Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Balaji Srinivasan: The Network State Is Eternal (#277)

Episode Date: December 4, 2022

Balaji S. Srinivasan is an American entrepreneur and investor. He holds a Ph.D. from Stanford university and sports several high scale financial successes; he was the co-founder of Counsyl, the former Chief Technology Officer of Coinbase, and former general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. twitter.com/balajis www.amazon.com/Network-State-How-Start-Country-ebook/dp/B09VPKZR3G Connect with me: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast Subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show for amazing content from Apple’s best podcast of 2018! Can you do me a favor? Please leave a rating and review of my Podcast:  🎧 On Apple devices, click here, https://apple.co/39UaHlB scroll down to the ratings and leave a 5 star rating and review The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast. 🎙️On Spotify it’s here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2G3PRMUhxGQkyQzLiiCqlf?si=8656119458df4555 🎧 On Audible it’s here : https://www.audible.com/pd/Into-the-Impossible-With-Brian-Keating-Podcast/B08K56PXJX?action_code=ASSGB149080119000H&share_location=pdp&shareTest=TestShar Other ways to rate here: https://briankeating.com/podcast-  Support the podcast on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating  or become a Member on YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You can't nuke a network. How would you nuke Bitcoin? You would go to arm you. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another fascinating episode of the Into the Impossible podcast. Tis I, your fearful host, Dr. Brian Keating, Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of California, San Diego, and also the Associate Director of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination in today's episode with Dr. Balaji-Shernavason. is sure to expand your imagination.

Talking to him is like drinking from an intellectual fire hose. Somebody shredded the Encyclopedia of Britannica into digital format and is beaming it straight into your mind. Talks faster than I do. Talks deeper than I do. And it's really fun to speak with a genius like him. We talked about so much ranging from U.S. politics with a special degree of attention paid to the San Francisco area where he and I both used to live.

Talked about his new book, The Network State, which is available for free, and we'll have show notes that link to that down below. And we also talked about the upside of science, technology, engineering, math, and the power of supporting the underdogs, people like Ramonajan, who revolutionized the world of mathematics in much the same way as Albert Einstein did for physics. and the impact of his work is still being felt to this day. And Baleji has a special connection, not just because Baleji's last name is Srinivasa,

and Raman and John's first name was Srinivasa. That's the least of the connection. I think the depth of their intellects is what really binds them together. You'll hear about fascinating magical numbers known as taxi cab numbers and many more delicious brain nuggets to chew on. And I hope if you're getting some value out of these, episodes, you'll spread the word. You'll share the episodes with friends. And in so doing, really help me out. How about this project of connecting a multiverse of minds together?

Another way you can do that is to leave a review on Apple Podcast. I implore you. And I'll keep doing it until we reach the magic number, not of 1729, although that would be kind of cool. but until we get to perhaps a number closer to 1,000, that's what I'm going to stop bugging you guys. So faster we can get there, the better. We've got over 700 around the world, including this one, who just came in from Great Britain,

from someone named Super Sayan, says it makes hard science convincingly comprehensible for the non-scientific people like me. I love it. Thank you, Super Sion. I love it too. I love doing it. I love talking to brilliant minds.

like Balagy and many, many others. And I know that you'll enjoy this episode. So for now, sit back, relax, go on a brain-boggling adventure to see how deep the human mind can go. Let me know what you thought about the episode, leave a review, and a set of stars,

a collection, an asterism, as we astronomers say. Enjoy this ride into the impossible. Let's go. Any sufficiently advanced technology is in distinguishing from magic. We're recording this a week or so before the biggest elections of our lives in the government of the United States,

of America, at least here in California. It's a late evening, a week or so before the election. I'm talking today to a renowned individual, a thinker, an engineer, a creator, sort of a philosopher, a guru, to many around the world, maybe millions. And that's Bologi Sernivasa.

Dr. Bala Jernabasan. And we, I think we barely may have overlapped. I was at Stanford. You were there for a very long time. Maybe I'm a little bit older than you. But we definitely overlap where we're from. We're both from Long Island. So I think that's pretty cool.

I'm actually from Suffolk County, though. You're from Nassau County, if I understand. Yes, that's right. But anyway, it's the longest island in America, at least. Maybe one of the longest islands in the world. We're going to get to the world. We're going to talk about a phenomenal new contribution to the world. and that's Ballyji's newest book.

So first of all, thank you so much for joining us. It's early where you were. It's late where I am. We'll turn up the Zoom, tune up our appearances, Max Mulli. How are you doing today? Good. I'm doing great. Thanks for joining us.

So as I mentioned, I always like to start off an interview with a renowned author such as yourself by doing that, which you are never supposed to do, which is to judge a book by its cover. But Baleji, as you know, what else do you have to go on when you see a new book? All you have is cover and the author's name and the subtitle. So I thought you would start by, how did you come up at the name, the network state, the subtitle, the cover design, and the overall gestalt of this magnificent new book? Well, thanks. Appreciate it. Yeah.

So, you know, maybe you can put the cover just to my left or something while I'm talking about it. Yeah. You know, the network state is a seemingly abstract concept that one of the important things that we did is illustrated, like, as visually as possible. on the cover of the book and then later in the network scene in one image very early in the book in chapter one like basically the you know we did the network in one sentence then we get to never see in one image basically it's two or three pages into the book for the ADD okay and uh the reason for that is that something that's really abstract or difficult to grasp often a you know pictures worth a thousand words and when you see essentially a social network with some sort of

moral value or, you know, some belief that then holds territory around the world that's not contiguous in one place. That kind of illustrates what the network state is. And so what that cover illustrates are three different, you know, groups that, you know, represented by like a yin yang symbol and the Vitruvian symbol and the Bitcoin symbol that own different pieces of territory around the world, but really their capital is in the cloud. And so, you know, they are, they have projections down onto the earth. They might have, you know, a million people in the cloud and a few thousand people at each node on the earth. So it might even be like a thousand to one ratio, but those nodes are actually quite important. And those people in the cloud, of course, are scattered all over the earth,

but there's a few points of physical concentration. And the fact that those exist are actually very important because it means that it's not a purely digital thing. It does have a physical to it. It's cloud first, land, less, but not land never. And so the cover of the book is sort of a way of showing that poetically without, you know, all of the bells and whistles that you'd use to show it a little more, you know, granularity or operational. And then if you go to the network state in one image and you click on that image there, or if you look at the GIF in that thing, that gives a more zoomed-in view where now you're actually seeing a census. And you're not just seeing that a social network is crowdfunding territory.

If you're seeing more than the four nodes or three nodes that are shown on the cover of the book, you're seeing more like 50 nodes. And those 50 nodes around the world have between like 1,000 to 10,000 people, or actually some go all the way down to one person, just somebody in their room or two. You know, you might require a node to have at least two people. Fine, okay. But, you know, let's say it goes down to two, but up to, you know, 20,000 people. and but then the whole thing sums to a million people around the world and it sums to a certain number of

square meters around the world and it sums to a certain amount of annual income around the world if you take all the on-chain income and then that second image the network scene in one image just a few pages in shows how you can build something that looks a lot like a state it's got a population income and real estate footprint comparable to that legacy states but you're sewing together a piece of territory and population from around the world, much as Bitcoin was a decentralized currency, this is a recipe for a decentralized state, right? So that's what those early images on the cover and in chapter one are meant to convey. And I wonder if we could immediately kind of get into the nuts and bolts of what a network actually is. And kind of as I understand, the fundamental, you know,

kind of Newton's laws or shorting our equation of network behavior is Metcalf's law. which I kind of think about in many ways, but one is entropically and how you percolate out, you know, sources on nodes and how those nodes feed together information and the fundamental unit of information. I wonder if we could start by sort of, you know, going back to Bitcoin itself. It's obviously central. I mean, you play a huge role in the story of Bitcoin. But I wonder, I've often wondered, there's nothing about Bitcoin that couldn't have been implemented, you know, 20 years ago, 30 years ago. So why do you think it took so long? I mean, I'm not diminishing Notoshi, whatever, Satoshi's role at all, or any of your contributions. But fundamentally, it's a relatively simple algorithm that's what gives it so much power.

Why do you think it came about when it did? I guess that's a succinct way of asking this question. Why did it take so long or maybe it wasn't so long from your perspective? Yeah, I mean, so the thing is that certain things, you know, like, for example, the hash functions that Satoshi used were not available, you know, 30 years ago, to my knowledge, like the elliptic curve work. And so he had to snap together stuff that was like if what was the exact date that shot 256 was published 2001, I think, by NRAC. And then BreitemD.

And their predecessors were 128 and it wasn't, you know, completely. Yeah, no, it's true. There were there were hash functions and so like basically, I think there are a few things. First is, remember, you, you needed to have bandwidth suitable. enough people who had computers that were permanently connected to the internet to host the Bitcoin blockchain. And, you know, probably even in the year 2001, maybe you could have done that in academia, but at least the initial vision of lots of home computers doing that and being always online

and synchronizing back and forth. I mean, peer-to-peer networks, you know, he cites, he uses the term peer-to-peer in the white paper, which had at the time fallen out of fashion. but like Kazah and Skype and so on. They weren't like that old, right? Like Skype, you know, launched, I think, 2004, if I'm not mistaken, 2003. Okay. So it's like about five or six years after Skype.

And then there's a financial crisis, which was the cultural trigger. Yeah. So you had to have P to P-to-P networking. You had to have shots 56 or probably something similar. At least that came out in 2001. It was relatively soon after all those pieces came together. But, you know, could have potentially. it'd be done sooner, maybe.

The interesting thing is there wasn't, to my knowledge, a Liebnitz to Satoshi's Newton that say it's not like there was somebody who was putting those pieces together in quite that way at that time. And they just, you know, it's not like Ethereum is wonderful and it's amazing, but it's not like it shipped, you know, three months later with a different notation, but the same concepts. You know, it was something where Satoshi genuinely pioneered this new thing that people really didn't get for a while because it started with different premises

in the existing system. And so if you start with different premises, then, you know, whatever you build from that, it's not obvious that it's going to actually be useful. Like, for example, if people are like, okay, we're into the concept of internal combustion engines and you build a better one, then it's very easily accepted that it's 10% better, you know, want energy or something. When you're talking about a decentralized digital currency, it's not even obvious still to many people that they want that, right?

