Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA | Lex Fridman Podcast #331
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Balaji Srinivasan is 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. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Balaji's Twitter: https://twitter.com/balajis
Balaji's Website: https://balajis.com
Books:
1. The Network State: https://thenetworkstate.com
2. Reputation and Power: https://amzn.to/3eyQiF6
3. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: https://amzn.to/3TpuLNP
4. Seeing Like a State: https://amzn.to/3MJfvcD
Articles:
1. Bitcoin Is Civilization: https://www.commonsense.news/p/is-bitcoin-anarchy-or-civilization
2. Great Protocol Politics: https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/12/11/bitcoin-ethereum-cryptocurrency-web3-great-protocol-politics
3. Regulation, Disruption, and the Future: https://bit.ly/3CKY9Ys
4. The Measured Man: https://theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/the-measured-man/309018
5. Secret Document That Transformed China: https://npr.org/sections/money/2012/01/20/145360447/the-secret-document-that-transformed-china
6. Hollywood's Missing Movies: https://reason.com/2000/06/01/hollywoods-missing-movies
7. New York Times Truth Campaign: https://adweek.com/agencyspy/droga5s-first-big-campaign-for-the-new-york-times-is-all-about-the-truth/126274

PODCAST INFO:
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Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8
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Full episodes playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4
Clips playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOeciFP3CBCIEElOJeitOr41

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
2:21 - Prime number maze
28:33 - Government
44:50 - The Network State
54:54 - Pseudonymous economy
1:18:40 - Exit
1:33:21 - Building a network state
2:21:08 - Wikipedia
2:58:38 - Fixing science
3:25:06 - Fixing the FDA
4:56:14 - Longevity
5:15:12 - Donald Trump's ban from social media
5:44:31 - War
5:51:39 - Censorship
6:05:39 - Social media
6:21:54 - Wokeism and communism
6:40:42 - Cryptocurrency
6:58:15 - AI, AR, and VR
7:10:14 - Advice for young people
7:43:08 - Regulating logic

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 Donald Trump was probably the biggest person ever to be removed from social media. Do you understand why that was done? Can you still mend the case for it and against it? Everybody who's watching this around the world basically saw, let's say, US establishment or Democrat aligned folks just decapitate the head of state digitally, right? Just boom, gone, okay? And they're like, well, if they can do that in public to the US president who's ostensibly the most powerful man in the world, what does the Mexican president stand against that? Nothing. Regardless of whether it was justified on this guy, that means they will do it to anybody. Now the seal is broken. Just like the bailouts, as exceptional as they were in the first year, everybody was shocked by them, then they became a policy instrument. And now there's bailouts happening. Every single bill is printing another whatever billion dollars or something like that. The following is a conversation with biology, Serena Vassin, 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. Biology is a fascinating mind who thinks deeply about this world and how we might be able to engineer it in order to maximize the possibility that humanity flourishes on this fun little planet of ours. Also, you may notice that in this conversation, my eye is red. That's from Jiu Jitsu. And also, if I may say so, from a life well lived. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's biology, Srinivasan. At the core of your belief system is something you call the prime number maze. I'm curious, I'm curious. We've got to start there. Sure. If we can start anywhere, it's with mathematics. Let's go. All right, great. A rat can be trained to turn at every even number or every third number in a maze to 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, pretty difficult to figure out what the turning rule was. Yet, the rule is actually very simple. And so, the thing I think about a lot is just how many patterns in life are we just like these rats and we're trapped in a prime number maze? And if we had just a little bit more cogitation, if we had a little bit more cognitive ability, a little bit more, whether it's brain machine interface or just better physics, we could just figure out the next step in that prime number maze. We could just see it. We could just see the grid. And that's what I think about. That's a big thing that drives me, is figuring out how we can 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 of its 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 identities. That really does bring us forward, especially when you can check them and you don't know how they work. Right? You have the phenomenological, but you don't have the theory underneath it. And then that stimulates the advancement of theory to figure out why is this thing actually working. And then the epistemic arose in part from the phenomenological studies that were basically being done where people are just getting steam engines and so on to work. And then they 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... So just something that's true and that works, even if we don't know yet, that's amazing and it pulls us forward. So I do think that the limits are more of a bug than a feature. Is there something that humans will never be able to figure out about our universe, about the theory, about the practice of our universe? Yeah. People will typically quote Gridell'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. The Hillebert... Hillebert'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 his Road to Reality series for basic physics getting up to everything we know, but go ahead. Tell me about that. It's even wilder. When we started doing physics, we started to question of what is fundamental and what is emergent in this beautiful universe of ours. And there's a bunch of folks who think that space-time, as we know it, the four-dimensional space is emergent. It's not fundamental to the physics of the universe. And the same, many argue, I think Sean Carroll is one of them, is that time itself, the way we experience it is also emergent. It's not fundamental to the way our universe works. Anyway, those are the technical term, I apologize for swearing. Those are the mind fucks of modern physics. But if we stroll along that road further, we get somebody like Donald Hoffman, who makes the evolutionary case that the reality we perceive with our eyes is not only an abstraction of objective reality, but it's actually completely detached. We're in a video game, essentially, that's consistent for all humans, but it's not at all connected to physical reality. It's an illusion. It's like a version of the simulation hypothesis? In a very distant way, but the simulation says that there's a sort of computational nature to reality, and then there's a programmer that creates this reality and so on. He says that we humans have a brain that is able to perceive the environment, and evolution is produced from primitive life to complex life on earth, produce the kind of brain that doesn't at all need to sense the reality directly. So 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, right? Just on that, people talk about qualia. Is your perception of green different from my perception of green? My counter argument on that is, well, we know something about spectrum of light, and we can build artificial eyes. If we can build artificial eyes, which we can, they're not amazing, but you can actually do that. We can build artificial ears and so on. Obviously, we can build recording devices and for cameras and things like that. Well, operationally, the whole concept of your perception of green, you see green as purple, I see green as green, or what I call green, doesn't seem to add up because it does seem like we can do engineering around it, right? So the Hoffman thing, I get why people more broadly will talk about a simulation hypothesis because it's like Feynman and many others have talked about how math is surprisingly useful to describe the world, like very simple equations give rise to these complex phenomena. Wolfram is also on this from a different angle with the cellular automata stuff. But- It's almost suspicious how well it works. Yeah, but on their hand, it's like, yet we're still also in a prime number maze. There's things we just don't understand. So 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. Display all our rage while just rats in a cage. I know that gets very abstract, but there are unsolved problems in physics, like the condensed matter space, there's a lot of interesting stuff happening. My recollection, I may be out of date on this, things like sonar luminescence, we don't know exactly how they work. And sometimes those things that are at the edges of physics, in the late 1800s, I think Rutherford, somebody famous, I think it was Rutherford said, basically all physics is being discovered, et cetera. And that was obviously before quantum mechanics. That sort of edge case, people are looking at the bomber and the passion series and seeing this weird thing with the hydrogen spectrum and it was quantized and that led to the sort of phenomenological set of observations that led to quantum mechanics and everything. And sometimes I think the UAP stuff might be like that. People immediately go to aliens for UAP, like the unidentified aerial phenomena, right? There's surprising amount of stuff out there on this. The UK has declassified a bunch of material. Harry Reid is the senator, has talked about this. It's not an obviously political thing, which is good. Is there something happening there, right? And people had thought for a long time that the UAP thing was American kind of counterpropaganda to cover up their new spy planes that were spying over the Soviet Union to make anybody who talked about them seem crazy and hysterical or whatever. But if the UAP thing is real, it could be atmospheric phenomena like the Aurora Borealis or the Northern Lights, but some things we don't understand. It could be something like the bomber and passion series, which were the observations of emission spectra before quantum mechanics. So that's another option as opposed to doesn't exist or 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. The Drake equation, which is like multiplying all the probabilities together. There's perhaps more sophisticated takes like the dark forest, which says that if the universe is like a dark forest, we're the dumb ones that aren't hiding our presence. There's one calculation I saw and I haven't reproduced it myself, but basically says that the assumption that other civilizations have seen ours is wrong because when you have a spherical radius for like the electromagnetic radiation that's leaving our planet, as that sphere gets larger and larger, it gets smaller and smaller amounts of energy. So you get farther out, you're not getting enough photons or what have you to actually detect it. I actually haven't looked into the math behind it, but I remember seeing that argument. So actually it is possible that it's so diffuse when you go past a certain number of light years out that an alien civilization wouldn't be able to detect it. That's another argument. That's more basically about signals from them, from us to be able to signals colliding enough to find the signal from the noise. Right, exactly. Intelligent signal. Yeah. Hanson has an article called Grabby Aliens. Have you seen his thing? Yes, yes, yes. He's been on this podcast. Oh, great. He's brilliant. I like him. He pushes boundaries in interesting ways. In every ways, in all of the ways. In all the ways. That's right. I like him overall. He's an asset to humanity. Grabby Aliens. So he has this interesting idea that the civilizations quickly learn how to travel close to the speed of light. Right. So we're not going to see them until they're here. Yeah, that's possible. One of the things is, so here's for example, a mystery that we haven't yet done, right? We haven't really figured out yet, which is abiogenesis in the lab. Right? We've done lots of things where you can show macromolecules binding to each other. You can show evidence for the so-called RNA world, abiogenesis to go from non-life to life in the lab. You can show microevolution, obviously with bacteria. You can do artificial selection on them. Lots of other aspects of fundamental biochemistry origins of life stuff have been established. There's a lot of plausibility arguments about the primitive environment and nitrogen and carbon snapping together to get the RNA world as the initial hypothesis. But to my knowledge at least, we haven't actually seen abiogenesis demonstrated. Now one argument is you need just like this massive world with so many different reps before that actually happens. And one possibility is if we could do atomic level simulations of molecules bouncing against each other, it's possible that in some simulation we could find a path, a reproducible path to abiogenesis and then just replicate that in the lab. I don't know. 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. One of the most fascinating mysteries. One of the most important. Yeah. And again, there may be some biochemist who's like, oh, Baljee, you didn't know about X, Y, and Z that happened in the abiogenesis field. I freely confess I'm not like O'Qurrant on it. The last thing I remember looking at is- What's O'Qurrant mean? Like up to the moment. Oh, nice. That's a nice word. That's a- O'Qurrant. I'm probably mispronouncing it. Yeah. 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 in post. One thing that I do think was interesting is Craig Venter a while back tried to make a minimum viable cell where he just tried to delete all of the genes that were not considered essential. So it's like a new life form. This was like almost 20 years ago and so on. That thing was viable in the lab, right? So it's possible that you kind of reverse engineer. You're coming at the problem from different directions. Like RNA molecules can do quite a lot, you've got some reasonable assumptions as to how that could come together. You've got sort of stripped down minimum viable life forms and so it's not there isn't stuff here. You can see microevolution, you can see at the sequence level. If you do molecular phylogenics, you can actually track back the bases. So it's not like there's no evidence here. There's a lot of tools to work with. But this in my view is a fascinating area and actually also relevant to AI because another form of abiogenesis would be if we are able to give rise to a different branch of life form, the silicon based as opposed to carbon based, to stretch your point. You give rise to something that actually does meet the definition of life for some definition of life. What do you think that definition is for an artificial life form? Because you mentioned consciousness. When will it give us pause that we created something that feels by some definition or by some spiritual, poetic, romantic, philosophical, mathematical definition that it is alive and we wouldn't want to kill it? So a couple of remarks on that. One is Francis Crick of Watson and Crick. Before he died, I think his last paper was published on something called the Claustrum. And the thing is that sometimes in biology or in any domain, people are sort of discouraged from going after the big questions. But he proposed the Claustrum is actually the organ that is the seat of consciousness. It's like this sheath that covers the brain. And for mice, if you, and again, I may be recollecting this wrong, but you can look at it. My recollection is in mice, if you disrupt this, the mouse is very disoriented. It's the kind of thing which Watson and Crick were all about. Structure implies function. They found the structure of DNA, this amazing thing. And they remarked in this very understated way at the end of the paper that, well, obviously this gives a basis for how the genetic material might be replicated and error corrected because helix unwinds and you copy and paste. So he was a big structure function person and that applies not just at the protein level, not just at the level of DNA, but potentially also at the level of organs. Like the Claustrum is kind of this system integrated level. It's like the last layer in the neural network or something. And so that's the kind of thing that I think is worth studying. So consciousness is another kind of big, abiogenesis is a big question. The prime number remains consciousness is a big question. And then definition of life, right? There's folks, gosh, there's, I think, so this one is something I'd have to Google around, but there was a guy I think at Santa Fe Institute or something who had some definition of life and like some thermodynamic definition. But you're right that it's 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 viruses are like this boundary case, are they alive or not? Most people don't think they're alive, but they're more alive than a rock in a sense. Well, I think in a world that we'll talk about today quite a bit, which is the digital world, I think the most fascinating philosophically and technically definition of life is life in the digital world. So chatbots, essentially creatures, whether they're replicas of humans or totally independent creations, perhaps in an automatic way. I think there's going to be chatbots that we would ethically be troubled by if we wanted to kill them. They would have the capacity to suffer. They would be very unhappy with you trying to turn them off. And then there'll be large groups of activists that will protest and they'll go to the Supreme Court of whatever the Supreme Court looks like in 10, 20, 30, 40 years. And they will demand that these chatbots would have the same rights as us humans. Do you think that's possible? I saw that Google engineer who was basically saying this had already happened and I was surprised by it because when I looked at the chat logs of it, it didn't seem particularly interesting. On their hand, I can definitely see it. I mean, GPT-3 for people who haven't paid attention shows that serious step-ups are possible and obviously you've talked about AI on your podcast a ton. Is it possible that GPT-9 or something is kind of like that or GPT-15 or GPT-4 maybe? For people just listening, there's a deep skepticism in your face. Yeah. The reason being because it's possible that you have a partition of society on literally this basis. That's one model where there's some people, just like there's vegetarians and non-vegetarians, there may be machines have life and machines are machines or something like that. You could definitely imagine some kind of partition like that in the future where your fundamental political social system, that's a foundational assumption. Is AI, does it deserve the same rights as 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. There's a spectrum. There's a spectrum. For example, Disney is considered about as human as a dog, but like Exxon, I may be remembering this wrong, but they had a level with human at one end and rock at the other. 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 do think of corporations as being more or like the branding is really what they're responding to. That's what I mean. They're also responding. I have a brand of human that I'm trying to sell and it seems to be effective for the most part. Sure. Although it has become like a running joke that I might be a robot, which means the brand is cracking. It's seeping through. But I mean, in that sense, I don't see a reason why chat bots 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 chat bots 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 chat bots talking to each other. And then you ask, can you determine the difference between N chat bots talking to each other and clicking buttons and stuff in apps and humans doing that? And I think we're very far off, or I shouldn't say very far off. At least I don't know how far off we are in terms of time, but we're still far off in terms of a group of N chat bots looking like their digital output is like the group of N humans. So, go from the Turing test to the multiplayer Turing test. That's one definition. Another definition is to be able to kind of swap in and you're not just convincing one human that this is a human for a small session. You're convincing all humans that this is a human for N sessions. Remote work actually makes this possible, right? That's another definition of a multiplayer Turing test where basically you have a chat bot 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 the actions of 10,000 or 100,000 or a million people and with cryptocurrency, you can even monitor a wallet that was on that computer and you could see what long run series of actions were increasing or decreasing this digital balance. You see what I'm saying, right? So you start to get at least conceptually, it'd be invasive and there'd be a privacy issue and so on. Conceptually you could imagine an agent that could learn what actions humans were doing that resulted in the increase of their local cryptocurrency balance, okay? There may be better ways to formulate it, but that I consider a challenge problem is to go from the Turing test to a genuine intelligent agent that can actually go and make money for you. If you can do that, that's a big deal. People obviously have trading bots and stuff, but that would be the next level. It's typing out emails, it's creating documents. It'll mimic human behavior in its entirety. Yeah, that's right. And 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 the automator app in Apple, right? Everything is 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 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 usually be able to do without collecting thousands and thousands and thousands of human traces doing it. But it is a predator prey on that. Go ahead. Well, and then the computer- Or millions of human traces, I don't know. The computer just sees the JavaScript. It needs to be able to look outside the simulation for the computer. The world is like, 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, you know, I think that's exactly what mushrooms do or psychedelics is you get to go outside and look back in and that's what a computer needs to do. Yeah, same thing. I do wonder whether they actually give people insight or whether they give people the illusion of insight. Is there a difference? Yeah, because, well, actual insight, you know, actual insight is, again, Maxwell's equations. You're able to shift the world with that. There's a lot of practical devices that work. The illusion of insight is I'm Jesus Christ and nothing happens, right? So I don't know. I think those are quite different. I don't know. I think you can fake it till you make it on that one, which is insight in some sense is revealing a truth that was there all along. Yeah, so I mean, I guess like I'm talking about technical insight where you have, this is the thing, you know, we were talking about actually before the podcast, like technical truths versus political truths, right? Some truths, they're on a spectrum and there's some truths that are actually entirely political in the sense that if you can change the software in enough people's heads, you change the value of the truth. For example, the location of a border is effectively consensus between large enough groups of people, who is the CEO, that's consensus among a certain group of people. What is the value of a currency or any stock, right? That market price is just the psychology of a bunch of people. Like literally, if you can change enough people's minds, you can change the value of the border or the position of the hierarchy or the value of the currency. Those are purely political truths. Then all the way on the other end are technical truths that exist independent of whatever any one human or all humans think, like the gravitational constant, right? Or the diameter of a virus. Those exist independent of the human mind. 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 amount of Bitcoin or that if you hold this private key, you hold this Bitcoin. And then we make that very hard to change because you have to change a lot of technical truths. So you can push things to this interesting intermediate zone. The question is how much of our world can we push into that? Right. And that takes us in a nonlinear fascinating journey to the question I wanted to ask you in the beginning, which is this political world that you mentioned and the world of political truth. As we know it in the 20th century, in the early 21st century, what do you think works well and what is broken about government? The fundamental thing is that we can't easily and peacefully start new opt-in governments. And start up governments. Yeah. And 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, I don't know, Microsoft or name some company that's a GameStop and you can try to reform it. Or you can start your own. And the fact that both options exist mean that you can actually just start from scratch. And that's just, I mean, the same reason we have a clean piece of paper. I've mentioned this actually in the network state book. I'll just quote this bit, but we want to be able to start a new state peacefully for the same reason we want a bare plot of earth, a blank sheet of paper, an empty text buffer, a fresh 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 want to backspace, you don't want to have just like 128 bytes of space, 128 kilobytes and just have to backspace the old document before creating the new one. So that's a fundamental thing that's wrong with today's governments. And it's a meta point, right? Because it's not any one specific reform, it's a meta reform of being able to start new countries. Okay. So that's one problem, but you could push back and say that's a feature. A lot of people argue that tradition is power. So generation, if you try a thing long enough, which is the way I see marriage, there's value to the struggle and the journey you take through the struggle and you grow and you develop ideas together. You grow intellectually, philosophically together. And that's the idea of a nation that spans generations that you have a tradition that strives towards the truth and is able to arrive there or no, not arrive, but take steps towards there through the generations. So you may not want to keep starting new governments. You may want to stick to the old one and improve it one step at a time. So just because you're having a fight inside a marriage doesn't mean you should get a divorce and go on Tinder and start dating around. That's the pushback. So it's not obvious that this is a strong feature to have to launch new governments. There's several different 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. Like 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 it's way older than all of these nations. I mean, humans are tens of thousands of years old. The answers to 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 had done historical reconstructions like skeletons and stuff like that. Many folks report that the transition to agriculture and being sessile resulted in diminution of height. People had like tooth decay and stuff like that. People had traded off upside for stability, right? That's what the state was. That's 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 you're able to roam around, just pick off fruits and so on, a little 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, you know? And I think that's important. To make America great again is to dissolve it completely into oblivion. No, it's a joke. I see. Yeah, 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, glitch. It's wearing the beta. And let me say one other thing about this, which is, you know, there are, I mean, everybody in the world, okay, let's say, I don't know about percentage, let's say 99.99% or it's rounds to that number of political discourse in the US focuses on trying to fix the system. If those folks, I mean, 0.01% of the energy is going towards building a new system, that seems like a pretty good portfolio strategy, right? Or 100% are supposed to go and edit this code base from 200 something years ago. I mean, the most American thing in the world is going and, 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 emigrants, right? Emigration from other countries to the US and actually also emigration within the US. There's this amazing YouTube video called, it's like 50 states, US population, I think 1792. It says 2050, so they've got a simulation. So you just stop it at 2019 or 2020, but it shows that like Virginia was like number one early on and then it lost ground in like New York gained. And then like Ohio was a big deal in the early 1800s and it was like father of presidents in general, these presidents and later Illinois and Indiana. And then California only really came up in the 20th century, like during the great depression and now we're entering the modern era where like Florida and Texas have risen and New York and California have dropped. And so interstate competition, it's actually just like inter-currency competition. You've got trading pairs, right? You sell BTC by ETH, you sell Solana or 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. And 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. Pretty much like the link matrix that's shaped America in a huge way. And so 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 twenties, right? Who endorsed 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, that we might even 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 who has kids is never really ready to be kids, that's the whole point, you dive in. Okay. But the, I mean, you mentioned that you came to Washington, is there other criticisms of government that you can provide as we know it today? Before we kind of outline the ideas of V3. Well, I'll give a few, right? And so a lot of this stuff will go into the version. So I've got this book, The Network State, which covers some of these topics. Does Network State have a subtitle? It is The Network State, How to Start a New Country. How to start a new country. But I just have it at thenetworkstate.com. I should say it's an excellent book that you should get. I read it on Kindle, but there's also a website. And Balaji said that he's constantly working on improving it, changing it. By the time the whole project is over, it'll be a different book than it was in the beginning. I think so. It's 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 shipped a version 1.0 and the next version, I'm going to split into tentatively motivation theory and practice. Motivation like what is the political philosophy and so on that motivates me at least to do this, which you can take or leave, right? And then theory as to why network state is now possible and I can define it in a second. And then the practice is zillions of practical details and everything from roads to diplomatic recognition and so on. Funding, founding, all that stuff. A lot of stuff actually I left out of V1 simply because I wanted to kind of get the desirability of it on the table and then talk about the feasibility. I should actually linger on that briefly in terms of things we can revolutionize. One of the biggest innovations I think that Tesla does with the way they think about the car, with the deploy the car is not the automation or the electric. To me, it's the over the air updates. Be able to send instantaneously updates to the software that completely changes the behavior, the UX, everything about the car. And so I do think it would be interesting because books are a representation of human knowledge, a snapshot of human knowledge, and it would be interesting that if we can somehow figure out a system that allows you to do sort of like a GitHub for books. Like if I buy a book on Amazon without having to pay again, can I get updates like V1.1, V1.2, and there's like release notes? Right. That would be incredible. But it's not enough to do like a second edition or a third edition, but like minor updates that's not just on your website, but actually go into the model that we use to buy books. So I spend my money, maybe I'll do a subscription service for five bucks a month where I get regular updates to the books. And then there's an incentive for authors to actually update their books such that it makes sense for the subscription and that means your book isn't just a snapshot, but it's a lifelong project. Right. If you care enough about the book. So I think there's a lot that can be done there because actually in going through this process, in many ways, the most traditional thing I did was a self-published ebook on Kindle. Right. Why? Because basically like, if you actually ink a deal with a book publisher, first they'll give you some advance. I didn't need the advance or anything. But second is all these constraints. Oh, you 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. And also the narrowing window of what they'll actually publish, it gets narrower and narrower. You see all these meltdowns over young adult novels and stuff on Twitter, but it's more than that. So actually having an Amazon page, it's just like a marker that a book exists. And now I've got an entry point where if someone says, okay, I like this tweet, but how do I kind of get the, that might be a concept from like the middle of chapter three, right? How do I get the thing from front to back? I can just point them at thenetworkstate.com. That is import this, right? This one entry point. And you mentioned like subscription and money and so on and so forth. And I think people are paying for content online now with newsletters and so on, but I've chosen to, and it 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 thenetworkstate.com, what I want to do is have that optimized for every Android phone so people in India or Latin America or Nigeria can just tap and open it. Going to do translations and stuff like that. Greg Fodor of AllspaceVR, founder of AllspaceVR, he sold that and he coded the website and worked with him on it. And there's our designer who, Elijah, and it was basically just a three person group. And we thought we had something pretty nice. But one thing I was really pleasantly surprised by is how many people got in touch with us afterwards and asked us if we could open source the software to create this website, right? Because it's actually, you can try it on mobile. I think it's actually in some ways a better experience than Kindle. And so that was interesting because I do think of the website as like a V1 version of a, this concept of a book app, right? For example, imagine if you have the Bible and the 10 commandments aren't just text, but there's like a checklist and there's a gateway to a Christian community there. And the practice is embedded into the thing. Like, do you know brilliant.org? Amazing site. I love this site. Brilliant is basically mobile friendly tutorials. And you can kind of just swipe through, you're in line at Starbucks or getting on a plane or something. You 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 you think through what is the key insight. Like we mentioned the prime number maze that reveals something central to the human condition which is struggling against the limitation of our minds. And in that same way, you 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 preexisting states. Okay? So just taking those pieces, highly aligned online community that is not Facebook, that is not Twitter. People don't think of themselves as Facebookers or Twitterians, right? That's just a collection of hundreds of millions of people who just fight each other all day, right? It's a fight club. A company is highly aligned where you'll put a task into the company Slack and if you do it in all hands, about a hundred percent 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 a Twitter account, you might get 0.1% of people engaging with something. It's not the a hundred percent. 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 a thousand or 10,000 people who can collectively do something as simple as just all liking something on Twitter. For example, why would they do that? They're a guild of electrical engineers. They're a guild of graphic designers. And you've got a thousand people in this guild and every day somebody is asking a favor from the guild and the other 999 people are helping them out. For example, I've just launched a new project or I'd like to get a new job. Can somebody help me? And so on. And so you kind of give to get your, you know, you're helping other people in the community and you're kind of building up karma this way. And then sometimes you spend it down. Like Stack Overflow has this karma economy. It's not meant to be an internal economy that is like making tons and tons of money off of 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 a thousand people and you paste in a tweet and a thousand of them RT it or like it. Okay. If you can't even get that, you don't have something. If you do have that, you have the basis for at least collective digital action on something. Okay. And you can think of this as a group of activists. You can think of it as, for example, let's say I mentioned a guild, but let's say they're a group that wants to raise awareness of the fact that life extension is possible, right? Every day there's a new tweet on, I don't know, whether it's Metformin Research or Sinclair's work or David Sinclair, right? Andrew Huberman has good stuff here, you know, or there's a Longevity VC. There's a bunch of folks working in this area. Every day there's something there. And literally the purpose of this online community is raise awareness of longevity. And of the thousand people, 970 go and like that. That's pretty good, right? That's solid. You've got something there. You've got a laser, right? You've got something which you can focus on something because most of the web to internet is 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- Some of them look delicious. Some of them look delicious. Novelty, we can over consume novelty, right? So what we were talking about earlier, the balance between tradition and innovation, right? Here is a different version of that, which is entropy going in a ton of different directions due to novelty versus like focus. It's like heat versus work. Heat is entropic and work force along a distance. You're going in a direction, right? And so if those 30 links on 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. 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 David Sachs found and sold the company Yammer that was partially on their basis. It was fine. It was a billion dollar company, but Facebook for Work was actually Slack, right? It looked different. It was more chat focused. It was less image focused and whatnot. What does the platform for a highly aligned online community look like? I think Discord is the transitional state, but it's not the end state. Discord is sort of chatty. The work isn't done in Discord itself, right? The cryptocurrency for tracking or the crypto karma for sort of tracking people's contributions is not really done in Discord itself. Discord was not built for that. And I don't know what that UX looks like. Maybe it looks like tasks, you know, like maybe it looks something different. Okay. So let me linger on this. Sure. I mean, some people might not be even familiar with Discord or Slack or so on. Even these platforms have like communities associated with them. Meaning the big, like the meta community of people who are aware of the feature set and that you can do a thing, that this is a thing and then you could do a thing with it. Discord, like when I first realized that, I think it was born out of the gaming world is like, holy shit. This is like a thing. There's a lot of people that use this. Right. There's also a culture that's very difficult to escape that's associated with Discord that spans all the different communities within Discord. Reddit is the same, even though there's different subreddits, there's still, because of the migration phenomenon, maybe there's still a culture to Reddit and so on. Yes. So I'd like to sort of try to dig in and understand what's the difference between the online communities that are formed and the platforms on which those communities are formed. Sure. Very important. Yes, it is. It is. So for example, an office, a good design for an office is frequently you have the Commons, which is like the lunchroom or the gathering area. Then everybody else has a cave on the border they can kind of retreat to. Cave in the Commons. I love it. By the way, I was laughing internally about the heat versus work. I think that's going to stick with me. That's such an interesting way to see Twitter. Yeah. Is it just heat or is this thread, because there's a lot of stuff going on. Right. Is it just heat or we're doing some like, is there a directed thing that's going to be productive at the end of the day? That's right. I love this. I've never seen, anyway, the cave in the Commons is really nice. So that has to do with the layout of an office that's effective. That's right. So you can think of many kinds of social networks as being on the cave in Commons continuum. For example, Twitter is just all Commons. The caves are just like individual DMs or DM threads or whatever, but it's really basically just one gigantic global public fight club for the most part. Right? Then you have- Or love club. Well, some would love, but mostly fight. Or actually- I love aggressively, that's all. Yeah. 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, because of the Commons structure of it, it's a mechanism for virality of anything. You just described the kind of things that become viral. Yeah. Meaning no offense to librarians. It's like a library and Liberia. Liberia was wrecked by civil war for many years. Right? That's Liberia is one of my favorite sets for porn. Just kidding. Jokes. I'm learning. 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. 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. The reason is I think it's easy to understand when something is completely public like Twitter or completely private like Signal. Those are the only two modes I think in which one can really operate. When something is quasi-private like Facebook, you have to just kind of assume it's public because if it's interesting enough, it'll go outside your friend network and it'll get screenshotted or whatever and posted. Facebook is sort of forced into default public despite its privacy settings. For anybody who says something interesting, if it's like you can figure out all their dials and stuff like that, but just hard to understand unless it's totally private or totally public. You have to basically treat it if it's totally public, if it's not totally private. Okay. At least under real name. I'll come back to pseudonym. So you've got Twitter, that's total Commons. Facebook, which 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 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 are become physical societies. Like lots and lots of subreddit like things become physical societies. Then you start going further into like Discord where it's more full featured than, you know, as you go Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, now you jump into Discord and Discord is a bunch of individual communities that are connected and you can easily sort of jump between them. Right. And then you have Slack and you know, yes, you can use Slack to go between different company slacks, but Slack historically, at least I'm not sure what their current policy is, historically they discourage public slacks. So it's mostly like you have your main Slack for your company and then you sometimes may jump into like, let's say you've got a design consultant or somebody like that, you'll jump into their Slack, but Discord is, you've got way more Discord usually that you jump into than Slacks, right? Well, and let me ask you then on that point, because there is a culture, one of the things I discovered on Reddit and Discord of anonymity or pseudonyms or usernames that don't represent the actual name. I think about 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 same stuff in Discord, I think I was the only asshole using my actual name on there. It's like everybody was using pseudonyms. So what's the role of that in the online community? Well, so I actually gave a talk on this a few years ago called the pseudonymous economy. Okay. And it's come about faster than I expected, but I did think it was going to come about fairly fast. And essentially the concept is obviously we've had, so first anonym, pseudonym, real name, right? Do you need to describe the difference? The difference. Anonymous is like 4chan, where there's no tracking of a name, you know, there's zero reputation associated with an identity, right? Anonymous 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 the air tag that's put on you, right? Why do I say that, right? Another word for a name is a handle and so just visualize like a giant file cabinet. There's a handle with Lex 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 stalk billions of other people now. That's a very new thing and I actually think this will be a transitional era in like human history. We're actually 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. 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. That was like one of the purposes of names was to make masses of humans legible to a state, hence seeing like a state. You can see them now. Digital identifiers, one thing that people don't usually think about is pseudonymity is itself a form of decentralization. People know Satoshi Nakamoto was pseudonymous. They also knew he was into decentralization, but one way of thinking about it is let's say his real name or his state name is a node. Attached to that is every database, his Gmail, his Facebook if he had one, every government record on him. 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 think of it as being the center of a giant network of all of these things. When you go and create a pseudonym, you're butting 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 chooses to do that. All those things, the digital signatures are all attached to this new decentralized name because he's instantiating it, not the government, right? One way of thinking about it is the root administrator of the quote real name system is the state because you cannot simply edit your name there, right? You can't just go, you can't log into USA.gov and backspace your name and change it. Moreover, your birth certificate, all this stuff that's fixed and immutable, right? Whereas you would take for granted that on every site you go to, you can backspace, you can be like, call me Ishmael, walk into a site, use whatever name you want. You'd have to use the same name across multiple sites. You can do that. And if not, you don't have to. One thing that we're seeing now actually is at the level of kids, the younger generation. Eric Schmidt several years ago mentioned that people would change their names when they became adults so that they could do that. This is kind of already happening. People are using, I've remarked on this many years ago, search resistant identities. Okay, why? They have their Finsta, which is their quote fake name Instagram and Rinsta, which is their real name Instagram. Oh, this is cool. Okay. And what's interesting is on their Rinsta, they're their fake self because they're in their Sunday best and smiling. And this is the one that's meant to be search indexed, right? On the Finsta, their fake name, this is just shared with their closest friends. They're their real self and they're hanging out at parties or whatever. And so this way they've got something which is the public persona and the private persona, the public persona that's search indexed and the private persona that is private for friends. And so organically people are, like Jean Jacobs, she talks about cities and how they're organic. And some of the mid 20th century guys, the architecture they had removed shade from awnings and stuff like that got removed. So this is like the restoration of awnings and shade and structure so that you're not always exposed to the all seeing web crawler that I have sore on, which is like Google bot just indexing everything. These are search resistant identities and that eye just sort of passes over you like the Terminator eye just kind of passes over you, right? So search resistant identity is not pulled up, it's not indexed, right? And now you can be your real self. And so we've had this kind of thing for a while with communication. The new thing is that cryptocurrency has allowed us to do it for transaction, hence the pseudonymous economy, right? And should go from anonymous, pseudonymous real name. These each have their different purposes, but the new concept is that pseudonym, you can have multiple of them by the way, your ENS name, you could have it under your quote real name or state name like Lex Friedman.eth, but you could also be punk6529.eth, okay? And now you can earn, you can sign documents, you can boot up stuff, you can have a persistent identity here, okay, which has a level of indirection to your real name. Why is that very helpful? Because now it's harder to both discriminate against you and cancel you. Concerns of various factions are actually obviated or at least partially addressed by going pseudonymous as default, right? It is the opposite of bring your whole self to work. It's bring only your necessary self to work, right? Only show those credentials that you need, right? Now of course, anybody who's in cryptocurrency understands Sushin Nakamoto and so on is for this, but actually many progressives are for this as well. Why? You don't ban the boxes. It's like you're not supposed to ask about felony convictions when somebody is being hired because they've served their time, right? Or you're not supposed to ask about immigration status or marital status in an interview. And people have this concept of blind auditions where if a woman is auditioning for 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 getting a violin position. So you combine those concepts like ban the box, not asking these various questions, blind auditions, and then also the concept of implicit bias. Like if you believe this research, people are unconsciously biased towards other folks, right? Okay, so you take all that, you take Satoshi and you put it together and you say, okay, let's use pseudonyms. That actually takes unconscious bias even off the table, right? Because now you have genuine global equality of opportunity. Moreover you have all these people, billions of people around the world that might speak with accents, but they type without them. And now if they're pseudonymous, you aren't discriminating against them, right? Moreover with AI, very soon, the AI version of Zoom, you'll be able to be whoever you 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. 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 a pseudonym or when you're completely anonymous, is there some sense where you're not actually being your real self? That as a social entity, it is, human beings are fundamentally social creatures. And for us to be social creatures, there is some sense in which we have to have a consistent identity that can be canceled, that can be criticized or applauded in society. And that identity persists through time. So is there some sense in which we would not be our full, beautiful human selves unless we have a lifelong consistent real name attached to us in a digital world? So this is a complicated topic, but let me make a few remarks. First is real names, quote unquote state names were not built for the internet. They're actually state names, right? It's actually a great way of thinking about it, 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? Their real name is out there, their stalker knows it, they can find address information, all this other kind of stuff, right? And with all these hacks that are happening, just every day we see another hack, massive hack, et cetera, that real name can be indexed into data that was supposed to be private, right? Like for example, you know, the Office of Personnel Management, like the government, the US government, many governments actually, are like a combination of the surveillance state and the Keystone cops, right? Why? They slurp up all the information and then they can't secure it. So it leaks out the back door. Okay. They've, they basically have, you know, a hundred million records of all this very, 300 million records, all this very sensitive data. They just get owned, hacked over and over again, right? And so really there should be something which 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 he merges various databases, they've got a bunch of addresses to go and hit. Okay. So in that sense, real names were not, state names were not built for the internet. They just give up too much information. And our actually existing internet environment, they give up too much information. On the other hand, they also give too little. Why? If instead you give out Lexfreedman.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 Lexfreedman.eth, what can you do that? Some you can do today, some you'll soon be able to do. You can pay Lexfreedman.eth, you can message Lexfreedman.eth. You can look it up like a social profile. You can send files to it. You can upload and download. Basically it combines aspects of an email address, a website, a username, et cetera, et cetera. But you, you know, eventually I think you'll go from email to phone number to ENS address or something like that as the primary online identifier, because this is actually a programmable name, right? Whereas a state name is not. 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 ENS name is developed for the online world. Now the reason say ENS or something like it, you know, somebody had a, in a village, they'll, their name might be Smith because they were a blacksmith or Potter because they were a Potter, right? And same, I think your surname right now for many people it's dot Ethan that reflects the Ethereum community, your surname online will carry information about you like dot salt says something different about you dot BTC says yet something different. I think we're going to have a massive fractionation of this over time. We're still in the very earliest days of our internet civilization, right? A hundred, 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, it's the civilization fundamentally that you're associated with, right? Right. So there's some improvements to the real name that you could do in the digital world, but do you think there's value of having a name that's persist throughout your whole life that is shared between all the different digital and physical communities? I think you should be able to opt into that, right? At which 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, no. My name is- I don't mean it like that. No, no. Yeah. So here's why that wouldn't work. That's the application I'm interested in. Okay. Well, I'm not interested in the murder application, but- Well, I would like you to prevent me- Take that thought. Sure. A person who's clearly bad for society from doing that. Sure, sure. But murder is going to be against the rules in almost every society. And I mean, people will argue- Most likely, yeah. Yeah, most likely, right? Except animals. Well, I'm thinking of like the Aztecs or the Mayas or something like that. There's various, you know, the Soviet Union, there's weird edge case, unfortunately. Wrong words. Yeah, there's societies, unfortunately, that have actually, that's why I asterisked it. But let's say murder is something that society one probably has effectively, a social smart contract or a social contract that says that's illegal. Therefore you're in jail. Therefore you're deprived of the right to exit. But upon entry into that society, in theory, you would have said, okay, I accept this quote social contract, right? Obviously, if I kill somebody, I can't leave. Okay. So you've accepted upon crossing the border into there, right? Now, as I mentioned, you know, like what is murder? Like people will, I mean, there's an obvious answer, but as I said, there's been human sacrifice in some societies. Communism, they kill lots of people. Nazism, they kill lots of people. Unfortunately, there's quite a lot of societies. You know, I wanted to say it's an edge case, but maybe many of the 20th century societies around the world have institutionalized some kind of murder, whether it was the Red Terror, you know, in the Soviet Union or obviously the Holocaust or, you know, the Cultural Revolution or year zero and so on and so forth, right? So my point there is that who 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 what I'm talking about, the hanging order for the Kulaks? Yes. Okay. The famous hanging order, which actually showed they were actually bloodthirsty. The key thing was he said, here's a list of all the quote, rich men, the Kulaks go and kill them. The real names, the state names were what facilitated the murder. They didn't prevent the murderers there, right? So my point is just in the ethical weighting of it, it's a two-sided thing, right? You're right that the tracking can, you know, prevent disorganized murders, but the tracking facilitates unfortunately organized murders. Lists of undesirables were the primary tool of all of these oppressive states in the 20th century. You see my point? I see your point and it's a very strong point. In part, it's a cynical point, 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, it's, it's like fire. It is something which, um, you're going to keep having it reform because there's, there's good reasons where you have centralization, decentralization, re-centralization, but power corrupts absolute power corrupts absolutely. And you just have to be very suspicious of this kind of centralized power. The more trust you give it, often the less trusted it deserves. It's like a weird feedback loop, right? The more trust, the more it can do, the more it can do, the more bad things it will do. So okay. There is a lot of downside to the state being able to track you. Right. And history teaches us lessons when 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, it is all the convenience and none of the freedom. That's the downside, but don't you, the question is about, 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 understand. But you know, nevertheless engaging with it, like, you know, I don't know, is the ratio 10x, is it 100x? I wouldn't be surprised if it's 100x. Yeah, but have you seen the viciousness, the negativity, the division within online communities that have anonymity? So that's the thing is basically there's also a sila and a syriptus. I'm not, you know, when you see what centralization can do and you correct in the direction of decentralization, you can over-correct with decentralization and you get anarchy. And this is basically then you want to re-centralize, 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? Then you 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 deal of societal stability. So it's kind of like saying, are we going north or south? And the answer is like, what's our destination? Where's our current position in the civilizational state space? Well, my main question, I guess, is does creating a network state escape from some of the flaws of human nature? The reason you got Nazi Germany is a large scale resentment with different explanations for that resentment that's ultimately lives in the heart of each individual. They made up the entirety of Nazi Germany and had a charismatic leader that was able to channel that resentment into action, into actual policies, into actual political and military movements. Can't you not have the same kind of thing in digital communities as well? Have you heard the term argumentum ad Hitlerum or like Godwin's law or something like, you know, it's something where if the reference point is Hitler, it's this thing where a lot of things break down. But I do think, I mean, look, is there any, did Bitcoin manage to get where it was without a single shot being fired to my knowledge? Yes. Right. Did Google manage to get to where it is without shots being fired? Absolutely. And. While a lot of shots were being fired elsewhere in the world. Sure. But who's firing those shots? The states. The states, right. Yeah. But that's because Bitcoin and Google are a tiny minority of communities. It's like the icing on the cake of human civilization. Sure. Basically any technology, I mean, like you can use a hammer to go and hit somebody with it, right? I'm not saying every technology is equally destructive or what have you, but you can conceive of, it's kind of like rule 34, but for technology, right? Okay. Right. You can probably figure out some. Your ability to reference brilliant things throughout is quite admirable. Yes. But anyway, sorry. Rule 34 for technology. Rule 34, but for abusive technology, you can always come up with a black mirror version of something. And in fact, there is this kind of funny tweet, which is like a sci-fi author. My book, Don't Invent the Torment Nexus was meant to be a cautionary tale on what would happen if society invented the torment nexus. And then it's like, tech guys, at long last we have created the torment nexus. Right. And so the thing is that simply describing something, some abuse, unfortunately after the initial shock wears off, people will unconsciously think of it as sort of an attractor in the space. Right. It's like, I'll give you some examples. Like Minority Report had the gesture thing, right? And the Kinect was based on that. So it's a dystopian movie, but had this cool kind of thing and people kind of keyed off it, right? Or people have said that movies like Full Metal Jacket, that was meant to be, in my understanding, it was meant to be like an anti-war movie, but soldiers just love it despite the fact that the drill sergeant is actually depicted as a bad guy for the portrayal of that kind of environment. So just saying it's like giving the vision of the digital Hitler or whatever is not actually a vision I want to paint. I do think everything is possible. Obviously, ISIS uses the internet. Yeah, we're not bringing up Hitler in a shallow argument. We're bringing up Hitler in a long, empathetic, relaxed discussion, which is where Hitler can live in a healthy way. There's deep lessons in Hitler and Nazi Germany as there is with Stalin, yes. Okay. So in many ways, and this is a very superficial way of talking about it, but this is, Exit is the anti-genocide technology, right? Because Exit is the route of the politically powerless. Exit is not, people will always say, oh, Exit is for the rich. That's actually not true. Most immigrants equals most immigrants are not rich. They're politically powerless. You can describe Exit. What is Exit? So there's this book, which I reference a lot. I like it, called Exit, Voice, and Loyalty by Albert Hirschman. And he essentially says, and I gave this talk in 2013 that goes through this at YC Star Up 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, hey, here's a ticket that I'd like to get solved and Exit is taking your business elsewhere. At the level of corporate governance, Voices, board of directors vote and Exit is selling your shares. In a country, Voices is a vote and Exit is migration. 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. So you can vote with your ballot, you can vote with your wallet, you can vote with your feet. And that 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 what you said seriously. You're not just complaining or whatever. You actually left San Francisco because it was so bad on this and this issue and you've actually voted with your feet. It is manifest preference as opposed to stated preference. So voice versus Exit is this interesting dichotomy. Do you try to reform the system or do you exit it and build a new one or seek an alternative? And then loyalty modulates this, where if you are a patriot as part of the initial part of your conversation, like are you a traitor? You're giving up on our great thing or whatever. And people push those buttons to get people to stick. That's like, I shouldn't say the bad version. Let's say a common version. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. But then there's the good version, which is, oh, maybe the price is down right now, but you believe in the cause. So even if they're on paper, you would rationally exit. You believe in this thing and you're going to stick with it. So loyalty can be, again, good and bad, but it kind of modulates a trade-off between voice and exit. 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 that are off? Because they're not mutually exclusive. It's kind of like left and right, sometimes you need both together. I think that one of the biggest things the internet does is it increases microeconomic leverage and therefore increases exit in every respect of life. For example, on every phone, you can pick between Lyft and Uber. When you're at the store, you see a price on the shelf and you can comparison shop. If it's Tinder, you can swipe. 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, this is 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 by typing in some characters into Dalit. And that makes the positive forces of capitalism more efficient increase in microeconomic leverage. It's individual empowerment. 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 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. The 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. 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 inside the United States? Well, the physical world- I think you do, yeah, under the constraints of the physical world, you do like micro migrations. So this is coming back to the hunter gatherer, farmer soldier, digital nomad kind of thing, right? So 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, one of the 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 in the 1980s, I mean, they didn't have Google Maps, right? So you couldn't just discover things off the path. People would just essentially do home to work and work to home and home to work and a trip had to be planned, right? They were contained within a region of space or you do home to school, school to home, home to school. It wasn't like you went and explored the map. Most people didn't, right? They were highly canalized, okay, meaning it was just back and forth, back and forth, very routine, just like the push the button, push the button, trapped within this very small piece and also trapped within this large country because it was hard to travel between countries and so on. Again, of course there were vacations, of course there were some degree of news and so on. Your mobility wasn't completely crushed, but it was actually quite low, relatively speaking. 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. I don't have the data to show it, but I'd be shocked if people, the average person didn't go to more places, wasn't 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, I mean, how many websites have you visited? I don't know, hundreds of thousands probably at this point over your life, right? How many places on the surface have you visited? You're actually unusual. You might be like a world traveler or 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 era, right? Because you couldn't build permanent fortifications and whatnot. Even nations as we currently think of them with like demarcated borders, you needed cartography, you needed maps, right? That stuff didn't exist for a long time. You just had 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. I think the 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 issue. Let me just give you some data. Personal anecdotal experience data. There's a reason I only do this podcast in person. There's 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 way to do that, just as Ukraine went to the front. The way you can have people be cruel to each other in the physical space is through the machinery of propaganda that dehumanizes the other side, all that kind of stuff. That's really hard work to do. Online, I find just naturally at the individual scale, people somehow start to easily engage in the drug of mockery, derision, and cruelty when they can hide behind anonymity. I don't know what that says about human nature. I ultimately believe most of us want to be good and have the capacity to do a lot of good, but sometimes it's fun to be shitty, to shit on people, to be cruel. I don't know what that is. It's weird because I think one of my sayings is just like the internet increases in microeconomic 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 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 on location to kind of extreme outcomes on both sides. Having that here, you are talking about the bad outcome, which I agree does happen with the internet in some sense makes people have very low empathy between others, but it also is the other extent where people find their mental soulmates across the world. Someone who's living in Thailand or in like 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 meet in person. It's like the brains have been communicating for two years, three years, you've been friends, and you see them in person and it's just great. It's not just the total lack of empathy. It is frankly far more empathy than you would be able to build usually with an in-person conversation in the 80s or the 90s with someone on their side of the world 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. Like it's a sensor distribution. I work for the intelligence agency, so I'm seeing the private chats. I'm collecting all of your data. Yes, but you can intuit stuff. I don't think I'm being very selective. If you just look at the young folks, I am very concerned about the intellectual psychological growth of young men and women. 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 basic technology. Stuff I coat up over the weekend kind of thing. I think if I throw 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. The entirety of Reddit just chuckled as you said that. Well, within a subreddit, it's actually fairly polite. Like I say, you're not usually seeing, it depends on which subreddit, of course. There's a consistency. I think the definition of politeness is interesting here because it's polite within the culture of that subreddit. Yes, they abide by, let me put it a different way, they abide by the social norms of that subreddit. Right, and that's the definition of politeness. Yeah, or civility is like, right? There is an interesting difference between pseudonymous and anonymous, you're saying. It's possible that pseudonymity, you can actually avoid some of the negative aspects. Absolutely. We're re-Dunbarizing the world in some ways. With China being the big exception or outlier, the Dunbar number, 150 people, that's roughly the scale of your society, right? That's the number of people that a human can kind of keep in their brain. Whether apocryphal or not, I think it's probably roughly true. And we're re-Dunbarizing the world because A, we're making small groups much more productive and B, we're making large groups much more fractious, right? So you have an individual notch, you can program Minecraft by himself or Satoshi who could do V1 to 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 countries of hundreds of millions of people that are just finding that the first and second principle or they're just splitting on principle components. Scott Alexander thinks of them as scissor statements, statements that one group thinks is obviously true, one group thinks is obviously false. You can think of them as political polarization, you can think of it in terms of game theory. There's lots of different reasons you can give for why this happens, but those large groups now are getting split. And so you have both the unsustainability of these large sort of artificial groups and the productivity of these small organic ones. And so that is kind of, it's like sort of obvious that's the direction of civilizational rebirth. We just need to kind of lean into that. This is a statement. 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. Just 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 crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from preexisting states. So we talked about was the alignment of online communities and the capacity for collective action. Yep. Well, one collective action, it could be a thousand people liking a tweet, right? If you can get a thousand of a thousand people doing it. But a much higher level, much higher bar is a thousand people crowdfunding territory and actually living together. Just like people currently- In physical space. In physical space. And not all in one place. That's critical. Just like Bitcoin is a decentralized currency, the network state is a recipe for a decentralized state-like entity, okay, where it starts with, for example, two people just get, they become roommates. They meet in this community, they become roommates. Okay, they get their place together. Or 10 people get a group house. Or eventually a hundred people just buy a small apartment building together. And guess what? They start getting equity, not just paying rent. Okay? These are all people who share their values. And now they can crowdfund territory together. Now, of course, they don't just jump straight from a thousand people liking something to a thousand people crowdfunding something, what I described in the middle is you do a lot of meetups, you get to know these other people before you decide to live, you know, collectively with them. But once you live with them, you start to get a network effect. For example, if those hundred people want to learn Spanish or Turkish or Vietnamese, they could all have a building where they're doing Vietnamese immersion, right? And that's something which they get a benefit from being physically around the other people that the pure digital wouldn't give them to quite the same extent, right? And so crowdfunds territory around the world, crucially not just one place, they're all connected by the internet, just like Hawaii is 2000 miles away from the continental US, but both sides think of them as American, but the people on Hawaii and people in the continental US. What's the role of having to have territory? If most of the exchange, so presumably as technology gets better and better, the communication, the intimacy, the exchange of ideas all happens in a digital world, what's the importance of being able to crowdfund territory? Well, because we're still physical creatures. You can't reproduce yet digitally, right? There's still lots of things- So it's all about sex. Well, that's going 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. It's not a cult. Why can't you just like take a train? Why is it not a cult? It's not a cult because a cult is very internally focused and it tries to close its members off from the outside world. This is much more how America itself was populated where there were lots of towns like Penn is named after William Penn or the founder of Texas like Sam Houston, right? Lots of towns like the Oneida Commune in Northern New York, they recruited and they became a town and they became actually the Oneida Glassware Company, kind of 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? Yes, reproduction, it's marriage and kids and so on, but it's also just hanging out and it is just the physical world is very high bandwidth. There's lots of stuff. 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. We can build a billion dollar company online, but we need a billion permits to build a shed in San Francisco. 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. If the population of Nevada had 100% consensus, you could just dissolve every law in Nevada in theory and then build new ones. 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. That's the power of when you actually have human consensus. One way I talk about this also in the book a little bit, and this is going to go much more into detail in the V2, I think of this as 100% democracy as opposed to 51% democracy. 51% democracy, which is the current form of government, is 49% dictatorship because the entire premise of democracy is about the consent of the governed. That's actual legitimating underpinning principle. 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 you drink it, it's milk or it's nothing, right? So all of that is routinized. All of that is accepted. We have this thing which is just the minimum possible amount of democracy of 51%, okay. What happens is then that 51% tries to ram something down the 49% throat and then the next election it's now 51, 49 the other way and then they ram it back. That's how you get the seesaw that is just splitting countries apart, right? The alternative to that is you build a consensus online, you go and get some God forsaken patch of territory. Actually the worse the territory, the better. Why? Because it's like Burning Man. Nobody cares, right? The nicer the piece of land, the more the people are going to argue about it. But Starlink has repriced the world. Basically all kinds of pieces of territory that were previously, you know, they're far away from natural ports. They're far away from natural resources. All kinds of pieces of territory around the world now have satellite internet. And so what you can do is again, the map has been reopened, right? We were talking about earlier, the map has been reopened. You can gather your community online. They're now capable of collective action. You can point here. This place has great Starlink coverage. You go there like the Verizon guy, 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 Himby. Okay. Do you want that? Let's go. Nimby, Yimby, Himby. What are those? So Nimby is not in my backyard. Don't build in cities. Yimby is let's build high density buildings, really tall buildings and so on in cities. There's a third version, which is Himby, my little acquaintance, which is horizontal sprawl is good. Why horizontal sprawl? Because to build a skyscraper, to build a tall building in a city, you have this enormous permitting process, all of this stuff which has to get done. It's expensive, it's time consuming. The way that cities were built, if you go back to the V1, what does the startup city look like? It looks like something like Burning Man. It looks like the cities of the Wild West. They were not multi-story buildings, right? They were basically things that were just like one story and someone could have it there in the dust and then you build roads and stuff between them and they can move them around. It was a much more dynamic geography. And so when you have that as a vision of what a startup city looks like, right? Now you've got something, there's a company I found called Kift, which is like van life. There's a lot of stuff in construction that makes this feasible. There's so-called man camps for fracking where people can just do like companies like a Greco, they're a product power. You can bring water, all this stuff on site. So it's easy to actually snap this stuff to grid, relatively speaking, if you've got horizontal space, you pick this space, you crowd from the territory, now you've got a city. Okay. And the last bit is eventually gains diplomatic recognition from preexisting states. So this is a part that people, different people will be with me up to this point and then they'll say, okay, that's a part I disagree with or how are you 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. Of course people have crowdfunded land and moving together and doing it at a larger scale. All that I believe, how are you possibly ever going to gain diplomatic recognition from preexisting states? You dumb delusional tech bro, right? That's a common thing. Okay. That's about the tone of it as well. And so first I would say sovereigns are already out for business. They're inking deals. Okay. Nevada inked a deal with Tesla to build the Geiger factory. El Salvador has Bitcoin as its national currency. Wyoming has done the Dow law where Ethereum is now recognized, where you can have on chain and corporations 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 and on. Sovereigns are open for business. Sovereigns are doing deals with companies and with currencies. Sovereigns at the level of cities like Miami or New York where the mayors are accepting their salary in Bitcoin. States like Wyoming or Nevada has its new private cities legislation or entire countries like El Salvador. So- When you say sovereigns, by the way, you mean the old school physical nation states. Governments. Fiat states. Fiat states. Okay. But the Fiat isn't the thing that makes a state. What makes a state is geographical location. It is something where, they're both, right? So basically it's a play on words. So just like Fiat currency is cryptocurrency, we will have Fiat country and crypto country, right? And in fact, you can think of the Fiat and crypto version of almost anything. One thing I'll come to later is a big thing, the big thing I think comes after digital currency is digital passports. Okay. And that's a big part of this whole network thing which we'll come back to. So that last bit, the reason I just mentioned all those deals between sovereigns, whether at the city, US state, or UN listed country level, okay? And on the other hand, so that's on one side of the market and the other 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? So- Can you possibly escape that? So yes, and let me give you a concrete example. Israel. Okay. So people talk about, a lot of people are like, oh, Balj, he took this from Snow Crash or some sci-fi book they'll reference. Actually, there's many different references to the book. This is not the only reference, but a very important reference that I think is much more important to me than Snow Crash, which is good, a good book, whatever, but it's fictional, is Dierdudensdat 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. In the book, he was writing about the death of distance in 1897. Why? Because steamships could take you across countries. And he was just amazingly smart and practical guy, who just handled all these various objections. And he said, look, the Jewish people, our choices are either A, assimilate and give up the culture, or B, some people are thinking communism is a good idea, I disagree with that. Or C, build our own country. 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 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 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, Bir-Bidzin in the former Soviet Union, right? So the land was a parameter. Palestine went out because of its historical religious importance. Now, by the way, one thing, I'm sure there's some fraction of viewers are going to be like, oh my God, all the bad stuff that happened. I'm obviously not denying that there's enormous amounts of controversy and so on that attends Israel. I consider myself generally pro-Israeli. I'd also consider myself pro-Palestinian. I fund lots of Palestinians and so on and so forth. So I'm leaving that part out, that huge conflict 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 was the people who were actually tilling the land and building the buildings and so and so forth. Like who had the claim there is like the people who are present, okay? And this territory, this network of territories eventually became the basis for or part of the basis for what became Israel. Now I'm fully aware that the exact configuration of what territory belongs to Israel, what territory belongs to Palestinians, this is an enormous topic of dispute, okay? But I just point this out to say the process of going from book to crowdfunding territory to a sovereign state where people were now citizens of Israel as opposed to the British Empire is not some fictional thing, but did happen and within the lifetimes of some of the older, you know, they're in their eighties now, but in the lifetimes of some older people, okay? So it's not impossible. In fact, it has happened, right? But for that step, then perhaps hopefully is a better example because in this particular, like you said, land last, if I were to say, if I was an alien and arrived at earth and say choice of land, maybe if you were interested in choosing a land that represents a network state where ideas that unites a people based on ideas, maybe pick a land that doesn't lead to generational conflict and war. So I'll get to that. And destruction and suffering and all that. All this stuff. That's right. So now that I've said what are the positive things about Israel, and I think there's a lot to admire in Israel, as I said, I think there's also a lot to admire in the Palestinians and so on. I'm not taking any position on that. There's other inspirations for the network state. The second major inspiration is India, which managed to achieve independence nonviolently, right? That's very important, right? So can you fuse these things, right? A state started with a book that achieved independence nonviolently, okay? And that managed to build this polyglot, multicultural democracy, right? That does, like India has its flaws, but it does manage to have human rights of lots of people respected and what have you, right? And has managed to, there were times like emergency in the 1970s in Dhiraghandi, declared emergency. There were times when seem touch and go, but overall with fits and starts, this flawed thing has kind of 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. Okay, there was something there, but let's say built one of the richest countries in the world without huge amounts of natural resources in the middle of a zone where there was lots of communist revolution going on. And so he was the CEO founder essentially of this amazing startup country, right? 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? They're all forks of the UK code base. We think obviously, the UK was sort of the ancestor of America, but Israel was a former British colony, right? India was a British colony and so was Singapore, right? For people who don't know what fork and code base means, it's a language from versioning systems, particularly Git, represented online on a website called GitHub. And a fork means you copy the code and all the changes you make to the code now live in their own little world. So America took the ideas that define the United Kingdom and then forked it by evolving those ideas in a way that didn't affect the original country. That's right. And what's interesting about this is, and of course, I'm saying that in a somewhat playful way, right? But I think it's a useful analogy, interesting analogy, right? So you have the Americans who forked the UK code base and then you have the Indians, the 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 crowdfunds territory around the world that is led by a CEO founder and that is also governed by something that's like a constitution. But just like you went from, you know, I talk about the V1, V2, and V3 a lot, right? Like V1 is gold and V2 is fiat and V3 is Bitcoin, right? Or V1 is hunter-gatherer and V2 is farmer-soldier, V3 is digital nomad or sovereign collective, okay? Which is not just an individual but a group. Here V1 is UK common law. They don't have a constitution. It's 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 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, Scotland, Northern Ireland, the United States of America, the network states of the internet, okay? Where you go from the rights of Englishmen with the Magna Carta to Europeans, African Americans, all the immigrants to the Americans or the North America. Then you go to all the people of the world. And so you basically are more democratic and you're more capitalist because you're talking about internet capitalism, not just nation state 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 Palestinian Washington or a Brazilian Hamilton, right? And now rather than say, okay, maybe you have a small percentage chance of immigrating to the US and a small percentage chance of your descendant becoming president, now we can just say you can start online. And you know what? Maybe this person is so exceptional, they have Americans coming to their network state, right? I don't think it's possible with the rich get richer in a digital space too, the people with more followers have friends that have followers and they... I don't think it's the rich get richer. I think what happens is... So this is an important concept. 