Naval Ravikant on Clubhouse | 13 Feb 2021 | Clubhouse Podcasts

No, I generally I'm very bad about reading any books about anything contemporary. Is that about something new or recent?

Yeah, but it's a general interest thing. It's not a pejorative. Like, I love the same individual, right? But it's just a general interesting thing you go back. But I mean, but all the things you're talking about, right? The big split being between essentially the institutions and authority, which are, you know, their credibility and their legitimacy is eroding, right? And then you have this revolt of the public, which is enabled by social media. And Gurri, the author, credits social media as being the enabling force for people to have alternate ways of getting information, plus alternate ways of coordinating and organizing. But the problem is that the public has no actual leadership, no plan, no ideology, no theory. And so they become this nihilistic force where all they can really do is destroy and tear down.

That's what we're doing. Full-blown political war.

That would be terrible if true. I hope that if that is the case, first of all, on these massive shifts, I think 10 or 15 different things can be true. It's like trying to describe the macro economy, trying to describe geopolitical forces, like trying to describe the weather. There's just too many moving parts and causality. You can stitch lots of narratives through and they'll account in different proportions for what's going on. And given that nature is complex and non-linear, it's very hard to see which one is the dominant factor. But let's suppose that that hypothesis is correct. I think the counterability force to that would be that since the Enlightenment, we've gotten used to things actually working. Like iPhones compute and cars drive and oil burns and things of that nature. So we've gotten used to things conforming with reality, with life getting better and technology advancing. And if you go to a cultural model in which technology stops working or stops advancing, if the Enlightenment stops, there will be hopefully at least some place in the world where that is still allowed. And that will just become the new breakthrough for technology and for science. Like look at Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley drives so much of the innovation for the entire planet that it's literally unfair to everybody else, right? It's like, yeah, you all get to be vassals of Twitter and Google and Facebook and Amazon and Apple, and it's just too bad to happen to be based out of the West Coast of the United States. And the rest of you have the choice of either using incredibly inferior products or being swept up in our network effect. And so, but does that go away? Like if we shift, let's say that we shift to an oral dominant society, that's probably not going to happen everywhere at once at the same level because there's going to be someone somewhere out there with the next Lee Kuan Yew who will say, you know what, you can still come and build technology over here because technology is leveraged. It's the biggest force multiplier imaginable. So any nation that controls technology development or is the home for innovation technology will become the most powerful nation on earth eventually in a long enough timeline. So somebody somewhere is going to say, yeah, you know, we want you to develop technology here. And as Matt Ridley wrote in his recent book, he said, you know, innovation is a child of freedom and the parent of prosperity. So if you want prosperity, you need innovation. And if you want innovation, you have to have freedom. So someone's gonna at least hopefully create enough freedom that all the technology development will go there. They will become the most powerful people on earth and the oral tradition people are just going to lose because their views don't conform to reality and technological progress. And even if no nation offers this freedom, then the technology development moves into the digital domain, which it kind of already has. I mean, most innovation in recent times has been software, not hardware, because it's less regulated. It moves to a digital domain, onto blockchains and on the internet. So fundamentally, I do think that the hope for us remaining a merit-based society is market forces enforced by things like blockchains. I don't think blockchains are like a feature of what's going on in technology today. I don't think it's like, oh, we've got blockchains and we've got VR and we've got AI and we've got SaaS and we've got some drug development stuff. No, I think blockchains are really, really, really important. I think without blockchains working properly and decentralizing the platforms, we may end up in a bad cultural sack of history. But in some sense, I also view them as inevitable. At least what I manage the game theory through, I do think they will win in the end. It's just a question of when. I view them as a third act of the internet. Act one was the web browser, pioneered by people like yourself. Act two was mobile, pioneered by Steve Jobs and crew. And now act three, I think, is blockchains. And it's in plain sight, but it's so hard to understand and it's so wrapped up in this whole idea of making money and get-rich-quick schemes and tokens that people just miss it. It's lying in plain sight, but it's so hard to follow that people just don't understand it. But I think it is literally as important to the internet's development as mobile phones were and as the web browser was.

