Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA | Lex Fridman Podcast #331

1. 0:00 – 2:21

   Introduction

   1. LFLex Fridman0:00

      Donald Trump was probably the biggest person ever to be removed from social media. Do you understand why that was done? Can you steel man the case for it and against it?

   2. BSBalaji Srinivasan0:09

      Everybody who is watching this around the world basically saw, let's say, US establishment or Democrat-aligned folks just decapitate, you know, the head of state-

   3. LFLex Fridman0:21

      Mm-hmm.

   4. BSBalaji Srinivasan0:22

      ... from, digitally, right? Like, just boom, gone, okay? And they're like, "Well, if they can do that in public to the US president, who's ostensibly the most powerful man in the world, what does the Mexican president stand against that?" Nothing. Regardless of whether it was justified on the sky, that means they will do it to anybody. Now the seal is broken. Just like the bailouts, as exceptional as they were and at first everybody was shocked about them, then they became a policy instrument. And now there's bailouts happening, th- every single bill is printing another whatever, billion dollars or something like that.

   5. LFLex Fridman0:56

      The following is a conversation with Balaji Srinivasan, an angel investor, tech founder, philosopher, and author of The Network State: How to Start a New Country. He was formerly the CTO of Coinbase and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. This conversation is over seven hours. For some folks, that's too long, for some, too short, for some, just right. There are chapter timestamps, there are clips, so you can jump around or, like I prefer to do with podcasts and audiobooks I enjoy, you can sit down, relax, with a loved human, animal, or consumable substance, or all three if you like, and enjoy the ride from start to finish. Balaji is a fascinating mind who thinks deeply about this world and how we might be able to engineer it in order to maximize the possibility that humanity flourishes on this fun little planet of ours. Also, you may notice that in this conversation, my eye is red. That's from jujitsu, and also, if I may say so, from a life well-lived. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and now, dear friends, here's Balaji Srinivasan.

2. 2:21 – 28:33

   Prime number maze

   1. LFLex Fridman2:21

      At the core of your belief system is something you call the, uh, prime number maze. I'm curious, I'm curious. We gotta, we gotta start there.

   2. BSBalaji Srinivasan2:28

      Sure.

   3. LFLex Fridman2:28

      If we can start anywhere, it's with mathematics. Let's go.

   4. BSBalaji Srinivasan2:31

      All right, great. A rat can be trained to turn at every even number or every third number in a maze to, to get some cheese, but evidently, it can't be trained to turn at prime numbers. Two, three, five, seven, and then 11 and so on and so forth. That's just too abstract, and frankly, if most humans were dropped into a prime number maze, they probably wouldn't be able to figure it out either, you know, th- they'd have to start counting and so on, actually pretty difficult to figure out what the, the turning, you know, rule was. Yet, the rule is actually very simple. And so the thing I think about a lot is just how many patterns in life are, we're just like these rats and we're trapped in a prime number maze, and if we had just a little bit more, you know, cogitation, if we had, you know, a little bit more cognitive ability, a little bit more whether it's, uh, you know, brain-machine interface or just better physics, we could just figure out the next step in that prime number maze, if we could just see it, we could see the grid, right? And that's what I think about, like, that, that's a big thing that drives me, is figuring out how do we actually conceive, understand that prime number maze that we're living in.

   5. LFLex Fridman3:35

      So understand which patterns are just complex enough that they are beyond the limit of human cognition.

   6. BSBalaji Srinivasan3:41

      Yes.

   7. LFLex Fridman3:42

      And, uh, what do you make of that? Are the limits of human cognition a feature or a bug?

