Naval Ravikant on Clubhouse | 28 Feb 2021

I think it's really hard to discuss these topics because there's no direct path to them and we all have different visions of what they mean in our heads. And most of the problem most of the time is not a path to get there or that we aren't there, it's just that our mind is always in the way. So any technique that you and I would devise to become happy, our mind would become preoccupied with that technique and it would keep us from being happy. In fact, the pursuit of happiness itself, the direct pursuit of happiness, is kind of the surest path to unhappiness. For example, one popular path to happiness is taking recreational drugs, and so then you end up spending all the time that you're not on the recreational drug craving the recreational drug. So for every moment happy, you spend many more moments unhappy and craving that happy state. So just even chasing happiness can't be done directly, it's a direct failure. So when I talk about happiness and peace and contentment, these are not techniques, these are not systems to get you there, these aren't even systems to get me there. These are just a large collection of personal realizations that I have, which is part of my longing for a peaceful existence. And you know, it all kind of seeps into the character of my being and it helps change my day-to-day experience. But this is not math, this is not science, this is not even knowledge. It's not even transmissible. The only thing that someone can transmit to you in this context is a longing for you to find it yourself. And that longing will perhaps create some kind of a path for you that is unique to you. But if you were to take all my comments on all of these non-material topics, that probably sum to zero, just like all wisdom does. It's just not transmissible. So trying to parse another person's wisdom is a fool's errand. If it reminds you of something, if it creates a feeling inside of you that what was already there, if it helps have a pointer for you when you're in a difficult period in your life, all of that is helpful. But you can't take this as a to-do list, that is the surest path to failure. Look, if you really wanted to be peaceful and content and happy, however you define it, whether it's equanimity or whether it's joy, whether it's bliss, if that was your number one overwhelming desire in your life, you would figure it out. And only you can figure it out because it's just a game going on in your head. It's just a series of chemical reactions happening in your head. You know, there are what, there's like 15 of us in this room right now, right? And every single one of them is having a completely different internal experience, even though most of us are having sort of the same external experience of sitting in this room and talking to each other. So there's not much I can say on the topic that makes any sense. There's no to-do list that I can give you. And I know that's unsatisfying, but you know, that's why there's no shortcuts. Look, your own mind is your own filter into reality. So you have to adjust your filter, and only you know how your filter is set up, and only you can examine why it's set up that way, and only you can evaluate what parts of it that you like and don't like. Nobody else can do that for you.

Yeah, I think it's a meaningless question. All simulation theory does is it gives you a probabilistic explanation for why this might not be real, that this might be a dream. But beyond that, it doesn't actually do anything. It gives you a plausible mechanism and a probability that it's likely to have happened, that's the claim of simulation theory. But then in every other respect, it's indistinguishable from God, right? From any God theory, because you just replace God with a great programmer. You have replaced kind of the Maya illusion slash dream with the simulation. And it's not falsifiable and it doesn't make any interesting predictions about the world that can be tested. And the basic story is so easy to vary by changing who the programmer is and what the programmer wants and all that stuff that it's not a tight explanation or scientific theory in any sense of the word. So it wouldn't pass any of the Karl Popper tests. So it's kind of a meaningless discussion. And I think it's just religion for nerds.

I would say that, you know, we all have multiple drivers in our life. And there was a time in my life when I was driven mostly by the desire to make money, I didn't want to be poor. And there was a time in my life when I was driven by a desire to be healthier, it was a period where I was kind of unhealthy. And so, you know, we go through different desires. But I would say the overwhelming underlying latent desire that I've always had since I was small, and kind of resurges when all the other desires are put to rest, is just a natural curiosity about the world and why it works and how it works and what exactly is going on here. And as I get older, I can attach fancy words to that, like I can say I'm looking for truth, right? Because what I end up reading mostly is science and philosophy, because those are both truth-seeking. And I end up gravitating from fiction to non-fiction because, you know, fiction is by definition not true, although it may be trying to express things that are true. So I would say it's mostly a curiosity and a desire to understand. But of course, that core desire does get muddled by many, many other things. So I'd say curiosity is kind of my core drive, if I have everything else that I want. Now of course, like other people, I don't always have everything else that I want, so I go and get those other things first. But if I have everything else that I want, then I'm left with curiosity for the truth.

