YouSaid · the spoken record

Balaji Srinivasan

lines on the record: 605
first: 2022-10-20
most recent: 2022-10-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“How often are they born? So let me first anchor this because people, just to give some numbers, right? How many UN listed countries are there? Like 196, 193, okay? And there's some that are on the border like Taiwan or Israel, right? Where they're not, I mean, Israel is a country, but it's not recognized by every country or what have you, right?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, sure, sure, but let's say you're not going to be able to get to Mars in a purely digital thing. You need to build, you know, you have to build a rocket launchpad. You're not going to be able to do all the innovative biomedicine, whether it's all the, you know, have you seen bioelectricity or there's stuff on regenerative medicine, all this stuff. You just can't do that digitally, right? We're still physical beings. So you need physical space, but how do we get that? So this is meant to wend its way through various roadblocks in the so-called, you know, actually my term from many years ago, the idea may is it's meant to wend its way through the idea may is to find how to use bits to reun lock innovation atoms.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but as I said, But you're not going to build a self driving car city in digital space. You're not going to be able to do”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, maybe I'm meme. But the book is, I think, is a good meme. That's actually why I wanted to make it free. I wanted people to take it out there, make it their own. And one of the things I say at the beginning, and I'll come back to this thing, is it's a toolbox, not a manifesto. Even if you dislike 70% of it, 80% of it, 90% of it, if there's something that's useful to you, you can take that and use it. Just like a library, a software library. You might just use one function there. Great. I'm glad I've delivered you some value, right? That's my purpose in this, right?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. So there's network state in the precise definition I have in the book, which is a diplomatically recognized entity. And there's network in sort of the loose definition where one thing that's interesting is this term has become a lowercase term really fast. Yeah. Like in the sense of Google became lowercase Google for like Googling or like Uber became lowercase Uber. If you go to the networkstate.com forward slash reviews or you go to search.tour.com and put in network state, you'll see it's just become like a word or a phrase. So that means it's sort Whatever I intended to mean, and people will use it to mean what they want it to mean, right? Okay.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Main knowledge being lost, and the heirs who win the role of mayor or whatever of this town don't have the ability to bill it from scratch. They're just selected for legitimacy, not competence. So once you think about this concept of founding versus inheriting, and I've got the whole essay which talks about this, Of course, the alternative to somebody who's legitimate but not competent, what people will say is, oh, we need an authoritarian to be in control of everything. And then their hope is that that person is competent, but they don't have legitimacy because if they're just installed as just like a”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ability to build from scratch is so important because if some part breaks and you don't know why it was there, can you even maintain it? No, you can't. Unless all the replacement parts and the know-how to fit them together is there, you can't repair this. So in 2009, Mother Jones had a story that said that the U.S. military had forgotten how to make some kinds of nuclear weapons because there was a part where all the guys who knew how to make it at like aged out or left. And this was some aerogel or something like that. It was rumored. Thing is you're seeing increasingly, for example, you've got wildfires in California. You've got water that's not potable in Jackson. You've got power outages in Texas. You're seeing a lot of the infrastructure of the U.S. is just less functional. I think probably part of that is due to civil engineering not being that sexy a field, people aging out and just demanding.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are not the grandson, but like the 40th generation heir of a factory that somebody else built. Like think about a factory and you have this grandchild or great-grandchild that inherits a factory. Most of the time it's just cranking out widgets and the great grandson is cashing checks. They have been selected as the legitimate heir because it's the founder passes down to his son, pass it down to his grandson, to his great-grandson. So legitimacy is there. They've got title. They can show I own this factory. They can cash the checks. There's professional managers there. Everything seems fine. Until one day, that factory has to go from making widgets to making masks for COVID or something else. It has to change direction. It has to do something it hasn't done before. None of that capability for invention and reinvention is present anymore. These people have inherited something that they could not build from scratch because they could not build from scratch. They can't even maintain it. This is an important point.