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in the Securities discussed in this podcast, my guest today is Balaji srinivasan, a Serial entrepreneur, and angel. Investor apology is known to challenge conventional wisdom and he lives up to his reputation. In this conversation, we
Got a wide variety of topics including advancements in health, tracking ways to evaluate your own information diet and how technology is driving decentralization and what that could mean for countries corporations and individuals before we transition to the episode, if you enjoyed this conversation with Balaji, I'd recommend the etherium episode on our newest Show Business breakdowns. You can find that episodes and more on your favorite podcast player or at join Colossus.com. Now, please enjoy my conversation with Balaji srinivasan.
So Balaji, I think the best place to start is with three interesting Concepts that you've been thinking about more recently. The first of which is information diet, I love this concept. I devote my life to this concept as well, like, what goes in determines a lot of what comes out. Why did you get interested in this? What does information diet mean to you? What are you doing about
it for a long time? I've been interested in genomics and metabolism and things like that. You know, I did my graduate work in the space and I taught by informatics it.
Annapurna started genomics company and so I've been interested in health for a long time. And there's an interesting study, many years ago and has been follow-ups on since the saying you are what you eat. I mean, you don't really think about this, but when you eat something, it's literally incorporated into your body and if you were smart about it, you might be able to track and say, okay? When you eat this piece of chicken or this lettuce, or what have you, where are those lipids those carbohydrates, those proteins, Etc, where those Incorporated exactly is go to your eye.
Or is it just all diffuse? Does it? Gravitates towards particular things, or have you answers interesting studies that have been done on exactly this, where they're trying to track where it ends up deposit. Obviously easier to do and animals than it is in humans. You literally are what you eat in the sense of your body. Is reconstructed by the stuff and that intersects obviously genetics and insects of what we know about biochemistry and metabolism and pharmacogenomics and nutrigenomics which is like the response the body. You know you might be a caffeine fast or slow metabolizer alcohol faster slow metabolizer okay all those things.
So interesting that for a long time and more recently, we've started to get better Quantified Self stuff. Some people have said, oh I OT that's a bust or whatever, it's not really because it's something, which it actually is working. It's just working in the domain of health and I mean, actually a lot of Home devices now by the buyer iot ovens and stuff like that. And I oh, tea coffee things that refill your coffee. There's like a thing called endless or something like that. Which
bottomless we have an investor.
Yeah, it's funny because it's just like
Also, if you things that are purchased, as much as that, and anything, you can take off, your plate is often worth it to see the attention aspect for at least some people, it seems like a gimmick, but then it's also like, okay, why do we have an LED on the screen of something? At a certain point, the conversation becomes basically free the internet becomes free and so I adhesive is happening. Okay, so we're cursing back up to the fitness stuff, there's the whoop device or a ring, there's a Fitbit, there's Apple watch. And these things have really become a big thing, especially in the wake of the pandemic because some of these things are actually monitoring.
Vices that studies are showing that you can get like early warning on things. We're starting to equip them with more and more stuff. In fact this would have happened five or ten years ago. The Apple watch is actually Nerf by the FDA, it would have had things like blood glucose meters and so on, we've been able to do this non-invasively. I've seen demos of this, we're back in. 2013-2014 there's a company thinks a no intelligence and one of their lead people was recruited by Apple actually and they had a device where I could wear it and basically felt like velcro and the thing is it wasn't pricking the skin.
Seeing blood spread out like in a blood test. Okay? But essentially what it was doing, was it had something which essentially was getting into the skin enough under sort of lipid bilayer there that you're able to actually do non-invasive monitoring of stuff. We start to know what's going on in our bodies. We know what's going on in Bangalore Budapest but not our bodies, we have information on the other side of the world but not something that is like half a foot away. We don't know what's going on subcutaneously. It's actually this amazing Blank Spot on the map. It's like back in the 1990's. There's
As concert of getting lost, you don't get lost two more. You got GPS now. You never don't know your location in the future. You will never not know your infection. This is one of the few good things about the whole covid thing. Is enormous, effort is being put into various kinds of non-invasive Diagnostics and monitoring and all that stuff. So, now, what you can start doing is you can start seeing cause and effect for your diet, you can start eating something and you see it's spiking your levels held or your freestyle Libra or some other device like
Today you're wearing that's monitoring your blood glucose. You can see that your resting heart rate spiked. You can see when you got a good night of sleep or not, you kind of know this stuff kind of intuitively but tracking it over. Time is actually very valuable. You hit what you measure? What are we optimizing Today? Twitter likes that sucks. You know? It's funny. People say that we have nothing in common around the world. Well, every politician in the world, every celebrity is optimizing, you know, their Twitter likes or their followers or what have you? I think for those of us who have something like math or
Something else like that, the primary metric this is not your all-encompassing metric units, maybe top 10 or something like that but it's certainly not number one. But for those people for whom it is number one, this is just like this mind-melting kind of thing because you just optimizing popularity which is benefiting Twitter, is just Rose in their database. It's not benefiting you that much. There's some benefit out of it but not that much especially on the anger and rage that comes out of getting attention sometimes. So just talked about diet, talked about the cause and effect of diet when you got this iot stuff, now let's apply that stuff to information diet currently.
There's that saying, right? If it bleeds it leads, you can expand it. If it enrages it engages, Legacy Media and social media profit from Fight Club. Two people just go at it over some stupid polarizing article and they might agree on 85 90 % of other things. It might live in the same Community, they might know each other from work or church or whatever. But they just go ahead and over this thing which frankly, neither than what, do you know, thought to bring up. But it's optimized for being polarizing. It's late star, codex calls like a scissor statement. This is
A statement, which is something, which is obviously true to one party and obviously false the other, which basically is like a natural selection process where media companies and social media companies are constantly shifting and selecting effectively for scissor Stevens cause they're so enraging. And therefore engaging. And so, what happens in this fight club, what are its a thousand clicks? Ten thousand clicks, everybody watches fight, fight, fight, someone wins, somebody loses. But most the time both lose because both are harmed in this environment. But who gains Twitter gains the
X gains, they sold ads doesn't matter made money, right? The issue here is, I think of it as analogous to our diet diet, because over the last 50, 60 years as restaurant culture has become more and more and more mainstream, you've gone from having family cooked meals, where the person who is your food provider was also, your healthcare provider to Outsourcing all of that to capitalistic entities that are not actually economically aligned with you and so therefore it's Coca-Cola.
Le it's sugary Foods, its unhealthy foods that are delicious, they get you to eat more. That's huge portion sizes. But you pay later with diabetes or disorders of metabolism, and so on and so forth. And it's really something where it's an externality, people have talked about this, like a Fiat food, like how the food pyramid is totally upside down and tells you all these carbohydrates and Grains when actually, that should be the thing, you avoid to the maximum extent. Because we're showing it causes, inflammation causes type 2 diabetes. There's this GIF of the Obesity epidemic.
Google that sometime it's from slates almost 10 years ago, and it's frightening because it actually looks like an epidemic. A true epidemic Could It Be by the way? Partially microbial ecologist. Sure. Could it be that this era? You know, how in previous eras? You're seeing the show, Mad Men, we kind of wince when you were supposed to wins, when like they're smoking all the time pregnant women, smoking a cigarette. I haven't seen the show but I saw like a few episodes. I don't remember all the episodes. The director knows enough about modern culture around smoking that they can kind of pan to a shot where the audience will go.
Go. You know, smoking a lot. Yeah, that looks like a really Smoky room where they doing to their health, but guess what, if the drugs at that time were nicotine and alcohol, look, maybe to a greater extent, someone will come back to that point and it came in store, but I'm sure nicotine is dropped off. But we're juicing ourselves sugar with caffeine, and with whatever the dopamine e, stimulus is of social media. / rage stimulus, we're doing that, we're dosing ourselves to the absolute maximum. This is a sugar caffeine and social media Society.
Have you seen that book? I think it's apocryphal. Okay, I'm not sure if it's actually true but it's interesting if it is true. You could probably you should do what I call the independent confirmations, this book that claims that the Nazis were really on meth that was laced through a bunch of things in their society, that spends a lot either. So angry old. So I don't know if that's actually true. I thought it was like a funny thing I saw in my peripheral vision with diligence seeing and double-checking. That's a general thing. By the way, I think lots of things and social media are insistent repetition.
Other than independent replication in cryptocurrency we have this concept of independent confirmation so you don't just approve a transaction right away you 846 independent confirmations is cryptographic checks and so on and so forth. A lot of our mechanisms for information dissemination have advanced over our mechanisms for information verification, but fortunately, they are on the screen there in a database, their electronic. So maybe some of the truth can catch up to the LIE, even though it's got getting its Busan, the cryptographic truth, curating your information diet more. Okay, so now pull
Altogether. Basically, just like you can see the cause and effect your eat that cookie. And you see your glucose Spike or have you. I think we're going to start to be able to see the cause and effect, where you see this content, it's coming in, through your eyes. It's coming in through your ears and you see your heart rate spiked with the right analytics. You can see whether or not your biochemistry is moving in a positive or negative Direction. You can actually see the effect on your body itself. Obviously, if people see like a disturbing image, or something like that, or a stressful text or something, you'll see it. You'll see it in the analytics. If you've got enough handle
Addicts. But we also want to look at is a long-term effect. That is to say, what if you start to think about what would Men's Health look like in the era of Fitbit? What would Bloomberg look like if it was something which is measured by, did this stimulus of content, improve your portfolio over time? What would it look like if you had learning content, then you saw whether or not you actually retain that would like tests of mnemonic media. So this is a completely different model for media. Because right now media is based on page views per
Region profit. So page uses obvious, just sheer popularity, 10 million clicks. Whatever Prestige is a little less obvious that is popularity Among The Establishment. You're going for pulitzer's. That's a very small group of people that all clap each other. On the back and are less and less representative, not just of America, but over the world and then the third is profit. So short term profit because covid happens. A lot of newspapers. Subscriptions are getting sold. Wow you need to be glued to the news. Again, if it bleeds, it leads, there's an incentive.
Of for conflict. And given that Legacy Media corporations, consi interrogate, everybody else's incentives. Constantly paint them in the worst possible light. It's worth asking what their incentives are. There's actually an incentive, if it bleeds, it leads. Well, that means there's an incentive to make it bleed War. Reporting is it causing the wars? Is it in flaming? Well, we know that that did happen with the Spanish-American war will in Randall. Hurst the yellow journalist basically was like something like a you give me the papers and I'll furnish the war or something like that. I'm probably butchering the quote.
We know that there's at least one guy who basically started a war to sell papers and we know that we're reporting juices, things, conflict, Justice things. So if these guys make more money in situations of conflict, that's actually bad. That's something that should be interrogated. We should be tracking that Paul Graham. Actually had a plot from a few years ago which showed that starting in 2013. The New York Times, in particular, started juicing their content with all these sort of woke words with the right analytics. We can just see that they just juice the sugar content.
