All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E48: The role of decentralization, China/US break down & more with Bestie Guestie Balaji Srinivasan

Starting point is 00:00:00 So we have Bology here and obviously Bology is an expert in everything, but Bology, you're used to being interviewed one-on-one. I've had you on my podcast a couple of years ago. We had many great discussions. You've been on a bunch of other people's, but today we'll see how you do on the squad here with five people passing the ball. You've listened to the pod before. Yeah, I'll pass. So 20% each or whatever. It's fine. Okay, perfect. Well, we will have all in stats. We'll do a thorough breakdown. We're trying to get 20% with this moderator, this ball. Says the guy who has the largest percentage. Look, you're supposed to be a non-shooting point, Gar Jason. No one wants to see you brick 3.0 after 3.0. Just bring the ball down the court and pass it.

Starting point is 00:00:51 Just pass the ball. Just pass it, again. Just pass it, again. That's coming from the guy who has 24% of air time, David Sacks, from the assembly. Yeah, exactly. I fit exactly what I was supposed to be doing, which is one quarter. It's statistically proven.

Starting point is 00:01:06 No way, no way. What? You're like your winners, right? Rainman, David, Simon, Simon. I'm going home. And I said, we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. WS Ice, Queen of Canoe. I'm going home.

Starting point is 00:01:23 Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of the King of King made from like the chin hair of like a baby goat, a baby goat that's then locked by a Tibetan Sherpa who literally is forced to use lotion and camphor to keep their hands soft so that they don't disturb the innate properties of the thread. It's amazing.

Starting point is 00:02:02 And available right now, two for one at Kmart, 1495. I mean, I'm just going based on the aesthetics of the thread. It's amazing and available right now two for one at Kmart 1495 I mean, I'm just going based on the aesthetics of the look David Freiburg is back the queen of Kenwa Recently Having his office hit by a skunk. Are you okay, David? Are you gonna be okay for the show? Be all right just getting Getting used to the condition Which are on you're on bad at drilling.

Starting point is 00:02:26 Did you get hit by the skunk or just your office got hit by the skunk? Well, my windows were open. Apparently it's baby skunk season here in northern California. So there were some baby skunks playing around. Got to make sure it's not your returns. Did a fine guy. Oh my God. I'll do soon.

Starting point is 00:02:42 To soon, to soon, to soon. Way too soon. Let's move on. Definitely. From a non-descript motel 8 somewhere in Texas. In Texas.

Starting point is 00:03:00 David Sacks, a coastal elite in Texas, on mute, you're on mute, David. This is episode 48. You can, yeah. I happen to be in Texas. That's correct. It happens to be a tax-free state, no coincidence. It happens to be a state where you can carry a gun now.

Starting point is 00:03:22 Yeah, exactly. And women are no longer allowed to make decisions for their own body. So, two out of three ain't bad again. What a great place to live. Ridiculous. David, are you considering moving to the great state of Texas?

Starting point is 00:03:40 Um, well, I'm open to the possibility. Let's just say I'm open to it. You're open to it. But I recently ran a Twitter survey where I asked Miami or Austin and Miami won by about 52%. Austin got about 48%. With over 10,000 votes, it was pretty interesting. And do you have a preference yourself between the two?

Starting point is 00:04:01 I personally like Miami. I already have a place in Miami, but I'm checking out Austin. Just for, yeah, just for how close are you to 11? Two diligence. Just for complete two diligence. So I think at this point we should just go through the cities that SACS doesn't have a home. We just that might be easier for us to narrow down so that we can get the possible location. All right, listen, people started haranging us on the Twitter to have some bestie guesties on the program.

Starting point is 00:04:33 And so we decided we were bringing Bologi Shrinivasan. Bologi Shrinivasan. Did I get it correct? I mean, I've been pronouncing your name wrong for five years. Did I come close? It's a fucking a fucking ignorance. You are such a fucking racist Listen Greek names are hard to pronounce. I mean it's fun. It's fun. It's fun. It's

Starting point is 00:04:54 your name. Blagy. Everybody gets that. Balaji. Balaji. Balaji. Balaji. Balaji is Shrinivasan. Moona. Moona. Tide. Shrinivasan. Bolly G's three of us. Mooted, Mooted Tide's three of us. That's a total of a near-bolly G. Bolly G, you've listed. You said to figure it out how to say polyhapatia. So I have been training the world. I say polyhapatia for the year. Street Lunkard names are the only names that are

Starting point is 00:05:18 harder than South Asian names or South Asian names. But although Tamil names are pretty brutal. I mean, yeah, yeah, Tamil names are basically you guys add like maybe one or two more syllables. So I actually have to strain them. And ours end in a vowel. The Tamil is always ended at a consonant, which always just then you can just, they take liberal license to go on

Starting point is 00:05:34 for another 20 minutes. It does. Okay, you guys just drop a few syllables from your names. I mean, we could, we could. Yeah, but we don't. Paul and Jimmy Dory, thing. Jamak Paul, Paul three. We could we could yeah, but we don't volunteer she think Jamal Paul ball three. No, I mad poly All right, there's a big tech backlash and it's not just because of David Sacks's comments

Starting point is 00:05:56 The new poll shows that 80% are registered voters wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute wait before we go there I have a question for biology You are in my opinion, but I think a lot of people would say one of the most incredibly well-read, thoughtful, you know, commentators that we have, frankly, like, you know, not just in tech, but I just think generally in our society, I would give you that. I think you're incredible. I'm curious, how did you become such a polymath? Was this just one of these things where you've always been curious about everything?

Starting point is 00:06:30 Just tell us about, I'm curious about how you grew up first of all, and then second, how do you spend a normal day? I just want to know those, and then we can just jump in. But I'm just curious, because I do extremely well read and extremely knowledgeable. Well, thank you, I appreciate that. I try to learn from everybody. What do I do? I think

Starting point is 00:06:51 normal people go to the club or they go out and have fun. I read math books and history books and science books and stuff like that. That's how I have fun. I find that more interesting. Nothing wrong with going out, people do that. I go for walks and stuff, I work out. But so I do a lot of that. And I have, I mean, other than that, I just read a lot and I think I remember a moderate amount. And so I cite that.

Starting point is 00:07:24 And it's something really much more complicated than that, but that's it. I think we call that a polymathetia. That's probably the only difference between... Jamoth would be you if he could stop going to the club. And so you lost that last 40%. I will make an observation, which I was actually talking to Sacks about this, which is there's some people who are great at business and Learn the tech because that part is necessary to put it together and there's some people who are fundamentally like scientists or academics and then get into business in order to Advanced technology and there's nothing wrong with the first group and I think that's totally, you know, fine and legitimate like

Starting point is 00:08:03 Business people first and then they get in tech. I'm really part of the second group, I think where I'm fundamentally an academic at heart. I spent almost the first three decades of my life meditating on mathematics and just kind of got into tech relatively later in life than many others. All right. And you spent your career building companies, everybody remembers urn.com. By the way, that's actually doing extremely well at Coinbase.

Starting point is 00:08:28 Coinbase urn is on track for a hundred million revenue. Actually, it's much more than that in terms of GMV. It's broken out separately in their, not their S1, but their quarterly filings. You can go and check me on that. The other assets that we added after I joined Coinbase are more than 50% of Coinbase's revenue again in their filings and Coinbase custody in all of its Assets come from Rosetta, which is something that we did there and we launched USDC when I was there and that is Whatever $100 million a day. So they got a lot of value out of that acquisition

Starting point is 00:09:03 Just a part of it. And you were the CTO for a while of Coinbase, obviously. What was your take on Coinbase's lend product, the SEC coming in and saying, hey, pump the brakes, we want a bunch of information, and then they've just brought Armstrong and Coinbase announced that they're not going to do the lend product. What was your take on that? So I don't speak for Coinbase. Or more. Okay. I'm in my personal capacity. now it's that they're not going to do the LEN product. Where's your take on that? So I don't speak for Coinbase anymore. Okay, I'm in my personal capacity.

Starting point is 00:09:29 But I do think that this is sort of the beginning of an era where we're going to be rolling back the alphabet soup of that FDR put in place. That's to say, the SEC is not set up to go after millions of crypto holders and developers. They're set up to go after a Goldman and a Morgan. Just like the FAA is not set up to go after millions of drone developers, they're set up to go after Boeing and Airbus. The FDA is not set up to go after millions of biohackers, they're set up to go after Pfizer

Starting point is 00:10:02 and Merck. So the entire 20th century alphabet suit, that regulatory apparatus, is meeting something that it's not really set up for. And the problem is not any one actor like Coinbase or Crack and Rehabi, their problem is that technology is shifted and they've got many more people to deal with and many of those are individuals who are more risk tolerant than companies. So I don't think they're going to be able to maintain the status quo of 100 years ago, the statutes that they're citing. I think that's going to either get knocked down in court, we're going to be technologically invalidated.

Starting point is 00:10:36 There's going to be sanctuary cities and states for crypto or there's going to be international entities like what El Salvador is doing in Switzerland. So I don't believe that that era is going to maintain, but I think there's gonna be a big conflict over it, so we'll see. How do you think it's different this time, though, biology, to the, like, crackdown? Because folks said the same thing going into kind of the Napster era when, you know, everything was basically

Starting point is 00:11:02 peer-to-peer sharing of media files that were technically copyrighted. There was some regulatory regime that had oversight over that copyright. But then the DOJ got wrangled in and they went in and they made an example out of arresting a couple hundred kids like very kind of basically called everyone to back away entirely from the market. Similar to what we may be seeing happening in China right now. But is it not possible that we see a similar response this time around where they kind of take this targeted, make an example approach to kind of share people, kind of out of the frenzy that's that's I think driving a lot of people onto these platforms rather than going after the platform themselves? It's kind of saying, look, this is a violation of security flaws.

