Balaji Srinivasan — Bitcoin and Ethereum, Lee Kuan Yew, US vs China, and More

1. 0:00 – 6:07

   Legal disclaimers, sponsor messages, and setting up Balaji’s background

   1. TFTim Ferriss0:00

      We have an important preface, an important caveat, an important disclaimer before we get started, and here it is provided from my lovely lawyers. Here we go. I am not an investment advisor. All opinions are mine alone. There are risks involved in placing any investment in securities or in Bitcoin or in cryptocurrencies or in anything. None of the information presented today, or really any time since you might be listening to this any time, is intended to form the basis for any offer or recommendation or have any regard to the investment objectives, financial situation, or needs of any specific person. That includes you, my dear listener. So everything you're gonna hear is for informational entertainment purposes only. And with that said, please enjoy. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time what I would take if I could only take one supplement. The answer is invariably Athletic Greens. I view it as all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it, in fact, in The 4-Hour Body, this is more than 10 years ago, and I did not get paid to do so. With approximately 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole food sourced ingredients, you'd be very hard-pressed to find a more nutrient-dense and comprehensive formula on the market. It has multivitamins, multi-mineral greens complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health, an immunity formula, digestive enzymes, adaptogens, and much more. I usually take it once or twice a day just to make sure I've covered my bases if I miss anything I'm not aware of. Of course, I focus on nutrient-dense meals to begin with. That's the basis. But Athletic Greens makes it easy to get a lot of nutrition when whole foods aren't readily available. From travel packets, I always have them in my bag when I'm zipping around. Right now, Athletic Greens is giving my audience a special offer on top of their all-in-one formula, which is a free vitamin D supplement and five free travel packs with your first subscription purchase. Many of us are deficient in vitamin D, I've found that true for myself, which is usually produced in our bodies from sun exposure. So adding a vitamin D supplement to your daily routine is a great option for additional immune support. Support your immunity, gut health, and energy by visiting athleticgreens.com/tim. You'll receive up to a year's supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your subscription. Again, that's athleticgreens.com/tim. This podcast episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep. Sleep is super important to me. In the last few years, I've come to conclude it is the end-all be-all, that all good things, good mood, good performance, good everything seem to stem from good sleep. So I've tried a lot to optimize it. I've tried pills and potions, all sorts of different mattresses, you name it. And for the last few years, I've been sleeping on a Helix Midnight Luxe Mattress. I also have one in the guest bedroom, and feedback from friends has always been fantastic. It's something that they comment on. Helix Sleep has a quiz, takes about two minutes to complete, that matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you. With Helix, there's a specific mattress for each and every body. That is your body, also your taste. So let's say you sleep on your side and like a super soft bed. No problem. Or if you're a back sleeper who likes a mattress that's as firm as a rock, they've got a mattress for you, too. Helix was selected as the number one best overall mattress pick of 2020 by GQ Magazine, Wired, Apartment Therapy, and many others. Just go to helixsleep.com/tim, take their two-minute sleep quiz, and they'll match you to a customized mattress that will give you the best sleep of your life. They have a 10-year warranty, and you get to try it out for 100 nights risk-free. They'll even pick it up from you if you don't love it. And now, my dear listeners, Helix is offering up to $200 off of all mattress orders and two free pillows at helixsleep.com/tim. These are not cheap pillows either, so getting two for free is an upgraded deal. So that's up to $200 off and two free pillows at helixsleep.com/tim. That's Helix, H-E-L-I-X, sleep.com/tim for up to $200 off. So check it out. One more time, Helix, H-E-L-I-X, sleep.com/tim.

   2. BSBalaji Srinivasan4:18

      Optimal minimal. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now we just seem like perfect timing. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism. Living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show.

   3. TFTim Ferriss4:42

      Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I'm gonna keep my preamble short because we are gonna run out of time well before we run out of subject matter with today's guest. Balaji Srinivasan, and I'm sure that that pronunciation could be improved, @balajis. That's B-A-L-A-G... It's not a G, it's a J-I-S. Is an angel investor and entrepreneur, formerly the CTO of Coinbase and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. He was also the co-founder of Earn.com, acquired by Coinbase; Consyl, that's with a S-Y-L, acquired by Myriad; Teleport, acquired by Topia, Topia perhaps; and CoinCenter. He has been named to the MIT Technology Review's Innovators Under 35, that was in 2013. He's the recipient of a Wall Street Journal Innovation Award, many others, and holds a BS, MS, PhD in electrical engineering and an MS in chemical engineering, all from Stanford University. Balaji also teaches the occasional class at Stanford, including an online MOOC, M-O-O-C, that's Massive Open Online Course, in 2013, which reached, as I understand it, more than 250,000 students worldwide. You can find him on Twitter, @balajis. [laughs] I'll get it right this time with a J. B-A-L-A-J-I-S. And you can find much more about him on his website, balajis.com. Balaji, thanks for coming on the show.

   4. BSBalaji Srinivasan6:05

      Great to be here, Tim.

2. 6:07 – 8:26

   Why “1729” matters: Ramanujan’s story and the meaning behind the number

   1. TFTim Ferriss6:07

      And I thought we would start with a number, and that number is 1729. And as I understand it, that's not in reference to a date, but you use that number quite a bit. Could you please provide a bit of context for how you've used that number and why you've used that number?

   2. BSBalaji Srinivasan6:25

      Sure. So I'm actually going to be launching something at that domain probably by the time this podcast is published, hopefully. So it's a domain 1729.com. What does it refer to? It's not a year. It's the first number that's the sum of two cubes in two different ways. And what that refers to is basically the Ramanujan number. You know, so Srinivasa Ramanujan was India's greatest mathematician and, uh, kind of like India's Einstein, but has a kind of a romantic story in the sense that, you know, he was extremely poor and wrote these letters to mathematicians around the world. He had just self-taught math from a textbook. He wrote these letters to mathematicians around the world, and, uh, most of them ignored him, just thought he was a crank, and one guy brought him out to England, this guy G.H. Hardy, and who thought this guy has to be a genius because no one would make up these equations. And so then Ramanujan began a rampage through mathematics and, you know, has people still to this day going through, like, a page of his notebooks for an entire mathematical journal issue because he just wrote down all these results that were true, but he didn't provide the proof. He would just intuit the result. So where does 1729 come from, 1729? Well, unfortunately, Ramanujan died very young. Very, very young from, um... People think it's because he was away from his food and the warm weather of India and so on. But basically, o- on his deathbed, Hardy came in to try to cheer him up. He said, "You know, Ramanujan, I, I came in on a taxi and the license plate, it's very boring, it's 1729." And on his deathbed, Ramanujan still had the wit and faculty to say, "Oh, that's not boring. It's the sum of... first number that's the sum of two cubes in two different ways," because he's on a first name basis with every number. And that's, that's kind of the legend of Ramanujan. And so if you... Have you ever seen Good Will Hunting?

   3. TFTim Ferriss8:13

      I have. Mm-hmm.

   4. BSBalaji Srinivasan8:14

      Yeah. So Good Will Hunting was kind of based on that, so was... There's actually a, a recent... There's a book that was turned into a movie called The Man Who Knew Infinity.

   5. TFTim Ferriss8:20

      It's a very fun movie to watch. I mean, it's, it's engaging. I don't know how factually accurate it is, but-

3. 8:26 – 10:17

   From MOOC to “global talent search”: using the internet to discover and level up hidden talent

   1. BSBalaji Srinivasan8:26

      There's pieces. Actually, the number is in there an- and so on. But to me, you know, for many years actually, before joining Andreessen Horowitz, what I was gonna do is turn the MOOC course that I had done in 2013 into, like, a global talent search because just like you have the Hubble telescope looking for dark matter around the universe, I thought of the mobile telescope, the telescope provided to us by mobile, could help us find the dark talent in the Global South and, you know, the undiscovered talent. And basically, you know, that's not just the Global South, that's Eastern Europe, that's Russia, that's all the former Soviet countries. That's basically the, the world that all these people who didn't have a chance, and I think of that as something that I've wanted to do for a very long time. That's what I was gonna do prior to joining a16z. For a bunch of reasons, you know, I joined a16z instead in 2013, and now I'm kind of coming back to the path not traveled and doing this, quote, "global talent search." And the idea is that basically we who have been fortunate enough to have some resources or winnings, we can offer a hand up to all these people, bring them into the global economy, level them up, give them what we know in terms of education or teaching or what have you. And all of this stuff can be delivered, I know it sounds like a cliche, but at scale over the internet, right? You produce it once, and you can replicate across millions of people. So this is what I'm, what I'm doing next, and hopefully by the time the podcast comes out, this will be, this will be live. Knock on wood. Okay.

   2. TFTim Ferriss9:54

      Amazing. So there are these seeming pillars of, of influence. Pillar may be too strong a word, and I, I think we'll want to explore a few of those, including Lee Kuan Yew perhaps.

   3. BSBalaji Srinivasan10:09

      Sure.

   4. TFTim Ferriss10:09

      And we'll get to that. For people who don't know who that is, we'll, we'll explain because good God, I mean, what, what a figure-

4. 10:17 – 17:30

   What “Startup Engineering” taught: bridging academic rigor and real-world startup execution

   1. BSBalaji Srinivasan10:17

      Yep

   2. TFTim Ferriss10:17

      ... and what an influence. Before we move it further ahead, what was the subject matter and the intent behind the MOOC that you taught?

   3. BSBalaji Srinivasan10:26

      The subject matter, it was... The title was Startup Engineering, and the concept was that it was basically the class that I wish I had had before doing my first startup. And so it's kind of like a time capsule back to somebody who was into math or into just technology in general, but was just completely naive about how to actually run a business or anything like that. When doing my first startup, I actually... This is a first approximation, but I thought that the primary difficulty would be calculating difficult integrals. And I was like, "Okay, that's, that's the hard part, and everything else is kind of, kind of basic. Whatever. We can knock that out before breakfast." Uh, and of course that's not the case.

   4. TFTim Ferriss11:09

      [laughs] As often turns out. [laughs]

   5. BSBalaji Srinivasan11:11

      As often turns out. That's right. Because the thing is as, you know, I was a career academic for many years, and in academia there is a high premium placed on novelty of results, technical difficulty, and, you know, there's some, some good aspects of this. You do... You know, in math, you learn how to think rigorously and go premise, premise, premise, conclusion, really interrogate your results. There's seemingly obvious things that aren't actually true mathematically when you actually go and work them all the way through. Famously, like, you know, the parallel postulate. You know, Euclid is not something you can just take for granted. You get different geometries if, if you assume a different condition there. And you think rigorously in academia, and then you think, "Okay, well, that's, that's the entirety of the world. It's just technical difficulty." And it's not. And so, uh, this course was meant for- Teaching the philosophy and all the nitty-gritty details to go from a command line up to a website with payments, uh, with JavaScript, and all that type stuff, all the ... 'Cause y- you learn computer science in academia, you don't really learn software engineering. And there's a thousand details in, in how that works which are useful to get, number one, like Git and, and stuff like that. And of course, the reason you don't learn those things is they move fast. You have to keep updating it. So that was one piece, and the second piece was the philosophy of startups, meaning what is the difference between a startup versus small business, or why is this happening now? There, there's piece of recent history. For example, do you know what the NSF AUP is?

   6. TFTim Ferriss12:39

      I do not. I'm not even gonna try to pretend. [laughs]

   7. BSBalaji Srinivasan12:41

      Sure, sure, sure. So National Science Foundation had this thing called the Acceptable Use Policy in place for many years, and it prevented commercial traffic on the internet. How about that? So the dot-coms-

   8. TFTim Ferriss12:51

      Did not know that

   9. BSBalaji Srinivasan12:52

      ... yeah, the dot-coms that we know and love were actually not feasible until, I think, about 1991, plus or minus one or two years, but I think it was 1991. They repealed the AUP. And it w- the reason people fought it, they said there was gonna be spam and porn and malware on this commercial internet, and it was all gonna be broken, because before that it was like an academic and military internet. Everybody was sort of a quasi trusted user on it. You had to have a .mil or .edu domain, right? And then they're like, "Oh my God, all these crazy people are gonna get on. There's gonna be..." And you know what? They were right. All that stuff did, did happen. But-

   10. TFTim Ferriss13:25

       Yeah

   11. BSBalaji Srinivasan13:25

       ... the benefit was worth it, you know? The, the downside was mitigated by, I think, the upside. Uh, and that was the birth of the commercial internet. And that's something which most people don't even know how that came about. It really was something where one rule was, was holding back all this innovation. That's something that's made a deep impression on me. So, so like stuff like that was s- kind of stuff that I tried to convey in the course, alongside the, the nitty-gritty. And I think most of the time that kind of stuff is not taught in the same place from the same person, you know, with one coloring the other. I think that's part of why the course was popular.

