Naval Ravikant | Get Rich Slow | Clubhouse Room 03/10/2021

Okay, this is something I do want to ask you because right now, you know, Twitter has not given me access to Twitter Spaces and I don't necessarily want to use Twitter Spaces because I, well one, I love Clubhouse and two, I want to build a follow graph elsewhere. But if Twitter Spaces were to open up to me today, I could invite a lot of people. Right? When am I going to be able to invite everyone to Clubhouse? Because I hate doing something and people are like, 'Oh, it's so exclusive. Oh, you know, you need a special Silicon Valley ticket to get in. Oh, it doesn't support Android.' So when is this thing going to be more broadly open? That's my question for you to start off.

Thanks, thanks a lot. No, really, give me a date, dude.

Okay, I'll get you out of the hot seat. You can go. Okay. Good luck. I'm just here to listen.

All right, so this room is an experiment. What I'm gonna try and do here is, you know, a lot of people ask me questions on Twitter about their business and Twitter is obviously not a great forum for that. And the podcasts are very one-way and we don't actually get a chance to talk. So what I like to do is I like to pull up people from the audience and just give them 30 seconds. Please, no speechifying and no lecturing. Just ask your question about your business and I'll try to give you my viewpoint, which is that of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor who's just seen a lot of companies. So obviously it's going to come with a Silicon Valley bias and taint. It is, yes, going to be speaking from a place of privilege and abundance and first-worldism, so you should just expect all of that. It's probably going to be very focused on technology and technology-type solutions, but it's just a chance for you to kind of see how someone who's seen a lot of businesses thinks about business and maybe hopefully answer some questions and try to do them in a way that has broader applicability. So I'm just going to start pulling people up now. If you start lecturing or if you start going to something that is off-topic, that is not related to business, I'm basically going to unceremoniously just boot you out and might even block you. So just keep that in mind. So if you're not going to ask a specific question about your business, this is the wrong forum. So here we go.

Harrison Shulman, I believe, is the first one that I just invited up. Let's see if he makes it up. There's a delay. Oh, here's Harrison. Hey, Harrison.

And I don't want to... thank you. No, that's close enough. That's fine. Let's do it. Making money, that's... sorry, yeah.

Yeah, I don't think we're going to create a new form of money and a new form of financial institutions without having a lot of bumps along the way. It's not going to be a smooth, monotonic increase. And because these things are very thinly traded and small chunks of the world discovers them, you know, suddenly at the time, and what are small amounts of money in the real world can move these markets massively, there's just going to be a lot of ups and downs and the bubbles and busts are going to be a part of the process. Are we in a local bubble right now? Probably yes. I see an incredible amount of froth. You know, numbers are going up every day. Is the bubble going to pop, quote unquote, in the sense like, will prices come down from here? Probably. I mean, they could rise 3x from here and then come down 2x and back to where we are. So it's very hard to predict anything exact, nor would I try to do that. That's a fool's errand. But bubbles and busts are going to be part of it. And what the game is like during every so-called bubble, the game is to take your assets from things that don't make sense, shift them out of the things that don't make sense, and put them in the things that do make sense. So for example, in 2013, 2014, you know, the IQ test was buying Bitcoin. If you bought Bitcoin at that point, you did pretty well. And in 2017-2018, if you came out of that holding a few key things like Ethereum, you know, you probably did better now than if you hadn't. So in this one, you probably have to pick out what are the staple DeFi things, what's going to work and last out of DeFi, and hold on to that. But yeah, I mean, there's going to be bubbles along the way. But look, bubbles are of a concern for traders, right? Traders are people who kind of trade in and out and try and play timing games. I just don't think that's a good way to make money. That's a way to kind of gamble. It's kind of a casino, and maybe you have an edge because you understand a few of these coins better and a few of the trading patterns better than everybody else. But my experience has been that people who make money trading are usually very loud about it when they make money, and then they're very quiet when they go bust, and inevitably most of them go bust. So I'm not a trader. I'm an investor. I buy something when I have faith in it. I hold it as long as I have faith in it, and then I sell it when I no longer have faith in it, when I lose faith in it. I try not to time myself in and out. And I'm not saying that I only do pure investing. I also fall into the trap of trading. But usually when I fall into the trap of trading, I'm following after someone to something, I just lose a bunch of money. So I'm not sure if I really answered your question. It's kind of a non-answer, but it's sort of an impossible question to answer, right? Because it's too macro. It's like, are we in a bubble now? One interesting story is that this is probably the third bubble that I've seen up close, right? And they're each different. Like I saw the internet bubble, the 1999 bubble up close, and I remember thinking at the time, 'Man, I don't have much capital. Dear God, please give me one more bubble.' And then I saw the 2017 crypto bubble up close, and then that one popped before I could take advantage of it, and I was like, 'Dear God, just give me one more bubble. How about a third one?' And here we are in a third one, and honestly, I don't know what to do. Like, it's not obvious. So it's the nature of bubbles that when you're in them, you don't know when they end, you don't know where they top out. And if you sell, you're probably selling too early, and if you don't sell, then you held on too late. So it's just the nature of the beast. So just focus on the long term. Pick things that you don't mind holding through booms and busts because you believe in their fundamental value. Just ride it out. Take a longer viewpoint and you can sleep better at night.

Yeah, I mean, just get your blood pressure down, you know, stress less, hold for longer, and you'll make clearer decisions. Look, the richest man in the world who's an investor is Warren Buffett, and that guy makes one investing decision a year, and you know, he probably sells once every few years. So that's the model to emulate, right? Have the judgment, spend the time to do the research to figure out where the fundamental value is, and then make your bets with deep conviction. Hold on to that. Traders, by definition, are people who don't have conviction in the underlying asset. Their conviction is a short-term one in market movements. It's very hard to have conviction about short-term things. By definition, the shorter the moves are, like whether it's news or weather or, you know, sports or politics, these short-term aberrations are very hard to predict. But in a weird way, it's easier to predict the long term than it is to pick the short term. Like if I look at an entrepreneur and the person is really bright and really hardworking, then long-term I can predict they're going to be successful. But is the specific company that they're going to be working on successful? That's a much, much harder thing. Is the exact product they ship next week going to be successful? That's a much harder thing. Long-term is actually easier to predict than short-term. It just requires patience. So it's not that people don't have the judgment. Like, the longer term you look, actually the better your judgment gets. They just don't have the patience because they want to get rich quick. So, all right, I'll take that.

All right, let's see who's next. You know, actually, if someone who is in my friend's circle here wants to help me play moderator, I would like to invite them up. Is there anybody in my friend's circle who wants to raise their hand? I've got Brian. Brian Gu, hold on, I'm gonna invite Brian.

Let's go ahead with your question. Do you want to introduce yourself briefly just for the people who don't know you?

Yeah, it's really, really well put. I think you said games, but your signature game is Dark Forest, which is a super cool project that I encourage everybody to check out.

