Are you aware of what it's like to talk to? You know, I feel like I could rule the world. I know, I could be what I want to be. Like all Days on the Road, Less Traveled. Never looking bigger, a good Pond. We got a good guest here. This is probably
All right, before I introduce Our Guest I'm going to butter him up a little bit. I'm going to butter them up because I'm genuinely excited for this. I there's probably like three or four podcast so far that I'm like, oh yeah, this is one that I wake up in the morning. I'm excited to do. I know that if we do a good job, this is going to be what people's favorite podcasts. Why is that? Well, this is the
bottom, not morning for a Sean. It's it's and it's like it's a let it's all it's almost gonna. It's gonna be midnight. Sooner Abreu is yeah we got up late.
We're stayed up late.
Yeah, but that's alright. It's my birthday. By the way today. So this is how I'm spending my birthday evening. Happy birthday. My wife was like what do you do for your birthday? I was like, don't worry, it's already planned, I'm doing a podcast, I love it. So anyways the reason I think this project podcast can be good, this episodes can be good is because our podcast is all about ideas people. Listen to this pod, they wake up and they listened to spot because we get the wheels turning. We present new and interesting ideas or we talked about spaces, or we talked about spaces in ways.
Ways that you haven't heard too much before. Now, one of those, one of the ways that I get a bunch of my ideas is from our guest. Balaji who is, who is here and he has been, I don't know what the exact quote was, but I think Marc andreesen, at one point called you like the highest ideas per minute of anybody? He's met was there? Do you know that quote that I'm talking about? He sort of, yeah, it is
kind remark. He said they were useful ideas to, which was good. So some
credit for our ideas, people don't usually call,
Useful. But that's okay. Entertaining
is okay. Yes, we teach people how to like launch like a porn app. You teach people how to like you warn the world of a pandemic. So like your podcast is actually very popular and if her love people, say good things about it. So, don't be too hard on yourself. It's good. Thank you. Thank you.
And I think that, you know, one of the like, a lot of people ask us like, oh, you know, who do you guys follow? Who do you guys read your one of my answers to, if I start a new Twitter account.
And I had to follow five people to like get that information flowing in. Who are the five kind of must follows. I think he would definitely be there for me and Sam. I know you've been following as well so we'll give kind of like a very quick rundown but then we have a bunch of topics that I think are exciting. We're going to talk about a bunch of crypto things because I think you're very forward thinking in the crypto World we're going to talk about some non crypto things as well and then we'll all
try to
steer clear of too much controversy. And you know, let's let's play ball. Nobody get cancelled, here we go. So so bald
Here at one point you were you're a founder of I
believe
genetics company or a biogenetic company. How would you describe your first company? What was the kind of category you would call
that one?
Um, clinical genomics. So basically, you know, one of the first companies to use genomics in medicine and basically we took, if you've heard of Tay-Sachs or Sickle Cell, these sort of genetic diseases, mendelian diseases that you probably learned about in high school. Those are simple genetic diseases where they can be predicted by usually just variation in one Gene. And we did is we took all of those at the same time.
And test them at once with a universal genetic test and those one of the first applications of genomics in the clinic, where the scalability of it, the fact that you could assess many different markers, many different variants of the same time allows you to cut cost relative to traditional one. One gene or one variant at a time blood test. So which I actually just used it, already used it. My wife and I for freezing, embryos used you, it's what?
They called Mary? Yeah, Mary under here, we had Women's Health division but basically it was it was called Co un Sy, L Council as an independent company. So like I well I saw the packaging in the trash can and I was like, oh wait, I know this day about. And so yeah, so Shawn. That's what we use it for. Glad that could be of assistance. I think it's interesting because that's a space which has sort of just evolved in its own way, you know, genomics and biomedicine
Hasn't really linked up with the mean body of tech. You know, it's like internet technology because they were technology, it might do. So this decade will see hasn't yet. It's sort of like how, you know, like high frequency trading and all the tips of his own kind of sub area and crypto has now linked it up with the main body of tech. You know, where its programming, you know, programming on top of blockchains right now that we have on there are 30 million sequence genomes.
And lots of people with genotypes, are forget the latest number, but between 3 and me and ancestry.com, millions of people have personal genomes, albeit genotypes, rather than full sequences. I think we're going to start to see more kind of, you know, computations a lot of genomes have been installed in the same sense like a personal computers installments, a piece of software right for data, rather locally on your computer that you can do things but that's a whole separate topic. Happy to dive into that if you're interested and what and what did you do after that? So I was yeah, it was like a sorry.
That was like a 300 million dollar exit or something. Yeah, like pretty wildly successful, it's good, it's good. Yes, good company and I think you know, so after that there's a bunch of things. I was an early investor in crypto currencies, so Bitcoin etherium Z cash, bunch of other ones, you've heard of, I shouldn't say every major coin, very major coin that I think has some technological innovation. You know. I've probably got like something in it, not every single one, but a lot of them.
Early, investor in superhuman Soylent Cameo, Lambda School. Replicate, Mighty, bunch of others have all done, fairly well, you know, deal. If you just saw this become unicorn rubber last week, all things that sort of, I think Fit My Philosophy because, you know, I sort of invest in invest in things that help to improve quality of life in the future that I Envision. And so, you know,
Somebody make with crypto, for example, crypto is built for the apocalypse but with internet, right? You know Soylent, you know that type of stuff, right? And you know there's an apocalypse and there's a rebirth after that. And so at the kind of think of that as sort of this stack of Technologies, you kind of viewed from that lens of the unbundling and fracturing of all 20th century, all pre-internet institutions. And then the re bundling of
Of them back together into new internet, native forms. I think very few institutions that produce the internet will survive the internet in the fullness of time.
So I think I'll start go ahead. I
think I think Shawn that before we like really get into it though. I did want to call out I think we want to call his latest project right? Because I want we might talk for a little bit. I want to I want to be able to promote that right away as opposed to in the end. So you want to show on you want to take it from there?
Yeah well I'll let you introduce it but
Super interesting project, believe the URL is 1729.com. So just the numbers 17 1729.com and it's really simple and I love simple simple idea which is it's a newsletter that pays you. So it's a newsletter that you get that has these little micro test. So I got one, I don't know. Just yesterday the day before it was basically, like, you can get 3,000 bucks and Bitcoin. If you create memes that will promote, you know, crypto and India are, you know, help how package that idea in a
A way that's shareable and spreadable. That's what memes are around crypto in India. And so, there are these little tasks that come out. And so it's a newsletter that you read not just for, like, Sam's got a newsletter, two million subscribers, The Hustle they give information, but it's sort of like, a path that's like, you know, you just consume it and you move on with your day, your newsletter is actually kind of interesting because it gives you an opportunity. A small bite-sized opportunity for you to do a thing and build up. Not only not only earn from it but also build up in a way as you
More and more of these build up some credentials by having accomplished these little micro test. So can you give us the like, that's right now that's my read from the
outside. Did you hear that slight? He goes. Yours is actually interested. We should do a collaboration with. I'm sure. Actually there's a lot with the hustles kind of ethos. I think overlaps, you know, as I was mentioning to Shawn beforehand, you know, you guys like it takes all different kinds to build a company and you guys have sort of the sales, you know, business.
Ena natively, right? And for me that's very much an acquired tongue, you know, where like I can emulate, you know, business and I can, I can run that in emulation layer, but like my core OS is math. You know, and then there's folks who are like the reverse who are fundamentally businessmen and who can get into the tech and get into the computer science and so on as sort of a way to do business and, you know, one needs both kinds, right. But I think one area of overlap potentially with the hustle, you know, serve audience.
Is that, you know, a lot of time online as we know, is just being wasted, right? It's being thrown into a meat grinder. I mean, like the sheer number of hours when we really think about the millions, or billions of hours that are used on social networks. Look, I think there's a necessary step to get people online. I think, like, on balance, it was necessary but I think one issue is that social networks were invented and scaled 10 years, seven years ish before cryptocurrency. And so because of that, you could only transfer status online
line and not value. And what that means is that everything basically boiled down to status games leaderboard, what's the most popular? How many followers, how many faves Etc and those appear locally nonzero-sum? But are globally, zero. Something that's a locally. It appears it cost me nothing to give this person to like, but globally, it's a zero-sum leaderboard, only one can be at the top, right? And that leads to the status games that you see on Twitter and all these other places that are somewhat familiar rated in places, like Reddit where they use pseudonyms.
But it's an issue. Anyway, what's my point? So 72 9, you know, my friend, Dan Romero, actually a while back was tweeting like you know, what's the new Hacker News? And I think you guys were talking about that and I think the new Hacker News is for crypto is not just a place where you come to discuss and do things aimlessly, but something, which uses crypto so that you can actually earn and learn, you know, and actually, the third is burned. So we actually haven't done a thing proof of work out, right? So basically you're pursuing, you know, truth health and
both in that order. And I think that's actually the right priority order, right? So learn truth, you know, determine what is true pursue Health, you know? Because without that, you have really nothing else and then wealth is important, but it's third and it's important to have that 30, never one to do something that's untrue to make money, or, you know, to sacrifice your long-term health for wealth. I mean whatever, losing sleep, one day, okay? May not the end of world for a year. It's going to affect your long-term Health, you know, and that's actually going to affect even from a pure dollars and cents you. It's going to affect your wealth generating capacity.
See and your capacity to provide value for your employees and your shareholders, even if you if it's the selfless thing to do on a daily basis on a long-term basis, you want to take care of your health, for the health of those around you. So essentially, this was sort of so this shoe health and wealth thing is this like a personal saying or is this like the, is this like the slogan for 17? 20 minutes so I can force him to try and it's basically I think of as the new Liberty, equality fraternity,
Okay, that's great. It sounds ambitious but basically as a tripartite motto for a new kind of state in the in the fullness of time and the reason is that technology actually allows us to do all three, you know, with crypto in particular, the decentralized Ledger's, we called you connect last question in a
slightly different way, which is, whenever I'm looking at investment. I think I asked the founders, this, my favorite question asking, founder is awesome, what is the world was fast?
Or three years. What does the world look like? If this has been adopted, what is my, what is my day? Look like, that's different. Maybe me as a user, but I would love to hear your version of that because I think there is a really different and cool, new laying that out gets opened up, as something like this gets more adopted. So what does the world look like? If this what does my day look like? What
does it look like? Well, first is rather than just accumulating Karma. You're actually accumulating something of value, right? So something a tradable asset your
Earning cryptocurrency, you're actually leveling up yourself. Imagine if you didn't just gain, I don't know. A hundred thousand followers, but $100,000 in all your posting online, right? That would actually give material benefit to people right now. You know, for technical reasons, Facebook and Twitter, basically capture all the revenue. And in the early 2000s, the mid-2000s, I was actually a great deal because they were giving these free platforms that you could broadcast anybody, the world and they would maintain everything for you to give all the hosting, you know,
Free model was actually a very good deal relative to the alternative at that time and so they just take the cut for doing it. But now today people realize actually, hey, all this content that I'm producing for them all this work than putting into it, the hours into your tweets, or whatever your kit seeing a single dime out of it, there's zero creator monetization. For the most part in these major social networks, I'm going to think, okay, not totally zero, you can put a link in biood Instagram, and there's some stuff, but it has lagged, right? And so now we need a kind of a new social contract, a social smart contract.
And what that means is basically to make money online and not just make money, but to learn things online and not just to make money to learn bills to become healthy. And so if this becomes popular, you don't waste time online or not. Just waste time, you learn things, you actually gain crypto credentials, not just cryptocurrency. So, like badges in your wallet, which are emblematic or reflective of your ability to do certain things. For example, you complete five python problems and you get a badge that says, I've completed five python problems and you complete, you know,
10 questions on, I don't know Russian history and you get that kind of badge right? Or the Russian language. Now why that kind of thing is important is it totally destroys the concept of a college diploma. The reason being college diploma is a very, very coarse-grained, you know, kind of illustration of somebody skills. If somebody says oh I've got a Harvard degree or Stanford degree, right? What does that really mean? You know, you have some estimate, okay, I kind of know that they, you know, Stanford degree in computer science,
I kind of know what the curriculum is but this particular person, you don't know what their skills are actually all their coursework they did. During undergrad has been basically wasted, right? And if instead what you did was that portfolio that they had every single problem that they solved was in a folder on GitHub so that, you know, they have 25 courses, and ten ten weeks per course in terms. Of course, all 2500 problems. Were organized in folders on GitHub, you can see their portfolio. You can drill down and see their particular skills, okay? This guy knows, operating systems. She knows.
Compilers this person knows machine learning and I can see that as evidence by the 15 problems are solved with Source Code online and especially for a broad discipline like computer science or electrical engineering or chemical engineering, you can't simply presume that because somebody has a degree that they have. That particular skill set. People have strengths and different areas point is, once you unbundle that or you granular eyes that once you give individual measurable skills, you can see just how much talent, you know, race or background. Somebody has an arrow. This person has solved a hundred different problems in compilers.
And they're actually really an expert in this area and I've got the badge to prove it. Okay, once those badges are in your crypto wallet just like you log into a website today and you can load in your crypto currency or unload it, right? I think one of the things we want to do to try and is have this reportable crypto diploma or descriptive credentials. So you could log into a job board and just start working because you're automatically qualified on the base of your credentials. Right? Right now, the only thing we can declare is our interest, right? I'm interested in Game of Thrones, you can't provably declare
I know how to calculate eigen values, right? I know arnoldii length shows, you know, I know, you know, methods for large matrices. I know how to do graph layout, that type of stuff, right? You can credibly clear that you can certainly put the words in your CV, but if you guys have hired, you know, that that's an unreliable narrator problem often, right? You know, people will say so. So how does that happen coming off? By the way if you know Sean and I might ask this is a similar question but basically like what I'm understanding with this is like so right now.
Now, as it is, it's a much simpler, it's not doing everything. You just said, it's basically here's a here's something that is just like silly funny or actually useful. I'm going to pay you money if you could pull it off. That's right. And that's in itself, that's just like interesting and fun and neat. But the long-term plan here is that basically you're going to have, let's say you're building a company, anyone who meets the requirements are you saying, they're going to be able to login based off of their tasks.
Three in just contribute. What? I get paid for exactly. Now, that sounds like it's my thing with. You is like everything you sound as crazy but you you're right a fair bit so it's like it's like it's but so I have to like the. I'd like life
would be easier than just ridiculous. We can just write you off as crazy. We can just move on with her day. Sure. That the guys right. So now we have to take each one of these ideas that actually say shit might actually cry.
So let me let me speak to a few points here, right? So basically like the very short version is 70 times.
