Balaji Srinivasan | The Pseudonymous Economy & Transhumanism

Hi, everyone. Really nice to see all of you. To plot that Intelligent Corporation group, we have recurring guest here, which is who is Balaji. And I think really, you're still one of our most watched videos. You're only surpassed by Chiara Melleto, who made it to 110k views when she published her book Under Theory of David Dodge. And then it comes you straight away. And I think comments on the YouTube video are something like, this is the best thing I've seen on the Internet and so much more relevant than everything else that is happening in schools. So.

All right, that's good.

But yeah, I'm really, really happy to have you here, to have you back on again. And you know, this is kind of like a collaborative podcast, which we often do with this group, where I ask a bunch of questions up front and then people here get to ask their questions. But to do a very brief intro, you know, you've kind of stumped companies out of the ground as if there was no tomorrow. You were at a 16Z for a while, and now you've dedicated your time to stopping network states out of the ground with much success. I think you've really kindled a few wonderful projects that I'm really excited to talk about. But we first came across your work when writing Gaming the Future, the book. And it's not only the Network State part that's really relevant to this, but like it comes with a bunch of other bits like decentralized attendance and like a more longer facing kind of like promises of crypto technologies for civilization. And so I'm really happy to dig into those as well. But I got super excited about your work and when, before the book was published, joined your Discord and VR university meetings, which were amazing. And yeah, so we also got to collaborate a bit on Tech Trees, which is also something of like major interest to you. So maybe you can dig down to that as well. But for now, I'm really, really happy to have you here and for everyone else again, that algorithm is. I'm going to ask a few questions and then feel free to drop questions in the chat and can kind of like go back and forth as we see fit. Okay, cool.

All right, sounds good.

First thing up is what are you focused right now? Is it the network State?

Hopefully.

I mean, you just published a book and then if you want to give a brief overview of like, how the hell did you get there, what got you started on your path and how is it, you know, that you arrived at your current focus?

Sure, yeah. Well, so I'VE been thinking about these concepts for a long time. How to get to the network state. It's because I wanted to unlock innovation and longevity and biomedical innovation more generally and realized that it's actually just as it was easier to start Bitcoin than to reform the Fed, it's literally easier to start a new country than to reform the fda. And you know, once you actually embrace the totality of that and you realize that while that sounds crazy, it's actually less crazy than spending a lot of time trying to edit, you know, schedule X or subpart Y of some regulation. Sometimes, you know, it's like Larry page says, sometimes 10x is easier than 10%. Right? So once you kind of set that goal well, you know, many people here are probably, would probably accept the premise that, you know, we are sort of waking up from the vacation from history, that we're entering a period of volatility again. And that volatility doesn't just have downside potential, it has upside potential. That is to say, perhaps it's not just a, a time when, you know, bad things happen, but perhaps good things happen. Perhaps it's a time where we can start new countries again. And you know, what's my book about? It's about a theory and you know, it's got, it's version 1.0, right? And what I want to try to do is update it every year. It's, you know, knock on wood, it's a big thing to update something every year. It's like a academic textbook, you know, first edition, second edition, third edition, etc. Etc. Maybe it'll converge on something. What am I working. So that's how I got here, which is how to unlock biomedical innovation. And like the Toyota 5 Whys, you know, you ask what, why, why, why, why all the way up, you know, why can't we innovate? Okay, well, you know, there's this incredible amount of bureaucracy and process around it. It's not like, you know, phase 1, 2, 3 and 4 clinical trials. It's not like S and P orbitals, right? It's not baked into the fabric of reality. These are man made obstacles that did not exist at the time of Beijing. And best and when, you know, drug development was a matter of willing doctor and willing patient. Those guys won the Nobel Prize by the way, for insulin. So why'd I get here? Because biomedical innovation was blocked. Start a new country is actually literally easier than reforming the fda. And what are the next steps is to make the book real. And so can we get if it took about 13 years, from the publication of the Bitcoin white paper to the recognition of bitcoin as national currency of El Salvador, let's say a comparable time period from the publication of the network state to the recognition of the first network state. That's what I'm working on next. Not just getting it recognized, but building the thousand things that are required. The pipeline of thousands of startup societies, maybe tens of thousands. Just like there's thousands of, you know, YC companies before you get a Stripe or a Dropbox or an Airbnb. You know, there's about 3,000 YC companies and about 5 that are over 50 billion less. Less people checked before the crash. Right. Maybe 10 billion. There might be several thousand startup societies or crypto communities, and then one or two of them achieve diplomatic recognition. But that's changed the world. It's a peaceful way of actually doing political innovation. So that's what I'm focused on for if that was the last 10 years, that's also the next 10 years.

And what do you think classifies as network state versus not like I, you know, you and I and many people here in this call, you know, have been following seasteading movements for a while, travel cities and so forth. And so is it just the software layer on this, or is there anything in particular that is like a, you know, a very concrete, you know, concrete goal here? I know that, for example, we have a lot of virtual and online communities now that are also kind of like volunteer communities of some extent, but I think your kind of like, demand is really high, which is like, let's form them on the network and then move them into reality. So you kind of like both meet spaces and cyberspace in this industry. So what kind of classifies, what's your ideal, idealized form of a network state?

Sure, yeah. So just like, you know, there wasn't really a cryptocurrency before Bitcoin, but there were things that were sort of adjacent to it. However, Bitcoin, I think, had a few, several critical innovations, one of which was a decentralization. You know, there are a few things that Bitcoin introduced, none of which were completely new. You know, people had the concept of chains of hashes. Adam Back had the concept of hashcash. A lot of those pieces were out there. Right. So, you know, similarly, there's lots of things that people have talked about on the Internet as being state like. Right. But insofar as I've made a contribution, I think it's a synthesis of a bunch of things that based on both modern technology and the historical process of state formation, are likely to produce an entity that is capable of actually achieving diplomatic recognition and is therefore a digital cognate or of a country in the same way that Bitcoin is a digital cognate of offline gold. Okay. And so, for example, you know, what is different about the. A network state. So let me first give like a kind of this informal definition. Okay. And then let me kind of contrast it. I did this in the book as well, but I'll contrast it to various other things that exist right now. So in one sentence, a network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre existing states. Okay, so highly aligned online community right there that knocks out Twitter or Facebook. Right. Why?

Well, here members don't actually really have skin in the game and like the long term goals that they're working towards. But you know, it's, it's pretty much. And I, I know that you pointed this out a lot. I think you, for a while your pin treat was even, how can we get off Twitter, Go over here or something.

Yeah, yeah, it's still that, it's still that. Right. Like Twitter is basically the reason is Twitter is a combination between a librarian. Liberia. Right. It is, you know, civil discussion and a civil war. And you know, it's something where people will just shoot at each other and in the midst of a conversation and then resume the conversation, you know, and that's because, you know, what is Twitter? It's a combination of. It's 330/something million people from around the world that are unified by nothing more than desire for intellectual stimulation, which can mean learning something or fighting someone. Right. And so it's not something where people have shared values. They don't, you know, there's nothing you can. They don't think of themselves as Twitterians, you know, they, they know what Twitter is, but it's more like the battleground that they enter each day. Uh, it's like all, you know, all the people who play a video game, they don't think of themselves as on the same team. In fact, quite the contrary if it's something where they shoot each other. So right there, highly aligned online community that knocks out Twitter and, and so on and so forth. Okay, now you go to something, let's say like, like a Facebook group or a, you know, a message board or a subreddit that starts to get more aligned. There's leadership there's a. There's a moderator. Okay? But capacity for collective action is very weak in the sense that, you know, a. Maybe with a subreddit or for example, let's say you've got a bunch of folks, they're following somebody on Twitter or they're in a Facebook group, what fraction of them can you get to take an action even to like a post? There's a thousand people, you know, for. Let's say you've got a million people on Twitter who follow you. Like a thousand like posts is actually fairly high. Okay, that's one out of a thousand people actually doing something, you know, so conversion rate is 0.1%. So the capacity for collective action online is actually quite low. And this is something which, you know, is worth just hovering on. You know, this is one of the reasons I think the Internet is still only a shadow of what it will become. It's still very entropic. You know, like heat is all these molecules, you know, moving in different directions. And then like work is forced along a distance. And if you think about what, what is Reddit, what is hacker news, what is Twitter? It's just a bunch of random stuff. You go to hacker news, it's 30 random links. You refresh again tomorrow, it's 30 random links. It's just higgledy piggledy, you're going here, you're going there, right? And that's actually why, you know, you. It's not that easy to get collective action online. You have to get these molecules that are going all in these higgledy piggly, different directions to align along one axis. Not that easy. So just right there, the capacity for collective action, that knocks out quite a lot of other groups. Okay, so now you might say, okay, a company. And a company is closer in some ways because it does have a capacity for collective action. You have a hundred people in a company and you put out an all hands, you'll probably get on the order of 100% of people attending that all hands. Okay, but it's not really a community because it's a company. A company is not the same as community. In a community, people tend to have different employers, but shared values. In a company that are all under the same employer, it's a little, it's a little too focused in some ways, you know, whereas. And they've got a lot of shared risk. They can all go down or up together. It's a little too volatile. Whereas community people tend to have different jobs and so on. But a company does have a capacity for collective Action. And then a little bit more of the definition crowdfund territory around the world. Now we do start getting something relatively unusual. I mean, if you're a multinational tech company like Google or Facebook, you do have offices around the world. You swipe a badge, you're in a little piece of Google. It's like the embassy of Google. Somewhere around it flies a flag. Right. You walk in, you see the, you know, the signage. Perhaps there's a tasteful mix of, you know, Bangalore's architecture and the Google logo in the background. Or Berlin's. Right. Or Boston's, but it's a piece of Google somewhere around the world. Google embassy. And that's the same for Facebook. That's same for any multinational. That's the same for Starbucks. That's the same for all of these places that have become, in a sense, a home away from home. Right. And so we know that that works for commercial real estate. Can that work for residential real estate? Right. We have not actually done that where it's a community that's crowdfunding territory to live together as opposed to a company that's purchasing territory in order to, you know, kind of network together into real estate or commercial office space. Right.

