podcast very soon,

02:21:14.120 | and I think the world is a better place

02:21:17.200 | because Wikipedia exists.

02:21:18.840 | One of the things he wanted to come on and talk about

02:21:21.600 | is the ways that he believes that Wikipedia is going wrong.

02:21:26.360 | - So on technical truths, it's great.

02:21:28.240 | Remember I think earlier on technical truths

02:21:30.720 | versus political truths?

02:21:31.560 | On technical truths, it's great.

02:21:32.880 | On political truths, it's like a defamation engine.

02:21:35.880 | Just as one example, okay?

02:21:37.360 | This is something that I was gonna write up,

02:21:39.280 | but there was a scam called HPZ Token

02:21:43.560 | that managed to edit Wikipedia.

02:21:45.680 | Nobody detected it.

02:21:47.280 | It said that I was the founder of HPZ Token.

02:21:50.240 | - That you were the founder of HPZ Token.

02:21:51.280 | - Yeah, I had nothing to do with this,

02:21:53.960 | and people were scammed out of it

02:21:55.880 | because Google just pushes Wikipedia links

02:21:59.280 | to high on Google, and people are like,

02:22:02.840 | "Well, it's Wikipedia, therefore it's real," right?

02:22:06.240 | Wikipedia has the bio of living persons thing.

02:22:09.200 | They should just allow people to delete their profile

02:22:10.960 | 'cause they have zero quality control on it.

02:22:12.760 | It's literally facilitating fraud, right?

02:22:15.840 | Where people will maliciously edit

02:22:18.120 | and then do things with them,

02:22:19.740 | and nobody cares or is looking at it

02:22:22.520 | beyond the fraudsters, and this is happening.

02:22:24.600 | If that was happening, that was undetected.

02:22:26.120 | I wasn't paying attention to this.

02:22:27.080 | This was there for weeks or months, totally undetected,

02:22:30.860 | that literally facilitated fraud, right?

02:22:32.960 | And fundamentally, the issue is that

02:22:35.040 | Wikipedia doesn't have any concept of who's editing

02:22:38.400 | or property rights or anything like that, right?

02:22:40.800 | It is also something which is,

02:22:42.480 | it used to be something in the early 2000s, mid-2000s,

02:22:45.000 | people said, "Oh, it's Wikipedia,

02:22:46.440 | "how trustworthy it can be, Britannica's reviewed,"

02:22:48.720 | and that's been forgotten,

02:22:49.880 | and now it's become over-trusted, right?

02:22:51.960 | Remember the thing, like, the more trust something gets,

02:22:54.080 | the less trustworthy it often becomes.

02:22:56.160 | It kind of abuses the power, right?

02:22:58.120 | So what I'm interested in,

02:23:01.040 | Google actually had a model a while back called KNOL.

02:23:03.840 | KNOL, K-N-O-L, was something where

02:23:07.640 | when there were different versions of a Wikipedia-style page,

02:23:12.480 | you had Google Docs-like permissions on them.

02:23:14.800 | For example, you might have 10 different versions

02:23:17.560 | of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, okay?

02:23:21.560 | And each one had an editor

02:23:23.840 | and folks that they could grant edit rights and so on,

02:23:26.800 | but this way, you would actually be able to see

02:23:29.560 | different versions of a page,

02:23:31.400 | and they might have different versions of popularity,

02:23:33.680 | but this way, you wouldn't have edit wars,

02:23:35.560 | you'd have forks, right?

02:23:37.480 | And they would all kind of coexist,

02:23:39.840 | and then people could review them,

02:23:41.840 | and now you could see different versions of something

02:23:44.860 | versus the thing that just kind of rewards

02:23:48.000 | dogged persistence or being an editor

02:23:50.000 | or something like that.

02:23:51.120 | The other thing is, a lot of the folks

02:23:52.920 | who have editorial privileges of Wikipedia

02:23:55.480 | are there from the early 2000s,

02:23:57.440 | and most of India wasn't online then.

02:24:00.240 | Most of Africa wasn't online then, right?

02:24:02.320 | So there's this inherited power that exists,

02:24:06.480 | which again, was fresh and innovative 10 or 20 years ago,

02:24:10.220 | but it's now kind of outdated.

02:24:13.000 | - Yeah, I wanna see some data, though.

02:24:14.560 | - You wanna see what? - I wanna see some data,

02:24:16.160 | because we can always, I mean, this is,

02:24:20.800 | we often highlight small anecdotal--

02:24:23.480 | - Okay, I'll give you an example.

02:24:24.360 | - Cases, hold on a second.

02:24:26.320 | We often highlight issues in society, in the world,

02:24:30.840 | in anything by taking a specific example,

02:24:35.040 | taking anecdotal data and saying, "There's a problem here."

02:24:37.920 | I wanna know on net how much positive

02:24:40.500 | is being added to the world because of it.

02:24:42.520 | My experience that I try to be empathetic and open-minded,

02:24:46.960 | my exploration of Wikipedia has been such

02:24:49.800 | that it is a breath of fresh air

02:24:53.000 | in terms of the breadth and depth of knowledge that is there.

02:24:58.000 | Now, you can say there's bias built in,

02:25:02.080 | there's wars that are incentivized not to produce truth,

02:25:06.360 | but to produce a consensus around a particular narrative,

02:25:11.000 | but that is how the entirety of human civilization operates,

02:25:15.480 | and we have to see where's it better and where's it worse

02:25:19.120 | in terms of platforms.

02:25:20.240 | - I think Wikipedia was an improvement over what came before

02:25:24.000 | but has a lot of flaws.

02:25:25.680 | You're right that absolutely,

02:25:27.620 | sometimes people can over-fixate on the anecdotal,

02:25:29.960 | but sometimes the anecdotal illustrates a general pattern.

02:25:34.120 | For example, one thing that happens frequently in Wikipedia

02:25:36.960 | is there are editors who will plant a story

02:25:41.960 | and then they will then go and use that story

02:25:44.420 | as like a neutral third party to win an edit war.

02:25:47.840 | So here's a phenomenon that happens in Wikipedia.

02:25:51.520 | You have an editor who's privileged

02:25:54.800 | above just random users, okay,

02:25:56.920 | who will plant a story and then cite that story

02:25:59.040 | as if it was a neutral third party.

02:26:00.520 | So there's a site called Wikipediocracy, okay,

02:26:03.760 | and it discusses the case of a person named Peppermint

02:26:08.280 | who had a name that they didn't want included,

02:26:11.520 | their so-called dead name on their Wikipedia profile.

02:26:14.120 | And there's a Wikipedia editor named Tenebrae

02:26:16.720 | who people allege was a Newsday reporter or writer

02:26:21.720 | that put a piece into Newsday that dead named Peppermint

02:26:27.800 | and then was able to cite it on the Wikipedia article

02:26:30.580 | as if it was like a neutral third party

02:26:32.080 | when it actually wasn't,

02:26:33.100 | when people allege it was the same guy, okay?

02:26:35.500 | Now, that is not an uncommon thing.

02:26:38.320 | That actually--

02:26:39.160 | That's what I want data on.

02:26:40.000 | Okay, I know--

02:26:40.820 | How many articles, I'm not--

02:26:42.640 | Who's auditing--

02:26:43.920 | I'm dancing with you, not against you.

02:26:45.600 | Sure, sure.

02:26:46.440 | I'm saying how many articles have that kind of war

02:26:50.560 | where douchebags are manipulating each other?

02:26:53.520 | So that's the question, what's the audit?

02:26:55.640 | Has Wikipedia actually been audited, right?

02:26:57.640 | Who are the editors?

02:26:58.680 | Like, who's actually writing this stuff?

02:27:00.320 | It is actually something where, again, on technical topics,

02:27:03.440 | I think it's pretty good.

02:27:04.720 | On non-technical topics, there's something called

02:27:07.200 | the Wikipedia Reliable Sources Policy.

02:27:09.360 | It's a fascinating page, okay?

02:27:11.160 | So it actually takes a lot of the stuff

02:27:13.600 | that we have been, you know, the world has been talking about

02:27:16.400 | in terms of what's a reliable source of information

02:27:19.120 | and so on and so forth.

02:27:20.280 | It's called the Wikipedia Reliable Sources,

02:27:22.160 | Perennial Sources, okay?

02:27:23.800 | And if you go to this page, okay,

02:27:25.320 | which I'm just gonna send to you now, all right,

02:27:27.360 | you will literally see every media outlet in the world

02:27:31.320 | and they're colored gray, green, yellow, or red, okay?

02:27:36.320 | And so red is like untrustworthy, green is trustworthy,

02:27:40.320 | yellow is like neutral, okay?

02:27:42.680 | Now, this actually makes Wikipedia's epistemology explicit.

02:27:47.040 | They are marking a source as trustworthy or untrustworthy.

02:27:50.320 | For example, you are not allowed to cite social media

02:27:52.800 | on Wikipedia, which is actually an enormous part

02:27:55.440 | of what people are posting.

02:27:56.840 | Instead, you have to cite a mainstream media outlet

02:28:00.760 | that puts the tweets in the mainstream article

02:28:04.560 | and only then can it be cited in Wikipedia.

02:28:06.640 | - By the way, to push back, this is a dance.

02:28:09.320 | We're dancing. - Sure, sure, sure, sure.

02:28:10.960 | - That those are rules written on a sheet of paper.

02:28:14.280 | I have seen Wikipedia in general play in the gray area

02:28:18.600 | that these rules create.

02:28:20.160 | - Oh, well, if you are an editor, then you can get--

02:28:23.440 | - So you can use the rules and you can,

02:28:26.000 | because there's a lot of contradictions within the rules,

02:28:28.960 | you can use them to, in the ways you said,

02:28:32.000 | to achieve the ends you want.

02:28:33.320 | It really boils down to the incentives,

02:28:37.800 | the motivations of the editors.

02:28:40.160 | And one of the magical things about Wikipedia,

02:28:42.960 | the positive versus the negative,

02:28:44.720 | is that it seems like a very small number of people,

02:28:47.560 | same with Stack Overflow, can do an incredible amount

02:28:51.880 | of good editing and aggregation of good knowledge.

02:28:56.880 | Now, as you said, that seems to work much better

02:29:03.000 | for technical things over which there's not

02:29:05.400 | a significant division.

02:29:08.960 | Some of that has to do less with the rules

02:29:11.400 | and more with the human beings involved.

02:29:15.160 | - Well, but here's the thing is,

02:29:17.040 | so first, let me take this,

02:29:17.960 | I should finish off this point

02:29:19.000 | with reliable source, perennial sources, right?

02:29:20.800 | So if you go to this, you'll see that Al Jazeera

02:29:24.920 | is marked green, but let's say the Cato Institute

02:29:29.560 | is marked yellow, right?

02:29:32.200 | The nation is marked green. - Oh, shit.

02:29:34.680 | Oh, snap.

02:29:35.840 | Right, okay, sure, yes.

02:29:37.680 | - The nation is marked green,

02:29:38.720 | but National Review is marked yellow, okay?

02:29:41.160 | You could probably go and do,

02:29:42.600 | so what's good about this is it makes

02:29:43.920 | the epistemology explicit, right?

02:29:46.920 | You could actually take this table,

02:29:48.960 | and you could also look at all the past edit wars

02:29:51.240 | and so on over it, and take a look at what things

02:29:53.560 | are starting to get marked as red or yellow

02:29:55.760 | and what things are starting to get marked as green,

02:29:57.760 | and I'm pretty sure you're gonna find

02:29:59.080 | some kind of partisan polarization

02:30:00.520 | that comes out of it, right, number one.

02:30:02.960 | Number two is once something gets marked

02:30:06.400 | as being yellow or red, then all links

02:30:10.720 | and all references to it are pulled out.

02:30:12.160 | For example, Coindesk, okay, was marked

02:30:16.040 | as being like, gosh, what was it?

02:30:17.880 | - Yellow?

02:30:18.720 | - I think it's marked as red.

02:30:22.040 | Coindesk, which is actually like--

02:30:23.360 | - I get a lot of useful information from Coindesk.

02:30:25.280 | - That's right, but it's marked as red, why?

02:30:26.960 | Because there's some Wikipedia editors

02:30:29.040 | who hate cryptocurrency, and so cryptocurrency

02:30:31.760 | on Wikipedia has been a huge topic

02:30:34.000 | where they've just edited out all the positive stuff,

02:30:35.960 | and these are senior editors of Wikipedia

02:30:37.840 | who can control what sources are considered reliable.

02:30:41.120 | So they've now knocked out Coindesk,

02:30:42.960 | they've knocked out social media.

02:30:45.060 | They only allow mainstream media coverage,

02:30:47.440 | and not even all mainstream media,

02:30:48.840 | only those they've marked as green.

02:30:50.960 | This is the manipulation of consensus.

02:30:52.520 | - I wanna know how many articles are affected by it,

02:30:55.760 | and on that-- - Hundreds of thousands.

02:30:57.080 | Hundreds of thousands.

02:30:57.960 | - You could just say that randomly.

02:31:00.600 | - I can, I can. - No, no, no, no, no.

02:31:01.680 | - I can, because all the-- - They're affected,

02:31:02.840 | there's different levels of effect

02:31:04.440 | in terms of it actually having a significant impact

02:31:07.400 | on the quality of the article.

02:31:08.520 | - Let me give you an example.

02:31:09.440 | Let me give you an example, right?

02:31:12.040 | The fact that people cannot cite direct quotes

02:31:16.760 | on social media, but can only cite the rehash

02:31:20.440 | of those quotes in a mainstream media outlet,

02:31:22.320 | and not just any mainstream media outlet,

02:31:24.180 | but those that are colored green

02:31:25.800 | on the Wikipedia reliable perennial sources policy,

02:31:29.080 | is a structural shift on every single article

02:31:32.320 | to make Wikipedia align with

02:31:34.280 | US mainstream media corporations, right?

02:31:36.920 | - I am, as often, playing devil's advocate,

02:31:41.320 | to counter a point so that the disagreement

02:31:44.920 | reveals some profound wisdom.

02:31:48.760 | That's what I'm doing here.

02:31:50.800 | But also in that task here, I'm trying to understand

02:31:55.800 | exactly how much harm is created by the bias

02:32:02.120 | within the team of editors that we're discussing,

02:32:06.400 | and how much of Wikipedia is technical knowledge.

02:32:10.360 | For example, the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

02:32:16.400 | The Wikipedia article I've seen there,

02:32:21.640 | now that changes very aggressively a lot,

02:32:24.500 | and I hear from every side on this,

02:32:29.440 | but it did not seem biased to me.

02:32:32.140 | As compared to mainstream media in the United States.

02:32:39.160 | - So now I'm gonna sound extremely woke, okay?

02:32:42.100 | If you go and look at this, all right?

02:32:45.840 | Times of India is yellow, but Mother Jones,

02:32:49.680 | Jacobin, okay, they are green, right?

02:32:53.180 | So a niche, mostly white, Western, partisan left outlet,

02:32:59.140 | is marked green, but a billion people,

02:33:02.620 | like the Times of India is marked yellow, right?

02:33:06.660 | That's a structural bias towards Western media outlets

02:33:11.540 | and Western editors when much of the rest of the world

02:33:15.060 | hadn't gotten online or whatever.

02:33:16.220 | - I would just love to see, in terms of the actual article,

02:33:20.700 | what ideas are being censored, altered, shifted.

02:33:27.340 | I would love, I just think it's an open, I'm not sort of--

02:33:31.180 | - So the edit logs are there, edit logs are public.

02:33:32.900 | - Yeah, I would be fascinated, yeah.

02:33:34.940 | Is there a way to explore the way

02:33:37.180 | that narratives are shifted because of--

02:33:39.100 | - Sure, so a very simple one is,

02:33:41.480 | if you were to pull all the edit logs of Wikipedia,

02:33:44.560 | you could see how many times

02:33:46.780 | are social media links disallowed, okay?

02:33:51.020 | Like, first of all, think about it like this.

02:33:52.780 | How many, I mean, just the fact that social media

02:33:55.540 | is not allowed to be cited on Wikipedia

02:33:57.940 | or inconsistently allowed.

02:33:58.780 | - You think that's a problem?

02:33:59.900 | - It's a huge problem.

02:34:00.740 | You can't cite, let's say Jeff Bezos' own tweet.

02:34:04.060 | You have to cite some random media corporation.

02:34:06.900 | - Here's the thing, and sorry if I'm interrupting.

02:34:09.820 | - Please.

02:34:10.660 | - Hopefully I'm adding to it.

02:34:11.500 | I think they're trying to create friction

02:34:15.260 | as to the sources used because if you can use social media,

02:34:20.260 | then you can use basically bots

02:34:23.220 | to create a bunch of sources, right?

02:34:25.700 | And then you can almost automate the editor war, right?

02:34:30.340 | - Here's the thing, is basically Wikipedia initially,

02:34:33.500 | like said, oh, we'll only cite mainstream media

02:34:37.220 | as a way of boosting its credibility in the early 2000s,

02:34:42.100 | okay, when its credibility was low.

02:34:44.020 | Now it's sort of become merged with the US establishment

02:34:49.020 | and it only cites these things whose trust,

02:34:51.700 | I mean, have you seen the graphs on trust in mainstream media?

02:34:54.900 | Like it's plummeted.

02:34:55.780 | It's down to like 10% or something like that, right?

02:34:58.020 | So the most trusted sources for Wikipedia

02:35:00.700 | are untrusted by the population.

02:35:02.660 | - Yeah. - True?

02:35:03.500 | - That feels like it's a fixable technological problem.

02:35:06.700 | I think I'm under-informed and my gut says

02:35:10.220 | we're both together under-informed.

02:35:12.300 | I do a rigorous three to four hour discussion

02:35:14.620 | about Wikipedia.

02:35:15.460 | But hold on a second.

02:35:16.300 | I think I have a gut sort of developed

02:35:22.180 | feeling about which articles not to trust on Wikipedia.

02:35:25.540 | I think I need to make that explicit also.

02:35:28.380 | I have a kind of an understanding

02:35:30.420 | that you don't go to Wikipedia for this particular topic.

02:35:34.740 | Like don't go to Wikipedia for an article

02:35:37.540 | on Donald Trump or Joe Biden.

02:35:38.820 | There's going to be, if I did,

02:35:41.060 | I would go to maybe sections that don't have room

02:35:45.460 | for insertion of bias or like the section on controversy

02:35:49.220 | or accusations of racism or so on or sexual assault.

02:35:53.580 | I usually not trust Wikipedia on those sections.

02:35:57.260 | - Like math, that'll be great, right?

02:35:59.420 | Wikipedia's great for that.

02:36:00.820 | On many topics that do not have a single consensus truth,

02:36:05.820 | it's structurally shifted towards

02:36:08.780 | basically white Western liberals, woke whites, right?

02:36:13.980 | Fundamentally, that's the demographic of the Wikipedia.

02:36:16.100 | - What kind of articles do you think are affected by this?

02:36:18.860 | Let's think about it.

02:36:20.100 | - Everything that's not math and technology.

02:36:22.660 | - I think that's too strong a statement.

02:36:24.020 | So we can, like I said, war in Ukraine.

02:36:28.180 | - Sure.

02:36:30.500 | - I think that's too strong a statement.

02:36:32.380 | There's so much, I guess I'm saying affected

02:36:37.260 | to a large degree.

02:36:39.220 | Even major battles in history, Battle of Stalingrad.

02:36:43.820 | - Sure.

02:36:45.260 | - That's not math.

02:36:46.660 | So you think all of that is affected to a point

02:36:50.460 | where it's not a trusted source?

02:36:53.100 | - Absolutely.

02:36:53.940 | If you look at the edit wars, for example,

02:36:55.460 | on Stalin versus Hitler,

02:36:56.820 | the tone on Hitler starts out legitimately and justifiably

02:37:01.460 | as basically genocidal, maniacal dictator.

02:37:04.540 | With Stalin, there's a fair number of Stalin apologists

02:37:07.380 | that edit out mention of genocide

02:37:09.260 | from the first few paragraphs.

02:37:10.820 | - I am playing devil's advocate in part,

02:37:14.020 | but I also am too under-informed to do the level of defense

02:37:18.500 | I would like to provide for the wisdom that is there,

02:37:22.260 | for the knowledge that is there.

02:37:23.620 | I don't wanna use the word truth,

02:37:25.020 | but for some level of knowledge that is there in Wikipedia,

02:37:30.020 | I think I really worry about,

02:37:33.940 | I know you don't mean this,

02:37:35.020 | but a cynical interpretation of what you're saying,

02:37:38.100 | which is don't trust anything written on Wikipedia.

02:37:42.020 | I think you're being very consistent and eloquent

02:37:44.660 | in the way you're describing the issues of Wikipedia,

02:37:46.940 | and I don't have enough actual specific examples

02:37:51.940 | to give where there is some still battle for truth

02:37:58.420 | that's happening that's outside of the bias of society.

02:38:02.220 | I just, I think if we naturally distrust

02:38:05.100 | every source of information,

02:38:07.100 | there is a general distrust of institutions

02:38:12.100 | and a distrust of social knowledge

02:38:16.900 | that leads to an apathy and a cynicism

02:38:20.500 | about the world in general.

02:38:22.420 | If you believe a lot of conspiracy theories,

02:38:26.820 | you basically tune out from this collective journey

02:38:30.020 | that we're on towards the truth,

02:38:32.060 | and that's, it's not even just Wikipedia.

02:38:35.660 | I just think Wikipedia was, at least for a time,

02:38:37.900 | and maybe I tuned out,

02:38:39.580 | maybe because I am too focused on computer science

02:38:42.140 | and engineering and mathematics,

02:38:45.340 | but to me, Wikipedia for a long time

02:38:47.500 | was a source of calm escape

02:38:51.980 | from the political battles of ideology.

02:38:55.780 | And as you're quite eloquently describing,

02:38:59.060 | it has become part of the battleground

02:39:03.480 | of political ideology.

02:39:05.100 | I just would love to know where the boundaries of that are.

02:39:08.420 | - Glenn Greenwald has observed this.

02:39:10.260 | Lots of other folks, for example,

02:39:13.540 | I'm definitely not the only person who's observed

02:39:15.260 | that Wikipedia-- - A lot of,

02:39:16.380 | let me just state, because I'm sensing this,

02:39:18.780 | and because of your eloquence and clear brilliance here,

02:39:21.860 | that a lot of people are going to immediately agree with you.

02:39:25.340 | - Okay.

02:39:26.180 | - And this is what I am also troubled by.

02:39:29.020 | This is not you, but I often see that people

02:39:33.780 | will detect cynicism,

02:39:36.300 | especially when it is phrased as eloquence,

02:39:38.820 | it's yours, and will look at a natural dumbass like me

02:39:43.820 | and think that Lex is just being naive.

02:39:48.180 | Look at him trusting Wikipedia--

02:39:49.980 | - Let me argue your side. - For his mainstream narrative.

02:39:51.420 | - Let me argue your side, okay?

02:39:52.900 | - Can you please do that,

02:39:53.740 | 'cause you could do that better than me?

02:39:54.940 | - No, no, no, no, Lex, I enjoy talking to you.

02:39:57.060 | - And I'm doing devil's advocate a little bit,

02:39:58.900 | 'cause I do really want to be,

02:40:01.180 | I am afraid about the forces that are basically editors

02:40:06.180 | of authority of talking down to people

02:40:08.340 | and censoring information.

02:40:09.860 | - Yeah, so let me first argue your side,

02:40:11.580 | and then let me say something, okay?

02:40:12.700 | Which is, what you are reacting to is,

02:40:17.700 | oh, even those things I thought of as constants

02:40:21.620 | are becoming variables.

02:40:22.500 | Where is the terra firma?

02:40:24.020 | If we cannot trust anything,

02:40:26.500 | then everybody's just, it's anarchy and it's chaos,

02:40:30.100 | like there's literally no consensus reality,

02:40:31.940 | and anybody can say anything, and so on and so forth, right?

02:40:34.900 | And I think that there's two possible deviations from,

02:40:38.980 | let's say that the mainstream,

02:40:42.180 | obviously people talk about QAnon, for example,

02:40:44.340 | as this kind of thing, where people just make things up.

02:40:48.740 | They just go totally,

02:40:50.140 | quit supply chain independent from mainstream media.

02:40:52.940 | And if mainstream media is a distorted gossamer

02:40:57.220 | of quasi-truth, these guys go to just total fiction,

02:41:00.460 | as opposed to like, right?

02:41:01.900 | The alternative to QAnon is not BlueAnon, mainstream media,

02:41:06.900 | but Satoshianon, okay?

02:41:09.780 | Which is an upward deviation, okay?

02:41:11.740 | Not a downward deviation to say

02:41:12.940 | there is no such thing as truth,

02:41:14.300 | but rather the upward deviation

02:41:15.660 | is decentralized cryptographic truth,

02:41:18.360 | not centralized corporate or government truth, okay?

02:41:22.340 | - So how does the decentralization of Wikipedia look like?

02:41:25.540 | - Great question.

02:41:26.380 | It's this concept of the ledger of record.

02:41:27.980 | First, whether you're Israeli or Palestinian,

02:41:30.340 | Japanese or Chinese, Democrat or Republican,

02:41:32.920 | those people agree on the state of the Bitcoin blockchain.

02:41:37.260 | Hundreds of billions of dollars is managed without weapons,

02:41:40.780 | okay, across tribes with wildly varying ideologies, right?

02:41:45.780 | And what that means is that is a mechanism

02:41:50.360 | for getting literally consensus.

02:41:52.340 | It's called consensus, cryptographic consensus,

02:41:54.380 | proof of work.

02:41:56.020 | And when people can get consensus on this,

02:41:58.180 | what they're getting consensus on are basically bytes

02:42:00.860 | that determine who holds what Bitcoin.

02:42:02.860 | This is exactly the kind of thing

02:42:03.900 | people would fight wars over.

02:42:05.500 | You know, for hundreds of billions of dollars,

02:42:06.980 | let alone millions of dollars,

02:42:08.180 | people will kill each other over that in the past, right?

02:42:11.220 | So for hundreds of billions of dollars,

02:42:12.320 | people can get consensus truth on this

02:42:14.420 | in this highly adversarial environment, right?

02:42:16.940 | So the first generalization of that is it says,

02:42:20.340 | you can go from bytes that reflect

02:42:22.000 | what Bitcoin somebody has,

02:42:24.740 | to bytes that reflect what stocks, bonds,

02:42:26.980 | other kinds of assets people have.

02:42:28.460 | That's the entire DeFi, Ethereum, that whole space, okay?

02:42:32.620 | Basically the premise is if you go from consensus

02:42:34.660 | on one byte by induction,

02:42:36.900 | you can go to consensus on N bytes,

02:42:38.360 | depending on the cost of getting that consensus, right?

02:42:40.540 | And almost anything digital can be represented,

02:42:43.180 | you know, everything digital can be represented as bytes,

02:42:45.340 | right?

02:42:46.180 | So now you can get consensus

02:42:47.320 | on certain kinds of digital information, Bitcoin,

02:42:50.360 | but then also any kind of financial instrument.

02:42:52.620 | And then the next generalization is

02:42:54.460 | what I call the ledger of record.

02:42:57.940 | Many kinds of facts can be put partially

02:43:02.940 | or completely on chain.

02:43:04.680 | It's not just proof of work and proof of stake.

02:43:07.260 | There's things like proof of location,

02:43:09.220 | proof of human, proof of this, proof of that.

02:43:11.420 | The auditable oracles I talked about extended further.

02:43:14.140 | Lots and lots of people are working on this, right?

02:43:16.040 | Proof of solvency,

02:43:17.220 | seeing that some actor has enough of a bank balance

02:43:21.540 | to accommodate what they say they accommodate.

02:43:23.380 | You can imagine many kinds of digital assertions

02:43:26.140 | can be turned into proof of X and proof of Y.

02:43:28.500 | You start putting those on chain,

02:43:29.580 | you now have a library of partially

02:43:32.380 | or completely provable facts, okay?

02:43:35.060 | This is how you get consensus.

02:43:37.500 | As opposed to having a white Western Wikipedia editor

02:43:42.500 | or mostly white Western US media corporation

02:43:47.840 | or the US government simply say what is true

02:43:51.960 | in a centralized fashion.

02:43:53.800 | - So do you think truth is such an easy thing

02:43:58.520 | as you get to higher and higher questions of politics?

02:44:03.060 | Is the problem that the consensus mechanism is being hacked

02:44:07.760 | or is the problem that truth is a difficult thing

02:44:09.960 | to figure out?

02:44:11.000 | Was the 2020 election rigged or not?

02:44:13.880 | Is the earth flat or not?

02:44:15.840 | That's a scientific one.

02:44:17.000 | That's how this is--

02:44:17.840 | - My technical versus political truth spectrum, yeah.

02:44:19.960 | - But even the earth, like, well, that one is,

02:44:23.520 | yeah, nevermind, that's a bad example

02:44:25.160 | because that is very,

02:44:27.160 | you can rigorously show that the earth is not flat.

02:44:29.680 | But what, there's some social phenomena,

02:44:34.400 | political phenomena, philosophical one,

02:44:36.320 | that will have a lot of debates, historical stuff,

02:44:39.440 | about the different forces operating within Nazi Germany

02:44:46.700 | and Stalinist Soviet Union.

02:44:50.080 | I think there's probably a lot of,

02:44:52.720 | yeah, like, historians debate about a lot of stuff,

02:44:56.180 | like Blitz, the book that talks about the influence

02:45:01.180 | of drugs in the Third Reich.

02:45:03.200 | - Were they on meth or something?

02:45:04.240 | - Yeah, there's a lot of debates about how truth,

02:45:07.280 | what is the significance of meth on the actual behavior

02:45:11.240 | and decisions of Hitler and so on.

02:45:13.520 | So there's still a lot of debates.

02:45:15.340 | Is it so easy to fix with decentralization,

02:45:20.040 | I guess is the question.

02:45:21.300 | - So I actually have, like, basically chapter two

02:45:23.760 | of the "Network State" book is on essentially this topic.

02:45:26.400 | And so it's like 70 pages or something like that.

02:45:29.080 | So let me try to summarize what I think about on this.

02:45:32.960 | The first is that there was an Onion article that came out,

02:45:36.160 | I can't find it now anymore,

02:45:37.920 | but it was about historians in the year 3000

02:45:41.480 | writing about the late '90s and early 2000s.

02:45:43.840 | And they're like, clearly Queen Brittany

02:45:47.920 | was a very powerful monarch.

02:45:51.520 | We can see how many girls around the world

02:45:55.680 | worshipped her like a god.

02:45:57.160 | And so, and it was very funny

02:45:58.700 | because it was a plausible distortion

02:46:02.740 | of the current society by a human civilization

02:46:07.740 | picking through the rubble a thousand years later,

02:46:11.340 | having no context on anything, right?

02:46:13.600 | And it was a very thought provoking article

02:46:15.240 | because it says, well, to what extent is that us

02:46:19.640 | picking over Pompeii or the pyramids,

02:46:22.800 | or even like the 1600s or the 1700s,

02:46:25.440 | like a few hundred years ago,

02:46:26.960 | we're basically sifting through artifacts.

02:46:29.240 | And Selma Berger actually has this concept,

02:46:32.680 | which is obvious, but it's also useful to have a name for it.

02:46:36.240 | It's like, I think he calls it like dark history,

02:46:38.120 | which is, and again, I might be getting this wrong,

02:46:40.640 | but it's like only a small percentage

02:46:42.800 | of what the Greeks wrote down,

02:46:45.400 | has come to us to the present day, right?

02:46:47.360 | So perhaps it's not just the winners who write history,

02:46:51.040 | it's like the surviving records.

02:46:52.280 | We have this extremely partial,

02:46:55.400 | fragmentary record of history.

02:46:57.840 | And sometimes there's some discovery

02:46:59.240 | that rewrites the whole thing.

02:47:00.080 | Do you know what like Gobekli Tepe is?

02:47:02.300 | - Everything I know about that is from Rogan

02:47:04.320 | 'cause he's a huge fan of that kind of stuff.

02:47:06.160 | - Yeah, so that like rewrites.

02:47:07.680 | - And then there's a lot of debates there.

02:47:09.360 | - There's a lot of debates.

02:47:10.200 | And I think it's like the discovery of this site

02:47:11.560 | in Northern Turkey that totally shifts our estimate

02:47:15.000 | of like when civilization started,

02:47:17.360 | maybe pushing it back many thousands of years further

02:47:19.520 | in the past, right?

02:47:20.840 | The past, it's like an inverse problem in physics, right?

02:47:24.300 | We're trying to reconstruct this from limited information,

02:47:27.920 | right?

02:47:28.760 | It's like X-ray crystallography,

02:47:29.580 | it's an inverse problem, right?

02:47:31.240 | It's Plato's cave.

02:47:32.440 | We're trying to reconstruct what the world looks like

02:47:34.480 | outside from the shadows,

02:47:35.600 | these fragments that have been given to us, right?

02:47:39.580 | Or that we've found.

02:47:41.000 | And so in that sense, as you find more information,

02:47:44.280 | your estimate of the past changes, right?

02:47:46.560 | Oh, wow, okay, that pushes back civilization

02:47:48.480 | farther than we thought.

02:47:49.320 | That one discovery just changes it.

02:47:50.160 | - So you want to try to,

02:47:51.840 | given all the gaps in the data we have,

02:47:55.080 | you want to try to remove bias

02:47:57.560 | from the process of trying to fill the gaps.

02:48:01.160 | - Well, so here's the thing.

02:48:02.600 | I think we're very close to the moment of it.

02:48:04.520 | And so that's why it'll sound crazy when I say it now.

02:48:06.540 | But our descendants,

02:48:09.300 | I really do think of what the blockchain is

02:48:13.500 | and cryptographically verifiable history

02:48:15.540 | as being the next step after written history.

02:48:18.340 | It's like on par with that.

02:48:20.080 | Because anybody who has the record,

02:48:22.140 | the math is not gonna change, right?

02:48:24.060 | Math is constant across human time and space, right?

02:48:27.220 | So, you know, the value of pi is constant.

02:48:29.420 | That's one of the few constants

02:48:30.560 | across all these different human civilizations, okay?

02:48:33.740 | So somebody in the future,

02:48:36.840 | assuming of course the digital record

02:48:38.360 | is actually intact to that point,

02:48:39.880 | because in theory digital stuff will persist.

02:48:43.500 | In practice, you have lost data and floppy drives

02:48:46.880 | and stuff like that.

02:48:47.720 | In a sense, in some ways digital is more persistent,

02:48:49.440 | in some ways physical is more persistent, okay?

02:48:51.240 | But assuming we can figure out

02:48:52.200 | the archival problem somehow,

02:48:54.880 | then this future record,

02:48:57.480 | at least it's internally consistent, right?

02:48:59.760 | You can run a bunch of the equivalence of checksums, right?

02:49:02.760 | The Bitcoin verification process,

02:49:04.560 | just sum it all up and see that,

02:49:06.320 | okay, it's F of G of H of X,

02:49:08.440 | and boom, that at least is internally consistent, okay?

02:49:11.680 | Again, it doesn't say that

02:49:13.320 | all the people who reported it were,

02:49:16.200 | you know, they could have put something on chain

02:49:17.480 | that's false, but at least you know the metadata

02:49:19.200 | is likely to be very difficult to falsify.

02:49:21.160 | And this is a new tool.

02:49:22.560 | It's really a new tool in terms of a robust history

02:49:26.240 | that is expensive and technically challenging

02:49:28.900 | to edit and alter.

02:49:30.200 | And that is the alternative to the Stalin-esque

02:49:32.640 | rewriting of history by centralized power.

02:49:34.720 | - Yeah, I'm gonna have to do a lot of actually reading

02:49:37.560 | and thinking about,

02:49:39.120 | I'm actually, as you're talking,

02:49:40.680 | I'm also thinking about the fact that I think

02:49:43.000 | 99% of my access to Wikipedia is on technical topics,

02:49:48.000 | 'cause I basically use it very similarly to Stack Overflow.

02:49:53.200 | - And even there, it doesn't have unit tests.

02:49:54.800 | For example, one thing-

02:49:56.320 | - That's a good way to put it.

02:49:57.400 | - Right, so one thing I remember,

02:49:58.920 | again, I might be wrong on this,

02:49:59.960 | but I recall that the Kelly criterion

02:50:02.120 | it's actually quite a useful thing to know.

02:50:04.360 | It's like how to optimally size your bets.

02:50:06.480 | And you can have, given your kind of probability

02:50:10.840 | that some investment pays off or assumed probability,

02:50:13.120 | you can have bets that are too large,

02:50:15.040 | bets that are too small.

02:50:16.200 | Sometimes the Kelly criterion, it goes negative

02:50:18.520 | and actually it says you should actually take leverage.

02:50:20.800 | You're so sure this is a good outcome

02:50:22.600 | that you should actually spend more

02:50:23.840 | than your current bankroll

02:50:24.760 | because you're gonna get a good result, right?

02:50:26.360 | So it's a very sophisticated thing.

02:50:28.080 | And as I recall, many sites on the internet

02:50:30.320 | have the wrong equation.

02:50:33.120 | And I believe that was reprinted on Wikipedia.

02:50:34.920 | The wrong equation was put on Wikipedia

02:50:36.520 | as a Kelly criterion for a while.

02:50:38.080 | - That's funny.

02:50:38.920 | - Okay, and so without unit tests,

02:50:41.880 | see math is actually the kind of thing

02:50:43.040 | that you could unit test, right?

02:50:44.200 | You could literally have the assert

02:50:45.720 | on the right-hand side today, right?

02:50:47.480 | The modern version, we've got Jupiter,

02:50:50.000 | we've got Replit, we've got all these things.

02:50:52.240 | The modern version of Wikipedia,

02:50:54.360 | there's sites like golden.com, for example,

02:50:58.680 | there's a bunch of things.

02:50:59.520 | I'm funding lots of stuff across the board on this.

02:51:02.480 | And I'm not capitalizing these companies

02:51:05.400 | or capitalize independently,

02:51:06.360 | but I'm trying to see if,

02:51:07.720 | not just talk about a better version.

02:51:09.560 | It's hard to build something better.

02:51:10.640 | So actually go and build it.

02:51:12.160 | And where you want is assertions

02:51:14.040 | that are actually reproduced.

02:51:15.280 | You don't just have the equation there.

02:51:17.280 | You have it written down in code.

02:51:18.200 | You can hit enter, you can download the page,

02:51:19.720 | you can rerun it.

02:51:20.680 | It's reproducible.

02:51:21.720 | - So the problem with that kind of reproducibility

02:51:24.240 | is that it adds friction.

02:51:25.280 | It's harder to put together articles

02:51:26.640 | that do that kind of stuff,

02:51:28.080 | unless you do an incredible job with UX and so on.

02:51:31.360 | The thing that I think is interesting about Wikipedia

02:51:34.120 | on the technical side is that without the unit tests,

02:51:38.160 | without the assertions,

02:51:40.080 | it still often does an incredible job

02:51:42.720 | because the reason it's,

02:51:44.520 | the people that write those articles,

02:51:46.400 | and I've seen this also in Stack Overflow,

02:51:48.720 | is are the people that care about this most.

02:51:51.240 | And there's a pride to getting it right.

02:51:54.440 | - Okay, so let me agree and disagree with that.

02:51:58.120 | So absolutely, there's some good there.

02:52:00.840 | There's, I mean, again,

02:52:02.600 | do I think Wikipedia is a huge step up

02:52:04.000 | from what preceded it in some ways on the technical topics?

02:52:06.840 | Yes.

02:52:08.200 | However, you're talking about the editing environment.

02:52:10.600 | Like the markup for Wikipedia,

02:52:12.200 | it's very mid 2000s.

02:52:14.960 | It is not--

02:52:15.800 | - It's a Craigslist.

02:52:16.720 | - Yeah, exactly.

02:52:17.560 | At a minimum, for example, it's not WYSIWYG.

02:52:20.240 | So like Medium or something like that,

02:52:23.720 | you know, or Ghost,

02:52:25.560 | you can just go in and type

02:52:26.600 | and it looks exactly like it looks on the page.

02:52:28.440 | Here, you have to go to a markup language

02:52:31.760 | where there can be editor conflicts

02:52:33.800 | and you hit enter and someone is over in your edit

02:52:36.080 | or something like that.

02:52:37.200 | And you don't know how it looks on the page.

02:52:38.480 | You might have to do a few, you know,

02:52:39.640 | previews or what have you.

02:52:40.600 | So number one, so editing,

02:52:42.480 | you talk about bearish ending, that's the thing.

02:52:45.000 | Number two is, given that it might be read a thousand times

02:52:49.240 | for every one time it's written,

02:52:51.280 | it is important to actually have

02:52:52.880 | the mathematical things unit tested, if they can be,

02:52:55.280 | given that we've got modern technology.

02:52:57.040 | And that's something that's hard to like retrofit into this

02:52:59.200 | because it's so kind of ossified, right?

02:53:01.760 | - Right, there's the interface on every side for the editor,

02:53:05.000 | even just for the editor to check that they're,

02:53:08.160 | say the editor wants to get it right,

02:53:09.960 | we make it, we wanna make it really,

02:53:12.640 | or not really easy, but easier to check their work.

02:53:15.680 | - That's right. - Like debugging,

02:53:16.520 | like a nice ID for the--

02:53:19.840 | - That's exactly right.

02:53:20.680 | - Editing experience.

02:53:21.520 | - That's right, and the thing about this is,

02:53:24.160 | as I said, because the truth is a global constant,

02:53:27.360 | but like incorrectness, you know, right, go ahead.

02:53:30.200 | Every happy family.

02:53:31.640 | - I love to think that like truth will have a nice debugger.

02:53:36.120 | - Well, so here's, right?

02:53:37.800 | So the thing is that what you can do is,

02:53:42.120 | let's say you did have like a unit tested page

02:53:44.040 | for everything that's on Wikipedia.

02:53:45.240 | First of all, it makes a page more useful

02:53:47.200 | because you can download it, you can run it,

02:53:48.600 | you can import it and so on.

02:53:50.000 | Second is it leads into,

02:53:51.560 | one of the things that we can talk about,

02:53:53.480 | I've sort of like a roadmap for building alternatives

02:53:56.160 | to not just existing companies,

02:53:58.680 | but to many existing US institutions

02:54:01.600 | from media and tech companies to courts and government

02:54:05.800 | and, you know, academia and nonprofits.

02:54:08.840 | The Wikipedia discussion actually relates

02:54:10.920 | to how you improve on academia, right?

02:54:14.800 | And so academia right now, one of the big problems,

02:54:17.000 | this is kind of related to the, oh boy,

02:54:19.320 | okay, the current institutions,

02:54:20.560 | we don't have trust in them.

02:54:21.400 | Is that the answer is,

02:54:22.240 | is that the answer to trust no one, right?

02:54:24.200 | And I think the alternative is decentralized cryptographic

02:54:26.800 | trust or verification.

02:54:28.120 | How does that apply to academia?

02:54:30.520 | First observation is we are seeing science

02:54:35.440 | being abused in the name of quote unquote science, okay?

02:54:40.760 | Capital S science is Maxwell's equations.

02:54:44.120 | That's- - That's the good one.

02:54:45.360 | - That's a good one, right?

02:54:46.800 | Quote unquote science is a paper that came out last week.

02:54:50.520 | And the key thing is that capital S science, real science,

02:54:54.720 | is about independent replication, not prestigious citation.

02:54:58.460 | That's the definition, like all the journal stuff,

02:55:02.760 | the professors, all that stuff is just a superstructure

02:55:06.440 | that was set on top to make experiments more reproducible.

02:55:11.440 | And that superstructure is now like dominating

02:55:16.120 | the underlying thing because people are just fixating

02:55:18.200 | on the prestige and the citation

02:55:20.040 | and not the replication, right?

02:55:21.800 | So how does that apply here?

02:55:23.240 | Once you start thinking about how many replications

02:55:26.240 | does this thing have, Maxwell's equation,

02:55:28.680 | I mean, there's trillions of replications.

02:55:30.560 | Every time, us speaking into this microphone right now,

02:55:33.920 | you know, we're testing, you know,

02:55:36.160 | our theory of the electromagnetic field, right?

02:55:38.480 | Or electromagnetic fields.

02:55:40.400 | Every single time you pick up a cell phone

02:55:41.860 | or use a computer, you're putting our knowledge

02:55:44.880 | to the test, right?

02:55:46.480 | Whereas some paper that came out last week

02:55:49.480 | in Science or Nature may have zero independent replications,

02:55:52.800 | yet it is being cited publicly as prestigious scientists

02:55:57.220 | from Stanford and, you know, Harvard and MIT

02:56:00.240 | all came up with X, right?

02:56:02.880 | And so the prestige is a substitute

02:56:05.280 | for the actual replication.

02:56:08.720 | So there's a concept called Goodhart's Law, okay?

02:56:11.320 | I'm just gonna quote it.

02:56:12.240 | "When a measure becomes a target,

02:56:13.640 | it ceases to be a good measure," okay?

02:56:15.560 | So for example, backlinks on the web

02:56:20.560 | were a good signal for Google to use

02:56:23.080 | when people didn't know they were being used as a signal.

02:56:25.040 | - Yeah, you talked about quantity versus quality

02:56:28.080 | and PageRank was a pretty good approximation for quality.

02:56:30.960 | - Yes.

02:56:31.800 | - It's a fascinating thing, by the way, but yeah.

02:56:33.360 | - It is a fascinating thing, we can talk about that.

02:56:34.960 | But basically, once people know

02:56:38.040 | that you're using this as a measure,

02:56:39.520 | they will start to game it.

02:56:41.080 | And so then you have this cycle

02:56:43.360 | where sometimes you have a fixed point,

02:56:45.800 | like Satoshi with "Proof of Work"

02:56:47.640 | was miraculously able to come up with a game

02:56:50.120 | where the gaming of it was difficult

02:56:51.600 | without just buying more compute, right?

02:56:53.240 | So it's actually, it's a rare kind of game

02:56:55.360 | where knowledge of the game's rules

02:56:57.740 | didn't allow people to game the game.

02:56:59.040 | - Yeah.

02:56:59.880 | - But--

02:57:00.700 | - A brilliant way to put it, yeah.

02:57:01.540 | Which is one of the reasons it's brilliant,

02:57:03.400 | is that you can describe the game

02:57:06.040 | and you can't mess with it.

02:57:07.320 | - Exactly, it's very hard to come up with something

02:57:09.320 | that's stable in this way.

02:57:10.160 | There's actually, on the meta point,

02:57:12.880 | gosh, there's a game where the rule of the game

02:57:16.560 | is to change the rules, okay?

02:57:19.140 | It is--

02:57:21.600 | - You mean "Human Civilization" or what?

02:57:23.440 | - Yeah, gosh, it is called something, NOMIC, okay?

02:57:28.440 | - N-O-M-I-C?

02:57:30.400 | - NOMIC is a game where the rule of the game

02:57:33.040 | is to change the rules of the game.

02:57:34.480 | At first, that seems insane.

02:57:36.480 | Then you realize that's Congress.

02:57:38.180 | - Yeah.

02:57:41.160 | - Right?

02:57:41.980 | It is so meta because there are laws for elections

02:57:46.980 | that elect the editors of those laws

02:57:52.880 | who then change the laws that get them elected

02:57:54.840 | with gerrymandering and other stuff, right?

02:57:56.780 | That's a bad way of thinking about it.

02:57:58.560 | The other way of thinking about it is

02:57:59.840 | this is what every software engineer is doing.

02:58:02.040 | You are constantly, quote, "changing the rules"

02:58:04.460 | by editing software and pushing code updates and so on, right?

02:58:08.560 | So many games devolve into the metagame

02:58:12.500 | of who writes the rules of the game, right?

02:58:14.400 | Become essentially games of NOMIC.

02:58:16.620 | Proof of Work is so amazing

02:58:18.780 | because it didn't devolve in such a way, right?

02:58:21.460 | It became very hard to rewrite the rules

02:58:22.880 | once they got set up.

02:58:23.760 | Very financially and technically expensive.

02:58:25.740 | That's not to say it will always be like that,

02:58:28.220 | but it's very hard to change.

02:58:29.500 | - If we could take a small tangent,

02:58:31.100 | we'll return to academia.

02:58:32.180 | I'd love to ask you about how to fix the media as well

02:58:35.060 | after we fix academia.

02:58:36.580 | - Yeah, these are all actually related.

02:58:37.820 | - Yeah, Wikipedia, media, and academia

02:58:40.760 | are all related to the question of

02:58:42.700 | independent replication versus prestigious citation.

02:58:46.580 | - Sure, so the problem is authority and prestige

02:58:50.820 | as you see it from academia and the media

02:58:54.780 | and Wikipedia with the editors.

02:58:57.340 | We have to have a mechanism where sort of

02:59:04.780 | the data and the reproducibility

02:59:07.460 | is what dominates the discourse.

02:59:09.780 | - That's right, and so one way of thinking about this is,

02:59:11.740 | I've said this in, I think I tweeted this,

02:59:14.940 | Western civilization actually has

02:59:17.260 | a break-classification emergency button.

02:59:19.860 | It's called decentralization, right?

02:59:21.060 | Martin Luther had it.

02:59:22.380 | When the Catholic Church was too ossified and centralized,

02:59:25.620 | decentralized with the Protestant Reformation, okay?

02:59:28.140 | He said, at the time, people were able to

02:59:32.760 | pay for indulgences, like that is to say they could sin.

02:59:36.240 | They could say, okay, I sinned five times yesterday.

02:59:38.640 | Here's the equivalent of 50 bucks.

02:59:40.560 | Okay, I'm done with my sin.

02:59:41.400 | I can go and sin some more.

02:59:42.440 | Okay, they should really buy their way out of sin, okay?

02:59:44.520 | Now people debate as to how frequent

02:59:46.280 | those indulgences were, but these are one of the things

02:59:47.660 | he invade against in the 95 Theses.

02:59:50.000 | So decentralization, boom, break away

02:59:52.080 | from this ossified church, start something new, right?

02:59:55.600 | And in theory, the "religious wars" of the 1600s

02:59:59.160 | that ensued were about things like

03:00:01.560 | where the wafer was the body of Christ or what have you,

03:00:04.920 | but in part, they were also about power

03:00:07.280 | and whether the centralized entity would write all the rules

03:00:09.720 | or the decentralized one would.

03:00:11.280 | And so what happened was, obviously Catholicism still exists

03:00:13.340 | but Protestantism also exists, okay?

03:00:15.920 | And similarly, here you've got this ossified

03:00:19.120 | central institution where, forget about,

03:00:22.120 | I mean, there's complicated studies

03:00:23.600 | that are difficult to summarize,

03:00:24.440 | but when you have the science saying

03:00:26.440 | masks don't work and then they do, okay?

03:00:29.280 | Which everybody saw.

03:00:30.680 | And this is not like, everybody knew

03:00:32.680 | that there was not like some massive study

03:00:34.880 | that came out that changed our perspective on mask wearing.

03:00:37.860 | It was something that was just insistently asserted

03:00:39.920 | as this is what the science says.

03:00:41.400 | And then without any acknowledgement,

03:00:43.160 | the science said something different the next day, right?

03:00:45.700 | I remember 'cause I was in the middle of this debate.

03:00:48.260 | And I think you could justify masks early in the pandemic

03:00:51.320 | as a useful precaution and then later,

03:00:55.040 | post-vaccination, perhaps not necessary.

03:00:56.600 | I think that's like the rational way of thinking about it.

03:00:58.880 | But the point was that such levels of uncertainty

03:01:01.320 | were not acknowledged.

03:01:02.480 | Instead, people were basically lying in the name of science

03:01:07.480 | and public policy, it wasn't public health,

03:01:11.560 | it was political health, okay?

03:01:13.040 | So something like that, you're just spending

03:01:14.400 | down all the credibility of an institution

03:01:15.560 | for basically nothing, okay?

03:01:17.440 | And so in such a circumstance, what do you do?

03:01:20.140 | Break glass, decentralize.

03:01:21.920 | What does that look like?

03:01:22.880 | Okay, so let me describe what I call cryptoscience

03:01:28.320 | by analogy to crypto, just like there's fiat science,

03:01:31.400 | cryptoscience, right, fiat economics, okay?

03:01:33.640 | So in any experiment, any paper when it comes out, right,

03:01:38.400 | you can sort of divide it into the analog to digital

03:01:43.720 | and the purely digital, okay?

03:01:44.560 | So the analog to digital is you're running some instruments,

03:01:47.580 | you're getting some data, okay?

03:01:49.260 | And then once you've got the data,

03:01:51.400 | you're generating figures and tables and text

03:01:54.240 | and a PDF from that data, right?

03:01:56.880 | Leave aside the data collection step for now,

03:01:58.440 | I'll come back to that, right?

03:01:59.840 | Just the purely digital part,

03:02:01.540 | what does the ideal quote academic paper look like

03:02:04.480 | in 2022, 2023?

03:02:06.560 | First, there's this concept called reproducible research,

03:02:10.640 | okay?

03:02:12.240 | Reproducible research is the idea that the PDF

03:02:15.920 | should be regenerated from the data and code, okay?

03:02:20.840 | So you should be able to hit enter and regenerate it.

03:02:22.680 | Why is this really important as a concept?

03:02:24.240 | John Claire Boo and Dave Donahoe at Stanford 20 years ago

03:02:27.640 | pioneered this in stats because the text alone

03:02:32.120 | often doesn't describe every parameter

03:02:33.680 | that goes into a figure or something, right?

03:02:35.520 | You kind of sometimes just need to look at the code

03:02:37.000 | and then it's easy and without that, it's hard, okay?

03:02:39.740 | So reproducible research means you've regenerate the PDF

03:02:43.260 | from the code and the data, you hit enter, okay?

03:02:47.640 | Now, one issue is that many papers out there

03:02:51.000 | in science, nature, et cetera,

03:02:52.200 | are not reproducible research.

03:02:53.520 | Moreover, the data isn't even public.

03:02:55.640 | Moreover, sometimes the paper isn't even public.

03:02:57.720 | The open access movement has been fighting this

03:02:59.520 | for the last 20 something years.

03:03:00.720 | There's various levels of this like green and gold,

03:03:02.960 | open access, okay?

03:03:04.440 | So the first step is the code, the data,

03:03:07.640 | and the PDF go on chain, step number one, okay?

03:03:11.340 | The second thing is once you've got,

03:03:13.000 | so you can, anybody who is,

03:03:14.960 | and that could be the Ethereum chain,

03:03:16.120 | it could be its own dedicated chain, whatever, okay?

03:03:18.440 | It could be something where there's just the URLs

03:03:21.120 | are on the Ethereum chain and stored on Filecoin,

03:03:22.720 | many different implementations,

03:03:23.720 | but let's call that on chain broadly, okay?

03:03:26.400 | Not just online, on chain.

03:03:27.540 | When it's on chain, it's public and anybody can get it.

03:03:30.600 | So that's first.

03:03:31.860 | Second is once you've got something

03:03:33.640 | where you can regenerate the code,

03:03:35.640 | or the PDF from the code and the data on chain, guess what?

03:03:40.120 | You can have citations between two papers

03:03:43.920 | turn into import statements.

03:03:45.560 | - Yeah, that's funny.

03:03:47.120 | - That's cool, right?

03:03:48.400 | So now you're not just getting composable finance,

03:03:51.320 | like DeFi, where you have like one interest rate calculator

03:03:54.000 | calling another, you have composable science.

03:03:57.600 | And now you can say this paper on this,

03:03:59.960 | especially in ML, right?

03:04:01.400 | You'll often cite a previous paper in its benchmark

03:04:04.600 | or its method, right?

03:04:05.600 | You're gonna wanna scatter plot sometimes your paper,

03:04:08.800 | your algorithm versus theirs on the same dataset.

03:04:11.560 | That is facilitated if their entire paper

03:04:15.640 | is reproducible research that is generated.

03:04:18.240 | You can just literally import that Python

03:04:20.140 | and then you can generate your figure off of it, right?

03:04:24.040 | Moreover, think about how that aids reproducibility

03:04:26.720 | because you don't have to reproduce in the literal sense,

03:04:29.500 | every single snippet of code that they did,

03:04:31.560 | you can literally use their code, import it, okay?

03:04:34.000 | People start compounding on each other.

03:04:35.360 | It's better science, okay?

03:04:37.080 | Now I talked about this, but actually there's a few folks

03:04:39.840 | who have been actually building this.

03:04:41.680 | So there's usescholar.org,

03:04:45.360 | which actually has a demo of this,

03:04:46.800 | like just a V1 kind of prototype

03:04:48.680 | where it shows two stats papers on chain

03:04:52.000 | and one of them is citing the other

03:04:55.360 | with an import statement.

03:04:56.280 | There's also a thing like called I think dsci.com,

03:04:58.560 | which is trying to do this, right?

03:04:59.760 | Decentralized science.

03:05:01.040 | So this itself changes how we think about papers.

03:05:04.880 | And actually, by the way,

03:05:06.480 | the inspiration for PageRank was actually citations.

03:05:10.820 | It was like the impact factor out of academia.

03:05:12.240 | That's where Larry Page and Sergey Brin

03:05:13.720 | got the concept out of, right?

03:05:15.060 | So now you've got a web of citations

03:05:18.600 | that are import statements on chain.

03:05:20.440 | In theory, you could track back a paper

03:05:22.360 | all the way back to its antecedents, okay?