A place where you make money, learn things level up with technological progressives or building a positive future. Right? So it's you know, on the East Coast for example, media media businesses have sort of software Engineers as second-class says, right there, just guys who build the app and the writers are kind of the first class, right? Traditionally in Tech. It's been the opposite. You know, the software Engineers are the have private place. They're building Dropbox or Google or whatever, and then the writers are content marketing. I think here, another aspect of such time as that
Kind of unified where we have a product roadmap. We also have content calendar and those are really, you know, side by side and basically equal pairs. We have a story that were telling as we're kind of building this functionality and I think one of the things about this into several different angles that can talk about. But one, big thing is this sort of reaction against what I think of as the entropic internet, right? So if you know, entropy or the counts of entropy it's like particles flying in every direction. Okay, if you go and look at Hacker News, for example or Twitter, there's something that
you can't unsee once it's been pointed out, which is those 30 links are like a Jackson, Pollock, blah on the, on the page, right? It's just, it's like guaranteed to just fragment your brain into a thousand pieces, right? And the opposite of that is something like, you know, what Michael Nielsen has been doing with the science of reminding, you know, where you learn something and you don't just learn it. You get, you know reminders at, you know, one minute and one hour. And one day, you know, spaced repetition, right of the same concept with a
Bit of space repetition gets stored in like your permanent memory banks, you remember Quantum Computing, for example, right? So right now, what we're doing with the entropic internet is for just eating all this junk food, which feels good because it's novelty seeking. Oh, cool. That's cool. Oh, that's cool. That's cool, right? And you know, if you have a really good memory, then you don't need the space repetition. But most people don't have such a good memory and even people who have a great memory, I mean do you remember the thousands of links that you've seen online? No, it's actually more like watching a movie. It's just it's just sugar, it's just candy, right?
If instead, you could be much more deliberate about a lesson Tropic internet and said, essentially a goal for yourself and you make one, high-level decision come to 72 a 9. And then we do is we basically serve you content that strengthens you, right? Sean. I think that we can take this in so many ways. I want to talk about media eventually, but where did it go? This is so interesting. What he's like. Do you want to
yeah? Like,
he just threw out this, like, meaty thing. And we could like chop this up in like a hundred.
That way. There's so like I want to talk about this Anonymous work thing which is somewhat like this want to talk about this topic and I want to talk about what you just said about East Coast media. I would love to talk about that. What do you want to?
Let's jump around because I think that's my fear. If this was let's do it. Like we always do it. This was just us hanging out having a conversation and then the listeners are flies on the wall. That's what people like best. So let's do that. So what would you say right now, is this a normal conversation? You'd be like, tell me what, the, you know, let's talk about media.
I want to go to this media thing because you said something that I see that you're doing and I think it's smart, but
But it's so obvious. I don't know why you and others haven't done it, which is I do the same thing. I criticize like East Coast media where like the writers are the stars and a lot of them are like the circle jerk community that I am somewhat part of I owned a media company and I've hired a lot of those people. And in Silicon Valley, the engineers are like the gods where? Yeah. And both are circle-jerk communities. Like they both can stink and they both can rock whatever. So, but you're saying that, you're paying attention to
Now and media, I was talking with you, I don't know, did we do a call? We did something where I was teaching, where I was teaching you about email because you're like, this email thing is cool or and I was like, dude. What the hell was the matter III? Remember, we had a call and I remember you had actually some insight. I don't think it was quite like, oh my God, no, I'm teasing. You, you, I Sky criticized your website go. Dude, if you want email to be part of your website, just make your website like your
Little domain like just make that an email. Oh that's it. Got it. Yeah, I understand, I understand. So the thing is that I was actually building 72 9 at the time, but your suggestion of actually having the subscriber thing on the front page, like sub stack is actually what we did do. So we did take that suggestion and I think it's good. So but whatever. But what I'm getting at though is like why are you all of a sudden caring about media? And, and I and the reason why I'm asking this is I
Of media I love content. So to Sean it's a pretty shitty business model like subscribe subscriptions, a good business model advertising is a shitty business model but
another way of putting it is another way of putting the question is you built a, you know, a bio dad, you know, genetics genetics company, you were CTO of coinbase? What it could be early and crypto and the current project in its product. Form is a newsletter, right? Low-tech, but you know, Hive reach in a potentially. So why did you decide to do that?
At of in a why did you decide to go to kind of go into a space where you know we debate this all the time you know is Media a good space to go into y so I think Sam is that what you're getting at like why did you decide to launch a product? Which is a useful
to know and I want to know what your version of media is going to be in like because I don't ever want to leave this industry, but I think the business model blows. So like if you have, if you can save me, I would love that. Well, okay, so lots of lots of things there. So one is that
I think let me give it, let me give a story history and then maybe go from there. So you can you can date. Let's say the modern era of tech different, starting points. Let's date it starting at like 1995 with the Netscape IPO. Okay, and, you know, from 95 to roughly 2008 Tech and media basically ignored each other or rather media coverage of tech was positive, you know, up until the.com Boom.
Then after the.com, crash and 911. For many years, there in the early 2000s, Tech was happening, but it certainly was not a front page story. It's actually hard to remember. But, you know, if you go back to even 2008 and you look at like lists of power centers of the u.s. Silicon Valley doesn't actually come up there because Google was just a search engine. Facebook was just a college social network, you know, is growing, but it's just college network and the iPhone
Hadn't yet come out is just coming out 2007, it was announced. Right? And so the so Samia, kind of ignored Tech during this period is occupied with the Iraq War and, you know, terrorism and all the stuff that was a big storyline of the 2000s and it was, you know, obviously there are blogs and stuff like that. And people were using it, but it was kind of a, this Sideshow is like that thing. You kind of, you know, supporting character, basically Tech also ignored media and there. And that reason is different. That's because
Reassemble was at Yahoo and he tried to turn Yahoo into a media company and for an entire generation of tech Founders that that seemed like a very bad model because, you know, Yahoo failed or I shouldn't say fail, fail, didn't go to zero. Of course, for relative to Google it failed and all these this entire generation of tech. Founders, took the lesson that you just build a pipe, right? You build Facebook? Yeah, AOL did it to exactly this, right? So Facebook Dropbox, you know, you know, YouTube, Twitter,
Or that entire generation of companies. Basically said we're neutral pipe, we're just going to build a technology by the way, that was hard enough, those pretty freaking heart you know like at that time bandwidth, constrained environment before, all the modern web development tools, that was actually not trivial, you know. So they just focus on that completely and they said, look, the users bring their own content. User-generated content, right? And that kind of, you know, happen for a while and then the financial crisis happened, and iPhone happened.
And after the financial crisis in, you know, 2008 from 2008 to 2012 Facebook, Google Apple, all started going totally vertical and there's a graph called print media disruption, which you can see which was after the financial crisis. You might, you know, I show that on screen. If there's like a video version of this after the financial crisis, print media, drop the revenue from like something like 65 billion down to like 17 billion while Google and Facebook were just going vertical like this, right? And Craigslist of course was also a factor here, it wasn't just, you know,
Like like advertising is also classified. As I was a major factor Craig Newmark effectively bought them off with the Newmark Foundation stuff with a lot of grants for journalism like data journalism, dr. Tom is sort of there's like a surveillance handbook at data journalism.com by the way exactly how to surveil a subject of an article which you can look at to see exactly how these folks kind of think. But we, when we started the Hustle, by the way, we started it out of Craigslist office. There are a bunch of stories in the
There were negative pieces on Craigslist. It was an obvious to me whether or not they Craigslist. Classifieds are actually that much worse than newspaper classifieds. I never saw any stats on it, but it seemed motivated in part by, you know, Craigslist, economic, you know, attacks on on media implicit, not not intentional, but implicit, I think in part some degree of Peace was bought with Craig. Then funding a bunch of Journalism. I have nothing against Craig, you know, I don't know him. I'm just saying that. That's an observation Craigslist feathers
Wildly profitable businesses just private so nobody knows how much money it makes but it's very big deal. Okay, what's my point coming? Back at the stack. So from 2008 to 2012 Tech suddenly came out of its box, which was, you know, cute Gadget manufacturers over there in Palo Alto. Just take over all of these segments that were previously, the East Coast segments like Madison Avenue is taking a hit. Everybody was looking to cut costs after the 2008 crisis entertainment. Okay, let's do that. Online rather than going to the movies, all of that type of
Just shift online as a huge digital shock right? A Coronas a second one by the way. And so what happened is that you know Tech and media were basically Allied through 2012 to get Obama re-elected. And if you look at the late 2012 coverage, for example, like the Nerds Go Marching In December, 2012 was sort of the high Watermark of sort of the tech media Alliance and then in 2013 basically the post-election, the knives came out, right and
And essentially what happened was media was like, okay, you guys are getting way too big for your britches. We kind of thought of you as like just a part of the Coalition, but you're coming for the entire enchilada, you know, to mix metaphors, right? And this was something where all the negative articles on Tech and Tech Bros, you can date it exactly to like, 2013, 2012, there's even articles at, you know,
Valley back, whatever. Denying that such a thing as a brogrammer exist. Okay, the same guy the next year is starting to write nasty articles on like Tech Bros and and whatnot. Rights is a very crisp shift, okay. And so then what happened basically, for the next several years Tech got its head caved in by by media with the tech lash something I've warned against because I can see it as like a almost like a seed, investor. I could see this thing brewing and going viral.
All in 2013 and I can see even, you know, there's one journal and slate, who's like, sort of, sort of denounce this thing and said, oh you know what you look at all these rich people. This is such a silly view of the world, you know, we can do so much more and then five years later, he's calling for abolish billionaires, right? You can actually see the radicalization pipeline of these folks in real time. And, you know, you can, you can watch this happening because their world is collapsing, and they blame it on Tech, and it is certainly true that economically.
A lot of that revenue is going to checked in and try to do it but Google and Facebook and Twitter to create ads but not just add sales. Took me a lot of influence. And so you had this sort of Battle of the Bulge style reaction, you know, in from roughly 2013 to 2019 with this Tech lash and these media corporations, they couldn't build search engines or create social networks. With a could do is write stories and shape narratives. And do you know the difference between like a story and, you know, a product announcement?
Wyoming ones objective one isn't. Yeah, but a story has a bad guy.
I gotta hear. So go ahead. I said Amber hero.
Yeah. Yeah. But like you know as people who said you can build a religion without God but not without seeing and you know, so the not original to me, you know, that's the saying. And so what happened basically was you know, while Tech is busy. Doing these pastel colored product announcements? Oh you know like Drop.
Choppers. 10 more gigs. Yay. And it's just a utility, right? Media corporations were busy lining up to paint Tech as bad as evil and you've heard like 500 different lines of argument on this, right? And every you know like journal and academic was Jocelyn to try to find that Meme that would like kill these tech companies once and for all right. And you know they've been somewhat successful in that in a but they also haven't been what's
Happened is a lot of the older line tech companies that didn't have any ideological defenses but we're good at making money. Got sort of mentally colonized, right. And you know when woke and that has resulted in, you know. Yeah they can make a lot of money but didn't have the the meta-level story then of the meta level narrative. So it's like that saying about economists. Right practical men who believe themselves fully devoid of external influence are often the slaves of some dead Economist, have your
That you know that Spike John John Maynard Keynes, I think. So his point being that these ideas floating around the air and people are running on scripts that they don't even realize they're running on because media scripts humans, just just code scripts machines, right? This is something I had the fairest podcast right? So Tech. It's our impact band in fact,
that for a second for somebody who doesn't get it real right off the top, you know, sure thing, you know, just the way they, you know, what is a script in the way that the media scripts
humans?
Masks work masks don't work. Okay Boomer every meme right? For example. Okay you see a bunch of kids when they cut the cake the care and think. Yeah the Karen thing you know you see a bunch of kids when they come out of a movie theater. What is the first thing they
do?
I haven't seen Kids come out of a movie theater, I don't know.
Okay, bunch of kids coming for the first thing they do is they start quoting lines from the movie, right? They just reenact what they just saw on screen, right? And so, you know, this is something where the way to get people to do something, sometimes it is to tell them to do it. But often is just show it being done, right? And that is kind of, you know, Peter Till's, you know, a citation of René Girard on mimesis. I think it's important like Cuba
Our
mimetic, that's how we acquire language, that's how we align and objectives. You know, and I think that whether you want to call it contagious, mental illness, I think that's an understudy concept. By the way, we know that there's contagious, physical illnesses, we know there's viruses right contagious mental illness. Well we serve all stuck our brains into Twitter, right? Like this vat, rightly mentioned putting your brain into a vat with 300 million other people and they're all, just sending electromagnetic, you know, their brain states to you. It's
He's a little unhygienic. If you think about it that way, right? And an interesting sense, we sort of social distance away from each other. Offline will be packed, clothes online, like social networking pack clothes, and what that meant was that bad means, you know, crazy means could spread faster than ever while fire whoosh like this, right? Because everybody's brain was connector, is brain, right? There's, you know, there's a famous cartoon of this, you know, with the, with a stock market where it shows the medic Contagion.
Respect to prices, you know, and it's like a guy says, okay, I can't have any more of this goodbye and someone over here is in there, like goodbye-bye-bye
bye-bye-bye, you
know, like and then, and then there's somebody else who over here is it? And it's, like, I think this stock could really Excel. And then someone's like
Excel, sell, sell, sell, sell sell,
and it's actually really funny, right? Because, you know, it just sort of conveys these sort of
Like traveling waves of me. It's right right now. We don't have great visuals on this. We can't we can't do the molecular Neurology of the meme like we can do the molecular biology of the gene. Let me explain what I mean by that the concept of genetics predated molecular genetics, you know like Mendel went into these phenomenological experiments where you could see you know like the pea plants and so on big, a little layer. If you remember that from high school or what have you before people understood the biochemistry of, you know,
Deoxyribonucleic acid and how a gene is actually represented in the double helix and all the type of stuff that awaited kind of The Next Century, right in the same way. I think Dawkins and kind of our phenomenological understanding of memes, right? Is something that is ahead of our molecular neurology, how our ideas represented in the brain. Right? How are they stored? How are they retrieved? How are they accessed? How they communicate? People have done things on this would like, you know, the so-called Jennifer Aniston neuron, right? Where you know, it appears is actually sites.
In the brain that actually store Jennifer Aniston, like you see something and it just has, you know, what were you see, the words, Jennifer Aniston, you see the image Jennifer Aniston? You see a video of her, you see, Brad Pitt, and it would light up next to her and so on and so forth for somebody who follows all the Celeb stuff, it's not my thing. But this is from that is from paper while ago when Jennifer Aniston was still I think very much in the news not as much today. Right. That concept seems to also exists to some extent with in neural networks, you know, like the new, you know, like the
AI stuff that's being done. Where you can actually seem to express like an abstract concept where a neuron replacer. I think opening I forget who I think is opening. I had a paper on this recently. Okay so we're starting to actually get at how Concepts abstract Concepts could be represented in a quantifiable scientific way and you know, I we're not yet there but eventually we'll be able to see things like, okay, here's this traveling wave of ideas. We met a
Agent. Here are ideas that serve as vaccines against those other ideas, right? They block them out because these are deers are themselves trying to spread its yeah. So how does this? So like I'm going to say, like, here's the, the dumb, Sam version of what you said, which is like, I can convince people to believe certain things by making them feel certain emotions. And I could do that by by using sticky viral content, which boils down to funny memes. And that the internet is still on tap.
And we can all were all race into steak, put our stake in the ground and email is one great Empire to build. Is that kind of what you're getting at? Well, email. This one piece of it, right? But basically, you know, there's push notifications that's just a mechanism of how nodes are connected by the on a side. Note on that, I do think that within five to ten years in addition to email and text message, your DNS name will become probably the NSA, moralistic crypto name will become the third most popular Communication channel.