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 pre-2009, now it exists. Those people who are rich in BTC terms are only partially correlated with those who are rich in USD terms. There's all these folks who 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 a last to cryptocurrency. Old money and old states, I think those people who are the most focused on, you might call it reform, I would call it control, okay? The most focused on control of the old world who have the least incentive to switch, the rich will get poorer because it will be the 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. It's 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, 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 in granite, right? So the point is that we think it's totally understandable today for there to be a huge founder who comes out of Vietnam or South America. You can name founders from all over the world, right? Exceptional people can rise from all over 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 a car, he managed a monetary policy and a currency from scratch, okay? As a 20 something, right? Obviously that's a more accomplished person than somebody who just inherited an economy. This is a- A lot of people can push back at that and say that the people that initially build a thing aren't necessarily the best ones to manage a thing once it scales and actually has impact. Sometimes, sometimes, but Zuck has done a good job of both. I think Vitalik has done a good job of both, right? That's not an inherent truth. Well, so actually I've- If you built the thing, you will be the best person to run it. I will agree with you on that. And actually I talk about this in the book or I've got an essay on this called Founding versus 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 dissipation pit grandson dissipates it, right? Why is shirt sleeves a symbol of poverty? Back in the past, it was kind of like, you're just working with your- you're not white collar, you're back to working with your hands. You're just- Oh, so it's a blue collar to blue collar and three generations. Yeah, yeah. We're working class or something like that, right? So essentially that the grandson squanders it, right? And 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 older families, you know, they were much bigger, right? Six, you know, children is not uncommon. Whatever fortune you have is now split six ways and then six ways and six ways again. So with the exception of premature and 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 is compound to such an extent that it's like up six X over 20 years, right? So it's actually hard to maintain a quote ruling class in the sense that this person who's like four generations down has, you know, like one 16th of the DNA, you know, one over two to the fourth, right? Of their scion who built a fortune. So it's not even like the same, is it the same family even, right? Is the fortune actually in the family? So most people don't think a few generations out. They just kind of think, oh, Marx is right. There's always been a rich and a poor. It's actually much more dynamic than that because you literally like, what is even the family when it's diluted out, you know, one 16th, right? If you're one 16th of Rockefeller, are you a Rockefeller? Really like 15, 16 something else. Would you have the Rockefeller fortune? Probably not, right? Now, are there, again, premature, premature where the guy who inherits the name all the way through, that would be one way to pass it down. But even that person doesn't necessarily have the qualities of the guy who, you know, the cultural qualities, other qualities, 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 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 the legitimate heir because it's the, you know, the founder passes it down to his son, passes it down to his grandson, to his great grandson. So legitimacy is there. They've got title, they can show, I own this factory, okay? They can cash the checks, there's professional managers there, everything seems fine. Until one day that factory has to go from making, you know, widgets to making masks for COVID or something else. It has to change direction, it has to do something it hasn't done before. None of that capability for invention and reinvention is present anymore. These people have inherited something that they could not build from scratch. Because they could not build from scratch, they can't even maintain it. This is an important point. The ability to build from scratch is so important because if some part breaks and you don't know why it was there, can you even maintain it? No, you can't, okay? Unless all the replacement parts and the know-how to fit them together is there, you can't repair this. I remember when 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 aero jail 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. So you're just selected for legitimacy, not competence, okay? So once you think about this concept of founding versus inheriting, and I've got the whole essay which talks about this, of course, the alternative to somebody who's legitimate but not competent, what people will say is, oh, we need like, you know, an authoritarian to be in control of everything. And then their hope is that that person is competent, but they don't have legitimacy because if they're just installed as just like a authoritarian ruler, 50% of the population is really mad at them. They don't have title, they just grab the title, you know, maybe they can exert enough force, but 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 and they build it from scratch. And so you need this 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 new ones pop up? There could be thousands. Given 7 billion people, 8 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. Now work state. Yeah. Like in the sense of Google became lowercase Google for like Googling or like Uber became lowercase Uber. So like if you go to the networkstate.com front slash reviews, or you go to search.twitter.com and put it 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. It's internet, right? You've become a meme. Well, first of all, you're a meme and this book is a meme. Am I a meme? Okay. Maybe I'm a meme, but the book is a book that I think is 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, 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 Ayn Rand? No, I'm not Ayn Rand. And basically the whole point of this actually is it's polytheistic, polystatistic, polynomistic is genuinely- Is it polyamorous? It's not polyamorous. Okay. Though somebody might want to- Do you have love advice in the book? I didn't see it. So did you talk about love in the- I do not talk about love. I rather- Maybe in V2 you will. Not that I don't believe in love. Love is great. All right. I will accept your offer to write a guest chapter in your V2 book about love. All right. Great. Because there is some aspect that's very interesting, which parts of human civilization require physical contact, physical- Because it seems like more and more can be done in the digital space. Yeah. But as I said- Like work, for example. But you're not going to build the self-driving car city in digital space. You're not going to be able to do- Why do you need cars at all? Well, sure. But let's say you're not going to be able to get to Mars in a purely digital thing. You need to build, you have to have a little rocket launch pad. You're not going to be able to do all the innovative biomedicine, whether it's all the- Have you seen bioelectricity or there's stuff on regenerative medicine, all this stuff? You just can't do that digitally, right? We're still physical beings. So you need physical space, but how do we get that? So this is meant to wend its way through various roadblocks in the so-called- actually my term from many years ago, the idea maze. It's meant to wend its way through the idea maze to find how to use bits to unlock innovation atoms. So the idea maze within the bigger prime number maze, or go back to visualizing the number of states and how often are they born. So let me first anchor this because people, just to give some numbers, right? How many UN listed countries are there? Like 196, 193, okay? And there's some that are on the border like Taiwan or Israel, right? Where they're not- I mean, Israel is a country, but it's not recognized by every country or what have you, right? Is Texas a country? No, but it may eventually become. Right, okay. So within that list of about 200 countries, okay, I've got a graph in the book that shows that most countries are actually small countries. About there's 12 countries that have less than a hundred thousand people by the UN definition of a country. There's another 20 something that have between a hundred thousand and one million. There's another 50 or 60 something that have between a million and 10 million. So most countries in the UN are less than 10 million people. There's only 14 countries that are over a hundred million people, okay? So most countries are small countries is kind of surprising to us because most people live in big countries, okay? And so now you're like, okay, well, I've built social networks that are bigger than that. You have a following that's bigger than a hundred thousand people. You have a following that's bigger than a small country like CureBody or what have you, right? And okay, so that first changes feasibility. You think of a country as this huge, huge, huge thing, but it's actually smaller than many- many countries are smaller than social networks that you've built, okay, number one. Number two is the number of UN listed countries, even though it's been flat-ish for the last 30 years with like a few things like South Sudan and East Timor that have come online. There's a graph that I posted which shows that it's increased by about- from about 40 or 50 something at the end of World War II when the UN was set up to 197 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 it's flat and then it just goes, voof, like this. Now you can define, you can argue where the boundary is for quote a new currency, okay? But I think Bitcoin certainly counts. I think Ethereum certainly counts in terms of just its scale and adoption worldwide. So at least you have two. If you take the broad church view, you have a thousand or something like that, right? Somewhere in between, you might say how many currencies are above the market cap of an existing previously recognized fiat currency, like which got onto the leaderboard, right? There's a website just like coinmarketcap.com. That's like a site for like cryptocurrency tracking, it's very popular, okay? There's a fun site called fiatmarketcap.com, which shows where Bitcoin is relative to the fiat currencies of the world. And it's like last I checked like number 27, somewhere in between the Chilean peso and the Turkish lira or something, okay? And it previously been close to cracking the top 10, okay? And I think it will again at some point. So we know that you can have a currency out of nowhere that ranks with the fiat currencies of the world, could you have a country out of nowhere that ranks with the countries of the world? So this is maybe the fastest way, you probably should have said this at the very beginning. If you go to the network state in one image, okay? That kind of summarizes what a network state looks like in a visual, just one single visual. And the visual is of a dashboard. And the dashboard shows something that looks like a social network, except you're visualizing it on the map of the world. And it's got network nodes all over the place, a hundred people here, a thousand people there, they're all connected together. The total population of the people in this social network is about 1 million people. So 1.7 million people in this example. And some of the buildings are, some of the people are just singletons. They're just folks in their apartment who 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 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 in crowdfunding 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, okay? So they conceptualize themselves as something. And at the very top of the dashboard, there's something very important, which is the population annual income and real estate footprint of this network state. So population we already discussed. You can build an online social network. We know you can build something which has a population that's bigger than these hundred thousand or million person countries. One of the new things contributions the network state has is say that you can not just succeed in population, you can succeed 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. What 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. 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. 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? Proving 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 a hundred thousand people spread across countries? Couldn't they all be bots? Could they be AIs? Proof of human, proof of income, and also proof of real estate start to actually rise dramatically in importance because you're saying we're 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 it's real, okay? So I have a whole talk on this actually, I'm giving at this Chainlink conference, but essentially how do you prove this, right? The short answer is crypto oracles plus auditing. The somewhat longer answer is you put these assertions on chain, these proof of human, these proof of real estate, et cetera, assertions on chain, okay? And there's people who are writing to the blockchain and they are digitally signing their assertions. Now, of course, simply just putting something on chain doesn't make it true. It just says you can prove not that what is written on chain is true, but that the metadata is true. You can show who wrote it via their digital signature, what they wrote, their hash, and when they wrote it, their timestamp. So you can establish those things in metadata of who, what, and when was written. Who's the who in that picture? So for example- How do you know it's one human? Great question. So let's say you've bought a bunch of your piece of territory from Blackstone, okay? As a function of that, Blackstone.eth signs an on-chain receipt that says, Lex Friedman.eth bought this piece of property from us and it has, it's a thousand square meters and this is put on chain, they sign it, okay? Just a digital receipt, just like you might get an email receipt when you buy a piece of property or something, okay? It's just put not online, but on chain and it's signed by Blackstone or whatever real estate vendor you buy it from. It could be a company, it could obviously be an individual, right? And so you have a bunch of these assertions. Let's say there's 47 different real estate vendors. I know vendor's an atypical term there, but just bear with me, right? 47 different real estate sellers that you've bought all of your territory from. Each of them put digital signatures that are asserting that a certain amount of real estate was bought and its square meters, its location or whatever else they 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 their stuff on chain. So you get that on chain receipt. They've got 500,000 of these. And what you can do is just sampling, okay? You pick a subset N of them, let's say 500 properties around the world. You go there. You actually go and independently look at what the square footprint is. And then from that, you can see what was the actual, your measurement versus their reported. And then you can, via Cisco inference, extrapolate that if they were randomly selected to the rest of the properties and get a reliability score for Blackstone's reporting of its real estate square footage. Who does the, so that's the auditing step. That's the auditing step. So the crypto Oracle is the on chain, what did you say? Assertions? That's right. Yeah. About like who bought stuff with who I still have to get to the proof of human, but auditing, there's a bunch of people randomly checking that you're not full of shit. That's right. So who is in charge of the auditing though? I think there could be a big four like a PWC and basically the accountants that do corporate balance sheet and cashflow 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? 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. But of course the government itself is corrupt in many ways and prints all this money and seizes all of these assets and surveils everybody and so on and so forth. So the answer to your question is going to be probably exit in the sense that if those accountants, they are themselves going to digitally sign a report and put it on chain. So they're going to say, we believe that X, Y and Zs reports are on chain were 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 ways to mess with this? I mean, I just, let me breathe in and out. As I mentioned, some of the heaviest shit I've ever read. So because I visited to 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 the cooperation of Arthur G. Salzberger's New York Times company. Like Walter Durante 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, right? And really, I think what it comes back to is if you're showing your work, right? This is the difference between crypto economics and fiat economics. The Bitcoin blockchain, anybody can download it and run verification on it. This is different than government inflation stats, which people don't believe, right? 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, right? And so the independent verifiability is really the core of what true auditability is. And so then to your question, it's hard for some group to be able to collude because the blockchain is public 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 Cisco test. 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 digit, 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 datasets are probably going to be small. For example, most numbers in a set, about 30%, will have a leading digit of one. Yeah. So that's a great example of what we were talking about earlier, the observational leading to the theory. Ooh, there's a Benford's law of controversy. I'm looking that up. Benfors law of controversy. Benfors 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 site. Can I just say how much I love Wikipedia? I have the founder of Wikipedia coming on this very podcast very soon and I think the world is a better place because Wikipedia exists. One of the things he wanted to come on and talk about is the ways that he believes that Wikipedia is going wrong. So on technical truths, it's great. Remember our thing earlier on technical truths versus political truths? On technical truths, it's great. On political truths, it's like a defamation engine. Just as one example, okay, this is something that I was 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. That you were the founder of HPZ Token. I had nothing to do with this and people were scammed out of it because Google just pushes Wikipedia links to high on Google and people are like, well, it's in his Wikipedia, therefore it's real, right? Right as 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, right? Where people will maliciously edit and then do things with them and nobody cares or is looking at it beyond the fraudsters. And this is happening. If that was happening, that was like undetected. I wasn't paying attention to this. This was like there for like, I don't know, weeks or months, totally undetected that literally facilitated fraud, right? And fundamentally the issue is that Wikipedia doesn't have any concept of who's editing or property rights or anything like that, right? It is also something which is, it used to be something in the early 2000s, mid 2000s people said, oh, it's Wikipedia, how trustworthy can be, Botanic is reviewed. And that's been forgotten and now it's become over trusted, right? Remember the thing like the more trust something gets, the less trustworthy it often becomes. It kind of abuses the power, right? So what I'm interested in, Google actually had a model a while back called KNOL. KNOL, NOL, was something where when there were different versions of a Wikipedia style page, you had Google docs like permissions on them. For example, you might have 10 different versions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, okay? And each one had an editor and folks that they could grant edit rights and so on. But this way you would actually be able to see different versions of a page and they might have different versions of popularity, but this way you wouldn't have edit words, you'd have forks, right? And they would all kind of 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 at 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. I want to see some data though. I want to see some data because we can always, 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 it is a breath of fresh air in terms of the breadth and depth of knowledge that is there. Now you can say there's bias built in. There's wars that are incentivized not to produce truth, but to produce a consensus around a particular narrative, but that is how the entirety of human civilization operates. 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 on 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. Here's a phenomenon that happens in Wikipedia. You have an editor 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. 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. 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 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. Okay, I know. How many articles? I'm not- Who's auditing Wikipedia? I'm dancing with you, not against you. Sure, sure. Okay. I'm saying how many articles have that kind of war where douchebags are manipulating each other? So that's the question. What's the audit? Has Wikipedia actually been audited? Who are the editors? Like who's actually writing this stuff? It is actually something where, again, on technical topics, I think it's pretty good. On non-technical topics, there's something called the Wikipedia reliable sources policy. It's a fascinating page. So it actually takes a lot of the stuff that the world has been talking about in terms of what's a reliable source of information and so on and so forth. It's called the Wikipedia reliable sources perennial sources. 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. That those are rules written on a sheet of paper. I have seen Wikipedia in general play in a gray area that these rules create. Oh, well, if you are an editor, then you can get- You can use the rules because there's a lot of contradictions within the rules. You can use them in the ways you said to achieve the ends you want. 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 is- First, let me finish off this point of reliable sources, parallel sources. If you go to this, you'll see that Al Jazeera is marked green, but let's say the Cato Institute is marked yellow. The Nation is marked green. Oh, shit. Oh, snap. Okay, sure. Yes. Right? The Nation is marked green, but National Review is marked yellow. You could probably go and do- What's good about this is it makes the epistemology explicit. 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. I'm pretty sure you're going to find some kind of partisan polarization that comes out of it, right? Number one. Number two is once something gets marked as being yellow or red, then all links and all references to it are pulled out. For example, CoinDesk was marked as being like- Gosh, what was it? Yellow? I think it's marked as red. CoinDesk which is actually- 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. So cryptocurrency on Wikipedia has been a huge topic where they've just edited out all the positive stuff. These are senior editors of Wikipedia who can control what sources are considered reliable. So they've now knocked out CoinDesk, they've knocked out social media. They only allow mainstream media coverage and not even all mainstream media, only those they've marked as green. This is the manipulation of- I want to know how many articles are affected by it and on that- Hundreds of thousands. You could just say that randomly. I can, I can. No, no, no, no. I can because all the- No, affected, there's different levels of effect in terms of it actually having a significant impact on the quality of the article. Let me give you an example. Yes. The fact that people cannot cite direct quotes on social media, but can only cite the rehash of those quotes in a mainstream media outlet and not just any mainstream media outlet, but those that are colored green on the Wikipedia reliable perennial sources policy is a structural shift on every single article to make Wikipedia aligned with US mainstream media corporations. Yes. Right? I'm 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. Now I'm going to sound extremely woke. If you go and look at this, Times of India is yellow, but Mother Jones, Jacobin, they are green. Right, so a niche mostly white Western partisan left outlet is more green, but a billion people, the Times of India is marked yellow. That's a structural bias towards Western media outlets and Western editors when much of the rest of the world hadn't gone online or whatever. I would just love to see in terms of the actual article what ideas are being censored, altered, shifted. I just think it's an open... I'm not sort of... Edit logs are there. Edit logs are public. So here's a way. It'd be fascinating. Is there a way to explore the way that narratives are shifted because of this? 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. First of all, think about it like this. Just the fact that social media is not allowed to be cited on Wikipedia or inconsistently allowed. You think that's a problem? It's a huge problem. You can't cite, let's say, Jeff Bezos' own tweet. You have to cite some random media corporation. Here's the thing, and sorry if I'm interrupting. Please. Hopefully I'm adding to it. I think they're trying to create friction as to the sources used because if you can use social media, then you can use basically bots to create a bunch of sources. Then you can almost automate the editor war. Here's the thing is basically Wikipedia initially said, oh, we'll only cite mainstream media as a way of boosting its credibility in the early 2000s when its credibility was low. Now it's sort of become merged with the US establishment and it only cites these things. Whose trust? I mean, have you seen the graphs on trust in mainstream media? It's plummeted. It's down to like 10% or something like that, right? So the most trusted sources for Wikipedia are untrusted by the population. 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 on Wikipedia. I think I need to make that explicit also. I have a kind of an understanding that you don't go to Wikipedia for this particular topic. You don't go to Wikipedia for an article on Donald Trump or Joe Biden. If I did, I would go to maybe sections that don't have room for insertion of bias or like the section on controversy or accusations of racism or so on or sexual assault. I usually not trust Wikipedia on those sections. Like math? That'll be great. 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? Let's think about like- Everything that's not math and technology. I think that's too strong a statement. So we can, like I said, war in Ukraine. I think that's too strong a statement. There's so much effect, I guess I'm saying affected to a large degree. Even major battles in history, battle of Stalingrad or- Sure. Like 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 edit out mention of genocide from the first few paragraphs. I am playing devil's advocate in part, but I also am too under informed to do the level of defense I would like to provide for the wisdom that is there, for the knowledge that is there. I don't use the word truth, but for some level of knowledge that is there in Wikipedia, I think I really worry about, I know you don't mean this, but a cynical interpretation of what you're saying, which is don't trust anything written on Wikipedia. I think you're being very consistent and eloquent in the way you're describing the issues in 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 think if we naturally distrust every source of information, there is a general distrust of institutions and a distrust of social knowledge that leads to an apathy and the cynicism about the world in general. If you believe a lot of conspiracy theories, you basically tune out from this collective journey that we're on towards the truth. 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 is- 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 a phrase that's eloquent, it's yours, and will look at a natural dumbass like me and think that Lex is just being naive. Look at him trusting Wikipedia for the mainstream network. Let me argue your side. Okay? Can you please do that because you could do that better than me? No, no, no. No, Lex, I enjoy talking to you. And I'm doing Devil's Advocate a little bit because I do really want to be, I am afraid about the forces of basically editors of authority of talking down to people and censoring information. Yeah. So let me first argue your side and then let me say something, okay? Which is what you are reacting to is, oh, even those things I thought of as constants are becoming variables. Where is the terra firma? If we cannot trust anything, then everybody's just, it's anarchy and it's chaos. There's literally no consensus reality and anybody can say anything and so on and so forth, right? And I think that there's two possible deviations from, let's say that the mainstream, obviously people talk about like QAnon, for example, as like this kind of thing where people just make things up. They just go totally quote supply chain independent from mainstream media. And if mainstream media is a distorted gossamer of quasi-truth, these guys go to just total fiction as opposed to like, right? The alternative to QAnon is not BlueAnon mainstream media, but SatoshiAnon, okay? Which is an upward deviation, okay? Not a downward deviation to say there is no such thing as truth, but rather the upward deviation is decentralized cryptographic truth, not centralized corporate or government truth. Okay. So how does the decentralization of Wikipedia look like? Great question. It's this concept of the ledger of record. Whether you're Israeli or Palestinian, Japanese or Chinese, Democrat or Republican, those people agree on the state of the Bitcoin blockchain. Hundreds of billions of dollars is managed without weapons, okay, across tribes with wildly varying ideologies, right? And what that means is that is a mechanism for getting literally consensus. It's called consensus, cryptographic consensus, proof of work. And when people can get consensus on this, what they're getting consensus on are basically bytes that determine who holds what Bitcoin. This is exactly the kind of thing people would fight wars over. For hundreds of billions of dollars alone, millions of dollars, people will kill each other over that in the past, right? So for hundreds of billions of dollars, people can get consensus truth on this in this highly adversarial environment, right? So the first generalization of that is it says you can go from bytes that reflect what Bitcoin somebody has to bytes that reflect what stocks, bonds, other kinds of assets people have. That's the entire DeFi, Ethereum, that whole space, okay? Basically the premise is if you go from consensus on one byte by induction, you can go to consensus on n bytes depending on the cost of getting that consensus, right? And almost anything digital can be represented, you know, or everything digital can be represented as bytes, right? So now you can get consensus on certain kinds of digital information, Bitcoin, but then also any kind of financial instrument. And then the next generalization is what I call the leisure of record. Many kinds of facts can be put partially or completely on chain. It's not just proof of work and proof of stake. There's things like proof of location, proof of human, proof of this, proof of that. The auditable oracles I talked about extended further. Lots and lots of people are working on this, right? Proof of solvency, seeing that some actor has enough of a bank balance to accommodate what they say they accommodate. You can imagine many kinds of digital assertions can be turned into proof of X and proof of Y. You start putting those on chain, you now have a library of partially or completely provable facts, okay? This is how you get consensus. As opposed to having a white Western Wikipedia editor or mostly white Western US media corporation or the US government simply say what is true in a centralized fashion. So do you think truth is such an easy thing as you get to higher and higher questions of politics? Is the problem that the consensus mechanism is being hacked or is the problem that truth is a difficult thing to figure out? Was the 2020 election rigged or not? Is the earth flat or not? That's a scientific one. That's how this is- My technical versus political truth spectrum, yeah. But even the earth, well, that one is, yeah, nevermind. That's a bad example because that is very, you can rigorously show that the earth is not flat. But there's some social phenomena, political phenomena, philosophical one that will have a lot of debates, historical stuff about the different forces operating within Nazi Germany and Stalinist Soviet Union. I think there's probably a lot of, yeah, the historians debate about a lot of stuff like Blitz, the book that talks about the influence of drugs in the Third Reich. Were they on meth or something? Yeah. There's a lot of debates about how truth, what is the significance of meth on the actual behavior and decisions of Hitler and so on. So there's still a lot of debates. Is it so easy to fix with decentralization, I guess is the question. So I actually have, like basically chapter two of the Network State book is on essentially this topic. And so it's like 70 pages or something like that. So let me try to summarize what I think about on this. The first is that there was an Onion article that came out, I can't find it now anymore, but it was about historians in the year 3000 writing about the late 90s and early 2000s. And they're like, clearly Queen Brittany was a very powerful monarch. We can see how many girls around the world worshiped 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 some of Berger actually has this concept, which is obvious, but it's also useful to have a name for it. I think he calls it like dark history, which is, and again, I might be getting this wrong, but it's like only a small percentage of what the Greeks wrote down has come to us to the present day. 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 rewrites- And then there's a lot of debates there. There's a lot of debates. So basically it's like the discovery of this site in Northern Turkey that totally shifts our estimate of when civilization started. Probably pushing it back many thousands of years further in the past. The past, it's like an inverse problem in physics. We're trying to reconstruct this from limited information. It's like extra-ecrosolachry. It's an inverse problem. It's Plato's cave. We're trying to reconstruct what the world looks like outside from these shadows, these fragments that have been given to us or that we've found. And so in that sense, as you find more information, your estimate of the past changes. Oh, wow. Okay, that pushes back civilization farther than we thought. That one discovery just changes it. So you want to try to, given all the gaps in the data we have, you want to try to remove bias from the process of trying to fill the gaps? Well, so here's the thing. I think we're very close to the moment of it, and 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. Math is constant across human time and space. So the value of pi is constant. That's one of the few constants across all these different human civilizations. So somebody in the future, assuming of course the digital record is actually intact to that point because in theory digital stuff will persist in practice, you have lost data and floppy drives and stuff like that. In a sense, in some ways digital is more persistent, in some ways physical is more persistent. But assuming we can figure out the archival problem somehow, then this future record, at least it's internally consistent. You can run a bunch of the equivalence of checksums, the Bitcoin verification process, just sum it all up and see that, okay, it's F of G of H of X and boom, that at least is internally consistent. Okay? Again, it doesn't say that all the people who reported it, they could have put something on chain that's false, but at least you know the metadata is likely to be very difficult to falsify. And this is a new tool. It's really a new tool in terms of a robust history that is expensive and technically challenging to edit and alter. And that is the alternative to the Stalin-esque rewriting of history by centralized power. Yeah, I'm going to have to do a lot of actually reading and thinking about... I'm actually, as you're talking, I'm also thinking about the fact that I think 99% of my access to Wikipedia is on technical topics because I basically use it very similarly to Stack Overflow. And even there, it doesn't have unit tests. For example, one thing- That's a good way to put it. Right. And I think you should remember, again, I might be wrong on this, but I recall that the Kelly Criterion, it's actually quite a useful thing to know. It's like how to optimally size your bets. Okay? And you can have, given your kind of probability that some investment pays off or assumed probability, you can have bets that are too large, bets that are too small. Sometimes the Kelly Criterion, it goes negative and actually it says you should actually take leverage. You're so sure this is a good outcome that you should actually spend more than your current bankroll because you're going to get a good result. Right? 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 the Kelly Criterion for a while. That's funny. Okay? And so without unit tests, see, math is actually the kind of thing that you could unit test, right? You could literally have the assert on the right-hand side today, right? The modern version, we've got Jupiter, we've got Replet, we've got all these things. The modern version of Wikipedia, there's sites like golden.com, for example, there's a bunch of things. I'm funding lots of stuff across the board on this. And I'm not capitalizing these companies or capitalize independently, but I'm trying to see if not just talk about a better version, it's hard to build something better, so actually go and build it. And what you want is assertions that are actually reproduced. You don't just have the equation there. You have it written down in code, you can hit enter, you can download the page, you can rerun it. It's reproducible. So the problem with that kind of reproducibility is that it adds friction, it's harder to put together articles that do that kind of stuff, unless you do an incredible job with UX and so on. The thing that I think is interesting about Wikipedia on the technical side is that without the unit tests, without the assertions, it still often does an incredible job. Because the reason it's... The people that write those articles, and I've seen this also in Stack Overflow, 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. I mean, again, do I think Wikipedia is a huge step up from what preceded it in some ways on the technical topics? Yes. However, you talk about the editing environment, right? Like the markup for Wikipedia, it's very mid-2000s, right? It is not... It's a Craigslist. Yeah, exactly. At a minimum, for example, it's not WYSIWYG, right? 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 bearish editing, that's the thing. Number two is given that it might be read a thousand times for every one time it's written, it is important to actually have the mathematical things unit tested if they can be given that we've got modern technology. And that's something that's hard to retrofit into this because it's so kind of ossified, right? Right. Yeah, the interface on every side for the editor, even just for the editor to check that... Say the editor wants to get it right, you want to make it really... Or not, easy, but easier to check their work. Like debugging, like a nice idea 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 truth will have a nice debugger. Well, so here's... Right? The thing is that what you can do is... Let's say you do 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 have trust in them. The answer is that the answer to trust no one, right? And I think the alternative is decentralized cryptographic trust or verification. How does that apply to academia? First observation is we are seeing science being abused in the name of quote unquote science, okay? Capital S science is Maxwell's equations. That's a good one. That's a good one, right? Quote unquote science is a paper that came out last week. And the key thing is that capital S science, real science is about independent replication, not prestigious citation. That's the definition, like all the journal stuff, the professors, all that stuff is just a superstructure that was set on top to make experiments more reproducible. And that superstructure is now like dominating the underlying thing because people are just fixating on the prestige and the citation and not the replication, right? So how does that apply here? Once you start thinking about how many replications does this thing have, Maxwell's equation, I mean, there's trillions of replications. Every time us speaking into this microphone right now, we're testing our theory of the electromagnetic field, right? Or electrical and magnetic fields. Every single time you pick up a cell phone or use a computer, you're putting our knowledge to the test, right? Whereas some paper that came out last week in Science or Nature may have zero independent replications, yet it is being cited publicly as prestigious scientists from Stanford and Harvard and MIT all came up with X, right? And so the prestige is a substitute for the actual replication. So there's a concept called Goodhart's law, okay? I'm just gonna quote it. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure, okay? So for example, backlinks on the web were a good signal for Google to use when people didn't know they were being used as a signal. You talked about quantity versus quality and pagerank was a pretty good approximation for quality. Yes. It's a fascinating thing, by the way, but yeah. It is a fascinating thing. We can talk about that. But basically, once people know that you're using this as a measure, they will start to game it. And so then you have this cycle where sometimes you have a fixed point like Satoshi with Proof of Work was miraculously able to come up with a game where the gaming of it was difficult without just buying more compute, right? So it's actually a rare kind of game where knowledge of the game's rules didn't allow people to game the game. Yeah. But- A brilliant way to put it, yeah. Which is one of the reasons it's brilliant is that you can describe the game and you can't mess with it. Exactly. It's very hard to come up with something that's stable in its way. There's actually, on the meta point, gosh, there's a game where the rule of the game is to change the rules, okay? It is- You mean human civilization or what? Yeah. Gosh, it is called something. Gnomic, okay? N-O-M-I-C. Gnomic 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, it is so meta because there are laws for elections that elect the editors of those laws who then change the laws that get them elected with gerrymandering and other stuff, right? That's a bad way of thinking 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? So, many games devolve into the meta game of who writes the rules of the game, right? Become essentially games of gnomic. 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. So, the problem is authority and prestige as you see it from academia and the media and Wikipedia with the editors. We have to have a mechanism where the data and the reproducibility is what dominates the discourse. That's right. I've said this in, I think I tweeted this, but Western civilization actually has a break classification emergency button. It's called decentralization, right? Martin Luther hit it when the Catholic Church was too ossified and centralized, decentralized with the Protestant Reformation. Okay? He said, at the time, people were able to pay for indulgences. Like that is to say they could sin. They could say, okay, I sinned five times yesterday. Here's the equivalent of 50 bucks. Okay, I'm done with my sin. I can go and sin some more. Okay? They should literally buy their way out of sin. Okay? Now, people debate as to how frequent those indulgences were, but these are one of the things he invades against in the 95 Theses. So decentralization, boom, break away from this ossified church, start something new, right? And 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. And so what happened was obviously Catholicism still exists, but Protestantism also exists. Okay? And similarly here, you've got this ossified central institution where, 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 there's fiat science, crypto science, right, fiat economics, okay? So in any experiment, any paper when it comes out, right, you can sort of divide it into the analog to digital and the purely digital, okay? The analog to digital is you're running some instruments, you're getting some data, okay? And then once you've got the data, you're generating figures and tables and text and a PDF from that data, right? Leave aside the data collection step for now, I'll come back to that, right? Just the purely digital part. What does the ideal quote academic paper look like in 2022, 2023? First, there's this concept called reproducible research, okay? Reproducible research is the idea that the PDF should be regenerated from the data and code, okay? So you should be able to hit enter and regenerate it. Why is this really important as a concept? John Claire Boo and David Donahoe at Stanford 20 years ago pioneered this in stats because the text alone often doesn't describe every parameter that goes into a figure or something, right? You kind of sometimes just need to look at the code and then it's easy and without that, it's hard, okay? So reproducible research means you regenerate the PDF from the code and the data. You hit enter, okay? Now one issue is that many papers out there, science, nature, et cetera, are not reproducible research. The data isn't even public. Moreover, sometimes the paper isn't even public. The open access movement has been fighting this for the last 20 something years. There's various levels of this like green and gold, open access, okay? So the first step is the code, the data, and the PDF go on chain, step number one, okay? The second thing is once you've got, so you can, anybody who is, and that could be the Ethereum chain, it could be its own dedicated chain, whatever, okay? It could be something where there's just the URLs are on the Ethereum chain and stored on Filecoin, many different implementations. But let's call that on chain broadly, okay? Not just online on chain. When it's on chain, it's public and anybody can get it. So that's first. Second is once you've got something where you can regenerate the code or the PDF from the code and the data on chain, guess what? You can have citations between two papers turn into import statements. Yeah, that's funny. That's cool, right? Very cool. 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 an ML, right? You'll often cite a previous paper in its benchmark or its method, right? You're gonna wanna scatter plot sometimes your paper, your algorithm versus theirs on the same dataset. That is facilitated if their entire paper is reproducible research that is generated. You can just literally import that Python and then you can generate your figure off of it, right? Moreover, think about how that aids reproducibility because you don't have to reproduce in the literal sense every single snippet of code that they did. You can literally use their code, import it, okay? People start compounding on each other. It's better science, okay? Now I talked about this, but actually there's a few folks who have been actually building this. So there's uScholar.org, which actually has a demo of this, like just a V1 like kind of a 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 dsci.com, which is trying to do this, right? Decentralize science. So this itself changes how we think about papers. And actually, by the way, the inspiration for PageRank was actually citations. It was like the impact factor out of academia. That's where Larry Page and Sergey Brin got the concept out of, right? So now you've got a web of citations that are import statements on chain. In theory, you could track back a paper all the way back to its antecedents, okay? So if it's citing something, you can now look it up and look it up and look it up. And a surprising number of papers actually, their antecedents don't terminate or the original source says something different or it just kind of got garbled like a telephone game. And there's this famous thing on like the spinach, 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. It'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 QAnon, right? It is not saying don't trust anybody. Neither is it just trust the centralized academic establishment. Instead of saying trust because you can verify, because we can download things and run them. The crucial thing that I'm assuming here is the billions of supercomputers around the world that we have, all the MacBooks and iPhones that can crank through lots and lots of computation. So everything digital, we can verify it locally, okay? Now there's one last step, which is I mentioned the instruments, right? Whether it's your sequencing machine or your accelerometer or something like that is generating the data that you are reporting in your paper when you put it on you, okay? Basically you think of that as the analog digital interface. We can cryptify that too. Why? For example, an Illumina sequencing machine has an experiment manifest and 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? Is if you have a crypto instrument, you can have various hashes and stuff of the data as a chain of custody for the data itself that are streamed and written on chain that the manufacturer can program into this. For anything that's really, and you might say, 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, 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 or sharing the data, I think it would surprise people how often- It's hard to get data. The actual data or specifics or a large number of the parameters. People share like one or two parameters that were involved with running the experiment. You won't mention the machines involved, except maybe at a high level, but the versions and so on. The dates when the experiments were run, you don't mention any of this kind of stuff. So there's several ways to fix this. And one of them, I think, implied in what you're describing is a culture that says it's not okay. So first of all, there should be, even if it's not perfectly unchained to where you can automatically import all the way to Newton, just even the act of sharing the code, sharing the data, maybe in a way that's not perfectly integrated into a larger structure is already a very big positive step. I'm saying if you don't do this, then this doesn't count. Because in general, I think my worry, as somebody who's a programmer, who's OCD, I love the picture you paint that you can just import everything, automatically checks everything. My problem is that makes incremental science easier and revolutionary science harder. Oh, I actually very much disagree with that. I would love to hear your argument. You guys, let me just kind of elaborate why sometimes you have to think in this gray area of fuzziness when you're thinking on totally novel ideas. And when you have to concretize in data, some of the greatest papers ever written don't have data. They're in a space of ideas almost. You're kind of sketching stuff and there could be errors, but Einstein himself with the famous five papers, I mean, they're really strong, but they're fuzzy. They're a little bit fuzzy. And so I think even the GAN paper, you're often thinking of new data sets, new ideas, and I think maybe as a step after the paper is written, you could probably concretize it and integrate it into the rest of science. You shouldn't feel that pressure, I guess, early on. Well, I mean, each of the steps that I'm talking about, there's data being public and everything. Just having the paper being public, that's like V1, right? Then you have the thing being regenerated from code and data, like the PDF being regenerated from code and data. Then you have the citations as import statements. Then you have the full citation graph as an import statement. So you just follow it all the way back, right? And now that gives you auditability. Then you have the off-chain, the analog digital crypto custody, right? Like where you're hashing things and streaming things. So you have the chain of custody. Each of those is kind of like a level up and adds to complexity, but it also adds to the auditability and the verifiability and the reproducibility. But one thing I'd say I wanted to respond to that you said was that you think this would be good for incremental but not innovative. Actually, I think it's quite the opposite. I think academia is institutional and it's not innovative. For example, NIH has this graph, which is like, I think it's age of recipients of R01 grants, okay? And what it shows is basically it's like a hump that moves over time, roughly plus one year forward for the average age as the year moves on, okay? I'll see if I can find the GIF. Why is this? Let me see if I can find it actually. Look at this movie just for a second. It's ridiculously powerful movie and it's 30 seconds. What's that? I just sent it in WhatsApp. The name of the video is Age Distribution of NIH Principal Investigators and Medical School Faculty. And it starts out on the 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 Balajia said, about one year. Per 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. 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 gerontocratic, even more hidebound, right? And so the thing is the structures that Vannevar Bush and others set up, the entire post-war science establishment, one thing I'll often find is people will say, Balaji, 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 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 like 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 come you as some tech bro could possibly think you could ever do basic science without the funding of the US government? Has it not developed all basic science, 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 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, Newton was before, I believe he was before the American, let me find the exact, it's actually less old than people think. Okay. So Newton died 1727, right? So I knew that 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 basic science. It is not necessary for basic science. It is one possible catalyst. And I would argue that mid-century it was okay because mid-century was the time when the middle of the centralized century. 1933, 1945, 1969 you have Hoover Dam, you have the Manhattan Project, you have Apollo. That generation was acclimatized to a centralized US government that could accomplish great things probably because technology favored centralization going into 1950 and then started favoring decentralization going out of it. I've talked about this in the book, sovereign individual has talked about this, but very roughly you go up into 1950 and you have mass media and mass production and just centralization of all kinds, giant nation states slugging it out on the world stage. You go out in 1950 and you get cable news and personal computers and the internet and mobile phones and cryptocurrency and you have the decentralization. And so this entire centralized scientific establishment was set up at the peak of the centralized century. And it might've been the right thing to do at that time, but is now showing its age and it's no longer actually geared up for what we have. Where are the huge innovations coming out? 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, Matt Ridley and Alina Chan have written this book on whether the coronavirus was a lab leak or not. I think it's plausible that it was. I can't say I'm a hundred percent sure, but I think it's at least 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. There's a famous story where Newton solved a problem. 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, 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 going to get stuck on technicalities because I think I was referring to your vision of datasets and importing code. And so that forces just knowing how code works, it forces a structure and structure usually favors incremental progress. If you fork code, you're not going to, it descentivizes revolution. You want to go from scratch. Okay. I understand your point there. Okay. And I also agree that some papers like Francis Crick on the Klaus trim or others are theoretical. They're more about like where to dig than the data itself and so on and so forth. So I agree with that. Still, the counter argument 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 source should be forkable. Well, yeah, yeah. So here's what you know, like a, 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. It seems to, yes, I think so. Chemistry, I think so. And then you start getting into weird stuff like psychology, which some people don't even think is a science. No, just love for my psychology friends. I think as you get farther and farther away from things that are like hard technical fields, it starts getting tougher and tougher and tougher to have like importable code. Okay. So let me give the strong foreign version, right? So there's a guy who I think is a great machine learning guy, creator of actually Keras, who he disagrees with me on Francois Schiele. Yeah, he's been on this podcast twice. Yeah. Okay, great. I disagree with him on a lot of stuff. Yes, me too. I think we have mutual respect, follow each other on Twitter, whatever. Yes, I think he does respect and like you. Here's something which I totally agree with him on, and he actually got like trolled or attacked for this, but I completely agree. Within 10, 20 years, nearly every branch of science will be for all intents and purposes, a branch of computer science, computational physics, computational chemistry, computational biology, computational medicine, even computational archeology, realistic simulations, big data analysis and ML everywhere. That to me is incredibly obvious. Why? First of all, all we're doing every day is PDFs and data analysis on a computer, right? And so every single one of those areas can be reduced to the analog to digital step, and then it's all digital. Then you're flying, you're in the cloud, right? Do you say how long or- 10 to 20 years. 10, 20 years. I mean, I think arguably it's already there, right? And here's the thing, you were saying, well, you might drop off when you hit psychology or history. Actually I think it's the softer 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 it's 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, 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 Ngrams and stuff like that. Yes. Beautifully put. Then I would venture to say that Donald Trump was erased from history when he was removed from Twitter and many social platforms and all his tweets were gone. I think it's someone who has an archive of it, but yeah, I understand your point. Yeah. Well, as the flood of data about each individual increases censorship, it becomes much more difficult to actually have an archive of stuff. But yes, for important people like a president of the United States, yes. Let me on that topic ask you about Trump. You were considered for 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. 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, reforming the Fed basically still hasn't happened. So just as it was easier to create Bitcoin than to reform the Fed, it will literally be easier to start a new country than to reform the FDA. It may take 10 or 20 years. I mean, think about Bitcoin, it's only about 13 years old, right? It may take 10 or 20 years to start a new network state with a different biomedical policy. But that is how we get out from 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 US regulators impose their regulations on the entire world. So basically you have a monopoly by US regulators. This is not just the FDA, it is SEC and FAA and so on and so forth. And for the same reason that a small company will use Facebook login, they will outsource their login to Facebook, a small country will outsource their regulation to the USA, okay, with all the attendant issues. Because I mean, you know the names of some politicians. Can you name a single regulator at the FDA? No, right? Yet, they will brag on their website that they regulate, I forget the exact numbers, I think it's like 25 cents out of every dollar, something along those lines, okay? It's like double digits, okay? That's a pretty big deal. And the thing about this is, 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 that 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 access in one place. So there's a team up though between the giant company and the giant government to box out all the small startups and all the small countries and lots of small innovation, right? There are cracks in this now, right? The FDA did not acquit itself well during the pandemic. For example, there's so many issues, but one of the things that even actually New York Times reported, the reason that people thought there were no COVID cases in the US early in the pandemic was because the FDA was denying people the ability to run COVID tests and the emergency use authorization was, emergency should mean like right now, right? But it was 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, then 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, 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. He was a public face. In my recent memory, there's not been many faces of scientific policy, of science policy. Yeah. And he became the face of that. And, you know, as there's some of his meme, which is, you know, basically saying that he is science or that some people represent science. Or quote unquote science or whatever. Yeah. The positive aspect of that is that there is accountability when there's a face like that. Right. But you can also see the Fauci example shows you why a lot of these folks do not want to be public because they enter a political, 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 given an example, you know, there's a concept called challenge trials. Okay. The Moderna vaccine was available very, very early in the pandemic. You can just synthesize it from the sequence. And challenge trials would have meant that people who are healthy volunteers, okay, they could have been soldiers, for example, of varying ages who are there to take a risk their lives for their country potentially, okay. It could have been just healthy volunteers, not necessarily soldiers, just patriots of whatever kind in any country, not just the US. But those healthy volunteers could have gone. And at the early stages of the pandemic, we didn't know exactly how lethal it was 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. It may be, by the way, that those who are the most susceptible to the virus died faster earlier. It's as if you can imagine a model where those who were exposed and had the lowest susceptibility also had the highest severity and died in greater numbers early on. If you look at the graph, like deaths from COVID were exponential going into about April 2020 and then leveled off to about 7,500, 10,000 a day and then kind of fell, right. But it could have gone to 75,000 at the beginning. So we didn't know how serious it was. So this would have been a real risk that these people would have been taking. But here's what they would have gotten for that. Basically in a challenge trial, somebody would have been given the vaccine and then exposed to the virus and then put under observation. And then that would have given you all the data 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 it was safe and effective and so on, like that could have been gathered expeditiously with volunteers for challenge trials. And you think there would be a large number of volunteers. Absolutely. So is there a concern there? Is there an ethical concern of taking on volunteers? Well, so let me put it like this. Had we done that, we could have had vaccines early enough to save the lives of like a million Americans, especially seniors and so on, okay. Soldiers and more generally first responders and others, I do believe there's folks who would have stepped up to take that risk. The heroes walk among us. Yeah, that's right. If military service is something which is a ritualized thing, people are paid for it, but they're not paid that much. They're really paid in honor and in duty and patriotism. That is actually the kind of thing where I do believe some fraction of those folks would have raised their hand for this important task. I don't know how many of them, but I do think that volunteers would have been there. There's probably some empirical test of that, which is there's a challenge trials website. There's a Harvard prof who put out this proposal early in the pandemic and he could tell you how many volunteers he got. But something like that could have just shortened the time from pandemic to functional vaccine, 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. Actually no NPI, no non-pharmaceutical intervention really turned out to work that much. Actually, at the very beginning of the pandemic, I said something like, look, it's actually February 3rd, about a month before people... I was just watching what was going on in China. I saw that they were doing digital quarantine, like using WeChat codes to block people off and so on. I didn't know what was 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. Sometimes a solution creates the next problem. My rough forecast of the future, the coronavirus results in quarantines, nationalism, centralization. This may actually work to stop the spread, but once under control, states will not see their powers, so we decentralized. 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, we should have had 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. Those are two examples on both vaccines and testing. There's so many more that I can point to. So those are decentralized innovations and that's what FDA should stand for. FDA can stand for it. Or something like FDA, right? Ah, so let's talk about that, right? Something like FDA. So this is very important. In general, the way I try to think about things is V1, V2, V3, as we've talked about a few times. Maybe- 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, by the FDA itself, omits the. Their pronouns are just FDA, FDA. 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 LA, 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 insider or outsider, okay, in terms of how the language works, right? And that's- go ahead. I mean, it just makes me sad because that lingo is part of the mechanism which creates the silo, the bubble of particular thoughts. And that ultimately deviates from the truth because you're not open to new ideas. I think it's actually like, you know, in Glorious Basterds, there's a scene in the bar. Do you want 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. Sorry, I'll be back there. So basically, like English start going like one, two, three, four, five. And I believe it's like the Germans start with like the thumb, something that you'd never know, right? I may be misremembering there, but I think that's right. Okay. So FDA's got the lingo. All right. Right. So FDA's got the lingo. So coming back up, basically just talk about FDA and then come back to your question on the platform. So what was V0 FDA? What was V1? What does the future look like? V1. The first one was patent medicines. Okay. That's what people say. But V1 was also Banting and Best. Okay. Banting and Best, they won the Nobel Prize in the early 1920s. Right? Why? They came up with that idea for insulin supplementation to treat diabetes. And they came up with a concept. They experimented on dogs. They did self-experimentation. They had healthy volunteers. They experimented with the formulation as well, right? Because just like you'd have like a web app and a mobile app, maybe a command line app, you could have a drug that's administered orally or via injection or cream or there's different formulations, right? Dosage, all that stuff they could just iterate on with willing doctor, willing patient. These folks who were affected just sprang out of bed. The insulin supplementation was working for them. And within a couple of years, they had won the Nobel Prize and Eli Lilly had scaled production for the entire North American continent, okay? So that was a time when pharma moved at the speed of software, when it was willing buyer, willing seller, okay? Because the past is demonized as something that our glorious regulatory agency is protecting us from, okay? But there's so many ways in which what it's really protecting you from is being healthy, okay? As you know, I mean, there's a zillion examples of this. I won't be able to recapitulate all of them just in this podcast, but if you look at a post that I've got, it's called Regulation, Disruption, and the Future Technologies of 2013, Coursera PDF, okay? This lecture, which I'll kind of link it here so you can maybe put in the show notes if you want. This goes through like a dozen different examples of crazy things the FDA did from the kind of stuff that was dramatized in Dallas Virus 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 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 and 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, the banks and whatnot, crypto has a pretty good set of answers for these things. And over time, all the countries that are not, or all the groups that are not the US establishment or the CCP will find more and more to their liking in the crypto economy. So that part I think is going, okay? We can talk about that. What does that look like for biomedicine? Well, first, what does exit the FDA look like, right? So there actually are a bunch of exits from the FDA already, which is things like right to try laws, okay? CLIA labs and laboratory developed tests, compounding pharmacies, off-label prescription by doctors and countries that aren't fully harmonized with FDA. For example, you know, Kobe Bryant before he passed away went and did stem cell treatments in Germany, okay? Stem cells have been pushed out, you know, I think in part by the Bush administration by other things. So those are different kinds of exits. Right to try basically means, you know, at the state level, you can just try the drug, okay? CLIA labs and LDTs, that means that's a path where you don't have to go through FDA to get a new device approved. You can just run it in a lab, okay? Compounding pharmacies, these were under attack. I'm not sure actually where the current, you know, statute is on this, but this is the ledger that a pharmacist has some discretion in how they, you know, prepare mixtures of drugs. Off-label prescription by MDs. So MDs have enough like weight in the system that they can kind of push back on FDA and off-label prescription is the concept that a drug that's approved for purpose A can be prescribed for purpose B or C or D without going through another, 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 he's going to poison us with your non-FDA approved things or whatever, right? Like those exits exist. You've probably actually used tests or treatments from those. You don't even realize that you have, right? So it hasn't killed you, number one. Number two is actually testing for safety. You know, there's safety efficacy and like comparative safety is, it's actually relatively easy to test for. There's very few drugs that are like, there's TGN 1412. That's a famous example of something that was actually really dangerous to people, right? With an early test. So those do exist, just acknowledge they do exist. But in general, testing for safety is actually not that hard to do. Okay. And if something is safe, then you should be able to try it usually. Okay. Now what does that decentralized FDA look like? Well, basically you take individual pieces of it and you can often turn them into vehicles. And this is like 50 different startups. Let me describe some of them. Have you gotten any drugs or something like that recently? I mean like prescribed drugs, prescription drugs. No, 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 in the, right? Okay. It's a wadded up chemistry textbook. I love it. That's what it is, right? That's what a terrible user interface. We don't usually think of it that way. Why is the user interface so terrible? It's a web of regulation that makes it so terrible. And there's actually guys who tried to innovate just on user interface called like Help I Need Help. That was like the name of the company a while back. And it was trying to explain the stuff in plain language. Just on user interface you can innovate. And why is it important? Well, there's a company called PillPak, which innovated on quote the user interface for drugs by giving people a thing which had like a daily blister pack. So it's like here's your prescription and you're supposed to take all these pills on the first and second. And basically whether you had taken them on a given day was manifest by whether you had opened it for that specific day. Okay. This is way better than other kinds of so-called compliance methodologies. Like there are guys who 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 leads 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 PillPak 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 people have sort of, in my view, some have quoted out context or like, oh, biology thinks you should replace the FDA with the ELP 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 a bad experience with a drug? Like VAERS but for drugs. Yeah. It's called MedWatch, right? And so you can do like voluntary reporting and you can get like a PDF and just like upload it, right? Is this a government? Like, is this.gov? Yeah, it's form 3500B. I love it. It's HTML. It's going to be like from the nineties or it's going to have an interface designed by somebody who's a cobalt slash Fortran programmer. Right. Wow. So here we go. So basically the 3500B- I hope you've 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, et cetera. The point is FDA already has a terrible Yelp for drugs. It has a terrible version of it. What would the good version look like? The fact that you've never, I mean, the fact you have to fill out a PDF to go and submit a report. How do you submit a report at Yelp or Uber or Airbnb or Amazon? You tap and there's star ratings, right? So just modernizing FDA 3500B and modernizing phase four, okay, is a huge thing. Can you comment on that? What incentive mechanism forces the modernization of that kind of thing? Here's how it would work or one possible- To create an actual Yelp. Yeah. Here's how that would work, right? You go to the pharmacy or wherever and you hold up your phone and you scan the barcode of the drug, okay? What does it usually say? Instantly you see global reports, right? By the way, because your biology or physiology, that's global, right? Information from Brazil or from Germany or Japan on their physiological reaction to the same drug you're taking is useful to you. It's not like a national boundaries thing. So the whole nation state model of only collecting information on by other Americans. Really you want a global kind of thing. Just like Amazon book reviews, that's a global thing. Other things are aggregate at the global level, okay? So what you want is to see every patient report and every doctor around the world on this drug that might be really important to your rare or semi-rare condition. Just that alone would be a valuable site. Who builds that site? It sounds like something created by capitalism. It sounds like it would have to be a company. Yeah, you can definitely do it. See these- But we don't have a world where a company is allowed to be in charge of that kind of thing. It's not like the health went down. It just seems like a lot of the- So it depends, right? Basically, this is why you have to pick off individual elements, right? There's essentially a combination of first recognizing that FDA is actually bad. You need to be able to say that. 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. 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 similar to this. I was in Vegas at a club, I don't go to clubs. Okay. I got kicked out for the, I think the first time in my life for making a joke with a bouncer. And because I had a camera with me and you're not allowed to have a camera. And I said, okay, cool, I'll take it out. But I made a funny joke that I don't care to retell. But he was just a little offended. He was like, I don't care who you are, I don't care who you're with. And then he proceeded to list me the famous people he has kicked off. But there is, I mean, all of those, the reason I made the joke is I sensed that there was an entitlement to this particular individual, like where the authority has gotten to his head. Respect my authority. Yeah. Right. 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 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. Yep. Okay. Advanced. Right? And the thing about this is everybody in line, actually some fairly high, let's say call it influence or net worth or whatever people fly, right? 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 if you could 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. That when it's a government to government thing, see a dot com is treated with extreme scrutiny by FDA, but it's another dot gov. Well, they're not trying to make a profit. So they kind of just wave them on through. Okay. So these body scanners were basically applied to millions and millions of people and this huge opt-in experiments almost, I think it's quite likely by the way, that if there was even a slightly increased cancer risk that the net morbidity and mortality from those would have outweighed the deaths from terrorism or whatever that were prevented, right? You can work out the numbers, but you can just get the math under reasonable assumptions. It's probably true. If it had any increased morbidity and mortality. I've not seen the recent things, but I've seen that concern expressed 12 years ago. Point being that despite the cost, despite how many people are exposed to it, despite how obviously patently ludicrous it is, you don't make any trouble nor do people organize protests or whatever about this because it's something where the security theater of the whole thing is part of it. Well, if we took them away, there'd be more terrorism or something like that. People think, right? But it is fascinating to see that the populace puts up with it because one of my favorite things is to listen to Jordan Peterson who I think offline, but I think also on the podcast, you know, is somebody who resists authority in every way. And even he goes to TSA with a kind of suppressed, like all the instructions, everything down to whenever you have like the yellow thing for your feet, they force you to adjust it even slightly if you're off. Just even, I mean, it's like it's a Kafka novel. We're living like TSA. It makes me smile. It brings joy to my heart because I imagine Franz Kafka and I just walking through there because it's really is just deeply absurd. But and then the whole motivation of the mechanism becomes distorted by the individuals involved. The initial one was to reduce the number of terrorist attacks, I suppose. Right. Now it's guns and drugs. Basically it's like, essentially what they've done is they've repealed the fourth amendment, right? Search and seizure, they can do it without probable cause. Everybody is being searched. Everybody's a potential terrorist. So they've got probable cause for everybody in theory. And so what they do, they'll post on their website the guns and drugs or whatever that they seized in these scanners. Well, of course, if you search everybody, you're going to find some criminals or whatever. But the cost of doing that is dramatic. Moreover, the fact that people have sort of been trained to have compliance, it's like the Soviet Union, right? Where just grudgingly, all right, go along with this extremely stupid thing. What's my point? The point is this is a really stupid regulation that has existed in plain sight of everybody for 20 years. We're still taking off our shoes. Okay. Because some shoe bomber, whatever number of years ago. Okay. So all this stuff is there as opposed to, there's a zillion other things you could potentially do different paradigms for quote airport security. But now apply that to FDA. Just like a lot of what TSA does is security theater, arguably all of it. A lot of what FDA does is safety theater. The difference is there's far fewer people who go through the aperture. They're the biotech and pharma CEOs. Okay. So you don't have an understanding of what it is to deal with them, number one. Number two is the penalty is not a few hundred dollars of missing your flight. It is a few million dollars or tens or hundreds of millions of dollars for getting your company subject to the equivalent of a retaliatory wait time. Just like that bouncer threw you out. Just like the TSA officer, if you make a joke or they can just sit you down and make you lose your flight. Right? So too, can the FDA just silently impede the approval of something and choke you out financially because you don't have enough runway to get funded. Right? So impose more wait time. Guess what? We want another six months. Data is going to take you 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 with or vaccine evaluated rather via challenge trials to months or years, the cost during that time, it just increases nonlinearly. Right? So you can't iterate on the product. All the normal observations, if it takes you 10 years to launch a product versus 10 days, what's the difference in terms of your speed of variation, your cost, et cetera. Right? So this is part of what, it's not the only thing. There's other things. There's AMA and CPT. There's other things. But this is one of the things that jacks up prices in the US medical system. Okay? So now you have something where these CEOs, they're going through this aperture. They 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'm being 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 and sorry to interrupt, but for the CEO of the company, I know 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, 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 thought to 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 regulator? Can you name an evil CEO? 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, there is portrayals, especially in sort of authoritarian regimes or the Soviet Union where there's bureaucracy, you know, Chernobyl, you can kind of see within that there's the story of the regulator, but yeah, it's not as plentiful and it's also doesn't have often doesn't have a face to it. It's like bureaucracy is this amorphous thing that results. Any one individual you see, they're just obeying somebody else. There's not a face to it of evil. The evil is the entire machine. That's right. That's what I call the school of fish strategy, by the way. It's something where you are an individual and you can be signaled out, but there's more accountability for one person's bad tweets than all the wars in the Middle East, right? Because it's a school of fish. Yeah. Right? So if the establishment is wrong, if the bureaucracy is wrong, they're all wrong at the same time. Who could have known? Whereas if you deviate, then you are a deviation who can be hammered down. Okay. Now the school of fish strategy is unfortunately very successful because, you know, truth is whatever. If you just always ride with the school of fish and turn when they turn and so on, unless there's a bigger school of fish that comes in, you basically can never be proven wrong. Right? So actually, you know, of course someone who believes in truth and believes in, you know, innovation and so on just physiologically can't ride with the school of fish. You just have to say what is true or do what is true. Right? Still, you've described correctly, you know, how it's faceless. Right? So I will give two examples of fictional portrayals of evil regulators. One is actually the original Ghostbusters. Okay. Did not expect that one, but yes. Yeah. So the EPA is actually the villain in that where they flip a switch that lets out all the ghosts in the city. And essentially the guy is coming in with a head of steam as this evil regulator that's just totally arrogant, doesn't actually understand the private sector or the consequences of their actions and they force the, and crucially they bring a cop with them with a gun. So it shows that a regulator is not simply, you know, some piece of paper, but it is the police. Right? And that cop with the gun forces the Ghostbusters to like release the containment and the whole thing spreads. The second example is Dallas Buyers Club, which is more recent, and that actually shows the FDA blocking a guy who had with a life-threatening illness, you know, with AIDS from getting the drugs to tree's 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 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. Sometimes regulatory agencies collide with each other, right? Even though FDA is under HHS, sometimes it collides with HHS and they've got regulations that conflict. For example, HHS says everybody's supposed to be able to have access to their own medical record. FDA didn't want people to have access to their own personal genomes. That conflicts. Okay? 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 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 teramycin for Pfizer. I hadn't seen my family for eight or nine months. They were flying into Sao Paulo, and I was flying down from some little village on the Amazon to Manus and then to Sao Paulo. I was a young guy in his twenties. I couldn't wait to see the kids. One of them was a year old baby. The other was three. I missed my wife. There was a Quonset hut in front of just a little dirt strip with a single engine plane to fly me to Manus. I roll up and there's a Brazilian soldier there. The military revolution happened literally the week before. So this soldier is standing there with his machine gun, and he said to me, you can't come in. I speak in pretty good Portuguese by that time. I said, my God, my plane, my family, I gotta come in. He said again, you can't come in. I said, I gotta come in. And he took his machine gun, took the safety off, and pointed at me and said, you can't come in. Oh, now I got it. I can't go in there. And that's the way I always described 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're the boss. If you're a pharmaceutical firm, they own you body and soul. Okay, that's the CEO of a successful company, Genentech. He said he's told the story hundreds of times and regulatory approval is a fundamental challenge facing his company because if you are regulated by FDA, they are your primary customer. If they cut the cord on you, you have no other customers. And in fact, until very recently with the advent of social media, no one would even tell your story. It was assumed that you were some sort of corporate criminal that they were protecting the public from, that you were gonna put poison in milk, like the melamine scandal in China. I'm not saying those things don't exist, by the way. They do exist. That's why people are like, they can immediately summon to mind all the examples of corporate criminals, right? That's why I mentioned those fictional stories. I mean, you can't just put them in 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, go ahead. Yeah, but the pharmaceutical companies are stuck between a rock and a hard place because the reputation, if they go to Twitter, they go to social media, they have horrible reputations. 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. This is partially what's just happened with Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, the other MAGA. Okay. They have been- That's funny. Well done. Yeah. I didn't even think about that. That's well done. Right? So I have this tweet, it's like MAGA Republicans and MAGA Democrats. Okay. Oh, damn it. So many things you've said today will just get stuck in my head. They change the way you think. Something about catchy phrasing of ideas makes them even more powerful. So yeah. Okay. So that's happening in the tech sector. 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. 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 a policeman has a quota, right? These are the police. One way I describe it also is like a step down transformers. You have high voltage electricity that's generated at the power plant and it comes over the wires and then there's step down transformers that turn it into a lower voltage that you can just deal with out of your appliances, right? Similarly, you have something where the high voltage of 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. 