Why wouldn't I just, you know, have the bank hold my money or the government hold my money? They don't understand the concept of digital property. or what have you yet. And so it's still a non-obvious thing to many people. But I don't know. I think about 50% of people get it thereabouts, depending, when I say 50%, there's hundreds of millions of people around the world

who hold cryptocurrency. And then a large enough number of people now get it on some level that they at least understand why it's around. Let's put it like that. Whether it's 50%, it's hundreds of millions of people. That's a better term for it. In absolute numbers,

there's a large number of people who get it down at this point. So that's the answer to, to, you know, why didn't it happen sooner? Mm-hmm. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. You also asked earlier, like, why the term, the network state. And that is just something where, you know, sometimes you name a book last or, you know, this is something where in a sense I wrote the book in a few months,

and in a sense, I wrote the book in several years because I'd been thinking about some of the concepts for a while. For example, one critical concept is people don't just judge a book by its cover. they will often judge a book by its title. Yeah. You know, for example, how many people have read the end of history versus they've heard the title and a little quick summary and they argue with it based on their sort of compressed understanding.

Right. That's not necessarily a completely wrong thing to do because that compressed thing, you know, is a summary. But what happens is obviously in a compressed summary, you can't answer every single critique and criticism and so on. And some people would, you know, say, oh, Fukuyama didn't consider this, this and that, end of history is so stupid. And often he had entertained those counter arguments in the book, which you cannot easily fit

into a sentence or two, right? Right. Yeah. With that said, that said, a phrase travels, right? Like much farther than a full book. So you have to kind of armor up that phrase and have it do as much work for you as possible. Just as an example, like, why do people call themselves democratic socialists? okay, in their very limited space to kind of convey a message.

They use the very first word to say, no, no, we're democratic socialists. We're not like the communists who are undemocratic socialists, right? So they are intentionally using some very scarce, you know, verbal real estate to preempt the most significant, the most significant bit is carrying, doing a lot of the work in that. sent in that for a lot of the work that's right because at the time you know like certainly the mid-twene century that you know otherwise they'd be the undemocratic socialists right that's why other folks will call themselves you know like the christian socialist oh we're not progressives right progressives right and then you're regressive yeah yeah yeah exactly but but like like if you say christian socialist some people would say that right or liberation theology you know in south america well we're not

godless communists we're godful communists but uh you know and so so often that that word is chosen in such a way as to sort of embrace the fact that people will often just engage with the phrase. And network state, you can get a lot out of just the phrase. First is, network replaces nation. And so it sounds, it starts with an end. That's just like a small thing, but it's just like helps fit in the brain in the same way, right? Second is the network actually, if you read the book, there's like four definitions of network state that are interesting.

The first is the network is actually the people. And, you know, the nation and the state are different. Um, you know, a nation, it's like shared birth, shared, you know, shared descent, like the same, uh, root word in Latin as like natality. Right. So Nazis, I think. And, um, whereas the state is an administrative layer above that people. So the nation is the nation is the state is the management. It's like labor and management in a factory. They're actually quite distinct. Okay. And so you could have the Japanese nation and the American state over it. You could have the, the Kurdish nation and the Turkish state over it. Or the Catalonian nation and the Spanish state over it. And those are different. Okay. And the, or you could have the Japanese nation in the Japanese state, and the Japanese state is just a subset of those Japanese people and a totally different subset would result in a very different kind of state. Once you realize this is separable, which is not obvious because you usually hear them as a compound term, then you're like, okay, how can we separate and then recombine in a different way? A network state is one where the network replaces the nation, and now it's not necessarily common descent or common physical location for hundreds or thousands of years, but it's a proposition nation. It's literally a nation of shared belief, but that's a network today because those folks are online. So the first way is you swap in the network for the nation.

The second is the network, because it's on computers, it's logic, its code, is the state itself. So network state is a way of talking about a state that is governed by the rules of the network, such as, you know, law is code, right? Like the whole Larry Lessig concept, right? So the state, the governance is now digital. right? A third is when you talk about a state, usually people are thinking about something that's got physical terrain that it controls, right? And in the network state, it does have physical terrain that it controls, but that physical terrain is a network around the world.

It's a physical network. It's little pockets, just like on the book's cover as we were just talking about. So the land of the network state is a network. Okay. And the fourth and perhaps most abstract definition is in the book I talk about like God's data network as these three Leviathens that people are essentially implicitly invoke on a daily basis. Like they live their lives, they often don't think of this explicitly, but it's like, you know, who is the strongest force in their life? Is it Almighty God, right? Is it the U.S. military? Yeah. Or is it encryption? You know, what is it that stops you from stealing? In the 1800s, it's because you thought you got, you know, hit by a lightning bolt, you get smoked by God if you stole.

1900s, you might not believe in God, but the boys in blue are there. They're throwing you in jail. The state will punish you, right? And the 2000s on the computer network where there is no obvious God and there is no state, right? It's the network that will, that will, uh, won't let you steal. Either the social network will swarm you or the encrypted network or the encryption will, will stop you from transferring the funds.

And what I mean by that is, if somebody steals your cryptocurrency and you're in Idaho, and they're in, you know, Eastern Europe or something like that. To go to the Idaho Police Department and file a case, that's no longer a geographical thing. The state is as powerless there, relatively speaking. I mean, maybe you can try and get the FBI or something to do something. But the state is not set up for that anymore than the church was set up to really be an administrator in the same way that a secular state is. So the network is like a new Leviathan.

And then network state refers to the fact that these Leviathans are like, you know, almost like fundamental forces, and you can take fusions of them, and network state fuses the last two, right? So you can get a lot of the title. Go ahead. Yeah, no, there's certainly a million different launching off points. And I should say, we're limiting this conversation to just twice as long as the conversation you had with Lex Friedman. So, but, you know, because we are heading into election day in America here, and you're not located here currently, but you obviously have opinions about it. I just want to turn to that one phrase that you see. said, one of the networks that was enforcement mechanisms of the past, in fact, mentioned by the

Founding Fathers in the Constitution was that this was a constitution that was wholly unfit for a non-God-fearing population. In other words, God fearing their nature was essential, even the ones that were deist or even atheist of the Founding Fathers. And so they implemented something which would seem to be sort of subjective and hard to implement in a purely cryptographic or, you know, a chain-based reality, when you could do everything with 50.000 0.1% consensus, and that was the electoral college. And obviously there's lots of moves to get rid of that, but that's, you know, wholly, you know, effectively meant to undo the tyranny of the majority. And I guess I wonder, you know, is there room in a network state for those four different, you know, kind of concepts or previous concepts to still do useful work? In other words, if you had, say, a theocracy, you know, could it also tolerate a network state?

And in other words, are they exclusive, say, the belief that held together civilization for thousands of years and instantiated laws between men and fellow men? Is there room in such a concept as a network state for God, or maybe the overt, you know, a converse question, you know, if you have a state that is, you know, purely based on, you know, some sort of notion of Ten Commandments, whatever you want is your moral code. Is there room for, you know, another power to make these decisions almost exclusively numerically, you would see? So is there room for another power to make like political decisions?

Is that what you're saying? Yeah. I mean, is this sort of replacement? I mean, if you viewed it, if you viewed the United States Constitution as being, you know, suitable as the founding father said for only for God-fearing population, then, you know, is, yeah, is the network state, you know, excluding God or, you know, vice versa? Oh, so it's not. So in fact, I have this concept in the book called The One Commandment, which I do think

that whatever you do for a new community, I think it's, I'm sympathetic to Daos. I like Daos, but the big problem with a lot of DAOs, decentralized autonomous organizations, they're not really autonomous and they're not really even that decentralized except for the location of the people. They often start with a token. They start with money, right? And the problem with that is, I've ever seen an idiocracy. Yeah, actually, Mike Judge is a graduate, physics graduate of UC San Diego.

Great. Okay. And I'm going to have him on the podcast. He promised to come up. All right. Great. Well, so there's a scene there where he's like, wow, you like money too? Me too, right?

And, you know, the reason that's actually a great scene is it just emphasized the fact that money is universal barter. It's universally valuable. And it's universally valuable. Then clearly it's not specifically something. I mean, everybody will be like, like, okay, yeah, I'll take 10 bucks. No matter all their ideological differences or whatever, they'll basically take some money.

And so what that means is a Dow can bring people in and, oh, wow, we've got 10,000 people in our Discord. Why are there 10,000 people in their Discord? Because they're just waiting for an AirDrop. And they'll type it in a funny way, when AirDrop or something like that, right? And they're saying it kind of joking, but they're not. They're the only reason that they're there is for the money. They don't really have a shared belief.

They're kind of, right? And so the problem is that, well, you know, economics and money, and so on that's good, you have to have a belief structure first of common values. Otherwise, there's many different ways that people can like scam or, you know, engage in low trust activity with each other if they don't think of themselves as part of basically the same group and there being something other than just this transaction at hand, right? They have to think of themselves as being an iterated game with the other person. And, you know, just like, I mean, there's a thousand examples of this, but like, you know, shrinkflation. That is, right? Yeah.

You know, you sell it. Yeah, yeah, you're selling, I don't know, milk, but you sell it for the same price and you call it, you know, milk, but you just, you make the container, it has like less volume of liquid in it, you know, right? And same size box or yeah, but you get less fluid mass. Less mass in there. And you're just kind of, you know, you sort of, that's like a company which is, it's reducing the amount that you are getting for the same price, but it's kind of tricking people into still

buying it. It's on the line, right? And there's a lot of that borderline stuff that happens if there isn't sort of shared values between the buyer and the seller. And this is for a thousand things. It's for, you know, it's for labor. It's for, you know, management. It's for a thousand things, right? So you kind of have to start, whether it's with a shared belief in God, you certainly need a shared belief of some in something, you know. And, you know, and, you know, historically you could say the belief in God, well, that's like a decentralized and scalable enforcer. Why? Because someone who's a God-fearing man, you know, that old phrase, well, you know, even if there wasn't a state around to punish them, even if there wasn't a state, even if they were at the

head of the state, if they feared God, well, they'd behave even when no one was watching them. Because, oh, you know, they might get hit by a lightning bolt or something like that, right? And so there's a, there's a rational sense in which you want an irrational actor who's a, quote, God-fearing person that behaves even when they cannot be punished. Or more generally, they believe in something bigger than, you know, just the state itself. They behave well even other than that, right? And so, so, yeah, so in the book, I do talk about this one commandment concept, which is, you know, I'm not saying that every new startup society or aspiring network state needs to have its own 10 commandments.

But you might be able to have one commandment, which is one moral critique of society where you think your society is better. And you kind of need that level of focus, just like a startup company needs a product that is better than, you know, the existing marketplace on one very core dimension because it's very hard to improve on even one dimension. You have to kill it on that dimension. Here, you need a moral improvement on the on society at large. And you say, for example, just give two examples, cul-de-sac. They're cul-de-sac.com, they're saying cars are bad, right? And so therefore, car-free neighborhood is good. Walkability is good.