No, I want to talk about that in a second because that's amazing. But to wrap up the media think so too. What did Sean say earlier? He was he had a good question which was like in three years. What's the world going to look like, what's your? Let's say that you are running, what? You kind of are this small media business? Maybe one day, it will be a media Empire. What do you think that's going to look like? And like, how's that going to function? How's that business model going to work? Totally. Yeah. So
Basically, I think this is, you know, I'm giving long answers because I didn't have the time to write short ones. I don't know if that makes any sense. You know. If you've heard that one. Yes. Yeah. Click the yeah, it's a I didn't have time to write a short thing. I was too busy doing the logs, accept the truth. So so excuse my digression and you know, maybe I can edit this down into sound bites or shorter thesis statements. The short version is basically Tech ignored media for all the reasons. I just described in that story and over the last six years, we've seen the cost of ignoring media
The story is told and you're the bad guy.
Okay, now there's another story to be told, which is for example. There's a website called Tech, journalism is less diverse in Tech.com. Okay? So Nigerian guy, basically tried to submit this as an op-ed to a bunch of tech journalism outlets and couldn't get there. And I put up a prize and he actually went into this analysis and shows that actually Tech is like 30 points. More diverse in the media, Outlets that constantly give Tech shit about this, right? And so the
Another story is that actually a lot of the owners of these media corporations are like literally inherited wealth. Like Napa toasts that right, you know, just got the family business from their father's father's father's father. And you know, you know another aspect is there mostly American as opposed to the mostly immigrant nature of tech which is very Global and has an international purview and so on and so forth. There's actually a number of ways where The Narrative of these media corporations where they run Billboards, that literally, they Market themselves as
As truth on a billboard for democracy like democracy dies in darkness. Like that's how they Market themselves on a billboard or fairness and balance, right? That's just corporate propaganda literally by these Legacy Media corporations to Define themselves as a literal truth, you know. And they believe this, you know, the brains have been melted by corporate propaganda to such an extent. Now I don't think any tech company would be, you know, people talk about tech Eric answer. I think any tech company would be so crazy as to Market itself as a little truth. But now I actually have an answer as to what that literal truth is, which is cryptography.
Photography and especially how the blockchain actually puts it, on line is decentralized, truth rights. Mathematical truth is truth that anybody has access to you know, as I mentioned in a previous podcast, basically everybody knows exactly how much Bitcoin somebody has. You know, whether your Palestinian or an Israeli democrat or republican, that's not something. There's actually contention over which is amazing because it's this trillion dollar piece of international property. That's the kind of thing. People usually fight over. We can use those. So what are you implying people?
Are going to be, we're going to be covering that. We're going to be covering these transactions and we're going to know. Well, is that? I mean, here's what I think about it. But yeah, here's one, here's that's only one, that's only one Niche Niche. That's an interesting one. Yeah, but it's out. Yeah. Okay. So Step 2 is D Phi, where it's not just who owns what Bitcoin, but who owns what? Digital property digital goods and that's an enormous swaths of the economy, right? Maybe most of the economy, over time, all property, eventually becomes digital check, clarify, why I think that because that's, that's a provocative statement. Why does all property become digital because
Much of the physical world becomes printing. Okay, so obviously, you can print out a piece of paper, right? If you look at, for example, the supply chain, or what's going on to robotics, in terms of like getting food to your door. Okay, there's folks who will obviously the restaurant is now pop up, right? The delivery, you know, bit. There's folks are doing autonomous cars, right? Or or sidewalk delivery robots, which are better in some ways. There's folks, who are doing autonomous food prep, right?
Right? And so you could imagine the whole thing being fully automated and it's all of Robotics and it's all this Electro, mechanical process that has no human intervention in which case it's analogous to just a print, right? It's like printing something out and I think like robotics is something which is sort of again, sort of have been happening in our peripheral vision. We kind of know what's going on, Boston, Dynamics and what not. But what I think is going to happen is most of the value will be created online and you'll print it out by essentially invoking robotics.
And I think that's the next, you know, this decade were going to see more and more about you starting to see actually robots in the field like these robot dogs. I think we're going to see way more of, then it's going to come pretty quickly because once a robot can do something, you've turned labor into Capital because it's all electricity and the value
creation and say I'm, so
I'm installing that premise, okay? All property becomes digital, so that's the second phase, right? You know who owns what Bitcoin and then, you know who owns what, loans bonds stocks assets, all the
The type of stuff, okay? But the third face is most interesting to me and with that is it's related to something called crypto oracle's. So many of these contracts over here in the second phase you're doing bets on, you know, will this price go up or down or more interestingly, will the temperature go up in, you know, this, this, this Farmland. So I need to pay out this insurance because there's a drought, okay? That's like an example of a smart contract which combines a financial aspect.
And a fact about the world, right? For something like that to happen. Those kind of similar to the business model of like, the Climate Corporation like climate.com. If you remember that red for something like that, to work the smart contract needs access to data about the outside world, which is not purely Financial, okay? And that's the crypto Oracle problem or basically oracle's broadcast data on chain and they sign it and they say I'm reporting that this is true. I The Weather Channel, I'm saying that it's 82 degrees in Poughkeepsie today at this time, right? And I give a timestamp
like temperature field and this is happening. Not just for temperature, but it's happening for you know, crime statistics for not just individual crimes from which statistics are calculated. It's happening for medical records, right? So a hospital wouldn't just say we have a thousand coronavirus patients. It actually has a feed of this patient at this time. This patient at that time Redfin or Zillow doesn't just publish aggregate stats. It actually has a feed of which real estate transactions are happening at what time. Okay. And from this accurate stats can be computed but you can also drill down to individual rows in
Wasn't some, what's the point right now? All of these feeds of data that I'm describing are siloed, you know, the the real estate data happens here. The medical data happens, here, the price. T it happens, here the temperature, did it happens here, but what I called The Ledger of record is essentially the integration of all these crypto oracle's. And the reason they go on chain is that its profitable. You can trade off of that information. Are you can make money off that information. So each individual Oracle goes on chain and it's subsidized. So you've got a micro incentive to put it online. That's not some macro, you know, highfalutin.
And, you know, concept with the macro concept is as all of those individual oracle's go into this thing, I call the lecture record, you now have cryptographically verifiable facts about the world, you have a digital history and unalterable history. You can tell what happened when. And in a sense, this is kind of just the next step in the sense that we've got all these tweets, right? Which actually give us a reasonable, I shouldn't say perfect, but some degree of the intellectual history of, you know, the last decade, right? If the Twitter data base was downloadable and eventually, you know, either
Like it either, it will be or someone will scrape it or something like that because, you know, storage just keeps improving. So you could store all of Twitter on a microdrive of 2035 or something like that, that database could be analyzed in all kinds of ways to determine people's moods. But people talked about all the mimetic contagion stuff that we just talked about. You could actually look at all of that and visualize that we can't easily see that right now because the data set is an open in the future with this Ledger of record, it would be and you be able to establish what happened at what time and so that is the sense, Sam in which you go see.
Plea from just who owns, what Bitcoin to who owns what smart contracts to who said what thing about time look? What facts were assertive and that is actually a very powerful thing where we start to actually displace a corporate media Corporation as the font of Truth, with cryptography and said. All right, let me pause there. I know that's a whole download but I maybe I can express it better.
I'm going to summarize come with it. Some of the interesting ideas that you brought up, so I think and you can take a drink of water you deserve. So I think one of the interesting things was kind of observation.
Of First Media ignoring tax and then sort of Aztec became more powerful, ignoring media. And what you're identifying is that technology companies are going to realize the power of media, meaning being able to shape the narrative rather than just being the villain in the narrative.
Continued, this is the third swing of the pendulum. Now let's middle. There's one
interesting Trend. If you're building a company right now, that's very much worth considering. And in order to do that, you're going to flex different muscles, storytelling memes, packaging. You know different things got any money
on. Have to do what's that? Give you my mom.
His own a media Corporation or be
owned by one.
There you go. It's so so that's, that's man one. Interesting, kind of point you brought up second one, is this idea of empirical truths, enforced by economics. So today, media companies claim to be the truth. They Market themselves as the truth. It would just, you know, sort of the corporate propaganda. And there's all kinds of hypocrisy underneath that. So, you identified many of them. The less a criticized Nemesis diversity. Yes, not being diversity of dumping de force yourself, you're criticizing, you know, hating billionaires. Yet the media companies.
Owned by billionaire families that are passing it down from one child, you know, one, father didn't know the next son. So there's all these hypocrisy is underneath that and how do you get away from that while there is this general movement of all things becoming digital, it's not just software reads the world, sort of the whole world becomes software and as the whole world becomes becomes digital assets, become digital, contracts, become Digital Data and news reporting becomes digital and have this idea of crypto oracle's which are the journalists are media companies of the future. Where if we need
What happened? What is the truth? Who won the game? Who got elected? You know? In order to enforce these betting markets, or these prediction markets, are these stock markets, then you, then they will be rewarded through these sort of micro economic incentives, for being accurate or and so punished if they worked
very able summary but let me offer a few asterisk or so. I think the vision of the future is oracle's and Advocates, right? So redefine a reporter as like a sensor, right. The censored essentially writes data on chain,
Okay, which can literally be like a machine that just takes a temperature sense and writes it on chain, right? And the thing is, you might think that's trivial but hey, that would actually in aggregate. If you had lots of them, give you a cryptographically provable record that you could use in, for example, discussions about climate change, right? So
the one, the weatherman becomes a sensor
who tells whether man becomes a sensor. That's right, that's right. Or but then I put this this is kind of a little bit. Okay, so I understand what your vision is here but it's missing a whole
Wait, wait, wait, let me be part of it, huh? Before you critique, because you might be right? Okay, the first layer that base layer is the raw facts cryptographic elad a stations there, right? From from sensors, and the sensor could be lying to you. Of course, it could be saying the temperature is 80 when it's actually 30 but it's got a digital signature. So you can see, it's track record. You can involve other kinds of things are right? You can match it up, you can audit it. Other people can audit it, so you can have a second thing that's auditing, you know, one out of a hundred of the measurements of the first guy. There's a hyper geometric distribution.
In which is like, you know auditing things off an assembly line like pick a ball and see if it's corrupted or not but then the second layer is Advocates on top of those oracle's, okay? So these are humans and you just assume that a human has an editorial judgment. You know why? Because not just what they write. It's what they write about and now the selection function of what specific facts, they choose to include is itself visible, right? Editorial, judgment is now quantifiable because you have this layer of
The raw facts that are on chain and then narrative becomes tangible because it's which facts you actually sign your story. Okay. And so the selection function is basically just like a ranking algorithm for a social media site that selection function actually is now quantifiable but can see not just what was included but crucially what was omitted
The sukkah themes, like, but this seems like an entire so, okay. So what you're going to do is 1729, you're going to hire.
I don't know what you're talking about in 1729 for the whole thing, right?
Yeah, I know. It's making that dream just make using that. Yeah. Your your media Empire you're gonna hire 200 Engineers to build this. What did you call it? The The Ledger of record, Roger of record and then you're going to hire 200 journalists to editorialize. Sorry you're not.
Journalist Advocates to editorialize, some of the, the facts correct know as I've got a different. So it's actually useful that I would call when you just said, like I don't mean it's a bad way but sort of like the rearward looking model here is at least what I'm planning to do which may well fail. But you know, at least this what I'm thinking about. So first is its decentralized media. So what I want to do is invest in lots of individual, you know, diverse influencer pseudonymous voices around the world. Okay, so
Basically you know everything, that's not Brooklyn books. You know, all these other voices that are underrepresented in our conversation, ideologically, demographically internationally technologically, you know like scientific depth being brought to bear. Those are kind of folks I want to fund whatever it is that right?
Chosen by you and also a central choosing decentral, you know, you know.
Yes, yes, that's right. But but the like all the tools and stuff that we use for selection funding like the YC style, safe
And and so on all those will be public. So I want people to pick it up and copy it and so on and so forth, right? So I'm not at all proprietary about that. I'm just trying to set an example for, it's worth a sort of similar like, you know, last night, you know, I tweeted out like for the code relief thing in India and, you know, the notion CEO and the actually, the HubSpot founder, there are mesh actually RT that. So it kind of gave a template that they could then just use. And that's what I seek to do.
Do right. And you know, the goal being to basically bootstrap whole bunch these voices, okay? Called up one component. The second component is to bootstrap the technology, which is to say figure out like what the right version of using crypto oracle's in content is okay. Maybe that's going to require a few years of compounding, maybe I just write the articles on what that vision of the future is and I'm not smart enough to build it, but one of my, you know, you know, portfolio companies or readers or something like that is because, you know, we all it's all
Solar relay race, right? You know you hand the Baton and maybe someone else can figure out something you did in and so on, right? So kind of open sourcing my thinking on how we can get to a better model of you know truth right out there and then third is writing a story. So first is you know like the writers and the people who are writing these tasks second is of the technology technology for kind of creating the task, create the content, and third is the story which is I have a book, the network state, which I've been, I'm a perfectionist.
So I edit the chapters and I edit them and edit them. So put the first one up at 72. Nine.com you know how to start a new country. I think it's done pretty well, you know, like it's got a lot of good feedback and I think it stimulated some thinking and essentially the idea is, you know, how do you start a new country? Well when there's no land the short answer is rather than try to like take over a peninsula or, you know, piece of territory or, you know, or declare or conversely, take over like a coil platform near
Glenn and call yourself seal and right. Instead you have a community built in the cloud and they go and take piece of land all around the world which are like, you know, cul-de-sacs or apartment complexes and so on. You network them together such as it's something which may eventually have the scale of hundreds of thousands of millions of people, and the footprint of a contiguous state, but it's discontinuous since networked on the internet, right? So that's the third part, which is a story. So it is not simply content or
technology is tumeric, is anybody do you think that as our project out there
or do you feel like there's anybody out there who's doing that taking that approach you? How do you start a new country? Create a community in the cloud and then have this like decentralized pods or hubs all around the world.
So those so actually concrete I think it's a 20-year project and you know basically my one liner on this is 2000s where the tech companies. 2010's crypto, protocols 2020s startup cities, 2030s Network States,
Okay. So company protocol city-state. I think that's where we're going. So we sent in things just
beginning. We are in this startup cities phase right now. So let's transition to that real quick. So yeah, what is a start-up city is this like Sam leaving San Francisco? Moving to Austin. You know, they are clammy actively recruiting candidates like a start-up, CEO would and and hiring away, great talent into Miami. Is that what a start-up city is to you? Or is it something else?
Yeah. So what's great about the term is it?
Encompasses kind of three definitions, right. The first is just a city, where startups happen, which is where let's San Francisco used to be huh, you know, the nowadays, it's just, you know, like somebody just choosing San Francisco for a start-up. I crinkle my eyebrows is, you know, I mentioned it before before the pandemic, I said was like choosing Java, you know, proven but kind of kind of sucks and it's like okay you don't know new languages. And you know, I'm not sure about your productivity in this or whatever, but now it's like choosing Oracle for a new company, you know, which is like, right.
Basically, you're just getting locked into this, horrible cost structure of the cleaning product, when far better options are available, I question their judgment, you know. So the first definition is a city where startups just happened, okay? The second is a city that acts like a start-up which is Miami now under Suarez, which is amazing. Okay? And the third definition is a city, that's startup itself like Prosperity hn or cul-de-sac.com or the various startups cities that promo stop VC is investing in and
The thing is, I think, you know, obviously when I, when I said 2000s, tech companies, 2010, scripted, protocols, 2020, startups. These 2030s number States. That's sort of when that exponential starts. Right? What is the analog of Bitcoin in 2010? Its startup cities in 2021, right? Okay, we're good.
