EP #6 Abuses of the American Regulatory State w/ Balaji Srinivasan

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And a massive transformative purpose is what you're telling the world. It's like, this is who I am, this is what I'm going to do. This is the dent I'm going to make in the universe. Balaji. Good morning, buddy.

Good morning.

Great to see you. It was fun hanging out with you in New York.

Yeah.

And getting a chance to connect and talk about all kinds of fun things. But I just noted you've erased the magic whiteboard behind you. When's the last time that was blank?

Just a few days ago, actually. I tried to just keep myself sharp, do some equations.

I can't think without a whiteboard. It's like I need to get up there and diagram and write it out.

It's just a large buffer and it's just bigger than a piece of paper. And something about the manual act of writing things out because, you know, we grew up in the offline world before the online world and have some of, some of that DNA in us still. You know, it's good that they still teach kids, you know, writing with their hands and whatever.

Yeah, I can't wait till I get into the VR world where I can just sort of like throw things up against the wall virtually and see back what I was looking at even a year ago or 10 years ago.

Right.

The gesture stuff, you do need the haptic feedback of some kind. But you could imagine holding like an apple pencil or something like that, and I'm just not sure it would feel the same without a surface to push against. But there's probably something that could be done on that.

I think so. So I'm curious what's your mornings look like? Because it's nighttime here in Santa Monica, it's morning there where you are. How do you start your day? What do you do?

How do I start my day? My ideal day is which is. Which is an ideal, not always achieved, but the ideal day is I actually try to wake up without an alarm and I try not to schedule too many things super early in the morning and I try to work out if I can first thing. You know, usually that's a goal 100% of the time and it's not achieved. But try to work out first thing and then I start the day and try to have as many huge blocks of time as possible that are unscheduled. And if I do meetings, I have them all on the same day. Like, you know, for example, Thursdays are meeting day and then. Or Mondays and Thursdays are meeting day and then nothing on the other days. And so this way, either I've got a back to, back to. Back to back meeting day with lots of phone calls and stuff. It can be very efficient. And then I take the to DOS and then I execute on them the other days, or I can just allocate as I see fit on that day. And there's a huge difference between like an entire day versus a six hour block of time versus a one hour block of time in terms of getting ready for deep work, you know.

Yeah, I get it. It's that precious time, you know, for me, it's getting up in the morning and looking at what are the single most important things I have to do during the day. Sort of making that top three list. Like if I achieve these three things, I'm super happy the day. It's prioritizing because ultimately everything gets in the way and you reach the end of the day. And like I missed these things.

Yeah, that's right. And I think actually I. What I do is I have this little app that you can change your wallpaper background on your phone. It's almost like a mantra. I'll try to reduce the top one or top three things that I want to get done into just three words. And I just like mutter them to myself. I see them subconsciously every time I pick up the phone and just reminds me, oh yeah, do I act on that thing today? You know, it's like when I was at Coinbase, it was like assets, EARN, USDC, something like that, like in, you know, Q3 or whatever.

Right.

And so just like remember those three things and something like along those lines.

Yeah, no, it's great and it's how you start your day. Like win the morning, win the day is so true in life. And for me it's, you know, it's get a great night's sleep. It's. Do you intermittent fast. Do you eat in the morning?

Well, so what I've actually found really works well if, when I can stick to it is omad, like the one meal a day. If you basically set that time, for example, one meal a day from 12 to 1pm okay. And that's it. And the rest of the day you just drink water, coffee, whatever.

Okay.

If you can stick to that, there's two things that happen. First is, I mean like that meal tastes so good. Okay. Number one. And number two is you just spend a lot less time eating and you, you have all. You have more energy at other times and so on. The tricky, where it gets tricky is if you have to do social dinners, then it's like sort of A, rude to not eat and B, it's like in Dungeons and Dragons, you know, you roll a saving throw. Do you know what that is?

Yep.

Yeah. So if you're in front of the food for two hours, you're. And you haven't eaten in whatever a day or something like that, you're like.

It's hard.

Yeah. It's something where the constant temptation can overwhelm one's willpower at a certain point.

Right.

At that point, the only trick you can do is tell the entire table that you're not going to eat. So that you've got social pressure to fulfill in fact your obligation not to eat.

Yeah. But it's also kind of odd, right? Like depending on what culture, you know, if you're, if you're meeting with strangers or what have you, it's often rude.

Or your mom or whatever.

Yeah, exactly. That's right. That's right. So. So it's something where, you know, that's actually the thing that can sort of break the omad diet is the social eating. It's kind of thing that you could have in a. In one of my one commandment societies. Like you'd have omad one commandment and that actually would have the social pressure the opposite way. Sort of like how pre Covid the social pressure was. If it's important, it has to be in person.

Right.

And then when that flipped finally for the very. That that was not a technological flip, that was a cultural flip when that flipped to the very highest level society. So now you could do large deals, remote, you could do. There's not. There's no limits on remote, right? No cultural limits on remote. That was actually the key bottleneck on remote was, was that. And I think what's going to happen eventually is a lot of that moves into VR or the Metaverse and so on. Like, you know, you could actually, in a sense, have, you know, I know sounds there's gonna be people who listen to that are like, oh, that sucks, or whatever. I'm not saying you can't have like a physical event if you don't want to have a physical event, but many kinds of events will be more visually interesting in the metaverse. People won't feel like they need to look at their phones because it's just more interesting. There's more fireworks, more stuff happening, pizazz, et cetera.

I remember years ago, we have this X Prize event every year called Global Visioneering, where we come up and look at our next prizes. And about six, seven years ago, one of the prizes I put forward for was have a virtual experience and event that is measurably better than being there in person, so that you much rather willing go there, right? The information that you have, the experience that you have and so forth. So I wish we had had that X Prize. It would have given birth to Zoom even earlier, or some variations of it. But how far are we in your mind? I mean. Cause I'm gonna have a lot more information about you. Pupillary dilation and where you're looking, intonation and all of that, as well as being able to have my AI visualize everything you're speaking about in the moment you're saying it.

So how do I think about that? So the, you know, I've mentioned this before, but I think the augmented reality glasses are one of the most. There's a few different convergence devices that I think are coming. You know, one of them is, you know, the Metaverse. Another is the Digital Passport. The third are AR glasses. And those are all kind of related, right? Metaverse, perhaps, like super obvious at this point. To us, you know, it's video games plus social networks plus workplace chat apps like Slack plus, you know, crypto.

I think.

I think that's an obvious component of an open metaverse.

Yes. Plus transfer of value, people, places and things.

Yes, yes, that's right. So, and so that's like, you know, one piece of it. The second piece is the AR glasses, which things are the hardware enablement of it. Sort of like how people talked about mobile prior to the iPhone. But it wasn't really. It wasn't. You know, Jack Dorsey was familiar with the 140 character thing for Twitter was I believe based on certain SMS message lengths when Twitter got set up in 2005, a few years before the iPhone. So Jack Darcy was on top of mobile before mobile was a thing.

Yeah, I mean AR glasses, the application, the business opportunity. Right. So I talk about the fact that we have millions and millions of dollars that have dematerialized into your cell phone, that have digitized and gone away and they're demonetized and dematerialized in your cell phone. And the question is, when's your cell phone going to dematerialize? And it's going to dematerialize into your AR glasses. Right. Along with lots of other things.

Have you seen this? Basically this is one of my favorite images, which is like all the devices that went into your smartphone here.

This is the, the 20 years later, all these things fit in your pocket image.

Yeah, yeah, it's this one. It's. Yeah, showing a camcorder, a boombox, headphones, a walkie talkie, a cell phone, CD player, music recorder, vcr, you know, a bunch of tapes, a bunch of VHS tapes, you know, like a. Etc etc, a bunch of, bunch of different devices, speakers, all these things just got put into that one convergence device.

Right.

And actually, you know, people in the 90s thought that convergence device was going to be your television because that was the obvious thing with a screen that people were constantly looking at. And so people thought it was going to be the TV that was everything, but the TV's a little too far and you have the gorilla arms thing when you're interacting with it and so on. So this is, you know, you take a bunch of different kinds of apps which are now fairly mature, right? The social networks and the video games and so on. And actually you, you know, an interesting point, people talk about remote work a lot, but you know what the compliment to remote work is remote life. Okay. And a non obvious point perhaps, or maybe obvious in retrospect, is while social networks and video games were not built consciously for remote socializing, they give that implicitly.

Yeah, they do. And it's the tools to enable us to be working 24, 7 any place on the planet at, at a level of productivity and quality. I'm about to go on a three week trip. I'm going to Florence, Geneva, Spain, Riyadh and back. And I'm gonna take my mics, my cameras, my lights and I'll be on. The only challenge is the time zone challenge, which is when you get to the Middle east, if you Live in California. Everybody's waking up at midnight, and you can work 24, 7 and having a fantastic productivity for about two days. Then you drop down exhausted.

Right, right, right, right, right. No, it's funny. I mean, it's. Basically, it's something where, you know, one thing I've talked about is in the remote economy, there are only three locations in the same office, in the same time zone and around the world.

Right.

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Yes. And I think the thing about it is, you know, I'm not the first person to make this observation, but historically, latitude was how the world was organized, you know, like. Because the same latitude meant the same crops and, you know, like similar climactic conditions. You know, you're warm, whereas you go up, you're cold, you go down, you're equatorial.

Right.

And. And now it's longitude. Longitude is organizing principle, where in a sense, you know, I put. Here's this tweet, right? Like the Nordic States and cape town are 10,000 km apart, but in basically the same time zone, plus, minus an hour or so, Right?

Yes.

So it's actually. Now, longitude is a more important organizing principle in some ways for the world than latitude, which is this huge, huge civilizational difference. We've just begun to do this gigantic global repricing of real estate. The other thing is you know, obviously, Starlink opens up the map, and so all kinds of places that were in the middle of nowhere. You know, historically, you located cities near ports, you located them near mines. More recently, you've had them near universities. Right where the knowledge economy is. But now the knowledge economy is on the Internet. And in theory, you could take some totally godforsaken backwater and build it into something. Burning man shows that that is possible right now. And can we extend that to Building Man? I think we can. And I like that.

Building Man.

Yeah.

The other thing that. What used to be an organizing principle was language. And of course, we've got translation capabilities today that are even breaking that down.

Yeah. So, I mean, this is an interesting question, because something I've thought about are sometimes the effects of technology are surprising. Thiel had this line that AI is centralized and crypto is decentralized. And someone said, well, actually, recently, crypto is becoming centralized with stablecoin control and things like that, and the CBDC and digital yuan. And it's AI that's gotten decentralized with stable diffusion, which is funny. I think there's actually. And then I think you can have a third point on that triangle, by the way, which is social. So AI, crypto, and social. And it's almost like trite to talk about that. Okay, but why. Why those three technologies in particular? Because, as opposed to electric cars or rocket ships, those three technologies are ways to coordinate human beings.

Right.

Social and crypto are ways to coordinate them. Obviously, it's, you know, either upvotes or cryptocurrency. It's like democracy or capitalism. Then AI is a way to replace a human being with a brain.

Right.

So those are three things that are essentially technopolitical technologies, as opposed to, let's say, an electric car or a rocket ship, which is not interacting with a human per se. Coming back up, basically the question of what is the impact of AI and, you know, machine translation? You and I have seen demos for a while that show somebody speaking in English, and then it's speaking in Chinese in their own voice. Like recognizably on the. In the voice, but with a perfect Chinese accent.

Right.

That's been around for some time as demos, and I think it's probably not too far, given the ridiculous pace of AI progress with the Transformers and so on, that you'll be able to speak in your voice, into the phone, and it'll speak out in your voice in Chinese or Korean or what have you. I don't think that's too many years Away Google Trans is already close to that.

Right.

And once that happens, you know, the obvious, you know, prediction would be, well, the language spheres of the world collapse into one thing. Okay. And let me take the obvious prediction, then let me do the non obvious prediction. The obvious prediction is right now there's basically two Internets. There's English Internet and the Chinese Internet. And all the other Internets are actually interesting because they're much less surveilled than those two big ones.

