Lex Fridman Podcast #331 – Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA
Machine transcription by Qwen3-ASR 0.6B (MLX, local, Apache-2.0). May contain recognition errors.

The following is a conversation with Biology Sir Novosin, an angel investor, tech founder, philosopher, and author of The Network State, How to Start a New Country. He was formerly the CTO of Coinbase and General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. This conversation is over seven hours. For some folks, that's too long. For some too short. For some just right. There are chapter timestamps, there are clips, so you can jump around or like I prefer to do with podcasts and audiobooks I enjoy. You can sit down, relax with a loved human, animal or consumable substance or all three if you like and enjoy the ride from start to finish. Biology is a fascinating mind who thinks deeply about this world and how we might be able to engineer it in order to maximize the possibility that humanity flourishes on this fun little planet of ours. Also, you may notice that in this conversation my eye is red that's from jujitsu, and also if I may say so from a life well lived. And now a quick few second mention of his sponsor. Check them out in the description as the best way to support this podcast. We got Policy Genius for life insurance, Blinkist for non fiction, Notion for team collaboration and Onit for supplements. Choose wisely, my friends. And now onto the full ad reads as always no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting but if you skip them please still check out our sponsors I enjoy their stuff maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by Policy Genius, a marketplace for finding and buying insurance. It's basically a modern take on life insurance and. Life insurance to me was always a fascinating thing. I think a lot of people live life kind of aware of their mortality and the mortality of those they love, but not really deeply aware. Of course, there is a surface layer at which you could plan for your own mortality. That's where life insurance comes in. But you can really deeply contemplate it. That's something that the Stoics espoused. Really meditate on your death every day. There is something about the way that the human mind perceives time. That is made more clear through the process of meditating on your mortality. Somehow the childlike fear of the unknown turns into the acceptance. Of us of you of me being one with nature. Yeah it's really interesting but yeah one of that is to actually do all the wise financial planning and life insurance is part of that. With Policy Genius you can find life insurance policies that start at seventeen dollars per month for five hundred thousand dollars of coverage. Head to Policy Genius dot com or click the link in the description to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you could save. That's Policy Genius dot com. This show is also brought to you by Blinkist, my favorite app for learning new things. Blinkist takes key ideas from thousands of non fiction books and condenses them down into fifteen minutes that you can read or listen to. It's kind of amazing that even for the books I've read going through the way that Blinkist condenses down the key insights from the book actually gives me a different perspective. In many ways a deeper perspective on the book I do highly recommend that whether you look at Blinkist first and then read the book after or read the book and look at Blinkist after I think both of those really give you a deep understanding of the book if that's something you are interested in if you don't have much time and you really just want to get a sense of what the book is about then just go with Blinkist I highly recommend it obviously you do not have time to read all of these books so. A lot of these books are part of the sort of public discourse so you should be at least aware of the insights they're exploring and if you understand that to be a gap in your knowledge that you would like to alleviate then you can always go and read the full book but Blinkist is a heck of a good start. You can claim a special offer for savings at Blinkist dot com slash lex. This show is also brought to you by Notion, a note taking and team collaboration tool. It's one central customizable and powerful workplace that can be tailored to fit any team. Obviously, if you look around the the productivity forums and Stack Exchange, Notion is going to show up time and time again as the recommended note taking tool. A lot of sort of cutting edge productivity gurus. And folks use Notion, but that's not what they want me to emphasize here. They really want to emphasize that it's also for teams whether that's a startup or business or any kind of team. It's good for it's great for collaboration. It's like a full on operating system for running every aspect of your company as it grows quickly. Learn more and get started for free at Notion dot com. This episode is also brought to you by Onit, a nutrition supplement and fitness company. They make Alpha Brain, a nutropic that helps support memory, mental speed and focus. I take it every once in a while when I need a super boost for my focus. So I would say the deep work sessions in the morning. Well, first of all, I start the day with a mantra, but then when I visualize the rest of the day and I start to take on the day with a cup of coffee. Well, first first some water with electrolytes, so with element and then coffee and then I sit behind the computer. Oftentimes I prefer a difficult programming task. There is something about my morning mind that prefers the design type of thinking the design challenges of programming and so. During that