Welcome to the making cents podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed. And we'll only be here in the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of The Making Sense podcast. You'll need to subscribe at Sam Harris dot-org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcast track along with other subscriber, only content.
Don't we don't run ads on the podcast and therefore, it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So, if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay. Well, our 20-year engagement in Afghanistan has come to an end.
I think I might have more to say about this next week. We're coming up on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 which is obviously significant for the world, but it's also personally significant 911 was definitely a hinge event in history, but it was also a hinge event in my life, even though I was not directly connected in any way that I'm aware of to the events of that day.
I don't believe I knew personally, anyone who died, but it really did change my life. I began writing my first book. The end of faith on the 12th, or the 13th, the latest.
And the events of that day, really determined a lot of what I focused on for more than a decade. So anyway, I think I probably have more to say about that next week. Perhaps, I'll do an AMA there too.
But the topic of today's conversation is not entirely unrelated because viewed from one Vantage Point, 911 certainly seems to have hastened. The unraveling of everything which is the topic of today's podcast.
Today, I'm speaking with Balaji srinivasan, as you'll hear biology, as a jack of many trades. He's a Serial entrepreneur and angel investor. He was a general partner at entries in Horowitz. A major Venture Capital firm is a very technical academic background. He's a PhD in electrical engineering and a master's in chemical engineering, both from Stanford. And he also taught computer science and statistics at Stanford.
He is all in for blockchain technology and cryptocurrency which we talked a lot about and he was actually the first CTO of coinbase.
Anyway, Balaji is very active on Twitter. And that's where I think I discovered him first.
He was very early to recognize the problem of covid and he may be very early to sound the death. Knell of much of what we once considered stable in our world.
And there was a lot to talk about apology and I had a five hour conversation, which I believe is my longest podcast ever. We had a few sidebar discussion. So the final edit came in at 4 hours and there are certainly a lot here in general. We talked about the challenges to civilization and the possible remedies, we discuss the Abundant evidence of American decline.
The rise of India and China centralizing and decentralizing Trends in politics and elsewhere, the relationship between politics and Technology, the failures of the FDA, the TSA how regulation actually preserves monopolies, the significance of Bitcoin and blockchain Technology, the challenge of cybersecurity. The Chinese government's attack on bitcoin the threat of u.s. Regulation of cryptocurrency.
The problems with Enterprise blockchain, blockchain scalability, Creator coins and related matters, life and Singapore, the idea of virtual government, the future of decentralized Journalism, independent replication in science. Wealth inequality is notion of ubiquitous invest in Social Status, nonzero-sum capitalism, the very strange and arresting idea that one could stop.
That one's own country in the cloud and then have it come Crashing Down to Earth and other topics.
As I hear there was a time zone difference due to his being in Singapore. So it's some point around 2:00 in the morning. I tapped out, but we covered more or less everything. I wanted to get to. You'll hear me. Push back more and more as the conversation progresses. I think that starts around hour or two or three as most of you know, I'm very worried about the degradation of our institutions, but I'm even more worried about the growing
Isis on the left and the right that we don't need institutions and what biology is proposing. Here is a crowdsourced peer-to-peer blockchain enabled, quasi utopian alternative to our current institutions. Governmental, Financial journalistic, Etc. And I must say, I remain skeptical and worried. I wish I could share his optimism here.
And who knows? I may get there, but I found the conversation. Fascinating, if nothing else. It's a harbinger of some very interesting things to come and I bring you Balaji srinivasan.
I'm here with Balaji srinivasan biology. How you doing?
Great. Good to be
here. Okay, so there is a, obviously, a lot to talk about. I went out on Twitter and ask for questions and I won't hit you with actually Twitter shaped questions, but it did. Gage, a very high level of interest in in are covering really the totality of your interests and are intersecting interest. And a lot of this focus is on.
I guess civilizational challenges and American Decline and then the possible response to all of this and how we how we move forward, how we reboot to something more hopeful. And you have thought a lot about this. But before we just jump into everything all at once, perhaps you can summarize your intellectual and professional background. How do you think about your place in the world and the tools you've acquired this far? Sure.
So, you know, of Indian descent parents from India, basically, I grew up on Long Island, came to Stanford for undergrad. You don't got my be SMS, PhD in electrical engineering Ms. Had chemical engineering taught, computer science and statistics at Stanford for a few years primarily in the areas of computational statistics and genomics and bioinformatics and then started a genomics company which
Ended up selling for more than 300 mil. And that was in the area of like mendelian genetic testing. Actually, you know, I Steven Pinker is, you know, a one-time collaborator of mine and friendly who I believe, you know, and then, you know, went completely from genomics into totally different area gotten to venture capital and joined education Horowitz, which is a twenty billion dollar Venture Capital firm.
Help set up our crypto and our bio arms are when crypto was not a thing, you know, Bitcoin was not a thing and recruited video Pandey to the firm who's now the head of the bio fund their and our investments have been really quite quite good on both the crypto in the bio said also an angel investor in Bitcoin, you know, Theory MZ cash. Most of the major coins as well as lots of. It's funny to call to have a traditional tech companies like
You know, Soylent repli'd, superhuman, Lambda School of Mighty, a bunch of other things, you know, Cameo.com, for example, many of which have been quite successful and then took over one of our portfolio companies when I was at a 16c and took that over turned that around into something called earn earn.com. So, let's coinbase became CTO of coinbase. That was my kind of most recent thing. And in addition to that, of sort of being
You know, I guess a part-time, Tweeter writer public. You know, it's funny, put his way public intellectual. I guess, everybody's an influencer or whatever, you know, but, you know, at least I've put some ideas. I think I've helped influence conversation some ways. And I also taught a mooc course online, with more than 250,000 students, back in 2013, and I've wanted to repeat that at some point. And right now, I've just got a little newsletter thing called 1729.com, which is sort of see it.
Maybe something bigger where I'm just kind of putting some essays out and, you know, tweeting and doing Angel Investing right now. So our that's me Jack of all trades. Master of none brings us to the present, a
nice. Well, it's a polymathic picture which is definitely a lot of fun and gives us a lot to cover. When were you at Stanford? What years were you there?
Oh 1997 to hos, really? I guess O7 almost 10 years, uh, you know, it's funny like the first 10 something Gears of
My professional life was sort of spent in, you know, meditating on mathematics. All right, and, you know, I kind of thought that the world was just, you know, who could solve the most difficult integrals. And yeah, it's the kind of stuff that I do then, you know, for example, actually, just just to talk about that for a second, lots of stuff in undergrad, you know, when people learn it, the learn the algebra formulas, but they won't really have an insight into what underpins that that's protect perhaps.
Most apparent in like probability for statistics, you know, people will learn how to manipulate probability distributions, but they won't actually understand how a collection of data maps to that. And a lot of that is actually not taught. It's just something you have to sort of figure out and grad school, you know, something which I've wanted to write a text on or something at some point, but it's kind of a general thing that people kind of understand symbols on a screen. But they do not understand how it Maps.
A real life.
So why did you go into EE and chemical engineering rather than math or something?
