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

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

No. Yeah, I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.

I put my all in it like no days off on the road.

Let's travel, never looking back.

We got a good pod and we got a good guest here. This is probably— all right, before I introduce our guest, I'm going to butter him up a little bit. I'm gonna butter them up because, um, I'm genuinely excited for this. I— there's probably like 3 or 4 podcasts so far that I'm like, oh yeah, this is one that I wake up in the morning, I'm excited to do. I know that if we do a good job, this is going to be one people's favorite podcast. Why is that? Well, this is the part—

it's not morning for us, Sean. It's, uh, it's 10, it's 10:30, right?

It's a—

it's almost— it's gonna be midnight soon where Abreu is. Yeah, we got up late. or we stayed up late.

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

Oh, I forgot to tell you. Happy birthday.

My wife was like, what do you want to do for your birthday? I was like, don't worry, it's already planned. I'm doing a podcast. I love it. So anyways, the reason I think this podcast is going to be good, this episode is going to be good, is because our podcast is all about ideas. People listen to this pod, they wake up and they listen to this pod because we get the wheels turning. We present new and interesting ideas, or we talk about spaces Or we talk about spaces in ways that you haven't heard too much before. Now, one of the ways that I get a bunch of my ideas is from our guest Balaji, who is here, and he has been— I don't know what the exact quote was, but I think Marc Andreessen at one point called you the highest ideas per minute of anybody he's met. Do you know that quote that I'm talking about? He sort of gave you this title.

Yeah, that's a pretty kind remark. He said they were useful ideas too, which was good. Yeah, we don't get that same credit.

For our ideas, people don't usually call them useful, but that's okay. Entertaining is okay.

We teach people how to like launch like a porn app. You teach people how to like, you warn the world of a pandemic.

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

It's good. Thank you, thank you. And I think that, you know, one of the, like a lot of people ask us like, oh, you know, who do you guys follow? Who do you guys read? You're one of my answers to if I started a new Twitter account and I had to follow 5 people to like get that information flowing again, who are the 5 kind of must follows? I think you would definitely be in there for me. And Sam, I know you've been following as well. So we'll give kind of like a very quick rundown, but then we have a bunch of topics that I think are exciting. We're going to talk about a bunch of crypto things because I think you're very forward thinking in the crypto world. We're going to talk about some non-crypto things as well. And then we'll all try to, uh, steer clear of too much controversy and let's play ball, nobody get canceled. Here we go. So biology is your— at one point you were a founder of, I believe, a genetics company or a biogenetic company. How would you describe your first company? What was the kind of category you would call that one?

Clinical genomics. So basically one of the first companies to use genomics in medicine. And basically we took— if you've heard of Tay-Sachs or sickle cell, these sort of genetic diseases, Mendelian diseases that you probably learned about in, in high school, um, those are simple genetic diseases where they can be predicted by usually just variation in one gene. And, um, we did is we took all of those at the same time and test them at once with a universal genetic test. And that was one of the first applications of genomics in the clinic where the scalability of it, the fact that you could assess many different markers, many different variants at the same time, allowed you to cut costs relative to your traditional one gene or one variant at a time blood tests.

Which I actually just used it. Oh, really? I used it, my wife and I for freezing embryos used you. It's, what's it called? Myriad?

Yeah, it's now Myriad Women's Health division, but basically it was called C-O-U-N-S-Y-L, Counsyl. As an independent company.

Um, so like, I, I saw the packaging in the trash can and I was like, oh wait, I know this name. Um, and so yeah, so Sean, that's what we used it for.

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

And what did you do after that?

Um, so I was—

and that was like a— sorry, actually, that was like a $300 million exit or something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Wow. Like, like, pretty wildly successful.

It was good. It was good. Yeah, it was a good company. And, um, I think, you know, so after that, there's a bunch of things. Um, I was an early investor in cryptocurrencies, so Bitcoin, Ethereum, um, Zcash, a bunch of other ones you've heard of. I shouldn't say every major coin, but every major coin that I think has some technological innovation. I, you know, I've probably got like something in it. Not every single one, but a lot of them. Um, early investor in Superhuman, Soylent, Cameo, Lambda School, Replit, uh, Mighty, a bunch of others, um, have all done fairly well. Um, you know, Deal, if you just saw that, just became a unicorn or whatever last week. Um, all things that sort of, I think, fit my philosophy, um, because, you know, I, I sort of invest in invest in things that help to improve quality of life in the future that I envision. And so, you know, uh, some— somebody might— with, um, crypto, for example, crypto is built for the apocalypse but with internet, right? You know, Soylent, you know, that type of stuff, right? And, you know, there's an apocalypse, then there's a rebirth after that. And so I kind of think of That is sort of this stack of technologies. You kind of view it from that lens of the unbundling and fracturing of all 20th century, all pre-internet institutions, and then the rebundling of them back together into new internet-native forms. I think very few institutions that predated the internet will survive the internet in the fullness of time.

So I want to ask you— I'm sorry, go ahead.

I think, I think, Sean, that, um, before we like really get into it though, I did want to call out— I think, uh, we want to call his latest project because I want— we might talk for a little bit. I want to, I want to be able to promote that right away as opposed to in the end. So you want to— Sean, you want to take it from there?

Yeah, well, I'll let you introduce it, but, uh, super interesting project. I believe the URL is 1729.com, so just the numbers, 1729.com. And it's really simple, and I love simple, simple idea, which is it's a newsletter that pays you. So it's a newsletter that you get that has these little micro tasks. So I got one, I don't know if it was yesterday or day before, it was basically like You can get $3,000 in Bitcoin if you create memes that will promote crypto in India or help package that idea in a way that's shareable and spreadable. That's what memes are around crypto in India. And so there are these little tasks that come out. And so it's a newsletter that you read, not just for like— Sam's got a newsletter, 2 million subscribers, The Hustle. They give information, but it's sort of like a path. It's like, you know, you just consume it and you move on with your day. Your newsletter is actually kind of interesting because it gives you an opportunity, a small bite-sized opportunity for you to do a thing and build up, not only earn from it, but also build up in a way as you do more and more of these, build up some credentials by having accomplished these little micro tasks. So can you give us the like—

That's right.

I know that's my read from the outside.

Did you hear that slight? He goes, yours is actually interesting.

We should do a collaboration with— I'm sure actually there's a lot with the Hustle's kind of ethos that I think overlaps. Um, you know, as I was mentioning to Sean beforehand, you know, you guys, like, it takes all different kinds to build a company, and you guys have sort of the sales, you know, business DNA natively, right? And for me, that's very much an acquired tongue, you know, where, like, I, I can emulate, you know, business, and I can, I can run that in an emulation layer, but, like, my core OS is math, you know. And then there's folks who are, like, the reverse, who who are fundamentally businessmen and who can get into the tech and get into the computer science and so on as sort of a way to do business. And one needs both kinds, right? But I think one area of overlap potentially with the Hustle sort of audience is that a lot of time online, as we know, is just being wasted, right? It's being thrown into a meat grinder. I mean, the sheer number of hours when you really think about the millions or billions of hours that are used on social networks. Look, I think it was a necessary step to get people online. I think on balance it was necessary. But I think one issue is that social networks were invented and scaled 10 years, 7 years-ish before cryptocurrency. And so because of that, uh, you could only transfer status online and not value. And what that means is that everything basically boiled down to status games— leaderboard, what's the most popular, how many followers, how many faves, etc. And those appear locally non-zero-sum but are globally zero-sum. That is to say, locally it appears It costs me nothing to give this person a like, but globally it's a zero-sum leaderboard. Only one can be at the top, right? And that leads to the status games that you see on Twitter and all these other places that are somewhat ameliorated in places like Reddit where they use pseudonyms, but it's an issue. Anyway, what's my point? So 1729, uh, you know, my friend Dan Romero actually a while back was tweeting like, you know, what's the new Hacker News? And I think you guys were, were talking about that. Um, and I think the new Hacker News for crypto is not just a place where you come to discuss and do things aimlessly, but something which uses crypto so that you can actually earn and learn. And actually, the third is burn. So, we actually have another thing, proof of workout. So, basically, you're pursuing truth, health, and wealth in that order. And I think that's actually the right priority order. So, learn truth, determine what is true, pursue health because without that, you have really nothing else. And then, wealth is important, but it's third. And it's important to have that third. You never want to do something that's untrue to make money or to sacrifice your long-term health for wealth. I mean, whatever, losing sleep one day, okay, maybe not the end of the world. For a year, it's going to affect your long-term health and that's actually going to affect even from a pure dollars and cents, it's going to affect your wealth-generating capacity and your capacity to provide value for your employees and your shareholders. So, even if it's the selfless thing to do on a daily basis, on a long-term basis, you want to take care of your health for the health of those around you. So, Essentially, this was sort of— Go ahead.

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

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

That's great.

I know it sounds ambitious, but basically as a tripartite motto for a new kind of state in the fullness of time. And the reason is that technology actually allows us to do all three, you know, with crypto in particular, with decentralized ledgers. We can—

Can I ask the question in a slightly different way?

Of course.

Which is, whenever I'm looking at an investment, I think I ask the founders, this is my favorite question to ask a founder, is awesome, what is the world, let's fast forward 3 years, what does the world look like if this has been adopted? What does my day look like that's different? Maybe me as a user, but I would love to hear your version of that, because I think there is a really different and, uh, cool new lane that gets opened up as something like this gets more adopted. So what does the world look like if this, uh, what does my day look like?

What does it look like? Well, first is, um, rather than just accumulating karma, you're actually accumulating something of value, right? So something, a tradable asset. Um, you're earning cryptocurrency, you're, you're, you're actually leveling up yourself. Imagine if you didn't just gain, I don't know, 100,000 followers but $100,000. In all your posting online, that would actually give material benefit to people. Right now, for technical reasons, Facebook and Twitter basically capture all the revenue. In the early 2000s, mid-2000s, that was actually a great deal because they were giving these free platforms that you could broadcast to anybody in the world and they would maintain everything for you. They give all the hosting. The free model was actually a very good deal relative to the alternative at that time, and so they just take the cut for doing it. But now today, people realize actually, hey, all this content that I'm producing for them, all this work that I'm putting into it, the hours into your tweets or whatever, you aren't seeing a single dime out of it. There's zero creator monetization for the most part in these major social networks. I'm not saying, okay, not totally zero. You can put link in bio at Instagram and there's some stuff, but it has lagged, right? And so now we need a kind of a new social contract, a social smart contract. And what that means is basically to make money online and not just make money but to learn things online and not just to make money and learn but also to become healthy. And so if this becomes popular, you don't waste time online or not just waste time, you learn things, you actually gain crypto credentials, not just cryptocurrencies, so like badges in your wallet which are emblematic or reflective of your ability to do certain things. For example, you complete 5 Python problems and you get a badge that says I've completed 5 Python problems and you complete, you know, 10 questions on I don't know, Russian history, and you get that kind of badge, right? Or the Russian language. Now, why that kind of thing is important is it totally destroys the concept of a college diploma. The reason being, college diploma is a very, very coarse-grained, you know, kind of illustration of somebody's skills. If somebody says, oh, I've got a Harvard degree or Stanford degree, right, what does that really mean? You know, you have some estimate. Okay, I kind of know that they, you know, Stanford degree in computer science, I kind of know what the curriculum is, but this particular person You don't know what their skills are. Actually, all their coursework they did during undergrad has been basically wasted, right? And if instead what you did was that portfolio that they had, every single problem that they solved was in a folder on GitHub. So, you know, they have 25 courses and 10 weeks per course and 10 problems per course. All 2,500 problems were organized in folders on GitHub. You could see their portfolio. You could drill down and see their particular skills.

Okay.

This guy knows operating systems. She knows compilers. This person knows machine learning. And I can see that as evidenced by 15 problems they've solved with source code online. And especially for a broad discipline like computer science or electrical engineering or chemical engineering, you can't simply presume that because somebody has a degree that they have that particular skill set. Um, people have strengths in different areas. Point is, once you unbundle that or you granularize that, once you give individual measurable skills, you can see just how much talent, you know, or background somebody has in there. Oh, this person has solved 100 different problems on compilers. Uh, they're actually really an expert in this area, and I've got the badges to prove it. Okay, once those badges are in your crypto wallet, Just like you log into a website today and you can load in your cryptocurrency or unload it, I think one of the things we want to do at Centrally Trend is have this sort of portable crypto diploma or these crypto credentials so you could log into a job board and just start working because you're automatically qualified on the base of your credentials. Right now, the only thing we can declare is our interest. I'm interested in Game of Thrones. You can't provably declare, "I know how to calculate eigenvalues. I know Arnoldi-Langsauss. I know methods for large matrices. I know how to do graph layout, that type of stuff, right? You can't credibly declare that. You can certainly put the words in your CV, but if you guys have hired, you know that that's an unreliable narrator problem often, right? You know, people will say—

so how does that—

jump in and cut me off, by the way, if you know.

I think Sean and I might ask this— it's a similar question, but basically like what I'm understanding with this is like, so right now as it is, it's a much simpler— it's not doing everything you just said. It's basically, um, here's a— here's something that is just like silly, funny, or actually useful. I'm going to pay you money if you could pull it off.

That's right.

Um, and that's in itself, that's just like interesting and fun and, and neat. But the long-term plan here is that basically you're going to have— let's say you're building a company— anyone who meets the requirements, are you saying they're going to be able to log in based off of their task history and just contribute work and get paid for it.

Exactly.

Now that sounds like— my thing with you is like everything you sound is crazy, but you, you're right a fair bit. So it's like, it's like, it's—

but so I have to like, I'm like, life would be easier if we could just write you off as crazy. We could just move on with our day. But damn it, the guy's right. So now we have to take each one of these ideas and actually say shit.

So let me, let me speak to a few points here, right? So basically, like, the very short version is 72Trend is a place where you make money, learn things, level up with technological progressives who are interested in building a positive future, right? So it's, you know, on the East Coast, for example, media, media businesses have sort of software engineers as second-class citizens, right? They're just guys who build the app, and the writers are kind of the first class, right? Um, traditionally in tech, it's been the opposite. You know, the software engineers are the— you have pride of place, they're building Dropbox or Google or whatever, and then the writers are content marketing. I think here, uh, another aspect of Safety Giant is they're kind of unified, where we have a product roadmap and we also have content calendar, and those are really, you know, side by side and basically equal pairs. We have a story that we're telling as we're kind of building this functionality. And I think one of the things about this— and there's several different angles I can talk about— but one big thing is, uh, this sort of reaction against what I think of as the entropic intranet, right? So if you know entropy, right, the concept of entropy, it's like particles flying in every direction. Okay, if you go and look at Hacker News, for example, or Twitter, there's something that you can't unsee once it's been pointed out, which is those 30 links are like a Jackson Pollock blah on the page, right? It's like guaranteed to just fragment your brain into 1,000 pieces, right? And the opposite of that is something like what Michael Nielsen has been doing with the science of reminding, where you learn something and you don't just learn it, you get reminders at 1 minute and 1 hour and 1 day, spaced repetition of the same concept. With a little bit of spaced repetition, it gets stored in your permanent memory banks. You remember quantum computing, for example, right? So, right now, what we're doing with the Entropic Internet is we're just eating all this junk food, which feels good because it's novelty-seeking. Oh, cool. That's cool. Oh, that's cool. Oh, that's cool, right? And, if you have a really good memory, then you don't need the spaced repetition, but most people don't have such a good memory. And, even people who have a great memory, I mean, do you remember the thousands of links that you've seen online? No, it's actually more like watching a movie. It's just sugar, it's just candy, right? If instead you could be much more deliberate about a less entropic internet and set essentially a goal for yourself and you make one high-level decision, come to 72.9, and then what we do is we basically serve you content that strengthens you, right?