I was going to ask you a different question, maybe that's a
good one, that's a good one to drop on your listeners. Good. The credit rating is a pretty good by or whatever, you know.
Yeah, exactly that and I just wonder if you got into
Do early on. I want to know actually what was the you know where were you kind of when you first? How did you actually first hear about it was it the white paper that you stumble into conversation with a friend. So how'd you hear about it? How'd you get here? And then how long did it take you to sort of like you know, the mine virus-infected, you completely and you're like, oh wait this is actually going to work. So I would love to hear that from you.
Yeah, so, you know, I have to recollect the exact timeline but basically it was something where I'd been thinking about economics and money.
After the financial crisis because everything broke and see start thinking more deeply about you know, the system that you just saw was functional just shattered into a million pieces and or just didn't work and I've been thinking about like how the true definition of money is energy and since of Jou Ellie s Jewels like visualize like an iPhone you know coming together like like The Rare Earth elements in the glass and the aluminum and so on. And this in the the Silicon just wish like this.
Ocular assembly and how much energy would it actually take you to assemble that from its constituent Parts, you know, like in chemistry, you can, you can quantify this, you know, with like various various chemical processes. How much, how much input energy do you need to catalyze it around to make the reaction run. And so that was like something I was thinking about, because if you could reduce the energy cost of assembling something like a phone over time, you had genuinely reduce the price.
Right, that's genuine reduction because humans are able to do this thing more efficiently today than we were in the past. And I'd be the kind of deflation that you want Jewel, deflation where because of Technology, we've actually made this thing cheaper to do than we used to be able to do right now. I've been thinking about this and then you know, one of my friends, you know basically you know, I write these essays, whatever I want but just this is before I was a public, you know, public figure of that. Sounds like an Ting just, you know, my academic friends was like, oh,
You should, you know, look at this Bitcoin thing and I forget exactly when that was his 2010 or 2011. But basically I thought was really interesting because it was also using energy you know in a sense a different way to kind of support value but is doing Samantha's. Very counterintuitive. The most counterintuitive thing about Bitcoin at the time to me was that the extra computation was not going into increasing the number of transactions per second, but rather increasing the security of the system that was a design decision that was totally foreign.
To everything we learned about scaling out systems and going parallel, and so on and so forth. That was that was something which took me a while to wrap my head around, not that I thought it was bad. I just, I was like, I just don't understand this. Or for example, the fact that all blockchain addresses Republic essentially he had stepped out of the box of what I thought a distributed system should be, you know, like had made certain design decisions. Now in retrospect, these are genius moves, but like having all your transactions out there in public on chain.
Um, just would have seen like a like a feature that you wouldn't be able to give up, right? But with the pseudonymity, it's like, okay. And then now with zero knowledge, we figured out what Z cash and other things how to add back that privacy, right? So I followed Bitcoin, but it was actually only after the 2011 crash and Recovery that. I was like, okay, this thing really has legs and I wrote in late, 2012 actually had a course at Stanford, I gave where I talked about Bitcoin and I'm
I'm not sure if Bitcoin is the one that wins, but it is a very powerful Tech that is like, something in that class will be a big deal. Right? And I think both were correct statements. I can find the exact PDF, or whatever if you want. And so that was around the time, the coinbase also got going and, actually Brian and Fred and I think we first met in January, 2013, very, very, very early on in the history of coinbase. And actually, like I use the queen bee CPI in a class that I taught that year.
And in a mooc course. And, you know, basically that was kind of my story of getting into Bitcoin and crypto and 2013, boom, of course happen. But it was basically the crash from $32 down to two dollars in 2011 and the subsequent recovery up to like 10 bucks. In 2012, that convinced me, the thing had staying power because it's very rare that you have something endure, a 90% plus drop and then come back. Right? That's extremely rare. You are you?
You. So you deaf you taught your, a professor like you're correct. Yeah you're a lecture. I think at there was some article I have no idea. If it's true that you were considering joining the FDA was that true? Yeah. I mean we're rather I was, I was interviewed for a very senior role and I probably could have been
At least number two, that was on the table. But I chose not to, I mean, it's now a few years later, I don't usually, like, kiss and tell her whatever, you know, but the point the point the point is, is that you, you have this like academic side of you and, which is fascinating. You have this crypto guy part of you as part, in which is part investor still part academic. But you also have this third part of you is which is that you've built company so you helped build you. This is like true.
You know, like this is the most normal part of the earth which isn't even nor like, like the most horrible part of you helped build like a fifty billion dollar company called coinbase. That's the most normal part of you I used when I'm freezing my embryos and we just found out that like one of our potential children just had like down syndrome and like oh shit. That's the most normal part of you. Is that you? You built that shit, right? Well, it's funny, which is funny because I for your audience. Yes, I think that's probably true.
Which is weird because that's not normal, right? Right. And so I guess on the what I'm curious about is on the on the Tim Ferriss podcast you use one of the more baller phrases to say that you're rich, use post economic. I didn't use that phrase Tim did, but it's a good phrase. It's the Most baller phrase out of ever heard of like post economic like to the point where money does it like you're beyond that and because I care about money and it's interesting.
Beyond just like, you can buy nice shit but it's like you can think about stuff that you normally wouldn't be able to think about. We're has most of your success financial success. Come from this weird part of you that is this crypto investor and got an early or from the traditional part of building companies and there's a reason why I'm asking, but I'm curious what the answer is. I think I'm, you know, I like to think of myself as a pragmatic idea log where I have a horizon where I
My eyes set on this long-term goal of transhumanism and Transcendence. But then I'm willing to be as pragmatic as possible in the short run and execute and go down to do list. And so on for that North Star right, which I'm always conscious of and I wake up in the morning and I go to sleep at night and I think about that
and I think I think that's
basically
So as you can see, I think that's evident you you kind of cut that when we asked you about 1729, and when you talked about it, you talked about essentially disrupting, you know, education making making it. So that when people spend their time online, they're not just frivolously scrolling feeds. They're actually learning and earning and burning calories. But then if you go to the product, it is the V1 kind of crawl where you say, okay? What's simple, building block that we need to do that? Let's send a newsletter every day with a micro tasks that
People can do to learn something and learn a little bit of money and so I think you have I think you embodied that exact idea of like what's the extreme young term North Star and then what is today's building block in order to move
forward and and that's why, and that's why I was getting, what the hell are you up to me? Yeah, well it's funny, but it's funny. Well, so let me talk about that for a second. That is absolutely, an acquired language where I have learned that you need. You know, Moritz talks about this half-jokingly,
As you know, every app needs one of the seven deadly sins, you know, like lust greed, sloth gluttony wrath Pride ever got the other one's right. But as things close right and so the, you know, you know, Tinder is lost right? And Twitter is wrath and arguably early Google which is pretty actually, you know, this pretty high brow like search, you know. But arguably, that's lot, you know, and you know the Newberry
Beats or door - is gluttony. I love those companies are give you are not trying to dis any of them, right? And so you know the the those hooks basically I think you need to deliver a visceral instant benefit to somebody, right? We're in a second you can explain what it is. Okay? Newsletter, that pays you right earn Bitcoin for submitting a form in a minute, right? So instant benefit, if you can't give that to somebody in,
Lee then it's too complicated. You know, rarely there's exceptions. You know, rarely there's things that have very end loaded benefit. You know like things like aetherium or Rome. Research.com. For example, you know that rewarded in academic mindset at the beginning, there was very long term, right? But even it cerium, for example, there was like a speculative upside, you know, which was the visceral short-term thing. We could align the short-term mentality with long-term mentality.
But I have to bring you back, go ahead, don't pose bring about the rats, go ahead. Yeah, I got to bring it back to the original question, which was basically, I was asking I'm like, did you get wealthier from this Bitcoin stuff or from building? The company stuff and I have a reason for asking. Um, I don't usually like, disclose my like, percentages or something like that, but let's say I've done well from both. I mean fortunate from both. It's interesting because is an investor you have
It's one percent or less of the work. It's 10 to 20% of the return, but at 0% of the control, you know? And you know, I have never been like a tech guy in the sense of actually, you know, there's people who talk about, oh, you know, I had a Commodore 64 really early on as programming, you know. So that's actually, there's actually never me. I played video games a lot when I was a kid, but I was a math guy, right? That's actually the
Angle that I came into it from you know, is into, you know, like math and physics. You know, growing up and you know, fireman lectures and all the type of stuff and, you know, thought that I was going to be maybe like a stats Professor or Applied Mathematics Professor or something like that. And so computers were always just a tool and business is always just a tool only later to, you know, the reason I got into, you know, genomics or clinical genomics, reason, I just start up was and I'll come back to your point. I know you're going. You've got to pick out a thing. The reason I did that was
In Academia. If you raise ten million dollars in a grant raises in the right term, you get a 10 million dollar Grant in each row of data costs. $1000 to collect. You can only do 10,000 rows before you run out of money, right? Whereas if you're making even $10 on a row, you can collect a much larger sample and make a much bigger difference for the world, right? Because you can actually do the data analysis that large sample thing. So the thing is that the zero percent control even though I am an investor and I think I've done
I'm fairly well at it. And so on, I invest on an ideological basis, invest, in the world that I'd want to build and there's probably things which are, you know, good financial investments that, you know, I I just I just not interested in something. If it's if it's just making money, I can sort of force myself to be in that headspace, but I have to force myself, you know. Yeah. The reason I was just asking, was just, I just think that you're the, I mean, you're like supposed to be this, your the stereotype
You is that you have all these odd and unique Frameworks that create This brilliant ideas? Yeah, that's cool. I I dig that. But what I was curious about like just what's your life philosophy towards certain things. Specifically everything that was your goal for example,
Well, it was just like did were you just like well I'm just gonna go and like make this company. Sell it. Get the bag. Now I can do all this crazy wild shit, and everything else is upside and like and that's why I'm running because like if that is your strategy I actually think that's kind of cool because there was some practicality and then like genius stuff comes out afterwards and it's interesting I was curious like in that sense I'm not capable of I should say that capable of it. I
I didn't just do a job for the sake of doing a job to get the money to undo. The next thing I really believe in both you know Council and you know crypto and you know earn and coinbase. And so like that's how I could put in that level of energy and like, you know, Buffett has this concept of I don't agree with a lot of his stuff nowadays actually, but this concept as good as like, you know, if you're, if you're waiting to do what you want, it's like, you know, waiting to make love at like 7:00.
E or something like that. You're just deferring. It just doesn't work like that, right? You should start. You know, working on it now tll says, concert of, how do you achieve your 10-year goal in six months, you know? So yeah, I think that when I tried to do is Advance short-term goals, you know, maybe a sinuous path, right? Maybe a winding path, but I had that long-term kind of vector that I'm that I'm going towards. And so the short-term stuff was never a, let me make the money and move on maybe that might have been smarter to do, like, Dez, Shaw did something like that.
Right. Like it's, you know, Dee Dee Sharp D, sharp, as the guy who created the hedge fund. Yeah. The hedge fund and he put a ton of money into protein folding. Yeah. So like and Shaw's famous because that's where Bezos worked and was. Yeah, exactly. Joyce Amazon, he built out. This Sandy Shaw was like, hey, are you sure you want to do this? Yeah, exactly, right. So, I mean there's a lot of effect to effective altruism people who are like this, I would argue that the effective altruism
We'll miss one, very important thing which is that it is the production by people of goods that actually makes them feel that they deserve things. Like, if you haven't built, you feel guilt things. Very powerful concept, right? If you haven't built, you feel guilt. So it's just handed to you. Then you don't actually feel like you deserve it. And that leads to a sense that nobody deserves it, and everybody's things should be taken down, right? So, I think that emergency aid is actually very good but like industrialized Aid, where it Fosters a sense of dependencies is
Easterly and Levine have written about things like this. But rehearsing back at the stack they do this concept of, you know, work hard, make a lot of money and then spend it on altruism for example, right. And I think that's a reasonable strategy, but if I find it like, holding your breath, you know? And I only worked on those things that had meaning for me along the way. But we're leading to a greater meaning thing and I've been fortunate enough to do that. By the way, you know, like one thing I was just mentioning to Sean is that
it's hard for me to necessarily give advice to folks on the very macro sometimes. Because in many ways, the world has just become more. Balaji like. Okay, if you were a person who was a nine-to-five morning person who liked routine who like you know, structure, who wanted to hit the same button every day, who wanted work-life balance and to come home to the family and you know, like have dinner at the same time every night and so on and so forth.
The mid 20th century was awesome for you because that was kind of the peak of centralization homogeneity routinization structures. Also by the way, the peak of like, you know, mass murder and so on within like China and Russia and what both those are related to centralization. But in the u.s. at least like a decent quality of life, that was like the best centralized model in the world, right? Where's the rest of the world wasn't wasn't doing so well under that degree of centralization and and now we're kind of in the opposite thing where it's like favoring night people.
Who are asynchronous rather than hitting a button. The the same button for twenty years at a factory, you're hitting a different key every second, you know, like you're just generating like different information. Your your day can be extremely varied, you know one day like covid is kind of locked us inside but your day online can be extremely varied, you know, do one thing, one day podcast and other day may play a video game or basically the entire diversity of The Human Experience is a click away, you know and that's
and also the
You know, you're rewarded. Now, for diversity of thought, and opinion in a way that, you know, if now that everybody's a Content producer, the more differentiated your content, those sort of a higher, the reward you get versus, if you're in the previous era, there was not everybody was a Content producer, every was a Content consumer. You just go home, sit down, watch the box and, and if you tried to sort of straight out of line, you weren't necessarily going to find your other find other people who had the same convictions as you. And so, you know,
it's sort of paid to just tow the party line in a bigger way than it does. Today we're actually will standing out for
today's interesting because I think we are in the middle of a
On, you know, the Battle of the Bulge Jinta was is basically like Germany's Counterattack in the waning days of the war which is actually a pretty ferocious counter-attack but ultimately in the long sweep of History was just a counter-attack and the long sweep was there. Right? And what I think we have now is a strong counter attack in favor of Conformity by both, you know, kind of like the book contingent and like, you know, CCP, right? And so I think like,
Lee. It's going to be a quite a fight because in my, in my model of kind of like these memes and and things all battling each other in this gigantic constant at this Cloud continent. One of the most powerful memes is, I mean that says there should be no other means before me.
So you said something that I want to, I want to go to you said, the world is becoming more Balaji like you're leaving. So what does that mean?
What does that mean? That means that from 9 to 5. It is, you know, either
Like tweets or surges of work right from day people. It's like, night people are a sink, you know, from status quo, bias to disruption bias, you know, from you know, sort of the
Physical world to the informational world, the theoretical world like ideas, matter more ideas can shape the world more, you know.
All those kinds of things in many ways, you know, for example, something like Soylent. Okay. It's real itself, like I like the company and, you know, Rob Reinhardt standard units, friend and so on. I prefer like a keto version of soylent of which one of them exist, okay. But as - the keto thing, the concept of just not having to think about it so I can just do more math or more programming or you know just more content like that's like I love that, right? That's a very Balaji kind of
Right. And now, of course, I recognize that, you know, there's better forms of food, like salads and so on. But of course, there's worst forms of food like candy bars, right? And so, if you compare it against, you know, what's better, then you'll miss the fact that many people who are busy, don't eat well, and to eat a candy bar rather than a salad, you know? And so this is actually like, basically it improves Baseline Health, you know in theory if it was more keto or right? And so that kind of thing is something where it fit my preferences and
because of that, I invested it and the world just sort of adopted that or like crypto, you know, fit my preferences for okay, should be programmable, should be decentralized. There shall be, you know, like you should have somebody else to do bailouts and so on and world became more decentralized. And so so in some sense that prediction of the future is just something where the world start fitting those preferences, you know? And that's something that's hard to kind of Clone. I don't know if that makes any sense.
Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. If you were, I don't know 21 today
and I know what you want answer. I'm going to give an asterisk which is in many ways though. A lot of these businesses do not fit, my preferences like Instagram and, you know, in terms a great company but like going and taking lots of selfies outside or, you know, like a that seems like something you would do. Broke.
Yeah. I'm a very private person in that,
sitcom on. Yeah. No, no. Like, I actually tweeted on this before the pandemic.
Instagram is for people who go outside Twitter is for depressed intellectuals, you know, like can I go ahead? The reason why it can I explain what you look like right now? Like I'm in a, I'm in a dungeon here. You're supposed to be this like big shot. Crypto entrepreneur guy. You have what looks like a like a super, super old camera. 0 lighting. Doesn't look at that. It like your videos.
Setup is so horrible. It's gonna be the best. I need to actually get that set up. So actually, I am solving that. So I've got a studio and so on that I'm doing but basically like,
you know, economy in Sodom and transition, who he hasn't? He hasn't set up a full remote work station
yet. Yeah, yeah, I haven't even done all day yet. Partly. Because I do have the Blue Yeti or whatever. I did get that. So people nagged me into doing that.
It's sort of something where I go zero or a hundred, you know, on something and you know, so just use a default unless I like actually engage and so, you know, I'm just learning Acoustics and I'm learning things my way.
We're talking exactly right guys. Flew out to our houses and they built us because they were fans of the podcast. So we literally didn't know anything. We still don't know anything. We didn't know how to put this together ourselves, either. And now Sam's like act alike.
We did this. No, I'm making fun of him cuz he's like, well, you know,
Instagram is great but it's not really for me. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. You can figure that out. Yeah, it's funny. Well, it's interesting because I will value something once it has a DOT product with like my North Star, right? So like the dot product, you know, inner product in in linear algebra, it's like here's a vector. Here's another vector and how much they line are. They is it just at right angles or is there some alignment, right? And so the reason that I'm going to be
Moving, I think dramatically hopefully audio and video production is, I need the content to tell the story to build a future, right? I said I'm going to get good at that hopefully because we need to. But before then I just felt it as sort of being an exhibitionist and it was like not you know, not my thing, right?
So I was going to ask you if you were 21 today, what would you be like, what would 21 year old biology today, let's say you don't have the tracker, you don't have the name and you don't have the funds to be investing. And, you know, having a big platform to speak on just just
Yet, what would
twenty-one-year-old you be focused on? How would you be
spending your time?
So what I do first skills wise get really good at computer science and statistics first, and the reason is that every domain has algorithms and data structures which means that computer science and stats are valuable anywhere. You can walk into Walmart and you start writing down code for shopping carts and you know, baskets and pricing. And so on, you can walk into American Airlines and do that for, you know, flight.
Scheduling, you can walk into Pfizer and start writing about that's, you know, for drug preparation and you know, like a pharmaceutical manufacturing, right? Reaction kinetics all the type stuff and of course, each of these areas will have domain knowledge, you know, but computer science, and statistics are a universal language. And I mean CSN stats. I don't mean just like learning programming. And, you know, how to invoke Library calls. I mean, actually understand the concepts and really wrestling with them, okay.
And the reason is it's sort of like what physics was to the early 20th century CE. S in stats is to this Century because physics was awesome for, you know, understand the natural world. All these physicists could, you know, in the Heyday of physics go and kick in the doors of any discipline and be like ha. I'm going to write down some equations and just change your life, you know, because you're doing this in a phenomenological way and and we can do it way better and now today because so much of the world is constructed virtual world, you know, because there
Interacting with it on screens you know something like cryptocurrency is a constructed virtual world, right. Social networks are constructed virtual world so our video games Cs and stats becomes. I mean it was valuable before but it's even more valuable today that's a foundational kind of thing and then you know in terms of demeans to get good at, I find something, you know, it sounds funny to put it this way but like an area that you really care about for some reason, you know, and there's but it's also a line, you know. It could guy concept because
So like the four things, I've may not remember them fully, but it's like what you're good at, what the world needs, what you can make money at and what you have fun. We have fun doing. That's right. Exactly, that's right. So they could guy concept finding what that is after you build that base of skills, right? The Cs and stats. By the way, you can understand Finance because it's crypto overall become crypto. You can understand genomics, because the, a c's, GS and T's On Screen, you essentially have a theoretical like
Foundation in any area you walk into and then from that other Concepts can be layered on top if that makes any sense, right? So it's like a general purpose computer to general-purpose set of principles, then demands today, genomics, big robotics big crypto, of course, big. I think an underappreciated area is going to be relocation
Permanent international migration in this way. I did teleport a while back digital nomadism is going to be huge. Being like there's a thousand pieces of the toolchain for a log people to go more mobile, you know, Uber and Airbnb. Uber is go down, you know, to the coffee shop, but the next step is Uber around the world, right? How do I just boom pick up steaks and just move internationally right now? As quickly as I can, for as low cost as I can. I think that's that's a big area that people haven't really thought as much about is they will and I think post vaccination the post.
Vaccination World a lot more people value their freedom to exit. That's why folks are going to Miami and so on. Like when you're cooped up in a room you want to burst free into the counter-reaction of that is going to be this great migration. In fact, I wrote about this in 2013, there's a article, I wrote called software is reorganizing the world are essentially I said because the internet is breaking geography, because you're closer to people who are 3,000 miles away than your next door, neighbor's the underlying premises of the city in the nation state are being, invalidated the CG
Rascal proximity no longer leads to cultural proximity, and therefore, you know, the, the assumption that people in the shared geography will share the same law and Customs is no longer applicable. And when it's going to result in is these Cloud communities eventually, migrating, and materializing into the physical world, and forming Cloud cities, and eventually Cloud countries. And that's now, I think with covid starting to happen, Krypto is a big component of it because those Cloud communities can actually have their own currencies.
Okay, remind me why I got in the stress. Go ahead,
sorry, one sec. If you said, Geographic proximity is not as no longer linked to cultural proximity is how he said it was at the phrase. Yes, that's a powerful one. Which is explained that for somebody who's never heard you say that before.
Sure. Okay. So if somebody lives in a city in an apartment building, they often don't know their next door. Neighbors, may not even recognize the person who's living 50 feet away from them. Right, literally, this person is living eating sleeping there, but you walk down this hallway. It's all closed doors, right?
It's basically as if you lived in a data center, you know, like with virtual machines, you know, like you cut up a server into a bunch of virtual machines than all siloed, and, and compartmentalize an isolated from each other, right? So you go and you live in this box, you don't know who's next door. You don't know who's above, you don't know who's below. You don't know who's the left to the right? If you don't recognize the people in the hallway. But who do you recognize you recognize a person from 3,000 miles away, who you're laughing with on Snapchat or, you know, like video chat or anything like that. You recognize that guy on the other side of the world who you're arguing with.
You know, your social network, your friends and your enemies or whatever, you know, your friends and your Frenemies, like they're just scattered around the world, you know. Some of them might be geographically close by, but even that is point allistic, you know, it's like, okay, this person, this building this person to spoon. This was this building and I don't know anybody in between, you know, like I mean, I buy into that. Like I've got so many friends who I consider actually dear close friends that they're just internet. I call my internet friends and I have soon we met them once or twice
soon. We'll just drop the whole internet friends part and we'll
Yes. Now at this point the majority of my friends are internet friends so that that's just called my friends now at this point, right?
Why they point a listing? I know that sounds like maybe it's not a word I made up. It's actually like a reference to like art. So whatever. It's like, lots of little points, you know, discrete Parts here. But what the the nitpick here is its, I actually agree with you, but I challenge my belief because like, all three of us, I think you in particular in your own bubble butt.
But really, we're all in our in this little bubble of like the future. It's not for filter bubble. It's a future bubble because it's the way that, well, that's a very optimistic, wonderful way to put it. And I like that, I like that term. But like, I have, I'm from Missouri. Okay, my family lives in Missouri. They once one's a teacher, and the husband works at a bar. Their kids are going to school and the exciting shit that they do is play softball on Saturdays.
Um, do you ever ask yourself the ideas that I'm coming up with or that I'm predicting the future? They really only impacting this small small, small tip of the iceberg of people. How are they going to impact the random person in Nebraska or Missouri? Let alone, you know, someone in Kenya or you know what I mean? Do you ask yourself this by thinking about what the world's gonna look? I absolutely do. So here, I'm going to put on my pragmatic executive, whatever hat, right? Which
Is, you know, you have to focus at the beginning, right? And the way I look at it is the V1 goal is to build a community least with 70 to 89. Then I'll talk about the B2 is to build a community of technological progressives who are. Like, I mean, sort of, like, ycs Founders, but not just Tech, Founders, you know, people who are media media Founders, their influencers, their writers, they're activists for technological progress.
Like Isabella behnke. She's like a pro-nuclear activist for folks who are, you know, for faster approvals of drugs and devices, right? And I want to build consensus, among that group, that technology is good and that we can work together across borders to help people achieve a better future, not a Pollyanna, you know, kind of everything's going to be great. But certainly what I think of, as the bright Sun to where the West is today, which is Black Mirror.
you know, and I think that, you know, that
It's sort of like it, you know, in terms of your efforts, how can they scale, right? So my initial focus is definitely, let's call them Founders but not just company. Founders, a broader class of Founders including media Founders protocol, Founders Community, Founders influencers, Etc. And getting, you know, some agreement among this group among this set of ideas and then recognizing that, I personally cannot solve all the problems of the world and figuring out how we can build for lack of better term, positive some user.
Your faces for those folks who may not be as interested in the world of ideas in the stuff above. Right? How do we build? Not just positive some but aligning user interfaces? Okay and it user interface I use in the broadest sense, you know? We're like you know the how your house Works, how your car Works, how your street Works, how your community Works, how can we actually build things where folks are actually aligned, you know, where
The founder of the CEO gains or losses, just as the average citizen does, right? Whether it's sort of like and if you see the guy from Chad who just died on the battlefield. No, no. So no. I think it's like the prime minister of Chad died on the battlefield, right? And they're all these memes, you know why? Because, like, of course, he's a Chad, he died in conflict with his soldiers, right? Imagine like some Western leader doing that.
That they don't have skin in the game, right? And it was, it was like a joke and it was sarcastic, but it also had like a really penetrating aspect of truth, right? Which is a degree of disalignment of Western leaders and you know, they're they're they're citizens, right? Because it used to be that a huge meant, you know, like a aspect of being a king or being a leader was you were willing to go into battle, right? Even like we're one, there's concert like you know the nobility the aristocracy was supposed to actually go into about, right?
Prison battle. Look, we don't want to have worse, right? Wars are not good, but the concept of alignment I think is a very fundamental one and in the communities and in the, in the structures I want to build in the future. I think that alignment has to be quantifiable. Now, we're actually seeing this in crypto because I do think that, you know, one thing people don't get, is that crypto is not just, you know, the next Wall Street. It's also the next Silicon Valley, because decentralized social networks, and so on are built there, but even less, obviously,
It's a next Yale law and Columbia School of Journalism and Kennedy School of government. You know why?
Because Yale law gets replaced with smart, contracts, Columbia School of Journalism with crypto oracle's and decentralized truth and Kennedy School of government because the next heads of state or heads of
networks. Hmm.
Okay. So let's talk and look what I mean by that is you know there's that saying it's apocryphal but like you know give me control over a nation's monetary policy. And I care not who makes its laws right? It's apocryphal. I'm not sure exactly who said over it but you've heard around. And so the people who have founded and run these
Gigantic crypto networks that are sometimes in the multiple billions or trillions of dollars are essentially. Like, you know, basically they're like the, you know, a Fed chair, right? At least of a state. If not the country, and they've gotten there by founding something, not by winning this whole popularity process where as a juror on to Kratts, 72 paid all their dues and now they finally actually can actually put their theories into practice when they're 70 something, you know, but instead, as actually a Founder who is
Lined with all of their people and have opted in to be part of the same kind of thing, right? So, the short answer to your question is quantifiable alignment is, I think the ethical way for those leaders to help, you know, essentially the the population that's not as interesting ideas, you know, let me pause her.
I think Shawn it's something that's how I actually wanted to transition to a topic that I think is a little bit controversial but also exciting and that's the controversial part. Is that you know, I'm going to talk about crypto social networks. So we've talked about bit Cloud on here and we got a lot of flack. We talked about it because I said, wow
I think I think Shawn, I gave us flak.
Yeah, we gave each other for like I was really excited and you're like, dude, you're pumping this thing. I'm like no, I'm not trying to pump this thing. I'm trying to explain that.
I'm seeing some very interesting novel things here and that's exciting to me. Like I'm a product person. You see a tons of products, you see tons of apps, you see, tons of announcements and you don't always see anything, you know it, sometimes years go by between seeing something really, really interesting. And the really interesting thing about big cloud that we talked about was number one, the growth hack, how do you get valuable people onto a new network? Well, they loaded up a bunch of people's accounts with a bunch of
and they gave it, you know, they used economic incentive to bring high-status individuals to a new network. So that was interesting. The second interesting thing was that, you could, you know, sort of this Robin Hood meets Twitter, you can buy somebody's coin, and in doing. So if I identify Balaji as an interesting person in to hunt in 2014, as some people did I get to benefit from the rise so a curator would get rewards alongside a Creator. So somebody who's in early, you can invest in somebody who's
Popularity and reputation is going to rise. I thought that was interesting, the third part. And so, you know, there's some interesting Parts, but the there's also a bunch of controversy and I think that the place I want to start is I think that these decentralized social networks of which big cloud is one are very interesting because they are like they took Facebook's most valuable thing, right? Like the Facebook database, the social graph that Facebook would, you know, defend with its life and they basically put it out.
Are, you know, as the that is the product. Here's the social graph with economics built-in and now any social network can be built on top of this and I wanted to hear what you see in these social crypto social networks because I think you will probably when you look at your North Star, you also don't see like 30 years from now. It's you know, Mark Zuckerberg owning the four, most powerful social platforms and we were all users and consumers and have no economic participation. I don't think you would be excited about that version of the
You're so tell us what version of the future you see with crypto social networks and then try to maybe I guess talk about what you're seeing out there
today.
Great. So I've been writing about this stuff for a long time and it just Disclosure by the way, I am an investor in big cloud, like a small early investor, I was involved with the project or anything. But I understand why, you know, there are some agitation around it. And but I also think it's actually a good idea overall. And I think it's and let me give a few different thoughts, Okay? So
First, is that?
A very important concept is that crypto is in a sense, the sequel to open source because it's not just open source, it's open State and open execution, okay? So that's say, it's not just that you have the source code, you also have the database and you can track every single op code when it's executing, okay? And one of the consequences is, you know, with Twitter or Facebook, they have the Twitter Facebook API and they can shut it off on way, right? And they have, you know, meerkat or
- Teespring Zynga. So many companies that built on top of these apis have had their access throttled or limited or their business model destroyed overnight because there's some change in that one-sided you know, relationship, right? And the thing about that is that's because if those companies had let the API be completely open, Twitter's was for a while. Then somebody could clone the entire Twitter functionality, and sell ads against an intruder would be reduced.