Okay, but if they're not connected to the market, then what are they connected to? Because as far as I can tell, and I'm not trying to be difficult, I actually genuinely want to know, because all I've been able to come up with is either you connect to the market, or you connect to natural forces, like, you know, does this ball fall if I hold it up and drop it? But that's just the free market of nature. Or I connect to judgment by other people, you know, architects telling architects, or journalists writing articles for journalists. Is there a fourth?

Yeah, I guess what I'm saying is that I consider feedback from other people to eventually end up in the domain you're talking about, Mark, which is if you're not subject to the natural forces or free markets, you end up controlled by people and obviously under control by the people in power. But you know, I'm a little more optimistic. I actually don't think we're headed for a dark time. I view this as, yes, it will be very tumultuous, but I think the institutions are losing power by the day. Right? How many people now listen to Joe Rogan versus listen to CNN? That was unimaginable a decade ago. Substack with all these independent journalists, unimaginable. Twitter, where it is today, is still a much freer place for discussion than the comments section of any newspaper or even any newspaper website. So I actually think we're going through a tumultuous period, but our actual abilities to speak back and to see what is going on and to realize the truth is increasing. I'm not saying there are problems with the system, but I view the march of technology still as generally good and in the right direction. And certainly an intelligent individual can take advantage of it. And I think to the extent that you're an intelligent individual and you're counting on the masses to kind of align with your point of view, that's never going to happen, right? By definition, if you're intelligent, you're not part of the masses. And so you're kind of operating slightly outside of the system, not entirely within the system. If the whole system agrees with you and you agree with the system, then you're kind of an average person getting average results. So I'm not that bummed about it. I just think it's all the way it's always been in some ways. It's actually even improving for intelligent, capable individuals because they have more choice. There's a lot more freedom of choice and knowledge and capability brought about by the internet and by technology. So I'm cautiously optimistic. As long as we don't blow ourselves up, I think it all gets better. But you know, there's always a chance of blowing ourselves up. But at least the current conflicts we're talking about, these are worst-case secession and dissolution kind of conflicts. Those can be bloody, but they don't need nuclear weapons flying around.

Well, the new things are, I don't think it goes from the current institutions to a new set of institutions, right? I think it basically goes to an unlimited number of institutions. There will be one-man institutions, two-women institutions, you know, three-people-and-a-dog institutions, all the way to the New York Times. It's going to be a big distributed power law curve of institutions. And people will be able to move around and switch around. That's why this whole idea of misinformation is nonsense. It's like, no one agrees with anyone. No one can tell what's the truth. They always say, point to the expert. Well, who are the experts? Someone appointed by Harvard? Great, let me appoint people at Harvard. Now I am the expert of all news and of all power. So I think it's just going to be a large smattering of different kinds of institutions of different shapes and sizes. And they'll figure it out. I mean, editorial is not that hard, let's be honest. Like, you know, you can hire an editor, you can bundle a Substack with like five reporters together. So I don't think it's rocket science. I think it's actually quite doable. And we're gonna look back in, you know, five, ten years from now, and I think we will see the demise of most of our current media organizations. There might be a few left. They might not be the objective ones, they might be the partisan ones, right? It might be the New York Times being used as a signaling mechanism across a large group of distributed institutions and individuals that are politically aligned with the people in power. And there might be a rebel alliance on the other side of people, maybe a little more disparate, but also aligned through signaling mechanisms, institutions, you know, editors stitching together journalists in between, etc. So I think we're going through a Cambrian explosion of media sources. Right? Everyone is a media source. What the hell is this media organization right here that we're going? We've got two, we've got three, six, nine, 12, 15 people in this room who many of whom don't even know each other, talking about topics that are way beyond our quote-unquote expertise, which I'm sure someone in the press would love to attack us about. How dare they talk about journalists, they're not journalists themselves, right? You've heard that nonsense argument. So, you know, the whole idea of media institutions is going away. It's funny because I got invited on Clubhouse by a couple of people saying, hey, would you like to appear in our Clubhouse show? It's at such and such time and, you know, we'll interview you. And I'm thinking, why do I even need to be on your show? I am a show. It's Clubhouse. You know, as Jay-Z said, I'm not a businessman, I'm a business, man. So anyone can be a journalist, anyone can be a business person, anyone can be a coder or creator or entrepreneur, or thanks to blockchain land, anyone can be an investor. So this whole idea that you are a thing and you are an expert in that thing is starting to break down. Now, it breaks down most easily for things like, do you remember when you used to go to a party and someone would be the photographer? Right? Now everybody got a phone in their pocket, everyone's a photographer. And then you would go to a party and someone was a DJ. Okay, well now someone just plugs in their Spotify or SoundCloud. You can still have a DJ if you want a particular vibe, but you don't need them for the music anymore. So the same way those professions sort of went away because they were very easily democratized, and I think journalism is very much in the crosshairs for that kind of thing. Even if you credential a journalist, there's no real objective knowledge that a journalist has to develop or display to get the tag of journalist or the seal of journalism. So everyone will be a journalist just like everyone's a DJ and everyone's a photographer and everyone's a political expert and these days everyone's an epidemiologist.

