Donald Trump was probably the biggest person ever to be removed from social media.
Do you understand why that was done? Can you steal man the case for it and against it?
Everybody who is watching this around the world
basically saw let's say U.S. establishment or Democrat-aligned folks just decapitate,
you know, the head of state digitally, right? Like just boom, gone, okay?
And they're like, well, if they can do that in public to the U.S. president,
who's ostensibly the most powerful man in the world, what does the Mexican president stand
against that? Nothing. Regardless of whether it was justified on this guy, that means they
will do it to anybody. Now the seal is broken. Just like the bailouts, as exceptional as they were
in the first year everybody was shocked by them, then they became a policy instrument. And now
these bailouts happening, every single bill is printing another whatever billion dollars or
something like that. The following is a conversation with Balaji Srinivasan, an angel investor,
tech founder, philosopher, and author of The Network State, how to start a new country.
He was formerly the CTO of Coinbase and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz.
This conversation is over seven hours. For some folks, that's too long. For some, too short. For
some, just right. There are chapter timestamps, there are clips, so you can jump around or like I
prefer to do with podcasts and audiobooks I enjoy. You can sit down, relax with a loved human, animal,
or consumable substance, or all three if you like, and enjoy the ride from start to finish.
Balaji is a fascinating mind who thinks deeply about this world and how we might be able to
engineer it in order to maximize the possibility that humanity flourishes on this fun little
planet of ours. Also, you may notice that in this conversation my eye is red. That's from Jiu Jitsu.
And also, if I may say so, from a life well lived. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it,
please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Balaji Srinivasan.
At the core of your belief system is something you call the prime number maze. I'm curious.
I'm curious. We've got to start there. If we can start anywhere, it's with mathematics. Let's go.
All right, great. A rat can be trained to turn at every even number or every third number in a maze
to get some cheese. But evidently, it can't be trained to turn at prime numbers. Two, three,
five, seven, and then 11 and so on and so forth. That's just too abstract. And frankly,
if most humans were dropped into a prime number maze, they probably wouldn't be able to figure
it out either. They'd have to start counting and so on. Actually, it would be pretty difficult to
figure out what the turning rule was. Yet the rule is actually very simple. And so the thing I think
about a lot is just how many patterns in life are we just like these rats and we're trapped in a
prime number maze. And if we had just a little bit more cogitation, if we had a little bit more
cognitive ability, a little bit more, whether it's brain machine interface or just better physics,
we could just figure out the next step in that prime number. We could just see it. We could
just see the grid. And that's what I think about. That's a big thing that drives me,
is figuring out how do we actually conceive, understand that prime number maze that we're
living in. So understand which patterns are just complex enough that they are beyond the limit
of human cognition? Yes. And what do you make of that? Are the limits of human cognition a feature
or a bug? I think mostly a bug. I admire Ramanujan. I admire Feynman. I admire these
great mathematicians and physicists who were just able to see things that others couldn't.
And just by writing it down, that's a leap forward. People talk about it's not the idea
it's execution, but that's for trivial ideas, for great ideas for Maxwell's equations or
Noon's laws or quantum electrodynamics or some of Ramanujan's identity. That really does bring us
forward, especially when you can check them. You don't know how they work. You have the
phenomenological, but you don't have the theory underneath it. And then that stimulates the
advancement of theory to figure out why is this thing actually working. That's actually,
Statmeck arose in part from the kind of phenomenological studies that were basically
being done where people are just getting steam engines and so on to work. And then they kind
of abstracted out thermodynamics and so on from that. So the practice led the theory rather than
vice versa, to some extent that's happening in neural networks now, as you're aware.
And I think that's just something that's true and that works. If we don't know yet,
that's amazing and that pulls us forward. So I do think that the limits are more of a bug than
a feature. Is there something humans will never be able to figure out about our universe,
about the theory, about the practice of our universe? Yeah, people will typically quote
Cradell's incompleteness for such a question. And yeah, there are things that are provably
unknowable or provably unprovable. But I think you can often get an approximate solution.
You know, Hilbert's problem is like, we will know, we must know. At least we should know
that we can't know. Push to get at least an approximate solution. Push to know that we
can't know. At least we push back that darkness enough so that we have lit up that corner of
the intellectual universe. Okay, let's actually take a bit of a tangent and explore a bit
in a way that I did not expect we would. But let's talk about the nature of reality briefly.
I don't know if you're familiar with the work of Don Hoffman. No, I don't. I know Roger Penrose
has like his Road to Reality series for like basic physics getting up to everything we know,
but go ahead. It's even wilder. Yeah. In modern physics, we start the question of what is fundamental
and what is emergent in this beautiful universe of ours. And there's a bunch of folks who think
that space time, as we know it, the four-dimensional space is emergent. It's not fundamental to the
physics of the universe. And the same, many argue, I think Sean Carroll is one of them, is that time
itself, the way we experience it is also emergent. It's not fundamental to the way our universe works.
Anyway, those are the technical term I apologize for swearing. Those are the
mind fucks of modern physics. But if we stroll along that road further, we get somebody like
Donald Hoffman, who makes the evolutionary case that the reality we perceive with our eyes
is not only an abstraction of objective reality, but it's actually completely detached.
We're in a video game, essentially, that's consistent for all humans, but it's not at
all connected to physical reality. It's an illusion. It's like a version of the simulation
about this. Is that his? In a very distant way, but the simulation says that there's a sort of
computational nature to reality. And then there's a kind of a programmer that creates this reality
and so on. Now, he says that we humans have a brain that is able to perceive the environment,
and evolution is produced from primitive life to complex life on earth, produced the kind of
brain that doesn't at all need to sense the reality directly. So this table, according to
Donald Hoffman, is not there. Not just as an abstraction, we don't sense the molecules that
make up the table, but all of this is fake. Interesting. So I tend to be more of a hard
science person. And so just on that, people talk about qualia. Is your perception of green
different from my perception of green? And my counterargument on that is, well, we know something
about spectrum of light, and we can build artificial eyes. And if we can build artificial
eyes, which we can, you know, like they're not amazing, but you can actually, you can do that,
you can build artificial ears and so on. Obviously, we can build recording devices and,
you know, for cameras and things like that. Well, operationally, the whole concept of your
perception of green, you see green as purple, I see green as green, or what I call green,
doesn't seem to add up because it does seem like we can do engineering around, right?
So the Hoffman thing, I get why people more broadly will talk about a simulation hypothesis,
because, you know, it's like Feynman, many others have talked about how math is surprisingly useful
to describe the world, you know, like very simple equations give rise to these complex phenomena.
Wolfram is also on this from a different angle with the cellular automata stuff. But
it's almost suspicious how well it works. Yeah, but on their hand, it's like, you know,
it is, yet we're still also in a prime number maze. You know, there's things we just don't
understand. And, you know, so. Also, within the constraints of the non-prime numbers,
we find math to be extremely effective, surprisingly effective.
Yeah, exactly. So maybe the math we have gets us through the equivalent of the even turns and
the odd turns, but there's math we don't yet have that is more complex or more complex rules
for other parts of the world. Despite all our age, we're just rats in a cage.
I know that gets like very abstract, but, you know, there are unsolved problems in physics,
you know, like the condensed matter space, there's a lot of interesting stuff happening.
My recollection, I may be, you know, out of date on this, like things like sonaluminescence,
we don't know exactly how they work. And sometimes those things that are like at the edges of physics,
you know, in the late 1800s, I think Rutherford, somebody, I think as Rutherford said,
you know, basically all physics is being discovered, etc. And that was obviously before
quantum mechanics, you know, that that sort of edge case people are looking at the bomber and the
passion series and seeing, you know, this weird thing, you know, with the hydrogen spectrum,
it was quantized and, you know, that led to like the sort of phenomenological set of observations
that led to quantum mechanics and everything. And, you know, sometimes I think the UAP stuff
might be like that, right? People immediately go to aliens for UAP, like the unidentified aerial
phenomenon, right? And people have been, there's surprising amount of stuff out there on this.
The UK has declassified a bunch of material, you know, Harry Reid as the senators talked about
this. It's not an obviously, it's not an obviously political thing, which is good. It's something
that is there's something happening there, right? And people had thought for a long time that the
UAP thing was a like American kind of counter propaganda to cover up their new spy planes that
were spying over the Soviet Union to make anybody who talked about them seem, you know, crazy and
hysterical or whatever. But if the UAP thing is real, it could be atmospheric phenomena like,
you know, like the aurora borealis or the northern lights, but some things we don't understand. It
could be something like the, the bomber and passion series, you know, which were the observations of
like emission spectrum before quantum mechanics. So that's like another option as opposed to
it doesn't exist or little green men, it could be physics we don't understand yet as one possible.
Do you think there's alien civilizations out there? So there's a lot of folks who have kind of
written and talked about this is, you know, the Drake equation, which is like, you know, the
multiplying all the probabilities together. There's perhaps more sophisticated takes like the,
the dark forest, you know, which says that if the universe is like a dark forest,
we're the dumb ones that aren't hiding our presence. There's one calculation I saw,
and I haven't reproduced myself, but basically says that the assumption that other civilizations
have seen ours is wrong because when you have like a spherical radius for like the, you know,
electromagnetic radiation that's leaving our planet as that sphere gets larger and larger,
it gets like smaller and smaller amounts of energy. So, you know, you get farther out,
you're not getting enough, you know, you know, photons or would have you to actually
detect it. You know, I don't know, I actually haven't looked into the math behind it, but I
remember, remember seeing that argument. So actually, it is possible that it's so diffuse
when you go past a certain, you know, number of light years out that people, you know,
that an alien civilization wouldn't be able to detect it, right? That's, that's another argument.
That's more basically about signals from them, from us. Yeah. To be able to
signals colliding enough to find the signal from the noise. Right. Exactly.
Intelligent signal. Yeah. Hansen, Hansen has an article called Grabby Aliens. Have you seen
his thing? Right. And so there's been on this podcast. Oh, great. He's brilliant. I like him,
he pushes, you know, boundaries in interesting ways. In every ways. In all of the ways. In
all the ways. That's right. I like him overall. He's, you know, he's an asset to Andy.
Grabby Aliens. So he has this interesting idea that the civilizations quickly learn how to
travel close to the speed of light. Right. So we're not going to see them until they're here.
Yeah, that's possible. I mean, one of the things is, so here's, for example, a mystery that we
haven't yet done, right, or we haven't really figured out yet, which is, um, abiogenesis in the lab.
Right. We've done lots of things where you've got, you can show macromolecules binding to each
other. You can show, you know, evidence for the so-called RNA world. Abiogenesis is to go from,
you know, like non-life to life, right, in the lab. You can show microevolution,
obviously, with bacteria, you can do artificial selection on them. Lots of other aspects of,
um, you know, fundamental, you know, biochemistry origins of life stuff have been established.
There's a lot of plausibility arguments about the primitive environment and
nitrogen and carbon snapping together to get, you know, the, you know, the RNA world is the,
the, the initial hypothesis. But to my knowledge, at least we haven't actually seen
abiogenesis demonstrated. Now, one argument is you need just like this massive world
with, uh, you know, so many different reps before that actually happens. And, um,
one possibility is if we could do atomic level, you know, simulations of molecules
bouncing against each other, it's possible that in some simulation we could find a path,
a reproducible path to abiogenesis, and then just, you know, replicate that in the lab.
Right. Um, I don't know. Okay. Uh, but that seems to me to be like a mystery that we still
don't fully understand, like an example of the prime number maze, right?
One of the most fascinating mysteries. One of the most important. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And,
and again, there may be some biochemists who's like, oh, Bodgy, you didn't know about X, Y,
and C that happened in the abiogenesis field. I freely confess, I'm not like at, you know,
Ocaron on it. The last thing I remember looking at it is Ocaron to me, like up to the moment.
Oh, nice. That's a nice word. That's a Ocaron. I'm probably mispronouncing it. Yeah. Um,
we'll edit it in post to pronounce it correctly with AI. Yeah. Yeah. We'll copy your voice and
it will pronounce it perfectly correctly. Yeah. In post. One thing that I do think was interesting
is, uh, Craig Venter a while back tried to make a minimum viable cell, um, where he just tried
to delete all of the genes that were, that were not considered essential. And so it's like a new
life form. And this was like almost 20 years ago and so on. And that thing was a, was, was viable
in the lab, right? And so it's possible that you could, you kind of reverse engineer. So
you're coming out the problem from different directions, like RNA molecules can do quite
a lot. You've got some, you know, reasonable assumptions as to how that could come together.
You've got like sort of stripped down minimum viable life forms and, and so it's sort of,
it's not, there isn't stuff here. You can see micro evolution. You can see at the sequence level,
you know, if you do molecular phylogenetics, you can actually track back the bases. There's
actually, so it's not like there's no evidence. There's a lot of tools to work with. But this,
in my view, is a fascinating area and actually also relevant to AI because another form of
a biogenesis would be if we are able to give rise to a different branch of life form, the silicon
based as opposed to carbon based, you know, to, to stretch your point. You give rise to something
that actually does meet the definition of life for some definition of life.
Right. What do you think that definition is for an artificial life form? Because you mentioned
consciousness. Yeah. When will it give us pause that we created something that feels by some
definition or by some spiritual, poetic, romantic, philosophical, mathematical definition that it is
alive and we wouldn't want to kill it? So a couple of remarks on that. One is Francis Crick of,
of Watson and Crick before he died. I think his last paper was published on something called the
classroom. Okay. And the thing is that, you know, sometimes in biology or in any, you know, domain,
people are sort of discouraged from going after the big, the big questions, right? But he proposed
the classroom is actually the organ that is the seat of consciousness. It's like this sheath that
like covers the brain. And for mice, if you, and again, I may be recollecting this wrong,
so but you can look, but my recollection is in mice, if you disrupt this, the mouse is like
very disoriented, right? It's like, it's the kind of thing which, you know, Watson, Crick, we're all
about structure implies function, right? Found the structure of DNA, this amazing thing. And,
you know, they remarked in this very under, understated way at the end of the paper that,
well, obviously, this gives a basis for how the genetic material might be replicated and error
corrected, because, you know, helix unwinds and you copy paste, right? So he was a big
structure function person. And that applies not just at the protein level, not just at the level
of DNA, but potentially also at the level of organs, like the classroom is kind of this system
integrated level, right? It's like the last layer in the neural network or something, you know?
And, and so that's, that's the kind of thing that I think is worth studying. So consciousness is
another kind of big, a biogenesis, a big question, the primordial remains consciousness is a big
question. And, you know, then definition of life, right? There's folks, gosh, there's, I think,
so this one is something I'd have to Google around, but there's a guy I think at Santa Fe
Institute or something who had some definition of life and like some thermodynamic definition.
But you're right that it's going to be a multi feature definition. We might have a
Turing test like definition, frankly, which is just if enough humans agree it's alive,
it's alive, right? And that might frankly be the operational definition, because, you know,
viruses are like this boundary case, you know, are they, are they alive or not? Most people don't
think they're alive, but they're, they're on, they're kind of, they're more alive than a rock,
in a sense. Well, I think in a world that we'll talk about today quite a bit, which is the digital
world, I think the most fascinating philosophically and technically definition of life is life in
the digital world. So chatbots, essentially creatures, whether they're replicas of humans
or totally independent creations, perhaps in an automatic way, I think there's going to be chatbots
that would ethically be troubled by if we wanted to kill them. They would have the capacity to
suffer. They would be very unhappy with you trying to turn them off. And then there will be large
groups of activists that will protest and go to the Supreme Court of whatever the Supreme Court
looks like in 10, 20, 30, 40 years. And they will demand that these chatbots would have the same
rights as us humans. Do you think that's possible? I saw that Google engineer who was basically
saying this had already happened and I, I was surprised by it because it just, when I looked
at the chat logs of it, it didn't seem particularly interesting. On their hand, I can definitely
see, I mean, GPT-3 for people who haven't paid attention shows that serious step ups are possible.
And obviously, you know, you've talked about AI in your podcast a ton. Is it possible that GPT-9
or something is kind of like that or GPT-15 or GPT-4 maybe? But for people just listening,
there's a deep skepticism in your face. Yeah. The reason being because,
you know, it's possible, is possible that you have like a partition of society on literally this
basis. You know, that's one model where there's some people just like there's vegetarians and
non-vegetarians, right? There may be machines have life and machines are machines, you know,
like or something like that, right? You know, you could, you could definitely imagine some
kind of partition like that in the future where your fundamental political social system, that's
a foundational assumption. And, you know, is AI, does it, you know, deserve the same rights as
like a human or, for example, a corporation is an intermediate. Do you see that thing which is
how human are different corporations? Have you seen that infographic? It's actually funny.
Yeah. There's a spectrum.
There's a spectrum. So for example, Disney is considered about as human as like a dog.
But like Exxon, I may be remembering this wrong, but they had like a level with like human at one
end and like rock at the other end. Does it have to do with corporate structure?
I think it's about people's empathy for that corporation, their brand identity.
But it's interesting to see that first of all, people sort of do think of corporations as being
more or like the branding is really what they're responding to.
Well, that's what, I mean, they're also responding, you know, I have a brand of human that I'm trying
to sell and it seems to be effective for the most part. Although it has become like a running joke
that I might be a robot, which means the brand is cracking. It's seeping through. But I mean,
in that sense, I just, I think, I don't see a reason why chatbots can't manufacture the brand
of being human, of being sentient.
I mean, that is the Turing test, but it's like the multiplayer Turing test. Now that actually
a fair number of chatbots have passed the Turing test, I'd say there's at least two steps up,
right? One is a multiplayer Turing test where you have chatbots talking to each other.
And then you ask, can you determine the difference between
end chatbots talking to each other and clicking buttons and stuff in apps and humans doing that?
And I think we're very far off, I shouldn't say very far off. At least, I don't know how far
we are in terms of time, but we're still far off in terms of a group of end chatbots looking
like their digital output is like the group of end humans, like a go from the Turing test to
the multiplayer Turing test. That's one definition. Another definition is, you know, to be able to
kind of swap in and you're not just convincing one human that this is a human for a small,
you know, session, you're convincing all humans that this is a human for end sessions. Remote
work actually makes this possible, right? That's another definition of a multiplayer Turing test,
where basically you have a chatbot that's fully automated, that is earning money for you as an
intelligent agent on a computer that's able to go and get remote work jobs and so on. I would
consider that next level, right? If you could have something that was like that, that was
competent enough to, I mean, because everything on a computer can be automated, right? Literally,
you could be totally hands-free just like autonomous driving, you could have autonomous
earning. As a challenge problem, if you were Microsoft or Apple and you had legitimate access
to the operating system, just like Apple says, can you send me details of this event?
A decentralized thing could, in theory, log, you know, the actions of 10,000 or 100,000
or a million people. And with cryptocurrency, you can even monitor a wallet that was on that
computer. And you could see, you know, what long run series of actions were increasing or decreasing
this digital balance. You see what I'm saying, right? So you start to get, at least conceptually,
it'd be invasive and, you know, there'd be a privacy issue and so on. Conceptually, you could
imagine an agent that could learn what actions humans were doing that results in the increase
of their local cryptocurrency balance, okay? There may be better ways to formulate it, but
that would consider a challenge problem is to go from the Turing test to a genuine
intelligent agent that can actually go and make money for you. If you can do that, that's a big
deal. People obviously have trading bots and stuff, but that would be, you know, the next
level, it's typing out emails, it's creating documents, it's actually... So mimic human behavior
in its entirety. Yeah, that's right. And it can, it'll schedule zooms, it'll send emails, it'll
essentially, because if you think about it, a human is hitting the keys and clicking the mouse,
but just like a self-driving car, the wheel rotates by itself, right? Those keys are
effectively just, it's like a, like the automator app in Apple, right? Everything's just moving
on the screen. You're seeing it there and it's just an AI. It's kind of hilarious that the
I'm not a robot click thing actually works because I actually don't know how it works,
but I think it has to do with the movement of the mouse, the timing, and they know that
it's very difficult for currently for a bot to mimic human behavior in the way they would
click that little checkbox. Yeah, exactly. I think it's something, I mean, again, my recollection
on that is it's like a pile of highly obfuscated JavaScript with all kinds. It looks like a very
simple box, but it's doing a lot of stuff and it's collecting all kinds of instrumentation,
and yeah, exactly like a robot is just a little too deterministic, or if it's got noise, it's
like Gaussian noise, and the way humans do it is just not something that you'd used to be able to
do without collecting thousands and thousands and thousands of human traces doing it,
but it is a predator prey on that. Well, and then the computer...
Or millions of human traces, I don't know. The computer just sees the JavaScript. It needs to
be able to look outside the simulation for the computer. The world is... The computer doesn't
know about the physical world, so it has to look outside of its world and introspect back on this
simple box, which is kind of... I think that's exactly what mushrooms do, or like psychedelics,
is you get to go outside and look back in, and that's what a computer needs to do.
I do wonder whether they actually give people insight or whether they give people the illusion
of insight. Is there a difference? Yeah, because, well, actual insight,
actual insight is, again, Maxwell's equations. You're able to shift the world with that. There's
a lot of practical devices that work. The illusion of insight is, I'm Jesus Christ,
and nothing happens, right? So I don't know. I think those are quite different.
I don't know. I think you can fake it till you make it on that one, which is
insight, in some sense, is revealing a truth that was there all along.
Yeah, so I guess I'm talking about technical insight, where you have... This is the thing
we were talking about actually before the podcast, like technical truths versus political
truths, right? Some truths, they're on the spectrum, and there's some truths that are
actually entirely political in the sense that if you can change the software in enough people's
heads, you change the value of the truth. For example, the location of a border is effectively
consensus between large enough groups of people. Who is the CEO? That's consensus
among a certain group of people. What is the value of a currency or any stock? That market price is
just the psychology of a bunch of people. Literally, if you can change enough people's minds,
you can change the value of the border or the position of the hierarchy or the value of the
currency. Those are purely political truths. Then all the way on the other end are technical
truths that exist independent of whatever any one human or all humans think, like the gravitational
constant or the diameter of a virus. Those exist independent of the human mind. Changing
enough human minds doesn't matter. Those remain constant. Then you have things that are interestingly
in the middle where cryptocurrency has tried to pull more and more things from the domain of
political truths into technical truths, where they say, okay, the one social convention we have
is that if you hold this private key, you hold this Bitcoin. Then we make that very
hard to change. You have to change a lot of technical truths. You can push things
to this interesting intermediate zone. The question is how much of our world can we push
into that? Right. That takes us in a nonlinear, fascinating journey to the question I wanted
to ask you in the beginning, which is this political world that you mentioned in the world of political
truth. As we know it in the 20th century and the early 21st century, what do you think works well
and what is broken about government? The fundamental thing is that we can't easily
and peacefully start new opt-in governments. Start up governments. Yeah. What do I mean by that is
basically you can start a new company. You can start a new community. You can start a new currency
even these days. You don't have to beat the former CEO in a duel to start a new company.
You don't have to become head of the World Bank to start a new currency. Because of this,
yes, if you want to, you can join Microsoft or name some company that's a GameStop and you
can try to reform it. Or you can start your own. The fact that both options exist mean that
you can actually just start from scratch. The same reason we have a clean piece of paper.
I've mentioned this actually in the network state book. I'll just quote this bit, but
we want to be able to start a new state peacefully for the same reason we want to bear plot of earth,
a blank sheet of paper, an empty text buffer, a fresh tarp or a clean slate,
because we want to build something new without historical constraint. For the same reason you
hit plus and do docs.new, like create a new doc. It's for the same reason because you don't have
just 128 bytes of space, 128 kilobytes and just have to backspace the old document for creating
the new one. That's a fundamental thing that's wrong with today's governments and it's a meta
point, right? Because it's not any one specific reform. It's a meta reform of being able to start
new countries. Okay, so that's one problem, but you know, you could push back and say that's a
feature because a lot of people argue that tradition is power. Through generation,
if you try a thing long enough, which is the way I see marriage, there's value to the struggle
and the journey you take through the struggle and you grow and you develop ideas together,
you grow until actually philosophically together. And that's the idea of a nation that spans
generations that you have a tradition that becomes more that that strives towards the truth and is
able to arrive there or no, not arrive but take steps towards there through the generations.
So you may not want to keep starting new governments. You may want to stick to the old one
and improve it one step at a time. So just because you're having a fight inside a marriage doesn't
mean you should get a divorce and go on Tinder and start dating around. That's the pushback.
So it's not obvious that this is a strong feature to have in order to launch new governments.
There's several different kinds of lines of attack or debate or whatever on this, right?
First is, yes, there's obviously value to tradition and people say this is Lindy and that's
Lindy. It's been proven for a long time and so on. But of course, there's a tension between
tradition and innovation. Going to the moon wasn't Lindy. It was awesome and artificial
intelligence is something that's very new. New is good, right? And this is a tension within
humanity actually itself because you know it's way older than all of these nations. I mean,
humans are tens of thousands of years old. Answers for humans are millions of years old,
right? And you go back far enough and the time that we know today of the sessile farmer and soldier
is if you go back far enough, you want to be truly traditional? Well, we're actually
descended from hunter-gatherers who were mobile and wandered the world and there weren't borders
and so on. They kind of went where they want, right? And people have done historical reconstructions
like skeletons and stuff like that. And many folks report that the transition to agriculture
and being sessile resulted in a diminution of height. People had like tooth decay and stuff
like that. The skeletons, people had traded off upside for stability, right? That's what the
state was. That was what these sessile kinds of things were. Now, of course, they had more likelihood
of living consistently. You could support larger population sizes, but it had lower quality of
life, right? And so the hunter-gatherer, maybe that's actually our collective recollection
of a Garden of Eden where people, just like a spider kind of knows innately how to build webs
or a beaver knows how to build dams. Some people theorize that the entire Garden of Eden is like
a sort of built-in neural network recollection of this pre-sessile era where we're able to roam
around, just pick off fruits and so on, low population density. So point is that I think
what we're seeing is a V3. You go from the hunter-gatherer to the farmer and soldier, the sessile,
nations are here and they've got borders and so on, to kind of the V3, which is the digital nomad,
the new hunter-gatherer. We're going back to the future because it's even older than nations is
no nations, right? Even more traditional than tradition is being international, right?
And so we're actually tapping into that other huge thread in humanity, which is the desire to
explore, pioneer, wander, innovate, kind of thing that's important.
To make America great again is to dissolve it completely into oblivion. No, it's a joke.
Yeah, yeah, I know it's a joke. Humor, I'm learning this new thing.
Yes, the new thing for the road. The chatbot emulation isn't fully working there.
Yeah, yeah, glitch. That's where in the beta.
And let me just say one other thing about this, which is there are, I mean, everybody in the
world to, okay, let's say, I don't know what percentage, let's say 99.99% or it's rounds to
that number of political discourse in the US focuses on trying to fix the system.
If those folks, I mean, 0.01% of the energy is going towards building a new system,
that seems like a pretty good portfolio strategy, right? Or 100% are supposed to go and edit this
codebase from 200 something years ago. I mean, the most American thing in the world is going and,
you know, leaving your country in search of a better life. America was founded 200 years ago
by the founding fathers. It's not just a nation of immigrants, it's a nation of immigrants, right?
Immigration, you know, from other countries to the US and actually also immigration within the
US. There's this amazing YouTube video called, it's like 50 states, US population, I think 1792,
it says 2050, so they've got a simulation. So you just stop it at 2019 or 2020.
But it shows that like Virginia was like number one early on, and then it lost ground and like
New York gained. And then like Ohio was a big deal in the early 1800s. And it was like father
of presidents in general, these presidents and later Illinois and Indiana. And then
California only really came up in the 20th century, like during the Great Depression.
And now we're entering the modern era where like Florida and Texas have risen and New York and
California have dropped. And so interstate competition, it's actually just like inter
currency competition, you know, you've got trading pairs, right? You, you know, sell BTC by ETH,
you sell, you know, Solana or Zeke, you know, sell Monero by Zcash, right? Each of those trading
pairs gives you signal for today on this currency is down or up relative to this other currency.
In the same way, each of those migration pairs, someone goes from New York to Ohio, Ohio to
California, gives you information on the desirability of different states. You can literally
form a pairs matrix like this over time, very much like the link matrix. That's shaped America in a
huge way. And so, you know, you ask, A, if this nation of immigrants that was founded by men
younger than us, by the way, the founding fathers were often in their 20s, right? Who,
you know, endorse the concept of proposition nation who've given rise to a country of founders and
pioneers who've literally gone to the moon, right? Those folks would think that this is the end of
history. That that's it. We're done. Like we've done everything else. I mean, there's people
in technology who believe, and I agree with them, that we can go to Mars. They might be able to end
death, but we can't innovate on something that was 230 years old, you know? So there is a balance
certainly to strike. The American experiment is fascinating, nevertheless. So one argument you
can make is actually that we're in the very early days of this V2. So what you describe as V2,
you could make the case that we're not ready for V3, that we're just actually trying to figure
out the V2 thing. You're trying to like skip. When are we ever ready? Now again, we'll go back to
marriage, I think, and having kids kind of thing. I think everyone has kids is never really ready
to be kids. That's the whole point. You dive in. Okay. But I mean, you mentioned that you can't
watch. Is there other criticisms of government that you can provide as we know it today before
we kind of outline the ideas of V3? Let's stick to V2. I'll give a few, right? And so a lot of
this stuff will go into the version. So I've got this book, The Network State, which covers some
of these topics. Does Network State have a subtitle? It is The Network State, How to Start a New
Country. How to Start a New Country. But I just have it at thenetworksstate.com. I should say
it's an excellent book that you should get. I read it on Kindle, but there's also a website.
And Balaji said that is constantly working on improving it, changing it. But by the time the
whole project is over, it'll be a different book than it was in the beginning. It's always shedding
its old skin. Well, I wanted to get something out there and get feedback. And just like an app,
right? Again, you have these two poles of an app is highly dynamic and you're accustomed to having
updates all the time and a book is supposed to be static. And there's a value in something static,
something unchanged and so on. But in this case, I'm glad I kind of shipped a version 1.0. And
the next version, I'm going to split it into like tentatively motivation theory and practice,
like motivation like what is the sort of political philosophy and so on that motivates me at least
to this, which you can take or leave, right? And then theory as to why Network State is now
possible. And I can define it in a second. And then the practice is zillions of practical details
and everything from roads to diplomatic recognition and so on, funding, founding, all that stuff.
A lot of stuff actually I left out of V1 simply because I wanted to kind of
get the desirability of it on the table and then talk about the feasibility.
I should actually link on that briefly in terms of things we can revolutionize. Like
one of the biggest innovations I think that Tesla does
is with the way they think about the car, with the deploy the car is not the automation or the
electric. To me, it's the over the air updates. Be able to send instantaneously updates to the
software that completely changes the behavior, the UX, everything about the car. And so I do
think it'll be interesting because books are a representation of human knowledge, a snapshot
of human knowledge. And it'll be interesting that if we can somehow figure out a system
that allows you to do sort of like a GitHub for books, like if I buy a book on Amazon without
having to pay again, can I get updates like V1.1, V1.2, and there's like release notes?
Right. That would be incredible. It's not enough to do like a second edition or third edition,
but like minor updates that's not just on your website, but actually go into the
model that we use to buy books. Right. So I spend my money, maybe I'll do a subscription
service for five bucks a month where I get regular updates to the books. And then there's an incentive
for authors to actually update their books such that it makes sense for the subscription. And
then that means your book isn't just a snapshot, but it's a lifelong project. Right. So you care
enough about the book. So I think there's a lot that can be done there because actually in going
through this process in many ways, the most traditional thing I did was a self-publish ebook
on Kindle. Right. Why? Because basically like, you know, if you actually ink a deal with a book
publisher, first they, you know, they'll give you some advance. I didn't need the advance or anything.
But second is all these constraints. Oh, you know, you want to translate into this or you want to do
this other format or you want to update it, you have to go and now talk to this other party. Right.
You know, and also the narrowing window of what they'll actually publish. It gets narrow now. Or
you see all these, you know, meltdowns over young adult novels and stuff on Twitter, but it's,
it's more than that. So, you know, actually having an Amazon page, it's just like a marker
that a book exists. Okay. And now I've got an entry point where if someone says, okay,
I like this tweet, but how do I kind of get the, that might be a concept from like the middle of
chapter three. Right. How do I get the thing from front to back? I can just point them at the
networkstate.com that is import this, right, this one entry point. Okay. And you mentioned like
subscription and money and so and so forth. And I think people are paying for content online now
with newsletters and so on. But I've chosen to and I will always have the thing free. And I want it
on or you can get the Kindle version on Amazon simply because you have to kind of set a price for
that. But the networkstate.com, what I want to do is have that optimized for every Android phone.
So people in India or Latin America or Nigeria can just tap and open it. I'm going to do translations
and stuff like that. Greg Fodor of Alt-SpaceVR, you know, founder of Alt-SpaceVR, you know,
he sold that and he coded the website and, you know, I worked with him on it and there's another
designer who, Elijah, and it was basically just a three-person group. And we thought we had something
pretty nice. But one thing I was really pleasantly surprised by is how many people got in touch with
us afterwards and asked us if we could open source the software to create this website, right?
Because actually, you can try it on mobile. I think it's actually, in some ways, a better
experience than Kindle. And so that was interesting because I do think of the website as like a V1
version of the concept of a book app, right? For example, imagine if you have the Bible and the
Ten Commandments aren't just text, but there's like a checklist and there's a gateway to a
Christian community there. And, you know, the practice is embedded into the thing, you know?
Like, you know, Brilliant.org? Amazing site. I love this site. Brilliant is basically mobile-friendly
tutorials. And you can kind of just swipe through, you know, you're in line at Starbucks or,
you know, getting on a plane or something. You just swipe through and just get really nice
micro lessons on things. And it's just interactive enough that your brain is working and you're
problem-solving. And sometimes you'll need a little pen and paper. But that format of sort of
very mobile-friendly, just continuous learning, I'd like to do a lot more with that. And so
that's kind of where we're going to go with the book app. So there's a lot of fun stuff about
the way you did at least V1 of the book, which is you have like a one sentence summary, one paragraph
summary, TLDR, and like one image summary, which is, I think honestly, it's not even about a short
attention span. It's a really good exercise about summarization, condensation, and like
helping youth think through what is the key insight. Like we mentioned the prime number of maze
that reveals something central to the human condition, which is struggling against the
limitation of our minds. And that's the same way you summarize the network state in the book.
So let's actually jump right there. And let me ask you, what is the network state?
What is the network state? So I'll give it a sentence and also give it an image, right?
So the informal sentence, a network state is a highly aligned online community
with a capacity for collective action that crowd funds territory around the world
and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.
So just taking those pieces, highly aligned online community that is not Facebook, that is not
Twitter. People don't think of themselves as Facebookers or Twitterians, right? That's just
a collection of hundreds of millions of people who just fight each other all day, right? It's a fight
club. A company is highly aligned where you'll put a task into the company slack and if you do in
all hands about 100% of the people in a company slack will do it. So they're highly aligned
in that way. But online communities don't tend to be highly aligned. Online communities tend to be
like a Game of Thrones fan club or something like that. Or on a Twitter account, you might get 0.1%
of people engaging with something. It's not the 100%. If you combine the degree of alignment
of a company with the scale of a community, that's like what a highly aligned online community is,
right? Start to get 1,000 or 10,000 people who can collectively do something as simple as just
all liking something on Twitter. For example, why would they do that? They're a guild of
electrical engineers. They're a guild of graphic designers. And you've got 1,000 people in this
guild and every day somebody is asking a favor from the guild and the other 999 people are helping
them out. For example, I've just launched a new project or I'd like to get a new job. Can somebody
help me and so on? And so you kind of give to get, you're helping other people in the community
and you're kind of building up karma this way. And then sometimes you spend it down like Stack
Overflow has this karma economy. It's not meant to be an internal economy that is
like making tons and tons of money off of, it's sort of a keep score, right? That's a highly
aligned online community part. Then capacity for collective action, I just kind of described that
which is at a minimum, you don't have a highly aligned online community unless you have 1,000
people and you paste in a tweet and 1,000 of them RT it or like it. If you can't even get that,
you don't have something. If you do have that, you have the basis for at least collective digital
action on something. And you can think of this as a group of activists. You can think of it as,
for example, let's say, I mentioned a guild, but let's say there are a group that wants to
raise awareness of the fact that life extension is possible, right? Every day there's a new
tweet on, I don't know whether it's Metformin Research or Sinclair's work or David Sinclair,
right? Andrew Huberman has good stuff here or there's a longevity VC, there's a bunch of folks
working this area. Every day there's something there and literally the purpose of this online
community is raise awareness of longevity and of the 1,000 people, 970 going like that,
that's pretty good, right? That's solid. You've got something there. You've got a laser, right?
You've got something which you can focus on something because most of the Web 2 internet
is entropic. You go to Hacker News, you go to Reddit, you go to Twitter and you're immediately
struck by the fact that it's like 30 random things, random. It's just a box of chocolates.
It's meant to be, you know, we're- Some of them look delicious.
Some of them look delicious. Novelty, we can over-consume novelty, right? So,
where we're talking about earlier, the balance between tradition and innovation, right? Here
is a different version of that which is entropy going in a ton of different directions due to
novelty versus focus, you know? It's like heat versus work, you know? Heat is entropic and work
force along a distance, you're going in a direction, right? And so, if those 30 links on,
you know, the next version of Hacker News or Reddit or something like so brilliant,
it's just, that's leveling you up. The 30 things you click, you've just gained a skill
as a function of that, right? So, these kinds of online communities, I don't know what they look
like. They probably don't look like the current social media. They just like, for example,
I know this is a meta analogy, but in the 2000s, people thought Facebook for work would look
like Facebook. And, you know, David Sacks, you know, found and sold a company, Yammer,
that was partially on the basis. It was fine. It was a billion dollar company. But Facebook for
work tended, was actually slack, right? It looked different. It was more chat focused. There was
less image focused and whatnot. What does the platform for a highly aligned online community
look like? I think Discord is the transitional state, but it's not the end state. Discord is
sort of chatty. The work isn't done in Discord itself, right? The cryptocurrency for tracking
or the Crypto Karma for sort of tracking people's contributions is not really done in Discord
itself. Discord was not built for that. And I don't know what that UX looks like. Maybe it looks like
tasks, you know, like maybe it looks something different. Okay. So, let me link on this. So,
you were actually, some people might not be even familiar with Discord or Slack and so on.
Even these platforms have like communities associated with them. Yes. Meaning the big,
the like the meta community of people who are aware of the feature set and that you can do a
thing, that this is a thing and then you can do a thing with it. Discord, like when I first
realized that I think it was born out of the gaming world. Yes. Is like, holy shit, this is like a
thing. There's a lot of people that use this. Right. There's also a culture that's very difficult
to escape that's associated with Discord that spans all the different communities within
Discord. Reddit is the same. Even though there's different subreddits, there's still,
because of the migration phenomenon maybe, there's still a culture to Reddit and so on. Yes. So,
I'd like to sort of try to dig in and understand what's the difference between
the online communities that are formed and the platforms on which those communities are formed.
Sure. Very important. Yes, it is. So, for example, an office,
a good design for an office is frequently you have, you know, the commons, which is like the
lunchroom or the gathering area, then everybody else has a cave on the border they can kind of
retreat to. Cave in the commons. I love, by the way, I was laughing internally about the heat
versus work. I think that's going to stick with me. That's such an interesting way to see Twitter.
Yeah. Like, is this heat or is this thread? Because there's a lot of stuff going on. Right.
Is it just heat or are we doing some like, is there a directed thing that's going to be productive
at the end of the day? That's right. Love is never seen. The cave in the commons is really nice.
So, that has to do with the layout of an office that's effective. That's right. And so, you can
think of many kinds of social networks as being on the cave in commons continuum. For example,
Twitter is just all commons. The caves are just like individual DMs or DM threads or whatever,
but it's really basically just one gigantic global public fight club for the most part, right?
Then you have- Or love club. Well, somewhat love, but mostly fight. Or actually-
I love aggressively, that's all. Yeah. I mean, the way I think, I mean, Twitter is like a cross
between a library and a civil war. It's something where you can learn, but you can also fight if
you choose to fight, right? Yeah. Well, I mean, it's because of the commons structure of it,
it's a mechanism for virality of anything. You just describe the kind of things that become viral.
Yeah. Meaning no offense to librarians. It's like a library and library. Library was racked
by civil war for many years, right? It's a library. It's one of my favorite sets for porn. Just
kidding. Jokes. I'm learning as that's probably crossing the line for the engineers working on
this humor module. Maybe take that down a notch. Yeah. Gosh. We're just talking about- Oh, yeah.
So, continue. Go ahead and continue. Twitter is the commons. Yeah. So, Twitter is the commons.
Then Facebook is like- It's got all these warrants and stuff. Facebook is very difficult to reason
about privacy on that. And the reason is I think it's easy to understand when something is completely
public like Twitter or completely private like Signal. And those are the only two modes I think
in which one can really operate. When something is quasi-private like Facebook, you have to just
kind of assume it's public because if it's interesting enough, it'll go outside your friend
network and it'll get screen-shotted or whatever and post it. And so, Facebook is sort of forced
into default public despite its privacy settings. For anybody who says something interesting,
you can figure out all their dials and stuff like that, but just hard to understand unless it's
totally private or totally public, right? You have to basically treat it if it's totally public,
if it's not totally private. Okay. At least under a real name. I'll come back to pseudonym.
So, you've got Twitter, that's total commons. Facebook is like a warrants. It's like rabbit
warrants or like an ant colony where you don't know where information is traveling. Then you've
got Reddit, which has sort of your global Reddit and then all the subreddits. That's a different
model of cave and commons. I think one of the reasons it works is that you have individual
moderators where something is totally off-topic and unacceptable, totally off-topic and
unacceptable in this subreddit and totally on-topic and acceptable in another. That's like kind of a
precursor of the digital societies I think that we're going to see that actually have become
physical societies like lots and lots of subreddit like things have become physical societies.
Then you start going further into like Discord where it's more full-featured than
as you go Twitter, Facebook, Reddit. Now you jump into Discord and Discord is
a bunch of individual communities that are connected and you can easily sort of jump
between them. Then you have Slack and yes, you can use Slack to go between different
company slacks, but Slack historically, at least I'm not sure what their current policy is,
historically they discourage public slacks. It's mostly like you have your main Slack for
your company and then you sometimes may jump into like, let's say you've got a design consultant
or somebody like that, you'll jump into their Slack, but you've got way more Discord usually
that you jump into than Slack. Let me ask you then on that point because there is a culture,
one of the things I discovered on Reddit and Discord of anonymity or pseudonyms or
user names that don't represent the actual name. I'll Slack as an example of one because I think I
did a, I used to have a Slack for like deep learning course that I was teaching and that was like
very large, like 20,000 people, whatever, but so you could grow quite large, but there was
a culture of like, I'm going to represent my actual identity, my actual name and then the
same stuff on Discord. I think I was the only asshole using my actual name on there. It's
like everybody was using pseudonyms. So what's the role of that in the online community?
Well, so I actually gave a talk on this a few years ago called the pseudonymous economy.
Okay. And it's come about faster than I expected, but I did think it was going to come about fairly
fast. And essentially the concept is obviously we've had, so first, anonym, pseudonym, real name,
right? Can you describe the difference between them? Anonymous is like 4chan where there's no
tracking of a name. There's zero reputation associated with an identity, right? Pseudonymous
is like much of Reddit where there's a persistent username and it has karma over time, but it's
not linked to the global identifier that is your state name, right? So your quote, real name,
even the term real name, by the way, is a misnomer because it's like your social security name,
like social security number. It's your official government name. It's your state name. It is
the tracking device. It's an air tag that's put on you, right? Why do I say that, right?
Another word for a name is a handle. And so just visualize like a giant file cabinet. There's a
handle with Lex Freeman on it that anybody, the billions of people around the world can go up to
and they can pull this file on you out. Images of you, things you said, like billions of people
can stock billions of other people now. That's a very new thing. And I actually think this will be
a transitional era in like human history. We're actually going to go back into a much more encrypted
world. Okay, let me linger on that because another way to see real names is the label on a thing that
can be canceled. Yes, that's right. In fact, there's a book called Seeing Like a State,
which actually talks about the origins of surnames and whatnot. If you have a guy who is
that guy with brown hair, that's like an analog identifier. It could be in 10 different people
in a village. But if you have a first name, last name, okay, that guy can now be conscripted. You
can go down with a list, a list of digital identifiers, pull that guy out, pull him into the
military for conscription, right? So that was like one of the purposes of names was to make
masses of humans legible to a state, right? Hence seeing like a state. You can see them now, right?
See, digital identifiers, one thing that people don't usually think about is
pseudonymity is itself a form of decentralization. So, you know, people know Satoshi Nakamoto was
pseudonymous. He also knows decentralization. But one way of thinking about it is, let's say his real
name, okay, or his state name is a node, okay? Attached to that is every database, you know,
his Gmail, his Facebook, if he had one, every government record on him, right? All of these
databases have that state name as the foreign key, right? And so it can go and look things up in all
of those databases, right? And so it's that thing of it as being the center of a giant network of
all of these things. When you go and create a pseudonym, you're budding off a totally new node
that's far away from all the rest. And now he's choosing to attach Bitcoin Talk and Bitcoin.org
and the GPT signatures of the code if he choose to do that. All those things, the digital signatures
are all attached to this new decentralized name, because he's instantiating it, not the government,
right? One way of thinking about it is the root administrator of the quote, real name system
is the state, because you cannot simply edit your name there, right? You can't just go, you
can't log into USA.gov and backspace your name and change it. Moreover, your birth certificate,
all these stuff that's fixed and immutable, right? Whereas you would take for granted that on every
site you go to, you can backspace, you can be like, call me Ishmael, you know, walk into a site,
you use whatever name you want, you try to use the same name across multiple sites, you can do that.
