Hello and welcome to the North Star. I'm your host David Pharrell. And this is the North Star podcast in each episode. We explore the intersection between
different ideas cultures and life philosophies.
The guests are diverse, but they share profound similarities. They're Guided by Purpose Driven by curiosity and see the world with a unique lens and in each episode we get to dive into their hard-earned wisdom and apply it to our lives.
When I'm not recording podcasts, I write essays on my website / al.com
send a weekly email newsletter called Monday
musings and run an online writing school called rite of passage. I hope you enjoy the show. My guest today is Balaji srinivasan an angel investor and entrepreneur when it comes to the Future. He's the single most creative person. I know because he's so technical.
And polymathic talking to him is an experience unlike talking to anybody else. I know which is what I tried to replicate in this conversation a little bit about biology. He's worked as the chief technology officer at coinbase and a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz in the world of Academia. He holds a BS Ms. And PhD in electrical engineering and an MS in chemical engineering and all those from Stanford University.
He's also taught
at Stanford where his online course has reached 250,000 students worldwide.
Why'd this episode is a whirlwind through biology's interests? We started by talking about his production function and we talked about what holding all those degrees from Stanford taught him about learning how he identifies talent and what building and selling to companies for more than a hundred million dollars taught him about management. We also talked about apologies interest in genomics had a reverse aging and why living forever is the ultimate goal of technology and at the
The episode we built off the ideas I talk about in my online writing school called rite of passage to talk about his plan to fund online writers with a project called media fund. So please enjoy my conversation with Balaji srinivasan.
Welcome to the podcast. The thing that I find very interesting about you is that you've straddled the world of tech and Academia like few other people. What do you think that Academia with your background with a BS and Ms. A PhD, what did that all that teach you about studying
and learning?
Well, I was a career academic, you know for the first years of my career and I thought I was actually going to be a professor at Stanford or MIT or something like that. And what is he trying to learning? Well first is I did learn how to learn quickly and the way that I learn technical content quickly is I just start doing problems. I don't even read the text. And the reason until I have an issue in the reason is that especially in technical topics often if you know for example differential equations or you
Statistics or you know Maxwell's equations or something like that. You can often jump into an area and just start calculating and quickly run into a roadblock. And then you realize what you actually don't know there's a great series of books on this called Shams outlines their like these yellow books from the early 2000s where you can do like Shams outline of probability and statistics or Shams outline of accounting and it's amazing how many people have book learning of something but you just give them Shams and
Ask them to do the first ten problems in you know, accounting or something like that, you know, I counted as a little bit there's an aspect where it's not fully technical. It's related to the time and place, you know, accounting treatments are but like, you know, electricity and magnetism you can give them something like this and they may not be able to do it. Whereas for sure somebody who can do those questions can explain to you how you know the equations work. So I jump in on technical topics is just go start doing
problems.
How does your learning work differently when you're learning technical learning versus more sort of liberal arts style learning whenever we talk you seem pretty well-versed in those things to what do you think the similarities and differences are
I think that with liberal arts style learning, you know, I actually only really got into it after I left school. Well, I shouldn't say that. I liked fiction. I like to reading fiction when I was in, you know college but I really didn't care about politics or anything like that or or history growing.
Up in the 90s, you know, it was into history. Oh carrot, right, but I got into liberal arts as a way to win arguments. So what I mean by that is history is most interesting backwards, you know, you go to Berlin for example, why is the city The Way It Is Well, let me tell you about something called, you know, the the Cold War and the Berlin Wall, I'll had that happen Okay. Well then here's World War II. How did that happen? And I think history is most interesting backwards where you can understand how people got you know.
Is constant in the positions they are today and then it's relevant right? You have a contemporary hook you have some aspect of life experience on which to stick that right. There's other people for example, they're fascinated by things like hieroglyphics or the pyramids and they want to understand the context of that and that's also obviously legitimate and and and that's interesting. But at least for me I hook all of that stuff to a purpose which is okay. For example how best to run an organization. Well, you know the floor
Paucity of the Ancients actually does have something to say about that because you know, you're managing people you're you know, there's there's aspects of human nature that haven't changed in thousands of years and it's worth knowing what you know, the the great classic liberal arts, you know curriculum has to say about that and so from kind of a very pragmatic perspective you get to apply philosophy. This is also similar to you know, the founders of the US that's why they had to learn all this philosophy and history and and you know, so on because
They're actually building a political system that's applied history on a small scale. That's what building a company is your building, you know set of rules that scale the executive that scale the CEO and those rules are like laws but internal to the company and there's penalties for you know, breaking them or whatever and rewards for following them. And this is in its own sense similar, you know to running a small city or a large city depending on how big the company
gets.
It seems like there's a lot of people and Technology Program comes to mind Peter teal comes to mind. You come to mind who would be academics and in another life like what you said? Why did you leave Academia for Tech besides the obvious that the power law of wealth in Tech is much higher than in Academia. Is there anything else going on there?
So it's interesting like personally, I'm not you know Money Motivated there. I know there are people who are but
Basically where the same t-shirts that I were in grad school, I don't own any cars or anything like that where I look at money as is I look at money as a tool to build that which I can't buy for example Ilan is doing SpaceX because he can't buy a trip to Mars. And you know, yeah, you can have all the money in the world. You can't buy a trip to Mars just like, you know two hundred years ago. You could be the richest man in the world, but you couldn't buy an iPhone right and
So that's what I care about and I also care about mathematics, you know in the sense of in the year 3000 as a metric for whether civilization is Advanced. We might all just be uploaded artificial intelligences or whatever at that point. I think a useful civilizational ruler is what mathematical problems can that Civilization solve y and that's not why is that? Yeah, it's not intuitive. So the reason is that if you're really good at math in the year 3000 for example, you would have computers.
Right, so you would have the infrastructure required to support computers. You'd have enough the civilization that people can focus on you know, higher level things you've hopefully be enough at peace that people will be able to focus on that type of thing and Mathematics is cumulative so that if you can, you know do differential geometry you can get a differential equations, right? And so because of that it's this kind of oh, it's also something that space time invariant right or at least so we think the math math should be Spaceman fair in physics met
Very in space at least like that's a physical law might be different. I don't know a billion miles away so far. It doesn't look like that but might be so because of those properties, right? Like it's not dependent on specific civilization, you know, the Incas the as text the Zulus the parsee is every every group on the planet has the same math, right? That's the past and the present and the future so one it's Universal, right, you know to is it's hierarchical it's cumulative. So you've got a ruler a ladder whereas for example fashion.
And we couldn't say if we progressed in fashion, right fashion is just cyclical fashion is what people think is is cool at any given moment. And that's a function of just preference at that time. Whether it's you know hoop skirts or Victorian clothing or whatever, right? So a math is universal be it's cumulative hierarchical see implicitly it says you're at peace. You've got a supply chain you're focused on higher things. You've got computers. You've got whatever comes after computers. Maybe it's brain-machine interface or something like that that allows us to
Compute all this stuff just to give you an example just the massive math program was no so there's a thing this is something I've thought about a lot. I think cryptocurrencies will actually help us with this but think the internet is really under exploited for collaborative work. Okay. So there is a thing ten years ago now is called a polymath project where a mathematician research meditation named I think it was either William gower's or Terry towel. Both of them are feels not let's make this both of them. But the polymath project essentially posed an unsolved math problem.
Oh and just ask people to sort of collaboratively solve it on a Blog and it worked. You know, it's not something that you would imagine would work because you might think isn't, you know math sort of like basketball where you know, there's LeBron who's really good and you know, you know, no one else is going to score like LeBron. So how would you know one of the best mathematicians are World get help from the crowd you might argue that right and certainly, you know, the terms that they were using were accessible only to a small group of Specialists still collectively that group was actually
Able to make serious progress and able to solve this and that's something where you use the internet to put a lot of brains together asynchronously, right? You couldn't have had a conference going on for months and months and months and having all those people in one spot all those folks who could work on it. They could sleep drink coffee and you know, they contribute. Oh this little snippet or they had this bad idea. Right and the bad idea would not be worthy of publishing in a manuscript is just an offhand comment. Oh, do you think about fraud indicating that this or whatever, you know, that's made.
For it, but you know I'm saying right and says offhand comments that weren't publication grade that weren't making, you know, an airline trip for that. You didn't know the person you'd know Terry towel well enough to like call them up and say those actually got surfaced and integrated into something and broadly speaking. It's actually kind of interesting how little collaborative work is done on the internet. I mean, we have Wikipedia, that's one of the great ones. There's obviously GitHub with open-source. There's Google Docs you might say well that is a lot of collaborative work and I agree, but I think there's so much.
More that can be done. Why aren't there more things like Google Docs where you can collaborate in real-time and see that thing coming together, you know, you can see people fighting in quasi real time on Twitter, but you know, you can't necessarily see them building things together and that's partially because the division of labor is challenging Rewards or challenging, you know, approval of digital work is challenging all the type of stuff but I think that with cryptocurrencies and other kinds of things you might be able to get there where you incentivize tasks for subunits anyway, so that's one last aspect rehearsing back up the stack.
To do something like the polymath project you need civilization. And that's also something that's
article. It's funny. I feel like your answer there with the polymath project speaks to the next question. I want to ask and like whenever we talk, I feel like I have more links per minute with you than anyone else. I know and it has to do with the way that you think and the best I can describe it is you sort of think and hyperlinks. You're like a high context thinker probably more than anyone I know.
And it honestly it kind of makes it annoying to talk to you because I can't actually get up the stack of like where do you eat it sometimes what's going on there and how you think your brain works?
I think it said I try to store the minimum amount of information then on compact it so, you know when I'm talking to somebody on something like this, you know, I may do it verbally like we're talking now, but the reason you know, what is the link? What is the citation? What is a reference a reference is reinforcements?
It's what it means is it's not just you who's thinking this here is this person and all these people who have reviewed this piece of paper and that's actually 50 people you're bringing with you and they're all research mathematicians, right? Oh and that actually represents 50,000 people. So arguing from references is summoning reinforcements to any discussion. So again, it's about like okay, you know, like why do you learn history to win arguments? Right? Why do you argue from references again to win arguments? Because it's not you it's you and what army
Army of
Scholars
Hmm, let's move into Talent. You've sold to companies for more than hundred million dollars. What have you learned about Gathering recruiting and identifying up-and-coming Talent?
