Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.
Kind: captions Language: en are you aware of what it’s like to talk to you um no i feel like i can rule the world i know i could be what i want to i put my law in it like my days this is probably all right before i introduce our guest i’m going to butter them up a little bit i’m going to butter them up because i’m i’m genuinely excited for this i there’s probably like three or four 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 best it’s not morning it’s going to be midnight soon where brayu 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 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 um so anyways the the reason i think this project podcast can 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 those one of the ways that i get a bunch of my ideas is from our guest biology who is who is here and he has been i don’t know what the exact quote was but i think mark andreasen at one point called you like the highest ideas per minute of anybody he’s met is there do you know that quote that i’m talking about he he sort of yeah kind remark uh i he said they were useful ideas too which is good so um uh for our ideas people don’t usually call them useful but that’s okay entertaining is okay yes we teach people how to like launch like a porn app you teach people you warn the world of a pandemic uh so like your 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 um and i think that you know one of the like if the 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 five people to like get that information flowing in who are the five 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 uh very forward thinking in the crypto world we’re going to talk about some non-crypto things um as well and then we’ll all try to uh steer clear of too much controversy and you know let’s let’s play ball nobody get cancelled here we go so um so biology is here at one point you were you’re a founder of i believe um 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 um clinical genomics so basically um you know one of the first companies to use genomics in medicine uh 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 high school 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 one gene or one variant at a time blood test which i actually uh just used i used it my wife and i uh for freezing embryos um used you it’s what’s it called miriam yes women’s health um you know division but basically it was it was called clu and syl council 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 and so yeah so sean that’s what we used it for the classic cloud 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 um you know of like internet technology consumer technology it might do so this decade we’ll see um hasn’t yet it’s sort of like how you know like high frequency trading and all the type of stuff is its own kind of sub area and crypto has now linked it up with the main body of tech you know where it’s programming uh you know programming on top of blockchains right um now that we have under 30 million sequence genomes and lots of people with genotypes i forget the latest number but both 23andme ancestry.com there’s millions of people who have personal genomes uh albeit genotypes rather than full sequences i think we’re going to start to see more kind of you know computations a lot of genomes have been installed in the same sense like a personal computer’s install 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 and what did you do after that um so i was and that was like a sorry actually that was like a 300 million dollar exit or something yeah yeah well 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 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 have all done fairly well um you know a deal if you just saw this became a unicorn or whatever last week all things that sort of i think fit my philosophy um because you know 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 mike 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 and there’s a rebirth after that and so i kind of think of that is sort of this stack of technologies you can 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 oh 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 uh we want to call his latest project right 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 well 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 17 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 tests so i got one i don’t know it was yesterday the day before it was basically like you can get 3 000 bucks in bitcoin if you create memes that will promote you know crypto and india or you know help help package that idea in a way that’s shareable and spreadable that’s what memes are um around crypto and 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 pat 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 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 know that’s my reason for 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 hustles 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 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 you know one needs both kinds right um but i think one area of overlap potentially with the hustle you know sort of audience is uh that you know a lot of time online as we know is just being wasted right it’s being thrown into a meat grinder i mean like the sheer number of hours when we really think about the millions or billions of hours that are used on social networks um look i think there’s a necessary step to get people online i think like on balance it was necessary but i think one issue is that social networks were invented and scaled 10 years seven years issued 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 boils 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’s to say locally it appears it cost 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 you know and actually the third is burn so we actually have another thing proof of work out right so basically you’re pursuing you truth health and wealth in that order and i think that’s actually the right priority order right so learn truth you know determine what’s true pursue health you know 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 you know to 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 gonna affect your long-term health you know and that’s actually going to affect even from a pure dollars and census it’s going to affect your wealth entering capacity and your capacity to provide value for your employees and your shareholders even if you 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 so that this true health and wealth thing is this like a personal saying or is this like the the is this like the slogan for 17 29 years for 1729 it’s basically i think of as the new liberte egalite fraternity okay uh that’s great i know it sounds ambitious but basically um as a tripartite motto for a new kind of state in the in the fullness of time um and uh the reason is that um 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 which is whenever i’m looking at an investment i think i asked the founders this my favorite question to ask the founder is awesome what is the world let’s fast forward three years what does the world look like if this has been adopted what is my 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 a 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 date 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 thousand followers but hundred thousand dollars in all your posting online right that would actually give material benefit to people right now you know for technical reasons facebook and twitter basically capture all the revenue and 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 um and they would maintain everything for you they give all the hosting you know 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 um you aren’t seeing a single dime out of it there’s zero creator modernization for the most part in these major social networks um i’m not saying okay not totally zero you could put link in bio at instagram and there’s some stuff but it has lagged right and um 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 become healthy and so if this becomes popular you don’t waste time online or not just waste time you learn things um 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 five python problems and you get a badge that says i’ve completed five 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 um 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 sold was in a folder on github so you know they have 25 courses in 10 10 weeks per course and 10 problems per course all 2500 problems were organized in folders on 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 um this person knows machine learning and i can see that as evidenced by the 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 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 a hundred 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 right i think one of the things we want to do at safety trying 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 right now the only thing we can declare is our interest right i’m interested in game of thrones you can’t provably declare i know how to calculate eigenvalues right i know arnoldii langsos you know i know you 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 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 gonna 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 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 workers 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 so i have to like i’d like life would be easier because it’s ridiculous if we could just write you off as crazy we could just move on with our day damn it the guy’s right so now we have to take each one of these ideas and actually say [ ] so this is actually so so let me let me speak to a few points here right so basically like the very short version is 70 trying is a place where you make money learn things level up with technological progressives interested in building a positive future right so it’s it you know on the east coast for media media businesses have sort of software engineers as second classes 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 private place they’re building dropbox or google or whatever and then the writers are content marketing i think here 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 is a sort of reaction against what i think of as the entropic internet right so if you know entropy or 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 on on the on the page right it’s just it’s like guaranteed to just fragment your brain into a thousand pieces right um and the opposite of that is something like you know what michael nielsen has been doing with the science of reminding you where you learn something and you don’t just learn