Yeah, that's a very astute observation. So I only realized this was true about me from watching my own kids. And I think kids naturally are very, very curious. It's just it's beaten out of them. If you think about what school does, one of the reasons why I'm kind of harsh on the industrial education system a lot is because it basically replaces curiosity with compliance. The industrial education system is there to train factory workers, it's not there to train independent thinkers or curious kids. And the moment someone tells you what the right way and the wrong way to think is, then they're kind of taking you out of the truth. So I believe that actually it's a combination of well-meaning adults plus society plus the education system that's currently built that destroys your natural curiosity. Look, if you remember school, right, there were kind of kids who didn't do that well, then there were the kids who did really well, like the straight-A 4.0 students. Those were rarely the most successful people in life later. The ones who did the best later in life were actually kind of the system hackers, the ones who did the bare minimum to get the good grades, or get good enough grades, or they dropped out of the school game altogether. But then later in life is where they sort of triumphed. And this could range from, you know, revenge of the nerds to revenge of the misfits, revenge of the iconoclasts. And so it's really the kids who were able to resist what school was trying to do to them, which is make them conform, who did the best later in life. And I'm not faulting the school system, but the school system is a needed combination between daycare plus education plus socialization. And so it does absolutely serve a purpose. You don't want, you know, a child being completely illiterate or what have you. But that said, it does, because of its nature, it's a scale industry, right? It has to be one teacher plus per 50 students or whatever that ratio is. And so by the nature of making something scalable, you stop making it individual. And so you take away the humanity. You know, if you have to raise your hand to go to the bathroom, if you have to raise your hand to go get a bite to eat, if you crave going into nature but you're forced into this small sterile environment all the time, if you're forced into playing social games when you don't want to play social games, or getting into status hierarchies and so on, or when you're just forced to live an artificial life, knowing that it doesn't reflect the life outside the window or outside the door, then you're naturally going to be forced to conform and it's going to take some of the curiosity out of you, or you're going to be a rebel and you're going to be getting in trouble. So I do believe that it is the industrial education system that takes curiosity out of kids' lives. And so I do think the homeschooling movement is very important. And I also think that it's really important, like if you have young kids, to always answer all their questions. Never ever, you know, tell a child that you don't have time to answer their questions. Or the one thing that I try not to do, I try not to talk down to my kids and I don't give them false answers. I would rather give them the real answer and have them not understand it and then stumble over trying to explain it in a way that perhaps they will understand it. But I never want to leave that 'why' question unsatisfied.

Yeah, it's easy to stitch together narratives of why we do what we do after the fact, but the reality is that life is just very path-dependent. You're in a certain situation and you're faced with a bunch of choices, and sometimes you can also blow up out of those choices, but you just take whatever path is in front of you. And so I just followed the path that was in front of me. It's, if you would drop me into a thousand different universes, I wouldn't have started AngelList a thousand times. I probably wouldn't even be an entrepreneur a thousand times. But there were certain things that I was just drawn to. I was drawn to science because it's the study of truth, and I just really respected and admired the scientists growing up, the great scientists. And I also wanted to make money, and the intersection of science and money is technology. So that sort of led me to technology. And then the center of technology was the tech industry in the San Francisco Bay Area, so that kind of pulled me towards Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I had to go there. And then when I got there, I realized I'm not actually the hardest working person. You know, I don't like working hard. I'm kind of a lazy person to be honest. I do end up working hard, but I don't like to do classic work. Like you could not get me to do a nine-to-five job and show up on time and sit at the desk and answer questions, you know, from my bosses. And I just, I never liked bosses, I never liked straightjackets. I was fired from my first internship. Reality and suffering hits us when we can no longer deny what reality is telling us. So like your girlfriend breaks up with you, you don't want to acknowledge the relationship was bad, but the moment she leaves you, that's the moment you suffer. You're crying and you're forced to face the reality and all the expectations you had where this thing was going to head, you know, come rushing back out of you and have to crash to the floor because you'd been denying reality all along. So these moments of trauma and suffering are what actually bring us back to reality. They force us to reconcile with ourselves, they force us to improve and change, and they actually build a closer relationship for us with reality and with ourselves. So I would say that the most important turning points in your life are actually the ones where you had the most trauma, because if I were to take those away, I would take away the story of your life, and what would remain would be pretty boring.