Shawn, I think that we can take this in so many ways. I want to talk about media eventually. Sure. This is so interesting what he's like, you, you wanna—

yeah. Okay. Okay.

Here we go.

He, he just threw out this like meaty thing and we could like chop this up in like a hundred different ways. There's, so like, I wanna talk about this anonymous work thing, which is somewhat like this. I wanna talk about this topic and I wanna talk about what you just said about East Coast media. I would love to talk about that. Sure.

Where do you wanna take this, Sean?

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

I, I want to go to this media thing because you said something that I see that you're doing, and I think it's smart, but it's so obvious I don't know why you and others haven't done it, which is I do the same thing. I criticize like East Coast media where like the writers are the stars, and a lot of them are— it's like the circle jerk community Um, that I am somewhat part of. I owned a media company and I've hired a lot of those people. And in Silicon Valley, the engineers are like the gods, where— and both are circle jerk communities, so like they both can stink and they both can rock, whatever. So, um, but you're saying that you're paying attention to content now in media. I was talking with you, I don't know, did we do a call? We did something where I was teaching, where I was teaching you about email. Because you're like, this email thing is cool. And I was like, duh, dude, what the hell?

What does that matter? I remember we had a call and I remember you had actually some insight. I don't think it was quite like— Oh, I got it.

No, I'm teasing you. You— I criticized your website. I go, dude, if you want email to be part of your website, just make your website like your personal domain. Like, just make that an email form and that's it.

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

Um, so, but what I'm getting at though is like, why are you all of a sudden caring about media? And, and I— and the reason why I'm asking this is I love media, I love content, so does Sean. It's a pretty shitty business model, like Subscription's a good business model. Advertising is a shitty business model.

But another way of putting it, another way of putting the question is, you built a, you know, a bio, you know, genetics company. You, uh, you know, were CTO of Coinbase, early in crypto, and the current project in its product form is a newsletter, right? Low-tech but, you know, high reach, you know, potentially. So why did you decide to do that? Of, you know, why did you decide to go kind of go into a space where Uh, you know, we debate this all the time, you know, is media a good space to go into?

Why?

Um, so I think, Sam, is that what you're getting at? Like, why did you decide to launch this product, which is a newsletter?

And I want to know what your version of media is going to be. And like, because I don't ever want to leave this industry, but I think the business model blows. So like, if you have, if you can save me, I would love that.

Well, okay. So lots of, lots of things there. So one is that, um, I think let me give it— let me give a story, a history, and then maybe we can go from there. So, um, you know, you can, you can date, let's say, the modern era of tech, different starting points. Let's date it starting at like 1995 with the Netscape IPO. Okay. Um, and, you know, from '95 to roughly 2008, um, you know, tech and media basically ignored each other, or rather media coverage of tech was, was positive You know, up until the dot-com boom, and after the dot-com crash and 9/11, for many years there in the early 2000s, um, you know, tech was happening, but it certainly was not a front page story. It's actually hard to remember, but you know, if you go back to even 2008 and you look at like lists of power centers of the US, Silicon Valley doesn't actually come up there because Google was just a search engine. Facebook was just a college social network, you know, it was growing, but it was just a college social network. And, uh, the iPhone hadn't yet come out. It was just coming out. 2007 was announced, right? And, um, so the— so, so media kind of ignored tech during this period, is occupied with the Iraq War and, you know, terrorism and all this stuff. That was a big storyline of the 2000s. Uh, and it was, you know, obviously there were blogs and stuff like that, and people were using it, but it was kind of a— it was a sideshow. It was like that thing you kind of you know, supporting character basically. Um, tech also ignored media, and the— and that, that reason is different. That's because Terry Semel was at Yahoo and he tried to turn Yahoo into a media company. And for an entire generation of tech founders, uh, that, that seemed like a very bad model because, you know, Yahoo failed. Or I shouldn't say failed, failed— it didn't go to zero, of course, but relative to Google, it failed. And all these— this entire generation of tech founders took the lesson that you just build a pipe Right? You build Facebook.

Yeah, AOL did it too.

Yeah, exactly. That's right. So Facebook, Dropbox, you know, um, you know, YouTube, Twitter, that entire generation of companies basically said we're a neutral pipe, we're just going to build a technology. By the way, that was hard enough. That was pretty freaking hard, you know, like at that time, bandwidth-constrained environment before all the modern web development tools. That was actually not trivial, you know. So they just focused on that completely and they said, look, the users bring their own content, user-generated content. Right? And, um, that kind of, you know, happened for a while. And then the financial crisis happened and the iPhone happened. And after the financial crisis in, you know, 2008, from 2008 to 2012, Facebook, Google, Apple all started going totally vertical. And there's a graph called Print Media Disruption, which you can see, which was after the financial crisis. You might, you might show that on screen if there's like a video version of this. After the financial crisis, print media dropped the revenue from like something like $65 billion down to like $17 billion while Google and Facebook were just going vertical like this, right? And Craigslist, of course, was also a factor here. It wasn't just, you know, like, like advertising. It was also classifieds. That was a major factor. Craig Newmark effectively bought them off with, um, the Newmark Foundation stuff with a lot of grants for journalism, like datajournalism.com. This sort of, uh, there's like a surveillance handbook at datajournalism.com, by the way, exactly how to surveil a subject of an article, uh, which you can look at to see exactly how these folks kind of think.

Um, but we, uh, when we started The Hustle, by the way, we started it out of Craigslist's office.

There are a bunch of stories, uh, in the 2000s that were negative pieces on Craigslist. It wasn't obvious to me whether or not the Craigslist classifieds were actually that much worse than newspaper classifieds. I never saw any stats on it, uh, but it seemed motivated in part by, you know, Craigslist's economic, you know, attacks on, on media. Implicit, not, not intentional, but implicit. I think in part some degree of peace was bought with Craig then funding a bunch of journalism. I have nothing against Craig. I don't know him. I'm just saying that that's an observation. Craigslist, by the way, is a wildly profitable business. It's just private, so nobody knows how much money it makes, but it's a very big deal.

Okay.

What's my point? Coming back up the stack. So from 2008 to 2012, tech suddenly came out of its box, which was, oh, cute gadget manufacturers over there in Palo Alto just take over all of these segments that were previously the East Coast segments, like Madison Avenue, was taking a hit. Everybody was looking to cut costs after the 2008 crisis. Entertainment, okay, let's do that online rather than going to the movies. All of that type of stuff just shifted online. It's a huge digital shock, right? Corona's a second one, by the way. Um, and so what happened is that, you know, tech and media were basically allied through 2012 to get Obama reelected. Um, and if you look at the late 2012 coverage, for example, like the nerds go marching in, December 2012 the high water mark of sort of the tech media alliance. And then in 2013, basically the post-election, the knives came out, right? Um, and, uh, essentially what happened was media was like, okay, uh, you guys, um, are getting way too big for your britches. Uh, we kind of thought of you as like just a part of the coalition, but you're coming for the entire enchilada, you know, to mix metaphors, right? Uh, and, um, this was something where all the negative articles on tech and tech bros, you can date it exactly to like 2013, 2012. Um, there's even articles at, uh, you know, Valleywag or whatever denying that such a thing as a programmer exists. Okay, um, the same guy the next year is starting to write, you know, nasty articles on like tech bros and, and whatnot, right? So it's a very crisp shift. Okay, and, um, so, so then what happened basically for the next several years, tech got its head caved in by, by media with the techlash, something I warned against because I could see it as like a, almost like a seed investor. I could see this thing brewing and going viral in, in 2013, and I could see even, you know, there's one journo in Slate who's like sort of, sort of denounced this thing and said, oh you know, would you look at all these rich people? This is such a silly view of the world. You know, we can do so much more. And then 5 years later, he's calling for abolish billionaires, right? You can actually see the radicalization pipeline of these folks in real time. And, um, you know, you, you can, you can watch this happening because their world is collapsing and they blame it on tech. And it is certainly true that economically a lot of that revenue has gone to tech. Tech didn't try to do it, but Google and Facebook and Twitter took away ads But not just ads, they also took away a lot of influence. And so you had this sort of Battle of the Bulge-style reaction, you know, in from roughly 2013 to 2019 with this techlash. And these media corporations, they couldn't build search engines or create social networks. What they could do is write stories and shape narratives. And do you know the difference between like a story and, uh, you know, a product announcement?

Well, I mean, one's objective, one isn't.

Yeah, but a story has a bad guy. Okay, so go ahead.

I said, and a hero.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, but, but like, you know, as people have said, you can build a religion without God but not without Satan. Um, and you know, so the, um, not original to me, you know, that's, that's a saying. Uh, and so what happened basically was, you know, while tech is busy doing these pastel-colored product announcements Oh, you know, like Dropbox offers 10 more gigs, yay! And it's just a utility, right? Um, media corporations were busy lining up to paint tech as bad, as evil. And you've heard like 500 different lines of argument on this, right? And every, you know, uh, like journo and academic was jostling to try to find that meme that would like kill these tech companies once and for all, right? And, uh, you know, they've been somewhat successful in that, but they also haven't been. Um, what's happened is a lot of the older-line tech companies that didn't have any ideological defenses but were good at making money got sort of mentally colonized, right? And, you know, went woke. And, um, that has resulted in, you know, yeah, they could make a lot of money, but they didn't have the, the meta-level story, didn't have the meta-level narrative. So it's like that saying about, uh, economists, right? Practical men who believe themselves fully devoid of external influence are often the slaves of some dead economist. Have you ever heard that? You know, that's by John Maynard Keynes, I think. Um, so his point being that these ideas float around the air and people are running on scripts that they don't even realize they're running on, because media scripts humans just as code scripts machines, right? This is something I had in the Ferriss podcast, right? So tech, it's sort of abandoned.

Unpack that for a second for somebody who doesn't get it real quick right off the top, you know. Sure, you know, just the way that You know, uh, what is a script in the way that the media scripts humans?

Um, masks work, masks don't work. Um, okay boomer. Um, every meme, right? For example, okay, you see a bunch of kids when they come—

or the Karen thing.

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

I haven't seen kids come out of a movie theater, I don't know.

Okay, a bunch of kids come here, the first thing they do is they start quoting lines from the movie, right? They just reenact what they just saw on screen, right?

Right.

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

Goodbye.

And someone overhears them. They're like goodbye by bye-bye-bye, you know, like— uh, and then there's somebody else who overhears that and it's like, um, I think this stock could really excel. And then someone's like Excel sell-sell-sell-sell.

Right.

It's actually really funny because it just sort of conveys these sort of traveling waves of memes. Right now, we don't have great visuals on this. We can't do the molecular neurology of the meme like we can do the molecular biology of the gene. Let me explain what I mean by that. The concept of genetics predated molecular genetics. Mendel went into these phenomenological experiments where you could see, you know, like the pea plants and so on, big A, little a, if you remember that from high school or what have you. Before people understood the biochemistry of, you know, deoxyribonucleic acid and how a gene is actually represented in the double helix and all that type of stuff, that awaited kind of the next century, right? In the same way, I think Dawkins and kind of our phenomenological understanding of memes, right, is something that is ahead of our molecular neurology. How are ideas represented in the brain? How are they stored? How are they retrieved? How are they accessed? How are they communicated? People have done things on this with the so-called Jennifer Aniston neuron where it appears there's actually sites in the brain that would actually store Jennifer Aniston. You see something and it just has— you see the words Jennifer Aniston, you see the image Jennifer Aniston, you see a video of her, you see Brad Pitt and it would light up next to her and so on and so forth for somebody who follows all this celeb stuff. It's not my thing. This is from a paper a while ago when Jennifer Aniston was still, I think, very much in the news, not as much today. That concept seems to also exist to some extent within neural networks, like the AI stuff that's being done where you can actually seem to express an abstract concept where a neuron replies to. I think OpenAI, I forget who, I think is OpenAI who had a paper on this recently. So we're starting to actually get at how concepts, abstract concepts, could be represented in a quantifiable scientific way. And, you know, I, I, we're not yet there, but eventually we'll be able to see things like, okay, here's this traveling wave of ideas, mimetic contagion. Here are ideas that serve as vaccines against those other ideas, right? They block them out because these ideas are themselves trying to spread.

Yeah, so how does this— so like, I'm gonna say, like, here's the, the, the dumb Sam version of what you said, which is like, I can convince people to believe certain things by making them feel certain emotions, and I could do that by, by using sticky viral content, which boils down to funny memes, um, and that the internet is still untapped, and then we can all— we're all racing to stake— put our stake in the ground, and email is one great empire to build. Is that kind of what you're getting at?

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

Um, well, I want to talk about that in a second because that's amazing. But to wrap up the media thing, so what did Sean say earlier? He was saying that he had a good question, which was like, in 3 years, what's the world going to look like? What's your— let's say that you are running, which you kind of are, um, this small media business. Maybe one day it will be a media empire. What do you think that's going to look like? Um, and like, how's that going to function? How's that business model going to work?

Totally.

Yeah.

So, um, basically, I think, uh, so, you know, I'm giving long answers because I didn't have the time to write short ones. I don't know if that makes any sense. You know, if you've heard that one.

Yes. Yeah, it's, uh, uh, I didn't have time to write a short thing, I was too busy doing the long—

Exactly. So, so excuse my digression, and you know, maybe I can edit this down into sound bites or shorter thesis statements. The short version is basically tech ignored media for all the reasons I just described in that story, and over the last 6 years we've seen the cost of ignoring media. The story is told and you're the bad guy. Okay, now, um, there's another story to be told, which is, uh, for example, there's a website called techjournalismislessdiverseinthetech.com. Okay, um, so a Nigerian guy basically tried to submit this as an op-ed to a bunch of, uh, tech journalism outlets and couldn't get it there. And I put up a prize, and he actually went and did this analysis, and it shows that actually tech is like 30 points more diverse than the media outlets that constantly give tech shit about this, right? Um, and so the, um, you know, another story is that actually a lot of the owners of these media corporations are like literally inherited wealth, like nepotists that, right, you know, just got the family business from their father's father's father's father. And, uh, you know, you know, another aspect is they're mostly American as opposed to the mostly immigrant nature of tech, which is very global and has an international purview. Um, and so on and so forth. There's actually a number of ways where, uh, the narrative of these media corporations where they, they run billboards that literally they market themselves as truth on a billboard, or democracy— like, democracy dies in darkness— like, that's how they market themselves on a billboard, or, or fairness and balance, right? That's just corporate propaganda, literally, by these legacy media corporations to define themselves as the literal truth, you know. And they believe this, you know. Their brains have been melted by corporate propaganda to such an extent. Now I don't think any tech company would be— people talk about tech arrogance. I don't think any tech company would be so crazy as to market itself as a little truth. But now, actually, we have an answer as to what that literal truth is, which is cryptography. Cryptography, and especially how the blockchain actually puts it online, is decentralized truth. It's mathematical truth. It's truth that anybody has access to. As I mentioned in a previous podcast, basically, everybody knows exactly how much Bitcoin somebody has. Whether you're Palestinian or Israeli, Democrat or Republican, that's not something there's actually contention over, which is amazing because it's this trillion-dollar piece of international property. That's the kind of thing people usually fight over. We can use those.