And if not, you don't have to. One thing that we're seeing now actually is at the level of kids,
you know, the younger generation, Eric Schmidt several years ago mentioned that, you know,
people would like change their names when they became adults so that they could do that. This
is kind of already happening. People are using, I remarked on this many years ago, search resistant
identities. Okay. Why? They have their Finsta, which is their quote, fake name Instagram,
and RINsta, which is their real name Instagram. This is cool. Okay. And what's interesting is
on their RINsta, they're their fake self because they're in their Sunday best and, you know,
smiling. And this is the one that's meant to be search indexed, right? On the Finsta,
with their fake name, this is just shared with their closest friends. They're their real self and
they're, you know, hanging out at parties or whatever, you know? And so this way they've got
something which is the public persona and the private persona, right? The public persona that's
search indexed and the private persona that is private for friends, right? And so organically,
people are, you know, like Gene Jacobs talks about like cities and how, you know, they're organic and
when I like some of the mid-20th century guys, the architecture they had removed shade from,
you know, like awnings and stuff like that got removed. So this is like the restoration of like
awnings and shade and structure so that you're not always exposed to the all-seeing web crawler
that I have saw on, which is like Googlebot indexing everything. These are search resistant
identities and that like I just sort of passes over you, like, you know, in the Terminator,
like in the Terminator, I just kind of passes over you, right? So search resistant identity
is not pulled up, it's not indexed, right? And now you can be your real self. And so we've had this
kind of thing for a while with communication. The new thing is that cryptocurrency has allowed us
to do it for transaction, hence the pseudonymous economy, right? And you go from anonymous, pseudonymous
real name, these each have their different purposes. But the new concept is that pseudonym,
you can have multiple of them, by the way, your ENS name, you can have it under your quote real
name or state name, like lexfreedman.eth, but you could also be punk6529.eth, okay? And now you
can earn, you can sign documents, you can boot up stuff, you can have a persistent identity here,
okay, which has a level of indirection to your real name. Why is that very helpful? Because now
it's harder to both discriminate against you and cancel you. Concerns of various factions are actually
obviated, or at least partially addressed by going pseudonymous as default, right? It is the
opposite of bring your whole self to work, it's bring only your necessary self to work, right?
Only show those credentials that you need, right? Now, of course, you know, anybody who's
in cryptocurrency understands Sushinakamoto and so on is for this. But actually, many progressives
are for this as well. Why? You don't ban the boxes. It's like you're not supposed to ask about,
like felony convictions when somebody is, you know, being hired because they've served their
time, right? Or you're not supposed to ask about immigration status or marital status in an interview.
And, you know, people have this concept of blind auditions where, you know, if a woman is
auditioning for like a violin seat, they put it behind a curtain so they can't downgrade her
for playing her performance is judged on merits of its audible quality, not in terms of who this
person is. So this way they don't discriminate versus male or female for who's, you know,
getting a violin position. So you combine those concepts like ban the box, not asking these
various questions, blind auditions, and then also the concept of implicit bias. Like if you, you
know, believe this research, people are unconsciously biased towards other folks, right?
Okay, so you take all that, you take Satoshi and you put it together and you say, okay,
let's use pseudonyms. That actually takes unconscious bias even off the table, right?
Because now you have genuine global equality of opportunity. Moreover, you have all these people,
billions of people around the world that might speak with accents, but they type without them.
And now if they're pseudonymous, you aren't discriminating against them, right?
But moreover, with AI, very soon, the AI version of Zoom, you'll be able to be whoever you want to
be and speak in whatever voice you want to speak in, right? And you'll be, and that'll happen in
real time. So I mean, this is really interesting, but for Finsta and Rinsta, there's some sense in
which the fake Instagram you're saying is where you could be a real self. Well, my question is,
under pseudonym, or when you're completely anonymous, is there some sense where you're not
actually being your real self? That as a social entity, human beings are fundamentally social
creatures. And for us to be social creatures, there is some sense in which we have to have a
consistent identity that can be canceled, that can be criticized or applauded in society, and that
identity persists through time. So is there some sense in which we would not be our full,
beautiful human selves unless we have a lifelong consistent real name attached to us in a digital
world? So this is a complicated topic, but let me make a few remarks. First is real names, quote,
unquote, state names were not built for the internet. They're actually state names, right?
It's actually a great way of thinking about social security name, right? So your state name,
your official name, was not built for the internet. Why? They give both too much information and too
little. Okay, so too much information because someone with your name can find out all kinds
of stuff about you, like for example, if someone doesn't want to be stalked, right?
The real name is out there, their stalker knows it, they can find address information,
all this other kind of stuff, right? And with all these hacks that are happening, just every day
we see another hack, massive hack, etc. That real name can be indexed into data that was supposed
to be private, right? Like for example, you know, the Office of Personal Management, like the
government, the US government, many governments actually, are like a combination of the surveillance
state and the Keystone cops, right? Why? They slurp up all the information and then they can't
secure it. So it leaks out the back door, okay? They basically have, you know, 100 million records
of all this very, 300 million records, all this very sense of data, they just get owned, hacked,
over and over again, right? And so really, there should be something which totally inverts the
entire concept of KYC and what have you. And of course, comply with the regulations as they are
currently written. But also, you should argue, privacy over KYC, the government should not be
able to collect what it can't secure. It's slurping up all this information. It's completely unable
to secure it. It's hacked over and over again, you know, China probably has the entire OPM file.
And it's not just that, like Texas is hacked. And some of these hacks are not even detected yet,
right? And these are just the ones that have been admitted. And so, you know, what happens is criminals
can just run this stuff and find, you know, okay, so that guy who's got that net worth online and
emerges various databases, they've got a bunch of addresses to go and hit, okay? So, in that sense,
real names were not, state names were not built for the internet, they just give up too much
information. And in our actually existing internet environment, they give up too much information.
On their hand, they also give too little. Why? If instead you give out lexfriedman.eth, okay,
or a similar crypto domain name or urban name or something like that. Now, that's actually more like
a DNS, okay? First, if you've got a lexfriedman.eth, what can you do that? Some you can do today,
some you'll soon be able to do. You can pay lexfriedman.eth, you can message lexfriedman.eth,
you can look it up like a social profile, you can send files to it, you can download and download.
Basically, it combines aspects of an email address, a website, a username, etc., etc. Well,
you know, eventually, I think you'll go from email to phone number to DNS address or something like
that as the primary online identifier, because this is actually a programmable name, right?
Whereas a state name is not, you know, think about it like a state name will have apostrophes
perhaps in it, or is that your middle name or this and that. That was a format that was developed
for the paper world, right? Whereas the DNS name is developed for the online world. Now,
reasons say ENS or something like it, you know, somebody in a village, their name might be Smith
because they were a blacksmith or Potter because they were Potter, right? And the same I think
your surname, right now for many people that's.eth and that reflects the Ethereum community,
your surname online will carry information about you, like.sol says something different about you,
.btc says yet something different. They were going to have a massive fractionation of this
over time. We're still in the very earliest days of our internet civilization, right?
A hundred, 200 years from now, those surnames may be as informative as, say, Chen or Friedman or
Srinivasan in terms of what information they carry because the protocol is the civilization
fundamentally that you're associated with, right? Right. So there's some improvements to the real
name that you could do in the digital world. But do you think there's value of having a name
that's persist through all your whole life that is shared between all the different digital and
physical communities? I think you should be able to opt into that, right? At which? At which level?
In terms of the society that you're joining. Wait a minute. So can I murder a bunch of people
in society one and then go to society two and be like, I'm murder free? No, I don't mean it like
that. That's the application I'm interested in. Okay. Well, I would like you to prevent me,
a person who's clearly bad for society from doing that. Sure, sure. Murder is going to be
against the rules in almost every society. And I mean, basically, I mean, people will argue,
yeah, most likely, right? Except animals. Well, I'm thinking of like the Aztecs or the Maya's
or, you know, something like that. There's various, you know, Soviet Union, there's weird,
there's weird edge, not edge case. Yeah, there's societies, unfortunately, that have actually,
that's why that's why I asked, but let's say murder is something that society one probably has
effectively a social smart contract or a social contract that says that's illegal. Therefore,
you're in jail. Therefore, you're deprived of the right to exit. But upon entry into that society,
in theory, you would have said, okay, I accept this quote, social contract, right? Obviously,
if I kill somebody, I can't leave. Okay, so you've, you've accepted upon crossing the border into
there, right? Now, as I mentioned, you know, like what is murder? Like people will, I mean,
there's obvious answer. But as I said, there's been human sacrifice in some societies,
communism, they kill lots of people, non-season, they kill lots of people. Unfortunately, there's
quite a lot of societies. You know, I wanted to say it's an edge case, but maybe many of the
20th century societies around the world have institutionalized some kind of murder, whether
it was the Red Terror, you know, in the Soviet Union, or obviously the Holocaust, or, you know,
the Cultural Revolution, or Year Zero, and so on and so forth, right? So, my point there
is that who is committing all those murders? It was the state, it was the organization
that one is implicitly trusting them to track you, right? And how did they commit those murders?
Well, how did Lenin, you know, you know the hanging order, you know, I'm talking about the
hanging order for the Kulaks? Yes. Okay, the famous hanging order, which actually showed
they were actually bloodthirsty, the key thing was he said, here's a list of all the, quote,
rich men, the Kulaks, go and kill them. The real names, the state names were what facilitated the
murder. They didn't prevent the murderers there, right? So, my point is, just in the ethical
waiting of it, it's a two-sided thing, right? You're right, that the tracking can, you know, prevent
disorganized murders, but the tracking facilitates, unfortunately, organized murders. Lists of
undesirables were the primary tool of all of these oppressive states in the 20th century.
You see my point? I see your point, and it's a very strong point.
In part, it's a cynical point, which is that the rule of a centralized state is more negative than
positive. I think it is a, it is like, it's like nuclear energy, okay? It's like fire. It is something
which you're going to keep having it reform because there's good reasons where you have
centralization, decentralization, decentralization, but power corrupts, absolute power corrupts,
absolutely. And you just have to be very suspicious of this kind of centralized power.
The more trust you give it, often the less trust it deserves. It's like a weird feedback loop,
right? The more trust, the more it can do, the more it can do, the more bad things it will do.
So, okay. There is a lot of downside to the state being able to track you.
Right. And history teaches us lessons, one at a large scale,
especially in the 20th century, at the largest of scale as they can do,
commit a large amount of murder and suffering. And by the way, history isn't over. If you think
about what the Chinese are building on this, right? That surveillance state, it's not just
tracking your name, it's tracking everything on you, you know? Like WeChat is essentially like,
it is all the convenience and none of the freedom.
So, that's the downside. But don't you, the question is, I think probably fundamentally
about the human nature of an individual, of how much murder there would be if we can just
disappear every time we murder at the individual level.
So, the issue is basically like, once one realizes that the moral trade-off has two
poles to it, right? And moreover, that basically centralized organized murder has, I mean,
if we add up all the disorganized murder of the 20th century, it's probably significantly less
than the organized murder that these states facilitated, right? And probably by, you know,
R.J. Rommel has this thing called democide, right? And the thing is, it's so grim, right?
Because, you know, it's saying like, one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic, right?
These are just like, just incalculable tragedies that we can't even, you know, understand. But,
you know, nevertheless engaging with it, like, you know, I don't know, is it ratio 10x? Is it
100x? I wouldn't be surprised if it's 100x, right? Yeah, but have you seen the viciousness,
the negativity, the division within online communities that have anonymity?
So, that's the thing is, basically, you, there's also a sila and a syribus. I'm not, you know,
you know, when you see what centralization can do and you correct in the direction of
decentralization, you can overcorrect with decentralization and you get anarchy. And
this is basically, then you want to decentralize, right? And this is the, you know, I think it's
the romance of the three kingdoms, the empire long, united must divide, the empire long,
divided must unite, that's always the way of it, right? So, what's going to happen is,
we will state certain verbal principles, right? And then the question is, where in state space
you are? Are you too centralized? Well, then, okay, you want to decentralize. And are you too
decentralized? Only want to centralize and maybe track more, right? And people opt into more
tracking because they will get something from that tracking, which is a greater due societal
stability. So, it's kind of like saying, are we going north or south? And the answer is like,
what's our destination? Where's our current position in the, in the civilizational state space?
Well, my main question I guess is, does creating a network state escape from the, some of the flaws
of human nature? The reason you got Nazi Germany is a large scale resentment with different
explanations for that resentment that's ultimately losing the heart of each individual they made
up the entirety of Nazi Germany. And it had a charismatic leader that was able to channel that
resentment into action, into actual policies, into actual political and military movements.
Can't you not have the same kind of thing in digital communities as well?
Have you heard the term argumentum ad Hitler or like Godwin's law or something? Like,
you know, it's something where if the reference point is Hitler, it's this, it's this thing where
a lot of things break down. But I do think, I mean, look, is there any,
did Bitcoin manage to get where it was without a single shot being fired to my knowledge? Yes,
right? Did Google manage to get to where it is without shots being fired? Absolutely.
And while a lot of shots were being fired elsewhere in the world, sure. But who's firing
those shots? I guess it's right. Yeah. But that's because Bitcoin and Google are a tiny minority
of communities that it's like the icing on the cake of human civilization. Sure. Basically,
any technology, I mean, like you can use, you can use a hammer to go and hit somebody with it,
right? I'm not, I'm not saying every technology is equally destructive or have you, but you can
conceive of, it's kind of like rule 34, but for technology, right? You, okay, right? You can,
you can probably figure out some. Your ability to reference brilliant things throughout is
quite admirable. Yes. But anyway, sorry, rule 34 for technology. Rule 34, but for abusive
technology, you can always come up with a black mirror version of something. And in fact, there
is this kind of funny tweet, which is like a sci-fi author, my book, don't invent the torment nexus,
was meant to be a cautionary tale on what, you know, what happened if society invented the
torment nexus. And then it's like, tech guys, at long last, we have created the torment nexus.
It's hard, right? And so the thing is that simply describing something, some abuse, unfortunately
after the initial shock wears off, people will unconsciously think of it as sort of an
attractor in the space, right? It's like, I'll give you some examples, like, you know, Minority Report
had the gesture thing, right? And the connect was based on that. So it's a dystopian movie,
but had this cool kind of thing and people, you know, kind of keyed off it, right? Or, you know,
people have said that movies like, you know, Full Metal Jack, that was meant to be in my,
my understanding is meant to be like an anti-war movie. But lots of, you know, soldiers just love
it, you know, despite the fact that the drill sergeant is actually depicted as a bad guy,
right? For the sort of portrayal of that, you know, kind of, kind of environment, right?
So I'm just saying it's like giving the vision of like the digital Hitler or whatever,
is not actually a vision I want to paint. I do think is it, is it, everything is possible. Obviously,
you know, ISIS uses the internet, right? Like, is it? Yeah, I'm not, we're not
bringing up Hitler in a shallow argument. We're bringing up Hitler in a long, empathetic,
relaxed discussion, which is a different, which is, which is where Hitler can live
in a healthy way. There is a, there's deep lessons in Hitler, Nazi Germany,
as the rest was stolen. Yes. Okay. So in many ways, you know, and this is a very superficial
way of talking about it, but this is, exit is the anti-genocide technology, right? Because
exit is the route of the politically powerless. Exit is not, people always say, oh, exit is for
the rich or there. That's actually not true. Most immigrants, most immigrants equals most
immigrants are not rich. They're politically powerless. Describe exit. What is exit? So
there's this, you know, book, which I reference a lot. I like it and called Exit Voice and Loyalty
by Albert Hirschman. Okay. And he essentially says, and, you know, I gave this talk in 2013 that,
that goes through this, at YC Starb School, but just to describe these voices reform,
exit is alternatives. For example, in the context of an open source project, voices
submitting a bug and exit is forking. In a company, voices, you're saying, you know,
hey, here's a, here's a ticket, okay, that I'd like to get solved and exit is taking your business
elsewhere. Okay. You know, at the level of corporate governance, voices, you know, board
directors vote and exit is, sign your shares, right? In a country, voices a vote and exit is
migration. Okay. And I do think that the two forces we talk about a lot, democracy and capitalism,
are useful forces. But there's a third, which is migration, right? So you can vote with your ballot,
you can vote with your wallet, you can vote with your feet. Wallet has some aspects of exit
built into it. But voting with your feet actually has some aspects of voice built into it, because
when you leave, it's like an amplifier on your vote. You might say 10 things, but when you actually
leave, then people take, when you said seriously, you're not just like complaining or whatever,
you, you actually left San Francisco because it was so bad on this and this issue, and you've
actually voted with your feet. It is manifest preference as opposed to state of preference.
So voice versus exit is this interesting dichotomy. Do you try to reform the system,
or do you exit it and build a new one or seek an alternative? And then loyalty modulates this,
where if you are a patriot as part of the initial part of your conversation, right? Like, you know,
are you, you're a trader, you know, you're giving up on our great thing or whatever, right?
And people will push those buttons to get people to stick. That's like, you know, I
shouldn't say the bad version, let's say a common version, sometimes good, sometimes bad.
Then, but then there's the good version, which is, oh, you know, maybe the price is down right
now, but you believe in the cause. So even if they're, you know, on paper, you would rationally
exit, you believe in this thing, and you're going to stick with it. Okay. So loyalty can be, again,
good and bad, but it kind of modulates the tradeoff between voice and exit. Okay. So given that
framework, we can think of a lot of problems in terms of, am I going to use voice or exit or
some combination there? Because they're not mutually exclusive. It's kind of like, you know,
left and right, something is used both together. I think that one of the biggest things the internet
does is it increases microeconomic leverage and therefore increases exit in every respective
life. For example, you know, on every phone, you can pick between Lyft and Uber, right? When
you're at the store, you see a price on the shelf and you can comparison shop, right? If it's Tinder,
you can swipe, right? If it's Twitter, you can click over to the next account. The back button
is exit. The microeconomic leverage, leverage in the sense of alternatives, right? This is like
the one of the fundamental things that the internet does. It puts this tool on your desktop and now
you can go and talk to an illustrator or you can kind of build it yourself, right, by typing in some,
you know, characters into Dalit. And that makes the positive forces of capitalism more efficient
increase in microeconomic leverage. And it's individual empowerment, right?
And so our sort of industrial age systems were not set up for that level of individual
empowerment. Just to give you like one example that I think about, we take for granted every
single website you go and log into, you can configure your Twitter profile and you can make it
dark mode or light mode and your name, all this stuff is editable, right? How do you configure
your USA experience? Is there a USA.gov that you edit? Can you even edit your name there?
Dark mode for USA. I mean, just your profile. Is there like a national profile? I mean,
there's like driver's license point is that it's assumed that it's not like individually
customizable quite in that way, right? Of course, you can move around your house and stuff like
that, but it's not like your experience of the US is like configurable, you know?
Let me think about that. Let me think about sort of the analogy of it. So the microeconomic
leverage, you can switch apps. Can you switch your experience in small ways efficiently multiple
times a day in the inside the United States? Under the constraints of the physical world,
you do like micro migrations. So this is coming back to the hunter-gatherer,
farmer-soldier, digital nomad kind of thing, right? The digital nomad combines aspects of
the V1 and the V2 for a V3, right? Because the digital nomad has the mobility and freedom of
the hunter-gatherer, but some of the consistency of the civilization of the farmer and soldier,
right? But coming back to this, like one other thing about it is in the 1950s, if a guy on
assembly line might literally push the same button for 30 years, okay? Whereas today,
you're pushing a different key every second, right? That's like one version of like
microeconomic leverage. Another version is, you know, in the 1980s, I mean, they didn't have
Google Maps, right? So you couldn't just like discover things off the path. People would just
essentially do, you know, home to work and work to home and home to work and a trip had to be
planned, right? They were contained within a region of space or you do home to school,
school to home, home to school. You know, it wasn't like you went and explored the map.
Most people didn't, right? They were highly canonized, okay? Meaning, you know, it was just
back and forth, back and forth, very routine, just like the push the button, push the button,
trapped within this very small piece and also trapped within this large country because it was
hard to travel between countries and so on. Again, you know, of course, there were vacations,
of course, there was some degree of news and so on. Your mobility wasn't completely crushed,
but it was actually quite low, okay, relatively speaking. Just you were trapped in a way that
you weren't even really thinking about it, okay? And now that map has opened up. Now,
you can see the whole map. You can go all over the place. You know, I don't have the data to show
it, but I would be shocked if people, the average person didn't go to more places, wasn't, you know,
doing more, you know, going to more restaurants and things like that today than they were in the
80s, simply because the map is open, okay? And the map is made more open through the digital world.
To the digital world, exactly. So we're reopening the map like the hunter-gatherer,
okay? Because you can now think about every site for very low costs that you can visit, right?
The digital world, you can, I mean, how many websites have you visited? I don't know,
hundreds of thousands, probably at this point over your life, right? How many places on the
surfaces are you visiting? You're actually unusual. You might be like a world traveler or have you,
right? But still, even your physical mobility is less than your digital mobility, right? You can
just essentially, I mean, the entire concert like nations and borders and whatnot didn't exist in
the hunter-gatherer hour, right? Because you couldn't build permanent fortifications and whatnot.
Even nations, as we currently think of them, would like demarcated borders. You needed cartography,
you needed maps, right? That stuff didn't exist for a long time. You just had a sort of a fuzzy
area of we kind of control this territory and these guys are on the other side of the river,
okay? I think just to... I don't want to digress too much, but yeah.
Where to digress away, I think entirety of life on earth is a kind of a digression which
creates beauty and complexity as part of the digression. I think your vision of the network
state is really powerful and beautiful. I just want to linger on this real name issues. Let me
just give you some data. Personal anecdotal experience data. There's a reason I only do this
podcast in person. There is something lost in the digital space. Oh, sure.
And I find... Now, I personally believe to play devil's advocate against the devil's advocate
that I'm playing, I personally believe that this is a temporary thing. We will figure out
technological solutions to this, but I do find that currently people are much more willing to be
on scale, cruel to each other online than they are in person. The only... The way to do that, just
visit Ukraine, went to the front. The way you can have people be cruel to each other in the physical
space is through the machinery of propaganda that dehumanizes the other side, all that kind of stuff.
That's really like hard work to do. Online, I find just naturally at the individual scale, people
somehow start to easily engage in the drug of mockery, derision, and cruelty when they can
hide behind anonymity. I don't know what that says about human nature. I ultimately believe most of
us want to be good and have the capacity to do a lot of good, but sometimes it's fun to be shitty,
to shit on people, to be cruel. I don't know what that is. It's weird because I think one of my
sayings is, just like the internet increases in microeconomy and leverage, the internet increases
variance. For anything that exists before, you have the zero and 100 versions of it. I'll give
some examples and I'll come to this. For example, you go from the 30-minute sitcom to the 30-second
clip or the 30 episode Netflix binge. You go from Guy working 95 to the guy who's the 40 years old
and has failed to launch, doesn't have a job or anything, and the 20-year-old tech billionaire.
You go from all kinds of things that were sort of Gaussian or kind of constrained in location to
kind of extreme outcomes on both sides. Applying that here, you are talking about the bad outcome,
which I agree does happen where the internet in some sense makes people have very low empathy
between others. But it also is the other extent where people find their mental soulmates across
the world, someone who's living in Thailand or in Latin America who thinks all the same stuff,
just like them. Wow, you never met this person before. You get to know them online. You've been
in person. It's like the brains have been communicating for two years, three years,
you've been friends, and you've seen a person that's just great. It's actually not just the
total lack of empathy. It is frankly far more empathy than you would be able to build usually with
an in-person conversation in the 80s or the 90s with someone on their side of the world because
you might not even be able to get a visa to go to their country or not even know they existed.
How would you be able to find each other and so on and so forth? It is kind of both. It is tearing
society apart and it's putting it back together, both at the same time. My main concern is this.
What I see is that young people are, for some reason, more willing to engage in the drug
of cruelty online under the veil of anonymity. That's what you're seeing publicly, but you're
not seeing the private chats. It's a sensual distribution. I work for the intelligence agency,
so I'm collecting all of your data. Yes, but you can intuit stuff and I don't think I'm being very
selective. If you just look at the young folks, I mean, I am very concerned about the intellectual,
psychological growth of young men and women. I agree. I'm not disagreeing with you on this.
I am saying, however, there is a positive there that once we see it, we can try to amplify that.
Yes, with technology. Yes, that's right. I'm just saying the very, very basic technology. I give
stuff I code up over the weekend kind of thing. I think if I throw an anonymity on top of that,
it will lead to many bad outcomes for young people. Anonymy, yes. Pseudonymity, maybe not,
because Reddit is actually fairly polite, right? The entirety of Reddit just chuckled as you said
that. Well, within a subreddit, it's actually fairly polite. Like, let's say you're not usually
seeing, it depends on which subreddit, of course. There's a consistency. I think definition of
politeness is interesting here because it's polite within the culture of that subreddit.
Yes, let me put it a different way. They abide by the social norms of that subreddit.
And that's the definition of politeness. Yeah, or civility, is that right?
So there is an interesting difference between pseudonymous and anonymous, you're saying,
it's possible that pseudonymity, you can actually avoid some of the negative aspects.
Absolutely. We're redunbarizing the world in some ways. With China being the big exception
or outlier, the Dunbar number, 150 people, if you know that, that's roughly the scale of your
society, right? That's a number of people that a human can kind of keep in their brain. Whether
apocryphal or not, I think, I think it's probably roughly true. And we're redunbarizing the world
because, A, we're making small groups much more productive, and B, we're making large groups
much more fractious, right? So you have an individual like Notch, you can program Minecraft
by himself or Satoshi, you could do V1 of Bitcoin by himself or Instagram, which is just like 10
people or WhatsApp is like 50 people when they sold. But on the other hand, you have huge quote
countries of hundreds of millions of people that are just finding that the first and second principle
or the, you know, they're just splitting on principle components, you know, what
Scott Alexander thinks of them as scissor statements, you know, the statements that
one group thinks is obviously true, one group thinks is obviously false. You can think of them
as political polarization, you think of them in terms of game theory, there's lots of different
reasons you can give for why this happens. But those large groups now are getting split. And so
you have both the unsustainability of these large sort of artificial groups and the productivity
of these small organic ones. And so that is kind of it's like sort of obvious that's the
direction of civilizational rebirth, we just need to kind of lean into that.
Scissor statements, there's so many beautiful just like, you know, we mentioned chocolates,
right advertising themselves, your entirety speech is an intellectual like box of chocolates.
But okay, so I don't think we finished defining the network state. Let's like linger on the
definition you gave the one sentence statement, which I think essentially encapsulated the
online nature of it. I forget what else. Can we just try to bring more richness to this definition
of how you think about the network state? Absolutely. So that informal sentences, a
network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowd
funds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from preexisting
states. So we talked about was the alignment of online communities and the capacity for
collective action. Well, one collective action, it could be a thousand people liking a tweet,
right? If you can get a thousand of a thousand people doing it. But a much higher level,
much higher bar is a thousand people crowdfunding territory and actually living together,
just like people currently in physical space and not all in one place. That's critical.
Just like Bitcoin is a decentralized currency, the network stays a recipe for a decentralized
state like entity, okay, where it starts with, you know, for example, two people just get,
you know, they become roommates, they meet in this community, they become roommates,
okay, they get a place together, or 10 people get a group house, or eventually 100 people just
buy a small apartment building together. And guess what? They start getting equity,
not just paying rent, okay? These are all people who share their values. And now they can crowdfund
territory together. Now, of course, they don't just jump straight from a thousand people liking
something to a thousand people crowdfunding something. What I describe in the middle is
you do a lot of meetups, you get to know these other people before you decide to live,
you know, collectively with them. But once you live with them, you start to get a network effect.
For example, if those 100 people want to learn Spanish or Turkish or Vietnamese,
they could all have a building where they're doing Vietnamese immersion, right? And that's
something which they get a benefit from being physically around the other people that the pure
digital wouldn't give them to quite the same extent, right? And so crowdfunds territory around
the world crucially not just one place, they're all connected by the internet, just like Hawaii's
2,000 miles away from the continental US, but both sides think of them as American with the
people on Hawaii and people in the continental US. What's the role of having to have territory if
most of the exchange, so presumably as technology gets better and better, the communication,
the intimacy, the exchange of ideas all happens in the digital world. What's the importance of
being able to crowdfund territory? Well, because we're still physical creatures. You can't reproduce
yet digitally, right? There's still lots of things. So it's all about sex. Well, that's
got to be part of it. You're going to want to reproduce, right? Are we talking about a cult?
Well, it's not a cult. Why can't you just take a turn? Why is it not a cult?
It's not a cult because a cult is very internally focused and it tries to close its members off
from the outside world. This is much more how America itself was populated, where there were
lots of towns, like Penn is named after William Penn or the founder of texts like Sam Houston,
right? Lots of towns like the Oneida commune in Northern New York, they recruited and they became
a town and they became actually the Oneida glassware company kind of makes glassware out of there.
All of these communities that were opt-in voluntary communities were not simply like
cults that were closed off from the world. They were meant to set an example to the world of what
virtuous living looked like and they were trying to recruit from the rest of the world. They were
exporting goods to the rest of the world, right? So it's reproduction, it's marriage and kids and
so on, but it's also just hanging out and it is just the physical world that's very high bandwidth.
There's lots of stuff, it's fun to just go and have a dinner in person just to hang out to build
things. Moreover, there's also lots of innovation that can only take place in the physical world.
One of my sayings in the book is, cloud first land last, but not land never. In many ways,
one of the problems the book solves is Teal's problem of, we have innovation in bits but not
in atoms, right? We can build a billion dollar company online, but we need a billion permits
to build a shed in San Francisco, right? How do you reconcile that? Well, what is stopping the
innovation in atoms? It is a ticket of regulations. What are those regulations? Ultimately a social
construction. If you lean into the whole deconstructionist school of thinking, you can
deconstruct and then reconstruct the state itself given sufficient social consensus online, okay?
If the population of Nevada had 100% consensus, you could just dissolve every law in Nevada in
theory and then build new ones, okay? The online consensus of getting people to agree on something
is upstream of what happens offline. Once you have consensus in bits, the human consensus,
also cryptographic consensus, cryptocurrency consensus, then you can reshape the world of
atoms. The reason we can't reshape the world of atoms right now is because you don't have
that consensus of minds. For example, in SF, anything you do, there's going to be 50% of
people who are against you. That's just a recipe for gridlock. Whereas, if you have a bare piece
of land that everybody agrees on, you can get 70,000 units get set up in Burning Man in just a
few days, okay? That's the power of what when you actually have human consensus. One way of
talking about this also in the book a little bit, and this I'm going to go much more into detail
in the V2, I think that this says 100% democracy as opposed to 51% democracy. 51% democracy,
which is the current form of government, is 49% dictatorship. Because the entire premise of
democracy is about the consent of the government. That's the actual legitimating underpinning
principle. And in so far as 49% did not consent to the current president or prime minister or
whatever, let's say presidential system first passed the post, okay? In so far as 49% did not
consent or in a prime minister system, it could be like 60% or more didn't consent to the current
leader. Those folks are having something imposed on them that they literally did not vote for.
Moreover, campaign promises are non-binding. So whatever they voted for, they can effectively
be defrauded. The actual voter fraud is when a politician promises X but does not do it. It's
as if you bought a can of orange juice and it actually drank it its milk or it's nothing, right?
So all of that is routineized. All of that is accepted. We have this thing, which is just the
minimum possible amount of democracy of 51%. Okay. And what happens is then that 50% tries to ram
something down the 49%'s throat. And then the next election, it's now 51, 49 the other way,
and then they ram it back. And that's how you get the seesaw that is just splitting countries apart,
right? The alternative to that is you build a consensus online, you go and get some Godforsaken
patch of territory. Actually, the worse the territory, the better. Why? Because it's like
Burning Man. Nobody cares, right? The nicer the piece of land, the more the people are going to
argue about it. But Starlink has repressed the world. Basically, all kinds of piece of territory
that were previously, you know, they're far away from natural ports, they're far away from natural
resources, all kinds of pieces of territory around the world now have satellite internet.
And so what you can do is, again, the map is being reopened, right? We were talking about
earlier, the map is being reopened, you can gather your community online, they're now capable of
collective action, you can point here, this place has great Starlink coverage, you go there like
the Verizon guy, you know, can you hear me now? Good, right? You see that the coverage is good
there, you drive out there, you test it out. Maybe you do it with mobile homes first, right?
This, by the way, is its own thing. There's YIMBY and there's NIMBY and there's YIMBY,
but I actually also like YIMBY, okay? Do you want that?
Let's go, NIMBY, YIMBY, YIMBY, what are those?
So, NIMBY is not in my backyard, don't build in cities. YIMBY is, let's build high density
buildings, really tall buildings and so on in cities. There's a third version, which is YIMBY,
my little coinage, which is horizontal sprawl is good. Why horizontal sprawl? Because to build a
skyscraper, to build a tall building in a city, you have this enormous permitting process, all
of this stuff which has to get done, it's expensive, it's time consuming. The way that cities were
built, if you go back to the V1, what does the startup city look like? It looks like something
like Burning Man. It looks like the cities of the Wild West. They were not multi-story buildings,
right? They were basically things that were just like one story and someone could have it there
in the dust and then you build roads and stuff between them and they can move them around.
It was a much more dynamic geography and so when you have that as a vision of what a startup city
looks like, right? Now you've got something, there's a company I find it called Kift,
which is like Van Life. There's a lot of stuff in construction that makes us feasible. There's
so-called man camps for fracking where companies like a Greco, they have pride power. You can
bring water, all this stuff on site. So it's easy to actually snap this stuff to grid. Relatively
speaking, if you've got horizontal space, you pick this space, you crowd from the territory,
now you've got a city. And the last bit is eventually gains diplomatic recognition from
pre-existing states. And this is the part that different people will be with me up to this
point and then they'll say, okay, that's a part I disagree with or how are you going to ever do
that, right? They'll say, yeah, you can build an online community. I believe you can get them to
do collective action. And of course, people have crowdfunded land and move it together. You're
doing it at a larger scale. All that I believe, how are you possibly ever going to gain diplomatic
recognition from pre-existing states? You dumb delusional tech bro, right? That's a common thing.
Okay. That's about the tone of it as well, right? And so first I would say sovereigns are already
out for business. They're inking deals. Nevada inked a deal with Tesla to build a Geige factory.
El Salvador has Bitcoin as its national currency. Wyoming has done the Dow Law,
where Ethereum is now recognized, where you can have on-chain incorporations that are recognized
by Wyoming law. Virginia and New York negotiate with Amazon for HQ2. Tuvalu signed a deal with
GoDaddy for the.tv domain. Columbia signed a deal for the.co domain. And on and on sovereigns
are open for business. Sovereigns are doing deals with companies and with currencies. Sovereigns
at the level of cities like Miami or New York, where the mayors are accepting their salary in
Bitcoin, states like Wyoming or Nevada has its new private cities legislation, or entire countries
like El Salvador. When you say sovereigns, by the way, you mean the old school physical
nation states, governments? Fiat states. Fiat states. But the fiat isn't the thing that makes
a state. What makes a state's geographical location? It is something where they're both,
right? So basically, it's a play on word. So just like fiat currency is cryptocurrency,
we will have fiat country and crypto country, right? And in fact, you can think of the fiat
and crypto version of almost anything. One thing I'll come to later is a big thing. The big thing
I think comes after digital currency is digital passports. And that's a big part of this whole
network thing, which we'll come back to. But so that last bit, the reason I just mentioned all
those deals between sovereigns, whether at the city, US state, or UN listed country level,
okay? And on their hand, so that's on one side of the market. And their side are the
companies and the currencies. Why could we not have online communities, right?
So let me... Making those deals. So diplomatic recognition, but aren't you still attached
to the responsibilities that come from being a member of a sovereign old school nation state?
Can you possibly escape that? So yes, and let me give you a concrete example. Israel, okay? Why?
You know, people talk about... A lot of people are like, oh, biology just... He took this from
Snow Crash or some sci-fi book they'll reference. Actually, if there's many different references
of the book, this is not the only reference. But a very important reference that I think is much
more important to me than Snow Crash, which is good, a good book, whatever, but it's fictional,
is Jurgenstadt by Theodor Herzl, which translates as the Jewish state. And that led to the
foundation of Israel. And that's very real. It's worth reading because it's amazing. Theodor Herzl
was like a tech founder, okay? In the book, he was writing about the death of distance in 1897.
Why? Because steamships could take you across, you know, countries, okay? And he like... He's just,
you know, amazingly smart and practical guy. We just handle all these various objections.
And he said, look, you know, the Jewish people, you know, our choices are either a,
assimilate and get up to culture, or b, some people are thinking communism is a good idea.
I disagree with that. We should do c, build our own country, right? And that was considered
totally crazy. But what he did was he a, wrote a book, b, started a fund, c, organized a semiannual
conference, the, you know, World Zionist Congress, and the fund and the Congress are still going today.
Crucially, there were a bunch of intermediate stages between the book and the idea, and then the
actual state of Israel in 1947. For example, the, you know, the folks who were committed Zionists
got together and started crowdfunding territory in what is now Palestine. And in fact, though,
Palestine was only one choice. In the book, they also had Argentina as a choice.
So this is my concept. Cloud first, land last, and the land's a parameter you can choose, right?
Other places that were considered at various points like Madagascar,
Birbidsen in the former Soviet Union, right? So the land was a parameter. Palestine went out
because of its, you know, historical, religious importance. Now, by the way, one thing, I'm sure
there's some, like some fraction of viewers would be like, oh my God, like all the bad stuff they have,
but I'm obviously not denying that there's enormous amounts of controversy and so on
that attends Israel. I consider myself generally pro-Israeli. I'd also consider myself pro-Palestinian.
I fund lots of Palestinians and so on and so forth. So I've, I'm leaving that part out,
that huge conflict, or, you know, for now. Okay. And you might say that's airbrushing it.
I don't mean it to do that. I'm saying here is the positive things they did. Can we take the
positive and not have the negative? And I'll come back to how we might swap those parts out.
But let me just talk about this a little bit more. So one of the things that happened was committed
Zionists went and crowdfunded territory in what is now Israel, and they knit it together. Right?
Why? Because when you're physically present on territory, yes, in theory, like the British
Empire was in control. They were the sovereign. Okay. In practice, who were the boots on the
ground, the facts on the ground, right? There's the people who are actually tilling the land and
building the buildings and so on and so forth. Like who had the claim there is like the people
who are present. Okay. Now, this territory, this network of territories eventually became the basis
for or part of the basis for what became Israel. Now, I'm fully aware that the exact configuration
of what territory belongs to Israel, what territory belongs to Palestinians, this is an
enormous topic of dispute. Okay. But I just point this out to say the process going from book
to crowdfunding territory to a sovereign state where people were now citizens of Israel,
as opposed to the British Empire is not some fictional thing, but did happen. And within
the lifetimes of some of the older, you know, they're in their 80s now, but in the lifetimes
of some older people. Okay. So it's not impossible. In fact, it has happened, right? Okay.
But for that step, then perhaps hopefully is a better example, because in this particular,
like you said, land last, if I were to say it was if I was an alien and arrived at earth and say
choice of land, maybe if you were interested in create choosing a land that represents a network
state where ideas that unites a people based on ideas, maybe pick a land that doesn't lead to
generational conflict and war and destruction and suffering and all that.
Also, that's right. So now that I've said what are the positive things about Israel,
and I think there's a lot to admire in Israel, as I said, I think there's also a lot to admire in
the Palestinians and so on. I'm not taking any position on that. There's other inspirations
for the network state. The second major inspiration is India, which managed to achieve
independence non-violently. That's very important. So can you fuse these things?
A state started with a book that achieved independence non-violently and that managed
to build this polyglot multicultural democracy that does like India has its flaws, but it does
manage to have human rights of lots of people respected and what have you. And has managed
to, there were times like emergency in the 1970s and there are gone, the declared emergency. There
are times when it seemed touch and go, but overall with fits and starts, this flawed thing has made
its way through. And the third inspiration is Singapore with Lee Kuan Yew, who built a city
state from nothing. I shouldn't say from nothing. There was something there, but let's say built
one of the richest countries in the world without huge amounts of natural resources in the middle
of a zone where there was lots of communist revolution going on. And so he was the CEO
founder essentially of this amazing startup country. And finally, of course, America,
which has too many influences to name, things we talked about, the nation of immigrants,
obviously the constitution and so on. And you think, okay, can we go, you think of these
inspirations. What's interesting about these four countries, by the way, Israel, India,
Singapore and the US, they have something in common. You know what that is?
Who's that? They're all forks of the UK code base.
We think obviously, you know, the UK was sort of the ancestor of America, but
Israel was a former British colony, right? The India was a British colony and so was Singapore,
right? And for people who don't know what fork and code base means, it's language from
versioning systems, particularly get represented online on a website called GitHub. And a fork
means you copy the code and all the changes you make to the code now live in their own little
world. So America took the ideas that define the United Kingdom and then forked it by evolving
those ideas in a way that didn't affect the original country.
That's right. And what's interesting about this is, and of course, I'm saying that in a somewhat
playful way, right? But it's a useful analogy, interesting analogy, right? So you have
the Americans who forked, you know, the UK code base, and then you have, you know, the Indians,
Israelis and the Singaporeans who also made their own modifications. And in some ways,
each society has pieces that you can take from them and learn from them and try to combine them,
right? So you have a state that is started by a book that nonviolently assembles, that crowd funds
territory around the world, that is led by a CEO founder, and that is also governed by something
that's like a constitution. But just like you went from, you know, I talked about the V1,
V2 and V3 a lot, right? Like V1 is gold and V2 is fiat and V3 is Bitcoin, right? Or V1 is
hunter-gatherer and V2 is farmer-soldier, V3 is digital nomad or sovereign collective,
okay, which is not just an individual but a group. Here, V1 is UK common law. They don't
have a constitution. It's just all precedent going for many years, right? V2 is the US Constitution
and V3 is the smart contract, the social smart contract, which is a, you know, fusion obviously
of Rousseau's concept of the social contract and the smart contract. The social smart contract is
like written in code, okay? So it's like even more rigorous than the Constitution. And in many ways,
you can think of going from the United Kingdom of England, Wales, you know, Scotland, Northern
Ireland, the United States of America, the network states of the internet, okay, where you go from
the rights of Englishmen with the Magna Carta to Europeans, African-Americans, all the immigrants
to the, you know, the Americans or the, you know, North America, then you go all the people of the
world. And so you basically are more democratic and you're more capitalist because you're talking
about internet capitalism, not just nation-state law capitalism. In a sense, it's the V3, right?
Another way it's the V3, only about 2% of the world is over 35 native-born American,
can qualify to be president of the United States. But 100% of the world, you could become the president
of a network state. There might be a, you know, Palestinian Washington or a, you know, Brazilian
Hamilton, right? And now rather than say, okay, maybe you're, maybe you have a small percentage
chance of immigrating to the US and a small percentage chance of your descendant, you know,
becoming like, you know, president, now we can just say, you can start online. And you know what,
maybe this person is so exceptional, they have Americans coming to their, you know, network
state, right? You don't think that kind of thing is possible with, like, the rich get richer in a
digital space too, that people with more followers have friends that have followers and they, like...
I don't think it's the rich get richer. I think what happens is, so this is an important concept,
it is, it's multi-axis, right? That is to say, for example, just the introduction of the Bitcoin
axis, right? And those, because it didn't exist before 2009, now it exists. Those people who are
rich in BTC terms are only partially correlated with those who are rich in USD terms. There's
all these folks, essentially... BTC is Bitcoin and USD is US dollar. Yes. So that's a new axis and
ETH is yet another axis, right? Ethereum. ETH is Ethereum. Right. So you are essentially getting
new social systems, which are actually net inequality decreasing, because before you only
had USD millionaires and now you have a new track and then another track and another track, right?
You have different hierarchies, different ladders, right? And so on net, you have more ladders to climb
and so it's not the rich getting richer. In fact, old money in some ways is the last
to cryptocurrency. Old money and old states, I think, those people who are the most focused on,
you might call it reform, I would call it control, okay? The most focused on control of the old world
who have the least incentive to switch, they will, the rich will get poorer because it will be the
poorer or those who are politically powerless, politically poor, who go and seek out these
new states. Yeah, I didn't mean in the actual money, but yes, okay, there's other ladders. I meant
in terms of influence, political and social influence in these new network states. You,
I think, said that basically anybody can become president of a network state.
Just like anybody can become CEO of a startup company. Of course, whether people follow you
is another matter, but anybody can go and found one. Go ahead, sorry.
Oh, from the perspective that anyone can found one. Anyone can found, I see.
We don't think it's implausible that somebody from Brazil or Nigeria, I mean,
most, quote, billionaires in the world are not American. And in fact, actually,
here's another important point. It's far easier to become a tech billionaire than become,
or a billionaire period, than become president of the United States. There's less than 50 US
presidents ever, all time, okay? It is a much more realistic ambition to become a billionaire
than become president. There's like thousands of billionaires worldwide. In fact, 75% of them are
outside of the US. And many of those have been, you know, some of them are like energy and oil,
which is often based on political connections. But a very large chunk of the rest are tech,
okay? And that's something where you're mining, but you're mining online by hitting keys as opposed
to with the pickaxe, you know, and granite, right? So the point is that we think it's totally
understandable today for there to be a, you know, huge founder who comes out of Vietnam
or, you know, South America, like that, like you can name founders from all over the world,
right? Exceptional people can rise from all the world to run giant companies. Why can they not
rise to run giant new countries? And the answer is we didn't develop the mechanism yet, right?
And just as another example, I talked about this in the book. Vitalik Buterin is far more qualified
than Jerome Powell, right? Or anybody at the Federal Reserve. He actually built
and managed a monetary policy and a currency from scratch, okay, as a 20-something, right? Obviously,
that's a more accomplished person than somebody who just inherited an economy. This is a guy.
A lot of people can push back at that and say that the people that initially build a thing
aren't necessarily the best ones to manage a thing once it scales and actually has impact.
Sometimes, sometimes, but Zuck has done a good job of both. I think Vitalik has done a good
job of both, right? But that's not an inherent truth. Well, so actually, if you build the thing,
you will be the best person to run it. I will agree with you on that. And actually,
I talk about this in the book, or I've got an essay on this called Founding vs. inheriting, okay?
And the premise is actually that the classic example, you know, the saying shirt sleeves
to shirt sleeves in three generations. It means the guy who starts out poor and builds a fortune,
his son maintains it, and his dissipate grandson dissipates it, right?