Starting point is 00:11:45 You guys are getting prosecuted. Here's the 100 examples and suddenly 80% of the attention kind of gets vacuumed out. Yeah, so I'd say a few things about that. First is, I think 2021 is different from the year 2000 in the sense that China is an absolutely ruthless and very competent state. Whereas the US government, I would consider,

Starting point is 00:12:07 it's a difference between lawful evil and chaotic evil. You guys know that from the judges and dragons, okay? So Chinese government is lawful evil. They are very organized, and they plan ahead, and when they push a button, they just execute like this whole society, and they don't leave round corners or things left out. The US government is today in 2020, not the 1950 US government.

Starting point is 00:12:30 The 2020 US government is like this shambolic chaotic mess that can't really do anything and is optimized for PR and yelling online. And that's a whole important topic. So that's one thing where I think there's a difference in just state capacity. But in, that's not to say that they're not going to try with what they've got. The other thing is that, so to your napsure point, there was thesis and antithesis, but there was synthesis. That's to say, you know, napsure led to Kazah and LymeWire and actually the Kazah guys went into Skype, so something legit came out of that. But the more important or more on-point thing is it led to Spotify and iTunes.

Starting point is 00:13:09 The record companies were forced to the negotiating table. There was a waypoint there that's important, which is when that happened in Napster, we ran a company called Winant, then it was part of AOL. The biggest architectural flaw of NAPS are was that- It's a llama's ass. Yeah. And well, the biggest problem with NAPS are that it was not fundamentally peer-to-peer. And so there were these servers.

Starting point is 00:13:32 And so, you know, the simple software architecture decision that somebody had to make was, well, let's just make an entirely headless product that basically is if fundamentally peer-to-peer, and that's what the Nutella source code was. We actually released that on a well servers without them knowing it took them a few hours to figure this out. They called us we shut the whole thing down. But in those few hours it was downloaded about five or six thousand times all this open source code that we put out. That was the basis of line wire bear share and that is what basically just decapitated the music industry and it was there that then the music industry realized we need a contractual framework to operate with these folks because they'll just keep inventing technology that makes us impossible.

Starting point is 00:14:18 And then that's what sort that's what iTunes was able to do with the ninety nine cent store. That's what spotify was able to do after that and but a lot that's what Spotify was able to do after that. But a lot of it started was because of what Bology said earlier, which is that technologically, people just will continue to push the boundaries. And we did that in music, and I think that's a lot of why the industry looks the way it does today. But ultimately, the premise kind of resolved back to centralized systems, right? I mean, like think about, you know, the Napster concept, it was really supposed to be true

Starting point is 00:14:49 peer-to-peer file sharing, and it ended up becoming the iTunes store where everything's sat on Apple servers, and they ultimately serve everything. Well, that's the reflexivity, because like what happens is all of these folks, you know, you're sitting at Warner Brothers or Warner Music or Universal Music Group, you're seeing an entire industry that was worth probably $20 or $30 billion just getting completely decimated.

Starting point is 00:15:08 And then there's this psychological thing that happens where first you want to shut everything down, but then because there's this other thing that is even more evil and even worse and uncontrollable than the thing that you hated, then you actually say, well, listen, my enemy's enemy is my friend. And so then you say, well, fine, let's find a few partners to work with. And we can try to find a way of living with these technologies. And that's going to repeat to your point, biology. crypto is probably now where we're going to see it play out first,

Starting point is 00:15:35 because that's probably the most important intersection of individuals, desire, and a regulatory framework that's outdated, where the SEC has some extremely complicated questions it needs to answer, especially even after something today. Like if you're sitting inside, you know, the SEC and all of a sudden you see that China, an entire country, that basically was where an enormous amount of this crypto activity started and originated and was happening, can completely turn something off. What is our position as a government and as a society? We don't know.

Starting point is 00:16:09 Let me just fill everybody in for a second. Who don't know what happens on the taping today, September 24th. Chinese government has announced that doing any transactions in cryptocurrency is now illegal. Holding it, apparently you can still hold it and this comes after Bitcoin servers being kicked out of the country. So yes, they've pushed the button. Go ahead, biology. To Friedberg, I would say, BitTorrent is what kept the record industry honest. And that kind of forced them to the table of iTunes to Chimaltz Point also. I wouldn't call it more evil. I call it more good. And BitTorrent also lurks out there as kind of this pure to peer enforcer that it's a check exactly and it's not gone

Starting point is 00:16:48 And in fact, it's a basis for new technologies and I think this is another flare up The other thing is that with crypto the upside even though the state wants to crack down at it harder The upside is also greater and the global internet is bigger And so I think the rest of world meaning all the world besides the US and China, is a huge player in what is to come. That's India, but it's also Brazil, it's every other country that's not the US or China. And so that's a new player on the stage. And then third to, to jump out to your point about, yes, China, ban crypto can be used to it. Well, you know, what's interesting is people talk about China copying the US. Nowadays, in many ways, especially on a policy front, the US is copying China without

Starting point is 00:17:28 admitting it, but it does so poorly. For example, the lockdown. The Chinese lockdown was something where it wasn't just sitting in your rooms. It was something with drones with thermometers and central quarantine where people were taken from their families and centrally quarantined and a thousand ultra-intrusive measures That the population by and large complied with I mean forget about a vaccine mandate We're talking about like you can see all the videos and stuff from from out of China the government itself is published

Starting point is 00:17:57 Yeah, they didn't seem real at first They didn't seem real at first, right? Yeah, and and so you know the thing is that for the US to follow that It's a little bit like as a mental image, imagine a life Chinese gymnast going and doing this whole gymnastics routine and then a big, you know, lumpy American following and not being able to do those same moves, right? The Chinese government, you know, is, as I said, lawful evil, but they are set up to just snap this, snap that, do this, do that.

Starting point is 00:18:23 The US government is absolutely not. And the US people are not, whatever you do, 50% will be. But also our system is a democracy, is it not like so? You cannot just do that. Even if the government wanted to weld people into their homes, we have a democratic state here where we have to discuss these things and there's a legal framework to it. So it's not even possible. Yes, even in the 1950s and 1940s and 1930s, the US was still a democracy, but it basically managed to exert

Starting point is 00:18:45 a very strong top-down control on things. Today we have something for a bright, like under FDR or in the 50s, a very conformist society, which was able to kind of drive things through. Even though it was a democracy, it was something where mass media was so centralized that a relatively few, very little too small group of people could get consensus among themselves. And then what they printed in the headlines, I mean, who's going to go and figure out the facts on their own?

Starting point is 00:19:12 This gets into the media topic later. So it's de facto centralized at the media level, the information production and dissemination level, and then you kind of manufactured consent from there. Today, it's you're combining that democratic aspect, the legal aspect, with a new information dissemination thing, which is desadilized, I think a lot of things. Sax, what's your take? Yeah, well, I'd love to get apologies, take on an article that came out this week

Starting point is 00:19:34 in the Wall Street Journal. I think it was a really important article came about four days ago, and it was entitled, Xi Jinping, Ames Teranin, Chinese capitalism, and Hugh Temao's socialist vision. The article describes how we've all seen and talked about in this pod how they've been cracking down on tech giants. They've been cutting down their tech oligarchs down to size like Jack Ma, how he disappeared

Starting point is 00:19:58 under House arrest. We've seen that they stopped the anti-IPO But but this article went beyond those steps and really talked about she's ideological vision and what it basically says is that what's going on here isn't just the CCP Consolidating power they actually want to bring the country back to socialism and what they say is that within the CCP, or at least she's view of it, capitalism was just something they did as an interim measure to catch up to the West, but ultimately they are very serious about socialism. And you know, reading this article, I had to wonder, well, gee, did we just catch a lucky break here in the sense that, look, they're abandoning or if they abandon the

Starting point is 00:20:45 thing they copied from us, which is market-based capitalism, they use that to catch up. Maybe this is the way that actually this is the thing that slows them down. The thing that historically that it brought to mind is that if you go back into the 1500s and you compare Europe to China, the Chinese civilization was way ahead. I mean, the standard of living was way ahead, technologically it was way ahead. Europe was a bunch of squalid, warring, tribal nation states. And then what happened is a single Chinese emperor banned the shipbuilding industry. Any ship with more than two mass was banned. So exploration just stopped in China. They became very inward facing. Whereas the European

Starting point is 00:21:35 states explored and discovered and conquered the new world, colonized the world, and that led to an explosion of wealth and innovation. And as a result, Western Europe and then it's sort of descend of the United States ended up essentially conquering and dominating the modern world. And so I guess, you know, bring it back to my question to biology, is there a chance that what she is doing we're turning to socialism? Could this be like the Chinese emperor who banned shipbuilding? Or am I reading way too much into this single Wall Street Journal story? So my short answer on that is I think the socialist thing is real,

Starting point is 00:22:14 but I think it's better to call it nationalist socialism with the implications that has. Whereas I think the US is kind of going in the direction of what I've called maybe socialist nationalism, Whereas I think the US is kind of going in the direction of what I've called maybe socialist nationalism You know where it's it's like different emphases in terms of what is prioritized, but you know and I think in many ways China is like the new Nazi Germany woke America's like the new Soviet Russia and the decentralized center is gonna be the new America I can elaborate on that but Basically with respect to this one thing I try to do is I try to triangulate lots of stories.

