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

“Okay, so let me agree and disagree with that, right? So absolutely, there's some good there. I mean, again, do I think Wikipedia is a huge step up from what preceded it in some ways on the technical topics? Yes. However, you talk about the editing environment, right? Like the markup for Wikipedia, it's very, you know, mid-2000s, right? It is not”
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 without unit tests, see, math is actually the kind of thing that you could unit test, right? You could literally have the assert on the right-hand side today, right? The modern version, we've got Jupyter, we've got Replit, we've got all these things. The modern version of Wikipedia, there's sites like golden.com, for example, like there's a bunch of things I'm funding lots of stuff across the board on this. And I'm not capitalizing these companies or capitalized independently, but I'm trying to see if not just talk about a better version. It's hard to build something better. So actually go and build it. And what you want is assertions that are actually reproduced. You don't just have the equation there. You have a written down code. You can hit enter. You can download the page. You can rerun it. It's reproducible.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, one thing I remember again, I may be wrong on this, but I recall that the Kelly criterion, it's actually quite a useful thing to know. It's like how to optimally size your bets. And you can have, given your kind of probability that some investment pays off or assume probability, you can have bets that are too large, bets that are too small. Sometimes the Kelly criterion, it goes negative and actually it says you should actually take leverage. You're so sure this is a good outcome that you should actually spend more than your current bankroll because you're going to get a good result, right? So it's a very sophisticated thing. And as I recall, many sites on the internet have the wrong equation. And I believe that was reprinted on Wikipedia. The wrong equation was put on Wikipedia as a Kelly criterion for a while.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Somebody in the future, assuming, of course, the digital record is actually intact to that point because in theory, digital stuff will persist in practice. You have lost data and floppy drives and stuff like that. In a sense, in some ways, digital is more persistent, in some ways physical is more persistent. But assuming we can figure out the archival problem somehow, then this future record, at least it's internally consistent, right? You can run a bunch of the equivalents of checksums, right? The Bitcoin verification process, just sum it all up and see that, okay, it's f of g of h of x and boom, that at least is internally consistent. Okay. Again, it doesn't say that all the people who reported it were, they could have put something on chain that's false, but at least you know the metadata is likely to be very difficult to falsify. And this is a new tool. It's a really a new tool in terms of a robust history that is expensive and technically challenging to edit and alter.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so here's the thing I think we're very close to the moment of it. And so that's why it'll sound crazy when I say it now. But our descendants, I really do think of What the blockchain is and cryptographically verifiable history as being the next step after written history. It's like on par with that because anybody who has the record, the math is not going to change, right? Math is constant across human time and space, right? So the value of pi is constant. That's one of the few constants across all these different human civilizations.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of debates. It basically is like the discovery of this site in northern Turkey that totally shifts our estimate of when civilization started, maybe pushing it back many thousands of years further in the past, right? You know, the past, it's like an inverse problem in physics, right? We're trying to reconstruct this from limited information, right? It's like x-ray crystal rate. It's an inverse problem, right? It's Plato's cave. We're trying to reconstruct what the world looks like outside from these shadows, these fragments that have been given to us, right, or that we've found. And so in that sense, as you find more information, your estimate of the past changes, right? Oh, wow, okay, that pushes back civilization farther than we thought. That one discovery just changes it.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Having no context on anything, right? And it's a very thought-provoking article because it says, well, to what extent is that us picking over Pompeii or the pyramids or even like, you know, the 1600s or the 1700s, like a few hundred years ago, were basically sifting through artifacts and some of Berger actually has this concept of like, which is obvious, but it's also useful to have a name for it. I think he calls it like dark history, which is And again, it might be getting this wrong, but it's like only a small percentage of what the Greeks wrote down has come to us to the present day, right? So perhaps it's not just the winners who write history, it's like the surviving records. We have this extremely partial fragmentary record of history. And sometimes there's some discovery that rewrites the whole thing. Joint, like Gobekli Tepe is.”