03:05:25.600 | So if it's citing something,

03:05:26.960 | you can now look it up and look it up and look it up.

03:05:29.160 | And a surprising number of papers actually,

03:05:33.440 | you know, their antecedents don't terminate

03:05:35.920 | or the original source says something different

03:05:38.220 | or it just kind of got garbled like a telephone game.

03:05:40.800 | And, you know, there's this famous thing on like the spinach,

03:05:45.680 | like it does actually have iron in it

03:05:47.640 | or something like that.

03:05:48.760 | I forget the details on this story,

03:05:50.560 | but it was something where you track back the citations

03:05:52.280 | and people are contradicting each other, okay?

03:05:54.600 | But it's just something that just gets copy pasted

03:05:56.280 | and it's a fact that's not actually a fact

03:05:57.920 | 'cause it's not audited properly.

03:05:59.720 | This allows you to cheaply audit, in theory,

03:06:02.540 | all the way back to Maxwell or Newton

03:06:04.080 | or something like that, okay?

03:06:05.720 | Now, what I'm describing is a big problem,

03:06:07.680 | but it's a finite problem.

03:06:09.240 | It's essentially taking all the important papers

03:06:12.120 | and putting them on chain.

03:06:13.080 | It's about the scale of, let's say, Wikipedia, okay?

03:06:15.920 | So it's like, I don't know, a few hundred thousand,

03:06:17.600 | a few million papers.

03:06:18.440 | I don't know the exact number,

03:06:19.480 | but it'll be out of that level, okay?

03:06:20.840 | So now you've got, number one,

03:06:22.920 | these things that are on chain, okay?

03:06:24.840 | Number two, you've turned citations into import statements.

03:06:28.200 | Number three, anybody can now, at a minimum,

03:06:31.720 | download that code.

03:06:33.600 | And while they may not have the instruments,

03:06:35.320 | and I'll come back to that point,

03:06:36.480 | while they may not have the instruments,

03:06:37.540 | they can do internal checks,

03:06:38.580 | the Benford's Law stuff we were just talking about.

03:06:41.200 | You can internally check the consistency

03:06:43.160 | of these tables and graphs,

03:06:44.480 | and often you'll find fraud

03:06:46.080 | or things that don't add up that way,

03:06:47.440 | 'cause all the code and the data is there, right?

03:06:50.520 | And now you've made it so that anybody in Brazil,

03:06:54.080 | in India, in Nigeria, they may not have an academic,

03:06:56.080 | you know, like a library access,

03:06:58.880 | but they can get into this, all right?

03:07:00.520 | Now, how do you fund all of this?

03:07:02.360 | Well, good thing is crypto actually allows tools

03:07:05.160 | for that as well.

03:07:06.000 | Andrew Huberman and others have started doing things

03:07:07.480 | like with NFTs to fund their lab.

03:07:10.960 | I can talk about the funding aspect.

03:07:12.240 | There's things like researchhub.com,

03:07:14.160 | which are trying to issue tokens for labs,

03:07:16.220 | but a lab isn't that expensive to fund.

03:07:18.280 | Maybe it's a few hundred thousand, a few million a year,

03:07:20.000 | depending on where you are.

03:07:21.520 | Crypto does generate money.

03:07:23.280 | And so you can probably imagine various tools,

03:07:25.560 | whether it's tokens or NFTs

03:07:26.800 | or something like that to fund.

03:07:28.680 | Finally, what this does is it is not QAnon, right?

03:07:33.680 | It is not saying don't trust anybody.

03:07:36.080 | Neither is it just trust

03:07:37.800 | the centralized academic establishment.

03:07:39.980 | Instead it's saying trust because you can verify,

03:07:43.000 | because we can download things and run them.

03:07:45.000 | The crucial thing that I'm assuming here

03:07:47.040 | is the billions of supercomputers around the world

03:07:50.120 | that we have, all the MacBooks and iPhones

03:07:52.480 | that can crank through lots and lots of computation.

03:07:54.880 | So everything digital, we can verify it locally, okay?

03:07:58.640 | Now, there's one last step,

03:08:00.080 | which is I mentioned the instruments, right?

03:08:02.200 | Whether it's your sequencing machine

03:08:04.000 | or your accelerometer or something like that

03:08:06.880 | is generating the data that you are reporting in your paper

03:08:09.880 | when you put it on chain, okay?

03:08:11.760 | Basically you think of that as the analog digital interface.

03:08:14.580 | We can cryptify that too, why?

03:08:16.580 | For example, an Illumina sequencing machine

03:08:19.800 | has an experiment manifest.

03:08:21.960 | And when that's written to,

03:08:24.500 | there's a website called NCBI,

03:08:26.220 | National Center for Biotechnology Information.

03:08:28.640 | You can see the experiment metadata

03:08:31.040 | on various sequencing runs.

03:08:32.760 | It'll tell you what instrument and what time it was run

03:08:35.640 | and who ran it and so on and so forth, okay?

03:08:39.080 | What that does is it allows you to correct

03:08:40.560 | for things like batch effects.

03:08:41.860 | Sometimes you will sequence on this day and the next day

03:08:44.560 | and maybe the humidity or something like that

03:08:46.560 | makes it look like there's a statistically significant

03:08:48.760 | difference between your two results,

03:08:50.040 | but it was just actually batch effects, okay?

03:08:52.280 | What's my point?

03:08:54.220 | Point is, if you have a crypto instrument,

03:08:57.400 | you can have various hashes and stuff of the data

03:09:00.860 | as a chain of custody for the data itself

03:09:02.860 | that are streamed and written on chain

03:09:05.120 | that the manufacturer can program into this.

03:09:07.480 | For anything that's really, and you might say,

03:09:08.640 | "Oh boy, boy, that's overkill," right?

03:09:10.400 | I'm saying actually not.

03:09:11.360 | You know why?

03:09:12.240 | If you're doing a study whose results

03:09:14.640 | are going to be used to influence a policy

03:09:16.580 | that's gonna control the lives of millions of people,

03:09:19.000 | every single step has to be totally audible.

03:09:21.320 | You need the glass box model.

03:09:23.280 | You need to be able to go back to the raw data.

03:09:25.760 | You need to be able to interrogate that.

03:09:27.920 | And again, anybody who's a good scientist

03:09:31.600 | will embrace this, right?

03:09:33.200 | - Yeah, so first of all, that was a brilliant exposition

03:09:36.480 | of a future of science that I would love to see.

03:09:39.280 | The pushback I'll provide, which is not really a pushback,

03:09:42.800 | is like what you describe is so much better

03:09:46.840 | than what we currently have that I think

03:09:50.960 | a lot of people would say any of the sub-steps

03:09:54.560 | you suggest are already going to be a huge improvement.

03:09:57.840 | So even just sharing the code.

03:10:01.000 | - Yes.

03:10:01.820 | - Or sharing the data.

03:10:03.020 | You said, I think it would surprise people how often--

03:10:08.020 | - It's hard to get data.

03:10:09.500 | - It is, like the actual data or specifics

03:10:12.780 | or a large number of the parameters,

03:10:14.500 | not you'll share like one or two parameters

03:10:17.640 | that were involved with running the experiment.

03:10:20.820 | You won't mention the machines involved,

03:10:23.800 | except maybe at a high level, but the versions and so on.

03:10:27.500 | The dates when the experiments were run,

03:10:29.100 | you don't mention any of this kind of stuff.

03:10:31.500 | So there's several ways to fix this.

03:10:35.660 | And one of them, I think, implied in what you're describing

03:10:40.660 | is a culture that says it's not okay.

03:10:45.620 | - Exactly.

03:10:46.460 | - To like, so first of all, there should be,

03:10:48.980 | even if it's not perfectly unchained

03:10:51.020 | to where you can automatically import all the way to Newton,

03:10:54.120 | just even the act of sharing the code, sharing the data,

03:11:01.300 | maybe in a way that's not perfectly integrated

03:11:04.900 | into a larger structure is already a very big positive step.

03:11:09.220 | - Yeah.

03:11:10.060 | - I'm saying like, if you don't do this,

03:11:12.620 | then this doesn't count.

03:11:15.980 | And because in general, I think my worry,

03:11:20.620 | as somebody who's a programmer, who's OCD,

03:11:25.500 | I love the picture you paint

03:11:27.560 | that you can just import everything

03:11:28.780 | and it automatically checks everything.

03:11:30.960 | My problem is that makes incremental science easier

03:11:35.500 | and revolutionary science harder.

03:11:37.300 | - Oh, I actually very much disagree with that.

03:11:39.020 | - I would love to hear your argument.

03:11:40.380 | Let me just kind of elaborate.

03:11:42.100 | - Sure, sure.

03:11:42.940 | - Why, sometimes you have to think

03:11:46.580 | in this gray area of fuzziness

03:11:49.500 | when you're thinking in totally novel ideas

03:11:51.940 | and when you have to concretize in data.

03:11:54.460 | Like some of the greatest papers ever written

03:11:56.180 | are to don't have data.

03:11:57.740 | They're in the space of ideas almost.

03:11:59.980 | Like you're kind of sketching stuff

03:12:01.640 | and there could be errors,

03:12:02.560 | but like Einstein himself with the famous five papers,

03:12:05.300 | I mean, they're really strong, but they're fuzzy.

03:12:08.920 | They're a little bit fuzzy.

03:12:10.500 | And so I think, even like the Gann paper,

03:12:15.120 | you're often thinking of like new data sets, new ideas.

03:12:19.200 | And I think maybe as a step after the paper is written,

03:12:24.120 | you could probably concretize it,

03:12:25.600 | integrate it into the rest of science.

03:12:27.200 | - Sure.

03:12:28.040 | - Like you shouldn't feel that pressure, I guess, early on.

03:12:30.880 | - Well, I mean, there's different,

03:12:33.120 | each of the steps that I'm talking about, right?

03:12:35.340 | There's like the data being public and everything.

03:12:38.000 | Just having the paper being public, that's like V1, right?

03:12:41.580 | Then you have the thing being regenerated from code and data,

03:12:44.900 | like the PDF being regenerated from code and data.

03:12:46.880 | Then you have the citations as import statements.

03:12:49.360 | Then you have the full citation graph

03:12:50.960 | as an import statement.

03:12:51.800 | So you just follow it all the way back, right?

03:12:53.940 | And now you have, that gives you audibility.

03:12:57.680 | Then you have the off-chain,

03:13:00.000 | you know, the analog digital crypto custody, right?

03:13:02.640 | Like where you're hashing things and streaming things.

03:13:04.500 | So you have the chain of custody.

03:13:06.600 | Each of those is kind of like a level up

03:13:08.000 | and adds to complexity,

03:13:09.800 | but it also adds to the audibility and the verifiability

03:13:12.240 | and the reproducibility.

03:13:13.600 | But, you know, one thing I'd say,

03:13:15.200 | I wanted to respond to that you said was

03:13:18.080 | that you think this would be good for incremental,

03:13:20.100 | but not innovative.

03:13:20.940 | Actually, I think it's quite the opposite.

03:13:22.000 | I think academia is institutional and it's not innovative.

03:13:26.440 | For example, NIH has this graph,

03:13:28.680 | which is like, I think it's age of recipients

03:13:31.320 | of R01 grants, okay?

03:13:33.520 | And what it shows is basically it's like a hump

03:13:36.600 | that moves over time,

03:13:37.760 | roughly plus one year forward for the average age

03:13:41.280 | as the year moves on, okay?

03:13:43.040 | I'll see if I can find the GIF.

03:13:44.980 | What this, why is this?

03:13:46.440 | Let me see if I can find it actually.

03:13:48.040 | Look at this movie just for a second.

03:13:49.440 | It's a ridiculously powerful movie and it's 30 seconds.

03:13:52.320 | I just sent it in, WhatsApp.

03:13:53.740 | The name of the video is "Age Distribution

03:13:56.660 | of NIH Principal Investigators and Medical School Faculty."

03:14:00.660 | And it starts out on the X-axis is age

03:14:03.380 | with the distribution and percent of PIs.

03:14:06.980 | And from early 1980s, moving one year at a time.

03:14:11.980 | And the mean of the distribution is moving slowly,

03:14:15.540 | approximately as Belagio said, about one year.

03:14:19.900 | - Per year.

03:14:20.740 | - Per year.

03:14:21.580 | - And this is 10 years ago.

03:14:22.620 | One year in age per year of time.

03:14:25.780 | - And notice how, first of all,

03:14:27.420 | the average age is moving way upward

03:14:29.980 | before you become an NHPI.

03:14:32.940 | Second is, it's a cohort of guys, people,

03:14:36.100 | who are just awarding grants to each other.

03:14:38.760 | That's clearly what's happening.

03:14:40.380 | That's the underlying dynamic.

03:14:42.140 | They're not awarding grants to folks who are much younger,

03:14:45.060 | because those folks haven't proven themselves yet.

03:14:47.580 | So this is what happens when you get prestigious citation

03:14:50.660 | rather than independent replication.

03:14:52.300 | The age just keeps creeping up.

03:14:54.100 | And this was 10 years ago, and it's gotten even worse.

03:14:56.020 | It's become even more gerontocratic,

03:14:57.820 | even more hidebound, right?

03:14:59.740 | And so the thing is, the structures

03:15:01.620 | that Vannevar Bush and others set up,

03:15:03.100 | the entire post-war science establishment,

03:15:05.940 | one thing I'll often find is people will say,

03:15:08.900 | "Baljeet, the government hath granted us the internet

03:15:13.540 | and self-driving cars and space flight and so on.

03:15:18.540 | How can you possibly be against the US government,

03:15:21.580 | kneel and repent for its bounty?"

03:15:24.780 | And really, the reason they kind of,

03:15:26.740 | they don't say it quite in that way,

03:15:27.980 | but that's really the underpinning kind of thing,

03:15:29.580 | because they've replaced GOD with GOV.

03:15:32.780 | They really think of the US government as God.

03:15:34.860 | The conservative will think of the US government

03:15:36.260 | as the all-powerful military abroad,

03:15:39.140 | and the progressive will think of it

03:15:40.780 | as the benign, all-powerful, nurturing parent at home.

03:15:45.780 | But in this context, they're like,

03:15:48.500 | "How come you as some tech bro could possibly think

03:15:52.460 | you could ever do basic science

03:15:55.020 | without the funding of the US government?

03:15:56.420 | Has it not developed all basic science?"

03:15:59.380 | And the answer to this is actually to say,

03:16:01.460 | "Well, what if we go further back than 1950?

03:16:03.860 | Did science happen before 1950?"

03:16:05.220 | Well, I think it did.

03:16:06.420 | Bernoulli and Maxwell and Newton,

03:16:09.100 | were they funded by NSF?

03:16:11.220 | No, they weren't.

03:16:12.420 | Were aviation, railroads, automobiles,

03:16:14.660 | gigantic industries that arose,

03:16:17.820 | and both were stimulated by

03:16:19.780 | and stimulated development of pure science?

03:16:21.740 | Did they, were they funded by NSF?

03:16:23.180 | No, they were not.

03:16:24.260 | Therefore, NSF is not a necessary condition

03:16:28.580 | for the presence of science,

03:16:29.420 | neither is even the United States.

03:16:30.540 | Obviously, a lot of these discoveries,

03:16:32.100 | Newton was before, I believe he was before the American,

03:16:36.540 | hold on, let me just find the exact,

03:16:38.540 | it's actually less old than people think.

03:16:41.460 | Okay, so Newton died 1727.

03:16:43.820 | So I knew that it was in the 1700s.

03:16:47.580 | So Newton was before the American Revolution, right?

03:16:51.020 | Obviously, that meant huge innovations could happen

03:16:54.100 | before the US government, before NIH, before NSF, right?

03:16:58.420 | Which means they are not a necessary condition, number one.

03:17:02.460 | That itself is crucial because a lot of people say,

03:17:04.780 | "The government is necessary for basic science."

03:17:07.340 | It is not necessary for basic science.

03:17:09.540 | It is one possible catalyst.

03:17:12.140 | And I would argue that mid-century, it was okay,

03:17:15.180 | because mid-century was the time when,

03:17:17.420 | the middle of the centralized century.

03:17:20.020 | 1933, 1945, 1969, you have Hoover Dam,

03:17:23.740 | you have the Manhattan Project, you have Apollo.

03:17:25.700 | That generation was acclimatized

03:17:28.700 | to a centralized US government

03:17:30.380 | that could accomplish great things,

03:17:31.860 | probably because technology favored centralization

03:17:34.340 | going into 1950 and then started favoring decentralization

03:17:36.900 | going out of it.

03:17:37.860 | I've talked about this in the book,

03:17:38.980 | Sovereign Individual has talked about this,

03:17:40.260 | but very roughly, you go up into 1950

03:17:44.140 | and you have mass media and mass production

03:17:47.220 | and just centralization of all kinds,

03:17:49.100 | giant nation states slugging it out on the world stage.

03:17:51.580 | And you go out in 1950 and you get cable news

03:17:54.660 | and personal computers and the internet

03:17:57.380 | and mobile phones and cryptocurrency,

03:17:58.940 | and you have the decentralization.

03:18:00.700 | And so this entire centralized scientific establishment

03:18:04.060 | was set up at the peak of the centralized century.

03:18:07.140 | And it might've been the right thing to do at that time,

03:18:09.540 | but is now showing its age.

03:18:11.260 | And it's no longer actually geared up for what we have.

03:18:13.620 | Where are the huge innovations coming out of?

03:18:14.820 | Well, Satoshi Nakamoto was not, to our knowledge,

03:18:18.660 | a professor, right?

03:18:20.580 | That's this revolutionary thing that came outside of it.

03:18:23.540 | Early in the pandemic,

03:18:24.900 | there was something called project-evidence.github.io,

03:18:28.140 | which accumulated all of the evidence

03:18:30.540 | for the coronavirus possibly having been a lab leak,

03:18:34.060 | when that was a very controversial thing to discuss.

03:18:37.140 | Alina Chan, to her credit,

03:18:38.860 | Matt Ridley and Alina Chan have written this book

03:18:41.700 | on whether the coronavirus was a lab leak or not.

03:18:45.420 | I think it's plausible that it was.

03:18:47.180 | I can't say I'm 100% sure,

03:18:50.140 | but I think it's at least,

03:18:50.980 | it certainly, it is a hypothesis worthy of discussion.

03:18:53.620 | Okay?

03:18:54.740 | Though, of course, it's got political overtones.

03:18:56.740 | Point being that the pseudonymous online publication

03:18:59.220 | at project-evidence.github.io

03:19:01.740 | happened when it was taboo to do so.

03:19:03.300 | So we're back to the age of pseudonymous publication

03:19:06.780 | where only the arguments can be argued with.

03:19:10.700 | The person can't be attacked.

03:19:12.380 | Okay?

03:19:13.220 | This is actually something that used to happen in the past.

03:19:14.780 | Like, you know, someone,

03:19:17.260 | there's a famous story where Newton solved a problem

03:19:19.140 | and someone said, "I know the lion by his claw,"

03:19:21.180 | or something like that, right?

03:19:22.460 | People used to do pseudonymous publication in the past

03:19:24.380 | so that they would be judged on part

03:19:25.980 | by their scientific ideas

03:19:27.180 | and not the person themselves, right?

03:19:29.620 | And so, I do disagree that this is the incremental stuff.

03:19:34.020 | This is actually the innovative stuff.

03:19:35.020 | The incremental stuff is gonna be

03:19:36.100 | the institutional gerontocracy that's academia,

03:19:39.860 | where it's like, you know, do you know who I am?

03:19:41.940 | I'm a Harvard professor.

03:19:43.220 | - Yeah, I don't, I think I agree with everything you said,

03:19:46.860 | but I'm not gonna get stuck on technicalities

03:19:51.860 | because I think I was referring to your vision

03:19:56.980 | of data sets and importing code.

03:19:59.860 | - Sure.

03:20:00.700 | - And so that forces just knowing how code works,

03:20:03.380 | it forces a structure,

03:20:04.780 | and structure usually favors incremental progress.

03:20:08.900 | Like, if you fork code,

03:20:11.900 | you're not going to, it decentrifies revolution.

03:20:16.900 | You want to go from scratch.

03:20:20.900 | - Okay, so I understand your point there, okay?

03:20:23.500 | And I also agree that some papers,

03:20:25.300 | like Francis Crick on the Klaustrum,

03:20:27.140 | or others are theoretical.

03:20:28.660 | They're more about like where to dig than the data itself,

03:20:31.420 | and so on and so forth, right?

03:20:32.700 | So, I agree with that.

03:20:33.900 | Still, I don't, the counterargument is,

03:20:37.380 | rather than a thousand people reading this paper

03:20:39.420 | to try to rebuild the whole thing and do it with errors,

03:20:44.100 | when they can just import,

03:20:45.260 | they can more easily build upon what others have done, right?

03:20:48.180 | - Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

03:20:49.020 | So the paper should be forkable.

03:20:51.860 | - Well, yeah, yeah.

03:20:52.700 | So here's why, you know, like,

03:20:53.980 | Python has this concept of batteries included

03:20:56.020 | for the standard library, right?

03:20:57.660 | Because it lets you just import, import, import,

03:21:00.020 | and just get to work, right?

03:21:01.820 | That means you can fly.

03:21:03.620 | Whereas if you couldn't do all those things,

03:21:05.260 | and you had to rewrite string handling,

03:21:06.940 | you would only be able to do incremental things.

03:21:08.940 | Libraries actually allow for greater innovation.

03:21:11.020 | That's my counter.

03:21:11.860 | - I think you create, I think that paints a picture.

03:21:15.300 | I hope that's a picture that fits with science.

03:21:18.900 | It certainly does.

03:21:19.780 | It fits with code very well.

03:21:21.140 | I just wonder how much of science can be that,

03:21:24.220 | which is you import, how much of it is possible to do that?

03:21:28.660 | Certainly for the things I work on, you can,

03:21:31.140 | which is the machine learning world,

03:21:32.940 | all the computer science world.

03:21:35.500 | But whether you can do that for, all right,

03:21:37.820 | you can think biology, it seems to, yes, I think so.

03:21:42.260 | Chemistry, I think so.

03:21:44.460 | And then you start getting into weird stuff like psychology,

03:21:47.780 | which some people don't even think is a science.

03:21:50.140 | No, just love for my psychology friends.

03:21:53.860 | I think as you get farther and farther away

03:21:57.700 | from things that are like hard technical fields,

03:22:02.500 | it starts getting tougher and tougher and tougher

03:22:04.460 | to have like importable code.

03:22:07.140 | - Okay, so let me give the strong form version, right?

03:22:11.660 | So there's a guy who I think is a great machine learning guy,

03:22:15.300 | creator of actually Keras,

03:22:17.340 | who he disagrees with me on Francois Chalut.

03:22:19.420 | - Yeah, he's been on this podcast twice.

03:22:20.900 | - Okay, great.

03:22:21.740 | So he disagrees-

03:22:22.580 | - I disagree with him on a lot of stuff.

03:22:23.860 | - Yes, me too.

03:22:24.860 | I think we have mutual respect.

03:22:26.300 | You know, follow each other on Twitter, whatever.

03:22:28.460 | - I think, yes, I think he does respect and like you.

03:22:31.580 | - Here's something which I totally agree with him on.

03:22:33.900 | And he actually got like trolled or attacked for this,

03:22:35.860 | but I completely agree.

03:22:36.940 | Within 10, 20 years,

03:22:37.860 | nearly every branch of science will be,

03:22:39.540 | for all intents and purposes, a branch of computer science.

03:22:41.780 | Computational physics, computational chemistry,

03:22:43.500 | computational biology, computational medicine,

03:22:45.180 | even computational archeology,

03:22:46.740 | realistic simulations, big data analysis,

03:22:48.380 | and ML everywhere.

03:22:49.340 | That to me is incredibly obvious why.

03:22:51.620 | First of all, all we're doing every day

03:22:54.220 | is PDFs and data analysis on a computer, right?

03:22:58.140 | And so every single one of those areas

03:22:59.980 | can be reduced to the analog to digital step,

03:23:02.500 | and then it's all digital.

03:23:03.620 | Then you're flying, you're in the cloud, right?

03:23:04.900 | - Did he put a date?

03:23:05.740 | Did he say how long or--

03:23:07.180 | - 10 to 20 years, he was saying.

03:23:08.020 | - 10, 20 years.

03:23:08.860 | - I mean, arguably it's already there, right?

03:23:10.860 | And here's the thing.

03:23:12.260 | You were saying, well, you know,

03:23:14.180 | you might drop off when you hit psychology or history.

03:23:16.860 | Actually, I think it's the softer sciences

03:23:21.140 | that are gonna harden up.

03:23:22.540 | Why?

03:23:24.060 | One of the things I talk about a lot in the book is,

03:23:26.380 | for example, with history,

03:23:27.860 | the concept of crypto history makes history computable.

03:23:31.180 | One way of thinking about it is,

03:23:32.780 | remember my Britney Spears example, right?

03:23:34.460 | Where Queen Britney, right?

03:23:36.340 | Okay, so at first it's kind of a funny thing to say

03:23:39.340 | a computer scientist's term for history is the log files,

03:23:42.540 | until we realized that what would a future historian,

03:23:45.340 | how would they write about the history of the 2010s?

03:23:48.700 | Well, a huge part of that history occurred

03:23:52.220 | on the servers of Twitter and Facebook.

03:23:55.300 | So now you go from like a log file,

03:23:57.420 | which is just the individual record

03:23:58.580 | of like one server's action,

03:24:00.460 | to a decade worth of data on literally billions of people.

03:24:05.460 | All of their online lives, like arguably,

03:24:09.420 | that's why I say that's like actually

03:24:11.020 | what the written history was of the 2010s

03:24:13.820 | was this giant digital history.

03:24:15.940 | As you go to the 2020s and the 2030s,

03:24:17.980 | more of that is gonna move from merely online to on chain

03:24:22.060 | and then cryptographically verifiable.

03:24:23.860 | So that soft subject of history becomes something

03:24:26.300 | that you can calculate things like Google trends

03:24:28.380 | and Ngrams and stuff like that.

03:24:30.140 | - Yes, beautifully put.

03:24:31.820 | Then I would venture to say that Donald Trump

03:24:35.940 | was erased from history when he was removed from Twitter

03:24:40.940 | and many social platforms and all his tweets were gone.

03:24:44.980 | - I think it's someone who has an archive of it,

03:24:47.220 | but yeah, I understand your point.

03:24:49.020 | - Yeah, well, as the flood of data

03:24:51.820 | about each individual increases censorship,

03:24:54.580 | it becomes much more difficult

03:24:56.540 | to actually have an archive of stuff.

03:24:58.020 | But yes, for important people

03:24:59.260 | like a president of the United States, yes.

03:25:02.140 | Let me on that topic ask you about Trump.

03:25:06.540 | You were considered for a position as FDA commissioner

03:25:09.780 | in the Trump administration.

03:25:11.420 | And I think in terms of the network state,

03:25:17.740 | in terms of the digital world,

03:25:20.140 | one of the seminal acts in the history of that

03:25:24.660 | was the banning of Trump from Twitter.

03:25:27.420 | Can you make the case for it and against it?

03:25:30.340 | - Sure, so first let me talk about the FDA thing.

03:25:32.980 | So I was considered for a senior role at FDA,

03:25:36.100 | but I do believe that, and this is a whole topic,

03:25:38.780 | we can talk about the FDA.

03:25:40.100 | I do believe that just as it was easier to create Bitcoin

03:25:44.220 | than to reform the Fed,

03:25:46.180 | reforming the Fed basically still hasn't happened.

03:25:48.660 | So just as it was easier to create Bitcoin

03:25:51.500 | than to reform the Fed,

03:25:52.980 | it will literally be easier to start a new country

03:25:55.460 | than to reform the FDA.

03:25:57.660 | It may take 10 or 20 years.

03:25:59.460 | I mean, think about Bitcoin,

03:26:00.300 | it's only about 13 years old, right?

03:26:02.420 | It may take 10 or 20 years to start a new network state

03:26:05.540 | with a different biomedical policy.

03:26:07.460 | But that is how we get out from

03:26:09.580 | this perhaps the single worst thing in the world,

03:26:12.980 | which is harmonization, regulatory harmonization.

03:26:15.820 | - Can you describe regulatory harmonization?

03:26:18.740 | - Regulatory harmonization is the mechanism

03:26:21.340 | by which US regulators impose the need

03:26:26.620 | their regulations on the entire world.

03:26:28.820 | So basically you have a monopoly by US regulators.

03:26:32.060 | This is not just the FDA, it is SEC and FAA

03:26:36.180 | and so on and so forth.

03:26:37.340 | And for the same reason that a small company

03:26:40.300 | will use Facebook login,

03:26:42.140 | they will outsource their login to Facebook.

03:26:45.100 | A small country will outsource their regulation to the USA.

03:26:48.860 | Okay, with all the attendant issues,

03:26:50.940 | because I mean, you know the names of some politicians.

03:26:55.100 | Can you name a single regulator at the FDA?

03:26:57.900 | No, right?

03:26:58.740 | Yet they will brag on their website that they regulate,

03:27:01.060 | I forget the exact numbers,

03:27:01.940 | I think it's like 25 cents out of every dollar,

03:27:03.940 | something along those lines, okay?

03:27:05.060 | It's like double digits, okay?

03:27:06.940 | That's a pretty big deal.

03:27:08.620 | And the thing about this is,

03:27:10.300 | people will talk about quote, our democracy and so on.

03:27:12.980 | But many of the positions in quote, our democracy

03:27:15.180 | are actually not subject to democratic accountability.

03:27:18.180 | You have tenured professors

03:27:20.140 | and you have tax exempt colleges.

03:27:22.700 | You have the Salzburgers, the New York Times

03:27:24.380 | who have dual class stock.

03:27:25.900 | You have a bunch of positions

03:27:29.500 | that are out of the reach of the electorate.

03:27:30.900 | And that includes regulators who have career tenure

03:27:33.820 | after just a few years of

03:27:35.340 | not necessarily even continuous service.

03:27:37.300 | So they're not accountable to the electorate.

03:27:39.380 | They're not named by the press.

03:27:41.980 | And they also aren't accountable to the market

03:27:45.020 | because you've got essentially uniform global regulations.

03:27:48.740 | Now, the thing about this is,

03:27:50.060 | it's not just a government thing.

03:27:51.500 | It's a regulatory capture thing.

03:27:53.180 | Big pharma companies like this as well.

03:27:55.260 | Why?

03:27:56.100 | Because they can just get their approval in the US

03:27:58.060 | and then they can export to the rest of the world.

03:28:00.540 | I understand where that comes from as a corporate executive.

03:28:02.580 | It's such a pain to get access in one place.

03:28:04.980 | So there's a team up though,

03:28:06.020 | between the giant company and the giant government

03:28:09.580 | to box out all the small startups

03:28:11.700 | and all the small countries and lots of small innovation.

03:28:14.900 | There are cracks in this now.

03:28:16.700 | The FDA did not acquit itself well during the pandemic.

03:28:19.140 | For example, it denied, I mean, there's so many issues,

03:28:21.660 | but one of the things that even actually

03:28:23.820 | New York Times reported,

03:28:25.660 | the reason that people thought there were no COVID cases

03:28:27.900 | in the US early in the pandemic

03:28:29.740 | was because the FDA was denying people

03:28:31.540 | the ability to run COVID tests.

03:28:33.540 | And the emergency use authorization was,

03:28:36.260 | emergency should mean like right now, right?

03:28:38.740 | But it was not, it was just taking forever.

03:28:41.940 | And so some labs did civil disobedience

03:28:44.420 | and they just disobeyed the FDA

03:28:45.900 | and just went and tested academic labs

03:28:48.700 | with threat of federal penalties.

03:28:50.140 | 'Cause that's what they are.

03:28:50.980 | They're like the police, okay?

03:28:53.340 | And so we're sort of retroactively granted immunity

03:28:57.700 | because NYT went and ran a positive story on them.

03:29:00.340 | So NYT's authority is usually greater than that of FDA.

03:29:02.980 | If they come into a conflict, NYT runs stories,

03:29:04.940 | then FDA kind of gets spanked, right?

03:29:07.700 | And it's not, probably neither party

03:29:09.820 | would normally think of themselves that way.

03:29:11.620 | But if you look at it,

03:29:12.660 | when NYT goes and runs stories on a company,

03:29:14.940 | it names all the executives and they get all hit.

03:29:17.980 | When it runs stories on a regulator,

03:29:19.300 | it just treats the regulator usually

03:29:21.180 | as if it was just some abstract entity.

03:29:23.000 | It's Zuckerberg's Facebook, but you can't name,

03:29:25.820 | the people who the career bureaucrats at FDA.

03:29:28.060 | Interesting, right?

03:29:28.900 | - It's very interesting.

03:29:29.740 | - It's a very important point.

03:29:30.620 | Like that person who's like named

03:29:32.540 | and their face is known.

03:29:34.220 | Like you, just as an example,

03:29:35.520 | you know Zuckerberg's face and name.

03:29:37.400 | Most people don't know Arthur G. Sulzberger.

03:29:39.100 | They couldn't recognize him, right?

03:29:40.580 | Yet he's a guy who's inherited the New York Times company

03:29:42.540 | from his father's father's father.

03:29:43.700 | That is unaccountable power.

03:29:44.900 | It's not that they get great coverage,

03:29:46.340 | it's that they get no coverage.

03:29:47.660 | You don't even think about them, right?

03:29:49.780 | And so it's invisibility, right?

03:29:52.420 | - There's some aspect why Fauci was very interesting.

03:29:55.700 | - 'Cause he was a public face.

03:29:56.540 | - In my recent memory, there's not been many faces

03:30:01.140 | of scientific policy, of science policy.

03:30:03.340 | - Yeah.

03:30:04.180 | - And he became the face of that.

03:30:05.100 | And you know, as there's some of his meme,

03:30:09.500 | which is basically saying that he is science

03:30:12.840 | or to some people represents science.

03:30:14.380 | But in the--

03:30:15.220 | - Or quote unquote science or whatever, yeah.

03:30:17.100 | The positive aspect of that is that there is accountability

03:30:19.980 | when there's a face like that.

03:30:20.980 | - Right, but you can also see the Fauci example shows you

03:30:23.100 | why a lot of these folks do not want to be public

03:30:25.900 | because they enter a political and media minefield.

03:30:28.980 | I'm actually sympathetic to that aspect of it.

03:30:30.940 | What I'm not sympathetic to is the concept that in 2022,

03:30:35.200 | that the unelected, unfireable, anonymous American regulator

03:30:40.100 | should be able to impose regulatory policy

03:30:42.300 | for the entire world.

03:30:43.860 | We are not the world of 1945.

03:30:46.640 | It is not something where these other countries

03:30:48.280 | are even consciously consenting to that world.

03:30:50.580 | Just as give an example,

03:30:52.220 | there's a concept called challenge trials, okay?

03:30:54.900 | The Moderna vaccine was available very, very early

03:30:59.340 | in the pandemic.

03:31:00.180 | You can just synthesize it from the sequence.

03:31:02.060 | And challenge trials would have meant that people

03:31:05.260 | who are healthy volunteers, okay?

03:31:08.340 | They could have been soldiers, for example, of varying ages

03:31:10.460 | who are there to take a risk their lives

03:31:13.060 | for their country potentially, okay?

03:31:14.460 | It could have been just healthy volunteers,

03:31:15.720 | not necessarily soldiers, just patriots of whatever kind

03:31:18.060 | in any country, not just the US.

03:31:19.980 | But those healthy volunteers could have gone.

03:31:22.860 | And at the early stages of the pandemic,

03:31:24.500 | we didn't know exactly how lethal it was gonna be

03:31:26.500 | because Li Wenliang and 30-somethings in China

03:31:30.900 | were dying from this.

03:31:31.720 | It seemed like it could be far worse.

03:31:33.060 | - How lethal the virus would be.

03:31:35.620 | - Yeah, it may be, by the way,

03:31:37.060 | that those who are the most susceptible to the virus

03:31:40.340 | died faster earlier.

03:31:42.780 | It's as if you can imagine a model

03:31:44.460 | where those who were exposed

03:31:47.600 | and had the lowest susceptibility

03:31:49.080 | also had the highest severity

03:31:50.480 | and died in greater numbers early on.

03:31:52.240 | If you look at the graph,

03:31:53.600 | like deaths from COVID were exponential

03:31:55.640 | going into about April 2020

03:31:57.160 | and then leveled off to about 7,500, 10,000 a day

03:32:00.320 | and then kind of fell, right?

03:32:02.300 | But it could have gone to 75,000 at the beginning.

03:32:04.080 | So we didn't know how serious it was.

03:32:05.100 | So this would have been a real risk

03:32:06.520 | that these people would have been taking,

03:32:07.700 | but here's what they would have gotten for that.

03:32:09.560 | Basically, in a challenge trial,

03:32:11.440 | somebody would have been given the vaccine

03:32:14.660 | and then exposed to the virus

03:32:16.340 | and then put under observation.

03:32:19.200 | And then that would have given you all the data

03:32:22.060 | 'cause ultimately the synthesis of the thing,

03:32:24.340 | I mean, yes, you do need to scale up synthesis

03:32:26.100 | and manufacturing and what have you,

03:32:28.100 | but the information of whether it worked or not

03:32:31.100 | and was safe and effective,

03:32:32.900 | like that could have been gathered expeditiously

03:32:35.420 | with volunteers for challenge trials.

03:32:36.260 | - And you think there'd be a large number of volunteers?

03:32:38.540 | - Absolutely.

03:32:39.380 | - What's the concern there?

03:32:40.540 | Is there an ethical concern of taking on volunteers?

03:32:44.200 | - Well, so let me put it like this.

03:32:46.480 | Had we done that, we could have had vaccines early enough

03:32:51.040 | to save the lives of like a million Americans,

03:32:53.520 | especially seniors and so on, okay?

03:32:55.560 | Soldiers and more generally first responders and others,

03:32:59.120 | I do believe there's folks who would have stepped up

03:33:03.000 | to take that risk.

03:33:04.800 | - The heroes walk among us.

03:33:06.320 | - Yeah, that's right.

03:33:07.160 | Like if military service is something

03:33:09.040 | which is ritualized thing, people are paid for it,

03:33:12.660 | but they're not paid that much.

03:33:14.140 | They're really paid in honor and in duty and patriotism.

03:33:18.060 | That is actually the kind of thing

03:33:19.460 | where I do believe some fraction of those folks

03:33:22.360 | would have raised their hand for this important task.

03:33:25.100 | I don't know how many of them,

03:33:26.260 | but I do think that volunteers would have been there.

03:33:28.820 | There's probably some empirical test of that,

03:33:30.460 | which is there's a challenge trials website.

03:33:32.460 | There's a Harvard prof who put out this proposal

03:33:34.280 | early in the pandemic

03:33:35.120 | and he could tell you how many volunteers he got.

03:33:38.900 | But something like that could have just shortened

03:33:42.440 | the time from pandemic to functional vaccine, right?

03:33:47.440 | To days even, if you'd actually really act on it.

03:33:51.680 | The fact that that didn't happen

03:33:53.100 | and that the Chinese solution of lockdown,

03:33:55.680 | that actually, at the beginning,

03:33:56.840 | people thought the state could potentially stop the virus,

03:33:59.980 | stop people in place.

03:34:00.820 | It turned out to be more contagious than that.

03:34:02.340 | Basically no NPI, no non-pharmaceutical intervention

03:34:05.960 | really turned out to work that much, right?

03:34:08.320 | And actually at the very beginning of the pandemic,

03:34:09.880 | I said something like, look,

03:34:11.300 | it's actually February 3rd, about a month before people,

03:34:14.240 | I was just watching what was going on in China.

03:34:15.600 | I saw that they were doing digital quarantine,

03:34:18.520 | like using WeChat codes to block people off and so on.

03:34:21.560 | I didn't know what was gonna happen, but I said, look,

03:34:23.760 | if the coronavirus goes pandemic and it seems it may,

03:34:26.120 | the extreme edge case becomes the new normal.

03:34:28.200 | It's every debate we've had on surveillance,

03:34:30.040 | deplatforming and centralization accelerated.

03:34:32.680 | Pandemic means emergency powers for the state,

03:34:35.380 | even more than terrorism or crime.

03:34:38.080 | And sometimes a solution creates the next problem.

03:34:40.560 | My rough forecast of the future,

03:34:41.760 | the coronavirus results in quarantines,

03:34:43.600 | nationalism, centralization.

03:34:45.360 | And this may actually work to stop the spread,

03:34:48.880 | but once under control,

03:34:49.760 | states will not see their powers, so we decentralize.

03:34:52.760 | And I didn't know whether it was gonna stop the spread,

03:34:55.040 | but I knew that they were gonna try to do it, right?

03:34:57.640 | And look, it's hard to call every single thing right,

03:35:01.080 | and I'm sure someone will find some errors,

03:35:03.000 | but in general, I think that was actually pretty good

03:35:05.720 | for like early February of 2020, right?

03:35:08.200 | So it's my point though.

03:35:09.240 | The point is, rather than copying Chinese lockdown,

03:35:13.040 | we should have had were different regimes around the world.

03:35:16.700 | To some extent, Sweden defected from this, right?

03:35:19.140 | They had like no lockdowns or what have you.

03:35:21.360 | But really the axis that people were talking about

03:35:23.800 | was lockdown versus no lockdown.

03:35:25.400 | The real axis should have been challenge trials

03:35:28.400 | versus no challenge trials.

03:35:29.320 | We could have had that in days, okay?

03:35:31.640 | And those are two examples on both vaccines and testing.

03:35:35.480 | There's so many more that I can point to.

03:35:37.720 | - So those are kind of decentralized innovations,

03:35:40.120 | and that's what FDA should stand for.

03:35:42.720 | - FDA can stand for it.

03:35:44.280 | - Or something like FDA, right?

03:35:45.960 | - Ah, so let's talk about that, right?

03:35:46.960 | Something like FDA.

03:35:47.800 | So this is very important.

03:35:49.240 | In general, the way I try to think about things is V1, V2,

03:35:53.880 | V3, as we've talked about a few times.

03:35:55.160 | - Right, so FDA, V.

03:35:57.120 | - Well, right, so what was before FDA, right?

03:35:59.320 | So there was both good and bad before FDA,

03:36:01.040 | 'cause people don't necessarily have

03:36:02.040 | the right model of the past, okay?

03:36:04.080 | So if you ask people what was there before the FDA,

03:36:06.880 | they'll say, "Oh, and by the way,

03:36:08.240 | "the FDA itself omits the, right?

03:36:11.680 | "Their pronouns are just FDA, FDA."

03:36:14.200 | Okay, so, but basically-

03:36:17.360 | - Why is that important?

03:36:18.880 | - It's just something where-

03:36:20.680 | - Well, why is that either humorous or interesting to you?

03:36:24.320 | - They have a sort of in-group lingo

03:36:27.320 | where when you are kind of talking about them

03:36:30.640 | the way that they talk about themselves,

03:36:33.080 | it is something that kind of piques interest.

03:36:35.040 | It's kind of like, you know, in LA,

03:36:37.680 | people say the 101 or the, you know, right?

03:36:40.360 | Whereas in Northern California, they'll say 101.

03:36:42.920 | Or people from Nevada will say Nevada, right?

03:36:46.120 | It just instantly marks you as like insider or outsider,

03:36:48.840 | okay, in terms of how the language works, right?

03:36:51.240 | And that's, go ahead.

03:36:52.880 | - I mean, it just makes me sad,

03:36:54.760 | because that lingo is part of the mechanism

03:36:56.960 | which creates the silo, the bubble of particular thoughts,

03:37:01.880 | and that ultimately deviates from the truth

03:37:03.880 | because you're not open to new ideas.

03:37:05.960 | - I think it's actually like, you know,

03:37:07.280 | in "Glorious Bastards" there's a scene in the bar.

03:37:09.600 | Do you wanna talk about it?

03:37:10.440 | - No, but it's good.

03:37:12.680 | You can't, just to censor you,

03:37:15.080 | this is like a Wikipedia podcast, it's like Wikipedia.

03:37:17.520 | You can't cite Quentin Tarantino films, no.

03:37:21.440 | - Okay, okay, okay.

03:37:22.280 | - Sorry, take me back there.

03:37:23.440 | - Basically, like English start going like

03:37:25.200 | one, two, three, four, five.

03:37:26.920 | And I believe it's like the Germans start with like the thumb

03:37:30.760 | - Something that you'd never know, right?

03:37:33.080 | I may be misremembering it, but I think that's right.

03:37:35.000 | Okay, so that's like--

03:37:35.840 | - FDA's got the lingo, all right.

03:37:38.160 | - Right, so FDA's got the lingo.

03:37:39.080 | So coming back up, basically, just talk about FDA

03:37:42.960 | and then come back to your question on the platform.

03:37:45.080 | - So what was V0, FDA, what's V1?

03:37:47.760 | What does the future look like?

03:37:49.360 | - V1 was quote, patent medicines, okay?

03:37:52.200 | That's something so people say.

03:37:53.200 | But V1 was also Banting and Best, okay?

03:37:55.600 | Banting and Best, they won the Nobel Prize

03:37:58.360 | in the early 1920s, right?

03:38:00.920 | Why?

03:38:01.760 | They came up with the idea for insulin supplementation

03:38:06.400 | to treat diabetes.

03:38:08.040 | And they came up with a concept,

03:38:09.800 | they experimented on dogs, they did self-experimentation,

03:38:13.320 | they had healthy volunteers,

03:38:14.520 | they experimented with the formulation as well, right?

03:38:16.920 | Because just like you'd have like a web app and a mobile app,

03:38:20.320 | maybe a command line app, you could have, you know,

03:38:22.640 | a drug that's administered orally or via injection

03:38:25.240 | or cream or, you know, there's different formulations,

03:38:27.280 | right, dosage, all that stuff,

03:38:28.880 | they could just like iterate on, okay,

03:38:30.720 | with willing doctor, willing patient.

03:38:33.480 | These, you know, these folks who were affected

03:38:37.040 | just sprang out of bed,

03:38:38.400 | the insulin supplementation was working for them.

03:38:40.440 | And within a couple of years,

03:38:41.920 | they had won the Nobel Prize and Eli Lilly

03:38:43.880 | had scaled production

03:38:44.720 | for the entire North American continent, okay?

03:38:47.080 | So that was a time when pharma moved at the speed of software

03:38:51.840 | when it was willing buyer, willing seller, okay?

03:38:54.760 | Because the past is demonized

03:38:56.640 | as something that our glorious regulatory agency

03:38:58.880 | is protecting us from, okay?

03:39:01.080 | But there's so many ways

03:39:02.960 | in which what it's really protecting you from

03:39:04.440 | is being healthy, okay?

03:39:06.720 | As, you know, I mean, there's a zillion examples of this,

03:39:10.000 | I won't be able to recapitulate all of them

03:39:11.720 | just in this podcast,

03:39:12.560 | but if you look at a post that I've got,

03:39:15.320 | it's called "Regulation, Disruption, and the Future,

03:39:19.640 | Technologies of 2013," Coursera PDF, okay?

03:39:25.680 | This lecture, which I'll kind of link it here

03:39:29.600 | so you can maybe put in the show notes if you want,

03:39:32.360 | this goes through like a dozen different examples

03:39:35.760 | of crazy things the FDA did

03:39:38.360 | from the kind of stuff that was dramatized

03:39:41.000 | in Dallas Buyers Club,

03:39:42.120 | where they were preventing people from getting AIDS drugs

03:39:45.360 | to, you know, their, you know, various attacks on,

03:39:49.760 | you know, quote, "raw milk,"

03:39:52.160 | where they were basically saying,

03:39:53.760 | here's a quote from FDA, you know, filing in 2010,

03:39:58.760 | "There's no generalized right to bodily and physical health.

03:40:02.360 | There's no right to consume or feed children

03:40:04.400 | any particular food.

03:40:05.520 | There's no fundamental right to freedom of contract."

03:40:08.920 | They basically feel like they own you.

03:40:10.880 | You're not allowed to make your own decisions

03:40:12.640 | about your food.

03:40:13.720 | There's no generalized right to bodily and physical health,

03:40:15.720 | direct quote from their like written kind of thing, okay?

03:40:19.400 | The general frame is usually that FDA says

03:40:22.360 | it's protecting you from the big bad company,

03:40:25.280 | but really what it's doing is it's preventing you

03:40:27.600 | from opting out, okay?

03:40:29.200 | Now, with that said,

03:40:30.600 | and this is where I'm talking about V3,

03:40:33.360 | as critical as I am of FDA or the Fed for that matter,

03:40:37.080 | I also actually recognize that like the Ron Paul type thing

03:40:41.520 | of end the Fed is actually not practical.

03:40:44.000 | End the Fed will just be laughed at.

03:40:45.680 | What Bitcoin did was a much, much, much more difficult task

03:40:49.120 | of building something better than the Fed.

03:40:52.080 | That's really difficult to do because the Fed and the FDA,

03:40:55.960 | they're like the hub of the current system.

03:40:57.960 | People rely on them for lots of different things, okay?

03:41:00.760 | And you're gonna need a better version of them

03:41:05.560 | and how would you actually build something like that?

03:41:07.040 | So with the Fed and with SEC and the entire,

03:41:12.040 | the banks and whatnot,

03:41:14.000 | crypto has a pretty good set of answers for these things.

03:41:17.120 | And over time, all the countries that are not,

03:41:21.400 | or all the groups that are not the US establishment

03:41:23.520 | or the CCP will find more and more to their liking

03:41:26.560 | in the crypto economy.

03:41:27.680 | So that part I think is going, okay?

03:41:29.520 | We can talk about that.

03:41:31.400 | What does that look like for biomedicine?

03:41:33.800 | Well, first, what does exit the FDA look like, right?

03:41:36.360 | So there actually are a bunch of exits from the FDA already,

03:41:40.960 | which is things like right to try laws, okay?

03:41:45.320 | CLIA labs and laboratory developed tests,

03:41:47.480 | compounding pharmacies, off-label prescription by doctors,

03:41:51.000 | and countries that aren't fully harmonized with FDA.

03:41:53.280 | For example, Kobe Bryant, before he passed away,

03:41:56.680 | went and did stem cell treatments in Germany, okay?

03:41:59.920 | Stem cells have been pushed out,

03:42:01.520 | I think in part by the Bush administration,

03:42:03.000 | but by other things.

03:42:04.320 | So those are different kinds of exits.

03:42:07.160 | Right to try basically means at the state level,

03:42:10.040 | you can just try the drug, okay?

03:42:12.520 | CLIA labs and LDTs, that means that's a path

03:42:17.120 | where you don't have to go through FDA

03:42:18.400 | to get a new device approved.

03:42:19.480 | You can just run it in a lab, okay?

03:42:21.760 | Compounding pharmacies, these were under attack.

03:42:23.600 | I'm not sure actually where the current statute is on this,

03:42:25.960 | but this is the idea that a pharmacist has some discretion

03:42:28.520 | in how they prepare mixtures of drugs.

03:42:31.640 | Off-label prescription by MDs.

03:42:34.560 | So MDs have enough weight in the system

03:42:36.840 | that they can kind of push back on FDA.

03:42:38.200 | And off-label prescription is the concept

03:42:40.440 | that a drug that's approved for purpose A

03:42:41.800 | can be prescribed for purpose B or C or D

03:42:44.160 | without going through another whole new drug approval process

03:42:47.800 | and then countries that aren't harmonized, right?

03:42:49.400 | So those are like five different kinds of exits

03:42:51.800 | from the FDA on different directions.

03:42:54.160 | So first those exits exist.

03:42:55.360 | So for those people who are like,

03:42:56.720 | "Oh my God, we're all gonna die

03:42:58.320 | or he's gonna poison us with non-FDA approved things

03:43:00.920 | or whatever," right?

03:43:02.120 | Like those exits exist.

03:43:04.520 | You've probably actually used tests or treatments from those.

03:43:07.720 | You don't even realize that you have, right?

03:43:09.480 | So it hasn't killed you, number one.

03:43:11.480 | Number two is actually testing for safety.

03:43:14.040 | You know, there's safety, efficacy, and like comparative.

03:43:16.960 | Safety is actually relatively easy to test for.

03:43:19.960 | There's very few drugs that are like,

03:43:22.280 | there's TGN-1412, that's a famous example

03:43:24.560 | of something that was actually really dangerous to people,

03:43:26.880 | right, with an early test.

03:43:28.240 | So those do exist, just acknowledge they do exist.

03:43:30.600 | But in general, testing for safety

03:43:32.360 | is actually not that hard to do, okay?

03:43:34.840 | And if something is safe,

03:43:36.200 | then you should be able to try it usually, okay?

03:43:38.840 | Now, what does that decentralized FDA look like?

03:43:40.600 | Well, basically you take individual pieces of it

03:43:43.000 | and you can often turn them into vehicles.

03:43:46.160 | And this is like 50 different startups,

03:43:49.360 | but let me describe some of them.

03:43:50.640 | First, have you gotten any drugs

03:43:52.640 | or something like that recently?

03:43:53.600 | I mean, like prescribed drugs, prescription drugs,

03:43:55.280 | and it was like--

03:43:56.120 | - Now that you clarify, the answer's no.

03:43:57.760 | - Yeah. (laughs)

03:43:59.280 | - Prescribed drugs, no.

03:44:00.840 | - Okay, so--

03:44:01.680 | - Not long, maybe antibiotics a long time ago, maybe.

03:44:04.680 | But no. - All right.

03:44:05.520 | So you know how you have like a,

03:44:07.120 | sort of like a wadded up chemistry textbook,

03:44:09.680 | the package insert that goes into the, right?

03:44:11.640 | - Yes, yes, yes. - Okay.

03:44:12.960 | (laughs)

03:44:13.800 | - It's a wadded up chemistry textbook, I love it.

03:44:15.560 | That's what it is, right?

03:44:16.400 | That's what a terrible user interface,

03:44:18.120 | we don't usually think of it that way.

03:44:19.520 | Why is your user interface so terrible?

03:44:20.800 | That's a web of regulation that makes it so terrible.

03:44:23.520 | And there's actually guys who tried to innovate

03:44:26.360 | just on user interface called, like, Help, I Need Help.

03:44:29.000 | That was like the name of the company a while back.

03:44:31.280 | And it was trying to explain the stuff in plain language.

03:44:33.760 | Okay.

03:44:35.120 | Just on user interface, you can innovate.

03:44:36.880 | And why is it important?

03:44:37.840 | Well, there's a company called PillPack,

03:44:41.360 | which innovated on, quote, the user interface for drugs

03:44:43.800 | by giving people a thing which had like a daily blister pack.

03:44:47.840 | So it's like, here's your prescription

03:44:50.720 | and you're supposed to take all these pills

03:44:52.160 | on the first and second.

03:44:53.480 | And basically, whether you had taken them on a given day

03:44:57.520 | was manifest by whether you had opened it

03:44:59.480 | for that specific day, okay?

03:45:01.600 | This is way better than other kinds

03:45:03.120 | of so-called compliance methodologies.

03:45:04.720 | Like, there are guys who tried to do like an IOT pill

03:45:07.080 | where when you swallow it, it like gives you measurements.

03:45:09.400 | This was just a simple innovation on user interface

03:45:11.720 | that boosted compliance in the sense of compliance

03:45:14.280 | with the drug regimen dramatically, right?

03:45:16.240 | And I think they got acquired or what have you

03:45:18.720 | for a lot of money.

03:45:19.640 | - And hopefully utilized effectively.

03:45:22.240 | - Utilized effectively, right?

03:45:23.080 | - Although sometimes these companies

03:45:24.880 | that do incredible innovation,

03:45:26.040 | it really makes you sad when they get acquired

03:45:27.800 | that that leads to their death, not their scaling.

03:45:30.520 | - Sure.

03:45:31.360 | I mean, they did a lot of other good things,

03:45:32.200 | but this was one thing that they did well, right?

03:45:34.600 | So PillPack just shows what you can get

03:45:36.360 | with improving on user interface.

03:45:38.720 | Why can't, I mean, we get reviews for everything, right?

03:45:42.160 | One thing that, you know, like people have sort of,

03:45:44.400 | in my view, somewhat quoted our context.

03:45:45.640 | They're like, "Oh, biology thinks you should replace

03:45:47.400 | the FDA with the Elkford drugs."

03:45:48.840 | Actually, there's something called phase four, okay,

03:45:51.800 | of the FDA, which is so-called post-market surveillance.

03:45:54.480 | Do you know that that's actually something where,

03:45:58.240 | in theory, you can go and fill out a form

03:46:01.160 | on the FDA website, which basically says,

03:46:03.960 | I've had a bad experience with a drug.

03:46:07.240 | - Not like VAERS, but for drugs.

03:46:09.600 | - Yeah, so it's called MedWatch, right?

03:46:12.160 | And so you can do voluntary reporting,

03:46:15.320 | and you can get a PDF and just upload it, right?

03:46:20.320 | - Is this a government, like is this the .gov?

03:46:24.640 | - Yeah, it's form 3500B.

03:46:26.240 | - I love it.

03:46:27.360 | It's HTML.

03:46:28.600 | It's gonna be from the '90s.

03:46:31.720 | It's gonna have an interface designed by somebody

03:46:36.200 | who's a COBOL/Fortran programmer.

03:46:39.360 | - Right, here we go.

03:46:40.200 | So here we go.

03:46:41.040 | So basically, the 3500B--

03:46:43.760 | - I hope to be proven wrong on that, by the way.