Up-and-coming is very important component of it. We're boy has a good saying which I had sort of get through boy, which I sort of kind of independently come up with in a somewhat different phrasing his his racing is higher Geniuses. No one knows yet.
Right and mine was sort of hungry and can teach us something, you know, and everyone has different like versions of this right but hungry and can teach us. Something is basically like, okay, you've got somebody who is at the beginning of their career, right? And one thing I found that at least I'm wired for and a lot of other people are not wired for is I'm almost I shouldn't say anti credential because I understand the the value of it, but I'm actually most
I did when I see a smart person who does not have that credential because that's a good trade right? I can hire them. I can pay them reasonably. Well, I can help them level up. I can give them essentially the biggest opportunity I've ever had in their lives, you know, and you know, I say that in the sense of like I'm not trying to thump my chest or anything like that. But but I have recruited people out of the middle of nowhere, you know, folks like living with their parents and can to folks in Malaysia folks in Poland people who are truly in the middle of nowhere and
Because I could see that they could code well or right well or both. I would just pluck them off the internet and I didn't care if they had an accent or anything like that. They were smart people right and often they had some personal circumstance where you know, this this person could out code and outwork lots of the folks with the perfume degrees from Harvard or Stanford or whatever, right? And I'm not saying by the way, the people at Harvard Stanford are dumb. I'm not saying anything like that, but from a price performance standpoint, right? Well you want is
You know as raboy says the genius is no one knows yet. Right and it's also something where by giving somebody the biggest opportunity I've ever had. They're hungry. Right? And so they're bit like why can they teach us something? Well if I learn something from their writing if I learn something from you know their code, you know, they're writing is actually pretty important getting to something that you talk about because in especially today when you're moving to remote everything the way that you engage with somebody is do they write clearly. For example, did they write stuff like a mystery novel?
Where you have to kind of listen for a while before figuring out what they're saying or do they put the headline first? Right? And of course is difference between casual conversation versus writing something for instructions, right? You'd write it then you pull it to the beginning and it's like you can be key in the headline. Then you communicate it again and the subtitle you can come in and get in a slightly different way in the opening sentence in the opening paragraph and it's like this Russian doll thing where you know, at least that's an Uzi style of writing, you know, and and that's how you should write internal memos. That's how you should write slacks is
Most important first, right? So basically look for folks that are like that that are under priced relative to their potential and a try to level them up. Now the issue with doing that by the way here is actually an important tip on that is the most challenging thing to do as an entrepreneur, but it's also absolutely necessary is to hire people who are better than you
Okay. Why is that first why is it necessary? Well, let's say you're getting into robotics. Okay, you may not know robotics, but you need to find somebody who will do the job better than you could when you're you know, if you were doing it. And the reason is if it's much worse than you could have done then you'll basically look at it and you'll constantly like, ah, you know, I if only I had the time I could get in there and fix this thing and if there's high stakes for the customers and if you have the power to do it
You feel dragged in that direction where if you hire someone who can't do the job better than you, can you feel that you should do the job? Okay, however, why is it hard to find such a person? Well, obviously if somebody is better than you in this skill, why would they want to work for you or work for your company? Right? And so the answer I've come up with on that is thinking of skill as a vector right? You may be worse at robotics, but you're better at mathematics or you know, like like programming or something like
Like that, and so then you go to that person as essentially at least the way I think of it is like an academic peer and you say look you're a disciplinary expert in robotics. I'm not a 10 or 9 like you are but I have you know done the equivalent of Shams outlines, right? I have self studied and I've gone my way to a 6 right I can tell you what, you know degrees of freedom are I can tell you how you know manipulators work and the basic sensors and actuators. I know something of the
Problems in your field and so I've done my homework and what happens is somebody who's 9 in that area is actually pretty impressed. If somebody has put in the work to at least learn the basic vocabulary of their space. It's always like a not bad, right? For example, if you're if you're an engineer and there's someone who's self-taught and maybe their code isn't like well structured or whatever but they've managed to get a data analysis together and make some graphs and charts, you know in scrape some stuff. You're always like, okay that person is resourceful. I
At that, you know, okay. Let me talk to this person. And then if you have strengths in another area will then there's an ongoing trade of knowledge. All right. And again, this is how I like to recruit you know money is important. It's an important tool. It has to be there, you know, it has it's a powerful thing for alignment and so in several I'm not against money but fundamentally what I look for in the folks who we hire if I hire people are folks where I can learn from them and hopefully I can teach them something, you know, so you really learn something you love up in your skills.
And so that Vector way of thinking about skills is the way that you can hire somebody better than you because they're better than you in one or a few critical key areas. Hopefully you're better in some other areas. And then there's a mutual positive some exchange over the course of the relationship by the way speaking of the course of relationship. I think read Hoffman's concept of a tour of Duty is useful because you know, like like a company is not a family, right? This is a family is about like, you know, Unconditional Love or Whatever, right, you know.
Not to say that's bad. Just just you know, that's not that's not how a company is good company is conditional love since you have to deliver on their hand. It's a company is also it shouldn't be mercenary because it's mercenary, you know, look everybody has a bad day. Everybody has bad week at times sometimes even a bad month or something like Corona like, you know, of course, these are you know, our fellow co-workers and you have to have some mercy and so on as well, right, you know, if the customer doesn't because the customer like you don't care whether someone had a bad day it Coca-Cola
Plant, you just oh, wow. Why is this bottle all crushed? Okay. I'm just going to buy the Pepsi. It's not out of malice or anything like that. It's just like the interface you're seeing is not a human you're seeing a crushed can or something, you know, there's a failure somewhere in the supply chain. So you shrug and just pick the other thing, right? So the customer is genuinely merciless. So you have to somehow buffer that and I think the intermediate is this concert of the Tour of Duty where you say, look here's what I'm going to try to give you. Also. I think it's also useful by the way for folks to write out.
What their goals are right, where do they want to be in a year or three years? Wait, but that's obvious. So
like yeah, is it are you saying that because people don't do it or are you saying it as it's undervalued or you saying it because you have some different insight into this like, you know, this feels like something that my dad would tell me I'm like right before I go to college or something that like, thanks Uncle Tom. So like what are you trying to say here?
Yes over your dad is telling you is actually non-obvious and good you may have internalized that already right but but basically writing out what your goals are.
It's amazing. How many people don't do that? And the thing about it is it's not actually the think about it every moment. But by writing out what your goals are so many people just random walk through life and there's something else that's important. This gets into like management and whatnot. Right? But basically before somebody joins if they write out what they would consider a success like, you know, for example bold bear and base. So the bull case the bear case in the base case, right? So bulb air base is a useful thing to do where you
Kind of have folks right out and this is a for themselves. Like what would be good would be amazing and would be a fail in four years, right? And basically it's actually always fun to look back on this stuff and four years later, right? And you're like, wow, I was so off on these things and I was dead on this right point being that by doing that they self constrain and they actually take some responsibility for their own life. Right? And this is the same thing where you know, whenever you're dividing up labor at the
Junction point between a manager and employee right? You should do a two by two table which is what are the manager expect from themselves. What do they expect from the employee where does the employee expect from themselves was the employee expect from the manager? Okay that two by two table is so simple, but you should do that at every one on one and you should do 1101 a week and what it does. Is it rectifies miscommunication and by putting into words what you expect of yourself and the other person your whole
Adding yourself accountable in front of them just like they are holding their self accountable in front of you and both of you know, what you expected from the other if a week later or two weeks later three weeks later. I mean, look everybody doesn't always hit everything there new things come up. It's not meant to be like, you know signed in blood thing, but that two by two table if you track that in a simple Google doc right over time, it's super useful because it also as a manager allows you to point back and say hey we agreed on this at this time.
Or I did deliver what you asked of me and the employee is can do the same. It's like hey, you can't say that. I didn't deliver because I did do this or that I'm not saying is an adversarial thing, but it is something which is its usual to keep aligned. Right? And so that's what I mean like this concept of you know, right out what your goals are your Uncle Tom or your dad is a smart guy. So
so last question about personal productivity, but it's another very Balaji thing. I feel like you very purposefully live in the future and
I feel like you actually make certain decisions like we were together we had dinner in San Francisco and it was like 11 o'clock at night. You're like, oh I'm just going to hotel tonight and then I'm going to Uber to the to the hotel and then sort of figure it out and I was sort of just watching that I was just like man, this is It's not like hoteltonight noubar so futuristic but like Yay menu of your decisions and sort of the options that you give yourself are very mobile first things that I think people will be
Living in 10 to 15 years,
right? Right, right. So so why is that I've thought about that and it just so happens in some sense that my preferences and way of life like the world has become more like me over the last 20 or 30 years. This is not something that I could like. I feel really bad for somebody who is a morning person is extremely 925 once of
Teen doesn't like computers wants to come into the office every day and you know high-five somebody like essentially the kind of person that the 1950s was built around nothing against that person. Okay, that's perfectly fine person makes the world go round in many ways super reliable, like daily kind of kind of person right that like morning person type mentality and is just the opposite of the way the world is going it's going from synchronous asynchronous. It's going from in person to remote it's going from
Like pull the same lever a thousand times to think deeply and then write a piece of code that just does it it's going from like like essentially the centralized Century to a decentralized century in many many ways all the stuff that I have been into. It's just a predictor of you know, just just by my nature I seem to gravitate to the stuff for example machine learning and genomics at Stanford in the early 2000s was something I thought was I shouldn't say old hat but machine learning was something I had been doing for years by
Six, right and you know to my surprise Ten Years Later everybody's talking about concept like I mean, of course, there's new developments in it. Of course, there's deep neural networks. There's a reason that people are talking about and what not, but it was it was interesting to me to see people like, oh the gradient like, yeah gradient. Okay, you know and and so that was something I had to calibrate on just just to give you a few examples of this machine learning genomics robotics. Like that was a you know, we built a clinical genomics lab that had robots in it in the early 2010's.
Profitable things like, you know, obviously promote work Soylent Bitcoin, you know the teleport rebuilt a search engine for digital Nomads. That was a little too early had, you know, it was great great company actually many ways, but it had that, you know being around in 2020. It would have had probably millions of users is given how many people are still searching for that? Right? So, you know, we set that up in 2014 the soul that in 2016 or 2017. So, you know so digital Nomads mm remote work startup cities exit like all the stuff.