Why is shirt sleeves a symbol of poverty? Well, back in the past, it was kind of like,
you know, you're just working with your, you're not white collar, you're back to working with your
hands, you're just- Oh, this is a blue collar to blue collar in three generations. Yeah, yeah,
we're working class or something like that, right? So essentially that the grandson squanders it,
right? And, you know, in sense, by the way, just to talk about that for a second, if you have two
children and four grandchildren and eight great grandchildren and 16 and so on, and an older
family is, you know, they were much bigger, right? Six, you know, children is not uncommon.
Whatever fortune you have is now split six ways and then six ways and six ways again.
So with the exception of premature where the oldest son inherits all the way down,
the majority of descendants just a few generations out have probably inherited none of that fortune,
unless it has compounded to such an extent that it's like up six X over 20 years, right?
So it's actually hard to maintain a quote rule in class in the sense that this person who's like
four generations down has, you know, like one sixteenth of the DNA, you know, one over two to
the fourth, right? Of their, their scion who built a fortune. So it's not even like the same,
is it the same family even, right? Is the fortune actually in the family? So most people don't think
a few generations out, they just kind of think, oh, Marx is right, there's always been a rich and
a poor. It's actually much more dynamic than that because you literally like, what is even the family
when it's diluted out, you know, one sixteenth, right? If you're one sixteenth of Rockfeller,
are you a Rockfeller, really 15, 16, something else, would you have the Rockfeller fortune?
Probably not, right? Now, are there, again, premature where the guy who inherits the name
all the way through, that would be one way to pass it down. But even that person doesn't necessarily
have the qualities of the guy who, you know, the cultural qualities of other qualities,
the guy who's like four generations past, they tend to squander it, right? So this actually brings us
to, coming back up to governance, the system, the guys who built the United States, you know,
like Washington and Hamilton, these are giants, right? These are founders. And the folks today
are like, not the grandson, but like the 40th generation heir of a factory that somebody
else built. Like think about a factory and you have, you know, this grandchild or great-grandchild
that inherits a factory. Most of the time, it's just cranking out widgets and the great-grandson
is cashing checks. They have been selected as legitimate heir because it's the, you know,
the founder passed it down to his son, passed it down to his grandson, to his great-grandson.
So legitimacy is there. They've got title, they can show, I own this factory, okay?
They can cash the checks, there's professional managers there, everything seems fine.
Until one day, that factory has to go from making, you know, widgets to making masks for COVID or
something else. It has to change direction, it has to do something it hasn't done before.
None of that capability for invention and reinvention is present anymore.
These people have inherited something that they could not build from scratch. Because
they could not build from scratch, they can't even maintain it. This is an important point.
The ability to build from scratch is so important because if some part breaks and you don't know
why it was there, can you even maintain it? No, you can't, okay? Unless all the replacement parts
and the know-how to fit them together is there, you can't repair this. So in 2009,
Mother Jones had a story that said that the US military had forgotten how to make some kinds of
nuclear weapons because there was a part where all the guys who knew how to make it had like aged
out or left, okay? And this was some like aerogel or something like that, it was rumored, okay?
Thing is, you're seeing, you know, increasingly, for example, you've got wildfires in California,
you've got, you know, water that's not potable in Jackson, you've got power outages in Texas.
You're seeing a lot of the infrastructure of the US is just less functional. I think probably part
of that is due to civil engineering not being that sexy a field, people aging out and just
domain knowledge being lost. And the heirs who win, you know, the role of mayor or whatever of this
town don't have the ability to build it from scratch. You just select for legitimacy, not
competence, okay? So once you think about this concept of founding versus inheriting, and I've
got the whole essay which talks about this, of course, the alternative to somebody who's legitimate
but not competent, what people will say is, oh, we need like, you know, an authoritarian to be in
control of everything. And then their, their hope is that that person is competent, but they don't
have legitimacy. Because if they're just installed as just like a authoritarian ruler, 50% of the
population is really mad at them, they don't have title, just grab the title, you know, maybe they
can exert enough force. That's the problem with kind of the authoritarian, you know, dictator
takeover, right? So the alternative, the third version is the founder who combines both legitimacy
and competence because they start from scratch, and they attract people to their vision, they
build it from scratch. And so you need his ability to constantly do refoundings, rebirths.
So if you imagine a world that is primarily network states, can you help me imagine what
that looks like? Now, there's several ways to imagine things, which is how many of them are
there? And how often do they, the nuance pop up? There could be thousands. Given seven billion
people, eight billion people on earth. Yeah, yeah. So there's network state in the, like,
the precise definition I have in the book, which is a diplomatically recognized entity. And there's
never seen sort of the loose definition where, you know, one thing that's interesting is,
this term has become a lowercase term really fast. Okay, no state. Yeah. Like in the sense of Google,
became lowercase Google for like Googling, or like Uber became lowercase Uber. Like,
if you go to thenetworkstate.com, front session reviews, or you go to search.twitter.com and
put in network state, you'll see it's just become like a word or a phrase. Okay. So that means it's
sort of whatever I intended to mean, people will use it to mean what they wanted to mean. Right?
Okay. So it's interesting, right? You become a, well, first of all, your meme and this book is
a meme. Am I a meme? Okay, maybe I'm a meme. But the book is, because I think it's a good meme.
That's actually why I wanted to make it free. I wanted people to take it out there, make it
their own. And one of the things I say at the beginning, and I'll come back to this thing is,
it's a toolbox not a manifesto. Even if you dislike 70% of it, 80% of it, 90% of it, if there's
something that's useful to you, you can take that and use it just like a library, you know,
a software library. You might just use one function there. Great. I'm glad I've delivered
to you some value, right? That's my purpose in this. So you're not on rent? No, I'm not on rent.
And basically, the whole point of this actually is it's, it's polytheistic, polystatistic, poly
numistic is genuinely is it polyamorous? It's not polyamorous. So somebody might love advice
in the book. I didn't see it. So did you talk about love in the hotel? I do not talk about love.
Rather, maybe to you. Not that I don't believe in love. Love is great. I will accept your offer
to write a guest chapter in your in your V2 book about love. All right, great. Because there is
some aspect that's very interesting, which, which parts of human civilization required physical
contact, physical, because it seems like more and more can be done in the digital space.
Yeah. But as I said, we work, for example, but you're not going to build a self-driving car city
in digital space. You're not going to be able to do all cars at all. Well, you're, well, sure,
but let's say you're not going to be able to get to Mars in a purely digital thing. You need to
build, you know, you have to have a little rocket launchpad. You're not going to be able to do all
the innovative biomedicine, whether it's, you know, all the, you know, if you've seen bioelectricity or
there's stuff on regenerative medicine stuff, all this stuff, you just can't do that digitally,
right? We're still physical beings, you know, so you need physical space. But how do we get that,
right? So that this is, this is meant to wind its way through various roadblocks in the so-called,
you know, actually my term from many years ago, the idea maze, it's meant to wind its way through
the idea maze to find how to use bits to re-unlock, unlock innovation in atoms.
The idea maze within the bigger prime number maze or go back to visualizing the number of states
and how often are they born. Okay. So let me first, let me first anchor this because
people, just to give some numbers, right? How many UN listed countries are there,
like 196, 193, okay? And there's some that are on the border like Taiwan or Israel, right?
Where they're not, I mean, Israel is a country, but it's not recognized by every country or what
have you, right? Is Texas a country? No, but it may eventually become, right? Yeah. Okay. So
within that list of about 200 countries, okay, I've got a graph in the book that shows that most
countries are actually small countries. About, there's 12 countries that have less than 100,000
people by the UN definition of a country. There's another 20 something that have between 100,001
million. There's another 50 or 60 something that have between a million and 10 million. So most
countries in the UN are less than 10 million people. There's only 14 countries that are over 100
million people, okay? So most countries or small countries is kind of surprising to us because
most people live in big countries, okay? And so now you're like, okay, well, I've built social
networks that are bigger than that. You have a following that's bigger than 100,000 people.
You have a following that's bigger than, you know, a small country like Curebody or would have you,
right? And okay, so that first changes feasibility. You think of a country as this huge, huge,
huge thing, but it's actually smaller than many, many countries are smaller than social
networks that you've built. Okay, number one. Number two is the number of UN-listed countries,
even though it's been flat-ish for the last 30 years with like a few things like South Sudan
and East Timor that have come online. There's a graph that I posted which shows that it's increased
by about from about 40 or 50 something at the end of World War II when the UN was set up to
190 something today. There's been like kind of a steady increase in particular with all the
decolonization, all the countries that got their independence, first from the British Empire and
then from the Soviet Empire, right? That imperial breakup led to new countries, okay? And so the
question is, is that flat forever? Well, the number of new currencies similarly increased for a while,
roughly one per country or thereabouts, and then it was flat for a while and then suddenly it's
gone completely vertical. That's an interesting graph, right? Where it's like linear-ish and
that's flat and then it just goes like this. Now, you can define, you can argue where the
boundary is for a new currency, okay? But I think Bitcoin certainly counts. I think Ethereum certainly
counts in terms of just its scale and adoption worldwide. So at least you have two. If you take
the broad-church view, you have a thousand or something like that, right? Somewhere in between,
you might say, how many currencies are above the market cap of an existing previously recognized
fiat currency, like which got onto the leaderboard, right? There's a website just like coinmarketcap.com,
that's like a site for cryptocurrency tracking, it's very popular, okay? There's a fun site called
fiatmarketcap.com, which shows where Bitcoin is relative to the fiat currencies of the world.
And it's like, last I checked, like number 27, somewhere in between the Chilean Pezzo and the
Turkish lira or something, okay? And it'd previously been close to cracking the top 10, okay? And I
think it will again at some point. So we know that you can have a currency out of nowhere that ranks
with the fiat currencies of the world. Could you have a country out of nowhere that ranks with the
countries of the world? So this is maybe the fastest way, you probably just said this at the very
beginning. If you go to the network state in one image, okay, that kind of summarizes what a
network state looks like in a visual, just one single visual. And the visual is of a dashboard.
And the dashboard shows something that looks like a social network, except you're visualizing it on
the map of the world. And it's got network nodes all over the place, 100 people here,
1,000 people there, they're all connected together. The total population of the people in this social
network is about 1 million people. So 1.7 million people in this example. And some of the buildings
are, some of the people are just singletons. They're just folks in their apartment who can
conceptualize themselves as citizens of this network state. And they've got the flag on their
wall, right? And the digital passport on their phone along with the digital currency. Others
are groups of hundreds or thousands or even tens of thousands of people that have all taken over
a neighborhood just like Chinatowns exist, right? Just like intentional communities existed,
they just basically go and crowdfund land together, right? And these are all networked
together. Just like the islands of Indonesia are separated by ocean, these are islands of this
network state that are separated by internet. So they conceptualize themselves as something.
And at the very top of the dashboard, there's something very important, which is the population,
annual income, and real estate footprint of this network state. So the population we already
discussed, you can build an online social network. We know you can build something which has a
population that's bigger than these 100,000 or a million person countries. One of the new things
contributions the network state has is say that you can not just exceed in population, you can
exceed it in real estate footprint. Because one way of thinking about it is, I don't exactly know
the numbers on foreign ownership in Estonia, but let's say to first order the million something
Estonians own and could afford Estonia, okay? A million people could buy a territory that is
the size of Estonia, right? That's probably true to first order. There might be some overseas
ownership, but it's probably true, okay? You probably find a country for which that's true.
But that means is a million people digitally could buy distributed territory that is probably
greater than or equal to the size of Estonia, especially if they're buying like desert territory
or stuff like that, which means now you have a digital country that is ranking not just in people,
not just in real estate footprint. So it's also in real estate footprint with the countries of
the world. So you start ranking and you're bigger than these UN listed countries in your
population and your real estate footprint. And the third is income, okay? You can prove on chain
that you have a income for the digital population that is above a certain amount, right? This is
what I call the census of the network state. And it's actually such a crucial component that I have
it in the essay, the network state in a thousand words. The post office and census were actually
important enough to be written into the US Constitution, okay? Partly because it was like
for apportionment of representatives partly because there's a feedback mechanism. And so
that census was done every 10 years and it's provided a crucial snapshot of the US for the
last several hundred years, okay? Now here, this census of a digital state could be done every 10
seconds, okay? Conducting it is actually not the hard part. You know what the hard part is?
Proving it. Because how will the world believe that you actually have 100,000 people spread
across countries? Couldn't there be bots? Could there be AIs? Proof of human, proof of income,
and also proof of real estate start to actually rise dramatically in importance because you're
saying we're going to rank this digital state on the leaderboard of the fiat states, okay? And so
that means that people will start to, at first they'll just laugh at it. Once you start claiming
you have 10,000 citizens, people are going to start poking and be like, is that real? Prove that
that's real, okay? So I have a whole talk on this actually. I'm giving it this chain link conference,
but essentially how do you prove this, right? The short answer is crypto oracles plus auditing.
The somewhat longer answer is you put these assertions on chain, these proof of human,
these proof of real estate, et cetera, assertions on chain, okay? And there's people who are writing
to the blockchain and they are digitally signing their assertions. Now, of course, simply just
putting something on chain doesn't make it true. It just says you can prove not that the, what is
written on chain is true, but that the metadata is true. You can show who wrote it via their digital
signature, what they wrote, their hash, and when they wrote their timestamp. So you can establish
those things in metadata of who, what, and when was written. Who's the who in that picture? So for
example, how do you know it's one human? Great question. So let's say you've bought a bunch of
your piece of territory from Blackstone, okay? As a function of that, blackstone.eath signs an
on chain receipt that says this, lexfriedman.eath bought this piece of property from us and it has,
you know, like, it's a thousand square meters and, and this is put on chain. They sign it,
okay? That's a, that's their digital receipt. Just like you might get an email receipt when
you buy a piece of property or something, okay? It's just put not online, but on chain. And it's
signed by Blackstone or whatever real estate vendor you buy it from. It could be a company,
it could obviously be an individual, right? And so you have a bunch of these assertions. You,
let's say there's 47 different real estate vendors. I know vendors in atypical term there,
but just bear with me, right? 47 different real estate sellers that you've bought all of your
territory from. Each of them put digital signatures that are asserting that a certain amount of real
estate was bought and it's square meters, its location or whatever they'll say want to prove.
The sum of all that is now your real estate footprint, okay? And now the question is,
was that real? Well, because they signed what they put on chain, you can do things like you can
audit. Let's say Blackstone has signed 500,000 properties and they've sold them and put them
on chain. And I'm not talking about 2022 or 2023, but 2030, right? It'll be a few years out. But
people are doing this type of stuff. They're putting this up on chain. So you get that on chain
receipt. They've got 500,000 of these. What you can do is just sampling, okay? You pick a subset
end of them, let's say 500 properties around the world, you go there, you actually go and independently
look at what the square footprint is. And then from that, you can see what was the actual your
measurement versus their reported. And then you can via Cisco inference extrapolate that if they
were randomly selected to the rest of the properties and get a reliability score for Blackstone's
reporting of its real estate square footage, okay? So that's the auditing step. That's the auditing
step. So the crypto oracle is the on chain, what did you say, assertions about like who bought
stuff with who. I still have to get to the proof of human, but auditing, there's a bunch of people
randomly checking that you're not full of shit. That's right. So who is in charge of the auditing
though? So it could be a big four, like PWC and basically the accountants that do corporate
balance sheet and cash flow. And keeps them in check from corruption. I'm just imagining a
world full of network states. Yeah, it's a good question. So at a certain point, you get to who
watches the watchers, right? Yeah. And oh, well, the government is meant to keep the accountants
accountable. And Arthur Anderson actually did have a whole flame out in the around the time,
the Enron thing. So it is possible that there's corrupt accountants or bad accountants or what
have you. Of course, the government itself is corrupt in many ways and prints all this money
and ceases all these assets and surveils everybody and so on and so forth. So the answer to your
question is going to be probably exit in the sense that if those accountants, they are themselves
going to digitally sign a report and put it on chain, okay? So they're going to say,
we believe that X, Y and Z's reports are on chain, we're this reliable and here's our study. If they
falsify that, well, if somebody finds that eventually, then that person is down weighted,
then you have to go to another accountant, right? Is there a way to mess with this? I mean, I just
let me breathe in and out. As I mentioned, some of the heaviest shit I've ever read.
So because I visited Ukraine, I've read Red Famine by Ann Applebaum, Bloodlands and it's
just a lot of coverage of the census. I mean, there's a lot of coverage of a lot of things,
but in Ukraine in the 1930s, Stalin messed a lot with the census to hide the fact that
sort of a lot of people died from starvation.
And did that with a cooperation of Arthur G. Salisbury, who's a New York Times company,
like Walter Grandi falsified all those reports?
There's several parties involved. Can there be several parties involved in this case
that manipulate the truth as it is represented by the crypto oracle and as it is checked by
the auditing mechanism? It is possible, but the more parties are involved in falsifying something,
the more defections there are. So that's why you basically have another level of auditing is
fundamentally the answer. And really, I think what it comes back to is if you're showing your work,
this is the difference between crypto economics and fiat economics. The Bitcoin blockchain,
anybody can download it and run verification on it. This is different than government inflation
stats, which people don't believe because the process is just, it is true that CPI methodology
is published and so on, but it is not something which people feel reflects their actual basket of
goods. And so the independent verifiability is really the core of what true auditability is.
And so then to your question, it's hard for some group to be able to collude because the
blockchain is public and everything they've written to it is public. And so if there's
an error, it's easier in some ways to tell the truth than to lie because the truth is just
naturally consistent across the world, whereas lies can be found out even in a statistical
test. So you know, Benford's law? Yes. Right. It's something where the digits in like a real,
if you take the last digit or the first, I think it's the first digit, right? So you take the
first digit in an actual financial statement, you look at the distribution of like how many
ones and how many twos, how many threes, the percentages. It has actually, you'd guess it
might be, oh, each one will be equally random. It'd be 10%. It's not like that actually. There's
a certain distribution that it has and fake data doesn't look like that, but real data does.
That's weird. It's interesting, right? Benford's law also called the first digit law states that
the leading digits in a collection of data sets are probably going to be small. For example,
most numbers in a set about 30% will have a leading digit of one. Yeah. So that's a great
example of what we were talking about earlier, the observational leading to the theory.
Oh, there's a Benford's law of controversy. I'm looking that up.
Benford's law of controversy. Benford's law of controversy is an adage from the 1980 novel
Timescape stating, passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information
available. The adage was quoted in an international drug policy article in peer reviewed social
science. Can I just say how much I love Wikipedia? I have the founder of Wikipedia coming on this very
podcast very soon. And I think the world is a better place because Wikipedia exists.
One of the things he wanted to come on and talk about is the ways that he believes that Wikipedia
is going wrong. So on technical truths, it's great. I remember I think earlier on like technical
truths versus political truths. On technical truths, it's great. On political truths,
it's like a defamation engine. Just as one example. There's something that I was going to write up,
but there was a scam called HPZ token that managed to edit Wikipedia. Nobody detected it.
It said that I was like the founder of HPZ token. You were the founder of HPZ token.
Yeah. I had nothing to do with this. And people were scammed out of it because Google just pushes
Wikipedia links to high on Google. And people were like, well, it's in this Wikipedia,
therefore it's real. Wikipedia has the bio of living persons thing. They should just allow
people to delete their profile because they have zero quality control on it. It's literally facilitating
fraud where people will maliciously edit and then do things with them. And nobody cares
or is looking at it beyond the fraudsters. And this is happening. If that was happening,
that was undetected. I wasn't paying attention to this. This was there for weeks or months,
totally undetected, that literally facilitated fraud. And fundamentally, the issue is that
Wikipedia doesn't have any concept of who's editing or property rights or anything like that.
It is also something which is, it used to be something in the early 2000s, mid 2000s, people
said, oh, it's Wikipedia. How trustworthy it can be, Britannica's reviewed. And that's being
forgotten. And now it's become overtrusted. Remember the thing like the more trust something
gets, the less trustworthy it often becomes. It kind of abuses the power, right? So what I'm
interested in, Google actually had a model a while back called KNOL. KNOL null was something where
when there were different versions of a Wikipedia-style page, you had Google docs like permissions
on them. For example, you might have 10 different versions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Okay. And each one had an editor and folks that they could grant edit rights and so on.
But this way, you would actually be able to see different versions of a page. And they might have
different versions of popularity. But this way, you wouldn't have edit wars, you'd have forks,
right? And they would all kind of coexist. And then people could review them. And now
you could see different versions of something versus the thing that just kind of rewards
dogged persistence or being an editor or something like that. The other thing is a lot of the folks
who have editorial privileges of Wikipedia are there from the early 2000s. And most of India
wasn't online then. Most of Africa wasn't online then, right? So there's this inherited power
that exists, which again was fresh and innovative 10 or 20 years ago, but it's now kind of outdated.
Yeah, I want to see some data though. I want to see some data because we can always,
here's, we often highlight small anecdotal cases. Hold on a second. We often highlight
issues in society, in the world, in anything by taking a specific example, taking anecdotal data
and saying there's a problem here. I want to know on net how much positive is being added to the world
because of it. My experience that I try to be empathetic and open-minded, my exploration of
Wikipedia has been such that is it a breath of fresh air in terms of the breadth and depth of
knowledge that is there. Now you can say there's bias built in. There's wars that are incentivized,
not to produce truth, but to produce a consensus around a particular narrative. But
that is how the entirety of human civilization operates. And we have to see where's it better
and where's it worse in terms of platforms. I think Wikipedia was an improvement over what
came before, but it has a lot of flaws. You're right that absolutely sometimes people can over
fixate on the anecdotal, but sometimes the anecdotal illustrates a general pattern. For example,
one thing that happens frequently in Wikipedia is there are editors who will plant a story
and then they will then go and use that story as like a neutral third party to win an edit war.
So here's a phenomenon that happens in Wikipedia. You have an editor who has,
who is privileged above just random users, who will plant a story and then cite that story as
if it was a neutral third party. So there's a site called Wikipediaocracy. And it discusses the case
of a person named Peppermint who had a name that they didn't want included their so-called dead
name on their Wikipedia profile. And there's a Wikipedia editor named Tenebrae who people
allege was a Newsday reporter or writer that put a piece into Newsday that dead name Tenebrae,
that dead name Peppermint and then was able to cite it on the Wikipedia article as if it was
like a neutral third party when it actually wasn't, when people allege it was the same guy.
Now, that is not an uncommon thing. That's what I wanted on. How many articles? I'm dancing
with you, not against you. I'm saying how many articles have that kind of war where douchebags
are manipulating each other? So that's the question. What's the audit? Has Wikipedia actually been
audited? Who are the editors? Who's actually writing this stuff? It is actually something where,
again, on technical topics, I think it's pretty good. On non-technical topics,
there's something called the Wikipedia Reliable Sources Policy. It's a fascinating page. So
it actually takes a lot of the stuff that we have been, the world has been talking about in terms of
what's a reliable source of information and so on and so forth. It's called the Wikipedia
Reliable Sources Parennial Sources. And if you go to this page, which I'm just going to send
to you now, you will literally see every media outlet in the world and they're colored gray,
green, yellow, or red. And so red is untrustworthy, green is trustworthy, yellow is neutral. Now,
this actually makes Wikipedia's epistemology explicit. They are marking a source as trustworthy
or untrustworthy. For example, you are not allowed to cite social media on Wikipedia,
which is actually an enormous part of what people are posting. Instead, you have to cite a
mainstream media outlet that puts the tweets in the mainstream article and only then can it be
cited in Wikipedia. By the way, to push back, this is a dance. Sure, sure. That those are rules
written on the sheet of paper, I have seen Wikipedia in general play in a gray area that
these rules create. Oh, well, if you are an editor, then you can get. But you can use the rules
and because there's a lot of contradictions within the rules, you can use them in the ways you said
to achieve the ends you want. It really boils down to the incentives, the motivations of the
editors. And one of the magical things about Wikipedia, the positive versus the negative,
is that it seems like a very small number of people, same with Stack Overflow, can do
an incredible amount of good editing and aggregation of good knowledge. Now, as you said,
that seems to work much better for technical things, over which there's not a significant
division. Some of that has to do less with the rules and more with the human beings involved.
Well, but here's the thing. So first, let me finish off this point of reliable source,
parental sources. So if you go to this, you'll see that Al Jazeera is marked green. But let's say
the Kato Institute is marked yellow. The nation is marked green. Oh, shit. Oh, snap. Why? Okay,
sure. Yes. The nation is marked green, but national review is marked yellow. You could
probably go and do, say, what's good about this is it makes the epistemology explicit, right?
You could actually take this table and you could also look at all the past edit wars and so on
over it and take a look at what things are starting to get marked as red or yellow and what
things are starting to get marked as green. And I'm pretty sure you're going to find some kind of
partisan polarization that comes out, right? Number one. Number two is once something gets
marked as being yellow or red, then all links and all references to it are pulled out. For
example, Coindesk, okay, was marked as being like, gosh, I think it's marked as red. Coindesk,
which is actually like, I get a lot of useful information from Coindesk. That's right. But
it's marked as red. Why? Because there's some Wikipedia editors who hate cryptocurrency.
It's a cryptocurrency and Wikipedia has been a huge topic where they've just edited out all
the positive stuff. And these are senior editors of Wikipedia who can control what sources are
considered reliable. So they've now knocked out Coindesk. They've knocked out social media.
They only allow mainstream media coverage and not even all mainstream media, only those they've
marked as green. Yeah. This is the manipulation of... I want to know how many articles are affected
by it. And hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. You could just say that randomly.
You can... No, no, no, no, no. I can't because all the... The effect that there's different levels of
effect in terms of it actually having a significant impact on the quality of the article. Let me give
you an example. Let me give you an example, right? The fact that people cannot cite direct quotes on
social media, but can only cite the rehash of those quotes in a mainstream media outlet, and not
just any mainstream media outlet, but those that are colored green on the Wikipedia reliable
is a structural shift on every single article to make Wikipedia align with US mainstream media
corporations, right? I am as often playing devil's advocate to counter a point so that the disagreement
reveals some profound wisdom. That's what I'm doing here. But also in that task here, I'm trying to
understand exactly how much harm is created by the bias within the team of editors that we're
discussing, and how much of Wikipedia is technical knowledge. For example, the Russian invasion of
Ukraine, the Wikipedia article I've seen there, now that changes very aggressively a lot, and I
hear from every side on this, but it did not seem biased to me as compared to mainstream media in
the United States. So now I'm going to sound extremely woke, okay? If you go and look at this,
all right? Times of India is yellow, but Mother Jones, Jacobin, okay, they are green, right?
So a niche, mostly white, Western, like partisan left outlet is marked green, but a billion people,
you know, like the Times of India is marked yellow, right? That's a structural bias towards
Western media outlets and Western editors, when much of the rest of the world hadn't gone online.
I would just love to see in terms of the actual article, what ideas are being censored,
altered, shifted. I would love, I just think it's an open, I'm not sort of...
So the edit logs are there, the edit logs are public.
Yeah, I would be fascinated. Is there a way to explore the way that narratives are shifted,
because of... Sure. So a very simple one is if you were to pull all the edit logs of Wikipedia,
you could see how many times are social media links disallowed, okay? Like, first of all,
think about it like this. How many, I mean, just the fact that social media is not allowed to be
cited on Wikipedia or inconsistently... You think that's a problem.
It's a huge problem. You can't cite, let's say, Jeff Bezos' own tweet. You have to cite some
random media corporation. Here's the thing, and sorry if I'm interrupting.
Please. Hopefully I'm adding to it. I think they're trying to create friction as to
the sources used, because if you can use social media, then you can use basically bots to create
a bunch of sources, right? And then that you can almost automate the editor war, right?
Like, here's the thing, is basically, Wikipedia initially, you know, like said, oh, we'll only
cite mainstream media as a way of boosting its credibility in the early 2000s, okay,
when its credibility was low. Now it's sort of become merged with the US establishment,
and it only cites these things. Who's trust? I mean, have you seen the graphs on trust in
mainstream media? Like, that's plummeted. It's down to like 10% or something like that, right?
So the most trusted sources for Wikipedia are untrusted by the population.
Yeah. True.
That feels like it's a fixable technological problem. I think I'm under-informed and my gut says
we're both together under-informed to do a rigorous three to four hour discussion about
Wikipedia. Hold on a second. I think I have a gut sort of developed feeling about which
articles not to trust in Wikipedia. I think I need to make that explicit also.
I have a kind of an understanding that you don't go to Wikipedia for this particular topic.
Like, don't go to Wikipedia for an article on Donald Trump or Joe Biden. There's going to be,
if I did, I would go to maybe sections that don't have room for insertion of bias,
or like the section on controversy, or accusations of racism, or so on, or sexual assault,
I'll usually not trust Wikipedia on those sections.
Like math? That'll be great, right? Wikipedia is great for that. On many topics that do not have
a single consensus truth, it's structurally shifted towards basically
white Western liberals, woke whites, right? Fundamentally, that's a demographic of the
Wikipedia. What kind of articles do you think are affected by this?
Everything that's not math and technology. I think that's too strong a statement.
Like I said, Warren Ukraine, I think that's too strong a statement. I guess I'm saying
affected to a large degree. Even major battles in history, battle Stalingrad, that's not math.
You think all of that is affected to a point where it's not a trusted source?
Absolutely. If you look at the edit wars, for example, on Stalin versus Hitler,
Hitler's, the tone on Hitler starts out legitimately and justifiably as
basically genocidal, maniacal dictator. With Stalin, there's a fair number of Stalin apologists
that added out mention of genocide from the first few paragraphs.
I am playing devil's advocate in part, but I also am too underinformed to do the level of
defense I would like to provide for the wisdom that is there, for the knowledge that is there.
I don't use the word truth, but for some level of knowledge that is there in Wikipedia,
I think I really worry about, I know you don't mean this, but a cynical interpretation of what
you're saying, which is don't trust anything right now on Wikipedia. I think you're being
very consistent and eloquent in the way you're describing the issues with Wikipedia, and I don't
have enough actual specific examples to give where there is some still battle for truth that's
happening that's outside of the bias of society. I just, I think if we naturally distrust every
source of information, there is a general distrust of institutions and a distrust of sources of
knowledge that leads to an apathy and a cynicism about the world in general. If you believe a lot
of conspiracy theories, you basically tune out from this collective journey that we're on
towards the truth. It's not even just Wikipedia, I just think Wikipedia was at least for a time,
and maybe I tuned out, maybe because I am too focused on computer science and engineering and
mathematics, but to me Wikipedia for a long time was a source of calm escape from the political
battles of ideology. As you're quite eloquently describing, it has become part of the battleground
of political ideology. I just would love to know where the boundaries of that are. Glenn
Greenwald has observed this. Lots of other folks, for example, I'm definitely not the only person
who's observed that Wikipedia. Let me just state because I'm sensing this, and because of your
eloquence and clear brilliance here, that a lot of people are going to immediately agree with you.
This is what I am also troubled by. This is not you, but I often see that people will detect
cynicism, especially when it is phrased as eloquence is yours, and will look at a natural
dumbass like me and think that Lex is just being naive. Look at him trusting Wikipedia for the
mainstream narrative. Let me argue your side. Can you please do that because you could do that better
than me? No, no, no. No, Lex, I enjoy talking to you. I'm doing Devils Advocate a little bit
because I do really want to be, I am afraid about the forces that basically editors of authority
are talking down to people and censoring information. Yeah, so let me first argue your
side, and let me say something, which is what you are reacting to is, oh, even those things I
thought of as constants are becoming variables. Where is the terra firma? If we cannot trust
anything, then everybody's just, it's anarchy and it's chaos. There's literally no consensus
reality and anybody can say anything and so on and so forth. I think that there's two possible
deviations from, let's say that the mainstream, obviously people talk about QAnon, for example,
as this kind of thing where people just make things up. They just go totally
quit supply chain independent from mainstream media, and if mainstream media is a distorted
gossamer of quasi-truth, these guys go to just total fiction as opposed to the alternative
to QAnon is not blue Anon, mainstream media, but Satoshi Anon, which is an upward deviation,
not a downward deviation to say there is no such thing as truth, but rather the upward
deviation is decentralized cryptographic truth, not centralized corporate or government truth.
So how does the decentralization of Wikipedia look like?
Great question. It's this concept ledger of record. First, whether you're Israeli or Palestinian,
Japanese or Chinese, Democrat or Republican, those people agree on the state of the Bitcoin
blockchain. Hundreds of billions of dollars is managed without weapons across tribes with
wildly varying ideologies. And what that means is that is a mechanism for getting literally
consensus. It's called consensus, cryptographic consensus, proof of work. And when people can
get consensus on this, what they're getting consensus on are basically bytes that determine
who holds what Bitcoin. This is exactly the kind of thing people would fight wars over.
For hundreds of billions of dollars alone, millions of dollars, people will kill each
other over that in the past. So for hundreds of billions of dollars, people can get consensus
truth on this in this highly adversarial environment. So the first generalization of that is it says
you can go from bytes that reflect what Bitcoin somebody has to bytes that reflect what stocks,
bonds, other kinds of assets people have. That's the entire DeFi Ethereum, that whole space.
Basically, the premise is if you go from consensus on one byte, by induction, you can go to
consensus on n bytes, depending on the cost of getting that consensus. And almost anything
digital can be represented, everything digital can be represented as bytes. So now you can get
consensus on certain kinds of digital information, Bitcoin, but then also any kind of financial
instrument. And then the next generalization is what I call the ledger of record. Many kinds of facts
can be put partially or completely on chain. It's not just proof of work and proof of stake.
There's things like proof of location, proof of human, proof of this, proof of that. The
auditable oracles I talked about extended further. Lots and lots of people are working on this,
right? Proof of solvency, seeing that some actor has enough of a bank balance to accommodate what
they say they accommodate. You can imagine many kinds of digital assertions can be turned into
proof of X and proof of Y. You start putting those on chain. You now have a library of
partially or completely provable facts. This is how you get consensus. As opposed to having a
white Western Wikipedia editor or most white Western US media corporation or the US government
simply say what is true in a centralized fashion.
So do you think truth is such an easy thing as you get to hire and hire questions of politics?
Is the problem that the consensus mechanism is being hacked or is the problem that truth
is a difficult thing to figure out? Was the 2020 election rigged or not? Is the earth flat or not?
That's a scientific one. My technical versus political truth spectrum, yeah.
But even the earth, well, that one is never mind. That's a bad example because that is very,
you can rigorously show that the earth is not flat. But there's some social phenomena, political
phenomena, philosophical one that will have a lot of debates, historical stuff about
different forces operating within Nazi Germany and Stalinist Soviet Union. I think there's
probably a lot of, yeah, like the historians debate about a lot of stuff like Blitz, the book
that talks about the influence of drugs in the Third Reich.
Right. Were they on math or something?
Yeah, there's a lot of debates about how truth, what is the significance of
math on the actual behavior and decisions of Hitler and so on. So there's still a lot of
debates. Is it so easy to fix with decentralization, I guess is the question.
So I actually have basically chapter two of the network state book is on essentially this topic.
And so it's like 70 pages or something like that. So let me try to summarize what I think
about on this. The first is that there was an onion article that came out, I can't find it now
anymore, but it was about historians in the year 3000 writing about the late 90s and early 2000s.
And they're like, clearly, Queen Brittany was a very powerful monarch. We can see
how many girls around the world worshipped her like a god. And so it was very funny because it
was a plausible distortion of the current society by a human civilization picking through the rubble
a thousand years later, having no context on anything. And it's a very thought-provoking
article because it says, well, to what extent is that us picking over Pompeii or the pyramids,
or even like the 1600s or the 1700s, like a few hundred years ago,
we're basically sifting through artifacts. And, you know, some of Berger actually has this concept
like, which is obvious, but it's also useful to have a name for it. It's like, I think it
calls it like dark history, which is, and again, it might be getting this wrong, but it's like
only a small percentage of what the Greeks wrote down, you know, has come to us to the present day.
Right. So perhaps it's not just the winners who write history, it's like the surviving records.
We have this extremely partial fragmentary record of history. And sometimes there's some
discovery that rewrites the whole thing. Do you know what like Gobekli Tepe is?
Everything I know about that is from Rogan because he's a huge fan of that kind of stuff.
Yeah. So that like rewrites. And then there's a lot of debates there.
There's a lot of debates. Basically, it's like the discovery of this site in Northern Turkey that
totally shifts our estimate of like when civilization started, maybe pushing it back
many thousands of years further in the past. Right. You know, the past, it's like an inverse
problem in physics. Right. We are trying to reconstruct this from limited information.
Right. It's like X-ray crystallography. It's an inverse problem. Right. It's Plato's cave.
You know, we're trying to reconstruct what the world looks like outside from these shadows,
these fragments that have been given to us. Right. Or that we've found. And so in that sense,
as you find more information, your estimate of the past changes. Right. Oh, wow. Okay.
That pushes back civilization farther than we thought. That one discovery just changes it.
Do you want to try to, given all the gaps in the data we have, you want to try to remove
bias from the process of trying to fill the gaps?
Well, so here's the thing. I think we're very close to the moment of it. And so that's why
it'll sound crazy when I say it now. But our descendants, I really do think of
what the blockchain is and cryptographically verifiable history as being the next step after
written history. It's like on par with that. Because anybody who has the record, the math
is not going to change. Right. Math is constant across human time and space. Right. So, you know,
the value of Pi is constant. That's one of the few constants across all these different human
civilizations. Okay. So somebody in the future, assuming, of course, the digital record is actually
intact to that point, because, you know, in theory, digital stuff will persist. In practice,
you have lost data and floppy drives and stuff like that. In a sense, in some ways,
digital is more persistent. In some ways, physical is more persistent. Okay. But assuming we can
figure out the archival problem somehow, then this future record, at least it's internally
consistent. Right. You can run a bunch of the equivalents of checksums, right, the Bitcoin
verification process. Just sum it all up and see that, okay, it's f of g of h of x,
and boom, that that at least is internally consistent. Okay. Again, it doesn't say that
all the people who reported it were, you know, they could have put something on chain that's
false, but at least, you know, the metadata is likely to be very difficult to falsify.
And this is a new tool. It's a really a new tool in terms of a robust history that is expensive
and technically challenging to edit and alter. And that is the alternative to the Stalin-esque
rewriting of history by centralized power. Yeah, I'm going to have to do a lot of actually reading
and thinking about, I'm actually, as, as you're talking, I'm also thinking about the fact that
I think 99% of my access to Wikipedia is, is on technical topics. Because I basically use it
very similarly to stack overflow. And even there, it doesn't have unit tests. For example,
one thing, the good way to put it, right. So one thing I remember, again, I might be wrong on this,
but I recall that the Kelly criterion, it's a, it's actually quite a useful thing to know. It's
like how to optimally size your bets. Okay. And you can have, given your kind of probability
that some investment pays off or assume probability, you can have bets that are too large,
bets that are too small. Sometimes the Kelly criterion, it goes negative. And actually, it
says you should actually take leverage. You're so sure this is a good outcome that you should
actually spend more than your current bankroll because you're going to get a good result, right?
So it's a very sophisticated thing. And as I recall, many sites on the internet have the wrong
equation. And I believe that was reprinted on Wikipedia. The wrong equation was put on Wikipedia
as a Kelly criterion for a while. It's funny. Okay. And so without unit tests, see math is
actually the kind of thing that you could unit test, right? You could literally have the assert
on the right hand side today, right? The modern version, we've got Jupiter, we've got replete,
we've got all these things. The modern version of Wikipedia, there's sites like golden.com,
for example. There's a bunch of things. I'm funding lots of stuff across the board on this.
And I'm not capitalizing these companies or capitalizing independently, but I'm trying to
see if, not just talk about a better version, it's hard to build something better. So actually,
go and build it. And what you want is assertions that are actually reproduced. You don't just have
the equation there. You have a written down code, you can hit enter, you can download the page,
you can rerun it. It's reproducible. So the problem with that kind of reproducibility
is that it adds friction. It's hard to put together articles that do that kind of stuff,
unless you do an incredible job with UX and so on. The thing that I think is interesting about
Wikipedia on the technical side is that without the unit tests, without the assertions, it still
often does an incredible job. Because the people that write those articles, and I've seen this
also in Stack Overflow, are the people that care about this most. And there's a pride to getting
it right. Okay. So let me agree and disagree with that. So absolutely, there's some good there.
Again, do I think Wikipedia is a huge step up from what preceded it in some ways on the technical
topics? Yes. However, you talked about the editing environment. Like the markup for Wikipedia,
it's very mid-2000s. It is not... It's a craigslist. Yeah, exactly. At a minimum, for example,
it's not WYSIWYG. So like medium or something like that, or ghost, you can just go in and type
and it looks exactly like it looks on the page. Here, you have to go to a markup language where
there can be editor conflicts. And you hit enter and someone is over in your edit or something like
that. And you don't know how it looks on the page. You might have to do a few previews or
what have you. So number one, so editing, you talk about barrage editing, that's the thing.
Number two is, given that it might be read a thousand times every one time it's written,
it is important to actually have the mathematical things unit tested, if they can be, given that
we've got modern technology. And that's something that's hard to retrofit into this because it's
so kind of ossified, right? Right. The interface on every side for the editor, even just for the
editor to check that... Say the editor wants to get right, we want to make it really...
Or not really easy, but easier to check their work. That's right. Like debugging, like a nice
idea for the... That's exactly right. For the editing experience. That's right. And the thing
about this is, as I said, because the truth is a global constant, but like incorrectness,
you know, right? Go ahead. Every happy family. I love to think that like truth will have a nice
debugger. Well, so here's right. So the thing is that what you can do is, let's say you did have
like a unit tested page for everything that's on Wikipedia. First of all, it makes a page more
useful because you can download it, you can run it, you can import it and so on. Second is it
leads into one of the things that we can talk about. I've sort of like a roadmap for building
alternatives to not just existing companies, but to many existing US institutions from media
and tech companies to courts and government and academia and nonprofits. The Wikipedia discussion
actually relates to how you improve on academia, right? And so academia right now, one of the big
problems, this is kind of related to the, oh boy, okay, the current institutions, we don't trust
them, but the answer is that the answer is to trust no one, right? And I think the alternative is
decentralized cryptographic trust or verification. How does that apply to academia? First observation
is we are seeing science being abused in the name of quote, quote, unquote science, okay?
Capital S science is Maxwell's equations. That's, that's a good one. That's a good one, right?
Quote, quote, science is a paper that came out last week. And the key thing is that
capital S science, real science is about independent replication, not prestigious citation.
That's the definition. Like all the journal stuff, the professors, all that stuff is just a
superstructure that was set on top to make experiments more reproducible. And that
superstructure is now like dominating the underlying thing because people are just fixating on the
prestige and the citation and not the replication, right? So how does that apply here? Once you
start thinking about how many replications does this thing have? Maxwell's equation, I mean,
there's trillions of replications. Every time us speaking into this microphone right now,
you know, we're testing, you know, our theory of the electromagnetic field, right? Or
electron magnetic fields. Every single time you pick up a cell phone or use a computer,
you're putting our knowledge to the test, right? Whereas some paper that came out last week in
science or nature may have zero independent replications, yet it is being cited publicly
as prestigious scientists from Stanford and, you know, Harvard and MIT all came up with X,
right? And so the prestige is a substitute for the actual replication. So there's a concept
called Good Heart's Law, okay? I'm just going to quote it. When a measure becomes a target,
it ceases to be a good measure, okay? So, for example, backlinks on the web were a good signal
for Google to use when people didn't know they were being used as a signal.
Yeah, you were talking, you talked about quantity versus quality and page rank was a pretty good
approximation for quality. Yes. Such a fascinating thing, by the way, but yeah.
It's a fascinating thing that we can talk about that. But basically, once people know that you're
using this as a measure, they will start to game it. And so then you have this cycle where, you
know, sometimes you have a fixed point, like Satoshi with proof of work was miraculously
able to come up with a game where the gaming of it was difficult without just buying more compute,
right? So it's actually, it's a rare kind of game where knowledge of the game's rules didn't
allow people to game the game. Yeah, brilliant way to put it, yeah. Which is one of the reasons
it's brilliant is that you can describe the game and you can't mess with it.
Exactly. It's very hard to come up with something that's stable in this way. It's actually
on the meta point. Gosh, there's a game where the rule of the game is to change the rules, okay?
It is... You mean human civilization or what? Yeah, gosh, it's just called something
NOMIC. N-O-M-I-C. NOMIC is a game where the rule of the game is to change the rules of the game.
At first, that seems insane. Then you realize that's Congress.
Yeah. Right? Yeah. Literally what it is so meta because there are laws for elections that elect
the editors of those laws who then change the laws that get them elected with gerrymandering
and other stuff, right? That's a bad version. Bad way of thinking that. The other way of
thinking about it is this is what every software engineer is doing. You are constantly changing
the rules by editing software and pushing code updates and so on, right? Many games devolve
into the meta game of who writes the rules of the game, become essentially games of NOMIC.
Proof of work is so amazing because it didn't devolve in such a way, right? It became very hard
to rewrite the rules once they got set up, very financially and technically expensive.
That's not to say it will always be like that, but it's very hard to change.
If we could take a small tangent, we'll return to academia. I'd love to ask you about how to
fix the media as well after we fix academia. Yeah. These are all actually related.
Related. Yeah. Wikipedia, media and academia are all related to the question of
independent replication versus prestigious citation. Sure. The problem is authority and
prestige as you see it from academia and the media and Wikipedia with the editors.
We have to have a mechanism where sort of the data and the reproducibility is what
dominates the discourse. That's right. One way to think about this is,
I've said this in, I think I tweeted this or something, but Western civilization actually
has a break glass of incase of emergency button. It's called decentralization, right?
Martin Luther hit it when the Catholic church was too ossified and centralized,
decentralized with a Protestant Reformation. He said, at the time, people were able to
pay for indulgences, like that is to say they could sin. They could say, okay, I sin five times
yesterday, here's the equivalent of 50 bucks, okay, I'm done with my sin. I can go and sin some more.