time, usually I don't need a boost. I think my right in my mind unless I didn't sleep a lot, but even in that case I am just ready to go. But in the later sort of like two three four hours in, then it can really help to have to have a boost if I am still working on something very difficult. That's what I'll take an Alpha Brain. You can get a special discount on it if you go to lexfreeman dot com slash onit. This is the lexfreeman podcast to support it. Please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here is Biology Sir Novosin. At the core of your belief system is something you call the prime number maze. I am curious. I am curious. We got we got to start there. If we can start anywhere it's with mathematics. Let's go. All right, great. A rat can be trained to turn at every even number or every third number in a maze to to get some cheese. But evidently it can't be trained to turn at prime numbers two, three, five, seven and then eleven and so on and so forth. That's just too abstract and frankly if most humans were dropped into a prime number maze. They probably wouldn't be able to figure it out either. You know they'd have to start counting and so on. Actually, pretty difficult to figure out what the the turning you know rule was. Yet the rule is actually very simple, and so the thing I think about a lot is just how many patterns in life are we just like these rats and we're trapped in a prime number maze and if we had just a little bit more. You know cogitation if we had you know a little bit more cognitive ability a little bit more whether it's you know brain machine interface or just better physics we could just figure out the next step in that prime number maze we could just see it we could just see the grid right. And that's what I think about like that that's a big thing that drives me. Is figuring out how we can actually conceive understand that prime number maze that we're living in. So understand which patterns are just complex enough that they are beyond the limit of human cognition. Yes. And what do you make of that? Are the limits of human cognition a feature or a bug? I think mostly a bug. I admire Ramonjan. I admire you know Feynman. I admire these great mathematicians and physicists who were just able to see things that others couldn't. And just by writing it down, you know that's that's a leap forward. You know people talk about it's not the idea it's execution but that's for trivial ideas for great ideas for Maxwell's equations or Newton's laws or you know quantum electrodynamics or some of Ramonjan's identities that really does bring us forward especially when you can check them you don't know how they work right. You have the phenomenological but you don't have the theory underneath it and then that stimulated the advancement of theory to figure out why is this thing actually working that's actually you know Stat mech you know arose in part from the kind of phenomenological studies that were basically being done where people are just getting steam engines and so on to work and then they kind of abstracted out thermodynamics and so on from that right so the the practice led the theory rather than vice versa to some extent that's happening in neural networks now as you are aware right and I think that's. Um so just something that's true and that works you know if we don't know yet that's amazing and it pulls us forward so I do think that the limits are are more of a bug than a feature. Is there something that humans will never be able to figure out about our universe about the theory about the practice of our universe. Yeah people will typically quote Gödel's incompleteness with for such a question and yeah there are things that are provably unknowable or provably unprovable. Um but I think you can often get an approximate solution you know the the Hilbert you know you know Hilbert's problems like we will know we must know. At least we should know that we can't know push to get at least an approximate solution push to know that we can't know at least we push back that darkness enough so that we have lit up that corner of the intellectual universe. Okay let's actually take a bit of a tangent and explore it in a way that I did not expect we would but let's talk about the nature of reality briefly I don't know if you are familiar with the work of Don Hoffman. No I don't I know Roger Penrose has like his road to reality series for like basic physics getting up to everything we know but go ahead tell me it's even wilder. In modern physics we start the question of what is fundamental and what is emergent in this beautiful universe of ours and there is a bunch of folks who think that space time as we know it the four dimensional space is emergent it's not fundamental to the physics of the universe and the same many argue I think Sean Carroll is one of them is that time itself the way we experience it is also emergent. It's not fundamental to the way our universe works. Anyway those are the technical term I apologize for swearing those are the mind fucks of modern physics but if we. Stroll along that road further we get somebody like Donald Hoffman who makes the evolutionary case that the reality we perceive with our eyes is not only an abstraction of objective reality but it's actually completely detached like we're in a video game essentially that's consistent between it. Consistent for all humans but it doesn't it's not at all connected to physical reality so it's it's an illusion version of the simulation hypothesis is that his. In a very distant way but, the simulation says that there is a sort of computational nature to reality and then there is a kind of a programmer that creates this reality and so on. Now he says that