03:46:46.080 | - So 3500B, consumer voluntary reporting.

03:46:49.400 | When do I use this form?

03:46:50.440 | You were hurt or had a bad side effect.

03:46:52.040 | Use a drug which led to unsafe use, et cetera.

03:46:54.240 | The point is, FDA already has a terrible Yelp for drugs.

03:46:58.200 | It has a terrible version of it.

03:47:00.080 | What would the good version look like?

03:47:01.120 | The fact that you've never,

03:47:01.960 | I mean, the fact you have to fill out a PDF

03:47:03.600 | to go and submit a report.

03:47:04.440 | How do you submit a report at Yelp or Uber or Airbnb

03:47:07.720 | or Amazon, you tap, and there's star ratings, right?

03:47:10.120 | So just modernizing FDA 3500B and modernizing phase four,

03:47:15.120 | okay, is a huge thing.

03:47:18.520 | - Is it, can you comment on that?

03:47:19.640 | Is there, what incentive mechanism forces

03:47:23.320 | the modernization of that kind of thing?

03:47:26.360 | - Here's how it would work, or one possible.

03:47:27.840 | - To create an actual Yelp.

03:47:29.160 | - Yeah, here's how that would work, right?

03:47:31.800 | You go to the pharmacy or wherever,

03:47:36.440 | and you hold up your phone

03:47:37.280 | and you scan the barcode of the drug, okay?

03:47:39.080 | What does you see?

03:47:39.920 | Instantly, you see global reports, right?

03:47:42.480 | By the way, because your biology,

03:47:44.120 | your physiology, that's global, right?

03:47:46.080 | Information from Brazil or from Germany or Japan

03:47:51.080 | on their physiological reaction

03:47:54.160 | to the same drug you're taking is useful to you.

03:47:56.800 | It's not like a national boundaries thing.

03:47:58.480 | So the whole nation state model

03:47:59.800 | of only collecting information on by other Americans,

03:48:02.440 | really you want a global kind of thing,

03:48:03.680 | just like Amazon book reviews, that's a global thing.

03:48:07.560 | Other things are aggregate at the global level, okay?

03:48:09.960 | So what you want is to see every patient report

03:48:14.960 | and every doctor around the world on this drug.

03:48:17.920 | That might be really important

03:48:19.360 | to your rare or semi-rare condition.

03:48:22.080 | Just that alone would be a valuable site.

03:48:24.520 | - Who builds that site?

03:48:25.520 | It sounds like something created by capitalism.

03:48:28.840 | It sounds like it would have to be a company.

03:48:31.520 | - Yeah, you can definitely do it.

03:48:32.360 | - But we don't have a world where a company

03:48:34.920 | is allowed to be in charge of that kind of thing.

03:48:36.440 | - Well, I don't know.

03:48:37.280 | - Google Health went down.

03:48:38.600 | It just seems like a lot of the...

03:48:41.040 | - So it depends, right?

03:48:42.160 | Basically, this is why you have

03:48:43.480 | to pick off individual elements, right?

03:48:45.680 | There's essentially a combination of first recognizing

03:48:48.280 | that DFT is actually bad.

03:48:50.720 | You need to be able to say that.

03:48:52.240 | Let me put it like this.

03:48:53.200 | It does a lot of bad things.

03:48:54.520 | It is something which you need to be able to criticize.

03:48:57.560 | You might be like, "Well, that's obvious," right?

03:48:59.800 | Well, in 2010, for example, there's a book that came out,

03:49:02.400 | if anybody wants to understand FDA,

03:49:04.040 | it's called "Reputation and Power."

03:49:05.680 | - Yeah, a lot of people don't wanna criticize FDA.

03:49:08.400 | - Yeah, because they will retaliate

03:49:09.840 | against your biotech or pharma company.

03:49:11.560 | - Yeah, and that retaliation can be initiated

03:49:13.760 | by a single human being.

03:49:15.120 | - Absolutely.

03:49:15.960 | The best analogy is, you think about the TSA, okay?

03:49:19.480 | Have you flown recently?

03:49:20.440 | - Yeah. - Okay.

03:49:21.740 | Do you make any jokes about the TSA

03:49:23.200 | when you're in the TSA line?

03:49:24.600 | - Usually you don't want to,

03:49:26.520 | but they're a little more flexible.

03:49:28.400 | You know what, can I tell a story?

03:49:29.840 | - Sure. - Which is,

03:49:31.000 | it was similar to this.

03:49:33.480 | I was in Vegas at a club.

03:49:36.380 | I don't go to clubs.

03:49:37.920 | I got kicked out for the,

03:49:39.520 | I think the first time in my life,

03:49:41.560 | for making a joke with a bouncer.

03:49:43.600 | 'Cause I had a camera with me,

03:49:46.720 | and you're not allowed to have a camera,

03:49:48.680 | and I said, "Okay, cool, I'll take it out."

03:49:52.120 | But I made a funny joke that I don't care to retell.

03:49:55.760 | But he was just a little offended.

03:49:57.560 | He was like, "I don't care who you are.

03:49:59.560 | "I don't care who you're with."

03:50:01.480 | And then he proceeded to list me,

03:50:04.840 | the famous people he has kicked off that club.

03:50:07.760 | But there is, I mean, all of those,

03:50:10.240 | the reason I made the joke is I sensed

03:50:13.080 | that there was an entitlement to this particular individual,

03:50:17.080 | like where the authority has gone to his head.

03:50:19.840 | - Respect my authority. - Yeah.

03:50:21.320 | I almost wanted to poke at that.

03:50:23.360 | And I think the poking, the authority,

03:50:25.240 | I quickly learned the lesson.

03:50:26.840 | I have now been rewarded with the pride I feel

03:50:31.320 | for having poked authority,

03:50:32.960 | but now I'm kicked out of the club

03:50:35.080 | that would have resulted in a fun night

03:50:37.560 | with friends and so on.

03:50:38.480 | Instead, I'm standing alone crying in Vegas,

03:50:41.120 | which is not a unique Vegas experience.

03:50:42.960 | It's actually a fundamental Vegas experience.

03:50:45.320 | But that, I'm sure, that basic human nature

03:50:48.080 | happens in the FDA as well.

03:50:49.720 | - That's exactly right.

03:50:50.640 | So just like with the TSA, just to extend the analogy,

03:50:54.720 | when you're in line at the TSA, right?

03:50:57.360 | You don't wanna miss your flight.

03:50:58.400 | That could cost you hundreds of dollars.

03:51:00.480 | And so you comply with absolutely ludicrous regulations

03:51:03.520 | like, oh, three ounce bottles.

03:51:05.720 | Well, you know what?

03:51:06.560 | You can take an unlimited number of three ounce bottles

03:51:08.400 | and you can combine them into a six ounce bottle

03:51:11.680 | through the terrorist technology called mixing.

03:51:13.960 | Okay, advanced, right?

03:51:15.840 | And the thing about this is everybody in line,

03:51:19.280 | actually some fairly high, let's say,

03:51:22.800 | call it influence or net worth or whatever, people fly.

03:51:25.840 | Millions and millions and millions of people are subject

03:51:28.720 | to these absolutely moronic regulations.

03:51:30.920 | It's all what I think security theater is Shryer's term.

03:51:35.680 | A lot of people know this term.

03:51:36.800 | So millions of people are subject to it.

03:51:38.560 | It costs untold billions of dollars in terms of delays

03:51:42.080 | and what if you just walk up to, right?

03:51:43.960 | It irradiates people.

03:51:46.000 | And this is another FDA thing, by the way.

03:51:47.480 | This is an FDA-TSA team up, okay?

03:51:49.880 | In 2010, the TSA body scanners,

03:51:52.720 | there were concerns expressed,

03:51:53.920 | but when it's a government to government thing,

03:51:56.040 | see a dot com is treated with extreme scrutiny by FDA,

03:51:58.560 | but it's another dot gov,

03:51:59.520 | well, they're not trying to make a profit.

03:52:00.680 | So they kind of just wave them on through, okay?

03:52:03.000 | So these body scanners were basically like applied

03:52:06.440 | to millions and millions of people

03:52:08.520 | and this huge kind of opt-in experiments.

03:52:10.480 | Almost, I think it's quite likely by the way,

03:52:12.760 | that if there was even a slightly increased cancer risk,

03:52:16.360 | that the net morbidity and mortality

03:52:19.160 | from those would have outweighed the deaths from terrorism

03:52:21.440 | or whatever that were prevented, right?

03:52:23.000 | You can work out the numbers,

03:52:24.280 | but you can just get the math under reasonable assumptions,

03:52:26.640 | it's probably true.

03:52:27.880 | If it had any increased morbidity and mortality.

03:52:29.760 | I've not seen the recent things,

03:52:30.880 | but I've seen that concern expressed 12 years ago.

03:52:33.820 | Point being that despite the cost,

03:52:37.320 | despite how many people are exposed to it,

03:52:39.000 | despite how obviously patently ludicrous it is,

03:52:42.000 | you don't make any trouble,

03:52:43.200 | nor do people organize protests or whatever about this,

03:52:46.160 | because it's something where people,

03:52:49.760 | the security theater of the whole thing is part of it.

03:52:53.080 | Oh, well, if we took them away,

03:52:54.040 | there'd be more terrorism or something like that.

03:52:55.640 | People think, right?

03:52:57.040 | - But it is fascinating to see that the populace

03:53:00.760 | puts up with it, 'cause it doesn't,

03:53:03.120 | one of my favorite things is to listen to Jordan Peterson,

03:53:05.480 | who I think offline, but I think also on the podcast,

03:53:10.040 | you know, is somebody who resists authority in every way.

03:53:12.720 | And even he goes to TSA with a kind of suppressed,

03:53:17.720 | like all the instructions, everything down to,

03:53:20.920 | whenever you have like the yellow thing for your feet,

03:53:24.500 | they force you to adjust it even slightly if you're off.

03:53:27.880 | Just even, I mean, it's like, it's a Kafka novel.

03:53:32.320 | We're living, like TSA, it makes me smile.

03:53:34.960 | It brings joy to my heart, because I imagine

03:53:37.080 | Franz Kafka and I just walking through there,

03:53:40.860 | because it really is just deeply absurd.

03:53:45.120 | But, and then the whole motivation of the mechanism

03:53:49.840 | becomes distorted by the individuals involved.

03:53:52.120 | The initial one was to reduce the number

03:53:53.880 | of terrorist attacks, I suppose.

03:53:55.360 | - Right, now it's guns and drugs.

03:53:56.600 | Basically, it's like, essentially what they've done

03:53:58.560 | is they've repealed the Fourth Amendment, right?

03:54:00.620 | Search and seizure, they can do it without probable cause.

03:54:03.840 | Everybody is being searched.

03:54:04.840 | Everybody's a potential terrorist.

03:54:06.000 | So they've got probable cause for everybody, in theory.

03:54:08.320 | And so what they do, they'll post on their website

03:54:10.860 | the guns and drugs or whatever

03:54:12.020 | that they seized in these scanners.

03:54:13.220 | Well, of course, if you search everybody,

03:54:15.020 | you're gonna find some criminals or whatever.

03:54:17.500 | But the cost of doing that is dramatic.

03:54:20.020 | Moreover, the fact that people have sort of been trained

03:54:22.340 | to have compliance, it's like the Soviet Union, right?

03:54:25.460 | Where, just grudgingly, all right,

03:54:27.980 | go along with this extremely stupid thing.

03:54:29.700 | What's my point?

03:54:30.680 | The point is, this is a really stupid regulation

03:54:34.540 | that has existed in plain sight of everybody for 20 years.

03:54:36.860 | We're still taking off our shoes, okay,

03:54:39.260 | because some shoe bomber, whatever number of years ago,

03:54:41.740 | okay, all of this stuff is there,

03:54:44.460 | as opposed to, there's a zillion other things

03:54:46.680 | you could potentially do, different paradigms

03:54:48.100 | for, quote, airport security.

03:54:49.200 | But now apply that to FDA.

03:54:51.500 | Just like a lot of what TSA does is security theater,

03:54:54.220 | arguably all of it, a lot of what FDA does is safety theater.

03:54:57.500 | The difference is, there's far fewer people

03:54:59.580 | who go through the aperture.

03:55:00.780 | They're the biotech and pharma CEOs, okay?

03:55:03.780 | So you don't have an understanding

03:55:05.540 | of what it is to deal with them, number one.

03:55:07.380 | Number two is, the penalty is not a few hundred dollars

03:55:10.100 | of missing your flight.

03:55:11.580 | It is a few million dollars, or tens,

03:55:14.060 | or hundreds of millions of dollars

03:55:15.060 | for getting your company subject to the equivalent

03:55:18.060 | of a retaliatory wait time,

03:55:19.180 | just like that bouncer threw you out,

03:55:20.780 | just like the TSA officer, if you make a joke,

03:55:22.900 | or they can just sit you down

03:55:24.140 | and make you lose your flight, right?

03:55:25.780 | So too, can the FDA just silently impede

03:55:30.780 | the approval of something and choke you out financially

03:55:34.060 | because you don't have enough runway to get funded, right?

03:55:36.660 | So just impose more wait time.

03:55:38.140 | Guess what, we want another six months.

03:55:40.020 | Data's gonna take another six months,

03:55:41.300 | your company doesn't have the time, you die, right?

03:55:44.140 | If you live, you have to raise a round

03:55:46.500 | at some dilutive valuation,

03:55:48.500 | and now the price gets jacked up on the other side.

03:55:50.700 | That's the one thing that can give, by the way,

03:55:52.220 | in this whole process.

03:55:53.820 | When you push out timelines from days

03:55:57.500 | to get a vaccine approved, or a vaccine evaluated, rather,

03:56:01.180 | via challenge trials, to months or years,

03:56:03.980 | the cost during that time, when you,

03:56:06.620 | it just increases non-linearly, right?

03:56:08.780 | Because you can't iterate on the product.

03:56:11.260 | All the normal observations,

03:56:12.620 | if it takes you 10 years to launch a product

03:56:14.100 | versus 10 days, what's the difference

03:56:15.900 | in terms of your speed of variation,

03:56:16.820 | your cost, et cetera, right?

03:56:18.100 | So this is part of what, it's not the only thing,

03:56:19.820 | there's other things, there's AMA and CPT,

03:56:21.900 | there's other things, but this is one of the things

03:56:24.820 | that jacks up prices in the US medical system, okay?

03:56:28.140 | So now you have something where these CEOs,

03:56:31.340 | they're going through this aperture,

03:56:33.020 | they can't tell anybody about it,

03:56:36.140 | because if you read "Reputation and Power,"

03:56:38.500 | okay, I'm gonna just quote this,

03:56:40.500 | because it's an amazing, amazing book, right?

03:56:42.660 | It's written by a guy, Daniel Carpenter,

03:56:44.860 | a smart guy, but he's an FDA sympathizer.

03:56:47.300 | He fundamentally thinks it's a good thing, or what have you.

03:56:49.940 | Nevertheless, I respect Carpenter's intellectual honesty,

03:56:53.180 | because he quotes the CEOs in the book verbatim,

03:56:57.900 | and he gives some paragraphs.

03:56:59.260 | And essentially, from their descriptions,

03:57:00.900 | it's like, think about like a Vietnam War thing,

03:57:03.820 | where you've got a POW, and they're like blinking

03:57:06.900 | through their eyes, being tortured, okay?

03:57:09.620 | That is the style, when you read Carpenter's book,

03:57:12.240 | you read the quotes from these CEOs,

03:57:16.980 | hold on, let me see if I can find it.

03:57:18.660 | - Do you recommend the book?

03:57:19.780 | - It's a good book, yeah.

03:57:20.940 | Or it's now a little bit outdated, okay?

03:57:23.740 | Because it's like, you know, almost 10 years old.

03:57:26.020 | Still, as a history of the FDA, it is well worth reading.

03:57:30.100 | And by the way, the reason I say it,

03:57:31.020 | like the FDA is so insanely important.

03:57:34.620 | It's so much more important than many other things

03:57:36.220 | that people talk about, but they don't talk about it, right?

03:57:39.280 | I just wanna read his little blurb for it, right?

03:57:41.580 | This is 2010.

03:57:42.420 | "The U.S. Food and Drug Administration

03:57:43.700 | "is the most powerful regulatory agency in the world.

03:57:45.640 | "How did the FDA become so influential,

03:57:47.280 | "and how does it wield its extraordinary power?

03:57:50.640 | "Reputation and power traces the history

03:57:52.180 | "of FDA regulation of pharmaceuticals,

03:57:54.460 | "revealing how the agency's organizational reputation

03:57:56.700 | "has been the primary source of its power,

03:57:58.140 | "yet it's also one of its ultimate constraints.

03:58:00.680 | "Carpenter describes how the FDA cultivated a reputation

03:58:03.300 | "for competence and vigilance throughout the last century,

03:58:05.480 | "and how this organizational image

03:58:07.260 | "has enabled the agency to regulate

03:58:09.500 | "while resisting efforts to curb its own authority."

03:58:12.020 | First of all, just that description alone,

03:58:14.460 | you're like, wait a second,

03:58:16.580 | he is describing this as an active player.

03:58:19.460 | It's not like a DMV kind of thing, which is passed through.

03:58:23.660 | It's talking about cultivating a reputation,

03:58:26.580 | its power, resisting efforts to curb its own authority.

03:58:30.780 | The thing is, now you're kind of through the looking glass.

03:58:33.860 | You're like, wait a second, this is kind of language

03:58:35.940 | I don't usually hear for regulatory agencies.

03:58:38.620 | The thing is, the kind of person who becomes the CEO

03:58:41.580 | of a giant company, what do they wanna do?

03:58:43.180 | They wanna expand that company.

03:58:45.480 | They wanna make more profit.

03:58:48.560 | Similarly, the kind of person who comes

03:58:49.940 | to run a regulatory agency or one of the subunits,

03:58:53.420 | that person wants to expand its ambit.

03:58:55.640 | Okay?

03:58:58.260 | - By the way, is that always obvious,

03:58:59.460 | and sorry to interrupt, but for the CEO of the company,

03:59:01.780 | I know that the philosophical ideal of capitalism

03:59:05.220 | is you want to make the thing more profitable,

03:59:07.340 | but we're also human beings.

03:59:10.340 | Do you think there's some fundamental aspect

03:59:12.260 | to which we wanna do a lot of good in the world?

03:59:14.300 | - Sure, but the fiduciary duty will push people

03:59:17.000 | to get the ambitious, the profit-maximizing,

03:59:20.060 | expansionist CEO is selected for, right?

03:59:23.800 | Basically, they believe, crucially,

03:59:25.200 | they're not just, this is important,

03:59:26.620 | they're not just, I mean, some of them are

03:59:28.760 | grant-of-auto, make as much money as possible,

03:59:30.560 | but they believe in the mission, okay?

03:59:32.640 | They've come to believe in the mission,

03:59:33.680 | and that is the person who's selected.

03:59:35.080 | Chomsky actually had this good thing,

03:59:36.160 | which is like, I believe that you believe what you believe,

03:59:39.440 | but if you didn't believe what you believe,

03:59:40.560 | you wouldn't be sitting here.

03:59:41.600 | - Right, so they select for the kind of people

03:59:43.520 | that are able to make a lot of money,

03:59:45.700 | and in that process, those people are able

03:59:48.800 | to construct a narrative that they're doing good,

03:59:52.400 | even though what they were selected for

03:59:54.160 | is the fact that they can make a lot of money.

03:59:55.480 | - Yeah, and they may actually be doing good,

03:59:57.080 | but the thing is, with CEOs, we have a zillion images

04:00:00.600 | in television and media movies of the evil corporation

04:00:04.040 | and the greedy CEO.

04:00:04.960 | We have some concept of what CEO failure modes are like,

04:00:08.320 | okay?

04:00:09.140 | Now, when have you ever seen an evil regulator?

04:00:11.340 | Have you, can you name a fictional portrayal

04:00:14.160 | of an evil regulator?

04:00:15.160 | Can you name an evil CEO?

04:00:16.000 | There's tons. - Yeah, a lot, a lot,

04:00:17.640 | a lot, a lot.

04:00:19.040 | But that's so interesting.

04:00:20.200 | I'm trying, I'm searching for a deeper lesson here.

04:00:22.680 | You're right.

04:00:23.760 | You're right.

04:00:26.200 | I mean, there is portrayals,

04:00:30.080 | especially in sort of authoritarian regimes

04:00:33.280 | or the Soviet Union, where there's bureaucracy,

04:00:36.400 | you know, Chernobyl, you can kind of see

04:00:39.080 | within that there's the story of the regulator,

04:00:41.880 | but yeah, it's not as plentiful,

04:00:45.200 | and it also often doesn't have a face to it.

04:00:47.400 | It's almost like bureaucracy is this amorphous thing

04:00:51.480 | that results, any one individual you see,

04:00:53.920 | they're just obeying somebody else.

04:00:55.640 | There's not a face to it of evil.

04:00:58.480 | - That's right.

04:00:59.320 | - The evil is the entire machine.

04:01:01.040 | - That's right.

04:01:01.880 | That's what I call the school of fish strategy, by the way.

04:01:04.080 | It's something where you are an individual

04:01:06.240 | and you can be signaled out,

04:01:08.040 | but there's more accountability for one person's bad tweets

04:01:11.420 | than all the wars in the Middle East, right?

04:01:13.400 | Because it's a school of fish.

04:01:15.200 | - Yeah. - Right?

04:01:16.300 | So if the establishment is wrong,

04:01:18.640 | if the bureaucracy is wrong,

04:01:20.200 | they're all wrong at the same time.

04:01:21.240 | Who could have known?

04:01:22.560 | Whereas if you deviate,

04:01:24.960 | then you are a deviation who can be hammered down, okay?

04:01:28.760 | Now, the school of fish strategy is,

04:01:30.920 | unfortunately, very successful because,

04:01:33.840 | you know, truth is whatever.

04:01:35.120 | If you just always ride with the school of fish

04:01:37.040 | and turn when they turn and so on,

04:01:38.880 | unless there's a bigger school of fish that comes in,

04:01:41.920 | you basically can never be proven wrong, right?

04:01:44.200 | And this is actually, you know, of course,

04:01:46.160 | someone who believes in truth

04:01:47.420 | and believes in, you know, innovation and so on,

04:01:50.040 | just physiologically can't ride with the school of fish.

04:01:52.420 | You just have to say what is true or do what is true, right?

04:01:55.060 | Still, you've described correctly, you know,

04:01:57.420 | how it's faceless, right?

04:01:58.740 | So I will give two examples of fictional portrayals

04:02:00.860 | of evil regulators.

04:02:02.620 | One is actually the original Ghostbusters.

04:02:04.660 | - Okay. - Did not expect that one,

04:02:06.780 | but yes. - Yeah.

04:02:07.620 | So the EPA is actually the villain in that,

04:02:09.620 | where they flip a switch

04:02:11.620 | that lets out all the ghosts in the city.

04:02:13.620 | And essentially, the guy is coming in

04:02:15.380 | with a head of steam as this evil regulator

04:02:17.840 | that's just totally arrogant,

04:02:19.540 | doesn't actually understand the private sector

04:02:21.680 | or the consequences of their actions.

04:02:24.080 | And they force the,

04:02:26.020 | and crucially, they bring a cop with them with a gun.

04:02:28.520 | So it shows that a regulator is not simply,

04:02:31.960 | you know, some piece of paper,

04:02:33.640 | but it is the police, right?

04:02:35.880 | And that cop with the gun forces the Ghostbusters

04:02:38.480 | to like release the containment and the whole thing spreads.

04:02:40.680 | The second example is Dallas Buyers Club,

04:02:42.160 | which is more recent.

04:02:43.280 | And that actually shows the FDA blocking a guy

04:02:46.100 | who, with a life-threatening illness,

04:02:48.740 | you know, with AIDS,

04:02:49.760 | from getting the drugs to treat his condition

04:02:52.340 | and from getting it to other people, right?

04:02:54.780 | Those are just two portrayals,

04:02:55.860 | but in general, what you find

04:02:57.860 | is when you talk about FDA with people,

04:03:00.460 | one thing I'll often hear from folks is like,

04:03:03.900 | why would they do that, right?

04:03:06.500 | They have no mental model of this.

04:03:07.820 | They kind of think of it as,

04:03:09.220 | why would the,

04:03:11.460 | why would this thing,

04:03:12.760 | which they think of as sort of the DMV,

04:03:14.120 | they don't think of the DMV as like this active thing, okay?

04:03:17.320 | Why would the FDA do that?

04:03:18.760 | Well, it is because it's filled with some ambitious people

04:03:22.720 | that want to keep increasing the power of the agency,

04:03:24.560 | just like the CEO wants to increase

04:03:25.800 | the profit of the company, right?

04:03:27.040 | I use that word ambit, right?

04:03:28.980 | Why ambit?

04:03:29.820 | Because these folks are,

04:03:32.280 | we know the term greedy, right?

04:03:34.380 | These folks are power hungry.

04:03:36.380 | They want to have the maximum scope.

04:03:38.880 | And sometimes regulatory agencies

04:03:40.040 | collide with each other, right?

04:03:40.980 | Even though FDA is under HHS,

04:03:42.600 | sometimes it collides with HHS

04:03:44.040 | and they've got regulations that conflict.

04:03:46.800 | For example, HHS says everybody's supposed to be able

04:03:48.920 | to have access to their own medical record.

04:03:50.520 | FDA didn't want people to have access

04:03:51.960 | to their own personal genomes.

04:03:53.440 | That conflicts, okay?

04:03:54.640 | And both of those are kind of anti-corporate statutes

04:03:59.120 | that were put out,

04:03:59.960 | with HHS's thing being targeted at the hospitals

04:04:02.480 | and FDA being targeted at the personal genomic companies,

04:04:04.640 | but those conflicted, right?

04:04:06.840 | It's a little bit like CFTC and SEC have a door jam

04:04:09.480 | over who will regulate cryptocurrency, right?

04:04:11.400 | Sometimes regulators fight each other,

04:04:14.100 | but they fight each other.

04:04:14.980 | They fight companies.

04:04:16.360 | They are active players.

04:04:18.120 | This "Reputation and Power" book,

04:04:19.360 | the reason I mention it is,

04:04:21.320 | I'm gonna see if I can find this quote.

04:04:22.520 | So let me see if I can find this quote.

04:04:24.400 | "Reputation and Power, Organizational Image

04:04:27.320 | and Pharmaceutical Regulation at the FDA."

04:04:30.760 | So Genentech's executive, G. Kirk Robb, right?

04:04:35.440 | Robb would describe regulatory approval for his products

04:04:37.360 | as a fundamental challenge facing his company.

04:04:39.840 | And he would depict the administration

04:04:41.160 | in a particularly vivid metaphor.

04:04:42.920 | "I've told the story hundreds of times

04:04:44.440 | to help people understand the FDA.

04:04:46.520 | When I was in Brazil,

04:04:47.360 | I worked on the Amazon River for many months

04:04:48.920 | selling teramicin for Pfizer.

04:04:50.720 | I hadn't seen my family for eight or nine months.

04:04:52.800 | They were flying into Sao Paulo

04:04:54.280 | and I was flying down from some little village

04:04:56.200 | on the Amazon to Manus and then to Sao Paulo.

04:04:58.080 | I was a young guy in his twenties.

04:04:59.000 | I couldn't wait to see the kids.

04:05:00.440 | One of them was a year old baby.

04:05:01.560 | The other was three.

04:05:02.440 | I missed my wife.

04:05:04.000 | There was a Quonset hut in front of

04:05:06.160 | just a little dirt strip with a single engine plane

04:05:08.240 | to fly me to Manus.

04:05:09.080 | I roll up and there's a Brazilian soldier there.

04:05:11.440 | The military revolution happened literally the week before.

04:05:13.560 | So this soldier is standing there with his machine gun

04:05:15.680 | and he said to me, "You can't come in."

04:05:18.120 | I was speaking pretty good Portuguese by that time.

04:05:20.240 | I said, "My God, my plane, my family, I gotta come in."

04:05:23.280 | He said again, "You can't come in."

04:05:25.160 | I said, "I gotta come in."

04:05:26.880 | And he took his machine gun, took the safety off

04:05:29.640 | and pointed at me and said, "You can't come in."

04:05:31.720 | And I said, "Oh, now I got it.

04:05:33.960 | I can't go in there."

04:05:35.400 | And that's the way I always describe the FDA.

04:05:37.520 | The FDA is standing there with a machine gun

04:05:39.240 | against the pharmaceutical industry.

04:05:40.480 | So you better be their friend rather than their enemy.

04:05:42.520 | They are the boss.

04:05:43.600 | If you're a pharmaceutical firm,

04:05:44.800 | they own you body and soul.

04:05:46.640 | Okay, that's the CEO of a successful company, Genentech.

04:05:50.320 | He said he's told the story hundreds of times

04:05:52.640 | and regulatory approval is a fundamental challenge

04:05:54.400 | facing his company because if you are regulated by FDA,

04:05:59.240 | they are your primary customer.

04:06:01.120 | If they cut the cord on you, you have no other customers.

04:06:05.160 | And in fact, until very recently

04:06:07.280 | with the advent of social media,

04:06:09.000 | no one would even tell your story.

04:06:10.800 | It was assumed that you were some sort of

04:06:13.680 | corporate criminal that they were protecting the public from,

04:06:17.720 | that you were gonna put poison in milk,

04:06:20.240 | like the melamine scandal in China.

04:06:21.680 | I'm not saying those things don't exist, by the way.

04:06:23.120 | They do exist.

04:06:24.000 | That's why people are like,

04:06:25.200 | they can immediately summon to mind

04:06:26.680 | all the examples of corporate criminals.

04:06:28.800 | That's why I mentioned those fictional stories,

04:06:29.960 | those templates.

04:06:30.960 | Even if "Star Wars" doesn't exist,

04:06:32.360 | how many times have you heard a "Star Wars" metaphor

04:06:34.040 | or whatever for something, right?

04:06:35.360 | Breaking bad, you know?

04:06:36.200 | Go ahead.

04:06:37.040 | - Yeah, but the pharmaceutical companies

04:06:39.160 | are stuck between a rock and a hard place

04:06:41.200 | because the reputation, if they go to Twitter,

04:06:43.560 | they go to social media, they have horrible reputation.

04:06:46.760 | So it's like they don't know.

04:06:47.600 | - Yes, but why is that?

04:06:49.160 | Because reputation and power.

04:06:51.320 | FDA beat down the reputation of pharma companies,

04:06:54.480 | just like EPA helped beat down

04:06:56.040 | the reputation of oil companies.

04:06:57.720 | And as it says over here, right?

04:06:59.760 | "In practice, dealing with the fact of FDA power

04:07:01.880 | meant a fundamental change in corporate structure

04:07:03.960 | and culture.

04:07:04.920 | At Abbott and at Genentech,

04:07:06.520 | Rob's most central transformation

04:07:08.080 | was in creating a culture of acquiescence

04:07:10.840 | towards a government agency.

04:07:12.480 | As was done at other drug companies

04:07:14.160 | in the late 20th century,

04:07:15.480 | Rob essentially fired officials at Abbott

04:07:17.360 | who were insufficiently compliant with the FDA."

04:07:19.920 | What that means is de facto nationalization of the industry

04:07:24.240 | via regulation.

04:07:25.320 | Just to hover on that.

04:07:27.400 | That's a really big deal

04:07:29.160 | because if their primary customer

04:07:30.640 | is this government agency,

04:07:31.960 | then it has nationalized it just indirectly, right?

04:07:36.720 | This is partially what's just happened

04:07:38.160 | with Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, the other MAGA.

04:07:42.960 | Okay?

04:07:43.800 | They have been, that's funny.

04:07:46.360 | - Well done.

04:07:47.200 | (laughs)

04:07:48.600 | Yeah, I didn't even think about that.

04:07:50.360 | It's well done.

04:07:51.360 | - Right, so it's, you know,

04:07:52.880 | like I have this tweet,

04:07:53.720 | it's like MAGA Republicans and MAGA Democrats, right?

04:07:56.400 | Okay.

04:07:57.720 | - Oh, damn it.

04:07:58.600 | So many things you've said today

04:08:00.000 | will just get stuck in my head.

04:08:01.760 | It changes the way you think.

04:08:03.400 | Catchy.

04:08:04.840 | Something about catchy phrasing of ideas

04:08:07.600 | makes me even more powerful.

04:08:09.920 | So yeah, okay.

04:08:11.120 | So that's happening in the tech sector.

04:08:12.720 | - It's happening in tech.

04:08:13.560 | So Facebook is the outlier

04:08:15.120 | 'cause Zuck still controls the company.

04:08:16.960 | But just like, I mean,

04:08:19.360 | why had tech had a good reputation for a while?

04:08:22.360 | Because there wasn't a regulatory agency

04:08:24.440 | whose justification was regulating

04:08:26.640 | these corporate criminals, right?

04:08:28.720 | Once that is the case,

04:08:30.520 | the regulatory agency basically

04:08:32.440 | comes back to Congress each year.

04:08:33.800 | If you look at its budget approvals,

04:08:34.920 | it's saying, "We fined this many guys.

04:08:37.480 | "We found this many violations," right?

04:08:39.520 | They have an incentive to exaggerate the threat

04:08:43.840 | in the same way that a prosecutor

04:08:45.680 | or a policeman has a quota, right?

04:08:48.680 | Like these are the police.

04:08:50.600 | One way I describe it also is like,

04:08:52.360 | you know, like a step-down transformers.

04:08:55.640 | You have high voltage electricity

04:08:57.240 | that's generated at the power plant,

04:08:59.160 | and it comes over the wires,

04:09:00.200 | and then there's step-down transformers

04:09:01.960 | that turn it into a lower voltage

04:09:03.800 | that you can just deal with out of your appliances, right?

04:09:07.240 | Similarly, you have something where the high voltage

04:09:11.520 | of like the US military or the police,

04:09:14.400 | and that is transmitted down into a little letter

04:09:17.680 | that comes in your mailbox saying,

04:09:18.640 | "Pay your $50 parking ticket,"

04:09:20.440 | where it's a piece of paper,

04:09:22.760 | so you don't see the gun attached to it.

04:09:25.160 | But if you were to defy that,

04:09:27.400 | it's like "Grand Theft Auto,"

04:09:28.360 | where you get one star, two star, three stars,

04:09:30.280 | four stars, five stars,

04:09:31.720 | and eventually, you know,

04:09:33.280 | you have some serious stuff on your hands, okay?

04:09:36.760 | So once you understand that, you know,

04:09:38.680 | every law is backed by force,

04:09:41.080 | like that Brazilian guy with the machine gun

04:09:42.840 | that Rob mentioned,

04:09:44.840 | these guys are the regulatory police, okay?

04:09:46.720 | Now, see, for a time, what happened was

04:09:49.720 | you had the captured industry

04:09:52.160 | because all of the folks who were in pharmaceuticals

04:09:55.840 | were, as Carpenter said,

04:09:57.960 | a culture of acquiescence towards the FDA.

04:10:01.880 | The FDA was their primary customer.

04:10:03.480 | So just like in a sense, it's rational,

04:10:05.680 | you know, Amazon talks about being customer obsessed, right?

04:10:08.600 | What Rob did was rational for that time, right?

04:10:12.080 | What GKirp Rob did was saying,

04:10:14.600 | "Our customer is the FDA, that's our primary customer.

04:10:16.720 | "Nobody else matters.

04:10:17.920 | "They are satisfied first.

04:10:18.960 | "Every single trade-off that has to be made is FDA,"

04:10:21.880 | right?

04:10:22.720 | And, you know, really that's why

04:10:24.240 | the two most important departments

04:10:25.480 | at many pharmaceutical companies, arguably all,

04:10:27.440 | are regulatory affairs and IP, not R&D, right?

04:10:30.520 | Because one is the artificial scarcity of regulation,

04:10:33.280 | which jacks up the price,

04:10:34.560 | and the other is artificial scarcity of the patent,

04:10:36.800 | which allows people to maintain the high price, right?

04:10:39.400 | So this entire thing is just like, you know,

04:10:41.000 | college education.

04:10:41.840 | These things may at some point have been a good concept,

04:10:44.480 | but the price has just risen and risen and risen

04:10:46.280 | until it's at the limit price and beyond, okay?

04:10:49.080 | So what has changed?

04:10:51.600 | What's changed is in the 2010s,

04:10:55.800 | late 2000s and 2010s and so on,

04:10:58.040 | with the advent of social media,

04:10:59.320 | with the advent of a bunch of millionaires,

04:11:02.240 | like who are independent,

04:11:04.440 | with the advent of Uber and Airbnb, right?

04:11:08.200 | With the advent of cryptocurrency,

04:11:09.880 | with the diminution of trust in institutions,

04:11:12.960 | it used to be really taboo to even talk about the FDA

04:11:15.520 | as potentially bad in like, you know, 2010, 2009, okay?

04:11:19.880 | But now people have just seen face plant after face plant

04:11:22.440 | by the institutions,

04:11:23.720 | and people are much more open to the concept

04:11:26.400 | that they may actually not have it all together.

04:11:29.080 | And I think it's, you know,

04:11:30.360 | you could probably see some tracking poll

04:11:32.200 | or something like that,

04:11:33.080 | but I wouldn't be surprised

04:11:33.920 | if it's like a 20 or 30 point drop

04:11:35.320 | after the CDC failed to control disease and the FDA failed,

04:11:39.240 | and the entire biomedical regulatory establishment

04:11:41.800 | and scientific establishment

04:11:43.120 | was saying masks don't work before they do.

04:11:45.160 | This was just a train crash

04:11:46.360 | of all the things that you're paying for

04:11:47.560 | that you supposedly think are good.

04:11:49.600 | As I mentioned, one response is to go QAnon,

04:11:52.200 | and people will say, "Oh, don't trust anything."

04:11:53.840 | But the better response is decentralizing FDA, okay.

04:11:56.520 | So I will say one other thing,

04:11:59.040 | which is I mentioned, you know,

04:12:00.880 | this concept of improving the form 3500B,

04:12:03.640 | where you like scan, go ahead.

04:12:05.520 | - No, yeah, yeah, right.

04:12:06.840 | That just makes me laugh that I could just tell

04:12:09.480 | the form sucks by the fact that it has that code name.

04:12:12.240 | Sorry. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

04:12:13.560 | Exactly, right?

04:12:14.480 | - UX is broken at every layer.

04:12:16.720 | - Yeah, so they have a bad Yelp for drugs,

04:12:19.320 | could we make a better one?

04:12:20.160 | We could make a better one, just modern UX.

04:12:22.120 | The key insight here, by the way,

04:12:23.400 | which is a non-obvious point,

04:12:25.000 | and I've got a whole talk on this actually

04:12:27.120 | that I should probably release.

04:12:28.080 | I actually did like almost eight, nine years ago.

04:12:30.040 | It's called "Regulation is Information."

04:12:32.280 | Product quality is a digital signal.

04:12:35.760 | Okay, what do I mean by that?

04:12:37.160 | Basically, when I talk about exit, you know,

04:12:40.560 | exit the Fed, that's the crypto economy, right?

04:12:43.080 | What does exit the FDA look like?

04:12:44.440 | Well, one key insight is that many

04:12:47.000 | of the big scale tech companies

04:12:49.000 | can be thought of as cloud regulators

04:12:50.720 | rather than land regulators.

04:12:52.080 | What do I mean by that?

04:12:52.920 | Well, first, what is regulation?

04:12:54.240 | People do want a regulated marketplace.

04:12:57.000 | They want A, quality ratings,

04:12:59.920 | like on a one to five star scale,

04:13:02.160 | and B, bans of bad actors,

04:13:04.800 | like the zero star frauds and scammers and so on,

04:13:07.440 | and these are distinct, right?

04:13:08.560 | Somebody who's like a low quality

04:13:10.400 | but well-intentioned person is different

04:13:12.480 | than a smart and evil person.

04:13:13.920 | Those are two different kinds of failure modes

04:13:15.280 | you could have in a marketplace, right?

04:13:17.280 | Why is it rational for people to want

04:13:19.000 | a regulated marketplace, especially for health?

04:13:21.160 | Because they wanna pay essentially one entry cost,

04:13:24.040 | and then they don't have to evaluate everything separately

04:13:26.800 | where they may not have the technical information

04:13:28.360 | to do that, right?

04:13:29.800 | You don't wanna go to Starbucks

04:13:31.000 | and put a dipstick into every coffee

04:13:34.640 | to see if it's poisoned or something like that.

04:13:36.120 | You sort of wanna enter a zone

04:13:38.000 | where you know things are basically good,

04:13:40.440 | and you pay that one diligence cost on the zone itself,

04:13:43.320 | right, whether it's a digital or physical zone,

04:13:45.040 | and then the regulator's taking care of it,

04:13:46.680 | and they've baked in the regulatory cost

04:13:49.280 | into some subscription fee of some kind, right?

04:13:52.560 | So the thing is, the model we've talked about

04:13:54.720 | is the land regulator of a nation state

04:13:56.560 | and a territorially bounded thing,

04:13:58.640 | but the cloud regulator, what's a cloud regulator?

04:14:00.800 | That is Amazon Star Ratings, that's Yelp,

04:14:05.600 | that is eBay, that is Airbnb, that is Uber and Lyft,

04:14:09.760 | and so on and so forth.

04:14:11.200 | It's also actually Gmail and Google, why?

04:14:14.040 | Because you're doing spam filtering,

04:14:16.640 | and you are doing ranking of emails

04:14:19.800 | with a priority inbox, right?

04:14:21.440 | With Google itself, they ban malware links, right?

04:14:24.440 | So the bad actors are out, and they're ranking them, right?

04:14:26.920 | How about Apple, the App Store, right?

04:14:29.200 | They ban bad actors, and they do star ratings.

04:14:31.520 | When you start actually applying this lens,

04:14:32.760 | PayPal, they've got a reputation,

04:14:35.160 | every single web service that's at the scale

04:14:38.840 | of like tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people

04:14:41.600 | has had to build a cloud regulator,

04:14:44.240 | and the crucial thing is it scales across borders.

04:14:46.480 | So you can use the data from Mexico

04:14:48.880 | to help somebody in Moldova or vice versa, right?

04:14:52.400 | Because it's fundamentally international, right?

04:14:54.560 | Those ratings, you have a network effect.

04:14:56.560 | And there's another aspect to it,

04:14:59.080 | which is these are better regulators

04:15:01.120 | than the land regulators.

04:15:02.120 | For example, Uber is a better regulator

04:15:04.880 | than the taxi medallions, why?

04:15:07.400 | Every ride is GPS tracked,

04:15:09.080 | there's ratings on both the driver and the passenger side.

04:15:12.000 | Both parties know that payment can be rendered

04:15:15.000 | in a standard currency, right?

04:15:17.320 | If you have below a certain star rating on either side,

04:15:19.320 | you get deplatformed and so on

04:15:21.000 | to protect either rider or driver, and on and on, right?

04:15:24.680 | What does that do?

04:15:25.520 | Think about how much better that is than taxi medallions,

04:15:26.840 | rather than a six-month or annual inspection.

04:15:29.960 | You have reports from every single rider, okay?

04:15:32.840 | Before Uber, it was the taxi drivers and taxi regulators

04:15:37.840 | were in a little monopoly locally, okay?

04:15:40.960 | Because they were the persistent actors in the ecosystem.

04:15:42.960 | Taxi riders had nothing in common,

04:15:45.080 | didn't even know each other.

04:15:45.920 | In New York, some guy gets in a taxi,

04:15:47.600 | another guy, they had no way to communicate with each other.

04:15:49.600 | So the persistent actors in the ecosystem

04:15:51.760 | were the regulators and the drivers.

04:15:53.760 | And they had this cozy kind of thing,

04:15:55.160 | and medallion prices just kept going up.

04:15:56.800 | And this was a sort of collaboration

04:15:58.520 | on artificial scarcity.

04:15:59.960 | Afterwards, with Uber and Lyft and other entrants,

04:16:03.120 | you had something interesting,

04:16:03.960 | a different kind of regulator-driver fusion.

04:16:06.680 | If you assume regulatory capture exists and lean into it,

04:16:11.080 | Uber is the new regulator,

04:16:13.440 | and Uber drivers are the drivers.

04:16:15.720 | Lyft is the competing regulator,

04:16:17.720 | and Lyft drivers are the new drivers, okay?

04:16:19.920 | So you have a regulator-driver fusion

04:16:22.200 | versus another regulator-driver fusion.

04:16:23.880 | You no longer have a monopoly, you have multiple parties.

04:16:27.640 | Okay, you have a competitive market.

04:16:29.440 | This is the concept of polycentric law, right?

04:16:32.160 | Where you have multiple different legal regimes

04:16:34.920 | in the same jurisdiction overlapping

04:16:36.800 | that you can choose between with a tap of a button, right?

04:16:39.160 | All these concepts from libertarian theory,

04:16:41.040 | like polycentric law or catalysis,

04:16:43.600 | all these things are becoming more possible

04:16:45.560 | now that the internet

04:16:46.400 | has increased microeconomic leverage,

04:16:48.520 | because that exit is now possible.

04:16:52.640 | Now, you may argue, "Oh, well, Lyft and Uber,

04:16:55.720 | they're not profitable anymore."

04:16:57.000 | And there's two different criticisms of them.

04:16:58.720 | One is, "Oh, they're not profitable,"

04:17:00.640 | or, "Oh, they're charging too much," or whatever.

04:17:02.760 | And I think part of this is because of certain kinds of...

04:17:06.240 | The regulatory state has caught up

04:17:07.760 | to try to make them uncompetitive.

04:17:09.040 | For example, they don't allow people in some states

04:17:11.800 | to identify themselves as independent contractors,

04:17:13.640 | even if they are part-time, okay?

04:17:15.720 | There's various other kinds of rules and regulations.

04:17:18.760 | You know, in Austin for a while,

04:17:19.920 | Uber was even banned, what have you, right?

04:17:22.240 | Net-net though, like Uber, Grab, Gojek, Lyft, Didi,

04:17:27.240 | like ride-sharing as a concept is now out there.

04:17:30.600 | And whatever the next version is, whether it's self-driving,

04:17:32.800 | like, while it's like a very hard-fought battle

04:17:34.920 | and the regulatory state keeps trying

04:17:35.960 | to push things back into the garage,

04:17:38.400 | this is a fundamentally better way

04:17:40.120 | of just doing regulation of taxis.

04:17:42.240 | Similarly, Airbnb for hotels.

04:17:45.040 | I mean, it's basically the same thing, okay?

04:17:47.640 | And Airbnb could use competition.

04:17:50.880 | I think that it would be good to have, you know,

04:17:52.720 | like competition for them,

04:17:53.800 | and there are other kinds of sites opening up.

04:17:56.120 | But the fundamental concept of the cloud regulator now,

04:17:58.080 | let's apply it here.

04:17:59.320 | Once you realize regulation is information,

04:18:02.040 | the way you'd set up a competitor to FDA or SEC or FAA

04:18:08.080 | or something like that is you just do better reviews.

04:18:11.340 | Like you just start with that.

04:18:13.160 | That's pure information.

04:18:13.980 | You're under free speech.

04:18:14.820 | That's like still, you know, the most defended thing,

04:18:17.200 | literally just publishing reviews.

04:18:18.760 | And not just reviews by any old person.

04:18:20.800 | It turns out that FDA typically will use expert panels,

04:18:23.800 | where there's expert panels.

04:18:24.640 | It's like professors from Harvard or, you know,

04:18:26.520 | things like that.

04:18:27.360 | So what that is, is this concept of a reputational bridge.

04:18:31.840 | What you wanna do is you wanna have folks who are,

04:18:33.880 | let's say, biotech entrepreneurs,

04:18:36.160 | or they're, you know, profs like Sinclair or what have you.

04:18:40.280 | You do wanna have the reviews of the crowd, okay?

04:18:44.040 | But you also wanna have, especially in medicine,

04:18:45.800 | by the way, so you wanna have the reviews of experts

04:18:47.720 | of some kind.

04:18:48.880 | So there's gonna be defectors from the current establishment.

04:18:51.560 | Okay, just like, you know,

04:18:52.760 | there are profs who defected from computer science academia

04:18:55.320 | to become Larry and Sergey and whatever, you know,

04:18:57.120 | or they weren't profs, they were grad students, right?

04:19:00.080 | In the same way, you'll have defectors

04:19:02.280 | who have the credentials from the old world,

04:19:04.960 | but can build up the new.

04:19:05.920 | Just like there's folks from Wall Street

04:19:07.080 | who have come into cryptocurrency

04:19:08.080 | and helped legitimate it, right?

04:19:09.320 | Just like there's folks who left Salsberger

04:19:11.600 | to come to Substack, okay?

04:19:13.160 | You know, we have these folks who, by defecting,

04:19:17.080 | they help, and then they're also supplemented

04:19:18.960 | by all this new talent coming in, right?

04:19:20.240 | That combination of things is how you build a new system.

04:19:22.560 | It's not completely by itself,

04:19:24.200 | nor is it trying to reform the old, it's some fusion, okay?

04:19:27.200 | So in this new system, who do you have?

04:19:28.320 | You have, like, the most entrepreneurial

04:19:30.480 | and innovative MDs.

04:19:31.800 | You have the most entrepreneurial and innovative professors.

04:19:34.480 | And you have the founders of actual new products and stuff.

04:19:37.680 | And they are giving open-source reviews of these products.

04:19:42.240 | And they're also building a community that will say,

04:19:45.840 | "Look, we want this new drug, or we want this new treatment,

04:19:49.680 | or we want this new device,

04:19:51.440 | and we're willing to crowdfund 10,000 units.

04:19:54.040 | So please give us the thing,

04:19:56.200 | and we'll write a very fair review of it,

04:19:58.680 | and we'll also all evaluate it as a community," and so on.

04:20:01.280 | So you turn these people from just passive patients

04:20:03.600 | into active participants in their health.

04:20:05.160 | That's a community part,

04:20:06.080 | and they've got the kind of biomedical,

04:20:08.080 | technical leadership there.

04:20:09.360 | Now, what is the kind of prototype of something like this?

04:20:12.080 | Something like VitaDow is very interesting.

04:20:14.400 | Things like MoleculeDow are very interesting.

04:20:16.000 | It'll start with things like longevity, right?

04:20:18.760 | And why is that?

04:20:19.800 | Because the entire model of FDA, this 20th century model,

04:20:23.960 | is wait for somebody to have a disease,

04:20:27.760 | and then try to cure them, okay?

04:20:30.200 | Versus, you know, saying an ounce of prevention

04:20:32.440 | is worth a pound of cure, right?

04:20:34.440 | Why are we not actually tracking folks

04:20:37.160 | and getting a constant dashboard on yourself

04:20:39.960 | so you can see whether things are breaking?

04:20:42.080 | And then you deal with it

04:20:43.560 | just like you've got server uptime things.

04:20:44.920 | You don't wait necessarily for the site to go down.

04:20:47.960 | You start seeing, "Oh, response rates are spiking.

04:20:50.040 | We need to add more servers," right?

04:20:51.240 | You have some warning, okay?

04:20:52.800 | Even 10 years ago, there was this article

04:20:55.280 | called "The Measured Man" in "The Atlantic,"

04:20:57.960 | where this guy, physicist Larry Smarr, okay?

04:21:01.200 | What he was doing is he was essentially

04:21:02.920 | doing a bunch of measurements on himself.

04:21:05.600 | And he was finding that there were predictors of inflammation

04:21:09.960 | that were spiking, and he went to the doctor,

04:21:11.400 | showed the charts, and the doctor was like,

04:21:13.320 | "I can't do anything with this."

04:21:15.760 | Then it turned out to be an early warning

04:21:17.800 | of a serious condition,

04:21:19.720 | and he had to, I think, go for surgery or something.

04:21:22.920 | And he was starting to think, "Well, look,

04:21:25.040 | the way that we're doing medicine right now

04:21:26.640 | is it's not quite like pre-germ theory of disease,

04:21:31.640 | but it is pre-continuous diagnostics, okay?

04:21:37.000 | Continuous diagnostics,

04:21:38.720 | just to talk about this for a second,

04:21:40.000 | this is, I mentioned one angle on which you go after FDA,

04:21:43.040 | which is like the better phase four, right?

04:21:45.840 | I've mentioned the concept of better reviews in general,

04:21:48.800 | okay?

04:21:49.960 | I mentioned VitaDow, which is like a community

04:21:52.360 | that is going after longevity.

04:21:54.000 | Let's talk about continuous diagnostics.

04:21:55.960 | So basically, we know better what is going on

04:22:00.840 | in Bangalore or Budapest than in our own body.

04:22:03.140 | That's actually kind of insane to think about.

04:22:05.880 | This stuff that, you know,

04:22:06.960 | it's all the other side of the world, 10,000 miles away,

04:22:08.720 | but a few millimeters away,

04:22:10.320 | you don't really know what's going on, right?

04:22:12.360 | And that's starting to change

04:22:13.720 | with all the quantified self-devices,

04:22:15.360 | the hundreds of millions of Apple Watches

04:22:17.640 | and Fitbits and stuff, right?

04:22:19.320 | You're also starting to see continuous glucose meters,

04:22:21.280 | which are very important.

04:22:22.200 | They're starting to give you readouts.

04:22:23.200 | People are seeing, "Wow, this is spiking my insulin.

04:22:25.840 | "Or rather, this is spiking my blood sugar."

04:22:28.840 | And it might be something you didn't predict.

04:22:30.800 | It varies for different people.

04:22:32.000 | For some people, you know,

04:22:33.480 | a banana isn't a big deal.

04:22:34.420 | For others, it's actually quite bad for the blood sugar.

04:22:36.960 | What happens when you extend that?

04:22:38.040 | Well, about 10 years ago, a guy, Mike Snyder,

04:22:41.960 | professor at Stanford, did something called the integrome,

04:22:44.280 | where he just threw the kitchen sink

04:22:45.800 | of all the diagnostics he could at himself

04:22:47.640 | over the period of, I think, a few weeks or a few months.

04:22:50.240 | I forget the exact duration.

04:22:51.640 | And he was able to do things where he could see,

04:22:53.560 | during that period, he got a cold or something.

04:22:55.920 | And he could see in the expression data,

04:22:58.320 | the gene expression data,

04:22:59.260 | that he was getting sick before he felt sick.

04:23:02.000 | He could also see that something about that viral infection

04:23:04.840 | made him develop diabetes-like symptoms,

04:23:08.000 | if I'm remembering it accurately.

04:23:10.080 | So you could see, "Oh, wait a second.

04:23:11.100 | "These are things that I can see in my readouts

04:23:15.600 | "that I would only have the vaguest interpretation of

04:23:19.720 | "as a human being."

04:23:22.680 | And moreover, he could take,

04:23:25.400 | I don't think he did this,

04:23:26.240 | but if you took treatments, if you took drugs,

04:23:29.040 | you could actually show what your steady state was,

04:23:34.080 | if you tracked over time,

04:23:35.160 | show what your disease state or sick state was.

04:23:38.560 | And then this drug pushes you back into non-disease state.

04:23:42.600 | You can actually get a quantitative readout

04:23:44.840 | of what steady state was.

04:23:47.260 | And that steady state,

04:23:50.400 | your expression levels across all these genes,

04:23:53.000 | your small molecules,

04:23:53.960 | basically everything you can measure,

04:23:56.960 | that's gonna vary from person to person.

04:23:59.080 | What's healthy and natural for you

04:24:01.160 | may be a different baseline than for me.

04:24:02.880 | For example, people who are,

04:24:04.240 | small example, people who are South Asian

04:24:06.520 | or have dark skin tend to have vitamin D deficiency.

04:24:08.920 | Why?

04:24:09.760 | Because we need a lot of sunlight.

04:24:11.040 | So often inside, you're tapping on your screen.

04:24:14.080 | So what do we do?

04:24:15.000 | Take actually significant vitamin D infusions.

04:24:17.520 | That's a small example

04:24:19.560 | of where baselines differ between people.

04:24:22.080 | So continuous diagnostics, what could that mean?

04:24:25.440 | That could mean things like the continuous glucose meter,

04:24:27.800 | it's quantified self,

04:24:29.680 | it's like continuous blood testing.

04:24:31.680 | So you have a so-called mobile phlebotomist.

04:24:33.860 | This is something which,

04:24:35.480 | phlebotomist takes blood,

04:24:36.600 | mobile phlebotomist would come to your office,

04:24:38.600 | come to your remote office.

04:24:39.880 | This is a great business for people.

04:24:41.240 | I think you can revisit this in 2022.

04:24:44.440 | People tried this in the 2010s,

04:24:45.600 | but I think it's worth revisiting.

04:24:47.200 | Mobile phlebotomist comes every week or every month,

04:24:50.520 | takes blood, runs every test.

04:24:52.560 | Maybe that's a few thousand dollars a year,

04:24:55.400 | maybe eventually gets to a few hundred dollars a year.

04:24:58.300 | And that's expensive in some ways,

04:24:59.800 | but boy, that's better health insurance in other ways.

04:25:01.840 | - Yeah, I mean, it's amazing.

04:25:03.040 | So one, there's a bunch of companies that do this,

04:25:04.880 | and I actually would love to learn more about them.

04:25:06.640 | One of them is a company called InsideTracker

04:25:09.660 | that sponsors this podcast.

04:25:10.960 | They do that, but the reason I really appreciate them,

04:25:13.200 | they're the first ones that introduced me

04:25:14.720 | to how easy it is.