   8. BSBalaji Srinivasan3:49

      I think mostly a bug. I admire Ramanujan, I admire, uh, you know, Feynman, I m- I admire these great mathematicians and physicists who were just able to see things that others couldn't. And just by writing it down, you know, that's, that's a leap forward. You know, people talk about it's not the idea, it's the execution, but that's for trivial ideas. For great ideas, for Maxwell's equations or Newton's laws or, you know, quantum electrodynamics or some of Ramanujan's identities, that really does bring us forward, especially when you can check them and you don't know how they work, right? You, you have the phenomenological but you don't have the theory underneath it, and then that stimulates the advancement of theory to figure out why is this thing actually working? That's actually, you know, stat mech, you know, arose in part from the kind of phenomenological studies that were basically being done where people were just getting steam engines and so on to work, and then they kind of abstracted out thermodynamics and so on from that, right? So the, the practice led the theory rather than vice versa. To some extent that's happening in neural networks now as, as you're aware, right? And I think that's, um... So just something that's true and that works, even if we don't know yet, that's amazing and that pulls us forward. So I, I do think that the limits are, are more of a bug than a feature.

   9. LFLex Fridman4:59

      Is there something that humans will never be able to figure out about our universe? About the theory, about the practice of our universe?

   10. BSBalaji Srinivasan5:06

       Yeah, people will typically quote Gödel's Incompleteness with, for such question, and, uh, yeah, uh, there are things that are provably unknowable or provably unprovable, um, but I think you can often get an approximate solution. You know, the, the Hilbert, you know, you know Hilbert's problems, like, we will know, we must know? Uh, at least we should know that we can't know. Push to get at least an approximate solution, push to know that we can't know, at least we push back that darkness enough so that we have lit up that corner of the intellectual universe.

   11. LFLex Fridman5:35

       Okay, let's actually take a bit of a tangent and explore a bit, in a way that I did not expect we would, but let's talk about the nature of reality briefly. I don't know if you're familiar with the work of Don Hoffman.

   12. BSBalaji Srinivasan5:47

       No, I don't. I know Roger Penrose has, like, his Road to Reality series for, like, basic physics getting up to everything we know, but go ahead, tell me-

   13. LFLex Fridman5:54

       Oh, it's even wilder.

   14. BSBalaji Srinivasan5:55

       Yeah.

   15. LFLex Fridman5:55

       In modern physics, we start to question of what is fundamental and what is emergent in this beautiful universe of ours, and there's a bunch of folks who think that spacetime as we know it, the four-dimensional space, is emergent, it's not fundamental to the, the physics of the universe, and the same-... many argue, I think Sean Carroll is one of them, is that time itself, the way we experience it, is also emergent. It's not fundamental-

   16. BSBalaji Srinivasan6:21

       Mm-hmm.

   17. LFLex Fridman6:21

       ... to the way our universe works. Anyway-

   18. BSBalaji Srinivasan6:23

       Hmm.

   19. LFLex Fridman6:23

       ... those are, uh, the technical term, I apologize for swearing, those are the mind-fucks of, uh, modern physics. But if we stroll along that road further, we get somebody like Donald Hoffman, who makes the evolutionary case that the reality we perceive with our eyes is not only an abstraction of objective reality, but is actually completely detached.

   20. BSBalaji Srinivasan6:47

       Hmm.

   21. LFLex Fridman6:48

       Like we're in a video game, essentially, that's, uh, consistent between each, uh, consistent for all humans, but it doesn't, it's not at all connected to physical reality.

   22. BSBalaji Srinivasan6:58

       Hmm.

   23. LFLex Fridman6:58

       So it's, it's an illusion.

   24. BSBalaji Srinivasan6:59

       It's like a version of the simulation hypothesis, is that his...

   25. LFLex Fridman7:02

       In a very distant way, but, uh, the simulation says that there's a sort of computational nature to reality, and then there's a kind of, a programmer that creates this reality and so on. No, he s- he says that we humans have a brain that is able to perceive the environment, and, uh, evolution has produced from primitive life to complex life on Earth, produced the kind of brain that doesn't at all need to sense the reality, uh, directly. So like, this table, according to Donald Hoffman, is not there (laughs) .

   26. BSBalaji Srinivasan7:34

       Well, so that-

   27. LFLex Fridman7:36

       Like, not, not just as an abstraction, like we don't sense the molecules that make up the table, but all of this is fake.