Of their articles, they somebody's putting all these enraging words, one reason why maybe that the Washington Post had just gotten bought in 2012, by besos Legacy. Media was down on one knee, Google and Facebook. We're going vertical. Have you seen the graph of print media disruption? Yeah, select from sixty seven billion down to 17. C media is really on the back foot and whereas this paper going to get sold for scrap, Jack Sheaffer actually have an article at the time saying that the salzburger family which owns near Times isn't interesting. By the way, we hear so much about duck.
Berg and clinic and Andreessen, all the founders in Tech. But most people cannot name the owners of media companies. I argue the reason for that is it's not so much that the owners of media companies get positive coverage is that they get no coverage. We are told that Zuckerberg for example, exerts editorial control over Facebook, we're not really focused on salzburger who exercises indirect controller in your attendance by appointing. The editor-in-chief in the CEO who pulled up into the publisher, the thing is like look scrutiny is good but these are media corporations they should be
Routinized just as much as tech companies are for their editorial decisions for their personnel, for their conflicts of interest for their incentive structure, just to digress on this topic. From it, made things that tech companies are attacked for, for example, there was an article a while back by Swisher in the New York Times attacking Zach for having dual class shares. A few more years earlier. There's an article by Joe nocera celebrating the souls burgers for what having dual class shares. It is something where it's like, wildly inconsistent, you know, these folks will attack you.
For having ad tractors or whatever, while assuming their site in add trackers, this is classic Russell conjugation dual classes bad when Zuckerberg does it. But good when salzburger does, it's like a true rip in The Matrix where only somebody who, like just reads all this stuff and I catalog all of it.
I was gonna say, it's crazy. I mean, just look at these two next to each
other. Look at these two next to each other, right? 2012 article how punch protected the times 2019 article text tool class stock. Let me just talk about this topic for a second, Russell conjugation. And I'm
Being stack digressing on. Things will come back up. Eric Weinstein has actually helped popularize this and at first it seems sort of like just a fun observation. So it comes from Bertrand Russell and he observes that. I sweat you perspire but She Glows the same concept can be gift-wrapped in positive or negative connotation as one sees fit. Now, the thing about this is and this is not an obvious thing, Russell conjugation is actually a way to embed an org chart
Language a hidden or chart. Okay, let me explain what I mean first when you think about power power is fundamentally a double standard, that is to say, a can do something to B, but B cannot do it to a that can be an explicit optin, double standard, for example, you as an employee, you join a company you report to the CEO you as a private, you join the military, a general can tell you what to do but not vice versa in such a case, the right to exit to leave the company bounds, the control the CEO has, and in theory you can also eventually leave them
Military though, you lose some rights upon signing that contract but there is a tour of Duty or would have the point is so that that double standard is consciously opted into by both sides for their Mutual benefit to win the market to win the war Etc. OK, one can critique these hierarchies but they're explicit and their opted into. There's a different kind of thing which is an implicit hierarchy where someone can do something to you and you cannot do it to them, but it's not acknowledged. Explicitly, for example, you cannot have dual class stock.
But the New York Times company can and it is gift wrapped in opposite sounding language. Now, once you kind of look for this, you'll see it a lot, you harass, but they hold you accountable for clap back. You are doxing but they're investigating. He docks has she leaks, they investigate. So the thing is the same action documents were obtained vs. Hack documents were put on the internet, it illegally. Those are two different ways of the knife went in like super
Passive voice description versus active voice, putting a spotlight on it. These are all linguistic tricks that effectively embed in org chart in the conversation, another example, white but the covid stuff. There's so many aspects of this, but when you talk about the lab leak, you are a paranoid conspiracy theorist, Etc. Okay. Once it's acknowledged by The Establishment, well, scientists say so on and so forth. And so this is like, government by gerund
And it is Power by participial. It is basically org chart by adjective. It is essentially an org chart that's embedded in the language and who is allowed to use what word and what is considered ceiling in a given situation is something there. Now, what we're really doing here, by the way is we're sort of deconstructing, deconstruction Foucault. And these guys who are actually like the roots of much of the woke stuff happening online, we can go deep into Wilkins if you care or not. A lot of that actually does have an important kernel of truth to it which is that
One can find that there are power relationships and Society language can deconstruct, there are assumed default, set really aren't universal, default set by the laws of physics, but they're just imposed by some Society. At some point, in the past we've inherited today and we don't think about too much and that you can attack them with language and deconstruct them. And this is true, but you can also deconstruct the construction itself and when we are doing that is to actually look at the double standard in the use of language pointed out actually have a
I love it. I'll give you another example by the way, of this language, double standard. So in 2019 there is an amazing one which was YouTube in Mighty back-to-back, the making of a YouTube radical. This was June 8th, we 19 the making of you too radical and then it's like want free speech in Russia. Try YouTube. Now when do you think that article came out
like the next week or something? Mix day like a
steeper, the propaganda engine and essentially these are like rips in the
Individually this argument can work, but once you see them side-by-side, you're like wait a second. This is not a Universalist argument, it's a tribalist darken. It is arguing that media tribe should have power and that's really what it is. Immediate tribe should have power and Tech tribes should not be tribe. Can have dual class stock Tech tribe cannot or in the case of YouTube. YouTube should not be broadcasting content. That media tribe does not want in the United States but overseas YouTube and meet a tribe are aligned from now. So go ahead and broadcast content is absolutely nothing to do with free speech.
Is absolutely nothing to do with corporate. Governance is everything to do with the leninist whom and that's where the org chart is embedded in the language. It's the Russell conjugation.
If you apply this back to the information diet concept, I think everyone listening will say, it makes a lot of sense that the information going into your brain is similar to the food, going into your body and with the tighter feedback cycle or measurables, we probably would change a lot of what we consume. I'm wearing the Whooper the levels or whatever like it's amazing like very quickly, like I'm not going to drink at night anymore because it blows up.
My measurables and just like the food pyramid, you don't spend that long investigating that to say, this should be inverted. And there's like an 80/20 paredo thing where like if you just stop with the greens and the sugar like you get a lot of the benefit is the same true here. Like if you just stopped reading the news entirely and just like read Source material let's say or like research material would that get the vast majority of the information diet
benefit in your opinion? In general, I feel that the most constructive criticism is to build the alternative. Yes. Deconstruct the
Establishment. Use every verbal. Technical monetary Etc weapon. I think that's actually extremely important, but build something better. It's in coming to build something better. See me weak, recessions media. How do we build something better? So first on the information diet, one very important concept, which I'm going to try to explain to your viewers, maybe they already know it, maybe some of them are very familiar with in some are some are unfamiliar is a concert of like on chain proof particular, this
somewhat enough but explain
it. Okay? For example, a few weeks ago,
Can't beat Aaron donated a huge amount of these so-called dog tokens to covid support in India. And unchain you can actually see it, you know, when someone would show you an unbelievable tweet, and you say, like, Is that real, and you'd go to twitter.com to that user and try to scroll to see if twitter.com loaded it for you. Why? Because anybody can kind of Photoshop and tweet and if it's truly unbelievable, you're like, Is that real? I have to actually go and check and how you check. Well, the non-technical way of doing is you go to twitter.com and you go to that and it's basically,
It's like you're looking for true.com to give a digital signature and says this is authentic. Yeah, okay. Now with blockchains is sort of similar where one thing that's incredibly important, the most people don't really think about that much but it's very, very important for the future of the world. This multi-hundred billion dollar sector the hundreds of billions of dollars in Bitcoin stored on the Bitcoin blockchain. Nobody really disputes who has how much VTC I've mentioned this before but whether democrat or republican Israeli or Palestinian Chinese or Japanese.
These groups that have had conflict in the past, and the present, even they're not disputing. Who has how much BTC that is actually something we've got Global consensus on Truth. This is also the case for other sufficiently decentralized watching zai, KU has how much ethereum the actual amount the wrong numbers are not in dispute. Now, the thing is that that can actually be extended not just to who has how much BTC but everything in finance who has what stock, who has What bond. Once you can gain consensus on a bite, you can gain consensus on a stream of bytes and you can gain consensus on a
A data structure made of bites and it's not a complete report extension. But conceptually basically all the finance, everything that can be represented, digitally can be put into this form and that's what Defy is and what it's going to become. You may be familiar with this but then you can go further and you can have other kinds of facts that start getting put on chain some of these rely on some reporter. Some Oracle from off chain, putting the data on CH, the weather channel is digitally signing and saying, this is the temperature in Poughkeepsie or Fitbit is usually signing and saying, this was your heart.
At this time. Why would you want to do something like that? Well, first, you wouldn't have one at all. Be public on chain. You might have it in Cryptid, such that it's there, but it's basically nobody can view it other than you just like random bytes to others. You know, only you or those who the so-called viewing keys can be. But now here's what you can do, if you have and you can start the centralized by the he doesn't need to be on chain. But if you have the next Men's Health and all your readers have, let's just say Fitbit or Apple watch, you can see what the cause effect of your
Antonis. You don't just put out like some here, is great abs or whatever, you put it out. Let's say it's like, here's how to improve your diet and you actually see what Delta there is on. Wait, for these people, you actually start tracking something completely different, which is the readers benefit and if course, you can just trust it, but to report these metrics to you and that might be fine as if you want of this because it's non-trivial. Okay. Just the concept itself is like a New Concept for basically all Health magazines. All diet magazines could immediately go over to this. Now, there's no.
Hackers out there, the V2 of it would be that it's put on chain. So therefore, it's not just Fitbit reporting it, but it's like harder to falsify, not impossible, the reporter as I mentioned, could still falsified, but the metadata is hard to falsify. It's harder to mess with. And so, the reason I see that is, lots of media companies are very competitive about analytics, they don't trust this guy's metrics. How are they overstating it? Or your video views understood or overstated metrics are important in hygiene around? Them is important. And So eventually, I think these metrics kind of go on chain for anything that you're basing big decisions on
Do I want to invest in this company or that company? Well, this company is showing a better Improvement on chain in the metrics, the health metrics, the finance metrics etc, for its readers, in this other company,
it's all making me. Think the bias should be on the information diet stuff towards information where the perspective of the source isn't a big part of the information. You're after basically like almost like raw data or unprocessed
information.
So actually there's a few different things. One is, we're able to interrogate the information supply chain, all the way to the origin, just like your physical Supply chains. We can interrogate that all the way back to China. And actually, that's very important nowadays, the information supply chain. You see it in the media and that comes from, a government study, that's based on academic study, that's based on a data set. There's this concept in Academia of reproducible research. This is big when I was a grad student and in reproducible, research idea, is you don't just publish a PDF, okay? You also publish the code and the data under
Inning that just in the same way, a web page is templated from a database. You're familiar with that. Hi it's Patrick that comes from a database, right? In the same way you have underlying data sets that underpin your scientific study and the code generates the charts and graphs and you also have the text interspersed, there's various tools for doing this in our, there's something called sleeve in Python. There's like notebooks. There's something called distilled out publish the format for doing this, but the reason to do this reason, it's called reproducible, research is at least for anything that's on the computer, this allows a grad student or another
Archer to see exactly what you did. You don't need to explain to them that you chose this or that parameter to make this plot and they can actually go and do independent diligence on it. They can say, hey, was your stuff really robust? Was it flat in this parameter range? Or is actually hypersensitive any sort of cherry pick, something? All that type of stuff is transparent for the skilled practitioner. When looking at the code, you can wrap it another function and drive it with new parameters. And most importantly, you can actually replicate the research by importing it and running it on your computer.