Oh yeah, I think this is actually one of the least covered and most important things going on right now. Crypto completely changes the nature of the firm. Right? So Ronald Coase, who's the economist, famously had the theory of transaction costs and the size of the firm. And he basically said the boundary of the firm, the optimal size of the firm, is set by transaction costs. And when transaction costs are high, when doing deals is expensive and difficult because it's hard to convey the nature of the deal, then you bring that facility in-house. You hire a person to do that. So for example, let's say I want to do accounting or bookkeeping for my company. And if it's very hard and complicated, like I'm in the finance business, or like for example, AngelList, where accounting and bookkeeping is very complicated because we're a financial services business, you got to bring that in-house. But if you're a small company and if it's kind of easier, simpler to do, then you can contract for it more easily. And you contract with someone to do it outside. And so the size of the firm is just dictated by what can I outsource and what do I bring in, based on how difficult is it to articulate what that thing is and to get someone to do it. Also, like some companies, for certain missions, you need long-lived players. Like for example, if you're creating Clubhouse, you need engineers to stick around for years because the knowledge of the code base really gets buried in their head. So you don't want to outsource that. You don't want people leaving. You want people locked in. And so you bring that in-house. On the other hand, like if technology is not core to you and you want to build an app, you're like Nestle and you need to build a website, you may not need to bring that in-house. You can contract for that out of house. It's a much simpler contract. So contracting costs are a big deal determining the size of the firm. So now with crypto, how does that play? Well, in crypto, then everything is like extremely well-defined. Like you can build a piece of code that is then a function that has a unique global ID on, let's say, the Ethereum blockchain. And I can call that piece of code and I can sort of coin into it. And on the other end, you're going to give me the answer, and you might even change the money that I put in and transform it into more money or less money based on what I called that function for. So in crypto land, like all the code that has been built is automatically exposed by APIs. All the services are sort of exposed to each other, and this is a thing called composability. And so, like Lego blocks, everything in the crypto ecosystem kind of plugs into each other. Not everything, but almost everything for practical purposes. So that right there squishes down the size of the firm. And that's number one. Number two is, you can actually, the way you raise money for a crypto company is completely opposite of how you raise it for a normal company. Normal company, you raise a seed round from angel investors, then you do a Series A, Series B, all the way to an IPO. Crypto company, you literally IPO on day one. You just kind of start selling tokens. And so immediately you're liquid, immediately it's trading, and immediately there's like a whole bunch of people who can permissionlessly invest in your business. So your investor base is much larger, and you also measure it every day in the market. So it creates an extremely different dynamic. And of course, because you're building like these little Lego blocks as opposed to building an entire company, a single individual can just have enormous amount of leverage. The most extreme example is, of course, the Bitcoin white paper, where Satoshi, you know, and then working later with Hal Finney and others, basically launched Bitcoin with an incredibly small number of people. So very, very small number of people behind Bitcoin. You could argue that the breakthrough in Bitcoin was just writing the white paper. It wasn't written code. Once Satoshi had written the white paper, his or her job was done. So that's kind of another way you can have these very atomized, micro-sized firms. Yet another way in which they differ is that these are protocols. These aren't companies, right? And protocols have communities attached. They have peer governance. They can actually outlive the original developers. They can even outlive the original company. Some crypto companies set up the protocol and then they dissolve the company. You can have anonymous contributors. You can literally have people, like in the Monero blockchain, there are coders who code from an era nobody knows who the heck they are. You can pay people anonymously. You can pay them, you know, based on the price of the coin. You can incent the community in ways that you just can't do in the normal world because you can pay them each encrypted tokens. So the scope of how you build a company is completely different. I think it's all up for grabs, and we're seeing all kinds of models being tested in this massive Cambrian explosion. And we're going to end up with things that look very, very different. You know, one thought I had a while back was like maybe someone should set up like a completely crypto company where all the people who are working are anonymous. They're just known by their public keys, and they're all paid, you know, through some kind of a smart contract. All the customers are basically also, when they buy something, when they contribute revenues into the company, it goes into a smart contract. The shareholders are all held, their cap tables are all held in the blockchain, and the profits are automatically paid out. And at first I thought, wow, this is so interesting. This is what the future is going to look like. We're going to take companies and we're going to redo them crypto style. And then I realized, no, actually we're not, because these things look completely different. They don't even look like normal companies. They look like quasi-governments slash nations slash movements, where some people are getting paid and some people aren't, and some are just incented by the protocol. And it's not clear who's working for who. And sometimes they're fighting and they're forking the protocol. You can't fork a company, you know. You don't see like mutinies happening where like the code gets forked and the company suddenly splits into two competing companies with a customer base choosing sides. That never happens. But in crypto land, that happens all the time. Whereas in normal company land, you see acquisitions happen all the time, but in crypto land, that basically never happens. Or if it does, it's a sign that wasn't really a crypto project. That was just more of a centralized company in the first place. So crypto has its own rules, its own ecosystem, its own behavior, and I think it's fascinating to watch how it evolves. And it's also one of the reasons why VCs are having a really tough time playing in the space, because it's very hard to figure out how to invest in these things. They don't look like normal companies. So if you're a venture capitalist, your LP agreements don't envision any of this. You know, it's all of a sudden like a hedge fund you're running on buying tokens, or you're investing in grants or like decentralized projects, or you're actually some of the VCs running yields, staking and mining farms, or they're literally running miners. Or for example, with your game, if somebody wants to go ahead and procure tokens for that game or assets in the game, it's really planets in the Dark Forest game, then they have to go out there and actually play the game. Or they have to hire a bunch of people to play the game, or they have to hire a bunch of coders to write plugins to get assets for the game. So it's just a very, very different place. I almost hesitate to call them companies anymore. They're just a different thing.

Yeah, on the second point, it's interesting how few crypto forks have actually succeeded. Because this is all open source, you'd think it would be really trivial and easy for someone to just fork something, maybe cut the, you know, any pre-mine out, cut out any rewards that have gone to other people, and say, 'Hey, come to our clone and you're gonna have better economics.' Like a simple example would be you could take the Bitcoin blockchain, you could fork it, and you could create Bitcoin, call it Fair Coin, and what you do is you cut out Satoshi's genesis block, you cut out the Winklevoss, you cut out any large exchange address, and then you basically just airdrop Bitcoin to all the smaller holders and say, 'Here we go, people.' Or you airdrop it to another community and try and tempt them in. But that kind of thing just doesn't work in crypto. It turns out that these forks and reallocations have generally had a disastrous history. So I think you're right, it's much more about the community and the protocol and kind of the apps that are built on top and the people who are using it. These things are very loosely held together by these community-based network effects and Schelling points, and not really held together based as much on economic incentives as it might initially appear, or purely economic incentives. The second part, which is what you mentioned first about composability, I think composability is probably, as you say, the most underrated thing about blockchains and crypto. The key here, I think, to focus on is that if you're Facebook, right, you're Mark Zuckerberg and you're running Facebook, you have to protect that database. That database, you're in charge of it. And if someone breaks in as a hacker, you know, they steal incredibly valuable data and it's very embarrassing to you. At the same time, your value as a company derives from the data you own, the Facebook social graph, and damn if you're going to share that with anybody. And then writing to that database is an extreme privilege. Like you negotiate with your product managers as to what the rules are for writing that database, and you control access to that database. So that database is the magic keys, and you wrap all this proprietary code around the database to serve up the app, but it also protects ingress and egress out of that database. In crypto land, it's really interesting. We came up with a system where we basically said we don't trust anybody. We don't trust anybody else out there. We are in a dark forest, to use your analogy. We're in a dark forest and we don't know who's walking out there, and everybody out there we just have to assume is a hostile actor. But we have to assume actually that the majority of actors in the ecosystem are not hostile, but there are enough hostile actors out there that you have to always treat any single actor as potentially hostile. So I am responsible for my own data. I have to protect my own data. So the user suddenly has to take on the heavy lift of handling private keys and bearer tokens and potentially losing their money. But they're responsible for securing their data now. In normal land, people can't remember their password and, you know, password resets don't work and people lose their passwords and they can't hold on to that. In crypto land, you better remember your seed phrase. You better remember where you secured your coins, and if you lose them, you lose them. So it's the exact opposite. The burden of data security first and foremost lands on the user. But as soon as the user gets through that, then you put everything into this giant shared database where nobody trusts anybody, but everybody has control over their own data and it's encrypted. And now writing to the database is controlled by the miners and the blockchain consensus rules. So the write activity is very controlled. You can't read it unless the person with the private key lets you read it, and you certainly can't write into somebody else's account without their permission, their private key. So now the database is in this weird way open to everyone, but it's secure. It's completely secure against hostile actors. So now you no longer need this code to be closed. The code can be open. It's not just an open API, it's way beyond that. Every piece of code is open. You can connect that database from any single angle that you want. And this is huge because now this is what enables composability. Now every application plugs into every other application anywhere it needs to. And the image that I have of crypto land is crypto's like Voltron. It's like all these little robots that look useless that are running around being built that look like toys, but eventually when they snap together like Voltron or Legos, they build something much, much larger that basically just overwhelms the legacy financial system or the legacy gaming system or the legacy even social networks. So I think crypto is way underestimated because this combination of closed data and open source just allows it to create things that are much, much larger than we've experienced before. The entire community is essentially working on the same product. It's funny to me that the people in the AI community think they're going to build this massive AGI that's world-changing by working in their little closed silos, when crypto land, every project is essentially cooperating with every other project. And that's probably more how you end up with an AGI, something that knows how to allocate value and takes advantage of all the code that's been built out there, as opposed to small silos of code. I'll stop there.