They start with those moral premises, okay? And from that, they derive the concept of, let's build a car-free, walk-able neighborhood, but the cars are pushed to the boundary. A totally different concept is KIFT, K-A-F-T, okay? Also, start society. And they start with mobility is good, so van life is good. Okay. So cul-de-sac is walkability.

I don't want to touch a car at all. Mm-hmm. Gift is a different thing, which is I want to be able to see this, you know, huge outdoors and travel and not be bound to one location. Therefore, I'm going to live in a car. I'm a city-free life, not a car-free life. Okay. I'm going to see the great outdoors and so on.

What's funny is the same person might actually think, oh, both of these are pretty cool, but they're both mutually incompatible rejections of, you know, modern society. Yet the COs are friendly. Okay. And that's actually a pretty interesting thing where, of course, you couldn't combine. car free and living in a van at the same time. Okay. Obviously.

Still, you could imagine someone picking like, okay, I like a walk-well neighborhood. I also like the constant of actually seeing this giant country that we're in and not just, you know, seeing it in picture books, actually going and bathing in a stream. And, you know, today I'm in Nevada and tomorrow I'm in Montana. That's actually pretty cool. I could just drive up there. Wow. Awesome.

Right. And, you know, more generally, you could have, for example, a carnivore community where they only eat meat or a vegan community. where they only eat vegetables and fruit or whatever. And both of those would probably be healthier than the McDonald's community. That is the default. So essentially what I say in the book is that you do need a common belief. And I think that's abstracted by the that.

That's not just like, you know, okay, Balji, just saying something. That is a distillation of countless different communities that have been found in the past. And, you know, one thing I quote is the, I think, Sir Walter Raleigh and some of the early American communities, is there's this historian Paul Johnson in an interview with Charlie Rose, which I quote in the book. And what that historian observes is that the early American colonies that were for-profit often just gave up in the winter. But those that had a religious belief continued through the tough winters. Just like those who are zealous about crypto continue through the tough crypto winters, right? It's somewhat analogous.

It's kind of, you know, it's obviously something of a joke, but it's not completely a joke, right? You need something more than money to carry you forward where the money isn't there. You need to be irrational to achieve the greatest results. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill, four-burner gas grill, on special buy for only $199. And entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $499. This Memorial Day get low prices,

Guaranteed at the Home Depot. While supplies last, pricing valid May 14th or May 27th. U.S. only exclusions apply. See Home Depot.com slash price match for details. All right. So I wonder in those communities that you talked about if they would allow any taxi cab numbers. And I wonder if you can expound a little bit on your fascination

with one such taxi cab number, 1729. And the context I want to, so I'd love to hear it in your own voice, because you're such a champion of Ramanujan and his titanic contributions. But I wonder, you know, in reading the book and coming to the end, it's, you know, essentially a love letter at the very end to him. But the centrality of math, and, you know, math is sort of the, in some sense, the most abstract. I mean, I always say you can't hand me a triangle, but the human mind can think about a triangle. You can't hand me infinity.

We can think about infinity. But the level where, you know, we sort of meet the instantiation of the instantiation of the, the network state, I think for the first time it really would be at a base layer predicated on math, right? I mean, a lot of the operational behavior and the consensus and so forth, and obviously, the monetary exchange would all be math-based. And so it reminds me of this famous essay by Eugene Vigner, a famous physicist, mathematician, physicist, who spoke of the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the physical sciences, wondering why, for example, you know the square of negative one why that has any interplay with with

electromagnetic fields right yeah sure yes and statistics which from which comes from the properties of the state the mathematics of the state that's the etymology of statistics as you know that you know the classic key variable key feature metric of that is a normal distribution which describes populations as normal population it has a number pie in it what why does the ratio of the circle's circumference to its diameter play any role in the governance of a nation. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the centrality of mass in the network states and the various configurations thereof. And maybe maybe also along the way, we'll get into

Ramanujan and why he's so important to you. Sure. Yeah. So on centrally math, you know, one thing you just mentioned earlier in the conversation is that, you know, the core thing about the network is Metcalf's law. And certainly Metcalf's law, you know, network effect scales in square. That's, That's theoretically important. Two things, though. First is, depending on the actual network, it's often, you know, much less than N squared. For example, that's the number of potential connections. But, you know, of the 4 billion people on Facebook, it's not like they're actually all literally connected directly to each other.

There's, you know, some people have said it's like more like N log in or. Yeah, the smart world approximation, right? Yeah, exactly. It's more like K times N or something like that in terms of the actual. And you could actually, Facebook itself could graph this and there's a bunch of research on this. I haven't looked at the exact curve. But it's not exactly n-square. That's kind of one.

The second thing is maybe deeper point relates to the mathematics of it. I think for the network, the most important concept, the thing I think about the most is a very simple seeming thing, but that you can get very far with it. And that is the concept of the geodesic, graph geodesic distance versus the geographic distance. And the geographic distance or the great circle distance is the distance, the distance is the distance between two points on the surface of the earth, like as the crow flies from one to the other. Okay. And, um, you know, you can, you can think of that as, you know, plane flight distance.

You can make a somewhat more complicated version where, you know, for example, South Africa and Argentina, you could easily fly from one to the other, but to walk from one to the other would have been difficult. So you had to go all the way around the Bering Strait and down, you know, the US, right? Like I'm sure someone has done that ancestral like migration of humanity, though he didn't come from South Africa, but you know what I mean? like that huge walk across Asia or whatever, right? Maybe it's possible in the in the thaw of the, you know,

it's probably not possible where you can't get. Land bridge, right. Yeah, land bridge. So point is, you know, whether you're talking about it as a crow flies or how primitive man might walk, right, or surf or whatever, that's like the physical distance in the world. And that's the distance that we're used to in terms of saying people are close or far or what have you.

But the geodesic distance, a graph geodesic, is the number of degrees of separation in a social network. And that's actually also a distance metric. And in the technical sense, like, you know, D of A comma B. And it's like non-negative and, you know, it satisfies a triangle inequality and whatever. And the graph geodesic, okay, that is something which is, you can build a geography on it.

You can build a topology on it. You basically have something where, you know, that shortest path distance between two nodes. Okay. It's like, it's something that you can, well, first of all, you can do a projection of a graph down to two dimensions. And so you can make graph proximity in this relatively high dimensional space. You can visualize it in two or three dimensions. But second is, it gives you a different intuition about how the space works. For example, a node can instantly connect to it

another node just by friending a bunch of people. Or it can instantly be very far away by blocking them, right? That we know for like an individual. That now extends to entire groups, which we haven't really seen as much on the internet. But a group can suddenly become adjacent to another group by building a ton of connections there. Or it can suddenly break away from a group by, you know, cutting it. It's as if every continent and nation in the world was on wheels, right? You know, one thing we sort of take for granted is Russia, the entity has kind of

be in the same place. And it has ancient geographical relationships, you know, with Turkey and with Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. And then also on its Asian boundary with, you know, it's just ancient, but they have longstanding relationships with Japan and China, right? And so, you know, the borders may expand and contract. And that means, you know, Ukraine is inside during the Soviet era and it's outside. But essentially, Russia has been in the same place that we kind of take that for granted. By contract, in the cloud with the geodesic distance, you can have Ethereum as this cluster, and then Solana suddenly just appears next to it, right?

And it's competing with it or what have you, right? And then Minero is there, and then Zcash just appears next to it, okay? And this is when you take a tech company and it's got some market and then another tech company just appears next to it and is competing for that same market. Or then it just bows out of the market and it just disappears. Okay. These are like large groups of people can just like materialize in space. The intuition is more like virtual reality where,

boom, a bunch of people can just appear and they can just disappear. Now, that's digital, so the speed is instant. But it's a geography that's closer to our hunter-gatherer ancestry where you're wandering around and suddenly, boom, another tribe could just appear. And you might be in competition. Right. Or boom, it could leave. Right.

And this is just a totally different way of thinking about how states are organized and what have you, because fundamental assumptions about proximity and how governance is done, if the geography keeps changing, then you cannot assume that the geographical borders will remain constant. Yeah. If people can connect across borders, you cannot assume that governance within borders is necessarily the right thing. You know, as I was saying to Lex, like, you know, what's older than borders is no borders. because you had hunter-gatherers roaming the entire world. And there's that aspect of humanity that desires to travel the world and see everything and not be bound. And there's the other aspect that wants, you know, there's no place like home, right? That's a fundamental tension within humanity.

And the math, I think, illustrates that where you start realizing the geography of the cloud is just very different than the geography of the land. You can teleport, you can be adjacent, you can be infinitely far with blocking, you can move groups nearby, you can move groups far away. It's as if these clouds like would float around and there's much more dynamic and mobile and evanescent and so on than the geography of land. So I think the metaphor actually, you know, of cloud and land, you can go pretty far with that. Go ahead. So thinking back just to close the loop on Ramanujan. So.

Oh, yes. I want to ask you, you know, first of all, there are two countries that are formed in 1947, Israel and India slash Pakistan. What do you attribute the success of these two different populations? They figure prominently in the book, you know, in one way or another, and some of the work and conversations that you had. What makes them so, you know, either, you know, prototypical of good or bad aspects of potential network state material?

And what do you attribute the success or the, you know, they far outnumber most, you know, kind of ethnicities or nationalities, at least if you think of the Jews as a, as, you know, as, you know, as, you know, as, as, you know, as, as, you know, as a, as, you know, as a, Indians and Jews do pretty well when it comes to Nobel Prizes, for example. Okay. You know, but, uh, nobody's perfect, right? So, um, but tell me, what do you attribute, uh, you know, this to? And, and what is Roman Nugent specifically? I mean, he, he figures prominently in your thinking, obviously, and I don't

think you've talked as much about him specifically. So what does he mean to you? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, Rbonogen is, as probably most people watching this know, India's, you know, most famous mathematician and, you know, had a very romantic life in the sense of, you know, tragic, but, you know, like movie worthy. And there's, you know, a book in a movie called The Man Who New Infinity and actually Goodwill Hunting is based, I believe, in part on his life. And essentially was this mathematical genius that grew up in, you know, poverty in India. And then what happened was he, you know, was able to figure out a big chunk of math on his own and wrote these letters to all these mathematicians, most of whom ignored him. But one guy, G.H. Hardy in the UK, paid attention and basically airlifted Ramanjin out and thus began just a rampage through math. And, you know, Romangin's notebooks today still, you know, there's journals devoted just to them. where he would just write down these formulas and then, you know, just with intuition, he'd get these, you know, equations right.

