The Tim Ferriss Show - #506: Balaji Srinivasan on The Future of Bitcoin and Ethereum, How to Become Noncancelable, the Path to Personal Freedom and Wealth in a New World, the Changing Landscape of Warfare, and More

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Starting point is 00:04:33 The Tim Ferriss Show. Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I'm going to keep my preamble short because we are going to run out of time well before we run out of subject matter with today's guest. Balaji Srinivasan, and I'm sure that that pronunciation could be improved, at Balaji S, that's B-A-L-A-G. It's not a G, it's a J-I-S, is an angel investor and entrepreneur, formerly the CTO of Coinbase and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. He was also the co-founder of Earn.com, acquired by Coinbase, Council, that's with a S-Y-L, acquired by Myriad,

Starting point is 00:05:16 Teleport, acquired by Topia, Topia perhaps, and Coincenter. He has been named to the MIT Technology Review's Innovators Under 35, that was in 2013. He is the recipient of a Wall Street Journal Innovation Award, many others, and holds a BS, MS, PhD in electrical engineering and an MS in chemical engineering, all from Stanford University. Balaji also teaches the occasional class at Stanford, including an online MOOC, M-O-O-C, that's Massive Open Online Course, in 2013, which reached, as I understand it, more than 250,000 students worldwide. You can find him on Twitter, at BalaGS. I'll get it right this time, with J-B-A-L-A-J-I-S. And you can find much more about him on his website, balags.com. Balagi, thanks for coming on the show.

Starting point is 00:06:05 Great to be here, Tim. And I thought we would start with a number, and that number is 1729. And as I understand it, that's not in reference to a date, but you use that number quite a bit. Could you please provide a bit of context for how you've used that number and why you've used that number? Sure. So I'm actually going to be launching something at that domain probably by the time this podcast is published, hopefully. So it's a domain 1729.com. What does it refer to?

Starting point is 00:06:38 It's not a year. It's the first number that's the sum of two cubes in two different ways. And what that refers to is basically the Ramanujan number. So Srinivasa Ramanujan was India's greatest mathematician and kind of like India's Einstein, but has kind of a romantic story in the sense that he was extremely poor and wrote these letters to mathematicians around the world. He had just self-taught math from a textbook. He wrote these letters to mathematicians around the world. He had just self-taught math from a textbook. He wrote these letters to mathematicians around the world, and most of them ignored him, just thought he was a crank. And one guy brought him out to England, this guy,

Starting point is 00:07:14 G.H. Hardy. And we thought, this guy has to be a genius because no one would make up these equations. And so then Ramanujan began a rampage through mathematics and has people still, to this day, going through a page of his notebooks for an entire mathematical journal issue. Because he just wrote down all these results that were true, but he didn't provide the proof. You're just into it, the result. So where does 1729 come from, 1729? Well, unfortunately, Ramanujan died very young, very, very young. People think it's because he was away from his food and the warm weather of India and so on. But basically, on his deathbed, Hardy came in to try to cheer him up. He said, Ramanujan, I came in on a taxi,

Starting point is 00:07:57 and the license plate, it's very boring. It's 1729. On his deathbed, Ramanujan still had the wit and faculty to say, oh, that's not boring. It's the first number, it's the sum of two cubes in two different ways, because he's on a first name basis with every number. And that's kind of the legend of Ramanujan. And so have you ever seen Good Will Hunting? I have. Yeah. So Good Will Hunting was kind of based on that. So there's actually a recent, there's a book that was turned into a movie called The Man Who Knew Infinity.

Starting point is 00:08:20 It's a very fun movie to watch. I mean, it's engaging. I don't know how factually accurate it is. There's pieces. Actually, the number is in there and so on. But to me, for many years, actually, before joining Anderson Horowitz, what I was going to do is turn the MOOC course that I had done in 2013 into a global talent search. Because just like you have the Hubble telescope looking for dark matter around the universe, I thought of the mobile telescope. The telescope provided to us by mobile could help us find the dark talent in the global south and the undiscovered talent. And basically, that's not just the global south, that's Eastern Europe, that's Russia, that's all the former Soviet

Starting point is 00:09:03 countries. That's basically the world that all these people who didn't have a chance. And I think of that as something that I've wanted to do for a very long time. That's what I was going to do prior to joining A6NZ for a bunch of reasons. I joined A6NZ instead in 2013, and I'm kind of coming back to the path not traveled and doing this, global talent search and the idea is that basically we who have been fortunate enough to have some resources or winnings we can offer a hand up to all these people bring them into the global economy level them up give them what we know in terms of education or teaching or what have you and all this stuff can be delivered i

Starting point is 00:09:41 know it sounds like a cliche but at scale scale over the internet, right? You produce it once and you can replicate it across millions of people. So this is what I'm doing next. And hopefully by the time the podcast comes out, this will be live. Knock on wood. Okay. Amazing. So there are these seeming pillars of influence. Pillar may be too strong a word. And I think we'll want to explore a few of those, including Lee Kuan Yew, perhaps. And we'll get to that. For people who don't know who that is, we'll explain because good God, I mean, what a figure and what an influence. Before we move further ahead, what was the subject matter and the intent behind the MOOC that you taught? The subject matter, the title was Startup Engineering.

Starting point is 00:10:30 And the concept was that it was basically the class that I wish I had had before doing my first startup. time capsule back to somebody who was into math or into just technology in general, but was just completely naive about how to actually run a business or anything like that. When doing my first startup, I actually, this is a first approximation, but I thought that the primary difficulty would be calculating difficult integrals. And I was like, okay, that's the hard part. And everything else is kind of basic, whatever. We can knock that out before breakfast. And of course, that's not the case. As often turns out. As often turns out. That's right. Because the thing is, I was a career academic for many years. And in academia, there is a high premium placed on novelty of results, technical difficulty. And there you know, there's some good

Starting point is 00:11:25 aspects of this. You do, you know, in math, you learn how to think rigorously and go premise, premise, premise, conclusion, really interrogate your results. There's seemingly obvious things that aren't actually true mathematically when you actually go and work them all the way through. Famously, like, you know, the parallel postulate, you know, Euclid is not something you can just take for granted. You get different geometries if you assume a different condition there. And you think rigorously in academia, and then you think, okay, well, that's the entirety of the world. It's just technical difficulty. And it's not. And so this course was meant for teaching the philosophy and all the nitty gritty details to go from a command line up to a website

Starting point is 00:12:07 with payments, with JavaScript and all the types of all the, because you learn computer science in academia, you don't really learn software engineering. And there's a thousand details in how that works, which are useful to get number one, like Git and stuff like that. And of course, the reason you don't learn those things is they move fast. You have to keep updating it. So that was one piece. And the second piece was the philosophy of startups, meaning what is the difference between a startup versus small business?

Starting point is 00:12:32 Or why is this happening now? There's a piece of recent history, for example, do you know what the NSF AUP is? I do not. I'm not even going to try to pretend. Sure, sure, sure. So National Science Foundation had this thing called

Starting point is 00:12:43 the Acceptable Use Policy in place for many years, and it prevented commercial traffic on the internet. How about that? So the dot-coms that we know and love were actually not feasible until I think about 1991, plus or minus one or two years, but I think it was 1991. They repealed the AUP. And the reason people fought it, they said there was going to be spam and porn and malware on this commercial internet and it's all going to be broken because before that it was like an academic and military internet everybody was sort of a quasi-trusted

Starting point is 00:13:13 user on it you had to have a dot mil or dot edu domain right and then they're like oh my god all these crazy people are going to get on it's going to be and you know what they were right all that stuff did did happen but yeah the benefit was worth it you know what? They were right. All that stuff did happen, but the benefit was worth it. The downside was mitigated by, I think, the upside. That was the birth of the commercial internet. And that's something which most people don't even know how that came about. It really was something where one rule was holding back all this innovation. That's something that's made a deep impression on me. So stuff like that was the kind of stuff that I tried to convey in the course alongside the nitty gritty. I think most of the time, that kind of stuff is not taught in the same place from the same person, with one coloring the

Starting point is 00:13:53 other. I think that's part of why the course was popular. Thank you. It was a very comprehensive answer. I love comprehensive answers. I've been looking forward to this conversation. You're very good at teasing out the details. And we may end up teasing out the details on all sorts of things in this conversation, including some of what one of our mutual friends described as one of several Bologisms, including the line, immutable currency, infinite frontier, or maybe frontiers and immortal life. I'm giving teasers to people. So this is a bit of a cheap trick, if you'll excuse it. Another one, this is from, we'll just say Anonymous. Although I think this sentiment has been echoed by a few people I chatted with, which you may enjoy, which is

Starting point is 00:14:37 something along the lines of, quote, Bology will end up on one side of a firing squad, but I'm not sure which side, end quote. Okay. That's funny. I'm very peaceful. I'm extremely peaceful. I just want to put that out there for the record. Go ahead. He's very peaceful. And I think that part of what fascinates people about you is how often they would consider you prescient. And often that comes with a degree of fear, not of you, but of the consequences of you being right. And I'm thinking of, for instance, a quote, I think it was on January 8th by the co-founder of Rome Research. You probably remember this one. I think it's at C-O-N-A-W, if I'm getting that right, which was something along the lines of the most terrifying

Starting point is 00:15:25 words in the English language, our apology was right. Okay. So I'm planting those seeds just because we're going to come back to why some of the things you've predicted accurately have in fact been terrifying. Before we do that, if you want to say something first, we can dive into it. I will offer just a little bit of color there, which is, so what he's referring to is specifically my predictions on COVID and the pandemic and so on. But then also more generally, a bunch of unheeded predictions or things that I've said and that people would be like, ah, that'll never happen. And then this kind of happens. And so it's not so much that it's always bad predictions. It's not always just Cassandra. I like to think that I look for large deviations so that you can actually get large upside as well as large downside. And so folks who I think who followed me on investments have done correct? Yes, that's right. Is that the gift, given the gift of prophecy, but with the condition that no one would believe her.

Starting point is 00:16:30 So we will come back to some of these predictions. And is it, I want to say, I just heard you say COVID. Most people would say COVID. Does it matter? Is one correct and one not? I mean, it's an acronym. I've heard it pronounced both ways, COVID or COVID-19 or COVID. So I don't like COVID. Yeah. I'm going to roll with it. We'll come back to that. Now, before we started recording, and you and I have chatted before, we were chatting, but I thought it would be kind of fun to kick the ball around in the conversation about podcasts, because you have opinions about the state of

Starting point is 00:17:08 media or mainstream media, and perhaps even the future of media, which I'd love to dig into at some point. But you had some perspectives on the podcasting world relative to perhaps other ecosystems. Could you just provide your first, I don't want to say postulate, that's me trying to get fancy. No, no, no. Yeah. All right. Please go ahead. Yeah. So basically, let me give some definitions first. So here's a one-liner that took me a very long time to understand. So product is merit and distribution is connections. For example,

Starting point is 00:17:41 a great blog post that nobody sees is a great product with terrible distribution. Conversely, a really dumb article or whatever that is a piece of content that is in a feed that is seen by millions is a terrible product with great distribution. And these are actually essentially disjoint things. Sometimes you can build products that have distribution built in, like social networks or payment apps, where they're inherently viral. That's why people like them. But most of the time, these are disjoint things. And you have to put as much thought into the distribution of the product. If you're selling chairs or something like that, it's not enough to make a good chair.

Starting point is 00:18:17 You need to think about, okay, how do you get to Walmart? How do you get to this distributor? How do you get on Amazon? All those types of things are critical parts of making it work. And Peter Thiel has this good line, which is that distribution is the thing that just engineers don't get. Part of the reason I think they don't get it is that it's based on, quote, connections. So it can't be just reduced to math, or at least parts of it can be like your contribution margin and so on. But it is something where a lot of it is, quote, networking or knowing somebody.

Starting point is 00:18:46 And people don't usually put thought into this. But when you walk into a convenience store, why are some energy drinks pulled up all the way to the front, like five-hour energy? Why is it in the checkout aisle? And why are others at the back? That is not an accident. That's a bunch of distribution relationships and deals because people are hyper-conscious. The store owner is hyper-conscious of the fact that being upfront near the checkout

Starting point is 00:19:08 is a great spot to move inventory. And that's actually more valuable to be there than at the back. This is a negotiation with them. Okay, what's my point? Point is that I think an enormous amount of our media ecosystem today is actually something where the product is terrible, but they've got a lot of great legacy distribution. So again, a software analogy, think about Microsoft or Oracle. Oracle, which makes a database, any engineer who's listening to this, the database is okay,

Starting point is 00:19:38 but most people, if you're starting from scratch, you'll use Postgres or an open source database or a combination of some kind. So Oracle has kind of a bad product or a declining product in many ways, at least relatively versus the open source competition. But it has great legacy distribution because it's got its hooks in all of these enterprises. The salespeople know them. It's also hard to extract it, to pull it out. How does that relate to the podcasting thing? Well, if you think about distribution,

Starting point is 00:20:05 not just for sales or for companies, but for ideas, media creators can have great content, which is great product, or they can have lots of followers or lots of influential followers, which are the quantity and quality respectively of their distribution. And podcasters, when two people tend to do a podcast together, they tend to have comparable distribution. Because they have comparable distribution, X hundred thousand, Y hundred thousand, or X million, Y million followers across platforms, not any one platform, right? That actually is, it's almost like the wild west where both people come to a saloon armed, an armed society, polite society. It sounds like something that should be put on the license plates here in texas go ahead

Starting point is 00:20:47 and what i think it's done is it's changed the culture of podcasting the thing is when everybody's kind of comparable in distribution the culture has changed to one of politeness back and forth give and take as well as the long-form of it. The contrast to this is like a journalist versus a subject. Podcasting is peer to peer. Journalist subject is hierarchical. There's a journalist, a corporate journalist, an employee of a media corporation, and then there's the subject, as in, you know, the subject under the microscope or the subject, and there's a king and their subject. And that word or subject to, that word subject is such a revealing word. It gives away so much. The journalist and the subject under a microscope. And the thing is, the journalist-subject relationship, when the journalist interviews the subject, the journalist can edit, they can pull whatever quote they want,

Starting point is 00:21:32 and they have the distribution that the subject doesn't. They have millions of folks who will read their thing. The subject can just squeak and can't get a word out edgewise. They can yell all they want, but it doesn't do anything. No one will listen to them. It's just boom. That's why people used to say, never argue with the man who buys ink by the barrel. You're writing a little letter to the editor and they've got, you know, they're rolling off the printing presses, right? It's as if you've got millions of drones that you can just hit enter and boom, just push software updates too.

Starting point is 00:21:57 And this person can just talk to the people around them. Because that's what media is. Media scripts human beings. If code scripts machines, media scripts human beings, even in ways that we don't fully appreciate. That's why people spend so much on advertising. You might think advertising doesn't convince you of something, but it just sort of reminds you that Coca-Cola exists. And then you're at the store, maybe I'll get a Coke. That's how words are picked up. That's how vocabulary is picked up. A small example, if I said postulate like eight minutes ago or nine minutes ago, you might say postulate two minutes ago, right? That's a small example, right? That's not bad. It's just how we should think about it.

Starting point is 00:22:28 Point being that once we are equal on distribution, then we can actually speak to each other as peers. And it's futile to try to argue with someone who has way more distribution and is hostile. You just need to build your own distribution, which is much more possible in the internet age. I agree with that. I agree with the, if we were to put it in indelicate terms, these mutually assured destruction elements of civility. I think there are also a few other contributing factors. One is that many journalists working under a masthead have the air cover, right? They have the air cover of not only the reputation, whatever that might be. It doesn't need to be the most prestigious publication, but they have the reputational cover. They also have the insurance cover, right? The errors and

Starting point is 00:23:18 omission policies in actual insurance, those clauses within actual insurance policies, and some degree of legal protection by their employer would be one. Another is that very often, podcasters have experienced having their quotes cherry-picked or have been on the receiving end of a hit piece and therefore i think are just more sensitive to inflicting that on other people exactly empathetic yeah they're more empathetic and i would say that you see that very clearly you see a shift sometimes not always in journalists and journalists. And there are many spectacular, wonderful, diligent, ethical journalists out there. Some of them are very close friends of mine. In those who are, say, tending towards the kind of cynical cherry-picking side, once they launch, this is how it usually or often happens, their own book, and now suddenly they are at the whim of other media and other reviewers

Starting point is 00:24:26 and other critics, they really, for the first time, sometimes get a large dose of their own medicine. And often that can stem the tide a little bit. I would say last, not to give podcasters too much ethical credit, although certainly some of them and many of them are ethical, I think that it's very difficult to cherry pick when you're interviewing in long form. Not only that, but both sides can very easily record. So there are a lot of factors that make it a friendlier format. Although I will say I have had podcasts that are highly produced, try to pull a fast one on me before. And not that this is terribly relevant, but that was how I learned to listen and pay attention to my dog very closely because it was one of the few times that this woman walked in, this was pre-COVID, this was many years ago, to interview me with a producer and so on. And my dog growled. The dog growled. Molly growled.

Starting point is 00:25:33 And that almost never happens. And I apologized for her growling and continued the interview and very quickly realized that I was being led into a trap. And I just stopped the interview. I said, yeah, I think that if this is how you're going to approach it, we're done. And it turns out, if they're on deadline, and they have a highly produced piece, and they have a lot of employees and mouths to feed, that that is actually a reasonably strong move, assuming you can afford to do it. It's just to not play ball, just to walk off the field. And so a lot to be said about media. Oh, absolutely. I mean, the thing is actually the non-answer, the ignore, the block is actually quite effective as an individual and even more effective if practiced by a large group

Starting point is 00:26:20 of people. Like there's the site blocknyt.com, that if you saw, actually did quite well on Twitter and is a minor hit. And I think you're going to see much more of that, where essentially the issue is that a journalist versus subject, it's almost like a traveling salesman who goes town to town and runs a con on this person and the next person and the next person. There's this great book called The Journalist and the Murderer that actually documents this. Have you heard of this? No, I haven't, but that's a hell of a title. Hell of a title. It's actually in the modern library's, I think, top 100 books of the 20th

Starting point is 00:26:56 century. It's called Journalist and Murderer. It's by a former journalist. And essentially, it talks about how there's this really brutal killer and a journalist who interviewed that killer and then you know published a story that was like a huge misrepresentation and the killer was like so mad they sued the journalist and the jury actually ended up sympathizing with a murderer over the journalist once they understood what the journalist had done so it's a phenomenal book you should read it actually you know i'm, I'm just going to read you the opening of it because it's so good. It's by Janet Malcolm of The New Yorker. Okay, ready?

Starting point is 00:27:31 Famous opening. Every journalist who is, this is her quote, okay? It's not mine, but it's, all right. Every journalist who's not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of non-fiction writing learns when the article or book appears,

Starting point is 00:27:59 his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and the public's right to know, the least talented talk about art, the seemliest murmur about earning a living. Okay, so I want to offer, but. By Janet Malcolm of The New Yorker. So I wanted to say that's a journalist on corporate journalists, basically. For those who want to, there are two sides to this coin. And I want to say, for those who want to further educate themselves on the dark arts and those

Starting point is 00:28:33 gambits they might fall prey to, there's also a book called Trust Me, I'm Lying by Ryan Holiday, which covers a lot of this, including the tactic of getting an email 20 minutes before a piece is going to be published asking for comment, which of course is intended to not elicit any comment or panic you or other tricks. I'm going to be commenting on you whether you provide a quote or not. Therefore, you should do A, B, or C. But that's a good book on some of the dark arts. And don't lose your place. I don't think you will because you seldom do. But this also lends all the more testament to those journalists who can withstand and methodically counteract these powerful incentives and motivations to actually do good work where they don't get sucked into this vortex of perverse incentives. So I do want to say that the people

Starting point is 00:29:37 who are actually able to stand in the eye of the hurricane and do that, I give a tremendous amount of respect because it's hard. I understand what you're saying. I do think that the structural incentives in the profession now are such that you've got someone who's literally just swimming against the stream. And I think actually part of the issue is that it's a profession in the first place. And what I mean by that is, you know, like the founding fathers talked about how a standing military was a bad thing because you'd have this Praetorian class that was armed to the teeth and there would be, again, subjects. And that Praetorian class was in drills. It had its own esprit de corps, its own sense of self, and would increasingly go contemptuous of these civilians who they watched

Starting point is 00:30:23 over, you know, and that was a recipe for bad things. So that's what they preached against a standing military. Now, the US basically didn't have a standing military for a long time until essentially the permanent wartime mobilization of the 20th century, especially post-World War II. You know, before it was like, you know, the ideal was to have citizen soldiers. Like if you've seen the movie 300, where all the Athenians come out and it's like, you know, I'm a you know the ideal was to have citizen soldiers like if you've seen the movie 300 where all the athenians come out and it's like you know i'm a potter and i'm a baker or whatever and they grab an axe and go to war but they're not permanent military now whether we can get back to a standing military or rather away from a standing military to a citizen military i think that's going to have to wait till mid-century when it's all drones, at which point then it's all computer programming. And actually, so that's,

Starting point is 00:31:08 I know that's just a cast off remark. So within the next 30 to 40 years, once we get to the sort of asymmetrical warfare, where the cost of offense is much lower than the cost of defense with armies of drones, is that what you mean? Yeah, I think basically sometime mid-century, maybe more. You know, I don't know if you followed the, just as a footnote on a footnote, but the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict, right, which was heavy on drones. You know, that's a glimpse of the future of warfare. You know, the future is already here, but it's not evenly distributed kind of thing. So I do think that eventually, once you get full automation of everything, it'll actually be just drone on drone.

Starting point is 00:31:45 And then people will surrender rather than have the civilians killed. It actually might be more ethical in some way. There'll be obviously a transitional phase. The transitional phase of human versus drone will sort of be like early in World War I, there were cavalry charges versus machine gun nests. The cavalry were just kind of this outdated way of war that quickly went away. Human versus drone, human versus robot will be like that, I think. And then people will quickly be like, okay, we just need robot versus robot. Anyway, so leaving the standing military bit

Starting point is 00:32:13 aside, because I don't think that can be solved in the short term. By analogy, there's a concept of standing media. Standing media is, again, like a praetorian class or a select class, a quote elite, that among themselves practices certain behaviors that the average person can't. And what's interesting is, NYMAG, you know, had this thing a few years ago, like the media on the media. And it was, let's see if I can find it. Here's it, the survey, right? Okay, I'll just find you the exact thing. The media on the media, July 24, 2016, 9 p.m. One of the biggest things that they all agreed on is journalism's biggest blind spot on its coverage is groupthink. We draw from a limited pool of people who generally have a similar background class or simply unable to see the perspective of people who are not like them and tend to drive out those who don't fit in.

