Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Communities & Crypto | MFM #178

1. 0:00 – 2:42

   Setting the tone: why Balaji is an “ideas per minute” guest

   1. SPShaan Puri0:00

      Are you aware of what it's like to talk to you?

   2. SPSpeaker0:03

      Um, no.

   3. SPShaan Puri0:04

      [laughs]

   4. SPSpeaker0:06

      Yeah. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. Uh. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road less traveled, never looking back. Like

   5. SPShaan Puri0:17

      We got a good pod and we got a good guest here. This is probably... All right. Before I introduce our guest, I'm gonna butter him up a little bit. I'm gonna butter him up because, um, I'm, I'm genuinely excited for this. I- there's probably like three or four podcasts 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 gonna be one- people's favorite podcast." Why is that? Well, this is the podcast-

   6. SPSpeaker0:42

      Well, it's not morning for us, Shaan. It's, uh, it's 10-

   7. SPShaan Puri0:45

      Yes, it's late night for us

   8. SPSpeaker0:45

      ... it's almost 10:30, right?

   9. SPShaan Puri0:46

      [laughs]

   10. SPSpeaker0:46

       Or it- it's 11- it's al- it's almost g- it's gonna be midnight soon where Abhay is. Yeah, we got up late, or we were- stayed up late.

   11. SPShaan Puri0:53

       Yeah, but that's all right. It's my birthday, by the way, today, so this is how I'm spending my birthday evening.

   12. SPSpeaker0:57

       Wow. Oh, I forgot to tell you. Happy birthday.

   13. SPShaan Puri0:58

       [laughs] Uh, my wife was like, "What do you want to do for your birthday?" I was like, "Don't worry, it's already planned. I'm doing a podcast. I'm- I love it." Um, so anyways, the, the reason I think this pod has- podcast is gonna be good, this episode's gonna be good, is because our podcast is all about ideas. People listen to this pod, they wake up and they listen to this pod because we get the wheels turning. We present new and interesting ideas, or we talk about spaces, or we talk about spaces in ways that you haven't heard too much before. Now, one of those... L- 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 Andreessen at one point called you, like, the highest ideas per minute of anybody he's met. Is there... Uh, do you know that quote that I'm talking about? He, he sort of gave you this title.

   14. SPSpeaker1:41

       Yeah, it was a pretty kind remark. Uh, I- he said they were useful ideas too, which was good. So, um-

   15. SPShaan Puri1:47

       [laughs]

   16. SPSpeaker1:48

       ... and he basically was-

   17. SPShaan Puri1:48

       Yeah, we don't get that same credit, uh, f- for our ideas. People don't usually call them useful, but that's okay.

   18. SPSpeaker1:53

       Uh, well, you know, well-

   19. SPShaan Puri1:53

       Entertaining is okay.

   20. SPSpeaker1:54

       Well, you s- you, we teach people how to, like, launch, like, a porn app.

   21. SPShaan Puri1:58

       [laughs]

   22. SPSpeaker1:58

       You teach people how to, like... You, you warn the world of a pandemic.

   23. SPShaan Puri2:02

       [laughs]

   24. SPSpeaker2:02

       Uh, so, like... Your, your podcast is actually very popular, and I've heard a lot of people say good things about it, so don't be too hard on yourself. It's good.

   25. SPShaan Puri2:10

       Thank you. Thank you.

   26. SPSpeaker2:11

       [laughs]

   27. SPShaan Puri2:11

       Um, and I think that, you know, one of the... Uh, like, if, uh, the, uh... A lot of people ask us like, "Oh, you know, who do you guys follow? Who do you guys read?" Uh, you're one of my answers to, "If I started 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 you would definitely be in 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 gonna talk about a bunch of crypto things, because I think you're, uh, very forward-thinking in the crypto world. We're gonna talk about some non-crypto

2. 2:42 – 5:39

   Balaji’s first company: clinical genomics and scaling genetic testing

   1. SPShaan Puri2:42

      things, um, as well, and then we'll all try to, uh, steer clear of too much controversy and, you know, let's, let's play ball. Nobody get canceled. Here we go. So, um, so Balaji's here. At one point, you were... You're a founder of, I believe, um, a genetics company or a biogenetic company. How, how would you describe your, your first company? What, what was the kind of category you would call that one?

   2. SPSpeaker3:04

      Um, clinical genomics. So basically-

   3. SPShaan Puri3:07

      Clinical genomics

   4. SPSpeaker3:08

      ... um, you know, one of the first, uh, companies to use genomics in medicine. Uh, 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, in high school, um, those are simple genetic diseases where they can be predicted by usually just variation in one gene. And, um, we did is we took all of those at the same time and tested them at once with a universal genetic test, and that was one of the first, um, applications of genomics in the clinic where, uh, the scalability of it, the fact that you could assess many different markers, many different variants at the same time, allowed you to cut costs relative to a traditional one, one gene or one variant at a time blood test. Uh, so- Which I actually, uh, just used it.

   5. SPShaan Puri3:58

      Oh, really?

   6. SPSpeaker3:58

      I used it, uh, my, my wife and I, uh, for freezing embryos, um, used you. It's... What's it called? Mir-

   7. SPShaan Puri4:04

      Yeah, it's now, it's now-

   8. SPSpeaker4:04

      What is it called? Mirian or-

   9. SPShaan Puri4:05

      ... the Mirian Women's Health, um, you know, division, but basically it was, it was called C-O-U-N-S-Y-L, Council, as an independent company. Um-

   10. SPSpeaker4:13

       So, like, I... Well, I saw the packaging in the trash can and I was like, "Oh, wait, I know this name."

   11. SPShaan Puri4:18

       [laughs]

   12. SPSpeaker4:19

       Um, and so yeah. So Shaan, that's what we used it for.

   13. SPShaan Puri4:21

       Glad, glad, glad that could be of assistance. Um, I think it's interesting 'cause, uh, that's a space which has sort of just evolved in its own way, um, you know, genomics and biomedicine. It hasn't really linked up with the main body of tech, um, you know, of like internet technology, consumer technology. It might do so this decade. We'll see. Um, hasn't yet. It's sort of like how, you know, like high-frequency trading and all that type of stuff was its own kind of sub-area, and crypto has now linked it up with the main body of tech, you know, where it's programming, uh, you know, programming on top of blockchains, right? Um, now that we have on the order of 30 million sequenced genomes and lots of people with genotypes, I forget the latest number, but both 23andMe and ancestry.com, there's millions of people who have personal genomes, uh, albeit genotypes rather than full sequences. I think we're gonna start to see more kind of, you know, computation, 'cause a lot of genomes have been installed in the same sense like a personal computer's installed. It's a piece of software, right? Or data rather, locally on your computer that you can do things with. That's a whole separate topic. Happy to dive into that if you're interested. Yeah.

   14. SPSpeaker5:28

       And what, and what did you do after that? Um, so I was-

   15. SPShaan Puri5:32

       Well, and, and that was like a...

   16. SPSpeaker5:33

       Yeah.

   17. SPShaan Puri5:33

       Sorry. Actually-

   18. SPSpeaker5:34

       Yeah

   19. SPShaan Puri5:34

       ... that was like a $300 million exit or something like-

   20. SPSpeaker5:36

       Yeah. Yeah, yeah

   21. SPShaan Puri5:36

       ... like wild- like, like pretty wildly successful.

   22. SPSpeaker5:38

       It was good. It was good.

   23. SPShaan Puri5:39

       Um-

3. 5:39 – 7:15

   Post-exit moves: crypto investing, tech bets, and a worldview about rebuilding institutions

   1. SPSpeaker5:39

      Yeah, it was a good company. And, um, I think, you know... So after that, there's a bunch of things. Um, I was an early investor in cryptocurrencies, so Bitcoin, Ethereum, um, Zcash, b- bunch of other ones you've heard of. I, I shouldn't say every major coin, but every major coin that I think has some technological innovation, I, you know, I've, I've probably got like something in it. Not every single one, but a lot of them. Um- Early investor in Superhuman, Soylent, Cameo, Lambda School, Replit, uh, Mighty, bunch of others, um, have all done fairly well. Um, you know, Deel, if you just saw, they just became a unicorn or whatever last week. Um, all things that sort of, I think, fit my philosophy, um, because, you know, I, 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, uh, [chuckles] some- somebody might... Uh, with, with, um, crypto for example, crypto is built for the apocalypse, but with internet.