Sometimes he had a proof often he didn't, but quite often those amazing identities, somebody could prove them with a lot of effort. But he would just like, you know, spit it out like a neural network and may not be able to explain the process necessarily, but you could check them and they're very plausible. And unfortunately, he died very young. And, you know, when he, on his deathbed, you know, the Hardy was coming in to try to, you know, cheer him up and said, oh, you know, there's this taxi cab that we came in on the license plate was very boring. Its number was 1729. And he said, no, it's a sum of two cubes in, uh, it's the first

number of some of two cubes in two different ways. One people's 12 cube equals equals nine people's 10 cube, right? And that's kind of like what E equals MC squared is for, you know, the West in India, right? Like, because it's, uh, it's just like this cool equation. I mean, it's on the one hand, kind of trivial, you know, once you know it, okay, you're just cubing numbers and summing them together. It's more that he was just on a first name basis with every number and could just like whip out this random identity, you know, when someone asked him right about something, right? Right. And so so that's actually something which is sort of symbolizes to me all of what I think of as the dark talent of the world. You know, just like the Hubble telescope, it's all about the dark matter, right?

Because all of this dark talent, which potentially is just languishing in obscurity. And just like we had the Hubble telescope, we now have the mobile telescope and we can go and find all these people. We can pull them out and we can actually, you know, basically give them the opportunities that both they deserve and that the world needs because we need more remodgents, right? We need all this talent in, you know, all these places that have just been kind of left out of the 20th century, the quote third world or what have you, or even the second world, you know, people under communist states, people in poor countries. And now they're actually not so poor. Yeah. So this is something which, you know, has kind of a mathematical meaning, cultural meaning. It's, you know, it's obviously important for India, but it's important for the rest of the world.

And it's something that I think about a lot. I've thought about for many years. And I think now the time is right to potentially go in the remote first world, you know, try and find these next remonogens. Yeah. And I want to dovetail that. First, by asking a question, I asked Michael Saylor almost two years ago now. And that was, what is the purpose of money? What is the value of money?

I said to him, he's a, he's a bachelor. He has no kids, no, you know, no ex. no spouses of any kind. You know, he said he's, you know, his money is basically going to be for him, and then he's going to save it up, and then he's going to apply it to Sailor Academy and education and so forth.

But I ask him, what's the purpose of money? You know, that's what you're going to do with it, but what's the purpose of it? He basically said power, and money is, you know, is basically stored up, you know, energy that can be, you know, displaced and used in a variety of ways. And I said, Michael, I hope you're not, you know,

forming some like militia, you know, the Sailor Army, He has a sailor army, you know, obviously, but not of the violent kind. And may it always be like that. But what is it to you about it? What does money do for you? I said to him, you know, like from what Charlie Sheen's character said to Gordon Gecko and Wall Street, you know, the first version of it said, you know, how many yachts can you water ski

behind? What does money mean to you in contrast to Michael or any other guests that I may have had on? I think money is a tool, not an end in its own right? I have, you know, I have nothing against money, but it's very much like a, it's an acquired skill that I've had in terms of, you know, I've very much charted out as like a career academic and it's just, you know, doing math for a long time and stats and, you know, genomics and what have you. I didn't really think, I didn't really care about money too much.

And I still don't really care about money. I made myself realize, okay, it's an important constraint that you need to use to get things, but there's some people who wake in the morning and they go to sleep at night, and all they're thinking about is how to increase their balance and what have-you-right. Right. And instead, you know, really, for example, let's say that you wanted to understand the genome. Okay. If you get a grant of $50 million and each genome costs you $1,000 to sequence,

that's a historic $1,000 genome prices for like, you know, 10 years ago, well, you're limited to 50,000 genomes. But if you can figure out a business model, that makes you even $100,000. per genome on net. You're now unlimited in the number of genomes you can sequence because each new one it adds to your data set and you can just keep going, right? So if it turns out that you need to find a way to sequence a million genomes in order to understand human biology that now by solving the money problem, you know, by solving the economics and figuring out a business model that can generate that data, you can now accumulate enough data to be able to diagnose and potentially

eventually treat diseases, right? That's the way that I kind of think about things. That's what originally got me into, you know, one of the reasons that got me into actually, okay, let's build a business rather than just doing things in academia. Because business can scale, obviously, and an academic research paper is not meant to scale. That's a limited study, limited study size. This is meant to potentially grow to infinity. And for those things that need large data sets to understand the world, you're going to need that. And then you get into other aspects where if you want true independence,

academic independence, well, if you believe that you have the skills to get, you know, tenure in the hard sciences at a university. You are overlapping with, it's not identical to, but it is overlapping with the skills required to become independently wealthy by, you know, your mid-30s or something like that. And if you can do that, well, then you've got tenure in a different way, right? Tenure itself is like a illiquid asset where you can sort of trade it between universities and you can be tenured at X place and you can trade it for a tenure track at Y place or Z place. relatively illiquid, but it's somewhat tradable. Whereas money, if you just had the runway for,

you know, 50 years of, you know, just being able to live without, you know, going and doing anything, you could just devote that to academics or open source software or what have you. That is in a sense a kind of tenure. It is, it's an unbundled version where it doesn't come with the quote, you know, prestige of, you know, a legacy university or what have you. But it's more advanced in other ways because that money is a negotiable asset. that you can just chip a little thing off of it. And then you can go and decide to go and do your open source work in the Bahamas, right? That's pretty nice, you know, like on balance.

And it doesn't necessarily have to be Lambeaus or whatever, but you can just go and code on the beach or be in a warm area or something like that, right? That's nice on the margins, right? You know, you can hire a research system. You don't have to go and spend $20,000 or you don't have to like go and write a grant to get $20,000 or $50,000 for, hundred thousand dollars even for a research assistant you just do it out of your own pocket right so that's what money means to me is it's a tool to figure out uh to acquire knowledge eventually um even if there's a lot of indirections in between a and b so why do you think that you know i made this statement i had the opportunity to spend some time with peter teal a couple weeks ago and um i said to him

you know a fact that i you know come across in my research and and that was that you know there's basically no one who won the Nobel Prize in physics, at least, or even in economics, died with a net worth substantially greater than his, unfortunately, most of them. Not unfortunately, but just a fact that most of the Nobel Prize winners are male, only two living female Nobel Prize winners in physics. But anyway, no of them died. Einstein included Charlie Towns, invented the laser, and, you know, that Shockley invented the transistor. you know, they are responsible for you and I having this conversation, you know, a billion

fold over, right? And they died basically with less, you know, net worth than their Nobel Prize. Now, obviously, when I asked them, and I asked at your alma mater, Huido Inbenz at Stanford, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics last year, I asked me, you know, why, you know, why aren't there, why aren't all these Nobel laureates and economics billionaires, you know, multi-billionaires? Not connoting that, you know, the conflating rather than the fact that, you know, money is the most important thing. But, you know, for someone who's professionally, I mean, you made a comment a few minutes ago that, that, you know, you could, the skills are sort of fungible and that we could

become, you know, a businessman or woman or whatever, become independently. But so few of us do it. Now, why is that? It's sort of the question to you. Why do the Nobel law? Why don't they? I mean, obviously, Einstein wanted to have more wealth and it goes back a long way, the tradition of, you know, wanting to not have a patron to have the FU money to do stuff on your own without having to take you know, 65 diversity classes and then anti-sexual harassment classes and so forth that we have to do and getting very little time to spend with our students in the laboratory. So why do so few of us do it?

And why do so many physicists and Nobel Prize economics, you know, winners, why do they die poor, you know, relatively speak? Well, so first of all, I mean, it's just maybe an obvious point, but I'll poke at this a little bit. You know, depending on how you think about it, the point is not to die with a bunch of unspent money. Yeah, right? No.

Dr. Bill Perkins, who wrote a book, Guy was Zero on. Yeah. That's a great book. Right, right. Is it basically like, you know, you can't take it with you. Right. What you can do is, you know, do a few things.

You can invest in longevity. You can invest in this concept I talked about in the Lexington podcast, which you about called Genomic Reincarnation. Briefly, if you believe that, you know, you carry out a chromosome synthesis is going to be as feasible as microbial chromosome synthesis kind of, or, you know, already is prokary chromosome synthesis already is, you might be able to sequence your and then reincarnate yourself in the future if somebody use that money to pay for that reincarnation and that synthesis in the future. Okay. So you pay for life extension. You could pay for that.

You could pay for cryonics like Halifini did. You could certainly leave money to somebody or something. And I don't have a good answer on that last part, by the way, in terms of what to leave the money to because I think a lot of the foundations tend to get captured. I think giving it to the government is a waste. But I also think giving it to people's children, I see all these generally, not always, of course, there's always exceptions. Generally speaking, I find that many of these nepotists

who've inherited large amounts of money feel guilty about it. They have civilizational diabetes because if you haven't built, you feel guilt. Right. And actually, yeah, the Getty family, one of the Sions or great grandchildren, children is now supportive of the, you know, let us deface artworks and protest towards, you know, monas and vangos. And this is to protest fossil fuel use, which is the only reason that anyone knows this person's name. And you know, the point in the Lex Friedman podcast that actually resonates with the Yer's proverb

where, you know, the out of the, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the son raises the tree. and then the grandson chops down the trees. Yeah, shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations. Three generations, exactly. Yeah, that's right. And the thing about this is basically with something like that, what's happening there frequently,

and there's this documentary called Born Rich by I think the Johnson Johnson Air, which is worth looking at. Yeah. What's happening there is, I think, a few things. First is sometimes people feel, I think, wrongly, but they feel guilt, not just that they didn't work hard, but oh, my fortune was acquired in some ways, you know, illegitimately, oh my God, right?

But then they don't actually want to give up their fortune and said they want to expiate their sins by making you pay for it. Right. I made a billion dollars because I have a billion dollars because my great, great, whatever, you know, made a lot of money in oil, but I think oil is bad today because I've read some stupid propaganda. So therefore, you know, what I mean by that is like, yes, I think nuclear is better.

But like, you know, it's, there's, tradeoffs is everything and like you know you can you won't have a modern civilization without oil you wouldn't have something to complain about without right you can't make a solar panel without some oil processed along the way yeah exactly that's right you know like turbines you know for wind or solar like first of all they take a huge amount of space as if you're seeing like a wind farm or solar insulation it's like a little recycle energy right yeah the density is just very low and second is it's you know whatever but point is these folks for I think bad reasons feel extremely guilty about oil.