You have some pseudorandom seeds that you said the beginning but base you can replicate it. So anything on the computer you can replicate. This is reproducible research. There's another concept called Open Access which says, basically, every article is being paid for by public funds should be public and we made progress towards this or last 20 years the public library science actually a video in 2003 talking about this. There's actually an article that I put up at 70 trying.com called kryptos ihub talking about this your readers can take a look at that essentially Open Access says if it's public research funded by public funds and
Public. I basically agree with that, but Publishers have essentially gone in the way though, there's been steady progress and Open Access. You can buy these things and you get this concept, what I'm calling truly reproducible research, where it's not just that some of the code and data is out there, some of the time or that the papers are open access some of the time. But rather that you publish the code and the data in the PDF, on chain such that you get a truly, permalink you get the ability to not just cite the paper, you get the timestamp so you can prove you were first, which is important in like academic culture. You have
He's on chain that other people can import and you also have a actual academic supply chain where you can trace the etiology, the origin of a fact or an assertion all the way through the literature. And there's a famous paper that actually did track something like this all the way through the literature and found, it was just something that just got repeated with some like medical nostrum that actually didn't really have that base of evidentiary support where when you track all the back, you couldn't find the brought table. This
is like the spinach thing where they fat fingered the
Amount of iron in the spinach, and it got propagated like
forever. It might be that like iron in spinach. It's something along those lines, but it's basically something where if you think about it, right? All the partial differential equations and so on a physics Maxwell's equations or Newton's Laws which are not pdes. But bodis typically, those are continuous equations, which you really could only learn by effectively Scatter Plots. That is to say, for example, seems inclined plane experiment, you roll a ball down, you're just checking whether
they're not what, parameters affect the time that it gets to the bottom, right? The height of the inclined plane, you know, how smooth you make it. And so and so forth, you're just collecting data in a table and you make a graph, which is dot dot dot and it's that interpolation, which is the continuous equation. So every equation that is written in a paper underpinning, it is a data set. It might be a data set from 50 years ago but that curve is discrete at the root level like somebody collected measurements and led to this now.
Could be that somebody like Feherty who's like this incredible observational genius and maxilla could put together these sort of observations in this paper and that paper without full data set. He could do it from the verbal. But most the time, even that by the way, is going to be like if x then y, but you can make it a table. I observe this this happened, right? The thing is if we have this, right? If we had what I described where the papers are on, chain the code and the data not as a PDF, and the citation graph is on chain. And the import graph is on chain such that, when you're using somebody older paper, you're importing it,
It. It's a big project but it's a finite project. It's like Wikipedia in theory. You could go and do this. You could take whatever million papers that have actually been important. That have been cited. You could one by one, put them on chain. You could use sigh Hub to do it. I'm not going to do that. But you could say Hub is basically like the BitTorrent of Science Publishers in free the papers. So this bold person called Alexandra, Albuquerque and did and she's like running it out of kazachstan or some random place, but it's ridiculously popular in Academia.
Because you can just paste in the URL and get back to PDF, immediately very popular doing covid. When the public needs to access to, this stuff starts to show. Okay, what could happen if all this stuff was just burst free out of the pay wall. One thing I've thought a lot about is what is a kryptos? I have look like, and a criticai hub. Might align incentives, such as a Publishers, also made money by putting all their papers online. I'm all about aligning incentives. If at all possible, it's one thing to demonize Publishers, bad. They've got a business model they need, okay?
How can I mean, they're making a lot of money, but whatever can we align interest? If we can figure something like that out, that attacks the problem at base because our entire Society is based on quote science-y, a government study by this regulation because Science. Why do this because science? Well, what is that science? Well, some of it is quote, unquote science. We're just some dumb story that appeared last week and some of his truly fundamental science and we are equating the two, when they're not and they distinguish them as number of independent Publications. And if the stuff is on,
Then we can start to do that this relates to another concert I have, which is at first, it seems like a trivial or weird statement. The only thing more prestigious than science is math and they're not normally juxtaposed, but I would say math greater than science. There's a trivial sense in which that's true, which is theorems or theorems math is pure in a sense that science is you know essentially approximate math scared and Science in another respect. Which is when I talk about independent replications it's not realistic to expect everybody to have inclined plane
Ins and that's and reactors and bubbling Alchemy type stuff. Chemistry sets or whatever at home for everything. Scientific equipment is expensive. So how are people supposed to independently? Replicate stuff. Well, yeah. They don't have all the scientific equipment but you know, they do have computers. So they have all this mathematical equipment. So you can run billions and billions and billions of calculations per second. So you might not be able to replicate the experiment, but you can certainly replicate all the calculations. After the raw data sets put online.
That's
interesting. This is also, by the way, the reason that cryptocurrency exists, if you listen to the economic scientists quote-unquote like the Nobel Prize, you know, I'm going to get the exact term, right Nobel, Memorial prize in economic Sciences. There's a bunch of Economics. No Bells who have denounced Bitcoin. I think it's Krugman stiglitz murden Schiller and it poor. See more heavy. That's a and yet it moves Bitcoins moving. Yeah, I know it's price is down now but who cares? Whatever. Hundred billion from zero.
Like it's clearly changed the world. Every potentate knows about it. It's legal tender now in El Salvador is transformed, the tech industry. It is led to much like all these building dollar companies. It's obviously a big deal and yet these guys, their Theory would say, it doesn't work. It shouldn't work, you can't work. It should be banned. These are basically like the Soviet scientists in the late. Soviet regime, who had all gone, the Stalin prize. They also had their economic pseudoscience, some of the stuff like Contra Rob's work. On, some of the linear algebra was math. It was actually porn.
Outside the regime, but mostly we'll just mark this claptrap. That was obviously false. Once the regime collapse and actually a lot of I think American macroeconomics Western economics will be seen like that because it's quote economic Sciences, it's not economic mathematics, which is what cryptocurrency is just to delve into that for a second, then we'll pop all the way back up in physics. You can do experiments in chemistry. You can do, reversible screams, even in biology, you can do reproducible experiments as human subjects regulations of its humans medicine makes it harder. Obviously, you know, as always at
Ethical constraints that we have to abide by of course, but you can do experiments. You can say, case-control this person got, this is person got that even microeconomics, which is about Assemblies of humans. You can do experiments. The theory of the firm, you can vary prices every startup, is in a sense, an experiment, all the advice that Paul Graham and Ben Horowitz. And so on give out is effectively stuff that you can abide by or not and see what happens. So, microeconomics is also subject to experiment, macroeconomics until very recently, was not subject to experiment. Basically, for the most part, the only thing
Know about macroeconomics is communism didn't work in a similar Spirit. If the whole ramshackle structure of contemporary macroeconomics vanished Into Thin Air in the field, had to be reconstructed from scratch. The sentence Which packs as much of the discipline and diffuse possible. Words might be governments, are not households, not communism, doesn't work, but governments are not households. Jody means when he says governments aren't households, he means that unlike in your households, they don't need to balance their budgets. They can print money and deficits been forever. You know, there's this thing.
Famous quote actually from Paul Krugman Fiat money is backed by men with guns and says that Joe Rosenthal in Business Insider several years ago. Right? That gives a different vantage point on the pronouncements of macroeconomist, they're more like Priestly dictates than genuine science Priestly dictates back by men with guns because fiat currency Fiat, money is backed by men with guns. So now rather than like, the Nobel Prize in economic Sciences like the Nobel Prize and economic religion, instead we have Nakamoto prize in economics mathematics where
Rather than take the word of these economists on how well the economy is going. For example, in 2004 Bernanke gave a speech on the so-called great moderation at Jackson Hole just opening this up. He said I'm going to quote this because it's like actually pretty amazing. So this is official Federal Reserve speech February twins. 2004 three years before financial crisis, you know, started getting underway for his before I really hit one of the most striking features of the economic landscape over the past 20 years or so, has been a substantial decline in manufacturing.
Macro economic volatility several writers on the topic have dubbed, this remarkable decline in the variability of both output and inflation, the great moderation. So essentially it's like this Victory lap on something which is now we know completely and totally wrong. Actually the entire economy is going to gyrate in three or four years from then we're still in like this Q E Infinity, which is, we're not even calling you a team or we're calling mmtv, like sprinting, all the money and for in the middle of this incredible crazy thing, which is absolutely mind-blowing.
The great moderation. Some of the things that we are calling Sciences are insufficiently rigorous, but now, as I mentioned, we have to have a better alternative. So, what's the alternative Bill crypto economics? Mathematical economics based on mathematics says. You don't need to trust Bernanke on the great moderation. You do not need to trust the CPI. The Consumer Price Index on inflation stats. In fact, I'm going to probably find a prize on inflation. Stats actually just like a decentralized Shadows dance version of that totally on chain smart.
At calculating it, prices scrape from all these websites that they might ease billion prices project but on Gene. So it's fully reproducible and it's more transparent and you can customize it to your own personal basket of goods. So now, you can see whether the inflation is actually happening or you're being gaslighted about it. This I think is a major application of crypto. I can come back to it thing. Is that rather than trying to trust pithre great? Moderation has happened or inflation isn't happening, or everything's under control and the stress test of work to the banks? Well, you can actually run the entire economy on
Laptop, you can replay with Bitcoin, you can replay the history of an economy, on your laptop from T, equals zero. And every Satoshi is accounted for every debit and every credit it's on chain. It is something we're back. Also every Edge has meditate on it, something like chain Alice's, for example, which is mixed in the sense of it is basically surveillance on the blockchain, but in theory, you could know what those things. Many of those edges were for like, was that a wire? Was that perched on Exchange? And so the thing that previously was just sort of this
Abstract thing that's captured in whatever solos growth equation or something. Is now it's a data structure and install growth model, right? What I mean by that is you think about in the late 90s. There is a concept of Six Degrees of Separation and that was this kind of vague thing, fun thing, party trick, whatever, right. And then it became something very concrete with the social network, an actual data structure, our graph where you can do all pair shortest paths, that's an algorithm and it's very expensive algorithm but there's ways of Bringing Down the computation to actually determine
What the shortest path is between any two parties and whether it's really six degrees or whether it's 5.7 on average or whether it varies based on time and space or all these other conditions. So something that was just sort of this abstracting became a data structure. It's not a public data. Structure until decentralized social media, where the graphs are actually open, I'll come back to that. But now the economy is similarly subject to inspection. The crypto economy is on champ, it's transparent. We can all calculate our own inflation stats. We can determine whether volatility is increasing or decreasing.
Decreasing and not simply take the pronouncements of priests for this. We have decentralized. This is a thing that goes really back in Western Civilization for a long time. The establishment becomes ossified and incompetent, you break glass and decentralize. That's what Luther did basically break glass decentralize like the Catholic Church doesn't have legitimacy. We're going to decentralize and that's what Bitcoin is. It basically says break glass. Take the power away from these institutions that no longer have our trust decentralize. It, pull it back. Obviously there's a lot of technical details associated
It was something like that. It's not a trivial thing to do. This starts to get a sketch of what economic mathematics looks like rather than put economic Sciences or economic priesthood.