Interesting. So you start to get little fiefdoms of privacy potentially.

That's right.

Right.

And so like, you know, this is a non obvious point perhaps, but basically what I've realized, you know, for example, there is this really popular Indian app called Share Chat. Have you ever heard of it?

I have not.

Okay, so Share Chat's big thing is no English. Okay. So one thing, you know, many people know this, but you know, I'll just say like, India is like, it's best thought of as being like Europe, you know, just like the Spaniards and the Finns are both in Europe. But very different.

Right.

Different cultures and languages and so on. India is like this. It's like a continent with a billion people. And you know, South Indians and North, like they speak different languages, you know, they're now part of one, you know, giant civilizational state. But they do have different languages and what have you. Just like, you know, Finnish and Spanish or whatever are different.

Right.

And so ShareChat has, you know, Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, Malayalam.

Right.

It does have the language itself here written in English and there's like some, you know, onboarding that's in English.

Right.

But it's a non English social media app.

Right.

And that means it has sort of shelter from the global Internet. Okay. And you just have different kinds of things. It's like way more positive in some ways, for example.

Right.

And, and it's just something which is intentionally illegible to the world at large.

Right.

And one thought I've had, and here's, here's my other kind of tweet on whatever this kind of relevant here. English and Chinese are perhaps the most monitored languages. Platform operators in the US and China speak these languages. So it's easier for them to act as digital thought police, but other language spheres may have greater practical freedom. Right, and so this is the machine translation point that you were just making. On the one hand, machine translation could, in a positive way, unite the world in a negative way, make every conversation legible to surveillance. Okay. On the other hand, if we think about the Revival of Hebrew.

Right.

Maybe that's what happens. And we actually get much more share, chat like stuff because if you can translate into a language, you can translate out of a language into a private language.

So I'm going to come back here in a little bit when we talk about innovation, talk about life off this planet and such. But I want to take the conversation someplace different.

Sure.

It's an area that we have a passion about and a lot of people listening, I think have a passion about, which is health, tech and longevity.

Yes.

It's something that you and I go back, people may not know your background in this area. In fact, you and I both got a phone call from. I don't know if it was Elon or Peter Thiel. Elon was calling me with Peter Thiel in line saying, do you want to be the head of NASA? And I was like, I'd rather put a gun to my head to do that. Are you willing to say what he was calling you to ask you to be the head of.

Yeah, I mean, it's been reported, basically fda. And you know, the thing about that is I could have been number two at FDA for sure. I think that was, you know, potentially on the table. But I, I ultimately decided to not do that and remain in crypto. And, and actually that was before. That was obviously a good decision. But at the time, my reasoning, I've got my little notes file or whatever on this, or notes file, my little pen and paper notes. And my reasoning then, I think is stronger now, which is it was easier to start Bitcoin than to reform the Fed. I think it's going to be literally.

So let's dive into that. Right. Because the reality is, I want to talk about the fact that the United States is 42nd in the world in longevity, which is insane. Right.

It's declining. Do you see that?

See the status and declining. Over the last two years, it's been declining. And so the question is, why in the world, with the amount of wealth and technology, is it in such a state of disrepair? And what can we do about this? The level of bureaucracy in the FDA is one thing, but putting aside. Well, let's dive into the regulatory process right now because you and I've talked about this, we've talked about this before, that the government values lives lost from action more than lives lost from inaction. If you approve a drug and people die, you're in trouble. If you don't approve a drug and people die, you know you're being safe.

Right.

How do you, how do you possibly counter that, is there a solution for that?

So first thing I was just going to say is like that, that kind of one liner was it's easier to, it was easier to found bitcoin than to perform, than to reform the Fed. And I think it's literally easier to start a new country than to reform the FDA and the US medical system, as insane as that sounds. Okay, I believe it. Right, okay. And it's also, I think, easier to start a new city than to reform San Francisco. Why is this the case? So you said something which was interesting, which is said, you know, despite all this wealth, you know, et cetera, there isn't this innovation. I, I would argue potentially it is because of all that wealth that there isn't the innovation. That is to say, if you, you know, you, the US and the west to some extent have civilizational diabetes.

What does that mean?

So, for example, if you have obviously too little food, that's bad, you die.

Right?

Ah, got it.

Yes. If you have too much food, you get fat and you get diabetes and you know, you, you have too much sugar and it's just too rich a life. And that's actually also bad.

Right.

And so there's lots of things that are sort of at that optimal level, you know, and so yes, of course, if you are raised in the woods and you're pre industrial civilization and so on, you need a little bit more wealth, you know, flush toilets and indoor heating and stuff like that to develop. But if you have too much, well then you're playing to not lose, you're not playing to win. You know, your risk averse rather than, you know, risk seeking. It is not rational to push the envelope. Even for example, some of the terminology we have the developed world and the developing world. Developed indicates it's an endpoint. We're done, right. Do, I'm saying, right, Ta da, ta da. We're done.

Right.

And, and you know, the finished world and the, in the approaching world or something and an alternative frame. What happens then is people take so much for granted that now it actually starts collapsing. You know, we, we have, if you were to graph the cost of infrastructure, for example, in the U.S. for example, San Francisco has paid $300 million for a bus lane and taking like almost 20 years to build it. They held, they held a, they held a ceremony for opening a public bathroom with two stalls with literally guys with cameras being like, whoa, okay, apology.

I want to see inside your brain as the neurons connect from the FDA to toilet stalls.

Yes. Okay, I'll come Back. I'll come back, I'll bring it all together.

Yeah.

So the thing is that all of these costs have been imposed. And, you know, that's. That's very physical and tangible. That's the reason I point to that is you can see that the government has become insanely inefficient on the physical infrastructure like a bathroom. I mean, the same, the quote, the same US Government that built interstate highway system and put a man on the moon is holding a press conference for opening a bathroom.

Right.

But it's not the same. It's kind of crazy, right? It's not the same government. It's a government which has legitimacy and continuity, but radically diminished capacity in the sense of state capacity.

Right.

We are identifying it as the same thing, but it's like saying that Rome is the same as the Roman Empire because it has the same name. It is basically something which. Yes, there is a line that connects it. There's also a lot of lines that broke.

Right.

There's. It is something that's inherited the name. It's like the, the fifth or the tenth generation inheritor of a factory as opposed to the founder of the factory.

Right?

Yeah. So once you have that, by the way, we see this, we see this in multigenerational wealth, right? The, the creator of the family creates the wealth and, and drives the value. The second generation is trying to preserve it. The third generation is. Is losing it.

That's right. And I actually, you know, I don't have an answer as to what to do with, you know, giant amounts of wealth and, you know, beyond one person, because I, you know, I don't think that just giving it to the state and having it thrown into the same wood chipper as everything else is necessarily the best thing.

And I want to come back to philanthropy as a standalone. I want to come back to the notion of fda.

Yeah, let's talk about FDA and biomedicine.

Yeah.

So basically you talked about how that stuff is invisible.

Right.

And that's like Bastiat seen and unseen.

Right.

You know, that illusion. It's like when a window is broken, everybody sees the glass maker and all the economic activity that's coming to repair the window but is not seen is the capital or what the shopkeeper would have done with that capital if they didn't have to repair the window.

Right.

So it's a broken windows fallacy. Okay. And that's the same thing that happens with the fda, which, as you've, you know, as you said, if there is a. If there's a thalidomide, if there's a Vioxx, if there's one of these situations. Elixir of sulfanilamide was one of the.

Earlier things that has congressional investigation.

Yes, exactly. That's right. So, you know, fundamentally, there's a couple of points. First is you can make the emotional case for what is being held back. How? By, for example, talking about drug lag. You know, if you've got a drug that was approved and then after its approval, you see a quantifiable reduction in morbidity and mortality, but it took 10 years to approve. Therefore, that morbidity and mortality excess during those 10 years is on the head of FDA.

Right?

That is. And then you could go and interview those people and you could ask them, what did your, you know, husband, what did your, you know, child die from? They died from this disease. Did you know, that drug was approved five years later, could have saved them. That's actually something where you can actually have the human story around it, right?

You could quantify. You could quantify the cost in human lives and such.

And one way that happened was in 1991 with Act Up. Are you familiar with Act Up?

I'm not.

So in 1991, you know, people who had AIDS were protesting the FDA, and because they had a lethal. It was very. The entire course, obviously, of the disease was, you know, incredibly rapid.

Right.

At that time. And, you know, there were folks like this, if I die of aids, forget burial, just drop my body on the steps of the fda.

Okay, love that.

All right.

And because essentially these people that now the impact of drug lag was not some abstract thing. It was not some slow, degenerative thing. It was a very fast decline in an otherwise healthy person. And they weren't even being allowed to test these experimental drugs, right? So they had the moral authority on their side. They went there, they protested. And this resulted in certain reforms to FDA where it started actually losing some power. Okay. And so it had to get some of these things through.

All right, let me throw out this idea. And we've talked about it a little bit, but I want to get your view on it. If you look at a accredited investor in a regulation deoffering, right? If anybody started a private company and you're trying to raise money, you need to have accredited investors. These are people who can have a net worth of over a million dollars or making a quarter million dollars a year, and they're allowed to invest in risky things. But if you take a company public, you go through enough lawyers and enough Process that grandmothers and kids can invest in a public company. And so I've wondered always, why isn't there an accredited patient program where I'm a patient, I've got a fatal disease, I want to go and try this crazy ass treatment and it's my life and you can't tell me I can't try it. And as long as I have a review of my next of kin or my physician or I'm of sound mind, I should be allowed to try it. Right? A freedom to try anything.

Right? To try. Yep.

Right to try.

Yes. So my body, my choice, right? To try. I do believe in this. In fact, there are laws called, quote, right to try laws that allow people to try drugs because look, if you can literally jump off a bridge, if you can go bungee jumping and skydiving, if you can go and fight in a war.

Right.

If you can, you know, take, you know, like, I mean, the US is building statues to Breaking Bad. You know, you're familiar with that. There's like, yes, yeah. So you literally statues to fictional drug dealers who are selling drugs that, you know, yeah, it's a movie or whatever, but they're definitely injurious to you. And so like society is in a sense celebrating them. They're like, well, you know, people are going to do it anyway, let's hand out the syringes or whatever in San Francisco. Yet you can't be, you're prevented from taking a life affirming drug, an enhancing drug, something that can cure you or what have you.

Right.

So this is this totally backwards kind of thing. One thing I wanted to say, by the way, you asked why not, and I argue there's actually kind of two levels to engage on. And the level that actually technologists do not reflexively engage on, but need to train themselves to engage on is to start with the moral argument.

Right.

Why? Because what'll happen is if you talk about FDA or something like that, immediately you're going to be hit with a barrage of oh, thalidomide, oh, you know, if they really know the history, elixir of sulfanilamide, oh, Vioxx, oh my God, all these scandals, et cetera, et cetera. And so then you have to hit back with ACT up with banting, and best with the fact that FDA approved the body scanners. All these things where they've either let bad things through or stop good things from getting through. Okay, once you've done that, now it's, it's sort of like, you know, air superiority. If they can just win on the air game and just say, this is bad. What you're trying to say, boom, they just blow up all your stuff over here and people just quail.

Right?

If you have your own airplanes and you can hit moral for moral argument, now it goes to the rational argument.

Right?

Now it's basically something where they don't have air superiority anymore. They can't just knock you out of the battlefield with what you're saying is bad, you evil tech bro.

Whatever, right?

Instead, now you've got a moral counter argument where it simply can't be answered in terms of people yelling at each other. Now you have to go and look at the numbers, okay? So start with the moral, with the good, bad. Now we go to rational. What is rational? Rational is think of FDA and every regulator as essentially a binary classifier. It's got a type 1 and type 2 error rate. It's got both false positives and it's got false negatives and true positives and true negatives.

Okay?

And now you can actually start to assess any regulator as literally a binary classifier. It takes in a bunch of signals on drug and device approvals and it outputs a 0 or 1. Or more sophisticated, it might be like 0 or 1 under some conditions or for some people.

Right.

But once you can think of it like this, this entire structure of NDAs, like new drug applications, INDs. INDs.

Right.