we humans have a brain that is able to perceive the environment. And evolution is produced from primitive life to complex life on Earth. Produce the kind of brain that doesn't at all need to sense the reality directly so like this table. According to Donald Hoffman is not there. Well so like not not just as an abstraction like we don't sense the molecules that make up the table but all of this is fake. Interesting so you know I I tend to be more of a hard science person right and so. Um you know so just on that people talk about qualia you know like is your perception of green the different different from my perception of green and you know my counter argument on that is well we know something about you know spectrum of light and we can build artificial eyes and if we can build artificial eyes which we can you know like they're not amazing but you can actually you can do that you can build artificial ears and so on obviously we can build recording devices and you know for cameras and things like that. Well operationally the whole concept of your perception of green you see green is purple eyes green is green or what I call green doesn't seem to add up because it does seem like we can do engineering around it right so the Hoffman thing I get why people more broadly will talk about a simulation hypothesis because you know it's like Feynman many others have talked about how. Math is surprisingly useful to describe the world you know like very simple equations give rise to these complex phenomena Wolfram is also on this from from different angle with the cellular automata stuff but um. It's almost suspicious how well it works. Yeah but on their hand it's like you know it is yet we're still also in a prime number maze you know there is things we just don't understand and you know so. So the within the constraints of the non prime numbers, we find math to be extremely effective surprising effective. Yeah exactly so maybe maybe the math we have gets us through the equivalent of the even turns and the odd turns but there is math we don't yet have that is more complex or more complex rules for other parts. This play all our age. I know that gets like very abstract but you know there are unsolved problems in in physics you know like the condensed matter space there is a lot of interesting stuff happening. My recollection I maybe you know out of date on this like things like so on illumination we don't know exactly how they work and sometimes those things that are like at the edges of physics you know in the late eighteen hundreds I think Rutherford somebody I think it was Rutherford said you know basically all physics is being discovered et cetera and that was obviously before quantum mechanics you know that that sort of edge case people were looking at the bomber and the passion series and seeing you know this weird thing you know with the hydrogen spectrum and it was quantized and you know that led to. Ah like the sort of phenomenological set of observations that led to quantum mechanics and and and everything and you know sometimes I think the UAP stuff might be like that right people immediately go to aliens for UAP like the unidentified aerial phenomena right and people have been there is surprising amount of stuff out there on this the UK has declassified a bunch of material you know Harry Reid was a sender has talked about this it's not an obviously it's not an obviously political thing it it which is good it's something that. Is there something happening there right and people had thought for a long time that the UAP thing was a like American kind of counter propaganda to cover up their new spy planes that were spying over the Soviet Union to make anybody who talked about them seem. You know crazy and and and hysterical or whatever, but if the UAP thing is real, it could be atmospheric phenomena like you know like the aurora borealis or the northern lights but some things we don't understand it could be something like the the bomber and passion series you know which were the observations of like emission spectrum before quantum mechanics so that's like another option as opposed to doesn't exist or little green men. It could be physics we don't understand yet. As one possible. Do you think there is alien civilizations out there? So there is a lot of folks who have kind of written and talked about there is you know the Drake Equation which is like you know multiplying all the probabilities together there is perhaps more sophisticated takes like the the dark forest you know which says that if the universe is like a dark forest where the dumb ones that aren't hiding our presence. There is one calculation I saw and I haven't reproduced myself but basically says that the the assumption that other civilizations have seen ours is wrong because when you have like a spherical radius for like the you know electromagnetic radiation that's leaving our planet as that sphere gets large and larger it gets like smaller and smaller amounts of energy so you know you get farther out you are not getting enough. You know you know photons or or would have you to to actually detect it. Um I you know I don't know actually I haven't looked into the math behind it but I remember remember seeing that argument so actually it is possible that it's so diffuse when you go past a certain you know number of light years out that people you know that an alien civilization wouldn't be able to detect it right that's that's another argument that's more basically about signals from them from us. Yeah to be able to signals colliding enough to find the signal from the noise. Right exactly. Intelligence signal. Yeah Hanson Hanson has an article called Grubby Aliens. Have you seen his