It's, it's a great question. Well, Sanford actually do not have an applied math degree. So, ee was sort of the closest to that. Since there's a pretty close close correspondence between, you know, the like signal processing in particular and then what's actually useful in real life, you know, you know, Fourier transforms functional analysis, you can throw a lot of math at a, you know, wavelets hard basis.
A lot of that stuff actually has a tight correspondence between the math and then what's actually useful in real life and both of those were important to me that you know, there's something that's interesting and challenging for mathematical. See I'm going then useful in real life as for chemical engineering. It was sort of the most quantitative way. I could get into bio medicine because I was interested in life extension and stuff like that for many years. And, you know, I'm kind of coming back to that early interest plus, they're both very broad, right? They could they touch a lot of different areas. You know, I have at least
I'm grounding and you know everything from navier-stokes two antennas, you know, certainly not an expert in these areas, not all these areas, but I at least know enough to know what, I don't know, you know what I mean, right? So that was helpful,
right? Okay. Well, let's turn you loose on the problems at hand.
Yeah, you asked you asked is just you know, it's not just one.
It's good. We will be talking about almost none of that stuff but Charles give a very technocratic.
And to end enumerate, inflection too much of what we do touch. Yeah, it's funny. It's funny.
I like your I like your second, you know, a stress on that. Which is, you know, John Allen Paulo's many years ago in the 90s, wrote a book that was influential on me when I was growing up called in numeracy, and I actually think that's a good way of kind of defining what the new class is as opposed to the old class because there's people who sort of are self-styled technocrats or they're kind of called that it's kind of got a bad name, but they actually can't do math, right, you know.
They styled themselves policy wonks, or would have you but you know, they can't code. They can't. You know that I think this Century the numbers overpower the letters.
Yeah, although broad concept for you can talk about amazingly, it still gives enough scope for Motivated reasoning that you can. You can get objectively, you know, perfectly numerate, people who are no longer persuaded by numbers when they go against their cherished beliefs
true. True. I'm not saying it's just, you know, Panacea, but I do think that
There's a greater degree of check on flights of fancy or if you're going with numerous people who are more likely to be logical or would have your at least there's a greater check. You might, you might disagree that we could, we can go and talk about that.
Yeah. Okay, so let me just set up the problem as I see it. Yeah, I think there's so many intersecting issues here. Maybe main one for me is the failure of Institutions from government to the media to universities to
Science journals to major corporations. I mean, this is just a, if the story of bad incentives and incompetence and ideological capture hyper partisanship, in our politics of the despair, many things intersect in here and we can see the failure is more or less everywhere. I think in the last year and a half our astoundingly, an apt response to covid has been the clearest example of the problem here. Yep.
Although now we have a misadventure in our, in an exit from Afghanistan the last week, which is gives it a run for its money, but it's just everything. But the development of the vaccines at least to my eye, we've proven unequal to the moment and yeah, I do view this as a dress rehearsal for something that is more or less inevitable and and will be quite a bit worse and amazing. You know, there's an obvious American failure here, but, you know, there's
The the International System generally has failed. And I just we see the issue on a dozen other fronts. I mean there's this. The moral Panic of woke knows that has captured our institutions, which I've spoken about a lot on the podcast. There's the rise of populism at home and abroad. There's this slow-moving collision with China and the capitulation of our major corporations to these increasingly orwellian demands. That come from the Chinese Communist Party move. Got LeBron James literally doing the bidding of the
P. We had four years of trump which culminated in a mob of Q and on addled, lunatic storm in the capital, but then under Biden we have, which was, you know, build, you know, even from the perch of this podcast as a very likely return to competence. But as I said, we have this suddenly spooked exit from Afghanistan. That has alarmed our friends and Charmed our enemies all over the world. So across the board, we seem to be advertising.
And what a ramshackle superpower we are. So I had this totally aspects of this that we could start with. I guess some. Let's start with just the phenomenon of American decline as you see it and then and then we'll eventually get to possible remedies and and the path forward. So it just what do you, what's your 30,000 foot view of America at the moment?
Great questions. So, you know, one thing that you said that I wanted to sort of look slightly poke out for a second, as you said.
The one thing that we were successful on was vaccine and I think it's important to determine what we was there because we was was the was really, in many ways. You know, it's funny to put this way the private sector or technology, you know, biotechnology and the state mostly got out of the way and you know, they, you know, it wasn't the FDA that was developing rexine per se. They were sort of forced to get out of the way of blocking it, you know, yeah, so so I think, broadly speaking what we're talking about is a decline in American state capacity.
And what's interesting is, this is mirrored on the other side of the world in China. And actually, this is surprising very surprising to me, to a lesser extent, but a real extend in India, both China and India have had a rise in sea capacity over this period. And, you know, the Chinese story is well understood, you know, they've built all this stuff and you know, there's a lot of a lot of negative things that I can and will say about China. But it's also important to understand the things that they are doing that are unambiguously like
Right, you know the build-out so they have reason and say capacity in India actually also has where, for example June India stack is no. Okay. So there's an article you might want to Google. It's called the internet country. I think it's tiger feathers dotsub stack.com. I believe, that's right. And it basically just kind of describes how sort of out of the global. I India's built national identity and payments and so on apis for billion citizens, okay, and
Are not as good necessarily. I would argue as the Chinese versions but the exist and that's incredibly impressive. And that, you know, and are in some ways are better because they're public as opposed to sort of the WeChat is, you know, private persons. I'm not being them up in just a Kaiser. Probably probably will listen to this. It's actually quite quite impressive that you could do something like that for India, which you did not have a functional public sector for many years and on, you know, moreover, like 4G LTE. They have they've done something.
There's or not. There's a project. There are private project called Reliance jio, which is given wireless internet to hundreds of millions of people. So, basically, on the other side of the world, we're seeing essentially something where the winners of the 20th century, right? The US and Western Europe have gotten like, you know, one way of thinking about it is civilizational diabetes, you know, so fat and happy at the end of history that they had, sort of invent internal conflicts and drama to make things meaningful again, and now they have, you know,
They've got to the, they've set it afire and they're burning down the house. That's one perspective on. I think there's others technological one, but the other part of it is on the other side of the world, you know, the Indians and Chinese that sat out the 20th century are going to be extremely important players in the 21st. And right now in 2020, you know, there's sort of this overdue American, you know, cross partisan like understanding that. Whoa, this China thing. It's actually become a big deal.
But I think the realization in 2030 is going to be that India is actually also a big deal because India is actually on an amazing growth trajectory right now, that's not being reported on, you know, that there is an interesting aspect, where thanks, the vagaries of History, you know, there are now millions of English-speaking, Indians who are broadly West aligned, and you know, of course, you know, part of what the Chinese use is there.