   12. TFTim Ferriss13:56

       Thank you. That's a very comprehensive answer. I love comprehensive answers.

   13. BSBalaji Srinivasan13:59

       Sure.

   14. TFTim Ferriss14:00

       Been looking forward to this conversation. You're very good at, at teasing out the, the details, and we may end up teasing out the details on all sorts of things in this conversation, [laughs] including some of what one of our mutual friends described as one of several Balajisms, including the line immutable currency, infinite frontier, or maybe frontiers, and immortal life. I'm giving teasers to people, so this is-

   15. BSBalaji Srinivasan14:23

       Sure, sure

   16. TFTim Ferriss14:23

       ... a bit of a cheap tr- a b- it's a bit of a cheap trick, if you'll excuse it. Another one, this is from, we'll just say anonymous, although I think this sentiment has been echoed by a few people I chatted with, which you may enjoy, which is something along the lines of, in a quote, "Balaji will end up on one side of a firing squad, but I'm not sure which side." End quote. [laughs]

   17. BSBalaji Srinivasan14:45

       [laughs] Okay. That's funny. I'm very peaceful. I'm extremely peaceful. I just wanna, I just wanna put that out there for the record. Go ahead.

   18. TFTim Ferriss14:52

       [laughs] He's very peaceful, and I, I think that part of what fascinates people about you is how often they would consider you prescient, and often that comes with a degree of fear, not of you, but of the consequences of you being right. And I'm thinking of, for instance, a quote, I think it was on January 8th, by the co-founder of Roam Research, you probably remember this one. I think it's @Conaw, if I'm getting that right, which was something along the lines of, "The most terrifying words in the English language are Balaji was right." Okay.

   19. BSBalaji Srinivasan15:28

       Yeah.

   20. TFTim Ferriss15:28

       So I'm, I'm planting those seeds just because we're gonna come back to why some of the things you've predicted accurately have in fact been terrifying. Before we do that, we, we can, if you want to say something first, we can, we can certainly, we can dive into it.

   21. BSBalaji Srinivasan15:43

       I, I will offer just a little bit of color there, which is-

   22. TFTim Ferriss15:45

       [laughs]

   23. BSBalaji Srinivasan15:46

       ... so what he's referring to is specifically my predictions on COVID and, and the pandemic and so on, but then also more generally a bunch of unheeded predictions or things that I've said and that people would be like, "Ah, that'll never happen," and then it kind of happens. And so it's not so much that it's always bad predictions. It's not always just Cassandra. I like to think that I look for large deviations so that you can actually get large upside as well as large downside. And so folks who've, I think, who followed me on investments have done reasonably well. But there's both. We'll see.

   24. TFTim Ferriss16:17

       There are, there are both. And Cassandra, for those wondering, that is a mythological reference, correct?

   25. BSBalaji Srinivasan16:24

       Yes, that's right.

   26. TFTim Ferriss16:24

       Is that the s- [laughs] right. The gift, given the gift of prophecy, but with the condition that no one would believe her.

   27. BSBalaji Srinivasan16:30

       Correct.

   28. TFTim Ferriss16:31

       Uh, so we'll-

   29. BSBalaji Srinivasan16:31

       That's right

   30. TFTim Ferriss16:32

       ... we'll, we will come back to some of these predictions. And is it, I want to say I just heard you say COVID, most people would say COVID. Does it matter? Is one correct and one not?
5. 17:30 – 26:44

   Why podcasting feels more civil than legacy journalism: distribution, power, and editing

   1. BSBalaji Srinivasan17:30

      Yeah, so basically, let me give some definitions first. So here's a one-liner that took me a very long time to understand. So product is merit and distribution is connections. For example, a great blog post that nobody sees is a great product with terrible distribution. Conversely, a really dumb article or whatever that, you know, that is a piece of content that is in a feed that is seen by millions is a terrible product with great distribution. And these are actually essentially disjoint things. Sometimes you can build products that have distribution built in, like social networks or payment apps, where they're inherently viral. That's why people like them. But- Most of the time these are disjoint things, and you have to put as much thought into the distribution of the product. You know, if you're selling chairs or something like that, it's not enough to make a good chair. You need to think about, okay, how do you get to Walmart? How do you get to this distributor? How do you get on Amazon? All, all those types of things are, are critical parts of, of making it work. And Peter Thiel has this good line which is that distribution is the thing that just engineers don't get. Part of the reason I think they don't get it is that it's based on, quote, "connections." So it can't be just reduced to math, or at least it- parts of it can be, like your contribution margin and so on. But it is something where a lot of it is, quote, "networking" or knowing somebody. And people don't usually put thought into this, but when you walk into a convenience store, why are some energy drinks pulled up all the way to the front, like 5-Hour Energy, why is it in the checkout aisle, and why are others at the back? That is not an accident. That's a bunch of distribution relationships and deals, because people are hyper-conscious, the store owner's hyper-conscious of the fact that being up front near the checkout is a great spot to move inventory, and that's actually more valuable to be there than at the back. So it's a negotiation with them. Okay, what's my point? Point is that I think an enormous amount of our media ecosystem today is actually something where the product is terrible, but they've got a lot of great legacy distribution. So again, a software analogy. Think about, um, Microsoft or Oracle. Oracle, which makes a database, any engineer, you know, who's listening to this, the database is okay, but most people, if you're starting from scratch, you'll use Postgres or an open source database or a combination o- of some kind. So Oracle has kind of a, a bad product or a declining product in many ways, at least relatively versus the open source competition, but has great legacy distribution because it's got its hooks in all of these enterprises. The salespeople know them. Uh, it's also hard to extract it, to pull it out. How does that relate to the podcasting thing? Well, if you think about distribution not just for sales or, or for companies, but for ideas. Media creators can have great content, which is a great product, or they can have lots of followers or lots of influential followers which show the quantity and quality respectively of their distribution. And podcasters, when two people, uh, tend to do a podcast together, they tend to have comparable distribution. Because they have comparable distribution, X00,000, Y00,000, or X million, Y million followers across platforms, not any one platform, right? That actually is ... It's almost like the Wild West where both people come to a saloon armed.

   2. TFTim Ferriss20:37

      [laughs]

   3. BSBalaji Srinivasan20:38

      An armed society, a polite society.

   4. TFTim Ferriss20:39

      [laughs] Sound, uh, sounds like something that should be put on the license plates here in Texas. Go ahead. [laughs]

   5. BSBalaji Srinivasan20:47

      Yeah. And, and, and what, what I think it's done is it's changed the culture of podcasting. The thing is, when everybody's kind of comparable in distribution, the culture has changed to one of politeness, back and forth, give and take, as well as the long form nature of it. The contrast to this is like a journalist versus a subject. Podcasting is peer to peer. Journalist/subject is hierarchical. There is a journalist, a corporate journalist, an employee of a media corporation, and then there's the subject, as in, you know, the subject under the microscope or the subject, and there's a king, and they're a subject. And that word, or subject to. That word subject is such a revealing word. It gives away so much. The journalist and the subject under the microscope. And the thing is, the journalist/subject relationship, when the journalist interviews the subject, the journalist can edit, they can, they can pull whatever quote they want, and they have the distribution that the subject doesn't. They have millions of folks who will read their thing. The subject can just squeak and can't get a word out edgewise, you know. They can, they can yell all they want, but it doesn't do anything. No one will listen to them. It's just boom. That's why people used to say, "Never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel." You're writing a little letter to the editor, and they've got ... you know, they're rolling off the printing presses, right? It's as if you've got millions of drones that you can just hit enter and boom, just push software updates to, and this person can just talk to the people around them. Because that's what media is. Media scripts human beings. If code scripts machines, media scripts human beings, even in ways that we don't fully appreciate. You know, that's why people spend so much in advertising. You might think, oh, advertising doesn't convince you of something. But it just sort of reminds you that Coca-Cola exists. And then you're at the store, you know, maybe I'll get a Coke. That's how words are picked up. That's how vocabulary is picked up. A small example, if I said postulate like eight minutes ago or nine minutes ago, you might say postulate two minutes ago, right? That's a small example, right? That's not bad, it's just how, how we should think about it. Point being that once we are equal on distribution, then we can actually speak to each other as peers, and it's futile to try to argue with someone who has way more distribution and is hostile. You just need to build your own distribution, which is much more possible in the internet age.

   6. TFTim Ferriss22:45

      I agree with that. I agree with the, if we were to put it in, uh, indelicate terms, the sort of mutually assured destruction element of civility. I think there are also a few other contributing factors. One is that many journalists working under a masthead have the air cover, right? They have the air cover of not only the reputation, whatever that might be. It doesn't need to be the most prestigious publication. But the, they have the reputational cover. They also have the insurance cover, right? The errors and omission policies i- in actual insurance. The, those clauses within actual insurance policies, and some degree of legal protection by their employer would be one. Another is that very often podcasters have experienced having their quotes cherry-picked or have been on the receiving end of a hit piece, and therefore I think are just more sensitive to inflicting that on other people, not to say-

   7. BSBalaji Srinivasan23:50

      Exactly. Empathetic. Empathetic, right?

   8. TFTim Ferriss23:52

      Yeah. They're, they're more empathetic. And I would say that you see that very clearly. You see a shift sometimes, not always, in, in journalists. And there are many spectacular, wonderful, diligent, ethical journalists out there. Some of them are very close friends of mine. In those who are, say- Tending towards the kind of cynical cherry-picking side. Once they launch, this is how it usually or often happens, their own book, and now suddenly they are at the whim of other media and other reviewers and other [laughs] critics, they really, for the first time, sometimes get a large dose of their own medicine.

   9. BSBalaji Srinivasan24:34

      Mm-hmm.

   10. TFTim Ferriss24:34

       And often that can, can stem the tide a little bit. I would say last, not to give podcasters too much ethical credit, although I... Certainly some of them and many of them are ethical, I think that it's very difficult to cherry-pick when you're interviewing in long form. [laughs]

   11. BSBalaji Srinivasan24:51

       Yep.

   12. TFTim Ferriss24:52

       Not only that, but both sides can very easily record. So there are a lot of, lot of factors that make it a friendlier format. Although, I will say I have had podcasts that are highly produced try to pull a fast one on me before and, uh-

   13. BSBalaji Srinivasan25:09

       Hmm

   14. TFTim Ferriss25:10

       ... not that this is terribly relevant, but that was how I learned to listen and pay attention to my dog very closely because it was one of the few times that this woman walked in, this was pre-COVID, this was many years ago, to interview me with a producer and so on.

   15. BSBalaji Srinivasan25:28

       And, and the dog-

   16. TFTim Ferriss25:29

       And my dog growled

   17. BSBalaji Srinivasan25:30

       ... what? Growled.

   18. TFTim Ferriss25:30

       The dog growled. Molly growled, and that almost never happens.

   19. BSBalaji Srinivasan25:35

       Hmm.

   20. TFTim Ferriss25:35

       And I apologized for her growling and continued the interview, and very quickly realized that I was being led into a trap. [laughs] And I just, I just stopped the interview. I said, "Yeah, I think that if this is how you're gonna approach it, we're done." And it turns out if they're on deadline, and they have a highly produced piece, and they have a lot of employees with- and mouths to feed, that that is actually a, a reasonably strong move, assuming you can afford to do it.

   21. BSBalaji Srinivasan26:00

       Mm-hmm.

   22. TFTim Ferriss26:01

       Is just to not play ball, just to walk off the field.

   23. BSBalaji Srinivasan26:03

       Yep.

   24. TFTim Ferriss26:04

       And so lot to be said about media.

   25. BSBalaji Srinivasan26:07

       Oh, absolutely. I mean, the thing is actually the non-answer, the ignore, the block, is actually quite effective as an individual, and even more effective if practiced by a large group of people.

   26. TFTim Ferriss26:21

       Yeah.

   27. BSBalaji Srinivasan26:21

       Like, there's this site blocknyt.com that if you saw, you know, actually did, like quite well on Twitter, and is like a minor hit, and I think you're gonna see much more of that where essentially the issue is that a journalist versus subject, it's almost like a traveling salesman who goes town to town and, and runs a con on this person, and then the next person, and the next person.

   28. TFTim Ferriss26:42

       [laughs]

6. 26:44 – 40:18

   The critique of corporate journalism—and a proposed alternative: citizen journalism plus cryptographic truth

   1. BSBalaji Srinivasan26:44

      There's this great book called The Journalist and the Murderer that actually documents this.

   2. TFTim Ferriss26:47

      [laughs]

   3. BSBalaji Srinivasan26:48

      Have you heard of this?