Yeah, I put up a tweet recently for the references. I said that the three most important epochs of the internet were first the web, second mobile, and third blockchains. And obviously this is going to be controversial, lots of people jumped in my comments to tell me how I was wrong. But look, to say anything interesting, you know, you kind of say something that's half true or at least partially true. Nobody knows the exact future, nobody knows exactly how the internet is playing out. Obviously there will be other acts, like VR/AR will probably be quite interesting when it arrives, and AI, which I think is a little overhyped, you know, if it materializes, would be a total game changer, especially AGI. But I think the thing that's most interesting that's going on right now in technology is blockchains. And by blockchains, I mean these decentralized consensus mechanisms that enable us to form everything from corporations to networks to protocols to products that are operated by the community of users underneath, or interested users underneath, as opposed to being owned by centralized entities. And so the first wave of the internet, we saw the creation of classic web companies. In the second wave of the internet, we saw Apple and Google basically take over by the App Store and the Play Store, and also a few other behemoths like Amazon and Netflix and Facebook and so on rise up. But now I think the most interesting action is going in blockchains. And Bitcoin is the obvious one, which is we're literally redefining what money is and moving it onto the internet as opposed to having it be in the possession of any single government or small group of people. And I think there will be hugely beneficial repercussions to society for doing that. But then with Ethereum, we're building an entire decentralized stack of Wall Street on top. All the things that Wall Street does, or London or Shanghai or Hong Kong or New York do with all their financial institutions, is being done better and easier and smoother on this decentralized finance stack. It doesn't quite work yet, it's a Rube Goldberg machine, but it's getting better and better. One analogy I made was I think that DeFi, decentralized finance, and smart contracts are like building castles made out of math, you know, that are floating in the sky and freely trading with each other. This is like this old city-state model of free trade and impregnable protection of property and privacy, which is kind of a fantasy. But that's really, if you go back in human history and you look at when humans have made great leaps forward, it's been in city-state models, whether it was Greece with Athens and Sparta, or whether it was Renaissance Italy with Florence and so on. But I think we're building the virtual equivalent of that using blockchains. And I think we will also see huge advancements in decentralized mechanisms for building decentralized social networks, for building decentralized, you know, they call it non-fungible tokens or decentralized registries of items and assets, both digital and pointing to in the real world. And we will see decentralized new game worlds. And eventually, to my mind, a blockchain is actually a precursor for a metaverse. Let me tell you what I mean by that. Like when VR/AR really, really takes off, it's going to have to be global just like the internet was. It's going to have to be permissionless just like the original internet was. It's going to have to be censorship-free for people to dream and to create and to imagine, as opposed to trying to fit into, you know, whatever the local boss thinks that you should and shouldn't do. It's not going to be owned by Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg and his crew, we're not going to create the next internet because we just won't have it. Nor by Jack Dorsey, nor by Jeff Bezos, nor by any of them, nor by Tim Cook, benevolent dictator. So they might control the hardware that lets us in, but hopefully there will be competing hardware standards and they will let us into one large decentralized open space. And that decentralized open space is going to need to know how to allocate resources, how to pay for things, how to protect users' data and privacy, how to interlink with each other. And these are the kinds of distributed consensus and Byzantine problems that blockchains are extremely good at solving. So I'm pretty confident that not only are blockchains the most important thing going on right now, but they're also the fundamental layer for whatever comes next. Now, due to their design, they're basically venture capital done in public, right? The way these companies work is they create a protocol, then they IPO, and then they raise money. Like literally their first act is an IPO, and then after that the investors start coming in. Whereas the classic tech model, which is closed to the average investor by regulations, basically makes people like me wealthier and keeps you from doing venture capital investing until it's really late in the game, and then the company IPOs and most of the appreciation is gone. And I might have made a hundred X or a thousand X, and you get to fight for twenty percent a year. So with blockchains, because the currencies built on them are permissionless, they IPO on day one. So what you're seeing is venture capital in action, unregulated, with lots of scams and pumps and dumps and lots of clones and forks and really bad actors. And 99 percent of it is junk, as opposed to normal startups where 90 percent is junk. So it's even worse than the normal setup. So to people it looks really scammy and looks really worthless. But this is kind of an IQ test, it's really going to differentiate the capable people from the incapable people. So you know, the vast majority of what happens in blockchain then is going to be terrible. But I believe that there will be a piece emerging out of that, and I think we've already had a few huge hits around Bitcoin, Ethereum, DeFi, and so on. And now we're seeing with NFTs, and soon I think we'll see with social protocols and with gaming protocols, we're going to see massive revolutionary shifts. And it's a major technology that by the time the shift materializes, it's too late for the incumbents. When the iPhone showed up to Nokia and Ericsson, it must have looked like Martians had just landed, you know, from space with battleships, and there was just nothing they could do. If you're sitting at Nokia and you were told, 'Hey, let's go make a Nokia phone to compete with Apple,' you would just weep because there's nothing you could literally do. You'd have to write this massive software stack and build a touchscreen phone, and you know, it just was impossible. It was a computer, which was just a whole different thing. So I think the same way that when blockchain-based technologies really become frictionless and well-implemented and seamless, that they're just going to overwhelm the current technologies that they're facing. They'll just be so much more capable, unimaginably powerful compared to what we have out there in the centralized models.

Yeah, the early versions aren't designed for the average user. And people who say, 'I'm looking for an app, give me an app that an average user uses every day,' are missing the point entirely. The average user every day is not involved in stashing gold bricks in their house, right? So it doesn't really replace... so Bitcoin competes with that. It's a store of value. The average person is not busy trading exotic derivatives on Wall Street, right? So the early versions of this stuff, yeah, MetaMask looks weird to you, but hey, MetaMask is letting you be your own bank. It's letting you basically do your own high-frequency trading, or it's letting you do your own lending and borrowing, or your own staking, or your own yield optimization. It's letting you do things that you just could not do otherwise, like literally would be physically and virtually impossible in any other model. So it's not like you're getting a shitty version of the Model T, where, you know, yeah, okay, people are driving a car and not having a [__] of your car. No, what you're able to do with MetaMask is literally everybody else is driving their nice car and you've got the world's first airplane. It can barely get off the ground, you're wondering why it's such a Rube Goldberg machine, but what you're dealing with is a completely different beast. So yeah, it's not ready for prime time. By the time it is ready for prime time, these blockchains will be worth many, many trillions of dollars, and they will be just a short step away, I believe, from dominating our financial system. So it's hard to see when that does... it's hard to see what happens in the future because it's so decentralized that the speed of the system itself is really hard to wrap your head around. Every technological revolution does not even vaguely resemble the one that came before it. They are not predictable by definition. If they were predictable, we wouldn't need the technological revolution, we could just cut to the chase.

Yes, yes. Individuals place bets. We place bets. So what I'm doing is I'm placing my bets. Does not mean I know what's going to happen, doesn't mean I'm almost right. What I like to do is I like to place asymmetric bets where if I am right, I will be paid extremely well, and if I am wrong, I just lose my little entry fee. So they have lottery ticket-like characteristics, except that they're more likely... the expected value is positive, unlike the lottery where it's negative. So I'm placing my bets and I'm not afraid to place my bets in public. I might be wrong, and that's fine. I don't mind the public humiliation, that's meaningless. Money on the other hand is real, that I can spend it. So I'm happy to place that bet and make my bets, and you can do whatever you would like. In fact, the less people who get it from the traditional investing background, the better it is for people like me.