thing? Right and so he's been on this podcast. Oh great, he's brilliant. I like him. He he pushes you know boundaries in interesting ways in every ways in all of the ways in all the ways that's right I like him overall he's you know he he's an asset to humanity. Grubby Aliens so he has he has this interesting idea that the civilizations. Quickly learn how to travel close to the speed of light, right? So we're not going to see them until they're here. Yeah that's possible. I mean one of the things is so here is for example a mystery that we haven't yet done right which or we haven't really figured out yet which is um. A biogenesis in the lab, right? We've done lots of things where you've got you can show macromolecules binding to each other you can show you know evidence for the so called RNA world a biogenesis to go from. You know like non life to life right in the lab you can show micro evolution obviously with bacteria you can do artificial selection on them lots of other aspects of um you know fundamental you know biochemistry origins of life stuff have been established there is a lot of plausibility arguments about the primitive environment and nitrogen's and carbon snapping together to get you know the you know the RNA world is the the the initial hypothesis but to my knowledge at least we haven't actually seen a biogenesis demonstrated now one argument is you need just like this massive world with. Ah you know so many different reps before that actually happens and um one possibility is if we could do atomic level you know simulations of molecules bouncing against each other it's possible that in some simulation we could find a path a reproducible path to a biogenesis and then just you know replicate that in the lab right. Um I don't know okay but that seems to me to be like a mystery that we still don't fully understand like an example of the prime number maze right one of the most fascinating mysteries one of the most important yeah yeah yeah and and again there may be some biochemist who's like oh biology you don't know about X Y and C that happened in the biogenesis field I freely confess I am not like you know Ocarant on it the last thing I remember looking at it is what's Ocarant mean like up to the moment. Oh nice that's a nice word. That's a Ocarant. I am probably mispronouncing it, but yeah. Um. We'll edit it in post to pronounce it correctly with AI. Yeah yeah we'll we'll copy your voice and it will pronounce it perfectly correctly. Yeah in post one thing that I do think was interesting is. Ah, Craig Ventur. A while back, tried to make a minimum viable cell, um, where he just tried to delete all of the genes that were that were not considered essential, and so it's like a new life form, and this was like almost twenty years ago and so on, and that thing was a was was viable in the lab, right, and so it's possible that you could you kind of reverse engineer, so you are coming out the problem from different directions, like RNA molecules can do quite a lot, you've got some you know reasonable assumptions as to how that could come together, ah, you've got like sort of stripped down minimum viable life forms and and so sort of it's not there isn't stuff here you can see microevolution you can see at the sequence level you know if you do molecular phylogenetics you can actually track back the bases there's actually so it's not like there's no evidence here there's a lot of tools to work with but this in my view is a fascinating area and actually also relevant to AI because another form of abiogenesis would be if we are able to give rise to a different branch of life form the silicon based as opposed to carbon based you know to stretch a point um you give rise to something that actually does meet the definition of life for some definition of life right what do you think that definition is for an artificial life form because you mentioned consciousness yeah when will it give us pause that we created something that feels by some definition or by some spiritual poetic romantic philosophical mathematical definition that it is alive right and we wouldn't want to kill it so couple of remarks in that one is Francis Crick of of Watson and Crick ah before he died I think his last paper was published on something called the cloudstrom okay and the thing is that you know sometimes in biology or in any you know domain people are sort of discouraged from going after the big the big questions right but he proposed the cloudstrom is actually the organ that is the seat of consciousness it's like this sheath that like covers the brain and for mice if you and again I may be recollecting this wrong so but you can look but at my recollection is um in mice if you disrupt this the mouse is like very disoriented right it's like it's the kind of thing which you know Watson and Crick were all about structure implies function right they found the structure of DNA this amazing thing and you know they remarked in this very under understated way at the end of the paper that well obviously this gives a basis for how the genetic material might be replicated and corrected because you know helix unwinds and you copy paste right so he was a big structure function person and that applies not just at the protein level not just at the level of DNA but potentially also at the level of organs like the cloudstrom is kind of this system integrated level right it's like the the last layer in the neural network or something you know um and and so that's that's the kind of thing that I think is worth studying um so consciousness is another kind of big abiogenesis a big question the prime number maze consciousness is a big question um and you know then definition of life right