#178 with Balaji - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Communities & Crypto

are you aware of what it's like to talk to you no yeah i feel like i could rude aware i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a road less travel never look place got a good pod and we got a good guest here this is probably alright before i introduce our guest i'm gonna butter them up a little bit i'm gonna butter them up because i'm i'm genuinely excited for this i there's probably like three or four podcasts so far that i'm like oh yeah and this is one that i wake up in the morning i'm excited to do i know that if we do a good job this is gonna be what people's favorite podcast podcasts why is that well this is the it's not morning for us sean it's it's ten it's late or it it's a let it's it's almost good it's gonna be midnight sooner brand you is yeah we got up late or we were a stayed up late yeah but that's alright it's my birthday by the way today so this is how gonna hour thursday birthday evening you happy birthday my wife was like what do you wanna do for your birthday i was like don't worry it's already planned i'm doing a podcast i'm i love it so anyways the the reason i think this process is podcast gonna be good this episode is gonna be good is because our podcast is all about ideas people listen to this pod they wake up and they listen to this pod because we get the wheels turning we present new and interesting ideas or we talk about spaces or we talk about spaces in ways that you haven't heard too much before now one of those look one of the ways that i get a bunch of my ideas is from our guest biology who is who is here and he has been i don't know what the exact quote was but i think mark andrei and at one point called you like the highest ideas per minute of anybody he's met was there do you know that quote that i'm talking about he he sort of kind remark i he said they were useful ideas too which is good so yeah that same credit for our ideas people don't usually call them useful but that's okay table is okay yes you we teach people how to like launch like a porn app you teach people how to like you you warn the world of a pandemic so like you your your podcast is actually very popular and if heard a lot of people say good things about it so don't be hard yourself it's good i do your think and i think that you one of the like if the a lot of people ask us like oh you know who do you guys follow who do guys read you're one of my answers to if i start a new twitter account and i had to follow five people to like get that information flowing in who are the five kinda of must follows i think you would definitely be in there for me and sam i know you've been following as well so we'll give kind of like a very quick rundown but then we have a bunch of topics that i think are exciting we're gonna talk about a bunch of crypto things because i think you're very forward thinking into the crypto world we're gonna talk about some non crypto things as well and then we'll all try to steer clear of too much controversy and you know let's let's play all nobody get canceled here we go so so ba here at one point you were you're a founder of i believe a genetics company or a bio come how would you describe your your first company what what was the kind of category you call that one clinical genomics so basically you know one of the first companies he use genomics in medicine and basically we took if you've heard of tae sachs or sickle cell these sort of genetic diseases mendelian diseases that you've probably learned about in in high school those are simple genetic diseases where they can be predicted by usually just variation in one gene and we did we took all of those at the same time and test them at once with a universal genetic test and that was one of the first applications of genomics in the clinic where the scalability of it the fact that you could assess many different markers many different variants at the same time allowed you to cut costs relative to a traditional one one gene or one variant at a time blood test which i actually just used it i used it my my wife and i for freezing embryos used you it's what's it called myriad myriad women's health you know division but basically it was it was called c o and s y council as an independent company so like i well i saw the packaging in the trash can and i was like oh i know this day about and so yeah so sean that's what we used it for it glad that could be of assistance i think it's interesting because that's a space which has sort of just evolved in its own way you know genomics and bio it hasn't really linked up with the main body of tech you know of like internet technology consumer technology it might do so this decade will see hasn't yet it's sort of like how you know like high frequency trading and all the type of stuff is own kind of sub area and crypto has now linked it up with the main body of tech you know where it's programming you know programming on top of blockchain right now that we have under thirty million sequence genomes and lots of people with gen types i forget the latest number but book twenty three b ancestry street dot com there's millions of people who have personal genomes albeit gen types rather than full sequences i think we're gonna start to see more kind of you know lot genomes have being installed in the same instance like a personal computers installed it's a piece of software right or data rather locally on your computer that you can do things that's a whole separate topic happy to dive into that and what what and what did you do after that so i was and yeah that was like sorry actually that was like a three hundred million dollar exit or something like yeah yeah wow like like pretty wildly successful was good it was yeah was good copy and i think you know so after that there's a bunch of things i was a early investor in cryptocurrencies so bitcoin ethereum z cash bunch of other ones you've heard of i shouldn't say every major coin they're a major coin that i think has some technological innovation you know i've i've probably got like something in not every single one but a lot of them early investor in superhuman soil and cameo lambda school rep mighty bunch of others have all done fairly well you know deal if you just saw this become unicorn river last week all things that sort of i think fit my philosophy because you know i i sort of invest in invest in things that help to improve quality of life in the future that i envision and so you know some somebody mike with with crypto for example crypto is built for the apocalypse what with internet right you know so he you know that have stuff right and you know there's an apocalypse then there's a rebirth after that and so i kind of think of that is sort of this stack of technologies you kind of view from that lens of the un bundling and fracturing of all twentieth century all pre internet institutions and then the re bundling of them back together into new internet native forms i think very few institutions that the internet will survive the internet in the fullness of time so so i i think sorry go ahead i think i think sean that before we like really get into it though i did wanna call out i think we wanna call his latest project right because i want we might talk for a little bit i wanna i wanna be able to promote that right away as opposed to in the end so you wanna sean you wanna take it from there yeah well i'll let i'll let you introduce it but super interesting project i believe the url is seventeen twenty nine dot com so just the numbers seventeen one seven two nine dot com and it's really simple and i love simple simple idea which is it's a newsletter that pays you so it's a newsletter that you get that has these little micro tests so i got one i don't know if it's yesterday the day before it was basically like you can get three thousand bucks in bitcoin if you create memes that will promote you know crypto in india or you know help help help package that idea in a way that's shareable and spread that's what means are around crypto in india and so there are these little tasks that come out and so it's a newsletter that you read not just for like sam got a newsletter two million ish subscribers the hustle they give information but it's sort of like a path it's like you know you just consume it and you move on with your day your newsletter is actually kinda interesting because it gives you an opportunity a small bite sized opportunity for you to do a thing and build up not only not only earn from it but also build up in a way as you do more and more these build up some credentials by having accomplish these little micro tests so can you give us the like i know that's my reason outside did you hear that slight he goes yours is actually interesting we should do a collaboration with i'm sure actually there's a lot with the hustle kind of ethos so i think overlaps you know as i was mentioning to sean beforehand you know you guys like it it takes all different kinds to build a company and you guys have sort of the sales you know business dna natively right and for me that's very much an acquired tongue you know where like i i can emulate you know business and i can i can run that in an emulation layer but like my core os is math you know and then there's folks who are like the reverse who are fundamentally businessman and who can get into the tech and get into the computer science so on as sort of a way to do business and you know one needs both kinds right but i think one area of overlap potentially with the hustle you know serve of audience is that you know a lot of time online as we know is just being wasted right being thrown into a meat grinder i mean like the sheer number of hours when you really think about the millions or billions of hours that are used on social networks look i think there's a necessary step to get people online i think like on balance it was necessary but i think one issue is that social networks were invented and scaled ten years seven years before cryptocurrency and so because of that you could only transfer status online and not value and what that means is that everything basically boiled down to status games leader board what's the most popular how many followers how many fa etcetera and those appear locally non zero sum but are globally zero sum that's say locally it appears it cost me nothing to give this personal like but globally it's a zero sum leader word only one can be at the top right and that leads to the status games that you see on twitter and all these other places that are somewhat in places like reddit where they use pseudo but it's an issue anyway what's my point so seventy twenty nine you know my my friend dan romero actually a while back was tweeting like you know what's the new hacker news and i think you guys were were talking about that and i think the new hack news for crypto is not just a place where you come to discuss and do things seamlessly but something which uses crypto that you can actually earn and learn you know and actually the third is burned so we actually have a another thing proof of workout right so basically you're pursuing you know truth health and wealth in that order and i think that's actually the right priority order right so learn truth you know determine goes truth pursue health you know because without that you have really nothing else and then wealth is important but it's third and it's important to have that third you never want to do something that's untrue to make money or you know to to sacrifice your long term health for wealth i mean whatever losing sleep one day okay i may at the end of world for a year it's gonna affect your long term health you know and that's actually gonna affect even from a pure dollars and cents it's gonna affect your well sharing capacity and your capacity could provide value for your employees and your shareholders so even if you if it's the selfless thing do on a daily basis on a long term basis you wanna take care of your health for the help of those around you so essentially this was sort of so the this true health and wealth thing is this like a personal saying or is this like the the is this like the slogan for seventeen twenty nine so got for century tran and it's basically i think of as the new liberty egalitarian for okay that's great i i know it sounds ambitious but basically as a trip type motto for a new kind of state in the in the fullness of time and the reason is that technology actually allows us to do all three you know with crypto in particular the decentralized ledger we can connect fast the question in a slightly different way which is whenever i'm looking at investment i think i asked the founders is this my favorite question to asked founder is awesome what does the world fast forward three years what does the world look like if this has been adopted what is my what does my day look like that's different maybe me as a user but i would love to hear your version of that because i think there is a really different and cool new lane that gets opened up as something like this gets more adopted so what does the world look like if if this what does look like if i what does it look like well first is rather than just accumulating karma you're actually accumulating something of value right so something a t asset you're earning cryptocurrency you're you're you're actually leveling up yourself imagine if you didn't just gain i don't know a hundred thousand followers but a hundred thousand dollars in all your posting online right that would actually give material benefit to people right now you know for technical reasons facebook and twitter basically capture all the revenue and in the early two thousands mid two thousand thousands was actually a great deal because they were giving these free platforms that you could broadcast anybody in the world and they maintain everything for you to give all the hosting you know the free model was actually a very good deal relative to the alternative at that time and so they just take cut for doing it but now today people realize actually hey all this content that i'm producing for them all this work i'm putting into it the hours into your tweets or whatever you aren't seeing a single dime out of it there's zero creator monetization for the most part in these major social networks i'm wanna say okay not totally zero you could put lincoln bio instagram and there's some stuff but it has lagged right and so now we need a kind of a new social contract to social smart contract and what that means it's basically to make money online and not just make money but to learn things online and not just to make money learn but also to become healthy and so if this becomes popular you don't waste time online or not just waste time you learn things you actually gain crypto credentials not cryptocurrency so like badges in your wallet which are emblem or or reflective of your ability to do certain things for example you complete five python problems and you get a badge that says i've completed five python problems and you complete you know ten questions on i don't know russian history and you get that kind of batch right or the russian language now why that kind of thing is important is it totally destroys the concept of a college diploma the reason being college diploma is a very very coarse grained you know kind of illustration of somebody skills if somebody says i've got a harvard degree or stanford degree right what does that really mean you know you have some estimate okay i kinda know that they you know stanford degree in computer science i'd kinda know what the curriculum is but this particular person you don't know what their skills are actually all their coursework work they did during undergrad has been basically wasted right and if instead what you did was that portfolio that they had every single problem that they solve was in a folder on github so that you know they have twenty five courses and ten ten weeks per course and ten problems of course all twenty five hundred problems were organized in folders on on github you could see their portfolio you could drill them and see their particular skills okay this guy knows operating systems she knows compile this person knows machine learning and i can see that as evidenced by the fifteen problems they've solved with source code online and especially for a broad discipline like computer science or electrical engineering or chemical engineering you can't simply presume that because somebody has a degree that they have that particular skill set people have strengths in different areas point is once you un bundle that or you granular at once you give individual measurable skills you can see just how much talent you know or background somebody has there oh this person solved a hundred different problems on compile they're actually really an expert in this area and i've got the badges to prove it okay once those badges are in your crypto wallet just like you log into a website today and you can load in your cryptocurrency or unload it right i think one of the things we wanna to do it since you try is have this sort of report crypto diploma or these credentials so you could log into a job board and just start working because you're automatically qualified on the base of your credentials right right now the only thing we can declare is our interest right i'm interested in game of thrones you can't pro declare i know how to calculate e values right i know are no lang you know i know you know methods for large mat cs i know how to do graph layout out that type of stuff right you can't cr declare that you can certainly put the words in your cv but if you guys have hired you know that that's a an unreliable narrative problem often right right you know people will say so how does that jump coming me off by the way if you you yeah hey sean and i might i ask this it's a similar question but basically like what i'm understanding with this is like so right now as it is it's a much simpler it's not doing everything you just sell it's basically here's a here's something that is just like silly funny or actually useful yes i'm gonna pay you money if you could pull it off that's right and that's in itself that's just like interesting and fun and and me but the long term plan here is that basically you're gonna have let's say you're building a company anyone who meets the requirements are you saying they're gonna be able to log in based off of their task history and just contribute where can get paid for it exactly now that sounds like the it's my thing with you is like everything you sound as crazy but you you're right a fair bit so it's like it's like it's so i have to like i've like life would be easier ridiculous if we could just write you off as crazy we could just move on with their day sure the guy's right so now we have to take each one of these ideas that actually say shit so so let me let me speak to a few points here right so basically like the very short version is ce china is a place where you make money learn things level up with technological progresses interested understood building a positive future right so it's you know on the east coast for example media media businesses have sort of software engineers as second classes right they're just guys who build the app and the writers are kind of the first class right traditionally in tech it's been the opposite you know the software engineers are the you have private of place they're building dropbox or google or whatever and then the writers are content marketing i think here another aspect of stitch sunshine is that are kinda unified where we have a product roadmap and we also have content calendar and those are really you know side by side and basically equal pairs we have a story that we're telling as we're kind of building this functionality and i think one of the things about this into several different angles i can talk about but one big thing is this sort sort of reaction against what i think of as the ent internet right so if you know entropy right the concept of entropy it's like particles flying in