Finally a community that's called the Embassy network. And so we have in San Francisco, one in a castle in France. And there's like different kind of like embassies across the world where you can like float relatively freely between if you want to. But you know, we don't really have like, we have like governance potential, APIs and so forth that people can plug and play. But it's really difficult because no city really wants you to live together that way.

Yeah, well, that's interesting. Why do you say no city wants you to live together? They want single occupancy kind of stuff.

Yeah, yeah, they're pretty family or normal family oriented.

Right, right, right, exactly. So, so the thing is that, you know, once you start having collective living, you start sometimes going outside of existing zoning, people are like, oh, you all want to live next to each other, that's weird. Why don't you all live on totally different streets of totally different, you know, buildings and so on? Right. So, so basically this concept of an aligned online community, capacity for collective action, crowdfunds territory around the world and then finally gains diplomatic recognition from pre existing states. That last bit is again unusual. There are precedents for it. So you know, I've mentioned like GoDaddy did a deal with Tuvalu for the TV domain. Wyoming uses Ethereum for online incorporation. Miami And El Salvador and New York, you know, in Miami and New York they, the mayors are paid in bitcoin and El Salvador becomes a national currency. In Nevada they did a deal with Tesla for the Gigafactory. Virginia did a deal with Amazon for HQ2 and so on and so forth. So there are deals between sovereigns, whether cities, U.S. states or countries on the one hand, and companies and currencies on the other hand. And the question is, can we extend it to online communities, right? I think we can. So each of these pieces I talk about highly aligned online community, capacity for collective action, crowdfunds territory around the world, gain simple Mac recognition. Each of these pieces, there's like sub modules, there's things that kind of exist, but we haven't snapped them all together. And I think if you do, you get something that's a cognitive estate and that's why there's lots of stuff out there. When you say are people building network states? It's funny because on the one hand it's cool to see lowercase network state become like a term very, very quickly. Like it took a long time for Google to become Googling or Uber to become Ubering. But if you go to search.twitter.com and you just put in network state, that's the thing, right? Like people talk about it. And of course when people talk about it, any term, you can only pack so much into a few syllables. It's a little bit like, you know, Clayton Christensen introduced this term of disruption and he had this very specific technical concept of what that was supposed to mean. And it's supposed to mean like innovation that came in from the low end and then it disrupted the high end innovation and people just used it as a general term for tech blowing somebody shit up. Okay. And so it was, it was something which became just a, you know, it subsumed the other definition, but it wasn't the precise technical definition that he wanted. But of course the common English language definition dominated that. Right. And so what I find is that people are kind of casually are talking about network states and they're referring to like their DAO as a network state or something like that. And so I kind of rolled my eyes a little bit and you know, there may be, it's, you know, I don't want to be like the Academy francaise and be very, I don't know, like a very verbally dictatorial or whatever on it. Right. But, but I do think that if you prepend the term recognized network state, that gets closer to what I had. Should I tell you about, you know, the four phases of the network state. Did we talk about that? You should talk about that from the book.

Yeah, yeah. Why not talk about it? And I do just want to say, in terms of definition, you know, we've seen it all before with AI that back in the day I meant, like, AI meant artificial general intelligence. Now we have to have a new term for general intelligence. Back in the days, nanotechnology meant, like, actually atomically precise, and it became something totally else. And it's partly like a compliment, you know, to the success of the work, I think, just get. Get to use.

But, yeah, that's a good example.

And also, where will we end up in like, in these 13 years? I think before that, with Bitcoin, you mentioned. Okay, it took 30 years.

Yeah.

For bitcoin recognition. Like, where could we be? And like, I don't know, in about 13 years. And like. Yeah, what's the. What's the path there?

Great question. So. So first is recognize network state. It's good. The. The comparable to AGI is a good. Comparable. Right. So artificial general intelligence versus just AI in general. So. So basically, the four phases of the network state that I describe in the book are, number one, startup society. You just got a guy, you know, person in their dorm room and, you know, somebody, you know, with a laptop, somewhere with a dream, okay. They've got a concept of, you know, they're like Theodore Herzl. They've got a concept for what they think should be a state. They're the next Lee Kuan Yew. They're the next Washington. They're. They're the potential founder of a country. And then the next step is what I call a network union, where that person has taken a bunch of people online and sewed them together into a unit that's capable of collective action. Could be as simple as having ten people there, and you get ten likes. A hundred people, you get a hundred likes. It's as simple and as hard as that. Why is that hard? Well, probably whatever app or forum you use for that looks different than Twitter or Discord because they're not really built for, you know, the focusing energy of everybody doing the same thing at the same time. You know, they are built for people milling around and chatting and having fun. Discord is built for playing video games, not for building buildings. And so, you know, you. You might have. The reason I say that is if you think about Slack, for example, in the 2000s and early 2010s, people thought that Facebook for work would look like Facebook in Fact, Facebook itself thought that Slack actually got pretty far. No, Slack Yammer actually got fairly far sold for a billion to Microsoft on that premise. But having, you know, a Facebook for work, which was just posting a lot of photos, didn't really feel like work to people. And it turned out that Slack was actually the right paradigm. The UX was different. It was more text heavy, less images. It was a little more keyboard driven than Facebook. It was a little more lean forward than lean back. It was more mobile friendly. There are a few things that Slack did. Slack was actually Facebook for work. It was irc, not social networking. And so it may turn out that the interface for tasking, for getting people to do, you know, 100% of the people to do something looks different than Discord and looks different than Twitter. We don't know what it looks like yet. Okay, so that's step two, build a network union, this digital group that's capable of collective action. Step three is now you actually take it into the physical world. You have what I call a network archipelago. And that is, you know, a group of territories around the world that you've crowdfunded that collective action. You go from a hundred people liking something to a hundred people crowdfunding something, or a thousand people, or 10,000 people. And it can be as simple as literally two people living together in a group house. That's a huge step forward in fact, or 10 people, you know, getting like a, like several houses together in a cul de sac. And now you start actually distilling the cloud, you know, materializing the cloud out of the air on land, okay? And so that's the network archipelago. And this is literally just co living communities at this point, but of arbitrary and unbounded scale because they're just networked together by the Internet, okay? In the same way that the islands of Indonesia are separated by ocean, the islands of these. But they think of themselves as part of the same country, right? Think about Hawaii and the continental US 2,000 miles away, but both parties on both sides think of themselves as part of the same country. In the same way you can have islands of territory arbitrarily separated by Internet rather than ocean that think of themselves as part of the same community. Okay? So that's the concept of the network archipelago. And with, you know, mixed reality where you have like AR glasses and you can just see, you know, right now what we're in is we're in a zoom. And in the zoom, you know, people are like from around the world, it's true, but it's not that immersive. Okay. But soon we'll have AR glasses. And if you've seen some of the demos I tweeted about some of this, you would literally be able to have a room with 30 people as holograms. Okay. In 3D that's coming. It's like you could see the demos. Microsoft has this thing that I, that I tweeted about. Apple is working on this. Everybody's working on this. Okay. So that really does start to be depth of distance in some way. It's more convenient than people traveling. They don't even have to appear as ourselves. They can appear as their best dressed version of themselves. Whatever. Okay. Just like your zoom background, okay. They can appear as, you know, a totally different person. They can appear as a pseudonymous person. So once that happens, the networking, these network archipelagos start to get more, more tightly linked. I mean, one of the things I point out in the book is the Internet increases the value of enclaves. Let's say it used to be that territory that was just surrounded by another piece of land wasn't that useful because it was landlocked and because it needed a port. Because, you know, getting access to the ocean was the original peer to peer network. That's how Portugal could connect to Brazil and Macau without going overland. Right. And so, you know, access to the ocean was so critical. And that's why basically a lot of these countries have sort of evolved to have access to the ocean. But now there's a different port. It's on every computer. It's a peer to peer port. And so an Internet, an enclave can be networked to another enclave and another one just instantly via the Internet. And you can actually sew together lots of these fractal pieces of land into this network archipelago. And then finally you get the network state where that network archipelago achieves some form of diplomatic recognition. Now, one thing I want to make clear is you might have a thousand people do a startup society, and then a hundred become a network union and 10 become a network archipelago. For one, that becomes a recognized network state. And that's fine because those intermediate forms, the network union could be a guild. It's never even meant to become a network archipelago. The network archipelago, I give examples of like keto community or other kinds of things. There's many you could think of. If you want Japanese immersion, you want language immersion, you want cultural immersion, you know, you don't have to necessarily change the law in order to have value from living together. Okay, and I'll show you a little visual here. Can I display something or do you want to display something? See if you can display this.