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their scion who built a fortune. So it's not even like the same, is it the same family even? Is the fortune actually in the family? So most people don't think a few generations out. They just kind of think, oh, Marx is right. There's always been a rich and a poor. It's actually much more dynamic than that because you literally, like what is even the family when it's diluted out, you know, 116th, right? If you're 1 16th a Rockefeller, are you a Rockefeller or 15, 16th, something else, would you have the Rockefeller fortune? Probably not, right? Now, are there, again, primogeniture where the guy who inherits the name all the way through, that would be one way to pass it down. But even that person doesn't necessarily have the qualities of the guy who, you know, the cultural qualities, other qualities, the guy who's like four generations past, so they tend to squander it, right? So this actually brings us to, coming back up to governance, the system, the guys who built the United States, like Washington and Hamilton, these are giants, right? These are founders. And the folks today.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, or working class or something like that, right? So essentially the grandson squanders it, right? And in sense, by the way, just to talk about that for a second, if you have two children and four grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren and 16 and so on, and an older family is, you know, they were much bigger, right? Six, you know, children is not uncommon. Whatever fortune you have is now split six ways and then six ways and six ways again. With the exception of primogeniture, where the oldest son inherits this all the way down, the majority of descendants just a few generations out have probably inherited none of that fortune unless it has compounded to such an extent that it's like up 6x over 20 years, right? So it's actually hard to maintain a quote ruling class in the sense that this person who's like four generations down has one sixteenth of the DNA, you know, one over two to the fourth, right?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Back in the past, it was kind of like you're just working with your, you're not white collar, you're back to working with your hands, you're just a blue collar.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Will agree with you on that, and actually I talk about this in the book, or I've got an essay on this called Founding Verse Inheriting. And the premise is actually that the classic example, you know, the saying shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations. It means the guy who starts out poor and builds a fortune, his son maintains it, and his dissipate grandson dissipates it, right?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“South America, like that, like you can Neam founders from all over the world, right? Exceptional people can rise from all the world to run giant companies. Why can they not rise to run giant new countries? And the answer is we didn't develop the mechanism yet, right? And just as another example, I talk about this in the book. Vitalik Buteran is far more qualified than Jerome Powell or anybody at the Federal Reserve. He actually built and managed a monetary policy and a currency from scratch as a 20-something. Obviously, that's a more accomplished person than somebody who just inherited an economy.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't think it's implausible that somebody from Brazil or Niger, I mean, most quote billionaires in the world are not American. And in fact, actually, here's another important point. It's far easier to become a tech billionaire than to become or a billionaire period than to become president of the United States. There's less than 50 U.S. presidents ever, all time. It is a much more realistic ambition to become a billionaire than to become president. There's like thousands of billionaires for what? In fact, 75% of them are outside the US. And many of those have been some of them are like energy and oil, which is often based on political connections, but a very large chunk of the rest are tech. And that's something where you're mining, but you're mining online by hitting keys as opposed to with a pickaxe in granite, right? So the point is that we think it's totally understandable today for there to be a huge founder who comes out of Vietnam or, you know,”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just like anybody becomes CEO of a startup company. Of course, whether people follow you is another matter, but anybody can go and found one. Go ahead. Sorry.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So you are essentially getting new social systems, which are actually net inequality decreasing, because before you only had USD millionaires, and now you have a new track. And then another track and another track, right? You have different hierarchies, different ladders, right? And so on net, you have more ladders to climb. And so it's not the rich getting richer. In fact, old money in some ways is a last to cryptocurrency. Old money and old states, I think those people who are the most focused on, you might call it reform, I would call it control. The most focused on control of the old world, who have the least incentive to switch. The rich will get poorer because it will be the poorer or those who are politically powerless, politically poor, who go and seek out these new states”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think it's the rich get richer. I think what happens is, so this is an important concept. It's multi-axis, right? That is to say, for example, just the introduction of the Bitcoin axis. And those, because it didn't exist pre-2009. Now it exists. Those people who are rich in BTC terms are only partially correlated with those who are rich in USD terms. There's all these folks essentially BTCT.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Becoming president. Now we can just say, you can start online. And you know what? Maybe this person is so exceptional. They have Americans coming to their network state, right?