Crypto's fun. It's my passion right now. So, all right, let's find somebody else. Gosh, I do not know who any of these people are, but here we go. Maybe I'll invite a couple of people up and they can sort of take turns.

Heinevault, can you hear me? Yes, I can. Go ahead, Maxine.

Yeah, so passion... okay, so my answers on these things is usually not find out what you're most passionate about. That's actually a very unimaginative answer and that's the really old answer where it's like people will either say, you know, your parents will say do what's practical, and all the books will say do what you love. I don't think either is actually quite correct. I think the way that I like to phrase it, which is nuanced and it's important to get the whole thing, is you want to find what feels like play to you but looks like work to others. So both of those are true. Both of those have to be simultaneously true. So 'feels like play to you' is the what you're passionate about part. So you'll naturally be good at it, you're into it, you're curious about it, you enjoy doing it. But 'looks like work to others' that is equally important. That means that in society, that thing is seen as work by other people, and therefore it is likely to have some value. So you want to find the intersection of those two, and that's not easy. I'm not saying you're necessarily going to find it trivially, nor that you're going to find it, you know, on a timeline when you're in college. One of the false dichotomies of college is this idea that you're expected to decide on your career that you're going to do for the next 10, 20, 50, 100 years, whatever, you know, through path during this very short couple of years stint. And unfortunately, I think we lock people into lifetimes of drudgery where they basically say, 'Well, I'm going to go be a lawyer.' They go to law school, now they're locked into law whether they love the law or not, or the practice of law or not, or investment banking, or medicine, or what have you. These are straitjackets. It's like too early, especially now as careers have gotten longer and people live longer, getting them to commit for like their entire lives based on these short stints, too much. So I would say, you know, especially at your age, and given that you're in computers and you're basically coding, don't overthink it. Just build things. Just build whatever you feel like. Build toys, build apps for yourself, just do whatever you enjoy. Now, to most people, to most people sitting in front of a computer writing code looks like work. So almost anything you do in front of a computer, especially with code, that is fun to you, that feels like play to you, satisfies kind of the criteria. So I would say just code for fun. If you code for fun, you will eventually find your way to something you're passionate about and that you can make money in. Now, I think that's somewhat unique to you because, A, you have the luxury of time because you're very young, even though I know in college they pressure you and it may feel like you don't have that luxury of time, you really do have the luxury of time. And the second reason is because you're coding. If you're coding in computer science and cognitive science, you're good at using the tool that is the most powerful tool ever invented by humanity that gives you permissionless leverage. So you're actually way ahead of the curve. Unfortunately, most people when they ask these kinds of questions, my answer starts with some variant of 'learn to code,' which I hate to say it because I don't want to be glib. I know it's not an easy thing to do, but at the same time, it's like if you were, you know, alive when literacy was first getting widespread and you were not literate, you know, someone who really had your best interests at heart would tell you, 'Hey, go learn to read and write.' It's just too important to not do it. So in the same way, when, you know, numeracy was becoming more widespread, they would say, 'Hey, go become good at mathematics.' Now, literacy and numeracy are prerequisites for programming. So now I can just say go program, because it means you have to be literate, you have to be numerate, and you have to be facile with the best tool that we've ever invented where you can permissionlessly create and extract leverage. So I think you're already most of the way there. You just need to code for fun. So hope that answers your question. Thank you, Naval. Thank you.

All right, who wants to go next? Lex can go, it's up to him, or whoever wants to.

I actually do. He does? Okay, excellent. We'll go with him next, but Dev was here first. Let's just go in order.

The pathway of these devices so far, and you know, if I can't get it to run on Neuralink, then I'll just build my own device is basically my pathway. I think it's probably too early to bet on Neuralink because we don't really know what they're doing, and as far as I know, they don't really have a widespread device that's announced or in development that you can really target. I don't think that the area is one to dismiss. You know, there's definitely something there. The question is, on what time scale does it arrive and what does it look like? So if you're going to devote your life to neural interfaces, or at least, you know, let's call it decades to neural interfaces because you're genuinely interested in the topic, then you may as well tinker on it now. And if you can do it on someone else's dime, so much the better. I just wouldn't necessarily bet on a specific platform emerging on the time scale that you need. You know, platforms take time.

Like I was joking around with Joe Rogan on here a little while back, and I basically said VR isn't working today. And I meant that partially jokingly and partially in the sense that it's just not mainstream. It's not like PlayStations or iPhones where it's everywhere. But you know, people took that the wrong way partially. You know, on Twitter it's fun to take excerpts and get outraged, but some people took that to mean like, 'Oh, Naval doesn't believe in VR.' No, I think it'll eventually get there. I think it kind of has to. But that said, it's just obviously not there today because we're talking on our iPhones, we're not wearing VR headsets right now. So the same way I think with Neuralink, the timing is everything, right? And the timing on something like that, it's pretty fuzzy. Could be five years, it could be 20 years. Do you want to dig into that a little bit more or is it kind of satisfactory high level?

Right, that makes the most sense. Okay, I'll keep myself to the audience. Yeah, thank you, good questions, Max. And well, as a quick side comment, you probably had a bunch of offline conversation with Joe Rogan, but I think I'm pretty sure he wants to do like a three-hour rant with you on his podcast about VR. I think he's still upset about your VR comment.