   2. SPShaan Puri6:41

      [laughs]

   3. SPSpeaker6:43

      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 I kind of think of that as sort of this stack of technologies. You can kind of view it from that lens of the unbundling and fracturing of all 20th century, all pre-internet institutions, and then the rebundling of them back together into new internet-native forms. I think very few institutions that predated the internet will survive the internet in the fullness of time.

   4. SPShaan Puri7:12

      S- so I want to ask you-

   5. SPSpeaker7:14

      And I think, I think-

   6. SPShaan Puri7:14

      Oh, sorry. Go ahead. Go ahead

4. 7:15 – 20:12

   1729: turning wasted online time into earning, learning, and health (and why status-only networks are broken)

   1. SPSpeaker7:15

      ... I think, I think, Shaan, that, um, before we, like, really get into it, though, I did want to call out, I think, uh, we want to call out 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 do you want to... Well, Shaan, do you want to take it from there?

   2. SPShaan Puri7:31

      Yeah. Well, I'll let, I'll let you introduce it, but, uh, super interesting project. I believe the URL is 1729.com. So just the numbers 17... 1-7-2-9.com. And it's really simple, and I love simple, a simple idea, which is it's a newsletter that pays you. So it's a newsletter that you get that has these little micro tasks. So I got one, I don't know if it was yesterday or the day before. It was basically like, you can get 3,000 bucks in Bitcoin if you create memes that will promote, you know, crypto in India or, you know, help, help, help package that idea in a way that's shareable and spreadable, that's what memes are, um, 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, 2 million-ish subscribers, The Hustle. They give information, but it's sort of like a pa- It'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 ear- not only earn from it, but also build up in a way, as you do more and more of these, build up some credentials by having accomplished these little micro tasks. So can you give us the, like-

   3. SPSpeaker8:38

      That's right

   4. SPShaan Puri8:39

      ... I don't know. That's my read from the outside.

   5. SPSpeaker8:40

      By the way, did, did you hear that slight? He goes, "Yours is actually interesting."

   6. SPShaan Puri8:43

      [laughs]

   7. SPSpeaker8:44

      [laughs] Uh, w- we should do a collaboration with... I'm sure... Actually, there's a lot with The Hustle's kind of ethos that I think overlaps. Um, you know, as I was mentioning to Shaan beforehand, you know, you guys, uh... Like, it, it takes all different kinds to build a company, and you guys have sort of the sales, you know, business DNA natively, right? And for me, that's very much an acquired tongue, you know, where, like, I, I can emulate, you know, business, and I can, I can run that in an 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? Um, but I think one area of overlap potentially with The Hustle, you know, sort of audience is, uh, 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 you really think about the millions or billions of hours that are used on social networks. Um, 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, uh, you could only transfer status online and not value. And, uh, what that means is that everything basically boiled down to status games. Leaderboard, what's the most popular, how many followers, how many faves, et cetera. And those appear locally non-zero sum, but are globally zero sum. That is to say, locally, it appears it costs me nothing to give this person a 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 ameliorated in places like Reddit, where they use pseudonyms. But it's an issue. Anyway, what's my point? So 1729, uh, you know, my, 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, were talking about that. Um, and I think the new Hacker News i- 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 burn. So we actually have a third thing, proof of workout, right? So basically, you're pursuing, you know, truth, health, and wealth 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 third. You never want to do something that's untrue to make money or, you know, to, to sacrifice your long-term health for wealth. I mean, whatever, losing sleep one day, okay, may not the end of the world. For a year, it's gonna affect your long-term health, you know? And that's actually gonna affect even from a pure dollars and cents view, it's gonna affect your wealth generating capacity and your capacity to provide value for your employees and your shareholders. So 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-

   8. SPShaan Puri11:45

      So the, the-

   9. SPSpeaker11:45

      Go ahead

   10. SPShaan Puri11:46

       ... this true health and wealth thing, is this, like, a personal saying, or is this, like, the, the... Is this, like, the slogan for 1729?

   11. SPSpeaker11:52

       It's the slogan for 1729. It's basically I think of as the new liberté, égalité, fraternité. Okay? Um-

   12. SPShaan Puri11:59

       Yeah, that's great. Yeah

   13. SPSpeaker12:00

       ... you know, I, I know it sounds ambitious, but basically, um, as a tripartite motto for a new kind of state In the, in the fullness of time. Um, and, uh, the reason is that, um, technology actually allows us to do all three. You know, with crypto in particular, with decentralized ledgers, we can-

   14. SPShaan Puri12:19

       So Balaji, can I, can I ask the question-

   15. SPSpeaker12:20

       Go ahead, yeah

   16. SPShaan Puri12:20

       ... in a slightly different way-

   17. SPSpeaker12:22

       Of course

   18. SPShaan Puri12:22

       ... which is, whenever I'm looking at an investment, I think, I ask the founders this, my favorite question to ask a founder is, "Awesome. What does the world... Let's fast-forward three years. What does the world look like if this has been adopted? What does my, what does my day look like, uh, 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, uh, cool new lane that, uh, gets opened up-

   19. SPSpeaker12:44

       Yep

   20. SPShaan Puri12:44

       ... as something like this gets more adopted. So what does the world-

   21. SPSpeaker12:46

       Yeah

   22. SPShaan Puri12:46

       ... look like if, if this... Uh, what does my day look like-

   23. SPSpeaker12:48

       So-

   24. SPShaan Puri12:48

       ... if I, if this gets adopted?

   25. SPSpeaker12:48

       What does it look like? Well, first is, um, rather than just accumulating karma, you're actually accumulating something of value, right? So something, a tradable asset. Um, you're earning cryptocurrency. You're, you're, you're actually leveling up yourself. Imagine if you didn't just gain, I don't know, 100,000 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, mid-2000s, that was actually a great deal because they were giving these free platforms that you could broadcast to anybody in the world. Um, and they would maintain everything for you. They give all the hosting. You know, the 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 that I'm putting into it," the hours into your tweets or whatever, um, you aren't get- seeing a single dime out of it. There's zero creator monetization for the most part in these major social networks. Um, I'm not saying... Okay, not totally zero. You could put link in bio at Instagram, and there's some stuff. But it has lagged, right? And, um, 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 and learn, but also to become healthy. And so if this becomes popular, you don't waste time online, or not just waste time, you learn things. Um, you actually gain crypto credentials, not just cryptocurrency. So, like, badges in your wallet which are emblematic or, 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, uh, you complete, you know, 10 questions on, um, I don't know, Russian history, and you get that kind of badge, right? Um, 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, um, you know, kind of illustration of somebody's 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, a Stanford degree in computer science, I, 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, you know, they have 25 courses and 10, 10 weeks per course and 10 problems per course. All 2,500 problems were organized in folders on, on GitHub. You could see their portfolio. You could drill down and see their particular skills. Okay, this guy knows operating systems. She knows compilers. Um, this person knows machine learning. And I can see that as evidenced by the 15 problems they've 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. Um, people have strengths in different areas. Point is, once you unbundle that or you granularize that, once you give individual measurable skills, you can see just how much talent, you know, or, or background somebody has in an area. Oh, this person solved 100 different problems on compilers. Uh, they're actually really an expert in this area, and I've got the badges 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 cryptocurrency or unload it, right? I think one of the things we want to do at 72Trans is have this sort of portable crypto diploma or these crypto credentials so you could log into a job board and just start working because you're automatically qualified on the basis 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 eigenvalues," right? I know Arnoldi-Lanczos. You know, I know, you know, methods for large matrices. I know how to do graph layout, that type of stuff, right? You can't credibly declare that. You can certainly put the words in your CV, but if you guys have hired, you know that that's, uh, an unreliable narrator problem often.