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The network states of the internet where you go from the rights of Englishmen with a Magna Carta to Europeans, African Americans, all the immigrants, the Americans or the North America, you've got all the people of the world. And so you basically are more democratic and you're more capitalist because you're talking about internet capitalism, not just nation-state locked capitalism. In a sense, it's the V3, right? Another way it's the V3. Only about 2% of the world is over 35 native born American can qualify to be president of the United States. But 100% of the world, you could become the president of a network seat. There might be a Palestinian Washington or Brazilian Hamilton, right? And now rather than say, okay, maybe you have a small percentage chance of immigrating to the U.S. and a small percentage chance of your descendant.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is led by a CEO founder and that is also governed by something that's like a constitution, but just like you went from, you know, when I talk about the V1, V2, and V3 a lot, right? Like V1 is gold and V2 is fiat, and V3 is Bitcoin, right? Or V1 is hunter-gatherer, and V2 is farmer, soldier, V3 is digital nomad, or sovereign collective, okay, which is not just an individual but a group. Here, V1 is UK common law. They don't have a constitution. It's just all precedent going for many years, right? V2 is the US Constitution. And V3 is the smart contract, the social smart contract, which is fusion, obviously, of Rousseau's concept of the social contract, and the smart contract. The social smart contract is like written in code. So it's like even more rigorous in the Constitution. And in many ways, you can think of going from the United Kingdom of England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, the United States of America.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. And what's interesting about this is, of course, I'm saying that in a somewhat playful way, right I think it's a useful analogy, interesting analogy, right? So you have the Americans who forked the UK code base, and then you have the Indians, the Israelis, and the Singaporeans who also made their own modifications. And in some ways, each society has pieces that you can take from them and learn from them and try to combine them, right? So you have a state that is started by a book that nonviolently assembles, that crowdfunds territory around the world.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Singapore and the US, they have something in common. You know what that is? They're all forks of the UK code base. Think obviously the UK was sort of the ancestor of America, but Israel was a former British colony. India was a British colony, and so was Singapore, right?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And has managed to, you know, there were times like emergency in the 1970s in Aragon, the declared emergency. There were times when team touch and go, but overall with fits and starts, this flawed thing has kind of made its way through. And the third inspiration is Singapore with Lee Kwan Yu, who built a city-state from nothing. You know, I shouldn't say from nothing. Okay, there was something there, but let's say built one of the richest countries in the world without huge amounts of natural resources in the middle of a zone where there was lots of communist revolution going on. And so he was the CEO founder, essentially, of this amazing startup country, right? And finally, of course, America, which has too many influences to name, things we talk about, the nation of immigrants, obviously the Constitution and so on. And you think, okay, can we go, you think of these inspirations? What's interesting about these four countries, by the way, Israel, India.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. So I'll get to that. The stuff. That's right. So now that I've said what are the positive things about Israel, and I think there's a lot to admire in Israel, as I said, I think there's also a lot to admire in the Palestinians and so on. I'm not taking any position on that. There's other inspirations for the network state. The second major inspiration is India, which managed to achieve independence nonviolently. That's very important, right? So can you fuse these things, right? A state started with a book that achieved independence nonviolently. and that managed to build this polyglot multicultural democracy that does india has its flaws but it does manage to have you know human rights of lots of people respected and what have you right”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People who are actually telling the land and building the buildings and so on and so forth who had the claim there is like the people who are present now this territory this network of territories eventually I'm fully aware that the exact configuration of what territory belongs to Israel, what toiletry belongs to Palestinians, this is an enormous topic of dispute. But I just point this out to say the process going from book to crowdfunding territory to a sovereign state where people were now citizens of Israel, as opposed to the British Empire, is not some fictional thing, but did happen. And within the lifetimes of some of the older in their 80s now, but in the lifetimes of some older people, so it's not impossible. In fact, it has happened, right?