But Catherine, the great thing is that Scott is not under house arrest, right? Quite the opposite. He's actually, in my opinion, he's stronger now than ever before. He's eliminated this weakness that he had of, you know, the real name issue is not a problem for him anymore. He must have more subscribers than he ever has had before. He now has paying subscribers, right? So he now has an income for his work. I mean, as far as I see it, this is a victory for the individual. Well, there's a slight hit. His work will forever now be seen through the prism of the culture war. It's like, really an escape. It's unfortunate because he was not that, but the New York Times made him that. And you know, I think the New York Times firing a lot of bullets and every time they fail to kill someone, they just make them stronger, right? And they're creating kind of a, it's like if you take tanks and you roll them against infantrymen long enough and you keep blowing them up, what happens? They turn to terrorists. Then they start going behind the lines wearing suicide vests. And that'll eventually happen. So yeah, it's ugly for the individuals involved. And I think everyone in this room has either been canceled, will be canceled, should be canceled, or will be. There'll be cancellation, right? So the only way out is just cancel yourself. You know, just give up on this idea that all of society is going to respect you and you're going to say something interesting at the same time, right? If you're going to say anything interesting, you're going to make enemies. It's the nature of the beast. So we're learning the tactics of resilience. By the way, somebody, there's some alternative social network to Twitter that somebody set up, and they were bemoaning on there like, hey, how come all the top accounts that are followed in tech land are all these center-right people? And it's like, well, because if you look at all the leftists, they own all the media arms, right? They literally run the country right now, and all of media already reports to them. So if you want to find interesting people, individuals, they tend to end up being center-right because they get canceled out of the leftist culture. And if they're too far right, then nobody wants to follow them because then it gets tainted with all the horrible stuff that extremists do. So the people who are popular in political culture today as individual brands are mostly center-right. And I don't think that's a coincidence. It just shows what the structure of power is like right now.

Yeah, well, but that's always been the case. It's just that before it's been funneled through a few organs of power that have gotten to set the tone. And now you just realize, actually, I got to do my own homework if I want to understand truth. If we don't want to talk falsely now, right, going back to the title, truth-seeking is a difficult business. If truth-seeking were easy, everybody would have it and there would be no advantage to it. But truth-seeking is a very difficult business because we're always trying to fool each other for control, for power. We're also always trying to fool ourselves to make ourselves feel better, right? That's the whole ego game. So most of the life that we live, ironically, is falsehoods. Like, you know, people ask me, they say, hey, what percentage of things that you want to tweet do you actually tweet? The answer's like one percent, okay? Because 99% of it, like, people are not ready to handle, or maybe I'm completely wrong on it. But I just feel like society is the set of consensus hallucinations we agree to, the false beliefs that we agreed to so we can all get along, so we don't kill each other, right? There's something useful in that, I think. And I'm worried about a world without that hallucination, without that sort of collective hallucination. Or this is true, this is true. Like a very simple example is, you know, you look at the Declaration of Independence. I think that's a document where it starts out and says, you know, all men are created equal. Really? Anyone taking the genetics class? Are we actually exactly the same? No, we're all...