   26. SPShaan Puri16:46

       Right.

   27. SPSpeaker16:46

       Right? You know, people will say something-

   28. SPShaan Puri16:47

       And how does, so how does that... Uh-

   29. SPSpeaker16:49

       Jump in and cut me off, by the way, if, if, you know. Yeah, go ahead.

   30. SPSam Parr16:51

       I, I think Shaan and I might ask the s- a similar question. But basically, like what I'm understanding with this is, like... So right now as it is, it's f- a much simpler... It's not doing everything you just said.
5. 20:12 – 31:39

   Why tech has to engage media: a timeline from tech/media indifference to ‘techlash’

   1. SPSam Parr20:12

      Shaan, I, I, I think that we can take this in so many ways. I want to talk about media eventually.

   2. SPSpeaker20:17

      Sure.

   3. SPSam Parr20:17

      But where do... 'Cause this is so interesting what he's like. Do you want to-

   4. SPShaan Puri20:21

      Yeah.

   5. SPSam Parr20:22

      Like-

   6. SPShaan Puri20:22

      Okay. We'll hear-

   7. SPSam Parr20:23

      He, he, he just threw out this, like, meaty thing, and we could, like, chop this up-

   8. SPShaan Puri20:27

      [laughs]

   9. SPSam Parr20:27

      ... in, like, 100 different ways. There's... So, like, I want to talk about this anonymous work thing, which is somewhat like this. I 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.

   10. SPSpeaker20:36

       Sure.

   11. SPSam Parr20:36

       Where do you want to take this, Shaan?

   12. SPShaan Puri20:37

       So let's jump around because I think that's... If, if this was... Let's do it like we always do. If this was just us hanging out, having a conversation, and then the listeners are flies on the wall. Uh, that's what people like best, so let's do that. So, uh, yeah, what would you say right now if this was a normal conversation? You'd be like, "Tell me what the..." You know, "Let's talk about media."

   13. SPSam Parr20:52

       Well, I, I, I, 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 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. It's like this circle jerk community, um, 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, eh. And, and both are circle jerk communities. Like, they both can stink, and they both can rock, whatever. So, um, but you're saying that you're paying attention to content now in media. I was talking with you. I don't know. Did we do a call? We did something-

   14. SPSpeaker21:33

       Something

   15. SPSam Parr21:33

       ... where I was teaching, where I was teaching you about email because you're like, "This email thing is cool."

   16. SPSpeaker21:39

       [laughs]

   17. SPSam Parr21:39

       And I was like, "Duh, dude. What the hell?"

   18. SPSpeaker21:41

       Was that about-

   19. SPSam Parr21:42

       Like, yeah, you-

   20. SPSpeaker21:42

       I, I, I, I remember we had a call, and I remember you had actually some insight. I don't think it was quite like-

   21. SPSam Parr21:49

       Oh, I-

   22. SPSpeaker21:49

       Go ahead. Yeah.

   23. SPSam Parr21:50

       No, I, I'm-

   24. SPSpeaker21:50

       Yeah

   25. SPSam Parr21:50

       ... I'm teasing you. You, you, you... I s- I criticized your website. I go, "Dude, if you want email to be part of your website, just make your website like your personal domain. Like, just make that an email form-

   26. SPSpeaker22:01

       Oh

   27. SPSam Parr22:01

       ... and that's it."

   28. SPSpeaker22:01

       Got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I understand. I understand. So the thing is that, um, I was actually building 1729 at the time, but your suggestion of actually having the subscriber thing on the front page like Substack is actually what we did do. So we did take that suggestion, and I think it's good. Um, so-

   29. SPSam Parr22:20

       But what I'm-

   30. SPSpeaker22:20

       Yeah, go ahead.
6. 31:39 – 38:23

   Memes as ‘human scripts’ and the spread of contagious ideas

   1. SPSpeaker31:39

      but they didn't have the, the, the meta level story. They didn't have the meta level narrative. So it's like that saying about, uh, economists, right? Practical men who believe themselves fully devoid of external influence are often the slaves of some dead economist. Have you ever heard that? You know, that's by, uh, John, John Maynard Keynes, I think. Um, so his point being that these ideas float around in the air, and people are running on scripts that they don't even realize they're running on because media scripts humans just as code scripts machines, right? This is something I had in the Ferriss podcast, right? So tech had sort of abandoned-

   2. SPShaan Puri32:12

      Unpack, unpack that for a second.

   3. SPSpeaker32:13

      Yeah.

   4. SPShaan Puri32:13

      For somebody who doesn't get it real qu- right off the top, you know.

   5. SPSpeaker32:15

      Sure.

   6. SPShaan Puri32:16

      Saying co- you know, just the way that, y- you know... Uh, what is a script in the way that the media scripts humans?

   7. SPSpeaker32:22

      Um, masks work, masks don't work. Um, okay, boomer. Um, e- every meme, right? Uh, for example, okay, y- you see a bunch of kids when they come-

   8. SPShaan Puri32:33

      Or the, or the ca- the Karen thing.

   9. SPSpeaker32:34

      Yeah, the Karen thing. You know, you s- see a bunch of kids when they come out of a movie theater. What is the first thing they do?

   10. SPShaan Puri32:42

       I haven't seen kids come out of a movie theater. [laughs]

   11. SPSpeaker32:44

       [laughs]

   12. SPShaan Puri32:44

       I don't know.

   13. SPSpeaker32:45

       Okay. A bunch of kids come out of a movie theater. The first thing they do is they start quoting lines from the movie, right?

   14. SPShaan Puri32:50

       Yeah.

   15. SPSpeaker32:50

       They just reenact what they just saw on screen, right?

   16. SPShaan Puri32:54

       Right.

   17. SPSpeaker32:54

       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 it is just show it being done, right? And that is kind of, you know, Peter Thiel's, you know, a, a citation of René Girard on mimesis I think is important. Like, humans are mimetic. That's how we acquire language. That's how we align on objectives, you know. And I think that, um, whether you want to call it contagious mental illness, I think that's an understudied concept, by the way. We know that there's contagious physical illnesses. We know there's viruses, right? Uh, contagious mental illness, well, we've sort of all stuck our brains into Twitter, right? Like this vat, right? Like imagine putting your brain into a vat with 300 million other people, and they're all just sending electromagnetic, you know, th- their brain states to you. It feels a little unhygienic if you think about it that way, right? Um, and in, in an interesting sense, we sort of social distance away from each other offline, but we packed close online, like social networking packed close. And what that meant was that bad memes, you know, crazy memes could spread faster than ever, wildfire. Whoosh, like this, right? Because everybody's brain was connected to everybody's brain, right? There's, you know, there's a famous, uh, cartoon of this, um, you know, with the, with the stock market where it shows the meme contagion with respect to prices, you know. And it's like, uh, a guy says, "Okay, I can't have any more of this. Goodbye." And someone overhears him, and they're like, "Goodbye? Buy? Buy? Buy, buy, buy."

   18. SPShaan Puri34:22

       [laughs]

   19. SPSpeaker34:22

       You know, like, um... A- and then, and then, then there's somebody else who overhears it, and it's like, um, "I think this stock could really excel." And then someone's like, "Excel? Sell, sell? Sell, sell, sell."