We've been talking about in terms of physical exit from a location and I gave this talk at Y combinator and 2013 talking about silicon Valley's ultimate exit. It's happening dot jpg, you know, we are literally physically exiting all the moving trucks are here. We have decentralized into the cloud. We're finally achieving our destiny of becoming this digital people like 2020 is a year the internet starts and I mean, there's a 50 other things like that. But but even something like Soylent why because I wanted to be maximally productive. I wanted to base to be able to sit and you know have
Like something nutritious and then just be able to work all day. And so the thing about it is the the 925 person wants to work at a defined period of time consistently and then go home and then go and you know do sports or whatever right? And that's fine. Nothing against that is good. Right? Whereas like what I want to do is maximize the number of hours. I'm working every day including weekdays and weekends, but I mean at work at the same time because I might want to work for 16 hours one day and then
I like sleep and and then think about it and then wake up and work, you know again, right and so just for a reason the world has acclimatize itself to this style of work. So whatever my personal preferences are it's going to become the future. This is something that it's not it's not something that's like a good or bad thing. It just so happens. I'll give you one more example, by the way in the early 2000s other mid-2000s are there's a period between when Google Maps in the iPhone came out.
Okay, so 2004 to 2007 and during that period what I did was I would you know when I was I'm sure other people did this but just to give you an example, I would go and you Google Maps will give you screen by screen directions. So what I do is I would charge my laptop. I would screenshot every screen of the directions. Then I keep my laptop on the driver side or the passenger side seat facing so it's like a Proto iPhone doing Google Maps right where I
Just pause and eat in a sense. Right? And and I also printed as a backup just in case the laptop ran out of power. And so I knew that mobile was going to be a thing that Google Maps is going to be a nap right and and just just stuff like that. You know, we're just like weird idiosyncratic things that I do for example, you know back in 2015 or something like that when there's some wedding or something people were doing I wrote a semi serious proposal. It was kind of meant to be a joke, but also semi-serious on how people were going to Skype into their weddings in the future and that's how
Happened this year. Okay, five years later because of Corona right? And you know, the thing about that is it's ultimately what was holding. That back was a cultural thing. But guess what you'll get more attendees to your wedding. If you know, they can all come virtually right? You might actually see them and be able to catch up with them. The remote socialization tools are not yet there obviously and what people always say is nothing beats in person and so on and maybe that's true but I think in VR and whatnot. You can probably get something which is a pretty
Decent party experience. If even if you consider a wedding special, you know, and so I do think and it'll be way cheaper, you know, and so if it's 80 or 90 percent is good, but 1/100 the cost. A lot of people are going to do that. Right? So so just for whatever reason it just seems like my preference is certain to become the future in one 10 or 20 years. I'll give you one more example. Okay, November 20 19, you know, I tweeted something like has anybody done full like Zoom conferences here. I'll find the exact.
It's pretty funny. Look everybody ends up doing that just like, you know, obviously a few months later do the corona never 26 2019. Has anyone held a fully remote conference via Zoom or VR or something? Well, of course they have right so, you know just kind of funny.
So I want to transition into teaching where education is in a weird spot because when technology works it's deflationary where we get the essence of technology is you get more
more for Less Costco down value goes up and teaching has been in a weird place where that hasn't been happening costs have been going up so much and you when you were teaching at Stanford Utah class about cryptocurrencies data mining statistics computational biology from teaching in person teaching remotely. What did you learn about teaching and the differences between in-person and
virtual?
Yeah, well, so the deflation aspects important for people, you know, it's funny people talk about vamos cost disease like you know that jobs that have no rises in labor productivity have salaries going up and and whatnot and folks act as if this is like super mysterious, but as a great graph that shows that you know, the inflation is here. It's just not evenly distributed where prices are up in education as you point out there also up in healthcare that are up in or at least until recently they're up in real estate and and they're down.
In you know computers and Telecommunications and so on and the rough lesson of that is anything that the technology industry touches prices hyper deflate and everybody becomes equal because everybody's got the same iPhone or Android phone experience. They've got the same Google. They've got the same Wikipedia. They've got the same stack Overflow the same GitHub anything that is digital, you know, for example, Steph Curry also uses Uber so you actually get a consumer experience where to have the consumer
Connie is actually another form of equality at massive massive scale you produce the same product for everybody. There's not that much really price differentiation between a top-end iPhone in a low-end wine. I mean, it may be 5x or 10x. I guess that you can get the gold thing or whatever but that's purely a conspicuous consumption thing as opposed to a functionality thing. So every area of technology is touched the price hyper deflates every area of the state has touched due to regulations or subsidies. That's what impacts and impairs increase in labor productivity just as one example within medicine.
Requirement to have the doctor in the loop for many kinds of diagnostic decisions, even if artificial intelligence can do it better than 99% of doctors even before it's deployed. Right? So you get into a production system you calculate and you get all collect. All the data will become better than every doctor, you know for many things and maybe you have like some MD supervising it it's not it's not something where it's just a program that runs by itself without any supervision, but that kind of thing which is like automating the doctor away. You can't do because of regulations and
He's and by the way a subsidy is much like a regulation in the sense that it sort of has a particular way of doing things cast into stone. You know, the state has got it taken over and that's why I for example have
any subsidy changes gravity, right? So if my
substitute exactly that's right. That's why you know, we're still we're in 2020. We still have yellow school buses. We still have you know, number two pencils or whatever. I guess. I think we do and you know, like in many ways you still go to a school, you know the because all that stuff is in budget.
It's right like and Corona has finally changed that but you know until Corona essentially this lagging aspect of the system law medicine medicine education Finance real estate. All of these things were sort of lagging areas that were regulated or subsidized and Technology had partially reform them, but not fully right now. They're just dragged into the future where you have digital education. It's all being put online you have digital quartz where you know folks actually can attend court or whatever.
Ever, you know virtually you have much more telemedicine because they finally repeal these laws that were stopping doctors in in Michigan from treating doctors in Illinois, like interested licensure. And so the reason that all that stuff the price of increase is 100% in my view a function of the state either subsidizing or regulating and thereby distorting Market forces and stopping new technology from entering it I should say a hundred percent. Let's say it is both the state and it's the state's indirect impact in terms of the cultural stuff the state sets up like
You're supposed to go to college before you get a job that type of stuff right now. That's all falling apart who wants to go to zoom classes, you know, and you know, people are realizing that a lot of K through 12 is actually babysitting as opposed to education. And so maybe you can unbundle those and you have you know, a learning pod and you have a babysitter to learning pod and education is coming remote from a world class teacher or learning app. So if which you know, these are really quite good and those learning apps will let your child learn at their own pace. Maybe they're really fast on math and so in reading or vice versa
Shh and now it's not the Industrial Age Factory style production of like every child the same which is simply not true. You know, there's no such thing as a sixth grader. There's no such thing as a 30 year old, you know, you have 30 year olds who are billionaires you have 30 year olds who are in prison and you have 30 year olds who are everything in between and you know you have basically, you know, this this huge spectrum of experience and difference and actually that goes very young. You know, there's there's 18 year olds who are extremely good basketball players each year.
To our Chin Li good, you know mathematicians. There's 18 year olds who have quite a lot of you know differentiation by that age already. And so I think that having an educational system that that speaks to that is important and we've mostly gone after higher ed so far in Tech because it's been a little more amenable to choice, you know, there's the concept your people are adults and they're able to choose between things. So you've had Coursera you've had Udacity you've had you to me, you've had all that stuff which is good. Right? You've got Lambda school and so on now investment in land.
School
rite of passage.
Yeah. Yeah, but now it's finally going into K through 12. And of course lots of Kicking and Screaming people are freaking out about it. But but yeah, so so finally Tech is getting an education. I think it will bring those prices down.
Yeah. I want to try to get back to like very concretely what you would what kind of advice you would give to somebody who wants to learn how to teach because your mooc was the best my knowledge one of the biggest moocs in the world, but as you think about that, I have a comment so one of my right up,
Students she so talented and she would routinely ask these these incredible questions and her name was Taylor and I would talk to different people and they'd all be like, wow, you know, she's really smart and So eventually we looked her up in terms of the survey data and I was like wait, she's 17 years old. Like how could this be that she's 17. She's asking all these great questions and like, you know when you meet someone who is like a really good talent, but like an idiosyncratic Talent your like I just need to talk to you in some right away. So I
Call her up and I'm like, hey, what's your story? She's from an hour north of Victoria Canada. She lives on a small island and she took online courses her entire way through high school because she didn't want to go to the local public school. And so I was like
specification is just way off the
charts if it's station is way off the truck, but then there was something else too. And I think that humans are like this and the internet is beginning to expose this she was more polymathic than almost anyone. I know so it's like what are you interested in? She's like, oh, I'm really interested in sort of theoretical math and physics.
But I also do drawings and I was like, okay. So are you thinking going to college is like yeah, I'm gonna go to college major in the liberal arts. And I'm like, wait what I have never met a seventeen-year-old or just about anybody who has studied all these things in depth and I think that then this spoke to what you were just saying about age is just a number here. There's like different kinds of aptitude that are becoming legible now and now you don't need to be on the conveyor belt of how old you are you could be on different kinds of conveyor belts based on wealth their
assess or talent in a certain area and I think that's really interesting.