Starting point is 00:33:01 Now, I actually understand this coming from academia. I could see how that epistemic bubble happens. It's ironic that the people who complain often most about filter bubbles are actually complaining about the plural, because there was just one filter bubble that they controlled, and now they're annoyed that there's more than one. They have competing filter bubbles. They have competing filter bubbles. It's competing filter bubbles. Exactly. So the way I kind of think about this is the answer is not reform. The answer is not to tell these professionals, hey, go in journalism better, or hey, you're doing a good job. This guy's doing a bad job. I think that's been tried for a very long time. I think the answer is radical decentralization in several ways. One critical way is everyone

Starting point is 00:33:46 a journalist. So citizen journalism as opposed to corporate journalism. So this way, you don't have a media corporation that's literally running billboards declaring itself to be truth incarnate. Lest I exaggerate, that's literally the slogan of one large media company that shall go unnamed. It runs a billboard saying it's the truth. And yet these media companies are basically, the big ones are nepotistic endeavors. They're passed down from father to son. They are everything that they castigate technology for being, which it isn't. They're these kind of inbred sort of things, right? And no one ever points this out, right? No one points out that the owners of these papers are actually like just literally father to son kind of endeavors, which is not happening in tech, right?

Starting point is 00:34:28 You don't get father, people found their companies in tech. So the alternative to, you know, like sort of this hereditary dictatorship running these media corporations is everybody writes. And you have local expertise, you have chemical engineers writing on chemical engineering, and you have biologists writing about biology, and you have computer scientists writing about computer science, and they do it as a duty, not for profit. Meaning that it's actually the fact that there is this corporate business model there basically currently incentivizes them to go for popularity and the number of clicks,

Starting point is 00:35:05 as opposed to truth. Now, you might say, are you against profit, etc? No, I'm saying that the citizen journalism part is one important component. Let me give two or three more. A second important component is decentralized cryptographic truth. And this is a big concept, I'm not sure I'm going to be able to do it justice in a few sentences, but I'm going to try, which is to say it is now possible with cryptocurrency for a Israeli and a Palestinian, a Chinese person, a Japanese person, a Democrat and a Republican to all agree on the state of the Bitcoin blockchain. Regardless of your political views, your geography, people agree on how much Bitcoin someone has globally. This is an incredible triumph because, you know, a trillion dollars, forget it. I mean, a million dollars is the kind of thing that people will fight over and disagree on

Starting point is 00:35:54 and so on. There's essentially no dispute on who owns what BTC. And that's the kind of thing that people tend to have large disputes over. A trillion dollars people tend to fight over. They tend to try to fake history. They tend to forge things, all the type of stuff, right? The point is that once you can develop consensus algorithms that can get people to agree on what Bitcoin someone had at what time, you can extend them as we're doing to get people

Starting point is 00:36:18 to agree on what property somebody had at what time. So what stocks, what bonds, what real estate, what this, what that, which is, again, another huge component of the kinds of things people fight about. And then less obviously, you can extend that to what events happened at what time. So what device recorded this temperature in Kansas on this date? Or what hospital uploaded this medical record to the blockchain at this time? Or what was the price of this house that was sold in this area? Or what crime was reported by this victim or this police officer in this area? All of these feeds of data right now that are happening in these kind of disparate silos, you put them together into something I call the ledger of record, which is a

Starting point is 00:37:02 global feed of cryptographically timestamped history, undeletable history. And it's kind of like Twitter in the sense of when people are referencing whether something happened, they're like, was that tweet real? And you go to the permalink, and you want to see whether someone actually did it. That's imperfect for many reasons, one of which is that Twitter can man in the middle of it. Another is that the person's account can get hacked, and they can post to someone else's happened last summer. With cryptography, with digital signatures, without going into all the details, that offers not a perfect set of checks, but a much greater set of checks on this. It becomes much harder to falsify history. You can't delete the tweets as Twitter can do. There's a lot of

Starting point is 00:37:37 things that come into it where that feed becomes incorruptible. It becomes an indelible ledger and it becomes cryptographically validated. And so what I think in crypto, this is called crypto oracles. The point being that you're no longer relying on just pure humans, fallible humans to tell you what is true. You rely on decentralized cryptographic truth rather than corporate truth. And this is already the kind of thing which is the input to smart contracts, handling millions of dollars. I think we're going to scale this out over the next 10 years. And this is actually the alternative to a few folks in Brooklyn trying to determine what is true for the entire world, which simply doesn't scale. Not that it ever did, but it's very obvious that it doesn't. All right, let me pause

Starting point is 00:38:15 there. A lot to digest. There's more I could say. That is a lot to digest. So it'll be very interesting to see what happens to long-form journalism, that is pieces that would take possibly weeks or months of time, dedicated time to produce. But putting a bookmark in that, we can always come back to it. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront. Did you know if you missed 10 of the best performing days after the 2008 crisis, you would have missed out on 50%, 5-0% of your returns. Don't miss out on the best days in the market. Stay invested in a long-term automated investment portfolio. Wealthfront pioneered the

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Starting point is 00:39:29 on your investment gains. Their newest service is called Autopilot, and it can monitor any checking account for excess cash to move into savings or an investment account. They've really thought of a ton. They've checked a lot of boxes. Smart investing should not feel like a roller coaster ride. Let the professionals do the work for you. Go to wealthfront.com slash Tim and open a Wealthfront investment account today, and you'll get your first $5,000 managed for free for life. That's wealthfront.com slash Tim. Wealthfront will automate your investments for the long term, and you can get started today at wealthfront.com slash Tim. There are a few things that I would love to get your opinion on,

Starting point is 00:40:09 perspective on, and I'll give kind of a preview of the two. One will be current forms of self-defense, whether preemptive or reactive, while we're waiting for the future to be evenly distributed? What can we do in the meantime to protect ourselves or counterpunch if we're being potentially mistreated by members of the media? That's one. And then after that, I'm going to ask you about, for yourself, keeping a ledger of predictions, much like you've recommended people to write out the bull, bear, and base case of joining a company and then checking themselves, say, a few years later. But let's first talk to any particular strategies or tactics for defending oneself. Exactly, for self-defense. Do you have any thoughts there? Sure. So I have several.

Starting point is 00:41:05 The first is maybe the least obvious, which is you should radically reduce your expenses if possible, because financial independence is upstream of individual independence and ideological independence. If you're in lots of debt, if you're not in debt, but you're just spending every dollar you have because you live in an expensive area, then you are extremely conformist because, oh my God, you lose your job and you have no savings and you've got this high consumption. And so you just have to stay in line for everything. Now, if you want to live like that, go ahead. Okay. But if you don't, the first thing to understand, I think, is that it's much easier to reduce

Starting point is 00:41:47 your costs by 5x than increase your top line by 5x. It's possible to do both, but it's almost deterministic to reduce costs if you're willing to do it. And how do you do it? You go to nomadlist.com or teleport.org and you do a spreadsheet and you optimize your personal runway. And your personal runway is what it sounds like there's a concept i developed it's very obvious but just extends the concept

Starting point is 00:42:08 corporate runway to individuals it's your savings divided by your burn rate and here's the thing the moment that you move to let's say bali or some very inexpensive locale and start living like a grad student and of course this is most applicable for people earlier in their life it's harder for folks with families and what have you right so? So I recognize that. But even then it can be done. There's a Reddit group called, I think, Lean Fire, Financial Independence Retire Early. There's Mr. Money Mustaches, folks who do this kind of thing like household budgeting. But as an individual, it's actually relatively easy. We do now, and this is actually even easier in 2021 than it was when I first started recommending this. You get a remote work job at a good tech company. It could be any company, of course, but let's just say tech

Starting point is 00:42:50 because it pays well or whatever, if you can get it. But a remote work capable job, you move to the cheapest place that you can tolerate that's good. And actually, there's actually some really great places that are cheap and warm, especially now that remote is feasible. I mean, basically all of Latin and South America, if you have to be in an American time zone, for example, and big chunks of Canada, if you like the cold, you know, and of course, let's say you're making, I don't know, 100,000 a year as an engineer. And before you're in San Francisco, and you're burning like 90,000 of that a year or something. That's actually not insane. A lot of people do exactly that, right? Because the rent is so high. Now you go to some rural locale, or even overseas, and now you're actually only burning, let's say 50K a year, 40K in tax or what have you. And then like 10 or 20K, let's say it's 60K. Okay. 20K in expenses. Cause you just cut it all the way down. Well, now every year that you work, you have basically built up because if

Starting point is 00:43:58 your income goes away, your tax goes away as well. Every year that you work up, if you're, if you're spending 20K a year, you have 40K in savings, if you just do out the math, earn 100, spend 60, bank 40. If your spending is 20, then you have two years of runway, personal runway added for every year that you work there in this simple toy example. And that means that you don't need to accept angel financing. You can sell finance. You can just, for every year you work, you can take two years off. It's basically a way of getting personal financial independence, like a deterministic path to doing it. Now, of course, you're no stranger to this. You've been talking about this stuff forever, you know, the four-hour work week.

Starting point is 00:44:31 This is not unusual for your audience. But I think that the perhaps somewhat novel is connecting this to ideological independence because it means you can't be canceled. You know, you can just write it out like you know the square jawed chad yes you know from you know the memes i'm talking about no no i don't what is square chad okay okay this is very very online but if you google the chad yes it's like you know someone being like oh my god i can't believe you believe this or whatever and the guy's like, yes. And he's just not backing down at all. Just totally firm square jawed chat. You've never seen this?

Starting point is 00:45:10 No. It's all right. I didn't know who Taylor Swift was until like four years ago. So I'm a little sheltered, it would appear. Yeah. It's like it comes from, you know, yes, Chad, no, you're me. Here, I'll send you the I'll send you the thing.

Starting point is 00:45:26 I'll put this in show notes for people right next to drone warfare. I bet 99% of your audience says, maybe it's obscure or maybe it's not. I don't know, but we'll have to see. Anyway, point is, how do you do the square jaw, Chad? Yes, it means you have to be able to, you know, you're not backing down. You accept what consequences may come because you have planned for the future. You know conflict may come and you have essentially banked up. And so that's, let's call that one piece, right?

Starting point is 00:45:57 Financial independence. And it requires, not to state the obvious, but it requires or may not even require courage the less fear you have. If courage is acting in the face of fear, if you have minimized the risk or the damage of being canceled or any type of media retribution, you have less fear to overcome. It just makes it easier, like you said, to have that ideological freedom to hold a position. That's right. The second thing is if you read books like Beautiful Trouble, do you know what that is? I do not. Okay. So that's like- I feel like I'll be saying I don't and I do not a lot in this

Starting point is 00:46:34 conversation. Please continue. No, no, no. So Beautiful Trouble is an awesome window into another world, which is it's sort of like, you know how it's a handbook for activists. And so you sort of learn when you read it, you'll be like, Whoa, I recognize that from this event. And I recognize that from this event. And you start to realize actually how much stuff you read in the paper, some part of it is sort of from corporate PR. But another big chunk of it is from activist PR, for example, taking a laser pointer ish thing and shining a logo onto the side of a building. There's various kinds of stunts like this. But the one that's relevant here is

Starting point is 00:47:09 there's this concept called spectrum of allies, where you've got people who are at, let's say there's five categories, strongly supportive, weakly supportive, neutral, mildly opposed, and strongly opposed. And your goal as an activist is to recognize you can't just move people from plus two to minus two right away. What you do is you try to find some incident or thing that is bad. And then you go and you put a microphone to everybody and you force them to comment on this person or this incident and be like, can you excuse this horrible thing? And you try to force them from a plus one to a zero or what have you, right? Now that is actually a very premeditated thing. One way of visualizing it is it's an attack on your social network. Okay, this is a premeditated

Starting point is 00:47:51 thing. It's not like a organic thing. And it's a spectrum of allies. And one way of thinking about this is you have a social network supply chain. Okay, so visualize yourself, you're a node at the center, and you have your employer, let's say your CEO, you have your investors, you have your employees, you have your customers, right? There's all these nodes around you. I'm talking about from like a tech startup context, but you can, of course, generalize this to something else. And those nodes can be colored, you know, let's say they're gray or blue or red, they

Starting point is 00:48:19 can be colored according to their ideology. And the most important thing about your social network supply chain, and this is not obvious, it is what periodicals they read and respect. Because those periodicals have root access to their brains. If a periodical suddenly says, you know, let's say the Wall Street Journal, and you've got a bunch of Republicans surrounding you, for example, right? The Wall Street Journal suddenly says you are bad. All of those people who read and respect the Wall Street Journal will suddenly like zombie-like turn their eyes glowing red and start excommunicating you. Or they'll move in the spectrum of allies. So the guy who is on the

Starting point is 00:48:54 fence may quit. The person who's really strong and strong supporter might move to what the minimum contractual obligation is. And so the attack, it's like a mortar that lands in somebody's social network neighborhood. That's what negative press is. Negative press is an attack on your social network. Now, how do you mitigate this? Well, first, as I mentioned, you're like a quote sovereign individual, you're financially independent. So if people pull away, it doesn't matter. But second and more important, you need to actually identify where likely attacks are going to come from and make sure you actually choose your friends, your employees, everything such that that's actually robust to foreseeable kinds of attacks, right? You robustify your social

Starting point is 00:49:36 network supply chain in the same way that a judicious person who runs a manufacturing plant is thinking, okay, China has some supply chain risk. You are thinking, okay, that person has social network supply chain risk. I think they would go south in this event. And then you might want to get them off the board, or you might want to not hire them as an employee or have them a contractor. And that's actually better for them as well, because they may or may not know it, but they're basically like the Manchurian can't, they've got like a remote chip in their brain. And there's like this when, when you're denounced. Okay.

Starting point is 00:50:12 And now we have it actually relatively good in, you know, the West in, you know, the term canceled, by the way, it's actually very juvenile. It kind of comes from like TV shows being canceled, like cancel cultures, like teenagers complaining about it. And this sort of elliptical way of complaining about it has made its way up to 30 and 40 and 50-somethings discussing this topic. But the original term for being canceled was being purged. That's what they called it in the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China and so on. And it could well be said that in the Soviet Union or the PRC, an editorial was a prelude to an extraditional execution.

Starting point is 00:50:46 You wouldn't just get canceled and lose your friends. You'd lose life, liberty, and or property. You'd be shot or jailed or certainly expropriated or all of the above. Sent to a labor camp in the Cultural Revolution. Correct. And the other nodes in your social network might be as well. Like if you were a member of a family that had a known capitalist rotor in China, not really very good. It was possible, just like people come back from being canceled,

Starting point is 00:51:16 Deng Xiaoping was actually purged three times. His son was thrown through a window during the Cultural Revolution and was in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. So, I mean, this is the kind of stuff that happened in other countries. It got even more violent than it has so far in the US, but we'll see what happens with that. Anyway, the point is that, so that's a second mode of defense. First is personal financial independence, and second is collective independence. You want to really think through who the nodes are that are associated with you. By the way, one interesting consequence of this, if you flip it around, is if you have a monochromatic supply chain, there's basically nobody, for example, at the New York Times company who reads and respects Breitbart.

Starting point is 00:51:58 So Breitbart has zero effect on the New York Times company. No node there can be a Manchurian candidate by them. But the New York Times company, absolutely, if you go to Breitbart's extended social network supply chain, there's absolutely folks, whether it's ads or other kinds of things that read and respect NYT. So A can publish an article that has no effect on B, but B can publish it and it has an effect on A. Another example is if Xinhua, Xinhua Daily, and by the way, I'm not saying anything pro or con about Breitbart or NYT, I'm just making an observation of fact there. Another example is XinhuaNet in China, the Chinese People's Daily. If you're Chinese and they denounce you, your whole social network

Starting point is 00:52:34 supply chain is like, whoa, the government just denounced this guy. You're in trouble. If you're in the US, nobody even reads Chinese or even cares, hey, these guys are totalitarians, who cares? Or at least that's what folks, you'd be able to brush it off. And so so it's more than just quote, red or blue or whatever it is, there's other colors to it, right, whatever you assign the color to the CCP or what have you. And so you know, another one might be if Al Jazeera denounces you or Russian state media denounces you, you've got vulnerabilities to different kinds of things. If you were a Russian expatriate, you might be much more concerned if RT suddenly started going after you than if you were just some random American or even a Chinese person. Go ahead, let me pause there. Well, I was thinking I'd be curious to hear

Starting point is 00:53:15 what else you have thought about for yourself in terms of self-defense, if there are any tactical recommendations, and just also to come back to one of the examples you gave with reducing your expenses by 5x, would you not, so it's a combination of questions, you can take them in either order, but if you were employed by a tech company, whether that's a Google, a Facebook, or otherwise, is that not a significant vulnerability in the system? While financially, if you maintain your job, you can withstand, say, public denouncement or media denouncement, but the company may not have the same willingness. Absolutely. Absolutely. So let me get to point number three. So point

Starting point is 00:54:06 number three is, I gave a whole series of talks on this, and I've been thinking about the technology for it as well, something I call the pseudonymous economy. So the thing is that real names weren't built for the internet. Real names are actually a technology. In fact, real names are a stolen base in many ways. Even the term real name is a stolen base. It's better called a state name or a social security name because it's a global identifier. It's an identifier that anybody can type into a database and pull up all kinds of information on you. And this is something where historically past cultures understood that giving out someone's real name was actually very bad, you know, or knowing it, you had power over that person.

Starting point is 00:54:42 The reason is that if you read this book, Seeing Like a State. Seeing Like a State. Yeah, Seeing Like a State. So this is a great book by Yale University Press that essentially talks about how names were developed to, among other things, simplify the process of conscription. So rather than, oh, that guy over there with brown hair, which is an analog identifier that could refer to a bunch of folks and that was imprecise. Instead, you'd say John Davison. And that first name, last name was a, it's not perfect. It's not quite as good as a number, but it's a reasonably good digital identifier where you could go down a list and cross it off. And the thing is that that would not just be conscription, but you couldn't have

Starting point is 00:55:19 even executed like Leninist redistribution of property very easily without those lists. It was all about the lists. Literacy is what actually enabled a big chunk of that. You had lists of names, that guy's rich, that guy's not rich, take his property, etc. So the point being that the alternative to real names or like a single global identifier and everything is pseudonyms, search-resistant identities, which people are already using at large scale. There's 400 million pseudonyms, you know, or pseudonymous users on Reddit. And by the way, there's a distinction between anonymous, pseudonymous, and real name. Anonymous is totally disposable identifier. That's like the culture of 4chan. That actually is kind of a pit. Pseudonymous, like Reddit, is a persistent pseudonym that

Starting point is 00:55:58 accumulates reputation, but that is at a distance from your global identifier. In general, what I think is the piece of Westphalia at the end of our 30 years internet war is going to be- Hold on, pause for definition. If I could click on a, do you say Westphalia? Yeah. So from 1618 to 1648, Protestants and Catholics slugged it out over religion, but also over power. Who's going to rule the Catholic

Starting point is 00:56:25 church or Martin Luther's guys, the disciples of Protestants? Very bloody war, lots of killing. And it was basically centralization versus decentralization, along other things. And eventually, the truce that came about was the so-called Peace of Westphalia, which established the modern nation state. I was just thinking how happy it makes me that you thought I might even know that. I'm so honored. So thank you. But no, please continue.

Starting point is 00:56:53 I don't want to take us off track. It made my day. It just made my day. Thank you. I don't mean to drop an obscure reference, and there's lots of areas of history that I don't know about. But this is one that I think about a lot because it's highly relevant i think to the present day in many many different ways arguably the 30 years war arose out of the introduction

Starting point is 00:57:14 of the printing press um because you could go and mimeograph you know all of martin luther's stuff and spread to people and that's how you know the software install, boom, into people's brains. And that's the Protestant Reformation. Distribution took off. So this technology gave rise to this huge fight that essentially redrew the map. And the concept of the nation state was born out of that, which is, okay, you don't have these transnational entities that just can have influence everywhere. Instead, we're going to have these sort of geographically defined areas that have a sovereign government with a monopoly of violence and a religion can't just walk in there and just start bossing people around. There's like a lawful government.

Starting point is 00:57:53 That was the truth that people came to. You stay in your lane, I stay in mine, just out of all the bloodshed and to stop the bloodshed. So I think we've just began. Hopefully there's not bloodshed or not much of it. I think we've just begun. People think we're just began hopefully there's not bloodshed or not much of it i think we've just begun people think we're ending it but i think we've just begun the global internet like cold war where all of these social networks currency networks compete for ideological and economic dominance around the world because they can just spread virally back and forth like this

Starting point is 00:58:21 and um everyone will be trying to cancel each other and whatnot. It's going to be this crazy, crazy thing. For example, one thing I anticipate will happen sometime in the 2020s is I think in some country, probably the US for lots of reasons, I think the cloud will burst. And what I mean by that is like treasury was just recently hacked with the solar winds thing. People don't know what they got. They could have gotten every tax return. They could have gotten all kinds of very sensitive stuff. It was hacked with what? I'm sorry. Oh, SolarWinds is sort of the name of the hack. I see. Got it. government systems and this is not the first time this has happened it's also happened at the government of texas and so and so forth i'm not pointing at any particular entity the main

Starting point is 00:59:08 thing is when there's a recent hack of ledger the crypto company their database was just blasted on the internet and you could actually you know i wasn't a customer but people could see their name and their home address on the internet and And they're like a crypto fanatic who has a hardware wallet on there. What a nightmare. What a nightmare. Oh my God. And so it is like this thing where,

Starting point is 00:59:34 you know, you don't, you can't easily change your home. I mean, some people can. Yeah, suddenly you have guys in track suits showing up at your house. Potentially, exactly. It's like a rank order list of who holds crypto. Really, really, really sucks. May lead to home invasions, other kinds of things. Very bad piece of information to have out there. It's an enriched

Starting point is 00:59:52 list. So it's hard for, you know, the thing is even discussing it, I hate bringing more attention to it. On the other hand, it's also something which has important consequences. And one of the consequences is that shows it's not a theoretical risk to think about what these hacks could be so far people have talked about hacks kind of in the abstract but once a government database is hacked and all of this surveillance on us is just blasted out on the internet the cloud bursts you know whether it's what does that mean like by the cloud all facebook dms rain down all slacks rain down something like that rain down meaning are suddenly searchable and available suddenly searchable and available consumption wikileaks

Starting point is 01:00:32 style exactly now when that happens the defense that people are good now it'll cause all kinds of crazy stuff basically it's not so much that you'll see fires and and electrical outages and so on but but all kinds of social damage will be caused, low trust, relationships broken, all that type of stuff, like the tearing of the social fabric. Go ahead. Well, I was just going to say, not to mention that even if you feel like you have nothing to hide, and this is an issue with a lot of surveillance act bills and things like that,

Starting point is 01:01:01 if suddenly every lawmaker, every member of Congress has dirt on them? I mean, the destabilizing effect is non-trivial. It's non-trivial. Now, there's an argument that when everybody's naked, no one is. Some people may make that argument. Right, right. Sure. But it doesn't all happen at once. That's the thing, right? It's not all discovered simultaneously nor distributed simultaneously. Exactly. That's right. And if you look at what happened during the Sony hack and so on, this is like a preview of that. And so the answer, I think, is we're going to need to build a pseudonymous economy where over the medium to long term, you separate out your real name,

Starting point is 01:01:41 your earning name, and your speaking name. And in fact, you have multiple earning names and multiple speaking names, just like you have multiple usernames at different sites. Crypto is a crucial component of this because it allows you to earn pseudonymously. And with a recent innovation that, you know, I haven't coded it up, but I've got like the white paper level description of it would let you transfer reputation from one pseudonym to another. So one issue right now, just to frame the problem, is you may have a bunch of reputation followers or karma, for example, under a username, even a pseudonym. If you boot up another pseudonym, it starts at absolutely zero, which is one of the big things that stop people from doing it. Let's say, you know, for example, you have a large

Starting point is 01:02:19 Twitter following and you boot up a new pseudonym. That pseudonym starts with nothing. And so it takes you time to boot up like a new following. That's a whole effort that deters a lot of people from doing it. They're starting all the way from scratch. And, you know, I thought about this problem and how to, because the thing is that with cryptocurrency, we've actually solved this where you can set up a username and another username and you can use Zcash to transfer money from one name to another pseudonymously. So money can be transferred. Reputation, though, didn't seem to be until I realized that actually, you might not be able to do it for followers, which are non fungible,

Starting point is 01:02:55 that is to say one person is not like the same as the other. But you could do it on a site like Reddit, where you had karma that was accumulated. And so someone who had 10,000 karma under one pseudonym, just like you use Zcash to transfer digital currency, Zcash is basically like the truly anonymous version of Bitcoin, truly private version of Bitcoin. Just like you use Zcash to transfer cash from one name to another, you could use Zkarma to transfer karma from one username to another and thereby reboot under a new username.