If I had to sum it up back, like you said, I've got a lot of interesting directions in the notion of information diet is as much about verification as it is about like what actually goes in. And if you just blink or squint and look out, I don't know how long it's going to take to do all this, but let's say 10 years or 20 years or 50 years or something that everything's going to get much more personal.
Sized and much more based on relevant outcomes for the individual, whether that's health, or mental, well-being, or blood glucose or whatever, and provable. So, it kind of begs this interesting question about, you know, whether its sovereignty or what the right word is, if the promise of decentralization and provability of information is better outcomes for the individual. I'm really interested in how you think about collections of individuals and modern cities. I don't know how else to put
that.
Okay, so first is one thing, I just observed. The other day is Twitter bios. They used to be something like, I'm Patrick 32. I like the Steelers now that was like the, you know, to thousands. How was it right? Father husband, yes. Some stuff like that. That's right. And increasingly what they've become, our emojis and hashtag signaling tribal affiliation. I'm with this gang. Don't f with me. Here's what I believe, go away. If you don't like it. And so, and so for me, that's the most Salient kind of thing. So first,
Of all why that arises is because zoc and or C and so on, they did connect the world. You essentially went from something where the geographic distance was primary summer. The geodesic distances primary, that's to say the distance between two people on the surface of the Earth is becoming less and less material than their distance, in a social network and that Distance. By the way, is a distance metric, you can do Cloud cartography on this. It's something that satisfies all the qualities of a metric, you can do graph layouts and all that stuff. And the point of this is once you start
About distance in the social graph. Well nation, states have borders and those are formed over lots of wars and conflict over time to get groups of people who mostly agree because they're physically close to each other, they share culture. And because they share culture, they can have the same laws and now that's all breaking apart because you are closer, intellectually, culturally morally to somebody thousands of miles away. Then you are to your next door neighbor who you may not even know if you're an apartment complex. That is the Great.
Ian that's happening. And so what I think that's going to be resolved by is at first digital borders. So that's what these hashtags are. It's like, I'm part of this group, you're part of that group. It's like taking this graph and coloring it with ideologies. And then what's going to happen is there's going to be great, migrations. It's already kind of happening. Like, SF to Miami is like vo point one of us Collective migrations the collective. It is important. This is what I called a concert of crowd Choice. Essentially there's lots of things where you can take the
Century version and just put it on line. There's paper and then you can scan it. There is University offline. You can put into Coursera there is a cache and you can have PayPal but really we want to do is a full digital version. So PayPal goes to bitcoin or the scanner goes to a digital text file. So essentially when you're talking about Collective decision-making, the obvious thing to do is hey we vote off line on paper. Let's vote online District. That's like the scanner some places do that as soon as it does that whatever. But a different way of thinking about it is, hey, the
Mobile phone. Is this absolutely incredible device and enables all kinds of things? Can we think about Collective decision-making? Better in particular, America is not shaped by democracy, but by capitalism and by migration all three forces, voting with your ballot with your feet, and with your wallet, right? All three forces. And so, what does that look like if we actually start thinking about it in a different way? And we say, okay? So in terms of collective decision, making what if we optimize for the amount of consent, if you think about it, why is democracy considered legitimate because about
Consent of the governed, they have consented by putting in this vote. But we currently are in a 51% democracy rather than a hundred percent democracy because that consent is the barest, scraping of the bar, right? I mentioned is 4 bits, like a Fosbury Flop and you just barely getting over the bar as opposed to clearing it healthily. And so it's not a mandate, what happens is, basically, if there isn't consent, you have to use coercion. So the guys who have 51%, Crackdown on the 49%, they lose two points and it's just like the Seesaw back and forth.
And that's what we've seen. So instead, how do we use the internet and the new tools? We have given that the old ways are falling apart. Then people are just trying to scramble like make America great again or for the East Coast or trying unions or whatever. Try to prop up these failing media companies and these are just like Echoes of a distant past rather than like leaning into what the future looks like with the new technologies are. So what would that look like? Well, it look like you have a group that is your true group of peers on social media, not your physical group around you. Those are really just your Co
Your Co ideologists are actually your true group. That's a your neighbors often, you just don't know them. You don't know them anywhere near as well as you know the people online who are your friends or your enemies or whatever? But you know that so you take your friends who you know online and you group together and you basically say okay, that thousand of us or hundred of us are going to move collectively, even a hundred, by the way, is a lot and you appoint, a leader, and you basically crowdfund, a pool of funds to collectively fund the move. And at
Under people, maybe you can get the mayor of a small town to like roll out. The Welcome Wagon at thousand people especially if it's like a thousand software Engineers that's a hundred million dollars a year. Let's say a hundred k h and that's remote Revenue. You can do that anywhere. Now okay, very big and those thousand software Engineers can all collectively move to a city and actually make a big dent hundred million dollars of extra income being spent locally is a big deal and we start getting to 10,000. Now you're talking a billion ARR that's huge for most places. So the point is
Is you can start actually collective bargaining with governments. So this is constant called Network Union. So central.com has an article on this and the idea is it's like a union except you don't just represent. Somebody in a labor dispute, you can do that but it's a network Union where it's got a union leader and they do daily positive actions for their union members, which could be something like. Hey this person got D platform from fintech or you know Media Company. We're going to all tweet together or Lobby to get them back or this person was
Covered poorly. Unfairly. We're all going to get that person's back. Or we all want to do something together like we want to buy masks together, or we want to have Community Goods such as like a homeschooling teacher for us. Many of these things can be done online, but many of them like the homeschooling thing. If you have somebody few people round-robin that are like the community school teacher, these are things that are easier if they're in person. And now that everything is remote and now, that Starling has made the remote Arbitrage possible. Starlink Arbitrage is like this huge thing.
Shell City by country. Tweeted that a year ago, I think that's still definitely accurate. Blue cities are seeing an exodus. They just hit peak blue, or whatever. Lots of red states are seeing and in Exodus or influx. And they're also, by the way, passing, a lot of interesting Tech and crypto laws like Wyoming, Texas, Florida, Colorado, Nevada, so and served again. Doing interesting things are driving this corrective where folks are moving and the next step I think is for them to start moving together. This is the concert of crowd Choice. The idea here is
Optimizing for consent because everybody exceeds to it there's a liter. So the organized in a hierarchy, there are funds that are managed on chain because they're on chain their Sovereign, you can decide how Sovereign you want to be, but it's definitely yours. The say that mayor who do the deal with can't just sees all the money out of your bank account when you land on their side that will become a more and more important consideration. Just the fact that they can be done, means that it's not contemplated like you just put it out of reach and you know, letting that get any fancy thoughts on this money by the community and I think crowd choice.
To be an intern in Native form of governance. Where if you don't like it, you can opt out. You leave that hierarchy Judo, another Network Union. And so this is optimizing for consent. It's optimizing for Choice. It's optimizing for Collective Goods. It's optimizing for competition. So that there's choice of government. I think the very first version of this is we're starting to move from the two-party system to the n city system. Doing what I mean by that. Yeah, roughly. Yeah. What we're now seeing, which is good? I think overall is,
SF vs Miami versus Austin, respond Yeoman versus versus that. And ideally what that does is it reduces Democrat versus Republican within the cities and now pit cities against each other competing in a more aligned way, which is way better. Because then you don't have people attacking each other within the city limits. It's just kind of a war of words between cities. That's the ideal. Now, of course, this kind of stuff can escalate to Athens versus Sparta or whatever. But basically we've got a long way to run before then going from just a choice between
Parties to n different cities with genuinely distinct governance and genuine feature sets. Miami is really Pro crypto in other places. Aren't some place is going to be Pro drums, Mark Anderson. I talked about this several years ago, have bunch of tweets on this but basically Mark has an article at that time. Also I on make Detroit Grand Valley. Essentially meaning don't try to compete in Silicon Valley for what it was good at. This is like seven or eight years ago, which is software. Now, Silicon Valley itself is in the cloud but anything physical or anything that's
A jurisdiction can distinguish Itself by having a regulatory regime that's variable to cryptocurrency or two drones or to robotics or to 3D printing or what have you that kind of stuff. So one aspect of the collective thing, which you mentioned is pro-choice, I think it's a critical concept, it's very important concept, it's really the realization of Tebow sorting. So Charles T value, know everything you ever come up with some scientists,
you know, new Under the Sun.
Yeah, yeah. Nothing to understand right? In fact, actually this one of my dear Holmes or premises
And every ideology has been around. Since the beginning of time. What changes is the technological feasibility. In this Sense Technology is the Upstream driving force of History. Libertarian. Ideas have been around for a while to becoming more feasible things to blockchain centralized, you know, ideas like communism, becoming less feasible. Thanks to internet and watching in some ways you can argue, they're becoming more feasible. Thanks to you bi and seizures of funds and so on. But I think in the huge fight that's going to ensue this decade between these two forces I do think decentralisation ultimately wins but
But it'll be a long multi generational thing. Potentially in a huge drag out fight, okay? So one concept of collective, kind of sisian making is crowd choice, where you're optimizing for consent rather than the desiccated obsolete structures. From 250 years ago, that were devised when people had pen and paper. Some of the principles are, there are not contending with how the internet is pitted. People against each other, to figure out how to make the internet. A line people together. This new stimulus is pushed people. It's a new geography. Fundamentally, the other aspect everything, I think a lot about this.
Things. But with the collective stuff, is imagine a basketball game, where every single person, every player only saw their own score, there's no teams for and they saw how many shots they had. How many points, nobody knew, who is winning the game. Now that is basically Twitter people who think they're on the same team are really just Twitter maximalist. Robbed Rising likes and follows. I mean if they have some offline binding like there's a company or there's a cryptocurrency or something aligning them that's different and we'll come back to that but
But other folks who are quite Advanced, can ideology often find themselves in fighting because they don't have proper on. She metrics, they're playing Twitter zero-sum status game, and consciously, or not angling for, like, influence within a movement or within a tribe. As opposed to like delivering benefits to the community or provable on Shane actions that show. They actually did something, they made some sacrifice proof of quote actual work. So an alternative thing which is interesting to think about what would a social network look like with Collective dashboards, where he had a group of people who the
Gaining ping in the community band symmetric than the entire Community. Agree was valuable. Now we have a model for this. It's Enterprise sales when a start-up within a tech company you have a sales team which is a bunch of individuals. It's true. But everybody's looking at the big board where who's putting on the sales? Which everybody knows benefits. Everybody and pays people's at least their base salary and comp. That's one model. Of course the sales team can be competitive but there's other models as well. Like looking at how many conversions were on the website, like the entire company can kind of look at that and see, is that going up? Is that going down?
To training the right direction and so on so forth. It's a collective metric where many people can drive towards it. One thing I think a lot about is, how do we make team sports for social media? Video games are also like this, by the way, good video games. You don't Capture the Flag. You know, when your team is one of your team is lost. Social media is not like this, it's complete individual, but I think Collective social media combined with crypto is very, very interesting because you have on shampoo will metrics you start to do things
so I totally follow the granularity with which we can affiliate with other like-minded. People not just
Terms of what we're interested in. But also in terms of like the system settings, the rules of the game that we want to live within and its cities are one really interesting unit where there are specific rules or standards or Norms that are set and that we're probably heading is cities that are ever more specifically catered to one affinity group or collection of affinity groups. And I guess the question it brings to mind for me is like let's say I want to start and I kind of do. Let's say I wanted to make the town in which I live the world's Beacon for people.