Yeah, that's your own beach because you can switch it, because the contact list is inside your phone. So if WhatsApp deplatforms you, you can switch to Signal. And if Signal removes you, you can go to WeChat. WeChat removes you, you can go to Telegram. You have lots of options. It's these giant coordinated consensus systems where we're all put together in one place and there's kind of one overlord who's deciding who gets to talk and who doesn't that I don't love. So I really, I think once Twitter started censoring people, its days were numbered. That's the point at which everybody knows that it's not permanent, right? Having Twitter followers is not a permanent thing because Twitter could kick you out, that's the obvious thing. But they could change their algorithm. They could literally just change their algorithm and then you would basically lose followers. Or Twitter could just go out of business, you know, 20 years from now. Or they could just roll out a whole bunch of boneheaded features and those features could just basically rob the platform of all vitality. I actually think Twitter's now become an incredibly unpleasant place to be. Just maybe it's just me because I have a lot of followers, but I also think that there was something happened in 2020 that broke most people's online brains, and a lot of the crazies just came out of the woodwork. And they were always there on Twitter, but they just went even crazier. So I just find the quality of the discourse on Twitter has completely collapsed. So those are not your followers, right? That's a temporary thing, it's a castle built on sand. Now, is there an alternative? No, the blockchains are not quite yet ready for prime time. Blockchain social networks are not here yet. And so it's very difficult. That said, people are getting smarter and smarter about knowing where to find others. You can collect people on an email list, it's not quite the same thing. And you know, if I really wanted to build a media following, then I would focus on the free and open internet, which means my blog, my podcast, and my email list. All of which are kind of interesting, but the reality is I don't really care that much. I don't get that much out of having an audience. That, you know, some days it's just like, what is it, this is Saturday night and here I am because I got summoned to this room, right? So how is this improving my life? So I'm very practical that way. And I don't think fame gives you all that much in modern society. It's much more of a trap in many ways than it is, you know, that has benefit. Now obviously I enjoy it at some level or I wouldn't even be here. So I'm contradicting myself just by the act of being here. But that said, if I were to try to build something solid, then I would count on my podcast, I would count on my blog, and I would count on email subscribers and a newsletter. Notice how Substack has a much nicer censorship policy than, for example, a Clubhouse or a Twitter does, because Substack knows they don't have a network effect. They know that you're free because you have all your subscribers' emails, so you can pack up and leave at any time. Like this new Twitter Super Follow thing, you know, looks interesting, but I wouldn't use it because I don't want to invest more into the Twitter platform. I just think that's you're just building more elaborate ramparts in your castles on sand. And the same way, like yes, I'm an investor in Clubhouse, but I was a seed investor in Twitter also. And so if Twitter launches Spaces and Clubhouse exists, I'm still going to use Clubhouse. Why? Just because of redundancy. I want to be on two different platforms. I want to have followers in two different places, because then if one of them cuts me off, I've still got my followers in the other place. So just from a pure redundancy perspective, it's better to use multiple platforms. But these are all just short-term defensive measures until I hope sometime within the next decade we can get back to decentralizing these things so that our kids aren't basically just searching somebody else's farm.

Well, I've always wanted a product like this. And I pitched actually a friend of mine, David King, on doing something like this, and he was doing something in the space. And then Twitter announced they were doing something else in the space, so then he sort of pivoted away. But he knew Paul Davison pretty well. And Paul and I used to work together at CoinList. Paul was CEO of CoinList briefly. And so I remember when Paul left, I said, 'Man, you're meant to do consumer products company and you're going to do something that is like a small hard-charging team just building something for lots and lots of people.' That was clearly his superpower. So when he started Clubhouse, I begged him to let me invest. And this was before it was anything really. And I think he gave me a smaller allocation than I hoped for, which is the story of our relationship. But he's a fantastic guy and I'm lucky and happy to be an investor. That said, I do hope a decade from now that we're still not locked into centralized social platforms.

In defense of investors, I think it's unfair that people say all these investors are promoting Clubhouse. If you didn't like it, you wouldn't talk about it or be on it. You have to enjoy the platform, otherwise it's useless. Of course, there are people who are much larger investors than me who have spoken far fewer words in Clubhouse. In a way, I'm almost slightly resentful. I'm like, hey, I'm just making you richer, why aren't you doing your share? I don't see anybody else creating rooms to pull you in. But that said, I also reserve the right to drop out of Clubhouse at any moment. In fact, there was a round in between after the round we invested where there was more money and a chance to put more in, and I passed. I passed because I felt this sort of subtle obligation for me to spend more time on Clubhouse, and also it was a very crowded round. I wanted to make room for new investors and help the founder, but also I just didn't want to be on the hook because I felt like, okay, if I keep investing, they're going to have big expectations out of me. Now, keep in mind this is before Clubhouse had totally taken off, and I was one of the few people on the platform who were pulling people in. Now there's a lot of them obviously, but I just didn't want to be a performing monkey. I didn't want the obligation for a show, I didn't want the pressure for a show. So I'm not here trying to make my Clubhouse investment successful. My Clubhouse investment is tiny compared to many, many other investments I have. I just think it's an incredibly well-designed product that's really needed for this moment.