Starting point is 00:22:50 So rather than, for example, nothing wrong with a Wall Street Journal piece like looking at it. But for every WSHAPE piece you read, it's useful to get like, you know, what is CGTN or global time saying, even if you discounted just to see what they're saying, and then you also triangulate with, let's say, the Indian or Russian point of view. And by doing this, I feel that it's better than just reading 10 American articles. And especially reading primary sources, there's this good site called Reading the Chinese Dream, which actually translates primary sources, and then kind of form your opinions from that versus like a quote-hot take, right? I'm not saying you are. I'm just saying that that's what I try to do.

Starting point is 00:23:29 So I think we've really gotten China right here. I mean, I think that if you look at what's happening, I think we've basically forecasted this orchestration of essentially the revertical integration of China. You know, we have China Inc where the CEO is Xi Jinping, and where there is a, it's almost like they've changed the game, where what they are playing essentially is like settlers of Catan or something,

Starting point is 00:23:56 where the goal is just to hoard resources. And I think that they have enough critical resources for the world, and the clever part of what they did was the last 20 or 30 years, they leveraged the world to essentially finance their ability to then have a strangle hold on these critical resources, whether it's ships or whether it's rare earths or other materials. They leveled up. And I think that was the genius.

Starting point is 00:24:21 Well, they leveled up on our capital. And now that all that infrastructure is there and now that we are addicted to the drug, they can then change the rules of the agency. They leveled up with our operating system. It was a brilliant move, but they allowed entrepreneurs to believe that they could be entrepreneurs. They allowed an entire society

Starting point is 00:24:37 to basically level up the technology. Why did nobody see this coming, Chimoff? Nobody saw this coming. People were starting venturing. Look what they were doing. People were starting venture firms. Look what they were doing. People were taking companies public. They did built and road while we did nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan. Right? I mean, what is built and road? Belt and road is there. It's there creating ports and superhighways

Starting point is 00:24:59 to extract the resources that Jamal is talking about and bringing them into the Chinese system. And what did we spend our trillions on nation building in Afghanistan? Why didn't we see this coming? Everybody was looking at China starting venture firms there, embracing it, taking companies, public, wall street, politicians, nobody saw this coming. The rising tiger stories been around since the late 90s. Right? I'm talking about, why didn't we see them cutting the heads off there?

Starting point is 00:25:26 I'll give you the answer because they spent because it was not about white people. China was in Sri Lanka. China was in Africa. These are not sexy, interesting places. Are there white and western audiences? Are there white and western audiences? You guys couldn't give a fuck. Let's just be honest, okay?

Starting point is 00:25:45 And so that's why it didn't matter. Because we thought, we all thought that these are countries that are sort of, you know, squalid, third world, developing nation states that don't really matter. They don't necessarily have the resources that matter. But what did China do? They realized that those folks are the future GDP. Those folks are the future population pools, the young that can folks are the future GDP, those folks are the future population

Starting point is 00:26:05 pools, the young that can actually do the hard work. And then they went and they secured again. So not only do they chose this. Now, so that's one thing, hold on. So that's one thing. I think we entirely missed it because, as David said, the military industrial complex doesn't look at, you know, a developing nation and say, we want to be there, it looks at Afghanistan and says we want to dominate it because we can actually feed off of that domination. So that's one thing. The second thing is that I think that we misunderstood

Starting point is 00:26:36 Xi Jinping's ambition. And I think that that's a reasonable mistake to have made. The first one is an error of just complete stupidity. The second one is something that I think it was legitimate to have missed. And to your point, Jamoth, they not only stole the entrepreneurial playbook, but the colonizing other places and giving them debt and giving them resources and building ports in other countries. We thought it was dumb.

Starting point is 00:26:57 Let's all be honest. You know, 10 years ago, we did it. No, I would argue in a lot of cases we benefited. So China set up and bought like the largest pork production company in Australia. And what do you feed those pigs? You feed them soybeans. And where do those soybeans come from? Largest soybean exporting market is the United States. You know, we had a tremendous customer in China as they expanded their consumption pattern through all of this investing they were doing worldwide.

Starting point is 00:27:28 We were exporting John Deere, farm equipment, caterpillar construction equipment and soybean products and there was a, and our knowledge industry and there was a tremendous service model and globalization really created, call it a catch 22 for the United States where, you know, we were watching the rising tiger, you know, and it a catch 22 for the United States, where we were watching the rising tiger

Starting point is 00:27:47 and it fueled in part by this kind of distributed entrepreneurism. But as that distributed entrepreneurism creates obviously the social. Do you think there is an equal amount of dollars that went into Western developed nations from China as it went into third world countries? No, but it's hard to question nations. It couldn't give a shit about that. But that money is too hard to turn down. There's a mistake in our thinking with respect to the rest of the world that we've been making, we make over and over again. And it was all kind of predicted by a story

Starting point is 00:28:12 in name Samuel Huntington at Harvard in the 1990s. He wrote a book called Clash of Civilizations. This book was written at the same time that another famous book came out called The End of History in the Last Man. And what the common belief was in the 1990s in the US was that we had reached the end of history where every country would become democratic and capitalist, right? That was the end of history, is democratic capitalism.

Starting point is 00:28:35 And we believe that the more we went all over the world spreading our ideals, it would hasten this day where they'd all become democratic capitalists. What Huntington said is no, you know, cultures and civilizations, these go back thousands of years, these are stubborn things. And what these other cultures really want is not Westernization, but modernization. And what they're gonna do is they're gonna modernize,

Starting point is 00:28:57 they're gonna learn from us as much as they can about technology, they're gonna assimilate and adapt and take all of our technology, but they are not going to become like us They're not going to westernize and that is basically what's happened over the last 25 years And so the Chinese have caught up to us and suddenly we realize whoa wait a second They have not westernized. They are still their own unique civilization They they have they have basically the equivalent of a modern day emperor and

Starting point is 00:29:24 And they have no interest in westernizing and we're like what have we done because now we've allowed them to catch up from a technological standpoint. Bologi, why do we, why do everybody in the West get this so wrong? Well, so a few things. One is political differences aren't public in China, but they are real. So it's all the backroom stuff. And there was a real leadership shift from Deng and Zhang and Hu to Xi. The Mao era was revolutionary communist. The Deng Zhang Hu era was internationalist capitalist. I think that was real. And the Xi era is nationalist socialist.

Starting point is 00:30:01 And it's just different. Like who did not fully control the military, the way that she does? There's this ad you guys should watch the Chinese military ad. Let's call it like we will all be here or something like that. And the thing about it, it's not just that

Starting point is 00:30:16 it's like extremely well coordinated military parade and set to be intimidating and so on. It's that the whole thing clearly just falls up to one guy, G. It's not him writing in a car with the rest of the Communist Party flanking him as an oligarch. It's just like one guy. There's two million person army folds up to him. That is a true consolidation and roll up a power that he was able to accomplish among other things with tigers and flies going and throwing Boji Lee in prison, you know, having

Starting point is 00:30:42 generals, you know generals throwing in prison, whether they were actually corrupt or whether they simply descended or were brought to the right power. Yeah, it's hard to know from the outside. In one sense, because so many folks in the Chinese government were taking bribes, it's almost like an equity stake in their province, coming up, they're like, hey, it grew, so give me a cut.

Starting point is 00:31:03 A lot of people were vulnerable. So he just consult, so it's not something, you know, people will say, oh, you know, the Chinese plan for a hundred years, they don't plan for a hundred years. They had this huge war in the 20th century, it's in the Nationalists of Communists, the Ding, the Ding transition, you know, his trying for the gang before. That was not something Mao had planned. They're human beings like everybody else. And they had a real leadership transition after three hours of continuity.

Starting point is 00:31:26 Then this is one of, I think this is the key point you're making, which is, I think the reason that this actually flipped and we didn't see it coming is because Xi Jinping decided, I wanna have complete control over the country. These other people are getting too powerful. And we're actually reading into this that there's some crazy plan.

Starting point is 00:31:41 It just could be a crazy man, not a crazy man. I really disagree with you. Well, why, explain. But I mean, he just decided to basically take away every entrepreneur's company. They were not trying to, they were doing all of this stuff in plain sight, okay? As an example, we view Sierra Leone as a place

Starting point is 00:32:00 where we make commercials about, or we try to fundraise for, or we send USAID. They view Sierra Leone as a place where there's critical resources that are dependent on that the future of the world depends on. And so they will go, they will modernize, they will invest, and they will then own those critical resources. We view Chile as a random country in South America that abuts Peru and Argentina. They view Chile as a place where there is the largest sources of lithium that we need for battery production in the future. They were doing this

Starting point is 00:32:30 for decades right in front of us. And the reason we didn't pay attention is because not of those countries mean anything to us. Okay, so I agree with you, Chimalt, and the thing is, though, I'd argue that the blindness actually comes from both ends of the political spectrum. Like on the conservative end, oh, these are shithole countries, basically, you know, you can believe that if you want, but, you know, the trend is that it, you know, it's something where, for example, COVID was only taken seriously once it was hitting Italy and France, like China was still considered like a third-world country. But it actually also comes from the liberal side in a different, like it's a slightly

Starting point is 00:33:08 mask, but it's a condescension of not the military industrial complex, but the nonprofit NGO, you know, complex, like, oh, the white savior with the NGOs, you know, coming in and, you know, you know, pat them on the head kind of thing. They're not a big deal. And the thing about this is like the one thing I think is a huge thing for a diplomatic court today is making any generalization about another culture, which says that they're not completely good or that they have some aspect to them that doesn't match exactly to the US. You can