People that have a certain set of attributes that I care about like I want to attract as many people as possible. What is the playbook in your mind? Therefore cities that will do that successfully? What are the ingredients for the dimensions that matter most for creating a I'll call like a successful Affinity town or city? So
this is a huge area startup cities writing a book that has lots of stuff that's going to give us catch. I'm going to read a tweet that I had last year which I think is being influential how to start a new city.
Mindy in the cloud, organize, the economy around remote work. Enforced laws, that smart contracts practice in person Norms of Civility, simulate architecture and VR eventually crowdfund territory and materialize City into the real world. And the key is to go Cloud first land last build, a Community First. Don't worry about real estate, that can be solved. Once you have sufficient numbers of people with the line values, negotiate a deal with the state to buy land in the of nowhere with specified laws. So that's like the true de novo approach. Where you have total root access
To everything. It's like burning man. You just pick something middle of nowhere and I think that's worth doing the more middle of nowhere. It is, the less people can complain about it. You should actually do drone over flight or something beforehand. Put that on chain and show that you really did build it from nothing. Because when you do build it, they're going to be like, would you take it from whatever you got all these iPhones from nothing order. So that's a de novo approach. If you don't to do total de novo, then what I would say. Here's one model I think actually influencers will become mirrors will become God.
As will become presidents. But first do that online. So say build your community online, which you've already done some extent, set up a network Union, where you can do that in a spreadsheet, it's just an org chart where you have, I don't know, a few lieutenants like hiring do you want to make it a company? You can make it a company if you want. Will you do is you conceptualize, okay, what benefits could we provide collectively to the PO shock subscribers? For example maybe more analysis of this or you try and figure out what the community service kind of
Things you start providing that digitally you include that with the subscription, those five people get recognition for doing that. Maybe there's more dues that are paid that. Go towards them and supplement their income. These are building the organization in the cloud. This way, you build a hierarchy and then you start having people move out one by one. And the critical concept is, you are basically like mayor for life of this town. And if they don't like it, which is totally reasonable, they can exit to another town and join another hierarchy at whatever level TBD
If they want to be the founder, they can do that if they want to be one of the first, whatever Executives. You know, they can do that if they want to be the equivalent of employee number 5000. And just go into a built environment, they can do that as well. And so, they can dial up or down their risk tolerance and people can move back and forth between founder and employee and executive as they see fit, but critically we're doing, is you have a digital structure for this? It's based on something which we know Works mainly an org chart from a company where there's no accountability you know, in a real way, by the way hierarchy, a strict eye.
Hierarchy, minimizes bureaucracy, because if you have, let's say an org chart where there's five people who fold into you and five people folds, the next guy and five people in Folgers that person. So then any person has maximum like three people to go through to get a decision made because it's 555 ride like this, into that scale, select 5 cubed is 125 people. So the minimum number of people who can stop you from doing something is degree of bureaucracy, the more people who can stop, you have like government by Vito even Ezra Klein is actually notices current by Vito.
Strict hierarchy minimize the bureaucracy. Now, what's interesting is, by the way, if you think about what I'm saying, this strict hierarchy, this digital hierarchy that's been built is quite different from some other things to other things are out there. One is this idea that oh we have elections and there's a ceremonial mayor and whatever right into that you're totally centralization with, there's no leaders. Both those concerts are in Vogue, but I think this is the Practical critique to both of them. It is a critique to the idea of just
having ceremonial mayor because I've got another article. It's empty, tray, 9 called founding verse inheriting. The short version is that the east coast and by the way you may have some East Coast listeners and sensor. I'm not actually yeah just generalizing yeah, yeah, yeah. What I'm talking about is a certain institutional state of mind there's insurgents on the east coast and there's institutional people on the west coast. And in fact, a lot of people in west coast of actually left the West Coast. Now, in Silicon Valley itself is now very institutional. So this is something we're proud than east coast versus West Coast. You can call it.
At versus crypto, because crypto is going to be synonymous with kind of the text structure soon if it isn't already. Basically let's call it. This sort of Fiat mindset is actually one of inherited institutions. So inherited wealth is obvious, it's like Rockefellers. Would our there's inheriting money that whatever great-grandfather earned for them. Inherited companies is something also like salzburger inherits it from New York Times company from his father who inherited from his father at six Generations. Back. By the way, there's very few tech companies that are passed, father to son, that I can think.
Think of Jesus Built his company from scratch. All of this stuff is new money as opposed to this generationally old money. Again, an interesting point that in all the critiques of Tack and so on, just seems to have been missed somehow, you know, in the Thousand articles, right, this is why I say like looking at their Founders and owners as well as very important because it's not going to be reporting their paper. That's what is not shown really often. You know, it's like boshy odds concert of seen and unseen as what is unseen that one can infer and you can see on the side but just in a different context he's talkin about economics. I'm talking.
Informationally, but it's analogous. Okay? But coming back up. So it's not just that you inherit a fortune such as the, you heard of paper, a newspaper or an institution. That's an obviously not just celebrated, its Murdock inheriting it from his father and so on and so forth. And I'm not saying by the way, inheriting is necessarily bad. Obviously there's people who inherited things, you're totally fine but where things do start to get bad is inheriting institutions that one could never built from scratch. What I mean by this is the current mayor of whatever city in the US could not have.
Usually, the police force from scratch because current president or the last president, or the last president before that or whatever, not picking on any particular person could not have organized. The US military from scratch or all of these departments. That's a massive beast. That's like a George Washington level figure toured as a federal reserve for all its flaws in you. I think we need to build an alternate to it. Alexander Hamilton built a Federal Reserve in it. Power, the u.s. through to present a unified. I think you need to replace it with something better. Those kind of people did walk the earth. In fact, they still walk the earth. The
Alec and Satoshi did a theorem in Bitcoin. Those are at the level. I think in the fullness of time will be looked at as comparable to what Hamilton did. If not even more important like Bitcoin Bezos, organized Amazon's Logistics infrastructure which if you've heard the saying you know about the military right? Amateurs talk tactics professionals, talk Logistics. I think if business was tasked with it he could probably be a military commander since a lot of it is that is strategic mind, all that stuff. So those people do walk the earth but their Founders, not inheriting things. So the folks who are inheriting these in,
Esta tutions have inherited something they can never build in the first place and the reason that's important again, this article found in verse inheriting and 70 Trend.com goes into this, kind of my place for essays. The reason this is important is let's say you've got an air and they inherit a factory that's cranking out widgets. And then stairs are and two or three or four generations down these cash. The checks they come in ceremonial heyo. Its Founders. Hey, how's it going? And they've got some professional manager who just cranking up the widgets and there's no immediate signal of anything being wrong.
Are coming out profit is coming in till 5:00. Then something like covid hits, some huge shock. The factory has to be turned from making widgets to making masks. Now, this professional managers have no idea how to do this. That's the kind of edit that only the founder could make, by the way, a lot of Chinese factories. It exactly this. They switched over to making medical equipment, and so on totally different things and making chairs to go to making medical supplies, to figure out how to move the tools around that change. The system can only happen. If one has intimate understanding of the technical,
Gold Business Financial realities of that entity. So the point is that this are was repeating, they could not create. This is the same as somebody who grows up in a household and they may hear a language, they can't speak it. There's cultural artifacts that surround them and they kind of copy them with the can't create them from first principles, and if you cannot create well, that's read-only culture. You can't actually rebuild, you can't reinvent in a crisis and that's what happened to
Are all people could do without slogans. The only people who did anything in my view, where the folks who cranked out vaccines. And that's basically what save the bacon. The state was essentially incompetent at every level from police failing, and fire failing to the CDC, and the FDA failing to State local and federal governments, feeling it was just wild and competence. It's not first role versus third world anymore. It's like a sending world into sending world. It's like just descending World levels of competence. It's like
right decline. This great thing that's now like basically ruin, right? There's some rebirth there in Detroit, but that's basically what's happened and San Francisco's incompetence and sickness has spread to all these other cities with homeless encampments and poop on the street and needles and mentally ill people who are not getting treatment attacking people in the streets and so on and so forth that is spread as metastasize Ur. This wildly incompetent State expensive and wildly incompetent. Steam is basically run by people who are ceremonial. They don't actually know how to run it. They are optimized crucially.
For legitimacy, but not for competence. Why legitimacy? They do have legitimacy because they were elected, that's a known process, but not for competence. And so often people are caught between, oh, I want democracy. I want somebody who's legitimate who I feel like I voted for, you know, and so on and someone's else is like oh you actually a dictator is better and by the way the dictator will not necessarily be competent but at least they're like at least there's a chance of confidence they'll be able to make decisions cut through all this fluff Etc and so you get a tug of war between people
Ooh, think legitimacy and competence are necessarily a post course, the 49% didn't feel this person was legitimate and that flips the last four years, it was one party that didn't think it was legitimate. Now next, we're using third party and legitimacy, incumbents are thought of as being in opposition. But the founder combines both, because why are they legitimate? Why is Zuckerberg Co Facebook? Because he found a Facebook started, a dorm room. And every single person who joined Facebook, who sign up as an executive who invest,
That there is a series of deals that he did each individually, beneficial would literally three billion people. Some of them obviously through intermediaries where it's like, sign up at the website but every trade he made that person better off and he after billions and billions and billions and billions of Trades, he is where he is. So just like billions of bilateral trades like this. And that power was built up over time was not built up all at once. It wasn't just one day, you know. No one was said, okay give this. 20 year old person the keys to have 3 billion.
Person Communications Network that is beyond anything ever seen in history Beyond by the way, David Cameron, while back the premise for the UK appeared on a video chat with Jacques. And I was thinking at the time of like, but this is the leader of a tiny 60 million person social network talking to lead over 3 billion personal kind of funny and yeah there's something really true there. Like Zuck actually has power that he hasn't even flexed which is to say I mean you're seeing the movie The Lawnmower Man. No, I never heard of it. So this is from the 90s and basically it's about like this guy who is given like
Intelligence. It's like about an AI that occupies his body. Just like a random Lawnmower Man. U becomes a super intelligent creature. That's kind of, like, Terminator with Skynet. But there's a scene in it towards the end, where basically, he had said earlier in the movie, that when he truly escapes from the a, i escaped from the lab, you'll make all the telephones in the world ring at the same time. So they think they've killed them or whatever. Right? And at the end, what happens is like closing credits because back when they were landlines, articles in cell, phones are every telephone just starts ringing around the world. Nothing is Zach.
Hasn't even flexed that pinky finger. He has Lawnmower, Man level power, like, he could literally make all three billion phones in the world. Show a push notification. He could speak in tongues, he could put whatever he wanted in the feed. He has more reach than Z Jinping and Biden, and Cameron, and every president of every country. Combined, and more engagement, how many people tuned into the State of the Union versus coming to face buried? It's got to be like a hundred X the number and yet he hasn't used that power.