And the way they expedite their sins is by making you pay. Right. By the wrong, you know, I don't think there's anything wrong with inheriting wealth. I think, you know, when you hear people, oh, I'd be rich as you if I inherited money, you know, to some lottery winner. Look how many lottery winners not only lose all their money, but like commit suicide or murdered or like, it's actually very difficult for these Sions or whatever to actually steward their money and then actually do something good with it.

But as you're saying, there is, the guilt is a very powerful. emotional emotion, right? So it ever wrong. Right. So the thing about inheritive, I mean, I'm not like, as I said, I don't have a good answer on this as of now. Okay. I don't think it works to give it to a foundation often because that foundation will allocate in a bad way frequently. Ford Foundation, Rockefeller, Carnegie, if not in my view of being really good and how they allocate money. They become very, they just get entrained with the establishment, right? They are now, they're just just allocates the same stuff. It's something unique.

I mean, actually, the one thing that I do think is a pretty good kind of grant is like the clay math millennium prizes. That I actually think is pretty cool, right? That's hard to corrupt. It's genuinely benefiting all of humanity. The solutions to those math problems, if they're derived, easily worth a million dollars each. And that's, it's hard to corrupt and valuable through infinity. you know, it's possible that maybe some open source thing or some smart contract that executed what your wishes could be as good, possible.

But yeah, so with respect to this, I think that... Why are we getting on the topic of inherited wealth? It was the J&Js or... Yeah, so the Gettys. Right. So what happens is they expiate their sins by making you pay. There's something else which happens, which is when money is in abundance, then people want status. and when status is abundance, people want money, right?

So when these folks are born rich, oh, they have all the money. Okay, well, now they want to be respected. Well, no one's going to respect them for just being an oil air. Right. By taking a stand against oil. Right. Now suddenly, you know, oh, wow, the chattering classes say nice things about them. So they get positive feedback, right?

So the social incentives drive it. Conversely, if status is in, you know, abundance, you want money. And this is like what I think David Brooks wrote about years ago. I think it's like Megan McArdle has written about this status income dis homogamy where you have a journalist who is palling around with all of these wealthy people and they're in fact concerned about what they'll write. Then they go home to like a small apartment or something like that. And so status is much higher than their income. So what they do, they constantly write about how, you know, we need to abolish billionaires and so on.

The thing is they're actually upper middle class typically or at least middle class. So in the top whatever percent of the world, certainly top 10 percent, maybe kind of like. percent of the world. And what they say they want equality, they don't actually mean that they should be pulled down to global median income. What they mean is that tiny percent of four percent of people above them should be pulled down to them. Right. So by equality, they actually want ascendance, right? They actually want to level up. Once you realize that that's actually the goal, you can pitch something very different, which is the level up. And that is actually the difference where, you know, what the founder mentality is, is pitching essentially the

personal level up, which allows them to transcend, which is actually the true goal. Very few people actually want equality, even if they purport to it, what they want is for those above them to be pulled down, not for themselves to be reduced to the global media. I mean, you've moved to, yeah, out of America. So I do you feel like, would there ever be a scenario where you could see America being a good place for you to put your resources, your talent, your time, and your money? I mean, obviously, like, This is a very complicated topic that's hard to produce to just a sound bite. But I think the short version is, I have always been and I'm still in favor of American values.

I think the particular American state and establishment has introduced those values. And in particular, you know, the, I mean, the U.S. was the undisputed hyperpower of 1991. With even moderately good management, you could have had probably 100 years of peace and prosperity, you know, something like that, right? And what's happened is the U.S. establishment over the last 30 years has probably blown the biggest lead in human history. You know, San Francisco is being turned into like this, you know, open-air drug den. Failed state. Failed city. Go ahead.

Failed city. I mean, to the north here, I can make fun of them. Yeah, exactly. It's happening here, too. I mean, San Diego used to be the last bastion. Now there's homeless camps that stretched for five square city blocks. And I've had the mayor on my podcast. He's a Democrat, Todd Gloria.

I've had Republicans on. And it seems like there's just unwilling to really take on these huge challenges, which, as you're saying, we have the resources. I mean, California is the fourth largest economy in the world now. Yeah, in fact, actually in some ways, it's the money is the bad part because many poor countries around the world manage basic functional civil order. They have far less money. The money is not the constraint at all.

It's actually the wrong belief system. And it took me a while to understand what the heck was going on. because, you know, with communism, at least I kind of understood it at the level of, okay, let's all gang up and rob this rich guy and have some ideological justification for that, right? Gangas Khan, but with an ideological overlay, you know, that's like Stalin, right? So communism, at least, I didn't agree with it, but I understood it, okay? With, you know, the wokeness that has taken over these cities, I'm like, what political ideology would actually want to cover a city in feces?

like that just seems negative sum for everybody. That's not even like, you know, communism at least, yeah, communism at least marketed as zero sum, okay? We will all rise while we rob this rich guy, you know, who I see rich while we're poor. I get that even though I think it's bad because I think it's actually negative sum.

What actually happens is the poor and the rich guy both end up in the gulac, you know, everybody loses, you know? But with what is like, why don't people want to like cover the streets and poop? That seems obviously the bad. Then I realized that actually, a lot of these activists, you know, and that's actually where it's a big part of what's driven by. They have this mental model that, oh, some captain of industry walks out of his high rise and he steps in poop,

and now he understands the plight of those who he's normally pushed out of sight. If you notice when we talk about the homeless, you know, these folks will say, well, I'm so sorry, it's visible to you, huh, you know, as if it had just existed and now it's suddenly being made visible to you, as opposed to what's actually happened, which is that the provision of syringes and, quote, safe injection sites and so on has actually created a gigantic class of folks who are either drug abusers and or mentally ill and or, you know, have some issue where, you know, you can decompose the, quote, homeless problem. The word doesn't actually encompass it. There's folks who are addicted to drugs. There's folks who are mentally ill. There's folks who are criminals.

there's folks who just want to like, you know, live on the streets and just have, you know, a handout or what have you. And then there's folks who are genuinely, for every reason, down on their luck and living in a car or a van. But that last group is not the same as someone who will just, you know, hoop on the street and smash somebody with a different population. It's different populations, right? And actually the term, quote, homeless conflates, you know, fairly different things. So first of all, you're mislabeling it. The word is wrong because you think, oh, that means we need to build more houses. Housing is not a cure for mental illness. Right. Okay. Gerders are, you know, just totally different things.

You're conflating two different things. And the, so they just have the wrong concepts on this. And, you know, once you realize that this activist is looking forward to this, you know, captive industry being humiliated and seeing the plight of the poor finally, realize that actually what these folks are doing is they're kind of using the homeless as native advertising in the following sense. These, you know, somebody's mentally ill is, you know, for example, they attacked a woman in San Francisco on camera right outside her apartment. Like this crazy guy was not like letting her go inside.

This immigrant woman was trying to get into her apartment. Do you remember this thing? It was like a few years ago, right? Yeah, yeah. And then what is actually happening is so that woman might, you know, survive. Fortunately, she survived this attack. She was, you know, I think relatively unharmed, but it was very scary. You know, she could have just been like.

dragged into the dark and who the heck knows, right? And so what might happen, I don't know her specifically, but what would happen is, okay, come around the next election, she would vote for somebody who promises to, quote, solve the homeless problem, right? And what does that mean? That means more budget to quote, solve the homeless problem. And that actually means more budget for syringes and these billboards in San Francisco that say something like, you know, snort crack, but don't, don't inject it. Right. heroin, right. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not even, hold on, I'm going to get the exact billboard, San Francisco drug billboards, right? It can't go too hard. They might be a sponsor of the podcast, so please don't be too harsh on them now.

Okay, sure. So, so no overdose, right? Change it up. Injecting drugs carries the highest risk of overdose. So try smoking or snorting instead, okay? Crop rotation. Crop rotation. Yeah, they put these on buses. And of course that, you know, like this is, marketed as being actually, you know, being real. Come on, man. Obviously, you know, it's naive to say people won't use drugs. So therefore, we just need to kind of meet reality where it is and so on. This is like the total opposite of people being like, you know, oh, okay, everyone's going to be racist. So therefore we just kind of need to meet reality where it is on this, right?

So on some... It's like saying like a wife, you know, her husband's going out of town. She says, oh, you know, in case you cheat on me, please use a condom. I mean, you know, right. It's basically it's something which is like, you know, they are the, what's actually happening, and this is a key step in this whole cycle that I had to realize, that homeless industrial complex, when it gets budget, it increases the size of the homeless problem. So it's not a bunch of it.

Right. Well, that's right. In fact, it's opposite. What happens is the number of put activists and this homeless industrial complex has grown with the homeless population itself. So it's to feed the pigeons aside. Look at all these pigeons. Oh, my God.

And they're actually creating. the problem, they are exacerbating the problem, and they are paid to exacerbate the problem, and they are paid to not understand that they're exacerbating the problem. Whether you call it natural selection, I doubt it's fully conscious, but their actions are making the problem worse. Right, if they care about, right. I mean, mental illness is not going to be cured by, you know, safe syringes and drug problems certainly won't be either.

But it's like, that's the band-aid that, you know, covers up the, you know, the triangular knife blade scar and it's yeah but do you feel like a well i have to i have to i mean with such analogous things happen in a truly you know networked state and then you know again getting back to the question like what would it take to return your business back to california i mean to be crude about it you said this place was steps from the water we just haven't found the steps yet how much did we save enough enough to get lost or you could book a stay with hilton Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water.

The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. I don't know, I mean, like, what does it take to return your business back to Detroit?

What does it take to return your business back to, like, how about bringing it back to Greece or Rome, you know? Like, I think that that era, and civilization is over. And I'm not, I'm not like, I shouldn't suppose that you're not happy where you are. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry if I'm saying. No, no, I understand what you're saying.

I mean, I can give a recipe. I'll come to that in a second. One thing I want to say also is basically, if you, you know, one thing that's recently finally being kind of featured in the press is like the mothers of these drug addicts, right? You know, like mother of addict slams, you know, San Francisco open air drug policies. Basically, these mothers are seeing that they're kids who were borderline. their addiction is being enabled by this homeless industrial complex, right?

So that is actually the angle where you can see this is not compassionate. It's actually zomifying a previously functional human being in the name of, quote, compassion, but it's actually, you know, turning somebody into a dependent when they could have potentially stood on their own feet and be independent with a different, you know, form of intervention. This is very similar to how these NGOs, this nonprofit industrial complex, you know, they want to be these saviors in Africa and India. and so and so forth. And really, investment is independence and charity's dependence. Like Easterly and Levine have written about, you know, stopping the aid and so on.