   28. BSBalaji Srinivasan7:43

       Interesting. So, uh, you know, I, I tend to be more of a hard science person, right? And so, um, you know, so just on that, people talk about qualia, you know, like, uh, is your perception of green the different fr- you know, different from my perception of green? And, you know, my counterargument on that is, well, we know something about, you know, spectrum of light, and we can build artificial eyes. And if we can build artificial eyes, which we can, you know, they're, like, they're not amazing, but you can actually, you can do that. You can build artificial ears and so on. Obviously we can build recording devices and, you know, for cameras and things like that. Well, operationally, the whole concept of your perception of green, you see green as purple, I see green as green, or what I call green, doesn't seem to add up because it does seem like we can do engineering around it, right? So the Hoffman thing, I get why people more broadly will talk about a simulation hypothesis because, you know, it's like, uh, Feynman and many others have talked about how, uh, math is surprisingly useful to describe the world.

   29. LFLex Fridman8:42

       Yeah.

   30. BSBalaji Srinivasan8:42

       You know, like very simple equations give rise to these complex phenomena. Wolfram is also on this, um, from a, from a different angle with the cellular automata stuff but, um...
3. 28:33 – 44:50

   Government

   1. LFLex Fridman28:33

   2. BSBalaji Srinivasan28:33

      Right.

   3. LFLex Fridman28:34

      And that takes us in a non-linear fascinating (laughs) journey to the question I wanted to ask you in the beginning-

   4. BSBalaji Srinivasan28:43

      Sure.

   5. LFLex Fridman28:43

      ... which is, um, this political world that you mentioned and the world of political truth. As we know it, in the 20th century and the early 21st century, what do you think works well and what is broken about government?

   6. BSBalaji Srinivasan28:57

      The fundamental thing is that we can't easily and peacefully start new opt-in governments. And-

   7. LFLex Fridman29:06

      Like startup governments.

   8. BSBalaji Srinivasan29:07

      Yeah. And what I mean by that is basically, um, you can start a new company, you can start a new community, you can start a new currency even these days. You don't have to beat the former CEO in a duel to start a new company. Um, you don't have to become head of the World Bank to start a new currency, okay? Um, because of this, yes, if y- you can... If, if you're... if you want to, you can join, I don't know, uh, Microsoft or name some company that's a... GameStop, and you can try to reform it, okay? Or you can start your own. And the fact that both options exist mean that, you know, you've... you can actually just start from scratch, and that's just... I mean, the same reason we have a clean piece of paper, right? I- I mentioned this actually in, in The Network State book. I'll just quote this bit, but we want to be able to start a new state peacefully for the same reason we want a bare plot of Earth, a blank sheet of paper, an empty text buffer, a fresh start, or a clean slate, because we want to build something new without historical constraint, right? For the same reason you hit plus and do docs.new, you know, like create a new doc. It's for the same reason, right? Because you don't want backspace, you don't want to have just like...... 128 bytes of space, 128 kilobytes, and just have to backspace the old document before creating the new one. So, that's a fundamental thing that's wrong with today's governments. And it's a meta point, right? Because it's not any one specific reform, it's a meta-reform of being able to start new countries.

   9. LFLex Fridman30:30

      Okay, so that's one problem, but there, you know, you could push back and say that's, that's a f- feature beca- you know, a lot of people argue that tradition is power. Through generation, if you try a thing long enough, which is the way I see marriage, there's value to the struggle and the journey you take through the struggle, and you grow and you develop ideas together, you grow intellectually, philosophically together. And that's the idea of a nations that spans generations, that you have a tradition that becomes more, that, that strives towards the truth and is able to arrive there. Or no, not arrive, but take steps towards there through the generations. So y- you may not want to keep starting new governments. You might want to, uh, stick to the old one and, uh, improve it one step at a time. So just because you're having a fight inside a marriage doesn't mean you should get a divorce and go on Tinder and start dating around. That's the, uh, that's the pushback. So it's-

   10. BSBalaji Srinivasan31:31

       Sure.