Starting point is 01:03:26 Okay. And that username would have no comment history, but people would be like, okay, that's a 50,000 karma person or whatever the number is. Clearly that's somebody who our community esteems to some extent, you know, has been uploaded a lot. Perhaps we should listen to what they have to say because they felt they had to go into a pseudonym for this. And of course, you could do this with not just a global karma, but subreddit specific karma. You accumulate all this karma in the, I don't know, the historian subreddit or the mathematician subreddit or something like that. You have something controversial to get off your chest. You can say it this way. That's one dimension of the pseudonymous economy. I think another dimension is basically that people, just like you don't

Starting point is 01:04:05 give out your password, you know, I think it's going to become less and less and less common for people to give out the mapping between their physical body and their usernames online. Like you may not even tell your wife, you know, just like, you know, people often- When you mean physical mapping, that just means you're not going to correlate those two things for someone. That's right. Exactly, right? So essentially, it will be considered a faux pas.

Starting point is 01:04:30 And we're already moving towards this, right? Like there's this YouTuber whose name I forget, who's like, Schick is that, he's like a faceless guy, like faceless horror or something like that. What's his name? Don't know what I'm talking about. I don't know, but we'll put it,

Starting point is 01:04:43 we'll find it and put it in the show notes. Okay, yeah. So this guy's name corpse husband corpse husband ever heard of it okay c-o-r-p-s-e husband corpse husband so this guy with this super deep voice it sounds like this you know like like like a like can't even, I can't even mimic it. This guy with the super deep voice has never shown his face. So Corpse Husband, basically, you know, he's quasi anonymous. He's given away his audio, but not his video. And, you know, I think that stuff like that, I mean, what's, I think what's going to happen soon, sooner than we think probably by 2025, 2030 latest is you'll have filters on your Zoom that are not simply like, oh, my background is San Francisco or whatever, but audio and video filters so that you sound and

Starting point is 01:05:31 look like a different person. And that will be like the equivalent of clothes. The FBI informant filter, something like that. Or it's just something where people don't need to know who you are. And here's where I think, why I call this a piece of West Valley. I think at the end of this rainbow is not the right metaphor, but this journey, pseudonymity stops both discrimination and cancellation. So it's not ideal, but it is accepted and widely used by people of all political persuasions. And so it's sort of like a mutual disarmament where you can't cancel somebody. The only thing you can do is judge them by what they're saying. You can't discriminate against somebody.

Starting point is 01:06:09 You don't even know what their immutable characteristics are. And so that's actually, I think, an acceptable truce to many parties. Not a great one, but it's the total opposite of bring your full self to work, Google stuff or whatever. It's actually the total opposite trade-off, which is minimum necessary self. And I think this goes hand in hand with a future world where there's more tasking, more micro work, less full-time jobs, and so on. Some of the stuff, obviously, you've touched on many times. All right. So there are lots of questions I could ask, including what are, we've talked about what it stops, but not what it

Starting point is 01:06:41 produces or what side effects or perverse incentives could come into play with a pseudonymous economy. I think we might get into that, but I just want to ensure that I don't miss asking a question. And this is really a meta question of sorts. And if it's a shitty question, you can tell me and we'll do something else. I, for context, as you mentioned, or maybe as I mentioned, I think it was on January 30th of 2020, this was a week after the lockdown in the city of Wuhan, you posted a tweet, what if this coronavirus is the pandemic

Starting point is 01:07:15 that public health people have been warning about for years? And you ended up predicting accurately many things related to COVID. You have certainly been a participant and in some respects by participating a predictor of many developments in blockchain and cryptocurrency. And for that reason, I had a laundry list of questions related to different types of possible predictions that you might have. But I thought a broad strokes way of checking all of those boxes might be, and tell me if this

Starting point is 01:07:53 makes any sense or if you're game to try this, is to actually talk about investing. And just to say, if someone handed you $100,000 or $100 million today, and you had to invest it, how would you even think about that? Because I think by answering that, it might actually begin to speak to some of your predictions in the upcoming years. Sure. What do you think about that framing? Sure. So basically, I mean, I never give financial advice. Right. I was just going to say, right. This is important as a disclaimer.

Starting point is 01:08:28 What would you do? This is not financial advice. We're not registered investment advisors. Caveat emptor. This is for informational purposes only. No minors or minotaur is allowed, et cetera, et cetera. Please continue. Sure.

Starting point is 01:08:42 So the question is, if I was given $100,000 or $100 million, what do I do with that? How do I maximize returns? So the dumbest thing, but that I think is the most obvious thing to do, is put half into Bitcoin and half into Ethereum. The dumbest, meaning the simplest, or the most ill-advised? No, no, the simplest. The simplest thing that I think is guaranteed to produce really exceptional returns, I think you could probably do... I mean, in retrospect, from 2030 looking back, there will be almost certainly something you could do that would be better than that. But that's going to do extremely well. Okay.

Starting point is 01:09:19 And I think that's a global strategy also. Go ahead. Is that what you would do? Now, understanding you've sold multiple companies, you've had multiple exits, you are post-economic, I assume, in that respect. But you said to maximize returns, and I'm not sure if that is how you would think of the objective at this point. So is the objective to make the maximum difference to humanity, or is it to maximize returns? What was your? It's whatever you would do with it.

Starting point is 01:09:48 Oh, okay. Well, what I would do is something very different. So I thought you meant invest on behalf of somebody else. Okay. Well, in a sense, you answered that. So I'd love to hear your personal take. Sure. Okay. So I'll tell you what at least I'm planning on doing, which is pouring money, some of my own and maybe some from investors if I decide to raise money, into bootstrapping talent around the world through 1729. So just return to that because we were talking about that at the beginning. This is going to be the first newsletter that pays you. And so that's to say daily, at least $1,000 in Bitcoin prizes for doing tasks. Okay, so for example, here's an essay, the best 10 responses to it get 100 bucks in Bitcoin. Here is a scientific article,

Starting point is 01:10:36 the best 140 second video on this gets $1,000 that explains it to the masses. Here is a textbook or a chapter of a textbook. Please generate 10 exercises for this chapter that are fully open source that anybody can do. I'll give you $100 in Bitcoin each. So that's cumulative, like an open source Coursera, open source Wikipedia in a sense. And the goal here in doing this is several fold. First is I want to actually build up those citizen journalists that we talked about, those content creators. Second, I want to invest in like a cumulative form of education, open source education, you know, where these folks are doing tutorials. So for example, those 10 questions I just mentioned, they could be on science, but they could be on video editing or other kinds of things. And it's

Starting point is 01:11:21 all just open source so that people get paid for creating the educational tasks that others can do. How are those two things related, by the way? I know it seems a little vague, but let me explain. So you have these tasks that people are completing and you have this educational content that people are creating. The reason they're related is there's global tasks that anybody can do, but you might be able to get paid more if you know Figma or if you know Python or if you know chemistry. And so the educational tasks that I also pay people to do are like a curriculum that if you solve these tasks, you can level up and get higher value remunerative tasks. The basic idea is, go ahead. May I pause you for a second? So if you have a task like create 10 exercises based on this

Starting point is 01:12:02 textbook or this material, Can multiple people perform that or complete that task? If so, do you pay all of them? How do you decide who to pay? That's a great question. So the review process, actually, we allocate as much of a budget or a good chunk of the budget just to review because review is its own thing. And there's various ways of doing review. And we're going to experiment with a crowdsourced aspect, like a Reddit style leaderboard of up and down voting, and then a manual, you know, review on top of that. And then there's like 50 different things that you can do to kind of make this more sophisticated. In a sense, this is like earn.com 3.0. You know, there was earn.com, there's Coinbase earn, which earn.com

Starting point is 01:12:41 is actually doing extremely well before we sold to coinbase was essentially pay people to reply to emails and complete tasks and then coinbase earn was asset issuers like uh you know creators of new cryptocurrencies and digital assets would pay users to do tutorials on their asset to learn about how it worked you know like filecoin or orchid how to use decentralized storage or decentralized vpn and is like a third iteration, which also combines a bunch of ideas that I've had for online education. So just to summarize it again, A, a newsletter that pays you with at least $1,000 a day in Bitcoin prizes for completing tasks and tutorials. And then B, what this does is hopefully it bootstraps talent all over the world. Anywhere there's a phone, there's a job, right? We can give this sky hook to people and you can just start with nothing, absolutely nothing

Starting point is 01:13:31 other than this phone, which people have made really cheap. And you can do the tutorials. You learn some skills, you level up, you get more tasks, you start leveling up more, you get digital currency. So anywhere there's a phone, there's a job and there's an education. And this is what I plan to do with what I've been fortunate enough to make. And that's my contribution to humanity, I think, or hope it to be. And hopefully this helps find also the next Ramanujans out there.

Starting point is 01:13:56 Who is this kid in Brazil or the Middle East? Somebody in some war-torn area like Syria, it's all bombed out. But hopefully that kid has a smartphone and we can kind of airlift them out, right? Give them a shot if they're willing to put in the work and be all free. So let me pause there. That's at least what I'm thinking about doing. And I know it's an idiosyncratic use of capital, but I'm not the type to spend on Ferraris or whatever. Yeah, I would expect no less. So let's just say that there is a bright kid in Syria who I'm struggling so much because I'm accustomed to saying Ramanujan, but I'm getting that incorrectly. So Ramanujan, and he's performing, or she is performing various tasks at a high level. What do you then do with that talent? So presumably they develop some type of reputational

Starting point is 01:14:45 score or they accrue some type of reputation. How do you airlift that kid out or encourage them to airlift themselves out? Is it the capital? Is it that they now have the resources and greater optionality to perhaps improve their situation? Or is there another approach? Because they could be brilliant and continue to complete these micro tasks. Right. So three thoughts there, right? So first is, of course, Syria is an unusual case because it's actually a war zone. We could use another example if it's easier. So let's say it's Nigeria or it's India, or it's a place where maybe the kid doesn't necessarily want to leave. If they don't want to leave, now they have their cake and eat it too.

Starting point is 01:15:28 They can have home-cooked food. They can have their local culture and local language, but they can also get into the internet fastly. And they can contribute pseudonymously, ideally, to a community that will neither discriminate against them nor cancel them. Because the accent doesn't matter. Their age doesn't matter. Skin color doesn't matter. Gender doesn't matter. None of those things matter. It can't matter. That's at least my idea, the true global meritocracy. And that's international, of course. And so the concept here is, yes, they would start earning. And the thing is, a thousand bucks, even once in a year is actually a lot of money for people in a lot of places. So that's like quite a lot of people that we can airlift out that way. And when I say airlift, as I said, I don't necessarily mean remove them from that location unless they want to leave. They might be able to stay there. I mean more like airlift them from whatever situation they're in. At least give them the opportunity. And what does that mean in practice? Well, one of the most important things it does, I think is this is the, if again, if this works, it's ambitious and it's crazy and

Starting point is 01:16:29 so on, but let me try and explain it anyway. This is actually the digital native solution to education. Here's what I mean by that. So you can think of a piece of paper and then you can think of a scanner and then you can think of a text file, right? So you go from physical to this hybrid physical to digital scanner and then digital native. Another example would be you got a face to face meeting, you've got zoom and then you've got virtual reality. Zoom is also like a scanner. It's taking the offline and putting it online, but then VR is like digital native. Third example, physical cash, then something like PayPal or FinTech, right, which is just basically the scanner, taking that and putting it online. And then you have

Starting point is 01:17:11 crypto, which swaps out the back end is just now natively digital, it doesn't have a physical form. And with education, you at least higher education offline, you've got the physical college, then you've got the scanner, which is like audacity and Coursera and so on, which are fine companies, good companies, billion dollar companies, you know, but they're basically taking the college experience and putting it online. And then there's this really interesting terra incognita of what is digital native education look like. So let me kind of motivate how that works. And then you can see how maybe that links in with the tasking piece. And I say this as someone who's taught a lot of courses, whatever. And, you know, so this at least, it may be a mistake, but it comes from my experience

Starting point is 01:17:51 of mistakes, whatever. So let's say you take a Stanford degree in computer science. There are on the order of 25 courses you need to complete the degree, give or take. And that's in addition to so-called graduate education requirements. And each one is roughly, each course is roughly 10 weeks and say on the order of 10 problems per week, sometimes more, sometimes less. So that means about 2,500 problems, 25 times 10 times 10. You need to solve 2,500 problems before you get your one degree. So it's like you have zero degrees at problem 2,300, and then you have one degree after problem 2,500.

Starting point is 01:18:25 I caricature it, but not by much. And after you have your one degree, you go and now you can actually get paid and you can work and so on and so forth. That's a historical thing. Get your degree and then work. Now, of course, this isn't only an idealization. People will do paid internships and so on during college. So after 500 problems, they have enough qualification to go and get some job or internship.

Starting point is 01:18:45 That's true. But to first order, this is how the system is still meant to work, right? Get your diploma before you get a job. Now, one of the things people used to say as sort of a caricature or attack or whatever of a audacity, audacity of these nanodegrees, they say, oh, you're getting a nanodegree? Well, you better expect a nanosalary. You know, oh, ha ha ha, right? It's crap, whatever. So the thing about that is, what if you take that seriously? What if you say, all right, rather than this step function, this discontinuous thing where you have to solve 2,500 problems before you get a job that's paying 100K, what if you

Starting point is 01:19:19 solve five problems and I give you a job that pays you 10 bucks, a microtask, and we see how you do on that. That radically reduces the risk for both sides, your risk in terms of, you know, spending all this time learning something, and the employer's risk. And, and frankly, you know, the difference between a person who solved five problems or one problem in JavaScript versus zero was actually a big difference. It's a, you know, that's actually a big difference. So the idea here is that if you could show proof of skill, somehow, right, if I can demonstrate that I have some skill in JavaScript, or I have some skill in chemistry, or skill in illustrator, whatever, then I could qualify for more skilled micro tasks, right, as opposed to the mechanical Turk style, lowest

Starting point is 01:20:00 common denominator, which is fine. But that's just like labeling something as a cat or a dog, all you need is a pulse. It's the the recaptcha style thing that you see you know label the cars that type of stuff is fine but that's like just all you need is a pulse you don't need any skill the question then becomes how do you actually do proof of skill and i think the answer is something and i've got a post coming on this which i call the crypto credential and the idea is every time you solve one of these problems, we don't give you karma, like on hacker news, we give you a little badge that says you solved that problem. And that's held in your digital wallet, just like your cryptocurrency. Think of it as an NFT, if you know what NFTs are. So it is an NFT

Starting point is 01:20:39 basically, right? Except it's non-transferable. And just a side note, for people who are interested in learning more about NFTs or non-fungible tokens, if I'm remembering correctly, Katie Hahn and I discussed this at length in that podcast episode, which you can find elsewhere. So just Google her name, H-A-U-N, and my name, and it'll pop right up. So please continue.

Starting point is 01:21:00 Awesome. Okay, yes. No, Katie's awesome. So the idea is this would be, this is not something you can resell. So it's not, and if it's not like a piece of art in that sense, it's a third application or nth application of crypto. It's not cryptocurrency. It's not art. It is a crypto credential. It's awarded to you. And you know, the first version of those are just, you solve problems on a website and you earn these crypto credentials. Just like you earn badges at Stack Overflow, just like you earn badges in a video game, you earn these crypto credentials. The difference being they're on-chain. And because they're on-chain, you can log into any site with them. And now you can qualify for instant jobs, micro-tasks. Now,

Starting point is 01:21:38 here's what's cool about this. There's a lot of details in how we implement this, which I can get into. But what's cool about this is it levels it all out. You know, yes, absolutely. There's smart people at Harvard or MIT or Stanford, but there's smart people in the middle of Brazil and, you know, in Hungary and India and Nigeria and the Philippines. And I know there's smart people there because I could see them in my class. And I could see that many of them were the equal or the better of some of the more pampered kids at these expensive schools, especially nowadays, where there's less stress on just getting the right answer and more on canceling people or whatever, right? Like undergrad is much more screwed, especially in the US, than it was even 20 years ago,

Starting point is 01:22:19 10 years ago. Plus, because of the pandemic, lots of colleges are shut down and they're having economic problems. There's a huge desire to do something better. And the concept is, if we do this right, it's like Wikipedia for education, because every course is's my thinking right now. I might change my mind. But exorcism.io. This is an awesome site, by the way. It's got a funny name too, like exorcism, but with an E. And Exorcism basically has something where you can learn Python by doing like 50 Python problems. Or you can learn JavaScript by doing like 70 JavaScript problems. And it's recorded on the site.

Starting point is 01:23:02 It's like you see this counter go up. And just think about how much better that is than typical social media, where all you're doing is fighting for clicks or whatever, you know, fighting for hearts on Twitter or likes on Facebook, whatever it is. And that's something where you're just incrementing numbers on somebody else's server. I'm not saying it has zero value, there is some value to it, but it's not value that you can easily quantify or extract from the system. You know, you built up your followers there. You can't import them or export them. It's not really building up yourself.

Starting point is 01:23:29 So the idea behind 7029.com would be, you would constantly be pursuing your, improving your knowledge and your bank account. You'd constantly be learning and earning. You'd be learning and getting these crypto credentials, and then that would allow you to earn cryptocurrency. Now, the third thing, actually, and this is something I've been also thinking about, starting with the idea of, and maybe we'll do this, is you may think this is crazy, but you're also the four-hour body guy.

Starting point is 01:23:58 I'm already crazy. I think I've crossed that Rubicon a long time ago. All right. So the third thing I was also thinking about is actually putting up a third kind of daily post, which is burning. That is to say, just post something of you working out and we give the 100 best each day, like $10 in BTC. And it's a varied health task, not just working out. Maybe it's show your fitness tracker or what vitamins are you using or something like that with a goal being that people who are at 7029 are focused on truth health wealth learning true things and

Starting point is 01:24:33 leveling themselves up that way like gaining knowledge health like improving their body their physique but also you know like staving off aging you know thinking about transhumanism measuring themselves and then wealth as important, but third, truth, health, and wealth in that order, because determine what's true, make sure to maximize your health, and then accumulate wealth, but don't do it at the expense of what is true or what is good for your health. Go ahead, you're smiling. I love that. I love it because, I mean, not to bring this to the four-hour body, seems like a downgrade, but I mean, look, I mean, not to bring this to the four-hour body, it seems like a downgrade. But I mean, look, I'm very proud of that book and happy with it.

Starting point is 01:25:08 It's a great book. Great book, yeah. And a lot of what was in there that seemed highly speculative at the time has only gained more traction and support in literature and so on. So I'm very pleased with that. A large component of that, and especially The Four-Hour Chef, which very confusingly is about accelerated learning and behavioral change, the disproportionate impact of small incentives and stakes is, I just think, so under-discussed. And one of the stories that I tell in the 4-Hour Body, I believe, was of a Google engineer who hoped to get in shape. And he created a pact with a fellow engineer, which was, we're going to work out together, whatever it was, three days a week.

Starting point is 01:25:53 And if either of us misses a workout, we're going to pay the other person a dollar. Now, these are Google engineers. They make more than a few dollars a year. And it was incredibly effective. And the fact that it's a micro incentive leading to a micro behavior should not be minimized because ultimately our life is largely comprised of longitudinal accrual of these micro behaviors. It's a big fucking deal. That's exactly right. I love that idea. I love that idea. Let me backstep if I could. I knew this was going to happen, so no surprise here. But I realized that I did not deliver on the promise of one of my questions. And that question was related to, so we're going to focus on the earning component here for a moment, just because I want

Starting point is 01:26:40 to ensure that I provide what I promised to the listeners. I asked the, what would you personally do in this case to maximize return with a hundred K or a hundred million? And then we didn't dig into the predictions or assumptions underlying your answer. So the answer was half in BTC, Bitcoin, half in Ethereum. And I'd love to hear you comment on number one, the assumptions of what's going to happen or not happen that makes that a rational investment. And number two, and maybe you can answer this first, if you could paint a picture of what you consider the risk profile to be in doing something like that. And again, this isn't investment advice. Is part of the calculus an assumption that this is a 10 or 100X or it's a zero or something else, if you could just speak to that?

Starting point is 01:27:29 Sure, sure. So, I mean, look, it's crypto. So, you know, crypto is crazy. And it's very difficult to predict exactly what's going to happen with anything. But, you know, the two things I said that I would do with the money are money are you know there's return on investment there's like return to society and what's interesting is actually when you talk about the you know so return on investment is 50 btc 50 you teach return to society is the sort of open source education tasking truth health well thing and you know by the way truth health and wealth i think of as the next liberte, egalite, fraternite. It's the slogan of the next state, which I'll come to. Okay.