Because the aid is basically something which is meant to give the person who's quote giving it out a good feeling, right? But it's all the whole, you know, Teachyman to Fish versus give a man. Jesus said this 2,000 years ago, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, right. Okay. So actually, you know, and, but if you also look, you know, there's this article by Priconomics,

which is about the most effective. development program in human history. Have you heard this one? No. Is it the U.S. Army or something? No, it's actually Nigeria's most effective development plan in human history was just a business plan competition. Guess what? Wealth creation. Basically, the thing is, you know, you can do, I've talked about this before, but if you've got a rich guy, okay, they can do one or two things. They can say, I'm giving out grants or I'm making investments, right? If you're giving out grants for a nonprofit or for individuals, what will you get? You're going to get a queue of people who are each competing to be the most pathetic or sympathetic, right?

In extremists, you know, this is like slim dog millionaire where they chop off the limbs of this poor beggar to make them more sympathetic, okay? There's actually like learned helplessness. They actually sell a harm in a sense, either cycle, right? They make themselves out to be, they think of themselves as being as harmed as possible, right? And you actually see this in, you know, there's the tech instabrag versus the woke instaag. What is the Instaag? It's basically I'm, you know, autistic, disabled.

Maximal intersectionality, right. Yeah, maximum intersectionality. I'm the maximum victim. I have established that I'm at the absolute bottom, therefore you need to put me at the absolute top, right? The powerful victim, right? So basically because they're at the absolute bottom, they win the status competition, right? They are now at the top of the queue for the grant because they're the most pathetic and

they're the most deserving. How could you possibly give somebody else some money? And this is a learned helplessness to win the, game that's being set up. And what happens is of 100 people who are in the queue for that, grant, maybe one person, quote, wins by being the most pathetic, they really go all in. They're the method actor, you know, so to speak, right? And the other 99 make themselves weaker in the process. They think, you know, they think of them, woe is me. They rend their garments, right? By contrast, when folks are competing for an investment, rather than the woke insta sag,

you have the tech instabrag. The instabrag is like, you know, I graduated MIT. in physics in three years and I, you know, had my first startup at this and we got to one mill rev and we sold it to this, right? And often what you'll find is the same person, okay, who's like a, you know, talented college graduate will unconsciously talk about all of their victimhood on in one context and then talk about what a killer they are in a different context and they'll make that, you know what I'm saying, right? Yeah, no, I've had that, you know, for the scenario where it's like, you know, I've come to, you know, here and now my amic points are, you know, they're not transferable to the Delta Lounge. And I'm like, wait a second,

I thought you could like, you know, this long suffering, you know. Yeah, right. Well, but actually, but though, even more than that, it's like, yes, that's the fact that they're upper middle class, but the, the thing is that in order to get an investment, right? Like in tech, there's this sort of instabrag, you know, five second intro that people will use at parties or whatever. It's not actually, It's just like, it's something which is, oh, he, he, you know, he's a core contributor to J-Quire. Oh, it's like on Tinder, they pose and their Rolex is showing. Yeah, there's like, well, we'll see. Stanford grad, you know, I mean, that's the thing is, so you're, so I think there's a very important difference here.

You're bringing it back to their frequent flyer lounge or the Rolex, and it's not really about the display of wealth. That's actually not what it is. It is the display of competence. First 10 employees at Stripe. It is the, you know, I was a core contributor to JQuery. It is a technical or. I see. Yeah, YC class.

Yeah, exactly. That's right. Insofar as money is quoted is we got the company to a 10 million valuation and is acquired by Facebook or whatever, you know, like 100 million dollars is required. Right. And so it's not that, oh, I have a Rolex. Nobody respects that. That's like, you know, that's it. Huh?

Go ahead. It's goty. Yeah. It's goty. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, like, I'm saying, shouldn't say nobody was saying. I'm sure on Tinder, I'm told that, you know, they have to have some way of differentiating the three guys that are going to get that competing for the, you know, one girl, right? That may be the case, right? But it's also like, you know, who are you going to attract with that or whatever? Yeah, fine. You know, but let's say, let's say that there's, there's maybe something to that.

The point is that, so what I'm, what I'm talking about, though, here is the instant kind of demonstration of victim of status versus the instant demonstration of victor status. Like, I'm like, I am the most convincing victim and I'm the most convincing victor. Those are the two different things, right? Where you've got 100 people there competing for this VC investment or angel investment. And each person is just straining, you know, be like, close one more deal, right? Ship one more feature. You know, improve the design just a bit to kind of pep the other one and get that investment, right? Now, what happens in that context?

Yeah. It's like a, it's like a hundred people running a 400 meter dash. Okay, it's true, only one wins. But the other 99, their cardiovascular fitness is improved in the process, right? These folks competing for that investment, that one investment of $100,000 makes 99 people stronger, right? They become better at building, better at designing. Even if they don't win this time, they become overall as wealth creating for the community, right? And that's why this, you know, if you actually, the true charity is investment because you're investing in their independence.

I mean, another way to see this, by the way, is like, if you're walking down the street and, And let's say someone makes $100,000 a year. Okay. And they see somebody, you know, like, who's just down on their life. Okay, if you give them $10, right, somebody might give them $10. Now, that's $10,000 and $99,9009 for the person on the street. That person marked down the street, though, is very unlikely to give that, you know, guy $1,000, let alone $50,000 and actually make them equal, right?

And so that person doesn't actually want equality. If they were giving $30,000, $40,000, they're like, wait a second, I earned this money. Why am I giving it away? That immediately kicks in once it's beyond just like, oh, I feel sorry for you. Here's a few coins. Right. Yeah. That's why you'll have Charles Sandberg have a press release for giving a million dollars to the ACLU,

which is, you know, 0.001% of her network. Yeah. So what's, but here's what's happening is what people are doing with that consciously or unconsciously is sometimes they're assuage and guilt. Sometimes if it's a public donation like that, they're buying status. Yeah. But what happens is charity decelerates, right? That is say the closer you get to income equality, the more that person rises, the less the money comes, okay? Which means charity never actually attains a quality. You know, if that person's at zero, you might give them 10, right? But if that person

even had 10,000 or 20,000, if they were like working class on their feet, you wouldn't, you know, people wouldn't give them, you know, 10 bucks. They'd say, okay, you know, you're on your feet, go, go, right? By contrast, with investment, you know, this is a very famous example. There's many, many, you know, millions of not famous examples. When Peter Thiel invested in Zuck, Zuck was much less wealthy than him. Now Zuck is much wealthier than him, but both them benefited in the process, right? Yeah. That's like putting $10,000 into somebody. Now they're worth a million dollars. At least until last week. I mean, Peter said he's off the board and then META has crashed, which we're going to get to because I do want to get to. Okay, sure. Point being that basically with

investment, you're actually incentivized to make them richer than. And with charity, you're not, right? Charity in Fort Monroe for it to continue, they have to be poorer than you. They have to be in a dependent role, et cetera, right? So a huge part of this stuff is, in my view, a combination of gaining status while having a crew of dependence. It's the same process that was run overseas in many of these, quote, third world countries to keep people dependent that's now being run in American cities. Now, you said, what would be, would have to change to come back to California? You know, I gave, again, I think of this is highly implausible, but, you know, let's just do it for the, the mental exercise, right? I, you know, someone asked me about this with,

like, the chips thing. Yeah. And, and I was like, you know, because I was like, you can't ban your way to number one. Okay. This is this recent thing. We say, you know, and it's like, how to become number one in tech? Okay, here's some obvious points. For STEM education, not. not math is white supremac. For technology, you know, like a pro tech culture, not lull tech bro, right? It's for skilled immigration, not like multi-hundred-day visa delays for like basic things. You know, you can't get like a B-1 or whatever to come to you. Yeah, H-1B.

No, no, but actually different. H-1 is like a permanent work visa. A B-1 is just like a visitor visa, right? At itself, there's 100-day delays to attend a conference. You're not even trying to immigrate. To attend a conference is a huge pain, right? Pro-wealth creation, not abolish billionaire. right. Pro civilization, not what's happening in San Francisco, right? And I think, unfortunately,

I mean, civilizations have like a heartbeat, you know, and in different ways like China and India and other civilizations are like on the rise. And like, blue America is just in some fundamental ways on the decline. In some ways, they're still actually, they've got something. I mean, what do I actually think happens? It's possible. This is the somewhat dystopian outcome, not somewhat very dystopian outcome, which is, you know, San Francisco actually hasn't been pushed to the limit of what it could be. If you take it to the limit, you have a few engineers coding AI in their rooms with, you know, DoorDash being delivered and outside a, you know, sea of fatherless drug-addicted zombies that, you know, these NGOs are getting addicted

on syringen. Like, how far can you push that, right? San Francisco is like running the experiment of like, you know, like basically turning a previously functional city into shantytowns and a few few tech people, right? I don't think the tech people are causing that. I think they managed to survive despite that. I think it's the NGOs. I think it's the government, the state that is causing that. But the tech people are indirectly subsidizing it by being present and by paying, they are themselves enabling the enablers, right? They're by living in San Francisco, you are voting for more San Francisco. No matter what you quote, vote for, you're actually enabling it by actually physically being there and contributing to it. And so if you want less of it,

You, you know, it's only words if you pass some vote or something like that. Truly, you know, symbolizing it is going somewhere else and doing what our ancestors did and moving, you know, and, you know, whether it's, you think of as the frontier, whether you think of it as moving in search of a better life, whether you think of it as voting with your feet or protest vote. There's many different ways of thinking about that. But really, it is moving on from something that really has failed, partly because it was so rich, you know. they got so rich that they could just do anything and the money would keep rolling in. They didn't have a connection between cause and effect. Now they're finally seeing it with people going to Miami. That's the only thing that's giving them some degree of correction, right, is that exit.

As you say, as long as they're the number four economy in the world here. That's momentum. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's momentum. And I think, I don't know. We'll see what happens. Go ahead. No.

I'm not saying it's going to zero overnight, but I am saying that it's definitely no longer. the crucial thing is it no longer has power in a fundamental sense. Like Microsoft 2020 is wealthier than Microsoft 2000, but it's far less powerful. It's no longer a choke point on the whole tech industry, right? And you do not need to come to Silicon Valley to raise money. You don't need to come there to incorporate a company. You don't need it. You know, Sand Hill is just less relevant.