04:25:17.160 | But it's also depressing how little information,

04:25:20.140 | exactly as you beautifully put once again,

04:25:22.520 | how little information we have about our own body

04:25:25.440 | in a continuous sense.

04:25:27.080 | And actually also sadly, even with InsideTracker,

04:25:31.520 | as I collect that data,

04:25:33.280 | how not integrated that data is with everything else.

04:25:37.960 | If I wanted to opt in, I would like,

04:25:40.920 | I can't, it's just like riffing off the top of my head,

04:25:44.140 | but I would like Google Maps to know

04:25:47.000 | what's going on inside my body.

04:25:48.840 | Maybe I can't intuit at first

04:25:50.920 | why that application is useful,

04:25:52.440 | but there could be incredible,

04:25:54.000 | like that's where the entrepreneur spirit builds

04:25:57.280 | is like, what can I do with that data?

04:25:58.880 | Can I make the trip less stressful for you

04:26:01.400 | and adjust to Google Maps, that kind of thing.

04:26:03.480 | - That's right.

04:26:04.320 | So, I mean, one of the things about this, by the way,

04:26:06.280 | is because there are so many movies made about Theranos,

04:26:09.920 | okay, that's one of the reasons why people

04:26:12.560 | have sort of been scared off from doing diagnostics

04:26:16.360 | to some extent, okay, why?

04:26:17.960 | 'Cause VCs are like, oh, is this another Theranos?

04:26:20.080 | Like the diligence and everything,

04:26:21.840 | everyone's looking at it, oh, blood testing,

04:26:23.600 | one drop of blood, huh?

04:26:24.920 | Hurts the recruiting.

04:26:25.920 | Essentially, a lot of the media and stuff around that

04:26:30.520 | basically has pathologized the thing

04:26:32.080 | that we wanna have a lot more entrance in, right?

04:26:34.520 | Now, one way of thinking about it is

04:26:36.560 | FDA has killed way more people than Theranos has,

04:26:40.720 | all right, way more.

04:26:41.540 | Just take drug lag alone, okay?

04:26:43.900 | Whenever you have a drug that works

04:26:47.460 | and reduce morbidity and mortality

04:26:49.340 | after it was actually generally available,

04:26:51.120 | but was delayed for months or years,

04:26:53.880 | the integral under that curve

04:26:55.100 | is the excess morbidity and mortality

04:26:56.580 | attributable to FDA's drug lag.

04:26:58.260 | You could go back and do that study

04:27:00.580 | across lots and lots of different drugs,

04:27:02.340 | and you'd probably find quite a lot.

04:27:03.580 | Alex Tabarrok and others have written on this, right?

04:27:05.820 | Daniel Henninger has written on this, okay?

04:27:07.580 | That's just like one example.

04:27:09.100 | I mean, I gave the pandemic example,

04:27:10.620 | the fact that they held up the EUAs for the tests

04:27:13.460 | and didn't do challenge trials.

04:27:15.100 | That's like a million American dead

04:27:18.340 | that could have been orders of magnitude less

04:27:19.860 | if we had gotten the vaccine out

04:27:21.120 | to the vulnerable population sooner, okay?

04:27:23.540 | So you're talking about something

04:27:24.700 | that has a total monopoly on global health,

04:27:27.160 | and you can't know what it is without that

04:27:32.160 | unless you have zones that are FDA-free,

04:27:35.140 | but that have some form of regulation.

04:27:37.640 | As I mentioned, it's a V3.

04:27:38.900 | It's not going back to zero regulation,

04:27:41.180 | everybody in a manner for itself,

04:27:42.900 | but it's a more reputable regulator,

04:27:45.340 | just like Uber is a better regulator

04:27:48.140 | than the taxi medallions, right?

04:27:49.740 | - Yeah, I mean, you're painting such an incredible picture.

04:27:52.180 | You're making me wish you were FDA commissioner.

04:27:55.220 | But I-

04:27:56.060 | - There are a bunch of people who tweeted something like that

04:27:57.620 | after the, you know, with the pandemic.

04:28:00.180 | Whatever, go ahead, yeah.

04:28:01.300 | - Is that possible?

04:28:02.340 | Like if you were just given,

04:28:04.140 | if you became FDA commissioner,

04:28:05.540 | could you push for those kinds of changes,

04:28:09.300 | or is that really something

04:28:10.500 | that has to come from the outside?

04:28:11.820 | - Short answer is no.

04:28:12.860 | And the longer answer, meaning-

04:28:15.180 | - The long, that'd be funny if you're like,

04:28:16.500 | the short answer is no, the long answer is yes.

04:28:18.540 | (both laughing)

04:28:19.500 | - So basically, see, a CEO of a company,

04:28:23.820 | while it's very difficult,

04:28:25.420 | they can hire and fire, right?

04:28:27.780 | So in theory, they can do surgery on the organism.

04:28:31.340 | And like, you know, Steve Jobs took over Apple

04:28:33.900 | and was able to hire and fire, raise money, do this, that.

04:28:37.220 | He basically had root over Apple.

04:28:39.420 | That he was a system administrator, right?

04:28:41.220 | He had full permissions, okay?

04:28:43.780 | As FDA commissioner,

04:28:44.780 | you do not have full permissions over FDA,

04:28:47.260 | let alone like the whole structure around it, right?

04:28:50.380 | If you're FDA commissioner,

04:28:51.420 | you are not the CEO of the agency, okay?

04:28:54.060 | Lots of these folks there have career tenure.

04:28:57.460 | They can't be fired.

04:29:00.340 | They can't even really be disciplined.

04:29:01.460 | There's something called the Douglas factors.

04:29:02.940 | You ever heard of the Douglas factors?

04:29:04.540 | It's like the Miranda rights for federal employees, okay?

04:29:07.780 | You know, the right to remain as a,

04:29:08.940 | so basically, if you've heard

04:29:10.540 | that federal employees can't be fired,

04:29:12.260 | the Douglas factors are how that's actually operationalized.

04:29:15.420 | When you try to fire somebody,

04:29:16.940 | it's this whole process where they get to appeal it

04:29:20.420 | and so on and so forth.

04:29:21.340 | And they're sitting in the office

04:29:22.660 | while you're trying to fire them.

04:29:24.300 | And they're complaining to everybody around them

04:29:26.900 | that this guy's trying to fire me,

04:29:28.020 | he's such a bad guy, blah, blah, right?

04:29:30.260 | And everybody around, even if, you know,

04:29:33.220 | they may think that guy is doing a bad job,

04:29:35.060 | they're like, wait a second, he's trying to fire you,

04:29:36.340 | he might try to fire me too.

04:29:38.180 | And so anybody who tries to fire somebody at FDA

04:29:41.060 | just gets a face full of lead for their troubles.

04:29:44.620 | What they instead will do is sometimes

04:29:45.860 | they'll just transfer somebody to the basement or something

04:29:48.700 | so they don't have to deal with them

04:29:49.540 | if they're truly bad, okay?

04:29:51.300 | But the thing about this is there is only one caveat,

04:29:55.420 | Douglas factor number eight,

04:29:57.140 | the notoriety of the offense or its impact

04:29:59.060 | upon the reputation of the agency.

04:30:02.980 | There's that word again, reputation,

04:30:04.300 | of reputation and power.

04:30:05.780 | So the one way you can truly screw up

04:30:08.180 | within a regulatory bureaucracy

04:30:09.980 | is if you sort of endanger the like annual budget renewal.

04:30:14.140 | Think of it as like this mini Death Star

04:30:16.780 | that's coming to dock against the max Death Star

04:30:19.820 | for its like annual refuel.

04:30:22.380 | And it's talking about all the corporate criminals

04:30:24.380 | that it's prosecuted, the quotas,

04:30:26.100 | like the police quotas, the ticketing, you know,

04:30:28.180 | and if they don't have a crisis, they will like invent one.

04:30:32.420 | Just again, just like TSA,

04:30:33.780 | just like other agencies you're more familiar with,

04:30:35.420 | you can kind of map it back.

04:30:36.460 | Look at the guns and drugs we've seized.

04:30:38.740 | And say an incentive for, you know,

04:30:41.700 | creating these crises or manufacturing them

04:30:43.580 | or exaggerating them.

04:30:44.580 | And if you endanger that refueling,

04:30:48.100 | that annual budget renewal or, you know, what have you,

04:30:51.380 | then the whole agency will basically be like,

04:30:53.260 | okay, you're bad and you can be disciplined

04:30:55.380 | or sometimes, you know, with rare except,

04:30:56.980 | you know, you can be booted.

04:30:58.460 | But what that means is that FDA commissioner

04:31:00.980 | is actually a white elephant.

04:31:02.260 | It's a ceremonial role, really, right?

04:31:04.220 | You know, the term white elephant,

04:31:05.340 | it's like basically, you know,

04:31:07.300 | the Maharaja gives you a white elephant as a gift.

04:31:11.300 | Seems great.

04:31:12.260 | Next day, it's eaten all of your grass.

04:31:15.340 | It's pooped on your lawn.

04:31:17.180 | It has like, just put a foot on your car and smashed it.

04:31:20.820 | But you can't give it away.

04:31:22.300 | It's a white elephant.

04:31:23.140 | The Maharaja gave it to you, right?

04:31:25.260 | That's what being like FDA commissioner is.

04:31:27.540 | It's the kind of thing where if,

04:31:31.020 | and a lot of people are drawn in like moths to the flame

04:31:33.300 | for these titles of the establishment.

04:31:37.300 | I wanna be head of this.

04:31:38.660 | I wanna be head of that, right?

04:31:40.620 | And really what it is, it's like,

04:31:42.780 | I don't know, becoming head of Kazakhstan in the mid 1980s

04:31:49.220 | in the Soviet Union, the Kazakhstan SSR, right?

04:31:51.340 | Soviet Socialist Republic,

04:31:52.580 | before the thing was gonna like crumble potentially, right?

04:31:55.260 | In many ways, it's becoming, you know,

04:31:56.980 | folks who are just totally status obsessed

04:31:58.580 | getting these positions,

04:32:00.100 | but like a lot of the merit,

04:32:02.940 | all the folks with merit are kind of leaving the government

04:32:05.300 | and going into, you know, tech or crypto or what have you.

04:32:09.100 | So even if these agencies were hollow before,

04:32:12.180 | in some ways they're becoming hollower

04:32:13.620 | because they have less talent there, right?

04:32:15.900 | So A, you can't hire and fire very easily.

04:32:18.300 | You can hire a little bit, but you can't really fire.

04:32:20.660 | B, a lot of the talent has left the building,

04:32:24.380 | but was there.

04:32:25.260 | C, we're entering the decentralizing era.

04:32:27.500 | And D, you know, like, be like Satoshi.

04:32:30.780 | Satoshi founded Bitcoin

04:32:32.220 | 'cause he knew you could not reform the Fed.

04:32:34.180 | There's everybody's trying to go and reform, reform, reform.

04:32:36.620 | The reason they're trying to reform

04:32:37.460 | is we haven't figured out the mechanism

04:32:39.060 | to build something new.

04:32:39.900 | And now perhaps we have that.

04:32:40.780 | So I've named a few of them, right?

04:32:42.060 | I'll name one more.

04:32:43.020 | Related to the literants.

04:32:45.340 | Fitness is actually the backdoor to a lot of medicine.

04:32:48.260 | Okay, why is that?

04:32:50.020 | You go to any, you know, conference,

04:32:51.940 | it could be neurology, it could be cardiology.

04:32:54.260 | You'll find somebody who's giving a talk

04:32:55.580 | that says something along the lines of,

04:32:57.220 | fitness is the ultimate drug.

04:32:58.620 | Maybe not today when people are saying,

04:32:59.860 | oh, fat phobic or whatever, but not too many years ago.

04:33:01.980 | You'd see somebody, people saying,

04:33:04.340 | fitness is the ultimate drug.

04:33:05.180 | If we could just prescribe fitness in a pill,

04:33:08.000 | that would improve your cardiovascular function,

04:33:09.620 | your neurological function, it deals with depression.

04:33:11.060 | - By the way, in that case,

04:33:12.140 | the use of the word drug means medicine, so.

04:33:14.740 | - Medicine, yeah, sure, sure, sure.

04:33:16.740 | - Fitness is the ultimate medicine, yeah.

04:33:18.380 | - Yeah, the ultimate medicine, right?

04:33:19.540 | So if they could just prescribe the effects of it,

04:33:22.220 | it's just like, boom, just massive effect, right?

04:33:24.560 | Like you're fit enough, you do the resistance training,

04:33:26.520 | it helps with, you know, preventive diabetes.

04:33:28.740 | Every kind of thing in the world,

04:33:30.060 | you see a significant treatment effect.

04:33:32.660 | Yet your fitness is your own responsibility.

04:33:34.860 | You go to some gym, 24 Hour Fitness, what do they have?

04:33:37.100 | They have on the wall exhortations like,

04:33:39.700 | your body is your responsibility, right?

04:33:42.460 | Am I right?

04:33:43.300 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

04:33:44.140 | - And you know, go ahead, but.

04:33:46.580 | - No, it's just, it's hilarious, yes, yes, yes.

04:33:49.940 | - It's funny, but it's true, right?

04:33:51.180 | - Yeah, it's funny 'cause it's true.

04:33:52.180 | - And so your fitness, your diet, that's your responsibility.

04:33:55.020 | But when you go into a doctor's office,

04:33:58.100 | suddenly it becomes lie back and think of England, okay?

04:34:00.900 | Suddenly you become passive.

04:34:02.400 | Suddenly, oh, your doctor is Dr. Google?

04:34:05.100 | Well, your doctor must be a moron.

04:34:06.740 | You're going and trying to take care of yourself,

04:34:08.900 | you're Googling symptoms.

04:34:10.460 | Oh, how stupid you are.

04:34:12.140 | I have a medical degree.

04:34:13.080 | And that doctor, see, the thing is,

04:34:15.580 | if you come in and you've self-diagnosed

04:34:17.540 | or you've done some of your own research,

04:34:19.360 | if you're right, and if they've got an ego about it,

04:34:22.480 | they're undermined.

04:34:23.780 | And if you're wrong, they're like, you know,

04:34:25.300 | ha ha, you know, arrogant.

04:34:26.460 | But either way, if they've got this kind of mindset,

04:34:29.020 | they have an incentive to resist

04:34:30.540 | the patient taking care of themselves.

04:34:31.660 | Isn't that the doctor's job, right?

04:34:33.260 | And they're kind of taught to behave like this, many of them.

04:34:36.740 | So what that means then is that intervention

04:34:39.660 | of that 15 or 30 minute appointment with the doctor,

04:34:42.460 | whatever drug they prescribe better hit you

04:34:44.260 | like Thor's hammer to put you back

04:34:46.340 | on the straight and narrow.

04:34:47.920 | Because that's only with you for like a few seconds,

04:34:51.300 | you know, a few minutes or whatever.

04:34:52.380 | The doctor's only with you for a few minutes.

04:34:53.620 | The drug is only, you know, some drugs are very powerful.

04:34:55.620 | So they actually do work like this, okay.

04:34:57.540 | But your fitness is your own responsibility.

04:35:01.380 | And that's a continuing forcing function every day.

04:35:04.260 | And again, we get back to decentralization, right?

04:35:07.220 | The decentralization of responsibility

04:35:09.700 | from somebody thinking of themselves merely as a patient

04:35:12.060 | to an active participant in their own health,

04:35:14.180 | who's doing their own monitoring of their own health, right?

04:35:16.540 | And logging all their stuff, who's eating, you know,

04:35:20.360 | properly and looking at the effect of their diet

04:35:22.620 | on things like their, you know,

04:35:23.620 | continuous glucose monitor is a V1, but other things, right?

04:35:27.140 | Who is, you know, as fit as they can possibly be.

04:35:30.020 | Like these are kind of obvious things,

04:35:32.100 | but why is this the back door to medicine?

04:35:33.500 | Because since FDA only regulates those things

04:35:36.740 | that are meant to diagnose and treat a disease,

04:35:39.100 | all the stuff that is meant to improve

04:35:42.020 | an otherwise healthy person

04:35:43.700 | is potentially out of their purview.

04:35:45.140 | Supplements are one interesting aspect

04:35:46.900 | that they were carved out in the mid 90s.

04:35:50.020 | And that's why the supplement industry is big

04:35:51.460 | 'cause FDA doesn't have as tight a rein on that.

04:35:54.420 | But all of the Fitbit, CGM,

04:35:58.780 | continuous glucose meter type stuff,

04:36:00.540 | you can crank out all kinds of things

04:36:02.540 | that help people get fitter,

04:36:05.060 | that will also actually have just general health value,

04:36:09.260 | but you're not quite marketing them to diagnose

04:36:11.460 | or treat, you know, a disease.

04:36:13.340 | See what I'm saying?

04:36:14.180 | You're marketing them for the purpose of fitness.

04:36:15.980 | This is a market, why?

04:36:17.740 | Because psychologically people,

04:36:20.180 | they don't like paying to get back to normal,

04:36:23.380 | but they will absolutely pay tons of money

04:36:25.100 | to get better than normal.

04:36:25.940 | They'll pay for fitness, they'll pay for makeup,

04:36:27.660 | they'll pay for hair, they'll pay for this and that.

04:36:30.980 | So that's actually the back door

04:36:33.140 | and you can do tons of things there

04:36:34.580 | where obviously being healthier is also protective.

04:36:38.540 | You can actually show the studies on this.

04:36:39.740 | So this way you build out all the tooling to get healthier

04:36:43.500 | and that actually helps on this axis.

04:36:45.900 | Fewer things which kind of a US medical system,

04:36:47.620 | but I'll admit, 'cause you got me on this topic.

04:36:48.980 | - I love this.

04:36:49.820 | - Okay, so--

04:36:50.660 | - This is the most eloquent exploration

04:36:54.060 | of the US medical system and how to improve it,

04:36:57.580 | how to fix it and what the future looks like.

04:36:59.900 | - Yeah, so-- - I love it.

04:37:01.180 | - So basically, so part of it is decentralizing control

04:37:03.700 | back to the individual, right?

04:37:05.160 | Now, I've talked about FDA at length,

04:37:07.000 | but let me talk about some of the other broken parts

04:37:08.820 | of the US system, right?

04:37:10.800 | There's like AMA, there's CPT, there's CPOM,

04:37:13.780 | there's this, you know, like all these regulations

04:37:17.340 | which see normally in capitalism,

04:37:21.060 | you have a buyer and a seller, right?

04:37:24.820 | Duh.

04:37:25.900 | In medicine, you have third-party regulation

04:37:28.320 | and fourth-party pricing and fifth-party payment, okay?

04:37:33.020 | So third-party regulation, FDA is regulating it,

04:37:36.280 | fourth-party pricing, it is, you know, the CPT codes, right?

04:37:41.280 | Fifth-party payment, it's the insurance companies, right?

04:37:44.980 | And just to discuss these bits of the system,

04:37:48.100 | first, why are some people against capitalism in medicine?

04:37:52.460 | I actually understand why they're against it

04:37:53.980 | because they are visualizing themselves on a gurney

04:37:57.900 | when they're being wheeled in

04:38:00.000 | and now somebody at their moment of vulnerability

04:38:02.380 | is charging this insane price for their care

04:38:04.940 | and many people in the US have had this horrible experience

04:38:07.380 | where they're bankrupted or scared of being bankrupted

04:38:10.220 | by medical bills.

04:38:11.160 | Therefore, the concept of adding more capitalism to medicine

04:38:14.420 | scares them and they think it's horrible

04:38:16.420 | and you're some like awful, greedy tech bro kind of thing.

04:38:19.860 | All right?

04:38:21.020 | Let me say I understand that concern

04:38:23.020 | and let me kind of, let me pull,

04:38:25.140 | tease that apart a little bit, right?

04:38:27.460 | Basically, the most capitalistic areas of medicine

04:38:30.820 | are the most functional areas of medicine.

04:38:32.320 | So that's say the places where you can walk in

04:38:34.540 | and walk out, okay?

04:38:36.380 | Whether that's dentistry, dermatology, plastic surgery,

04:38:40.860 | even veterinary medicine, which is not human, okay?

04:38:43.580 | Where you can make a conscious decision, say,

04:38:45.500 | okay, I want this care or I don't want this.

04:38:48.300 | I see a price list, I can pay cash, right?

04:38:51.420 | If I don't like it, I go to another dermatologist.

04:38:53.820 | There's few dermatological emergencies.

04:38:55.740 | That's why dermatologists have a great quality of life, okay?

04:38:58.280 | By contrast, when you're being wheeled in on a gurney,

04:39:00.380 | you need it right now, okay?

04:39:02.220 | And you're unconscious or what have you

04:39:04.260 | or you're not in a capacity to deal with it, right?

04:39:07.100 | And so these are the two extremes.

04:39:08.820 | It's like ambulatory medicine, you can walk around and pick

04:39:12.260 | and like ambulance medicine, okay?

04:39:14.820 | And what that means is the more ambulatory the medicine,

04:39:19.060 | the more legitimate capitalism is in that situation.

04:39:22.060 | People are okay with a dermatologist

04:39:25.620 | basically turning you down

04:39:26.780 | because you don't have enough money

04:39:28.020 | and you go to another dermatologist

04:39:29.500 | because you can comparison shop there.

04:39:31.000 | It's not usually an emergency, right?

04:39:33.600 | Whereas if you're coming in with an ambulance,

04:39:36.180 | then people don't wanna be turned down

04:39:37.660 | and I understand why, okay?

04:39:39.700 | What this suggests by the way

04:39:40.860 | is that you should only have insurance for the edge cases.

04:39:45.860 | Insurance should only cover the ambulance,

04:39:48.260 | not the ambulatory.

04:39:49.620 | And most people are losing money on insurance, right?

04:39:52.260 | Because most people are paying more in in premiums

04:39:54.780 | than they are getting out.

04:39:56.040 | It's just that this huge flight of dollars through the air

04:39:59.220 | that no one can make heads or tails out of.

04:40:01.180 | Oh, the other aspect that's obviously broken

04:40:03.700 | is employer provided health insurance

04:40:05.260 | which just started after World War II.

04:40:06.980 | So auto insurance is in a much more competitive market.

04:40:09.700 | You don't whip out your auto insurance card

04:40:12.020 | at the gas station to pay for your gas, right?

04:40:14.100 | You only whip it out when there's a crash, right?

04:40:16.140 | That's what quote health insurance should be.

04:40:18.460 | And the Singapore model is actually a pretty good one

04:40:20.480 | for this where they have sort of a mandatory HSA.

04:40:23.020 | You have to like put some money in that

04:40:25.220 | and that pays for your healthcare bills

04:40:27.580 | but then it's cash out of that.

04:40:28.720 | It's like a separate pocket

04:40:29.580 | sort of for savings to pay for-

04:40:31.140 | - Health savings account.

04:40:32.060 | - Health savings account, right?

04:40:33.260 | The thing about this is once you realize,

04:40:36.140 | well first, ambulatory medicine is capitalistic medicine.

04:40:39.220 | Ambulance medicine is socialist medicine, okay?

04:40:42.660 | You wanna shift people more towards ambulatory.

04:40:44.940 | Guess what?

04:40:45.760 | That's in their interest as well.

04:40:46.940 | Now that brings us back to the monitoring, right?

04:40:49.600 | The continuous monitoring where

04:40:51.860 | whether eventually it's Mike Snyder's Integrome,

04:40:54.220 | the V1 is the quantified self and the Apple watch

04:40:57.220 | and the continuous glucose meters

04:40:59.340 | and the VN is the Mike Snyder Integrome.

04:41:01.500 | There's a site called Q.bio which is doing this also, right?

04:41:05.020 | Eventually this stuff will hopefully just be in a device

04:41:07.260 | that just measures tons and tons of variables on you, right?

04:41:09.780 | There's ways of measuring some of these metabolites

04:41:13.820 | without breaking the skin.

04:41:15.140 | So it's not, you don't have to keep breaking the skin

04:41:18.480 | over and over, there's various ways of doing that.

04:41:20.360 | So now you've got something where you've got the monitoring,

04:41:23.860 | you've got the dashboards, you've got the alerts

04:41:26.860 | and just like this Larry Smarr guy

04:41:28.820 | that I mentioned, the measured man,

04:41:30.020 | you might be able to shift more and more things

04:41:32.140 | to ambulatory.

04:41:33.780 | And one of the things about this also is

04:41:35.740 | the medical system is set up in a bad way

04:41:37.900 | where the primary care physician is the one who is

04:41:42.900 | like not the top of their class,

04:41:44.980 | but the guys who are at the bottom of the pinball machine,

04:41:47.420 | the surgeons and the radiologists,

04:41:49.100 | once your stuff is already broken, okay?

04:41:51.620 | They're the ones who are paid the most.

04:41:52.740 | So a lot of the skill collects at the post break stage,

04:41:57.740 | right where you actually want Dugie Howser MD

04:41:59.940 | is at the upstream stage, okay?

04:42:03.020 | So you want this amazing, amazing doctor there, right?

04:42:05.660 | How could we get that?

04:42:06.860 | I mentioned the app that doesn't exist,

04:42:08.980 | which is like a better version of the 3500B, right?

04:42:11.740 | Here's another app that doesn't exist.

04:42:12.860 | And this is one that FDA is actively quashed.

04:42:15.020 | Why can't you just take an image of a mole

04:42:17.980 | or something like that?

04:42:18.940 | You know, with the incredible cameras we have,

04:42:21.580 | a huge amount of medical imaging should be able to be done

04:42:24.620 | at home and it goes to doctors,

04:42:27.340 | whether it's in the US or the Philippines or India.

04:42:29.980 | I mean, teleradiology exists, right?

04:42:32.460 | Why can you not do that for dermatology,

04:42:35.300 | for everything else?

04:42:36.140 | You should be able to literally just hold the thing up

04:42:37.940 | and with a combination of both AI and MDs, just diagnose.

04:42:42.660 | That should exist, right?

04:42:45.140 | Answer is there's a combination of both American doctors

04:42:49.180 | and the FDA that team up to prevent this or slow this.

04:42:52.460 | And, you know, one argument is,

04:42:55.580 | oh, the AI is not better than a human 100% of the time

04:42:59.100 | because it's not deployed yet.

04:43:00.620 | Therefore it could make an error, therefore it's bad.

04:43:02.100 | Even if it's better than 99% of doctors, 99% of the time.

04:43:05.220 | Another argument is the software has to go

04:43:07.620 | through design control, okay?

04:43:09.540 | Now, basically, once you understand how FDA works,

04:43:13.620 | basically imagine the most bureaucratic frozen process

04:43:18.340 | for code deployment at any company ever.

04:43:21.220 | And that is the most nimble thing ever

04:43:24.900 | relative to FDA's design review.

04:43:27.220 | So just to review, A, talked about how FDA

04:43:31.060 | was blocking all this stuff.

04:43:32.580 | B, talked about why ambulatory medicine is capitalist

04:43:35.580 | medicine, ambulance medicine is socialist medicine.

04:43:38.700 | C, talked about how with the diagnostic stuff

04:43:41.620 | we can shift it over to ambulatory.

04:43:43.440 | D, talked about how there's lots of things

04:43:45.120 | where you could have a combination of doctor and AI

04:43:47.020 | in an app that you kind of quickly self-diagnose.

04:43:49.740 | Some of this is happening now.

04:43:51.900 | Some of the telemedicine laws were relaxed during COVID

04:43:55.980 | where now people, you know, a doctor from Wyoming

04:43:58.740 | can prescribe for somebody in Minnesota.

04:44:01.300 | Like some of that stuff was relaxed during COVID, okay?

04:44:04.100 | There's other broken things in medical system.

04:44:05.740 | I'll just name two more and then kind of move on, okay?

04:44:08.500 | I mentioned like AMA and CPT, okay?

04:44:11.540 | - Those are two regulatory bodies?

04:44:13.460 | - AMA, American Medical Association,

04:44:14.780 | CPT, Current Procedural Terminology, okay?

04:44:17.180 | Basically, you know Marx's labor theory of value

04:44:20.380 | where people are supposed to be paid on their effort, right?

04:44:24.100 | Of course, the issue with this is that you'd be paying

04:44:27.900 | a physicist to try to dunk and, you know,

04:44:32.220 | they'd be trying but they wouldn't actually

04:44:34.460 | probably be able to do it.

04:44:35.580 | They'd be trying real hard, whereas you actually

04:44:38.220 | want to pay people on the basis of results, right?

04:44:40.520 | Cheaply attained results are actually better

04:44:42.540 | than expensively attained non-results, perhaps obvious, okay?

04:44:45.720 | Nevertheless, the way that the US medical system

04:44:48.700 | has payouts, it's based on so-called RVUs,

04:44:50.940 | relative value units.

04:44:52.260 | And this is something where there's a government body

04:44:56.580 | that sets these prices and it is in theory only for Medicare

04:45:01.580 | but all the private insurers key off of that.

04:45:05.080 | And AMA basically publishes a list of these so-called

04:45:10.080 | the CPT codes, which is like the coding,

04:45:13.760 | the biomedical coding of this,

04:45:15.260 | and what each medical process is worth and whatnot.

04:45:18.820 | So it's like, I don't remember all the numbers,

04:45:22.480 | but it's like a five-digit code and it's like,

04:45:24.780 | okay, I got a test for cystic fibrosis

04:45:27.500 | or a test for this or a test for that.

04:45:29.420 | God help you if your medical billing is erroneous.

04:45:34.420 | Why?

04:45:35.280 | The insurance company will reject it

04:45:37.220 | 'cause it doesn't pay for that.

04:45:38.060 | This is this giant process of trying to encode

04:45:41.180 | every possible ailment and condition into the CPT codes

04:45:45.900 | and you can literally get degrees in medical billing

04:45:49.620 | just for this, okay?

04:45:50.900 | This enormous inefficient industry, okay?

04:45:54.220 | Like literally medical billing is a whole field, okay?

04:45:56.460 | - Yeah.

04:45:57.300 | What do you wanna do when you grow up?

04:45:59.900 | I wanna work in medical billing.

04:46:01.300 | - In medical billing, okay?

04:46:02.740 | Where everybody's mad at you at all times.

04:46:04.660 | Part of what happens is when you give a treatment,

04:46:07.620 | when a doctor gives a treatment to a patient,

04:46:10.060 | they can't like repo the treatment, okay?

04:46:12.460 | Like a car, you sell a car, you can in theory repo the car.

04:46:14.920 | So the patient has a treatment.

04:46:16.180 | Now, what happens?

04:46:18.060 | Well, the insurance company,

04:46:19.900 | that treatment is perhaps provided,

04:46:23.020 | look, it's a lab test provided by a company, right?

04:46:24.780 | The company bills the patient.

04:46:26.940 | The company is supposed to charge a high price, why?

04:46:29.700 | The insurance company wants it to try to collect

04:46:31.900 | from the patient.

04:46:32.740 | The patient is scared, oh my God, they see this huge price.

04:46:34.980 | They sometimes don't pay.

04:46:37.020 | Sometimes the insurance company doesn't pay either.

04:46:40.140 | And when a company is stiffed by an insurance company,

04:46:44.220 | when a diagnostic company is stiffed by an insurance company

04:46:46.740 | it has to jack up the price on everybody else, right?

04:46:48.960 | Everything boils down to the fact that you don't have

04:46:52.460 | you know, a buyer and a seller.

04:46:54.300 | The doctor doesn't know the price of what is being sold.

04:46:57.100 | The buyer doesn't know the price of what is being bought

04:47:01.100 | at the time it's being bought.

04:47:02.740 | Neither party can really even set a free price

04:47:04.660 | because there's this RVU system that hovers above.

04:47:07.460 | The buyer feels they've already bought it

04:47:09.420 | 'cause they bought insurance.

04:47:10.820 | The insurance company doesn't wanna pay for it.

04:47:12.820 | Everybody is trying to like push the price

04:47:14.900 | onto somebody else and you know,

04:47:17.500 | not actually show the sticker price of anything

04:47:19.860 | and hide everything and so on and so forth.

04:47:22.300 | Oh, the other thing about it is obviously lawsuits

04:47:24.420 | are over everything.

04:47:25.460 | Everybody's mad about everything.

04:47:27.940 | It's health, people are dying, okay?

04:47:30.260 | So everything is just optimized for optics

04:47:32.700 | as opposed to results, right?

04:47:34.340 | Similarly, actually many drugs are optimized

04:47:36.260 | for minimizing side effects and optics

04:47:39.260 | rather than maximizing effects

04:47:40.580 | which are totally different criteria, right?

04:47:42.540 | You might have, for example, a drug that only cures

04:47:46.460 | a thousand people but doesn't have any side effects

04:47:49.020 | versus one that cures a million people

04:47:51.940 | but that has 10 really serious side effects a year, right?

04:47:55.900 | And the second one would probably not happen

04:47:57.780 | because those side effects would be so big, okay.

04:48:00.220 | How do you attack this?

04:48:02.340 | I name a few examples but I actually think the reform

04:48:04.660 | is gonna come in part from outside the system.

04:48:06.820 | In particular, India is coming online, okay?

04:48:10.480 | Why is that important?

04:48:11.820 | Well, you may have encountered an Indian doctor or two, okay?

04:48:16.380 | Maybe an Indian programmer, one or two, all right?

04:48:18.940 | And I do think telemedicine could explode, right?

04:48:23.940 | Where you could have an Indian doctor in India

04:48:28.060 | and there's a US doctor, okay, who's like a dispatcher.

04:48:33.340 | You see what I'm saying?

04:48:35.140 | They've got all these other Indian doctors behind them,

04:48:37.020 | they've got a telemedical app

04:48:38.540 | and you are now doing something

04:48:40.600 | where these relatively inexpensive Indian doctors

04:48:44.820 | who are vetted by the American doctor

04:48:46.460 | or the doctor in the jurisdictions of license

04:48:48.560 | become the backend doctors of the world.

04:48:50.100 | To some extent, that's already there with teleradiology

04:48:52.380 | and other kinds of things, right?

04:48:53.940 | But now that you've got literally like a billion Indians

04:48:56.380 | who've just come online, okay,

04:48:58.260 | you have this huge pool of folks

04:48:59.620 | who have a different attitude towards medicine.

04:49:01.380 | For example, it's a lot more cash payment over there.

04:49:03.700 | For example, India is big on generic drugs.

04:49:06.140 | For example, during COVID, it had something called,

04:49:08.860 | has something called Arrogya Setu

04:49:10.100 | which is a national telemedicine app, okay?

04:49:12.380 | The US wasn't able to ship that.

04:49:13.580 | In some ways, India's digital infrastructure,

04:49:15.740 | again, you'll have to read a post called

04:49:18.720 | "The Internet Country" by tigerfeathers.substack.com

04:49:21.760 | and you'll see that actually India's

04:49:23.840 | national software infrastructure is surprisingly good.

04:49:27.120 | It's not as good as China's in some ways,

04:49:29.100 | but it's like better than the US's

04:49:30.640 | which is like health.gov and like non-existent.

04:49:32.780 | It's like kind of impressive

04:49:33.800 | how good some of India's software is.

04:49:35.760 | The fact that it exists is good.

04:49:37.660 | So you have all these new doctors coming online,

04:49:40.040 | India cranks out generics, right?

04:49:42.540 | Telemedicine is now more legal in the US

04:49:46.000 | and you have a cash payment in India, right?

04:49:49.480 | And in a lot of other places,

04:49:50.560 | you don't have the whole insurance, employer health thing.

04:49:53.720 | And this market is growing.

04:49:55.520 | So you could have a sort of parallel market

04:49:59.680 | that starts evolving, right?

04:50:01.440 | Which is, and people are already doing some medical tourism

04:50:03.720 | and I think that's another exit from the FDA.

04:50:05.560 | You have a parallel market that starts evolving

04:50:07.760 | that just starts from fundamentally different premises.

04:50:09.840 | It's just cash, cash for everything, right?

04:50:13.260 | There's downsides with cash for everything.

04:50:15.260 | There's a huge upside with cash for everything.

04:50:17.020 | Cash for everything means

04:50:17.860 | you get customer service from the doctor.

04:50:20.140 | It means the prices are actually visible.

04:50:23.140 | It ideally pushes you again,

04:50:25.180 | towards more ambulatory medicine

04:50:26.620 | rather than ambulance medicine.

04:50:28.480 | It is monitoring, constant monitoring

04:50:31.340 | with the quantified self and whatnot,

04:50:33.300 | as opposed to just let your system fail

04:50:35.700 | and then wheel you in, right?

04:50:38.600 | There's a reputational bridge

04:50:40.040 | because now we've had a couple of generations almost

04:50:42.400 | of Indian doctors in the US.

04:50:43.880 | So people know that there's some very competent

04:50:47.200 | Indian doctors.

04:50:48.040 | There are a good chunk of AMA.

04:50:49.200 | And so they can sort of lobby for this.

04:50:52.260 | And you have plenty of Indian engineers.

04:50:54.960 | Now I'm not saying India alone is a panacea,

04:50:57.320 | but I do think that this is a large enough parallel market

04:51:00.240 | to start doing interesting things.

04:51:02.000 | - And you could see a sort of medical tourism,

04:51:04.280 | medical migration to where it gives India an opportunity

04:51:08.480 | to basically let go of the constraints of the FDA.

04:51:13.480 | - Yeah, because--

04:51:15.920 | - And innovate aggressively.

04:51:17.480 | And I mean, it's just such a huge opportunity

04:51:20.340 | to define the future of medicine

04:51:22.440 | and make a shit ton of money

04:51:25.000 | from a market that's desperate for it in the United States

04:51:28.040 | because of all the over the regulation.

04:51:30.160 | - That's right.

04:51:31.000 | And I think basically it's something where the reason,

04:51:33.040 | it needs to be--

04:51:33.880 | - And that would fix the FDA, sorry to interrupt.

04:51:35.720 | - Yes, we fix the FDA by exiting the FDA, right?

04:51:38.440 | And then the FDA would dry out and then it would hopefully--

04:51:42.040 | - It might reform, it might dry out, right?

04:51:44.400 | And this is why people are, for example,

04:51:46.400 | they're traveling across borders,

04:51:48.040 | they're getting orders from Canadian pharmacies.

04:51:50.480 | A lot of this type of stuff,

04:51:52.000 | we can start to build alternatives, right?

04:51:54.120 | I mean, India's generic industry is really important

04:51:56.880 | because it just doesn't enforce American IP there.

04:51:59.380 | So generic drugs are cheaper, right?

04:52:02.600 | And it's quite competent, it's been around for a while.

04:52:04.780 | So there's enough proof points there

04:52:06.760 | where, again, I'm not saying a panacea,

04:52:09.920 | it's gonna be something which will require

04:52:11.600 | like American and Indian collaboration.

04:52:13.160 | I think there's gonna be a lot of other countries

04:52:14.480 | and so on that are involved.

04:52:15.800 | But you can start to see another pole getting set up,

04:52:19.100 | which is a confident enough civilization

04:52:22.280 | that is willing to take another regulatory path, right?

04:52:25.640 | And that is in some ways doing better

04:52:27.840 | on national software than the US is.

04:52:29.720 | And it has enough of a bridge to the US

04:52:31.720 | that it can be that stimulation which you need,

04:52:35.120 | which is kind of something that outside poke, right?

04:52:37.800 | I wanna talk about India,

04:52:39.000 | but let me just kind of wrap up

04:52:41.000 | on this big FDA biomedical kind of thing, right?

04:52:44.040 | With the book, "The Network State",

04:52:47.040 | the purpose of "The Network State",

04:52:49.600 | I want people to be able to build

04:52:51.680 | different kinds of network states.

04:52:52.720 | I want people to build the vegan village.

04:52:55.480 | I want people to be able to build a,

04:52:58.000 | if they wanna do the Bendic option,

04:52:59.320 | like a Christian network state.

04:53:01.120 | If people wanna do different kinds of things,

04:53:03.320 | I'm open to many different things

04:53:05.040 | and I will fund lots of different things.

04:53:07.520 | For me, the motivation is just like you needed

04:53:10.960 | to start a new currency, Bitcoin.

04:53:15.280 | It was easier to do that than reform the Fed.

04:53:16.920 | I think it's easier to start a new country

04:53:18.040 | than reform the FDA.

04:53:18.920 | And so I wanna do it to, in particular, get to longevity,

04:53:22.000 | right, meaning longevity enhancement, right?

04:53:24.280 | And what does that mean?

04:53:25.320 | So in an interesting way,

04:53:27.160 | and this will sound like a trite statement,

04:53:28.920 | but I think it's actually a deep statement

04:53:30.480 | or let me hopefully try to convince you it is.

04:53:32.880 | Crypto is to finance sort of what longevity is to,

04:53:36.880 | you know, the currency to medicine.

04:53:38.240 | Why?

04:53:39.240 | It inverts certain fundamental assumptions.

04:53:42.480 | Okay, so at first crypto looks like traditional finance.

04:53:44.880 | It's got the charts and the bands

04:53:47.160 | and you're buying and selling and so on.

04:53:49.000 | But what Satoshi did is he took fundamental premises

04:53:52.040 | and flipped them.

04:53:52.880 | For example, in the traditional macroeconomic worldview,

04:53:57.760 | hyperinflation is bad, but deflation is also bad.

04:54:00.920 | So a little inflation is good, right?

04:54:04.320 | In the traditional macroeconomic worldview,

04:54:06.880 | it's good that there are custodians, banks,

04:54:09.160 | that, you know, kind of intermediate the whole system,

04:54:11.640 | right?

04:54:12.480 | In the traditional, you know, worldview,

04:54:14.520 | every transaction needs to be reversible

04:54:17.840 | because somebody could make a mistake

04:54:19.200 | and so on and so forth, right?

04:54:21.360 | In the traditional worldview,

04:54:22.440 | you don't really have root access over your money.

04:54:24.940 | Satoshi inverted all of those things, okay?

04:54:29.760 | Obviously, you know, the big one is hyperinflation is bad,

04:54:33.200 | but he also thought mild inflation was bad

04:54:35.520 | and deflation was good.

04:54:36.640 | That's just a fundamental shift, okay?

04:54:39.840 | He gave you root access over your money.

04:54:41.520 | You're now a system administrator of your own money.

04:54:42.920 | You can room-RF your entire fortune

04:54:46.000 | or send millions with a keystroke.

04:54:47.320 | You are now the system administrator of your own money.

04:54:48.840 | That alone is why cryptocurrency is important.

04:54:50.960 | If you want system administration access at times

04:54:53.200 | to computers, you'll want it to currency, right?

04:54:55.480 | To be sovereign.

04:54:57.000 | You know, there's other assumptions where like

04:54:58.520 | the assumptions, every transaction is private

04:55:00.480 | in the existing system by default,

04:55:02.880 | or it's visible only to the state.

04:55:04.820 | Whereas at least the initial, you know,

04:55:06.400 | the Bitcoin blockchain, everything is public, right?

04:55:08.640 | There are various kinds of things like this

04:55:10.400 | where he just inverted fundamental premises.

04:55:13.160 | And then the whole crypto system is in,

04:55:16.840 | the crypto economy is in many ways a teasing out

04:55:19.320 | of what that means.

04:55:21.400 | Just to give you one example, the US dollar,

04:55:24.940 | people have seen those graphs where it's like inflating

04:55:26.880 | and so it just like loses value over time

04:55:29.080 | and you've seen that, okay?

04:55:30.780 | Whereas, and most of the time it's just sort of denied

04:55:34.360 | that it's losing any value.

04:55:35.840 | The most highbrow way of defending it

04:55:39.440 | is the US dollar trades off temporary short-term

04:55:44.440 | price stability for long-term depreciation.

04:55:47.460 | And Bitcoin makes the opposite trade-off.

04:55:50.920 | In theory, at least, long-term appreciation

04:55:54.740 | at the expense of short-term price instability.

04:55:58.000 | Because like, you know,

04:55:59.400 | there's the whole plunge protection team and so on.

04:56:01.200 | Basically, there's various ways in which price stability

04:56:05.320 | is tried to be maintained in the medium term

04:56:08.000 | at the expense of long-term depreciation.

04:56:09.440 | You need like a reserve of assets to keep, you know,

04:56:11.920 | stabilizing the dollar against various things.

04:56:13.560 | So what does crypto medicine look like

04:56:16.840 | relative to fiat medicine to make the same analogy, right?

04:56:19.580 | The existing medical system,

04:56:21.080 | it assumes that a quick death is bad,

04:56:25.240 | an early death is bad,

04:56:26.420 | but also that living forever is either unrealistic

04:56:30.320 | or impossible or undesirable,

04:56:32.320 | that you should die with dignity or something like that,

04:56:35.040 | okay?

04:56:36.200 | So a little death is good.

04:56:38.000 | That's the existing medical system.

04:56:40.080 | Whereas the concept of life extension

04:56:42.840 | and, you know, David Sinclair and, you know,

04:56:45.440 | what do you call it?

04:56:46.280 | Healthspan says, rejects that fundamental premise.

04:56:49.480 | And it says, actually, the way to defeat cancer

04:56:52.220 | is to defeat aging.

04:56:53.060 | Aging is actually a programmed biological process.

04:56:56.500 | And we have results that are showing stopping

04:57:00.260 | or even reversing aging in some ways.

04:57:02.420 | And so now, just like with the other thing,

04:57:06.840 | you say a quick death is bad,

04:57:09.780 | and so is actually death itself, right?

04:57:12.700 | So we actually want significant life extension.

04:57:15.620 | This is similar.

04:57:16.620 | It's very similar to what, you know,

04:57:18.840 | the rejection of the fiat system, right?

04:57:22.480 | The fiat system says, a little inflation is good.

04:57:25.360 | Fiat medicine says, a little death is good.

04:57:28.240 | Bitcoin says, actually, no inflation,

04:57:30.900 | just get more valuable over time.

04:57:32.880 | And crypto medicine says, actually, let's, you know,

04:57:35.360 | extend life.

04:57:36.320 | This leads to all kinds of new things

04:57:38.840 | where you start actually thinking about,

04:57:40.200 | all right, how do I maintain my health with,

04:57:43.840 | you know, diagnostics?

04:57:45.160 | How do I, you know, take control of my own health

04:57:48.700 | with the decentralization of medicine?

04:57:50.500 | All the stuff that I've been describing

04:57:52.400 | sort of fits, like, longevity is traditional medicine

04:57:55.780 | as crypto is to traditional currency.

04:57:58.660 | - If we take those assumptions separately,

04:58:00.420 | so we take cryptocurrency aside,

04:58:02.440 | is that to you obvious that this,

04:58:07.260 | letting go of this assumption about death,

04:58:10.620 | is that an obvious thing?

04:58:12.100 | Is longevity obviously good?

04:58:15.660 | Versus, for example, the devil's advocate to that would be,

04:58:19.660 | what we want is to keep death

04:58:22.220 | and maximize the quality of life up until the end.

04:58:26.260 | - Well-- - Like, so that

04:58:28.420 | you're right into the sunset, healthy.

04:58:31.560 | - Somebody who was listening to the whole podcast

04:58:32.980 | would say, well, Balaji, just a few hours ago,

04:58:35.220 | you were saying this gerontocracy runs the US

04:58:37.460 | and they're all old and they don't get it, blah, blah, blah.

04:58:39.660 | And now you're talking about making people live forever,

04:58:41.660 | so there's never any new blood to wash it out.

04:58:43.260 | Ha ha, what a contradiction, right?

04:58:44.620 | - It's funny that you're so on point

04:58:48.060 | across all the topics we covered

04:58:51.940 | and the possible criticism, I love it.

04:58:53.620 | - Well, just trying to anticipate, you know, some--

04:58:55.260 | - Yeah, good, well done, well done, sir.

04:58:58.220 | - I think the argument on that is,

04:59:00.920 | so long as you have a frontier,

04:59:03.080 | it is okay for someone to live long, okay?

04:59:06.980 | So long as people can exit to a new thing, number one.

04:59:09.900 | Number two is, in order for us to go and colonize

04:59:13.100 | other planets and so on, if you do wanna get to Mars,

04:59:16.340 | if you wanna become Star Trek and what have you,

04:59:19.620 | probably gonna need to have,

04:59:23.240 | just to survive a long flight, so to speak,

04:59:28.620 | multiple light year flight,

04:59:30.260 | you're gonna need to have life extension.

04:59:32.580 | So to become a pioneering interstellar kind of thing.

04:59:35.260 | I know that, it's the kind of thing which sounds like,

04:59:38.540 | okay, yeah, and when we're on the moon,

04:59:40.300 | we're gonna need shovels.

04:59:42.020 | It sounds like a piling a fantasy

04:59:47.020 | on top of a fantasy in that sense,

04:59:48.500 | but it's also something where,

04:59:49.720 | if you're talking about the vector of our civilization,

04:59:51.620 | where are we going?

04:59:52.740 | Well, I actually do think it's either anarcho-primitivism

04:59:55.700 | or optimalism/transhumanism.

04:59:58.300 | Either we are shutting down civilization, it's degrowth,

05:00:01.740 | it's Unabomber, et cetera, or it's the stars

05:00:05.380 | and escaping the prime number base.

05:00:07.020 | - It's like, to me, it's obvious that we're going to,

05:00:12.020 | if we're to survive, expand out into space.

05:00:15.940 | - Yes.

05:00:16.780 | - And it's obvious that once we do,

05:00:20.540 | we'll look back at anyone, which is currently most people,

05:00:24.140 | that didn't think of this future,

05:00:27.380 | didn't anticipate this future,

05:00:28.860 | worked towards this future as Luddites,

05:00:31.700 | like as people who totally didn't get it.

05:00:34.340 | It'll become obvious.

05:00:35.620 | Right now it's impossible, and then it'll become obvious.

05:00:38.300 | - Yes.

05:00:39.140 | - It seems like, yes, longevity in some form,

05:00:42.420 | I mean, there could be a lot of arguments

05:00:43.940 | of the different forms longevity could take,

05:00:46.340 | but in some form, longevity is almost a prerequisite

05:00:50.140 | for the expansion out into the cosmos.

05:00:52.380 | - That's right.

05:00:53.220 | - Expansion of longevity.

05:00:54.060 | - There's also a way to bring it back to Earth

05:00:55.860 | to an extent, which is how were societies used to be judged?

05:00:58.980 | You may remember, people used to talk about life expectancy

05:01:01.900 | as a big thing, right?

05:01:04.100 | Life expectancy is actually a very, very, very good metric.

05:01:06.700 | Why?

05:01:07.540 | It's a ratio scale variable.

05:01:09.140 | There's like four different class of variables

05:01:11.220 | statisticians talk about.

05:01:12.100 | Ratio scale is like years or meters or kilograms, okay?

05:01:16.580 | Then you have interval scale,

05:01:18.340 | where plus and minus means something,

05:01:19.700 | but there's no absolute zero.

05:01:21.020 | Then you have ordinal, where there's only ranks,

05:01:23.060 | and plus and minus don't mean anything,

05:01:24.140 | and then you have categorical,

05:01:25.260 | like the Yankees and the Braves are categorical variables,

05:01:29.660 | they're just different,

05:01:30.500 | but all you have is the comparator operator,

05:01:32.380 | whether you have a quality, you don't have a rank, okay?

05:01:34.900 | So ratio scale data is the best

05:01:37.300 | because you can compare it across space and time.

05:01:39.460 | If you have a skeleton that is like, you know,

05:01:43.580 | two meters tall, that's from 3000 years ago,

05:01:46.540 | you can compare the height of people

05:01:49.020 | from many, many years ago, different cultures and times,

05:01:51.180 | right?

05:01:52.020 | Whereas their currency is much harder to value,

05:01:53.740 | that's not like a ratio scale variable.

05:01:55.060 | Other things are harder to value across space and time,

05:01:57.460 | right?

05:01:58.300 | So life expectancy is good because,

05:02:01.100 | as a ratio scale variable, it's a very clear definition,

05:02:03.820 | right, like when someone born and died,

05:02:05.660 | those are actually relatively clear.

05:02:07.500 | But most other things aren't like that.

05:02:11.180 | You know, that's why murder or death,

05:02:14.860 | that, you know, it can be scored, it's unambiguous,

05:02:18.180 | you know, it's done when it's done,

05:02:19.940 | whereas when did somebody get sick?

05:02:21.860 | Oh, well, they were kind of sick,

05:02:23.420 | or they were sick today, they were sick at this hour,

05:02:25.420 | the boundary conditions, many other kinds of things

05:02:27.120 | are not like clear cut like that, right?

05:02:28.700 | - And I should just briefly comment

05:02:30.180 | that life expectancy does have this quirk,

05:02:33.380 | a dark quirk that it, when you just crudely look at it,

05:02:38.500 | is incorporates child mortality,

05:02:41.620 | mortality at age of one or age of five,

05:02:45.020 | and maybe it's better and clearer to look at mortality

05:02:50.020 | after five or whatever.

05:02:54.340 | And that's still, those metrics still hold

05:02:56.540 | in interesting ways and measure the progress

05:02:58.500 | of human civilization in interesting ways.

05:03:00.620 | - That's right.

05:03:01.460 | You actually want longevity biomarkers.

05:03:02.940 | A lot of people are working on this.

05:03:04.580 | There's a book called "The Picture of Dorian Gray,"

05:03:06.580 | and the concept is sell your soul to, you know,

05:03:09.740 | ensure the picture rather than he will age and fade, right?

05:03:13.440 | And so the concept is that that thing on the wall

05:03:16.300 | just reflects his age and you can see it, okay?

05:03:18.660 | So there's a premise that's embedded

05:03:20.540 | in a lot of Western culture that

05:03:22.480 | to gain something you must lose.

05:03:24.000 | If you're Icarus and you try to fly,

05:03:26.540 | then you'll fly too high and it'll melt your wings.

05:03:30.780 | But guess what?

05:03:31.620 | We fly every day, commercial air flight, right?

05:03:33.420 | So the opposite of like the Icarus

05:03:36.140 | or "Picture of Dorian Gray" kind of thing

05:03:37.900 | is the movie "Limitless," which I love

05:03:40.060 | because it's so Nietzschean and so unusual

05:03:42.860 | relative to the dystopian sci-fi movies

05:03:45.260 | where there's a, without giving, right?

05:03:46.660 | I mean, the movie's kind of old now,

05:03:47.940 | but there's a drug in it that's a nootropic

05:03:51.140 | that boosts your cognitive abilities

05:03:53.380 | and it's got side effects, but at the end,

05:03:55.740 | he engineers out the side effects.

05:03:57.980 | Amazing, just like, you know,

05:03:59.020 | yeah, there were planes that crashed and we land, right?

05:04:00.980 | Okay, so why did I mention the "Picture of Dorian Gray?"

05:04:02.980 | Well, there's another aspect of it,

05:04:03.980 | which is longevity biomarker.

05:04:06.340 | The point is to kind of estimate

05:04:07.740 | how many years of life you have left

05:04:09.820 | by that Q.bio or Integrome,

05:04:14.140 | or you take all these analyses on somebody, right?

05:04:17.580 | One of the best longevity biomarkers

05:04:19.620 | could be just your face, right?

05:04:22.780 | You image the face and you can sort of tell,

05:04:25.340 | oh, somebody looks like they've aged,

05:04:26.700 | oh, someone looks younger, et cetera, et cetera.

05:04:29.140 | And this is actually data that you've got

05:04:31.740 | on millions and millions of people

05:04:33.580 | where you could probably start having AI predict,

05:04:37.820 | okay, what is somebody's life expectancy

05:04:40.100 | given their current face and other kinds of things, right?

05:04:42.500 | Because you have their name, they have your birth date,

05:04:44.820 | you have their, you know, date they passed away

05:04:46.660 | if they've already passed away, right?

05:04:48.860 | And you have photos of them through their life, right?

05:04:50.900 | So just imaging might give

05:04:52.940 | a reasonably good longevity biomarker,

05:04:55.500 | but then you can supplement that

05:04:56.740 | with a lot of other variables.

05:04:59.020 | And now you can start benchmarking every treatment

05:05:02.060 | by its change in how much time you have left.

05:05:06.020 | If that treatment, that intervention

05:05:08.100 | boosts your estimated life expectancy by five years,

05:05:14.220 | you can see that in the data.

05:05:16.860 | You can get feedback on whether your longevity

05:05:20.180 | is being boosted or not, okay?

05:05:22.820 | And so what this does,

05:05:24.180 | it just fundamentally changes the assumptions in the system.

05:05:26.660 | Now, with that said, you know,

05:05:29.100 | life extension may be the kind of thing,

05:05:31.220 | I'm not sure if it'll work for our generation.

05:05:33.380 | We may be too late.

05:05:34.580 | It may work for the next generation.

05:05:35.940 | - Wouldn't that make you sad?

05:05:37.740 | - Well, I've got something.

05:05:38.860 | - To the last generation.

05:05:40.420 | - Could be, but I've got something for you,

05:05:42.620 | which is, I call it genomic reincarnation, okay?

05:05:46.380 | This one you probably haven't heard before.

05:05:47.540 | I've tweeted about it, okay?

05:05:49.860 | - By the way, good time to mention that your Twitter

05:05:53.700 | is one of the greatest Twitters of all time,

05:05:55.460 | so people should follow you.

05:05:56.380 | - Well, Lex Friedman has one of the greatest podcasts

05:05:58.500 | of all time.

05:05:59.340 | You guys should listen to the Lex Friedman podcast,

05:06:01.460 | which you may be doing, right?