Yeah, I mean, Joe's not a technologist, right? So I think it's easy to get snowed by VR. The problem with VR is that right now there's not like, there's no apps that people are putting on their headsets that are kind of mainstream-ish that you can just use for hours at a time, you keep coming back to. And VR is kind of in this little uncanny valley where, and I don't understand VR well enough, so you should get someone like Eugene Wei or, you know, who's the guy who started Oculus, Palmer, or maybe like John Carmack or, you know, people like that, with Chris Dixon, they'll have a much better viewpoint on why it's not quite there today. I mean, the simplest thing is if VR had been working, they wouldn't have sold Oculus for 1.65 billion to Facebook. It would have been bigger than Facebook. It would have been the next Apple, right? And yeah, I know they've shipped a million headsets or something, but when something works like that, you ship a hundred million headsets. Look, everybody wants Ready Player One. You see that kind of situation, that's captivating. But then the reality is you put a helmet on your head and 15 minutes later you kind of feel a little dizzy, maybe a little nauseous. The games aren't that compelling, you can't move around that much, it just feels weird. It's good for very, very specific things, but those are not yet mass-market use cases.

What's interesting is this rumor that leaked about the new Apple headset that's supposed to be released in 2022. This is a rumor of course, so take it with a grain of salt, but those are mixed reality AR/VR glasses. And that seems to me to be a completely different approach. Because the current VR approach is we're going to strap this thing to your head and black out all other light, whereas the Apple approach seems more pragmatic, saying no, these are glasses, we're going to try it in the real world. And of course, glasses failed in the past, that was Google Glass, but you know, it's easy to explain away those failures. The battery life was awful and the processor wasn't there at the time, the camera wasn't there at the time. So maybe we've advanced to the stage where we're not going to end up with the General Magic device, we're going to end up with the iPhone. But it's a jump, there's still a jump required. Now the good news is the jump required for VR, I don't think it's a scientific breakthrough. I think it's just technology and engineering. And so they'll get there and you know, the time frame might be as short as three to four years, it might be as long as 10 to 20. But it'll get there in some contexts where most of us will be using VR for certain kinds of things, like for social networks, it's not clear that you'll necessarily need VR for at least this kind of a social interaction. For example, we could be doing Clubhouse right now with 3D avatars, or we're doing it all with video, but we choose not to because really the important thing here is the voice communications. We just go ahead with that, it's like the easiest form of communication. So very often we give up fidelity for ease of use and to just boil things down to their essence, and I don't think VR will be any different. But for certain applications like for games or for like real-world overlays or, you know, watching videos or movies or kind of immersive environments where you're talking, where you really want to feel like you're connecting with somebody, VR is going to be very hard to beat once it starts working. So that was an aside though, yes, I apologize for that.

Well, this is a really good question, right? So this kind of goes back to like the great man or great woman theory of history, right? So in history, there's this debate about whether it's shaped by individuals like, you know, Hitler and Churchill and Einstein, or is it just that that's the person who happened to be at their time to reflect the anger, the populist, or the inevitable demographic shift. And this is debated, but for example, in science, there's this concept of simultaneous discovery which happens all the time. Usually when you find someone invent something, someone else in a different part of the world invented or discovered it at roughly the same time, give or take. So at least in science, the great man theory of history tends to get refuted. And even in politics, I think you make a good argument that it kind of gets refuted. So you know, the same kind of question kind of arises here, which is like with Clubhouse, was Clubhouse inevitable in that somebody would have created Clubhouse in 2020? Or was it the great person, right? Was it Paul Davison, Rohan, Seth, are like uniquely qualified and talented? And of course, there's some truth to both, but where does it really come down? And I actually think that it would have happened anyway. I do not think that it was, you know, necessarily, yes, they're the best team to do it and they jumped on it first and executed flawlessly, but I think if they hadn't, somebody else would have. Why do I say that? Well, I think one is there's a zeitgeist that this thing was needed/wanted. I believe Twitter was working on Twitter Spaces even before they saw Clubhouse. I'm not sure of that, but I have reason to believe that from some conversations that I had with Kayvon in the past, who's the head of product at Twitter. And also, I know because I wanted a product like this, I pitched this product to David King a long time ago, who actually tried to build it as something else, I forget what he called it, oh, it's called Fireside, from Fireside Chats. And then when he heard that Twitter was working on something related, which is what Twitter Spaces turned into, he backed off and he stopped working on it. And then Paul Davison and Rohan started with Talk Show and they pivoted into Clubhouse and they launched. So there were enough other people who were exploring this space and trying to solve this problem that I think something would have popped up. Now why now? Why 2020? Why did it take off in 2020? I think one easy answer is COVID. You know, people are locked up and, you know, wanted to communicate and connect, so that's a big one, kind of like Zoom taking off at the same time. But that's not the only answer. I think the other answer is if I were to do a show of hands of how many people in this room are actually using AirPods right now or some kind of a wireless headphones, it would actually be really high. And it would be high enough that it would make the difference, you know, that plus COVID lockdowns would be enough to tip from something like this not being able to achieve critical mass to being able to achieve critical mass. So I think wireless headsets actually have a lot to do with it, or I should say high-quality, easy-to-use, portable wireless headsets.

Yeah, I think that's a great question. So I think there's a related, I'm going to answer the question in a related but different way, which is when you create a business, when you create a product, what are you doing? What is the point of leverage? What is the most important thing? It's the creativity. It's the act of creating the right thing. If you create the right thing, you will find product-market fit and the world will beat a path to your door. If you create the wrong thing, you miss. If for example, if Paul and Rohan had spent their time instead of creating Clubhouse, they'd created something just slightly different that didn't catch, then no amount of hard work they put in would have mattered, no matter how much of a team they hired, what it mattered. It's like that getting that creative spark, right? So what I believe at an early stage a startup should be optimizing for is creative execution. And that's a weird combination of doing the right thing and doing it fast and doing it well. So you got to have a number of iterations, you got to be able to take your creativity and take 10, 20, 30, 50 attempts in quick succession. You have to create them high quality. Like one of the things that always impressed me about Clubhouse was not only is it updating the app a lot, not just shipping features all the time, but it's just extremely well implemented. It's almost pixel perfect. Someone is obsessing over where all the features and buttons and links and so on go. And then there's creativity in terms of good ideas, and the creativity needs criticism. It can't just live on its own because if we just want to start forming connections and come up with ideas, we can come up with them all day long, but someone has to critique them. But in the friendly improv kind of way where they say, 'Yes, that's one idea, and we can also do it this way.' So it has to be like positive, constructive criticism to go with it. So really the question you're asking is not how many people do I need on my team or how big should the company be or should I prototype from my own, it's who are, what is the right combination of people to spark maximum creativity or maximum creative execution? Because it's not just whiteboarding, this is execution. So maximum creative execution, historically, that turns out to be two people. It's not always the case. Sometimes you can have a lot of creativity with just one person who's been thinking about the problem for a long time. For example, Satoshi Nakamoto is probably one person. Vitalik, you know, actually it's not fair, I don't want to say Vitalik was single-handed because I know he did have other people around him. So I don't actually know the founding story, but there are examples where the creativity is mainly in one individual, and there are lots of examples where the creativity is mainly two people riffing back and forth and improving each other's ideas and really just complementing each other well. And then from there, it gets rarer and harder as you add more people. So can your maximum point of creativity be three people? Sure, it could, but less likely. Five, way less likely. By the time you're 10, your execution capabilities have gone way up, but your creative capabilities have gone way down. So I actually think what you want to figure out is what is your creative execution capability? If you're a one-person machine, if you can crank out lots and lots of iterations, you have lots of good ideas, you've thought about the problem deeply, those ideas have been better over the years, and you have a strong vision, then just recruiting a person for the sake of recruiting them, odds are it's going to make you less creative. You're going to spend a lot of time trying to explain things to that person, you might clash. But on the other hand, if you had like say an office mate or a former business partner or a grad student that you'd worked with, you get along great, you both like riff on each other's ideas, that person does something you can't do well and you do something they can't do well, and the two of you together enjoy working back to back, then that team is going to have much better creative execution than you can have on your own. So I would optimize for creative execution, and only you can answer that question because only you know who's around you and what you're capable of.