For example, A6 and Z, that's why they've gone full remote. They've gone full cloud. Like tech is global. It's decentralized. Thankfully, in a sense, we've decentralized opportunity. I mean, that's the flip side of this. Now, if you're in Manila, or you're in, you know, you're in, you know, the, you know, South America or the Middle East or the Midwest,

you've got as much opportunity as if you're in the middle of Sand Hill. And that's awesome, right? So there's a huge benefit to not having everything centralized, concentrated, quote, unequal, et cetera, in California, in Silicon Valley. I mean, what a risk for the technology industry to be in the worst governed city, in the worst governed state in the world, right? Relative to its wealth. It's like the worst governed.

And the wealth is what enables that. It's like giving a ton of money to this air who just puts it up their nose, right? That's what San Francisco is. And yet we're doing, you know, we're giving rebates and gas, inflation, you know, bonuses sending out here in California because we obviously have too much money. I mean, my favorite statistic is the NASA budget, you know, for all of 2020 is lower than the Los Angeles Unified School District budget. And you look at how much NASA does. It's just incredible. And you think that's just obvious.

It's not throwing more money at it. It's getting people that actually care about it going. What does they do another country? I mean, don't they go to school year round? I mean, I get paid a very handsome salary by the state of California. I'm not complaining. I'm a state employee. Gavin Newsom is my ultimate boss, right?

I shouldn't speak to me about it. It's true, I guess. But the point is, you know, I would be doing this job even though I didn't get paid. I love it so much. I love being a scientist. I love working with people. It doesn't mean it couldn't be, you know, infinitely better. And I wonder, you know, you mentioned this.

A lot of what I'm seeing nowadays is kind of this nexus around colleges. I'm coming to think of, you know, ironically, in my profession is sort of, you know, one of those stem causes for some of these challenges. I mean, the ideologies that come out. I mean, what you're explaining in the, you know, kind of extrapolation of the end of, you know, modern history, maybe in the Fujiamas kind of tortured saying. But more than that is sort of like, where what's next is like, is China inevitably going to become like, you know,

work San Francisco, if they continue on this, is it like an inevitable, the dialectic of history. But I see all these ideas originate in the university system. And those come from, you know, the pattern of basically the old world. I mean, the most, you know, Humboldt and the institutions of Germany that educated the first PhDs in America. And now, you know, kind of doctor, you know, doctors of education, et cetera, that set public school policies. And now we have, you know, like my kids go to school, you know, nine months of the year. Why is that? that? I mean, do they not have stuff to do? I've read a statistic that actually the biggest discrepancy between, you know, disadvantaged, economically disadvantaged kids and non-disadvantage

kids, which sometimes, you know, unfortunately, it's a proxy for black and white or minorities or whatever. I don't want to get into that, but the study disaggregates by that. Anyway, the biggest difference is that the wealthier kids do something over the summer. In other words, they're not idle for three months during the summer. They're doing something, even if it's going or water park, they're interacting, they're solving problems, they're doing some kind of thing out of the house. And then obviously it's best to have some kind of enrichment program, but the poor kids don't have that.

And it would be so obvious, like, just keep school open at 12 months of the year. Why should a public art teacher be tenured in the state of California, you know, in a school? What do they need tenure for, academic freedom? Are they doing research that does around the cutting edge? I don't think I need tenure. I should get your opinion about academia. First of all.

Well, so, okay. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, response. A ton of it can say in academia, but we, so I'll give the very quick version. I've talked about this at length in, you know, various other podcasts, but I'll paste on a link at the end. Sure version is independent replication over procedure citation. Essentially, what's happened is academia has mistaken the form for the substance.

The entire infrastructure of NSF and NIH and universities and journals and so on is, just, you know, a superstructure on top of the fundamental, I mean, it's got a few different origins, but this is, I'm just taking the stem part of it. All of that is a superstructure on one person telling another person how to replicate an experiment. That's actually all that truly matters. If you cannot independently replicate the experiment, it's not science. It may be published in a scientific journal. It may look like we think of it with the academic affiliations. It may have the form. But if the data isn't available, if the protocol isn't available, if the methods are not independently replicable, it's not actually science. If you cannot replicate, it's not science.

That actually kills a huge amount of stuff, which has talked about a science, right? And in fact, it also allows you to rank papers. You know, everyone talks about citations, H-Index. That did here at UCSD, by the way, my colleague, Jorge Hirsch. Yeah. And there's something, you know, the thing is it's an interesting proxy variable. Like, you know, not better much what you want to do is you want to rank papers or more generally ideas by the number of replications, not the number of citations. Maxul's locations has trillions and trillions of replications. Some paper that came out of science or nature last week,

you know, that purports to be, this is how, you know, this virus works or whatever. That has like probably zero replications. And we're not tracking the number of replications. That's way more important than the number of citations. Well, once we do that, you know, to push back respectfully, I mean, once you get the Higgs Beaus on Mass, it's not like, oh, we have to do it 65 trillion times, you know,

again and again, that doesn't add incremental surprise or, you know, I don't know about that. And the reason is because, for example, think about, let me give a different, think about code. Okay. When you have a piece of software, you are effectively, it's not simply a paper. You are replicating the results because you're running it again locally millions of times. And in doing that, what do you find? But you'll first of all, you'll find it doesn't work on this platform or that platform. But you'll also start servicing one in a thousand or one in a million bugs, which, you know, in doing that, doing it a few times, you might not have seen them, but you surface race conditions, you know, threads that are competing with each other, rare things that arise under odd circumstances.

And by just replicating it tons of times, you find that kind of stuff, right? And I do think that if you've got just something which is true on the base of one expensive experiment, you don't really know how true it is. It is only if you can just do it over and over again and you've reduced it not just to a science, but to an engineering, that you can then think of it. you know, if it's flaky science in the sense of it kind of works, kind of doesn't, it's like, you know, you have to get the instrumentation just so and hold it just so versus something that's highly robust, then it's not a subroutine that you can use for something else, you know,

like the light doesn't just flick on and you can just assume it's going to work, right? So I actually do think much more emphasis on replication. And this is, it's not unique to me. Of course, people talk about the reproducibility crisis in many areas. But that's like one thing I think is rotten at the core. I think, I mean, there's so much more of it. I mean, basically you asked, will China become like a, you know, woke San Francisco. They actually had their opium period already. Yeah.

Our futures are past, right? Like it is now America's time to have its own, you know, fentanyl wars or whatever, right? And, you know, I think part of it is with the, you know, some comments on these, if you, if you're just being born to number one and you haven't done what it takes to remain number one, people think being number one is their birthright. I wrote this article and it's called founding Britson Heritage. You know, the people who are, especially running the U.S. establishment now are like the third or fifth generation errors of a factory that cranks out widgets. And, you know, they have the name and they legitimately inherit it. Okay, they've gone through the process to do this. But they're completely incapable of changing the factory

to crank out something different or innovate on it, right? These are not people who could organize the U.S. military from scratch. Everybody who had any talent to found has been drained out of the U.S. establishment into tech. And so what that means is you have folks who, are selected, adversely selected, they're the folks who are often less quantitative or they're less good with budgets or numbers. And those are the folks who remain in the US establishment with everybody else going into tech.

And then what happens there is it's not the typical theory of comparative advantage. You know why? It's like the Peter principle, right? You know, like a rising to their level of incompetence and they happen to master that domain. Yes, it is that. But it's also something where it's like,

if I'm making apples and you're making oranges, fine. I can take it or leave it. if you're right. If I'm making Apple computers and this person is making governance, that is not a trade I can refuse. Right. So basically comparative advantage does not work if you're outsourcing your governance to others. This is a fundamental, you see what I'm saying? Right. So this is a fundamental issue where there's no gains from trade. There's huge losses from trade. We have left the government of the United States, the establishment of the United States to these kleptocratic incompetence. and all the folks who can add.

I mean, you can see this where, you know, a while back, there was this clip on, I think, let me get it right. It was Brian Williams and Marigay. Okay. So where they, uh, he's talking about like a trillion, like, what are the population of America is like a trillion people or something? Yeah, it was, it was like, you know, oh, Bloomberg could give a million dollars per U.S. resident.

And they flashed a tweet. It was such a ludicrous thing where they flashed a tweet on screen. that said, you know, that Bloomberg could give every American a million dollars. And they just, it wasn't just that they got it wrong on screen. It was that they didn't have any sense. They couldn't just do basic long division. There's no Sandy check there. They really thought of rich people as being so much richer than they actually are.

They, the entire production staff for this media outlet didn't have the most basic contact with reality. And that actually is a, it's like a, you know what a dye test is, D.Y. or a smoke test. Sometimes you'll take some dye and you'll kind of put it through a system and you'll just see. Oh, yeah, like an exhaust system, see if there's a leak or something. See if there's a leak, right? So this is sort of like you're tracking something through a system.

You're seeing these people can't add multiplies of tractor divide, okay? They have blue check marks. They got blue check marks. They have verbal ability and they can act. They can act. Yeah, exactly. They have verbal ability and they have status so they can act. They cannot add.

Yeah. And so it is like Dr. Nick, you know, in The Simpsons. He plays, you know, a doctor on TV, right? Right. So for these people to make policy recommendations, policy equals budget. Budget involves division. And, you know, forget about NPV and talking about like a, you know, that's not even like that advanced math. You can't even divide, you know, a million bucks.

Or, you know, divide properly to figure out that. But you think it's that it's not appealing. Like, yeah, I was noting that there's basically no governor, no senator, all these hotly contested, you know, races. stuff and backed by this billionaire. Like, there's not one race in the whole country where anyone's brought up science and technology. They haven't even brought it up.

Yeah, a governor. It's insane. And the number of, like, scientists in any government around the world, I think it's pitifully low. I know there's like one or two physicists. But I also wanted to ask you, you know, when you think about, you know,

governing of a country or something like that, I've done a video that's, you know, knowledge is not equal to wisdom. And I've interviewed 14 Nobel Prize winners on this podcast, and I'm always trying to see if a sufficient amount of knowledge can actually be converted into wisdom. And I haven't come to any sort of conclusion about it. But I guess the question that I have is, you know,

who would you want to run a country? And I guess in your case, maybe you're saying, you know, the people run it. But I mean, isn't that the kind of Churchill quote that the people, you know, get the government to deserve and they deserve to get it good and hard? Well, so first, by the way, one thing I want to say is, if you look at the, I mentioned this example of the math errors and so on. Look at this other tweet that I linked there, the Lorena Gonzalez one, okay?

Yep. She was replying to Mike Salana, who's a, you know, VC associate at Founders Fund. Yeah. Or VP at Founders Fund, really. And she's like, serious question, how does it feel to be a billionaire while promoting companies that leave workers in poverty? Do you ever feel bad with the massive income inequality? It's not every day that a billionaire engages me on Twitter.

they just think of billionaire as being a big number, right? This is the same as when Bernie Sanders, like... That's where she lives, by the way, Balagia. Is where she lives in San Diego? Yeah. No. Okay. Great.