So what are you implying? We're going to be covering that? We're going to be covering these transactions and we're going to know? Well, I mean, here's what I'm thinking. Yeah, here's what I'm— that's only one niche. That's an interesting one.

Yes.

But is that—

yeah. Okay. So step 2 is DeFi, where It's not just who owns what Bitcoin, but who owns what digital property, digital goods, and that's an enormous swath of the economy, maybe most of the economy over time. All property eventually becomes digital. Should I clarify why I think that? Because that's a provocative statement. Why does all property become digital? Because much of the physical world becomes printing. So obviously, you can print out a piece of paper. If you look at, for example, the supply chain or what's going on in robotics, in terms of, um, like getting food to your door. Okay, there's folks who, uh, will— obviously the restaurant is now pop-up, right? Uh, the delivery, you know, bit— there's folks who are doing autonomous cars, right, or sidewalk delivery robots, which are better in some ways. There's folks who are doing autonomous food prep, right? And so you could imagine the whole thing being fully automated, and it's all of robots, and it's all this electromechanical process that has no human intervention, in which case it's analogous to just a print, right? It's like printing something out. And I think like robotics is something which is sort of, again, sort of been happening in our peripheral vision. We kind of know what's going on— Boston Dynamics and whatnot. But what I think is going to happen is most of the value will be created online, and you'll print it out by essentially invoking robotics. And I think that's the next, you know, this decade we're going to see more and more of that. You're starting to see actually robots in the field, like these robot dogs. I think we're going to see way more of that, and it's going to come pretty quickly, because once a robot can do something You've turned labor into capital because it's all electricity and the value creation— Sam, I'm installing that premise. All property becomes digital. So that's the second phase. You know who owns what Bitcoin and then you know who owns what loans, bonds, stocks, assets, all that type of stuff. But the third phase is the most interesting to me. And with that is it's related to something called crypto oracles. So many of these contracts over here in the second phase, you're doing bets on you know, will this price go up or down? Or more interestingly, will the temperature go up in, you know, this farmland, so I need to pay out this insurance because there's a drought? That's like an example of a smart contract, which combines a financial aspect and a fact about the world. For something like that to happen, that was kind of similar to the business model of like the Climate Corporation, like Climate.com, if you remember that. For something like that to work, the smart contract needs access to data about the outside world, which is not purely financial. That's the crypto oracle problem, where basically oracles broadcast data on-chain and they sign it and they say, "I'm reporting that this is true. I, the Weather Channel, am saying that it's 82 degrees in Poughkeepsie today at this time," and they give a timestamp, like temperature feed. This is happening not just for temperature, but it's happening for crime statistics, or not just individual crimes from which statistics are calculated. It's happening for medical records, right? So a hospital wouldn't just say, "We have 1,000 coronavirus patients." It actually has a feed of this patient at this time, this patient at that time. Redfin or Zillow doesn't just publish aggregate stats. It actually has a feed of which real estate transactions are happening at what time. From this, aggregate stats can be computed, but you can also drill down to individual rows and diligence them. What's the point? Right now, all of these feeds of data that I'm describing are siloed. The real estate data happens here. The medical data happens here. The price data happens here. The temperature data happens here. But what I call the ledger of record is essentially the integration of all these crypto oracles. The reason they go on-chain is that it's profitable. You can trade off of that information or you can make money off that information. So each individual oracle goes on-chain and it's subsidized. So you've got a micro incentive to put it online that's not some macro highfalutin concept. But the macro concept is as all of those individual oracles go into this thing I call the ledger of record, you now have cryptographically verifiable facts about the You have a digital history, an unalterable history. You can tell what happened when. In a sense, this is kind of just the next step in the sense that we've got all these tweets, which actually give us a reasonable, I shouldn't say perfect, but some degree of the intellectual history of the last decade. If the Twitter database was downloadable and eventually either something like it, either it will be or someone will scrape it or something like that because storage just keeps improving so you could store all of Twitter on a MicroDrive of 2035 or something like that. That database could be analyzed in all kinds of ways to determine people's moods, what people talked about, all the memetic contagion stuff that we just talked about. You could actually look at all of that and visualize that. We can't easily see that right now because the dataset isn't open. In the future, with this ledger of record, it would be, and you'd be able to establish what happened at what time. And so, that is the sense, Sam, in which you go simply from just who owns what Bitcoin to who owns what smart contracts to who said what thing at what time, like what facts were asserted. That is actually a very powerful thing where we start to actually displace a media corporation as the font of truth with cryptography instead. All right. Let me pause there. I know that's a whole download, but maybe I can express it better.

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

This is the third swing of the pendulum.

Now that's one interesting trend. If you're building a company right now, that's very much worth considering. Uh, and in order to do that, you're gonna have to flex different muscles. Uh, storytelling, memes, packaging, you know, different things. I've got a meme on memes. You don't have to do—

what's that? They give you my meme on memes. Own a media corporation or be owned by one.

There you go. And so, so that's, that's one interesting kind of point you brought up. Second one is this idea of empirical truths enforced by economics. So today, uh, media companies claim to be the truth. They market themselves as the truth. It was just, you know, sort of the corporate propaganda. And there's all kinds of hypocrisy underneath that. So, uh, you identified many of them. The, let's say, criticizing others for diversity, not being diversity, not being diverse yourself, uh, criticizing, you know, hating billionaires yet The media companies owned by billionaire families that are passing it down from one child to one father to the next son. So there's all these hypocrisies underneath that. And how do you get away from that? Well, there is this general movement of all things becoming digital. It's not just software eats the world, the whole world becomes software. And as the whole world becomes digital, assets become digital, contracts become digital, data and news reporting becomes digital. And you have this idea of crypto oracles, which are the journalists or media companies of the future where if we need to know what happened, what is the truth, who won the game, who got elected in order to enforce these betting markets or these prediction markets or these stock markets, then they will be rewarded through these sort of microeconomic incentives for being accurate and be punished if they weren't.

Very able summary, but let me offer a few asterisks. So I think the vision of the future is oracles and advocates. right? So redefine a reporter as like a sensor, right? A sensor that essentially writes data on-chain, okay? Which can literally be, um, like, like a machine that just takes a temperature sense and writes it on-chain, right? And the thing is, you might think that's trivial, but hey, that would actually, in aggregate, if you had lots of them, give you a cryptographically provable record that you could use in, for example, discussions about climate change, right?

So the weatherman becomes a sensor.

Who tells the weather?

The weatherman becomes a sensor. That's right.

That's right. But this is kind of a little— okay, so I understand what your vision is here, but it's missing a whole lot.

Wait, wait, wait, wait. Let me hear the second part of it, hold on, before you— because you might be right. Okay. The first layer, that base layer, is the raw facts, cryptographic attestations, right, from sensors. And the sensor could be lying to you, of course. It could be saying the temperature is 80 when it's actually 30. But it's got a digital signature, so you can see its track record. You can involve other kinds of things there. You can match it up. You can audit it. Other people can audit it. So you can have a second thing that's auditing 1 out of 100 of the measurements of the first guy. There's a hypergeometric distribution, which is auditing things off an assembly line, like pick a ball and see if it's corrupted or not. But then the second layer is advocates on top of those oracles. So these are humans, and you just assume that a human has an editorial judgment. You know why? Because it's not just what they write, it's what they write about. And now the selection function of what specific facts they choose to include is itself visible, right? Editorial judgment is now quantifiable because you have this layer of the raw facts that are on-chain, and then narrative becomes tangible because it's which facts you actually cite in your story. Okay? And so the selection function is basically just like a ranking algorithm for a social media site. That selection function actually is now quantifiable. We can see not just what was included, but crucially what was omitted. The—

so this seems like— but this seems like an entire— so, okay, so what you're gonna do is, uh, 1729, you're gonna hire—

I don't think he's talking about 1729 for this whole thing, right?

Yeah, I know, I'm just making that— I'm just using that. Yeah, your, your media empire, you're gonna hire 200 engineers to build this, um, Um, what did you call it? The, um, the, um, ledger of record. Your ledger of record. Um, and then you're gonna hire 200 journalists to editorialize— sorry, you're not calling them journalists, advocates, uh, to editorialize some of the, the facts, correct?

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

Is that chosen by you? So is it central choosing decentral? You know what I mean?

Yes, that's right. But all the tools and stuff that we use for selection and funding, like the YC-style SAFE equivalent and so on, all those will be public. So I want people to pick it up and copy it and so on and so forth. So I'm not at all proprietary about that. I'm just trying to set an example. For what it's worth, sort of similar, last night, you know, I tweeted out like for the COVID relief thing in India and, you know, the Notion CEO and the, the, actually the HubSpot founder, Dharmesh, actually, um, RT'd that. So it kind of gave a template that they could then just use. And that's, that's what I seek to do. Right. Um, and, uh, you know, the goal being to basically bootstrap a bunch of these voices. Okay. Call that one component. The second component is to bootstrap the technology, which is to say, figure out what the right version of using crypto oracles in content is. Maybe that's going to require a few years of compounding. Maybe I just write the articles on what that vision of the future is, and I'm not smart enough to build it, but one of my portfolio companies or readers or something like that is, because it's all a relay race. You hand the baton and maybe someone else can figure out something you didn't and so on. So kind of open sourcing my thinking on how we can get to a better model of, you know, truth right out there. And then third is writing a story. Um, so, so first is, you know, like the, the writers and the, the people who are writing these tasks. Second is the technology, technology for kind of creating the task, creating the content. And third is the story, which is— I have a book, uh, The Network State, which I've been— I'm a perfectionist, so I edit the chapters and I edit them and edit them. So I put the first one up at 72grand.com, you know, how to start a new country. I think it's done pretty well, you know, like, uh, it's, it's, uh, it's got a lot of good feedback, and I think it stimulated some thinking. And essentially the idea is, you know, um, how do you start a new country? Well, when there's no land, the short answer is rather than try to like take over a peninsula or a, you know, piece of territory, or, you know, or, or declare, or conversely take over like an oil platform near England and call yourself Sealand. Instead, you have a community that you build in the cloud and they go and take pieces of land all around the world, which are cul-de-sacs or apartment complexes and so on, and you network them together such that it's something which may eventually have a scale of hundreds of thousands or millions of people and the footprint of a contiguous state, but it's discontinuous and it's networked on the internet. So that's the third part, which is a story. So it is not simply content or technology.

Is anybody— do you think that— is there a project out there, or do you feel like there's anybody out there who's doing that, taking that approach? How do you start a new country, create a community in the cloud, and then have this like decentralized pods or hubs all around the world where those people actually congregate?

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

We are in this startup cities phase right now, so let's transition to that real quick. So yeah, uh, what is a startup city? Is this like Sam leaving San Francisco, moving to Austin, you know, the mayor of Miami actively recruiting candidates like a startup CEO would and, and hiring away great talent into Miami? Is that what a startup city is to you, or is it something else?

Yeah, so what's great about the term is it encompasses kind of 3 definitions, right? The first is just a city where startups happen, which is what San Francisco used to be. Um, you know, uh, the nowadays it's just, you know, like somebody who's choosing San Francisco for a startup, I crinkle my eyebrows, you know, I mentioned it before, before the pandemic I said it was like choosing Java, you know, proven but kind of, kind of sucks and it's like, okay, you don't know new languages and, you know, I'm not sure about your productivity in this or whatever. But now it's like choosing Oracle for a new company, you know, which is like, right, basically you're just getting locked into this horrible cost structure of a declining product when far better options are available. I question their judgment, you know. Um, so the first definition is a city where startups just happen, okay? The second is a city that acts like a startup, which is Miami now under Suárez, which is amazing, okay? And the third definition is a city that's a startup itself, like Prospera.hn or culdesac.com, or the various startup cities that Pronomos.vc is investing in. And, um, the, the thing is, I think, uh, you know, obviously when I, when I said 2000s tech companies, 2010s crypto protocols, 2020 startup cities, 2030s network states, that's sort of when that exponential starts, right? What is the analog of Bitcoin in 2010? It's startup cities in 2021, right? Okay, where— go ahead.

I was going to ask you a different question.

Maybe that's a good one. That's a good one to drop on your listeners. Bitcoin in 2010 was a pretty good buy or whatever. Yeah, exactly.

And I actually wanted to know, you got into crypto early on. I want to know actually, how did you actually first hear about it? Was it the white paper that you stumbled onto, a conversation with a friend? So how'd you hear about it? How'd you get hooked? And then how long did it take you to sort of like the mind virus infected you completely and you're like, "Oh wait, this is actually going to work." So I would love to hear that from you.

Yeah. So I have to recollect the exact timeline, but basically it was something where I had been thinking about economics and money after the financial crisis because everything broke. And so you start thinking more deeply about the system that you just thought was functional just shattered into a million pieces or just didn't work. I had been thinking about how the true definition of money is energy in the sense of J-O-U-L-E-S, joules. Visualize an iPhone coming together like the rare earth elements and the glass and the aluminum and so on and the silicon just like this molecular assembly and how much energy would it actually take you to assemble that from its constituent parts. In chemistry, you can quantify this with various chemical processes, how much input energy do you need to catalyze it or to make the reaction run. So that was something I was thinking about because if you could reduce the energy cost of assembling something like a phone over time, you had genuinely reduced the price. That's a genuine reduction because humans are able to do this thing more efficiently today than we were in the past. That'd be the kind of deflation that you want jewel deflation, where because of technology, we've actually made this thing cheaper to do than we used to be able to do. Now, I've been thinking about this and then one of my friends— basically, I'd write these essays or whatever, but this is before I was a public figure, if that sounds like anything. Just one of my academic friends was like, "Okay, you should look at this Bitcoin thing." I forget exactly when that was. It was 2010 or 2011. Basically, I thought it was really interesting because it was also using energy in a sense, a different way to kind of support value, but it was doing something I thought was very counterintuitive. The most counterintuitive thing about Bitcoin at the time to me was that the extra computation was not going into increasing the number of transactions per second, but rather increasing the security of the system. That was a design decision that was totally foreign to everything we had learned about scaling out systems and going parallel and so on and so forth. That was something which took me a while to wrap my my head around. Not that I thought it was bad, I just thought it was like, I just don't understand this. Or for example, the fact that all blockchain addresses were public. Essentially, he had stepped out of the box of what I thought a distributed system should be. Had made certain design decisions. Now, in retrospect, these are genius moves, but having all your transactions out there in public on-chain just would've seemed like a feature that you wouldn't be able to give up. Right? But with the pseudonymity, it's like, okay. And then now with zero knowledge, we figured out with Zcash and other things how to add back that privacy. Right? So I followed Bitcoin, but it was actually only after the 2011 crash and recovery that I was like, okay, this thing really has legs. And I wrote in late 2012, I actually had a course at Stanford I gave where I talked about Bitcoin. And I'm like, I'm not sure if Bitcoin is the one that wins, but it is a very powerful tech, um, that is, is like something in that class will be a big deal, right? And I think both were correct statements. I could find the exact PDF or whatever if you want. Um, and so that was around the time that Coinbase also got going. And actually, Brian and Fred and I, uh, I think we first met January 2013, very, very, very early on in the history of Coinbase. Um, and actually, like, I, I used the Coinbase API in a class that I taught that year in a MOOC course. And basically, that was kind of my story of getting into Bitcoin and crypto. And then 2013 boom, of course, happened. But it was basically the crash from $32 down to $2 in 2011 and the subsequent recovery up to like $10 in 2012 that convinced me the thing had staying power because it's very rare that you have something endure a 90%+ drop and then come back, right? That's extremely rare.