Because in this important, his viewers kind of, don't want them to use that power or their diffident about it, or they didn't really sign the social contract. Let him use that power. They just signed up for something to communicate with their friends. Didn't sign up for something. Where's duck is their leader? She's not really the leader leader. He's like the leader of the platform, he's not the leader of the people, but somebody else could be, you could set up a new platform, which was premised on X is the leader and people fold in a hierarchy, and if you don't like it, that's totally fine. But there's a thousand others like this and you can go and find
Found your own or what have you, there's leader. And they make hierarchal decisions because think about the different scene duck with Facebook employees versus up with Facebook users within the company. It's a strict hierarchy, you join. And basically, you're doing what duck wants either directly or indirectly. Orders are given not like in a peremptory way like doing this or whatever. I mean maybe there's an emergency but for the most part if you're CEO you learn very quickly that you can't use the, I'm CEO a card, very much. You have to persuade, these are people with options. You're talented. People have to say why it's important.
And you have to be willing to take feedback, all that stuff is very important for True leadership. Basically, it is a hierarchy within the company where people will essentially do what he wants him to do. It's completely different on the platform where people just know about and do anything. There's no direction. It's all in Tropic, all these particles moving in different directions, but it doesn't have to be. There's no upper limit to the scale of a network Union, your diamond, your triangle, your hierarchy could scale out. So this I think, is a really interesting way to think about social networks, not just the social graph, but the social tree, not simply the social
Network. But the network Union and the network Union we had defined, it is, it's a social network with the hierarchical structure, a defined leader and integrated cryptocurrency and a sense of purpose. Why an integrated group currency, because that gives wealth creation. That gives smart contracts that we sell and buy all the people that gives rule of law, that gives wealth accumulation. It gives provable statements and gives punching metrics. It gives lots and lots of things. People, don't even really realize. It gives encryptions you can do encrypted messaging between yourselves blah blah blah.
Basically like the stuff that actually turns a community into something real online, it gives you borders gives you everything and a sense of purpose is very important. Why are we doing this? How do we take all these entropic particles and focus them on something? Why Patrick's City one way of thinking about this, by the way, just to linger on that entropic point for a month. And, you know, the term entropy entries are all the particles scattering, every direction versus work in One Direction, you know? And if you go to Hacker News, or you go to read it or you go to Twitter with this new set of spectacles, and you just look at in your life.
Like, wow. That's interesting. That's 30 different links, every day. I'm just like throwing random things in my head, 30 different things because we have a novelty biases. Humans, this is no, this is know. Twitter is no etcetera, right? What there isn't is like a bias towards actually learning things, you have a higher order goal, sometimes which is, I want to learn Elixir now to be clear, I'm not saying there's no role for Serendipity, but I think we are over serendipitous, you know, so to speak. We're over novelty seeking its
Not optimized for result. Seeking The Joint, the Karen bend. It is so one-armed Bandit, you know, slot machines, the carob and it comes from decision Theory. Where basically the idea is you've got a row of slot machines, K of them, okay? And you've got to find out budget and you want to figure out what your strategy is for exploration versus exploitation. So this is something where the trade-off is, let's say, for example, there's just two machines in the first one, when you put in a dollar it gives you back 50 cents. But one out of a hundred times gives
you $5,000. The second one, when you put in a dollar, it gives you back 75 cents, fifty percent of the time, but $2 the other time, I'm just making up numbers. I don't, you know, I have to actually work it out, but point is that first one is something. We're if you explore it, might just look at your constant, losing money. You have to actually stick with that for a long time before you figure out. Well, this is one with the jackpot payoff and it dominates the other one. So you have a finite budget. Also because that exploration is itself costly. This is a really good mental model. I used.
Think about business opportunities about allocation of time and so on and so forth. So Twitter or read it or Hacker News is like this totally random jackpot eMachine, where I'm not saying you don't look at it some of the time but I'd like to see what if we try to allocate more of our time towards non entropic media making it just as engaging and so on, it's engaging you on the upward Arc of your life, you're gaining muscle, you're losing fat, you're learning things, you're earning money, you're accomplishing things that are of genuine value to you, rather than
Just getting mad and clicking things. We should have just value to the Legacy Media or social media company. Operator said brings it full circle back to the information type.
Could you talk a little bit about what I view, as sort of the last important piece of this sovereignty idea. So the whole thrust of our conversations, like ever more choice, and tailored life information, everything for the individual and I think ownership, you know, the joke like ownership is nine-tenths of the law or whatever applies here too. You mentioned this concept like everyone is an investor now behind that. I think is two things like again, personalization.
What'd you quote, unquote own but also the source of your income being more capital gains than W-2 or cash or something. Flesh out this concept a little bit for us of everyone being an investor and how that concept tucks back into the two major themes we've talked
about. So first is everyone becomes an investor meaning in the 1800, everybody was farmer. The 1970 was in manufacturing. Mm, everybody becomes an investor. The thing is that the transition from farming to manufacturing obviously led to Communism. And I mean, that was
Real Revolution, but it led to massive disruption in the 20th century as people who you know, had to acclimatize to what that new world look like. The other side of it was okay. It was a big deal. Ideologies were let loose by this thing would happen. What's interesting by the late 20th century? The thing that people had announced was in romanticized. Oh, all the good manufacturing jobs are going overseas. This thing that a hundred years ago, people thought of as tolerable relative farming. Now, that of is great jobs, you know, look, I could just work a job and come back or do so. Now, what is happening in
Well, I think with some legitimacy in over some justification, bemoaned the financialization of the economy, everything is finance, Finance fans. But I think what's going to happen is we're going to actually lean into that. And what I mean by that is there's many different Trends which when I say the statement, everybody becomes an investor that can be interpreted on many levels. First is it's true in the sense of social media, everybody became a publisher, three billion. People are now writing online, posting online each day. This is a massive increase, obviously,
From even 25 years ago. So the Unabomber, you know, why, he sent all those bombs to everybody and like kill people at universities and elsewhere.
All I know about him is kaczynski's, like, weird philosophical, writings when you read them are bizarrely, interesting and strange, but I don't know why I sent the
bombs. So the thing is this is a genius mathematician, right? Also, a lunatic but basically he killed people for the distribution at the time. Getting an op-ed in the Washington Post was really hard.
So, this guy was such a attention-seeking clickbait guy. Apres Le Nom, he would kill people for the distribution. And so, remember the guy's smart, his content parses to some extent. There's like a logical consistency there. This way. I, by the way, he was a research mathematician at Berkeley that was proving theorems like really actually off-the-charts Smart in some ways where I disagree with them. By the way, is the idea that one can optimize for Humanity while trying to reverse the Arrow Technology. I think you just lead to mass starvation and be bad.
That he idolizes. This nature thing, I will say this, so at least kachinsky sort of had skin in the game. The sense of he went and lived in the woods and many other people who idolize, this, sort of inner core, primitivist sick, thing, do not do that, but be that, as it may point is that this guy who was smart whose writings parse on the service levels willing to kill for the distribution now, with those lenses. Think about Twitter, a lot of people there who are smart but lunatics aren't as willing to kill for this reaction, though. We haven't given them the opportunity there. Surely will
A
scream for it. So I'm going to attack you to kill people's reputations to lie and to do whatever. Jaws. For the attention, might be a hundred X kitchen. She might be a thousand ten thousand X cushions, but that also illustrates how scarce distribution was back, then, and how abundant is today, and how we're still a society like learning to deal with this. And that's why I think crowd choice and consent and the social smart contract become a big thing where people explicitly opt in to new communities with the constraints. And I say the social smart contracted means
Means you actually sign a social contract just like you. Do you sign a click-through to get onto a site but much more serious. More like a DocuSign you actually read it and sign it and it's on chain. It's a smart contract. So it's logged. It's clear that you can sensitive that time for this duration, your funds are locked up is like a genuine commitment that you're making before you enter this startup City before you enter this network State. That's where I think we land on the far side of it right now, we're in this environment. Our room became a publisher. So that's one level in which you can understand, everybody becomes an investor every social media platform, integrates Crypt,
And c and therefore you're not just liking and tweeting your constant. Investing on things buying this selling that the cloud is actually like one of the first examples of this is pros and cons of big cloud. I won't get into all of that I'm interested in it because it is a genuinely decentralized, social media, just from a technological perspective, I am an investor in it but an investor in like five hundred other things in a small percentage of holding just as closure. Whatever the thing about it is actually there's also Hive and steam and other things that are like this and it's still early. The space is still early.
But everything's on chain. So you can do things like print every single tweet ever or the equivalent thereof print. Every post you ever, you can print out the social graph, you can crawl the social graph. You can search the social graph. All these are things that Twitter and Facebook, just don't let you do. That's one aspect of programmability but the other aspect is the monetization is built-in. So, the cryptocurrency is built into the edges, so you can pay people, you can invest in them, you can sell and buy essentially, it makes the edges more functional. You can actually
You earn money on them and eventually do real work on them crowd, something science more contracts form. Real businesses offer SAS services for API Keys. Etc etc. All the stuff is happening on decentralized, social media. It's in the early stages. But what's going to happen is we're going to move from social networks to truly digital economies. Think that's going to be the term for them. So now what you've done is you've massively leveled up. What is happening online? You've actually got people earning real money and their constant out thinking like an investor all the time. Do I put money into this to have put money into that?
Number of Investments source. So does everybody's complexity of their personal finances? I think lots of people will personally incorporate, it's going to be all kinds of tension with existing government laws. If you have, the whole Uber thing was a big thing. Independent contractors are a becoming, an investor will put a similar strain on the system. It's just simply not meant for everybody to be basically like have a portfolio complexity sizes Soros. Lots of stuff will be built to accommodate this unless stuff is being built but that's like one dimension of everybody becomes an investor a second dimension. Is that
Lynch has become more important because not everybody can diligence Investments. So they'll follow an evolved to follow. You do follow people in AngelList Investments and back them and this is sort of like choosing a boss. In a traditional company International Company. You're like, hey you can go start a company on your own or you can find an executive or a CEO that you respect and join their company and take direction from them. But you also have a more stable income, the same way you can go and just invest all the money yourself being independent Wester, or you can join a fund where
As an influencer, who has a good track record, hopefully a non chain track record where it's provable returns again on chain on chain on chain because trust is Vanishing the world, but fortunately computation is rising. So we can compensate for the loss of trust with the increasing computation. Both of these are things that are catalyzed by widespread information networks. So you have on Shane provable returns people follow those influencers and now they're giving up some of the returns, whatever percent for hopefully A reduced risk because it's guy's neck spurt in managing the
Me no one can say your company won't go bust but let's say there's a Buffett or somebody like that might be good for a long time. Also in this world very becomes an investor I think Bitcoin is the no op which everybody holds I think we have a hundred million something people owning crypto today in 10 years, think it's very very, very likely that it's going to be a billion. Plus maybe in 3 billion that might be even conservative. If inflation hits in a big Way by Bitcoin, don't sell Bitcoin that to me is very obvious, but it's not yet obvious. So just saying it in that world, the
A world where everybody holds Bitcoin. Everybody is on decentralized. Social media investing, just like everybody's on Twitter and Facebook tweeting and Publishing. That's also world of Robin Hood being ever, the coolant being there for a long time. That's a world of all these, VCS and angels, and Founders and startups. And exits, that's a world of essentially, everybody becoming an investor except it's a world where, if in the 20th century, the 99% were labor and the 1% per capital. The flip happens, this Century, where the 99%
Our capital in the 1% or labor to say, the 99% are investors. You're just retail investors trying to get in the deal. They don't get screwed, whatever. And the 1% of the founders who can actually turn money into things because that's actually very rare skill. Extremely rare skill. If you're an investor, one of the things that people don't understand until their investor is this idea that money is abundant because people are looking around, like, where is the money? I don't see the money. My buddy money is about money is abundant for people who are hard working with good ideas because they're rare, it is actually very non-trivial to convert money.
