35: Balaji Srinivasan - The Heretic & The Virus

The Heretic & The Virus
Information
Guest	Balaji Srinivasan
Length	03:20:38
Release Date	21 May 2020
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Investor Balaji Srinivasan is a highly original thinker in Silicon Valley on Biotech to Blockchain and everything in between. Most recently, he was quite early in warning us about the Corona virus and was ridiculed for his efforts by many in the world of institutional sense-making. That is before people realized he was not wrong, but simply early.

In this episode Eric talks to Balaji on the topic of what it was like to see the future before it arrived and what his crystal ball suggests about what is likely to happen next. As Balaji understands our world, the Corona virus presents a complex set of challenges that will strongly discriminate between those who can pass it's tests and those who will fail them. He sees this resulting in functional Green Zones which will become dominant in the future and Red Zones which will be characterized by dysfunctional responses. Presumably this new divide will then be expected to take over from the "North-South" divide between industrialized and developing nations. 

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Transcript

Audio Essay: Superposition

00:00:00
Eric Weinstein: [intro music] Hi, it's Eric with some thoughts for this week's audio essay on the topic of superposition. Now, to those of you in the know, superposition is an odd word in that it is the scientific concept we reach for when trying to describe the paradox of Schrödinger's cat in the theory and philosophy of quantum measurement. We don't yet know how to say that the cat is both dead and alive at the same time rigorously, so we fudge whatever is going on with this unfortunate feline and say that the cat and the quantum system on which its life depends are a mixture of two distinct states that are somehow commingled in a way that has defied a satisfying explanation for about a century.

Now, I'm usually loathe to appeal to such quantum concepts in everyday life, as there is a veritable industry of people making bad quantum analogies. For example, whenever you have a non-quantum system that is altered by its observation, that really has nothing to do with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Jane Goodall's chimpanzees are almost certainly altered in their behavior due to her presence, but there is likely no competent quantum theorist who would analogize chimps to electrons and Goodall to a Hermitian observable executing a quantum observation. Heisenberg adds nothing other than physics envy to the discussion of an entirely classical situation such as this. However, I have changed my mind in the case of superposition, as I would now like to explain.

To begin with, superposition isn't a quantum phenomena. For example, imagine that you'd come from Europe to Australia and that you had both euros and Swiss francs in your pockets. You might then be said to be in a superposition because you have pocket change in both euros and francs rather than a pure state of only one currency or the other. The analog of a physical observable in this situation would be something like a multiple-choice question found on the landing card about the contents of your pockets. Here it is easy to see the danger of this setup. Assuming you have three times as much value in euros as you do in francs, what happens when you get a question that doesn't include your situation as an answer? What if the landing card asked, "Is all of your change in A, euros, or B, Swiss francs?" with no other options available? Well, this as stated is a completely classical superposition problem having nothing to do with quantum theory.

Were you to have such a classical question asked of you like this, there would have been no way for you to answer. However, if the answer were on the multiple-choice menu, there would be no problem at all and you would give a clear answer determined by the state of your pockets. So if the state in question isn't on the multiple-choice menu, the classical world is forced to go mute as there is no answer determined by the system. Whereas if it is found on the list of allowable choices, the answer is then completely determined by the system's state at the time that the question was asked.

Oddly, the quantum world is, in a way, exactly as deterministic as the classical one just described, despite what you may have heard to the contrary. In order to understand this, we'll have to introduce a bit of jargon. So long as the system, now called the Hilbert space state, is on the list of answers, technically called the system of eigenvectors, corresponding to the question, now called a quantum observable, the question will return a completely deterministic answer, technically called the eigenvalue corresponding to the state eigenvector. These are, in a sense, good questions in quantum theory, because the answer corresponding to the state of the system actually appears as one of the multiple-choice options.

So if that is completely deterministic, well, then what happened to the famous quantum probability theory and the indeterminacy that we hear so much about? What if I told you that it were one hundred percent confined to the situation which classical theory couldn't handle either? That is, quantum probability theory only becomes relevant when you ask bad quantum questions where the state of the system isn't on the list of multiple-choice answers. When the landing card asked if all your change were completely in euros or only in francs, the classical system couldn't answer because three times the value of your Swiss francs were held in euros, so no answer could be determined. But if your pocket change were somehow quantum, well, then you might find that seventy-five percent of the time your pocket coins would bizarrely turn into pure euros and would bewilderingly turn into pure francs twenty-five percent of the time just by virtue of your being asked for a measurement by the landing card. In the quantum theory, this is due to the multiple-choice answers of the so-called observable represented by the landing card question not being well suited to the mixed state of your pockets in a superposition between euros and francs.

In other words, quantum theory gets probabilistic only where classical theory went mute. All of the indeterminacy appears to come from asking bad multiple-choice questions in both the classical and quantum regimes in which the state of the system doesn't fit any given answer. Quite honestly, I've never heard a physicist rework the issue of quantum probabilities in just this way so as to highlight that the probabilistic weirdness comes only from the quantum being overly solicitous and accommodating really bad questions. For some reason, they don't like the idea of calling an observable that doesn't have the state of the system as an allowable answer a bad question, but that is precisely why I do like it. It points out that the quantum is deterministic where the classical theory is deterministic and only probabilistic where the classical theory is mute. This is because it is weirdly willing to answer questions that are in a sense that can be made precise bad questions to begin with.

That doesn't get rid of the mystery, but it recasts it so it doesn't sound quite so weird. The new question is, why would a quantum system overcompensate for the lousy questions being posed when the classical system seems to know not to answer? So why bring any of this up? Well, the first reason is that I couldn't resist sneaking in a personal reformulation of the quantum measurement problem that most people will have never considered. But the second reason is that I have come to believe that we are wasting our political lives on just such superposition questions. For example, let's see if we can solve the abortion debate problem right now on this podcast using superposition, as it is much easier than the abortion problem itself.

The abortion debate problem is that everyone agrees that before fertilization there is no human life to worry about, and that after a baby is born there is no question that it has a right to live. Yet pro-choice and pro-life activists insist on telling us that the developing embryo is either a mere bundle of cells suddenly becoming a life only when born or a full-fledged baby the moment the sperm enters the egg. You can guess my answer here. The question of is it a baby's life or a woman's choice is agreed upon by everyone before fertilization or following birth because the observable in question has the system as one of the two multiple choice answers in those two cases.

However, during the process of embryonic development, something miraculous is taking place that we simply don't understand scientifically. Somehow a non-sentient blastula becomes a baby by a process utterly opaque to science, which as yet has no mature theory of consciousness. The system in utero is in a changing and progressing superposition tilted heavily towards not being a baby at the beginning and tilted heavily towards being one at the end of the pregnancy. But the problem here is that we have allowed the activists rather than the embryologists and developmental biologists to hand us the life versus choice observable with its two terrible multiple choice options.

If we had let the embryologists set the multiple choice question, there would be at least twenty-three Carnegie stages for the embryo before you even get to fetal development. But instead of going forward from what we both know and don't know with high confidence about the system, we are instead permanently deranged by being stuck with Schrodinger's embryo by the activists who insist on working backwards from their political objectives.

So does this somehow solve the abortion issue? Of course not. All it does is get us to see how ridiculously transparent we are in our politics that we would allow our society to be led by those activists who would shoehorn the central scientific miracle of human development into a nutty political binary of convenience. We don't even think to ask, who are these people who have left us at each other's throats debating an inappropriate multiple choice question that can never be answered? Well, in the spirit of the portal, we are always looking for a way out of our perennial problems to try to find an exit. And I think that the technique here of teaching oneself to spot superposition problems in stalemated political systems brings a great deal of relief to those of us who find the perspective of naive activism a fairly impoverished worldview.

The activist mindset is always trying to remove nuanced selections that might better match our world's needs from among the multiple choice answers until it finds a comical binary. Do you support the war on drugs? Yes or no? Are you for or against immigration? Should men and women be treated equally? Should we embrace capitalism or choose socialism? Racism, systemic problem or convenient excuse? Is China a trading partner or a strategic rival? Has technology stagnated or is it in fact racing ahead at breakneck speed? Has feminism gone too far or not far enough? In all of these cases, there is an entire industry built around writing articles that involve replacing conversations that might progress towards answers and agreement with simple multiple choice political options that foreclose all hope. And in general, we can surmise when this has occurred because activism generally leaves a distinct signature where the true state of a system is best represented as a superposition of the last two remaining choices that bitterly divide us handed us by activists.

So I will leave you with the following thought. The principle of superposition is not limited to quantum weirdness, and it may be governing your life at a level you have never considered. Think about where you are most divided from your loved ones politically. Then ask yourself, when I listen to the debates at my dinner table, am I hearing a set of multiple choice answers that sound like they were developed by scholars interested in understanding or by activists who are pushing for an outcome? If the latter, think about whether you couldn't make more progress with those you love by recognizing that the truth is usually in some kind of a superposition of the last remaining answers pushed by the activists. But you don't have to accept these middlebrow binaries, dilemmas, and trilemmas. Instead, try asking a new question. If my loved ones and I trashed the terms of debate foisted upon us by strangers, activists, and the news media, could we together fashion a list of multiple choice answers that we might agree contain an answer we all could live with and that better describes the true state of the system?

I mean, do you really want open or closed borders? Do you really want to talk about psilocybin and heroin in the same breath? Do you really want to claim that there is no systemic oppression or that it governs every aspect of our lives? Before long, it is my hope that you will develop an intuition that many long-running stalemated discussions are really about having our lives shoehorned by others into inappropriate binaries that can only represent the state of our world as a superposition of inappropriate and simplistic answers that you never would have chosen for yourself.

After a few brief words from our sponsors, I'll be back to introduce the guest for this episode's discussion.

Sponsors

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Background

[upbeat music] Today's guest is general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a founder of the biotech firm Console, and former CTO at Coinbase. He's also a friend and one of the people in tech I always love talking with on almost any subject because of the originality of his homespun analyses.

Balaji Srinivasan is a fellow STEM PhD who left research for tech. If you think about academics as having a natural culture that is often as strong or stronger than national or ethnic cultures, Balaji and I still maintain various sensibilities in common that reveal us to be academic expats from the system of research universities. In a different era, Balaji would likely have become a quirky professor loved by students and feared by anyone with the soul of an administrator. But perhaps because his move from Silicon Valley electrical engineering to tech was later in time and not quite as far of an intellectual jump from conventional East Coast mathematics, Balaji went in for a much more aggressive computer and data-centered vision of the future than I was prepared for.

Balaji is a firm believer in visions where crypto and decentralized computing, together with other technologies, ultimately liberate us from the world of excess social engineering, financialization, and declining technical competence. Thus, I have always enjoyed our conversations immensely, as I view him as one of the most aggressive and generative futurists out there with an interesting and original take on almost anything involving our various possible worlds to come.

It was thus no surprise to me that Balaji was one of the earliest and clearest major voices on the coronavirus. While predictably derided and misportrayed by journalists and others as being part of a world of tech bro preppers deranged by cheap apocalyptic fantasies from too many dystopian video games, Balaji held his ground and calmly analytically explained why everyone needed to radically change her or his thinking as quickly as possible surrounding the virus. Of course, in that nearly forgotten academic world where such a highly original non-joiner would have been welcomed, Balaji might have spoken with the authority of a professor. Yet despite having a PhD from Stanford and having co-founded a major biotech company that sold for nine figures, I was shocked to see far less technical people making their living as writers taking potshots at the so-called tech bro.

Okay, I admit I don't get it. If you're male and you make a living in technology, you're automatically a dismissible bro according to people who write for a living across the country in either Brooklyn or near Dupont Circle? Well, that's moronic. Balaji may be crazy, but he's certainly the right kind of crazy according to us and not a prepper, a grifter, or a bro.

And if I may speak directly to the so-called commentariat, cut it out. Stop with the jealousy. You guys are losing mind share for rational reasons because you can't compete with people who are actually trying to think ahead and help other people think rationally for themselves. If you want to compete with the Balajis of the world, stop trying to figure out who is up or who is down and start learning to look at the world from first principles. That's what they do. Then get the story early, get it right, and then show us how you don't back down. Dare your editors to fire you if they don't like the scoop you just filed and you did so responsibly. But whatever you do, you have a responsibility to the world to stop running everyone outside your little club down for the thought crime of giving good advice that contradicts whatever nonsense is being spouted by the three-letter officinal organization that you've been led to believe represents the gold standard or the word of God like the WHO or the CDC. It's enough already. Capiche?

Okay. So Balaji might be crazy, but he's very much our kind of crazy here at the Portal. Thus, I wanted to introduce him to our audience. As you will note, he and I disagree, but that is hardly the issue. Balaji is trying to think critically about what happens next and how this virus remakes the world. I personally tend to think Balaji might be too quick to give up on making institutions sane again, and he likely views me as stuck in the past, unable to realize how the blockchain and private enterprise will allow us to disintermediate the traditional institutions and their subversion. Suffice it to say that I think I am more correct, but that I hope that his vision is closer to accurate. And if I'm honest, neither position is a slam dunk.

I do hope you will enjoy this first uninterrupted conversation with Balaji Srinivasan, which will begin after a few brief messages from our sponsors.

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Interview

[intro music]

Eric Weinstein: Hello, you found The Portal. I'm your host, Eric Weinstein, and today I get to sit down with my friend, uh, constantly inspiring mind, which is always restless, Mr. Balaji Srinivasan. Balaji, great to have you with us.

00:20:22
Balaji Srinivasan: Eric, great to be here.

00:20:23
Eric Weinstein: So Balaji, of course, is the former CTO of Coinbase, as well as general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and, uh, also the founder of a biotech startup that, uh, I think sold for over 300 million, if I'm not incorrect. Balaji, is that correct?

00:20:40
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yep.

00:20:41
Eric Weinstein: And, uh, generally, just a great, uh, uncorrelated mind and spirit who has been particularly good, um, getting us early information on the corona situation. So Balaji, can you just give us a little bit of history with you and the coronavirus and how you came to be concerned about this and what you've learned in this process?

00:21:05
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah, sure. So, um, you know, I've been, uh, basically I guess a part-time citizen journalist on corona for the last three months or so, four months, um, since late January. Uh, you know, I was, I was gonna be doing some other things this year, um, and I may still do them and, and try and fold them in or reboot them. But, um, I was, uh, basically just following the news and, um, I saw the lockdown of Wuhan on January 23rd, and, uh, I realized that was a very serious, um, thing, uh, because actions mean louder... you know, speak louder than words, especially in China. And, uh, and from that, I started digging into the biomedical literature and, and, uh, read everything I could get my hands on, talked to a lot of people in China to get a, a view on the ground. And mainly the reason that I dug into it is, um, you know, like as, as an investor, you're tuned to look for things that can g- get very big from a small base, you know? And, uh, and this was the first thing that I felt like I was diligencing, um, that if it did get really big, that I would feel bad about it. Like normally you're do- doing, you know, diligence, good investment, and you wanna hope... you hope it gets big. And this was something where I was diligence-ing and trying to attack it and cut the legs out from under it like, you know, like one normally would, and I couldn't. And, uh, so I started tweeting about it and covering it and, uh, and that kind of brings us to the present day. Lots of things happened obviously d- over that period.

00:22:32
Eric Weinstein: So this is really an interesting perspective. In some sense, the virus was pitching us from Wuhan with all of those fumigations, and there were a small number of early adopters in the States who really got the virus. But for the most part, um, the herd couldn't understand what was going on. And in part, that puts you as an early adopter because you started talking, um, very early about this being a potentially worldwide disaster.

00:23:03
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah. I mean, like the thing about it is, um, it's, it's one of those things that had tail risk, right? Um, actually, you know, I, I, I was certainly by no means the only person. Like Nassim Taleb, um, you know, also had, you know, some writing at the same time, p- put out a paper on this. Uh, and, and, you know, if you think about tail events, right, whether Taleb has from kind of a, you know, Wall Street perspective or, you know, like I have, we have from a, from a tech or VC perspective. Um, Tyler Cowen has a good way of talking about this where he calls it like, uh, base-raters versus growth, growth-casers, right? Um, and the base-rate people essentially say, "Hey, what you're talking about has never happened before, and therefore tomorrow will be the same as today, and therefore, you know, you're crazy. Uh, you know, like y- things won't change," right? And frankly, actually, most of the time that prediction algorithm is pretty good in the same way that like predicting tomorrow's weather from today's is actually... It took a while for weather prediction to, to beat that, right? Um, and, uh, and then of course you've got another school of thought, which is the growth algorithm or the growth mindset, where you can say, "Hey, actually, maybe this thing could go vertical." Um, and, and you try and diligence it. Go ahead.

00:24:15
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. So, um, who do you, who do you think of as being early on this that had a large platform and a, and a strong voice?

00:24:24
Balaji Srinivasan: Early, had a large, large platform, strong voice. Um, so, uh, I actually wanna give, uh... Let's see. Who, um... So there's folks in China, uh, like Kai Xing, uh, and I'm probably mispronouncing that. But basically, uh, there were actually some Chinese, uh, uh, news outlets that published really important stuff on the coronavirus, and it was actually censored in real time. Like I archived the links, and I could see them being taken down in real time. Uh, and they had a fairly large platform in China. Um, so that's kind of one group. Um- A, let's see. It was, uh, so I'd say Lori Garrett, who, uh, uh, she had written a book on, um, uh, basically, you know, illnesses like the, I think, The Coming Plague she had written. Um, I think, um, [lip smack] Taleb, uh, i- is somebody. I think, uh, actually Scott Alexander put together a long list of folks. Um, and you can kind of go through that list 'cause I'm sure I'll, you know, forget somebody off the top of my head. And, um, y- uh, you know, actually Matt Stoller, who I disagree with on, on many things, um, was, was also early on this. Uh, you know, Matt, Matt and I have, uh, I don't know, we maybe agree on 30% of things, um, maybe 40%, but we very much disagree on the rest. However, he was, he was absolutely right and early on this. Um-

00:25:48
Eric Weinstein: Well, he, he's a very disagreeable person in general, and it seems to me like no one who lack... There was no agreeable person who got this early. You ha- you had-

00:25:59
Balaji Srinivasan: I think that's right, and that's, that's because, um, [lip smack] you know, the thing is, um, the term disagreeable has a pejorative connotation, right? Um, and, you know, you can use it in the neutral sense of someone who will not agree for the sake of agreeing. Uh, but it's basically something where, you know, you might, you might portray both of them as positive. There's, like, a consensus model, and there's, like, a, I don't know, an independent thinking model, right? Or a first principles model. And yeah, like, if you're, if you're a consensus thinker, it's, it is something where there, you know, you would just get attacked and yelled at and mocked, uh, for, for saying something that was, that was quite different. Um, and, and you know what? Like, a lot of people who say something that's different from consensus aren't necessarily correct, and then you get back into the loop of, okay, how do you know whether they're correct or not, right? But go ahead.

00:26:54
Eric Weinstein: Well, I guess I just, I... If, I feel like if I actually have to refight that battle every show, I'll get nowhere. So I've just decided-

00:27:03
Balaji Srinivasan: Right

00:27:03
Eric Weinstein: ... that we've won, and that they're obviously wrong because the record shows that they're obviously wrong, and wrong for the same reasons every time. Like, if I were to say something about the fact that, um, we should really be thinking about the potential for the COVID epidemic to turn towards armed conflict and war, uh, I'll elicit the same reaction from people who aren't allowed to think that many steps ahead. It's like, "Well, Chicken Little, I don't know," you know?

00:27:33
Balaji Srinivasan: Right.

00:27:33
Eric Weinstein: "I guess the sky's falling again." And-

00:27:36
Balaji Srinivasan: Right, right, right

00:27:37
Eric Weinstein: ... and whatever that energy is, um, part of our lesson, I think, is just to ignore it, to learn that it's, it's sort of, sort of an evil thing that will hurt us very badly. Because what we're doing is we're learning to associate the people who have the timestamps... And again, I, on this one, I don't have the timestamps. It's, in fact, the first thing that I say on this is on February 9th, where I say, "No, I don't yet have a take on the coronavirus," where I at least knew that I wasn't doing the work. I was seeing too much crazy-

00:28:08
Balaji Srinivasan: Sure

00:28:08
Eric Weinstein: ... stuff. So I, I guess what I wanna do is to sort of say, "Look, let's try to do something different." On my show, we don't have to refight the battle of disagreeability. The disagreeable people are right, and the other people are wrong. Okay. What do we do now with the coexistence of these communities? Like, for example, you've seen these tech journalists who really wanted to go after the tech bros who are, like, preppers and, you know, the whole thing. How do we continue to manage, uh, our sense-making operation in a world where the, the giant sense-making organs get things wrong and, and don't even s- stop to take, y- you know, the measure of the situation? They don't catch their breath. Is, is... It doesn't matter whether somebody like a Mike Cernovich was early. The point is Mike Cernovich is off the menu, and whoever got it wrong and said, "This is a psychological problem, um, we should treat it psychologically," that person will continue to have a job at The Washington Post. Why won't this change?

00:29:14
Balaji Srinivasan: So, um, so a few things. One is, actually, I think both these questions, both the f- the first thing and this are related, which are, um, there's two ways that you can diverge from the conventional wisdom. This is almost tautological, but one is you can be more correct, and the other is you can be less correct. And, uh, and, and the thing is, I think, you know, uh, let's call it n- not just on the West Coast, but there's a, the disagreeable state of mind or whatever. Um, you know, Taleb state of mind is you diverge from the consensus because you've got a better view than the consensus. You're not consensus and right, you know, in Gilgameshian. Uh, and, uh, we're also seeing, you know, uh, I would say, uh, the, uh, like, QAnon-type stuff and, and so on, which is non-consensus and, uh, you know, I would argue wrong, um, and, and kind of crazy stuff. And, uh, and so this is actually-

00:30:03
Eric Weinstein: But e- even there you have to be very careful-

00:30:05
Balaji Srinivasan: Go ahead

00:30:05
Eric Weinstein: ... because any large group of th- disagreeable people finds a lot of discarded truth that the mainstream doesn't wanna deal with. So even in-

00:30:14
Balaji Srinivasan: Yes

00:30:14
Eric Weinstein: ... the darkest corners of the web, and make them as dark as you want, they usually have a little bit of truth that they're carefully polishing because the mainstream won't deal with it.