You, um, you, uh, so you, you def— you, you, you taught— you were a professor, correct?

Yeah.

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

Yeah, I mean, or rather, I was, I was interviewed for, uh, a very senior role Um, and sure, I probably could have been at least number 2. That was on the table, uh, but I, I chose not to. I mean, it's now a few years later. I don't usually like kiss and tell or whatever, you know.

But the point, the point, the point is, is that you, you have this like academic side of you, and which is fascinating. You have this crypto guy part of you, uh, as a part, which is part investor part, still part academic, but you also have this third part of you, which is that you've built companies. So you helped build— this is like traditional, like, this is the most normal part of you, which isn't even normal. Like, the most normal part of you helped build like a $50 billion company called Coinbase. The most normal part of you I used when I'm freezing my embryos and we just found out that like one of our potential children just had like Down syndrome and like, oh shit, that's the most normal part of you is that you you built that shit, right?

Well, it's funny, which is— it's funny because I, uh, for your audience, yes, I think that's probably true, which is weird because that's not normal, right?

And so I guess, uh, on the— what I'm curious about is on the, on the Tim Ferriss podcast, you use one of the more baller phrases to say that you're rich. You use post-economic.

I didn't use that phrase, Tim did, but it's a good phrase.

It was the most baller phrase I'd ever heard of, like, post-economic, like, to the point where money doesn't— like, you're beyond that. And because I care about money and it's interesting to me beyond just like you can buy nice shit, but it's like you can think about stuff that you normally wouldn't be able to think about. Where has most of your success, financial success, come from? This weird part of you that is this crypto investor and got in early, or from the traditional part of building companies? And there's a reason why I'm asking, but I'm curious what the answer is.

I think I'm, uh, you know, I like to think of myself as a pragmatic ideologue where I have a horizon where I have my eyes set on this long-term goal of transhumanism and transcendence, but then I'm willing to be as pragmatic as possible in the short run and execute and go down to-do lists and so on. For that North Star, right, which I'm always conscious of. And I wake up in the morning and I go to sleep at night and I think about that.

And I think, I think that's basically, uh, sorry, I was just gonna say, I think that's evident. You, you kind of proved that when we, we asked you about 1729. And, uh, when you talked about it, you talked about essentially disrupting, you know, education, making, uh, making it so that when people spend their time online, they're not just frivolously scrolling feeds, they're actually learning and earning and burning calories. But then if you go to the product, it is the V1 kind of crawl where you say, okay, what's the simple building block that we need to do that? Let's send a newsletter every day with a microtask that people can do to learn something and earn a little bit of money. And so I think you embodied that exact idea of like, what's the extreme long-term North Star? And then what is today's building block in order to move forward?

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

What are you doing? Well, it's funny. But, uh, it's funny. Well, so let me talk about that for a second. That is absolutely an acquired language where I have learned that you need, you know, Moritz talks about this half-jokingly as, you know, every app needs one of the seven deadly sins, you know, like lust, greed, sloth, gluttony, wrath, pride, uh, I forget the other ones, right? Um, but it's things close, right? Tinder is lust, right? And Twitter is wrath. And arguably early Google, which is pretty actually, you know, that's pretty highbrow, like search, you know, but arguably that's sloth, you know. Um, and, you know, uh, then Uber Eats or DoorDash is gluttony. I love those companies, don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to diss any of them, right? Um, and, uh, so You know, the, those hooks, basically I think you need to deliver a visceral instant benefit to somebody, right, where in a second you can explain what it is. Okay, a newsletter that pays you, right? Earn Bitcoin for submitting a form in a minute, right? So instant benefit. If you can't give that to somebody instantly, then it's too complicated. You know, rarely there's exceptions. You know, rarely there's things that have a very end-loaded benefit, like things like Ethereum or RomeResearch.com, for example, that rewarded an academic mindset at the beginning. That was very long-term, right? But even Ethereum, for example, there was like a speculative upside, which was the visceral short-term thing where you could align the short-term mentality with the long-term mentality.

But I have to bring you back.

Go ahead.

Yeah, I got to bring you back to the original question, which was basically I was asking, I'm like, did you get wealthier from this Bitcoin stuff or from building the company stuff? And, and I have a reason for asking.

Um, I don't usually like disclose my like percentages or something like that, but let's say I've done well from both. I've been fortunate from both. Um, it's interesting because as an investor you have, um, it's 1% or less of the work it's 10 to 20% of the return, but it's 0% of the control, you know. And, you know, I have never been like a tech guy in the sense of, um, actually, you know, there's people who talk about, oh, you know, I had a Commodore 64 really early on, I was programming, you know, and so on. That's actually— that was actually never me. Um, I played video games a lot when I was a kid, but I was a math guy, right? That's actually the angle that I came into it from. You know, I was into, you know, like math and physics, you know, growing up. And, you know, Feynman lectures and all the type of stuff. And, you know, thought that I was going to be maybe like a stats professor or, or applied mathematics professor or something like that. Um, and so computers were always just a tool, and business is always just a tool. Only later, to, you know, the reason I got into, you know, genomics or clinical genomics, the reason I did a startup was, uh, and I'll come back to your point, I know you're gonna— you gotta, you gotta think. The reason I did that was in academia that if you raise $10 million in a grant— raise isn't the right term— you get a $10 million grant and each row of data costs $1,000 to collect, you can only do 10,000 rows before you run out of money, right? Whereas if you're making even $10 on a row, you can collect a much larger sample and make a much bigger difference for the world, right? Because you can actually do the data analysis on that large sample thing. So the, the thing is that the 0% control, even though I am an investor, and I think I've done fairly well at it and so on, I invest on an ideological basis. I invest in the world that I want to build. And there's probably things which are, you know, good financial investments that, um, you know, I, I just, I'm just not interested in something if it's, if it's just making money. I can sort of force myself to be in that headspace, uh, but, but I, I have to force myself, you know.

Yeah, the reason I was just asking was just, I just think that you're the— I mean, you're like supposed to be this you're the stereotype of you is that you have all these odd and unique frameworks that create this brilliant ideas, yada yada yada. That's cool. I dig that. But what I was curious about, like, just what's your life philosophy towards certain things specifically?

How do you think about execution, for example?

Well, it was just like, were you just like, well, I'm just going to go and like make this company, sell it, get the bag. Now I could do all this crazy wild shit and everything else is upside and like And that's why I'm wondering, because like, if that is your strategy, I actually think that's kind of cool because there was some practicality and then like genius stuff comes out afterwards. And that's what I was curious, like, in that sense, I'm not capable of—

I should say not capable of it. I, I didn't just do a job for the sake of doing a job to get the money to then do the next thing. I really believed in both, you know, Council and, you know, crypto and, you know, Earn and Coinbase. And so like, that's how I could put in that level of energy. Like, you know, Buffett has this concept of— I don't agree with a lot of his stuff nowadays actually, but this concept is good. It's like, you know, if you're waiting to do what you want, it's like, you know, waiting to make love at like 70 or something like that. You're just deferring. It just doesn't work like that, right? You should start, you know, working on it now. Teal also has a concept of how do you achieve your 10-year goal in 6 months, you know? So yeah, I think that what I tried to do is advance short-term goals, you know, maybe a sinuous path, right? Maybe a winding path. But I had that long-term kind of vector that I'm going towards. And so the short-term stuff was never, oh, let me make the money and move on. Maybe that might have been smarter to do. Like D.E. Shaw did something like that, right? Like, it's, it's, you know, D.E.

Shaw is the guy who created the hedge fund.

Yeah, the hedge fund. And he put a ton of the money into protein folding.

Yeah, so like, and Shaw's famous because that's where Bezos worked and, uh, was— yeah, exactly, he built out this— and D. Shaw was like, hey, are you sure you want to do this?

Yeah, yeah, exactly right. So I mean, there's a lot of effective altruism people who are like this. Um, I would argue that the effective altruism people miss one very important thing, which is that it is the production by people of goods that actually makes them feel that they deserve things. Like, if you haven't built, you feel guilt. I think it's a very powerful concept, right? If you haven't built, you feel guilt. So if it's just handed to you, then you don't actually feel like you deserve it, and that leads to a sense that nobody deserves it and everybody's things should be taken down, right? So, um, I think that emergency aid is actually very good, but like industrialized aid where it fosters a sense of dependency is, is bad. You know, Easterly and Levine have written about things like this. But recursing back at the stack, they do this concept of, you know, work hard, make a lot of money, and then spend it on altruism, for example, right? And I think that's a reasonable strategy, but I find it like holding your breath, you know. Um, and I, I only worked on those things that had meaning for me along the way but were leading to a greater meaning thing. And I've been fortunate enough to do that, by the way. You know, like, one thing I was just mentioning to Sean, um, is that it's hard for me to necessarily give advice to folks on the very macro sometimes because in many ways the world has just become more biology-like. Okay, um, if you were a person who was a 9-to-5 morning person who liked routine, who liked, you know, structure, who wanted to hit the same button every day, who wanted work-life balance and to come home to the family and, you know, like, have dinner at the same time every night and so on and so forth, the mid-20th century was awesome for Um, because that was kind of the peak of centralization, homogeneity, routinization, structure. It was also, by the way, the peak of like, you know, mass murder and so on within like China and Russia and whatnot. Both those are related to centralization, but in the US at least, like a decent quality of life, that was like the best centralized model in the world, right? Whereas the rest of the world wasn't, wasn't doing so well under that degree of centralization. And, uh, and now we're kind of in the opposite thing where it's like favoring night people who are asynchronous, um, you know, rather than hitting a button, the, the same button for 20 years at a factory, you're hitting a different key every second, you know, like you're just generating like different information. Um, your, your day can be extremely varied, you know, one day like COVID has kind of locked us inside, but your day online can be extremely varied, you know, do one thing one day, podcast another day, uh, maybe play a video game, or, you know, basically the entire diversity of the human experience is a click away.

You know, um, and also the, uh, you know, you're rewarded now for diversity of thought and opinion in a way that, you know, if now that everybody's a content producer, uh, the more differentiated your content, the sort of higher the rewards you get versus if you're in the previous era, there was not everybody was a content producer, everyone was a content consumer. You just go home, sit down, watch the box, and, um, and if you tried to sort of stray out of line, you weren't necessarily going to find your other find other people who had the same convictions as you. Um, and so, you know, it sort of paid to just toe the party line in a bigger way than it does today, where actually, well, standing out pays more today.

It's interesting because I think we are in the middle of a, um, you know, the Battle of the Bulge. Do you know what that was? It's basically like Germany's counterattack in the waning days of the war, which is actually a pretty ferocious counterattack, but ultimately in the long sweep of history was just a counterattack, and the long sweep was there, right? And, um, what I think we have now is a strong counterattack in favor of conformity by both, you know, kind of like the woke contingent and like, you know, CCP, right? And so I think like actually it's going to be quite a fight because in my, in my model of kind of like these memes and, and things all battling each other in, in this gigantic continent, this cloud continent, um One of the most powerful memes is a meme that says, "There shall be no other memes before me." You said something that I want to go to.

You said the world is becoming more biology-like.

Sure.

Meaning, you know, so what does that mean?

What does that mean? That means that from 9 to 5, it is, you know, either like tweets or surges of work, right? From day people, it's like night people are async, you know? From status quo bias to disruption bias, from sort of the physical world to the informational world, the theoretical world. Ideas matter more. Ideas can shape the world more. All those kinds of things. In many ways, for example, something like Soylent. Soylent itself, I like the company and Rob Reinhardt, the founder, is a friend and so on. Um, I prefer like a keto version of Soylent, of which one of them exists, okay? But as my— minus the keto thing, the concept of just not having to think about it so I could just do more math or more programming or, you know, just more content, that's like— I love that, right? That's a very biology kind of thing, right? And now of course I recognize that, you know, there's better forms of food like salads and so on, but of course there's worse forms of food like candy bars, right? And so if you compare it against, you know, what's better, then you'll miss the fact that many people who are busy don't eat well and they eat a candy bar rather than a salad, you know? And so this is actually like, basically it improves baseline health, you know, in theory, if it was more keto or whatever, right? Um, and so that kind of thing is something where it fit my preferences, and because of that, I invested in it, and the world just sort of adopted that. Or like crypto, fit my preferences for, okay, it should be programmable, it should be decentralized, you shouldn't have someone be able to do bailouts and so on, and the world became more decentralized. So in some sense, that prediction of the future is just something where the world is sort of fitting those preferences. And that's something that's hard to kind of clone. I don't know if that makes any sense.

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. If you were, I don't know, 21 today, Um, and actually, you know, let me give one answer.

I want to give one asterisk, which is in many ways though, a lot of these businesses do not fit my preferences. Like Instagram, and you know, Instagram is a great company, but like going and taking lots of selfies outside, or you know, like that seems like something you would do, bro. Yeah, yeah, I'm a very private person in that.

Come on.

Yeah, yeah, no, no, like, you know, I actually tweeted on this before the pandemic, like Instagram is for people who go outside. Twitter is for depressed intellectuals.

Can I—

Go ahead.

The reason why— Can I explain what you look like right now?

Like I'm in a dungeon here?

You're supposed to be this big shot crypto entrepreneur guy. You have what looks like a super, super old camera. Zero lighting, uh, just looking down at like, your video setup is so horrible. I thought it was going to be the best.

I need to actually get that set up. So actually, I am solving that. Um, so I've got a studio and so on that I'm doing. Um, but basically, like, you know, we caught him in transition.

He hasn't, he hasn't set up the full remote workstation yet.

Yeah, yeah, I haven't, I haven't done all that yet. Uh, partly because I do have the Blue Yeti or whatever. I did get that, so people nag me into doing that. That. It's sort of something where I go zero or 100, you know, on something. And, you know, so I just use the defaults unless I like actually engage. And so, you know, I'm just learning acoustics and I'm learning— I'm just—

no, I'm just— we're talking shit.

A month ago, you're right, go ahead.

And then these guys flew out to our houses and they built us these studios for us because they were fans of the podcast. So we literally didn't know anything. We still don't know anything. We We didn't know how to put this together ourselves either. Uh, and now Sam's like acting like we did this.

No, I'm making fun of him because he's like, well, you know, Instagram's great, but it's not really for me.

Yeah, bro. Yeah, you can figure that out. Yeah, yeah, no, it's funny.

A shocker.