it you get you know reminders at you know one minute and one hour and one day you know space repetition right of the same concept with a little bit of space repetition it gets stored in like your permanent memory banks you remember quantum computing for example right so right now what we’re doing with the entropic internet is for 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 you know if you have a really good memory then you don’t need the space repetition but most people don’t have such a good 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 it’s just sugar it’s just candy right if instead you can be much more deliberate about a less entropic internet and essentially a goal for yourself and you make one high level decision come to 7029 and then what we do is we basically serve you content that strengthens you right sean i i i think that we can take this in so many ways i want to talk about media eventually but where do this is so interesting what he’s like you you want to yeah like she 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 want to talk about this anonymous work thing which is somewhat like this i want to talk about this topic and i want to talk about what you just said about east coast media i would love to talk about that sure what do you want to do so let’s just jump around because i think that’s if this was let’s do it like we always do if this was just us hanging out having a conversation and the listeners are flies on the wall uh that’s what people like best so let’s do that so uh yeah what would you say right now if it’s a normal conversation you’d be like tell me what the you know let’s talk about media 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 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 something where i was teaching where i was teaching you about email because you’re this email thing is cool and i was like duh dude what the hell well i i i remember we had a call and i remember you had actually some insight i don’t think it was quite like oh my god no i i’m teasing you you you i 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 and that’s it got it yay i understand i understand so the thing is that um i was actually building 1729 at the time but your suggestion of actually having the subscriber thing on the front page like subscribe is actually what we did do so we did take that suggestion and i think it’s good um so but 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 subscribe 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 genetic genetics company you uh you know we’re cto of coinbase early in crypto and the current product in its product form is a newsletter 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 you say you want to know 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 yeah then maybe go from there so um you know you can you can date let’s say the modern era of tech different starting points well 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 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 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 there’s a sideshows like that thing you kind of you know supporting character um tech also ignored media and that that reason is different that’s because terry simmel 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 fail fail 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 built a pipe right you built facebook yeah aol did it too yeah exactly that’s right so facebook dropbox you um you know youtube twitter that entire generation of companies basically said we’re 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 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 know i showed 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 was also classified that was a major factor craig newmark effectively bought them off with uh the numark 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 office there are a bunch of stories in the 2000s there 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 but it seemed motivated in part by you craigslist 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 you know i don’t know him i’m just saying that i that’s that’s an observation uh craigslist by the way is a wildly profitable business it’s just private so nobody knows how much money it makes but it’s 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 you know 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 a corona is 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 was sort of 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 valuebag 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 tech lash 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 journal 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 five 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 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 is going 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 tech lash 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 you know a product announcement well i mean one’s objective one isn’t it yeah but a story has a bad guy i got a hero 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 gernon 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 and but they also haven’t been um what’s happened is a lot of the older lion 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 they didn’t have the middle 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 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 because media scripts humans just as code scripts machines right this is something i had in the ferris podcast so technically unpack that for a second for somebody who doesn’t get it right off the top you know 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’re the k 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 coming 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 is just show it being done right and that is kind of you know peter thiel’s you know a citation of rene gerard on mimesis i think is important like humans are memetic that’s how we acquire language that’s how we align on objectives you know and i think that um 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 uh contagious mental illness well we’ve sort of all stuck our brains into twitter right like this vat right 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 social distance away from each other offline but we packed close online like social networking packed clothes and what that meant was that bad means you know crazy memes could spread faster than ever wildfire whoosh like this right because everybody’s brain was connected over his brain right there’s you know there’s a famous uh cartoon of this um you know with the with the stock market where it shows the medic contagion with respect to prices you know and it’s like uh a guy says okay i can’t have any more of this goodbye and someone overhears and they’re like goodbye bye bye bye bye bye you know like uh and then and then there’s somebody else who overhears it and it’s like um i think the stock could really excel and then someone’s like excel sell sell sell sell and it’s actually really funny right because um you know it just sort of conveys these sort of like traveling waves of of memes right right now we don’t have great visuals on this we can’t uh we can’t do the molecular neurology of the meme like we can do the molecular biology of the gene uh let me explain what i mean by that the concept of genetics uh predated molecular genetics you know like mendel went into these phenomenological experiments where you could see you know like the the pea plants and so on big a little layer 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 right how are they stored how are they retrieved how are they accessed how they communicate people have done things on this with like you know the so-called jennifer aniston neuron right where you know it appears there’s actually sites in the brain that would actually store jennifer aniston like you see something and it just has you know where you see the words jennifer aniston you see the image jennifer anderson 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 but um this is from that uh it’s from paper a while ago when jennifer anderson was still i think very much in the news not as much today right um that concept seems to also exist to some extent within neural networks um you know like the new you know like the the the ai stuff that’s being done where you can actually seem to um express uh like a like an abstract concept where a neuron replacer i think open ai i forget who i think is opening i had a paper on this recently okay so we’re starting to actually get at how concepts abstract concepts could be represented in a quantifiable scientific way and you know we’re not yet there but eventually we’ll be able to see things like okay here’s this traveling wave of ideas memetic 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 so yeah so how does this so like i’m going to 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 on tap 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 yeah but basically you know there’s push notifications that’s just a mechanism of how nodes are connected but they on a side note on that i do think that within five to ten in addition to email and text message your um ens name will become probably the ensdam real estate crypto name will become the third most popular communications channel um well i want to talk about that in a second because that’s amazing but to wrap up the media thing so to what what did sean say earlier he was a he had a good question which was like in three years what’s the world going to 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 you know if you’ve heard that one yes yeah yeah it’s uh uh i didn’t have time to write a short thing i was too busy doing the long term so so excuse my digression and you know maybe i can edit this down into sound bytes or 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 six 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 tech journalism tech.