Like that entire structure of things is something which is basically input to a binary classifier.

Right?

And essentially this is something where it's useful to think of it this way, because now you can throw math at it right now, you can benchmark it now you can make the invisible visible.

Because anybody assuming a rationality that does not necessarily exist, but it is a future that's possible. Right? In a network state, we're going to have the chance to redesign governance in the future, hopefully.

Hopefully, that's right.

Yeah. And you'll talk about that. But before we do, before we do, I want to take our conversation to a topic we talked about in New York, which is longevity.

Yes.

So how long do you hope to live?

Well, I'm not sure this particular vessel will make it, but I hope we can extend it for future generations as long as possible. Let me put it like that. All right. But, you know, I'm already praying a little bit, you know, but. Or maybe a lot.

That's fine. And you know that that can be reversed.

Yes.

But without a target, you'll miss it every time. So if I were to say to you right now, you know, given what you know. Can I ask, how old are you now?

Yeah, I'm 42.

You're 42, so you're still young. I'm 61. How old are you? Thank you.

If I shave, I look much younger. So anyway, go ahead.

All right, well, that's a regeneration technique. I just go shave tomorrow morning. Yes, but what's your. Give me a target. Like if you could snap your fingers and actually hit it, what would you. What do you think is a under over on your age? Sorry to talk about morbid things.

No, no, no, no, it's a good question. You need a huge. Potentially a huge supply chain. Maybe there's a miracle drug or something like that that'll just do it. There's a whole cocktail that.

I'm not looking for an analysis. I'm looking for a number.

A number. I mean, I would live to as long as I could live for. I understand. Yeah. I don't know. What do I personally think? I guess I'm. I set my expectations low, I guess, you know, in the sense of I think I will live a normal lifespan.

What do you consider normal lifespan?

I don't know, 75 or 80, but.

Dude, good, we have to talk.

Yeah, but, but, but, but all the upside that comes from that is a positive surprise.

Right?

Okay.

And so the reason I set my expectations low is, for example, do you talk about genomic reincarnation?

No, but I can. I can hypothesize.

Okay. So this is something I think of as more feasible than cryonics. Okay. And the reason I use the term reincarnation rather than resurrection will be clear. Okay.

Are you signed up for cryonics, by the way?

No, but. But I will do this. Okay, so let me explain what this is. So basically the short. The short concept is sequence your DNA and everything else, you can have that on disk. And if you have high enough karma, your society revives you at some point in the future. Once or not revives reincarnates you once eukaryotic chromosome synthesis is possible. That's the short version. Let me explain it a little bit longer. Basically, as you're probably aware, you can divide into bacteria, archaea and eukaryote. That's the three kingdoms of life for bacteria. We've been able to actually have a genome on disk to. That you can effectively print out. Bacterial chromosome synthesis is feasible. Ventner et al did this a long time ago. It's actually possible to do that. It's like about a megabase of sequence or.

There.

Yeah, it's Prokaryotic life.

Right?

Yeah. And those are very simple chromosomes, often just like a loop or a ring or something like that. They don't have a lot of structure relatively to eukaryotes. Eukaryotic chromosome synthesis is getting better and better and it's much more complicated to synthesize human chromosomes. But it is, it is gradually improving. If you spot me that one, Sci fi technology.

Okay.

Which is that we can eventually do eukaryotic chromosome synthesis.

And by the way, George Church very much wants to do that.

Okay. Yeah, sure. So, which is great. I follow this. I look at this every year. Or they're about to see where it's getting to. If you spot me that sci fi technology, then eventually if you have the DNA of Einstein or someone like that on disk, you could print out young Einstein. Okay. You could basically. And of course you'd have to figure out the details of getting that chromosome into an embryo and you know, all that type of stuff. That's non trivial. I grant all of that. Okay. Nevertheless, there is potentially a path there that I think is more realistic, it's funny to put it that way than. Or not. Let's say I think it's a cryonics. The hard part is.

But you skipped an entire part of this, which is how do you keep yourself alive longer? Right.

I know. I just go to what I think is. What I think is feasible.

Well, you didn't ask me what my life expectancy expectation is.

Okay, okay, go ahead. Sorry, sorry, I should, I should have asked you that.

Go ahead.

What's your life expectancy?

So it's like the only. It's the only, you know, sort of polite thing.

Yes. Response.

So I have to tell you a story. So I'm in medical school. I was doing a joint MD, PhD program in engineering, aerospace engineering and medicine. And I'm watching this television show on long lived sea life. And it's, you know, bowhead whales can live 200 years and Greenland sharks can live 4 or 500 years and sea turtles potentially could live longer. And I'm like, if they can live that long, why can't I?

Right?

They've got some anti cancer stuff going on in their.

Well, yeah, but it's all software. So I said it's either a software problem or a hardware problem. Fair.

Okay.

And we're gonna be able to get the tools to improve.

What do you mean by software in that sense? You mean like basically we can dose it with drugs versus changing genetics. That's what we call hardware.

I mean, add the genes required for increased cancer detection or repair systems. And it's, it's basically alter your. Actively alter your genetic code while you're alive. Right. Or replace the organs.

Crispr. Crispr. CRISPR shows that this is potentially that this is possible. I think sickle cells was actually.

Yeah, but yeah, so sickle cell anemia, beta thalassemia, a whole range of diseases. Right. There's going to be a point, I think it's in the next 10 years that every genetic disease is, if it's got enough funding behind it, can be in fact cured.

I think it's possible. Here's the article. Like sickle cell patient treated with CRISPR gene editing still thriving. So in a live patient. And it looks like the modification is actually taking place. But the thing is with sickle cell, because you can treat it by modifying the cells in the bone marrow, those can basically be uptaken through the entire body.

Sure. But there's a lot of other diseases in, in liver diseases.

Go ahead.

We're curing different forms of congenital blindness. We're able to use adeno associated viruses to target specific cell types in liver, in skin, in bone marrow, whatever it might be. But I'm still going back to my prediction of my own life expectancy. I set my life expectancy at a ridiculous number when I was in Medical School, what, 40 years ago? No, it was something much more reasonable like 500 years. But the challenge is that if you can live my hypothesis, biology is if you can. So let's back up a second. Say that's ridiculous. Fine. Coming back to 200 years. 150 years. Okay. We know people can make it to 120 years. There's reasonable validated individuals who have lived. Supercentenarians. 112. 115. 120.

Yep.

So we know we can get there. And so, okay, let's set a target of 120. I'm 60. That's 60 years from now. I'm 6159 years from now. In 59 years, the amount of progress we're going to be seeing is unfathomable in the form of AI and quantum computing and genomics and understanding. So it's not that I have to make those changes today. I need to live long enough to build the next bridge, to live longer and so forth. Right.

I completely get the argument. It's basically the argument of eventually there'll be a Moore's law for longevity. And if you can just survive long enough to get there, then you get the skyhooks. And you, you know, you get the boosting and so on and so forth.

So 75, 80 for yourself.

Well, the reason is because, you know, I'm, I, I am, I think myself as a pragmatic ideologue.

Right.

Where.

Or a pessimist, as the case may be.

I'm not a pessimist, actually. I would not consider myself an optimist either. I'm, you know, actually Elon had this thing where he's like, you know, he's determined rather than pessimistic or optimistic. I am about technological, like I will set, you know, a North Star kind of goal there. I'm just as ambitious, I think, as you in the sense of, I do think this can be done. Whether it can be done within my lifetime, I don't know whether it'll be done soon enough for me. I don't know, will push really hard to get there. I think like the pragmatic ideologue is basically the concept of setting that North Star and that, that destination. And then, you know, you have a winding path there. You have to accumulate the capital and figure out the bugs and recruit the team and do a thousand pragmatic things to reach that destination and that balance of things. Most people are very pragmatic, are not ideologues and most ideologues are not very pragmatic.

Right.

So.

Or realize that the biggest business opportunity on the planet is longevity, in fact, is adding healthy years in a person's life and then realize that ultimately billions of dollars are flowing into this marketplace and the more credible the conversation becomes, the more capital is coming in, the more people are investing and it's a self fulfilling prophecy in regards. Yeah.

Yes. But the question is, so the key thing is more credible, right? And I look, I love the concept of the bold declaration and so on. I'm going to live till X number of years. And so more power to that. What I found that moves the needle for people, so to speak, is the visuals.

Right.

You know, we were showing this, you know, when you and I were talking in New York, right? The what? The quote, holy shit phenotypes, right? Yes. And so let me actually put a few of those on screen. Here's one. This is not exactly longevity, but it is an amazing visual.

Right.

So that guy before and after, you know, longevity like his, you know, his hair is now ungraying. And then if you scroll down, there's another guy with the same thing.

And this was a chemotherapy for.

It was a side effect. Yeah, it was a side effect of a treatment for lung cancer.

Right.

And the, the thing about this is, you know, I, this is, this is a non. Trite point. It'll sound like a trite point, but I think it's not, which is longevity. Crypto is actually very similar to longevity in that they both reject fundamental premises of the establishment while also bearing some similarities. Okay. For example, with crypto, the similarities to the existing, you know, finance system is you have the bar charts and the, you know, you have, you have obviously market depth. And a lot of this kind of stuff looks like traditional finance.

Right.

That's a surface resemblance. But the substrate that the, the underlying difference in premises is that the establishment, for example, will say, yeah, hyperinflation is bad, but deflation is also bad, therefore mild inflation is good.

Right.

A little inflation is good. Whereas crypto will say, or satoshi said, hyperinflation is bad and mild inflation is also bad and deflation is good because it reflects genuine reduction in prices over time. Okay. And that's a fundamental premise difference. And there's other premise differences. It's like you should have control over your own data and you should have, you know, sovereignty over your own currency. And I see this, I was going.

To, I was going to ask you why there's such a correlation between longevity and the crypto space. Because I'm seeing, you know, your Brian Armstrong is committed, you know, a huge amount to the space and there's a lot of the crypto billionaires disproportionate from traditional Wall street wealthy individuals.

That's right.

Investing in this, in this space.

And I think, I think, you know, Hal Finney, who is, if not satoshi, is one of the best, certainly an influence on Satoshi, was also, was, was then called an extropian, you know, who was into this type of stuff, longevity and transhumanism and whatnot.

In the 90s, you call optimal.

I call it optimalism.

Right.

Because transhumanism now more recently has acquired negative connotations.

I agree with you by.

Yeah, but optimalism I think is something which is not optimism but optimal.

Right.

It doesn't say push things to their extreme necessarily. It says push things to their optimum.

Right.

It's got a kind of a positive connotation.

So one of the things that gives me hope here, and it's something I've mentioned before in our conversation, is we've got the same exact genes when we're born, when we're 20, when we're 50, when we're 60, when we're 80, when we're in 100, hopefully when we're 120. And the question is, why does your body look different? Why does your hair get white? Why do you get flabby? And it's not the genes you have, your genetics, are not. It's your transcriptome. It's which genes are on, which genes are off. And the question is, do you always have inside of yourself that youthful state? And so the work that David Sinclair and George Church and a few others have been doing has been able to demonstrate that in a number of systems. And we were talking about our age reversal xprize, and I still believe that there's a. There. There.

Yeah. Oh. I mean, if you took. Here's the thing, if. If you took everything that Sinclair is doing, all the studies and so on, and you just had a lab. So first of all, the first thing you need is the ultimate longevity predictor or biomarker or whatever.

Right? Sure.

And maybe that. That literally could be imaging. And here's why. Is, you know, the most obvious thing you can do with machine learning with. With faces, is you can try and predict age. And that's actually pretty good. There's good algorithms out there because you've got lots of training data. You've got literally billions of photos of people where you know exactly their birth date and their age. You have a smaller data set, but still extant, of folks who have passed away. And if you take past photos of them, you can actually predict their life expectancy from their face.

Interesting. So is anybody doing that right now?

I want to actually fund a study like that. If no one.

I would love to do that with you.

Okay.

Because I think that that's really. That's really great. I know. Do you know Alex Zavaronkov from medicine?

Yeah.

So I think Alex has done some work in that area, but I think it's a really important element. For sure.