Well, it's, it's interesting because I will value something once it has a dot product with like my North Star, right? So like the dot product, you know, the inner product in, um, in, in linear algebra, it's like, you know, here's a vector, here's another vector, and how much do they align? Are they— is it just at right angles or is there some alignment, right? And, uh, so the reason that I'm going to be improving, I think dramatically, hopefully, audio and video production is I need the content to tell the story to build a future, right? And so that I'm going to get good at that, hopefully, because we need to. But before then, I just felt of it as sort of being an exhibitionist, and it was like not, uh, you know, not my thing, right?

Uh, so I was gonna ask you, if you were 21 today, what would you be like? What would 21-year-old Balaji today— let's say you don't have the track record, you don't have the name, and you don't have the funds to be investing and, uh, you know, having a big platform to speak on just, just yet. What would 21-year-old you be focused on? How would you be spending your time?

Um, so what would I do? Uh, first, skills-wise, I'd get really good at computer science and statistics, uh, first. And the reason is that every domain has algorithms and data structures, which means that computer science and stats are valuable anywhere. You can walk into Walmart and you start writing down code for, uh, shopping carts and, you know, baskets and pricing and so on. You can walk into American Airlines and do that for, you know, flight scheduling. You could walk into Pfizer and start writing about VATs, you know, for drug preparation and, you know, like a pharmaceutical manufacturing, right? Um, reaction kinetics, all that type of stuff. And of course, each of these areas will have domain knowledge, you know, but computer science and statistics are a universal language. And I mean CS and stats, I don't mean just like learning programming and, uh, you know, how to invoke library calls. I mean actually understanding the concepts and really wrestling with them. Okay. Um, and the reason is it's sort of like what physics was to the early 20th century, CS and stats is to this century. Because physics was awesome for, you know, understanding the natural world. All these physicists could in the heyday of physics, go and kick in the doors of any discipline and be like, "Ha, I'm going to write down some equations and just change your life because you're doing this in a phenomenological way and we can do it way better." Now, today, because so much of the world is a constructed virtual world, because we're interacting with it on screens, something like cryptocurrency is a constructed virtual world, right? Social networks are constructed virtual worlds, so are video games. CS and stats becomes— I mean, it was valuable before, but it's even more valuable today. So that's a foundational kind of thing. And, um, then, you know, in terms of domains to get good at, uh, I would find something— you know, it sounds funny to put it this way, but like an area that you really care about for some reason, you know. And there's— but, but that's also aligned, you know, the ikigai concept, because, right, so like the 4 things— I may not remember them fully, but it's like what you're good at, what the world needs, uh, what you can make money at, um, and, uh, and what you have fun doing. That's right, exactly. That's right. So the Ikigai concept, finding what that is. So after you build that base of skills, right, um, with CS and stats, by the way, you can understand finance because it's crypto, or it'll all become crypto. You can understand genomics because the A, C's, G's, and T's on screen. You essentially have a theoretical, like, foundation in any area you walk into, and then from that, other concepts can be layered on top, if that makes any sense, right? So I mean, it's like a general-purpose computer. It's a general-purpose set of, of principles. Then domains, uh, today genomics, big robotics, big crypto, of course, big. Um, I think an underappreciated area is going to be relocation, permanent international migration. You know, this is why I did Teleport a while back. Digital nomadism is going to be huge. Uh, being like, there's a thousand pieces of the tool chain for allowing people to go more mobile. You know, Uber and Airbnb. Uber is go down, you know, to the coffee shop, but the next step is Uber around the world. Right? How do I just boom, pick up stakes and just move internationally right now as quickly as I can for as low a cost as I can? I think that's, that's a big area that people haven't really thought as much about as they will. And I think post-vaccination, the post-vaccination world, a lot more people value their freedom to exit. That's why folks are going to Miami and so on. Like, when you're cooped up in a room, you want to burst free. And so the counterreaction of that is going to be, um, this great migration. In fact, I wrote about this in 2013. There's an article I wrote called "Software is Reorganizing the World," where essentially I said, because the internet is breaking geography, because you're closer to people who are 3,000 miles away than your next-door neighbors, the underlying premises of the city and the nation-state are being invalidated. That's to say, geographical proximity no longer leads to cultural proximity. And therefore, the assumption that people in the shared geography will share the same law and customs is no longer applicable. And what it's going to result in is these cloud communities eventually migrating and materializing into the physical world and forming cloud cities and eventually cloud countries. As that's now, I think, with COVID starting to happen, um, crypto is a big component of it because those cloud communities can actually have their own currencies. Okay, remind me why I got in this rush. Go ahead.

Sorry, one second. You said geographic proximity is not— is no longer linked to cultural proximity. Is that how you said it? Was that the phrase? Yes, that's a powerful one. Which is, uh, explain that for somebody who's never heard you say that before.

Sure. Okay. So if somebody lives in a city in an apartment building, they often don't know their next-door neighbors, may not even recognize the person who's living 50 feet away from them, right? Literally, this person is living, eating, sleeping there, but you walk down this hallway, it's all closed doors, right? It's basically as if you lived in a data center, you know, like with virtual machines, you know, like you cut up a server into a bunch of virtual machines and they're all siloed and compartmentalized and isolated from each other, right? So you go and you live in this box, You don't know who's next door. You don't know who's above you. You don't know who's below. You don't know who's left or the right of you. You don't recognize the people in the hallway. But who do you recognize? You recognize a person from 3,000 miles away who you're laughing with on Snapchat or video chat or anything like that. You recognize that guy on the other side of the world who you're arguing with. Your social network, your friends and your enemies or whatever, your friends and your frenemies, they're just scattered around the world. Some of them might be geographically close by, but even that is pointillistic. It's like, okay, this person in this building, this person in this building, this person in this building, and I don't know anybody in between, you know?

Like, I, I mean, I, I buy into that. Like, I've got so many friends who I consider actually dear close friends that they're just internet— I call my internet friends, and I, I, I have only met them once or twice.

Soon we'll just drop the whole internet friends part and we'll just— yeah, it'll just be like, yeah, now at this point the majority of my friends are internet friends, so that's just called my friends now at this point, right?

By the way, pointillistic— I know that sounds like, uh, maybe it's not a word I made up, it's actually like a reference to like art Um, so whatever, it's like lots of little points, you know, discrete parts.

But, uh, what the, the nitpick here is, or it's— I actually agree with you, but I challenge my belief because, um, like all three of us, I think you in particular in your own bubble, but really we're all in our— in this little bubble of like, um, uh, the future.

It's not the filter bubble, it's a future bubble because the way that—

well, that's, that's the very optimistic, wonderful way to put it, and I like that. I like that term. But like, I have— I'm from Missouri, okay? My family lives in Missouri.

They—

one's a teacher and the husband works at a bar. Their kids go to school, and the exciting shit that they do is play softball on Saturdays. Do you ever ask yourself, the ideas that I'm coming up with or that I'm predicting the future, they're really only impacting this small, small, small tip of the iceberg of people. How are they going to impact the random person in Nebraska or Missouri, let alone, you know, someone in Kenya? Or, you know what I mean? Do you ask yourself this when you're thinking about what the world's going to look like?

I absolutely do. So here I'm going to put on my pragmatic executive whatever hat, right? Which is, you know, you have to focus at the beginning, right? The way I look at it is the V1 goal is to build a community, at least with 72289, then I'll talk about the V2, is to build a community of technological progressives who are sort of like YC's founders, but not just tech founders, people who are media founders, they're influencers, they're writers, they're activists for technological progress, like Isabella Bemke, she's like a pro-nuclear activist, or folks who are, you know, um, for faster approvals of drugs and devices, right? And I want to build consensus among that group that technology is good and that we can work together across borders to help people achieve a better future. Not a Pollyanna, you know, kind of, oh, everything's going to be great, but certainly what I think of as the bright sun to where the West is today, which is Black Mirror, you know. And, um, I think that, uh, you know, that it's sort of like at, you know, in terms of your efforts, how can they scale, right? So my initial focus is definitely, let's call them founders, but not just company founders, a broader class of founders including media founders, protocol founders, community founders, influencers, etc., and getting some agreement among this group, among this set of ideas. And then recognizing that I personally cannot solve all the problems of the world and figuring out how we can build, for lack of a better term, positive-sum user interfaces for those folks who may not be as interested in the world of ideas and the stuff above. How do we build not just positive-sum but aligning user interfaces? And a user interface I use in the broadest sense. Where, like, you know, the— how your house works, how your car works, how your street works, how your community works. Um, how can we actually build, uh, things where folks are actually aligned, you know, where, um, the, the founder or the CEO gains or loses just as the average citizen does, right? Where there— it's sort of like, um, I don't know if you see the, uh, the guy from Chad who just died on the battlefield? No?

No.

So basically, I think it was like the prime minister of Chad died on the battlefield, right? And there are all these memes. You know why? Because like, of course he's a Chad. He died in conflict with his soldiers, right? Imagine like some Western leader doing that. They don't have skin in the game, right? And it was like a joke and it was sarcastic, but it also had like a really penetrating aspect of truth, right? Which is a degree of disalignment of Western leaders and, you know, their, their, uh, their citizens, right? Um, because it used to be that a huge man— you know, like, uh, aspect of being a king or being a leader was you were willing to go into battle, right? Even in like World War I, there was this concept of like, you know, the, the nobility, the aristocracy was supposed to actually go into battle, right? Of course, battle— look, we don't want to have wars, right? Wars are not good. But the concept of alignment, I think, is a very fundamental one. Alignment. In the communities and in the structures that I want to build in the future, I think that alignment has to be quantifiable. Now, we're actually seeing this in crypto because I do think that one thing people don't get is that crypto is not just the next Wall Street. It's also the next Silicon Valley because decentralized social networks and so on are built there. But even less obviously, it's the next Yale Law and Columbia School of Journalism and Kennedy School of Government. You know why? Because Yale Law gets replaced with smart contracts, Columbia School of Journalism with crypto oracles and decentralized truth, and Kennedy School of Government because the next heads of state are heads of networks. Okay? What I mean by that is, you know, there's that saying, it's apocryphal, but like, you know, "Give me control over a nation's monetary policy and I care not who makes its laws." Right? It's apocryphal. I'm not sure exactly who said it, but you've heard it around. The people who have founded and run these gigantic crypto networks that are sometimes in the multiple billions or trillions of dollars are essentially like, basically they're like a Fed chair, at least of a state, if not the country. They've gotten there by founding something, not by winning this whole popularity process where as a gerontocrat at 70, they've paid all their dues and now they finally can actually put their theories into practice when they're 70-something. But instead as actually a founder who is aligned with all of their people and have all opted in to be part of the same kind of thing, right? So the short answer to your question is quantifiable alignment is, I think, the ethical way for those leaders to help, you know, essentially the, the population that's not as interested in ideas, you know. Uh, let me pause there.

I think Sean had something.

Yeah, I actually wanted to transition to a topic that I think is a little bit controversial, uh, but also exciting. And that's, uh, the controversial part is that, you know, um, I'm going to talk about crypto social networks. So, um, we've talked about Bitcloud on here and we got a lot of flack. Um, we talked about it because I said, wow, I think, I think Sean and I gave us flack. Yeah, we gave each other flack. I was really excited and you were like, dude, you're pumping this thing. And I'm like, no, I'm not trying to pump this thing, I'm trying to explain that, um I'm seeing some very interesting novel things here, and that's exciting to me. I'm a product person. You see tons of products, you see tons of apps, you see tons of announcements, and you don't always see anything. Sometimes years go by between seeing something really, really interesting. And the really interesting thing about Bitcloud that we talked about was, number one, the growth hack. How do you get valuable people onto a new network? Well, they loaded up a bunch of people's accounts with a bunch of money and they used economic incentive to bring high-status individuals to a new network. So that was interesting. The second interesting thing was that you could sort of this Robinhood meets Twitter. You can buy somebody's coin. And in doing so, if I identify Balaji as an interesting person in 2014, as some people did, I get to benefit from the rise. So a curator would get rewards alongside a creator. So somebody who's an early— you can invest in somebody whose popularity and reputation is going to rise. I thought that was interesting. The third part, and so there's some interesting parts, but there's also a bunch of controversy. I think that the place I want to start is I think that these decentralized social networks, of which Bitcloud is one, are very interesting because they took Facebook's most valuable thing, the Facebook database, the social graph that Facebook would defend with its life. And they basically put it out there as the— that is the product. Here's the social graph with economics built in, and now any social network can be built on top of this. And I wanted to hear what you see in these crypto social networks, because I think you will probably— when you look at your North Star, you also don't see like 30 years from now, it's Mark Zuckerberg owning the 4 most powerful social platforms, and we are all users and consumers and have no economic participation. I don't think you would be excited about that version of the future. So tell us what version of the future you see with crypto social networks and then try to maybe, I guess, talk about what you're seeing out there today.

Great. So I've been writing about this stuff for a long time. And just disclosure, by the way, I am an investor in Bitcloud, like a small early investor. I wasn't involved with the project or anything, but I I understand why, you know, there's some agitation around it, and, um, but I also think it's actually a good idea overall. And I think it's, uh, and let me give a few different thoughts, okay? Um, so first is that, um, a very important concept is that crypto is in a sense the sequel to open source, because it's not just open source, it's open state and open execution. Okay, so let's say it's not just that you have the source code, you also have the database, and you can track every single opcode when it's executing. Okay, and one of the consequences is, you know, with Twitter or Facebook, they have the Twitter or Facebook API, and they can shut it off one way, right? And they have, you know, Meerkat, or, um, gosh, Teespring, Zynga— so many companies that built on top of these APIs have had their access throttled or limited, or their business model destroyed overnight. Because there's some change in that one-sided, you know, relationship, right? Um, and the, the thing about that is, uh, that's because if those companies had let the API be completely open— Twitter's was for a while— then somebody could clone the entire Twitter functionality and sell ads against it, and then Twitter would be reduced to essentially an API provider, and they couldn't monetize that successfully enough to prevent that from happening. Happening, right? So I think, you know, TweetDeck and so on were essentially cloning the entire interface or whatever. I don't remember exactly the details, but I think that was it. So fundamentally, the issue was that the business model for creating an API and a protocol that was totally open, that had state, was not feasible then. Okay. What do I mean by state, by the way, just for your audience, which is maybe less technical? That's like database state, that's stored state, that is information that's not transient. Transient, okay? I do a phone call with you, that's transient. I mean, maybe it's stored on some NSA server somewhere, but we don't have a copy of it typically, right? Whereas Facebook has state. There's a huge amount of data that they've got, your photo and your messages and all that type of stuff, right? The crucial thing that crypto enables and the reason it's not just disrupting Wall Street but it's disrupting Silicon Valley is that, as I said, it's open state and open execution. So we're moving into the third model of internet technologies, you know, Web3.

How much of your day is spent doing some of this, like, crazy thinking and building and working on a lot of the stuff? I mean, are you, um, do you grind real hard on all this stuff, or, um, what do you spend your day doing?

That's a good question. Um, I mean, day varies because this is all heavy, heavy stuff.

Yeah, everything we've discussed is, like, pretty heavy. No, and you're what, you're just rattling this off, like, as if you just like, you've like, you've like already said what you're— you've, you've thought through it. You're like, well, why am I wrong? And then you've already thought through it again. Anyway, like, what's your—

what's your—

how much time are you— energy are you devoting to this throughout your day? And or like, do you just go for walks and shoot the shit? Like, what do you— what do you do?