Okay, this is literally by the way out of sin. People debate as to how frequent those indulgences
were, but these are one of the things he invades against in the 95 theses. Decentralization, boom,
break away from this ossified church, start something new. In theory, the quote religious
wars of the 1600s that ensued were about things like where the wafer was the body of Christ or
what have you, but in part they were also about power and whether the centralized entity would
write all the rules or the decentralized one would. What happened was obviously Catholicism
still exists, but Protestantism also exists. Similarly, here you've got this ossified
central institution where, you know, forget about, I mean, there's complicated studies,
they're difficult to summarize, but when you have the science saying masks don't work and then they
do, okay, which everybody saw. And this is not like, you know, everybody knew that there was not
like some massive study that came out that changed our perspective on mask wearing. It was
something that was just insistently asserted as this is what the science says. And then without
any acknowledgement, the science said something different, you know, the next day, right? I remember
because I was in the middle of this debate. And I think you could justify masks early in the pandemic
as a useful precaution. And then later, you know, post-vaccination perhaps not necessary. I think
that's like the rational way of thinking about it. But the point was that such levels of uncertainty
were not acknowledged. Instead, people, you know, were basically lying in the name of science and
public policy was, you know, it wasn't public health, it was political health, okay? So something
like that, you're just spending down all the credibility of an institution for basically
nothing, okay? And so in such a circumstance, what do you do? Break glass, decentralize. What
does that look like? Okay, so let me describe what I call crypto science by analogy to,
you know, crypto, just like the fiat science, crypto science, right, fiat economics, okay?
So in any experiment, any paper when it comes out, right,
it's, you can sort of divide it into the analog to digital and the purely digital, okay? So the
analog to digital is you're running some instruments, you're getting some data, okay? And then once
you've got the data, you're generating figures and tables and text and a PDF from that data, right?
Leave aside the data collection set for now, I'll come back to that, right? Just the purely
digital part. What does the ideal quote, academic paper look like in 2022, 2023? First,
there's this concept called reproducible research, okay? Reproducible research is the idea that the
PDF should be regenerated from the data and code, okay? So you should be able to hit enter and
regenerate it. Why is this really important as a concept? John Clairbou and David Donahoe had
stand for 20 years ago, pioneered this in stats because the text alone often doesn't describe
every parameter that goes into a figure or something, right? You kind of sometimes just
need to look at the code and then it's easy and without that, it's hard, okay? So reproducible
research means you regenerate the PDF from the code and the data. You hit enter, okay? Now,
one issue is that many papers out there, science, nature, etc., are not reproducible research.
Moreover, the data isn't even public. Moreover, sometimes the paper isn't even public. The open
access movement has been fighting this for the last 20-something years. There's various levels of
this, like green and gold, open access, okay? So the first step is the code, the data, and the PDF
go on chain, step number one, okay? The second thing is once you've got, so you can, anybody who
is, and that could be the Ethereum chain, it could be its own dedicated chain, whatever, okay?
It could be something where there's a, just the URLs are on the Ethereum chain, it's stored on
Filecoin, many different implementations, but let's call that on chain broadly, okay?
Not just online on chain. When it's on chain, it's public and anybody can get it.
So that's first. Second is once you've got something where you can regenerate the code,
or the PDF from the code and the data on chain, guess what? You can have citations between two
papers, turn it to import statements. Yeah, that's funny. That's cool, right? So now you're not just
getting composable finance, like DeFi, where you have like one interest rate calculator calling
another. You have composable science. And now you can say this paper on this, especially in ML,
right? You'll often cite a previous paper in its benchmark or its method, right? You're going to
want to scatter plot sometimes your paper, your algorithm versus theirs on the same data set.
That is facilitated if their entire paper is reproducible research that is generated,
you can just literally import that Python and then you can generate your figure off of it, right?
Moreover, think about how that aids reproducibility, because you don't have to reproduce
in the literal sense every single snippet of code that they did, you can literally use their
code and import it, okay? People start compounding on each other. It's better science, okay? Now,
I talked about this, but actually there's a few folks who have been actually building this.
So there's youscholar.org, which actually has a demo of this, like just a v1,
like kind of prototype where it shows two stats papers on chain. And one of them is citing the
other with an import statement. There's also a thing called, I think, dsi.com, which is trying
to do this, all right? Decentralized science. So this itself changes how we think about papers.
And actually, by the way, the inspiration for PageRank was actually citations. It was like
the impact factor out of academia. That's where Larry Page and Sergey Brin got the concept out,
right? So now you've got a web of citations that are import statements on chain. In theory,
you could track back a paper all the way back to its antecedents, okay? So if it's citing
something, you can now look it up and look it up and look it up. And a surprising number of papers
actually, you know, their antecedents don't terminate or the original source says something
different or it just kind of got garbled like a telephone game. And, you know, there's this famous
thing on like the spinach, like it does actually have iron in it or something like that. I forget
the details on this story, but it was something where you track back the citations and people are
contradicting each other, okay? But it's just something that just gets copy pasted and it's
a fact that's not actually a fact because it's not audited properly. This allows you to cheaply
audit, in theory, all the way back to Maxwell or Newton or something like that, okay? Now,
what I'm describing is a big problem, but it's a finite problem. It's essentially taking all the
important papers and putting them on chain. It's about the scale of, let's say, Wikipedia, okay?
So it's like, I don't know, a few hundred thousand, a few million papers. I don't know the exact number,
but it'll be out of that level, okay? So now you've got, number one, these things that are on
chain, okay? Number two, you've turned citations into import statements. Number three, anybody
can now, at a minimum, download that code. And while they may not have the instruments, and I'll
come back to that point, while they may not have the instruments, they can do internal checks,
the Benford's Law stuff we were just talking about. You can internally check the consistency of these
tables and graphs, and often you'll find fraud or things that don't add up that way, because all the
code and the data is there, right? And now you've made it so that anybody in Brazil, in India,
in Nigeria, they may not have an academic library access zone, but they can get into this. All
right. Now, how do you fund all of this? Well, good thing is crypto actually allows tools for
that as well. Andrew Huberman and others have started doing things like with NFTs to fund their
lab. I can talk about the funding aspect. There's things like researchhub.com, which are trying
to issue tokens for labs, but a lab isn't that expensive to fund. Maybe it's a few hundred
thousand, a few million a year, depending on where you are. Crypto does generate money. And so you
can probably imagine various tools, whether it's tokens or NFTs or something like that to fund.
Finally, what this does is it is not queuing on, right? It is not saying don't trust anybody.
Neither is it just trust the centralized academic establishment, instead of saying trust because
you can verify, because we can download things and run them. The crucial thing that I'm assuming here
is the billions of supercomputers around the world that we have, all the MacBooks and iPhones that
can crank through lots and lots of computation. So everything digital, we can verify it locally.
Okay. Now, there's one last step, which is I mentioned the instruments, right? Whether it's
your sequencing machine or your accelerometer or something like that is generating the data
that you are reporting in your paper when you put it on chain. Okay. Basically,
you think of that as the analog digital interface. We can crypto-fi that too. Why?
For example, an Illumina sequencing machine has an experiment manifest. And when that's
written to this website called NCBI, National Center for Biotechnology Information, you can
see the experiment metadata on various sequencing runs. It'll tell you what instrument and what
time it was run and who ran it and so on and so forth. Okay. What that does is allows you to
correct for things like batch effects. Sometimes you will sequence on this day and the next day
and maybe the humidity or something like that makes it look like there's a statistically
significant difference between your two results, but it was just to actually batch effects. Okay.
What's my point? Point is, if you have a crypto instrument, you can have, you know,
various hashes and stuff of the data as a chain of custody for the data itself that are streamed
and written on chain, that the manufacturer can program into this. For anything that's really,
and you might say, well, boy, that's overkill, right? I'm saying actually not. You know why?
If you're doing a study whose results are going to be used to influence a policy that's going to
control the lives of millions of people, every single step has to be totally audible. You need
the glass box model. You need to be able to go back to the raw data. You need to be able to
interrogate that. And again, this is, anybody who's a good scientist will embrace this, right?
Yeah. So first of all, that was a brilliant exposition of a future of science that I would
love to see. The pushback I'll provide, which is not really a pushback, is like what you describe
is so much better than what we currently have, that I think a lot of people would say any of the
sub steps you suggest are already going to be a huge improvement. So even just sharing the code.
Yes. Or sharing the data. I think it would surprise people how often it's hard to get
data. Like the actual data or specifics or a large number of the parameters. You'll share
like one or two parameters that were involved with running the experiment. You won't mention the
machines involved, except maybe at a high level, but the versions and so on. The dates when the
experiments were wrong, you don't mention any of this kind of stuff. So there's several ways to
fix this. And one of them I think implied in what you're describing is a culture that says it's not
okay. Exactly. So first of all, there should be, even if it's not perfectly on chain to where you
can automatically import all the way to Newton, just even the act of sharing the code, sharing the
data, maybe in a way that's not perfectly integrated into a larger structure is already a very big
positive step of saying like, if you don't do this, then this doesn't count. And because in
general, I think my worry, you know, as somebody who's a programmer who's OCD, I love the picture
you paint that you can just import everything and automatically checks everything. My problem is that
makes incremental science easier and revolutionary science harder. Oh, I actually very much just
screwed that. I would love to hear your argument. You guys, let me just kind of elaborate. Sure.
Why, sometimes you have to think in this gray area of fuzziness when you're thinking
in totally novel ideas. And when you have to concretize in data, like some of the greatest
papers that were written are to don't have data, they're in the space of ideas almost,
like you're kind of sketching stuff. And there could be errors, but like,
Einstein himself with the famous five papers, I mean, they're really strong, but they're,
they're fuzzy. They're a little bit fuzzy. And so I think, you know, even like the GAN paper,
you're often thinking of like new data sets, new ideas. And I think maybe as a step after
the paper is written, you could probably concretize it, integrate it into the rest of science.
Like you shouldn't feel that pressure, I guess, early on. Well, I mean, there's,
so it's different. Each, each of the steps that I'm talking about, right? There's like data being
public and everything, just that just having the paper being public, that's like v one, right?
Then you have the thing being regenerated from code and data, like the PDF being
regenerated from code and data. Then you have the citations as import statements.
Then you have the full citation graph as an import statement. So you just follow it all the way
back, right? And, and now you have that gives you audibility. Then you have the off chain,
you know, the, the analog digital crypto custody, right? Like where you're hashing things and
streaming things. So you have the chain of custody. Each of those is kind of like a level
up and adds to complexity, but it also adds the audibility and the verifiability and the
reproducibility. But, you know, one thing I'd say I wanted to respond to that you said was
that you think this would be good for incremental, but not innovative. Actually,
it's quite the opposite. I think academia is institutional and it's not innovative. For example,
NIH has this graph, which is like, I think it's age of recipients of R01 grants. Okay. And what it
shows is basically it's like a hump that moves over time, roughly plus one year forward for the
average age as the year moves on. Okay. And I'll see if I can find the gift. What this, why is this,
let me see if I can find it actually. Look at this movie just for a second. It's a ridiculously
powerful movie and it's 30 seconds. I just sent it in. What's that? The name of the video is
age distribution of NIH principal investigators and medical school faculty. And it starts out on
accesses age with the distribution and percent of PIs. And from 19, early 1980s, moving one year at a
time. And the mean of the distribution is moving slowly, approximately as Bladia said,
about one year per year. Now, this is 10 years ago. One year in age per year of time. And notice
how, first of all, the average age is moving way upward before you become an NHPI. Second is,
it's a court of guys, people who are just awarding grants to each other. Yeah. That's clearly what's
happening. That's the underlying dynamic. They're not awarding grants to folks who are much younger.
Okay. Because those folks haven't proven themselves yet, right? So this is what happens
when you get prestigious citation rather than independent replication. The age just keeps creeping
up. And this was 10 years ago and it's gotten even worse. It's become even more generocratic,
even more hidebound, right? And so the thing is, the structures that Vanavar Bush and others set
up, the entire post-war science establishment, one thing I'll often find is people will say,
Baljeet, the government hath granted us the internet and self-driving cars and space flight
and so on. How can you possibly be against the US government, kneel and repent for its bounty?
And really, the reason they kind of, they don't say it quite in that way, but that's really the
underpinning kind of thing because they've replaced GOD with GOV. They really think of the US government
as GOD. The conservative will think of the US government as the all-powerful military abroad
and the progressive will think of it as the benign, all-powerful, nurturing parent at home.
Okay. But in this context, they're like, how can you as some tech bro could possibly think
you could ever do basic science without the funding of the US government? Has it not developed
all basic science, right? And the answer to this is actually to say, well, what if we go further back
than 1950? Did science happen before 1950? Well, I think it did. Bernoulli and Maxwell and Newton,
were they funded by NSF? No, they weren't, right? Were aviation, railroads, automobiles, gigantic
industries that arose and that both were stimulated by and stimulated development of pure science?
Were they funded by NSF? No, they were not, right? Therefore, NSF is not a necessary condition
for the presence of science. Neither is even the United States. Obviously, a lot of these
discoveries to Newton was before, you know, like the, I believe it was before the American,
let me just find the exact, it's actually less old than people think. Okay. So,
Newton died 1727, right? So, I knew that, you know, it was like in the 1700s. So,
Newton was before the American Revolution, right? Obviously, that meant huge innovations could happen
before the US government, before NIH, before NSF, right? Which means they are not a necessary
condition, number one. That itself is crucial because a lot of people say the government is
necessary for the, for basic science. It is not necessary for basic science. It is one possible
catalyst. And I would argue that mid-century, it was okay because mid-century was the time when
the middle of the centralized century. 1933, 1945, 1969, you have Hoover Dam,
you have the Manhattan Project, you have Apollo. That generation was acclimatized to a centralized
US government that could accomplish great things, probably because technology favored
centralization going into 1950 and then started favoring decentralization going out of it.
I've talked about this in the book. The sovereign individual has talked about this,
but very roughly, you know, you go up into 1950 and you have mass media and mass production
and just centralization of all kinds, giant nation states, slugging it out on the world stage.
And you go out in 1950 and you get cable news and personal computers and the internet and
mobile phones and cryptocurrency and you have the decentralization. And so this entire centralized
scientific establishment was set up at the peak of the centralized century and it might have been
the right thing to do at that time, but is now showing its age. And it's no longer actually
geared up for what we have. Where are the huge innovations coming out? Well, Satoshi Nakamoto
was not, to our knowledge, a professor, right? That's this revolutionary thing that came outside
of it. Early in the pandemic, there was something called project-evidence.github.io,
which accumulated all of the evidence for the coronavirus possibly having been a lab leak
when that was a very controversial thing to discuss, right? Alina Chan, to her credit,
you know, Matt Ridley and Alina Chan have written this book, you know, on whether the
coronavirus was a lab leak or not. I think it's plausible that it was. I can't say I'm 100% sure,
but I think it's at least, it certainly, it is a hypothesis worthy of discussion, okay?
Though, of course, it's got political overtones. Point being that the pseudonymous online publication
at project-evidence.github.io happened when it was taboo to do so. So we're back to the age of
pseudonymous publication where only the arguments can be argued with the person can't be attacked,
okay? This is actually something that used to happen in the past, like, you know,
someone, there's a famous story where Newton solved a problem and someone said,
I know the lion by his claw or something like that, right? People used to do pseudonymous
publication in the past so that they would be judged on part by their scientific ideas and
not the person themselves, right? And so I do disagree that this is the incremental stuff.
This is actually the innovative stuff. The incremental stuff is going to be the institutional
gerontocracy that's academia where it's like, you know, do you know who I am? I'm a Harvard
professor. Yeah. I don't, I think I agree with everything you said, but I'm not gonna get stuck
on technicalities because I think I was referring to your vision of data sets and importing code.
Sure. And so that forces just knowing how code works. It forces a structure and structure usually
favors incremental progress. Like, if you fork code, you're not going to, it desensitizes revolution.
You want to go from scratch. Okay. So I understand your point there. Okay. And I also agree that
some papers like Francis Crick on the classroom or there's our theoretical, they're more about like
where to dig than the data itself and so on and so forth, right? So I agree with that. Still,
I don't, the counterargument is rather than a thousand people reading this paper to try to
rebuild the whole thing and do it with errors, when they can just import, they can more easily build
upon what others have done, right? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So the, the paper should be forkable. Well,
yeah, yeah. So here's what, you know, like, you know, Python has this concept of batteries included
for the standard library, right? Because it lets you just import, import, import and just get to
work, right? That means you can fly. Whereas if you couldn't do all those things and you had to
rewrite string handling, you would only be able to do incremental things. Libraries actually
allow for greater innovation. That's my counter. I think you create, I think that paints a picture.
I hope that's a picture that fits with science. It certainly does. It fits with code very well.
I just wonder how much of science can be that, which is you import, how much of it is possible
to do that? Certainly for the things I work on, you can, which is the machine learning world,
all the computer science world, but whether you can do that for, all right, you can think biology
seems to, yes, I think so. Chemistry, I think so. And then you start getting to weird stuff like
psychology, which some people don't even think is a science. No, just love for my psychology friends.
I think as you get farther and farther away from things that are like hard, technical fields,
it starts getting tougher and tougher and tougher to have like,
importable code. Okay. So let me give the strong foreign version, right? So there's a guy who I
think is a great machine learning guy, a creator of actually Keras, who he disagrees with me on
Francois Chilliard. Yeah, he's been on this podcast twice. Okay, great. So he disagrees.
I disagree with him on a lot of stuff. Yes, me too. I think we have mutual respect,
you know, follow each other on Twitter, whatever. I think yes, I think he does respect them like
you. Here's something which I totally agree with him on. And he actually got like trolled or attacked
for this, but I completely agree. Within 10, 20 years, nearly every branch of science will be,
for all intents and purposes, a branch of computer science, computational physics,
computational chemistry, computational biology, computational medicine, even computational
archaeology, realistic simulations, big data analysis and ML everywhere. That to me is incredibly
obvious. Why? First of all, all we're doing every day is PDFs and data analysis on a computer, right?
And so every single one of those areas can be reduced to the analog digital step,
and then it's all digital. Then you're flying, you're in the cloud, right?
You put a date, do you say how long or? 10 to 20 years.
10 to 20 years. I mean, I think arguably it's already there, right? And here's the thing.
You were saying, well, you know, you might drop off when you hit psychology or history.
Actually, I think it's the software sciences that are going to harden up. Why? One of the things
I talk about a lot in the book is, for example, with history, the concept of crypto history
makes history computable. One way of thinking about it is, remember my Britney Spears example,
right, where Queen Britney, right? Yeah. Okay. So at first, it's kind of a funny thing to say
a computer scientist's term for history is the log files, until we realized that
what would a future historian, how would they write about the history of the 2010s?
Well, a huge part of that history occurred on the servers of Twitter and Facebook.
So now you go from a log file, which is just the individual record of one server's action,
to a decade worth of data on literally billions of people. All of their online lives,
like arguably, that's why I say that's actually what the written history was of the 2010s was
this giant digital history. As you go to the 2020s and the 2030s, more of that is going to move from
merely online to on-chain and then cryptographically verifiable. So that soft subject of history
becomes something that you can calculate things like Google Trends and Engrams and stuff like that.
Yes, beautifully put. Then I would venture to say that Donald Trump was erased from history when he
was removed from Twitter and many social platforms and all his tweets were gone.
I think it's someone who has an archive of it, but yeah, I understand your point.
Yeah. Well, as the flood of data about each individual increases censorship,
it becomes much more difficult to actually have an archive of stuff. But yes, for important
people like a president in the United States, yes. Let me on that topic ask you about Trump.
You were considered for position as FDA commissioner in the Trump administration.
And I think one of in terms of the network state, in terms of the digital world, one of the seminal
acts in the history of that was the banning of Trump from Twitter. Can you make the case for it
and against it? Sure. So first, let me talk about the FDA thing. So I was considered for a senior
role at FDA, but I do believe that, and this is a whole topic we can talk about the FDA,
I do believe that just as it was easier to create Bitcoin than to form the Fed,
right? Reforming the Fed basically still hasn't happened, right? So just as it was easier to
create Bitcoin than to reform the Fed, it will literally be easier to start a new country than
to reform the FDA. It may take 10 or 20 years, I mean, think about Bitcoin, it's only about 13
years old, right? It may take 10 or 20 years to start a new network state with a different
biomedical policy. But that is how we get out from this, perhaps the single worst thing in the world,
which is harmonization, regulatory harmonization. Can you describe regulatory harmonization?
Regulatory harmonization is the mechanism by which U.S. regulators impose their regulations on the
entire world. So basically, you have a monopoly by U.S. regulators. This is not just the FDA,
it is SEC and FAA and so on and so forth. And for the same reason that a small
company will use Facebook login that will outsource their login to Facebook,
a small country will outsource their regulation to the USA, with all the attendant issues.
Because, I mean, you know the names of some politicians. Can you name a single regulator
at the FDA? No, right? Yet, they will brag on their website that they regulate, I forget the
exact numbers, I think it's like 25 cents out of every dollar, something along those lines. It's
like double digits, okay? That's a pretty big deal. And the thing about this is, you know,
people will talk about quote, our democracy and so on. But many of the positions in quote,
our democracy are actually not subject to democratic accountability. You have tenured
professors and you have tax exempt colleges. You have the Salzburgers, the New York Times who have
dual class stock. You have, you know, a bunch of positions that are out of the reach of the
electorate. And that includes regulators who have career tenure after just a few years of
not necessarily even continuous service. So they're not accountable to the electorate.
They're not named by the press. And they also aren't accountable to the market because you've
got essentially uniform global regulations. Now, the thing about this is it's not just a
government thing. It's a regulatory capture thing. Big pharma companies like this as well,
why? Because they can just get their approval in the US and then they can export to the rest of
the world, right? I understand where that comes from as a corporate executive. It's such a pain
to get, you know, access in one place. So there's a team up, though, between the giant company and
the giant government to box out all the small startups in all the small countries and lots of
small innovation, right? There are cracks in this now, right? The FDA did not acquit itself well
during the pandemic. For example, it denied, I mean, there's so many issues. But one of the things
that even actually New York Times reported, the reason that people thought there were no COVID
cases in the US early in the pandemic was because the FDA was denying people the ability to run COVID
tests. And the emergency use authorization was, you know, emergency should mean like right now,
right? But it was not, it was just taking forever. And so some labs did civil disobedience and they
just disobeyed the FDA and just went and tested academic labs with threat of federal penalties
because that's what they are. They're like the police, okay? And so they were sort of retroactively
granted immunity because NYT went and ran a positive story on them. So NYT's authority is
usually greater than that of FDA. If they come into a conflict, NYT runs stories and
FDA kind of gets spanked, right? And it's not, you know, probably neither party would normally
think of themselves that way. But if you look at it, when NYT goes and runs stories on a company,
it names all the executives and they get all hit. When it runs stories on a regulator, it just treats
the regulator usually as if it was just some abstract entity. It's Zuckerberg's Facebook,
but you can't name, you know, the people who the career bureaucrats at FDA. Interesting, right?
It's very interesting. It's a very important point. Like that person who's like named and their face
is known, like you just as an example, you know Zuckerberg's face and name. Most people don't
know Arthur G. Salzberger. They couldn't recognize him, right? That he's a guy who's inherited the
New York Times company from his father's father's father. That is unaccountable power. It's not
that they get great coverage, that they get no coverage. You don't even think about them, right?
And so it's invisibility, right? There's some aspect why Fauci was very
interesting. In my recent memory, there's not been many faces of scientific policy,
of science policy, and he became the face of that. And, you know, as there's some of his meme,
which is, you know, basically saying that he is science or that some people represent science,
but the positive aspect of that is that there is accountability when there's a face like that.
Right. But you can also see the Fauci example shows you why a lot of these folks do not want
to be public because they enter a political, you know, immediate minefield. I'm actually
sympathetic to that aspect of it. What I'm not sympathetic to is the concept that in 2022,
that the unelected, unfireable, anonymous American regulator should be able to impose
regulatory policy for the entire world. We are not the world of 1945, you know? It is not something
where these other countries are even consciously consenting to that world. Just as a given example,
there's a concept called challenge trials, okay? The Moderna vaccine was available very,
very early in the pandemic. You can just synthesize it from the sequence. And challenge trials would
have meant that people who are healthy volunteers, okay, they could have been soldiers, for example,
of varying ages who are there to take a risk their lives for their country potentially, okay? It could
have been just healthy volunteers, not necessarily soldiers, just patriots of whatever kind in any
country, not just the U.S. But those healthy volunteers could have gone. And in the early
stages of the pandemic, we didn't know exactly how lethal it was going to be because, you know,
Li Wenliang and, you know, 30-year-old, 30-somethings in China were dying from this. It seemed like it
could be far worse. How lethal the virus would be. Yeah. And it may be, by the way, that those
who were the most susceptible to the virus died faster earlier. It's as if you could imagine a
model where those who were exposed and had the lowest susceptibility also had the highest severity
and died in greater numbers early on. If you look at the graph, like deaths from COVID were
exponential going into about April 2020 and then leveled off to about 7,500, 10,000 a day and then
kind of fell, right? But it could have gone to 75,000 at the beginning because we didn't know how
serious it was. So this would have been a real risk that these people would have been taking,
but here's what they would have gotten for that. Basically, in a challenge trial, somebody would
have been given the vaccine and then exposed to the virus and then put under observation.
And then that would have given you all the data because ultimately the synthesis of the thing,
I mean, yes, you do need to scale up synthesis and manufacturing and what have you.
But the information of whether it worked or not and was safe and effective and so,
like that could have been gathered expeditiously with volunteers for challenge trials.
You think there'd be a large number of volunteers?
Absolutely.
What's the concern there? Is there an ethical concern of taking on volunteers?
Well, so let me put it like this. Had we done that, we could have had vaccines early enough
to save the lives of like a million Americans, especially seniors and so on, okay? Soldiers
and we're generally first responders and others. I do believe there's folks who would have stepped
up to take that risk. The heroes walk among us. Yeah, that's right. If military service is something
which is its ritualized thing, people are paid for it, but they're not paid that much. They're
really paid in honor and in duty and in pictures. That is actually the kind of thing where I do
believe some fraction of those folks would have raised their hand for this important task. I
don't know how many of them, but I do think that the volunteers would have been there.
There's probably some empirical test of that, which is there's a challenge trials website.
There's a Harvard Prof who put out this proposal early in the pandemic and he could tell you how
many volunteers he got. But something like that could have just shortened the time from pandemic
to functional vaccine, right, to days even if you'd actually really acted on it. The fact that
that didn't happen and that the Chinese solution of lockdown, that actually, at the beginning,
people thought the state could potentially stop the virus, stop people in place. It turned out
to be more contagious than that. Basically, no NPI, no non-pharmaceutical intervention,
really turned out to work that much, right? And actually, at the very beginning of the pandemic,
I said something like, look, this is actually February 3rd, about a month before people,
I was just watching what was going on in China. I saw that they were doing digital quarantine,
like using WeChat codes to block people off and so on. I didn't know what was going to happen,
but I said, look, if the coronavirus goes pandemic and it seems it may, the extreme edge case becomes
the new normal. It's every debate we've had on surveillance, deplatforming, and centralization
accelerated. Pandemic means emergency powers for the state, even more than terrorism or crime.
And sometimes a solution creates the next problem. My rough forecast of the future,
the coronavirus results in quarantines, nationalism, centralization. And this may
actually work to stop the spread. But once under control, states will not see their powers,
so we decentralize. And I didn't know whether it was going to stop the spread,
but I knew that they were going to try to do it. And look, it's hard to call every single thing
right. And I'm sure someone will find some errors. But in general, I think that was actually pretty
good for early February of 2020. So it's my point, though. The point is, rather than copying Chinese
lockdown, what we should have had were different regimes around the world, to some extent Sweden
defected from this. They had no lockdowns or what have you. But really, the axis that people were
talking about was lockdown versus no lockdown. The real axis should have been challenge trials
versus no challenge trials. We could have had that in days. And those are two examples on both
vaccines and testing. There's so many more that I can point to. So those are kind of decentralized
innovations. And that's what FDA should stand for. FDA can stand for it. Or something like FDA, right?
So let's talk about that, right? Something like FDA. So this is very important. In general,
the way I try to think about things is V1, V2, V3, as we've talked about a few times.
Right. Well, FDA, V...
Well, right. So what was before FDA, right? So there was both good and bad before FDA,
because people don't necessarily have the right model of the past. So if you ask people what was
there before the FDA, they'll say, and by the FDA itself, omits the, right? Their pronouns
are just FDA, FDA. Okay. So, but basically... Why is that important?
It's just something where... Why is that either humorous or interesting to you?
They have a sort of in-group lingo where when you are kind of talking about them,
the way that they talk about themselves, it is something that kind of piques interest. It's
kind of like in L.A., people say the 101 or the, right? Whereas in Northern California,
they'll say 101 or people from Nevada will say Nevada, right? It just instantly marks you as
like insider or outsider. Okay. In terms of how the language works, right? And that's... Go ahead.
That means just makes me sad, because that lingo is part of the mechanism which creates the silo,
the bubble of particular thoughts, and that ultimately deviates from the truth because
you're not open to new ideas. I think it's actually like, in Glorious Bastards,
there's a scene in the bar. Do you want me to talk about it? No, but it's good. You can't...
Just to censor you, this is like a Wikipedia podcast, like Wikipedia. You can't cite Quentin
Tarantino films. No. Okay, okay, okay. Sorry. Be back there. Basically,
like English start going like one, two, three, four, five. And I believe it's like the German
start with like the thumb. Something that you'd never know, right? I may be misremembering there,
but I think that's right. Okay, so... FDA's got the lingo. All right, FDA's got the lingo. So coming
back up, basically, just talk about FDA and then come back to your question on the platform.
So what was V0 FDA? What was V1? What does the future look like? V1 was
quote, patent medicines. Okay, that's what we'll say. But V1 was also Banting and Best. Okay,
Banting and Best, they won the Nobel Prize in the early 1920s, right? Why? They came with
that year for insulin supplementation to treat diabetes. And they came with a concept. They
experimented on dogs. They did self experimentation. They had healthy volunteers. They experimented
with the formulation as well, right? Because just like you'd have like a web app and a mobile app,
maybe a command line app, you could have, you know, a drug that's administered orally or via
injection or cream or, you know, there's different formulations, right? Dosage,
all that stuff they could just like iterate on, okay, with willing doctor, willing patient. These,
you know, these, these folks who are affected just sprang out of bed. The insulin supplementation
was working for them. And within a couple of years, they had won the Nobel Prize and Eli Lilly
had scaled production for the entire North American continent. Okay, so that was a time when
pharma moved at the speed of software, when it was willing buyer, willing seller. Okay,
because the past is demonized as something that our glorious regulatory agency is protecting
us from. Okay. But there's so many ways in which what's really protecting you from is being healthy.
Okay. As you know, I mean, there's a zillion examples of this. I won't be able to recapitulate
all of them just in this podcast. But if you look at a post that I've got, it's called
Regulation, Disruption, and the Future Technologies of 2013, Coursera PDF. Okay. This lecture,
which I'll kind of link it here so you can maybe put in the show notes if you want.
This goes through like a dozen different examples of crazy things the FDA did from
the kind of stuff that was dramatized in Dallas Buyers Club where they were preventing
people from getting AIDS drugs to their various attacks on, quote, raw milk, where they were
basically saying, here's a quote from FDA filing in 2010. There's no generalized right to bodily
and physical health. There's no right to consume or feed children any particular food. There's no
fundamental right to freedom of contract. They basically feel like they own you. You're not
allowed to make your own decisions about your food. There's no generalized right to bodily and
physical health. Direct quote from there, like a written kind of thing. Okay. The general frame
is usually that FDA says it's protecting you from the big bad company. But really what it's
doing is protecting, it's preventing you from opting out. Okay. Now, with that said, and this
is where I'm talking about V3, as critical as I am of FDA or the Fed for that matter, I also
actually recognize that the Ron Paul type thing of end the Fed is actually not practical. End
the Fed will just be laughed at. What Bitcoin did was a much, much, much more difficult task
of building something better than the Fed. That's really difficult to do because the Fed and the
FDA, they're like the hub of the current system. People rely on them for lots of different things.
Okay. And you're going to need a better version of them. And how would you actually build something
like that? So with the Fed and with SEC and the entire, you know, the banks and whatnot,
crypto has a pretty good set of answers for these things. And over time, all the countries that are
not, all the groups that are not the US establishment or the CCP will find more and more to their
liking in the crypto economy. So that part I think is going. Okay. We can talk about that.
What does that look like for biomedicine? Well, first, what does exit the FDA look like?
Right. So there actually are a bunch of exits from the FDA already, which is things like
right to try laws, clear labs and laboratory developed tests, compounding pharmacies,
off-lil prescription by doctors, and countries that aren't fully harmonized with FDA. For example,
you know, Kobe, Kobe Bryant, before he passed away, went and did stem cell treatments in Germany.
Okay. Stem cells have been pushed out, you know, I think in part by the Bush administration,
by other things. So those are different kinds of exits. Right to try basically means, you know,
at the state level, you can just try the drug. Okay. Clear labs and LDTs, that means that's
a path where you don't have to go through FDA to get a new device approved. You can just run it in
a lab. Okay. Compounding pharmacies, these were under attack. I'm not sure actually where the
current, you know, statute is on this, but this is the idea that a pharmacist has some discretion
in how they, you know, prepare mixtures of drugs. Off-lil prescription by MDs. So MDs have enough
like weight in the system that they can kind of push back on FDA. And off-lil prescription is
the concept that a drug that's approved for purpose A can be prescribed for purpose B or C or D
without going through another, you know, whole new drug approval process. And then countries that
aren't harmonized. Right. So those are like five different kinds of exits from the FDA on different
directions. So first those exits exist. So for those people who are like, oh my god, we're all
going to die or is going to poison us with your non-FDA approved things or whatever. Right. Like
those exits exist. You probably actually use tests or treatments from those. You don't even
realize that you have. Right. So it hasn't killed you. Number one. Number two is actually testing
for safety. You know, there's safety, efficacy and like comparative safety is actually relatively
easy to test for. There's very few drugs that are like, there's TGN1412. That's a famous example
of something that was actually really dangerous to people. Right. With an early test. So those do
exist. Just acknowledge they do exist. But in general, testing for safety is actually not that
hard to do. Okay. And if something is safe, then you should be able to try it usually. Okay. Now,
what does that decentralized FDA look like? Well, basically you take individual pieces of it and
you can often turn them into vehicles. And this is like 50 different startups. Let me describe
some of them. First, have you gotten any drugs or something like that recently? I mean, like
prescribed drugs, prescription drugs and all that you clarify the answers. No. Yeah.
Prescribed drugs. No. Okay. So not long, antibiotics a long time ago, maybe, but no.
So you know how you have like a sort of like a wadded up chemistry textbook,
the package insert that goes into the right. Yes. Okay. Wadded up chemistry textbook. I love it.
That's what it is, right? That's what a terrible user interface. We don't usually think of it that
way. Why is your user interface so terrible? That's a web of regulation that makes it so
terrible. And you know, there's actually guys who try to innovate just on user interface call
like, help, I need help. That was like the name of the company a while back. And it was trying
to explain the stuff in plain language. Okay. Just on user interface, you can innovate. And
why is it important? Well, you know, there's a company called Pill Pack, which innovated on,
quote, the user interface for drugs by giving people a thing which had like a daily blister pack.
So it's like, here's your prescription and you're supposed to take all these pills on the first and
second. And basically, whether you had taken them on a given day was manifest by whether you had
opened it for that specific day. Okay. This is way better than other kinds of so-called compliance
methodologies like they're guys who try to do like an IoT pill where when you swallow it,
it like gives you measurements. This was just a simple innovation on user interface that boosted
compliance in the sense of compliance with a drug regimen dramatically, right? And I think they
got acquired or would have you for a lot of money. And hopefully utilized effectively.
Utilized effectively, right? Well, sometimes these companies that do incredible innovation,
it really makes you sad when they get acquired that at least to their death, not their scaling.
Sure. I mean, they did a lot of other good things, but this is one thing that they did well, right?
So Pill Pack just shows what you can get with improving on user interface.
Why can't I mean, we get reviews for everything, right? One thing that, you know, like people
have sort of, in my view, somewhat quota context are like, oh, biology thinks you should replace
the FDA with the help for drugs. Actually, there's something called phase four, okay,
of the FDA, which is so-called post-market surveillance. Do you know that that's actually
something where in theory, you can go and fill out a form on the FDA website, which basically says
I've had, you know, a bad experience with a drug? Like, there's but for drugs.
Yeah. So it's called MedWatch, right? And so you can do like voluntary reporting and you can get
you know, like a PDF and just like upload it, right?
Is this a government? Like, is this the dog gov?
Yeah, it's form 3500B.
Well, I love it. It's HTML. It's going to be like from the 90s. It's going to have an interface
designed by somebody who's a cobalt slash Fortran programmer.
Right. Here we go. So here we go. So basically the 3500B.
I hope to be proven wrong on that, by the way.
So 3500B consumer voluntary reporting. When do I use this form?
You were hurt or had a bad side effect? Use a drug, which lets unsafe use etc.
The point is FDA already has a terrible Yelp for drugs.
Yeah.
It has a terrible version of it.
Yeah.
What would the good version look like? The fact that you've never, I mean,
this fact you have to fill out a PDF to go and submit a report. How do you submit a report at
Yelp or Uber or Airbnb or Amazon UTAP and their star ratings?
So just modernizing FDA 3500B and modernizing Phase 4 is a huge thing.
Is it, can you comment on that? Is there, what incentive mechanism forces the modernization
of that kind of thing?
Here's how it would work, or one possible.
To create an actual Yelp.
Yeah. Here's how that would work. You go to the pharmacy or wherever,
and you hold up your phone and you scan the barcode of the drug.
Okay. What does you say?
Instantly you see global reports, by the way, because your biology, your physiology,
that's global. Information from Brazil or from Germany or Japan on their physiological reaction
to the same drug you're taking is useful to you. It's not like a national boundaries thing.
So the whole nation state model of only collecting information on by other Americans.
So really you want a global kind of thing just like Amazon book reviews.
That's a global thing. Other things are aggregate at the global level.
Okay. So what you want is to see every patient report and every doctor around the world
on this drug that might be really important to your rare or semi rare condition.
Just that alone would be a valuable site.
Who builds that site? It sounds like something created by capitalism.
You could do it by capital.
It would have to be a company.
Yeah. You can definitely do it.
See, these are-
But we don't have a world where a company is allowed to be in charge of that kind of thing.
Well, I don't know.
Health won't went down. It just seems like a lot of the-
So it depends, right? Basically, this is why you have to pick off individual elements, right?
There's essentially a combination of first recognizing that
on safety is actually bad. You can be able to say that. Let me put it like this.
It does a lot of bad things. It is something which you need to be able to criticize.
You might be like, well, that's obvious, right?
Well, in 2010, for example, there's a book that came out.
If anybody wants to understand FDA, it's called Reputation and Power.
Yeah. A lot of people don't want to criticize FDA.
Yeah. Because they will retaliate against your biotech or pharma company.
Yeah. And that retaliation can be initiated by a single human being.
Absolutely. The best analogy is you think about the TSA. Okay.
Have you flown recently?
Yeah.
Okay. Do you make any jokes about the TSA when you're in the TSA line?
Usually you don't want to, but they're a little more flexible.
You know what? Can I tell a story?
Sure.
Which is, it was similar to this. I was in Vegas at a club. I don't go to clubs.
Okay.
And I got kicked out for the- I think the first time in my life
for making a joke with a bouncer, because I had a camera with me and you know,
I had a lot to have a camera and I said, okay, cool. I'll take it out.
But I made a funny joke that I don't care to retell.
But he was just a little offended and he was like, you're out.
I don't care who you are. I don't care who you're with.
And then he proceeded to list me, the famous people he has kicked off in that club.
But there is, I mean, all of those, the reason I made the joke is I sensed that there was an
entitlement to this particular individual where the authority has gone to his head.
Respect my authority.
Yeah. I almost wanted to poke at that.
Right.
And I think the poking the authority, I quickly learned the lesson.
I have now been rewarded with the pride, I feel, for having poked the authority.
But now I'm kicked out of the club that would have resulted in a fun night with friends and so on.
Instead, I'm standing alone crying in Vegas, which is not a unique Vegas experience.
Sure.
It's actually a fundamental Vegas experience.
But that, I'm sure, that basic human nature happens in the FDA as well.
That's exactly right. So just like with the TSA, just to extend the analogy,
when you're in line at the TSA, you don't want to miss your flight.
That could cost you hundreds of dollars.
And so you comply with absolutely ludicrous regulations like, oh, three ounce bottles.
Well, you know what? You can take an unlimited number of three ounce bottles
and you can combine them into a six ounce bottle through the terrorist technology called mixing.
Advanced.
And the thing about this is everybody in line, actually some fairly high,
let's say, call it influence or net worth or whatever people fly.
Millions and millions and millions of people are subject to these absolutely moronic regulations.
It's all what I think security theater is Shrier's term. A lot of people know this term.
So millions of people are subject to it. It costs untold billions of dollars in terms of
delays and what if you just walk up to it, right? It irradiates people.
And this is another FDA thing, by the way. This is an FDA TSA team up.
Okay. In 2010, the TSA body scanners, there were concerns expressed.
But when it's a government to government thing, see a dot com is treated with extreme scrutiny
by FDA when it's another dot gov. Well, they're not trying to make a profit.
So they kind of just wave them on through.
Okay. So these body scanners were basically like applied to millions and millions of people.
And this huge kind of opt-in experiments almost, I think it's quite likely, by the way, that
if there was even a slightly increased cancer risk, that the net, you know, morbidity and
mortality from those would have outweighed the deaths from terrorism or whatever that would
prevent it, right? You can work out the numbers, but under, you can just get the math under reasonable
assumptions. It's probably true. If it had any increased morbidity and mortality. I've not
seen the recent things, but I've seen that a concern expressed, you know, 12 years ago.
Point being that despite the cost, despite how many people are exposed to it, despite how
obviously, patently ludicrous it is, you don't make any trouble, nor do people organize protests
or whatever about this, because it's something where people, the security theater of the whole
thing is part of it. Oh, well, if we took them away, there'd be more terrorism or something
like that. People think, right? But there, it is fascinating to see that the populace puts up with
it because it doesn't, one of my favorite things is to listen to Jordan Peterson, who, I think offline,
but I think also on the podcast, you know, it's somebody who resists authority in every way,
and even he goes to TSA with a kind of suppressed, like all the instructions, everything down to
whenever you have like the yellow thing for your feet, they force you to adjust it even slightly
if you're off. Just even, I mean, it's like, it's a Kafka novel. We're living, like TSA,
it makes me smile, it brings joy to my heart because I imagine Franz Kafka and I just walking
through there because it really is just deeply absurd. But, and then the whole motivation of the
mechanism becomes distorted by the individuals involved. The initial one was to reduce the
number of terrorist attacks, I suppose. Right. Now it's guns and drugs. Basically, it's like,
essentially what they've done is they've repealed the Fourth Amendment, right? Search and seizure,
they can do it without probable cause. Everybody is being searched. Everybody is a potential
terrorist. So they've got probable cause for everybody in theory. And so what they do,
they'll post on their website, the guns and drugs or whatever that they seized in these
scanners. Well, of course, if you search everybody, you're gonna find some criminals or
whatever. But the cost of doing that is dramatic. Moreover, the fact that people have sure been
trained to have, you know, compliance, it's like the Soviet Union, right? Where, you know,
just crudgingly, all right, go along with this extremely stupid thing. What's my point? The
point is, this is a really stupid regulation that has existed in plain sight of everybody for 20
years. We're still taking off our shoes. Okay, because some shoe bomber, whatever number of years
ago, okay? All of this stuff is there as opposed to, there's a zillion other things you could
potentially do, different paradigms for, quote, airport security, but now apply that to FDA.
Just like a lot of what TSA does is security theater, arguably all of it. A lot of what
FDA does is safety theater. The difference is, there's far fewer people who go through the
aperture. They're the biotech and pharma CEOs, okay? So you don't have an understanding of
what it is to deal with them, number one. Number two is the penalty is not a few hundred dollars
of missing your flight. It is a few million dollars or tens or hundreds of millions of dollars for
getting your company subject to the equivalent of a retaliatory wait time, just like that bouncer
threw you out, just like the TSA officer, if you make a joke or, you know, they can just sit you
down and make you lose your flight, right? So two, can the FDA just silently impede the approval
of something and choke you out financially because you don't have enough runway to get funded, right?
So just impose more wait time. Guess what? Data is going to take another six months,
your company doesn't have the time, you die, right? If you live, you have to raise around at some
dilutive valuation and now the price gets jacked up on the other side. That's the one thing that
can give by the way in this whole process. When you push out timelines from days to get a vaccine
approved or a vaccine evaluated rather via challenge trials to months or years, the cost
during that time, it just increases nonlinearly, right? Because you can't iterate on the product.
All the normal observations, if it takes you 10 years to launch a product versus 10 days,
what's the difference in terms of your speed of variation, your cost, etc., right? So this is part
of what, it's not the only thing, there's other things, there's AMA and CPT, there's other things,
but this is one of the things that jacks up prices in the US medical system, okay?
So now you have something where these CEOs, they're going through this aperture,
they are, they can't tell anybody about it because if you read Reputation and Power, okay,
I'm going to just quote this because it's an amazing, amazing book, right? It's written by a guy,
you know, Daniel Carpenter, a smart guy, but he's an FDA sympathizer. He fundamentally thinks it's
like a good thing or what have you. Nevertheless, I respect Carpenter's intellectual honesty because
he quotes the CEOs in the book, you know, verbatim and you give some paragraphs. And essentially,
from their descriptions, it's like, think about like a Vietnam War thing where you've got a POW
and they're like blinking through their eyes, I've been tortured, okay? That is the style,
when you read Carpenter's book, you read the quotes from these CEOs, let me see if I can find it.
Do you recommend the book? It's a good book, yeah. Or it's now a little bit outdated, okay?
Because it's like, you know, almost 10 years old. Still, as a history of the FDA,
it is well worth reading. And by the way, the reason I say it like the FDA is so
insanely important. It's so much more important than many other things that people
talk about, but they don't talk about it, right? I just want to read his little blurb for it,
right? This is 2010. The US Food and Drug Administration is the most powerful regulatory
agency in the world. How did the FDA become so influential? And how does it wield its
extraordinary power? Reputation power traces the history of FDA regulation pharmaceuticals,
revealing how the agency's organizational reputation has been the primary source of its
power is also one of its ultimate constraints. Carpenter describes how the FDA cultivated
reputation for competence and vigilance throughout the last century and how this organizational
image has enabled the agency to regulate while resisting efforts to curb its own authority.