Yeah, I think also, you know Blake Ross for example famously coded Firefox, like when he was a high school student, you know, and there's more and more examples of this young talent. And I think actually we're sort of going back to the future where in the eighteen hundreds kids worked very early on, you know, they were the reason that like, you know, Jebediah and Abigail would have six kids is because they were actually, you know,
Cash flow positive in the sense of those kids were quickly picking, you know, like cotton or they were you know going and like mending fences milking cows doing doing all these Farm type things. Right? And so the thing about that was those kids were they were not infantilized right there very quickly given a level of responsibility that was commensurate with, you know, their ability to follow instructions or doing chores as soon as they could understand what chores were right, so because of that
That you know folks became adults relatively quickly. They married early, you know all the type of stuff. Right? And then what happened was by like the late eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundred's, you know, sending your kids to work early on meant sending them now increasingly browse to the than a farm saying them to a factory right where there'd be wage labor and the difference and the sort of a flip way of putting it but I think in a you know, interesting way of putting it is those Factory owners were not Equity aligned they weren't they didn't love the kids right, you know the parents
Like when they sent their kids out to do chores, they wouldn't you wouldn't work the kid to the bone. Of course, you know, you love your kid and you weren't, you know going to harm them. This charge would be good for them did learn some discipline or whatever. The factory owner would not necessarily have such a constraint and so child labor obviously got a bad name because some unscrupulous Factory owners would push these kids, you know too much right? And so what happened was basically a backlash against children doing any kinds of work and so that led to you know, the 20th century and you know, basically the post-war rise of like
Teen culture and some tree take for granted really wasn't a thing, you know because teens didn't have like consuming capabilities and people like more
topic was 18 century
staple. Yeah. Yeah dolls. Is that not true, right so essentially yeah. No exactly right. This is this entire kind of post-war consumer culture with you know teens and young adults being so important and what not. It was something where those kids were used to be producers rather than consumers. I'm not seeing a hundred percent, but that was that was you know, like a like a big
The trend is only like a prince who you know could afford to not work until they were 20 something or and just learn the Fine Arts. Right? So because of that, you know by this reaches its apotheosis with the idea of being on your parents health insurance until you're 26, right? So this kind of period of infantile ization this period of oh, you're not independent. You're not making your own way failure to start Failure to Launch all the type of stuff that people talk about is in part coming from this.
This well intention thing of okay, let's stop children from being exploited by unscrupulous Factory workers Etc right now. What's I think happening is we're coming back to the future which is thanks to remote work. Thanks to pseudonymity. Thanks to cryptocurrency. Thanks to software development and online writing and so on you can have a kid like your example of Victoria like Blake Ross. You did Firefox who can set up a pseudonym online and you know on the internet. Nobody knows you're 14 years old, right and they can do professional software development or writing or anything.
And so long as they're sending the right symbols and getting the right symbols getting their work done on time. They can work and crucially this is important a parent can supervise them, right you can know because they're at home. You can just watch them. They're just typing things into a screen right there not working at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. They're not at risk of having their finger singed by, you know, like like some like bad piece of equipment or or something like that maximum. They can do is spill coffee on their laptop let you know the if you have them
Drinking coffee in their teens, right? So their injury profile radically drops, right the degree of exploitation. I mean, it's still possible, of course, but many of the concerns of physical damage Associated child labor go away, right? And so now what you have I think are lots of kids who are going to be remote working at a much earlier age. Also you combine that with the fact of you know, folks needing more money, right? Like the US economy is Contracting and you know, folks are now
All like basically family units are getting crushed back together because everybody stay at home all the time, right? And so you're sort of getting this interesting.
Steampunk Neo modern, you know techno archaic future with and this is something I think is a deeper point, but our future is more like the eighteen hundreds in the Seventeen hundreds in the nineteen hundreds. We're sort of going in reverse 1950 was kind of a mirror image moment. And that's like the peak of the centralized Century you go forward and backward in time. You get more decentralized top of the mountain.
Yeah, it's funny. It's interesting to see the adulting meme on one side. Hashtag adults hang. Oh, I'm try stripping years old. I have to go.
Do my laundry and this is such a big moment in my life where I'm gonna get out of bed it before 2 p.m. On this Saturday to go do my right my Noble duty of cleaning my clothes for the world and that contrasted with what we were talking about with metallic. But also I'm on the record saying that there's going to be a teenage billionaire by the end of the decade because if you take everything that you just said and then you add the leverage that you get with software to me that seems like uh,
Almost a logical conclusion and I guess my question here would be let's move into writing and getting people to write about these technical subjects at a high level. That isn't really happening that much. So there's the incentives for high-level companies to be founded that are decent in terms of it's pretty clear how you can make a lot of money doing that but this is something that you and I are both really interested in how can we use the internet to
Buys and allow people to write really well about super technical subjects that it doesn't quite feel like sub stack is there even though I'm a big fan of the company and know that they're onto something they only feel like a part of this project of increasing the quality of information on the internet.
Yeah. I think that's right. So by the way, there's certainly our teenage billionaires, but they were born rich rather than built. Rich and by the I think that's a very useful.
Kind of one-liner, you know rich is it obscures more than it? You know, I think it's a born rich is different from built Rich. Did you know somebody hand it to them or do they build their Fortune? Right and there's a huge huge difference between those obviously, but I agree with you that you know, will we certainly have 20-something billionaires will probably have a teenage billionaire if we if we haven't already had one. I do think that all these people who kind of tweet adulting and so now I've actually feel that's so it's interesting. There's an aspect of that which is related to progress in the
Incense which is, you know, the more things that can get done without you thinking about them. The more civilizational progress has for example, I you know hit a key to send an email, right and there's so many things happening right? I depress the key. There's like the capacitance that changes when I hit that key the wireless keyboard. Okay, a 211 b or you know, like or Bluetooth, they'll send it to the laptop laptop will trap that event and it'll turn into packets and it'll
It's like 500 things that are happening there, right and and you're not thinking about any of those things. You're certainly not like milking the cow or to see it happening. It's right exactly. So progress is abstraction. And that person who's saying, oh I'm adulting is like well all those things that they were doing were behind levels of abstractions. They didn't care about them, right the issue though is that you do too much abstraction and a lot of people just you know, humans being humans. They get alienated from that and I think it's easy when I was actually ridiculously hard, too.
Put all the things behind an easy interface really really really hard to do, you know, like think about it
was on it's like Amazon wait the boxes don't just fall from the sky and land on my front doorstep. No, there's entire Supply chains. There's trucking companies. There's there's there's how the cardboard gets made. You know, it's like that I pencil right? It's like all exactly abstract it
away. Exactly. It is really hard to make something easy. And so the problem is it has a good one.
I know right? Yes. It's really hard to make something easy. And so the issue is that if you're a producer, right if you're found or something, you have a respect for everything else out there because you're like my God that was a lift to do that from scratch that was very difficult. And and then you're also actually much less critical of products on the internet because you like, you know, I have some empathy for the person on their side. Yeah, this product sucks, but I'm sure they worked hard on it, you know, and you're like hey, you know,
Better next time or whatever. This is what I wanted to see right you're just like more constructive in your criticism of
it. So when it comes to getting people to write good ideas technical ideas online there seems to be a big hole in the market like for example yesterday. I was walking the beach and Los Angeles and there's this guy's taking a selfie and so I go up to him and I'm like, hey, can I can I just take the photo for you? Because it was kind of awkward when he was.
Doing and so he's like yeah sure. So I snapped the photo for him. We ended up talking and he had been a geologist for 37 years. He's based in Houston. So I'm like, oh so you work in oil and gas. He's like, yeah, how'd you know, it's like those kind of obvious, right?
We shall listen Houston. Right?
Right. Yeah exactly. So then I looked down at my foot and I have a big thing of tar on my foot and I'm like, why is this and he's like, oh like that's actually pretty normal when you're on the beach and then he starts talking to me about all the developments that have
Made in geology. I was like, wow, I had no idea that any of this existed but crucially that information at least some level of it isn't really well written online because there isn't an incentive for him to take that and then publish these very technical ideas and it seems like this is as close as we can get to a free launch of raising the quality of average online information saying Wikipedia isn't the end of History here. It's actually
just like one that's right. That's right.
So, okay. So this is gets into kind of some of the stuff that I want to fund and I've been thinking about so I have a landing page by the way, if folks want to go and put in their info on this at media fun.com, this is just a landing page right now. It's a twinkle in my eye, but let me let me talk about what we were thinking about here. So typically and I'll get your point on incentivizing, you know, the like useful content online typically.
People will put let's say War reporting and Kim Kardashian reporting at opposite ends of the spectrum. Right? Like, you know, hey, this is super serious Pulitzer and this is like, you know fun infotainment or whatever. I actually argue. They're both infotainment at one end of the spectrum and the other end is news you can use or tutorials.
In the differences, you know is this piece of information directly relevant to your life. Like are you going to in particular spend the effort to check every line of this information? For example with the tutorial it has built in fact checking because you have the tutorial on the left and you have your terminal on the right and you're typing in line by line to check that it works right or if you've got like a YouTube video that is showing you how to sew something right or how to build a table.
You're checking every line of that every every frame of that as you go and build a thing, right so they can't quote lie to you now that they would want to they can't misrepresented. They can't distort it. They can't understate the complexity or overstate certain things. It's instructional and because instructional it is it's leveling you upright and and you're also fact-checking it which is non-obvious people don't think about that part and you know, similarly news you can use is like the weather right, you know or a stock price, right? And and this is something where it is Upstream of a
An action if rainy then umbrella if High stock maybe I sell if low stock maybe I buy right and so that's information that guard guides decisions. It's right next to the tutorial stuff. Right on the other end of spectrum is I read about some distant issue in so-and-so country. And unless I have you know, like relatives are or if I have you know businesses there or operations there. It's really not relevant to me on a daily basis. And the thing is that you know, people might say, oh you
Concerned about this in that the problem is that There's 7 billion people on the planet and to even know each of their names, right? This is just kind of a toy experiment but you know, there's 86,400 seconds in a day, right? And so in 12 days, you could if you learn one named a second 12 days, you could learn the names of a million people. Okay, and it would take you a hundred twenty days for 10 million people and twelve hundred days for a hundred million people and 12,000 days four billion people and basically
Your whole life to even learn the names of the seven billion people on the planet. And so therefore you cannot possibly care about them. Equally you have to somehow triage or somehow prioritize right with the Assumption being that to even care about someone at least you need to know their name to personalize it, right? So you have to rank order what you're paying attention to and the infotainment stuff should be filtered out of the feed. When way of thinking about this is, you know, the analogy between your diet and your information diet. So your diet, I mean look, you know having a cookie from time time might be fine.
But if you're only eating cookies and you're not eating healthy food, you're going to have negative metabolic consequences, you know, your health is going to be messed up your life is going to be worse and so on right in the same way, like, you know, I'm not saying never, you know, have fun never, you know, like like watch something interesting but I do feel that Twitter and a lot of social media are like a restaurant that's learned to put sugar in their food.