   20. SPShaan Puri34:33

       [laughs]

   21. SPSpeaker34:33

       Right? And, and it's actually really funny, right? Because, um, you know-

   22. SPShaan Puri34:38

       [laughs]

   23. SPSpeaker34:39

       ... it, it just sort of conveys these sort of like traveling waves of, of memes, right? Right now we don't have great visuals on this. We can't, uh, we can't do the molecular neurology of the meme like we can do the molecular biology of the gene. Uh, let me explain what I mean by that. The concept of genetics, uh, predated molecular genetics. You know, like Mendel went into these phenomenological experiments where you could see, you know, like the, the pea plants and so on, big A, little A, if you remember that from high school or what have you. Uh, before people understood the biochemistry, uh, of, you know, deoxyribonucleic acid and how a gene is actually represented in the double helix and all that 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 are ideas represented in the brain, right? How are they stored? How are they retrieved? How are they accessed? How are they communicated? People have done things on this with like, you know, the so-called, uh, Jennifer Aniston neuron, right, where, you know, it appears there's actually sites in the brain that would actually store Jennifer Aniston. Like you see something, and it, it just has, you know, where, where 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 this celeb stuff. It's not my thing. But, um, this is from that, uh... It's from a paper a while ago when Jennifer Aniston was still, I think, very much in the news. Not as much today, right? Um, that concept seems to also exist to some extent within neural networks, um, you know, like the new, you know, like the, the, the AI stuff that's being done where you can actually seem to, um, express, uh, like a, like an abstract concept where a neuron replaces. I think OpenAI, I forget who, I think it was OpenAI who 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, I... We're not yet there, but eventually we'll be able to see things like, okay, here's this traveling wave of ideas, mimetic contagion. Here are ideas that serve as vaccines against those other ideas, right? They, they block them out because these ideas are themselves trying to spread.

   24. SPSam Parr36:50

       So yeah, so how does this... So, like, I'm gonna say, like, here's the, 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 can do that by, by using sticky viral content, which boils down to funny memes. Um, and that the internet is still on tap, and then we can all- we're all racing to stake, put our stake in the ground, and email is one great empire to build. Is that kind of what you're getting at?

   25. SPSpeaker37:18

       Well, email is one piece of it, right? Um, but-

   26. SPSam Parr37:21

       Yeah

   27. SPSpeaker37:21

       ... but basically, you know, there's push notifications. That's just a mechanism of how nodes are connected. But on a side note on that, I do think that within 5 to 10 years, in addition to email and text message, your, um, ENS name will become probably the th- ENS name or let's say crypto name will become the third most popular communication channel. Um-

   28. SPSam Parr37:42

       Well, I want to talk about that in a second-

   29. SPSpeaker37:43

       Sure

   30. SPSam Parr37:43

       ... 'cause that's amazing. But to wrap up the media thing, so to, what did, what did Shaan say earlier? He was say- he, he had a good question, which was like, "In three years, what's the world gonna look like?" What's your... Let's say that you are running, which you kind of are, um, this small media business. Maybe one day it will be a media empire. What do you think that's gonna look like? Um, and, like, how's that gonna function? How's that business model gonna work?
7. 38:23 – 47:58

   Cryptography as decentralized truth: from Bitcoin ownership to a ‘ledger of record’

   1. SPSpeaker38:23

      Exactly. That's right. So, so excuse my digression, and, you know, maybe I can edit this down into sound bites or, or sh- 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, um, there's another story to be told, which is, uh, for example, there's a website called techjournalismislessdiversethantech.com, okay?

   2. SPSam Parr38:50

      [laughs]

   3. SPSpeaker38:51

      Um, so a Nigerian guy basically tried to submit this as an op-ed to a bunch of, uh, tech journalism outlets and couldn't get it there, and I put up a prize, and he actually went and did this analysis, and it shows that actually tech is, like, 30 points more diverse than the media outlets that constantly give tech shit about this, right? Um, and so the, um, you know, another story is that actually a lot of the owners of these media corporations are, like, literally inherited wealth, like nepotists that, you know, just got the family business from their father's father's father's father. And, uh, you know, you know, another aspect is they're mostly American, as opposed to the mostly immigrant nature of tech, which is very global and has an international purview, um, and so on and so forth. There's actually a number of ways where, uh, the narrative of these media corporations, where they, they run billboards that literally they market themselves as truth on a billboard or democracy. Like, democracy dies in darkness. Like, that's how they market themselves on a billboard. Or, or fairness and balance, right? That's just corporate propaganda literally by these legacy media corporations to define themselves as the literal truth, you know? And they believe this. You know, their 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 arrogance or... I don't think any tech company would be so crazy as to market itself as the literal truth. But now actually we have an answer as to what that literal truth is, which is cryptography. Cryptography, and especially how the blockchain actually puts it online, is decentralized truth, right? It's mathematical truth. It's truth that anybody has access to. Um, you know, as I mentioned in a previous podcast, basically everybody knows exactly how much Bitcoin somebody has, you know? Whether you're Palestinian or Israeli, Democrat or Republican, that's not something there's actually contention over, uh, which is amazing because it's this trillion-dollar piece of international property that's the kind of thing people usually fight over. And we can use those-

   4. SPSam Parr40:39

      So what are you implying? Pe- pe- we're gonna be, we're gonna be covering that? We're gonna be co- covering these transactions, and we're gonna know-

   5. SPSpeaker40:45

      Well-

   6. SPSam Parr40:46

      Is that... I mean-

   7. SPSpeaker40:46

      Here's what I think about-

   8. SPSam Parr40:47

      I mean, yeah, but-

   9. SPSpeaker40:48

      Yeah, here's what I'm pla- here's what-

   10. SPSam Parr40:48

       That's only one, that's only one nit- niche. That's an interesting one, though.

   11. SPSpeaker40:52

       Yes.

   12. SPSam Parr40:52

       But is that... Yeah.

   13. SPSpeaker40:53

       Ah, okay. So step two is DeFi, where it's not just who owns what Bitcoin, but who owns what digital property, digital goods, and that's an enormous swath of the economy, right? Maybe most of the economy over time. All property eventually becomes digital. Should I clarify why I think that? 'Cause that, that's a-

   14. SPSam Parr41:08

       Yeah

   15. SPSpeaker41:08

       ... 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? Um, if you look at, for example, the supply chain or, or what's going on in robotics in terms of, um, like getting food to your door, okay? There's folks who, uh, will... Obviously, the restaurant is now a pop-up, right? Uh, the delivery, you know, bit, there's folks who 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? And so you could imagine the whole thing being fully automated, and it's all robotics, and it's all this electromechanical 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 has sort of, again, sort of ha- been happening in our peripheral vision. We kind of know what's going on, Boston Dynamics and whatnot. But what I think is gonna 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 we're gonna see more and more of that. You're starting to see actually ro- robots in the field, like these robot dogs. I think we're gonna see way more of that, and it's gonna come pretty quickly. 'Cause once a robot can do something, you've turned labor into capital because it's all electricity, and the value creation-

   16. SPSam Parr42:26

       So, and l- Sam, so-

   17. SPSpeaker42:28

       Okay

   18. SPSam Parr42:28

       ... so, so I want you to-

   19. SPSpeaker42:29

       I know. That's just a premise. I, I'm installing that premise, okay? All property becomes digital, so that's the second phase, right? You know who own- who owns what Bitcoin, and then you know who owns what loans, bonds, stocks, assets, all the type of stuff, okay? But the third phase is the most interesting to me, and with that is it's related to something called crypto oracles. So many of these contracts over here in the second phase, you're doing bets on, um- You know, uh, will this price go up or down? Or more interestingly, uh, will the temperature go up, um, in, you know, this, uh, th- 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, that was kind of similar to the business model of, like, the Climate Corporation, like climate.com, if you remember that, right? For something like that to work, the smart contract needs access to data about the outside world, which is not purely financial, okay? And, uh, that's the crypto oracle problem, where basically oracles broadcast data on chain, and they sign it, and they say, "I'm reporting that this is true. I, the weather channel, am saying that it's 82 degrees in Poughkeepsie today at this time," right? And they give a timestamp, like temperature feed. And this is happening not just for temperature, but it's happening for, um, you know, crime statistics, for not just just individual crimes from which statistics are calculated. It's happening for medical records, right? So a hospital wouldn't just say, "We have 1,000 coronavirus patients." It actually has a feed of this patient at this time, this patient at that time. Um, 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 Diligence 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 data happens here. The temperature data happens here. But what I call the ledger of record is essentially the integration of all these crypto oracles, and the reason they go on chain is that it's profitable. You can trade off of that information, or you can make money off that information. So each individual oracle goes on chain, and it's subsidized. So you've got a, a micro-incentive to put it online that's not some macro, you know, highfalutin, you know, concept. But the macro concept is as all of those individual oracles go into this thing I call the ledger of record, you now have cryptographically verifiable facts about the world. You have a digital history, an 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? Uh, if the Twitter database was downloadable, and eventually, you know, either something like it... E- 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, what people talked about, all the memetic 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 dataset isn't open. In the future, with this ledger of record, it would be, and you'd be able to establish what happened at what time. And so that is the sense, Sam, in which you go simply from just who owns what Bitcoin to who owns what smart contracts to who said what thing at what time, like what facts were asserted, 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 instead. All right. Let me pause there. I know that's a whole download, but I, maybe I can express it better.