Justification for being anti-west are, you know, the Opium Wars and, you know, the Boxer Rebellion. And these are things, you know, actually, Adam twos who I don't agree on many things with and is actually in some ways communist sympathetic wrote a pretty good history of kind of China in. You know, I think the new Statesman recently that's worth browsing for people because, you know, most most folks, very few Americans. I speak to have any idea of how China got rich, for example, or you know, how, you know,
Like India's, rise and state capacity. It's just a complete Melody, you know, and this is kind of related to, you know, the some of the phenomena that you mentioned, which is, you know, pre 2016. There is there is an American internationalism and of course, had been declining before then. But you know, reflected, let's say, George HW, Bush, or the sort of democrat with a broad view of the world is both on the Republican and the Democrat side of sort of understanding other countries, you know, and
ending the other guy's point of view and overseas, right? It wasn't, you know, trumpian chest-thumping, but it also wasn't, you know, sort of this woke narcissism which, you know, is this is also narcissistic and inward-looking in its own way, right? It pretends, to be really tolerant in Universal but assumes that everybody is basically, you know, has the values of a Oberland 2021 graduate or whatever, right?
And so because of that there's actually very little surprisingly hard news about other countries. It's just you know, are they good? Are they bad? You know, these basic facts have simply not been communicated, you know? Yeah. Anyway, okay. So coming back up the stack. So the point basically being that the I think in many ways the 21st century, this is for some angles which 21st century is a mirror of the 20th. One of them is that, you know, if it
Was about like a capitalist West and a socialist East. It's sort of reversing, you know, where, you know, now, in many ways like you could say, the new political spectrum of the world is something where the u.s. Is at the Left, Right. Basically, Europe is Center left, India, Israel, you know like their center, right? And China is far right? And the Spectrum, I would put there is
Gastineau Massachusetts left to ethno nationalist, right? And in the center would be pseudonymity and that's crypto show. Elaborate on
that y'all. I want to get into crypto. Let's keep talking about the problem and then it goes crypto. I know is a big part of the solution as you see, sure.
Sure, sure. Okay, so but I'll describe the Spectrum for a second, basically, during the Cold War, the first Cold War, you know, you roughly had the US on the capitalist, right? And then Europe was on the line.
Like, you know, call it. I don't know center, right? At least the US was the right pull of capitalism. And then you had a bunch of countries in the center. Maybe the third world that were like kind of non-aligned. And then you had, you know, they're in some of them. Actually, you could call them essential left as well because there were Soviet sympathetic, but they weren't feeling troops. Then you have the far left, which is the USSR, and the Soviet Bloc and whatnot. Right? And in many ways that spectrum is sort of flipped where you know Eastern Europe would be considered to the right of the u.s. In many ways of visegrad countries. Not in silly. I'm not saying
Good or bad. I'm just saying, you know, it's like flipped, right? China is certainly to the ethno-nationalism right there. Their belief is China's the best and whereas the US has like, you know, the ethno Massachusetts left, where, you know, the statement is that you know, basically whites are the worst and you know, the that's what's funny. Is it flips around into its own kind of supremacist ISM, you know, where, once you've given yourself license to hate, you know, to send white people to the back of line for vaccines rather than people of another color, right, which is actually
Policy in some states. If you saw that its own form of serve, racial Obsession, and so it's in that way like this the spectrum of the 20th century has flipped around. And in another way. It's also flipping which is that I think that the 20th century is the centralized century and a large part of what happened. This is, by the way, there's a book that's really worth reading. Have you heard the book? The sovereign individual?
Yeah. I haven't read it though.
Okay, so very worth reading, you know, it's on Kindle. Your
Into might want to read it. I think it is an important book to understand where we're coming from, where we're going. It actually holds a very well despite being written about 20 years ago, but briefly speaking, one way of thinking about, you know, the time period from, you know, you could say from 1492 or, you know, depending on how far back you put it up till about 1950. Is that technology favorite centralization?
And that meant, you know, for example, the centralized Union, 1 over the Confederate States, you had mass media and mass production, you had, you know, by 1950 at Peak centralization, which was, you know, One telephone company, which is AT&T, and two superpowers us, and USSR, and three television stations, ABC, CBS, NBC, and all kinds of diversity. All kinds of, you know, intellectual diversity, schools of thought, all these kind of funny, princes, and principalities.
He's all of that was crushed. And you know, you had these giant homogeneous masses by 1950 right, which worser controlled by and, you know, antenna Towers broadcast towers and people can really talk to each other very easily because it was Capital expensive to go and set up a television station or a factory or something like that. Right? And this is also reflected through the political organization. We had these gigantic polities, you know, you're the US and you had the USSR and you had China. And you know,
Basically, it was just like these gigas states, you know, slugging it out and the ideologies were adapter for the technology. They were ideologies of, you know, mass media and mass control and, you know, a huge number of Nazis and Communists. And then fortunately Democratic capitalist, as, you know, basically the three factions, okay. And so then what you see though, going from 1950 to the present day? With the invention of the transistor, things start things start changing and I wrote an essay on this or give an interview rather at setan. Yeah.
Sot ony, e dotsub stack.com. I gave an interview with with him where I talk about this in a little more detail. But basically, you know, from 1947 to the present day. You have the transistor, your the personal computer. You have the internet, you have remote work. You have smart, smart phone, you have cryptocurrency. These are all decentralizing things. Right? And because of that institutions that were set up during the centralizing era are out of their depth.
And, you know, basically the entire regulatory state that FDR set up in the 1930s, which you can think of a sort of the last major tectonic plate moving of the u.s., Right? Like the u.s. Carbon arguably dates back to that. And the reason I say that is so many aspects of the Constitution are things were sort of overturned during FDR's rain like the Tenth Amendment the idea that you know, States basically can do anything that isn't the federal government doesn't explicitly have that's does basically.
On became a became a non issue or a dead letter during FDR's rain, right? And, you know, when we're thinking about it, by the way, is FDR was a dictator who ruled till he died. Okay. Now, you know, it's funny to put it that way. Right? But basically notice the economy started picking up a few years after he left and he had done all this stuff like naira like the you know, the national industrial Recovery Act and tried to pack the chords. And you know, there was the poultry case.
You know, Schechter poultry company, I believe we're, you know, you tried to get them like, kill chickens. If I'm not mistaken. He actually did a lot of things that various dictators would would do, you know, didn't put? Well, I should say didn't put people in camps. He did, you know, which was the Japanese internment. It wasn't as bad as you know, the other countries, but essentially what was happening was there was, you know, nor near as bad obviously, but essentially what's happening. There's a pressure for centralization. You saw similar things happening.
Around the world and Diaz was just like the least bad of them. There were enormous reasons both ideological and technological for the formation of these centralized States. And I think the technology is being Upstream of it. You know, how, like there's a sort of common thing that says, you know, cultures of true in politics. You've heard that before. Yeah, right. And that's true, but Technologies Upstream about them technology influences, you know, there's a different view which says technology is the driving force of history. And every idea
Biology is being out there for all time. They're just wait, you know around in The Matrix but technology determines which of them are feasible and infeasible by Parts. Okay. So
are you are you arguing that the that centralization itself was not the problem? It's that we had a centralized system of authorities that became incompatible with the prevailing technology.
Yes, exactly. Right? So with India and China they had sort of refounding moments, right? India, you know China's re founded in 1978 under tension.