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-Corp 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 at many pharmaceutical companies arguably all are regulatory affairs and IP, not R&D, right? Because one is artificial scarcity of regulation, which jacks up the price, and the other is artificial scarcity of the patent, which allows people to maintain the high price, right? So this entire thing is just like 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, the late 2000s and 2010s and so on, with the advent of social media, with the advent of a bunch of millionaires who are independent, with the advent of Uber and Airbnb, right? With the advent of cryptocurrency, with the diminution of trust in institutions, it used to be really taboo to even talk about the FDA as potentially bad in 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 I wouldn't be surprised if it's like a 20 or 30 point drop after the CDC failed to control disease and the FDA failed, and the entire biomedical regulatory establishment and scientific establishment was saying masks don't work before they do. This was just a train crash of all the things that you're paying for that you supposedly think are good. As I mentioned, one response is to go QAnon and people 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 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, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, right? UX is broken at every layer. Yeah, so they have a bad yelp for drugs. Could we make a better one? We could make a better one, just modern UX. The key insight here, by the way, which is a non-obvious point, and I've got a whole talk on this actually that I should probably release, I actually did like almost eight, nine years ago. It's called regulation is information. Product quality is a digital signal. Okay, what do I mean by that? Actually when I talk about exit, exit the Fed, that's the crypto economy, right? What does exit the FDA look like? Well, one key insight is that many of the big scale tech companies can be thought of as cloud regulators rather than land regulators. What do I mean by that? Well, first, what is regulation? People do want a regulated marketplace. They want A, quality ratings, like on a one to five star scale, and B, 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 taking care of it, and they've baked in the regulatory cost into some subscription fee of some kind, right? So the thing is, the model we've talked about is the land regulator of a nation state in 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 mails 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, they've got a reputation. Every single web service that's at the scale of tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people has had to build a cloud regulator. And the crucial thing is it scales across borders. So you can use the data from Mexico to help somebody in Moldova or vice versa, right? Because it's fundamentally international, right? Those ratings, you have a network effect. And there's another aspect to it, which is these are better regulators than the land regulators. For example, Uber is a better regulator than the taxi medallions. Why? Every ride is GPS tracked. There's ratings on both the driver and the passenger side. Both parties know that payment can be rendered in a standard currency, right? If you have below a certain star rating on either side, you get deplatformed and so on to protect either rider or driver, and on and on, right? What does that do? Uber that is in taxi medallions, rather than a six month or annual inspection, you have reports from every single rider, okay? Before Uber, it was the taxi drivers and taxi regulators were in a little monopoly locally, okay? Because they were the persistent actors in the ecosystem. Taxi riders had nothing in common, didn't even know each other. In New York, some guy gets in a taxi, another guy, they had no way to communicate with each other. So the persistent actors in the ecosystem were the regulators and the drivers, and they had this cozy kind of thing and medallion prices just kept going up, and this was a sort of collaboration on artificial scarcity. Afterwards, with Uber and Lyft and other entrants, you had something interesting, a different kind of regulator driver fusion. If you assume regulatory capture exists and lean into it, Uber is the new regulator and Uber drivers are the drivers, Lyft is the competing regulator, and Lyft drivers are the new drivers, okay? So you have a regulator driver fusion versus another regulator driver fusion. You no longer have a monopoly, you have multiple parties, okay? You have a competitive market. This is the concept of polycentric law, right? Where you have multiple different legal regimes in the same jurisdiction overlapping that you can choose between with a tap of a button, right? All these concepts from libertarian theory like polycentric law or catalysis, all these things are becoming more possible now that the internet has increased microeconomic leverage, 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. In Austin for a while, Uber was even banned, what have you, right? Netnet though, like Uber, Grab, Go-Jek, Lyft, Didi, like ride sharing as a concept is now out there, and whatever the next version is where it's self-driving, while it's like a very hard fought battle and the regulatory state keeps trying to push things back into the garage, this is a fundamentally better way of just doing regulation of taxis. Similarly, Airbnb for hotels. It's basically the same thing, okay? And Airbnb could use competition, I think that it would be good to have 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 still the most defended thing. Basically just publishing reviews. And not just reviews by any old person. It turns out that FDA typically will use expert panels, where there's expert panels. It's like professors from Harvard or 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 profs like Sinclair or what have you. You do want to have the reviews of the crowd, okay? But you also want to have, especially in medicine, you want to have the reviews of experts. Of some kind. So there's going to be defectors from the current establishment. Just like there are profs who defected from computer science academia to become Larry and Sergey and whatever. Or they weren't profs, they were grad students, right? In the same way you'll have defectors who have the credentials from the old world, but can build up the new. Just like there's folks from Wall Street who have come into cryptocurrency and helped legitimate it, right? Just like there's folks who left Salzburger to come to Substack. We have these folks who by defecting, they help and then they're also supplemented by all this new talent coming in, right? That combination of things is how you build a new system. It's not completely by itself, nor is it trying to reform the old, it's some fusion, okay? So in this new system, who do you have? You have the most entrepreneurial and innovative MDs. You have the most entrepreneurial and innovative professors, and you have the founders of actual new products and stuff. And they are giving open source reviews of these products. And they're also building a community that will say, look, we want this new drug or we want this new treatment or we want this new device and we're willing to crowdfund 10,000 units. So please give us the thing and we'll write a very fair review of it and we'll also all evaluate it as a community and so on. So you turn these people from just passive patients into active participants in their health, that's a community part, and they've got the kind of biomedical technical leadership there. Now, what is the kind of prototype of something like this? Something like VitaDao is very interesting. Things like MoleculeDao are very interesting. It'll start with things like longevity, right? And why is that? Because the entire model of FDA, this 20th century model, is wait for somebody to have a disease and then try to cure them, okay? Versus saying an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, right? Why are we not actually tracking folks and getting a constant dashboard on yourself so that you can see whether things are breaking and then you deal with it just like you've got server uptime things? You don't wait necessarily for the site to go down. You start seeing, oh, response rates are spiking. We need to add more servers, right? You have some warning, okay? Even 10 years ago, there was this article called The Measured Man in the Atlantic where this guy, physicist Larry Smarr, okay? What he was doing is he was essentially doing a bunch of measurements on himself and he was finding that there were predictors of inflammation that were spiking and he went to the doctor, showed the charts and the doctor was like, I can't do anything with this. Then it turned out to be an early warning of a serious condition and he had to, I think, go for surgery or something and he was starting to think, well, look, the way that we're doing medicine right now is it's not quite like pre-germ theory of disease, but it is pre-continuous diagnostics, okay? Continuous diagnostics, just to talk about this for a second, I mentioned one angle on which you go after FDA, which is the better phase four, right? I've mentioned the concept of better reviews in general, okay? I mentioned VitaDao, which is a community that is going after longevity. Let's talk about continuous diagnostics. 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 is all the other side of the world, 10,000 miles away, but a few millimeters away you don't really know what's going on, right? That's starting to change with all the quantified self-devices, the hundreds of millions of Apple watches and Fitbits and stuff, right? You're also starting to see continuous glucose meters, which is very important. They're starting to give you readouts. People are seeing, wow, this is spiking my insulin or rather this is spiking my blood sugar and it might be something you didn't predict. It varies for different people. For some people, a banana isn't a big deal for others. It's actually quite bad for the blood sugar. What happens when you extend that? Well, about 10 years ago, a guy, Mike Snyder, a professor at Stanford did something called the Integroam where he just threw the kitchen sink of all the diagnostics he could at himself over the period of I think a few weeks or a few months, I forget the exact duration. He's able to do things where he could see during that period he got a cold or something. 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. You could see, oh, wait a second. These are things that I can see in my readouts that I would only have the vaguest interpretation of as a human being. Moreover, he could take, I don't think he did this, but if you took treatments, if you took drugs, you could actually show what your steady state was if you tracked over time, show what your disease state or sick state was, and then this drug pushes you back into non-disease state. You can actually get a quantitative readout of what steady state was. 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. 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. Often inside you're tapping on your screen. So what do we do? Take actually significant vitamin D infusions. That's a small example of where baselines differ between people. These diagnostics, what could that mean? That could mean things like the continuous glucose meter, it's quantified self, it's like continuous blood testing. So you have a so-called mobile phlebotomist. This is something which phlebotomist takes blood. Mobile phlebotomy would come to your office, come to your remote office. This is a great business for people. I think you can revisit this in 2022. People tried this in the 2010s, but I think it's worth revisiting. Mobile phlebotomist comes every week or every month, takes blood, runs every test. Maybe that's a few thousand dollars a year, maybe eventually gets to a few hundred dollars a year. And that's expensive in some ways, but boy, that's better health insurance in other ways. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing. So one, there's a bunch of companies that do this and I actually would love to learn more about them. One of them is a company called InsideTracker that sponsors this podcast. They do that. But the reason I really appreciate them, they're the first ones that introduced me to how easy it is, but it's also depressing how little information exactly, as you beautifully put it once again, how little information we have about our own body in a continuous sense. And actually also sadly, even with InsideTracker, as I collect that data, how not integrated that data is with everything else. If I wanted to opt in, I would like, I can't just like riffing off the top of my head, but I would like Google Maps to know what's going on inside my body. Maybe I can't intuit at first why that application is useful, but there could be an incredible, that's where the entrepreneurial spirit builds is like, what can I do with that data? Can I make the trip less stressful for you and adjust the Google Maps thing 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 darnos, that's one of the reasons why people have sort of been scared off from doing diagnostics to some extent. Why? Because they're like, oh, is this another Theranos? 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, right? Way more. Just take drug lag alone, okay? Whenever you have a drug that works and reduce morbidity and mortality after it was actually generally available, but was delayed for months or years, the integral under that curve is the excess morbidity and mortality attributable to FDA's drug lag. You could go back and do that study across lots and lots of different drugs and you'd probably find quite a lot. Alex Tabarrok and others have written on this, right? Daniel Henninger has written on this, okay? That's just like one example. I mean, I gave the pandemic example, the fact that they held up the EUAs for the tests and didn't do challenge trials. That's like a million American dead that could have been orders magnitude less if we had gotten the vaccine out to vulnerable populations sooner, okay? So you're talking about something that has a total monopoly on global health and you can't know what it is without that unless you have zones that are FDA free, but that have some form of regulation. As I mentioned, it's a V3. It's not going back to zero regulation, everybody in a manner for itself, but it's a more reputable regulator, just like Uber is a better regulator than the tax and medallions, right? Yeah. I mean, you're painting such an incredible picture. You're making me wish you were FDA commissioner. There are a bunch of people who tweeted something like that after the pandemic. Whatever, go ahead. Is that possible? 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? The short answer is no. And the longer answer, meaning- That'd be funny if you're like, the short answer is no, the long answer is yes. Basically a CEO of a company, while it's very difficult, they can hire and fire, right? So in theory, they can do surgery on the organism and like Steve Jobs took over Apple and was able to hire and fire, raise money, do this, that. He basically had root over Apple, that he was a system administrator, right? He had full permissions, okay? As FDA commissioner, you do not have full permissions over FDA, let alone like the whole structure around it, right? If you're FDA commissioner, you are not the CEO of the agency, okay? Lots of these folks there have career tenure. They can't be fired. They can't even really be disciplined. There's something called the Douglas Factors. You ever heard of the Douglas Factors? It's like the Miranda rights for federal employees, okay? You know, the right to man says it. So basically, if you've heard that federal employees can't be fired, the Douglas Factors are how that's actually operationalized. When you try to fire somebody, it's this whole process where they get to appeal it and so on and so forth. And they're sitting in the office while you're trying to fire them and they're complaining to everybody around them that this guy's trying to fire me, he's such a bad guy, blah, blah, right? And everybody around, even if they may think that guy is doing a bad job, they're like, wait a second, he's trying to fire you, he might try to fire me too. And so anybody who tries to fire somebody at FDA just gets a face full of lead for their troubles. What they instead will do is sometimes they'll just transfer somebody to the basement or something so they don't have to deal with them if they're truly bad, okay? But the thing about this is there is only one caveat to 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 annual budget renewal. Think of it as 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, the police quotas, the ticketing. And if they don't have a crisis, they will invent one. Just again, just like TSA, just like other agencies you're more familiar with, you can kind of map it back. Look at the guns and drugs we've seized. And say I have 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 rare except you can be booted. But what that means is that FDA commissioner is actually a white elephant. It's a ceremonial role, really, right? You know the term white elephant, it's like basically the Maharaja gives you a white elephant as a gift. It seems great. Next day, it's eating all of your grass, it's pooped on your lawn, it has 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 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 crumble potentially, right? In many ways, it's becoming folks who are just totally status obsessed getting these positions, but like a lot of the merit, all the folks with merit are kind of leaving the government and going into tech or crypto or what have you, right? So even if these agencies were hollow before and some of these are becoming hollow-er 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, but was there. C, we're entering the decentralizing era and D, like be like Satoshi. Satoshi founded Bitcoin because he knew you could not reform the Fed. Everybody is trying to go and reform, reform, reform. The reason they're trying to reform is we haven't figured out the mechanisms 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 literance, fitness is actually the back door to a lot of medicine, okay? Why is that? You go to any 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, fat phobic or whatever, but not too many years ago you would see somebody, people saying fitness is the ultimate drug. If we could just prescribe fitness in a pill, that would improve your cardiovascular function, your neurological function, it deals with depression. By the way, in that case, the use of the word drug means medicine. 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, like you're fit enough, you do the 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. And you know, go ahead. No, 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 is Dr. Google? Well, your doctor must be a moron. You're going and trying to take care of yourself, you're Googling symptoms. Oh, how stupid you are. I have a medical degree. And that doctor, see, the thing is if you come in and you've self-diagnosed or you've done some of your own research, if you're right and they've got an ego about it, they're undermined. And if you're wrong, they're like, ha ha, arrogant. But either way, if they've got this kind of mindset, they have an incentive to resist the patient taking care of themselves. Isn't that the doctor's job, right? And they're kind of taught to behave like this, many of them. So what that means then is that intervention of that 15 or 30 minute appointment with the doctor, whatever drug they prescribe, better hit you like Thor's hammer to put you back on the straight and narrow. Because that's only with you for like a few seconds, a few minutes or whatever. The doctor's only with you for a few minutes. The drug is only, some drugs are very powerful, so they actually do work like this. 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 of their stuff, who's eating properly and looking at the effect of their diet on things like their continuous glucose monitor as a V1, but other things, right? Who is as fit as they can possibly be. These are kind of obvious things, but why is this the backdoor to medicine? Because since the 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 quit marketing them to diagnose or treat a disease. You 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, right? So that's actually the backdoor 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. A few other things which kind of a US medical system, Wallimonyx. You got me on this topic. I love this. Okay. So- This is the most eloquent exploration of the US medical system and how to improve it, how to fix it and what the future looks like. Yeah. 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 AMA, there's CPT, there's CPOM, there's this, you know, like all these regulations which see normally in capitalism, you have a buyer and a seller, right? Duh. In medicine, you have third party regulation and fourth party pricing and fifth party payment. Okay. So third party regulation, FDA is regulating it, fourth party pricing, it is, you know, the CPT codes, right? Fifth party payment, it's the insurance companies, all right? And just to discuss these bits of the system, first, why are some people against capitalism in medicine? I actually understand why they're against it because they are visualizing themselves on a gurney when they're being wheeled in and now somebody at their moment of vulnerability is charging this insane price for their care and many people in the US have had this horrible experience where they're bankrupted or scared of being bankrupted by medical bills. Therefore, the concept of adding more capitalism to medicine scares them and they think it's horrible and you're some like awful, greedy tech bro kind of thing, all right? Let me say I understand that concern and let me, you know, kind of let me tease that apart a little bit, right? Actually the most capitalistic areas of medicine are the most functional areas of medicine. So that's say the places where you can walk in and walk out, okay? Whether that's dentistry, dermatology, plastic surgery, even veterinary medicine, which is not human, okay? Where you can make a conscious decision, say, okay, I want this care or I don't want this, I see a price list, I can pay cash, right? If I don't like it, I go to another dermatologist. There's few dermatological emergencies, that's why dermatologists have a great quality of life, okay? By contrast, when you're being wheeled in on a gurney, you need it right now, okay? And you're unconscious or what have you, or you're not in a capacity to deal with it, right? And so these are the two extremes. It's like ambulatory medicine you can walk around and pick and like ambulance medicine, okay? And what that means is the more ambulatory the medicine, the more legitimate capitalism is in that situation. People are okay with a dermatologist basically turning you down because you don't have enough money and you go to another dermatologist because you can comparison shop there. It's not usually an emergency, right? Whereas if you're coming in with an ambulance, then people don't 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. 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 up 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. The Singapore model is actually a pretty good one for this where they have sort of a mandatory HSA. You have to put some money in that and that pays for your healthcare bills, but then it's cash out of that. It's like a separate pocket, sort of four savings to pay for health savings accounts. 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 eventually it's Mike Snyder's Intergrom, the V1 is the quantified self and the Apple Watch and the continuous glucose meters, and the VN is the Mike Snyder Intergrom. There's a site called Q.bio which is doing this also, right? Eventually this stuff will hopefully just be in a device that just measures tons and tons of variables on you, right? There's ways of measuring some of these metabolites without breaking the skin. So it's not, you don't have to keep breaking the skin over and over. There's various ways of doing that. So now you've got something where you've got the monitoring, you've got the dashboards, you've got the alerts, and just like this Larry Smarr guy that I mentioned, the measured man, you might be able to shift more and more things to ambulatory. 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 not the top of their class, but the guys who are at the bottom of the pinball machine, the surgeons and the radiologist, 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 Howser MD is at the upstream stage, okay? So you want this amazing, amazing doctor there, right? How could we get that? I mentioned the app that doesn't exist, which is like a better version of the 3500B, right? Here's another app that doesn't exist, and this is one that FDA has 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, tell 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, 98% 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 and an app that you 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, some of that stuff was relaxed during COVID. There's other broken things in medical system, I'll just name two more and then move on. I mentioned AMA and CPT. Those are two regulatory bodies? AMA, American Medical Association, CPT, current procedural terminology. Basically, you know Marx's labor theory of value, where people are supposed to be paid on their effort, right? Of course, the issue with this is that you'd be paying a physicist to try to dunk and 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. 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. AMA basically publishes a list of these so-called CPT codes, which is like the coding, the biomedical coding of this and what each medical process is worth and whatnot. It's like, I don't remember all the numbers, but it's like a five-digit code and it's like, okay, I got a test for cystic fibrosis or a test for this or a test for that. That's not going to help you if your medical billing is erroneous. Why? The insurance company will reject it because it doesn't pay for that. 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, okay? This enormous inefficient industry. Okay, literally medical billing is a whole field, okay? What do you want to do when you grow up? I want to work in medical billing. In medical billing, okay? 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 repo the treatment, okay? Like a car, you sell a car, you can in theory repo the car. So the patient has a treatment. Now, what happens? Well, the insurance company, that treatment is perhaps provided, look, it's a lab test provided by a company, right? The company bills the patient. The company is supposed to charge a high price. Why? The insurance company wants it to try to collect from the patient. The patient is scared. Oh my God, they see this huge price. They sometimes don't pay. Sometimes the insurance company doesn't pay either. And when a company is stiffed by an insurance company, when a diagnostic company is stiffed by an insurance company, it has to jack up the price on everybody else, right? Everything boils down to the fact that you don't have 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, the other thing about it is obviously lawsuits are over everything. Everybody's mad about everything. It's health. People are dying. Okay. So everything is just optimized for optics as opposed to results, right? Similarly, actually many drugs are optimized for minimizing side effects and optics rather than maximizing effects, which are totally different criteria, right? You might have, for example, a drug that only cures a thousand people but doesn't have any side effects versus one that cures a million people but that has 10 really serious side effects a year, right? The second one probably not happen because those side effects would be so big. How do you attack this? I name a few examples, but I actually think the reform is going to come in part from outside the system. In particular, India is coming online. Okay. Why is that important? Well, you may have encountered an Indian doctor or two, okay? Maybe an Indian programmer, one or two, all right? And I do think telemedicine could explode, right? Where you could have an Indian doctor in India and there's a US doctor, okay, who's like a dispatcher. You see what I'm saying? They've got all these other Indian doctors behind them. They've got a telemedical app and you are now doing something where these relatively inexpensive Indian doctors who are vetted by the American doctor or the doctor in jurisdiction of the license become the back end doctors of the world. To some extent, that's already there with tele-radiology and other kinds of things, right? But now that you've got literally like a billion Indians who've just come online, okay, you have this huge pool of folks who have a different attitude towards medicine. For example, it's a lot more cash payment over there. For example, India is big on generic drugs. For example, during COVID, it had something called, it has something called Arrogia Sethu, which is a national telemedicine app, okay? The US wasn't able to ship that. In some ways, India's digital infrastructure, again, you'll have to read a post called The Internet Country by tigerfeathers.substack.com and you'll see that actually India's national software infrastructure is surprisingly good. It's not as good as China's in some ways, but it's like better than the US's, which is like healthier.gov and like non-existent. It's like kind of impressive how good some of India's software is. The fact that it exists is good. So you have all these new doctors coming online. India cranks out generics, right? Telemedicine is now more legal in the US and you have cash payment in India, right? In a lot of other places. You don't have the whole insurance employer health thing and this market is growing. So you could have a sort of parallel market that starts evolving, right? Which is, and people are already doing some medical tourism. I think that's another exit from the FDA. You have a parallel market that starts evolving. That just starts from fundamentally different premises. It's just cash, cash for everything, right? There's downsides with cash for everything. There's a huge upside with cash for everything. Cash for everything means you get customer service from the doctor. It means the prices are actually visible. It ideally pushes you again towards more ambulatory medicine rather than ambulance medicine. It is monitoring, constant monitoring with the quantified self and whatnot, as opposed to just let your system fail and then wheel you in, right? There's a reputational bridge because now we've had a couple of generations almost of Indian doctors in the US. So people know that there's some very competent Indian doctors. They're a good chunk of AMA and so they can sort of lobby for this. And you have plenty of Indian engineers. Now I'm not saying India alone is a panacea, but I do think that this is a large enough parallel market to start doing interesting things. 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 just such a huge opportunity to define the future of medicine and make a shit ton of money from a market that's desperate for it in the United States because of all the over the regulation. That's right. And I think basically it's something where the reason it needs- And that would fix the FDA, sorry, to interrupt. Yes. The FDA by exiting the FDA, right? And then the FDA would dry out and then it would hopefully- It might reform, it might dry out, right? And this is why people are, for example, they're traveling across borders to getting orders from Canadian pharmacies. A lot of this type of stuff, we can start to build alternatives, right? I mean, India's generic industry is really important because it just doesn't enforce American IP there. So generic drugs are cheaper, right? And it's quite competent, it's been around for a while. So there's enough proof points there where, again, I'm not saying a panacea, it's going to be something which will acquire 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's and it has enough of a bridge to the US that it can be that stimulation which you need, which is kind of something that outside poke, right? I 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 Benedict option like a Christian network state. If people want to do different kinds of things, I'm open to many different things and I will fund lots of different things. For me, the motivation is just like you 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 and selling and so on. But what Satoshi did is he took fundamental premises and flipped them. For example, in the traditional macroeconomic worldview, hyperinflation is bad, but deflation is also bad. So a little inflation is good, right? In the traditional macroeconomic worldview, it's good that there are custodians, banks that 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 is bad, but he also thought mild inflation was bad and deflation was good. That's just a fundamental shift, okay? He gave you root access over your money. You're now a system administrator of your own money. You can room-RF your entire fortune or send millions with a keystroke. You are now the system administrator of your own money. That alone is why cryptocurrency is important. If you want system administration access at times to computers, you'll want it to currency, right? To be sovereign. There's 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 initial, the Bitcoin blockchain, everything is public, right? There are various kinds of things like this where he just inverted fundamental premises. And then the whole crypto system is in the crypto economy is in many ways a teasing out of what that means. Just to give you one example, the US dollar, people have seen those graphs where it's like inflating and so it just loses value over time and you've seen that, okay? And most of the time it's just sort of denied that it's losing any value. The most highbrow way of defending it is the US dollar trades off temporary short-term price stability for long-term depreciation. And Bitcoin makes the opposite trade off. In theory at least, long-term appreciation at the expense of short-term price instability. Because there's the whole plunge protection team and so on. Basically there's various ways in which price stability is tried to be maintained in the medium term at the expense of long-term depreciation. You need a reserve of assets to keep stabilizing the dollar against various things. So what does crypto medicine look like relative to fiat medicine to make the same analogy? The existing medical system, it assumes that a quick death is bad, an early death is bad, but also that living forever is either unrealistic or impossible or undesirable that you should die with dignity or something like that, okay? So a little death is good. That's the existing medical system. Because the concept of life extension and David Sinclair and what you call health span says rejects that fundamental premise. And it says actually the way to defeat cancer is to defeat aging. Aging is actually a programmed 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 that 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 own health with the decentralization of medicine? All the stuff that I've been describing sort of fits like longevity is traditional medicine as crypto is to traditional currency. If we take those assumptions separately, so we take cryptocurrency aside, is that to you obvious that this letting go of this assumption about death, is that an obvious thing? Is longevity obviously good versus for example, the devil's advocate to that would be what we want is to keep death and maximize the quality of life up until the end. Well, like so that you ride into the sunset healthy. Somebody who was listening to the whole podcast would say, well, Balaji, just a few hours ago you were saying this gerontocracy runs the US and they're all old and they don't get it, blah, blah, blah. And now you're talking about making people live forever. So there's never any new blood to wash it out. Ha ha, what a contradiction, right? It's funny that you're so on point across all the topics we covered and the possible criticism. I love it. Well, just trying to anticipate some of it. Well done, sir. I think the argument on that is so long as you have a frontier, it is okay for someone to live long, okay? So long as people can exit to a new thing, number one. Number two is in order for us to go and colonize other planets and so on, if you do want to get to Mars, if you want to become Star Trek and what have you, probably going to need to have just to survive a long flight, so to speak, multiple light year flight, you're going to need to have life extension. So to become a pioneering interstellar kind of thing. I know that it's a kind of thing which sounds like, okay, yeah, and when we're on the moon, we're going to need shovels. It sounds like 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-permeatism or optimism slash transhumanism. Either we are shutting down civilization, it's degrowth, it's Unabomber, et cetera, or it's the stars and escaping the prime number maze. It's like to me, it's obvious that we're going to, if we're to survive, expand out into space. Yes. It's obvious that once we do, we'll look back at anyone, which is currently most people, that didn't think of this future, didn't anticipate this future, worked towards this future as Luddites, 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 expansion of longevity. There's also a way to bring it back to earth to an extent, which is how were societies used to be judged. You may remember people used to talk about life expectancy as a big thing, right? Life expectancy is actually a very, very, very good metric. Why? It's a ratio scale variable. There's four different class of variables that staticians talk about. Ratio scale is like years or meters or kilograms. 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 to anything. 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. Ratio scale data is the best because you can compare it across space and time. If you have a skeleton that is like 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. 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. Life expectancy is good because as a ratio scale variable, it was a very clear definition, like when someone born and died. Those are actually relatively clear. Most other things aren't like that. That's why murder or death, it can be scored, it's unambiguous, it's done when it's done. Whereas when does somebody get sick? Oh, they were kind of sick, they were sick today, they were sick at this hour, the boundary conditions, many other kinds of things are not clear cut like that. I should just briefly comment that life expectancy does have this quirk, a dark quirk that when you just crudely look at it, it incorporates child mortality or mortality at age of one or age of five. Maybe it's better and clearer to look at mortality after five or whatever. Those metrics still hold in interesting ways and measure the progress of human civilization in interesting ways. Yes, that's right. You actually want longevity biomarkers. A lot of people are working on this. There's this book called The Picture of Dorian Gray and the concept is sell your soul to ensure the picture rather than he will age and fade. The concept is that thing on the wall just reflects his age and you can see it. There's a premise that's embedded in a lot of Western culture that to gain something you must lose. If you're Icarus and you try to fly, then you'll fly too high and it'll melt your wings. But guess what? We fly every day, commercial flight. The opposite of the Icarus or Picture of Dorian Gray kind of thing is the movie Limitless, which I love because it's so Nietzschean and so unusual relative to the dystopian sci-fi movies where there's a... Without giving... The movie is kind of old now, but there's a drug in it that's a neurotropic that boosts your cognitive abilities and it's got side effects. But at the end, he engineers out the side effects. Amazing. Just like, yeah, there are planes that crash and we land, right? Okay. Why did I mention The Picture of Dorian Gray? Well, there's another aspect of it, which is longevity biomarker. The point is to kind of estimate how many years of life you have left by that Q.bio or Integrom or... You take all these analyses on somebody, right? One of the best longevity biomarkers could be just your face, right? You image the face and you can sort of tell, oh, somebody looks like they've aged, oh, someone looks younger, et cetera, et cetera. And this is actually data that you've got on millions and millions of people where you could probably start having AI predict, okay, what is somebody's life expectancy given their current face and other kinds of things, right? Because you have their name, they have their 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 is it just fundamentally changes the assumptions in the system. Now with that said, 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, Lex Friedman has one of the greatest podcasts of all time. You guys should listen to the Lex Friedman podcast, which you may be doing, right? Which you may be doing right now. Yes. Yeah. Well, thank you. So- What was the term again? Sorry, genomic- Sorry, I called it genomic, not resurrection, but genomic reincarnation, okay? So here's the concept. You may be aware that you can synthesize strands of DNA, okay? There's sequencing of DNA, which is reading it, and synthesizing DNA, which is creating strands of DNA. What's interesting is you can actually also do that at the full chromosome level for bacterial chromosomes. Remember that thing I was saying earlier about the minimum life form that Craig Venter made? So people have synthesized entire bacterial chromosomes, and they work. 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 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 23, and 46, whatever you take the pairs. What you can do is potentially print somebody out from disk, reincarnate them. In so far, if your sequence determines you, and you can argue with this because there's epigenetics and other stuff, okay? But let's just say to first order, your DNA sequence is Lex. You can sequence that, okay? You can do full genome sequencing and log that to a file. Then here's the 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 I think will be possible, right? Folks are working on it. I'm sure someone will mess with me. 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, that's actually a process for psychology to study. If you create a blank mind, 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, by the time one is age 20 or 30 or something in your 20s, 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, things that are idiosyncratic to your own physiology, you're like, oh, I'm totally wrecked if I get seven hours of sleep versus nine hours or whatever it is, right? People will have different kinds of things like this. That manual can be given to your next self so you can 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, or a slow metabolizer. Oh, that explains X or Y. Or I have a weird version of alcohol dehydrogenous. Oh, okay, that explains my alcohol tolerance. This is part of the broader category of what I call practical miracles, right? So it's longevity, it's genomic reincarnation, it is restoring sight, and it is curing deafness with the artificial eyes and artificial ears. It is the super solider serum. Did I show you that? So like myostatin null, a tweet about this, basically X-Men are real. So here is a study from an EGM 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, this is almost certainly a teenager by now. So this kid basically was just totally built. Yeah. Okay. Extraordinarily muscular. At a very young age. Yes. So the child's birth weight was in the 75th percentile, he appeared extraordinarily muscular, protruding muscles in his thighs, motor and mental development has been normal. Now at four and a half years of age, he continues to have increased muscle bulk and strength. And so essentially myostatin mutation is associated with gross muscle hypertrophy in a child. So this is like real life X-Men. Okay? And- And there's pictures of animals. Yes. So this is a company called Variant Bio that is looking at people who have exceptional health related traits and is looking for essentially this kind of thing, but maybe more disease or whatever related, right? For example, people who have natural immunity to COVID, understanding how that works, perhaps we can give other people artificial immunity to COVID, right? If you scroll up, you see my kind of tweet, super soldier serum is real, where it's like wild type mouse and a myostatin null. And look at the chest on that thing. You see the before and after. Wow. Okay. This is what's possible. This could be us, but you're regulating. You know, right? You know what I'm saying? Like this could be us, but you're regulating. This could be us, but the FDA regulating, right? All this- Oh yeah, on steroids. But it's not, that's the thing is- But it's not steroids. Well, that's the thing is people, again, you 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. That's good. But you know what? Like, have we actually put in that much effort into figuring out like the right way of doing testosterone supplementation or the right way of doing this? Obviously, we've managed to put a lot of effort into marijuana, increasing the potency of it or what have you. Could we put the effort into these kinds of drugs, right? These kinds of compounds? Maybe. I think that would actually be a really good thing. The thing about this is I feel this is just a massively underexplored area. Rather than people drinking caffeine all the time, that's a very mild enhancing drug. Okay? Nicotine is also arguably kind of like that. Some people have it even without the cigarettes, right? Why can't we research this stuff? One way of thinking about it is, you know, Lancer Armstrong, the cyclist, yes, he violated all the rules. You know, he shouldn't have won the Tour de France or anything like that. But his chemists, and I say this somewhat tongue in cheek, but also, you know, his chemists 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 were also juiced or whatever, right? Whatever was done there, take it out of the competition framework. There's a lot of testicular cancer patients or cancer patients period who would want some of that. And we should take that seriously, we should take that pursuit really, really, really seriously. Yes, except again, just like the Theranose stuff, all this pathologize, oh, it's a Balco scandal, oh, it says, oh my God, you know, and yes, of course, within the context of that game, they're cheating. When the context of life, you want to be cheating death, right? So it's just a kind of a reframe on what is good, right? And it is just taking away these assumptions that mild inflation is good or mild death is good and going towards transcendence. So that gets me done with the giant FDA, biomedical, et cetera, et cetera. Longevity, yeah. That's beautifully, beautifully done. You have two questions. One was on Trump and deplatforming and the other was on crypto and the state of crypto and the third is on India. Which one should we do? All right. Since we talked about how to fix government, we talked about how to fix health, medicine, FDA, longevity, let us briefly talk about how to fix social media, perhaps. Sure, very important. Since we kind of talked about it from different directions, but it'd be nice to just look at social media. And if we can perhaps first, as an example, maybe it's not a useful example, but to me, it was one that kind of shook me a little bit is the removal of Trump and since then other major figures, but Donald Trump was probably the biggest person ever to be removed from social media. Do you understand why that was done? Can you steel man the case for it and against it? And if there's something broken about that, how do we fix it? Steel man the case for is kind of obvious in the sense of you are seeing a would-be dictator who is trying to run a coup against democracy, who has his supporters go and storming the seat of government, who could use his app to whip up his followers across the country to reject the will of the people. And so you're an executive and you'll take actions that while perhaps controversial are still within the law and you'll make sure that you do your part to defend democracy by making sure that at least this guy's megaphone is taken away and that his supporters cannot organize more riots. That's basically the case for the deplatforming. Okay. Would you agree with that? So it's like really steel manning it. Yes, it's steel manning, so I'm giving the for case. Well, I guess I would like to separate the would-be dictator. Oh, I guess if you're storming the Capitol, you are a dictator. I see, I see. So those are two are interlinked, right? You have to have somehow a personal judgment of the person. Bad enough to be worth this significant step. Yeah, it's not just their actions or words in a particular situation, but broadly this person is dangerous. The context of everything that led up to this moment and so on, right? So that's a for case, right? Now the against case, there's actually several against cases, right? There's obviously the Trump supporters against case. There is the libertarian slash left libertarian 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, whether it was actually vote counts or just changes of all the rules for mail-in ballots and stuff. There were regular meetings between the Chamber of Commerce and AFL and the unions. In particular, they admit that the BLM riots of the mid 2020s were actually on a string and they could say stand down, right? So that's actually, that's a quote from this article where it's like, the word went out, stand down, protect the results, announced that it would not be activating the entire national mobilization network today, remains ready to activate if necessary. Pothoser credits the activists for their restraint. So basically the activists re-arranged the protected results protest towards a weekend of celebration. So point being that the fact that the Trump supporter would say the fact that they could tell them to stand down meant that the previous unrest was in part coordinated. And so it'd say, okay, so that makes it illegitimate in a different way, right? Plus, you know, well, there's one riot on Jan six versus the attacks on the White House and stuff, you know, there's storming of the White House in mid 2020 and then actually stormed the White House, but they're setting fires outside and it's quite a lot of stuff, right? So the second against case is the, let's say libertarian slash left libertarian who'd say, do we really want giant corporations, regardless of what you think about Trump and you don't have to be a Trump supporter. Do you really want giant corporations to be determining who can say what on the internet? And if they can deplatform 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 deplatform 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 backend, that would be corporate collusion by any other name. It's actually very similar to the so-called business plot against FDR. FDR was a complicated figure who can in some ways best be thought of as the least bad person bad communist dictator or socialist dictator of the 20th century. Why? Because he nationalized the economy, repealed the 10th Amendment, right? Tried to pack the courts. He 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, right? We don't usually think about the same guy who did this, did that. Earlier in his life, most people don't know this one, he led a whole Navy thing to entrap gay sailors. And do you know about this one? No. Yeah. Google FDR entrapment of gay sailors. Basically, he got young men to try to find folks within the Navy who were gay and then basically entrap them so that they could be prosecuted and what have you, right? FDR did a lot of stuff, but fundamentally nationalized the economy and set up the Alphabet Soup is what they called it at the time. That's like all these agencies or whatever. In some sense, he's continuous like there'd been a rising trend of centralization. Woodrow Wilson obviously centralized, Lincoln centralized, right? Even actually 1789 was a degree of centralization over the more loose thing that was 1776, 1789. So he was on that trend line, but he was definitely a huge kind of dog leg up. So the thing is that because of all the lawsuits that were flying, many folks like Amy Schles 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 were the bailouts good or bad? I think they were bad, but how could I prove it? I'd need to actually be able to fork the economy. Crypto actually allows you in theory to do that, like where folks could actually shift balance. Is this a whole separate thing where you can actually start to make macroeconomics into more of an experimental science rather than simply arguing from authority? You could argue from experiment. Some of the virtual economy stuff that Edward Castronova has done is relevant to this. We can talk about that. Point is though with FDR, there's 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 had been beating up. Again, Teddy Roosevelt had also been doing this with the trust buster. The journos at the time, Ida Tarbell had gone and basically ran all these articles and Rockefeller knocked him down. Woodrow Wilson in his 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 broke the whole thing open and told to Congress and so on. So this guy's, the whole plot was broken up. Now what we have thinking about today or the whole aftermath of Jan six is it's a business plot but in reverse because the generals and the CEOs both were against Trump and actually the business plot happened and now all the CEOs just, they pushed all the buttons that they needed to and now the network was prime over the state. Okay. Now why is that an interesting way of looking at it? Because one thing I have in the book is you can kind of think of 1950 as like ish as peak centralization. If you go forward and backward in time, things decentralized. 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, right? And of course, I think you could absolutely support Ukraine on other measures, but it's pretty hypocritical for the guys who profited from the Hall de Mour. The Oxlisborough family literally profited from denying the Hall de Mour to now make themselves cheerleaders for Ukraine. It's actually this insane thing which we can talk about. A tiny tangent on that. You put it brilliantly and a reminder for anyone who listens to me talk about Ukraine, it is possible to have empathy for a nation and not be part of the machine that generates a mainstream narrative. Yes, that's right. Like basically, you know, I was actually one of the first three Estonian residents, okay? And I completely understand why Estonia and the Baltics and all these countries, including Ukraine that just recently within living memory got their independence from the Soviet Empire, would not want to be forcibly reintegrated into a place that they just escaped from, you know? And so that is something which is sort of outside the American left-right, you know, tired kind of thing where when you understand it from that point of view, right? Then there's like a fourth point of view, which is like India's point of view or like much of the developing world or what I call, you know, parts of it are, you know, ascending, parts are 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, you know, we've got a lot of wars in our neck of the woods and human rights crises that Europe just didn't even care about. So it can't be that Europe's problems are the world's problems, but the world's problems are not Europe's problems, right? So that's like a fourth point of view. Then a fifth point of view is China, which is like, guess what? We're going to be the Iran of the Iraq war, you know, where like who won the Iraq war? Iran, arguably, because they extended their influence into Iraq, right? So China's like, guess what? We're going to turn Russia into our gas station and build a pipeline. They're building, there's a power, Siberia is like the name of the Eastern Russia pipeline, just like Nord Stream is, you know, Nord Stream one and Nord Stream two. I think they're building a new pipeline, you know, through Mongolia. So Xi Jinping and Putin and the Mongolian head of state were all photographed kind of thumbs-upping this pipeline. We'll see if it goes through, but it's ironic that, you know, Russia wanted to make Ukraine their, you know, colony, but the outcome of this war may be that Russia becomes China's colony, you know? So that's at least like five different perspectives, right? There's like the US establishment perspective, there's the, you know, Tucker-Maga perspective, there's the Baltics and Ukrainian perspective, there's like the Indian and like poor countries perspective, then there's Chinese perspective, and then of course there's the Russians, right? So just respect to that, by the way, that's another example of history happening in reverse. This is the sign of Soviet partnership, except this time China 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 you know, I'm going to list a few more actually, because there's so, so, so many of them. Do you have an explanation why that happens? Yes. Let me just list a few of them. This is in the, the Network State book, it's in the chapter called Fragmentation Frontier Fourth Turning Futures Are Past, right? So I give this example of like a fluid unmixing, right? Just watch this for a second, right? This is from Smart Every Day Unmixing Color Machine, Ultra-Limited Reversible Flow, Smart Every Day 217. And so you can mix something, and then like this thing that you don't think of as reversible, you can unmix it, which is insane, right? That it works. Okay, the physics of that situation, it just works, right? So for people just listening, that there is whatever the mixture this is, this is ultra-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 it's just like the futures are past these things. 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, it's just an interesting visual model for what's happening in the world as we re-decentralize after the centralized century, right? So basically, I mentioned the Internet frontier reopens back then the Western frontier closed. Today we experienced COVID-19. Back then we experienced the Spanish flu, tech billionaires and we had the capitol industry, right? Today founders like Alon and Dorsey are starting to win against establishment journalists. Back then, Ida Tarbell demagogued and defeated Rockefeller. I think net-net founders win this time versus the journos. Back then the journos won over the founders, okay? Today we have cryptocurrencies. Back then we had private banking. Today this is an amazing one. We have a populist movement of digital gold advocates. Back then, because Bitcoin maximalist 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 and the cross of gold speech. Gold was considered a tool of big business. Now gold is the tool against big business and big government, right? Digital gold, yeah. Digital gold, right. Today we have the inflation and cultural conflict of Weimar like America. Back then we had the inflation and cultural conflict of Weimar Germany. Today in Weimar America we have right and left fighting in the streets. Same unfortunately in Weimar Germany. Peter Turchin has written about, today we have what Turchin considers antebellum like polarization like pre-war polarization. Back then, if you go further back in time, we had what we now know to be antebellum polarization, right? Today we have Airbnb. Back then we had Flophouses. Today we have Uber. Back then we had Gypsy cabs. So today we see the transition from neutral to yellow journalism. Back then we saw the transition from yellow to neutral journalism, right? And 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, right? Wrote this whole long book, which I didn't even realize he wrote about these kind of topics about the problem of China. And one of his observations was, again, I'm not saying this is, I'm just saying he made this observation. He was saying that America was energetic and China laconic at the time because everybody was in opium dams and so on and so forth, okay? Four 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 Web 3 protocols. That's fascinating, yeah. That's where it 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. I think it's one of these things where China's risen, India's like about 10 years behind China, but I think this is the Indian decade in many ways. We can come back to that point. But there's absolutely sparks of light in Africa. I mean, it's a huge continent. It sounds like the more behind so I had to interrupt, the more behind you are, the more opportunity you have to leapfrog. Sometimes, that's right. It 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 in history? 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 may disagree? Do you want to open the door to total corporate oligarchy? That's why I mentioned it's like the opposite of business plots and they pulled on that thread. Okay? So the macro explanation that I have for this future is our past thesis and there's more. It also gives some predictions, right? If you go backwards in time, the US federalizes into many individual states. Before the Civil War, people said the United States are and after they said the United States is. Before FDR, the 10th Amendment, reserved rights to the states. Afterwards, it was just federal regulation of everything. As we go forwards in time, you're seeing states break away from the feds on gun laws, drug laws, sanctuary cities, okay? Many other kinds of things. Now, Florida, for example, has its own guard that's like not a national guard, but like a state guard. Other states are doing this. And that's a force of decentralization, saying that parallels in reverse. In reverse, right? So you're having make America states again. Nice. Okay. That's what I think happening, right? I'm not saying I, 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, a better term is micro-states because they're actually not nations. That's why they don't work. But micro-states are better, right? Going 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. So if you weren't talking about tradition, that doesn't matter. Traditionally. In terms of like, I thought you meant nation is a thing that carries across the generations. There's a tradition, there's a culture and so on, and state is just the layer- I mean, that's also another way of thinking about it, right? There's a reversal there as well. Okay. Yeah. So I mean, one way of thinking about it is, one nation under God indivisible is no longer true. It is, America is at least two nations, the Democrat and Republican, in the sense of their own cultures, where I can show you graph after graph. You've seen the polarization graphs. I can show you network diagrams where 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 shares on Facebook and Twitter are just separate sub graphs. 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 of their way. What that means is in one generation, ideology becomes biology. These become ethnic groups. It takes on the character of Hoodoo and Tutsi or Protestant and Catholic, Sunni and Shiite. It's not about ideology. If you think about all the flips during COVID, right, where people were on one side versus the other side, it's tribal. It's just tribe on tribe. And so it's not universalist that identity of American makes less sense than the identity of Democrat and Republican right now or perhaps identity of individual states. What I think that's a good or bad thing, I think that's unfortunately, whatever it is, it's the arrow of history, right? On the opposite side of things, India is actually was 562 princely states at the time of Indian unification from 1947 to 19... 1947 when they got independence from the British, it was 562 princely states. Most people don't know that part. They got, or outside India don't know that part. It got unified into a republic only by like 1950. And India is like actually a modern... India is like Europe. It's kind of like the European Union in the sense that we didn't have a unified India in the past. It was something with a lot of different countries like Northern South India or like Gujarat and Tamil Nadu are as different as Finland and Spain, okay? But India is moved in the direction of much more unification, like much more centralization or what have you, whereas the US is decentralized. You go, okay, a few more things. There are flips and I'll finish this off. Today we're seeing the rise of the pseudonymous founder and starved societies. All the way back in the 1770s, we saw pseudonymous founders of starved countries, namely the US, right? The Federalist Papers. Today we're seeing so far unsuccessful calls for wealth seizures in the US. Back then we saw FDR's Executive Earth 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 like a breakup potential in the future, right? One other thing that kind of rhymes is in many ways like the modern US establishment, the story that you hear is the victories in 1945 and 1865 legitimate the current establishment. That is being the Nazis, being the Confederates, right? So they beat the ethnic nationalists abroad and they beat the, quote, secessionists at home, right? And the ethnic nationalists were Aryan Nazis and the secessionists were slave owners and against freedom and so on and so forth, okay? I'm not disputing that, I'm just saying that that's just like the way people think about it. There's a possibility, and I'm not saying it's 100% at all, okay? But if you're a sci-fi writer, there's a possibility that the US loses to the ethnic nationalists abroad, except this time they're Chinese communists, non-white communists, as opposed to Aryan Nazis, which seemed like the total opposite, okay? And there's a possibility that there is a financial secession at home where it's Bitcoin maximalist states that are advocating for freedom, the opposite of slavery. See what I'm saying? Oh boy, that's dark. You're looking for major things in history that don't yet have a- Cognate going forward, right? And that's a nice way to think about the future. It is only one model, and any mental model or something like that. That's why I say as a sci-fi scenario, it's just like a scenario one could contemplate, right? Where the new version has, I mean, the Chinese communists do not think of themselves as Aryans, but they are ultra-nationalist. And the Hitler comparisons, people talk about Hitler endlessly, like Saddam is a new Hitler, everybody's a new Hitler, et cetera. If there is a comparison to quote Nazi Germany, it is CCP China in a sense, why? They are non-English speaking, manufacturing powerhouse with a massive military build out under one leader that is a genuine peer competitor to the US on many dimensions, and in fact, exceeding on some dimensions of technology and science, right? The problem is it's a boy who cried wolf. People say this a zillion times, right? And that is like, I'm not saying this, by the way, crucially, 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 attacked on this basis or what have you. The other thing is that many Chinese people will say, well, look, relative to where we were when Deng took over in 1978, we built up the entire country. We're not starving to death anymore, and the West wants to recolonize us. And so I understand where that's coming from. This way you 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 people are like, oh, I think this is, again, I have nothing personal. There's this guy, Peter Zahan, he writes these books, right? I probably agree with about 20 or 30%, but I disagree with a lot of the rest. And a bunch of it is basically about how China's really weak and America's really strong and the rest of the world is screwed. And I think there's absolutely problems in China, and the current management is actually messing a lot of things up. We could talk about that. But I do think that the US is fighting its factory. So one thing Zion will talk about is how America has this blue water Navy, all the aircraft carriers, and China has nothing, it's got bupkis, et cetera. Well, China ships things all around the world, right? It probably has one of the most active fleets out there in terms of 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 300 X 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 Nazi Germany in a serious fight is they had this giant manufacturing plant that was overseas and they just outproduced, right? And they supplied the Soviets also with Lend-Lease and the Soviets talked about how they would not have won the war without the Americans. People are like, oh, the Russians fought the Germans. The Russians armed by Americans fought the Germans. 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 Klemogorov and so on. There's amazing Russian scientists and engineers. So I'm not saying that- I mean, in general, from brilliant folks like yourself that criticize communism, it's too easy to say nothing communism produces is good, which of course is not true. There's a lot of brilliant people and a lot of even, 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 red and yellow. The branding is stellar. Nazi Germany to excellent branding with the flag and so on. Ends there in terms of compliments. Yeah. Well, actually they copied a lot of stuff from each other. 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 the same pose. It's almost like, you know how AI will do style transfer? You can almost see, because the socialist realism style of the muscular brawny worker is very similar to the style of the Aryan Superman, pointing at the vermin or whatever. And then there's the crappy open source version that tries to copy, which is Mussolini. That does the same exact thing, but does it kind of shittier. So my main thing about this is basically 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, the future is not yet determined, right? At all odds, we want to avoid a hot war between, I mean, a hot war between the US and China would be- Do you think it's possible that we'll get a war? We're doing these things like Pelosi going to Taiwan and trying to cause something. Like look, again, this is one of these things which is complicated because obviously 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 one of China's many neighbors, you look at China with apprehension. Like Vietnam, for example, has sort of fallen into, or not fallen into, is partnering with India because they're mutually apprehensive of China. China's not making great friends with its neighbors. It's demonizing Japan. It's so ultra-nationalist nowadays. And so if you're a Taiwanese, you're like, yeah, I do not want to be under the Chinese surveillance state. I completely understand that. Some people are pro-reunification, others aren't, but there's more trend in some ways for independence. Okay, fine. But there's also an increasing temperature across the entire world. As we sit here today, there 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 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 the balance of terror. There were smart guys on both sides who thought through this and there were near misses, right? There's that story about the Soviet colonel who didn't order a nuclear strike because he thought it was just an error in the instruments, right? Okay, what's the point? The point is, for example, policy going to Taiwan, that didn't strengthen Taiwan. If you're going to go and provoke China, I thought Scholar Stage, his Twitter account, had a good point, which is if you're actually going to do it, then you strengthen Taiwan with huge battalions of arms and material and you make them a porcupine and so on and so forth. Instead, her kind of going and landing there and mooning China and then flying back in the middle of a hot war with Russia, that's absolutely in the middle of an economic crisis or whatever. It just, can you pick battles or whatever, right? It's like you don't have to fight Russia and China at the same time. It's like kind of insane to do that, okay? Plus even with Ukraine, some people were like, oh, this was like a victory for US military policy or something. There was a guy who, I'm not trying to beat him up or anything, he was 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. The reason is US didn't focus on some high-end Chinese objects, but on core military tasks that focus should remain. 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. Now, Ukraine is like this Syria-like battleground with a million refugees or whatever the number is, right? The country is blown to smithereens, thousands of people dead, whatever thousand dollar gas in Europe with like 10X energy, radicalized Russians, the threat of World War III or even nuclear war. Shooting somebody isn't, that's not like the point of a military. The point is there's a million ways to smash Humpty Dumpty into pieces and unleash the blood-drenched tides, right? And have people all shooting each other and killing each other. It's really hard to maintain stability. That's what competence is, is deterrence and stability, right? There's not like a success in any way. It's like an absolute tragedy for everybody involved, right? Yeah. I mean, deterrence of course is the number one thing, but there's a lot to be said there, but I'm a huge not fan of declaring victory as we've done many times when it's the wrong. Yeah. I mean, the other thing about this is the whole mission accomplished thing during your book. Mission accomplished is what I meant, yeah. Exactly. And so obviously, the thing is Russia lives next door to Ukraine. And so, I mean, just like Iraq lives next door to Iran and Afghanistan is next door to Pakistan and China. And so if the US eventually gets tired of it and leaves, those guys are next door, right? And so, who knows what's going to happen here, okay? But one of the problems is like the whole Afghanistan thing or the Iraq thing is the lesson for people was the uncertainty. They're like, is the US 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 like Putin or whatever, right? So point is coming all the way back up, we were talking about how history, futures are past and FDR, like the business plot, FDR failed, but the tech companies were able to de-platform Trump, right? And the left libertarian would say, do we want that much corporate power? Okay. So we gave the four case for Trump de-platforming, protecting democracy, the Trump supporter case against, which is on the secret history of the shadow campaign to save the 2020 election, basically that article, the left libertarian or libertarian case against. And then to me, what is, 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, you know, AMLO, he was the head of state of Mexico, I think at that time, okay? AMLO, Macron, other folks, everybody who's watching this around the world basically saw, let's say US establishment or Democrat aligned folks just decapitate the head of state digitally, right? Like just boom, gone, okay? And they're like, well, if they can do that in public to the US president who's ostensibly the most powerful man in the world, what does the Mexican president stand against that? Nothing, right? Like these US 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 de-platform Xi Jinping off of Sino Weibo, they'd probably just fall through a trap door, you know, their whole family, right? But for the rest of the world that is hosting their business, their politics on these US tech companies, they're like, regardless of whether it was justified on this guy, that means they will do it to anybody. Now the seal is broken. Just like the bailouts, as exceptional as they were in the first year, everybody was shocked by them. Then they became a policy instrument. And now this bailout's 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. People that platforms in general see as dangerous. Hitler, you can go, we keep bringing it up. Of course. That's the ultimate edge case. Right. In the sense of that saying like something must be done. This is something. Therefore, this must be done. Right. I've heard that one before. No, but I love it. So can I just use that as an explanation with confidence for everything I do? Yeah, sure. There you go. Right. Something must be done. Therefore, this must be done. So that is the like the two, all kinds of regulations, all kinds of things are kind of justified on that basis. Right. And there's a version of that, which is punch a Nazi. I decide who is a Nazi. You're a Nazi. Therefore I punch you and that's justified. Yeah. And you know, like people say, oh, how many people are calling Israelis? You know, like these things. Right. And so the problem with argumentum ad hellerum is it just, I mean, people will say Obama's a Nazi. Right. Everybody's a Nazi. Right. But there is a social consensus about who, let's set Nazi aside, but who is dangerous for society. Okay. But now let's talk about that. All right. So basically I think a more interesting example than Hitler in this context is Herbert Matthews. So Fidel Castro, before he became the communist dictator of Cuba, was on the run. He was like Osama bin Laden at the time. He's 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 like, you know, photo of Castro looking all mighty and so on. And he's like, Castro is still alive and still fighting. Okay. And there's this book on this called The Man Who Created Fidel. Okay. Where basically NYT's article was crucial positive press that got Castro's point of view out to the world and helped lead to the communist revolution that actually impoverished Cuba, led to like gay people being, you know, like discriminated against there, led to people fleeing, you know, and drowning trying to escape. Right? That's an example of where platforming somebody led to a very bad outcome. In fact, many of the communist dictators in the 20th century had like their own personal journalists. Right? For example, there's a guy, John Reed. He's an American. He's buried. You know, if I get this right, I think he's buried at the Kremlin wall. Okay. Why is an American buried there? Okay. Because he wrote a book called Ten Days That Shook the World that whitewashed the entire Soviet revolution and the Russian revolution in 1917, October Revolution, and made these guys out to be the good guys when they were actually genocidal psychopaths. Okay. He got their point of view out to the world and it was a totally misleading point of view. All right. So what do you think he was thinking? Do you think he saw the psychopathy? You know, sometimes it's not obvious. Well, the French Revolution had already happened. So people kind of knew that this sort of psychopathic killing in the name of equality could produce bad results. Right? But it's more than that. Right? So it's John Reed. It's Herbert Matthews. It's Edgar Snow. Okay. So these are all people who should be extremely famous. Right? So Edgar Snow is Mao's journalist. Okay. So he wrote, you know, here's the, there's actually an article in this how 1930s reporter from Missouri became China's ideal journalist. Okay. And he wrote various books, including like Red Star Over China. Okay. And it's just a hagiography of Mao. Right? Yeah. And then of course you've got Durante. He is like Stalin's biographer. Right? Just to recap, John Reed brought Lenin's message to the world. Mao is dead. Durante helped Stalin starve out the Ukrainians. Lenin is dead. Edgar Snow was Mao's biographer. And Herbert Matthews was like Castro's. This guy, David Halberstam in Vietnam, who was effectively Ho Chi Minh. 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 Pham, Pham Suan An, Time Magazine reporter and Vietnamese communist agent. That guy was the source of many fabricated stories that David Halberstam printed in the New York Times that led to the undermining of the South Vietnamese regime. And you know, for example, stories of Buddhists being killed and so on. Ashley Rinsburg in the Great Lady Wink writes this whole thing up at length so you can go and read it for his account. But basically all of these communist dictators had a journalist right alongside them as their biographer. Yeah. Okay. But those are tools of the propaganda machine versus- Well, so my point is these are five examples that are on the far left that should be balanced also against the Times running profiles of Hitler on the far right. We know that the Times actually also ran a whole thing, which was Hitler's like mountain retreat or something like that. Do you know about that story? What year was this? I'll tell you in a second. Hitler at home in the clouds. Oh boy. Please tell me it's like early thirties. I think it's, oh yeah, this is auto-detolish us. This is actually a guy that Ashley Rinsburg writes up in the Great Lady Wink, right? 1937. 37. There's another one where I think the date is wrong, but it's 39. But essentially these titles are like where Hitler dreams and plans. He lives simply, you know, right? And there's another one, Hare Hitler at home in the clouds. Okay. The thing about this is absolutely there are folks who are hate geographers of the far right, but whether you're talking Lenin and John Reed or Stalin and Walter Durante of the New York Times or Castro and Herbert Matthews again of the New York Times or Edgar Snow and Mao or David Halliburstam 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, you know, lunatics, right? And I think part of the issue here is, you know the saying about how communists don't understand self-interest, nationalists don't understand other interests. And so nationalists are more obvious. Isn't that good? I thought it was good. It's pretty good. Right? Pretty good. So the nationalist is very obvious in the sense of like they're for the Aryans. They're not even for like the Slavs or whatever, right? Like you know, basically, you know, had Hitler constructed a different ideology, you know, then like he might've gotten more support in Eastern Europe or whatever, right? But he also called the Slavs inferior, not just, you know, basically everybody was inferior to the Aryans, okay? Except maybe the English or whatever, but that was it, right? Oh, and the Japanese are honorary Aryans or something. So the nationalist declares the supremacy of their own race or culture or what have you and doesn't understand people's other interests. 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 Soviet nationalism where in particular Russians were pushed into many territories and, you know, Russian speakers were, you know, like privileged in, you know, the Eastern Europe and the Baltics. Of course, Russians themselves were oppressed at home as sultan's rights here, both victim and victimizer of the regime. Their churches were crushed and so on. As compensation, they were agents of empire. It's a tragedy all around, okay? I think Russians have been hard done in many ways. They've had a very hard century. They've also done hard by others, okay? It's complicated. And the journalist 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. Because podcasts made it much more popular and common is it somehow makes it easier not to do this kind of bullshit journalism that- The gotcha stuff, yeah. I feel like asking interesting and deep questions allow, I think you could sit down with Hitler in 1940, 1941, 1942, and the podcast actually serve a purpose. In 41 and 42, mid-World War II? A purpose of one, which is very important, get good information for the future so history can study it. And two, reveal to the world the way a man thinks that is beyond the propaganda. So all this stuff is complicated, but today, so the specific issue of the folks you were talking about, like Putin, Xi, Trump, right? For those folks, they are very clearly outgroup for both the US left and right, which is, it'll 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- Those are water tankies? Tankies are those who are, they may call themselves tankies. Let's say they're anti-imperialist left and MAGA right, okay? For different reasons are against the US establishment and for Putin or Xi or something like that as an agent against US establishment, right? So leaving those aside, the point is that most of your audience is sort of on guard, vaccinated in a sense, right? Versus Xi and Putin and Trump, right? They know the counter arguments and so on and so forth, okay? 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 when what John Reed was doing and so on, when he was the sole source of information about the Russian revolution, right? That's different. That's different, right? So it's something about, it kind of gets back to the competitive environment and so on. There's no dearth of folks who are writing critical coverage of these three men, right? And so if I felt that that was insufficient, then you might need more of it, right? 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, right? That's why I brought those guys, right? Because often it's kind of like, have your stock shelves at a supermarket and so seem totally out of left field. No, but shoes, but the same thing, Sears, I used to work at Sears. The thing that is the most popular is the thing that's not on the shelf because it's been sold out, right? So in some ways, this is similar to that famous photo that people have, or image that people have on Twitter of the plane and the parts that are shot versus not, right? The survivorship bias, right? And one way of kind of thinking about it is the guys who you think of as bad guys or possible bad guys or controversial guys or whatever are those you've already got some vaccination to. That's why you think of them at all. Whereas the folks that I mentioned, the regulators, invisible, right? Salzberger, you know Zuckerberg, you know his pros and cons, you know who he is as a person. You don't even know Salzberger exists, most people, right? Despite the fact that he's like, certainly is powerful. He owns the New York Times, he inherits it. He also got dual class stock, just like Zuck. But he's invisible, right? Well, that's why I think studying the knowns, the people that are known can help you generalize to the way human nature is. And then you start to question, are the same kind of humans existing in places that wield power? 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 I'm like, 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 regulated marketplace and how do we do better? As critical as I can be of the Fed, I recognize that some kind of monetary policy is necessary. And Satoshi came up with a better one, right? As harsh as one can be a critic of the current system, it is really incumbent as difficult as that is upon one to come up with a better version. Just like academia, as much as I think current science is corrupted, what I propose is a way to actually improve on that. And actually any true 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 with that, but just enough to build that better version and not regress. There's an implied optimism within the V1, V2, V3 framework. Let me ask you at a high level about social media because you are one of its prominent users to communicate your wisdom. I use Twitter, I wouldn't really think of it as quick communicate my wisdom per se or anything like that. I use Twitter like I might use GitHub as a scratch pad for just kind of floating concepts. And 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 lasting impact that your scratch book? I think it's good, but basically like if I say that's what's my primary thing on Twitter, it's that. It's a scratch pad for me to kind of put some concepts out there, iterate on them, get feedback on them and so on and so forth. Do you think it's possible that the words you've tweeted on Twitter is the most impact you will have? On the world? On the world. Is that possible? Is it possible? Well, my tweets- That you gave me. It's a good question. I think the network state will be, I think, important or I hope it... Well, the book- The book or the concept. Good question. The movement. The movement. Right? In the sense that Zionism shows that it is possible to have a book and then a conference and then a fund and eventually in the fullness of time with a lot of time and effort to actually get a state, right? 