00:30:24
Balaji Srinivasan: So, so this gets basically to, I think, one of my one-liners, which is the internet increases variance. And you can hover on that, and you can do a lot with that statement. So for example, um, you go from 30-minute sitcoms to 30-second clips and 30-episode Netflix binges. You go from, you know, a stable nine-to-five job to gig economy on one side and, you know, a, a 20-year-old billionaire on, on the other side, right? Um, and o- on many different dimensions, the internet is increasing variance. It's going, you know, for example, from three television channels or, or cable news to a incredible, you know, variety of different media.

00:31:03
Eric Weinstein: And-

00:31:03
Balaji Srinivasan: It's every person a media What's that? N

00:31:05
Eric Weinstein: N, where N has grown arbitrarily large.

00:31:07
Balaji Srinivasan: Yes

00:31:08
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:31:08
Balaji Srinivasan: N is, N is arbitrarily large. That's right. Um, and, uh, you know, in the sense every person is now a personal media channel, and I think a big next thing is th- that they are gonna become personal media corporations. Um, and so what I, what I think is important in this world is to think about what, um, decentralized truth looks like. Uh, and, you know, how do you come back to reference points that are true even if people don't wanna believe they're true? So, you know, one that I think about a lot is, you know, uh, the blockchain, right? So basically, the Bitcoin blockchain, um... There's, there's actually a great book on this concept or this angle on Bitcoin that I don't think people outside the space really think about too much. It's called, uh, The Truth Machine. It's by, um, Paul Vigna and Michael Casey. Uh, M- Casey's a former Wall Street Journal, uh, journalist, and, and Vigna's a current WSJ journalist. Um, and so both think about... They're actually very good. They're not haters or anything like that. They're smart, um, and you can learn something from them. Um, anyway, so this book, The Truth Machine, makes a point that, um, or it, it popularizes a point that's well-known within the community that whether you're Saudi or Japanese or Brazilian, American, Norwegian, Chinese, what have you, you have the same view of the Bitcoin blockchain as everybody else, and that means the database of who has what money everybody agrees on. Um, and that's a really important point because that's, that's a, a truth which there's an enormous literal incentive to change in the sense of if you could, you know, falsify it, if you could somehow manipulate it to award yourself a billion dollars, um, you would do so, or people would do so. And, uh, a- and so this is a really interesting example of truth in an adversarial environment where there's an enormous incentive to, um, to break it, to abuse it, but it, the, the database hasn't been corrupted because we've used technology, cryptography, other kinds of things, proof of work, to make it difficult to, um, fake this history, to fake this truth. And that's very powerful because I think you can extend that to other kinds of things. As traditional sources of authority are metabolized, um, people do wanna have common reference points where you can cite this, and the other person will have to concede it's actually true, and then you can kind of move forward from there, premise, premise, premise, premise, at least with a rational person. So let me pause there, uh, because I think that's part of where I think we, we end up going.

00:33:42
Eric Weinstein: Well, I like that a lot, and this is what I talk about in terms of self-refereed games, that, um, in a math department, you may really dislike somebody, but if they have the better argument, uh, as to who's right and who's wrong, I- I've almost never seen a, an argument go m- multiple days where people can't come to terms with who was correct and who was not. Um, so there are these, you know, jujitsu to, to an extent as long as you're not talking about rule-breaking. Somebody's either choked you out or they haven't. And, and there are edge cases, of course, in every situation. But we have a, we have a coming world in which the attempt to reference things to authoritative sources is, I think, now going to fail. Wikipedia, which is the ultimate, um, sort of top layer on top of an authoritative source model, uh, is probably going to get degraded because too many people have write privileges inside of what were previously authoritative sources. Um, so I like the idea that the blockchain is an example of how you force reason and, uh, and rationality because it's too expensive not to participate in communal truth. Um, although I don't think it works as well for, um, situations where you're not solving an arithmetic problem or something equivalent to an arithmetic problem. I mean-

00:35:09
Balaji Srinivasan: So, so that's... So wait here, yeah, so you're smart enough that you're, you added that qualifier on the end, which is somewhat something equivalent to an arithmetic problem. And, and a really interesting question is how many things can be so reduced? And I think it's a, a much larger set of things than people think. So once you can track, you know, who has what Bitcoin, you can extend the same thing to any digital form of property, right? Um, which includes stocks, bonds, um, you know, much of the world economy. It includes the passwords to who has access to what, uh, you know, website, um, who has the private keys to a device, to a car-

00:35:46
Eric Weinstein: Well, we-

00:35:46
Balaji Srinivasan: ... to a house, right? Go ahead.

00:35:48
Eric Weinstein: Right. So it has to do with what, who can... You know, we can agree that a robber might have a painting, that the painting may not belong to the robber. And so when you start-

00:35:58
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah

00:35:58
Eric Weinstein: ... getting into issues of fairness as opposed to just issues of custody, and again, you know, to the same extent, when you have something that might or might not be equivalent to arithmetic, one thing that you find that's very interesting is watching the number of bets that don't complete, where two people start off acting like they've got a really serious disagreement, and then they, somebody says, "Well, let's, let's settle it with a wager."

00:36:24
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah.

00:36:24
Eric Weinstein: And then you watch as the sta- statement gets sharpened, you realize that the two people never really had a disagreement because they can't come to an agreement as to what the bet should be because, quite frankly, they both have the same underlying model of reality, but they wanted to put a different sort of emotive layer on top of it.

00:36:45
Balaji Srinivasan: Yes. I think it's, it's also interesting because in the formulation of a bet, um, each participant immediately with the po- prospect of loss starts hedging, right? And, and, and that's rational to do in the sense of, you know, i- if you think some metric is gonna hit 80%, well, you take the bet if you think it's... if someone says it's only gonna hit 10%, right? There's a sort of a tug of war on it, and people wanna give themselves more margin, right? Um- But actually, Tyler Cohen a while back tweeted, or maybe it was Tabarrok, uh, he posted something about how betting reduces partisanship. That is to say, it is, um, you know, capitalism is the opposite to tribalism, where it, uh, you know, the, the prospect of individual gain and loss means it, there's an incentive to give a non-consensus answer. Now, by the way, I wanna return to your point about, you know, sources of authoritative truth melting down, you know, like the center cannot hold and metabolizing. I think, uh, I, I have... I think there's at least five replacements for universal authoritative truth. Um, the first is most obvious, which is tribal truth. You know, like it's true because your chieftain says it's true, and we see that a lot, right? So that actually kind of rebuilds authoritative truth. It's just not universal truth. It's what your group leader is saying, right? So that's a big thing on social media. Um, a second is iterative truth. Uh, so the next three I'm gonna talk about come from, I think, tech. So iterative truth of the GitHub sense, where rather than put out a story and say it's capital T true, you know, like the New York Times literally... The New York Times markets itself as essentially infallible neutral truth, right? And, uh, you know, like it runs that ad campaign saying, "The truth isn't easy. The truth isn't this, and the truth isn't that," right? Um, and they publish a fair number of just the flu, you know, pieces, by the way, you know. And then recently they're like, you know, "The truth is it's not just the flu." And I, I just kinda laughed when I saw that, right? So, um, an alternative to saying the article is true and how dare you question it is, uh, the Git or GitHub model, where you put out some code and you know it's gonna have bugs. And, you know, whereas o- in an East Coast model or an academic model, a retraction or a correction is this huge black mark, right? That people will fight tooth and nail to avoid, right? As, as you're aware, you know, folks will av- try to avoid that in academia. They try to avoid that in journalism. A correction is like, ooh, you know, and it's like, you know, oh man, it's a humiliation for them, right? Um, by contrast, a pull request, you know, a p- somebody who files a bug, uh, you know, an active project will have edits, and it will have issues and bugs and pull requests. There's nobody who's ever written software who will pretend to say, "Oh, my code is always right. It has no bugs," right? Um, in fact, the whole thing is set up recognizing that it's fallible and iterative. And so that's the second model of iterative truth, okay? It works well in the West Coast model, the GitHub model, and it scales well worldwide.

00:39:40
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Except the problem is-

00:39:41
Balaji Srinivasan: Go ahead

00:39:41
Eric Weinstein: ... is that, um, the... In the GitHub model, you have individual coders who are submitting code, and there is this concept of just a very basic level, um, whether or not the code should or should not run. Does it run? Will it compile?

00:40:01
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah.

00:40:01
Eric Weinstein: A lot of what we see in, uh, and I guess the first thing you had was tribal truth, which I don't even wanna call tribal truth. Maybe it's tribal strategy. It's like, don't, don't contradict the quarterback. We're trying to win a game here, you know? Whether the quarterback is right or wrong, the quarterback is running the show. And so this could be like, well, the Democratic t- party has chosen Joe Biden, and our, our associated organs are behind him. What are you doing questioning Tara Reid and the fact that he's 77 years old? Like, that's, that's a particular kind of a, an issue which is y- you're gonna break down the coherence of the system. I guess what, where I'm, I'm really driving with all of this, Balaji, is I saw this with 2008, and I saw it with Nassim, uh, of all people, which is when it was clear that the world had gotten this wrong and that a tiny number of people had gotten it right, we did not promote those tiny number of people appropriately. So one of the things I find interesting in this situation... I'm just gonna repeat myself. Uh, one of the things I find interesting in this situation is I went through this a little bit with Nassim Taleb in 2008, and, um, you know, he was getting it right, and there was a small group of us who were very alarmed about the state of, um, of finance and the risks that were being, uh, swept under the rug, um, in particular through well-established metrics like value at risk. And what we found was is that the people who had been the big critics didn't become super prominent establishment figures. The establishment would rather deal with the failed people who screwed everything up a second time, a third time, a fourth time because it's really not about us improving as a society. It's about the fact that it's hard to profit, um, in, in stagnant times if you're not getting things wrong. Like b- get- getting things wrong is actually valuable if what you're doing is transferring money between parties. So for example, when you print money, you can talk about it in terms of stimulus, much needed stimulus. We've-- We're determined to putting a floor in the market, restore confidence. All of that is language for transferring wealth, and we don't hear it as wealth transfers. And to your point about Bitcoin, um, what happens when I have a, a group of people who can transfer wealth by using a printing press, and they talk only in terms that are so abstract as to be lifeless, bloodless, meaningless?

00:42:44
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah. Well, so I, so I, I think two or three things I wanna respond to there, which are, um, one is we can actually, um, invert the... So, you know, there's, there's a, a line of argument which I'm sympathetic to, which says, um, folks who are criticizing, um, aren't building, uh, or rather, you know, if th- you're criticizing the man in the arena, it's always harder if you're the man in the arena, et cetera, right? And, um, the answer to them is-

00:43:14
Eric Weinstein: Do you want to just... It's a reference to Teddy Roosevelt's famous speech, if you don't know it, it's really-

00:43:19
Balaji Srinivasan: Exactly. That's right. That's right. So, you know, the, the answer to critics is actually pretty easy, which is, "Okay, go start your own company." Right? 'Cause the barrier to starting y- your own company is actually very low. You can just go out and incorporate it. And, um, so I think that's a good response to the person who says, "Oh, I could do so and so better than so and so CEO," or whatever. Like, y- you know, some people really could. Some of those critics are actually talented people, um, and, uh, and they could do better if they, they were in... But you'll only know for sure if you actually go and make the leap. Like, many, many of us in, in tech, for example, are former academics who, you know, may have grown up as critics, uh, until you put yourself in the driver's seat, and then you have to actually be both, by the way. As CEO or as a senior executive, you have to both be a big booster of, you know, the company and the vision and so and so forth, and your own harshest critic, and write detailed reviews of, "Hey, we should have done X rather than Y," that kind of thing, right? Um, so applying that to this, the fundamental question is how do we exit these institutions and build alternatives? Um, we can start a new company, but how can we start, for example, um, you know, a new FDA or equivalent, right? How can we, uh, start a new city? How can you eventually start a new country? Those are... You know, how do we start a new currency? Well, that one we've actually made some progress on, right? And, uh, so, so then, you know, once you've started a new currency, you know, if you notice the energy out of, like, the anti-Fed stuff, it's like Bitcoiners are laughing, right? They're not, like, mad anymore. And, uh, the reason they're, they're not mad is they, they have the exit. If they're right, they've got a bet which is very divergent from where, um, you know, B- Bernanke and, and co, uh, were and where, you know, the current Fed is, right? They got a bet that's very divergent, and, um, and they'll, they'll do well in the event that, you know, they're correct. And they've been correct for the last, you know, at least 1,000x or 10,000x up, right? So I think that's a real question, is not so much how to get the critics into power within legacy institutions, but to empower them to build new institutions, um, without too much interference from the legacy establishment.

00:45:32
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is-

00:45:32
Balaji Srinivasan: Uh, so go ahead.

00:45:33
Eric Weinstein: This is where you and I obviously disagree. Uh, for those of you who are actually watching this rather than listening to this, Balaji looks like he's got a tremendous amount of money. He showed up with practically a hoodie, uh, unshaved. I'm still clearly trying to please my boss by wearing a, a, a s- a jacket and shirt ridiculously indoors-

00:45:54
Balaji Srinivasan: [laughs]

00:45:54
Eric Weinstein: ... during quarantine. Okay. I, yeah, I disagree with this. I think that this is part of the West Coast fantasy that we can just do everything from our garages, and we can neglect the legacy stuff. And, and as you know with something like Bitcoin, um, you know, if you think about gold, the dollar, and Bitcoin, let's say, as three example currencies, one of them is backed by violence, the dollar, one of them is backed by quantum chromodynamics, gold, and one of them is backed by elliptic curves or, you know, equivalent ar- or, you know, mathematics. Um, and so something backed by violence can choose to disagree with you in a very different way. Could-- You could just make it very dangerous to hold Bitcoin. Um, so there are all sorts of weird ways in which I don't think that this is played out. We don't really know how governments' legacy structures will interact with new structures. I do believe in, in, uh, not the WHO but the who when they say, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

00:46:57
Balaji Srinivasan: [laughs]

00:46:58
Eric Weinstein: We will have definite problems that will be... Uh, Bitcoin isn't gonna get us out of, uh, all of our human stuff. It'll get us out of some of it. Um, but I guess what, what, what concerns me is, is that all the West Coast people are so sick of the East Coast stuff, again, letting West and East stand for something that we-

00:47:16
Balaji Srinivasan: Sure

00:47:16
Eric Weinstein: ... can kind of understand.

00:47:17
Balaji Srinivasan: Me- mendoms.

00:47:18
Eric Weinstein: Right. Um, well, as mendoms, I would say that the West Coast just says, "I don't wanna deal with that East Coast stuff. It's boring. It, it kills all the fun. All profit is lost. It's so consensus-driven, hierarchical, credential-focused eff it." And as a result, I feel like what's happened is that we've abandoned, um, any hold that we might have in, let's say, the National Academy of Sciences or the great universities, and we're not really creating these things anew. We're still feeding. I mean, if I could just put one horrible spin on it, Burning Man is, like, a blast for one week a year, and it makes fun of the default world. But all of the riches that are needed to run Burning Man are amassed in the default world and then plowed as treasure into this giant weird celebration for one week. And I feel like the rest of us are, in some weird ways, partially parasitic on the very institutions that we've allowed to be taken over.

00:48:21
Balaji Srinivasan: So, uh, so let me, let me give something to this argument because I've actually, um, been thinking about it more over the last few months in particular, which is, um [lip smacks], you know, from the standpoint of corona, part of the reason that we're in the COVID-19 crisis, maybe the, the biggest part of the reason, is that, you know, we, we just don't have, uh, people with scientific and engineering backgrounds in the press or the state for the most part. You know, we have lawyers. We have, you know, liberal arts majors. We have accomplished character assassins. [laughs] But we, we don't really have too many people who know math or, or computer science or, in this case, virology, bioinformatics, genomics, et cetera, right? That's-

00:49:02
Eric Weinstein: You've looked at the advanced degrees in Congress on Wikipedia?

00:49:06
Balaji Srinivasan: It's all JDs, right?

00:49:07
Eric Weinstein: It's, it's beyond pathetic. I mean, it-- just the idea that you would expect that the next President of the United States should be able to write a few lines of code, I, I just, uh... We're just drawing from the complete wrong pools of people.

00:49:28
Balaji Srinivasan: Right. A-a-and the thing about this is it just to show it doesn't have to be that way. Here's where... Let me give-- Let me do a few different riffs on exit in this context, right? So one way-- One, one version of it is look at other countries, right? Um, like look at something that's different in space. Uh, and so you can look at Lee Hsien Loong, who's the prime minister of Singapore, and, you know, he was, uh, as you may know, like, uh, the, the senior wrangler at Cambridge, so like an actual research mathematician caliber person in terms of IQ, but also could really execute. You know, he posted a Sudoku solver, for example, on his... Uh, well, he could execute as prime minister. He's also very, still very sharp. He posted a Sudoku solver on his, uh, Facebook page in C++ and, and knew, you know, two's complement and relatively obscure binary bit flipping type stuff, right? And, uh, there's, you know, other folks like, uh, Toomas Ilves, who was the, uh, president, I believe, of Estonia. Um, he was actually a critical figure that helped make Estonia, you know, E-Estonia, like an internet, you know, based country, right? Um, and, uh, I think he was a Princeton, Princeton graduate and was familiar. And basically he was kind of like a, a Bitcoin proponent in 2020 who was starting, helping start a new country. It's because he was next to the Estonian heads of state that he could, he could do that. Um, [lip smack] so those are some examples of it doesn't have to be that way. You know, you have heads of state who are, do have some technical skill. But so I definitely wanna give something to your argument, um, which I agree with, uh, which is that we cannot completely neglect. And so then how do we reconcile those, you know, take that thesis, antithesis, and, and come to a synthesis? Um, something I think about a lot is like a kitty corner strategy. For example, Google, um, you know, went and built up its wealth initially in search, and after it had built a cash cow in search, then and only then did it decide to take on Microsoft on its home turf with, you know, uh, first Gmail, you know, and then, um, Google Docs and Sheets and, and so on. And that was a huge ti- I mean, that, that battle is still being waged today, right? Like, that would not have been the smart first thing for Google to do. Um, they had to build up kind of their own thing first, their cash cow, before they went and engaged more competitive markets. So, um, so that's one option. I mean, there's something kind of ha- like that happened with the United States as well. You know, it exited Europe in seven... You know, like actually not 1776, in the 1600s and 1700s. Uh, eventually declared independence, fully exited, and then over 140 years essentially built its strength, had its own problems. Um, and then, you know, by 1945, uh, was stronger than almost every European country, right? And kinda came back in. Um, and, uh, you know, so, so that's an ex- a second example of kitty corner. You go to a diagonal, you win in that diagonal, you build your strength there, and then you come back. And, uh, you know, today in, with the, um, with what's, what's happened, I, I think of, um, you know, t- of course you know this, but maybe not all your audience knows this. Uh, Founders Fund has this, uh, you know, funny one-liner, which is, um, "We wanted flying cars. Instead we got 140 characters," right? And, uh, you know, meaning, you know, where's the innovation of the future? We just have this messaging service and so on. But I have a feeling that, um, social media and cryptocurrency are gonna actually be the way that we do get that future. And, uh, the reason is I think of them respectively as American glasnost being social media, and American perestroika being cryptocurrency. Um, now should I explain that for your viewers, or y- y- you wanna, you wanna take it from there? Do you, have you, have you thought about that?

00:53:06
Eric Weinstein: No, no, you can, you can do that. Although I-

00:53:09
Balaji Srinivasan: Okay

00:53:09
Eric Weinstein: ... I, I am worried that right now we're in the COVID epi- epidemic, and I think, you know, I, of course, I find cryptocurrency fascinating. I do think it's more speculative because of the different ways in which... You know, look, obviously you've been, you've been very early on COVID, you've been early on Bitcoin, and a major proponent in all things blockchain. The, the, the concern that I have, Balaji, is that I don't know how, I don't know how to reformat this conversation. Like, I know how to have this boring conversation with the East Coast, and I know how to have the wild-eyed conversation with the West Coast. But-

00:53:55
Balaji Srinivasan: Sure

00:53:55
Eric Weinstein: ... the thing that I'm looking to have is a conversation that doesn't really sound like either one of those two. Um-

00:54:01
Balaji Srinivasan: Sure

00:54:02
Eric Weinstein: ... and it has to do with the following thing. Uh, okay, so imagine that you've got like more or less these two bad families, the Clintons and the Bushes, okay? And, you know, it's like the Hatfields and the McCoys, and, and then m- maybe they're more similar to each other than, than we know. And, you know, of course, Barack Obama is somehow attached to the Clinton family, whatever. But it's like, it's a little rich that we're gonna take this most powerful of nations with all of its great universities, all of its culture, and in the space of like 20 or 30 years, we're just gonna screw the whole thing up so much that we're talking about, like, moving onto the blockchain. And, uh, we're gonna just, you know, "Hey, hey, let the legacy institutions die. We'd, we've outgrown The New York Times, we've outgrown Harvard, we've outgrown political parties and countries. We, we should just be the, you know, electronic states of America." And it's just like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we, we, we skipped a bunch of steps here, you know? At some level, we've got a really bad economic problem. And then we've got two, what I view as relatively non-productive strategies, either continue go, to go with the Bush/Clinton stupidity now represented by Biden and, and, and, you know, weirdly Trump, who obviously is, you know- Not really coming out of the Republican Party. But it's... All of this is like a reaction to how sick people are of the kleptocracy, you know, this geriatric kleptocracy. And then, you know, the, the other option is, well, let's m- make ourselves into a really large version of Estonia, because Lord knows they've been forward-thinking. And I guess I have the sense of, is there no one to have a more integrated conversation with?