Starting point is 00:33:41 be called a racist for doing that. And so this is kind of the criticism of Islam. I mean, if you criticize Saudi Arabia for throwing gay people off of buildings, you are not respected. Can I just say that biology just gave the most precise delineation that I've had? So let me just repackage what you said because it resonated with me. Western philosophy tends to view countries in three buckets. Bucket number one are countries like us, right? Those are the other western countries, the G8 countries, they feel like we're aligned. And then what happens is you get

Starting point is 00:34:10 this weird thing where then you move into like countries where you basically either deal with it with wokeism, right? Oh, let me go pat them on the head. Let me go try to save them because it makes me feel better. Or you deal with them as Neocons where it's like, let me go dominate them and take them to war. And literally you can take all 180 out countries in the world and effectively sort them into those three things. And that I think is the problem with America's view of what we're doing. And so what David said is really true, which is that while we were doing this,

Starting point is 00:34:41 we had Neocon war, wokism, or I, you're our buddy because you're like us. The entire world reordered itself with completely different incentives and they did it right in front of us. And now we wake up to realize, oh my gosh, that was an enormous miscalculation that we just did. Yeah. So, you know, if you look at the history of the West interaction with the rest of the world,

Starting point is 00:35:04 and let's talk about colonialism, and whether you're talking the history of the West interaction with the rest of the world, and let's talk about colonialism, and whether you're talking about colonialism over the last few hundred years, or even you talk about a microcosm like Afghanistan over the last 20 years, I would argue that there's three phases to the West interaction with these other cultures. Phase one is sort of domination, right? Like Jemoth was saying. Phase two is assimilation, where the culture that's been dominated realizes that they're behind

Starting point is 00:35:29 and they want to catch up. And so there's a process of Americanization, Romanization, and what they're doing is they are learning from us and taking our technology and it loels us into a false sense of security that we think they're becoming Americanized or it's not alignment. It's not alignment. It's just they're trying to catch up. Then the third phase is reassertion where the dominated country, culture, you know, what have you

Starting point is 00:35:56 reasserts its traditional culture and its traditional views because they've modernized but without becoming truly becoming Americanized or Westernized. And we are caught off guard by that. And we don't really realize that they never really wanted our culture. They just wanted to throw off American domination or Western domination. And so what they've actually done is use this period to basically assimilate and catch up. And the reality is, like in Afghanistan, they don't have to fully assimilate all of our technology. They don't have to become as strong as us because we are in their land.

Starting point is 00:36:34 They just have to become strong enough to basically achieve a system. Because it's got to upgrade their systems. They just have to achieve a defensive superior audience on the offensive capability. So it's much easier for them to catch up than we think. And we are always caught off guard by this dynamic and it repeats itself over and over again. And what you've seen in China is, you know, 30, 40 years ago, you had the great economic or former dunk shopping, he laid out what they had to do. He said, he said, buy your time and hide your strengths. Hide your strength under a bushel.

Starting point is 00:37:06 That was the great motto by Dunkshelping. He set that policy for 30 or 40 years. They embraced basically perestroika with outgloss nose. They reformed their economic system. They copied us, but not making Gorbachev's mistake of giving up any political control whatsoever. By 2012, they had largely caught up. And so I would say that G was not an aberration. He was a reassertion.

Starting point is 00:37:31 They had gotten to a point of strength where they were ready for that strong leader who was ready to reassert basically their ethno-nationalism. And that's the point we're at right now. And once again, we've been played for fools and caught off guard. Friedberg, I mean, one of the signs And that's the point we're at right now. And once again, we've been played for fools and called off guard. Friedberg.

Starting point is 00:37:46 But I mean, one of the signs was his corruption crackdown a few years ago, right? I mean, that was kind of step one where he took all these provincial managers and kicked them out and put them in jail and started to, you know, clean things up internally, where there was clearly, kind of corrupt behavior underway. But, you know, I'm a couple points back. I do think it's worth highlighting that to some degree, you can try and diagnose his motivation. Or diagnose the motivation as being rather not too

Starting point is 00:38:15 surprising and maybe not too nefarious in the power grabbing sense, which I think we all want to bucket it as. But if there's a population, like we're seeing in the United States, where when you loosen the screws on liberalism, and you kind of allow more freedom to operate and more kind of free market behavior, you see tremendous progress. And as I think we've talked about in the past, tremendous progress always yields a distribution of outcomes amongst the population, but everyone moves forward. Some people just move forward 10 times faster and farther, and it causes populist unrest.

Starting point is 00:38:55 We've seen it in the United States. If AOC, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders were elected to be the triumvirate that ran the United States today, they would probably say, let's end all this capitalism that's creating all this wealth in the United States and progress generally would slow down. And I think that there's been inklings of that. Clearly, there's data to support the inklings of this in China that indicates the loosening of the screws has allowed tremendous progress, but it's time to tighten the scrues because populism and unrest is going to arise from kind of perceived inequality, just like we're

Starting point is 00:39:30 seeing in the United States. And, you know, I guarantee or I can't guarantee, but I would assume that if, you know, certain populist leaders in the United States had the same level of authority that Chinese leaders do, they would probably act in the same way. I think what we're going to see next is, and I think we should talk about what we think will happen next with China. I think China is on the brink of having a revolution. If you look at what happened to the Uighurs, obviously you can't practice religion there. Students in Hong Kong can't protest.

Starting point is 00:39:57 You can't publish what you want. Founders can't start companies. Now you're not going to be able to play video games as much as you want. You can't use social media. And today, you can't have any control over your finance. If you squeeze people across this many vectors, this hard, this quickly, I think Freeberg's right, it could result in massive China's not like a uniform people and a uniform culture. Of course. Yeah, but I mean, I'm just listed like seven or eight things they're doing too. But there are many many many provinces, many cultures, many differences, many differences of experience, by the way. I mean, you know, the rural population in China doesn't experience much of what I think

Starting point is 00:40:34 is driving industry and driving this inequality and perceived inequality and the changes that are underway. I don't think that a revolution is generally supported unless you have, you know, enough kind of concentrated swell across the population. I don't know that a revolution is generally supported unless you have enough kind of concentrated swell across the population. I don't know how you could see something like that happening and it has diverse population as China. I support China's limits on social media use by children. I could use that here for my kids.

Starting point is 00:40:57 Clearly, SACS is letting his kids use whatever they want. I mean, we definitely need to have some of those over here. Bologgy, what do you think is gonna happen? Worst case, best case for China in the next two decades? Well, so one thought I wanted to give is basically that in some ways, this is inevitable because China and India are 35% of the world. Asia was the center of the world. And one way of thinking about it is that America and the West

Starting point is 00:41:19 executed extremely well over the last couple of centuries. And Asia didn't with socialism and communism, and now that they've actually got a better OS, it's not like the US really could restrain them. So in that sense, that's also part of their internal narrative in a way. I mean, of course, Mao killed millions of people there, they screwed up their own stuff,

Starting point is 00:41:40 but their narrative is they were colonized by the West, and the opium wars are patronized as copycats and masculated on film for decades. They're like heads down and sweatshops. They built plastic stuff. They took orders from all these overseas guys and announced their time to stand up and take back their rightful position in the world.

Starting point is 00:41:57 And that's like, that's their narrative. And so it's important to not agree with it, but at least understand where it's coming from because they want it more, I think. And so I disagree, Jason, with your view that they're gonna have a revolution. I think that's a Western mindset where Australia, for example,

Starting point is 00:42:19 is having these COVID protests. In China, the harder the crackdown, the less more crack down, like the easier it makes an X crack down. It's like, it's something where it's not a different, it's not a different, it's not a different, it's not a different, it's an easy revolution, that's for sure, but we saw protests, you saw a Tiantiman Square, you saw a Hong Kong, and you're not seeing anything since that was 30 years ago. It's still proof positive that if you squeeze people, they will take to the streets.

Starting point is 00:42:41 Take in, we saw it on the bottom. And we saw it on the bottom. And we saw it on the bottom. And we saw it on the bottom. And we saw it on the bottom. And we saw it on the bottom. And we saw it to the streets. I don't know how to comment. And we started life in China has accelerated and spent a pace over the past 30 years. The average person in China is so much better off than they were five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago. Revolutions don't come out of that amount of progress, right?

Starting point is 00:42:56 When you go from $4,000 a year in average income to $20,000 a year in average income, what happens if they don't have jobs in their recession? The only time you revolt is because of economics. That's what I just hear. So what happens if there's a, if they have a, they're growing it in a percent a year.

Starting point is 00:43:12 The GDP's growing 8% a year. The population is seeing an incredible benefit and the cost is reverses. What if that reverses? Would you see a revolution then? Well, Jake, I mean, look, I think we, it's a topology's point about, this is like a Western mindset.