every direction okay if you go and look at hacker news for example or twitter there's something that you can't un unmute once it's being pointed out which is those thirty links are like a jackson poll blah on on on on the on the page right it's just it's like guaranteed to just fragment your brain into a thousand pieces right and the opposite of that is something like you know what michael nielsen has been doing with the science of reminding you know where you learn something and you don't just learn it you get you know reminders at you know one minute and one hour and one day you know space repetition right of the same concept and with a little bit of space repetition it gets stored in like your permanent memory banks you remember quantum computing for example right so right now what we're doing with the ant ent internet is we're just eating all this junk food which feels good because it's novelty seeking oh cool that's cool oh that's cool oh that's cool right and you know if you have a really good memory then you don't need this space repetition but most people don't have such a good memory even people who have a great memory i mean do you remember the thousands of links that you've seen online no it's actually more like watching a movie it's just it's just sugar it's just candy right if instead you could be much more deliberate about a less in drop and said essentially a goal for yourself and you make one high level decision come to s train nine and then what we do is we basically serve you content that strengthens you right sean i i i think that we can take this in so many ways i wanna talk about media eventually but we're because this is so interesting what he's like do you you wanna yeah like he he he just threw throughout this like meaty thing if we could like chop this up in like a hundred different ways there's so like i wanna talk about this anonymous work thing which is somewhat like this wanna talk about this topic and i wanna talk about what you just said about east coast media i would love to talk about that what do wanna do let's jump around because i think that's if it if this was let's do it like we always do if this was just us hanging out having a conversation and then the listeners are flies on the wall that's what people like best so let's do that so yeah what would you say right now if this a normal conversation conversation you'd be like tell me about the you know let's talk about media i i wanna go to this media thing because you said something that i see that you're doing and i think it's smart but it's so obvious i don't know why you and others haven't done it which is i do the same thing i criticized like east coast media where like the writers or the stars and a lot of them are i'd like the circle jerk community that i am somewhat part of i owned a media company and i've hired a lot of those people and in silicon valley the engineers are like the gods where and and both are circle jerk community so like they both can stink and they both can rock whatever so but you're saying that you're paying attention to content now in media i was talking with you i don't know do we do a call we did something something where i was teaching where i was teaching you about email because you're like this email thing is cool and i was like duh dude what the hell well about i i i i i remember we had a call and i remember you had actually some insight i don't think it was quite like oh i could no i i'm i'm teasing you you you you i i criticized your website go dude if you want email to be part of your website just make your website like your personal domain like just make that an email oh and that's it got it yeah i understand i understand so the thing is that i was actually building seventy twenty nine at the time but your suggestion of actually having the subscriber thing on the front page like sub sec is actually what we did do so we did take that suggestion and i think it's good so but what okay but what what i'm getting at though is like why are you all of a sudden caring about media and and i and the reason why i'm asking this is i love media i love content soda to sean it's a pretty shitty business model like subs subscription is a good business model advertising is a shitty business model but another way of another way putting the question is you built a you know a bio you know genetic genetics company you've you know we're cto of coinbase bay one you're early in crypto and the current product in its product form is a newsletter right low tech but you know hive reach you know potentially so why did you decide to do that of you know why did you decide to go kinda go into a space where you know we debate this all the time you know is media a good space to go into why so i think sam is that what you're getting at like why did you decide to launch product which you say know and i wanna know what your version of media is gonna be and like because i don't everyone wanna leave this in but i think the business model blows so like if you have if you can save me i would love that well okay so lots of lots of things there so one is that i think let me give it let me give a story a history and yeah then maybe we can go from there so you know you can you can date let's say the modern era of tech different starting plans well let's data it starting at like nineteen ninety five with the nets sci ipo okay and you know from ninety five to roughly two thousand eight you know tech and media basically ignored each other or or rather media coverage of tech was was positive you know up until the dot com boom and then after the dot com crash and nine eleven for many years there in the early two thousands you know tech was happening but it certainly was not a front page story it's actually hard to remember but you know if you go back to even two thousand eight and you look at like lists of power centers of the us silicon valley doesn't actually come up there because google was just a search engine facebook was just a college social network you know was was growing but it was just college network and the iphone hadn't yet come out it was just coming out two thousand seven was announced right and so the so so me kind of ignored tech during this period is occupied with the iraq war and you know terrorism and all this stuff that was a big storyline of the the two thousands and it was know obviously there were blog and stuff like that and people were using it but it was kind of a business scishow shows like that thing you kind of you know supporting character basically tech also ignored media and and that reason is different that's because terry selma was a yahoo and he tried to turn yahoo into a media company and for an entire generation of tech founders that that seemed like a very bad model because you know yahoo failed or i shouldn't say fail failed it didn't go to zero of course but relative to google it failed and all these this entire generation of tech founders took the lesson that you just build a pipe right you build facebook yeah aol did it too yeah exactly that's right so facebook yeah dropbox you know you know youtube twitter that entire generation of companies has basically said we're a neutral pipe we're just gonna build a technology by the way that was hard enough that pretty freaking hard you know like at that time bandwidth with constraint environment before all the modern web development tools that was actually not trivial you know so they just focus on that completely and they said look the users bring their own content user generated content right and that kind of you know happened for a while and then the financial crisis happened and the iphone happened and after the financial crisis in you know two thousand and eight from two thousand eight to twenty twelve facebook google apple all started going totally vertical and there's a graph called the print media disruption which you can see which was after the financial crisis you might you know i show that on screen if there's like a video version of this after the financial crisis print media dropped the revenue from like someone like sixty five billion down to like seventeen billion while google and facebook or just going vertical like this right and craigslist of course was also a factor here it wasn't just you know like like advertising is also classified that was a major factor craig new mark effectively bought them off with the new mark foundation stuff with a lot of grants for journalism like data journalism dot com is sort there's like a surveillance handbook at data journalism dot com by the way exactly how to sur a a subject of an article which you can look at to see exactly how these folks kinda of think but we when we started the hustle by the way we started it out of craigslist office there are a bunch of stories in the two thousands there were negative pieces on craigslist it wasn't obvious to me whether or not the craigslist classified are actually that much worse the newspaper classified i never saw any stats on it but it seemed motivated in part by you know craigslist economic you know attacks on on media implicit not not intentional but implicit i think in part some degree of peace was bought with craig then funding a bunch of journalism i have nothing against craig you know i don't know him i'm just saying that i that's that's an observation craigslist by the is a wildly profitable business it's just private so nobody knows how much money makes but it's it's a very big deal okay what's my point coming back at the stack so from two thousand eight to twenty twelve tech suddenly came out of its box which was you know oh acute gadget manufacturers over there in palo alto just take over all of these segments that were previously the east coast segments like mas and nav was taking a hit everybody was looking to cut costs after the two thousand and eight crisis entertainment okay let's do that online rather than going to movies all of that type of stuff just shifted online is it's a huge digital shock right a corona is a second one by the way and so what happened is that you know tech and media were basically allied through twenty twelve to get obama reelected and if you look at the late twenty twelve coverage for example like the nerds go marching in december twenty twelve was sort of the high watermark of sort of the tech media alliance and then in twenty thirteen basically the post election the knives came out right and essentially what happened was me it was like okay you guys are getting way too big for your we kind of thought of you as like just a part of the coalition but you're coming for the entire you know to mix metaphors right and this was something where all the negative articles on tech and tech pros you can date it exactly to like twenty thirteen twenty twelve there's even articles at you know valley denying that such a thing as a programmer exists okay the same guy the next year is starting to write you know nasty articles on like tech bros and and and whatnot it's a very crisp shift okay and so so then what happened basically for the next several years tech got its head caved in by by media with the tech lash something i've warned against because i could see it as like a almost like a seed investor i could see this thing brewing and going viral in in twenty thirteen and i could see even you know there's one journal in slate who's like sort of sort of denounced this thing and said oh you know would you look at all these rich people this is such a silly view of the world you know we can do so much more and then five years later he's calling for abolish billionaires right you can actually see the radical rationalization pipeline of these folks in real time and you know you you can you can watch this happening because their world is collapsing and they blame it on tech and it is certainly true that economically a lot that revenue is gone to tech and try to do it but google and facebook twitter took away ads but not just ads sales took a lot of influence and so you had the sort of battle of the bulge style reaction you know in from roughly twenty thirteen to twenty nineteen with this tech clash and these media corporations they couldn't build search engines or create social networks what they could do is write stories and shape narratives and do you know the difference between like a story and you know a product announcement w me one's objective one isn't yeah but a story has a bad guy i got a hero so go ahead i said and a hero yeah yeah yeah but but like you know as people have said you can build a religion without god but not without hidden and you know so the not original to me you know that's that's a saying and so what happened basically was you know while tech is busy doing these pastel colored product announcements oh you know like dropbox offers ten more gigs yay and it's just a utility right media corporations were busy lining up to paint tech as bad as evil and you've heard like five hundred different lines of argument on this right and every you know like journal and academic was jo to try to find that meme that would like kill these tech companies once and for all right and you know they've being somewhat successful in that and but they also haven't been what's happened is a lot of the older line tech companies that didn't have any ideological defenses but we're good at making money got sort of mentally colonized right and you know went woke and that has resulted in you know yeah they could make a lot of money but didn't have the the the meta level story they have the meta level narrative so it's like that saying about economist right practical men who believe themselves fully devoid of external influence or often the slaves of some debt economist have you ever heard that you know that's by john john maynard cans i think so his point being that these ideas float around the air and people are running on scripts that they don't even realize they're running on because media scripts humans just just code scripts machines right this is something i had in the ferris podcast right so tickets abandon and unpack that for a second for somebody who doesn't get it real right off the top you know you know just the way that you know what what is a script in the way that the media scripts humans masks work masks don't work okay boomer at every meme right for example okay you you see a bunch of kids when they or the the karen thing yeah the karen thing you know you you see a bunch of kids when they come out of a movie there what is the first thing they do haven't seen kids come out of a movie theater address dot no okay bunch kids coming there the first thing they do is they start quoting lines from the movie right they just re enact what they just saw on screen right right and so you know this is something where the way to get people to do something sometimes it is to tell them to do it but often is just show it being done right and that is kind of you know peter till you know a citation of hr gerard on mime i think it's important like humans are mime that's how we acquire language that's how we align on objectives you know and i think that whether you wanna call it contagious mental illness i think that's an understood concept by the way we know that there's contagious physical illnesses we know there's viruses right contagious mental illness as well we've sort of all stuck our brains into twitter right like this vat right let me imagine mentioned putting your brain into a vat with three hundred million other people and they're all just sending electromagnetic you know that their brain states to you it feels a little un if you think about it that way right and in in an interesting sense we sort of social distance away from each other offline but we packed close online like social networking packed close and what that meant was that bad means you know crazy means could spread faster than ever wildfire wu like this right because everybody's brain was connector everybody's brain right there's you know there's a famous cartoon of this you know with the with a stock market where it shows the medic contagion with respect to prices you know and it's like a guy says okay i can't have any more of this goodbye and someone over here and they're like goodbye buy buy buy buy buy you know like and then and then then then there's somebody else who over here is it and it's like i think the stock could really excel and then someone's like excel sell sell sell sell sell right and and it's actually really funny right because you know it it just sort of conveys these sort of like traveling waves of of means right right now we don't have great visuals on this we can't we can't do the molecular neurology of the meme like we can do the molecular biology of the gene let me explain what mean by that the concept of genetics pre dated molecular genetics you know like mendel went into these ph phenomenal logical experiments where you could see you know like the the p plants and so on big eight little a if you remember that from high school or would have you before people understood the biochemistry of you know d nucleic acid and how a gene is actually represented and the double helix and all the type of stuff that awaited kind of the next century right in the same way i think dock ins and kind of our understanding of means right is something that is ahead of our molecular neurology how are ideas represent in the brain right how are they stored how are they retrieved how are they accessed how are they communicate people have done things on this with like you know the so called jennifer aniston neuron right where you know it appears as actually sites in the brain that would actually store jennifer aniston like you see something and it it just has you know what where you see the words jennifer aniston you see the image jennifer aniston you see a video of her you see brad pitt and it would light up next to her and so on and so forth for somebody who follows all the sled stuff it's not my thing but this is from that it's from paper a while ago when jennifer transitioned was still i think very much in the news not as much today right that concept seems to also exist to some extent within neural networks you know like the new you know like the the the ai stuff that's being done where you can actually seem to express like at like an abstract concept where a neuron replacement i think open ai i forget who i think is opening ai who had a paper on this recently okay so we're starting to actually get at how concepts abstract concepts could be represented in a quantifiable scientific way and you know i i we're not yet there but eventually we'll be able to see things like okay here's this traveling wave of ideas meta contagion here are ideas that serve as vaccines against those other ideas right they've they've blocked them out because these ideas are themselves trying to spread yeah so how does this so like i'm gonna say like here's the the the dumb sam version of what you said which is like i can convince people to believe certain things by making them feel certain emotions and i could do that by by using sticky viral content which boils down to funny memes and that the internet is still on top and then we can all we're all racing into steak put our stake in the ground and email is one great empire to build is that kinda what you're getting at well email this one piece of it right but yeah but basically you know there's push notifications that's just a mechanism of how notes are connected but they on a side note on that i do think that within five to ten years in addition to email and text message your e s name will become probably the dns name or let's say crypto name will become the third most popular communication channel i wanna talk about that in the because that's amazing but to wrap up the media thing so to what what did sean say earlier he was a that he had a good question which was like in three years what's the world gonna look like what's your let's say that you are running what you kind of are this small media business maybe one day it will be a media empire what do you think that's gonna look like and like how's is that gonna function how's that