there's folks gosh there's I think so this one is something I'd have to Google around but there was a guy I think at Santa Fe Institute or something who had some definition of life and like some thermodynamic definition um but you are right that it's going to be a multi-feature definition we might have a Turing test like definition frankly which is just if enough humans agree it's alive it's alive right and that might frankly be the operational definition because you know viruses are like this boundary case you know are they are they alive or not most people don't think they're alive but they're they're they're on they're kind of they're more alive than a rock in a sense well I think in a world that we'll talk about today quite a bit which is the digital world I think the most fascinating philosophically and technically definition of life is life in the digital world so chatbots essentially creatures whether they're replicas of humans or totally independent creations perhaps in an automatic way I think there is going to be chatbots that we would ethically be troubled by if we wanted to kill them they would have the capacity to suffer they would be very unhappy with you trying to turn them off and then there will be large groups of activists that will protest and they'll go to the Supreme Court of whatever the Supreme Court looks like in in 10 20 30 40 years and they will demand that these chatbots would have the same rights as us humans do you think that's possible I saw that Google engineer who is basically saying this had already happened and I I was surprised by it because just when I looked at the chat logs of it it didn't seem particularly interesting on their hand I can definitely see I mean GPT three for people who you know haven't paid attention shows that serious step ups are possible and obviously you know you've talked about AI in your podcast a ton um is it possible that GPT nine or something is is kind of like that or GPT fifteen or GPT four maybe but yeah for people just listening there's a deep skepticism in your face yeah you know the reason being because um you know it's possible is possible that you have like a partition of society on literally this basis you know um that's one model where there are some people just like there's vegetarians and non vegetarians right there may be um machines have life and machines are machines you know like or something like that right ah you know you could you could definitely imagine some kind of partition like that in the future where your fundamental political social system that's a foundational assumption and you know is AI does it you know deserve the same rights as like a human or for example a corporation is an intermediate do you see that thing which is how human are different corporations have you seen that infographic it's actually funny so it's like there's a spectrum so for example Disney is considered about as human as like a dog but like Exxon I may be remembering this wrong but they had like a level with like human at one end and like rock at the other does that have to do with corporate structure what what I think about people's empathy for that corporation their brand identity but it's interesting to see that first of all people sort of do think of corporations as being more or like the branding is really what they're responding well that's what I mean they're also responding you know I have a brand of human that I'm trying to sell and it seems to be effective for the most part sure although it has become like a running joke that I might be a robot right which means there's the brand is cracking it's seeping through but I mean in that sense I just I think I don't see a reason why chatbots can't manufacture the brand of being human of being sentient I mean that is the Turing test but it's like the multiplayer Turing test now that actually a fair number of chatbots have passed the Turing test I'd say there's at least two steps up right one is um a multiplayer Turing test where you have chatbots talking to each other and then you ask can you determine the difference between in chatbots talking to each other and clicking buttons and stuff in apps and and humans doing that and I think we're very far off I shouldn't say very far off at least I don't know how far we are in terms of time but we're still far off in terms of a group of end chatbots looking like their digital output is like the group of end humans like a go from the Turing test to the multiplayer Turing test that's one definition another definition is you know to be able to kind of swap in and you are not just convincing one human that this is a human for a small you know session you are convincing all humans that this is a human for end sessions remote work actually makes this possible right that's another definition of a multiplayer Turing test where basically you have a chatbot that's fully automated that is earning money for you as an intelligent agent on a computer that's able to go and get remote work jobs and so on I would consider that next level right if you could have something that was like that that was competent enough to I mean because everything on a computer can be automated right literally you could be totally hands free just like autonomous driving you could have autonomous earning as a challenge problem if you were Microsoft or Apple and you had legitimate access to the operating system just like Apple says can you send me details of this event a decentralized thing could in theory log you know the actions of 10,000 or 100,000 or a million people and with cryptocurrency you could even monitor a wallet that was on that computer and you could see you know what long run series of actions were increasing