You know what I have to spend energy on? I have to spend it like, I have to spend energy on small things like remembering calendar appointments and stuff like that, that is actually what is very mentally taxing for me. Um, it's sort of like, uh, you know how a sports car is not meant to drive on like normal highways, or you, you can do it but you just have to like kind of watch out or whatever, right? Um, what I find hard is stuff that other people find easy at times, like just Oh, remembering that that meeting is in 15 minutes or something like that, you know, because I get engrossed in what I'm doing, you know. Um, and, and so what I've just done is built technological workarounds to help with that. Um, and so I guess the answer to your question is this is just how I recreate or whatever. I just, I just, I can't stop it, you know. I just go, like, I walk around and think, oh, that, that'd be cool, this would be and just tap it into my, you know, tweets or my notes.

I'm not—

I'm not like— I'm not trying to humble brag or something. You're asking what my process is. Um, I think part of it is I do—

yeah, just say the truth. I don't care if you brag.

No, no, no. Yeah, I'm just saying, like, um, in terms of how to replicate, I guess what one thing I do do is something, you know, maybe similar. Like, Feynman had this concept that I think about a lot, which is, um, I have a bunch of active problems at any one time like how to decentralize social networks, how to build alternatives to media corporations, how to establish decentralized truth. You know, these are sort of like active—

how to not miss my dentist appointment.

Exactly, that's right. Very right. So, um, the, um, those, those are like active problems, and, um, then against them I match solutions, you know. So those, um You know, I've gotten, you know, for example, you read something, you're like, okay, this maps to that, right? Um, and you know, this maps to that because this was a problem that you had 2 years ago, and now you see some concept and it lights up that this hammer could fit this nail, right? So that's, that's kind of what I try to do. I don't know if that makes any sense.

You also kind of helped popularize the Idea Maze concept, right? Was that you who, uh, kind of coined the Idea Maze concept?

I coined the term and And it was funny because you never know what's going to resonate with people. Dixon actually might— go ahead.

I was going to say that not only resonated with me, it made me feel much less stupid as a founder as I was wandering around. So, okay, the idea maze, I'll paraphrase kind of just my understanding of it, which was there's this movie, the Steven Spielberg version of startups is founder wakes up, aha, eureka, I know this is the future. I'm a visionary. Goes and builds the thing. It's a straight line. And yes, there's adversity along the way, but the idea, like, I solve the problem and then I just do the thing. And then reality, or at least what my reality was more like, was I'm interested in solving this problem for people, or I'm interested in this kind of new space and it's all kind of foggy. And then I always think I'm in the eureka moment and I'm like, yes. And I sprint and then I hit a dead end and I'm like, oh, fuck, this is not how things actually work. This Distribution strategy is not quite right. Okay, let me backtrack 3 steps and then let me go down this other fork in the road that we didn't take last time. And I get a bit further and I hit another dead end. And like you're wandering around a maze and eventually you sort of come out the other side. And that is actually quite a normal process for thinking through it as an entrepreneur, trying to bring something to life and make something successful. That was my interpretation and it made me feel a lot better about hitting those dead ends because it didn't mean You're stupid and not cut from the same cloth. It's, this is the process, or this is one version of the process, at least, that is a common set of problems. So carry on, go back a few steps and then figure out a new way. So did I butcher it?

No, that's quite good. In fact, now, 8 years later or what have you on it, I'll give a few other thoughts. One is it's actually similar to mining for gold. Right? You know, like, how— I don't know if you've seen that quote that circulated, um, about San Francisco during the Gold Rush era and how similar it was to startup era, right? Like, yeah, you know, everybody had crazy plans and there was unlimited amounts of financing for any kind of gold mining operation. Like, that culture interestingly has seemingly a through line for 100-something years, right? It really sounded like it was describing startup culture where they're mining for gold and their theories about this river or this mountain or whatever as the best way to get it. Of course, tech culture is not just like the gold aspect, it's the technology aspect, but that aspect is similar. So the idea maze is like, okay, which thing is going to lead to the pot of gold? It's sort of like that, you know, it's sort of like a physical gold mine. So that's one interesting bit. The second bit is that the maze is time varying. So what's a bad idea today could be a good idea in the future or vice versa. For example, Pandora, you know, pre-iPhone was only an okay idea and post-iPhone, it finally became like a billion-dollar company. I'm not sure how it's doing now, but iPhone was a lift that it needed. For ubiquitous audio everywhere, right? Um, another is often that very small-seeming permutations can radically change the outcomes of companies. Like, I remember— you make— you guys remember this— in the early days of Twitter and Facebook, I remember people saying, why would anybody use Twitter? It's just the status update function of Facebook, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, that was a common knock on it. But the fact that Twitter was default public, number one, and asymmetric, number 2, meant that it just became a completely different experience than sort of the private set of Warrens that Facebook is. Fundamentally, the fact that for the most part anybody can link to any other tweet means it's a connected graph. It's just one graph. Whereas Facebook is something where I probably can't view that Facebook post, so I don't share it with people. So it's a fundamentally private experience. So it's actually in a sense less viral. Now, of course, I think I think Facebook, it's a more successful company and I think it gets way more crap than Twitter even though Facebook is— Twitter is probably worse for the world in some ways. It's better for the world in some ways and worse for the world in some ways. It's just this gigantic amplifier, both positive and negative. All the good stuff comes out of Twitter and all the bad stuff. Actually, Paul Graham had a good comment on this where it's like the terms are so large that you can't even initially sum them to see whether it's positive or negative sum overall. Oh, where was I? I lost my train of thought. Uh, give me—

we're talking about the Idea Maze.

And you're— yeah, that's right. Okay, so come back to the big— so now one thing I will say that I've grown to appreciate more is the, the specific Idea Maze you decide to run really does matter and can be like a 1,000x multiplier on the result, right? So, you know, look, genomics was I could show you all the good arguments as to why genomics would be a huge deal in the 2000s or 2010s, and I could show you the curve of declining sequencing costs and so on. But basically, that generation of companies was— I shouldn't say capped, but it was somewhere between a few hundred mil to a bill or something. There wasn't a $100 billion company that, to my knowledge, came out of that. That was like the Zipcar era, and then there's going to be an Uber era coming up. Right? And it's really hard to know whether you're in the Zipcar or the Uber era of something, you know? Um, and often there's iterations on a theme and it just breaks through. Like, and sometimes things seem tired and old. Like, Substack 2 or 3 years ago may have seemed like, eh, all right, whatever, just another blog, who cares? But adding those 2 features of A, monetizability, and B, newsletter, so that you've got 'Cause a blog by default, I mean, I think maybe you can with Blogspot do emailing and so on, but it wasn't set up for that. It wasn't smack in the face for both user and writer. Those two aspects really changed things and have made Substack a breakout where that was not obvious 2 years ago or 3 years ago, right? Ben Thompson of Stratechery, which Substack was inspired by, had been kind of just rattling off in his own thing for a long time, building his own thing when nobody cared, and then it actually worked, right? Part of this is also the decline of the existing media environment. I mean by like, you know, the iPhone came and Pandora went from a bad idea to a great idea. The decline of the existing East Coast media corporations has led to this exodus where this thing that was an okay idea became an amazing idea because there's suddenly a need for it, right? That all these nails came up, right? Um, I think insofar as I'd give advice for people who are thinking about picking the idea, you, you really want to ask yourself if this has a chance chance of being an epochal shift like search or social or, you know, mobile or, or crypto now, right? Uh, or something like that. And it doesn't have to be, by the way. And that epochal shift, by the way, might be 5 or 10 years out from when you even start the thing. You know, some companies just go like vertical relatively late in life. Um, but you ideally want to be part of— you want to have a thesis on why some huge trend will occur. Let me give you another example of this, by the way. Teleport, which we set up in 2014.

I was just, uh, I was just gonna ask you all about Teleport. Um, I'm trying to find the old website. Was it dot— was it just dot com? Dot org. That's why. So can you— the way that I understand it is Teleport was going to crawl or aggregate tons and tons of data and tell you the best place to live.

Yeah, because here's a thought, basically Um, an extremely valuable search engine, maybe the most valuable search engine, is the one that tells you the economically best place to live. Because there's all—

well, it wasn't just economically, was it?

Wasn't it just like, uh, it wasn't just economically, but the concept was that every other quality of life metric that you had, to a first approximation, we could have you implicitly put a dollar value on like how much more is it worth? And when I say implicitly, it'd be like, okay, this place is, you know, $3,000 a month in expense, but this place is $3,500. However, it is warmer. And so out of millions of like choices like that, you could sort of back out the function of how much more people value that extra degree of warmth. You see what I'm saying, right?

Yep.

Yeah, it still gets a fair bit of traffic. It looks like still people are still going to this.

People are still using it.

Yeah. You sold it to, uh, what's this, Autopia?

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

Um, and why did you say Stan and— why did you say they did fine?

Well, I say they're different because they basically just did fine in their careers as a function of that. Like, um, Oh, I got it.

Okay.

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

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

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's, he's, uh, he's actually, uh, Levels.io on Twitter. Uh, and yeah. He's good because the only thing that I think he's probably a little too aggro on is like he's so— he's anti-investor. And there's bad investors, there's also good investors. So that's something, whatever, you know, probably it might just be a Twitter, Twitter thing where if I got the second bit or third bit of information, he might agree there's some value-add people or whatever. Um, but, uh, the thing is that Nomad List and Teleport, I think essentially had worked out the theory of this almost a decade ago, you know, that digital nomadism would be valuable, that people would want to relocate. Because, um, the reason I just say economics, whether it's just— you can put a number on it, right? And so that's something you can plug into an algorithm. And, um, do you know what constrained optimization is?

Yes.

Okay. All right.

So basically, I mean, is that basically where you put— you very purposely constrain something. Oh, to be happy.

Yeah, so in, in, in math, you know, there's something— constrained optimization is like, um, I want to, um, optimize my, uh, you know, like, uh, the amount of time that I spend delivering packages subject to the following constraints. A, you know, the A, a car can only hold so many pounds, it can only take so many packages at a time. B, it has to have this many stops between refueling, and so on and so forth. You have these constraints on the optimization. Okay? And what you try to do is you take all those constraints, you try to express the entire thing often in terms of minimizing or maximizing a single number. That's called the objective. Okay? And so, no matter how complicated all the things you are that are putting in, the first-order, second-order, third-order things, you're just minimizing one objective. So you think about the best place in the world to live, you actually want to think, okay, how do I like imagine like, uh, green hills and red valleys, like green is good and red is bad, like a heat map, you know, of good places and bad places to live, right? And so it's a scaler. And so you can basically to first sort of think of that as the net economic benefit or loss I would have in relocating from here to here. Okay. And so you take all of these layers on the world. So first is cost of living. Second is how much you'd make in that geography, right? Third is like, you know, is there bars or nightlife if you're interested in that? Fourth, if you're older, you know, do they have schools? Do they have airports? Uh, is there— is it green? What is the, you know, what's the rule set like? You know, like, uh, is X banned or is Y legal? You know, and so on and so forth. All of those you layer on top of each other and you have actually a very complicated mathematical optimization problem, right? Which actually varies for somebody at different times of their life. You know, the best place to live when you're, you know, a 20-something college student, you want the bars and nightlife. But if you've got children, you're probably thinking about schools and just a different set of considerations. So the greens and reds change, you know, um, we could quantify all of that, right? So the idea is that it'd be the search engine that would give you the maximum value, right? It would basically be something where by changing your XY location, you might gain, you know, uh, like $50,000 hedonically of which maybe $20,000 or $30,000 is economic and the other remainder is in quality of life. Let me pause there.

Could this company— could this have worked? Um, I mean, I, I was okay.

It wasn't a failure, but it was— it's something like Zipcar to Uber. If it had been in operation, uh, or if it had been like the main thing in 20— if we had started in 2019 and 2020 had been the pandemic, right? Like, um, Um, or, or, you know, arguably it's still early. I think it's still early because, uh, post-vaccine is when travel truly opens up, you know, and when everybody's fully vaccinated. So it's like mobile phone installs, it'll take a while. And hopefully there won't be, you know, variants that present immune escape that can, that can actually get out of, um, of the vaccine. We'll see what happens, or the vaccines. But modulo that, I think you will have a ton more. You already are seeing folks going to Miami and so like the map is becoming mobile even as states are doing lockdowns. You have the other thing, which is the centralized lockdowns and the decentralized, you know, global migrants, right? So I think tools for international relocation are still early. If anybody wants to build like Teleport 2.0 or Nomad List 2.0, DM me, you know, with a demo, and I'll definitely take a look because I think we're still very early in that space.

When— by the way, right now, um, I, I have no idea where you are right now, but Uh, if you were doing— making your own personal teleport list, which cities most interest you for, for living in long term?

Have you heard the term entrepôt? Maybe I'm mispronouncing that. E-N-T-R-E-P-O-T. Um, so that's basically like a, uh, like a commercial center. Um, you know, typically a port or, or, or, you know, something like that historically, but I think those are waxing in importance. Okay, so, uh, you know, Dubai, right? Monaco, um, Singapore, actually Miami, which is pretty interesting. Americans think of Miami as a party destination, you know, with sun and beaches and so on and so forth. But Antonio García Martínez, actually, he was— he turned me on to this. I had not actually been aware of this till his essay, I think, in 2019. He's from Miami. What he said is really interesting, which is Miami is like the Singapore of Latin America, which is to say that if you've got a Mexican national and a guy from Paraguay and they want to do a deal, they'll do it in Miami because everybody knows it, they all respect it, it's like a decentralized demilitarized zone, it's got good banking, rule of law because it's based in the US, at least relatively to South America, Latin America, more stable currency relative to there. We'll see what happens in the future. And, um, so it's a spot where people from the Latin and South American, you know, diasporas, they all have like, uh, communities in Miami, right? So it's actually this international business capital that many Americans are just not aware of. They just think of it as a beach place, right? So it's actually a great spot for all this tech VC. The fusion there is going to be fascinating. I think we're going to see way more more, uh, stuff done, um, not just south of the border but in South America. There's a lot of talent down there, of course, um, but now you just kind of have eyes on it looking at a new light. And, uh, you know, there's actually another aspect, a non-obvious aspect, which COVID is going to increase investment. You know what that is? No. The world has gone remote, and, uh, what that means is that longitude rather than latitude is now the organizing principle. Basically what you care about is not where somebody is. If they're not in the office, then the next question is what time zone are they in, right? Yeah, right. And so, you know, this is something— there's a website, I think it's called time.is. I posted on this, tweeted on this, right? But what that means is longitudinal arbitrage.

Okay, Airbnb founders or whatever, they did this where they went and worked in Argentina because it's sort of like, um, low cost of living at the time, and then also like sort of time zone-wise you're still lined up with the United States.

States.

So it's like, you can go, but yeah, I don't know if it was— was it Coinbase? Is that what it was?

Armstrong did that. I'm not sure if the Airbnb founders did too, but yeah, Brian Armstrong of Coinbase was in Argentina at a time before Coinbase.

Uh, are you—

how interesting.

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

Um, no.