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 shows that actually tech is like 30 points more diverse in the media outlets that constantly give tech [ ] 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 and so on and so forth there’s actually a number of ways where uh the narrative of these media corporations where 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 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 the brains have been melted by corporate propaganda to such an extent now i don’t think any tech company would be you know people talk about tech arrogance or i 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 right it’s mathematical truth it’s truth that anybody has access to um you know as i mentioned in a previous podcast basically everybody knows exactly how much bitcoin somebody has you know 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 peop we’re going to be we’re going to be covering that we’re going to be covering these transactions and we’re going to know well is that i mean here’s what i think yeah here’s what i’m playing here that’s only one that’s only one niche that’s an interesting one yeah yeah okay so step two is defy 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 right maybe most of the economy over time all property eventually becomes digital should i clarify why i think that because that’s that’s a provocative statement why does all property become digital because much of the physical world becomes printing okay so obviously you can print out a piece of paper right um 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 robotics 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 has sort of again sort of have 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 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 you create and say i’m sorry i’m installing that premise okay all property becomes digital so that’s the second phase right you know who owns what bitcoin and then you know who owns what loans bonds stocks assets all the type of stuff okay but the third phase is 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 um you know will this price go up or down or more interestingly uh will the temperature go up um in you know this uh this this farmland so i need to pay out this insurance because there’s a drought okay that’s like an example of a smart contract which combines a financial aspect and a fact about the world right 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 okay and uh that’s the crypto oracle problem where basically oracle’s broadcast data on chain and they sign it and they say i’m reporting that this is true i the weather channel i’m saying that it’s 82 degrees in pokey today at this time right and i give a timestamp like temperature feed and this is happening not just for temperature but it’s happening for um you know 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 a thousand chronovirus patients it actually has a feed of this patient at this time this patient at that time um redfin or zillow doesn’t just publish aggregate stats it actually has a feed of which real estate transactions are happening at what time okay and from this accurate 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 you know the 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 and the reason they go on chain is that it’s profitable you can trade off of that information right you can make money off of 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 you know high floating you know concept but the macro concept is as all of those individual oracles go into this thing i call the ledger record you now have cryptographically verifiable facts about the world you have a digital history an unalterable history you can tell what happened when and in a sense this is kind of just the next step in the sense that we’ve got all these tweets right which actually give us a reasonable i shouldn’t say perfect but some degree of the intellectual history of you know the last decade right uh if the twitter database was downloadable and eventually you know either something like it either it will be or someone will scrape it or something like that because you know storage just keeps improving so you can store all of twitter on a micro drive 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 data set 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 and that is actually a very powerful thing where we start to actually displace a corporate media corporation as the font of truth with cryptography instead all right let me pause there i know it’s a whole download but maybe i can express it better i’m going to summarize some of the some of the interesting ideas that you brought up so i think uh and you could take drink of water you deserve it um so so i think one of the interesting things was the kind of observation of me first media ignoring tech and then sort of as tech became more powerful ignoring media and 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 that’s one interesting trend if you’re building a company right now that’s very much worth considering uh yeah and in order to do that you’re gonna have to flex different muscles uh storytelling memes packaging you know different things you don’t have to do once i give you my meme i mean own a media corporation or be owned by one there you go uh 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 diversity yes 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 you know one father to the next son so there’s all these hypocrisy underneath that uh and how do you get away from that while there is this general movement of all things becoming digital it’s not just software it’s the world sort of uh you know the whole world becomes software and as the whole world becomes 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 you know in order to enforce these betting markets or these prediction markets or these stock markets um then you then they will be rewarded through these sort of micro economic incentives for being accurate or punished 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 the weatherman becomes a sensor who tells the weather that’s right that’s right or but this but this this is kind of a little the okay so i i understand what your your vision is here but it’s missing a whole lot wait wait wait wait wait wait let me give you the second part of it before you because you might be right okay the first layer that base layer is the raw facts cryptographical attestations right from 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 right um you can match it up you can audit it other people can audit it so you can have a second thing that’s auditing you know one out of a hundred of the measurements of the first guy um there’s a hyper geometric distribution which is like you know auditing um things off an assembly line like pick a ball and see if it’s corrupted or not uh but then the second layer is uh advocates on top of those oracles okay so these are humans and you just assume that a human has an editorial judgment you know why because 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 but you 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 going to do is uh 1729 you’re i don’t going to hire 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 lecture record um and then you’re gonna hire 200 journalists to editorialize sorry you’re not quantum journalist advocates uh to editorialize some of the the facts correct no so i’ve got a different so it’s actually useful i would call what you just said like uh i don’t mean it’s a bad way but sort of like the real world looking model um here’s at least what i’m planning to do which may well fail but you know at least just what i’m thinking about so first is it’s decentralized media so what i want to do is invest in lots of individual uh you know diverse influencers pseudonymous voices around the world okay so basically you know everything that’s not brooklyn books you all these other voices that are underrepresented in our conversation ideologically demographically internationally technologically you know like scientific depth being brought to bear those are kind of folks that i want to fund is that right chosen by you you decentral you know you know what i mean yes yes that’s right but but the the like all the tools and stuff that we use for selection funding like the yc style safe equivalent and so on um all those will be public so i want people to pick it up and copy it and so on and so forth right so i’m not at all proprietary about that i’m just trying to set an example uh for what it’s worth sort of similar like you know last night um you know i tweeted out like for the code relief thing in india and you know the notion co and the um the uh actually the hubspot founder uh dharmesh actually um rt 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 uh figure out like what the right version of using crypto oracles in content is okay um 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 you know you know portfolio companies or readers or something like that is um because you know we all uh it’s all it’s all a relay race right you know you hand the baton and maybe someone else can figure out something you did it and so on right 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 of 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 729.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’s 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 a oil platform near england and call yourself sea land right instead you have a community that you build in the cloud and they go and take pieces of land all around the world uh which are like you know cul-de-sacs or apartment complexes and so on 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 discontiguous and it’s networked on the internet right 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 to 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 concrete 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 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 three definitions the first is just a city where startups happen which is where what san francisco used to be um you know uh the okay nowadays it’s just you know like somebody who’s choosing san francisco for a startup i crinkled 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 and this or 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 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 suarez which is amazing okay and the third definition is a city that’s a startup itself like prospero.hn or cul-de-sac.com or the various startup cities that pronamos.vc is investing in and um the the thing is i think uh you know obviously when i when i said 2000 tech companies 2010 scripted protocols 2020 startup cities 2030’s and upper 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 uh i was going to ask you a different question maybe that’s a good one just a good one to drop on your listeners bitcoin 2010 was a pretty good buy or whatever you know yeah exactly that and i actually wanted to know you got into crypto early on i want to know actually what was the uh you know where were you kind of when you first how did you actually first hear about it was it the white paper that you stumbled through a conversation with a friend so how did you hear about it how did you get yes and then how long did it take you to sort of like you know the mind virus infected you completely and you’re like oh wait this is actually gonna work so i would love to hear that from you yeah so you know i have to recollect the exact timeline but basically it was something where i’d been thinking about economics and money after the financial crisis because everything broke and so you start thinking more deeply about you know the system that you