To essentially an Epi provider and they couldn't monetize that successfully enough to prevent that from happening, right? So as I think you know, tweetdeck and sold research including the entire interface, where I don't remember exactly the details, but I think I was hit so fundamentally. The issue was that the business model for creating an API and a protocol. That was totally open that had state was not feasible, then okay, what I mean by state, by the way, just for your audience which is maybe less technical. That's like database State, that's stored state, that is
Information, that's not transient, okay? Like, you know, I do a phone call with you, that's transient. I mean, maybe it's stored on some NSA server somewhere, but we don't have a copy of it typically, right? Whereas Facebook has State, there's a huge amount of data that they've got your photo and your messages and all the type of stuff, right? The crucial thing that crypto enables, the reason it's not just erupting Wall Street but something Silicon Valley is that as I said, it's open season, open execution. It's we're moving into the third model of Internet Technologies, you know, web
3, how much of your day is spent doing some of this, like crazy thinking, and do building and working on a lot of the stuff. I mean, are you do grind real hard on all this stuff or what do you spend your day doing? That's a good question. I mean day varies because this is all heavy heavy stuff. Yeah. Everything we've discussed is like pretty heavy. No. And you're what it's your just round this off. Like as if you just like you've liked you like already said, what your you've thought through.
You're like,
well, why am I wrong? And then you've already thought through it again. Anyway, like what's your, what's your, how much time are you energy? Are you devoting to this throughout your day and more like Jesus. Go for walks and shoot the shit. Like, what do you what do you do? You know what? I have to spend energy on. I have to spend like
I have to spend energy on small things, like remembering calendar appointments, and stuff like that. That is actually. What is very mentally taxing for me? It's sort of like, you know, how a sports car is not meant to drive unlike normal highways or you can do it, but you just have to like, kind of watch out river, right?
What I find hard is stuff that other people find easy at times like just oh, remembering that that meeting is in 15 minutes or something like that. You know, there's I'll get engrossed in what I'm doing, you know? And and so what I've just done a built technological, workarounds to help with that.
And so I guess the answer to your question is this is just how I Recreation or whatever. I just I just I can't stop it. You know, I just go as like I walk around and think. Oh, that'd be cool. This would be cool. Is tap it into my, you know, tweets or my notes. I'm not like, I'm not trying to Humble brag or some you asked about my processes? I think part of it is I do. Yeah, just say the truth. I don't care if you're bragging one another. Yeah, I'm just saying, like, in terms of how to
Implicit I guess what? One thing I do do is something you know maybe similar like firemen had this concept that I think about a lot which is I have a bunch of active problems at any one time like had decentralized social networks how to build alternatives to Media corporations. How to establish decentralized truth. These are sort of like active how to not miss my dentist appointment. Exactly. That's right. Very so the those those are like, active problems and
then against them, I match Solutions, you know, so those
You know, I've gotten, you know, for example, you've read some of your like, okay, this maps to that, right? And you know, this maps to that because this is a problem that you had two years ago. And now you see some concept and it lights up that this Hammer could fit this nail, right? So that's that's kind of what I try to do. And if that makes any
sense, you also kind of helped popularize, the idea maze concept, right? Was that you who kind of coined the idea maze
contact? I coined the term and it was funny because
Never know what's going to resonate with people you know Dixon they actually go ahead.
I'll just say that not only resonated with me, it made me feel much less stupid as a Founder as I was like wandering around you. So okay the idea maze I'll paraphrase kind of just try understanding of it which was there's this like movie, you know, this this the Steven Spielberg version of startups is founder wakes up. Aha, Eureka, I know the, you know, this is the future. I'm a Visionary goes and builds the thing. It's a
Straight line and yes, there's adversity along the way. But the idea like I solved the problem and then I just do the thing and then like, you know, reality or at least what my reality was more. Like, was I'm interested in like, solving this problem for people, or I'm interested in this like kind of new space and it's all kind of foggy and then I think I always think I'm in the Eureka moment and I'm like, yes and I Sprint and then I hit a dead end and I'm like, oh, fuck this is not how things actually work. This was this product this
Recent strategy, is not quite right, okay? Let me backtrack three steps. And then let me go down this other fork in the road that we didn't take last time and I get a bit further and I hit another dead end and like you're wandering around a maze and eventually you should have come out the other side. And that, that is actually quite a normal process for thinking through it as an entrepreneur, trying to try to bring something to life and make something successful. That was my interpretation and made me feel a lot better about hitting those dead ends because it didn't mean you're stupid and not cut from the same cloth. It's this is the process.
Or this is one version of the process. At least, that is a common set of problem, so, you know, carry on, go back to the go back. Go back. A few steps and then figure out a new way. So, did I butcher it?
Or is that knows it's, it's quite good. In fact, you know, now like eight years later or would have you on it. I'll give a few other thoughts. One is it's actually similar to like mining for gold.
But, you know, like how do you see that quote that circulated about San Francisco during the Gold Rush era and how similar it was to start a Para?
Right. Like you know, everybody had crazy plans and there was unlimited amounts of financing for any kind of gold mining operation. Like that culture. Interestingly has seemingly a through line for a hundred, something gears, right? It really sounded like it was describing startup culture where they're mining for gold. They theories about this River or this mountain or whatever, as the best way to get it. And, you know, of course, Tech culture is not just like the gold aspects. The technology has to it but that aspect too similar. And so the idea maze is like okay, which thing is going to lead to the pot of gold.
Sort of like that you know you're sort of like a physical gold mine. So that's one interesting that the second bit is that the maze is time varying. So what's a bad idea today? Could be a good idea in the future or vice versa for example Pandora you know pre iPhone was only an okay idea and post iPhone and finally became like a billion dollar Community are doing now but it's like iPhone was a lift that it needed for ubiquitous audio everywhere, right? Another is often that very small seeming permutations can radically change the outcomes of
Companies, like, I remember, you make you guys remember. This is early days of Twitter and Facebook are people saying, why would anybody use Twitter? It's just the status update function of Facebook, right? Yeah, okay. That was a common knock on it, but the fact that Twitter was default public number one and asymmetric number two, meant that it just became a completely different experience than sort of the private set of Warren's that Facebook is Right. Fundamentally the fact that for the most part anybody can link to any other tweet means it's a
Connected graph. It's just one graph, right? Whereas Facebook is something where I probably can't view that Facebook post, I don't share it with people so it's a fundamentally private experience. So it's actually in a senseless viral. Now of course I think, you know, Facebook it's a more successful company and I think it gets way more crap than Twitter even though Facebook is sort of probably worse for the world in some ways is better for the world in some ways and worse for the road. Sometimes it's just this gigantic amplifier book, positive and negative all the good stuff comes out of Twitter. And all the bad stuff is just, it's actually Paul Graham at a good.
Comment on this birds, like the terms are so large that you can't even actually selling them to see like whether it's positive or negative sum over. All right. Where was I? Lost my train of thought. Give
me we're talking about the idea Maze and your teammates, right? Okay, so come back to
the big. Now, one thing I will say that I've grown to appreciate more
Is.
The this specific idea makes you decide to run really does matter and can be like a thousand X multiplier on the result, right? So you know look genomics was if I could show you all the good arguments as to why genomics would be a huge deal in the 2000s or a 2010's and I can show you the curve of declining sequencing costs and so on. But basically that generation of companies was I shouldn't say capped, but it's somewhere between like a few hundred mil to a bill or something. There wasn't a hundred
The dollar company that to my knowledge came out of that and it was sort of like that was like the Zipcar era and then there's going to be a new Barrera coming up, right? And it's really hard to know whether you're in the zip car or the Uber era of something you know, and often there's iterations on a theme and it just breaks through like and sometimes things seem tired and old like sub stack two or three years ago. May have seemed like our whatever, just another blog, who cares. But adding those two features of
Of a monetized ability and be newsletter so that you've got, you know, because because a Blog by default, I mean, it's not, I think maybe you can with Blogspot to emailing and so on, but it wasn't like, set up for that. Was a smack in the face, for both the user and writer, those two aspects, really changed things and you know have made subject to break out where that was not obvious two years ago or three years ago, right? Ben Thompson was trajectory, which subject was inspired by had been kind of straddling off in his own thing for a
Long time, building his own thing, when nobody cared and then it actually worked, right? Part of this is also the decline of the existing media environment. That's what I mean by like, the iPhone came and Pandora, went from a bad idea to a great idea. The decline of the existing East Coast media, corporations has led to this Exodus where this thing that was an okay idea, became an amazing idea because there's certainly a need for it, right? That all these nails came up, right? I think insofar as it. Give advice for people who are thinking about picking the idea you really
To ask yourself if this is a chance of being an epochal shift like search or social or, you know, mobile or or crypto now, right? Or something like that. And it doesn't have to be by the way. And that epochal shift, by the way, might be five or 10 years out from when you even start the thing, you know some companies just go like vertical relatively late in life.
But you ideally want to be part of it. You want of a thesis on why some huge Trend will occur. Let me give you another example of this by the teleport, which we set up in 2014. Just I was just going to ask you all about teleport. I'm trying to find the old website, was it? That was it just that kind of got org. It's a that's why.
So, can you, what would the way that I understand? It is teleport was going to crawl, aggregate tons and tons of data and tell you the best place to live. Yeah, because Here's a thought, basically.
An extremely valuable search engine. May be the most valuable search engine is the one that tells you the economically best place to live because there's all, what was it just economically? Was it wasn't, it didn't, it wasn't just economically. But the concept was that every other quality of life metric that you had to a first approximation, we could have you, implicitly put a dollar value on it, like, how much more is it worth? And then I say implicitly.
Lee. It'd be like, okay this place is, you know, three thousand dollars a month in expense, but this place is $3,500. However, it is warmer and so out of millions of like choices like that you can sort of back out the function of the, how much more people value, that extra degree of warm. You see I'm saying, right? Yep. Yeah, it still gets a fair bit of traffic. It looks like still people are still going to this. Not actually using it to do so yeah, you sold it to a, what's this autopia relocation company, right?
Teleport. I think is I think we're completely right about everything that people wanted. I mean, it was fine. It was a fine result likes 10 and, you know, silver did find, you know, and I'm what did you say Sten? And what'd you say they did find by say they just because they see is defined in their careers, as a function of that, like the guy, okay? Like those are the two co-founders with me. So, Stan and silver, early Skype employees and they've done great. And
It was a fine welcome, but it was also a little too early, you know. And basically it's something where if teleport and Nomad list is the other one. By the way, was also quite good, but it's got which I love. I think that guy's awesome. Yeah, he's he's actually a levels I/O on Twitter. And yeah, he's good because the only thing that I think he's probably a little too aggro on is like, he's so he's anti
Esther and there's bad investors. Also good investors. So that's something whatever, you know, I probably might be a Twitter Twitter thing where if I got the second bit or third bit of information, he might agree. There's some value had people over there but the thing is that Nomad, listen teleport. I think essentially had worked out the theory of this, almost a decade ago. You know that digital nomadism would be valuable that people would want to relocate. Because the reason I just say economics, whether it is
You can put a number on it, right? And so that's something you can plug into an algorithm and constrained optimization is
yes. Okay. Alright. So basically I mean is that basically where you put you very purposely constrained something. Oh to be happy. Yeah, so in in math, you know, there's something a constrained optimization is like,
I want to optimize my
You know like a the amount of time that I spend delivering packages subject to the following constraints. A, you know, the car Can Only Hold so many pounds. It can only take so many packages of time. Be, you know, it has to have this many stops, you know, between refueling and so on and so forth of these constraints on the optimization, okay? And we try to do is you take all those constraints, you try to express the entire thing often in terms of minimizing or maximizing a
Number. That's called The Objective, okay? And so, no matter how complicated, all the things you are that are putting in the first order, second, or third, or things, you just minimizing one objective. So you think that the best place in the world to live? You actually want to think. Okay, how do I like imagine like Green Hills and red? Valleys like green is good and red is bad, like a heat map, you know, of good places in bad places to live, right? And census Keeler. And so you can basically, to First sort of think of that as the net economic benefit.
Or loss. I would have in relocating from here to here. Okay. And so you take all of these layers on the world. So first is cost of living. Second is how much you'd make in that geography, right? Third is like, you know, is there bars or nightlife if you're in that fourth? If you're older, you know, do they have schools? They have airports is a green. What is the you know what's a rule set? Like you know, like a is X band or is why legal? You know? And so and so forth, all of those you layer on top of each other.
And you have actually a very complicated mathematical optimization problem, right? Which actually varies for somebody at different times their life, you know, the best place to live when you're you know, a 20-something college student. You want the bars and nightlife but if you've got children you're probably think about schools and just a different set of considerations. So the greens and Red's change, you know, we could quantify all of that, right? So idea, is that it be the search engine that would give you the maximum value.
Right? It would basically be something where by changing your XY location. You might gain, you know, like $50,000 hedonic, Lee of which maybe 20 or $30,000 is economic and the other remainder is in quality of life. Let me pause. Her, could this company? Could this had worked? I mean I was okay, Steve, it was, it was my failure but it was it's something like Zipcar doober. If it had been an operation or if it had been like the main thing in 20, if we had
In 2019 and 2020 and being the pandemic right? Like or or you know arguably it's still early. I think it's still early because post vaccine is when travel truly opens up, you know? And when everybody is fully vaccinated, so it's like mobile phone installs. It'll take a while and hopefully there won't be, you know, very inset present immune Escape that can that can actually get out of the vaccine will see what happens are the vaccines, but modulo that I think,
You will have ton more. You already are seeing folks went to Miami and so on, like the the map is becoming mobile. Even a states are doing lockdowns, you have the other thing which is the centralized lockdowns in the decentralized, you know, Global migrants, right? So I think tools for international relocation or still early. If anybody wants to build like teleport 2.0 or Nomad list 2.0 DME, you know with the demo and I will definitely take a look. So I think we're still very early in that space. When by the way right now I have no idea where you are right now but
If you were doing it, making your own personal teleport list which cities most interests you for for living in long-term, have you heard the term entrepot maybe, I mispronounce it entr EPO T. So that's basically like a like, a commercial center, you know, typically a port or or or something like that historically, but I think those are waxing in importance, Okay? So
So you know, Dubai, right, Monaco Singapore, actually Miami which is pretty interesting Americans. Think of Miami as a party destination, you know, with sun and beaches and so on and so forth. But Antonio Garcia Martinez actually gives he turned me on to this. I had not actually been aware of this till his essay, I think in 2019, he's from Miami. What he said is really interesting wishes. Miami is like the Singapore of Latin America, which is to say that if you've got like a, you know, Mexican
National and a guy from Paraguay and they want to do a deal, they'll do it in Miami because everybody knows it, they all respect it, it's like a decentralized, you know, demilitarized zone. It's got good banking rule of law because based in the u.s. at least relatively to South America Latin America, more stable currency, relative to their, we'll see what happens in the future and so it's a spot where people from the Latin and South American you know diasporas they all have like communities in Miami, right?