So. So let's. Because basically there obviously are millions of photos of people who have unfortunately passed away.

Right.

You have. That's very. That's an incredibly solid data set for machine learning purposes, because you've got an incredibly quantifiable endpoint.

Right.

It's a current date, it's a no bull.

It's a no bullshit situation.

No bullshit situation. Right, yeah.

Pull out the plastic surgery, pull out the Cardassians, and you're fine.

Yeah, right, exactly. But even that is kind of interesting because given a large enough data set, you could quantify how much younger that actually made you look if it did.

Right.

And of course, if you're given a large Enough data set you could use for different ethnicities. A big part of this will frankly just be assembling that data set. And so that's like the hard part, I think, more than running the algorithm. Right, okay, let's say you can do that now. You could hold up your phone and it could tell you number of years to live. Okay, that's depressing. But, but here's the good part. Now you can do delta delta T, where every single potential intervention from Metformin to whatever.

Right?

Yes.

Will, if you know the reason that you know the picture of Dorian Gray, you're familiar with that book.

Yeah?

Yes.

So it's like, you know, the portrait on the wall ages where, you know, this is something where people's eyes, you know, when people say, oh, you look healthy, you look unhealthy, there's. There's a zillion things that are happening behind the scenes in somebody's appearance.

Our brains have been trained over millennia to understand that.

That's right. And when someone loses weight or gets fit, they're like, wow, you look younger, and so on. There's probably something real that's happening epigenetically or whatever.

Right.

And so I think that something basically imagine a magic mirror on the wall, okay. And it was an AI mirror. And you know, you have to figure out the data privacy stuff. Maybe there's a local server or what have you. Okay. And it will literally tell you all kinds of stuff on your health just by imaging. For example, do you see that thing, this almost 10 years old, where they could predict pulse from your. From a video, from flush.

From the capillary flush on your face and.

Yeah, exactly. So pulse detection. This is like 10 years ago. They're doing pulse detection from like, you know, head motion or from like the like slight flush in your face.

Right.

And this is something where, you know, I think where you can get with medical imaging from like the amazing high def cameras we've got and all the ML we've got, I think so far beyond where people think.

Right?

So one of the reasons you don't have that is FDA has been holding that back. All kinds of medical imaging stuff. For example, here's a rare story on this. So essentially, like, why can't you just hold up your phone and. And like image some mole or something like that and immediately have a million examples from around the world that can benchmark that was cancerous, that was non cancerous, that should be totally free, that should be totally available. Answer is fda, Right?

And more generally, the medical establishment. Right. Because for the longest time I was able to read an EKG better than the cardiologist, better than most.

There'll always be some guy who's like the expert. Expert, expert. Yeah, but nobody's not better than the best. And that's why they'll block it or.

And the association of Cardiologists or the association of Dermatologists or whatever don't want to lose their job. All of a sudden they're being replaced by an algorithm. I don't want this.

Wait, wait, wait, wait. I've got a solution to that. I've got a solution. Go for it. So I actually do think a non obvious factor that's going to change all of this is India.

Okay.

Why? Because India is coming online. India has, in a huge way, in a huge, huge, huge way. It is maybe the single most obviously underpriced thing in my view on this decade.

And I want to talk about India, but I don't want to.

Let me grab it. Okay, let me specific relevance here. Basically, India has a lot of. So India has over the last 50 years actually built a reputation of having a lot of good doctors.

Right.

Something like, I've got 10, 20% or something of the doctors in the US are of Indian origin.

Okay.

More if you include South Asian.

Yeah, it's amazing.

It's amazing.

Right, okay.

And that's just like. So now because of that, Indians also have done a lot in software. Number three in tech unicorns. And so it's totally. And crucially domestically, they've got a generic drug industry where they don't actually abide by this artificial scarcity of ip. They can crank out generic drugs and that's like a huge thing. They've got great chemists.

Right.

So. And finally telemedicine has now finally been quasi legalized in the US There are.

Various things and you've got folks like Mukesh Ambani who's investing heavily into the entire medical area. I mean, massive amount of capital is going in.

That's right. So you put all that together and you've got an aging population in the US and you've got price pressure and whatnot. I think it's quite possible you start seeing telemedicine come in from India.

Right?

For sure. And maybe there's an Indian American doctor over here who's routing it. Okay. And so they're like signing off within the system. You have that like legal kind of thing. And they're the ones who maybe they send it to an Indian service that has different regulations and that Allows you to actually just automatically read this because that disruptive technology is something where this huge. I mean, one of the reasons, you know, the AMA and others, they didn't want that many so called FMG is foreign medical graduates to enter the US because it did bring price pressure down. Right now suddenly all those guys are online, all of them are ambitious and they're seeking, you know, like so. So there is something here where there's a giant force. There's so much.

There's a next step here which is, you know, in the interim, before we have AI, we have the craft, and Indian physicians and nurses and software engineers are the crowd. Eventually though, I mean, AI, even today, right now, AI is likely better as a diagnostician than most physicians. And in the very near future, you provide an AI, the data, the imagery, the information. I mean, I found this out. Take a guess.

It's more reliable, is cheaper. How many?

Yeah, but they don't under. The average physician hasn't read any of the articles published that day, let alone. Right. So how do you take a guess how many scientific publications are. Don't Google are published per day?

Oh, it's easily a thousand. It's more than that. It's. What is it, like a few million articles a year? It's probably about 3,4000, right?

Okay, good guess. Yes, it's 4900. It's 1.8 million articles per year and 28,000 journals. And so it's like how many has your physician read that morning? So it's like insane, right? And it might have been the breakthrough that morning that's gonna diagnose you or treat you. But I want to go someplace else. I want to. Let's assume for a second that we are going to be able to extend the healthy human lifespan. Harvard, Oxford, London School of Business did a study about a year ago that said for every additional year you add $38 trillion to global GDP.

Oh, wow.

Amazing.

That's pretty good. That's a great, that's a great stat. I wouldn't have. It's just good to have a number there. I mean like, I don't know what the exact number is, but that's high.

It's additional productivity right at the top of your game. Why do people retire? They retire because you're tired or you're in pain. And if you feel great, if you have the aesthetics, the energy, the volition, you're going to go and keep going because you've got all the contacts. You're making the most dent in the universe. That you can. So $38 trillion. And here's my question. Implications. So I have a conversation with Elon not too long ago, and we're talking about longevity, because that's what I'm focused on. That's what make investments. He goes, I don't think people should live that long. I'm like, what? He goes, yeah, I think people need to die to make room for new ideas to come in.

I understand this argument.

I understand it, but I don't buy.

It well, so here's how I think you can square that circle. Essentially, what he's referring to is the whole concept of, you know, science advances one funeral at a time.

Yes.

If you've heard that.

And it may well have been that.

Yeah. And. And I, I actually do understand where that comes from. If you think about the gerontocracy in the US and how you have. Have you seen the graph of, like, the average age of, you know. Yeah. Legislators.

Right.

Yeah. And so essentially, you know, the argument has been, oh, they're old, they don't get it, and. And so on and so forth. Well, two things. First is if the life extension, or more generally, health extension, health span. A lot of people imagine somebody who's superannuated, just living longer and longer. Really, what you want is.

Let's define. We're not talking about. We're not talking about living in a wheelchair, slobbering. We're talking about health span. Right.

So you're.

You feel good, you're thinking well, you're moving well, your cognition is.

You're 25. You're 25 or whatever for a long, long period of time, you heal better.

Or even 55 or 60 for a long, long time.

Fine. Right, Exactly. You're. You're mobile, you're independent, you're all this stuff.

Right.

Okay. So if you have expanded health span. Well, first of all, you won't be necessarily as set in your ways. You have more of the plasticity of youth or number one. But I think the more fundamental thing is the frontier. Okay. If you can reopen the frontier. Okay. And, you know, I've thought about this a lot. I've written about this in the book. You know, there's four, you know, possible places. There is the frontier.

Right.

The land.

And by the way, when biology is speaking about the book, he's talking about network state.

Yeah, the network state dot com. Exactly.

Right.

The frontier. Reopening the frontier is this crucial, crucial thing. In a sense. We, you know, you can talk about the land, the Internet, the sea and space.

Right.

And how advanced are these respective things? So the land, you have 8 billion people. The Internet now you have 4 billion people on the oceans. Here's an interesting stat. You know how many people are like at any one time on the high seas?

Huh? I'll take a guess. 5 million.

It's sub that. It's like if you include all the cruise ships and stuff together, it's like at least the, the stat I saw was like about a million, right? So all, all the ships, all the cargo ships and so on is about a million on the seas at any one time. And then how many people are in space? International Space station is like 10, right?

Max.

Max, right. And I think who knows what that is now with Russia and the US fighting, you know, like, whatever, right? So of those frontiers, right, space is the one that everybody talks about, the final frontier. And that's important. But it's the least mature of these.

Right.

Conversely, the land is so mature that it's difficult to build on it directly. And so the big part of what I talk about in the book is using the Internet frontier to open the others up.

Right.

And the frontier, how does that relate to this? Well, if you have, in the event you could do space travel or if you could even start new societies on Earth or on the sea using the Internet. Now, the fact that some gerontocracy controls an older thing doesn't matter because you can go and start a new one, right?

Yes. This was always the case on the meritocracy always mattered most on the frontier, right. If I needed my horse shoed, I didn't care how old or if the person was a woman or black or white or gray, it was. I needed my horse done.

Right? Yes, exactly. That's right. And I think, you know, like, at its best, Silicon Valley is, or really what Silicon Valley was and what I think technology is now, because I don't think tech is. I, you know, I don't think Silicon Valley is a metonym for technology anymore. It's not focused in one spot. It's intrinsically global. You have, you know, Indians and Chinese people and, you know, Eastern Europeans and Brazilians all working together on something.

Right.

And you know, like something like calendly, it's a Nigerian founder that everybody in tech uses, right? So that's actually not in a Kumbaya, we are the world kind of thing. But that is like the potential of capital and software and tech to put people together.

It's a meritocracy. The best idea comes forward independent of where it came from. I don't know who founded this. I just know it works really well.

That's right. That's right. And, and, you know, this is something. Well, so coming back, basically, that frontier is, I think, the answer to the, you know, science advances one funeral at a time. Science also advances one frontier at a time. It was the new world, Right. It was, you know, obviously space and so on.

Well, the American west was a incredible frontier for railroads and steam engines. For everything.

Yeah, yes. Or not steam engines, but railroads and other things. Yes.

So my question is, is extreme longevity good or bad for humanity?

I think it's on balance, good. I think that basically, for example, we're not going to be able to easily colonize other planets and, and terraform them on the time scales there without, you know, probably changing our biological substrate.

Right.

Like many of those, you know, you could imagine something where the, to humans, the highly inhospitable atmosphere of some other planet wouldn't work. But to, I don't know, a human who can metabolize sulfur and breathe sulfur, you know, maybe, maybe it's totally fine. Yay. You know, have a great time. And there's. Go ahead.

No, agreed. I think at the end of the day, we're heading towards a world of increasing abundance where AI robotics capability are going to help us meet our needs. And how we live our lives is going to be an adventure in cyberspace. It's going to be entertainment, it's going to be exploration. It's not going to be slaving to get food, water, shelter, health care. So I don't know about you, but I think it's becoming more exciting and I want to see as much of the future as I can.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in a sense it's interesting because what happens next, right? That's something, you know, someone's like, you know, I wish my grandfather or great grandfather was around to see this. You know, like, wow, how things would have worked out. You know, how insane that is.

Right.

The other, by the way, the other sort of practical immortality thing that I think is working today, I mentioned genomic resurrection. The other one is actually, and this is being depicted in a dystopian way in her or Black Mirror. But I think AI immortality is now feasible in the sense of if you took all of your audio and video recordings over your life, right. That is something where you could have a. Maybe it's not GPT3, maybe it's GPT7 or something like that. You could have something that could speak in your voice that could basically Be what you would say.