just thought was functional just shattered into a million pieces and or just didn’t work and um i’d been thinking about like how the true definition of money is energy in a sense of j-o-u-l-e-s joules like visualize like an iphone you coming together like like the rare earth elements and the glass and the aluminum and so on and this and the the silicon just rush like this molecular assembly and how much energy would it actually take you to assemble that from its constituent parts you know like in chemistry you can you can quantify this you know with like uh various various chemical processes how much how much input energy do you need to catalyze it um or to make the reaction run and um so that was like 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 right that’s a genuine reduction because humans were able to do this thing more efficiently today than we were in the past and that’d be the kind of deflation that you want joule deflation where because of technology we’ve actually made this thing cheaper to do than we used to be able to do right um now i’ve been thinking about this and then you know one of my friends you know basically like you know i’d write these essays or whatever uh but just this is before i was a public you know public figure that sounds like anything just you know my academic friends was like okay you should you know look at this bitcoin thing and uh i forget exactly when that was 2010 or 2011 but basically um i thought it was really interesting because it was also using energy you know in a sense a different way to kind of support value um but it was doing something i thought was very counterintuitive the most counter to the 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 that was something which took me a while to wrap my head around not that i thought it was bad i just i 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 you know like had made certain design decisions now in retrospect uh these are genius moves but like having all your transactions out there in public on chain um just would have seemed like a 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 um so i i followed bitcoin but it was actually only after the 2011 crash and recovery that i was like okay this thing really has legs um 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 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 i think we first met january 2013 very very very early on in the history of coinbase um and actually like i used the queen bees api in a class that i taught that year um and in a mooc course and uh you know basically that was kind of my story of getting into bitcoin and crypto um then 2013 boom of course happened but it was basically the crash from 32 down to two dollars in 2011 and the subsequent recovery up to like 10 bucks in 2012 that convinced me the thing had staying power because it’s very rare that you have something endure a 90 plus drop and then come back right that’s extremely rare 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 two 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 as a partner which is part investor still part academic but you also have this third part of viewers which is that you’ve built companies so you you helped build you this is like traditional like this is the most normal part of you which isn’t even nor like like the most normal part of you helped build like a 50 billion dollar company called coinbase so the most normal part of you uh 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 [ ] that’s the most normal part of you is that you you built that [ ] 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 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 use post-economic i didn’t use that phrase tim did but it’s a it’s a good phrase it was the most baller phrase that i’ve 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 [ ] 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 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 as you can see 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 micro task that people can do to learn something and earn a little bit of money and so i think you have i think you embody 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 and that’s why i was getting like what the hell are you up to 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 um but i think it’s close right and um so the you know you know tinder is lust and twitter is wrath and arguably early google which is pretty actually you know that’s pretty high brow like search you know but arguably that’s sloth you know um and you know uh then ubereats or or doordash is bloody i love those companies don’t give your 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 um have a very end loaded benefit you know like things like ethereum or rome research.com for example you know that rewarded an academic mindset at the beginning it was very long term right but even ethereum for example there was like a speculative upside you know which was the visceral short-term thing where you could align the short-term mentality with the long-term mentality um but i have to bring you back go ahead go call this bring your best go ahead yeah yeah i gotta bring it 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 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 one percent or less of the work it’s 10 to 20 of the return but at zero percent 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 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 um and so computers were always just a tool and business was 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 you’ve got a good thing the reason i did that was in academia if you raise 10 million dollars in a grant raises in the right term you get a 10 million grant and each row of data costs a thousand dollars 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 and also that large sample thing so the thing is that the zero percent 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 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 that’s cool i i dig that but what i was curious about like just what’s your life um philosophy towards certain things specifically how do you think about execution for example well it was just like did were you just like well i’m just gonna go and like make this company sell it get the bag now i can do all this crazy wild [ ] and everything else is upside and like and that’s why i’m wondering because 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 it’s interesting i was curious like in that sense i’m not capable of i should say i capable of it i 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 um i really believed in both you know council and you know crypto and and you know earn and coinbase um and so like that’s how i could put in that level of energy and like you know buffett has this concept of um i don’t agree with a lot of his stuff nowadays actually but this concept was as good as like you know if you’re if you’re waiting to do what you want uh 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 tll says concept of how do you achieve your 10-year goal in six months you know so yeah i think that what i tried to do 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 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 uh it’s it’s you know d isha d shaw is the guy who created the the hedge fund yeah the hedge fund they 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 indeed shaw was like hey are you sure you want to do this yeah yeah yeah exactly right so i mean there’s a lot of effect to 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 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 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 up 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 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 nine to five morning person who liked routine who liked you 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 you um because that was kind of the peak of centralization homogeneity routinization structure is 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 covet 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 an 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’s a content consumer you just go home sit down watch the box and um and if you try 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 will standing out today it’s interesting because i think we are in the middle of a um you know the battle of the bulge which that was it’s basically like germany’s counter-attack and the waiting days of the war which is actually a pretty ferocious counter-attack but ultimately in the long sweep of history was just a counter attack and the long sweep was there right and um what i think we have now is a strong counter-attack in favor of conformity by both you know kind of like the book contingent and like you know ccp right and so i think like it’s going to be a quite a fight because in my in my model of kind of like these memes and and things all battling each other in this gigantic continent this cloud continent um one of the most powerful memes is a meme that says there should be no other memes before me so you said something that i want to i want to go to you said the world is becoming more biology-like uh meaning uh so what does that mean what does that mean that means that um from nine to five 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 uh status quo bias to disruption bias you know from um you know sort of the physical world to the informational world the theoretical world like ideas matter more ideas can shape the world more you know um all those kinds of things in many ways you know for example something like soylent okay um itself like i i like the company and you know rob reinhart the founder and his friend and so on um i prefer like a keto version of soylent of which one of them exists okay but as minus the keto thing the of just not having to think about it so i can 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 uh candy bars right and so if you compare it against you know what’s better then you you’ll miss the fact that many people who are busy don’t eat well and to 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 you know fit my preferences for okay it should be programmable it should be decentralized there should be you know like you shouldn’t have somebody be able to do bailouts and so on and the world became more decentralized and so so in some sense that prediction of the future is just something where the world is sort of fitting those preferences you know um 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 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’s 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 um instagram is for people who go outside is for depressed intellectuals you know can i um go ahead the reason why can i explain what you look like right now um like i’m in a