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 so you know where the network state is popular? In places like Catalonia. Catalonian nationalists. In Catalonia, guys are a committed Catalonian 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 part of a separate nation. Not all, many, okay? And so they want a state of their own. Who doesn't if you're a nation? You know, meaning that they've got a legitimate claim from history, language, culture, all that stuff, right? The Basques do as well. The Kurds do as well, okay? Lots of ethnic groups around the world do. So in the game of musical chairs, that was the formation of current national borders, they lost out, right? So what do they do? Well, one answer is they just submit to the Spanish state and they just speak Spanish and their culture is erased and their history is erased and so on. The second is they do some sort of Ireland-like insurgency, the troubles to try to get a thing of their own, which is obviously bad for other kinds of reasons, right? You know, violent, et cetera. What this Catalonian nationalist said is 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 site called Vilaweb, sorry. It can be, meaning the network state can be especially appealing to us. Catalans are now embarking on the task of having a normal and current state in the old way and this is a project that we cannot give up. But this does not mean that at the same time we are not also attentive to ideas like this and we do not try to learn and move forward, right? Meaning, you know, the network state, right? Because that's the third way, which says, okay, maybe this particular region is not something where you're 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 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 really 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 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 region called New Caledonia and that's in the Southwest Pacific. So maybe New Catalonia is somewhere else, right? So if you're flexible on that, now of course, a bunch of people will immediately say, they'll have 50 different objections to this. They'll say, oh, you don't get it. The whole point is the land and you know, so on. They've been there for generations. So I do get it, but this Catalan nationalist who's like literally written in Catalonian for I don't know how many years, right? Is basically saying this is worth thinking about. And so it's a peaceful third way. Yeah, but it's interesting. I mean, it's a good question whether Elon Musk, SpaceX and Tesla will be successful without Twitter. Yeah, I don't think as successful. I mean, obviously they existed before Twitter and a lot of the engineering problems are obviously non-Twitter things, right? But Twitter itself has certainly probably helped Musk with Tesla sales. The engineering, no, that's not what I mean. The best people in the world solve the engineering problems. Yes, but he hires the people to solve them and he knows enough about engineering to hire those people. That's the point I'm making 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. I think Twitter is a great place to make viral ideas that are compelling to people, whatever those ideas are. And whether that's the network state or whether that's humans becoming a multi-planetary species. Here is a remark I had just before the pandemic related to this, okay, about Twitter helping Elon just beyond that for a second. Maybe centralization is actually also underexplored in the design space. For example, today's social networks are essentially governed by a single CEO, but that CEO is a background figure. They aren't leading the users to do anything. What if they did? One example, could Elon Musk's then 30 million followers somehow get us to Mars faster? Tools for directed collaborative work by really large groups on the internet are still in their infancy. The 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 in operational transformation. Microtasks like Mechanical Turk, Scale AI and Earn.com before we sold it. These encrypted obviously the polymath project where a bunch of people parallel processed and we're able to solve an open math problem by collaborating. Wikipedia with its flaws that we talked about. Social networks and group messaging. All these are ways for collaborating. They're not just simply attacking or doing something on the internet. This is something that Elon could use, right? What works and what doesn't about Twitter? If there's something that's broken, how would you fix it? A million things I can say here. So a few things. First is fact checking. I had this kind of fun, I thought it was a funny tweet. To anyone who wants to quote ban lying on social media, please write down a function that takes in a statement and returns whether it is true. If you can start with the remand hypothesis, that would be amazing. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That's kind of funny, right? That's funny. And so now- That joke landed on like five people. Sure. You want to explain the joke? Go. Well, no, there's a lot of problems, the citability where the truth, that's what proofs in math is, the truth of the thing is actually exceptionally difficult to determine. And that's just a really nice example. The problems that persist across centuries that have not been solved by the most brilliant minds, they're essentially true or false problems. That's right. And so when people are saying, when they were saying they want to ban lying on social media, fact check social media, the assumption is that they know what is true. And what do they mean by that? They really mean the assertion of political power, right? With that said, do I think it could be useful to have some kind of quote fact checking thing? Yes, but it has to be decentralized and open source. You could imagine an interesting concept of coding trugal, like a Google that returned what was true. It's like a modified version. I like it. Right? It's like GPT-3, but the stable diffusion version where it's open. Okay. And so now anybody, stable diffusion shows it is possible to take an expensive AI model and put it out there, right? So you have, you know what a knowledge graph is? Like basically, you wouldn't actually, whether you have it as RDF or like a triple store kind of thing or some other representation, it's like an ontology of A is a B and B has a C and it's got probabilities on the edges sometimes and other kinds of metadata. And this allows Google to show certain kinds of one box information where it's like, what is Steve Jobs', what is Lorene Powell Jobs' age or birthday? They can pull that up out of the knowledge graph, right? And so you can imagine that trugal would have both deterministic and statistical components 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? So that's one concept of like what next social media looks like. There's actually so much more. Another huge thing is decentralized social media, okay? Social media today is like China under communism in a really key sense. There's a great article called The Secret Document That Transformed China. Do you know what China was like before 1978? I know about the atrocities. Sure. So put some flesh on the bones, 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- But great biographies because of that were written. Like I'm currently reading Mao's Great Famine by Frank de Carter, which is, whoo boy. It's crazy, okay? Yeah. Here's the thing is capitalism was punishable by death in living memory in China. Just to explain what that meant, okay? I mean, that's what communism was, right? It was literally the same China that has the entrepreneurs and Jack Ma and so on and so on. 40 something years ago, capitalism was punishable by death. To give you a concrete example, this is a famous story in China. It may be apocryphal, but it's what the folks have talked about. There's a village in Xiaogang, and basically all the grain that you were supposed to produce was supposed to go to the collective. Even one straw belonged to the group. At one meeting with communist party officials, a farmer asked, what about the teeth in my head? Do I own those? Answer, no. Your teeth belong to the collective. Okay? Now, the thing is that when you're taking 100% of everything, okay, work hard, don't work hard, everyone gets the same, so people don't want to work, right? So what happened? These farmers gathered in secret and they did something that 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 collect grain, they've got something. We'll be able to keep some of it. If any of us are killed for doing this, then the contract said that the others would take care of their children. Okay? To keep some of what you earned, I mean, just think about how- They formed a mini capitalism society within the communist, a secret capitalism society amongst five people. Right. So now that they could keep some of what they earned, right? So keep some of what you earned, they had a bumper harvest. And you know what happened with that bumper harvest? That made the local officials really suspicious and mad. They weren't happy that there was a bumper harvest. They're like, what are you doing? You're doing capitalism? Right? And in a few years earlier, they might have just been executed. And in fact, many were. That's what it means when you see millions dead. Millions dead means guys were shot for keeping some grain for themselves. Okay? It means like guys came and kicked in the door of your collective farm and raped your wife and took you off to a prison camp and so on and so forth. That's what communism actually was. Okay? It hasn't been depicted in movies. There's a great post by Ken Billingsley in the year 2000 called, if I get this right, Hollywood's Missing Movies. Okay? This is basically here. I'll paste this link so you can put 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. And 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. Anyway. Otherwise, if I say something, it sounds too surprising, so that's why I want to make sure I have... 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. Instead, he's like, we can reform in one place. And in fact, he fenced it off from the rest of China and it did trade with Hong Kong and he spent his political capital on this one exception. It grew so fast, they gave him more political capital. Some people think actually that the Sino-Vietnamese war was 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 is changed. Okay? 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. Right? It's really good. Yeah, yeah. I'm enjoying your metaphors and way of talking about stuff. Yeah, yeah. Swap. You could, yeah. Rebranding and swap the front end. Reinterpretation, swap the back end. That's right. And 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 this on the front end, sometimes I want to do this on the back end, sometimes it's explicit, and sometimes the user doesn't need to see it and it's on the back end. Lots of political stuff 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 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 is that one example. I go through an extended description of this in the book, but the Republicans were the radical Republicans, the left of 1865. They won the revolution and their moral authority led them to have economic authority 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, et cetera, were boxed out from the plumb positions in the late 1800s. And so what happened was the Republicans turned their moral authority into economic authority, made tons of money. The Democrats then started repositioning, not as a party of the Southern racists, but the poor, right? And the cross of gold speech by William James Bryan was part of that. There's a gradual process that reaches a crucial mark with the election of FDR, where it's actually not the 1932, but 1936 election that black voters switched over to FDR. Okay? That was actually the major flip to like 70% to the Democrats. Now they'd reposition as a party of the poor, not the party of the South, okay? And Republicans had lost some economic authority, or rather they had moral authority, they turned into economic authority. They started to lose some moral authority. The loss of moral authority was complete by 1965. That was actually a mop-up. People dated the civil rights movement as the big wave where the Republicans lost moral authority. It's not really, that was a mop-up because 1936, 30 years earlier was when black voters switched to the Democrats, okay? So 1965 was another 10 points moving over of black voters to Democrats. Republicans had completely lost moral authority 100 years after the Civil War, okay? Then the next 50 years, that loss of moral authority meant that they lost economic authority because now you wouldn't want a Republican bigot as a CEO of your tech company anymore, would you, right? So by 2015, now you have, it's like two sign waves that are staggered, right? Moral authority leads to economic authority, leads to loss of, moral authority leads to loss of economic authority. And so now you have the, the Democrats have completed 155 year arc from the defeated party in the Civil War to the dominant party in the US establishment. All the woke capitalists are now at the very top. And now the same repositioning is happening where if you're so woke, why are you rich? You get it, right? Like, you know, if you're so smart, why aren't you rich is the normal kind of thing, right? If you're so woke, if you're so holy, why is like, for example, the BLM founder, why do they have this million dollar mansion, right? If you're so woke and it's all about being good and you're anti-capitalist, how come you seem to be raking in the money, et cetera, right? This is an argument which I'm not sure how long it will go. It might take years to play out, it might take decades to play out. I think it 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 printed money, you don't have anything that's legitimate, you don't actually own anything, it's all a handout from the government and so on and so forth, right? And so that's a counter positioning that will basically attack the wokes by how much money they're making. They're not contesting the ideology. So when one guy signals economics, you signal culture. When the other guy signals culture, you signal economics. That's actually, that's the whole thing I can talk about. Should I talk about that for a second? Sure. Is this integrated into the forces that you talk about? You've talked about the three forces, the trifecta of forces that affect our society, which is the wokes, let's say- Woke capital, communist capital, crypto capital. You talk so fast, and I think so slow. No, no, no. Woke capital, communist capital, and crypto capital. Can you explain each of those three? We actually talked about each of the three in part, but it'd be nice to bring them together in a beautiful triangle. Okay. 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. Okay? All right. So NYTCCPBTC 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 just submit. CCP is an embodiment of communist capital that you're talking about. Well, yeah. And by the way, in China, they call it CPC. So basically they don't like it usually if you say CCP, right? So the communist party of China as opposed to Chinese communist party over there. 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 integrated. When we say communist, what do you mean here? Why is the word communist important? Why don't you just say China? So is communist an important word? Or is it just a catchy label? It's a catchy label, but I think it's also important because 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? In the 1980s, you wouldn't think the communists would become capitalists, but they did. You wouldn't think that the wokes, the progressives, right, would become so enamored with giant corporations and their power, right? They've seen something to liken that, right? And you also wouldn't think that the non-Americans or the post-Americans or the internationalists would be the champions of capital because you think it's the American nation, right? So, rather than the conservative American nationalists being the defenders of capital, you have the liberal Americans who are with capital, you have the communist Chinese who are with capital, and you have the internationalists who are with capital. And it's the conservative American nationalists who are in some ways against that, which is kind of funny, right? So it's like this weird ideological flippening that if you take the long lens, you have these poles that kind of repel each other, okay? So just on the CCP-NYT-BDC thing- NYT, by the way, is woke capital. Yeah. What is NYT? So its formula is a little interesting. If CCP is just you must submit because they're powerful, okay, and then you bow your head because the Chinese Communist Party is strong. Woke capital is you must sympathize. Why do you bow your head, Lex? Oh, because you're a white male. Therefore you're guilty. You must bow your head because you are powerful. But notice it ends in the same place, in your head looking to the ground, right? In China, it's because they're powerful, so therefore you must bend your head. For the Wokes, it's the left-handed version where you are powerful and it's shameful, so you should bow your head, right? Right. Okay? But it ends in your head bowed. It's an ideology of submission. It's not that subtle, but it's like somewhat subtle. And then finally, crypto capital is head held high. You must be sovereign, okay? 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 white supremacist and whatever nonsense is happening today is terrible, but a society that's totally stripped of sympathy is also not one that one would want to be part of, right? That's just like the, whether it's 4chan's actual culture or it's feign culture or something like that or some weird combination, that's also not good. It's like Russia in the 90s, 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 conversely- It's like 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 the, you will own nothing and be happy. Everything's in the cloud and can be deleted at any point, right? So each of these is kind of has badness when it's there, but also it's total extreme opposite is bad. And so you want to kind of carve out like an intelligent intermediate of these three poles and that's the decentralized center or the recentralized center I call it. Now with that said, I think there is a repositioning in particular of vote 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 Rosato's graph that Paul Graham posted? No, but this is a good chance to say that Paul Graham is awesome. Okay, yeah. And so here is this graph, okay? David Rosato's data analysis, I think that put this together. So basically this is a graph of the word usage frequency in New York Times, 1970 to 2018. And he's got some controls there. Paul Graham tweets hypothesis, although some newspapers can survive the switch to online subscriptions, none can do it and remain politically neutral, quote newspaper 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? So I talk about this in the book, but I think fundamentally what happened was tech hurt media and their revenue dropped by about $50 billion over the four years from 08 to 2012. Tech helped Obama get reelected and media was positive on tech until December 2012. They wrote like the nerds go marching in the Atlantic. Then after January 2013, once Obama was disconsed, then the knives came out because basically these tech guys were bankrupting them. They were through supporting them. 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 humanities departments. Then they just deployed them. Basically somebody observed that wokeness is the combination of Foucaultian 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. 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 cite it anyway. The glossary of the Greek military junta, right? The creation and or use of special terms are employed by the junta as propaganda tools because essentially the word itself embeds a concept. You can Russell conjugate something one way or the other, right? Russell 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, okay? You have a thin skin, they clap back, right? So, once you kind of realize that these words have just been chosen in such a way as to 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 playing words to the great awakening, right? This kind of spasm of quasi-religious extremism. I wouldn't call it religious because it's not God-centered, it's really state and network centered, so I call it a doctrine, which is a superset of religion and political doctrine. These words went vertical and all the terrorism stuff you just notice kind of fell off a cliff. That was the obsession of everything in the 2000s and just channel change, right? It's amazing how that happened. Yeah. It's not like any of the pieces got picked up. Some of those words are still raging, of course. And there's victims to this wokeism movement and- But in a weird way, even though some parts of it, just like there's wars in the Middle East that still keep raging, there's certainly active fronts of wokeism, but in a sense, the next shift is already on. You know why? It's a pivot from wokeism to statism. In many ways, NYT is sort of, and more generally the US establishment is sort of, you may not believe this, they're kind of coming back to the center a little bit. And the same with that Lenin after the revolution implemented the new economic policy, which you may be aware of, right? Which was just like X percent more capitalism. He kind of boot on the neck, take control, but then ease up for a bit. And the so-called net men during the 20s were able to eke out something. There was like, oh, okay, fine. He's going to be easier on us. Then it intensified again because basically by loosening up, they were able to consolidate control. They weren't putting as much pressure on it, right? Then it went extremely intense again, right? Similar to Mao's 100 flowers thing, let 100 flowers bloom. They 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 as a national things like the KGB, right? They were for the state, but there were always local nationalist ethnic insurgencies in like Estonia and other places, right? So you can reconcile them, but nevertheless on its face, those are contradictory. So what are you going to get, I think? I think you're going to get this rotation where a fair number of the folks on the sort of authoritarian right are kind of pulled back into the fold a bit, okay? These are the cops and the military and whatnot, some of them, because as this decade progresses, you're going to see the signaling on American statism as opposed to wokeism, okay? 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's the visual of that. So that's why, as I wrote the book and after I showed, I was like, 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, dollar versus crypto. That's right. And some folks switch sides, right? Because you have folks like Jack Dorsey and a lot of the tech founders in basically the lower left corner, right? Who were blue but are now going to become orange or are orange. And you have folks in the upper right corner who are going to, at the end of the day, pick the dollar and the American flag over the internationalist ideals of cryptocurrency. The realigning, as you call it. Let me ask you briefly, we do need to get a comment, your visionary view of things. We're at a low point in the cryptocurrency space from a shallow analysis perspective, or maybe in a deeper sense, if you can enlighten me. Do you think Bitcoin will rise again? Yes. Do you think it will go to take on fiat, to go over a million dollars to go to these heights? I think it's possible. And the reason I think it's possible is I think a lot of things might go to a million dollars because inflation- Oh, because inflation. Right. That was an important point, right? Yes, it's a very important point, yes. Because you're seeing essentially- Yes. The choke pointing on energy is pushing up prices across the board for a lot of things. China's not doing us any favors with the COVID lockdowns. Putin's not doing the world any favors with this giant war. There's a lot of bad things happening in the physical world, right? When China, Russia, and the US are all, and Europe is, there's folks who are just insane about degrowth and they're against, they're pushing for burning coal and wood, right? So a lot of prices are going up in a really foundational and fundamental way. And with that said also, the dollar is in some way strengthening against certain other things because a lot of other countries are dying harder, right? And you've got riots in Sri Lanka and riots in Panama and riots in all these places, right? So it's very complicated because you've got multiple different trends going in the same way. Your Bitcoin maximums would just say infinity over 21 million. And so therefore you print all the dollars, there's 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 stable coins, okay? But I do think- So it still moves, fiat still moves somehow into the cryptocurrencies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's kind of like Microsoft where Windows is still around, right? Microsoft is still around. It's still a multi-hundred billion dollar company. He doesn't mean it. He doesn't mean it. Don't worry. All my machines are Windows and- Are they? 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-set, they do make some good stuff, right? Like Microsoft Teams is good. Yeah, there's a lot of incredible stuff. And UCO has done a lot of innovative things like GitHub. Yeah, well, there's an acquisition, but still, they give them credit for it. The acquisition, the pivoting of vision and motivations and focus and all that kind of stuff. Anyway, yes, Microsoft does an analogy metaphor for something. Well, yeah, so basically just like, they didn't need a turnaround, but they did endure to the present day. They didn't die from Google app. I mean, for the massive attacks on them, they didn't die. They are less powerful, but they make more money, right? And I think that might be something that, I mean, our best case scenario is the US establishment or CCP has more power over fewer people. Okay. I see. And so, but you can exit. If you're there, you're kind of knuckling under or whatever, but you can exit, right? And so I mentioned those three polls. CCP is obviously a billion people, 1.4 aligned under the digital yuan and so on, right? NYT is the entire, it's the tech companies, it's the US dollar, it is the establishment. And then crypto capital is everybody else. But I actually think that over time, that third world is web three this time and that's the third poll and that's India and it's Israel and it's lots of American conservatives and left libertarians and libertarians. And it's also lots of Chinese liberals, all the folks who are trying to get out of China because it's become so nationalist and crazy and difficult for capitalism. And so if you take basically non-establishment Americans on both left and right, okay, the bottom two quadrants in the political compass I talked about, you take the liberal Chinese, you take the Israelis and the Indians. Why? Because they don't, both of them have a lot of tech talent, right? They're the number one and number two demographics for tech founders. And they want to, while they are generally sympathetic to the West, right? And they have more ties to the West. They also are more cautious about national interests rather than just starting fights where that's how they would think about it, right? They just, India thinks of Brazil as a poor country, Israel thinks of itself as a small country. And so therefore it needs to not just get in every fight just for the sake of it. And so need to maintain a cautious distance with China, but not like do what Pelosi is doing and try and start like a big thing, okay? I think Israel is similar where it's maintaining diplomatic relations with China, it's more friendly towards China than the US is. India and Israel, I think are two sovereign states that have a lot of globally mobile tech talent that obviously have ties to the West with the large diaspora that are hard to demonize, you know, in the sense of willing to argue on the internet. Let's put it like that, in English, right? It's very important. And them plus enough Americans plus enough Chinese can set up another poll that is not for cold war or military confrontation, but for peace and trade and freedom and so on and so forth, right? That's the center as opposed to the left of the woke American US 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 a unipolar world, America is totally dominant. That's one argument. You can say it's a bipolar world. It's just the US versus China. Everybody else will have to be forced to align with one or the other. Jayashanker 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 is 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 could say it's unipolar, you could say it's bipolar, you could say it's just multipolar and everybody is kind of there, you know, India, Israel, these are groups 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 woke's have control of lots of institutions. They've got the US establishment and they've got the tech companies, they've got the media companies and so on. But crypto is basically everybody else. And crucially crypto has inroads in China and America where it's hard to demonize it as completely foreign because there's many, many, many huge proponents of the universalist values of crypto in America and China because it is true global rule of law and free speech and you know, so on. It is genuinely universalist in a way where America can no longer be, you know, the number one rule of the rules-based order is America is always number one. And China doesn't even pretend to maintain a rules-based order, right? Whereas for all those countries that don't want to either be dominated by the US media corporations that can or social media that can just 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 barrier-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 worked for over years, gone. Okay. 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 their 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. If that can just be taken away from you with the press of a key, that just gives bad governments, bad corporations, so much power that that's wrong, right? That's why I'm a medium and long-term bull on crypto simply because the check on this thing and that if you think about it in terms of just abstract decentralization is one thing, but you think about it in terms of property rights, it's quite another. And now what that also means is once you have property rights and you have decentralized social media, it'll be like the explosion of trade that happened after China went from communist to capitalist. Literally billions of people around the world are no longer giving everything to the collective. They own the teeth in their head now, finally. Okay. It's funny, right? So you're 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 rays 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, right? It's a continuous theme, right? The V1 was offline, I've got a key, I own it, I have de facto control. V2 is the cloud, someone else manages it for me, it's hosted, I get collaboration, so on. V3 is the chain where you combine aspects of those, right? You have the global state of the cloud, but you have the local permission and controlling of the private key, okay? So that's why I'm a medium to long-term ultra bull on crypto. And there's a podcast I gave with Asymco where I talked through how crypto actually doesn't just go after finance. So it's gold and it's wire transfers and it's crowdfunding and it's all finance with DeFi. But it's actually also search and it's social and it's messaging. It's actually even operating systems and eventually cloud and whatnot. Do you want me to talk about that briefly? Yeah, yeah. If you can briefly see how broad you see the effect of crypto. So first, crypto is fundamentally a new way of building backend systems, right? So if you think about how big a deal it was to go from AT&T's corporate Unix to Linux, it's permissionless, right? When you went from, as much as I admire a lot of the stuff that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman have done at OpenAI, I mean, they're phenomenal in terms of research. They've pushed the envelope forward. I give them a ton of credit, right? Still it was great to see StableDiffusion 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, right? So what crypto gives you, obviously it's every financial thing in the world. You can do stocks, bonds, et cetera. It's not just like the internet wasn't just a channel. It wasn't like radio and TV and internet. It was internet radio and internet TV and internet this and internet that. Everything was the internet. All media became the internet. Crypto is not an asset class. It's all asset classes. It's crypto stocks and crypto bonds, et cetera. In a real sense, like private property arguably didn't exist in the same way before crypto. International law didn't exist before crypto. How are you going to do a deal between Brazil and Bangladesh? If a Brazilian company wants to acquire a Bangladeshi 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, but now that Brazilian and Bangladeshi can go peer to peer because they're using blockchain, right? They can agree on a system of law that is completely international and that's code so each party can diligence it without speaking Portuguese and Bengali, right? So that's why I am a long-term bull on crypto. I just described the finance case. Let me go through the others, right? Social. So you have the private keys for your ENS. You have apps like Farcaster. You basically have decentralized social media where there's different variants. Some you just log in with your crypto username. Others, the entire social network and all the likes and posts are on chain like DSo, but there's several different versions, right? Search. Once you realize block explorers are an important stealth threat to search, they're very high traffic sites like blockchain.com and Etherscan that Google has just totally slept on. They don't have a block explorer. You don't have to do anything in terms of trading or anything like that. Google does not have a block explorer. Why? 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. And once you have crypto social, you now show that you're not just indexing in a block explorer like on chain transactions, but on chain communications. So now you suddenly see, oh, the entire social web that Google couldn't index. It could only index the World Wide Web and not the social web. Now it's actually the on chain signed web because every post is digitally signed. It's a new set of signals. It's way easier to index than either the World Wide Web or the social web because it's open and public. So this is a total disruptive thing to search in the medium term because the new kind of data sets index, right? So that's how it's a threat to social, to search. It is a threat to messaging. Why? Because, or it's disruptive eventually because the ENS name, as I mentioned, is like a universal identifier. You can send encrypted messages between people. That's a better primitive to base it on. You know, WhatsApp is just claiming that they're end-to-end encrypted. But with an ENS name or with a crypto name, you can be provably audibly end-to-end encrypted because you're actually sending it back and forth, right? 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, you know, so end-to-end encrypted messaging will happen and with payments and all this other stuff, okay? So you get the crypto messaging apps. You get operating systems. Why? Well, the frontier of operating systems, I mean, look, you know, Windows, Linux, and Mac OS have been around forever. But if you actually think about, you know, what is a blockchain? Well, there's operating systems. There's web browsers. But 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, you know, something like Ethereum has an EVM. It's got a programming language. It's got an ecosystem where people monetize on it. They build front-end apps and they build back-end apps. They interoperate between each other. This is the frontier of operating systems research. People haven't thought of it that way, right? It's also the frontier of a lot of things in databases. You will get a crypto LinkedIn where there's zero-knowledge proofs of various credentials, okay? So, actually, every single Web2 company, I can probably come up with a Web3 variant of it, right? Like Ethereum is, I mean, and this is high praise for both parties, but Ethereum is like the crypto stripe or the Web3 stripe. And you will see versions of everything else that are like this. But you know, I kind of described search, social, messaging, operating systems, the phone, right? Solana is doing a crypto phone. Why do you want that? Because it's a digital property. Apple was talking about running some script to find if people were having, you know, CSAM, like child porn or whatever on their phones, right? And even NYT actually reported that like Google ran something like this and found false positives. Some guy had to take a photo of a kid for 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, you know, is it really that much ethically different if it's the Chinese state that locks you out or an American corporation, right? Basically it's operationally very similar. You just have no recourse. You're unpersoned, right? So the crypto phone becomes like insanely important because you have a local set of private keys. Those are the keys to your currency and your passport and your services and your life, right? It becomes something you just hold on you with your person at all times, like your normal phone. You might have backups and stuff, but you know, the crypto phone is an insanely important thing, okay? And so that's search, that's social, that's messaging, that's operating systems, that's a phone. That's a lot right there. Yeah, that's beautiful. Can I have 120 seconds to just finish up a few more thoughts on social media? Yes, 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. You know, TikTok having some of the AI creation tools in there is just like a V1 of that. There's this whole thread with everything stable diffusion is unlocking. But basically this is 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. Really decentralized AI is truly representative. You cannot be faux representative. You cannot claim that Google is representing Nigerians and Indians and Brazilians and Japanese. Those folks need to have access themselves, right? So that's a fundamental ethical argument against centralized AI. It's unethical and it's like 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, right? You justify it with the bowness and you make the money by centralizing it. But the actual way of doing it is letting it free for the world and letting people build their own versions. If people want to build a Asian Lord of the Rings, they can do that. 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 in AI, which a lot of people seem to- Talk about and focus on. Yeah, centralization is inherently unrepresentative fundamentally. 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 where 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, et cetera. They're competing with features of Twitter or Facebook and the API was cut off. And that was when actually progressives were for net neutrality and an open internet and open social against the concentration of corporate power and so on. Remember that, right? And so what's 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? And 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 kick somebody into the 300-like pit that existed at the center of the Soviet Union. Anybody could be kicked into the pit at any moment. And 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 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. And so, this is kind of back and forth. Sometimes right now you think of those as independent things, but then they fuse, okay? And so, that's very clear with the AI bias arguments where it just so happens that it's so powerful, Lex, this technology is so powerful in the wrong hands, it could be used, so we will charge you 99.99 for every use of it. How's that? How altruistic is that? Is that amazingly altruistic? It's really good, right? So once you kind of see that, as I said, whenever they're positioning in economics, you can go in culture. When they're positioning on culture, you can go in economics. If they're so woke, why are they rich? If they're so concerned about representation, why is it centralized? Answer, they're not actually concerned about it, they're making money, right? Okay. So that is, I think, in a few words, blows up a lot of the AI bias type stuff, right? Okay. They're basically, they're biasing AI. All right. So the amount of stuff that can be done with AI now, like it also helps the pseudonymous economy as I was talking about with the AI Zoom. So you have totally new sites, totally new apps that are based on that. I think it may, I mean, it changes, you're going to have new Google Docs, all these kinds of things. You might have, 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 might, with AI, you can change the productivity of gestures. You can have a few gestures, like for example, the image to image thing with the stable diffusion where you make a little cartoon third graders painting and it becomes a real painting. A lot of user interfaces will be rethought now that you can actually do this incredible stuff with AI, it knows what you want it to do, right? And I saw this funny thing, which was a riff on Peter Thiel's line, which is AI is centralized and crypto is decentralized. And somebody was saying, actually, it turns out crypto is centralized with the CBDCs and stable coin and so on, but AI is getting decentralized with stable diffusion, ha ha, right? Which is funny. And I think there's centralized and decentralized versions of each of these, right? And finally, the third poll to actually, you know, Thiel, you know, he talks about AI and crypto, but the third poll is actually, that's sort of underappreciated because people think it already exists, is social. That just is keeping on going, right? And obviously the next step in social is AR and VR. Why is it so obvious? Because it's meta, you know, it's Facebook. Now I saw this very silly article. It's like, oh my God, Facebook is so dumb for putting a $10 billion into, you know, virtual reality, right? And I'm like, okay, the most predictable innovation in the world in my view is the AR glasses. Have you talked about this on the podcast before? AR and VR? I mean, of course a lot, but AR is not as obvious actually. Okay. So AR glasses, what are AR glasses? So you take Stampshot Spectacles, Google Glass, Apple's AR kit, Facebook's Oculus Quest 2, right? Or MetaQuest 2, whatever, okay? You put those together and what do you get? You get something that has the form factor of glasses that you'd wear outside, okay? Which can with a tap record or give you Terminator vision on something or with another tap go totally dark and become VR glasses. Okay? So normal glasses, AR glasses, VR glasses, recording. It's as multifunctional as your phone, but it's hands-free and you might actually even wear it more than your phone. In fact, you might be blind without your AR glasses because one of the things I've shown the book early on are like 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, okay? Secret societies are returning. This is what NFTs will become. The NFT locally on your cryptophone, if you hold it, you can see the symbol. And if you don't, you can't. By the way, for people just listening, we're looking at a nice nature scene where an artificially created globe is floating in the air. Yes, but it's invisible if you're not holding up the AR kit phone, right? So only you have a window into this artificial world. That's right. And then here's another thing, which shows you another piece of it. And this is using ENS to unlock a door. So this is an NFT used for something different. So the first one is using the NFT effectively to see something. And the second is using the NFT to do something. Okay? So based on your on-chain communication, right? You can unlock a door. That's a door to a room. Soon it could be a door to a building. It could be the gates to a community. It could be your digital login, okay? And so- Amazing. What this means is basically a lot of these things which are like individual pieces get synthesized, right? And you eventually have a digital, just like you have a digital currency or digital currencies unify concepts like obviously gold, stocks, bonds, derivatives, every kind of financial instrument plus Chuck E Cheese tokens, karma, everything that's fungible and transferable. The digital passport unifies your Google style login, your private keys, your API keys, your NFTs, your ENS name, your domain name, all of those kinds of things and your key card for your door and so on, right? So the AR glasses are what probably, I don't know, it'll be Facebook's version three or version four. Apple is also working on them. Google is also working on them. You might just get a bunch of those models at the same time. It's like predicting the iPhone, just like Dorsey knew that mobile was going to be big and that's why he had 140 characters for Twitter because it was like an SMS code limitation and Twitter was started before the iPhone. AR glasses are an incredibly predictable invention that you can start thinking about the future of social is in part in person, okay? And it also means people might go outside more. Why? Because you can't see a monitor in the sun, but you can hit AR and maybe you have a full screen thing and you just like kind of move your fingers or something and you can tap. You have to figure out the gesture. You don't want to have gorilla arms. Maybe you do have a keyboard outside or just even like a, you could even have a desk like this. If you can touch type, you can imagine something where you look down and you can see a keyboard with your AR glasses and it registers it and then you can type like this, right? And probably you could have some AI that could figure out what you meant rather than what you were doing, right? Okay. 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, right? In terms of their association, right? And this is the long-term trend in tech because you're going from eyeballs in the 1980s, sorry, eyeballs in the 1990s to daily active users in the 2000s to holders in the 2010s. So you go from just like, oh, I'm just a looky-loo to I'm logging in every day to I'm holding a significant percentage of my net worth. And then this decade is when the online community becomes primary. You're a netizen. The digital passport is your main identity. And so this is not, see the problem with Facebook or Twitter is it's a bunch of different communities that don't share the same values fighting with each other. This brings us back to the network state where you have one community with shared values, shared currency, and it's full stack. It's a social network and it's a cryptocurrency and it's a co-living community and it's a messaging app and it's a this and it's a that. And it's like Estonia, with a million people, you can actually build a lot of that full stack. That starts to get to what I call a network state. I feel like there should be a standing applause line here. This is brilliant. You are an incredible person. This was an incredible conversation we covered. How to fix our government, looking at the future of governments moving into network state. We covered how to fix medicine, FDA, longevity. That was just like a stellar description. Really I'll have to listen to that multiple times to really think. And thank you for that, especially in this time where the lessons learned from the pandemic aren't clear 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. 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 he can take it or leave it or what have you. Yeah, to maybe to your younger self, advice to your younger self. My friend, Novel, this is a lot of what he puts out is the very practical brass tacks, next steps. And I tend towards the macro. Of course, we both do both kind of thing, right? Let's talk brass tacks, next steps, because I actually am practical, or at least practical enough, to get things done, I think. Just like you said, you're breaking up the new book into three. Yes. It's Motivation, Theory, and Practice. That's right. So let's talk practice. Especially at the individual scale. Right. So first, what skill do you learn as a young kid? So let me just give what the ideal full stack thing is, and then you have to say, okay, I'm good quantitatively, I'm good verbally, I'm good this, I'm good that, right? So the ideal is you are full stack engineer and full stack influencer, or full stack engineer, full stack creator. So that's both right brain and left brain, all right? So what does that mean with engineering? That means you master computer science and statistics. Okay. And of course, it's also good to know physics and continuous math and so on. That's actually quite valuable to know. And you might need to use a lot of that continuous math with AI nowadays, right? Because a lot of that is actually helpful, right? Grade descent and whatnot. But computer science and stats are to this century what physics was to the last. Why? Because for example, what percentage of your time do you spend looking at a screen of some kind? A large percentage of the time. A large percentage of the time, right? Probably more than, for many people, it's more than 50% of their waking hours. If you include laptop, you include cell phone, tablet, your watch, maybe a monitor of some kind, right? All those together, it's a lot, okay? 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 than 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 there'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 is run 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? Sure. Yeah. You include all of that together. I include all of that as a package. That's theory and practice, right? I mean, look, it's okay to use libraries once you know what's going on under the hood, right? That's fine, but you need to be able to kind of write out the whole thing yourself. I mean, it's... That could be true, could not be true. I don't know. Are you sure about that? Because you might be able to get quite far standing on the shoulders of giants. You can, but it depends. You couldn't build... Well, okay. Somebody... 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 computer architecture and layout of memory and theory of compilers. 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 what a great specialized engineer could do that you can't. Yeah. I think at least a while back, facebook.com, it's just a single C++ compiled binary. It's not C++. It was like hip hop. They had a PHP compiler where they had just one giant binary. I may be getting this wrong, but that's what I recall, right? Yeah. I mean, it should be simple. It should be simple. And then you have guys like John Carmack who comes in and does an incredibly optimized implementation that actually... Well, yeah, more than that, right? Like he's... I mean, yes, right, but go ahead. I mean, there's some cases with John Carmack by being an incredible engineer is able to bring to reality things that otherwise would have taken an extra five to 10 years. Yeah. Or maybe even more than that. This is the great man theory of history versus the determinist waves of history are pushing things along. The way I reconcile those is the tech tree model of history. Like civilization, you're playing a game civilization. Yeah. So like civilization, you've got the tech tree and you can go and be like, okay, I'm going to get spearmen or I'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 wasn't a Leibniz to Satoshi's Newton, right? Like Vitalik, as amazing as he is, was five years later or thereabouts, right? There wasn't contemporaneous like another person that was doing what Satoshi was doing is truly Sui generis, right? And that shows what one person can do. Like probably Steve Jobs with Apple, given how the company was dying before he got there and he built it into the most valuable or put on the tech tree to become 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 he doesn't grow his own food and he didn't even think of the rights that he's got, someone else thought of those and whatnot. And so 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 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, add value, right, okay. So now the other side is creator, right? Becoming a creator. First, online, like social media is about to become far, far, far more lucrative and monetizable. People are not updated. They kind of think it's like over or something like that or it's old or whatever. But with crypto, once you have property rights on 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 the introduction of property rights in China changed everything. It might take some lag for that to happen, but you can lend against that, borrow against that. You own the digital property, right? And you can do NFTs, you can do investments, you can do all this other stuff, right? So in many ways, I think anybody who's listening, who's like, I want to build a billion dollar company, I'm like, build a billion dollar company, yes, also build a million person media operation or a million person following or something online, right? Because a US media company is simply not economically or socially aligned with your business. I mean, the big thing that I think tech and media actually, it's funny, there's this collision and sometimes there's an admin smashing event and there's a repositioning, right? And media attacked tech really hard in the 2010s as well as many other things. And now post 2020, I think it's now centralized tech and media versus decentralized tech and media. And centralized tech and media is NYT and Google, which have all become woke-ified, the establishment companies. But decentralized tech and media is like Substack, a lot of defectors from the US establishment, from the NYT have gone to Substack. But also all the founders and funders are much more vocal on Twitter, whether it's Mark Anderson, Jack Dorsey, Jeff Bezos, Zuckerberg. Zuck is just cutting out the establishment and just going direct to posting himself or posting the jujitsu thing, which he recently did, or going and talking to Rogan, right? And so 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 their employees, Salzburgers employees are just dogs on the leash, right? 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 or possible strike that's going at the New York Times. Obviously, the most obvious rich corporate zillionaire, the epitome of white privilege is, and again, I'm not the kind of person who thinks white is an insult, right? But the guy who inherited the company from his father's father's father's father in the NFL, right? You're supposed to have the Rooney rule where you're supposed to interview diverse candidates for the top job. You know the other competitors for the top job of the publisher of the New York Times were two cousins of Salzburg. So it's three cis straight white males in 2017 who competed for this top job. Everybody in media was silent about this coronation. They had this coronation article in the Times about this, right? So you have this meritless nepotist, right? This literally rich cis white man who makes millions of dollars a year and it makes like 50x the salary of other NYT journalists, okay? Hours 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, there's a website called techjournalismislessdiversethantech.com which actually shows the numbers on this, right? Here, I can look at these numbers, right? So why do I say this? Well, centralized US media has lost a ton of clout. You've seen the crypto prices down, like stock prices have crashed. That's very obvious and quantifiable. Less visible is that media engagement has crashed, right? By the way, yeah, there's a plot that shows on the X axis percent white and on the Y axis are the different companies. And the tech companies are basically below 50% white and all the different media tech journalism companies are all way above 70, 80, 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? It's like anyone who's homophobic, anyone who's... It feels like it's a personal thing that they're struggling with. Maybe the journalists are actually the ones who are racist. Well actually, it's funny you say that because there's this guy, A.M. Rosenthal, okay? And on his gravestone was, quote, he kept the paper straight, right? And actually, he essentially went and this is the managing editor of the New York Times for almost from 69 to 77, executive editor from 77 to 86. And it was a history- Oh, Lord. Yeah. History of basically keeping gay reporters out. Essentially, the way I think about it is New York Post reported that... 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 a notorious homophobe. He made it a specific policy of the paper not to use the term gay. He denied a plum job to gay men for being gay. He minimized the AIDS crisis. So 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 has reinvented themselves as a cheerleader to stand with Ukraine, right? They were for Abe Rosenthal's homophobia before they were against it, right? They were like, if you saw the link I just pasted in, okay? During BLM, it's credibly reported that, and I haven't seen this refuted, the family that owns the New York Times were slaveholders. Somehow that stayed out of 1619 and BLM coverage, right? So they were literally getting the profits from slavery to help bootstrap what was the Times or went into it. They actually did this article on the compound interest of slaveholders in Haiti and how much they owed people, right? If you apply that to how much money they made off of slaves, I mean, can anyone name one of Salzburger's slaves? Can we humanize that, put a face on that, show exactly who lost such that he may win, right? So you stack this up and it's like for the Iraq war before they were against it, and it's like, yeah, sure, Bush did a lot of bad stuff there, but they also reported a lot of negative coverage, like false coverage, right, about WMDs, like the whole Jewish military. And so it's like this amazing thing where if some of the most evil people in history are the historians, if the... They actually ran this ad campaign in the 2017 time period called The Truth. So giant Orwellian billboards, right, which say 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. Like, do you know what other... Truth. Yeah. Big truth, period. Big white board. So, okay, what other national newspaper proclaimed itself the truth in constantly every day? You know this one actually. Oh, you mean Pravda? Yeah, yeah. There you go. That's right. What is the Soviet translation? What's the Russian translation of Pravda is? It's truth. Yeah. That's so sorry. That didn't even connect in 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 they're a communist, these guys have figured out how to charge people $99 a year or whatever it is for the truth. Wow, that's actually even amazing, right? So, the corporate truth. So, when you stack all that up, right, basically legacy media has delegitimized themselves, right? And that those, quote, investigative journalists don't investigate Salzberger shows that they are so courageous as to investigate your boss, but not their own. Yes. Ta-da, total mass drop, right? That's like just obvious, right? Now once you realize this and, you know, every influencer who's coming up, every creator realizes, okay, well, that means I have to think about these media corporations as competitors. They are competitors. They are competitors for advertisers and influence. They will try basically what the media corporations did partially successfully during the 2010s is they sort of had this reign of terror over many influencers where they'd give them positive coverage if they supported sort of the party line and negative coverage if they didn't, okay? But now the soft power has just dropped off a cliff, right? And you know, many kinds of tactics that, you know, establishment journalists do, one way of thinking of them is like as a for-profit Stasi. Why? Because they may stalk you, dox you, surveil you, like they can literally put, you know, like two dozen people following somebody around for a year and that's not considered stalking, right? That's not considered spamming. They are allowed to do this and make money doing this. Whereas if you so much as criticize them, oh my God, it's an attack on the free press, blah, blah, blah, right? But you are the free press and I'm the free press, like we're the free press. Again, it goes back to the decentralized, you know, the free speech is not like some media corporations saying it's everybody's right. And what actually happened with social media, what they're against is not that it is an attack on democracy, it's that it's the ultimate democracy because people have a voice now that didn't used to have a voice. You know, it's saying freedom of the press belongs to those who own one, right? That old one, right? You never argue with the man who buys ink by the barrel, right? In a real way, the entire things that were promised to people, freedom of speech, free markets, you know, like a beggars 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 didn't have the resources to buy a newspaper, you didn't have practical reach or distribution, okay? What happened was all these people in the US and around the world suddenly got voices and they were suddenly saying things that the establishment didn't want them to say. And so that's what this counter decentralization has meant, both in the US and in China, this crackdown, but it's as if like a stock went up like 100X and then dropped like 30%, all the deplatforming stuff, yes, it's bad, okay? It's a rearward move, but in the long arc, I think we're going to have more speech. I think the counter decentralization may succeed in China, but I don't think it's going to succeed outside it because you're trying to retrofit speech and thought controls onto an ostensibly free society, right? Now that check got cash, people actually have a voice, it's not going to be taken away from them very easily, right? So how does this relate to my advice to young kids? Once you have that context, right, once you realize, hey, look, Apple didn't like do deals with BlackBerry, okay? Amazon didn't collaborate or give free content to Barnes and Noble. Netflix was not going and socializing with employees of Blockbuster. These employees of establishment media corporations are your competitors, okay? They are out for clicks, they are out for money, if they literally choke out the Ukrainians before making themselves into champions of the Ukrainian cause, they'll basically do anything, you know? And so once you realize that, you're like, okay, I need to build my own voice, okay? If you're Brazilian, you're Nigerian, you're in the Midwest or the Middle East, right? If you're 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 of 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, maybe statistician, something like that, electrical engineer, et cetera. But the importance of creating your own content and telling your own stories, if you don't tell your own story, the story will be told for you, right? The sort of flip of winners write history is if you do not write history, you will not be the winner. You must write a history, okay? As kind of a funny way of putting it, right? Yeah, chicken and egg. Yeah. Contrapositive, right? And now what does that mean practically, okay? So in many ways, the program that I'm laying out is to build alternatives, peaceful alternatives to all legacy institutions, right? To obviously to the Fed, right? With Bitcoin, to Wall Street, with DeFi and with Ethereum and so on. To academia with the ledger of record and the on-chain reproducible research that we talked about, to media with decentralized social media, decentralized AI. You can melt Hollywood with this, okay? Melt the RIA, melt the MPAA. I mean, there's some good people there, but everybody should have their own movies. People should be able to tell their own stories and not just wait for it to be cast through Hollywood and Hollywood is just making remakes anyway, okay? So you can tell original stories and you can do so online and you can do so by hitting a key and the production values will be there now that the AI content creation tools are out there. I mentioned disrupting or replacing or building alternatives to the Fed, to Wall Street, to academia, to media. I mentioned to Wikipedia, right? There's things like Golden, there's things like there's a bunch of Web3-ish Wikipedia competitors that are combining both AI and crypto for property rights. You'll also need alternatives to all the major tech companies. That was the list that I went through with decentralized search and social and messaging and operating systems and even the crypto phone, 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 native born and over 35 and so on and so forth, but 100% of the world can become president of their own network state. What that means is, and this kind of related to those two points, right? If you're an individual and you're good at engineering and you're good at content creation, okay? Like somebody like Jack Dorsey, for example, or Mark Anderson. Actually, a lot of the founders are actually quite good at both nowadays. Look, Bezos is actually funny on Twitter when he allows himself to be. You don't become a leader of that caliber without having some of both, right? If you've got some of both, now, no matter where you are, what your ethnicity is, what your nationality is, whether you can get a US visa, you can become president of a network state. And what this is, it's a new path to political power that does not require going through either the US or the Chinese establishment. You don't have to wait till you're 75. You don't have to become a gerontocrat or spout the party line and so on. The V1 of this is folks like Francis Suarez or Naib Bakele of El Salvador, but Suarez is a great example where, while not a full sovereign or anything like that, he has in many ways the skills of a tech CEO where he just put up a call on Twitter and helped build Miami, recruited all these people from all over. And it wasn't the two-party system, but the end-city system. He just helped build the city by bringing people in, okay? And when I say Suarez is a V1, 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 institution, 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. There's no more inspiring. 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 time, people will look at the internet as being to the Americas, what the Americas were to Europe. A new world, okay? In the sense of this cloud continent has just come down, okay? And people are, if you spend 50% of your waking hours looking at a screen, 20%, you're spending all this time commuting up to the cloud in the morning and coming back down. You're doing these day trips and it's got a different geography and all these people are near each other that were far in the physical world and vice versa, right? And so this will, because it's this new domain, it gives rise to virtual worlds that eventually become physical in the same way that most people don't know this that well, but the Americas really shaped the old world. Many concepts like the ultra capitalism and ultra democracy of the new world, the French Revolution was in part, I mean, that was a bad version, okay? But that was in part inspired by the American, okay? There are many movements that came back to the old world that started here. 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 kill a year American empire that everything's American and so on. And his, I think fundamental category era is he considers the internet to be American. But you know why that's not the case? Because, and it'll be very obviously so I think in five or 10 years. Why? Because the majority of English speakers online by about 2030 are 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 figure out, not to figure it, but to communicate. I didn't realize this in 2013, but these folks don't type with an accent. Okay? They speak with an accent, but they don't type with an accent. And all the way back in 2013 when I taught this Coursera course, I was like, who are these folks? I had hundreds of thousands of people from around the world sign up. It was a very popular course even then, okay? And hundreds of thousands of people signed up. I was like, who are these folks? And there were like Polish guys and you know, like this lady from Brazil. And they knew scumbag Steve and good guy Greg, but they didn't know the Yankees or hot dogs or all the offline stuff of America. They didn't know physical America. They knew the digital conversation, the Reddit conversation and you know, what became the Twitter conversation. For example, I just saw this YouTube video where there's an Indian founder and he just said, just casually like, oh, I slid into his DMs like this, right? It was kind of a joke, but he said it in an Indian accent and 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. It may have started American, but it got forked by the rest of the world. That's right. And it gives a global equality of opportunity. It's even more capitalist than America is. It's even more democratic than America is, just as America is more capitalist and democratic than the UK. The meme has escaped the cage of its captor. And by the way, that doesn't mean I'm, so I 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. That might not be the greatest example, but yes, go on. Well, put it like this. Yes, but just broadly speaking. They're not like burning the British flag and effigy or anything. Essentially 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? Like once you have kind of a healthy distance, people can respect all the accomplishments of the UK while also being happy that you're no longer run by them, right? And then you can have like a better kind of arms length relationship, right? And that's what post-British means. It is not anti-British, not at all. In fact, you can respect it while also being happy that you've got your own sovereignty, right? And you're happy that Britain is doing its own thing. I'm glad they're doing well, right? Okay. And they're actually doing some special economics on 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. You know, like rather than just everything must be scored as pro-American or anti-American, you can think of post-American, that not everything has to be scored on that axis. Like 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. Perhaps an obvious example, is longevity pro-American or anti-American? You know, no, 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 are global human rights, are global values, which is freedom of speech, private property, protection from search and seizure. And actually, so that's all the Bill of Rights 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 V2 of the book, a digital Bill of Rights, okay? And so this was a really good, decent first cut at a digital Bill of Rights, okay? And he talks about the right to encrypt, the right to compute, the right to repair, the right to portability, right? So encrypt is perhaps obvious, you know, e-commerce and everything. Compute like your device, it's not like you can't just have somebody intercept it or, 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. But click the tweet that I sent you just before this one, right? So I was like, you know, in woke America, they're abolishing accelerated math because math is quote white supremacist. Not to be outdone, Europe seeks to regulate AI by regulating logic itself. You can't reason without a license, right? Article three, for purposes of this regulation, the following definitions apply. AI system is software that's developed with one or more of the techniques and approaches listed in Annex 1. And you know what's in Annex 1? In Annex 1, logic and knowledge-based approaches. So step away from the if statement. Right. Okay? And the thing is, you know, if you've dealt with these bureaucracies, the stupidest possible interpretation, I mean, think about if you think, oh, no, no, that wouldn't make any sense. It wouldn't do that. The entire web has been uglified by the stupid cookie thing that does absolutely nothing, right? The actual way to protect privacy is with user local data, meaning like decentralized systems, right? Where the private keys are local. No, I'm just laughing at the layers of absurdity in this, yeah, step away from the if statement. I mean, it's hilarious. It's very, very clumsy. It's us struggling how to define, yeah, the digital bill of rights, I suppose, and doing it so extremely clumsily. It's funny, you know, like I heard this thing, which is like, Europe's like, well, look, the US and China are way ahead of us in AI, but we're going to be a leader in AI regulation. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And something we haven't mentioned much of in this whole conversation, I think, may be 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 and 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, 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. It was brilliant throughout on all those different topics. So yeah, thank you again for talking to me. This is great. I really appreciate being here, sir. Thanks for listening to this conversation with biology. Soon of Austin to support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Ray Bradbury. People ask me to predict the future when all I want to do is to prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting the future is much too easy anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
 Donald Trump was probably the biggest person ever to be removed from social media.
 Do you understand why that was done?
 Can you still mend the case for it and against it?
 Everybody who's watching this around the world basically saw, let's say, US establishment
 or Democrat aligned folks just decapitate the head of state digitally, right?
 Just boom, gone, okay?
 And they're like, well, if they can do that in public to the US president who's ostensibly
 the most powerful man in the world, what does the Mexican president stand against that?
 Nothing.
 Regardless of whether it was justified on this guy, that means they will do it to anybody.
 Now the seal is broken.
 Just like the bailouts, as exceptional as they were in the first year, everybody was
 shocked by them, then they became a policy instrument.
 And now there's bailouts happening.
 Every single bill is printing another whatever billion dollars or something like that.
 The following is a conversation with biology, Serena Vassin, 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.
 Biology is a fascinating mind who thinks deeply about this world and how we might be able
 to engineer it in order to maximize the possibility that humanity flourishes on this fun little
 planet of ours.
 Also, you may notice that in this conversation, my eye is red.
 That's from Jiu Jitsu.
 And also, if I may say so, from a life well lived.
 This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
 To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
 And now, dear friends, here's biology, Srinivasan.
 At the core of your belief system is something you call the prime number maze.
 I'm curious, I'm curious.
 We've got to start there.
 Sure.
 If we can start anywhere, it's with mathematics.
 Let's go.
 All right, great.
 A rat can be trained to turn at every even number or every third number in a maze to
 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, pretty difficult to figure out what the turning rule was.
 Yet, the rule is actually very simple.
 And so, the thing I think about a lot is just how many patterns in life are we just like
 these rats and we're trapped in a prime number maze?
 And if we had just a little bit more cogitation, if we had a little bit more cognitive ability,
 a little bit more, whether it's brain machine interface or just better physics, we could
 just figure out the next step in that prime number maze.
 We could just see it.
 We could just see the grid.
 And that's what I think about.
 That's a big thing that drives me, is figuring out how we can 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 of its 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 identities.
 That really does bring us forward, especially when you can check them and you don't know
 how they work.
 Right?
 You have the phenomenological, but you don't have the theory underneath it.
 And then that stimulates the advancement of theory to figure out why is this thing actually
 working.
 And then the epistemic arose in part from the phenomenological studies that were basically
 being done where people are just getting steam engines and so on to work.
 And then they 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...
 So just something that's true and that works, even if we don't know yet, that's amazing
 and it pulls us forward.
 So I do think that the limits are more of a bug than a feature.
 Is there something that humans will never be able to figure out about our universe,
 about the theory, about the practice of our universe?
 Yeah.
 People will typically quote Gridell'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.
 The Hillebert...
 Hillebert'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 his Road to Reality series for basic physics getting up to everything
 we know, but go ahead.
 Tell me about that.
 It's even wilder.
 When we started doing physics, we started to question of what is fundamental and what
 is emergent in this beautiful universe of ours.
 And there's a bunch of folks who think that space-time, as we know it, the four-dimensional
 space is emergent.
 It's not fundamental to the physics of the universe.
 And the same, many argue, I think Sean Carroll is one of them, is that time itself, the way
 we experience it is also emergent.
 It's not fundamental to the way our universe works.
 Anyway, those are the technical term, I apologize for swearing.
 Those are the mind fucks of modern physics.
 But if we stroll along that road further, we get somebody like Donald Hoffman, who makes
 the evolutionary case that the reality we perceive with our eyes is not only an abstraction
 of objective reality, but it's actually completely detached.
 We're in a video game, essentially, that's consistent for all humans, but it's not at
 all connected to physical reality.
 It's an illusion.
 It's like a version of the simulation hypothesis?
 In a very distant way, but the simulation says that there's a sort of computational
 nature to reality, and then there's a programmer that creates this reality and so on.
 He says that we humans have a brain that is able to perceive the environment, and evolution
 is produced from primitive life to complex life on earth, produce the kind of brain that
 doesn't at all need to sense the reality directly.
 So 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, right?
 Just on that, people talk about qualia.
 Is your perception of green different from my perception of green?
 My counter argument on that is, well, we know something about spectrum of light, and we
 can build artificial eyes.
 If we can build artificial eyes, which we can, they're not amazing, but you can actually
 do that.
 We can build artificial ears and so on.
 Obviously, we can build recording devices and for cameras and things like that.
 Well, operationally, the whole concept of your perception of green, you see green as
 purple, I see green as green, or what I call green, doesn't seem to add up because it
 does seem like we can do engineering around it, right?
 So the Hoffman thing, I get why people more broadly will talk about a simulation hypothesis
 because it's like Feynman and many others have talked about how math is surprisingly
 useful to describe the world, like very simple equations give rise to these complex phenomena.
 Wolfram is also on this from a different angle with the cellular automata stuff.
 But-
 It's almost suspicious how well it works.
 Yeah, but on their hand, it's like, yet we're still also in a prime number maze.
 There's things we just don't understand.
 So 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.
 Display all our rage while just rats in a cage.
 I know that gets very abstract, but there are unsolved problems in physics, like the
 condensed matter space, there's a lot of interesting stuff happening.
 My recollection, I may be out of date on this, things like sonar luminescence, we don't know
 exactly how they work.
 And sometimes those things that are at the edges of physics, in the late 1800s, I think
 Rutherford, somebody famous, I think it was Rutherford said, basically all physics is
 being discovered, et cetera.
 And that was obviously before quantum mechanics.
 That sort of edge case, people are looking at the bomber and the passion series and seeing
 this weird thing with the hydrogen spectrum and it was quantized and that led to the sort
 of phenomenological set of observations that led to quantum mechanics and everything.
 And sometimes I think the UAP stuff might be like that.
 People immediately go to aliens for UAP, like the unidentified aerial phenomena, right?
 There's surprising amount of stuff out there on this.
 The UK has declassified a bunch of material.
 Harry Reid is the senator, has talked about this.
 It's not an obviously political thing, which is good.
 Is there something happening there, right?
 And people had thought for a long time that the UAP thing was American kind of counterpropaganda
 to cover up their new spy planes that were spying over the Soviet Union to make anybody
 who talked about them seem crazy and hysterical or whatever.
 But if the UAP thing is real, it could be atmospheric phenomena like the Aurora Borealis
 or the Northern Lights, but some things we don't understand.
 It could be something like the bomber and passion series, which were the observations
 of emission spectra before quantum mechanics.
 So that's another option as opposed to doesn't exist or 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.
 The Drake equation, which is like multiplying all the probabilities together.
 There's perhaps more sophisticated takes like the dark forest, which says that if the universe
 is like a dark forest, we're the dumb ones that aren't hiding our presence.
 There's one calculation I saw and I haven't reproduced it myself, but basically says that
 the assumption that other civilizations have seen ours is wrong because when you have a
 spherical radius for like the electromagnetic radiation that's leaving our planet, as that
 sphere gets larger and larger, it gets smaller and smaller amounts of energy.
 So you get farther out, you're not getting enough photons or what have you to actually
 detect it.
 I actually haven't looked into the math behind it, but I remember seeing that argument.
 So actually it is possible that it's so diffuse when you go past a certain number of light
 years out that an alien civilization wouldn't be able to detect it.
 That's another argument.
 That's more basically about signals from them, from us to be able to signals colliding enough
 to find the signal from the noise.
 Right, exactly.
 Intelligent signal.
 Yeah.
 Hanson has an article called Grabby Aliens.
 Have you seen his thing?
 Yes, yes, yes.
 He's been on this podcast.
 Oh, great.
 He's brilliant.
 I like him.
 He pushes boundaries in interesting ways.
 In every ways, in all of the ways.
 In all the ways.
 That's right.
 I like him overall.
 He's an asset to humanity.
 Grabby Aliens.
 So he has this interesting idea that the civilizations quickly learn how to travel close to the speed
 of light.
 Right.
 So we're not going to see them until they're here.
 Yeah, that's possible.
 One of the things is, so here's for example, a mystery that we haven't yet done, right?
 We haven't really figured out yet, which is abiogenesis in the lab.
 Right?
 We've done lots of things where you can show macromolecules binding to each other.
 You can show evidence for the so-called RNA world, abiogenesis to go from non-life to
 life in the lab.
 You can show microevolution, obviously with bacteria.
 You can do artificial selection on them.
 Lots of other aspects of fundamental biochemistry origins of life stuff have been established.
 There's a lot of plausibility arguments about the primitive environment and nitrogen and
 carbon snapping together to get the RNA world as the initial hypothesis.
 But to my knowledge at least, we haven't actually seen abiogenesis demonstrated.
 Now one argument is you need just like this massive world with so many different reps
 before that actually happens.
 And one possibility is if we could do atomic level simulations of molecules bouncing against
 each other, it's possible that in some simulation we could find a path, a reproducible path
 to abiogenesis and then just replicate that in the lab.
 I don't know.
 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.
 One of the most fascinating mysteries.
 One of the most important.
 Yeah.
 And again, there may be some biochemist who's like, oh, Baljee, you didn't know about X,
 Y, and Z that happened in the abiogenesis field.
 I freely confess I'm not like O'Qurrant on it.
 The last thing I remember looking at is-
 What's O'Qurrant mean?
 Like up to the moment.
 Oh, nice.
 That's a nice word.
 That's a-
 O'Qurrant.
 I'm probably mispronouncing it.
 Yeah.
 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 in post.
 One thing that I do think was interesting is Craig Venter a while back tried to make
 a minimum viable cell where he just tried to delete all of the genes that were not considered
 essential.
 So it's like a new life form.
 This was like almost 20 years ago and so on.
 That thing was viable in the lab, right?
 So it's possible that you kind of reverse engineer.
 You're coming at the problem from different directions.
 Like RNA molecules can do quite a lot, you've got some reasonable assumptions as to how
 that could come together.
 You've got sort of stripped down minimum viable life forms and so it's not there isn't stuff
 here.
 You can see microevolution, you can see at the sequence level.
 If you do molecular phylogenics, you can actually track back the bases.
 So it's not like there's no evidence here.
 There's a lot of tools to work with.
 But this in my view is a fascinating area and actually also relevant to AI because another
 form of abiogenesis would be if we are able to give rise to a different branch of life
 form, the silicon based as opposed to carbon based, to stretch your point.
 You give rise to something that actually does meet the definition of life for some definition
 of life.
 What do you think that definition is for an artificial life form?
 Because you mentioned consciousness.
 When will it give us pause that we created something that feels by some definition or
 by some spiritual, poetic, romantic, philosophical, mathematical definition that it is alive and
 we wouldn't want to kill it?
 So a couple of remarks on that.
 One is Francis Crick of Watson and Crick.
 Before he died, I think his last paper was published on something called the Claustrum.
 And the thing is that sometimes in biology or in any domain, people are sort of discouraged
 from going after the big questions.
 But he proposed the Claustrum is actually the organ that is the seat of consciousness.
 It's like this sheath that covers the brain.
 And for mice, if you, and again, I may be recollecting this wrong, but you can look
 at it.
 My recollection is in mice, if you disrupt this, the mouse is very disoriented.
 It's the kind of thing which Watson and Crick were all about.
 Structure implies function.
 They found the structure of DNA, this amazing thing.
 And they remarked in this very understated way at the end of the paper that, well, obviously
 this gives a basis for how the genetic material might be replicated and error corrected because
 helix unwinds and you copy and paste.
 So he was a big structure function person and that applies not just at the protein level,
 not just at the level of DNA, but potentially also at the level of organs.
 Like the Claustrum is kind of this system integrated level.
 It's like the last layer in the neural network or something.
 And so that's the kind of thing that I think is worth studying.
 So consciousness is another kind of big, abiogenesis is a big question.
 The prime number remains consciousness is a big question.
 And then definition of life, right?
 There's folks, gosh, there's, I think, so this one is something I'd have to Google around,
 but there was a guy I think at Santa Fe Institute or something who had some definition of life
 and like some thermodynamic definition.
 But you're right that it's 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 viruses are like this boundary
 case, are they alive or not?
 Most people don't think they're alive, but they're more alive than a rock in a sense.
 Well, I think in a world that we'll talk about today quite a bit, which is the digital world,
 I think the most fascinating philosophically and technically definition of life is life
 in the digital world.
 So chatbots, essentially creatures, whether they're replicas of humans or totally independent
 creations, perhaps in an automatic way.
 I think there's going to be chatbots that we would ethically be troubled by if we wanted
 to kill them.
 They would have the capacity to suffer.
 They would be very unhappy with you trying to turn them off.
 And then there'll be large groups of activists that will protest and they'll go to the Supreme
 Court of whatever the Supreme Court looks like in 10, 20, 30, 40 years.
 And they will demand that these chatbots would have the same rights as us humans.
 Do you think that's possible?
 I saw that Google engineer who was basically saying this had already happened and I was
 surprised by it because when I looked at the chat logs of it, it didn't seem particularly
 interesting.
 On their hand, I can definitely see it.
 I mean, GPT-3 for people who haven't paid attention shows that serious step-ups are
 possible and obviously you've talked about AI on your podcast a ton.
 Is it possible that GPT-9 or something is kind of like that or GPT-15 or GPT-4 maybe?
 For people just listening, there's a deep skepticism in your face.
 Yeah.
 The reason being because it's possible that you have a partition of society on literally
 this basis.
 That's one model where there's some people, just like there's vegetarians and non-vegetarians,
 there may be machines have life and machines are machines or something like that.
 You could definitely imagine some kind of partition like that in the future where your
 fundamental political social system, that's a foundational assumption.
 Is AI, does it deserve the same rights as 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.
 There's a spectrum.
 There's a spectrum.