Spin up a version of yourself. So I did this. I trained up a neural net based on all my blogs and all my books. It's a engine called Futurescope and it searches the world's news for things you would like. For things I would like. So in particular, there are two versions of it, futureloop.com and longevityinsider.org longevityinsider.org has got all my blogs and books in longevity. Futureloop.com is everything I've written about. AI, robotics, 3D printing, synthetic biology, AR.VR and blockchain. It searches looking for positive minded, non dystopian convergent technologies on these things based upon what I look. And it generates the top 10 articles. If I could search all the world's news and journals every year, every day it finds those articles for me and delivers them to me. So there's a little mini Peter, I call it Virtual Peter, searching the world for this information and delivering it to me. But at the end, can I upload my brain and have some AI on the cloud say, hey Peter, it's Peter, I'm here, you can kill yourself now.

Oh boy.

I don't, I don't think I want to do that.

Well, yeah, I mean, the thing is, there are many possible futures on this kind of thing. And you know, one thing that people always get back to is, is does it have to be your own consciousness or can it be a clone of you in some way or what have you.

Right.

But you know, to bring it back to the brass tack stuff, right. On, on longevity. I think people are unaware of just how much progress. That's why I showed that like, you know, anti graying photo, right. Or the super soldier serum photo. I think people are unaware of how feasible it might be to do this in our own bodies. And actually just like the, the longevity biomarker thing where you kind of take an image of someone's face and you predict how many years they have to live.

Right.

I think having something which was just a clip show of a hundred videos or graphs, ideally it's videos or images because a graph is more abstract.

Right.

But that actually shows an animal that looks younger, right? That shows an experiment where hair pigmentation has been reversed, muscle has come back, people look younger. I think a collection like that would do more than a thousand papers for suspending disbelief. This is actually possible. That's, I think, useful. Another important thing to kind of poke at.

I agree. I call this a longevity mindset. The question is, can I train? So our brains are neural nets and we train them by giving them example after example after example. And can I create a longevity mindset for myself by showing myself. That's why I built longevityinsider.org to give me those examples every day to see that this is coming. So I believe that it's coming and I therefore take better care of myself and invest in those areas. Yeah, I think we're going to see more and more evidence all the time. And you and I Talked about this $100 million longevity age reversal X prize.

Yes.

Which I'm excited to talk to you more about a different time. Hey everybody. I hope you're enjoying this episode. I'll tell you about something I've been doing for years. Every quarter or so, having a phlebotomist come to my home to draw bloods, to understand what's going on inside my body.

Body.

And it was a challenge to get all the right blood draws and all the right tests done. So I ended up co founding a company that sends a phlebotomist to my home to measure 40 different biomarkers every quarter, put them up on a dashboard so I can see what's in range, what's out of range, and then get the right supplements, medicines, peptides, hormones to optimize my health. It's something that I want for all my friends and family and I'd love it for you. If you're Interested, go to mylifeforce.com Peter to learn more. Let's get back to the episode. Let's take the conversation into a subject I care about, which is innovation and moonshots. So I don't think there are enough entrepreneurs working on the world's most important problems. How do you feel about that? Do you agree?

Yes. I think though that it's a multi sided market. And what I mean is, right, you know, like the concept, like a two sided market like Uber is of course the riders and drivers, right. So it's a multi sided market where it's, there's obviously the founders and the funders. Okay. But I think actually an underappreciated thing are the writers and the policymakers because you know, the writers and that's like the, you know, specific people who are writing text more generally. The screenwriters for the world.

Right.

The folks who are basically screenwriting the media, the content and so on out there, those influence the policymakers and they can move a switch that makes a new kind of founder even possible. Yeah. And for example, very famous example, NSF's acceptable use policy in 19 pre1991 as you may remember, the Internet was just an academic and military network. Commercial traffic was actually not allowed because it was going to cause malware and porn and scams. And they were all totally right about that. But when they, when enough, you know, folks pushed on, enough policymakers to flip the switch to just allow that to happen, to allow commerce on the Internet, enormous amounts of founders and funders flocked in and then this entire frontier got populated, right? So it's often like one policy switch that is often not thought of as being that important, that just unlocks the whole kind of thing, right? And then media is upstream of that policy switch because it is, it's making the moral case for why this is better to do rather than not do. And so to your point, I actually wrote this article called the Purpose of Technology. I've got it here in the, in the chat. And when you think of it as a multi sided market, the founders are sometimes not the, the first mover, they're sometimes the last mover. Other folks have to sort of prepare the environment such that a new kind of founder is possible. For example, Y. Com. I mentioned nsf, aup. Another example is Y Combinator made, you know, Stripe and Airbnb and Dropbox feasible because it said, guess what, you don't have to be 30 something to raise VC. You can just come and start the, the, you know, the water's warm. This is something you can feasibly do, right?

And crazy, crazy ideas welcome.

Crazy ideas welcome. And you know, the thing is, I mean, if we like one thing, I'm actually amazed by, in retrospect, if you think about how like what Gates and Jobs did before the Internet, before that information was out there to make the moves that they did in the 70s, it's actually insane to think how did they build the sales team? How, you know, there was, there's like no guidance of any kind, right? They just had to figure it all out from scratch and just scale a cliff face at, you know, whatever youthful age. It's actually bananas that they were able to do that. Maybe there are other things at that time that they could rely on, but they didn't have the Internet and all this information didn't have stack overflow to debug, didn't have all this entrepreneurship advice. They had nothing. They had to invent all of that.

Right?

It's crazy. But once that became more of a process, it smoothed it out. A third example is just the fact, you know, of, of the U.S. for example, in the 1800s, all of this Terrain out west was something that a new kind of founder was possible. You know, basically someone who'd go out there and found a new community. Of course, you know, like there's battles between the, you know, the US State and the, you know, American Indians and so on. But the, the, the very concept that one could actually go and do that was, was not something that was there before. And you know, this is something where, you know, I talk about this in the book like, you know, some people will say, oh my God, that was you know, so terrible and so on. And it's like there were actually a bunch of wars between different Indian tribes and so on before the, you know, the, the westerners came in.

And this was, it was not a peaceful existence.

It was not a peaceful existence. It was like tribes n plus one and N plus two and N plus three coming in and had the American Indians, Native Americans had, you know, sufficient technology, oceanic navigation. There's, there's, you know, Harry Turtledove and others have written alternate histories of how they would colonize Europe.

Right.

Just like the Mongols when they had, you know, advanced technology, you know, over the Europeans kind of came into Europe just like, you know, various Arab civilizations, they took Andalusia and what have you. So that's not something which is like good or bad. I just say that because you're like, oh my God, you know, you know, like the, the US expansion, like imperialism.

Yes.

Yeah. If the Native Americans had had the technology, they would have expanded and because, you know, it's human nature. Yeah, that's right. So, so leaving that part aside just to answer that for a bit, this, this political economic climate allowed a new kind of founder. And you know what? Now another example is something which is sort of a founder driven thing is Elon showed that space innovation is actually possible. Okay. Like literally nobody thought of space as something that you could feasibly do in the 2000s. Like you're going to compete with NASA. Good luck.

Right.

That was, well, I mean that was my focus for that decade, right. With the original xprize. So, so this is my question. There are areas in the world today, and these are the basics. Increasing access to food. Right. We are post Covid the World Food program is being slayed to try and supply. I mean there's more people starving in so many different ways. Access to fertilizer, access to water, shelter, healthcare, all of these things. And for me, listen, I'm a techno optimist. I fully agree. I'm not going to solve it with policy and the world's not going to become smarter overnight. I'm going to solve this with technology. I'm going to dematerialize, demonetize and democratize stuff and make more food, water, energy available. So I am on a mission to try and get entrepreneurs to focus on these things. I say the world's biggest problems are the world's biggest business opportunities. I want to become a billionaire, help a billion people. So I'm just curious, how would you drive innovation in area? I'm using prizes. But are there other elements that will create the right situation where entrepreneurs are focusing in and importantly as well, capital is coming in. Is there any kind of a role for venture capital, for uplifting humanity, for making the world a better place, so to speak?

Yeah, I mean the thing is, I think VC has to get into. I mean it is kind of already there, but content. Why? Because basically. Just talk about this for a second. The current media, media is upstream of all of this stuff, Right. Media is the software that scripts the minds. Just like code is what scripts the.

Machines or scripts the minds in a negative way as well as a positive way, correct?

That's right. And so all of these visions we have of the future are typically dystopian black mirror. And we want is not utopian but positive. Bright sun. You want a bright sun rather than a black mirror. And there's so many structural things that go into this. I talk about this in the Purpose of Technology article, but I'll give a few, please. The first is the fundamental incentives have to be changed because right now traditional media is about page views, prestige and or profit. And that seems like so obvious. How would you ever get away from that? But page views mean you're attracting the most number of viewers.

Right.

You're optimizing for a mass audience. Prestige means you're trying to impress the kind of people who hand up Pulitzers. And then profit is very much short term profit where if it bleeds, it leads and you're just trying to juice the numbers and it's often, you know, something where you're incentivized to make it much more sensational or what have you.

Right. Do you know what CNN stands for?

Go ahead. Cable News Network. No, what is it?

No. The Crisis News Network.

Crisis News Network. Exactly.

Or the constantly negative News Network.

Yeah, you know, the Summer of Sharks or whatever.

Right.

Whatever it is, they're gonna, you know, add some spice to it. It's literally.

How many people do you have? People sharks kill every year on the average.

I don't know, it's like 10 or something less than that.

7.

Yeah, it's on that order. Right, exactly. And so it's something where huge problems are not included and so small problems are magnified because it's not a dashboard. It's not a numerical dashboard. It's a verbal thing.

Right?

Like a. Like a CEO does not manage their company by anecdote. You know, I mean, the qualitative can be helpful, don't get me wrong. But you also have the quantitative, and the quantitative is almost completely missing from many of these things. You don't have, like, you don't have a dashboard that's showing the tracking of certain problems over time. People don't have a sense of the relative magnitude of, let's say, I don't know, meth addiction versus shark attacks. It might occupy similar space in their heads. Right, okay, so so basically, how would you get away from this page? Use prestige and profit? Well, if you start with not trying to write content for the most, but for the best. Okay, so you're writing an article which is meant to attract the next Zuck, all right, and. Or the next Vitalik or what have you. And so you're not writing it for just millions of people to understand it necessarily. You're writing it. You're also not writing in a sycophantic PR way. It's a third way where you're describing a problem and issues. You're not attacking people unnecessarily. You're saying, here's a potential constructive solution. And if you're building something here, just like we were just doing where we said, you know, we want to improve longevity, here's the things that are out there. I think a critical thing would be something that estimates age from face. Here's a link at the bottom. We'll fund you, okay? So you have content which is investable content, right? We have the credible capital and so on to do that. Somebody comes, we fund them, we see if it works.

Right?

And we may. We may take the best of 10 or best 100. This is the. The X Fund rather than X Prize kind of model. Very similar.

Right?

Okay. You put out, like sort of a pilot light, and then you have folks swim to that.

Right?

Or a magnet. So that is the best rather than the most. So you're not doing page views per se. You're doing that one person that comes, that makes you $10 million rather than 10 million views. Prestige. Rather than going for what is considered important by consensus today, you're going for what is considered important by, like, societal consensus in 10 years. The, the contrarian thing, for example, Peter, you know, Thiel is known for, for it's actually overstated because it's not meant to be contrarian forever. It's meant to be contrarian today. Make a non consensus decision and then it's proven consensus in five or 10 or 15 years. If you're always non consensus, you haven't won only once.

Right.

You're an outlier.

Yes.

Yeah. So it's temporary contrarian.

Right.

You are essentially somebody who's giving something here where you think it's underpriced and then it's going to come to its, you know, it's high, high bar.

Right.

Yeah. The way, the way I describe that is the day before something is truly a breakthrough. It's a crazy idea. Right. But it will eventually be a breakthrough.

That's right. And, and of course there's some crazy ideas that remain crazy ideas. And we are the ones, I think, who can maybe hopefully parse through that. If you have some technical background, you can parse it.

Okay.

And then the third is profit. Rather than the short term profit of, you know, there's a war or a famine or something, you have the long term patient profit of in 10 years, this problem is actually solved. Rather than have a lot of, you know, like traffic around, you know, exaggerating a problem.