   4. TFTim Ferriss26:50

      No, I haven't, but that's a hell of a title. [laughs]

   5. BSBalaji Srinivasan26:52

      Hell of a title. It's actually in the modern libraries, like, I think top 100 books of the 20th century. It's called Journalist-

   6. TFTim Ferriss26:57

      Wow

   7. BSBalaji Srinivasan26:57

      ... and the Murderer. It's by a former journalist, and essentially it talks about how there's, like, this really brutal killer and a journalist who interviewed that killer, and then, you know, published a story that was, like, a huge misrepresentation, and the killer was, like, so mad they sued the journalist. And the jury actually ended up sympathizing with the murderer over the journalist once they understood what the journalist had done. So it's a phenomenal book. You should read it. Actually, you know, I'm gonna... I'm just gonna read you the, uh, opening of it because it's so good. Uh, it's by Janet Malcolm of The New Yorker. Okay, ready? Famous opening. "Every journalist who is..." This is her quote, okay? It's not mine, but it's... All right. "Every journalist who's not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all of her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns when the article or book appears his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and the public's right to know. The least talented talk about art. The seemliest murmur about earning a living."

   8. TFTim Ferriss28:11

      [laughs] Okay, so-

   9. BSBalaji Srinivasan28:15

      Ha

   10. TFTim Ferriss28:15

       ... I wanna offer... But-

   11. BSBalaji Srinivasan28:17

       By Janet Malcolm of The New Yorker. So I wanted to say, that's, that's a journalist on corporate journalists, basically

   12. TFTim Ferriss28:23

       ... for those who want to, there are two sides to this coin, and I, I wanna say for those who want to further educate themselves on the dark arts and those gambits they might fall prey to, there's also a book called Trust Me, I'm Lying by Ryan Holiday, which covers a, a lot of this, including the tactic of getting an email 20 minutes before a piece is gonna be published asking for comment. Which, of course, is intended to-

   13. BSBalaji Srinivasan28:51

       Panic you

   14. TFTim Ferriss28:51

       ... not elicit any-

   15. BSBalaji Srinivasan28:53

       Yeah

   16. TFTim Ferriss28:53

       ... any comment or panic you.

   17. BSBalaji Srinivasan28:54

       Right.

   18. TFTim Ferriss28:55

       Or other tricks. You know, "I'm going to be commenting on you whether you provide a quote or not. Therefore, you should do A, B, or C." But that's a good book on some of the dark arts. And don't lose your place. I don't think you will because you seldom do. But this also lends all the more testament to those journalists who can withstand and methodically counteract these powerful incentives and motivations to actually do good work where they don't get sucked into this, this vortex of perverse incentives. So I, I do wanna say that the people who are actually able to stand in the eye of the hurricane and do that, I give a tremendous amount of respect, because it's hard.

   19. BSBalaji Srinivasan29:44

       I understand what you're saying. I do think that the structural incentives in the profession now are such that you've got someone who's literally just swimming against the stream, and I think actually part of the issue is that it's a profession in the first place. And what I mean by that is, you know, like, the, the Founding Fathers talked about- How a standing military was a bad thing because you'd have this Praetorian class that was armed to the teeth and there would be again subjects and that Praetorian class was in drills. It had its own esprit de corps, its own sense of self and would increasingly go contemptuous of these civilians who they watched over, you know. And that was a recipe for, for bad things. So that's why they preached against a standing military. Now the US basically didn't have a standing military for a long time until essentially the permanent wartime mobilization of the twentieth century, especially post-World War II. You know before it was like, you know, the ideal was to have citizen soldiers. Like, uh, if you've seen the movie 300 where all the Athenians come out and it's like, you know, "I'm a potter," and, "I'm a baker," or whatever and they grab a- an ax and go to war but they're not permanent military. Now whether we can get back to a standing military or rather away from a standing military to a citizen military, I think that's gonna have to wait till mid-century when it's all drones at which point then it's all computer programming and actually so that's an, a... I know that's just a cast-off remark.

   20. TFTim Ferriss31:10

       So within the next 30 to 40 years once we get to the sort of asymmetrical warfare where the cost of offense is much lower than the cost of defense with armies of drones. Is that what you mean?

   21. BSBalaji Srinivasan31:21

       Yeah. I think, I think basically sometime mid-century, maybe more. You know, I don't know if you followed the, just as a footnote on a footnote, but the, um, Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict, right, which was heavy on drones. You know, that's a glimpse of the future of warfare. You know, the future's already here but it's not evenly distributed kind of thing. So I, I do think that eventually once you get full automation of everything it'll actually be just drone on drone and then, you know, people will surrender rather than have the civilians killed. It actually might be more ethical in some way. There'll be obviously a transitional phase. The transitional phase of human versus drone will sort of be like early in World War I there were cavalry charges versus machine gun nests and the cavalry were just kind of this outdated way of war that quickly went away. Human versus drone, human versus robot will be like that I think and then people will quickly be like, "Okay, we just need robot versus robot." Anyway, so leaving the standing military bit aside because I don't think that can be solved in, in the short term. By analogy there's a concept of standing media. A standing media is again like a Praetorian class or a select class, a quote elite that among themselves practices certain behaviors that the average person can't. And what's interesting is NY Mag, you know, had this, uh, thing a few years ago like the media on the media and it was, um... Let's see if I can find it. Ah, here is it. This survey, right? Okay. I'll just find you the exact thing. The media on the media July 24, 2016 9, 9 P.M. One of the biggest things that they all agreed on is journalism's biggest blind spot in its coverage is groupthink. We draw from a limited pool of people who generally have a similar background class, are simply unable to see the perspective of people who are not like them and tend to drive out those who don't fit in. Now I actually understand this coming from academia. I could see how that epistemic bubble happens. It's ironic that the people who complain often most about filter bubbles are actually complaining about the plural because there was just one filter bubble that they controlled and now they're annoyed that there's more than one.

   22. TFTim Ferriss33:19

       They've competing filter bubbles. [laughs]

   23. BSBalaji Srinivasan33:21

       There's competing filter bubbles. Exactly.

   24. TFTim Ferriss33:22

       [laughs]

   25. BSBalaji Srinivasan33:25

       So the way I, I kinda think about this is the answer is not reform. The answer is not to tell these professionals, "Hey, go in journalism better," or, "Hey, you're doing a good job. This guy's doing a bad job." I think that's been tried for a very long time. I think the answer is radical decentralization in several ways. One critical way is everyone a journalist. So citizen journalism as opposed to corporate journalism. So this way you don't have a media corporation that's literally running billboards declaring itself to be truth incarnate. Lest I exaggerate, that's literally the slogan of one large media company that shall go unnamed. It runs a billboard saying, "It's the truth." And yet these media companies are basically the big ones are nepotistic endeavors. They're passed down from father to son. They are everything that they castigate technology for being which it isn't. You know? They're these kind of inbred sort of things, right? And no one ever points this out, right? No one points out that the owners of these papers are actually like just literally father to son kind of endeavors which is not happening in tech, right? You don't get father... You, you... People found their companies in tech. So the alternative to, you know, like sort of this hereditary dictatorship running these media corporations is everybody writes and you have local expertise, you have chemical engineers writing on chemical engineering, and you have biologists writing about biology, and you have computer scientists writing about computer science and they do it as a duty not for profit meaning the, it's actually the fact that there is this corporate business model there basically currently incentivizes them to go for popularity and the number of clicks as opposed to truth. Now you might say, "Are you against profit?" Et cetera. No, I'm saying that the citizen journalism part is one important component. Let me give two or three more. The second important component is decentralized cryptographic truth and this is a big concept. I'm not sure I'm gonna be able to do it justice in a few sentences but I'm gonna try which is to say it is now possible with cryptocurrency for a Israeli and a Palestinian, a Chinese person, a Japanese person, a Democrat and a Republican to all agree on the state of the Bitcoin blockchain. Regardless of your political views, your geography people agree on how much Bitcoin someone has, okay, globally. This is an incredible triumph because, you know, a trillion dollars, forget it. I mean a million dollars is the kind of thing that people will fight over and disagree on and so on. There's essentially no dispute on who owns what BTC and that's the kind of thing that people tend to have large disputes over. A trillion dollars people tend to fight over. They tend to try to fake history. They tend to for- forge things. All the type of stuff, right? The point is that once you can develop consensus algorithms that can get people to agree on what Bitcoin someone had at what time, you can extend them as we're doing to get people to agree on what property somebody had at what time. So what stocks, what bonds, what real estate with this, with that. Which is again, another huge component of the kinds of things people fight about. And then less obviously, you can extend that to what events happened at what time. So what device recorded this temperature in Kansas on this date? Or what hospital uploaded this medical record to the blockchain at this time? Or what was the price of this house that was sold in this area? Or what crime was reported by this victim or this police officer in this area? All of these feeds of data right now that are happening in these kind of disparate silos, you put them together into something I call the ledger of record, which is a global feed of cryptographically timestamped history, undeletable history. And this... It's kind of like Twitter in the sense of when people are referencing whether something happened, they're like, "Was that tweet real?" And you go to the permalink, and you want to see whether someone actually did it. That's imperfect for many reasons, one of which is that Twitter can man in the middle it. Another is that the person's account can get hacked, and they can post as someone else as happened, you know, last summer. With cryptography, with digital signatures, not going into all the details, that offers not a perfect set of checks, but a much greater set of checks on this. Becomes much harder to falsify history. You can't delete the tweets as Twitter can do. There's a lot of things that come into it where that feed becomes incorruptible. It becomes an indelible ledger, and it becomes cryptographically validated. And so what I think in crypto, this is called crypto oracles. The point being that you're no longer relying on just pure humans, fallible humans, to tell you what is true. You rely on decentralized cryptographic truth rather than corporate truth. And this is already the kind of thing which is the input to smart contracts handling millions of dollars. I think we're going to scale this out over the next ten years, and this is actually the alternative to a few folks in Brooklyn trying to determine what is true for the entire world, which simply doesn't scale. Not that it ever did, but it's very obvious that it doesn't. All right, let me pause there. A lot, lot to digest. There's more I could say.

   26. TFTim Ferriss38:17

       That is a lot to digest, so it'll be very interesting to see what happens to long form journalism. That is pieces that would take possibly weeks or, or months of time, dedicated time to produce, but putting a bookmark in that, we can always come back to it. [electronic music] Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront. Did you know if you missed ten of the best performing days after the 2008 crisis, you would have missed out on fifty percent, five zero percent, of your returns? Don't miss out on the best days in the market. Stay invested in a long-term automated investment portfolio. Wealthfront pioneered the automated investing movement, sometimes referred to as robo advising, and they currently oversee twenty billion dollars of assets for their clients. Wealthfront can help you diversify your portfolio, minimize fees, and lower your taxes. Takes about three minutes to sign up, and then Wealthfront will build you a globally diversified portfolio of ETFs based on your risk appetite and manage it for you at an incredibly low cost. Wealthfront's software constantly monitors your portfolio day in and day out so you don't have to. They look for opportunities to rebalance and tax loss harvest to lower the amount of taxes you pay on your investment gains. Their newest service is called Autopilot, and it can monitor any checking account for excess cash to move into savings or an investment account. They've really thought of a ton. They've checked a lot of boxes. Smart investing should not feel like a rollercoaster ride. Let the professionals do the work for you. Go to Wealthfront.com/tim and open a Wealthfront investment account today, and you'll get your first five thousand dollars managed for free for life. That's Wealthfront.com/tim. Wealthfront will automate your investments for the long term, and you can get started today at Wealthfront.com/tim. [electronic music] There are a few things that I would love to get your opinion on, perspective on, uh, and I'll, like give, give kind of a preview of the two. One will be current forms

7. 40:18 – 54:04

   Self-defense against media and cancellation: personal runway and social-network ‘supply chain’ risk

   1. TFTim Ferriss40:18

      of self-defense, whether preemptive or reactive while we're waiting for the future to be evenly distributed [chuckles] . What can we do in the meantime to protect ourselves or counterpunch if we're being potentially mistreated by members of the media? That's one. And then after that, I'm going to ask you about for yourself keeping a ledger of predictions, much like you've recommended people to write out the bull, bear, and base case of joining a company and then checking themselves, say a few years later.

   2. BSBalaji Srinivasan40:53

      Right. Yep.

   3. TFTim Ferriss40:53

      But let's first talk to any particular strategies or tactics for-

   4. BSBalaji Srinivasan41:00

      Self-defense

   5. TFTim Ferriss41:00

      ... defending oneself. Exactly, for self-defense. Do you have any thoughts there?