   11. LFLex Fridman31:32

       ... it's not obvious that this is a strong feature to have-

   12. BSBalaji Srinivasan31:35

       Sure.

   13. LFLex Fridman31:35

       ... you know, to launch new governments.

   14. BSBalaji Srinivasan31:36

       There's several different kind of lines of attack, or, or debate, or whatever on this, right? First is, uh, yes, there's obviously value to tradition, and, uh, you know, people say, "This is Lindy and that's Lindy. It's been proven for a long time," and so on. But of course, there's a tension between tradition and innovation, you know? Like, going to the moon wasn't Lindy (laughs) , just it was awesome, and you know, like artificial intelligence is something that's very new. New is good, right? And this is a tension within humanity actually itself, 'cause you know it's way older than all of these nations. I mean, humans are tens of thousands of years old. The ancestors of humans are millions of years old, right? And you go back far enough, and the time that we know today of the sessile farmer and soldier is, if you go back far enough, you wanna be truly traditional, well, we're actually descended from hunter-gatherers who were mobile, and wandered the world, and there weren't borders and so on. They kind of went where they want, right? And you know, people have, you know, had done historical reconstructions of like skeletons and, and stuff like that, and, uh, many folks report that the transition to agriculture and being sessile, um, resulted in, you know, diminution of height, you know, people had like tooth decay and stuff like that. The skeletons, they, uh, people had traded off upside for stability, right? That's what the state was, that was what these sessile kinds of things were. Now, of course, um, they, they had more likelihood of living, uh, consistently, you could support larger population sizes, but it had lower quality of life, right? And so the hunter-gatherer era, you know, maybe that's our, our collective recollection of a Garden of Eden, where people, you know, just like a, a spider kind of knows i- innately how to build webs, or a beaver knows how to build dams, you know, some people theorize that, uh, the entire Garden of Eden is like, um, a sort of built-in neural network recollection of this, you know, pre-sessile era, where we were able to roam around and just pick off fruits and so on, low population density. So, point is that I think what we're seeing is a V3. You go from the hunter-gatherer to the farmer and soldier, the sessile nations are here and they've got borders and so on, to kind of the V3, which is the digital nomad, the new hunter-gatherer. We're going back to the future, because you know what's even older than nations is no nations, right? Even more traditional than tradition is, you know, being international, right?

   15. LFLex Fridman33:57

       Mm-hmm.

   16. BSBalaji Srinivasan33:58

       And so we're actually tapping into that other huge thread in humanity, which is the desire to explore, pioneer, wander, innovate, you know?

   17. LFLex Fridman34:07

       So the way-

   18. BSBalaji Srinivasan34:07

       And I think that's important.

   19. LFLex Fridman34:08

       ... to make America great again is to dissolve it completely in- into oblivion. No, that's a joke.

   20. BSBalaji Srinivasan34:13

       I, I, see yeah, yeah, yeah, I know it's a joke. B- but the thing that... Well-

   21. LFLex Fridman34:16

       (laughs) Humor, I'm learning this new thing.

   22. BSBalaji Srinivasan34:18

       Yes, a new thing for the ro- uh, yeah. You, the chatbot emulation isn't fully working there.

   23. LFLex Fridman34:21

       Yeah, yeah, glitch. This, we're in the, in the beta-

   24. BSBalaji Srinivasan34:24

       And let me just say, say one other thing about this, which is, you know, there are, I mean, everybody in the world to fr- okay, let's say, I don't know what percentage, let's say 99.99%, uh, or it's rounds to that number, of political discourse in the US focuses on trying to fix the system.

   25. LFLex Fridman34:44

       Hmm.