Starting point is 00:43:25 I mean, think about the Arab Spring. We saw all those revolutions with the Arab Spring, and we thought, oh, look, they're finally throwing off the Yoke of oppression, and now they're going to set up Democratic States. And what do we actually get? We actually got religious fundamentalism, right? Like, we didn't get what we thought. And I think this happens over and over again, is that, is that, you know, we're trying to superimpose our mindset on them. You know, we're thinking like, frankly, Adavos, man. Yeah, no, I'm begging like-

Starting point is 00:43:54 And people want security, by the way. And security can come in a lot of different forms. And religious fundamentalism is one of them. And, you know, the way that we see kind of government operate in China may seem foreign and uncomfortable to us, but it provides enough security to people to know they're going to have housing, shelter, food, medicine, and be able to do the things that they want to do to some extent in some limit. It's not necessarily an equation that says all humans that don't live like Americans are going

Starting point is 00:44:19 to be unhappy. Yeah, last thing I'll just say is basically, I think that you're the China will collapse from internal revolution or the US military is like really strong relative to China. I think are both actually forms of wishful thinking. With that said, I do believe that we need a strategy for China on a global scale. I think the future is a centralized, eastern, decentralized West. But I don't think it's going to be just, hey, Deus Ex Machina is going to solve this problem. No, I don't think the revolution is going to necessary over turn-china. I think you're going to see revolutionary moments.

Starting point is 00:44:50 Well, just to say one thing in your defense, J. Cal, because everyone's kind of beating up on you, is I mean, it's beating up, by the way, just, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no learned over the last 20 years is the road from here to there is going to be much more

Starting point is 00:45:25 complicated than we think. And longer. And longer. And cultures are very stubborn things and they're not going away anytime soon. And the transition is going to have to happen within those cultures. It's not something that we can superimpose. By the way, I would also point out freedom is the birthright and the want of a people that at some point have enough security to feel

Starting point is 00:45:45 like they have that luxury. Up until that point, I think that you have to make the decision of does security give me more than freedom. And in a lot of cases, security coming with all the cost it comes with may give people more than absolute freedom. And that's a transitionary phase, I think. A lot of people go through. People's being civilizations and states and whatnot.

Starting point is 00:46:06 Anybody have a prediction of what's gonna happen in the next 20 years or we'll move on to the next one? I just can't believe SACS was empathetic to your point, Jake, that was a great moment. It's really insane, I should. I have a few predictions. Yeah. I think actually, if you read the kill chain

Starting point is 00:46:21 or similar books, that's by I think Christian Bros. It's a good book where basically it's like, the US military has a perfect record in its war games with China. China's won every round. If you look at just the fact that with COVID, the US military basically suffered a military defeat in the sense that it had this whole biodefense program. It's supposed to protect against biological weapons. That didn't work.

Starting point is 00:46:46 Afghanistan, huge defeat, $2 trillion. You have this August thing where it looks like France is now pulling off from NATO or the EU is doing their own thing. I think that China is, and then China is really already predominant in many ways in Asia. And the US just doesn't care about the area as much. I mean, who wants to start another gigantic war, or this, certainly I don't think the people of America do after 20 years of forever war? And China really cares about Taiwan.

Starting point is 00:47:16 They really care about their backyard. So whether that's a war or whether that's a referendum on Taiwan or whether it's some unpredictable event like COVID, I don't know. But I do think that China does have some Monroe doctrine like thing that it gets to within Asia where basically it says, you know, just like the US said, hey, you know, we're running this hemisphere, they're saying, hey, we're running this sector of things. Whether that's a military conflict where the US decides to just withdraw, I don't know. And then I think what has to happen is we have to figure out what the decentralized West looks like. An asymmetric response to China because it's going to basically be the number one centralized state in the world. You're

Starting point is 00:47:54 not going to be able to combat it head on militarily. It's just, you know, it's got like 10x growth in front of it. It's already a monster. Unless there's some assassination or revolution or something crazy like that, that's hard to predict. If it manages what it's got, it's got like, it's like Google 2010. It's got 10 years of that in front of it. And whether it's a Chinese decade or a Chinese century, I think depends on whether we can build the technologies to defend freedom, meaning like encryption, meaning, you know, decentralized social networks, meaning these kinds of things, because that's the only, I think, kinds of tools that are going to help us, whether it's drones, whether it's other kinds of things, asymmetric defense versus what they're going to be. It's not going to just be a DSX market. I think that's a great point to end on Jason, because there's

Starting point is 00:48:40 other stuff we're going to talk about. So what are the things that, you know, Bologi's commented on that I give him, you know, a tremendous amount of credit for is, corporate, is the idea of corporate journalism? In fact, Bologi, you're the first person I heard that term from corporate journalism, which is a recognition that all of these reporters actually are employees of companies and they have a company culture

Starting point is 00:49:03 and they often, they have owners, the the companies do those owners often have an agenda There's often a dogman site these corporations and And it really got me to see Journalism in a new light because these journalists portray themselves as the high priest of the truth Who are there to speak truth to power. And actually, they're really just kind of the lowest paid functionaries on the corporate totem pole. And in contradiction to what you've called citizen journalists, who are people who are

Starting point is 00:49:39 writing what they see as the truth in blogs or formats like this, where they are not getting paid for it. We're doing it because we want to put forward, well, we know to be the truth. And actually, I'd love to hear you speak to that because I think this is one of the most powerful ideas that I've heard you put forward. Sure, so much I can say about this.

Starting point is 00:50:00 The first thing I would do is I'd recommend a book that recently came out by Ashley Rinsberg called The Grey Lady Winked. And the reason it's very important, and I'd put it up there frankly with the top five books I'd recommend, I know I'd recommend other books, top five books I'd recommend. Grey Lady Winked. It goes back through the archives. You know, the New York Times calls themselves the paper of record, they call themselves, you know, the first draft of history, they've literally run billboards calling themselves the truth. But it's just owned by some random family in New York

Starting point is 00:50:30 and, you know, this guy Arthur Salsberger who inherited it from his father's father's father. And so you have this like random rich white guy in New York who literally tries to determine what is true for the entire world. His employees write something down. We're supposed to believe that this is true. And I simply just don't believe that that model is operative anymore,

Starting point is 00:50:47 because I think truth is mathematical truth, it's cryptographic truth, it's truth that one can check for oneself rather than, you know, argument from authority, it's argument from cryptography. And, you know, one of the things with Bitcoin with cryptocurrencies is given decentralized way of sort of checking on that. Now, to the point about corporate media, it's, they're literally corporations. These are publicly traded companies with financial statements and quarterly reports and goals and revenue targets. And so once you kind of are on the inside of one of these operations, you realize that

Starting point is 00:51:20 that hit piece or what have you is being graded in the spreadsheet for how many likes and RTs it gets on Twitter. If it gets more, they're going to do more pieces like that, flood the zone with that. If it doesn't, then they're going to do less. They're all conscious of this. For example, Nicholas Christoff wrote an article. I think it's like the article is no one reads or articles someone will read where you notice that his Trump columns get something like 5x more views than his other columns.

Starting point is 00:51:47 It's like a huge ratio. And so at least some folks there are privy to their page use. And of course, they're looking at their Twitter likes and RTs, even if they, those are not directly page use, they're certainly correlated with the pages on the article. So all these folks are literally employees of for-profit corporations that are trying to maximize their profits, but we believe them when they mark themselves as the truth, like the NYT, or as democracy itself, like the Washington Post, or fair and balanced, like Fox, these people equate themselves with

Starting point is 00:52:14 like truth, democracy, and fairness, they weren't exactly around at the founding. Okay, they weren't part of the Constitution in 1776, the post offices, but these media corporations were started later on and have kind of glommed themselves on and declared themselves like part of the establishment, you know, and they are not. And the last point, and I'll just give you guys the floraches, but we didn't go and say, oh, blackberry, do better, blockbuster, do better, Barnes and Noble do better. We just replace them, disrupted them with better technological versions. And so the idea that, oh, you know, New York Times do better, that's completely outmoded

Starting point is 00:52:55 way of thinking about it. We need to disrupt, we need to replace, we need to build better things, we need to have things that have like on-chain fact checking that have voices from overseas, that have have voices that are actually experts in their own fields that have voices that are not necessarily corrupted by these foreign products. That's what you mean by on-chain fact-checking. Give an example. This is a very deep area, but fundamentally, the breakthrough of Bitcoin was that in Israeli and a Palestinian or a Democrat and a Republican or a Japanese person, a Chinese person, all agree on who has what Bitcoin on the Bitcoin blockchain. It is essentially a way of in a low trust environment, but a high competition

Starting point is 00:53:36 environment, you can use computation to establish mutually agreed upon facts. And these facts are who owns what million or billion of the roughly trillion dollars on the Bitcoin blockchain. And that's the kind of thing that's, I mean, people will fight over a $10,000 shed, you know, when you can establish global truth over a bite, which says, you know, do you have 20 or 5 or 10 BTC, you can actually generalize that to establish global truth on any other financial instrument. And that's tokens and that's loans and derivatives. And that's a huge part of the economy.

Starting point is 00:54:13 And then you can generalize it further to establish other kinds of assertions. And that gets a little bit further afield, but not just proof of work and proof of stake, but things like proof of location or proof of identity. There's various other facts you can put on there. So you start actually accumulating what I think of is not the paper of record, but the ledger of record, a ledger of all these facts that some of them are written by so-called cryptorical, some of them arise out of smart contracts, but this is what you refer to. And as a today model of what that looks like, it's sort of like how when someone links a tweet to prove that something happened, people link an on-chain record to prove that something happened. Concrete example. Do you guys remember when Vitalik Utarion made that large donation

Starting point is 00:54:51 earlier this year? Yes. Okay. So, you want to talk about that? Explain what happened. I think that you basically tweeted out something that was essentially trying to raise money to secure necessary equipment and pharmaceutical supplies to India during a pretty bad COVID outbreak. And then I think you decided that you were going to donate some money and then Vitalik basically stepped up and actually gave quite a large sum. I'm not exactly sure the exact number of all the time. Yeah, so it was an enormous amount in illiquid terms of this meme coin, these Shibu

Starting point is 00:55:24 coins. But the thing is that everybody, when they wanted to prove that this had happened because they're so unbelievable, such a large amount of money, he was marked it on the overbillion when he gave it. Do you know how they proved it? They didn't link a tweet.