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 actually have basically chapter two of the Network State book is on essentially this topic. And so it's like 70 pages or something like that. So let me try to summarize what I think about on this. The first is that there was an onion article that came out. I can't find it now anymore, but it was about historians in the year 3000 writing about the late 90s and early 2000s. And they're like, Clearly, Queen Brittany was a very powerful monarch. We can see how many girls around the world worshipped her like a god. And so it was very funny because it was a plausible distortion. Of the current society by a human civilization picking through the rubble a thousand years later.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can be put partially or completely on chain. It's not just proof of work and proof of stake. There's things like proof of location, proof of human, proof of this, proof of that. The auditable oracles I talked about extend it further. Lots and lots of people are working on this, right? Proof of solvency, seeing that some actor has enough of a bank balance to accommodate what they say they accommodate. You can imagine many kinds of digital assertions can be turned into proof of X and proof of Y. You start putting those on chain. You now have a library of partially or completely provable facts. This is how you get consensus. As opposed to having a White Western Wikipedia editor, or mostly White Western US Media Corporation, or the US government. Simply say what is true in a centralized fashion.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bytes that reflect what stocks, bonds, other kinds of assets people have. That's the entire DeFi, Ethereum, that whole space. Basically, the premises, if you go from consensus on one byte by induction, you can go to consensus on n bytes, depending on the cost of getting that consensus, right? And almost anything digital can be represented. Everything digital can be represented as bytes, right? So now you can get consensus on certain kinds of digital information, Bitcoin, but then also any kind of financial instrument. And then the next generalization is I call the leisure of record many kinds of facts”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when people can get consensus on this, what they're getting consensus on are basically bytes that determine who holds what Bitcoin. This is exactly the kind of thing people would fight wars over. For hundreds of billions of dollars, let alone millions of dollars, people will kill each other over that in the past, right? So hundreds of billions of dollars, people can get consensus truth on this in this highly adversarial environment, right? So, the first generalization of that is it says you can go from bytes that reflect what Bitcoin somebody has.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great question. It's this concept of the ledger of record. First, whether Israel or Palestinian, Japanese, or Chinese, Democrat or Republican, Those people agree on the state of the Bitcoin blockchain. Hundreds of billions of dollars is managed without weapons across tribes with wildly varying ideologies. And what that means is that is a mechanism for getting literally consensus. It's called consensus, cryptographic consensus, proof of work.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is an upward deviation, not a downward deviation to say there is no such thing as truth, but rather the upward deviation is decentralized cryptographic truth, not centralized corporate or government truth.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So let me first argue your side and then let me say something, okay? Which What you Reacting to is, oh, even those things I thought of as constants are becoming variables. Where is the terra ferma? If we cannot trust anything, then everybody's just anarchy and it's chaos. Like there's literally no consensus reality and anybody can say anything and so on and so forth, right? And I think that there's two possible deviations from let's say that the mainstream, you know, obviously people talk about like QAnon, for example, as like this kind of thing where people just make things up. You know, they just go totally quit supply chain independent from mainstream media. And if mainstream media is a distorted gosser of quasi-truth, these guys go to just total fiction as opposed to like, right, the alternative to QAnon is not blue anon mainstream media, but Satoshi Anon.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Glenn Greenwald has observed this lots of other folks, for example, I'm definitely not the only person who's observed that Wikipedia.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. If you look at the edit words, for example, on Stalin versus Hitler, Hitler's, the tone on Hitler starts out legitimately and justifiably as basically genocidal maniacal dictator. With Stalin, there's a fair number of Stalin apologists that edit out mention of genocide from the first few paragraphs.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like math, that'll be great, right? Wikipedia is great for that on many topics that do not have a single consensus truth. It structurally shifted towards basically white Western liberals, woke whites. Fundamentally, that's a demographic of the Wikipedia adult.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here's the thing basically Wikipedia initially said, oh, we'll only cite mainstream media as a way of boosting its credibility in the early 2000s, when its credibility was low. Now it's sort of become merged with the US establishment and it only cites these things whose trust? I mean, have you seen the graphs on trust in mainstream media? Like it's plummeted. It's down to like 10% or something like that, right? So the most trusted sources for Wikipedia are untrusted by the population.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So a very simple one is if you were to pull all the edit logs of Wikipedia, you could see how many times are social media links disallowed? First of all, think about this how many, I mean, just the fact that social media is not allowed to be cited on Wikipedia or inconsistently.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So now I'm going to sound extremely woke. If you go and look at this, all right Times of India is yellow, but Mother Jones, Jacobin, they are green. Mostly white Western partisan left outlet is more green. But a billion people, like the Times of India is marked yellow, right? That's a structural bias towards Western media outlets and Western editors when much of the rest of the world hadn't gotten online or whatever.