   26. BSBalaji Srinivasan34:44

       If those folks, I mean, 0.01% of the energy is going towards building a new system, that seems like a pretty good portfolio strategy, right? Or 100% are supposed to go and edit this code base from 200-something years ago. I mean, the most American thing in the world is going and, you know, leaving your country in s- in search of a better life. America was founded 200 years ago by the Founding Fathers. It's not just a nation of immigrants, it's a nation of emigrants, right? Emig- emigration, you know, from other countries to the US, and actually also, emigration within the US. There's an amazing YouTube video called, um, it's like, 50 States, US Population, I think 1790 to it says 2050, so they've got a simulation, so you just stop it at 2019 or 2020. But it shows that, like Virginia was like number one early on, and then it lost ground and like New York gained.

   27. LFLex Fridman35:29

       Mm-hmm.

   28. BSBalaji Srinivasan35:29

       And then like Ohio was a big deal in the early 1800s, and it was like father of presidents and generally all these presidents, and later Illinois and Indiana, and then California only really came up in the, the 20th century, like during the Great Depression. And now we're entering the modern era, where like Florida and Texas have risen and New York and California have dropped.

   29. LFLex Fridman35:46

       Mm-hmm.

   30. BSBalaji Srinivasan35:46

       And so interstate competition, it's actually just like inter-currency competition, you know, you've got trading pairs, right? You, you know, sell BTC, buy ETH. You sell, you know, eh, eh, Solana or ZC-, you know, sell, eh, Monero, buy Zcash, right? Each of those trading pairs gives you signal for today on this currency is down or up relative to this other currency. In the same way, each of those migration pairs, someone goes from New York to Ohio, Ohio to California, gives you information on the desirability of different states. You can literally form a pairs matrix like this over time.
4. 44:50 – 54:54

   The Network State

   1. LFLex Fridman44:50

      let, let, let's actually jump right there and let me ask you, what is the network state?

   2. BSBalaji Srinivasan44:55

      What is the network state? So I'll give it in a sentence and I'll also give it in an image, right? So the informal sentence. A network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from preexisting states. Okay? So just taking those pieces. Highly aligned online community, that is not Facebook, that is not Twitter. F- people don't think of themselves as Facebookers or Twitterians, right? That's just a collection of hundreds of millions of people who just fight each other (laughs) all day, right? It's a fight club. A company is highly aligned where, you know, you'll put a task into the company Slack, and on the, r- if you do it in all-hands, about 100% of, of the people in the company Slack will do it, so they're highly aligned in that way. But online communities don't tend to be highly aligned. Online communities tend to be like a Game of Thrones fan club or something like that.

   3. LFLex Fridman45:42

      Mm-hmm.

   4. BSBalaji Srinivasan45:43

      Where, you know, on, on a Twitter account, you might get .1% of people engaging with something. It's not to 100%. If you combine the degree of alignment of a company with the scale of a community, that's like what a highly aligned, you know, online community is, right? So to get 1,000 or 10,000 people who can collectively do something as simple as just all liking something on Twitter, for example. Why would they do that? They're a, they're a guild of electrical engineers, they're a guild of graphic designers, and you've got 1,000 people in this guild, and every day, somebody is asking a favor from the guild, and the other 999 people are helping them out. For example, "I've just launched a new project," or, "I'd like to get a new job. Can somebody help me?" And so on. And so you kind of give to get. You're, you know, you're helping other people in the community and you're kind of building up karma this way, and then sometimes you spend it down. Like Stack Overflow has this karma economy. It's not meant to be an internal economy that is, um, like making tons and tons of money off of ... It's sort of to keep score, right? That's the highly aligned online community part. Then capacity for collective action, I just kind of described that, which is, at a minimum, you, you, you don't have a highly aligned online community unless you have 1,000 people and you paste in a tweet and 1,000 of them RT it, or, or like it, okay?

   5. LFLex Fridman46:52

      Mm-hmm.