Yeah, cool.

Sure. See if I can. This is really. Here we are. Display something. Okay. Can you guys see the screen? Yep. Okay, so. So that is the concept of the network state. Going from one person, sometimes pictures worth a thousand words. So one guy in Tokyo goes to 17, 172, 1,729, 70,000, 172,000, 1.72 million around the world. Okay, so you go 1 10, 100, a thousand, 10,000, 100,000. And you're just building a digital movement. And you've got this census at the top that shows you the population, income and real estate footprint of this movement. And you can see the buildings get more sophisticated. You know, they start with just somebody in their room and then they start leveling up as the community gets larger. You have little towns and then, you know, whole like subunits of cities. Okay. Nothing prevents people from doing this. There's no technological limitation on this. It's simply about aligning people behind a common cause online, you know, in a way that hasn't been done. One thing I, you know, said is like, you know, the network state is to meetup.com what eHarmony is to Tinder. Okay. In the sense that, you know, you have, you have folks that are actually meeting up for the purposes of a quote, serious relationship, but with a community, not with another person. Right.

Yeah, I love it.

And, and that's new. Okay, go ahead.

I think like one thing, you know, that I don't know if you've read the post, but like this old slave psychotics post on the archipelago and atomic communitarianism where basically Scott Alexander lays out this land of like a bunch of different islands on archipelago. All are value aligned voluntary communities in a utopia where they all kind of voluntarily cooperate with each other. And one big thing that he kind of like sets as a condition here is like, well, they need to be independent, like in terms of externalities that could be served, problems and war and violence between them. And so I would love to hear a little bit more because you thought, I think really deeply and really well about the concept of decentralized defense. And I think that, I think it is something that's extremely, extremely undervalued topic right now because I think usually our standard responses to defense are really heavily relying on the nation state. And so I would be really curious, like what. How can these new sovereignties defend themselves? And in general, like, how do we kind of have a decentralized defense system in place as technologies and risks from, you know, a smaller number of actors being able to cause larger and larger damage to the world, like, as these technologies proliferate, like, how the hell can we get decentralized defense in place?

Sure. So many comments on this. So basically the. So somebody. Somebody's iPhone entered the waiting room. I just admitted them. I'm not sure who that is. But the. So many, many kind of comments on this. But basically, when it comes to decentralized defense, I think the entire paradigm of how people think about the. The state is incorrect. And why is that? Well, so first is, if you think about Bitcoin or Ethereum, they have managed to endure. So I'll give like five or six different overlapping points. Okay, so first is Bitcoin or Ethereum have defended hundreds of billions of dollars for on the order of a decade without a military. Right. Without a police force. And this is the kind of thing that people would normally fight about. Yet somehow they managed to get, as I've said before, a Democrat or a Republican, an Israeli or a Palestinian, Japanese person, Chinese person, they disagree about many things, but they agree about how much Bitcoin each person has on the Bitcoin blockchain. They can get digital consensus on these bytes, and then from that they can get consensus on larger strings of bytes on other things. And so number one is we have kind of an example of property being defended digitally online. In fact, there's a lot of innovation on this. And that's not just property. That's identity. That's basically stocks, bonds, commodities. All kinds of things can be defended insofar as they're purely digital in this thing. Okay, then number two is you can extend that to offline stuff. Why? Because you have your smart locks for your apartments and your cars, and you have all of these digitally gated private spaces. You have elevators that, you know, you need a, you know, a key to a digital, you know, card key that you have to swipe in order to go to a certain floor. And in theory, of course. Is it possible to hotwire these things? It's possible, but it's quite difficult. I mean, yes, they're electromechanical. In theory, you might be able to, like, hijack them and go to a certain floor or hijack the Tesla car, but in practice, very difficult to do. And so that means that a lot of physical property can be similarly digitally gated. Right? Whether it's a car, whether it's a house, whether it's other kinds of things. You can have kind of A digital unlock. Okay, so that now means a very large amount of property can be defended by encryption. By cryptography. It's a different rather than by the state's violence. This is the sovereign individual thesis, but it's actually playing out. It's been playing out for the last 10 years with Bitcoin and Ethereum. I don't think people realize how big this will get because it's a little bit like, for example, Alison, how much time did you spend online in the year 2000? Like, what fraction of your day?

Very little.

Very little. Right. Okay, now how much in the year 2010?

Considerable amount. I would say probably more than now.

More. Oh, really? More than now in 2010? Okay, fine. So how much of your day do you spend online now? Like, basically, you know, majority of your waking hours.

Yeah, yeah. It depends really on the day, but sometimes, yes.