   20. SPShaan Puri46:00

       I'm gonna summarize some of the, some of the interesting ideas that you brought up. So I think, uh, and you can take a drink of water. You deserve it. Um, so, [laughs] so, so I think one of the interesting things was kind of s- observation of m- first media ignoring tech, and then sort of as tech became more powerful, ignoring media. And what you're identifying is that technology companies are gonna realize the power of media, meaning being able to shape the narrative rather than just being the villain in the narrative. Continue.

   21. SPSpeaker46:23

       This is a third swing of the pendulum. Now we're in the middle of the third-

   22. SPShaan Puri46:26

       So that's one, that's one interesting trend.

   23. SPSpeaker46:27

       Yes.

   24. SPShaan Puri46:27

       If you're building a company right now, that's very much worth considering.

   25. SPSpeaker46:31

       Yep.

   26. SPShaan Puri46:31

       Uh, and in order to do that, you're gonna have to flex different muscles, uh, storytelling, memes, packaging, cl- you know, different things that-

   27. SPSpeaker46:37

       I've got a meme on memes

   28. SPShaan Puri46:37

       ... that you don't have to do. What's that?

   29. SPSpeaker46:39

       Did I give you my meme on memes?

   30. SPShaan Puri46:40

       Yeah.
8. 47:58 – 52:58

   Oracles and advocates: separating raw facts from editorial selection (and ‘decentralized media’)

   1. SPSpeaker47:58

      Very able summary, but let me offer a few asterisks.

   2. SPShaan Puri48:01

      Please.

   3. SPSpeaker48:02

      So I think the vision of the future is oracles and advocates, right? So redefine a reporter as, like a sensor, right? A sensor that essentially writes data on chain, okay? Which can literally be, um, like, like a machine that just takes a temperature sense and writes it on chain.

   4. SPShaan Puri48:19

      Right.

   5. SPSpeaker48:19

      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? Um-

   6. SPShaan Puri48:29

      So the we- the weatherman becomes a sensor who tells you the weather-

   7. SPSpeaker48:32

      The weatherman becomes a sensor

   8. SPShaan Puri48:33

      ... in a certain area.

   9. SPSpeaker48:33

      That's right.

   10. SPShaan Puri48:34

       Yeah.

   11. SPSpeaker48:34

       That's right. Or, but this-

   12. SPShaan Puri48:35

       Go ahead

   13. SPSpeaker48:35

       ... but this, this is kind... a little... The...

   14. SPShaan Puri48:38

       Okay. So I, I understand what your, your vision is here, but it's missing a whole lot.

   15. SPSpeaker48:43

       Wait, wait, wait, wait.

   16. SPShaan Puri48:43

       For example-

   17. SPSpeaker48:43

       Let me give you the second part of it. Hold on. Before you... 'cause you, 'cause you might be right. Okay. The first layer, that base layer, is the raw facts, cryptographical attestations, uh, cr- right, from, from sensors. And w- 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 its track record. You can involve other kinds of things there, right? Um, 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 100 of the measurements of the first guy. Um, there's a hypergeometric distribution which is like, you know, auditing, um- ... things off an assembly line, like pick a ball and see if it's corrupted or not. Uh, but then the second layer is, uh, advocates on top of those oracles. Okay? So these are humans, and you just assume that a human has an editorial judgment. You know why? 'Cause it's 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 cite in 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. We can see not just what was included, but crucially what was omitted. The-

   18. SPShaan Puri50:03

       Right. So this seems like, but this seems like an entire... So, okay, so what you're gonna do is, uh, 1729, you're gonna hire, uh, 200 engineers-

   19. SPSpeaker50:11

       Okay. I, I don't think he's talking about 1729 for this whole thing, right? You're-

   20. SPShaan Puri50:14

       No.

   21. SPSpeaker50:14

       Yeah.

   22. SPShaan Puri50:14

       I know. I'm just making that-

   23. SPSpeaker50:15

       Yeah, sure

   24. SPShaan Puri50:15

       ... I'm just ma- using that. Yeah, the, your am- your media empire, you're gonna hire 200 engineers to build this, um, um, what did you call it? The, um, the, um-

   25. SPSpeaker50:24

       Ledger of record

   26. SPShaan Puri50:25

       ... your, your ledger of record. Um, and then you're gonna hire 200 journalists to editorialize... Uh, sorry, you're not calling them journalists, advocates, uh, to editorialize some of the, the facts, correct?

   27. SPSpeaker50:38

       No. Uh, so I've got a different... So it's actually useful. I, I would call what you just said, like, uh, I don't mean this in a bad way, but sort of like the rear-view mirror looking model. Um, here's at least what I'm planning to do, which may well fail, but, you know, at least this is what I'm thinking about. So first is it's decentralized media. So what I want to do is invest in lots of individual, uh, you know, diverse influencers, pseudonymous voices around the world, okay? So basically, you know, uh, everything that's not Brooklyn wokes, you know, all these other voices that are, are underrepresented in our conversation ideologically, demographically, internationally, technologically, you know, like scientific depth being brought to bear, those are the kind of folks that I'd want to fund, number one, right?

   28. SPShaan Puri51:19

       But is that chosen by you? In a-

   29. SPSpeaker51:21

       Yeah

   30. SPShaan Puri51:21

       ... so is it central choosing decentral? You know, uh, uh, you know what I mean?
9. 52:58 – 54:35

   The Network State and the roadmap from startups to ‘startup cities’ to ‘network states’

   1. SPSpeaker52:58

      which is I have a book, uh, The Network State, which I've been... I'm, I'm a perfectionist, so I edit the chapters, and I edit them and edit them. So I put the first one up at 1729.com, you know, how to start a new country. And I think it's done pretty well. It, you know, like, uh, it's, it's, uh, it's got a lot of good feedback, and I think it's stimulated some thinking. And essentially the idea is, you know, um, 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 a, you know, piece of territory or, you know, or, or, or declare, or conversely take over, like, a oil platform near England and call yourself Sealand, right? Instead, you have a community that you build in the cloud, and they go and take piece of land all around the world, uh, which are like, you know, cul-de-sacs or apartment complexes and so on, and you network them together such that it's something which may eventually have a scale of hundreds of thousands or millions of people, and the footprint of a contiguous state, but it's discontiguous and it's networked on the internet, right? So that's the third part, which is a story. So it is not simply content or technology, but it's narrative.

   2. SPShaan Puri53:59

      Uh, by the way, who, who, who's doing that? Is anybody... Do you think that, is there a project out there, or do you feel like there's anybody out there who's doing that, taking that approach to 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 where those people actually concrete?

   3. SPSpeaker54:14

      So, so I think, I think it's a 20-year project. And, you know, basically, uh, my, my one-liner on this is 2000s were the tech companies. 2010s, crypto protocols. 2020s, startup cities. 2030s, network states. Okay? So company, protocol, city, state. I think that's where we're going. We're essentially, I think it's just beginning.