They're giving us intellectual diabetes exactly. That's right. They're basically
stimulating us and
And I actually think that you could make this told the quantitative where there are devices for example, that will monitor your blood glucose. And so you can see you know, after you eat a cookie or banana. You can see a spike with some time delay, right? So you can actually see what it's doing to your body. You can see it on screen which is actually pretty awesome, right? Okay. The equivalent is you are reading Twitter or whatever or social media and we should be able to see a spike in cortisol or something like that. All that stresses me out o that
Rigsby or it's like cloying emotionality intervene like oh so cute this this this puppy or whatever right? And so it's meant to provoke an extreme emotional reaction and it's coming in through our eyes and ears and you know in much the same way that like Hollywood has learned to put sex and violence into movies because it's stimulating right? It's like you see this and you're you know reptile brain is like oh violence. I must pick up an Axe and join in. You know, it's real, right.
It's exciting. It's cool it you pay attention to it. Right? So we need is I think a different form of media that is more like the news you can use in tutorials in the infotainment. Right? And it's all about relevance and skill building and it's like an optimized information diet. And so this gets back to write down your goals. Ha ha your dad was smart. So what skills do you actually want to build? Right? What is your intention ality and you know to some extent, you know, like following people.
Twitter is sort of there, but I think a better, you know, one framework for this is
The mnemonic framework by Michael Nielsen and antimatter Shack, right? So the idea is, you know, rather than reading recreationally as we do now if you've read in the lean forward Ray if you if you've read to remember they've got a site quantum dot country where they have spent a lot of time on essentially an application where you read it immediately prompts you for whether you recall the stuff right? It's got like a question there and it asks you whether you remembered it and it's optimized for mobile.
And so on so you can still do it in a Leanback kind of way right? But then sometimes they'll ask you to break out a pen and paper and actually learn something and crucially because they send these kind of email reminders to people they find that people's retention is actually much higher then they would expect and it's a finite amount of effort that gives an exponential amount of attention. So it shows you can spend your time in a much better way by learning things very fast, and that we this is kind of really to the Shams thing. I talked about earlier where you you solve problems and if you sell the
alms you understand what's going on and then you can fast forward and Skip there like a placement test kind of thing. So I think that a big part of the next generation of content for allowing people to level up can't be like the current social media where you interact with it by liking and and and rting it should be about learning and earning and it's see
it's purely passive what you're saying is about more active approach, right? So I open up Twitter and there's it's interesting. It is very personalized in a way, but in what?
You're saying I've never thought about this before it's actually very unperson alized. It has no idea. Here we go Dad. It has no idea what your goals are
exactly. That's right. Exactly. And and so one way of thinking about it is social media Netflix and so on are optimized to just like consume as many minutes of your day as possible literally addictive. There's a totally opposite design Paradigm, which is give the maximum value to somebody in a minimum amount of time. How can I give somebody a hundred dollars in like one second right now, we do learn.com before we sold it actually your comments.
I'll like this it coinbase earn is like that we can give you like 5 dollars of value in a few seconds. All right you go there you answer some questions on cryptocurrency. You were in some cryptocurrency that concept of tasking over the internet and you might say well, how can you run a hundred dollars in a few seconds? Well, let's say you're a doctor and you are really good at diagnosis. I could probably get you a stream of images which you could help label. It might automate a machine learning algorithm. Can you ever cared about yay exactly look people have actually proposed this and it's actually is this is this
Interest is this not is this cancers is not and it sounds flip, but it's actually something where you're downloading the information out of a skilled practitioners brain and into a machine-readable format right those 0 and 1 labels from a you know, a thousand radiologist could train a an algorithm right or it could supplement an algorithm where the algorithm can't decide and it kicks it over to a human for the hard
cases. Well, it's interesting because this is one of the things that mandelbrot talks about in misbehavior of markets. Is that a human's ability to use their personal?
Reception to gauge what like a graph looks like this is where humans are really good and Nassim taleb was very influenced by that book. If you look at his citations throughout the entire toe, he's always cited mandelbrot a couple weeks ago. He went on Twitter. It was sort of like a riddle of different numbers and which one is more likely just with Statistics and to leave said this is something that you want to eyeball. And so there's a certain class of we could call them eyeball problems, which computers are
Way worse at solving than humans and then we could get tender for cancer for those.
Yeah. It's interesting though. Because once you can teach a machine to do something it'll usually do it better than a human for exempt. What's it made of? Yeah, exactly right like so so for example chess right or go, right? It is non-trivial to teach them those eyeball problems. Very non-trivial. You often have to you know, think very deeply about what a human is actually doing extract the training in
Formation, it's you know, there's various techniques, right? But once you do it surpassed its kind of like with flight.
There's aspects of we don't yet understand how agile the Bumblebee is or how it can fly how it does. At least it's apocryphal aeroastro evidently. We don't fully understand it and there's aspects of like how birds are really agile that we haven't yet been able to figure out but we have been able to make machines that fly faster and higher than any animal that we know of. So, basically there is something to that deer that once we can put it into the machine format. We can exceed and it just non-trivial.
Able to do that I mean brain-machine interface another great example of this like you just turn it into something where you can read signals from the brain and you're like, okay. Well, that's what it in a is encoded as
Boom, you can think you have you seen these like there's device an hour you can think and type it's telepathy. It's pretty awesome actually.
So let's talk about media fund which you mentioned earlier. So let's take all of this back into very tacitly. Now, how do we create incentives? You were talking about this twinkle in the eye vision? What is that thing?
Yeah. So one thing I've been thinking a lot about is that if you as a writer add value,
You to your reader. You should get a cut of that. Okay, so like the Venture journalism or Venture media model of which there's a few but basically there's like kind of two of them. Right one is let's say you're interested in Fusion Energy to solve climate change or genetic testing to help with covid or self-driving cars to reduce traffic fatalities or encryption to protect privacy, right? So you've got some social problem. So you are concerned about a problem or you're just excited about technology or either one.
Any writing about it and that inspires an entrepreneur to go and you know start a company and it could be writing by the way, but it could also be video. It could be images because you know, that's let's call it full stack media, right? So you inspire someone to go and and start something and you know, that could be for example the movie Minority Report inspired them to connect at Microsoft or you had Nicholas Kristoff the New York Times wrote an article that inspired Bill Gates to go and do these decentralized toilets in Africa.
Which didn't require connection to a central grid, right? So those two are cases with big companies but there's many startups that were inspired by a piece of writing and the thinking is okay you inspire them. What if you get a cut where they seek investment through a form on your site and you get an affiliate referral, right? So they click through the setup. Let's an angel is profile. We have the record of the fact that they listed John at author.com as a referrer, right or they came from author.com domain just like we track referrals all the time now within the internet.
Passing, right and if we invest X dollars ten percent of that goes to the author and they can take half of that inequity in half of that in cash for example, right and so just as a toy example, let's say that there's an entrepreneur their company's value to 10 million investors put in 500 K 50k of that goes to the author and 25k of that is cash today and 25k is speculative equity and then in 10 years that's worth two and a half million dollars because that Fusion Energy company exits.
400 x right. These are not totally insane numbers. This is possible. It goes from a 10 million values to so-called billion dollar valuation. So here's what that does by the way that changes the incentive structure of the writer to go from quantity to Quality. Now, it doesn't matter. You know, how many page views you get or rather? That's not the only metric where you're trying to do is find the next Zuckerberg or vitalik a Fusion Energy and and attract them to your blog right where your outlet without my mean by the way is you only have
10,000, you know readers in the world the only people who care enough about this Fusion Energy is news they can use as opposed to a curiosity but your discussion is pegged at a very high level, right? You're someone who is able to add value to the best people in the world and they look back in and they're like, okay, this is awesome. Like, you know Ernest Cline do with Ready Player One, you helped Inspire Oculus. You could have gone a cut of
that. Yeah. It's interesting because I've seen this with rite of passage where when I first started the school I wanted to have the world's biggest.
Writing school and then I wanted to have the world's smartest community of online writers and it is totally changed how I write. I haven't looked at my page view metrics in months. I used to look at it every single day. And so what ends up happening is you begin to think in terms of a tractors and right now there aren't really metrics that incentivize people to actually attract higher level people and who could build a company like this, but once you
You begin to have those incentives you then and I've realized this and last couple months. Oh my goodness, the kinds of articles that I right now have a level of meat and nutrition that I was actually incentivize to write intellectual junk food when Google analytics was my proprietary measure of how well I was doing
Mmm, exactly. That's right. You will get what you optimize right? And so if your dashboard is how much so by the way, there's another aspect of it which is how much our users have learned. So the Demonic dashboard how much they've retained for me writing. You've actually increase your human capital and then how much they've earned like did they raise money right or and not everybody's going to be an entrepreneur founder. It's a relatively small percentage of people but you know, there's there's a more like repeatable process, which is recruiting.
Right, so you didn't just level them up and teach them Fusion Energy or what? Have you you may have gotten like point one percent of them or .01% You made them a Founder but one percent you got them a job at a Fusion Energy company and then you get a cut of
that. Why is this so important? Why writing? Why are you focused on this? Like, why is this the thing that you're now attracted to that's not really clear to me.
Ha. Okay. That's great question. It's because media and social media are uh,
Upstream of everything like code is how you have machines know what to do and media is how humans know what to do and technology has focused on software which is how we can gain lots of value out of machines, but we have focused less than we should have. I mean, it's funny to say that because you know social media is so huge and whatnot. We focused a lot less than we should have on first-party media in terms of increasing people's human capital. And again, there's been a lot of efforts here.
There's online education. There's a lot of good stuff out there, but we really haven't done is seek to build like the full stack narrative, right? Oh, that's something else by the way, everything I've described up to this point is maybe sound like eat your vegetables, right which is education versus infotainment. But there is, you know, thesis antithesis synthesis where you can make it edutainment right really entertaining but also highly educational, you know, textbooks that read like novels right? And I think that's
Possible to do it just hasn't really been tried. You know, for example, there's this famous book on statistical mechanics opening to 1975 book states of matter by David goodstein Ludwig boltzmann who spent much of his life settings to school mechanics died in 1906 by his own hand Paul ehrenfest carrying on the work died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to say Siskel mechanics, perhaps it would be wise to approach the subject cautiously.