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Religious importance. Now, by the way, one thing I'm sure some fraction of viewers are going to be like, oh my God, all the bad stuff I have, I'm obviously not denying that there's enormous amounts of controversy and so on that attends Israel. I consider myself generally pro-Israeli. I'd also consider myself pro-Palestinian. I fund lots of Palestinians and so on and so forth. So I'm leaving that part out, that huge conflict for now. And you might say that's airbrushing it. I don't mean it to do that. I'm saying here is the positive things they did. Can we take the positive and not have the negative? And I'll come back to how we might swap those parts out. But let me just talk about this a little bit more. So one of the things that happened was committed Zionists went and crowdfunded territory in what is now Israel. And they knit it together, right? Why? Because when you're physically present on territory, yes, in theory, like the British Empire was in control. They were the sovereign. In practice, who were the boots on the ground? The facts on the ground, right?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Either A, assimilate, give up the culture, or B, some people are thinking communism is a good idea. I disagree with that. We should do C, build our own country. And that was considered totally crazy. What we did was he A wrote a book. B, start a fund. C organized a semi-annual conference, the World Zionist Congress, and the fund and the Congress are still going today. Crucially, there were a bunch of intermediate stages between the book and the Idea and then the actual state of Israel in 1947. For example, folks who were committed Zionists got together and started crowdfunding territory in what is now Palestine. And in fact, though, Palestine was only one choice. In the book, they also had Argentina as a choice. So this is my concept, cloud first, land last, and land's a parameter you can choose, right? Other places that were considered at various points like Madagascar, Birabidzin in the former Soviet Union, right? So the land was a parameter. Palestine went out because of its”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yes, and let me give you a concrete example Israel. Why? People talk about, you know, a lot of people are like, oh, biology just, he took this from Snow Crash or some sci-fi book they'll reference. Actually, there's many different references to the book. This is not the only reference. But a very important reference that I think is much more important to me than Snow Crash, which is good. A good book, whatever, but it's fictional, is Jerjunstadt, by Theodor Herzl, which translates as the Jewish state, and that led to the foundation of Israel. And that's very real. It's worth reading because it's amazing. Theodor Herzl was like a tech founder. In the book, he was writing about the death of distance in 1897. Why? Because steamships could take you across countries, okay? And he's just, you know, amazingly smart and practical guy where he just handled all these various objections. And he said, look, you know, the Jewish people, you know, our choices.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The big thing I think comes after digital currency is digital passports. Okay, so, and that's a big part of this whole network thing, which we can come back to. That last bit, the reason I just mentioned all those deals between sovereigns, whether at the city, US state, or UN listed country level, and on the other hand, so that's on one side of the market, on the other side are the companies and the currencies. Why could we not have online communities”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Crypto country, right? And in fact, you can think of the fiat and crypto version of almost anything. One thing I'll come to later is.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is something where both, right? So basically, it's a play on word. So just like fiat currency, cryptocurrency, we will have fiat country”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, first, I would say sovereigns are already out for business, they're inking deals. Nevada ink to deal with Tesla to build the Geiga factory. El Salvador has Bitcoin as its national currency. Wyoming has done the Dow law where Ethereum is now recognized, where you can have on-chain incorporations that are recognized by Wyoming law. Virginia and New York negotiate with Amazon for HQ2. Tuvalu signed a deal with GoDaddy for the.tv domain. Colombia signed a deal for the.co domain and on and on. Sovereigns are open for business. Sovereigns are doing deals with companies and with currencies. Sovereigns at the level of cities like Miami or New York where the mayors are accepting their salary in Bitcoin states like Wyoming or Nevada has its new private cities legislation or entire countries like El Salvador.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Horizontal space, you pick this space, you crowd from the territory, now you've got a city. Okay, and the last bit is eventually Gehan's diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states. And this is the part that people, you know, different people will be with me up to this point, and then they'll say, okay, that's a part I disagree with, or how are you going to ever do that? They'll say, yeah, you can build an online community. I believe you can get them to do collective action. And of course, people have crowdfunded land and moved intogether. You're doing it at a larger scale. All that I believe, how are you possibly ever going to gain diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states? You dumb delusional tech bro, right? That's a common thing. Okay. That's about the tone of it as well, right?