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That randomly. I can't. I can't. No, no, no, no, no. I can because all the On the quality of the article. Let me give you an example. The fact that people cannot cite direct quotes on social media, but can only cite the rehash of those quotes in a mainstream media outlet, and not just any mainstream media outlet, but those that are colored green on the Wikipedia reliable perennial sources policy is a structural shift on every single article to make Wikipedia aligned with US mainstream media corporations.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, but it's marked as red. Why? Because there's some Wikipedia editors who hate cryptocurrency. It's a cryptocurrency on Wikipedia has been a huge topic where they've just edited out all the positive stuff. And these are senior editors of Wikipedia who can control what sources are considered liable. So they've now knocked out Coindesk, they've knocked out social media. They only allow mainstream media coverage and not even all mainstream media, only those they've marked as green. This is the manipulation of”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The nation is Mark Green, but national review is Mark Yellow. You could probably go and do what's good about this is it makes epistemology explicit. You could actually take this table and you could also look at all the past edit wars and so on over it and take a look at what things are starting to get marked as red or yellow and what things are starting to get marked as green. And I'm pretty sure you're going to find some kind of partisan polarization that comes out of it, right? Number one. Number two is once something gets marked as being yellow or red Then all links and all references to it are pulled out. For example, Coindesk was marked as being like, gosh, I think it's marked as red. Coindesk, which is actually like.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, but here's the thing. So, first, let me take this, I should finish off this point, reliable source parental sources, right? So, if you go to this, you'll see that Al Jazeera is marked green But let's say the Cato Institute is marked yellow, right? The nation is marked green.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every media outlet in the world and their colored gray, green, yellow, or red. And so red is like untrustworthy. Green is trustworthy. Yellow is like neutral. Now, this actually makes Wikipedia's epistemology explicit. They are marking a source as trustworthy or untrustworthy. For example, you are not allowed to cite social media on Wikipedia, which is actually an enormous part of what people are posting. Instead, you have to cite a mainstream media outlet that Puts the tweets in the mainstream article, and only then can it be cited on Wikipedia.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's the question. What's the audit? Has Wikipedia actually been audited? Right. Who are the editors? Like, who's actually writing this stuff? It is actually something where again, on technical topics, I think it's pretty good. On non-technical topics, there's something called the Wikipedia Reliable Sources Policy. It's a fascinating page. So it actually takes a lot of the stuff that we have been, you know, the world has been talking about in terms of what's a reliable source of information and so on and so forth. It's called the Wikipedia Reliable Sources Perennial Sources. And if you go to this page, which I'm just going to send to you now, you will literally see.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That happens in Wikipedia. You have an editor who has privileged above just random users who will plant a story and then cite that story as if it was a neutral third party. So there's a site called Wikipediaocracy. And it discusses the case of a person named Peppermint who had a name that they didn't want included, their so-called dead name on their Wikipedia profile. And there's a Wikipedia editor named Tenebray who people allege was a Newsday reporter or writer that put a piece into Newsday that dead named peppermint and then was able to cite it on the Wikipedia article as if it was like a neutral third party when it actually wasn't when people alleged it was the same guy. Now that is not an uncommon thing.”
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 Wikipedia was an improvement over what came before, but it has a lot of flaws. You're right that absolutely sometimes people can Anecdotal illustrates a general pattern. For example, one thing that happens frequently on Wikipedia is there are editors who will plant a story and then they will then go and use that story as like a neutral third party to win an edit war. So here's a phenomenon.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most of India wasn't online then. Most of Africa wasn't online then, right? So there's this inherited power that exists, which again was fresh and innovative 10 or 20 years ago. But it's now kind of outdated.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When there were different versions of a Wikipedia style page, you had Google Docs like permissions on them. For example, you might have 10 different versions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And each one had an editor and folks that they could grant edit rights and so on. But this way you would actually be able to see different versions of a page, and they might have different versions of popularity. But this way you wouldn't have edit words, you'd have forks. right and they would all kind of you know coexist and then people could review them and now you can see different versions of something versus the thing that just kind of rewards dogged persistence or being an editor or something like that the other thing is a lot of the folks who have editorial privileges of Wikipedia are there from the early 2000s”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where people will maliciously edit and then do things with them, and nobody cares or is looking at it beyond the fraudsters. And this is happening. If that was happening, that was like undetected. I wasn't paying attention to this. This was like there for like, I don't know, weeks or months, totally undetected that literally facilitated fraud, right? And fundamentally, the issue is that Wikipedia doesn't have any concept of who's editing or property rights or anything like that, right? It is also something which is, it used to be something in the early 2000s, mid-2000s, people said, oh, you know, it's Wikipedia, how trustworthy can be Britannica's reviewed. And that's been forgotten. And now it's become overtrusted, right? Remember the thing like the more trust something gets, the less trustworthy it often becomes. It kind of abuses the power, right? So what I'm interested in, you know, Google actually had a model a while back called KNOL. KNOL was something where”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had nothing to do with this And people were scammed out of it because Google just pushes Wikipedia links to high on Google. And people are like, well, it is Wikipedia, therefore it's real, right? Wikipedia has the bio of living persons thing. They should just allow people to delete their profile because they have zero quality control and it's literally facilitating fraud, right?