00:55:59
Balaji Srinivasan: So yeah, I mean, I, I, I actually do think, um, I think my point of view maybe is more integrated in the sense of, for example, I believe in recentralization. I believe all progress happens along the Z axis, and let me explain what I mean by that. Um, y- you know, if, if you visualize like a clock, you know? You start a company and it's like one, one minute after midnight. You know, you're starting it as a solo person, and, and many people will die. You know, the company will die, you know, on, on, you know, before you get to the next milestone. But if you start making revenue, okay, um, more people join around 3:00 PM. You go from just one person on the tundra to like a lean two with a few people. Then you start getting around to like 6:00, and now you've got like a whole group of folks, and something crucial happens at this time, which is your most important number goes from your, um, your burn rate to your bus number. It goes from basically every single person has to be indispensable to every single person must be dispensable. Because in the first stage where you're coming up to product market fit and so on, you know, you need just these absolutely exceptional, unique, iconoclastic, crazy people. But then once you've built a machine where you need to scale it, actually you don't want iconoclastic people or, or at least you have to be careful about it since you need something where you can add 30 more engineers and get X more result, right? Like, it has to be more kind of, you know, you put in people and you, you get a result, right? Um, and, and so then you, you're led to... You know, or you put in, you know, customer service reps, you put in, um, uh, you know, drivers if it's Uber, you know? You, you have, you have some model that works like that. And so then you get to a totally different thing where now you're talking about bus number, and, uh, meaning how many people can get hit by a bus before, uh, you know, the, the, the system no longer works. And the bus number way of thinking about things starts making you think about folks as, quote, "replaceable," uh, because if, if not, then you wouldn't be doing your job. If, if you had a company of, you know, 400 people and 300 of them were essential and they quit and your company would go to zero, you wouldn't be doing your job as CEO. It literally, it's like required to make them redundant. And not in a bad sense, but redundant in the sense of if one of them goes down, the whole company doesn't go down. You're making the thing anti-fragile in, in, in Taleb's sense. But then this is taken almost always too far to the point that people do feel like cogs. They, they feel the redundancy. They feel the, you know, de-skilling. Uh, they feel the bureaucracy creeping up where the bureaucracy is basically a substitute... Bureaucracy is not always bad. Bureaucracy at its best is a substitute for the thought process of a very talented executive or, or CEO. Like Bezos implements a process, and rather than him being there to manage that process every step of the way, he writes down instructions and people follow that. That's actually a functional bureaucracy where it's like writing or, or code that scales a, a human being's judgment in such a way that it can scale across other human beings who don't maybe have the same level of judgment. Um, that's why you have written policies and procedures. There's consistency. You know, customers get the same experience. Then of course what happens is around 9:00 past, you know, the hour, uh, you start going into the degeneration mode, and the bureaucracy stifles individual initiative to such a point that someone leaves to start their own company and now it's 12:01 again, right? And that's the cycle that happens, and that's... You know, I'm not saying i- it's exactly someone leaving from A to, to start B, but that's IBM to Microsoft to Google to Facebook to then what's next, right? And I'm not saying that, you know, a guy from IBM left to start X. I am however saying that progress happens along the Z axis. If you think about this clock as turning, right? Um, but each turn it's like ascending a, a helix where it kind of goes up, right? Um-

00:59:41
Eric Weinstein: Now you're starting to sound like Ken Wilber and spiral dynamics, but-

00:59:45
Balaji Srinivasan: I, I don't know him. Uh, but, but so, so this is just my mental model where it might seem circular that y- you know, the qu- the libertarian founder rebuilds the state.

00:59:54
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:59:55
Balaji Srinivasan: Right, right. You know, 'cause y- you start a company to get away from, you know, control and bureaucracy and so on, and then you find that you have to actually rebuild it to scale the company, right? It's kind of a deep insight.

01:00:07
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, so I, I like the helical model. Um, effectively, you know, the, the premise of the portal is to find the way out of flatland. And if you're born into flatland, how do you learn about the Z axis? And so the typical example that we like to give is that the square root of negative one is the question that can be posed in flatland that is on the real line, but forces you to invent the imaginary axis to solve it. So what's a problem that you can-

01:00:33
Balaji Srinivasan: In fact, one over one plus X squared is a great example of a function that, you know, it's defined everywhere along the real line, but the power series doesn't converge at, you know, plus one and minus one because there's poles at I and negative I, so you can't even understand flatland unless you understand, you know-

01:00:51
Eric Weinstein: Its context

01:00:52
Balaji Srinivasan: ... complex analysis.

01:00:52
Eric Weinstein: No, exactly right.

01:00:52
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah, exactly.

01:00:53
Eric Weinstein: So yeah, I like all that, but Balaji, look, one of the things that I wanna get to is that I, I really enjoy our conversations. Um, y- I find you to be one of the most generative people that I speak to, uh, just across many topics. I, I don't think you could possibly be right about everything that you're talking about because you have so many interesting different opinions on so many things that it, it sort of statistically doesn't seem, uh, uh, likely. But it's always like one of the most interesting perspectives in the room. It always gets me thinking. Uh, I wanna get back a little bit to the virus, and I'll, I'll have you back one, one or more times after this to talk about whatever you wanna do.

01:01:31
Balaji Srinivasan: Sure.

01:01:31
Eric Weinstein: But I wanna get to a little bit about what I think you're doing essentially right now.

01:01:36
Balaji Srinivasan: Sure.

01:01:37
Eric Weinstein: Where the hell are we? It doesn't-- I, I don't know how to say this to people, but this virus and its-- our response to it is so bad that it's, it's particularly crashing my operating system. I can't believe how lousy the explanations are, how completely willing people are to talk about flattening the curve, uh, or social distancing, or when the vaccines will be ready. And like, all of this strikes me as the kind of nonsense speak that I saw around the financial crisis, where you get people to parrot whatever the phrase is that's repeated on television as if they understand it. Um, I'm feeling like my IQ has plummeted to low two figures. What's going wrong with me? Why am I not functioning well with the explanations that are being given? And how is it that you're functioning better? And I, I, I'm legitimately not doing this to compliment you. I'm saying I can't believe how badly I'm doing understanding this, because I keep wanting to make contact with some grown-up in some official position who makes sense, and I can't find a one.

01:02:46
Balaji Srinivasan: Well, I think, uh, so w- first, um, you know, thank you for, I, I think, I think they're kind words. Uh, the, uh, but, uh, a- and, um, but, but I'll tell you, I'll tell you at least my mental model. I, I, I wouldn't say that you're doing badly or I'm doing well or anything like that, but at least my mental model on this. Um, [lip smack] in an interesting sense, the world has actually receded such that we, um, we know we don't n-- or not everybody, but let's say smart people like yourself increasingly know what they don't know. And here's what I mean by that. So in one sense, the world has receded physically, where lots of people are now literally sitting in their rooms, right? They can't travel around the world and, and, you know, or even to their office or what have you, right? Um, but the second way in the world has receded is most of what we know about the world is mediated, right? You're a research scientist. Um, I'm sure some of the folks listening are. Um, and so you have discovered facts that are true, uh, of your own accord in, in, you know, some discipline, right? You write a PhD thesis or what have you, you know, or even just do any kind of research. It, it's kind of like that. Many people... This is what I call kind of like a pre-headline person. Um, a pre-headline person as opposed to a post-headline person. A pre-headline person is like a research scientist or a founder or a journalist, um, or a politician, someone who has known, uh, about the facts, known something to be true prior to it being printed in a newspaper. And, uh, it-- that seems like a very small thing, but it's actually a big thing because it means that those people are responsible for discovering and disseminating new facts, right? Whereas a post-headline person will not believe something until it's actually printed in a, in a newspaper that they trust. Um, your personal, you know, kind of statement to them that, "Hey, X is true," uh, you know, they won't necessarily listen to it unless they believe in your authority from some other thing, some other institutional position. Okay. So, so i- in many of senses, our domain has shrunken, both physically because we're in our rooms and mentally because all of these nodes who we trusted to give us information, um, about things, we're realizing that those folks messed up. And so, you know, the signal they're giving today, well, yesterday they were basically saying, "Oh, this thing is nothing to worry about. It's just the flu. Um, you know, don't wear a mask. Now you have to wear a mask." Like, these contradictions are so obvious and coming so quickly that we are forced to realize that those folks are extremely fallible human beings and not oracles, you know? It's not The Institution said, it's not The New York Times said or The Washington Post said. It's this guy said, you know, or this girl said, you know, this person said, right? And, um, so, so I think that's, you know, the first step. As Saul Alinsky would say, you know, if the first step is in community organization is disorganization, um, I think the first step in understanding is not understanding, having it all be a jumble, right? And at least what I'm doing is I'm leaning on... You know, you have training in, in physics. I know, I know something of physics. You know, uh, uh, certainly I'm, I'm not going down to elementary particle level, but, um, I do know, uh, genomics and I know bioinformatics and I know diagnostics, and I know how to read biomedical papers. So, uh, you know, that's also s- mediated of course, but it doesn't make the pretense... It doesn't, it doesn't have the pretense of being capital T truth. It's, "Here are some researchers. We put out something. We believe it to be true," and you can contest it. Within the domain, you can. It's legitimate to contest it, you know, in, uh, in, in biomedical research. And so leaning on those, uh, you know, that, that gives me some information, maybe more, maybe, maybe orients it. I would also say from two other standpoints, um, as part of the earlier part of our conversation, I think, uh, discipline-wise or, or I don't know, I'm not sure, call it mentally or dispositionally rather, that's, that might be better. Uh, from a, from a dispositional standpoint, I expect authority to fail. [chuckles] And I, I, I, I, I already knew the state was gonna fail. The extent to which it failed is kind of interesting, but, like, the ma- the, the direction and magnitude was not 1000x off from what I expected. Um, I think that for those who did not expect that, uh, or who found it to be 1000x off... Go ahead.

01:07:11
Eric Weinstein: I expect institutional failure. I, I think about it all the time. I talk about it all the time. The magnitude of this institutional failure caught me by surprise.

01:07:22
Balaji Srinivasan: And that's fair. That's fair. I don't wanna say, you know, like this is something where the, the permanent bureaucracy failed, FDA, CDC, international organizations like WHO failed. The elected government failed. The unelected government, meaning the career bureaucrats, you know, they failed. Um, state and local, you know, the, the mayor of New York, you know, like et cetera. Um, and the legacy press failed. And, and the military frankly has failed. Like, the only thing, you know, I was tweeting about this, but basically biodefense since anthrax Was something that billions of dollars has been allocated for.

01:07:56
Eric Weinstein: Why can't I talk about the Wuhan lab?

01:08:01
Balaji Srinivasan: You-- Well, so that's actually now come back within, I'd say, the, the somewhat mainstream, um, to discuss. Um-

01:08:08
Eric Weinstein: Oh, oh, sorry. I can talk about it again?

01:08:10
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah. [laughs] Right, right. Like, like, so, so, uh, with the Wuhan lab, um, just to touch on that for a second, uh, you know, it is certainly the case... Let's say we've got two hypotheses or, I mean, there's, there can be K hypotheses, frankly, and you wanna distinguish between them, right? Um, it is certainly the case that there have been deadly natural viruses, uh, and, and infectious diseases in general that have arisen before the age of modern biologies, right? Yeah.

01:08:37
Eric Weinstein: Look, I can see where you're going. I don't, I don't wanna do it that way. Let me, let me phrase it-

01:08:41
Balaji Srinivasan: Well, let it... So... Okay, okay. So, so-

01:08:43
Eric Weinstein: No, no, let me phrase it because I d- I don't wanna waste time pr- showing that we're not crazy people. Obviously, we're not crazy people.

01:08:50
Balaji Srinivasan: [laughs]

01:08:50
Eric Weinstein: No, it's a tax-

01:08:51
Balaji Srinivasan: Sure, sure, sure

01:08:51
Eric Weinstein: ... it's a tax that I don't wanna pay, Balaji. That's the thing, is I don't wanna pay-

01:08:55
Balaji Srinivasan: Well, listen

01:08:55
Eric Weinstein: ... the tax of saying, "Well, of course w-" You know, nobody's saying X, nobody's saying Y. By the time we get done with the recitations of what nobody's saying, you know, our time will be over.

01:09:06
Balaji Srinivasan: So I, I, uh, i- I guess by my nature, when I have the time to do it, I, I like to be, uh, I like to be precise in those, in the statements that I feel that there's uncertainty about, right? So let me give the other side of it. Why is it... I think it's plausible that it was naturally occurring. I also think it is plausible or certainly not impossible that, um, you know, the, the, the... There's a, there's a scientist, Zhengli Shi, who works in Wuhan, who had co-authored papers by, uh... with, with a guy named Ralph Baric, who, uh, which were on gain-of-function research in coronaviruses. Zhengli Shi's-

01:09:43
Eric Weinstein: This is a North Carolina lab head, you know?

01:09:45
Balaji Srinivasan: North Ca- That's right. Uh, a- and by the way, I'm not, like, attacking this person or anything like that. I'm just saying that there's published research that is on essentially making-

01:09:54
Eric Weinstein: Can, can we, can we just not-

01:09:56
Balaji Srinivasan: ... viruses from the coronavirus family I know, I know. But, but I just wanna say that, like, you know, the, uh... Let me asterisk that, okay? So, so-

01:10:05
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, there's a giant asterisk. Balaji's a smart guy.

01:10:08
Balaji Srinivasan: Giant asterisk. [laughs]

01:10:08
Eric Weinstein: He's not saying any of the stupid stuff-

01:10:10
Balaji Srinivasan: Okay

01:10:10
Eric Weinstein: ... you're going to try to ascribe to him. Like it was definitely-

01:10:14
Balaji Srinivasan: Sure, sure, sure

01:10:14
Eric Weinstein: ... a synthetically engineered bioweapon let loose by a rogue faction of the Chinese Communist Party. Like, yes, he's not saying any stupid thing. I don't wanna waste our time on this.

01:10:24
Balaji Srinivasan: Sure, sure, sure. Sure. So, so what do I think... But, but I think it is, just given the context, though, I think it's important to be precise about what it, what I think it could've been. I think it could have been that, um, you know, because SARS hit China in 2003, that folks were studying SARS viruses or SARS-related viruses, um, and, uh, something got out on someone's shoe. That's very possible, where, you know, you, you were doing experiments. I mean, the, there's a, there's a coronavirus from bats in Yunnan Province that's published on GenBank that has 96% sequence homology to, uh, the, the SARS-CoV-2, the COVID-19 coronavirus on-

01:11:06
Eric Weinstein: It's the horseshoe bat stuff from some cave-

01:11:08
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah

01:11:09
Eric Weinstein: ... thousands of years ago.

01:11:09
Balaji Srinivasan: However, however, the, there, there are later pangolin-derived sequences that were published that have even higher homology. Uh, and, um, in theory... So one of the things I always think about in, in this is what do I know to be true for sure, and what can I go and check for myself if I was willing to spend enough time and money, right? And in theory, okay, if you had somebody on the ground in China, China's a big place, there's gonna be somebody who you could, uh, collaborate with or pay or what have you to go and, um, capture some... I mean, I'm not sure too many people would wanna do this, okay? But they, they could, you know, go and capture some bats or pangolins with whatever local regulations there are around that, and sequence them, right? That is a, that is a conceivable experiment you could do, right? And then you could-

01:11:56
Eric Weinstein: This, this is not an answer to the question.

01:11:59
Balaji Srinivasan: No, no, so it, it does. It does because what you wanna do is you want P of Y given X, right? Or P of H given D, right? Probability of hypothesis given data. And, um, the thing, for example, like I always think about what could falsify or, or prove, uh, in, or prove a hypothesis.

01:12:14
Eric Weinstein: Balaji, you're going down a different path. Like, my question is different.

01:12:18
Balaji Srinivasan: Go ahead.

01:12:18
Eric Weinstein: My question is there is no way that the Wuhan lab should be discounted at this point. We don't have enough information to suggest that no one should bring up the Wuhan lab because of concerns about racism or concerns about-

01:12:38
Balaji Srinivasan: Oh, yeah.

01:12:39
Eric Weinstein: Well, the, so-

01:12:39
Balaji Srinivasan: That, that, that-

01:12:40
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. So this is-

01:12:41
Balaji Srinivasan: So, so, so, right. So I think it is-

01:12:41
Eric Weinstein: ... this is where I'm having a different issue, which is I didn't, I didn't-- I'm not trying to tell you what the probability is. I'm not trying to say where it originated. I'm not trying to say what I think and don't think. I get very nervous when somebody removes one of the choices and says, "Don't-"

01:12:57
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:12:58
Eric Weinstein: Right?

01:12:58
Balaji Srinivasan: Right.

01:12:58
Eric Weinstein: And so the, the, the issue that I'm having is that's bad scientifically. When somebody says, "Well, only bad people think that the Wuhan lab might be involved," it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Something broke down, because that should be a live hypothesis, and it shouldn't carry stigma. If you're saying, "Well, definitely, you know, it's, it's the Chinese are just trying to get us, you know, and they're trying to take our stuff," that, that would be stupid. But saying, "Hey, we've got a pretty significant lab doing research pretty closely related to this topic," and it-

01:13:33
Balaji Srinivasan: Right

01:13:33
Eric Weinstein: ... could be anything from an accident to somebody was trying to grow, um, let's imagine trying to grow coronavi- virus, bat, you know, bat coronavirus tissue in human lungs and cadaver tissue. You don't know. And it's not a question-

01:13:51
Balaji Srinivasan: So let me-

01:13:52
Eric Weinstein: It's a-

01:13:52
Balaji Srinivasan: Let me give an as-

01:13:53
Eric Weinstein: Wait, wait. Let, let, let me just finish it-

01:13:54
Balaji Srinivasan: ... or asterisk on this.

01:13:54
Eric Weinstein: Finish our-

01:13:55
Balaji Srinivasan: Go, go. Okay, okay. Go ahead. Sorry.

01:13:57
Eric Weinstein: And the instant you start talking about this, you get these really weird comebacks, which is like, "Uh, I don't think anybody smart thinks that this was engineered from first principles in a lab and released as a bioweapon." You're saying, "Well, yeah, nobody said that, so why is it that that's what you're responding to?" Like, y- you-

01:14:17
Balaji Srinivasan: Right

01:14:17
Eric Weinstein: ... can feel that there's a force field around the issue of is there s- more significant Chinese responsibility in falsifying data, controlling the WHO, disguising the origins that they know about this virus, and why are we participating in some thing to aid China? I don't understand. Why, why is the US leadership so courteous to these people, the Chinese Communist Party?

01:14:46
Balaji Srinivasan: So, well, okay, so, so, so I, I think there's, there's a few interlocking things there. Um, the first is, you know, should a legitimate sc- scientific hypothesis be shamed out of public debate? I don't think so. Um, the second is, uh, y- and this is, this is somewhat difficult, but let me see if I can get there. Uh, you know, you've graded math exams, you've graded physics exams almost certainly, right? If s- if somebody gets the right answer and they just circle it at the bottom but they don't show their work, or they get the right answer and they just put pi down there or whatever, and it just happens to be right, but their, all their steps are wrong, right? Um, then that usually doesn't get credit, right? And I think there were a number of folks, uh, at least in January, who were throwing around things like, "Oh, it's like an HIV infused, you know, sequence." And so, and, uh, and because of that, because those were just kind of l- that, that's like being in the direction of it coming from a lab, though it's not the same as it. Uh, but it was just like noise and dumb and bad and, uh, and, and wrong because, like, basically if you went and looked at these sequences in, in BLAST, uh, which is, which is like a, like Google for DNA sequences or RNA or protein sequences, right? You look at it in BLAST and you could see actually no, it wasn't similar to HIV sequences at all. That was, that was a spurious kind of, uh, assertion, right? And, and so I think it is in the presence of that noise, that chaff, that it is incumbent upon those who are correct to look like signal, not just be signal, but look like it, you know, like the whole thing about Caesar's wife and, and so on, right? Um, so that's why I try to be careful. The more controversial it is, the more it could be-

01:16:28
Eric Weinstein: I understand the-

01:16:28
Balaji Srinivasan: ... misunderstood. Yeah

01:16:29
Eric Weinstein: ... I understand the impulse to being careful.

01:16:31
Balaji Srinivasan: Right.

01:16:31
Eric Weinstein: That's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is... A- and this is, this is really hard on me. In essence, the way I'm seeing this is, is that I'm trying to stand up for a missing position. Once upon a time, we had top people, professors, you know, people w- w- who'd be virologists, who would get up and they would say something approximating the truth. You know, like, "We can't know this. These are the available hypotheses based on this information. I'm leaning this way. We can't rule anything out." Here we don't have that. We've got this very different sort of a thing and which is what's confusing me, which is I'm not-

01:17:14
Balaji Srinivasan: So-

01:17:14
Eric Weinstein: I'm not used to the surgeon general sounding like a goddamn moron.

01:17:18
Balaji Srinivasan: [laughs]

01:17:19
Eric Weinstein: You know? No, no, no.

01:17:19
Balaji Srinivasan: That's true.

01:17:19
Eric Weinstein: I'm not, I'm-

01:17:20
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:17:21
Eric Weinstein: I'm not used to-

01:17:21
Balaji Srinivasan: Right

01:17:22
Eric Weinstein: ... reporters... I, like, you know, I was just watching this old vid- video of Richard Threlkeld, uh, in s- in Vie- in the Vietnam jungle getting shot at with his, the platoon he was covering, you know? And like my old notion of reporters is that they're fairly heroic, and my new notion is, is that they just don't, th- they sometimes hate the people they're covering so much that they don't pay attention to reality. They just try to contradict whatever it is that they hate. They're jealous of powerful people in politics.

01:17:53
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah.

01:17:53
Eric Weinstein: They're jealous of rich people in San Francisco. They're jealous of beautiful people, you know, somewhere else. And so it's just like, okay, fine, let's just trash people. That's my job. So I wasn't used to the idea that I couldn't turn to the surgeon general and say, "Stop lying to me." Or, or, or, or, or, you know, this is gonna come out on YouTube, and now I've got a problem. I'm building a channel on YouTube, and the CEO of YouTube says, "We won't allow videos that contradict the WHO." And my jaw is on the floor. Like, are, are you an American? Are, are, are... Who are you? And, and do, do we just have to nationalize YouTube? Do we have to-

01:18:35
Balaji Srinivasan: So, so that's exactly the wrong approach, by the way, which is-

01:18:36
Eric Weinstein: No, because you're gonna t- you're gonna say blockchain. Just put it on the blockchain, dude.