Starting point is 01:28:08 Or one of the next states. But coming back at the stack, so both of those things actually have common premises underneath them, which is that I am simultaneously very bearish on the US specifically and the West generally, but very bullish on the internet technology, crypto, Asia, and future progress. And those are not normally often somebody is very positive on one and positive on the other or vice versa. Now they're actually separated out. They're separated out things because for a long time, people associated technological progress with the USA. And now technological progress is something that doesn't benefit the US establishment. They don't win a game. The East Coast establishment does not

Starting point is 01:28:48 win a game of free speech and free markets. And so that's why they're clamping down on free speech and free markets. Because if everybody has a voice, especially around the world, go ahead. Why do they not? Could you just say a few more lines on why that's the case? Sure. Why they don't win that game? Why those things are bad for the East Coast establishment? Well, so, you know, a small example of not winning a game of free markets, whether it's the bailouts, whether it is all the regulations that protect them, or the whole GameStop thing, you know, where it definitely looked like some strings were pulled somewhere. I'm not saying the Robin Hood thing, you know, because I think Vlad gave a pretty good explanation on that,

Starting point is 01:29:24 you know, for people who follow that whole scenario. But certainly Discord going and just shutting down GameStop discussion out of nowhere based on, I think, a pretext seemed like someone pulled some string somewhere to make that happen. And that's something where truly for your markets, maybe Wall Street doesn't win, right? There's a rigging that's going on. I see. So by East Coast establishment, just to be clear, you mean specifically in the financial sector? Do you also mean DC? Media, DC, Harvard, basically the legacy entities in the US, like the pre-internet establishment. And then free speech, that's even more obvious. Every single day you have some new editorial saying something like, free speech is killing us, or critical thinking is bad, or whatever.

Starting point is 01:30:04 And, oh, I can't believe people are having unfettered conversations, right? That was like the latest meme. And for many people, this is like this weird thing where how is it that the US that they grew up in is suddenly just on a 180 on this? And the answer is that those folks have legacy distribution, but they have a terrible product. They can't win the argument. And because they can't win the argument, they're trying to use their distribution to shut off other people's distribution because they know they'd lose the argument if distribution is open at all. So they're

Starting point is 01:30:32 against free speech, against free markets. And crypto is actually truly free speech and free markets. So that's actually the true inheritor of the Western tradition. It's sort of like the internet is to the USA what the Americas were to the UK. It's like this new world that will eventually give birth to the successor. And crypto is like a huge, huge part of all of that because it captures the part of the West that's actually globally admirable. Unambiguous rule of law, except in smart contracts, protection from search and seizure through encryption, all that type of stuff. Coming back up, you asked though, why?

Starting point is 01:31:04 Why did they not win this game? Because first is empirical observation. What's the underlying thing? Well, they basically become these inbred folks. They are not selecting on talent anymore. They are selecting on connections. They're selecting on whether you are the son of the son of the son or the daughter of the daughter of the daughter. It is not something where they're actually taking the best folks. They are taking the folks who can just repeat a party line. I think that's one huge component of it. Just for sake of clarity, do you mean within corporate entities, therefore contrasting sort of- East Coast Media, for example, take a look at how many of those folks went to private school, how many of those folks have a trust fund, how many of those folks inherited a fortune.

Starting point is 01:31:45 Just for me, how does that tie to the BTC ETH? How does that tie? How does that tie? Those folks, they lack the skills to win in a fair competition. So there's various rigging that was done, most obviously with the bailouts in 2008, but there's so many other items of this. That's just a very high profile one. And in response to that, technologists developed Bitcoin and Ethereum and these free systems. I mean, if you look at the Genesis block, it says it references the bailouts in the Genesis block of Bitcoin, where it's essentially the counter to this sort of nepotistic East Coast establishment. And to me, that's super obvious. But you're right that it's actually useful to lay out the full logic of it. Because

Starting point is 01:32:30 one of the consequences here, or one of the medium-term things, is you can only use force to clamp down on global free speech and free markets for so long. It's like a jack-in-the-box that will just pop out somehow. One way I think about that is after the financial crisis, basically, you know, the way that they decided to like stop the next crisis is they made it almost impossible to get a banking charter. So you punish the banks by eliminating all of their competition. Now, somehow, fintech and crypto found a way. Different threads coming to the same thing, where basically like working above, doing partnerships, working below. Like despite the front door being closed, technology came in through the windows and the chimney or what have you. And it's actually sort of reforming the system against their will.

Starting point is 01:33:18 Like Dodd-Frank did not reform the banks. It just sort of enshrined them. It was a coronation in the name of a regulation, right? Yeah, it did reduce some of their profit levels in some ways, but it made them more invulnerable. Go ahead. You're going to say. No, I'm just smiling. I'm enjoying. And for those who can't see us because we're probably not going to be publishing video, we are currently on video so we can watch each other's facial expressions. Please continue. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:33:44 I like the coronation disguised as regulation. Right, right. Exactly, right? So it is literally picking winners because you're writing the regulation that assumes a certain structure and capital requirements. I mean, like the concept of a smart contract was not contemplated in Dodd-Frank, like a contract that could be executed independently of a judge or a person. Okay, what's my point? Point is, I don't think many institutions that predated the internet will survive the internet. It is this universal asset. And the reason is because it connects people peer-to-peer. And so what that does is it, I mean, one of my laws of internet physics is

Starting point is 01:34:26 the internet increases variance. Okay. Why? First, let me give the observation, right? The observation is you go from 30-minute sitcoms to 30-episode Netflix binges or 30-second YouTube clips. You go from a stable nine- a stable nine to five job to a 20 something billionaire or a 40 year old failed son who's made nothing of themselves. You go from a taxi ride, you know, it's standard taxi ride to Uber, which actually has very long trips and also very short ones. Like the whole thing is spread out relative to the ride time of a normal taxi. And the reason for this, this is a very common thing in every area. I've seen hundreds, probably thousands of companies at this point. I've seen all these graphs, right?

Starting point is 01:35:12 So you'll have to believe me that this is a synthesis of a lot of different graphs that I've seen. When the internet disruptor comes in, variance increases. There's more downside and more upside, more amazing outcomes, and more really bad outcomes in all kinds of ways. Why does that happen? Because it connects people peer-to-peer, entities peer-to-peer, it removes the middleman, it removes the mediator, it removes the moderator, it removes the mediocrity. Now, each of those words has a different connotation. Getting rid of the middleman,

Starting point is 01:35:39 everyone cheers, yay. Getting rid of the moderator, people are like, oh, I'm not so sure. Getting rid of the mediocrity, again, everybody cheers. So those are all kind of similar words, but they mean somewhat different implications, but they're all true at the same time. So what happens is you have these communities that then arise where nodes that can never connect to each other, boom, they form some bizarre subreddit or some amazing thing like E research you know which is put you know or y combinator so you it's like uh i don't know if you've ever centrifuged anything have you ever centrifuged anything this is i can finally say yes to something yes okay all right great so you centrifuge and you get these different layers out right this you know you mostly samples of

Starting point is 01:36:19 some tissue or fluid from my own body there you go there you go right so so if you centrifuge something you see all the layers just you can often see them just in the test tube itself. And you're like, Whoa, that was like a slurry before, but now it's like very defined. There's a supernatant in those layers. And, um, in the same way, that's what the internet is doing. It's just like basically taking all of these previously mediating, mediocre, moderating middleman institutions and just nuking them all. And they're like trying to fight back, but they won't make it. The centrifugal force is too much, I think. The one exception might be the Chinese Communist Party. That might be the exception that

Starting point is 01:36:57 proves the rule. Just because they were like super early on a lot of this, they built the firewall, they may be the exception that proves the rule, and the future may be a centralized East versus a decentralized West, where what I think happens in the West, did you see this greater Idaho thing, for example? Have I seen which? Greater Idaho. So a bunch of counties in Oregon want to break away from Oregon and merge with Idaho. Catalonia wants to break away from Spain. There's all of these breakaway movement type things or whatever happening. It's like a rumbling that's happening. Quebec, there are quite a few examples of... I mean, I have a Texas t-shirt that says,

Starting point is 01:37:34 most likely to secede with a picture of the state. Not that that is... Actually, you could look into some of the formation documents, so to speak, of Texas. It's kind of fun. But yes, I'm not familiar with greater Idaho, but I'm familiar with the breakaway. The breakaway stuff. The breakaway movement. And the thing about that is, I think some of that is bad, some of that is good, but the centrifugal force, the whole thing is juddering, right?

Starting point is 01:38:00 The system is juddering because folks are unhappy with it. And I think one of the reasons for that is, going back to Westphalia, one of the Westphalian assumptions is that people who are geographically proximal are ideologically proximal. That is to say, you live next door to this guy, therefore you share his language, you share his culture, you share the norms for the most part, you know them, you say hi to them, all the type of stuff. In the modern era, people live in these apartment buildings where they couldn't recognize somebody who lives 10 feet away from them, but they're sharing the most intimate moments with people 3,000 miles away via Snapchat or Twitter or whatever. So this variance, just again to try to tie some of

Starting point is 01:38:42 these threads together, the variance increased by the internet and what you're describing, these are to the benefit of, in this case, Bitcoin and Ethereum. Yes, yes. And now the reason is, there are examples of the extreme upside. There are examples of,

Starting point is 01:39:00 like several things at the same time, right? First, those middlemen are going away. You know, whether it's the old nation states, I mean, they'll fight, don't get me wrong, you know, it's not going to be a trivial thing. Some of them will reform, I'll come to that point. I don't think every state just goes away. I'm not like a total tech utopianist in that sense. But first, there's a loss of faith in the past. And that makes people open to turning a constant into a variable, a dollar sign, this fixed dollar that everybody knew into, well, like in a fiat or crypto, something that was a constant is now a variable fiat or crypto before it was just fiat. It wasn't even thought of as fiat. Was fiat even a word 10 years ago? I mean, like people, people never heard it. You never heard it. Right. But I thought it was, it was car. I think it was a car when I was a kid and now it's crypto. Exactly. That's right. That's right. Or rather, it's opposite of crypto.

Starting point is 01:39:49 Okay, I see. I'm sorry. You're right. You're right. It was a car. Jesus, well, I'm tying myself up in knots here. Yeah, it was a shitty car, and now it's a shitty debased currency. Yeah, exactly. That's right. So essentially, many things we have taken to be constants have been turned into variables because they were constants due to that mediating influence. And once people could connect peer-to-peer on the internet, you could see there were actually more permutations and more levels, and those people started to gain more of a voice. And that's true in so many different areas. I just point out this one. For example, just the digital versus physical versions of everything. You have to specify whether it's a snail mail or an email 20 years ago. Now,

Starting point is 01:40:29 it's almost all email or the meeting. It's an in-person meeting or an online meeting. The reason that BTC and ETH are important is, first, they represent the sort of unbundling from the old system where it's no longer able to corral all the nodes. The nodes don't all trust it. It isn't performing the functions that they all wanted. And the top ones can now escape to build something better, which they did on the internet. And that, I think, becomes the new center that people align around, like the digital native kind of thing. Because I don't believe that you just have all these particles flying around forever.

Starting point is 01:41:01 I think we're in the age of unbundling and then eventually rebundling. I mean, there's that thing by Jim Barksdale, right? The only way he knew how to make money on the internet was unbundling and bundling. It was a very funny kind of thing. It's also true. You think about you unbundle all the songs from all the albums, then you rebundle them in Spotify playlists. You unbundle every single article and website and URL in the world, and you re-bundle them into a Twitter feed. You unbundle all of these different... Actually, there's a lot of things I could talk about with unbundling here. But you unbundle all these different products, and you have them on Amazon, and you re-bundle them into shopping lists or whatever there.

Starting point is 01:41:40 So you can click and just buy 50 things at once that are served by... It's as if you have your own store shelf. This is your prep or shopping list. And there's a thousand things like this if you think about the unbundling and rebundling. But I think the next step is because states of mind and nation states no longer map to each other, because people are friends with millions of people around the world who share their values, but they're not physically concentrated, the physical areas have less volition by their subjects. So they have to enact more coercion. And more coercion in turn leads to less volition and leads to less legitimacy. And that's a negative feedback loop where at the same time, people are building bonds with other folks of like mind that are geographically disparate. And that is something that's exerting like a strain on the whole system, which I think

Starting point is 01:42:29 eventually results in mass migrations and people assembling into communities of like mind to sort of rebuild civil society with folks who they agree with ideologically. And that's already kind of happening with hacker houses. And so I wrote an article on this, by the way, eight years ago in 2013. I think it's accelerated by COVID and a mass exodus, at least for the time being. I don't think this is permanent, but out of city centers. To question, not to belabor this point, but I think it's a useful tool to use in the conversation. In the case of BTC and ETH, how would you think about downside risk and what would need to happen or what might happen or not happen that would make them bad investments great question so i think that for btc because like a 10 year old protocol

Starting point is 01:43:34 the attack on btc that i think would be the most likely is that the chinese put up the great firewall against it so it's a network level attack as opposed to a mining attack. Because the thing is that Bitcoin assumes that every node can reach every other node. So, or every mining node can reach every other mining node. So it assumes a global internet. If you put up the firewall, you can work out the kind of predator prey on this.

Starting point is 01:43:57 But, you know, they block port 8333 and the Bitcoin devs do port randomization. And then they do, you know, deep packet inspection and these guys do tunneling to try to put it over ssh or htps there's a back and forth that can happen there i think at the end of the day the firewall is pretty sophisticated and it will that plus like domestic penalties may make it challenging for people to maintain a blockchain indefinitely in china or what would happen is they mine the China chain and the rest of the

Starting point is 01:44:28 world chain is also being mined. And there's like a peekaboo problem where they sync up every once in a while. And because the China chain would have more mining, the rest of the world chain would have less mining. All the blocks mined in the rest of the world would get thrown away with a chain reorganization. And the China chain would basically periodically throw away every transaction that was happening in the rest of the world. That would be the worst case scenario where, remember, two things would have to happen there. First, they'd have to put up the firewall. And second, they would have to allow Chinese mining to continue. At some point as you're describing this, I'd love to hear you assign a probability if you had to, like zero to 100% over a timeframe, frame right like in the next five or ten

Starting point is 01:45:05 years i'd say 30 chance of a firewall attack it's not a hundred percent the reason is because it's just something i mean bitcoin is like a guy who's like extremely strong and muscular on many dimensions but can be hit from a direction over here which is just it's just an assumption of the protocol is that every node can reach every other node. And depending on the location of where mining is happening, and so now, to be clear, I don't think this is a fatal blow. I think what would happen is in the event that China allowed mining to continue, but put up the firewall, which is like the most Machiavellian thing they could do. They're pretty smart. Right. And the 30% that you assigned was only for the first part of that, correct? Not the allowing mining to continue.

Starting point is 01:45:45 Well, if they do both. So meaning, I think it's very likely they're going to do a firewall attack at some point. If they do that and shut down mining, no problem. And the reason is because there's enough for the rest of the world or whatever, mining to continue. It just means that Chinese can only transact in the rest of the world. They have to either go overseas or pick up the phone and speak the words to somebody to execute a transaction. China will never be able to actually eliminate Bitcoin

Starting point is 01:46:08 because of the way it's constructed. But they could try to seriously, if they really went after it as super aggressively, they're the only state in the world that I think has the combination of total disregard for individual privacy or human rights, totally organized, top-down surveillance regime, which gets a workout every single day with a firewall, you know, like that combination. The U.S. government can't mail checks to people on time. So a lot of people think the U.S. government could do some technical, the U.S. government is incapable of a technical attack. The U.S. government can't set up a website. It is not the entity that we know from the movies, which maybe never existed. But, you know never existed. But the US government from 1933 to

Starting point is 01:46:46 1968 could do like Hoover Dam and like Manhattan Project and Apollo. That was like a generation that is long since gone. You can't think of the last impressive thing that happened. Go ahead. Well, no, no, I'm just smiling. I'm just enjoying this conversation tremendously. It's not because I have something to say, although now that you've given me the mic, I'll ask a question that perhaps is just on the mind of people listening. And that is, that 30% that you gave, does that mean that Bology is saying there's a 30% chance of Bitcoin being a bad investment? No. I'm saying something different, which is in the event of such an attack, like a firewall attack, what would happen probably is a few things.

Starting point is 01:47:30 First, depending on how it manifests, people might actually move over to a quasi-trusted chain for a time. That's to say you'd put some form of signature or hash into miners when they put it out there to prove that they were a non-China miner. And you'd actually temporarily move away from the Satoshi algorithm of heaviest proof of work chain to heaviest trusted proof of work chain. You actually have to introduce some trust potentially to get around it. That's one option. The other option is that's like a fork of the chains. And this is an event that they do the firewall, but they also allow mining to continue,

Starting point is 01:48:02 which is like the most Machiavellian thing that's possible. However, if there's some other issue with the Bitcoin protocol, the thing that I'm pretty sure will never disappear is the Bitcoin ledger. That is replicated in so many places and it's so valuable that in the event of some issue with the Bitcoin protocol, the ledger could be imported into a hundred other chains and would be. It's already done with all these forks or whatever, right? But for example, Zcash could just double their supply from 21 million to 42 million and just give refuge to all Bitcoiners. It just kind of snapshots at a particular timestamp. Everybody who has private keys before then, you've got a spot on the Zcash ledger. The same thing could happen on Ethereum. The same thing could happen in all these other chains, right? So it's as if

Starting point is 01:48:42 your stock would get split into 100 different or 1000 different instances, your private keys would still find refuture. And that, you know, now, the sum total of all those values, that might be a price hit. There's no question that there might be a price hit there. Maybe it's even more who the heck knows, it's just like crypto is so unpredictable, I can't even, I can't even say what would happen, because some of the forks have done extremely well, way better than I would have expected. But that would be a Tower of Babel moment, where you'd still want to hold on to your private keys, but it'd be all these other chains that would back you up. So it would be messy. But I don't think the idea of cryptocurrency can be defeated at this point. I think any

Starting point is 01:49:17 individual chain, it remains to be seen how robust they are. I don't think that cryptocurrency as a concept goes away. It's similar, by the way, to file sharing, where Napster got sued and Kazaa got sued, but BitTorrent and MagnetLinks and the Pirate Bay are still around and actually quite good. BitTorrent streaming is quite good. What was that, Popcorn Time? Popcorn Time is actually quite a good app that's basically streaming with the quality of an iTunes or whatever, BitTorrent streaming. So that doesn't mean I'm not saying it would be a bad investment. I think that's the most likely attack I can see from the Chinese side. That's specific to BTC. For BTC. Yeah. So on the US side, so not like other algorithms, other consensus algorithms have a greater degree of partition tolerance built in,

Starting point is 01:49:59 for example. The fundamental thing you'd have to work out is like tolerance for extended partitions where a big chunk of the network can't see another big chunk of the network. And so then you'd have to work out is tolerance for extended partitions where a big chunk of the network can't see another big chunk of the network. And so then you'd have to detect that. You'd have to maintain a log of which nodes you were able to reach. There's ways of doing this. It's non-trivial. It's especially non-trivial in production, but it's possible. A lot of smart computer scientists work on it.

Starting point is 01:50:18 So you'd have to have partition-tolerant chains, which could exist, number one. Number two, with respect to what the U.S. would do, the U. US will probably do a regulatory attack, because that's the one part of the state that's still functional. They can pass regulations and yell at people and job with them and so on. Now, what happened in New York with a BitLicense, I think, is a harbinger of what is to come. New York sort of overestimated their clout. They're like, we're in New York, so of course, we're going to regulate all crypto stuff. What are you going to do? You're going to go somewhere else.

Starting point is 01:50:48 It's New York. It's the best. And that's not what happened. Instead, what happened was every crypto company was like, actually, the world is very big now. New York is the last place that we're going to operate, like literally last. We'll operate in 49 other states and do New York last. And that just meant that actually New Yorkers got financial innovation last rather than first.

Starting point is 01:51:04 So that one regulation, the BitLicense, was something where these folks who were at some point the Big Apple, quote unquote, was number one. And they just overplayed their hand in an arrogant way because they didn't understand. The guys who got them there weren't arrogant like that. They were always hungry coming up. There were folks who understood, okay, New York has to do this, has to do that. These folks had been born with it. They'd inherited the system. They just thought they always had that leverage. And I think that's a microcosm of what the US might do, where it becomes super unfriendly for crypto, or it's possible. I think it's also possible the resistance comes from within the US. This is something

Starting point is 01:51:39 we have very low probability on. I think it can go many different ways. The future is uncertain. So the regulatory, federal level regulatory attack in the US you view as a low probability event? No, I think it's- Or just a low consequence event because those companies domiciled in the US who are focused on crypto just re-domicile. It's not that easy to just do that for lots of reasons. It is not easy. It's not that easy to just do that. Right. Exactly. So I think US incorporation in the sense of like being incorporated in the US is going to be considered

Starting point is 01:52:09 like a major vulnerability in the future, I think, after, you know, like the 2020s. And people ideally will want to incorporate on chain and then have jurisdictions that respect that because that's global rule of law. You know, you can put your shareholder vote in there. You can put your board of directors vote in there. Everything can be done on chain in a better way. And then just like you can print out a document locally or exchange Bitcoin locally or have email work everywhere, you'd basically have local government system or Twitter works everywhere. You know what I mean?

Starting point is 01:52:41 Local governments would actually adapt to the on-chain realities rather than vice versa. That's starting to happen. So now to the federal point, go ahead. Yeah, I was just going to say that sounds like a company or organizational response to federal regulatory attack. I'm wondering what, if anything, individual retail investors who hold Bitcoin could or would do. Sure. So I'd say go to Miami, go to Wyoming, go to places like that, maybe Colorado, which will be sanctuary cities and states for crypto. Why is that? Is it just because you have the first two at least or no state income tax? Oh, no, no. Because Wyoming and Miami have... I mean, there's places that are low tax. That's not actually the thing. The mayor of Miami. It's not related to that.

Starting point is 01:53:25 The mayor of Miami, Francis Suarez, is awesome guy. You should follow his Twitter. Basically, may single-handedly change governance in the US because he just got out there and he innovated in a way. He's got the personality of a startup CEO. All right, have you followed this at all? The whole Miami thing? I haven't.