Fine. Okay, so if you think about two axes, right, or three, which are the number of people, the number of hours in the day. So you've got like, you know, let's say fraction of the world, number of hours of the day that they spend online, and then time on this axis, okay, you. You go from maybe a few million people spending a few percent of their time online to billions of people spending at least 10% of their time online. Maybe more like 30 or 40%. Right? That's where we are today, and that's where we're going to go with cryptocurrency. We are, you know, a. Whatever. We're about 300 million people worldwide that hold some cryptocurrency. Let's say that's on the order of 0.1% of their net worth. Okay. I think that's an underestimate, let's just say. So by 2030, you're going to have a billion people, and it'll be like 10% of their net worth. And by 2040, it'll be like billions of people and it'll be more than 50% of their net worth. It'll be like, comparable to, say, it might happen faster or slower than that, but I'm just giving the directionality. Okay, so that means that property is becoming cryptography. It's not. I mean, in a sense, international law didn't even exist before the blockchain. You know why I say that? Because. No. Okay, so I've gave this example before, but let's say you're in. You're in Brazil. Okay? You want to acquire a company. You're. You're CEO of a company in Brazil. You want to acquire a company in Bangladesh. Okay. How many Brazil Bangladesh deals are there each year? Not many. So what are, what are your regulatory obligations? What are your tax obligations? Nobody knows. How many you know, people who speak both Portuguese and Urdu are there? Not too many. So what do you do? You basically go and you probably set up a US hub that intermediates because there's definitely been US Brazil deals, there being US Bangladesh deals. Okay. And so the direct peer to peer doesn't exist there. So you go through a hub of the US you might also go through the hub of China, which definitely exports to both countries. Right? Exports or imports from both countries. Okay. And so there are Chinese companies that also do business with both. Right. And so the thing is that really you don't have a global economy. You have a hub and spoke economy where there is the US and there is China. And those are the two possibilities for doing international deals of substantial magnitude until cryptocurrency. Now that Brazilian and Bangladeshi can collaborate on a smart contract and they can diligence it in the universal language of computer science, and they can send payments back and forth and they can crowdfund something together and they can do this outside the US or the Chinese court system. And this is the thing that I've been talking about, which is that people have taken for granted that America is the world's largest integrated market, which is why you start in the US Or China is the world's second largest. So you can also start in China or stay in China like WeChat and these others, but now there's a third. And that is actually the global Internet, which is distinct and not coterminous with the other two. And that global Internet is achieving rule of law, it's achieving property rights, achieving all this stuff. And because it's decentralized and distributed, it's not something where you're moving police around the world or military around the world. Now again, this works for digital stuff, but as I've talked about, that digital stuff guards a lot of physical stuff with the smart locks and things like that. And even though it's a, it's a small slice of the world's net worth today, I think it'll be a larger and larger slice tomorrow, just like Internet time became a larger slice. So that right there gives a big chunk of the world that is digital property rights, okay? And it gives the reason that that grows because it's got all the peer to peer, everybody who wants to what happens is first you transact, right? Bitcoin just gives raw transactions. Once you transact you want contract, right? Why? Because not everything is just an instant payment between A and B. Perhaps B is sending something back, like shares. Or B is sending back, you know, A is sending a loan and B is sending back 10 payments on that loan. So then you get smart contracts and you go up one level and you start having actually financial statements and entire companies, okay? Then you start having M and A. Then you start, you know, so basically each level, it's like you have a payment, then you have a contract, then you have a, you know, financial statement or a company, right? Then you have a group of companies that are acquiring each other and have, you know, intercompany relationships. Then you have an economy. Right? That is how this whole thing is building out, right? It's like. It's like building the economy. Federal Reserve. First you start with gold and you kind of. It's like a reverse tornado. Okay? So all of that builds online and then it has hooks offline into the, you know, the smart locks and smart doors and stuff. All of which again, there's proof points for it already at fairly large scale. Tesla's all smart locks. And that right there defends a lot with cryptography. Okay, but then what about the fact that the government has nukes? Aren't you so naive, tech bro? Blah, blah, blah. Okay, fine. Well, here's the thing. That visual that I showed earlier, you may remember this. Do you know why? Or one of the reasons the Internet was invented in the first place. Like one of DARPA's cited reasons or ARPA.

Yeah, it was to survive nuclear attack.

Exactly. That's right. So we might have to go back to the future. Okay, back to the future, to the original motivation. Because see, if I had just said that the network state is nuke proof, a fractal polity is nuke resistant, people wouldn't necessarily believe you. But then you go back to that original definition, you're like, oh, the reason the Internet was built in the pro place. You know, like people talk about the reason for the season. Okay, so the. The justification for the Internet was a communications network that would stand up in the event of nuclear attack. And in fact, you know, in many ways there's a. This is a little bit tongue in cheek, but, you know, if my, you know, some vision for the future is the apocalypse, but with Internet, okay, so all old institutions melt down, but the Internet stays up. This is what happens in war zones, right? All kinds of things melt down, but the Internet somehow stays up because it's built to be like highly robust. Okay, so you can send photos, videos of the crazy things, you know, that are happening, right? This is what's going on not just in Ukraine, but Syria and a bunch of other places around the world, right? And so that premise that the Internet will stay up when a lot of our things go down is actually being tested and found to be true. It's not trivial. You have to get Starlink and these, you know, cell towers and stuff, pretty robust, but it is seemingly working. The Internet is like the last thing that goes down. So if that's the case, well, now you've got something. Why? Why, by the way, just go a little bit deeper. Why is the network state? Why is a fractal polity nuclear resistant? Well, a nuclear weapon is a political tool. The whole point of it is like all weapons, all weapons are political tools. It's bang, bang, bang, words, words, words, right? You're shooting somebody until you get them to submit. And unconditional surrender was the whole thing with Germany and Japan, for example, during World War II. You have certain terms that you want the other guy to accede to. He doesn't accede to it. Then you beat them up. And then, you know, you say you're ready to talk now. You keep beating them up, right? That's why people say, you know, war is politics by other means. You have political goals that you're attempting to achieve with violence being a tool to achieve that political goal. Now what that means though is that you need surgical violence. You need violence of a kind that is just enough to scare them, to intimidate them, to demoralize them, but not so much that it, you know, like hits for example, your allies or it, you know, for example, the bombing of. When the US in, in the 90s, it, it bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Right. It did not mean to do that. That was not a surgical act. Right. It caused an international incident. And it, what it wanted to do is just bomb the guys that wanted to bomb. And so that's the issue with a really large nuclear weapon, is you, yeah, you might nuke, if you could find it. You, you might nuke one of these sharp societies, but you also nuke everything else near it. You, if it's in the middle of Japan, it's a hundred people in Japan, you nuke it, but you kill a lot of other Japanese people. And now you've got an international incident. So these kind of area effect weapons become less useful when your population is not concentrated in one area the entire. It's kind of like, you know, people talk about how you can see the great Wall from space, like the Great Wall of China from space. Certain technologies are powerful enough that they change the very geography of human political organization. And the combination the Internet and nuclear weapons. Internet is the answer in some ways. To quote nuclear weapons. In the event I tweeted about this, which is right now, people are assuming either A, there will be no use of nuclear weapons, or B, that it's a total exchange and the world ends. Hopefully the world doesn't end. Okay. I think unfortunately there's an option C, which I think of as the stupidest option, which is we sort of idiocratically lapse into a use of nuclear weapons or even an exchange which causes obviously, you know, global economic crash and so on and so forth. But then life goes on and the nuclear taboo is being broken. Okay, I think this is a likely outcome. And you know, why do I think that's likely? Because it reminds me of kind of pre Covid where people were sort of sleepwalking towards this thing and then they overreacted, right? There's only two, two modes that, you know, much of the west has, which are A, apathy and B, panic, right? So it's apathy. Oh, what can happen, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And then B, oh my God. And freak out for a while, right? So if that happens, if the use of nuclear weapons is unfortunately normalized, if the taboo is broken, you need to start thinking about nuke resistant polities and said distributed state. You can't nuke, you know, bitcoin mining, and you can't nuke the network state. And the other aspect of it is you can have a secret state. Not all those nodes on the network are necessarily revealed, right? You could have a hundred nodes and only 30 of them are public and the other 70 are encrypted. You re encrypt the map. You go back to the 1400s or before, where there were here be dragons on the map, okay? And you have, you know, this is actually something. By the way, one of my less obvious predictions is I think over the last 20 or 30 years, what we did is we put the entire world online in unencrypted form, okay? So everybody can find anybody's face, they can find their name, they can stalk them online. Future people will think that that was such an uncivilized way to live, that we did that before we had pseudonymity and cryptography and so on and so forth. And so all those borders, you were not like your real name was not meant built for the Internet, right? It was, it was something that was a, is a global identifier, True, but it wasn't something that's meant to be put into search engines and stuff. It's not adapted for that simultaneously gives away too much information and too little. Too much information because people can stalk you. Too little. Because let's say Allison, you know, is not actually that specific an identifier. But Allison D eth is the specific person. And then that is something where you can pay or you can, you can look up files, you can upload files, you can do all these things, right? It's a programmable name, like a, like a, you know, Ethereum name, right. So many of these, these pieces of the, the current world were not built for being uploaded, including real name, real face, et cetera. And one of my premises, one of the things I think a lot about, is that we're going to re encrypt the world. We're kind of already going there with Signal and WhatsApp, with pseudonyms online, right? With what I call the pseudonymous economy where you don't just have a pseudonymous face online, you earn online with, you know, kind of return to, you know, shelter and shade and private societies. You know, you can't hit what you can't see. And if the mob can't see you and doesn't know about you, they can't be as mimetic. And you don't necessarily need to have a huge amount of attention. You don't necessarily need a huge amount of fame. What you need is the freedom to be able to operate. Fame is in some ways sort of anti correlated with freedom. The more people who are paying attention to what you're doing, the more constrained you are, which is a non obvious point. And so this concept of re encrypting the world I think is another aspect of defense. Finally, I'll get to one point on defense. So what I've talked about so far on defense, right? A, that Bitcoin and Ethereum have guarded hundreds of billions of dollars. B, that they can guard other kinds of property beyond just Bitcoin, Ethereum, including all the stuff with smart contracts. C, they can guard offline property because anything that's unlocked with a smart lock, which includes cars, houses, et cetera, can be guarded this way. D, that also combines with the distributed physical nature of a network state to make you nuke resistant. E, you can have nodes of the network state encrypted so that people can't even see them. Maybe a Visitor can see 30 of 100 nodes and then you level up, and the capital cities can't be seen until you're several layers in or several years in. Okay? And then the last, but certainly not the least, is, if you remember, in 2020, the. This will be somewhat, I don't know, maybe some controversial. I don't think it's that controversial at this point. It is just a fact that across the country in the U.S. during BLM, the police kneeled to the riders, okay? And in 1991, in the Soviet Union, the tanks did not fire upon Yeltsin. Okay? Why is that? Why is it that the guys with the guns did not fire the guns? They kneeled or they held fire? The answer is because a moral argument had wended its way through the airwaves into their eyes and ears and delegitimated the use of force on the crowd. Okay? In the Soviet Union, it was. They had seen enough blue jeans and rock and roll to say, okay, that's good, and firing on the crowd would be bad. And so what's upstream of the soldiers is the morality of those soldiers, the ideas in their heads. They're not simply automatons. They won't simply fire. And so that's why the media campaign the story that you're telling. I mean, a third example is Gandhi's use of nonviolence in India to get independence. Right? So there is a way you have. If you're good enough at arguing, if you're good enough at media, if you're good enough at content you. I mean, that's why people say the pen is mightier than the sword. Right. You can morally delegitimate the use of violence against your people. And in the same way that you might have a brave soldier who would risk their lives, you would have a brave activist who would stand like tank man and the. You know. Right. Like, in a sense, they would be, you know, like, their resistance is filmed. And so that amp is amplified where, you know, they are clearly going in without arms, saying, you know, like, leave us alone, please. Right? And the same kind of bravery of a soldier who sometimes takes on a difficult mission. They would kind of go and do something like that. Right. You don't. Obviously, the goal is not for them to die, but they are prepared to die. Right. And so. So you can actually, I think, get very, very far with nonviolent defense. Now, there is a counterargument to this. The counterargument is China's drone armada. Okay. I do think that is coming, which is to say, basically everything I just talked about was morally Influencing the soldiers. Human soldiers are not automatons, but robots are automatons and robot war is a possibility. Right. So against that, you have to think about encryption. Now, the thing is, when I start stacking all this stuff, I'm like, AR communities, you know, drone war, encrypted societies like crypto smart locks and so on. It's like, ah, you're so crazy. Whatever. But basically what I'm just doing is trying to take the Internet seriously. I'm looking at all this stuff which I see at 0.1% or 1% with a lot of energy behind it, and like an angel investor, I'm sort of projecting out what that world looks like when those things have all gone to fixation as a population genesis as they go to like, you know, 100%. So that's kind of how I think about the security environment in the future. And the last thing I would just say is that, of course not being naive, there's a lot of transitional phases. And what you'd want to do is contract with a city, a U.S. state or a country and just be under their defense umbrella. That's the obvious reverse compatibility. Just like you have a cryptocurrency exchange that has a crypto to fiat currency exchange. Right. You would have diplomatic relationships between a crypto country and a fiat country, such that a passport holder of one might have some reciprocity from another. Okay. And so that's kind of a multifarious answer to the defense question, but hopefully that gives something interesting there. Go ahead.