01:18:40
Balaji Srinivasan: Well, well, hold on. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna just gonna say it for, uh... Let me explain why. The issue is, um, the entire impulse that YouTube has there in terms of let's give in to the centralized political authority because it's the only one we have, is the same one that says, "Oh, nationalizing will make it better." No, it's gonna make it worse. It's gonna just basically make it political truth again, right? Um, even worse now because now it's like the national outlet of this. It basically becomes like the Chinese state-controlled media. Uh-

01:19:10
Eric Weinstein: Balaji, it's not like I disagree-

01:19:12
Balaji Srinivasan: And, uh-

01:19:12
Eric Weinstein: ... with you in the sense that-

01:19:14
Balaji Srinivasan: Go ahead

01:19:14
Eric Weinstein: ... I'm trying to say I'm standing up for a position. Like what you're saying, there are three versions of crazy here, and I wanna talk about all three of them.

01:19:24
Balaji Srinivasan: Yep.

01:19:25
Eric Weinstein: There's Balaji crazy, where the idea is that we all move our lives onto the blockchain and, uh-

01:19:31
Balaji Srinivasan: So I, I, that's a caricature. I wanna come back to that-

01:19:34
Eric Weinstein: I'm caric-

01:19:34
Balaji Srinivasan: ... caricature in a second

01:19:35
Eric Weinstein: ... I'm caricaturing all three of them.

01:19:36
Balaji Srinivasan: Sure. Okay.

01:19:37
Eric Weinstein: Okay? So y- I'm not being fair to any one of us, and I will be merciless to my-

01:19:41
Balaji Srinivasan: Fair

01:19:41
Eric Weinstein: ... myself, okay? So the Balaji version of craziness is, "Hey, don't you understand? We can all retreat into our garages. We can have sex with tardigrades, and we can, uh, form government on the blockchain, and as long as we take enough nootropics, uh, everything's gonna be awesome." Okay? That's the California version, and y- you are being saddled with that. Then there's the Eric version, which is equally, if, if not more embarrassing- "Hey, I once saw some functional institutions when I was growing up. Even though that they've all since been allowed to fall into disrepair and we have lunatics heading all of them, I still think that we can get things back together so that we can trust the CDC and the surgeon general. And, uh, if we can only get our people in office... And by the way, we're running, ri- running Biden against Trump, a 74-year-old versus a 77-year-old, which is completely insane. But nevertheless, in 2028, everything will be fine." [lip smack] Then there's, like, the establishment position, which is like, "Okay, we're wrong every four seconds. We contradict ourselves constantly. Everyone can see that we're lying more or less 24/7. But hey, you're all still forced to pay attention because these institutions still matter, because ultimately it's all backed by guns." Okay? So we, we've got one guy backed by the blockchain, one guy backed ni- by nostalgia, and one guy backed by, uh, you know, firearms.

01:21:02
Balaji Srinivasan: So the first one is exit, exit the system, the second is fix the system, and the third is the system isn't broke, right? Now, I think there's, uh, a synthesis of these, which is, um, there are certain aspects of the system that people will need to reinvent. Uh, the system does need to be fixed, but it can't be fixed in a down the middle way. That's too fortified a route. You have to go kitty-corner. You need a creative approach that is different, right? And I'll give several examples of reform that has happened by going kitty-corner, right? And you know what I mean by kitty-corner, going to a diagonal rather than straight ahead, okay? So one was the example I mentioned where Google went and made money in search, and then it went and attacked Microsoft, right? Um, the biggest example, you know, that's like civilizational example that we've had recently is the internet opening up and giving, uh, us this digital frontier where you could build without a license, you know? And that, that metaphor becomes more than a metaphor when you talk about not just Minecraft, but VR and so on. Like that d- that domain name where you can build and you have complete authority to do so is the opposite of what happens in the offline world, where you cannot build without a permit and without a this and without a that, right? Um, [lip smack] and the, this reopening of the frontier is this meta game which, um, has sucked a lot of talent out of DC because now there's an option, you know, to go into tech. Uh, not just DC, but, uh, pulled, pulled talent out of academia and out of journalism and out of even Hollywood, frankly, uh, into-

01:22:33
Eric Weinstein: Boston, New York, and Washington, DC. It's a good-

01:22:36
Balaji Srinivasan: Exactly. That's right. That's right. And so in a sense, the fact that a frontier exists and that people have moved to this digital frontier has in turn weakened legacy institutions. So it's kind of this, you know, double whammy, a minus one for them and a plus one for, for the frontier. Um, and you know, y- another third example is, you know, cryptocurrency, right? Rather than Satoshi going down the middle and trying to get a meeting with the IMF or the World Bank to say, "Hey, let's start a new currency, you know, one that you can't print," you know, had he done the down the middle kind of thing, he, he, first, he probably wouldn't have gotten a meeting. And had he gotten the meeting, he would've been laughed out of the room, right? And so a new approach was actually needed.

01:23:15
Eric Weinstein: You, you know that I tried to get prime brokerage for Bitcoin in 2010?

01:23:20
Balaji Srinivasan: Wow, really? Okay. So you were ahead of the curve.

01:23:22
Eric Weinstein: Well, yeah. But I st-

01:23:23
Balaji Srinivasan: I'm sure-

01:23:23
Eric Weinstein: I st- we couldn't get anyone to take it seriously, so it's not like I bought a hard drive and just loaded it up with Bitcoin.

01:23:30
Balaji Srinivasan: Exactly. That's right. So this is also related... I mean, there's so many other examples of this. You know, for example, in 2020, um, Google and Apple and so on, they still don't have TV channels, but they do have Apple TV and YouTube and iTunes and, you know, so on, right? It was literally easier to build and scale the internet and get it to people's houses than it was for them to go and wrestle with, you know, television comp- or, you know, like the, the entire licensing complex around television, right? And so I think that is... Yet the reform happened, right? It just wasn't... You, you didn't attack the Maginot Line head on. You know? You recognized it was a Maginot Line, and you figured out how to go around. Yeah? Um, now, uh, a f- the flip side of this, to, to bring up the Maginot Line point in a different way, when you talk about how you've been, like, amazed by, like, what's happened in the US, unfortunately, and, and, you know, this is, this is actually something I do not think most people have realized, uh, America has been invaded and defeated by the coronavirus, and that is the first successful invasion of America in modern times. I think, like, the War of 1812 is, like, the last time, you know, the British burned the White House, like serious, you know, kind of foreign damage on American soil. I mean, obviously there was Pearl Harbor, right? But, like, um, the continental United States has been so safe for so long that there has never been, like, a foreign occupier. And, uh, you know, what, what happened is this virus basically bypassed the Atlantic and the Pacific. It bypassed the nuclear umbrella and all the aircraft carriers. It bypassed all of that to go and kill, like, almost 80,000 Americans, sickened a bunch more. And we basically lack, you know, whether it's the military, whether it's our regulatory bureaucracy, whether it's a simple lack of, of, like, the, the people to get the thing under control, we, we lack the ability to stop this. And so right now, what is happening is, um, you know, like the country is essentially negotiating... I shouldn't say negotiating. It's essentially an unconditional surrender to the virus. Um, because, like, for example, the concept of, hey, everyone's gonna get it, herd immunity, that's basically throwing oneself on the mercy of God because it's not at all clear that everyone's gonna have h- you know, immunity to this virus that's, that's lifelong. Um, other coronaviruses, for example, have immunity that only drops off, uh, you know, after, uh, two or three years. There's, like, a paper on that. Um, so it's, it's not clear that letting everybody get it means that they won't be able to get it again in the future. It may just be that letting everybody get it makes this like a, almost like a temperate malaria. You know, it's just endemic in the region, and it just takes a toll every year. You know, people have talked about this being like the fifth endemic coronavirus, and it becomes, you know, cold and flu and COVID-19 season, not just cold and flu season. And so You know, the, the maginot line concept is one I think about a lot in this context where basically the entire 20th century establishment... Interestingly, by the way, the other entity, major entities that have been invaded by the coronavirus, the ones who have been doing the worst, are the other NATO countries, you know, UK, like France, Italy, Spain, Germany, and Russia. So the, the, the folks who are squaring off in the 20th century have basically been invaded and defeated by, you know, the coronavirus so far. And when I say defeated, like the occupation is, is going to begin, and, uh, and, and that's not gonna be pleasant. People are, are fooling themselves and thinking it's gonna be pleasant. It's not gonna be pleasant. Anyway, I got on that because, you know, we were just kind of talking about maginot lines and, and moving around them. But recognizing that something that seems impregnable isn't if you change, you know, your, your, your mode is, is I think really important. You change, you change your point of view. Go ahead.

01:27:24
Eric Weinstein: Well, so I sort of like this, um, but I also feel like... [sighs] I feel like I don't even understand where we are, and maybe the ideiology that I want to entertain is, is that I have a certain kind of weakness of mind, that I'm very good at opposing institutions, um, because I know how they work, but I'm not used to an institution being this wrong, like blatantly s... You know, when I start seeing "Science and Nature" talking about things that are completely insane in social justice theory, and I just think like, "Okay, whatever this thing is, it's broken through to 'Science and Nature.' It's invaded Harvard, Princeton, Rockefeller University." Um, this inability to think, uh, seems to be attacking everything institutional, and I would really say that that's the major thing that invaded us. It wasn't the virus because, you know-

01:28:26
Balaji Srinivasan: Right.

01:28:27
Eric Weinstein: Um-

01:28:27
Balaji Srinivasan: Right.

01:28:28
Eric Weinstein: What, what's really invaded us is that everything institutional is playing host to this particular kind of establishment stupidity at the moment, and there... In the old days, we had Noam Chomskys inside of the establishment. Now we're down to, like, our last Noam Chomsky. So it used to be that it was very tough for everything to go this dumb because of the number of smart iconoclasts who sat in official chairs. And, like, what I see now is, is that effectively there are no people who are willing to stand up and say, "This is insanity."

01:29:08
Balaji Srinivasan: Well, so here's a couple of thoughts on that. I mean, I think that, um, in terms of history, a comparable period in some ways is, um... I mean, the Cultural Revolution, you know, from '66 to '76 was much more violent than, you know, the recent wokeness i-i-in the US. But there were some similarities in the sense that, um, Tsinghua, for example, which is like the Chinese MIT, was literally occupied by rival gangs of, you know, machine gun-toting students and, you know, they were shooting each other over some point of, you know, Maoist theory, right? Um, woke and woker basically over there, right? And, uh, I think a very important thing for folks to understand, actually Dalio had a very similar comment, like he had a similar, I think, mental model. Nobody has lived through anything like this in the US, but people have in history and they have in other places, and that's, that's what's useful to really read, like the history of other places and other times. Um, obviously history is of other times, but, you know, meaning non-American history. And, you know, many of the folks who have landed in the US, um, whether, uh, you know, from South America or from, you know, Central America or Iran, Russia, Eastern Europe, India, China, Korea, et cetera, et cetera, have been leaving economic or political instability, often communism or in the case of India, socialism, or in the case of Iran, Islamic fundamentalism, and they've been part of functioning societies. Like, you know, Cuba, for example, under Batista was, you know, a flawed but actually relatively well-off country, and then it all just went completely to hell, right? Same with, you know, uh, so many countries like, um, you know, when, when, when communist revolutions come to town, uh, they can go from decent levels, you know, like Venezuela, for example, prior to, you know, Chavismo, uh, to, to, you know, starvation. And so other places have seen that kind of fall, and, uh... You know, like how far do we have to fall? We have, we still have a ways to go. Uh, and, and I think that it's useful to think about these other countries and, and figure out how bad it could get. But l- l- why don't we come back to that point? Go ahead.

01:31:38
Eric Weinstein: So I-- Yeah, look, I, I, I don't want this to be... W- we can explore why we're getting knocked over by a feather, um, but, uh, maybe what I'd rather do is to use the COVID situation and your different lens on it, uh-

01:31:55
Balaji Srinivasan: How did we get back up?

01:31:56
Eric Weinstein: ... to ill- to illustrate sort of where we are. So the, the kind of... Here's some of the questions that are on my mind.

01:32:01
Balaji Srinivasan: Sure.

01:32:02
Eric Weinstein: What is the real endgame of this? Where are we really? When, when, when people are talking about reopening back to normal, um, I have the feeling that almost none of this stuff makes sense. And, you know, th- my, my take on flatten the curve was that we were caught with our, with our pants down with respect to preparedness, and so we were trying to av- avoid deaths of accountability, which would be triage deaths. So then, you know, the issue was that the limbo bar was so low because we didn't want people dying to show that we were completely incompetent, so everybody should stay home so that we don't have deaths due to triage. As opposed to deaths due to the coronavirus. I believe that a lot of what we're hearing in terms of how we're gonna come back or when there's going to be a vaccine, uh, nobody really knows when there's gonna be a vaccine or how that-- what, what that's gonna look like. What is the grown-up mature perspective on the possible scenarios to- towards, uh, normalization?

01:33:12
Balaji Srinivasan: So I think the grown-up mature perspective is, um, A, the virus is actually serious, um, and, uh, I can, I can go into why. Uh, basically, it's not just mortality, though mortality is quite high, but it's morbidity that is say, a lot of people are actually getting sick for weeks or even months, um, and, uh, and that doesn't show up in death statistics.

01:33:37
Eric Weinstein: So g- let's just pause there 'cause I think this is super important.

01:33:40
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah.

01:33:40
Eric Weinstein: So Balaji, here's something that you could really do that would, I think, be very helpful to me. I would like to understand what are the basic scenarios that may be playing out if, um, if our public officials were able to speak to us truthfully, uh, what would they be saying if, if, if political economy and our relationship with China and, uh, issues having to do with questions about preparedness and our supply chains weren't, uh, deranging everything? What do you think the various scenarios are, more or less, in terms of the universality classes of what might happen next?

01:34:19
Balaji Srinivasan: [lip smack] So, uh, may- maybe I'll say something you may not agree with, which is I think, um, if we're being like truthful, uh, you know, in the public square, um, folks would say, uh, you know, in many dimensions, America's actually behind. Um, it thinks it's ahead, but it's behind, uh, which is similar to, you know, Blockbuster or Barnes & Nobles or BlackBerry or other, you know, like once powerful entities that were disrupted by something that they didn't, they didn't see coming or didn't understand. And, um, what this virus has done is basically i- it has shown that America can't physically innovate anymore, or at least cannot do so quickly enough or at, um, any scale above an individual or a corporate level. It can't coordinate at the level of a town or a city or a state, let alone a country. Um, and, uh, it can, it can blow things up in other places, but building is harder than blowing something up. And so first thing is America's actually behind. I actually... You know, it's funny, I did a Twitter poll on this for what that's worth. You know, it's not a representative sample, but it's, it's really a survey of the folks who are kind of in my, you know, my following or what have you. And I said, um, "Is America A, ahead, B, behind, or C, tied with China for in- for physical innovation? Um, and, uh, or rather, is China ahead?" And, and 51% said China was ahead, uh, in this little, you know, non-scientific poll for what it's worth, again, but just of, of folks who are in tech and of, of folks who would follow me on Twitter or what have you. Um, and, uh, you know, the other question I asked was, um, A... It's a kind of two-part question. A, are you an American or not? And B, do you think the US is still the world's undisputed number one superpower? And again, about, um, so, uh, roughly about half of the Americans said it is and half isn't, and same for the rest of the world. Those maybe about like 55 or 60/40 for the Americans and, and maybe, uh, 45/55 the other-- for the rest of the world. And so I think these are things which if you're, if you're being honest with the US, um, you wanna start thinking about it in terms of [lip smack] like a great company, um, or a great country that missed a few steps and that is not as far as he- ahead as people think, and that, uh, you know, that, that could, that could, you know, fall further and maybe will fall further, you know, given the corona crisis, uh, and, and needs to realize that and needs to rebuild. Um, so... And I think like just saying that, uh, on a, on a... The problem with this is people will not receive a dispassionate analysis of strengths and weaknesses as constructive criticism. They'll say, "Oh my God, why do you hate this or hate that? Why do you hate the country or this?" That's ig- that's not at all where it's coming from. It's a, it's a great country. It's given, you know, like my family and, and, you know, a lot of people a lot. Um, however, uh, you know, it's, it's kind of like, uh, Japan before the Meiji Restoration or China before Deng Xiaoping fixed it, or, you know, the Soviet Union in, in the '80s in some ways. So n- you know, I'm not saying that the US is as bad as the Soviet Union or, or Maoist China. Um, or, uh, or, or frankly, you know, Microsoft, uh, under Steve Ballmer. It's basically in a stagnation that it needs to get out of. And Peter has talked about this, but it's now very clear that the consequence of not being able to innovate in the physical world has led to this, and that's one of the big things. The second big thing is the smart people, um, folks with technical and scientific ability are simply not steering the ship, and thus you have... You know, that you asked, "Okay, which of- official is gonna give a straight answer?" Those folks don't have the technical ability to give a straight answer. Um, it's, it's not like, you know, you, you're on the board and you can tell-- ask the CEO, "Hey, give me the figures on X, Y, and Z by W date." Right? Like you can, you can expect a tech CEO to be on top of their metrics, um, because they have to be to survive as a company. Uh, but you know, our current government of the United States is not like the founder CEO. It's not the person who inherited from them. It's not the third generation. It's like, you know, the, the 40th generation. Um, you know, for example, the mayor of New York wouldn't be able to build the NYPD from scratch, you know? Uh, but somebody did at some point. They did staff that unit and they gave it tasks and they, uh, you know, they, they, they figured out the esprit de corps and, and, you know, rules of... Not, not exactly rules of engagement, but basically-

01:39:01
Eric Weinstein: But Balaji-

01:39:01
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah. Go ahead

01:39:01
Eric Weinstein: ... John F. Kennedy wasn't one of our founding fathers, nor was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

01:39:06
Balaji Srinivasan: No. Right. But, but the thing is that at a certain point when you go enough generations, you lose that. Enough generations away-

01:39:14
Eric Weinstein: We, we went enough generations.

01:39:16
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah.

01:39:16
Eric Weinstein: It was still working.

01:39:18
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah, but, but it's not anymore.

01:39:20
Eric Weinstein: Right. I, I agree with... I mean, I, I see us as dying from a very mysterious ailment, which is that we got two bad generations that do not give a shit about the future and are not smart enough or honest enough to recognize that what they're doing is stealing from their own children.

01:39:36
Balaji Srinivasan: You know, FDR put some of that stuff in place, right? Social Security and, and whatnot. Um, and, and, you know, there's a, there's a saying that, uh, there's a great deal of ruin in a nation, and I would agree there's a great deal of ruin in a nation. Do, do you know where that's from? It's like in, in Britain, someone s- someone said to a prime minister, "Oh, this will be..." Or to someone in government. I don't know if it's a prime minister, but someone in government. "Oh, this will be the ruin of the nation." And, and he turned to the guy and he said very wisely, "Well, there's a great deal of ruin in a nation," meaning calm down, hold your horses. Like, eh, lots of stuff breaks, but, you know, we'll figure it out. But here's the thing. There's a great deal of ruin in a nation, but not an infinite amount. Um, you could well say that Cuba was ruined by, you know, the, uh, Castro's revolution or that Iran was, you know, ruined for a, for a generation by, you know, the, the Islamic Revolution. Um, countries do get messed up. And, um, it's, it's one of these things where, uh, you know, if, if you were... wanted to be really provocative about it, and you... And this is, this... We'll have to see where things land up in a few years. You could say 1492 to 2020. You could say basically this is the first time that the number one power in the world is, uh, a Western country that, um, has, has sort of been invaded and defeated. You know, like, uh, let's say like Portugal, Spain, um, the UK, France, uh, Russia, and then the United States. Um, the number one, you know, or in some cases tied for number one powers in the world, uh, have been Western for a long time. And you can argue Russia, it's Eastern, you know, or Western, that people always argue about its identity in that way. But, um, you know, now it's something where it's no longer, I think, the undisputed number one. And if you want to regain that, first you have to realize that you don't have it anymore. Um, you can't, you can't just like declare victory, mission accomplished over corona while it rampages through the country and, and there's green zones in other countries. You have to realize that actually it's... Yeah, go ahead.

01:41:36
Eric Weinstein: L- let's, let's get back to scenarios that the virus will take, and then we'll come back to whether or not the real issue is, is that our leaders aren't smart enough to deliver information about spike proteins or something, you know?

01:41:50
Balaji Srinivasan: It's, it's not just technical ability, though. That's the thing is that's easy to quantify. It's also like managerial ability and leadership ability. Like people are selected, you know... Like elections select for people who are good actors, not necessarily good leaders. And, um, you know, you can, you can play act at being, uh, uh, you know, a, a mayor or a governor or a leader of some kind as opposed to someone... Right? Go ahead.

01:42:14
Eric Weinstein: Let- so l- let's assume that there's some issue that maybe somehow we don't have people smart enough to convey news from experts to the general public. But I, I don't wanna get infinitely caught up on that. What am I not getting-

01:42:30
Balaji Srinivasan: Okay

01:42:30
Eric Weinstein: ... about this virus? Like-

01:42:33
Balaji Srinivasan: What do we know about this virus? I'm sorry.

01:42:35
Eric Weinstein: What am I not getting?

01:42:36
Balaji Srinivasan: Go ahead.

01:42:36
Eric Weinstein: What are the likely scenarios for how we get-

01:42:39
Balaji Srinivasan: Okay

01:42:39
Eric Weinstein: ... to, to something where people aren't asking, "Can I come out of my house yet?" I mean, obviously at some level it could become normal that everybody shelters in place ad infinitum. It could become normal that we just say F it, and we throw caution to the wind, and we all go, uh, you know, to, on spring break in Florida. It could be that we come up with some sort of managed titration where we titrate back into the world, but nothing ever goes back to the way it was. What are the most likely scenarios that a competent and honest government would be able to level with us about if that was where we were w- with a smarter population and smarter government to boot?