or decreasing this digital balance you see I'm saying right so you start to get at least conceptually it'd be invasive and and you know there'd be a privacy issue and so on conceptually you could imagine an agent that could learn what actions humans were doing that resulted in the increase of their local cryptocurrency balance okay there may be better ways to formulate it but that I would consider a challenge problem is to go from the Turing test to a genuine intelligent agent that can actually go and make money for you if you can do that that's a big deal people obviously have trading bots and stuff but that would be you know the next level it's typing out emails it's creating documents it's actually so mimic human behavior in its entirety yeah that's right and it can it will schedule Zooms it will send emails it'll essentially because if you think about it a human is hitting the keys and clicking the mouse but just like a self-driving car the wheel rotates by itself right those keys are effectively just it's like a like the automator app in in Apple right everything's just moving on the screen you are seeing it there and it's just an AI it's kind of hilarious that the I'm not a robot click thing actually works because I I actually don't know how how that's how it works but I think it has to do with the movement of the mouse the timing and they know that it's very difficult for currently for a bot to mimic human behavior in the way they would click that little checkbox yeah exactly I think it's something I mean again my recollection on that is it's like a pile of highly obfuscated JavaScript with all kinds it looks like a very simple box but it's doing a lot of stuff and it's collecting all kinds of instrumentation and yeah exactly like a like a robot is just a little too deterministic or if it's got noise it's like Gaussian noise and the way humans do it is just not something that you'd usually be able to do without collecting thousands and thousands and thousands of human traces doing it but it is a predator prey on that well and the computer or millions of human traces I don't know the computer just sees the JavaScript it needs to be able to look outside the simulation for the computer the world is like it doesn't the computer doesn't know about the physical world so it has to look outside of its world and introspect back on this simple box right which is kind of you know I think that's exactly what mushrooms do or like psychedelics is you get to go outside and look back in yeah that's what a computer needs to do you know I do wonder whether they actually give people insight or whether they give people the illusion of insight is there a difference yeah because well actual insight you know actual insight is again Maxwell's equations you are you are able to shift the world with that there's a lot of practical devices that work the illusion of insight is I'm Jesus Christ and nothing happens right so I don't know I think this is quite different I don't know I I think you can fake it till you make it on that one which is insight in some sense is revealing a truth that was there all along yeah so I mean I guess like I am talking about technical insight where you you have this is the thing you know we were talking about actually before the podcast like technical truths versus political truths right some truths they're they're on a spectrum and there are some truths that are actually entirely political in the sense that if you can change the software in enough people's heads you change the the value of the truth for example the location of a border is effectively consensus between large enough groups of people who is the CEO that's you know consensus among a certain group of people what is the value of a currency or any stock right that that market price is just the psychology of a bunch of people like literally if you can change enough people's minds you can change the value of the border or the position the hierarchy or the value of the currency those are purely political truths then all the way on the other end are technical truths that exist independent of whatever any one human or all humans think like the gravitational constant right or the diameter of a virus those those are just those exist independent of the human mind changing enough human minds doesn't matter those those remain constant and um then you have things that are interestingly in the middle where cryptocurrency has tried to pull more and more things from the domain of political truths into technical truths where they say okay the one social convention we have is um that if you hold this amount of Bitcoin or that if you hold this private key you hold this Bitcoin and then we make that very hard to change because you have to change a lot of technical truths so you can push things to this interesting intermediate zone the question is how how how much of our world can we push into that right and that takes us in a non linear fascinating journey to the question I wanted to ask you in the beginning which is um this political world that you mentioned in the world of political truth as we know it in the 20th century in the early 21st century what do you think works well and what is broken about government the fundamental thing is that we can't easily and peacefully start new opt-in governments and start up governments yeah and what do I mean by that is basically um you can start a new company you can start a new community you can start a new currency even these days you don't have to beat the former CEO in a duel to start a new company um you don't have to become head of the world bank to start a new currency okay um because of this yes if you can if if you're if you want to you can