i’m in a dungeon here you’re you’re supposed to be this like big shot crypto entrepreneur guy you have what looks like a like a super super old camera zero lighting uh just looking down at like your video setup is so horrible i thought it was gonna 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 economics we caught him in transition he’s 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 um it’s sort of something where i go zero or a hundred you know on something and you know so i just use the defaults unless i like actually engage and so uh you know i’m just learning acoustics and i’m learning we’re talking [ ] a month ago you’re absolutely right though you’re right go ahead and then okay 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 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 yeah you can figure that out 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 line 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 right 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 biology today let’s say you don’t have the tracker you don’t have the name 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 would 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 connects all that type of stuff and of course each of these areas will domain knowledge you know but computer science and statistics are 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 what physics was to the early 20th century cs and stats is to this century physics was awesome for you know understanding the natural world all these physicists could you know 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 you know because you’re doing this in a phenomenological way and and we can do it way better um and uh now today because so much of the world is a constructed virtual world you know because we’re interacting with it on screens you know something like cryptocurrency is a constructed virtual right social networks are constructed virtual world 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 a line you know the ikigai concept because yeah so like the four things i 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 what’s your favorite fun doing that’s right exactly that’s right so thank you guy 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 it will all become crypto you can understand genomics because the acs gs and ts 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 so it’s like a general purpose computer it’s a general purpose set 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 that’s 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 counter reaction of that is going to be this great migration in fact i wrote about this in 2013 there’s a article i wrote called software is reorganizing the world where essentially i said um because the internet is breaking geography because you’re closer to people who are three thousand miles away than your next door neighbors uh the underlying premises of the city and the nation state are being invalidated let’s say geographical proximity no longer leads to cultural proximity and therefore you know the the uh 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 kovitz 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 room go ahead sorry one second you said geographic proximity is not is no longer linked to cultural proximities he said it was that the phrase yes that’s a powerful one which 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 a data center you know like with virtual machines you know like you cut up a server into a bunch of virtual machines and 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 don’t know who’s below you don’t know who’s left or the right if you don’t recognize the people in the hallway but who do you recognize you recognize a person from 3000 miles away who you’re laughing with on snapchat or you know like video chat or anything like that you recognize that guy on the other side of the world who you’re arguing with you know your social network your friends and your enemies or whatever you know your friends and your frenemies like they’re just scattered around the world you know some of them might be geographically close by but even that is pointillistic you know it’s like okay this person this building this person this building this was this building and i don’t know anybody in between you know right 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 that’s just called my friends now at this point right by the way 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 discreet parts here 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 it’s the way that well that’s that’s a very optimistic wonderful way to put it i i like that i like that term but like i have i’m from missouri okay my family lives in missouri they once one’s a teacher and the husband works at a bar their kids go to school the exciting [ ] that they do is play softball on saturdays do you ever ask yourself the ideas that coming up with or that i’m predicting the future they’re really only impacting 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 gonna look like i absolutely do so here i’m gonna put on my pragmatic executive whatever hat right which is you know you have to focus at the beginning right and um the way i look at it is the v1 goal is to build a community at least with 1729 then i’ll talk about the v2 is to build a community of technological progressives who are like i mean sort of like yc’s founders but not just tech founders um you know people who are media 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 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 or broader class of founders including media founders protocol founders community founders influencers etc and getting you know some agreement among this group along the set of ideas and then recognizing that i personally cannot solve all the problems of the and um figuring out how we can build for lack better term positive sum user interfaces for those folks who may not be as interested in the world of ideas and the stuff above right how do we build uh not just positive sound but aligning user interfaces okay and a user interface i use in the broadest sense you know um 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 and if you see the uh the guy from chad who who just died on the battlefield no no so basically i think it’s 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 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 a aspect of being a king or being a leader was you were willing to go into battle right even in like world war one 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 and in the communities and in the in the structures i want to build in the future i think that alignment has to be quantifiable now we’re actually seeing this in crypto i do think that you know one thing people don’t get is that crypto is not you know 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 okay so let’s talk and look 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 it’s apocryphal i’m not sure exactly who said you’ve heard around and uh so the people who who have founded and run these gigantic crypto networks that are sometimes in the multiple billions or trillions of dollars are essentially like you know basically they’re like the you know a fed chair right at least of a state if not the and they’ve gotten there by um founding something not by winning this whole popularity process where as a gerontocrat at 70 they paid all their dues and now they finally actually can actually put their theories into practice when they’re 70 something you know 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 uh let me pause there i think sean had something yeah i actually wanted to transition to a topic 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 gonna talk about crypto social networks so um we’ve talked about big cloud on here and we got a lot of flack we talked about it because i said wow i think i think sean i gave us flack yeah we gave each other flag i was really excited and you were like dude you’re pumping this thing 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 uh and that’s exciting to me like i’m a product person you see tons of products you see tons of apps you see tons of announcements and um you don’t always see anything you know it’s sometimes years go by between seeing something really really interesting and the really interesting thing about big cloud that we talked about was number one um the growth hack how do you get valuable people onto a new network um well they loaded up a bunch of people’s accounts with a bunch of money and they gave you know they used economic incentive to bring high status individuals to a new network so that was interesting the second interesting thing was that um you could you know sort of this robin hood meets twitter you can buy somebody’s coin and in doing so if i identify biology as an interesting person in 2014 as some people did um 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 uh and so you know there’s some interesting parts but the there’s also a bunch of controversy and i think that the place i want to start is i think that these decentralized social networks of which big cloud is one are very interesting because they are like um they took facebook’s most valuable thing right like the facebook database the social graph that facebook would uh you know defend with its life uh and they basically put it out there you know 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 uh and i wanted to hear what you see in these social crypto social networks um i think you will probably when you look at your north star you also don’t see like 30 years from now it’s you know mark zuckerberg owning the four most powerful social platforms and uh we’re 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 um and it just disclosure by the way i am an investor in big cloud like a small early investor um i wasn’t involved with the project or anything but i um 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 op code when it’s executing okay and one of the consequences is you know with twitter or facebook they have the twitter 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 if those companies had let the api be completely open twitter’s was for a while then somebody could clone the entire twitter and sell ads against and then twitter would be reduced to essentially an api provider and they couldn’t monetize that successfully enough to prevent that from happening right so i think you know tweetdeck and so we’re essentially cloning the entire interface earlier i don’t remember exactly the details but i think that was it so fundamentally the issue was that the the business model for creating an api and a protocol that was totally open that had state was not feasible then okay what i mean by state by the way just for your audience which is maybe less technical that’s like