01:43:20
Balaji Srinivasan: So, you know, first thing I would say is, uh, I think, you know, i- if you... It's very... There's a great website called endcoronavirus.org by guys, uh, out of, out of the Northeast, I think, um, you know, out of, uh... I think they're affiliated with Harvard. Um, and, uh, it basically shows that many countries have managed to get the virus under control, basically, um, you know, through a combination of not just lockdown, but, uh, central quarantine, testing, uh, border control, um, you know, et cetera, et cetera.

01:43:50
Eric Weinstein: What does it mean to get the virus under control?

01:43:54
Balaji Srinivasan: Two things. It means, number one, that daily new cases are either zero or very close to that. And that's, by the way, the explicit goal of the head of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, the prime minister of Singapore, is to get new cases to zero, number one. And then number two, to keep the, uh, RT reproduction number, uh, below one in the event that it does arise again. Um, and so, so basically keep it down and have it stay down, right? And for that to happen, you need to have, uh, like not just a coordinated society, um, but a coordinated state. You know, you need both society and the state to work together. There's some exceptions to this, I would say. Maybe I shouldn't say need. Hong Kong is arguably a counterexample where people will say society did it but the state didn't, right? Um, but, uh, I think the first thing is it is possible to get the virus under control. It is not an inevitability that it goes to 100%. I, it's, I think it's an important point. Now, one can counter-argue as to, okay, how expensive is it to do that forever, right? Will these green zones be able to keep themselves green? And I kinda think they will, uh, or at least many of them will, uh, because once you've gotten cases down to zero and you're sort of woke to the virus and you've set up your defenses, uh, I, I can get into what those defenses are technologically and societally, because I don't think people in the West have really followed it too much. Should I talk about that? Okay. So, um, here's, here's just some of the things folks are doing, um-

01:45:28
Eric Weinstein: And you might wanna talk about green zones. Talk about the zones as well.

01:45:31
Balaji Srinivasan: Red-- Yeah. Let me define it, right? So, so a green zone is a place with comprehensive testing that has no new cases in, let's say, the last two weeks, okay? Um, you could change the time parameter. You could say four weeks or something, but conceptually, that's right. Uh, and it also keeps the virus from coming back up, so the reproduction number stays below one in the event that there is a flare-up. Uh, a red zone is everywhere else, and there's degrees of green and red. Um, and essentially, the new developed world and developing world, I think, is going to be green zones and red zones. And that is to say talent and capital will prefer to be in green zones and to avoid or get out of red zones if they, if it can. Um, [lip smack] and, and the reason for that is several-fold. Uh, first is, like, the, you know... and this is a premise which I'm, I'm, I'm surprised that I still have to argue it in May, but the virus is serious. And, um, you know, at, at first you might think, "Oh, well, look at the death counts. Of course people would agree it's serious." Um, but people will throw up various, uh, in, in my view, spurious objections. The most, I think, intelligent objection is, yes, there's 80,000 deaths in the US, there's hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide, but they're concentrated in older people and people with preexisting conditions, and therefore, uh, you know, much of the population isn't at risk, so let them out of lockdown, go back to work. It's not a big deal, right? Uh, for most people. My counterargument to that would basically be, all right, um, other countries', uh, lockdown was just one component of what they did. It, it was, it was an important component, but the US is sort of in a cargo cult lockdown. Number two is, um, the, there's a lot of folks, uh, we don't know the exact number, but there's many folks under age 50 who've had very serious conditions, uh, that are not lethal. They're not dead. Um, they may al- not always be hospitalized, but they're serious. And, uh, you know, whether you wanna believe WHO or not, WHO reported, like, something like 19% of people have a severe or critical condition, whereas 80% are mild. Um, if that maps to the experienced severity that folks, uh, you know, uh, that I've, that I've seen, and people I know have had very severe cases. They're not dead, they're not hospitalized, but it's the worst illness they've had in their lives. They've had very long convalescences, you know, weeks to months, like eight weeks or so. Joe Rogan interviewed someone on this, right?

01:47:54
Eric Weinstein: Are they permanent-

01:47:54
Balaji Srinivasan: Okay.

01:47:54
Eric Weinstein: Are they permanently impaired? For example, lung tissue-

01:47:57
Balaji Srinivasan: Great question

01:47:58
Eric Weinstein: ... that never comes back.

01:48:00
Balaji Srinivasan: Great question. Um, so I tweeted on this in March, actually. Um, SARS and MERS, there are studies. So there's a, uh, group out of, uh, UCLA and I think David Geffen School of Medicine, um, UCLA and USC, that published a paper saying, uh, we need longitudinal monitoring of people who have recovered from COVID-19 to see if they have permanent lung damage, because some, uh, a good chunk of folks with SARS and MERS did. Um, so, you know, the thing about the long term is we'll only know it in the long term, but I do think we should be doing longitudinal studies of patients. We should be quantifying morbidity better, not just mortality. Yes, we need to know death statistics across demographics. Very important. But we also need to know things like self-reported severity, uh, duration of illness, length of convalescence, meaning recovery after illness, um, self-reported recurrence of symptoms, uh, and, um, you know, then things like CT scans, like at, you know, 30- and 60- and 90-day intervals and other kinds of things. Like, uh, do, are people getting back? And here's the issue, is even if it's just a ser- and I say "just" in quotes, but just a very serious illness which, um, knocks out, you know, with some probability, healthy 30- and 40-year-olds for eight weeks or 10 weeks, that's something where, you know, i- if, if, if you had a choice, you would avoid an area where you could get that very easily. Your team would avoid an area. They would not... You would not be able to recruit people to such a city very easily, um, if, if they had a choice of an equivalent job somewhere else. And, uh, so, you know, what, what, what that does is it turns, you know, the first thing in real estate from location, location, location to infection, infection, infection. Um, it's deeper than that as well. [lip smack] People think, "Oh, you know, end the lockdowns," but end the lockdowns doesn't by its own bring back the market. One way of thinking about it is, you know, we, we, earlier we made the, uh, analogy to an invasion, right? An invasion by a virus. There's another analogy I'm gonna give, which is in terms of a public utility. Um, our society is explicitly premised on electrical power. That is to say, you know, there's, there's power outlets for, for all kinds of stuff, and if the power goes out, we wouldn't tell people, "Oh, just bull through it," right? Because you need to charge your computer. And, you know, you can't tell a restaurant, "Oh, just bull through it." If their oven doesn't work, they're not gonna be able to serve too many customers. Maybe they can cobble a salad together, but they're operating way below capacity. They won't be able to, you know, handle any apps. The, their demand will be way down in lots of ways. People won't be able to get there. And, um, and they won't be able to serve them. Supply will also be down. And so, uh, the, the point I'm making is our society is also implicitly premised, just like it's explicitly premised on power as well as water, internet, roads, it's implicitly premised on the absence of serious infectious, uh, uh, disease from public venues. Uh, and the thing is that 50 years ago, this was understood to be a big deal. That is to say, you know, I tweeted something on the conquest of public health, uh, or conquest of infectious diseases, you know, a bicentennial review. It was understood that, you know, getting, you know, cholera and malaria and stuff like that under control and turning them into non-issues was a massive achievement. And, uh, that was, that was something that was a huge social and technological achievement of coordination.

01:51:34
Eric Weinstein: Well, even like the banishing of malaria from Southern Europe and the Southern United States, you know, it led us to think in terms of, well, malaria cannot be an American problem or an Italian problem.

01:51:47
Balaji Srinivasan: Yes. Bingo. That's exactly right. So the, the, the issue is that, um, power and water are utilities that are noticeable by their presence, but public health is noticeable by its absence. And so, you know, just like, like a, an electromagnetic pulse would mean the power has gone out in America, this is like the health has gone out in America. And so what, what that means is you can't just tell a restaurant, "Bull through this," okay? 'Cause here's what happens. First, like California put out these guidelines for in-person restaurants how to reopen. I'm just using restaurants as a working example 'cause many of the things, you know, apply there. Okay. First, these guidelines essentially expect Joe's Diner to implement bio-defense mode. Okay? It's like 12 pages of like the most ridiculous requirements. Get hand sanitizer, get this. You can't even buy that stuff. Um, or if you can, it's expensive. So, so first is the, the... These restaurants are hit with new guidelines. They're not trained or skilled in this kind of thing. They're, they're great at cooking food, not like sanitizing a, a place to, to, to... for a deadly virus. Uh, number two is it's a new tax on them because they need to buy all this equipment and train their workers. Number three, because of social distancing, they have to space their tables out so they have less revenue that way. It's the opposite of a crowded restaurant, right? Um, number four, uh, they have fewer customers because half their customer base or whatever fraction, basically like having the uncontrolled virus means, "Hey, I'm risking it every time I walk down." And, um, this is something that the folks who are arguing, "Oh, the virus isn't that bad because the mortality rate's... You know, it's not killing 50% of people," right? And my argument is, okay, yeah, sure, relative to death, you can say anything is not a big deal, right? Death is the worst outcome, right? But relative to a cup of coffee or, you know, a slice of cheesecake or whatever at the local, you know, cafe, uh, you know, 10 weeks of serious illness is not, um, something that you wanna casually risk for that. The same mo- You know, yes, okay, you can argue the virus isn't as bad as dying. Fine. But it's also, you know, this consumer benefit you're offering is not as good as the risk of, you know, where it is in the middle, right? And, and so, you know, one way of conceptualizing that is, and, you know, I'm not, I'm not just like a economic, um, determinist by any means, but for those people who are in the language of economics, okay, let's say that the virus would, you know, on, on average do $10,000 of damage to you. Um, for example, it puts you out of work for that many weeks. You make $50,000 a year, it puts you out of work for 10 weeks, okay? Um, so let's say it does $10,000 of damage in the event of a serious case, um, and you have, uh, a 5% chance of getting the virus and a 30% chance conditional on getting the virus of having a serious case, and then it'll cost you $10,000 for 10 weeks of sickness. Okay. That is, um, 5% times 30% times 10,000, that's $150 cost that is now being imposed on every interaction that has a chance of getting the virus, right? And that's not worth it for many kinds of things. And I'm not saying that people will calculate that numerically and explicitly, but implicitly I think that that is gonna be a tax on a lot of economic behavior. For that many weeks. You make $50,000 a year, it puts you out of work for 10 weeks, okay? Um, so let's say it does $10,000 of damage in the event of a serious case, um, and you have, uh, a 5% chance of getting the virus and a 30% chance conditional on getting the virus of having a serious case, and then it'll cost you $10,000 for 10 weeks of sickness. Okay. That is, um, 5% times 30% times 10,000, that's $150 cost that is now being imposed on every interaction that has a chance of getting the virus, right? And that's not worth it for many kinds of things. And I'm not saying that people will calculate that numerically and explicitly, but implicitly I think that that is gonna be a tax on a lot of economic behavior. Go ahead.

01:55:51
Eric Weinstein: So I, I like the general framework here, but I think we're, we're sort of skipping a step, which is that most of us wanna know what this is gonna look like.

01:55:59
Balaji Srinivasan: Ah.

01:55:59
Eric Weinstein: So in a, in a green zone, for example. So, uh, let's say that I buy into your red zone, green zone thing, thing. In a green zone, am I shaking hands with people I meet?

01:56:13
Balaji Srinivasan: No. You're, you're, you're probably... Like, you're probably having some degree of social distancing. Well, okay, I'll put it like this.

01:56:22
Eric Weinstein: Well, well-

01:56:22
Balaji Srinivasan: I think, I think you're more likely to shake hands with somebody in a green zone, certainly. But, um, but I s- I think that on balance until, um, until... Smart people will probably continue to take precautions even in green zones. But, um, I think that you'd be more likely to shake hands or, or go to a restaurant in a green zone certainly than a red zone.

01:56:45
Eric Weinstein: And in my green zone, um, let's say five years from now, am I wearing a mask constantly when I'm outdoors?

01:56:52
Balaji Srinivasan: So the, there's major branch points here, and so here's some of the key variables, right? The first is, um, do we get a drug or vaccine ever for this, okay? Um, and... Oh, 'cause there's some things, you know, HIV is, I mean, we've turned into a chronic disease, but we haven't cured it, okay? Um, so Uh, I'm not saying this is-- I, I, we don't know yet. People thought there was gonna be an HIV vaccine very quickly. There's good reason. Peter Kolchinsky actually has a great article in "City Journal" on the case for why you, you should get a coronavirus vaccine. Um, he thinks it is possible. It's been done in other animals and, and so on. So that's, that's important. Um, on the other hand, y- nothing's ever certain. So, uh, especially in science, you're talking about technological innovation, something that has not been done, so it's hard to do it on a schedule. Um, so A is, is, is there a drug or a vaccine? And a drug meaning something that knocks it down to a basic non-issue, right? That doesn't have to cure it completely, but may- knocks it down. Is there a drug or a vaccine, number one, and if so, how fast does it arrive, right? And, um, [lip smack] the, uh, there's this Warp Speed project that's being announced. I mean, maybe they'll get something out there. Uh, we'll, we'll see what happens. Certainly like-

01:58:07
Eric Weinstein: Have you seen the list of people who's in it?

01:58:10
Balaji Srinivasan: Um, no. Actually, I, I d- I didn't look at that yet.

01:58:13
Eric Weinstein: Can I ask you a question on that, just-

01:58:15
Balaji Srinivasan: Sure. Sure

01:58:15
Eric Weinstein: ... as an intermediate? When you think about the smart people you're talking to relative to this virus-

01:58:23
Balaji Srinivasan: Mm-hmm

01:58:23
Eric Weinstein: ... technical, technically capable people, people who can think well outside the box-

01:58:28
Balaji Srinivasan: Look at me. Look at me

01:58:28
Eric Weinstein: ... operate there, execute, are you aware of these people being herded up by our national government and put in service of the public health?

01:58:41
Balaji Srinivasan: Um, so there was a "Wall Street Journal" article saying that there's, um, like a, like a-

01:58:47
Eric Weinstein: Um, let's talk about a part, like a-

01:58:49
Balaji Srinivasan: Like that secret vaccine

01:58:49
Eric Weinstein: No, I wanna talk about informal things that we're all doing to connect up. Right. Like I, I have a very simple metric- No, I, I hear the thrust of your, the thrust of your-

01:58:57
Balaji Srinivasan: The thrust of your question is, uh, you know, I, I would say no. Um, like there's, there's informal connections and so on and so forth, but there's nothing, uh, that, uh... you know, and again, I need to look at Warp Speed. It, I think it just came out like, uh, you know, yesterday, so I just have to read about it.

01:59:10
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yesterday. I have to read about it. Apology.

01:59:11
Balaji Srinivasan: Um, go ahead.

01:59:13
Eric Weinstein: It's not work... The question is different. A- and I guess, you know, part of the problem is, is that it, it feels to me like nobody has the right emotional valence, and so I'll just say it very starkly. Um, the instantaneous thing to do was to identify a group of people who were early or are thought of, I don't know, highly by people who are early, and get them all tested, tell them to report to central facilities, put them in some giant dorm with a marine at the barrack, you know, at the, at the, at the entrance. Get-- make sure that you print up, uh, security, you know, expedite security clearances and have them go crazy. Right. No, like a movie-like thing. What?

01:59:57
Balaji Srinivasan: Like, like, uh, kind of out of a movie.

02:00:00
Eric Weinstein: No, not kind of out of a movie. Kind of out of the World War II era.

02:00:03
Balaji Srinivasan: Right. Right. So I mean, so it's, might as well be out of a movie. [chuckles]

02:00:07
Eric Weinstein: No.

02:00:08
Balaji Srinivasan: Go ahead.

02:00:08
Eric Weinstein: Right. Yeah, but like I don't, I saw that move and I didn't, and I, and I rejected it.

02:00:12
Balaji Srinivasan: Okay.

02:00:12
Eric Weinstein: No.

02:00:13
Balaji Srinivasan: Go ahead.

02:00:13
Eric Weinstein: This is like what smart people do when they're not stupid. I mean, I, I don't know how to say this politely, but-

02:00:19
Balaji Srinivasan: Right.

02:00:19
Eric Weinstein: Right ... I, I know tons of people who should have been called, and I kept asking, "Are you called?" And they'd say things like, "No, we're, we're passing our best thoughts to somebody who might be close to somebody on the security council." And my thought was, you're not in Washington, D.C., you're not at whiteboards. Nobody told you to tell your family you're gonna be gone for three months. Like, we didn't do anything smart.

02:00:49
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah. So, so, you know, I tweeted this, but basically, um, amazingly, the US today reminds me of the India of my youth in the sense of, you know, India is a country with a lot of smart people that just couldn't get it together at a societal level for a long, long, long time. Um, and now amazingly, I would actually argue despi- even though it's, it's got a serious outbreak and so on, um, [lip smack] you know, I- India, I think when, when... You know, this is a prediction and I, and I, I would not call it 100% or anything like that. I could be proven wrong in six months to a year. My overall feeling is India is punching above its weight, um, in this whole crisis, and has had a higher state capacity than the US over this, which is amazing to me. Um, where-

02:01:39
Eric Weinstein: Knowing India, it's astounding.

02:01:40
Balaji Srinivasan: Knowing India, it's astounding, right? Like it's-

02:01:43
Eric Weinstein: It's astounding.

02:01:44
Balaji Srinivasan: It's astounding. And India's actually done a better job than frankly, maybe, you know, the France, Italy, the UK. Like it's-

02:01:50
Eric Weinstein: I don't, I don't even wanna get into-

02:01:51
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah

02:01:51
Eric Weinstein: ... whether they did a good job or a bad job. When I-- You know, I mean, both you and I have a fair amount of interaction with India. When I heard that India was gonna actually try to coordinate like sheltering in place, I thought, "What do you think you are, Luxembourg?" I mean- Right, right, right, right. But-

02:02:06
Balaji Srinivasan: But they've actually... So they didn't just do that. They've shipped like a national telemedicine app with contact tracing. I mean, it has bugs and so on, but like, you know, it's, it's out there. Uh, it's-- which no other Western democracy, to my knowledge, has, at least... You know, maybe Estonia has something, but not a large Western democracy. Um, it, they, they got, uh... You know, in, I remember in March, I posted a SoundCloud, um, where every single Indian on a, when they picked up the phone to call somebody, there was a 30-second public health announcement played with a consistent set of talking points from the government. Um, you know, the, the prime minister never said, "Oh, it's just the flu," or anything like that. They were taking it seriously from the beginning. They sealed the border to such an extent that, you know, e- even citizens found it hard to get back in, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, like they, they did a lot of the blocking and tackling that I was just like, "What?" I was, I was honestly stunned, um, because India has come so far, and then the US has come far in the opposite direction. Uh, do I have an explanation for it? It-- You, you can't give a technological determinist explanation, or at least not, not an obvious one, because India and China have been rising over the same period that the US and UK and Italy and so on have been falling. Um- I think you, you sort of have to argue it from just like a civilizational arc standpoint, you know? Just like empires rise and they fall, you know? Maybe, uh, you could-- You can give other deterministic arguments.

02:03:34
Eric Weinstein: You and I are in different places about this. I just-

02:03:37
Balaji Srinivasan: Go ahead. Go ahead

02:03:37
Eric Weinstein: ... my feeling is like, okay, so we got stuck with, you know, the modern Republican and Democratic Party leadership and like, you know, 30 people are gonna take down one of the greatest national experiments in the history of the world.

02:03:52
Balaji Srinivasan: Ah, so you think of it as a small-- Okay, you think if you just change out 30 people, you could fix it. Is that, is that your mental block? 'Cause I think that's a really-- It's like-

02:03:59
Eric Weinstein: No

02:04:00
Balaji Srinivasan: ... is that the first move?

02:04:01
Eric Weinstein: My model is, is that we got hit with something almost 50 years ago, which is this economic anomaly.

02:04:08
Balaji Srinivasan: 1971?

02:04:09
Eric Weinstein: And that we then developed a culture of, uh, of covering up the economic anomaly that has run its course after 50 years. But my belief about that was that, um, you know, about when we got the Clintons in 1992, we took a really dangerous turn towards sophisticated-sounding total bullshit. Like, I, I really believe that the-- You, you know, Reagan, you could sort of see that they were trying to restart the, the miracle, and maybe all of the mergers and acquisitions and getting rid of antitrust and dereg and all that kind of stuff was thought that it might work, and then realized, okay, well, maybe it doesn't work well enough to restart growth, but it's good enough to, uh, get some of us rich at the expense of some of the rest of us. And then the Clintons just took that and, you know, raised it to some really high power. And now we're l- we're left with a situation where we can't reboot from anything because roughly speaking, I don't know, the people that I would want in control of this thing are like people on the internet. They're, they're like you. I mean, who the hell are you? I don't know. But like, you know, when I, when I get confused about where we are, I don't call up the Centers for Disease Control and I say, "Walk me through this," or, "Dear WHO," um, you know, "explain how this all makes sense." I, I call up people who are in these weird off the beaten path technical, um, centers, you know? And, and, and that is a failure of our society. So what my model is, different from most of the rest of yours, is that I just think the important thing is to tell Hillary Clinton and all of her friends to get up out of their chairs and move. Like, we can't have the dumb people leading the country. We can't have Donald Trump as the president bungling this this badly. And then we get into this really weird thing where we've got like the Trumpies who can't stand the fact that they can see that The New York Times is full of nonsense and that the r- Democratic Party is filled with nonsense, which they're quite, quite accurate about. Or then you get y- you know, all of the Democrats and the academics are like, "Oh my God, you're," you know, "you're opening us up to crazy anti-vaxxers and gun nuts," you know? And it's like, okay, well, first of all, whoever you guys are, don't you realize that this is a pandemic and this is the time to get all of the weak people, the stupid people, the non-creative people, the conventional people out of the chairs. And there's like a religion about you can't say that. Well, who would you put in the chairs and why are your friends better than-- It's like, look, I guarantee you that if you ask the virology community who are the 10 best virologists in the world, you get a fair amount of agreement. And the key thing that we don't have is we don't have people who know that they have a job the next week if they speak the truth, or that they can get grants the next week. But I wanted to c-continue to get back on this other topic, which is what does it look like if you manage everything well? Do we ever go back to hugging strangers when we meet them? Do we ever go back to expecting that we're gonna walk down the street and not see face masks? Do we-- It-- Because you see, even if we get these vaccines for this biology, it's really the case that we forgot what pathogens were. You know?