Uh, I would say it is like, uh, you know, some kind of— it's like this— it's like an amusement park ride, um, but it's the one— it's the one that's like, you know, the bungee, and it's the bungee— only two people can go on it at any one time, and they basically, they swing and they're like super high up, and then they hit the ground, and then they like spring forward and go to the other way, and they just keep going back and forth. And yeah, that's what it feels like, because you're like, it's like exhilarating, there's really interesting topics, but you get so high up, you know, as the, as the sparring partner, you're like, I'm out of my depth. And then you come back to root and you say something that's like, oh, that speaks to my life experience. And then it goes back up to like, well, we're too far in the future again, I can't, I can't, I can't see anymore. And then we're back to Earth. And so I meant that as a— I mean that as a compliment. But I also, I was just curious, like, you know, when you're you, your brain is completely normal to you. You live there all the time, you know. And for me and Sam, I don't know, I can't speak for Sam, but I know for me, I love talking to you. I love listening to you. And, you know, any conversation we've had, whether through DMs, phone call, or whatever, has always been great. But you're the only person I talk to frequently that makes me feel out of my depth where I'm like, you know what? I kind of wish you had a better sparring partner in here who knew what the hell you're talking about and can actually like push this even further. Whereas what I'm trying to do almost is bring it back down to like—

And who do you feel that way?

Yeah, that's kind of— that's what I'm saying too, which is—

I, I mean, it's certainly not my intention. Basically, go ahead. Sorry, Sam.

Who, who do you feel that way with?

Oh, I mean, like Feynman, Ramanujan, like You know, there's like geniuses have walked the earth, right? Or have walked there.

Like, I talked to a guy who's good friends with, um, what's his name, um, what's the VC, uh, Andreessen, Marc Andreessen. And they're like, um, they're like, when I talk to him, I just, I can't keep up. Do you feel that? It is—

well, I think, I think what you're saying is sort of like, is that a good sparring partner for you? Who do you have good thought spars with? Um, and those might be other people that people should go follow or listen to, because if they like what they're getting from you, maybe meet, that's another person.

I think, you know, Mark and I have kept up a high-bandwidth conversation for almost a decade now. Mark and Ben, for sure. Naval Ravikant, you know, who's a very good friend of mine, and Armstrong, Fred Ehrsam. These are really smart guys who, like, basically folks who I get a bounce from every single day, you know, and I think, you know, just play tennis with them. But it's also something where they're not exactly playing the same sport, you know, like racquetball versus tennis. So I learned something, you know. I don't know. I mean, like, I try to learn. I mean, you know, actually Sergey Brin had a good one-liner on this a long, long time ago, which is, you know, every interview he did, he wanted that person to teach them something. Right, which did a few things. First is it meant even if the interview, even if he didn't hire them, he gained something out of it, right? But second is it's also sort of got their, um, their teaching abilities out on, on, you know, and, and that's actually useful because you often have to do something within a company and then teach other people what you did, right? Coming back up, you know, think of, you know, when I do these podcasts, I'm— they're so— they're totally off the cuff, right? So it's totally you know, just freestyle. And, uh, so in the edited version, I think I would try to map the points such that it's bullet, bullet, bullet, bullet, specific, specific, specific, specific, general, specific, specific, general. Like, more disciplined in terms of how I accumulate to a thesis, right? And I think, you know, I think maybe two— a few good examples of that, if you look at the, uh, biology.com posts on India, you know, like, uh, why India should buy Bitcoin, how India legalizes crypto, um, add crypto to India stack. I think that's sort of more this sort of workmanlike, you know, set up this, this and this premise conclusion, you know, over and over again. I think it's reasonably well written, okay, at least it's comprehensible. But that's like the install software in the most— install intellectual software in the most efficacious way. But do you know what I mean by that? Install intellectual software.

Yeah, exactly. That makes sense to me when you say it. Yes.

Yeah, you get it, right? Like, what— go ahead, Sam, you're gonna say something.

So you, you've been blogging on there for a while. I've, I've been reading it. Um, you've been doing— you did Teleport, like, in what, 2014, which was, uh, right, or ish, um, which was about, like, kind of making, making predictions. You've been all about predictions. I mean, it seems like that's been part of your, your, your personality for a very long time. What predictions did you make 10 years ago about the year 2020 that were wildly wrong and that, and you would have bet a lot of money that they were going to be correct? Like, you were really bought in on them and they, and they've proven to be wrong.

It's a good question. Um, I mean, there's lots of things, so many things I've gotten wrong. I mean, one thing that's kind of interesting, you know, I only really became a public figure in 2013, you know, public figure. I don't know if you— I didn't call myself that now, but that, like, I only actually wrote publicly in 2013. Before that, I was sort of, you know, cloistered in academia or in genomics. It's like, it's like an enterprise founder who just doesn't ever take the mic or whatever, you know, so to speak, right? Um, and I had plenty that I was thinking and I was writing about, but, um, I wasn't, I wasn't speaking publicly on it. And, um, I think that one big thing I got wrong was I, I was just never the— like, I'm the personality for cryptocurrency. I'm not really the personality for early social networks, which were all about exhibitionism. And remember Zombies, that game, you know, like people wasting time online, all that type of stuff? That's like totally not me. And, uh, so I, I actually, you know, there's people who dismiss crypto as, oh, it's, you know, it costs too much, or it's, it's just a scam, you know. They just didn't get it, you know, for a long time. And then there was eventually a light bulb moment moment. Social networks, like, I sort of got the appeal of it being like a Facebook online. You remember the concept of Facebook? I don't know if you guys are old enough. Actually, Sam, you're actually relatively younger, but something's almost impossible to Google. This is funny. Google the Stanford Facebook. Haha. You know, that's like 3 proper nouns. But, um, back in the late '90s and early 2000s, a Facebook was a noun, which was— it was something that was given out to freshmen when you came. You're aware of that?

Well, yeah, yeah. And I mean, I had my brothers— you're probably 10 years older than me. I have brothers that old. Yeah, I know what you're talking about. Okay.

Well, so that's something which was a physical Facebook, and I understood the appeal of like putting that online, but I only actually understood like the power of social networks when there was a friend of mine who was live tweeting a genomics conference. Okay, I was like, oh, that saved me a flight. Nobody would have written up the material as well as this scientist would have because they would have just, you know, messed up the terminology or made it confusing. They certainly wouldn't have gone into as much depth. And I was just able to like just slurp in and download like 5 hours of presentations without a plane flight, you know, um, at my laptop in 10 minutes and get the important bits. And I was like, I was like, that I really like a lot. Okay. I actually understand the value of that. I did not understand the value of tweeting your breakfast, right? That seemed to me the stupidest, most exhibitionist, like, waste of time thing in the world.

So what did you predict? That it just— I'm like, this Twitter thing, it might say small. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I underestimated when social networks were basically voyeurism and exhibitionism and time wasting and zombies and so on. I I, I did not really think through their social impact, right? It was only after— and the thing is that the reason that genomics thing really piqued my interest is because I realized that that was something that would only be, um, feasible when the thing has achieved such massive scale that even this very niche, niche, niche, niche, niche application was feasible. You know, it's like, like you have gigantic scale thing, Google, and then you can Google like like, I don't know, Belgian cooking recipes or something like that, or French cooking recipes. Maybe that's not that niche, but you know what I'm saying, right? Um, so social networks, I only after I, uh, I understood that, that they weren't just time wasters or distractions, that you could actually learn things with them. So I, I very much underestimated social, um, and I think that I probably overestimated genomics. What I got wrong with that was I saw, I think, all the technology and the computer science and all of that. There's a curve, by the way, that your audience can Google, which is like cost of sequencing a human genome, like NHGRI, National Human Genome Research Institute. And that was just dropping through a cliff in the late 2000s. And it was clear that this looked like a Moore's Law-like thing, and Moore's Law catalyzed quite a lot of stuff. So get into that. What I didn't understand as an academic, and I only understood as an entrepreneur, is what the FDA really was. You know, I didn't understand that like basically the FDA is like the primary blocker of like medical innovation, not just in the US but in the world. People are now, by the way, catching up to this, you know, because of the disaster of the FDA holding back authorization on COVID testing, them doing things like holding back the Johnson Johnson vaccine because like 1 out of a million people literally are getting blood clots. You know, this type of stuff people are understanding that their degree of risk aversion is not actually optimal. There's both type 1 and type 2 errors, both false positives and false negatives. And if you are rejecting good drugs or good vaccines or good tests, you are potentially doing as much or even more damage than bad one— than approving bad ones. And people are only focused on the PR downside of approving a bad thing and not on the unseen of not approving a good thing, right?

You, you basically wanted to be the Ron Swanson of the FDA, you know. You wanted to— you wanted to get elected and then tear it down.

Well, no, no, actually, that's why I didn't take the position. And in fact, it was a surprise to me, uh, because I— the paradox of that is obvious, right? Like, um, Google didn't reform Microsoft by becoming, you know, Bill Gates. Google reformed it by building a parallel system. And then Once it had made billions of dollars and after 10 years of Microsoft throwing everything in the book, then they replaced their leader, Ballmer, with Satya, and then they reformed and embraced open source. I don't believe that one can abolish the FDA any more than one can abolish the Fed, but I do think you can exit the FDA like we exited the Fed. You exit the Fed with Bitcoin. It required basically this development of both technical and cultural and economic breakthroughs to build a parallel financial system, which started off as just a crazy person's vision of the future. But some people got the potential very early on, like Hal Finney was speculating that it could be $1 to $10 million per coin very, very, very early on, I think in one of the first threads, like if Bitcoin took over. I wonder if he was Satoshi's friend or a colleague or something like that, that was just lending his name to this anonymous project to give people a second look at it. Hey, actually, this pseudonymous guy is actually maybe better than he seems Seems it's possible, right? Point is though, that parallel system was built outside the existing system and it was completely ethical because everybody who was engaged in it had opted into it, right? It's not forced on anybody. And all the bugs, every hack, every loss of funds, every drop or surge in the price, uh, every technical difficulty, every UX difficulty, all of that was opted into. Completely ethical opt-in experiment, right, at the broad scale. Which is the opposite, by the way, of monetary policies that are foisted on you top-down from above. You had ability to take the non-inflated USD after 2008. But if you disagree enough with a cryptocurrency's monetary policy, you can fork the entire economy, go your own way. That Minority Report does exist. It may not be successful, but then that's in the execution. One thing I think about a great deal is what is to our existing institutions what crypto was to finance. You can see already a crypto law with smart contracts for big chunks of law. You can start to see crypto media. Media in the sense of decentralized cryptographic truth and the crypto oracles things I was talking about, where the foundational assertions are not human beings thumping their chests and saying "Science," capital S, you know, or with quotations, right? But rather cryptographic facts. By the way, can I dive into that for a second on quote-unquote science versus science? This is a very important issue. Okay. Let's do it. So you've seen all these people who are like, "Masks don't work because of science. Masks work because of science," right? And essentially what they actually are saying is, "Some authority figure has told me that this is true, and therefore it is true." It's not actually— science is not about peer review. It's about independent replication. That's a fundamental difference, right? Peer review is at best a proxy for independent replication. There's a premise that that guy who reviewed it as a peer actually went and and grab the bubbling beakers and did the experiment themselves. That's less and less the case today. Most of the time it is, or maybe it's less the case forever. Most of the time it's like a few emailed comments and like make a new figure. Okay? Right. So the actual, you know, like independent replication is download the code and run it on my machine. Okay? Now, there's only one thing which has— now, first let me back up a second. Science is actually the ostensible basis of our civilization. It's no longer religion. You don't cite God or the Ten Commandments as why have this law. It is science says that there's a certain amount of emissions, so therefore this policy is there. Science says there's a certain amount of viral particles, so therefore we wear masks versus not, and so on and so forth. So upstream of everything is a scientific premise, which is then coming in often from peer review as opposed to independent replication, which is subject to institutional capture, which is what's happened. And you start to get scientists saying more and more ludicrous things that are, you know, like all the public health people just completely own themselves during the pandemic in many different respects. Like, they admitted that saying that masks don't work was a noble lie, right? Um, which, which was— it wasn't even that noble, it was just stupid. It was obvious at the time, you know. Um, and you can't do that too many times. And there's many more examples of that, but that's a particularly egregious one. You can't do that too many times before people just don't trust it. Right? So what's the alternative? What's the— because, you know, the answer isn't, in my view, to go to astrology or woo or stuff like that. What do we have? Not science. There's only one thing that's more prestigious than science. What is that?

More prestigious than science?

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

What is it?

Math. Okay, what do I mean by that? When I say math greater than science, okay, It's like kind of a one-liner. It's like a funny headline or whatever, but let me expand what I mean by that. Um, every scientific paper is based on the collection of data and the generation of like figures and tables and so on, right? Um, there's a concept called the open access movement, which is about putting research online and taking it out from behind these publisher paywalls. There's also a concept called reproducible research, which says that that scientific paper should be fully reproducible possible from the underlying data and code. Like, you should be able to hit enter, and just like you can template a web page with parameters from a database, you can template a scientific paper with calculated parameters from that dataset. Okay? There's sites like distill.pub, or if you look at what OpenAI does, like, a lot of their papers are basically, like, interactive websites, which operate in this fashion, where the underlying dataset is, like, templating the page. Okay? What's important The point is that it is— when I talk about science as being independent replication, yes, it is impractical for everybody around the world to have their own inclined planes and cloud chambers to try and replicate all these experiments. We don't have those. But what does everybody around the world have?

Computers.

Yes, that's right. They have computers, they have phones. They can't necessarily do science at home, but they can do math. On the computer. So the more of that independent replication process that you can turn into math, the more that people who do not trust a central authority can check the, the claims. Okay, now we've already seen a huge victory of this, right? Which is, uh, you know, scientific economics has been defeated by mathematical economics. That say, all these Nobel laureates winners of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, all went and denounced Bitcoin in different ways. It can't work. It won't work. It shouldn't work. It should be banned. Mathematical economics defeated these quote scientists, and I put them as quote unquote scientists because they're not. One of the big things, by the way, is it's like Scott Alexander calls it the skin suit. Science is like Newton and Maxwell, and the crucial thing is Maxwell's equations have trillions of independent replications. Every single time you pick up a cell phone, you're doing an independent replication of the equations for the E and the B field, for the electrical and magnetic field, and a thousand other things. There's equations for quantum mechanics that you're effectively replicating, independently confirming, because the engineering wouldn't work if the science doesn't. So those things have trillions of independent replications, and it's a total category error to compare them to a study that came out last week that has basically zero replications. Calling them both science means you're taking things— the only similarity is like they're coming out of universities, but the axis on which to compare is the number of independent replications, not the number of citations, number of independent replications. What's awesome about this is this is actually where crypto is. If you think about what does it mean to have a transaction confirmed on-chain, I don't know if you've ever seen blockchain.com. Have you ever sent any cryptocurrency and refresh the blockchain, Sean? Maybe?

I've sent it a whole bunch of times, but I never sort of tracked and traced the transaction before. It's sort of a log. I never looked at the log of the transaction.