Me into a spaceship into an electric car. A lot of people just think the Fat Cat CEO, you know, just puts their feet up on a desk or Bergeron flunkies, but that's really not how it is actually. An interesting point is a lot of people who think that think it's incredibly important through the political leader, is but unimportant who the corporate leader is the say like really matters. Let's say like Bernie is president of the u.s. or whatever but it doesn't matter who the CEO is, they're completely dispensable and the worker could do the job just as good as the CEO. Interesting contradiction interesting way of thinking about it. Another view.
Of course in the political and corporate leader, both matter and Leadership matters which is my view and then there's other view which is I think now absolutely I should say obsolete but old-school Tech few which is only the corporate leader matters, political leaders. Don't there's like all the Innovations happening there. The reason that has now become obsolete, is we've all learned what happens when you have terrible political leadership? San Francisco, literally just need to keep the lights on. They need to keep the poop out in the streets, the lights on and they literally couldn't even manage that like PG&E with power outages, they
Even do that because the inherited a system they couldn't build one way of thinking about that. By the way, is San Franciscan city government in the u.s. carbon General. Imagine a board meeting where the board just basic assumes that after they all finish their stupid political knife fighting and they write down, what should be done that the company can just execute on it. Imagine if 80% of the company was devoted to the board meeting, 90% 95%, the attention energy. How well do you think that company does but that's all the political wrangling not the actual
In itself. So essentially this model that I'm describing with the hierarchy where you have a CEO who points themselves digitally. Just like you're playing yourself a founder of a company. You're the founder and people fold into you. That's the model that selects for both common solution for the ability to actually execute, not just to inherit the thing. Everybody becomes investor. We talked about the decentralized media aspect. We talked about the crypto aspect. We talked about the fact that everybody is doing VC, and Robin, Hood, and Angel. And the steps tough talk about the sheer numbers going from roughly 325,000 people, I think, would bloom
Our terminals to easily 30 million plus on cryptic Shimmer like a hundred million in crypto alone. So, yeah, I'm Robin Hood and so on and you're talking, probably hundreds of millions also had, no, the Chinese stuff that's happening. And the fact that governments are now going to be competing on money, like, most people do understand this yet, but we are entering the age of global monetary competition. All these constants are coming variables. The dollar is facing serious competition, from both the digital Yuan, and the coin, both on different flanks, and the people who run the dollar. Take this complete for granted.
That's why they're printing all this money. They're trying to sanction various people, all these people are thousands of different sanctions programs around the world. They got pushed back though, recently like they tried to sanction, not Russia and China Iran, but Germany and India, who are allies. So the discriminant right to do that, Germany over North stream to for like a pipeline, they're building with Russia and India for buying some like missiles from Russia to use versus China or something. I don't remember exactly what came of the Indian situation, but the German situation, the u.s. at first talk to real tough game and then
I have backed off, and one of the things I think we're seeing is the limits of American power where Empire is receding abroad because they're Democrat, nor Republican, really has the appetite for more forever worse and the little rips in The Matrix like Crimea and Isis and China. In the South China Sea here on quasi going nuclear or whatever is happening there in North Korea, kind of doing it Springs. Friendship, all of those kinds of grips in the space-time Continuum are sort of on like the borders of Empire. But it's like Rumblings
Press Hodges, you are sort of gravitationally Contracting and troops coming home and less overseas intervention because it can't. Now this is something which is maybe a long-term Arc, but there's huge possible. Disruptions to that in particular. One thing I'm concerned about is that people will try to stoke a war with China as a cure for the internal division in America. So I know that there are some people I think misguided we're doing this is sort of like, have a
Maybe to save the relationship, but actually worse than that, which is to say it. Like it's not like the war on terror, led to a more unified America, everything gets politicized, and just led to this gigantic surveillance state, where Republicans built the surveillance state in the early 2000s and the debate the Batman movies at that time there was like should we use the power and Stones over like 15 years later that surveillance state is now being used to track Republicans and I think students going to be used to track. Unfortunately everybody house on American Activities, Committee was actually started.
To go after Nazis and then post World War II was used to go after a communist and McCarthy was running. So lots of these kinds of weapons will be flipped. I expect, for example, at some time in the 2020s, here's a prediction, okay? That the New York Times will have something on inflation or Bitcoin. The Twitter decides fact check because Jack actually recognizes the allow. The some of the writings is incorrect. So I think that's called it a prediction. And then you'll see the New York Times eyes bulge where they expect this fact-check stuff to only be used on the
There's Mia corporations, not on themselves, like how could they get something wrong? Oh my God. But I think that's going to happen, especially if it's on something technical, which tech people feel confident in like the article recently where they said something like Bitcoin was hacked and it actually wasn't. It was just traditional subpoena process but they made it seem like ecdsa was broken, which would be huge news
without really intending to do this. But it's cool that we have thinking about the three big things in someone's life, what they consume the context in which they
Live their lives day-to-day. What they own, those are three big important things that determines the quality and direction of somebody's life. You thought in deep detail about these things, much more than I have and much more certainly than most people listening have just as hard to think about these things at a deep level. If you had to turn these into like RX like into a prescription for people listening saying, wow, these are things I haven't really thought about. I want to take some next step. I would you turn all of what we've talked about into that RX just at a high level.
For those listening that want to do more
monetarily, I'd say, buy Bitcoin and if you're more adventurous also by eith like 50% BTC and 50% youth put into it, what you can afford to just never think about. Literally, if it goes to zero for years drops, 80%, you don't even care. You're not looking at the price if you want to like coin basis, pretty good security, but there's Cold Storage Services. Also to do that number one because that alone I think is the dumbest
But most obvious thing to do to prepare yourself for five or 10 years or more of significant financial and monetary disruption number one number two. If you're interested in health there's a few things that I think are producing pretty darn good results. Now among like the tech crew, whether it's a Fitbit or an Apple Watch or a whoop or an aura or something like that, she probably get something like that, optimize your sleep. There's also cheaper ways of doing stuff like eight sleep. For example, is like a really good mattress was Casper. Getting a really good mattress given that you're spending thirty three percent
Time sleeping, very important. Don't skimp on that. Even if it's whatever thousands of dollars like is probably worth it. If it gives you even 10% better sleep, if you have noisy things around children or construction or something, figure out how you can get either, whether it's headphones or move or something to like, truly limit noise when sleeping because you'll track your sleep, you start to see those things that improve it, you know, for example, cutting up drinking at night and so on. Okay. So the intermittent fasting stuff is talked about, but it's not like very precise often when you fast, how do you
Fast. Oh, mad is something that a lot of tech people are doing now. That is, I think very effective where it's what sounds like one meal a day. Basically, the simplest version is you have a one hour or two hour window where you can eat in that window, you can basically whatever you want, you should eat healthy food but you can basically where you want and you don't need outside that. Some people do dinner 6 to 8 p.m. so you can eat with the family and that's it. Basically, it's very easy to remember. It's essentially like a significant calorie restrictions because as long as you just don't need another
I didn't get in the habit of not eating at other times. It's kind of hard to eat a full day in one meal, the satiety kicks in, but it's like 50% or more dropping calories. So you start just dropping weight. It's also simpler because you just have fewer dishes to do and all that type of stuff. Right? So you know there we can do is like lunch 12:00 to 1:00 p.m. whatever you want and then you drink coffee or water or you can have like flavorless water or vitamin zero or something like that over the day, you know, that kind of stuff and you can track your blood.
Coast and make sure that things are getting back to normal. So that's like intermittent fasting and diet home gym if your folks are into that, that's maybe an obvious one, but basically investing in health, if you want to get more serious about it, David Sinclair's podcast and stuff are good to listen to Harvard Professor who's into longevity, and he has kind of a thing of Resveratrol. Vitamin K, Vitamin D, Penniman and Metformin as sort of like a combination regime that he takes and guy looks pretty young and he's got this science and so on behind it. He's got the dosages or
Over there. If you want to listen to him, you can do that. No, that stuff is expensive. Metformin. You might need to get a prescription for. You can get like a pill box and start kind of doing that. This like a V1, longevity stack, longevity stuff is going to get bigger and bigger. So these are individual things on wealth on wealth. Also, basically we built actually a search engine for this called teleport dot-org several years ago. I think had we done it during covid times, it would have been a hundred X bigger. It was fine, it's fine. Result or outcome Nomad list is also good, but I think search engines for digital Nomads are going to be a
age thing where you can punch in and find the best place in the world to live and work and there's actually multiple map overlays. If you're a single person you might care where the bars are drinking is bad but whatever. Going to the bar if you want, if you're with kids, you might care about where the schools are. You make, are where the airport is my care where starlink is gas, tax property tax. All of these are layers on the map and like, superimposing all them and doing the calculations actually very non-trivial. But you can do a first cut on that and try to find
Okay, if you could live anywhere, where do you live and getting a place where you can be outside and their son is probably good if you like the sun finding a place that's congenial. And one of the key concepts by the way, is you can do longitudinal Arbitrage. So, once you're outside the office, you just need to be within whatever number of hours of the other people. So, plus minus three hours is usually fine. If you're the founder, it's your decision. If, you know, ask your CEO or whatever, your exact but plus minus 3 hours. Probably is managed.
Table. Which means if you're in the u.s. South America opens up, canned opens up. There's an interesting hack by the way, that I've been thinking a lot about this great website called time dot is. There's another thing on Wikipedia, with the time zones of the world, which actually more complicated than you might think. Because there's like weird fractal things with the small islands and stuff. One interesting fact that I've been thinking a lot about is Guang, it's something where any u.s. Resident or US citizen could just go there, you have basically a permanent Visa but it's within two hours of Asia by time zone. So you
Be an American citizen working remote for Asian companies by living in Guam. I think that's going to be a huge thing. Probably tweet about this rare. The Guam Arbitrage. I think Guam gets office has built their Guam. There's always sort of like, Northern Mariana Islands and so and so far they've actually had pretty good internet and second island paradise. So you can be a US citizen and participate in the Asian economy without getting a passport, or anything like that, or like a permanent result that says hard is coming. Easier Taiwan has a gold Visa and so on, like I tweeted a bunch of stuff taiwan's. Gobies
Stony as he says in ship, Singapore has stuff. Monaco has stuff to buy his stuff. Chile has some stuff, everybody's trying to attract, entrepreneurs Francis, trying to do this. You've got a lot of choices. But if you just want to remain a US citizen, then Guam is kind of interesting potentially. I haven't beta tested it myself, but I think it's conceptually interesting. As also, an example of lunchroom Arbitrage, see in the u.s. territory leads the u.s. territory, but work in Asia. So it opens up the set of companies that you can finish the work for thinking a little bit quote, outside the box sets wealth.