02:07:49
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah.

02:07:49
Eric Weinstein: We, we, we've had this very long-- Like, you know, you're younger than I am, and I, I at least had the Hong Kong flu as a, as a, as a very young kid. Um, and you know, most people don't even remember that there was a Hong Kong flu in the late '60s. And that, that sense that swimming pools were a dangerous place during the polio epidemic, that, you know, we, we've been through this stuff, and I'm not sure that this is the disease that... Maybe we'll defeat this one, you know? But there's still some different thing, which is are we gonna continue to have, um, you know, gain-of-function research? Are we gonna continue to have biosafety level four labs all over the world doing whatever the, it is that they do? Are we going to continue to be able to meet each other as strangers? Are-- Is this a permanent cultural shift? Is it-- I mean, I guess what I'm asking is what is the likely trajectory for this particular disease?

02:08:49
Balaji Srinivasan: So, um, so I, y- obviously predicting the future is challenging, but here-- Let me give different scenarios, and I'll give some probability estimates or whatever. Um, so I think the biggest branch point is, uh, as I mentioned before, like, uh, A, is there a drug or vaccine developed, and then B, how fast? Um, and obviously, you know, in the event that some miracle cure comes out, uh, tomorrow, um, and it's scaled to billions of people, uh, well, even then, I still think you've, you've still got a giant crisis on your hands because a lot of these jobs have basically been destroyed. There's a lot of bankruptcy. You can't, you can't unwind. You know, th- actually, Josh Wolfe actually had a good point on this where- To bring the market back up, you just need people to, um, repurchase the stocks they just sold. It's a reversible thing in the language of thermodynamics, right? But when lots of people are fired, businesses shut down and bankrupted, those folks get new jobs, they move other places, the economy gets reallocated. That's not something you can just reverse, right? You can't just click your fingers and reverse it. So even if-

02:09:59
Eric Weinstein: Well, you could piece, you could piece together any glass that you, uh, drop on a tile floor. It'll just take you some time.

02:10:06
Balaji Srinivasan: Well, so my, my point is that, you know, when you have something where on, on the, the peak number of unemployed on, on a weekly basis was something like 7 million people, uh, you know, in, in the recent reports, and that was 10X the highest number during the financial crisis. And it took, I think, on the order of 10 years, like, um, 2017, before unemployment levels returned to before the financial crisis. So when you've got 10X a financial crisis, I, I mean, I think that's a generational recovery just on the economic stuff. Um, and I mean, potentially, at least. That, that's-- There's a scenario that I, I don't say 100%, but that's like, would I, would I bet that this is worse than the financial crisis? Yes. Uh, and um, because it's not fundamentally a, a, an economic event or a political event. It's a, it's a biological event, right? It's upstream. Let me, let me go a bit further. So, so let's talk about... I, I, wanna answer your question. So, I think green zones may be able to get it under control without a drug or vaccine just by testing border control and, and frankly, having locus of control, right? Like let's say they believe that they can actually do it, whereas Swedes and others have adopted some sort of fatalistic posture, which is everyone's gonna get it, so might as well get it over with. And they don't realize that that has a lot of risk to it. Um, and [chuckles] you know, it does. It's just like it, it-- maybe it works out, right? Like-

02:11:31
Eric Weinstein: I, I don't even understand... Look, look, every time somebody says one of these things, I just, I, I scratch my head because I think, "Well, do you wanna get it early before people understand best practices, or do you wanna get it late when people understand what works and what doesn't?" For example.

02:11:45
Balaji Srinivasan: I, I mean, it's, it-- I, I sort of get that people are like, "Oh, let me rip the Band-Aid and get it over with." But we don't know what the length of immunity is. It's obviously knocking out a bunch of people. Um, I think it's gonna make people sicker than they think it is. Uh, and, and why would you let, you know... Basically, at one point, I made this point to somebody, like if you had the state capacity of a South Korea or a Taiwan or a New Zealand or a China or an Australia or Slovakia or any of these places that's gotten it under control, or at least seems to have, you would never, if you had the option of getting it under control, choose herd immunity as a strategy. You, and when I say un-- you know, like you'd never do that, right? It's like, you know, "Hey, you've got a fire extinguisher. You put out the fire." "Oh, let me burn down my house so that... or let it burn down my house such that like it'll be a fire break to future fires in the future." Okay. You know, may- might work, [chuckles] you know, but it wouldn't be the strategy you would choose. It, it seems more like calling defeat, "Oh, I meant to do that. Oh, I, I, I rejected Harvard." You know, that kind of thing. Um, and, uh, you know, the, um-

02:12:49
Eric Weinstein: It's like if, if the old lady who swallowed a fly started with a horse.

02:12:54
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sort of like that, right? Like, so, so I, I think, um, the, the red zone, green zone distinction will be important as well in terms of what that future looks like. In, uh, you know, you know, in a green zone, I think you're gonna have a greater degree of normality. That is say, you're gonna be able to assemble crowds. Um, you're going to be able to, you know, people can go back to bars and so on. However, with that said, even in green zones, uh, did you see what happened in South Korea with the bar?

02:13:24
Eric Weinstein: Tell me.

02:13:25
Balaji Srinivasan: So, uh, a COVID-19 positive person who was asymptomatic, uh, walked into a bar and, um, basically infected... Uh, went to five bars in a night, uh, and infected on the order of 40 to 70 people, resulting in 1,900 people being tested and traced and 2,000 bars being shut down. Okay? So that's what like a serious society is doing to keep this thing under control, and it-- because you, you... Uh, an interesting mental model for this is a viral fire, right?

02:13:58
Eric Weinstein: Right. It's a fire.

02:13:58
Balaji Srinivasan: The fire is burning within people and can pass between people and can go whoosh like this very quickly. You know, people are kindling for the fire, right? If people are kept apart from each other physically, the fire can't spread, you know? And, uh, so I think that the adaptation we're gonna have, I think the, the, the most likely thing I can see is there'll be very large economic costs for assembling large crowds in person. So especially large crowds of strangers.

02:14:29
Eric Weinstein: So we'll be incorporated externalities.

02:14:32
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah. So what that means is the pandemic insurance for your concert or your rally or something like that is going to be high. Um, because, you know, in theory, you're liable... Once you know about this, once it's no longer force majeure, this is, I mean, this is something that'll be in every single contract, right? So large crowds, I mean, you know, the... I, I have a one-liner for this. I call it the physical divide. The reason is, you know, people used to talk about the digital divide, right? But, you know, for, for 70 years, we've gotten really good at packing a bunch of transistors on a chip. That's become really cheap. You know what's become suddenly really expensive, Eric? Putting a bunch of people in a room. Okay? So that's become very, very, very expensive suddenly, okay? And, uh, so I think-

02:15:21
Eric Weinstein: So we have Ackoffology's law, where we have to get more and more sparse as time goes on?

02:15:26
Balaji Srinivasan: So, so what I think is, yeah, there's a, there's now... Uh, one of the big things is there's a tax on large in-person gatherings, and crucially, there's, there's a few big differences. People will often quote this. They'll be like, "Oh, hey, after, you know, the Spanish flu, we had the Roaring '20s. It's so ahistorical to say anything will change after this. It'll all go back exactly how it was, you crazy tech person," right? And, you know, you know, just like the just the flu kind of person, I call this argument just the Spanish flu

02:15:57
Eric Weinstein: Just the Spanish flu

02:15:58
Balaji Srinivasan: Which thing is clever, right? Okay. So the just the Spanish flu argument basically says, "This is just the Spanish flu. Yeah, that killed like 100 million people, but nothing happened lasting from it. We had the Roaring '20s, and you didn't even veer about it."

02:16:10
Eric Weinstein: Well worth it.

02:16:11
Balaji Srinivasan: There, there are a few major differences. Not, not... Yeah, so, so what I'm meaning, there are major differences from that period, and let me go through some of them, 'cause I had to think about this a lot and do some research on it to articulate why would there be a branch point, right? Why would the Spanish flu not seemingly have such a large effect where people are in crowds two or three years later, but this, this one would? So, um, first, and this is just to, like, to anchor, the economy of... Do you know what the Carrington Event was? Okay. So for your readers or, or listeners, uh, I think 1857, the Carrington Event, um, was a solar storm that, uh, resulted in basically, like, telegraphs catching fire or what have you. But for the most part, the economy of 1857 continued, uh, despite this giant solar storm, um, because it wasn't, you know, fil- it wasn't elec- exactly. So in a, in a very obvious sense, the economy of 2020 is more vulnerable to an electromagnetic pulse or a solar storm than the economy of 1857 or 1918, right? So despite all our advancements, we're more vulnerable along that axis of an electromagnetic pulse. Everybody would agree with that, right? So then a fundamental question is, is the economy of 2020 also more vulnerable in an unarticulated sense to a pandemic than the economy of 1918, right? Because we can give an example where it was more vulnerable because very explicit and quantifiable, its electrical stuff no longer works, right? Once you kind of analogized, going back to our previous point about how it's like a health outage, just like a power outage, you know. When the power-- The, the difference is the power is more tangible because you, you bank on its presence. Uh, with health, you're depending on the infection's absence, so it's only, you know, tang- tangible in, in, in the opposite case. With a health outage, what businesses, what activities, what parts of our economy and society are premised on the absence of serious infectious disease from society? So the most obvious one are crowds, right? B- big crowds are out, and I think out for a generation. Um, that, uh, that's something at least as a, as a, um, crowd... To, to materialize a crowd in one location will be considered a show of strength. Okay? It's considered a society that is so confident and so advanced that it feels like it's just wiped out the disease. Or, or it is also possible, by the way, and I wanna make sure I... It is possible the herd immunity argument works. I can't say, I, I'm, I don't say it's not possible. I've just said it's risky, you know? Uh, so the, the... It is possible that this tears through the whole population like the Spanish flu did, and then it's not a recurring issue. It just kills its 100 million or whatever it is and then it goes away.

02:19:03
Eric Weinstein: Well, there's an issue about is the best thing from the point of view of lineage a bloodbath? You know, that even if a small number of us make it through because, you know, take something where you've got a mutant receptor that makes it very difficult for the virus to attach. Just imagine.

02:19:21
Balaji Srinivasan: I mean, I think the best thing for lineage would be for us to invent, to, to, to get the biotechnology and biomedicine of 2100 and bring it into 2021, you know, or 2020. You know, like, essentially to advance biomedicine quickly so that all the crazy stuff, you know, uh, like for example, just getting a readout on your body to figure out exactly what's wrong, you know? This is... Mike Snyder's Integrome is kind of like this. He was a professor at Stanford Medical School who took a bunch of different assays and ran them all at the same time, and was able to find out when he was getting sick and when he was having diabetes or diabetes-like symptoms, because he could see the readouts. It wasn't just univariate. It was highly multivariate. So, like, getting readouts like that on people, um, or all the promise of, like, nanomedicine, you know. And this is stuff where it's like you're actually sending in mini robots to go and, like, attack the, uh, attack the virus. All the crazy-sounding stuff. Or life extension, you know, like, like what, uh, David Sinclair talks about. Go ahead.

02:20:18
Eric Weinstein: Got it. So that's cool. What about surveillance medicine? Surveillance-based medicine?

02:20:24
Balaji Srinivasan: Okay. So, so let's talk about this, right? So the good scenario, as I was saying, is you advance biomedicine in the treatment sense and so on, diagnostic sense well enough that, uh, you know, corona becomes a non-issue, COVID-19 is a non-issue, even if it's still around. Um, I wanna talk about interesting things that China is doing to... just for people to know what they're doing. Uh, you know, whether or not... I mean, one of the things that the US did is it copied lockdown from Italy, which in turn copied it from China. So we've already kind of cloned China without acknowledging we're cloning China or looking at the original source material to figure out exactly what they did. For example, they didn't just give stay-at-home orders. Anybody who has tested positive was then sent to a central quarantine, for example, right? There's 100 differences in terms of the execution. It's like the difference in saying, you know, build a social network and build Facebook, right? There's, there's a huge difference in the execution. Okay. So with that said, we should understand what China is doing, if not, not necessarily to copy it, but to at least to understand. Okay. One of the things they're doing is everybody in China has WeChat, and WeChat is not used that much in the West, but in China, it's like a combination PayPal and, uh, Messenger and Facebook and so on. But even more than that, it's like your handheld interface to society. You... Any, any restaurant, stall, you know, like that you walk up to, any government building, anything has a digital interface on WeChat. And in fact, you don't even need the physical interface. You don't need a point-of-sale terminal. They're just like, "Here's my WeChat code," and you just QR scan it and go, right? Okay So WeChat's completely ubiquitous in China, and, um, [lip smack] it is, uh, it's something where one of the features they have rolled out in WeChat is a national COVID-19 app that gives every citizen a, uh, green, yellow, or red code, uh, corresponding to green is you're considered healthy, you can travel, get on subways, whatever, keep going. Yellow is, um, you are supposed to be, I think, stay at home and, uh, you're exposed, right? And, uh, red is you're confirmed positive, you have to go to supervised quarantine. Okay? Now, this is basically a way of instrumenting the entire country for coronavirus. And you could imagine standing in front of a gigantic monitor where you're looking at the greens, yellows, and reds across China, and, you know, of course, those labels need to be kept up to date, which I'll come back to. But assuming they are kept up to date by sensor fusion, you know, you take a bunch of different kinds of tests and you have, okay, what is P of, uh, label equals Y, yellow, given this vector of variables, right? You basically have a conditional probability function that you're estimating. So you have this gigantic screen, mentally at least, which has all of these nodes moving around, and they're colored green, yellow, or red. And now if you m- if you remember that South Korea example, what happened was a red walked into a crowd of greens, or a yellow walked into a crowd of greens in a bar. Now, rather than going and just trying to track them down, you can see them on screen. You can hit one button, and the 50 people that that yellow was near are all marked yellow themselves, and they all get text messages telling them to quarantine.

02:23:42
Eric Weinstein: Is this exciting to you?

02:23:44
Balaji Srinivasan: What's that?

02:23:45
Eric Weinstein: Is this exciting to you?

02:23:48
Balaji Srinivasan: I think it's-- Uh, so there's obviously bad aspects to it, right? Like in the sense of this is total surveillance and so on. Um-

02:23:56
Eric Weinstein: Well, I'm just, I'm-

02:23:57
Balaji Srinivasan: It-

02:23:57
Eric Weinstein: ... I'm monitoring a change in my friends from going from being diehard libertarians to, "Oh my God, the surveillance economy is gonna be huge."

02:24:09
Balaji Srinivasan: I would never call myself a diehard libertarian, nor would I call myself a statist or, you know, or anything like that. Let me explain why.

02:24:16
Eric Weinstein: Me too. I'm not talking about you.

02:24:17
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah.

02:24:17
Eric Weinstein: You're too original. Forget it.

02:24:19
Balaji Srinivasan: Uh, yeah, yeah. So, so, so-

02:24:20
Eric Weinstein: But I, I have noticed like a very strange change where a lot of my libertarian friends who were early on the virus are wildly into surveillance.

02:24:32
Balaji Srinivasan: So here's the thing about this, is, um, the pandemic is like a war in the sense of, uh, it, it, it is like being invaded by a virus. And, uh, you know, Lincoln famously suspended habeas corpus. Um, there were many violations of civil liberties and so on that happened during World War II. But crucially, um, the country did come back to a state of normality afterwards, after that, you know, uh, rival, um, was defeated, after that enemy was defeated, right? And so, um, [lip smack] you know, there's basically three models, right? The first model is you don't allow the state to do anything, and then you fall into kind of a market anarchy. I'll come back to that because I think that's what's gonna happen in a lot of the US. Um, we're on track for that. Uh, the second model is you do let the state do something, and it manages to solve the problem. If it doesn't, it goes back to market anarchy. But it, it manages to solve the problem, and it, uh, doesn't give up power, in which case, by 2025 or 2026 or 2023, um, you're gonna be pushing hard on decentralization and crypto. Or in the third case, like the good government, it takes on these superpowers, and then it, of its own accord, gives them up later, right? Now, that's, that's unlikely, but it's not completely unprecedented. For example, South Africa, in the transition from apartheid, gave up its nukes. Um, Ukraine, when it became an independent Soviet republic, gave up its nukes. So it is, uh, you know, it is unlikely for a state to give up its powers, but it's not unprecedented for it to do so. It does happen sometimes. So those are kind of three outcomes. Um, I'd say what I'm most excited about, I'm not really excited about anything, but I do think that the best bet is an intelligent state that puts out the viral fire and then sends the fire engines home. You know? Like it, it does not, does not maintain that, uh, uh, you know, infrastructure for-

02:26:33
Eric Weinstein: So when you say intelligent state, do you mean intelligent as in smart or intelligent as in surveillance?

02:26:40
Balaji Srinivasan: Intelligent as in smart. As in like enlightened, you know? Um, so just going back to the, the yellow, red, and green code thing. So the thing about this is, you know, we already in the US have NSA tracking of cell phones. That's been around since 2013, at least Snowden ha- has revealed that. Um, we, uh, we have, um, lockdown and house arrest. Uh, we have taken on a ton of the economic costs. It, it kind of seems to me like, you know, you, you'd wanna put out the viral fire. But, uh, let me describe a little bit further this system, how it works. Um, I'm-- By the way, to be clear, I'm not advocating for this. I'm just saying how it works so you can see it. So folks with this green, yellow, and red code, and, um, now there's another aspect to it, which is at least it's been reported that, uh, China's trying to test all 11 million people in Wuhan in 10 days. Okay? Now, if they can do that, you've got WeChat, which is a social graph, okay? So you visualize like, you know, the social graph of, you know, Wuhan, and it's superimposed on the map. Everyone's got X, Y coordinates, and these nodes are kind of walking around, and they're connected to each other in at least two ways. One is A is a friend of B, and the other is a proximity graph, which is based on their X, Y locations over time, right? And whether they're near enough to somebody else, because you can certainly be physically near somebody who's not your friend in the social network, right? So you have this graph, the social network, or, or, and proximity graph, and now you superimpose colors, the green, yellow, and red. And now what you do, what they're doing with this testing thing is they're trying to test, again, it being reported, um, 11 million people in 10 days. And if you have the state capacity to do that, it's like dropping a massive amount of flares over a region such that you're lighting up all of the nodes. It's like total testing, right? It's no longer a population... You know, it's not sampling them, it's total testing. And now you've got very fresh labels on the nodes. Are they green, yellow, and red? And here's a crucial thing. If you can do that, if you can take an entire city, if you can light up the entire city social network with testing and find the yellow and red nodes, well, you would find any hidden disease reservoirs. That's so amazing. You could then centrally quarantine or you have them do, you know, stay at home, uh, and you put out the fire because you find the disease reservoirs, right? And then you don't have to... Uh, like you, you can now do that like city by city, okay? It's like a clear and hold strategy. It's like counterinsurgency. So with just testing and quarantine, you could potentially put out the virus like this, right? Now, um, the reason I describe this is it's, you know, you might think, "Wow, that's an insane violation of civil liberties that we would never do," et cetera, et cetera. But that was what people said about like what happened with the lockdown in Wuhan, and then it was basically done by Western countries like six weeks later, and done in a bad and amateurish kind of way. It was like, if you're doing a lockdown, you know, you don't wanna... You... There's 100 other things that had, that were done. And I published a bunch of this stuff in, in, in March, by the way, on what was actually happening in other countries, South Korea, Taiwan, et cetera. [lip smack] But point being that, uh, it is possible, potentially, it appears possible to put out the viral fire with techniques short of a drug or vaccine. And, you know, this makes sense in the sense of, you know, we, the, you know, the US conquered a bunch of infectious diseases before they had PCR testing, before they had genome sequencing. You know, sometimes like, you know, quarantine and, and elbow grease can get you much farther than you might think. So, uh, so let me pause there. That gives some sense of how you can get the virus under control. Um-

02:30:35
Eric Weinstein: Well, and I appreciate your, your analogy to wartime. I, I often talk about regulated expression as a paradigm that we don't use enough.

02:30:43
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah. Reg- regulated expression.

02:30:45
Eric Weinstein: Well, just from biology, that you have some reaction that you don't want to be present generally.

02:30:51
Balaji Srinivasan: Uh-huh.

02:30:52
Eric Weinstein: But the idea is like, okay, well, I'm gonna upregulate this and downregulate that relative to the situation.

02:30:58
Balaji Srinivasan: Right. Right.

02:30:58
Eric Weinstein: And then saying that this is like life during wartime, um, means that there are restrictions on civil liberties that aren't usually in place. And then, you know, the, the concern of course is that the argument, well, we already have X, and so this is X plus epsilon. We already had Snowden's revelations, and so we know that we're doing this already. We should just make use of the data. You know, if I play that game, um, that compounds to tyranny very quickly.

02:31:23
Balaji Srinivasan: Absolutely.

02:31:24
Eric Weinstein: Now I've got-

02:31:24
Balaji Srinivasan: I agree. I agree

02:31:24
Eric Weinstein: ... now I've got the information that says that, um, so-and-so is gonna give syphilis to so-and-so else today, you know? What do we do?

02:31:32
Balaji Srinivasan: So, so yeah. No, no, totally. Totally. And the thing is that basically the US government has proven itself so incompetent in this current set of circumstances that I don't think it would be smart to advocate for it having any more power. Um, so I wanna be clear about that. But I do think it's important to understand what is being done successfully in the rest of the world, even if it's not imitated directly. For example, there's privacy preserving contact tracing, right? Um, maybe that gets you 60%, right? Uh, maybe you have something where enough people opt in to a green, yellow, red code system to put out the fire in their city. There's, there's different ways of doing that. Yeah.

02:32:10
Eric Weinstein: There's different ways. Actually, I wanna... Uh, I, I think you've actually hit this nail on the head before, and I want to bring back Balaji on Balaji then.

02:32:20
Balaji Srinivasan: Okay. Sure. Sure.

02:32:21
Eric Weinstein: Which would, which would be, I think what you're saying is that trust is a competitive advantage in the current world.