join I don't know Microsoft or name some company that's a GameStop and you can try to reform it okay or you can start your own and the fact that both options exist mean that you know you've you can actually just start from scratch and that's just I mean the same reason we have a clean piece of paper right I mentioned this actually in in the network state book I'll just quote this bit but we want to be able to start a new state peacefully for the same reason we want a bare plot of Earth a blank sheet of paper an empty text buffer a fresh tarp or a clean slate because we want to build something new without historical constraint right for the same reason you hit plus and do docs dot new you know like create a new doc for the same reason right because you don't have backspace you don't have just like 128 bytes of space 128 kilobytes and just have to backspace the old document for creating the new one so that's a fundamental thing that's wrong with today's governments and it's a meta point right because it's not any one specific reform it's a meta reform of being able to start new countries okay so that's one problem but you know you could push back and say that's that's a feature because you know a lot of people argue that tradition is power through generation if you try a thing long enough which is the way I see marriage there's value to the struggle and the journey you take through the struggle and you grow and you develop ideas together you grow intellectually philosophically together and that's the idea of a nation's that spans generations that you have a tradition that becomes more that that strives towards the truth and is able to arrive there or no not arrived but take steps towards there through the generations so you may not want to keep starting new governments you may want to stick to the old one and improve it one step at a time so just because you are having a fight inside a marriage doesn't mean you should get a divorce and go on Tinder and start dating around that's the that's the pushback so it's not obvious that this is a strong feature to have sure to launch new governments there's several different kind of lines of attack or or debate or whatever on this right first is ah yes there is obviously value to tradition and you know people say this is Lindy and that's Lindy it's been proven for a long time and so on but of course there is a tension between tradition and innovation you know like going to the moon wasn't Lindy just it was awesome and you know like artificial intelligence is something that's very new new is good right and this is a tension within humanity actually itself because you know it's way older than all of these nations I mean humans are tens of thousands of years old answers to humans are millions of years old right and you go back far enough and the time that we know today of the sessile farmer and soldier is if you go back far enough you want to be truly traditional well we're actually descended from hunter gatherers who were mobile and wandered the world and there weren't borders and so on they kind of went where they want right and you know people have you know had done historical reconstructions of like skeletons and and stuff like that and many folks report that the transition to agriculture and being sessile um resulted in you know diminution of height you know people had like tooth decay and stuff like that the skeletons people had traded off upside for stability right that's what the state was that was what these sessile kinds of things were now of course um they they had more likelihood of living consistently you could support larger population sizes but it had lower quality of life right and so the hunter gatherer era you know maybe that's our actually our collective recollection of a garden of Eden where people you know just like a a spider kind of knows innately how to build webs or a beaver knows how to build dams you know some people theorize that the entire garden of Eden is like um a sort of built-in neural network recollection of this you know pre sessile era where you are able to roam around just pick off fruits and so on low population density so point is that I think what we're seeing is a V three you go from the hunter gatherer to the farmer and soldier the sessile nations are here and they've got borders and so on to kind of the V three which is the digital nomad the new hunter gatherer we're going back to the future because you know it's even older than nations is no nations right even more traditional than tradition is you know being international right and so we're actually tapping into that other huge thread in humanity which is the desire to explore pioneer wander innovate you know and I think it's important to make America great again it's to dissolve it completely into oblivion no that's a joke I see yeah yeah I know it's a joke well humor I'm learning this new thing yes a new thing for the robot the chatbot emulation isn't fully working there yeah yeah glitch that's we're in the in the beta and let me say say one other thing about this which is you know there are I mean everybody in the world to okay let's say I don't know what percentage let's say 99 point nine nine percent or it's bounced to that number of political discourse in the US focuses on trying to fix the system if those folks I mean 0.01 percent of the energy is going towards building a new system that seems like a pretty good portfolio strategy right or 100 are supposed to go and edit this code base from 200 something years ago I mean the most American thing in the world is Going and you know leaving your country in in search of a better life. America was founded 200 years ago by the founding fathers. It's not just a