05:06:03.180 | - Which you may be doing right now.

05:06:04.620 | - Yes. - Yeah.

05:06:05.860 | - Well, thank you.

05:06:06.700 | - What was the term again?

05:06:07.980 | Sorry, genomic--

05:06:09.660 | - Sorry, I call it genomic, not resurrection,

05:06:11.900 | but genomic reincarnation, okay?

05:06:13.420 | So here's the concept.

05:06:15.180 | You may be aware that you can synthesize strands of DNA,

05:06:18.900 | okay?

05:06:19.740 | There's sequencing of DNA, which is reading it,

05:06:22.180 | and synthesizing DNA, which is creating strands of DNA.

05:06:25.360 | What's interesting is you can actually also do that

05:06:28.660 | at the full chromosome level for bacterial chromosomes.

05:06:33.220 | Remember that thing I was saying earlier

05:06:34.340 | about the minimum life form that Craig Venter made?

05:06:37.500 | So people have synthesized entire bacterial chromosomes,

05:06:41.460 | and they work.

05:06:42.300 | Like, they can literally essentially print out

05:06:44.860 | a living organism, all right?

05:06:46.860 | Now, when you go from bacteria to eukaryotes,

05:06:51.500 | which are the kingdom of life that we're a part of, right?

05:06:56.500 | Yeast are part of this kingdom and so on.

05:06:58.060 | It becomes harder because the chromosomes

05:06:59.520 | are more complicated.

05:07:00.840 | But folks are working on eukaryotic chromosome synthesis.

05:07:04.380 | And if you spot me that sci-fi assumption

05:07:06.980 | that eventually we'll be able to take your genome sequence,

05:07:10.620 | and just like we can synthesize a bacterial chromosome,

05:07:14.180 | we can synthesize not just one eukaryotic chromosome,

05:07:16.820 | but your entire complement of chromosomes in the lab,

05:07:18.980 | right, 'cause you have 23, and 46, whatever,

05:07:22.100 | you take the pairs.

05:07:23.220 | What you can do is potentially print somebody out from disk,

05:07:27.600 | reincarnate them, insofar if your sequence determines you.

05:07:34.140 | And you can argue with this 'cause there's epigenetics

05:07:36.260 | and other stuff, okay?

05:07:37.460 | But let's just say at a first order,

05:07:39.020 | your DNA sequence is Lex.

05:07:41.380 | You can sequence that, okay?

05:07:43.100 | You can do full genome sequencing and log that to a file.

05:07:47.140 | Then here's the karma part.

05:07:50.380 | Your crypto community, where you've built up

05:07:53.540 | enough karma among them, if when you die,

05:07:57.420 | your karma balance is high enough,

05:08:00.500 | they will spend the money to reincarnate the next Lex,

05:08:04.940 | who can then watch everything that happened

05:08:08.380 | in your past life, and you can tell them something.

05:08:12.180 | - Mm-hmm.

05:08:13.580 | - Everything I described there, I mean,

05:08:14.660 | if you spot me eukaryotic chromosome synthesis,

05:08:18.660 | that's the only part that I think will be possible, right?

05:08:23.580 | Folks are working on it, I'm sure someone will mention it.

05:08:25.380 | - Right, it's essentially a clone.

05:08:27.540 | - It's like a clone, right?

05:08:29.360 | But it is you in a different time.

05:08:34.360 | - You're in a different time,

05:08:35.200 | but you don't unfortunately have the memories.

05:08:37.980 | Well, you could probably watch the digest of your life,

05:08:42.980 | and it would be pretty interesting, right?

05:08:45.180 | I mean-- - Yeah, that's actually

05:08:47.220 | a process for psychology to study.

05:08:50.180 | If you create a blank mind, what would you need

05:08:53.860 | to show that mind to align it very well

05:08:57.980 | with the experiences, with the fundamental experiences

05:09:02.260 | that define the original version,

05:09:04.900 | such that the resulting clone would have

05:09:08.020 | similar behavior patterns, worldviews, perspectives,

05:09:10.900 | feelings, all those kinds of things.

05:09:14.900 | - Potentially, right?

05:09:16.300 | - Including, sadly, enough traumas and all that.

05:09:18.540 | - Or what have you, right?

05:09:19.500 | But basically, just in a very simple version of it,

05:09:22.380 | by the time one is age 20 or 30,

05:09:26.260 | or something to meet your 20s,

05:09:27.580 | you'll learn your own personal operating system.

05:09:30.100 | You'll be like, "Oh, alcohol really doesn't agree with me,"

05:09:33.500 | or something like that.

05:09:34.340 | Just by trial and error, things that are idiosyncratic

05:09:37.700 | to your own physiology, like, "Oh, I'm totally wrecked

05:09:41.460 | "if I get seven hours of sleep versus nine hours,"

05:09:44.380 | or whatever it is, right?

05:09:45.300 | People will have different kinds of things like this.

05:09:47.980 | That manual can be given to your next self,

05:09:51.100 | so you can go, "Don't do this, do this,

05:09:52.420 | "don't do this, do this," right?

05:09:53.740 | To some extent, personal genomics

05:09:54.820 | already gives you some of this,

05:09:56.060 | where you're like, "Oh, I'm a caffeine,

05:09:57.860 | "or a slow metabolizer, oh, that explains X or Y,"

05:10:01.260 | or, "I have a weird version of alcohol, dehydrogenase,

05:10:04.140 | "oh, okay, that explains my alcohol tolerance."

05:10:06.900 | So this is part of the broader category

05:10:08.820 | of what I call practical miracles, right?

05:10:10.660 | So it's longevity, it's genomic reincarnation,

05:10:14.280 | it is restoring sight, and it is curing deafness

05:10:17.900 | with the artificial eyes and artificial ears.

05:10:22.900 | It is the super soldier serum, did I show you that?

05:10:26.800 | So like, Myostat and Null, a tweet about this,

05:10:29.740 | basically, X-Men are real.

05:10:32.100 | So here is a study from NEGM from several years ago, okay?

05:10:37.100 | What is this, this is like the mid-2000s.

05:10:43.220 | This was in 2004, okay?

05:10:46.380 | So it's now 17 years later, it's probably,

05:10:48.620 | this is almost certainly a teenager by now.

05:10:51.260 | So this kid basically was just totally built.

05:10:56.260 | - Yeah. - Okay?

05:10:58.340 | Extraordinarily muscular. - Like, very muscular,

05:11:00.620 | at a very young age. - Yes.

05:11:03.740 | So the child's birth weight was in the 73th percentile,

05:11:05.940 | he appeared extraordinarily muscular,

05:11:07.300 | protruding muscles in his thighs,

05:11:08.540 | motor and mental development has been normal.

05:11:10.380 | Now at four and a half years of age,

05:11:11.500 | he continues to have increased muscle bulk and strength.

05:11:14.100 | And so, essentially, Myostatin mutation

05:11:17.100 | associated with gross muscle hypertrophy in a child.

05:11:19.340 | So this is like real life X-Men, okay?

05:11:22.900 | And-- - And there's pictures

05:11:24.900 | of animals. - Yes.

05:11:27.180 | So there's a company called Variant Bio

05:11:29.020 | that is looking at people

05:11:30.500 | who have exceptional health-related traits,

05:11:33.020 | and is looking for essentially this kind of thing,

05:11:35.180 | but maybe more disease or whatever related, right?

05:11:38.380 | For example, people who have natural immunity to COVID.

05:11:40.500 | Understanding how that works,

05:11:41.500 | perhaps we can give other people

05:11:42.740 | artificial immunity to COVID, right?

05:11:45.220 | If you scroll up, you see my kind of tweet,

05:11:47.340 | "Super soldier serum is real,"

05:11:49.020 | where it's like wild type mouse and a Myostatin null.

05:11:52.060 | And look at the chest on that thing.

05:11:54.540 | You see the before and after.

05:11:56.100 | - Wow. - Okay?

05:11:57.900 | This is what's possible.

05:12:00.180 | This could be us, but you're regulating.

05:12:02.740 | You know, right?

05:12:03.580 | You're not saying like, "This could be us, but you're playing."

05:12:04.780 | This could be us, but the FDA regulating, right?

05:12:07.380 | All this-- (Lex laughing)

05:12:09.580 | Okay? - Oh, yeah.

05:12:11.220 | On steroids.

05:12:12.820 | - But it's not, that's the thing is--

05:12:13.660 | - But it's not steroids.

05:12:15.300 | - Well, that's the thing is people,

05:12:17.860 | again, you go back to the Icarus thing.

05:12:19.540 | They think, "Oh, steroids.

05:12:21.340 | "Well, that's definitely gonna give you cancer,

05:12:23.180 | "screw up your hormones," et cetera, et cetera.

05:12:25.580 | And it could, but you know what?

05:12:27.820 | Like, have we actually put in that much effort

05:12:30.380 | into figuring out like the right way

05:12:33.340 | of doing testosterone supplementation

05:12:35.140 | or the right way of doing this?

05:12:36.820 | Obviously, we've managed to put a lot of effort

05:12:40.020 | into marijuana, increasing the potency of it

05:12:42.740 | or what have you.

05:12:43.580 | Could we put the effort into these kinds of drugs, right?

05:12:46.780 | Or these kinds of compounds?

05:12:48.380 | Maybe.

05:12:49.700 | I think that would actually be a really good thing.

05:12:51.540 | The thing about this is I feel this is just

05:12:53.300 | a massively underexplored area

05:12:56.220 | rather than people drinking caffeine all the time.

05:12:58.500 | That's a very mild enhancing drug, okay?

05:13:02.060 | Nicotine is also arguably kind of like that.

05:13:04.220 | Some people have it even without the cigarettes, right?

05:13:06.920 | Why can't we research this stuff?

05:13:09.300 | One way of thinking about it is Lance Armstrong,

05:13:11.580 | the cyclist, yes, he violated all the rules.

05:13:16.580 | You know, he shouldn't have won the Tour de France

05:13:18.620 | or anything like that.

05:13:20.140 | But his chemists, and I say this somewhat tongue in cheek,

05:13:22.900 | but also his chemists are candidates

05:13:25.460 | for like the Nobel Prize in chemistry

05:13:27.780 | because they brought a man back from like testicular cancer

05:13:31.380 | to like winning Tour de France against a bunch of guys

05:13:34.660 | who probably, you know, a bunch of them

05:13:35.860 | were also juiced or whatever, right?

05:13:37.660 | Whatever was done there,

05:13:40.180 | take it out of the competition framework.

05:13:42.020 | There's a lot of testicular cancer patients

05:13:43.900 | or cancer patients period who would want some of that.

05:13:46.660 | And we should take that seriously.

05:13:50.100 | We should take that pursuit really, really, really seriously.

05:13:52.740 | Yes, except again, just like the Theranos stuff,

05:13:55.340 | all this pathologize.

05:13:56.300 | Oh, it's a Balico scandal.

05:13:57.660 | Oh, it says, oh my God, you know?

05:13:59.340 | And yes, of course,

05:14:00.420 | within the context of that game, they're cheating.

05:14:02.780 | When the context of life, you want to be cheating death.

05:14:06.620 | - Yes. - Right?

05:14:07.660 | So it's just a kind of a reframe on what is good, right?

05:14:12.460 | And it is just taking away these assumptions

05:14:15.060 | that mild inflation is good or mild death is good

05:14:18.380 | and going towards transcendence.

05:14:20.180 | So that gets me done with the giant FDA,

05:14:24.260 | biomedical, et cetera, et cetera.

05:14:25.620 | - Longevity, yeah.

05:14:26.460 | - Okay. - That is beautifully,

05:14:27.780 | beautifully done.

05:14:28.620 | - You have two questions.

05:14:29.980 | One was on Trump and deplatforming

05:14:31.540 | and the other was on crypto and the state of crypto

05:14:33.300 | and the third is on India.

05:14:34.180 | Which one should we do?

05:14:35.580 | - All right, since we talked about how to fix government,

05:14:38.780 | we talked about how to fix health, medicine, FDA, longevity,

05:14:43.780 | let us briefly talk about how to fix social media, perhaps.

05:14:50.820 | - Sure, very important. - Since we kind of talked

05:14:53.420 | about it from different directions,

05:14:54.820 | but it'd be nice to just look at social media.

05:14:57.100 | And if we can perhaps first, as an example,

05:15:00.580 | maybe it's not a useful example,

05:15:02.060 | but to me it was one that kind of shook me a little bit,

05:15:05.120 | is the removal of Trump and since then other major figures,

05:15:10.980 | but Donald Trump was probably the biggest person ever

05:15:15.160 | to be removed from social media.

05:15:16.900 | Do you understand why that was done?

05:15:19.940 | Can you steel man the case for it and against it?

05:15:22.980 | And if there's something broken about that,

05:15:26.140 | how do we fix it?

05:15:27.220 | - Steel man the case for is kind of obvious

05:15:29.780 | in the sense of you are seeing a would-be dictator

05:15:34.220 | who is trying to run a coup against democracy,

05:15:36.660 | who has his supporters go and storming

05:15:40.580 | the seat of government, who could use his app

05:15:44.940 | to whip up his followers across the country

05:15:47.300 | to reject the will of the people.

05:15:50.920 | And so you're an executive and you'll take actions

05:15:55.180 | that while perhaps controversial are still within the law

05:15:58.780 | and you'll make sure that you do your part

05:16:01.180 | to defend democracy by making sure

05:16:03.860 | that at least this guy's megaphone is taken away

05:16:06.220 | and that his supporters cannot organize more riots.

05:16:08.980 | That's basically the case for the deplatforming.

05:16:12.900 | Okay, would you agree with that?

05:16:15.100 | That's fair.

05:16:15.940 | - So it's like really steel manning it.

05:16:18.460 | - You asked to steel man, so I'm giving the for case, yeah.

05:16:20.340 | - Well, I guess I would like to separate

05:16:23.260 | the would-be dictator.

05:16:26.860 | Oh, I guess if you're storming the Capitol,

05:16:30.800 | you are a dictator, I see, I see.

05:16:32.960 | So those are two are interlinked, right?

05:16:37.680 | You have to have somehow a personal judgment of the person.

05:16:41.980 | - Bad enough to be worth this significant step.

05:16:46.140 | - Yeah, it's not just their actions or words

05:16:48.460 | in a particular situation, but broadly,

05:16:50.780 | this person is dangerous. - The context of everything

05:16:52.140 | that led up to this moment and so on, right?

05:16:54.500 | So that's the for case, right?

05:16:56.520 | Now, the against case.

05:16:57.540 | There's actually several against cases, right?

05:16:59.380 | There's obviously the Trump supporters against case.

05:17:02.600 | There is the sort of the libertarian/left libertarian

05:17:07.600 | against case, and there is the rest of world against case.

05:17:15.260 | There's actually three, 'cause it's not just two factions,

05:17:17.980 | there's multiple, right?

05:17:19.140 | So what is the Trump supporter against case?

05:17:21.140 | There's an article called "The Secret Bipartisan Campaign

05:17:23.700 | That Saved the 2020 Election," right?

05:17:26.100 | Which came out a few weeks after the inauguration,

05:17:30.680 | like February 4th, 2021.

05:17:32.460 | And essentially, the Trump supporter would read this

05:17:35.420 | as basically saying, in the name of defending democracy,

05:17:39.980 | they corrupted democracy,

05:17:41.780 | whether it was actually vote counts

05:17:44.300 | or just changes of all the rules

05:17:45.540 | for mail-in ballots and stuff,

05:17:47.200 | there were regular meetings between the Chamber of Commerce

05:17:49.540 | and AFL and the unions.

05:17:52.740 | In particular, they admit that the BLM riots

05:17:55.260 | of the mid-2020s were actually on a string

05:17:58.740 | and they could say, "Stand down," right?

05:18:00.420 | So that's actually, that's a quote from this article

05:18:03.300 | where it's like, "The word went out, 'Stand down,'

05:18:06.500 | protected results announced that it would not be activating

05:18:08.740 | the entire national mobilization network today,

05:18:10.740 | but remains ready to activate if necessary.

05:18:12.860 | Hothoser credits the activists for their restraint."

05:18:15.640 | So basically, "The activists re-oriented

05:18:18.020 | the protected results protest

05:18:19.340 | towards a weekend of celebration."

05:18:21.360 | So point being that the fact that,

05:18:24.940 | the Trump supporter would say,

05:18:26.380 | the fact that they could tell them to stand down

05:18:28.980 | meant that the previous unrest was in part coordinated.

05:18:33.980 | And so they'd say, "Okay, so that makes it illegitimate

05:18:37.060 | in a different way," right?

05:18:37.940 | Plus, well, there was one riot on Jan 6th

05:18:40.780 | versus the attacks on the White House and stuff,

05:18:43.060 | there was a storming of the White House in mid-2020,

05:18:45.020 | and didn't actually storm the White House,

05:18:46.740 | but they're setting fires outside

05:18:48.160 | and there's quite a lot of stuff, right?

05:18:50.260 | So the second against case is the,

05:18:52.820 | let's say libertarian/left libertarian who'd say,

05:18:55.960 | "Do we really want giant corporations,

05:19:00.900 | regardless of what you think about Trump,

05:19:02.620 | and you don't have to be a Trump supporter,

05:19:04.020 | do you really want giant corporations to be determining

05:19:06.500 | who can say what on the internet?

05:19:08.460 | And if they can de-platform a sitting president

05:19:11.620 | and the quote, "most powerful man in the world,"

05:19:14.460 | he's not the most powerful man in the world.

05:19:16.460 | In fact, the quote, "people" are electing a figurehead,

05:19:21.220 | and actually it's the heads of network

05:19:22.980 | that are more powerful than the heads of state, right?

05:19:26.060 | That the fact that the CEOs of Facebook and Twitter

05:19:30.060 | and Google and Apple and Amazon

05:19:32.500 | all made those decisions at the same time

05:19:35.140 | to not just de-platform Trump from Twitter,

05:19:37.340 | which literally billions of people around the world saw,

05:19:39.820 | but also censor or stop on Facebook,

05:19:42.540 | and to have Google and Apple pull Parler out of the App Store

05:19:45.740 | and Amazon shut down the backend,

05:19:47.620 | that would be corporate collusion by any other name.

05:19:50.460 | It's actually very similar

05:19:51.380 | to the so-called business plot against FDR.

05:19:54.260 | FDR was a complicated figure

05:19:59.100 | who can in some ways best be thought of

05:20:01.380 | as the least bad communist dictator

05:20:04.860 | or socialist dictator of the 20th century.

05:20:06.780 | Why?

05:20:07.620 | Because he nationalized the economy,

05:20:09.760 | repealed the 10th Amendment, right?

05:20:11.700 | Tried to pack the courts.

05:20:13.100 | He sicced the government on all of his enemies

05:20:16.620 | from Huey Long to Andrew Mellon.

05:20:19.060 | Obviously he interned the Japanese,

05:20:20.620 | which shows that wasn't really totally a good guy, right?

05:20:23.180 | We don't usually think about the same guy

05:20:24.540 | who did this, did that.

05:20:25.960 | Earlier in his life, most people don't know this one,

05:20:28.660 | he led a whole Navy thing to entrap gay sailors.

05:20:33.340 | And did you know about this one?

05:20:34.500 | - No. - Yeah.

05:20:35.340 | Google FDR entrapment of gay sailors.

05:20:36.860 | Basically he got young men to try to find folks

05:20:41.340 | within the Navy who were gay

05:20:42.940 | and then basically entrap them

05:20:46.060 | so that they could be prosecuted and what have you, right?

05:20:49.100 | FDR did a lot of stuff,

05:20:50.980 | but fundamentally nationalized the economy

05:20:53.500 | and set up the alphabet soup,

05:20:55.500 | is what they called it at the time.

05:20:56.640 | And that's like all these agencies or whatever.

05:20:58.760 | And in some sense, he's like continuous,

05:21:01.820 | there'd been a rising trend of centralization.

05:21:05.020 | Woodrow Wilson, obviously centralized,

05:21:07.060 | Lincoln centralized, right?

05:21:08.740 | Even actually 1789 was a degree of centralization

05:21:12.020 | over the more loose thing that was 1776, 1789.

05:21:16.340 | So he was on that trend line,

05:21:17.300 | but he was definitely a huge kind of dog leg up.

05:21:20.140 | So the thing is that because of all the lawsuits

05:21:22.460 | that were flying, many folks like Amie Schlaes

05:21:26.500 | has written a book, "The Forgotten Man."

05:21:28.460 | And essentially her thesis

05:21:29.620 | and thesis of many others at that time,

05:21:31.020 | like John T. Flynn, who's this journalist

05:21:32.980 | who was pro FDR and then was against,

05:21:35.360 | was that FDR made the Great Depression great.

05:21:37.980 | Okay, that it wouldn't have been such a bad thing

05:21:40.020 | without him mucking up the entire economy

05:21:42.500 | and giving it a sickness.

05:21:43.580 | It would have recovered quickly without that, right?

05:21:45.740 | This is a counterfactual,

05:21:46.740 | which people just argue about it

05:21:48.500 | really angrily back and forth.

05:21:49.940 | And you can't actually run the experiment

05:21:52.060 | unless you could fork the economy, right?

05:21:54.140 | Just like where the bailouts good or bad.

05:21:55.580 | I think they were bad, but how could I prove it?

05:21:57.900 | I'd need to actually be able to fork the economy.

05:21:59.500 | Crypto actually allows you in theory to do that.

05:22:01.660 | Like where folks could actually shift balances.

05:22:03.420 | This is a whole separate thing

05:22:04.260 | where you can actually start to make macroeconomics

05:22:06.140 | into more of an experimental science

05:22:07.580 | rather than simply arguing from authority.

05:22:09.500 | You could argue from experiment.

05:22:11.500 | Some of the virtual economy stuff

05:22:12.700 | that Edward Castronova has done is relevant to this.

05:22:15.220 | We can talk about that.

05:22:16.460 | Point is though with FDR,

05:22:17.860 | there's this thing because he had

05:22:19.820 | breached such a war on private industry at that time

05:22:23.140 | and justified it with this narrative,

05:22:24.540 | quote, bold, persistent experimentation.

05:22:26.140 | There was something called the quote, business plot

05:22:27.900 | where all of these captains of industry

05:22:29.900 | that he'd been beating up.

05:22:31.060 | And again, Teddy Roosevelt had also been doing this

05:22:33.700 | with the trust buster.

05:22:36.400 | The journos at the time, Ida Tarbell had gone

05:22:38.700 | and basically ran all these articles on Rockefeller

05:22:41.500 | and knocked them down, Woodrow Wilson and Skid Row.

05:22:43.660 | But FDR, the CEOs were thinking,

05:22:46.500 | "Oh, bad, this is so terrible."

05:22:48.940 | There's a so-called business plot

05:22:50.940 | to try to take over the government

05:22:52.780 | and stop FDR from pushing the country

05:22:56.100 | in what they thought was a bad direction.

05:22:57.620 | Smedley Butler was a general that they recruited

05:23:00.220 | to try to help them with this,

05:23:01.940 | but he turned on them and he went

05:23:03.980 | and kind of broke the whole thing open

05:23:05.660 | and told to Congress and so on.

05:23:07.460 | And so all these guys, the whole plot was broken up.

05:23:12.500 | Now, one way of thinking about today

05:23:14.640 | or the whole aftermath of Jan 6th

05:23:17.200 | is it's a business plot, but in reverse

05:23:18.940 | because the generals and the CEOs both were against Trump

05:23:23.100 | and actually the business plot happened

05:23:25.600 | and now all the CEOs just,

05:23:27.300 | they pushed all the buttons that they needed to.

05:23:30.860 | And now the network was prime over the state.

05:23:34.360 | Now, why is that an interesting way of looking at it?

05:23:37.080 | Because one thing I have in the book

05:23:39.640 | is you can kind of think of 1950

05:23:42.240 | as like issues peak centralization.

05:23:44.900 | You go forward and backward in time, things decentralize.

05:23:48.600 | And you start getting mirror image events

05:23:51.480 | that happen with the opposite outcome.

05:23:52.920 | For example, 1890, the frontier closes.

05:23:56.200 | 1991, the internet frontier opens.

05:23:58.000 | Internet becomes open for commerce.

05:24:00.160 | You go backwards in time, you have the Spanish flu,

05:24:02.240 | forwards in time, COVID-19.

05:24:03.860 | Backwards in time, you have the captains of industry,

05:24:08.900 | the robber barons.

05:24:10.300 | Forwards in time, you have the tech billionaires.

05:24:12.400 | And there's so many examples of this.

05:24:14.720 | Like another one is backwards in time,

05:24:17.860 | the New York Times is allying with Soviet Russia

05:24:20.440 | to choke out Ukraine.

05:24:21.840 | Now today, they have reinvented themselves

05:24:24.560 | as cheerleaders for Ukraine against nationalist Russia.

05:24:28.060 | And of course, I think you could absolutely support Ukraine

05:24:30.920 | on other measures, but it's pretty hypocritical

05:24:32.520 | for the guys who profited from the Haldimor.

05:24:35.400 | The Oxelsberg family literally profited

05:24:37.280 | from denying the Haldimor to now make themselves cheerleaders

05:24:40.360 | for Ukraine.

05:24:41.200 | It's actually this insane thing, which we can talk about.

05:24:42.840 | - A tiny tangent on that.

05:24:44.540 | You put it brilliantly.

05:24:46.120 | And a reminder for anyone who listens to me

05:24:49.480 | talk about Ukraine, it is possible to have empathy

05:24:53.140 | for a nation and not be part of the machine

05:24:56.620 | that generates a mainstream narrative.

05:24:58.600 | - Yes, that's right.

05:24:59.600 | Like basically, I was actually one of the first

05:25:02.960 | of three Estonian EU residents, okay?

05:25:06.280 | And I completely understand why Estonia and the Baltics

05:25:09.480 | and all these countries, including Ukraine,

05:25:11.300 | that just recently within living memory

05:25:12.880 | got their independence from the Soviet empire

05:25:15.180 | would not wanna be forcibly reintegrated

05:25:18.320 | into a place that they just escaped from.

05:25:20.660 | And so that is something which is sort of outside

05:25:23.920 | the American left, right, tired kind of thing,

05:25:27.660 | where when you understand it from that point of view,

05:25:29.940 | then there's like a fourth point of view,

05:25:31.380 | which is like India's point of view,

05:25:33.260 | or like much of the developing world,

05:25:35.300 | or what I call parts of it are ascending,

05:25:38.520 | parts are descending, whatever.

05:25:39.720 | But much of the rest of the world

05:25:41.100 | outside of that border region says,

05:25:43.460 | "Look, we're sympathetic to the Ukrainians,

05:25:45.940 | "but we can't allow our people to starve.

05:25:48.340 | "So we're gonna maintain trade."

05:25:50.260 | And guess what, actually, we've got a lot of wars

05:25:52.140 | in our neck of the woods and human rights crises

05:25:54.300 | that Europe just didn't even care about.

05:25:56.020 | So it can't be that Europe's problems

05:25:57.380 | are the world's problems,

05:25:58.220 | but the world's problems are not Europe's problems, right?

05:26:00.020 | So that's like a fourth point of view.

05:26:01.180 | And a fifth point of view is China, which is like,

05:26:03.180 | guess what, we're gonna be the Iran of the Iraq war,

05:26:06.060 | where like who won the Iraq war?

05:26:07.500 | Iran, arguably, because they extended their influence

05:26:09.740 | into Iraq, right?

05:26:10.740 | So China's like, guess what, we're gonna turn Russia

05:26:12.260 | into our gas station and build a pipeline.

05:26:14.500 | They're building, there's a power,

05:26:15.420 | Siberia's like the name of the Eastern Russia pipeline,

05:26:18.600 | just like Nord Stream is,

05:26:19.980 | Nord Stream One and Nord Stream Two.

05:26:21.620 | I think they're building a new pipeline through Mongolia.

05:26:24.700 | So Xi Jinping and Putin and the Mongolian head of state

05:26:28.060 | were all photographed kind of thumbs upping this pipeline.

05:26:30.420 | We'll see if it goes through,

05:26:31.940 | but it's ironic that Russia wanted to make Ukraine

05:26:36.940 | their colony, but the outcome of this war

05:26:40.100 | may be that Russia becomes China's colony.

05:26:42.460 | So that's at least like five different perspectives, right?

05:26:45.380 | There's like the US establishment perspective,

05:26:47.860 | there's the Tucker-MAGA perspective,

05:26:51.260 | there's the Baltics and Ukrainian perspective,

05:26:54.100 | there's like the Indian and like poor countries perspective

05:26:56.260 | and then there's the Chinese perspective

05:26:57.100 | and then of course there's the Russians, right?

05:26:58.540 | So just respect to that, by the way,

05:27:02.340 | that's another example of history happening in reverse.

05:27:04.980 | This is the sign of Soviet partnership,

05:27:07.660 | except this time, China's the senior partner

05:27:10.060 | and Russia's the junior partner,

05:27:11.580 | and this time they're both nationalists rather than communist

05:27:13.820 | and there's so many flips like this

05:27:16.260 | and I'm gonna list a few more actually

05:27:19.600 | because there's so, so, so many of them.

05:27:21.820 | - Do you have an explanation why that happens?

05:27:23.540 | - Yes, let me just list a few of them.

05:27:25.980 | This is in the "The Network State" book,

05:27:27.980 | it's in the chapter called

05:27:29.140 | "Fragmentation, Frontier, Fourth Turning,

05:27:31.740 | Futures are Past," right?

05:27:33.460 | So I give this example of like a fluid unmixing,

05:27:38.460 | all right, just watch this for a second, all right?

05:27:41.300 | - This is from "Smarter Every Day,"

05:27:43.540 | "Unmixing Color Machine, Ultra-Limited Reversible Flow,

05:27:47.380 | Smarter Every Day, 217."

05:27:50.100 | - And so you can mix something

05:27:52.700 | and then like this thing that you don't think of

05:27:54.460 | as reversible, you can unmix it,

05:27:56.980 | which is insane, right, that it works.

05:27:59.300 | Okay, the physics of that situation, it just works, right?

05:28:02.100 | - So for people just listening,

05:28:04.300 | that there is whatever the mixture this is,

05:28:07.140 | this is ultra-laminar reversible flow,

05:28:09.580 | so this probably has something to do with the material.

05:28:12.480 | We're used to mixing not being a reversible process.

05:28:17.980 | - Exactly. - And that's what that shows

05:28:19.380 | and then he then reverses the mixing

05:28:22.460 | and is able to do it perfectly.

05:28:24.140 | - That's right, so that's like the Futures are Past thesis.

05:28:27.300 | - It shows that free will is an illusion, just kidding.

05:28:29.780 | - Well, basically there's some environments

05:28:33.020 | where the equations are like time symmetrical, right?

05:28:36.160 | And this is one model, sort of,

05:28:39.340 | it's just an interesting visual model

05:28:40.460 | for what's happening in the world

05:28:42.060 | as we re-decentralize after the centralized century, right?

05:28:45.780 | So basically, I mentioned the internet frontier reopens

05:28:50.180 | back in the Western frontier closed,

05:28:51.900 | today we experienced COVID-19,

05:28:53.220 | back then we experienced the Spanish flu,

05:28:55.140 | tech billionaires, and we have the capital industry, right?

05:28:56.940 | Today, founders like Elan and Dorsey

05:28:59.500 | are starting to win against establishment journalists.

05:29:02.740 | Back then, Ida Tarbell demagogued and defeated Rockefeller.

05:29:06.000 | I think net-net founders win this time versus the journos.

05:29:09.580 | Back then, the journos won over the founders, okay?

05:29:12.660 | Today we have cryptocurrencies,

05:29:13.900 | back then we had private banking.

05:29:15.620 | Today, this is an amazing one,

05:29:17.340 | we have a populist movement of digital gold advocates.

05:29:21.440 | Back then, 'cause Bitcoin maximalists and so on,

05:29:23.580 | where gold has become populist

05:29:25.420 | because it's against the printing money and so on and so forth.

05:29:28.220 | Back then, we had a populist movement against gold

05:29:31.640 | in the form of William Jennings Bryan

05:29:32.940 | and the cross of gold speech.

05:29:34.340 | Gold was considered a tool of big business.

05:29:36.660 | Now, gold is the tool against big business

05:29:39.220 | and big government, right?

05:29:40.980 | - Digital gold, yeah.

05:29:41.900 | - Digital gold, right?

05:29:43.580 | Today we have the inflation and cultural conflict

05:29:45.460 | of Weimar-like America.

05:29:47.380 | Back then, we had the inflation

05:29:48.380 | and cultural conflict of Weimar Germany.

05:29:50.500 | Today, in Weimar America,

05:29:51.620 | we have right and left fighting in the streets,

05:29:53.540 | same, unfortunately, in Weimar Germany.

05:29:55.720 | Peter Turchin has written about,

05:29:57.060 | today we have what Turchin considers antebellum-like

05:29:59.540 | polarization, like pre-war polarization.

05:30:01.660 | Back then, if you go further back in time,

05:30:03.720 | we had what we now know to be antebellum polarization, right?

05:30:06.260 | Today we have Airbnb, back then we had flophouses.

05:30:08.380 | Today we have Uber, back then we had gypsy cabs.

05:30:10.780 | So today we see the transition

05:30:12.900 | from neutral to yellow journalism.

05:30:14.420 | Back then, we saw the transition

05:30:15.500 | from yellow to, quote, neutral journalism, right?

05:30:17.900 | And today, figures like Mike Moritz,

05:30:21.180 | he wrote about China's energetic and America's laconic.

05:30:24.180 | But back then, Bertrand Russell

05:30:25.780 | actually wrote this whole long book.

05:30:27.500 | Actually, the mathematician, Bertrand Russell, right?

05:30:29.660 | Wrote this whole long book,

05:30:30.940 | which I didn't even realize he wrote

05:30:31.900 | about these kind of topics,

05:30:34.100 | about the problem of China.

05:30:36.220 | And one of his observations was,

05:30:38.340 | again, I'm not saying this is,

05:30:39.860 | I'm just saying he made this observation.

05:30:41.620 | He was saying that America was energetic

05:30:44.100 | and China laconic at the time,

05:30:45.420 | 'cause everybody was in opium dens and so on and so forth.

05:30:49.180 | More examples, the one I just mentioned,

05:30:50.860 | where the Chinese and Russians are again

05:30:52.620 | lining up against the West,

05:30:53.700 | except this time the Chinese are the senior partner

05:30:55.380 | in the relationship rather than the junior partner.

05:30:57.460 | Today, I think in the second Cold War,

05:30:59.540 | there will also be a third world,

05:31:01.220 | but this time I think that third world might come in first,

05:31:04.020 | because it's not the non-aligned movement,

05:31:05.780 | it's the aligned movement around Web3 protocols.

05:31:08.260 | - That's fascinating, yeah.

05:31:10.900 | That's where Nick comes in.

05:31:12.220 | By the way, something we haven't mentioned,

05:31:13.900 | Africa, that there could be very interesting things

05:31:16.100 | in Africa as well.

05:31:17.020 | - Nigeria is actually, Nigeria's has its first tech unicorn,

05:31:20.660 | and I'm investing there.

05:31:22.620 | And I think it's one of these things where China's risen,

05:31:26.140 | India's like about 10 years behind China,

05:31:29.060 | but I think this is the Indian decade in many ways.

05:31:31.780 | We can come back to that point.

05:31:33.580 | But there's absolutely sparks of light in Africa.

05:31:35.940 | I mean, it's a huge continent.

05:31:37.220 | - It feels like the more behind, sorry to interrupt,

05:31:39.460 | the more behind you are,

05:31:41.780 | the more opportunity you have to leapfrog.

05:31:43.860 | - Sometimes, that's right.

05:31:44.700 | And Pesa is a classic example

05:31:46.780 | where they did this in East Africa,

05:31:48.700 | but I think there's more possibility there.

05:31:51.120 | - So what is the fact that there's a kind of symmetry?

05:31:57.380 | - There's a kind of symmetry, right?

05:32:00.060 | - What is that, how did that take us from Trump?

05:32:03.740 | - Trump, okay, yeah.

05:32:06.580 | - The different perspective you took,

05:32:07.980 | the libertarian perspective of it doesn't really matter.

05:32:12.420 | - Yeah, because the libertarian perspective,

05:32:14.020 | or the left libertarian perspective would say,

05:32:17.180 | is it really a good idea to have total corporate power

05:32:20.900 | against the quote elected government,

05:32:23.540 | even if you may disagree?

05:32:26.400 | Do you wanna open the door to total corporate oligarchy?

05:32:29.700 | And it's like the opposite, that's why I mentioned

05:32:31.100 | it's like the opposite of business plots,

05:32:32.380 | and they pulled on that thread, okay?

05:32:34.020 | So the macro explanation that I have for this future

05:32:38.340 | is our past thesis, and there's more,

05:32:39.980 | it also gives some predictions, right?

05:32:41.780 | If you go backwards in time,

05:32:43.060 | the US federalizes into many individual states,

05:32:47.200 | like before the Civil War,

05:32:48.340 | people said the United States are,

05:32:49.740 | and after they said the United States is.

05:32:51.680 | Before FDR, the 10th Amendment,

05:32:53.940 | reserved rights to the states,

05:32:55.180 | afterwards it was just federal regulation of everything.

05:32:58.120 | As we go forwards in time,

05:32:59.380 | you're seeing states break away from the feds

05:33:01.580 | on gun laws, drug laws, sanctuary cities, okay?

05:33:06.580 | Many other kinds of things, you know?

05:33:08.940 | And now Florida, for example, has its own guard

05:33:12.180 | that's like not a national guard, but like a state guard.

05:33:15.020 | Other states are doing this.

05:33:17.660 | - And that's a force of decentralization,

05:33:19.260 | you're saying that parallels in reverse.

05:33:21.820 | - In reverse, right?

05:33:22.820 | So you're having to make America states again.

05:33:25.860 | - Nice.

05:33:26.700 | - Okay, that's what I think happening, right?

05:33:28.900 | I'm not saying, well, I think there's aspects of that

05:33:31.020 | that are good, there's aspects that are bad,

05:33:32.620 | but just like that's kind of the angle, right?

05:33:36.560 | - But then that's, I mean, from your perspective,

05:33:39.140 | that's probably not enough, right?

05:33:40.340 | That's not--

05:33:42.220 | - It's part of the future.

05:33:43.320 | Let's just say--

05:33:44.160 | - I think you, sorry to interrupt,

05:33:45.900 | you suggested all kinds of ways

05:33:47.420 | to build different countries.

05:33:48.920 | I think that's probably one of them.

05:33:50.360 | You said like start micro-countries or something like this.

05:33:54.020 | I forgot the terminology.

05:33:55.140 | - Yeah, micronations.

05:33:55.980 | Yeah, that's not my,

05:33:57.300 | I actually think of them as,

05:33:58.420 | a better term is microstates

05:33:59.620 | 'cause they're actually not nations.

05:34:00.700 | That's why they don't work,

05:34:01.540 | but microstates are better, right?

05:34:03.140 | Coming back to the difference

05:34:04.860 | between the nation and the state,

05:34:05.700 | the nation is like,

05:34:06.620 | the nation state is a term that people use

05:34:09.660 | without expanding it,

05:34:10.740 | but nation comes from the same root word as like natality.

05:34:13.380 | So it's like common descent, common birth, right?

05:34:15.780 | Common origin, like the Japanese nation.

05:34:17.660 | That's a group of people that have,

05:34:19.100 | come down from history, right?

05:34:20.380 | - Hence nationalism.

05:34:21.700 | - Yeah, whereas the state

05:34:22.820 | is like the administrative layer above them.

05:34:24.300 | It's like labor and capital,

05:34:25.780 | like labor and management, okay?

05:34:27.180 | The American state stood over the Japanese nation

05:34:30.220 | in 1946 after the war.

05:34:32.060 | - Right.

05:34:32.900 | Oh, so you weren't talking about tradition,

05:34:34.260 | and you know that that doesn't matter.

05:34:35.780 | - Tradition what?

05:34:36.620 | - In terms of like,

05:34:37.780 | I thought you meant nation is a thing

05:34:39.660 | that carries across the generations.

05:34:41.420 | There's a tradition, there's a culture, and so on,

05:34:43.540 | and state is just the management, the layer.

05:34:45.940 | - I mean, that's also another way

05:34:47.220 | of thinking about it, right?

05:34:48.060 | - There's a reversal there as well, okay.

05:34:50.060 | - Yeah, so I mean,

05:34:51.100 | one way of thinking about it is,

05:34:53.180 | you know, one nation under God indivisible

05:34:56.100 | is no longer true.

05:34:57.180 | It is, America is at least two nations,

05:34:59.740 | the Democrat and Republican,

05:35:01.380 | in the sense of their own cultures,

05:35:03.500 | where I can show you graph after graph.

05:35:05.300 | You've seen the polarization graphs.

05:35:06.900 | I can show you network diagrams where,

05:35:08.980 | you know, like there's this graph

05:35:10.780 | of polarization in Congress,

05:35:11.940 | where there's red and blue,

05:35:12.980 | they're separate things.

05:35:14.380 | There's this article from 2017 showing

05:35:17.180 | how, you know, shares on Facebook and Twitter

05:35:19.380 | are just separate subgraphs.

05:35:20.420 | They're just separate graphs in the social network,

05:35:22.100 | and they're pulling apart.

05:35:23.540 | Those are two nations.

05:35:25.540 | They're not under God because people in the US

05:35:27.620 | no longer believe in God,

05:35:28.500 | and they're very much divisible because

05:35:31.100 | 96% of Democrats won't marry Republicans

05:35:33.340 | in a high percentage other way.

05:35:35.100 | And what that means is in one generation,

05:35:37.660 | ideology becomes biology.

05:35:39.500 | These become ethnic groups.

05:35:40.620 | It takes on the character of Hutu and Tutsi

05:35:42.820 | or Protestant and Catholic, Sunni and Shiite.

05:35:44.500 | It's not about ideology.

05:35:45.980 | If you think about all the flips during COVID, right,

05:35:48.100 | where people were on one side versus the other side,

05:35:49.700 | it's tribal, it's just tribe on tribe.

05:35:51.780 | And so it's not universalist that identity of American

05:35:54.300 | makes less sense than the identity of Democrat

05:35:56.100 | and Republican right now,

05:35:57.660 | or perhaps the identity of individual states.

05:35:59.460 | What I think that's a good or bad thing,

05:36:00.500 | I think that's unfortunately, you know,

05:36:01.900 | whatever it is, it's the arrow of history, right?

05:36:03.940 | On the opposite side of things,

05:36:05.380 | India is actually was 562 princely states

05:36:08.300 | at the time of Indian unification from 1947 to 19,

05:36:12.780 | 1947 when they got independence from the British,

05:36:15.260 | it was 562 princely states.

05:36:16.660 | Most people don't know that part.

05:36:17.540 | They got, or outside India don't know that part.

05:36:19.620 | It got unified into a republic only by like 1950.

05:36:22.500 | And India is like actually a modern create,

05:36:25.220 | India is like Europe.

05:36:26.220 | It's kind of like the European union in the sense that

05:36:28.900 | we didn't have a unified India in the past.

05:36:30.780 | It was something with a lot of different countries,

05:36:32.420 | like Northern South India or like Gujarat and Tamil Nadu

05:36:36.100 | are as different as Finland and Spain, okay?

05:36:39.460 | But India is moved in the direction

05:36:41.180 | of much more unification, like much more, you know,

05:36:44.620 | centralization or what have you,

05:36:47.380 | whereas the US is decentralized.

05:36:48.540 | And you go, okay, a few more things,

05:36:50.700 | there are flips and I'll finish this off.

05:36:52.220 | Today we're seeing the rise of the pseudonymous founder

05:36:54.060 | in startup societies back all the way back in the 1770s,

05:36:56.740 | we saw pseudonymous founders of startup countries,

05:36:58.700 | namely the US, right?

05:36:59.540 | The Federalist Papers.

05:37:00.660 | Today we're seeing so far unsuccessful calls

05:37:03.700 | for wealth seizures in the US.

05:37:05.260 | Back then we saw FDR's Executive Order 6102,

05:37:08.100 | which was a successful seizure of gold.

05:37:10.220 | I expect we may see something like that,

05:37:11.940 | an attempted seizure of digital gold.

05:37:13.700 | And I think that'll be one of the things

05:37:15.860 | that individual states like Florida or Texas

05:37:18.220 | may not enforce that.

05:37:19.860 | And I think that's actually the kind of thing

05:37:21.900 | where you could see, you know,

05:37:23.860 | like a breakup potential in the future, right?

05:37:26.620 | One other thing that kind of rhymes is,

05:37:29.420 | in many ways like the modern US establishment,

05:37:31.660 | the story that you hear is the victories in 1945 and 1865

05:37:37.100 | legitimate the current establishment.

05:37:38.380 | That is being the Nazis, being the Confederates, right?

05:37:40.980 | So you beat the ethnic nationalists abroad

05:37:43.620 | and they beat the quote, secessionists at home, right?

05:37:46.580 | And the ethnic nationalists were, you know, Aryan Nazis

05:37:50.220 | and the secessionists were, you know,

05:37:52.180 | slave owners and against freedom and so on and so forth.

05:37:54.620 | Okay?

05:37:55.460 | I'm not disputing that, I'm just saying that

05:37:56.300 | that's just like the way people think about it.

05:37:59.220 | There's a possibility,

05:38:00.180 | and I'm not saying it's 100% at all, okay?

05:38:02.260 | But if you're a sci-fi writer,

05:38:03.880 | there's a possibility that the US loses

05:38:07.980 | to the ethnic nationalists abroad,

05:38:09.940 | except this time they're Chinese communists,

05:38:11.580 | non-white communists, as opposed to Aryan Nazis,

05:38:14.380 | which seemed like the total opposite, okay?

05:38:17.100 | And there's a possibility that there is

05:38:19.540 | a financial secession at home,

05:38:23.180 | where it's, you know, Bitcoin maximalist states

05:38:26.420 | that are advocating for freedom, the opposite of slavery.

05:38:29.260 | See what I'm saying?

05:38:31.620 | - Oh boy, that's dark.

05:38:35.940 | You're looking for major things in history

05:38:38.740 | that don't yet have a--

05:38:41.660 | - Cognate going forward, right?

05:38:43.500 | And that's a nice way to think about the future.

05:38:47.460 | - It is only one model,

05:38:48.780 | and any mental model or something like that,

05:38:50.940 | that's why I say as a sci-fi scenario,

05:38:52.740 | it's just like a scenario one could contemplate, right?

05:38:55.100 | Where the new version has, I mean,

05:38:57.780 | the Chinese communists do not think of themselves

05:38:59.660 | as Aryans, right?

05:39:02.140 | But they are ultra-nationalist.

05:39:05.140 | And the Hitler comparisons,

05:39:06.820 | people talk about Hitler endlessly,

05:39:08.180 | like Saddam is the new Hitler,

05:39:10.060 | everybody's the new Hitler, et cetera.

05:39:12.280 | If there is a comparison to quote Nazi Germany,

05:39:16.300 | it is, you know, CCP China in a sense, why?

05:39:20.460 | They are non-English speaking, manufacturing powerhouse

05:39:24.660 | with a massive military build-out under one leader

05:39:28.820 | that is a genuine peer competitor

05:39:31.660 | to the US on many dimensions.

05:39:33.160 | And in fact, you know,

05:39:34.260 | exceeding on some dimensions of technology and science.

05:39:37.060 | That is like, the problem is it's a boy who cried wolf.

05:39:40.720 | People say this a zillion times, right?

05:39:42.720 | And you know, that is like, you know,

05:39:46.500 | I'm not saying this by the way, crucially,

05:39:48.140 | I am just like, I think China is very complicated

05:39:53.140 | and there's hundreds of millions of people,

05:39:55.580 | probably half in China that disagrees

05:39:57.020 | with the current ultra-nationalist kind of thing, right?

05:39:59.380 | And so I kind of hate it when innocent Chinese people

05:40:02.980 | abroad or whatever, are just like attacked on this basis

05:40:06.380 | or what have you.

05:40:07.220 | Plus the other thing is that many Chinese people will say,

05:40:09.420 | well, look, relative to, you know,

05:40:11.880 | where we were when Deng took over in 1978,

05:40:16.100 | we built up the entire country.

05:40:17.480 | We're not starving to death anymore

05:40:18.720 | and the West wants to recolonize us.

05:40:20.380 | And so I understand where that's coming from.

05:40:22.000 | This way you wanna be able to argue different points of view.

05:40:24.200 | With that said, there's one huge difference, right?

05:40:28.320 | Which is Nazi Germany was like 70 million people

05:40:31.540 | and the US was 150 million

05:40:32.960 | and the Soviet Union was 150 million

05:40:34.320 | and the UK was like 50 million.

05:40:35.360 | So they were outnumbered like five to one.

05:40:37.760 | China outnumbers the US four to one.

05:40:42.760 | - This is gonna be a fun century.

05:40:46.040 | - Things are gonna get--

05:40:47.040 | - Under this model.

05:40:48.220 | - Under this model, things are gonna be potentially crazy.

05:40:50.260 | Plus, you know, people are like, oh, I think this is,

05:40:53.000 | you know, again, I have nothing personal,

05:40:55.980 | there's this guy, Peter Zaihan, he writes these books, right?

05:41:00.560 | I probably agree with about 20 or 30%,

05:41:02.420 | but I disagree with a lot of the rest.

05:41:03.860 | And a bunch of it is basically about

05:41:06.300 | how China's really weak and America's really strong

05:41:08.380 | and the rest of the world is screwed.

05:41:09.880 | And, you know, I think there's absolutely problems in China

05:41:14.700 | and, you know, like the current management

05:41:17.560 | is actually messing a lot of things up,

05:41:18.600 | we could talk about that.

05:41:20.220 | But I do think that, you know,

05:41:22.140 | the US is like fighting its factory.

05:41:24.580 | So one thing, you know, Zaihan will talk about is how,

05:41:26.780 | oh, America has this blue water Navy,

05:41:28.400 | all the aircraft carriers and China has nothing,

05:41:30.480 | it's got bupkis, et cetera.

05:41:32.140 | Well, China ships things all around the world, right?

05:41:34.620 | It probably has, you know,

05:41:36.180 | one of the most active fleets out there

05:41:39.100 | in terms of, you know, its commercial shipping.

05:41:41.500 | And in terms of building ships, here's a quote,

05:41:45.860 | "China's merchant shipbuilding industry

05:41:47.300 | is the world's largest,

05:41:48.140 | building more than 23 million gross tons of shipping

05:41:49.940 | in 2020.

05:41:51.020 | US yards built a mere 70,000 tons the same year

05:41:53.620 | that they typically average somewhere in the 200,000s."

05:41:55.840 | That is a 100 to 300X ratio, just in shipbuilding.

05:41:58.660 | Pretty much everything else you can find

05:42:00.060 | in the physical world is like that, okay?

05:42:02.540 | We're not talking like 2X,

05:42:04.360 | we're talking they can put together a subway station

05:42:06.980 | in nine hours with prefab and the US takes three years, okay?

05:42:11.980 | When you have 1000X difference in the physical world,

05:42:17.740 | the reason the US was won against, you know,

05:42:20.740 | Nazi Germany in a serious fight is

05:42:22.900 | they had this giant manufacturing plant that was overseas

05:42:26.180 | and they just outproduced, right?

05:42:28.460 | And they supplied the Soviets also with lend-lease

05:42:30.180 | and the Soviets talked about how

05:42:32.380 | they would not have won the war without the Americans.

05:42:34.520 | People are like, "Oh, the Russians fought the Germans."

05:42:38.000 | The Russians armed by Americans fought the Germans.

05:42:41.040 | Like it's a Soviet Union,

05:42:42.440 | they're not actually able to make high quality stuff.

05:42:44.700 | There obviously are individual people in Soviet Russia

05:42:48.320 | who were innovative, right?

05:42:49.520 | I'm not taking that away.

05:42:50.360 | There's a tradition of amazing,

05:42:52.920 | I just wanna be like,

05:42:53.980 | there's individual Russians who obviously I admire,

05:42:56.840 | Mendeleev and, you know, Klimogorov and so on.

05:43:00.080 | There's amazing Russian scientists and engineers.

05:43:01.640 | So I'm not saying that--

05:43:02.480 | - I mean, in general, from brilliant folks like yourself

05:43:07.100 | that criticize communism,

05:43:08.860 | it's too easy to say nothing communism produces is good,

05:43:13.860 | which of course is not true.

05:43:16.360 | - Yes.

05:43:17.200 | - A lot of brilliant people and a lot of even, you know,

05:43:20.920 | there's a lot of amazing things that have been created.

05:43:23.160 | - Yeah, so they had some amazing mathematicians,

05:43:24.980 | amazing scientists and so on, right?

05:43:26.680 | However--

05:43:27.520 | - Great branding on the, you know, red and yellow.

05:43:30.520 | - Yeah, yeah, so-- - The branding is stellar.

05:43:32.720 | Nazi Germany to excellent branding.

05:43:35.240 | With the flag and so on, you know?

05:43:37.320 | - So--

05:43:38.160 | - So--

05:43:38.980 | - And ends there in terms of compliments.

05:43:42.520 | - Yeah, well, actually they copied a lot of stuff

05:43:44.480 | from each other, you know?

05:43:45.380 | Like there's this movie called "The Soviet Story."

05:43:48.000 | It basically shows a lot of Nazi

05:43:50.260 | and Soviet propaganda things next to each other.

05:43:52.320 | And you can see guys almost in like the same pose.

05:43:54.680 | It's almost like, you know how AI will do like

05:43:57.000 | style transfer?

05:43:58.000 | You can almost see, 'cause the socialist realism

05:44:00.480 | style of like the muscular brawny worker,

05:44:02.920 | very similar to like the style of the Aryan Superman,

05:44:05.520 | you know, like pointing at the vermin or whatever.

05:44:07.640 | - And then there's the crappy open source version

05:44:09.880 | that tries to copy, which is Mussolini.

05:44:12.080 | - Yeah.

05:44:12.920 | - That just like, that does the same exact thing,

05:44:15.120 | but does it kind of shittier, so anyway.

05:44:17.200 | - So my main thing about this is basically like

05:44:19.760 | trying to fight your factory in the physical world

05:44:23.360 | is probably not gonna work.

05:44:24.780 | People are, I think, overconfident on this stuff, right?

05:44:28.440 | With that said, I think we want to, at all,

05:44:31.160 | you know, the future is not yet determined, right?

05:44:33.120 | At all odds, you know, we wanna avoid a hot war

05:44:36.120 | between like, I mean, a hot war between the US and China

05:44:39.160 | would be-

05:44:40.720 | - Do you think it's possible that we'll get a war?

05:44:42.920 | - We're doing these things like Pelosi going to Taiwan

05:44:45.400 | and trying to cause something.

05:44:48.620 | Like, look, again, this is one of these things

05:44:51.120 | which is complicated because obviously,

05:44:53.520 | if you're, there's more than one perspective on this, right?

05:44:55.920 | Again, you've got the US establishment,

05:44:57.600 | the US conservative, the Taiwanese perspective,

05:45:00.200 | the Chinese perspective, all the bystanders over there,

05:45:02.600 | there's more than one perspective on this, okay?

05:45:04.840 | If you're, you know, one of China's many neighbors,

05:45:08.500 | you look at China with apprehension.

05:45:10.600 | Like Vietnam, for example, has sort of fallen into,

05:45:13.320 | or not fallen into, is partnering with India

05:45:15.780 | because they're mutually apprehensive of China.

05:45:17.920 | China's not making like great friends with its neighbors.

05:45:20.400 | It's kind of, you know, it's demonizing Japan.

05:45:22.280 | It's so ultra-nationalist nowadays.

05:45:24.760 | And so if you're a Taiwanese, you're like,

05:45:27.000 | yeah, I do not want to be

05:45:28.840 | under the Chinese surveillance state.

05:45:30.280 | I completely understand it.

05:45:31.160 | Some people are pro-reunification, others aren't,

05:45:33.960 | but there's more, you know, trend, you know,

05:45:36.120 | in some ways for independence.

05:45:38.040 | Okay, fine.

05:45:39.360 | - But there's also an increasing temperature

05:45:41.880 | across the entire world.

05:45:43.520 | As we sit here today, there's speeches by Vladimir Putin

05:45:47.960 | about the serious possibility of a nuclear war.

05:45:50.980 | And that escalates kind of the heat in the room

05:45:56.680 | of geopolitics.

05:45:57.840 | - It escalates the heat in the room, of course, right?

05:45:59.560 | And the thing is, people have this belief

05:46:01.840 | that because something hasn't happened,

05:46:03.720 | it won't happen or it can't happen.

05:46:05.960 | But like, there were a lot of measures people took

05:46:08.920 | during the Cold War to make sure a nuclear exchange

05:46:13.920 | didn't happen, the whole mutually assured destruction thing

05:46:16.520 | and communicating that out and like the balance of terror.

05:46:20.160 | There were smart guys on both sides

05:46:21.840 | who thought through this and there were near misses, right?

05:46:25.720 | There, you know, like there's that story

05:46:27.200 | about like the Soviet colonel

05:46:28.920 | who didn't order a nuclear strike

05:46:30.200 | 'cause he thought it was just like an error

05:46:31.600 | in the instruments, right?

05:46:32.840 | Okay, what's the point?