Altars buy Bitcoin and probably eat. Eh, work remote minimize consumption. If you can, it's much easier to reduce your expenditure 5x. Then to increase your top line. 5x going remote will do a lot for you on that. Just getting out of big Cities Health. We already talked about, obviously the Home Gyms kind of obvious the oh, mad, like the intermittent fasting, the longevity, stack sleep stuff. I'm not like a huge personal has been dropped. Like, give me like 30 pounds doing this. Let's see where it goes. I used to be like as Jack too.
Is South Asian physiognomy would permit prior to my first startup like an obsessive and doing anything if I'm doing it. But startups have a way of prioritizing other things. This interesting thing by the way, is like SEO, there's founder or whatever you think you're basically putting everybody else in front of yourself and you're like, oh I could work out or I could finish this email I could work out or I could respond to this deal. Do you know people need me to be there for them? Therefore I can't be selfish like this who cares about my work out if this you know I don't can't eat healthy eventually. I realized I was
A false economy, like going to credit card debt. Maybe not obvious point but the younger you are the easier. It is to do that without realizing you're putting miles on something putting in credit card debt. And actually what you want to do is do something where it's communicate to people like, yeah, we're all going to invest not just me as founder or me, SEO. But you as an individual, we all want you to invest in your health and don't be ridiculous about it. You know, in the sense of sometimes, we do need to like crank on something because the site is down or something, you know, but in general emergencies notwithstanding you
You want to budget for your health time for health because just in a pure enlightened self-interest manner, that means cos healthy all the way through the founders, help you all the way through the executives, and employees are healthy all the way through health insurance cost is more alertness, more Fitness, all the type of stuff. So enlightened self-interest for your for your group and focus on health and the metrics that you do that. You can actually do group health. I think. Curating, your information diet is important. Just going from first principles like every once in a while but I'll do is I'll just draw a pie chart of how I'm spending my time.
I want to spend my time on a whiteboard and it's always like dis aligned and I think about okay, how do I kill all these things on my calendar unapologetically and boost these other things and at least I start vectoring in the direction. I was things. I do white boards. Everywhere just to have extremely fast boot up, just take notes on something. Some people have painting, some people have photos, I just have white boards everywhere, we're just little notes and equations and thoughts and stuff like that, but it's also useful. There's two books I think are quite good near Al's in distractible.
And James clears Atomic habits where they're complementary James. Clear basically, says, how to teach yourself to do good things and near says, how to stop yourself from doing bad things, the basic idea behind the atomic habits is you have a stimulus. You have a response and you have a reward. So it is not simply enough to say, I must work out. It's like you put your shoes in a spot, like your running shoes and his father, you always see and you have your socks in your shorts, whatever there's you can change right instantly.
See them, you're like, oh yeah, that reminds me. I'm supposed to work out, you run and then your reward is something like you post your Fitbit thing, somewhere, your proof of work out. You log something, there's something which is like. Yeah I've got an accomplishment. This is the way to kind of hack your brain circuitry so it's stimulus-response reward. This is why people are on Twitter, hit somebody, you know get a like right but maybe we can use that for good things and near has the inverse of this. Like in distract will have a gain more focus and whatnot sent on the
Of stuff, that's all individual stuff. And I think you need to achieve individual Financial Independence to achieve ideological and Penance to achieve Collective Independence. Once you've got a bunch of people who are doing that, who are financially independent of our healthy core mobile, who are conscious about their information diet. Then they can work with someone like you or with an influencer more generally or become an influencer or a Founder by themselves, by the way. That's a new thing, you know, founding influencer. It's like a constant just, like, founding engineer found doing influencer, I think is on par with founding
Near where then sister brings a community and their knowledge that Community. Then jr. Brings a technology. That's a great co-founder pair and the community is more forgiving of the bugs. Basically, the product issuance of the product doesn't matter, the product does matter, but influencer knows what product the community wants. So now, you start basically having software that starts. The key is a hierarchy with a sense of purpose or something you're doing for the community. You might need to survey them. You might talk to hundreds or thousands of people via direct message or what have you but if
If you decide to do this, you can probably find something that a bunch of people complain about that. You've probably talked about that's actually something that they would pay for, because that show some commitment and you just set that up, effectively as a service and you start providing. So, you organize, this online started, as usual stuff, maybe it is just a summary of content, maybe it is reviews of things. Maybe it is crowd sourcing information this week, maybe it is helping somebody with something. Maybe somebody's launch, something you want to signal, boost them, it's something. You've got some daily action, you've got some common.
That's just putting this network Union together and then that becomes something that can do more and more things over time.
There's been so much fun. I wish we had more time maybe we even do find a way to get more time. I asked the same closing question of everybody which is to ask. What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for
you? The interesting thing about the question is that kindness almost feels like it was sort of undeserved in a way or is like a bounty of some kind that kind of arrived from you didn't need to do it or whatever. I'm not sure if this is the kind of
This thing anybody's ever done for me, but it was surprising to see some of my former students have made, like, really touching images, or videos, like, people who I got into Bitcoin, like, in 2013, I taught this class that had 250,000 students. It had Bitcoin tutorials in there was one big bonus like at 60 bucks and some people like had their life just totally changed by. That didn't very kind things over the years sent me really nice messages. They're like, you know, II was at X now I'm
Why thank you and just very unexpected gratitude because all it just did was type some stuff online that I knew, and I didn't realize it had this positive impact on people. So that was touching to me because you have a very left, brain view of the world, or actually, right? Brain is a logical reps, head, right left? Brain is the emotional. I was forget that right
is emotional space shuttles, right? And
left? Yeah, so if you have a very left brain view of the world it's like wow that was unexpected that was really nice. Thank you that's that's kind of one thing I think former
Or students or people online sometimes say, just unexpectedly kind things. Well, one thing many many, many, many years ago, I was kind of a smartass times in high school. There's a physics teacher and it was talking about, centrifugal force is explaining in a saying, you know, you know, when you wash clothes in the drying machine. Yes, what is it? Mr. Srinivasan. How could you possibly have a question now? Just the beginning of that. As like, don't you dry clothes in the drying machine. So,
That got me kicked out of that class, but there was a kind administrator who allowed me to take physics, C electricity and Magnus e Gray, but it's called AP Physics, electricity and magnetism. I'm not sure if it's still called that allowed me to take that just independent study. So I wouldn't fail. The course I would just be able to do it myself and I could do that for also mechanics which is the first half of that and I was like very kind. He didn't need to do that and so I was like, this is awesome. I
Have to go to class and I can just learn it myself out of the book at my own pace when I want to. And that got me into more physics and math and whatnot and taught me how to learn how to self bootstrap, because that seemed kind of thing of just sort of being a little bit dishabille, Tiant like I was trolling him. I was, I was a kid but it was also technically correct, which is the best kind of correct showing me that. Small Mercy actually put me on a good course. Where I would I say it was a life-changing event. Nah, maybe not lie.
Event, but would have gotten a good grade had I not be able to deciding the is able to get like a 5 on everything and I learned that actually learn faster out of school and helped shape my thinking on things. So, I don't know if that's a good version of it, but that's something I
like it. Very consistent with what you've put out there in the world of self bootstrapping and sell sovereignty and all these things. I've learned a lot today. I really appreciate your time. I'm sure we'll connect again. Sometime soon this has been a blast. Thank you, thank you. This episode was brought to you by Catalyst in this four-part miniseries. I sit down with Catalyst client, right?
Ian cope from American Century Investments, and talk about how Ryan found out about Catalyst, how he got involved in small-cap investing, and his favorite aspects of using the Catalyst models for him, and his team, in this week's episode Ryan. And I talked about the origins of American Century Investments and why he is excited about the small cap investing space. So, Ryan, I think the right place to begin. Our conversation today is with a background on American Century and on you and the strategies that you manage will start at the high level with the company. I think American centuries.
Aim that may ring true for some of the listeners. But I think they'd be surprised at just the scope and the size of it. So just give us a quick overview of American Century where it came from, what it does and the scope of the business. Yeah, of course, Americans entry actually has a really interesting background so it was founded in Kansas City about 60 years ago. As an
investment management, firm by Jim Stowers in the mid-1990s, Jim, and his wife Virginia were both
cancer survivors, and they decided to really make a difference with their wealth. So they gave away
Five percent of their wealth
to found the Stowers Institute for medical research, which is a
world-class biomedical research facility here in Kansas City. Dedicated to understanding and ultimately looking for cures to gene-based diseases like cancer, and Alzheimer's, so every year, forty percent of our profits in the form
of dividends go to fund the
work at the Stowers Institute and since year 2000 that's over a billion dollars. What's the size of the firm itself in terms of client assets or you know whatever you think there are?
German is we're now a global asset management firm
with offices across the world and we manage over 225 billion dollars today. What's the
nature of the strategies? Like if you had to sum up what United the various strategies that investors participate in? What's the common DNA? Well, American Century started as a growth shop and in the late 90s introduce the value discipline, which is where
I live today, we really are across the asset Spectrum, all types of different
strategies and asset. Allocation
Acacia
models, whatever people are looking for American Century, has the ability to offer that today.
What's your own background? And how you got there. So you mentioned the value background, what does that mean to you? These terms have become ubiquitous but sometimes it means different things. So what does value mean to you? How did you get to American Century? Yeah, so for me personally, I started at American Century as an intern in 2008 and
full-time in 2009 after business school, I've been on the small cap value team since 2012. If you were to
ask my parents or my wife, I've been a value investor, my whole life.
If you look in my garage, you'll find my 2015, Honda Accord in there and I think value
investing just really resonated with me as a
person. And I found a
great fit with the small cap value team at American Century.
I love that. Did you extrapolate the car into the investment strategy? How does that show up? Most reliably, I think it's always looking for a high quality investment but paying a good price for that item and so I
think a Honda Accord fits that bill perfectly,
something that's very reliable, it's not going to get
us into trouble.
Well as investors or as a driver but is Affordable and was able to buy it at a good price on you know a discount to its fair value. If you will,
what's your perspective on small cap relative to what's become a very large cap dominated Market, not just in terms of where the assets are, but just in terms of the companies, you hear talked about, I'm sure a lot of your portfolio. People might be unfamiliar with what, why play in this space relative to the big fast-growing, Fang type names. Yeah. So we get super excited about small cap
value stocks every day and I
Totally understand why others don't. But I'm confident that there's going to
be a place for active management in the
small cap value space in, definitely their significant
inefficiency. So we've
seen it this year with stocks, like GameStop and AMC which are both in our small cap value Benchmark. Unlike in those mean stocks over long periods of time, it's really fundamentals that drive stock prices and the ability to efficiently analyze. Those fundamentals is really what gives us our Edge on our small cap.
Value. Small cap income team at American Century.
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