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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yes. Let me list a few of them. This is in the Network State book. It's in the chapter called Fragmentation Frontier Forth Turning Future is our past, right? So I give this example of like a fluid unmixing. Just watch this for a second, right?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make Ukraine their colony, but the outcome of this war may be that Russia becomes China's colony. So that's at least like five different perspectives, right? There's like the US establishment perspective, there's the Tucker MAGA perspective, there's the Baltics and Ukrainian perspective, there's like the Indian and poor countries perspective. Then there's the Chinese perspective. And then, of course, there's a Russians, right? Just respect to that, by the way, that's another example of history happening in reverse. This is the sign of Soviet partnership, except this time China's a senior partner and Russia is a junior partner. And this time they're both nationalists rather than communist. And there's so many flips like this. And I'm going to list a few more, actually, because there's so, so, so many of them.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that's right. Like basically, I was actually one of the first three Estonian e residents. And I completely understand why Estonia and the Baltics and all these countries, including Ukraine, that just recently within Living Memory got their independence from the Soviet Empire would not want to be forcibly reintegrated into a place that they just escaped from, you know. And so that is something which is sort of outside the American, left, right, you know, tired kind of thing where when you”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Peak centralization. You go forward and backward in time, things decentralize. And you start getting mirror image events that happen with the opposite outcome. For example, 1890, the frontier closes. 1991, the internet frontier opens. Internet becomes open for commerce. You go backwards in time. You have the Spanish flu, forwards in time, COVID-19, right? Backwards in time, you have the captains of industry, the robber barons. forwards in time, you have the tech billionaires. And there's so many examples of this. Like another one is backwards in time. The New York Times is allying with Soviet Russia to choke out Ukraine. Now today, they have reinvented themselves as cheerleaders for Ukraine against nationalist Russia, right? And of course, I think you could absolutely support Ukraine on other measures, but it's pretty hypocritical for the guys who profited from the Haldemor, you know, the Ox Silzberg family literally profited from denying the Haldom.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a so-called business plot to try to take over the government and stop FDR from pushing the country in what they thought was a bad direction. Smedley Butler was a general that they recruited to try to help them with this, but he turned on them and he went and kind of broke the whole thing open and told to Congress and so on. And so all this guy's, you know, the whole plot was broken up, right? Now one way of thinking about today or the whole aftermath of Gen 6 is it's a business plot but in reverse because the generals and the COs both were against Trump and actually the business plot happened and now all the CEOs just you know they pulled all the push all the buttons that they needed to and now the network was prime over the state okay now why is that an interesting way of looking at it because one thing I have in the book is you can kind of think of 1950 as like ish just”
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 where the bailout's good or bad. I think they were bad, but how could I prove it? I need to actually be able to fork the economy. Crypto actually allows you in theory to do that, like where folks could actually shift balances. This is a whole separate thing where you could actually start to make macroeconomics into more of an experimental science rather than simply arguing from authority. You could argue from experiment. Some of the virtual economy stuff that Edward Castranova has done is relevant to this. We can talk about that. Point is, though, with FDR, There's this thing because he had made such a war on private industry at that time and justified it with this narrative, quote, bold, persistent experimentation. There was something called the quote business plot where all of these captains of industry that he had been being up. And again, Teddy Roosevelt had also been doing this with, you know, the trust buster, the journals at the time. Ida Tarbell had gone and basically ran all these articles and Rockefeller knocked him down. Woodrow Wilson is controlled. But FDR, the COs were thinking, oh bad, this is so terrible.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of many others at that time, like John T. Flynn, who's this journalist who was pro FDR and then was against, was that FDR made the Great Depression great, that it wouldn't have been such a bad thing without him mucking up the entire economy and giving it a sickness. It would have recovered quickly without that, right? This is counterfactual, which people just argue about it really angrily back and forth. And you can't actually run the experiment unless you could fork the economy.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, Google FDR Entrapment of Gay Sailors basically got young men to try to find folks within the Navy who were gay and then basically entrap them so that they could be prosecuted and what have you, right? FDR did a lot of stuff, but fundamentally nationalized the economy and set up the alphabet soup is what they called it at the time. And that's like all these agencies or whatever. In some sense, he's continuous like there'd been a rising trend of centralization. Woodrow Wilson obviously centralized Lincoln centralized, right? Even actually, you know, 1789 was a degree of centralization over the more, you know, like loose thing that was 1776, 1789. So he was on that trend line, but he was definitely a huge kind of dog leg up. So the thing is that because of all the lawsuits that were flying, many, you know, forks like Amy Schleigh's has written a book, The Forgotten Man. And essentially her thesis and the thesis.