First of all, just that description alone, you're like, wait a second,
he is describing this as an active player. It's not like a DMV kind of thing, which is passed
through. It's talking about cultivating a reputation, its power, resisting efforts to curb
its own authority, right? The thing is, now you're kind of through the looking glass, you're like,
wait a second, this is kind of language I don't usually hear for regulatory agencies.
The thing is, the kind of person who becomes the CEO of a giant company, what do they want to do?
They want to expand that company. They want to make more profit. Similarly, the kind of person
who comes to run a regulatory agency or one of the subunits, that person wants to expand its ambit.
Okay. But is that always obvious inside to interrupt? But for the CEO of the company,
I know that the philosophical ideal of capitalism is you want to make the thing more profitable,
but we're also human beings. Do you think there's some fundamental aspect to which we want to do
a lot of good in the world? Sure. But the fiduciary duty will push people to get the ambitious,
you know, the profit maximizing expansionist CEO is selected for, right? Basically, they believe
crucially, they're not just, this is important, they're not just, I mean, some of them are
grant the photo, make as much money as possible, but they believe in the mission. Okay. They've
come to believe in the mission and that is the person who's selected. Chomsky actually had this
good thing, which is like, I believe that you believe what you believe, but if you didn't believe
what you believe, you wouldn't be sitting here. Right. So they select for the kind of people
that are able to make a lot of money. And in that process, those people are able to have
constructed narrative that they're doing good, even though what they were selected for is the
fact that they can make a lot of money. Yeah. And they may actually be doing good. But the thing is,
with CEOs, we have a zillion images and television and media movies of the evil corporation and the
greedy CEO. We have some concept of what CEO failure modes are like. Okay. Now, when have you ever seen
an evil regulator? Can you name a fictional portrayal of an evil regular? Can you name an
evil CEO? Yeah, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot. But that's so interesting. I'm searching for a deeper
lesson here. You're right. You're right. I mean, there is portrayals, especially in sort of
authoritarian regimes or the Soviet Union, where there's bureaucracy, Chernobyl, you can kind of
see within that there's the story of the regulator. But yes, it's not as plentiful. And it's also
doesn't have, often doesn't have a face to it. It's almost like bureaucracy is this amorphous
thing that results. And you want individually, you see, they're just obeying somebody else.
There's not a face to it of evil. That's right. The evil is the entire machine.
That's right. That's what I call the school of fish strategy, by the way. It's something where
you are an individual and you can be signaled out. But there's more accountability for one person's
bad tweets than all the wars in the Middle East, because it's a school of fish. Right? So if the
establishment is wrong, if the bureaucracy is wrong, they're all wrong at the same time. Who
could have known? Whereas if you deviate, then you are a deviation who can be hammered down.
Okay. Now the school of fish strategy is unfortunately very successful because truth is
whatever, if you just always ride with the school of fish and turn when they turn and so on,
unless there's a bigger school of fish that comes in, you basically can never be proven wrong.
Right? And this is actually, of course, someone who believes in truth and believes in
innovation and so on, just physiologically can't ride with the school of fish. You just have to
say what is true or do what is true. Right? Still, you've described correctly how it's faceless.
Right? So I will give two examples of fictional portrayals of evil regulators.
One is actually the original Ghostbusters. Okay. Not exactly that one, but yes. Yeah. So the EPA
is actually the villain in that, where they flip a switch that lets out all the ghosts in the city.
And essentially, the guy is coming in with a head of steam as this evil regulator that just
totally arrogant, doesn't actually understand the private sector or the consequences of their actions
and they force the, and crucially they bring a cop with them with a gun. So it shows that a regulator
is not simply some piece of paper, but it is the police. Right? And that cop with the gun forces
the Ghostbusters to like release the containment and the whole thing spreads. Yeah. A second example
is Dallas Buyers Club, which is more recent. And that actually shows the FDA blocking a guy who
with a life-threatening illness, you know, with AIDS from getting the drugs to trees condition
and from getting it to other people. Right? Those are just two portrayals, but in general,
what you find is when you talk about FDA with people, one thing I'll often hear from folks is
like, why would they do that? Right? They have no mental model of this. They kind of think of it as
why would the, why would this thing, which they think of as sort of the DMV, they don't think
of the DMV as like this active thing. Okay. Why would the FDA do that? Well, it is because it's
filled with some ambitious people that want to keep increasing the power of the agency just
like the CEO wants to increase the profit of the company. Right? I use that word ambit, right?
Why ambit? Because these folks are, we know the term greedy, right? These folks are power hungry.
They want to have the maximum scope and sometimes regulatory agencies collide with each other,
right? Even though FDA is under HHS, sometimes it collides with HHS and they've got regulations
at conflict. You know, for example, HHS says everybody's supposed to be able to have access
to their own medical record. FDA didn't want people to have access to their own personal
genomes. That conflicts, okay? And both of those are kind of anti-corporate statutes that were put
out with HHS's thing being targeted at the hospitals and FDA being targeted at the personal
genomic companies, but those conflicted, right? It's a little bit like CFTC and SEC have a door jam
over who will regulate cryptocurrency, right? Sometimes regulators fight each other,
but they fight each other. They fight companies. They are active players.
This reputation and power book, the reason I mention it is, I want to see if I can find this
quote. So let me see if I can find this quote. Reputation and power organizational image and
pharmaceutical regulation at the FDA. So Genentech's executive, G. Kirk Robb, right? Robb would describe
regulatory approval for his products as a fundamental challenge facing his company,
and he would depict the administration in a particularly vivid metaphor. I've told the story
hundreds of times to help people understand the FDA. When I was in Brazil, I worked on the Amazon
River for many months selling teramison for Pfizer. I hadn't seen my family for eight or nine months.
They were flying into Sao Paulo and I was flying down from some little village
on the Amazon to Manus and then to Sao Paulo. I was a young guy in his twenties. I couldn't
wait to see the kids. One of them was a year old baby. The other was three. I missed my wife.
There's a quonset hut in front of just a little dirt strip with a single engine
plane to fly me to Manus. I roll up and there's a Brazilian soldier there.
The military revolution happened literally the week before. So this soldier is standing there
with his machine gun and he said to me, you can't come in. I was speaking pretty good Portuguese by
that time. I said, my God, my plane, my family, I got to come in. He said again, you can't come in.
I said, I got to come in. And he took his machine gun, took the safety off, and pointed at me and
said, you can't come in. And I said, oh, now I got it. I can't go in there. And that's the way I
always describe the FDA. The FDA is standing there with a machine gun against the pharmaceutical
industry. So you better be their friend rather than their enemy. They are the boss. If you're a
pharmaceutical firm, they own you body and soul. Okay, that's the CEO of a successful company,
Genentech. He says he's told the story hundreds of times and regulatory approval is a fundamental
challenge facing his company. Because if you are regulated by FDA, they are your primary customer.
If they cut the cord on you, you have no other customers. And in fact, until very recently
with the advent of social media, no one would even tell your story. It was assumed that you were some
sort of, you know, corporate criminal that they were protecting the public from that you're going
to put poison and milk, you know, like the melamine scandal in China. I'm not saying those things
don't exist, by the way, they do exist. That's why people are like, they can immediately summon to
mind all the examples of corporate criminals, right? That's why I mentioned those fictional
stories, those templates. Even if Star Wars doesn't exist, how many times have you heard
a Star Wars metaphor or whatever for something, right? Breaking bad, you know, go ahead.
Yeah, but the pharmaceutical companies are stuck between rock and a hard place because
the reputation, if they go to Twitter, they go to social media, they have horrible reputation.
So it's like, they don't know. Yes. But why is that? Because reputation and power, FDA beat down
the reputation of pharma companies just like EPA helped beat down the reputation of oil companies.
And as it says over here, right? In practice, dealing with the fact of FDA power meant a
fundamental change in corporate structure and culture. At Abbott and at Genentech, Rob's most
central transformation was in creating a culture of acquiescence towards a government agency.
As was done at other drug companies in the late 20th century, Rob essentially fired officials
at Abbott who were insufficiently compliant with the FDA. What that means is de facto
nationalization of the industry via regulation, just to hover on that. That's a really big deal
because if their primary customer is this government agency, then it has nationalized it
just indirectly, right? This is partially what's just happened with Microsoft, Apple, Google,
Amazon, the other MAGA. They have been... That's funny. Well done. Yeah. I didn't even think about
that. That's well done. So I have this tweet of MAGA Republicans and MAGA Democrats.
Oh, damn it. So many things you've said today will just get stuck in my head. They changed
the way you think. Catchy, something about catchy phrasing of ideas makes me even more powerful.
So yeah. Okay. So that's happening in the tech.
It's happening in tech. So Facebook is the outlier because Zuck still controls the company.
But just like, I mean, why had tech had a good reputation for a while? Because there wasn't
a regulatory agency whose justification was regulating these corporate criminals, right?
Once that is the case, the regulatory agency basically comes back to Congress each year.
And if you look at its budget approvals, it's saying, we find this many guys. We found this
many violations, right? They have an incentive to exaggerate the threat in the same way that a
prosecutor or policeman has a quota, right? Like, these are the police. One way I describe it also
is like a step down transformer is you have high voltage electricity generated at the power plant
and it comes over the wires and then there's step down transformers that turn it into a lower voltage
that you can just deal with out of your appliances, right? Similarly, you have something where
the high voltage of like the US military or the police and that is transmitted down into a little
letter that comes in your mailbox saying, pay your $50 parking ticket,
where it's a piece of paper so you don't see the gun attached to it. But if you were to defy that,
it's like Grand Theft Auto where you get one star, two star, three stars, four stars, five stars,
and eventually you have some serious stuff on your hands, okay? So once you understand that
every law is backed by force like that Brazilian guy with the machine gun that Rob mentioned,
these guys are the regulatory police. Now, see, for a time what happened was
you had the captured industry because all of the folks who were in pharmaceuticals
were, as Carpenter said, a culture of acquiescence towards the FDA. The FDA was their primary customer.
So just like in a sense it's rational, Amazon talks about being customer obsessed, right?
What Rob did was rational for that time, right? What G-Curb Rob did was saying our customer is
the FDA, that's our primary customer, nobody else matters, they are satisfied first. Every
single trade-off that has to be made is FDA, right? And really, that's why the two most
important departments that many pharmaceutical companies argue with all are regulatory affairs
and IP, not R&D, right? Because one is the artificial scarcity of regulation, which jacks up the price,
and the other is artificial scarcity of the patent, which allows people to maintain the high price,
right? So this entire thing is just like college education. These things may at some point have
been a good concept, but the price has just risen and risen and risen until it's at the
limit price and beyond, okay? So what has changed? What's changed is in the 2010s, late 2000s and
2010s and so on, with the advent of social media, with the advent of a bunch of millionaires like
who are independent, with the advent of Uber and Airbnb, right? With the advent of cryptocurrency,
with the diminution of trusted institutions, it used to be really taboo to even talk about the
FDA is potentially bad in like 2010, 2009, okay? But now, people have just seen face plant after
face plant by the institutions, and people are much more open to the concept that they may actually
not have it all together. And I think you could probably see some tracking poll or something like
that, but wouldn't be surprised if it's like a 20 or 30 point drop after the CDC failed to control
disease and the FDA failed, and the entire biomedical regulatory establishment and scientific
establishment was saying masks don't work before they do. This was just a train crash of all the
things that you're paying for that you supposedly think are good. As I mentioned, one response is
to go Q and on and people say, oh, don't trust anything, but the better response
is decentralizing FDA, okay? So I will say one other thing, which is I mentioned this concept
of improving the form 3500B where you like scan, go ahead. Yeah, right. That just makes me laugh that
I could just tell the form sucks by the fact that it has that code name. Sorry. Yeah, exactly,
right? UX is broken at every layer. Yeah, so they have a bad yelp for drugs. Could we make a better
one? We could make a better one, just modern UX. The key insight here, by the way, which is a non
obvious point, and I've got a whole talk on this actually, that I should probably release. I actually
did like almost eight, nine years ago. It's called regulation is information. Product quality is a
digital signal. Okay, what do I mean by that? Basically, when I talk about exit, exit the
the Fed, that's the crypto economy, right? What does exit the FDA look like? Well,
one key insight is that many of the big scale tech companies can be thought of as cloud regulators
rather than land regulators. What do I mean by that? Well, first, what is regulation? People do
want a regulated marketplace. They want a quality ratings, like on a one to five star scale,
and B, bands of bad actors, like the zero star frauds and scammers and so on. And these are
distinct, right? Somebody who's like a low quality but well intentioned person is different than a
smart and evil person. Those are two different kinds of failure modes you could have in a marketplace,
right? Why is it rational for people to want a regulated marketplace, especially for health,
because they want to pay essentially one entry cost, and then they don't have to evaluate everything
separately where they may not have the technical information to do that, right? You don't want
to go to Starbucks and put a dipstick into every coffee to see if it's poisoned or something like
that. You sort of want to enter a zone where you know things are basically good, and you pay that
one diligence cost on the zone itself, right? Whether it's a digital or physical zone, and then
the regulator's taken care of it, and they've baked in the regulatory cost into some subscription fee
of some kind, right? So the thing is, the model we've talked about is the land regulator of a
nation state and a territorially bounded thing. But the cloud regulator, what's a cloud regulator?
That is Amazon star ratings, that's Yelp, that is eBay, that is Airbnb, that is Uber and Lyft,
and so on and so forth. It's also actually Gmail and Google. Why? Because you're doing spam filtering,
and you are doing ranking of emails with priority inbox, right? With Google itself,
they ban malware links, right? So the bad actors are out, and they're ranking them, right? How about
Apple? The App Store, right? They ban bad actors, and they do star ratings. When you start actually
applying this lens, PayPal, you know, they've got a reputation, every single web service that's at
the scale of like tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people has had to build a cloud regulator,
and the crucial thing is that it scales across borders. So you can use the data from Mexico
to help somebody in Moldova or vice versa, right? Because it's fundamentally international, right?
Those ratings, do you have a network effect? And there's another aspect to it, which is these are
better regulators than the land regulators. For example, Uber is a better regulator than the
taxi medallions. Why? Every ride is GPS tracked. There's ratings on both the driver and the passenger
side. Both parties, you know, know that payment can be rendered in a standard currency, right?
If you have below a certain star rating on either side, you get de-platformed and so on to protect
either rider or driver, and on and on, right? What does that do? Think about how much better that is
than taxi medallions, rather than a six-month or annual inspection. You have reports from every
single rider, okay? Before Uber, it was the, you know, the taxi drivers and taxi regulators were in
a little monopoly locally, okay? Because they were the persistent actors in the ecosystem. Taxi
writers had nothing in common, didn't even know each other. Some, you know, in New York, some guy
gets into taxi, another guy, they had no way to communicate with each other. So the persistent
actors in the ecosystem were the regulators and the drivers, and they had this cozy kind of thing,
and medallion prices just kept going up, and this was the sort of collaboration on artificial scarcity.
Afterwards, with Uber and Lyft and other entrants, you had something interesting, a different kind
of regulator driver fusion. If you assume regulatory capture exists and lean into it,
Uber is the new regulator, and Uber drivers are the drivers, Lyft is the competing regulator,
and Lyft drivers are the new drivers, okay? So you have a regulator driver fusion versus another
regulator driver fusion. You no longer have a monopoly, you have multiple parties, okay? You
have a competitive market. This is the concept of like polycentric law, right? Where you have
multiple different legal regimes in the same jurisdiction overlapping that you can choose
between with a tap of a button, right? All these concepts from like libertarian theory like,
you know, polycentric law or catalytic, all these things are becoming more possible
now that the internet has increased microeconomic leverage,
and because that exit is now possible. Now, you may argue, oh, well, Lyft and Uber,
they're not profitable anymore, and there's two different criticisms of them. One is, oh,
they're not profitable, or oh, they're charging too much, and I think part of this is because
of certain kinds of, the regulatory state has caught up to try to make them uncompetitive.
For example, they don't allow people in some states to identify themselves as independent
contractors, even if they are part-time, okay? There's various other kinds of rules and regulations,
you know, in Austin for a while, Uber was even banned, what have you, right? Net-net, though,
like Uber, Grab, Gojek, Lyft, DD, like ride sharing as a concept is now out there, and whatever the
next version is where it's self-driving, like, well, it's like a very hard-fought battle,
and the regulatory state keeps trying to push things back into the garage.
This is a fundamentally better way of just doing regulation of taxis. Similarly, Airbnb for hotels,
I mean, it's basically the same thing, okay? And Airbnb could use competition, I think that
it would be good to have, you know, like competition for them, and there are other
kinds of sites opening up, but the fundamental concept of the cloud regulator now, let's apply it
here. Once you realize regulation is information, the way you'd set up a competitor to FDA, or SEC,
or FAA, or something like that, is you just do better reviews. Just start with that. That's
pure information. You're under free speech. That's like still, you know, the most
defended thing, literally just publishing reviews, and not just reviews by any old person.
It turns out that FDA typically will use expert panels, whether it's expert panels,
it's like professors from Harvard, or, you know, things like that. So what that is,
is this concept of a reputational bridge. What you want to do is you want to have folks who are,
let's say, biotech entrepreneurs, or they're, you know, profs like Sinclair or what have you,
you do want to have the reviews of the crowd, okay? We also want to have, especially in medicine,
right now, so you want to have the reviews of experts of some kind. So there's going to be
defectors from the current establishment, okay, just like, you know, there are profs who defected
from computer science academia to become Larry and Sergey and whatever, you know, or they weren't
pros, they were grad students, right? And the same thing, you'll have defectors who have the
credentials from the old world, but can build up the new, just like there's folks from Wall
Street who have come into cryptocurrency and helped legitimate it, right? Just like there's
folks who left Salzburger to come to Substack, okay? You know, we have these folks who, by
defecting, they help, and then they're also supplemented by all this new talent coming in,
right? That combination of things is how you build a new system. It's not completely
by itself, nor is it trying to reform the old at some fusion, okay? So in this new system,
who do you have? You have, like, the most entrepreneurial and innovative MDs. You have
the most entrepreneurial and innovative professors. And you have the founders of actual new products
and stuff. And they're giving open source reviews of these products. And they're also building a
community that will say, look, we want this new drug or we want this new treatment or we want
this new device, and we're willing to crowdfund 10,000 units. So please give us the thing and
we'll write a very fair review of it, and we'll also all evaluate it as a community and so on.
So you turn these people from just passive patients into active participants in their health,
that's the community part, and they've got the kind of biomedical technical leadership there.
Now, what is the kind of prototype of something like this? Something like VitaDAO is very
interesting. Things like MoleculeDAO are very interesting. It'll start with things like
longevity. And why is that? Because the entire model of FDA, this 20th century model,
is wait for somebody to have a disease and then try to cure them. Versus, you know,
saying an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Why are we not actually tracking folks and
getting a constant dashboard on yourself so you can see whether things are breaking,
and then you deal with it just like you've got server uptime things. You don't wait necessarily
for the site to go down. You start seeing, oh, response rates are spiking, we need to add more
servers, right? You have some warning, okay? Even 10 years ago, there's this article called
The Measured Man in the Atlantic where this guy, physicist Larry Smarr, okay? What he was doing is
he was essentially doing a bunch of measurements on himself. And he was finding that there were
predictors of inflammation that were spiking, and he went to the doctor, showed the charts,
and the doctor was like, I can't do anything with this. Then that turned out to be an early
warning of like a serious condition that he had to, I think, go for like, you know, surgery or
something. And he was starting to think, well, look, the way that we're doing medicine right now is
it's not quite like pre germ theory of disease, but it is pre continuous diagnostics.
Okay. Pre continuous diagnostics, just to talk about this for a second, this is, I mentioned one
angle on which you go after FDA, which is like the, the better phase four, right? I've mentioned the
concept of better reviews in general, okay? I mentioned Vitadal, which is like a community
that is going after longevity. Let's talk about continuous diagnostics. So basically,
we know better what is going on in Bangalore or Budapest than in our own body.
That's actually kind of insane to think about this stuff that, you know, it's all the other side
of the world 10,000 miles away, but, you know, a few millimeters away, you don't really know what's
going on, right? And that's starting to change with all the quantified cell devices, the hundreds
of millions of Apple watches and Fitbits and stuff, right? You're also starting to see continuous
glucose meters, which is very important. They're starting to give you readouts. People are seeing,
wow, this is spiking my insulin or this is spiking my blood sugar. And it might be something you
didn't predict. It varies for different people. For some people, you know, banana isn't a big
deal for others. It's actually quite bad for the blood sugar. What happens when you extend that?
Well, about 10 years ago, a guy, Mike Snyder, a professor at Stanford, did something called the
Intergrome, where he just threw the kitchen sink of all the diagnostics he could at himself over
the period of, I think, a few weeks or a few months, I've got the exact duration. And he's able
to do things where he could see during that period, he like got it cold or something. And you could
see in the expression data, the gene expression data, that he was getting sick before he felt sick.
He could also see that something about that viral infection made him develop diabetes-like
symptoms, if I'm remembering it accurately. So you could see, oh, wait a second, these are things
that I can see in my readouts that I would only have the vaguest interpretation of as a human
as like a human being, right? And moreover, he could take, you know, I don't think he did this,
but if you took treatments, if you took drugs, right, you could actually show what your
steady state was if you tracked over time, show what your disease state or sick state was. And
then this drug pushes you back into non-disease state. You can actually get a quantitative readout
of what steady state was, right? And that steady state, your expression levels across all these
genes, your small molecules, basically everything you can measure, that's going to vary from person
to person, right? What's healthy and natural for you may be a different baseline than for me.
For example, people who are small example, people who are South Asian or have dark skin,
tend to have vitamin D deficiency. Why? Because we need a lot of sunlight. So
often inside you're tapping on your screen. So what do we do? Take like actually significant
vitamin D infusions, okay? That's like a small example of where baseline is different between
people, okay? So continuous diagnostics, what could that mean? That could mean, you know,
things like the continuous glucose meter, it's quantified self, it's like continuous blood
testing, right? So you have a so-called mobile phlebotomist. This is something which
phlebotomist takes blood, right? Mobile phlebotomy would come to your office, come to your remote
office. This is a great business for people. I think, you know, you can revisit this in 2022.
People tried this in the 2010s, but I think it's worth revisiting. Mobile phlebotomist comes every
week or every month, takes blood, runs every test, right? Maybe that's, you know, a few thousand
dollars a year, maybe eventually gets to a few hundred dollars a year. And that's expensive in
some ways. But boy, that's better health insurance in other ways. Yeah, that's amazing. So one,
there's a bunch of companies that do this, and I actually would love to learn more about them.
One of them is a company called Inside Tracker that sponsors this podcast. They do that. But
the reason I really appreciate them, they're the first ones that introduced me to,
like, how easy this, but it's also depressing how little information exactly as you beautifully put
once again, how little information we have about our own body in a continuous sense. Yes. And
actually, also sadly, even with Inside Tracker, as I collect that data, how not integrated that
data is with everything else. Right. If I wanted to opt in, I would like, I can't just like riffing
off the top of my head, but I would like Google Maps to know what's going on inside my body.
That's right. Maybe I can't intuit at first why that application is useful, but there could be
an incredible, like that's where the entrepreneurial spirit builds is like, what can I do with that
data? Can I make the trip more less stressful for you and adjust to Google Maps and that kind
of thing? That's right. Yeah. So, I mean, one of the things about this, by the way, is because
there are so many movies made about Theranos, okay, that's one of the reasons why people have
sort of been scared off from doing diagnostics to some extent, okay? Why? Because VCs are like,
oh, is this another Theranos? And like, the diligence and everything, everyone's looking
at it, oh, blood testing, one drop of blood, huh? It hurts the recruiting. Essentially,
a lot of the media and stuff around that basically has pathologized the thing that
we want to have a lot more entrance in, right? Now, one way of thinking about it is,
FDA has killed way more people than Theranos has, all right? Way more. Just take drug lag alone,
okay? Whenever you have a drug that works and reduce morbidity and mortality after it was actually
generally available, but was delayed for months or years, the integral under that curve is the
excess morbidity and mortality attributable to FDA's drug lag. You could go back and do that study
across lots and lots of different drugs, and you probably find quite a lot. Alex Tabarak
and others have written on this, right? Daniel Henninger has written on this, okay? That's just
like one example. I mean, I gave the pandemic example, the fact that they held up the EUAs
for the tests and didn't do challenge trials. That's like a million American dead that could
have been orders of magnitude less if we had gotten the vaccine out to a vulnerable population
sooner, okay? So you're talking about something that has a total monopoly on global health,
and you can't know what it is without that unless you have zones that are FDA free,
but that have some form of regulation. As I mentioned, it's a V3. It's not going back
to zero regulation. Everybody in a manner for themselves, but it's a more reputable regulator
just like Uber is a better regulator than the tax medallions, right?
Yeah. I mean, your paintings such an incredible picture. You're making me wish you were FDA
commissioner, but I- There are a bunch of people who tweeted something like that after the pandemic,
whatever. Go ahead. Is that possible? If you were just given, if you became FDA commissioner,
could you push for those kinds of changes, or is that really something that has to come from
the outside? Short answer is no, and the longer answer, meaning- I'd be funny if you're like,
the short answer is no, the long answer is yes. So basically, see, a CEO of a company,
it's, well, it's very difficult. They can hire and fire, right? So in theory, they can do surgery
on the organism, and Steve Jobs took over Apple and was able to hire and fire, raise money, do
this that he basically had root over Apple, that he was a system administrator, right?
He had full permissions. As FDA commissioner, you do not have full permissions over FDA,
let alone the whole structure around it, right? If you're FDA commissioner, you are not the CEO
of the agency, okay? Lots of these folks there have career tenure. They can't be fired. They
can't even really be disciplined. There's something called the Douglas Factors. You ever
heard of the Douglas Factors? It's like the Miranda rights for federal employees, okay?
You have the right to man size it. So basically, if you've heard that federal employees can't be
fired, the Douglas Factors are how that's actually operationalized. When you try to fire somebody,
it's this whole process where they get to appeal it and so on and so forth. And they're sitting in
the office while you're trying to fire them. And they're complaining to everybody around them that
this guy's trying to fire me. He's such a bad guy, blah, blah, blah, right? And everybody around,
even if they may think that guy is doing a bad job, they're like, wait a second,
he's trying to fire you. You might try to fire me too. And so anybody who tries to fire somebody at
FDA just gets a face full of lead for their troubles. What they instead will do is sometimes
let's just transfer somebody to the basement or something so they don't have to deal with them
if they're truly bad, okay? But the thing about this is there is only one caveat, Douglas Factor
number eight, the notoriety of the offense or its impact upon the reputation of the agency.
There's that word again, reputation of reputation and power. So the one way you can truly screw up
within a regulatory bureaucracy is if you sort of endanger the like annual budget renewal.
Think of it as like this mini death star that's coming to dock against the max death star for
its annual refuel. And it's talking about all the corporate criminals that it's prosecuted,
the quotas, like the police quotas, the ticketing. And if they don't have a crisis,
they will invent one. Again, just like TSA, just like other agencies, you're more familiar with,
you can kind of map it back. Look at the guns and drugs we've seized. And save an incentive for
creating these crises or manufacturing them or exaggerating them. And if you endanger that
refueling, that annual budget renewal or what have you, then the whole agency will basically
be like, okay, you're bad and you can be disciplined or sometimes with the rare accept, you can be
booted. But what that means is that FDA commissioner is actually a white elephant. It's a ceremonial
role, really, right? The term white elephants, like basically the Maharaja gives you a white
elephant as a gift. Seems great. Next day, it's eaten all of your grass, it's pooped on your lawn,
it has like just put a foot on your car and smashed it, but you can't give it away. It's a white
elephant, the Maharaja gave it to you, right? That's what being like FDA commissioner is. It's
the kind of thing where if, and a lot of people are drawn in like moths to the flame for these
titles of the establishment, I want to be head of this, I want to be head of that, right?
And really what it is, it's like, I don't know, becoming head of Kazakhstan in the mid 1980s
in the Soviet Union, the Kazakhstan SSR, Soviet Socialist Republic, before the thing was going
to like crumble potentially, right? In many ways, it's becoming, you know, folks who are just totally
sad of success getting these positions. But like a lot of the merit, all the folks with merit are
kind of leaving the government and going into, you know, tech or crypto or what have you, right?
So even if these agencies were hollow before in some ways, they're becoming hollower because
they have less talent there, right? So A, you can't hire and fire very easily. You can hire a
little bit, you can't really fire. B, a lot of the talent has left the building, what was there?
C, we're entering the decentralizing era. And D, you know, like, be like Satoshi. Satoshi
founded Bitcoin because he knew you could not reform the Fed. There's everybody is trying to
go and reform, reform, reform. The reason they're trying to reform is we haven't figured out the
mechanism to build something new. And now perhaps we have that. So I've named a few of them, right?
I'll name one more related to the literates. Fitness is actually the backdoor to a lot of medicine.
Okay, why is that? You go to any, you know, conference, it could be neurology, it could be
cardiology. You'll find somebody who's giving a talk that says something along the lines of
fitness is the ultimate drug. Maybe not today when people are saying, oh, a fat phobic river,
but not too many years ago, you'd see somebody, people saying fitness is the ultimate drug. If
we could just prescribe fitness in a pill, that would improve your cardiovascular function,
your no-large function, it deals with depression. By the way, in that case, the use of the word
drug means medicine. Medicine, yeah, sure, sure, sure. Fitness is the ultimate medicine, yeah.
Yeah, the ultimate medicine, right? So if they could just prescribe the effects of it, it's just
like, boom, just massive effect, right? Like, you're fit enough, you do resistance training, it
helps with preventive diabetes. Every kind of thing in the world, you see a significant treatment
effect. Yet your fitness is your own responsibility. You go to some gym, 24-hour fitness, what do
they have? They have on the wall, exhortations, like your body is your responsibility, right?
Am I right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, go ahead. No, it's just, it's hilarious.
Yes, yes, yes. It's funny, it's true, right? Yeah, it's funny because it's true. And so your
fitness, your diet, that's your responsibility. But when you go into a doctor's office,
suddenly it becomes lie back and think of England. Okay, suddenly you become passive. Suddenly,
oh, your doctor, your doctor is Dr. Google? Well, your doctor must be a moron. You're going and
trying to take care of yourself, you're googling symptoms. Oh, how stupid you are. I have a medical
degree. And that doctor, see, the thing is, if you come in and you've self-diagnosed,
or you've done some of your own research, if you're right, they're, and then they've got an ego
about it, they're undermined. And if you're wrong, they're like, you know, ha ha, you're arrogant.
But either way, they have, if they've got this kind of mindset, they have an incentive to resist
the patient taking care of themselves, isn't that the doctor's job, right? And they're kind of taught
to behave like this, many of them. So what that means then is that intervention of that 15 or 30
minute appointment with the doctor, whatever drug they prescribe, better hit you like Thor's hammer
to put you back on the straight and narrow. Because that's only with you for like a few
seconds, you know, a few minutes or whatever, the doctor's only with you for a few minutes,
the drug is only, you know, some drugs are very powerful, so they actually do work like this,
okay? But your fitness is your own responsibility. And that's a continuing forcing function every
day. And again, we get back to decentralization, right? The decentralization of responsibility
from somebody thinking of themselves merely as a patient to an active participant in their own
health, who's doing their own monitoring of their own health, right? And logging all their stuff,
who's eating, you know, properly and looking at the effect of their diet on things like their,
you know, continuous glucose monitor as a V1, but other things, right? Who is, you know, as fit as
they can possibly be, like, these are kind of obvious things. But why is this the back door
to medicine? Because since FDA only regulates those things that are meant to diagnose and treat a
disease, all the stuff that is meant to improve an otherwise healthy person is potentially out of
their purview. Supplements are one interesting aspect that they were carved out in the mid-90s.
And that's why the supplement industry is big, because FDA doesn't have as tight a reign on that.
But all of the Fitbit, CGM, continuous glucose meter type stuff, you can crank out all kinds of
things that help people get fitter, that will also actually have just general health value,
but you're not quite marketing them to diagnose or treat, you know, a disease. See what I'm saying?
You're marketing them for the purpose of fitness. This is a market. Why? Because psychologically,
people, they don't like paying to get back to normal. But they will absolutely pay tons of
money to get better than normal. They'll pay for fitness, they'll pay for makeup, they'll pay for
hair, they'll pay for this and that. So that's actually the back door. And you can do tons of
things there where obviously being healthier is also protective. You can actually show the
studies on this. So this way, you build out all the tooling to get healthier. And that actually
helps on this axis. Fewer things are just kind of a US medical system while I'm on it. Because you
got me on this topic. I love this. Okay. This is the most eloquent exploration of the US medical
system and how to improve it, how to fix it and what the future looks like. I love it.
So basically, so part of it is decentralizing control back to the individual, right? Now,
I have talked about FDA at length, but let me talk about some other broken parts of the US system,
right? There's like AMA, there's CPT, there's CPOM, there's this, you know, like all these
regulations which see normally in capitalism, you have a buyer and a seller, right? Da. In medicine,
you have third-party regulation and fourth-party pricing and fifth-party payment. Okay. So third-party
regulation, FDA is regulating it. Fourth-party pricing, it is, you know, the CPT codes, right?
Fifth-party payment, it's the insurance companies, right? And just to discuss these bits of the system,
first, why are some people against capitalism in medicine? I actually understand why they're
against it because they are visualizing themselves on a gurney when they're being wheeled in and now
somebody at their moment of vulnerability is charging this insane price for their care and many
people in the US have had this horrible experience where they're bankrupted or scared of being
bankrupted by medical bills. Therefore, the concept of adding more capitalism medicine scares them
and they think it's horrible and you're some like awful greedy tech bro kind of thing, all right?
Let me say I understand that concern and let me, you know, kind of, let me tease that apart a
little bit, right? Basically, the most capitalistic areas of medicine are the most functional areas
of medicine. So let's say the place is where you can walk in and walk out, okay? Whether that's
dentistry, dermatology, plastic surgery, even veterinary medicine, which is not human, okay?
Where you can make a conscious decision, say, okay, I want this care or I don't want this,
I see a price list, I can pay cash, right? If I don't like it, I go to another dermatologist.
There's few dermatological emergencies, that's why dermatologists have a great quality of life,
okay? By contrast, when you're being wheeled in on a gurney, you need it right now,
okay? And you're unconscious or what have you or you're not in a capacity to deal with it, right?
And so these are the two extremes. It's like ambulatory medicine, you can walk around and pick
and like ambulance medicine, okay? And what that means is the more ambulatory the medicine,
the more legitimate capitalism is in that situation. People are okay with a dermatologist
basically turning you down because you don't have enough money and you go to another dermatologist
because you can comparison shop there, it's not usually an emergency, right? Whereas if you're
coming in with an ambulance, then people don't want to be turned down and I understand why, okay?
What this suggests, by the way, is that you should only have insurance for the edge cases.
Insurance should only cover the ambulance, not the ambulatory. And most people are losing
money on insurance, right? Because most people are paying more in in premiums than they are
getting out. It's just that this huge flight of dollars through the air that no one can make heads
or tails out of. Oh, the other aspect that's obviously broken out is employer provided health
insurance just started after World War II. So auto insurance is in a much more competitive market.
You don't whip out your auto insurance card at the gas station to pay for your gas, right? You
only whip it out when there's a crash, right? That's what quote health insurance should be.
And the Singapore model is actually a pretty good one for this where they have sort of a
mandatory HSA. You have to like put some money in that and that pays for your healthcare bills,
but then it's cash out of that. It's like a separate pocket that's sort of for savings to
pay for health. Health savings accounts. Health savings account, right? The thing about this is
once you realize, well, first, ambulatory medicine is capitalistic medicine. Ambulance medicine is
socialist medicine, okay? You want to shift people more towards ambulatory. Guess what?
That's in their interest as well. Now that brings us back to the monitoring, right? The continuous
monitoring where whether eventually it's Mike Snyder's Intergrome. The V1 is the quantified
cell from the Apple Watch and the continuous glucose meters. And the VN is the Mike Snyder
Intergrome. There's a site called Q.Bio, which is doing this also, right? Eventually this stuff
will hopefully just be in a device. It just measures tons and tons of variables on you, right?
There's ways of measuring some of these metabolites without breaking the skin.
So it's like, you don't have to keep breaking the skin over and over. There's various ways
of doing that. So now you've got something where you've got the monitoring, you've got the dashboards,
you've got the alerts. And just like this Larry Smar guy that I mentioned, the measured man,
you might be able to shift more and more things to ambulatory. And one of the things about this
also is the medical system is set up in a bad way where the primary care physician is the one who is
like not the top of their class, but the guys who are at the bottom of the pinball machine,
the surgeons and the radiologists. Once your stuff is already broken, okay? They're the ones
who are paid the most. So a lot of the skill collects at the post-break stage, right? Where
you actually want Doogie Hauser MD is at the upstream stage, okay? So you want this amazing,
amazing doctor there, right? How could we get that? I mentioned the app that doesn't exist,
which is like a better version of the 3500B, right? Here's another app that doesn't exist.
And this is one that FDA is actively quashed. Why can't you just take an image of a mole
or something like that? With the incredible cameras we have, a huge amount of medical imaging
should be able to be done at home. And it goes to doctors, whether it's in the US or the Philippines
or India, I mean, tele radiology exists, right? Why can you not do that for dermatology for
everything else? You should be able to literally just hold the thing up. And with a combination of
both AI and MDs, just diagnose. That should exist, right? Answer is there's a combination
of both American doctors and the FDA that team up to prevent this or slow this. And one argument
is, oh, the AI is not better than a human 100% of the time because it's not deployed yet.
Therefore, it could make an error. Therefore, it's bad, even if it's better than 99% of doctors,
90% of the time. Another argument is the software has to go through design control, okay? Now,
basically, once you understand how FDA works, basically imagine the most bureaucratic, frozen
process for code deployment at any company ever. And that is the most nimble thing ever
relative to FDA's design review. So just to review, A, talked about how FDA was blocking all this stuff.
B, talked about why ambulatory medicine is capitalist medicine, ambulance medicine is
socialist medicine. C, talked about how with the diagnostic stuff, we can shift it over to
ambulatory. D, talked about how there's lots of things where you could have a combination of
doctor and AI in an app that you kind of quickly self-diagnose. Some of this is happening now.
Some of the telemedicine laws were relaxed during COVID, where now people, a doctor from
Wyoming can prescribe for somebody in Minnesota, like some of that stuff was relaxed during COVID.
There's other broken things of medicalism, I'll just name two more and then kind of move on.
I mentioned like AMA and CPT. Those are two regulatory bodies. AMA American Medical Association,
CPT, Current Procedural Terminology. Basically, you know Marx's labor theory value, where people
are supposed to be paid on their effort, right? Of course, the issue with this is that you'd be
paying a physicist to try to dunk and they'd be trying, but they wouldn't actually probably be
able to do it. They'd be trying real hard, whereas you actually want to pay people on the basis of
results, right? Cheaply attained results are actually better than expensively attained non-results,
perhaps obvious, okay? Nevertheless, the way that the US medical system has payouts,
it's based on so-called RVUs, relative value units. And this is something where there's a
government body that sets these prices and it is, in theory, only for Medicare, but all the
private insurers key off of that. And AMA basically publishes a list of these so-called the CPT
codes, which is like the coding, the biomedical coding of this and what each medical process is
worth and whatnot. So it's like, I don't remember all the numbers, but it's like a five-digit code
and it's like, okay, I got a test for cyst fibrosis or a test for this or a test for that.
God help you if your medical billing is erroneous. Why? The insurance company will reject it
because it doesn't pay for that. This is this giant process of trying to encode
every possible ailment and condition into these CPT codes and that you can literally get
degrees in medical billing just for this. This enormous inefficient industry, like literally
medical billing is a whole field. What do you want to do when you grow up? I want to work in medical
billing. In medical billing, where everybody's mad at you at all times. Part of what happens is
when you give a treatment, when a doctor gives a treatment to a patient,
they can't like repo the treatment. Like a car, you sell a car, you can in theory repo the car.
So the patient has a treatment. Now, what happens? Well, the insurance company,
that treatment is perhaps provided, look, it's a lab test provided by a company. The company
builds the patient. The company is supposed to charge a high price. Why? The insurance company
wants it to try to collect from the patient. The patient is scared. Oh my God, they see this huge
price. They sometimes don't pay. Sometimes the insurance company doesn't pay either.
And when a company is stiffed by an insurance company, when a diagnostic company is stiffed
by an insurance company, it has to jack up the price and everybody else, right? Everything boils
down to the fact that you don't have a buyer and a seller. The doctor doesn't know the price of what
is being sold. The buyer doesn't know the price of what is being bought at the time it's being bought.
Neither party can really even set a free price because there's this RVU system that hovers above.
The buyer feels they've already bought it because they bought insurance. The insurance company
doesn't want to pay for it. Everybody is trying to push the price onto somebody else and not
actually show the sticker price of anything and hide everything and so on and so forth. Oh,
their thing about it is obviously lawsuits are over everything. Everybody's mad about everything.
It's health. People are dying. So everything is just optimized for optics as opposed to results,
right? Similarly, actually, many drugs are optimized for minimizing side effects and optics
rather than maximizing effects, which are totally different criteria, right? You might have, for
example, a drug that only cures 1,000 people but doesn't have any side effects versus one that
cures a million people but that has 10 really serious side effects a year, right? And the
second one would probably not happen because those side effects would be so big. Okay.
Okay. How do you attack this? I named a few examples but I actually think the
reform is going to come in part from outside the system. In particular, India is coming online.
Okay. Why is that important? Well, you may have encountered an Indian doctor or two,
okay? Maybe an Indian programmer, one or two, all right? And I do think telemedicine
could explode, right? Where you could have an Indian doctor in India and there's a U.S. doctor,
okay, who's like a dispatcher. You see what I'm saying? They've got all these other Indian
doctors behind them. They've got a telemedical app and you are now doing something where these
relatively inexpensive Indian doctors who are vetted by the American doctor or the doctor in
the jurisdiction of the license become the back end doctors of the world. To some extent,
this is already there with tele radiology and other kinds of things, right? But now that you've
got literally like a billion Indians who've just come online, okay, you have this huge pool of
folks who have a different attitude towards medicine. For example, it's a lot more cash payment
over there. For example, India is big on generic drugs. For example, during COVID, it had something
called, it has something called a rogue estate through which is a national telemedicine app.
Okay. The U.S. wasn't able to ship that. In some ways, India's digital infrastructure,
again, you'll have to read a post called The Internet Country by tigerfeathers.substack.com
and you'll see that actually India's national software infrastructure is surprisingly good.
It's not as good as China's in some ways, but it's like better than the U.S. is which is like
health.gov and non-existent. It's like kind of impressive how good some of India's software is.
The fact that it exists is good. So you have all these new doctors coming online.
India cranks out generics. Telemedicine is now more legal in the U.S. and you have cash payment in
India and in a lot of other places. You don't have the whole insurance employer health thing
and this market is growing. So you could have a sort of parallel market that starts evolving,
which is, and people are only doing some medical tourism or I think that's another exit from the
FDA, you have a parallel market that starts evolving that just starts from fundamentally
different premises. It's just cash, cash for everything. There's downsides with cash for
everything. There's a huge upside with cash for everything. Cash for everything means you get
customer service from the doctor. It means the prices are actually visible. It ideally pushes
you again towards more ambulatory medicine rather than ambulance medicine is monitoring,
constant monitoring with the quantified self and whatnot as opposed to just let your system fail
and then wheel you in. There's a reputational bridge because now we've had a couple of generations
almost of Indian doctors in the U.S. So people know that there's some very competent Indian
doctors. They're a good chunk of AMA and so they can serve lobby for this and you have plenty of
Indian engineers. Now, I'm not saying India alone is a panacea, but I do think that this is a large
enough parallel market to start doing interesting things. You could see sort of medical tourism,
medical migration to where it gives India an opportunity to basically let go of the constraints
of the FDA and innovate aggressively. And I mean, it's such a huge opportunity to
define the future of medicine and make a shit ton of money from a market that's desperate for it
in the United States because of all the over the regulation. That's right. And I think basically
it's something where the reason it needs... And that would fix the FDA, sorry to interrupt. Yes,
we fix the FDA by exiting the FDA. And then the FDA would dry out and then it would hopefully...
It might reform, it might dry out. And this is why people are, for example, they're traveling
across borders, they're getting orders from Canadian pharmacies. A lot of this type of stuff,
we can start to build alternatives. I mean, India's generic industry is really important
because it just doesn't enforce American IP there. So generic drugs are cheaper, right? And it's
quite competent. It's been around for a while. So there's enough proof points there where,
again, I'm not saying a panacea, it's going to be something which will require like American
and Indian collaboration. I think there's going to be a lot of other countries and so on that are
involved. But you can start to see another poll getting set up, which is a confident enough
civilization that is willing to take another regulatory path, right? And that is in some ways
doing better on national software than the US is. And it has enough for a bridge to the US
that it can be that simulation which you need, which is kind of something that outside poke,
right? I want to talk about India, but let me just kind of wrap up on this big FDA biomedical
kind of thing, right? With the book, the network state, the purpose of the network state... I want
people to be able to build different kinds of network states. I want people to build the vegan
village. I want people to be able to build a... If they want to do the bendic option, like a
Christian network... If people want to do different kinds of things, I'm open to many different things
and I will fund lots of different things. For me, the motivation is just like you needed to
start a new currency, Bitcoin. It was easier to do that than reform the Fed. I think it's
easier to start a new country than reform the FDA. And so I want to do it to in particular get to
longevity, right? Meaning longevity enhancement, right? And what does that mean? So in an interesting
way, and this will sound like a trite statement, but I think it's actually a deep statement,
or let me hopefully try to convince you it is. Crypto is to finance longevity is to the current
state of medicine. Why? It inverts certain fundamental assumptions, okay? So at first,
crypto looks like traditional finance. It's got the charts and the bands and you're buying, selling
so on. But what Satoshi did is he took fundamental premises and flipped them. For example, in the
traditional macroeconomic worldview, hyperinflation is bad, but deflation is also bad. So a little
inflation is good, right? In the traditional macroeconomic worldview, it's good that there are
custodians, banks that kind of intermediate the whole system, right? In the traditional worldview,
every transaction needs to be reversible because somebody could make a mistake and so on and so
forth, right? In the traditional worldview, you don't really have root access over your money.