02:32:28
Balaji Srinivasan: Hmm.

02:32:28
Eric Weinstein: Because if trust is high between a population and its government, that government-

02:32:34
Balaji Srinivasan: Yes. Yes

02:32:34
Eric Weinstein: ... can do things to fight a virus that somebody else can't, and that means it's a better place to do your production, manufacturing, what have you.

02:32:44
Balaji Srinivasan: Absolutely.

02:32:45
Eric Weinstein: And so the key thing... So this is the thing that I'm very upset about with the US, which is I don't trust these people because they're bad. They're obviously bad. They're stupid. They're incompetent. They're kleptocratic. They're, they're-

02:32:57
Balaji Srinivasan: Right. Right

02:32:57
Eric Weinstein: ... not technically adept. I, I get bored of saying this because I, I know people who are those things, and they're sitting at home. They're not called up. Um, the... You could solve this problem tomorrow if you could call up the Marc Andreessens, Patrick Collisons, Balaji Srinivasans, Laura Demings. I mean, you know, there's any one of a number of people who are just very mentally agile. And if, if you had them addressing the country, you'd completely change the US perspective on the virus. The key thing that we see is is that I see Larry Kudlow and Steve Mnuchin on a, on a coronavirus panel. I'm just thinking like, "What?"

02:33:47
Balaji Srinivasan: So let me give you some like, you know, aspect of how this is actually happening in some way, different maybe from how you think of it.

02:33:53
Eric Weinstein: Bruce, have you buy into this idea that trust is a central asset?

02:33:57
Balaji Srinivasan: Oh, a- absolutely. I... In fact, I've, I've talked about that a lot. I mean, I'm not a ideological... So ideological anything usually... [chuckles] It's funny. Um, w- you... One can go meta and say, "Oh, you're making an absolutist statement about absolutist statements."

02:34:13
Eric Weinstein: No, I don't wanna play those games.

02:34:14
Balaji Srinivasan: Fine. Yeah, yeah. Okay, fine.

02:34:15
Eric Weinstein: It's really fine.

02:34:15
Balaji Srinivasan: But let's just say-

02:34:16
Eric Weinstein: But let's just say-

02:34:16
Balaji Srinivasan: ... ideology in general is about 100% consistency. But, but I think a better model is ideology often identifies sliders, like polls, and then any particular situation requires you to set those sliders at some parameter values that are difficult to intuit in advance or even verbally defend. The only way you can defend it is outcome-based. Like, do people buy your product or not? Do they come to your country or not? Did you make the right set of trade-offs that you can give some kind of high-level ideological justification of maybe, but the specific parameter values, how much surveillance versus how much not, how much coercion versus how much voluntary, like those are just-- Like the exact dials can't be discovered, in my view, by angels on the heads of a pin, um, but, but solely by what people respond to or not and how much wealth and health is created for the population in a broad-based sense. Um, coming to your second point, so that's like a kind of like how I think about it is, uh, ideology plays well, you know, verbally and on Twitter. Ideology is viral, but pragmatism is functional. And, uh, and I think that that's like the, the Singapore style of combine whatever things you need to make something work but get the highest health and wealth for your population. That's the kind of-

02:35:38
Eric Weinstein: Well, but there's, there's another dimension in my opinion.

02:35:40
Balaji Srinivasan: Go ahead.

02:35:40
Eric Weinstein: So you have the ideology playing well on the internet. Uh, practicality, I understand what you're saying. But there's another thing which is coherence. So for example, The New York Times, CNN, NPR, the Democratic Party are coherent. They may be coherent around nonsense.

02:35:59
Balaji Srinivasan: Right.

02:35:59
Eric Weinstein: Right. But if they all decide to start moving in one general direction, they will coordinate their movement enough that, in, in my opinion, the, the big knock against our world, our shared world, is that, um, there's a tremendous amount of noise, and in this haystack of noise are more often found the needles of truth than over in the establishment area. So in general, my feeling is, is that somebody in our network is usually on top of most of these topics before it's clear to anyone else. But there is a fair amount of noise to sort through.

02:36:38
Balaji Srinivasan: So your previous point was a very important one, which is how do we get competent people into positions of leadership, right? Um, and I'd, I'd say there's many dimensions to this. Let me give you one reassuring thing, which is, um, Gates and Bezos are doing some amazing things with the resources they have. Um, for example, Bezos has said that Amazon is putting $4 billion of its profits into COVID-19, uh, supply chain stuff, and, uh, Gates is spending billions of his own money on vaccines. And the critical thing... Do you know the concept of bioavailability from, uh, pharmaceuticals? Have you heard that concept? Okay. So if you, uh, take, take a drug, right? There's different ways you can take it intravenously, uh, orally, sometimes, you know, you can inhale it, and so on and so forth. And a critical question is, okay, you take 100, you know, like cc's of, uh, you know, something and-- or, you know, 100 units of some drug. And then the question is, is it actually, um, is it actually bioavailable? Does it actually hit the, uh, you know... D- does it hit your system, or does it leach out? Is it excreted and it's not properly metabolized and it's just in, in one orifice, out the other, okay? And, um, bioavailability is often set to like 100% for like intravenous administration. But the point is that you might take a drug, but it might not actually be that active. You might just excrete it without actually it, it hitting the relevant part of the body where you want it to excrete. And that's the difference between the $2 trillion that the US government printed and the $4 billion that Amazon is allocating toward COVID-19. Amazon will be a very careful steward of that capital because it's run by Bezos, and he's smart and competent and, and ultimately, there's one decision maker who's very smart and engaged, and that's him, to resolve any conflicts in how the money is allocated. The US government's $2 trillion, I remember seeing that and I was like, "Okay. Well, how much of that is masks and vaccines and this and, you know, and, and drugs and testing and whatnot?" And it-- I, I think there was like something in there for like hospitals, but most of it was not that. It was just a gigantic pork barrel thing with everybody getting an ask in and, and so on and so-- That was when capital was allocated politically rather than ideologically. So that was capital that was highly non-bioavailable. It was $2 trillion, but only a fraction of that actually hit the target of the virus, um, as opposed to what Bezos and Gates are doing, which are very focused efforts with their own capital. One one-thousandth as much capital, not $2 trillion, but like a billion. However, it was capital that because an individual was pointing it, it was actually on target as opposed to just, you know, sprayed all over the place, right? Um-

02:39:31
Eric Weinstein: So it's on target for the individual, whatever that person is trying to accomplish.

02:39:36
Balaji Srinivasan: Correct. That's right. But, um, I think that is where we're likely to go, where we have these, um, you know, West Coast leaders who have enough individual capital and know-how and networks and, uh, capability. They're actually able to put a dent in this thing with far less resources than the state. And I think over time, what that leads to is, um, building up larger and larger and larger audiences. And, and here's, here's why... Let me talk about the audiences thing for a second. There's two different kinds of truths, right? At least there's, uh, political truths and technical truths. And a political truth is something which is based on the software installed in people's heads. That is to say, you know, for example, where are the borders of a country, or how much is a currency worth, or who is the president? Those are ultimately things which are, are based on the software installed in people's heads. And if you can change enough of that, if you can muscle them into believing something else, you can actually change where the border is located. You can change what the currency is worth. You can change who the president or, you know, the leader of some organization is. Okay. Then separately from that, there are technical truths which are, you know, the diameter of this virus or, you know, the, the value of, um, this expression in math or, uh, the gravitational constant, right? Those are things which no amount of muscling of people's brains is going to change because they're physics or they're math, right? They're science. And it's import-- I mean, like, the thing is that, uh, you know, there, there's also interesting things in the middle, right? Um, like something like cryptocurrency uses technical truths to, uh, make it harder to change political truths in certain ways, um, because people are coming to consensus on who holds what money, but cryptography is being used to make it difficult to, to muck with that. What's my point? Point is, um, political truths are important. Political truths are where a lot of where the money is. Political truths are where our entire establishment is focused on, and they're incapable of thinking about technical truths at all. Here's an interesting point. If you can convince enough people, like, you know, if you can get enough backlinks, uh, then I think you can change things. Um, and it doesn't necessarily have to be, um, through a standard process. Uh, I think, you know, for example, if you just built a large enough specialist social network in San Francisco, I bet you could win the election of San Francisco. That that would actually be an afterthought. Um, for example, if you built up, uh, a San Francisco COVID-19 response community and you organized-- And maybe San Francisco is not a great place to start, by the way. It's a pretty hard nut to crack, okay?

02:42:30
Eric Weinstein: Right.

02:42:30
Balaji Srinivasan: But-

02:42:31
Eric Weinstein: But, but Balaji.

02:42:31
Balaji Srinivasan: Go ahead.

02:42:33
Eric Weinstein: The, the thing is, is that... Look, I'll be honest, I, I don't really see between the West Coast, the East Coast, and the nostalgic perspective which I seem to represent, none of us seem to have it right. But I'll be honest, I've spent enough time around West Coast billionaires to know that they don't part with large amounts of money very easily.

02:42:57
Balaji Srinivasan: [laughs]

02:42:57
Eric Weinstein: I mean-

02:42:57
Balaji Srinivasan: Sure, sure.

02:42:58
Eric Weinstein: You know... No, no, seriously. There's a-

02:43:00
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah

02:43:00
Eric Weinstein: ... there's an incompetent news story that's constantly written about so and so has a, a limitless wallet. Um, you know, $10 million is like blowing his nose. And it's like, I've never met this person where $10 million is like blowing your nose.

02:43:16
Balaji Srinivasan: Right.

02:43:16
Eric Weinstein: I've never met someone so rich that they can't think about whether or not they wanna spend $10 million on something. So we just had some sort of a rapid grant thing going on with, like, multiple billionaires all getting together to put up $11 million. So my first feeling about this is we're not that good on the West Coast to be able to take all this stuff on.

02:43:42
Balaji Srinivasan: No, not all of it. Wait, wait.

02:43:43
Eric Weinstein: Wait, wait, wait.

02:43:43
Balaji Srinivasan: Okay. Can I say one thing else?

02:43:44
Eric Weinstein: Can I say one thing, though? No, no, no.

02:43:46
Balaji Srinivasan: Okay, go.

02:43:46
Eric Weinstein: I'm gonna-

02:43:47
Balaji Srinivasan: Fine

02:43:47
Eric Weinstein: ... I'm gonna get myself in trouble with my new tribe.

02:43:49
Balaji Srinivasan: Fine.

02:43:49
Eric Weinstein: Fine. My new tribe likes to talk an awful lot about disintermediating corrupt institutions, and then it can't actually get its own act together very deeply. Um, the magic is supposed to be when these people inhabit the regular institutions, then the regular institutions have to up their game because you've got a lot of people asking unfamiliar questions. The klepto-kleptocracy goes down because people who are making their money by doing new things are pissed off about people making money from stealing things. And we, we're treating the problem of how do we remove septuagenarians from our political parties who've been there forever or who just got there. You know, like, how do I get rid of Trump? Pretty easy to me. You just stop the Democratic Party from being as corrupt and soulless as it is. Um, how do you get rid of the people in the Democratic Party? Well, they're gonna die, you know? In 20-- In the next 25 years, the current crowd of people who seem to be in control are gonna age out of this thing. My guess is, is that within five to 10 years, there are gonna be far fewer of these types of people, um, than there are now. And we're treating this weirdly as, like, a given. Like, we can't get rid of the rot. And I don't wanna keep getting back into it. It's not that interesting. But I honestly don't think that the West Coast solution... It's like, you know, if you get a bunch of tech billionaires... Jack Dorsey has stepped up to the plate at a surprising level, if I understand correctly what he's giving through C- for COVID.

02:45:25
Balaji Srinivasan: But, but I'm not talking about giving. Let me be very precise about this.

02:45:27
Eric Weinstein: Sorry. But, but yes, I'm talking about directing the capital, remaining engaged, bringing the same thing that built the businesses and built the VC fortunes into the mix so that the idea is that you have an idea of get shit done, you g- have an idea of fund, get stuff funded.

02:45:45
Balaji Srinivasan: Even, even more precise than that, though, which is what Amazon is doing is essentially rolling out the technologies to turn the Amazon campus into a green zone. And then it can sell that to other people as a business model to start expanding green zones out where they MVP it for their own company first. They show that it works 'cause they've got outcome statistics in terms of who's sick and so on, and essentially build a private healthcare system and/management system, and it radiates out from there. That is, like, the West Coast model rather than try to start with $2 trillion and a top-down kind of thing.

02:46:24
Eric Weinstein: No, I'm not talking about starting-

02:46:25
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah

02:46:25
Eric Weinstein: ... with the $2 trillion.

02:46:26
Balaji Srinivasan: No, no, no. I know. I know. I know. [laughs]

02:46:27
Eric Weinstein: Amazon has a different situation because of its particular business model. Obviously, you know, a world that isn't gonna go out shopping quite as much in brick and mortar. This has accelerated a move towards online purchases. All sorts of things are happening, right? And I understand that you can actually start to implement this and experiment within your companies, et cetera. Obviously, what Elon is doing in a-- at an atoms-based company rather than an electron-based company, you know, is different. Um, I, I-- maybe I'm just bored, uh, uh, uh, of hearing my own take on this, but somehow there was a lost notion of competency that we had relatively recently that nobody thinks is even worth trying to get back.

02:47:17
Balaji Srinivasan: I'm not sa- I'm not saying it's not worth trying to get back. I am saying that I don't think the mechanism for doing so is gonna be a front door mechanism.

02:47:25
Eric Weinstein: Okay. I-- and I appreciate the, the kiddie corner and trying to sneak up on things. And, you know, these are interesting groups-

02:47:31
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah, sneak up... I, I wouldn't even initially call it sneak up on it because that involves like... It, it is more accepting what you can change today with what you have, doing that, and then seeing what door opens in two years or three years, right? By Bezos, for example, let's say Bezos going and fixing Amazon, which is within his power, right? I mean, a very important question, you know, like, uh, you know, there's that, that kind of thing that they, they make people say when they're in, uh, like rehabilitation facilities, like 50 Cent raps about this. It's like, um, [tsks] I'm gonna butcher it. It's, uh, "God, give me the strength to know the th- to change the things they can-"

02:48:15
Eric Weinstein: Accept the things I cannot change, and save the-

02:48:15
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah, yeah. The wisdom to know the difference, right? Exactly. So, um, so essentially where is one's locus of control, right? Um, basically it is, you know, like, like what is it that, that you can actually control yourself without requiring some new powers, without getting new permissions from somebody, without winning an election? What can you do today? What's under one's control? Uh, and I have a feeling that if, uh, you know, there's somebody who comes up with a reproducible strategy to develop, to turn things into green zones and it-- and shows that with outcome statistics, that that person will, by dint of that success, be able to parlay that into larger and larger successes.

02:48:59
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah. But-

02:48:59
Balaji Srinivasan: And then you can see where it goes

02:49:00
Eric Weinstein: ... but apology, what's-- Okay, yes. But then, you know, I'm gonna have all my usual problems, right?

02:49:05
Balaji Srinivasan: Go ahead. Go ahead.

02:49:05
Eric Weinstein: Which is what if that person does it through surveillance, through an unacceptable level of surveillance? I, I can't-

02:49:13
Balaji Srinivasan: Go ahead.

02:49:13
Eric Weinstein: I can't stand surveillance. I frigging hate it. And I've learned through time that most people don't feel this way. [smacks lips] They accept surveillance. You know? They, they don't have a sense like, you know, if I'm gonna speak out about Jeff Epstein, if I'm gonna speak out about our intelligence services, if I'm gonna speak out about lots of different things, I want surveillance to be dangerous, illegal, expensive, and difficult. Somebody says like, "I don't know. If it keeps me from getting sick, uh, let, let them know." Okay? So then we're gonna have this. If you start telling me about these private solutions and green zones and, you know, th-this whole nine yards, I, I, I'm gonna say, "Okay. Well, I don't know where that's going." Maybe the idea is that we're gonna get an incredibly Jeff Bezos-type answer, um, for what the world should be. Maybe I don't want a-- an Amazon-friendly version of this. Maybe I want a man in the street, median individual-friendly version of this. Maybe I don't... Maybe I'm really frustrated, which is we're gonna do what you're saying because we've got this particular class of people we can't get rid of, and they're, they're gonna be gone soon. They're just not gonna be gone in time. Like, if, if, if you imagine that Andrew Yang, for example, uh, were the nominee rather than, uh, Biden presumptively, I guarantee you that Andrew Yang would be making use of this time to, to tell us what it sounded like to be in direct dialogue with technical people. He would have a more technical version of this thing.

02:50:57
Balaji Srinivasan: Mm-hmm.

02:51:00
Eric Weinstein: But he couldn't pop-

02:51:01
Balaji Srinivasan: I mean, even-- But, but, but, uh, you know, it feels like I think one big difference between us on this is you're much, much more focused on electoral politics than I am. And, um, the, uh, the-- I think one difference is I don't believe that that is actually the most important locus of how things get done. Um, you know, there's technology, there's the permanent bureaucracy, y-you know, there's... I mean, like, like folks who are on Twitter, right? What's that? Yeah.

02:51:34
Eric Weinstein: Uh, I don't trust Google's relationship to China.

02:51:38
Balaji Srinivasan: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

02:51:39
Eric Weinstein: I don't necessarily tr-tu-trust tech's relationship to China.

02:51:44
Balaji Srinivasan: [chuckles] Go ahead.

02:51:44
Eric Weinstein: I don't, I don't always love the business community's solutions for things which are also corrupt. You know? Like, the way in which we talk about what we do as all of it is just returns to technology and competence and brilliance is a bit of a PR campaign, you know? And, and the government has their version of a PR campaign and legal, you know-- Sorry, legacy media has their version of this. And I guess what my take on this is, is that I, I'm closer to the tech version, but there's a missing chunk, you see. And, and I think that science is the most important part of this missing chunk. The thing that's really flipping me out is that no one is trying to restore independent science, the kind of science you can do when you're not worried about your funding

02:52:38
Balaji Srinivasan: So I'm gonna talk about the PR campaign aspect. Um, I understand that vantage point. I think that, uh, you don't wanna be really on a PR campaign, you wanna be on a results campaign. And, um-

02:52:52
Eric Weinstein: And no, no. You, you-- we're gonna g- we're gonna get into this. Uh, let me head it off at the pass. If you wanna say what your results are, I'm gonna say to you, okay, cases, uh, cases reduced per unit surveillance or cases reduced?

02:53:07
Balaji Srinivasan: Right. Exactly.

02:53:07
Eric Weinstein: In general.

02:53:08
Balaji Srinivasan: So that's the thing, is you can add that, you add that as a metric, and if it is truly the case, okay, that, um... You know, c- 'cause here's the thing. Uh, y- you know, um, what Chrome Web, Web Inspector is? It's-- Okay, so if you launch any web browser, um, there's, there's a thing you can do where you can show every tracking pixel and everything that loads on a webpage. And you should just do that sometime, and you'll see, like you go to techcrunch.com, you're in like 100 databases, okay? You're, you're already there, right? Now, you can argue that is bad, and I would, I would agree with you in many ways. And I think that there are technologies like zero-knowledge and, and so on that maybe can get us... Or Brave is working on like zero-knowledge ads, can get us much of what we currently have with the internet with- by also protecting privacy, potentially. Um, or you move to like a micropayment ecosystem where you're just sending the money and not your information. Lot, lots of different models are there. But I look at, um [lip smack] I'm pro-privacy, pro-decentralization, pro-encryption. I think that we can get there with some combination of technology and policy and, and, and whatnot. Uh, however, I also recognize that maybe we've got only a stone ax right now, and we've got a beast that's coming at us, and, you know, take that thing out first and then figure it out later, right? And it-- There's-- Now, there, there's another possibility, by the way.

02:54:36
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. I, I think my point would be consider fragging your commanding officer first.

02:54:42
Balaji Srinivasan: [chuckles]

02:54:42
Eric Weinstein: Putting somebody competent in charge, and then regrouping. Like, what's the next part of the plan? If we can't get rid of our commanding officer, then we've got a real problem.

02:54:54
Balaji Srinivasan: [lip smack] So, I mean, the thing is that, um, a, a better way of doing it, I think, is just pulling the backlinks away, okay? So take your example. Let's-- I mean, look, you can't do this in a platoon or whatever, but a guy goes off and says, uh... If it were, if it were legitimate. It's better, it's better in a startup, okay? Let me use that analogy rather than a platoon, 'cause there's like, you know, y- being disobedient in the military is, is different. Um, but you've got a company and, uh, you know, let's say the traitorous eight, you know, they just left and they just did their own thing, and the folks who followed them, followed them. It's a free country. And so the backlinks that were pointing in this direction are now pointing in another direction. So if you pull enough backlinks over, then you've reformed the system without changing it in a direct way. You haven't taken it on in the front, you've taken it on in the back door. Go ahead.

02:55:48
Eric Weinstein: So the United States of blockchain and the idea-

02:55:51
Balaji Srinivasan: Not blockchain only. It's a tool.

02:55:52
Eric Weinstein: Got it. But I'm just, I'm just... I, I, I, I think that this is kind of a weird intellectual impasse, um-

02:56:00
Balaji Srinivasan: Hmm

02:56:00
Eric Weinstein: ... which is I'm not disagreeing with you, Balaji, that the current system is corrupt, doesn't work, can't get it done. New things are exciting. They're happening elsewhere. I, I, I think we live in a persistent fantasy either about, um, what's possible with sort of West Coast mentality, um-

02:56:21
Balaji Srinivasan: Well, I can say one thing that I haven't, we haven't talked about, which, which, which I think is very important. Um, I think that the layer that... How would you reform the East Coast with West Coast tactics, okay? Let's talk, maybe talk about that for a second. I think that, um, for example, what Bloomberg did, where he spent like $500 million on the election, at, at least as reported, I think that was a waste of, waste of money. Uh, but I do think that an equivalent amount of money spent on, um, personal media corporations that is getting as many people to do Substack-like things as possible that are, um, broadly aligned with, um, the future, like with technology, they're pro, uh, you know, transhumanism, they're pro all of this good stuff, that would have actually a major impact. And it's something that can be funded. It's something that doesn't require a huge amount of resources. It's something that can probably at least break even. Um, not that media companies necessarily make a ton of money. But the reason is that writing is fighting. And if you have, uh, a large number of new writers who are scientists and engineers, and crucially, these should be, I think, citizen journalists as opposed to corporate journalists. They're not full-time journalists. They have personal media corporations, um, meaning they basically have like a, a, like a-- They're getting like $1,000 a year or $2,000 a year from a Substack equivalent or Substack itself. And, uh, you know, they, they don't have... This is not something they're doing full-time. This is a model where it's something in between like an, a blogger and a journalist, but, you know, it, it, it is something where you've got a, like a, a serious hobby, okay, of writing. And if you had 1,000 people like that in SF, that... You know, or, or anywhere, um, that would definitely shift the debate on the topic. And it, and it would, it would shift electoral politics. It would shift the Overton window.