One of the problems with Twitter is as it's generated, it becomes very difficult to speak on Twitter because everything you say is just an excerpt of what you're actually thinking. You're not there to provide the context, and on Twitter, people will strawman you rather than steelman you. They will try to find the worst possible interpretation of what you said and attack it. So Clubhouse is much better because here, when you're talking to somebody else, firstly most of the audience can't talk back, so we just stuck them into a box, which is too bad for them, but at least it keeps this conversation more pleasant for me. But also the people who are up here, because we're talking voice to voice, human to human, there's context. You're forced to be civil, I'm forced to be civil. We're forced to take each other at our best intentions opposed to our worst intentions. It's like when you're at a cocktail party, you don't end up fighting with everybody at the cocktail party. I remember I tweeted once at Jack Dorsey and I said, what is Twitter? And he basically said, oh, it's a place for people to have conversations, it's a town hall for conversations. And it is absolutely no such thing. There are not high-quality conversations taking place on Twitter. Twitter is like a bar brawl, people are going and throwing chairs and beer at each other. So maybe it starts as a town hall but it always ends in a fist fight. So it's a very different kind of medium, it ends up being a broadcast medium. Twitter is a brilliant broadcast medium if you just want to show up, drop something there and then leave and not actually interact. At least that's the way it feels for the big accounts I know. For little accounts, it is a completely different experience. But when you're a big account, that's basically all you can do, and it kind of sucks. I waste a lot of my time going through my Twitter feed and blocking people and muting people and then responding to the few civil, interesting people who actually have something genuine to say. And every day that goes by, those well-intentioned people are getting drowned out by a larger and larger army of spammers and haters, and so it just becomes impossible to have conversations with Twitter. So I'm grateful that something like Clubhouse exists where you can speak in context.

Now interestingly, I've never had a bad incident speaking on Clubhouse, but what'll sometimes happen is people will excerpt something from what I said on Clubhouse, they'll turn it into a tweet, they'll often just misinterpret what I was saying, so they just say something else, and then somebody else will jump on it and attack it. Like there were a bunch of VR phonies who recently said, oh, because I was joking around with Joe Rogan about VR not being prime time at this exact moment is the point I was making. It's obviously not widespread, it doesn't work today. Because Joe was saying why aren't we in Clubhouse VR, and I was like because VR doesn't work yet. But of course I'm a believer in VR, I invest in a lot of your companies, I think it will work, but it's just not there yet. But of course these people on Twitter jumped on, aha, Naval hates VR, look how wrong he is and look how correct we are and look how we got him on this one, how he doesn't get the future. But you can only do that on Twitter where you can take people out of context because it is a context-free machine.

So decentralization doesn't mean that you put everything on a blockchain. It just means that you take the important metadata, such as the user ID, the follow graph, and a few important pieces of content, and the ones that are persistent, let's just say, and you put those in the blockchain. And then everything else, the blockchain has a pointer either to a site that can do hosted audio streaming or hosts files, or maybe just has a JSON file which has everyone's tweets on it. So basically what the blockchain does is it doesn't give you moment-to-moment decentralization, what it gives you is the ability to exit, it gives you the ability to leave. So today, for example, I'm Naval on Twitter. If tomorrow I say something that displeases the powers that be via Twitter, and I can't imagine their trust and safety team is thrilled with how much I call them out, so I've got to be on a hit list somewhere. But nevertheless, I'm one of those people that it would be convenient if I were to stop talking about some of the things I say on there. So let's say that the Twitter trust and safety team find something I say objectionable and they want to block my account, so they suspend it or they delete my account. Now all of a sudden the 1.1 million and change followers that I have are lost. Now if you were looking at a blockchain version of Twitter, what would happen is it's not the tweets and all the files would be held in the blockchain, but what would be held in the blockchain would be just my handle and all the people pointing to that, and I would control my handle. And so if Twitter suddenly blocks me, then I would just redirect the pointer from my handle @naval, which went to twitter.com, and I would put it towards some other website that was now competing with Twitter and would now suddenly have a shot because all my followers, when they clicked on my profile or tried to fetch tweets for me from some desktop client, it would instead now fetch them from this new site. So that single little piece of metadata, the pointer to my name, if that can be decentralized, then the whole thing is effectively decentralized. And the clearest example of this is the domain name system. You can for example be kicked off of, let's say you're posting on Medium, if you're on medium.com and you write something they don't like, they can kick you off. But if you have your own domain, then they can't. And even if your hosting provider tries to kick you off, they can't, because you will just take your domain name and you'll point it to a different hosting provider. So at the beginning, we can bring that level of decentralization to social media.

The hard part is actually going to, it's not the technology, it's a collective action problem, which is we're all locked into Twitter as our Schelling point. And because they're centralized and they've been around for a while, they have the best technology, they have the best app, they have the best user experience, and they just have all the people. So they've gotten us all into a single place, and now someone has to say, hey guys and gals over here, follow me, we're going to go to this different place. It's like when you're out with a large group, you're out with like eight or ten people at night and you're all trying to decide where to go for dinner or whose house to go to spend the evening. And once everyone kind of settles into one restaurant or into one person's house, trying to get them to move as a group is nearly impossible. Well, now we're faced with the same problem but involving hundreds of millions of people. So it's actually going to be very difficult to convince people to move over to these decentralized social networks. That said, they're going to have a couple of things going for them. So they obviously start out way behind in terms of user experience and in terms of users. But here's what they do offer the world. They offer four things that you can't get elsewhere. One is you get immutability, your content is forever, your followers are forever. Second thing you get is you get payments, so it has built-in payments which entrepreneurs can do incredible things with that are going to make Twitter Super Follow look like nothing. The third thing you can do is you can get programmability and composability, so it can connect into the rest of all the other crypto-based apps, and you can also get programmers writing code without even need for APIs. The code itself will all be open because the data underneath is protected through private keys and blockchain consensus. And the last thing you get is you get peer governance, you get the users themselves are deciding the future of the platform, they're taking ownership and agency as opposed to leaving it up to a small group of benevolent dictators.