   6. BSBalaji Srinivasan41:04

      Sure. So I, I have several. The first is maybe the, maybe the least obvious, which is you should radically reduce your expenses if possible because financial independence is upstream of individual independence and ideological independence. If you're in lots of debt, if you're not in debt but you're just spending every dollar you have because you live in an expensive area, then you are extremely conformist because, oh my God, you lose your job and you have no savings and you've got this high consumption, and so you just have to stay in line for everything. Now, if you want to live like that, go ahead, okay? But if you don't, the first thing to understand, I think, is that it's much easier to reduce your costs by five X than increase your top line by five X. Um, it's possible to do both, but it's almost deterministic to reduce costs if you're willing to do it. And how do you do it? You go to nomadlist.com or teleport.org, and you do a spreadsheet, and you optimize your personal runway. And your personal runway is what it sounds like. There's a concept I developed. It's very obvious, but just extends the concept of corporate runway to individuals. It's your savings divided by your burn rate And here's the thing, the moment that you move to, let's say, Bali or some very inexpensive locale and start living like a grad student, and of course this is most applicable for people earlier in their life. It's harder for folks with families and what have you, right? So I recognize that. But even then it can be done. There's a Reddit group called, I think, Lean FIRE, Financial Independence Retire Early. There's Mr. Money Mustache. There's folks who, who do this kind of thing, like household budgeting. But as an individual it's actually relatively easy. What you do now, and this is actually even easier in 2021 than it was when I first started recommending this, you get a remote work job at a good tech company. It could be any company of course, but, you know, let's just say, you know, tech is, it's, 'cause it pays well or whatever, if you can get it. But a remote work capable job. You move to the cheapest place that you can tolerate that's good, and actually, there's actually some really great places that are cheap and warm, especially now that remote is feasible. I mean, basically all of Latin and South America if you have to be in an American time zone, for example, and big chunks of Canada if you like the cold. You know? And of course the Midwest and what have you. There's huge areas of the map that have opened up thanks to remote. And if you do that and if you cut your expenses 5X, now you go from, just as a thought experiment, let's say you're making, I don't know, 100,000 a year as an engineer, and before you were in San Francisco and you were burning like 90,000 of that a year or something. Th- that's actually not insane. A lot of people do exactly that, right? 'Cause the rent is so high and whatever. Right. Now you go to some rural locale or even overseas, and now you're actually only burning, let's say, 50K a year. 40K in, in tax or what have you, and then like 10 or 20K. Let's say it's 60K. Okay? 20K in expenses, 'cause you just cut it all the way down. Well, now every year that you work you have basically built up, because if, if your income goes away your tax goes away as well. Every year that you work up, if you're, if you're spending 20K a year you have 40K in savings if you just do out the math. Earn 100, spend 60, bank 40. If your spending is 20 then you have two years of runway, personal runway added for every year that you work there in this simple toy example. And that means that you don't need to accept angel financing. You can self-finance. You can just, for every year you work you can take two years off. It's basically a way of getting personal financial independence, like a deterministic path to doing it. Now of course you're no stranger to this. You've been talking about this stuff forever. You know, the four-hour work week, and whatever. This is not, this is not unusual for your audience. But I think that the perhaps somewhat novel is connecting this to ideological independence because it means you can't be canceled. You know? You can just ride it out. Like, you know, the square-jawed Chad, "Yes." You know, from, you know the memes I'm talking about? No?

   7. TFTim Ferriss44:50

      No, I don't.

   8. BSBalaji Srinivasan44:50

      Okay. [laughs]

   9. TFTim Ferriss44:50

      What is a square-jawed Chad? [laughs]

   10. BSBalaji Srinivasan44:52

       Okay, okay. This is very, very online. But if you Google the Chad, "Yes." It's like, you know, someone being like, "Oh my God, I can't believe you believe this," or whatever, and the guy's like, "Yes."

   11. TFTim Ferriss45:02

       [laughs]

   12. BSBalaji Srinivasan45:03

       And that, that he's just not backing down at all. Just totally firm, square-jawed Chad.

   13. TFTim Ferriss45:08

       [laughs]

   14. BSBalaji Srinivasan45:09

       You've never seen this?

   15. TFTim Ferriss45:10

       No. [laughs]

   16. BSBalaji Srinivasan45:11

       Okay. You do?

   17. TFTim Ferriss45:12

       Nope. That's all right.

   18. BSBalaji Srinivasan45:13

       Okay.

   19. TFTim Ferriss45:13

       I didn't know who Taylor Swift was until like four years ago, so I'm, I'm a little, I'm a little sheltered it would appear.

   20. BSBalaji Srinivasan45:19

       Yeah. It's like, it's like, uh, it comes from, you know, "Yes, Chad." No, you're a meme. Here, I'll send you the ... [laughs] I'll send you the thing.

   21. TFTim Ferriss45:26

       [laughs]

   22. BSBalaji Srinivasan45:26

       Anyway.

   23. TFTim Ferriss45:27

       I'll put this in sh- I'll put this in show notes for f- for people right next to drone warfare. [laughs]

   24. BSBalaji Srinivasan45:31

       I, I bet 99, 99% of your audience has ... I ... This is ... Maybe it's obscure. Maybe, or maybe it's not. I don't know. But we'll have to see. Anyway, point is how do you do the square-jawed Chad, "Yes." It means you have to be able to ... You know, you're, you're not backing down. You accept what consequences may come because you have planned for the future. You know conflict may come and you have essentially banked up. And so, so that's, let's call that one piece, right? Financial independence.

   25. TFTim Ferriss45:58

       Right. And it, and it requires, not, not to state the obvious, but it requires or may not even require courage the less fear you have, right?

   26. BSBalaji Srinivasan46:08

       Yeah.

   27. TFTim Ferriss46:08

       If courage is acting in the face of fear, if you have minimized the risk or the damage of being canceled or any type of media retribution, you have less fear to overcome. It just makes it easier, like you said, to have that ideological freedom-

   28. BSBalaji Srinivasan46:23

       That's right

   29. TFTim Ferriss46:23

       ... to hold a position.

   30. BSBalaji Srinivasan46:25

       That's right. The second thing is if you read books like Beautiful Trouble. Do you know what that is?
8. 54:04 – 1:09:59

   The pseudonymous economy: separating real name, earning name, and speaking name

   1. BSBalaji Srinivasan54:04

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

   2. TFTim Ferriss54:46

      Seeing Like a State

   3. BSBalaji Srinivasan54:47

      ... yeah, Seeing Like a State. So this is a great book by Yale University Press that essentially talks about how names were developed to, among other things, simplify the process of conscription. So rather than, "Oh, that guy over there with brown hair," which is an analog identifier that could refer to a bunch of folks and that was imprecise, instead you'd say John Davison. And that first name, last name was a... It's not perfect, it's not quite as good as a number, but it's a reasonably good digital identifier where you could go down a list and cross it off. And the thing is, is that would not just be conscription, but you couldn't have e- even executed, like, Leninist redistribution of property very easily without those lists. It was all about the lists. Literacy is what actually enabled a big, big chunk of that. Um, you had lists of names. That guy's rich, that guy's not rich, take his property, et cetera. So the, the point being that the alternative to real names or, like, a single global identifier and everything is pseudonyms, search-resistant identities, which people are already using at large scale. There's 400 million pseudonyms, you know, or pseudonymous users on Reddit. And by the way, there's a distinction between anonymous, pseudonymous, and real name. Anonymous is totally disposable identifier. That's, like, the culture of 4chan. That actually is kind of a pit. Pseudonymous, like Reddit, is a persistent pseudonym that accumulates reputation but that is at a distance from your global identifier. In general, what I think is the, you know, the Peace of Westphalia at the end of our 30 years internet war is going to be-

   4. TFTim Ferriss56:11

      Ho- ho- hold on. Pause for definition. [laughs] If I could click on a... Do you say Westphalia?

   5. BSBalaji Srinivasan56:17

      Yeah. So from 1618 to 1648, Protestants and Catholics slugged it out over religion, but also over power. You know, who's gonna rule, the Catholic Church, you know, or, or, you know, Martin Luther's guys, the disciples of Protestants. Very bloody war, lots of killing, and it was basically centralization versus decentralization, you know, among other things. And eventually the truce that came about was the so-called Peace of Westphalia, which established the modern nation-state.

   6. TFTim Ferriss56:42

      I was just thinking how, how happy it makes me that you thought I might even know that. I, I'm so-

   7. BSBalaji Srinivasan56:48

      [laughs]

   8. TFTim Ferriss56:49

      ... uh, honored [laughs] so thank you. But, no, please, please continue. I don't, I don't wanna, I don't wanna take us off track. But, uh-

   9. BSBalaji Srinivasan56:56

      No, I, I, yeah

   10. TFTim Ferriss56:56

       ... I just, that ju- that just, that, it made my day. That just made my day. Thank you.

   11. BSBalaji Srinivasan56:59

       It, it, I don't mean-

   12. TFTim Ferriss57:00

       Please

   13. BSBalaji Srinivasan57:00

       ... to drop an obscure reference, and there's lots of, lots of areas of history that I don't know about, but this is one that I think about a lot because it's highly relevant, I think, to the present day in many, many different ways. Arguably, the Thirty Years' War arose out of the introduction of the printing press, um, because you could go and mimeograph, you know, all of Martin Luther's stuff and spread it to people, and that's how, you know, you did the software install, boom, into people's brains. And that's Protestant Reformation. Distribution, you know, took off. So this technology gave rise to this huge fight that essentially redrew the map, and the concept of the nation-state was born out of that, which is, okay, you don't have these transnational entities that just can have influence everywhere. Instead, we're gonna have these sort of geographically defined areas that have a sovereign government with a monopoly of violence, and a religion can't just walk in there and just start bossing people around. There's, like, a lawful government. That was the truce that people came to. You stay in your lane, I stay in mine, just out of all the bloodshed and to stop the bloodshed. So I think we've just began... Uh, hopefully there's not bloodshed, or not much of it. I think we've just begun. I don't... People think we- we're, we're ending it, but I, I think we've just begun the global internet, like, cold war, where all of these social networks, currency networks compete for ideological and economic dominance around the world because they can just spread virally back and forth like this. And, um, everyone will be trying to cancel each other and whatnot. It's gonna be this crazy, crazy thing. You know, for example, one thing I anticipate will happen sometime in the 2020s is I think in some country, probably the US for lots of reasons, I think the cloud will burst. And what I mean by that is so- you know, like, Treasury was just recently hacked with the SolarWinds thing. People don't know what they got. They could've gotten every tax return. They could've gotten all kinds of very sensitive stuff. And in the-

   14. TFTim Ferriss58:49

       It was hacked with, with what? I'm sorry.

   15. BSBalaji Srinivasan58:51

       Oh, Solar, SolarWinds is sort of the name of the hack. And-

   16. TFTim Ferriss58:54

       I see. Got it

   17. BSBalaji Srinivasan58:55

       ... and the scope of it is not fully understood. It's, like, this total ownage of all kinds of government systems. And this is not the first time this has happened. It's also happened at the government of Texas and, and so on and so forth. I'm not pointing at any particular entity. The main thing is when there was a recent hack of Ledger, the crypto company, their database was just blasted on the internet and you could actually... Uh, uh, you know, I wasn't a customer, but people could see their name and their home address on the internet, and they are, like, a crypto fanatic who has a hardware wallet on there.

   18. TFTim Ferriss59:28

       What a nightmare.

   19. BSBalaji Srinivasan59:30

       Yeah.

   20. TFTim Ferriss59:30

       What a nightmare. Oh my God.

   21. BSBalaji Srinivasan59:32

       And you get... And, and so it is, like, this thing where, you know, y- you don't, um, you can't easily change your home. I mean, some people can. But-

   22. TFTim Ferriss59:38

       Yeah. Sud- suddenly you have guys in tracksuits showing up at your house.

   23. BSBalaji Srinivasan59:42

       Potentially. Exactly. It's like a rank ordered list of who holds crypto. Really, really, really sucks. May lead to home invasions, other kinds of things. Very bad piece of information to have out there. It's an enriched list. So it's hard for... You know, the thing is even discussing it, I hate bringing more attention to it. Other hand, it's also something which has important consequences, and one of the consequences is that shows it's not a theoretical risk to think about what these hacks could be. So far people have talked about hacks kind of in the abstract, but once a government database is hacked and all of this surveillance on us is just blasted out on the internet, the cloud bursts. You know, whether it's-

   24. TFTim Ferriss1:00:18

       What does, what, what does that mean-

   25. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:00:20

       Like-

   26. TFTim Ferriss1:00:20

       ... by the cloud bursting?