 For example, Disney is considered about as human as a dog, but like Exxon, I may be remembering
 this wrong, but they had a level with human at one end and rock at the other.
 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 do think of corporations as being more or
 like the branding is really what they're responding to.
 That's what I mean.
 They're also responding.
 I have a brand of human that I'm trying to sell and it seems to be effective for the
 most part.
 Sure.
 Although it has become like a running joke that I might be a robot, which means the brand
 is cracking.
 It's seeping through.
 But I mean, in that sense, I don't see a reason why chat bots 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 chat bots 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 chat bots talking to each other.
 And then you ask, can you determine the difference between N chat bots talking to each other
 and clicking buttons and stuff in apps and humans doing that?
 And I think we're very far off, or I shouldn't say very far off.
 At least I don't know how far off we are in terms of time, but we're still far off in
 terms of a group of N chat bots looking like their digital output is like the group of
 N humans.
 So, go from the Turing test to the multiplayer Turing test.
 That's one definition.
 Another definition is to be able to kind of swap in and you're not just convincing one
 human that this is a human for a small session.
 You're convincing all humans that this is a human for N sessions.
 Remote work actually makes this possible, right?
 That's another definition of a multiplayer Turing test where basically you have a chat
 bot 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 the actions of 10,000 or 100,000 or a million
 people and with cryptocurrency, you can even monitor a wallet that was on that computer
 and you could see what long run series of actions were increasing or decreasing this
 digital balance.
 You see what I'm saying, right?
 So you start to get at least conceptually, it'd be invasive and there'd be a privacy
 issue and so on.
 Conceptually you could imagine an agent that could learn what actions humans were doing
 that resulted in the increase of their local cryptocurrency balance, okay?
 There may be better ways to formulate it, but that I consider a challenge problem is
 to go from the Turing test to a genuine intelligent agent that can actually go and make money
 for you.
 If you can do that, that's a big deal.
 People obviously have trading bots and stuff, but that would be the next level.
 It's typing out emails, it's creating documents.
 It'll mimic human behavior in its entirety.
 Yeah, that's right.
 And 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 the automator app in Apple, right?
 Everything is 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 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 usually be able to do without collecting
 thousands and thousands and thousands of human traces doing it.
 But it is a predator prey on that.
 Go ahead.
 Well, and then the computer-
 Or millions of human traces, I don't know.
 The computer just sees the JavaScript.
 It needs to be able to look outside the simulation for the computer.
 The world is like, 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, you know,
 I think that's exactly what mushrooms do or psychedelics is you get to go outside and
 look back in and that's what a computer needs to do.
 Yeah, same thing.
 I do wonder whether they actually give people insight or whether they give people the illusion
 of insight.
 Is there a difference?
 Yeah, because, well, actual insight, you know, actual insight is, again, Maxwell's equations.
 You're able to shift the world with that.
 There's a lot of practical devices that work.
 The illusion of insight is I'm Jesus Christ and nothing happens, right?
 So I don't know.
 I think those are quite different.
 I don't know.
 I think you can fake it till you make it on that one, which is insight in some sense is
 revealing a truth that was there all along.
 Yeah, so I mean, I guess like I'm talking about technical insight where you have, this
 is the thing, you know, we were talking about actually before the podcast, like technical
 truths versus political truths, right?
 Some truths, they're on a spectrum and there's some truths that are actually entirely political
 in the sense that if you can change the software in enough people's heads, you change the value
 of the truth.
 For example, the location of a border is effectively consensus between large enough groups of people,
 who is the CEO, that's consensus among a certain group of people.
 What is the value of a currency or any stock, right?
 That market price is just the psychology of a bunch of people.
 Like literally, if you can change enough people's minds, you can change the value of the border
 or the position of the hierarchy or the value of the currency.
 Those are purely political truths.
 Then all the way on the other end are technical truths that exist independent of whatever
 any one human or all humans think, like the gravitational constant, right?
 Or the diameter of a virus.
 Those exist independent of the human mind.
 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 amount of
 Bitcoin or that if you hold this private key, you hold this Bitcoin.
 And then we make that very hard to change because you have to change a lot of technical
 truths.
 So you can push things to this interesting intermediate zone.
 The question is how much of our world can we push into that?
 Right.
 And that takes us in a nonlinear fascinating journey to the question I wanted to ask you
 in the beginning, which is this political world that you mentioned and the world of
 political truth.
 As we know it in the 20th century, in the early 21st century, what do you think works
 well and what is broken about government?
 The fundamental thing is that we can't easily and peacefully start new opt-in governments.
 And start up governments.
 Yeah.
 And 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, I don't know, Microsoft or name
 some company that's a GameStop and you can try to reform it.
 Or you can start your own.
 And the fact that both options exist mean that you can actually just start from scratch.
 And that's just, I mean, the same reason we have a clean piece of paper.
 I've mentioned this actually in the network state book.
 I'll just quote this bit, but we want to be able to start a new state peacefully for the
 same reason we want a bare plot of earth, a blank sheet of paper, an empty text buffer,
 a fresh 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 want to backspace, you don't want to have just like 128 bytes of space,
 128 kilobytes and just have to backspace the old document before creating the new one.
 So that's a fundamental thing that's wrong with today's governments.
 And it's a meta point, right?
 Because it's not any one specific reform, it's a meta reform of being able to start
 new countries.
 Okay.
 So that's one problem, but you could push back and say that's a feature.
 A lot of people argue that tradition is power.
 So generation, if you try a thing long enough, which is the way I see marriage, there's value
 to the struggle and the journey you take through the struggle and you grow and you develop
 ideas together.
 You grow intellectually, philosophically together.
 And that's the idea of a nation that spans generations that you have a tradition that
 strives towards the truth and is able to arrive there or no, not arrive, but take steps towards
 there through the generations.
 So you may not want to keep starting new governments.
 You may want to stick to the old one and improve it one step at a time.
 So just because you're having a fight inside a marriage doesn't mean you should get a divorce
 and go on Tinder and start dating around.
 That's the pushback.
 So it's not obvious that this is a strong feature to have to launch new governments.
 There's several different 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.
 Like 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 it's way older than all of
 these nations.
 I mean, humans are tens of thousands of years old.
 The answers to 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 had done historical reconstructions like skeletons and stuff like that.
 Many folks report that the transition to agriculture and being sessile resulted in diminution of
 height.
 People had like tooth decay and stuff like that.
 People had traded off upside for stability, right?
 That's what the state was.
 That's 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 you're able to roam around, just pick
 off fruits and so on, a little 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, you know?
 And I think that's important.
 To make America great again is to dissolve it completely into oblivion.
 No, it's a joke.
 I see.
 Yeah, 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, glitch.
 It's wearing the beta.
 And let me say one other thing about this, which is, you know, there are, I mean, everybody
 in the world, okay, let's say, I don't know about percentage, let's say 99.99% or it's
 rounds to that number of political discourse in the US focuses on trying to fix the system.
 If those folks, I mean, 0.01% of the energy is going towards building a new system, that
 seems like a pretty good portfolio strategy, right?
 Or 100% are supposed to go and edit this code base from 200 something years ago.
 I mean, the most American thing in the world is going and, 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 emigrants, right?
 Emigration from other countries to the US and actually also emigration within the US.
 There's this amazing YouTube video called, it's like 50 states, US population, I think
 1792.
 It says 2050, so they've got a simulation.
 So you just stop it at 2019 or 2020, but it shows that like Virginia was like number one
 early on and then it lost ground in like New York gained.
 And then like Ohio was a big deal in the early 1800s and it was like father of presidents
 in general, these presidents and later Illinois and Indiana.
 And then California only really came up in the 20th century, like during the great depression
 and now we're entering the modern era where like Florida and Texas have risen and New
 York and California have dropped.
 And so interstate competition, it's actually just like inter-currency competition.
 You've got trading pairs, right?
 You sell BTC by ETH, you sell Solana or 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.
 And 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.
 Pretty much like the link matrix that's shaped America in a huge way.
 And so 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 twenties, right?
 Who endorsed 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,
 that we might even 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 who has kids is never really ready to be kids, that's the whole point,
 you dive in.
 Okay.
 But the, I mean, you mentioned that you came to Washington, is there other criticisms of
 government that you can provide as we know it today?
 Before we kind of outline the ideas of V3.
 Well, I'll give a few, right?
 And so a lot of this stuff will go into the version.
 So I've got this book, The Network State, which covers some of these topics.
 Does Network State have a subtitle?
 It is The Network State, How to Start a New Country.
 How to start a new country.
 But I just have it at thenetworkstate.com.
 I should say it's an excellent book that you should get.
 I read it on Kindle, but there's also a website.
 And Balaji said that he's constantly working on improving it, changing it.
 By the time the whole project is over, it'll be a different book than it was in the beginning.
 I think so.
 It's 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 shipped a version 1.0 and the next version, I'm going to split
 into tentatively motivation theory and practice.
 Motivation like what is the political philosophy and so on that motivates me at least to do
 this, which you can take or leave, right?
 And then theory as to why network state is now possible and I can define it in a second.
 And then the practice is zillions of practical details and everything from roads to diplomatic
 recognition and so on.
 Funding, founding, all that stuff.
 A lot of stuff actually I left out of V1 simply because I wanted to kind of get the desirability
 of it on the table and then talk about the feasibility.
 I should actually linger on that briefly in terms of things we can revolutionize.
 One of the biggest innovations I think that Tesla does with the way they think about the
 car, with the deploy the car is not the automation or the electric.
 To me, it's the over the air updates.
 Be able to send instantaneously updates to the software that completely changes the behavior,
 the UX, everything about the car.
 And so I do think it would be interesting because books are a representation of human
 knowledge, a snapshot of human knowledge, and it would be interesting that if we can
 somehow figure out a system that allows you to do sort of like a GitHub for books.
 Like if I buy a book on Amazon without having to pay again, can I get updates like V1.1,
 V1.2, and there's like release notes?
 Right.
 That would be incredible.
 But it's not enough to do like a second edition or a third edition, but like minor updates
 that's not just on your website, but actually go into the model that we use to buy books.
 So I spend my money, maybe I'll do a subscription service for five bucks a month where I get
 regular updates to the books.
 And then there's an incentive for authors to actually update their books such that it
 makes sense for the subscription and that means your book isn't just a snapshot, but
 it's a lifelong project.
 Right.
 If you care enough about the book.
 So I think there's a lot that can be done there because actually in going through this
 process, in many ways, the most traditional thing I did was a self-published ebook on
 Kindle.
 Right.
 Why?
 Because basically like, if you actually ink a deal with a book publisher, first they'll
 give you some advance.
 I didn't need the advance or anything.
 But second is all these constraints.
 Oh, you 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.
 And also the narrowing window of what they'll actually publish, it gets narrower and narrower.
 You see all these meltdowns over young adult novels and stuff on Twitter, but it's more
 than that.
 So actually having an Amazon page, it's just like a marker that a book exists.
 And now I've got an entry point where if someone says, okay, I like this tweet, but how do
 I kind of get the, that might be a concept from like the middle of chapter three, right?
 How do I get the thing from front to back?
 I can just point them at thenetworkstate.com.
 That is import this, right?
 This one entry point.
 And you mentioned like subscription and money and so on and so forth.
 And I think people are paying for content online now with newsletters and so on, but
 I've chosen to, and it 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 thenetworkstate.com, what I want to do is have that optimized for every Android phone
 so people in India or Latin America or Nigeria can just tap and open it.
 Going to do translations and stuff like that.
 Greg Fodor of AllspaceVR, founder of AllspaceVR, he sold that and he coded the website and
 worked with him on it.
 And there's our designer who, Elijah, and it was basically just a three person group.
 And we thought we had something pretty nice.
 But one thing I was really pleasantly surprised by is how many people got in touch with us
 afterwards and asked us if we could open source the software to create this website, right?
 Because it's actually, you can try it on mobile.
 I think it's actually in some ways a better experience than Kindle.
 And so that was interesting because I do think of the website as like a V1 version of a,
 this concept of a book app, right?
 For example, imagine if you have the Bible and the 10 commandments aren't just text,
 but there's like a checklist and there's a gateway to a Christian community there.
 And the practice is embedded into the thing.
 Like, do you know brilliant.org?
 Amazing site.
 I love this site.
 Brilliant is basically mobile friendly tutorials.
 And you can kind of just swipe through, you're in line at Starbucks or getting on a plane
 or something.
 You 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 you think through
 what is the key insight.
 Like we mentioned the prime number maze that reveals something central to the human condition
 which is struggling against the limitation of our minds.
 And in that same way, you 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 preexisting states.
 Okay?
 So just taking those pieces, highly aligned online community that is not Facebook, that
 is not Twitter.
 People don't think of themselves as Facebookers or Twitterians, right?
 That's just a collection of hundreds of millions of people who just fight each other all day,
 right?
 It's a fight club.
 A company is highly aligned where you'll put a task into the company Slack and if you do
 it in all hands, about a hundred percent 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 a Twitter account, you might get 0.1% of people engaging with something.
 It's not the a hundred percent.
 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 a thousand or 10,000 people who can collectively do something as simple as
 just all liking something on Twitter.
 For example, why would they do that?
 They're a guild of electrical engineers.
 They're a guild of graphic designers.
 And you've got a thousand people in this guild and every day somebody is asking a favor from
 the guild and the other 999 people are helping them out.
 For example, I've just launched a new project or I'd like to get a new job.
 Can somebody help me?
 And so on.
 And so you kind of give to get your, you know, you're helping other people in the community
 and you're kind of building up karma this way.
 And then sometimes you spend it down.
 Like Stack Overflow has this karma economy.
 It's not meant to be an internal economy that is like making tons and tons of money off
 of 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 a thousand people and you paste in a tweet and a thousand
 of them RT it or like it.
 Okay.
 If you can't even get that, you don't have something.
 If you do have that, you have the basis for at least collective digital action on something.
 Okay.
 And you can think of this as a group of activists.
 You can think of it as, for example, let's say I mentioned a guild, but let's say they're
 a group that wants to raise awareness of the fact that life extension is possible, right?
 Every day there's a new tweet on, I don't know, whether it's Metformin Research or Sinclair's
 work or David Sinclair, right?
 Andrew Huberman has good stuff here, you know, or there's a Longevity VC.
 There's a bunch of folks working in this area.
 Every day there's something there.
 And literally the purpose of this online community is raise awareness of longevity.
 And of the thousand people, 970 go and like that.
 That's pretty good, right?
 That's solid.
 You've got something there.
 You've got a laser, right?
 You've got something which you can focus on something because most of the web to internet
 is 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-
 Some of them look delicious.
 Some of them look delicious.
 Novelty, we can over consume novelty, right?
 So what we were talking about earlier, the balance between tradition and innovation, right?
 Here is a different version of that, which is entropy going in a ton of different directions
 due to novelty versus like focus.
 It's like heat versus work.
 Heat is entropic and work force along a distance.
 You're going in a direction, right?
 And so if those 30 links on 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.
 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 David Sachs found and sold the company Yammer that was partially on their basis.
 It was fine.
 It was a billion dollar company, but Facebook for Work was actually Slack, right?
 It looked different.
 It was more chat focused.
 It was less image focused and whatnot.
 What does the platform for a highly aligned online community look like?
 I think Discord is the transitional state, but it's not the end state.
 Discord is sort of chatty.
 The work isn't done in Discord itself, right?
 The cryptocurrency for tracking or the crypto karma for sort of tracking people's contributions
 is not really done in Discord itself.
 Discord was not built for that.
 And I don't know what that UX looks like.
 Maybe it looks like tasks, you know, like maybe it looks something different.
 Okay.
 So let me linger on this.
 Sure.
 I mean, some people might not be even familiar with Discord or Slack or so on.
 Even these platforms have like communities associated with them.
 Meaning the big, like the meta community of people who are aware of the feature set and
 that you can do a thing, that this is a thing and then you could do a thing with it.
 Discord, like when I first realized that, I think it was born out of the gaming world
 is like, holy shit.
 This is like a thing.
 There's a lot of people that use this.
 Right.
 There's also a culture that's very difficult to escape that's associated with Discord that
 spans all the different communities within Discord.
 Reddit is the same, even though there's different subreddits, there's still, because of the
 migration phenomenon, maybe there's still a culture to Reddit and so on.
 Yes.
 So I'd like to sort of try to dig in and understand what's the difference between the online communities
 that are formed and the platforms on which those communities are formed.
 Sure.
 Very important.
 Yes, it is.
 It is.
 So for example, an office, a good design for an office is frequently you have the Commons,
 which is like the lunchroom or the gathering area.
 Then everybody else has a cave on the border they can kind of retreat to.
 Cave in the Commons.
 I love it.
 By the way, I was laughing internally about the heat versus work.
 I think that's going to stick with me.
 That's such an interesting way to see Twitter.
 Yeah.
 Is it just heat or is this thread, because there's a lot of stuff going on.
 Right.
 Is it just heat or we're doing some like, is there a directed thing that's going to
 be productive at the end of the day?
 That's right.
 I love this.
 I've never seen, anyway, the cave in the Commons is really nice.
 So that has to do with the layout of an office that's effective.
 That's right.
 So you can think of many kinds of social networks as being on the cave in Commons continuum.
 For example, Twitter is just all Commons.
 The caves are just like individual DMs or DM threads or whatever, but it's really basically
 just one gigantic global public fight club for the most part.
 Right?
 Then you have- Or love club.
 Well, some would love, but mostly fight.
 Or actually- I love aggressively, that's all.
 Yeah.
 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, because of the Commons structure of it, it's a mechanism for virality of anything.
 You just described the kind of things that become viral.
 Yeah.
 Meaning no offense to librarians.
 It's like a library and Liberia.
 Liberia was wrecked by civil war for many years.
 Right?
 That's Liberia is one of my favorite sets for porn.
 Just kidding.
 Jokes.
 I'm learning.
 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.
 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.
 The reason is I think it's easy to understand when something is completely public like Twitter
 or completely private like Signal.
 Those are the only two modes I think in which one can really operate.
 When something is quasi-private like Facebook, you have to just kind of assume it's public
 because if it's interesting enough, it'll go outside your friend network and it'll get
 screenshotted or whatever and posted.
 Facebook is sort of forced into default public despite its privacy settings.
 For anybody who says something interesting, if it's like you can figure out all their
 dials and stuff like that, but just hard to understand unless it's totally private or
 totally public.
 You have to basically treat it if it's totally public, if it's not totally private.
 Okay.
 At least under real name.
 I'll come back to pseudonym.
 So you've got Twitter, that's total Commons.
 Facebook, which 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 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 are become physical societies.
 Like lots and lots of subreddit like things become physical societies.
 Then you start going further into like Discord where it's more full featured than, you know,
 as you go Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, now you jump into Discord and Discord is a bunch of
 individual communities that are connected and you can easily sort of jump between them.
 Right.
 And then you have Slack and you know, yes, you can use Slack to go between different
 company slacks, but Slack historically, at least I'm not sure what their current policy
 is, historically they discourage public slacks.
 So it's mostly like you have your main Slack for your company and then you sometimes may
 jump into like, let's say you've got a design consultant or somebody like that, you'll jump
 into their Slack, but Discord is, you've got way more Discord usually that you jump into
 than Slacks, right?
 Well, and let me ask you then on that point, because there is a culture, one of the things
 I discovered on Reddit and Discord of anonymity or pseudonyms or usernames that don't represent
 the actual name.
 I think about 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 same stuff in Discord, I think I was the only asshole using my actual name
 on there.
 It's like everybody was using pseudonyms.
 So what's the role of that in the online community?
 Well, so I actually gave a talk on this a few years ago called the pseudonymous economy.
 Okay.
 And it's come about faster than I expected, but I did think it was going to come about
 fairly fast.
 And essentially the concept is obviously we've had, so first anonym, pseudonym, real name,
 right?
 Do you need to describe the difference?
 The difference.
 Anonymous is like 4chan, where there's no tracking of a name, you know, there's zero
 reputation associated with an identity, right?
 Anonymous 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 the air tag that's put on you, right?
 Why do I say that, right?
 Another word for a name is a handle and so just visualize like a giant file cabinet.
 There's a handle with Lex 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 stalk billions of other people
 now.
 That's a very new thing and I actually think this will be a transitional era in like human
 history.
 We're actually 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.
 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.
 That was like one of the purposes of names was to make masses of humans legible to a
 state, hence seeing like a state.
 You can see them now.
 Digital identifiers, one thing that people don't usually think about is pseudonymity
 is itself a form of decentralization.
 People know Satoshi Nakamoto was pseudonymous.
 They also knew he was into decentralization, but one way of thinking about it is let's
 say his real name or his state name is a node.
 Attached to that is every database, his Gmail, his Facebook if he had one, every government
 record on him.
 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 think of it as being the center of a giant network of all of these things.
 When you go and create a pseudonym, you're butting 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 chooses to do that.
 All those things, the digital signatures are all attached to this new decentralized name
 because he's instantiating it, not the government, right?
 One way of thinking about it is the root administrator of the quote real name system is the state
 because you cannot simply edit your name there, right?
 You can't just go, you can't log into USA.gov and backspace your name and change it.
 Moreover, your birth certificate, all this stuff that's fixed and immutable, right?
 Whereas you would take for granted that on every site you go to, you can backspace, you
 can be like, call me Ishmael, walk into a site, use whatever name you want.
 You'd have to use the same name across multiple sites.
 You can do that.
 And if not, you don't have to.
 One thing that we're seeing now actually is at the level of kids, the younger generation.
 Eric Schmidt several years ago mentioned that people would change their names when they
 became adults so that they could do that.
 This is kind of already happening.
 People are using, I've remarked on this many years ago, search resistant identities.
 Okay, why?
 They have their Finsta, which is their quote fake name Instagram and Rinsta, which is their
 real name Instagram.
 Oh, this is cool.
 Okay.
 And what's interesting is on their Rinsta, they're their fake self because they're in
 their Sunday best and smiling.
 And this is the one that's meant to be search indexed, right?
 On the Finsta, their fake name, this is just shared with their closest friends.
 They're their real self and they're hanging out at parties or whatever.
 And so this way they've got something which is the public persona and the private persona,
 the public persona that's search indexed and the private persona that is private for friends.
 And so organically people are, like Jean Jacobs, she talks about cities and how they're organic.
 And some of the mid 20th century guys, the architecture they had removed shade from awnings
 and stuff like that got removed.
 So this is like the restoration of awnings and shade and structure so that you're not
 always exposed to the all seeing web crawler that I have sore on, which is like Google
 bot just indexing everything.
 These are search resistant identities and that eye just sort of passes over you like
 the Terminator eye just kind of passes over you, right?
 So search resistant identity is not pulled up, it's not indexed, right?
 And now you can be your real self.
 And so we've had this kind of thing for a while with communication.
 The new thing is that cryptocurrency has allowed us to do it for transaction, hence the pseudonymous
 economy, right?
 And should go from anonymous, pseudonymous real name.
 These each have their different purposes, but the new concept is that pseudonym, you
 can have multiple of them by the way, your ENS name, you could have it under your quote
 real name or state name like Lex Friedman.eth, but you could also be punk6529.eth, okay?
 And now you can earn, you can sign documents, you can boot up stuff, you can have a persistent
 identity here, okay, which has a level of indirection to your real name.
 Why is that very helpful?
 Because now it's harder to both discriminate against you and cancel you.
 Concerns of various factions are actually obviated or at least partially addressed by
 going pseudonymous as default, right?
 It is the opposite of bring your whole self to work.
 It's bring only your necessary self to work, right?
 Only show those credentials that you need, right?
 Now of course, anybody who's in cryptocurrency understands Sushin Nakamoto and so on is for
 this, but actually many progressives are for this as well.
 Why?
 You don't ban the boxes.
 It's like you're not supposed to ask about felony convictions when somebody is being
 hired because they've served their time, right?
 Or you're not supposed to ask about immigration status or marital status in an interview.
 And people have this concept of blind auditions where if a woman is auditioning for 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 getting a violin
 position.
 So you combine those concepts like ban the box, not asking these various questions, blind
 auditions, and then also the concept of implicit bias.
 Like if you believe this research, people are unconsciously biased towards other folks,
 right?
 Okay, so you take all that, you take Satoshi and you put it together and you say, okay,
 let's use pseudonyms.
 That actually takes unconscious bias even off the table, right?
 Because now you have genuine global equality of opportunity.
 Moreover you have all these people, billions of people around the world that might speak
 with accents, but they type without them.
 And now if they're pseudonymous, you aren't discriminating against them, right?
 Moreover with AI, very soon, the AI version of Zoom, you'll be able to be whoever you
 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.
 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 a pseudonym or when you're completely anonymous, is there
 some sense where you're not actually being your real self?
 That as a social entity, it is, human beings are fundamentally social creatures.
 And for us to be social creatures, there is some sense in which we have to have a consistent
 identity that can be canceled, that can be criticized or applauded in society.
 And that identity persists through time.
 So is there some sense in which we would not be our full, beautiful human selves unless
 we have a lifelong consistent real name attached to us in a digital world?
 So this is a complicated topic, but let me make a few remarks.
 First is real names, quote unquote state names were not built for the internet.
 They're actually state names, right?
 It's actually a great way of thinking about it, 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?
 Their real name is out there, their stalker knows it, they can find address information,
 all this other kind of stuff, right?
 And with all these hacks that are happening, just every day we see another hack, massive
 hack, et cetera, that real name can be indexed into data that was supposed to be private,
 right?
 Like for example, you know, the Office of Personnel Management, like the government,
 the US government, many governments actually, are like a combination of the surveillance
 state and the Keystone cops, right?
 Why?
 They slurp up all the information and then they can't secure it.
 So it leaks out the back door.
 Okay.
 They've, they basically have, you know, a hundred million records of all this very,
 300 million records, all this very sensitive data.
 They just get owned, hacked over and over again, right?
 And so really there should be something which 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 he merges various databases, they've
 got a bunch of addresses to go and hit.
 Okay.
 So in that sense, real names were not, state names were not built for the internet.
 They just give up too much information.
 And our actually existing internet environment, they give up too much information.
 On the other hand, they also give too little.
 Why?
 If instead you give out Lexfreedman.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 Lexfreedman.eth, what can you do that?
 Some you can do today, some you'll soon be able to do.
 You can pay Lexfreedman.eth, you can message Lexfreedman.eth.
 You can look it up like a social profile.
 You can send files to it.
 You can upload and download.
 Basically it combines aspects of an email address, a website, a username, et cetera,
 et cetera.
 But you, you know, eventually I think you'll go from email to phone number to ENS address
 or something like that as the primary online identifier, because this is actually a programmable
 name, right?
 Whereas a state name is not.
 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 ENS name is developed for the online world.
 Now the reason say ENS or something like it, you know, somebody had a, in a village, they'll,
 their name might be Smith because they were a blacksmith or Potter because they were a
 Potter, right?
 And same, I think your surname right now for many people it's dot Ethan that reflects the
 Ethereum community, your surname online will carry information about you like dot salt
 says something different about you dot BTC says yet something different.
 I think we're going to have a massive fractionation of this over time.
 We're still in the very earliest days of our internet civilization, right?
 A hundred, 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, it's the
 civilization fundamentally that you're associated with, right?
 Right.
 So there's some improvements to the real name that you could do in the digital world, but
 do you think there's value of having a name that's persist throughout your whole life
 that is shared between all the different digital and physical communities?
 I think you should be able to opt into that, right?
 At which 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, no.
 My name is-
 I don't mean it like that.
 No, no.
 Yeah.
 So here's why that wouldn't work.
 That's the application I'm interested in.
 Okay.
 Well, I'm not interested in the murder application, but-
 Well, I would like you to prevent me-
 Take that thought.
 Sure.
 A person who's clearly bad for society from doing that.
 Sure, sure.
 But murder is going to be against the rules in almost every society.
 And I mean, people will argue-
 Most likely, yeah.
 Yeah, most likely, right?
 Except animals.
 Well, I'm thinking of like the Aztecs or the Mayas or something like that.
 There's various, you know, the Soviet Union, there's weird edge case, unfortunately.
 Wrong words.
 Yeah, there's societies, unfortunately, that have actually, that's why I asterisked it.
 But let's say murder is something that society one probably has effectively, a social smart
 contract or a social contract that says that's illegal.
 Therefore you're in jail.
 Therefore you're deprived of the right to exit.
 But upon entry into that society, in theory, you would have said, okay, I accept this quote
 social contract, right?
 Obviously, if I kill somebody, I can't leave.
 Okay.
 So you've accepted upon crossing the border into there, right?
 Now, as I mentioned, you know, like what is murder?
 Like people will, I mean, there's an obvious answer, but as I said, there's been human
 sacrifice in some societies.
 Communism, they kill lots of people.
 Nazism, they kill lots of people.
 Unfortunately, there's quite a lot of societies.
 You know, I wanted to say it's an edge case, but maybe many of the 20th century societies
 around the world have institutionalized some kind of murder, whether it was the Red Terror,
 you know, in the Soviet Union or obviously the Holocaust or, you know, the Cultural Revolution
 or year zero and so on and so forth, right?
 So my point there is that who 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 what I'm talking about,
 the hanging order for the Kulaks?
 Yes.
 Okay.
 The famous hanging order, which actually showed they were actually bloodthirsty.
 The key thing was he said, here's a list of all the quote, rich men, the Kulaks go and
 kill them.
 The real names, the state names were what facilitated the murder.
 They didn't prevent the murderers there, right?
 So my point is just in the ethical weighting of it, it's a two-sided thing, right?
 You're right that the tracking can, you know, prevent disorganized murders, but the tracking
 facilitates unfortunately organized murders.
 Lists of undesirables were the primary tool of all of these oppressive states in the 20th
 century.
 You see my point?
 I see your point and it's a very strong point.
 In part, it's a cynical point, 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, it's, it's like fire.
 It is something which, um, you're going to keep having it reform because there's, there's
 good reasons where you have centralization, decentralization, re-centralization, but power
 corrupts absolute power corrupts absolutely.
 And you just have to be very suspicious of this kind of centralized power.
 The more trust you give it, often the less trusted it deserves.
 It's like a weird feedback loop, right?
 The more trust, the more it can do, the more it can do, the more bad things it will do.
 So okay.
 There is a lot of downside to the state being able to track you.
 Right.
 And history teaches us lessons when 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, it is all the convenience and none of
 the freedom.
 That's the downside, but don't you, the question is about, 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 understand.
 But you know, nevertheless engaging with it, like, you know, I don't know, is the ratio
 10x, is it 100x?
 I wouldn't be surprised if it's 100x.
 Yeah, but have you seen the viciousness, the negativity, the division within online communities
 that have anonymity?
 So that's the thing is basically there's also a sila and a syriptus.
 I'm not, you know, when you see what centralization can do and you correct in the direction of
 decentralization, you can over-correct with decentralization and you get anarchy.
 And this is basically then you want to re-centralize, 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?
 Then you 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 deal of societal stability.
 So it's kind of like saying, are we going north or south?
 And the answer is like, what's our destination?
 Where's our current position in the civilizational state space?
 Well, my main question, I guess, is does creating a network state escape from some of the flaws
 of human nature?
 The reason you got Nazi Germany is a large scale resentment with different explanations
 for that resentment that's ultimately lives in the heart of each individual.
 They made up the entirety of Nazi Germany and had a charismatic leader that was able
 to channel that resentment into action, into actual policies, into actual political and
 military movements.
 Can't you not have the same kind of thing in digital communities as well?
 Have you heard the term argumentum ad Hitlerum or like Godwin's law or something like, you
 know, it's something where if the reference point is Hitler, it's this thing where a lot
 of things break down.
 But I do think, I mean, look, is there any, did Bitcoin manage to get where it was without
 a single shot being fired to my knowledge?
 Yes.
 Right.
 Did Google manage to get to where it is without shots being fired?
 Absolutely.
 And.
 While a lot of shots were being fired elsewhere in the world.
 Sure.
 But who's firing those shots?
 The states.
 The states, right.
 Yeah.
 But that's because Bitcoin and Google are a tiny minority of communities.
 It's like the icing on the cake of human civilization.
 Sure.
 Basically any technology, I mean, like you can use a hammer to go and hit somebody with
 it, right?
 I'm not saying every technology is equally destructive or what have you, but you can
 conceive of, it's kind of like rule 34, but for technology, right?
 Okay.
 Right.
 You can probably figure out some.
 Your ability to reference brilliant things throughout is quite admirable.
 Yes.
 But anyway, sorry.
 Rule 34 for technology.
 Rule 34, but for abusive technology, you can always come up with a black mirror version
 of something.
 And in fact, there is this kind of funny tweet, which is like a sci-fi author.
 My book, Don't Invent the Torment Nexus was meant to be a cautionary tale on what would
 happen if society invented the torment nexus.
 And then it's like, tech guys, at long last we have created the torment nexus.
 Right.
 And so the thing is that simply describing something, some abuse, unfortunately after
 the initial shock wears off, people will unconsciously think of it as sort of an attractor in the
 space.
 Right.
 It's like, I'll give you some examples.
 Like Minority Report had the gesture thing, right?
 And the Kinect was based on that.
 So it's a dystopian movie, but had this cool kind of thing and people kind of keyed off
 it, right?
 Or people have said that movies like Full Metal Jacket, that was meant to be, in my
 understanding, it was meant to be like an anti-war movie, but soldiers just love it
 despite the fact that the drill sergeant is actually depicted as a bad guy for the portrayal
 of that kind of environment.
 So just saying it's like giving the vision of the digital Hitler or whatever is not actually
 a vision I want to paint.
 I do think everything is possible.
 Obviously, ISIS uses the internet.
 Yeah, we're not bringing up Hitler in a shallow argument.
 We're bringing up Hitler in a long, empathetic, relaxed discussion, which is where Hitler
 can live in a healthy way.
 There's deep lessons in Hitler and Nazi Germany as there is with Stalin, yes.
 Okay.
 So in many ways, and this is a very superficial way of talking about it, but this is, Exit
 is the anti-genocide technology, right?
 Because Exit is the route of the politically powerless.
 Exit is not, people will always say, oh, Exit is for the rich.
 That's actually not true.
 Most immigrants equals most immigrants are not rich.
 They're politically powerless.
 You can describe Exit.
 What is Exit?
 So there's this book, which I reference a lot.
 I like it, called Exit, Voice, and Loyalty by Albert Hirschman.
 And he essentially says, and I gave this talk in 2013 that goes through this at YC Star
 Up 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, hey, here's a ticket that I'd like to get solved
 and Exit is taking your business elsewhere.
 At the level of corporate governance, Voices, board of directors vote and Exit is selling
 your shares.
 In a country, Voices is a vote and Exit is migration.
 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.
 So you can vote with your ballot, you can vote with your wallet, you can vote with your
 feet.
 And that 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 what you said seriously.
 You're not just complaining or whatever.
 You actually left San Francisco because it was so bad on this and this issue and you've
 actually voted with your feet.
 It is manifest preference as opposed to stated preference.
 So voice versus Exit is this interesting dichotomy.
 Do you try to reform the system or do you exit it and build a new one or seek an alternative?
 And then loyalty modulates this, where if you are a patriot as part of the initial part
 of your conversation, like are you a traitor?
 You're giving up on our great thing or whatever.
 And people push those buttons to get people to stick.
 That's like, I shouldn't say the bad version.
 Let's say a common version.
 Sometimes good, sometimes bad.
 But then there's the good version, which is, oh, maybe the price is down right now, but
 you believe in the cause.
 So even if they're on paper, you would rationally exit.
 You believe in this thing and you're going to stick with it.
 So loyalty can be, again, good and bad, but it kind of modulates a trade-off between voice
 and exit.
 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 that are off?
 Because they're not mutually exclusive.
 It's kind of like left and right, sometimes you need both together.
 I think that one of the biggest things the internet does is it increases microeconomic
 leverage and therefore increases exit in every respect of life.
 For example, on every phone, you can pick between Lyft and Uber.
 When you're at the store, you see a price on the shelf and you can comparison shop.
 If it's Tinder, you can swipe.
 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, this is 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 by typing in some characters into Dalit.
 And that makes the positive forces of capitalism more efficient increase in microeconomic leverage.
 It's individual empowerment.
 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 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.
 The 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.
 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 inside the United States?
 Well, the physical world-
 I think you do, yeah, under the constraints of the physical world, you do like micro migrations.
 So this is coming back to the hunter gatherer, farmer soldier, digital nomad kind of thing,
 right?
 So 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, one of the 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 in the 1980s, I mean, they didn't have Google Maps, right?
 So you couldn't just discover things off the path.
 People would just essentially do home to work and work to home and home to work and a trip
 had to be planned, right?
 They were contained within a region of space or you do home to school, school to home,
 home to school.
 It wasn't like you went and explored the map.
 Most people didn't, right?
 They were highly canalized, okay, meaning it was just back and forth, back and forth,
 very routine, just like the push the button, push the button, trapped within this very
 small piece and also trapped within this large country because it was hard to travel between
 countries and so on.
 Again, of course there were vacations, of course there were some degree of news and
 so on.
 Your mobility wasn't completely crushed, but it was actually quite low, relatively speaking.
 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.
 I don't have the data to show it, but I'd be shocked if people, the average person didn't
 go to more places, wasn't 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, I mean, how many websites have you visited?
 I don't know, hundreds of thousands probably at this point over your life, right?
 How many places on the surface have you visited?
 You're actually unusual.
 You might be like a world traveler or 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 era, right?
 Because you couldn't build permanent fortifications and whatnot.
 Even nations as we currently think of them with like demarcated borders, you needed cartography,
 you needed maps, right?
 That stuff didn't exist for a long time.
 You just had 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.
 I think the 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 issue.
 Let me just give you some data.
 Personal anecdotal experience data.
 There's a reason I only do this podcast in person.
 There's 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 way to do that, just as Ukraine went to the front.
 The way you can have people be cruel to each other in the physical space is through the
 machinery of propaganda that dehumanizes the other side, all that kind of stuff.
 That's really hard work to do.
 Online, I find just naturally at the individual scale, people somehow start to easily engage
 in the drug of mockery, derision, and cruelty when they can hide behind anonymity.
 I don't know what that says about human nature.
 I ultimately believe most of us want to be good and have the capacity to do a lot of
 good, but sometimes it's fun to be shitty, to shit on people, to be cruel.
 I don't know what that is.
 It's weird because I think one of my sayings is just like the internet increases in microeconomic
 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 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 on
 location to kind of extreme outcomes on both sides.
 Having that here, you are talking about the bad outcome, which I agree does happen with
 the internet in some sense makes people have very low empathy between others, but it also
 is the other extent where people find their mental soulmates across the world.
 Someone who's living in Thailand or in like 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 meet in person.
 It's like the brains have been communicating for two years, three years, you've been friends,
 and you see them in person and it's just great.
 It's not just the total lack of empathy.
 It is frankly far more empathy than you would be able to build usually with an in-person
 conversation in the 80s or the 90s with someone on their side of the world 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.
 Like it's a sensor distribution.
 I work for the intelligence agency, so I'm seeing the private chats.
 I'm collecting all of your data.
 Yes, but you can intuit stuff.
 I don't think I'm being very selective.
 If you just look at the young folks, I am very concerned about the intellectual psychological
 growth of young men and women.
 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 basic technology.
 Stuff I coat up over the weekend kind of thing.
 I think if I throw 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.
 The entirety of Reddit just chuckled as you said that.
 Well, within a subreddit, it's actually fairly polite.
 Like I say, you're not usually seeing, it depends on which subreddit, of course.
 There's a consistency.
 I think the definition of politeness is interesting here because it's polite within the culture
 of that subreddit.
 Yes, they abide by, let me put it a different way, they abide by the social norms of that
 subreddit.
 Right, and that's the definition of politeness.
 Yeah, or civility is like, right?
 There is an interesting difference between pseudonymous and anonymous, you're saying.
 It's possible that pseudonymity, you can actually avoid some of the negative aspects.
 Absolutely.
 We're re-Dunbarizing the world in some ways.
 With China being the big exception or outlier, the Dunbar number, 150 people, that's roughly
 the scale of your society, right?
 That's the number of people that a human can kind of keep in their brain.
 Whether apocryphal or not, I think it's probably roughly true.
 And we're re-Dunbarizing the world because A, we're making small groups much more productive
 and B, we're making large groups much more fractious, right?
 So you have an individual notch, you can program Minecraft by himself or Satoshi who could
 do V1 to 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 countries of hundreds of millions of people that are
 just finding that the first and second principle or they're just splitting on principle components.
 Scott Alexander thinks of them as scissor statements, statements that one group thinks
 is obviously true, one group thinks is obviously false.
 You can think of them as political polarization, you can think of it in terms of game theory.
 There's lots of different reasons you can give for why this happens, but those large
 groups now are getting split.
 And so you have both the unsustainability of these large sort of artificial groups and
 the productivity of these small organic ones.
 And so that is kind of, it's like sort of obvious that's the direction of civilizational
 rebirth.
 We just need to kind of lean into that.
 This is a statement.
 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.
 Just 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 crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually
 gains diplomatic recognition from preexisting states.
 So we talked about was the alignment of online communities and the capacity for collective
 action.
 Yep.
 Well, one collective action, it could be a thousand people liking a tweet, right?
 If you can get a thousand of a thousand people doing it.
 But a much higher level, much higher bar is a thousand people crowdfunding territory and
 actually living together.
 Just like people currently- In physical space.
 In physical space.
 And not all in one place.
 That's critical.
 Just like Bitcoin is a decentralized currency, the network state is a recipe for a decentralized
 state-like entity, okay, where it starts with, for example, two people just get, they become
 roommates.
 They meet in this community, they become roommates.
 Okay, they get their place together.
 Or 10 people get a group house.
 Or eventually a hundred people just buy a small apartment building together.
 And guess what?
 They start getting equity, not just paying rent.
 Okay?
 These are all people who share their values.
 And now they can crowdfund territory together.
 Now, of course, they don't just jump straight from a thousand people liking something to
 a thousand people crowdfunding something, what I described in the middle is you do a
 lot of meetups, you get to know these other people before you decide to live, you know,
 collectively with them.
 But once you live with them, you start to get a network effect.
 For example, if those hundred people want to learn Spanish or Turkish or Vietnamese,
 they could all have a building where they're doing Vietnamese immersion, right?
 And that's something which they get a benefit from being physically around the other people
 that the pure digital wouldn't give them to quite the same extent, right?
 And so crowdfunds territory around the world, crucially not just one place, they're all
 connected by the internet, just like Hawaii is 2000 miles away from the continental US,
 but both sides think of them as American, but the people on Hawaii and people in the
 continental US.
 What's the role of having to have territory?
 If most of the exchange, so presumably as technology gets better and better, the communication,
 the intimacy, the exchange of ideas all happens in a digital world, what's the importance
 of being able to crowdfund territory?
 Well, because we're still physical creatures.
 You can't reproduce yet digitally, right?
 There's still lots of things-
 So it's all about sex.
 Well, that's going 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.
 It's not a cult.
 Why can't you just like take a train?
 Why is it not a cult?
 It's not a cult because a cult is very internally focused and it tries to close its members
 off from the outside world.
 This is much more how America itself was populated where there were lots of towns like Penn is
 named after William Penn or the founder of Texas like Sam Houston, right?
 Lots of towns like the Oneida Commune in Northern New York, they recruited and they became a
 town and they became actually the Oneida Glassware Company, kind of 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?
 Yes, reproduction, it's marriage and kids and so on, but it's also just hanging out
 and it is just the physical world is very high bandwidth.
 There's lots of stuff.
 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.
 We can build a billion dollar company online, but we need a billion permits to build a shed
 in San Francisco.
 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.
 If the population of Nevada had 100% consensus, you could just dissolve every law in Nevada
 in theory and then build new ones.
 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.
 That's the power of when you actually have human consensus.
 One way I talk about this also in the book a little bit, and this is going to go much
 more into detail in the V2, I think of this as 100% democracy as opposed to 51% democracy.
 51% democracy, which is the current form of government, is 49% dictatorship because the
 entire premise of democracy is about the consent of the governed.
 That's actual legitimating underpinning principle.
 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 you drink it, it's milk or
 it's nothing, right?
 So all of that is routinized.
 All of that is accepted.
 We have this thing which is just the minimum possible amount of democracy of 51%, okay.
 What happens is then that 51% tries to ram something down the 49% throat and then the
 next election it's now 51, 49 the other way and then they ram it back.
 That's how you get the seesaw that is just splitting countries apart, right?
 The alternative to that is you build a consensus online, you go and get some God forsaken patch
 of territory.
 Actually the worse the territory, the better.
 Why?
 Because it's like Burning Man.
 Nobody cares, right?
 The nicer the piece of land, the more the people are going to argue about it.
 But Starlink has repriced the world.
 Basically all kinds of pieces of territory that were previously, you know, they're far
 away from natural ports.
 They're far away from natural resources.
 All kinds of pieces of territory around the world now have satellite internet.
 And so what you can do is again, the map has been reopened, right?
 We were talking about earlier, the map has been reopened.
 You can gather your community online.
 They're now capable of collective action.
 You can point here.
 This place has great Starlink coverage.
 You go there like the Verizon guy, 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 Himby.
 Okay.
 Do you want that?
 Let's go.
 Nimby, Yimby, Himby.
 What are those?
 So Nimby is not in my backyard.
 Don't build in cities.
 Yimby is let's build high density buildings, really tall buildings and so on in cities.
 There's a third version, which is Himby, my little acquaintance, which is horizontal
 sprawl is good.
 Why horizontal sprawl?
 Because to build a skyscraper, to build a tall building in a city, you have this enormous
 permitting process, all of this stuff which has to get done.
 It's expensive, it's time consuming.
 The way that cities were built, if you go back to the V1, what does the startup city
 look like?
 It looks like something like Burning Man.
 It looks like the cities of the Wild West.
 They were not multi-story buildings, right?
 They were basically things that were just like one story and someone could have it there
 in the dust and then you build roads and stuff between them and they can move them around.
 It was a much more dynamic geography.
 And so when you have that as a vision of what a startup city looks like, right?
 Now you've got something, there's a company I found called Kift, which is like van life.
 There's a lot of stuff in construction that makes this feasible.
 There's so-called man camps for fracking where people can just do like companies like a Greco,
 they're a product power.
 You can bring water, all this stuff on site.
 So it's easy to actually snap this stuff to grid, relatively speaking, if you've got horizontal
 space, you pick this space, you crowd from the territory, now you've got a city.
 Okay.
 And the last bit is eventually gains diplomatic recognition from preexisting states.
 So this is a part that people, different people will be with me up to this point and then
 they'll say, okay, that's a part I disagree with or how are you 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.
 Of course people have crowdfunded land and moving together and doing it at a larger scale.
 All that I believe, how are you possibly ever going to gain diplomatic recognition from
 preexisting states?
 You dumb delusional tech bro, right?
 That's a common thing.
 Okay.
 That's about the tone of it as well.
 And so first I would say sovereigns are already out for business.
 They're inking deals.
 Okay.
 Nevada inked a deal with Tesla to build the Geiger factory.
 El Salvador has Bitcoin as its national currency.
 Wyoming has done the Dow law where Ethereum is now recognized, where you can have on chain
 and corporations 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 and on.
 Sovereigns are open for business.
 Sovereigns are doing deals with companies and with currencies.
 Sovereigns at the level of cities like Miami or New York where the mayors are accepting
 their salary in Bitcoin.
 States like Wyoming or Nevada has its new private cities legislation or entire countries
 like El Salvador.
 So-
 When you say sovereigns, by the way, you mean the old school physical nation states.
 Governments.
 Fiat states.
 Fiat states.
 Okay.
 But the Fiat isn't the thing that makes a state.
 What makes a state is geographical location.
 It is something where, they're both, right?
 So basically it's a play on words.
 So just like Fiat currency is cryptocurrency, we will have Fiat country and crypto country,
 right?
 And in fact, you can think of the Fiat and crypto version of almost anything.
 One thing I'll come to later is a big thing, the big thing I think comes after digital
 currency is digital passports.
 Okay.
 And that's a big part of this whole network thing which we'll come back to.
 So that last bit, the reason I just mentioned all those deals between sovereigns, whether
 at the city, US state, or UN listed country level, okay?
 And on the other hand, so that's on one side of the market and the other 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?
 So-
 Can you possibly escape that?
 So yes, and let me give you a concrete example.
 Israel.
 Okay.
 So people talk about, a lot of people are like, oh, Balj, he took this from Snow Crash
 or some sci-fi book they'll reference.
 Actually, there's many different references to the book.
 This is not the only reference, but a very important reference that I think is much more
 important to me than Snow Crash, which is good, a good book, whatever, but it's fictional,
 is Dierdudensdat 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.
 In the book, he was writing about the death of distance in 1897.
 Why?
 Because steamships could take you across countries.
 And he was just amazingly smart and practical guy, who just handled all these various objections.
 And he said, look, the Jewish people, our choices are either A, assimilate and give
 up the culture, or B, some people are thinking communism is a good idea, I disagree with
 that.
 Or C, build our own country.
 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 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 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, Bir-Bidzin in the
 former Soviet Union, right?
 So the land was a parameter.
 Palestine went out because of its historical religious importance.
 Now, by the way, one thing, I'm sure there's some fraction of viewers are going to be like,
 oh my God, all the bad stuff that happened.
 I'm obviously not denying that there's enormous amounts of controversy and so on that attends
 Israel.
 I consider myself generally pro-Israeli.
 I'd also consider myself pro-Palestinian.
 I fund lots of Palestinians and so on and so forth.
 So I'm leaving that part out, that huge conflict 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 was the people who were actually tilling the land and building the buildings and so
 and so forth.
 Like who had the claim there is like the people who are present, okay?
 And this territory, this network of territories eventually became the basis for or part of
 the basis for what became Israel.
 Now I'm fully aware that the exact configuration of what territory belongs to Israel, what
 territory belongs to Palestinians, this is an enormous topic of dispute, okay?
 But I just point this out to say the process of going from book to crowdfunding territory
 to a sovereign state where people were now citizens of Israel as opposed to the British
 Empire is not some fictional thing, but did happen and within the lifetimes of some of
 the older, you know, they're in their eighties now, but in the lifetimes of some older people,
 okay?
 So it's not impossible.
 In fact, it has happened, right?
 But for that step, then perhaps hopefully is a better example because in this particular,
 like you said, land last, if I were to say, if I was an alien and arrived at earth and
 say choice of land, maybe if you were interested in choosing a land that represents a network
 state where ideas that unites a people based on ideas, maybe pick a land that doesn't lead
 to generational conflict and war.
 So I'll get to that.
 And destruction and suffering and all that.
 All this stuff.
 That's right.
 So now that I've said what are the positive things about Israel, and I think there's a
 lot to admire in Israel, as I said, I think there's also a lot to admire in the Palestinians
 and so on.
 I'm not taking any position on that.
 There's other inspirations for the network state.
 The second major inspiration is India, which managed to achieve independence nonviolently,
 right?
 That's very important, right?
 So can you fuse these things, right?
 A state started with a book that achieved independence nonviolently, okay?
 And that managed to build this polyglot, multicultural democracy, right?
 That does, like India has its flaws, but it does manage to have human rights of lots of
 people respected and what have you, right?
 And has managed to, there were times like emergency in the 1970s in Dhiraghandi, declared
 emergency.
 There were times when seem touch and go, but overall with fits and starts, this flawed
 thing has kind of 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.
 Okay, there was something there, but let's say built one of the richest countries in
 the world without huge amounts of natural resources in the middle of a zone where there
 was lots of communist revolution going on.
 And so he was the CEO founder essentially of this amazing startup country, right?
 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?
 They're all forks of the UK code base.
 We think obviously, the UK was sort of the ancestor of America, but Israel was a former
 British colony, right?
 India was a British colony and so was Singapore, right?
 For people who don't know what fork and code base means, it's a language from versioning
 systems, particularly Git, represented online on a website called GitHub.
 And a fork means you copy the code and all the changes you make to the code now live
 in their own little world.
 So America took the ideas that define the United Kingdom and then forked it by evolving
 those ideas in a way that didn't affect the original country.
 That's right.
 And what's interesting about this is, and of course, I'm saying that in a somewhat playful
 way, right?
 But I think it's a useful analogy, interesting analogy, right?
 So you have the Americans who forked the UK code base and then you have the Indians, the
 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 crowdfunds
 territory around the world that is led by a CEO founder and that is also governed by
 something that's like a constitution.
 But just like you went from, you know, I talk about the V1, V2, and V3 a lot, right?
 Like V1 is gold and V2 is fiat and V3 is Bitcoin, right?
 Or V1 is hunter-gatherer and V2 is farmer-soldier, V3 is digital nomad or sovereign collective,
 okay?
 Which is not just an individual but a group.
 Here V1 is UK common law.
 They don't have a constitution.
 It's 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 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, Scotland,
 Northern Ireland, the United States of America, the network states of the internet, okay?
 Where you go from the rights of Englishmen with the Magna Carta to Europeans, African
 Americans, all the immigrants to the Americans or the North America.
 Then you go to all the people of the world.
 And so you basically are more democratic and you're more capitalist because you're talking
 about internet capitalism, not just nation state 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 Palestinian Washington or a Brazilian Hamilton, right?
 And now rather than say, okay, maybe you have a small percentage chance of immigrating to
 the US and a small percentage chance of your descendant becoming president, now we can
 just say you can start online.
 And you know what?
 Maybe this person is so exceptional, they have Americans coming to their network state,
 right?
 I don't think it's possible with the rich get richer in a digital space too, the people
 with more followers have friends that have followers and they...
 I don't think it's the rich get richer.
 I think what happens is...
 So this is an important concept.
 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 pre-2009, now it exists.
 Those people who are rich in BTC terms are only partially correlated with those who are
 rich in USD terms.
 There's all these folks who 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 a last to cryptocurrency.
 Old money and old states, I think those people who are the most focused on, you might call
 it reform, I would call it control, okay?
 The most focused on control of the old world who have the least incentive to switch, the
 rich will get poorer because it will be the 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.
 It's 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, 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 in granite, right?
 So the point is that we think it's totally understandable today for there to be a huge
 founder who comes out of Vietnam or South America.
 You can name founders from all over the world, right?
 Exceptional people can rise from all over 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 a car, he managed a monetary policy and a currency from scratch, okay?
 As a 20 something, right?
 Obviously that's a more accomplished person than somebody who just inherited an economy.
 This is a-
 A lot of people can push back at that and say that the people that initially build a
 thing aren't necessarily the best ones to manage a thing once it scales and actually
 has impact.
 Sometimes, sometimes, but Zuck has done a good job of both.
 I think Vitalik has done a good job of both, right?
 That's not an inherent truth.
 Well, so actually I've-
 If you built the thing, you will be the best person to run it.
 I will agree with you on that.
 And actually I talk about this in the book or I've got an essay on this called Founding
 versus 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 dissipation
 pit grandson dissipates it, right?
 Why is shirt sleeves a symbol of poverty?
 Back in the past, it was kind of like, you're just working with your- you're not white collar,
 you're back to working with your hands.
 You're just-
 Oh, so it's a blue collar to blue collar and three generations.
 Yeah, yeah.
 We're working class or something like that, right?
 So essentially that the grandson squanders it, right?
 And 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 older families, you
 know, they were much bigger, right?
 Six, you know, children is not uncommon.
 Whatever fortune you have is now split six ways and then six ways and six ways again.
 So with the exception of premature and 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 is compound to such an extent that it's like up six X over 20
 years, right?
 So it's actually hard to maintain a quote ruling class in the sense that this person
 who's like four generations down has, you know, like one 16th of the DNA, you know,
 one over two to the fourth, right?
 Of their scion who built a fortune.
 So it's not even like the same, is it the same family even, right?
 Is the fortune actually in the family?
 So most people don't think a few generations out.
 They just kind of think, oh, Marx is right.
 There's always been a rich and a poor.
 It's actually much more dynamic than that because you literally like, what is even the
 family when it's diluted out, you know, one 16th, right?
 If you're one 16th of Rockefeller, are you a Rockefeller?
 Really like 15, 16 something else.
 Would you have the Rockefeller fortune?
 Probably not, right?
 Now, are there, again, premature, premature where the guy who inherits the name all the
 way through, that would be one way to pass it down.
 But even that person doesn't necessarily have the qualities of the guy who, you know, the
 cultural qualities, other qualities, 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
 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 the legitimate heir because it's the, you know, the founder
 passes it down to his son, passes it down to his grandson, to his great grandson.
 So legitimacy is there.
 They've got title, they can show, I own this factory, okay?
 They can cash the checks, there's professional managers there, everything seems fine.
 Until one day that factory has to go from making, you know, widgets to making masks
 for COVID or something else.
 It has to change direction, it has to do something it hasn't done before.
 None of that capability for invention and reinvention is present anymore.
 These people have inherited something that they could not build from scratch.
 Because they could not build from scratch, they can't even maintain it.
 This is an important point.
 The ability to build from scratch is so important because if some part breaks and you don't
 know why it was there, can you even maintain it?
 No, you can't, okay?
 Unless all the replacement parts and the know-how to fit them together is there, you can't repair
 this.
 I remember when 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 aero jail 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.
 So you're just selected for legitimacy, not competence, okay?
 So once you think about this concept of founding versus inheriting, and I've got the whole
 essay which talks about this, of course, the alternative to somebody who's legitimate but
 not competent, what people will say is, oh, we need like, you know, an authoritarian to
 be in control of everything.
 And then their hope is that that person is competent, but they don't have legitimacy
 because if they're just installed as just like a authoritarian ruler, 50% of the population
 is really mad at them.
 They don't have title, they just grab the title, you know, maybe they can exert enough
 force, but 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 and they build it from
 scratch.
 And so you need this 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 new ones pop up?
 There could be thousands.
 Given 7 billion people, 8 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.
 Now work state.
 Yeah.
 Like in the sense of Google became lowercase Google for like Googling or like Uber became
 lowercase Uber.
 So like if you go to the networkstate.com front slash reviews, or you go to search.twitter.com
 and put it 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.
 It's internet, right?
 You've become a meme.
 Well, first of all, you're a meme and this book is a meme.
 Am I a meme?
 Okay.
 Maybe I'm a meme, but the book is a book that I think is 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, 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 Ayn Rand?
 No, I'm not Ayn Rand.
 And basically the whole point of this actually is it's polytheistic, polystatistic, polynomistic
 is genuinely-
 Is it polyamorous?
 It's not polyamorous.
 Okay.
 Though somebody might want to-
 Do you have love advice in the book?
 I didn't see it.
 So did you talk about love in the-
 I do not talk about love.
 I rather-
 Maybe in V2 you will.
 Not that I don't believe in love.
 Love is great.
 All right.
 I will accept your offer to write a guest chapter in your V2 book about love.
 All right.
 Great.
 Because there is some aspect that's very interesting, which parts of human civilization require
 physical contact, physical-
 Because it seems like more and more can be done in the digital space.
 Yeah.
 But as I said-
 Like work, for example.
 But you're not going to build the self-driving car city in digital space.
 You're not going to be able to do-
 Why do you need cars at all?
 Well, sure.
 But let's say you're not going to be able to get to Mars in a purely digital thing.
 You need to build, you have to have a little rocket launch pad.
 You're not going to be able to do all the innovative biomedicine, whether it's all the-
 Have you seen bioelectricity or there's stuff on regenerative medicine, all this stuff?
 You just can't do that digitally, right?
 We're still physical beings.
 So you need physical space, but how do we get that?
 So this is meant to wend its way through various roadblocks in the so-called- actually my term
 from many years ago, the idea maze.
 It's meant to wend its way through the idea maze to find how to use bits to unlock innovation
 atoms.
 So the idea maze within the bigger prime number maze, or go back to visualizing the number
 of states and how often are they born.
 So let me first anchor this because people, just to give some numbers, right?
 How many UN listed countries are there?
 Like 196, 193, okay?
 And there's some that are on the border like Taiwan or Israel, right?
 Where they're not- I mean, Israel is a country, but it's not recognized by every country or
 what have you, right?
 Is Texas a country?
 No, but it may eventually become.
 Right, okay.
 So within that list of about 200 countries, okay, I've got a graph in the book that shows
 that most countries are actually small countries.
 About there's 12 countries that have less than a hundred thousand people by the UN definition
 of a country.
 There's another 20 something that have between a hundred thousand and one million.
 There's another 50 or 60 something that have between a million and 10 million.
 So most countries in the UN are less than 10 million people.
 There's only 14 countries that are over a hundred million people, okay?
 So most countries are small countries is kind of surprising to us because most people live
 in big countries, okay?
 And so now you're like, okay, well, I've built social networks that are bigger than that.
 You have a following that's bigger than a hundred thousand people.
 You have a following that's bigger than a small country like CureBody or what have you,
 right?
 And okay, so that first changes feasibility.
 You think of a country as this huge, huge, huge thing, but it's actually smaller than
 many- many countries are smaller than social networks that you've built, okay, number one.
 Number two is the number of UN listed countries, even though it's been flat-ish for the last
 30 years with like a few things like South Sudan and East Timor that have come online.
 There's a graph that I posted which shows that it's increased by about- from about 40
 or 50 something at the end of World War II when the UN was set up to 197 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 it's flat and then
 it just goes, voof, like this.
 Now you can define, you can argue where the boundary is for quote a new currency, okay?
 But I think Bitcoin certainly counts.
 I think Ethereum certainly counts in terms of just its scale and adoption worldwide.
 So at least you have two.
 If you take the broad church view, you have a thousand or something like that, right?
 Somewhere in between, you might say how many currencies are above the market cap of an
 existing previously recognized fiat currency, like which got onto the leaderboard, right?
 There's a website just like coinmarketcap.com.
 That's like a site for like cryptocurrency tracking, it's very popular, okay?
 There's a fun site called fiatmarketcap.com, which shows where Bitcoin is relative to the
 fiat currencies of the world.
 And it's like last I checked like number 27, somewhere in between the Chilean peso and
 the Turkish lira or something, okay?
 And it previously been close to cracking the top 10, okay?
 And I think it will again at some point.
 So we know that you can have a currency out of nowhere that ranks with the fiat currencies
 of the world, could you have a country out of nowhere that ranks with the countries of
 the world?
 So this is maybe the fastest way, you probably should have said this at the very beginning.
 If you go to the network state in one image, okay?
 That kind of summarizes what a network state looks like in a visual, just one single visual.
 And the visual is of a dashboard.
 And the dashboard shows something that looks like a social network, except you're visualizing
 it on the map of the world.
 And it's got network nodes all over the place, a hundred people here, a thousand people there,
 they're all connected together.
 The total population of the people in this social network is about 1 million people.
 So 1.7 million people in this example.
 And some of the buildings are, some of the people are just singletons.
 They're just folks in their apartment who 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 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 in crowdfunding 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, okay?
 So they conceptualize themselves as something.
 And at the very top of the dashboard, there's something very important, which is the population
 annual income and real estate footprint of this network state.
 So population we already discussed.
 You can build an online social network.
 We know you can build something which has a population that's bigger than these hundred
 thousand or million person countries.
 One of the new things contributions the network state has is say that you can not just succeed
 in population, you can succeed 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.
 What 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.
 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.
 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?
 Proving 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 a hundred thousand people spread
 across countries?
 Couldn't they all be bots?
 Could they be AIs?