So it's actually this international business Capital that many Americans are just not aware of, there's think there's a beach place, right? So it's actually a great spot for all this Tech. VC, the fusion there is going to be fascinating. I think we're going to see way more stuff done, not just South of the Border, but in South America, there's a lot of talent down there, of course. But now you just kind of have eyes on it looking at a new life. And there's actually another aspect of non-obvious aspect which covid is going to
Kris investment. You know what that is?
No, The World Is Gone remote. And what that means is that longitude, rather than latitude is now the organizing principle. Basically, what you care about is not where somebody is, if they're not in the office. Then, the next question is, what time is it? Are they right? Yeah. Right. And so you know this is something, there's a website things called time dot is I post on this tweeted on this, right? But what that means is longitudinal Arbitrage
Okay, that's interesting, Airbnb,
Founders or whatever, they did this, where they went and worked in Argentina because it's sort of like low cost of living at the time. And then also, like, sort of time zone wise, you're still lined up with the United States. So it's like, are you can grab something that but yeah, I don't know if it's quite was a coinbase. What is that
weighs Armstrong did that? I'm not sure if they were B&B Founders did too. But, yeah, Brian arms are going to be this was in Argentina at a time.
Before Columbus are not interesting to
you. Are you aware of what it's like to talk to? You know? I would say it is like, you know, some kind of, it's like this, right? It's like an amusement park ride but it's the one it's the one that's like, you know, the bungee and it's the bungee you you only two people go on at any one time and they basically stay swing and they're like super high up and then they hit the ground and then they like spring forward and go to the other way. They just keep going back.
Worth and yeah that's what it feels like
because you're like, it's like exhilarating there's really interesting topics, but you get so high up, you know, as far as the sparring partner, you're like, I'm out of my depth and then you come back to her route and you say something that's like oh that speaks to my life experience and then it goes back. Okay, well we're too far and I'm going again. I can't I can't I can't see anymore and then we're back there. I meant that as a compliment, but I also I was just curious like, you know, the
When you're you York, your brain is completely normal to you live there all the time, you know? And for me and Sam I don't know, I can't speak for sale, but I know for me, I love talking to you. I love listen to you. And you know, any conversation, we've had a whether through DM's phone call or whatever has always been great. But I'ma you're the only person I've talked to you, too frequently in that that makes me feel out of out of my depth where I'm like, you know what? I kind of wish you had a better sparring partner in here. Who knew what the hell you're talking about and can actually, like, push this even further, whereas,
I'm trying to do almost is bring it back down to like and who do you feel that way?
Yeah that's kind of true which is I mean certainly not my intention basically. Go ahead. Sorry sir. Who do you feel that way with? Oh, I mean like
Fineman ramanujan. Like you know there's like Geniuses of walk the earth, right? Or have walked there? Like I talked to a guy who's good friends with what's his name. What's the VC bald head? And driessen Marc Andreessen? And they're like, they're like when I talk to him I just I can't keep up. Do you feel that it does is what I
think? I think what you're saying is sort of like, is that a good sparring partner for you? Who do you have good thoughts bars with? And those might be other people that people should go follow or listen to be.
if they like what they're getting from you, maybe that's another person
I think I think, you know, Mark and I have kept up a high-bandwidth conversation for almost a decade now, Mark and been for sure, Noble Rubicon, you know, who's very good friend of mine and
Armstrong Frederick's. Mmm. These are really smart guys who like basically folks who I get a balance from every single day, you know? And I think, you know, just play tennis with them but it's also something where
They're not exactly playing the same sport, you know, like racquetball versus tennis. I learned something, you know?
No. I mean like
I try to learn. I mean, you actually Sergey Brin had a good one-liner on this long, long time ago, which is, you know, every interview he did. He wanted that person to teach them something right which is a few things. First has meant, even if the interview, you didn't hire them again something out of it, right? But second is, it's also sort of got there.
They're teaching abilities out on, you know, and and it's actually useful because you often have to do something with them coming in and teach other people. You did write a coming back up, you know, I think of, you know, when I do these podcasts, I'm there. So they're totally off the cuff, right? So it's totally, you know, just freestyle and send the edited version. I think I would try to map the points. Such that its bullet bullet, bullet, bullet specifics.
Pacific specific specific, General specific, specific General like more disciplined in terms of how I accumulate to a thesis, right? And I think, you know, I think maybe to a few good examples of that. If you look at the biology, s.com posts on India, you know, like why India should buy Bitcoin, how India, legalizes crypto add Cryptid? India stack, I think that's sort of, more of this sort of workmen, like,
You know, set up this this and this premise conclusion you know over and over again. I think it's reasonably well written. Okay. At least it's comprehensible but that's like the install software in the Mos Def install intellectual software the most efficacious way. But they
do. You know what I mean by that install is to actual doctor. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That makes sense to me. When you say yes.
Yeah you get it right. Like what? Go ahead. Sam Morgan says. So you've been blogging on there for a while. I've been reading it.
You've been doing you to teleport like in what 2014 which was, or fish, which was about like kind of making its making predictions. You've been all about predictions, I mean, it seems like that's been part of your personality for a very long time. What predictions did you make ten years ago about the year 2020? That were wildly wrong and that, and you would have bet a lot of money that they were going to be correct. Like it, you're really
Bought in on them and they and they proven me wrong. It's a good question. Um,
I mean, there's lots of things, so many things have gotten wrong. I mean, one thing that's kind of interesting, you know, I only really became a public figure in 2013 and a public figure. I don't know if you didn't call myself that now, but like, I only actually wrote publicly in 2013 before that I was sort of, you know, cloistered in Academia or in genomics. It's like, it's like an Enterprise founder who just doesn't ever take the mic or whatever, you know, so to speak, right? And I had plenty that I was thinking it was writing about, but
I wasn't even speaking publicly on it, and I think that
One big thing I got wrong was it's just never the like I'm the personality for cryptocurrency. I'm not really the personality for early social networks which were all about exhibitionism and remember zombies that game you know like people Wasting Time online all the type of stuff that's like totally not me. And so I actually, you know, there's people who dismiss crypto as oh it's you know it costs too much or
it's just a scam, you know, they just didn't get it, you know, for a long time and then there's eventually light bulb moment, social networks, like
I sort of got the appeal of it being like a Facebook online. Remember the concept of Facebook, I don't forget. Should give you guys are old enough, actually Sam, you're actually relatively younger but something is almost impossible to Google so funny. Google, the Stanford Facebook. Ha ha that's like three proper nouns, but back in the late 90s, and early 2000s, a Facebook was a noun, which was, it was something that was given out to freshman when you came. No, I yeah. You're we're there. Well, yeah. And I mean, I had
My brother's you're, uh, you're probably 10 years older than me. I have brothers that old. Yeah, I know he time. Okay. Well, so that's something which was a physical Facebook and I understood the appeal of like putting that on line but
I only actually understood like the power of social networks when there is a friend of mine who was live-tweeting a genomics conference, okay? I was like, oh, that saved me a flight. Nobody would have written up the material, as well as this scientist would have because it would have just, you know, messed up the terminology or made it confusing. They certainly wouldn't have gone into as much depth and I was just able to like just slurping
And download like five hours of presentations, without a plane flight, you know, a my laptop in 10 minutes and get the important bits as like, that. I really like a lot. Okay? I actually understand the value that I did not understand the value of tweeting your breakfast, right? That seemed to me that stupidest most exhibitionist like waste of time thing in the world. So what did you predict that? It
just like that sort of thing. It might save arrested but this
fall I'm yeah I see you underestimated.
When social networks were basically voyeurism and exhibitionism and time-wasting and zombies. And so on, I did not really think through their social impact. Right. It was only after in the thing. Is that the reason that genomic staying really piqued? My interest is because I realized that that was something that would only be feasible when the thing is achieve, such massive scale that even this very nice.
Nice niche, Niche Niche, application was feasible, you know. It's like like you have gigantic scale thing Google and then you can Google like I know Belgian cooking recipes or something like that. Or a French cooking recipes made. That's not that nice waiting room saying, right?
So, social networks, I only after I understood that that they weren't just time-wasters or distractions that you can actually learn things with them. So I very much underestimated social and I think that I probably overestimated genomics. You know what I got wrong with that was I saw I think all the technology and the computer science and all of that you know, there's a
Hurt, by the way that your audience can go, which is like cost of sequencing, a human genome like nhgri National Human Genome Research Institute and that like was just dropping through a cliff in the laity thousands. And it was clear that this look like a Moore's Law like thing. And it was like catalyzed quite a lot of stuff. So get into that. What I didn't understand as an academic and I only understood as an entrepreneur is what the FDA really was.
You know, I didn't understand that like, basically, the FDA is like the primary Blocker of like medical Innovation, not just in the US, but in the world, people are now by the way, catching up to this you know, because of the disaster of the FDA holding back authorization on Covert, testing them doing, things like holding back the Johnson and Johnson vaccine because like, one out of a million people literally are getting blood clots, you know, this type of stuff. People are understanding that their degree of risk. Aversion is not actually optimal. There's both type 1 and type 2.
Two errors with false positives and false negatives. And if you are rejecting good drugs or good vaccines or good test, you are potentially doing as much or even more damage than bad. One than approving bad ones. And people are only focused on the pr downside of approving. A bad thing and not on the Unseen of not approving a good thing, right? You basically wanted to be the Ron Swanson of the FDA, you know, you wanted to you wanted to get elected of the teardown. Well, no, no actually
That's why I didn't take the position. And in fact, it was a surprise to me because I the Paradox of that. It's obvious, right? Like Google didn't reform, Microsoft by becoming, you know, Bill Gates, Google reformed, it by building a parallel system and then once it had made billions of dollars in after 10 years of Microsoft, throwing everything in the book, then they replace their leader.
Palmer with Sofia and then they reformed embraced open source, right? So I don't believe that one can abolish the FDA any more than one can abolish the FED but I do think you can exit the FDA like we exited the fed and you exit the FED with Bitcoin or required like basically you know this this this development of both Technical and cultural and economic breakthroughs to build a parallel Financial system which started off as just a crazy persons, you know,
You know, the future right? But some people got the potential very early on like Health, any was speculating. That could be like one to ten million dollars per coin. Very very, very early on. I think I'm like one of the first threads like if the coin took over, right? I wonder if he was satoshi's friend or colleague or something like that, that was just sort of lending his name to this Anonymous project to give people, you know, a second. Look at Red. Hey actually, this this pseudonymous guy is actually maybe better than he seems, it's possible Right? Point is so that parallel system was built outside the existing system.
Mm and is completely ethical because everybody who is engaged in it opted into it, right? It's not forced on anybody and all the bugs. Every hack every loss of funds, every drop or surge in the price. Every technical difficulty, every ux difficulty. All that was opted into completely ethical opt-in experiment, right? At the broad scale, which is opposite by the way of monetary policies that are foisted on you top down from above, you had no ability to take the non inflated USD after 2000.
Print, but if you disagree enough with a cryptocurrencies monetary policy, you can Fork the entire economy. Go Your Own Way, right? That Minority Report does exist. It may not be successful, but then, you know, that's in the execution. So, one thing I think about a great deal is, what is to our existing institutions, what crypto was to finance, right? So you can see already a crypto law that smart contracts for big chunks of law. You can start to see crypto media in the sense of decentralized.
Affic Truth in the crypto oracle's things. I was talking about where the foundational assertions are not human beings. Thumping, their chest and saying science capital S, you know, where we petitions, right? But rather cryptographic facts by they can I can I dive into that for a second on quote unquote science versus science is a very important issue. Okay, let's do so. You've seen all these people who are like
Masks don't work because of science masks work because of science, right? And essentially, what they actually are saying is some authority figure has told me that this is true and therefore it is true. It's not actually science is not about pure review, it's about independent replication.
That's a fundamental difference, right? Peer review is at best a proxy for independent replication. There's a premise that that guy who reviewed it, as a peer actually went and grabbed the bubbling beakers into the experiment themselves, that's less and less the case today, most of the time it is or maybe it's less because his forever most time. It's like a few email comments and like make a new figure. Okay, let's so the the actual, you know, like independent replication is download the code and run it on my machine. Okay, now there's only one thing which has now
Let me back up. A second science is actually the ostensible basis of our civilization, you know, what, it's no longer religion, right? You don't cite God or the Ten Commandments as why have this law. It is science says that there's a certain amount of emissions is, therefore this policy is there, right? Science says there's certain amount of viral particles so therefore, we wear masks versus not and so on and so forth, right? So Upstream of everything is a scientific premise, which is then coming in often, from
I'm peer review as opposed to Independent replication, which is subject, institutional capture, which is what's happened. And you start to get scientists saying, more and more ludicrous things that are, you know, like all the public health, people just completely own themselves during the pandemic in many different respects, like they admitted that saying that masks don't work was a noble lie, right? Which wasn't, it wasn't even that Noble. It was just stupid. It was obvious at the time, you know? And you can't do that too many times as many more examples that that's a particularly egregious one.
You can't do that too many times before. People just don't trust it, right. So what's the alternative was sealed? Because, you know, the answer, isn't in my view to go to astrology or whoo or stuff like that? What do we have not science. There's only one thing that's more prestigious in science.
What is that?
More prestigious than science. It's not usually thought of as in being an opposition.
What is it math?
Okay. What do I mean by that? When I say math greater than science. Okay. It's like kind of a one-liner. It's like a funny headline or whatever. But let me expand what I mean by that every scientific paper is based on the collection of data and then generation of like figures and tables and so on right there's a concept called The Open Access movement which is about putting research online and taking it out from behind these publisher pay balls. There's also a concept called
Research, which says that that scientific paper should be fully, reproducible from the underlying data and code, like you should be able to hit enter and just like, you template a web page with parameters from a database, you can template the scientific paper with calculated parameters from that data set. Okay, there's there's sites like distilled Out Pub or if you look at what open AI does, like a lot of their papers are basically like interactive websites which operate in this fashion, where the underlying data set is like, templating the page, okay. What's the point?
Point. The point is that it is when I talk about science and being independent replication, yes, it is Impractical for everybody around the world to have their own inclined planes, and Cloud Chambers to try and replicate all these experiments. We don't have those but what does everybody around the world have
Computers. Yes,
that's right. They have computers. They have phones. They can't necessarily do science at home but they can do math.
On the computer. So the more of that independent, replication process that you can turn into math.
The more that people who do not trust a central Authority can check the clamps. Okay, now we've already seen a huge victory of this right. Which is you know scientific economics has been defeated by mathematical economics. That's a all these Nobel laureates winners of the Nobel Prize in economic Sciences all went and denounced Bitcoin in different ways. It can't work, it won't work, it shouldn't work, it should be banned and mathematical, economics, defeated,
Like these quote scientist and I put them as quote unquote side is because they're not, you know, one of the big things by the way, is it's like Scott, Alexander calls it, the skin suit, you know, like science is like, Newton and Maxwell and The crucial thing is like, Maxwell's equations, have trillions of independent replications every single time. You pick up a cell phone. You're doing an independent replication of, you know, the equations for the E and the B field for the electrical and magnetic field, right? And at that,
Thousand other things. You're there's equations for quantum mechanics that you're effectively replicating independently confirm because engineering would work at the science, just right? So those things have trillions of independent applications and it's a total category error to compare them to a study that came out last week that has basically zero replications
Right calling the boat. Science means you're taking things. The only similarity is like they're coming out of universities but the axis on which to compare is the number of independent replications, not the number of citations number of independent applications. And what's awesome about this is this is actually where crypto is if you think about, what does it mean to have a transaction confirmed on chain? And if you've ever seen blockchain.com, if you're sent any crypto currency and refresh the blockchain, Shawn, maybe
I've sent it a whole bunch of times but I never sort of tracked.