All right, that's a great hook, you know at the beginning. It's like forbidden knowledge. Oh my God, what did they see, you know kind of thing, but of course is a very technical topic. It's just a so I think that can be done where you apply many of the techniques of Hollywood and of you know screenwriting and so on to this kind of content and it just hasn't really been tried yet. I mean again, it's somewhat these educational apps are out there. I'm not saying there's zero, but it but I feel it hasn't been like directing the gun
sights. I
I think you're missing feedback. Loops as a critical component of this as someone who teaches and one of the things that we do is we try to make as much of the student experience legible as possible. And so for example during class at least once I will ask a question and I will get hundreds of paragraph responses from my students. I can also follow the chat and after every single lesson, I have five to eight hundred.
Shots that I can look at to gauge the temperature of the class. We have our entire circle Forum of places where students are engaging and interacting and I look at all this and so I can actually understand how my students are feeling so much better than like when I would go to college classes, I would sit down and go to the class. I wouldn't give much response at all except for maybe head nods. And I think that what you're saying here, is that what we can actually
we do is begin to understand what parts of the educational experience have this drop off rate. And then in the same way that Netflix has a lot of data on how their TV shows are actually performing if we can then apply that to the educational experience. It can be so much richer. And so yeah, not sure that necessarily it hasn't been tried before. I think that there's actually like a 10x hundred X of legibility that then allows us to gain visibility into what students are feeling and where they're struggling.
That's really good. So basically first of all, it's that's good feedback on feedback. Let me sort of integrate that with this because I agree with you since you know having taught that's also super important the aspects where I was thinking about that were a the mnemonic dashboard so you can see where your students are learning. So that is feedback of a Kind be is I think every New Media Company needs to be a media Community as well where you have a personal relationship with your 10,000 readers in for example, like locals.com is like a social network in a box, right?
Right, you put up your content, but you also have a relationship with your readers, you know, like a newsletter is just a broadcast, but you really want like a mini Social Network. I mean there's comments on it, of course, but maybe you want something persistent like a chat room where it's not just it's like a guide a chat room, perhaps where you're posting first party stuff, right? And you know that there's a Continuum between a Blog where somebody comments and then and there's one moderator then a group log and then you know where there's a few moderators and then social media where there's no
Readers be on Twitter and it's just a free for all right, like who's posting who's giving feedback to each other? I do think that the blog or group blog model is actually under appreciated where it's a moderated conversation. But everybody a group log with The Social Network I think is a less explored format on the internet that I think we could do a lot more of a little bit like, you know, the faculty of a university and all of their grad students being in the same
chat.
Right, but I'm hearing you say is like you get to kind of create your own University here that the university starts with the network. You become a magnet for talent. Then you then have your own incubator coming out of a university that then radiates startups like a YC model and then you take a cut of the magnetism in the network. That is built.
That's right. That's right. And you know the thing is I've had this, you know business plan and so on since 2013 are just been doing other things since then.
And with now we're just Tech is in 2020. Maybe it's the right time for something like this. The big thing about it is it's
extremely scalable
because once you can actually see the part that's not scalable. Is that personal feedback? Right? But the part that is scalable is everything associated with mnemonics everything associated with like content that trans people and so on and so forth, right? So you might you might do something where for example if you want to become an expert on Platinum
You know and platinum Mining and the uses industrial use the Platinum, you know, there's there is some stuff out there. It's not bad. There's Wikipedia. There's so on there isn't like to my knowledge at least Platinum University. Right? And and so that kind of thing where it's contemporaneous also, by the way, because a lot of textbooks don't get updated fast enough and so on this would be the place, you know, where you'd come to become a world expert in this keyword and I think that building a community of those folks
You know interesting question is always a question of dutifully decentralized or do it centralized view centralized. You have a consistent format and style and aesthetic. If you do decentralized, then you can have a hundred people who are motivated to CEOs and you know that may get you more in the long run. Right? So there's arguments are both like Y combinator is decentralized because Paul Graham goes and funds, you know a thousand people they do different things but something that's achieving a vision is typically centralized, you know, like a lawn decentralized. Both are both are reasonable. I do however think that there's
There's a big gap here and it's still what's funny about it is despite all the online education. I think as you said Wikipedia is not yet the end of History. We're not yet. They're on this.
Yeah. What I hear you saying is that there's a Last Mile problem with knowledge where when I was talking to this oil guy on the beach in Los Angeles. He already had all the knowledge that's actually the hard part. But what's happening is he's not sharing the knowledge, you know, a lot of people think and this is why
I'm so loud about trying to get people to write a lot of people think that writing is starting at square one where oh my goodness. I need to start writing.
But people who have years of experience or have read X number of books travel to Y number of countries started Z number of companies. They're actually at like mile 24 at a marathon where they actually gaining the experience is the hard part making it legible to the world is what we are struggling with as a society in terms of how many experts there are verses how few of them actually share their knowledge my
To you is I kind of think of you sometimes as the pseudonym guy. How does that factor into this? And in terms of the future that we're going to
yeah, so, you know, I gave a talk last year called the pseudonymous economy and that's maybe you know useful for you know, folks with this to just Google and watch some YouTube. And one thing I think is going to happen. This decade is that people are going to stop using their real names online and start using pseudonyms more and more and I also think the specific kind of student.
Mm, that'll get popularized will be a crypto domain name. So like David / l dot e th well, that's actually it's got your real name before it but you might actually use you know, Fubar 97 Dottie th right and the thing about this that's powerful about crypto domain name in particular as a pseudonym people here may not know. What a Cryptid domain name is, but you can Google DNS that's the etherium name system or handshake and read about it. It's like a domain name like, you know, David Pearl.com or you know food bar.com
But it also has encryption and payments and all the other stuff built into it. Like you could send an encrypted message to that Cryptid domain name. You could send a payment certainly to it. You could send other things like digital art or digital certificates like a certificate of graduation of rite of passage. You could confirm that that person graduated right a passage at a particular time. You could see the reputation because they can log in to online services with that crypto domain name. You can see like whether they've staked a balance, for example, they stick to balance of a hundred bucks so that there are
trustworthy actor when they log into a platform and you know, they're also likely to be real and not a troll you can do things like they accumulate Karma under one name and they can transfer it privately to another pseudonym. So this way you can you know build up karma in a community and then transfer to a pseudonym and then speak more freely in that Community than you normally would write all of these are types of things which I think allow for people to speak their minds freely on the internet and Ernst autonomously without being attacked and
I think that's going to be a huge part of the 2020s. Is this pseudonymous economy with crypto domain names as being the kind of
pseudonym the other thing that you've been talking about as we've spoken recently and you're talking about this with with with truth and verification is something that you call The Ledger of record. So why don't you give us just a brief background of oracle's the Oracle problem and then let's work our way up The Ledger of
record. Yeah, totally. So to introduce first a concert of crypto oracle's, you know right now if you want to find out
The weather in Chicago, Illinois back in 2014, January 15th, right you'll go and look at The Weather Channel's records on that. If you go if you want to look up stock prices, you're going to go and probably look up let's say Bloomberg's you know records on that. If you want to know real estate prices in a particular you look up zillow's records on that, right? So we have a system right now where there's tons and tons of data that's on line. It's in these databases, but it's siloed. It's behind
And you don't pay well, it's not all that, you know queryable. It's in these companies datasets, but it's not out there on the internet and an important point is that many stories today are effectively wrappers around this kind of data for example, sports articles are wrappers around the feet of data from the NBA and financial articles are wrappers around the feet of data from Bloomberg and many political articles are wrappers around the feet of data from Twitter. And so right if you think about they literally have embedded tweets, right?
This is progress in a sense where you have the letters sitting on top of the numbers. Each of those posts is fundamentally a numerical data structure. Right? Even, you know, tweet even though it's words there. There's numbers. It's a when was a time stamp? You know, what where was it posted from what device what account all the type of stuff right? It's literally a data structure can print the so-called Jason of it. So the the concept is our if all of these articles are based on feeds of data, what if we took
All of the fields of data and we put them not just online but on chain, okay. So on chain is the next step after online and what that means is it's not just like accessible on a server that might go down at some point. It is posted on a blockchain which will never go down.
So you saw the permalink problem? You saw the link for our problem blockchains don't go down since they're you know, distribute it so and by there's other kinds of data structures, you can use an ipfs or like when I POS you can use ipfs or a system like that for decentralized data storage. Okay, block chains are not the only thing but you post it on chain or the equivalent and what you can get is especially if posted on chain, you'll get time stamps. You'll get a digital signature as to who posted you get a hash of was posted and so you can prove
Medically who posted what when right or at least What entity with this digital signature wrote? What data at what time and why is this important? Because
it's digital history.
It's unfalsifiable history. So to give you three examples of how this record of all of these facts could resolve things six years ago. Tesla had a issue where the nyt wrote an article saying that you know, their their car had stalled out on the side of the highway.
And they pulled the instrumental record and they showed that that article was not true that it had not actually stalled out in that way. Right? And so that was something where the instrumental record The Ledger of record was able to falsify the words on top the numbers took precedence over the letters second example last year the Brazilian fires Emmanuel macron retweeted a photo of supposedly the Brazilian fires in the New York Times printed this tweet put it in article and it turns out that photo was taken by a photographer who died in 2003. So the photo must
At least 15 years old. And so again a timestamp basically showed that the story about the Brazilian fires false and that was actually a big deal because people were talking about International intervention. Oh my God, you know Brazil is letting the Amazon burned down. We need to stop it etcetera. But the information was fake. It was not or at least some of those photos were false third example in China recently two years ago a court in Hangzhou went and proved that a patent dispute the the litigant
Aunt was incorrect because the defendant had actually put their patent or the content is our pan on chain before that infringement had had actually occurred. So a third example of where a timestamp resolve the dispute, right and to put a you know, to make this even more obvious like the crypto space is worth hundreds of billions of dollars and the whole reason is because you timestamp as to who got what money went.
Who own one scarce property went right? And so it's the simple kind of mechanism of the timestamp is you know, you think about Nixon right with Watergate. What do they say? What did he know and when did he know it? Right so digital history as to what happened? When who did what when is way more important than people think right go back to the the timestamp go back to the video camera. Go back to the footage find out what happened if you had that in an undeletable way.
Or a public way or all of the above, right? You'd have what I call The Ledger of record where you take. So what's a crypto Oracle by the way coming back to that definition? Imagine if the Weather Channel didn't just Post-its whether online where I could go down but on chain where it couldn't write whether if Bloomberg did the same if Zillow to the same right? That would mean that you have a ledger of record where it's like you hit a button. It's like for the record.