In Indian 1991 sir, still young enough as states to sort of ride the decentralization curve, which was in a parent like, basically, they were re-founded on capitalism, you know, which is part of the sort of Latter half 20th century Trend away from centralization, right? And so they, you know, for all their many flaws, many, many, many flaws, they're sort of writing the right wave of decentralization. Now, there's many asterisks and
And reversals and things you can put on this. Because, of course, China has built this gigantic surveillance state in India, has built a centralized, you know, payment stack and so on, but and I'll get to that. But even with those sort of reversals and you know things overall they were sort of founded or re-founded in the decentralized era. And they're sort of writing that way of to a better extent then the modern US which was set up pre, you know, like like 1950, right? Look, are the in the 1930s. It's about a
You to 60 years older. Let me illustrate. What I mean when I say FDR's regulatory, state was set up for the centralized world. So, you know, the FDA for example, it's set up to go and regulate Merck and Pfizer, right? Not a million people doing personal genomics. The FAA is set up to go after Boeing and Airbus not a million drone hobbyists, right? The SEC is set up to go and regulate, you know, Goldman and Morgan. And you know, the nice Ian.
NASDAQ not millions of millions of crypto people trading at home, right? The presumption is that you can have this ti la, this three-letter agency, that pulls the CEOs of the major things in the room and jawbone's them and says, this is the way it's going to be. And that's sufficient. There's two reasons for that first is, you know, the it's sort of easier to have the points of control B corporations that the regulatory State can kind of give instructions to to do X, Y, and Z as opposed to individuals, but second and much more subtle.
Li, but very importantly, there's a book called reputation and Power by Daniel Carpenter. And he is, you know, FDA sympathetic. It's a good. It's a good book though because he is honest enough to actually give first-party testimony of the executives who are regulated by FDA and their testimony is similar to that of like somebody who's like a captor, you know, captive of a Vietnamese, you know, torturer during during you know, the the 70s and you know, they would be blinking.
Being, you know, I'm being tortured, even if they're forced to say something, you know, positive? Right? So these Executives, you know, are basically blinking, I'm being tortured. And some of them are saying it outright. And then Daniel Carpenter kind of says like but they were of course exaggerating, you know, but he concludes the quotes from them. Right? And so the thing is that the the FDA was kind of, you know, for many years used to being able to torture these Executives. For various reasons. One of the most important is that companies are unsympathetic, right?
This is a big bad Corporation. Obviously, it's trying to cheat you, you know, we have seen thousands and thousands, countless numbers of movies and you know books and so on where the villain is some mega-corporation, right? I mean think of how many movies you've seen where that's the plot that the reveal at the end is that was an evil greedy Mega corporation that you know turned the mutants loose or something like
that. Right? Yeah, but but villains aside we have to confront this problem of bad incentives and the negative.
Negative externalities of yes, people's greedy, quote, greedy profit
motive. I agree. I totally agreed that I told her that and I'm not, I'm not somebody who is against regulation large. I just think that the current Regulators like you can go from nation state Regulators to Cloud regulators and actually achieve a better result a very obvious version of that is right. And you might describe this. But I think it's true, is for example, the transition from taxi regulations, where you have a
Rear Medallion inspection, maybe every six months or so. Cozy relationship between the taxi drivers Union and the taxi regulators and the the customers of those taxis. They don't put in any Star reviews or anything like that. And then you move to an environment where every ride is GPS, tracked driver knows that the writer can provide payment, writer knows the drivers being raided and can be decommissioned. You have real-time star ratings and reviews on both sides, you know, there's a uniformity of service to some extent.
And so on and so forth. Like, uber and Lyft are not just better, you know, like taxis Are Better Taxi regulators and the sexually a broader concept if you think about it, what is PayPal doing? What is eBay doing? What does Amazon doing? What does Apple doing? What is Google doing? These are all actually all Cloud Regulators for significant part of their business where you know, Apple provides, but I mean by regulation there, I mean star star reviews, right? Basically ratings of you know,
Actors and then bands of Bad actors, right? So you're doing quality scores and bands of Bad actors. Those are the two components of Regulation or regulated Marketplace. The distinction is in the first, you're giving like a star rating 125 like this is good or bad and the second year identifying actually fraudulent actor who you know, is not incompetent. Not a one star actor. There is zero star actor. Okay, and so there's no safety
permanency of. It's a reputational currency and a level of transparency that is causing it. Yes, and what otherwise would be a trustless?
Ian, it's allowing for something like trust. Exactly. That's
right. So, the subtlety is not that we are against all regulation. It's that we are against this technologically inferior form of Regulation, based on paper, based on these 20th century, obviously processes. When you can do it way better, you know, like why lots of people use Amazon, why just to look at the star ratings of products?
They have built a sophisticated regulatory system that is better than you know, the FTC or the BBB or anything like that, which is you know, on his back
foot except when you go to when you have to buy batteries on Amazon, I don't know if you've noticed that, but everything is awful. Everything is none of the batteries were real. This. These are Chinese, fakes the cap,
right? So the counter-argument is now people have learned to game some of those things. Okay, and I would agree with that that some of those reviews online can be gamed because there's a huge financial
incentive to do so. And then I think we're going to see the next generation of crypto reviews, which make it harder to game where you have proof of human and you have web of trust and you have so on and so forth, but I think broadly speaking being able to get a product review for anything. Under the sun for free in seconds is superior to the you know, 1980s or 1990s environment where one could not do
that? Okay, but if we revert back to the FDA for a moment,
yes. Popping back up, so,
Is that
just a question? I think many people would consider it a problem. Even a looming. One that the FDA is not built to regulate the true democratization of crispr Technology, say or sure the desktop manipulation of Novel, viruses, right? And the fact that it's not built to handle that is one problem. The other problem is it's nowhere written.
In that the ongoing survival of our species is compatible with the true democratization of that Tech rights, like if this is some Texas, shouldn't be spread, right? And we need something like the FDA to put his foot down. Now, if they may be incapable of doing that, or we'll do it too late, or maybe it's not even possible. Given just the nature of the spread of Technology, but it's not intuitive to many people that the solution here is necessarily.
To ride this curve of decentralization down to truly peer-to-peer free-for-all.
So you raise an important point. And basically, I think it's something where we're going to a very high variance world because the FDA is also stopping life extension, and it's stopping anti-aging and stopping reversing the Beijing for many different reasons, but, you know, the bureaucratic roadblocks that puts in place.
The idea that everything has to be sort of forced into the new drug application, you know, format, you know, all of that is something which is also preventing people from living forever. And when I say living forever, I mean at a minimum reversing aging, you can demonstrate that that'll lab David Sinclair has written about this. There's long, you know, books on this
side, but no, but why would that be the case? Because again, this is just a sure first principles and tuition, but there should be a massive incentive ever. Take one component of Life Extension. Also someone with their some path by which we're going to
Cure Alzheimer's, right? There's so much money to be made in a cure for Alzheimer's. There's so much money being spent in the in trying to mitigate the pollen suffering due to alzheimer's. Why would the FDA in any way stand in the way of that
progress. Excellent question. So this actually gets back to the. So I'll give a couple of concrete examples which are observable variables. Right? Do you recall how the FDA basically with a Johnson Johnson vaccine, despite extreme?