05:46:34.080 | Point is, you know, for example, Pelosi going to Taiwan,

05:46:38.040 | that didn't strengthen Taiwan.

05:46:39.940 | That didn't like, if you're gonna go and provoke China,

05:46:42.920 | I thought Scholar Stage, his Twitter account,

05:46:44.760 | had a good point, which is you should,

05:46:47.520 | if you're actually gonna do it,

05:46:48.360 | then you strengthen Taiwan with like huge battalions

05:46:50.920 | of like arms and materiel and you make them a porcupine

05:46:54.000 | and so on and so forth.

05:46:55.240 | Instead, her kind of going and landing there

05:46:57.600 | and mooning China and then flying back

05:47:00.400 | in the middle of a hot war with Russia,

05:47:02.440 | that's absolutely, you know,

05:47:03.560 | in the middle of an economic crisis or what have,

05:47:06.560 | it just, you know, can you pick battles or whatever, right?

05:47:10.800 | It's like, you don't have to fight Russia

05:47:13.040 | and China at the same time.

05:47:15.320 | It's like kind of insane to do that, okay?

05:47:17.200 | Plus even with Ukraine, some people were like,

05:47:20.080 | oh, this was like a victory

05:47:21.800 | for the US military policy or something.

05:47:23.840 | There was a guy who, I'm not trying to beat him up

05:47:25.800 | or anything, he's like, this is in March,

05:47:27.880 | threat on US security assistance to Ukraine, it's working.

05:47:30.200 | Ukraine might be one of the biggest successes

05:47:32.000 | of US security assistance.

05:47:33.120 | And the reason is, you know, US didn't focus

05:47:35.480 | on some high-end shiny objects,

05:47:36.800 | but on core military tasks that focus should remain.

05:47:39.160 | And it's like, how is this a success?

05:47:42.200 | The West gave massive arms to Ukraine

05:47:44.320 | only after the invasion, but not enough before to deter.

05:47:48.040 | And now Ukraine is like this Syria-like battleground

05:47:51.520 | with a million refugees or whatever the number is, right?

05:47:55.920 | Their country is blown to smithereens,

05:47:57.600 | thousands of people dead, whatever thousand dollar gas

05:48:00.600 | in Europe with like 10X energy, radicalized Russians,

05:48:03.880 | the threat of World War III or even nuclear war, you know?

05:48:07.000 | Shooting somebody isn't, that's not like the point

05:48:10.280 | of the military, the point is, there's a million ways

05:48:12.980 | to smash Humpty Dumpty into pieces

05:48:14.560 | and unleash the blood-drenched tides, right?

05:48:17.680 | And have people all shooting each other and killing each other.

05:48:19.120 | It's really hard to maintain stability.

05:48:21.280 | That's what competence is, is deterrence and stability.

05:48:24.000 | Right?

05:48:24.840 | There's not like a success in any way.

05:48:27.360 | It's like an absolute tragedy for everybody involved, right?

05:48:30.960 | - Yeah, I mean, deterrence of course is the number one thing,

05:48:34.040 | but there's a lot to be said there.

05:48:36.760 | But I'm a huge not fan of declaring victory

05:48:41.960 | as we've done many times when it's the wrong.

05:48:44.920 | - Yeah, I mean, the other thing about this

05:48:46.320 | is the whole mission accomplished thing during Iraq.

05:48:48.360 | - Mission accomplished is what I meant, yeah.

05:48:49.840 | - Exactly, mission accomplished was obviously,

05:48:52.360 | the thing is Russia lives next door to Ukraine.

05:48:55.780 | And so, I mean, just like Iraq lives next door to Iran

05:48:59.560 | and Afghanistan is next door to Pakistan and China.

05:49:01.880 | And so if the US eventually gets tired of it and leaves,

05:49:05.100 | those guys are next door, right?

05:49:07.040 | And so, who knows what's gonna happen here, okay?

05:49:10.840 | But one of the problems is like,

05:49:14.880 | the whole Afghanistan thing or the Iraq thing

05:49:17.120 | is the lesson for people was the uncertainty.

05:49:20.080 | They're like, is the US gonna fight?

05:49:21.620 | Don't know.

05:49:22.620 | Will the US win if it fights?

05:49:23.700 | Don't know, therefore roll the dice.

05:49:25.660 | That uncertainty is itself like tempting to folks,

05:49:28.880 | like Putin over there, right?

05:49:30.480 | So point is coming all the way back up,

05:49:32.400 | we were talking about how history, futures are past

05:49:35.960 | and FDR, like the business plot for FDR failed,

05:49:39.660 | but like the tech companies

05:49:41.260 | were able to de-platform Trump, right?

05:49:42.920 | And the left libertarian would say,

05:49:44.320 | do we want that much corporate power?

05:49:45.760 | Okay, and so that's,

05:49:47.920 | so we gave the four case for Trump de-platforming,

05:49:49.720 | protecting democracy, the Trump supporter case against,

05:49:52.480 | which is on the secret history of the shadow campaign

05:49:54.480 | to save the 2020 election, basically that article,

05:49:56.800 | the left libertarian or libertarian case against.

05:49:59.040 | And then to me, what is, you know,

05:50:01.440 | like I am more sympathetic to the libertarian

05:50:06.400 | slash left libertarian against,

05:50:07.440 | and then also maybe the fourth group,

05:50:09.520 | which is the non-American case, right?

05:50:11.880 | Which is to say every, you know, Amlo,

05:50:16.000 | he's the, he was the head of state of Mexico,

05:50:19.200 | I think at that time, okay.

05:50:21.360 | Amlo, Macron, you know, other folks,

05:50:24.080 | everybody who's watching this around the world

05:50:26.640 | basically saw, let's say,

05:50:29.040 | US establishment or Democrat aligned folks

05:50:32.480 | just decapitate, you know, the head of state digitally,

05:50:37.480 | right, like just boom, gone, okay.

05:50:39.880 | And they're like, well, if they can do that in public

05:50:42.320 | to the US president,

05:50:43.480 | who's ostensibly the most powerful man in the world,

05:50:45.920 | what is the Mexican president stand against that?

05:50:48.800 | Nothing, right?

05:50:50.040 | Like these US media corporations,

05:50:52.000 | these US tech companies are so insanely powerful,

05:50:54.640 | everybody's on Twitter or what have you,

05:50:56.680 | other than China, leaving them aside,

05:50:58.040 | they've got their own root system.

05:50:59.640 | If somebody tried to de-platform

05:51:01.840 | Xi Jinping off of Sina Weibo,

05:51:03.840 | they'd probably just fall through a trap door,

05:51:05.720 | you know, their whole family, right?

05:51:07.600 | But for the rest of the world,

05:51:09.000 | that's on the, that is hosting their business,

05:51:11.760 | their politics on these US tech companies,

05:51:14.240 | they're like, regardless of whether it was justified

05:51:17.520 | on this guy, that means they will do it to anybody.

05:51:20.520 | Now the seal is broken,

05:51:21.600 | just like the bailouts, as exceptional as they were

05:51:23.840 | in the first era, everybody was shocked by them,

05:51:26.000 | then they became a policy instrument.

05:51:28.280 | And now there's bailouts happening,

05:51:30.560 | every single bill is printing another whatever,

05:51:32.600 | billion dollars or something like that, right?

05:51:34.440 | - Can I ask on your thoughts and advice on this topic?

05:51:39.280 | If I or anyone were to have a conversation

05:51:42.960 | with Donald Trump, first of all, should one do so?

05:51:47.360 | And if so, how do you do it?

05:51:52.040 | And it may not necessarily be Trump,

05:51:54.160 | it could be other people like Putin and Xi Jinping

05:51:57.560 | and so on, let's say people that are censored.

05:52:01.040 | - Right.

05:52:01.880 | - Like people that platforms in general see as dangerous.

05:52:06.720 | Hitler, you can go, we keep bringing it up.

05:52:09.560 | - Of course, that's the ultimate edge case, right?

05:52:11.760 | In the sense of, that's saying like,

05:52:13.160 | something must be done, this is something,

05:52:14.880 | therefore this must be done, right?

05:52:16.640 | I've heard that one before.

05:52:18.840 | (laughing)

05:52:20.160 | - No, but I love it.

05:52:22.000 | - So this is just--

05:52:23.800 | - Can I just use that as an explanation

05:52:25.600 | with confidence for everything I do?

05:52:27.280 | - Yeah, sure, there you go, right?

05:52:28.440 | - Something must be done, this is something,

05:52:30.160 | therefore it must be done.

05:52:31.160 | - Therefore this must be done.

05:52:32.120 | So that is the, like, all kinds of regulations,

05:52:35.640 | all kinds of things are kind of justified on that basis,

05:52:37.320 | right, and there's a version of that which is,

05:52:40.240 | punch a Nazi, I decide who's a Nazi, you're a Nazi.

05:52:44.040 | - Therefore I punch you and that's justified, yeah.

05:52:46.560 | - Yeah, and you know, like people say,

05:52:47.840 | oh, how many people are calling Israelis,

05:52:50.200 | you know, like these things, right?

05:52:52.480 | And so the problem with argumentum ad hilarum is,

05:52:57.480 | it just, I mean, people will say Obama's a Nazi,

05:53:00.440 | everybody will say everybody's a Nazi, right?

05:53:01.960 | - But there is a social consensus about who,

05:53:04.920 | let's set Nazis aside, but who is dangerous for society.

05:53:08.320 | - Okay, but now let's talk about that, all right?

05:53:10.000 | So basically, I think a more interesting example

05:53:12.640 | than Hitler in this context is Herbert Matthews.

05:53:16.880 | So Fidel Castro, before he became the communist dictator

05:53:20.320 | of Cuba, was on the run.

05:53:22.760 | He was like Osama Bin Laden at the time,

05:53:24.120 | he was like a terrorist that the Cuban regime

05:53:26.080 | had seemingly defeated.

05:53:27.760 | And what Herbert Matthews did is he got an intro to him,

05:53:30.040 | he went to the, you know, place where he was hiding out,

05:53:33.120 | he gave an interview and he printed this hagiography

05:53:35.960 | in the New York Times with this like, you know,

05:53:37.720 | photo of Castro looking all, you know, mighty and so on.

05:53:41.600 | And he's like, Castro is still alive and still fighting,

05:53:45.160 | okay, and there's this book on this called

05:53:48.280 | "The Man Who Created Fidel," okay?

05:53:50.960 | Where basically, NYT's article was crucial positive press

05:53:55.960 | that got Castro's point of view out to the world

05:53:59.640 | and helped lead to the communist revolution

05:54:02.760 | that actually impoverished Cuba,

05:54:05.880 | led to like gay people being, you know,

05:54:08.120 | like discriminated against there,

05:54:09.800 | led to people fleeing, you know,

05:54:11.760 | and drowning trying to escape, right?

05:54:14.120 | That's an example of where platforming somebody

05:54:16.720 | led to a very bad outcome.

05:54:17.800 | In fact, many of the communist dictators

05:54:20.560 | in the 20th century had like their own personal journalist,

05:54:23.320 | right?

05:54:24.160 | For example, there's a guy, John Reed, he's an American.

05:54:26.040 | He's buried, you know, if I get this right,

05:54:28.360 | I think he's buried at the Kremlin wall, okay?

05:54:31.280 | Why is an American buried there, okay?

05:54:34.840 | Because he wrote a book called "10 Days That Shook the World"

05:54:39.560 | that whitewashed the entire Soviet revolution

05:54:42.680 | and the Russian revolution in 1917, October revolution,

05:54:46.960 | and made these guys out to be the good guys

05:54:49.400 | when they were actually genocidal psychopaths, okay?

05:54:52.240 | He got their point of view out to the world

05:54:54.120 | and it was a totally misleading point of view, all right?

05:54:56.080 | - Do you think, what do you think he was thinking?

05:54:59.760 | Do you think he saw the psychopathy?

05:55:01.880 | You know, sometimes it's not obvious, like--

05:55:03.680 | - Well, the French revolution had already happened.

05:55:05.240 | So people kind of knew that this sort of psychopathic,

05:55:08.080 | you know, killing in the name of equality

05:55:09.560 | could produce bad results, right?

05:55:11.520 | But it's more than that, right?

05:55:14.040 | So it's John Reed, it's Herbert Matthews,

05:55:16.000 | it's Edgar Snow, okay?

05:55:18.440 | So these are all people who should be extremely famous,

05:55:20.280 | right?

05:55:21.320 | So Edgar Snow is Mao's journalist, okay?

05:55:24.480 | So he wrote, you know, there's actually an article in this

05:55:28.200 | how 1930s reporter from Missouri

05:55:30.360 | became China's ideal journalist, okay?

05:55:33.520 | And he wrote various books,

05:55:34.880 | including like "Red Star Over China," okay?

05:55:38.280 | And it's just a hagiography of Mao, right?

05:55:41.480 | And then of course you've got Duranty,

05:55:43.840 | and he is like Stalin's biographer, right?

05:55:46.720 | Just to recap, John Reed brought Lenin's message

05:55:49.920 | to the world, Mailman's dead.

05:55:51.600 | Duranty helped Stalin starve out the Ukrainians,

05:55:55.560 | Mailman's dead.

05:55:57.540 | Edgar Snow was Mao's biographer,

05:56:01.060 | and Herbert Matthews was like Castro's.

05:56:05.120 | This guy, David Halberstam in Vietnam,

05:56:07.920 | who was effectively Ho Chi Minh's.

05:56:10.040 | He basically went and took leaks from a communist spy.

05:56:14.600 | I'll give you the exact name.

05:56:16.720 | Pham, I'm gonna mispronounce this,

05:56:18.400 | but it's Perfect Spy,

05:56:20.120 | the incredible double life of PHAM, Pham Xuan An,

05:56:23.760 | Time Magazine reporter and Vietnamese communist agent.

05:56:26.600 | That guy was the source of many fabricated stories

05:56:29.360 | that David Halberstam printed in the New York Times

05:56:31.280 | that led to the undermining of the South Vietnamese regime.

05:56:34.140 | And for example, stories of Buddhists being killed and so on

05:56:38.140 | Ashley Rinsberg in "The Great Lady Winked"

05:56:39.840 | writes this whole thing up at length,

05:56:41.040 | so you can go and read it for his account.

05:56:43.600 | But basically all of these communist dictators

05:56:46.920 | had a journalist right alongside them as their biographer.

05:56:50.240 | - Yeah. - Okay?

05:56:51.160 | - But those are tools of the propaganda machine versus-

05:56:54.080 | - Well, so my point is,

05:56:56.040 | these are five examples that are on the far left

05:57:00.040 | that should be balanced also against the Times

05:57:02.200 | running profiles of Hitler on the far right.

05:57:05.360 | We know that basically,

05:57:06.720 | the Times actually also ran a whole thing,

05:57:08.160 | which was Hitler's like mountain retreat

05:57:10.980 | or something like that.

05:57:11.820 | Do you know about that story?

05:57:12.640 | - What year was this?

05:57:13.560 | - I'll tell you in a second.

05:57:15.240 | Hitler at home in the clouds.

05:57:17.560 | - Oh boy, please tell me it's like early 30s.

05:57:20.760 | - I think it's, oh yeah, this is Otto D. Tallisius.

05:57:23.400 | This is actually a guy that Ashley Rinsberg writes up

05:57:26.320 | in "The Great Lady Winked," right?

05:57:27.520 | - 1937. - '37.

05:57:29.040 | There's another one where I think the date is wrong,

05:57:30.720 | but it's 39, you know,

05:57:32.000 | but essentially these titles are like,

05:57:34.840 | "Where Hitler Dreams and Plans,"

05:57:36.500 | "He Lives Simply," you know, right?

05:57:39.280 | And there's another one,

05:57:40.300 | "Hair Hitler at Home in the Clouds," okay?

05:57:43.000 | The thing about this is,

05:57:44.360 | absolutely there are folks who are hagiographers

05:57:47.160 | of the far right,

05:57:48.720 | but whether you're talking Lenin and John Reed

05:57:51.960 | or Stalin and Walter Durante of "The New York Times,"

05:57:56.080 | or Castro and Herbert Matthews, again, of "The New York Times,"

05:57:59.560 | or Edgar Snow and Mao,

05:58:02.120 | or David Halberstam and, you know,

05:58:04.640 | Ho Chi Minh, again, of "The New York Times,"

05:58:07.020 | like you start to see a pattern here

05:58:09.240 | where the guys who are being platformed and given a voice

05:58:12.000 | are these guys who end up being like far left,

05:58:14.480 | you know, lunatics, right?

05:58:16.200 | And I think part of the issue here is,

05:58:18.040 | you know, the saying about how communists

05:58:20.200 | don't understand self-interest?

05:58:21.840 | Nationalists don't understand other interest.

05:58:24.080 | And so nationalists are more obvious.

05:58:27.280 | Isn't that good?

05:58:29.120 | I thought it was good.

05:58:29.940 | - It's pretty good. - Right?

05:58:30.780 | - Pretty good.

05:58:31.620 | - So the nationalist is very obvious

05:58:33.360 | in the sense of like, they're for the Aryans.

05:58:35.760 | They're not even for like the Slavs or whatever, right?

05:58:37.760 | Like, you know, basically, you know,

05:58:40.800 | had Hitler constructed a different ideology,

05:58:43.720 | you know, then like he might've gotten more support

05:58:46.160 | in Eastern Europe or whatever, right?

05:58:47.460 | But he also called the Slavs inferior,

05:58:49.060 | not just, you know,

05:58:49.900 | basically everybody was inferior to the Aryans, okay?

05:58:52.340 | Except maybe the English or whatever,

05:58:53.580 | but that was it, right?

05:58:55.500 | Oh, and the Japanese are honorary Aryans or something.

05:58:58.280 | So the nationalist declares the supremacy

05:59:01.180 | of their own race or culture or what have you,

05:59:03.380 | and doesn't understand people's other interest,

05:59:05.580 | but he also pumps up his own guys, okay?

05:59:07.660 | Same with, you know, in some ways China today,

05:59:09.820 | same with Japan back in the day.

05:59:11.900 | Whereas the communist has a message

05:59:14.300 | that sounds more appealing.

05:59:16.300 | It's a universalist message ostensibly,

05:59:19.340 | but it's actually a faux universalism

05:59:22.060 | 'cause it's actually particularism.

05:59:23.300 | Like during the Soviet Union, communism,

05:59:25.780 | this faux universalism was basically a mask

05:59:28.580 | for Russian nationalism, you know,

05:59:29.900 | where, you know, or at least Soviet nationalism

05:59:32.780 | where in particular Russians were pushed

05:59:34.500 | into many territories and, you know,

05:59:36.640 | Russian speakers were, you know,

05:59:38.840 | like privileged in, you know,

05:59:40.460 | the Eastern Europe and the Baltics.

05:59:42.940 | Of course, Russians themselves were oppressed at home

05:59:45.360 | as Sultan's rights here,

05:59:46.320 | both victim and victimizer of the regime.

05:59:48.320 | Their churches were crushed and so on.

05:59:50.260 | As compensation, they were agents of empire.

05:59:52.140 | It's a tragedy all around, okay?

05:59:53.340 | I'm not, you know, I think Russians have been hard done

05:59:56.460 | in many ways, they've had a very hard, hard century.

05:59:58.180 | They've also done hard by others, okay?

05:59:59.980 | It's complicated.

06:00:00.820 | - Those journalists you mentioned,

06:00:02.300 | just to elaborate, maybe you disagree with me,

06:00:05.140 | I wonder what you think.

06:00:06.180 | - Sure.

06:00:07.020 | - But I think conversation,

06:00:08.500 | like not to sort of glorify any particular medium,

06:00:12.100 | but there's something,

06:00:12.940 | one of the reasons I like long form podcasts

06:00:15.700 | or interviews, long form unedited interviews,

06:00:18.880 | there's been shows throughout the 20th century

06:00:20.720 | that do that kind of thing, but they seem to be rare.

06:00:23.460 | That podcast made it much more popular and common.

06:00:27.240 | It somehow makes it easier not to do

06:00:32.180 | this kind of bullshit journalism that--

06:00:34.380 | - The gotcha stuff, yeah.

06:00:35.860 | - I feel like asking interesting and deep questions allow,

06:00:40.860 | I think you could sit down with Hitler in 1940, 1941,

06:00:45.580 | 1942, and the podcast actually serve a purpose.

06:00:50.580 | - In '41 and '42, mid-World War II?

06:00:54.580 | - Or mid-World War II.

06:00:55.860 | A purpose of, one, which is very important,

06:00:59.860 | get good information for the future

06:01:03.020 | so history can study it.

06:01:05.140 | And two, reveal to the world the way a man thinks

06:01:10.140 | that is beyond the propaganda.

06:01:14.360 | - So all this stuff is complicated,

06:01:17.240 | but today, so in the specific issue

06:01:19.180 | of the folks you were talking about,

06:01:20.340 | like Putin, Z, Trump, right?

06:01:23.020 | For those folks, they are very clearly out-group

06:01:27.620 | for both the US left and right,

06:01:29.140 | which is, let's say the Western left and right,

06:01:31.060 | which are your audience.

06:01:34.480 | There's folks who are tankies

06:01:36.460 | and there are folks who are MAGA who are sympathetic.

06:01:39.140 | - I'm sorry, what are tankies?

06:01:40.420 | - Tankies are those who are,

06:01:41.860 | they may not call themselves tankies.

06:01:44.180 | Let's say they're anti-imperialist left and MAGA right,

06:01:48.620 | for different reasons, are against the US establishment

06:01:52.940 | and for Putin or Z or something like that

06:01:56.160 | as an agent against the US establishment.

06:01:59.700 | So leaving those aside,

06:02:01.700 | the point is that most of your audience

06:02:03.180 | is sort of on guard, vaccinated in a sense,

06:02:07.100 | versus Z and Putin and Trump.

06:02:09.780 | They know the counter-arguments and so on and so forth.

06:02:13.860 | In which case, I wouldn't think interviewing them

06:02:16.740 | would be that big a deal, relatively,

06:02:20.580 | 'cause there's so much other coverage and so on out there.

06:02:23.980 | I think it's probably okay.

06:02:25.420 | However, for something like what John Reed was doing

06:02:30.420 | and so on, when he was the sole source of information

06:02:32.740 | about the Russian Revolution.

06:02:34.220 | - Yes, that's different.

06:02:35.460 | - That's different, right?

06:02:36.540 | So it's something about,

06:02:38.260 | it kind of gets back to the competitive environment

06:02:40.420 | and so on.

06:02:41.260 | The dearth of folks who are writing critical coverage

06:02:44.860 | of these three men.

06:02:47.140 | And so if I felt that that was insufficient,

06:02:50.340 | then you might need more of it.

06:02:51.900 | Just like, for example, nowadays with Stalin,

06:02:55.900 | there are a lot of articles and books and PDFs

06:02:58.940 | and so on on it.

06:02:59.860 | - But at the time, not as much.

06:03:02.020 | - At the time, not as much.

06:03:03.020 | That's why I brought those guys.

06:03:04.580 | Because often, it's kind of like,

06:03:06.780 | have you ever stocked shelves at a supermarket?

06:03:09.580 | This would seem totally out of left field.

06:03:11.460 | - No, but shoes, but the same thing,

06:03:13.780 | Sears, I used to work at Sears.

06:03:14.980 | - The thing that is the most popular

06:03:16.980 | is the thing that's not on the shelf

06:03:18.660 | because it's been sold out.

06:03:20.220 | - Yeah. - Right?

06:03:21.180 | So in some ways, this is similar to that famous photo

06:03:25.660 | that people have, or image that people have on Twitter

06:03:27.820 | of the plane and the parts that are shot versus not, right?

06:03:32.380 | The survivorship bias, right?

06:03:35.120 | And one way of kind of thinking about it is

06:03:37.820 | the guys who you think of as bad guys or possible bad guys

06:03:40.900 | or controversial guys or whatever,

06:03:43.460 | are those you've already got some vaccination to,

06:03:45.060 | that's why you think of them at all.

06:03:46.600 | Whereas the folks that I mentioned,

06:03:48.100 | the regulators, invisible, right?

06:03:50.760 | Salzburger, you know Zuckerberg,

06:03:52.300 | you know his pros and cons, you know who he is as a person.

06:03:55.040 | You don't even know Salzburger exists, most people, right?

06:03:57.660 | Despite the fact that he's like, certainly is powerful.

06:04:00.540 | You know, he owns the New York Times, he inherits it.

06:04:02.460 | He also got dual class stock, just like Zuck.

06:04:05.220 | But he's invisible, right?

06:04:06.620 | - Well, that's why I think studying the knowns,

06:04:10.020 | the people that are known can help you generalize

06:04:12.940 | to the way human nature is, and then you start to question,

06:04:17.420 | are the same kind of humans existing in places

06:04:20.700 | that wield power?

06:04:23.260 | - Yeah. - And you can assume

06:04:24.180 | they are, they do exist there,

06:04:26.300 | and then you can start to infer.

06:04:27.940 | - That's right. - And ask questions.

06:04:29.460 | - So this is kind of, what I try to do is I'm like,

06:04:32.580 | what is the dark matter?

06:04:33.560 | What is the question that is not being asked

06:04:35.620 | or what have you, right? - Yes, yes.

06:04:36.860 | - And so, you know, that's not to say

06:04:39.260 | that you need to be so anti-mimetic that you only do that.

06:04:42.780 | But I think you need to do that as well as understand

06:04:45.220 | what is good about the conventional wisdom.

06:04:46.900 | And, you know, for example, if you notice a lot

06:04:48.700 | of what I talk about is like the V1, V2, V3,

06:04:51.780 | where as critical as I am of, let's say, the FDA,

06:04:54.620 | I recognize that people want a regulated marketplace

06:04:57.140 | and how do we do better?

06:04:58.340 | As critical as I can be of the Fed,

06:04:59.980 | I recognize that some kind of monetary policy is necessary.

06:05:03.860 | And Satoshi came up with a better one, right?

06:05:06.580 | As harsh as one can be a critic of the current system,

06:05:11.280 | it is really incumbent, as difficult as that is,

06:05:14.120 | upon one to come up with a better version.

06:05:15.500 | Just like academia, as much as I think

06:05:17.580 | current science is corrupted,

06:05:19.420 | what I propose is a way to actually improve on that.

06:05:22.260 | And actually, any true scientist say,

06:05:24.620 | yes, I want my work to be reproducible.

06:05:26.140 | Yes, I want citations to be important statements

06:05:28.220 | and so on and so forth.

06:05:29.060 | And we don't have to get everybody to agree with that,

06:05:30.580 | but just enough to build that better version

06:05:32.300 | and not regress.

06:05:33.540 | - Yeah, there's an implied optimism

06:05:36.060 | within the V1, V2, V3 framework.

06:05:39.460 | Let me ask you at a high level about social media,

06:05:43.060 | because you are one of its prominent users

06:05:47.820 | to communicate your wisdom.

06:05:49.580 | - I use Twitter, I wouldn't really think of it

06:05:52.220 | as communicate my wisdom per se or anything like that.

06:05:55.300 | I use Twitter like I might use GitHub as a scratch pad

06:05:58.660 | for just kind of floating concepts.

06:06:00.740 | And I've got, okay, here's a frame on things,

06:06:03.200 | let me kind of put it out there

06:06:04.340 | and see what people think, get some feedback and so on.

06:06:06.620 | - Don't you think it has lasting impact, your scratch book?

06:06:10.340 | - I think it's good, but basically like,

06:06:13.220 | if I say what's my primary thing on Twitter, it's that.

06:06:16.380 | It's a scratch pad for me to kind of

06:06:18.900 | put some concepts out there, iterate on them,

06:06:21.620 | get feedback on them and so on and so forth.

06:06:23.300 | - Do you think it's possible that the words you've tweeted

06:06:25.820 | on Twitter is the most impact you will have?

06:06:30.820 | - On the world? - On the world.

06:06:32.420 | - I don't, so-- - Is that possible?

06:06:34.440 | - Is it possible?

06:06:36.040 | Well, my tweets-- - What you gave me.

06:06:37.640 | - It's a good question.

06:06:38.600 | I think the network state will be, I think, important,

06:06:42.760 | or I hope, well, the book--

06:06:44.280 | - The book or the concept?

06:06:45.640 | - Good question. - Sorry, just a quick, right?

06:06:47.320 | - The movement. - The movement.

06:06:48.640 | - Right, in the sense that Zionism shows

06:06:51.720 | that it is possible to have a book and then a conference

06:06:55.760 | and then a fund and eventually in the fullness of time

06:06:58.320 | with a lot of time and effort to actually get a state, right?

06:07:01.360 | And as I mentioned earlier,

06:07:03.700 | a lot of countries are small countries,

06:07:05.140 | but I didn't mention there's a guy

06:07:06.580 | who's the head of Kazakhstan and he made a remark.

06:07:08.580 | He's like, "You know, if we allow every nation

06:07:11.820 | "that wants to have self-determination to have a state,

06:07:15.080 | "we'd have 600 countries rather than 190."

06:07:17.980 | Because there's many opposites of a nation state,

06:07:21.500 | but one of the opposites is the stateless nation.

06:07:24.100 | And so you remember the network state is popular?

06:07:25.840 | In places like Catalonia, Catalonian nationalists,

06:07:29.020 | in Catalonia, guys who are committed Catalonian nationalists.

06:07:31.660 | So Catalonia, this region of Spain, right?

06:07:33.740 | The thing is that, again, V1, V2, V3,

06:07:39.640 | the nation state is V2 and it beat the city state,

06:07:43.140 | which is like V1.

06:07:44.860 | And the network state I think of as a potential V3,

06:07:46.660 | which combines aspects of V1 and V2.

06:07:48.700 | So Catalonia or the Basque region,

06:07:51.860 | these are underneath the quote nation state of Spain,

06:07:55.820 | but many Catalonians think of themselves

06:07:57.380 | as part of a separate nation.

06:07:58.960 | Not all, many, okay?

06:08:01.180 | And so they want a state of their own.

06:08:03.220 | Who doesn't, if you're a nation?

06:08:06.260 | Meaning that they've got a legitimate claim

06:08:08.500 | from history, language, culture, all that stuff, right?

06:08:11.780 | The Basques do as well.

06:08:12.900 | The Kurds do as well, okay?

06:08:14.820 | Lots of ethnic groups around the world do.

06:08:16.540 | So in the game of musical chairs,

06:08:18.660 | that was the formation of current national borders,

06:08:21.340 | they lost out, right?

06:08:23.300 | So what did they do?

06:08:24.400 | Well, one answer is they just submit to the Spanish state

06:08:27.920 | and they just speak Spanish and their culture is erased

06:08:30.220 | and their history is erased and so on.

06:08:32.420 | The second is they do some sort of Ireland-like insurgency,

06:08:36.180 | the troubles to try to get a thing of their own,

06:08:38.240 | which is obviously bad for other kinds of reasons, right?

06:08:40.820 | You know, violent, et cetera.

06:08:42.260 | What this Catalonian nationalist said, he's like,

06:08:44.820 | "Look, while we can't give up on our existing path,

06:08:47.740 | "the network state is a really interesting third option."

06:08:50.280 | I mean, by the way, I hadn't talked to this guy, V. Partal,

06:08:53.820 | okay, and he's got this site called ViaWeb,

06:08:56.620 | and, or V-I-L-A, VilaWeb, sorry.

06:08:59.800 | It can be, meaning the network state

06:09:01.080 | can be especially appealing to us.

06:09:02.260 | Catalans are now embarking on the task

06:09:04.000 | of having a normal and current state in the old way,

06:09:06.160 | and this is a project that we cannot give up.

06:09:07.980 | But this does not mean that at the same time

06:09:09.680 | we are not also attentive to ideas like this

06:09:11.680 | and we do not try to learn and move forward, right?

06:09:14.000 | Meaning, you know, the network state, right?

06:09:16.280 | Because that's the third way, which says,

06:09:18.060 | okay, maybe this particular region

06:09:20.300 | is not something where you're gonna be able to get,

06:09:24.440 | you know, a state.

06:09:25.920 | But just like there's more Irish people

06:09:27.940 | who live outside of Ireland, right?

06:09:29.980 | Just like, you know, the Jewish people, you know,

06:09:32.620 | didn't actually get a state in Poland or what have you,

06:09:35.440 | they had one in Palestine.

06:09:37.340 | Perhaps the Catalonians could crowdfund territory

06:09:40.340 | in other places and have essentially a state of their own

06:09:45.200 | that's distributed, okay?

06:09:46.820 | Now, again, what people are immediately gonna say is,

06:09:49.000 | "Well, that's gonna lead to conflict with the locals

06:09:50.760 | necessarily," and so on and so forth.

06:09:53.020 | But if you're parallel processing,

06:09:55.180 | you don't have the all-in-one bucket aspect of,

06:09:58.860 | I must win here, and the guy on the other side is like,

06:10:01.060 | I must win, you have optionality.

06:10:02.440 | You can have multiple different nodes around the world,

06:10:05.140 | just like there's multiple Chinatowns,

06:10:06.740 | you could have multiple Catalonian towns, right?

06:10:09.540 | And some places you might be able to just buy an island

06:10:12.360 | and that becomes, you know, the New Catalonia, right?

06:10:15.140 | Just like in, I think there's a region called New Caledonia

06:10:19.620 | and that's in the Southwest Pacific.

06:10:22.420 | So maybe New Catalonia is somewhere else, right?

06:10:24.840 | So if you're flexible on that, now, of course,

06:10:26.860 | a bunch of people will immediately say,

06:10:29.060 | they'll have 50 different objections to this.

06:10:30.920 | They'll say, "Oh, you don't get it.

06:10:31.980 | The whole point is the land," and so on.

06:10:34.620 | They've been there for generations.

06:10:36.700 | Say, "I do get it."

06:10:37.940 | But this Catalan nationalist who's like literally written

06:10:42.120 | in Catalonian for, I don't know how many years, right,

06:10:46.380 | is basically saying, "This is worth thinking about."

06:10:51.220 | And so it's a peaceful third way.

06:10:52.580 | - Yeah, but it's interesting.

06:10:53.880 | I mean, it's a good question whether Elon Musk, SpaceX,

06:10:58.300 | and Tesla will be successful without Twitter.

06:11:00.300 | - Yeah, I don't think as successful.

06:11:02.500 | I mean, obviously they existed before Twitter

06:11:05.980 | and a lot of the engineering problems

06:11:08.320 | are obviously non-Twitter things, right?

06:11:09.860 | But Twitter itself has certainly probably helped Musk

06:11:11.700 | with Tesla sales.

06:11:12.700 | - The engineering, no, that's not what I mean.

06:11:15.460 | - Oh, go ahead.

06:11:16.300 | - The best people in the world

06:11:17.620 | solve the engineering problems.

06:11:19.180 | - Yes, but he hires the people to solve them

06:11:20.660 | and he knows enough about engineering to hire those people.

06:11:22.500 | - That's the point I'm making.

06:11:24.440 | On Twitter, the legend of Elon Musk is created.

06:11:28.680 | The vision is communicated

06:11:32.720 | and the best engineers in the world

06:11:35.040 | come to work for the vision.

06:11:37.280 | It's an advertisement of a man of a company

06:11:40.560 | pursuing a vision.

06:11:42.080 | I think Twitter is a great place to make viral ideas

06:11:47.080 | that are compelling to people, whatever those ideas are,

06:11:50.680 | and whether that's the network state

06:11:52.820 | or whether that's humans becoming

06:11:54.900 | a multi-planetary species.

06:11:57.180 | - Here is a remark I had just before the pandemic

06:11:59.720 | related to this, okay, about Twitter helping Elon,

06:12:01.860 | just beyond that for a second.

06:12:03.540 | Maybe centralization is actually also underexplored

06:12:06.420 | in the design space.

06:12:08.140 | For example, today's social networks

06:12:09.420 | are essentially governed by a single CEO,

06:12:10.900 | but that CEO is a background figure.

06:12:12.220 | They aren't leading the users to do anything.

06:12:14.060 | What if they did?

06:12:15.280 | One example, could Elon Musk's then 30 million followers

06:12:17.980 | somehow get us to Mars faster?

06:12:20.360 | Tools for directed collaborative work

06:12:22.260 | by really large groups on the internet

06:12:23.620 | are still in their infancy.

06:12:24.460 | You can see pieces of what I was talking about,

06:12:26.340 | the scratch pad thing,

06:12:27.740 | the network state being a group

06:12:29.300 | which can do collective actions.

06:12:30.460 | This is kind of the thing, right?

06:12:31.740 | So technologies for internet collaboration

06:12:33.380 | that can be very useful to the software

06:12:35.400 | for future network states.

06:12:37.260 | Operational transformation,

06:12:38.300 | so like Google Docs coordinates edits.

06:12:40.660 | Conflict-free replicated data types

06:12:42.940 | is another alternative, easier to code in some ways

06:12:44.780 | than operational transformation.

06:12:46.400 | Microtasks like Mechanical Turk, Scale.ai,

06:12:48.580 | and Earn.com before we sold it.

06:12:50.700 | Blockchains and crypto, obviously.

06:12:51.760 | The Polymath project,

06:12:53.120 | where a bunch of people parallel processed

06:12:54.960 | and were able to solve an open math problem

06:12:57.280 | by collaborating.

06:12:58.980 | Wikipedia with its flaws that we talked about.

06:13:01.560 | Social networks and group messaging,

06:13:02.600 | all these are ways for collaborating.

06:13:04.040 | They're not just simply attacking

06:13:05.440 | or doing something on the internet.

06:13:07.080 | This is something that Elon could use, right?

06:13:09.080 | - What works and what doesn't about Twitter?

06:13:11.680 | If there's something that's broken, how would you fix it?

06:13:14.360 | - A million things I can say here.

06:13:15.360 | So a few things.

06:13:16.200 | First is fact-checking.

06:13:17.880 | I had this kind of fun, I thought it was a funny tweet.

06:13:20.180 | To anyone who wants to quote,

06:13:21.240 | "Ban lying on social media,

06:13:23.040 | "please write down a function that takes in a statement

06:13:25.000 | "and returns whether it is true.

06:13:26.560 | "If you can start with the remand hypothesis,"

06:13:28.440 | that would be amazing.

06:13:29.520 | - Yeah.

06:13:30.360 | - Okay?

06:13:31.180 | - Yeah, we'll put--

06:13:32.020 | - That's kind of funny, right?

06:13:32.840 | - That's funny.

06:13:33.680 | - And so now the thing is--

06:13:34.840 | - That joke landed on like five people.

06:13:38.600 | - Sure, you wanna explain the joke?

06:13:39.640 | Go.

06:13:40.480 | - Well, no, there's a lot of problems,

06:13:42.400 | decidability where the truth,

06:13:45.440 | that's what proofs in math is.

06:13:47.800 | The truth of the thing is actually

06:13:49.320 | exceptionally difficult to determine.

06:13:51.400 | And that's just a really nice example.

06:13:53.600 | - Right.

06:13:54.440 | - The problems that persist across centuries

06:13:57.040 | that have not been solved by the most brilliant minds,

06:14:00.040 | they're essentially true or false problems.

06:14:02.720 | - That's right.

06:14:03.560 | And so when people are saying,

06:14:04.380 | when they were saying they want to ban lying on social media,

06:14:07.320 | fact-check social media,

06:14:08.580 | the assumption is that they know what is true.

06:14:10.320 | And what do they mean by that?

06:14:11.260 | They really mean the assertion of political power, right?

06:14:14.360 | With that said, do I think it could be useful

06:14:17.740 | to have some kind of quote fact-checking thing?

06:14:19.560 | Yes, but it has to be decentralized and open source.

06:14:21.880 | You could imagine an interesting concept

06:14:23.680 | of coding Trugal, like a Google,

06:14:26.680 | that returned what was true.

06:14:27.680 | It's like a modified version.

06:14:28.520 | - Yes, I like it.

06:14:29.360 | - Right?

06:14:30.180 | So like GPT-3,

06:14:31.020 | but the stable diffusion version where it's open.

06:14:33.560 | Okay.

06:14:34.400 | And so now anybody,

06:14:35.220 | stable diffusion shows it is possible

06:14:36.480 | to take an expensive AI model and put it out there.

06:14:38.680 | Right?

06:14:39.520 | So you have, you know what a knowledge graph is?

06:14:41.480 | Like basically, you wouldn't actually,

06:14:46.080 | whether you have it as RDF

06:14:47.420 | or like a triple store kind of thing,

06:14:49.820 | or some other representation,

06:14:50.860 | it's like an ontology of A is a B and, you know,

06:14:55.140 | B has a C and it's got probabilities on the edges sometimes

06:14:58.500 | and other kinds of metadata.

06:14:59.700 | And this allows Google to show certain kinds

06:15:01.980 | of one box information where it's like,

06:15:04.620 | what is Steve Jobs's, you know,

06:15:07.300 | what is Lorraine Powell Jobs's age or birthday?

06:15:10.240 | They can pull that up out of the knowledge graph, right?

06:15:13.740 | And so you can imagine that Trugal

06:15:16.680 | would have both deterministic and statistical components.

06:15:19.880 | And crucially, it would say whether something is true

06:15:22.640 | according to a given knowledge graph.

06:15:24.480 | And so this way, at least what you can do is you can say,

06:15:28.720 | okay, here's the things that are consensus reality,

06:15:32.280 | like the value of the gravitational constant

06:15:34.160 | will be the same in the MAGA knowledge graph

06:15:37.520 | and the US establishment knowledge graph

06:15:39.020 | and the CCP knowledge graph and the, I don't know,

06:15:42.640 | the Brazilian knowledge graph and so on and so forth, okay.

06:15:46.020 | But there's other things that will be quite different.

06:15:48.680 | And at least now you can isolate

06:15:51.400 | where the point of disagreement is.

06:15:53.760 | And so you can have a form of decentralized fact-checking

06:15:55.980 | that is like, according to who, well, here is the authority

06:15:59.400 | and it is this knowledge graph, right?

06:16:00.820 | So that's like a kind of thing, right?

06:16:02.520 | - Yeah, yeah.

06:16:03.500 | - So that is, so that's one concept

06:16:06.100 | of like what next social media looks like.

06:16:08.060 | There's actually so much more.

06:16:09.700 | Another huge thing is decentralized social media, okay.

06:16:13.180 | Social media today is like China under communism

06:16:17.040 | in a really key sense.

06:16:18.780 | There's a great article called

06:16:20.260 | "The Secret Document That Transformed China."

06:16:22.240 | Do you know what China was like before 1978?

06:16:24.500 | - I know about the atrocities.

06:16:25.980 | - Sure, so. - But there.

06:16:26.820 | - To put some flesh on the bone, so to speak, okay.

06:16:30.660 | So basically.

06:16:32.100 | - There's a good book I'm reading

06:16:33.260 | because I think a lot of documents became public recently.

06:16:36.580 | And so.

06:16:37.420 | - There was a window when it opened up.

06:16:38.660 | Now it's probably closing back down again, but.

06:16:40.500 | - But great biographies because of that were written.

06:16:43.260 | Like I'm currently reading "Mao's Great Famine"

06:16:45.860 | by Frank Dicotter.

06:16:47.340 | - Yeah.

06:16:48.180 | - Which is, oh boy.

06:16:50.380 | - It's crazy, okay. - Yeah.

06:16:52.940 | - Here's the thing is capitalism was punishable by death

06:16:57.060 | in living memory in China.

06:16:59.780 | Just to explain what that meant, okay.

06:17:01.180 | I mean, that's what communism was, right?

06:17:03.020 | It was literally the same China that has like the CCP,

06:17:06.260 | you know, the entrepreneurs and Jack Ma and so on and so forth.

06:17:08.900 | 40 something years ago, capitalism was punishable by death.

06:17:11.140 | But to give you a concrete example,

06:17:13.540 | this is a famous story in China.

06:17:14.860 | It may be apocryphal,

06:17:15.980 | but it's what the folks have talked about.

06:17:18.220 | There's a village in Xiaogang

06:17:20.180 | and basically all the grain that you were produced

06:17:22.860 | was supposed to go to the collective.

06:17:24.380 | And even one straw belonged to the group.

06:17:26.780 | At one meeting with Communist Party officials,

06:17:28.260 | a farmer asked, "What about the teeth in my head?

06:17:30.060 | "Do I own those?"

06:17:30.900 | Answer, "No, your teeth belong to the collective."

06:17:33.540 | Okay.

06:17:34.380 | Now, the thing is that when you're taking 100%

06:17:38.940 | of everything, okay, work hard, don't work hard,

06:17:41.260 | everyone gets the same,

06:17:42.100 | so people don't wanna work, right?

06:17:43.540 | So what happened?

06:17:45.060 | These farmers gathered in secret

06:17:47.300 | and they did something that was like,

06:17:49.540 | would have gotten them executed.

06:17:50.620 | They were a contract amongst themselves and said,

06:17:54.620 | "We all agree that we will be able to keep

06:17:56.700 | "some of our own grain.

06:17:58.500 | "We will give some of them to the regime

06:18:00.440 | "so when it comes to collect grain, they've got something.

06:18:02.620 | "We'll be able to keep some of it."

06:18:04.180 | And if any of us are killed for doing this,

06:18:06.820 | then the contract said that the others

06:18:08.340 | would take care of their children.

06:18:10.020 | Okay?

06:18:11.900 | To keep some of what you earned,

06:18:13.380 | I mean, just think about how-

06:18:14.220 | - They formed a mini capitalism society

06:18:16.940 | within the Communist, a secret capitalism society

06:18:20.220 | amongst five people.

06:18:22.580 | - Right, so now that they could keep some

06:18:24.180 | of what they earned, right?

06:18:25.980 | Keep some of what they earned,

06:18:27.340 | they had a bumper harvest.

06:18:28.860 | And you know what happened with that bumper harvest?

06:18:30.780 | That made the local officials really suspicious and mad.

06:18:34.740 | They weren't happy that there was a bumper harvest.

06:18:36.140 | They're like, "What are you doing?

06:18:37.260 | "You're doing capitalism?"

06:18:38.780 | - Yeah. - Right?

06:18:39.740 | And a few years earlier, they might've just been executed.

06:18:43.260 | And in fact, many were.

06:18:44.100 | That's what it means when you see millions dead.

06:18:46.660 | Millions dead means guys were shot

06:18:48.900 | for keeping some grain for themselves.

06:18:51.020 | Okay, it means like guys came and kicked in the door

06:18:53.260 | of your collective farm and raped your wife

06:18:56.060 | and took you off to a prison camp and so on and so forth.

06:18:58.300 | That's what communism actually was, okay?

06:19:00.300 | It hasn't been depicted in movies.

06:19:01.860 | There's a great post by Ken Billingsley in the year 2000

06:19:05.580 | called, if I get this right, "Hollywood's Missing Movies."

06:19:09.700 | Okay, this is basically here.

06:19:13.420 | I'll paste this link so you can put it in the show notes.

06:19:15.020 | All right, this is worth reading.

06:19:16.340 | It's still applicable today,

06:19:18.100 | but now that we have stable diffusion,

06:19:19.900 | now we have all these people online,

06:19:21.260 | now that Russia and China are America's national bad guys,

06:19:25.400 | as they were before, they are again,

06:19:29.140 | perhaps we'll get some movies on what communism

06:19:30.980 | actually was during the 20th century and how bad it was,

06:19:32.940 | right, and vaccinate people against that

06:19:36.100 | as well as against Nazism, which they should be, okay?

06:19:39.100 | The point of this, go ahead.

06:19:41.120 | - No, 'cause I'm congratulating myself on the nice

06:19:46.100 | because you're sending me excellent links on WhatsApp

06:19:49.780 | and I just saw that there's an export chat feature.

06:19:52.940 | - Yes, great.

06:19:53.780 | - Because we also have disappearing messages on,

06:19:55.780 | so I was like, all right, this is great.

06:19:58.020 | - Great.

06:19:58.860 | - I get it.

06:20:00.180 | Your ability to reference sources is incredible,

06:20:03.740 | so thank you for this.

06:20:04.980 | - This is, otherwise, if I say something,

06:20:07.260 | it sounds too surprising,

06:20:08.420 | so that's why I wanna make sure I have--

06:20:09.580 | - Just on this topic.

06:20:10.580 | - Yeah, so like, yeah, I mean,

06:20:12.220 | people would be like shot for holding some grain.

06:20:15.160 | So what happened though was Deng Xiaoping said,

06:20:19.780 | okay, we're not gonna kill you.

06:20:21.860 | In fact, we're gonna actually set up

06:20:23.820 | the first special economic zone in Shenzhen.

06:20:25.660 | He didn't try to flip the whole country

06:20:27.280 | from communist to capitalist in one go.

06:20:29.620 | Instead, he's like, we can reform in one place.

06:20:32.620 | And in fact, he fenced it off from the rest of China

06:20:35.300 | and it did trade with Hong Kong

06:20:37.380 | and he spent his political capital on this one exception.

06:20:39.640 | It grew so fast, they gave him more political capital.

06:20:42.900 | Some people think actually that the Sino-Vietnamese War

06:20:47.260 | was Deng's way of just distracting the generals

06:20:52.300 | while he was turning China around

06:20:54.040 | to get it back on the capitalist road.

06:20:56.060 | And what he did was the opposite of a rebranding.

06:21:00.940 | He did a reinterpretation.

06:21:02.020 | Like a rebranding is where the substance is the same,

06:21:05.100 | but the logo is changed.

06:21:06.660 | You're now, you were Facebook, you're now meta.

06:21:09.940 | That's a rebranding, right?

06:21:11.780 | Reinterpretation is where the logo

06:21:13.820 | and the branding is the same.

06:21:14.860 | They're still the CCP,

06:21:15.900 | they're still the Chinese Communist Party,

06:21:17.980 | but they're capitalist now, the engine under the hood.

06:21:19.820 | It's deniable, okay?

06:21:21.980 | And this is a very common,

06:21:23.220 | once you realize those are different things,

06:21:24.500 | it's like swap the front end, swap the back end.

06:21:26.940 | - Yeah.

06:21:28.060 | - Go ahead. - Good way to put it.

06:21:29.140 | - Right? - It's really good.

06:21:29.980 | Yeah, yeah, really.

06:21:30.820 | (laughing)

06:21:33.100 | I'm enjoying your metaphors

06:21:34.980 | and way of talking about stuff.

06:21:36.420 | Yeah, so I get, yeah, yeah.

06:21:37.660 | Swap, you could, yeah.

06:21:39.060 | Rebranding is swap the front end,

06:21:40.940 | reinterpretation is swap the back end.

06:21:42.460 | - That's right.

06:21:43.300 | Once you realize that, you're like, okay,

06:21:45.620 | I can just like as an engineer, you can kind of,

06:21:48.340 | okay, sometimes I wanna do this on the front end,

06:21:49.900 | sometimes I wanna do it on the back end,

06:21:50.900 | sometimes it's explicit,

06:21:52.380 | and sometimes the user doesn't need to see it

06:21:53.780 | and it's on the back end.

06:21:54.980 | Lots of political stuff, you know,

06:21:57.460 | is arguably not just best done on the back end,

06:22:00.900 | but always done on the back end.

06:22:02.260 | One of the points I make in the book is,

06:22:04.060 | left is the new right is the new left,

06:22:05.940 | is, you know, if you look through history,

06:22:09.300 | the Christian King, the Republican conservative,

06:22:12.580 | the CCP entrepreneur, the WASP establishment,

06:22:17.580 | these are all examples of a revolutionary left movement

06:22:22.700 | becoming the ruling class right.

06:22:26.500 | Okay, like the Republican conservative,

06:22:28.020 | just as that one example,

06:22:29.060 | I go through extended description of this in the book,

06:22:31.300 | but the Republicans were the radical Republicans,

06:22:34.140 | the left of 1865, they won the revolution

06:22:37.180 | and their moral authority led them to have economic authority

06:22:41.100 | in the late 1800s.

06:22:41.940 | You wouldn't want a Democrat Confederate trader

06:22:45.380 | as the head of your, you know,

06:22:47.220 | railroad company, would you, right?

06:22:48.380 | So all the Confederate traders that were boxed out

06:22:51.700 | from the plum positions in the late 1800s.

06:22:55.300 | And so what happened was the Republicans

06:22:57.580 | turned their moral authority into economic authority,

06:22:59.540 | made tons of money.

06:23:00.940 | The Democrats then started repositioning,

06:23:02.780 | not as a party of the Southern racists, but the poor, right?

06:23:07.100 | And, you know, the cross of gold speech

06:23:09.260 | by William Jennings Bryan was part of that.

06:23:10.620 | There's a gradual process that reaches a path,

06:23:13.260 | not a path, let's say a crucial mark

06:23:15.900 | with the election of FDR,

06:23:17.700 | where it was actually not the 1932, but 1936 election

06:23:20.420 | that black voters switched over to FDR, okay?

06:23:23.980 | That was actually the, like the major flip to like 70%,

06:23:27.500 | you know, to the Democrats.

06:23:29.860 | Now they'd repositioned as a party of the poor,

06:23:31.660 | not the party of the South, okay?

06:23:33.740 | And Republicans had lost some economic authority,

06:23:38.740 | or rather they had moral authority,

06:23:40.140 | they turned into economic authority.

06:23:41.780 | They started to lose some moral authority.

06:23:43.700 | The loss of moral authority was complete by 1965.

06:23:45.980 | That was actually a mop-up.

06:23:47.020 | People dated, you know, the civil rights movement

06:23:48.980 | as the big way where the Republicans lost moral authority.

06:23:51.140 | It's not really, that was a mop-up because 1936,

06:23:54.180 | 30 years earlier was when black voters

06:23:55.620 | switched to the Democrats, okay?

06:23:57.300 | So 1965 was another 10 points moving over

06:23:59.700 | of black voters to Democrats.

06:24:01.620 | Republicans had completely lost moral authority

06:24:03.580 | 100 years after the civil war, okay?

06:24:05.860 | Then the next 50 years, that loss of moral authority

06:24:08.980 | meant that they lost economic authority,

06:24:11.060 | 'cause now you wouldn't want a Republican bigot

06:24:13.380 | as a CEO of your tech company anymore, would you?

06:24:15.260 | Right?

06:24:16.100 | So by 2015, now you have,

06:24:18.980 | it's like two sine waves that are staggered, right?

06:24:21.860 | Moral authority leads to economic authority,

06:24:23.780 | leads to loss of moral authority,

06:24:26.940 | leads to loss of economic authority.

06:24:28.700 | And so now you have the Democrats, you know,

06:24:32.140 | have completed 155 year arc from the defeated party

06:24:36.940 | in the civil war to the dominant party

06:24:40.180 | in the US establishment.

06:24:41.060 | All the woke capitalists are now at the very top.

06:24:44.340 | And now the same repositioning is happening

06:24:46.340 | where if you're so woke, why are you rich?

06:24:49.460 | You get it, right?

06:24:50.300 | Like, you know, if you're so smart,

06:24:51.140 | why aren't you rich is the normal kind of thing, right?

06:24:53.260 | If you're so woke, if you're so holy,

06:24:55.340 | why is like, for example, the BLM founder,

06:24:56.940 | why do they have this million dollar mansion, right?

06:24:58.620 | If you're so woke and it's all about being good

06:25:00.660 | and you're anti-capitalist,

06:25:01.500 | how come you seem to be raking in the money, et cetera,

06:25:03.620 | right?

06:25:04.700 | This is an argument which I'm not sure how long it will go.

06:25:09.460 | It might take years to play out,

06:25:11.340 | it might take decades to play out.

06:25:12.980 | I think probably on the order of a decade.

06:25:14.740 | You're gonna see, in my view, the repositioning.

06:25:17.060 | If the Democrats are the woke capitalists,

06:25:19.340 | the Republicans will eventually become,

06:25:21.420 | are becoming the Bitcoin maximalists.

06:25:23.420 | Why?

06:25:24.260 | Because, you know, if one guy picks left,

06:25:26.460 | the other guy picks right.

06:25:27.300 | It's literally like magnets kind of repelling.

06:25:28.980 | They're sort of forced into the other corner here, right?

06:25:31.460 | And the Bitcoin maximalists will essentially,

06:25:34.140 | where this guy says centralization,

06:25:35.500 | they say decentralization,

06:25:36.860 | where they defend the right of capital to do anything,

06:25:39.700 | the maximalists will say,

06:25:40.780 | actually, you're all cantillionaires,

06:25:42.780 | you're all benefiting from printed money,

06:25:44.620 | you don't have anything that's legitimate,

06:25:46.660 | you don't actually own anything,

06:25:47.820 | it's all a handout from the government,

06:25:49.180 | and so on and so forth, right?

06:25:50.660 | And so that's a counter positioning

06:25:52.980 | that will basically attack the wokes

06:25:56.780 | by how much money they're making.

06:25:58.100 | They're not contesting the ideology.

06:25:59.900 | So when one guy signals economics, you signal culture.

06:26:04.020 | When the other guy signals culture, you signal economics.

06:26:07.220 | That's actually, that's a whole thing I can talk about.

06:26:08.820 | Should I talk about that for a second?

06:26:09.740 | - Sure.

06:26:11.100 | - Is this integrated into the forces that you talk about?

06:26:15.660 | You've talked about the three forces,

06:26:18.660 | the trifecta of forces that affect our society,

06:26:21.740 | which is the wokes, let's say--

06:26:25.020 | - Woke capital, communist capital, crypto capital.

06:26:27.180 | - You talk so fast, and I think so slow.

06:26:31.940 | - No, no, no.