Satoshi inverted all of those things, okay? Obviously, the big one is hyperinflation was
bad, but he also thought mild inflation was bad and deflation was good. That's just a
fundamental shift, okay? He gave you root access over your money. You're now a system
administrator of your own money. You can room-RF your entire fortune or send millions with a
keystroke. You are now the system administrator of your own money. That alone is why cryptocurrency
is important. If you want system administration access at times to computers, you'll want it to
currency, right? To be sovereign. There are other assumptions where the assumption is every
transaction is private in the existing system by default or it's visible only to the state,
whereas at least the Bitcoin blockchain, everything is public, right? There are various
kinds of things like this where he just inverted fundamental premises. Then the whole crypto
system, the crypto economy is in many ways a teasing out of what that means. Just to give
you one example, the US dollar, people have seen those graphs where it's like inflating and so it
just loses value over time and you've seen that, okay? Whereas, and most of the time,
it's just sort of denied that it's losing any value. The most high-brow way of defending it
is the US dollar trades off temporary short-term price stability for long-term depreciation
and Bitcoin makes the opposite trade-off. In theory, at least, long-term appreciation at the
expense of short-term price instability because there's a whole plunge protection team and so on.
Basically, there's various ways in which price stability is tried to be maintained in the medium
term at the expense of long-term depreciation. You need a reserve of assets to keep stabilizing
the dollar against various things. What does crypto medicine look like relative to fiat medicine to
make the same analogy, right? The existing medical system, it assumes that a quick death is bad and
early death is bad, but also that living forever is either unrealistic or impossible or undesirable
that you should die with dignity or something like that, okay? So, a little death is good.
That's the existing medical system. Whereas, the concept of life extension
and David Sinclair and what you call health span rejects that fundamental premise.
And it says, actually, the way to defeat cancer is to defeat aging. Aging is actually a program
biomedical biological process and we have results that are showing stopping or even
reversing aging in some ways. And so now, just like with the other thing, you say a quick death is
bad and so is actually death itself, right? So, we actually want significant life extension.
This is similar. It's very similar to what the rejection of the fiat system, right?
The fiat system says, a little inflation is good. Fiat medicine says, a little death is good.
Bitcoin says, actually, no inflation, just get more valuable over time. And crypto medicine says,
actually, let's extend life. This leads to all kinds of new things where you start actually
thinking about, all right, how do I maintain my health with diagnostics? How do I take control
of my health with the decentralization of medicine? All the stuff that I've been describing
sort of fits like longevity is traditional medicine as crypto is to traditional currency.
If we take those assumptions separately, so we take cryptocurrency aside,
is that to you obvious that letting go of this assumption about death, is that an
obvious thing? Is longevity obviously good? Versus, for example, the devil's advocate to that
would be what we want is to keep death and maximize the quality of life up until the end.
So that you ride into the sunset healthy. Somebody who was listening to the whole podcast
would say, well, Balje, just a few hours ago, you were saying this gerontocracy runs the U.S.
and they're all old and they don't get it, blah, blah, blah. And now you're talking about
making people live forever so there's never any new blood to wash them out. Ha-ha,
what a contradiction, right? It's funny that you're so on point across all the topics we
and all the topics we covered and the possible criticism. I love it. Well, just try and anticipate,
you know, some of them, right? Well done, sir. I think the argument on that is so long as you
have a frontier, it is okay for someone to live long, okay, so long as people can exit to a new
thing, number one. Number two is in order for us to go and, you know, colonize other planets and so
on, you know, if you do want to get to Mars, if you want to become, you know, Star Trek and,
you know, what have you, probably going to need to have, you know, like, you know,
just to survive a long flight, so to speak, you know, multiple light-year flight, you're going
to need to have life extension. So to become a pioneering, you know, interstellar kind of thing.
I know that's like, it's the kind of thing which sounds like, okay, yeah, and when we're on the
moon, we're going to need shovels, you know, it sounds like a piling a fantasy on top of a fantasy,
in that sense, but it's also something where if you're talking about the vector of our civilization,
where are we going? Well, I actually do think it's either anarcho-primitism or
optimism slash transhumanism. Either we are shutting down civilization, it's degrowth,
it's, you know, unabomber, et cetera, or it's the stars and escaping the prime number maze.
It's like, to me, it's obvious that we're going to, if we're to survive, expand out into space.
Yes. And it's obvious that once we do, we'll look back at anyone, which is currently most people,
that didn't think of this future, didn't anticipate this future, work towards this future
as Luddites, like as people who totally didn't get it. It will become obvious. Right now,
it's impossible, and then it will become obvious. Yes. It seems like, yes, longevity,
in some form, I mean, there could be a lot of arguments that the different forms of longevity
could take, but in some form, longevity is almost a prerequisite for the expansion out into the
cosmos. That's right. Expansion of longevity. There's also like a way to bring it back to
earth to an extent, which is, how were societies used to be judged? You may remember, people used
to talk about life expectancy as a big thing, right? Yeah. Life expectancy actually a very,
very, very good metric. Why? It's a ratio scale variable. You know, there's like four different
class of variables and statistics to talk about. Ratio scale is like years or meters or kilograms.
Okay. Then you have interval scale, where plus and minus means something, but there's no absolute
zero. Then you have ordinal, where there's only ranks and plus and minus or anything. And then
you have categorical. Like the Yankees and the Braves are categorical variables. They're just
different, but all you have is the comparator operator, whether you have a quality, you don't
have a rank. Okay. So ratio scale data is the best because you can compare it across space and time.
If you have a skeleton that is like, you know, two meters tall, that's from 3,000 years ago,
you can compare the height of people from many, many years ago, different cultures and times,
right? Whereas their currency is much harder to value. That's not like a ratio scale variable.
Other things are harder to value across space and time, right? So life expectancy is good because
as a ratio scale variable, it's a very clear definition, right? Like when someone born and
died, you know, those are actually relatively clear. But most other things aren't like that.
You know, you, that's why murder or, you know, death, that, you know, it can be scored. It's
unambiguous. You know, it's done when it's done. Whereas when did somebody get sick? Oh, whether
they were kind of sick, were they sick today, they were sick at this hour, the boundary conditions,
many other kinds of things are not like clear cut like that, right? And I should just briefly comment
that life expectancy does have this quirk, a dark quirk that it, when you just crudely look at it,
incorporates child mortality, mortality at age of one or age of five. And maybe it's better,
clearer to look at mortality after, after five or whatever. And that's still those metrics still
hold in interesting ways and measure the progress of human civilization in interesting ways.
That's right. You actually want longevity biomarkers. A lot of people are working on this.
There's a book called The Picture of Dorian Gray, right? And the concept is sell your soul to,
you know, ensure the picture rather than he will age and fade, right? And so the concept is that,
that thing on the wall just reflects his age and you can see it, okay? So there's a premise that's
embedded in a lot of Western culture that to gain something you must lose. If you, if you're
Icarus and you try to fly, then you will, you know, you'll fly too high and they'll melt your wings.
But guess what? We fly every day, commercial or flight, right? So the opposite of like the
Icarus or Picture of Dorian Gray kind of thing is the movie Limitless, which I love because
it's so Nietzschean and so unusual relative to the dystopian, you know, sci-fi movies where there's a,
without giving, I mean, the movie's kind of old now, but there's a drug in it that's a new
tropic that boosts, you know, your cognitive abilities and it's got side effects. But the end,
he engineers out the side effects. Amazing. Just like, you know, yeah, there are planes that crash
and we land, right? Okay. So why do I mention the Picture of Dorian Gray? Well, there's another
aspect of it, which is longevity biomarker. The point is to kind of estimate how many years of
life you have left by, you know, that Q.Bio or Integrome or you take all these analyses on
somebody, right? One of the best longevity biomarkers could be just your face, right? You
image the face and you can sort of tell, oh, somebody looks like they've aged, oh,
somebody looks younger, et cetera, et cetera. And this is actually data that you've got on
millions and millions of people where you could probably start having AI predict, okay, what
does somebody's life expectancy given their current face and other kinds of things, right?
Because you have their name, your birth date, you have their, you know, date they passed away,
if they've already passed away, right? And you have photos of them through their life, right?
So just imaging might give a reasonably good longevity biomarker. But then you can supplement
that with a lot of other variables. And now you can start benchmarking every treatment
by its change in how much time you have left. If that treatment, that intervention
boosts your estimated life expectancy by five years, you can see that in the data.
You can get feedback on whether your longevity is being boosted or not, okay?
And so what this does, it just fundamentally changes the assumptions in the system. Now,
with that said, you know, life extension may be the kind of thing, I'm not sure if it'll work
for our generation, we may be too late, it may work for the next generation.
Wouldn't that make you sad?
Well, I've got something.
To the last generation.
Could be, but I've got something for you, which is, I call it genomic reincarnation.
Okay, this one you probably haven't heard before, I've tweeted about it, okay?
So, by the way, good time to mention that your Twitter is one of the greatest
Twitters of all time, so people should follow you.
Well, Alex Friedman has one of the greatest podcasts of all time. You guys should listen
to the Alex Friedman podcast, which you may be doing, right?
Which you may be doing right now.
Yes. Yeah.
Well, thank you. So, what was the term again? Sorry, genomic.
So I call it genomic, not resurrection, but genomic reincarnation, okay? So here's the concept.
But you may be aware that you can synthesize strands of DNA, okay?
There's sequencing of DNA, which is reading it, and synthesizing DNA,
which is like creating strands of DNA.
What's interesting is you can actually also do that at the full
chromosome level for bacterial chromosomes.
Remember that thing I was saying earlier about the minimum life form that Craig
Venter made? So people have synthesized like entire bacterial chromosomes,
and they work like they can literally essentially print out a living organism, all right?
Now, when you go from bacteria to eukaryotes, which are the kingdom of life that we're part of,
right? Yeast are part of this kingdom and so on.
It becomes harder because the chromosomes are more complicated.
But folks are working on eukaryotic chromosome synthesis.
And if you spot me at that sci-fi assumption that eventually we'll be able to take
your genome sequence, and just like we can synthesize a bacterial chromosome, we can
synthesize not just one eukaryote chromosome, but your entire complement of chromosomes in
the lab, right? Because you have, you know, 23, you know, 46, whatever you take the pairs.
What you can do is potentially print somebody out from disk, reincarnate them.
Insofar, if your sequence determines you, and you can argue with this, there's epigenetics
and our stuff, okay? But let's just say to first order, your DNA sequence is Lex.
You can sequence that, okay? You can do full genome sequencing and log that to a file.
Then here's the, you know, the karma part. Your crypto community, where you've built up
enough karma among them, if when you die, your karma balance is high enough,
they will spend the money to reincarnate the next Lex, who can then watch everything that
happened in your past life, and you can tell them something. Everything I described there,
I mean, if you spot me eukaryotic chromosome synthesis, that's the only part that like,
you know, I think will be possible, right? Folks are working on it. I'm sure someone
will mention it. It's essentially a clone. It's like a clone, right? But it is you in a different
time. You're in a different time, but you don't unfortunately have the memories.
Well, you could probably watch the digest of your life, and it would be pretty interesting, right?
Yeah, you know, that's actually a process for psychology to study. If you create a blank mind,
what would you need to show that mind to align it very well with the experiences,
with the fundamental experiences that define the original version, such that the resulting clone
would have similar behavior patterns, worldviews, perspectives,
feelings, all those kinds of things. Potentially, right?
Including sadly enough traumas and all that. Or what have you, right? But basically, just like
in a very simple version of it, you know, by the time one is age 20 or 30 or something,
20, you'll sort of learn your own personal operating system. You're like, oh, alcohol
really doesn't agree with me or something like that. You just by trial and error, you know,
things that are idiosyncratic to your own physiology, you're like, oh, you know,
I'm totally react if I get seven hours of sleep versus nine hours or whatever it is, right?
You people will have different kinds of, you know, things like this. That manual can be given to
your next self. So like, you can know, don't do this, do this, don't do this, do this, right?
To some extent, personal genomics already gives you some of this where you're like, oh, I'm a
caffeine non, you know, or a slow metabolizer. Oh, that explains X or Y, you know, or I have a
weird version of alcohol dehydrogenous. Oh, okay, that explains, you know, my alcohol tolerance.
So, you know, this is part of the broader category of what I call practical miracles,
right? So it's longevity. It's genomic reincarnation. It is restoring sight. And it is curing deafness
with, you know, the, you know, artificial eyes and artificial ears. It is the super soldier serum.
Did I show you that? So like myostatic null, I tweet about this, basically X men are real.
So here is a study from any GM from several years ago. Okay. What is this? It's like the mid 2000s.
This was in 2004. Okay. So it's now 17 years later. It's probably, this is almost certainly a
teenager by now. So this kid basically was just totally built. Yeah. Okay. Extraordinary.
Like very muscular at a, at a very young age. Yes. So the child's birth weight was in the 75
percentile. He appeared extraordinarily muscular with protruding muscles in his thighs, motor and
mental development has been normal. Now at four and a half years of age, he continues to have
increased muscle bulk and strength. And so essentially myostatic mutation associated with
gross muscle hypertrophy in a child. So this is like real life X men. Okay. And um,
It has pictures of animals. Yes. So it's coming called variant bio that is looking at people
who have exceptional health related traits. And it is looking for essentially this kind of thing,
but maybe more disease or, or whatever related, right? For example, people who have natural
immunity to COVID understanding how that works, perhaps we can give other people artificial
immunity to COVID. Right. Um, if you scroll up, you see my kind of tweet super soldier serum is
real where it's like wild type mouse and a myosthenol and look at the chest on that thing.
You see the before and after. Wow. Okay. This is what's possible. You know,
this could be us, but you regulating, you know, right? You're not saying like,
this could be us. We play this could be us, but the FDA regulating, right? All this.
Okay. Oh yeah. On steroids, but it's not, that's the thing. It's not there. Well,
that's the thing is people, when people, again, you get back to the Icarus thing,
they think, Oh, steroids. Well, that's definitely going to give you cancer,
screw up your hormones, et cetera, et cetera. And it could, but you know what, like, have we
actually put in that much effort into figuring out like the, the right way of doing testosterone
supplementation or the right way of doing this? Uh, obviously we've managed to put a lot of effort
into marijuana, increasing the potency of it or what have you. Could we put the effort into
these kinds of drugs, right? Oh, these kinds of compounds. Maybe. I think that would actually
be a really good thing. The thing about this is I feel this is just a massively underexplored area.
Um, rather than people drinking caffeine all the time, that's like a very mild, enhancing drug.
Okay. Uh, nicotine is also arguably kind of like that. You know, some people have it even without
the cigarettes, right? Why can't we research this stuff? One way of thinking about it is,
you know, Lance Armstrong, the, the cyclist, yes, he violated all the rules. Um, you know,
he shouldn't have won the Tour de France or anything like that. But his chemists, and I say
this somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but also, you know, his chemists are candidates for like the Nobel
Prize in chemistry because they brought a man back from like testicular cancer to like winning
Tour de France's against a bunch of guys who probably, you know, a bunch of them are also
Jews to whatever, right? Whatever it was done there, take it out of the competition framework.
There's a lot of testicular cancer patients or cancer patients period who would want some of that.
And we should take that seriously. We should take that pursuit really, really, really serious.
Yes. Except again, just like the thermo stuff, all this pathology is, oh, it's a Balco scandal.
Oh, it says, oh my God, you know, and yes, of course, within the context of that game,
they're cheating. When the context of life, you want to be cheating death. Yes. Right. So, um,
it's just a kind of a reframe on what is good, right? And it is just taking away these assumptions
that mild inflation is good or mild death is good and going towards transcendence. So that gets me
done with the giant FDA, biomedical, et cetera, et cetera. Longevity, yeah. That's beautifully,
beautifully done. You have, you had two questions. One was on Trump and de-platforming and the other
was on crypto and the state of crypto and the third is on India. Which one should we do?
All right. Since we talked about how to fix government, we talked about how to fix health,
medicine, FDA, longevity. Let us briefly talk about how to fix social media, perhaps. Sure.
Very. Since we kind of talked about it from different directions, but it'd be nice to just
look at social media. And if we can perhaps first, as an example, maybe it's not a useful
example, but to me, it was one that kind of shook me a little bit is the removal of Trump.
And since then, other major figures, but Donald Trump was probably the biggest person ever to be
removed from social media. Do you understand why that was done? Can you steelman the case
for it and against it? And if there's something broken about that, how do we fix it?
Steelman the case for is kind of obvious in the sense of you are seeing a would be dictator
who is trying to run a coup against democracy, who has his supporters go and storming the seat
of government, who could use his app to whip up his followers across the country to reject
the will of the people. And so you're an executive and you'll take actions that,
while perhaps controversial, are still within the law. And you'll make sure that you do your
that you do your part to defend democracy by making sure that at least this guy's megaphone
is taken away, and that his supporters cannot organize more rights, right? That's basically the
case for the deplatforming. Okay. Would you agree that? That's
So it's like really steelmaning it.
Yes, the steelman. So I'm giving the floor case. Yeah.
Well, I think I guess I would like to separate the would be dictator.
Oh, I guess if you're storming the Capitol, you are a dictator. I see, I see.
So those are two are interlinked, right? You have to have somehow a personal judgment of the
person. Bad enough to be worth this, you know, significant step.
Yeah, it's not just their actions or words in a particular situation, but broadly,
the context of everything that led up to this moment and so on, right?
Yeah. So that's, that's a four case, right? Now, the against case, there's actually several
against cases, right? There's obviously the Trump supporters, you know, against case,
there is the sort of the libertarian slash left libertarian, you know, against case.
And there is the rest of world against case. Okay, there's actually three because it's not
just two factions, there's multiple, right? So what is the Trump supporter against case?
There's an article called the secret bipartisan campaign that saved the 2020 election, right?
Which came out a few weeks after the inauguration, like February 4, 2021. And essentially,
the Trump supporter would read this as basically saying, in the name of defending democracy,
they corrupted democracy, you know, whether it was actually vote counts or just changes of all
the rules for mail and ballots and stuff. There were regular meetings between the chamber of
commerce and, you know, AFL and the unions. And in particular, they admit that the BLM riots of,
you know, the mid 2020s were actually on a string and they could say stand down, right? So that's
actually, that's a quote from this article where it's like, the word went out, stand down, protect
the results announced that it would not be activating the entire national mobilization
network today remains ready to activate if necessary. Podhozer credits the activists for
their restraint. So basically, the activists reoriented the protected results protest towards
a weekend of celebration. So point being that the fact that the Trump supporter would say,
the fact that they could tell them to stand down meant that the previous, you know, unrest
was in part, you know, coordinated. And so they'd say, okay, so that makes it illegitimate in a
different way, right? Plus, you know, what was one riot on Jan 6 versus the attacks on the White
House and stuff, you know, they're storming the White House in mid 2020 and didn't actually
storm the White House, but they're setting fires outside and quite a lot of stuff, right?
So the second against case is the, let's say, libertarian slash left libertarian would say,
do we really want giant corporations, regardless of what you think about Trump,
and you don't have to be a Trump supporter, do you really want giant corporations to be terminating
who can say what on the internet? And if they can de-platform a sitting president and the quote
most powerful man in the world, he's not the most powerful man in the world. In fact,
the quote people are electing a figurehead, and actually it's the heads of network that are more
powerful than the heads of state, right? That the fact that the CEOs of Facebook and Twitter and
Google and Apple and Amazon all made the decisions at the same time to not just de-platform Trump
from Twitter, which literally billions of people around the world saw, but also censor or stop on
Facebook and to have Google and Apple pull parlor out of the app store and Amazon shut down the
back end, that would be corporate collusion by any other name. It's actually very similar to the
so-called business plot against FDR. FDR was a complicated figure who can in some ways best be
thought of as the least bad communist dictator or socialist dictator of the 20th century. Why?
Because he nationalized the economy, repealed the 10th Amendment, tried to pack the courts. He
sicked the government on all of his enemies from Huey Long to Andrew Mellon. Obviously,
he interned the Japanese, which shows that wasn't really totally a good guy. We don't usually think
about it as the same guy who did this, did that. Earlier in his life, most people done this one,
he led a whole Navy thing to entrap gay sailors. And did you know about this one?
No. Yeah. Google FDR entrapment of gay sailors. Basically, he got young men to try to find folks
within the Navy who were gay and then basically entrap them so that they could be prosecuted
and what have you. FDR did a lot of stuff, but fundamentally nationalized the economy and set
up the alphabet soup is what they called it at the time. And that's like all these agencies or
whatever. And in some sense, there'd been a rising trend of centralization. Woodrow Wilson,
obviously centralized, Lincoln centralized, even actually 1789 was a degree of centralization over
the more loose thing that was 1776, 1789. So he was on that trend line, but he was definitely
a huge kind of dog leg up. So the thing is that because of all the lawsuits that were flying,
many forks like Amy Schley's has written a book, The Forgotten Man, and essentially
her thesis and thesis of many others at that time, like John T. Flynn, who's this journalist who
was pro FDR and then was against, was that FDR made the Great Depression great,
okay, that it wouldn't have been such a bad thing without him mucking up the entire economy and
giving it a sickness. It would have recovered quickly without that, right? This is a counterfactual,
which people just argue about it really angrily back and forth and you can't actually run the
experiment unless you could fork the economy, right? Just like where the bailouts could
are bad. I think they were bad, but how could I prove it? I'd need to actually be able to fork
the economy. Crypto actually allows you, in theory, to do that, like where folks could
actually shift balance. Is this a whole separate thing where you could actually start to make
macroeconomics into more of an experimental science rather than simply arguing from authority?
You could argue from experiment. Some of the virtual economy stuff that Edward Castronova
has done is relevant to this. We can talk about that. Point is though, with FDR,
there's a saying, because he had such a war on private industry at that time and justified it
with this narrative, quote, bold, persistent experimentation, there was something called
the, quote, business plot where all of these captains of industry that he'd been being up.
And again, Teddy Roosevelt had also been doing this with the trust buster, the journals at the
time, Ida Tarbell had gone and basically ran all these articles on Rockefeller knocked him down.
Woodrow Wilson is going to control. But FDR, the CEOs were thinking, oh, bad, this is so terrible.
There's a so-called business plot to try to take over the government and stop FDR from pushing the
country in what they thought was a bad direction. Spendley Butler was a general that they recruited
to try to help them with this, but he turned on them and he went and kind of broke the whole
thing open and told to Congress and so on. And so this guy's, the whole plot was broken up.
Now, when we have thinking about today, or the whole aftermath of Jan 6th is it's a business
plot, but in reverse, because the generals and the CEOs both were against Trump and actually
the business plot happened. And now all the CEOs just, they pulled all the push, all the buttons
that they needed to, and now the network was prime over the state. Now, why is that an interesting
way of looking at it? Because one thing I have in the book is you can kind of think of 1950 as
issues, peak centralization. You go forward and backward in time, things decentralize,
for example. And you start getting mirror image events that happen with the opposite outcome.
For example, 1890, the frontier closes, 1991, the internet frontier opens, internet becomes
open for commerce. You go backwards in time, you have the Spanish flu, forwards in time,
COVID-19. Backwards in time, you have the captains of industry, the robber barons,
forwards in time, you have the tech billionaires. And there's so many examples of this, like another
one is backwards in time, the New York Times is allying with Soviet Russia to choke out Ukraine.
Now today, they have reinvented themselves as cheerleaders for Ukraine against
nationalist Russia. And of course, I think you could absolutely support Ukraine on other measures,
but it's pretty hypocritical for the guys who profited from the Hall of Demorra,
the Oxelberg family, literally profited from denying the Hall of Demorra to now make themselves
cheerleaders for Ukraine. It's actually this insane thing, which we can talk about.
A tiny tangent on that. You put it brilliantly and a reminder for anyone who listens to me talk
about Ukraine. It is possible to have empathy for a nation and not be part of the machine that
generates the mainstream narrative. Yes, that's right. Like basically, I was actually one of the
first three Estonian residents. And I completely understand why Estonia and the Baltics and all
these countries, including Ukraine, that just recently within living memory got their independence
from the Soviet Empire would not want to be forcibly reintegrated into a place that they just
escaped from. And so that is something which is outside the American left-right, tired kind of
thing where when you understand it from that point of view, then there's a fourth point of view,
which is like India's point of view or much of the developing world or what I call parts of it
ascending, parts of descending. But much of the rest of the world outside of that border region
says, look, we're sympathetic to the Ukrainians, but we can't allow our people to starve. So we're
going to maintain trade. And guess what? Actually, we've got a lot of wars in our neck of the woods
and human rights crises that Europe just didn't even care about. So it can't be that Europe's
problems are the world's problems, but the world's problems are not Europe's problems. So that's
like a fourth point of view. And a fifth point of view is China, which is like, guess what? We're
going to be the Iran of the Iraq War, where who won the Iraq War? Iran, arguably, Brexit extended
their influence into Iraq. So China is like, guess what? We're going to turn Russia into our gas
station and build a pipeline. There's a power severe is like the name of the eastern Russia
pipeline, just like Nord Stream is Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2. I think they're building a new
pipeline through Mongolia. So Xi Jinping and Putin and the Mongolian head of state were all
photographed kind of thumbs-uping this pipeline. We'll see if it goes through. But it's ironic
that Russia wanted to make Ukraine their colony. But the outcome of this war may be that Russia
becomes China's colony. So that's at least like five different perspectives. There's like the
US establishment perspective. There's the Tucker, MAGA perspective. There's the Baltics and Ukrainian
perspective. There's like the Indian and like poor countries perspective. Then there's China
spectrum. Then of course, there's the Russians. So just with respect to that, by the way,
that's another example of history happening in reverse. This is the Sino-Soviet partnership,
except this time, China is a senior partner and Russia is a junior partner. And this time,
they're both nationalists rather than communist. And there's so many flips like this. And I'm going
to list a few more, actually, because there's so, so, so many of them.
Do you have an explanation why that happens? Yes. Let me just list a few of them. This is in the
Network State book. It's in the chapter called Fragmentation, Frontier, Fourth Turning, Future
is Our Past. So I give this example of a fluid unmixing. Just watch this for a second. This is
from a smart everyday unmixing color machine, ultra-limited reversible flow, smart everyday 217.
And so you can mix something and then like this thing that you don't think of as reversible,
you can unmix it, which is insane, right, that it works. Okay, the physics of that situation, it just works, right?
So for people just listening, that there is whatever the mixture this is, this is ultra-limiter,
reversible flow. So this probably has to do something to do with the material.
We're used to mixing not being a reversible process. Exactly. And that's what that shows.
And then he then reverses the mixing and is able to do it perfectly.
That's right. So that's like the futures are past these.
It shows that free will is an illusion. Just kidding. Okay.
Well, basically, there's some environments where the equations are like time symmetrical.
And this is one model, sort of just an interesting visual model for what's happening in the world
as we re-decentralize after the centralized century. So basically, I mentioned the Internet
Frontier over reopens back in the Western Frontier closed. Today, we experienced COVID-19.
Back then, we experienced the Spanish flu, tech billionaires, and we had the Capitan Street.
Today, founders like Alon and Dorsey are starting to win against the establishment journalists.
Back then, I had a Tarbell demagogued and defeated a Rockefeller. I think net-net
founders win this time versus the journals. Back then, the journals won over the founders.
Today, we have cryptocurrencies. Back then, we had private banking. Today, this is an amazing one.
We have a populist movement of digital gold advocates.
Back then, because Bitcoin maximalists and so on where gold has become populist because it's
against the printing money and so on and so forth. Back then, we had a populist movement
against gold in the form of William Jennings Bryan in the cross of gold speech. Gold was
considered a tool of big business. Now, gold is the tool against big business and big government,
right? Digital gold, yeah. Digital gold, right. Today, we have the inflation and cultural conflict
of Weimar-like America. Back then, we had the inflation and cultural conflict of Weimar Germany.
Today, in Weimar America, we have right and left fighting in the streets. Same, unfortunately,
in Weimar Germany. Peter Turchin has written about, today, we have what Turchin considers
antebellum-like polarization, like pre-war polarization. Back then, if you go further
back in time, we had what we now know to be antebellum polarization, right? Today, we have
Airbnb. Back then, we had flop houses. Today, we have Uber. Back then, we had Gypsy cabs.
Today, we see the transition from neutral to yellow journalism. Back then, we saw the transition
from yellow to, quote, neutral journalism, right? Today, figures like Mike Moritz wrote
about China's energetic and America's laconic. But back then, Bertrand Russell actually wrote
this whole long book. Actually, the mathematician Bertrand Russell wrote this whole long book,
which I didn't even realize he wrote about these kind of topics, about the problem of China.
And one of his observations was, again, I'm not saying this is, I'm just saying he made this
observation. He was saying that America was energetic and China laconic at the time, because
everybody was in opium dens and so on and so forth. More examples, the one I just mentioned,
where the Chinese and Russians are again lining up against the West, except this time, the Chinese
are the senior partner in the relationship rather than the junior partner. Today, I think in the
Second Cold War, there will also be a third world. But this time, I think that third world might come
in first, because it's not the non-aligned movement, it's the aligned movement around Web3 protocols.
That's fascinating, yeah. That's where Indic comes in. By the way, something we haven't mentioned,
Africa, that there could be very interesting things in Africa as well.
Nigeria is actually, Nigeria has first tech unicorn, and I'm investing there. And I think,
you know, it's one of these things where China's risen, India is like about 10 years behind,
you know, China. But I think this is the Indian decade in many ways. We can come back to that
point. But there's absolutely, you know, sparks of light in Africa. I mean, it's a huge continent.
It seems like the more behind, so I had to interrupt, the more behind you are,
the more opportunity you have to leap from. Sometimes. That's right. And Paisa is a classic
example where they did this in East Africa. But I think there's more possibility there.
So what is the fact that there's a kind of symmetry history?
There's a kind of symmetry, right? What is that? How did that take us from
Trump? The different perspective you took, the libertarian perspective of
it doesn't really matter. Yeah, because the libertarian perspective, or the left
libertarian perspective would say, is it really a good idea to have total corporate power against
the quote, elected government? Even if, you know, you may disagree, do you want to open the door to
total, you know, corporate oligarchy? And it's like the opposite. That's what I mentioned. It's
like the opposite of business plots. And they pulled on that thread. Okay. So the macro explanation
that I have for this future is our past thesis. And there's more, it also gives some predictions,
right? If you go backwards in time, the US federalizes into many individual states, like before
the Civil War, people said the United States are, and after they said the United States is,
before FDR, the 10th Amendment, reserved rights to the states. Afterwards, it was just federal
regulation of everything. As we go forwards in time, you're seeing states break away from the
feds on gun laws, drug laws, right, sanctuary cities, okay, many other kinds of things, you know.
And now Florida, for example, has its own guard that's like not a national guard, but like a state
guard, other cities, other states are doing this. And that's a force of decentralization,
you're saying that parallels in reverse. In reverse, right? So you're having, make America
states again. Nice. Okay. That's what's, I think, happening, right? I'm not saying, well, I think
there's aspects of that that are good, there's aspects that are bad, but just like that's kind
of the angle, right? But then that's, I mean, from your perspective, that's probably not enough,
right? That's not... It's part of the future. Let's just say... I think you suggested all kinds
of ways to build different countries. I think that's probably one of them. You said like start
micro-countries or something like this. I forgot the terminology. Yeah, micro-nations. Yeah,
that's not my... I actually think of them as... The better term is microstates because they're
actually not nations. That's why they don't work. But microstates are better, right?
Coming back to the difference between the nation and the state, the nation is like...
The nation state is a term that people use without expanding it, but nation comes from the
same root word as like natality. So it's like common descent, common birth, right? Common origin,
like the Japanese nation, that's a group of people that have come down from history, right?
Hence nationalism. Yeah, whereas the state is like the administrative layer above them. It's
like labor and capital, like labor and management, okay? The American state stood over the Japanese
nation in 1946 after the war, right? Also, you weren't talking about tradition, you know, that
doesn't matter in terms of... I thought you meant nation is a thing that carries across the generations,
that there's a tradition, there's a culture, and so on. And state is just the management,
the layer... I mean, that's also another way of thinking about it, right?
There's a reversal there as well, okay, sure. Yeah, so I mean, one way of thinking about it is,
you know, one nation under God and divisible is no longer true. It is... America is at least
two nations, the Democrat and Republican, in the sense of their own cultures, where I can show
you graph after graph, you've seen the polarization graphs, I can show you network diagrams where,
you know, like there's this graph of polarization in Congress where there's red and blue,
they're separate things, there's this article from 2017 showing how, you know, shares on Facebook
and Twitter are just separate subgraphs, they're just separate graphs in the social network,
and they're pulling apart. Those are two nations, they're not under God because people in the US
no longer believe in God, and they're very much divisible because 96% of Democrats won't marry
Republicans in a high percentage other way. And in one... What that means is in one generation,
ideology becomes biology. These become ethnic groups, it takes on the character of
Hutu and Tutsi or Protestant and Catholic, Sunni and Shiite. It's not about ideology. If you think
about all the flips during COVID, right, where people were on one side versus other side, it's
tribal, it's just tribe on tribe. And so it's not universalist that identity of American makes less
sense than the identity of Democrat and Republican right now, or perhaps the identity of individual
states. What I think that's a good or bad thing, I think that's unfortunately, you know, whatever
it is, it's the hour of history, right? On the opposite side of things, India is actually...
It was 562 princely states at the time of Indian unification from 1947 to 19... 1947 when it got
independence from the British, it was 562 princely states. Most people don't know that part,
they got... Or outside India don't know the part. It got unified into a republic only by like 1950.
And India is actually a modern... India is like Europe. It's kind of like the European Union in
the sense that we didn't have a unified India in the past. It was something with a lot of different
countries, like North and South India, or like Gujarat and Tamil Nadu are as different as Finland
and Spain. But India has moved in the direction of much more unification, like much more centralization
or what have you, whereas the US is decentralizing. You go, okay, a few more things that are flips
and I'll finish this off. Today we're seeing the rise of the pseudonymous founder and starved
societies back all the way back in the 1770s. We saw pseudonymous founders of starved countries,
namely the US, the Federalist Papers. Today we're seeing so far unsuccessful calls for
wealth seizures in the US. Back then we saw FDRs executive order 6102, which was a successful
seizure of gold. I expect we may see something like that, an attempted seizure of digital gold.
And I think that'll be one of the things that individual states like Florida or Texas may not
enforce that. And I think that's actually the kind of thing where you could see,
you know, like a breakup potential in the future. One other thing that kind of rhymes is in many
ways like the modern US establishment, the story that you hear is the victories in 1945 and 1865
legitimate the current establishment, that is, being the Nazis, being the Confederates. So they
beat the ethnic nationalists abroad and they beat the secessionists at home. And the ethnic
nationalists were Aryan Nazis and the secessionists were slave owners and against freedom and so
on and so forth. I'm not disputing that, I'm just saying that that's just like the way people think
about it. There's a possibility and I'm not saying it's 100% at all. But if you're a sci-fi writer,
there's a possibility that the US loses to the ethnic nationalists abroad, except this time
they're Chinese communists, non-white communists as opposed to Aryan Nazis, which seemed like the
total opposite. Okay. And there's a possibility that there is a financial secession at home where
it's, you know, Bitcoin maximalists states that are advocating for freedom, the opposite of slavery.
See what I'm saying?
Boy, that's dark. You're looking for major things in history that don't yet have a...
Cognate going forward, right? And that's a nice way to think about the future.
It is only one model and, you know, any mental model or something like that. That's why I say
I'm as a sci-fi scenario. It's just like a scenario one could contemplate, right? Where the new
version has, I mean, the Chinese communists do not think of themselves as Aryans, right?
But they are ultra-nationalists. And, you know, the Hitler comparisons, people talk about Hitler
endlessly, you know, like, Saddam is a new Hitler, everybody's a new Hitler, etc. If there is a
comparison to, quote, Nazi Germany, it is, you know, CCP China in a sense, why? They are non-English
speaking, manufacturing powerhouse with a massive military buildout under one leader that is a
genuine peer competitor to the US on many dimensions and in fact, you know, exceeding on some dimensions
of technology and science, right? That is like, the problem is it's a boy who cried wolf. People
say this a zillion times, right? And, you know, that is like, you know, I'm not saying this,
by the way, crucially, I am, there's like, I think China is very complicated and there's
hundreds of millions of people, probably half in China that disagrees with the current
ultra-nationalist kind of thing, right? And so I kind of hate it when innocent Chinese people
abroad or whatever are just like attacked on this basis or what have you. Plus, the other thing is
that many Chinese people will say, well, look, relative to, you know, where we were when Deng
took over in 1978, we built up the entire country. We're not starving to death anymore. And the West
wants to re-colonize us. And so I understand where that's coming from. This way you want to be able
to argue different points of view. With that said, there's one huge difference, right? Which is,
Nazi Germany was like 70 million people. And the US was 150 million and the Soviet Union was
150 million. And the UK was like 50 million. So they were outnumbered like five to one.
China outnumbers the US four to one. This is going to be a fun century.
Under this model, under this model, things are going to be potentially crazy. Plus,
you know, people are like, oh, I think this is, you know, again, I've nothing personal.
You know, there's this guy, Peter Zion, he writes these books, right?
I probably agree with about 20 or 30%, but I disagree with a lot of the rest. And a bunch
of it is basically about how China is really weak and America is really strong and the rest of the
world is screwed. And, you know, I think there's absolutely problems in China. And, you know,
like the current management is actually messing a lot of things up. We could talk about that.
But I do think that, you know, the US is like fighting its factory. So one thing, you know,
Zion will talk about is how, oh, America has this blue water Navy, all the aircraft carriers,
and China has nothing, it's got bupkas, et cetera. Well, China ships things all around the world,
right? It probably has, you know, one of the most active fleets out there in terms of,
you know, its commercial shipping. And in terms of building ships, here's a quote,
China's merchant shipbuilding industry is the world's largest, building more than 23 million,
gross tons of shipping in 2020. US yards built a mere 70,000 tons the same year,
though they typically average somewhere in the 200,000s. That is a 100 to 300x ratio,
just in shipbuilding. Pretty much everything else you can find in the physical world is like that.
Okay. We're not talking like 2x. We're talking they can put together a subway station in nine
hours with prefab, and the US takes three years. Okay. When you have a thousand X difference in
the physical world, the reason the US was won against, you know, Nazi Germany in a serious
fight is they had this giant manufacturing plant that was overseas, and they just outproduced,
right? And they supplied the Soviets also with lendlies. And the Soviets talked about how they
would not have won the war without the Americans. People are like, oh, the Russians, you know,
fought the Germans. The Russians armed by Americans fought the Germans. Like, it's a Soviet Union.
They're not actually able to make high quality stuff. There obviously are individual people in
Soviet Russia who were innovative, right? I'm not taking that away. There's a tradition of amazing.
I just want to be like, there's individual Russians who obviously I admire, Mendeleev,
and, you know, Klimogorov, and so on. There's amazing Russian scientists in here. So I'm not
saying that. I mean, in general, from a brilliant folks like yourself that criticize communism,
it's too easy to say nothing communism produces is good, which of course is not true. There's a
lot of brilliant people in and a lot of even, you know, there's a lot of amazing things that
have been created. Yeah. So they had some amazing mathematicians, amazing scientists and so on,
right? However, great branding on the, you know, red and yellow branding is stellar.
Nazi Germany to excellent branding with the flag and so on, you know, ends there in terms of
compliments. Yeah. Well, actually, they copied a lot of stuff from each other, you know, like
there's this movie called the Soviet story. It basically shows a lot of Nazi and Soviet propaganda
things next to each other. And you can see guys almost in like the same pose. It's almost like,
you know how AI will do like style transfer? You can almost see, because the socialist realism
style of like the muscular brawny worker, very similar to like the style of the Aryan
Superman, you know, like pointing at the vermin or whatever. And then there's the crappy open-source
version that tries to copy, which is Mussolini. Yeah. That just like, that does the same exact
thing, but does it kind of shittier? So anyway. So my main thing about this is basically like
trying to fight your factory in the physical world is probably not going to work. People
are, I think, overconfident on this stuff, right? With that said, I think we want to at all, you
know, the future is not yet determined, right? At all odds, you know, we want to avoid a hot war
between like, I mean, a hot war between the US and China would be. Do you think it's possible
that we get a war? We're doing these things like Pelosi going to Taiwan and trying to,
trying to cause something like, look, again, this is one of these things which is complicated,
because obviously, if you're, there's more than one perspective on this, right? Again,
you've got the US establishment, the US conservative, the Taiwanese perspective,
the Chinese perspective, all the bystanders over there, there's more than one perspective on this,
okay? If you're, you know, China's one of China's many neighbors, you look at China with apprehension,
like Vietnam, for example, has sort of fallen into or not fallen into is partnering with India,
because they are mutually apprehensive China. China is not making like great friends with its
neighbors. It's kind of, you know, it's demonizing Japan. It's so ultra-nationalist nowadays.
And so if you're Taiwanese, you're like, yeah, I do not want to be under the Chinese surveillance
state. I completely understand it. Some people are pro-reunification, others aren't, but there's
more, you know, trend, you know, in some ways for independence. Okay, fine.
But there's also an increasing temperature across the entire world. As we sit here today,
there are speeches by Vladimir Putin about the serious possibility of a nuclear war,
and that escalates kind of the heat in the room of geopolitics.
It escalates the heat in the room, of course, right? And the thing is, people have this belief
that because something hasn't happened, it won't happen or it can't happen. But like,
there were a lot of measures people took during the Cold War to make sure a nuclear exchange
didn't happen, the whole mutually assured destruction thing and communicating that out,
and like the balance of terror. There were smart guys on both sides who thought through this,
and there were near misses, right? There were, you know, like there's that story about like the
Soviet colonel who didn't order a nuclear strike because he thought it was just like an error in
the instruments, right? Okay, what's the point? The point is, you know, for example, Pelosi going
to Taiwan, that didn't strengthen Taiwan. That didn't like that. If you're going to go and provoke
China, I thought scholar stage as a Twitter account had a good point, which is you should,
if you're actually going to do it, then you strengthen Taiwan with like huge battalions of
like arms and materiel, and you make them a porcupine and so on and so forth. And said,
her kind of going and landing there and mooning China and then flying back in the middle of a
hot war with Russia, that's absolutely, you know, in the middle of an economic crisis or it just,
it just, you know, can pick battles or whatever, right? It's like, you don't have to fight Russia
and China at the same time. It's like kind of insane to do that. Okay. Plus, even with Ukraine,
some people are like, oh, this was like a victory for US military policy or something.
There's a guy who I'm not trying to beat him up or anything. He's like, this is in March,
thread on US security assistance to Ukraine, it's working. Ukraine might be one of the biggest
successes of US security assistance. And the reason is, you know, US didn't focus on some
high-end Chinese objects, but on core military tasks that focus should remain. And it's like,
how is this a success? The West gave massive arms to Ukraine only after the invasion,
but not enough before to deter. And now Ukraine is like this Syria-like battleground with,
you know, a million refugees or whatever the number is, right? Their country is blown to
smithereens, thousands of people dead, whatever $1,000 gas in Europe with like 10x energy,
radicalized Russians, the threat of World War III or even nuclear war, you know, shooting somebody
isn't, that's not like the point of a military. The point is, you know, there's a million ways
to smash Humpty Dumpty into pieces and, you know, unleash the blood-drenched tides, right,
and have people all shooting each other and killing each other. It's really hard to maintain
stability. That's what competence is, is deterrence and stability, right? There's not like a success
in any way. It's like an absolute tragedy for everybody involved, right?
Yeah. I mean, deterrence, of course, is the number one thing, but there's a lot to be said there,
but I'm a huge not fan of declaring victory as we've done many times when it's the wrong.
Yeah. I mean, look, I mean, the other thing about this is the whole mission accomplished thing
during Iran. Mission accomplished is what I meant. Yeah. Exactly. Mission accomplished was
obviously, you know, the thing is, Russia lives next door to Ukraine. And so, I mean,
just like Iraq lives next door to Iran, and Afghanistan is next door to Pakistan and China.
And so, if the US eventually gets tired of it and leaves, those guys are next door, right?
And so, you know, who knows what's going to happen here, okay? But one of the problems is,
like, you know, the whole Afghanistan thing or the Iraq thing is, the lesson for people was
the uncertainty. They're like, is the US going to fight? Don't know. Will the US win if it fights?
Don't know. Therefore, roll the dice. That uncertainty is itself like tempting to folks,
you know, like Putin or whatever, right? So, the point is, coming all the way back up,
we were talking about how history, futures are passed and FDR, like the business plot FDR,
failed, but like the tech companies were able to de-platform Trump, right? And the left libertarian
would say, do we want that much corporate power? Okay. And so, that's, so we gave the four case
for Trump de-platforming protecting democracy, the Trump supporter case against, which is on the
secret history of the shadow campaign to save the 2020 election, basically that article,
the left libertarian and libertarian case against. And then to me, what is, you know, like, I am more
sympathetic to the libertarian slash left libertarian against. And then also, maybe the fourth
group, which is the non-American case, right? Which is to say, every, you know, you know,
Amlo, he's the, he was the, you know, head of state of Mexico, I think at that time, okay?
Amlo, McCron, you know, other folks, everybody who was watching this around the world,
basically saw, let's say, U.S. establishment or Democrat-aligned folks just decapitate,
you know, the head of state digitally, right? Like, just boom, gone, okay? And they're like,
well, if they can do that in public to the U.S. president, who's ostensibly the most
powerful man in the world, what does the Mexican president stand against that? Nothing, right?
Like these U.S. media corporations, these tech companies are so insanely powerful.