Starting point is 00:55:36 They linked a block explorer, okay, like an on-chain record that showed that this debit and this credit had happened. And the big thing about this is, you know, we take for granted, when you link a tweet, you're taking for granted that Twitter hasn't monkeyed with it. But guess what? Twitter monkeys with a lot of tweets these days. A lot of people get disappeared.

Starting point is 00:55:55 And so it's not actually that good or record of what happened anymore. This is deleted. This guy got suspended. You know, like, even the Trump stuff forget about, like, Trump himself, but that historical archive of what happened, you can't link it anymore, it's link-wrought it. Just from that, I know that's one of the thousand most important things about it, but it's an important thing.

Starting point is 00:56:12 In the example of, say, Taiwan, and China believing Taiwan is part of the one China concept and Taiwan believes it is a country, and everybody in the world has a different vote on that. How does the blockchain clarify what is the fact about is China a country, or is it a province? Very good question.

Starting point is 00:56:33 Well, it clarifies the facts about the metadata, who asserted that it was a country, and who asserted that it was a province, and what time did they do so and you know what money how much BTC did they put behind that or would have you. So it doesn't give you everything. But it does start to give you unambiguous proof of who and proof of when and proof of what and then from that at least. Yeah, I mean like the way I've kind of explained it to family members who've asked because you know the concept of a chain is difficult I think for people to that aren't you know have don't have a background in computer science really grow. But everyone understands the concept of a database.

Starting point is 00:57:11 There's a bunch of data in there, except in this case, the data that makes up the database is what's being verified by everyone, and it's distributed. So everyone has a copy of it. I want to know what you guys think about this week in the Facebook dumpster fire. Let's move to something splashy. Can you say one thing? There's a book, Friedberg on what you just mentioned, which is called the Truth Machine by Casey and Vignet. And it gives a pop culture explanation of the ledger of record type concepts I just mentioned.

Starting point is 00:57:37 Which I don't think a lot of people grok get biology to your point. And I think we're skipping past it, but it's a really important point, which is historically databases have sat on someone's servers. And whoever has those servers decides what data goes in the database and how they're edited and what's allowed to come out of the database. So in this notion, generally, a database with information, and it can be held by lots of people who generally as a group kind of vote and decide what's going to go into it. And that's the power of decentralization and how it changes, you know, the information economy which drives the world. And it's going to have a lot of implications, right? Facebook's worst month ever continues. We talked last week about Facebook having a Lee internal leak called the Facebook papers. This is a

Starting point is 00:58:22 continuous leak to not only the Wall Street Journal, but apparently members of Congress are also getting it and the leaker and the SEC. And the SEC and the leaker apparently works in the safety group according to a Congress person who has been getting it. And they are going to unclog themselves and that they were leaking this out of frustration that there is human trafficking, democracy issues, and obviously self-harm in girls using Instagram and this research. But that's not all. Facebook is admitting, for the first time this week, that Apple's privacy updates are hurting their ad business.

Starting point is 00:59:00 And I think the story you're referring to is that two groups of Facebook shareholders are claiming that the company paid billions of extra dollars to the FTC to spare Mark Zuckerberg and Cheryl Sandberg from depotitions and personal liability in the Cambridge, Analytica, Saga, from the political article, quote, Zuckerberg Sandberg and other Facebook directors agreed to authorize a multi-billion dollar settlement the FTC as an express quid pro quo to protect Zuckerberg from being named in the FTC's complaint. Made subject to personal liability or even required to sit for a deposition according to the article, the initial penalty was $106 million, but the company agreed to pay $50 times more $5 billion to have Zucker and Sam Sam Burr expert from depositions of liability. Here is the money quote, the board has never provided, this is from the group of shareholders

Starting point is 00:59:50 suing, the board has never provided a serious check on Zuckerberg's unfettered authority instead and has enabled him, defended him and paid him, paid billions of dollars for Facebook's corporate coffers to make his problems go HMF. I have one prediction. The Facebook whistleblower, you know, when you are a federal whistleblower, number one is you get legal protection, but number two, which people don't talk about much, is you actually get a large share of the fines that are paid by the act of your whistleblowing. You know, there was a couple of SEC claims that I think were settled last year, where the whistle blower got paid, I think like $115 million or something, and just an enormous

Starting point is 01:00:30 amount of money. And the SEC has done a fabulous job in using whistle blowers as a mechanism of getting after folks. And I think the SEC said they've collected almost a billion dollars since this whistle blower program started, that they've paid out or something, just an enormous amount. And I had this interesting observation, which is this person leaked a bunch of stuff were whistleblow to the Senate, to Congress, to the SEC, there probably will be an enormous fine. This person may actually make billions of dollars, which will then make every other employee at Facebook really angry about why they didn't leak it first.

Starting point is 01:01:07 Because I guess all this stuff was sitting around and apparently now they've shut it down, so that entire data repository around this will topic is no longer freely available for employees to prove. Oh, what under a key tam thing? Well, I think it was more like, I guess all of this data was sitting inside of some Facebook internal server. I mean, this leaker makes money under like a key tam. So the SEC will pay for information that results in a fine. And so they just recently announced that they paid out $114 million whistle player payment. That was the highest

Starting point is 01:01:47 ever and that they, this whistleblower's extraordinary actions and high quality information prove crucial to successful enforcement actions. I don't think they announce all of these whistleblower payouts. They just pay them. So that's my one observation is I actually think the swissleblower may make billions of dollars. So more than any of us made a Facebook, which I think is hilarious. But the second thing, which is more important is that there was an article in the Wall Street Journal about how sentiment amongst Americans has now really meaningfully changed. And Jason, I don't know if you have those stats, but this is a plurality of Democrats and Republicans where it's like 80% of anybody now basically says the government needs to check Big Tech. The Wall Street Journal published an article yesterday highlighting a new poll

Starting point is 01:02:36 conducted for the future of tech commission. It found that 80% of registered voters, 83% damn 78% repubs agreed that the federal government quote needs to do everything it can to curb influence of big tech companies that have grown too powerful and now use our data to reach far into our lives findings are based on a survey of 2000 or so registered voters. I think it's a really, really, really tough road that these guys will have to navigate these next few years. Can I offer some contrary views here? Yeah, please. So, you know, the whistleblower thing, you know, real whistleblowers, in my view, are like Snowden or Sanjay, who are, you know, basically overseas and or in prison for telling what the US government is doing and the difference is, I'd say, they're whistle blowing if accepted an act upon

Starting point is 01:03:29 would reduce the power of the US government, whereas these, you know, kind of awards and so on, I think they do distort incentives. It's not like they're giving a billion dollars to Snowdon for blowing the whistle on the NSA. The military industrial complex is not happy with that. But this money is being given because the government is currently mad at Facebook

Starting point is 01:03:48 and wants to do something that is like a quasi-nationalization of Facebook. Now, very similar to what happened in China, where basically all the tech CEOs, they just do it much more explicitly there. They're just basically decapitated all of them, say, okay, you're going, you know, spending time with your family.

Starting point is 01:04:04 In the US, it's done in this sort of denied way and so on. But the US government getting more control over Facebook is not a solution to Facebook's real problems. It's just going to mean back door surveillance of everything. Every single thing that was pushed back on, every end-to-end encryption thing that they implemented. Now, the Keystone Cops and the US government, government, they don't just surveil everything, then their database gets leaked and it's all on the internet, just like what happened under the

Starting point is 01:04:30 SolarWinds hack. So, I'm not denying that there are, you know, like bad things about Facebook. I actually think on net, it's probably being more beneficial than many people say, but I don't believe that the federal government is a solution to those problems. I think the solution looks more like decentralized social networking, where people have control over their own data, not simply the US government quasi-nationalizing the thing. So people bring up this to centralized social networking, and as if it is a better solution, I think you believe it's a better solution. But I rarely hear anybody talk about, well, if there's slander on a decentralized network,

Starting point is 01:05:07 if there's child pornography, if you are personal banking information, or you're, you know, you were personally hacked and that information was put on a decentralized social network, that cannot be reversed and stopped because it's decentralized, correct? It depends. You know, the thing is, it's basically about the degree of truth. But what does it depend? You just said that the blockchain couldn't be changed, and that all the facts were permanent.

Starting point is 01:05:28 So why does it depend now? Well, for something like, child porn, for example, it's actually being used for that, you're not gonna find lots of people who are running those nodes. It is something where edge cases are always used to attack something. There's a famous cartoon which says, how do you want this wrapped?

Starting point is 01:05:46 And it's called control of the internet. And it's either protect children or stop terrorists. Right? And so when we talk about an edge case like that, I mean, the CSAM stuff, child porn, that's used by Apple to justify intrusive devices that are scanning everybody's stuff. The, I think the answer to a lot of those things is, if you're doing something that's bad, there's usually ways of going after it that don't involve this gigantic surveillance state that was after all only built.