So, you know, of course, Mike Salana is like, well, thank you very much. I don't even know if Mike Salon has a million dollars. Like Mike Salon is a great guy, smart guy. He works at FF. But he's not Peter Thiel, right? Right. And what you realize is, oh, these people don't understand what billion means. And then you realize, wait a second.

Of course, they're listening to Bernie. And Bernie is saying, millionaires and billionaires. Right. As if they say, they're a thousand times different. Yeah, exactly. It's like saying meters and kilometers.

Right. meters and kilometers. Like, that's... NBA players are so tall. They're meters and kilometers tall. Right. And the number of the ratio of millionaires, I mean, like, there's like, I don't know,

depending on how you count, it's like... But it's certainly on the order of five to 10 percent, last I saw, I may be wrong on the set. But it's a non-trivial number of people, if you include House or whatever, that have over a million net worth in the U.S. Whereas billionaires is like a few thousand in the world. It's a much different thing.

Correct. So you realize, so that's like three examples. Like Brian Williams and Marri Gay, that's Lorena Gizalas, that's Bernie Sanders. They don't actually know what a billion is. Like forget everything else. You know, we're talking about, you know what FISBuzz is? No. FISBuzz is a very basic, you know, programming question, okay,

which you ask candidates, okay? And it's like, let me, you know, let me get the, it's basically like, print the numbers from 1 to 100. And for each multiple of three, print FIS instead of the number. And for each multiple of five, print buzz. And, you know, if it's, if it's a multiple of three and five, print Fizz buzz. I think that's basically the thing, right? And this is not, this is not like rocket surgery. It's not rocket science, right? I mean, that's, you know, for effect, it is, it's like, you know, you understand. Yeah. Basically division, right? You're right. Right. Or loop, right? And many people cannot pass this. Right. Like in a test,

Kahneman did a test with, you know, Princeton seniors on, you know, if factory makes five widgets and five hours or whatever, you know, how many does a hundred make and a hundred hours? They could get half of got wrong. So the question you're asking of, oh, why don't they talk about science and topology? They don't know what a billion is. And also, they're counterpropos. She's the same woman. Do you know what else she's famous for? There's our lovely Congress Assembly woman here. Oh, the one that said FU at Lawn Must. Yeah. And he said message. Yeah, exactly.

Help drive. That's right. That's right. That's right. So, like, basically these folks are, I mean, they, it's like, it's like, the question of why don't they understand the implications of artificial intelligence and VR and cryptocurrency and, you know, whatever. That's just so far beyond.

We're talking like, it's in a different galaxy. These people cannot do FISB. Like, you can't over us. The problem is, by the, they're verbal and they can act. And so they can give the facade of. competence. Yeah. But if you actually gave them a basic test of math, they would recoil like garlic.

This is actually why, by the way, including even a single equation in anything you're right. Yeah. It makes them. It cuts it in half, right. Cuts the readership. Well, actually, what it does. Yes, that's the conventionalism.

Every equation cuts your audience. But what it actually does is it makes a certain kind of very, you know, confident political actor recoil in fear because it's like having Chinese characters in the essay. They don't necessarily understand it. So like, oh, okay, you know, I'm kind of, right. So I went to Paris once, and I went to the waiter, and I took, you know, one year of high school French, but I was with a woman, American woman who had lived there for 30 years, and she was only like 40. She spoke a, I mean, you couldn't even tell.

The waiter comes up and asks for our orders. She was in French. Waiter says, it's okay, madame, you couldn't speak American to me. I said, oh, yeah? Well, I would take to the six of those four costs. I was like, he couldn't have done. It's like, okay, well, you want to play that game. We can play that game, you know?

There's no problem. If you probe them, it's like the old joke, you know, like on the surface, they're deep, but deep down, they're superficial. And I think, yeah, because you know, don't know, don't you're smart. Bummies. They, to bet through a level of competency in any field, that alone to, you know, master this, this guy, it's not like they hand it out. You can make fun of, you know, so.

So here's a community organizing. He's very gifted human being, very intelligent. But does that mean wise? Not necessarily. So, well, right, so here's the thing. To give a little bit to these, you know, innumerates, right? it is actually the case that when they have the Simpsons they have the Council of Elders or whatever and they're like well we have to get a Skinner says you know we have to give the sub-megalidoids or whatever

you know some gratitude yeah yeah yeah right so so um just like the time we have left basically it actually is true that in addition to being able to do the math you also need the skills of a political leader and or, you know, actor or have you, right? Or influencer, a better way of thinking about it. And so someone like Elon actually does have both skills, right? He can do the math, but he can also convince. And so that's actually what you need is you can't just say, oh, you know, we wish that charismaless engineers would run the country. You need charisma charismatic engineers, right, to run the country. And how do you actually, you know, do that? Others, you're not going to build anything. But how do that?

Well, they have to be able to found. And how they found, well, that's the network state. So we come back to that. You cannot complain. Go ahead. Yeah. No, I was just going to say in the last couple minutes, I think, yeah, persuasion, salesmanship, it's a dirty word.

But actually, it's incredibly important to be, to have persuasive ability to just go. There's sort of a seductive element. Robert Green has talked about this. So I know you only have a couple minutes. Maybe someday we'll get to do a part two. But I just want to comment. One last thing on the dark side of networks. You know, I'm always using it to encourage people to have big fans.

families, you know, using that calf's law, the kind of, you know, benefits of having multiple children is that now they're friends with each other. Brian Kaplan's book and so on this. Yeah, yeah. So they'll be friends with each other. And then when you're dead, the parents are dead, then at least the kid's relationship will be sustained. And also, it's not like you need a new house if you add a kid, but you add on, you know,

it might double the size of the network and the happiness might scale the number, you know, squared and the cost might scale as N. So, but there's always a dark side, right? there's always a node that can go rogue or couldn't go bad or, you know, the niece of Osama bin Laden, who was using Instagram that, you know, led them to get his DNA for whatever. There's always some element of risk in the network. And I'm reminded of another Yiddish kind of story where there's a rabbi and he's in town and one of his congregants says some evil speech about him.

Hebrew we call it Lachan Harrah evil speech. And tell some gossip, which is true. It's not a lie. It's true about him, whatever it is. And then he feels really bad. Young Kapoor comes along. He wants to repent. He says so, Rabbi.

Rabbi, how can I make it up to you? Rabbi says, okay, my friend, just get me a feather pillow. Get some feather pillow. Great. What's next? He goes, cut the feather pillow open. Okay, great. Yeah. I can do that. Am I forgiven? No, no, no, there's one last thing is the wind is swirling around. Go pick up all the feather. One of the risks inherent in a network state, not just the upside, which you've categorized so nicely. Sure, sure. I mean, what most people will come to, what most will say is, oh, my God, you're so unrealistic. sake, it's never going to work, et cetera, et cetera. And they'll say, oh, in particular,

what people will always come back to is use of force. Oh, you know, you in what army, where's the military, you know, you don't have nukes, blah, blah. And, you know, there's a long and short answer to that. Go ahead, what? No, I'm just laughing. That would be a good thing in nowadays, right? Yeah, yeah.

Well, the thing is it's basically something where they're not actually, they're just sort of reacting at the surface level on something. Right. You know, the reason the internet was invented in part, you know, like DARPA funded it for something that... Nuclear conflict, right? Exactly. That's right. There's resistant.

And we might actually need to go back to that future where in the event that Putin or whatever sets off a nuke and the nuclear taboo is broken, you may want to have governance structures that are nuke resistant, right? And you can't nuke a network. How is a nuke that actually is something where, what, you're going to nuke? billions of people that you don't even know where they are. You need to have an X, Y location, and they need to be implicitly concentrated in one physical location. If you're distributed, that's actually something that makes nuclear weapons less useful, right? It's only if you're sessile and fixed to a location and you have a lot of fixed structures

and so on and so forth. And if people know where your location is, right? So, you know, there's a lot of things where folks haven't really thought about what, just like we talked about earlier, the cloud geography versus land geography, people have not thought about what actually security looks like in an environment where people are highly mobile, where capital is mobile, where you can encrypt things, where you can distribute and decentralize things. It's not to say that force goes away, but force looks a lot more like drones than nukes, you know, and a lot more like, you know, special ops than huge armies, right?

And it's much more surgical and it's tweezers and it's, you know, scalples. It's not sledgehammers, right? And so they haven't thought about what force looks like in a network world. That's not to say that no sledgehammers exist. There's still obviously huge sledgehammers being deployed in Ukraine and back and forth. But a lot of that is actually also still cloud war. It's also network war. You know, Ukraine wouldn't be where it is without being able to wage a really effective cloud war against, you know, Russia's traditional kind of land war.

So I think, you know, you asked what the downsides are. I mean, that's one downside is just that, I think, which is not exactly. what you're asking, but one downside is folks will try to map this to the things that they've already seen without thinking about how technology has changed things. It's a little bit like cryptocurrency, a lot like cryptocurrency where some people get it right away. And for some people, they just have to kind of see it working for a while. So one downside is you just have to make it work before people believe it, but that's fine. I mean, the critical thing is for something like this, you don't have to convince everybody. You just have to convince enough people that you can get a

small percent. Only a small percentage of people, for example, move to the U.S. That changed the world. You didn't get the majority of people to move to us. You didn't even get 10 percent of the world to move to the U.S. Only 4 percent of the world is in the U.S. And many of those were born for folks who moved there, right? So a tiny percentage moving to the frontier can change everything. So in a sense, the quote, lack of majority appeal or what have you, you know, is actually, is it bad? It's actually good in some ways, right? So that's kind of my quick answer in that. All right. And now you have to go. I appreciate your time. And maybe, we'll do a part two someday, maybe in person.

If I ever get where you are, you come back to Long Island. We'll meet up in Ron Concomma. How about that, Balog? Ron Concoma. There you go. Meet me in Montock. Yeah, that's even better. He's Hampton. All right, thank you.

Take care. Okay, bye, bye, bye, bye. Well, that was super fun. I want to thank Bellagie and hopefully be able to convince him to come back on for a part two. I want to also ask everybody, again, to leave a quick review on Apple Podcasts and leave a rating wherever you get these podcasts, Spotify, we're up to over 307 reviews just on Spotify in the last couple of months. It's amazing. The podcast is growing. We'll continue to grow. We've got great minds coming on the podcast. Stay tuned for Gary Nolan. Stay tuned for another episode

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