06:26:32.900 | - Woke capital, communist capital, and crypto capital.

06:26:37.900 | Can you explain each of those three?

06:26:40.460 | We actually talked about each of the three in part,

06:26:43.860 | but it'd be nice to bring them together

06:26:45.820 | in a beautiful triangle.

06:26:46.980 | - Then I will also come back up,

06:26:48.380 | and I'll talk about how the CCP story relates

06:26:51.020 | to social media and decentralized social media, okay?

06:26:53.260 | All right, so NYT-CCP-BTC is woke capital,

06:26:58.260 | communist capital, crypto capital.

06:27:00.060 | And communist capital is, the simplest is, you must submit.

06:27:03.780 | The Communist Party is powerful, CCP is powerful,

06:27:06.180 | and you are not.

06:27:07.020 | If you're in China, you just submit.

06:27:08.060 | - CCP is an embodiment of communist capital

06:27:12.460 | that you're talking about.

06:27:13.300 | - Well, yeah, so basically, and by the,

06:27:14.580 | in China, they call it CPC, you know?

06:27:16.460 | So basically, they don't like it usually if you say CCP,

06:27:18.900 | right, so the Communist Party of China,

06:27:21.580 | as opposed to Chinese Communist Party of China.

06:27:23.020 | Basically, that is capitalism,

06:27:25.700 | that is a Chinese pool of capital,

06:27:28.500 | that billion-person pool, okay?

06:27:30.700 | That's WeChat, and it's Alibaba,

06:27:35.460 | and it's that entire kind of thing.

06:27:37.060 | That is one just social network with currency.

06:27:39.820 | The whole thing's vertically integrated.

06:27:40.660 | - When we say communist, what do you mean here?

06:27:43.300 | Why is the word communist important?

06:27:44.980 | Why don't you just say China?

06:27:46.740 | So is communist an important word?

06:27:48.500 | - It just, well--

06:27:50.100 | - Or is it just a catchy label?

06:27:51.540 | - It's a catchy label, but I think it's also important

06:27:53.300 | because it seems, it's paradoxical, right?

06:27:56.300 | So I had a thread on this.

06:27:58.060 | The future is communist capital versus woke capital

06:28:00.100 | versus crypto capital.

06:28:01.500 | Each represents a left-right fusion that's bizarre

06:28:03.500 | by the standards of the 1980s consensus.

06:28:05.500 | It's PRC versus MMT versus BTC, all right?

06:28:08.140 | And why is it bizarre by the standards of 1980s consensus?

06:28:10.620 | Well, in the 1980s, you wouldn't think the communists

06:28:13.420 | would become capitalists, but they did.

06:28:15.780 | You wouldn't think that the wokes, the progressives, right,

06:28:19.660 | would become so enamored with giant corporations

06:28:24.020 | and their power, right?

06:28:25.100 | They've seen something to liken that, right?

06:28:27.420 | And you also wouldn't think that the non-Americans

06:28:32.660 | or the post-Americans or the internationalists

06:28:35.660 | would be the champions of capital

06:28:37.060 | because you'd think it's the American nation, right?

06:28:41.020 | So rather than the conservative American nationalists

06:28:45.300 | being the defenders of capital,

06:28:48.340 | you have the liberal Americans who are with capital,

06:28:53.340 | you have the communist Chinese who are with capital,

06:28:56.740 | and you have the internationalists who are with capital.

06:28:59.540 | And it's the conservative American nationalists

06:29:01.220 | who are in some ways against that,

06:29:03.220 | which is kind of funny, right?

06:29:04.500 | So it's like this weird ideological flippening

06:29:07.300 | that if you take the long lens,

06:29:10.300 | you have these poles that kind of repel each other, okay?

06:29:12.660 | So just on the CCP, NYT, BTC thing.

06:29:16.020 | - NYT, by the way, is woke capital.

06:29:18.260 | - Yeah, what is NYT?

06:29:19.180 | So its formula is a little interesting.

06:29:21.400 | If CCP is just, you must submit because they're powerful,

06:29:24.140 | okay, and then you bow your head

06:29:25.740 | because the Chinese Communist Party is strong.

06:29:27.580 | Woke capital is you must sympathize.

06:29:30.580 | Why do you bow your head, Lex?

06:29:31.940 | Oh, because you're a white male.

06:29:34.400 | Therefore, you're guilty.

06:29:35.380 | You must bow your head because you are powerful.

06:29:38.120 | Yet notice it ends in the same place,

06:29:41.020 | in your head looking to the ground, right?

06:29:44.700 | In China, it's because they're powerful,

06:29:47.540 | so therefore you must bend your head.

06:29:49.620 | For the wokes, it's the left-handed version

06:29:52.300 | where you are powerful and it's shameful,

06:29:54.940 | so you should bow your head, right?

06:29:57.900 | - Right. - Okay?

06:29:58.900 | But it ends in your head bowed.

06:30:00.940 | It's an ideology of submission.

06:30:02.340 | It's not that subtle, but it's somewhat subtle.

06:30:04.660 | And then finally, crypto capital is head held high.

06:30:06.920 | You must be sovereign, okay?

06:30:09.140 | And one of the things I point out in the book

06:30:12.100 | is each of these polls is negative in some ways

06:30:17.100 | when taken to extreme, but also negative in its opposite.

06:30:20.260 | For example, obviously just totally submitting

06:30:22.960 | to total surveillance is bad,

06:30:24.700 | but a society where nobody submits is San Francisco

06:30:27.160 | where people just rob stores and walk out

06:30:29.660 | in the middle shoplifting all these goods

06:30:33.500 | and nothing happens, right?

06:30:35.060 | A society where you have the woke level of sympathy

06:30:37.700 | where you get to the kind of insanity

06:30:39.580 | of math is white supremacist

06:30:41.320 | and whatever nonsense is happening today is terrible,

06:30:45.220 | but a society that's totally stripped of sympathy

06:30:47.860 | is also not one that one would wanna be part of, right?

06:30:50.380 | That's just like the,

06:30:51.380 | whether it's 4chan's actual culture or it's feign culture

06:30:56.460 | or something like that or some weird combination,

06:30:59.180 | that's also not good.

06:31:00.020 | It's like Russia in the '90s,

06:31:00.960 | like nobody trusts anybody, that's also bad.

06:31:03.520 | And being totally sovereign, that sounds good.

06:31:06.460 | And there's a lot that is good about it.

06:31:07.740 | I'm sympathetic to this corner,

06:31:09.020 | but being totally sovereign, you go so capitalist,

06:31:11.780 | so sovereign that you're against the division of labor.

06:31:13.600 | You don't trust anybody.

06:31:14.660 | So you have to pump your own water and so on.

06:31:16.220 | So you actually have a reduced standard

06:31:17.380 | of living over here, okay?

06:31:19.340 | And conversely-

06:31:20.180 | - Like survivalist or whatever.

06:31:21.540 | - Survivalist type of stuff, right?

06:31:23.200 | And you just go kind of too crazy into that corner.

06:31:27.400 | And then of course, though, the other extreme

06:31:29.320 | of having no sovereignty is the,

06:31:32.480 | you will own nothing and be happy.

06:31:33.760 | Everything's in the cloud

06:31:34.680 | and can be deleted at any point, right?

06:31:36.420 | So each of these kind of has badness when it's there,

06:31:39.380 | but also it's total extreme opposite is bad.

06:31:41.520 | And so you wanna kind of carve out

06:31:43.040 | like an intelligent intermediate of these three poles,

06:31:46.560 | and that's the decentralized center

06:31:48.800 | or the recentralized center, I call it.

06:31:50.340 | Now, with that said,

06:31:52.000 | I think there is a repositioning in particular

06:31:53.560 | of woke capital that is happening.

06:31:54.880 | And I think if the 2000s was the global war on terror,

06:31:59.000 | and then the channel just changed to wokeness in the 2010s,

06:32:01.960 | and when I mean channel change,

06:32:03.400 | have you seen Paul Graham's graph

06:32:05.560 | or actually David Rosado's graph that Paul Graham posted?

06:32:08.580 | - No, but this is a good chance to say

06:32:10.920 | that Paul Graham is awesome.

06:32:12.460 | - Okay, yeah.

06:32:13.300 | And so here is this graph, okay?

06:32:14.800 | David Rosado's data analysis, I think,

06:32:17.040 | that put this together.

06:32:18.080 | So basically, this is a graph of the word usage frequency

06:32:23.080 | in New York Times, 1970 to 2018.

06:32:25.480 | And he's got some controls there.

06:32:27.360 | - Paul Graham tweets, "Hypothesis.

06:32:29.520 | "Although some newspapers can survive

06:32:31.560 | "the switch to online subscriptions,

06:32:33.220 | "none can do it and remain politically neutral,

06:32:36.240 | "quote, newspaper or record.

06:32:38.140 | "You have to pick a side to get people to subscribe."

06:32:40.960 | And there's a bunch of plots.

06:32:46.080 | Plots.

06:32:47.200 | On the x-axis is years,

06:32:50.640 | on the y-axis is the frequency of use.

06:32:54.440 | And sexism has been going up,

06:32:56.400 | misogyny has been going up,

06:32:58.080 | sexist, patriarchy, mansplaining,

06:33:01.760 | toxic masculinity, male privilege.

06:33:04.080 | All these terms have been going up

06:33:06.440 | very intensely in the past decade.

06:33:10.920 | - Yeah, but really, 2013 is the exact moment.

06:33:13.680 | You see these things,

06:33:14.640 | they're flat and then just go vertical.

06:33:16.680 | Mansplaining, toxic masculinity.

06:33:18.600 | - What precisely happened in 2013?

06:33:20.480 | - Ah, so I talk about this in the book,

06:33:23.240 | but I think fundamentally what happened was

06:33:25.680 | tech hurt media and their revenue dropped

06:33:29.240 | by about $50 billion over the four years from '08 to 2012.

06:33:33.740 | Tech helped Obama get reelected

06:33:37.000 | and media was positive on tech until December 2012.

06:33:40.560 | They wrote, "The nerds go marching in the Atlantic."

06:33:43.360 | Then after January 2013, once Obama was ensconced,

06:33:48.360 | then the knives came out

06:33:49.800 | because basically these tech guys were bankrupting them.

06:33:52.360 | They were through supporting them.

06:33:55.240 | And so the journals got extremely nasty

06:33:58.440 | and just basically they couldn't build search engines

06:34:02.480 | or create social networks,

06:34:03.840 | but they could write stories and shape narratives.

06:34:05.160 | So a clear editorial direction went down

06:34:07.960 | that essentially took all of this,

06:34:11.440 | all these weapons that had been developed in academia

06:34:14.040 | to win status competitions in humanities departments.

06:34:17.180 | And then they just deployed them.

06:34:20.200 | And essentially somebody observed that

06:34:22.320 | wokeness is the combination of

06:34:23.920 | Foucauldian deconstruction and civil rights,

06:34:27.000 | where deconstruction takes away

06:34:29.280 | the legitimacy of the old order.

06:34:30.480 | And then civil rights says,

06:34:31.320 | okay, the only thing that's good is this,

06:34:33.240 | which says the old order is also bad in a different way,

06:34:35.640 | but this is what's good.

06:34:36.960 | And that is the underpinning ideology.

06:34:40.720 | All these words have embedded in them an ideology.

06:34:45.360 | Another way of thinking about it is,

06:34:47.520 | this is not my reference, but I'll cite it anyway,

06:34:49.520 | the glossary of the Greek military junta.

06:34:53.440 | The creation and or use of special terms

06:34:55.240 | are employed by the junta as propaganda tools

06:34:58.200 | because essentially the word itself embeds a concept.

06:35:00.920 | You can Russell conjugate something one way or the other.

06:35:03.080 | Russell conjugation is this concept that

06:35:04.960 | I sweat, you perspire, but she glows.

06:35:07.160 | You can always take something.

06:35:09.040 | You are uncontrollably angry,

06:35:11.880 | but he is righteously indignant.

06:35:14.160 | You have a thin skin, they clap back.

06:35:18.880 | So once you kind of realize that these words

06:35:22.600 | have just been chosen in such a way

06:35:24.080 | as to delegitimize their target,

06:35:26.440 | and they all went vertical in 2013,

06:35:28.720 | and they were suddenly targeted

06:35:29.960 | against their erstwhile allies in tech,

06:35:32.760 | but also just across the country,

06:35:34.960 | you can see that this great awokening,

06:35:37.080 | that's what Iglesias called it

06:35:39.000 | by playing words to the great awakening,

06:35:40.920 | this kind of spasm of quasi-religious extremism.

06:35:43.840 | I wouldn't call it religious because it's not God-centered.

06:35:46.760 | It's really state and network-centered.

06:35:48.560 | So I call it a doctrine,

06:35:49.520 | which is a superset of religion and political doctrine.

06:35:52.360 | These words went vertical and all the terrorism stuff

06:35:57.800 | you just noticed kind of fell off a cliff.

06:35:59.680 | That was the obsession of everything in the 2000s

06:36:02.880 | and just channel change.

06:36:04.360 | It's amazing how that happened.

06:36:07.040 | It's not like any of the pieces got picked up.

06:36:09.720 | Some of those wars are still raging, of course.

06:36:11.800 | - And there's victims to this wokeism movement.

06:36:16.800 | - But in a weird way, even though some parts of it,

06:36:20.200 | just like there's wars in the Middle East

06:36:22.560 | that still keep raging,

06:36:23.520 | there's certainly active fronts of wokeism,

06:36:25.840 | but in a sense, the next shift is already on.

06:36:29.120 | You know why?

06:36:30.640 | It's a pivot from wokeism to statism.

06:36:33.320 | In many ways, NYT is sort of,

06:36:35.000 | and more generally the US establishment

06:36:36.680 | is sort of kind of coming,

06:36:38.360 | you may not believe this,

06:36:39.200 | they're kind of coming back to the center a little bit.

06:36:41.520 | In the same way that Lenin, after the revolution,

06:36:44.840 | implemented the new economic policy,

06:36:46.440 | which you may be aware of, right?

06:36:47.680 | Which was just like X percent more capitalism.

06:36:50.040 | He kind of boot on the neck, take control,

06:36:52.840 | but then ease up for a bit.

06:36:54.360 | And the so-called net men during the '20s

06:36:57.320 | were able to eke out something.

06:36:58.680 | There was like, oh, okay, fine.

06:37:00.120 | He's gonna be easier on us.

06:37:01.760 | Then it intensified again,

06:37:02.840 | because basically by loosening up,

06:37:04.560 | they were able to consolidate control.

06:37:05.840 | They weren't putting as much pressure on, right?

06:37:07.920 | Then it went extremely intense again, right?

06:37:11.240 | Similar to like Mao's like a hundred flowers thing,

06:37:13.680 | let a hundred flowers bloom.

06:37:14.880 | And you know, everybody came out

06:37:16.240 | and then he founded all the people who were against him

06:37:17.720 | and he executed a bunch of them, right?

06:37:19.400 | So what's happening now is NYT is,

06:37:23.200 | and more generally the US establishment

06:37:24.440 | is somewhat tacking back to the center,

06:37:26.800 | where, you know, they're not talking BLM

06:37:29.920 | and abolish the police.

06:37:31.280 | They're saying fund the Capitol police, right?

06:37:34.240 | They've gone from the narrative of 2020,

06:37:36.440 | which was meant to win a domestic contest,

06:37:38.640 | where they said, America is a systemically racist country,

06:37:40.720 | tear down George Washington, we're so evil,

06:37:43.600 | to the rhetoric of 2022,

06:37:45.320 | which is we're the global champion of democracy

06:37:47.240 | and every non-white country is supposed to trust us.

06:37:49.600 | Now, obviously those are inconsistent, right?

06:37:54.640 | If you're in India or you're in Nigeria,

06:37:56.680 | and you just heard that America's calling itself

06:37:59.040 | the same guys, by the way,

06:38:00.360 | saying it's so institutionally racist, systemically racist.

06:38:02.800 | And now you're saying, well,

06:38:03.640 | we're the leader of the free world and the number one.

06:38:05.680 | Obviously there's an inconsistency

06:38:06.840 | between the domestic propaganda

06:38:08.160 | and the foreign propaganda, right?

06:38:10.320 | There's a contrast between abolish the police

06:38:12.120 | and put 2 billion for the Capitol police.

06:38:13.760 | You can reconcile this and you can say,

06:38:16.160 | the US establishment is pro-federal

06:38:18.560 | and anti-local and state.

06:38:20.400 | So abolish the local police,

06:38:22.400 | who tend to be, you know, Republican or rightist,

06:38:25.600 | but fund the FBI, fund the Capitol police,

06:38:27.520 | who tend to be, you know,

06:38:28.440 | just like in the Soviet Union,

06:38:30.600 | is the national things like the KGB, right?

06:38:33.000 | They were for the state,

06:38:36.360 | but there were all these local nationalist,

06:38:38.680 | ethnic insurgencies in like Estonia and other places, right?

06:38:41.840 | So you can reconcile them,

06:38:43.080 | but nevertheless on its face, those are contradictory.

06:38:46.040 | So what are you gonna get, I think?

06:38:48.480 | I think you're gonna get this rotation

06:38:51.160 | where a fair number of the folks

06:38:54.720 | on the sort of authoritarian right

06:38:56.800 | are kind of pulled back into the fold a bit, okay?

06:38:59.520 | These are the cops and the military and whatnot,

06:39:01.880 | some of them, because as this decade progresses,

06:39:05.280 | you're gonna see the signaling on American statism

06:39:07.400 | as opposed to wokeism, okay?

06:39:08.520 | Which is 30 degrees back towards the center, right?

06:39:12.240 | Conversely, on the other side,

06:39:14.240 | you're gonna have the left libertarians

06:39:16.640 | and right libertarians who are signaling crypto

06:39:19.480 | and decentralization and so on, okay?

06:39:22.200 | And so the next one isn't red versus blue,

06:39:25.040 | it's orange versus green.

06:39:26.640 | It's the dollar versus Bitcoin.

06:39:28.280 | And so you have the authoritarians,

06:39:29.720 | the top of the political compass

06:39:30.840 | versus the "libertarians," right?

06:39:33.200 | And here's the visual of that.

06:39:35.580 | So that's why as I wrote the book and after I showed it,

06:39:40.320 | I was like, "You know, I'm already seeing this shift

06:39:43.920 | happening from war on terror to wokeism

06:39:46.720 | to American statism, right?"

06:39:48.960 | And here, just take a look at this visual.

06:39:51.800 | - Interesting.

06:39:52.640 | So the visual is an animation transforming

06:39:57.080 | the left versus right, libertarian versus authoritarian

06:40:02.080 | to Bitcoin and dollar versus crypto.

06:40:07.640 | - That's right.

06:40:08.480 | And some folks switch sides, right?

06:40:10.240 | 'Cause you have folks like Jack Dorsey

06:40:13.400 | and a lot of the tech founders

06:40:15.480 | in basically the lower left corner, right?

06:40:17.600 | Who were blue but are now gonna become orange or are orange.

06:40:21.080 | And you have folks in the upper right corner

06:40:23.920 | who are going to, at the end of the day,

06:40:26.280 | pick the dollar and the American flag

06:40:28.880 | over the internationalist ideals of cryptocurrency.

06:40:32.680 | - The realigning, as you call it.

06:40:35.000 | Let me ask you, briefly, we do need to get a comment,

06:40:40.000 | your visionary view of things.

06:40:42.780 | We're at a low point in the cryptocurrency space

06:40:47.200 | from a shallow analysis perspective,

06:40:50.200 | or maybe in a deeper sense, if you can enlighten me.

06:40:53.920 | Do you think Bitcoin will rise again?

06:40:57.200 | - Yes.

06:40:58.040 | - Do you think it will go to take on fiat,

06:41:03.040 | to go over a million dollars, to go to these heights?

06:41:07.120 | - I mean, I think it's possible.

06:41:08.640 | And the reason I think it's possible

06:41:09.720 | is I think a lot of things might go to a million dollars

06:41:12.160 | because inflation. - Oh, because of inflation.

06:41:13.560 | - Right.

06:41:14.400 | - Whatever.

06:41:15.240 | - That was an important point, right?

06:41:16.060 | - Yes, it's a very important point, yes.

06:41:17.640 | - Because you're seeing essentially...

06:41:19.800 | (Lex laughing)

06:41:20.760 | - Yes.

06:41:21.600 | - But sort of the choke pointing on energy

06:41:23.760 | is pushing up prices across the board for a lot of things.

06:41:26.720 | China's not doing us any favors with the COVID lockdowns.

06:41:32.320 | Putin's not doing the world any favors

06:41:34.960 | with this giant war.

06:41:36.600 | There's a lot of bad things happening

06:41:38.920 | in the physical world, right?

06:41:40.400 | When China, Russia, and the US are all,

06:41:45.880 | and Europe is, there's folks who are just insane

06:41:48.480 | about degrowth and they're against,

06:41:52.560 | they're pushing for burning coal and wood, right?

06:41:55.320 | So a lot of prices are going up

06:41:57.120 | in a really foundational and fundamental way.

06:41:59.400 | And with that said also,

06:42:01.480 | the dollar is in some ways strengthening

06:42:02.920 | against certain other things

06:42:03.880 | 'cause a lot of other countries are dying harder, right?

06:42:06.720 | And you've got riots in Sri Lanka and riots in Panama

06:42:10.280 | and riots in all these places, right?

06:42:13.560 | So it's very complicated

06:42:15.200 | because you've got multiple different trends

06:42:16.960 | going in the same way.

06:42:17.800 | Your Bitcoin maxims would just say infinity over 21 million.

06:42:22.320 | And so therefore you print all the dollars

06:42:23.880 | with only 21 million Bitcoin, so Bitcoin goes to infinity.

06:42:26.320 | But it can be something where lots of other currencies die

06:42:29.880 | and the dollar is actually exported via stable coins, okay?

06:42:33.420 | But I do think--

06:42:35.320 | - So it still moves,

06:42:36.160 | fiat still moves somehow into the cryptocurrencies.

06:42:39.200 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

06:42:40.040 | I think it's kind of like Microsoft where,

06:42:42.160 | I mean, Windows is still around, right?

06:42:44.120 | Microsoft is still around.

06:42:44.960 | It's still a multi-hundred billion dollar company.

06:42:47.320 | It had-- - He doesn't mean it.

06:42:48.560 | He doesn't mean it, don't worry.

06:42:49.840 | All my machines are Windows

06:42:51.360 | and like still boot, yeah. - Are they?

06:42:52.920 | Okay, okay. - I don't own a single Mac.

06:42:54.760 | - Really?

06:42:55.600 | Okay, you are unusual in that.

06:42:57.160 | - Yeah.

06:42:58.000 | - That's, so at least for our--

06:42:59.480 | - It's not ideology, just convenience.

06:43:02.080 | - Fine, I mean, they actually now at PostSethia,

06:43:04.240 | they do make some good stuff, right?

06:43:05.760 | Like Microsoft Teams is good, right?

06:43:07.840 | - Yeah, there's a lot of incredible stuff.

06:43:09.600 | And UCO has done a lot of innovative things, like GitHub.

06:43:13.440 | - Yeah, I mean, well, there's an acquisition,

06:43:14.720 | but still, they give them credit for it.

06:43:16.040 | - The acquisition, the pivoting of vision and motivations

06:43:19.920 | and focus and all that kind of stuff.

06:43:22.320 | So anyway, yes, Microsoft does analogy metaphor

06:43:25.200 | for something?

06:43:26.040 | - Well, yeah, so basically just like,

06:43:27.440 | they didn't need a turnaround,

06:43:28.480 | but they did endure to the present day.

06:43:30.360 | They didn't die from Google app.

06:43:31.640 | I mean, for the massive attacks on them, they didn't die.

06:43:33.800 | They're less powerful, but they make more money, right?

06:43:36.920 | And I think that might be something that,

06:43:40.120 | I mean, our best case scenario is the US establishment

06:43:42.800 | or CCP has more power over fewer people, okay?

06:43:46.280 | - I see.

06:43:47.120 | - And so, but you can't exit.

06:43:49.280 | If you're there, you're kind of knuckling under or whatever,

06:43:52.040 | but you can't exit, right?

06:43:53.560 | And so I mentioned those three polls.

06:43:56.200 | CCP is obviously a billion people, 1.4 aligned

06:44:00.040 | under the digital yuan and so on, right?

06:44:02.480 | NYT is the entire, it's the tech companies,

06:44:06.360 | it's the US dollar, it is the establishment.

06:44:09.080 | And then crypto capital is everybody else.

06:44:11.280 | But I actually think that over time,

06:44:13.560 | that third world is web three this time.

06:44:16.440 | And that's the third poll.

06:44:17.800 | And that's India and it's Israel.

06:44:19.560 | And it's lots of American conservatives

06:44:21.600 | and left libertarians and libertarians.

06:44:24.120 | And it's also lots of Chinese liberals,

06:44:25.880 | all the folks who are trying to get out of China

06:44:28.360 | because it's become so nationalist and crazy

06:44:32.360 | and difficult for capitalism.

06:44:34.360 | And so if you take basically non-establishment Americans

06:44:38.640 | on both left and right, okay?

06:44:40.280 | The bottom two quadrants in the political compass

06:44:43.360 | I talked about, you take the liberal Chinese,

06:44:46.560 | you take the Israelis and the Indians, why?

06:44:49.440 | Because they don't, both of them have a lot of tech talent.

06:44:53.840 | Right, they're the number one and number two demographics

06:44:55.440 | for tech founders.

06:44:56.880 | And they want to, while they are generally sympathetic

06:45:01.880 | to the West, right?

06:45:04.040 | And they have more ties to the West,

06:45:05.720 | they also are more cautious about national interests

06:45:09.560 | rather than just starting fights,

06:45:10.840 | you know, where that's how they would think about it, right?

06:45:12.440 | They just, you know, India thinks of itself

06:45:14.040 | as a poor country,

06:45:14.880 | Israel thinks of itself as a small country.

06:45:16.760 | And so therefore it needs to not just get in every fight

06:45:19.560 | just for the sake of it.

06:45:20.440 | And so need to maintain a cautious distance with China,

06:45:24.360 | but not like do what Pelosi is doing

06:45:26.640 | and try and start like a big thing, okay?

06:45:28.680 | I think Israel is similar

06:45:30.560 | where it's maintaining diplomatic relations with China.

06:45:32.480 | It's more friendly towards China than the US is.

06:45:35.040 | India and Israel, I think, are two sovereign states

06:45:38.240 | that have a lot of globally mobile tech talent

06:45:40.080 | that obviously have ties to the West

06:45:41.840 | with a large diaspora that are hard to demonize,

06:45:45.640 | you know, in the sense of willing to argue on the internet.

06:45:50.280 | (laughs)

06:45:51.280 | Let's put it like that, in English, right?

06:45:52.760 | It's very important.

06:45:53.960 | And them plus enough Americans plus enough Chinese

06:45:57.600 | can set up another poll that is not for cold war

06:46:02.280 | or military confrontation, but for peace and trade

06:46:05.560 | and freedom and so on and so forth, right?

06:46:08.240 | That's the center as opposed to the, you know,

06:46:12.600 | left of the woke American US establishment

06:46:16.480 | or the right of the ultra-nationalist CCP, right?

06:46:18.920 | That's what I think about.

06:46:20.000 | Now, what I would say here is the reason I think

06:46:23.440 | these are the kind of the three polls,

06:46:24.560 | you can argue against this, right?

06:46:25.600 | You can say it's unipolar world.

06:46:27.280 | America's totally dominant.

06:46:28.420 | That's one argument.

06:46:29.400 | You can say it's a bipolar world.

06:46:30.520 | It's just the US versus China.

06:46:31.840 | Not everybody else will have to be forced to align

06:46:34.240 | with one or the other.

06:46:35.360 | Jay Shankar, you know, actually explicitly rejected this.

06:46:37.600 | He's like, look, there's a billion people in India.

06:46:39.760 | It's coming up on, it will eventually be like

06:46:41.960 | the number three economy.

06:46:42.880 | It's on the rise.

06:46:44.800 | He's got the history and culture.

06:46:45.920 | He thinks he's entitled to have,

06:46:47.280 | India's entitled to have its own side, right?

06:46:49.560 | In such a thing.

06:46:50.380 | It's a funny way of putting it, right?

06:46:51.680 | But it's also true.

06:46:53.200 | And so you could say it's unipolar,

06:46:54.800 | you could say it's bipolar,

06:46:55.640 | you could say it's just multipolar.

06:46:56.880 | And everybody is kind of, they're, you know,

06:46:58.640 | India, Israel, these are groups out there.

06:47:00.720 | But I actually think it's gonna be tripolar.

06:47:02.240 | And the reason it's tripolar is these three pools

06:47:05.240 | are the groups that have enough media and money

06:47:08.640 | and scale and whatnot to really kind of

06:47:11.200 | be self-consistent civilizations.

06:47:12.480 | Obviously China's like the vertically integrated,

06:47:14.080 | like Apple or whatever, just like one country.

06:47:14.920 | - Maybe a stable ideology.

06:47:17.200 | - A stable ideology, that's right, right?

06:47:19.300 | Obviously the, you know,

06:47:20.520 | the wolves have control of lots of institutions.

06:47:23.100 | They've got the US establishment,

06:47:24.560 | they've got the tech companies,

06:47:25.400 | they've got the media companies and so on.

06:47:27.300 | But crypto is basically everybody else.

06:47:29.660 | And crucially crypto has inroads in China and America

06:47:33.620 | where it's hard to demonize it as completely foreign

06:47:35.540 | because there's many, many, many huge proponents

06:47:38.020 | of the universalist values of crypto in America and China,

06:47:42.060 | because it is true global rule of law and free speech

06:47:45.460 | and, you know, so on.

06:47:46.760 | It is genuinely universalist in a way where

06:47:49.380 | America can no longer be, you know,

06:47:51.460 | the number one rule of the rules-based order

06:47:52.900 | is America is always number one.

06:47:54.980 | And China doesn't even pretend

06:47:56.340 | to maintain a rules-based order, right?

06:47:58.220 | Whereas for all those countries

06:47:59.860 | that don't wanna either be dominated

06:48:01.100 | by the US media corporations that can,

06:48:02.900 | or social media that can just censor Trump,

06:48:04.700 | nor do they wanna be dominated by China,

06:48:06.420 | this is an attractive alternative platform

06:48:08.220 | they can make their own, right?

06:48:09.660 | So that's where I think, you know,

06:48:10.860 | I wrote an article on this in Foreign Policy on here.

06:48:14.980 | Here's two articles that talk about this a little bit.

06:48:16.980 | It's called Great Protocol Politics.

06:48:19.100 | And then here's another one on the sort of domestic thing,

06:48:22.660 | Bitcoin is Civilization for Barry Weiss, okay?

06:48:25.800 | But I wanna just come up the stack a little bit

06:48:28.680 | and just return to that original point,

06:48:30.100 | which I diverged on,

06:48:31.060 | which was why, I gave the whole example

06:48:34.380 | of how we got into China

06:48:37.500 | because I talked about how China

06:48:39.300 | had gone from communist to capitalist

06:48:40.700 | and letting people have just a share of what they owned,

06:48:42.780 | right?

06:48:43.620 | With social media,

06:48:44.500 | we're still in kind of the communist era

06:48:46.900 | of social media almost,

06:48:47.740 | where whatever you earn on social media,

06:48:50.420 | like Google takes its cut,

06:48:52.100 | Twitter takes 100%,

06:48:53.260 | you're nothing for all your tweets or anything like that.

06:48:55.700 | Not only do you have, do you earn nothing,

06:48:58.660 | you might get a little rev share on TikTok or YouTube,

06:49:00.980 | you can do okay, right?

06:49:02.500 | But not only do you earn either nothing or a little bit,

06:49:05.540 | you have no digital property rights,

06:49:07.120 | even more fundamentally.

06:49:08.520 | You are at the,

06:49:10.540 | just the whim of a giant corporation can hit a button

06:49:14.660 | and everything you worked for over years, gone, okay?

06:49:18.460 | That is, even if that is quote,

06:49:19.940 | the current state of events,

06:49:21.300 | the state of affairs rather,

06:49:22.660 | that is not the right balance of power.

06:49:24.980 | To be able to unperson somebody at the touch of a key

06:49:28.780 | and take away everything in the digital world

06:49:30.620 | and we're living more and more in the digital world,

06:49:32.460 | we need to check on that power.

06:49:34.300 | And the check on that power is crypto

06:49:36.740 | and its property rights and its decentralization, right?

06:49:39.420 | Then when I say decentralization,

06:49:41.380 | I mean your money and your digital property

06:49:44.900 | is by default yours.

06:49:47.020 | And there has to be a due process

06:49:49.780 | for someone to take that away from you.

06:49:51.300 | Everything, all work is online.

06:49:53.540 | All your money is online, your presence is online.

06:49:55.700 | That can just be taken away from you

06:49:57.580 | with the press of a key

06:49:59.460 | that just gives bad governments, bad corporations

06:50:02.740 | so much power that that's wrong, right?

06:50:04.740 | That's why I'm a medium and long-term bull on crypto,

06:50:07.500 | simply because the check on this thing.

06:50:09.420 | And that if you think about it

06:50:10.740 | in terms of just abstract decentralization is one thing,

06:50:12.620 | but you think about it in terms of property rights,

06:50:14.700 | it's quite another.

06:50:16.060 | And now what that also means is once you have property rights

06:50:21.060 | and you have decentralized social media,

06:50:23.540 | it'll be like the explosion of trade that happened

06:50:27.580 | after China went from communist to capitalist.

06:50:29.460 | Literally billions of people around the world

06:50:31.540 | are no longer giving everything to the collective.

06:50:34.300 | They own the teeth in their head now, finally.

06:50:37.100 | Okay, it's funny, right?

06:50:38.700 | So you're lexfriedman.eth, you own it.

06:50:40.940 | The keys are on your computer.

06:50:42.300 | The bad part is of course they can get hacked

06:50:43.940 | or something like that.

06:50:44.780 | Then you can deal with that with social recovery.

06:50:46.300 | There's ways of securing keys.

06:50:48.180 | But the good part is, ta-da,

06:50:51.140 | you actually have property rights

06:50:52.580 | in the Hernando de Soto sense.

06:50:54.060 | You have something you own, ownership, digital ownership.

06:50:56.980 | It's the cloud is great,

06:50:58.660 | but crypto gives you some of the functionality of the cloud

06:51:02.260 | while also having some of the functionality

06:51:03.780 | of the offline world where you have the keys.

06:51:05.020 | So it's a V3, right?

06:51:06.940 | It's a continuous theme, right?

06:51:08.340 | The V1 was offline, I've got a key, I own it.

06:51:10.660 | I have de facto control.

06:51:12.060 | V2 is the cloud, someone else manages it for me.

06:51:14.020 | It's hosted, I get collaboration and so on.

06:51:16.100 | V3 is the chain where you combine aspects of those, right?

06:51:18.740 | You have the global state of the cloud,

06:51:20.460 | but you have the local permission

06:51:21.740 | and controlling of the private key, okay?

06:51:23.900 | So that's why I'm a medium to long-term ultra bull on crypto

06:51:26.420 | and I've actually, there's a podcast I gave with Asympco

06:51:28.740 | where I talked through how crypto actually

06:51:30.860 | doesn't just go after finance.

06:51:33.260 | So it's gold and it's wire transfers and it's crowdfunding

06:51:36.020 | and it's all finance with DeFi,

06:51:37.740 | but it's actually also search and it's social

06:51:40.460 | and it's messaging.

06:51:41.620 | It's actually even operating systems

06:51:44.100 | and eventually cloud and whatnot.

06:51:46.780 | Do you want me to talk about that briefly?

06:51:48.340 | - Yeah, yeah, if you can briefly see

06:51:49.860 | how broad you see the effect of crypto.

06:51:55.060 | So first, crypto is fundamentally a new way

06:51:57.060 | of building backend systems, right?

06:51:58.900 | So if you think about how big a deal it was to go

06:52:01.300 | from AT&T's corporate Unix to Linux, it's permissionless,

06:52:04.980 | right?

06:52:05.820 | When you went from, as much as I admire a lot of the stuff

06:52:08.100 | that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman have done at OpenAI,

06:52:11.420 | I mean, they're phenomenal in terms of research.

06:52:13.300 | They've pushed the envelope forward.

06:52:14.740 | I give them a ton of credit, right?

06:52:16.500 | Still, it was great to see stable diffusion out there,

06:52:19.780 | which was open source AI, right?

06:52:22.980 | And so from a developer, from a power user standpoint,

06:52:26.660 | whenever you have the unlocked version,

06:52:28.260 | like an unlocked cell phone,

06:52:29.140 | it's always gonna be better, right?

06:52:30.580 | So what crypto gives you,

06:52:34.380 | obviously it's every financial thing in the world.

06:52:37.100 | You can do stocks, bonds, et cetera.

06:52:38.980 | It's not, just like the internet wasn't just a channel.

06:52:42.620 | It wasn't like radio and TV and internet.

06:52:44.340 | It was internet radio and internet TV

06:52:46.060 | and internet this and internet that.

06:52:47.560 | Everything was the internet.

06:52:48.460 | All media became the internet.

06:52:49.780 | Crypto is not an asset class.

06:52:50.900 | It's all asset classes.

06:52:52.260 | It's crypto stocks and crypto bonds, et cetera.

06:52:54.260 | In a real sense, like private property

06:52:57.500 | arguably didn't exist in the same way before crypto.

06:53:00.620 | International law didn't exist before crypto.

06:53:02.340 | How are you gonna do a deal between Brazil and Bangladesh?

06:53:06.020 | If a Brazilian company wants to acquire

06:53:08.060 | a Bangladesh company,

06:53:09.180 | they usually have to set up a US adapter in between

06:53:11.260 | because otherwise, what are the tax

06:53:12.740 | or the other obligations between the two?

06:53:14.460 | You set up a US adapter or a Chinese adapter to go between,

06:53:17.260 | but now that Brazilian and Bangladesh can go peer to peer

06:53:20.060 | 'cause they're using blockchain, right?

06:53:21.420 | They can agree on a system of law

06:53:23.100 | that is completely international and that's code.

06:53:27.780 | So each party can diligence it

06:53:29.100 | without speaking Portuguese and Bengali, right?

06:53:32.340 | So that's why I am a long-term bull on crypto.

06:53:35.620 | I just described the finance case.

06:53:37.680 | Let me go through the others, right?

06:53:39.100 | Social.

06:53:39.940 | So you have the private keys for your ENS.

06:53:43.500 | You have apps like Farcaster.

06:53:45.460 | You basically have decentralized social media

06:53:48.260 | where there's different variants.

06:53:49.700 | Some, you just log in with your crypto username.

06:53:52.660 | Others, the entire social network

06:53:53.980 | and all the likes and posts are on chain like Deeso,

06:53:56.620 | but there's several different versions, right?

06:53:59.060 | Search.

06:53:59.900 | Once you realize block explorers

06:54:04.060 | are an important stealth threat to search,

06:54:06.160 | they're very high traffic sites like blockchain.com

06:54:08.500 | and Etherscan that Google has just totally slept on.

06:54:11.940 | They don't have a block explorer.

06:54:13.340 | You don't have to do anything in terms of trading

06:54:15.320 | or anything like that.

06:54:16.540 | Google does not have a block explorer.

06:54:17.860 | Why?

06:54:18.700 | Because think of it as search, but it is search.

06:54:20.580 | It's absolutely search.

06:54:21.660 | It's a very important kind of search engine.

06:54:23.860 | And once you have crypto social,

06:54:26.580 | you now show that you're not just indexing

06:54:29.080 | in a block explorer like on-chain transactions,

06:54:33.940 | but on-chain communications, okay?

06:54:36.580 | So now you suddenly see, oh, the entire social web

06:54:39.380 | that Google couldn't index.

06:54:40.300 | It could only index the World Wide Web

06:54:42.200 | and not the social web.

06:54:43.340 | Now it's actually the on-chain signed web,

06:54:47.460 | because every post is digitally signed.

06:54:48.900 | It's a new set of signals.

06:54:50.260 | It's way easier to index than either the World Wide Web

06:54:53.040 | or the social web, 'cause it's open and public.

06:54:55.140 | So this is a total disruptive thing to search

06:54:57.140 | in the medium term,

06:54:58.460 | because it's a new kind of data set to index, right?

06:55:01.460 | So that's how it's a threat to social, to search.

06:55:04.220 | It is a threat to messaging.

06:55:06.580 | Why?

06:55:07.420 | Because, or it's disruptive actually,

06:55:08.900 | because of the ENS name, as I mentioned,

06:55:10.260 | is like a universal identifier.

06:55:11.860 | You can send encrypted messages between people.

06:55:14.000 | That's a better primitive to base it on.

06:55:16.420 | You know, WhatsApp is just claiming

06:55:18.580 | that they're end-to-end encrypted.

06:55:20.100 | But with an ENS name or with a crypto name,

06:55:23.460 | you can be provably audibly end-to-end encrypted

06:55:26.100 | because you're actually sending it back and forth, right?

06:55:27.820 | 'Cause the private key is local, right?

06:55:29.460 | That itself, given how important that is, right?

06:55:32.220 | You could man-in-the-middle signal or WhatsApp

06:55:35.180 | because there's a server there, right?

06:55:36.740 | If you have, you know,

06:55:37.580 | so end-to-end encrypted messaging will happen

06:55:39.540 | and with payments and all this other stuff, okay?

06:55:41.220 | So you get the crypto messaging apps.

06:55:43.240 | You get operating systems.

06:55:44.820 | Why?

06:55:45.660 | Well, the frontier of operating systems,

06:55:47.140 | I mean, look, you know, Windows, Linux,

06:55:49.500 | and Mac OS have been around forever.

06:55:51.420 | But if you actually think about, you know,

06:55:53.780 | what is a blockchain?

06:55:54.920 | Well, there's operating systems, there's web browsers.

06:55:57.720 | A blockchain is the most complicated thing

06:55:59.300 | since an operating system or web browser

06:56:00.540 | 'cause it's a kind of operating system.

06:56:01.900 | Why?

06:56:02.740 | It's got, you know, something like Ethereum has an EVM.

06:56:05.220 | It's got a programming language.

06:56:07.080 | It's got an ecosystem where people monetize on it.

06:56:09.660 | They build front-end apps and they build back-end apps.

06:56:12.100 | They interoperate between each other.

06:56:13.820 | This is the frontier of operating systems research.

06:56:15.940 | People haven't thought of it that way, right?

06:56:17.660 | It's also the frontier of a lot of things in databases.

06:56:20.460 | You will get a crypto LinkedIn

06:56:22.700 | where there's zero knowledge proofs of various credentials.

06:56:24.900 | Okay?

06:56:25.940 | Basically, every single web two company,

06:56:28.420 | I can probably come up with a web three variant of it, right?

06:56:32.160 | Like Ethereum is, I mean,

06:56:33.680 | and this is high praise for both parties,

06:56:35.780 | but Ethereum is like the crypto stripe,

06:56:38.420 | or the web three stripe.

06:56:39.640 | And you will see versions of everything else

06:56:44.440 | that are like this.

06:56:46.240 | But, you know, I kind of described search,

06:56:49.200 | social, messaging, operating systems, the phone, right?

06:56:52.820 | Solana is doing a crypto phone.

06:56:53.980 | Why do you want that?

06:56:54.820 | Again, digital property.

06:56:56.440 | Apple was talking about running some script

06:56:59.000 | to find if people were having, you know, CSAM,

06:57:02.040 | like, you know, child porn or whatever on their phones,

06:57:04.680 | right?

06:57:05.520 | And even NYT actually reported that,

06:57:08.920 | like Google ran something like this

06:57:10.360 | and found false positives.

06:57:11.480 | Some guy had to take a photo of a kid

06:57:13.680 | for, you know, medical diagnosis.

06:57:15.860 | It got false, you know, falsely flagged as CSAM.

06:57:18.840 | He lost access to his account.

06:57:20.780 | Total nightmare.

06:57:21.620 | Imagine just getting locked out of your Google account,

06:57:23.560 | which you're so dependent on, right?

06:57:25.160 | As more and more of your digital life goes online,

06:57:28.760 | you know, is it really that much ethically different

06:57:31.560 | if it's the Chinese state that locks you out

06:57:34.600 | or an American corporation, right?

06:57:37.000 | Basically, it's operationally very similar.

06:57:38.600 | You just have no recourse.

06:57:39.440 | You're unpersoned, right?

06:57:41.160 | So the crypto phone becomes like insanely important

06:57:44.960 | because you have a local set of private keys.

06:57:47.920 | Those are the keys to your currency and your passport

06:57:50.120 | and your services and your life, right?

06:57:52.560 | So like, become something that you just hold on you

06:57:54.580 | with your person at all times, like your normal phone.

06:57:56.500 | You might have backups and stuff,

06:57:57.600 | but you know, the crypto phone

06:57:58.920 | is an insanely important thing, okay?

06:58:01.280 | And so that's search, that's social, that's messaging,

06:58:04.560 | that's operating systems, that's a phone.

06:58:08.380 | That's a lot right there.

06:58:09.280 | - Yeah, that is beautiful.

06:58:10.800 | - Can I have 120 seconds to just finish up

06:58:13.640 | a few more thoughts on social media?

06:58:14.480 | - Yes, please. - Okay.

06:58:15.880 | AI and AR, okay?

06:58:17.640 | This massive impact, obviously, of AI and social media.

06:58:20.000 | You're gonna have completely new social media companies,

06:58:23.040 | gestures, other things, you know, TikTok having, you know,

06:58:26.440 | some of the AI creation tools in there

06:58:28.000 | is just like a V1 of that.

06:58:30.640 | There's this whole thread with everything,

06:58:31.840 | stable diffusion is unlocking.

06:58:33.600 | But basically, this is gonna melt Hollywood.

06:58:36.640 | US media corporations that took a hit in the 2010s,

06:58:39.700 | we're now gonna be able to have everyone around the world

06:58:41.980 | able to tell their story.

06:58:43.380 | And all the stuff about AI ethics and AI bias,

06:58:45.780 | the ultimate bias is centralized AI.

06:58:48.460 | Only decentralized AI is truly representative.

06:58:51.880 | You cannot be faux representative.

06:58:53.260 | You cannot claim that Google is representing Nigerians

06:58:57.580 | and Indians and Brazilians and Japanese.

06:58:59.140 | Like, those folks need to have access themselves, right?

06:59:01.940 | So that's a fundamental ethical argument

06:59:03.780 | against centralized AI.

06:59:05.300 | It's unethical, and it's like, you know,

06:59:07.760 | this faux thing where you might have like faux diversity

06:59:11.040 | in the interface,

06:59:14.080 | but you haven't actually truly decentralized it.

06:59:15.780 | This is the woke capitalism, right?

06:59:17.320 | You justify it with the wokeness,

06:59:18.520 | and you make the money by centralizing it.

06:59:20.280 | But the actual way of doing it is letting it free

06:59:22.280 | for the world and letting people build their own versions.

06:59:25.000 | If people wanna build a Asian "Lord of the Rings,"

06:59:27.600 | they can do that.

06:59:28.560 | If they wanna build an Indian one, they can do that.

06:59:30.300 | If they, you know, whatever they want, right?

06:59:32.560 | So that is the argument for AI decentralization

06:59:37.560 | and for how that kind of links to this.

06:59:40.360 | - I love that.

06:59:41.200 | AI decentralization fixes the bias problem in AI,

06:59:44.560 | which a lot of people seem to-

06:59:45.980 | - Yeah, centralization-

06:59:47.440 | - Talk about and focus on.

06:59:49.260 | - Yeah, centralization is inherently unrepresentative,

06:59:52.440 | fundamentally.

06:59:54.160 | Like, you can like mathematically show it.

06:59:55.400 | It's not representing the world.

06:59:57.600 | The decentralization allows anybody to pick it up

07:00:00.880 | and make it their own, right?

07:00:02.920 | And centralization is almost always a mask

07:00:05.120 | for like that private corporate interest, right?

07:00:07.760 | It's like, one of the things about the vocabulism thing,

07:00:09.960 | by the way, is the deplatforming of Trump was political.

07:00:12.880 | Other things are political.

07:00:14.160 | But do you know what deplatforming started with?

07:00:16.200 | In the late 2000s, early 2010s, all the open social stuff

07:00:19.640 | was when deplatforming was being used as a corporate weapon

07:00:22.520 | against Meerkat and Zynga and Teespring, right?

07:00:27.320 | These were companies that were competing with features

07:00:29.400 | of, you know, TweetDeck, et cetera.

07:00:31.000 | They're competing with features of Twitter or Facebook,

07:00:33.160 | and the API was cut off.

07:00:34.320 | And that was when actually progressives

07:00:35.960 | were for net neutrality and an open internet

07:00:39.040 | and open social against the concentration

07:00:40.980 | of corporate power and so on.

07:00:42.120 | Remember that, right?

07:00:43.440 | And so what's gonna happen is both those two things,

07:00:46.280 | the political and the corporate are gonna come together.

07:00:48.040 | Why?

07:00:48.880 | In the Soviet Union, denunciation was used as a tool

07:00:53.360 | to, for example, undercut romantic rivals, right?

07:00:56.080 | There's a great article called "The Practice of Denunciation"

07:00:58.440 | in the Soviet Union, right?

07:01:00.400 | Which talks about all these examples

07:01:01.840 | where the ideological argument was used

07:01:04.680 | to like kick somebody into the 300 like pit

07:01:07.460 | that existed at like the center of the Soviet Union.

07:01:09.360 | Anybody could be kicked into the pit at any moment.

07:01:11.000 | And ta-da, well, Ivan's out, you know,

07:01:13.800 | and now, you know, hey, Anna, you know, whatever, right?

07:01:16.620 | Okay, that same thing is gonna be used by woke capitalists,

07:01:20.000 | is being used by woke capitalists,

07:01:21.480 | where the woke argument is used to justify

07:01:24.520 | pulling, pushing their competitor out of the app store

07:01:26.680 | or downracking them in search.

07:01:28.140 | Well, again, you wouldn't want a bigot to be in search

07:01:31.000 | who could compete with us or whatever, right?

07:01:32.800 | And conversely, so the wokeness is used to make money

07:01:36.720 | and the money is used to advance the ideology.

07:01:39.840 | It's like this kind of back and forth.

07:01:41.160 | Sometimes, right now, you think of those

07:01:43.320 | as independent things, but then they fuse, okay?

07:01:46.240 | And so that's very clear with the AI bias arguments

07:01:49.880 | where it just so happens that it's so powerful, Lex,

07:01:54.040 | this technology is so powerful in the wrong hands,

07:01:56.000 | it could be used, so we will charge you $99 for every use

07:01:59.100 | of it, how's that?

07:01:59.940 | How altruistic is that?

07:02:01.220 | Is that amazingly altruistic?

07:02:02.380 | It's really good, right?

07:02:03.620 | So once you kind of see that, as I said,

07:02:08.100 | whenever they're positioning in economics,

07:02:09.580 | you can go in culture, when they're positioning on culture,

07:02:11.460 | you can go in economics.

07:02:12.940 | If they're so woke, why are they rich?

07:02:14.560 | If they're so concerned about representation,

07:02:16.380 | why is it centralized?

07:02:17.220 | Answer, they're not actually concerned about it,

07:02:18.700 | they're making money, right?

07:02:19.820 | Okay, so that is, I think, in a few words,

07:02:22.780 | blows up a lot of the AI bias type stuff, right?

07:02:26.520 | Okay, they're basically, they're biasing AI, all right.

07:02:30.240 | So the amount of stuff that can be done with AI now,

07:02:32.760 | like it also helps the pseudonymous economy,

07:02:34.260 | as I was talking about with the AI Zoom.

07:02:35.880 | So you have totally new sites, totally new apps

07:02:38.880 | that are based on that.

07:02:40.040 | I think it may, I mean, it changes,

07:02:46.920 | you're gonna have new Google Docs,

07:02:48.160 | new, all these kinds of things.

07:02:49.240 | You might have, you know, once you can do things

07:02:51.840 | with just a few taps, you might have sites

07:02:54.060 | that are focused more on producing

07:02:55.740 | rather than just consuming, because, you know,

07:02:58.280 | you might, with AI, you can change

07:03:00.060 | the productivity of gestures.

07:03:01.640 | You know, you can have a few gestures,

07:03:03.620 | like, for example, the image-to-image thing

07:03:06.780 | with the Cable Diffusion, where you make a little cartoon,

07:03:09.620 | third graders painting, and it becomes a real painting.

07:03:12.420 | A lot of user interfaces will be rethought

07:03:14.660 | now that you can actually do this incredible stuff

07:03:16.900 | with AI, it knows what you want it to do, right?

07:03:19.820 | So, and I saw this funny thing,

07:03:21.840 | which was a riff on Peter Thiel's line,

07:03:24.420 | which is AI is centralized and crypto is decentralized.

07:03:27.200 | And somebody was saying, actually,

07:03:28.760 | it turns out crypto is centralized

07:03:30.080 | with the CBDCs and stable coin and so on,

07:03:32.760 | but AI is getting decentralized with Cable Diffusion,

07:03:34.640 | ha ha, right?

07:03:35.560 | Which is funny, and I think there's centralized

07:03:36.920 | and decentralized versions of each of these, right?

07:03:38.840 | And finally, the third pole that actually,

07:03:41.240 | you know, Thiel, you know, he talks about AI and crypto,

07:03:43.660 | but the third pole is actually,

07:03:44.640 | that's sort of underappreciated

07:03:45.800 | 'cause people think it already exists, is social.

07:03:47.600 | That just is keeping on going, right?

07:03:49.460 | And obviously the next step in social is AR and VR.

07:03:52.760 | And why is it so obvious?

07:03:53.600 | Because it's meta, you know, it's Facebook.

07:03:55.460 | Now I saw this very silly article, it's like,

07:03:57.560 | oh my God, Facebook is so dumb

07:03:58.780 | for putting a $10 billion into, you know,

07:04:00.860 | virtual reality, right?

07:04:02.200 | And I'm like, okay, the most predictable innovation

07:04:05.880 | in the world, in my view, is the AR glasses.

07:04:08.360 | Have you talked about this on the podcast before?

07:04:10.760 | - AR and VR, I mean, of course a lot,

07:04:13.080 | but the AR is not as obvious, actually.

07:04:15.120 | - Okay, so AR glasses, what are AR glasses?

07:04:17.920 | So you take Stampshed Spectacles, Google Glass,

07:04:21.920 | Apple's AR Kit, Facebook's Oculus Quest 2, right?

07:04:26.100 | Or MetaQuest 2, whatever, okay?

07:04:28.980 | You put those together and what do you get?

07:04:31.020 | You get something that has the form factor of glasses

07:04:33.940 | that you'd wear outside, okay?

07:04:35.940 | Which can, with a tap, record

07:04:39.460 | or give you terminator vision on something,

07:04:41.700 | or with another tap go totally dark and become VR glasses.

07:04:45.580 | Okay, so normal glasses, AR glasses, VR glasses, recording.

07:04:49.600 | It's as multifunctional as your phone, but it's hands-free.

07:04:53.400 | And you might actually even wear it more than your phone.

07:04:55.240 | In fact, you might be blind without your AR glasses

07:04:58.040 | because, you know, one of the things I've shown

07:05:01.000 | the book early on are like floating sigils.

07:05:04.240 | Did we talk, did I show you that?

07:05:06.300 | So this is a really important just visual concept.

07:05:11.280 | That right there shows with AR Kit,

07:05:12.880 | you can see a globe floating outside.

07:05:15.440 | Okay, secret societies are returning.

07:05:18.180 | This is what NFTs will become.

07:05:19.540 | The NFT locally on your crypto phone,

07:05:22.580 | if you hold it, you can see the symbol.

07:05:24.420 | And if you don't, you can't.

07:05:26.420 | - By the way, for people just listening,

07:05:28.100 | we're looking at a nice nature scene

07:05:31.700 | where an artificially created globe is floating in the air.

07:05:36.660 | - Yes, but it's invisible

07:05:38.820 | if you're not holding up the AR Kit phone, right?

07:05:42.060 | So- - So only you

07:05:43.700 | have a window into this artificial world.

07:05:46.200 | - That's right.

07:05:47.140 | And then here's another thing

07:05:48.840 | which shows you another piece of it.

07:05:50.640 | And this is using ENS to unlock a door.

07:05:55.640 | So this is an NFT used for something different.

07:05:57.280 | So the first one is using the NFT effectively

07:05:59.080 | to see something.

07:06:00.480 | And the second is using the NFT to do something.

07:06:03.100 | Okay, so based on your on-chain communication, right?

07:06:07.600 | You can unlock a door.

07:06:10.080 | That's a door to a room.

07:06:11.800 | Soon it could be a door to a building.

07:06:13.000 | It could be the gates to a community.

07:06:15.080 | It could be your digital login, okay?

07:06:17.520 | And so- - Amazing.

07:06:19.560 | - What this means is basically a lot of these things

07:06:21.360 | which are like individual pieces get synthesized, right?

07:06:24.640 | And you eventually have a digital,

07:06:27.480 | just like you have a digital currency,

07:06:29.000 | or digital currencies unify concepts like obviously gold,

07:06:33.820 | stocks, bonds, derivatives,

07:06:36.320 | every kind of financial instrument,

07:06:37.960 | plus Chuck E. Cheese tokens, karma,

07:06:39.720 | everything that's fungible and transferable.