 Proof of human, proof of income, and also proof of real estate start to actually rise
 dramatically in importance because you're saying we're 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 it's real, okay?
 So I have a whole talk on this actually, I'm giving at this Chainlink conference, but essentially
 how do you prove this, right?
 The short answer is crypto oracles plus auditing.
 The somewhat longer answer is you put these assertions on chain, these proof of human,
 these proof of real estate, et cetera, assertions on chain, okay?
 And there's people who are writing to the blockchain and they are digitally signing
 their assertions.
 Now, of course, simply just putting something on chain doesn't make it true.
 It just says you can prove not that what is written on chain is true, but that the metadata
 is true.
 You can show who wrote it via their digital signature, what they wrote, their hash, and
 when they wrote it, their timestamp.
 So you can establish those things in metadata of who, what, and when was written.
 Who's the who in that picture?
 So for example- How do you know it's one human?
 Great question.
 So let's say you've bought a bunch of your piece of territory from Blackstone, okay?
 As a function of that, Blackstone.eth signs an on-chain receipt that says, Lex Friedman.eth
 bought this piece of property from us and it has, it's a thousand square meters and
 this is put on chain, they sign it, okay?
 Just a digital receipt, just like you might get an email receipt when you buy a piece
 of property or something, okay?
 It's just put not online, but on chain and it's signed by Blackstone or whatever real
 estate vendor you buy it from.
 It could be a company, it could obviously be an individual, right?
 And so you have a bunch of these assertions.
 Let's say there's 47 different real estate vendors.
 I know vendor's an atypical term there, but just bear with me, right?
 47 different real estate sellers that you've bought all of your territory from.
 Each of them put digital signatures that are asserting that a certain amount of real estate
 was bought and its square meters, its location or whatever else they 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 their stuff on chain.
 So you get that on chain receipt.
 They've got 500,000 of these.
 And what you can do is just sampling, okay?
 You pick a subset N of them, let's say 500 properties around the world.
 You go there.
 You actually go and independently look at what the square footprint is.
 And then from that, you can see what was the actual, your measurement versus their reported.
 And then you can, via Cisco inference, extrapolate that if they were randomly selected to the
 rest of the properties and get a reliability score for Blackstone's reporting of its real
 estate square footage.
 Who does the, so that's the auditing step.
 That's the auditing step.
 So the crypto Oracle is the on chain, what did you say?
 Assertions?
 That's right.
 Yeah.
 About like who bought stuff with who I still have to get to the proof of human, but auditing,
 there's a bunch of people randomly checking that you're not full of shit.
 That's right.
 So who is in charge of the auditing though?
 I think there could be a big four like a PWC and basically the accountants that do corporate
 balance sheet and cashflow 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?
 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.
 But of course the government itself is corrupt in many ways and prints all this money and
 seizes all of these assets and surveils everybody and so on and so forth.
 So the answer to your question is going to be probably exit in the sense that if those
 accountants, they are themselves going to digitally sign a report and put it on chain.
 So they're going to say, we believe that X, Y and Zs reports are on chain were 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 ways to mess with this?
 I mean, I just, let me breathe in and out.
 As I mentioned, some of the heaviest shit I've ever read.
 So because I visited to 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 the cooperation of Arthur G. Salzberger's New York Times company.
 Like Walter Durante 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, right?
 And really, I think what it comes back to is if you're showing your work, right?
 This is the difference between crypto economics and fiat economics.
 The Bitcoin blockchain, anybody can download it and run verification on it.
 This is different than government inflation stats, which people don't believe, right?
 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, right?
 And so the independent verifiability is really the core of what true auditability is.
 And so then to your question, it's hard for some group to be able to collude because the
 blockchain is public 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 Cisco test.
 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
 digit, 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 datasets are probably going to be small.
 For example, most numbers in a set, about 30%, will have a leading digit of one.
 Yeah.
 So that's a great example of what we were talking about earlier, the observational leading
 to the theory.
 Ooh, there's a Benford's law of controversy.
 I'm looking that up.
 Benfors law of controversy.
 Benfors 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 site.
 Can I just say how much I love Wikipedia?
 I have the founder of Wikipedia coming on this very podcast very soon and I think the
 world is a better place because Wikipedia exists.
 One of the things he wanted to come on and talk about is the ways that he believes that
 Wikipedia is going wrong.
 So on technical truths, it's great.
 Remember our thing earlier on technical truths versus political truths?
 On technical truths, it's great.
 On political truths, it's like a defamation engine.
 Just as one example, okay, this is something that I was 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.
 That you were the founder of HPZ Token.
 I had nothing to do with this and people were scammed out of it because Google just pushes
 Wikipedia links to high on Google and people are like, well, it's in his Wikipedia, therefore
 it's real, right?
 Right as 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, right?
 Where people will maliciously edit and then do things with them and nobody cares or is
 looking at it beyond the fraudsters.
 And this is happening.
 If that was happening, that was like undetected.
 I wasn't paying attention to this.
 This was like there for like, I don't know, weeks or months, totally undetected that literally
 facilitated fraud, right?
 And fundamentally the issue is that Wikipedia doesn't have any concept of who's editing
 or property rights or anything like that, right?
 It is also something which is, it used to be something in the early 2000s, mid 2000s
 people said, oh, it's Wikipedia, how trustworthy can be, Botanic is reviewed.
 And that's been forgotten and now it's become over trusted, right?
 Remember the thing like the more trust something gets, the less trustworthy it often becomes.
 It kind of abuses the power, right?
 So what I'm interested in, Google actually had a model a while back called KNOL.
 KNOL, NOL, was something where when there were different versions of a Wikipedia style
 page, you had Google docs like permissions on them.
 For example, you might have 10 different versions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, okay?
 And each one had an editor and folks that they could grant edit rights and so on.
 But this way you would actually be able to see different versions of a page and they
 might have different versions of popularity, but this way you wouldn't have edit words,
 you'd have forks, right?
 And they would all kind of 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 at 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.
 I want to see some data though.
 I want to see some data because we can always, 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 it is a breath of fresh air in terms of the breadth and depth of knowledge
 that is there.
 Now you can say there's bias built in.
 There's wars that are incentivized not to produce truth, but to produce a consensus
 around a particular narrative, but that is how the entirety of human civilization operates.
 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 on 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.
 Here's a phenomenon that happens in Wikipedia.
 You have an editor 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.
 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.
 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 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.
 Okay, I know.
 How many articles?
 I'm not-
 Who's auditing Wikipedia?
 I'm dancing with you, not against you.
 Sure, sure.
 Okay.
 I'm saying how many articles have that kind of war where douchebags are manipulating each
 other?
 So that's the question.
 What's the audit?
 Has Wikipedia actually been audited?
 Who are the editors?
 Like who's actually writing this stuff?
 It is actually something where, again, on technical topics, I think it's pretty good.
 On non-technical topics, there's something called the Wikipedia reliable sources policy.
 It's a fascinating page.
 So it actually takes a lot of the stuff that the world has been talking about in terms
 of what's a reliable source of information and so on and so forth.
 It's called the Wikipedia reliable sources perennial sources.
 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.
 That those are rules written on a sheet of paper.
 I have seen Wikipedia in general play in a gray area that these rules create.
 Oh, well, if you are an editor, then you can get-
 You can use the rules because there's a lot of contradictions within the rules.
 You can use them in the ways you said to achieve the ends you want.
 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 is- First, let me finish off this point of reliable sources,
 parallel sources.
 If you go to this, you'll see that Al Jazeera is marked green, but let's say the Cato Institute
 is marked yellow.
 The Nation is marked green.
 Oh, shit.
 Oh, snap.
 Okay, sure.
 Yes.
 Right?
 The Nation is marked green, but National Review is marked yellow.
 You could probably go and do- What's good about this is it makes the epistemology explicit.
 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.
 I'm pretty sure you're going to find some kind of partisan polarization that comes out
 of it, right?
 Number one.
 Number two is once something gets marked as being yellow or red, then all links and all
 references to it are pulled out.
 For example, CoinDesk was marked as being like- Gosh, what was it?
 Yellow?
 I think it's marked as red.
 CoinDesk which is actually- 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.
 So cryptocurrency on Wikipedia has been a huge topic where they've just edited out all
 the positive stuff.
 These are senior editors of Wikipedia who can control what sources are considered reliable.
 So they've now knocked out CoinDesk, they've knocked out social media.
 They only allow mainstream media coverage and not even all mainstream media, only those
 they've marked as green.
 This is the manipulation of- I want to know how many articles are affected by it and on
 that- Hundreds of thousands.
 You could just say that randomly.
 I can, I can.
 No, no, no, no.
 I can because all the- No, affected, there's different levels of effect in terms of it
 actually having a significant impact on the quality of the article.
 Let me give you an example.
 Yes.
 The fact that people cannot cite direct quotes on social media, but can only cite the rehash
 of those quotes in a mainstream media outlet and not just any mainstream media outlet,
 but those that are colored green on the Wikipedia reliable perennial sources policy is a structural
 shift on every single article to make Wikipedia aligned with US mainstream media corporations.
 Yes.
 Right?
 I'm 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.
 Now I'm going to sound extremely woke.
 If you go and look at this, Times of India is yellow, but Mother Jones, Jacobin, they
 are green.
 Right, so a niche mostly white Western partisan left outlet is more green, but a billion people,
 the Times of India is marked yellow.
 That's a structural bias towards Western media outlets and Western editors when much of the
 rest of the world hadn't gone online or whatever.
 I would just love to see in terms of the actual article what ideas are being censored, altered,
 shifted.
 I just think it's an open...
 I'm not sort of...
 Edit logs are there.
 Edit logs are public.
 So here's a way.
 It'd be fascinating.
 Is there a way to explore the way that narratives are shifted because of this?
 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.
 First of all, think about it like this.
 Just the fact that social media is not allowed to be cited on Wikipedia or inconsistently
 allowed.
 You think that's a problem?
 It's a huge problem.
 You can't cite, let's say, Jeff Bezos' own tweet.
 You have to cite some random media corporation.
 Here's the thing, and sorry if I'm interrupting.
 Please.
 Hopefully I'm adding to it.
 I think they're trying to create friction as to the sources used because if you can
 use social media, then you can use basically bots to create a bunch of sources.
 Then you can almost automate the editor war.
 Here's the thing is basically Wikipedia initially said, oh, we'll only cite mainstream media
 as a way of boosting its credibility in the early 2000s when its credibility was low.
 Now it's sort of become merged with the US establishment and it only cites these things.
 Whose trust?
 I mean, have you seen the graphs on trust in mainstream media?
 It's plummeted.
 It's down to like 10% or something like that, right?
 So the most trusted sources for Wikipedia are untrusted by the population.
 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 on Wikipedia.
 I think I need to make that explicit also.
 I have a kind of an understanding that you don't go to Wikipedia for this particular
 topic.
 You don't go to Wikipedia for an article on Donald Trump or Joe Biden.
 If I did, I would go to maybe sections that don't have room for insertion of bias or like
 the section on controversy or accusations of racism or so on or sexual assault.
 I usually not trust Wikipedia on those sections.
 Like math?
 That'll be great.
 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?
 Let's think about like-
 Everything that's not math and technology.
 I think that's too strong a statement.
 So we can, like I said, war in Ukraine.
 I think that's too strong a statement.
 There's so much effect, I guess I'm saying affected to a large degree.
 Even major battles in history, battle of Stalingrad or-
 Sure.
 Like 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 edit out mention of genocide
 from the first few paragraphs.
 I am playing devil's advocate in part, but I also am too under informed to do the level
 of defense I would like to provide for the wisdom that is there, for the knowledge that
 is there.
 I don't use the word truth, but for some level of knowledge that is there in Wikipedia, I
 think I really worry about, I know you don't mean this, but a cynical interpretation of
 what you're saying, which is don't trust anything written on Wikipedia.
 I think you're being very consistent and eloquent in the way you're describing the issues in
 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 think if we naturally distrust every source of information, there is a general distrust
 of institutions and a distrust of social knowledge that leads to an apathy and the cynicism about
 the world in general.
 If you believe a lot of conspiracy theories, you basically tune out from this collective
 journey that we're on towards the truth.
 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
 is-
 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
 a phrase that's eloquent, it's yours, and will look at a natural dumbass like me and
 think that Lex is just being naive.
 Look at him trusting Wikipedia for the mainstream network.
 Let me argue your side.
 Okay?
 Can you please do that because you could do that better than me?
 No, no, no.
 No, Lex, I enjoy talking to you.
 And I'm doing Devil's Advocate a little bit because I do really want to be, I am afraid
 about the forces of basically editors of authority of talking down to people and censoring information.
 Yeah.
 So let me first argue your side and then let me say something, okay?
 Which is what you are reacting to is, oh, even those things I thought of as constants
 are becoming variables.
 Where is the terra firma?
 If we cannot trust anything, then everybody's just, it's anarchy and it's chaos.
 There's literally no consensus reality and anybody can say anything and so on and so
 forth, right?
 And I think that there's two possible deviations from, let's say that the mainstream, obviously
 people talk about like QAnon, for example, as like this kind of thing where people just
 make things up.
 They just go totally quote supply chain independent from mainstream media.
 And if mainstream media is a distorted gossamer of quasi-truth, these guys go to just total
 fiction as opposed to like, right?
 The alternative to QAnon is not BlueAnon mainstream media, but SatoshiAnon, okay?
 Which is an upward deviation, okay?
 Not a downward deviation to say there is no such thing as truth, but rather the upward
 deviation is decentralized cryptographic truth, not centralized corporate or government truth.
 Okay.
 So how does the decentralization of Wikipedia look like?
 Great question.
 It's this concept of the ledger of record.
 Whether you're Israeli or Palestinian, Japanese or Chinese, Democrat or Republican, those
 people agree on the state of the Bitcoin blockchain.
 Hundreds of billions of dollars is managed without weapons, okay, across tribes with
 wildly varying ideologies, right?
 And what that means is that is a mechanism for getting literally consensus.
 It's called consensus, cryptographic consensus, proof of work.
 And when people can get consensus on this, what they're getting consensus on are basically
 bytes that determine who holds what Bitcoin.
 This is exactly the kind of thing people would fight wars over.
 For hundreds of billions of dollars alone, millions of dollars, people will kill each
 other over that in the past, right?
 So for hundreds of billions of dollars, people can get consensus truth on this in this highly
 adversarial environment, right?
 So the first generalization of that is it says you can go from bytes that reflect what
 Bitcoin somebody has to bytes that reflect what stocks, bonds, other kinds of assets
 people have.
 That's the entire DeFi, Ethereum, that whole space, okay?
 Basically the premise is if you go from consensus on one byte by induction, you can go to consensus
 on n bytes depending on the cost of getting that consensus, right?
 And almost anything digital can be represented, you know, or everything digital can be represented
 as bytes, right?
 So now you can get consensus on certain kinds of digital information, Bitcoin, but then
 also any kind of financial instrument.
 And then the next generalization is what I call the leisure of record.
 Many kinds of facts can be put partially or completely on chain.
 It's not just proof of work and proof of stake.
 There's things like proof of location, proof of human, proof of this, proof of that.
 The auditable oracles I talked about extended further.
 Lots and lots of people are working on this, right?
 Proof of solvency, seeing that some actor has enough of a bank balance to accommodate
 what they say they accommodate.
 You can imagine many kinds of digital assertions can be turned into proof of X and proof of
 Y.
 You start putting those on chain, you now have a library of partially or completely
 provable facts, okay?
 This is how you get consensus.
 As opposed to having a white Western Wikipedia editor or mostly white Western US media corporation
 or the US government simply say what is true in a centralized fashion.
 So do you think truth is such an easy thing as you get to higher and higher questions
 of politics?
 Is the problem that the consensus mechanism is being hacked or is the problem that truth
 is a difficult thing to figure out?
 Was the 2020 election rigged or not?
 Is the earth flat or not?
 That's a scientific one.
 That's how this is-
 My technical versus political truth spectrum, yeah.
 But even the earth, well, that one is, yeah, nevermind.
 That's a bad example because that is very, you can rigorously show that the earth is
 not flat.
 But there's some social phenomena, political phenomena, philosophical one that will have
 a lot of debates, historical stuff about the different forces operating within Nazi Germany
 and Stalinist Soviet Union.
 I think there's probably a lot of, yeah, the historians debate about a lot of stuff like
 Blitz, the book that talks about the influence of drugs in the Third Reich.
 Were they on meth or something?
 Yeah.
 There's a lot of debates about how truth, what is the significance of meth on the actual
 behavior and decisions of Hitler and so on.
 So there's still a lot of debates.
 Is it so easy to fix with decentralization, I guess is the question.
 So I actually have, like basically chapter two of the Network State book is on essentially
 this topic.
 And so it's like 70 pages or something like that.
 So let me try to summarize what I think about on this.
 The first is that there was an Onion article that came out, I can't find it now anymore,
 but it was about historians in the year 3000 writing about the late 90s and early 2000s.
 And they're like, clearly Queen Brittany was a very powerful monarch.
 We can see how many girls around the world worshiped 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 some of Berger actually has this concept, which is obvious, but it's also useful to
 have a name for it.
 I think he calls it like dark history, which is, and again, I might be getting this wrong,
 but it's like only a small percentage of what the Greeks wrote down has come to us to the
 present day.
 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 rewrites-
 And then there's a lot of debates there.
 There's a lot of debates.
 So basically it's like the discovery of this site in Northern Turkey that totally shifts
 our estimate of when civilization started.
 Probably pushing it back many thousands of years further in the past.
 The past, it's like an inverse problem in physics.
 We're trying to reconstruct this from limited information.
 It's like extra-ecrosolachry.
 It's an inverse problem.
 It's Plato's cave.
 We're trying to reconstruct what the world looks like outside from these shadows, these
 fragments that have been given to us or that we've found.
 And so in that sense, as you find more information, your estimate of the past changes.
 Oh, wow.
 Okay, that pushes back civilization farther than we thought.
 That one discovery just changes it.
 So you want to try to, given all the gaps in the data we have, you want to try to remove
 bias from the process of trying to fill the gaps?
 Well, so here's the thing.
 I think we're very close to the moment of it, and 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.
 Math is constant across human time and space.
 So the value of pi is constant.
 That's one of the few constants across all these different human civilizations.
 So somebody in the future, assuming of course the digital record is actually intact to that
 point because in theory digital stuff will persist in practice, you have lost data and
 floppy drives and stuff like that.
 In a sense, in some ways digital is more persistent, in some ways physical is more persistent.
 But assuming we can figure out the archival problem somehow, then this future record,
 at least it's internally consistent.
 You can run a bunch of the equivalence of checksums, the Bitcoin verification process,
 just sum it all up and see that, okay, it's F of G of H of X and boom, that at least is
 internally consistent.
 Okay?
 Again, it doesn't say that all the people who reported it, they could have put something
 on chain that's false, but at least you know the metadata is likely to be very difficult
 to falsify.
 And this is a new tool.
 It's really a new tool in terms of a robust history that is expensive and technically
 challenging to edit and alter.
 And that is the alternative to the Stalin-esque rewriting of history by centralized power.
 Yeah, I'm going to have to do a lot of actually reading and thinking about...
 I'm actually, as you're talking, I'm also thinking about the fact that I think 99% of
 my access to Wikipedia is on technical topics because I basically use it very similarly
 to Stack Overflow.
 And even there, it doesn't have unit tests.
 For example, one thing-
 That's a good way to put it.
 Right.
 And I think you should remember, again, I might be wrong on this, but I recall that
 the Kelly Criterion, it's actually quite a useful thing to know.
 It's like how to optimally size your bets.
 Okay?
 And you can have, given your kind of probability that some investment pays off or assumed probability,
 you can have bets that are too large, bets that are too small.
 Sometimes the Kelly Criterion, it goes negative and actually it says you should actually take
 leverage.
 You're so sure this is a good outcome that you should actually spend more than your current
 bankroll because you're going to get a good result.
 Right?
 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 the Kelly Criterion for a while.
 That's funny.
 Okay?
 And so without unit tests, see, math is actually the kind of thing that you could unit test,
 right?
 You could literally have the assert on the right-hand side today, right?
 The modern version, we've got Jupiter, we've got Replet, we've got all these things.
 The modern version of Wikipedia, there's sites like golden.com, for example, there's a bunch
 of things.
 I'm funding lots of stuff across the board on this.
 And I'm not capitalizing these companies or capitalize independently, but I'm trying to
 see if not just talk about a better version, it's hard to build something better, so actually
 go and build it.
 And what you want is assertions that are actually reproduced.
 You don't just have the equation there.
 You have it written down in code, you can hit enter, you can download the page, you
 can rerun it.
 It's reproducible.
 So the problem with that kind of reproducibility is that it adds friction, it's harder to put
 together articles that do that kind of stuff, unless you do an incredible job with UX and
 so on.
 The thing that I think is interesting about Wikipedia on the technical side is that without
 the unit tests, without the assertions, it still often does an incredible job.
 Because the reason it's...
 The people that write those articles, and I've seen this also in Stack Overflow, 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.
 I mean, again, do I think Wikipedia is a huge step up from what preceded it in some ways
 on the technical topics?
 Yes.
 However, you talk about the editing environment, right?
 Like the markup for Wikipedia, it's very mid-2000s, right?
 It is not...
 It's a Craigslist.
 Yeah, exactly.
 At a minimum, for example, it's not WYSIWYG, right?
 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 bearish editing, that's the thing.
 Number two is given that it might be read a thousand times for every one time it's written,
 it is important to actually have the mathematical things unit tested if they can be given that
 we've got modern technology.
 And that's something that's hard to retrofit into this because it's so kind of ossified,
 right?
 Right.
 Yeah, the interface on every side for the editor, even just for the editor to check
 that...
 Say the editor wants to get it right, you want to make it really...
 Or not, easy, but easier to check their work.
 Like debugging, like a nice idea 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 truth will have a nice debugger.
 Well, so here's...
 Right?
 The thing is that what you can do is...
 Let's say you do 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 have trust in them.
 The answer is that the answer to trust no one, right?
 And I think the alternative is decentralized cryptographic trust or verification.
 How does that apply to academia?
 First observation is we are seeing science being abused in the name of quote unquote
 science, okay?
 Capital S science is Maxwell's equations.
 That's a good one.
 That's a good one, right?
 Quote unquote science is a paper that came out last week.
 And the key thing is that capital S science, real science is about independent replication,
 not prestigious citation.
 That's the definition, like all the journal stuff, the professors, all that stuff is just
 a superstructure that was set on top to make experiments more reproducible.
 And that superstructure is now like dominating the underlying thing because people are just
 fixating on the prestige and the citation and not the replication, right?
 So how does that apply here?
 Once you start thinking about how many replications does this thing have, Maxwell's equation,
 I mean, there's trillions of replications.
 Every time us speaking into this microphone right now, we're testing our theory of the
 electromagnetic field, right?
 Or electrical and magnetic fields.
 Every single time you pick up a cell phone or use a computer, you're putting our knowledge
 to the test, right?
 Whereas some paper that came out last week in Science or Nature may have zero independent
 replications, yet it is being cited publicly as prestigious scientists from Stanford and
 Harvard and MIT all came up with X, right?
 And so the prestige is a substitute for the actual replication.
 So there's a concept called Goodhart's law, okay?
 I'm just gonna quote it.
 When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure, okay?
 So for example, backlinks on the web were a good signal for Google to use when people
 didn't know they were being used as a signal.
 You talked about quantity versus quality and pagerank was a pretty good approximation for
 quality.
 Yes.
 It's a fascinating thing, by the way, but yeah.
 It is a fascinating thing.
 We can talk about that.
 But basically, once people know that you're using this as a measure, they will start to
 game it.
 And so then you have this cycle where sometimes you have a fixed point like Satoshi with Proof
 of Work was miraculously able to come up with a game where the gaming of it was difficult
 without just buying more compute, right?
 So it's actually a rare kind of game where knowledge of the game's rules didn't allow
 people to game the game.
 Yeah.
 But-
 A brilliant way to put it, yeah.
 Which is one of the reasons it's brilliant is that you can describe the game and you
 can't mess with it.
 Exactly.
 It's very hard to come up with something that's stable in its way.
 There's actually, on the meta point, gosh, there's a game where the rule of the game
 is to change the rules, okay?
 It is-
 You mean human civilization or what?
 Yeah.
 Gosh, it is called something.
 Gnomic, okay?
 N-O-M-I-C.
 Gnomic 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, it is so meta because there are laws for elections that elect the editors
 of those laws who then change the laws that get them elected with gerrymandering and other
 stuff, right?
 That's a bad way of thinking 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?
 So, many games devolve into the meta game of who writes the rules of the game, right?
 Become essentially games of gnomic.
 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.
 So, the problem is authority and prestige as you see it from academia and the media
 and Wikipedia with the editors.
 We have to have a mechanism where the data and the reproducibility is what dominates
 the discourse.
 That's right.
 I've said this in, I think I tweeted this, but Western civilization actually has a break
 classification emergency button.
 It's called decentralization, right?
 Martin Luther hit it when the Catholic Church was too ossified and centralized, decentralized
 with the Protestant Reformation.
 Okay?
 He said, at the time, people were able to pay for indulgences.
 Like that is to say they could sin.
 They could say, okay, I sinned five times yesterday.
 Here's the equivalent of 50 bucks.
 Okay, I'm done with my sin.
 I can go and sin some more.
 Okay?
 They should literally buy their way out of sin.
 Okay?
 Now, people debate as to how frequent those indulgences were, but these are one of the
 things he invades against in the 95 Theses.
 So decentralization, boom, break away from this ossified church, start something new,
 right?
 And 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.
 And so what happened was obviously Catholicism still exists, but Protestantism also exists.
 Okay?
 And similarly here, you've got this ossified central institution where, 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
 there's fiat science, crypto science, right, fiat economics, okay?
 So in any experiment, any paper when it comes out, right, you can sort of divide it into
 the analog to digital and the purely digital, okay?
 The analog to digital is you're running some instruments, you're getting some data, okay?
 And then once you've got the data, you're generating figures and tables and text and
 a PDF from that data, right?
 Leave aside the data collection step for now, I'll come back to that, right?
 Just the purely digital part.
 What does the ideal quote academic paper look like in 2022, 2023?
 First, there's this concept called reproducible research, okay?
 Reproducible research is the idea that the PDF should be regenerated from the data and
 code, okay?
 So you should be able to hit enter and regenerate it.
 Why is this really important as a concept?
 John Claire Boo and David Donahoe at Stanford 20 years ago pioneered this in stats because
 the text alone often doesn't describe every parameter that goes into a figure or something,
 right?
 You kind of sometimes just need to look at the code and then it's easy and without that,
 it's hard, okay?
 So reproducible research means you regenerate the PDF from the code and the data.
 You hit enter, okay?
 Now one issue is that many papers out there, science, nature, et cetera, are not reproducible
 research.
 The data isn't even public.
 Moreover, sometimes the paper isn't even public.
 The open access movement has been fighting this for the last 20 something years.
 There's various levels of this like green and gold, open access, okay?
 So the first step is the code, the data, and the PDF go on chain, step number one, okay?
 The second thing is once you've got, so you can, anybody who is, and that could be the
 Ethereum chain, it could be its own dedicated chain, whatever, okay?
 It could be something where there's just the URLs are on the Ethereum chain and stored
 on Filecoin, many different implementations.
 But let's call that on chain broadly, okay?
 Not just online on chain.
 When it's on chain, it's public and anybody can get it.
 So that's first.
 Second is once you've got something where you can regenerate the code or the PDF from
 the code and the data on chain, guess what?
 You can have citations between two papers turn into import statements.
 Yeah, that's funny.
 That's cool, right?
 Very cool.
 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 an ML, right?
 You'll often cite a previous paper in its benchmark or its method, right?
 You're gonna wanna scatter plot sometimes your paper, your algorithm versus theirs on
 the same dataset.
 That is facilitated if their entire paper is reproducible research that is generated.
 You can just literally import that Python and then you can generate your figure off
 of it, right?
 Moreover, think about how that aids reproducibility because you don't have to reproduce in the
 literal sense every single snippet of code that they did.
 You can literally use their code, import it, okay?
 People start compounding on each other.
 It's better science, okay?
 Now I talked about this, but actually there's a few folks who have been actually building
 this.
 So there's uScholar.org, which actually has a demo of this, like just a V1 like kind of
 a 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 dsci.com, which is trying to do this, right?
 Decentralize science.
 So this itself changes how we think about papers.
 And actually, by the way, the inspiration for PageRank was actually citations.
 It was like the impact factor out of academia.
 That's where Larry Page and Sergey Brin got the concept out of, right?
 So now you've got a web of citations that are import statements on chain.
 In theory, you could track back a paper all the way back to its antecedents, okay?
 So if it's citing something, you can now look it up and look it up and look it up.
 And a surprising number of papers actually, their antecedents don't terminate or the
 original source says something different or it just kind of got garbled like a telephone
 game.
 And there's this famous thing on like the spinach, 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.
 It'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 QAnon, right?
 It is not saying don't trust anybody.
 Neither is it just trust the centralized academic establishment.
 Instead of saying trust because you can verify, because we can download things and run them.
 The crucial thing that I'm assuming here is the billions of supercomputers around the
 world that we have, all the MacBooks and iPhones that can crank through lots and lots of computation.
 So everything digital, we can verify it locally, okay?
 Now there's one last step, which is I mentioned the instruments, right?
 Whether it's your sequencing machine or your accelerometer or something like that is generating
 the data that you are reporting in your paper when you put it on you, okay?
 Basically you think of that as the analog digital interface.
 We can cryptify that too.
 Why?
 For example, an Illumina sequencing machine has an experiment manifest and 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?
 Is if you have a crypto instrument, you can have various hashes and stuff of the data
 as a chain of custody for the data itself that are streamed and written on chain that
 the manufacturer can program into this.
 For anything that's really, and you might say, 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, 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 or sharing the data, I think it would surprise people how
 often-
 It's hard to get data.
 The actual data or specifics or a large number of the parameters.
 People share like one or two parameters that were involved with running the experiment.
 You won't mention the machines involved, except maybe at a high level, but the versions and
 so on.
 The dates when the experiments were run, you don't mention any of this kind of stuff.
 So there's several ways to fix this.
 And one of them, I think, implied in what you're describing is a culture that says it's not
 okay.
 So first of all, there should be, even if it's not perfectly unchained to where you can automatically
 import all the way to Newton, just even the act of sharing the code, sharing the data,
 maybe in a way that's not perfectly integrated into a larger structure is already a very
 big positive step.
 I'm saying if you don't do this, then this doesn't count.
 Because in general, I think my worry, as somebody who's a programmer, who's OCD, I love the
 picture you paint that you can just import everything, automatically checks everything.
 My problem is that makes incremental science easier and revolutionary science harder.
 Oh, I actually very much disagree with that.
 I would love to hear your argument.
 You guys, let me just kind of elaborate why sometimes you have to think in this gray area
 of fuzziness when you're thinking on totally novel ideas.
 And when you have to concretize in data, some of the greatest papers ever written don't
 have data.
 They're in a space of ideas almost.
 You're kind of sketching stuff and there could be errors, but Einstein himself with the famous
 five papers, I mean, they're really strong, but they're fuzzy.
 They're a little bit fuzzy.
 And so I think even the GAN paper, you're often thinking of new data sets, new ideas,
 and I think maybe as a step after the paper is written, you could probably concretize
 it and integrate it into the rest of science.
 You shouldn't feel that pressure, I guess, early on.
 Well, I mean, each of the steps that I'm talking about, there's data being public and everything.
 Just having the paper being public, that's like V1, right?
 Then you have the thing being regenerated from code and data, like the PDF being regenerated
 from code and data.
 Then you have the citations as import statements.
 Then you have the full citation graph as an import statement.
 So you just follow it all the way back, right?
 And now that gives you auditability.
 Then you have the off-chain, the analog digital crypto custody, right?
 Like where you're hashing things and streaming things.
 So you have the chain of custody.
 Each of those is kind of like a level up and adds to complexity, but it also adds to the
 auditability and the verifiability and the reproducibility.
 But one thing I'd say I wanted to respond to that you said was that you think this would
 be good for incremental but not innovative.
 Actually, I think it's quite the opposite.
 I think academia is institutional and it's not innovative.
 For example, NIH has this graph, which is like, I think it's age of recipients of R01
 grants, okay?
 And what it shows is basically it's like a hump that moves over time, roughly plus one
 year forward for the average age as the year moves on, okay?
 I'll see if I can find the GIF.
 Why is this?
 Let me see if I can find it actually.
 Look at this movie just for a second.
 It's ridiculously powerful movie and it's 30 seconds.
 What's that?
 I just sent it in WhatsApp.
 The name of the video is Age Distribution of NIH Principal Investigators and Medical
 School Faculty.
 And it starts out on the 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 Balajia said, about
 one year.
 Per 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.
 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 gerontocratic, even more hidebound, right?
 And so the thing is the structures that Vannevar Bush and others set up, the entire post-war
 science establishment, one thing I'll often find is people will say, Balaji, 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 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 like 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 come you as some tech bro could possibly think
 you could ever do basic science without the funding of the US government?
 Has it not developed all basic science, 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 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, Newton was before, I believe he was before the American,
 let me find the exact, it's actually less old than people think.
 Okay.
 So Newton died 1727, right?
 So I knew that 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 basic
 science.
 It is not necessary for basic science.
 It is one possible catalyst.
 And I would argue that mid-century it was okay because mid-century was the time when
 the middle of the centralized century.
 1933, 1945, 1969 you have Hoover Dam, you have the Manhattan Project, you have Apollo.
 That generation was acclimatized to a centralized US government that could accomplish great
 things probably because technology favored centralization going into 1950 and then started
 favoring decentralization going out of it.
 I've talked about this in the book, sovereign individual has talked about this, but very
 roughly you go up into 1950 and you have mass media and mass production and just centralization
 of all kinds, giant nation states slugging it out on the world stage.
 You go out in 1950 and you get cable news and personal computers and the internet and
 mobile phones and cryptocurrency and you have the decentralization.
 And so this entire centralized scientific establishment was set up at the peak of the
 centralized century.
 And it might've been the right thing to do at that time, but is now showing its age and
 it's no longer actually geared up for what we have.
 Where are the huge innovations coming out?
 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, Matt Ridley and Alina Chan have written this book on whether
 the coronavirus was a lab leak or not.
 I think it's plausible that it was.
 I can't say I'm a hundred percent sure, but I think it's at least 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.
 There's a famous story where Newton solved a problem.
 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,
 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 going to get stuck on technicalities
 because I think I was referring to your vision of datasets and importing code.
 And so that forces just knowing how code works, it forces a structure and structure usually
 favors incremental progress.
 If you fork code, you're not going to, it descentivizes revolution.
 You want to go from scratch.
 Okay.
 I understand your point there.
 Okay.
 And I also agree that some papers like Francis Crick on the Klaus trim or others are theoretical.
 They're more about like where to dig than the data itself and so on and so forth.
 So I agree with that.
 Still, the counter argument 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 source should be forkable.
 Well, yeah, yeah.
 So here's what you know, like a, 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.
 It seems to, yes, I think so.
 Chemistry, I think so.
 And then you start getting into weird stuff like psychology, which some people don't even
 think is a science.
 No, just love for my psychology friends.
 I think as you get farther and farther away from things that are like hard technical fields,
 it starts getting tougher and tougher and tougher to have like importable code.
 Okay.
 So let me give the strong foreign version, right?
 So there's a guy who I think is a great machine learning guy, creator of actually Keras, who
 he disagrees with me on Francois Schiele.
 Yeah, he's been on this podcast twice.
 Yeah.
 Okay, great.
 I disagree with him on a lot of stuff.
 Yes, me too.
 I think we have mutual respect, follow each other on Twitter, whatever.
 Yes, I think he does respect and like you.
 Here's something which I totally agree with him on, and he actually got like trolled or
 attacked for this, but I completely agree.
 Within 10, 20 years, nearly every branch of science will be for all intents and purposes,
 a branch of computer science, computational physics, computational chemistry, computational
 biology, computational medicine, even computational archeology, realistic simulations, big data
 analysis and ML everywhere.
 That to me is incredibly obvious.
 Why?
 First of all, all we're doing every day is PDFs and data analysis on a computer, right?
 And so every single one of those areas can be reduced to the analog to digital step,
 and then it's all digital.
 Then you're flying, you're in the cloud, right?
 Do you say how long or-
 10 to 20 years.
 10, 20 years.
 I mean, I think arguably it's already there, right?
 And here's the thing, you were saying, well, you might drop off when you hit psychology
 or history.
 Actually I think it's the softer 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 it's 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, 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 Ngrams and stuff like that.
 Yes.
 Beautifully put.
 Then I would venture to say that Donald Trump was erased from history when he was removed
 from Twitter and many social platforms and all his tweets were gone.
 I think it's someone who has an archive of it, but yeah, I understand your point.
 Yeah.
 Well, as the flood of data about each individual increases censorship, it becomes much more
 difficult to actually have an archive of stuff.
 But yes, for important people like a president of the United States, yes.
 Let me on that topic ask you about Trump.
 You were considered for 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.
 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, reforming
 the Fed basically still hasn't happened.
 So just as it was easier to create Bitcoin than to reform the Fed, it will literally
 be easier to start a new country than to reform the FDA.
 It may take 10 or 20 years.
 I mean, think about Bitcoin, it's only about 13 years old, right?
 It may take 10 or 20 years to start a new network state with a different biomedical
 policy.
 But that is how we get out from 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 US regulators impose their regulations
 on the entire world.
 So basically you have a monopoly by US regulators.
 This is not just the FDA, it is SEC and FAA and so on and so forth.
 And for the same reason that a small company will use Facebook login, they will outsource
 their login to Facebook, a small country will outsource their regulation to the USA, okay,
 with all the attendant issues.
 Because I mean, you know the names of some politicians.
 Can you name a single regulator at the FDA?
 No, right?
 Yet, they will brag on their website that they regulate, I forget the exact numbers,
 I think it's like 25 cents out of every dollar, something along those lines, okay?
 It's like double digits, okay?
 That's a pretty big deal.
 And the thing about this is, 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
 that 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 access
 in one place.
 So there's a team up though between the giant company and the giant government to box out
 all the small startups and all the small countries and lots of small innovation, right?
 There are cracks in this now, right?
 The FDA did not acquit itself well during the pandemic.
 For example, there's so many issues, but one of the things that even actually New York
 Times reported, the reason that people thought there were no COVID cases in the US early
 in the pandemic was because the FDA was denying people the ability to run COVID tests and
 the emergency use authorization was, emergency should mean like right now, right?
 But it was 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, then 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, 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.
 He was a public face.
 In my recent memory, there's not been many faces of scientific policy, of science policy.
 Yeah.
 And he became the face of that.
 And, you know, as there's some of his meme, which is, you know, basically saying that
 he is science or that some people represent science.
 Or quote unquote science or whatever.
 Yeah.
 The positive aspect of that is that there is accountability when there's a face like
 that.
 Right.
 But you can also see the Fauci example shows you why a lot of these folks do not want to
 be public because they enter a political, 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 given an example, you know, there's a concept called challenge trials.
 Okay.
 The Moderna vaccine was available very, very early in the pandemic.
 You can just synthesize it from the sequence.
 And challenge trials would have meant that people who are healthy volunteers, okay, they
 could have been soldiers, for example, of varying ages who are there to take a risk
 their lives for their country potentially, okay.
 It could have been just healthy volunteers, not necessarily soldiers, just patriots of
 whatever kind in any country, not just the US.
 But those healthy volunteers could have gone.
 And at the early stages of the pandemic, we didn't know exactly how lethal it was 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.
 It may be, by the way, that those who are the most susceptible to the virus died faster
 earlier.
 It's as if you can imagine a model where those who were exposed and had the lowest susceptibility
 also had the highest severity and died in greater numbers early on.
 If you look at the graph, like deaths from COVID were exponential going into about April
 2020 and then leveled off to about 7,500, 10,000 a day and then kind of fell, right.
 But it could have gone to 75,000 at the beginning.
 So we didn't know how serious it was.
 So this would have been a real risk that these people would have been taking.
 But here's what they would have gotten for that.
 Basically in a challenge trial, somebody would have been given the vaccine and then exposed
 to the virus and then put under observation.
 And then that would have given you all the data 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 it was safe and effective and so on,
 like that could have been gathered expeditiously with volunteers for challenge trials.
 And you think there would be a large number of volunteers.
 Absolutely.
 So is there a concern there?
 Is there an ethical concern of taking on volunteers?
 Well, so let me put it like this.
 Had we done that, we could have had vaccines early enough to save the lives of like a million
 Americans, especially seniors and so on, okay.
 Soldiers and more generally first responders and others, I do believe there's folks who
 would have stepped up to take that risk.
 The heroes walk among us.
 Yeah, that's right.
 If military service is something which is a ritualized thing, people are paid for it,
 but they're not paid that much.
 They're really paid in honor and in duty and patriotism.
 That is actually the kind of thing where I do believe some fraction of those folks would
 have raised their hand for this important task.
 I don't know how many of them, but I do think that volunteers would have been there.
 There's probably some empirical test of that, which is there's a challenge trials website.
 There's a Harvard prof who put out this proposal early in the pandemic and he could tell you
 how many volunteers he got.
 But something like that could have just shortened the time from pandemic to functional vaccine,
 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.
 Actually no NPI, no non-pharmaceutical intervention really turned out to work that much.
 Actually, at the very beginning of the pandemic, I said something like, look, it's actually
 February 3rd, about a month before people...
 I was just watching what was going on in China.
 I saw that they were doing digital quarantine, like using WeChat codes to block people off
 and so on.
 I didn't know what was 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.
 Sometimes a solution creates the next problem.
 My rough forecast of the future, the coronavirus results in quarantines, nationalism, centralization.
 This may actually work to stop the spread, but once under control, states will not see
 their powers, so we decentralized.
 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, we should have had 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.
 Those are two examples on both vaccines and testing.
 There's so many more that I can point to.
 So those are decentralized innovations and that's what FDA should stand for.
 FDA can stand for it.
 Or something like FDA, right?
 Ah, so let's talk about that, right?
 Something like FDA.
 So this is very important.
 In general, the way I try to think about things is V1, V2, V3, as we've talked about a few
 times.
 Maybe-
 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, by the FDA itself, omits
 the.
 Their pronouns are just FDA, FDA.
 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 LA, 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 insider or outsider, okay, in terms of how the language
 works, right?
 And that's- go ahead.
 I mean, it just makes me sad because that lingo is part of the mechanism which creates
 the silo, the bubble of particular thoughts.
 And that ultimately deviates from the truth because you're not open to new ideas.
 I think it's actually like, you know, in Glorious Basterds, there's a scene in the bar.
 Do you want 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.
 Sorry, I'll be back there.
 So basically, like English start going like one, two, three, four, five.
 And I believe it's like the Germans start with like the thumb, something that you'd
 never know, right?
 I may be misremembering there, but I think that's right.
 Okay.
 So FDA's got the lingo.
 All right.
 Right.
 So FDA's got the lingo.
 So coming back up, basically just talk about FDA and then come back to your question on
 the platform.
 So what was V0 FDA?
 What was V1?
 What does the future look like?
 V1.
 The first one was patent medicines.
 Okay.
 That's what people say.
 But V1 was also Banting and Best.
 Okay.
 Banting and Best, they won the Nobel Prize in the early 1920s.
 Right?
 Why?
 They came up with that idea for insulin supplementation to treat diabetes.
 And they came up with a concept.
 They experimented on dogs.
 They did self-experimentation.
 They had healthy volunteers.
 They experimented with the formulation as well, right?
 Because just like you'd have like a web app and a mobile app, maybe a command line app,
 you could have a drug that's administered orally or via injection or cream or there's
 different formulations, right?
 Dosage, all that stuff they could just iterate on with willing doctor, willing patient.
 These folks who were affected just sprang out of bed.
 The insulin supplementation was working for them.
 And within a couple of years, they had won the Nobel Prize and Eli Lilly had scaled production
 for the entire North American continent, okay?
 So that was a time when pharma moved at the speed of software, when it was willing buyer,
 willing seller, okay?
 Because the past is demonized as something that our glorious regulatory agency is protecting
 us from, okay?
 But there's so many ways in which what it's really protecting you from is being healthy,
 okay?
 As you know, I mean, there's a zillion examples of this.
 I won't be able to recapitulate all of them just in this podcast, but if you look at a
 post that I've got, it's called Regulation, Disruption, and the Future Technologies of
 2013, Coursera PDF, okay?
 This lecture, which I'll kind of link it here so you can maybe put in the show notes if
 you want.
 This goes through like a dozen different examples of crazy things the FDA did from the kind
 of stuff that was dramatized in Dallas Virus 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 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 and 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, the banks and whatnot, crypto has a pretty
 good set of answers for these things.
 And over time, all the countries that are not, or all the groups that are not the US
 establishment or the CCP will find more and more to their liking in the crypto economy.
 So that part I think is going, okay?
 We can talk about that.
 What does that look like for biomedicine?
 Well, first, what does exit the FDA look like, right?
 So there actually are a bunch of exits from the FDA already, which is things like right
 to try laws, okay?
 CLIA labs and laboratory developed tests, compounding pharmacies, off-label prescription
 by doctors and countries that aren't fully harmonized with FDA.
 For example, you know, Kobe Bryant before he passed away went and did stem cell treatments
 in Germany, okay?
 Stem cells have been pushed out, you know, I think in part by the Bush administration
 by other things.
 So those are different kinds of exits.
 Right to try basically means, you know, at the state level, you can just try the drug,
 okay?
 CLIA labs and LDTs, that means that's a path where you don't have to go through FDA to
 get a new device approved.
 You can just run it in a lab, okay?
 Compounding pharmacies, these were under attack.
 I'm not sure actually where the current, you know, statute is on this, but this is the
 ledger that a pharmacist has some discretion in how they, you know, prepare mixtures of
 drugs.
 Off-label prescription by MDs.
 So MDs have enough like weight in the system that they can kind of push back on FDA and
 off-label prescription is the concept that a drug that's approved for purpose A can be
 prescribed for purpose B or C or D without going through another, 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 he's going to poison
 us with your non-FDA approved things or whatever, right?
 Like those exits exist.
 You've probably actually used tests or treatments from those.
 You don't even realize that you have, right?
 So it hasn't killed you, number one.
 Number two is actually testing for safety.
 You know, there's safety efficacy and like comparative safety is, it's actually relatively
 easy to test for.
 There's very few drugs that are like, there's TGN 1412.
 That's a famous example of something that was actually really dangerous to people, right?
 With an early test.
 So those do exist, just acknowledge they do exist.
 But in general, testing for safety is actually not that hard to do.
 Okay.
 And if something is safe, then you should be able to try it usually.
 Okay.
 Now what does that decentralized FDA look like?
 Well, basically you take individual pieces of it and you can often turn them into vehicles.
 And this is like 50 different startups.
 Let me describe some of them.
 Have you gotten any drugs or something like that recently?
 I mean like prescribed drugs, prescription drugs.
 No, 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 in the, right?
 Okay.
 It's a wadded up chemistry textbook.
 I love it.
 That's what it is, right?
 That's what a terrible user interface.
 We don't usually think of it that way.
 Why is the user interface so terrible?
 It's a web of regulation that makes it so terrible.
 And there's actually guys who tried to innovate just on user interface called like Help I
 Need Help.
 That was like the name of the company a while back.
 And it was trying to explain the stuff in plain language.
 Just on user interface you can innovate.
 And why is it important?
 Well, there's a company called PillPak, which innovated on quote the user interface for
 drugs by giving people a thing which had like a daily blister pack.
 So it's like here's your prescription and you're supposed to take all these pills on
 the first and second.
 And basically whether you had taken them on a given day was manifest by whether you had
 opened it for that specific day.
 Okay.
 This is way better than other kinds of so-called compliance methodologies.
 Like there are guys who 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 leads 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 PillPak 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 people have sort of, in my view, some have quoted out context or like,
 oh, biology thinks you should replace the FDA with the ELP 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 a bad experience with a drug?
 Like VAERS but for drugs.
 Yeah.
 It's called MedWatch, right?
 And so you can do like voluntary reporting and you can get like a PDF and just like upload
 it, right?
 Is this a government?
 Like, is this.gov?
 Yeah, it's form 3500B.
 I love it.
 It's HTML.
 It's going to be like from the nineties or it's going to have an interface designed
 by somebody who's a cobalt slash Fortran programmer.
 Right.
 Wow.
 So here we go.
 So basically the 3500B- I hope you've 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, et cetera.
 The point is FDA already has a terrible Yelp for drugs.
 It has a terrible version of it.
 What would the good version look like?
 The fact that you've never, I mean, the fact you have to fill out a PDF to go and submit
 a report.
 How do you submit a report at Yelp or Uber or Airbnb or Amazon?
 You tap and there's star ratings, right?
 So just modernizing FDA 3500B and modernizing phase four, okay, is a huge thing.
 Can you comment on that?
 What incentive mechanism forces the modernization of that kind of thing?
 Here's how it would work or one possible-
 To create an actual Yelp.
 Yeah.
 Here's how that would work, right?
 You go to the pharmacy or wherever and you hold up your phone and you scan the barcode
 of the drug, okay?
 What does it usually say?
 Instantly you see global reports, right?
 By the way, because your biology or physiology, that's global, right?
 Information from Brazil or from Germany or Japan on their physiological reaction to the
 same drug you're taking is useful to you.
 It's not like a national boundaries thing.
 So the whole nation state model of only collecting information on by other Americans.
 Really you want a global kind of thing.
 Just like Amazon book reviews, that's a global thing.
 Other things are aggregate at the global level, okay?
 So what you want is to see every patient report and every doctor around the world on this
 drug that might be really important to your rare or semi-rare condition.
 Just that alone would be a valuable site.
 Who builds that site?
 It sounds like something created by capitalism.
 It sounds like it would have to be a company.
 Yeah, you can definitely do it.
 See these-
 But we don't have a world where a company is allowed to be in charge of that kind of
 thing.
 It's not like the health went down.
 It just seems like a lot of the-
 So it depends, right?
 Basically, this is why you have to pick off individual elements, right?
 There's essentially a combination of first recognizing that FDA is actually bad.
 You need to be able to say that.
 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.
 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 similar to this.
 I was in Vegas at a club, I don't go to clubs.
 Okay.
 I got kicked out for the, I think the first time in my life for making a joke with a bouncer.
 And because I had a camera with me and you're not allowed to have a camera.
 And I said, okay, cool, I'll take it out.
 But I made a funny joke that I don't care to retell.
 But he was just a little offended.
 He was like, I don't care who you are, I don't care who you're with.
 And then he proceeded to list me the famous people he has kicked off.
 But there is, I mean, all of those, the reason I made the joke is I sensed that there was
 an entitlement to this particular individual, like where the authority has gotten to his
 head.
 Respect my authority.
 Yeah.
 Right.
 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 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.
 Yep.
 Okay.
 Advanced.
 Right?
 And the thing about this is everybody in line, actually some fairly high, let's say call
 it influence or net worth or whatever people fly, right?
 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 if you could 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.
 That when it's a government to government thing, see a dot com is treated with extreme
 scrutiny by FDA, but it's another dot gov.
 Well, they're not trying to make a profit.
 So they kind of just wave them on through.
 Okay.
 So these body scanners were basically applied to millions and millions of people and this
 huge opt-in experiments almost, I think it's quite likely by the way, that if there was
 even a slightly increased cancer risk that the net morbidity and mortality from those
 would have outweighed the deaths from terrorism or whatever that were prevented, right?
 You can work out the numbers, but you can just get the math under reasonable assumptions.
 It's probably true.
 If it had any increased morbidity and mortality.
 I've not seen the recent things, but I've seen that concern expressed 12 years ago.
 Point being that despite the cost, despite how many people are exposed to it, despite
 how obviously patently ludicrous it is, you don't make any trouble nor do people organize
 protests or whatever about this because it's something where the security theater of the
 whole thing is part of it.
 Well, if we took them away, there'd be more terrorism or something like that.
 People think, right?
 But it is fascinating to see that the populace puts up with it because one of my favorite
 things is to listen to Jordan Peterson who I think offline, but I think also on the podcast,
 you know, is somebody who resists authority in every way.
 And even he goes to TSA with a kind of suppressed, like all the instructions, everything down
 to whenever you have like the yellow thing for your feet, they force you to adjust it
 even slightly if you're off.
 Just even, I mean, it's like it's a Kafka novel.
 We're living like TSA.
 It makes me smile.
 It brings joy to my heart because I imagine Franz Kafka and I just walking through there
 because it's really is just deeply absurd.
 But and then the whole motivation of the mechanism becomes distorted by the individuals involved.
 The initial one was to reduce the number of terrorist attacks, I suppose.
 Right.
 Now it's guns and drugs.
 Basically it's like, essentially what they've done is they've repealed the fourth amendment,
 right?
 Search and seizure, they can do it without probable cause.
 Everybody is being searched.
 Everybody's a potential terrorist.
 So they've got probable cause for everybody in theory.
 And so what they do, they'll post on their website the guns and drugs or whatever that
 they seized in these scanners.
 Well, of course, if you search everybody, you're going to find some criminals or whatever.
 But the cost of doing that is dramatic.
 Moreover, the fact that people have sort of been trained to have compliance, it's like
 the Soviet Union, right?
 Where just grudgingly, all right, go along with this extremely stupid thing.
 What's my point?
 The point is this is a really stupid regulation that has existed in plain sight of everybody
 for 20 years.
 We're still taking off our shoes.
 Okay.
 Because some shoe bomber, whatever number of years ago.
 Okay.
 So all this stuff is there as opposed to, there's a zillion other things you could potentially
 do different paradigms for quote airport security.
 But now apply that to FDA.
 Just like a lot of what TSA does is security theater, arguably all of it.
 A lot of what FDA does is safety theater.
 The difference is there's far fewer people who go through the aperture.
 They're the biotech and pharma CEOs.
 Okay.
 So you don't have an understanding of what it is to deal with them, number one.
 Number two is the penalty is not a few hundred dollars of missing your flight.
 It is a few million dollars or tens or hundreds of millions of dollars for getting your company
 subject to the equivalent of a retaliatory wait time.
 Just like that bouncer threw you out.
 Just like the TSA officer, if you make a joke or they can just sit you down and make you
 lose your flight.
 Right?
 So too, can the FDA just silently impede the approval of something and choke you out financially
 because you don't have enough runway to get funded.
 Right?
 So impose more wait time.
 Guess what?
 We want another six months.
 Data is going to take you 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 with or vaccine evaluated
 rather via challenge trials to months or years, the cost during that time, it just increases
 nonlinearly.
 Right?
 So you can't iterate on the product.
 All the normal observations, if it takes you 10 years to launch a product versus 10 days,
 what's the difference in terms of your speed of variation, your cost, et cetera.
 Right?
 So this is part of what, it's not the only thing.
 There's other things.
 There's AMA and CPT.
 There's other things.
 But this is one of the things that jacks up prices in the US medical system.
 Okay?
 So now you have something where these CEOs, they're going through this aperture.
 They 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'm being 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 and sorry to interrupt, but for the CEO of the company, I know 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, 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 thought to 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 regulator?
 Can you name an evil CEO?
 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, there is portrayals, especially in sort of authoritarian regimes or the Soviet
 Union where there's bureaucracy, you know, Chernobyl, you can kind of see within that
 there's the story of the regulator, but yeah, it's not as plentiful and it's also doesn't
 have often doesn't have a face to it.
 It's like bureaucracy is this amorphous thing that results.
 Any one individual you see, they're just obeying somebody else.
 There's not a face to it of evil.
 The evil is the entire machine.
 That's right.
 That's what I call the school of fish strategy, by the way.
 It's something where you are an individual and you can be signaled out, but there's more
 accountability for one person's bad tweets than all the wars in the Middle East, right?
 Because it's a school of fish.
 Yeah.
 Right?
 So if the establishment is wrong, if the bureaucracy is wrong, they're all wrong at the same time.
 Who could have known?
 Whereas if you deviate, then you are a deviation who can be hammered down.
 Okay.
 Now the school of fish strategy is unfortunately very successful because, you know, truth is
 whatever.
 If you just always ride with the school of fish and turn when they turn and so on, unless
 there's a bigger school of fish that comes in, you basically can never be proven wrong.
 Right?
 So actually, you know, of course someone who believes in truth and believes in, you know,
 innovation and so on just physiologically can't ride with the school of fish.
 You just have to say what is true or do what is true.
 Right?
 Still, you've described correctly, you know, how it's faceless.
 Right?
 So I will give two examples of fictional portrayals of evil regulators.
 One is actually the original Ghostbusters.
 Okay.
 Did not expect that one, but yes.
 Yeah.
 So the EPA is actually the villain in that where they flip a switch that lets out all
 the ghosts in the city.
 And essentially the guy is coming in with a head of steam as this evil regulator that's
 just totally arrogant, doesn't actually understand the private sector or the consequences of their
 actions and they force the, and crucially they bring a cop with them with a gun.
 So it shows that a regulator is not simply, you know, some piece of paper, but it is the
 police.
 Right?
 And that cop with the gun forces the Ghostbusters to like release the containment and the whole
 thing spreads.
 The second example is Dallas Buyers Club, which is more recent, and that actually shows
 the FDA blocking a guy who had with a life-threatening illness, you know, with AIDS from getting
 the drugs to tree's 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 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.
 Sometimes regulatory agencies collide with each other, right?
 Even though FDA is under HHS, sometimes it collides with HHS and they've got regulations
 that conflict.
 For example, HHS says everybody's supposed to be able to have access to their own medical
 record.
 FDA didn't want people to have access to their own personal genomes.
 That conflicts.
 Okay?
 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 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 teramycin for
 Pfizer.
 I hadn't seen my family for eight or nine months.
 They were flying into Sao Paulo, and I was flying down from some little village on the
 Amazon to Manus and then to Sao Paulo.
 I was a young guy in his twenties.
 I couldn't wait to see the kids.
 One of them was a year old baby.
 The other was three.
 I missed my wife.
 There was a Quonset hut in front of just a little dirt strip with a single engine plane
 to fly me to Manus.
 I roll up and there's a Brazilian soldier there.
 The military revolution happened literally the week before.
 So this soldier is standing there with his machine gun, and he said to me, you can't
 come in.
 I speak in pretty good Portuguese by that time.
 I said, my God, my plane, my family, I gotta come in.
 He said again, you can't come in.
 I said, I gotta come in.
 And he took his machine gun, took the safety off, and pointed at me and said, you can't
 come in.
 Oh, now I got it.
 I can't go in there.
 And that's the way I always described 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're the boss.
 If you're a pharmaceutical firm, they own you body and soul.
 Okay, that's the CEO of a successful company, Genentech.
 He said he's told the story hundreds of times and regulatory approval is a fundamental challenge
 facing his company because if you are regulated by FDA, they are your primary customer.
 If they cut the cord on you, you have no other customers.
 And in fact, until very recently with the advent of social media, no one would even
 tell your story.
 It was assumed that you were some sort of corporate criminal that they were protecting
 the public from, that you were gonna put poison in milk, like the melamine scandal in China.
 I'm not saying those things don't exist, by the way.
 They do exist.
 That's why people are like, they can immediately summon to mind all the examples of corporate
 criminals, right?
 That's why I mentioned those fictional stories.
 I mean, you can't just put them in 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, go ahead.
 Yeah, but the pharmaceutical companies are stuck between a rock and a hard place because
 the reputation, if they go to Twitter, they go to social media, they have horrible reputations.
 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.
 This is partially what's just happened with Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, the other
 MAGA.
 Okay.
 They have been-
 That's funny.
 Well done.
 Yeah.
 I didn't even think about that.
 That's well done.
 Right?
 So I have this tweet, it's like MAGA Republicans and MAGA Democrats.
 Okay.
 Oh, damn it.
 So many things you've said today will just get stuck in my head.
 They change the way you think.
 Something about catchy phrasing of ideas makes them even more powerful.
 So yeah.
 Okay.
 So that's happening in the tech sector.
 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.
 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 a policeman
 has a quota, right?
 These are the police.
 One way I describe it also is like a step down transformers.
 You have high voltage electricity that's generated at the power plant and it comes over the wires
 and then there's step down transformers that turn it into a lower voltage that you can
 just deal with out of your appliances, right?
 Similarly, you have something where the high voltage of 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.
 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-Corp 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 at many pharmaceutical companies
 arguably all are regulatory affairs and IP, not R&D, right?
 Because one is artificial scarcity of regulation, which jacks up the price, and the other is
 artificial scarcity of the patent, which allows people to maintain the high price, right?
 So this entire thing is just like 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, the late 2000s and 2010s and so on, with the advent of social
 media, with the advent of a bunch of millionaires who are independent, with the advent of Uber
 and Airbnb, right?
 With the advent of cryptocurrency, with the diminution of trust in institutions, it used
 to be really taboo to even talk about the FDA as potentially bad in 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 I wouldn't
 be surprised if it's like a 20 or 30 point drop after the CDC failed to control disease
 and the FDA failed, and the entire biomedical regulatory establishment and scientific establishment
 was saying masks don't work before they do.
 This was just a train crash of all the things that you're paying for that you supposedly
 think are good.
 As I mentioned, one response is to go QAnon and people 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 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, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, right?
 UX is broken at every layer.
 Yeah, so they have a bad yelp for drugs.
 Could we make a better one?
 We could make a better one, just modern UX.
 The key insight here, by the way, which is a non-obvious point, and I've got a whole
 talk on this actually that I should probably release, I actually did like almost eight,
 nine years ago.
 It's called regulation is information.
 Product quality is a digital signal.
 Okay, what do I mean by that?
 Actually when I talk about exit, exit the Fed, that's the crypto economy, right?
 What does exit the FDA look like?
 Well, one key insight is that many of the big scale tech companies can be thought of
 as cloud regulators rather than land regulators.
 What do I mean by that?
 Well, first, what is regulation?
 People do want a regulated marketplace.
 They want A, quality ratings, like on a one to five star scale, and B, 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 taking care of it, and
 they've baked in the regulatory cost into some subscription fee of some kind, right?
 So the thing is, the model we've talked about is the land regulator of a nation state in
 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 mails 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, they've got a reputation.
 Every single web service that's at the scale of tens of millions or hundreds of millions
 of people has had to build a cloud regulator.
 And the crucial thing is it scales across borders.
 So you can use the data from Mexico to help somebody in Moldova or vice versa, right?
 Because it's fundamentally international, right?
 Those ratings, you have a network effect.
 And there's another aspect to it, which is these are better regulators than the land
 regulators.
 For example, Uber is a better regulator than the taxi medallions.
 Why?
 Every ride is GPS tracked.
 There's ratings on both the driver and the passenger side.
 Both parties know that payment can be rendered in a standard currency, right?
 If you have below a certain star rating on either side, you get deplatformed and so on
 to protect either rider or driver, and on and on, right?
 What does that do?
 Uber that is in taxi medallions, rather than a six month or annual inspection, you have
 reports from every single rider, okay?
 Before Uber, it was the taxi drivers and taxi regulators were in a little monopoly locally,
 okay?
 Because they were the persistent actors in the ecosystem.
 Taxi riders had nothing in common, didn't even know each other.
 In New York, some guy gets in a taxi, another guy, they had no way to communicate with each
 other.