business model gonna work totally yeah so basically i think so you know i'm giving long answers because i didn't have the time to write short ones know if that makes any you know if you've heard that one yeah that's yeah it's i didn't have time to write a short thing i was stupid busy to do the exact for that so so excuse my aggression and you know maybe i can edit this down into sound bites or or or shorter thesis statements the short version is basically tech ignored media for all the reasons i just described in that story and over the last six years we've seen the cost of ignoring media the story is told and you're the back eye okay now there's another story to be told which is for example there's a website called text journalism is less diverse than tech dot com okay so nigerian guy basically tried to submit this as an op ed to a bunch of tech journalism outlets and couldn't get there and put up a prize and he actually went into this analysis and shows that actually tech is like thirty points more diverse and the media outlets that constantly give tech shit about this right and so the you know another story is that actually a lot of the owners of these media corporations are like literally inherited wealth like ne that right you know just got the family business from their father's father's father's father and you know know another aspect is they're mostly american as opposed to the mostly immigrant nature of tech which is very global and has an international purview and so on and so forth there's actually a number of ways where the narrative of these media corporations where they they run billboards that literally they market themselves as truth on a billboard or democracy like democracy dies and darkness like that's how they market themselves on a billboard or or fairness and imbalance right that's just corporate propaganda literally buy these legacy media corporations to define themselves as the literal truth you know and they believe this you know the brains have been melted by corporate propaganda to such an extent now i don't think any tech company would be you know people talk about tech eric and so i think any tech company would be so craziest to market itself as a little truth but now actually we have an answer as to what that literal truth is which is crypto photography crypto photography and especially how the blockchain actually puts it online is decentralized truth right it's mathematical truth it's truth that anybody has access to you know as i mentioned in a previous podcast basically everybody knows exactly how much bitcoin somebody has you know whether you're palestinian or israeli democrat or republican that not something there's actually contention over which is amazing because it's this trillion dollar piece of international property that's kind of thing people usually fight over we can use those so what are you implying peep pete we're gonna be we're gonna be covering that we're gonna be cove covering these transactions and we're gonna know well is that i mean here's what i thing i mean but yeah here's what here's that's only one that's only one niche niche that's an interesting one though what is that yeah okay so step two is d defy where it's not just who owns what bitcoin but who owns what digital proper and digital goods and that's an enormous swath of the economy right maybe most of the economy over time all property eventually becomes digital should i clarify why i think that because i that's a that's a provocative statement why does all property become digital because much of the physical world becomes printing okay so obviously you can print out a piece of paper right if you look at for example the supply chain or or what's going on in robotics in terms of like getting food to your door okay there's folks who will obviously the restaurant is now pop up right the delivery you know bit there's folks are doing autonomous cars right or or sidewalk delivery robots which are better in some ways there's folks who are doing autonomous food prep right and so you could imagine the whole thing being fully automated and it's all robotics and it's all this electro electromechanical process that has no human intervention in which case it's analogous to just a print right it's like printing something out and i think like robotics is something which is sort of again sort of have been happening in our peripheral vision we kinda know what's going on boston dynamics and whatnot but what's i think is gonna happen is most of value will be created online and you'll print it out by essentially invoking robotics and i think that's the next you know this decade we're gonna see more that you're starting to see actually robots in the field like these robot dogs i think we're gonna see way more of that it's gonna come pretty quickly because once a robot can do something you've turned labor into capital because it's all electricity and the value creation and look the sam's so i the premise i'm installing that premise okay all property becomes digital so that's the second phase right you know home who owns what bitcoin and then you know who owns with loans bonds stocks assets all the type of stuff okay but the third phase is most interesting to me and with that is it's really something called crypto oracle so many of these contracts over here in the second phase you're doing bets on you know will this price go up or down or more interestingly will the temperature go up in you know this the this this farmland so i need to pay out this insurance because there's a drought okay that's like an example of a smart contract which combines a financial aspect and a fact about the world right for something like that to happen that was kinda similar to the business model of like the climate corporation like climate dot com if you remember that right for something like that to work the smart contract needs access to data about the outside world which is not purely financial okay and that's the crypto oracle problem or basically oracle broadcast data on chain and they sign it and they say i'm reporting that this is true eye the weather channel i'm saying that it's eighty two degrees and keeps today at this time right and i give a time stamp like temperature feed and this is happening not just for temperature but it's happening for you know crime statistics or not just just individual crimes from which statistics are calculated it's happening for medical records right so a hospital wouldn't just say we have a thousand coronavirus it actually has a feed of this patient at this time this patient at that time red fin or zillow doesn't just publish aggregate stats it actually has a feed of which real estate transactions are happening at what time okay and from this accurate stats can be computed but you can also drill down to individual rose intelligence so what's the point right now all of these feeds of data that i'm describing are siloed you know the the real estate data happens here the medical data happens here price data happens here the temperature data happens here but what i call the ledger of record is essentially the integration of all these crypto oracle and the reason they go on chain is that it's profitable you can trade off of that information or you can make money off of that information so each individual oracle goes on chain and it's subsidized so you've gotta a micro sense to put it online that's not some macro you know high fluid you know concept but the macro concept is as all of those individual oracle go into this thing i call it lecture record you now have crypto roughly verifiable facts about the world you have a digital history and una history you can tell what happened when and in a sense this is kind of just the next step in the sense that we've got all these tweets right which actually give us a reasonable i shouldn't say perfect but some degree of the intellectual history of you know the last decade right if the twitter database was downloadable and eventually you know either something like it either it will be or someone will scrape it or something like that because you know storage just keeps improving so you could store all of twitter on a micro drive of twenty thirty five or something like that that database could be analyzed in all kinds of ways determine people's moods what people talked about all the contagion stuff that we just talked about you could actually look at all of that and visualize that we can't easily see that right now because the dataset isn't open in the future with this ledger of record it would be and you'd be able to establish what happened at what time and so that is the sense sam in which you go simply from just accrual and what bitcoin to who owns what smart contracts to who said what thing at what time like what facts were asserted and that is actually a very powerful thing where we start to actually displace a corporate media corporation as the font of truth with crypto photography instead alright let me pause there i know it's a whole download but i maybe i can express it better i'm gonna summarize come of the some of the interesting ideas that you brought up so i think and you could take drink of water you deserve it so so so i think one of the interesting things was kind of observation of first media ignoring tech and then sort of as tech became more powerful ignoring media and what you're identifying is that technology companies are gonna realize the power of media meaning being able to shape the narrative rather than just being the villain in the narrative continue this is the third swing of the pendulum now so that's a middle that's one interesting trend if you're building a company right now that's very much worth considering yep and in order to do that you're gonna have to flex different muscles storytelling memes packaging you know different things that means you don't have to do what's give you my me my is own a media corporation or be owned by one there you go it's so so that's that's one interesting kinda of point you brought up second one is this idea of empirical truths enforced by economics so today media companies claim to be the truth they market themselves as the truth it would just you know sort of the corporate propaganda and there's all kinds of hypocrisy underneath that so you identified many of them the let's say criticized diversity yes stopping being diversity yep dumping diverse yourself criticizing you know hating billionaires yet the media companies owned by billionaire families that are passing it down from one child you know one father to the next son so there's all these hypocrisy underneath that and how do you get away from that while there is this general movement of all things becoming digital it's not just software eats the world sort of you know you know the whole world becomes software and as the whole world becomes becomes digital assets become digital contracts become digital data and news reporting becomes digital and of this idea of crypto oracle which are the journalists or media companies of the future where if we need to know what happened what is the truth who won the game who got elected you know in order to enforce these betting markets or these prediction markets or these stock markets then you then they will be rewarded through these sort of micro incentives for being accurate or or and spanish if they were very able summary but let me offer a few asterisk so i think the vision of the future is oracle and advocates right so redefine a reporter as like a sensor right a sensor that essentially writes data on chain okay which can literally be like like a machine that just takes a temperature sense and writes it on chain right and the thing is you might think that's trivial but hey that would actually inaccurate if you had lots of them give you a crypto pro record that you could use in for example discussions about climate change right so the the weather man becomes a sensor tell whether becomes sense that's right yeah that's right or but this but this this is kinda a little the okay so i i understand what your your vision is here but it's missing a whole lot wait let part of it hunt before you could because you might be right okay the first layer that base layer is a raw facts crypto graphical add attest stations you know right from from sensors and what the sensor could be lying to you of course it could be saying the temperature is eighty when it's actually thirty but it's got a digital signature so you can see its track record you can involve other kinds of things right you can match it up you can audit it other people can audit it so you can have a second thing that's auditing you know one out of a hundred of the measurements of the first guy there's a hyper geometric distribution which is like you know auditing air things often assembly on like pick a ball and see if it's corrupted or not but then the second layer is advocates on top of those oracle okay so these are humans and you just assume that a human has an editorial judgment you know why because not just what they write it's what they write about and now the selection function of what specific facts they choose to include is it self visible right editorial judgment is now quantifiable because you have this layer of the raw facts that are on chain and then narrative becomes tangible because it's which facts you actually sign in your story okay and so the selection function is basically just like a ranking algorithm for a social media site that selection function actually is now quantifiable but can see not just what was included but crucially what was omitted the so that seems like but this seems like an entire so okay so what you're gonna do is seventeen twenty nine you're gonna hire i don't do talking about seventeen twenty nine for this other thing right you're yeah know i'm just making that i'm just making using that yep the you're your media empire you're gonna hire two hundred engineers to build this what did you call it the the ledger record you're you're audio of record and then you're gonna hire two hundred journalists to editorial or sorry you're not calling them journalists advocates to editorial some of the the facts correct no and so i've got a different so it's actually useful i i would call when you just said like i don't mean it's a bad way but sort like the rear road looking model here's at least what i'm planning to do which may well fail but you know at least dis what i'm thinking about so first is it's decentralized media so what i wanna do is invest in lots of individual you know diverse influencers sudan voices around the world okay so basically you know everything that's not brooklyn works you know all these other voices that are under underrepresented in our conversation ie ideological demographic internationally technologically you know like scientific depth being brought to bear those are kind of folks that i wanna fund whatever was that right chosen by you and so it's central choosing central you know you know what i mean yes that's right but but the the like all the tools and stuff that we use for selection funding like the yc style safe equivalent and and so on all those will be public so i want people to pick it up and copy it and so on and so forth right so i'm not at all proprietary about that i'm just trying to set an example ford's worth act sort of similar like you know last night you know i tweeted out like for the covid relief thing in india and you know the notion ceo and the the actually the hubspot founder dha actually yep rt that so it kinda gave a template that they could then just use and that's that's what i seek to do right and you know the goal being to basically bootstrap a bunch of these voices okay call that one component the second component is to bootstrap the technology which is to say figure out like what the right version of using crypto oracle and content is okay maybe that's gonna require a few years of compounding maybe i just write the articles on what that vision of the future is and i'm not smart enough to build it but one of my you know you know portfolio companies or readers or something like that is because you know we all it's all it's all a relay race right you know you you you hand the baton and maybe someone else can figure out something you did it and so on right so kind of open sourcing my thinking on how we can get to a better model of you know truth right out there and then third is writing a story so so first is you know like the the writers and the the people who are writing these tasks second is of the technology technology for kind of creating the task creating the content and third is the story which is i have a book the network state which i've been i'm i'm a perfection so i edit the chapters and i edit them and i edit them so i put the first one up at m grand dot com you know how to start new country and i think it's done pretty well you know like it's it's a it's got a lot of good feedback and i think it's stimulated some thinking and essentially the idea is you know how do you start a new country well when there's no land the short answer is rather than try to like take over a peninsula or a you know piece of territory or you know or or declare or conversely take over like a oil platform near england and call yourself seal land right instead you have a community that you build in the cloud and they go and take peace of land all around the world which are like you know c sa or apartment complexes and so on i mean you network them together such that it's something which may eventually have a scale of hundreds of thousands of millions of people and the footprint of a contiguous state but it's discontinuous in its network on the internet right so that's the third part which is a story so it is not simply content or who that is anybody do you think that is there a project out there or do you feel like there's anybody out there who's doing that taking that approach to how do you start a new country create a community in the cloud and then have this like decentralized pods or hubs all around the world for those people actually concrete i think it's a twenty year project and you know basically my my one liner on this is two thousands where the tech companies twenty tens crypto protocols twenty twenties startup up cities twenty thirties network states okay so company protocol city state i think that's where we're going so just beginning we are in this startup up cities phase right now so let's transition to that real quick so yep what is a startup up city is this like sam leaving san francisco moving to austin you know the miami actively recruiting candidates like a start ceo would and and hiring away great talent into miami is that what a startup city is to or is this something else yeah so look what's great about the term is it encompasses kind of three definitions right the first is just a city where startups happen which is where what san francisco used to be you know the nowadays is it's just you know like somebody who's choosing san francisco for a startup up i crinkle my eyebrows is you know i mentioned it before before the pandemic i said was like choosing java you know proven but kinda kinda sucks and it's like okay you don't know new languages and you know i'm not sure about your pro in this or whatever but now it's like choosing oracle for a new company you know which is like right basically you're just getting locked into this horrible cost structure of declining product when far better options are available i question their judgment you know so the first definition is a city where startups just happen okay the second is a city that acts like a startup which is miami now under suarez which amazing okay and the third definition is a city that's startup up itself like prosper dot h n or c sac dot com where the various startup cities at pro dot vc is investing in and the the thing is i think you know obviously when i when i said two thousand tech companies twenty ten scripted protocols twenty twenty start these twenty thirty number states that's sort of when that exponential starts right what is the analog of bitcoin in twenty ten it startup up cities in twenty