   27. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:00:21

       ... all Facebook DMs rain down All slacks rain down. Something like that happens

   28. TFTim Ferriss1:00:26

       Rain down meaning are suddenly searchable and available for-

   29. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:00:29

       Suddenly searchable and available

   30. TFTim Ferriss1:00:30

       ... consumption
9. 1:09:59 – 1:26:27

   ‘1729’ as a paying newsletter: tasks, prizes, open-source education, and crypto credentials

   1. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:09:59

      Sure. Okay. So I'll tell you what at least I'm, I'm planning on doing, which is pouring money, some of, some of my own, and maybe s- you know, some from investors if I, if I decide to raise money, into bootstrapping talent around the world through 1729. So just to return to that, because we were talking about that at the beginning. This is gonna be the first newsletter that pays you. And so that's to say daily, at least $1,000 in Bitcoin prizes for doing tasks. Okay, so for example, here's an essay. The best 10 responses to it get 100 bucks in Bitcoin. Here is a, a scientific article. The best 140-second video on this gets $1,000. That explains it to the masses. Here is a, a textbook or, or, or a chapter of a textbook. Please generate 10 exercises for this chapter that are fully open source that anybody can do, and I'll give you $100 in Bitcoin each. So that's cumulative, like an open source Coursera, open source Wikipedia in a sense. And the goal here in doing this is several fold. First is I want to actually build up those ci- citizen journalists that we talked about, those content creators. Second, I want to invest in like a cumulative form of education, open source education, you know, where these folks are doing tutorials. So for example, those 10 questions I just mentioned, they could be on science, but they could be on video editing or other kinds of things, and it's all just open source so that people get paid for creating the, the educational tasks that others can do. How are those two things related, by the way? I know that seems a little vague, but let me, let me explain. So you have these tasks that people are completing, and you have this educational content that people are creating. The reason they're related is there's global tasks that anybody can do, but you might be able to get paid more if you know Figma or if you know Python or if you know chemistry. And so the educational tasks that I also pay people to do are like a curriculum that if you solve these tasks, you can level up and get higher value remunerative tasks. The basic idea is ... Go ahead.

   2. TFTim Ferriss1:11:57

      May I pause you for a second?

   3. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:11:58

      Yeah.

   4. TFTim Ferriss1:11:58

      So if you have a task like create 10 exercises based on this textbook or this material-

   5. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:12:05

      Yeah

   6. TFTim Ferriss1:12:05

      ... can multiple people perform that or complete that task? If so, do you pay all of them?

   7. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:12:09

      Yes.

   8. TFTim Ferriss1:12:09

      How do you decide who to pay?

   9. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:12:11

      That's a great question. So the review process, actually, we allocate as much of a budget or a good chunk of the budget just to review, because review is its own thing. And there's various ways of doing review, and we're gonna experiment with a crowdsourced aspect, like a Reddit style leaderboard of up and down voting. And then a manual, you know, review on top of that. And then there's like 50 different things that you can do to kind of make this more sophisticated. In a sense, this is like Earn.com 3.0. You know, there was Earn.com, there's Coinbase Earn, which Earn.com was actually doing extremely well before we sold to Coinbase. It was essentially pay people to reply to emails and complete tasks. And then Coinbase Earn was asset issuers like, uh, you know, creators of new cryptocurrencies and digital assets would pay users to do tutorials on their asset to learn about how it worked, you know. Like Filecoin or, or how to use decentralized storage or decentralized VPN. And this is like a third iteration, which also combines a bunch of ideas that I've had f- for online education. So just to summarize it again, A, a newsletter that pays you with at least $1,000 a day in Bitcoin prizes for completing tasks and tutorials, and then B, what this does is hopefully it bootstraps talent all over the world. Anywhere there's a phone, there's a job, right? We can give this skyhook to people, and you can just start with nothing, absolutely nothing other than this phone, which people have made really cheap. And you can do the tutorials, you learn some skills, you level up, you get more tasks, you start leveling up more, you get digital currency. So anywhere there's a phone, there's a job and there's an education. And, uh, this is what I plan to do with, you know, what I've been fortunate enough to, to make, and that's my contribution to humanity, I think, or hope it to be. And, uh, and hopefully this helps find also, like the next Ramanujans out there, who is this kid in Brazil or the Middle East, you know, somebody in some war-torn area like Syria, it's all bombed out, but hopefully that kid has a smartphone and we can, like, kind of airlift them out, right? Give them a shot if they're willing to put in the work and, you know, be all free. So let me pause there. That's, that's at least what I'm thinking about doing. And, uh, I know it's an idiosyncratic use of capital, but I'm not the type to spend on Ferraris or whatever.

   10. TFTim Ferriss1:14:17

       Yeah, w- I would expect no less. So let's just say that there is a bright kid in Syria who I, I'm struggling so much 'cause I'm accustomed to saying Ramanujan, but I'm getting that incorrectly. So Ramanujan, and he's performing, or she is performing various tasks at a high level. What do you then do with that talent? So presumably they develop some type of reputational score, or they accrue some type of reputation. How do you airlift that kid out or encourage them to airlift themselves out? Is it the capital? Is it that they now have the resources to, and greater optionality to perhaps improve their situation? Or is there another approach? Because they could be brilliant and continue to complete these microtasks.

   11. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:15:10

       Right. So three thoughts there, right? So first is, of course, you know, Syria's an unusual case 'cause it's actually a war zone. But-

   12. TFTim Ferriss1:15:16

       We, we could use another example if it's easier.

   13. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:15:18

       So, so let's say, you know, it's Nigeria or it's India or it's a place where maybe the kid doesn't necessarily wanna leave. If they don't wanna leave, now they have their cake and eat it too. They can have home-cooked food, they can have their local culture and local language, but they can also get into the internet fast lane, and they can contribute pseudonymously, ideally, you know, to a community that will neither discriminate against them nor cancel them because the accent doesn't matter, their age doesn't matter, skin color doesn't matter, gender doesn't matter. None of those things matter. It can't matter. That's at least my ideal, the true global meritocracy, and that's international, of course. And so the concept here is, yes, they would start earning. And the thing is 1,000 bucks even once in a year is actually a lot of money for people in a lot of places. So that's like quite a lot of people that we can airlift out that way. And when I say airlift, as I said, I don't necessarily mean remove them from that location unless they wanna leave. They, they might be able to stay there. I mean more like airlift them from whatever situation they're in. At least give them the opportunity. And, uh, what does that mean in practice? Well, one of the most important things it does, I think is this is the... If, again, if this works, it's ambitious and it's crazy and so on, but let me try and explain it anyway. This is actually the digital native solution to education. Here's what I mean by that. So you can think of a piece of paper, and then you can think of a scanner, and then you can think of a text file, right? So you go from physical to this hybrid physical to digital scanner and then digital native. Another example would be you got a face-to-face meeting, you've got Zoom, and then you've got virtual reality. Zoom is also like a scanner. It's taking the offline and putting it online, but then VR is like digital native. Third example, physical cash, then something like PayPal or fintech, right? Which is just basically the, the scanner taking that and putting it online, and then you have crypto which swaps out the, the back end is, is just now natively digital. It doesn't have a physical form. And with education, you, at least higher education, offline you've got the physical college, then you've got the scanner, which is like Audacity and Coursera and so on, which are fine companies, good companies, billion-dollar companies, you know. But they're basically taking the college experience and putting it online. And then there's this really interesting terra incognita of what does digital native education look like. So let me kind of motivate how that works, and then you can see how maybe that links in with the tasking piece. Um, and I say this as someone who's taught a lot of courses, whatever, and, you know, so this at least it may be a mistake, but it comes from my experience of mistakes, whatever. So let's say you take a Stanford degree in computer science. There are on the order of 25 courses you need to complete the degree, give or take, and that's in addition to so-called graduate education requirements. And each one is roughly, each course roughly 10 weeks and say on the order of 10 problems per week. Sometimes more, sometimes less. So that means about 2,500 problems, 25 times 10 times 10. You need to solve 2,500 problems before you get your one degree. So it's like you have zero degrees at problem 2,300, and then you have one degree after problem 2,500. I caricature it, but not by much. And after you have your one degree, you go and now you can actually get paid and you can work and, and so on and so forth. That's a historical thing. Get your degree and then work. Now, of course, this is only an idealization. People will do paid internships and so on during college. So after, you know, 500 problems, they have enough qualification to go and get some, you know, job or internship. That's true. But to first order, this is how the s- the system is still meant to work, right? Get your diploma before you get a job. Now, w- one of the things people used to say as sort of a caricature or attack or whatever of, uh, Udacity, Udacity had these nano degrees. They say, "Oh, you're getting a nano degree? Well, you better expect a nano salary." You know? Oh, ha ha ha. Right? It's crap. Whatever. So the thing about that is, what if you take that seriously? What if you say, all right, rather than this step function, this discontinuous thing where you have to solve 2,500 problems before you get a job that's paying 100K, what if you solve five problems and I give you a job that pays you 10 bucks, a microtask, and we see how you do on that? That radically reduces the risk for both sides, your risk in terms of, you know, spending all this time learning something, and the employer's risk. And, uh, and, and frankly, you know, the difference between a person who solved five problems or one problem in JavaScript versus zero is actually a big difference. It surpri- you know, that's actually a big difference. So the idea here is that if you could show proof of skill somehow, right? If I could demonstrate that I have some skill in JavaScript or I have some skill in chemistry or s- or, or skill in Illustrator, whatever, then I could qualify for more skilled microtasks, right? As opposed to the Mechanical Turk style lowest common denominator, which is fine, but that's just, like, labeling something as a cat or a dog. All you need is a pulse. It's the, uh, the reCAPTCHA style thing that you see. You know, label the cars. That type of stuff is, is fine, but that's like, just all you need is a pulse. You don't need any skill. The question then becomes how do you actually do proof of skill? And I think the answer is something, and I've got a post coming on this, which I call the crypto credential. And the idea is every time you solve one of these problems, we don't give you karma, like on Hacker News. We give you a little badge that says you solved that problem, and that's held in your digital wallet, just like your cryptocurrency. Think of it as an NFT, if you know what NFTs are.

   14. TFTim Ferriss1:20:38

       Yep.

   15. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:20:38

       So it is an NFT basically, right? Um, except it's non-transferable.

   16. TFTim Ferriss1:20:42

       And just, uh, just a side note, for people who are interested in learning more about NFTs or non-fungible tokens, if I'm remembering correctly, uh, Katie Haun and I discuss this at length in that podcast episode, which you can, which you can find elsewhere. So just Google her name, H-A-U-N, and my name, and it'll pop right up. So ple- please continue.

   17. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:21:00

       Awesome. Okay. Yes. No, Katie's awesome. So the idea is this would be, uh, this is not something you can resell. So it's not an NFT. It's not like a piece of art in that sense. It's a, it's a third application or nth application of crypto. It's not cryptocurrency. It's not art. It is a crypto credential. It's awarded to you. And, uh, you know, the, the first version of those are just, you solve problems on a website and you earn these crypto credentials. Just like you earn badges at Stack Overflow, just like you earn badges in a video game, you earn these crypto credentials. The difference being they're on-chain. And because they're on-chain, you can log into any site with them, and now you can qualify for instant jobs, microtasks. Now, here's what's cool about this. There's a lot of details in how we implement this, which I can get into, but what's cool about this is it levels it all out. You know? Yes, absolutely there's smart people at Harvard or MIT or Stanford, but there's smart people in the middle of Brazil and, you know, in Hungary and India and Nigeria and the Philippines, and I know there's smart people there because I could see them in my class. And I could see that many of them were the equal or the better of, you know, some of the more pampered [scoffs] kids at these expensive schools. Especially nowadays, where there's less stress on just getting the right answer and more on canceling people or whatever, right? Like, undergrad is much more screwed than it wa- especially in the US, than it was, you know, even 20 years ago, 10 years ago. Plus, 'cause of the pandemic, lots of colleges are shut down and they're having e- economic problems. There's a huge desire to do something better. And the concept is, you know, if we do this right, it's like Wikipedia for education because every course is open source. The problems are out there. It's like an open source curriculum. We're gonna build it on the Exercism framework. At least that's my thinking right now. I might change my mind. But E-X-E-R-C-I-S-M.io. This is an awesome site, by the way. It's got a funny name too, like exorcism but with an E.