Starting point is 01:06:17 Well, in the last 10 or 20 years, just normal police work that you can do. If they're actually like, you know, a bad guy, there's other forms of police work, you can get search warrants. You don't have this completely lawless thing where you just, some guy in San Francisco hits a button and you're digitally executed. And so, it's not that there isn't any possibility for rule of law, it just has to actually be exercised in this... I think we're wrong. I think we're a long way away from decentralized social networking, actually being the norm or being a solution, Jason. I think we're wrong. Listen, I think we're a long way away from decentralized social networking actually being the norm or being a solution Jason. I think we're at the step of actually figuring out and how much tolerance we have for probably specifically Facebook and Google's specific business models. And it's those business models that I think are coming up against privacy. They theoretically now, and we'll figure this out,

Starting point is 01:07:09 maybe coming up against mental health and our child welfare policies and what we all view. But that and those are fundamentally governmental issues that they should adjudicate. And I think the more important thing that I take away from all of this is that we've all kind of let it probably get a little bit too far. And I think now that there's a plurality, something's going to happen.

Starting point is 01:07:34 I don't think it's going to be right. I don't think it's going to be just. It's kind of like trying to perform surgery with the rusty knife. There's going to be all kinds of collaborative things. There's going to be specifically to how to police Facebook, Twitter, social networks. I think it's just like social media. I think we've jumped the shark at this point. And I think folks who want the way to do that.

Starting point is 01:07:51 But you see decentralization as the solution, like biology? I do think that that's the ultimate solution for two key things. One is the most important thing that we all want is to know what the actual economic relationship we're having with folks that we spend time with is. So when we spend time with friends, that's friendship. There's no economic relationship there necessarily, okay? When we spend time with a lot of these applications, there is a subtle economic relationship that is actually hidden from us, which is that we believe we're getting value for free, but

Starting point is 01:08:21 really what's happening is we're giving back a bunch of information that we don't know. When you move to a world of decentralization, you shine a light on how people make money and you allow us to vote. Do I want it? Do I not? That single feature will provide more clarity for people than any of this other stuff will, because it'll force people to then step into an economic relationship with these organizations. And I think that that's just fair because those folks should be allowed to make money, but we should also be allowed to know what the consequences are and then decide. David, you are a big proponent of freedom of speech. We saw massive election interference. The Russians trying to use social media to create division, other countries doing it to each

Starting point is 01:09:05 other. It's not just the US and Russia, it's China and Russia and everybody doing it to each other. Do you believe that something like election interference and those bots would be solved or it would get worse because of decentralization or you were fan of decentralization or would you rather have a centralized Facebook Twitter and somebody responsible like Zuckerberg or Jack to mitigate this for democracies around the world. Well, the problem that we have is we do have a problem of social networks spreading lies and misinformation.

Starting point is 01:09:36 However, the people who are in charge of censoring those social networks, keep getting it wrong. So they allow disinformation to be spread by official channels, whether it's, you know, whether it's a corporate- Are you gonna say Dr. Herc, are you gonna say Dr. Fauci? No, there's so many official channels that get things wrong. We talked last week about the Rolling Stone, Ivermectin hoax.

Starting point is 01:10:04 There's been absolutely no censorship of that manifestly wrong story. There's no labeling of it, but then a subjective opinion, like what Dave Portnoy posted about AOC attending the Magala, which can't be factually wrong because it's just him, an opinion, that gets fact-checked and labeled. It's bizarre. So the situation we have today is we're not preventing misinformation. We're just enforcing the cultural and political biases of the people who have the power. And that is always a problem with censorship.

Starting point is 01:10:36 And this is why I agree with Justice Brandeis when he said that, you know, the sunlight is the best disinfectant. The answer to bat speeches, more speech, we need to have more free and open marketplace of ideas, and that ultimately is how you prevent disinformation. So decentralized, Twitter, decentralized social networks, do you think that is too much sunlight, and too unruly the fact that things could be spread on there?

Starting point is 01:11:00 And that's not- Well, I'd like to see what those things look like when we actually have them, or it's I agree with you, Samantha, we're still some ways off from that. Are we? I mean, but yeah, be it. Can I say a few things from that? Yeah, go ahead. Because I think we have these out there. Isn't Master Don out there and other services out there and they are contending with these very issues? So, this philosophy was not, sorry,

Starting point is 01:11:19 sorry, biology. I just would say one thing before you go, but like this, this general philosophy is not novel. The internet and the word of being called the tech platforms were meant to be the response to the undue influence that kind of American thought existed already in the media when they emerged in the late 90s. And you can go back hundreds of years. The state was meant to be the response to the church. And the state was meant to be the response to the church.

Starting point is 01:11:45 And the media was meant to be the response to the state and propaganda. And then the tech companies were meant to be the response to media. And now we're talking about decentralization and being the response to tech. And at some point, information accrues in this asymmetric way.

Starting point is 01:12:01 And it becomes called that undue influencer. And that I think ends up becoming the recurring battle that will continue to see whether or not this notion of decentralized systems actually is the endpoint or is just the next stepping stone in the evolution that is this constant kind of evolving cat and mouse game of where does the information lie, who has control over it and who's influencing people,

Starting point is 01:12:24 ends up kind of being, I think, the big narrative that will kind of realize over the next couple of decades. But I don't know, Bolognian, if it becomes the end point, right? I mean, this is this feels to me part of a longer form narrative. Yeah, so I think like lots of things look cyclic, if you look at them on like this, if you look from the Z axis, more like a helix,

Starting point is 01:12:41 where you do make progress, even if it seems you're going in a loop. And so I think, you know, it's centralized, then you decentralize and you re-centralize. It's like the concept of unbundling and bundling. You unbundle the CD into individual MP3s, you re-bundle into playlists, right? And so with decentralized media, it's not purely every single node on their own. I think it's more like a million hubs and a billion spokes. And Jason to your point, basically most of those hubs are

Starting point is 01:13:11 not going to allow things that 99.99 percent of people think are bad like C-Sam, you know. As for other things like you know, Slander, Hack, Talk, and Subvention, the thing is current central arbiters will falsely accuse people of these things or enforce them in political ways. The centralization is actually also not a solution to being abused as SACS points out. In fact, official disinformation early in COVID, which I had to basically be back with a stick, fortunately got some of it out in time, but people said the flu is more serious. The travel bands were overreactions that only Wuhan visitors were at risk that avoiding handshakes is paranoid, that the virus time, but people said the flu is more serious. The travel bands were overreactions. Only Wuhan visitors were at risk that avoiding handshakes is paranoid, that the virus is contained, tests are available, masks don't help. All that stuff, the surgeon general himself, people don't

Starting point is 01:13:55 wearing masks, right? Buzzfeed, NYT, all these guys got the story wrong and then they've rewrote history to pretend that they didn't. So that, to me, is a much greater danger when you have a single source of truth that's false. So we're picking the least bad solution. It's such a good point because I'm old enough to remember when Balji was right. I'm not about everything related to the beginning of COVID and I'm old enough to remember when in April

Starting point is 01:14:20 of last year I wrote a piece in favor of mass when the WHO and the surgeon general and all these official channels were saying don't wear a mask. So the problem is with these official censorship is that they keep getting it wrong. They keep getting it wrong. And I want to hold on. I want to bring one more quick point. Okay, Jason, you mentioned foreign interference on Facebook.

Starting point is 01:14:43 I would really encourage anybody who's concerned about that issue to look up. You can go look, you'd get Google, the actual ads that were run by agents of the FSB on Facebook during the 2016 election, you can actually see the ads they ran. I want to make two points about that. Number one, the ads are ridiculous. They are sort of like an absurd, you know, foreigners perspective almost. They're mean. They're mean. They're mean with bad English. Yes. Bad English and it's somebody who doesn't understand American culture is attempt to propaganda as an American and you look at it. It's so ham-handed. Let me give an example. It's like in one of them

Starting point is 01:15:27 they've got Jesus arm-reli-sling with the devil Sings and it's Jesus saying that I support Trump and the devil saying I sport Hillary Clinton. I mean literally stuff like that. Okay, it's You see in a Trump rally. It's utterly absurd and nobody would ever become inspired. The second thing is the second thing about it is that when you actually look at the number of impressions that were created by the sum total of all of the so-called disformation of all these ads, it is a fractionally small, if-and-testable drop in the ocean compared to the toll number impressions on Facebook. And so I'm not disputing the fact that somebody in that basement somewhere in Moscow perhaps was running some sort of

Starting point is 01:16:15 disinformation operation that was running ads on Facebook. What I am saying is that when you actually look at the effect saying, is that when you actually look at the effect quantitatively and qualitatively, you realize that that whole story was massively blown up abortion in order to create an hysteria that then justifies censorship, then justifies the empowerment by centralize authorities to be able to regulate these social networks with the effect that the people and power end up censoring in ways that do not support the truth, but actually just reinforce their own power. That is what the disinformation story is really about. No, it's not, but it's really about sex, is that Russia

Starting point is 01:16:59 wants to pit people like you and me against each other. You're right leaning on left leaning and what they want to do is create this moment Where you and I are fighting over this instead of fighting Russia Russia has this as a strategy to demoralize us and This is classic KGB technique I suggest so battles back and forth between Americans so we don't fight against I have no interest in fighting Russia per se I'm not interested in picking fights with foreign countries.

Starting point is 01:17:26 And also you should want to fight against Russian interference. Yeah. I'm also not engaging in a fight with fellow Americans. I'm attempting to depropagandize fellow Americans who've been led to believe that Russian interference in election was I'm not saying it didn't happen. But they didn't let it. We know that it happened. But they've been led to believe that it was a much greater threat than it actually was in order to empower centralized authorities to engage in censorship over social network. So I'm trying to essentially deprogram an enormous amount of programming that's taken place. I do not consider that to be fighting with fellow Americans.