Yeah, I love it. I do think we need to think about that as we move into that world. Otherwise we have the default structures. I want the opportunity for Mark to ask a question, and then I do want to, in the last minutes, get to tech twins, longevity and AI, because I think so far I would be really, really curious about your thoughts on AI too. Okay, Mark, go for it.

Yeah. When I first heard about the network state, I was nodding my head a lot. It was very much sort of along the lines that I'd been dreaming until you extended into the physical world. And then I was really kind of amazed and shocked. And, and that really is a step that you took that's very different than like the steps in the old cypherpunk thinking. Yes, the, the, the visions, like true names of the other realm where we're. Where you do have what is effectively a polity, but it's a polity that is populated only by our virtual selves. It has no physical reality. And our virtual selves. The reason why the story is named true names is it's protected by pseudonymity. And you're, you're all, you know, everybody's very protective that the pseudonymity is not traced back to their physical selves. Bitcoin is part of the reason it was able to grow through its, its, its infant mortality phase and not get shut down by governments is it wasn't out of place. It didn't have a physical reality. It was in this pure virtual world that was created by physical miners. And physical miners, once they started using a lot of energy, couldn't hide, and were subject to coercion by governments. But the Bitcoin system as a whole isn't in a place and is not subject to that coercion. And one of the things that really surprised me is that governments largely didn't try that. Every time it seemed like they were gearing up to try, it's like they realized there's no there, there, there's nothing to gain by trying to coerce this thing that isn't in a place that has no physical manifestation. So when I think about the network state, I think it's very, very bold and great that you're extending into physical reality, but I think that the image we should paint is one where most of the mass of what is considered the network state of what is effectively the new polity isn't anywhere absolutely physical.

Yeah, yeah. So, so, so I, so Mark, I, I very much agree. That's why I've kind of got a one liner on this cloud first, land last, but not land never. And what that. Right, so that means. Absolutely, the, the community lives online, the spirit lives online. And that's like, in a sense, the fundamental, you know, the, that's where the social network is, that's where the cryptocurrency is. That is where the data is, that is where the software is. All of that is there. But then this thing has tendrils and it materializes in the physical world. And if any one of those tendrils is cut off, this town of a hundred is invaded, this town of a thousand is regulated, then those tendrils withdraw and then they redistribute, you know, to the rest of the world, right? So it's like a diaspora, but it's a digital diaspora because, you know, like the, the Jewish diaspora or the Indian diaspora. Like, you know, when I was, when I was a kid, you know, to, to make a telephone call to India was whatever dollars a minute, it was quite expensive, right? You might send letters and those were, those had A long delay. So the bandwidth of the connectivity was far, far, far, far less than, you know, the era of Skype and now WhatsApp, where you have instant free video calling, right? So now you have, like, high bandwidth connections between folks who are totally on different parts of the world. That has just totally changed the geography of the world. And so thus, even if somebody knocks out one physical thing, your cloud entity can just reform them later. Right? For example, take this group. If you wanted people, there was that meetup. Alison, where'd you guys hear you did in, like Palo Alto or something like that, right? That beer hall, right? Yeah. But if you had put a different pin on the map, the cloud could have materialized there, right? That's like something we take for granted. But taking that as a subroutine and then using that systematically, I think is very important. We're really going back to, like the other mode of human organization. We've been in the farmer soldier mode for the last several thousand years. And the nomadic people, the border people have been like the exception. But if you go further back than that, everybody was a hunter gatherer and they just roamed the world. It was the ultimate, quote, open borders. There were no borders, right. There's no ability to defend borders. You had a culture that was borderless, right. In a sense, the Internet culture. I mean, how many different flags are there here? Right? Allison is German. There's like, you know, there's obviously a lot of Americans. There's people in Asia, et cetera. So, like, you kind of. We kind of have like this unlocked globe. And so we kind of need a new culture for that. The one thing I will say is the reason the physical component, the reason I stress that quite heavily, is that there's a lot of innovation. You cannot do without the physical world. You can't build tall buildings, you can't get flying cars, you can't get biomedical innovation and so on, if it's just online. As awesome as Bitcoin is and so on. The way I think about it is it's like the kitty corner approach. You retreat to advance, right? It's a tactical retreat to high ground, and then you press forward, right? Sort of like Google, for example, initially made their money in search of, and then they attack Microsoft in Docs and Office and so on, right? So you go outside in, right? You exit to enter, you build up strength in the cloud, and then you return to the land in force, right? Like descending from a lightning bolt, boom, like this. And just all the terrain clears and all the girders go up. Right. And your drones just, like, assemble everything right that I think is going to be possible.

That is a wonderful segue into the physical world and into the bits and pieces that we want to build there. And, you know, we share a really strong interest in longevity. We've also collaborated on a hackathon for building better technology trees to actually push a bunch of technologies forward, including longevity, but also dcis and what have you. So, you know, can you speak for a few words, really, just on your vision of, like, where can we go in this more transhumanistic futures? How can, like, tech trees get us there? And if you want to address AI, that would be absolutely wonderful.