   18. TFTim Ferriss1:22:50

       [laughs]

   19. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:22:51

       And Exercism basically has something where you can learn Python by doing, like, 50 Python problems, or you can learn-

   20. TFTim Ferriss1:22:57

       That's very cool

   21. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:22:58

       ... JavaScript by doing-

   22. TFTim Ferriss1:22:58

       Very cool

   23. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:22:58

       ... like, 70 JavaScript problems, and it's recorded on the site. It's like you see this counter go up. And just think about how much better that is than typical social media, where all you're doing is fighting for clicks or whatever. You know, fighting for hearts on Twitter or likes on Facebook, whatever it is. And that's something where you're just incrementing numbers on somebody else's server. I'm not seeing it as zero value. There is some value to it, but it's not value that you can easily quantify or extract from the system. You know, you've built up your followers there. You can't import them or export them. It's not really building up yourself. So the idea behind simpt229.com would be you would constantly be pursuing your, improving your knowledge and your bank account. You'd constantly be learning and earning. You'd be learning and getting these crypto credentials, and then that would allow you to earn cryptocurrency. Now, the third thing, actually, and this is something I've been also thinking about, flirting with the idea of, and it- maybe we'll do this, is, uh, you may think this is crazy, but you're also the four-hour body guy. So-

   24. TFTim Ferriss1:23:57

       [laughs] I'm already crazy. I think I've crossed, crossed that Rubicon a long time ago. [laughs]

   25. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:24:02

       All right. So, so the third thing I was also thinking about is actually putting up, um, a third kind of daily post, which is burning. That is to say, just post something of you working out, and we give the hundred best each day, like, $10 in BTC. And that, that's-

   26. TFTim Ferriss1:24:17

       Huh

   27. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:24:17

       ... it's a varied health task, not just working out. Maybe it's show your fitness tracker or what vitamins are you using, or something like that, with the goal being that people who are at Simp 229 are focused on truth, health, wealth. Learning true things and leveling themselves up that way, like gaining knowledge. Health, like improving their body, their physique, but also, you know, like staving off aging, you know, thinking about transhumanism, measuring themselves. And then wealth as important, but third. Truth, health, and wealth in that order, because, you know, determine what's true- Make sure to maximize your health and then accumulate wealth, but don't do it at the expense of what is true or, or what is good for your health. Go ahead. You're smiling.

   28. TFTim Ferriss1:24:58

       I love that. I love it because, uh, I mean, [laughs] not to bring this to the 4-Hour Body, seems like a, a downgrade, but the, the f- I, I mean, look, I'm very proud of that book and happy with it.

   29. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:25:08

       It's a great book. Great book, yeah.

   30. TFTim Ferriss1:25:09

       The, the ... And, and a lot of what was in there that seemed highly speculative at the time has, has only, uh, gained more traction and support and literature and so on, so I'm very pleased with that. A, a large component of that, and especially, uh, The 4-Hour Chef, which con- very confusingly is about accelerated learning and behavioral change, [laughs]
10. 1:26:27 – 1:43:03

    BTC/ETH as the simple allocation—and the underlying worldview (bearish on US institutions, bullish on crypto)

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:26:27

       I knew this was gonna happen, so no surprise here, but I, I realize that I did not deliver on the promise of one of my questions, and that question was related to ... So we're gonna focus on the earning component here for a moment just because I th- I, I want to ensure that I provide what I promised to the listeners. I asked the what would you personally do, in this case, to maximize return with 100K or 100 million, and then we didn't dig into the predictions or assumptions underlying your answer.

    2. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:26:56

       Ah.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:26:56

       So the answer was half in BTC, Bitcoin, half in Ethereum, and I'd love to hear you comment on, number one, the assumptions of what's going to happen or not happen that makes that a, a rational investment. And number two, and maybe you can answer this first, if you could paint a picture of what you consider the risk profile to be in doing something like that. And again, this isn't investment advice. Is part of the calculus an assumption that this is a 10 or 100X or it's a zero or something else? If you could just speak to that.

    4. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:27:29

       Sure. Sure. So I mean, look, it's crypto. So-

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:27:33

       Right. [laughs]

    6. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:27:34

       ... you know, crypto's crazy. And it's, uh, it's very difficult to predict exactly what's gonna happen, um, with anything. But, you know, but the, the two things I said that I would do with the money are, you know, there's return on investment, there's, like, return to society. And what's interesting is actually when you talk about the ... You know, so return on investment is 50% BTC, 50% ETH. Return to society is the sort of open source education, tasking, truth, health, wealth thing. And, you know, by the way, truth, health, and wealth I think of as the next liberté, égalité, fraternité. It's the slogan of the next state, which I'll come to. Okay. Or one, one of the next states. But, but coming back up the stack, so both of those things actually have common premises underneath them, which is that I am simultaneously very bearish on the US specifically, and the West generally, but very bullish on the internet, technology, crypto, Asia, and, you know, future progress. And those are not normally ... Often somebody is very positive on one and positive on the other, or vice versa. Now they're a- they're actually separated out. They're separated out things. 'Cause nor- for a long time, people associated technological progress with the USA, and now technological progress is something that doesn't benefit the US establishment. They don't win a game. The East Coast establishment does not win a game of free speech and free markets. And so that's why they're clamping down on free speech and free markets, 'cause if everybody has a voice, especially around the world ... Go ahead.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:28:56

       Why do they not ... Could you just say a few more lines on why that's the case?

    8. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:29:01

       Sure. So-

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:29:01

       Why they don't win that game, why those things are bad for the East Coast establishment.

    10. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:29:05

        Well, so, you know, a small example of not winning a game of free markets, whether it's the bailouts, whether it is all the regulations that protect them, or the whole GameStop thing, you know, where it definitely looked like some strings were pulled somewhere. I'm not saying the Robinhood thing, you know, because I think Vlad gave a pretty good, you know, explanation on that, you know, for people who follow that whole scenario. But certainly Discord going and just shutting down GameStop discussion out of nowhere based on, I think, a pretext seemed like someone pulled some strings somewhere to make that happen. And that's something where truly free markets, maybe Wall Street doesn't win, right? There's, there's a rigging that's going on.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:29:41

        I see. So by East Coast establishment, just to be clear, you mean specifically in the financial sector? Do you also mean DC?

    12. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:29:48

        No. Media, DC, Harvard, like basically the legacy kind of entities in the US, right? Like the pre-internet establishment. And then, like, free speech, that's even more obvious. Every single day you have some new editorial saying something like, "Free speech is killing us," or, "Critical thinking is bad," or, or whatever. And, uh, you know, "Oh, I can't believe people are having unfettered conversations," right? That was like the latest meme. And for many people, this is like this weird thing where how is it that the US that they grew up in has suddenly just done a 180 on this? And the answer is that those folks have legacy distribution, but they have a terrible product. They can't win the argument. And because they can't win the argument, they're trying to use their distribution to shut off other people's distribution, because they know they'd lose the argument if distribution was open to all. So they're against free speech, against free markets. And crypto is actually truly free speech and free markets. So that's actually the true inheritor of the Western tradition. It's sort of like the internet is to the USA what the Americas were to the UK. It's like this new world that will eventually give birth to the successor, and crypto's like a huge, huge part of all of that because it captures, you know, the part of the West that's actually globally admirable, you know? Unambiguous rule of law except in smart contracts, protection from search and seizure through encryption, you know, all that type of stuff. Coming back up, you asked though, why? Why do they not win this game, right? Because first is the empirical observation. What's the underlying underpinning thing? Well- Uh, they basically become these inbred folks. They are not selecting on talent anymore. They are selecting on connections. They're selecting on whether you are the son of the son of the son, or the daughter of the daughter of the daughter. It is not something where they're actually taking the best folks. They are taking the folks who can just repeat a party line. I think that's one huge component of it.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:31:31

        Just for sake of clarity, do you mean within corporate entities therefore con- contrasting sort of-

    14. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:31:36

        East Coast media, for example, take a look at how many of those folks went to private school, how many of those folks have a trust fund, how many of those folks-

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:31:43

        Mm-hmm

    16. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:31:43

        ... inherited a fortune.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:31:45

        Just for me, how does that tie to the BTC, ETH?

    18. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:31:49

        Ah.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:31:50

        How does that tie in?

    20. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:31:50

        How does that tie?

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:31:51

        Mm-hmm.

    22. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:31:51

        Those folks, they lack the skills to win in a fair competition. So there, there's various rigging that was done, most obviously with the bailouts of 2008, but there's so many other, you know, items of this. That's just a very high-profile one. And in response to that, technologists developed Bitcoin and Ethereum and these free systems. I mean, like, if you look at the genesis block, it says it references the bailouts in the genesis block of Bitcoin, where it's essentially the counter to this sort of nepotistic East Coast establishment. And, uh, you know, to me, that's like super obvious. But you're right that it's actually useful to kind of lay, lay out the full logic of it, because one of the consequences here, or one of the medium-term things, is you can only use force to kind of clamp down on global free speech and free markets for so long. It's like a jack-in-the-box that will just pop out somehow. One way I think about that is after the financial crisis, basically, you know, the way that they decided to like stop the next crisis is they made it almost impossible to get a banking charter. So you punish the banks by eliminating all of their competition. Now, somehow Fintech and crypto found a way. Different threads coming to the same thing, where basically like working above, doing partnerships, working below. Like despite the front door being closed, technology came in through the windows and the chimney or what have you, and is actually sort of reforming the system against their will. Like Dodd-Frank did not reform the banks, it just sort of enshrined them. It was, it was, um, you know, a coronation in the name of a regulation, right? Yeah, it did reduce some of their profit levels in some ways, but it made them like more invulnerable. Go ahead. You were gonna say?

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:33:31

        No, I'm just smi- I'm smiling. I'm enjoying.

    24. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:33:34

        Yeah.

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:33:34

        So, and for those who, who, who can't see us, because we're probably not gonna be publishing video, we're pub- we're, we are currently on video, so we can watch each other's facial expressions. Please continue.

    26. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:33:44

        Sure, sure, sure. Yeah.

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:33:44

        I like, I, I liked, I liked the, uh, the coronation disguised as regulation. [laughs]

    28. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:33:50

        Right. Right. Exactly, right? You know, so, so it is, it is literally picking winners, 'cause you're writing the regulation that assumes a certain structure and capital requirements. I mean, like the concept of a smart contract was not contemplated in Dodd-Frank. You know? Like a, like a contract that could be executed independently of a judge or, or a person. Okay, what's my point? Point is, as faith in the pre... I mean, I, I don't think many institutions that predated the internet will survive the internet. It is this universal asset, and the reason is because it connects people peer to peer. And so what that does is it... I mean, one of my laws of internet physics is the internet increases variance. Okay? Why? So at first let's see, let me give the observation, right? The observation is, uh, you go from 30-minute sitcoms to 30-episode Netflix binges or 30-second YouTube clips. You go from, you know, a stable nine-to-five job to a 20-something billionaire or a 40-year-old failed son who's made nothing of themselves. You go from a taxi ride, you know, a standard taxi ride, to Uber, which actually has very long trips and also very short ones. Like the whole thing is spread out relative to the ride time of a normal taxi. And the reason for this, like this is a very common thing. In every area, like in every... And I've seen hundreds, probably thousands of companies at this point. I've seen all these graphs, right? So you'll have to believe me that this is a synthesis of a lot of different graphs that I've seen. When the internet disruptor comes in, variance increases. There's more downside and more upside, more amazing outcomes and s- more really bad outcomes in all kinds of ways. Why does that happen? Because it connects people peer to peer, entities peer to peer, it removes the middleman, it removes the mediator, it removes the moderator, it removes the mediocrity. Now, each of those words has a different connotation. Getting rid of the middleman, everyone cheers. "Yay." Getting rid of the moderator, people are like, "Oh, I'm not so sure." Getting rid of the mediocrity, again, everybody cheers. So tho- those are all kind of similar words, but they mean somewhat different implications. But they're all true at the same time. So, uh, what happens is you have these communities that then arise where nodes that can never connect to each other, boom, they form some bizarre subreddit. Or some amazing thing like ETH research, you know, which has put, you know, or Y Combinator. So you, it, it's like a... I don't know if you've ever centrifuged anything. Have you ever centrifuged anything?

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:36:10

        This is, I can finally say yes to something. Yes.

    30. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:36:13

        Okay. All right.
11. 1:43:03 – 2:10:48

    Risk scenarios and attack surfaces: China’s firewall, US regulation, self-custody, and Ethereum’s different tradeoffs

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:43:03

       And a mass exodus, at least for the time being, I don't think this is permanent, but out of city centers. To question, not to belabor this point, but I think it's a useful tool to use in the conversation. In the case of BTC and ETH, how would you think about downside risk and- What would need to happen, or what might happen or not happen, that would make them bad investments?