Everyone's different in so many ways. You're not born into equal circumstances, you're not born into equal health, you're not born with equal parents. It's like a Dungeons and Dragons game where you roll the dice. Someone got the intelligence, someone got the dexterity, someone else got the wisdom. But a way more complex version of that with millions of genes interacting. So there's the beginning foundational lie to society. Another one is that someone owns a piece of land. Well, your great-great-great grandfather got there with a gun first under a certain regime, and we want to uphold that regime or else society collapses. So we'll go ahead with this fiction that you own this piece of land and that I can't set foot on it. So there's another big lie that is important to make society work. Anyway, I'm reinforcing your point. There are certain lies that you need to make society work.

Let me riff on this and just have a different take. I think there are real objective problems that we have that institutions have solved. And that if all of our institutions collapse and everything is now decentralized and distributed and all of our institutions lose their authority and credibility, that authority and credibility was solving a real problem which now we need to solve in some other way. How do people know who to listen to? How do people know who to trust? Well, people split up. Isn't that what Twitter has been doing to the rest of the world? It's been causing the Arab Spring. So maybe it's time for the American Spring where we decide, okay, you like those types of people and those sets of beliefs, and we like this types of people and this set of beliefs. It's like imagine if hardcore Catholic Christians from 500 years ago and militant Muslims were living next to each other this whole time and they didn't know because they were nicely divided along certain fault lines like rivers and media organizations and they went to different schools, different churches, different everything. And all of a sudden they find out, oh, actually we're all neighbors and we all call ourselves Americans. No, we're the real Americans, you're obviously fake. And I think social media is accelerating this. Remember even talk radio is responsible for, I hate to bring this up, but almost genocides in Rwanda with the, I'm going to mess this up, with the, someone telling me that, that's right, yeah, they basically attacked each other at the behest of radio show hosts. At least that's how it was organized. So social media is way more powerful than that. I told Paul this, he's not going to love me saying this out loud, but I think the next Hitler and the next Gandhi could both show up on Clubhouse. It's the perfect medium for them. If you're Martin Luther King and you want to launch a revolution, you show up on Clubhouse. But at the same time, if you're one of the bad, you know, so-called baddies, if you're the next Osama bin Laden, you show up on Clubhouse. Humans talking to other humans is the easiest and fastest way to communicate to build a flash mob. Actually, so this is one of my hypotheses. One of my hypotheses about Clubhouse is it's actually not that important to have a lot of followers because there's a mobbing effect in Clubhouse that is not present on Twitter. You can see at any given point on Clubhouse which is the most interesting conversation going on. It's the largest one, or where all your friends are. So you can flash mob much faster and then you get much more context with the speaker because they're saying a lot of things. They're not just saying one thing at a time, one 280 character limited thing. So you can stick around for quite a while. So for example, if Martin Luther King showed up on a Clubhouse right now, all of Clubhouse would immediately be listening to that. Of course, there's a 5k max in the room, so let's get past that for a second. But assuming they scale it, everybody would just be listening to him. It's the most compelling speaker talking about the most compelling topic. It doesn't matter if he came with zero followers or not. So Clubhouse in that sense is far more meritocratic. Well, the meritocratic doesn't mean good, it just means efficient at routing resources to the person best to clean the system. The Clubhouse is the most meritocratic of the social networks to date. You don't need to spend a lot of time building up a following. You can just show up. And so I think that Clubhouse will move flash mobs and move large groups of people much faster than any social network before it. So when they take the invite gate off this thing, that's when I say you get ready for the real dislocation in society. And I think we need to end up as at least two nations. I don't know how that happens. I don't know if it happens in a decade or 100 years or five years. I don't know if it's a war. I don't know if it's geographic. I don't know if it's cultural. I don't know if it's based on some other system. It might be our space. I just know that these people don't want to be living together. Now the counterpoint to all this, because it could be completely wrong, right? The counterpoint to this is actually certain forms of technology bring us closer together in a weird way. Talking to people, you can only disagree with them so much. Like if I'm talking to you right now and you're talking back to me, I can't call you a name. I can't make an indefensible ad hominem attack and then disappear, or at least it'll come across pretty badly. So the conversational element, which is much more human, connects us emotionally and hopefully stops this thing about we're on Twitter, we're very comfortable just assaulting somebody, body checking them in a way that we never would in another medium. I think we've all had this experience where you send an email and it gets misinterpreted because you can't put emotional content in email. So if you ever try and solve any emotional problem via email, like for example you're writing a letter to your lover, like don't leave me, it doesn't work. It's going to be way more effective. It's most effective if you talk in person. The second most effective, at least, you talk on the phone. And you send it through any text-based medium and it's going to get misinterpreted and mangled. So the same way I think that Clubhouse can actually bring people together much more than a pure text-based medium, at the same time it does provide this instant flash mobbing capability for ideologues, good and bad, that did not exist really on the internet before. So I think whatever the trend that is going on, Clubhouse is going to have a huge impact on it. Clubhouse will change society. And I'm not saying it's necessarily good or bad. It's just a thing and it's coming.