twenty one right okay where go ahead i was gonna ask you a different question maybe that's a good a good one to drop on your listeners credit trade was a pretty good goodbye or whatever you know yeah exactly that and actually wanna know you got into a crypto early on i wanna know actually what was the i you where were you kinda when you first how did you actually first hear about was it the white paper that you stumbled you conversation with a friend so how'd did you hear about it how'd did you get and then how long did it take you to sort of like you know the mind virus infected you completely and you're like wait this is actually gonna work so i would love to hear that from you yeah so you know i have to replicate the exact timeline but basically it was something where i've been thinking about economics and money after the financial crisis because everything broke and so you start thinking more deeply about you know the system that you just thought was functional just shattered into a million pieces and or just didn't work and i've been thinking about like how the true definition of money is energy in a sense of j o u l es jewels like visualize like an iphone you know coming together like like the rare earth elements and the glass and the aluminum and so on in this in the the silicon just ru like this molecular assembly and how much energy would it actually take you to assemble that from its parts you know like in chemistry you can you can quantify this you know with like various various chemical processes how much how much input energy do you need to catalyze it route to make the reaction run and that was like something i was thinking about because if you could reduce the energy cost of assembling something like a phone over time you had genuinely reduce the price right that's a genuine reduction because humans were able to do this thing more efficiently today than we were in the past and that'd be the kind of deflation that you want jewel deflation where because of technology we've actually made this thing cheaper to do than we used to be able to do right now been thinking about this and then you know one of my friends you know basically like you know i write these assays essays whatever one but just this is before i a public you know public figure if that sounds like i can't think just you know when my academic friends was like okay you should you know look at this bitcoin thing and i figured exactly when that was of twenty ten or twenty eleven but basically i thought it was really interesting because it was also using energy you know in a sense a different way to kinda support value but it was doing something thought i very counterintuitive intuitive the most counterintuitive thing about bitcoin at the time to me was that the extra computation was not going into increasing the number of transactions per second but rather increasing the security of the system that was a design decision that was totally foreign to everything we had learned about scaling out systems and going parallel and so on and so forth that was that was something which took me a while to wrap my head around not that i thought it was bad i just i was like i just don't understand that so for example the fact that all blockchain addresses were republic essentially he had stepped out of the box of what i thought a distributed system should be you know like had made certain design decisions now in retrospect these are genius moves but like having all your transactions out there in public on chain just would have seemed like a like a feature that you wouldn't be able to give up right but with the it's like okay and then now with your knowledge we figured out with z cash and other things how to add back that privacy right so i i followed bitcoin but it was actually only after the twenty eleven crash and recovery that i was like okay this thing really has legs and i wrote in late twenty twelve actually had of course it's stanford i gave where i talked about bitcoin and i'm like i'm not sure if bitcoin is the one that wins but it is a very powerful tech that is is like something in that class will be a big deal right and i think both were correct statements i could find the exact pdf or whatever if you want and so that was around the time that coinbase also got going and actually brian and fred and i i think we first met january twenty thirteen very very very early on in the history of coinbase and actually like i i used the coinbase api in a class that i taught that year and in a moot course and you know basically that was kind of my story of getting into bitcoin and crypto and twenty thirteen boom of course happened but it was basically the crash from thirty two dollars down to two dollars in twenty eleven and the subsequent recovery up to like ten bucks in twenty twelve that convinced me the thing had staying power because it's very rare that you have something endure a ninety percent plus drop and then come back right that's extremely rare you so you you def you you you talked you're a professor correct yeah you're were a lecture i think at there was some article i've no idea if it's true that you were considering joining the fda was that true yeah i mean where rather i was i was interviewed for a very senior role and sure i probably could have been at least number two that was on the table but i i chose not to i mean it's now a few years later i don't usually like the kiss and towels or whatever you know but the point the point the point is is that you you have this like academic side of you and what which is fascinating you have this crypto guy part of you as part and which is part investor still part academic but you also have this third part of you is which is that you built company so sure you helped build you this is like traditional like this is the most normal part of your which isn't even normal like like the most normal part of you helped build like a fifty billion dollar company called coinbase the the most normal part of you i used when i'm freezing my embryos and we just found out that like one of our potential children just have like down syndrome and like oh shit that's the most normal part of you is that you you built that shit right well it's funny which is it's funny because i for your audience yes i think that's probably true which is weird because that's not normal right and so i guess on the what i'm curious about is on the on the tim ferris podcast you use one of the more baller phrases to say that you're rich use post economic i didn't use that phrase as tim did but he is is it's a good phrase yeah it's the most baller phrase i i'd i've ever heard of like post economic like to the point where money does it like isn't you're beyond that and because i i care about money and it's interesting to me beyond just like you can buy nice ship but it's like you can think about stuff that you normally wouldn't be able to think about where has most of your success financial success come from this weird part of you that is this crypto investor and got in early or from the traditional part of building companies and there's a reason why i'm asking but i'm curious what the answer is i think i'm you know i like to think myself as a pragmatic idea log where i have a a horizon where i have my eyes set on this long term goal of trans and transcend but then i'm willing to be as pragmatic as possible in the short run and execute and go down to do listen and so on for that north star right which i'm always conscious of and i wake up in the morning and i go to sleep at night and i think about that and i think i think that's basically sorry i was just gonna say i think that's evident you you kinda could that when we we we asked you about seventeen twenty nine and when you talked about it you talked about essentially disrupting you know education making making it so that when people spend their time online they're not just frivolous scrolling feeds they're actually learning and earning and burning calories but then if you go to the product it is the v one kind of crawl where you say okay what's the simple building block that we need to do that let's send a newsletter every day with a micro task or that people can do to learn something and earn earn earn a little bit of money and so i think you have i think you embody that exact idea of like what's the extreme long term north star and then what is today's building block in order to move forward and and and that's why and that's why i getting like what the hell are you up to too many yeah we go well it's funny but it's funny well so let me talk about that for a second that is absolutely an acquired language where i have learned that you need you know mari talks about this half joking as you know every app needs one of the seven deadly sins you know like lush greed sloth glut wrath pride i forgot the other ones right but it's things is close right and so the you know you know tinder is lost right and twitter is wrath and arguably early google which is pretty act you know this pretty high brow like search you know but arguably that's slot you know and you know then uber eats or or door is blood me i i love those companies don't give you're i'm trying to any of them right and so you know the the those hooks basically i think you need to deliver a visceral instant benefit to somebody right where in a second you can explain what it is okay newsletter that pays you right earn bitcoin for submitting a form for in in a minute right so instant benefit if you can't give that to somebody instantly then it's too complicated you know rarely there's exceptions you know rarely there's things that have very end loaded benefit you know like things like ethereum or realm research dot com for example you know that rewarded an academic mindset at the beginning there was very long term right but even ethereum for example there was like a speculative upside you know which was the visceral short term thing where you could align the short term mentality with long term mentality but i have to bring you back go ahead call string about let's go ahead yeah yeah i gotta bring you it back to the original question which was basically i was asking i'm did you get wealthier from this bitcoin stuff or from building the company stuff and i have a reason for asking i don't usually like disclose my like percentages for like that but let's say i've done well from both i mean fortunate from both it's interesting because is an investor you have it's one percent or less of the work it's ten to twenty percent of the return but it's zero percent of the control you know and you know i have never been like a tech guy in the sense of actually you know those there's people who talk about oh you know i had a comp sixty four really early on and i was programming you know and so on that's actually that was actually never me or i i played video games a lot when i was a kid but i was a math guy right that's actually the angle that i came into it from you know i into you know like a math and physics you know growing up and you know i'm lectures and all the type of stuff and you know thought that i was gonna be maybe like a stats professor or or applied mathematics professor or something like that and so computers were always just a tool and business is always just a tool only later to you know the reason i got into you know genomics or clinical genomics reason i just start up was and i'll come back to your point i know you're i know you got a other thing the reason i did that was in academia if you raise ten million dollars in a grant raises in the right term you get a ten million dollar grant in each row of data cost a thousand dollars to collect you can only do ten thousand rows before you run out of money right whereas if you're making even ten dollars on a row you can collect a much larger sample and make a much bigger difference for the world right because you can actually do the data and nelson that large sample thing so the the thing is that the zero percent control even though i am an investor and i think i've done fairly well at it and so on i invest on an ideological basis i invest in the world that i'd wanna build and there's probably things which are you know good financial investments that you know i i i just i just not interested in something if it's if it's just making money i i can sort of force myself to be in that heads space but but i i have to force myself you know yeah the reason i was just asking was just i just think that you're the mean you're like supposed to be this the your the stereotype of view is that you have all these odd and unique frameworks that create this brilliant ideas is yada that's cool i i i dig that but what i was curious about like just what's your life philosophy towards certain things specifically the other thing that for example well it was just like did were you just like well i'm just gonna go and like make this company sell it get the bag now i could do all this crazy wild shit and everything else is upside and like and that's why i'm wondering because like if that is your strategy i actually think that's kinda cool because there were some practicality and then like genius stuff comes out afterwards and it's interesting i was curious like in in that sense i'm not capable of i should say i capable of it i i didn't just do a job for the sake of doing a job to get the money to and do the next thing i really believed in both you know counsel and you know crypto and and you know earn and coinbase and so like that's how i could put in that level of energy like you know buffett has this concept of i don't agree with a lot of his stuff nowadays actually but this concept as good as like you know if you're if you're waiting to do what you want it's like you know waiting to make love at like seventy or something like that you're just deferring it just doesn't work like that right you should start you know working on it now tl also is a constant of how you achieve your tenure year goal in six months you know so yeah i think that what i tried to do is advanced short term goals you know maybe a sin path right maybe a winding path but i had that long term kind of vector that i'm that i'm going towards and so the short term stuff was never let me make the money and move on maybe that might have been smarter to do like d shaw did something like that right like it's it's you know d ish shah d shah is the guy who created the the hedge fund yeah the hedge fund and he put a ton of the money into protein folding yeah so like and shaw is famous because that's where bezos worked and was yeah exactly joined him he built out this and d shah was like hey are you sure you wanna do this yeah hey exactly right so i mean there's a lot of effect effective alt and people who are like this i would argue that the affected alt people miss one very important thing which is that it is the production by people of goods that actually makes them feel they deserve things like if you haven't built you feel guilt thinks a very powerful concept right if you haven't built you feel guilt so if it's just handed to you then you don't actually feel like you deserve it and that leads to a sense that nobody deserves it and and everybody's thinks should be taken down right so i think that emergency aid is actually very good but like industrialized aid where it foster a sense of dependencies is is bad you know easter and levine have written about things like this but recur back at the stack they do this concept of you know work hard make a lot of money and then spend it on ultra for example right and i think that's a reasonable strategy but it i find it like holding your breath you know and i i only worked on those things that had meaning for me along the way but we're leading to a greater meaning thing and i've been fortunate enough to do that by the way you know like one thing i was just mentioning to sean is that it's hard for me to initially give advice to folks on the very macro sometimes because in many ways the world has just become more morphology like okay if you were a person who was a nine to five morning person who like routine who liked you know structure who wanted to hit the same button every day who wanted work life balance and to come home to the family and you know like have dinner at the same time every night and so on and so forth the midway century was awesome for you because that was kind of the peak of centralization centralization structure is also by the way the peak of like you know mass murder and so on with in like china and russia and what both of those are related to centralization but in us at least like a decent quality of life that was like the best centralized model in the world right whereas rest of the world wasn't wasn't doing so well under that centralization and and now we're kind of in the opposite thing where it's like favoring night people who are asynchronous you know rather than hitting a button the the same button for twenty years at a factory you're hitting a different key every second you know like you're you're just generating like different information your your day can be extremely varied you know one day like covid has kinda locked us inside but your day online can be extremely varied you know do one thing one day podcast another day may play a video game or you know basically the entire diversity of the human experiences is to click away you know and and that's and also the you know you're rewarded now for diversity of thought and and opinion in a way that you know if now that everybody's a content producer the more differentiated your content those sort of higher the rewards you get versus if you're in the previous era there was not everybody was a contact producer was a content consumer you just go home sit down watch the box and and if you tried to sort of stray out of line you weren't necessarily gonna find your find other people who had the same convictions as you and so you know it sort of paid to just tow the party line in a bigger way than it does today we're actually well standing out falls more to today it's interesting because i think we are in the middle of a you know the battle of the bulge ji was is basically like germany's counter attack in the waiting days of the war which is actually a pretty ferocious counter attack but ultimately in the long sweep of history was just a counter attack and the long sweep was there right and what i think we have now is a strong counter in favor of conformity by both you know kind of like the vote contingent and like you know cc right and so i think like actually the it's gonna be a quite a fight because in my in my model of kind of like these memes and and things all battling each other in in this gigantic continent this cloud continent what most powerful memes is it meme that says there should be no other means before me so you said something that i wanna i wanna go to you said the world is becoming morphology like sure you so what does that mean what does that mean that means that from nine to five it is you know either like tweets or surges of work right from day people it's like night people or async you know from status quo bias to disruption bias you know from you know sort of the physical world to the informational world the theoretical world like ideas matter more ideas can shape the world more you know all those kinds of things in many ways you know for example something like soil okay so itself like i i i like the company and you know rob rin founder you know his friend and so on i prefer like a keto version of soil of which one of them exists okay but as my minus the keto thing the concept of just not having to think about it so i can just do more math or more programming or you know just more content i that's like i love that right that's a very biology kind of thing right and now of course i recognize that you know there's better forms of food like salads and so on but of course there's worse forms of food like candy bars right and so if you compare it against you know what's better than you you'll miss the fact that many people who are busy don't eat well and to eat a candy bar rather than salad you know and so this is actually