Starting point is 01:53:42 Oh. And I should. Okay. What was the name one more time, please? His name is Francis Suarez. He's the mayor of Miami. And last fall, somebody after, you know, one of my friends actually, after just observing the latest catastrophe in San Francisco, was like, why don't we just all move Silicon Valley to Miami? And Francis Suarez retweeted him with, how can I help? Which is kind of like the VC, you know, kind of cash phrase or whatever, right? By the way, I'm not cynical about that phrase at all like the VC, you know, kind of cash phrase or whatever, right?

Starting point is 01:54:08 By the way, I'm not cynical about that phrase at all. It is, you know, there's people who try to make it into like something to be mocked or attacked and making everybody, you know, cynical. It's actually a good phrase. Even if it's, even if it's not lived up to a hundred percent, it's way better that that's said than not said. Anyway, so he put up, how can I help? And then the contrast with California, basically a legislator there told Elon Musk, F you, literally on Twitter. And Elon replied, message received, versus how can I help? Enormous gap between the two. So Miami suddenly basically began, go ahead, you're laughing. No, I'm just, I'm shaking my head because I'm just like, who, how is that a good move? And just, it's good move? It boggles the mind to me how that type of response is productive. They are getting local positive feedback for that.

Starting point is 01:54:51 There are people who are cheering them on Twitter, F you, Elon, ha, ha, ha, you know, et cetera, et cetera, right? Like just stupid peanut gallery type stuff. Yeah. And then Elon moves to Austin and there you go. Exactly. He said, message received, got the F out. And this is the thing. So Suarez essentially has recruited all of these tech and finance people to Miami by literally just being friendly

Starting point is 01:55:14 on Twitter and doing coffees with them, welcoming them to the city. Billions of dollars in capital, all these companies have now moved to Miami because... Smart. Yeah. That's smart. That's right. And so essentially you have uh he spent i mean like the roi of every tweet has to be like a million dollars right if you did a thousand tweets to recruit like one billion dollar company to the city right you can score it however you

Starting point is 01:55:36 want maybe it's not a billion dollars for the city but the market cap is going to get distributed somehow um it's going to be spent some fraction of that his roi is phenomenal and the thing about it is you don't actually need 10 of the world world's governors or mayors to be spent some fraction of that is ROI is phenomenal. And the thing about it is you don't actually need 10% of the world, world's governors or mayors to be like Francis Suarez. You just need 10 because those folks will be these technologically progressive leaders that will recruit tech and finance to their cities. And, uh, you know, Dubai is doing this. Estonia is doing this. Switzerland's doing it. Chile for a while had a Startup Chile program. All of these places now see their opportunity if they're smart.

Starting point is 01:56:10 And many of the legacy mayors don't understand what's just happened. Basically COVID has put us into the remote world. And now you're more like CEO of the city than a typical mayor. That's so true. Totally true. CEO of the city, you're always selling.

Starting point is 01:56:23 You are selling your city. And crucially, there's a new path to power. You are selling your city. And crucially, there's a new path to power. You don't need to go mayor to governor to president, right? You don't need to get on national TV. You don't need to politic an angle for a spot at the national convention or go to national media. Instead, by just doing sales every day doing by essentially getting on whether it's twitter or you know some social media platform and just getting out there and talking to folks recruiting folks and pitching your city and improving the product of your city he passed he got a bill through which was like oh miami is now like a pro bitcoin city and he's like actually it's the first city to buy bitcoin

Starting point is 01:57:00 how like the thing about it is oh you also put the Bitcoin white paper on miami.gov. Here's the thing. There are a bunch of governments that did this, right? Estonia, Colombia, Miami, etc., all in a little boomlet a few weeks ago, put the Bitcoin white paper on their site. Now, the thing is, on the one hand, of course, it's just a symbol. On their hand, it's actually a great signal that that's actually a crypto-friendly place. It doesn't cost them anything. It doesn't commit them to anything. What it does do is it puts up a flag. And if you can't get the white paper on a government website, maybe that place isn't actually that friendly to crypto. And if you can, there's at least somebody there who's

Starting point is 01:57:35 pretty friendly to crypto. It's actually a really great filtering mechanism in that sense. It's much more than symbolic because of the bureaucracy involved, right? It has to actually get the nod from quite a few stakeholders in order for that to happen, right? So it would seem entirely or could be entirely symbolic if it were just an individual blogger, but for it to be put on a website like that signifies much more. Quick question for you, again, just to, I mean, it's just as much for me as for people listening. What are the implications of a federal regulatory attack for those who are not able or not willing to move to Miami or Wyoming or the handful of places?

Starting point is 01:58:21 Yeah. So Wyoming also, by the way, has amazing crypto laws. And basically, my thesis on those, just to hover on that for a second, is those places will probably litigate and fight some federal kind of thing if it happens, just because they have a strong incentive to all their citizens are there and so on and so forth. So that's actually good because it drags it out for a long time. We see what happens. To be honest, I don't know. I don't know what the answer is. I think that things are going to get really crazy because here's the other side of it. That crypto ban, if it's contemplated, will happen at the time that crypto has created thousands of millionaires and billionaires, not thousands of billionaires, but a lot of very

Starting point is 01:58:59 wealthy people who are ideological. These are the kind folks you know the more crypto you have typically it's more correlated with buying into crypto in 2011 or 2012 or 2013 when it was an out of the money thing to do because you were basically ideologically you made you made a bet against the monetary policy of the u.s you saidouts are bad. And you said, this is actually, despite what everybody's saying on TV, I don't believe that. I actually want to make a contrarian and as it turns out, right bet. Not quote QAnon or something, but contrarian and correct. You know what I mean? And that's actually like the whole teal thing. You're actually making something that is in that quadrant. And so those folks are not folks who are likely to

Starting point is 01:59:46 just go down without a fight. The whole thing, these are activists. And also highly, highly anti-authoritarian, generally speaking. Yes, but capable of organizing. So it's an important combination, right? The way I describe the community, actually, I mean, this is the best parts of the community. There's all kinds of crazy actors in crypto who I wouldn't endorse. But maybe this is an idealization. Maybe this is the community I want to build.

Starting point is 02:00:13 But I think it is fair to say that the best tech folks and the best crypto folks are win and help win, which is actually neither. I agree with that. Yeah, so here's the thing about that, right? That win and help win is neither progressive nor conservative nor libertarian. And let me explain why. Okay. So first conservative, you know, your typical conservative actually just, you know, and maybe this is a caricature, maybe some of your listeners won't like this or whatever,

Starting point is 02:00:39 but like, they just kind of want to stay at home. You know, they want to do their nine to five. They want to just have things done. They're not as ambitious. They don't want to stay at home. You know, they want to do their 9-to-5. They want to just have things done. They're not as ambitious. They don't want to leave their small town. They don't want to go bright lights, big city. That's not dispositionally small C conservative, at least. Your progressive often has a very zero-sum mentality. They may be ambitious, but they often believe at a very fundamental level that the rich

Starting point is 02:01:02 are rich because the poor are poor, that one person's gain is another person's loss necessarily. And they feel it's a zero-sum conflict in the state, you know, zero weapon and so on. And the libertarian will say, live and let live, which is a vision of Little House on the Prairie, all being by themselves, et cetera. And win and help win is none of those three. It's ambitious in a way that the small C conservative is not. It is positive sum in a way that the progressive is not, and it is collective in a way that the libertarian is not. And I think that's actually the most powerful kind of philosophy where you are... And notice also the ordering, the sequencing, win and help win. That is to say, absolutely, take care of number one. That's important because if you don't do that,

Starting point is 02:01:44 you can't help others win. But do that as well. Two questions for you, and I'm sure many more, but it strikes me that what Francis Suarez is doing, what Wyoming is doing is very valuable as an experiment and also possibly as different prototypes and that there are governors and mayors who would be very interested in learning more about this, but they don't know how to approach it. Is there a list of what these different places are doing, Estonia, Dubai, et cetera, Miami, or anything, a resource that one could point mayors and governors to who want to possibly look at testing different aspects of embracing bitcoin or cryptocurrency so actually this is one of the first 79 tasks that i wanted to commission

Starting point is 02:02:32 because i've got a bunch of these i want to see whether folks can crowdsource the rest and then we just put that into the website so let's do this experiment i've got like 10 or 15 of them but i don't have i'm sure i don't have the global list and maybe we can just get that in the second because i asked about the probability you would assign to the chinese side of things when you were when we were discussing that earlier what probability would you assign to the federal attack regulatory attack or shutdown in the united states a regulatory attack of some kind is i mean it's basically like a hundred percent like in the United States? A regulatory attack of some kind is, I mean, it's basically like 100%. Like in the sense of, you know, like Mnuchin already tried something. The question is what level the attack will be.

Starting point is 02:03:14 How should that factor into how somebody thinks about, or how you might, I'll make it personal again, how would that, the regulatory attack potential factor into how you think about investing or not investing or bet sizing with BTC and Ethereum? So the thing about this is an attack is not necessarily successful. That's why I say a regulatory attack. And the reason is that there are lots and lots of people across the political spectrum who are very pro-crypto. Pro-crypto people tend to be more pro-crypto than anti-crypto people are anti-crypto with some notable exceptions.

Starting point is 02:03:49 I think that's true. So you just feel more passionately about it for all kinds of reasons, ideological, financial, technical, whatever. And they're extremely online. And many of them are crypto rich. So they have all the time in the world to be extremely online.

Starting point is 02:04:01 And they're extremely anti-establishment and so on, right? So you punch massively above their weight. This is a non-answer, but let me give you something that i think is interesting okay back in 2011 all the early bitcoin people thought that or not all a good chunk let's say on bitcoin talk or whatever i shouldn't say all but a good chunk of people thought that once more people knew about bitcoin and crypto itself wasn't a thing, it was just Bitcoin then. Once more people knew about Bitcoin, well then China and Russia and every country that wasn't the US would adopt it and the US would fight it really hard. And actually that's not what happened. What happened was once there was money to be made, a whole bunch of people who

Starting point is 02:04:41 weren't just interested in a purely ideological project, but were maybe ideologically sympathetic and could invest, came off the sidelines. That's what happened in 2013. And that was this enormous strengthening of the ranks that was able to make the argument that this was financial innovation because there was technical and monetary upside, not just an ideological project. And so that actually meant that the greatest support in some ways came from within the US. And in fact, places like China and Russia were actually more bearish on crypto and still

Starting point is 02:05:11 are than the US is in many ways. So it was like the regime and the opposition are like both the strongest within. It's a hard thing for me to fully articulate, but if that makes any sense, it's sort of like, you know, both the problem of, you know, the bailouts and this giant monetary system that's failing the world and the solution are both coming from within, you know, the US or the West, which is this kind of crazy thing. But it's actually similar in so much to like the three body problem where the Chinese invite the aliens to the world and then they have to solve it because you know it's like like homer simpson like beer the cause of and solution to all man's problems right i was just gonna say you know it also strikes me that your vulnerability to regulatory shutdown also probably depends on the form in which you hold Bitcoin.

Starting point is 02:06:10 Oh yeah. You definitely want to hold your keys locally. I'm an investor in a company called Casa Hodel, which is actually like a rel is a keys.casa is URL. That is, it sounds oxymoronic, but it's cold storage as a service. So they go through with you how to set up your cold storage in such a way that like the whole signing ceremony and so on. It's basically home storage of your crypto in such a way that it's hard to mess it up and it's more error proof and whatnot. I think that, you know, one of the most hardening things I've seen since January of last year is all this crypto leaving exchanges all

Starting point is 02:06:45 around the world. Get your keys off exchanges. Do it now. Do it yesterday. Get your coins off exchanges. And don't worry, they'll be fine. Okay. But you know, not your keys, not your coins. Absolutely 100% true. And the thing is with DeFi, you can't even mess around with DeFi, really, unless you have your keys locally. So there's an incentive as well as a disincentive. So definitely keep your keys locally because that at least means that you can't just have your account frozen with a tap. So we've spoken, or I should say you've spoken at length about a number of risk factors, a number of potentials related to Bitcoin. Just to make sure that we touch this

Starting point is 02:07:27 base, is the risk profile of Ethereum different? Is it more resilient and less susceptible to certain risks? Is it more susceptible? How would you think about Ethereum as compared to Bitcoin from that perspective? Yeah. So it has a different pattern of risks. Some of them are shared, like regulatory attacks on crypto. Others are distinct. For example, if Ethereum completes the migration to a proof of stake system successfully, then it doesn't have stationary Ethereum miners that can be sort of rounded up in the same way that Bitcoin mining farms can be. So that's one major, major difference where you've got a bunch of mobile individuals.

Starting point is 02:08:08 It's got downsides in other ways. I won't get into extreme technical detail, but proof of stake, because it's not doing computation in the same way that proof of work is, doesn't have some of the same guarantees that proof of work does in terms of being totally, totally trustless. Like you sort of need someone to point you

Starting point is 02:08:24 to which chain is real. There's a bunch of chains like Medusa-like that are all competing. So it has a different and overlapping set, different and orthogonal set of risk modes or risk factors. I think Ethereum is certainly more complicated than Bitcoin in many ways, the most important of which being that there's tons of programs running on top of Ethereum itself, right? All these smart contracts.

Starting point is 02:08:47 And it does have actually a negative network effect right now where the more things that run on it, the higher the fees are, which crowd out other things. So there's both positive network effects from composability and negative network effects that come from just incredibly high fees for all kinds of stuff. Now, everybody's working on scalability of blockchains. It's a good problem to have. It's kind of like scaling the early internet. There's going to be paradigmatically new things. An investor in something called Starkware, which has something called Cairo, that is very promising. In general, so-called zero

Starting point is 02:09:15 knowledge roll-ups are very promising. It may turn out, for example, with Ethereum that only the priciest applications stay on Ethereum, and many other applications go to other L1 chains that then all just specialize by application. I think that's probably the most likely outcome, or rather, I think Ethereum will scale. But I think that, you know, for example, derivatives might go to a chain that specialize for that. NFTs might go to a chain that specialize for that, and so on and so forth. And chain interoperability, a so-called interchain, will be a big thing, you thing, where assets can be indexed in references, even if they're remote to a particular chain. So Bitcoin had no knowledge of other chains, but nowadays chains do have knowledge of other chains through things like crypto oracles or things outside of themselves. So the risk factors

Starting point is 02:09:58 of Ethereum are distinct, different from those of Bitcoin, some overlapping, some not. Let's segue to Lee Kuan Yew, and we'll get into who this is. Before we get there, maybe this will be a shorter question and a shorter answer, but they're in some ways tied together, in my mind at least. There are those out there who are terrified of your predictions because they feel, rightly or wrongly, and I want to hear your perspective on this, that there is a high likelihood baked into those predictions of apocalyptic outcomes and that one needs to become a tech-enabled Jason Bourne to survive, let alone thrive, in the future. We should shoot him, but go ahead. So how would you respond to that assessment? Do you view yourself as leaning towards viewing the future through the lens of entropy and dystopian possibilities? Or is that just a misread of what you're saying? And is that just a misread of what you're saying?

Starting point is 02:11:07 And is that just a misread of you in general? I think the future will be more different from the present than is commonly understood. And that's actually so more different than ours. Like, was the year 2000 that different from 1970? Not really. I mean, certainly there were political changes. Obviously, you know, China had reformed and the USSR had fallen and so on and so forth. But the rhythms of daily life were actually quite similar.

Starting point is 02:11:36 People got up, they went to work. There was a relative constancy there. Yeah, there were phones, but there weren't smartphones. There were still basically landlines, you know, headsets or handsets, cordless perhaps. Over the last 20 years, there's been an enormous change in terms of rhythms of daily life. One way of thinking about that is, what was your daily life when you woke up in 1980? Okay, so there'd be an alarm clock, beep, beep, beep. You'd wake up, you'd go downstairs, maybe flip on the TV to

Starting point is 02:12:05 look at the morning news, make some eggs, drink some orange juice, maybe read the morning newspaper, go and drive to work where your job involved. If you're white collar, like some papers, and if you're blue collar, you're going and hammering something or whatever, you'd come back, maybe go to the bar on the way back, or you just come straight home and play with your kids or something like that. And almost every aspect of that has now changed. How do you wake up? You wake up to your phone. What's the first thing you do? You look at all of your email because you're getting just all these messages, right? Messages are coming into you, right? You have this personal communication service. So first thing you do is different.

Starting point is 02:12:43 This is for people who are addicted to their phone, but a lot of people are. You come downstairs or you get up and maybe you've got some fitness thing that has read off your sleep. So you look at that because your sleep was also instrumented. You go to the kitchen and yeah, there's food there, but maybe you just go straight to work and you Uber Eats food to work. Or maybe you don't go to work at all and you just go straight to work and you Uber Eats food to work. Or maybe you don't go to work at all and you just work remote from your pajamas in the living room, which is totally feasible today. Your job isn't involving papers or hammering things, but it's hitting keys. Everything is with 50 people who you might have never met in person, that they're remote all around the world.

Starting point is 02:13:22 Through the day, you're reading newspapers, you're reading code. Your job is just much more variable than the hammering job. Rather than pushing the same button for 20 years, you're pushing a different key every second. Basically, every single second of life, from your sleep to your sleep tracker, to your food, through your ordering apps or what have you, to obviously your work, to your food, through your ordering apps or what have you, to obviously your work, to your finances, to your communications, to where you decide to go after you finish working, like, okay, let's do Google Maps. Now the whole map is opened up. One thing we take for granted in the 80s and 90s, when you really had to get an atlas or get a map out to go somewhere new, and you had to study because you could get lost. Getting lost was a thing. lost anymore not in the same way so for the most part thoroughfares were really

Starting point is 02:14:08 important people didn't really go off the beaten path that much unless you had a house over there it was like the fewest number of turns you really didn't drive around randomly you didn't go to like this random coffee shop over here the map was mostly like corridor you know it wasn't opened up and so that's all opened up now your recreational life, you can meet with a different person rather than the same group of friends. So in so many ways, the rhythms of life, we've turned into these sort of nomadic creatures from 20 years ago. And our political structures and our homes and a lot of those are things haven't flexed to accommodate that. And one way to think about that is there's two major ways that humans operate.

Starting point is 02:14:51 There's like the hunter-gatherer, you know, where roam around the world. Many religions, many cultures have something similar to a Garden of Eden type thing, which is whether it's in our genes from some primitive hominid ancestor that we've got all the way down, because vision is baked into the genes, of course. The reason you can recognize something as human, that's genetic. So maybe there's something coded into us from many, many millennia ago that recognizes this Garden of Eden-like thing. We're hunter-gatherers, who knows how it's represented. And then, of course, there's the farmer and the warrior, right, where you have a piece of land. Rather than roaming all around, you're settled in one spot and your food

Starting point is 02:15:29 is worse. It's grains. It like messes up your teeth and so on. It has you grow less, but it's more reliable. It's more consistent rather than the variable ups and downs of the hunter gatherer. And in many ways, what I think, and this is not original, you know, to me by any means, fusion synthesis, a lot of different ideas, but perhaps at least this take on it is, we're going back to the hunter-gatherer way of doing things, but with technology. The best quality of life will actually be available to the digital nomad who has a minimum number of possessions, has the ability to pick up and move stakes at any point, because mobility is leverage against the state, right? A state is a sessile actor. Mobility is something that you can do as an individual, the state cannot do, not as easily. You know, it can't just stretch a tendril somewhere else. So new kinds of polities will form,

Starting point is 02:16:21 new ways of self-governing humans that are fundamentally network-based rather than state-based, fundamentally optimized for mobile social networks, as opposed to stationary houses, because the assumptions are fundamentally different. And, you know, basically, for example, you know, I define a network state as a social network with an integrated cryptocurrency and a sense of national consciences that eventually crowdfunds territory okay and i think that's a new kind of thing that's at least one definition of a network scene that territory doesn't have to be all in one place it can be a cul-de-sac here a ranch here an apartment building here and so you have you know a group of a hundred thousand people let's say that owns pieces of territory all around the world and that is constantly in communication with each other through a social network and considers themselves to be a

Starting point is 02:17:08 people. It's like national formation distillation, that centrifugation that we talked about, out of the internet, boom, it's a network state. And it is like a cloud formation taking physical shape. The clouds are actually distilling down. And so when I think about the future, I think about this type of stuff where I'm just thinking from, I'm thinking about 50 different graphs. This is going down. This is going up. This is going down. This is going up.

Starting point is 02:17:36 Actually, Jordan Peterson had a good remark on this, a similar kind of train of thought where he's like, the number of different revolutions that's happening at the same time is too hard to track. Tinder alone is a complete change in how mating happens swipe right swipe left swipe right swipe left that itself is like this huge thing that would dominate the textbooks of another age you know because this is massive change in how like the daily rhythms of life operate you went from having like have you seen the graph of how people meet their partners i have not okay this is an amazing graph of of how people meet their partners i have not okay this

Starting point is 02:18:05 is an amazing graph of like how people meet their significant others the 2020 update basically each little curve here tells a story but it's like did you meet at church did you meet through your parents you meet at college you meet at work and you can see like meet at work is like this boomlet that kind of drops off it's peaked in the 80s and it drops off in the 90s with various kinds of pathologization of something like that, right? So what dominates everything today is internet, internet, internet.

Starting point is 02:18:32 And in particular, basically, where norms have shifted now is that it's actually more legitimate. I mean, like I've aged out of this, fortunately, right? Before my younger friends would have you, it is impolite to hit on, often considered, depending before my younger, you know, friends would have you it is impolite to hit on often considered depending on the situation. It's often considered impolite to hit on somebody in real life, but it's totally okay to do so on Tinder. So of course, humans are contextual. And

Starting point is 02:18:56 of course, the same behavior that's okay in a in a bar is okay in a workplace or whatever. But now that's actually extended to digital venues as well. So Tinder alone is just this massive revolution. And then you have like 20 of them happening at the same time. And so all of those are these things where the institutions that we have are simply not built for this at all. And that's where they're straining and stressing against, and they're going to give, and we have to have a vision for what's on the other side. So you're more a student of destabilization or stabilization, but it just so happens that right now these multiple revolutions combine to present destabilizing forces, not so much that you view humans or the future of humans through a dystopian or pessimistic

Starting point is 02:19:41 lens. Is that fair to say? Yeah, that's fair to say. I think there's actually a lot of good stuff that's going to come out of this. I think we are going to get to... So what is a positive vision? What do I think about? I do think that we can shape the future. Individuals can shape the future. You can shape the future. A founder can shape the future. I've seen it happen with my own eyes. What I think a lot about is a positive international vision and i think that's going to be based around essentially transhumanism and why do i say that so uh you know i've got various one-liners on this but i've got this book coming out by the way that that'll actually also be serialized at 1729 so like there's daily tasks and book chapters with

Starting point is 02:20:23 the book's title is the network suit so So if you've got about 10 chapters, they should be dropping and then more to come. But one of the concepts in it is infinite frontier, immutable money, eternal life, like as something to strive for, you know, cause you need these sort of slogans or things, which, you know, bumper sticker that expands into a PhD thesis, right? So what does that say? That says space is good. That says, you know, Bitcoin is good. Crypto is good. That says life extension is good. And you know, that pulls so much with it.