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, on technical truths, it's great. Remember Remember, I think earlier on technical truths versus political truths. On technical truths, it's great. On political truths, it's like a defamation engine. Just as one example, this is something that I was going to write up, but there was a scam called HPZ Token that managed to edit Wikipedia. Nobody detected it. It said that I was like the founder of HPZ token. They were.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First digit, right? So you take the first digit in an actual financial statement, you look at the distribution of like how many ones and how many twos, how many threes, the percentages, it has actually, you'd guess it might be, oh, each one will be equally random. It'd be 10%. It's not like that, actually. There's a certain distribution that it has. And fake data doesn't look like that, but real data does. Interesting, right”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Truth than to lie because the truth is just naturally consistent across the world, whereas lies can be found out even Siskel Tesla, you know, Benford's law.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is possible, but the more parties are involved in falsifying something, the more defections there are. So that's why you basically have another level of auditing is fundamentally the answer, right? And really, I think what it comes back to is if you're showing your work, right, this is the difference between crypto economics and fiat economics. The Bitcoin blockchain, anybody can download it and run verification on it. This is different than government inflation stats, which people don't believe, right? because the process is just it is true that cpi methodology is published and so on but it is not something which people feel reflects their actual basket of goods right and so the independent verifiability is really the core of what true auditability is and so then to your question it's hard for some group to be able to collude because the blockchain is public and everything they've written to it is public and so if there's an error it's easier in some ways to tell the”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And did that with the cooperation of Arthur G. Salzburg's New York Times company, like Walter Duranty falsified all those reports”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a good question. So at a certain point, you get to who watches the Watchers, right? And oh, well, the government is meant to keep the accountants accountable. And, you know, Arthur Anderson actually did have a whole flame out around the time the Enron thing. So it is possible that there's corrupt accountants or bad accountants or what have you. But of course, the government itself is corrupt in many ways and prints all this money and seizes all of these assets and surveills everybody and so on and so forth. The answer to your question is going to be probably exit in the sense that if those accountants, they are themselves going to digitally sign a report and put it on chain. So they're going to say we believe that X, Y, and Z reports are on chain were this reliable and here's our study. If they falsify that, well, if somebody finds that eventually, then that person is downweighted and then you have to go to another accountant.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that real? Well, because they signed what they put on chain, you can do things like you can audit. Let's say Blackstone has signed 500,000 properties and they've sold them and put them on chain. And I'm not talking about 2022 or 2023, but 2030, right? It'll be a few years out. People are doing this type of stuff. They're putting this stuff on chain. So you get that on-chain receipt. They've got 500,000 of these. What you can do is just sampling. You pick a subset n of them, let's say 500 properties around the world. You go there. You actually go and independently look at what the square footprint is. And then from that, you can see what was the actual your measurement versus their reported. And then you can via Cisco Inference extrapolate that if they were randomly selected to the rest of the properties and get a reliability score for Blackstone's reporting of its real estate square footage. Who does?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great question. So let's say you've bought a bunch of your pieces of territory from Blackstone. As a function of that, Blackstone.eth signs An on chain receipt that says this lexreatman. bought this piece of property from us and it has like it's a thousand square meters and and this is put on chain they sign it okay that's that's their digital receipt just like you might get an email receipt when you buy a piece of property or something okay you just put not online but on chain and it's signed by blackstone or whatever real estate vendor you buy it from it could be a company it could obviously be an individual right and so you have a bunch of these assertions you let's say there's 47 different real estate vendors i know vendors in atypical term there but just bear with me right 47 different real estate um sellers that you've bought all of your territory from each of them put digital signatures that are asserting that a certain amount of real estate was bought and it's square meters its location or whatever else they want to prove the sum of all that is now your real estate footprint okay and now the question”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On chain. And there's people who are writing to the blockchain, and they are digitally signing their assertions. Now, of course, simply just putting something on chain doesn't make it true. It just says you can prove not that what is written on chain is true, but that the metadata is true. You can show who wrote it via their digital signature, what they wrote, their hash, and when they wrote their timestamp. So you can establish those things and metadata of who, what and when was written.