   6. BSBalaji Srinivasan46:52

      If you can't even get that, you don't have something. If you do have that, you have the basis for at least collective digital action on something, okay? And you can think of this as a group of activists. You can think of it as j- for example, let's say, I mentioned a guild, but let's say they're a group that wants to raise awareness, uh, of the fact that life extension is possible, right? Every day, there is a new, um, tweet on, I don't know, whether it's, uh, metformin research or Sinclair's work, or David Sinclair, right? Andrew Huberman has good stuff here, you know, or, um, there's a LongevityVC, there's a bunch of folks working this area. Every day, there's something there, and literally, the purpose of this online community is ra- raise awareness of longevity, and of the 1,000 people, 970 go and like that. That's pretty good, right? That's solid. You've got something there. You've got, you've got a laser, right? You've got something which you can f- focus on something, because most of the Web 2.0 internet is entropic. You go to Hacker News, you go to Reddit, you go to Twitter, and you're immediately struck by the fact that it's like 30 random things. Random. It's just a box of chocolates. It's meant to be, you know, w- we're-

   7. LFLex Fridman47:56

      Some of them look delicious.

   8. BSBalaji Srinivasan47:57

      Some of them look delicious. Novelty, we can over-consume novelty, right? So, you know, we were talking about it earlier, the balance between tradition and innovation, right? Here is a different version of that, which is, um, entropy going in a ton of different directions due to novelty, versus, uh, like focus, you know? It's like, it's like heat versus work, you know? Heat is entropic, and work force along a distance, you're going in a, in a direction, right? And so, if those 30 links on, you know, the next version of Hacker News or Reddit or something like so brilliant is just, that's leveling you up. The, the 30 things you click, you've just gained a skill as a function of that, right? So these kinds of online communities, I don't know what they look like. They probably don't look like the current social media. They l- they... Just like, for example, I know this is a meta analogy, but in the 2000s, people thought Facebook for Work would look like Facebook. And, you know, David Sacks, you know, founded and sold the company Yammer that was partially on that basis. It was, it was fine. It was a billion-dollar company. But Facebook for Work tended ... wh- was actually Slack.... right?

   9. LFLex Fridman48:55

      Mm-hmm.

   10. BSBalaji Srinivasan48:55

       It looked different. It was more chat-focused, it was less image-focused and whatnot. What does the platform for a highly aligned online community look like? I think Discord is the transitional state, but it's not the end state. Discord is sort of chatty. The work isn't done in Discord itself, right? The cryptocurrency for tracking, or the cryptokarma for sort of tracking people's contributions is not really done in Discord itself. Discord was not built for that.

   11. LFLex Fridman49:19

       Mm-hmm.

   12. BSBalaji Srinivasan49:19

       And I don't know what that UX looks like. Maybe it looks like tasks, uh, m- you know, like, uh, may- maybe it looks, uh, something different. Okay.

   13. LFLex Fridman49:26

       So wait, wait, wait. Le- le- let me linger on this.

   14. BSBalaji Srinivasan49:28

       Sure.

   15. LFLex Fridman49:28

       So, you're actually, uh... there's some people who might not be even familiar with Discord or Slack or, and so on.

   16. BSBalaji Srinivasan49:34

       Mm-hmm.

   17. LFLex Fridman49:34

       Even these platforms have, like, communities associated with them.

   18. BSBalaji Srinivasan49:39

       Yes.

   19. LFLex Fridman49:40

       Meaning, meaning the, the big, the, like the meta-community of people who are aware of the feature set and that you can do a thing. That this is a thing, and then you can do a thing with it. Discord, like when I first realized it, I think it was borne out of the gaming world.

   20. BSBalaji Srinivasan49:54

       Yes.

   21. LFLex Fridman49:55

       It's like, holy shit, this is like a thing. There's a lot of people that use this.

   22. BSBalaji Srinivasan50:01

       Right.

   23. LFLex Fridman50:01

       There's also a culture that's very difficult to escape that's associated with Discord that spans all the different communities within Discord.

   24. BSBalaji Srinivasan50:09

       Right.

   25. LFLex Fridman50:09

       Reddit is the same. Even though there's different subreddits, there's still, because of the migration phenomenon maybe, there's still a culture to Reddit and so on.