Large-scale benefit from having it out there went and Amplified these very rare edge cases and used it to yank, the vaccine causing people to impart become vaccine, skeptical, or whatever. You want to call it. Remember that a few months ago.
Yeah, they around thrombosis issues.
Yeah, it almost has a very rare Edge case. Yep, but basically they're not optimized for making the correct trade-off between type 1 and type 2 errors. Alright, another example, this even more egregious.
Was last February, the FDA was you know, and by the way, you know, when you say the FDA the FDA is made of Institutions and those institutions are made of people, right? So, you know, Jeffrey Shirin and cdrh is actually like it's funny how it's always reported as like this abstract thing as opposed to a guy, right? Isn't that interesting? Right? Because the reporting doesn't actually people but by reporting is to abstract institution and makes it seem like nobody was making a decision report the person, right? So crh is run by a guy Jeffrey Shirin and last,
Sorry, there was a decision that was made basically to make it very hard for people to run the Diagnostics on the novel coronavirus. That is to say, they weren't actually given an emergency use
authorization, Avast. That was, that was really appalling. Yeah,
yes, but it was critical because during those critical few weeks. The information supply chain was messed up that is to say the state was inhibiting. Decentralized. Testing for the novel Coronavirus.
Until the Seattle Slew study. I believe literally just did Civil Disobedience. Broke the law tested for the coronavirus. You know, I'm using, you know, the tools they had even if they don't have the respect of certificates and you know in that unusual situation would happen was in York Times company, sort of, you know, retroactively blessed their Civil Disobedience because you can bless Civil Disobedience as good or as bad based on that. Holy writ, right? And by kind of writing an article where they said that this was good that indicated to the FDA.
That they couldn't go in for some them and beat them up later that actually the FDA was the wrong. They were, you know, the journalist was the judge Decatur in that scenario, which I'll come back to you.
But now what would newest describe this more generally just to the Dynamics of bureaucracy and the principle of its you're not going to get fired for the good thing. That didn't happen that nobody on your watch that nobody knows about but you will get fired for the terrible thing that happened. So there's just a risk aversion built-in, you know, or a loss.
A version by Miss a loss loss of version built into the human psyche. But there there may be even greater principle of loss aversion built into
bureaucracies.
Well, yeah, but basically, one way of thinking about it is you've seen a thousand movies on evil capitalist. You have lots of different, you know, you also seen movies, where the police go bad and so on and so forth. So you have that, mental model of greed, is what makes them go bad. Okay, just in a sentence, what makes regulator go bad
in the current environment, I guess overzealous regulation in a time of emergency.
Yeah, it's you could you could call it power. Okay. Yeah, that's your failure. But yeah, right if the if the
Goes, you know, like failure mode is too much profit, the regulator seeks to much. Ambit, you know a mbit like too much. Also just territory
following the letter of the rule when obviously a life-saving exception is warrant am is that there's no there's it's the rigidity problem and there's just no flexibility. Intelligently
responding is their moment are conscious of that. So when they choose to be they can be flexible, right? It's really about power for them. That's why you should read the book reputation and Power.
Our by Carpenter, like, we're familiar with this. Let me give an example, which is more familiar to people because most people have not actually encounter the FDA, so you only know about them through what you read, write. And you know, everything that one has not sense directly, you know, one has not actually required information on ideally tables of data that you kind of systematically correct, but at least personal experience, you're You're vulnerable to the intermediate, the media Corporation, or media entity that is reporting on them because they can be a very noisy camera. They could distort what
On the other side. It's noisy sensor. You have to kind of go back to sensors. Okay, so let me go to something, which we definitely have interactive it, which is the TSA, right? Yeah. So with the TSA, okay, back when we were all flying much more but you know, let's say for yourself back to 2019. Okay, and the TSA basically you walk up to, you know, the airport and what do you do? You don't make any jokes in the line? Okay, when you're being, you know, forced to take out three ounce bottles.
As you know, there's this new terrorist technology called mixing, that can take 2/3 ounce bottles and mix them into a six ounce bottle. It's the most insane and illogical regulations world that one alone. They take off our shoes and kind of go through this, you know, metal detector or the the actual look, this sort of somewhat radiative scanner. I forget that exact name for it and you don't make any jokes. You don't talk about how ludicrous, you know, anything is you just kind of comply and get on the plane. Why? Because if you were to
A fuss. Well, you might suffer what's called a retaliatory, wait time where you're forced to go and sit in the corner, you know, and they ask you a bunch of questions and you miss your flight and the cost of that a few hundred dollars. And, you know, the opportunity on the other side is not worth it to you. So you just sort of quietly comply with these illogical regulations, until you deplane on the other side and you leave. And the thing is, it's a cost that is imposed on literally millions of people every day for 20 years. So the cost is in the
Any incalculable, billions of dollars, but
he reminded me of the time when I came back from India with a long hair and probably wearing Court to pajamas and that point I fairly long established commitment to not lying under any circumstance and when asked by Customs whether I have used any drugs overseas I said, yes. Yeah that definitely and the custom officials eyebrows Rose to the back of his head and he so what drugs did you use? And
Well, I took acid and they Paul and I smoked some opium in India. Then I could, I could see, you know, the the Full Table of guys preparing to search my bags. Down to the last molecule.
I hope, I hope you got to the airport very
early, but this was on my return. So I just had to get out of there without being strip searched. But well,
it's up to that point though. Basically, you know, if you look at how the TSA justifies themselves, it's all about the guns and the drugs that they've seized. And of course if you repeal the
Fourth Amendment, you will search everybody and you'll find some bad guys. Hey, look at this. Look at this table of all these guns and knives and drugs and so on we found you, you know, but the thing is that, you know, what is not seen? It's the boss yet seen and unseen is the, is the not just the economic loss, the loss of privacy and all of the abuses of that system and you know, more to the point the initial reason d'etre like stopping terrorists. And people have done things like sanction test, where they try to get things on a plane and like fool, the TSA.
It's like this very high percentage chance that you can fold here. Okay, and moreover by the way something the FDA did Fast Track through were those detectors, right? So basically I think back in 2010 like, you know, ARS Technica had a long article on this so I can
know what are the find it Backscatter x-ray. Detectors. Are you? Yeah. Exactly why they
can use their work. Yeah. Professors who wrote in on the safety of these things. Right. And wrote a letter and because see the thing is
Is that the fda's mentality? The mentality of these, these agencies is if it's a.com, it's evil because it's for a profit. If it is a a.org, it's good. Because it's not for profit of its a.gov. It's a sister agency, so it's not for profit, and so we should let it on through and approve it. And if it's dot mil, well, they're not exactly the same culture. But at least they're not for profits will waive it on through, right? And essentially, when his tsa.gov to fda.gov, you know, basically,
They were given the benefit of the doubt. And so what's happened is the FDA way of through these body scanners that are rating all these people and we'll see what the long-term health effects of those are. But it's not obvious that they actually do anything relative to, you know, the Israeli style of actually looking for the person as opposed to the object, you know, and you know, Israel style has you know, its own merits and demerits but Israeli, you know. Airport security is focused on who could actually be a terrorist. Yeah.