Right. So you're posting this for the record that's undeletable and such as undeletable. It's also publicly accessible. You might make it something where you can do something in between by the way, you can make it something where it's accessible to those people who have a cryptographic key. Right? But the point is that this Ledger of record as you get feeds of not just sports scores and financial stuff, but every tweet every real estate transaction every coronavirus death, right every Weather Channel post you start to have
A library of all the events that ever happened and now any story you tell about what happened in the past better reference Ledger record. And the thing about it is on the one hand. This is not that big a change in Behavior. It's like tweeting except you tweet for the record by posting to The Ledger record and it's like linking except rather than linking to a website. You linked to a block chain or a block Explorer and that'll show you this undeletable thing.
So why is this important besides the novelty of it? Like it's not quite clear to me.
How this is something that's worth being excited about it sounds okay sort of just being so cool. This is a new technology. But the way that you're talking about. It's like no this isn't a bunch of interconnected cables and 1985. This is the internet and it's going to
have some fundamental changes. Absolutely. This is probably I think one of the most important I mean we have to be able to execute on it, but it's already happening you're having descript oracle's be set up this whole thing is going to be one of the most important Technologies of this decade if we can.
If we can popularize it and make it a thing and the reason is for let me give you a very contemporary example. Okay, how many coronavirus sets have occurred? Right? You know, this is a number out there. It's like, you know, I think the latest was like about a hundred seventy thousand in the US and the issue is that folks will discuss this, you know, oh, you know, these are folks who have heart attacks or diabetes. They didn't actually die from coronavirus and so and so forth, right? And so there's layers you just see that number right but
If you had something where every hospital was posting a feed online, okay, and not crucially not with private patient information. All right, and that's where the encryption and permissioning and so on. These are important issues. I don't gloss over them there things. You'll have to figure out technically but they're obviously giving summary statistics already right deaths and so on right so clearly that's not a patient privacy issue, right? So
if there was a feed of every
single
A virus death or case or release or diagnosis was like the single tweet right worth of data? Okay. It's a little more than a tweet, but just conceptually and all of that was posted on chain then anybody who is skeptical could hit enter
and pull all of the raw
data, right? You would not need to take it on faith. You'd have to see that a thousand hospitals all of whom have reputations and names and had been trusted and so on.
In hospitals were all going and posting this this data over time right once you've got that like
that's a level of granularity where
if you have something where it's st. Jude's and it's a you know, Caesar Cedar Sinai and it's Harvard's hospital. And by the way, for example, all the Chinese statistics, right, you know, one of the issues with this with coronavirus in the early days people like, oh I can't trust anything that comes out of China. Okay, you can trust something that comes out China, you know what that is.
Is is there blockchain transactions because they couldn't falsify that right just people in China who are sending and receiving Bitcoin and those transactions are getting posted. And by the way, that's also kind of the future. I think of international trade is you know, these these folks in different countries. You may not be able to trust each other's legal systems. They can trust digital currency. They can trust the on chain substance. You can fully audit everything you can see at. All right. So the point of this this idea
is let's say that folks in
China had
Done this they posted on chain right now. Basically, it's much more auditable right? There are still ways that you might be able to falsify it but they start to get really expensive depending on how it's done, you know, as an example. Would that Brazilian fires thing right very few people could have realized that the time stamp from 16 years ago of this journalist dying in 2003 would be relevant to like stopping a war 15 years later right and you'd have to in the blockchain.
In mode erase billions trillions of Records to go back and rewrite that thing from 15 years ago. You see I'm saying it's becomes infeasible. You can't do it Stalin did and and Photoshop somebody out of a photo. You can't delete history anymore. Right? And and so that is where things start to get super interesting in terms of having a base of undeniable truth to realign society around because without that you have something like covid-19, which I think is
Really motivate a lot of my thinking on this how do we get to consensus on those things that can be numerically demonstrated and we always get by the way with this kind of discussion is like the naive first order is O facts matter and then the sophisticated second order is facts don't matter and say it's all narratives and it's all you just competing tribes and the facts don't matter at all. Right, but the third order is actually facts really do matter because the The Narrative that is based on facts will in the medium to long term have more contact.
With reality and therefore more technological and economic strength.
That last bit is critical right? Like that's why the u.s. Eventually beat the Soviet Union is that like communism required to just lie more, you know that to make up factoring numbers because you know, if you didn't have prices Supply chains didn't work factories didn't produce and and so on So eventually, you know, holy lies right like the kinds that animated, you know, the Soviet regime unfortunately work surprisingly well in the short term because you can bully people into conforming with them.
And so on so forth, but in the medium to long-term, they don't work because your machines don't work, right you just become poorer as a society and you're screaming these holy lies, but it doesn't matter because other societies that didn't believe them have exceeded you technologically right and economically, so that's why you know, this type of stuff is actually pretty important, you know, the nature of how to get truth in a decentralized environment. Awesome.
So what I want to do is I have a bunch of questions and I just want to sort of do rapid fire and we're just going to
Around all over the place, but I want someone to sort of get a guess where you could call a Balaji explosion of sort of a Thea. Why is life extension the essence of Technology.
Ah, so I wrote an article on this Balaji s.com the purpose of technology and it's a non-obvious claim. But let me see if I can get there in a sentence which is if the purpose of technology is to reduce scarcity, then the ultimate purpose of technology is to eliminate mortality, okay?
Okay, so let's break that down. So the first part if x then y right if the purpose of Technologies to reduce scarcity, so why do we say that? Well, every technology that you've ever heard of it's usually described as oh this makes something faster or cheaper or you know better or you know, whatever right lighter that type of stuff and why is it better if it's faster? Why is it better if it's cheaper? So if it costs you a dollar it used to cost you $100.
That means it takes a hundred X, you know less money, but that also means it takes a hundred less X less time because your life is you know, at least some of your working life is turned into money that you spend an hour doing consulting. You got some money out of it, right and rather than spending a hundred minutes of your life. You spend one minute now of of time on using this because the technology improved it went a hundred X faster. There's actually a movie by thing Andrew niccol called in time that explore this idea of
As a currency, right? He puts in various dramatic hooks to make it seem like some people are hoarding time in a mortal and others aren't but I don't think that actually has to be scarce point being that if you're doing all these things in Tech to produce scarcity the ultimate scarcity production that gives everybody back lots of time is life extension or reversing aging and that should be technically feasible. Now, that's the thing that people don't get
it is possible to reverse aging like it's starting to happen in mice like the technology is actually moving like Oliver and oh David Sinclair law redeeming it longevity fund. There's some really awesome stuff that's happening in this area. And so we should prioritize that because life extension makes everything cheaper. If you live to a hundred fifty as opposed to 70, if you knew that you had that many years not just of being superannuated by the way, you could also call it youth extension, right like, you know,
Why can't we drink a potion or take an injection or whatever and restore ourselves to how we were at 25 and if you're 25, by the way, you're like well, that's fine. I don't care but once things start to break it's like a card that starts to kind of break down. You're like, yeah, you know, I wish I was 25 again. I could run faster. I could work harder. Lots of folks want to be 25 again right as a
24 girl that could tell you. It's pretty good right now.
It's pretty good now. That's right. That's right. But basically what happens is just stuff that never bothered you your elbow your knee or whatever.
It just starts acting up one thing by the way, that's important though is I made the analogy to a car breaking down but it's actually not a great analogy for the following reason when you deal with mechanical things like cars. There is a failure rate that you can model and some cars that are just lucky never experienced any of those failures and so, you know one out of 10,000 cars makes it 50 years a hundred years, you know, whatever without being repaired because you just the errors don't accumulate you might by random chance.
Able to make it humans aren't like that. There's like a hard drop off at 120.
If humans broke down like cars, there'd be some humans who be living to a thousand.
Right instead. What happens is you have a very predictable and coordinated kind of thing where people kind of go gray. They get fat or whatever in kind of the same way as they age right and so people believe and now there's a lot of evidence that shows that this is actually a triggered and coordinated thing just like we know that you're kind of genetically wired to go from a baby to an adult right? It's not like 25 would be your natural state forever. You're genetically wired to die.
Right, so maybe we can unwire that and in fact folks are working on that. Right? So this to me is also where you know more broadly. We have to start talking in Tech much more about our values and our valuations money is only a tool and what really matters is building something you can't buy and that's actually what improves life expectancy that's you know life expectancy. By the way used to be the metric of you know, technological products. Most recently. It's something where people have focused.
Hassan stock prices or GDP which are fine, right? But you know are ultimately human metrics as opposed to physical metrics, right? Let us say there are entry human, you know, I pay you actually pay me why or whatever versus. Hey, I change the physics of this person went from 70 years old 250. It's a different scene like a ratio scale variable versus one. That's not right either, you know folks are actually living forever or they're living, you know till H 400 or they're not whereas the stock price you can kind of decide on that between two people.
So I think that broadly speaking in the 2020s we're going to start to see another we won't see SAS apps and that type of stuff. That's all fine. It's good. Okay, but we're going to also start to see more of a focus on the real stuff right not just life extension, which is like the core of it but brain-machine interface limb regeneration, you know curing deafness. I had an article that I linked they're like rnai injections that you know, go and restore hearing curing loss of sight with like bionic eyes a lot of the
Miracles I think we can actually start making happen with technology and get the future that you know, folks have grown up thinking
about. Yeah values to valuation. That's a shot in the Balaji one-liner drinking game. You know, I'm thinking maybe we should do I'm trying to take his this a drinking game or is this Bingo and I you know, I'm trying to figure out which one but I could totally see 25 one-liner squares. Yeah, it's good. Actually Who's online writing to spin up a digital country?
Great question. So, you know herzl did it where he wrote detergents taught and that actually founded Israel, right? So perfect concept, right? And basically what happened was he catalyze a reverse diaspora where folks around the world were inspired by this and you know came to Israel and so on and obviously not without controversy or whatever but but it showed that basic about 50 years after he wrote it he got a state. So the first that shows that it's not crazy to think about doing it right possible future
is here.
Is not evenly distributed yet.