   26. BSBalaji Srinivasan50:19

       Yes.

   27. LFLex Fridman50:20

       So the... I- I- I'd like to sort of try to dig in and understand what's the difference between the online communities that are formed and the platforms on which those communities are formed?

   28. BSBalaji Srinivasan50:32

       Sure.

   29. LFLex Fridman50:32

       Really important.

   30. BSBalaji Srinivasan50:33

       Yes, it is. It is. So for example, an office. A good design for an office is frequently you have, um, you know, the, uh, the commons, which is, like, the lunchroom or the gathering area. Then everybody else has a cave on the border they can kind of retreat to.
5. 54:54 – 1:18:40

   Pseudonymous economy

   1. LFLex Fridman54:54

      because there is a culture, one of th-... things I discovered on Reddit and Discord of anonymity or s- pseudonyms or usernames-

   2. BSBalaji Srinivasan55:02

      Yes.

   3. LFLex Fridman55:02

      ... that don't represent the actual name. On Slack is an example of one, because I think I did a, I used to have a Slack for like deep learning course that I was teaching, and that was like a h- very large, like 20,000 people, whatever. But so you could grow quite large, but there was a culture of like, "I'm going to represent my actual identity, my actual name."

   4. BSBalaji Srinivasan55:21

      That's right.

   5. LFLex Fridman55:21

      And then the same stuff on Discord. I think I was the only asshole using my actual name on there.

   6. BSBalaji Srinivasan55:26

      Hmm.

   7. LFLex Fridman55:26

      It's like everybody was using, uh, pseudonyms. So what's, what's the role of that in the online community?

   8. BSBalaji Srinivasan55:33

      Well, so I actually gave a talk on this a few years ago called, uh, the Pseudonymous Economy. Okay. And, um, it's come about faster than I expected, uh, but I did think it was gonna come about fairly fast. And essentially the concept is obviously we've had ... So first, anonym, pseudonym, real name, right?

   9. LFLex Fridman55:49

      Can you describe the difference between that?

   10. BSBalaji Srinivasan55:50

       Difference? Anonymous is like 4chan, uh, where there's no tracking of a name. You're, you know, there's zero reputation associated with an identity, right? Pseudonymous is like much of Reddit, where there's a persistent username and it has karma over time, but it's not linked to a, the global identifier that is your state name, all right?

   11. LFLex Fridman56:11

       Mm-hmm.

   12. BSBalaji Srinivasan56:11

       So your, quote, "real name," even the term real name, by the way, is a misnomer because it's like your Social Security name, like Social Security number. It's your official government name. It's your, it's your state name. It is the tracking device. It's a, it's a air tag that's put on you, right? Why do I say that, right? Another word for a name is a handle. And so just visualize like a giant file cabinet. There's a handle with Lex Fridman on it that anybody, the billions of people around the world can go up to and they can pull this file on you out. Images of you, things you said, like billions of people can stalk billions of other people now. That's a very new thing. And I actually think this will be a transitional era in like human history. We're actually gonna go back into a much more encrypted world. And-

   13. LFLex Fridman56:54

       O- O- O- Okay, let me linger on that because, um-

   14. BSBalaji Srinivasan56:57

       Sure.

   15. LFLex Fridman56:57

       ... another way to see real names is the label on a thing that can be canceled.

   16. BSBalaji Srinivasan57:04

       Yes, that's right. A- In fact, there's a book called Seeing Like a State which actually talks about the origins of surnames and whatnot. Like if you have a guy who is that guy with brown hair. That's like an analog identifier. It could mean 10 different people in a village.

   17. LFLex Fridman57:19

       Mm-hmm.

   18. BSBalaji Srinivasan57:19

       But if you have a first name, last name, okay, that guy can now be conscripted. You can go down with a list, a list of digital identifiers, pull that guy out, pull him, you know, into the military for conscription, right?

   19. LFLex Fridman57:29

       Mm-hmm.