Starting point is 02:20:53 Life extension basically says, look, universal healthcare is not enough. We need eternal life. Okay. Our ambitions have actually been lower than they need to be. Universal healthcare is just moving gravy around on the plate. It's a fundamentally zero-sum mentality that really presumes... Go ahead. No, no, it's a great turn of phrase.

Starting point is 02:21:12 Yeah, yeah. The moving gravy around on the plate. Well, the goal is for you to not need healthcare in any normal sense. The goal is for you to be this self-repairing, rejuvenating... There's technologies out there, which would sound crazy, but I've got a post called The Purpose of Technology. You know, we can, scientists can, engineers can restore sight, cure deafness. There's good research on liver generation. There's good research on genetic modifications that will make you completely ripped without ever having to do anything like the foliostatin stuff and myostatin stuff. Can I pause for one second? Go ahead.

Starting point is 02:21:49 Just for people who don't have this bit of context, because I don't want folks to think these are the ravings of a madman. You are very cross-disciplinary. You've spent a lot of time in the biological sciences, genomics, computational biology, of course. Tell me if this is a fair statement. I mean, you almost became the head of the FDA under the last administration as well. Is that a fair statement? I was considered for a very senior role there, yes. Okay. Just wanted to add that for people who may not have any of that context. So please continue. Yes. Healthcare, universal healthcare or basic healthcare, moving gravy around on a plate unnecessarily or unhelpfully low expectation.

Starting point is 02:22:37 Right. Right. So exactly. I'm really not somebody to stand on qualifications or credentials or whatever, but in this area, people want to check them. Yes, I taught computational genomics. I founded a clinical genomics company, all that stuff. And of course, no one can be an expert in every area of biology. It's too big. There's guys who are experts in radiology, which I don't know as much about. But I do think that one of the few good things that'll come out of this pandemic is a Y-shaped

Starting point is 02:23:04 recovery, where we're taking a different fork. that one of the few good things that'll come out of this pandemic is a y-shaped recovery where we're taking a different fork we've deprecated the 20th century leisure economy you know the 20th century leisure economy of bars and restaurants and clubs and all that type of stuff is something which you know just had this enormous economic hit to it you know the levels of bankruptcies are just off the charts. It's a terrible thing. I think if we're lucky, we get not in its place because it's not zero sum, but there's a greater focus on health, on life extension. And we didn't say life extension, by the way, we're really reversing aging, which is even better, is it just captures everything right it's like a it's like um a universal ruler where if we

Starting point is 02:23:47 can reverse aging we can fix so many other things we can probably should i say cure cancer yeah there's many kinds of issues musculoskeletal things you know osteoporosis you know macular generation all those kinds of things that happen often they're correlated with increasing age you know and uh and people have this mental model that oh we're just breaking down you know like like a car it just accumulates hits and it breaks down right that actually cannot be the model of how aging happens do you know why why is that if that was the case if we were breaking down like a mechanical thing okay then there's no skull distribution distribution. It's like a hazard rate. You'd have an exponential distribution of lifetimes, and some fraction of cars, for example, just managed to make it through without any hits whatsoever. And so you'd have like some people, if that was the case, would live like a thousand years because they'd just be lucky

Starting point is 02:24:48 and not take any hits at all. That's not what we see. What we see is actually like a sharp cutoff, like 120. Right. If you keep the human in the garage in perfect condition, they don't last forever.

Starting point is 02:25:00 They die. Exactly. Exactly. That's right. So there's something interesting about it where also you know there's this is very predictable like there's a an aging and then you know like there's menopause for example and women you know one car rolls along in a bus attire another one smash the windshield and you know like there's a greater degree of variability when it's just

Starting point is 02:25:20 like random things happening if you see 500 older men, they all are some version of grayer or more wrinkled or what have you, right? There's a predictability to it of how actually everything's happening. So because of this, people have found that aging is actually a coordinated thing. And people understand that going from a child to an adolescent is a coordinated process, right? People get that that's programmed into your genes. What just hasn't really sunk in for many people is that the aging part is as well. And we might be able to unprogram that or reverse that. And in fact, there's actually a lot of results in this area, way more than people think. Okay. There are studies i can show you that are what we do that we technically call the holy

Starting point is 02:26:05 shit phenotype okay where there's a guy whose graying hair has just been reversed right repigmentation of hair just by taking a cancer drug as a side effect there are you know studies of rats you can see the foliostatin injections you get like this hulk like rat i posted one of these um and and so there's actually amazing things that are happening in biomedicine that have simply not achieved distribution in part because of regulation, in part because that's simply not the stories that people are interested in telling, in part because not exactly lack of funding, but it is lack of funding and energy sufficient to overcome the regulatory and negative press

Starting point is 02:26:45 obstacles you know and this is something i think is related to kind of doing decentralized media getting folks around transhumanism either people are going to kind of vector on the sort of anarcho-primitivism axis do you know what that is no it's a word it's a phrase i think is going to become much more well known anarcho-primitiv, it's basically like the Unabomber ideology, right? It is the – it's such an ideology that humans are bad. We're all destroying the planet. Therefore, we need to kill as many humans as possible. Or it's like, you know, vehement voluntary human extinction movement.

Starting point is 02:27:18 I don't. I don't. I do not. Okay. This is like a quasi joke, but there's actually a lot of folks who do on some level believe that humanity is bad. Humans are bad. Humans' impact on the world is bad. You shouldn't have children because everyone's causing climate change and we're ruining the earth. And we need to have a smaller footprint and we need to shrink onto ourselves and we can't expand

Starting point is 02:27:45 and what we're doing is terrible and we should just go back to nature somehow and technology is bad the future sucks right this is a real attitude and it's partly connected to folks i think idealizing nature you know and these are folks who love nature but often i don't think they realize they love tamed nature you know they they like nature without like wild lions they like nature while they still have eyeglasses and they like nature while they can decide to cut it loose on nature and go back to a warm bed they're not really going to live like i mean unabomber at least had skin in the game you know he's out there actually living in the wilderness like a you know like a true caveman but many of these folks are

Starting point is 02:28:23 they're just inconsistent but nevertheless they call themselves anarcho-primitivists, and that's a real ideology. And it's a burn-it-all-down ideology. And unfortunately, it's very popular, much more so than you might think, because it's easy to burn it all down. It's exciting to do. The aftermath sucks. But it is like you get the sense of transgression. You get the sense of maybe doing it all collectively together. You get the sense of we're making history and destroying it, seeking one to the man, et cetera. And against that, I think, is transhumanism, right, where you're going to the stars, right?

Starting point is 02:28:59 You're transcending this human body, right? We are doing brain-machine interface. We're doing liver generation. We're doing CRISPR, right? We're doing all the things, and we're taking away all the limits. Thus, infinite frontier, immutable money, eternal life. Let me hop in for just a second. Are there any particular thinkers, scientists, or resources you would recommend, just a a handful for people who want to explore this further? I don't know if it would be David Sinclair and Aubrey de Grey. Those are good.

Starting point is 02:29:34 Yeah. Who would make your short list or what resources? It's funny because the serious book on... So Zoltan Istvan is pretty good, I think. Say that one more time please Zoltan Istvan he's prof great name exactly there's a debate that he did with

Starting point is 02:29:55 a while back called his name is Zerzan and they billed it as Zoltan vs. Zerzan which I thought was hilarious it's like something from one of those early Superman movies. Yeah, that's right. Superman 2. Zoltan versus Zerzan 2014, right?

Starting point is 02:30:13 So, and, you know, this is one of those things which I don't think people realize is like this obscure thing happening in academia that is going to dominate our future you know because they're going to be like essentially these for lack of a term Luddite forces who don't like Tech don't like the disruptions bringing think you know we we need to go back right we need to go back to when it was a simpler time and I understand that right like I actually really do the easiest way to give them that pass is actually vr goggles so we'll give them the 80s you know um i like half kid but i don't fully kid ready player one here you go ready player 1980 exactly right uh because that's actually that's that's the best way to give them the idealized version that they think they want this is a rabbit hole that could go very very

Starting point is 02:31:00 deep so i i want to respect the value in that while also recognizing that we may want to leave people hungry for more of that and continue exploring. When we think of these sort of, I think I'm getting this right, sort of Malthusian dilemmas and growth of population and inextricable devastation and ecological collapse and so on. I mean, I do think there are some arguments to be made that uncontrolled population growth is a terrible thing for an invasive species so successful like human beings. But that's why we need stars. Right, right. So we have the extraplanetary, and then we also have a few corrective forces.

Starting point is 02:31:48 If anyone has read Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant, War, Famine, and Pestilence, example given, COVID-19, also do a pretty good job of correcting for a lot of that. So we were discussing nation building. We've talked about nation states, the weaknesses thereof of certain types of nation states, and different types of leadership. And that is a segue to Lee Kuan Yew. Could you please explain for people who Lee Kuan Yew was and why he is interesting. Lee Kuan Yew was probably the greatest leader of the 20th century. He was the man who took Singapore from literally a third world, he wrote a book called From Third World to First. And he took Singapore from this third world swamp, which had all of these historical battles with drug addiction, this

Starting point is 02:32:45 post-colonial, you know, kind of dump into, you know, this shining metropolis. He had no natural resources to work with. It was a tiny place that was surrounded by hostile actors. He was in a region where there was a ton of basically communist revolutionaries that were trying to operate because he's in Indochina where you had obviously Vietnam and you had Cambodia, you had China, you know, pushing everybody into communism. And despite all of that, he managed to pilot it through not simply to survive as a polity, but to build a country that was so impressive that when Deng Xiaoping took over China, he actually went to talk to Li Kuan Yew as one of the people to help him reform China.

Starting point is 02:33:32 Because you could see what an ethnically Chinese population had done there. You could also see it in Taiwan and Hong Kong, but for various reasons, those were certainly influential on Deng Xiaoping, but they were also counter-revolutionary. And so you had to give them a little bit more of a distance, whereas Singapore and LKY were kind of the Switzerland of Southeast Asia. And what Lee Kuan Yew did, really, the reason I think he's so important is I think he's a piece of the 21st century that fell into the 20th, to paraphrase. Basically, he was the first startup CEO of a country, of a city state. And I think we'll see a thousand more like him. And so he's a very important person to study his life and history. Because here's the thing, he did what he did with minimal coercion. He's not famous for winning some giant

Starting point is 02:34:25 violent conflict. He's not famous for, you know, some like activist, you know, kind of movement. He's famous for delivering results. That's actually really, really interesting. You know, he's famous for boosting prosperity and zero to one in a society. And it was really a lion, you know, really a great guy. Now, of course, there's a lot really a lion you know really a great guy uh now of course there's a lot of people who i should say a lot of people don't like it there's a lot of people who will try to knock down singapore in various ways you know there's a famous article from long time like disneyland with a death penalty right here's the thing part of the reason it is disneyland is it does have the death penalty for drug smokers right like the thing is singapore and china had a huge

Starting point is 02:35:04 problem with the opium wars or during during that period like the british basically had addicted huge percentages of population to opium and that part is often not talked about in like that disneyland of the death line thing there's a whole colonial overlay on what western powers have done in that region and uh you basically lkby just cleaned up that whole thing right now i can understand people don't want to live there i think also like the netherlands a totally different solution for example on drugs which is total legalization fine okay different strokes for different folks i think you can there's multiple solutions there but as just a

Starting point is 02:35:39 ridiculously impressive you know country in many many ways. From a financial center, it's becoming tech capital. I've got unicorns there. Just a very, very awesome country. It's warm. I love it. Great place. Hugely impressive. L-K-Y. And Lee Kuan Yew is spelled L-E-E-K-U-A-N Y-E-W for people who want to learn more about him. And it is true. I mean, the systematic approach with which that country has been transformed into what it is today is mind-boggling. And it makes me also all the more appreciate when I went to Princeton as an undergrad, and there were many Singaporean students, all of which were going to go back to Singapore at the end because their educations were being paid for by the government to work for the government. And so their inclusion and

Starting point is 02:36:36 retention of talent inside the government is also remarkable. And the way that they prioritize financially incentivizing also top talent to participate in government, I think is really worth studying. Are there any other countries that are on your short list to watch if there were places that maybe, you know, the 22nd century dropping into the 21st. I'm pushing the, you know, the comparison a bit. Yeah, so Estonia. Estonia. Yeah, so Estonia. So basically, the countries I'm going to name are those that have leaders with some of the skills of software ceos right

Starting point is 02:37:25 so it's a different approach to the network state where a state takes on like qualities of like a like a tech company you know master technology to drive things forward right so estonia basically had this guy around the time of independence when estonia got its independence from the soviet union there's a guy tom Tomas Ilves, who is a Princeton-trained computer scientist. And he was the one who said, look, we need to use this internet thing, which at the time was like, you know,

Starting point is 02:37:55 a country gaining its independence and me being there and saying, we need to do this crypto thing. It was definitely something people were talking, but that's roughly analogous. You know what I mean? It was a thing certainly people were talking about, but you're talking like the mid-90s when it was a relatively early thing to do, you know?

Starting point is 02:38:10 And it was not like uncontroversial. But essentially, Estonia became a software country. And so they had punched way above their weight with Skype and TransferWise and other kinds of companies that have come out. They're a really, really impressive place. Dubai actually, you know actually has done quite well. They've got a large fund where they're investing in things.

Starting point is 02:38:30 Very livable place and very tech savvy. I think Switzerland has... The commonality of the places that I'm naming is that they are relatively small countries which have had to do more convincing than coercing you know when you're a gigantic country your go-to is course right oh i can pass the law compel all these people etc when you're a small country you have to work for your supper every day and it's actually a better habit in the time of the internet you know when crucially all these

Starting point is 02:39:04 people are now mobile you know in the remote economy the internet you know when crucially all these people are now mobile you know in the remote economy the remote economy what covet has done most people don't understand is doing this and then the remote economy just jacked it up just like google news in 2002 put every single newspaper in competition with every other one and then all of these local newspapers shuttered and only the really big national newspapers became international centers right the ones that could respond to it, right? And then the smart ones actually saw that. And then you had new things come up like, you know, pure digital outlets, right?

Starting point is 02:39:32 In the same way, the remote economy has put every city in competition with every other city. Miami is in competition. San Francisco is in competition with this and competition with that. And the smart cities recognize that. Actually, Miami is on my watch list now you know it depends on how much strength francis suarez has because you know he's so-called weak mayor this weak mayor versus strong married like his formal powers may not be that much but his political capital is much higher now right well i don't know how that actually nets out okay but there's

Starting point is 02:40:00 estonia there's switzerland there is dubai there's singapore actually israel also they've got unity 600 they've got very up on cyber war they you know they reinvent themselves constantly taiwan with audrey tang there who has done a phenomenal job in terms of leading their covid response i think let me see what else um those are some big ones monaco the prince of monaco is actually very smart about crypto. I think, you know, now in terms of larger countries, I'm actually, so let's do China, India, US, right? We showed the big three.

Starting point is 02:40:36 India's in the news right now quite a bit. And I mean, you've commented on this, but. Yes, that's right. Not to skip to India. I'll do India last. It's the one which I think is going to be the dark horse of this decade. It's the one that's not priced in. People just don't understand how big a deal it's going to be, but I'll come back to that. China is priced in. Everybody knows it's a big deal. It's going to continue to be a big deal. Go ahead. No, you keep asking. I'm just smiling. I'm just smiling. Yes, China, China,

Starting point is 02:41:06 everybody knows China is a big deal. So I think the part that is, what is not pricing about China, I think that most people don't realize that a lot of, I mean, it is definitely becoming more totalitarian, right? The Xi Jinping thought app and so on and so forth. Thought control is actually, you know, Jack Ma having what happened to him. And by the way, the Jack Ma thing made the headlines because he's like so big that he's known in the US. For people who don't know, Jack Ma, founder or maybe co-founder of Alibaba, like Jeff Bezos of China, I think would be fair to say.

Starting point is 02:41:39 That's right. That's right. So the super rich, super successful tech entrepreneur gave a speech that was critical of regulation in a fairly measured way. And they just went after him. They stopped the IPO of the Alibaba IPO. He's under quasi house arrest., the state is really asserting itself and saying, there shall be no gods before me. As an entrepreneur, you better bow and kiss the ring. And they're also pushing much harder on this Xi Jinping thought app where you have to repeat Xi Jinping thought all the time and so on right now is that that far from where america is nowadays not that far anymore actually like that's the thing i don't think people get i think the world is splitting into three groups which i think of as woke capital communist capital and crypto capital and america is woke capital in america and its subsidiaries tributaries allies whatever you want to call them communist capital is china and crypto capital is the free world.

Starting point is 02:42:47 And the distinction is the first two are very good at pointing out each other's flaws and faults, but not in the internet censorship. All that stuff is going to ramp up aggressively in the US. I think that by 2024, you're going to have to use VPNs. There's going to be all kinds of filtering at the ISP level. It's going to get very, very aggressive. I mean, all that stuff already exists. There's safe search, there's block sites and so on, but it's going to get to a level way

Starting point is 02:43:16 beyond where people think because East Coast institutions can no longer win a game of free speech and free markets. So they're going to restrict and constrict. And obviously, the same thing is happening in China. The difference is China is just more explicit about it, which is both good and bad. It is good in the sense that everyone can identify it's happening. It's obviously bad because when it's explicit, they're just in your face about it. The site is up and then it's down and there's no apology that is given. It's just the government says so, right? In the US, it's this weird moonwalk where, you know, it's

Starting point is 02:43:51 more like the Soviet Union, where the Soviet Union would say that you have this great constitution and hey, everyone can have an election and so on and so forth, right? But then actually, I don't know if you know how elections worked in the Soviet Union. You could just put in a blank ballot to vote for the communists. But if you want to vote for someone else, you could do it. You'd write something out and they'd kind of know who you were, you know, and so on. Right. And so the Soviet Union had all these rights guaranteed on paper, but the actuality of

Starting point is 02:44:16 it was a completely different thing. You know, the gap between the actual thing and what was written down. And that's where the U.S. has become, where it is, you know, there's this joke in the 1980 the u.s is becoming where it is you know there's this joke in the 1980s they'll kind of illustrate it you know the guy yakov smirnov i don't know if you remember him he said something like um he's a joker came over from russia he's like well people say that you know in russia we don't have freedom of speech of course we have freedom of speech but in america you also have freedom after speech. That's good. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:44:46 That's good, right? Is that true anymore? Not really. Right? Not really. Or at least not outside of pseudonym. So what I think is, I think China is actually underestimated in some ways. It's not fully pricey.

Starting point is 02:45:02 I think a lot of Americans underestimate China for a few reasons. First is they think everybody within the country is like this oppressed, that they don't like the regime, you know, they're against regime. I think if you're a Uyghur or you're Jack Ma or you're an entrepreneur who's on the wrong side of the Communist Party, yeah, you're probably not a fan. But I think that on net, the Chinese government has delivered the goods for many people from their perception with the COVID response and with like 40 years of growth. And they're the relative winners of COVID. Like the West just totally wrecked themselves, right? And technologically, they're way beyond.

Starting point is 02:45:34 People don't understand how far beyond they are. Like they did like drones for taking people temperatures. You know, I tweeted about this in the early days of COVID. They really did like five years in like a few months of technological improvements from robots delivering stuff. They had hospitals that were fully telemedical hospitals where the doctors didn't have to as in C-O-P-E? Yeah. Well, so like it's used. I know the word. You know the word, right? But online it's used as, you know,

Starting point is 02:46:14 yo man, that's cope, right? You're just saying that to try to handle this difficult situation, right? And there's a lot of folks who are, over the course of COVID, I saw something very new and interesting. I mean, bad, but interesting happened, which was as the US sort of flailed in its response, you know, as the federal government failed and state governments failed and local governments failed, as public health failed and public schools failed and police failed and fire

Starting point is 02:46:38 failed, you know, as the power went out, as the health went out, you know, as like riots happened, all this stuff happened right people would basically say things like oh yeah you know i know you're saying taiwan's got it under control but they're an island and you know like new zealand oh yeah well jen they're totalitarian and everyone would give like this litany of excuses which was why that of course you're so stupid that that wouldn't possibly apply to the U.S. And fundamentally, it was basically a bunch of excuses where, yeah, America isn't the worst in the world. What are you saying? We're just as bad as Europe.

Starting point is 02:47:12 You know, they kind of make these kinds of comparisons, you know. And, you know, you have to cock your head and be like, we're number one, USA, USA, USA. It's just extremely different from, yeah, we're not the worst. Just completely different, right? And while there's this cope within the U.S. on this, outside it's very perceptible that the U.S. was basically like, it was just handed like a military defeat by COVID. People don't actually fully perceive this, but like, you know, I mentioned this, you know, a few times on Twitter.

Starting point is 02:47:40 It just hasn't sunk in or, you know, whatever. Maybe people will get mad at me. But 2018, there was a DOD thing that was something like national biodefense policy, biodefense strategy protects against man-made and natural threats. And all of these, you know, four-star this and that, FUFRAs, oh, we're so protected. And they've got like this plan and they've they've had billions of dollars that was allocated for biodefense since anthrax attacks in 2001 2002 or i think it was 2001 i forget it was late 2001 or early 2002 but i think it was late 2001 right after 9-11 since anthrax has been all

Starting point is 02:48:18 this money that went to biodefense i know because when i was in grad school a lot of that money was flying around for like microbial research and what have you. That was like 15 years ago. And there was SARS and there was the Ebola scare. There's plenty of warnings for all of this, right? And it was a military priority. There was like DARPA stuff that was supposed to crank out fast vaccines and none of it actually seemed to work, right? Like basically, to the best of my knowledge, and correct me if I'm wrong, I might be wrong. The military's most public thing was setting up the folding chairs in the Javits Center. And that sounds really harsh. You know what I'm talking about, right?

Starting point is 02:48:52 Like the palliative care early in the pandemic, right? I do, I do. Yeah, and they put like a flower there so people could like die next to a flower, okay? That sucks. And the reason I kind of make that harsh comparison is, you know the Maginot line in World War I? I do not. I do not. And also, I know we have the lens on the U.S. right now within the context of China, but I would love to make sure we don't forget to have you comment on the other things that are not fully appreciated about China. But yes, please continue. And I don't know the line that you're referring to in World War I. to have you comment on the other things that are not fully appreciated about China. Sure, sure.