database state that stored state that is um information that’s not transient okay uh you know 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 um whereas facebook has state there’s a huge amount of data they’ve got your photo and your messages and all that type of stuff right the crucial thing that crypto enables the reason it’s not just disrupting wall street but disrupting silicon valley is that as i said it’s open state and open execution so we’re moving into the third model of uh internet technologies you know web 3. how much of your day is spent doing some of this like crazy thinking do building and working on a lot of the stuff i mean are you um do you grind real hard on all this stuff um what do you spend your day doing that’s a good question um i mean dave varies because this is all heavy heavy stuff yeah everything we’ve discussed is like pretty heavy no and you’re what it’s you’re just rattling this off like as if you just you’ve like you’ve like already said what you’re you’ve already you’ve thought through and 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 uh energy are you devoting to this throughout your day and or like you just go for walks and shoot the [ ] like what do you what do you do you know what i have to spend energy on i have to spend like uh 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 whatever right um what i find hard is stuff that other find easy at times like just oh remembering that that meeting is in 15 minutes or something like that you know because i get it getting grossed on what you know um and and so what i’ve just built technological workarounds to help with that um and so i guess the answer to your this is just how i recreate whatever i just i just i can’t stop it you know i just go as like i walk around and think oh that that’d be cool this would be cool 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 um i think part of it is i do yeah just say the truth i don’t care if you’re bragging 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 decentralized 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 right so um the um those those are like active problems and um then i 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 this was a problem that you had two 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 help popularize the idea maze concept right was that you who uh kind of coined the id amaze content i coined the term and it was funny because you never know what’s going to resonate with people you know dixon actually go ahead i was gonna 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 may is i’ll paraphrase kind of just my understanding of it which was there’s this like movie you know this this the steven spielberg version of startups is founder wakes up aha eureka i know you 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 i solve the problem and then i just do the thing and then like you know reality or at least what my reality was more like was i’m interested in like solving this problem for people or i’m interested in this like kind of new space and it’s all kind of foggy and then i think 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 [ ] this is not how things actually work this was this product this uh distribution strategy is not quite right okay let me backtrack three 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 that is actually quite a normal process for thinking through it as an entrepreneur trying to try 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 you know carry on go back to the go back go back a few steps and then figure out a new way so did i did i butcher it or is that no that’s quite good in fact you know now like eight years later or what have you on it um i’ll give a few other thoughts one is it’s actually similar to like mining for gold right you know like house i don’t know if you see that quote that circulated um about san francisco during the gold rush era and how similar it was 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 star culture where they’re mining for gold and their theories about this river or this mountain or whatever is the best way to get it and uh you know of course tech culture is not just like the gold aspects the technology aspect but that aspect is similar and 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 sort of like a physical gold mine so that’s one interesting thing 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 uh 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 it did like 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 two meant that it just became a completely different experience than sort of the private set of warrens that facebook is right 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 right whereas facebook is something where i probably can’t view that facebook post so i don’t share it with so it’s a fundamentally private experience so it’s actually in a sense less viral now of course i think you know facebook it’s a more successful company and i think it gets way more crap than twitter even though facebook is twitter’s 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 but positive and negative all the good stuff comes out of twitter and all the bad stuff it’s just it’s actually polygram at a good comment on this where it’s like the terms are so large that you can’t even initially sum them to see like whether it’s positive or negative some overall right um oh where was i say i lost my trade of thought uh give me we’re talking about the id maze and you’re yeah that’s right okay so come back so now one thing i will say that i’ve grown to appreciate more the the specific idea makes you decide to run really does matter and can be like a thousand x multiplier on the result right so you know look genomics was if 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 um basically that generation of companies was i shouldn’t say capped but it’s somewhere between like a few hundred mil to a bill or something there wasn’t a hundred billion dollar company that to my knowledge came out of that um and it was sort of like that was like zipcar era and then there’s gonna be an uber era coming up right and it’s really hard to know whether you’re in the zip car or the uber era of um and often there’s iterations on a theme and it just breaks through like and sometimes things seem tired and old like sub stack two or three years ago may have seemed like uh all right whatever just another blog who cares but adding those two features of a monetizability and b newsletter so that you’ve got um you know because of blog by default i mean it’s not i think maybe you can with blogspot do emailing and so on but it wasn’t like set up for that wasn’t smack in the face for both user and writer those two aspects really changed things and um you know have made subzec a breakout where that was not obvious two years ago or three years ago right ben ben thompson of strategy which subject 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 and then it actually worked right part of this is also the decline of the existing media environment that’s what 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 okay here became an amazing idea because there’s certainly 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 is a chance of being an apocalypse shift 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 apocal shift by the way might be five or ten 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 won’t 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 um 2014. just uh i was just going to ask you all about teleport um i’m i’m trying to find the old website was it dot was it just dot com.org why so can you well the way that i understand it is teleport was going to crawl aggregate tons and tons of data and tell you the best place to live yeah because here’s the 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 well it wasn’t just economically was it wasn’t it just 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 it like how much more is it worth and and i say implicitly it’d be like okay this place is you know three thousand dollars a month in expense but this place is thirty five hundred dollars 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 do 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 using [Music] 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 um why did you say sten and why did you say they did fine well i say they just because they basically just define their careers as a function of that those are the two co-founders with me so stan and silver early skype employees they’ve done they’re doing great um and it was 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 by this guy which i love i think that guy’s awesome yeah yeah he’s he’s uh he’s actually uh levels i o 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 added people or 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 weather is 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 constrained something oh to be happy yeah yeah so 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 uh car can only hold so many pounds it can only take so many packages at a time b um you know it has to have this many stops you know between refueling and so on and so forth you have these constraints on the optimization okay um 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 or third order things um 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 scalar and so you can basically to first order 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 interest 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 band or is y legal you know and so 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 uh different times 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 said here is that it would be the search engine that would give you the maximum value it would basically be something where by changing your xy location you might gain you know like fifty thousand dollars hedonically of which maybe twenty or 30 thousand dollars is economic and the other remainder is in quality of life let me pause here could this company co could this had worked um i mean i was okay it wasn’t a failure but it was it’s something like zipcard uber if it had been an operation or if it had been like the main thing in 20 if we had started in 2019 and 2020 it’d be in the pandemic right like um or you know arguably it’s still early i think it’s still early because 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 on like the the 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 the demo and i’ll definitely take a look so i think we’re still very early in that space when 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 entrepot maybe i mispronounced it e-n-t-r-e-p-o-t so that’s basically like a uh like a commercial center um you know typically a port 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 garcia martinez 