   20. BSBalaji Srinivasan57:30

       So that was like one of the purposes of names, was to make masses of humans legible to a state, right?

   21. LFLex Fridman57:37

       Mm-hmm.

   22. BSBalaji Srinivasan57:37

       Hence, seeing like a state. You can see them now, right? See, digital identifiers, uh, one thing that people don't usually think about is pseudonymity is itself a form of decentralization. So, you know, people know Satoshi Nakamoto was pseudonymous. They also knew his inter- decentralization. But one way of thinking about it is, let's say his real name, okay, or his state name is Anode, okay? Attached to that is, uh, every database, you know, his, uh, his Gmail, his, you know, Facebook if he had one, every government record on him, right? All of these databases have that state name as the foreign key, right? Um, and so it can go and look things up in all of those, uh, databases, right?

   23. LFLex Fridman58:24

       Mm-hmm.

   24. BSBalaji Srinivasan58:24

       And so it's that, like think of it as being the center of a giant network of all of these things. When you go and create a pseudonym, you're budding off a totally new node that's far away from all the rest. And now he's choosing to attach Bitcoin Talk and bitcoin.org and the GPT signatures of, of the code if he ch- choose to do that. All those things, the digital signatures are all attached to this new decentralized name because he's instantiating it, not the government, right? One way of thinking about it is the root administrator of the, quote, "real name" system is the state, because you cannot simply edit your name there, right? You can't just go, you can't log into usa.gov and backspace your name and change it. Moreover, um, your birth certificate, all this stuff, that's fixed and immutable, right? Whereas you- we take for granted that on every site you go to, you can backspace, you can be like, "Call me Ishmael," you know, walk into a site, u- use whatever name you want. You just have to use the same name across multiple sites. You can do that. And if not, you don't have to. One thing that we're seeing now actually is at the level of kids, you know, the younger generation, um, Eric Schmidt several years ago mentioned that, you know, people would like change their names when they became adults, so that they could do that. This is kind of already happening. People are using, uh, I've remarked on this many years ago, search resistant identities.

   25. LFLex Fridman59:39

       Mm-hmm.

   26. BSBalaji Srinivasan59:39

       Okay? Why? They have their Finsta, which is their, quote, "fake name" Instagram, and Rinsta, which is their real name Instagram.

   27. LFLex Fridman59:46

       Oh, this is cool.

   28. BSBalaji Srinivasan59:46

       Okay? And what's interesting is on their Rinsta, they're their fake self because they're in their Sunday best and, you know, smiling. And this is the one that's meant to be search indexed, right?

   29. LFLex Fridman59:56

       Mm-hmm.

   30. BSBalaji Srinivasan59:56

       On the Finsta, with their fake name, this is just shared with their closest friends. They're their real self and they're, you know, hanging out at parties or whatever, you know. And so this way they've got something which is the public persona and the private persona, right? The public persona that's search indexed and the private persona that is private for friends, right? And so organically, people are... You know, like Jeanne Jacobs, she talks about like cities and how, you know, they're organic and, and whatnot. Like, uh, some of the mid-20th century guys, the architecture they had removed shade from, uh, you know, like, like awnings and stuff like that got removed. So this is like the restoration of like awnings and shade and structure so that you're not always exposed to the all-seeing web crawler, that eye of Sauron, which is like Googlebot just indexing everything. These are search resistant identities in that like eye just sort of passes over you, like, you know, in the Terminator, like in the Terminator eye just kind of passes over you, right? So search resistant identity is not pulled up, it's not indexed, right? And now you can be your real self.... and so, we've had this kinda thing for a while with communication. The new thing is that cryptocurrency has allowed us to do it for transaction, hence the pseudonymous economy, right? And, um, as you go from anonymous, pseudonymous, real name, these each have their different purposes. But the new concept is that pseudonym, you can have multiple of them, by the way. Your, your ENS name, you could have it under your, quote, " real name" or state name, like lexfriedman.eth, but you could also be, uh, punk6529.eth, okay?

Episode duration: 7:47:52