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Complicated figure who can in some ways best be thought of as the least bad communist dictator or socialist dictator of the twin century. Why? Because he nationalized the economy, repealed the Tenth Amendment, right? Tried to pack the courts. the government on all of his enemies from Huey Long to Andrew Mellon. Obviously, he in turned the Japanese, which shows that wasn't really totally a good guy, right? We don't usually think about the same guy who did this, did that. Earlier in his life, most people don't know this when he led a whole Navy thing to entrap gay sailors. And do you know about this one?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Giant corporations, regardless what you think about Trump, and you don't have to be a Trump supporter, do you really want giant corporations to be determining who can say what on the internet? And if they can deplatform a sitting president and the quote most powerful man in the world, he's not the most powerful man in the world. In fact, the quote people are electing a figurehead. And actually, it's the heads of network that are more powerful than the heads of state, right? That the fact that the CEOs of Facebook and Twitter and Google and Apple and Amazon all made those decisions at the same time to not just deplatform Trump from Twitter, which literally billions of people around the world saw, but also censor or stop on Facebook, and to have Google and Apple pull parlor out of the App Store and Amazon shut down the back end, that would be corporate collusion by any other name. It's actually very similar to the so-called business plot against FDR.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The word went out stand down, protect the results, announce that it would not be activating the entire national mobilization network today, remains ready to activate if necessary. Hodoser credits the activists for their restraint. So basically the activists re-arched the protected results protest towards a weekend of celebration. So point being that the fact that the Trump Square would say the previous unrest was in part coordinated and so they'd say, okay, so that makes it illegitimate in a different way, right? Plus, you know, what is one riot on Jan 6 versus the attacks on the White House and stuff, you know, the storming of the White House in mid-2020. didn't actually storm the White House, but they're setting fires outside and it's quite a lot of stuff, right? So the second against case is the, let's say libertarian slash left libertarian who'd say, do we really want John”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, three because it's not just two factions, there's multiple, right? So, what is the Trump supporter against case? There's an article called The Secret Bipartisan Campaign that saved the 2020 election, right? Which came out a few weeks after the inauguration, like February 4, 2021, and essentially the Trump supporter would read this as basically saying, in the name of defending democracy, they corrupted democracy, whether it was actually vote counts or just changes of all the rules for mail-in ballots and stuff. There were regular meetings between the Chamber of Commerce and AFL and the unions. In particular, they admit that the BLM riots of the mid-2020s were actually on a string.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Context of everything that led up to this moment and so on. So that's a four case, right? Now, the against case. There's actually several against cases, right? There's obviously the Trump supporters against case. There is the sort of the libertarian slash left libertarian against case. And there is the rest of world against case.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Steelman, the case four is kind of obvious in the sense of you are seeing a would-be dictator who is trying to run a coup against democracy, who has his supporters go and storming the seat of government who could use his app to whip up his followers across the country to reject the will of the people. And so you're an executive and you will take actions that, while perhaps controversial, are still within the law and you'll make sure that you do your part to defend democracy by making sure that at least this guy's megaphone is taken away and that his supporters cannot organize more rights, right? That's basically the case for the de-platforming. Okay, would you agree with that?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have two questions. One was on Trump and deplatforming, and the other was on crypto in the state of crypto, and the third is on India. Which one should we do?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, except again, just like the Theranos stuff, all this pathologize. Oh, it's a Balico scandal. Oh, it's this. Oh my God. And yes, of course, within the context of that game, they're cheating. When the context of life, you want to be cheating death. It's just a kind of a reframe on what is good. And it is just taking away these assumptions that mild inflation is good or mild death is good and going towards transcendence. So that gets me done with the giant FDA biomedical, et cetera, et cetera.