Everybody's on Twitter or what have you, other than China, leaving them aside. They've got their own
root system. If somebody tried to deplatform Xi Jinping off of Sina Weibo, they'd probably
just fall through a trap to their whole family, right? But for the rest of the world, it's on the,
that is hosting their business, their politics on these U.S. tech companies are like, regardless
of whether it was justified on this guy, that means they will do it to anybody. Now, the seal
is broken. Just like the bailouts, as exceptional as they were in the first year, everybody was
shocked by them, then they became a policy instrument. And now these bailouts happening,
every single bill is printing another whatever billion dollars or something like that, right?
Can I ask on your thoughts and advice on this topic? If I or anyone were to have a conversation
with Donald Trump, first of all, should one do so? And if so, how do you do it? And it may not
necessarily be Trump, it could be other people like Putin and Xi Jinping and so on. Let's say
people that are censored, right? Like people that platforms in general see as dangerous.
Hitler, you can go, we keep bringing it up. Of course, that's the ultimate age case, right?
Right. In the sense of that saying something must be done, this is something, therefore,
this must be done, right? I've heard that one before. No, but I love it. Can I just use that
as an explanation with confidence for everything I do? Yeah, sure. There you go, right? Something
must be done, this is something, therefore, must be done. Therefore, this must be done.
So that is all kinds of regulations, all kinds of things are kind of just for that basis, right?
And there's a version of that, which is punch a Nazi. I decide who is a Nazi, you're a Nazi.
Therefore, I punch you and that's justified. Yeah, and like people say, oh, how many people
are calling Israelis, these things, right? And so the problem with the argument to add
Hitler on is it just, I mean, people will say Obama's a Nazi. Everyone will say everybody's
a Nazi, right? But there is a social consensus about who, let's set Nazis aside, but who is
dangerous for society. Okay, but now let's talk about that, all right? So basically,
I think a more interesting example than Hitler in this context is Herbert Matthews.
So Fidel Castro, before he became the communist dictator of Cuba, was on the run. He was like
Assam bin Laden at the time. He was like a terrorist that the Cuban regime had seemingly
defeated. And what Herbert Matthews did is he got an intro to him. He went to the
place where he was hiding out. He gave an interview and he printed this hagiography in
the New York Times with this photo of Castro looking all mighty and so on. And he's like,
Castro is still alive and still fighting. And there's this book on this called The Man Who
Created Fidel, where basically, NYT's article was crucial positive press that got Castro's
point of view out to the world and helped lead to the communist revolution that actually
impoverished Cuba, like gay people being discriminated against there, led to people
fleeing and drowning, trying to escape. That's an example of where platforming somebody led
to a very bad outcome. In fact, many of the communist dictators in the 20th century had
like their own personal journalist. For example, there's a guy, John Reed, he's an American.
He's buried, if I get this right, I think he's buried at the Kremlin Wall. Why is an American
buried there? Because he wrote a book called 10 Days That Shook the World that whitewashed
the entire Soviet revolution and the Russian Revolution in 1917, October Revolution,
and made these guys out to be the good guys when they were actually genocidal psychopaths.
He got their point of view out of the world and it was a totally misleading point of view.
What do you think he was thinking? Do you think he saw the psychopathy? Sometimes it's not
obvious. Well, the French Revolution had already happened. People kind of knew that this sort of
psychopathic killing in the name of equality could produce bad results. But it's more than
that. As John Reed, it's Herbert Matthews, it's Edgar Snow. These are all people who
should be extremely famous. Edgar Snow is Mao's journalist. Here's actually an article in this,
how 1930s reporter from Missouri became China's ideal journalist. He wrote various books,
including Red Star over China. It's just a haze geography of Mao. Then, of course,
you've got Duranty. He's like Stalin's biographer, just to recap. John Reed brought Lenin's message
to the world. Milen's dead. Duranty helped Stalin starve out the Ukrainians. Milen's dead.
Edgar Snow was Mao's biographer. Herbert Matthews was like Castro's. This guy, David Halberstam,
in Vietnam, who was effectively Ho Chi Minh's. He basically went and took leaks from a communist spy.
I'll give you the exact name. Pham, I'm going to mispronounce this, but it's
perfect spy, the incredible double life of Ph. A. M. Pham Xuan An, Time Magazine reporter and
Vietnamese communist agent. That guy was the source of many fabricated stories that David Halberstam
printed in the New York Times that led to the undermining of the South Vietnamese regime.
You know, for example, stories of Buddhists being killed and so on. Ashley Rinsberg in
The Great Lady Wink writes this whole thing up at length, so you can go and read it for his account.
Basically, all of these communist dictators had a journalist right alongside them as their biographer.
Those are tools of the propaganda machine versus...
Well, so my point is, these are five examples that are on the far left that should be balanced
also against the times running profiles of Hitler on the far right. We know that times
actually also ran a whole thing, which was, you know, Hitler's like mountain retreat or something
like that. Do you know about that story? What year was this? I'll tell you in a second.
Hitler at home in the clouds. Oh boy, please tell me it's like early 30s.
I think it's... Oh yeah, this is auto-detolacious. This is actually a guy that Ashley Rinsberg writes
up in The Great Lady Wink, right? 1937.
There's another one where I think the date is wrong, but essentially these titles are like
where Hitler dreams and plans. He lives simply, you know, right? And there's another one,
Herr Hitler at home in the clouds. The thing about this is absolutely there are folks who are
hagiographers of the far right, but whether you're talking Lenin and John Reed or Stalin and
Walter Duranty of the New York Times, or Castro and Herbert Matthews again of the New York Times,
or Edgar Snow and Mao, or David Halberstam and Ho Chi Minh again of the New York Times,
like you start to see a pattern here where the guys who are being platformed and given a voice
are these guys who end up being like far left lunatics, right? And I think part of the issue
here is, you know the saying about how communists don't understand self-interest?
Nationalists don't understand other interest. And so nationalists are more obvious.
Isn't that good? I thought it was good. It's pretty good, right? Pretty good.
So the nationalist is very obvious in the sense of like they're for the Aryans. They're not even
for like the Slavs or whatever, right? Like, you know, basically, you know, had Hitler constructed
a different ideology, you know, then like he might have gotten some more support in Eastern
Europe or whatever, right? But he also called the Slavs inferior, not just, you know, basically
everybody was inferior to the Aryans, okay? Except maybe the English or whatever, but that was it,
right? Oh, and the Japanese are honorary Aryans or something. So the nationalist
declares the supremacy of their own race or culture or what have you and doesn't understand
people's other interest. But he also pumps up his own guys, okay? Same with, you know, in some ways,
China today, same with Japan back in the day. Whereas the communist has a message that sounds
more appealing. It's a universalist message ostensibly. But it's actually a faux universalism
because it's actually particularism. Like during the Soviet Union, communism, this faux universalism
was basically a mask for Russian nationalism, you know, where, you know, or at least, at least
Soviet nationalism, where in particular Russians were pushed into many territories and, you know,
Russian speakers were, you know, like privileged in, you know, the Eastern Europe and the Baltics.
Of course, Russians themselves were oppressed at home as sultans rights. They were both
victim and victimizer of the regime. Their churches were crushed and so on. As compensation,
they were agents of empire. It's a tragedy all around. I'm not, you know, I think Russians
have been hard done in many ways. They've had a very hard, hard century. They've also done hard by
others, okay? It's complicated. Those journalists you mentioned, just to elaborate, maybe you
disagree with me. I wonder what you think. Sure. But I think conversation, like not to sort of
glorify any particular medium, but there's something, one of the reasons I like long form
podcasts or interviews, long form unedited interviews, there's been shows throughout
the 20th century that do that kind of thing, but they seem to be rare. That's podcast made
it much more popular and common. Is it somehow makes it easier not to do this kind of bullshit
journalism? The gotcha stuff. Yeah. I feel like asking interesting and deep questions allow,
I think you could sit down with Hitler in 1940, 1941, 1942, and the podcast actually
serve a purpose. In 41 and 42, mid-World War II? Or mid-World War II. A purpose of one,
which is very important, get good information for the future so history can study it.
And to reveal to the world the way a man thinks that is beyond the propaganda.
So all this stuff is complicated, but today, so the specific issue of the folks you were talking
about, like Putin, Xi, Trump, for those folks, they are very clearly outgroup for both the US
left and right, which is, let's say the Western left and right, which are your audience. There's
folks who are tankies and there are folks who are MAGA who are sympathetic. So what are tankies?
Tankies are those who are, they may call themselves tankies. Let's say they're anti-imperialist left
and MAGA right. For different reasons are against the US establishment and for Putin or Xi or something
like that as an agent against the US establishment. So leaving those aside, the point is that most
of your audience is sort of on guard, vaccinated in a sense, versus Xi and Putin and Trump.
They know the counterarguments and so on and so forth. In which case, I wouldn't think interviewing
them would be like that big a deal, relatively, because there's so much other coverage and so on
out there. I think it's probably okay. However, for something like what John Reid was doing and so
on, when he was a sole source of information about the Russian Revolution, that's different.
So it's something about, it kind of gets back to the competitive environment and so on. There's no
dearth of folks who are writing critical coverage of these three men. And so if I felt that that was
insufficient, then you might need more of it. Just like, for example, nowadays with Stalin,
there are a lot of articles and books and PDFs and so on on it. But at the time, not as much.
At the time, not as much. That's why I brought up those guys, because often it's kind of like,
like, have your stock shelves at a supermarket, and so seem totally out of left field?
No, but shoes, but the same things here that I used to work with here.
The thing that is the most popular is the thing that's not on the shelf,
because it's been sold out. Yeah.
Right? So in some ways, this is similar to that famous photo that people have,
or the image that people have on Twitter of the plane and the parts that are shot versus not,
right? The survivorship bias, right? And one way of kind of thinking about it is,
the guys who you think of as bad guys or possible bad guys or controversial guys or whatever,
are those you've already got some vaccination to do. That's why you think of them at all.
Whereas the folks that I mentioned, the regulators invisible, you don't, right?
Salzburger, you know Zuckerberg, you know his pros and cons, you know who he is as a person.
You don't even know Salzburger exists, most people, right? Despite the fact that he's like,
certainly he's powerful. He owns the New York Times. He inherits it. He also got dual class
doc just like Zuck, but he's invisible, right? Well, that's why I think studying the knowns,
the people that are known, can help you generalize to the way human nature is. And then you start
to question, are the same kind of humans existing in places that wield power? And you can assume
they are, they do exist there, and then you can start to infer and ask questions.
So this is kind of what I try to do is, what is the dark matter? What is the question that is
not being asked or what have you, right? And so that's not to say that you need to be so
anti-mimetic that you only do that. But I think you need to do that as well as understand what is
good about the conventional wisdom. And for example, if you notice a lot of what I talk about
is like the V1, V2, V3, where as critical as I am of, let's say, the FDA, I recognize that
people want a regulator marketplace, and how do we do better? As critical as I can be of the Fed,
I recognize that some kind of monetary policy is necessary, and Satoshi came up with a better one,
right? As harsh as one can be a critic of the current system, it is really incumbent,
as difficult as it is, upon one to come up with a better version, just like academia. As much as
I think current science is corrupted, what I propose is a way to actually improve on that.
And actually, any true scientists say, yes, I want my work to be reproducible. Yes, I want
citations to be important statements and so on and so forth. And we don't have to get everybody
to agree that, but just enough to build that better version and not regress.
Yeah, there's an implied optimism within the V1, V2, V3 framework. Let me ask you at a high level
about social media, because you are one of its prominent users to communicate your wisdom.
I use Twitter, I wouldn't really think of this, communicate my wisdom, per se, or anything like
that. I use Twitter like I might use GitHub as a scratchpad for just kind of floating concepts.
And I've got, okay, here's a frame on things. Let me kind of put it out there and see what
people think, get some feedback and so on. Don't you think it has a lot of the impact
that your scratchbook? I think it's good, but basically, if I say that's what's my primary
thing on Twitter, it's that. It's a scratchpad for me to kind of put some concepts out there,
iterate on them, get feedback on them, and so on and so forth.
Do you think it's possible that the words you've tweeted on Twitter is the most impact you will
have on the world? Is it possible? Well, my tweets is a good question. I think the network
state will be, I think, important. Well, the book of the concept. Good question. The movement.
In the sense that Zionism shows that it is possible to have a book, and then a conference,
and then a fund, and eventually in the fullness of time with a lot of time and effort to actually
get a state. And as I mentioned earlier, a lot of countries are small countries,
but I didn't mention there's a guy who's the head of Kazakhstan, and he made a remark. He's like,
if we allow every nation that wants to have self-determination to have a state,
we'd have 600 countries rather than 190. Because there's many opposites of a nation state,
but one of the opposites is the stateless nation. And do you remember the network
state is popular in places like Catalonia? Catalonia nationalists. In Catalonia,
guys who are committed Catalonia nationalists. So Catalonia, you know, this region of Spain,
right? The thing is that, again, V1, V2, V3, the nation state is V2, and it beat the city state,
which is like V1. And the network state, I think of as a potential V3, which combines
aspects of V1 and V2. So Catalonia or the Basque region, these are underneath
the nation state of Spain, but many Catalonians think of themselves as a part of a separate
nation. Not all, set many. And so they want a state of their own. Who doesn't, if you're a nation,
meaning that they've got a legitimate claim from history, language, culture, all that stuff, right?
The Basques do as well. The Kurds do as well. Lots of ethnic groups around the world do.
So in the game of musical chairs, that was the formation of current national borders,
they lost out, right? So what did they do? Well, one answer is they just submit to the Spanish state
and they just speak Spanish and their culture is erased and their history is erased and so on.
The second is they do some sort of Ireland-like insurgency, the troubles to try to get a thing
of their own, which is obviously bad for other kinds of reasons, right? You know, violent, etc.
What this Catalonia nationalist said, he's like, look, well, we can't give up on our existing
path. The network state is a really interesting third option. I mean, by the way, I hadn't talked
to this guy, V Partal, okay, and he's got this cycle via web and VILA, Villevweb, sorry. It can
be, meaning the network state, can be especially appealing to us. Catalans are now embarking on
the task of having a normal and current state in the old way. And this is a project that we cannot
give up. But this doesn't mean that at the same time, we are not also attentive to ideas like
this. And we do not try to learn and move forward, right? Meaning, you know, the network state,
right? Because that's the third way, which says, okay, maybe this particular region
is not something where you're going to be able to get, you know, a state. But just like there's
more Irish people who live outside of Ireland, right? Just like, you know, the Jewish people,
you know, didn't actually get a state in Poland or what have you, they had one in Palestine.
Perhaps the Catalonians could crowdfund territory in other places and have essentially a state of
their own that's distributed. Okay. Now, again, what people are immediately going to say is,
well, that's going to lead to conflict with the locals necessarily and so on and so forth.
But if you're parallel processing, you don't have the all in one bucket aspect of I must win here.
And the guy on the other side is like, I must win. You have optionality. You can,
you can have multiple different nodes around the world. Just like there's multiple Chinatowns,
you can have multiple Catalonian towns, right? And some places you might be able to just buy
an island and that becomes, you know, the new Catalonia, right? Just like in, I think there's
a, there's a region called New Caledonia. And that's in the South of specific. So maybe,
maybe New Catalonia is somewhere else, right? So if you're flexible in that, now, of course,
a bunch of people will immediately say, they'll have 50 different objections to this. They'll
say, oh, you don't get it. The whole point is the land and, you know, so on, they've been there
for generations, sort of say, I do get it. But this Catalan nationalist who's like literally written
in Catalonian for, I don't know how many years, right, is basically saying, this is worth thinking
about. And so it's a peaceful third way. Yeah, but it's interesting. I mean, it's a good question
whether Elon Musk, SpaceX and Tesla will be successful without Twitter. Yeah, I don't think
it's as successful. I mean, obviously they existed before Twitter. And a lot of the engineering
problems are obviously not on Twitter things, right? But Twitter itself has certainly probably
helped Musk with Tesla sales. The engineering, no, that's not, that's not what I mean. Oh,
good. The best people in the world solve the engineering problem. Yes, but he hires the people
to solve them. And he knows enough about engineering to hire those people. That's the point I'm
making is on Twitter, the legend of Elon Musk is created. The vision is communicated. And
the best engineers in the world come to work for the vision. It's an advertisement of a man of a
company pursuing a vision. And I think Twitter is a great place to make viral ideas that are
compelling to people, whatever those ideas are. And whether that's the network state,
or whether that's humans becoming a multi-planetary species. Here is a remark I had just before the
pandemic related to this, okay, but Twitter helping Elon just beyond that for a second.
Maybe centralization is actually also underexplored in the design space.
For example, today's social networks are essentially governed by a single CO, but that
CO is a background figure. They aren't leading the users to do anything. What if they did?
One example, could Elon Musk's then 30 million followers somehow get us to Mars faster?
Tools for directed collaborative work by really large groups on the internet are still
in their infancy. You can see a piece of what I was talking about, the scratch pad thing,
the network state being a group which can do collective actions. This is kind of the thing,
right? So technologies for internet collaboration that can be very useful to the software for
future network states. Operational transformation is how Google Docs coordinates edits.
Conflict-free replicated data types is another alternative easier to code in some ways than
operational transformation. Micro tasks like mechanical turks, scaleai and earn.com before
we sold it. Blockchain and crypto, obviously, the polymath project where a bunch of people
parallel processed and were able to solve an open math problem by collaborating.
Wikipedia with its flaws that we talked about, social networks and group messaging,
all these are ways for collaborating. They're not just simply attacking or doing something
on the internet. This is something that Elon could use, right?
What works and what doesn't about Twitter? If there's something that's broken, how would you
fix it? A million things I can say here. A few things. First is fact-checking. I had this kind
of fun, I thought it was a funny tweet. To anyone who wants to quote, ban lying on social media,
please write down a function that takes in a statement and returns whether it is true.
If you can start with the reman hypothesis, that would be amazing. Yeah. Okay.
That's kind of funny, right? That's funny. That joke landed on like five people.
Sure. You want to explain the joke? There's a lot of problems, the decidability where the truth,
that's what proofs in math is. The truth of the thing is actually exceptionally difficult to
determine. That's just a really nice example. The problems that persist across centuries that have
not been solved by the most brilliant minds, they're essentially true or false problems.
That's right. When they were saying they want to ban lying on social media, fact-check social
media, the assumption is that they know what is true. What do they mean by that? They really
mean the assertion of political power, right? With that said, do I think it could be useful
to have some kind of quote, fact-checking thing? Yes, but it has to be decentralized and open
source. You could imagine an interesting concept of coding truegle, like a Google that returned
what was true. It's like a modified version. I like it. Right? It's like GPT-3, but the stable
diffusion version where it's open. Okay. Now, anybody stable diffusion shows it is possible
to take an expensive AI model and put it out there, right? You know what a knowledge graph is?
You wouldn't actually, whether you have it as RDF or like a triple store kind of thing or some
of the representation, it's like an ontology of A is a B and B has a C and it's got probabilities
on the edges sometimes and other kinds of metadata. This allows Google to show certain
kinds of one box information where it's like, what is Steve Jobs' age or birthday? They can
pull that up out of the knowledge graph, right? So you can imagine that truegle would have both
deterministic and statistical components. And crucially, it would say whether something is
true according to a given knowledge graph. And so this way, at least what you can do is you can
say, okay, here's the things that are consensus reality, like the value of the gravitational
constant will be the same in the MAGA knowledge graph and the US establishment knowledge graph
and the CCP knowledge graph and the, I don't know, the Brazilian knowledge graph and so on and so
forth. Okay. But there's other things that will be quite different. And at least now you can isolate
where the point of disagreement is. And so you can have a form of decentralized fact checking
that is like, according to who, well, here is the authority and it is this knowledge graph,
right? So that's like a kind of thing, right? Yeah. So that's one concept of what next social
media looks like. There's actually so much more. Another huge thing is decentralized social media.
Okay. Social media today is like China under communism in a really key sense. There's a great
article called The Secret Document that Transform China. Do you know what China was like before 1978?
I know about the atrocities. Sure. So put some flesh on the bone, so to speak. Okay. So basically,
there's a good book I'm reading because I think a lot of documents became public recently.
And so there's a window when it opened up now, it's probably closing back down again. But you
know, great biographies because of that were written like, I'm currently reading Miles Great
Famine by Frank Decatur, which is, oh boy. It's crazy. Okay. Here's the thing is capitalism was
punishable by death in living memory in China. Just to explain what that meant. Okay. I mean,
that's what communism was, right? It was literally the same China that has like the CCP,
you know, the entrepreneurs and Jack Ma and so on and so forth. 40 something years ago,
capitalism was punishable by death. But to put, to give you a concrete example,
this is a famous story in China, maybe apocryphal, but it's what, you know, the folks have talked
about. There's a village in Xiao Gang. And basically all the grain that you were produced was supposed
to go to the collective. And even one straw belonged to the group. At one meeting with
Communist Party officials, the farmer asked, what about the teeth in my head? Do I own those?
Answer, no, your teeth belong to the collective. Okay. Now, the thing is, that when you're taking
100% of everything, okay, work hard, don't work hard, everyone gets the same so people don't
want to work, right? So what happened? These farmers gathered in secret and they did something that
was like, would have gotten them executed. They wrote a contract amongst themselves and said,
we all agree that we will be able to keep some of our own grain. We will give some of them to
the regime. So when it comes to collective grain, they've got something, we'll be able to keep some
of it. And if any of us are killed for doing this, then the contract said that the others
would take care of their children. Okay. To keep some of what you earned. I mean, just think about
how- They formed a mini capitalism society within the secret capitalism society amongst five people.
Right. So now that they could keep some of what they earned, right? They had a bumper harvest.
And you know what happened with that bumper harvest? That made the local officials really
suspicious and mad. They weren't happy that there was a bumper harvest. They're like,
what are you doing? You're doing capitalism, right? And a few years earlier, they might have
just been executed. And in fact, many were. That's what it means when you see millions dead.
Millions dead means guys were shot for keeping some grain for themselves. It means like guys came
and kicked in the door of your collective farm and raped your wife and took you off to a prison
camp and so on and so forth. That's what communism actually was. It hasn't been depicted in movies.
There's a great post by Ken Billingsley in the year 2000 called, if I get this right,
Hollywood's Missing Movies. Okay. This is basically here. I'll paste this link so you
can put in the show notes. All right. This is worth reading. It's still applicable today.
But now that we have stable diffusion, now we have all these people online. Now that
Russia and China are America's national bad guys, as they were before, they are again,
perhaps we'll get some movies on what communism actually was during the 20th century and how
bad it was, right? And, you know, vaccinate people against that as well as against Nazism,
which they should be. Okay. The point of this, go ahead. No, because I'm congratulating myself on
the nice because you're sending me excellent links on WhatsApp. And I just saw that there's
an export chat feature. Yes. Great. Because we also have disappearing messages on. So I was like,
all right, this is great. Great. I'll be able to get it. Your ability to reference sources is
incredible. So thank you for this. Otherwise, if I say something, it sounds too surprising. So
that's why I want to make sure I have... On this topic. Yeah. So like, yeah, I mean, people would
be like shot for holding some grain. So what happened though was Ding Xiaoping said, okay,
we're not going to kill you. In fact, we're going to actually set up the first special
economic zone in Shenzhen. He didn't try to flip the whole country from communist to capitalist
in one go and said, he's like, we can reform in one place. And in fact, he fenced it off
from the rest of China. And it did trade with Hong Kong. And he spent his political capital on
this one exception. It grew so fast, they gave him more political capital. You know, some people
think actually that the, you know, Sino-Vietnamese war was Ding's way of just distracting the generals
while he was turning China around to get it back on the capitalist road. And what he did was
the opposite of a rebranding. He did a reinterpretation. Like a rebranding is where
the substance is the same, but the logo has changed. Okay. You know, you're now... You were
Facebook, you're now Metta. That's a rebranding, right? Reinterpretation is where the logo and
the branding is the same. They're still the CCP. They're still the Chinese Communist Party.
But they're capitalist now, the engine under the hood. It's deniable. Okay. And this is a very
common... Once you realize those are different things, it's like, swap the front end, swap the
back end. Yeah. Go ahead. Go ahead and put it. It's really good. Yeah, yeah. I'm enjoying your
metaphors and way of talking about stuff. Yeah. So I get, yeah, yeah. Swap, you could, yeah,
rebranding, swap the front end, reinterpretation, swap the back end. That's right. Once you,
you know, once you realize that, you're like, okay, I can, just like as an engineer, you can kind
of, okay, sometimes I want to do something on the front end, sometimes I want to do the back end,
sometimes it's explicit, and sometimes the user doesn't need to see it and it's on the back end.
Lots of political stuff is arguably not just best done on the back end, but always done on the
back end. One of the points I make in the book is left is the new, right is the new, left is,
you know, if you look through history, the Christian king, the Republican conservative,
the CCP entrepreneur, the WASP establishment, these are all examples of a revolutionary left
movement becoming the ruling class right. Okay. Like the Republican conservative,
just as that one example, I go through an extended description of this in the book,
but the Republicans were the, the radical Republicans, the left of 1865, they won the
revolution and their moral authority led them to have economic authority in the late 1800s.
You wouldn't want a Democrat Confederate trader as the head of your railroad company, would you,
right? So all the Confederate traders that were boxed out from the plump positions in the late
1800s. And so what happened was the Republicans turned their moral authority into economic
authority, made tons of money. The Democrats then started repositioning, not as a party of the
Southern races, but the poor, right? And, you know, the cross of gold speech by William
Jennings Bryan was part of that. There's a gradual process that reaches the pot, not a
posthumous, but let's say a crucial mark with the election of FDR, where it was actually not
the 1932, but 1936 election that black voters switched over to FDR. Okay. That was actually the,
the, like the major flip to like 70%, you know, to, to, to the Democrats. Now they had repositioned
as a party of the poor, not the party of the South. Okay. And Republicans had lost some economic
authority or rather they had moral authority. They turned into economic authority. They started
to lose some moral authority. The loss of moral authority was complete by 1965. That was actually
mop up. People dated, you know, the civil rights movement as the big way where the Republicans
lost moral authority. It's not really, that was a mop up because 1936, 30 years earlier was when
black voters switched to the Democrats. Okay. So 1965 was another 10 points moving over of black
voters to Democrats rather than said completely lost moral authority 100 years after the civil
war. Okay. Then the next 50 years, that loss of moral authority meant that they lost economic
authority because now you wouldn't want a Republican bigot as a sea of your tech company
anymore, would you? Right. So by 2015, now, now you have, it's like two sine waves that are staggered.
Right. Moral authority leads to economic authority leads to loss of moral authority,
leads to loss of economic authority. And so now you have the, the Democrats, you know, have,
you know, completed 155 year arc from the defeated party in the civil war to the dominant party in
the establishment. All the woke capitalists are now at the very top. And now the same repositioning
is happening where if you're so woke, why are you rich? You get it, right? Like, you know,
if you're so smart, why aren't you rich is the normal kind of thing, right? If you're so woke,
if you're so holy, why is like, for example, the BLM founder, why do they have this million
dollar mansion, right? If you're so woke and it's all about being good in your anti-capitalist,
how come you seem to be raking in the money, et cetera, right? This is an argument which
I'm not sure how long it will go. It might take years to play out, it might take decades to play
out. I think probably on the order of a decade, you're going to see in my view, the repositioning,
if the Democrats are the woke capitalists, the Republicans will eventually become,
are becoming the Bitcoin maximalists. Why? Because, you know, if one guy picks left,
the other guy picks right, it's literally like magnets kind of repelling, they're sort of
forced into the other corner here, right? And the Bitcoin maximalists will essentially,
where this guy says centralization, they say decentralization, where they defend the right
of capital to do anything, the maximalists will say, actually, you're all cantillionaires,
you're all benefiting from print and money, you don't have anything that's legitimate,
you don't actually own anything, it's all a handout from the government and so on and so
forth, right? And so that's counterpositioning that will basically attack the wokes by how
much money they're making. They're not contesting the ideology. So when one guy signals economics,
you signal culture, when their guy signals culture, you signal economics, that's actually,
that's the whole thing I can talk about. Should I talk about that first thing?
Sure. Is this integrated into the forces that you talk about? You've talked about
the three forces that are effective, forces that affect our society, which is the wokes,
let's say. Woke capital, commerce capital. You've talked so fast, it's, and I think so slow.
Woke capital, communist capital and crypto capital. Can you explain each of those three? We actually
talked about each of the three in part, but it'd be nice to bring them together in a beautiful
triangle. And then I will also come back up and I'll talk about how the CCP story relates to
social media and decentralized social media. All right. So NYT, CCP, BTC is woke capital,
communist capital, crypto capital. And communist capital is the simplest it is you must submit.
The communist party is powerful, CCP is powerful, and you are not. If you're in China, you're just
simple. CCP is an embodiment of communist capital that you're talking about.
Well, yeah. So basically, and by the end China, they call it CPC. So basically,
they don't like it usually if you say CCP, right? So the communist party of China as opposed to
Chinese kind of disorder. Basically, that is capitalism, that is a Chinese pool of capital,
that billion person pool, okay? That's WeChat and it's Alibaba and its entire kind of thing. That
is one just social network with currency. The whole thing is vertically introverted.
When we say communist, what do you mean here? Why is the word communist important? Why don't you
just say China? So is communist an important word? Well, it's just a catchy label.
It's a catchy label, but I think it's also important because it seems it's paradoxical,
right? So I had a thread on this. The future is communist capital versus woke capital versus
crypto capital. Each represents a left-right fusion that's bizarre by the standards of the
1980s consensus. It's PRC versus MMT versus BTC, all right? And why is it bizarre by the standards
of the 1980s consensus? Well, in the 1980s, you wouldn't think the communists would become
capitalist, but they did. You wouldn't think that the wokes, the progressives would become so enamored
with giant corporations and their power, right? They've seen something to liken that, right?
And you also wouldn't think that the non-Americans or the post-Americans or the internationalists
would be the champions of capital because you think it's the American nation, right?
Right. So rather than the conservative American nationalists being the defenders of capital,
you have the liberal Americans who are with capital, you have the communist Chinese who
are with capital, and you have the internationalists who are with capital. And it's the conservative
American nationalists who are in some ways against that, which is kind of funny, right?
So it's like this weird ideological flippening that if you take the long lens,
you have these polls that kind of repel each other, okay? So just on the CCP NYT BTC thing.
NYT, by the way, is woke capital. Yeah. What is NYT? So its formula is a little
interesting. If CCP is just, you must submit because they're powerful, okay? And then you
bow your head because the Chinese Communist Party is strong. Woke capital is you must sympathize.
Why do you bow your head, Lex? Oh, because you're a white male. Therefore, you're guilty. You
sympathize. You must bow your head because you are powerful. Yet, notice that it ends in the same
place in your head looking to the ground, right? In China, it's because they're powerful, so therefore
you must bend your head. For the wokes, it's the left-handed version where you are powerful and
it's shameful so you should bow your head, right? Right. Okay. But it ends in your head bowed.
It's an ideology of submission. It's not that subtle, but it's like somewhat subtle.
And then finally, crypto capital is head held high. You must be sovereign, okay?
And one of the things I point out in the book is each of these polls is negative in some ways
when taken to extreme, but also negative in its opposite. For example, obviously just totally
submitting to total surveillance is bad, but a society where nobody submits is San Francisco
where people just rob stores and walk out in the middle shoplifting all these goods and
nothing happens, right? A society where you have the woke level of sympathy where you get to the
kind of insanity of math is why it's supremacist and whatever nonsense is happening today is
terrible. But a society that's totally stripped of sympathy is also not one that one would want
to be part of, right? Whether it's 4chan's actual culture or it's fame culture or something like
that or some weird combination, that's also not good. It's like Russia in the 90s, like nobody
trusts anybody. That's also bad. And being totally sovereign, that sounds good. And there's a lot
that is good about it. And I'm sympathetic to this corner, but being totally sovereign,
you go so capitalist, so sovereign that you're against the division of labor. You don't trust
anybody. So you have to pump your own water and so on. So you actually have a reduced standard
of living over here, okay? And commercially- Survivalist or whatever. Survivalist type of
stuff, right? And you just kind of, you just go kind of too crazy into that corner. And then,
of course, though, the other extreme of having no sovereignty is you will own nothing and be
happy. Everything's in the cloud and can be deleted at any point, right? So each of these
has badness when it's there, but also it's total extreme opposite is bad. And so you want to kind
of carve out like an intelligent intermediate of these three poles. And that's the decentralized
center or the recentralized center, I call. Now, with that said, I think there is a repositioning
in particular of book capital that is happening. And I think if the 2000s was the global war on
terror, and then the channel just changed to wokeness in the 2010s, and when I mean channel
change, have you seen Paul Graham's graph or actually David Rosado's graph that Paul Graham
posted? No. Well, just a good chance to say that Paul Graham is awesome. Okay, yeah. And so here is
this graph, okay? David Rosado's data analysis, I think that put this together. So basically,
this is a graph of the word usage frequency in New York Times, 1970, 2018. And he's got some
controls there. Paul Graham tweets, hypothesis, although some newspapers can survive the switch
to online subscriptions, none can do it and remain politically neutral, quote, newspaper record,
you have to pick a side to get people to subscribe. And there's a bunch of
plots on the x-axis is years, on the y-axis is the frequency of use, and sexism has been going
up, misogyny has been going up, sexist, patriarchy, mansplaining, toxic masculinity, male privilege,
all these terms have been going up very intensely in the past decade. Yeah, but really 2013 is the
exact moment you see these things, they're flat and then just go vertical, mansplaining, toxic
masculinity. What precisely happened in 2013? Ah, so I talked about this in the book, but I think
fundamentally what happened was tech hurt media and their revenue dropped by about $50 billion over
the four years from OH 2012. Yeah. Tech helped Obama get reelected and media was positive on tech
until December 2012, they wrote like the nerds go marching in the Atlantic. Then after January
2013, once Obama was ensconced, then the knives came out because basically these tech guys were
bankrupting them, they were through supporting them. And so the journals got extremely nasty,
and just basically they couldn't build search engines or create social networks, but they could
write stories and shape narratives. So a clear editorial direction went down that essentially
took all of these weapons that had been developed in academia to win status competitions in humanity
departments and then they just deployed them. And essentially somebody observed that
wokeness is the combination of focaldi and deconstruction and civil rights, where deconstruction
takes away the legitimacy of the old order and then civil rights says, okay, the only thing that's
good is this, which says the old order is also bad in a different way, but this is what's good.
And that is the underpinning ideology that all these words have embedded in them,
like an ideology. Another way of thinking about it is, this is not my reference, but I'll side
it anyway, the glossary of the Greek military junta. The creation and or use of special terms
are employed by the junta as propaganda tools, because essentially the word itself embeds a
concept. You can rustle conjugate something one way or the other. Rustle conjugation is a concept
that I sweat, you perspire, but she glows. You can always take something. You are uncontrollably
angry, but he is righteously indignant. You have a thin skin, they clap back.
So once you kind of realize that these words have just been chosen in such a way as to
delegitimize their target, and they all went vertical in 2013, and they were suddenly targeted
against their erstwhile allies in tech, but also just across the country, you can see that this
great awakening, that's what Iglesias called it by plain words, the great awakening,
this kind of spasm of quasi-religious extremism. I wouldn't call it religious
because it's not God-centered, it's really state and network-centered. So I call it a doctrine,
which is a superset of religion and political doctrine. These words went vertical, and all
the terrorism stuff you just noticed kind of fell off the cliff. That was the obsession of
everything in the 2000s, and just channel change. It's amazing how that happened. It's not like
any of the pieces got picked up. Some of those wars are still raging, of course.
And there's victims to this vokism movement. But in a weird way, even though some parts of it,
just like there's wars in the Middle East that still keep raging, there's certainly
active fronts of vokism. But in a sense, the next shift is already on. You know why?
It's a pivot from vokism to statism. In many ways, NYT is sort of, and more generally,
the US establishment is kind of coming, you may not believe this, they're kind of coming
back to the center a little bit. And the same with that linen after the revolution
implemented the new economic policy, which you may be aware of, which was just like
X percent more capitalism. You kind of boot on the neck, take control, but then ease up for a bit,
and the so-called net men during the 20s were able to eke out something. There was like,
okay, fine, he's going to be easier on us. Then it intensified again, because basically by loosening
up, they were able to consolidate control, they weren't putting as much pressure on, right? Then
it went extremely intense again, right? Similar to Mao's 100 Flowers thing, let 100 flowers bloom,
and everybody came out, and then he founded all the people who were against him, and he
executed a bunch of them, right? So what's happening now is NYT is, and more generally,
the US establishment is somewhat tacking back to the center, where they're not talking BLM and
abolish the police, they're saying, fund the Capitol Police, right? They've gone from the
narrative of 2020, which was meant to win a domestic contest, where they said America is a
systemically racist country, tear down George Washington, we're so evil, to the rhetoric of
2022, which is we're the global champion of democracy, and every non-white country is supposed
to trust us. Now, obviously, those are inconsistent, right? If you're in India, or you're in Nigeria,
and you just heard that America is calling itself the same guys, by the way, saying it's so institutionally
racist, systemically racist, and you're saying, well, we're the leader of the free world, and the
number one, obviously, there's an inconsistency between the domestic propaganda and the foreign
propaganda, right? There's a contrast between abolish the police and put $2 billion for the
Capitol Police. You can reconcile this, and you can say the US establishment is pro-federal and
anti-local and state. So abolish the local police, who tend to be Republican or rightist,
but fund the FBI, fund the Capitol Police, who tend to be just like in the Soviet Union,
is the national things like the KGB, right? They're for the state, but they're always local,
nationalist, ethnic insurgencies, and like Estonia and other places, right? So you can
reconcile them, but nevertheless, on its face, those are contradictory. So what are you going to
get, I think? I think you're going to get on this rotation where a fair number of the folks on the
sort of authoritarian right are kind of pulled back into the fold a bit, okay? These are the cops
and the military and whatnot, some of them, because as this decade progresses, you're going to see
the signaling on American statism as opposed to wokeism, which is 30 degrees back towards the
center, right? Conversely, on the other side, you're going to have the left libertarians and
right libertarians who are signaling crypto and decentralization and so on, okay? And so the
next one isn't red versus blue, it's orange versus green, it's the dollar versus Bitcoin. And so you
have the authoritarians, the top of the political compass versus the quote libertarians, right?
And here is the visual of that. So that's why like, you know, as I wrote the book and after I
showed it, I was like, you know, I'm already seeing this shift happening from war on terror to
wokeism to American statism, right? And here, just take a look at this visual.
Interesting. So the visual is an animation transforming the left versus right libertarian
versus authoritarian to Bitcoin and dollar versus crypto.
That's right. And some folks switch sides, right? Because you have folks like, you know, Jack Dorsey
and a lot of the tech founders in basically the lower left corner, right, who were blue but are
now going to become orange or orange. And you have folks in the upper right corner who are going to,
at the end of the day, pick the dollar and the American flag over the internationalist ideals
of cryptocurrency. The realigning, as you call it. Let me ask you briefly, we do need to get a
comment, your visionary view of things. We're at a low point in the cryptocurrency space
from a shallow analysis perspective, or maybe in a deeper sense, if you can enlighten me,
do you think Bitcoin will rise again? Yes. Do you think it will go to take on
fiat, you know, to go over a million dollars to go to these heights?
I mean, I think it's possible. And the reason I think it's possible is I think a lot of things
might go to a million dollars because inflation. Oh, inflation. Right.
That was an important point. Right. It's a very important point, yes.
Because you're seeing essentially, sir, the choke pointing on energy is pushing up prices
across the board for a lot of things. China's not doing us any favors with the COVID lockdowns.
Putin's not doing the world any favors with this giant war. There's a lot of bad things
happening in the physical world. I mean, when China, Russia, and the US are all,
and Europe is, you know, like there's folks who are just insane about degrowth and they're against,
you know, they're pushing for burning coal and wood, right? So a lot of prices are going up in
a really foundational and fundamental way. And with that said, also, the dollar is in some way
strengthening against certain other things because a lot of other countries are dying harder,
right? You know, and you've got riots in Sri Lanka and riots in Panama and riots in,
you know, all these places, right? So it's very complicated because you've got multiple different
trends going in the same way. Your Bitcoin maximums would just say infinity over 21 million.
And so therefore, you print all the dollars, only 21 million Bitcoins and Bitcoin goes to
infinity. But it can be something where lots of other currencies die and the dollar is actually
exported via stablecoins. Okay. But I do think- So still moves fiat, still moves somehow into
the cryptocurrencies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's kind of like Microsoft where,
I mean, Windows is still around, right? Microsoft is still around, still a, you know,
multi-hundred billion dollar company. He doesn't mean it. He doesn't mean it. Don't worry. All
my machines are Windows and let's do a boot. Yeah. Okay, okay. I don't know a single Mac.
Really? Okay. You are unusual on that. Yeah. So at least for our- It's not ideology.
Just convenience. Fine. I mean, they actually now post-Satya, they do make some good stuff,
right? Like Microsoft Teams is good, right? Yeah, there's a lot of kind of stuff. New
CEO has done a lot of innovative things, like GitHub. Yeah. Well, there's an acquisition,
but still, is that giving credit for it? The acquisition, the pivoting of vision and motivations
and focus and all that kind of stuff. Anyway, yes, Microsoft does an analogy metaphor for
something. Well, yeah. So basically just like, you know, they didn't need to turn around,
but they are, they didn't do it to the present day. They didn't die from Google app. I mean,
for the massive attacks on them, they didn't die. They're less powerful, but they make more money,
right? Yes. And I think that might be something that, I mean, our best case scenario is
the US establishment or CCP has more power over fewer people. Okay. I see. And so,
you know, but you can exit. If you're there, you're kind of knuckling under or whatever,
but you can exit, right? And so I mentioned the, those three polls. CCP is obviously
a billion people, 1.4 aligned under the digital yuan and so on, right? NYT is the entire,
you know, it's the tech companies, it's the US dollar, it is the establishment. And then crypto
capital is everybody else. But I actually think that over time, that third world is Web 3 this
time. And that's the third poll. And that's India and it's Israel. And it's lots of American
conservatives and left libertarians and libertarians. And it's also lots of Chinese liberals,
all the folks who are trying to get out of China because, you know, the, like, you know,
it's become so nationalist and crazy and difficult for capitalism. And so if you take basically
non-establishment Americans on both left and right, okay, the, you know, the bottom two
quadrants in the political compass I talked about, you take the liberal Chinese, you take the Israelis
and the Indians. Why? Because they don't, both of them are, have a lot of tech talent, right?
They're the number one and number two demographics for tech founders. And they want to, while they
are generally sympathetic to the West, right, and they're more ties to the West, they also
are more cautious about national interest rather than just starting fights, you know, where that's
how they would think about it, right? They just, you know, India thinks of Israel as a poor country,
Israel thinks of itself as a small country. And so therefore it needs to not just get in every
fight just for the sake of it and so need to maintain a cautious distance with China, but not,
like, do what Pelosi is doing and try and start, start like a big thing, okay?
I think Israel is similar where it's maintaining diplomatic relations with China. It's more
friendly towards China than, than the U.S.'s. Indian Israel, I think, are two sovereign states
that have a lot of globally mobile tech talent that obviously have ties to the West with the
large diaspora that are hard to demonize, you know, in, or in the sense of willing to argue on the
internet. It's put it like that in English, right? It's very important. And them plus enough Americans
plus enough Chinese can set up another poll that is not for Cold War or military confrontation,
but for peace and trade and freedom and so on and so forth, right? That's the center as opposed to
the, you know, left of the, you know, the, the woke American U.S. establishment or the right of
the ultra-nationalist CCP, right? That's what I think about. Now, what I would say here is,
the reason I think these are the kind of the three polls, you can argue against this, right?
You can say it's unipolar world. America is totally dominant. That's one argument.
You can say it's a bipolar world. It's just the U.S. versus China. Everybody else will have to be
forced to align with one or the other. J.S. Schenker, you know, actually explicitly rejected
this. He's like, look, there's a billion people in India. It's coming up on, it will eventually be
like the number three economy. It's on the rise. He's got the history and culture. He thinks he's
entitled to have, India's entitled to have its own side, right? In such a thing. It's a funny way
of putting it, right? Yeah. But it's also true. And so you can say it's unipolar. You can say
it's bipolar. You could say it's just multipolar. And everybody is kind of there, you know,
in India, Israel, these groups are out there. But I actually think it's going to be tripolar.
And the reason it's tripolar is these three pools are the groups that have enough media and money
and scale and whatnot to really kind of be self-consistent civilizations. Obviously,
China is like the vertically integrated, like Apple or whatever, just like one country.
Maybe a stable ideology. A stable ideology. That's right, right? Obviously, the, you know,
the books have control of lots of institutions. They've got the U.S. establishment. They've got
the tech companies. They've got the media companies and so on. But crypto is basically
everybody else. And crucially, crypto has inroads in China and America where it's hard to demonize
it as completely foreign because there's many, many, many huge proponents of the universalist
values of crypto in America and China because it is true global rule of law and free speech and,
you know, so on. It is genuinely universalist in a way where America can no longer be, you know,
the number one rule of the rules-based order is America is always number one. And China doesn't
even pretend to maintain a rules-based order, right? Whereas for all those countries that don't
want to either be dominated by the U.S. media corporations that can, or social media that
can just censor Trump, nor do they want to be dominated by China, this is an attractive alternative,
a platform they can make their own, right? So that's where I think, you know, I wrote an article
on this in foreign policy on here. Here's two articles that talk about this a little bit. It's
called Great Protocol Politics. And then here's another one on the sort of domestic thing,
Bitcoin is civilization for very wise, okay? But I want to just come up the stack a little bit
and just return to that original point, which I diverged on, which was why I gave the whole example
of how we got into China because I talked about how China had gone from communist to capitalist
and letting people have just a share of what they owned, right? With social media, we're still in
kind of the communist era of social media almost, where whatever you earn on social media,
like Google takes its cut, Twitter takes 100%, you're nothing for all your tweets or anything
like that. Not only do you earn nothing, you might get a little rev share on TikTok or YouTube,
you can do okay, right? But not only do you earn either nothing or a little bit, you have no digital
property rights, even more fundamentally. You are at the, just the whim of a giant corporation
can hit a button and everything you work for over years gone, okay? That is, even if that is quote,
the current state of events, the state of affairs rather, that is not the right balance of power.