10. 54:35 – 56:24

    What is a startup city? Three definitions and examples of the ‘city-as-startup’ idea

    1. SPShaan Puri54:35

       And so we, we are in the, we are in the startup cities phase right now. So let's transition to that real quick. So-

    2. SPSpeaker54:39

       Yeah

    3. SPShaan Puri54:40

       ... uh, what is a startup city? Is this like Sam leaving San Francisco, moving to Austin, you know-

    4. SPSpeaker54:45

       Great question

    5. SPShaan Puri54:46

       ... the mayor of Miami actively recruiting candidates like a startup CEO would and, and hiring away great talent into Miami? Is that what a startup city is to you, or is it something else?

    6. SPSpeaker54:56

       Yeah. So l- 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, what San Francisco used to be. Um, ha. [laughs] You know?

    7. SPShaan Puri55:06

       [laughs]

    8. SPSpeaker55:06

       Uh, the, okay, nowadays it's just, you know, like somebody who's choosing San Francisco for a startup, I crinkle my eyebrows as l- uh, you know, I mentioned it before. Before the pandemic, I said it 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-

    9. SPShaan Puri55:27

       Right

    10. SPSpeaker55:27

        ... basically you're just getting locked into this horrible cost structure of a declining product when far better options are available. I question their judgment, you know? Um, so the first definition is a city where startups just happen, okay? The second is a city that acts like a startup, which is Miami now under Suarez, which is amazing, okay? And the third definition is a city that's a startup itself, like prospera.hn or culdesac.com, or the various startup cities that pronomos.vc is investing in. And, um, the, the thing is, I think, uh, you know, obviously when I, when I said 2000s tech companies, 2010s crypto protocols, 2020s startup cities, 2030s network states, that's sort of when that exponential starts, right? What is the analog of Bitcoin in 2010? It's startup cities in 2021.

    11. SPShaan Puri56:13

        Right.

    12. SPSpeaker56:14

        Okay? Where... Go ahead.

    13. SPShaan Puri56:17

        Uh, I was gonna ask you a different question. It, it came to mind, which is-

    14. SPSpeaker56:18

        Maybe that's a good one. It's a good one to drop on your listeners. Bitcoin in 2010 was a pretty good buy or whatever, you know?

    15. SPShaan Puri56:23

        Yeah, exactly.

    16. SPSpeaker56:24

        Go ahead.

11. 56:24 – 1:03:12

    How Balaji got into Bitcoin: post-2008 thinking, early confusion, and conviction after a crash

    1. SPShaan Puri56:24

       That, and I, I actually want to know-

    2. SPSpeaker56:25

       Why-

    3. SPShaan Puri56:25

       You got into crypto early on. I want to know actually what was the m- uh, 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 just stumbled into? A conversation with a friend? So how'd you hear about it? How'd you get hooked?

    4. SPSpeaker56:39

       Yeah, so-

    5. SPShaan Puri56:39

       And then how long did it take you to sort of like, you know, the mind virus infected you completely and you're like, "Oh, wait, this is actually gonna work." So I would love to hear that from you.

    6. SPSpeaker56:49

       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 so you start thinking more deeply about, you know, the system that you just thought was functional just shattered into a million pieces and, uh, or just didn't work. And, um, I'd been thinking about, like, how the true definition of money is energy in the sense of J-O-U-L-E-S joules. Like, visualize, like, an iPhone, you know, coming together, like, like the rare earth elements and the glass and the aluminum and so on, and the s- and the, the silicon just whoosh, like this molecular 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, uh, various, various chemical processes, how much, how much input energy do you need to catalyze it, um, or to make the reaction run. And, um, 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 reduced the price, right? That's a genuine reduction because humans are able to do this thing more efficiently today than we were in the past, and that'd be the kind of deflation that you want, joule deflation, where because of technology, we've actually made this thing cheaper to do than we used to be able to do, right? Um, now I'd been thinking about this and then, you know, one of my friends, you know, uh, basically like, you know, I'd write these essays or whatever, uh, one of... But just this is before I was a public, you know, public figure, if it sounds like anything. Just, you know, one of my academic friends was like, "Okay, you should, you know, look at this Bitcoin thing." And, uh, I forget exactly when that was, it was 2010 or 2011. But basically, um, I thought it was really interesting because it was also using energy, you know, in a sense, a different way to kind of support value. Um, but it was doing something I thought was 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 had learned about scaling out systems and going parallel and so on and so forth. That, that was, that was something which took me a while to wrap my head around. Not that I thought it was bad, I just thought it was like, I just don't understand this. Or for example, the fact that all blockchain addresses were public. 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, uh, these were genius moves, but, like, having all your transactions out there in public on chain, um, ju- just would've seemed 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 with Zcash and other things how to add back that privacy, right? Um, so I, I followed Bitcoin, but it was actually only after the 2011 crash and recovery that I was like, okay, this thing really has legs. Um, and I wrote, uh, in late 2012, I actually had, um, a course at Stanford I gave where I talked about Bitcoin, and I'm like, I'm not sure if Bitcoin is the one that wins, but it is, uh, a very powerful tech, um, that is, is... Like, something in that class will be a big deal, right? And I think both were correct statements. I could find the exact PDF or whatever if you want. Um, and so that was around the time that Coinbase also got going, and actually Brian and Fred and I, uh, I think we first met January 2013, very, very, very early on in the history of Coinbase. Um, and actually, like, I, I used the Coinbase API in a class that I taught that year, um, and in a MOOC course. And, uh, you know, basically that was kind of my story of getting into Bitcoin and crypto. Um, then the 2013 boom of course happened. But it was basically the crash from $32 down to $2 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.

    7. SPShaan Puri1:00:53

       You, um, you, uh, so you, you def- you, you, you taught... You were a professor?

    8. SPSpeaker1:01:00

       Lecture.

    9. SPShaan Puri1:01:00

       Is that correct?

    10. SPSpeaker1:01:00

        Yeah.

    11. SPShaan Puri1:01:02

        Um, you were a lecturer. I think at, there was some article, I have no idea if it's true, that, uh, you were considering joining the FDA. Uh, um, was that true?

    12. SPSpeaker1:01:10

        Yeah. I mean, or rather I was, I was interviewed for, uh, a very senior role. Um, and-

    13. SPShaan Puri1:01:17

        Yeah, sure

    14. SPSpeaker1:01:20

        At least number two, that was on the table. Uh, but I, I chose not to... I mean, it's now a few years later. I don't usually, like, kiss and tell or whatever, you know. But-

    15. SPSam Parr1:01:30

        Yeah, that's okay. The, the, the point, the point, the point is, is that you, you have this, like, academic side of you, and whi- which is fascinating. You have this crypto guy part of you, uh, as, uh, 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 companies.

    16. SPSpeaker1:01:47

        Sure.

    17. SPSam Parr1:01:47

        So you, you helped build... You p- And this is, like, traditional. Like, this is the most normal part of you-

    18. SPSpeaker1:01:52

        [laughs]

    19. SPSam Parr1:01:52

        ... which isn't even nor- Like, like, the most normal-

    20. SPSpeaker1:01:55

        Sure

    21. SPSam Parr1:01:55

        ... part of you helped build, like, a $50 billion company called Coinbase.

    22. SPSpeaker1:01:59

        Yeah.

    23. SPSam Parr1:01:59

        The, the most normal part of you, uh, I used when I'm freezing my embryos.

    24. SPSpeaker1:02:03

        [laughs]

    25. SPSam Parr1:02:03

        And we just found out that, like, one of our potential children just had, like, Down syndrome.

    26. SPSpeaker1:02:08

        Oh, shit.

    27. SPSam Parr1:02:08

        And like, oh, that's the most normal part of you, is that you, you built that shit, right?

    28. SPSpeaker1:02:14

        Well, it's funny.