02:58:22
Eric Weinstein: So I, I, I-

02:58:22
Balaji Srinivasan: It would shift a lot of things

02:58:23
Eric Weinstein: ... maybe we should just... Yeah.

02:58:24
Balaji Srinivasan: You, you don't agree with me on that, right?

02:58:25
Eric Weinstein: We're in some kind of disagree. M- my feeling is, is that there are plenty of smart, interesting people. You can find them all over the internet. It has nothing to do with anything. The key thing has to do with this sort of centralized exchange that I call the gated institutional narrative And the idea is it's a world that only listens to itself. You can say the smartest things in the world. Like, you, you got attacked by tech journalists, I assume?

02:58:49
Balaji Srinivasan: Air, I mean, air-based tech journalists.

02:58:52
Eric Weinstein: For being-

02:58:52
Balaji Srinivasan: That's what they do, yeah.

02:58:53
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, but for being early on COVID.

02:58:56
Balaji Srinivasan: Oh, yeah, yeah. That's true. Yes. Um-

02:58:59
Eric Weinstein: Okay. So whatever that group of people is that seems to continue to persist no matter how many times they get things wrong, they're clearly upset, they're angry, they're pissed off, they always have a job. Okay? What I'm talking about is roughly speaking, we did not get independence to the people who could use it, and we didn't seat them in institutional chairs. And I don't know why I seem to be the only person on this particular kick. It's clear as day to me. But the idea is w- you know, and let me go back to Noam Chomsky. Why does Noam Chomsky sit at MIT? He's in his 90s. It's because we used to have people like you would be a pr- you would be a professor.

02:59:41
Balaji Srinivasan: Okay, but let me pause you there, though. Isn't it better that Larry and Sergey went and did Google than became professors at Stanford, or that Zuckerberg went and did Facebook rather than becoming a professor at Harvard?

02:59:51
Eric Weinstein: I, I can't, I can't do this. Yes, for, for a few of the winners. But do you know how many people who were supposed to be-- Who, who became neither Larry nor, nor Sergey and didn't end up in a position, in a chair where they could do anything? Like, you know, the FDA is in shambles, the CDC's in shambles, Harvard's in shambles. You need people with agency protected from the, the people who wanna control them by regulating whether they have a job on Monday if they mouth off on Friday.

03:00:26
Balaji Srinivasan: Okay, so-

03:00:26
Eric Weinstein: There's no substitute... I, I think that really what I'm trying to say, Balaji, is that there is no substitute for journalistic independence or academic freedom. It, it's not on the blockchain. It's not a question of... Mostly speaking, the very rich people that we discuss, um, on the West Coast who have made it as so c- so-called technologists. First of all, they're really not technologists, they're really business people.

03:00:52
Balaji Srinivasan: [laughs]

03:00:53
Eric Weinstein: And they happen to do their business-

03:00:54
Balaji Srinivasan: It is both. It is both. But go ahead.

03:00:56
Eric Weinstein: But very often, the people who are really technologists work for them. I'm sorry to say it. I'm not saying... It-- There are all sorts of weird things that the, the, the West Coast does differently, and one thing is, is that it tries to bury the concept that their actual... Like, we'll always talk about Larry and Sergey, and we'll never talk about the mas- master coder who came up with MapReduce. You know?

03:01:23
Balaji Srinivasan: Jeff Dean?

03:01:23
Eric Weinstein: Yep.

03:01:24
Balaji Srinivasan: And Sanjay Ghemawat? Yeah, I know them.

03:01:26
Eric Weinstein: I know. You, I know you do because you're local. That's-- But that was my point. If I said Jeff Dean, do you, do you think that the world in general knows who he is?

03:01:35
Balaji Srinivasan: No, but the people who n- who, who, who should know do know. Um-

03:01:39
Eric Weinstein: I mean-

03:01:39
Balaji Srinivasan: Well, actually, I should, I should really-- Actually, let me ask you this, though.

03:01:42
Eric Weinstein: Many more people, many more people should know.

03:01:44
Balaji Srinivasan: You-- I think you're right about that. Uh, so... But, but here's the thing, is, um... [lips smack] Okay, a few different things. S- so several different things to shoot out there. First, you talked about, um, folks being under economic sanctions such that they couldn't speak freely, and, you know, how does the blockchain, you know, solve that? Actually, this is something the blockchain is pretty good at for two reasons. First is, uh, you can earn pseudonymously, so you can separate out your earning name, your speaking name, and your real name so that you only use your real name on official forms. You speak under one pseudonym and earn under yet a third. And that starts to, uh, isolate your, your job from your speech, from your, um, like, you know, kind of y- your real name, right? So that's kind of one aspect. The second aspect is that the mainstreaming of crypto and, and also-- And cryptography as well as cryptocurrency is mainstreaming encryption. And so technologies like Keybase and so on allow you to communicate with others or even publish your thoughts pseudonymously, um, or in encrypted fashion [lips smack] without someone being able to target you for thought crime, right? So, so I actually do think that those two things are pretty important.

03:03:03
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

03:03:04
Balaji Srinivasan: Okay.

03:03:04
Eric Weinstein: We're gonna get into another one of these things. We're-- My, my point is-

03:03:07
Balaji Srinivasan: But, but, but there's, there's-

03:03:08
Eric Weinstein: Thought crime.

03:03:09
Balaji Srinivasan: Go ahead.

03:03:10
Eric Weinstein: It, it's like we c- we're constantly working around something, you know. Like... What's the problem with thought crime? The problem with thought crime is we've got a bunch of people terrifying everybody. Tiny number of people terrifying everyone that if you observe what you see with your own eyes or hear with your own ears, uh, y- you're Satan. You know? I don't even know why, for example. I have no idea why my, my world is so convinced that I should never mention the Wuhan lab or you're a crazy person. Like, I, I don't even know where that comes from. It's, it's not part of science. It's not part of being a grownup. It's, it's some sort of a directive that I don't understand. I, I can't grasp it.

03:03:54
Balaji Srinivasan: It's decentralized consensus. It's basically some-- It, it's, it's, it's quasi-decentralized, and here's what I mean. It's, um, it's not something where most of the people repeating it were told to repeat it. It is that they saw it on social media or they heard it from somebody, and they saw the tone in which it was uttered, and it's usually uttered in, like, a contemptuous tone where A is looking down on B, and they don't wanna be the person looked down on. Um, and so then it's repeated that way. Now, some of them actually go and diligence it for its factual characteristics, but that's a rare kind of thing. Go ahead.

03:04:29
Eric Weinstein: Do you remember, do you remember the Sinclair Broadcasting network's, uh, com- Public service announcement

03:04:33
Balaji Srinivasan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. The only thing, the thing that was funny about that is that happens all the time. That was just something where someone put in the effort to go and get all of those clips out of a TV news search engine, which was impressive and actually worth doing. But, you know, that happens all the time for all kinds of stories. You know, you, you could... It's, it's very-

03:04:50
Eric Weinstein: Well, Jon Stewart made something of a career showing that there were talking points and that everybody fanned out from the party-

03:04:56
Balaji Srinivasan: Right, right

03:04:57
Eric Weinstein: ... and they repeat exactly the same thing.

03:04:58
Balaji Srinivasan: Yep.

03:04:58
Eric Weinstein: But like, at some level... Look, I, I think we're going around and around on, on something which I would like to, to just exit from. I understand that the current situation looks hopeless and pointless, and that we have new technologies and... Fine.

03:05:19
Balaji Srinivasan: Can I give a positive vision of the future? Like what things, uh, you know.

03:05:22
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Why don't you clo- close us out with a positive vision of the future, and you and I can talk about other things on another, another show. That'd be great.

03:05:29
Balaji Srinivasan: Okay, great. So positive vision of the future. Um, first, I think we're gonna get, uh, a Y-shaped recovery, which is to say not V-shaped where it bounces back or W-shaped where it bounces up and down, but Y-shaped in the sense of we were on one branch of the economy and now we're taking a totally different one. And so the bad part about that is I think we're deprecating the physical leisure economy. So bars, concerts, restaurants, travel, hotels, a lot of that stuff, uh, will be looked back on nostalgically when, you know, a middle class person could easily travel and vacation meant, you know, like, like international travel. I think, I think air travel, that type of stuff is gonna be less frequent. But where does the reallocation go to? Um, info, bio, crypto, robo, um, agro, and, uh, maybe astro. Okay? So info, anything digital, that's obvious. So that just continues, like, you know, um, but that includes virtual reality. That includes, um, you know, cryptocurrencies and so on. Um, bio also goes without saying. Uh, I think this is now, people have talked about this being the century of biology, but I think we're gonna get 50 years of progress in 10 or even faster. Um, and it's not gonna stop at corona. It's gonna be something where one thing that's actually underappreciated, people have gotten used to waking up in the morning and checking dashboards. Uh, they usually check it for, you know, their email dashboard or personal dashboard or their company dashboard, their metrics, but now they're checking it for countries, and they're checking it not just for money or things like that, but for health. That's very new. It's not like people didn't look at life expectancy, but real-time dashboards of how countries are doing in terms of health and wealth starts to reorient towards better metrics, I think, for society. And hopefully we apply that to tracking diabetes and heart disease. I'm not saying everybody will track it to the same extent they're tracking corona, but in the same way the financial crisis awakened an entire generation to thinking about the Fed and the money supply and being aware of those graphs, I think you're gonna have a much larger number of people looking at health. So we start thinking about important problems, and maybe we could throw, you know, not just money, but energy and time and intelligence at anti-aging, at brain machine interface, at limb regeneration, at, you know, like, uh, uh, stem cells. All of these kinds of things exist, but could use a shot in the arm. Okay? So bio. Um, then crypto, I think, uh, this is both... You know, I mean, obviously I'm very bull on crypto, but crypto is, um, the crypto economy. It is, it's Bitcoin, but it's also in, in many red zones and in places where there's market controls being put in place, um, I think crypto is gonna be essential. Robo, again, goes without saying, but, uh, whether it's drone delivery, I don't know if you've seen the sidewalk robots that are rolling around, uh, whether it's, um, basically the manufacturing robots, uh, whether it's bringing supply chains back to the US and, uh-

03:08:33
Eric Weinstein: Bo- Boston Dynamics in Singapore

03:08:35
Balaji Srinivasan: ... Boston Dynamics in Singapore. Right. Exactly. Uh, I love all that stuff, um, because anytime you can have a robot do something, you're freeing up a human to do a higher value thing and/or in this case, you've also got the hygiene argument where you'd much rather have one human and five robots touch something than, you know, um, like a-

03:08:55
Eric Weinstein: You know something?

03:08:55
Balaji Srinivasan: Like six humans touching it

03:08:56
Eric Weinstein: I can just feel it. You're gonna tell me that, um, you know, first it's gonna be, "Well, we already have robots that bark orders. Now we're gonna give them tasers."

03:09:06
Balaji Srinivasan: [laughs] No, no. I mean, like, like here's the thing. Here's-

03:09:08
Eric Weinstein: Then, then it's gonna be like drones with, with, uh, with 50 caliber ammunition, and the idea is that everything's gonna be incrementally just a little... Like we do really have-

03:09:17
Balaji Srinivasan: So, so I'm very conscious of the slippery slope argument, and in fact, I agree with it. What I'm, what I'm basically saying, w- when I made that previous comment, uh, what I was basically saying is that, um, we have the costs of this already in the sense of we have this NSA surveillance apparatus. It's already there. You'd, you would assume hopefully that someone could use it for good because what is it being used for otherwise? I don't know, right? Um, now I don't-

03:09:43
Eric Weinstein: Or, or we could shrink it.

03:09:44
Balaji Srinivasan: We could shrink it, that's right. But, but I think that, um, you know-

03:09:48
Eric Weinstein: And make it, make it like responsive to civic civil liberties.

03:09:52
Balaji Srinivasan: Sure. Absolutely. Uh, you know, or you have alternatively a competent state which takes root privileges for a period of time and then either gives them up or is forced to give them up later, right? But okay, so just finishing like the good scenario. Um, so robo is, uh, you know, as, as I mentioned, it's, it's robotic factories. It's basically like the real future, right? Um, it's autonomy, it's drones, it's, it's automation of all kinds. Uh, and then agro is actually kind of part of, you know, it's got pieces of the others, but certainly food production is gonna be a big thing. Um, and, uh, but, but food production in a hygienic way, you know? Whether-- Like meatpacking plants, for example, are probably gonna get robotized just given that they're, like they've all gotten corona infections. Um, and, uh, you know, maybe people will eat, um- Uh, you know, foods that are less amenable to, um, you know, for example, the organic foods or, or the free-range chicken type stuff is less factory farm, and therefore there's less people around, and so it's less, I think, intensive and, and so maybe it has a lower infection rate. That kind of thing may happen, right? But so those sectors, info, bio, crypto, uh, robo, agro, and the last astro with what Elon is doing with Starlink. Um, but those combined four are really interesting scenarios. Like for example, go and move from the city out to a really cheap rural area with a huge house, uh, and, um, it's like one tenth the cost or whatever, depending on how far out you go. And you've got Starlink, so you've got internet. Uh, every job is remote work, so you can pick from any job and switch jobs very easily. The liquidity of global labor markets shoots up. Um, you have drone delivery, and so you're connected, you know, via Amazon. You have fewer drives, but you're, you're s- but they're self-driving, so autonomous.

03:11:46
Eric Weinstein: Your carbon footprint goes down.

03:11:47
Balaji Srinivasan: What's that? What's that?

03:11:48
Eric Weinstein: I agree. Your carbon footprint goes way down.

03:11:51
Balaji Srinivasan: Your carbon footprint goes way down. That's right. And y- you're, you're s- in tune with nature, you know. You can walk outside and see green. Um, and, uh, you're basically-- It's like, it's like a techno rural sort of lifestyle. Um, somebody told me Asimov's book, "The Naked Sun," talks about something like this, and I have to go and read it because I, I had not read it until it was mentioned.

03:12:10
Eric Weinstein: I should say I also did an intro to one of my episodes where I talked about my wife's general belief, which is that, uh, coronavirus effectively just accelerates all aspects of the future that were being held back.

03:12:24
Balaji Srinivasan: Yes, that's right. So let's talk about three of the biggest ones, right? Um, education, healthcare, and, um, [lip smack] and real estate. So, uh, last one first, real estate. So for the last I don't know how many years, people in San Francisco and big cities have all been talking about, "Oh my God, we can't build skyscrapers," you know, a- a- because of like, you know, the NIMBY versus YIMBY thing. And generally I've been on the YIMBY side, you know. You know, it reduces cost to be able to build, et cetera. But now we may obviate that entirely. For example, one of the things I've been talking about on Twitter, um, VR has gotten really good. Oculus Quest is, I think, the most important device since the iPhone. Um-

03:13:03
Eric Weinstein: It's amazing.

03:13:04
Balaji Srinivasan: It's amazing, right? And it's under-hyped relative to how good it is. Um, I, I-

03:13:08
Eric Weinstein: Well, we, we, the, the previous version seemed to have been slightly over-hyped, and then people lost interest-

03:13:14
Balaji Srinivasan: Right. Right

03:13:14
Eric Weinstein: ... and didn't take into account what would change.

03:13:16
Balaji Srinivasan: That's right. That's right. So, um, one of the things I'm doing is experiments with portfolio companies of mine where everybody's buying Oculus Quests and seeing if they can do effectively like a virtual office, okay? Uh, now there's another version of this, which is, um, let's say that folks move out from the cities because cities are big crowds basically, right? Like remember the one thing I think is a pretty sure bet will decline are big crowds. When I say decline, doesn't mean go to zero, but it means decline.

03:13:45
Eric Weinstein: I, I'm with you.

03:13:46
Balaji Srinivasan: Okay. So cities and big crowds in general. So a city is like a, is like a persistent big crowd. You get away from the city, you go to a techno rural kind of thing. You've got a backyard now. What you could do is you could drop a shipping container that is both a home office and a VR room in the backyard. Now, it doesn't have to be exactly a shipping container. It could be a modular, okay? But you've got home office plus VR room. And, uh, what's interesting is for a company, I would rather for my 10 employees pay, let's say 100K for 10 VR rooms and the VR gear, um, and then I don't have to pay anything more, right? Like it's not, it's not a lease. It's like a piece of capital equipment. It's like an amazing perk that you get and, and, you know, maybe, maybe it's like, uh, something where the employee's in on half of it. Just all kinds of deals or whatever you can work out with that. But point is, now you've done something where you've decentralized commercial real estate. Um, you've networked together a bunch of cheap pieces of property to create something where you can now deliver the office itself as a service, okay? So that is to say you've got these VR rooms, you deliver a virtual office in VR, and, uh, you can change the, the lighting. You can have rooms that have persistent whiteboards. You can teleport somebody in for a business meeting. Um, this concept of actually making Microsoft Office, Microsoft Office VR or whatever, that will actually happen. Uh, I think it's pretty-

03:15:11
Eric Weinstein: Uh, I think it's pretty-

03:15:11
Balaji Srinivasan: Go ahead.

03:15:12
Eric Weinstein: Not the virus we wanted, but the virus we needed.

03:15:15
Balaji Srinivasan: Maybe. Okay? So what that does also, it gets people out, you know, i- in nature, right? And-

03:15:19
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah

03:15:20
Balaji Srinivasan: ... you have, you have, you have-- Uh, the other thing about like a VR lifestyle is, uh, you're standing more, and it's, it's actually better in some ways than sitting, right?

03:15:28
Eric Weinstein: Yes. There's... Or look-

03:15:30
Balaji Srinivasan: There's a lot of bene- Go ahead.

03:15:31
Eric Weinstein: The fu- Yeah. So there's lots of things that will happen. I-

03:15:33
Balaji Srinivasan: So let me give you two more. Let me give you two more. Education, okay? So colleges, the entire... This is something that's near to your heart. Um, you know, uh, my, my, um, friend/colleague, uh, Noah Smith actually tweeted about this, about this coming college apocalypse, mentioned that state funding is being cut, foreign students aren't coming because both immigration and lack of demand, and domestic students aren't coming. Uh, and for if, if the pandemic goes on such that campuses don't reopen in the fall, no one wants to pay 50K for zoom.edu. Um, and so, uh, suddenly you've got a tension between what the colleges think they're delivering in terms of benefit and what they're actually delivering. And so I think you're gonna have a Wile E. Coyote thing with lots of bankruptcies. Uh, and the fourth, uh, you know, or the thing that, that happens in addition to those three factors, uh, the fourth factor is all the online education that's been built over the last 10 years, I think that goes vertical. So we start l- start to actually get a future where anybody can get a quality technical or trade education, I think, online, um, for a fraction of the cost and actually unlock, you know, the power of the internet on that, and that's another major thing. And third is healthcare. So we also already mentioned bio, but these telemedicine apps like what India is doing with Arogya Setu, um- Put the doctor and the prescriptions and the EHR and so on in there. This is something that should have happened a long, long time ago, but telemedicine suddenly becomes the first line of defense. That's already happening in the US. So telemedicine becomes the first line of defense. You can get a house call. You can actually get prescriptions. You don't have to go down to the doctor. People will see the doctor more frequently. You'll actually have checkups. You'll have someone monitoring you. It becomes convenient. Um, and so you start hyper-deflating at least one aspect of medicine, which is the, you know, the, the GP visit, general practitioner visit. So you start actually going after- Go ahead.

03:17:22
Eric Weinstein: Great points. All things that are going to change, some for the better. There's no way to not, to avoid blowing people some good. Um, Balaji, I want to say-

03:17:30
Balaji Srinivasan: I wanted, I wanted to have some positivity on. That's all. I was like, "Yeah."

03:17:32
Eric Weinstein: I really appreciate it. I want to end it here because it is positive, and I, and I don't disagree. And, and we've been on this as well. I think that this idea that many aspects of the future that have been held back are going to be beneficial.

03:17:45
Balaji Srinivasan: Yep, yep.

03:17:45
Eric Weinstein: Um, I would like to talk to you, of course, at great length about a lot of different topics. Uh, you're one of my favorite divergent minds out there, and not just mine. A lot of people in my circle hold you in very high regards. I'm so glad we were able to bring you. You're the first remote, I think, that we've done, uh, in the history of the show. So, um, I wanted just to say thank you for coming through the portal, and, uh, do you want to say anything else about what you're doing, where we should be looking for you?

03:18:14
Balaji Srinivasan: Sure. Follow me at twitter.com/balajis, and I'll probably announce some stuff and, uh, uh, on my Twitter feed, and you can see it then.

03:18:23
Eric Weinstein: All right. So maybe there's some interesting things coming up. You've been through the portal with Balaji Srinivasan, general partner at Andreessen Hor- Horowitz, former CTO of Coinbase, and, uh, somebody who has been very active, uh, in the biotechnology sphere. In fact, shepherding a company to public offering or, or, sorry, rather a purchase, uh, I believe for over $300 million, and one of the people who was first and earliest and clearest on the coronavirus COVID-19 situation. So please, uh, try to find us, uh, wherever you listen to podcasts, on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify. Uh, also head over to our YouTube channel and not only subscribe, but be sure to click the bell icon to be notified whenever the next video drops. Um, and we will hopefully be back with Balaji on other topics. Uh, thanks for hanging in there, and stay safe out there, and be well. [outro music]