And you know the American is very much not its tries to enforce the sort of egalitarian thing that irradiates everybody, you know, equally right.
Listen. You're talking to someone who once wrote an article in favor of profiling at the
TSA. Yeah. And so the issue is
you can imagine imagine how comfortable the aftermath was on social media. Right? Right, right.
So look, you know, the problem basically is that if you know any kind of profiling itself has gotten a bad rep, but any kind
Of huh, mint right? Like human intelligence, you know where you're actually looking at the person as opposed to the process has been made, you know kind of like a like a taboo, didn't think to even think about it? And so the result is that everybody is not just inconvenience the the process supposed to detect, you know, quote terrorism doesn't even work. Right? So it's just this giant tax on society, where people are terrorists could actually get past the TSA. Okay. So what's my point though? And as as evidenced by those?
Tests, if you need evidence that show that people could get past it. Right. So thing has Type 1 errors. It has Type 2 hours. It's not actually set up to be what you want, which is sort of a metal detector for terrorists. Not a military court for objects, you know, you want like a like a scintillation detector like something that's detecting this extremely rare event of an actual terrorist, right? And you know, the thing is that despite this complete irrationality, despite the enormous, destruction of value. Despite the fact by the way that many well-heeled executives.
Politicians and so on must submit to this, we're in a bad equilibrium where to talk about abolishing the TSA, you know, it would be oh my God, you know, you can't possibly do that, right? It's a very hard thing to change
course and we have something. So people are familiar with the concept of security theater at the TSA. So we have something like regulatory theater elsewhere in the government, including the FDA,
exactly. And the difference is that with the TSA. You know, why don't you say anything? Because there's retaliatory, wait time, right? You
Can complain after you get out, right? But if you're FDA regulated or if a regulated or ICC regulated or something like that, you know, especially FDA but, you know, you enter this dark tunnel at the time that you start a company and then you're beaten with truncheons through the duration and you can't say anything because to say anything is to invite total Destruction of your company because you can just be, you know, passive-aggressively shunted to the back of the line with infinite dials until your Venture backing Runs Out.
And then your throttle to death and when you fail in such a way, it looks like you just sucked, right? It looks like oh, yeah, your thing, couldn't pass the FDA clearance. And so that's why you've got sour
grapes. But all right. Are you arguing that we actually don't want an FDA because I want a TSA, right? I mean, like I want a to say that functions
rationally. So this gets to my point of I think you can build something much better. Okay. And just as an example, let's take post-market surveillance, which is Phase 4. Okay, so
Why can you not take your phone scan, a barcode of a drug at the store and see every single review that if anybody's ever had of that drug, right? Ideally link to their personal genomics and ideally linked to yours. So if you have a a, you know at this spot and and you can actually see you meaning, sorry. It's a technical point. If you have a genetic variant of a particular kind you can see a table which shows everybody else who has that unique variant and then what
You know, reported was a five-star or one star for this drug, you know, basically, you could see the pharmacogenomics in real time rapid
sort of that integration with the full genome sequencing of the entire population. What you have is something like the tver database which now is being gamed by anti-vaxxers who are reporting that. You know, our covid-19 has are killing them.
But by the way, so by the the the high level thing here is what you're identifying is something true and important, which is that
The internet means more variance more upside and more downside, right? More highs and more lows. Right? And so on almost any issue, we can identify a downward deviation. We can identify q and on, right? But we can also identify often an upward deviation. We can identify Satoshi Anon, right? And, you know, so so to your point, yes, there's going to be people who count with crackpot, you know,
medical think, maybe maybe just drop the two sentence explanation of who Satoshi is because
I guess. Oh sure know it but not everyone.
Sure, Satoshi and on, but I'm just kind of it's like a funny way of referring to it as parallel to, you know, Satoshi and on meaning Satoshi Nakamoto was the pseudonymous programmer that create a Bitcoin and then disappeared, right? And we know he existed because there's, you know, like a lot of contemporary evidence in people who spoke to him electronically, but he maintained perfect operational, security result able to help something that has changed the world and you know, create a trillion dollars in wealth and you know is the
The subject of every, you know, banker and you know Finance here and you know, government a you don't they care about right? So that was something where you know, is a very different anonymous online kind of thing another one, by the way, was the the lab leak Theory last year. There's a website called I think project evidence dot GitHub, dot IO. And what that is is basically a compilation of all the evidence for the lab League, I think last April and you know, took about a year before that bubble to the mainstream. The critical thing is
Anonymous Global scientific publication. And in a sense. We're going back to the future because Newton others used to do this used to publish something where it was under a pseudonym. So people would sort of have to go after the ideas, rather than the person, you know, and so we're sort of back to that future. And so that there's there's an upside as well to like, Anonymous internet stuff. Not just a downside. So coming back to your point and we're like several things down. The stack will pop back up, right? But absolutely, I think it's naive to say no FDA, right?
It's sort of like, you know, Ron Paul saying, End the Fed. I'm actually sympathetic to that in some ways because, you know, like the FED prints all this money and so on and so forth, but I'm a pragmatist as opposed to a doctrinaire Libertarian and you know, the problem with let's say ending the fed or ending the FDA. Is there the center there, The Hub at the center of like millions of spokes, the entire system is built around them.
You know like to turn in like incomprehensible extent, you know, every wire transfer, you know, is you know, it's ultimately linked to like fedwire or something regulated by and you know, every single biotech company Drug Company. Device company is something pending the FDA might use an FDA database. It's not like they do in zero things of value. They do a fair amount and and so just simply having that be a black hole is so impractical as to be laughable. And so you can't really say end.
The fed or end the FDA that's like, you know what people will hear sometimes, but that I don't think is practical. Well, you can't do however, and this is very important, is, you can exit the FED, exit the FDA, and what that means is figuring out a way, which is non-trivial, to build a different system in parallel, and have that be buggy and incomplete, and risky to use at the beginning. Such that only early adopters are in.
But over time, it proves itself out and handles more and more and more of the criticisms, and the V2 and V3 and V4, and the V10, and so on ship over years and decades. And then eventually it can stand up and take over from the the previous entity. Okay, so we're actually doing that. That's what Bitcoin was right. Bitcoin inverted, the premises of the financial system. Satoshi is he said? Hey, actually, yes, deflation is good, gold is good. User level custody of your
Phone Keys as good as opposed to having a bank, custody it for you, and so on and so forth. Then you flip the premises and by flipping the premises, he put the ball at the hundred yard line and it completely different system with different axioms was built up from that and that system has proven to be superior to one that was just edits around the current system right editor on the current system, get you Dodd-Frank edits around the current system. Get you, you know, what happened in the, you know, the aftermath of financial crisis, you know, how they regulated. The banks by
Competition entirely. No new bank Charters were issued for almost a decade. Hmm. Okay. So it was, you know, I mentioned this, a precip is a carnation disguises regulation where, you know, essentially they're like, oh, you're so bad. Let's ban all your competitors and enshrine you in law, as a monopoly providers for eternity, this by the way, is a fundamental thing is. A lot of people think that regulation is like against big companies. It's actually for them and it's a way of locking them in place and setting up barriers, like all this antitrust stuff. And so on against Facebook,
And Google is ultimately something that's meant to make them fuse with the state. And you know, I say meant to you know, let's say that is the emergent effect. It's not like they're going to shut down Google search or Facebook. What they're going to do is a set of regulatory barriers to any competitor and be have a direct backlink, you know, or you know, backhaul connection to the nsa's they can hoover up all the data. The National Security State will get every single thing. They want as part of any settlement, you know, all the problems. They've had with Google or Facebook.