Let me give a vote for the latter caucuses that the Clubhouse and the decentralization of just human communication away from the media is going to give more ability for us to find our basic human connection. I like the idea, I forget what the year is, is it like 1913 that Freud, Hitler, and Stalin all lived in Vienna at the same time. And of course they didn't have Clubhouse to communicate. And it's very possible that the division that ultimately then resulted in World War II and some of the greatest atrocities of the 20th century could have been stopped if we had the distributed technology of Clubhouse. On this though, I want to say Happy Valentine's Day because I think it is February 14th to all the lovers out there. So I do hope love wins on this one.

Yeah, but I think nobody cares about credibility. Not even people who say they care about credibility care about credibility. Those people tend to care about the aesthetic of credibility. People just want to listen to what makes them feel good. And as Naval was talking about, I mean, this is a great app for that. You're going to have all sorts of ideologues. One thing I'm worried about is, is there even such a thing as a good ideology? Should anybody have direct access to 300 million people at any given moment of the day or 24 hours a day? These are, it's too late. Like that decision was made when the first TCP packet launched across. Yeah, I'm not saying to undo it. I'm just, I don't think anything good. I think that there are all sorts of negative externalities that I see sort of coming our way and I'm nervous about them. I think humans are just going to, humans given the choice will always, given options, humans will always choose, I want what's best for myself. Ultimately we're all kind of rationally selfish creatures who are trying to survive and replicate. We're moist robots or biological machines that are built to do that. So we're each optimizing for what we think is best for us. And so as time goes on, everyone wants to exercise choice. The reason why people want money is so they have the freedom of choosing where to live and how to live and not having to do things they don't want to do. And the same way, the reason people want civil liberties and human liberties is so that they can live the life that they want. So I think all turning everyone into a journalist doesn't actually mean that they end up more hive-like. It doesn't mean that they march off a cliff necessarily because some ideologue is demanding it. I think they much more embrace individuality. And what's going to happen is we are clustered into organizations against our choice, against our will, that are starting to get unbundled. Like one example is religion. Maybe you were born Christian and 300 years ago you'd have to stay Christian, but now you decide, no, I'm going to change. I'm going to become Buddhist or I'm going to become atheist or whatever. That was a choice that recently became available. The same way right now we're all bundled into American or we're all bundled into, we have to believe in capitalism. And I think people are going to start unbundling and making choices. The only sin is coercion. The only sin is forcing other people to behave the way you want them to behave. As long as it's a peaceful society and people are free to come and go, this will sort itself out. Now we actually aren't that, of course, because people do want to coerce each other for their own good. But I think that the urge to coerce other people for their own good is actually the source of evil. So when you basically think about, well, those people are idiots, they're going to follow Hitler off a cliff, but I'm not, so I better control the situation. I better make sure they don't listen to the next Hitler. That's where the evil starts, trying to control them in the first place. Because given their own devices, they just want freedom to determine outcomes for their own life. I don't think, I grew up in some bad neighborhoods, I've met some people in bad situations. I don't think I've ever met a truly evil person. Okay, I know they exist, like there are serial killers and child molesters and so on, but they're quite rare. The vast, vast, and vast majority of people are trying to do the right thing. They're trying to get by. They're trying to have some freedom. They're trying to have some love. They're trying to have some health. They're trying to take care of the people that they love. And usually when you dig down to as to why they're doing something, they're always doing it for somebody else. It's very rare to find a truly selfish person. But everybody thinks everybody else is selfish. And so it's because you see evil in the heart of somebody else, you decide you have to stop them. You have to coerce them. That is the beginning of evil. So I choose to be an optimist because I think most people are good and trying to be good and do the right thing within the parameters of their own survival and replication. And I think that given more choices, including the ability to have conversations and followers and so on, I think they will find the right way out of the current institutions and the current bundles that we're in, which were built for a different society, which were built for a pre-social media society. That said, it will be dislocated. People will get hurt.