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, he violated all the rules. He shouldn't have won the Tour de France or anything like that. But his chemists, and I say this somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but also his chemists are candidates for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Cause they brought a man back from testicular cancer to like winning tour de Franzis against a bunch of guys who were probably a bunch of them were also juiced or whatever, right? Whatever it was done there, take it out of the competition framework. There's a lot of testicular cancer patients or cancer patients, period, who would want some of that”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right way of doing testosterone supplementation or the right way of doing this. Obviously, we've managed to put a lot of effort into marijuana increasing the potency of it or what have you. Could we put the effort into these kinds of drugs, these kinds of compounds? Maybe. I think that would actually be a really good thing. The thing about this is I feel this is just a massively underexplored area rather than people drinking caffeine all the time. That's like a very mild enhancing drug. Nicotine is also arguably kind of like that. Some people have it even without the cigarettes, right? Why can't we research this stuff? One way of thinking about it is Landsor Armstrong, the cyclist.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's the thing you get back to the Icarus thing. They think, oh, steroids, well, that's definitely going to give you cancer, screw up your hormones, et cetera, et cetera. And it could, but you know what? Have we actually put in that much effort into figuring out like the...”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, this is a company called VariantBio that is looking at people who have exceptional health related traits. It is looking for essentially this kind of thing, but maybe more disease or whatever related, right? For example, people who have natural immunity to COVID, understanding how that works, perhaps we can give other people artificial immunity to COVID, right? If you scroll up, you see my kind of tweet, Super Soldier Serum is real, where it's like wild type mouse in a myostatin null. And look at the chest on that thing. You see the before and after wow, okay. This is what's possible, you know, this could be us but you regulating. Know right, you know, they're saying, like, this could be SP play, this could be us, but the FDA regulating.”
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 the child's birth rate was in the 75th percentile. It appeared extraordinarily muscular, the protruding muscles in his thighs. Motor and mental development has been normal. Now at four and a half years of age, he continues to have increased muscle bulk and strength. And so essentially myostatin mutation associated with gross muscle hypertrophy in a child. So this is like real-life X-Men.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is restoring sight and it is curing deafness with artificial eyes and artificial ears. The Super Soldier Serum, did I show you that? So, like, myostat and a tweet about this basically X-Men are real. So here is a study from any GM from several years ago. Where is this? It's like the mid-2000s. This was in 2004. Okay, so it's now 17 years later. It's probably, this is almost certainly a teenager by now. So this kid basically was just... Totally built Extraordinarily must be.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What have you, right? But basically, just like in a very simple version of it, by the time one is age 20 or 30 or something in your 20s, you'll sort of learn your own personal operating system. You'll be like, oh, alcohol really doesn't agree with me or something like that. You just by trial and error, you know, things that are idiosyncratic to your own physiology, you're like, oh, I'm totally wrecked if I get seven hours of sleep versus nine hours or whatever it is, right? People will have different kinds of, you know, things like this. manual can be given to your next self so you can know don't do this do this don't do this do this right to some extent personal genomics already gives you some of this where you're like oh i'm a caffeine nun you know or slow metabolizer oh that explains x or y you know or i i have a weird version of alcohol dehydrogenous oh okay that explains you know my alcohol tolerance so you know this is part of the broader category of what i call practical miracles right so it's longevity it's genomic reincarnation”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If when you die, your karma balance is high enough. They will spend the money to reincarnate the next lex. Who can then watch everything that happened in your past life and you can tell them something? Everything I described there, I mean, if you spot me eukaryotic chromosome synthesis, that's the only part that I think will be possible, right? Are you working on it? I'm sure someone will”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Folks are working on Eukaryotic chromosome synthesis. And if you spot me that sci-fi assumption that eventually we'll be able to take your genome sequence and just like we can synthesize a bacterial chromosome, we can synthesize not just one eukaryotic chromosome, but your entire complement of chromosomes in the lab, right? Because you have 23 and 46, whatever you take the pairs. What you can do is potentially print somebody out from disk. Reincarnate them. Insofar if your sequence determines you, and you can argue with this because there's epigenetics and our stuff, okay, but let's just say to first order, your DNA sequence is Lex, you can sequence that you can do full genome sequencing and log that to a file. Then here's the karma part. Your crypto community, where you've built up enough karma among them.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sorry, I call it genomic, not resurrection, but genomic reincarnation. Okay, so here's the concept. You may be aware that you can synthesize strands of DNA. There's sequencing of DNA, which is reading it and synthesizing DNA, which is like creating strands of DN What's interesting is you can actually also do that at the full chromosome level for bacterial chromosomes. Remember that thing I was saying earlier about the minimum life form that Craig Venter made? So people have synthesized entire bacterial chromosomes and they work. They can literally essentially print out a living organism. Now when you go from bacteria to eukaryotes, which are the kingdom of life that we're part of, right? Yeast are part of this kingdom and so on. It becomes harder because the chromosomes are more complicated.