AGI, Biotech, and China vs. The Internet | Balaji Srinivasan

Balaji Srinivasan (0:00)

For example, imagine you had a very fast spaceship, right? You still have to point it somewhere in three-dimensional space, and then go zoom in that direction. China's been working out for 45 years. China's really, really, really ridiculously strong. Academic journals think, oh my god, it's a corporation, they're so evil.

Kian Sadeghi (0:20)

I think we really touched it all in this podcast, and this was probably my favorite podcast we've done. Balaji's, as always, brilliant. Balaji Srinivasan.

SPEAKER_3 (0:27)

Balaji Srinivasan.

Kian Sadeghi (0:28)

Balaji Srinivasan. Balaji Srinivasan.

SPEAKER_3 (0:31)

Balaji S. Srinivasan is an American entrepreneur and investor. He was the co-founder of Counsyl, the former chief technology officer of Coinbase.

Kian Sadeghi (0:39)

What do you think about these foundation models coming and raising, you know, whatever, tens of millions and hundreds of millions of dollars, you think?

Balaji Srinivasan (0:45)

Good luck, obviously. You can only know if you have a control. Oh, boom, head explode, headshot, right? We didn't do a case control study on the FDA itself.

Kian Sadeghi (0:54)

All right, we have a very special episode today of High Alchemy. We're actually calling in very close to Singapore at the Network School. We have Balaji here who needs no introduction, really. Founder, investor, philosopher, clairvoyant, caller of society and culture. How are you doing today, Balaji? Good.

Balaji Srinivasan (1:12)

I'm doing great.

Kian Sadeghi (1:12)

Yeah, it's great to have you. We're just on the stage actually giving a talk about genetics. I want to start off actually in a place that usually people don't take you. They know you for crypto. They know you for politics. They know you for in a network school, network state, etc.

But one thing that has always struck me is very interesting is you started in genetics.

Balaji Srinivasan (1:30)

Yes. Yeah.

Kian Sadeghi (1:31)

So, tell me a bit more about Counsyl. Tell me a bit more about what you built in. I mean, you were at Stanford doing a lot of different computational genomics work actually. Tell me about that and how you started Counsyl, why there. Tell me a bit more.

Balaji Srinivasan (1:42)

So, actually, in a different life, I would have just remained an academic researcher. And I actually have, I think, like 5,000 citations or whatever on Google Scholar or something like that. That was a very important metric for me 25 years ago. It's completely unimportant today, but it's interesting. I had always been interested in genomics, and I'd been interested in genomics before it was even called genomics, DNA, and all that kind of stuff, partly because I was interested in longevity. Back in the 90s, there's this book, this author named Vikram Seth. Have you ever heard of him?

Kian Sadeghi (2:16)

I don't think so.

Balaji Srinivasan (2:17)

He's like a kind of a very poetic kind of writer. And he wrote this book called Golden Gate, and it's actually like almost a, it is a poem. So it's very old fashioned. It's actually rhyming, like every sentence all the way through a book, like it's very unusual. And it's this beautiful book. And towards the end, there's something, it's very melancholy. And there's this part at the end where he's like, oh, and they were all going to die someday, blah, blah. And I probably had a reaction that one out of 100,000 people had who read that book. And I grabbed the book and I just threw it across the room. I'm like, no way.

And I just opened up the Sanford Bulletin and I was like, okay, how do we learn about telomerase? How do we learn how to fix this or what have you? Just something about how he had said it was so-

Kian Sadeghi (2:59)

So what year is this? Undergrad Stanford?

Balaji Srinivasan (3:02)

Late 90s, something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kian Sadeghi (3:05)

So like right around the Human Genome Project then, that's going on probably?

Balaji Srinivasan (3:07)

Right, that's right. And the thing is that was around the time that bioinformatics became a subject, because prior to that, there wasn't enough information. First of all, computers weren't advanced enough. The internet wasn't advanced enough. There wasn't enough data collection. But essentially, the advent of both the Human Genome Project and the internet roughly around the same time in the 90s, led to people sequencing DNA, putting it on the internet, having other people analyze it, and thus began the concept of a so-called dry lab in biology, where you could, without any pipetting or what have you, analyze data and produce results.

So basically, I worked in many different areas of genomics, human genomics, population genomics, drug dosing like the Warfarin Consortium, and so on and so forth. And eventually, I came to the conclusion that if you were doing something as an academic project and you spent a thousand bucks, for example, and it's more than that, but a thousand bucks on every row when you're genotyping it, then to do a thousand people would cost you a million dollars. But if you can make even a hundred dollars per row, then after you did a thousand rows, you wouldn't run out of money, you would keep accumulating money. This is a very obvious calculation, but it was non-obvious at the time, which was like, oh, if you could make even a small margin on every row, then you could collect enough data to actually analyze things, you don't have to go and beg the government for money, because the thing about grants is they decelerate. So grants decelerate, and because they decelerate, then it's harder to get more money. Well, what if we built something that can actually accumulate data on its own? And then at that time, the thing is I was still, even though I always had quasi-libertarian intuitions, I didn't really understand what a business was, what a PNL was, anything like that. Nothing, nothing of that. I actually thought that the business was hard insofar as it was math and computers and everything else. It was just trivial stuff, whatever. And of course I was completely wrong about that. I had to learn all that. Anyway, point though is that after many trials and tribulations, we built a large company. The single most important thing that I took away from that whole experience was the extent to which the FDA is the primary bottleneck to global health. Like, you know.