like basically it improves baseline health you know in theory if it was more keto or whatever right and so that kind of thing is something where it fit my preferences and because of that i invested in it and the world just sort of adopted that or like crypto you know fit my preferences for okay it should be programmable should be decentralized there shall be you know like you shouldn't have someone be able to do bailout and so on and it world became more decentralized so so in some sense that prediction of the future is just something where the world sort of fitting those preferences you know and that's something that's hard to kinda clone i don't if that makes any sense yeah that makes us sound of sense if you're i don't know twenty one today and i know you know let me get one answer i wouldn't give one astra which is in many ways though a lot of these businesses do not fit my preferences like instagram and you know insurance instagram is a great company but like going and taking lots of selfies outside or you know like that's seems like something you would do brian yeah i'm a very private person and that's come on yeah yeah no no like know i actually tweet on this before the pandemic like instagram is for people who go outside twitter's for depression intellectual you know like can i go ahead the reason why can can i explain what you look like right now like i mean a i mean a dungeon here you're you're supposed to be this like big shot crypto entrepreneur guy you have look what looks like a like a super super old camera zero lighting just looking at it like your video setup is so horrible i supposed gonna to be the best i need to actually get that set so actually i am solving that so i've got a studio and so on that i'm doing but basically like you know caught caught him in transition he he's he hasn't a he hasn't set up the full remote workstation yet yeah yeah i haven't i haven't done all day yet partly because i i do have the blue yeti or whatever i did get that so people tagged me into doing that it's sort of something where i go zero or a hundred you know on something and you know so i just use the defaults unless i like actually engage and so you know i'm just learning acoustics and learning being just i'm just we're we're talking shit month a month ago year exactly you set up go ahead and then okay these guys flew out to our houses and they built us these studio for us because they were fans of the podcast so we literally didn't know anything we still don't know anything we we didn't know how to put this together ourselves either and now sam's like i like we did this no i make a bottom them because he's like well you know instagram is great but it's not really for me yeah yeah you could figure it that out yeah it's funny a shotgun well it's it's interesting because i will value something once it has a dot product with like my north star right so like the dot product you know inner product in in in linear algebra it's like you know here's a vector here's another vector and how much do they align are they is it just at right angles or is there some alignment right and so the reason that i'm gonna be improving i think dramatically hopefully audio and video production is i need the content to tell the story to build the future right so that i'm gonna get good at that hopefully because we need to but before the i just felt of it as sort of being an exhibition and it was like not you know not my i think right so i was gonna ask you if you were twenty one today what would you be like what would twenty one year apology today let's say you don't have the tracker you don't have the name and you don't have the funds to be investing and you know having a big platform to speak on just just yet what would twenty one year old you be focused on how would you be spending your time so what would i do first skills wise get really good at computer science and statistics first and the reason is that every domain has algorithms and data structures which means that computer science and stats are valuable anywhere you can walk into walmart and you start writing down code for shopping carts and you know baskets and pricing and so on you can walk into american airlines and do that for you know flight scheduling you could walk into pfizer and start writing about that's you know for drug preparation and and you know like a pharmaceutical manufacturing right reaction connects all that type of stuff and of course each of these areas will have domain knowledge you know but computer science and statistics are universal language and i mean cs and stats i don't mean just like learning programming and you know how to invoke library calls i mean actually understanding the concepts and really wrestling with them okay and the reason is it's sort of like what physics was to the early twentieth century cs and stats is to this entry because physics was awesome for you know understanding the natural world all these physicists could you know in the heyday of physics go and kick in the doors of any discipline and be like i'm gonna write down some equations and just change your life you know because you're doing this in a an way and and we can do it way better and now today because so much of the world is a constructed virtual world you know because we're interacting with it on screens you know something like cryptocurrencies is a constructed virtual world right social networks are constructive virtual world so video games cs and stats becomes i mean it was valuable before but it's even more valuable today so that's a foundational kind of thing and then you know in terms of domains to get good at i would find something you know it sounds funny to put it this way but like an area that you really care about for some reason you know and there's but but that's also a line you know that it could guy concept because mh right so like the four things that are i may not remember them fully but it's like what you're good at what the world needs what you can make money at and than what you have fun way of fun doing that's right exactly that's right so they could guide concept finding what that is so yeah after you build that base of skills right but cs and stats by the way you can understand finance because it's crypto or it'll all become crypto you can understand genomics because the c's g's and t's on screen you essentially have a theoretical like foundation in any area you walk into and then from that other concepts can be layered on top if that makes any sense right so i mean it's like a general purpose computer it's a general purpose set of of of principles than domains today genomics big robotics big crypto of course big i think an underappreciated area is gonna be relocation permanent international migration and this way teleport a while back digital no is gonna be huge being like there's a thousand piece of the tool chain for allowing people to go more mobile you know uber and airbnb uber has go down you know to the coffee shop but the next step is uber around the world right how do i just boom pick up stakes and just move internationally right now as quickly as i can for as low cost as i can i think that's that's a big area that people haven't really thought as much about as they will and i think post vaccination post vaccination world a lot more people value their freedom exit that's why folks are going to miami and so on like when you're coop up in a room you wanna burst free and so the counter reaction of that is gonna be this great migration and in i wrote about this in twenty thirteen there's a article called software is reorganizing the world essentially i said because the internet is breaking geography because you're closer to people who are three thousand miles away than your next door neighbors the underlying premises of the city and the nation state are being invalidate that's a geographical proximity no longer leads to cultural proximity and therefore you know the the assumption that people in the shared geography will share the same law and customs is no longer applicable and what it's gonna result in is these cloud communities potentially migrating and material into the physical world informing cloud cities and eventually cloud countries and that's now i think with covid starting to happen crypto is a big component of it because those cloud communities can actually have their own currencies okay remind me i got in this go ahead sorry once i you said geographic proximity is not is no longer linked to cultural is that he said was that phrase yes that's a powerful one which is if explained that for somebody who's never heard you say that before sure okay so if somebody lives in a city in an apartment building they often don't know their store neighbors may not even recognize the person who's living fifty feet away from them right literally this person is living eating sleeping there but you walk down this hallway it's all closed doors right it's basically as if you lived in a data center you know like with virtual machines you know like you cut up a server into a bunch of virtual machines and they're all siloed and and compartment and isolated it from each other right so go and you live in this box you don't know who's next door you don't know who's above you you know who's you don't know who's left to the right you don't recognize the people in the hallway but who do you recognize you recognize a person from three thousand miles away who you're laughing with on snapchat or you know like video chat or anything like that you recognize that guy on the other side of the world who you're arguing with you know your social network your friends and your enemies or whatever you know your friends and your friend enemies like they're just scattered around the world you know some of them might be geographically close by but even that is point you know it's like okay this person this building this person this building this was this building and i don't know anybody in between you know right i i mean i i buy into that like i've got so many friends i consider actually dear close friends that they're just internet i call my internet friends and i i i i have soon with them once or twice soon will just drop the whole internet friends part and we'll just yeah was just be like yeah now at this point the majority of my friends are internet friends so the that's just called by friends now at this point right but the way point to i know that it sounds like maybe it sounded word i meet up it's actually like a reference to like art so whatever it's like lots of little points you know discrete parts in it but what the the nit pick here is or it's i actually agree with you but i challenged my belief because like all three of us i think you in particular in your own bubble but really we're all in our in this little bubble of like the future it's not a filter bubble it's a future bubble because the way that well that's that's a very optimistic wonderful way to put it and i i i like that i like that term but like i have i'm from missouri okay my family lives in missouri they once one's a teacher and the husband works at a bar their kids are go to school and the the exciting shit that they do is play softball all on saturdays do you ever ask yourself the ideas that i'm coming up with or that i'm predicting the future they're really only impacting this small small small tip the iceberg of people how are they gonna impact the random person in nebraska or missouri let alone you know someone in kenya or you know what i mean do do you ask yourself this would be thinking that's what the world's gonna look like absolutely do here i'm gonna put on my pragmatic executive whatever hat right which is you know you have to focus at the beginning right and the way i look at it is the v one goal is to build a at least with seventy twenty nine and then i'll talk about the v two is to build a community of technological progressive who are like i mean sort of like yc these founders but not just tech founders you know people who are media media founders their influencers their writers their activist for technological progress like isabella be key she's like a pro nuclear activist or folks who are you know for faster approvals of drugs and devices right and i wanna build consensus among that group that technology is good and that we can work together across borders to help people achieve a better future not a polly you know kind of oh everything's gonna be great but certainly what i think of as the bright sun to where the west is today which is black mirror you know and i think that you know that it it's sort like at you know in terms of your efforts how can they scale right so my initial focus is definitely let's call them founders but not just company founders a broader class of founders including media founders protocol founders community founders influencers etcetera and getting you know some agreement among this group one this set of ideas and then recognizing that i personally cannot solve all the problems of the world and figuring out how we can build for lack better term positive some user interfaces for those folks who may not be as interested in the world of ideas and the stuff above right how do we build not positive some but aligning user interfaces okay and a user interface i use the broadest sense you know where like you know the how how your house works how your car works how your street works how your community works how can we actually build things where folks are actually aligned you know where the the founder or the ceo gains or loses just as the average isn't does right where there it it's sort like and know if do you see the the guy from chad who who just died on the battlefield no no so basically i think it's like the prime minister of chad died on the battlefield right and there are all these memes you know why because like of course he's a chad he died in conflict with his soldiers right imagine like some western leader doing that they don't have skin in the game right and it was it was it was like a joke and it was sarcastic but it also had like a really penetrating aspect of truth right which is a degree of dis alignment of western leaders and you know their their their citizens right because it used to be that a huge you know like a aspect of being a king or being a leader was you were willing to go into battle right even in like world war one there's was a concept of like you know the the nobility of the arr was supposed to actually go into battle right of course battle look we don't wanna have worse right wars are not good but the concept of alignment i think is a very fundamental one and in the communities and in the in the structures i wanna build in the future i think that alignment has to be quantifiable now we're actually seeing this in crypto because i do think that you know one thing people don't get is that crypto is not just know the next wall street it's also the next silicon valley because decentralized social networks and so on are built there but even less obviously it's a next yale law and columbia school of journalism and kennedy school government you know why because yale law gets replaced with smart contracts columbia school of journalism with crypto oracle and decentralized truth and kenny school or government because the next heads of state or heads of networks okay so let's talk and look what i mean by that is you know there's that saying it's ap but like you know give me control over a nation's monetary policy and i care out who makes its laws right it's ap i'm not sure exactly who said of it but you've heard around and so the people who who have founded and run these gigantic crypto networks that are sometimes in the multiple billions or trillions of dollars are essentially like you know basically they're like the you know a fed chair right at least of a state if not the country and they've gotten in there by founding something not by winning this whole popularity process where as a ge at seventy they've paid all their dues and now they finally actually can actually put their theories into practice when they're seventy something you know but instead as actually a founder who is aligned with all of their people and have all opted in to be part of the same kind of thing right so the short answer to your question is quantifiable alignment is i think the ethical way for those leaders to help you know essentially the the population that's not as interested in ideas you know let me pause her i think wanted something yeah i actually wanted to transition to a topic that i think is a little bit controversial but also exciting and that's the controversial part is that you know i'm gonna talk about crypto social networks so we've talked about bit cloud on here and we got a lot of slack we talked about it because i said wow i think i think sean i gave us slack yeah we gave each flack i was really it and you're like dude you're pumping this thing i'm like no i'm not trying to pump this thing i'm trying to explain that i'm seeing some very interesting novel things here and and that's exciting to me like i'm a product person you see a tons of products you see tons of apps you see tons of announcements and you don't know see anything you you know it's it's sometimes a years go by between seeing something really really interesting and the really interesting thing about big cloud that we talked about was number one the growth hack how do you get valuable people onto a new network well they loaded up a bunch of people's accounts with a bunch of money and they gave you know they used an economic incentive to bring high status individuals to a new network so that was interesting the second interesting thing was that you could know sort of this robinhood hood meets twitter you can buy somebody's coin and in doing so if i identify biology as an interesting person in two in twenty fourteen as some people did i get to benefit from the rise so a curator would get rewards alongside a a creator so somebody who's in early you can invest in somebody who's popularity and reputation is gonna rise i thought that was interesting the third part and so you know there's some interesting parts but the there there's also a bunch of controversy and i think the the place i wanna start is i think that these decentralized social networks of which bit cloud is one are very interesting because they are like they took facebook's most valuable thing right like the the facebook database the social graph that facebook would you know defend with its life and they basically put it out there you know as the that is the product here's the social graph with economics built in and now any social network can be built on top of this and i wanted to hear what you see in these social crypto social networks because i think you will probably when you look at your north star you also don't see like thirty years from now it's you know mark zuckerberg owning the four most powerful social platforms and we are all users and consumers and have no economic participation i don't think you would be excited about that version of the future so tell us what version of the future you see with crypto social networks and then try to maybe i guess talk about what you're seeing out there today great so i've been writing about this stuff for a long time and in just disclosure by the way i am an investor in bit cloud like a small early investor i wasn't involved with the project or or anything but i i understand why you know there's some annotation around it and but i also think it's actually a good idea overall and i think it's and let me give a few different thoughts okay so first is that a very important concept is that crypto is in a sense the sql to open source because not just open source it's open state and open execution okay so let's say it's not just say you have the source code you also have the database and you can track every single op code when it's executing okay and one of the consequences is you know with twitter or facebook they have the twitter or facebook api and they can shut it off one way right and they have you know mee cat or gosh tees springs so z so many companies that