Yeah, Lex is great, yeah, he got a pass. He's like... So I had a question about where we're going with privacy, right? We see these changes from Apple with their App Transparency prompt that they're having. There's a whole subject around this advertising tracking for marketing purposes. Google has also made a big change where they're deprecating the pixel. And I want to understand what your thoughts about this process and where we're going and how does this match with AI? Because AI needs like a lot of data and we're taking data away. And if you can like maybe talk about how this relates to China, because in China they don't have this privacy-respecting, you know, view of the world, so they have more data, their AI is going to be better.

Yeah, you know, I'm neither a privacy expert nor an AI expert, so I'm just giving opinions here. My sense is that we're living in an age where physical privacy is dead because cameras are everywhere and you could just be identified left and right walking down the street and they can already stitch together, you know, a face factor after a crime, but Face ID is going to be everywhere and everything. So physical privacy is just gone, ceases to exist. And on the one hand you can lament that, but then on the other hand, remember we evolved in hunter-gatherer tribes of 150 people where there was no such thing as physical privacy. You didn't even have your own room back then, let alone, you know, any expectation of physical privacy walking down the street. So the kind of this casual anonymity that we got used to in the early 20th century, in the 19th century, where you could lose yourself in a crowd, that's gone. Now digital privacy is the thing that remains. And in fact, digital privacy allows more than just privacy, it allows anonymity, where you can just be a hexadecimal string on a blockchain. It allows pseudonymity, where you can have identities on Twitter that develop reputations of their own but are not necessarily matched to you. So it's a much more fertile world, but your digital privacy is only as good as your ability to maintain it. So who is against digital privacy, right? Who's trying to unmask you? So on the one hand you're trying to stay masked, let's say that you care about your digital privacy, and you can do some basic things like use Signal instead of Messenger or WhatsApp. WhatsApp is okay, but you know, Signal's better. You can, you know, use VPNs, you could even use Tor if you're more extreme. Those are kind of the basics. Now there are people who are more extreme than that. I have friends who will cover up the cameras on their phones and on their laptops with tape, right? People who will literally remove microphones from around them. But this is getting harder and harder. There are microphones everywhere, in all the televisions, they're in all their devices. So now you start getting into who am I trying to be private from? Am I trying to be private from Google and Apple? Am I trying to be private from the local internet marketing agency? Or am I trying to be private from a nation state, like from the Chinese government or the US government? If you're trying to hide from the Chinese and the US government, that's really hard. If they're targeting you, they're coming after you, you almost don't have a chance unless you're incredibly sophisticated. So really, for a practical individual, the only privacy choices you have are being private from people who are trying to target ads at you and kind of more the internet crowd. I worry about that crowd less. Like Google can't throw me in prison, you know? They could do things to try and get me thrown in prison, but they can't directly throw me in prison. And that's not really their incentive, right? Their incentive is they want to target ads at me. It's kind of creepy, it's obtrusive, something might leak out because I don't know what their security practices are like inside. But it's not the end of the world. But if the Chinese government is tracking me, if they hack into my Gmail, if they want to blackmail me, if they want to like steal my crypto or things like that, or break into my bank account, that I care about. So I think there are certain threats that I worry about a lot more. But I just think it's very hard for an unsophisticated individual to defend themselves against these threats. Your average person can't even just, you know, keep their password straight. Then there's sort of this additional layer of where you're talking about AI, and I think what you're referring to there is like how much data do these people get to target things at me? Well, Google and Apple sort of blocking third parties is sort of cynical. It just cements their monopoly power because Apple has you through the device, so they know everything about you anyway. And Google has Chrome and you visit Google Search, so it's easy, and they have YouTube, so they have some of the most visited properties in that. So they don't need third-party cookies, you're just on Google every time. So they've got enough data on you to do targeting. So Google and Apple can sort of play the privacy high ground and pretend they're on your side, but in the process what they're actually doing is they're snuffing all the small companies out of business. So in a weird way, a lot of these pro-privacy regulations, just like all regulations, are cementing the monopolists and oligopolists and blowing up all the small businesses. And actually, Ben Thompson who writes Stratechery writes a lot about this, so if you're interested, go subscribe to his blog, it's like 10 bucks a month, or his newsletter, it's really good. But he talked a lot more detail about this. And then it getting sucked up into like large data sets and AI, that's where I'd be out on a limb speculating. I don't know enough about how these AI systems are being used. You know, we don't even need to use the word AI, it's just basically all this data getting hoovered up and used to identify you. I guess I would summarize it by saying that physical privacy is completely dead, digital privacy is mostly dead unless you're a very sophisticated actor, in which case you can protect your digital privacy against at least corporations for the most part. And if you're an incredibly sophisticated actor, you can protect your privacy even against nation states in certain circumstances. I would just say for the average individual, it's pretty simple: use Brave, use Signal, use a VPN. That'll get you 60% of the way there.

My own idiosyncrasies aren't necessarily that important because they don't necessarily apply to you, you don't have the same DNA. Rather, I think it's more about is what I'm saying true or not. And I think that in general in life we spend a lot of time procrastinating by learning, right? And it's by reading books, it's by reading tweets, it's by asking people, because we're sort of kind of deciding how committed we want to be to something. But when we are finally committed, then we take action. So there's nothing wrong with trying to get the data to decide whether you want to commit to something or not, but I think most accomplishment comes from making a commitment, an internal commitment that this is something that I cannot do without, it is unacceptable to me if I don't get this thing. And when you finally get to that stage, then you just act. And most learning isn't acting, right? Like one of the things that we've seen happen in 2020 is the wholesale failure of institutions across the board. And part of the reason is I think institutions have been unmasked as mostly intellectual, right? They're thinking in the abstract, they're thinking top-down. A lot of the intelligentsia don't actually have real-world experience solving the problem at hand. The only way to solve a problem is to act on it, and that's where the greatest learning comes. It comes through failure, it comes through action, it comes through repetition. Right, Malcolm Gladwell famously said like to become an expert in anything you got to put in the 10,000 hours. The tweak I put on it, and it's a little glib because I think Gladwell would agree, it's really 10,000 iterations, not 10,000 hours. It's not 10,000 obviously, it's just a lot of iterations. But iterations are where you do something and then you examine the outcome, you take the feedback and then you do it again but in a slightly different way with the learning from the previous time applied, and you just keep doing that. And that's how we as humans accomplish anything, it's always by doing lots and lots of iterations. So when we're asking for advice, when we're asking for help, when we're asking for mentorship, we're looking for books, we're watching videos, what we're really doing is we're deciding, we're deciding like am I going to commit to do this thing? And when you commit to do this thing, you're going to just start the process of doing the thing, you're going to do the iterations. And I think that's what separates the successful quote-unquote from the unsuccessful. The only difference, you know, the difference that luck makes is how many iterations it's going to take you. Is it going to take you 500 or 10,000, right? That's the difference that luck makes. It also makes a difference in magnitude, okay? You're going to build a business, is it going to be a 10 million dollar business or a 100 million dollar business or a billion dollar business? There's a lot of luck involved in that. But if you're going to succeed or not eventually, I don't think luck has a whole lot to do with that. That's just number of iterations and how many iterations it's going to take you. So once you've decided you want to do something, just get moving. Mentorship, I think, is really overrated. It's only important to the extent that you think it's important. If you think it's important and it's what's going to give you the confidence and courage to motivate you to get started, then great, it's useful. But you don't really need it. One of the ways you can see that it's overrated is that if you look in human history, whether it's in science or politics or art or warfare, most of the accomplishments are done by young people. They're done, you know, between the ages of call it 17 to 30. It's rare to have, you know, great scientific breakthroughs later or, you know, in works of art they can get better over time, but like in politics and war etc., it's really a young person's domain. Not to say you can't do something when you're older, get better at it. In fact, I favor things like investing where you get better as you get older, where those are purely judgment-based activities. But certainly in doing basic activities, if you're playing basketball, you better get started young. So a lot of the greatness is done by young people, it sort of tells you that they weren't necessarily waiting around for mentors. Coaches can be helpful, role models can be helpful, advisors can be helpful, mentors can be helpful, but these are all things in the margin. These are not the central thing. And if you spend too long searching for a mentor, it's just an advanced form of procrastination.