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could be, but I've got something for you. Which is, I call it genomic reincarnation. This one you probably haven't heard before. I've tweeted about it.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reasonably good longevity biomarker, but then you can supplement that with a lot of other variables. And now you can start benchmarking every treatment by its change in how much time you have left If that treatment, that intervention Boosts your estimated life expectancy by five years, you can see that in the data. You can get feedback on whether your longevity is being boosted or not. And so what this does is just fundamentally changes the assumptions in the system. Now, with that said, life extension may be the kind of thing. I'm not sure if it'll work for our generation. We may be too late. It may work for the next generation.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But at the end, he engineers out the side effects. Amazing. Just like, you know, yeah, there are planes that crash and we land, right? Okay. So why did I mention the picture during Great? Well, there's another aspect of it, which is longevity biomarker. The point is to kind of estimate how many years of life you have left by that Q.io or Integrome, you take all these analyses on somebody, right? One of the best longevity biomarkers could be just your face. You image the face and you can sort of tell, oh, somebody looks like they've aged, oh, someone looks younger, et cetera, et cetera. And this is actually data that you've got on millions and millions of people where you could probably start having AI predict, what is somebody's life expectancy given their current face and other kinds of things, right? Because you have their name, your birthday, you have their, you know, they passed away if they've already passed away, right? And you have photos of them through their life, right? So just imaging might give a”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In interesting ways. That's right. You actually want longevity biomarkers. A lot of people are working on this. There's a book called The Picture of Dorian Gray, right? And the concept is sell your soul to ensure the picture rather than he will age and fade, right? And so the concept is that that thing on the wall just reflects his age and you can see it. There's a premise that's embedded in a lot of Western culture that to gain something you must lose. If you're Icarus and you try to fly, then you will fly too high and they'll melt your wings. But guess what? We fly every day commercial our flight, right? So the opposite of like the Icarus or picture of Dorian Gray kind of thing is the movie limitless, which I love because it's so Nietzschean and so unusual relative to the dystopian sci-fi movies where there's a, without giving, I mean, the movie is kind of old now, but there's a drug in it that's a neurotropic that boosts your cognitive abilities and it's got side effects.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is good because as a ratio scale variable, there's a very clear definition when someone born and died, those are actually relatively clear. Most other things aren't like that. That's why murder or death, it can be scored. It's unambiguous. It's done when it's done. Whereas when did somebody get sick? Oh, they were kind of sick, where they were sick today. They were sick at this hour. The boundary conditions, many other kinds of things are not like clear cut like that, right?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, like a way to bring it back to Earth to an extent, which is how were societies used to be judged? You may remember people used to talk about life expectancy as a big thing, right? Life expectancy is actually a very, very, very good metric. Why? It's a ratio scale variable. There's like four different class of variables statisticians talk about. Ratio scale is like years or meters or kilograms. Then you have interval scale where plus and minus means something, but there's no absolute zero. Then you have ordinal where there's only ranks and plus and minus domain thing. And then you have categorical, the Yankees and the Braves are categorical variables. They're just different. But all you have is the comparator operator, whether you have a rank. So ratio scale data is the best because you can compare it across space and time. If you have a skeleton that is like, you know, two meters tall, that's from 3,000 years ago, you can compare the height of people from many, many years ago, different cultures and times, right? Whereas their currency is much harder to value. That's not like a ratio scale variable. Other things are harder to value across space and time, right? So life expectancy.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Piling a fantasy on top of a fantasy in that sense, but it's also something where if you're talking about the vector of our civilization, where are we going? Well, I actually do think it's either anarcho-primitivism or optimism slash transhumanism. Either we are shutting down civilization as degrowth, you know, unibomber, et cetera, or it's the stars and escaping the prime number maze”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the argument on that is so long as you have a frontier. It is okay for someone to live long so long as people can exit to a new thing. Number one. Number two is in order for us to go and colonize other planets and so on, if you do want to get to Mars, if you want to become Star Trek and what have you, probably going to need to have just to survive a long flight, so to speak, multiple light year flight, you're going to need to have life extension. So to become a pioneering interstellar kind of thing. I know that's the kind of thing which sounds like, okay, yeah, and when we're on the moon, we're going to need shovels. It sounds like.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Somebody who is listening to the whole podcast will say, well, Baji, just a few hours ago, you were saying this gerontocracy runs the US and they're all old and they don't get it, blah, blah. Now you're talking about making people live forever so there's never any new blood to wash about. Haha, what a contradiction, 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 so is actually death itself, right? So we actually want significant life extension. This is similar. It's very similar to what the rejection of the fiat system. The fiat system says a low inflation is good. Fiat medicine says a low death is good. Bitcoin says actually no inflation, just get more valuable over time. And crypto medicine says actually let's extend life. This leads to all kinds of new things where you start actually thinking about, all right, how do I maintain my health with diagnostics? How do I take control of my own health with the decentralization of medicine? All the stuff that I've been describing sort of fits like longevity as traditional medicine as crypto is to traditional currency.”