Starting point is 02:49:25 But yes, please continue. And I don't know the line that you're referring to in World War I. Oh, okay. So after World War I, the French built something called the Maginot Line, which was like, oh yeah, Germans, you're going to try trench warfare on us? We're building the system of fortifications where we'll just gun you the F down and you'll never win trench warfare against us again, right? Of course,

Starting point is 02:49:45 Germans invented blitzkrieg and just went around it. Right. So the huge system of fortifications. So it's a, it's a great metaphor for fighting the last war. Right. And so, you know,

Starting point is 02:49:55 there's like, there's a guy who I, I don't personally be for the right thing. I've never met him or anything. There's a guy who a lot of, you know, folks quote like Zion and I should probably go and write a blog post on all the things I disagree with. There's about 20% I agree with.

Starting point is 02:50:08 It's true that shale oil is an important resource for the U.S., but he thinks, for example, American or demographics are a big win for the U.S. over China. But robotics over demographics, you need a small number of people programming robots. That's the future. You can already see that in warehouses. Another thing is he's really bullish on the U.S. military. the US military. And the US military, F-35 was a failure. The US military just failed on the pandemic. This military, in many ways, I would argue, is actually a mansion online, where it's set up to fight the last war. And one way of thinking about that, it's hard to test this, because it's just a prediction, it's a

Starting point is 02:50:45 forecast. But China was able to build a hospital in like 10 days. And their infrastructure in general, they can snap together a subway in like nine hours. I've been posting these videos on Twitter. It's like crazy, but they prefab everything, they snap together on site, okay? And that's something which is a whole of society thing. It has to be legal to do that. The engineers have to be willing to work 24 hours you know they have to have like that the early american 1900s work ethic not the late american current work ethic you know they have to be interested in building things as a society you know where it's not like everybody fighting each other where you built something and it'll make my property less expensive it'll be shadows or

Starting point is 02:51:24 something you know like which is the San Francisco style. All these things have to come together. It's not just one thing. But they snap together a substation in nine hours. They can snap together a skyscraper in 30 days. And people will say, oh, yeah, well, their building quality is terrible. It's all going to fall over or whatever. Have you seen the Millennium Tower in San Francisco?

Starting point is 02:51:42 It's actually creaking to one side. The whole Salesforce complex that they built in near Salesforce, like this new train station, that was also cranking. It was like a billion dollars or something like that. It was creaking after the first few weeks, and they had to not allow anybody in there. It's not like the American building quality. You'd have to do a Cisco analysis, of course, to actually put them side by side. But in general, if you go to China, most of the buildings are standing up, and most of them are new, and they've been built over the last 20, 30 years. What's my point?

Starting point is 02:52:14 The point is, the Chinese have shown the ability under duress to be able to execute in the physical world. As a subroutine, you can think, okay, we're going to build a hospital. That's just not something we can contemplate in the US. That seems like a 30-year process, not a 10-day process, right? What do you have to do in a war? You have to build like a field hospital, right? You might have to build a bridge. You might have to take down a bridge. There's all those kinds of things that have to happen. And if in perhaps the most desperate crisis the US has faced in a long time, people have this idea that it's like cramming forming for a test, like, we'll pull it out, you know, the US will do the right thing after exhausting everything else. So the quotes like Churchill isms from like 70 years ago. And the thing is

Starting point is 02:52:54 that cramming for the test only works if you've like studied someone, not if you're if you haven't done anything for years, right. And that's actually, I think think it's flipped over a card where in an actual like serious like military conflict between the u.s and china a non-nuclear conflict i think china would probably win there's like a taiwan conflict because we've got all the observables right the observables are even under duress the u.s military can't execute in the physical world it's got these plans for a pandemic that didn't work the chinese can actually execute in the physical world. It's got these plans for a pandemic that didn't work. The Chinese can actually execute in the physical world and build these things. And that's not just a one-off, it's like across your whole society. And it's also not a one-off for the Americans across our whole society, where the power is going out and other kinds of infrastructure things are happening.

Starting point is 02:53:37 And it's not like just one localized place. It's like the water in Flint, it's a power in California, it's a power in Texas. It seems to be spreading. I was just going to ask, so if there were a military conflict or a nation-state versus nation-state conflict between the US and China, it seems unlikely that it would be like red dawn on US soil. It seems unlikely, not impossible. I mean, there might be a cyber attack that has impact on any number of things in the United States, in the domestic US, continental US. But if we take as an example, Taiwan, if there were a conflict over Taiwan and the US lost, what are the consequences of that in your mind? I think it's huge because I think it basically, it'd be comparable to like the russo-japanese war and like uh in 1905 russo-japanese

Starting point is 02:54:27 war actually led to like all of these former colonial colonized people being like whoa wait a second the non-whites can win against whites holy cow right and it was this huge mental unblock where that led to anti-colonial sentiment and so on, just kind of ended one century and began another. And I think that would be the true end of the American empire. I think it wouldn't be something that someone could write off like, you know, oh, Vietnam, we didn't really try. Or, you know, oh, Afghanistan or Iraq, well, you know, no one else visibly won. You know, it would feel different, I think. It would be like the Mike Tyson getting knocked out by Buster Douglas moment for the United States,

Starting point is 02:55:08 where people were like, oh, this is a defeatable enemy. That's right. Now, the thing about it is, we should hope it doesn't come to that. What I fear is that often there's a delayed reaction or a fuse on this stuff. Occupy Wall Street only happened about three years after the financial crisis. So the fear is that if vaccines are eventually rolled out and if enough Americans take them, then by 2023 or 2024, people will be spoiling for a fight to go and beat up China as the one legitimated enemy. In sort of the same ways in the mid-2000s, it was like okay to hate people in the Middle East.

Starting point is 02:55:49 That was like a loosened valve or whatever. You could be more angry towards them. It was more socially legitimate. I don't think it was good. I think that it was just true that that was more legitimate or at least people greenlit it more. In the same way, I think anti-Chinese

Starting point is 02:56:06 sentiment will be more greenlit. People won't jump on you for saying things that are negative about China. It'll filter into, unfortunately, many Chinese Americans, because anybody who's working at a university lab or something like that, they'll come up with some rationale for why it's not racist or whatever because it's nationalist oh my god i can't believe you're saying that the agents of the child during dictatorship are blah blah blah that that you have to be concerned about but point is that they will um i don't think it'd be great to be a chinese american in like four years or five years as as the new cold war really heats Now, we should hope that it doesn't actually come

Starting point is 02:56:45 to, I mean, call it, this is one of my like bad predictions, right? It'd be an unfortunate thing. Many Chinese, of course, many Chinese Americans have been here for generations, right? They have no ancestral connection or the ancestral connection is very distant. I shouldn't say it doesn't matter. It does matter. Like, I don't think there's going to be strict citizenship or anything like the Japanese internment. But I do think that it'll sort of be like being a Muslim American in the 2000s. Basically, it's one of those things where there was a lot of surveillance of mosques. Folks within the community felt it a lot. You might say it's legitimate.

Starting point is 02:57:17 You might say it's not. I'm not trying to get into whether it's good or bad. I'm just saying that that's likely to happen. Okay. So what's my point? Point is that I think that Cold War between the US and China, we should hope it doesn't kick off into a hot one.

Starting point is 02:57:30 If it does kick off into a hot one, then the wounded American pride might retaliate with nukes. It's crazy things that can happen. It gets really bad very quickly if you think about those scenarios. With that said, I think that most of the world

Starting point is 02:57:43 will actually not want to be, they want to try to keep as far away from this fight as possible. I don't think many Americans realize that. Many Americans think, oh, yeah, Europe, they're going to saddle up with us against China. Europeans don't think that. Europeans think America has gone crazy. And Europe is actually, in many ways, now, in some ways, actually to the right of the US. You know, you can actually kind of put it on a spectrum where the US where the US is basically the most left-wing large country in the world, and you've got crypto in

Starting point is 02:58:10 the center, and you've got India and Israel center-right, and then you've got China as the farthest right. That's a new political spectrum of roughly, on one side, ethno-nationalists, on the other side, ethno-Massachists, and in the center, Sudanese. Okay, if that makes any sense. It does. Let me jump in for a second here, and then I want to move to the dark horse, because I know it'll probably not be a short conversation. On the Chinese front, considering China, if there were just a few actions or a few investments or changes that the US military could make or the US government, what would they be to try to

Starting point is 02:58:52 mitigate against some of these risks? The US has within it the capability, like we were talking about earlier with crypto, beer, the cause and solution to all man's problems and so on. The US has within it that capability for a rebirth, just like, frankly, China had a rebirth under Deng Xiaoping, and India had a rebirth under Manmohan Singh after decades of just being in the toilet. The U.S. would have to experience a national rebirth, and that's a serious thing. That's a big deal. It has to be

Starting point is 02:59:28 like the level of Deng or Manmohan Singh or Lee Kuan Yew or something at that level. You'd know it when you saw it. And what kinds of things could lead to that? Let me give you some out of left field thoughts. To answer your question, do you think there's like a tweak or another tweak? No, I don't think there's a tweak because I think the US is on a civilizational downtrend. You know, for example, Intel failed their chip tape out and Lockheed Martin, as mentioned, F-35 and Boeing failed their thing. And all physical businesses have been shut down. The only thing that basically is functional, if you think about it, are the internet businesses that were founded 20 something years ago. There's only things that essentially function through the pandemic. The political institutions didn't work. And the reason is those new businesses were new enough

Starting point is 03:00:14 that it gets to a fundamental distinction I have, which is between founding versus inheriting. If the founders are still around, the founders can edit things and change things. Whereas so many of these East Coast institutions were inherited, sometimes in the literal sense of inherited fortunes or inherited newspapers or inherited money, but also in the sense of inherited something that they couldn't have built in the first place. The 57th mayor or 72nd governor of some state could never have organized the National Guard and the Public Health Department from scratch, right? They were selected solely for legitimacy and not for competence as well, right? Like if you're elected, you're selected only for legitimacy. You're not actually selected

Starting point is 03:00:55 for being able to organize, I don't know, the NYPD from scratch. By contrast, if you're a founder, you're selected for both legitimacy. Why is the guy the CEO? Because he founded it, right? So you're selected for legitimacy, but you're also selected for competence because all the backlinks, the support that come into you, you don't just get them with a snap overnight like you do when you win an election. They come to you gradually over time with a thousand proof points. You know, Zuckerberg didn't just get 3 billion people in this gigantic organization. There were a thousand proof points that he did over Zuckerberg didn't just get 3 billion people in this gigantic organization. There were a thousand proof points that he did over 10 years where the support came in gradually.

Starting point is 03:01:33 It wasn't just, OK, I don't have the nuclear codes. Boom, I have the nuclear codes. It wasn't like this overnight thing. It was gradual. And crucially, one of the things about that is the folks who were selected on the basis of founding rather than inheriting, selected for both legitimacy and competence rather than just legitimacy, those folks actually are folks like Bezos who actually could organize the NYPD or the U.S. military because he's an expert in logistics. And, you know, it's saying, right, amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics. I think I have no question that Bezos would at least be an extremely important contributor to the organization of military from scratch, right? If Bezos had to do the US military from scratch, like a drone army, he could probably do it. So the question is, how do you have selection for legitimacy and competence? How do you get more founding DNA versus inheriting DNA? So let me just throw a few interesting concepts out there. One thing I think about a lot, this is a chapter in my upcoming book, is 100% democracy versus 51% democracy. So what's 51% democracy? Do you know what a Fosbury flop is?

Starting point is 03:02:32 I do. I do. This one I actually do know. You want to explain it for folks? Yeah. Dick Fosbury. Great story. That's right. So basically, if you've ever seen a pole vault in the Olympics, you know what a Fosbury flop is. It's essentially someone, they vault in such a way that they just barely clear the bar. They manipulate their body in such a way. And they do it backwards. Yeah, they do it backwards. They do it backwards. They do it backwards, right? So it's just barely clearing the bar. And that is the way a 51% democracy works, where if you think about the root of democracy, it's not actually voting per se. The root of democracy is the consent of the government.

Starting point is 03:03:08 That's what makes a democracy legitimate. Can I add a note on the Fosbury flop? Sure. existed, the techniques used for clearing that pole vault bar were almost like a, not a scissor kick necessarily, but very similar to the way you might clear the high hurdles in a sprint race. And then Dick Fosbury comes along, and I think, I want to say it was in Mexico City, but I might be misremembering that. I think that's right. And the equipment had changed. So it became possible for the first time to land in the way that he landed, which was on his back.

Starting point is 03:03:58 And he was ridiculed at the time, ended up winning a gold medal. And now that is the default technique. Right. So Fosbury's method was actually a smart hack of the system, right? But one of the things about it is basically, or the part that I'm evoking is the feeling of just barely clearing the bar. Very little margin of safety. Very little margin of safety. And so insofar as the legitimacy of democracy comes from the consent of the governed, we kind of intuit that there's more legitimacy if there's a landslide. There's more of a mandate if it's a bigger margin, right? Because you have more consent. If there's more consent, you need to use less coercion, right? You have more of a mandate

Starting point is 03:04:35 with which to govern, right? 60-40 is way better than 51-49. Here's the issue. The issue is when it's 51-49, which has been for a long time now, basically that's just the minimum necessary. That's a Fosbury flop of consent. It's a minimum consent to say, okay, we've got the consent of the government. We get the minimum necessary consent. You have to use a ton of coercion when you're in power. And then what that does is it pushes that 2% over to the other side or whatever. And then the next group is in power.

Starting point is 03:05:04 And then that guy has to use a lot of coercion when they're in power. And so this is a very bad negative feedback cycle where you're using, yes, you can use coercion if you're a government. But in general, think about being CEO. If any of your followers here are CEO, like a lot of people have this kind of fantasy model of a CEO where the guy goes and barks or he's like, I'm the CEO, just go do it, you know, like that, right? And if you ever are CEO, you'll find that that really doesn't work. You know, you have to persuade and you have to convince and you need to motivate. And you really can't just order flunkies around in quite that way, because everybody's got another possible job they can get

Starting point is 03:05:46 it's more like a you know a bunch of subatomic particles you're holding in your hand to just like not have them all go to escape right so it's a very different kind of thing where you have to convince you can't really course i'm not saying that you sometimes can't like have to give it like an order or something like yes we're going to do it this way. I'm not saying that doesn't happen, but ultimately, you know, it is much, much more towards convincing than coercion, right? Okay. So this is also true for a good leader. A good leader is doing more convincing than coercion. Here's the point. We see this 51-49 thing. The ideal would be 100-0. The ideal would be 100% democracy where everybody consents. And to do that in such a way that it's not like some Stalinist joke, where everyone's

Starting point is 03:06:29 voting their great consent for the great leader, and they don't actually have a say, right? You need to have them not manufactured consent, but demonstrated consent, right? To paraphrase Chomsky's thing, manufactured, you want demonstrated consent. So where I go with that is I think, okay, there's actually three kinds of votes. We think of two kinds, voting with ballot and voting with ballot, which are democracy, capitalism, respect. There's a third kind, which is voting with feet, namely migration. Actually, all three are components of the US political system. So for example, if you put them on an axis, with the x-axis being the cost of that particular kind of vote, and the y-axis being the probability of changing the outcome, vote with your ballot.

Starting point is 03:07:08 It's a tiny, tiny, small cost. It's like a few hours and a tiny probability of changing the outcome, like one over N of N people, roughly. If you vote with your wallet, like a political donation, it's not considered kosher to really calculate this out, but people do. Washington Post often publishes like the price of a vote or whatever. They calculate, okay, here's the spending of political ads, here's extra votes. There's ways that people try to pull this out of regressions. Main thing is, with some money, you can effectively get more votes than just your one, right? Vote with your wallet.

Starting point is 03:07:40 It does, through ads or what have you, campaign stuff. It gets you, you put in your 2,300 max if you're an individual, it might get you 10 votes or a hundred. I don't know the number, but basically it'll get you more than one towards second. So that is a higher cost than a few hours, but it's a somewhat higher probability, still small, of changing the law under which you live. And then we get to migration. Now, migration is the highest cost of all, usually, because it's like $10,000 or more to pick up stakes and move city to city or country to country. But it has by far the highest probability of changing the outcome. It's 100%. You just pick the laws, right? You just looked at the dashboard of all the laws, and you pick the one that you want, and you move there. Vote how

Starting point is 03:08:21 you want, we move where I'd like. So once you start thinking about like this third fundamental force, you know, there's nothing more American. I mean, every America is a nation of immigrants. That means tautologically, it's also a nation of immigrants. And the camera is not as frequently put on what causes people to leave. Causes people to leave was declining economic circumstances, or communism, or civil war, or socialism, or just a bad economic lack of opportunity, and they came over to the US. If our ancestors weren't evil, then emigration can't be evil. In fact, emigration is the most American thing ever. And so now when you think about that as the third fundamental force, you start thinking, okay, 100% democracy means that people are re-signing a social smart contract every few years.

Starting point is 03:09:06 They're part of a polity. And if they don't like it, they've got 999 other jurisdictions to go to. They can vote with their feet to go over there. The critical thing this does is this model of lots of jurisdictions run by CEOs of city states maximizes consent. I've got a mathematical model of this, but it maximizes consent because like a company, nobody is there if they don't want to be.

Starting point is 03:09:31 So let's take this opportunity to transition, unless there are just any closing comments on that chapter that you'd like to make. But I would love to, as our last topic- Our last closing comment. Yes, fire away. So once you start kind of thinking in this way, you know, about like maximizing consent and so on,

Starting point is 03:09:49 or using the network versus state, something that is possible, for example, in Austin, you know, it's a city of like 850,000-ish, 1.2 million, somewhere in that range of people, right? It's not inconceivable to just, if you start thinking of, okay, convincing rather than coercing, you just start by declaring yourself shadow, not you, but someone, maybe you, okay, someone with some distribution or even someone who wants to build it,

Starting point is 03:10:13 declares themselves either shadow mayor of Austin or community organizer or something like that. Very different proclamations. Very different proclamations. But yes. Shadow mayor is like this concept from the UK, like the shadow government, right? very different proclamations. Very different proclamations. But yes, yes. Shadowmare is like this concept, like from the UK, like the shadow government, right?

Starting point is 03:10:30 And you just start organizing people, whether it's Austin or some other city, you start organizing people. It's just like, you know, you start a company, you declare yourself CEO, you and who, right? Like you, you know, you're the CEO, right?

Starting point is 03:10:40 You just named yourself CEO, right? Okay. So you just, you know, whatever title you decide to give it, maybe you say lead community organizer. I don't know. And people just start folding into you if you start delivering the goods. What are the goods? I think you would conceive of this thing as like a network union. Let's say not like a normal social network, but a social tree.

Starting point is 03:11:05 Right. Not everybody connected higgledy-piggledy, but a graph where folks are folding up into like a union leader effectively a network union leader except to be a network union so it's not just focused on labor rights but it could collectively bargain on behalf of the people as consumers as producers as investors as voters whatever right it's just like a group of folks that are organized for collective action it could organize for example a shoveling of snow or Empower is out. It's a genuine community organization. And you have this head and these folks folding into them. What's my point? Just like a startup, you can grow that. And you might go back in time because this is so new. It's actually old. What I'm talking about is old. But it's new to us today because it hasn't been done in a while. It doesn't seem like something you would do. People know how

Starting point is 03:11:43 to start a company in a multi-billion dollar business. They don't know how to start a community organization, but your ancestors did it and like an Elks Club or whatever type thing. So you build that up and you may name it something and you start accumulating users, 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000, because your organization is competent and able to deliver the goods locally. It doesn't have guns. It can't coerce. It doesn't have guys with badges. It can't tax.

Starting point is 03:12:12 It has to do everything with contributions. Maybe it's selling a product. Maybe it's organized like a company. There's many different ways of doing it. But fundamentally, it's delivering the social goods that the current elected inherited government can't because that inherited government can't because that inherited government was set up for a different time under a different set of circumstances, right?

Starting point is 03:12:30 As you start just delivering more goods, you gain more political capital. And ultimately that entire social structure is just softer in people's heads. The mayor, the supervisors, city hall, all of that is just stuff people have agreed to do. And just like fiat to cryptocurrency, call that fiat government, this is crypto government

Starting point is 03:12:52 or something like that. You know, it might do it all pseudonymously or whatever for some time. There's lots of different ways and parameters you can fix. At a certain point, when you've got 100,000 people in this hierarchical organization, then yeah, when there's an election called, you'll probably just instantly win and become mayor. And this is a way that you can affect

Starting point is 03:13:11 political change outside of politics, because you start actually focusing on delivering the societal goods by convincing people, and you set coercion to zero. And frankly, you can get really far with that, because CEOs get really far with that. Right? You might think of this as a tech startup. You know, that's a fine way of thinking about it, and you modify it to make it like a community-oriented tech startup. There might be dues, you could do subscriptions. There's lots of different ways you could make this work, right? It's a community organization where you pay in to get something out. That might, just right there, that might work, right? It's got local news. It's got childcare. It's like round robin childcare. You keep track and you give to get. There's a lot of things you can do here once you start thinking about this,

Starting point is 03:13:52 right? You can use Facebook groups to organize it. You don't need to code things at the beginning. A lot of it is just, you might be able to do it with no code if you know that, right? This is, I think, the recipe for how you start rebuilding functional organizations in the US. Not trying to jam a square peg into a round hole and be like, hey, let me capture the coercive state and get the guns, and then I'll be able to finally do something. You're bossing around the other 49%. Instead, you build these convince-oriented organizations as opposed to coercive. Well, I might just call this, maybe this episode should be titled, The Episode That Shall Spawn a Thousand Shadow Mayors.

Starting point is 03:14:30 I think this is a valuable discussion. I think this is a very valuable discussion. I'm glad that you got to explain this, and I would love to get to India. Yes, sure. Let's add any sort of concluding statements just to that piece. And then segue, if you're open to it, to maybe starting with India, the dark horse, as you mentioned, and what is currently at stake. And there may be many things at stake, but certainly the one that is pinned at the top of your Twitter profile is of interest to me. So I'll let you take it from there. All right. So we talked about China, talked about the US. And so you have this thing where you have

Starting point is 03:15:10 this ascending China and you have this declining US and they're just on a collision course of sparks are already flying. This is the Thucydides trap of the rising power and the declining one and big fight, right? And there is an interesting possible way out of this, or at least, I'm not sure there's a way out for the US and China, but there might be a way out for the rest of the world, especially someplace like India, which is India's number three. So it's neither the US nor China is actually in its own way in the position of a Singapore, for example, where it is not realistic. You might think it's realistic to coerce the world to use the dollar. You might also think it's realistic

Starting point is 03:15:51 to coerce a big chunk of the world to use the digital yuan. Both of those are contenders for a global reserve currency. The digital rupee is not. Because it's number three, you'd have to beat out the number one and number two. So you could do something different. You could say, actually, the other possibility here, if you're neither Windows nor OSX, you go all in on Linux. So you're neither the dollar or the renminbi, you go all in on BTC and crypto. Because as a nation, of course, your first thing is you want to be able to control your currency. But internationally, you want no one to be able to control your currency. And you'd rather have no one control it than a foreign power control. Because the currency is not just a currency.