And Trace the the transaction before, you know, it sort of catalog. I never looked at the log of the transaction.
Look at the log. And for example, yesterday, when I went and said I was donating, you know, money for Indian covid relief. I was able to post the link on chain so people could see the funds flowing and see that I donated exactly as much. As I said to the dress, I said I was going to donate at the time that I said I was going to do it. Right? And and the critical thing there is, there's a thing that says number of independent confirmations. How many different
A nurse right, have confirmed that a did be at Z time. Okay. Independent confirmations are very similar to Independent replications. That's cool. They're actually doing calculations. All of them are doing mathematical calculations to confirm that this fact, this assertion actually happened. Then you have the digital signature, that owned this cryptocurrencies are that seems like a very limited scope. But as I said, we can expand it to property. We can spend this lots of other things, right? And script Oracle
So what's the point? The point is, if you take the concepts of open access the concepts of reproducible research, the concept of independent replication and its proximity to the multiple confirmations of on chain data, right? You can think about something where, oh, actually all these people have computers. So if the code and the data set for every paper we're actually on chain, not only could I independently replicate at least their post upload.
Conclusions. Right, to me. It still falsified the data by the way. That's still possible. Okay, but post upload every calculation they're making I can check. Moreover, if all of that is on chain, it's an open State, database, going back to our previous point, right? So, every paper can be compared against every other paper. We can have common formats rather than every paper using a different format. Right? We can import a library from a previous paper. Just so you can import a library from GitHub because again, it's all open state, right?
And so now you actually start to make science far more checkable and cumulative, because it is only the uploading process which now is in doubt, put everything that's on chain, at least given this data, I can check their calculations, I can check their figures, I can check their tables. I can also check their citations because I go back a few hops and they're importing this paper importing that paper, and I can actually see that their premises, I can check their premises as well. I can map.
The trails citations all the way back, right? All of which is actually quite difficult to do today, you know, only Google can build like Google Scholar because they have access to all these journals. It's all behind pay walls, right? Some of it has been broken out there would like PubMed Central and so on, but a lot of it is still behind pay walls or it's like a thousand different formats, right? And this is similar to how you know banking before crypto was a thousand different formats. It's like you know this wire transfer and this address and so on and crypto uniforms that are like unifies it and a uniform address right address formats.
Reversal of global.
Point being. This is actually a way that you can decentralize science by actually realizing that math is actually more powerful than simple assertion and using math. And all the computers that we have independent replications of every post. Upload claim. All right, I know that I just threw a ton of you. There you threw a
ton. Yeah.
But that's like a recipe for like what crypto science are decentralized. Science, might look like it. Just a
Question, you are a partner. A 16z is that we are doing General partner for a while and then aboard partner was part-time versus, you know, operating a company you
You're just, you're just a weirdo and I love it. You're just so interesting. You're just so odd and like, who like, you're just sitting here talking about math and science, and they did a crypto. We did starting traditional tech companies. We did where to live battle the ball. Think about where to live? Yeah, yeah, like you your eclectic but we can go deep on a specific topic. If you want actually, I'd love you to teach me something about newsletters because you built a large one.
So maybe, you know, like, I can ask you, you know, what would you like, given that I've got, you know, a newsletter that pays you. Maybe you can teach me something about that, and I can learn
I can teach you. Yeah I mean I could teach you everything about newsletters. I don't know if I could do it today. It's 1 a.m. where I sure but I bro I could I mean I can't imagine there's that many people in the whole world that know more about me than newsletters. You know like what you are to crypto, I am dead newsletters. It's unfortunate. It's unfortunate that cryptos far more lucrative but are you okay, you didn't you're quite well and and you know these as you know if you one of the funny things
Is about this whole Space. This just this Tech thing is, if you just stay in the game long enough and you take enough swings ones that you just don't expect. We'll just connect much harder. I mean like, you know, there's Investments that I've made, which I spent five minutes on that have returned more than like five months of work. Of course, you're still taking Capital risk, you know, it's not like a free money or anything like that, right? But no, I mean, you're like, you're very successful entrepreneur, and you're in the game.
So, just put some of that newsletter money into crypto, or other things I'm happy or media filter I did. And I actually, I there's like a famous story that I read tell over and over and over again. But the short of it is I was friends friendly with Ross Albright. Oh. And, and when he was arrested, I didn't know that's who he was. And I was sitting next to my coworker. I go. Billy my guy, Ross, just got arrested you heard of this thing called Silk Road and Billy is, uh, same as Billy Draper. Oh, and he was like,
And he was like, yeah my dad said that Bitcoin is like going to be the coolest thing ever and I said, sounds good to me. I'll go and buy
it so I bought it.
I don't know what it is but your dad is smart. I'll do what he says good. So that's like my style but I thought you got me. I mean, poor Russ. I didn't actually know his name is Albright. I thought it was ulbricht but Albert actually. I don't know how to pronounce but yeah. Porosity definitely. Yeah, we weren't like crazy close friends.
We've hung a couple times that I lived in Glen Park, where he lived, and I was at, like, in front of the library, the day, you got a restaurant on that topic, it is surprising to me, given all the malfeasance. It came out afterwards, that, that there hasn't been a retrial, you know, literally like agents, falsifying information, and so on. And that's just what's come out to the public. Like, who the heck knows? If, you know, it was all like I haven't got into details on this, but I do understand that, like, the supposed, you know, hits that he ordered were all faked, and it was just
All entrapment or something like that. And well, they were faked whether that was entrapment or if you meant to murder someone that's Up For Debate. I die. I said, I haven't gotten into the
guts of it. I like the to, I like that. You try to like in everybody knows the right thing to do, and then most of us don't always do the right thing whether its food, or it's consuming information, it's like ice. Maybe this is bullshit, but it's entertaining. So I'm going to, I'm going to do it, anyone read it, watch it anyways. And it's sort of like, you know, Warren Buffett.
Brilliant in one thing and then he, you know, drinks like whatever. So close a day and he's McDonald's every day and he's McDonald's for breakfast every day. He's leaving till the
90s. His Constitution manages to keep up with some our area. But go ahead. I
think he's pretty stress-free. I think it works for him. Do you have something like that? Where you're like? Yeah, I'm super smart, but this is the dumb thing I do and I know it's dumb but I do it.
Anyways. Watch is The Challenge on MTV?
I mean, Sam, we both watched shitty reality TV and we're like, yeah, we know there's better things to do, but we do this
anyways.
Big Kardashian fan, a big Kardashian. Um,
Are you seriously asking like what, you know, creature Comfort type stuff? I mean I used to like, you know, like things, you know, us normal humans. Do I mean II like I'm on I'm on Twitter or whatever you know, and that's like certainly a huge waste of my time. It's both good and bad. It's one of those things where you know every time you you get out, they pull you
back in, you know, like Godfather it, right?
I
I once watched a movie. Yes, I must tons of movies. Tons and tons of movies. Basically like less. So recently though, it's interesting. I, you know, actually one of the things I found, you know, just on the like, the Balaji like preferences becoming the future kind of thing, right? Let me give you some. This is not the answer to your question, but let me rip on this and then come back to your question, okay?
There is, for example, in 2005, when Google Maps was out of before, the iPhone came out. When I wanted directions to something, what I do is I would use Google Maps on my laptop. I would screenshot it a charge up the laptop. I'd also print out the screenshots in the event that there was a power outage and then a keep the laptop and the screenshots on the passenger side of car as I drove. Okay? And that's like, that's what why? I knew the iPhone with maps would be a success because I had this
Kroon jury-rigged version of it in that interim period. When Google Maps existed, but the iPhone did it, okay? It's like a small example, right? Certain things that I've been noticing actually, as I just talked to you, I was like, you know, I really haven't watched that many movies recently, and why is that it's like, well, so many them are woke that. I kind of just roll my eyes, and I know exactly what it's going to be like, Hollywood, just gone. So woke, and, and that's just like, being preached to write, even if you might agree or disagree with some of the, like, you know, Prince
There. It's just like alright. Again blah blah blah, right, and it's very predictable. It means the characters are hacking. I'd it means a messaging is is just so on the nose, you know, there isn't any of the humor and so on, that used to characterize it, there's so many areas that are off bounds. That like it's just also edited and I just found the quality of Hollywood has been dropping off a lot. Everything I've realized is I don't hire actually from Stanford or Harvard, or MIT, or whatever anymore. You know what I hire
from
Twitter.
Me
too, okay because basically it's versus International second is you can kind of tell that these folks you can write, you can see whether you can see what they're about and to other about it's actually it's like a V 1 of this concept of like it's a computer. Might think about how you didn't get like too much signal on them from their diploma, right? Yeah. You get way more signal from their writing and interests. And so on on Twitter, not just their skills, but their values and character, right? And, you know, there's like,
Super Smart Guys in you know Nigeria you know, smart women in like the Middle East and so on who you could they shine through and I'm like okay that person, right? And you've now got like an index on the world that you didn't have before rather than just buying this this degree, right? In fact, actually, I'm not, I don't quite say they're guilty till proven innocent. But unlike, you know, five or ten years ago, a lot of these graduates of woke schools,
I mean, I think of them as like, you know, like religious education now because that's what they're prioritizing. I don't know if you see this thing like there, abolishing accelerated math in Virginia and so on and so forth, right? And so it's actually something, where these folks are coming out of higher ed with a religious education that basically means that they are not necessarily all that technically good anymore and a set of priorities and entitlements that is very much often adverse to what is needed to build a business.
Us, you know, and so I think there's been like the college flipping for me, at least in terms of hiring from these places and said, you know, you want to hire the the guy from the Midwest or the Middle East who just has like you know just a different set of values and is just more hungry. You know what's up? Yeah,
exactly. Right. Exactly, what's your Hollywood? What's your Hollywood replacement in? That same way. So that's your hiring replacement. You said your Hollywood's consumption goes down? Would you replace it
with? Um,
Old books, math textbooks? I thought something what like normal people do or whatever, you know, that that this like a some fudge. So you know, before I started my first company I was actually about as jacked is is possible to be with my South Asian physiognomy. And so, like, lifted and ran all the time. I worked out all the time and it's very difficult to do that. While operating startup
Because, you know, your first priority is that there's always the temptation to make that short-term sacrifice of stay up late or skip the workout to take the sales call and frankly, your employee is like, you're at least what I told myself. The time the employees, you have a responsibility to them, which your small health or your hour of sleep isn't as important as their, you know, because you have a fiduciary responsibility to them, you know, you brought them on. You have got them jobs, move cross.
The country. Oh, I didn't do that deal because I went for a run. Okay, well, you know, and it took me a while to realize that actually that was a false economy and that, you know, like, spinning down your physical fitness or your health, is actually something that will also impoverish them in the medium to long run because you won't be, you know, you can only tap into that in your youth you can push harder, of course, right. But as you,
Ouch, as you get older, the you just don't have the energy to do that in quite the same way where you can't tolerate as much as you do. You fit now? I'm fitter than I was basically one of the things that actually I did attempt to to a nine is you know, we're doing the same proof of work out right where you can submit like proof-of-work. Haha, get a proof of work out right, where you submit a proof of work out. We give you
in bucks and BTC. If it's one of the top 100 of that day, okay? And it's kind of cool and it's got extremely good response. And basically what I realize that for the next thing that I did I actually had to make that part of like the job and the business such that everybody expected me. Just like I expected all our employees to an exercise and because it was actually something that Advance the company as a whole and I just had you know, whatever just I can only do one thing at a time.
So I need to actually make that a front-page priority in sort of the same way that people.
Have learned that spaghetti code is a short-term optimization and actually taking on technical debt. You're taking on physical debt if you are not like working out and eating right each day, you know. So I wanted to kind of put that in the top, my Consciousness for the next thing. And I actually think that that daily Fitness seeing properly. Etc, is on a straight line with transhumanism and with reversing aging and so on and so forth. And weather will be successful in that, I don't know. But at least, I want to at least set that.
Convector. Hmm, I like it. I think we lost Sam to a bathroom break because we've, we've broke the, the, my first million record of longest podcast. So, we should, we should wrap it up. Where can people find you? So, I know Twitter is where I kind of get the most, so shout out kind of where people can get more with uh, each function.
Yeah, go to 1729.com, that's the free newsletter. Newsletter, that pays you in fact where it's got these regular Bitcoin bounties for tasks and tutorials.
And, you know, I kind of spoke about what our long-term goal is for, we're doing their short-term, it's extremely easy to understand, which is read a post, do a task, or in some crypto and then, you know, like, for example, we had yesterday is, you know, learning about how to register a domain name, that was very valuable and the early 90s. Well, learning how to register a crypto. Domain name is probably going to be very valuable and we basically have a tutorial on that and if you go and do it and you tweet about your experience,
Then we'll give you 250 if you write a good set of tweets are like educational informative substrates, right, right. So that's like a cool. I think a way to incentivize you to learn something that you should already learn and assert giving out like $5,000 in aetherium for that. Right?
So in 2010, another dollar prize sponsor, could others. People sponsor like could we know. Yeah. Put up five grand for something.
Absolutely. So we have 72 and.com, Princess create okay. And one thing that I want to have eventually is something, you know, just like companies.
Have Twitter accounts, have them have 70 Tran accounts where every task that they can Outsource to the public at large they do and maybe they pay them in their corporate cryptocurrency.
Yeah, I learned, I love this sort of a mini xprize. I we've been talking about this on the Pod for a while as like I love that, the X prize was this kind of big Piñata that got a bunch of people to innovate and step up and actually more investment than the prize yet happened because of it and it wondered, I know it. I've now experienced a big company, we got acquired
And I'm like oh I understand why it's so hard for bigger companies to innovate. I wish we were just putting more of things on our company's roadmap, just out there and say hey if anyone can whoever builds the best version of X, we will like sort of State up front, what we will acquire it for what we will, pay for that bounty to be complete as one of the sort of a start-up ideas. I'm most passionate about
absolutely. So if you're interested in trying out some experiments on this, like one big thing is, you know, I think you're mentioning like start-up ideas that you had. So one thing I want to do is, do prizes for start-up ideas. You know, 25k?
Pay for the best one in 30 days and, you know, we have the right to put in a safe or something like that. You know, like butt.
You know, we can, we can, we can figure out all those things. But if you, if you want to try something, go to 72 and on.com princess create and just submit a task and instructions are there. And if it's good, we may even fund it. Okay? So that is to say, like the process of creating a task being drafting the copy, and the process of sponsoring a tasks are actually separable things. So you could have a lot of people, create unfunded tasks and just like a VC goes to invest in a start-up, it's like a sponsor invest in a task and then boom makes
Sit. Go mainstream, right? So that itself is like increasing concept where, you know, you don't just have like let's say HubSpot having a feed of tasks, it also has a queue where people can propose things that are be interesting for HubSpot to try on its audience.
You know, Cortez sick, man. We're all right, so
I'll wrap you for everything. Yeah, thanks for thanks for coming on. You know, it's great to have a smart guy come and chat with a couple of bullshitters like us. So we enjoyed the conversation. Thank speak for
yourself. You guys are to self-deprecating, you've done a great job, you know your your shows great and your feet is often insightful and you know Mutual admiration. So great job.
I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to put my all in it.