Yeah, I didn't want to say that, I already got accused of enough 'ism's. But yeah, do or do not, there's no try. It's absolutely, there's no try.

Yeah, I mean, the obvious thing is to create content, right? To create videos and to create courses. Sorry, Reem, you're on, but your mic is on, if you could just mute yourself please until, thank you. So the obvious thing to do is to develop content and to develop, you know, curriculums online or write things or do videos and so on. But it's sort of hard to stand out, right? There's probably like a lot of videos out there. So you're probably going to need to figure out some niche knowledge that you have, called specific knowledge. There's probably some part of martial arts that you're really into that other people aren't that much into, you're almost stupidly into. And what's the beauty of the internet is no matter how weird your niche obsession, there's a whole bunch of other people out there who are into it. And so you could create content around that. You'd want to brand it strongly. You know, you probably wouldn't want to just say, you know, for example, I don't know enough about martial arts, but say you're doing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, you wouldn't want to just say Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, you probably want to talk about your very specific thing that you do. And you'd want to coin a phrase, so to speak. You want to brand it in such a way that people will start talking about it that way. And then depending on how useful and broad that thing is and how people want to play with it, you may end up opening a line of studios. So you can prototype yourself with the gym thing, you could train a bunch of instructors and certify them like Zumba or Bikram Yoga, where you have some kind of a branded technique and now there are other certified instructors who are paying you a commission and they're kind of out there spreading. You could do it purely through videos and content online, you could even do it through software, you could do it through performances. There are many, many different paths to approach it, but essentially you want to figure out some part of it that you are really into but you know other people can learn from you and uniquely learn from you. You want to brand it in some way and then you want to create some leverage around it either by creating content or code or a program or a brand or kind of an instruction profile. So it's not just you always going out there and manually teaching people. And I think if you were to combine those three, then you're going to have something that is relatively highly leveraged.

So I would say give it a little while to play out. NFTs are working in highly digital domains, like if you create a piece of content or a piece of art that is completely digital...

And then people have an affinity for it and they want to just own that thing, then NFTs make sense. I don't see the clear overlap with martial arts right now, unless maybe there's like a trading card thing, like how people want to own baseball cards, maybe they want to own cards and martial artists. I don't know, I'm actually not a collector myself so I don't have a native understanding of NFTs like a collector actually would. And I would say to you that unless you yourself are into NFTs and you find yourself buying NFTs and selling NFTs, and unless you have a native sense of how they work, it's not clear to me that that is the place you would start.

Yeah, I'm not in a position yet where I can really articulate NFTs and that whole phenomenon yet because I don't fully understand it myself yet. I'm still trying to develop my framework around it. And I don't think I have any unique insights. I think just to kind of give people a sense of what I've gathered so far, which is very incomplete, is that basically the blockchain in a sense is a perfect digital registry. It's immutable, once you put data in there it can't be taken out, and it's highly authenticated. So it's very good for establishing ownership of things. And Bitcoin is the first fungible token in the sense that bitcoins are interchangeable with each other, so they're called fungible. But no one can steal my bitcoin once it's in there, secured by the network and by my private key. And if you can protect billions of dollars worth of value, actually now I think the Bitcoin blockchain is worth a trillion dollars as of today, if you can protect and secure a trillion dollars worth of value using blockchains, then you can certainly use it not just for the ownership of money, you can use it for the ownership of other things like art, like digital art. And those things are not fungible in the sense that they're not exchangeable. And that could be art, it could be domain names, it could be items in video games and so on. That said, it's not quite clear to me how much value something gets because you kind of have digital ownership. Sometimes that digital ownership has to sort of follow the item, it has to be attached to that media. Sometimes the media only has value when it's used somewhere, like for example a game item has value when it's used in a game and maybe it has different or less value when it's not being used in a game. I cannot say that I have a great grasp on where the value in NFTs comes from. I think people like Mark Cuban and others have spoken more about this and are maybe more articulated. I'm still forming my thoughts on it. I think Max just came up here, he may have an opinion on NFTs. Max, you want to articulate NFTs for us on the value?

Oh no, I'm putting you on the spot, Max. Not a real-world friend of mine, so that's okay, I can let you off the hook. I do think we're kind of in this weird situation right now where people are sort of, so there's like these weird sites that are selling land, right? They're literally selling land as NFTs and you're like, land where exactly? Where does this land exist? Well, maybe in a future VR world, but we don't have all of us wearing VR helmets and walking around VR worlds today. So basically they're trying to establish the canonical registry for digital ownership of land, just like Bitcoin is trying to establish the canonical registry for digital ownership of money. And what they're kind of hoping is if enough of the early adopters get together and agree that this is the title registry for land online, that when the rest of us come and join them in that quest for online land, because by then maybe there will be good VR applications, that we will agree that their canonical digital registry is the correct one and they will have won something by being there early. On the other hand, if virtual land takes off in some 3D world that is yet to be invented, then whoever invented that may get to reset the digital registry and say, I don't care, these people came before and bought this digital land, it's fake made-up digital land, I can make up my own and I'm not going to accept their registry inside mine. So there is sort of this subtle battle going on underneath for what is the canonical registry of ownership of non-fungible items. And just like Bitcoin is winning the battle for the canonical registry of the ownership of fungible tokens, there is one going on for non-fungible tokens. Beyond that though, I don't really understand what's going on. Now in terms of your question of how to deal with this investor who came to you, I think it's great that the investor believes in you. That's actually the best kind of investor, someone who has conviction in the entrepreneur rather than the business, because businesses come and go. But if someone believes in you then they're going to be more forgiving of your pivots and your attempts in the future. So I think it's starting on a great basis. You just have to negotiate a fair relationship where the person doesn't control you in some inordinate way, they don't have crazy expectations out of you, they understand what the role of an investor is and they give you kind of market terms. But all of that is really highly in the specifics. But I think the best way to start a relationship with an investor is someone who likes you as the entrepreneur. There's nothing better.