Negatives resisting them since the Snowden revelations in 2013. Will all go away. Still get like the sort of pure link. The only way to actually compete with that is not by regulating them. But by having a bunch of start of piranhas and decentralized competitors, go and devoured, them and build something better. And that's coming back to this point. We understand that in the context of a company that you can have a startup that starts out with nothing and it is, but you might have a hundred of these startups. By the way, and 99 of them fail is
Actually, not that high, a failure. Rape. Let's just say nine of them feel, but one of them has the right ideas and it gains strength over time and it reforms the existing incumbent, right? We understand that's a legitimate way of doing things for companies. Yes.
Yeah. I mean, it seems like we're in a situation where it's not always possible. I mean that hence
antitrust. Well, so I mean, but the thing is that what's interesting is, there's so many folks who are chewing at piece of Google and Facebook, like from the tech standpoint, or from the BC standpoint.
It is very much not obvious that antitrust is necessary or useful to disrupt. Antitrust is ostensibly Pro competition, but really, it's Pro Power.
This a like the people who are interested in this kind of thing are not the people who have actually built companies that have been such a disruptive threat to these incumbents. They've had to pay billions of dollars for them, you know, just to cover on this and over kind of going all the way down. The second will come back up. Okay, but, you know, one meme out there was, oh, you know, we need to regulate these big companies to stop them from buying up all their competitors like Instagram and, you know, so on to because they're too, you know, they have too much money to stop the competition.
The thing is that sucks acquisition of Instagram was something where like a billion dollars at the time was like a quarter of the cash on hand. It was a few weeks before the IPO, Instagram had zero revenue and scram is valued at 500 million dollars a few days before he valued at a billion. He didn't even get the boards, like, you know, sign off on it. He had to do it himself and Jon Stewart at the time, mocked it and he said, oh, Instagram, well, the only thing that's worth a billion dollars for an Instagram, would be something that instantly gets me a gram. Haha of cocaine, right?
So, so is mocked and derided at the time, was actually like an extreme, you know, extremely non-consensus thing for him to do to buy the thing and Aaron thought, it's a huge waste of money. And now, of course, Ten Years Later, it has forgotten that now wondering how it
was predatory, and an obvious, but it was. Yeah, exactly.
It simply, it simply wasn't. And when you are next to the CEOs and the founders of these large companies, the entire environment looks much more unstable than it looks from the outside.
Ed because you have structures coming at you, I mean, why did Google not win with Google video, because YouTube was basically more risk tolerant than they were, you know, and say, it's actually going by YouTube for 1.6 Bill. And here's a critical thing. People think, well. Let's just stop those big companies from buying these in these up-and-comers because then the up-and-comers will become successful. Actually know what you do is you then cut off the pipeline of the up-and-comers. And here's why as a venture capitalist. When you fund a company,
You have a few options for an exit, right? One of them. Yes is an IPO, but one of them is an Ma. And if you cut off every intervening gas station, where there's a possible fill up, it becomes less likely you reach that destination. Right? Right. And if there wasn't a YouTube exit, if there was an Instagram exit, there isn't funding for every exit like that results in funding for a thousand more competitors, right? And that's why we have Snapchat and that's why we have, you know, like Discord and all these messages.
Why doesn't Google run messaging, they have a low and Duo these like kind of, you know, sorry to some of my friends there, but they had this very confused messaging strategy because her gigantic company that you know, can only do the things that you know, they were able to do, you know ten years ago and they can't easily do new things and all those things are done by startups, but it
makes deny that there's a potential problem of Monopoly that needs to be responded to you. Seem
to be asleep. Yes. You think
there's a problem of centralization? Yeah. Can't you imagine? I'm what I'm saying? Monopolistic takeover of
One sector of the economy that needs to be
as the same thing goes, right, you know, the thing about tech monopolies is there so many of
them but, like, wait, right there, not that many competitors to Amazon, or Facebook, or Google
this. Well, so yeah. Well, there are actually with Facebook. I mean, so first, let me give the sort of first order version on that. Let me give a second-order right where I give something to your view. Okay. The first order version is there are a lot of competitors to them where you know, first of all, obviously there's Chinese competitors, but leave those side for the average American
Do you have to buy something at em, son? No, you really don't there's all these e-commerce specialty stores and stuff out there. Amazon is most convenient in some ways, but it is like, you know, if you buy if you're buying a chair, you do not have to use Amazon. It gives you an extra level of convenience, but it's really not that much easier than, you know, going and buying it online. There's almost no
Cliff Amazon is in a position. Now, to if any one of those competitors really start succeeding and I think they even did this with
mean, Shopify is doing extremely well for Sims
was, this is their story about it.
With diapers.com where they just said, okay, we're going to start selling Diapers at a loss Forever at repricing
pit. Yeah.
Well it does but you let us buy you for the price we think is appropriate.
I mean the thing about this is like, you know, I've heard that story. It may be true and it's something where it's a large company can do to you. But this is life in the NFL, you know, if you're doing a start-up, you are basically going against
Companies that will do all this stuff. That's why starts are hard. Right? The funny thing is, the kind of people who say that story are also, the people who hate Tech entrepreneurs typically, right? They're not like Pro entrepreneur, the kind of person who's funding or founding a new diapers.com would be like, yeah. No, that's a tactic. They could use. They could also cut off Epi axis. They could go and muscle this or that, right? And the thing is to retroactively deem that to be illegal to cut prices. Is I mean, this is the whole interesting, like, when is
Hard competition illegal and so on and so forth. And a lot of this stuff is just, you know, deemed illegal in in retrospect, right? Where you know, the winner to win is to lose, right, you know, if you win in the market and you provide a better product to the customers notice by the way, but not saying Amazon was bribing. They're not seeing Amazon was, you know, like like sending saboteurs and they weren't like, you know, breaking the law in that sense. Right? What they were doing was though they were cutting
Prices to give cheaper diapers to the customers of diapers.com. Okay. Well the diapers.com customers are benefiting and Amazon is like holding its breath to do that. Now, you might say Well, they're big and that's unfair and so on and so forth, but like that's just like one one thousandth of what you deal with. When you're, you know, a tech founder going up against incumbents. It's not meant to be fair. Like the whole point is ever heard the term. Unfair Advantage. Yeah, like they have an unfair Advantage when you start out. Okay, you know, it's unfair what's unfair is Gmail has a billion users.