Sure, sure. So basically, the tech tree thing is something I think, you know, foresight and I have and others for sure have been thinking about independently. I mean, it comes from civilization, the game, and it's actually a reconciliation of, you know, the great man theory of history and the sort of tides of history or movements of history things. So, you know, the great man theory of history is individuals like Steve Jobs or Satoshi move the world. And the tides of history is just like, you know, these things are in the air. And whether it's a Newton or a Leibniz, anybody could have invented calculus. Somebody was going to do it at that time, that it was right. And the reconciliation of those two, I think, is the tech tree model, where it is true that no one person can reinvent all of technology from the beginning, you know, from the smelting of ore and, you know, invention of engines and so on. So there is a base. You're standing on the shoulders of giants, but then one new giant can find a particular area of the tech tree to extend. And that's a great man theory of history. Right. Like Satoshi. There's nobody else. There's no Leibniz to Satoshi's Newton. He extended the tech tree in a direction that people had not thought of. Right. And it took years before somebody kind of imitated that. So enumerating the tech tree and seeing what is possible in aggregating people's intelligence around that is different than the last 20, 30 something years of tech, because the last 20, 30 something years has been very entropic. For example, if you take the top five YC companies, it's like Stripe and Airbnb and Dropbox. They have nothing in common beyond their corporate structure and their initial bootcamp. Right. They're not part of a common vision of the world, nothing against them. They're great companies. Don't get me wrong. Right. But basically, it's not like they all fit into a longevity tech tree. And one thing is not going to, insofar as they do snap together. It is something where it's like, you know, maybe it's like an API integration or something like that one company uses. Strike.

Right?

What you could get potentially with the longevity style tech tree, or more generally a tech tree, is you have an organization of a venture capital portfolio that is not purely entropic, that is directed, directed, yet decentralized. Right? So you have 30 different innovations. Anybody who's part of your, you know, VC community can look at this and they can say, okay, I will decide to work on, you know, Metformin and, oh, I'm really interested in biomarkers for longevity and so on and so forth. Right. And people can kind of themselves spread out and work on different nodes, but everybody also feels like they're working towards a common cause, right? It's not entropic. It's forced along a distance. Right. It's work. And then people can hop between things and, you know, there's still a shared story. People kind of know folks in that community. I've seen the power of this in cryptocurrency, which is sort of. It's kind of intermediate between, let's say, YC and this future that I'm describing. Because everybody in cryptocurrency knows the story of satoshi, and they have moral values that are in common. Right. You know, if you're yc, like, the moral value is something like people, like Paul Graham's essays or make something people want, which is fine, okay. Then within your crypto, kind of, it goes up a level. Okay? Satoshi, good. Inflation, bad. Deflation, good. Decentralization, good. These sort of guttural, visceral, moral values are there embedded in a narrative. And if you go from Binance to FTX to Kraken to coinbase, everybody in the space has heard the story of satoshi. It's like literally like a biblical kind of thing. It binds folks. They have a common narrative of what the future is and what, what, right. It's actually really important. Right. That's actually a much stronger tech community in some ways than a community that's just purely about price. Right. And purely about, you know, technology or whatever. If you're, if you're just about technology, as. As awesome as technology is, you will get rooted by somebody who is totally focused on what's good and bad. Right? Tech people tend to think about what's true and false and profitable and unprofitable. They're not naturally inclined typically to saying, that's good and that's bad. Why? Because good and bad usually means eliding some complexity, lecturing somebody, yelling at somebody, et cetera, et cetera. But what happens if you outsource that? You don't have comparative advantage. You have comparative disadvantage because then those folks who control the definition of good and bad control the definition of resource allocation. Good and bad goes to good and banned and so on and so forth. Right? That's how people can lose control of their companies and whatnot. In crypto, though, there's a moral thing that kind of pushes back against that and the tech tree gives even more of a push because now everybody has the same story of, I don't know, let's say David Sinclair and, you know. Well, actually, it's funny, the longevity story hasn't fully been told. Right. And actually, I think that'd be a good story to tell. For example, if you, you know, if you Google eternal life, do you know what the number one hit is? It's Christianity. You are.

Oh, Christianity. Well, I would have Twitter bio.

Oh, yeah, yeah. So. Well, I mean, I think basically the reason I say that is eternal life has a hook that goes back very, very deep into humanity, you know, and so you could tell the story of longevity as a story of making miracles real, you know, to literally, like, you know, extend life and, you know, cure blindness and cure deafness and heal the sick. Right. Like literally those kind of biblical type stories, those religious stories. You know, I've got actually in the vita of the networks here, I'm going to have this section on what I call practical miracles, like genomic reincarnation, which I've tweeted about how you can take a lot of these things and with, you know, sufficiently advanced technology like Arthur C. Clarke, you know, you could actually make them, make them real. And so the longevity story, the tech tree thing, what it does, it aligns community, it gives a way to organize entrepreneurs and the funding and the VCs, it's decentralized, yet directed. Okay, that's my comment on longevity, my comment on AI. Well, so, you know, it's funny. I did, I did machine learning and computational statistics in the context of genomics for many years, bioinformatics, for basically like, you know, first 10, 13 something years of my professional life. And so it's funny to see everybody talking about the stuff that I've worked on every day, years and years. It's kind of like, you know, Donald Knuth. Obviously there's a Lot of new stuff in deep learning, don't get me wrong. Right? But it's kind of like Donald Knuth in 1991, you know, I think he published something like 15 years of email is enough. I'm not answering email anymore in 1991. Okay. And that's kind of funny because obviously he was so ahead of the curve that this, this thing that most people had never experienced was like old hat. Right. Anyway, so. So it's a little bit amusing, you know, if you're. If you've seen a lot of this stuff. It's kind of like being in crypto or stuff like that. We've. Or C sett People have talked about new countries. Patri's talked about new countries for more than a decade and now it's actually starting to happen. Right. Sometimes you're kind of out there in the wilderness for a while. Anyway, so with ML with stats.

A.

Few remarks on current. The current spate of innovation and deep learning. First is. It's amazing. It's also something where anybody's moat seems to get liquefied in a week. So the awesome thing is really the advent of decentralized AI, right? With stable diffusion and where it's like truly open, it's not, you know, choke pointed through an API. As much as I respect the folks who are doing centralized AI, I think it's kind of like the difference in Unix and Linux. Any developer will prefer the unlocked version where you can actually extend it and make it your own. Right? So the evidence of decentralized AI, I think is apocal. I think stable diffusion is maybe the most important, you know, thing that's happened in AI for a while. More important than, in some ways, the distribution model is more important than the technology itself. Just to show that it's like unlocked. The concept of just everything just getting liquefied is that this month's world record result is just topped by something else a week later and topped by something else again. So it's a challenging area to build a business. You might want to be an investor there or it's certainly a developer. It's cool. You sort of just expect your business to just get liquefied by something that just came, you know, your. Your state of the art. And then like two months later, something much, much better comes out and it's just shooting a different paradigm and you know, oh boy. Right. So it's an amazing area to create value. I'm not sure it's a great place to make money yet though. I think, you know, well, because of that reason, since it's very hard to figure out what has enduring value there. I think guys like scale, you know, scale AI which do the training data, that seems like they'll do quite well. I think that in terms of what it means, you know, AI content creation, obviously, I mean people have made this observation, it's not unique to me at all. But AI for self driving or something like that is a series of very precise operations with a low tolerance for error. AI for content creation has a very high tolerance for error. Okay. You know, that is to say the image can have various fuzz around it. In fact, stable diffusion. I mean these diffusion models are basically random walks, you know, in a sense, or guided random walks. You know, with text there's many possible outcomes of a generated document that could work. It's a small set of a high dimensional space, but it's not a, it's not a, it's not a, like a discrete set of just one. Right. It's a large, it's a, it's still large in absolute terms. Lots of different texts could be reasonable answers in a language model. And so what that means is all kinds of content that you can tolerate some error in, which is a large amount of content. So that's music, that's movies, that's images, that's text, that's you know, things that we don't normally think of as content. Like you know, maybe programs, you know, for example Replit's co version of GitHub, Copilot, all those things are now AI aided. Right? There's Lex page, this AI based Google Docs. So every piece of content generation, like, you know, Figma will have AI content generation and so on. Everything will just be like templates to the nth power. Right? Which means that people who are productive will come way more productive and people who are mediocre will need to like kind of learn this new tooling and so on. So that's like, you know, one, that's the first order. The second order is just the liquidation of Hollywood and US media. And so that's basically something where, you know, if they were like on the ropes in the, in the, you know, like 2000 and tens after disruption of Google and Facebook and Ninja and some of them, you know, have, have built subscription services and so on. Many of them are on the ropes. This is just going to finish them off. And why? Because it's going to distribute the ability to create high production value content to anybody in the world. Right? You're Brazilian, you're Nigerian, you're Indian, you're Israeli, you're Japanese. You can tell your own story now. And you do not have to rely on the U.S. media Corporation to do it for you. So that is hugely important. Insanely, insanely, insanely important. As a consequence of AI content creation will be content decentralization. Okay? And so it's not. I mean, the thing is with Twitter, you could put out text, but now you'll be able to put out movies. Not just like a YouTube movie of self recording, but a high production value movie, a high production value piece of music gets deskilled. People can tell stories, okay? I don't think people realize what a big deal that is because stories unify communities. You know, stories like all these people in any given subreddit or something like that will now not just be like typing text at each other, but literal mini movies or what have you. I mean, TikTok, obviously we're already on the path of this. That's what TikTok is. That's what YouTube is, et cetera. But, but like the scale of it I don't think is fully appreciated yet. Eventually that becomes like full immersive VR communities. You're already seeing the 3D content generation. And so what that means, I think is you take that and you intersect that with the stuff I've been talking about with crypto communities. You have communities that have their own fully built out thought through Star wars extended universe type narratives right around keto and the evils of the food pyramid. Right. Or, you know, you have the Marvel extended universe around. You know, why you need to get nine hours of sleep a night and you know, everything's just boom. You know, like no electric lights past 9pm or something like that. Right. You could imagine all kinds of communities that tell different stories like this at different premises, as opposed to the 1950s model of everybody's watching I Love Lucy at, you know, and zombie, like at a certain time. Right. So I mean, I could talk more about AI, but that's those, that's some of the stuff I've been thinking about in terms of AI content creation. I'd say one thing else, which is AI also allows people to sort of substitute for, you know, like the number of people that you need to start a business just keeps dropping. You know, you had one person doing Minecraft and one person doing Bitcoin and 12 people doing Instagram and 55 people doing WhatsApp. So the, the, the power of a small group, the leverage that you can get on high iq, people working hard in a small Group is just bananas, you know, and so you just don't need to necessarily build large teams or have a lot of funding. You just hit. Hit the right keys at the right time. I call it, you know, something to tell my founders. All you have to do is type faster. That's it, you know, so. All right, go ahead. Yeah.