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 like a you know 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 you know demilitarized zone it’s got good banking rule of law because 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 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 there’s a beach place 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 stuff done not just south of the border but in south america there’s a lot of talent down there of course but now you just kind of have eyes on it looking at a new light and you know there’s actually another aspect non-obvious aspect which covet is going to increase investment you know what that no the world has gone remote and 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 things called time.is i posted on this tweeted on this right but what that means is longitudinal arbitrage okay that’s interesting airbnb founders or whatever they did this where they went and worked in argentina because it’s sort of like 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 so you can go i’m sure but yeah i don’t know if it was was it coinbase was 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 columbus uh are you so interesting are you uh are you aware of what it’s like to talk to you i would say it is like um 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 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 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 dick 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 okay 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 you know that uh when you’re you you’re com your brain is completely normal to you you live there all the time uh you know and and for me and sam i don’t know i can’t speak for saying but i know for me um i love uh 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 i’m you’re the only person i i talk to frequently that that makes me feel out of out of my depth where i’m like you know what i 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 what i was who do you feel that way with oh i mean like feinman ramanujan like you know there’s like geniuses that walk 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 ball uh andreessen mark 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 is this is what 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 thoughts bars with um and those might be other people that people should go follow or listen to if they like what they’re getting from you maybe that’s another person i think i think you know mark and i have kept up a high bandwidth conversation for almost a decade now mark and ben um for sure uh neville robbie kant um you know who’s a very good friend of mine uh and um armstrong fred ursum um these are really smart guys who like basically folks who i get a bounce every single day you know and i think you know i just played tennis with them but it’s also something where they’re not exactly playing the same sport you like racquetball versus tennis so as i learned something you know um i don’t know i mean like i i i i try to learn i mean 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 men even if the interviewer 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 that’s actually useful because you often have to do something within a company 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 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 biology.com posts on india you know like uh why india should buy how india legalizes crypto um ad crypto india stack i think that’s sort of more the 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 it’s comprehensible but that’s like the install software in the most eff install intellectual software the most efficacious way but they do you know what i mean by that install intellectual software yeah exactly yeah that makes sense to me when you say it yes yeah you get it right like what go ahead sam you’re gonna say so so you you’ve been blogging on there for a while i’ve i’ve been reading it uh you’ve been doing you did teleport like in what 2014 which uh right or ish um which was about like kind of making it making predictions you’ve been all about predictions i mean it seems like that’s been part of 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’re really bought in on them and they’ve proven to be wrong that’s a good question um i mean there’s lots of things so many things have 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 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 i was writing about but um i wasn’t even speaking publicly on it um i think that one big thing i got wrong was um i i was just never 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 um social networks like i i i sort of got the appeal of it being like a facebook online remember the concept of a facebook i’m gonna forget 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 it’s like three 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 um when you came no i yeah you’re aware that yeah well yeah and i mean i had my brothers you’re probably 10 years older than me yeah i have brothers at all yeah i know you’re talking about okay well so that’s something which um was a physical facebook and i understood the appeal of like putting that online but i i i only actually understood like the power of social networks uh 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 five hours of presentations without a plane flight you know um at my laptop in 10 minutes and get the important bits and i was 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 it might sound like arrested you might say small yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah 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 it was only after and the thing is that the reason that genomics thing really piqued my interest is because i realized that was something that would only be feasible when the thing has achieved such massive scale that even this very 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 i don’t know belgian cooking recipes or something like that right french cooking recipes maybe that’s not that niche but 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 um i think that i probably overestimated genomics you know uh what i what i got wrong with was i saw i think all the technology and the computer sciences all of that you know 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 like was just dropping through a cliff in 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 covet testing them doing things like holding back the johnson johnson vaccine because like one 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 one and type two errors both false positives and false negatives and uh if you are rejecting good drugs 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 of the territory well no no actually that’s why i didn’t take the position and in fact it was a surprise 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 bomber with satya and then they reformed and embraced open source right so 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 and you exit the fed with bitcoin it required like basically you know this uh this 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 you know vision of the future right um but some people got the potential very early on like california was speculating that could be like one to ten million dollars per coin very very very early on i think like on the first threads like if bitcoin took over right i wonder if he was satoshi’s friend or a colleague or something like that that was just sort of lending his name to this anonymous project to give people you know a second look at it right hey actually this this pseudonymous guy is actually maybe better than he seems it’s possible right point is though that parallel system was built outside the existing system and was completely ethical because everybody who is engaged in it have 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 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 forced on you top down from above you had no ability to take the non-inflated usd after 2008 right but if you disagree enough with the cryptocurrencies monetary policy you can fork the entire economy go your own way right that minority report does exist it may not be successful but then you know that’s in the execution so one thing i think about a great deal what is to um our existing institutions what crypto was to finance right so you can see already a crypto law with smart contracts for big chunks of law you can start to see crypto 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 dumping their chests and saying science capital s you know or with quotations right but rather cryptographic facts by the way can i 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 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 grabbed 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 than this case forever most time it’s like a few emailed comments and like make a new figure okay right so the 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 every second science is actually the ostensible basis of our civilization why it’s no longer religion right 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 right science says there’s 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 uh 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’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 up because you know the answer isn’t in my view to go to astrology or wu 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 an opposition what is it math okay what do i mean by that when i say math greater than science 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 payballs there’s also a concept called reproducible research which says that that scientific paper should be fully reproducible 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 uh calculated parameters from that data set okay there’s there’s uh sites like distill.pub or if you look at what openai does like a lot of their uh papers are basically like interactive websites which operate in this fashion where the underlying data set is like templating the page okay what’s the point the point is that um 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 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 and mathematical economics defeated like these quote scientists and i put them as quote-unquote scientists because they’re not you know one of the big things by the way is it’s like um scott alexander calls it the skin suit you know like science is like newton and maxwell and the crucial thing is like maxwell’s equations have trillions of independent replications every single time you pick up a cell phone you’re doing an independent replication of you know the equations for the e and the b field for the electrical and magnetic field right and and a thousand other things you you there’s there’s