    2. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:43:30

       Great question. So I think that for BTC, because it's like a 10-year-old protocol, the attack on BTC that I think would be the most likely is that the Chinese put up the great firewall against it. So it's a network-level attack as opposed to a mining attack. 'Cause the thing is that Bitcoin assumes that every node can reach every other node. So... Or every mining node can reach every other mining node. So it assumes a global internet. If you put up the firewall, you can work out the kind of predator-prey on this, but, you know, they block port 8323, and the Bitcoin devs do port randomization, and then they do, you know, deep packet inspection, and these guys do tunneling to try to put it over SSH or HTTPS. There's, there's a back and forth that can happen there. I think at the end of the day, the firewall's pretty sophisticated, and it will... That plus, like, domestic penalties may make it challenging for people to maintain a blockchain indefinitely in China. Or what would happen is they mine the China chain, and the rest of the world chain is also being mined, and there's, like, a peekaboo problem where they sync up every once in a while. And because the, the China chain would have more mining, the rest of world chain would have less mining, all the blocks mined in the rest of the world would get thrown away with a chain reorganization, and the China chain would basically periodically throw away every transaction that was happening in the rest of the world. That would be, like, the worst-case scenario where, remember, two things would have to happen there. First, they'd have to put up the firewall, and second, they would have to allow Chinese mining to continue.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:44:55

       At some point, as you're describing this, I'd love to hear you assign a probability if you had to, like zero to 100% over a timeframe, right? Like in the next five or 10 years.

    4. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:45:06

       I'd say 30% chance of a firewall attack. It's not 100%. The reason is because it's just something... I mean, Bitcoin is like a guy who's, like, extremely strong and muscular on many dimensions, but can be hit from a direction over here, which is just, it's just an assumption of the protocol is that every node can reach-

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:45:23

       Yeah

    6. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:45:23

       ... every other node. And depending on-

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:45:26

       Yeah

    8. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:45:26

       ... the location of where mining is happening, and so, now, to be clear, I don't think this is a fatal blow. I think what would happen is in the event that China allowed mining to continue but put up the firewall, which is, like, the most Machiavellian thing they could do. They're pretty smart.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:45:39

       Right. And the 30% that you assigned was only for the first part of that, correct? Not the allowing mining to continue.

    10. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:45:45

        Well, if they do both. So, so meaning-

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:45:47

        Oh, I see

    12. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:45:47

        ... or rather, I think it's very likely they're gonna do a firewall attack at some point. If they do that and shut down mining, no problem, and the reason is because there's enough rest of the world or whatever, you know, mining to continue. It just means that Chinese can only transact in the rest of the world. They have to, like, either go overseas or pick up the phone and speak the words to somebody to execute a transaction. China will never be able to actually eliminate Bitcoin because of the way it's constructed, but they could try to seriously... If they really went after it as super aggressively, they're the only state in the world that I think has the combination of total disregard for individual privacy or human rights, totally organized top-down surveillance regime, which gets a workout every single day with a firewall. You know, like, that combination. The US government can't mail checks to people on time, so a lot of people think the US government could do some technical... The US government is incapable of a technical attack. The US government can't set up a website. It is not the entity that we know from the movies, which maybe never existed. But, you know, the US government from 1933 to 1968 could do, like, Hoover Dam and, you know, like, uh, Manhattan Project and Apollo. That was, like, a generation that is long since gone. You can't think of the last impressive thing that happened that the... Go ahead.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:46:58

        Well, I... No, no, I'm, I'm just smiling. I just l- I'm just enjoying this conversation tremendously. Uh, it's, it's, uh, it's not because I have something to say, although now that you've given me the mic, I'll ask a question that perhaps is just on the mind of people listening, and that is, that 30% that you gave, does that mean that Balaji is saying there's a 30% chance of Bitcoin being a bad investment?

    14. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:47:20

        No. Uh, what I... I'm saying something different, which is in the event of such as an attack, like a firewall attack, what would happen probably is a few things. First, uh, depending on how it manifests, people might actually move over to a quasi-trusted chain for a time. That is to say you'd, you'd put some form of signature or hash into miners when they put it out there to prove that they were a non-China miner, and you'd actually temporarily move away from the Satoshi algorithm of heaviest proof of work chain to heaviest trusted proof of work chain. You actually have to introduce some trust potentially to get around it. That's one option. The other option... And so that's like a fork of the chains, in this event that they do the firewall, but they also allow mining to continue, which is, like, the most Machiavellian thing that's possible. However, if there's some other issue with the Bitcoin protocol, the thing that I'm pretty sure will never disappear is the Bitcoin ledger. That is replicated in so many places, and it's so valuable, that in the event of some issue with the Bitcoin protocol, the ledger could be imported into 100 other chains, and would be. It's already done with all these forks or whatever, right? But, you know, for example, Zcash could just double their supply from 21 million to 42 million and just give refuge to all Bitcoiners. It just, you know, kind of snapshots at a particular timestamp. Everybody who has private keys before then, you've got a spot on the Zcash ledger. The same thing could happen on Ethereum. The same thing could happen on all these other chains, right? So it's as if your stock would get split into 100 different or 1,000 different instances, so your private keys would still find refuge. And that, you know, now the sum total of all those values, that might be a price hit. There's no question that there might be a price hit there. Maybe it's even more. Who the heck knows? It's just like crypto is so unpredictable, I can't even, I can't even say what would happen. Because some of the forks have done extremely well, way better than I would've expected. But that would be a Tower of Babel moment where you'd still want to hold onto your private keys, but it would be all these other chains that would back you up. So it would be messy, but I, I don't think the idea of cryptocurrency can be defeated at this point. I think any individual chain, it remains to be seen how robust they are. I don't think that cryptocurrency as a concept goes away. It, it's similar, by the way, to file sharing. Where Napster got sued and Kazaa got sued, but BitTorrent and magnet links and The Pirate Bay are still around and actually quite good. BitTorrent streaming is quite good. What was that, uh, Popcorn Time? Popcorn Time was actually quite a good app, you know, that's like basically streaming with the quality of, like, an iTunes or whatever, b- BitTorrent streaming. So that doesn't mean... I'm not saying it would be a bad investment. I think th- that's, that's the most likely attack I can see from the Chinese side.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:49:50

        That's specific to BTC?

    16. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:49:51

        For BTC, yeah, yeah. So on the US side, so not all, uh, like, other algorithms, other consensus algorithms have a greater degree of partition tolerance built in, for example. You know, the fundamental thing you'd have to work out is, like, tolerance for extended partitions where a big chunk of the network can't see another big chunk of the network, and so then you'd have to detect that. You'd have to maintain a log of which nodes you were able to reach. There, there's ways of doing this. It's non-trivial. It's especially non-trivial in production, but it's possible. A lot of smart computer scientists working on this. So you'd have to have partition-tolerant chains which could exist, number one. Number two, with respect to what the US would do, the US will probably do a regulatory attack because that's the one part of the state that's still functional. They can pass regulations and, and yell at people and, and job on them and so on. Now, what happened in New York with the BitLicense, I think, is a harbinger of what is to come. New York sort of overestimated their clout. They're like, "We're in New York, so of course we're gonna regulate all crypto stuff. What are you gonna do? You gonna go somewhere else? It's New York. It's the best. Blah, blah, blah." And that's not what happened. Instead, what happened was every crypto company was like, "Actually, the world is very big now. New York is the last place that we're gonna operate, like literally last. We'll operate in 49 other states and do New York last." And that just meant that actually New Yorkers got financial innovation last rather than first. So that one regulation, the BitLicense, was something where these folks who were at some point the Big Apple, quote-unquote, was number one, and they just overplayed their hand in an arrogant way because they didn't understand. The guys who got them there weren't arrogant like that. They were always hungry, you know, coming up. Like, there were folks who understood, okay, New York has to do this, has to do that. These folks had been born with it. They had inherited the system. They just thought they always had that leverage, and I think that's a microcosm of what the US might do, where it becomes, like, super unfriendly for crypto or... It's possible, right? Think it's also possible the resistance comes from within the US. It's, this is something we have very low probability on. I think it can go many different ways. The future's uncertain.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:51:43

        So the regulatory, federal-level regulatory attack in the US you view as a low-probability event?

    18. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:51:50

        No, I think it's-

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:51:50

        Or just a low co-

    20. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:51:51

        I, I-

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:51:51

        Or just a low-consequence event because those companies domiciled in the US who are focused on crypto would just re-domicile?

    22. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:51:58

        It's not that easy to just do that for lots of reasons.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:52:01

        It is not easy, yeah. [laughs]

    24. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:52:01

        It's not that easy to just do that, right. Exactly. Look, so I think US incorporation in the sense of, like, being incorporated in the US is, uh, is going to be considered, like, a major vulnerability in the future, I think, after, you know, like the 2020s. And people ideally will want to incorporate on chain, and then have jurisdictions that respect that because that's global rule of law. You know, you can put your shareholder vote in there. You can put your board of directors vote in there. Everything can be done on chain in a better way, and then the... Ju- just like you can print out a document locally or exchange Bitcoin locally or, you know, have email work everywhere, you'd basically have local government system... Or Twitter works everywhere, you know what I mean? Local governments would actually adapt to the on-chain realities rather than vice versa. That's starting to happen. So now to the federal point-

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:52:47

        Now, that-

    26. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:52:48

        Go ahead.

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:52:48

        Yeah, I was just gonna say, that sounds like a, a company or organizational response to federal regulatory attack. I'm wondering what, if anything, individual sort of retail investors who hold Bitcoin could or would do.

    28. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:53:04

        Sure. So I'd say, I'd say go to Miami, go to Wyoming, go to places like that, maybe Colorado, which will be sanctuary cities and states for crypto.

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:53:12

        Why is that? Is it just because you have, the first two at least, are no state income tax?

    30. BSBalaji Srinivasan1:53:17

        Oh, no, because Wyoming and Miami have, uh... So it's, it's, uh, it's not j- it's not... I mean, there's places that are low tax. That's not actually the thing. The mayor of Miami-
12. 2:10:48 – 2:32:12

    From destabilization to ‘network states’: variance, unbundling/rebundling, and new forms of governance

    1. TFTim Ferriss2:10:48

       So how, how would you respond to that assessment? Do you view yourself as leaning towards viewing the future with... through the lens of entropy and, and dystopian possibilities, or is that just a misread of what you're saying? And is that just a misread of you in general?