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 crypto medicine look like relative to fiat medicine to make the same analogy, right? The existing medical system, it assumes that a quick death is bad, an early death is bad. Also, that living forever is either unrealistic or impossible or undesirable that you should die with dignity or something like that. So a little death is good The existing medical system. Whereas the concept of life extension and David Sinclair and you call it health span says rejects that fundamental premise. And it says actually the way to defeat cancer is to defeat aging. Aging is actually a program biomedical process and we can have results that are showing stopping or even reversing aging in some ways. And so now just like with the other thing, you say A quick death is bad.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just to give you one example, the US dollar people have seen those graphs where it's like inflating and so it just like loses value. Whereas, and most of the time, it's just sort of deny that it's losing any value. The most highbrow way of defending it is the US dollar trades off Temporary short term price stability for long term depreciation. Bitcoin makes the opposite trade In theory, at least, long-term appreciation at the expense of short-term price instability. There's the whole plunge protection team and so on. Basically, there's various ways in which price stability is tried to be maintained in the medium term at the expense of long-term depreciation. You need like a reserve assets to keep stabilizing the dollar against various things.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Satoshi inverted all of those things. Obviously, the big one is hyperinflation was bad, but he also thought mild inflation was bad and deflation was good. That's just a fundamental shift. He gave you root access over your money. You're now assistant administrator of your own money. You can room-RF your entire fortune or send millions with a keystroke. You are now the system administrator of your own money. That alone is why cryptocurrency is important. If you want system administration access at times to computers, you'll want it to currency, right? To be sovereign. There's other assumptions where the assumptions every transaction is private in the existing system by default, or it's visible only to the state, whereas at least the initial, you know, the Bitcoin blockchain and everything is public, right? Various kinds of things like this where he just inverted fundamental premises. And then the whole crypto system is in the crypto economy is in many ways a teasing out of what that means.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certain fundamental assumptions. Okay, so at first, crypto looks like traditional finance. It's got the charts and the bands, and you're buying and selling, so on. But what Satoshi did is he took fundamental premises and flipped them. For example, in the traditional macroeconomic worldview, hyperinflation is bad, but deflation is also bad. So a little inflation is good, right? In the traditional macroeconomic worldview, it's good that there are custodians, banks that kind of intermediate the whole system, right? And the traditional worldview, every transaction needs to be reversible because somebody could make a mistake and so on and so forth, right? In the traditional worldview, you don't really have root access over your money.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With the book, The Network State, the purpose of the network state I want people to be able to build different kinds of network states. I want people to build the vegan village. I want people to be able to build a, you know, if they want to do the Bendick option, like a Christian network. If people want to do different kinds of things, I'm open to many different things and I will fund lots of different things. For me, the motivation is just like you needed to start a new currency Bitcoin. It was easier to do that than reform the Fed. I think it's easier to start a new country than reform the FDA. And so I want to do it to in particular get to longevity, right? Meaning longevity enhancement, right? And what does that mean? So in an interesting way, and this will sound like a trite statement, but I think it's actually a deep statement, or hopefully try to convince you it is, crypto is to finance sort of what longevity is to, you know, the currency of medicine. Why? It inverts...”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can start to see another poll getting set up, which is a confident enough civilization that is willing to take another regulatory path and that is in some ways doing better on national software than the US's and that has enough of a bridge to the US that it can be that simulation which you need, which is kind of something that outside poke, right? I want to talk about India, but let me just kind of wrap up on this big FDA biomedical kind of thing, right?