07:06:41.940 | The digital passport unifies your Google style login,

07:06:46.100 | your private keys, your API keys, your NFTs,

07:06:49.000 | your ENS name, your domain name,

07:06:50.520 | all of those kinds of things,

07:06:51.800 | and your key card for your door and so on, right?

07:06:54.220 | So the AR glasses are what probably, I don't know,

07:06:57.120 | it'll be Facebook's version three or version four.

07:07:00.280 | Apple is also working on them.

07:07:01.400 | Google's also working on them.

07:07:02.640 | You might just get a bunch of those models at the same time.

07:07:04.840 | It's like predicting the iPhone,

07:07:06.300 | just like Dorsey knew that mobile was gonna be big.

07:07:08.680 | And that's why he had 140 characters for Twitter

07:07:11.360 | 'cause it was like an SMS code limitation

07:07:12.960 | and Twitter was started before the iPhone.

07:07:14.800 | AR glasses are an incredibly predictable invention

07:07:18.080 | that you can start thinking about the future of social

07:07:21.620 | is in part in person, okay?

07:07:23.920 | And it also means people might go outside more.

07:07:25.960 | Why?

07:07:26.800 | Because you can't see a monitor in the sun,

07:07:29.780 | but you can hit AR and maybe you have a full screen thing

07:07:33.080 | and you just like kind of move your fingers or something

07:07:36.320 | and you can tap.

07:07:37.160 | You have to figure out the gesture.

07:07:38.080 | You don't wanna have gorilla arms.

07:07:39.500 | Maybe you do have a keyboard outside

07:07:41.120 | or just even like a,

07:07:42.400 | you could even have a desk like this.

07:07:46.520 | If you had, if you can touch type,

07:07:49.100 | you can imagine something where you look down

07:07:50.600 | and you can see a keyboard with your AR glasses

07:07:53.800 | and it registers it and then you can type like this, right?

07:07:56.240 | And probably you could have some AI that could,

07:07:58.960 | figure out what you meant rather than what you were doing.

07:08:01.240 | Okay, so that's AI and social media.

07:08:04.640 | That's AR and social media.

07:08:06.240 | But really one last thing I'll say,

07:08:08.440 | which is a non obvious non-technological part

07:08:10.880 | is I think we'll go from very broad networks,

07:08:14.880 | which are hundreds of millions or billions of people

07:08:16.680 | like Twitter and Facebook,

07:08:17.600 | which have many small communities in them

07:08:19.520 | to much smaller networks that have a million

07:08:23.120 | or 10 million people, but are much deeper, right?

07:08:26.560 | In terms of their association, right?

07:08:29.000 | And this is the long-term trend in tech

07:08:30.680 | 'cause you're going from eyeballs in the 1980s,

07:08:33.480 | or I'm sorry, eyeballs in the 1990s

07:08:35.340 | to daily active users in the 2000s

07:08:38.280 | to holders in the 2010s.

07:08:41.320 | So you go from just like, oh, I'm just a looky-loo

07:08:43.200 | to I'm logging in every day

07:08:44.920 | to I'm holding a significant percentage of my net worth.

07:08:47.480 | And then this decade is when the online community

07:08:50.720 | becomes primary.

07:08:51.880 | You're a netizen.

07:08:52.720 | The digital passport is your main identity.

07:08:55.760 | And so this is not,

07:08:57.220 | see the problem with Facebook or Twitter

07:08:58.560 | is it's a bunch of different communities

07:08:59.740 | that don't share the same values fighting each other.

07:09:01.480 | This brings us back to the network state

07:09:02.840 | where you have one community with shared values,

07:09:05.160 | shared currency, and it's full stack.

07:09:07.520 | It's a social network and it's a cryptocurrency

07:09:10.520 | and it's a co-living community and it's a messaging app

07:09:14.080 | and it's a this and it's a that.

07:09:15.280 | And it's like Estonia,

07:09:16.680 | with a million people,

07:09:17.520 | you can actually build a lot of that full stack.

07:09:19.220 | That is, starts to get to what I call a network state.

07:09:21.680 | - I feel like there should be

07:09:25.680 | like a standing applause line here.

07:09:28.000 | This is brilliant.

07:09:29.600 | You're an incredible person.

07:09:31.840 | This was an incredible conversation.

07:09:33.320 | We covered how to fix our government,

07:09:36.040 | looking at the future of governments,

07:09:38.640 | moving into network state.

07:09:40.160 | We covered how to fix medicine, FDA, longevity.

07:09:45.160 | That was just like a stellar description.

07:09:49.840 | Really, I'll have to listen to that multiple times

07:09:51.760 | to really think and thank you for that,

07:09:53.360 | especially in this time

07:09:55.960 | where the lessons learned from the pandemic

07:09:58.680 | are unclear to at least me.

07:10:02.160 | And there's a lot of thinking that needs to be done there.

07:10:04.800 | And then just a discussion about how to fix social media

07:10:09.440 | and how to fix money.

07:10:12.560 | This was brilliant.

07:10:13.520 | So you're an incredibly successful person yourself.

07:10:16.280 | You taught, co-taught a course at Stanford for startups.

07:10:21.280 | That's a whole nother discussion that we can have,

07:10:24.800 | but let me just ask you,

07:10:26.320 | there's a lot of people that look up to you.

07:10:29.200 | So if there's somebody who's young,

07:10:31.040 | in high school, early college,

07:10:34.500 | trying to figure out what the heck to do with their life,

07:10:36.680 | what to do with their career,

07:10:38.160 | what advice could you give them?

07:10:39.880 | How they can have a career they can be proud of

07:10:42.960 | or how they can have a life they can be proud of.

07:10:46.000 | - At least what I would do,

07:10:47.000 | and then you can take it or leave it or what have you.

07:10:49.000 | (Lex laughing)

07:10:51.840 | - Yeah, maybe to your younger self.

07:10:53.600 | Advice to your younger self.

07:10:55.360 | - My friend, Novel,

07:10:56.360 | this is a lot of what he puts out

07:11:00.280 | is the very practical brass tacks, next steps.

07:11:03.880 | And I tend towards the macro.

07:11:07.100 | Of course, we both do both kind of thing, right?

07:11:10.680 | But let's talk brass tacks and next steps

07:11:12.240 | 'cause I actually am practical,

07:11:14.640 | or at least practical enough to get things done, I think.

07:11:17.760 | - It's just like you said,

07:11:19.160 | you're breaking up the new book into three.

07:11:21.640 | - Yes, it's motivation, theory, and practice.

07:11:23.800 | - Motivation, theory, and practice.

07:11:25.320 | - That's right.

07:11:26.160 | And each of those-- - Let's talk about practice.

07:11:27.680 | - So let's talk practice.

07:11:28.600 | - Especially at the individual scale.

07:11:30.000 | - Right, so first, what skill do you learn

07:11:33.040 | as a young kid, right?

07:11:35.640 | So let me just give what the ideal full stack thing is.

07:11:39.840 | And then you have to say,

07:11:40.680 | okay, I'm good quantitatively, I'm good verbally,

07:11:43.320 | I'm good this, I'm good that, right?

07:11:45.000 | So the ideal is you are full stack engineer

07:11:48.440 | and full stack influencer,

07:11:49.760 | or full stack engineer, full stack creator, okay?

07:11:51.920 | So that's both right brain and left brain, all right?

07:11:54.700 | So what does that mean with engineering?

07:11:56.760 | That means you master computer science and statistics, okay?

07:12:01.220 | And of course, it's also good to know physics

07:12:03.060 | and continuous math and so on.

07:12:04.180 | That's actually quite valuable to know.

07:12:05.520 | And you might need to use a lot of that continuous math

07:12:08.360 | with AI nowadays, right?

07:12:09.600 | 'Cause a lot of that is actually helpful, right?

07:12:11.940 | Great descent and whatnot.

07:12:13.200 | But computer science and stats are to this century

07:12:17.500 | what physics was to the last, why?

07:12:20.360 | Because, for example, what percentage of your time

07:12:23.080 | do you spend looking at a screen of some kind?

07:12:25.340 | - A large percentage of the time.

07:12:27.840 | - A large percentage of the time, right?

07:12:28.720 | Probably more than, you know,

07:12:30.520 | for many people it's more than 50% of their waking hours.

07:12:33.040 | If you include laptop, you include cell phone, tablet,

07:12:36.680 | you know, your watch, you know,

07:12:38.040 | maybe a monitor of some kind, right?

07:12:39.980 | All those together is probably, it's a lot, okay?

07:12:42.120 | Which means, and then that's gonna only increase

07:12:44.160 | with AR glasses, okay?

07:12:46.400 | Which means most of the rest of your life

07:12:48.560 | will be spent in a sense in the matrix, okay?

07:12:51.840 | In a constructed digital world,

07:12:54.180 | which is more interesting in some sense

07:12:56.560 | than the offline world.

07:12:57.920 | 'Cause we look at it more, it changes faster, right?

07:13:00.440 | And where the physics are set by programmers, okay?

07:13:03.680 | And what that means is, you know,

07:13:06.840 | physics itself is obviously very important

07:13:08.880 | for the natural world.

07:13:10.060 | Computer science and stats are for the artificial world,

07:13:12.640 | right?

07:13:13.480 | And why is that?

07:13:14.600 | Because every domain has algorithms and data structures,

07:13:19.440 | whether it's aviation, okay?

07:13:21.480 | You go to American Airlines, right?

07:13:23.920 | They're gonna have, you know,

07:13:26.200 | planes and seats and tickets and so on.

07:13:29.480 | So it's data structures,

07:13:30.600 | and you're gonna have algorithms

07:13:31.560 | and functions that connect them.

07:13:32.760 | You're gonna have tables that those data are run to.

07:13:34.800 | If it's Walmart, you're gonna have SKUs,

07:13:37.720 | and you're gonna have shelves,

07:13:38.880 | and you're gonna have, so you have data structures

07:13:40.360 | and you have algorithms to connect them.

07:13:41.800 | So every single area, you have algorithms

07:13:44.520 | and data structures, which is computer science and stats.

07:13:47.160 | And so you're going to collect the data and analyze it, right?

07:13:51.800 | And so that means if you have that base of CS and stats,

07:13:54.800 | where you're really strong and you understand, you know,

07:13:57.640 | the theory as well as the practice, right?

07:13:59.560 | And you need both, okay?

07:14:00.480 | Because you need to understand, you know,

07:14:03.280 | obviously the basic stuff like big O notation and whatnot,

07:14:06.240 | and you need to understand

07:14:07.600 | all your probability distributions, okay?

07:14:10.320 | You know, a good exercise, by the way,

07:14:11.520 | is to go from the Bernoulli trials, right?

07:14:16.200 | To everything else,

07:14:17.360 | 'cause you can go Bernoulli trials

07:14:18.680 | to the binomial distribution, to the Gaussian.

07:14:21.640 | You can also go from, you know,

07:14:23.240 | Bernoulli trials to the geometric distribution and so on.

07:14:26.120 | You can drive everything from this, right?

07:14:27.920 | - And computer science includes not just big O,

07:14:30.400 | but software engineering?

07:14:32.040 | - Well, computer science is theory,

07:14:33.120 | software engineering is practice, right?

07:14:34.880 | You could argue probability and stats is theory,

07:14:38.840 | and then data science is practice.

07:14:40.760 | - Sure. - Right?

07:14:41.600 | - Yeah. - And so-

07:14:42.440 | - So you include all of that together.

07:14:43.680 | - I include all of that as a package.

07:14:44.760 | That's theory and practice, right?

07:14:46.200 | I mean, look, it's okay to use libraries

07:14:50.240 | once you know what's going on under the hood, right?

07:14:52.600 | That's fine, but you need to be able to kind of

07:14:54.280 | write out the whole thing yourself.

07:14:55.520 | - I mean, it's...

07:14:56.800 | That could be true, could not be true, I don't know.

07:15:02.480 | Are you sure about that?

07:15:03.720 | Because- - Well, you should-

07:15:05.320 | - You could, you might be able to get quite far

07:15:09.560 | standing on the shoulders of giants.

07:15:11.600 | - You can, but it depends.

07:15:13.320 | Like, you couldn't build, well, okay.

07:15:17.280 | Somebody- - Maybe you could.

07:15:18.640 | However you were gonna finish that sentence,

07:15:21.040 | I could push back before-

07:15:22.160 | - You could probably push back, right?

07:15:23.520 | But here's what I was gonna say.

07:15:24.400 | I was gonna say, you couldn't really,

07:15:26.520 | you couldn't build Google or Facebook or Amazon or Apple

07:15:31.040 | without somebody at the company who understood

07:15:34.640 | like computer architecture and layout of memory

07:15:39.640 | and theory of compilers.

07:15:42.360 | - But you might want to, see, the thing is,

07:15:44.120 | if you just look at libraries,

07:15:45.280 | you might be able to understand the capabilities

07:15:48.560 | and you can build up the intuition of like

07:15:50.760 | what a great specialized engineer could do that you can't.

07:15:55.520 | - Like, for example, at least a while back,

07:15:57.560 | facebook.com, like was literally,

07:15:59.920 | it's just a single C++ compiled binary.

07:16:02.080 | Or sorry, it's not C++, it was like hip hop.

07:16:05.320 | They had a PHP compiler where they had just one giant binary.

07:16:10.320 | I may be getting this wrong, but that's what I recall, right?

07:16:13.160 | - Yeah, yeah.

07:16:14.000 | I mean, it should be simple, it should be simple.

07:16:16.560 | And then you have guys like John Carmack

07:16:19.200 | who comes in and does an incredibly optimized implementation

07:16:24.200 | that actually-

07:16:26.160 | - Well, yeah, more than that, right?

07:16:27.400 | Like he's, I mean, yes, right, but go ahead.

07:16:30.160 | - I mean, there's some cases with John Carmack

07:16:32.960 | by being an incredible engineer is able to bring to reality

07:16:37.960 | things that otherwise would have taken

07:16:39.640 | an extra five to 10 years.

07:16:41.560 | - Yeah, or maybe even more than that.

07:16:42.760 | Like, so, you know, this is the great man theory of history

07:16:45.520 | versus like sort of the kind of the determinist,

07:16:50.320 | like, you know, waves of history are pushing things along.

07:16:52.600 | The way I reconcile those is the tech tree model of history.

07:16:55.360 | You know, like civilization, you ever play a game,

07:16:56.720 | civilization? - Yeah.

07:16:57.560 | - Yeah, so like civilization, you got the tech tree

07:16:59.360 | and you can go and be like, okay, I'm gonna get spearmen

07:17:01.480 | or I'm gonna do granaries and pottery, right?

07:17:05.000 | And so you can think of it as something where

07:17:07.640 | here's everything that humanity has right now.

07:17:09.680 | And then Satoshi can push on this dimension

07:17:11.680 | of the tech tree.

07:17:12.600 | So he's a great man because there weren't other,

07:17:14.920 | there wasn't a Leibniz to Satoshi's Newton, right?

07:17:18.880 | Like Vitalik, as amazing as he is,

07:17:20.840 | was five years later or thereabouts, right?

07:17:22.840 | There wasn't contemporaneous, like, you know,

07:17:26.360 | another person that was doing what Satoshi was doing,

07:17:28.560 | it's truly Sui Gennaris, right?

07:17:31.080 | And that shows, you know, what one person can do.

07:17:33.080 | Like probably Steve Jobs with Apple, you know,

07:17:35.080 | given how the company was dying before he got there

07:17:36.920 | and he built it into the most valuable

07:17:38.320 | or put on the directory,

07:17:39.200 | he becomes the most valuable company in the world.

07:17:40.680 | It shows that there is quote, great man, right?

07:17:43.520 | Maybe more than just being five or 10 years ahead,

07:17:45.480 | like truly shaping where history goes, right?

07:17:48.320 | But on their hand, of course, that person,

07:17:50.280 | Steve Jobs himself wrote that email

07:17:52.000 | that Priestley was first saying that, you know,

07:17:53.840 | he doesn't grow his own food and he doesn't, you know,

07:17:57.720 | he didn't even think of the rights that he's got,

07:17:59.600 | someone else thought of those and whatnot.

07:18:01.600 | And so he kind of, it is always a tension

07:18:03.880 | between the individual and society on this, right?

07:18:05.800 | But coming back, so CS and stats,

07:18:08.440 | that's what you wanna learn.

07:18:10.040 | I think physics is also good to know

07:18:11.440 | because you go one level deeper

07:18:12.600 | and of course all these devices,

07:18:14.080 | you're not gonna be able to build, you know,

07:18:17.800 | LIDAR or things like that without understanding physics.

07:18:20.440 | - You mentioned that as one side of the brain,

07:18:22.320 | what about the other?

07:18:23.320 | - Right, so CS and stats is that side.

07:18:25.560 | Okay, and then you can go into any domain,

07:18:26.880 | any company, kick butt, you know, add value, right?

07:18:30.080 | Okay, so now the other side is creator, right?

07:18:32.800 | Becoming a creator.

07:18:33.880 | First, online, you know, like social media

07:18:37.200 | is about to become far, far, far more lucrative

07:18:40.040 | and monetizable.

07:18:41.240 | People are not updated.

07:18:43.680 | They kind of think this is, it's like over

07:18:45.760 | or something like that or it's old or whatever.

07:18:47.960 | But with crypto, once you have property rights

07:18:52.120 | in social media, now it's not what Google

07:18:55.840 | just allows you to have, but it's what you own, right?

07:18:58.960 | You actually have genuine property rights.

07:19:01.880 | And that just completely changes everything,

07:19:03.800 | just like, you know, the introduction of property rights

07:19:05.520 | in China change everything.

07:19:06.360 | It might take some lag for that to happen,

07:19:08.400 | but you can lend against that, borrow against that.

07:19:12.000 | You just, you own the digital property, right?

07:19:15.040 | And you can do NFTs, you can do, you know, investments,

07:19:17.120 | you can do all this other stuff, right?

07:19:18.760 | So in many ways, I think anybody who's listening,

07:19:22.480 | who's like, you know, I want to build a billion dollar

07:19:24.400 | company, I'm like, build a billion dollar company, yes.

07:19:26.760 | Also build a million person media operation

07:19:30.760 | or a million person following or something online, right?

07:19:33.240 | Because a US media company is simply not economically

07:19:37.920 | or socially aligned with your business.

07:19:40.120 | I mean, the big thing that I think, you know,

07:19:43.160 | tech and media actually, it's funny,

07:19:45.480 | there's this collision and sometimes

07:19:46.960 | there's an Adam smashing event

07:19:48.240 | and there's like a repositioning, right?

07:19:50.300 | And media attacked tech really hard in the 2010s,

07:19:54.400 | as well as many other things.

07:19:55.840 | And now, post 2020, I think it's now centralized tech

07:20:00.080 | and media versus decentralized tech and media.

07:20:03.040 | And centralized tech and media is NYT and Google,

07:20:07.440 | which have all become woke-ified,

07:20:08.680 | the establishment companies.

07:20:10.500 | But decentralized tech and media is like Substack,

07:20:12.660 | all lots of defectors from the US establishment,

07:20:17.280 | from the NYT have gone to Substack.

07:20:19.520 | But also all the founders and funders

07:20:21.880 | are much more vocal on Twitter,

07:20:23.960 | whether it's Mark Anderson, Jack Dorsey, Jeff Bezos,

07:20:28.120 | Zuckerberg, Zuck is just cutting out the establishment

07:20:30.400 | and just going direct to posting himself

07:20:33.480 | or posting the jiu-jitsu thing, you know,

07:20:35.160 | which he recently did or going and talking to Rogan, right?

07:20:38.400 | And so you now have this sort of Adam smash

07:20:41.960 | and like kind of reconstitution.

07:20:43.760 | Why is that important?

07:20:44.700 | Well, look, once you realize US media companies

07:20:48.080 | are companies and their employees,

07:20:51.880 | Sulzberger's employees are just dogs on a leash, right?

07:20:54.560 | They're hit men for old money,

07:20:56.980 | assassins for the establishment.

07:20:58.400 | They're never gonna investigate him, okay?

07:21:00.360 | There's this thing right now, like some strike

07:21:02.480 | or possible strike that's going at the New York Times.

07:21:04.580 | The obviously, the most obvious rich corporate zillionaire,

07:21:09.580 | the epitome of white privilege is, you know,

07:21:12.640 | and again, I'm not the kind of person

07:21:14.080 | who thinks white is an insult, right?

07:21:15.480 | But the guy who inherited the company

07:21:18.320 | from his father's father's father's father,

07:21:20.260 | in the NFL, right?

07:21:22.040 | You're supposed to have the Rooney rule

07:21:23.000 | where you're supposed to interview diverse candidates

07:21:24.480 | for the top job.

07:21:25.320 | You know, the other competitors for the top job

07:21:27.300 | of the publisher of the New York Times

07:21:28.160 | were two cousins of Sulzberger.

07:21:31.160 | So it's three cis straight white males in 2017

07:21:34.940 | who competed for this top job.

07:21:36.540 | And everybody in media was like silent

07:21:38.420 | about this coronation.

07:21:39.460 | They had this coronation article

07:21:40.940 | in the Times about this, right?

07:21:43.340 | So you have this meritless nepotist, right?

07:21:47.060 | This literally rich cis white man

07:21:49.380 | who makes millions of dollars a year

07:21:52.180 | and it makes like 50 X the salary of other,

07:21:55.980 | you know, NYT journalists, okay?

07:21:59.000 | And, you know, lives in a mansion and so on

07:22:02.140 | while denouncing, this is a born rich guy

07:22:04.300 | who denounces all the built rich guys

07:22:06.420 | at a company which is far whiter

07:22:08.920 | than the tech companies he's been denouncing, okay?

07:22:11.600 | And again, there's a website called

07:22:14.220 | Tech Journalism is Less Diverse Than Tech.com

07:22:16.980 | which actually shows the numbers on this, right?

07:22:18.820 | Here, I can look at this numbers, right?

07:22:21.140 | So why did I say this?

07:22:22.440 | Well, centralized US media has lost a ton of clout.

07:22:25.780 | Engagement is down.

07:22:27.900 | You've seen the crypto prices down,

07:22:29.440 | like stock prices have crashed.

07:22:30.980 | That's very obvious and quantifiable.

07:22:33.420 | Less visible is that media engagement has crashed, right?

07:22:36.460 | By the way, yeah, there's a plot

07:22:38.860 | that shows on the X axis percent white

07:22:41.580 | and then the Y axis are the different companies.

07:22:45.300 | And the tech companies are basically below 50% white

07:22:51.440 | and all the different media,

07:22:55.080 | tech journalism companies are all way above,

07:22:58.520 | you know, 70, 80, 90 plus percent white.

07:23:03.420 | And hypocrisy, ladies and gentlemen.

07:23:05.760 | - I mean, again, I'm not the kind of person

07:23:07.440 | who thinks white is an insult, but these guys are

07:23:10.200 | and they are the wokest whites on the planet, right?

07:23:13.200 | It's like ridiculous, right?

07:23:14.600 | - You know, it's like anyone who's homophobic,

07:23:19.120 | anyone who's, it feels like it's a personal thing

07:23:22.080 | that they're struggling with.

07:23:23.640 | Maybe the journalists are actually the ones who are racist.

07:23:27.280 | - Well, actually, you know, it's funny you say that

07:23:29.280 | because there's this guy, A.M. Rosenthal, okay?

07:23:33.260 | And you know, on his gravestone was,

07:23:35.000 | we kept the, he kept the paper straight, right?

07:23:37.300 | And actually he essentially went and,

07:23:41.600 | this is a managing editor of the New York Times for almost,

07:23:43.660 | you know, from '69 to '77, executive editor from '77 to '86.

07:23:47.880 | And it was a history-- - Oh my Lord.

07:23:50.120 | - Yeah, history of basically keeping,

07:23:52.700 | you know, gay reporters out.

07:23:53.540 | So essentially, the way I think about it is,

07:23:56.240 | New York Post reported that,

07:23:58.160 | just to talk about this for a second

07:24:01.240 | 'cause it's so insane, all right?

07:24:03.080 | New York Post reported,

07:24:03.920 | and I've got some of this in the book, okay?

07:24:05.560 | But, Abe Rosenthal, managing editor of the New York Times

07:24:10.560 | from 1969 to 1977, executive editor from 1977 to 1986.

07:24:16.440 | His gravestone reads, he kept the paper straight.

07:24:19.840 | And then here's Jeet here on this.

07:24:22.360 | He kept the paper straight. As it happens,

07:24:23.980 | Rosenthal was a notorious homophobe.

07:24:25.300 | He made it a specific policy of the paper

07:24:26.660 | not to use the term gay.

07:24:27.500 | He denied a plum job to a gay man for being gay.

07:24:29.620 | He minimized AIDS crisis.

07:24:31.020 | So, like, you know, the thing about this is,

07:24:34.580 | this is not like a one-off thing, okay?

07:24:36.620 | The New York Times literally won a Pulitzer

07:24:39.900 | for choking out the Ukrainians,

07:24:41.420 | for helping starve five million Ukrainians to death.

07:24:43.660 | And now has reinvented themselves as like a cheerleader

07:24:46.060 | to stand with Ukraine, right?

07:24:47.460 | They were for, you know, Abe Rosenthal's homophobia

07:24:50.940 | before they were against it, right?

07:24:52.840 | They were like, if you saw the link I just pasted in, okay?

07:24:56.480 | During BLM, you know, it's credibly reported

07:24:59.760 | that, and I haven't seen this refuted,

07:25:01.440 | the family that owns the New York Times were slaveholders.

07:25:03.600 | Somehow that stayed out of 1619 and BLM coverage, right?

07:25:06.640 | So they were literally getting the profits from slavery

07:25:09.640 | to help bootstrap, you know, what was the Times

07:25:12.640 | or, you know, went into it.

07:25:13.800 | They actually did this article on like the compound interest

07:25:16.840 | of slaveholders in Haiti and how much they owed people,

07:25:20.780 | right?

07:25:21.620 | If you apply that to how much money they made off slaves,

07:25:23.100 | I mean, can anyone name one of Salzburg's slaves?

07:25:25.380 | Like, can we humanize that, put a face on that,

07:25:27.580 | show exactly, you know, who lost such that he may win, right?

07:25:31.340 | And so you stack this up and it's like, you know,

07:25:34.060 | for the Iraq war before they were against it.

07:25:35.820 | And it's like, yeah, sure, Bush, you know,

07:25:37.740 | did a lot of bad stuff there,

07:25:38.740 | but they also reported a lot of negative, you know,

07:25:41.380 | not negative coverage, like false coverage, right?

07:25:43.040 | About WMDs, like, you know, the whole jihadist military.

07:25:45.860 | And so it's like this amazing thing where

07:25:48.480 | if some of the most evil people in history

07:25:50.240 | are the historians, if the, you know,

07:25:52.960 | they actually ran this ad campaign in the 2017 time period

07:25:56.040 | called "The Truth."

07:25:57.200 | So giant Orwellian billboards, right?

07:26:00.780 | Which say, you know, the truth is essential.

07:26:04.920 | Here, it looks like this.

07:26:06.320 | - This was when?

07:26:07.920 | - This was just a few years ago, 2017.

07:26:10.320 | - This is in New York.

07:26:11.980 | A billboard by the New York Times reads,

07:26:15.360 | "The truth is hard to know.

07:26:17.560 | The truth is hard to find.

07:26:19.580 | The truth is hard to hear.

07:26:21.180 | The truth is hard to believe.

07:26:22.620 | The truth is hard to accept.

07:26:24.780 | Truth is hard to deny.

07:26:26.840 | The truth is more important now than ever."

07:26:30.360 | All right, this is like, yeah, this is 1984 type of stuff.

07:26:36.300 | - Yeah, now here's the thing.

07:26:37.140 | Do you know what other-

07:26:38.460 | - Truth, big.

07:26:40.460 | Truth, period, big white board.

07:26:44.940 | - So, okay, what other national newspaper

07:26:48.440 | proclaimed itself the truth in constantly, every day?

07:26:52.700 | You know this one, actually.

07:26:54.840 | - Oh, you mean Pravda?

07:26:56.140 | Yeah, yeah.

07:26:56.980 | - There you go, that's right.

07:26:57.800 | What is the Soviet translation?

07:26:59.740 | What's the Russian translation of Pravda?

07:27:00.980 | - It's truth.

07:27:02.040 | - Yeah.

07:27:02.880 | - That's so sorry, that didn't even connect to my head, yes.

07:27:05.160 | (laughing)

07:27:08.000 | Yeah, truth.

07:27:09.900 | Unironically, huh?

07:27:11.960 | - And again, it just so happens that-

07:27:13.300 | - Is this an Onion article?

07:27:14.640 | - What's that?

07:27:15.480 | Onion article, right.

07:27:16.300 | So like, you know, Pravda, like at least they were communist,

07:27:18.680 | these guys have figured out how to get,

07:27:20.320 | charge people $99 a year or whatever it is for the truth.

07:27:23.320 | Wow, that's actually even amazing, right?

07:27:25.160 | So the corporate truth.

07:27:26.200 | So when you stack all that up, right,

07:27:28.120 | basically legacy media has delegitimized themselves, right?

07:27:32.520 | Every day that those, quote,

07:27:33.600 | "investigative journalists don't investigate Salzburger,"

07:27:36.240 | shows that they are so courageous

07:27:38.360 | as to investigate your boss, but not their own.

07:27:40.720 | - Yes.

07:27:41.960 | - Ta-da, total mass drop, right?

07:27:44.900 | That's like, just obvious, right?

07:27:47.820 | And now once you realize this,

07:27:49.220 | and you know, every influencer who's coming up,

07:27:52.740 | every creator realizes, okay, well that means

07:27:56.140 | I have to think about these media corporations

07:27:57.980 | as competitors.

07:27:59.560 | They are competitors.

07:28:00.400 | They are competitors for advertisers and influence.

07:28:03.700 | They will try, basically what the media corporations did

07:28:06.220 | partially successfully during the 2010s is

07:28:08.660 | they sort of had this reign of terror over many influencers,

07:28:11.900 | where they'd give them positive coverage

07:28:14.140 | if they supported sort of the party line,

07:28:16.440 | and negative coverage if they didn't, okay?

07:28:18.820 | But now the soft power has just dropped off a cliff, right?

07:28:23.820 | And, you know, many kinds of tactics that, you know,

07:28:27.920 | establishment journalists do,

07:28:29.080 | one way of thinking of them is like as a for-profit stasi.

07:28:32.260 | Why?

07:28:33.100 | Because they may stalk you, dox you, surveil you.

07:28:38.100 | Like, they can literally put, you know,

07:28:41.020 | like two dozen people following somebody around for a year,

07:28:45.900 | and that's not considered stalking, right?

07:28:50.080 | That's not considered spamming.

07:28:52.040 | They are allowed to do this and make money doing this.

07:28:55.300 | Whereas if you so much as criticize them,

07:28:58.340 | oh my God, it's an attack on the free press, blah, blah,

07:29:00.660 | right?

07:29:01.500 | But you are the free press and I'm the free press.

07:29:02.940 | Like, we're the free press.

07:29:04.100 | Again, it goes back to the decentralized, you know,

07:29:06.260 | the free speech is not like some media corporation's thing.

07:29:09.100 | It's everybody's right.

07:29:10.140 | And what actually happened with social media,

07:29:12.260 | what they're against is not that it is an attack

07:29:14.500 | on democracy, it's that it's the ultimate democracy

07:29:16.180 | because people have a voice now

07:29:18.260 | that didn't used to have a voice.

07:29:19.180 | You know what I'm saying?

07:29:20.020 | Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one, right?

07:29:22.420 | That old one, right?

07:29:23.260 | Or never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel, right?

07:29:25.780 | - Yeah.

07:29:26.620 | - In a real way, the entire things that were promised

07:29:30.500 | to people, freedom of speech, free markets, you know,

07:29:33.520 | like a beggar's democracy, it's like, oh yeah,

07:29:35.920 | you can have freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach,

07:29:38.140 | because you're just talking to yourself in your living room

07:29:40.940 | in, you know, Buffalo, New York, right?

07:29:44.140 | You maybe you can get gather some friends around.

07:29:45.760 | You didn't have the licenses to get, you know,

07:29:49.380 | like a TV broadcast license, radio license, you know,

07:29:52.100 | the resources to buy a newspaper.

07:29:53.660 | You didn't have practical reach or distribution, okay?

07:29:57.740 | What happened was all these people in the US

07:29:59.860 | and around the world suddenly got voices

07:30:01.300 | and they were suddenly saying things

07:30:02.300 | that the establishment didn't want them to say.

07:30:05.020 | And so that's what this counter decentralization has meant,

07:30:07.280 | both in the US and in China, this crackdown,

07:30:10.300 | but it's as if like a stock went up like 100X

07:30:12.980 | and then dropped like 30%.

07:30:15.340 | All the deplatforming stuff, yes, it's bad, okay?

07:30:18.980 | It's a rearward move, but in the long arc,

07:30:23.980 | I think we're going to have more speech.

07:30:26.740 | I think the counter decentralization may succeed in China,

07:30:29.420 | but I don't think it's gonna succeed outside it,

07:30:31.140 | 'cause you're trying to retrofit speech and thought controls

07:30:34.060 | onto an ostensibly free society, right?

07:30:36.940 | Now that Czech got cash, people actually have a voice.

07:30:39.600 | It's not gonna be taken away from them very easily, right?

07:30:42.000 | So how does this relate to my advice to young kids?

07:30:44.360 | Once you have that context, right?

07:30:46.020 | Once you realize, hey, look,

07:30:48.080 | Apple didn't like do deals with Blackberry, okay?

07:30:53.860 | Amazon didn't collaborate or give free content

07:30:57.600 | to Barnes and Noble.

07:30:59.480 | Netflix was not going and, you know,

07:31:03.080 | socializing with employees of Blockbuster.

07:31:05.480 | These employees of establishment media corporations

07:31:07.940 | are your competitors, okay?

07:31:09.960 | They are out for clicks.

07:31:12.360 | They are out for money.

07:31:13.720 | If they literally choke out the Ukrainians

07:31:18.320 | before making themselves into champions

07:31:20.560 | of the Ukrainian cause, they'll basically do anything.

07:31:23.560 | And so once you realize that, you're like,

07:31:25.760 | okay, I need to build my own voice, okay?

07:31:27.920 | If you're Brazilian, you're Nigerian,

07:31:30.840 | you're in the Midwest or the Middle East, right?

07:31:32.960 | If you're, you know, Japanese, you know, wherever you are,

07:31:37.440 | you need to build your own voice

07:31:38.720 | because outsourcing that voice to somebody else

07:31:41.820 | and having it put through the distorting filter,

07:31:43.860 | which maximizes the clicks of the distorting kind of thing,

07:31:47.680 | it's just not gonna be in one's own interest.

07:31:49.640 | You don't have to, you know,

07:31:51.040 | even agree with everything I'm saying

07:31:52.400 | or even all of it to just be like,

07:31:53.680 | well, look, I'd rather speak for myself.

07:31:55.120 | I'd rather go direct if I could.

07:31:56.440 | Speak unmediated, in my own words, right?

07:31:58.280 | Because the choice of word is actually very important,

07:32:00.360 | right?

07:32:01.200 | So that's the second big thing.

07:32:02.800 | You need to, and this is the thing

07:32:03.800 | that took me a long time to understand, okay?

07:32:06.400 | Because I always got the importance of math and science.

07:32:08.840 | And in fact, I would have been probably

07:32:11.240 | just a career academic or mathematician in another life,

07:32:14.660 | you know, maybe statistician, something like that,

07:32:16.640 | electrical engineer, et cetera.

07:32:18.180 | But the importance of creating your own content

07:32:20.200 | and telling your own stories,

07:32:22.120 | if you don't tell your own story,

07:32:23.920 | the story will be told for you, right?

07:32:25.820 | The sort of flip of winners write history is

07:32:29.120 | if you do not write history, you will not be the winner.

07:32:31.280 | You must write a history, okay?

07:32:33.720 | As kind of a funny way of putting it, right?

07:32:36.120 | - Yeah, chicken and egg.

07:32:38.040 | Yeah. - Contra positive, right?

07:32:39.560 | And now what does that mean practically, okay?

07:32:41.720 | So in many ways, the program that I'm laying out

07:32:45.720 | is to build alternatives, peaceful alternatives

07:32:48.460 | to all legacy institutions, right?

07:32:52.040 | To obviously to the Fed, right?

07:32:54.520 | With Bitcoin, to Wall Street with DeFi

07:32:57.520 | and with Ethereum and so on.

07:32:59.240 | To academia with the ledger of record

07:33:02.120 | and the on-chain reproducible research that we talked about.

07:33:05.080 | To media with decentralized social media, decentralized AI.

07:33:09.340 | You can melt Hollywood with this, okay?

07:33:11.980 | Melt the RIA, melt the MPAA.

07:33:14.600 | I mean, there's some good people there,

07:33:16.720 | but everybody should have their own movies.

07:33:19.140 | You know, people should be able to tell their own stories

07:33:21.860 | and not just wait for it to be cast through Hollywood

07:33:24.720 | and Hollywood is just making remakes anyway, okay?

07:33:27.080 | So you can tell original stories

07:33:28.480 | and you can do so online and you can do so by hitting a key

07:33:31.480 | and the production values will be there now

07:33:32.800 | that the AI content creation tools are out there.

07:33:35.280 | I mentioned disrupting or replacing

07:33:37.760 | or building alternatives to the Fed, to Wall Street,

07:33:40.600 | to academia, to media.

07:33:43.680 | I mentioned to Wikipedia, right?

07:33:46.140 | There's things like Golden.

07:33:47.420 | There's things like,

07:33:48.800 | there's a bunch of web three-ish Wikipedia competitors

07:33:51.980 | that are combining both AI and crypto for property rights.

07:33:54.880 | There's, you'll also need alternatives

07:33:57.760 | to all the major tech companies.

07:33:58.960 | That was the list that I went through with,

07:34:01.440 | you know, decentralized search and social and messaging

07:34:06.120 | and operating systems and even the crypto phone, okay?

07:34:09.520 | And then finally, you need alternatives

07:34:10.920 | to US political institutions and more generally,

07:34:14.480 | and Chinese political institutions.

07:34:16.200 | And what are those?

07:34:18.200 | That's where the network state comes in.

07:34:20.200 | And the fundamental concept is if, you know,

07:34:23.760 | as I mentioned, only 2% of the world

07:34:25.880 | can become president of the United States

07:34:27.200 | about the number of Americans who are, you know,

07:34:29.800 | native born and over 35 and so on and so forth.

07:34:32.120 | But 100% of the world can become president

07:34:33.480 | of their own network state.

07:34:34.560 | What that means is,

07:34:36.360 | and this is kind of related to those two points, right?

07:34:38.020 | If you're an individual and you're good at engineering

07:34:40.600 | and you're good at content creation, okay?

07:34:42.960 | Like somebody like Jack Dorsey, for example,

07:34:44.600 | or Mark Anderson, actually a lot of the founders

07:34:46.680 | are actually quite good at both nowadays.

07:34:48.200 | You look at Bezos, he's actually funny on Twitter

07:34:49.840 | when he allows himself to be.

07:34:51.240 | You know, you don't become a leader of that caliber

07:34:53.640 | without having, you know, some of both, right?

07:34:55.800 | If you've got some of both,

07:34:57.940 | now, no matter where you are, what your ethnicity is,

07:35:00.120 | what your nationality is, whether you can get a US visa,

07:35:03.040 | you can become president of a network state.

07:35:05.440 | And what this is, it's a new path to political power

07:35:09.120 | that does not require going through either the US

07:35:11.040 | or the Chinese establishment.

07:35:12.320 | You don't have to wait till you're 75.

07:35:14.120 | You don't have to become a gerontocrat

07:35:16.160 | or spout the party line and so on.

07:35:19.000 | The V1 of this is like folks like, you know,

07:35:21.720 | Francis Suarez or Nagy McKelvey of El Salvador,

07:35:25.680 | but, you know, Suarez is a great example where,

07:35:28.240 | while not a full sovereign or anything like that,

07:35:30.040 | he has many ways, in many ways, the skills of a tech CEO

07:35:32.680 | where he just put up a, you know, a call on Twitter

07:35:36.400 | and helped build Miami,

07:35:38.080 | recruited all these people from all over.

07:35:39.800 | And it wasn't the two-party system, but the end city system.

07:35:41.880 | He just helped build the city by bringing people in, okay?

07:35:45.320 | And that's, and when I say Suarez is a V1,

07:35:47.920 | you know, I love Francis Suarez, I love what they're doing.

07:35:51.000 | The next iteration of that

07:35:52.560 | is to actually build the community itself

07:35:55.080 | rather than just kind of taking an existing Miami,

07:35:57.080 | you're building something that is potentially

07:35:58.760 | the scale of Miami, but as a digital community.

07:36:00.760 | And how many people is that?

07:36:01.960 | Well, like the Miami population is actually not that large.

07:36:04.840 | It's like 400 something thousand people.

07:36:07.200 | You could build a digital community like that.

07:36:08.920 | So if you have the engineering

07:36:12.920 | and you have the content creation

07:36:14.240 | and you build your own distribution,

07:36:15.240 | you own your own thing,

07:36:16.320 | you can become essentially a new kind of political leader

07:36:19.880 | where you just build a large enough online community

07:36:22.240 | that can crowdfund territory

07:36:23.480 | and you build your vision of the good.

07:36:25.480 | - And anybody could build the vision of the good.

07:36:30.760 | Talking about eight billion people.

07:36:32.440 | I mean, there's no more inspiring.

07:36:34.760 | I mean, sometimes when we look at how things are broken,

07:36:38.920 | there could be a cynical paralysis.

07:36:41.720 | - Right.

07:36:42.560 | - But ultimately this is a really empowering message.

07:36:45.360 | - Yes.

07:36:46.200 | I think there is a new birth of global freedom

07:36:51.400 | and that in the fullness of time,

07:36:53.280 | people will look at the internet

07:36:55.000 | as being to the Americas what the Americas were to Europe.

07:37:00.000 | A new world, okay?

07:37:02.300 | In the sense of this cloud continent has just come down,

07:37:06.560 | okay, and people are, you know,

07:37:08.200 | if you spend 50% of your waking hours looking at a screen,

07:37:10.800 | 20%, you're spending all this time commuting up

07:37:12.920 | to the cloud in the morning and coming back down.

07:37:14.680 | You're doing these day trips

07:37:15.520 | and it's got a different geography

07:37:17.080 | and all these people are near each other

07:37:18.320 | that were far in the physical world and vice versa, right?

07:37:21.240 | And so this will, 'cause it's this new domain,

07:37:25.560 | it gives rise to virtual worlds

07:37:26.920 | that eventually become physical.

07:37:28.360 | In the same way that most people don't know this that well,

07:37:30.360 | but, you know, the Americas really shaped the old world.

07:37:33.960 | Many concepts like the ultra capitalism

07:37:36.520 | and ultra democracy of the new world,

07:37:38.240 | the French Revolution was in part,

07:37:39.360 | I mean, that was a bad version, okay?

07:37:40.920 | But that was in part inspired by the American, okay?

07:37:43.240 | There are many movements that came back

07:37:45.060 | to the old world that started here.

07:37:46.680 | In the same way, you know,

07:37:48.240 | I don't call it the mainstream media anymore.

07:37:50.120 | You know what I call it?

07:37:50.960 | The downstream media,

07:37:52.240 | because it's downstream of the internet.

07:37:54.400 | - That's right. - Right?

07:37:55.560 | - That's right.

07:37:56.400 | - And, you know, there's this guy a while back

07:37:58.000 | who he had this meme called

07:37:59.080 | the one kilo year American empire,

07:38:00.600 | that everything's American and so on.

07:38:02.280 | And his, I think, fundamental category era

07:38:04.120 | is he considers the internet to be American.

07:38:06.200 | But you know why that's not the case?

07:38:07.600 | Because, and it'll be very obviously so,

07:38:09.840 | I think in five or 10 years.

07:38:11.700 | Why?

07:38:12.540 | Because the majority of English speakers online

07:38:15.840 | by about 2030 are gonna be Indian.

07:38:19.960 | Okay?

07:38:21.160 | They just got 5G LTE super cheap internet recently,

07:38:25.280 | the last few years.

07:38:26.120 | It's like one of the biggest stories in the world

07:38:27.520 | that's not really being told that much, okay?

07:38:29.880 | And they've been lurking.

07:38:31.040 | And here's the thing.

07:38:32.120 | And this took me a long time to kind of, you know,

07:38:33.840 | figure out like to, not to figure it, but to communicate.

07:38:36.320 | I actually realized this in 2013,

07:38:37.600 | but these folks don't type with an accent.

07:38:41.940 | Okay, they speak with an accent,

07:38:44.400 | but they don't type with an accent.

07:38:46.240 | And all the way back in 2013,

07:38:47.760 | when I taught this Coursera course,

07:38:50.000 | I was like, who are these folks?

07:38:50.880 | I had hundreds of thousands of people

07:38:51.920 | from around the world sign up.

07:38:52.760 | It was a very popular course even then, okay?

07:38:54.920 | And hundreds of thousands of people signed up.

07:38:57.280 | I was like, who are these folks?

07:38:58.860 | And there were like Polish guys and, you know,

07:39:02.080 | like this lady from Brazil.

07:39:05.600 | And they knew scumbag Steve and good guy Greg,

07:39:09.220 | but they didn't know the Yankees or hot dogs

07:39:13.560 | or all the offline stuff of America.

07:39:15.840 | They didn't know physical America.

07:39:17.000 | They knew the digital conversation, the Reddit conversation

07:39:20.480 | and, you know, what became the Twitter conversation.

07:39:22.280 | For example, I just saw this YouTube video

07:39:25.600 | where there's a Indian founder.

07:39:27.360 | And he just said, just casually like,

07:39:29.200 | "Oh, I slid into his DMs like this," right?

07:39:32.200 | It was kind of a joke, but he said in an Indian accent

07:39:34.760 | and everybody laughed, everybody knew what he meant.

07:39:36.520 | And you're like, wait, that is a piece

07:39:38.320 | of what people think of as American internet slang.

07:39:41.200 | That's actually internet slang,

07:39:43.460 | which will soon be said mostly by non-Americans.

07:39:46.040 | Now, what does that mean?

07:39:46.880 | That means that just like the US was a branch of the UK

07:39:50.640 | and it started with English.

07:39:51.520 | And certainly there's lots of antecedents

07:39:53.120 | you can trace back to England.

07:39:54.560 | But nowadays, most Americans are not English in ancestry.

07:39:58.920 | There's Germans and Italians, Jewish people,

07:40:00.680 | African-Americans, you know, everybody, right?

07:40:03.000 | In the same way, the internet is much more representative

07:40:05.480 | of the world than the USA is.

07:40:07.160 | - It may have started American,

07:40:08.660 | but it got forked by the rest of the world.

07:40:10.960 | - That's right.

07:40:11.780 | And it gives a global equality of opportunity.

07:40:14.960 | It's even more capitalist than America is.

07:40:16.960 | It's even more democratic than America is,

07:40:19.280 | just as America is more capitalist

07:40:20.560 | and democratic than the UK.

07:40:22.600 | - The meme has escaped the cage of its captor.

07:40:26.880 | - And by the way, that doesn't mean I'm,

07:40:28.480 | so I wanna be very clear about something.

07:40:30.760 | When I say this kind of stuff, people will be like,

07:40:32.160 | oh my God, you hate America so much.

07:40:35.000 | And that's not at all what I'm saying.

07:40:36.960 | It's like, first, take Britain, okay?

07:40:39.920 | Would you think of the US or Israel or India or Singapore

07:40:44.320 | as being anti-British?

07:40:45.920 | Not today, they're post-British, right?

07:40:48.700 | In fact, they're quite respectful to,

07:40:50.120 | I mean, look at the Queen and so on.

07:40:51.280 | People respect the UK and so on.

07:40:52.880 | Everyone's coming there to pay their respects.

07:40:54.560 | - That might not be the greatest example, but yes, go on.

07:40:57.080 | - Well, let's put it like this.

07:40:57.920 | - Yes, but yes, broadly speaking.

07:40:59.280 | - They're not like burning the British flag

07:41:00.760 | and effigy or anything.

07:41:01.600 | I mean, essentially, the point is each of these societies

07:41:03.760 | is kind of moving along their own axis.

07:41:05.360 | They're not defining every action

07:41:06.840 | in terms of whether they're pro-British or anti-British.

07:41:09.720 | Like, once you have kind of a healthy distance,

07:41:12.320 | people can respect all the accomplishments of the UK

07:41:15.360 | while also being happy that you're no longer run by them.

07:41:19.480 | And then you can have like a better

07:41:22.320 | kind of arms-length relationship, right?

07:41:24.520 | And that's what post-British means.

07:41:26.000 | It is not anti-British, not at all.

07:41:27.520 | In fact, you can respect it while also being happy

07:41:30.240 | that you've got your own sovereignty, right?

07:41:32.600 | And you're happy that Britain is doing its own thing.

07:41:35.280 | I'm glad they're doing well, right?

07:41:37.640 | Okay, and they're actually doing

07:41:39.740 | some special economics zone stuff now.

07:41:41.600 | And in the same way, if you think of it

07:41:43.960 | as not being pro-American or anti-American,

07:41:46.600 | 'cause that's a with us or against us

07:41:47.960 | formulation of George Bush, you know?

07:41:49.880 | Like, rather than just everything must be scored

07:41:52.000 | as pro-American or anti-American,

07:41:53.600 | you can think of post-American,

07:41:55.000 | that not everything has to be scored on that axis.

07:41:57.520 | Like, you know, there are certain things around the world

07:42:02.520 | which should be able to exist on their own,

07:42:04.320 | and you should be able to move along your own axis.

07:42:06.560 | Like, is, like, perhaps an obvious example,

07:42:09.360 | like, is longevity pro-American or anti-American?

07:42:13.640 | You know, no, it's like, it's on its own axis.

07:42:15.920 | It's moving on its own axis.

07:42:17.320 | And new states and new countries should be able to exist

07:42:20.920 | that do not have to define themselves as anti-American

07:42:24.400 | to do so, they're just post-American.

07:42:26.840 | Friendly to, but different from.

07:42:28.760 | That is totally possible to do,

07:42:30.040 | and we've got examples of that, right?

07:42:31.800 | And so when I talk about this,

07:42:33.440 | I'm talking about is really in many ways

07:42:35.880 | US and Western ideals, you know?

07:42:38.560 | But manifested in just a different form, right?

07:42:42.120 | And also, crucially, integrative of global ideals.

07:42:45.840 | You know, these are, in a sense,

07:42:47.160 | are global human rights, they're global values,

07:42:51.160 | which is freedom of speech, private property,

07:42:53.160 | protection from search and seizure.

07:42:54.960 | And actually, so that's all the Bill of Rights type stuff.

07:42:57.640 | And I saw something that I thought was really good recently

07:42:59.560 | that's a good first cut.

07:43:02.160 | That's something that I might wanna include.

07:43:03.600 | I credit him, of course, in the V to the book,

07:43:06.240 | a digital Bill of Rights, okay?

07:43:08.320 | And so this was a really good,

07:43:11.000 | decent first cut at a digital Bill of Rights, okay?

07:43:13.320 | And he talks about the right to encrypt,

07:43:15.880 | the right to compute, the right to repair,

07:43:18.080 | the right to portability, right?

07:43:19.680 | So encrypt is perhaps obvious,

07:43:21.640 | you know, e-commerce and everything.

07:43:23.640 | Compute, like your device, it's not like,

07:43:26.320 | you can't just have somebody intercept it

07:43:28.120 | or shut down your floating points.

07:43:31.600 | That might sound stupid,

07:43:32.920 | but in the EU, they're trying to regulate AI.

07:43:36.280 | And by doing that, they have some regulation

07:43:37.760 | that says like logic is itself regulated.

07:43:42.120 | Did you see this?

07:43:42.960 | - No, it's hilarious.

07:43:43.800 | - Hold on, I'll click the tweet

07:43:45.720 | that I sent you just before this one, right?

07:43:48.400 | So I was like, you know, in woke America,

07:43:52.040 | they're abolishing accelerated math

07:43:53.680 | 'cause math is quote white supremacist.

07:43:56.040 | Not to be outdone, Europe seeks to regulate AI

07:43:58.320 | by regulating logic itself.

07:43:59.840 | You can't reason without a license, right?

07:44:02.520 | Article three, for purposes of this regulation,

07:44:04.240 | the following definition apply.

07:44:06.680 | AI system is software that's developed

07:44:08.920 | with one or more of the techniques

07:44:09.840 | and approaches listed in Annex 1.

07:44:11.160 | And you know what's in Annex 1?

07:44:12.840 | In Annex 1, logic and knowledge-based approaches.

07:44:16.200 | (laughs)

07:44:17.920 | So step away from the if statement.

07:44:20.680 | - Right.

07:44:21.520 | - Okay, and the thing is, you know,

07:44:24.040 | if you've dealt with these bureaucracies,

07:44:25.560 | the stupidest possible interpretation,

07:44:27.480 | I mean, think about, if you think,

07:44:29.080 | oh no, no, that wouldn't make any sense,

07:44:30.360 | they wouldn't do that.

07:44:31.280 | The entire web has been uglified

07:44:32.960 | by the stupid cookie thing

07:44:34.040 | that does absolutely nothing, right?

07:44:35.600 | The actual way to protect privacy

07:44:36.880 | is with user-local data,

07:44:38.840 | meaning like decentralized systems, right?

07:44:41.600 | Where the private keys are local.

07:44:42.760 | - Now I'm just laughing at the layers of absurdity

07:44:46.280 | in this step away from the if statement.

07:44:49.160 | I mean, it's hilarious.

07:44:50.920 | It's very, very clumsy.

07:44:52.800 | - They wanna be-- - It's us struggling

07:44:56.120 | how to define, yeah, the digital bill of rights, I suppose,

07:44:59.680 | and doing it so extremely clumsily.

07:45:01.560 | - It's funny, you know, the European,

07:45:02.840 | like I heard this thing, which is like,

07:45:04.160 | Europe's like, well, look, the US and China

07:45:05.840 | are way ahead of us in AI,

07:45:06.960 | but we're gonna be a leader in AI regulation.

07:45:09.080 | - Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

07:45:11.400 | And something we haven't mentioned much of

07:45:13.720 | in this whole conversation,

07:45:15.080 | I think maybe implied between the lines

07:45:18.240 | is the thing that was in the Constitution

07:45:21.400 | of the pursuit and happiness,

07:45:22.760 | and the thing that is in many stories

07:45:25.440 | that we humans conjure up, which is love.

07:45:30.160 | - Oh yeah. - I think the thing

07:45:31.080 | that makes life worth living in many ways.

07:45:33.720 | But for that, you have to have freedom,

07:45:35.880 | you have to have stability,

07:45:38.960 | you have to have a society that's functioning

07:45:40.720 | so that humans can do what humans do,

07:45:42.480 | which is make friends, make family,

07:45:45.840 | make love, make beautiful things together as human beings.

07:45:52.240 | Balaji, this is like an incredible conversation.

07:45:57.000 | Thank you for showing an amazing future.

07:46:03.280 | I think really empowering to people

07:46:05.840 | because we can all be part of creating that future.

07:46:09.320 | And thank you so much for talking to me today.

07:46:12.040 | This was an incredible,

07:46:13.600 | obviously the longest conversation I've ever done,

07:46:15.760 | but also one of the most amazing, enlightening.

07:46:18.200 | Thank you.

07:46:19.040 | Thank you, brother, for everything you do.

07:46:20.840 | Thank you for inspiring all of us.

07:46:23.040 | - Well, Lex, this was great.

07:46:24.760 | And we didn't get through all the questions there.

07:46:28.280 | - We didn't. (Lex laughing)

07:46:29.520 | Just for the record, we didn't get,

07:46:31.540 | I would venture to say we didn't get through 50%.

07:46:35.560 | This is great, this is great.

07:46:37.120 | And I had to stop us from going too deep on any one thing,

07:46:42.120 | even though it was tempting, like those chocolates,

07:46:45.200 | those damn delicious-looking chocolates

07:46:48.160 | that was used as a metaphor about 13 hours ago,

07:46:51.800 | however long we started the conversation.

07:46:55.120 | This was incredible.

07:46:56.360 | It was really brilliant.

07:46:57.200 | You're brilliant throughout on all those different topics.

07:47:00.280 | So yeah, thank you again for talking to me.

07:47:02.380 | - This is great.

07:47:03.220 | I really appreciate being here.

07:47:05.340 | Sir.

07:47:06.660 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation

07:47:08.220 | with Balaji Srinivasan.

07:47:10.140 | To support this podcast,

07:47:11.500 | please check out our sponsors in the description.

07:47:14.100 | And now let me leave you with some words from Ray Bradbury.

07:47:17.940 | "People ask me to predict the future,

07:47:20.420 | when all I want to do is to prevent it.

07:47:22.940 | Better yet, build it.

07:47:25.540 | Predicting the future is much too easy anyway.

07:47:28.460 | You look at the people around you,

07:47:30.260 | the street you stand on,

07:47:31.920 | the visible air you breathe,

07:47:34.120 | and predict more of the same.

07:47:36.960 | To hell with more.

07:47:38.520 | I want better."

07:47:39.960 | Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

07:47:43.640 | (upbeat music)

07:47:46.220 | (upbeat music)

07:47:48.800 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

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

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