To be able to unperson somebody at the touch of a key and take away everything in the digital
world when we're living more and more in the digital world, we need to check on that power.
And the check on that power is crypto and its property rights and its decentralization, right?
Then when I say decentralization, I mean, your money and your digital property is by default yours
and there has to be a due process for someone to take that away from you. Everything, all work
is online, all your money is online, your presence is online. That can just be taken away from you
with a press of a key that just gives bad governments, bad corporations so much power that
that's wrong, right? That's why I'm a medium and long-term bull on crypto simply because
the check on this thing and that if you think about it in terms of just abstract decentralizations,
one thing, but you think about it in terms of property rights, it's quite another.
And now, what that also means is once you have property rights and you have decentralized social
media, it'll be like the explosion of trade that happened after China went from Communist
to capitalist. Literally billions of people around the world are no longer giving everything to the
collective. They own the teeth in their head now, finally. Okay, is it funny, right? So your
lexfreeman.eth, you own it, the keys are on your computer. The bad part is, of course, they can get
hacked or something like that. Then you can deal with that with social recovery, there's
raise of securing keys. But the good part is, ta-da, you actually have property rights in the
Hernando de Soto sense. You have something you own, ownership, digital ownership. The cloud is
great, but crypto gives you some of the functionality of the cloud while also having some of the
functionality of the offline world where you have the keys. So it's a V3, a continuous theme. The
V1 was offline, I've got a key, I own it, I have de facto control. V2 is the cloud, someone else
manages it for me, it's hosted, I get collaboration, so on. V3 is the chain where you combine aspects
of those. You have the global state of the cloud, but you have the local permission and controlling
of the private key. So that's why I'm a medium to long-term ultra-bull on crypto. And there's a
podcast I gave with Asimco where I talked through how crypto actually doesn't just go after finance.
So it's gold, and it's wire transfers, and it's crowdfunding, and it's all finance with DeFi.
But it's actually also search, and it's social, and it's messaging, it's actually even operating
systems, and eventually cloud and whatnot. Do you want me to talk about that briefly?
Yeah, yeah, if you can briefly see how broad you see the effect of crypto.
So first, crypto is fundamentally a new way of building back-end systems. So if you think about
how big a deal it was to go from AT&T's corporate unix to Linux, it's permissionless. When you
went from as much as I admire a lot of the stuff that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman have done at
OpenAI. Phenomenal in terms of research, they've pushed the envelope forward, I give them a ton
of credit. Still, it was great to see stable diffusion out there, which was open-source AI.
Right? And so from a developer, from a power user standpoint, whenever you have the unlocked
version, like an unlocked cell phone, it's always going to be better. So what crypto gives you,
obviously, it's every financial thing in the world. You can do stocks, bonds, etc. It's not,
just like the internet wasn't just a channel. It wasn't like radio and TV and internet. It was
internet radio and internet TV and internet this and internet that. Everything was the internet,
all media became internet. Crypto is not an asset class. It's all asset classes. It's crypto stocks
and crypto bonds, etc. In a real sense, private property arguably didn't exist in the same way
before crypto. International law didn't exist before crypto. How are you going to do a deal
between Brazil and Bangladesh? If a Brazilian company wants to acquire a Bangladesh company,
they usually have to set up a US adapter in between because otherwise, what are the
tax or the other obligations between the two? You set up a US adapter or a Chinese adapter
to go between them, but now that Brazilian and Bangladesh can go peer to peer because they're
using the blockchain. They can agree on a system of law that is completely international and that's
code so each party can diligence it without speaking Portuguese and Bengali. So that's why
I am a long-term bull on crypto. I just described the finance case. Let me go through the others,
social. So you have the private keys for your ENS. You have apps like Farcaster. You basically have
decentralized social media where there's different variants. Some you just log in with your crypto
username. Others, the entire social network and all the likes and posts are on chain like
diesel, but there's several different versions. Search. Once you realize block explorers are
an important stealth threat to search. They're very high traffic sites like blockchain.com
and either scan. Google is just totally slept on. They don't have a block explorer. You don't
have to do anything in terms of trading or anything like that. Google does not have a
block explorer. Why? They don't think of it as search, but it is search. It's absolutely search.
It's a very important kind of search engine. Once you have crypto social, you now show that
you're not just indexing in a block explorer like on chain transactions, but on chain communications.
Okay. So now you suddenly see, oh, the entire social web that Google couldn't index. It could
only index a World Wide Web and not the social web. Now it's actually the on chain signed web
because every post is digitally signed. It's a new set of signals. It's way easier to index
than either the World Wide Web or the social web because it's open and public. So this is a total
disruptive thing to search in the medium term because it's a new kind of data set index, right?
So that's how it's a threat to social, to search. It is a threat to messaging. Why? Because or
disruptive eventually because the ENS name, as I mentioned, is like a universal identifier. You
can send encrypted messages between people. That's a better primitive to base it on. What's app is
just claiming that they're end to end encrypted. But with an ENS name or with a crypto name,
you can be provably auditably end to end encrypted because you're actually sending it back and
forth because the private key is local, right? That itself, given how important that is, right?
You could man in the middle signal or WhatsApp because there's a server there, right?
If you have, so end to end encrypted messaging will happen and with payments and all this other
stuff, okay? So you get the crypto messaging apps. You get operating systems. Why? Well,
the frontier of operating systems, I mean, look, Windows, Linux and macOS have been around forever.
But if you actually think about what is a blockchain? Well, there's operating systems,
there's web browsers. A blockchain is the most complicated thing since an operating system
or web browser because it's a kind of operating system. Why? It's got something like Ethereum.
It has an EVM. It's got a programming language. It's got an ecosystem where people monetize on it.
They build front-end apps and they build back-end apps. They interoperate between each other.
This is the frontier of operating systems research. People haven't thought of it that way,
right? It's also the frontier of a lot of things in databases. You will get a crypto LinkedIn
where there's zero knowledge proofs of various credentials. Basically, every single Web2 company,
I can probably come up with a Web3 variant of it, right? Ethereum is, I mean, and this is
high praise for both parties, but Ethereum is like the crypto stripe or the Web3 stripe.
And you will see versions of everything else that are like this. But I kind of described
search, social, messaging, operating systems, the phone, right? Solana is doing a crypto phone.
Why do you want that? Again, digital property. Apple was talking about running some script to
find if people were having CSAM, like child porn or whatever, on their phones, right?
And even NYT actually reported that Google ran something like this and found false positive.
Some guy had to take a photo of a kid for medical diagnosis. It got falsely flagged as CSAM. He
lost access to his account. Total nightmare. Imagine just getting locked out of your Google
account, which you're so dependent on, right? As more and more of your digital life goes online,
is it really that much ethically different if it's the Chinese state that locks you out
or an American corporation, right? Basically, it's operationally very similar. You just have no
recourse. You're unpersoned, right? So the crypto phone becomes like insanely important
because you have a local set of private keys. Those are the keys to your currency and your
passport and your services and your life, right? So it becomes something that you just hold on
you with your person at all times, like your normal phone. You might have backups and stuff,
but the crypto phone is an insanely important thing, okay? And so that's search, that's social,
that's messaging, that's operating systems, that's a phone. That's a lot right there.
Yeah, that's beautiful. Can I have 120 seconds to just finish up a few more thoughts on social
media? Please, please. Okay. AI and AR, okay. Just massive impact, obviously, of AI and social
media. You're going to have completely new social media companies, gestures, other things. TikTok,
having some of the AI creation tools in there is just like a V1 of that. There's a whole thread
with everything stable diffusion is unlocking. But basically, this is going to melt Hollywood.
US media corporations that took a hit in the 2010s, we're now going to be able to have everyone
around the world able to tell their story. And all the stuff about AI ethics and AI bias,
the ultimate bias is centralized AI. Only decentralized AI is truly representative.
You cannot be faux representative. You cannot claim that some, that Google is representing
Nigerians and Indians and Brazilians and Japanese. Those folks need to have access themselves. So
that's a fundamental ethical argument against centralized AI. It's unethical. And it's this
faux thing where you might have faux diversity in the interface, but you haven't actually truly
decentralized it. This is the woke capitalism. You justify it with the wokeness and you make
the money by centralizing it. But the actual way of doing it is letting it free for the world
and letting people build their own versions. If people want to build an Asian Lord of the Rings,
they can do that. If they want to build an Indian one, they can do that. If they, you know,
whatever they want, right? So that is the argument for AI decentralization and for how that kind
of links to this. I love that AI decentralization fixes the bias problem and AI, which a lot of
people seem to- Yeah, centralization is- Talk about and focus on.
Yeah, centralization is inherently unrepresentative, fundamentally, like you can mathematically
show it. It's not representing the world. The decentralization allows anybody to pick it up
and make it their own, right? And centralization is almost always a mask for that private corporate
interest, right? It's like one of the things about the woke capitalism thing, by the way,
is the deplatforming of Trump was political. Other things are political. But do you know what
deplatforming started with? In the late 2000s, early 2010s, all the open social stuff was when
deplatforming was being used as a corporate weapon against Meerkat and Zynga and Teespring,
right? These were companies that were competing with features of, you know, Tweetdeck, etc.
They're competing with features of Twitter or Facebook and the API was cut off. And that was
when actually progressives were for net neutrality and an open internet and open social against the
concentration of corporate power and so on. Remember that, right? And so what's going to
happen is both those two things, the political and the corporate, are going to come together.
Why? In the Soviet Union, denunciation was used as a tool to, for example, undercut romantic rivals,
right? There's a great article called the practice of denunciation in the Soviet Union,
right? Which talks about all these examples where the ideological argument was used to like kick
somebody into the 300-like pit that existed at like the center of the Soviet Union. Anybody
could be kicked into the pit at any moment. And ta-da! Well, Ivan's out, you know, and now,
you know, hey, Anna, you know, whatever, right? Okay. That same thing is going to be used by
woke capitalists, is being used by woke capitalists, where the woke argument is used to justify
pulling, pushing their competitor out of the app store or downracking them in search. Well, again,
you wouldn't want a bigot to be in search who could compete with us or whatever, right? And
conversely, so the wokeness is used to make money, and the money is used to advance the ideology.
It's like this kind of back and forth. Sometimes, right now, you think of those as independent
things, but then they fuse, okay? And so that's very clear with the AI bias arguments, where it
just so happens that it's so powerful, Lex. This technology is so powerful in the wrong hands,
it could be used, so we will charge you 999 for every use of it. How's that? How altruistic is
that? Is that amazingly altruistic? It's really good, right? So once you kind of see that, as I
said, whenever they're positioning on economics, you can go in culture. When they're positioning
on culture, you can go in economics. If they're so woke, why are they rich? If they're so
concerned about representation, why is it centralized? Answer, they're not actually
concerned about it, they're making money, right? Okay. So that is, I think, in a few words,
blows up a lot of the AI bias type stuff, right? Okay. They're basically, they're biasing AI.
All right. So the amount of stuff that can be done with AI now, like it also helps the pseudonymous
economy, as I was talking about with the AI Zoom. So you have totally new sites, totally new apps
that are based on that. I think it may, I mean, it changes, you're going to have new Google Docs,
you know, all these kinds of things. You might have, you know, once you can do things with just
a few taps, you might have sites that are focused more on producing rather than just consuming,
because, you know, you might, with AI, you can change the productivity of gestures, you know,
you can have a few gestures, like, for example, the image to image thing with the sale of diffusion,
where you make a little cartoon, third graders painting, and it becomes a real painting. A lot
of user interfaces will be rethought now that you can actually do this incredible stuff with
AI, knows what you want it to do, right? So, and I saw this funny thing, which was a riff on
Peter Thiel's line, which is AI is centralized and crypto is decentralized. And then somebody was
saying, actually, it turns out crypto is centralized with the CBDCs and stablecoin and so on. But AI
is getting decentralized with stable diffusion, haha, right? Which is funny. And I think there's
centralized and decentralized versions of each of these, right? And finally, the third poll that
actually, you know, Thiel, you know, he's talked about AI and crypto, but the third poll is actually
that's sort of underappreciated because people think it already exists, is social. That's just
keeping on going, right? And obviously the next step in social is AR and VR. And why is it so
obvious? Because it's meta, you know, it's Facebook. Now, I saw this very silly article,
it's like, oh, my God, Facebook is so dumb for putting a $10 billion into virtual reality,
right? And I'm like, okay, the most predictable innovation in the world, in my view, is the AR
glasses. Have you talked about this on the podcast before? AR, VR, of course a lot, but the AR is
not as obvious, actually. Okay, so AR glasses, what are AR glasses? So you take Stamshot Spectacles,
Google Glass, Apple's AR Kit, Facebook's Oculus Quest 2, right? Or Meta Quest 2, whatever you
put those together. And what do you get? You get something that has the form factor of glasses
that you'd wear outside, which can with a tap, record or give you terminator vision on something,
or with another tap go totally dark and become VR glasses. So normal glasses, AR glasses,
VR glasses recording, it's as multifunctional as your phone, but it's hands-free. And you might
actually even wear it more than your phone. In fact, you might be blind without your AR glasses,
because one of the things I've shown the book early on are floating sigils. Did I show you that?
So this is a really important just visual concept. That right there shows with AR Kit,
you can see a globe floating outside. Secret societies are returning. This is what NFTs will
become. The NFT locally on your crypto phone, if you hold it, you can see the symbol. And if you
don't, you can't. By the way, for people just listening, we're looking at a nice nature scene
where an artificially created globe is floating in the air. Yes, but it's invisible if you're not
holding up the AR Kit phone. So only you have a window into this artificial world.
That's right. And then here is another thing, which shows you another piece of it. And this is
using ENS to unlock a door. So this is an NFT used for something different. So the first one is
using the NFT effectively to see something. And the second is using the NFT to do something.
So based on your on-chain communication, you can unlock a door. That's a door to a room. Soon
it could be a door to a building. It could be the gates to a community. It could be your digital
login. And so what this means is basically a lot of these things which are like individual pieces
get synthesized. And you eventually have a digital, just like you have a digital currency,
or digital currencies, unify concepts like obviously gold, stocks, bonds, derivatives,
every kind of financial instrument, plus Chuck E. Cheese tokens, karma, everything that's fungible
and transferable. The digital passport unifies your Google style login, your private keys,
your API keys, your NFTs, your ENS name, your domain name, all those kinds of things,
and your key card for your door and so on. So the AR glasses are what probably, I don't know,
it'll be Facebook's version three or version four. Apple is also working on them. Google's also
working on them. You might just get a bunch of those models at the same time. It's like
predicting the iPhone, just like Dorsey knew that mobile was going to be big. And that's why he had
140 characters for Twitter because there's like an SMS code limitation and Twitter was started
before the iPhone. AR glasses are an incredibly predictable invention that you can start thinking
about the future of social is in part in person. And it also means people might go outside more.
Why? Because you can't see a monitor in the sun, but you can hit AR and maybe you have a full screen
thing and you just kind of move your fingers or something and you can tap. You have to figure
out the gesture. You don't have gorilla arms. Maybe you do have a keyboard outside or just even like
you could even have a desk like this. If you can touch type, you can imagine something where
you look down and you can see a keyboard with your AR glasses and it registers it and then you can
type like this. And probably you could have some AI that could figure out what you meant
rather than what you were doing. So that's AI and social media. That's AR and social media.
But really, one last thing I'll say, which is the non-obvious, non-technological part,
is I think we'll go from very broad networks, which are hundreds of millions or billions of
people like Twitter and Facebook, which have many small communities in them, to much smaller
networks that have a million or 10 million people, but are much deeper in terms of their
associated affiliation. And this is the long-term trend in tech because you're going from eyeballs
in the 1980s, sorry, eyeballs in the 1990s to daily active users in the 2000s to holders
in the 2010s. So you go from just like, oh, I'm just a lookie-loo to I'm logging in every day
to I'm holding a 63% of my net worth. And then this decade is when the online community becomes
primary. You're a netizen. The digital passport is your main identity. And so this is not, see,
the problem with Facebook or Twitter is it's a bunch of different communities that don't share
the same values fighting each other. This brings us back to the network state where
you have one community with shared values, shared currency, and it's full stack. It's a social network
and it's a cryptocurrency and it's a co-living community and it's a messaging app and it's
this and it's that. And it's like Estonia, with a million people, you can actually build a lot
of that full stack. That is, starts to get to what I call a network state.
There should be like a standing applause line here. This is brilliant. You're an incredible
person. This was an incredible conversation. We covered how to fix our government, looking
at the future of governments, moving into network state. We covered how to fix medicine,
FDA longevity. That was just like a stellar description. I really, I'll have to listen
to that multiple times to really think and thank you for that, especially in this time
where the lessons learned from the pandemic are unclear to at least me. And there's a lot of
thinking that needs to be done there. And then just a discussion about how to fix social media
and how to fix money. This was brilliant. So you're an incredibly successful person yourself.
You taught a course at Stanford for startups. That's a whole nother discussion that we can
have. But let me just ask you, there's a lot of people that look up to you. So if there's
somebody who's young in high school, early college, trying to figure out what the heck to do with
their life, what to do with their career, what advice could you give them? How they can have a
career they can be proud of or how they can have a life they can be proud of? At least what I would
do and then you can take it or leave it or what have you. Yeah, to maybe to a younger self, advice
to a younger self. My friend, Novel, this is a lot of what he puts out is the very practical
brass tacks next steps. And I tend towards the macro. Of course, we both do sort of
both kind of thing. Let's talk brass tacks next steps because I actually am
at least practical enough to get things done, I think. It's just like you said, you're breaking
up the new book into three. Yes, it's motivation, theory, and practice. Motivation, theory, and
practice. That's right. So let's talk practice. So let's talk practice. Okay. So first,
what skill do you learn as a young kid? So let me just give what the ideal full stack thing is
and then you have to say, okay, I'm good quantitatively, I'm good verbally, I'm good this, I'm good
that. So the ideal is you are full stack engineer and full stack influencer or full stack engineer,
full stack creator. So that's both right brain and left brain. So what does that mean with
engineering? That means you master computer science and statistics. Okay. And of course,
it's also good to know physics and continuous math and so on. That's actually quite valuable to
know. And you might need to use a lot of that continuous math with AI nowadays, right? Because
a lot of that is actually helpful, right? Great descent and whatnot. But computer science and
stats are to this century, what physics was the last why? Because, for example, what percentage
of your time do you spend looking at a screen of some kind? A large percentage of the time.
A large percentage of the time, right? Probably more than, you know, for many people, it's more
than 50% of the waking hours. If you include laptop, you include cell phone, tablet, you know,
your watch, you know, maybe a monitor of some kind, right? All those together is probably,
it's a lot. Okay. Which means, and then that's going to only increase with AR glasses. Okay.
Which means most of the rest of your life will be spent in a sense in the matrix.
Okay. In a constructed digital world, which is more interesting, in some sense, in the offline
world, because we look at it more, it changes faster, right? And where the physics are set by
programmers. Okay. And what that means is, you know, physics itself is obviously very important
for the natural world. Computer science and stats are for the artificial world, right? And why is
that? Because every domain has algorithms and data structures, whether it's aviation, okay? You go to
American Airlines, right? They're going to have, you know, planes and seats and tickets and so on.
So it's data structures, and you're going to have algorithms and functions that connect them,
and you're going to have tables that those data are into. If it's Walmart, you're going to have
SKUs, and you're going to have shelves, you're going to have data structures, and you have algorithms
to connect them. So every single area, you have algorithms and data structures, which is computer
science and stats. And so you're going to collect the data and analyze it, right? And so that means
if you have that base of CS and stats, where you're really strong, and you understand, you know, the
theory as well as the practice, right? And you need both, okay? Because you need to understand,
you know, obviously basic stuff like big O notation and whatnot. And you need to understand
all your probability distributions, okay? You know, a good exercise, by the way, is to go
from the Bernoulli trials, right, to everything else, because you can go Bernoulli trials to the
binomial distribution, to the Gaussian, you can also go from, you know, Bernoulli trials to the
geometric distribution, and so on. You can drive everything from this, right? And computer science
includes not just big O, but software engineering. Well, computer science is theory, software
engineering is practice, right? You could argue probability and stats is theory, and then data
science is practice, right? And so you include all of that together. I include all that as a
package. That's theory and practice, right? I mean, look, it's okay to use libraries once you know
what's going on under the hood, right? That's fine, but you need to be able to kind of write
out the whole thing yourself. I mean, it's, that could be true, could not be true. I don't know.
Are you sure about that? Because you might be able to get quite far standing on the shoulders
of giants. You can, but it depends. Like, you couldn't build, well, okay. Maybe you could.
However you were going to finish that sentence, I could push back. You could probably push back,
right? But here's what I was going to say. I was going to say, you couldn't really,
you couldn't build Google or Facebook or Amazon or Apple without somebody at the company who
understood like computer architecture and, you know, layout of memory and, you know,
theory of compilers. But you might want to see the thing is, if you just look at libraries,
you might be able to understand the capabilities. And you can build up the intuition of like what
a great specialized engineer could do that you can't. Yeah. Like, you know, for example,
do you know, at least a while back, facebook.com, like was literally, it's just a single C++
compiled binary or so. It's not C++. It was like hip hop. They had a PHP compiler where they had
just one giant binary. I think, I may be getting this wrong, but that's what I recall, right?
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's, it should be simple. It should be simple. And then you have
guys like John Carmack who comes in and does an incredibly optimized implementation
that actually, well, yeah, more than that, right? Like he's, I mean, yes, right, but go ahead.
I mean, there's some cases with John Carmack by being an incredible engineer is able to bring
to reality things that otherwise would have taken an extra five to 10 years. Yeah. Or maybe even
more than that. Like, so, you know, this is the great man theory of history versus like sort of the,
kind of the, the determinist, like, you know, waves of history are pushing things along.
The way I reconcile those is the tech tree model of history, you know, like civilization,
you're playing game civilization. Yeah. So like civilization, you got the tech tree and you can
go and be like, okay, I'm going to get spearmen or I'm going to do granaries and pottery, right?
And so you can think of it as something where here's everything that humanity has right now.
And then Satoshi can push on this dimension of the tech tree. So he's a great man because there
weren't other, there wasn't a Leibniz, Leibniz to Satoshi's Newton, right? Like Vitalik as,
you know, amazing as he is, was five years later or thereabouts, right? There wasn't contemporaneous,
like, you know, another person that was doing what Satoshi was doing is truly Suijinaris,
right? And that shows, you know, what one person can do, like probably Steve Jobs with Apple,
you know, given how the company was dying before he got there and he built into the most valuable
or put on the directory becomes the most valuable company in the world, it shows that there is
quote, great man, right? Maybe more than just being five or 10 years ahead, like truly shaping
where history goes, right? But on their hand, of course, that person, Steve Jobs himself,
wrote that email that recently was first thing saying that, you know, he doesn't grow his own
food and he doesn't, you know, he didn't even think of the rights that he's got, someone else
thought of those and whatnot. And so he kind of, it is always a tension between the individual and
society on this, right? But coming back, so CS and stats, that's what you want to learn. I think
physics is also good to know because you go one level deeper. And of course, all these devices,
you're not going to be able to build, you know, LiDAR or things like that without understanding
physics, right? You mentioned that as one side of the brain. What about the other? Right. So CS
and stats is that side. Okay. And then you can go into any domain, any company, kick butt, you know,
add value, right? Okay. So now the other side is creator, right, becoming a creator.
First, online, you know, become like social media is about to become far, far, far more
lucrative and monetizable. People are not updated. They kind of think this is, it's like over or
something like that or it's old or whatever. But with crypto, once you have property rights in
social media, now it's not what Google just allows you to have, but it's what you own, right? You
actually have genuine property rights. And that just completely changes everything, just like,
you know, the introduction of property rights in China change everything. It might take some lag
for that to happen, but you can lend against that, borrow against that. You just, you own the digital
property, right? And you can do NFTs, you can do, you know, investments, you can do all sorts of
stuff, right? So in many ways, I think anybody who's listening, who's like, you know, I want to
build a billion dollar company, I'm like, build a billion dollar company, yes, also build a million
person media operation or a million person following or something online, right? Because
a US media company is simply not economically or socially aligned with your business. I mean,
the big thing that I think, you know, tech and media actually, it's funny, they,
there's this collision and sometimes there's an admin smashing event and there's like a
repositioning, right? And media attack tech really hard in the 2010s, as well as many other things.
And now post 2020, I think it's now centralized tech and media versus decentralized tech and
media. And centralized tech and media is NYT and Google, which have all become vocified, the
establishment companies. But decentralized tech and media is like sub-stack, all lot the defectors
from, you know, from the US establishment from NYT have gone to sub-stack. But also all the founders
and funders are much more vocal on Twitter, whether it's Mark Anderson, Jack Dorsey, Jeff Bezos,
Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg is just cutting out the establishment and just going direct to, you know,
posting himself or posting the jujitsu thing, you know, what you recently did or going and talking
to Rogan, right? And so you, you now have this sort of atom smash and like kind of reconstitution.
Why is that important? Well, look, once you realize US media companies are companies and, you know,
the, their employees, Salzburgers employees are just dogs on the leash, right? They're, they're,
they're hitmen for old money, assassins for the establishment, they're never going to investigate
him. Okay, there's this thing right now, like some strike that or possible strike that's going
at the New York Times, the obviously the most obvious rich corporate zillionaire, the epitome
of white privilege is, you know, and again, another kind of person who thinks white is an
insult, right? But the, you know, the guy who inherited the company from his father's father's
father's father in the NFL, right? You know, you're supposed to have the Rooney Roll where
you're supposed to interview diverse candidates for the top job. You know, the other competitors
for the top job of the publisher of the New York Times were two cousins of Salzburg. So there's three
cis straight white males in 2017 who competed for this top job. And everybody in media was like
silent about this coronation. They had this coronation article in the Times about this, right?
So you have this meritless nepotist, right? This literally rich cis white man who has,
makes millions of dollars a year, and it makes like 50 X the salary of other, you know,
NYT journalists, okay? And, you know, lives in a mansion and so on. While denouncing,
this is a born rich guy who denounces all the built rich guys at a company which is far wider than
the tech companies he's been denouncing, okay? And again, this is something, there's a website
called tech journalism is less diverse than tech.com, which actually shows the numbers on this,
right? Here, I can, can look at this numbers, right? So why, why, why did I say this? Well,
centralized US media has lost a ton of clout. Engagement is down, you've seen crypto prices
down, like stock prices have crashed. That's, that's very obvious and quantifiable. Less visible is
that media engagement has crashed, right? By the way, yeah, there's a plot that shows in the X axis
percent white and then the Y axis of the different companies. And the tech companies are basically
below 50% white and all the different media tech journalism companies are all way above,
you know, 70, 80, 90, 90 plus percent white hypocrisy, ladies and gentlemen. I mean, again,
I'm not the kind of person who thinks white is an insult, but these guys are and they are the
wokest whites on the planet, right? It's like ridiculous, right? I, you know, it's like
anyone, anyone who's homophobic, anyone who's, it feels like it's a personal thing that they're
struggling with. Maybe the journalists are actually the ones who are racist. Well, actually,
you know, it's funny you say that because there's this guy, A.M. Rosenthal, okay? And, you know,
on his gravestone was quote, we kept the, he kept the paper straight, right? And actually,
he essentially went and this is a managing editor of the New York Times for almost,
you know, from a 69 to 77 executive error from 7786. And it was a history Lord. Yeah.
History of basically keeping, you know, gay reporters out. So essentially the way to think
about it is New York Post reported that just, just, just to talk about this for a second,
because it's so insane, all right? New York Post reported and I've got some of this in the book,
okay? But A. Rosenthal, managing editor of the New York Times from 1969 to 1977 executive editor
from 1977 to 1986. His gravestone reads, he kept the paper straight. And then here's
Jeet here on this, he kept the paper straight. As it happens Rosenthal was in tourist homophobe,
he made it a specific policy of the paper not to use the term gay. He denied a plum job
to a gay man for being gay. He minimized AIDS crisis. So like, you know, the thing about this
is, this is not like a one-off thing, okay? The New York Times literally won a Pulitzer
for choking out the Ukrainians for helping starve 5 million Ukrainians to death. And now
it's reinvented themselves as like a cheerleader to stand with the Ukraine, right? They were
for, you know, A. Rosenthal's homophobia before they were against it, right? They were like,
if you look, saw the link I just pasted in, okay? During BLM, you know, it's credibly reported that
I haven't seen this refuted, the family that owns the New York Times were slaveholders. Somehow
that stayed out of 1619 and BLM coverage, right? So they were literally getting the profits from
slavery to help bootstrap, you know, the, what was the times or, you know, went into it. They
actually did this article on like the compound interest of slaveholders in Haiti and how much
they owed people, right? If you apply that to how much money they made off slaves, I mean,
can anyone name one of Salzburger slaves? Like, can we humanize that, put a face on that, show
exactly, you know, who lost such that he may win, right? And so you stack this up and it's like,
you know, for the Iraq war, before they were against it. And it's like, yeah, sure, Bush,
you know, did a lot of bad stuff there, but they also reported a lot of negative, you know,
not negative coverage, like false coverage, right, about WMDs, like, you know, the whole
Judith Militering. And so it's like this amazing thing where if some of the most evil people in
history are the historians, if the, you know, they actually ran this ad campaign in the 2017 time
period called The Truth. So giant Orwellian billboards, right, which say, you know, the
truth is essential here, it looks like this. This was when? This was just a few years ago, 2017.
This is in New York. A billboard by the New York Times reads, the truth is hard to know,
the truth is hard to find, the truth is hard to hear, the truth is hard to believe,
the truth is hard to accept, the truth is hard to deny, the truth is more important now than ever.
This is like, yeah, this is 1984 type of stuff. Yeah. Now here's the thing,
do you know what other? Truth. Yeah. Truth, period, big white board.
So, okay, what other national newspaper proclaimed itself the truth in
constantly every, every day? You know this one, actually. Oh, you mean Pravda? Yeah. There you
go. That's right. What is it? What is the Soviet translation? What's the Russian translation of
Pravda is? It's truth. Yeah. Oh, that's so sorry. That didn't even connect to my head. Yes. Yeah,
truth. Unironically, huh? And again, it just so happens that... Is this an onion article?
Right. So, like, you know, Pravda, like at least you're a communist, these guys have figured out
how to get charged people $99 a year or whatever it is for the truth. Wow, that's actually even
amazing, right? So the corporate truth. So when you stack all that up, right, basically legacy
media has delegitimized themselves, right? Every day that those quote, investigative journalists
don't investigate Salzburger shows that they are so courageous as to investigate your boss,
but not their own. Yes. Ta-da, total mass drop, right? That's like just obvious, right? Now, once
you realize this, and you know, every influencer who's coming up, every creator realizes, okay,
well, that means I have to think about these media corporations as competitors.
They are competitors. They are competitors for advertisers and influence. They will try basically
what the media corporations did partially successfully during the 2010s is they sort
of had this reign of terror over many influencers where they'd give them positive coverage if they
supported sort of the party line and negative coverage if they didn't, okay? But now, the soft
power has just dropped off a cliff, right? And, you know, many kinds of tactics that, you know,
establishment journalists do, one way of thinking of them is like as a for-profit stasi. Why? Because
they may stalk you, dox you, surveil you. Like, they can literally put, you know,
two dozen people following somebody around for a year, and that's not considered stalking,
right? That's not considered spamming. They are allowed to do this and make money doing this.
Whereas if you so much as criticize them, oh, my God, it's an attack on the free press, blah,
blah, blah, right? But you are the free press and I am the free press. Like, we're the free press.
Again, it goes back to the decentralized, you know, the free speech is not like some media
corporations thing. It's everybody's right. And what actually happened with social media,
what they're against, is not that it is an attack on democracy, is that it's the ultimate democracy
because people have a voice now that didn't used to have a voice. You know what I'm saying? Freedom
of the press belongs to those who won one, right? That old one, right? Or never argue with a man
who buys ink by the barrel, right? Yeah. In a real way, the entire things that were
promised to people, freedom of speech, free markets, like a beggar's democracy, it's like,
oh, yeah, you can have freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach because you're just talking
to yourself in your living room in Buffalo, New York, right? Maybe you can gather some friends
around. You didn't have the licenses to get, you know, like a TV broadcast license, radio license,
you know, the resources to buy a newspaper, you didn't have practical reach or distribution,
okay? What happened was all these people in the US and around the world suddenly got voices,
and they were suddenly saying things that the establishment didn't want them to say.
And so that's what this counter decentralization has meant, both in the US and in China, this
crackdown, but as if like a stock went up like 100X and then dropped like 30%, all the deep
platforming stuff, yes, it's bad, okay? It's a rear-viewed move, but in the long arc, I think
we're going to have more speech. I think the counter decentralization may succeed in China,
but I don't think it's going to succeed outside it because you're trying to retrofit
speech and thought controls onto an ostensibly free society, right? Now that Czech got cash,
people actually have a voice, it's not going to be taken away from them very easily, right?
So how does this relate to my advice to young kids? Once you have that context, right? Once you
realize, hey, look, Apple didn't like do deals with BlackBerry, okay? Amazon didn't collaborate
or give free content to Barnes & Noble. Netflix was not going and, you know,
socializing with employees of Blockbuster. These employees of establishment media
corporations are your competitors, okay? They are out for clicks, they are out for money,
they will, if they literally choke out the Ukrainians before making themselves into champions of the
Ukrainian cause, they'll basically do anything, you know? And so when she realized that, you're
like, okay, I need to build my own voice, okay? If you're Brazilian, you're Nigerian, you're in the
Midwest or the Middle East, right? If you're Japanese, whatever, wherever you are, you need to
build your own voice because outsourcing that voice to somebody else and having it put through the
distorting filter, which maximizes the clicks of the distorting kind of thing, it's just not going
to be in one's own interest. You don't have to even agree with everything I'm saying or even
all of it to just be like, well, look, I'd rather speak for myself. I'd rather go direct if I could,
speak unmediated in my own words, right? Because the choice for word is actually very important,
right? So that's the second big thing. You need to, and this is the thing that took me a long
time to understand, okay? Because I always got the importance of math and science. And in fact,
I would have been probably just a career academic or mathematician in another life, you know,
maybe statistician, something like that, electrical engineer, et cetera. But the importance of creating
your own content and telling your own stories, if you don't tell your own story, the story will
be told for you, right? The sort of flip of winners' right history is if you do not write history,
you will not be the winner. You must write a history, okay? As kind of a funny way of,
you know, putting it, right? Yeah, chicken and egg, yeah. Contra positive, right? And now,
what does that mean practically, okay? So in many ways, the program that I'm laying out is to build
alternatives, peaceful alternatives to all, you know, legacy institutions, right? To, obviously,
to the Fed, right, with Bitcoin, to Wall Street with DeFi and with Ethereum and so on,
to academia with the ledger of record and the on-chain reproducible research that we talked
about, to media with decentralized social media, decentralized AI, you can melt Hollywood with
this, okay? Melt the RIA, melt the MPAA. I mean, there's some good people there, but everybody
should have their own movies, you know, there's people should be able to tell their own stories
and not just wait for it to be cast through Hollywood and Hollywood is just making remakes
anyway, okay? So you can tell original stories and you can do so online and you can do so by
hitting a key and the production values will be there now that the AI concentration tools are
out there. I mentioned disrupting or replacing or building alternatives to the Fed, to Wall Street,
to academia, to media, I mentioned to Wikipedia, right? There's things like Golden, there's things
like, there's a bunch of Web 3-ish Wikipedia competitors that are combining both AI and
crypto for property rights. There's, you'll also need alternatives to all the major tech companies,
that was the list that I went through with, you know, decentralized search and social and messaging
and operating systems and even the crypto phone, okay? And then finally, you need alternatives to
US political institutions and more generally, and Chinese political institutions. And what are
those, that's where the network state comes in. And the fundamental concept is if, as I mentioned,
only 2% of the world can become president of the United States, about the number of Americans who
are, you know, native born and over 35 and so on and so forth. But 100% of the world can become
president of their own network state. What that means is, and this is kind of related to those
two points, right? If you're an individual and you're good at engineering and you're good at
content creation, okay? Like somebody like Jack Dorsey, for example, or Mark, I understand,
actually a lot of the founders are actually quite good at both nowadays. You look at Bezos,
he's actually funny on Twitter when he allows himself to be. He's, you know, you don't become
a leader of that caliber without having, you know, some of both, right? If you've got some of both,
now, no matter where you are, what your ethnicity is, what your nationality is, whether you can get
a US visa, you can become president of a network state. And what this is, it's a new path to political
power that does not require going through either the US or the Chinese establishment. You don't
have to wait until you're 75. You don't have to become a gerontocrat or spout the party line and
so on. The V1 of this is like folks like, you know, Francis Suarez or Naidhi Bakeli of El Salvador.
But, you know, Suarez is a great example where, while not a full sovereign or anything like that,
he has many ways and many ways the skills of a tech CEO, where he just put up a, you know,
a call on Twitter and helped Bill Miami recruit all these people from all over. And it wasn't
the two-party system, but the end city system. He just helped build the city by bringing people in.
Okay. And that's, and when I say Suarez is a V1, you know, I love Francis Suarez,
I love what they're doing. The next iteration of that is to actually build a community itself,
rather than just kind of taking an existing Miami, you're building something that
is potentially the scale of Miami, but as a digital community. And how many people is that?
Well, like the Miami population is actually not that large. It's like 400 something thousand
people. You could build a digital community like that. So if you have the engineering and you have
the content creation and you build your own distribution, you own your own thing, you can
become essentially a new kind of political leader where you just build a large enough online community
that can crowdfund territory and you build your vision of the good.
And anybody could build the vision of the good, talking about eight billion people.
I mean, there's no more inspiring. I mean, sometimes when we look at how things are broken,
there could be a cynical paralysis. But ultimately, this is a really empowering message.
Yes. I think there is a new birth of global freedom. And that in the fullness of time,
people will look at the internet as being to the Americas, what the Americas were to Europe.
A new world in the sense of this cloud continent has just come down. And if you spend 50% of your
waking hours looking at a screen, 20%, you're spending all this time commuting up to the cloud
in the morning and coming back down. You're doing these day trips. And it's got a different
geography. And all these people are near each other that were far in the physical world and vice
versa. And so this will, because it's this new domain, it gives rise to virtual worlds that
eventually become physical. And the same way that most people don't know this that well,
but the Americas really shaped the old world. Many concepts like the ultra-capitalism and
ultra-democracy of the new world, the French Revolution was in part, I mean, that was a bad
version. But that was in part inspired by the American. There are many, many movements that
came back to the old world that started here. And the same way, I don't call it the mainstream
media anymore. I call it the downstream media because it's downstream of the internet.
That's right. Right. That's right. And there's this guy a while back who,
he had this meme called the one-kilo-year American empire. There are things American and so on.
And his, I think fundamental category is he considers the internet to be American.
But you know why that's not the case? Because, and it'll be very obviously so,
I think in five or 10 years. Why? Because the majority of English speakers online by about
2030 are going to be India. Okay. They just got 5G, LTE, super cheap internet recently,
the last few years. It's like one of the biggest stories in the world that's not really being
told that much. Okay. And they've been lurking. And here's the thing. And this took me a long
time to kind of, you know, figure out, like to, not to figure it, but to communicate. I actually
realized this in 2013, but these folks don't type with an accent. Okay. They speak with an accent,
but they don't type with an accent. And all the way back in 2013, when I taught this Coursera
course, I was like, who are these folks? I had hundreds of thousands of people from around the
world sign up. It was a very popular course even then. Okay. And hundreds of thousands of people
signed up. I was like, who are these folks? And there were like Polish guys and, you know, like,
you know, like this lady from Brazil. And they knew scumbag Steve and good guy Greg.
But they didn't know the Yankees or hot dogs or all the offline stuff of America. They didn't
know physical America. They knew the digital conversation, the Reddit conversation and,
you know, what became the Twitter conversation. For example, I just saw this, this YouTube video
where there's an Indian founder and he just said, just casually like, oh, I slid into his DMs like
this, right? It was kind of a joke. But he said in an Indian accent, everybody laughed, everybody
knew what he meant. And you're like, wait, that is a piece of what people think of as American
internet slang that's actually internet slang, which will soon be said mostly by non Americans.
Now, what does that mean? That means that just like the US was a branch of the UK and it started
with English. And certainly there's lots of antecedents you can trace back to England.
But nowadays, most Americans are not English in ancestry. There's Germans and Italians,
Jewish people, African Americans, you know, everybody, right? And the same way the Internet
is much more representative of the world than the USA is.
You may have started American, but you got forked by the rest of the world.
That's right. And it is, it gives a global equality of opportunity. It's even more
capitalist than America is. It's even more democratic than America is,
just as America is more capitalist and democratic than the UK.
The meme has escaped the cage of its captor. And by the way, that doesn't mean I mean,
so I want to be very clear about something. When I say this kind of stuff, people will be like,
oh my God, you hate America so much. And that's not at all what I'm saying. It's like, first,
take Britain, okay? Would you think of the US or Israel or India or Singapore as being anti-British?
Not today. They're post-British, right? In fact, they're quite respectful to, I mean,
look at the Queen and so on. People respect the UK and so on. Everyone's coming there to pay their
respects. Well, I might not be the greatest example, but yes, go on.
Well, put it like this, broadly speaking. They're not like burning the British flag
in effigy or anything. Essentially, the point is each of these societies is kind of moving
along their own axis. They're not defining every action in terms of whether they're pro-British
or anti-British, right? Once you have kind of a healthy distance, people can respect all the
accomplishments of the UK while also being happy that you're no longer run by them.
And then you can have like a better kind of arms-length relationship, right?
And that's what post-British means. It is not anti-British, not at all. In fact,
you can respect it while also being happy that you've got your own sovereignty, right?
And you're happy that Britain is doing its own thing. I'm glad they're doing well, right?
Okay. And they're actually doing some special economic zone stuff now. And in the same way,
if you think of it as not being pro-American or anti-American, because that's the with us or
against us formulation of George Bush, rather than just everything must be scored as pro-American
or anti-American, you can think of post-American, that not everything has to be scored on that
axis. Like, you know, there are certain things around the world which should be able to exist
on their own. And you should be able to move along your own axis. Like, it perhaps obvious example,
like is longevity pro-American or anti-American? No, it's like it's on its own axis. It's moving
on its own axis. And new states and new countries should be able to exist that do not have to define
themselves as anti-American to do so. They're just post-American, friendly to, but different from.
That's totally possible to do. And we've got examples of that, right? And so when I talk about
this, I'm talking about is really in many ways US and Western ideals, you know, but manifested in
just a different form, right? And also, crucially, integrative of global ideals, you know, these
are, in a sense, they're global human rights, they're global values, which is freedom of speech,
private property, protection from search and seizure. And actually, so that's all the Bill
of Rights type stuff. And I saw something that I thought was really good recently, that's a good
first cut. That's something that I might want to include. I credit him, of course,
in the V2 of the book, a digital Bill of Rights. And so this was a really good,
decent first cut at a digital Bill of Rights. And he talks about the right to encrypt,
the right to compute, the right to repair, the right to portability, right? So encrypt is perhaps
obvious, you know, e-commerce and everything, compute, like your device, it's not like you
can't just have somebody intercept it or, you know, shut down your floating points.
That might sound stupid, but in the EU, they're trying to regulate AI. And by doing that,
they have some regulation that says like, logic, is it self-regulated? Did you see this?
No, it's hilarious. Hold on. Click the tweet that I sent you just before this one, right?
So I was like, you know, in World of America, they're abolishing accelerated math because math
is quote, white supremacists. Not to be outdone, Europe seeks to regulate AI by regulating logic
itself. You can't reason without a license, right? Article three, for purposes of this
regulation, the following definition of apply. AI system is software that's developed with one or
more of the techniques and approaches listed in Annex One. And you know what's in Annex One?
In Annex One, logic and knowledge-based approaches. So step away from the if statement.
Okay. And the thing is, you know, if you've dealt with these bureaucracies, the stupidest
possible interpretation, I mean, think about, if you think, oh, no, no, that wouldn't make
any sense. They wouldn't do that. The entire web has been ugly-fied by the stupid cookie thing that
does absolutely nothing, right? The actual way to protect privacy is with user local data,
meaning decentralized systems, right, where the private keys are local.
No, I'm just laughing at the layers of absurdity in this. Step away from the if statement. I mean,
it's hilarious. It's very, very clumsy. It's us struggling how to define the digital bill of
rights, I suppose, and doing so extremely clumsily. It's funny. I heard this thing, which is like,
Europe's like, well, look, the US and China are way ahead of us in AI, but we're going to be a
leader in AI regulation. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And something we haven't mentioned much of in
this whole conversation, I think maybe implied between the lines is the thing that was in the
constitution of the pursuit and happiness and the thing that is in many stories that we humans
conjure up, which is love. I think the thing that makes life worth living in many ways.
But for that, you have to have freedom. You have to have stability. You have to have a society
that's functioning so that humans can do what humans do, which is make friends, make family,
make love, make beautiful things together as human beings.
Balaji, this is like an incredible conversation. Thank you for showing an amazing future.
I think really empowering to people because we can all be part of creating that future. And thank
you so much for talking to me today. This was an incredible, obviously the longest conversation
I've ever done, but also one of the most amazing enlightening. Thank you. Thank you, brother,
for everything you do. Thank you for inspiring all of us. Well, Lex, this was great. And
we didn't get through all the questions. We didn't. Just for the record, we didn't get,
I would venture to say we didn't get through 50%. This is great. This is great. And I had to stop us
from going too deep on any one thing, even though it was tempting, like those chocolates, those damn
delicious looking chocolates that was used as a metaphor about 13 hours ago, however long we
started the conversation. This was incredible. It was really brilliant. You're brilliant throughout
on all those different topics though. Yeah. Thank you again for talking to me. This is great.
I really appreciate being here. Sir. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Balaji
Srinivasan. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now let me leave you some words from Ray Bradbury. People ask me to predict the future.
When all I want to do is to prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting the future is much too easy
anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe,
and predict more of the same. To help with more, I want better. Thank you for listening and hope
to see you next time.