Sirs, and your new email product is 0, why don't they give you some users? Right? That's unfair that they're only sending Gmail modifications to their users are not yours. This. This line of argument can be extended to any asset that any incumbent has. And it's not actually Pro founder or Pro entrepreneur because it puts a effectively Lawless state above every founder and entrepreneur. We're really even if that thing is marketed as being better for customers, who's actually serving the customers.
Not the government. It was Amazon and diapers.com. Lizzie anews fair, you know, let you know, let us let us be laissez-faire. Actually has has a logic to it where you let them Slug It Out in the market. So long as they're not like killing each other, right? Notice. They're not doing things like sabotage or you know, things like that and then see where it comes out because that's actually better for customers. Now. This is actually related to you know, I believe Lena cons whole antitrust thing. Was that customer harm was insufficient as as a theory of antitrust.
Right. So they're moving away from, you know, customer harm in consumer welfare to like a different kind of thing. So the laws are being changed in a retroactive way, right? So just to finish this point, then let me argue the other side of it, right? So the key thing here is a venture capitalist. You need to have the possibility of a hundred million and billion dollar exit to fund the riskier 10 billion and hundred billion dollar IPO.
If you don't have because those are rarer, right? That's like, you know, you need to have the possibility of singles and doubles, not just, you know, swing for the fences, every single time because you'll get fewer hits, right? There's there's you know, and so if you cut that off, what actually happens is, it's not like, oh, there's way more companies that go IPO its way fewer. Because when you remove the deepest pocketed, bidders from the auction, right? When these big companies can't buy it anymore. There's a whole buyer that's being taken out from the
The market and that means a venture capitalist makes less money and that means less money for Venture Capital. That means this month less money for startups. So the number of startups shrinks. So when you cut off acquisition, you cut off the number of startups and see you actually cut off competition to these institutions. So Paris, it seems like a first-order thing, you know, it was compelling to some people. I think it's the stupidest thing, the world, if you're on the other side, but it seems some people o. If you stop the big companies from buying their competitors, then we'll have more competitors. Actually. If you stop them from buying, their competitors will be far fewer because venture capitalist will
Far fewer of them, right? Okay. So now let me argue the other point of it, right? Which is, you know, Glenn Greenwald who, you know, it has I'm friendly with on Twitter or whatever, but basically him, and I have sort of had kind of parallel migrations in somewhere, over the last eight years. I have become much more skeptical of centralized corporate power. And I think he's being much become much more skeptical of sort of Legacy Media. And, you know, if over the 2010s, you can see the conflict.
A lot of the conflict was Tech forces media. That was just one theater of our global social war, you know, and that's why I think of, as, by the way, not the Civil War, but the social war, I'll come back to that point. You know what it is. Now, it's not Tech versions media. It's decentralized Tech and media like sub stack and crypto. And so on versus centralized Tech and media, namely the Legacy incumbents who are losing a lot of their smartest people that still have the distribution. And the reason I have become skeptical of corporate power. Is that the
Given that, you know, folks will do things that are in the, you know, interest of their customers and their shareholders. And so on is not the case when you have these ideological mind, viruses out there, at least, it's not obviously the case they may have, you know, they may be responsive not to their fiduciaries but to the Twitter mob, okay, they may be responsible, not to the customers, but to the politicians who are funded by the Twitter mop, and I've seen that take over and brainwash and put employees and crazy people into many of these companies. And so,
You know, for that reason, you know, I can't give three cheers for antitrust, but I can give half a cheer for it in the same way that sort of one can argue that the antitrust attack on Microsoft in the late 90s and early 2000s, what it did is and this is, you know, there's people in Microsoft Word might argue with this but here's like one history of it, right. Essentially Gates. Who is this, you know, nietzschean wield power CEO. You know despite.
Looking, you know, like a nerd in the digital realm. He's like a level 99 super jacked, you know, like Avatar, right, you know, with all the muscles and gigantic flaming sword. So, you know, Gates basically had one everything going up into the year 2000, but but he caused a bandwagoning among everybody who had beaten right from Sun to Netscape and so on and so forth. And the antitrust sort of, you know what you call a prosecution persecution.
Whatever of Microsoft distracted, them enough, and then it led to bombers ascent and then under bomber. Basically, you know, Microsoft sort of was number two in everything, you know, that's to say they did Xbox because PlayStation was out there. So they couldn't be accused of being, you know, a monopolist. They're doing Bing because Google was out there. So not accused of being monopolist. It had the Zune because the iPod was out there so you can't be accused of being monopolist. Right? So like I'm number two, right? I'm in.
Competitive market and you know, once you start thinking that the goal is just to maintain competition while the other person, you know, Google or you know, what have you was playing to win? You know, you just had a different mindset creep in Microsoft could no longer play to win. It is remarkable, you know, in a testament to Gates and to bomber, frankly, you know that he stepped down and that something was able to take over and turn the thing around. It's very, very difficult to turn around, you know, a tech company of any scale. Let alone that scale. It's actually
He said he has something to tell of the CEO of Microsoft is one of the most unheralded like super Geniuses around for what he did the surgery, the speed of the surgery. He did on Microsoft to turn it into what it is. Now where he gave it a second, you know, set of legs. He rebooted it for open source is like a refounding moment or whatever, you know, he has this book on a cold hit refresh where it changes some of the elements on the page, but not all done. That was why he said as a refresh point being though, that basically the antitrust attack on Microsoft, you can argue that it distracted them enough. It made the giant you
Blink. And then a clear the way for the tech disruptors to take place, but the critical thing was, that, without those Tech disruptors are the government action alone would have simply like frozen Microsoft in place. Okay, you needed the tech disruption component. And frankly, that was actually, the more important component because simply regulating Microsoft would not have gotten you. Google Maps, right? Simply regulating Microsoft or not have gotten you. The iPhone simply regularly Microsoft, and not gotten you PlayStation or open source or GitHub or any of this.
Other stuff, right? And in the same way like, you know, the antitrust thing, what it will do is it will distract these, you know, 5 Tech Giants, right? The Google Apple Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and the box within will, now be busy at producing lots of documents for the federal government. That's somewhat amusing, you know, and
Basically, what it will do is it will result in many of their best leaving but for where and that's a critical thing. There has to be that second component because you need a vision of something better. Again going to the connected to the earlier point. It's not simply end of the fed or end the FDA that's impractical in Google and Facebook is Impractical. You can exit them and build something better. And what does that look like? And I argue it basically looks like a crypto version of everything. So now should I talk about that? Like the kind of crypto plan for disrupting
and yeah. Yeah, let's
Let's give a maybe a 10-minute primer on blockchain and cryptocurrency. I got, you know, I don't know how much knowledge to assume on the part of my audience. But I think it's worth putting the most important Concepts in View and just why migrating away from a environment of trusted. Third parties is important, so
sharp. Okay, so there's a ton, obviously, I can say on watching and currencies in Bitcoin and so on, first, you know,
Only understand one thing just to motivate.
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