Right.

And so that's a different model. That is the quote VC model of content.

Right.

Where you put out a proposal, you attract the best, not the most. You, you, you're proven. Right. But over the long term rather than the short term. And you make money over the long term rather than the short term. And that can fund an enormous amount of content. That can fund movies, I believe that can fund an entire parallel content industry that is positive sum as opposed to negative sum. And sensationalist.

Right.

It's interesting, your previous company, A16Z is heading towards a media play as well, right?

Yeah. They've got future.com and so on. Yeah, yeah. And I think this is something where that we're going to see several different efforts on this. We've seen, you know, kind of tech substacks. Like my book is kind of another version.

Right.

So we've got newsletters, podcasts, books. I think the next level is we want to do movies, video games, all this stuff. And you make them, quote, free to play. And you're not monetizing in game. You're not monetizing, you know, in the movie. For example, think about the Social network movie, you know, the one from 20 grand. Okay. So that was an interesting movie because even though Sorkin sort of tried to make Zuck look bad in the movie, he still. He couldn't help but show the Nietzsche and aspect of it.

Right.

Like how incredible it was to build something from nothing to something, being sued by all these people at the same time and so on.

Right.

And you know, I'm not taking any sides in any of that, you know, like. Like all those folks have all settled or whatever.

Right.

But the point basically being that there was something heroic about that and that did inspire. You know, it's a flawed hero. Okay, fine in the movie, but it's heroic nevertheless and inspired a lot of people.

Welcome to the human race.

Welcome to the human race. That's right. And you know, and of course, the movie was highly fictionalized and Zuck himself has disputed many of the characterizations of it. And I think he's. He's probably right about that. But point being that if you look at box office mojo, do you know how much that movie made?

No. I'll guess. Two and a half billion dollars.

No, much less than that. Okay, how much worldwide gross? 220. 220. Okay.

Right.

That's obviously. That's pretty good.

Right.

But it's actually, in my view, it's a fraction. If that movie had been free and if there had been something which. And like even just that movie.

Right.

And forget the better version for a second, and there'd be in a fund that had funded it. And then there was a call to action link at the end, which was, we will fund your startup, if you're inspired by this movie, easily would have generated more than 220 million. You know, how many startups were inspired by the Social Network? Like, absolutely insane number of things over the last few years.

So these are. These are business model changes for sure. Right. Which is where the most interesting stuff is happening right now.

That's right. And the reason these are important is it's true. Yes. It changes the economics, but also changes the alignment and the incentives. Now you imagine, okay, for example, there's another movie called the Founder about the founder of McDonald's. Have you ever seen that?

I have, yes.

Okay. It's quite good.

Right.

And so there's relatively small. And then there's one which is like, gosh, it's about the. Yeah, Joy.

Right.

That's like, you know, also quite good.

Right.

About, you know, so Joy or the Founder or the Social Network. There's actually a lot of drama involved in building any large business. Actually very difficult from the beginning. There's a lot of risk and stuff.

Right.

A bunch of the recent, you know, the fictionalization of Uber and we were all being hostile. Yeah, yeah, they've been hostile. And it's. It's the. But it's still. It's a fascinating journey.

Exactly. So. Well, you know, the thing is I've. I've resisted watching some of these recent ones simply because it's just like, all right, another thing, which they're, you know, I mean, like the US Media calling other people frauds is actually kind of bananas after Walter Duranty and Edgar Snow and John Reed and all these guys.

Right.

But coming back, these are all the guys who enabled various communist dictators, covered up famines.

I agree with you. Coming back to. If you were going to drive. So, again, feel like my ability to impact the world is to inspire entrepreneurs to make a change. Entrepreneurs are individuals who find a great problem and solve it. The more entrepreneurs solving problems, the better the world is and focusing them on the problems that create wealth. Like the biggest problems are the biggest business opportunities, but also are uplifting humanity. Because a world in which a mom knows her kids have access to the best education and healthcare, food, water, energy, is a more peaceful world. I want to know, do you think about that? Do you think about that? Because you have a voice to influence individuals.

Yeah.

And the network state, in part is about driving innovation, but do you think about directing innovation in a way that's making the world better? And I want. And so what's your message to those entrepreneurs listening? Because, excuse me, to all the people who build photo sharing apps out there, but my comment is, you know, do something that makes the world a better place and don't build another photo sharing app. It's. I use photo sharing apps. I like them. I'm just trying to say I don't need another one.

Right, right, right. So. So it's. It's tricky because. Let me, Let me give a partial. Completely understanding your critique of photosharing apps. Let me give a partial defense of them.

Right.

And that's. Okay.

Okay.

It's a different focus. Can we focus on the. On the. What you would do to folks. People there.

I will.

I will assume there is a defense. I agree there is a defense, but.

I'll give it a counterintuitive defense. Counterintuitive defense is photo sharing apps and things of that nature are building a remote society where people are now able to disconnect from the land around them that builds cloud communities that can eventually shape regulation on the earth. This is how bits unlock innovation in atoms. Okay.

And the speed of innovation and permissionless innovation, all of those things.

You have to essentially build enough moral strength in the cloud to like descend like lightning bolt and then clear the underbrush so that people can build there. Like you have to actually build that community of like mind that can have enough policy influence to just move the laws out of the way and allow founders to found. And photo sharing apps are actually along that continuum. This is something I talk about in the network state book, right? It's not just photo sharing apps, obviously. It's Slack and it's zoom and it's, it's this, it's the riverside stuff. It's remote, critically important, right?

Okay.

So I think of what they're doing as actually a useful precursor for what is fundamentally important, which is the innovation in atoms, right. Without thinking about it, they've actually built a subunit that helps us get towards that because they've built this cloud community that can reshape the land. Okay, now to innovation in atoms, the fundamental prerequisite is actually in my view, not necessarily technological. It is moral. That is, we just have to convince enough people of the moral rightness of what we're doing. You know, you know that thing where people will attack tech guys, they'll say, oh, you, you, you thought so much about whether you, you could, you didn't think about whether you should.

Oh, right.

You know that, that thing from the flip side of that is if there's a will, there's a way. Okay. If we can convince people, for example, that longevity is the most important thing that you can work on, that universal healthcare is not enough, that we need eternal life.

Right.

That's not just enough to share, to move some mashed potatoes around the plate for like, you know, like to get plus two years. But you actually need to like really solve the problem rather than pretend to solve a problem, right? Getting that degree of moral alignment of even a thousand like really, really intense, zealous activists, then the market will exist because the policies, the laws are moved out of the way and so on. You've cleared the underbrush and is now feasible to build. That's how I kind of think about it actually. You know, we have a century of innovation in biomedicine that with the right zone would just the right special economic zone, like essentially a post FDA zone, not a regulation free zone. People always think I say regulation free. What I mean is actually something that is to the FDA what Bitcoin was to the Fed. A better replacement, a better reviewer Something with, as we talked about earlier, better type 1 and type 2. Okay.

Without the, without the biases that, that unfortunately restrict innovation. That is, how can I put it? You don't want to become. You don't want to. If you're the expert in a field, you don't want that field disrupted since you're no longer the expert in it.

Right, exactly. How do you build a cloud regulator that is better than these land regulators that can use information from millions of people around the world to get a better Type 1 and Type 2 decision? Or rather, sorry, lower Type 1 and Type 2 error rates. A better binary classifier for, for approving things. Okay. So if you have these various special economic zones or call them special innovation zones because they're more about regulation than taxes per se.

Okay.

If you have these different zones, we would like. I actually don't think tech is a barrier. You know, the banting and best. I mentioned them earlier. Are you familiar with that example?

Right.

Basically Banting and Best 19, you know, early 1920s, they, they had the idea for insulin supplementation. And you know, once they had the, the concept, they did experiments on dogs. It seemed to work. Then they did experiments on themselves. Didn't seem to cause big issues. Then they had volunteer patients and people were like jumping out of bed. Whoa, this is actually working. Once they had that data, then within two years Eli Lilly had scale production for the entire North American continent and they'd won a Nobel Prize. That was when pharma moved at the speed of software, when it was willing, doctor willing, patient banting and best. In Canada, there's hospitals named after them. They're Nobel laureates. Okay. They're not like fly by night. This shows, remember the scene and unseen that you talked about earlier?

Right?

This shows what is unseen, the biomedical innovation we could have. You know, I put it like this could be us, but you regulating. Okay, you know, like this could be us but you playing whatever. It's like an online meme and.

Right.

So this could be us, but you regulating. We could all be super fit. We could be, you know, we could have longer life. All kinds of diseases could be cured if we could somehow unlock this pent up, you know, because all this stuff is in, is in research. You constantly hear Stanford scientists discover, Harvard scientists do this, all the stuff you see, and it's this giant wall that we could just unlock and just give some more kind of flesh on the bones, more, you know, examples that might, might make that more credible. In 2010, it turned out that it was taxi and Hotel regulations that were holding back hundreds of billions of dollars in value.

Okay.

Who would have thought that was actually the big thing? But that's Uber, that's Airbnb, that's Abroad, that's grab and go, Jack and DD and so on.

Right.

This Lyft. And then it turned out that it was the financial regulations, sec, cftc, you know, etc, they're holding back trillions of dollars in crypto and web three. Okay. And so the FDA and the entire US Medical establishment is holding back tens of trillions of dollars. The reason I say dollars is it's at least a quantifiable metric. It frankly understates the. The value that we're talking about. Yeah.

Because we have lives at stake. We have time at stake here.

Right.

Which is almost.

Yeah, that's right.

So I want to hit on three conversations before I overstay my welcome here.

Sure, sure, sure.

And they're important for me to think about.

Lightning round.

The lightning round, yes. So it's a question I ask everybody in this podcast if I were to say, listen, Balaji, I'm going to fund any X Prize you want. We're going to launch it, we're going to run it, we're going to get the world to focus on it. What is an X Prize Challenge? What is something that should exist, that doesn't exist, that we should challenge the world to do or challenge the world to fix? Do you have any ideas? What would you want to launch?

So, a very simple one, and I'll put more thought into this, but one that I think would have immediate benefit is the. The Longevity Predictor phone app.

Right.

Very simple. Remember the photo sharing stuff we talked about? It's actually on a continuum with this.

Yeah, it is. It's a. It's a prizable.

Yeah, it's a totally, totally prizable thing where basically you hold up the thing and it estimates your current age and it predicts how many years you have to live. And then it says, here's all the interventions you can do to boost that. I think that'd be. So that would solve several different things. First is it's core science.

Right.

The algorithm should be open source. The data set is the hardest part. You need those photos of people who've passed away.

Okay.

So you get that data set, like, you know, Clip, for example, was a very important thing often in machine learning, it's getting the data set together. That's a hard part more than the. The actual, you know, training the algorithm. So the hard part, the prize would come for the, the data set, which is the less sexy part. Okay, that's totally open, right? So once you've got that. Once you've got lots of photos of people with very good birth date data, photo death date, and maybe a lot of photos through their life. So you've got endpoints.

Right.

Facebook, frankly, has a. Facebook itself could probably do this because now that it's almost 20 years old, it's got a lot of photos of people who have passed away. They're like later in life. Okay, but. And of course, there's going to be some where they died of an accident or something like that. You might, you might filter that out.

Right.

But if they died from old age, okay, so that, that alone has many different qualities. It's, it's. It's something which is incredibly quantitative.

Right.

Totally, you know, deterministic. How many days. Right. It is something which you can put in an app and package in a way that people instantly understand. They hold up the phone, they see will go viral, it will stimulate, you can have it have lots of education in there, which is get metformin, get this, get that, etc. Okay. And then it's just that thing alone becomes a jumping off point for longevity distribution.

It's also potentially a good business to do.

It's potentially a good business. That's right.

But that's a different.

If someone's doing this, then get in touch with me and Peter on Twitter if you're listening to this podcast. We'll probably fund this if you're interested in this. Or we can do a prize for it, something like that.

Yeah, absolutely. What's another area that you care deeply about that you might want to launch a prize? And I'm not asking, I'm not pitching on launching a prize. I'm just trying to. Yeah, it's like, you know, sometimes a great idea is more valuable than the cash.

