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

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

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

Mm-hmm.

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

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

Sure.

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

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