Thank you, Guy. Sona, do you want to take a crack? You have a question?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think they are opposing variables. That's kind of common sense. If you're ambitious and driven, it's because you're unhappy about the way things are and you want to change them for yourself. So it is a struggle. That said, if you want to get to contentment, there's sort of two ways out, right? One is you can go out there and fulfill your desires, or the second is you can give up on your desires. And I think you just have to take the path that is most natural for you. I don't think you can force it. If you try to suppress your desire to say make money or have children or what have you, I don't think that's going to end well. So we kind of just have to learn our lessons so to speak. So I had a tweet a while back where I said the reason to win the game is to be free of it. And this is unlike most tweets, it's not aimed at the audience, it's aimed at me. It's because I'm always fighting with myself. I've basically on every measure achieved more than I even set out for originally, and so I should be happy, I should be content, but yet I can't turn off that drive, it keeps running at times. So I have to remind myself, hey, the point of winning the game was so I could stop playing the game, not so I could upgrade into an even stupider game. Right? At some point you have to see through it and realize that you can squander your entire life just playing these games and miss this life that actually is going on around us. So I would say they do run counter to each other. And it's just an observation, and that observation is helpful for two reasons. One is so that you can stop playing the game when you've won, or at least realize when you're doubling down and going back into a game that maybe you don't need to be playing anymore. And the second is so you can very carefully choose which games you choose to play. Because if you play every game, if you play the envy game with everyone around you and you want to be better looking and you want to have a better mate and you want a bigger house and you want to make more money and you want higher status and you want to be more popular, you're just going to be miserable all the time. So you kind of have to pick your most overwhelming desire, commit to that one, see it through, win that game and let everything else go. So these are again, these are the kind of notes to myself, but this is a constant struggle. I go through being between being overworked to being bored and I will snap within one minute between those two states. And so it's just, they do run counter to each other. You know, it's funny, like I probably spend, you know, I'll spend an hour a day meditating and then I'll spend the next two hours on phone calls like getting my mind all spun up and then I'm like, boy, there goes my meditation, there goes the peace of mind that I had from it. So yes, these are struggles. If they didn't run counter to each other, they would actually be quite easy. Now I think there is a state that you can enter, call it a flow state, where you're doing the activity for the sheer joy of it and you're enjoying it because it's kind of at the edge of your capability. You're both learning and getting better at doing it, but at the same time you're putting everything into it, you're exhausting yourself into it, and you're enjoying the activity enough that you don't really care about the outcome that much. And that's when you're going to do your best work, right? These flow states, when you're the most creative, you're also going to think the most rational, you're going to have the best judgment, because you're going to be most immersed in the moment and not really obsessing about the future outcome but rather looking at the facts at hand as dispassionately as possible. These states to me are golden. When you can put yourself into these kinds of situations, you can have your cake too. You can actually be quite calm while operating at peak effectiveness. But I won't say that these are easy states to achieve. They require a certain level of mastery in what you're doing and they require to keep a self-awareness as to your actions and it also requires a complete detachment from the outcome. And again, one doesn't do these things by struggling to do them, one finds oneself doing these things when one has a certain level of expertise and awareness.

Yeah, it's a tough thing. We are living much more digital lives, screen-based lives. In a way it can be great, like look at how much human connection we're having here in this room that wouldn't be possible without digital. Without digital I'd actually be just sitting by myself in my room reading a book, which may be better for my long-term mental health and well-being and education, but at the same time I obviously came on here because I was craving connection of some sort and so did all of you. So it can actually bring this together. As humans, technology is a tool. It doesn't necessarily have to divide us. It's not necessarily good or bad. It can connect us. For the older generation it's more acute because they're less facile with technology, but at the same time people are very practical, they'll adopt anything that's not too hard to use and sort of brings them closer together. I can't get my mom on Twitter for example, you know, that's not going to be her speed. It's like staring at a small screen and typing text with your thumbs and trying to articulate yourself in 280 characters and yelling at strangers for what. On the other hand, I think it's going to be fairly easy to get her on Clubhouse once there are speakers on here that are relevant to her interests. It's actually a relatively easy interface, voice is universal and she can just kind of leave it on the background when she wanders around. And if she wants to participate, the controls are actually quite simple. It is an iPhone screen so you know, it's tough as eyesight gets worse as you get older. So hopefully they'll have an iPad app and a computer app and so on and you know, all of that should be doable. But I don't think technology necessarily has to leave older people behind. But there's no question that it's harder. It's something that all of us are going to face. No matter how good you think your technology, your kids are going to be better at it. And if they're not, then you know, it's a problem because their younger generation, they're growing up with technology, they should be better at it. You know, your kids should get there faster, they should roll their eyes at you and say, mom, dad, I can't believe you're stumbling with that. It's just the nature of growing older. But overall I think that just like young kids have so much more access to technology and connection to technology than they used to, almost to a detriment where they'll be on TikTok or Instagram which are basically addiction machines, right? The way like TikTok algorithm is designed, it's not maliciously designed necessarily, it's just the AI that they let loose on it. That algorithm wins the more you stay stuck on TikTok. So I'm sure that there are lots of young kids who are just scrolling TikTok non-stop. It's like non-stop constant dopamine drips and it's going to connect and it's going to addict them to it. So that's not necessarily the good part of it. I wandered on a bit of a tangent, but I think with like elderly parents and even with kids, like look at iPads, right? I remember I used to do tech support for my mom all the time, like every week she'd call me up, oh my cable modem's broken, oh you know, I fired up my computer and I think I accidentally trashed the hard drive, what do I do? And that was a difficult scenario. But now ever since I got an iPad and switched it to an LTE connection and got her Wi-Fi working, it's seamless. I don't get tech support calls anymore. So things have gotten better for the elderly. So I do think technology will help them and solve these problems. They are a big market, we can keep building better and better tools for them. The good news is as everybody gets busier, we all value simpler and better interfaces. Nobody has the patience to go debugging stuff anymore, we all want stuff to work seamlessly and well. We value good UIs. The AirPods are a hit, but even with the elderly because you'll get tangled up in wires and cords. Things like Clubhouse are a hit because the interfaces are very simple. We're not going to tolerate complex UIs. So overall I'm pretty optimistic. But you know, look, it takes time. At the end of the day, the best thing you can do for your parents is to like take your iPad and sit down with them and show them the different pieces and show them how it's relevant to them. And I'll bet you if you show them something that they want, they'll figure out how to use it. These modern UIs are actually getting very good. The bar for the app UI has increased a lot in the last decade and I think it'll continue getting better and better. There are apps out there, I mean I'll make a disclaimer because I'm an investor in this one, but if you look at Honk, or if you look at, I'm not invested in the next one, it's a Rainbow wallet and Ethereum, these apps are just gorgeous. They're so well done. They even out Apple. So I just think that the trend line is very, very good.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you want the banking experience, banking is notoriously bad and I think that's just because you have non-technologists who are bankers and you know, they're not technology companies, of course, that's not likely their remission and they're trying to build technology and they just can't do that good of a job because it's not in their DNA. But if you go into crypto land, if you go into DeFi, decentralized finance, it's nightmarishly hard to use today. Like you'd have to set up your wallet, you have to plug it into your browser and you have to go to a website, log in with your private key and passwords and all that. But once you make it through that, and I do think they will make all of that easier, decentralized finance is way easier to use than my Schwab account or Wall Street. It's much easier for me to swap Ethereum tokens for 1inch tokens or Bancor tokens or ETH for Bitcoin or whatever on some of these exchanges that are built by software companies or by software projects. They look gorgeous. Go on Uniswap sometime, which is sort of the poster child for a decentralized exchange where you can swap one cryptocurrency for another. Once you're logged in, the thing is a delight to use. The interface is beautiful, it's simple, you see exactly what's going on, and there's no bank software that I'm aware of that is anywhere near as good.