 So the persistent actors in the ecosystem were the regulators and the drivers, and they
 had this cozy kind of thing and medallion prices just kept going up, and this was a
 sort of collaboration on artificial scarcity.
 Afterwards, with Uber and Lyft and other entrants, you had something interesting, a different
 kind of regulator driver fusion.
 If you assume regulatory capture exists and lean into it, Uber is the new regulator and
 Uber drivers are the drivers, Lyft is the competing regulator, and Lyft drivers are
 the new drivers, okay?
 So you have a regulator driver fusion versus another regulator driver fusion.
 You no longer have a monopoly, you have multiple parties, okay?
 You have a competitive market.
 This is the concept of polycentric law, right?
 Where you have multiple different legal regimes in the same jurisdiction overlapping that
 you can choose between with a tap of a button, right?
 All these concepts from libertarian theory like polycentric law or catalysis, all these
 things are becoming more possible now that the internet has increased microeconomic leverage,
 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.
 In Austin for a while, Uber was even banned, what have you, right?
 Netnet though, like Uber, Grab, Go-Jek, Lyft, Didi, like ride sharing as a concept is now
 out there, and whatever the next version is where it's self-driving, while it's like
 a very hard fought battle and the regulatory state keeps trying to push things back into
 the garage, this is a fundamentally better way of just doing regulation of taxis.
 Similarly, Airbnb for hotels.
 It's basically the same thing, okay?
 And Airbnb could use competition, I think that it would be good to have 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 still the most defended thing.
 Basically just publishing reviews.
 And not just reviews by any old person.
 It turns out that FDA typically will use expert panels, where there's expert panels.
 It's like professors from Harvard or 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 profs like Sinclair or what have you.
 You do want to have the reviews of the crowd, okay?
 But you also want to have, especially in medicine, you want to have the reviews of experts.
 Of some kind.
 So there's going to be defectors from the current establishment.
 Just like there are profs who defected from computer science academia to become Larry
 and Sergey and whatever.
 Or they weren't profs, they were grad students, right?
 In the same way you'll have defectors who have the credentials from the old world, but
 can build up the new.
 Just like there's folks from Wall Street who have come into cryptocurrency and helped legitimate
 it, right?
 Just like there's folks who left Salzburger to come to Substack.
 We have these folks who by defecting, they help and then they're also supplemented by
 all this new talent coming in, right?
 That combination of things is how you build a new system.
 It's not completely by itself, nor is it trying to reform the old, it's some fusion, okay?
 So in this new system, who do you have?
 You have the most entrepreneurial and innovative MDs.
 You have the most entrepreneurial and innovative professors, and you have the founders of actual
 new products and stuff.
 And they are giving open source reviews of these products.
 And they're also building a community that will say, look, we want this new drug or we
 want this new treatment or we want this new device and we're willing to crowdfund 10,000
 units.
 So please give us the thing and we'll write a very fair review of it and we'll also all
 evaluate it as a community and so on.
 So you turn these people from just passive patients into active participants in their
 health, that's a community part, and they've got the kind of biomedical technical leadership
 there.
 Now, what is the kind of prototype of something like this?
 Something like VitaDao is very interesting.
 Things like MoleculeDao are very interesting.
 It'll start with things like longevity, right?
 And why is that?
 Because the entire model of FDA, this 20th century model, is wait for somebody to have
 a disease and then try to cure them, okay?
 Versus saying an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, right?
 Why are we not actually tracking folks and getting a constant dashboard on yourself so
 that you can see whether things are breaking and then you deal with it just like you've
 got server uptime things?
 You don't wait necessarily for the site to go down.
 You start seeing, oh, response rates are spiking.
 We need to add more servers, right?
 You have some warning, okay?
 Even 10 years ago, there was this article called The Measured Man in the Atlantic where
 this guy, physicist Larry Smarr, okay?
 What he was doing is he was essentially doing a bunch of measurements on himself and he
 was finding that there were predictors of inflammation that were spiking and he went
 to the doctor, showed the charts and the doctor was like, I can't do anything with this.
 Then it turned out to be an early warning of a serious condition and he had to, I think,
 go for surgery or something and he was starting to think, well, look, the way that we're doing
 medicine right now is it's not quite like pre-germ theory of disease, but it is pre-continuous
 diagnostics, okay?
 Continuous diagnostics, just to talk about this for a second, I mentioned one angle on
 which you go after FDA, which is the better phase four, right?
 I've mentioned the concept of better reviews in general, okay?
 I mentioned VitaDao, which is a community that is going after longevity.
 Let's talk about continuous diagnostics.
 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 is all the other side of the world, 10,000 miles away, but a few millimeters
 away you don't really know what's going on, right?
 That's starting to change with all the quantified self-devices, the hundreds of millions of Apple
 watches and Fitbits and stuff, right?
 You're also starting to see continuous glucose meters, which is very important.
 They're starting to give you readouts.
 People are seeing, wow, this is spiking my insulin or rather this is spiking my blood
 sugar and it might be something you didn't predict.
 It varies for different people.
 For some people, a banana isn't a big deal for others.
 It's actually quite bad for the blood sugar.
 What happens when you extend that?
 Well, about 10 years ago, a guy, Mike Snyder, a professor at Stanford did something called
 the Integroam where he just threw the kitchen sink of all the diagnostics he could at himself
 over the period of I think a few weeks or a few months, I forget the exact duration.
 He's able to do things where he could see during that period he got a cold or something.
 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.
 You could see, oh, wait a second.
 These are things that I can see in my readouts that I would only have the vaguest interpretation
 of as a human being.
 Moreover, he could take, I don't think he did this, but if you took treatments, if you
 took drugs, you could actually show what your steady state was if you tracked over time,
 show what your disease state or sick state was, and then this drug pushes you back into
 non-disease state.
 You can actually get a quantitative readout of what steady state was.
 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.
 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.
 Often inside you're tapping on your screen.
 So what do we do?
 Take actually significant vitamin D infusions.
 That's a small example of where baselines differ between people.
 These diagnostics, what could that mean?
 That could mean things like the continuous glucose meter, it's quantified self, it's
 like continuous blood testing.
 So you have a so-called mobile phlebotomist.
 This is something which phlebotomist takes blood.
 Mobile phlebotomy would come to your office, come to your remote office.
 This is a great business for people.
 I think you can revisit this in 2022.
 People tried this in the 2010s, but I think it's worth revisiting.
 Mobile phlebotomist comes every week or every month, takes blood, runs every test.
 Maybe that's a few thousand dollars a year, maybe eventually gets to a few hundred dollars
 a year.
 And that's expensive in some ways, but boy, that's better health insurance in other ways.
 Yeah, I mean, it's amazing.
 So one, there's a bunch of companies that do this and I actually would love to learn
 more about them.
 One of them is a company called InsideTracker that sponsors this podcast.
 They do that.
 But the reason I really appreciate them, they're the first ones that introduced me to how easy
 it is, but it's also depressing how little information exactly, as you beautifully put
 it once again, how little information we have about our own body in a continuous sense.
 And actually also sadly, even with InsideTracker, as I collect that data, how not integrated
 that data is with everything else.
 If I wanted to opt in, I would like, I can't just like riffing off the top of my head,
 but I would like Google Maps to know what's going on inside my body.
 Maybe I can't intuit at first why that application is useful, but there could be an incredible,
 that's where the entrepreneurial spirit builds is like, what can I do with that data?
 Can I make the trip less stressful for you and adjust the Google Maps thing 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 darnos, that's one of the reasons why people have sort of been scared off from
 doing diagnostics to some extent.
 Why?
 Because they're like, oh, is this another Theranos?
 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,
 right?
 Way more.
 Just take drug lag alone, okay?
 Whenever you have a drug that works and reduce morbidity and mortality after it was actually
 generally available, but was delayed for months or years, the integral under that curve is
 the excess morbidity and mortality attributable to FDA's drug lag.
 You could go back and do that study across lots and lots of different drugs and you'd
 probably find quite a lot.
 Alex Tabarrok and others have written on this, right?
 Daniel Henninger has written on this, okay?
 That's just like one example.
 I mean, I gave the pandemic example, the fact that they held up the EUAs for the tests and
 didn't do challenge trials.
 That's like a million American dead that could have been orders magnitude less if we had
 gotten the vaccine out to vulnerable populations sooner, okay?
 So you're talking about something that has a total monopoly on global health and you
 can't know what it is without that unless you have zones that are FDA free, but that
 have some form of regulation.
 As I mentioned, it's a V3.
 It's not going back to zero regulation, everybody in a manner for itself, but it's a more reputable
 regulator, just like Uber is a better regulator than the tax and medallions, right?
 Yeah.
 I mean, you're painting such an incredible picture.
 You're making me wish you were FDA commissioner.
 There are a bunch of people who tweeted something like that after the pandemic.
 Whatever, go ahead.
 Is that possible?
 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?
 The short answer is no.
 And the longer answer, meaning-
 That'd be funny if you're like, the short answer is no, the long answer is yes.
 Basically a CEO of a company, while it's very difficult, they can hire and fire, right?
 So in theory, they can do surgery on the organism and like Steve Jobs took over Apple and was
 able to hire and fire, raise money, do this, that.
 He basically had root over Apple, that he was a system administrator, right?
 He had full permissions, okay?
 As FDA commissioner, you do not have full permissions over FDA, let alone like the whole
 structure around it, right?
 If you're FDA commissioner, you are not the CEO of the agency, okay?
 Lots of these folks there have career tenure.
 They can't be fired.
 They can't even really be disciplined.
 There's something called the Douglas Factors.
 You ever heard of the Douglas Factors?
 It's like the Miranda rights for federal employees, okay?
 You know, the right to man says it.
 So basically, if you've heard that federal employees can't be fired, the Douglas Factors
 are how that's actually operationalized.
 When you try to fire somebody, it's this whole process where they get to appeal it and so
 on and so forth.
 And they're sitting in the office while you're trying to fire them and they're complaining
 to everybody around them that this guy's trying to fire me, he's such a bad guy, blah, blah,
 right?
 And everybody around, even if they may think that guy is doing a bad job, they're like,
 wait a second, he's trying to fire you, he might try to fire me too.
 And so anybody who tries to fire somebody at FDA just gets a face full of lead for their
 troubles.
 What they instead will do is sometimes they'll just transfer somebody to the basement or
 something so they don't have to deal with them if they're truly bad, okay?
 But the thing about this is there is only one caveat to 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 annual budget renewal.
 Think of it as 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, the police
 quotas, the ticketing.
 And if they don't have a crisis, they will invent one.
 Just again, just like TSA, just like other agencies you're more familiar with, you can
 kind of map it back.
 Look at the guns and drugs we've seized.
 And say I have 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 rare except you can be booted.
 But what that means is that FDA commissioner is actually a white elephant.
 It's a ceremonial role, really, right?
 You know the term white elephant, it's like basically the Maharaja gives you a white elephant
 as a gift.
 It seems great.
 Next day, it's eating all of your grass, it's pooped on your lawn, it has 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 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 crumble potentially, right?
 In many ways, it's becoming folks who are just totally status obsessed getting these
 positions, but like a lot of the merit, all the folks with merit are kind of leaving the
 government and going into tech or crypto or what have you, right?
 So even if these agencies were hollow before and some of these are becoming hollow-er 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, but was there.
 C, we're entering the decentralizing era and D, like be like Satoshi.
 Satoshi founded Bitcoin because he knew you could not reform the Fed.
 Everybody is trying to go and reform, reform, reform.
 The reason they're trying to reform is we haven't figured out the mechanisms 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 literance, fitness is actually the back door to a lot of medicine, okay?
 Why is that?
 You go to any 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, fat phobic or whatever, but not too many years
 ago you would see somebody, people saying fitness is the ultimate drug.
 If we could just prescribe fitness in a pill, that would improve your cardiovascular function,
 your neurological function, it deals with depression.
 By the way, in that case, the use of the word drug means medicine.
 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,
 like you're fit enough, you do the 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.
 And you know, go ahead.
 No, 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 is Dr. Google?
 Well, your doctor must be a moron.
 You're going and trying to take care of yourself, you're Googling symptoms.
 Oh, how stupid you are.
 I have a medical degree.
 And that doctor, see, the thing is if you come in and you've self-diagnosed or you've
 done some of your own research, if you're right and they've got an ego about it, they're
 undermined.
 And if you're wrong, they're like, ha ha, arrogant.
 But either way, if they've got this kind of mindset, they have an incentive to resist
 the patient taking care of themselves.
 Isn't that the doctor's job, right?
 And they're kind of taught to behave like this, many of them.
 So what that means then is that intervention of that 15 or 30 minute appointment with the
 doctor, whatever drug they prescribe, better hit you like Thor's hammer to put you back
 on the straight and narrow.
 Because that's only with you for like a few seconds, a few minutes or whatever.
 The doctor's only with you for a few minutes.
 The drug is only, some drugs are very powerful, so they actually do work like this.
 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 of their stuff, who's eating properly and looking at the effect of their
 diet on things like their continuous glucose monitor as a V1, but other things, right?
 Who is as fit as they can possibly be.
 These are kind of obvious things, but why is this the backdoor to medicine?
 Because since the 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 quit marketing them to diagnose or treat a disease.
 You 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, right?
 So that's actually the backdoor 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.
 A few other things which kind of a US medical system, Wallimonyx.
 You got me on this topic.
 I love this.
 Okay.
 So-
 This is the most eloquent exploration of the US medical system and how to improve it, how
 to fix it and what the future looks like.
 Yeah.
 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 AMA, there's CPT, there's CPOM, there's this, you know, like all these regulations
 which see normally in capitalism, you have a buyer and a seller, right?
 Duh.
 In medicine, you have third party regulation and fourth party pricing and fifth party payment.
 Okay.
 So third party regulation, FDA is regulating it, fourth party pricing, it is, you know,
 the CPT codes, right?
 Fifth party payment, it's the insurance companies, all right?
 And just to discuss these bits of the system, first, why are some people against capitalism
 in medicine?
 I actually understand why they're against it because they are visualizing themselves
 on a gurney when they're being wheeled in and now somebody at their moment of vulnerability
 is charging this insane price for their care and many people in the US have had this horrible
 experience where they're bankrupted or scared of being bankrupted by medical bills.
 Therefore, the concept of adding more capitalism to medicine scares them and they think it's
 horrible and you're some like awful, greedy tech bro kind of thing, all right?
 Let me say I understand that concern and let me, you know, kind of let me tease that apart
 a little bit, right?
 Actually the most capitalistic areas of medicine are the most functional areas of medicine.
 So that's say the places where you can walk in and walk out, okay?
 Whether that's dentistry, dermatology, plastic surgery, even veterinary medicine, which is
 not human, okay?
 Where you can make a conscious decision, say, okay, I want this care or I don't want this,
 I see a price list, I can pay cash, right?
 If I don't like it, I go to another dermatologist.
 There's few dermatological emergencies, that's why dermatologists have a great quality of
 life, okay?
 By contrast, when you're being wheeled in on a gurney, you need it right now, okay?
 And you're unconscious or what have you, or you're not in a capacity to deal with it,
 right?
 And so these are the two extremes.
 It's like ambulatory medicine you can walk around and pick and like ambulance medicine,
 okay?
 And what that means is the more ambulatory the medicine, the more legitimate capitalism
 is in that situation.
 People are okay with a dermatologist basically turning you down because you don't have enough
 money and you go to another dermatologist because you can comparison shop there.
 It's not usually an emergency, right?
 Whereas if you're coming in with an ambulance, then people don't 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.
 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 up 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.
 The Singapore model is actually a pretty good one for this where they have sort of a mandatory
 HSA.
 You have to put some money in that and that pays for your healthcare bills, but then it's
 cash out of that.
 It's like a separate pocket, sort of four savings to pay for health savings accounts.
 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 eventually it's Mike Snyder's Intergrom, the V1 is the
 quantified self and the Apple Watch and the continuous glucose meters, and the VN is the
 Mike Snyder Intergrom.
 There's a site called Q.bio which is doing this also, right?
 Eventually this stuff will hopefully just be in a device that just measures tons and
 tons of variables on you, right?
 There's ways of measuring some of these metabolites without breaking the skin.
 So it's not, you don't have to keep breaking the skin over and over.
 There's various ways of doing that.
 So now you've got something where you've got the monitoring, you've got the dashboards,
 you've got the alerts, and just like this Larry Smarr guy that I mentioned, the measured
 man, you might be able to shift more and more things to ambulatory.
 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 not the top of their class, but the guys who are at the
 bottom of the pinball machine, the surgeons and the radiologist, 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 Howser MD is at the upstream stage, okay?
 So you want this amazing, amazing doctor there, right?
 How could we get that?
 I mentioned the app that doesn't exist, which is like a better version of the 3500B, right?
 Here's another app that doesn't exist, and this is one that FDA has 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, tell 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, 98% 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 and an app that you 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, some of that stuff was relaxed during COVID.
 There's other broken things in medical system, I'll just name two more and then move on.
 I mentioned AMA and CPT.
 Those are two regulatory bodies?
 AMA, American Medical Association, CPT, current procedural terminology.
 Basically, you know Marx's labor theory of value, where people are supposed to be paid
 on their effort, right?
 Of course, the issue with this is that you'd be paying a physicist to try to dunk and 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.
 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.
 AMA basically publishes a list of these so-called CPT codes, which is like the coding, the biomedical
 coding of this and what each medical process is worth and whatnot.
 It's like, I don't remember all the numbers, but it's like a five-digit code and it's like,
 okay, I got a test for cystic fibrosis or a test for this or a test for that.
 That's not going to help you if your medical billing is erroneous.
 Why?
 The insurance company will reject it because it doesn't pay for that.
 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, okay?
 This enormous inefficient industry.
 Okay, literally medical billing is a whole field, okay?
 What do you want to do when you grow up?
 I want to work in medical billing.
 In medical billing, okay?
 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 repo the treatment, okay?
 Like a car, you sell a car, you can in theory repo the car.
 So the patient has a treatment.
 Now, what happens?
 Well, the insurance company, that treatment is perhaps provided, look, it's a lab test
 provided by a company, right?
 The company bills the patient.
 The company is supposed to charge a high price.
 Why?
 The insurance company wants it to try to collect from the patient.
 The patient is scared.
 Oh my God, they see this huge price.
 They sometimes don't pay.
 Sometimes the insurance company doesn't pay either.
 And when a company is stiffed by an insurance company, when a diagnostic company is stiffed
 by an insurance company, it has to jack up the price on everybody else, right?
 Everything boils down to the fact that you don't have 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, the other thing about it is obviously lawsuits are over everything.
 Everybody's mad about everything.
 It's health.
 People are dying.
 Okay.
 So everything is just optimized for optics as opposed to results, right?
 Similarly, actually many drugs are optimized for minimizing side effects and optics rather
 than maximizing effects, which are totally different criteria, right?
 You might have, for example, a drug that only cures a thousand people but doesn't have any
 side effects versus one that cures a million people but that has 10 really serious side
 effects a year, right?
 The second one probably not happen because those side effects would be so big.
 How do you attack this?
 I name a few examples, but I actually think the reform is going to come in part from outside
 the system.
 In particular, India is coming online.
 Okay.
 Why is that important?
 Well, you may have encountered an Indian doctor or two, okay?
 Maybe an Indian programmer, one or two, all right?
 And I do think telemedicine could explode, right?
 Where you could have an Indian doctor in India and there's a US doctor, okay, who's like
 a dispatcher.
 You see what I'm saying?
 They've got all these other Indian doctors behind them.
 They've got a telemedical app and you are now doing something where these relatively
 inexpensive Indian doctors who are vetted by the American doctor or the doctor in jurisdiction
 of the license become the back end doctors of the world.
 To some extent, that's already there with tele-radiology and other kinds of things,
 right?
 But now that you've got literally like a billion Indians who've just come online, okay, you
 have this huge pool of folks who have a different attitude towards medicine.
 For example, it's a lot more cash payment over there.
 For example, India is big on generic drugs.
 For example, during COVID, it had something called, it has something called Arrogia Sethu,
 which is a national telemedicine app, okay?
 The US wasn't able to ship that.
 In some ways, India's digital infrastructure, again, you'll have to read a post called The
 Internet Country by tigerfeathers.substack.com and you'll see that actually India's national
 software infrastructure is surprisingly good.
 It's not as good as China's in some ways, but it's like better than the US's, which
 is like healthier.gov and like non-existent.
 It's like kind of impressive how good some of India's software is.
 The fact that it exists is good.
 So you have all these new doctors coming online.
 India cranks out generics, right?
 Telemedicine is now more legal in the US and you have cash payment in India, right?
 In a lot of other places.
 You don't have the whole insurance employer health thing and this market is growing.
 So you could have a sort of parallel market that starts evolving, right?
 Which is, and people are already doing some medical tourism.
 I think that's another exit from the FDA.
 You have a parallel market that starts evolving.
 That just starts from fundamentally different premises.
 It's just cash, cash for everything, right?
 There's downsides with cash for everything.
 There's a huge upside with cash for everything.
 Cash for everything means you get customer service from the doctor.
 It means the prices are actually visible.
 It ideally pushes you again towards more ambulatory medicine rather than ambulance medicine.
 It is monitoring, constant monitoring with the quantified self and whatnot, as opposed
 to just let your system fail and then wheel you in, right?
 There's a reputational bridge because now we've had a couple of generations almost of
 Indian doctors in the US.
 So people know that there's some very competent Indian doctors.
 They're a good chunk of AMA and so they can sort of lobby for this.
 And you have plenty of Indian engineers.
 Now I'm not saying India alone is a panacea, but I do think that this is a large enough
 parallel market to start doing interesting things.
 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 just such a huge opportunity to define the future of medicine and make
 a shit ton of money from a market that's desperate for it in the United States because of all
 the over the regulation.
 That's right.
 And I think basically it's something where the reason it needs-
 And that would fix the FDA, sorry, to interrupt.
 Yes.
 The FDA by exiting the FDA, right?
 And then the FDA would dry out and then it would hopefully-
 It might reform, it might dry out, right?
 And this is why people are, for example, they're traveling across borders to getting orders
 from Canadian pharmacies.
 A lot of this type of stuff, we can start to build alternatives, right?
 I mean, India's generic industry is really important because it just doesn't enforce
 American IP there.
 So generic drugs are cheaper, right?
 And it's quite competent, it's been around for a while.
 So there's enough proof points there where, again, I'm not saying a panacea, it's going
 to be something which will acquire 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's and it has enough of
 a bridge to the US that it can be that stimulation which you need, which is kind of something
 that outside poke, right?
 I 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 Benedict option like a Christian
 network state.
 If people want to do different kinds of things, I'm open to many different things and I will
 fund lots of different things.
 For me, the motivation is just like you 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 and selling and so on.
 But what Satoshi did is he took fundamental premises and flipped them.
 For example, in the traditional macroeconomic worldview, hyperinflation is bad, but deflation
 is also bad.
 So a little inflation is good, right?
 In the traditional macroeconomic worldview, it's good that there are custodians, banks
 that 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 is bad, but he also thought mild inflation was
 bad and deflation was good.
 That's just a fundamental shift, okay?
 He gave you root access over your money.
 You're now a system administrator of your own money.
 You can room-RF your entire fortune or send millions with a keystroke.
 You are now the system administrator of your own money.
 That alone is why cryptocurrency is important.
 If you want system administration access at times to computers, you'll want it to currency,
 right?
 To be sovereign.
 There's 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 initial, the
 Bitcoin blockchain, everything is public, right?
 There are various kinds of things like this where he just inverted fundamental premises.
 And then the whole crypto system is in the crypto economy is in many ways a teasing out
 of what that means.
 Just to give you one example, the US dollar, people have seen those graphs where it's like
 inflating and so it just loses value over time and you've seen that, okay?
 And most of the time it's just sort of denied that it's losing any value.
 The most highbrow way of defending it is the US dollar trades off temporary short-term
 price stability for long-term depreciation.
 And Bitcoin makes the opposite trade off.
 In theory at least, long-term appreciation at the expense of short-term price instability.
 Because there's the whole plunge protection team and so on.
 Basically there's various ways in which price stability is tried to be maintained in the
 medium term at the expense of long-term depreciation.
 You need a reserve of assets to keep stabilizing the dollar against various things.
 So what does crypto medicine look like relative to fiat medicine to make the same analogy?
 The existing medical system, it assumes that a quick death is bad, an early death is bad,
 but also that living forever is either unrealistic or impossible or undesirable that you should
 die with dignity or something like that, okay?
 So a little death is good.
 That's the existing medical system.
 Because the concept of life extension and David Sinclair and what you call health span
 says rejects that fundamental premise.
 And it says actually the way to defeat cancer is to defeat aging.
 Aging is actually a programmed 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 that
 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 own health with the decentralization of medicine?
 All the stuff that I've been describing sort of fits like longevity is traditional medicine
 as crypto is to traditional currency.
 If we take those assumptions separately, so we take cryptocurrency aside, is that to you
 obvious that this letting go of this assumption about death, is that an obvious thing?
 Is longevity obviously good versus for example, the devil's advocate to that would be what
 we want is to keep death and maximize the quality of life up until the end.
 Well, like so that you ride into the sunset healthy.
 Somebody who was listening to the whole podcast would say, well, Balaji, just a few hours
 ago you were saying this gerontocracy runs the US and they're all old and they don't
 get it, blah, blah, blah.
 And now you're talking about making people live forever.
 So there's never any new blood to wash it out.
 Ha ha, what a contradiction, right?
 It's funny that you're so on point across all the topics we covered and the possible
 criticism.
 I love it.
 Well, just trying to anticipate some of it.
 Well done, sir.
 I think the argument on that is so long as you have a frontier, it is okay for someone
 to live long, okay?
 So long as people can exit to a new thing, number one.
 Number two is in order for us to go and colonize other planets and so on, if you do want to
 get to Mars, if you want to become Star Trek and what have you, probably going to need
 to have just to survive a long flight, so to speak, multiple light year flight, you're
 going to need to have life extension.
 So to become a pioneering interstellar kind of thing.
 I know that it's a kind of thing which sounds like, okay, yeah, and when we're on the moon,
 we're going to need shovels.
 It sounds like 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-permeatism or optimism slash transhumanism.
 Either we are shutting down civilization, it's degrowth, it's Unabomber, et cetera,
 or it's the stars and escaping the prime number maze.
 It's like to me, it's obvious that we're going to, if we're to survive, expand out into space.
 Yes.
 It's obvious that once we do, we'll look back at anyone, which is currently most people,
 that didn't think of this future, didn't anticipate this future, worked towards this future as
 Luddites, 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 expansion of longevity.
 There's also a way to bring it back to earth to an extent, which is how were societies
 used to be judged.
 You may remember people used to talk about life expectancy as a big thing, right?
 Life expectancy is actually a very, very, very good metric.
 Why?
 It's a ratio scale variable.
 There's four different class of variables that staticians talk about.
 Ratio scale is like years or meters or kilograms.
 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 to anything.
 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.
 Ratio scale data is the best because you can compare it across space and time.
 If you have a skeleton that is like 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.
 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.
 Life expectancy is good because as a ratio scale variable, it was a very clear definition,
 like when someone born and died.
 Those are actually relatively clear.
 Most other things aren't like that.
 That's why murder or death, it can be scored, it's unambiguous, it's done when it's done.
 Whereas when does somebody get sick?
 Oh, they were kind of sick, they were sick today, they were sick at this hour, the boundary
 conditions, many other kinds of things are not clear cut like that.
 I should just briefly comment that life expectancy does have this quirk, a dark quirk that when
 you just crudely look at it, it incorporates child mortality or mortality at age of one
 or age of five.
 Maybe it's better and clearer to look at mortality after five or whatever.
 Those metrics still hold in interesting ways and measure the progress of human civilization
 in interesting ways.
 Yes, that's right.
 You actually want longevity biomarkers.
 A lot of people are working on this.
 There's this book called The Picture of Dorian Gray and the concept is sell your soul to
 ensure the picture rather than he will age and fade.
 The concept is that thing on the wall just reflects his age and you can see it.
 There's a premise that's embedded in a lot of Western culture that to gain something
 you must lose.
 If you're Icarus and you try to fly, then you'll fly too high and it'll melt your wings.
 But guess what?
 We fly every day, commercial flight.
 The opposite of the Icarus or Picture of Dorian Gray kind of thing is the movie Limitless,
 which I love because it's so Nietzschean and so unusual relative to the dystopian sci-fi
 movies where there's a...
 Without giving...
 The movie is kind of old now, but there's a drug in it that's a neurotropic that boosts
 your cognitive abilities and it's got side effects.
 But at the end, he engineers out the side effects.
 Amazing.
 Just like, yeah, there are planes that crash and we land, right?
 Okay.
 Why did I mention The Picture of Dorian Gray?
 Well, there's another aspect of it, which is longevity biomarker.
 The point is to kind of estimate how many years of life you have left by that Q.bio
 or Integrom or...
 You take all these analyses on somebody, right?
 One of the best longevity biomarkers could be just your face, right?
 You image the face and you can sort of tell, oh, somebody looks like they've aged, oh,
 someone looks younger, et cetera, et cetera.
 And this is actually data that you've got on millions and millions of people where you
 could probably start having AI predict, okay, what is somebody's life expectancy given their
 current face and other kinds of things, right?
 Because you have their name, they have their 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 is it just fundamentally changes the assumptions in the system.
 Now with that said, 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, Lex Friedman has one of the greatest podcasts of all time.
 You guys should listen to the Lex Friedman podcast, which you may be doing, right?
 Which you may be doing right now.
 Yes.
 Yeah.
 Well, thank you.
 So- What was the term again?
 Sorry, genomic- Sorry, I called it genomic, not resurrection,
 but genomic reincarnation, okay?
 So here's the concept.
 You may be aware that you can synthesize strands of DNA, okay?
 There's sequencing of DNA, which is reading it, and synthesizing DNA, which is creating
 strands of DNA.
 What's interesting is you can actually also do that at the full chromosome level for bacterial
 chromosomes.
 Remember that thing I was saying earlier about the minimum life form that Craig Venter made?
 So people have synthesized entire bacterial chromosomes, and they work.
 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 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 23, and 46, whatever you take the pairs.
 What you can do is potentially print somebody out from disk, reincarnate them.
 In so far, if your sequence determines you, and you can argue with this because there's
 epigenetics and other stuff, okay?
 But let's just say to first order, your DNA sequence is Lex.
 You can sequence that, okay?
 You can do full genome sequencing and log that to a file.
 Then here's the 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 I think will be possible, right?
 Folks are working on it.
 I'm sure someone will mess with me.
 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, that's actually a process for psychology to study.
 If you create a blank mind, 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, by the time one is age 20 or
 30 or something in your 20s, 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, things that are idiosyncratic to your own physiology, you're
 like, oh, I'm totally wrecked if I get seven hours of sleep versus nine hours or whatever
 it is, right?
 People will have different kinds of things like this.
 That manual can be given to your next self so you can 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, or a slow metabolizer.
 Oh, that explains X or Y.
 Or I have a weird version of alcohol dehydrogenous.
 Oh, okay, that explains my alcohol tolerance.
 This is part of the broader category of what I call practical miracles, right?
 So it's longevity, it's genomic reincarnation, it is restoring sight, and it is curing deafness
 with the artificial eyes and artificial ears.
 It is the super solider serum.
 Did I show you that?
 So like myostatin null, a tweet about this, basically X-Men are real.
 So here is a study from an EGM 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, this is almost certainly a teenager by now.
 So this kid basically was just totally built.
 Yeah.
 Okay.
 Extraordinarily muscular.
 At a very young age.
 Yes.
 So the child's birth weight was in the 75th percentile, he appeared extraordinarily muscular,
 protruding muscles in his thighs, motor and mental development has been normal.
 Now at four and a half years of age, he continues to have increased muscle bulk and strength.
 And so essentially myostatin mutation is associated with gross muscle hypertrophy in a child.
 So this is like real life X-Men.
 Okay?
 And-
 And there's pictures of animals.
 Yes.
 So this is a company called Variant Bio that is looking at people who have exceptional
 health related traits and is looking for essentially this kind of thing, but maybe more disease
 or whatever related, right?
 For example, people who have natural immunity to COVID, understanding how that works, perhaps
 we can give other people artificial immunity to COVID, right?
 If you scroll up, you see my kind of tweet, super soldier serum is real, where it's like
 wild type mouse and a myostatin null.
 And look at the chest on that thing.
 You see the before and after.
 Wow.
 Okay.
 This is what's possible.
 This could be us, but you're regulating.
 You know, right?
 You know what I'm saying?
 Like this could be us, but you're regulating.
 This could be us, but the FDA regulating, right?
 All this-
 Oh yeah, on steroids.
 But it's not, that's the thing is-
 But it's not steroids.
 Well, that's the thing is people, again, you 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.
 That's good.
 But you know what?
 Like, have we actually put in that much effort into figuring out like the right way of doing
 testosterone supplementation or the right way of doing this?
 Obviously, we've managed to put a lot of effort into marijuana, increasing the potency of
 it or what have you.
 Could we put the effort into these kinds of drugs, right?
 These kinds of compounds?
 Maybe.
 I think that would actually be a really good thing.
 The thing about this is I feel this is just a massively underexplored area.
 Rather than people drinking caffeine all the time, that's a very mild enhancing drug.
 Okay?
 Nicotine is also arguably kind of like that.
 Some people have it even without the cigarettes, right?
 Why can't we research this stuff?
 One way of thinking about it is, you know, Lancer Armstrong, the cyclist, yes, he violated
 all the rules.
 You know, he shouldn't have won the Tour de France or anything like that.
 But his chemists, and I say this somewhat tongue in cheek, but also, you know, his chemists
 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 were also juiced or whatever, right?
 Whatever was done there, take it out of the competition framework.
 There's a lot of testicular cancer patients or cancer patients period who would want some
 of that.
 And we should take that seriously, we should take that pursuit really, really, really seriously.
 Yes, except again, just like the Theranose stuff, all this pathologize, oh, it's a Balco
 scandal, oh, it says, oh my God, you know, and yes, of course, within the context of
 that game, they're cheating.
 When the context of life, you want to be cheating death, right?
 So it's just a kind of a reframe on what is good, right?
 And it is just taking away these assumptions that mild inflation is good or mild death
 is good and going towards transcendence.
 So that gets me done with the giant FDA, biomedical, et cetera, et cetera.
 Longevity, yeah.
 That's beautifully, beautifully done.
 You have two questions.
 One was on Trump and deplatforming and the other was on crypto and the state of crypto
 and the third is on India.
 Which one should we do?
 All right.
 Since we talked about how to fix government, we talked about how to fix health, medicine,
 FDA, longevity, let us briefly talk about how to fix social media, perhaps.
 Sure, very important.
 Since we kind of talked about it from different directions, but it'd be nice to just look
 at social media.
 And if we can perhaps first, as an example, maybe it's not a useful example, but to me,
 it was one that kind of shook me a little bit is the removal of Trump and since then
 other major figures, but Donald Trump was probably the biggest person ever to be removed
 from social media.
 Do you understand why that was done?
 Can you steel man the case for it and against it?
 And if there's something broken about that, how do we fix it?
 Steel man the case for is kind of obvious in the sense of you are seeing a would-be
 dictator who is trying to run a coup against democracy, who has his supporters go and storming
 the seat of government, who could use his app to whip up his followers across the country
 to reject the will of the people.
 And so you're an executive and you'll take actions that while perhaps controversial are
 still within the law and you'll make sure that you do your part to defend democracy
 by making sure that at least this guy's megaphone is taken away and that his supporters cannot
 organize more riots.
 That's basically the case for the deplatforming.
 Okay.
 Would you agree with that?
 So it's like really steel manning it.
 Yes, it's steel manning, so I'm giving the for case.
 Well, I guess I would like to separate the would-be dictator.
 Oh, I guess if you're storming the Capitol, you are a dictator.
 I see, I see.
 So those are two are interlinked, right?
 You have to have somehow a personal judgment of the person.
 Bad enough to be worth this significant step.
 Yeah, it's not just their actions or words in a particular situation, but broadly this
 person is dangerous.
 The context of everything that led up to this moment and so on, right?
 So that's a for case, right?
 Now the against case, there's actually several against cases, right?
 There's obviously the Trump supporters against case.
 There is the libertarian slash left libertarian 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, whether it was actually vote counts or just
 changes of all the rules for mail-in ballots and stuff.
 There were regular meetings between the Chamber of Commerce and AFL and the unions.
 In particular, they admit that the BLM riots of the mid 2020s were actually on a string
 and they could say stand down, right?
 So that's actually, that's a quote from this article where it's like, the word went out,
 stand down, protect the results, announced that it would not be activating the entire
 national mobilization network today, remains ready to activate if necessary.
 Pothoser credits the activists for their restraint.
 So basically the activists re-arranged the protected results protest towards a weekend
 of celebration.
 So point being that the fact that the Trump supporter would say the fact that they could
 tell them to stand down meant that the previous unrest was in part coordinated.
 And so it'd say, okay, so that makes it illegitimate in a different way, right?
 Plus, you know, well, there's one riot on Jan six versus the attacks on the White House
 and stuff, you know, there's storming of the White House in mid 2020 and then actually
 stormed the White House, but they're setting fires outside and it's quite a lot of stuff,
 right?
 So the second against case is the, let's say libertarian slash left libertarian who'd say,
 do we really want giant corporations, regardless of what you think about Trump and you don't
 have to be a Trump supporter.
 Do you really want giant corporations to be determining who can say what on the internet?
 And if they can deplatform 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 deplatform 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 backend,
 that would be corporate collusion by any other name.
 It's actually very similar to the so-called business plot against FDR.
 FDR was a complicated figure who can in some ways best be thought of as the least bad person
 bad communist dictator or socialist dictator of the 20th century.
 Why?
 Because he nationalized the economy, repealed the 10th Amendment, right?
 Tried to pack the courts.
 He 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,
 right?
 We don't usually think about the same guy who did this, did that.
 Earlier in his life, most people don't know this one, he led a whole Navy thing to entrap
 gay sailors.
 And do you know about this one?
 No.
 Yeah.
 Google FDR entrapment of gay sailors.
 Basically, he got young men to try to find folks within the Navy who were gay and then
 basically entrap them so that they could be prosecuted and what have you, right?
 FDR did a lot of stuff, but fundamentally nationalized the economy and set up the Alphabet
 Soup is what they called it at the time.
 That's like all these agencies or whatever.
 In some sense, he's continuous like there'd been a rising trend of centralization.
 Woodrow Wilson obviously centralized, Lincoln centralized, right?
 Even actually 1789 was a degree of centralization over the more loose thing that was 1776, 1789.
 So he was on that trend line, but he was definitely a huge kind of dog leg up.
 So the thing is that because of all the lawsuits that were flying, many folks like Amy Schles
 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 were the bailouts good or bad?
 I think they were bad, but how could I prove it?
 I'd need to actually be able to fork the economy.
 Crypto actually allows you in theory to do that, like where folks could actually shift
 balance.
 Is this a whole separate thing where you can actually start to make macroeconomics into
 more of an experimental science rather than simply arguing from authority?
 You could argue from experiment.
 Some of the virtual economy stuff that Edward Castronova has done is relevant to this.
 We can talk about that.
 Point is though with FDR, there's 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 had been beating up.
 Again, Teddy Roosevelt had also been doing this with the trust buster.
 The journos at the time, Ida Tarbell had gone and basically ran all these articles and Rockefeller
 knocked him down.
 Woodrow Wilson in his 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 broke the whole thing open and told to Congress and so on.
 So this guy's, the whole plot was broken up.
 Now what we have thinking about today or the whole aftermath of Jan six is it's a business
 plot but in reverse because the generals and the CEOs both were against Trump and actually
 the business plot happened and now all the CEOs just, they pushed all the buttons that
 they needed to and now the network was prime over the state.
 Okay.
 Now why is that an interesting way of looking at it?
 Because one thing I have in the book is you can kind of think of 1950 as like ish as peak
 centralization.
 If you go forward and backward in time, things decentralized.
 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, right?
 And of course, I think you could absolutely support Ukraine on other measures, but it's
 pretty hypocritical for the guys who profited from the Hall de Mour.
 The Oxlisborough family literally profited from denying the Hall de Mour to now make
 themselves cheerleaders for Ukraine.
 It's actually this insane thing which we can talk about.
 A tiny tangent on that.
 You put it brilliantly and a reminder for anyone who listens to me talk about Ukraine,
 it is possible to have empathy for a nation and not be part of the machine that generates
 a mainstream narrative.
 Yes, that's right.
 Like basically, you know, I was actually one of the first three Estonian residents, okay?
 And I completely understand why Estonia and the Baltics and all these countries, including
 Ukraine that just recently within living memory got their independence from the Soviet Empire,
 would not want to be forcibly reintegrated into a place that they just escaped from,
 you know?
 And so that is something which is sort of outside the American left-right, you know,
 tired kind of thing where when you understand it from that point of view, right?
 Then there's like a fourth point of view, which is like India's point of view or like
 much of the developing world or what I call, you know, parts of it are, you know, ascending,
 parts are 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, you know, we've got a lot of wars in our neck of the woods and human rights
 crises that Europe just didn't even care about.
 So it can't be that Europe's problems are the world's problems, but the world's problems
 are not Europe's problems, right?
 So that's like a fourth point of view.
 Then a fifth point of view is China, which is like, guess what?
 We're going to be the Iran of the Iraq war, you know, where like who won the Iraq war?
 Iran, arguably, because they extended their influence into Iraq, right?
 So China's like, guess what?
 We're going to turn Russia into our gas station and build a pipeline.
 They're building, there's a power, Siberia is like the name of the Eastern Russia pipeline,
 just like Nord Stream is, you know, Nord Stream one and Nord Stream two.
 I think they're building a new pipeline, you know, through Mongolia.
 So Xi Jinping and Putin and the Mongolian head of state were all photographed kind of
 thumbs-upping this pipeline.
 We'll see if it goes through, but it's ironic that, you know, Russia wanted to make Ukraine
 their, you know, colony, but the outcome of this war may be that Russia becomes China's
 colony, you know?
 So that's at least like five different perspectives, right?
 There's like the US establishment perspective, there's the, you know, Tucker-Maga perspective,
 there's the Baltics and Ukrainian perspective, there's like the Indian and like poor countries
 perspective, then there's Chinese perspective, and then of course there's the Russians, right?
 So just respect to that, by the way, that's another example of history happening in reverse.
 This is the sign of Soviet partnership, except this time China 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 you know, I'm going to list a few more actually,
 because there's so, so, so many of them.
 Do you have an explanation why that happens?
 Yes.
 Let me just list a few of them.
 This is in the, the Network State book, it's in the chapter called Fragmentation Frontier
 Fourth Turning Futures Are Past, right?
 So I give this example of like a fluid unmixing, right?
 Just watch this for a second, right?
 This is from Smart Every Day Unmixing Color Machine, Ultra-Limited Reversible Flow, Smart
 Every Day 217.
 And so you can mix something, and then like this thing that you don't think of as reversible,
 you can unmix it, which is insane, right?
 That it works.
 Okay, the physics of that situation, it just works, right?
 So for people just listening, that there is whatever the mixture this is, this is ultra-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 it's just like the futures are past these things.
 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, it's just an interesting visual model for what's happening in the world
 as we re-decentralize after the centralized century, right?
 So basically, I mentioned the Internet frontier reopens back then the Western frontier closed.
 Today we experienced COVID-19.
 Back then we experienced the Spanish flu, tech billionaires and we had the capitol industry,
 right?
 Today founders like Alon and Dorsey are starting to win against establishment journalists.
 Back then, Ida Tarbell demagogued and defeated Rockefeller.
 I think net-net founders win this time versus the journos.
 Back then the journos won over the founders, okay?
 Today we have cryptocurrencies.
 Back then we had private banking.
 Today this is an amazing one.
 We have a populist movement of digital gold advocates.
 Back then, because Bitcoin maximalist 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
 and the cross of gold speech.
 Gold was considered a tool of big business.
 Now gold is the tool against big business and big government, right?
 Digital gold, yeah.
 Digital gold, right.
 Today we have the inflation and cultural conflict of Weimar like America.
 Back then we had the inflation and cultural conflict of Weimar Germany.
 Today in Weimar America we have right and left fighting in the streets.
 Same unfortunately in Weimar Germany.
 Peter Turchin has written about, today we have what Turchin considers antebellum like
 polarization like pre-war polarization.
 Back then, if you go further back in time, we had what we now know to be antebellum polarization,
 right?
 Today we have Airbnb.
 Back then we had Flophouses.
 Today we have Uber.
 Back then we had Gypsy cabs.
 So today we see the transition from neutral to yellow journalism.
 Back then we saw the transition from yellow to neutral journalism, right?
 And 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, right?
 Wrote this whole long book, which I didn't even realize he wrote about these kind of
 topics about the problem of China.
 And one of his observations was, again, I'm not saying this is, I'm just saying he made
 this observation.
 He was saying that America was energetic and China laconic at the time because everybody
 was in opium dams and so on and so forth, okay?
 Four 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 Web 3 protocols.
 That's fascinating, yeah.
 That's where it 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.
 I think it's one of these things where China's risen, India's like about 10 years behind
 China, but I think this is the Indian decade in many ways.
 We can come back to that point.
 But there's absolutely sparks of light in Africa.
 I mean, it's a huge continent.
 It sounds like the more behind so I had to interrupt, the more behind you are, the more
 opportunity you have to leapfrog.
 Sometimes, that's right.
 It 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 in history?
 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 may disagree?
 Do you want to open the door to total corporate oligarchy?
 That's why I mentioned it's like the opposite of business plots and they pulled on that
 thread.
 Okay?
 So the macro explanation that I have for this future is our past thesis and there's more.
 It also gives some predictions, right?
 If you go backwards in time, the US federalizes into many individual states.
 Before the Civil War, people said the United States are and after they said the United
 States is.
 Before FDR, the 10th Amendment, reserved rights to the states.
 Afterwards, it was just federal regulation of everything.
 As we go forwards in time, you're seeing states break away from the feds on gun laws, drug
 laws, sanctuary cities, okay?
 Many other kinds of things.
 Now, Florida, for example, has its own guard that's like not a national guard, but like
 a state guard.
 Other states are doing this.
 And that's a force of decentralization, saying that parallels in reverse.
 In reverse, right?
 So you're having make America states again.
 Nice.
 Okay.
 That's what I think happening, right?
 I'm not saying I, 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, a better term is micro-states because
 they're actually not nations.
 That's why they don't work.
 But micro-states are better, right?
 Going 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.
 So if you weren't talking about tradition, that doesn't matter.
 Traditionally.
 In terms of like, I thought you meant nation is a thing that carries across the generations.
 There's a tradition, there's a culture and so on, and state is just the layer-
 I mean, that's also another way of thinking about it, right?
 There's a reversal there as well.
 Okay.
 Yeah.
 So I mean, one way of thinking about it is, one nation under God indivisible is no longer
 true.
 It is, America is at least two nations, the Democrat and Republican, in the sense of their
 own cultures, where I can show you graph after graph.
 You've seen the polarization graphs.
 I can show you network diagrams where 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 shares on Facebook and Twitter are just separate
 sub graphs.
 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 of
 their way.
 What that means is in one generation, ideology becomes biology.
 These become ethnic groups.
 It takes on the character of Hoodoo and Tutsi or Protestant and Catholic, Sunni and Shiite.
 It's not about ideology.
 If you think about all the flips during COVID, right, where people were on one side versus
 the other side, it's tribal.
 It's just tribe on tribe.
 And so it's not universalist that identity of American makes less sense than the identity
 of Democrat and Republican right now or perhaps identity of individual states.
 What I think that's a good or bad thing, I think that's unfortunately, whatever it is,
 it's the arrow of history, right?
 On the opposite side of things, India is actually was 562 princely states at the time of Indian
 unification from 1947 to 19...
 1947 when they got independence from the British, it was 562 princely states.
 Most people don't know that part.
 They got, or outside India don't know that part.
 It got unified into a republic only by like 1950.
 And India is like actually a modern...
 India is like Europe.
 It's kind of like the European Union in the sense that we didn't have a unified India
 in the past.
 It was something with a lot of different countries like Northern South India or like Gujarat and
 Tamil Nadu are as different as Finland and Spain, okay?
 But India is moved in the direction of much more unification, like much more centralization
 or what have you, whereas the US is decentralized.
 You go, okay, a few more things.
 There are flips and I'll finish this off.
 Today we're seeing the rise of the pseudonymous founder and starved societies.
 All the way back in the 1770s, we saw pseudonymous founders of starved countries, namely the
 US, right?
 The Federalist Papers.
 Today we're seeing so far unsuccessful calls for wealth seizures in the US.
 Back then we saw FDR's Executive Earth 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 like a breakup potential
 in the future, right?
 One other thing that kind of rhymes is in many ways like the modern US establishment,
 the story that you hear is the victories in 1945 and 1865 legitimate the current establishment.
 That is being the Nazis, being the Confederates, right?
 So they beat the ethnic nationalists abroad and they beat the, quote, secessionists at
 home, right?
 And the ethnic nationalists were Aryan Nazis and the secessionists were slave owners and
 against freedom and so on and so forth, okay?
 I'm not disputing that, I'm just saying that that's just like the way people think about
 it.
 There's a possibility, and I'm not saying it's 100% at all, okay?
 But if you're a sci-fi writer, there's a possibility that the US loses to the ethnic nationalists
 abroad, except this time they're Chinese communists, non-white communists, as opposed to Aryan
 Nazis, which seemed like the total opposite, okay?
 And there's a possibility that there is a financial secession at home where it's Bitcoin
 maximalist states that are advocating for freedom, the opposite of slavery.
 See what I'm saying?
 Oh boy, that's dark.
 You're looking for major things in history that don't yet have a-
 Cognate going forward, right?
 And that's a nice way to think about the future.
 It is only one model, and any mental model or something like that.
 That's why I say as a sci-fi scenario, it's just like a scenario one could contemplate,
 right?
 Where the new version has, I mean, the Chinese communists do not think of themselves as Aryans,
 but they are ultra-nationalist.
 And the Hitler comparisons, people talk about Hitler endlessly, like Saddam is a new Hitler,
 everybody's a new Hitler, et cetera.
 If there is a comparison to quote Nazi Germany, it is CCP China in a sense, why?
 They are non-English speaking, manufacturing powerhouse with a massive military build out
 under one leader that is a genuine peer competitor to the US on many dimensions, and in fact,
 exceeding on some dimensions of technology and science, right?
 The problem is it's a boy who cried wolf.
 People say this a zillion times, right?
 And that is like, I'm not saying this, by the way, crucially, 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 attacked
 on this basis or what have you.
 The other thing is that many Chinese people will say, well, look, relative to where we
 were when Deng took over in 1978, we built up the entire country.
 We're not starving to death anymore, and the West wants to recolonize us.
 And so I understand where that's coming from.
 This way you 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 people are like, oh, I think this is, again, I have nothing personal.
 There's this guy, Peter Zahan, he writes these books, right?
 I probably agree with about 20 or 30%, but I disagree with a lot of the rest.
 And a bunch of it is basically about how China's really weak and America's really strong and
 the rest of the world is screwed.
 And I think there's absolutely problems in China, and the current management is actually
 messing a lot of things up.
 We could talk about that.
 But I do think that the US is fighting its factory.
 So one thing Zion will talk about is how America has this blue water Navy, all the aircraft
 carriers, and China has nothing, it's got bupkis, et cetera.
 Well, China ships things all around the world, right?
 It probably has one of the most active fleets out there in terms of 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 300 X 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 Nazi Germany in a serious fight is they had this giant manufacturing plant that
 was overseas and they just outproduced, right?
 And they supplied the Soviets also with Lend-Lease and the Soviets talked about how they would
 not have won the war without the Americans.
 People are like, oh, the Russians fought the Germans.
 The Russians armed by Americans fought the Germans.
 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 Klemogorov and so on.
 There's amazing Russian scientists and engineers.
 So I'm not saying that-
 I mean, in general, from brilliant folks like yourself that criticize communism, it's too
 easy to say nothing communism produces is good, which of course is not true.
 There's a lot of brilliant people and a lot of even, 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 red and yellow.
 The branding is stellar.
 Nazi Germany to excellent branding with the flag and so on.
 Ends there in terms of compliments.
 Yeah.
 Well, actually they copied a lot of stuff from each other.
 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 the same pose.
 It's almost like, you know how AI will do style transfer?
 You can almost see, because the socialist realism style of the muscular brawny worker
 is very similar to the style of the Aryan Superman, pointing at the vermin or whatever.
 And then there's the crappy open source version that tries to copy, which is Mussolini.
 That does the same exact thing, but does it kind of shittier.
 So my main thing about this is basically 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, the future is not yet determined, right?
 At all odds, we want to avoid a hot war between, I mean, a hot war between the US and China
 would be-
 Do you think it's possible that we'll get a war?
 We're doing these things like Pelosi going to Taiwan and trying to cause something.
 Like look, again, this is one of these things which is complicated because obviously 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 one of China's many neighbors, you look at China with apprehension.
 Like Vietnam, for example, has sort of fallen into, or not fallen into, is partnering with
 India because they're mutually apprehensive of China.
 China's not making great friends with its neighbors.
 It's demonizing Japan.
 It's so ultra-nationalist nowadays.
 And so if you're a Taiwanese, you're like, yeah, I do not want to be under the Chinese
 surveillance state.
 I completely understand that.
 Some people are pro-reunification, others aren't, but there's more trend in some ways
 for independence.
 Okay, fine.
 But there's also an increasing temperature across the entire world.
 As we sit here today, there 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 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 the balance
 of terror.
 There were smart guys on both sides who thought through this and there were near misses, right?
 There's that story about the Soviet colonel who didn't order a nuclear strike because
 he thought it was just an error in the instruments, right?
 Okay, what's the point?
 The point is, for example, policy going to Taiwan, that didn't strengthen Taiwan.
 If you're going to go and provoke China, I thought Scholar Stage, his Twitter account,
 had a good point, which is if you're actually going to do it, then you strengthen Taiwan
 with huge battalions of arms and material and you make them a porcupine and so on and
 so forth.
 Instead, her kind of going and landing there and mooning China and then flying back in
 the middle of a hot war with Russia, that's absolutely in the middle of an economic crisis
 or whatever.
 It just, can you pick battles or whatever, right?
 It's like you don't have to fight Russia and China at the same time.
 It's like kind of insane to do that, okay?
 Plus even with Ukraine, some people were like, oh, this was like a victory for US military
 policy or something.
 There was a guy who, I'm not trying to beat him up or anything, he was 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.
 The reason is US didn't focus on some high-end Chinese objects, but on core military tasks
 that focus should remain.
 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.
 Now, Ukraine is like this Syria-like battleground with a million refugees or whatever the number
 is, right?
 The country is blown to smithereens, thousands of people dead, whatever thousand dollar gas
 in Europe with like 10X energy, radicalized Russians, the threat of World War III or even
 nuclear war.
 Shooting somebody isn't, that's not like the point of a military.
 The point is there's a million ways to smash Humpty Dumpty into pieces and unleash the
 blood-drenched tides, right?
 And have people all shooting each other and killing each other.
 It's really hard to maintain stability.
 That's what competence is, is deterrence and stability, right?
 There's not like a success in any way.
 It's like an absolute tragedy for everybody involved, right?
 Yeah.
 I mean, deterrence of course is the number one thing, but there's a lot to be said there,
 but I'm a huge not fan of declaring victory as we've done many times when it's the wrong.
 Yeah.
 I mean, the other thing about this is the whole mission accomplished thing during your
 book.
 Mission accomplished is what I meant, yeah.
 Exactly.
 And so obviously, the thing is Russia lives next door to Ukraine.
 And so, I mean, just like Iraq lives next door to Iran and Afghanistan is next door
 to Pakistan and China.
 And so if the US eventually gets tired of it and leaves, those guys are next door, right?
 And so, who knows what's going to happen here, okay?
 But one of the problems is like the whole Afghanistan thing or the Iraq thing is the
 lesson for people was the uncertainty.
 They're like, is the US 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 like Putin or whatever, right?
 So point is coming all the way back up, we were talking about how history, futures are
 past and FDR, like the business plot, FDR failed, but the tech companies were able to
 de-platform Trump, right?
 And the left libertarian would say, do we want that much corporate power?
 Okay.
 So we gave the four case for Trump de-platforming, protecting democracy, the Trump supporter
 case against, which is on the secret history of the shadow campaign to save the 2020 election,
 basically that article, the left libertarian or libertarian case against.
 And then to me, what is, 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, you know, AMLO, he was the head of state of Mexico, I think at that time,
 okay?
 AMLO, Macron, other folks, everybody who's watching this around the world basically saw,
 let's say US establishment or Democrat aligned folks just decapitate the head of state digitally,
 right?
 Like just boom, gone, okay?
 And they're like, well, if they can do that in public to the US president who's ostensibly
 the most powerful man in the world, what does the Mexican president stand against that?
 Nothing, right?
 Like these US 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 de-platform Xi Jinping off of Sino Weibo, they'd probably just fall
 through a trap door, you know, their whole family, right?
 But for the rest of the world that is hosting their business, their politics on these US
 tech companies, they're like, regardless of whether it was justified on this guy, that
 means they will do it to anybody.
 Now the seal is broken.
 Just like the bailouts, as exceptional as they were in the first year, everybody was
 shocked by them.
 Then they became a policy instrument.
 And now this bailout's 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.
 People that platforms in general see as dangerous.
 Hitler, you can go, we keep bringing it up.
 Of course.
 That's the ultimate edge case.
 Right.
 In the sense of that saying like something must be done.
 This is something.
 Therefore, this must be done.
 Right.
 I've heard that one before.
 No, but I love it.
 So can I just use that as an explanation with confidence for everything I do?
 Yeah, sure.
 There you go.
 Right.
 Something must be done.
 Therefore, this must be done.
 So that is the like the two, all kinds of regulations, all kinds of things are kind
 of justified on that basis.
 Right.
 And there's a version of that, which is punch a Nazi.
 I decide who is a Nazi.
 You're a Nazi.
 Therefore I punch you and that's justified.
 Yeah.
 And you know, like people say, oh, how many people are calling Israelis?
 You know, like these things.
 Right.
 And so the problem with argumentum ad hellerum is it just, I mean, people will say Obama's
 a Nazi.
 Right.
 Everybody's a Nazi.
 Right.
 But there is a social consensus about who, let's set Nazi aside, but who is dangerous
 for society.
 Okay.
 But now let's talk about that.
 All right.
 So basically I think a more interesting example than Hitler in this context is Herbert Matthews.
 So Fidel Castro, before he became the communist dictator of Cuba, was on the run.
 He was like Osama bin Laden at the time.
 He's 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 like, you
 know, photo of Castro looking all mighty and so on.
 And he's like, Castro is still alive and still fighting.
 Okay.
 And there's this book on this called The Man Who Created Fidel.
 Okay.
 Where basically NYT's article was crucial positive press that got Castro's point of
 view out to the world and helped lead to the communist revolution that actually impoverished
 Cuba, led to like gay people being, you know, like discriminated against there, led to people
 fleeing, you know, and drowning trying to escape.
 Right?
 That's an example of where platforming somebody led to a very bad outcome.
 In fact, many of the communist dictators in the 20th century had like their own personal
 journalists.
 Right?
 For example, there's a guy, John Reed.
 He's an American.
 He's buried.
 You know, if I get this right, I think he's buried at the Kremlin wall.
 Okay.
 Why is an American buried there?
 Okay.
 Because he wrote a book called Ten Days That Shook the World that whitewashed the entire
 Soviet revolution and the Russian revolution in 1917, October Revolution, and made these
 guys out to be the good guys when they were actually genocidal psychopaths.
 Okay.
 He got their point of view out to the world and it was a totally misleading point of view.
 All right.
 So what do you think he was thinking?
 Do you think he saw the psychopathy?
 You know, sometimes it's not obvious.
 Well, the French Revolution had already happened.
 So people kind of knew that this sort of psychopathic killing in the name of equality could produce
 bad results.
 Right?
 But it's more than that.
 Right?
 So it's John Reed.
 It's Herbert Matthews.
 It's Edgar Snow.
 Okay.
 So these are all people who should be extremely famous.
 Right?
 So Edgar Snow is Mao's journalist.
 Okay.
 So he wrote, you know, here's the, there's actually an article in this how 1930s reporter
 from Missouri became China's ideal journalist.
 Okay.
 And he wrote various books, including like Red Star Over China.
 Okay.
 And it's just a hagiography of Mao.
 Right?
 Yeah.
 And then of course you've got Durante.
 He is like Stalin's biographer.
 Right?
 Just to recap, John Reed brought Lenin's message to the world.
 Mao is dead.
 Durante helped Stalin starve out the Ukrainians.
 Lenin is dead.
 Edgar Snow was Mao's biographer.
 And Herbert Matthews was like Castro's.
 This guy, David Halberstam in Vietnam, who was effectively Ho Chi Minh.
 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 Pham, Pham Suan An, Time Magazine reporter and Vietnamese
 communist agent.
 That guy was the source of many fabricated stories that David Halberstam printed in the
 New York Times that led to the undermining of the South Vietnamese regime.
 And you know, for example, stories of Buddhists being killed and so on.
 Ashley Rinsburg in the Great Lady Wink writes this whole thing up at length so you can go
 and read it for his account.
 But basically all of these communist dictators had a journalist right alongside them as their
 biographer.
 Yeah.
 Okay.
 But those are tools of the propaganda machine versus-
 Well, so my point is these are five examples that are on the far left that should be balanced
 also against the Times running profiles of Hitler on the far right.
 We know that the Times actually also ran a whole thing, which was Hitler's like mountain
 retreat or something like that.
 Do you know about that story?
 What year was this?
 I'll tell you in a second.
 Hitler at home in the clouds.
 Oh boy.
 Please tell me it's like early thirties.
 I think it's, oh yeah, this is auto-detolish us.
 This is actually a guy that Ashley Rinsburg writes up in the Great Lady Wink, right?
 1937.
 37.
 There's another one where I think the date is wrong, but it's 39.
 But essentially these titles are like where Hitler dreams and plans.
 He lives simply, you know, right?
 And there's another one, Hare Hitler at home in the clouds.
 Okay.
 The thing about this is absolutely there are folks who are hate geographers of the far
 right, but whether you're talking Lenin and John Reed or Stalin and Walter Durante of
 the New York Times or Castro and Herbert Matthews again of the New York Times or Edgar Snow
 and Mao or David Halliburstam 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, you know, lunatics, right?
 And I think part of the issue here is, you know the saying about how communists don't
 understand self-interest, nationalists don't understand other interests.
 And so nationalists are more obvious.
 Isn't that good?
 I thought it was good.
 It's pretty good.
 Right?
 Pretty good.
 So the nationalist is very obvious in the sense of like they're for the Aryans.
 They're not even for like the Slavs or whatever, right?
 Like you know, basically, you know, had Hitler constructed a different ideology, you know,
 then like he might've gotten more support in Eastern Europe or whatever, right?
 But he also called the Slavs inferior, not just, you know, basically everybody was inferior
 to the Aryans, okay?
 Except maybe the English or whatever, but that was it, right?
 Oh, and the Japanese are honorary Aryans or something.