I don't think you can define the words hate speech as a problem. I think the moment you create a category, there's no exception for hate speech in the U.S. Constitution for good reason, because I can just define whatever I don't like as hate speech if I'm in charge. So creating a category called hate speech is the same as shutting down free speech. So these decentralized social networks will be uncensorable in the sense that you won't be able to forbid people from saying or writing certain things. That said, each one will have a client and you will choose which client to use. So Twitter will be a client into the blockchain as opposed to being the only place of canonical data. And what will happen is different clients will enforce different moderation and censorship policies. So some clients might be free-for-all, everything goes, and they're going to be really toxic places, nobody will want to hang out there. Others might be quite controlled, might even be safe enough for our children, which Twitter certainly is not today. There might be ones that might just say, hey, we only want peaceful content, anybody who uses curse words they're thrown off this thing. Others might say we want all intellectual discourse except for racist speech, and we get to define what that is and we're in charge, so that's just the way it is. But people will have a choice. Even with Twitter, you're seeing if there's a giant breakdown in norms just across countries, like India wants Twitter to remove certain accounts and Twitter is saying they're not going to do it. Yet when the Western governments tell Twitter to remove certain accounts, they do it. So Twitter itself is already being torn apart by definitions of what kind of speech. So no, I reject the idea that there's any definition of undesirable speech. The problem is who gets to decide. That's the person in charge, you might as well make them king and dictator. I'll tell you what, I'm fine with hate speech, just let me define what the heck it is.

I grew up in New York, so unfortunately I would have to categorize it as an abomination. It probably should be illegal, and if I could censor pineapple and pizza photos...

I mean, this is to beat a dead horse, but I'd be all over crypto and DeFi, and probably a decentralized social network. Oh, okay, cool, thank you. I also think VR and AR are actually going to be extremely interesting. I don't think technology is quite there yet, and I don't know if it's in the reach of startups to work on it because it does require a lot of resources. But I do think there's still a certain inevitability to those things. Look, technology is a broad frontier, right? And it's quite the set of things that don't quite work yet. What are the things that don't quite work yet that we want them to work? My friend Balaji Srinivasan, who is a brilliant guy, he has a framework that I kind of like where he basically says immutable money, infinite frontier, and immortal life. So what he means by that is cryptocurrencies, space travel, and anti-aging. So those are kind of the three things that he identifies as sort of the most important things that we can do in humanity. So I think any of those three is kind of an interesting area to think about and work on.

You know, honestly, I don't think it's a great use of time for everybody here. I think people are here for a different reason, they don't want to hear a pitch. And the room should feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I wasn't responding to this trap where then we're just going to end up going round robin getting pitched. And I'm sure all of the reasons are great and I'm sure all the models are interesting, but this is not the right venue. So instead of spending a minute asking permission to say the idea, just say the idea. I mean, just say it, two sentences, go.

You should create a website for it, you should brand it, and you should open source it, you put it up there. Call it something clever and go ahead and put the docs out there for it. And then if it's a good idea, people will copy it, they'll use it, they'll imitate it. That's the beauty of the internet.

Invested Forward, there it is. Yeah, so I think that's great. Cool.

I love that. Oh, I don't really care what people ask me. There's no hidden cards here, there's nothing I'm trying to tell the world, there's nothing I'm holding back. Anything I wish people had asked me? No, I don't want people asking me more things. It's fine. Ask whatever you want. I'm just a machine that's spinning back data at you based on what you put in. It's like a vending machine, you're putting in a quarter and you're pressing a button and you're getting an answer back. You're pressing on some genes and some memory cells and some neurons. I do not have an agenda here.

No dreams, but I'm very impressed by the works of David Deutsch, who's the author of The Beginning of Infinity and The Fabric of Reality, and I've never talked to him. But don't use this as a way to mount some campaign to go talk to him because that'll be an embarrassment, it won't be a natural conversation. But yeah, there was a point where I was going through and I did have kind of my bucket list and I was like, oh cool, I got to meet Nassim Taleb and I got to meet Nick Szabo and I got to meet Vitalik Buterin and I got to meet Neal Stephenson and Scott Adams is another one and Tim Ferriss of course. But after you go through enough of these, at some point you just realize, hey, they're just people, they're interesting people, but no one of them is somehow suddenly going to transform your life or create an amazing conversation. My favorite conversations are with books. It's when I sit there and I read a really interesting book and I get the author's best work and their best mindset, and I get to engage at my speed and my leisure. And obviously I don't have the back and forth discussion with them, but actually when it comes to learning, I actually think that conversations take a distant second place to both books, or maybe even a third place to books and just thinking for yourself. I don't mean to sound arrogant, but I would say that the majority of what I've learned in life is by reading and then by applying it and then by reflecting on it. It has not been through conversations. I do learn things through conversations, of course, and they tend to be timely, news-oriented, business news, politics, or even just kind of ideas for like where should I live, those sorts of very practical things. But if you're talking about the important timeless principles that will make you happier or will make you wealthier or just set you apart from everyone else, you're much more likely to find that through books and self-reflection than by talking to anybody. Like sitting here and listening to me, you're doing it because you're bored. It's not really a form of self-improvement. If you're putting this in the self-improvement bucket, you're deluding yourself. This is entertainment, this is the entertainment bucket, that's where I put it. So if you're having fun, fantastic. If you're here to learn something, you're probably in the wrong place.