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Proving it because how will the world believe that you actually have 100,000 people spread across countries? Couldn't there all be bots? Could there be AIs? Proof of human, proof of income, and also proof of real estate start to actually rise dramatically in importance because you're saying we're going to rank this digital state on the leaderboard of the fiat states. And so that means that people will start to, yeah, at first they'll just laugh at it. Once you start claiming you have 10,000 citizens, people are going to start poking and be like, is that real? Prove that it's real. Okay. So I have a whole talk on this actually. I'm giving it this Chainlink conference, but essentially how do you prove this, right? The short answer is crypto oracles plus auditing, the somewhat longer answer is you put these assertions on chain, these proof of human, these proof of real estate, et cetera, assertions.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is what I call the census of the network state. And it's actually such a crucial component that I have it in the essay, the network state in a thousand words. The post office and census were actually important enough to be written into the US Constitution, partly because it was for apportionment of representatives, partly because it was a feedback mechanism. And so that census was done every 10 years and it's provided a crucial snapshot of the US for the last several hundred years. Now here this census of a digital state could be done every 10 seconds conducting it is actually not the hard part. You know what the hard part is?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, a million people could buy a territory that is the size of Estonia, right? That's probably true to first order. There might be some overseas ownership, but it's probably true. Okay, you probably find a country for which that's true. What that means is a million people digitally could buy distributed territory that is probably greater than or equal to the size of Estonia, especially if they're buying like desert territory or stuff like that, which means now you have a digital country that is ranking not just in people, not just in real estate footprint. So it's also in real estate footprint with the countries of the world. So you start ranking and you're bigger than these UN listed countries in your population and your real estate footprint. And the third is income. You can prove on chain that you have a income for the digital population that is above a certain amount, right?”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Got the flag on their wall, right? And the digital passport on there on their wall. One of the new things contributions a network state has. Say that you can not just exceed in population, you can succeed in real estate footprint. Because when we were thinking about it, I don't exactly know the numbers on foreign ownership in Estonia, but let's say to first order the million something Estonians own and could afford Estonia.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Being close to cracking the top 10. And I think it will again at some point. So we know that you can have a currency out of nowhere that ranks with the fiat currencies of the world. Could you have a country out of nowhere that ranks with the countries of the world? So this is maybe the fastest way you probably should have said this at the very beginning. If you go to the network state in one image, okay, that kind of summarizes what a network state looks like in a visual, just one single visual. And the visual is of a dashboard. And the dashboard shows something that looks like a social network, except you're visualizing it on the map of the world. And it's got network nodes all over the place. A hundred people here, 1,000 people there. They're all connected together. The total population of the people in this social network is about 1 million people. So 1.7 million people in this example. And some of the buildings, some of the people are just singletons. They're just folks in their apartment who conceptualize themselves as citizens of this network state.”
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 an interesting graph, right? Where it's like linear ish, and then it's flat, and then it just goes like this. Now you can define, you can argue where the boundary is for a new currency. But I think Bitcoin certainly counts. I think Ethereum certainly counts in terms of just its scale and adoption worldwide. So at least you have two. If you take the broad church view, you have a thousand or something like that, right? Somewhere in between, you might say how many currencies are above the market cap of an existing previously recognized fiat currency? Like which got onto the leaderboard, right? There's a website just like coinmarketcap.com that's like a site for like cryptocurrency tracking is very popular. Okay. There's a fun site called fiat marketcap.com which shows where Bitcoin is relative to the fiat currencies of the world. And it's like last I checked like number 27 somewhere in between the Chilean Pezo and the Turkish lira or something. Okay. And it had previously.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like kind of a steady increase, in particular with all the decolonization, all the countries that got their independence, first from the British Empire and then from the Soviet Empire, that imperial breakup led to new countries. And so the question is, is that flat forever? Well, the number of new currencies similarly increased for a while, roughly one per country or thereabouts. And then it was flat for a while, and then suddenly it's gone completely vertical”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the UN are less than 10 million people. There's only 14 countries that are over 100 million people. So most countries are small countries is kind of surprising to us because most people live in big countries. And so now you're like, okay, well, I've built social networks that are bigger than that. You have a following that's bigger than 100,000 people. You have a following that's bigger than a small country like Kiribati or what have you, right? And okay, so that first changes feasibility. You think of a country as this huge, huge, huge thing, but it's actually smaller than many countries are smaller than social networks that you've built. Okay, number one. Number two is the number of UN listed countries, even though it's being flat-ish for the last 30 years. With like, you know, a few things like South Sudan and East Timor that have come online, there's a graph that I posted which shows that it's increased by about 40 or 50 something at the end of World War II when the unit was set up to 190 something today.”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So within that list of about 200 countries, okay, I've got a graph in the book that shows that most countries are actually small countries. There's 12 countries that have less than 100,000 people by the UN definition of a country. There's another 20 something that have between 100,000 and 1 million. There's another 50 or 60 something that have between a million and 10 million. So, most countries”
2022-10-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source