 So the nationalist declares the supremacy of their own race or culture or what have
 you and doesn't understand people's other interests.
 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 Soviet nationalism where
 in particular Russians were pushed into many territories and, you know, Russian speakers
 were, you know, like privileged in, you know, the Eastern Europe and the Baltics.
 Of course, Russians themselves were oppressed at home as sultan's rights here, both victim
 and victimizer of the regime.
 Their churches were crushed and so on.
 As compensation, they were agents of empire.
 It's a tragedy all around, okay?
 I think Russians have been hard done in many ways.
 They've had a very hard century.
 They've also done hard by others, okay?
 It's complicated.
 And the journalist 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.
 Because podcasts made it much more popular and common is it somehow makes it easier not
 to do this kind of bullshit journalism that-
 The gotcha stuff, yeah.
 I feel like asking interesting and deep questions allow, I think you could sit down with Hitler
 in 1940, 1941, 1942, and the podcast actually serve a purpose.
 In 41 and 42, mid-World War II?
 A purpose of one, which is very important, get good information for the future so history
 can study it.
 And two, reveal to the world the way a man thinks that is beyond the propaganda.
 So all this stuff is complicated, but today, so the specific issue of the folks you were
 talking about, like Putin, Xi, Trump, right?
 For those folks, they are very clearly outgroup for both the US left and right, which is,
 it'll 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-
 Those are water tankies?
 Tankies are those who are, they may call themselves tankies.
 Let's say they're anti-imperialist left and MAGA right, okay?
 For different reasons are against the US establishment and for Putin or Xi or something like that
 as an agent against US establishment, right?
 So leaving those aside, the point is that most of your audience is sort of on guard,
 vaccinated in a sense, right?
 Versus Xi and Putin and Trump, right?
 They know the counter arguments and so on and so forth, okay?
 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 when what John Reed was doing and so on, when he was the
 sole source of information about the Russian revolution, right?
 That's different.
 That's different, right?
 So it's something about, it kind of gets back to the competitive environment and so on.
 There's no dearth of folks who are writing critical coverage of these three men, right?
 And so if I felt that that was insufficient, then you might need more of it, right?
 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, right?
 That's why I brought those guys, right?
 Because often it's kind of like, have your stock shelves at a supermarket and so seem
 totally out of left field.
 No, but shoes, but the same thing, Sears, I used to work at Sears.
 The thing that is the most popular is the thing that's not on the shelf because it's
 been sold out, right?
 So in some ways, this is similar to that famous photo that people have, or image that people
 have on Twitter of the plane and the parts that are shot versus not, right?
 The survivorship bias, right?
 And one way of kind of thinking about it is the guys who you think of as bad guys or possible
 bad guys or controversial guys or whatever are those you've already got some vaccination
 to.
 That's why you think of them at all.
 Whereas the folks that I mentioned, the regulators, invisible, right?
 Salzberger, you know Zuckerberg, you know his pros and cons, you know who he is as a
 person.
 You don't even know Salzberger exists, most people, right?
 Despite the fact that he's like, certainly is powerful.
 He owns the New York Times, he inherits it.
 He also got dual class stock, just like Zuck.
 But he's invisible, right?
 Well, that's why I think studying the knowns, the people that are known can help you generalize
 to the way human nature is.
 And then you start to question, are the same kind of humans existing in places that wield
 power?
 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 I'm like, 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 regulated marketplace
 and how do we do better?
 As critical as I can be of the Fed, I recognize that some kind of monetary policy is necessary.
 And Satoshi came up with a better one, right?
 As harsh as one can be a critic of the current system, it is really incumbent as difficult
 as that is upon one to come up with a better version.
 Just like academia, as much as I think current science is corrupted, what I propose is a
 way to actually improve on that.
 And actually any true 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 with that, but just enough to build that better
 version and not regress.
 There's an implied optimism within the V1, V2, V3 framework.
 Let me ask you at a high level about social media because you are one of its prominent
 users to communicate your wisdom.
 I use Twitter, I wouldn't really think of it as quick communicate my wisdom per se or
 anything like that.
 I use Twitter like I might use GitHub as a scratch pad for just kind of floating concepts.
 And 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 lasting impact that your scratch book?
 I think it's good, but basically like if I say that's what's my primary thing on Twitter,
 it's that.
 It's a scratch pad for me to kind of put some concepts out there, iterate on them, get feedback
 on them and so on and so forth.
 Do you think it's possible that the words you've tweeted on Twitter is the most impact
 you will have?
 On the world?
 On the world.
 Is that possible?
 Is it possible?
 Well, my tweets-
 That you gave me.
 It's a good question.
 I think the network state will be, I think, important or I hope it...
 Well, the book-
 The book or the concept.
 Good question.
 The movement.
 The movement.
 Right?
 In the sense that Zionism shows that it is possible to have a book and then a conference
 and then a fund and eventually in the fullness of time with a lot of time and effort to actually
 get a state, right?
 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 so you know where the network state is popular?
 In places like Catalonia.
 Catalonian nationalists.
 In Catalonia, guys are a committed Catalonian 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 part of a separate nation.
 Not all, many, okay?
 And so they want a state of their own.
 Who doesn't if you're a nation?
 You know, meaning that they've got a legitimate claim from history, language, culture, all
 that stuff, right?
 The Basques do as well.
 The Kurds do as well, okay?
 Lots of ethnic groups around the world do.
 So in the game of musical chairs, that was the formation of current national borders,
 they lost out, right?
 So what do they do?
 Well, one answer is they just submit to the Spanish state and they just speak Spanish
 and their culture is erased and their history is erased and so on.
 The second is they do some sort of Ireland-like insurgency, the troubles to try to get a thing
 of their own, which is obviously bad for other kinds of reasons, right?
 You know, violent, et cetera.
 What this Catalonian nationalist said is 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 site called Vilaweb, sorry.
 It can be, meaning the network state can be especially appealing to us.
 Catalans are now embarking on the task of having a normal and current state in the old
 way and this is a project that we cannot give up.
 But this does not mean that at the same time we are not also attentive to ideas like this
 and we do not try to learn and move forward, right?
 Meaning, you know, the network state, right?
 Because that's the third way, which says, okay, maybe this particular region is not
 something where you're 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 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 really 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 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 region called New Caledonia and that's in the Southwest
 Pacific.
 So maybe New Catalonia is somewhere else, right?
 So if you're flexible on that, now of course, a bunch of people will immediately say, they'll
 have 50 different objections to this.
 They'll say, oh, you don't get it.
 The whole point is the land and you know, so on.
 They've been there for generations.
 So I do get it, but this Catalan nationalist who's like literally written in Catalonian
 for I don't know how many years, right?
 Is basically saying this is worth thinking about.
 And so it's a peaceful third way.
 Yeah, but it's interesting.
 I mean, it's a good question whether Elon Musk, SpaceX and Tesla will be successful
 without Twitter.
 Yeah, I don't think as successful.
 I mean, obviously they existed before Twitter and a lot of the engineering problems are
 obviously non-Twitter things, right?
 But Twitter itself has certainly probably helped Musk with Tesla sales.
 The engineering, no, that's not what I mean.
 The best people in the world solve the engineering problems.
 Yes, but he hires the people to solve them and he knows enough about engineering to hire
 those people.
 That's the point I'm making 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.
 I think Twitter is a great place to make viral ideas that are compelling to people, whatever
 those ideas are.
 And whether that's the network state or whether that's humans becoming a multi-planetary species.
 Here is a remark I had just before the pandemic related to this, okay, about Twitter helping
 Elon just beyond that for a second.
 Maybe centralization is actually also underexplored in the design space.
 For example, today's social networks are essentially governed by a single CEO, but that CEO is
 a background figure.
 They aren't leading the users to do anything.
 What if they did?
 One example, could Elon Musk's then 30 million followers somehow get us to Mars faster?
 Tools for directed collaborative work by really large groups on the internet are still in
 their infancy.
 The 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 in
 operational transformation.
 Microtasks like Mechanical Turk, Scale AI and Earn.com before we sold it.
 These encrypted obviously the polymath project where a bunch of people parallel processed
 and we're able to solve an open math problem by collaborating.
 Wikipedia with its flaws that we talked about.
 Social networks and group messaging.
 All these are ways for collaborating.
 They're not just simply attacking or doing something on the internet.
 This is something that Elon could use, right?
 What works and what doesn't about Twitter?
 If there's something that's broken, how would you fix it?
 A million things I can say here.
 So a few things.
 First is fact checking.
 I had this kind of fun, I thought it was a funny tweet.
 To anyone who wants to quote ban lying on social media, please write down a function
 that takes in a statement and returns whether it is true.
 If you can start with the remand hypothesis, that would be amazing.
 Yeah.
 Okay.
 Yeah.
 That's kind of funny, right?
 That's funny.
 And so now-
 That joke landed on like five people.
 Sure.
 You want to explain the joke?
 Go.
 Well, no, there's a lot of problems, the citability where the truth, that's what proofs in math
 is, the truth of the thing is actually exceptionally difficult to determine.
 And that's just a really nice example.
 The problems that persist across centuries that have not been solved by the most brilliant
 minds, they're essentially true or false problems.
 That's right.
 And so when people are saying, when they were saying they want to ban lying on social media,
 fact check social media, the assumption is that they know what is true.
 And what do they mean by that?
 They really mean the assertion of political power, right?
 With that said, do I think it could be useful to have some kind of quote fact checking thing?
 Yes, but it has to be decentralized and open source.
 You could imagine an interesting concept of coding trugal, like a Google that returned
 what was true.
 It's like a modified version.
 I like it.
 Right?
 It's like GPT-3, but the stable diffusion version where it's open.
 Okay.
 And so now anybody, stable diffusion shows it is possible to take an expensive AI model
 and put it out there, right?
 So you have, you know what a knowledge graph is?
 Like basically, you wouldn't actually, whether you have it as RDF or like a triple store
 kind of thing or some other representation, it's like an ontology of A is a B and B has
 a C and it's got probabilities on the edges sometimes and other kinds of metadata.
 And this allows Google to show certain kinds of one box information where it's like, what
 is Steve Jobs', what is Lorene Powell Jobs' age or birthday?
 They can pull that up out of the knowledge graph, right?
 And so you can imagine that trugal would have both deterministic and statistical components
 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?
 So that's one concept of like what next social media looks like.
 There's actually so much more.
 Another huge thing is decentralized social media, okay?
 Social media today is like China under communism in a really key sense.
 There's a great article called The Secret Document That Transformed China.
 Do you know what China was like before 1978?
 I know about the atrocities.
 Sure.
 So put some flesh on the bones, 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-
 But great biographies because of that were written.
 Like I'm currently reading Mao's Great Famine by Frank de Carter, which is, whoo boy.
 It's crazy, okay?
 Yeah.
 Here's the thing is capitalism was punishable by death in living memory in China.
 Just to explain what that meant, okay?
 I mean, that's what communism was, right?
 It was literally the same China that has the entrepreneurs and Jack Ma and so on and so
 on.
 40 something years ago, capitalism was punishable by death.
 To give you a concrete example, this is a famous story in China.
 It may be apocryphal, but it's what the folks have talked about.
 There's a village in Xiaogang, and basically all the grain that you were supposed to produce
 was supposed to go to the collective.
 Even one straw belonged to the group.
 At one meeting with communist party officials, a farmer asked, what about the teeth in my
 head?
 Do I own those?
 Answer, no.
 Your teeth belong to the collective.
 Okay?
 Now, the thing is that when you're taking 100% of everything, okay, work hard, don't
 work hard, everyone gets the same, so people don't want to work, right?
 So what happened?
 These farmers gathered in secret and they did something that 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 collect grain, they've got
 something.
 We'll be able to keep some of it.
 If any of us are killed for doing this, then the contract said that the others would take
 care of their children.
 Okay?
 To keep some of what you earned, I mean, just think about how-
 They formed a mini capitalism society within the communist, a secret capitalism society
 amongst five people.
 Right.
 So now that they could keep some of what they earned, right?
 So keep some of what you earned, they had a bumper harvest.
 And you know what happened with that bumper harvest?
 That made the local officials really suspicious and mad.
 They weren't happy that there was a bumper harvest.
 They're like, what are you doing?
 You're doing capitalism?
 Right?
 And in a few years earlier, they might have just been executed.
 And in fact, many were.
 That's what it means when you see millions dead.
 Millions dead means guys were shot for keeping some grain for themselves.
 Okay?
 It means like guys came and kicked in the door of your collective farm and raped your
 wife and took you off to a prison camp and so on and so forth.
 That's what communism actually was.
 Okay?
 It hasn't been depicted in movies.
 There's a great post by Ken Billingsley in the year 2000 called, if I get this right,
 Hollywood's Missing Movies.
 Okay?
 This is basically here.
 I'll paste this link so you can put 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.
 And 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.
 Anyway.
 Otherwise, if I say something, it sounds too surprising, so that's why I want to make sure
 I have...
 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.
 Instead, he's like, we can reform in one place.
 And in fact, he fenced it off from the rest of China and it did trade with Hong Kong and
 he spent his political capital on this one exception.
 It grew so fast, they gave him more political capital.
 Some people think actually that the Sino-Vietnamese war was 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 is changed.
 Okay?
 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.
 Right?
 It's really good.
 Yeah, yeah.
 I'm enjoying your metaphors and way of talking about stuff.
 Yeah, yeah.
 Swap.
 You could, yeah.
 Rebranding and swap the front end.
 Reinterpretation, swap the back end.
 That's right.
 And 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 this on the front end, sometimes I want to do this on
 the back end, sometimes it's explicit, and sometimes the user doesn't need to see it
 and it's on the back end.
 Lots of political stuff 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 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 is that one example.
 I go through an extended description of this in the book, but the Republicans were the
 radical Republicans, the left of 1865.
 They won the revolution and their moral authority led them to have economic authority 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, et cetera, were boxed out from the plumb positions in
 the late 1800s.
 And so what happened was the Republicans turned their moral authority into economic authority,
 made tons of money.
 The Democrats then started repositioning, not as a party of the Southern racists, but
 the poor, right?
 And the cross of gold speech by William James Bryan was part of that.
 There's a gradual process that reaches a crucial mark with the election of FDR, where it's
 actually not the 1932, but 1936 election that black voters switched over to FDR.
 Okay?
 That was actually the major flip to like 70% to the Democrats.
 Now they'd reposition as a party of the poor, not the party of the South, okay?
 And Republicans had lost some economic authority, or rather they had moral authority, they turned
 into economic authority.
 They started to lose some moral authority.
 The loss of moral authority was complete by 1965.
 That was actually a mop-up.
 People dated the civil rights movement as the big wave where the Republicans lost moral
 authority.
 It's not really, that was a mop-up because 1936, 30 years earlier was when black voters
 switched to the Democrats, okay?
 So 1965 was another 10 points moving over of black voters to Democrats.
 Republicans had completely lost moral authority 100 years after the Civil War, okay?
 Then the next 50 years, that loss of moral authority meant that they lost economic authority
 because now you wouldn't want a Republican bigot as a CEO of your tech company anymore,
 would you, right?
 So by 2015, now you have, it's like two sign waves that are staggered, right?
 Moral authority leads to economic authority, leads to loss of, moral authority leads to
 loss of economic authority.
 And so now you have the, the Democrats have completed 155 year arc from the defeated party
 in the Civil War to the dominant party in the US establishment.
 All the woke capitalists are now at the very top.
 And now the same repositioning is happening where if you're so woke, why are you rich?
 You get it, right?
 Like, you know, if you're so smart, why aren't you rich is the normal kind of thing, right?
 If you're so woke, if you're so holy, why is like, for example, the BLM founder, why
 do they have this million dollar mansion, right?
 If you're so woke and it's all about being good and you're anti-capitalist, how come
 you seem to be raking in the money, et cetera, right?
 This is an argument which I'm not sure how long it will go.
 It might take years to play out, it might take decades to play out.
 I think it 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 printed money,
 you don't have anything that's legitimate, you don't actually own anything, it's all
 a handout from the government and so on and so forth, right?
 And so that's a counter positioning that will basically attack the wokes by how much money
 they're making.
 They're not contesting the ideology.
 So when one guy signals economics, you signal culture.
 When the other guy signals culture, you signal economics.
 That's actually, that's the whole thing I can talk about.
 Should I talk about that for a second?
 Sure.
 Is this integrated into the forces that you talk about?
 You've talked about the three forces, the trifecta of forces that affect our society,
 which is the wokes, let's say-
 Woke capital, communist capital, crypto capital.
 You talk so fast, and I think so slow.
 No, no, no.
 Woke capital, communist capital, and crypto capital.
 Can you explain each of those three?
 We actually talked about each of the three in part, but it'd be nice to bring them together
 in a beautiful triangle.
 Okay.
 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.
 Okay?
 All right.
 So NYTCCPBTC 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 just submit.
 CCP is an embodiment of communist capital that you're talking about.
 Well, yeah.
 And by the way, in China, they call it CPC.
 So basically they don't like it usually if you say CCP, right?
 So the communist party of China as opposed to Chinese communist party over there.
 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 integrated.
 When we say communist, what do you mean here?
 Why is the word communist important?
 Why don't you just say China?
 So is communist an important word?
 Or is it just a catchy label?
 It's a catchy label, but I think it's also important because 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?
 In the 1980s, you wouldn't think the communists would become capitalists, but they did.
 You wouldn't think that the wokes, the progressives, right, would become so enamored with giant
 corporations and their power, right?
 They've seen something to liken that, right?
 And you also wouldn't think that the non-Americans or the post-Americans or the internationalists
 would be the champions of capital because you think it's the American nation, right?
 So, rather than the conservative American nationalists being the defenders of capital,
 you have the liberal Americans who are with capital, you have the communist Chinese who
 are with capital, and you have the internationalists who are with capital.
 And it's the conservative American nationalists who are in some ways against that, which is
 kind of funny, right?
 So it's like this weird ideological flippening that if you take the long lens, you have these
 poles that kind of repel each other, okay?
 So just on the CCP-NYT-BDC thing-
 NYT, by the way, is woke capital.
 Yeah.
 What is NYT?
 So its formula is a little interesting.
 If CCP is just you must submit because they're powerful, okay, and then you bow your head
 because the Chinese Communist Party is strong.
 Woke capital is you must sympathize.
 Why do you bow your head, Lex?
 Oh, because you're a white male.
 Therefore you're guilty.
 You must bow your head because you are powerful.
 But notice it ends in the same place, in your head looking to the ground, right?
 In China, it's because they're powerful, so therefore you must bend your head.
 For the Wokes, it's the left-handed version where you are powerful and it's shameful,
 so you should bow your head, right?
 Right.
 Okay?
 But it ends in your head bowed.
 It's an ideology of submission.
 It's not that subtle, but it's like somewhat subtle.
 And then finally, crypto capital is head held high.
 You must be sovereign, okay?
 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 white supremacist and whatever nonsense is happening today is terrible, but
 a society that's totally stripped of sympathy is also not one that one would want to be
 part of, right?
 That's just like the, whether it's 4chan's actual culture or it's feign culture or something
 like that or some weird combination, that's also not good.
 It's like Russia in the 90s, 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 conversely-
 It's like 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 the, you will
 own nothing and be happy.
 Everything's in the cloud and can be deleted at any point, right?
 So each of these is kind of has badness when it's there, but also it's total extreme opposite
 is bad.
 And so you want to kind of carve out like an intelligent intermediate of these three
 poles and that's the decentralized center or the recentralized center I call it.
 Now with that said, I think there is a repositioning in particular of vote 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 Rosato's
 graph that Paul Graham posted?
 No, but this is a good chance to say that Paul Graham is awesome.
 Okay, yeah.
 And so here is this graph, okay?
 David Rosato's data analysis, I think that put this together.
 So basically this is a graph of the word usage frequency in New York Times, 1970 to 2018.
 And he's got some controls there.
 Paul Graham tweets hypothesis, although some newspapers can survive the switch to online
 subscriptions, none can do it and remain politically neutral, quote newspaper 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?
 So I talk about this in the book, but I think fundamentally what happened was tech hurt
 media and their revenue dropped by about $50 billion over the four years from 08 to 2012.
 Tech helped Obama get reelected and media was positive on tech until December 2012.
 They wrote like the nerds go marching in the Atlantic.
 Then after January 2013, once Obama was disconsed, then the knives came out because basically
 these tech guys were bankrupting them.
 They were through supporting them.
 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 humanities departments.
 Then they just deployed them.
 Basically somebody observed that wokeness is the combination of Foucaultian 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.
 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 cite it anyway.
 The glossary of the Greek military junta, right?
 The creation and or use of special terms are employed by the junta as propaganda tools
 because essentially the word itself embeds a concept.
 You can Russell conjugate something one way or the other, right?
 Russell 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, okay?
 You have a thin skin, they clap back, right?
 So, once you kind of realize that these words have just been chosen in such a way as to
 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 playing words to the great awakening,
 right?
 This kind of spasm of quasi-religious extremism.
 I wouldn't call it religious because it's not God-centered, it's really state and network
 centered, so I call it a doctrine, which is a superset of religion and political doctrine.
 These words went vertical and all the terrorism stuff you just notice kind of fell off a cliff.
 That was the obsession of everything in the 2000s and just channel change, right?
 It's amazing how that happened.
 Yeah.
 It's not like any of the pieces got picked up.
 Some of those words are still raging, of course.
 And there's victims to this wokeism movement and-
 But in a weird way, even though some parts of it, just like there's wars in the Middle
 East that still keep raging, there's certainly active fronts of wokeism, but in a sense,
 the next shift is already on.
 You know why?
 It's a pivot from wokeism to statism.
 In many ways, NYT is sort of, and more generally the US establishment is sort of, you may not
 believe this, they're kind of coming back to the center a little bit.
 And the same with that Lenin after the revolution implemented the new economic policy, which
 you may be aware of, right?
 Which was just like X percent more capitalism.
 He kind of boot on the neck, take control, but then ease up for a bit.
 And the so-called net men during the 20s were able to eke out something.
 There was like, oh, okay, fine.
 He's going to be easier on us.
 Then it intensified again because basically by loosening up, they were able to consolidate
 control.
 They weren't putting as much pressure on it, right?
 Then it went extremely intense again, right?
 Similar to Mao's 100 flowers thing, let 100 flowers bloom.
 They 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 as a national things
 like the KGB, right?
 They were for the state, but there were always local nationalist ethnic insurgencies in like
 Estonia and other places, right?
 So you can reconcile them, but nevertheless on its face, those are contradictory.
 So what are you going to get, I think?
 I think you're going to get this rotation where a fair number of the folks on the sort
 of authoritarian right are kind of pulled back into the fold a bit, okay?
 These are the cops and the military and whatnot, some of them, because as this decade progresses,
 you're going to see the signaling on American statism as opposed to wokeism, okay?
 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's the visual of that.
 So that's why, as I wrote the book and after I showed, I was like, 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, dollar versus crypto.
 That's right.
 And some folks switch sides, right?
 Because you have folks like Jack Dorsey and a lot of the tech founders in basically the
 lower left corner, right?
 Who were blue but are now going to become orange or are orange.
 And you have folks in the upper right corner who are going to, at the end of the day, pick
 the dollar and the American flag over the internationalist ideals of cryptocurrency.
 The realigning, as you call it.
 Let me ask you briefly, we do need to get a comment, your visionary view of things.
 We're at a low point in the cryptocurrency space from a shallow analysis perspective,
 or maybe in a deeper sense, if you can enlighten me.
 Do you think Bitcoin will rise again?
 Yes.
 Do you think it will go to take on fiat, to go over a million dollars to go to these heights?
 I think it's possible.
 And the reason I think it's possible is I think a lot of things might go to a million
 dollars because inflation-
 Oh, because inflation.
 Right.
 That was an important point, right?
 Yes, it's a very important point, yes.
 Because you're seeing essentially-
 Yes.
 The choke pointing on energy is pushing up prices across the board for a lot of things.
 China's not doing us any favors with the COVID lockdowns.
 Putin's not doing the world any favors with this giant war.
 There's a lot of bad things happening in the physical world, right?
 When China, Russia, and the US are all, and Europe is, there's folks who are just insane
 about degrowth and they're against, they're pushing for burning coal and wood, right?
 So a lot of prices are going up in a really foundational and fundamental way.
 And with that said also, the dollar is in some way strengthening against certain other
 things because a lot of other countries are dying harder, right?
 And you've got riots in Sri Lanka and riots in Panama and riots in all these places, right?
 So it's very complicated because you've got multiple different trends going in the same
 way.
 Your Bitcoin maximums would just say infinity over 21 million.
 And so therefore you print all the dollars, there's 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 stable coins, okay?
 But I do think-
 So it still moves, fiat still moves somehow into the cryptocurrencies.
 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
 I think it's kind of like Microsoft where Windows is still around, right?
 Microsoft is still around.
 It's still a multi-hundred billion dollar company.
 He doesn't mean it.
 He doesn't mean it.
 Don't worry.
 All my machines are Windows and-
 Are they?
 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-set, they do make some good stuff, right?
 Like Microsoft Teams is good.
 Yeah, there's a lot of incredible stuff.
 And UCO has done a lot of innovative things like GitHub.
 Yeah, well, there's an acquisition, but still, they give them credit for it.
 The acquisition, the pivoting of vision and motivations and focus and all that kind of
 stuff.
 Anyway, yes, Microsoft does an analogy metaphor for something.
 Well, yeah, so basically just like, they didn't need a turnaround, but they did endure to
 the present day.
 They didn't die from Google app.
 I mean, for the massive attacks on them, they didn't die.
 They are less powerful, but they make more money, right?
 And I think that might be something that, I mean, our best case scenario is the US establishment
 or CCP has more power over fewer people.
 Okay.
 I see.
 And so, but you can exit.
 If you're there, you're kind of knuckling under or whatever, but you can exit, right?
 And so I mentioned those three polls.
 CCP is obviously a billion people, 1.4 aligned under the digital yuan and so on, right?
 NYT is the entire, it's the tech companies, it's the US dollar, it is the establishment.
 And then crypto capital is everybody else.
 But I actually think that over time, that third world is web three this time and that's
 the third poll and that's India and it's Israel and it's lots of American conservatives and
 left libertarians and libertarians.
 And it's also lots of Chinese liberals, all the folks who are trying to get out of China
 because it's become so nationalist and crazy and difficult for capitalism.
 And so if you take basically non-establishment Americans on both left and right, okay, the
 bottom two quadrants in the political compass I talked about, you take the liberal Chinese,
 you take the Israelis and the Indians.
 Why?
 Because they don't, both of them have a lot of tech talent, right?
 They're the number one and number two demographics for tech founders.
 And they want to, while they are generally sympathetic to the West, right?
 And they have more ties to the West.
 They also are more cautious about national interests rather than just starting fights
 where that's how they would think about it, right?
 They just, India thinks of Brazil as a poor country, Israel thinks of itself as a small
 country.
 And so therefore it needs to not just get in every fight just for the sake of it.
 And so need to maintain a cautious distance with China, but not like do what Pelosi is
 doing and try and start like a big thing, okay?
 I think Israel is similar where it's maintaining diplomatic relations with China, it's more
 friendly towards China than the US is.
 India and Israel, I think are two sovereign states that have a lot of globally mobile
 tech talent that obviously have ties to the West with the large diaspora that are hard
 to demonize, you know, in the sense of willing to argue on the internet.
 Let's put it like that, in English, right?
 It's very important.
 And them plus enough Americans plus enough Chinese can set up another poll that is not
 for cold war or military confrontation, but for peace and trade and freedom and so on
 and so forth, right?
 That's the center as opposed to the left of the woke American US 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 a unipolar world, America is totally dominant.
 That's one argument.
 You can say it's a bipolar world.
 It's just the US versus China.
 Everybody else will have to be forced to align with one or the other.
 Jayashanker 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 is 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 could say it's unipolar, you could say it's bipolar, you could say it's just
 multipolar and everybody is kind of there, you know, India, Israel, these are groups
 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 woke's have control of lots of institutions.
 They've got the US establishment and they've got the tech companies, they've got the media
 companies and so on.
 But crypto is basically everybody else.
 And crucially crypto has inroads in China and America where it's hard to demonize it as
 completely foreign because there's many, many, many huge proponents of the universalist values
 of crypto in America and China because it is true global rule of law and free speech
 and you know, so on.
 It is genuinely universalist in a way where America can no longer be, you know, the number
 one rule of the rules-based order is America is always number one.
 And China doesn't even pretend to maintain a rules-based order, right?
 Whereas for all those countries that don't want to either be dominated by the US media
 corporations that can or social media that can just 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 barrier-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 worked
 for over years, gone.
 Okay.
 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 their 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.
 If that can just be taken away from you with the press of a key, that just gives bad governments,
 bad corporations, so much power that that's wrong, right?
 That's why I'm a medium and long-term bull on crypto simply because the check on this
 thing and that if you think about it in terms of just abstract decentralization is one thing,
 but you think about it in terms of property rights, it's quite another.
 And now what that also means is once you have property rights and you have decentralized
 social media, it'll be like the explosion of trade that happened after China went from
 communist to capitalist.
 Literally billions of people around the world are no longer giving everything to the collective.
 They own the teeth in their head now, finally.
 Okay.
 It's funny, right?
 So you're 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 rays 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, right?
 It's a continuous theme, right?
 The V1 was offline, I've got a key, I own it, I have de facto control.
 V2 is the cloud, someone else manages it for me, it's hosted, I get collaboration, so on.
 V3 is the chain where you combine aspects of those, right?
 You have the global state of the cloud, but you have the local permission and controlling
 of the private key, okay?
 So that's why I'm a medium to long-term ultra bull on crypto.
 And there's a podcast I gave with Asymco where I talked through how crypto actually doesn't
 just go after finance.
 So it's gold and it's wire transfers and it's crowdfunding and it's all finance with DeFi.
 But it's actually also search and it's social and it's messaging.
 It's actually even operating systems and eventually cloud and whatnot.
 Do you want me to talk about that briefly?
 Yeah, yeah.
 If you can briefly see how broad you see the effect of crypto.
 So first, crypto is fundamentally a new way of building backend systems, right?
 So if you think about how big a deal it was to go from AT&T's corporate Unix to Linux,
 it's permissionless, right?
 When you went from, as much as I admire a lot of the stuff that Sam Altman and Greg
 Brockman have done at OpenAI, I mean, they're phenomenal in terms of research.
 They've pushed the envelope forward.
 I give them a ton of credit, right?
 Still it was great to see StableDiffusion 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, right?
 So what crypto gives you, obviously it's every financial thing in the world.
 You can do stocks, bonds, et cetera.
 It's not just like the internet wasn't just a channel.
 It wasn't like radio and TV and internet.
 It was internet radio and internet TV and internet this and internet that.
 Everything was the internet.
 All media became the internet.
 Crypto is not an asset class.
 It's all asset classes.
 It's crypto stocks and crypto bonds, et cetera.
 In a real sense, like private property arguably didn't exist in the same way before crypto.
 International law didn't exist before crypto.
 How are you going to do a deal between Brazil and Bangladesh?
 If a Brazilian company wants to acquire a Bangladeshi 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, but now that Brazilian and
 Bangladeshi can go peer to peer because they're using blockchain, right?
 They can agree on a system of law that is completely international and that's code so
 each party can diligence it without speaking Portuguese and Bengali, right?
 So that's why I am a long-term bull on crypto.
 I just described the finance case.
 Let me go through the others, right?
 Social.
 So you have the private keys for your ENS.
 You have apps like Farcaster.
 You basically have decentralized social media where there's different variants.
 Some you just log in with your crypto username.
 Others, the entire social network and all the likes and posts are on chain like DSo,
 but there's several different versions, right?
 Search.
 Once you realize block explorers are an important stealth threat to search, they're very high
 traffic sites like blockchain.com and Etherscan that Google has just totally slept on.
 They don't have a block explorer.
 You don't have to do anything in terms of trading or anything like that.
 Google does not have a block explorer.
 Why?
 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.
 And once you have crypto social, you now show that you're not just indexing in a block explorer
 like on chain transactions, but on chain communications.
 So now you suddenly see, oh, the entire social web that Google couldn't index.
 It could only index the World Wide Web and not the social web.
 Now it's actually the on chain signed web because every post is digitally signed.
 It's a new set of signals.
 It's way easier to index than either the World Wide Web or the social web because it's open
 and public.
 So this is a total disruptive thing to search in the medium term because the new kind of
 data sets index, right?
 So that's how it's a threat to social, to search.
 It is a threat to messaging.
 Why?
 Because, or it's disruptive eventually because the ENS name, as I mentioned, is like a universal
 identifier.
 You can send encrypted messages between people.
 That's a better primitive to base it on.
 You know, WhatsApp is just claiming that they're end-to-end encrypted.
 But with an ENS name or with a crypto name, you can be provably audibly end-to-end encrypted
 because you're actually sending it back and forth, right?
 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, you know, so end-to-end encrypted messaging will happen and with payments and
 all this other stuff, okay?
 So you get the crypto messaging apps.
 You get operating systems.
 Why?
 Well, the frontier of operating systems, I mean, look, you know, Windows, Linux, and
 Mac OS have been around forever.
 But if you actually think about, you know, what is a blockchain?
 Well, there's operating systems.
 There's web browsers.
 But 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, you know, something like Ethereum has an EVM.
 It's got a programming language.
 It's got an ecosystem where people monetize on it.
 They build front-end apps and they build back-end apps.
 They interoperate between each other.
 This is the frontier of operating systems research.
 People haven't thought of it that way, right?
 It's also the frontier of a lot of things in databases.
 You will get a crypto LinkedIn where there's zero-knowledge proofs of various credentials,
 okay?
 So, actually, every single Web2 company, I can probably come up with a Web3 variant of
 it, right?
 Like Ethereum is, I mean, and this is high praise for both parties, but Ethereum is like
 the crypto stripe or the Web3 stripe.
 And you will see versions of everything else that are like this.
 But you know, I kind of described search, social, messaging, operating systems, the
 phone, right?
 Solana is doing a crypto phone.
 Why do you want that?
 Because it's a digital property.
 Apple was talking about running some script to find if people were having, you know, CSAM,
 like child porn or whatever on their phones, right?
 And even NYT actually reported that like Google ran something like this and found false positives.
 Some guy had to take a photo of a kid for 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, you know, is it really that much ethically
 different if it's the Chinese state that locks you out or an American corporation, right?
 Basically it's operationally very similar.
 You just have no recourse.
 You're unpersoned, right?
 So the crypto phone becomes like insanely important because you have a local set of
 private keys.
 Those are the keys to your currency and your passport and your services and your life,
 right?
 It becomes something you just hold on you with your person at all times, like your normal
 phone.
 You might have backups and stuff, but you know, the crypto phone is an insanely important
 thing, okay?
 And so that's search, that's social, that's messaging, that's operating systems, that's
 a phone.
 That's a lot right there.
 Yeah, that's beautiful.
 Can I have 120 seconds to just finish up a few more thoughts on social media?
 Yes, 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.
 You know, TikTok having some of the AI creation tools in there is just like a V1 of that.
 There's this whole thread with everything stable diffusion is unlocking.
 But basically this is 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.
 Really decentralized AI is truly representative.
 You cannot be faux representative.
 You cannot claim that Google is representing Nigerians and Indians and Brazilians and Japanese.
 Those folks need to have access themselves, right?
 So that's a fundamental ethical argument against centralized AI.
 It's unethical and it's like 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, right?
 You justify it with the bowness and you make the money by centralizing it.
 But the actual way of doing it is letting it free for the world and letting people build
 their own versions.
 If people want to build a Asian Lord of the Rings, they can do that.
 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 in AI, which a lot of people
 seem to-
 Talk about and focus on.
 Yeah, centralization is inherently unrepresentative fundamentally.
 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 where
 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, et cetera.
 They're competing with features of Twitter or Facebook and the API was cut off.
 And that was when actually progressives were for net neutrality and an open internet and
 open social against the concentration of corporate power and so on.
 Remember that, right?
 And so what's 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?
 And 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 kick
 somebody into the 300-like pit that existed at the center of the Soviet Union.
 Anybody could be kicked into the pit at any moment.
 And 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 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.
 And so, this is kind of back and forth.
 Sometimes right now you think of those as independent things, but then they fuse, okay?
 And so, that's very clear with the AI bias arguments where it just so happens that it's
 so powerful, Lex, this technology is so powerful in the wrong hands, it could be used, so we
 will charge you 99.99 for every use of it.
 How's that?
 How altruistic is that?
 Is that amazingly altruistic?
 It's really good, right?
 So once you kind of see that, as I said, whenever they're positioning in economics, you can
 go in culture.
 When they're positioning on culture, you can go in economics.
 If they're so woke, why are they rich?
 If they're so concerned about representation, why is it centralized?
 Answer, they're not actually concerned about it, they're making money, right?
 Okay.
 So that is, I think, in a few words, blows up a lot of the AI bias type stuff, right?
 Okay.
 They're basically, they're biasing AI.
 All right.
 So the amount of stuff that can be done with AI now, like it also helps the pseudonymous
 economy as I was talking about with the AI Zoom.
 So you have totally new sites, totally new apps that are based on that.
 I think it may, I mean, it changes, you're going to have new Google Docs, all these kinds
 of things.
 You might have, 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 might, with AI,
 you can change the productivity of gestures.
 You can have a few gestures, like for example, the image to image thing with the stable diffusion
 where you make a little cartoon third graders painting and it becomes a real painting.
 A lot of user interfaces will be rethought now that you can actually do this incredible
 stuff with AI, it knows what you want it to do, right?
 And I saw this funny thing, which was a riff on Peter Thiel's line, which is AI is centralized
 and crypto is decentralized.
 And somebody was saying, actually, it turns out crypto is centralized with the CBDCs and
 stable coin and so on, but AI is getting decentralized with stable diffusion, ha ha, right?
 Which is funny.
 And I think there's centralized and decentralized versions of each of these, right?
 And finally, the third poll to actually, you know, Thiel, you know, he talks about AI and
 crypto, but the third poll is actually, that's sort of underappreciated because people think
 it already exists, is social.
 That just is keeping on going, right?
 And obviously the next step in social is AR and VR.
 Why is it so obvious?
 Because it's meta, you know, it's Facebook.
 Now I saw this very silly article.
 It's like, oh my God, Facebook is so dumb for putting a $10 billion into, you know,
 virtual reality, right?
 And I'm like, okay, the most predictable innovation in the world in my view is the AR glasses.
 Have you talked about this on the podcast before?
 AR and VR?
 I mean, of course a lot, but AR is not as obvious actually.
 Okay.
 So AR glasses, what are AR glasses?
 So you take Stampshot Spectacles, Google Glass, Apple's AR kit, Facebook's Oculus Quest 2,
 right?
 Or MetaQuest 2, whatever, okay?
 You put those together and what do you get?
 You get something that has the form factor of glasses that you'd wear outside, okay?
 Which can with a tap record or give you Terminator vision on something or with another tap go
 totally dark and become VR glasses.
 Okay?
 So normal glasses, AR glasses, VR glasses, recording.
 It's as multifunctional as your phone, but it's hands-free and you might actually even
 wear it more than your phone.
 In fact, you might be blind without your AR glasses because one of the things I've shown
 the book early on are like 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, okay?
 Secret societies are returning.
 This is what NFTs will become.
 The NFT locally on your cryptophone, if you hold it, you can see the symbol.
 And if you don't, you can't.
 By the way, for people just listening, we're looking at a nice nature scene where an artificially
 created globe is floating in the air.
 Yes, but it's invisible if you're not holding up the AR kit phone, right?
 So only you have a window into this artificial world.
 That's right.
 And then here's another thing, which shows you another piece of it.
 And this is using ENS to unlock a door.
 So this is an NFT used for something different.
 So the first one is using the NFT effectively to see something.
 And the second is using the NFT to do something.
 Okay?
 So based on your on-chain communication, right?
 You can unlock a door.
 That's a door to a room.
 Soon it could be a door to a building.
 It could be the gates to a community.
 It could be your digital login, okay?
 And so- Amazing.
 What this means is basically a lot of these things which are like individual pieces get
 synthesized, right?
 And you eventually have a digital, just like you have a digital currency or digital currencies
 unify concepts like obviously gold, stocks, bonds, derivatives, every kind of financial
 instrument plus Chuck E Cheese tokens, karma, everything that's fungible and transferable.
 The digital passport unifies your Google style login, your private keys, your API keys, your
 NFTs, your ENS name, your domain name, all of those kinds of things and your key card
 for your door and so on, right?
 So the AR glasses are what probably, I don't know, it'll be Facebook's version three or
 version four.
 Apple is also working on them.
 Google is also working on them.
 You might just get a bunch of those models at the same time.
 It's like predicting the iPhone, just like Dorsey knew that mobile was going to be big
 and that's why he had 140 characters for Twitter because it was like an SMS code limitation
 and Twitter was started before the iPhone.
 AR glasses are an incredibly predictable invention that you can start thinking about the future
 of social is in part in person, okay?
 And it also means people might go outside more.
 Why?
 Because you can't see a monitor in the sun, but you can hit AR and maybe you have a full
 screen thing and you just like kind of move your fingers or something and you can tap.
 You have to figure out the gesture.
 You don't want to have gorilla arms.
 Maybe you do have a keyboard outside or just even like a, you could even have a desk like
 this.
 If you can touch type, you can imagine something where you look down and you can see a keyboard
 with your AR glasses and it registers it and then you can type like this, right?
 And probably you could have some AI that could figure out what you meant rather than what
 you were doing, right?
 Okay.
 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, right?
 In terms of their association, right?
 And this is the long-term trend in tech because you're going from eyeballs in the 1980s, sorry,
 eyeballs in the 1990s to daily active users in the 2000s to holders in the 2010s.
 So you go from just like, oh, I'm just a looky-loo to I'm logging in every day to I'm holding
 a significant percentage of my net worth.
 And then this decade is when the online community becomes primary.
 You're a netizen.
 The digital passport is your main identity.
 And so this is not, see the problem with Facebook or Twitter is it's a bunch of different communities
 that don't share the same values fighting with each other.
 This brings us back to the network state where you have one community with shared values,
 shared currency, and it's full stack.
 It's a social network and it's a cryptocurrency and it's a co-living community and it's a
 messaging app and it's a this and it's a that.
 And it's like Estonia, with a million people, you can actually build a lot of that full
 stack.
 That starts to get to what I call a network state.
 I feel like there should be a standing applause line here.
 This is brilliant.
 You are an incredible person.
 This was an incredible conversation we covered.
 How to fix our government, looking at the future of governments moving into network
 state.
 We covered how to fix medicine, FDA, longevity.
 That was just like a stellar description.
 Really I'll have to listen to that multiple times to really think.
 And thank you for that, especially in this time where the lessons learned from the pandemic
 aren't clear 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.
 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 he can take it or leave it or what have you.
 Yeah, to maybe to your younger self, advice to your younger self.
 My friend, Novel, this is a lot of what he puts out is the very practical brass tacks,
 next steps.
 And I tend towards the macro.
 Of course, we both do both kind of thing, right?
 Let's talk brass tacks, next steps, because I actually am practical, or at least practical
 enough, to get things done, I think.
 Just like you said, you're breaking up the new book into three.
 Yes.
 It's Motivation, Theory, and Practice.
 That's right.
 So let's talk practice.
 Especially at the individual scale.
 Right.
 So first, what skill do you learn as a young kid?
 So let me just give what the ideal full stack thing is, and then you have to say, okay,
 I'm good quantitatively, I'm good verbally, I'm good this, I'm good that, right?
 So the ideal is you are full stack engineer and full stack influencer, or full stack engineer,
 full stack creator.
 So that's both right brain and left brain, all right?
 So what does that mean with engineering?
 That means you master computer science and statistics.
 Okay.
 And of course, it's also good to know physics and continuous math and so on.
 That's actually quite valuable to know.
 And you might need to use a lot of that continuous math with AI nowadays, right?
 Because a lot of that is actually helpful, right?
 Grade descent and whatnot.
 But computer science and stats are to this century what physics was to the last.
 Why?
 Because for example, what percentage of your time do you spend looking at a screen of some
 kind?
 A large percentage of the time.
 A large percentage of the time, right?
 Probably more than, for many people, it's more than 50% of their waking hours.
 If you include laptop, you include cell phone, tablet, your watch, maybe a monitor of some
 kind, right?
 All those together, it's a lot, okay?
 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 than 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 there'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 is run 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?
 Sure.
 Yeah.
 You include all of that together.
 I include all of that as a package.
 That's theory and practice, right?
 I mean, look, it's okay to use libraries once you know what's going on under the hood, right?
 That's fine, but you need to be able to kind of write out the whole thing yourself.
 I mean, it's...
 That could be true, could not be true.
 I don't know.
 Are you sure about that?
 Because you might be able to get quite far standing on the shoulders of giants.
 You can, but it depends.
 You couldn't build...
 Well, okay.
 Somebody...
 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 computer architecture and layout
 of memory and theory of compilers.
 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 what a great specialized engineer could do that
 you can't.
 Yeah.
 I think at least a while back, facebook.com, it's just a single C++ compiled binary.
 It's not C++.
 It was like hip hop.
 They had a PHP compiler where they had just one giant binary.
 I may be getting this wrong, but that's what I recall, right?
 Yeah.
 I mean, it should be simple.
 It should be simple.
 And then you have guys like John Carmack who comes in and does an incredibly optimized
 implementation that actually...
 Well, yeah, more than that, right?
 Like he's...
 I mean, yes, right, but go ahead.
 I mean, there's some cases with John Carmack by being an incredible engineer is able to
 bring to reality things that otherwise would have taken an extra five to 10 years.
 Yeah.
 Or maybe even more than that.
 This is the great man theory of history versus the determinist waves of history are pushing
 things along.
 The way I reconcile those is the tech tree model of history.
 Like civilization, you're playing a game civilization.
 Yeah.
 So like civilization, you've got the tech tree and you can go and be like, okay, I'm
 going to get spearmen or I'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 wasn't a Leibniz to Satoshi's Newton, right?
 Like Vitalik, as amazing as he is, was five years later or thereabouts, right?
 There wasn't contemporaneous like another person that was doing what Satoshi was doing
 is truly Sui generis, right?
 And that shows what one person can do.
 Like probably Steve Jobs with Apple, given how the company was dying before he got there
 and he built it into the most valuable or put on the tech tree to become 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 he doesn't grow his own food and he didn't even think of the
 rights that he's got, someone else thought of those and whatnot.
 And so 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 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, add value, right, okay.
 So now the other side is creator, right?
 Becoming a creator.
 First, online, like social media is about to become far, far, far more lucrative and
 monetizable.
 People are not updated.
 They kind of think it's like over or something like that or it's old or whatever.
 But with crypto, once you have property rights on 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 the introduction of property rights
 in China changed everything.
 It might take some lag for that to happen, but you can lend against that, borrow against
 that.
 You own the digital property, right?
 And you can do NFTs, you can do investments, you can do all this other stuff, right?
 So in many ways, I think anybody who's listening, who's like, I want to build a billion dollar
 company, I'm like, build a billion dollar company, yes, also build a million person
 media operation or a million person following or something online, right?
 Because a US media company is simply not economically or socially aligned with your business.
 I mean, the big thing that I think tech and media actually, it's funny, there's this
 collision and sometimes there's an admin smashing event and there's a repositioning, right?
 And media attacked tech really hard in the 2010s as well as many other things.
 And now post 2020, I think it's now centralized tech and media versus decentralized tech and
 media.
 And centralized tech and media is NYT and Google, which have all become woke-ified,
 the establishment companies.
 But decentralized tech and media is like Substack, a lot of defectors from the US establishment,
 from the NYT have gone to Substack.
 But also all the founders and funders are much more vocal on Twitter, whether it's Mark
 Anderson, Jack Dorsey, Jeff Bezos, Zuckerberg.
 Zuck is just cutting out the establishment and just going direct to posting himself or
 posting the jujitsu thing, which he recently did, or going and talking to Rogan, right?
 And so 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 their employees, Salzburgers
 employees are just dogs on the leash, right?
 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 or possible strike that's going at the New
 York Times.
 Obviously, the most obvious rich corporate zillionaire, the epitome of white privilege
 is, and again, I'm not the kind of person who thinks white is an insult, right?
 But the guy who inherited the company from his father's father's father's father in
 the NFL, right?
 You're supposed to have the Rooney rule where you're supposed to interview diverse candidates
 for the top job.
 You know the other competitors for the top job of the publisher of the New York Times
 were two cousins of Salzburg.
 So it's three cis straight white males in 2017 who competed for this top job.
 Everybody in media was silent about this coronation.
 They had this coronation article in the Times about this, right?
 So you have this meritless nepotist, right?
 This literally rich cis white man who makes millions of dollars a year and it makes like
 50x the salary of other NYT journalists, okay?
 Hours 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, there's a website called techjournalismislessdiversethantech.com which actually shows the numbers
 on this, right?
 Here, I can look at these numbers, right?
 So why do I say this?
 Well, centralized US media has lost a ton of clout.
 You've seen the crypto prices down, like stock prices have crashed.
 That's very obvious and quantifiable.
 Less visible is that media engagement has crashed, right?
 By the way, yeah, there's a plot that shows on the X axis percent white and on the Y axis
 are the different companies.
 And the tech companies are basically below 50% white and all the different media tech
 journalism companies are all way above 70, 80, 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?
 It's like anyone who's homophobic, anyone who's...
 It feels like it's a personal thing that they're struggling with.
 Maybe the journalists are actually the ones who are racist.
 Well actually, it's funny you say that because there's this guy, A.M.
 Rosenthal, okay?
 And on his gravestone was, quote, he kept the paper straight, right?
 And actually, he essentially went and this is the managing editor of the New York Times
 for almost from 69 to 77, executive editor from 77 to 86.
 And it was a history- Oh, Lord.
 Yeah.
 History of basically keeping gay reporters out.
 Essentially, the way I think about it is New York Post reported that...
 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 a notorious homophobe.
 He made it a specific policy of the paper not to use the term gay.
 He denied a plum job to gay men for being gay.
 He minimized the AIDS crisis.
 So 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 has reinvented themselves as a cheerleader
 to stand with Ukraine, right?
 They were for Abe Rosenthal's homophobia before they were against it, right?
 They were like, if you saw the link I just pasted in, okay?
 During BLM, it's credibly reported that, and I haven't seen this refuted, the family that
 owns the New York Times were slaveholders.
 Somehow that stayed out of 1619 and BLM coverage, right?
 So they were literally getting the profits from slavery to help bootstrap what was the
 Times or went into it.
 They actually did this article on the compound interest of slaveholders in Haiti and how
 much they owed people, right?
 If you apply that to how much money they made off of slaves, I mean, can anyone name one
 of Salzburger's slaves?
 Can we humanize that, put a face on that, show exactly who lost such that he may win,
 right?
 So you stack this up and it's like for the Iraq war before they were against it, and
 it's like, yeah, sure, Bush did a lot of bad stuff there, but they also reported a lot
 of negative coverage, like false coverage, right, about WMDs, like the whole Jewish military.
 And so it's like this amazing thing where if some of the most evil people in history
 are the historians, if the...
 They actually ran this ad campaign in the 2017 time period called The Truth.
 So giant Orwellian billboards, right, which say 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.
 Like, do you know what other...
 Truth.
 Yeah.
 Big truth, period.
 Big white board.
 So, okay, what other national newspaper proclaimed itself the truth in constantly every day?
 You know this one actually.
 Oh, you mean Pravda?
 Yeah, yeah.
 There you go.
 That's right.
 What is the Soviet translation?
 What's the Russian translation of Pravda is?
 It's truth.
 Yeah.
 That's so sorry.
 That didn't even connect in 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 they're a communist, these guys have figured
 out how to charge people $99 a year or whatever it is for the truth.
 Wow, that's actually even amazing, right?
 So, the corporate truth.
 So, when you stack all that up, right, basically legacy media has delegitimized themselves,
 right?
 And that those, quote, investigative journalists don't investigate Salzberger shows that they
 are so courageous as to investigate your boss, but not their own.
 Yes.
 Ta-da, total mass drop, right?
 That's like just obvious, right?
 Now once you realize this and, you know, every influencer who's coming up, every creator
 realizes, okay, well, that means I have to think about these media corporations as competitors.
 They are competitors.
 They are competitors for advertisers and influence.
 They will try basically what the media corporations did partially successfully during the 2010s
 is they sort of had this reign of terror over many influencers where they'd give them positive
 coverage if they supported sort of the party line and negative coverage if they didn't,
 okay?
 But now the soft power has just dropped off a cliff, right?
 And you know, many kinds of tactics that, you know, establishment journalists do, one
 way of thinking of them is like as a for-profit Stasi.
 Why?
 Because they may stalk you, dox you, surveil you, like they can literally put, you know,
 like two dozen people following somebody around for a year and that's not considered stalking,
 right?
 That's not considered spamming.
 They are allowed to do this and make money doing this.
 Whereas if you so much as criticize them, oh my God, it's an attack on the free press,
 blah, blah, blah, right?
 But you are the free press and I'm the free press, like we're the free press.
 Again, it goes back to the decentralized, you know, the free speech is not like some
 media corporations saying it's everybody's right.
 And what actually happened with social media, what they're against is not that it is an
 attack on democracy, it's that it's the ultimate democracy because people have a voice now
 that didn't used to have a voice.
 You know, it's saying freedom of the press belongs to those who own one, right?
 That old one, right?
 You never argue with the man who buys ink by the barrel, right?
 In a real way, the entire things that were promised to people, freedom of speech, free
 markets, you know, like a beggars 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 didn't have the resources to buy a newspaper, you didn't have practical reach or distribution,
 okay?
 What happened was all these people in the US and around the world suddenly got voices
 and they were suddenly saying things that the establishment didn't want them to say.
 And so that's what this counter decentralization has meant, both in the US and in China, this
 crackdown, but it's as if like a stock went up like 100X and then dropped like 30%, all
 the deplatforming stuff, yes, it's bad, okay?
 It's a rearward move, but in the long arc, I think we're going to have more speech.
 I think the counter decentralization may succeed in China, but I don't think it's going to
 succeed outside it because you're trying to retrofit speech and thought controls onto
 an ostensibly free society, right?
 Now that check got cash, people actually have a voice, it's not going to be taken away from
 them very easily, right?
 So how does this relate to my advice to young kids?
 Once you have that context, right, once you realize, hey, look, Apple didn't like do deals
 with BlackBerry, okay?
 Amazon didn't collaborate or give free content to Barnes and Noble.
 Netflix was not going and socializing with employees of Blockbuster.
 These employees of establishment media corporations are your competitors, okay?
 They are out for clicks, they are out for money, if they literally choke out the Ukrainians
 before making themselves into champions of the Ukrainian cause, they'll basically do
 anything, you know?
 And so once you realize that, you're like, okay, I need to build my own voice, okay?
 If you're Brazilian, you're Nigerian, you're in the Midwest or the Middle East, right?
 If you're 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 of 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, maybe statistician, something
 like that, electrical engineer, et cetera.
 But the importance of creating your own content and telling your own stories, if you don't
 tell your own story, the story will be told for you, right?
 The sort of flip of winners write history is if you do not write history, you will not
 be the winner.
 You must write a history, okay?
 As kind of a funny way of putting it, right?
 Yeah, chicken and egg.
 Yeah.
 Contrapositive, right?
 And now what does that mean practically, okay?
 So in many ways, the program that I'm laying out is to build alternatives, peaceful alternatives
 to all legacy institutions, right?
 To obviously to the Fed, right?
 With Bitcoin, to Wall Street, with DeFi and with Ethereum and so on.
 To academia with the ledger of record and the on-chain reproducible research that we
 talked about, to media with decentralized social media, decentralized AI.
 You can melt Hollywood with this, okay?
 Melt the RIA, melt the MPAA.
 I mean, there's some good people there, but everybody should have their own movies.
 People should be able to tell their own stories and not just wait for it to be cast through
 Hollywood and Hollywood is just making remakes anyway, okay?
 So you can tell original stories and you can do so online and you can do so by hitting
 a key and the production values will be there now that the AI content creation tools are
 out there.
 I mentioned disrupting or replacing or building alternatives to the Fed, to Wall Street, to
 academia, to media.
 I mentioned to Wikipedia, right?
 There's things like Golden, there's things like there's a bunch of Web3-ish Wikipedia
 competitors that are combining both AI and crypto for property rights.
 You'll also need alternatives to all the major tech companies.
 That was the list that I went through with decentralized search and social and messaging
 and operating systems and even the crypto phone, 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 native born and over 35 and so on
 and so forth, but 100% of the world can become president of their own network state.
 What that means is, and this kind of related to those two points, right?
 If you're an individual and you're good at engineering and you're good at content creation,
 okay?
 Like somebody like Jack Dorsey, for example, or Mark Anderson.
 Actually, a lot of the founders are actually quite good at both nowadays.
 Look, Bezos is actually funny on Twitter when he allows himself to be.
 You don't become a leader of that caliber without having some of both, right?
 If you've got some of both, now, no matter where you are, what your ethnicity is, what
 your nationality is, whether you can get a US visa, you can become president of a network
 state.
 And what this is, it's a new path to political power that does not require going through
 either the US or the Chinese establishment.
 You don't have to wait till you're 75.
 You don't have to become a gerontocrat or spout the party line and so on.
 The V1 of this is folks like Francis Suarez or Naib Bakele of El Salvador, but Suarez
 is a great example where, while not a full sovereign or anything like that, he has in
 many ways the skills of a tech CEO where he just put up a call on Twitter and helped build
 Miami, recruited all these people from all over.
 And it wasn't the two-party system, but the end-city system.
 He just helped build the city by bringing people in, okay?
 And when I say Suarez is a V1, 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
 institution, 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.
 There's no more inspiring.
 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 time, people will
 look at the internet as being to the Americas, what the Americas were to Europe.
 A new world, okay?
 In the sense of this cloud continent has just come down, okay?
 And people are, if you spend 50% of your waking hours looking at a screen, 20%, you're spending
 all this time commuting up to the cloud in the morning and coming back down.
 You're doing these day trips and it's got a different geography and all these people
 are near each other that were far in the physical world and vice versa, right?
 And so this will, because it's this new domain, it gives rise to virtual worlds that eventually
 become physical in the same way that most people don't know this that well, but the
 Americas really shaped the old world.
 Many concepts like the ultra capitalism and ultra democracy of the new world, the French
 Revolution was in part, I mean, that was a bad version, okay?
 But that was in part inspired by the American, okay?
 There are many movements that came back to the old world that started here.
 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 kill a year American
 empire that everything's American and so on.
 And his, I think fundamental category era is he considers the internet to be American.
 But you know why that's not the case?
 Because, and it'll be very obviously so I think in five or 10 years.
 Why?
 Because the majority of English speakers online by about 2030 are 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 figure out, not to figure
 it, but to communicate.
 I didn't realize this in 2013, but these folks don't type with an accent.
 Okay?
 They speak with an accent, but they don't type with an accent.
 And all the way back in 2013 when I taught this Coursera course, I was like, who are
 these folks?
 I had hundreds of thousands of people from around the world sign up.
 It was a very popular course even then, okay?
 And hundreds of thousands of people signed up.
 I was like, who are these folks?
 And there were like Polish guys and you know, like this lady from Brazil.
 And they knew scumbag Steve and good guy Greg, but they didn't know the Yankees or hot dogs
 or all the offline stuff of America.
 They didn't know physical America.
 They knew the digital conversation, the Reddit conversation and you know, what became the
 Twitter conversation.
 For example, I just saw this YouTube video where there's an Indian founder and he just
 said, just casually like, oh, I slid into his DMs like this, right?
 It was kind of a joke, but he said it in an Indian accent and 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.
 It may have started American, but it got forked by the rest of the world.
 That's right.
 And it gives a global equality of opportunity.
 It's even more capitalist than America is.
 It's even more democratic than America is, just as America is more capitalist and democratic
 than the UK.
 The meme has escaped the cage of its captor.
 And by the way, that doesn't mean I'm, so I 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.
 That might not be the greatest example, but yes, go on.
 Well, put it like this.
 Yes, but just broadly speaking.
 They're not like burning the British flag and effigy or anything.
 Essentially 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?
 Like once you have kind of a healthy distance, people can respect all the accomplishments
 of the UK while also being happy that you're no longer run by them, right?
 And then you can have like a better kind of arms length relationship, right?
 And that's what post-British means.
 It is not anti-British, not at all.
 In fact, you can respect it while also being happy that you've got your own sovereignty,
 right?
 And you're happy that Britain is doing its own thing.
 I'm glad they're doing well, right?
 Okay.
 And they're actually doing some special economics on 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.
 You know, like rather than just everything must be scored as pro-American or anti-American,
 you can think of post-American, that not everything has to be scored on that axis.
 Like 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.
 Perhaps an obvious example, is longevity pro-American or anti-American?
 You know, no, 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 are global human rights, are global values, which is
 freedom of speech, private property, protection from search and seizure.
 And actually, so that's all the Bill of Rights 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 V2 of the book, a digital Bill of Rights, okay?
 And so this was a really good, decent first cut at a digital Bill of Rights, okay?
 And he talks about the right to encrypt, the right to compute, the right to repair, the
 right to portability, right?
 So encrypt is perhaps obvious, you know, e-commerce and everything.
 Compute like your device, it's not like you can't just have somebody intercept it or,
 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.
 But click the tweet that I sent you just before this one, right?
 So I was like, you know, in woke America, they're abolishing accelerated math because
 math is quote white supremacist.
 Not to be outdone, Europe seeks to regulate AI by regulating logic itself.
 You can't reason without a license, right?
 Article three, for purposes of this regulation, the following definitions apply.
 AI system is software that's developed with one or more of the techniques and approaches
 listed in Annex 1.
 And you know what's in Annex 1?
 In Annex 1, logic and knowledge-based approaches.
 So step away from the if statement.
 Right.
 Okay?
 And the thing is, you know, if you've dealt with these bureaucracies, the stupidest possible
 interpretation, I mean, think about if you think, oh, no, no, that wouldn't make any
 sense.
 It wouldn't do that.
 The entire web has been uglified by the stupid cookie thing that does absolutely nothing,
 right?
 The actual way to protect privacy is with user local data, meaning like decentralized
 systems, right?
 Where the private keys are local.
 No, I'm just laughing at the layers of absurdity in this, yeah, step away from the if statement.
 I mean, it's hilarious.
 It's very, very clumsy.
 It's us struggling how to define, yeah, the digital bill of rights, I suppose, and doing
 it so extremely clumsily.
 It's funny, you know, like I heard this thing, which is like, Europe's like, well, look,
 the US and China are way ahead of us in AI, but we're going to be a leader in AI regulation.
 Oh, yeah.
 Yeah.
 And something we haven't mentioned much of in this whole conversation, I think, may be
 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 and 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, 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.
 It was brilliant throughout on all those different topics.
 So yeah, thank you again for talking to me.
 This is great.
 I really appreciate being here, sir.
 Thanks for listening to this conversation with biology.
 Soon of Austin to support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
 And now let me leave you with some words from Ray Bradbury.
 People ask me to predict the future when all I want to do is to prevent it.
 Better yet, build it.
 Predicting the future is much too easy anyway.
 You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe,
 and predict more of the same.
 To hell with more.
 I want better.
 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.