    29. SPSam Parr1:02:15

        Which is-

    30. SPSpeaker1:02:15

        It's, it's funny because I, uh, for your audience, yes, I think that's probably true.
12. 1:03:12 – 1:47:19

    Pragmatic ideologue, product hooks, and the ‘idea maze’ of entrepreneurship

    1. SPSpeaker1:03:12

       I think I'm, uh... You know, I like to think of myself as a pragmatic ideologue, where I have a, a horizon, where I have 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 lists and, 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, um-

    2. SPShaan Puri1:03:40

       By the way, I think, I think that's evident when-

    3. SPSpeaker1:03:41

       ... basically, uh-

    4. SPShaan Puri1:03:43

       Sorry. I was just gonna say, I think that's evident. You, you, you kind of-

    5. SPSpeaker1:03:46

       Good

    6. SPShaan Puri1:03:46

       ... proved that when we, we, we asked you about 1729. And, uh, when you talked about it, you talked about essentially disrupting, you know, education, making, uh, 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-

    7. SPSpeaker1:04:07

       Yes

    8. SPShaan Puri1:04:07

       ... what's the simple building block that we need to do that? Let's send a newsletter every day with a micro task or... that people can do to learn something and ear- earn, earn a little bit of money." And so I think you ev- I think you embodied that exact idea of, like, what's the extreme-

    9. SPSpeaker1:04:21

       Yeah

    10. SPShaan Puri1:04:21

        ... long-term North Star, and then what is today's building block in order to move forward?

    11. SPSam Parr1:04:26

        And th- and, and that's why I, and that's why I was getting like, "What the hell are you up to, man?"

    12. SPShaan Puri1:04:29

        [laughs]

    13. SPSpeaker1:04:29

        [laughs] Well, it's funny.

    14. SPSam Parr1:04:31

        But, but, uh-

    15. SPSpeaker1:04:31

        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, uh, and I forget the other ones, right? Um, but it's, think it's close, right? And, um, so the, you know, you know, Tinder is lust, right? And Twitter is wrath. And arguably early Google, which is pretty act- you know, that's pretty highbrow, like search, you know, but arguably that's sloth, you know? Um, and, you know, uh, uh, then Uber Eats or, or DoorDash is gluttony. I lo- I love those companies, so don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to diss any of them, right? Um, and, uh, so, you know, the, tho- those hooks, basically I think you need to deliver a visceral instant benefit to somebody, right? Where in a second you can explain what it is. Okay, a newsletter that pays you, right? Earn Bitcoin for submitting a form for, in, in a minute, right? So instant benefit. If you can't give that to somebody instantly, then it's too complicated, you know? Uh, rarely there's exceptions. You know, rarely there's things that, um, have a very end-loaded benefit, you know? Like, things like, um, Ethereum or rome research.com, for example. You know, that rewarded an academic mindset at the beginning. That was very long term, right? But even Ethereum, for example, there was like a speculative upside, you know, which was the visceral short-term thing where you could align the short-term mentality with the long-term mentality. Um-

    16. SPSam Parr1:06:11

        But I have to bring you back to the original question.

    17. SPSpeaker1:06:12

        Go ahead. Go. Callus bring me back to Earth. Go ahead. Yeah, yeah.

    18. SPSam Parr1:06:14

        I got to bring you back-

    19. SPSpeaker1:06:15

        Yeah, please

    20. SPSam Parr1:06:15

        ... 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, and I have a reason for asking.

    21. SPSpeaker1:06:25

        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've been fortunate from both. Um, it's interesting because as an investor you have, um... It's 1% or less of the work. It's 10 to 20% of the return, but it's 0% of the control, you know? And, you know, I have never been, like, a tech guy in the sense of, um... Actually, you know how there's people who talk about, "Oh, you know, I had a Commodore 64 really early on, and I was programming," you know, and so on. That's actually, that was actually never me. Um, or I, 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, I was into, you know, like, uh, math and physics, you know, growing up and, you know, Feynman lectures and all the type of stuff, and, you know, thought that I was gonna be maybe, like, a stats professor or, or applied mathematics professor or something like that. Um- And so computers were always just a tool, and business was always just a tool. Only later to... You know, the reason I got into, you know, genomics or clinical genomics, the reason I did a startup was, uh... And I'll come back to your point. I know you're gonna... And you gotta, we got a thing. The reason I did that was in academia, if you raise $10 million in a grant, raise isn't the right term. You get a $10 million grant, and each row of data costs $1,000 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 on that large sample thing. So the, the, the thing is that the 0% control, even though I am an investor, and I think I've done fairly well at it and so on, I invest on an ideological basis. I invest in the world that I'd want to build, and there's probably things which are, you know, good financial investments that, um, you know, I, I, I just, I'm just not interested in something if it's, if it's just making money. I, I can sort of force myself to be in that headspace, uh, but, but I, I have to force myself, you know?

    22. SPSam Parr1:08:33

        Yeah. The reason I was just asking was just I just think that you're the... You- I mean, you're, like, supposed to be this... The, the stereotype of you is that you have all these odd and unique frameworks-

    23. SPSpeaker1:08:42

        [laughs]

    24. SPSam Parr1:08:42

        ... that create these brilliant ideas, yada, yada, yada. That's cool. I, I, I dig that. But what I was curious about, like, just what's your life, um, philosophy towards certain things, specifically like-

    25. SPSpeaker1:08:51

        How do you think about execution, for example?

    26. SPSam Parr1:08:53

        ... was your goal just... 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, uh, and that's why I'm wondering because, like, if that is your strategy, I actually think that's kinda cool because there was some practicality, and then, like, genius stuff comes out afterwards. And-

    27. SPSpeaker1:09:14

        It's interesting

    28. SPSam Parr1:09:15

        ... that's what I was curious. Like-

    29. SPSpeaker1:09:16

        In, in that sense, I'm not capable of... I shouldn't say I'm not capable of it. I, I, I didn't just do a job for the sake of doing a job to get the money so then do the next thing. Um, I really believed-

    30. SPSam Parr1:09:29

        Yeah
13. 1:47:19 – 2:11:00

    Remote work, relocation, and ‘longitude arbitrage’: why movement becomes a bigger lever

    1. SPSpeaker1:47:19

       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. Um, but you ideally want to be part of a... You want to have a thesis on why some huge trend will occur. Let me give you another example of this, by the way. Teleport, which we set up in, um, 2014-

    2. SPSam Parr1:47:40

       I was just, uh, I was just gonna ask you all about Teleport.

    3. SPSpeaker1:47:43

       Yeah.

    4. SPSam Parr1:47:43

       Um, I'm, I'm trying to find the old website. Was it dot... Was it just .com?

    5. SPSpeaker1:47:47

       No, .org. It's still up.

    6. SPSam Parr1:47:49

       Ah, that's why. So can you... Well, the way that I understand it is Teleport was going to crawl, uh, aggregate tons and tons of data and tell you the best place to live.

    7. SPSpeaker1:48:03

       Yeah, 'cause here's a thought. Basically, um, an extremely valuable search engine, maybe the most valuable search engine, is the one that tells you the economically best place to live because there's al-

    8. SPSam Parr1:48:16

       Well, it wasn't just economically, was it? Wasn't it just like, uh-

    9. SPSpeaker1:48:20

       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, and when I say implicitly, it'd be like, okay, this place is, you know, $3,000 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 could sort of back out the function of how much more people value that extra degree of warmth. Do- do you see what I'm saying? Right?

    10. SPSam Parr1:48:54

        Yep. Yeah, it still gets a fair bit of traffic. It looks like still p- people are still going to the site.

    11. SPSpeaker1:48:58

        Yeah, people are still using it.

    12. SPSam Parr1:48:59

        Did you, did you-

    13. SPSpeaker1:48:59

        Yeah

    14. SPSam Parr1:49:00

        ... you sold it to, uh, what's this, Atopia company?

    15. SPSpeaker1:49:03

        Atopia, yeah.