There you go. Thank you. In fact, I've been doing a lot of Clubhouse recently and I wasn't going to come back on because at some level I also feel like my job is not to come here and be redundant, to say the same things over and over. I'm not a talking head, I'm not a Jordan Peterson where I have a message to get out, I'm not a public intellectual like Sam Harris. I'm just a curious person who has a lot of the same basic desires the rest of you do, which is I want to be happier and calmer, and I still like making money and I want to have a good family life and all of those things. So I tend to focus mostly on those and I need to spend more time learning and kind of feeding my own brain and my own curiosity rather than regurgitating what I know for the thousandth time until you all get sick of me and then start creating some kind of a novelism where Naval has certain beliefs and not others. I don't know, half the stuff that's even in that Almanac that Eric Jorgensen put together, I probably contradicted at some point. Some of it now is cringe-inducing when I read it and some of it I just flat out disagree with.

Well, that's kind of you, that's very kind of you. I don't know how I became a good speaker. I didn't used to be, or at least I didn't have that reputation when I was younger. I guess it just happened somewhere along the way. So we know something similar might happen to you.

You know what, let's keep some order to this chaos, why not. Let's go to Ronak. No problem.

Well, I think, look, I've met Elon a few times, but I know him much more by his public persona than his private person. So let's separate the two out, let's just go with the public persona which is kind of what everyone here is familiar with. I think what's inspiring about his public persona is that he is optimistic, he is future-focused, and he is a person of action. And we're just lacking that across the board. There's a lot of billionaires in this world, most of them are boring. Elon Musk is doing interesting things and taking risks. He's a builder, he's passionate, he's doing things that are unequivocally good for humanity, or trying to. So I think all of that is very inspirational and we need more people like that, we need more heroes like that so we don't get trapped in the zero-sum game narrative of rich people bad and poor people good, what Nietzsche used to call slave morality, which was the inversion of the old classical antiquities morality where power and might were seen as goods and later weakness and victimhood were seen as goods. So we kind of go through these pendulums where either the person on top, the lion, the Caesar, is in charge, that's good, that's what we want, that's what our animal instincts want. But then we're preached through Christianity or Puritanism or progressivism that weakness and victimhood are good. But the reality is neither is good. You don't want a strong man, you don't want to be a victim. All of us can achieve, all of us can self-actualize in the best way possible. All of us just need to show up and be our best selves. And that's what Elon is doing, he's being his best self in public. It is just completely shocking to me when someone criticizes Elon Musk publicly and you can just see the jealousy dripping off the tweet. You can literally just see the sheer unhappiness and the misery this person is in when all they can do is criticize someone who has done so much. So it just reveals more about the critic than it does about the so-called man in the arena, which is Elon Musk. So yeah, he's impressive. He does make me question if I'm doing everything I could with my life, if I'm thinking big enough. That said, I have no desire to be Elon Musk. I don't want to die on Mars, I'm perfectly happy on Earth. I'm not obsessed with building rockets or electric vehicles. I admire them as technological marvels. But he does make me say, there's a guy who's following his most intense passions, he's following them publicly, and am I following my own passions as intensely as he is following his? So I just want to make sure I'm not leaving anything on the table. But I'm a very, very different person.

It's funny, I went through this a few years ago where I was like, so what is it that I want to do with my life? What is the thing that I want out of my life? And I set three targets for myself internally. And I basically just said, okay, I want to have a certain kind of a media presence, but I don't want to try or do any work for it. I want to make a certain amount of money, but I'm not going to try and I don't want to do any work at it. And I want to have a certain level of peace and happiness in my life, and I don't want to try, I don't do any work at it. And if none of these things materialize, I want to be perfectly okay with the outcome. So that was kind of the idle goals that I set for myself. And I'm pretty happy to say that yeah, I hit all three of them, and I didn't really try and I didn't really work at it. So far so good. And it's not to say that it's effortless, I actually did put in a lot of quote-unquote effort as someone else would have thought looking from the outside. I was working all day or I was hustling all day or in Clubhouse all night. But the reality is I always did it on my own terms, so it didn't feel like work to me. My brother actually, I don't know if he realizes this, but he kind of made an impression on me one time because he was with a friend of his and his friend looked very successful, looked very financially successful, looked very socially successful. This is when I was much younger. And he relayed a quote from this guy to me who said, I've always done whatever I wanted. And I was like, wow, he's got all of that and he just did whatever he wanted. So I at least resolved that I wouldn't be miserable in the journey, that I was going to do it the way that I wanted and still get what I wanted. And so I adopted that almost as a little motto in the background. Now ironically, I think that guy ended up in a lot of trouble. I think he lost a lot of money for his investors, I think he got divorced, I think he may have even been sued or one step out of jail. So not to say it goes well for everybody, but hey, it worked for me.