built on top of these apis have had their access throttle or limited or their business model destroyed overnight because there's some change in that one side you know relationship right and the the thing about that is that's because if those companies had let the api be completely open twitter's was for a while then somebody could clone the entire twitter functionality and sell ads against and then twitter would be reduced to essentially an api provider and they couldn't monetize that successfully enough to prevent that from happening right so as i think you know tweet decades and soda essentially closing the entire interface i don't remember exactly the details but think that was it so fundamentally the issue was that the the business model for creating an api and a protocol that was totally open that had state was not feasible then okay what i mean by state by the way just for your audience which is maybe less technical that's like database state that's storage state that is information that's not transient okay like you know i i do a phone call with you that's transient i mean maybe it's stored on some msa nsa server somewhere but we don't have a copy of it typically right whereas facebook has state there's a huge amount of data that they've got your photo and your messages and all the type of stuff right the crucial thing that crypto enables and the reason it's not just disrupting wall street is disrupting silicon valley is that as i said it's open state and open executions who are moving into the third model of internet technologies in a web three how much of your day spent doing some of this like crazy thinking and do building and working on a lot of this stuff i mean are you do grind real hard on all this stuff or what do you spend your day doing it's a good question i mean dave varies because this is all heavy heavy i mean everything we've discussed was like pretty heavy no and you're what and it's you're just rallying this off like as if you just like you've like you've like already said what you're you've already you you've thought through and you're like well why am i wrong and then you've already thought through it again anyway like what's your what's your how much time are you energy are you dev voting to this throughout your day and or like do you just go for walks and shoot the shit like what do you what do you do you know what i have to spend energy on i have to spend at like i have to spend energy on small things like remembering calendar appointments and stuff like that that is actually what is very mentally taxing for me it's sort like you know how a sports car is not meant to drive on like normal highways or you you can do it but you just have to like kind of watch out wherever right what i find hard is stuff that other people find easy at times like just oh remembering that that meeting is in fifteen minutes or something like that you know because i get it grasp at what i'm doing you know and and so what i've just done a built technological workarounds to help with that and so i guess the answer to your question is this is just how i whatever i just i just i can't stop it you know i just go as like i walk around and think oh that that'd would be cool this would be cool and just tap it into my you know tweets or my notes i'm not i'm like i'm not trying to humble brag something mean you're asking what my process is i think part of it is i do yeah just say the truth i don't care your brag i'm wanna yeah i'm i'm just saying like in terms of how to replicate it i guess what one thing i do is something you know maybe similar like fe had this concept that i that i think about a lot which is i have a bunch of active problems at any one time like have decentralized social networks how to build alternatives to media corporations how to establish decentralized less truth you know these are sort of like active how to not miss my dentist appointment exactly that's right very so the those those are like active problems and then against them i match solutions you know so those you know i've got you know for example you you've read some you're like okay this maps to that right and you know this maps to that because this was a problem that you had two years ago and now you see some concept and it lights up that this hammer could fit this nail right so that's that's kind of what i try to do makes sense you also kinda help popular the idea maze concept right was that you who who kinda coined the idea maze concept i i coined the term and it was funny because you never know what's gonna resonate with people you know dixon actually go ahead i was just say that not only resonated with me it made me feel much less stupid as a founder as i was like wandering around so okay the idea maze is i'll para kind of just trying understanding of it which was there's this like movie you know this this the steven spielberg version of start is founder wakes up u eureka i know you know this is the future i'm a visionary goes and builds the thing it's a straight line and yes there's adversity along the way but the idea like i i solved the problem and then i just do the thing and then like you know reality or at least what my reality was more like was i'm interested in like solving this problem for people or i'm interested in this like kind of new space and it's all kind of foggy and then i think i always think i'm in the eureka moment and i'm like yes and i sprint and then i hit a dead end and i'm like oh fuck this is not how things actually work this was this product this distribution strategy is not quite right okay let me backtrack three steps and then let me go down this other fork in the road that we didn't take last time and i get a bit further and hit another data end and like you're wandering around maze and eventually you sort of come out the other side and that that is actually quite a normal process for thinking through it as as an entrepreneur trying to trying to bring something to life and make something successful that was my interpretation and made me feel a lot better about hitting those dead ends because it didn't mean you're stupid and not cut from the same cloth it's this is the process or this is one version of the process at least that is a common set of problem so you know carry on go back to the go back go back a few steps and then figure out a new way so did i did i butcher your it or is that no it's is quite good in fact you know now like eight years later or would have you on it i'll give a few of the thoughts one is it's actually similar to like mining for gold right you know like how i don't know if you seen that quote that's circulated about san francisco during the gold rush era and how similar it was to start a era right like yeah you know everybody had crazy plans and there was unlimited amounts of financing for any kind of gold mining operation like that culture interestingly has seemingly a through line for a hundred something years right it really sounded like it i was described star culture where they're mining for gold made theories about this river or this mountain or whatever is the best way to get it and you know of course tech culture is not just like the gold aspects the technology aspect but that aspect is similar and so the idea maze is like okay which thing is gonna lead to the pot gold it's sort of like that you know you're sort of like a physical goal so that's one interesting bit the second bit is that the maze is time varying so what's a bad idea today could be a good idea in the future or vice versa for example pandora you know pre iphone was only an o okay idea and post iphone it finally became like a billion dollar com i'm not sure how it's doing now but it like iphone was a lift that it needed for ubiquitous audio everywhere right another is often that very small seeming perm mutations can radically change the outcomes of companies like i remember you make you guys remember this in early days of twitter and facebook remember people saying why don't anybody use twitter it's just the status update function of facebook right yeah yeah yeah okay that was a common knock on it but the fact that twitter was default public number one and asymmetric number two meant that it just became a completely different experience than sort the private set of warrants at facebook is right fundamentally the fact that for the most part anybody can link to any other tweet means it's a connected graph it's just one graph right whereas facebook is something where i probably can't view that facebook post so i don't share it with people so it's a fundamentally private experience so it's it's actually in a sense less viral now of course i think you know facebook it's a more successful company and i think it gets way more crap than twitter even though facebook is twitter is probably worse for the world in some ways is better for the world in some ways and worse for the world some it's just this gigantic amplifier but positive and negatives all the good stuff comes out of twitter and all the bad stuff it's just it's actually poly had a good comment on this where it's like the terms are so large that you can't even initially some them see like whether it's positive or negative some overall right where website less train thought give give me we're talking about the idea in your right okay so come back to the bit now one thing i will say that i've grown to appreciate more is the the specific jeremy you decide to run really does matter and can be like a thousand x multiplier on the result right so you know look genomics was if if i could show you all the good arguments as to why genomics would be a huge deal in the two thousands or at twenty tens and i could show you the curve of declining sequencing costs and so on but basically that generation of companies was i shouldn't say capped but it's somewhere between like a few hundred mil to a bill or something there wasn't a hundred billion dollar company that to my knowledge came out of that and it was sort like that was like the zip car era and then there's gonna be an uber era coming up right and it's really hard to know whether you're in the zip car or the uber era of something you know right and often there's iterations on the theme and it just breaks through like and sometimes things seem tired and old like subs two or three years ago may have seemed like or whatever just another blog who cares but adding those two features of a monet ability and b newsletter so that you've got you know because because a blog by default i mean it's not i think maybe you can with blog spot do emailing and so but it wasn't like set up for that wasn't smack in the face for both user and writer those two aspects really changed things and you know have have made subject a breakout where it was not obvious two years ago or three years ago right ben ben thompson which subject was inspired by having i've been kinda just rattling off in his own thing for a long time billing own thing when nobody cared and and then it actually worked right part of this is also the decline of the existing media environment that's what mean about like you know the iphone came and pandora went from a bad idea to a great idea the decline of the existing east coast media corporations has led to this exodus where this thing that was an okay idea but you became an amazing idea because there's only a need for it right that all these nails came up right i think insofar as i'd give advice for people who are thinking about picking idea you you really wanna ask yourself if this is a chance of being an shift like search or social or you know mobile or or crypto now right or or something like that and it doesn't have to be by the way and that buckle shift by the way might be five or ten years out from when you even start the thing you know some companies just go like vertical relatively late in life but you ideally wanna be part you wanna have a thesis on why some huge trend will occur let me give you another example of this by the way teleport which we set up in twenty fourteen just i was just gonna ask you all about teleport i'm i'm trying to find the old website was it dot was it just dot com dot org it's that's why so can you what the way that i understand it is teleport was going to crawl or aggregate tons and tons of data and tell you the best place to live yeah because here's a thought basically an extremely valuable search engine maybe the most valuable search engine is the one that tells you the economically best place to live because well it wasn't just economically was it wasn't it like just it wasn't just economically but the concept was that every other quality of life metric that you had to a first approximation we could have you implicitly put a dollar value on it like how much more is it worth and and am i say implicitly it'd be like okay this place is you know three thousand dollars a month of expense but this displace is thirty five hundred dollars however it is warmer and so out of millions of like choices like that you can sort of back out the function of how much more people value that extra degree of warm you see what i'm saying right yep yeah it still gets a fair bit of traffic it looks like still people are still going to the and you yeah you sold it to a what's this top of yeah like a relocation company right tel port i think is i think we're completely right about everything that people wanted i mean it was fine was a fine result like stand and you know silver fine you know and i'm and why did you say stan and why did you say they did fine i see they're different fine because they basically just did fine in their careers as a function of that like the got it okay like those are the two cofounder with me so stan and and silver early skype employees and they've been they've doing great and i it was it was it was a fine outcome but it was also a little too early you know and basically it's something where if teleport and no matt this is the other one by the way was also quite good but guys which i love i think that guy's is awesome man yeah yeah he's he's he's actually levels sci on twitter and yeah he's good because the only thing that i think he's probably a little too ag on is like he still he's anti investor and there's bad investors there's also good investors so that's something whatever you know probably it might be a twitter twitter thing where if i got the second bit or third a bit of information he might agree there's some value add people over there but the thing is that no might list teleport i think essentially had worked out the theory of this almost a decade ago you know that digital no would be valuable that people would wanna relocate because the reason i just say economics whether is just you can put a number on it right and so that's something you can plug into an algorithm and do not constrained optimization is yes okay alright so basically i mean is that basically where you put you very purposely constrain something oh to be happy yeah so in in in math you know there's something a constrained optimization is like i want to optimize my you know like the amount of time that i spend delivering packages subject to the following constraints a you know the car it only holds so many pounds it only take take so many packages at of time be you know it it has to have this many stops you know between refueling and so on and so forth have these constraints on the optimization okay and what you try to do is you take all those constraints you try to express the entire thing often in terms of minimizing or maximizing a single number that's called the objective okay and so no matter how complicated all the things you are that are putting in the first order second or third or of things you're just minimizing one objective so you think that the best place in the world to live you actually wanna think okay how do i like imagine like green hills and red valleys like green is good and red is bad like a heat map you know of good places and bad places to live right and sets a scaler and so you could basically to first sort think of that as the net economic benefit or loss i would have in relocating from here to here okay and so you take all of these layers on the world so first is cost of living second is how much you'd make in that geography right third is like you know is there bars or nightlife if you interested in that fourth if you're older you know do do they have schools do they have airports is there is it green what is the you know what's the rule set like you know like a is x band or is y legal you know and so and so forth all of those you layer on top of each other and you have actually a very complicated mathematical optimization problem right which actually varies for somebody at at different times of their life you know the best place to live when you're you know if twenty something college student you want the bars in nightlife life but if you've got children you're probably thinking about schools and just a different set of consideration so the greens and reds change you know we could quantify all of that right said here is that it'd be the search engine that would give you the maximum value right it would basically be something where by changing your x y location you might gain you know like fifty thousand dollars honestly of which maybe twenty or thirty thousand dollars is economic and the other remainder is in quality of life let me pause her could this company could could this had worked i mean i it was okay it was it wasn't a failure but it it was it's something like zip card uber if it had been an operation or or if if it'd been like the main thing in twenty if we had started in twenty nineteen and twenty twenty and being the pandemic right like or or you know arguably it's still early i think it's still early because post vaccine is when travel truly opens up you know and when everybody's fully vaccine so it'll it's like mobile phone installs they'll take a while and hopefully there won't be you know variants that present immune escape that can that can actually get out of of the vaccine will see what happens or the vaccines but mod of that i think you will have ton more you already are seeing folks who in miami and so on like the the the the map is becoming mobile even as seats are doing lockdown downs so you have the other thing which is centralized lockdown downs and the decentralized you know global migrants right so i think tools for international relocation are still early if anybody wants to build like teleport two point o or no medal two point o dm me you know with a demo and i'll definitely take a because i think we're still very early in that space when when by the way right now i i i have no idea where you are right now but if you were doing it making your own personal teleport list which city most interest you for for living in long term have you heard the term on maybe i'm mispronounced ent r e p so that's basically like a like a commercial center you know typically a port or or or you know something like that historically but i think those are wax in importance okay so you know dubai right monaco singapore actually miami which is pretty interesting americans sink of miami as a party destination you know with sun and beaches and and so on and so forth but antonio garcia martinez is actually he was he he turned me onto to this i had not actually been aware of this till his essay i think in twenty nineteen he's from miami but he said it is really interesting which is miami is like the singapore of latin america which is to say that if you've got like a you know mexican national and a guy from paraguay and they wanna do a deal they'll do it in miami because everybody knows it they all respect it it's like a decentralized you know demi zone it's got good banking rule of law because based in the us at least relatively to south america latin america more stable currency relative to there we'll see what happens in the future and so it's a it's a spot where people from the latin and south american you know dia they all have like communities in miami right so it's actually this international business capital that many americans are not aware of they