Okay, so investigative journalism on the American regulatory state. Okay. Why? This is actually upstream of lots and lots of stuff to an extent that people don't get. Essentially the. You know, for example, most people cannot even name somebody at the Department of the Interior or, you know, the fda.

Right.

And yet you can name all the people who run giant tech companies.

Right.

And so there isn't a face. There isn't. There are people who are making decisions here. There's something called harmonization. Regulatory harmonization is the single most important problem to solve in technology, in my view. What is harmonization? It is the process by which unelected and unfirable and anonymous US Regulators impose.

They're driving everything.

Yeah. They choke off regulation for the entire world. And the way to think about it is just like a small company might use Facebook login rather than implementing login themselves. A small country, okay, might outsource their regulation to the U.S. they've got 10 million people in, you know, the Czech Republic or something like that.

Well, and they. They do that. Many of the. Many nations follow the FDA, the FAA's guidance.

Yes. And this is the alliance of. Actually, it is, you know, quote, big government, but it's also big pharma. Why it makes sense if you're a businessman, because you spend all this effort getting an FDA approval.

Right.

And then you don't want to get a zillion other approvals from all these other countries around the world with their own picayune regulations. Instead, what you want is one approval, one bar to clear, and then you've got a common market worldwide.

Right.

So that puts both the FDA and the lobbyists from pharma on the same side in all these countries, pushing to standardize and harmonize and so on. And you know, the thing is that there's probably some point where that's like, you can argue that was net good, where it's something like, you know, the, the whole romance of the three kingdoms thing. The empire long divided must unite. Long united, must divide. There's something good to like a global, scalable, uniform thing. That's what the App Store is. That's what Google Play is. And then bring it back, Bring it back to the.

Bring it back to the idea on. What's the concept on the regulation regulators here.

Right.

So the prize would be. Which is different than your normal thing because it's not for technological innovation. It's for essentially the thing that's upstream of. That would be like the Pulitzer Prize, except it is for examples of regulatory abuse.

So we're incentivizing reporters to dig deep and find. Basically, there's a watchdog prize on regulators.

Yes. Because just to put. Put more, you know, like flesh in the bones here. More. More detail. Regulators have something called the Douglas factors, which are like Miranda rights for federal employees. They basically can't be fired except if they bring the agency into disrepute. And what that means is anybody who's, you know, if you try to fire someone and you're within a regulatory agency, they don't get fired. They start. They start appealing. They're in the corner there. They're waiting. You know, they're telling everybody, oh, my God, you're so Bad for trying to fire me. It's this huge process. And so essentially these folks can't be fired. They have tenure, okay? Career tenure. They're anonymous. The, the US media is not going after them or, you know, holding them accountable, quote, unquote. And they exert enormous power over the entire world. And most citizens, you know, somebody in the Czech Republic doesn't even realize often that they're actually under the control of somebody in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Right.

This is why, for example, with the vaccines, like, we could have had the COVID vaccine within days. Moderna could have taken the sequence and turned into a vaccine. And we could have had challenge trials where healthy people could have volunteered to go and be exposed to the virus first, get the vaccine and then in a monitored environment, be exposed to the virus and see what happened.

What biology is talking about here is that when the virus was deciphered, was sequenced and sent from Wuhan to labs around the world, 24 hours later, Moderna had basically an MRNA vaccine designed.

Yes.

And a challenge trial is the way you get very rapid data where instead of just, you know, you're basically going to give people a vaccine, you're going to expose them and if it protected them, you know, pretty instantly, whether it works or not.

That's exactly right. And so the thing is that basically, you know, here's the timeline. I have genetic sequence of the coronavirus on January 11th or the next two days. They, you know, plot out a vaccine and then you could synthesize it for, you know, so first Moderna shot for TE to NIH for testing on February 24th and volunteers arm March 16th. You probably could have gotten it even faster with these challenge trials. But here's the reason, here's the interesting thing. Literally the world spent trillions of dollars on lockdown and all these insane things because they didn't have the moral innovation up front to challenge the FDA's regulatory establishment.

Right?

Millions, millions of people died. Trillions of dollars were destroyed. Because the upstream thing that enough people did not distrust the FDA's judgment. That's the fundamental, that's the prize of prizes, right? Fundamentally, there's been much more investigative journalism on, on Theranos. There is multiple documentaries made on that. But people, you know, people don't know about all the ridiculous abuses at fda. For example, the, the fact that just as another example, during the pandemic, they held back EUA's emergency use authorizations for testing, which meant that people didn't know the extent of the pandemic since there wasn't any testing. And actually folks in Seattle, I believe, had to like do civil disobedience and had their lab go and test for Covid to show that it was actually on the loose in the US and that was somewhere. They disobeyed the FDA and they could have like, you know, the FDA is the regulatory police. They could have been thrown in jail for this. Okay, so this is the, this is similar to NSFA up delegitimize the fda.

Right?

There's actually, if you want a whole set of stuff, right.

This is a deep rabbit hole to talk about, but so true. And so getting back to your prize idea, this is about a watchdog for regulatory.

Like the Pulitzer Prize. It's a different kind of prize.

Like a Pulitzer Prize, right?

Yeah, so it is.

I like the actual, I like the prize of, of more rapid vaccine. Vaccine development as well.

That's right. And there's some of these things, for example, where we have some of the threads that we talked about, right? Like, you know, this is 10 years old and this has like dozens and dozens and dozens of examples from across the regulatory state.

Right.

If you just scroll through this, okay. And by the way, I even talk about the photo sharing stuff in here for 10 years. So NHTSA, NHTSA ban on self driving cars, the harassment of Uber and Tesla. Like, you know, car dealerships couldn't sell direct. John Carmack talking about his experience with like Armadillo Aerospace. You know, the, like how peers.org had to like kind of, you know, fight for Airbnb drone startups in the faa. Like you just go through this and if you scroll down a little bit further, I'll show you a crazy example from FDA going on like a few more pages on page, page seven.

Right?

That's a screenshot from a lawsuit which the FDA filed in 2010.

Right.

Taking the position those are. This is their own lawsuit that they wrote all the text for. There is no right to consumer feed children any particular food. There is no generalized right to bodily and physical health. There's no fundamental right to freedom of contract, meaning you are a slave of the fda. You cannot feed your. I mean, just think about this stuff. It's like completely Orwellian stuff, right?

It's insane.

It's insane. This is their official position. You don't. I mean the, the way that's marketed to the public is they're protecting you from the big bad drug companies. In actuality, they take a very strong position that you have no control over your own human body.

With the exception you don't you don't know enough to have control.

That's right.

No, better.

That's right. Literally they, they say the narrow substantive due process precedence regarding abortion, intimate relations and the refusal of life saving, medical treat treatment, meaning the only things that they consider you to have your right over is abortion, euthanasia and like you know, intimate relations.

Right.

But, but basically, but that's it.

Right.

So it's not actually your body, your choice for everything else.

Right.

They've literally taken the position that you do not have, that you don't even have the right to obtain whatever food you want.

Right.

Well, this goes back to our original conversation about a, you know, accredited patient that I should have the right to take whatever meds I want, whether or not they're to able FDA approved or not.

Here's the thing, a relatively small amount of money here, I mean, you know, writing is not that expensive. Calling people is not that expensive. You know, journalists, quote unquote, are not paid that much.

Right.

Like, you know, for a relatively small amount of money you could shine a light on something that people are just totally unaware of.

Right.

These are, these are terrible decisions that are being made totally out of the public eyesight by folks who are completely unaccountable, who can't be fired, who can't be, who aren't subject to elect election where the current media isn't going after and have control over all these people around the world that have no say in American elections.

Right.

And it's just easier to keep things the way they are. And unfortunately the laws are all written for the incumbents that are funding everything.

That's right. And so to be absolutely clear, as I mentioned earlier, like pharma and you know, biotech has been corrupted in my view by FDA and is now like a fusion, like this unholy fusion. I do think of FDA as being upstream. Normally the public portrayal is that regulatory capture is that the big bad pharma is upstream of the state. It's actually the other way around because the state has the guns and can bankrupt any pharma company at any time.

Right.

But it is true that there is an unholy fusion and what you need is something from outside the system that you know, can actually go and shine a light on this.

Right.

It's a different kind of X prize, a Pulitzer Prize or kind of thing for showing the abuses of the American regulatory state and having them in short 140 second clips that you can put online along with a substantive article that accompanies it. If you did A hundred of those on fda. It would change the world. It'd probably be less than a few million dollars.

That's awesome. All right, my second question for you. I posit that mindset is the single most important thing that an entrepreneur has. More important than their capital, their friends, their technology. The right mindset is the distinguishing factor between someone who succeeds over and over and over again like you have. What mindset do you think has made you most successful?

Well, that's a great question.

What mindset? So I'm not limited to one. You know, I think about an abundance mindset, a curiosity mindset, an exponential mindset, seeing where the world is going, a moonshot mindset. Maybe these ring a bell for you, maybe of one that you think. But what mindsets do you have that you think distinguish you and have served you in your successes?

So do you know the concept of the bicameral mind?

Please tell me.

Sure. So this is a hypothesis from the past where evidently people had two voices in their heads. It's a hypothesis that the human mind once operated in a state where there was one part of the brain was speaking and second part which just listens to. And this is how people, like, actually thought they heard voices from God or whatever.

Right.

Okay. So just to take that phrase and just use it somewhat differently, I think you don't need just one mindset. You need a bicameral or multicameral mindset.

I agree with that, by the way.

Right.

And why do I say that? Because. So maybe the most trivial way of saying this is not original to me is you need to be your own biggest booster and your own harshest critic.

Right.

And that's true because no one else is going to have as much information as you. And so they're not going to be able to take apart the engine block and be really critical. But also, nobody else is going to cheerlead for you like you can. And it's like the Hillel quote.

Right.

Somewhat similar to the Hillel quote, which is, if I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I'm only for myself, who am I? That's a little bit different because it's like individualism versus collectivism. But at least the first part. Part of that is, if you're not for yourself, who will you be? Okay, how does that relate here? I think that you have to. At least for me, what's worked is on the one hand, I think I generally go into things with a. So I've maybe got four mindsets, you know, in. In. In India they call it samadhana beta dandam. Okay, and what does that mean? It's like roughly, and this is a paraphrase, and some people will disagree, this paraphrase, but it is. You start with a smile and you're trying to figure out how you can do things in a win win fashion.

Right.

If that doesn't work, you go to rational argument.

Right?

It's charts, it's graphs, it's like this is actually feasible, et cetera, et cetera.

Right.

If that doesn't work, you have to get political and you go to economic incentives or political incentives. You might have to go around a particular obstacle or whatever. And if that doesn't work, well, then you just need the grim determination of just like plowing through.

Right.

And so those are like the four mindsets of which the last is by far the least frequent. You always start with positivity, then rationality, then maybe you have to get political or economic, and then grim determination as like the last step if it's a truly, you know, irreconcilable obstacle.

Yeah.

And so that's like four mindsets, you know, quadricamenal, quadracameral mind.

Right.

Now all of that though is, you know, maybe there's that fifth, which is what is the goal in the first place? And that's, I think, where you have to, it's a combination of both moral and logical reasoning. You have to be that ideologue first and you have that North Star that you're working towards. And everything at least that I'm doing in my life works towards that North Star. And for me, longevity is pretty important. But actually even longevity is a subroutine towards an ultimate goal. You know what that is?

What is that?

The prime number maze. Have we talked about that?

We haven't yet. Is this sort of a life's purpose?

Yeah. Well, so this is, I think, I think it's Chomsky. I'm, I may be mis citing this, but the concept is, and it might be apocryphal, but I, I, I like it. At least as a thought experiment. A rat can be told to navigate a maze every second turn, every third turn, et cetera. Okay. But it cannot be taught to get out of a prime number maze. That's too abstract. 2, 3, 5, 7, and you skip 9, you do 11. And so that's too abstract for a rat to navigate. It's not smart enough. In fact, most humans probably couldn't find their way out of a prime number maze. It's actually pretty abstract.