    16. SPSam Parr1:49:03

        I don't know if I've-

    17. SPSpeaker1:49:03

        Which is like a relocation company, right? Um, Teleport I think is, uh, I think we're completely right about everything that people wanted. I mean, it was fine. It was a fine result. Like Sten and, you know, Silver did fine, you know? Um, and, um, um-

    18. SPSam Parr1:49:17

        Why did you say Sten and... Why did you say they did fine?

    19. SPSpeaker1:49:21

        Why'd I say they did fine? Because they basically just did fine in their careers as a function of that. Like, um, the-

    20. SPSam Parr1:49:27

        Oh, got it.

    21. SPSpeaker1:49:27

        Yeah.

    22. SPSam Parr1:49:27

        Okay.

    23. SPSpeaker1:49:28

        Uh, like those were the two co-founders with me. So Sten and, and Silver, early Skype employees, and they've done, they've done great. Um, and, uh, it was, it was a, it was a fine outcome. Um, but it was also a little too early, you know? And basically, it's something where if Teleport and, um, Nomad List is the other one, by the way, which is also quite good, but it's got-

    24. SPSam Parr1:49:49

        Which I love. I think that guy's awesome, man.

    25. SPSpeaker1:49:51

        Yeah. Yeah, yeah. He's, he's, uh, he's actually, uh, levelsio on Twitter. Uh, and-

    26. SPSam Parr1:49:56

        Yeah

    27. SPSpeaker1:49:57

        ... he's good 'cause the only thing, uh, that I think he's probably a little too aggro on is like he's so, he's anti-investor, and there's bad investors. There's also good investors. So that's something, whatever, you know. Um, probably it might just be a Twitter, Twitter thing where if I got the second bit or third bit of information, he might agree there's some value to have people or whatever. Um, but, uh, the thing is that Nomad List and 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, um, the reason I just say economics by the way is just you can put a number on it, right? And so that's something you can plug into an algorithm, and, um, do you know what constrained optimization is?

    28. SPSam Parr1:50:43

        Yes.

    29. SPSpeaker1:50:44

        Okay. All right. So basically-

    30. SPSam Parr1:50:46

        I mean, i- is that basically where you put... you very purposely constrain something-
14. 2:11:00 – 2:23:14

    Decentralizing science with math, replication, and on-chain verification (plus closing on 1729 tasks)

    1. SPSpeaker2:11:00

       human beings thumping their chests and saying, "Science," capital S, you know, or with, with quotations, right? But rather cryptographic facts. By the way, can I, can I dive into that for a second on quote unquote science versus science? This is a very important issue.

    2. SPSam Parr2:11:14

       Yes.

    3. SPSpeaker2:11:14

       Okay.

    4. SPSam Parr2:11:14

       Let's do it.

    5. SPSpeaker2:11:15

       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 peer 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 and did the experiment themselves. That's less and less the case today. Most of the time it is-- Or maybe it's less the case forever. Most of the time it's like a few emailed comments and, like, make a new figure, okay?

    6. SPSam Parr2:11:56

       Right.

    7. SPSpeaker2:11:56

       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, first, let me back up for a second. Science is actually the ostensible basis of our civilization, you know? W- 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, so therefore this policy is there, right? Science says there's a 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, uh, often from peer review as opposed to independent replication, which is subject to 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 owned themselves during the pandemic in many different respects. Like, they admitted that saying that masks don't work was a noble lie, right? Um, which, which wasn't, wasn't even that noble. It was just stupid. It was obvious at the time, you know? Um, and you can't do that too many times, and there's many more examples of that, but that's a particularly egregious one. You can't do that too many times or people just don't trust it, right? So what's the alternative? What's the alt- Because, you know, the answer isn't, in my view, to go to astrology or woo or, or stuff like that. What do we have if not science? Well, there's only one thing that's more prestigious than science. What is that?

    8. SPSam Parr2:13:26

       More prestigious than science? Well, religion.

    9. SPSpeaker2:13:29

       It's not usually thought of as being in opposition.

    10. SPSam Parr2:13:33

        What is it?

    11. SPSpeaker2:13:33

        Math.

    12. SPSam Parr2:13:33

        [sniffs] Okay.

    13. SPSpeaker2:13:35

        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. Um, every scientific paper is based on, um, the collection of data and the generation of, like, figures and tables and so on, right? Um, there's a concept called the open access movement, which is about putting research online and taking it out from behind these publisher paywalls. There's also a concept called reproducible 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 can template a webpage with parameters from a database, you can template a scientific paper with, uh, calculated parameters from that data set, okay? There's, there's, uh, sites like distill.pub, or if you look at what OpenAI does, like a lot of their, uh, uh, 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? The point is that, um, it is... When I talk about science as 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?

    14. SPSpeaker2:14:54

        Computers

    15. SPSpeaker2:14:55

        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, the claims. Okay? Now, we've already seen a huge victory of this, right? Which is, uh, you know, scientific economics has been defeated by mathematical economics that say 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 "scientists," and I put them as quote, quote scientists 'cause they're not... You know, one of the big things, by the way, is it's like, um, s- uh, uh, 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, and a thousand other things. You, you, there's, there's equations for quantum mechanics that you're effectively replicating, independently confirming, 'cause the engineering wouldn't work if the science doesn't, right? So those things have trillions of independent replications, 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 them both 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 replications. And what's awesome about this is this is actually where crypto is. If you think about w- w- what does it mean to have a transaction confirmed on chain? I don't know if you've ever seen blockchain.com. Have you ever sent any cryptocurrency and, and refreshed the blockchain, Shaan, maybe?

    16. SPSpeaker2:16:56

        I've s- sent it a whole bunch of times, but I never sort of tracked and traced the, the transaction befo- you know, sort of the log

    17. SPSpeaker2:17:02

        Okay

    18. SPSpeaker2:17:02

        I, I never looked at the log of, of the transaction.

    19. SPSpeaker2:17:04

        Look at the log. Uh, 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 address that I said I was gonna donate at the time that I said I was gonna do it, right?

    20. SPSpeaker2:17:22

        Mm-hmm.

    21. SPSpeaker2:17:22

        Um, and, uh, and the critical thing there is there's a thing that says number of independent confirmations. How many different miners, right, have confirmed that A did B 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, that you had the digital signature that owned this cryptocurrency-

    22. SPSpeaker2:17:52

        Right

    23. SPSpeaker2:17:52

        ... and so on. That seems like a very limited scope, but as I said, we can expand that to property, we can expand that to lots of other things, right? And to crypto oracles. What's the point? The point is, uh, if you take the concepts of open access, the concepts of, uh, reproducible research, the concept of independent replication and its proximity to the multiple confirmations of on-chain data, right? Uh, you can think about something where, oh, actually all these people have computers, so if the code and the dataset for every paper were actually on chain, uh, not only could I independently replicate at least their post-upload conclusions, right? They may have 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 like you can import a library from GitHub, because again, it's all open state, right? Uh, 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. Po- 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, uh, premises, I can check their premises as well. I can map the, the trail of 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 'cause they have access to all these journals. It's all behind paywalls, right? Some of it is being broken out there with like PubMed Central and so on, but a lot of it is still behind paywalls, 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 it or like unifies it in, in a uniform address, right? Address format that's universal and global. Point being, this is actually a way that, uh, 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 to do independent replications of every post-upload claim. All right. I know that I just threw a ton at you there. [laughs] Um-

    24. SPSpeaker2:20:22

        You threw a ton.

    25. SPSpeaker2:20:23

        Yeah.

    26. SPSpeaker2:20:23

        [laughs]

    27. SPSpeaker2:20:25

        But that's like a recipe for like what crypto science or decentralized science might look like.

    28. SPSpeaker2:20:29

        And ju- just like a quick question. You, you were a partner at a16z, is that what you were doing?

    29. SPSpeaker2:20:35

        Yeah.

    30. SPSpeaker2:20:35

        Um, so you're not just-

Episode duration: 2:36:34