No, and I think it's a positive, you know, and vision, but it's like more near term, like on the very long one, you know, like, are you worried about, like, AI singletons, or do you think that we actually have like a decentralized instantiation of AIs? If so, how you know that? So I don't know who, I don't quite remember who said. I think Peter Thiel of like, crypto's libertarian AI is totalitarian or something along those veins. Like, is there a centralized future through cryptographic technologies? With AI?

I like, I like Teal's poke, but I think you can modify it in a few ways. First is there's. There's decentralized and centralized. I actually put it as a triangle. Why? Because you have AI, which you might identify with in particular, actually with China, centralized AI. Then you have crypto, which is sort of, let's call it market. You know, it's kind of the. That's one part of the Western psyche. And then you have social, which is the third part of the triangle. And that's like voting or democracy. It's another part of the Western psyche. Right. And A.I. you might put as harmony. Right? Because it's just all become one. It's just, it's a. It's a different way of. With markets, it's let the market decide. With democracy, it's a bunch of voting. With AI, it's harmony, just the AI brain just takes care of it. And it's like the movie Transcendence all become one. It's a different way of doing decision making. And you think about it as three different poles here. This is like my, you know, nyt, ccp, BTC kind of triangle with social, AI, crypto, kind of these three things. Well, so first is you have centralized and decentralized versions of each. You have decentralized social, decentralized AI, decentralized crypto. And you have centralized social, centralized AI, centralized crypto. Right. So centralized social is obvious. That's Facebook and, you know, Twitter and so on. Decentralized social is, for example, ens. So that is to say, like being able to log into ens, it's orbit, it's this kind of stuff. It is Lens protocol. It's dso, it's Farcaster. And what I think that's. That's rising. Okay. Decentralized crypto is obvious. Centralized crypto is what, It's a cbdc, right? It's. It's, you know, like China's Digital Yuan. Decentralized centralized AI is obvious. That's like, you know, OpenAI or Google. Decentralized AI is stable diffusion. And so that's actually, I think the right axis is maybe obviously centralization, decentralization versus AI versus crypto, because you can have centralized and decentralized versions of each.

Nice one. Okay, that was a nice wrap. I know we have a ton of questions. I also want to be really mindful of your time, so.

Sure.

Well, okay. Well, if you give us another minute, then I'll just go down via. I think where's the friend where Shadi already had to leave. Let's see. David, if you're here, then go for it.