just think go as a beach place right so it's actually a great spot for all this tech vc the fusion there is gonna be fascinating i think we're gonna see way more stuff done not just south of the border but in south america there's a lot of talent down there of course but now you just kinda have eyes on it looking at new life and you know there's actually another aspect non obvious aspect which covid is going to increase investment you know what that is no the rule is gone remote and what that means is that long rather than latitude is now the organizing principle basically what you care about is not where somebody is if they're not in the office then the next question is what times zone are they right yeah right and so you know this is something there's a website things called time dot is i posted on this tweeted on this right but what that means is launched tune an arbitrage okay that's interesting airbnb founders or or whatever they did this where they went and worked in argentina because it's sort of like low cost of living at the time and then also like sort of time zone wise you're still lined up with the united states it's like arm you can go armstrong did that but but yeah i don't know if was was a coinbase base is that what arm armstrong did that i'm not sure if the airbnb founders did too but yeah brian i'm armstrong coinbase was in argentina at a time four coinbase are you interested are you are you aware of what it's like to talk to you no i would say it is like you know some kind of it's like this it's like an a amusement park ride but it's the one it's the one that's like you know the bungee and it's the bungee you only two people going on it at at any one time and they basically they swing and they're like super high up and then they hit the ground and if they're like forward and go to the other way they just keep going back and forth and yeah that's what it feels like because you're like it's like exhilarating there's really interesting topics but you get so high up you know as the as the spa partner you're like i'm out of my turf and then you come back to her root and you say something that's like oh that speaks to my life experience and then it goes back great well we're we're too four in the future again there i can't i can't i can't see anymore and then we're back there so i meant that as a i mean there's is a but i also i was just curious like you know the when you're you your com your brain is completely normal too you live there all the time you know and and for me and sam i don't know i can't speak for but i know for me i love talking to you i love listen to you and you know any conversations we've had or whether through dms phone call or whatever has always been great but i'm you're the only person i've i i talked to you frequently that that makes me feel out of out of my depth where i'm like you know what i i kinda wish you had a better scoring partner in here who knew what the hell you're talking about and can actually like push this even further whereas what i'm trying to do almost is and bring it back down to like and who do you feel that way yeah that's awesome to which is i i mean certainly now my intention basically go ahead sorry sam who who do you feel that way with oh i mean like fine men rem like you know there's like geniuses that walked the earth it's right or have locked there like i i talked to a guy who's good friends with what's his name what's the vc ba jason mark and jason and they're like they're like when i talk to him i just i can't keep up do you feel that it just is what i think think what you're saying is sort of like is that a good spa partner for you who do you have gifts thoughts far with and those might be other people that people should go follow or listen to because if they like what they're getting from you maybe that's not another the person i think i think you know mark and i have kept up a high bandwidth conversation for almost a decade now mark and ben for sure neville ruby con you know who's a very good friend of mine and armstrong fred or these are really smart guys who like basically folks who i get a bounce from every single day you know and i think you know i just play tennis with them but it's also something where they're not exactly playing the same sport you know like rat ball versus tennis so as so i learned something you know i know i mean like i i i i tried to learn i mean you actually sergey brandon had a good one liner on this a long long time ago which was you know every interview he did he wanted that person to teach them something right which did a few things first meant even if the interview didn't hire them gain something out of it right but second is it's also sort of got their their teaching abilities out on on you know and and it's actually useful because you often have to do something with them company and teach other people what you did right coming back up you know think of you know when i do these podcasts i'm they're they're so they're totally off the cuff right so it's totally you know just freestyle and in the edited version i think i would try to map the points such that it's bullet bullet bullet specific specific specific specific general specific exclusive general like more disciplined in terms of how i accumulate to a thesis right and i think you know i think maybe two a few good examples of that if you look at the ball s dot com posts on india you know like why india should by bitcoin how india legalize crypto add crypto india stack i think that's sort of more of the sort of work like you know set up this this in this premise conclusion you know over and over again i think it's reasonably well written okay at least it's it's comp but that's like the install software in the most install intellectual software in the most efficacious way then do do you know what i mean by that install intellectual software yeah exactly i yeah that makes sense to me when you say it yes yeah yeah you get right like what go ahead sam you're gonna say so so you you've been blogging on there for a a while i've i've been reading it you've been doing you did teleport like in what two thousand fourteen which was right or ish which was about like kinda making making predictions you've been all about predictions i mean it seems like that's been part of your your your personality for a very long time what predictions did you make ten years ago about the year two thousand twenty that were wildly wrong and that and you would've have bet a lot of money that they were gonna be correct like you really bought in on them and they and they proven be wrong it's a good question i mean there's lots of things so many things i've gotten wrong i mean one thing that's kinda interesting you know only really became a public figure in twenty thirteen you know public figure i don't know if you i didn't call myself that now but like i only actually have wrote publicly in twenty thirteen before that i sort of you know cl in academia or in genomics it's like it's like an enterprise founder who just doesn't ever take the mic or whatever you know what so to speak right and i yeah i plenty that i was thinking and i was writing about but i wasn't speaking publicly on it and i think that one big thing i got wrong was i i it's just never the like i'm the personality for cryptocurrency i'm not really the personality for early social networks which were all about exhibition ism and remember zombies that game you know like people wasting time online all the type of stuff that's like totally not me and so i i actually you know there's people who dismiss crypto as oh it's you know it it cost too much or it's it's just a scam you know they just didn't get it you know for a long time and then there's eventually a lip bulb moment social networks like i i i i sort of got the appeal of it being like a facebook online you remember the concept of facebook i remember afraid you guys are old enough sam you're actually relatively younger but something is almost impossible to google so funny google the stanford facebook u you know it's like three proper nouns but back in the late nineties and early two thousands a facebook was a noun which was it was something that was given out to freshman when you came no i yeah you're aware of that well yeah yeah and i mean i had my my brother's you're you you you're probably ten years old of than me i have brothers at old yeah i know you're talking about okay well so that's something which was a physical facebook and i understood the appeal of like putting that online but i i only actually understood like the power of social networks when there was a friend of mine who was live tweeting a genomics conference okay i was like oh that saved me a flight nobody would have written up the material as well as this scientist would have because it would have just you know messed up the terminology or made it confusing they certainly wouldn't have gone into as much depth and i was just able to like just slur in and download like five hours of presentations without a plain flight you know at my laptop in ten minutes and get the important bits and i was like that i really like a lot okay i actually understand the value of that i did not understand the value of tweeting your breakfast right that seemed to me that the stupidest most exhibition is like waste of time thing in the world so what did you predict that it just i'm like that's touching thing it might say i might say small yeah yeah i see i understand underestimated when social networks were basically for and exhibition ism and time wasting and zombies and so on i i i did not really think through their social impact right it was only after and the thing is that the reason that genomics thing really piqued my interest is because i realized that that was something that would only be feasible when the thing is achieved such massive scale that even this very niche niche niche niche application was feasible you know it's like like you it's gigantic scale thing google and then you can google like i don't know belgian cooking recipes or or something like that or french cooking recipes made that's not that niche screen what i'm saying right so social networks i only after i i understood that that they weren't just time waste or distractions that you've actually learned things with them so i i very much underestimated social and i think that i probably overestimate underestimated genomics you know what what i got wrong with that was i saw i think all the technology and the computer science and all of that you know there's a curve by the way that your your audience can google which is like cost of sequencing a human genome like n hdr national human genome research institute and that like was just dropping through a cliff in in the late to thousands and it was clear that this looked like a moore's law like thing and a moore's law catalyze quite a lot of stuff so get into that what i didn't understand as an academic and i only understood as an entrepreneur is what the fda really was and i didn't understand that like basically the fda is like the primary blocker of like medical innovation not just in the us but in the world people are now by the way catching up to this you know because of the disaster of the fda holding back authorization on covid testing them doing things like holding back the johnson and johnson vaccine because like one out of a million people literally are getting blood clots you know this type of stuff people are understanding that their degree of risk aversion is not actually optimal there's both type one and type two errors both false positives and false negatives and if you are rejecting good drugs or good vaccines or good tests you are potentially doing as much or even more damaged than bad one than than approving bad ones and people are only focused on the p downside of approving a bad thing and not on the unseen of not approving a good thing right you you basically wanted to be the ron swanson of the fda you know you wanted think you wanted to get elected at the territory well no no actually that's why it i didn't take the position and in fact it was a surprise to me because i the paradox of that is obvious right like google didn't reform microsoft by becoming you know bill gates google reformed it by building a parallel system and then once it had made billions of dollars and after ten years of microsoft throwing everything in the book then they replaced their leader ba with satya and then they reformed and embrace open source right so i don't believe that one can abolish the fda anymore than one can abolish the fed but i do think you can exit the fda like we exited the fed and you exit the fed with bitcoin required like basically you know this this this development of of both technical and cultural and economic breakthroughs to build a parallel financial system which started off as just a crazy person's you know vision of the future right but some people got the potential very early on like health he was speculating that could be like one to ten million dollars per coin very very very early and i think like one of the first threads like if bitcoin took over right i wonder if he was satoshi friend or a colleague or something like that that was just sort of lending his name to this anonymous project to give people you know a second look at right hey he actually this the pseudo sedan the sky is actually maybe better than he seems as it's possible right point is though that parallel system was built outside the existing system and is completely ethical because everybody who is engaging it and opted into it right it's not forced on anybody and all the bugs every hack every loss of funds every drop or surge in the price every technical difficulty every ux difficulty all that was opted into completely ethical opt in experiment right at the at the broad scale which is the opposite by the way of monetary policies that are fo on you top down from above you had no ability to take the non inflated usd after two thousand eight right but if you disagree enough with a cryptocurrencies monetary policy you can fork the entire economy go your own way right that minority report does exist you may not be successful but then you know that's in the execution so one thing i think about a great deal is what is to our existing institutions what crypto was to finance right so you can see already a crypto law with smart contracts for big chunks of law you can start to see crypto media in the sense of decentralized crypto graphic truth in the crypto oracle things i was talking about where the foundational assertion are not human beings dumping their chess and saying science capital as you know or with with quotations right but rather crypto graphic facts by the way can i can i dive into that for a second on quote unquote science versus science is a very important issue okay let's do so you've seen all these people who are like masks don't work because of science masks work because of science right and and essentially what they actually are saying is some authority figure has told me that this is true and therefore it is true it's not actually science is not about peer review it's about independent replication that's a fundamental difference right peer review is at best proxy for independent replication there's a premise that that guy who reviewed it as a peer actually went and grab the bubbling beak into the experiment themselves that's less less the case today most of the time it is or maybe it's less the case case forever most time times it's like a few email comments and like make a new figure okay right so the the actual you know like independent replication is download the code and run it on my machine okay now there's only one thing which has now first let me back over science is actually the os basis of our civilization you know what it's no under religion right you don't cite god or the ten commandments as why have this law it is science says that there's a certain amount of emissions so therefore this policy is there right science says there's a certain amount of viral particles so therefore we wear masks versus not and so on and so forth right so upstream of everything is a scientific premise which is then coming in often from peer review as opposed to independent replication which is subject to institutional capture which is what's happened and you start to get scientists saying more and more ludicrous things that are you know like all the the public health people just completely own themselves during the pandemic in many different respects like they admitted that saying that masks don't work was a noble lie right which which was it wasn't even in that noble it was just stupid it was obvious at the time you know and you can't do that too many times and as many more examples that that's a particularly egregious one you can't do that too many times if we just don't trust it right so what's the alternative what's because you know the answer isn't in my view to go to astrology or woo or or stuff like that what do we have not science only one thing that's more persistent in science what is that more prestigious in science it's not usually thought of us in being an opposition what is it math okay what do i mean by that when i say it math greater than science okay it's like kind of a one liner it's like a funny headline or whatever but let me expand what i mean by that every scientific paper is based on of the collection of data and then generation of like figures and tables and so on right there's a concept called the open access movement which is about putting research online and taking it out from behind these publisher payable there's also a concept called reproducible research which says that that scientific paper should be fully reproducible from the underlying data and code like you should be able to hit enter and just like you template a web page with parameters from a database you can template a scientific paper with calculated parameters from that dataset set okay there's there's sites like dis distilled dot pub or if you look at what open ai does like a lot of their papers are basically like interactive websites which operate in this fashion where the underlying data is like temp the page okay what's the point the point is that it is when i talk about science of being independent replication yes it is impractical for everybody around the world to have their own inclined planes and cloud chambers to try and replicate all these experiments we don't have those but what does everybody around the world have computers yes that's right they have computers they have phones they can't necessarily do science at home but they can do math on the computer so the more of that independent replication process that you can turn into math the more that people who do not trust a central authority can check the the claims okay now we've already seen a huge victory of this right which is you know scientific economics has been defeated by mathematical economics that say all these noble lau winners of the noble prize in economic sciences all went and denounced bitcoin in different ways it can't work it won't work it shouldn't work it should be banned and mathematical economics defeated like these quote scientist and i put them as quote quote scientists because they're not you know one of the big things by the way is it's like scott alexander calls at the skin suit you know like science is like newton and maxwell and the crucial thing is like maxwell equations have trillions of independent replication every single time you pick up a cell phone you're doing an independent replication of you know the equations for the e and the b field for the electrical electromagnetic field right and and a thousand other things here you there's there's equations for quantum mechanics that you're effectively replicating independently confirming because the engineering wouldn't work of the sciences right so those things have trillions of independent replication and it's a total category error to compare them to a study that came at last week that has basically zero replication right calling the both science means you're taking things