Starting point is 03:16:33 It's a technology platform. Swift, the international wire system, that's a technology platform. The US can hit a button and just de-platform you from Swift, just like Twitter can de-platform you from Twitter. The dollar is not just a currency. It's a technology platform. And it's a declining technology platform because it's basically been based on this 20th century technology. If you look at the, I retweeted this the other day, but China's been gradually over the last 10 years

Starting point is 03:16:56 replacing the dollar in cross-border trade. It was basically 80-something percent in 2011. And now it's, I think it's now less than, or close to less than 50%. So it's about to flip, the flipping is happening, right? And then they'll just replace it completely and it'll be dollar independent. And that means just like the bit licensing that we mentioned earlier, they'll come a day just like New York tried to throw its weight around with bit license and actually found that it just sanctioned itself. And rather than

Starting point is 03:17:21 forcing a bunch of companies to jump through its hoops, those companies just put it last and the list. America will try to wield the dollar as a weapon one more time and just find that it's actually just owned itself. It just walled itself off from enough of the world economies outside the dollar economy. Is India at risk of doing that right now? So India had postulated a crypto ban. I think that if you look at the very latest reports, that is now being retold. And the reason for that is a lot of tech people,

Starting point is 03:17:51 a lot of financiers, a lot of people in the government have communicated that actually the two biggest stories in internet in India over the last 30 years are a economic liberalization and be the internet and crypto combines both. It is the financial internet. It's literally at that level, you know, because what did the internet do? It digitized books, movies, songs, all forms of media, right? Crypto goes and digitizes everything scarce, stocks, bonds, commodities, and of course, gold and other things. Basically, because what a blockchain is, if the internet was a way to copy things from

Starting point is 03:18:24 point A to point B, a blockchain is a way to transfer things, scarce things, in a provable way. So every financial asset becomes natively digital, just like every media thing became natively digital. So economic liberalization and internet massively benefited India, and crypto is a combination of them. And so banning would be this huge own goal. So I wrote a couple of long articles on this.

Starting point is 03:18:44 A, why India should buy Bitcoin, and B, how India legalizes crypto. And those have gotten a fair amount of traction, I think, within the Indian discussion. And there's some really good follow up articles and videos that I've been retweeting. And it's definitely something now where I think folks are realizing that a ban would be precipitate. It'd be too hasty. We'll see what happens. But I think that it's going to be more likely that it's legalized with some form of regulation than it is to be banned. Knock on wood, that's how it looks as of right now. What would be the global consequences of India banning cryptocurrency? So global consequences wouldn't actually, it'd be more, would be felt, would be, it's like Bastiat seen and unseen. The thing is that if India bans crypto,

Starting point is 03:19:33 people don't understand how big a deal it is that India banned crypto. Because crypto hasn't had time to compound within India. It got banned in 2018 and then unbanked. And so because of that, the crypto industry is in a much more nascent state than it is in other places and so on. Meaning only 10 million people have it or something like that, which is small for a relatively large country. Let me describe what would happen in the alternative, and then it'll be more obvious as to why it's a big deal.

Starting point is 03:19:58 Basically, over the last four years, while everybody in the West was obsessed with American politics or whatever, India has brought about 400 million people online with something called Reliance Geo, which basically 4G LTE there is about 100x cheaper than in the US. So it has the cheapest mobile LTE service in the world, which is insane, right? Because that's a huge physical infrastructure project in India. That's hard to do. You need reliable power. All kinds of things have to work for something like that to work. And at the same time, two other things happened. COVID happened, so all the world's jobs went remote. And crypto happened, which meant that you have this peer-to-peer international payment realm. So India has opportunity to have 400 million people suddenly

Starting point is 03:20:43 start doing all these remote work jobs they're newly qualified for with their phones okay like because every remote work job can now be done there which is at least i don't know 10 million 20 million 30 million new sources of remittances and remote work maybe it's like 10x that who? So that would completely change the world. It would basically mean that every Indian who could do white collar work could do it for one tenth the price on an Android phone, you know, being paid in crypto or something like that. And when I say crypto, I don't necessarily mean Bitcoin or Ethereum, but that's also possible. If you look at stablecoinstats.com, one of the stablecoins, which you can now zip, transmit anywhere that has an internet connection, just over all the users in the Ethereum address, you can send it to them with some fees.

Starting point is 03:21:31 So the magnitude of that disruption is hard to actually, I mean, you know, when you have like a few hundred million people coming online, that's a very big deal. They're part of the global labor market. I mean, it's not like they wouldn't be connected if they didn't have crypto, but they'd be a lot less connected. Because crypto means anyone on the internet can pay anyone to first order, right? It's like email, you know. So if you have to go through the repeat, it's fine for some purposes, but it's certainly not fine for just paying somebody 20 bucks to do something right now. That's like a multi-day wait for an international wire transfer. You spend more than that on the wire fees. It just won't work. So banning crypto would be one of those things where it's more obvious as to what would be lost when we unban crypto. So by 2030, you'll be like, yeah, okay, that whole thing wouldn't have happened without it. But it's hard for me to show you that yet

Starting point is 03:22:24 because compounding hasn't happened yet. Right. But with distribution, with wider distribution and use of, say, micropayments via cryptocurrency, much of the friction for this type of gigantic possible workforce to engage globally is removed, right? A lot of the friction. Put another way, if the Indian government wants to facilitate the global participation and effective competition of its citizens who are going to come online en masse with profound implications, then cryptocurrency facilitates that substantially. That's right. I mean, India basically is internationally competitive in computer science.

Starting point is 03:23:14 And it's also pretty good at all of these. I mean, like the Indian diaspora has been pretty good at things like finance, media, journalism, as mentioned, engineering, but also medicine and so on and so forth, right? It's notable in those areas. These are all like white collar jobs that you could do over an internet connection for crypto. And then you wouldn't even have to leave India. And remittances remote work are a huge source of revenue. So basically, India could be this. The other thing about it, by the way, by supporting crypto, right now, you know, America is blowing up the Middle East, and China building colonies in Africa. And, you know, like, like actually on net, yes, those colonies, whatever you call them, colonies, you call them cities. The Africans actually

Starting point is 03:23:54 are benefiting from the Chinese presence in that sense. They're actually getting infrastructure and so on out of it. If you actually talk to Africans there, they're not that negative on them. It's definitely not like, oh, we hate the Chinese or something. It's not like that. But people can say like, oh, well, the Chinese are actually hooking them today and then they're going to put them in debt like they're trying to do with the Belt and Road projects. Are you familiar with that? No. Let me explain. Okay. I'm sure some of them are, but I'm not. So China has this thing called the Belt and Road, which was a bigger deal before the pandemic, but they may be rebooting it. Essentially, it's this idea of building global trade routes with overland and overseas, where China builds across Eurasia, these huge railway lines that can ship their finished goods everywhere to hit all these countries, ports and railway stations and fueling stations and all this stuff, schools, whatever.

Starting point is 03:24:47 And in return, that government just takes out a loan in renminbi. But maybe it can't pay it back, in which case China kind of repos everything and has a military base there or whatever, right? So that's kind of this heads I win, tails I don't lose deal that China is doing. It's actually quite smart. It's kind of like the Marshall Plan in a different way, where the US got all these military bases. That's a cynical way of looking at it, of course, but that's certainly part of the game for the US to have military presence in Western Europe. What's the point? The point is, while America is blowing things up, and while China is building these colonies, what India could do is build software

Starting point is 03:25:23 for the world. Because getting behind crypto, and this is a good case, right? If India gets behind crypto, crypto is a globally neutral platform. Because everybody can trust it since they don't need to trust it. They can audit it, right? They can look at it themselves. I already see this today, by the way. Chinese people no longer trust the, or Chinese investors don't trust the US legal system and certainly not vice versa. But both of them will definitely invest in a smart contract on Ethereum. That's actually where international capitalism still lives and will continue to thrive, even in this age of tariffs and trade war and so on and so forth. People can actually work across borders regardless of the silly fights.

Starting point is 03:26:00 This is actually my spirit. And this is something which I think India can be kind of a peacemaker, similar to actually, in some ways, it tried to stay out of the Cold War with the so-called non-aligned movement. You know, there was NATO and the Warsaw Pact and the non-aligned movement. The non-aligned movement was, it was sympathetic to the Soviet Union, but it wasn't sending troops around the world to wage communist revolution. That was actually the origin of the term third world. You know, first world was the West, second world were the communist countries, and the third world were all these countries that are behind the non-aligned movement. Now, of course, the non-aligned movement came in third. It was poor. Part of the reason it didn't join any militaries is it didn't have the money

Starting point is 03:26:37 to even pay for the guns or anything like that. But now back to the future, I think if the U.S. and the West is, you know, there's a declining West and it's woke capital and you have on the other side, you know, the Chinese are communist capital. I think India could be crypto capital and it could be the center of the decentralized movement, which is maybe the most powerful of the three because they're sympathizers of crypto in both the us and china millions of people and the it sounds weird to put it that way today in 2020 but it won't sound that weird in 2025 or 2030 because crypto is an ideological movement and it's a transnational movement it's international capitalists and it's not nationalist capitalists like reagan it's a not nationalist socialist or international socialist like uh hitler's st Stalin's nationalist socialist or Lenin's internationalist socialist. It's internationalist and capitalist, right? Or Trotsky was internationalist and socialist. So international and capitalist is like tech.

Starting point is 03:27:35 That's crypto. That is do a deal across borders. That is, I don't care what you look like, you know, we're equal partners in the deal. And of course, there's bad aspects of it, too. I'm sure people can rattle them off. But ultimately, there's an ideology embedded in there. It's not simply a currency. And that is, I think, over time going to be what blue jeans were in the Soviet Union.

Starting point is 03:27:56 That is to say, the orange coin is like the global symbol of freedom and prosperity, like the blue jeans were in the Soviet Union. It's really a deep point. You know, blue jeans in the Soviet Union were a symbol ofviet union it's really a deep point you know blue jeans in the soviet union right were a symbol of what was there beyond the iron curtain you know the orange coin is both freedom you know to say uh being able to transact with whoever you want you know to say what you want freedom from surveillance you know speaking your mind not being deplatformed not being censored and of course prosperity because going up into the right

Starting point is 03:28:23 i was just thinking to myself we're to have to call this episode the four-hour podcast. That's funny. That's funny. That's true. We've got a lot. So I think that there's an outside chance that India could become a backer of crypto for national security reasons, because it's not going to be the US or China. So it could play a different game. If it embraces crypto, then India gets all this tremendous volume, it gets all this remote work volume, and all of its financiers are actually quite good. And all of its engineers are also quite good. The other aspect of crypto is it would allow Indian media. So this is actually, you want a dark horse, you want a dark horse prediction for the 2020s. I actually think India has the potential to become a media

Starting point is 03:29:01 superpower. Why do I say that? so china in the late 90s early 2000s it was making plastic stuff for walmart a lot of people were very skeptical of china's ability to ascend the value chain oh it's never going to make you know fancy machine tools like the germans you know and of course it did it went all the way up from iphones and stuff now it makes drones with tgi it makes makes basically everything other than the very top-end semiconductors, and they're working on it. China's workshop of the world, people no longer say that it makes only crap. It makes a lot of quality stuff there now.

Starting point is 03:29:33 I'm just giving them their due. They do make quality stuff. And they ascended that value chain very intentionally, very methodically, with espionage, with all that kind of stuff, with bank borrowing steel. They did everything they could, right? You have a company there, they forced the acquisition of it all that stuff they play fair and foul okay so china became a tech and manufacturing superpower because they've got wechat they've got the software and they've also got the physical stuff but i think india can take

Starting point is 03:29:57 a different path and become a tech and media superpower and the reason i say that is so first let me talk about the raw material right so of course india has bollywood you know it has less well known it has the back end for a lot of animation for hollywood like if you go and you look at the end of tenant you see all these indians there um they did a lot of the special effects a lot of the computer graphics because a lot of indian engineers and india has sajha or at least the diaspora in the u.s south asian journalists association with like thousands of journalists and it has basically like this multi-thousand year culture of arts and letters and it's exported buddhism and hinduism okay fine it's got all that stuff finally it's got engineers that are competitive worldwide right because now actually

Starting point is 03:30:40 number three in tech unicorns after the u.s and china most people don't know that okay so how does india potentially become a media superpower well the difference is it's not just bollywood going global that's often the mistake people make why because when you go and you have a chair from china can you tell it's a chinese chair not really it's just it's a global chair you know you have to look on the bottom to say manchada everything's manchada so there's a company for example called arcelor metal in in you know it's an indian company it makes steel but it makes a global bar of steel you can you don't look at it and be like oh that's indian steel that's just like globally competitive product that's like the best product you may say i'm not a steel expert but it's like one of the best

Starting point is 03:31:22 products for its price right it? It's globally competitive. Whereas Bollywood has a specifically Indian flavor to it. And this is the mind shift that I think India is going to make in the 2020s. It's going to take a lot of people by surprise. It's going to start building products for the world, not just software products. It's going to do that with media products. And I think the direction is bright sun to the west black mirror. Let me explain what I mean by this. As I was saying earlier, because the East Coast of the US has experienced a decline in relative status as the internet has risen, they have this sort of black mirror worldview.

Starting point is 03:31:57 This future sucks. We need to crack down on free speech and free markets. I hate these tech bros. You invented a bus with Uber, you know, like they basically are doubling and tripling down on the old stuff. It's sort of similar to a country where technology passed them by, they doubled down on religious fundamentalism. Well, they might be richer than us, but we're better, we're holier, we've got a better democracy or whatever. It's more cop, right? So the West is in this sort of black mirror thing where the only thing they can see in the future,

Starting point is 03:32:28 not all of the West, but certainly a lot of the intelligentsia, a lot of the media folks and so on, one thing they can see in the future is this black mirror, right? Where their future is declining and the future is dystopian. To give a completely different worldview,

Starting point is 03:32:41 have you ever seen the movie or even the trailer to Super 30? I have not. Okay, you should definitely definitely watch this all your viewers should watch this you couldn't have a more different spirit and attitude towards technology than this okay like imagine sort of like rocky but for engineers got it kind of like that okay that like, it's not exactly right, but it's like, it's got the same spirit. And it is essentially something that just glorifies computer science, engineering, leveling up, you know, the future. Because here's the thing for the global South, for India, you know, for all these countries that have just gotten smartphones, they've risen with technology. This is something which is correlated with the greatest improvement in living standards they've

Starting point is 03:33:28 ever experienced. And that is just a completely different... You can't teach that. You can't inculcate... That's just a different cultural base. The future is looking bright. We're all the way up. We're coming back to our rightful place in the world. It's kind of the mentality. And that is the basis for a completely different kind of culture. And so I think that you can start the export of films, movies, culture that's based on technology, global technology, you know?

Starting point is 03:33:55 So all the stuff that I talked about, and how would you do it? You were like, well, how do you make it not boring? Because movies all require conflict, right? There's going to be some Pollyanna thing, right? And so there's actually an interesting flip you can do with a dystopian movie. The key trick is, it's like at the beginning of Terminator, the present is all idyllic, everyone's gambling

Starting point is 03:34:13 through the fields and so on, right? And then this crazy scientist invents some horrible, you know, new Terminator and it messes it all up and now the future is worse this is a premise is that the present was fine and this tech guy tech bro made the future worse right miles dyson and terminator but it's easy to actually invert that when the inversion is present that is dystopian it's a present where we're all wearing masks it's a present where the power is going out it's a present where random fires rage and cold snaps hit in the middle of nowhere, and politics is dysfunctional. Oh, this is a really fictional story I'm telling, right? So it's a present that's dystopian, and there's a small group that might be able to carve out a better future, right? They've just invented, for example, a better form of nuclear power,

Starting point is 03:34:59 but they're getting hemmed in by these power-hungry regulators and these NGOs that just hate nuclear power and press that's just trying to oppress them for clicks. And these guys need to figure it out and actually build something better. And so you just invert a lot of the troops. You're still fighting the power, but you're actually fighting the power that is technologically conservative. And you have a group of technological progressives. Now, that's what I just described actually has a lot of move to it because that's actually reality. That is every single startup founder has to go through what I just described. Once in a while, you see a Hollywood depiction of this.

Starting point is 03:35:36 House of Cards and Netflix in its first season actually depicted an evil NGO, like a water thing. You know, it was like some water charity that was just like a scam for the, it was the future president's wife running this thing. It depicted an evil journalist. The original Ghostbusters depicted an evil regulator. So did Dallas Buyers Club depicted evil regulators. So there are snatches where evil journalists, evil regulators, evil NGOs are depicted, but it's like one to 10,000 or a hundred thousand, where normally it's like the evil corporation or the evil military that's depicted. Those are the mental models that people slot things into. If you have media that inverts that, if you have media that allows people to pattern recognize that, and it doesn't have to

Starting point is 03:36:20 be feature films, it can be short video games, It can be clips and so on. That's actually upstream of driving technological progress. Because A, it shows that technology is good. B, it still has conflict, as much conflict as a dystopian. And C, you can just take all these plots, adapt them straight from the history of a thousand different tech companies, startups, and then going backwards further in time, Robert Goddard had to fight NYT Co. on rockets. Do you know that story? Basically, they said that it was a total joke, that what he was doing was a joke. They were basically being technologically conservative forever. So innovators had to fight this. And those stories are on the shelf that we can just take off and make into things. All right, let me pause there. Well, I'm just going to say, dark horses and cryptocurrencies and balaji oh my this episode is going to take my team a hundred years maybe i'll need a thousand indians to help us with this to do the show notes i'm just imagining linking to everything that that we that we

Starting point is 03:37:19 i'm using the royal we here that you have discussed so far. So I think this makes a lot of sense in part because my headset is running out of battery and my bloodstream is running out of glucose. I think this is probably a good chapter one for folks, but is there, is there anything that you would like to say if you're open to, to closing now or close to it. Are there any closing comments or questions or requests of my audience that you would like to make? Sure. Go sign up at 1729.com. It's free. And you'll get a chapter to my book. And you'll also be able to get some crypto tasks. If you like this, there's a lot more of it and it's all better organized and writing um tim has been a very gracious host it's been a lot of fun and uh you know i think um all these ideas are laid out at greater length in the book and on the tasks on the website it's all free wonderful and

Starting point is 03:38:15 people can find you on twitter at bology s website bology s.com for everybody listening my team will make a best effort to link to everything that we have discussed. It is going to be an incredibly voluminous version of show notes. And Balaji, thank you so much for taking the time. This is going to have to be the episode of everything. There are many titles that are vying for the final version of what we will call this episode. It'll be very, very challenging, but I'm looking forward to it as a challenge. But thank you for making the time.

Starting point is 03:38:49 This has been great. We've covered a lot of ground. Awesome. Thank you. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me?

Starting point is 03:39:04 Would you enjoy getting a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend.

Starting point is 03:39:42 So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This podcast episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep. Sleep is super important to me.

Starting point is 03:40:00 In the last few years, I've come to conclude it is the end all be all, that all good things, good mood, good performance, good everything seem to stem from good sleep. So I've tried a lot to optimize it. I've tried pills and potions, all sorts of different mattresses, you name it. And for the last few years, I've been sleeping on a Helix Midnight Luxe mattress. I also have one in the guest bedroom and feedback from friends has always been fantastic. It's something that they comment on. Helix Sleep has a quiz, takes about two minutes to complete, that matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you.

Starting point is 03:40:36 With Helix, there's a specific mattress for each and every body. That is your body, also your taste. So let's say you sleep on your side in like a super soft bed. No problem. Or if you're a back sleeper who likes a mattress that's as firm as a rock, they've got a mattress for you too. Helix was selected as the number one best overall mattress pick of 2020 by GQ Magazine, Wired, Apartment Therapy, and many others. Just go to helixsleep.com slash Tim, take their two minute sleep quiz, and they'll match you to a customized mattress that will give you the best sleep of your life. They have a 10-year warranty. You get to try it out for 100 nights risk-free. They'll even pick it up from you if

Starting point is 03:41:14 you don't love it. And now, my dear listeners, Helix is offering up to $200 off of all mattress orders and two free pillows at helixsleep.com slash Tim. These are not cheap pillows either, so getting two for free is an upgraded deal. So that's up to $200 off and two free pillows at helixsleep.com slash Tim. That's helixsleep.com slash Tim for up to $200 off. So check it out one more time. Helixsleep.com slash Tim for up to $200 off. So check it out one more time. Helix, H-E-L-I-X, sleep.com slash Tim. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time what I would take if I

Starting point is 03:41:56 could only take one supplement. The answer is invariably Athletic Greens. I view it as all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it, in fact, in the 4-Hour Body. This is more than 10 years ago, and I did not get paid to do so. With approximately 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole food sourced ingredients, you'd be very hard-pressed to find a more nutrient-dense and comprehensive formula on the market. It has multivitamins, multimineral greens complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health, an immunity formula, digestive enzymes, adaptogens, and much more. I usually take it once or twice a day just to make sure I've covered my bases if I miss anything I'm not aware of. Of course, I focus on nutrient

Starting point is 03:42:37 dense meals to begin with. That's the basis. But Athletic Greens makes it easy to get a lot of nutrition when whole foods aren't readily available. From travel packets, I always have them in my bag when I'm zipping around. Right now, Athletic Greens is giving my audience a special offer on top of their all-in-one formula, which is a free vitamin D supplement and five free travel packs with your first subscription purchase. Many of us are deficient in vitamin D. I found that true for myself, which is usually produced in our bodies from sun exposure. So adding a vitamin D supplement to your daily routine is a great option for additional immune support. Support your immunity, gut health,

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #506: Balaji Srinivasan on The Future of Bitcoin and Ethereum, How to Become Noncancelable, the Path to Personal Freedom and Wealth in a New World, the Changing Landscape of Warfare, and More

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #506: Balaji Srinivasan on The Future of Bitcoin and Ethereum, How to Become Noncancelable, the Path to Personal Freedom and Wealth in a New World, the Changing Landscape of Warfare, and More

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.