    2. BSBalaji Srinivasan2:11:10

       I think the future will be more different from the present than is commonly understood, and that's actually... So more different than ours. Uh, like was the year 2000 that different from 1970? Hmm, not really. I mean, uh, certainly there were political changes. And, and, uh, obviously, you know, China had reformed, and the USSR had fallen, and so on and so forth. But the rhythms of daily life were actually quite similar. People got up, they went to work. There was like a... there was a relative constancy there. Yeah, there were, there were phones, but they weren't smartphones. They were still basically landlines, you know, head- headsets or handsets, right? Cordless perhaps. Over the last 20 years, there's been an enormous change in terms of the rhythms of daily life. One way of thinking about that is, what was your daily life when you woke up in 1980? Okay, so you would... You know, there'd be an alarm clock, beep, beep, beep. You'd wake up, you'd go downstairs, maybe flip on the TV to look at the morning news, make some eggs, drink some orange juice, maybe read the morning newspaper, go and drive to work, where your job involved, um, if you're white collar, like some papers, and if you're blue collar, you're going and hammering something or whatever. You'd come back, maybe go to the bar on the way back, or you just come straight home and, you know, play with your kids or, or something like that. And almost every aspect of that has now changed. How do you wake up? You wake up to your phone. What's the first thing you do? You look at all of your email because you're getting just all these... or messages, right? Messages are coming into you, right? You have this personal communication device. So first thing you do is different. Um, this is for people who are addicted to their phone, but a lot of people are. You come downstairs or you get up and, um, maybe you've got some fitness thing that has read off your sleep. So you look at that, because your sleep is also instrumented. You know, you go to the kitchen and, uh, yeah, there's food there, but maybe you just go straight to work and you Uber Eats, you know, food to work. Uh, or maybe you don't go to work at all, and you just work remote from your pajamas in, in, you know, the living room, which is totally feasible today. Your job isn't involving papers or hammering things, but it's hitting keys. Everything is with 50 people who you might have never met in person, that they're remote all around the world. Through the day, you're like reading newspapers, you're reading code. Your job is just much more variable than the hammering job. Rather than pushing the same button for 20 years, you're pushing a different key every second. Basically, every single second of life, from your sleep to your sleep tracker, to your food, through your ordering apps or what have you... To obviously your work, to your finances, to your communications, to where you decide to go after you finish working. Like, okay, let's do Google Maps. Now the whole map has opened up. One thing we take for granted, in the '80s and '90s when y- you really had to get an atlas to... Or, you know, get, get a map out to go somewhere new, and you had to study it because you could get lost. Getting lost was a thing. You never get lost anymore, not in the same way. So for the most part, thoroughfares were really important. People didn't really go off the beaten path that much unless you had a house over there. It was, like, the fewest number of turns. You really didn't drive around randomly. You didn't go to, like, this random coffee shop over here. The map was mostly, like, coralloid. You know, it wasn't opened up. And so that's all opened up now. Your, your, your recreational life. You can meet with a different person rather than the same group of friends. So in so many ways, the rhythms of life, we've turned into these sort of nomadic creatures from 20 years ago. And our political structures and our, and our homes, and a lot of those sort of things haven't flexed to accommodate that. And one way to think about that is there's two major ways that humans operate. There's, like, the hunter-gatherer, you know, where roam around the world. Many religions, many cultures have something similar to a Garden of Eden type thing, which is whether it's in our genes from, you know, some primitive hominid ancestor that we've got all the way down. Because vision is baked into the genes, of course. Like, the reason you can recognize something as human, there's... That's genetic. So maybe there's some- something coded into us from many, many millennia ago that recognizes Garden of Eden-like thing. We were hunter-gatherers. Who knows how it's represented? And, and then of course, there's the farmer and the warrior, right? Where you have a piece of land rather than roaming all around. You're settled in one spot, and your food is worse. It's grains. It, like, messes up your teeth, and so on. It has you grow less, but it's more reliable. It's more consistent rather than the variable ups and downs of the hunter-gatherer. And in many ways, what I think, and this is not original, you know, to me by any means, this is a fusion, synthesis of a lot of different ideas, but perhaps at least this take on it is, you know, we're going back to the hunter-gatherer way of doing things but with technology. The best quality of life will actually be available to the digital nomad who has a minimum number of possessions, has the ability to pick up and move stakes at any point. Has... Because mobility is leverage against the state, right? A state is a sessile actor. Mobility is something that you can do as an individual the state cannot do, not as easily. You know, it can't just stretch a tendril somewhere else. So new kinds of polities will form. New ways of self-governing humans that are fundamentally network-based rather than state-based. Fundamentally optimized for mobile social networks as opposed to stationary houses. Because the assumptions are fundamentally different. And, you know, basically, for example, you know, I define a network state as a social network with an integrated cryptocurrency and a sense of national consciousness that eventually crowdfunds territory. Okay, and I think that's a new kind of thing. That's at least one definition of a network state. That territory doesn't have to be all in one place. It can be a cul-de-sac here, a ranch here, an apartment building here. And so you have, you know, a group of 100,000 people, let's say, that owns pieces of territory all around the world and that is constantly in communication with each other through a social network and considers themselves to be a people. It's like nation, n- national formation distillation, that centrification that we talked about, out of the internet. Boom. It's a network state. And, uh, it is a, like a cloud formation taking physical shape. You know, the clouds are actually distilling down. And so, you know, when I think about the future, I think about this type of stuff where I'm just thinking from... You know, I'm, I'm thinking about 50 different graphs. This is going down. This is going up. This is going down. This is going up. Actually, Jordan Peterson had a good remark on this similar kind of train of thought, where he's like, "The number of different revolutions that's happening at the same time is too hard to track." Tinder alone is a complete change in how mating happens. Swipe right, swipe left. Swipe right, swipe left. That itself is, like, this huge thing that would dominate the textbooks of another age, you know, because this is a massive change in how, like, the daily rhythms of life operate. You went from having, like a... Have you seen the graph of how people meet their partners?

    3. TFTim Ferriss2:18:03

       I have not.

    4. BSBalaji Srinivasan2:18:05

       Okay. This is this amazing graph of, like, how people meet their significant others. The 2020 update. Basically, e- each little curve here tells a story, but it's like, did you meet at church? Did you meet through your parents? Did you meet at college? Did you meet at work? And you can see, like, meet at work is, like, this boomlet that kind of drops off. It, it, it's peaked in the '80s, and it drops off in the '90s with, you know, various kinds of pathologization of something like that, right? So what dominates everything today is internet. Internet, internet. And in particular, basically, where norms have shifted now is that it's actually more legitimate. I mean, like, I've aged out of this, fortunately, right? But for my younger, you know, friends, what have you, it is impolite to hit on... Often considered, depending on the, the situation. It's often considered impolite to hit on somebody in real life, but it's totally okay to do so on Tinder. So of course, humans are contextual, and of course, the same behavior that's okay in a, in a bar is not okay in a workplace, what have you. But now that's actually extended to digital venues as well. So Tinder alone is just this massive revolution, and then you have, like, 20 of them happening at the same time. And so all of those are these things where the institutions that we have are simply not built for this at all, and that's why they're straining and stressing against it, and they're gonna give, and we have to have a vision for what's on the other side.

    5. TFTim Ferriss2:19:20

       So you're more a student of destabilization or stabilization, but it just so happens that right now these multiple revolutions combine to present destabilizing forces. Not so much that you view humans or the future of humans through a dystopian or pessimistic lens. Is that fair to say?

    6. BSBalaji Srinivasan2:19:43

       Yeah, that's fair to say. I think there's actually a lot of good stuff that's gonna come out of this. I think we are going to get to... So what is a positive vision? What do I think about? You know, I do think that- We can shape the future. Individuals can shape the future. You can shape the future. A founder can shape the future. I've seen it happen with my own eyes. What I think a lot about is a positive international vision, and I think that's gonna be based around essentially transhumanism. And why do I say that? So, uh, you know, I've got various one-liners on this, but I've got this book coming out, by the way. That, that'll actually also be serialized at 1729. So like those daily tasks and book chapters. The, the book's title is The Network State, so you've got about 10 chapters that I should be dropping, and then more to come. But one of the concepts in it is infinite frontier, immutable money, eternal life, like, as something to strive for. You know, 'cause you need these sort of slogans or, or things which, you, you know, a bumper sticker that expands into a PhD thesis, right? So what does that say? That says space is good. That says, you know, Bitcoin is good, crypto is good. That says life extension is good. And you know, that pulls so much with it. Life extension basically says, "Look, universal healthcare is not enough. We need eternal life." Okay? Our ambitions have actually been lower than they need to be. Universal healthcare is just moving gravy around on the plate. It's, it's a fundamentally zero-sum mentality that really presumes... Go ahead. Go ahead.

    7. TFTim Ferriss2:21:09

       [laughs] No, no, I just... That's a great turn of phrase. [laughs]

    8. BSBalaji Srinivasan2:21:12

       Yeah. Yeah. It's like-

    9. TFTim Ferriss2:21:13

       The moving grav- moving gravy around on the plate

    10. BSBalaji Srinivasan2:21:15

        ... well, like the goal is for you to not need healthcare in any normal sense. The goal is for you to be this self-repairing, rejuvenating... Uh, there's technologies out there which, which sound crazy, but I've got a post called The Purpose of Technology. You know, we can, scientists can, engineers can restore sight, cure deafness. There's good research on limb regeneration. There's good research on genetic modifications that'll make you completely ripped without ever having to do anything, like the Follistatin stuff and Myostatin stuff. And, you know, pace-

    11. TFTim Ferriss2:21:47

        Can I pause for one second?

    12. BSBalaji Srinivasan2:21:48

        Go ahead.

    13. TFTim Ferriss2:21:49

        Just for, just for people who don't have this bit of context because I, I don't want, I don't want folks to think these are the, the ravings of a madman.

    14. BSBalaji Srinivasan2:21:59

        [laughs]

    15. TFTim Ferriss2:22:00

        You, you are very, you, you are very cross-disciplinary. You've spent a lot of time in the biological sciences, genomics, computational biology of course. Tell me if this is a fair statement. I mean, you, you almost became the head of the FDA under the last administration as well. Is that a fair statement?

    16. BSBalaji Srinivasan2:22:19

        I, I was considered for a very senior role there, yes.

    17. TFTim Ferriss2:22:22

        Okay. That's... Just, just wanted to add that for, for people who may not have any of that context. So, so please continue. Yes. Healthcare, universal healthcare or basic healthcare, moving gravy around on a plate unnecessarily or unhelpfully-

    18. BSBalaji Srinivasan2:22:35

        Right

    19. TFTim Ferriss2:22:35

        ... low expectation.

    20. BSBalaji Srinivasan2:22:37

        Right. Right. So exactly. Like I, I'm, I'm really not somebody to stand on qualifications or credentials or whatever, but in this area some, you know, people wanna check them. Yes, I've taught computational genomics. I founded a clinical genomics company, all that stuff. And, uh, you know, of course, no one can be an expert in every area of biology. It's too big. You know, there's guys who are experts in radiology, which I don't know as much about. But I do think that one of the few good things that'll come out of this pandemic is a Y-shaped recovery where we're, we're taking a different fork. We've deprecated the 20th century leisure economy. You know, the 20th century leisure economy of bars and restaurants and clubs and all that type of stuff is something which, you know, just had this enormous economic hit to it. You know, the, the levels of bankruptcies are just off the charts. It's a terrible thing. I think if we're lucky, we get, not in its place because it's not zero sum, but there's a greater focus on health, on life extension. And the reason I say life extension, by the way, we're really reversing aging, which is even better, is it just captures everything, right? It's like a, it's like, um, a universal ruler where if we can reverse aging, we can fix so many other things. We can probably, should I say cure cancer. Uh, there's many kinds of issues, musculoskeletal things, you know, osteoporosis, you know, macular degeneration. All those kinds of things that happen often, they're correlated with increasing age, you know? And, uh, and people have this mental model that, oh, we're just breaking down, you know, like a, like a car. It just accumulates hits and it breaks down, right? That actually cannot be the model of how aging happens. Do you know why?

    21. TFTim Ferriss2:24:19

        Why is that?

    22. BSBalaji Srinivasan2:24:20

        If that was the case, if, if we were breaking down like a mechanical thing, okay, then there's a known statistical distribution. It would be like a... It, it's like a hazard rate, right? So there, there's a... You'd have an exponential distribution of lifetimes, and some fraction of cars, for example, just managed to make it through without any hits whatsoever. And so you'd have like some people, if that was the case, would live like 1,000 years, um, because they'd just be lucky and not take any hits at all. That's not what we see. What we see is actually like a sharp cutoff at like 120. And we're all-

    23. TFTim Ferriss2:24:55

        Right. Right. If you keep the, if you, if you keep the human in the garage in perfect condition, they don't last forever. [laughs] They die.

    24. BSBalaji Srinivasan2:25:00

        Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That's right. So, so there's something interesting about it where also, you know, there's, this is very predictable. Like there's a, an aging and then, you know, like there's menopause, for example, in women. You know, one car rolls along and it busts a tire. Another one smashed the windshield and, you know, like there's a greater degree of variability when it's just like random things happening. If you see 500 older men, they all are some version of grayer or, you know, more wrinkles or what have you, right? There's a predictability to it, you know, of how actually everything's happening. So because of this, people have found that aging is actually a coordinated thing. And people understand that going from a child to an adolescent is a coordinated process, right? You people get that that's programmed into your genes. What just hasn't really sunk in for many people is that the aging part is as well, and we might be able to unprogram that or reverse that. And in fact, there's actually a lot of results in this area, way more than people think. Okay? There are studies I can show you that are what we, the, in, we technically call the holy shit phenotype, okay, where there's a guy whose graying hair has just been reversed, right? Repigmentation of hair just by taking a cancer drug as a side effect. There are, you know, studies of rats. You can see the follistatin injections. You get, like, this Hulk-like rat. I posted one of these. Um, and, and so there's actually amazing things that are happening in biomedicine that have simply not achieved distribution, in part because of regulation, in part because that's simply not the stories that people are interested in telling, in part because, not exactly lack of funding, but it is lack of funding and energy sufficient to overcome the regulatory and negative press obstacles, you know? And this is something I think is related to kind of doing decentralized media, getting folks around transhumanism. Either people are gonna kind of vector on this sort of anarcho-primitivism axis. Do you know what that is?

    25. TFTim Ferriss2:26:58

        No.

    26. BSBalaji Srinivasan2:26:59

        It's a word, it's a phrase I think is gonna become much more well-known. Anarcho-primitivism. It's basically like the Unabomber ideology, right? It is the, um... it's essentially the ideology that humans are bad. We're all destroying the planet, therefore we need to kill as many humans as possible. Or it's like, you know VHEMT, Voluntary Human Extinction Movement?

    27. TFTim Ferriss2:27:18

        No [laughs] , I don't.

    28. BSBalaji Srinivasan2:27:20

        Okay. Um.

    29. TFTim Ferriss2:27:20

        I don't. I do not.

    30. BSBalaji Srinivasan2:27:22

        Okay.

Episode duration: 3:43:10