Yeah, exactly. Also The Federalist Papers, right, you know with Publius and so on the founding fathers went and wrote synonymously and that became the basis of the new government they argued with each other and so on about how it should be right. So, how'd you do it? I would say A you can write online build a community be give everybody VR headsets and start actually building a city in VR. Okay, and you can do this with Autodesk and so on you can actually import the models into VR right? I think by the way,
VR architecture is going to be a big thing. This decade just like there's folks who are now so many people are Publishers, right? So many people are you know video editors. A lot of people are going to become a mature Architects because becoming more accessible and that starts actually bring your VR will start to make people think again about innovating in the physical world because you can do everything on the computer and then hit enter. Alright, so a you build a community online with a purpose that comes from the writing be you you simulate the city or town in VR
See you enforce governance and physical levels of Civility. Okay, that's an important term. It's funny because the physical world is now becoming uncivil, right? But just remember back to 2010 when people weren't like beating each other up in the streets and like like you can mostly walk around now that's something where civility is novel. It's funny but it's true. Right but what I said somebody a while ago is Twitter is not the real world, but it will be
And that's happening right Twitter is fights are coming into the real world. Right? So that's another part of it. You want to have physical levels of Civility. You probably have a digital currency if folks save money and then this community is able to then crypto crowdfund territory.
And that is actually super super interesting because you basically everything you you're doing you're doing online. You're doing the dress rehearsal for the whole Community online. You're organizing online you build up a hierarchy online and its founding as opposed to election. Okay, or a founding as opposed to inheriting. So one thing I think a lot about it
stops becoming countries basically
exactly our cities to start you know, and in the thing is there's nothing nothing illegal about doing the city. There's nothing illegal about building stuff. There's nothing
You know you can all of that is totally possible there's unincorporated land. And so it's you're working within the existing system is nothing infeasible about it. Right but it's a level up from you know, going from start your own company start your own currency start your own City start your own country, right? So I think at the start your own City stage and obviously you learn a ton by doing that the city eventually becomes maybe a city-state right? But the thinking is it's a new model for legitimacy where its founding versus inheriting right? So the east coast of the US I think is
is very much about inheritance. So obviously inherited wealth you have these inherited fortunes but also inherited names right whether it's you know, a Kennedy or a bush or would have you it's not like anyone party or group but it is it's inherited wealth its Heritage names. It's also inherited institutions you inherit a paper right? Whether that's you know, the murdochs or the grams or the cells Burgers would have you they inherit papers and this is very different from the West Coast model, which is founding right SpaceX was an inherited right PayPal wasn't
Jared Anderson harvests was not inherited Facebook was not inherited. These were built from scratch Amazon does not inherited and the thing about it is when you inherit something right if you're like the 45th president or the year the 109th mayor, you don't know how to build that system from scratch, right? It's like it's like an heir to a factory, right? They don't know where everything went right? They didn't Build It Up from scratch so long as it's normal times the factory just keeps cranking through and your your manager keeps cranking through the widgets go through it doesn't
seem like there's anything wrong but something ephemeral that's hard to quantify has been lost which is the know how I know how to do it. Right? So these folks who are currently running these East Coast institutions could pretty much never have built up from scratch most of them, right, you know, for example, organizing the US military or or the Federal Reserve from scratch. This is the
inverse of progress as abstraction. This is the downside of that. So this is exactly is abstraction, then there it comes
Down but then we lose the process knowledge of how the system actually functions
exactly. That's exactly right and it's alienation from how that was actually done right? You don't you start to think okay the cylindre because it always has and always will and it's hundreds of years old and blah blah blah, right, but I don't think that many institutions that predated the internet will easily survive the internet.
That's another one liner if you want, right so these inherited institutions are incompetent and increasingly, you know, less considered less legitimate, right? There's like loss of faith in Banks. There's a loss of faith in media. There's a loss of face and politics loss of faith in education and higher education and so on what I think is going to be legitimate is an alternative model which is founding as opposed to inheriting. Why is this organization set up the way it is with the hierarchy it is
This person built it from scratch with their own two hands by hitting keys on a keyboard. Right and it accumulated crucially. The backlinks came in overtime. Incrementally. It was proof Point proofpoint proof point right, you know, this person came in as an executive. This person came as a partner this person came in as a customer this person came in as a, you know, like a like a well-wisher or supporter, but they happen over time. It wasn't like. Oh you win an election and boom it's all yours, right? Oh, you know you you inherit something and
it's all yours write it in just like get dumped in your lap. It was built up progressively over time as opposed to a big bang and then another big bang right and I think that's a different model of legitimacy, which is a digital model. It's an internal model. It's already work certainly for starting new companies and new currencies. I think it'll also work for starting new cities and I think it starts with
writing.
Awesome, you more questions. Why is genomics important? And why do you think that it's under-covered relative to its importance? It feels like a big secret that it's just been glossed over.
Yeah. So I mean first the reason genomics is important is that your genome is your OS, right? So that is your operating system and we now can read the source code for that. You can actually look at that on the computer and
You can see how your genes help determine your your body your metabolism, you know your makeup and you can click those jeans and you can see whether you can metabolize caffeine whether you're predisposed to this or that cancer. All the stuff is there but you're kind of to be sort of an expert to do it. I think it's going to become extremely accessible. And so that's number one is first, you know for the same reason you have a Fitbit or a scale you're going to measure yourself and and the genome is going to be a huge part of that number one.
Number two is once more folks have genomes. You can Network them together just like you can with computers when I say have genomes. I mean installed genomes where you've got on your computer, you know, you have some form some way of doing private aggregations, right? Because since its medical data effectively, it's private, but since it's it's statistical it needs to be aggregated to provide value. And so ways of doing private aggregations across people's computers will be
Be a super important thing for genomics that's actually where genomics and crypto intersect. Right since you want to basically calculate things like how many asg's T's and C's are there on different people for this particular trait while protecting their privacy?
So that's that's kind of number. Number two. Second point is lots of genomes have a network effect. Just like lots of computers have never compact Point number three is we're starting to learn how to edit genomes. So the first successful crisper therapies are now out there where folks are actually curing things like Sickle Cell by editing genes using, you know, restoring functionality fetal hemoglobin in one case to compensate for the Sickle Cell deficiency and others and live genome editing is crazy. That's like updating the software on your computer the fact that works is this in
Warmest enormous breakthrough should be page one headlines. Should I mean maybe it was for a day or something like that, but it's simply not something that most people are aware of right and finally genomics is a great way for software people to get into bio medicine because genomics also encompasses omics in general which is metabolomic sex, and it's transcriptomics and so on so it's looking at not just your DNA but looking at the small molecules that are floating around your body like, you know, when you're when your metabolism glucose it's looking at
The rnas that are floating around your body when you're synthesizing RNA and it's basically getting a readout of your whole body just like you'd get a readout of your computer State, you know, what's going on with the ram what's going with the hard drive and the CPU and so on you get that kind of read out a Fitbit but for everything, you know, you quick comment. I was talking to my
mom last night and she brought up such a good point that the fact that nutrition labels are static is kind of ridiculous that yes. It was a look at a nutrition label and the nutrition label should not just be this absolute thing. It should be relative to your DNA.
Your health and your biology
absolutely. In fact, you know, you could do that where if you had a genomics app and you barcode scan a food you could store a drug you could see whether or not it would affect you.
Right, you know one thing about that is something that might get past the regulatory issues associated with some of this is literally just see a table of all the people with different variants and what their reactions to this drug war.
That's literally just showing raw data. You're not saying the drug Works. You're not seeing it doesn't it's literally as a table of the raw data. This goes back to The Ledger record right where there's so much that can be done with decentralized data collection where you can start building up systems because the information is Upstream of decisions. It's information that defines what drugs are legal or not. It defines what you know, whether we consider somebody good or bad weather how many deaths for Corona happened whether you should buy or sell something and cetera. So the
Formation on your genome is actually just one of these aspects of information that will help guide your decisions. The aggregation of all those things is another entry of The Ledger record, which also helps got your
decisions. Cool last question. I think that one of the big things that's going to become true and this gets back into some of the things we were talking about earlier with media fund is that writers will go on to be millionaires billionaires and that writing is like we've spoken about the way that you
act a network the way that you start movements the way that you basically get free marketing advertising and networking for basically everything that you do and that writing online is the internet first credential that you would get at a university Network that you would get at a university benefits of going to conferences. Like now you get to run the show. Why do you think that media writing online and we can talk about media fund here too close? Why do you think that this now has Venture returns rather than being something like
Journalist where if you're an average pay journalist, you might make eighty seventy thousand dollars a year. Even that might even be on the high end. Whereas if you're like a very well-paid one. Maybe you're making 250 300
because you're no longer monetizing the content you're monetizing the action outside, right? So I think like this whole model that I'm interested in is open source media, which is to the existing media. What open source software was to Microsoft, right? So all the content is free. You monetize the community.
And you monetize the actions that are happening outside. The content is there to train you and to help you do things in the real world, right? And so for example a text book that teaches you how to do like investing or something like that is worth way more than the 50 bucks that you paid for it, right? Yeah. I think that's that's the answer. I think we are we're basically radically under monetizing writing because we're focusing on making people pay for the writing as opposed to using
The writing to level up people increasing their human capital and taking a cut of that.
I couldn't agree more. That's why all right a passage is about writing for free and then having the benefits of writing show up in other parts of your life. So given everything that we spoke about. Is there any message that? You want to leave the audience with
sure, you know, this is just a test right now, but if you go inside a bit media fun.com we do have a landing page there where we're looking to fund writers who are writing about technical content.
At first and we would basically fund you and then also take a cut of any Investments that come through your site and you recruits it comes to your site for our some of our companies. So that's the concept of how we might make media
millionaires great and how can people reach you? You can reach me at? Hello at / al.com and I will forward your email to biology. What's the best
dming me on Twitter will work for now and I've got open DM so do that
cool. Thanks biology. This was fantastic.
All right. Thank you, David.
Hey again, it's David here. One more time before you leave. I want to tell you about my online writing
school called rite of
passage. Now. It's nothing like the boring writing classes. You took in school. It's made for Curious people just like you who want to write more think better and use the internet to spark incredible friendships and don't tell your English teacher. I sat this but there's no.
Oh talks of adverbs or conjunctions. None of that boring stuff right of passage is way more practical than that. See I've taken everything. I've learned from interviewing some of the world's most effective people on this podcast and I've asked them how they write and then I distilled those lessons into a powerful set of principles for helping you write better. If you want to start writing online rite of passage is the best place to begin. That's all for today.
Day, and thanks so much for listening.