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Y horizontal sprawl because to build a skyscraper, to build a tall building in a city, you have this enormous permitting process, all of this stuff which has to get done. It's expensive, it's time consuming. The way that cities were built, if you go back to the V1, what does the startup city look like? It looks like something like Burning Man. It looks like the cities of the Wild West. They were not multi-story buildings, right? They were basically things that were just like one story and someone could have it there in the dust, and then you build roads and stuff between them. They could move them around. It was much more dynamic geography. And so when you have that as a vision of what a startup city looks like, right? Now you've got something, there's a company I find it called Kift, which is like Van Life. There's a lot of stuff in construction that makes this feasible. There's so-called man camps for fracking, where people can just do companies like Agreco, they provide power. You can bring water, all this stuff on site. So it's easy to actually snap this stuff to grid relatively speaking. If you've got”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, NIMBY is not my backyard. Don't build in cities. NIMBY is, let's build high density buildings, really tall buildings, and so on in cities. There's a third version, which is Himbi. It's my little coinage, which is horizontal sprawl is good.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here. This place has great Starlink coverage. You go there like the Verizon guy. You know, can you hear me now? Good, right? You see that the coverage is good there. You drive out there, you test it out. Maybe you do it with mobile homes first, right? This, by the way, is its own thing. There's Yimbi and there's NIMBY and there's YMB, but I actually also like Himbi.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The next election, it's now 5149 the other way, and then they ram it back, and that's how you get the seesaw that is just splitting countries apart, right? The alternative to that is you build a consensus online, you go and get some God-forsaken patch of territory. Actually, the worst a territory, the better. Why? Because like Burning Man, nobody cares, right? The nicer the piece of land, the more the people are going to argue about it. Starlink has repriced the world. Basically, all kinds of pieces of territory that were previously far away from natural ports, they're far away from natural resources, all kinds of pieces of territory around the world now have satellite internet. And so what you can do is, again,”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And insofar as 49% did not consent to the current president or prime minister or whatever, let's say presidential system first past the post, okay, insofar as 49% did not consent or in a prime minister system, it could be like 60% or more didn't consent to the current leader. Those folks are having something imposed on them that they literally did not vote for. Moreover, campaign promises are non-binding. So whatever they voted for, they can effectively be defrauded. The actual voter fraud is when a politician promises X but does not do it. It's as if you bought a can of orange juice and it actually drinking its milk or it's nothing, right? So all of that is routineized. All of that is accepted. We have this thing which is just the minimum possible amount of democracy of 51%. Okay. And what happens is then that 50% tries to ram something down the 49%' throat.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So once you have consensus in bits, the human consensus also cryptographic consensus, cryptocurrency consensus, then you can reshape the world of atoms. The reason we can't reshape the world of atoms right now is because you don't have that consensus of minds. For example, in SF, anything you do, there's going to be 50% of people who are against you. So that's just a recipe for gridlock. Whereas if you have a bare piece of land that everybody agrees on, you can get 70,000 units get set up in Burning Man in just a few days. That's the power of when you actually have human consensus. And one way I talk about this also in the book a little bit, and this I'm going to go much more into detail in the V2, I think of this as 100% democracy as opposed to 51% democracy. 51% democracy, which is the current form of government, is 49% dictatorship. Because the entire premise of democracy is about the consent of the governed. That's actual legitimating underpinning principle.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is stopping the innovation in Adams? It is a thicket of regulations. What are those regulations? Ultimately, a social construction. If you lean into the whole deconstructionist school of thinking, you can deconstruct and then reconstruct the state itself given sufficient social consensus online. If the population of ADA had 100% consensus, you could just dissolve every law in Nevada in theory and then build new ones. So the online consensus of getting people to agree on something is upstream of what happens offline.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can only take place in the physical world. Look, one of my sayings in the book is cloud first land last, but not land never. In many ways, one of the problems the book solves is Tiel's problem of, you know, we have innovation in bits, but not in atoms, right? We can build a billion dollar company online, but we need a billion permits to build a shed in San Francisco, right? How do you reconcile that?