Absolutely. Oh yeah, licking stamps and envelopes, I don't miss that at all. Sorry, they'll know a lot better than we do today. Thank you again, Naval. Thank you. Great. Thank you.

Yeah, so what Max is referring to is Balaji Srinivasan, brilliant guy, you should follow him on Twitter, but I think he's at balajis. He was the founder of Counsyl and CTO there, and he was founder and CTO of Coinbase, not founder, he's a CTO at Coinbase. And he's just done a ton of work in crypto and just a really interesting guy, one of the smartest human beings on the planet. And he had a talk about exit which was about sort of leaving the system. And Max, I've forgotten most of it, I admit not to remembering most of it, but I'll just pick out a couple of key points. It was basically about, you know, ways in which sovereign individuals can leave and start their own country or work remotely or live remotely, you know, sort of exit the system. And there's a lot of different pieces to it, but I think it's worth focusing on just a few of them. The first is like physical exit and the second is sort of digital exit, right? If you were just kind of subdivided to the two broad categories. Physical exit, which is basically saying the ability for people to live anywhere, to work from anywhere, well, thanks to COVID, that materialized as more true than ever. It turned out to be a simultaneous action problem. Like we've had the technology to do work for quite a while, but there just was institutional unwillingness to do that. The institutions were locked down into everybody going to the office and working from the same place at the same time. And there's some good reasons for that, but a lot of this momentum left over from factory work. And so COVID broke us of that habit of commuting to unnecessary meetings, you know, at unnecessary times. And so unnecessary commuting at unnecessary times to unnecessary meetings. And so COVID breaking us of that collective action problem and moving us into a new paradigm is a good thing for most people. I think a lot of people moved because they're like, hey, I'd rather live in the suburbs or in Utah or in a ski slope or next to my parents and work from there rather than have to go into, you know, live in a crowded city in a small apartment and go to a job that frankly isn't all that pleasant when I'm sitting there. So I think that part of it turned out to be really good, but it took COVID to sort of materialize that. Then there's a part of like, I'm a sovereign individual, I can live in any nation, I can cross borders and countries are going to bid on, you know, attracting the best workers. That isn't happening. Governments are very, very slow. They know how to stop things and break things much more than they know how to make things. Excuse me. That said, there are some innovative visa programs that have popped up. I think Singapore has Tech Pass, Taiwan has a Gold Star visa thing to attract tech workers. There are even Caribbean islands that are doing it. New Zealand has the Edmund Hillary Fellowship which I'm part of to kind of try and attract people who are going to invest and build and work in New Zealand. So there are some innovative programs going on, but there's not a whole lot of it. The global nomad thing is still only within a very small technical crowd, it's not like true for most people. So I think that the physical exit as a citizen, that's still not a real reality. Governments know how to stop people much more than they know how to attract people. And then I think there's kind of this last piece which is digital exit. And digital exit is out there in full force. And digital exit can be about your friends, your friend graph is portable, your friends are on Clubhouse and Twitter, a lot of us have more virtual relationships than we used to, obviously not the same kind as physical relationships, but they're there. And then there's kind of crypto exit, which is exiting the financial system. And that one has worked better than I would have guessed. I would have thought by now governments would have had big crackdowns on crypto. But it seems like governments are stronger than ever, money printing is stronger than ever, but crypto is stronger than ever too. At least in Western society, governments have been taking a more hands-off approach to crypto so far. They've done some basic regulatory checks and there was a crackdown on ICOs at the end of 2017. But in general they've been much more permissive than I would have guessed 10 years ago. Actually I wasn't even in crypto 10 years ago, so that's a little weird, but you know, call it six or seven years ago, I would have guessed by now that governments would have had a much more hostile position with regards to crypto. But instead you have like large Wall Street firms buying Bitcoin. You do have governments trying to consider what it means. And decentralized finance is undergoing, DeFi is undergoing the fastest pace of innovation I've ever seen in my career. And part of that is because there's money involved, part of that is because it's global, part of that because the bubble, and part of it is also because these things are composable, so they all interact with each other, so they can all build on each other. But the rate and pace at which DeFi is exploding and expanding is mind-boggling. I've never seen anything like it. 1999 there was a bubble and we threw lots of money at the internet and we had lots of innovation, but it was not at this speed and not this quality. In 2017 a lot of money got thrown into crypto and there was a little bit of innovation and a lot of money making and a bunch of fraud or scams. But now I see just a ridiculous pace of people trying all kinds of new things. So I think digital exit, especially with the financial system, is becoming much more of a reality with every passing day. I think it's only a short matter of time before DeFi becomes so good at what it's doing that working with the traditional financial system is going to look antiquated and almost intolerable for anyone sophisticated.

Awesome, thank you very much. Now, yeah, I'm probably gonna bounce, it's quite late over here. And I think I've gone through a bunch of questions, so this was a fun experiment. You know, I actually want to try this as an experiment. And the thing that I was testing was a lot of these, when I go into Clubhouse rooms, with no offense to the other hosts who are here, I just find most of them pretty dull. And I have a couple of problems with them that I wanted to experiment against. Firstly, they sort of divide the room into the speakers and the non-speakers, and there's a bunch of anointed speakers sitting around just kind of chit-chatting, right? They're not really doing anything useful, they're kind of just chit-chatting, which is fine. I mean, humanity, we're chattering monkeys, so you want to connect with each other. And then the rest of the people are kind of in the great unwashed masses, they're sitting in the cheap seats and they're sort of not allowed into the conversation. So what I wanted to try was first, can we focus on something useful? So that's why I tried to restrict it to business and, you know, let's talk about something concrete that can make a difference in people's lives. And the second is, can I just pick random people that I've never met, have no interaction with, and I don't follow out of the audience, and how are they gonna behave? Are they going to say stupid things? And actually every single person I pulled up today randomly who I didn't know was insightful, perceptive, didn't shield their business, asked good questions, had good thoughts, had good comments, was polite. It was absolutely fantastic. And so this to me was very heartening. It basically says that the power of Clubhouse and social media is that you can go direct, you can connect anyone to anyone. And it's amazing to me how well-behaved people are on this platform. There's something about speaking with a voice to another human being and connecting with them in front of an audience that just makes everybody behave. It's literally the exact opposite of what happens on other platforms that won't be named, where it's all text-based short-form communication where you just excerpt little things that somebody said out of context and then attack them or flame them for points. It's just really interesting how changing the media format creates a completely different dynamic. So this was great, I loved just talking to random people from the crowd. And everyone who came up here, thank you so much. Everyone who I couldn't get to, I apologize, it is a bit of a lottery thing, time is limited. But I'm definitely going to do this again. So thank you all for coming and have a great night. By the way, if anybody recorded this, feel free to stick it on YouTube and message me on Twitter. Thank you.