Starting point is 01:18:06 Well, I mean the point is you have the GOP recounting votes even to this day saying the election was stolen and then you have on the left You have the Democrats saying Russia won the election for Trump in both cases. These are probably factually incorrect in our last podcast I cited the piece by Rich Lowry because these are probably factually incorrect. In our last podcast, I cited the piece by Rich Lowry, which he is the editor of National Review, speaking to conservatives, saying that this whole stolen election myth,

Starting point is 01:18:31 yes, he called it a myth, is an albatross, is nothing but backfire on conservatives and Republicans. I think there are plenty of people who recognize that story to be what it is. We're talking about something very different here. I kind of just want to pivot forward a little bit and I think it's a good question with Bolognian on the line, but yeah, let's assume

Starting point is 01:18:50 we move forward to this decentralized model where there isn't a central media platform that adjudicates content and makes it available to the users of the platform. So now in a decentralized world, take YouTube, for example, YouTube has an application layer, which is the website we all use to access the videos, and there's a recommendation list that pops up. And then all the media that exists on the YouTube platform sits on

Starting point is 01:19:14 some servers. And so the application is how I'm kind of selecting what media to watch, but that's kind of being projected to me because of the recommendations being made by Google and the search function. If you guys remember, I don't know if you guys are old enough, but in the early 90s, we were all on Go for Boards and we were trying to find information and it was a total cluster, right? I mean, there's just like no way to kind of find what you're looking for. And so search became kind of the great unlock, right?

Starting point is 01:19:40 And search became the great unlock for access and content on this distributed network that we call the internet. Now, in the future, if all of the YouTube media is decentralized and on distributed servers and sits on a chain or whatever, what is the application layer look like, because how do you end up giving users are ultimately going to have to pick an application or pick a tool to help them access media, to help them access information, and there have to be to some degree a search function or an algorithmic function that creates the list of what content to read, or they're simply subscribing to nodes on the network, and that's kind of the future of decentralization, where there's no longer a search or recommendation function, but there is simply a subscription function. I think that, that to me is kind of the big philosophical question,

Starting point is 01:20:26 because from a user experience perspective, people want things easy and simple. They want to have things recommended to them, they want to have a bunch of a list of things, and they click down the list and they're done. I'm not sure most people, as we saw in Web 2.0, when they were all these like, you know, make your own website stuff,

Starting point is 01:20:40 and you had RSS feeds, and that all died, because it was complicated and it was difficult, and it wasn't great content for most people. They preferred having stuff presented to them. So do we just end up with like 10, 20, 30 subscription applications that create different algorithms and different kind of access points for the content or are people just living in a subscription universe

Starting point is 01:20:58 into the centralized world? When it comes to media. It's a great question. So I think first, we have some vision of what that world looks like already, because if you think about block explorers and exchanges and wallets and much of the rest of the crypto ecosystem, they are all clients to the Bitcoin and Ethereum and other blockchains. I wrote this post called Yes, You May Need a Blockchain, where people have said, oh, blockchains are just slow databases. That's like saying the early iPhone camera is just a poor camera.

Starting point is 01:21:35 Yes, it was worse on one dimension, image quality, but it was far better on other dimensions, namely the fact that it was ubiquitous, it was always with you, it was free, it was bundled, it was programmable, it was connected to a network and so on. And so blockchains, yes, they have lower transaction throughput, but they are a thousand X or more on another dimension, which is the number of simultaneous root users. That is to say, it's a blockchain is a massively multiplayer database where every user is a root user. That is meaning everybody can read the rows in the Bitcoin blockchain. And anybody who has some Bitcoin can write a row

Starting point is 01:22:08 that's a debit or a credit to somebody else, anybody with compute can mine blocks. Okay, so it's open and permissionless. Similarly, for a decentralized social network who'd operate in a similar way, whereas let's say something like Twitter or PayPal, the root password is not public. Nobody can access it.

Starting point is 01:22:27 So what this leads to to kind of continue point is basically, I think there's basically being three errors of the internet. The first was p2p, which was pure to pure. And so individual nodes are point to point communicating, and that's FTP, and it was telnet before SSH. Yeah, exactly. Right? And so the great thing about this is, oh, I'm not sure. and that's FTP and it was telnet before SSH. And FTI address. Yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 01:22:48 And so the great thing about this is open source is peer to peer, it was fully programmable, you could see everything. Then because of search, because of social, because of the rise of the second era, MVC, model view controller, essentially many protocols like social networking or search are not efficient if every node is pinging every other node. You can't pinging every other node with the index of the web. You can't pinging every other node with Facebook's entire social

Starting point is 01:23:13 graph when you go and message somebody. You want a central hub with their photos and stuff, so you can just send a few packets back and forth, right? And this led to the last 15 years, these gigantic hubs, the last 20 years, these giant hubs, the search and social and forth, right? And this led to the last 15 years, these gigantic hubs, the last 20 years, these giant hubs, the search and social and messaging, two set of marketplaces, hub and spoke architecture, and these hubs have global state and they're highly monetizable. You can make billions of dollars off of them

Starting point is 01:23:36 as many of our friends have. Right? By the way, the early peer to peer versions failed, right? Cause, uh, juice, I mean, you know, the alternatives didn't really work out. That's the idea. The hub and spoke, yeah, failed, right? Because juice, I mean, you know, the alternatives didn't really work out. But I think the hub and spoke. Yeah, yeah, exactly, right? So, I mean, BitTorrent did exist during this time.

Starting point is 01:23:50 It's not like it was zero, but generally speaking, this was the era of hub and spoke MVC dominance. And now we're into a third architecture, which I call CBC, client, blockchain client. And so desktop clients have a blockchain that they communicate with. For example, I have a wallet, you have a wallet on your client, and then the Bitcoin blockchain intermediates us. I debit and credit you, okay? That's a different architecture than both MVC and CBC. It actually combines the positive qualities of both. It's decentralized and open source and programmable like peer-to-peer.

Starting point is 01:24:22 But it also has global state and it's highly monetizable like MVC. So it combines the best of both worlds and it has something that's very new, which is not open source, where it's open source code, it's open state, where it's open state database. Like open state means the backend is open also. So all the applications that get built out,

Starting point is 01:24:41 essentially our clients that same backend, that same Bitcoin or Ethereum or or would have you back in. Then you exchange between them. The true scarcity now comes not from locking in your users, but from holding a currency. It kind of gets reduced. The IP gets reduced to its minimal viable thing, which is holding that cryptocurrency and what you can do with that. Give me the media analogy.

Starting point is 01:24:59 Where does the media sit? How do I, as a user, have an experience on what media to view and to access? Like think about, because again, just speaking in a layman's term for folks maybe to understand, most people, I don't think understand the dynamics of what underlies a social network as much as they understand the user experience

Starting point is 01:25:18 of browsing YouTube, right? So yeah, what is my option in browsing the decentralized version of YouTube? What does that experience end up looking like in this decentralized world? Right? Who ultimately adjudicates the algorithm that defines what my recommended videos are that I'm going to be accessing from these kind of different nodes? Well, I think the idea is you can bring your own. You can pick one.

Starting point is 01:25:41 They'll be a library of them. Well, that's my point. The picking function is what didn't work in Web 1.0 or Web 0.9, right? So we'll take a look at, so first of all, that state could potentially, so today, blockchains are not very scalable, but tomorrow, they're actually, they're improving very rapidly. If you're falling mad, if you're following Polygon,

Starting point is 01:26:02 and if you're looking at what Salana is doing, like you can do a lot more on-chain in 2021 than you could in 2020. It's kind of like bandwidth. It just improves every year. So more applications will become feasible like search indexes. Moreover, blockchains actually,

Starting point is 01:26:18 so just to your specific point about search indexing, blockchains actually radically simplify search indexes. To such a point, there a dark horse competitor to Google. What I mean by that is Google index the open web because the open web is open. And then social networks were like a dark web to them where that's why they were so mad. Google was so mad it couldn't acquire Facebook, right? Because it couldn't index it. It couldn't index Twitter had to deal with them. That's all on their server. So the social web is even harder to index than the open web.

Starting point is 01:26:46 But block-explo- or blockchains and block-exploters, which are like search engines on the top of them, blockchains are easier to index than either the open web or the social web. And the reason is many of the problems associated with indexing just go away. For example, just one small problem as you're probably aware. When you're indexing the open web, let's see, you've got a million websites you're crawling. Each one of them, you only have a certain bandwidth amount total. So you have to figure out, okay, do I have Recrawl this site or this one? Which one is going to freshen?

Starting point is 01:27:13 Okay, does this update every day or not? So you have to run all these statistical estimators just to figure out when to crawl a site. All that goes away, for example, in the context of a blockchain where you just subscribe and you get a block of transactions. Everybody got the real-time index and there's no advantage being Google and having to serve from. Freeberg, we got a rap. For Bestie Chimath, David Sacks, Freeberg, and our Bestie Bology. Thanks for coming on the pod and we will see you all next time on the All On The Package. Bye bye. Oh, man! What? What? What? What?

Starting point is 01:28:05 What? Besties are gone. Oh, go through that. That's my dog taking a wish to drive away to the next. Wait, I know. Oh, man. My ham is actually a little meaty. I've been sitting here for a while.

Starting point is 01:28:16 We should all just get a room and just have one big huge or two because they're all just like this sexual tension that we just need to release out of them. What? You're the beef. What you're that beat? What you're that beat? You're a beat. Beat it. What you're that beat?

Starting point is 01:28:30 We need to get merges aren't there. I'm doing all this! I'm doing all this! Holy...

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E48: The role of decentralization, China/US break down & more with Bestie Guestie Balaji Srinivasan

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