Look at the log. For example, yesterday when I went and said I was donating money for Indian COVID relief, I was able to post the link on-chain so people could see the funds flowing and see that I donated exactly as much as I said to the address that I said I was going to donate at the time that I said I was going to do it, right? Um, and, uh, and the critical thing there is there's a thing that says number of independent confirmations. How many different miners, right, have confirmed that A did B at Z time? Okay, independent confirmations are very similar to independent replications. That's cool. They're actually doing calculations. All of them are doing mathematical calculations to confirm that this this assertion actually happened, that you had the digital signature that owned this cryptocurrency and so on. That seems like a very limited scope, but as I said, we can expand that to property. We can expand that to lots of other things and to crypto oracles. What's the point? The point is, if you take the concepts of open access, the concepts of reproducible research, the concept of independent replication and its proximity to the multiple confirmations of on-chain data, you can think about something where, oh, actually, all these people have computers. So if the code and the dataset for every paper were actually on chain, not only could I independently replicate at least their post-upload conclusions, right? They may have still falsified the data, by the way. That's still possible. Okay. But post-upload, every calculation they're making, I can check. Moreover, if all of that is on chain, it's an open-state database, going back to our previous point, right? So every paper can be compared against every other paper. We can have common formats rather than every paper using a different format. Right. We can import a library from a previous paper just like you can import a library from GitHub, because again, it's all open state. Right. And so now you actually start to make science far more checkable and cumulative because it is only the uploading process which now is in doubt. Everything that's on chain, at least given this data, I can check their calculations, I can check their figures, I can check their tables. I can I can also check their citations because I go back a few hops and they're importing this paper, importing that paper, and I can actually see that their premises— I can check their premises as well. I can map the trail of citations all the way back, right? All of which is actually quite difficult to do today. Only Google can build like Google Scholar because they have access to all these journals. It's all behind paywalls, right? Some of it has been broken out there with like PubMed Central and so on, but a lot of it is still behind paywalls or it's like 1,000 different formats. right? This is similar to how banking before crypto was 1,000 different formats. It's like this wire transfer and this address and so on, and crypto uniforms it or unifies it in a uniform address, right? Address format that's universal and global. Point being, this is actually a way that you can decentralize science by actually realizing that math is actually more powerful than simple assertion and using math and all the computers that we have to do independent of every post-upload claim. All right, I know I just threw a ton at you there.

Um, you threw a ton.

Yeah, but that's like a recipe for like what crypto science or decentralized science might look like.

And just a quick question, you, you were a partner at a16z, is that what you were doing?

Um, a general partner for a while and then a board partner was part-time, um, versus, you know, operating a company.

You, uh, You're just a weirdo and I love it. You're just so interesting. You're just so odd. You're just sitting here talking about math and science and we did crypto, we did starting traditional tech companies, we did—

Where to live.

—the Battle of the Bulge.

How to think about where to live. Yeah.

Yeah. You're eclectic.

Well, we can go deep on a specific topic if you want. Actually, I'd love you to teach me something about newsletters because because, um, you built a large one. Um, so maybe, you know, like, I can ask you, you know, what would you— like, given that I've got, you know, a newsletter that pays you, maybe you can teach me something about that and I can learn.

I could teach you. Yeah, I mean, I could teach you everything about newsletters. I don't know if I could do it today. It's 1 AM, right? Sure, sure. Um, but I— bro, I could— I mean, I, I can't imagine there's that many people in the whole world that know more about me than newsletters, you know. What you are to crypto, I am to newsletters. It's unfortunate, it's unfortunate that crypto is far more lucrative.

But, uh, you did okay, you did quite well. And, and, you know, the thing is, as you know, if you— one of the funny things about this whole space, this just this tech thing, is if you just stay in the game long enough and you take enough swings, ones that you just don't expect will just connect much harder. I mean, like, you know, there's investments that I've made which I spent spent 5 minutes on that have returned more than like 5 months of work. Of course, you're still taking capital risk. You know, it's not like free money or anything like that, right? But, um, no, I mean, you're like— you're a very successful entrepreneur and you're in the game. And so just put some of that newsletter money into crypto or other things. I'm happy— or Media Factory. I did.

I— and I actually— I— there's like a famous story that I retell over and over and over again, but the short of it is I was friends friends, friendly with Ross Ulbricht. Oh, and when he was arrested, I didn't know that that's who he was. And I was sitting next to my coworker and I go, Billy, my guy Ross just got arrested. You heard of this thing called Silk Road? And Billy, his last name is Billy Draper. Oh, and he was like, and he was like, yeah, my dad said that Bitcoin is like going to be the coolest thing ever. And I said, sounds good to me. I'll go and buy it. So I bought it. I don't know what it is, but your dad is smart. I'll do what he says. Good. So that, that's like my story. I'm glad you got—

I mean, poor Ross. I didn't actually know his name was Albright. I thought it was Albrecht, uh, but, uh, Albrecht, actually. I don't know how it's pronounced, but, uh, yeah, poor Ross. Definitely, uh, I—

yeah, we weren't like crazy close friends. We, we've hung a couple times, and I lived in Glen Park where he lived, and I was at like in front of the library the day he got arrested.

On that topic, it is surprising to me, given given all the malfeasance that came out afterwards, that there hasn't been a retrial. You know, literally like agents falsifying information and so on. And that's just what's come out to the public. Like, who the heck knows if, you know, it was all like— I, I haven't gotten into the details on this, but I do understand that like the supposed, you know, hits that he ordered were all faked and it was just all entrapment or something like that. And well, they were faked.

Whether that was entrapment or he meant to murder someone, that's up for debate.

Yeah, I, I, I said I I like that you try to—

Everybody knows the right thing to do, and then most of us don't always do the right thing, whether it's food or it's consuming information. It's like, ah, maybe this is bullshit, but it's entertaining, so I'm going to do it anyway. I'm going to read it, watch it anyways. And it's sort of like Warren Buffett. He's brilliant in one thing, and then he drinks whatever, 6 Cokes a day and eats McDonald's for breakfast every day.

He's living till 90, so his constitution manages to keep up with it somehow. Or whatever. Yeah, but go ahead.

Yeah, I think he's, he's pretty stress-free, which I think works for him. Uh, do you have something like that where you're like, yeah, I'm super smart, but this is the dumb thing I do, and I know it's dumb, but I do it anyways?

Watches The Challenge on MTV.

Yeah, me and Sam, we both watch shitty reality TV, and we're like, yeah, we know there's better things to do, but we do this anyways.

Big Kardashian fan, eh? A big Kardashian fan.

Um, I know you see, you're basically asking like what, you know, creature comfort type stuff. Um, I mean, I used to—

like, you know, like things, you know, us normal humans do.

No, I mean, I, I, like, I'm on, I, I'm on Twitter or whatever, you know, and that's like certainly a huge waste of my time. Um, it's, it's both good and bad. It's one of those things where, you know, every time you, you, you get out, they pull you back in, you know, like Godfather, right? Um, I Uh, I once watched a movie. Yeah, no, I've watched tons of movies, tons and tons of movies, basically. Like, less so recently though. It's interesting. I, you know, actually one of the things I found, you know, just on the like the biology, like preferences becoming the future kind of thing, right? Let me give you some— this is not the answer to your question, uh, but let me riff on this and then come back to your question, okay? Um, there's— for example, in 2005, uh, when Google Maps was out but before the iPhone came out, when I wanted directions to something, what I'd do is I would use Google Maps on my laptop, I would screenshot it, I would charge up the laptop, I would also print out the screenshots in the event that there was a power outage, and then I'd keep the laptop and the screenshots on the passenger side of the car as I drove. Okay, and that's like— that's what— why I knew the iPhone with Maps would be a success, because I had this crude jury-rigged version of it in that interim period when Google Maps existed but the iPhone didn't. Okay, it's like a small example, right? Um, certain things that I've been noticing, actually, as I just talked to you, I was like, you know, I really haven't watched that many movies recently. And why is that? It's like, well, so many of them are woke that I kind of just roll my eyes and I know exactly what it's going to be like. Hollywood's just gone so woke. And, uh, and that's just like being preached to, right? Even Even if you might agree or disagree with some of the principles there, it's just like, all right, again, blah, blah, blah, right? And it's very predictable. It means the characters are hackneyed. It means the messaging is just so on the nose. There isn't any of the humor and so on that used to characterize it. There's so many areas that are off bounds that it's just all so edited. And I just found the quality of Hollywood has been dropping off a lot. Another thing I've realized is I don't hire actually from Stanford or Harvard or MIT or whatever anymore. You know where I hire from? Twitter. Me too. Okay, because basically, uh, it's— first, it's international. Second is you can kind of tell that these folks can write. You can see what they're—

you can see what they're about.

You can see what they're about. It's actually— it's like a V1 of this concept of like, um, it's a comp— you know, my thing about how you didn't get like too much signal on them from their diploma right? Yeah, you get way more signal from their writing and interests and so on on Twitter, not just their skills but their values and character, right? And, you know, there's like super smart guys in, you know, Nigeria, you know, smart women in like the Middle East and so on who you could— they shine through. I'm like, okay, that person, right? And you've now got like an index on, on the world that you didn't have before, rather than just buying this degree, right? In fact, actually, I'm not— I don't quite say they're guilty till proven innocent, but unlike, you know, 5 or 10 years ago, a lot of these graduates of woke schools— I mean, I think of them as like, uh, you know, like religious education now, because that's what they're prioritizing. I don't know if you see this thing, like they're abolishing accelerated math in Virginia and so on and so forth, right? And, uh, so, so it's actually something where these folks are coming out out of higher ed with a religious education that basically means that they are not necessarily all that technically good anymore and a set of priorities and entitlements that is very much often adverse to what is needed to build a business. So I think there's been like the college flippening for me at least in terms of hiring from these places and said, you want to hire the guy from the Midwest or the Middle East who just has like, you know, just a different set of values and is just more hungry, you know. Um, what's up? Yeah, exactly right.

Exactly. What's your Holly— what's your Hollywood replacement in that same way? So that's your hiring replacement. You said your Hollywood consumption goes down. What'd you replace it with?

Um, old books, uh, math textbooks. Um, I thought something what like normal people do or whatever, you know, that, that it's like a fridge. So, you know, before I started my first company, I was actually about as jacked as, as possible to be with my South Asian physiognomy. Um, and, uh, so I like lifted and ran all the time. I worked out all the time, and it was very difficult to do that while operating startup because, you know, your first priority is like— there's always the temptation to make that short-term sacrifice of stay up late or skip the workout to take the sales call. And frankly, your employees, like, you know, at least what I told myself at the time, the employees, you know, you have your responsibility to them, which your small health or your hour of sleep isn't as important as their, you know, because you have a fiduciary responsibility to them. You know, you brought them on, you had to quit them jobs, move across the country. Oh, I didn't do that deal because I went for a run. Oh, okay. Well, you know, and it took me a while to realize that actually that was a false economy. And, um, that, you know, like, spending down your physical fitness or your health is actually something that will also impoverish them in the medium to long run because you won't be— you know, you can only tap into that, uh, in your youth. You can push harder, of course, right? But as you— ouch— um, as you get older, the, uh, you just don't have the energy to do that in quite the same way, right? You can't tolerate as much.

Are you, yo, are you, are you, are you fit now?

I'm fitter than I was. Um, I basically, one of the things that actually I did at Semti29 is, uh, you know, we've been doing this thing, Proof of Workout, right, where you can submit like proof of work, haha, get a proof of workout, right, where you submit, um, a proof of workout. We give you $10 in BTC if it's one of the top 100 of the that day. Okay. And it was kind of cool, and it's got extremely good response. And basically what I realized, that for the next thing that I did, I actually had to make that part of like the job and the business such that everybody expected me, uh, just like I expected all our employees to go and exercise. And because it was actually something that advanced the company as a whole, and I just had, you know, whatever, just I can only do one thing at a time, so I needed to actually make that a front page priority in sort of the same way that people people have learned that spaghetti code is a short-term optimization and actually you're taking on technical debt. You're taking on physical debt if you are not working out and eating right each day. So I wanted to kind of put that in the top of my consciousness for the next thing. I actually think that that daily fitness, eating properly, etc., is on a straight line with with transhumanism and with reversing aging and so on and so forth. And whether we'll be successful in that, I don't know, but at least I want to at least set that direction vector. I like it.

I think we lost Sam to a bathroom break because we've— okay, we've broke the, the My First Million record of longest podcast, so we should, we should wrap it up. Um, where, where can people find you? So I know Twitter is where I kind of get the most, uh, so shout out kind of where people can get more, where to go.

Yeah, go to 1729.com. That's the free newsletter, newsletter that pays you, in fact, where it's got these regular Bitcoin bounties for tasks and tutorials. And, you know, I kind of spoke about what our long-term goal is for what we're doing there. Short term, it's extremely easy to understand, which is read a post, do a task, earn some crypto. And then, you know, like for example, we had yesterday, uh, is is learning about how to register a domain name, that was very valuable in the early '90s. Well, learning how to register a crypto domain name is probably going to be very valuable. We basically have a tutorial on that. If you go and do it and you tweet about your experience, then we'll give you $250 if you write a good set of tweets, educational, informative set of tweets. That's a cool, I think, a way to incentivize you to learn something that you should already learn, And so we're giving out like $5,000 in Ethereum for that, right? So $20,000 product.

Can others sponsor? Uh, could others, people sponsor? Like, could, could we put up 5 grand for something?

Absolutely. So we have samtitranon.com/create, okay? And one thing that I want to have eventually is something, you know, just like companies have Twitter accounts, have them have Sam Titranon accounts where every task that they can outsource to the public at large, they do. And maybe they pay them in their corporate cryptocurrency.

Yeah, I love that. I love the sort of mini X Prize. We've been talking about this on the pod for a while. It's like, I love that the X Prize was this kind of big piñata that got a bunch of people to innovate and step up, and actually more investment than the prize that happened because of it. Uh, and I wondered— I know I, I've now experienced a big company, we got acquired, and I'm like, oh, I understand why it's so hard for bigger companies to innovate I wish we were just putting more of things on our company's roadmap just out there and say, hey, if anyone, whoever builds the best version of X, we will like sort of state upfront what we will acquire it for, what we will pay for that bounty to be complete. That's one of the sort of startup ideas I'm most passionate about.

Absolutely. So if you're interested in trying out some experiments on this, like one big thing is, you know, I think you were mentioning like startup ideas that you had. So one thing I want to do is do prizes for startup ideas, you know, $25K for the best one in 30 days. And, you know, we have the right to put in a safe or something like that, you know, like, um, but, you know, we can, we can, we can figure out all those things. But if you, if you just want to try something, go to samtitanon.com/create and just submit a task, and instructions are there. And if it's good, we may even fund it. Okay, so that's to say, like, the process of creating a task, meaning drafting the copy, and the process of sponsoring a task are actually separable things. So you could have a lot of people create unfunded tasks, and just like a VC goes and invests in a startup, it's like a sponsor invests in a task and then boom, makes it go mainstream, right? So that itself is like an interesting concept where, you know, you don't just have, uh, like, um, let's say HubSpot having a feed of tasks. It also has a queue where people can propose things that would be interesting for HubSpot to try on its audience.

You know, great. That's sick, man. We're all right. So thank you for everything.

Yeah, thanks for, uh, thanks for coming on. You know, it's great to have a smart guy come and chat with a couple of bullshitters like us. So, uh, we, we enjoyed the conversation. Thanks.

Speak for yourself. You guys are too self-deprecating. You've done a great job. You know, your, uh, your show is great, and, uh, your, your feed is often insightful. And, uh, you know, uh, you know, mutual admiration. So great Ciao!