Well, for better or worse, building new things is coming. It doesn't need to come from a lot of people because we have leverage through technology. Only a small number of people need to actually build things, which is not great for society in other ways because then they amass all the wealth into the new robber barons. But play along with the mental model for a second. So imagine we created a company that was just really good at stamping out basic housing. All it did was you basically gave this thing a pile of dirt and they have a machine and they have a process that will for like a thousand dollars stamp out a basic, decent quality house. So this machine could like cheaply print, it's not quite 3D print because you're not picking a layer by there, but you could assemble and build huge amounts of housing stock and take care of the quote-unquote homeless problem. Not really, because the homeless problem is really a drug abuse and a mental illness problem. It's actually not a housing problem, that's secondary. But just play along with me. So you could do the same thing for food. You could do the same thing for basic healthcare. Obviously at some level you need humans involved and that has a cost, but you could have robots and so on. So I think we can start having a small number of people build things that then mass produce for the rest of society and take care of it. I'm not saying it's a wonderful society. It's a little bit of an H.G. Wells kind of society. So you also have to make sure that people have other outlets. The good, the bold case is that they all create art or study science or literature, what have you. The bear case is they just smoke weed and play video games all day. And unfortunately, I think current evidence shows that we're more headed in the latter. But humans want to be creative. Even all the people who are sitting there and smoking weed and playing video games, what are they actually doing? Well, they're smoking weed because they don't have something bigger to go out there and build. So they're just trying to stun their brain, the submission, to keep it quiet, to take it away from their daily lack of purpose. And then video games are a shadow career. The amount of time people spend getting good at video games, they could have gone and built a business.

Right. So humans are naturally religious creatures. And if we don't have a single authoritarian religion bearing down on us, we'll create our own religion. And even atheism is kind of a form of religion. It's a set of beliefs around which you structure your life. Because at the end of the day, nothing is knowable other than the fact that you exist. That's literally it. And by exist, I mean just that you're aware, not that your body exists. For all you know, you could be in the Matrix or in a VR helmet or a simulation or a brain in a vat. So at some level, you do have to have an axiomatic belief system on which to base the rest of reality. You don't even know if the next second is necessarily going to be like the last second or the laws of physics will be consistent. So there are certain axioms we all have to believe. And for whatever reason, we as humans actually most of us choose to believe axioms beyond that because we also have to function culturally with each other. So you can enter classic religion, which is like this cultural operating system that's layered onto groups of us so that we can cooperate and thrive. And so I think humans are naturally trust-seeking and community-building creatures. And even if the community of being American is yanked away from them or the community of being Christian is yanked away from them, I think they will create new communities and they will create new institutions. They will create new cultures, but these will be opt-in cultures. People at Burning Man, I have noticed, the Burning Man, for those of you who have been, I see a lot of people go there. What are they doing? They're actually trying, they keep talking about tribe, tribe, tribe. I'm trying to create a tribe. I want my tribe. That's my tribe. What they really want is chosen family. The old model was you're born a family, you're born in a tribe, you have your uncles, cousins, great uncles, aunts, sisters, whatever, and you kind of have to just get along with them. They're chosen for you. You don't choose them. But they give you a set of stability, but they also lock you in. Now you're stuck where you grew up and born and you're stuck in that job and you start taking care of people and you have to behave a certain way. But you have the love and the warmth and the protection and the support and the trust of a tight-knit tribe. Now people are creating their own tribes, chosen tribes. We went through this period that I would say culturally was very dislocated. We went from big families to nuclear families to single moms to, you know, every person is it for themselves. It's all about Tinder and who can get away with what in a relationship. But I think we're going back to now people seeking tribal connections. People are looking to live next to each other. People are looking to form their own communities. And media and phones actually allow us to do that. You can now go visit your far-flung friends. You can stay at Airbnb. You can catch up with them on Zoom or Clubhouse. So people are re-knitting back these tribes. So I think people will find their way back to institutions that are healthier. They'll be chosen, opt-in institutions. Who do I trust? Who do I spend time with? Who do I love? Who's going to take care of my kid? Which kind of hospital do I go to? But we do have to go through this period where the easy answer is all broken up. It's not just going to be Harvard and Kaiser and New York Times. It may end up being actually, you know, Primer for homeschooling and for journalism is these seven accounts and these three Substacks. And for my banking, I'm actually going to use Coinbase. So you just have to rethink it through. But each individual is reassembling a stack for themselves that they are much more aligned towards and is a chosen stack as opposed to one that is pushed down on them from above.