the only similarity is like they're coming out of universities but the access on which to compare is the number of independent replication not the number of citations number of independent replication and what's awesome about this is this is actually where crypto is if you think about what does it mean to have a transaction confirmed on chain don't know if you've ever seen watching dot com if ever sent any cryptocurrency and and refreshed blockchain sean maybe i've sent it side but i never sort of tracked and trace the the transaction but before you know sort of a log i never looked at the log of of the transaction look at the log i for example yesterday when i went and said i was donating you know money for indian covid relief i was able to post the link on chain so people could see the funds flowing and see that i donated it exactly as much as i said to the address that i said was gonna donate time that i said i was gonna do it right mh and and the critical thing there is there's a thing it says number of independent confirmations how many different minors right have confirmed that a did be at z time okay independent confirmations are very similar to independent replication that's cool they're actually doing calculations all of them are doing mathematical calculations to confirm that this fact this assertion actually happened then you have the digital signature that own this crypto cryptocurrencies are that seems like a very limited scope but as i said we can expand it to property we can expand it to lots of those things right and crypto oracle what's a point the point is if you take the concepts of open access the concepts of research the concept of independent replication and its proximity to the multiple confirmations of on chain data right you can think about something where oh actually all these people have computers so if the code and the dataset for every paper were actually on chain not only could i independently replicate at least their post upload conclusions right they may have still false by the data by the way that's still possible okay but post upload every calculation they're making i can check moreover if all of that is on chain it's an open state database going back to our previous point right so every paper can be compared against every other paper we can have common formats rather than every paper using a different format right we can import a library from a previous paper just so you can import a library from github because again it's all open state right and so now you actually start to make science far more check and cumulative because it is only the uploading process which now is in doubt everything that's on chain at least given this data i can check their calculations i can check their figures i can check their tables i can also check their citations because i go back a few hops and they're importing this paper importing that paper and i can actually see that their premises i can check their premises as well i can map the the trail citations all the way back right all of which is actually quite difficult to do today you know only google can build like google scholar because they have access to all these journals it's all behind pay right some of it has being broken out there with like pub central and so on but a lot of it is still behind payable or it's like a thousand different formats right and this is similar to how you know banking before crypto was a thousand different formats it's like you know this wire transfer and this address and so on encrypted uniforms it or like it uni identifies it and in a uniform address right address format that's universal and global point being this is actually a way that you can decentralized science by actually realizing that math is actually more powerful than simple assertion and using math and all the computers that we have do independent replication of every post upload plan alright i know that it's threw a ton at you there you threw a ton yeah but that's like a recipe for like what crypto science or decentralized science might look like and just just a a quick question you you were a partner at a sixteen z is that what you were doing a general partner for a while and then a board partner with part time versus you know operating your company you you're just you're just a weirdo and i love it you're just so interesting you're just so odd and like who like you're just sitting here talking about math and science and we did crypto we did starting traditional tech companies we did where to battle the think about where to live yeah yeah like you you you you're ec well we can go deep on a specific topic if you want actually i'd love you to teach me something about newsletters because you built a large one so maybe you know like i can ask you you know what would you like given that i've got you know a newsletter that pays you maybe you can teach me something about that and i can learn i could teach you yeah i mean i could teach you everything about newsletters i don't know if i could do it today it's one am right sure but i bro i'll i can i mean i i can't imagine there's that many people in the whole world that know more about me than newsletters you know like what you are to crypto i am newsletters is unfortunate it's unfortunate that crypto is far more lucrative but oh you're okay you you're quite well and and you know the thing is as you know if you one of the funny things about this whole space this just this tech thing is if you just stay the game long enough and you take enough swings ones that you just don't expect will just connect much harder i mean like you know there's investments that i've made which i spent five minutes on that have returned more than like five months of work of course you're still taking capital risk you're you know it's not like a free money or anything like that right but you know i mean you're like you're a very successful entrepreneur and you're in the game and so put some of that newsletter money into crypto or or other things i'm or media loss i did i and and i actually i i there's like a famous story that i retail over and over and over again but the short of it is i was friends friendly with ross bright oh and and when he was arrested i didn't know that that's who he was and i was sitting next to my coworker and i go billy my guy ross just got arrested you heard the thing called silk road and billy is not same as billy draper oh and he was like and he was like yeah my dad said that bitcoin is like gonna be the coolest thing ever and i said sounds good to me i'll go and buy it so i bought it over i don't know what it is but your dad is smart i'll do what he says good so that that's like my i i mean poor ross i didn't actually know his name was all bright i thought it was all brick but i'll i'll break actually i don't know how pronounced but yeah poor ross definitely i yeah we weren't like crazy close friends we we've hung a couple times and i lived in glen park where he lived and i was at like in front of the library of the day he got a arrested on that topic it is surprising to me given all the male that came at words that that there hasn't been a re trial you know literally like agents false finding information and so on and that's just what's come out to the public like who the heck knows if you know it was all like i i i haven't got into details on this but i do understand that like the supposed you know hit that ordered were all fake and it was just all ent or something like that mh and well the they were faked whether that was ent or he meant to murder someone that's up a debate i i i i said i haven't gotten into the guts of it i like that you i like that you try to like and it everybody knows the right thing to do and then most of us don't always do the right thing whether it's food or it's consuming information and it's like maybe this is bullshit but it's entertaining so i'm gonna i'm gonna do it i'm gonna read it watch it anyways and it's sort like you know warren buffett he's brilliant in one thing and then he you know drinks like whatever six dosing a day and he's mcdonald's every day you know he's mcdonald's with breakfast every he's so his constitution manages to keep up with some hour area but because yeah i think he's he's pretty stressed for you i i think is it works for him do you have something like that where you're like yeah i'm super smart but this is the dumb thing i do and i know it's dumb but i do it anyways watches the challenge on mtv by mean and sam we we both watch shitty reality tv and we're like yeah we know there's better things to do but we do this anyways big kardashian fan a big kardashian pin i you see you're based like what you know creature comfort type stuff i mean i like you know like figs you know us normal humans do no i mean i i like i'm on i i'm on twitter or whatever you know and that's like certainly a huge waste of my time it's it's both good and bad it's one of the things where you know every time you you you you get out they pull you back in you know like godfather right yep i i once watched a movie yeah i watched tons of movies tons of tons of movies basically like less so recently though it's interesting i you know actually one of the things i found you know just on the like the ball sheet like preferences becoming the future kind of thing right let me give you some this is not the answer to your question but let me on this and then come back to your question okay there's for example in two thousand five when google maps was out but before the iphone came out when i wanted directions to something what i do is i would use google maps on my laptop i would screenshot it i would charge up the laptop i would also print out the screenshots in the event that that there was a power outage and then it keep the laptop and the screenshots on the passenger side of car as drove okay and that's like that's what why i knew the iphone with maps would be a success because i had this crude jury rigged version of it in that interim period when google maps existed with the iphone did okay i was like a small example right certain things that i've been noticing actually as i just talked to you i was like you know i really haven't watched that many movies recently and why is that it's like well so many of them are woke that i kind of just rule my and i know exactly what it's gonna be like hollywood just gone so woke and and that's just like being preached to right even if you might agree or disagree with some of the like you know principles there it's just like alright again blah blah blah right and it's very predictable it means the characters are hack nine it means a messaging is is is just so on the nose you know there there isn't any of the humor and so on that used to characterize it there's so many areas that are off bounds that like it's just also edited and i just found the quality of hollywood has been dropping off a lot another thing i've i've realized is i don't hire actually from stanford or harvard or mit or whatever anymore you know i hire from twitter me take okay because basically it's first international second is you can kinda tell that these folks you can write you can see what they're you can see what they're about you can see what they're about it's actually it's like a v one of this concept of like it's a comp you know my thinking about how you didn't get like too much signal on them from their diploma right yeah you get way more signal from their writing and interests and so on twitter not just their skills but their values in character right and you know there's like super smart guys in you know nigeria you know smart women in like the middle east and so on who you could they shine through and i'm like okay that person right and you've now got like an index on on the world that you didn't have before rather than just buying this this degree right in fact actually i'm might i don't wanna quite say they're guilty till proven innocent but unlike you know five or ten years ago a lot of these graduates of woke schools mean i think of them as like you know like religious education now because that's what they're prioritizing i don't know if you see this thing like they're abolishing accelerated math in virginia and so on and so forth right and so so it's actually something where these folks are coming out of higher ed with a religious education that basically means that they are not necessarily all that technically good anymore and a set of priorities and entitlements that is very much often adverse to what is needed to build a business you know and so i i think there's been like the college flipping for me at least in terms of hiring from these places and said you know you wanna hire the the guy from the midwest or the middle east who just has like you know just a different set of values and it's just more hungry you know good yeah exactly exactly what what's your hollywood what's your hollywood replacement in that same way so that's your hiring replacement you said your hollywood consumption goes down what would you replace it with old books math textbooks i thought something what like normal people do or whatever you know that that this like a some fridge so you know before i started my first company i was actually about as jacked as as possible to be with my south asian ph and so like lifted and ran all the time i worked out all the time and it's very difficult to do that while operating startup because you know your first priority is like there's always the temptation to make that short term sacrifice of stay late or skip the workout to take the sales call and frankly your employees like you're at least what i told saw the time the employees you know you have your responsibility to them which your small health or your hour of sleep isn't as important as their you know because you have fiduciary responsibilities to them you know you brought them on and you have put them jobs move across country oh i didn't do that deal because i went for a run oh okay well you know and it took me a while to realize that actually that was a false economy and that you know like spending down your physical fitness or your health is actually something that will also imp them in the medium to long run because you won't be you know you can only tap into that in your youth you can push harder of course right but as you gotcha as you get older the you you just don't have the energy to do the that in quite the same way right you can't tolerate as much y are you are you are you fit now i'm fitter than i was i basically one of things that actually i did at empty train nine is you know be we're be doing the same proof of workout right where you can submit like proof of aha get a proof of workout right where you submit a proof of workout we give you ten bucks in btc if it's one of the top one hundred of that day okay and which kinda cool and it's got extremely good response and basically what i realized that for the next thing that i did i actually had to make that part of like the job and the business such that everybody expected me just like i expected all our employees to go an exercise and because it was actually something that advanced the company as a whole and i just had you know whatever just i can only do one thing at a time so i need to actually make that a front page priority in sort of the same way that people have learned that spaghetti code is a short term optimization and actually you're taking on technical debt you're taking on physical debt if you are not like working out and needing right each day you know so i wanted to kinda put that in the top of my consciousness for the next thing and i actually think that that daily fitness eating properly etcetera is on a straight line with trans and with ver aging and so on and so forth and whether world be successful in that i don't know but at least i wanna at least set that direction vector i like it i think we lost sam to a bathroom break because we've okay we've broke the my first million record of of longest podcast podcasts so we should we should wrap it up where where can people find you so i know twitter is where i trying to get the most so shout out kind of where people can get more where seven yeah go to one seven two nine dot com that's the free newsletter newsletter that pays you in fact where it's got these regular bitcoin bounties for tasks and tutorials and you know i kinda of spoke about what our long term goal is for what we're doing there short term it's extremely easy to understand which is read a post do a task or some crypto and then you know like for example we had yesterday is you know learning about how to register a domain name that was very valuable in the early nineties well learning how to register a crypto domain name is probably gonna be very valuable and we basically have a tutorial on that and if you go and do it and you tweet about your experience then we'll give you two fifty if you write a good sub tweets right like educational informative of dev tweets right right so that's like a cool i think a way to incentivize you to learn something that you should already learn and so we're of doing out like five thousand dollars in ethereum for that right so twenty two enterprise sponsor could others people sponsor like could could we oh yeah put up five grand for something absolutely so we have seventy t two dot com front slash create okay and one thing that i wanna have eventually is something you know just like companies have twitter accounts have them have seventy tran accounts where every task that they can outsource to the public at large they do and maybe they pay them in their corporate cryptocurrency yeah i love it i i love this sort of mini x prize i we've been talking about this on the pod for a while as like i love that the x prize was this kind of big pinata that got a bunch of people to innovate and step up and actually more investment than the prize yet happened because of it and i wondered i know it i i i've now experienced a big company we got acquired and i'm like oh i understand why it's so hard for bigger companies to innovate i wish we were just putting more of things on our company's road roadmap just out there and say hey if anyone can whoever builds the best version of x we will like sort of state upfront what we will acquire it for what we will pay for that bounty to be complete that's one of the sort of startup up ideas i'm most passionate about absolutely so if you're interested in trying out some experiments on this like one big thing is you know i think you're mentioning like startup ideas that you had so one thing i wanna do is do prizes for starter years you know twenty five k for the best one in thirty days and you know we have the right to put in a a save or something like that you know like but you know we can we can we could figure out all those things but if you if you just wanna try something go to send dot com front create and just submit a task and instructions are there and if it's good we may even fund it okay so that's to say like the process of creating a task meaning drafting the copy and the process of sponsoring a task are actually sep things so you could have a lot of people create un unwanted tasks and just like a vc goes and invest in a startup it's like a a sponsor invest in a task and then boom makes it go mainstream stream right so that itself is like interesting concept where you know you don't just have like let's say hubspot having a feed of tasks it also has a queue where people can propose things that be interesting for hubspot to try on its audience you know course sick man we're alright so we're happy for everything yeah thanks for thanks for coming on you know it's great to have a smart guy come and and chat with a couple of bullshit like us so we we enjoyed the conversation conversation thanks speak for yourself you guys guys have too self deprecating you've done a great job you know you're you're show is great and your your feet is often insightful and you know you know mutual admiration are a great job i feel like i could rule to world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days all on a goal travel never looking back