Yeah.

And it Depends how many turns you have to make.

Depends how many turns you have to make.

Right.

But it's actually like if you have.

And do you have a calculator with you?

Yeah, I do have a calculator, et cetera.

Right.

But you know, the, the thing about a prime number maze is it's on the one hand it's a great mental model because it's such a simple pattern, but also so far, it's so close and yet so far.

Right.

And the structure of our reality is it. Is there some shimmering order in front of us that is the equivalent of a prime number maze. Why live longer? So that I can understand that.

Right.

So I can understand the structure of the universe, so I can get smarter with AI or whatever to be able to understand that prime number maze. That's the kind of purpose, that's the kind of thing that drives me.

I love that. I love that a lot. And yeah, well, you know, if we had a few more hours, I'd dive into the conversation of are we living in a simulation? Zero or one, yes or no?

I think you can model things as being as if it's in a simulation because physical law is so incredibly predictive. I mean, the fact that physical laws exist and it's not random, that you've got time invariant laws is amazing.

Right.

But you know this, the weak form is physical. The weak form of the simulation hypothesis.

I know it is. I'm asking your opinion.

I guess I believe in the weak form in the sense of you can model reality as conforming to a simulation in the sense that physical laws do predict events. I don't necessarily believe in. I don't believe in the strong form, which is therefore there is a simulator and we're all in a box and mind's in a box and so on and so forth. I think that's too much of a jump.

Right.

In case you're curious. I think without question we're living in a simulation and it wouldn't change anything that I do day to day, so it doesn't really matter. I mean the challenge is, does it? You can choose whichever you want, but it's not going to change. But that's not where I want to go in our final number three in our lightning round here, I want to go into a topic that I'm focused on and thinking about a lot, which is philanthropy. I want to close on this because I think it's important. There is so much capital locked up, trillions of dollars of wealth sitting on the sideline. I talk about And I was just speaking at the Forbes 400 conference in New York and it's like you've got the Giving Pledge on one end where people are giving their money, half their money while they're alive to philanthropy. It's like you can't take it with you. So I'm not sure what the Giving Pledge is about anyway. But how do we get people of means to use that capital to really make a dent in the universe, to really transform? I know a lot of wealthy people, as do you, and some of them, like Elon or Martin Rothblatt or even Mark Benioff, Eric Schmidt, are reinvesting it and betting it all and taking big bets and moving the world forward. And a lot of people are just unfortunately sitting on it and having it just earn more money for them. I find that challenging at best. Your thoughts on that?

I think the money should go towards starting new countries, reopening the frontier, longevity, you know, all, all of, all of this kind of stuff that I talked about in the Network State book, optimalism, you know, basically pushing, pushing the limits of technology and science. And I agree broadly reopening the frontier. And I actually think that that's also probably the wealth maximizing thing, not simply the human flourishing optimizing thing because you know, you're going to get 1% interest or something like that. How are you going to get like, how are you going to multiply a billion dollars? Well, longevity is actually the kind of thing that could do that.

Right.

That could get you a thousand x interesting billion dollars.

Right?

Yes. And starting, starting your country. Right.

Starting new countries could get you a thousand X on a billion dollars. There's very few things that you can think of that could get you that much of a multiplier and a huge amount of money and you know, 38 trillion fact. That's a great, that's a great number. I'm going to go and look at that and dig into it. But I wouldn't be surprised that it's of the order of trillions, like for every extra year you can, could add. So it's, it's both the thing to do that I think is the right thing to do and the economically right thing to do. We just need to make people, it's, it's a, it's honestly it's raising awareness, Right. It's making people aware that it's morally, just morally imperative to do it. If you believe in universal healthcare, you believe in eternal life or you should.

Right.

And if not, there's something inconsistent in your world. You might just want state power as opposed to actually wanting to solve the problem.

Right.

So A B is that it's feasible to do so. So first, that it's desirable. Second, that it's feasible. Third, that it's profitable. We've got all of those. We just need to make that case.

I'm curious, starting a new country, what about the immune reaction from the rest of the world?

So I think it's a great question and I think three or four things on that, because I've thought about this a lot and we're going to put this into V2 of the book. The first is that something like this will have advocates and not. And the reception to the book has been incredibly positive, like relative to 10 years ago when I put some of these same concepts out there. I've been kind of talking about this continuously for a while. Patrick Friedman, who's, you know, worked on C setting, has as well. You know, there's a few people just like cryptocurrencies for a long time, they sort of bounced around the bottom right there. You know, if you go back, there's Chow, Me and E. Cash, and there's guys who talked about in the 90s, and there's stuff in the early 2000s, it's kind of just. Just bounced around the bottom. It didn't really have any traction. And then Satoshi and then just kind of went exponential.

Right.

I feel we're at that moment now, you know, the network state. And you know, we haven't talked about it that much here, but people can read about it then. Worksheet.com I've got a little movie, you know, Nas, Nasda, I L Y has something how to Start a New country, which has gotten millions of views over the last few days. And this concept of starting a new country is now actually feasible. I think that it took a long time to go from capital G Google to lowercase Googling, like a search. It took a long time to go from capital Uber to lowercase Ubering. You know, traveling around, it took like verbalizing verbal. Exactly. Becoming lowercase. It took days, weeks for the capital and network state to become lowercase network state. If you go to Twitter and you just put network seed in quotes, it's out there. It's gotten injected into the bloodstream. The concept is out there. People understand that this is now something that's technologically feasible to basically assemble a social network in the cloud, to have it crowdfund territory around the world, and to eventually gain diplomatic recognition. I have proof points for each of Those things, including the last, which is.

How far are we from that happening the first time? What's your under over prediction on this?

This is the goal for my next 10 years basically by 23. I think it is possible. I'm not saying, you know, this is a thing where I think it's possible. I'm not saying it's deterministic or anything like that. We think we have to try and it may not work. But I think it took about 1312 years from Bitcoin in 2009 to El Salvador recognizing Bitcoin as a national currency in 2021. Okay. I think that by 2032, 2033, we could have the first diplomatically recognized network state. So about 10 years from now.

Right.

And that's a goal that I want to shoot for. And I think it's about the same time frame as the El Salvador recognition of Bitcoin as a national currency or Wyoming's recognition of Ethereum as like something you can use to incorporate companies in Wyoming. Now the so called Dow law. And that's my goal for the next 10 years is I mean not make a billion dollars, but start one new country.

Yeah, I think that's, that's beautiful. And the beautiful thing about what you've outlined in your book and it's thenetworkstate.com.

Thenetworkstate.Com with the, the. We might get a short URL at some point, but go ahead.

Yeah, yeah. And please go check it out. When's the audible coming out?

Next year. Working on that now. Actually I'm working on a huge refurbishing of the whole book and so on. So a lot of great stuff will happen next year. I honestly do think of this version as a V1, but the V2 I think will be pretty, pretty cool.

Well, the beautiful thing of course is the concept is can go exponential, meaning there's no limitation to the number of network states that can come into existence. I've often said you and I had this conversation, I had a meeting years ago about how we go start a new country and it was less seasteading and less going into space. It was more buying a country. But you have to defend that country.

Sure.

Right. Which is the biggest challenge and turning it into an ideal medical state. So I'm going to go back to the question of the first network estate is created. It's demonstrated number two, three, four, five and hundreds could come into existence very quickly.

Yeah. So by the way, on the defense thing, by the way, just to quickly comment on that in the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The, the reason that that happened as peacefully as it did is the tanks did not fire on Yeltsin in Red Square. Why did they not fire? They had the guns. But the moral argument had been one, the blue jeans and the rock and roll and Coca Cola images of that. Those Soviet tank commanders no longer felt they had moral legitimacy, so they didn't pull the trigger. Okay. And so that's really the way, you know, I think people really underestimate the power of moral legitimacy and moral delegitimization.

That's one of the major takeaways I'm taking from this conversation we had today. Is that the power of the moral argument.

Yes.

Both for entrepreneurs, for investors, for, for anyone who wants to make change in the world.

That's right.

Rather than for the sake of change having a clear moral argument for why this is important for, for humanity.

Yes. And this is implicit in what we do. But we're so focused on true and false and profitable and unprofitable that we take the moral argument as implicit. Of course, it's better to live longer, of course, but we actually need to focus on that as explicit and run tracking polls to show that we're winning with the key demographics that matter with policymakers, with the public at large, with, you know, entrepreneurs and with folks in media. And we don't necessarily, we don't necessarily need to win 99 1, but we need to get it to at least 30, 70 or 50, 50, so that there's like a clear case for this. And because good, bad is upstream of true, false and profitable. And profitable. If someone argues something is bad, you can't just go back and argue that it's true. They'll say it's bad, that it's true. Shut up. Right. And you know, or it's, it's, it's bad, but it's profitable. So you can't say, oh, like gambling or whatever is really good.

Right.

You've lost a moral argument. If you're doing it, you're like, well, it makes money, blah, blah. You're not, you know, if you can't win morally, you can't win and so have to win morally first. And this is just a new register for us to speak about. But for example, you don't just get the technology for self driving cars to work. You make little movies that talk about how many people died from preventable car deaths.

Right.

You know, and we can do this now with AI Video. Hollywood is being disrupted. It's being decentralized that's happening now. That last hammerlock, that last fortification has fallen.

Right.

Stable diffusion is a world historical event because it means that anybody can now tell high quality stories. Persuasion has now been decentralized.

Right.

So we tell the stories that show why it's imperative to have self driving cars, it causes less death, why it's imperative to have a successor to the fda that's a decentralized, you know, tech forward version because of all the drugs that have been held back. Why, why we, why we need this stuff. And I think then we can win.

Yeah, it's a beautiful thing. Last question. I'm super curious. Organizing principle around the first network state. If you had a betting man, if you were going to start, and you probably will, is there an organizing theme?

Yes. So at least for me, and I'm willing to build. And the point of the network state book, by the way, is it's a toolbox, not a manifesto.

So yes, it's, it's open, open source for the world to follow suit.

That's right. And in particular I want to build a large coalition where there's lots of people who get their own network states and their own vision of the good. There could be folks who have a Christian one or you know, a Jewish one, or they, they could be a vegan and a carnivory one, which are both incompatible with each other, but potentially both improvements on the, the establishment.

Right.

So there's, you know, there's folks who want Catalonian network states, you know, because they're in cat, you know, Catalonia, they want to speak their language. There's folks who, you know, there's all kinds of different things which they want.

Right.

So I'm willing to build and want to build a large coalition of millions, maybe billions of people. What is my personal goal? I want to get us to the, you know, to unlock all this biomedical innovation.

Right.

How do we actually have all this stuff that could benefit humanity that's being held back by the American regulatory state and by, you know, the big pharma companies and biotech companies, companies. How do we actually unlock that? And so that large coalition is alignment where a lot of other people get what they want and then we get longevity and other things and we build essentially a political coalition that enables that.

Count me in on your network state. Have you given it a name yet?

I have a name for it, but I don't want to unwrap it just yet. We'll see, we'll see. The future is uncertain. It may turn out that I end up catalyzing the formation of other network states and you know, versus driving one of my own. I don't know yet. But I, I do think that the first step was to establish the feasibility of starting a new country. And we've done that. That's actually the amazing thing. That's an amazing take home to me over the last three months. You can see it on Twitter. You put a network state, this is a thing. It's going to happen. The Internet doesn't stop. It's not just starting new companies and new communities and new currencies. We're going to start new countries and it's going to be easier to start a country than to form the fda. Just like it was easy.

It really is greenfield operations to reinvent that which could be in order to get rid of the establishment which was. Is a beautiful place to go by the way. It's going to be one of the. It's adding an accelerant or an exponential to the exponential.

Yes, right. Yes, that's right. And you know, maybe we can unlock that.

All right.

I love that. Paolo, thank you for your time, buddy. Where do people find you go to these days?

Yeah. Thentworkstate.com and for me personally, I'm@twitter.com Bala GS B A L A J I.

S A pleasure my friend. I look forward to continue the conversation on X fund on longevity. Anyway, thank you. Have a beautiful day.

Thank you, sir. Okay, bye bye.

See ya.