equations for quantum mechanics that you’re effectively replicating independently confirming because the engineering wouldn’t work if the science system 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 right 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 and 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 refreshed blockchain sean maybe i’ve sent it a whole bunch of times but i never sort of tracked and traced the the transaction before you know sort of the log i never looked at the log of the transaction look at the log and for example yesterday when i went and said i was donating you know money for indian coveted 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 was going to donate at the time that i said i was going to do it right um and 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 fact this assertion actually happened that you had the digital signature that owned this cryptocurrency zone that seems like a very limited scope but as i said we can expand that to property we can spend it to lots of other things right and crypto oracles what’s the point the point is uh if you take the concepts of open access the concepts of uh reproductive research the concept of independent replication and its proximity to the multiple confirmations of on-chain data right uh you can think about something where oh actually all these people have computers so if the code and the data set 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 so you can import a library from github because again it’s all open state right and so now you actually start to make far more checkable and cumulative it is only the uploading process which now is in doubt everything that’s at least given this data i can check their calculations i can check their figures i can check their tables 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 uh 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 you know 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 payballs or it’s like a thousand different formats right and this is similar to how you know banking before crypto was a thousand different formats it’s like you know this wire transfer and this address and so on and crypto uniforms it or like it unifies it in a uniform address right a dress format that’s universal and global point being this is actually a way that uh 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 do 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 like a quick question you’re 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 you’re just you’re just a weirdo and i love it you’re just so interesting you’re just so odd and like who like you’re just sitting here talking about math and science and we did crypto we did starting traditional tech companies we did uh where to live battle the ball i don’t think about where to live yeah yeah like you you you’re eclectic um well we can go deep on a specific topic if you want actually i’d love you to teach me something about newsletters um you built a large one um so maybe you 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 1am right 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 newsletters it’s unfortunate it’s unfortunate that crypto is far more lucrative but uh oh you’re okay you’re 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 five minutes on that have returned more than like five months of work of course you’re still taking capital risk you know it’s not like a 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 foundation i did i and i actually i there’s like a famous story that i retail over and over and over again but the short of it is i was friends friendly with ross albright um oh and and uh when he was arrested i didn’t know that that’s who he was and i was sitting next to my co-worker and i go billy my guy ross just got arrested you heard of this thing called silk road and billy it’s not same as billy draper oh and he was like and he was like yeah my dad said that bitcoin is like gonna 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 myself i mean poor ross i didn’t actually know his name was albright i thought it was all bricked uh but uh all bro actually i don’t know how it’s pronounced but uh yeah poor ross definitely uh 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 all the malfeasance that came out afterwards that 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 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 the they were faked whether that was entrapment or he meant to murder someone that’s up for debate yeah i i i said i haven’t gotten into the guts of it i like that you uh i like that you try to like and 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 [ __ ] but it’s entertaining so i’m gonna i’m gonna do it anyway i’m gonna read it watch it anyways uh and it’s sort of like you know warren buffett he’s brilliant in one thing and then he you know drinks like whatever six jokes a day and eats mcdonald’s every day you know he’s mcdonald’s for breakfast every he’s living until the 90s so his constitution manages to keep up with somehow or yeah yeah i think he’s he’s pretty stressed for you which i think is it 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 a a big kardashian pin um you see basically asking like what you know creature comfort type stuff um i mean you know like you know like things you know us normal humans do no i mean i i like i’m on i’m on twitter or whatever you know and that’s like certainly a huge waste of my time um 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 um i uh i once watched a movie yeah i watched tons of movies tons and tons of movies basically like less so recently though it’s interesting 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 rip on this and then come back to your question okay 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’d charge up the laptop i’d also print out the screenshots in the event that there was a power outage and then keep the laptop and the screenshots on the passenger side of the car as i drove okay and that’s that’s 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 gone so woke and uh and that’s just like being preached to right even if you might agree or disagree with some of the like you know principles there it’s just like all right again blah blah blah right and it’s very predictable it means the characters are hacknide it means the messaging is is is just so on the nose you know that 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 like it’s just also 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 it’s a com you might think 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 this degree in fact actually i’m not i don’t quite say they’re guilty till proven innocent but unlike you know five or ten 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 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 you know and so i i think there’s been like the college flipping for me at least in terms of hiring from these places and said you know you want to hire the the guy from the midwest or the middle east who just has like you know just a different set of values and it’s just more hungry you know um what’s up yeah exactly right what’s your hollywood 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’s like a fridge uh so you know before i started my first company i was actually about as jacked as as possible to be with my south asian physionomy um and uh so it 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 uh you’re at least what i told myself the time the employees you know you give your responsibility to them which um 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 have to put 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 um the uh you just don’t have the energy to do that in quite the same way right you can’t tolerate asthma are you yo are you are you fit now i’m fitter than i was um i basically one of the things that actually i did at 70 29 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 work out right where you submit um a proof of work out we give you 10 bucks in btc if it’s one of the top 100 of that day okay and it’s 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 um 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 like working out and eating right each day you know so i wanted to kind of put that in the top my consciousness for the next thing um and i actually think that that daily fitness eating properly etc is on a straight line 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 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 you go yeah go to 1729.com um that’s the free newsletter newsletter that pays you in fact where it’s got these regular bitcoin bounties for tasks and tutorials and um 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 um you know 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 and we basically have a tutorial on that and if you uh go and do it and you tweet about your experience then we’ll give you 250 if you write a good set of tweets right like educational informative subtweets right right so that’s like a cool i think a way to incentivize you to learn something that you should already learn and so we’re giving out like five thousand dollars in ethereum for that right so sponsor uh could other people sponsor like could we oh yeah put up five grand something absolutely so we have 1729.com princess create okay and one thing that i want to have eventually is something you know just like companies have twitter accounts have them have 70 train 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 this sort of mini x prize i we’ve been talking about this on the pod for a while as like i love that the x prize was this kind of big pinata that got a bunch of people to innovate and step up and actually more investment than the prize yeah that happened because of it uh and i wondered i know i 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 i wish we were just putting more of things on our company’s roadmap just out there and say hey if anyone can whoever builds the best version of x we will like sort of state up front 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’re mentioning like startup ideas that you had so one thing i want to do is do prizes for startup editors 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 um but you know we can we can we could figure out all those things but if you if you just want to try something go to 1729.com from create and just submit a task and its 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 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 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 thank you speak for yourself you guys are too self-deprecating you’ve done a great job you know your show is great and uh your your feed is often insightful and uh you know uh you know mutual admiration so great job 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