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Might reform, it might dry out, right? And this is why people are, for example, they're traveling across borders to getting orders from Canadian pharmacies. You know, a lot of this type of stuff, we can start to build alternatives, right? I mean, India's generic industry is really important because it just doesn't enforce American IP there. So, generic drugs are cheaper, right? And it's quite competent, it's been around for a while. So, there's enough proof points there where, again, I'm not seeing a panacea. It's going to be something which will require like American and Indian collaboration. I think there's going to be a lot of other countries and so on that are involved.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is monitoring, constant monitoring with the quantified self and whatnot, as opposed to just let your system fail and then wheel you in, right? There's a reputational bridge because now we've had a couple of generations almost of Indian doctors in the US, so people know that there's some very competent Indian doctors. They're a good chunk of AMA. And so they can serve lobby for this. And you have plenty of Indian engineers. Now, I'm not saying India alone is a panacea, but I do think that this is a large enough parallel market to start doing interesting things.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of impressive how good some of India's software is. The fact that it exists is good. So you have all these new doctors coming online. India cranks out generics, right? Telemedicine is now more legal in the US. And you have cash payment in India and in a lot of other places. You don't have the whole insurance employer health thing. And this market is growing. So you could have a sort of parallel market that starts evolving, right? which is, and people are already doing some medical tourism, I think that's another exit from the FDA. You have a parallel market that starts evolving that just starts from fundamentally different premises. It just cash, cash for everything, right? There's downsides with cash for everything. There's a huge upside with cash for everything. Cash for everything means you get customer service from the doctor. It means the prices are actually visible. It ideally pushes you, again, towards more ambulatory medicine rather than ambulance medicine.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you are now doing something where these relatively inexpensive Indian doctors who are vetted by the American doctor or the doctor in the jurisdiction of the license become the back-end doctors of the world. To some extent this is already there with teleradiology and other kinds of things, right? But now that you've got literally like a billion Indians who've just come online, you have this huge pool of folks who have a different attitude towards medicine. For example, it's a lot more cash payment over there. For example, India's big on generic drugs. For example, During COVID, it has something called a Rogya Sethu, which is a national telemedicine app. The US wasn't able to ship that. In some ways, India's digital infrastructure, again, you'll have to read a post called The Internet Country by TigerFeathers.substack.com, and you'll see that actually India's national software infrastructure is surprisingly good. It's not as good as China's in some ways, but it's like better than the US's, which is like healthier.gov and like non-existent. It's like.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe an Indian programmer, one or two. All right. And I do think telemedicine could explode, right? Where you could have an Indian doctor in India, and there's a US doctor who's like a dispatcher. See what I'm saying? They've got all these other Indian doctors behind them. They've got a telemedical app.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mad about everything. It's health. People are dying. Okay. So everything is just optimized for optics as opposed to results, right? Similarly, actually, many drugs are optimized for minimizing side effects and optics rather than maximizing effects, which are totally different criteria, right? You might have, for example, a drug that only cures a thousand people but doesn't have any side effects versus one that cures a million people, but that has 10 really serious side effects a year, right? And the second one would probably not happen because those side effects How do you attack this? I name a few examples, but I actually think the reform is going to come in part from outside the system. In particular, India is coming online. Why is that important? Well, You may have encountered an Indian doctor or two.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of what is being bought at the time that it's being bought. Neither party can really even set a free price because there's this RVU system that hovers above. The buyer feels they've already bought it because they've bought insurance. The insurance company doesn't want to pay for it. Everybody is trying to push the price onto somebody else and not actually show the sticker price of anything and hide everything and so on and so forth. Oh, the other thing about it is obviously lawsuits are over everything.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Medical billing, okay, where everybody's mad at you at all times. Part of what happens is when you give a treatment, when a doctor gives a treatment to a patient, they can't repo the treatment. Like a car, you sell a car, you can in theory repo the car. So the patient has a treatment. Now, what happens? Well, the insurance company, you know, that treatment is perhaps right at, like, it's a lab test provided by a company, right? The company bills the patient. The company is supposed to charge a high price. Why? The insurance company wants it to try to collect from the patient. The patient is scared. Oh my God, they see this huge price. They sometimes don't pay. Sometimes the insurance company doesn't pay either. And when a company is stiff by an insurance company, a diagnostic company is stiff by an insurance company. It has to jack up the price of everybody else, right? Everything boils down to the fact that you don't have a buyer and a seller. The doctor doesn't know the price of what is being sold. The buyer doesn't know the price.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source