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not called because a cult is very internally focused and it tries to close its members off from the outside world. This is much more how America itself is populated where there were lots of towns like Penn is named after William Penn or the founder of texts like Sam Houston, right? Lots of towns like the Oneida Commune in northern New York, they recruited and they became a town and they became actually the Oneida glassware company kind of makes glassware out of there. All of these communities that were opt-in voluntary communities were not simply like cults that were closed off from the world. They were meant to set an example to the world about virtuous living look like and they were trying to recruit from the rest of the world. They were exporting goods to the rest of the world. So it is yes, reproduction, it's marriage and kids and so on, but it's also just hanging out and it is just the physical world is very high bandwidth. There's lots of stuff. It's fun to just go and have a dinner in person just to hang out, to build things. Moreover, there's also lots of innovations.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They could all have a building where they're doing Vietnamese immersion, right? And that's something which they get a benefit from being physically around the other people that the pure digital wouldn't give them to quite the same extent, right? And so crowdfund territory around the world crucially not just one place, they're all connected by the internet, just like Hawaii's 2,000 miles away from the continental US, but both sides think of them as American, both the people on Hawaii and people in the continental US.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Physical space, and not all in one place. That's critical. Just like Bitcoin is a decentralized currency, the network sees a recipe for a decentralized state-like entity, where it starts with, for example, two people just get, you know, they become roommates. They meet in this community, they become roommates. Okay, they get a place together, or 10 people get a group house, or eventually 100 people just buy a small apartment building together. And guess what? They start getting equity, not just paying rent. These are all people who share their values. And now they can crowdfund territory together. Now, of course, they don't just jump straight from a thousand people liking something to a thousand people crowdfunding something. What I described in the middle is you do a lot of meetups. You get to know these other people before you decide to live collectively with them. Once you live with them, you start to get a network effect. For example, if those 100 people want to learn Spanish or Turkish or Vietnamese,”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. So that informal sentences a network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states. So we talked about was the alignment of online communities and the capacity for collective action. Well, one collective action could be a thousand people liking a tweet, right? If you can get a thousand of a thousand people doing it, but a much higher bar is a thousand people crowdfunding territory and actually living together. Just like people currently”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you have an individual notch you can program Minecraft by himself or Satoshi could do v1 of Bitcoin by himself or Instagram, which is just like 10 people or WhatsApp, which is like 50 people when they sold. But on the other hand, you have huge countries of hundreds of millions of people that are just finding that the first and second principle or the, you know, they're just splitting on principal components. Scott Alexander thinks of them as scissor statements, statements that one group thinks is obviously true, one group thinks is obviously false. You can think of them as political polarization. You think of it in terms of game theory. There's lots of different reasons you can give for why this happens. But those large groups now are getting split. And so you have both the unsustainability of these large sort of artificial groups and”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. We're redunbarizing the world in some ways, with China being the big exception or outlier. The Dunbar number, 150 people, if you know that's like roughly the scale of your society, right? That's the number of people that a human can kind of keep in their brain. That's, you know, whether apocryphal or not, I think it's probably roughly true. We're redone barizing the world because we're making small groups much more productive. And B, we're making large groups much more fractious.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, within a subreddit, it's actually fairly polite. Like, let's say you're not usually seeing, it depends on which subreddit, of course.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'm not disagreeing with you on this. I am saying, however, there is Positive there that once we see it, we can try to amplify that”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it also is the other extent where people find their mental soulmates across the world, someone who's living in Thailand or in Latin America who thinks all the same stuff just like them, wow, you never met this person before, right? You get to know them online, you meet in person. It's like, you know, the brains are being communicating for two years, three years, you've been friends, and you see them in person, it's just great, right? So it's actually, it's not just the total lack of empathy. It is frankly far more empathy than you would be able to build usually with an in-person conversation in the 80s or the 90s with someone on their side of the world, because you might not even be able to get a visa to go to their country or not even know they existed. How would you be able to be able to find each other and so on and so forth, right? So it is kind of both. It is tearing society apart and it's putting it back together, both at the same time.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source