Yeah. And on a long enough time frame, again, I think this is perfectly valid. I just, I do think that there's something real in authority, even if that authority is really illegible right now and the powers that be are pretty illegible to us. I don't think that there's nothing happening there. And I think it might take us a really long time to figure out how to rebuild that same sense of authority and legitimacy in a digital context.

No, no, not disagree. These dislocate, there's always dislocations with technology changes. The printing press caused huge dislocation. Social media is going to cause huge dislocations. It's going to be rough. But the few, who was, I think maybe it was Alan Kay, I don't know, somebody famous said, famously said that the future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed. So we still have people like us on Clubhouse talking about sovereign individual type futures 20 years out, even for us, at least at a level where it outstrips the institutions that surround us today. And compare that to people who are probably living on a couple of dollars a day, or the farmers protesting in India about farm bill changes. So there's still a very, very, very wide gap and those gaps are very, very dislocative. It's a weird world. The recent round of the Federal Reserve printing was at eight trillion dollars or something on that order. Two trillion this year and then six trillion the year before, whatever. I might have the numbers wrong so don't quote me on that, but it's a lot of money. All of that money printing, well, it goes to the banks, Cantillon effect, if you look that up and just google that. And then it drops down from there into companies and into large institutions that then send it off into assets. So sorry if I back up for a second. We printed so much money that we're widening the wealth gap at this point. Because that money goes to rich people first and a lot of it flees into assets because it's afraid of inflation. So industries that should have been wiped out, like cruise ships and airlines and hotels, are still around. Housing markets that should have been wiped out, like urban area New York for at least certain parts of it, they're still afloat. But the things that weren't wiped out, that shouldn't have been wiped out, like tech for example or crypto, are booming. Because now we've raised the water level so the things that were going to drown are now above the water line. But the things that started above the water line were going to stay above the water line, now they're up in the stratosphere, they skyrocketed. So there's all this money that is now flowing into, yes, it's a good time as an individual investor, but these individual investors are also scared. They're running, they're taking the money, the free money that they got and they're starting to put it in things where they think it's going to be a safe haven. I don't know how this experiment ends. But there's a commonality here going back to New York Times. The New York Times is taking credibility that it built up over 100 years and squandering it by smearing people like Scott Alexander. The same way the United States is taking the reserve currency status that it locked in and solidified over the last 50 years and is testing that reserve currency status, it's squandering some of that reputation. Now it probably has a long ways to go, but 70% of all dollars are held by foreigners, or at least when I looked at the stat about a year ago. And so every time we print money, that means 70% of the dilution is borne by foreigners. That's an exorbitant privilege. And we're basically going to get away with that by monetizing our deficits and thereby bailing out our economy no matter what our policies are. But at some point that reserve currency status will come under threat. And if that does, it's a long ways down because there's no coming back from that.

Anyway, we achieved the main goal I had for this room. The main goal I had in this room was to have a conversation with people, some people that I didn't know that well, who are really interesting, and to also hit the same number as Elon in listeners. So I've got my wish. I hit 5k. And I'm calling Elon, I even, and I'm probably going to go out on that. So I'll hand the room off to you guys. Have a great time and have a good night. Pineapple.