Yeah, yeah, I just wanted to follow up. I mean, you started in the very beginning and thank you for all that. Started the very beginning. Speaking about your frustration with the FDA and line work on experimental drugs. You had this really proactive line that it's easier to start a country than it is to reform the fda. And I'm just wondering. But include the first part. Include the first part. And the reason is just as it's easier to start Bitcoin than reform the Fed, it might be easier to start a country than reform the fda. And the reason is that first part reduces the degree of craziness of it to just somewhat crazy rather than totally crazy. Go ahead. Well, no, I don't. Yeah, I wouldn't take issue with the starting the country part. What I'm curious about, if you can clarify is how does the network state solve the FDA problem where phase one, phase two, phase three, phase four. If I'm still in the US, aren't I still under the US's jurisdiction? Ah, great question. Okay, so the answer for that is once you have a large enough community, okay. With good enough media and so on and so forth. Have you seen the movie Dallas Buyers Club? Yes. Wonderful movie. Okay, right. So with a thousand Dallas Buyers Clubs, you will delegitimize the current fda. Okay. There's a. For example, there's a. There's. There's a PDF that I wrote 10 years ago that I still think holds up fairly well today. Okay. Read that PDF that gives a ton of specific examples. It's like, you know, from, you know, from the fda fast tracking these body Scanners through airports to them saying that there's no generalized right to bodily and physical health in a court case that you don't like control your own body. All of these crazy things the FDA has done, right? Blocking a guy, you know, Cohan from actually getting a, a drug that would have saved his life. All of these kinds of things. So one second. So all of these kinds of things or things that have actually happened and each of them can be made into 140 second clip. Okay, let's say you've done that, right? Crucially, I'll give three edits, right? First is you need to kind of delegitimize. Second, you need to have a V3 that is better than the current thing. Why do I say it's V3? Well, I'm not a pure anarchist and one thing that I want to you know, make clear is people actually do want a regulated marketplace. Why? This is just a, it's like a meta market kind of phenomenon. For example, they want the star reviews and the ratings on Amazon, right? They want the filtering of bad actors on ebay. And in general you can think of many of these scaled cloud marketplaces as cloud regulators that give star reviews and ratings of bad actors. This a whole talk in its own right. I call it regulation is information. A big part of, you know, V2 of the book. But basically you actually want a regulator that is better than the FDA in the same way that Bitcoin is better than the Fed. It didn't just replace the, it didn't just end the Fed, it exited the Fed, right? It replaced the Fed with something better. And that's always harder than just saying destroy, it's saying build. Right? So what is a better regulator than the FDA look like? That's the second part. The first part is delegitimizing the current thing. The second part is what does a better regulator look like? So I'll give a few examples. One is you're able to scan a barcode of a drug anywhere in the world and instantly get everybody who's ever taken that drug, all their reviews of it, all the doctors that prescribed it, the side effects of it, potentially the pharmacogenomics of it, if they've got genome sequences. So you can see that there were a thousand people with AA variant that took this and they had no side effects. But 50 people with the AT variant self reported side effects and so on, right? Nothing I described there is technologically infeasible. It's simply actually doing it. And crucially, it's Cross border. Because physiology is cross border. Right? Somebody with similar genetics that's living in Australia, you should be able to pool your information with them across borders. The national regulator is not necessarily the right form for that. Right. And you know, people, you know, I talked about this as quote, yelp for drugs. And people are like, oh, you're so stupid, tech bro, blah, blah. But you know, most people don't know that there's, you know, post market surveillance, right. That's actually phase four and there's like a form that the FDA has. There's like a PDF, right. I'll give you the exact. I think it's like 43 or something. The FDA has a form for post market surveillance and you've never filled this out? Right. Reporting adverse events. Gosh, I forget the form number. Hold on one second. Anyway, point is there's a PDF that you can fill out and the. You've never filled it out. Okay. And the. Here it is, the Med Watch forms. Okay. It's a 3500A. Okay. You've never filled out this form. Why have you never filled out this form? Or actually no, for patients of consumers, 3500B. Okay? So this is what you are. It's a consumer friendly version of the. This is what they call consumer friendly. Okay. Now why does, what do you, what do you actually want with this? What are other product reviews look like? Looks like one touch, right? So once you see the 3500B, obviously you can do better than this with an app. Obviously. Right. So now you're starting to take over one aspect of what the FDA does, right? With something that's better. Okay. Another example would be like reviews for medical tourism abroad. Another example would be telemedicine. In fact, one of the things I talk about in, in, you know, V2 of the book, but I've also talked about this online, is there are actually many exits from the FDA already, right? So, you know, a partial list. There's right to try laws, there's CLIA labs and laboratory developed tests. There's compounding pharmacies, there's off label prescription by mds. There's countries that aren't harmonized with fda. Okay. Those are five separate exits on five different dimensions which are worth understanding. Okay. And yeah, they always try to go after them. They attack compounding pharmacies a while ago. They always try to kind of close the LDT loophole is how they talk about it, right. And force Everybody into the 510k pathway. But there are, you know, it's like There shall be no other gods before me. Okay? But once you see these exits, you can actually take them, each of them write stories around them, build apps around them, show that you can have a regulatory system that's better than that of the fda. And now what you start doing is you're doing transfer of sovereignty, okay? You're chipping away at FDA sovereignty and you're transferring it, for example, right? To try laws are transferring some of that sovereignty to state regulators, right? Anti harmonization statutes. For example, being able to do stem cells in Germany, which basically say that the German health regulators are taking a different route than the US is starting to break away pieces. Once you've done that, once you've gotten the equivalent of a special economic zone, whether it's in a physical zone where you've improved on the FDA with right to try laws in a given state, or it's a digital zone where you've done something better than the FDA is 3500B online now. You take that, you put your energy of your million person network state behind it and you say that should be the law of this country and that country and this country and that country, right? So it's a little bit like Deng Xiaoping strategy where he didn't just try to flip China from capitalism to communism overnight he proved it out in or, sorry, from communism to capitalism overnight he proved out first special economic zone in Shenzhen that worked. They did like four more across the eastern seaboard that worked. And then he was able to use the leverage and the political capital from that to reform the rest of China. Okay? And so in the same way, what we do is we have these pilots which by the way don't have 100% success rate. So you have to get people's expectations there on improving on the fda, either digitally or physically or both. We show that it does. We delegitimize the FDA and shoulder abuses. So it's a combination of attack and build, attack and build. And then you kind of, you, you have these pockets of liberalization around the world, right? Either physical or digital, and you're just constantly raining fire in terms of, hey, look at this drug lag. Hey, why didn't we get the Moderna vaccine in a week? Answer is because we didn't have challenge trials. We could have had people just walking up and saying, hey, look, just like, I'm a soldier, I'm a volunteer, please give me the vaccine A, and then B, expose me to the virus. And then we could actually see that the thing worked in a few days. In a few weeks. And we could have had them, the vaccine deployed to all of these seniors in a few weeks. All of that is on the FDA's head. Same as their restriction of EUA as emergency use authorizations during the pandemic. This lab in Seattle had to actually do civil disobedience in order to get those tests out. All that's on the FDA's head. And that's why people didn't know how many coronavirus cases there were early on. The point being that you combine the media delegitization with, crucially, the productive aspect of building something better both in the US and around the world. And that's how you can do this. And that's actually a playbook, by the way, for not just the fda, but for other regulatory agencies. In fact, it's funny, I actually did a thing with, I guess, a friend of foresight, the Peter Diamandis of the XPRIZE foundation, and he asked me, he's like, so what would be a great X prize to do for advancing technology? And I said, well, you should do the X Prize version of the Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism on US Regulatory agencies. Okay, and why do I say that? Everybody here can name the founder of Amazon, right? You can name founder of Microsoft, you can name all these tech people, you know, founder, Snapchat, et cetera. Can anybody name anybody at the fda? Okay, maybe Alison can. Okay?

We have a bunch of them in our biotech group.

Okay. I'm sure there's some good ones. Okay? Some of them, I assume, are good people, blah, blah. But, you know, the thing is that, you know, most people cannot name folks at fda, sec, faa, et cetera, et cetera. Right? There isn't personal accountability. These people are not elected. They can't be fired, okay? They have nothing, you know, meaning there's no. There's no electoral nor market theory of accountability for them, right? And they're anonymous. And so they exercise power without accountability. And so just having an X Prize version of the Pulitzer Prize. And by the way, one other thing that's important is these regulatory agencies retaliate against folks in industry who speak about it. That's actually why you don't hear about it. It's like a black hole where things go in and then the information doesn't escape the black hole, right? It's like, you know, it's like being in a line at the airport security. And, you know, you don't complain about the TSA because you don't want to miss your flight. You don't want a Retaliatory wait time. You don't complain about FDA or SEC or FAA or anything like that because you don't want a retaliatory denial of your application. Right? So the answer to your question is multifold. It is a combination of physical exit, it is digital and physical alternatives. It is media delegitimization. It is AI content creation to tell these stories. Right? And it's investigative journalism, true investigative journalism, by the way. It's citizen journalism, not corporate journalism. All of these media corporations essentially have an iterative game relationship with fda. And you know, these, these institutions, what happens is FDA will want to go and put a hit on some company or some person and they will leak the information to a journo who will then put out a story that attacks that person and says so and so evil. You know, corporation put, you know, they, they put dihydrogen. They spill dihydrogen monoxide all over the ground at their factory. And, you know, dihydrogen monoxide can be toxic at high temperatures and it's water, right? And, you know, so they will do something where they make it sound horrible. You know, they went after Tiger Bomb, for example. You guys know what Tiger Bomb is? Tiger Bomb. It's like this.

Yes. You. You put a tear when you have a headache.

Yeah. It's like this famous thing. It's like a. You know, this was 10 years ago, US FDA warned Singapore, maker of Tiger Bomb products. Right. And, you know, agency inspectors found that employees were untrained. Now, look, Tiger Bomb was something that was like, that's been around for decades, right. What exactly was the issue when you actually drill into it this thing that they were saying was unsafe? There was like a guy on the line who spoke Chinese rather than English, and he couldn't answer immediately the questions that this, you know, FDA inspector posed to him. Therefore, the entire medication is unsafe. Right. And so, like, the thing is, once you realize that these regulators are like journalists in the sense of being the most unreliable of narrators, right? They're like the TSA guys who want to make everybody out to be a terrorist that comes through their, their aperture in order to justify their budget. Just like that. Security theater. Much of this is safety theater. Once you kind of have these lenses, what I've just given you is like a lens. And then you apply that lens and you can start pulling a lot of examples that are like that. It's a lens that the corporate, you know, media outlets aren't going to give, but the Citizen Journal. Citizen Journal outlets could. Right. That Gives another piece of the puzzle. So put all those together. That's kind of your strategy for dealing with the fda. It's delegitimize, it's prove alternatives, it's scale alternatives. Through lobbying and through investigative journalism.

We had recently two things I shared with one, Mike Sin, who's also in this group from qdao. They gave kind of like a project presentation on like a new FDA that could be in prosper. And then we also had Tom Bell, who I think was also in one of the network state VR rooms a while back. Him and his collaborator are currently doing like a study on jurisdictional arbitrage for longevity. So basically figuring out which jurisdictions are actually really good right now to go so that overall you can increase competition and common knowledge that there's others out there. So more people actually move their companies out and increase the pressure a bit on companies here in the U.S. so there's definitely, I think some interesting projects that are actively spanning out and obviously the prosper one is I think quite at least network stay aligned to this and that. Physical.

Yes. By the way, it doesn't have to be physical, but I do think there should be a path fiscal. Yeah.

Okay, well, they're already there. Let's see, with the current regulations.

Yes, they are.

With the regulations changing there. Let's see for how long. Let's hope for longer. Okay, cool. So I mean we are now at half an hour later and so we do want to kind of like that overstage your time. We have a few more questions, but I also totally understand if you have to double.

Great. Yeah, I can go a little bit longer. Go ahead.

Okay, good.

And Blake, how about another five, ten minutes? Right? Great. Okay, well, thanks again. So my question was about the power structures and ownership structures for network states. A lot of things are supposed to be decentralized, but we often see in the end that they do become centralized and captured. This can happen and especially when this is an open problem myself.