I'm so sorry, there have been people... no, oh, I'm sorry, I'll wait. Yeah, thank you so much, I appreciate that. I just want to give people a chance who have been waiting patiently. Veda, welcome. Oops, Frank, sorry, Frank, hello.

Well, if you couldn't read about it, then why would I tell you here? It's the same thing. I was concerned you were going to trap me. You know, I'm a huge fan of Big Think and I thought I might lose that. No, it's like, give us something. Yeah, people put out that tweet where they're like, hey, what's one thing that you believe that you can't say publicly? Right, it's like, yeah, that's like the last thing you're doing is that. Look, every secret that I'm comfortable revealing is an open book. I don't have any secrets in my life for my friends and family, at least nothing they care about, nothing dirty.

I don't know, man, my life is actually really simple and really boring. I mean, I basically just get up, if it's a good day I meditate and I work out. If it's a bad day I skip my meditation and workout. Then I get on the phone, I just basically do a bunch of phone calls, I do a bunch of emails, I go for a walk.

You know, make dinner, play with the kids, go to bed. That's my average day, and just repeat ad nauseam. Oh yeah, and I read a lot in between. During the day, I'm reading way too much Twitter, but I also open up my iBooks or my Kindle and I'll just read pages from a book. And at nighttime, I'll usually read, call it depending on the book, anywhere between 20 to 100 pages before I go to bed.

Okay, I'll give you one. I listen to podcasts in the shower. So I'll put my AirPods in the shower. A long time ago, I decided that whether Apple says they're waterproof or not, AirPods are expendable. So I would just put on the AirPods and I would go in the shower and I would have a podcast playing. I've got my Apple Watch so I can kind of cycle through the podcast itself. So now the problem with this is I've turned what would have been a beautiful meditative time for introspection in the shower into suddenly being like, you know, yet more time to cram media into my brain, which is not necessarily a good thing. So it's not to say that this is some kind of a life hack which should be on the Tim Ferriss blog, but once in a while I will just listen to podcasts in the shower and there you go.

Sure, sure, yeah, that's fine. It's like there's a hack. If somebody doesn't want to do something and you're trying to figure out why, let's say like you're trying to sell somebody a product and they won't buy it. If you say, 'Well, why won't you buy it?' they'll give you a reason, and that first reason is always the wrong reason. It's the cover story. So sometimes you have to ask them again. You'll say, 'Well, okay, any other reasons?' and they'll give the other reason. And it's like the last reason they give you, the one you have to drag out of them, that's the real reason.

Yeah, one thing I've decided that we don't need anymore is we don't need intermediaries, even the new social media intermediaries. What do I mean by that? Even the Joe Rogans of the world, even the Tim Ferrisses of the world who are interviewing people, they're needed less now than they were before. So at first we needed the New York Times to get the word out, then we had Twitter. Then to get the long form out, we needed to be on CNN or Bloomberg or CNBC. And then we got Joe Rogan. Well, now we don't even need Joe Rogan because you're on Clubhouse, you can just get on and go straight. So I got invited into various Clubhouse rooms to be interviewed and I was like, 'Why do I need you to interview me? I can just go straight on Clubhouse and I can talk directly to anyone that I want to talk to.' And I think that's beautiful. So that's why I tend not to drop into pre-scheduled rooms here. That strikes me as anachronistic. That's like the old model.

And it's also, look, it's very hard to speak on a broad variety of topics on demand for long periods of time without saying something stupid or without repeating yourself. And so generally these repeat commentator type people end up having to just interview others because they just run out of things to say themselves. Right, Joe Rogan, poor guy, he's been on what is it, 1500 episodes? He's got nothing left to say that he hasn't already said over and over and over again. So of course he has to interview people. And what makes Rogan interesting is he interviews people not just about news or politics or sports, which are kind of the normal frequent conversation topics. He brings on people from all different walks of life, from academia to science to, you know, martial arts, psychedelics or what have you. And he'll interview each one of them very thoroughly. He does a lot of homework. He's actually the single most prepared interviewer I've ever encountered by far. When I talked to him for two hours, that man was present 100% of the time. There was not one moment where he lost his train of thought. And I remember because I'm usually that guy and I lost my train of thought at one point in that episode and I got lost for a brief moment. And I'll look back and to my surprise, he was still completely focused. He was so present. Anyway, impressive guy. But you just run out of material. So I'm not gonna get up here and interview people, but at the same time I don't need people to interview me either.

I love it. Thank you, Rahul. It looks like it's you then.

You're the last one, bro. Frankly, it's embarrassing.

I don't know, I wanted to either. By the way, like this is a 20-year-old anime rendition of what I probably look like in some fantastical imaginary life. So yeah, it's probably just better that we all just use our imagination.

Yeah, it's not some hard and fast prescription. It's not as if, you know, if my wife talks to me I'll be like, 'Quiet, you know, this is like below my hourly wage,' right? Or she'll say, 'Pick up your socks,' and I'll be like, 'Oh, it's below my hourly wage,' right? So it's not that kind of thing. It's not meant to be a hard and fast rule. It's just kind of a general understanding of, well, look, I want to be in a certain place. Someone who's in that place would be earning this much roughly. And so I'm not going to be there while I'm behaving like some person at a much lower wage. And so it just reminds me to save time and save time by hiring people, by outsourcing things, by not coupon clipping, by not counting frequent flyer miles, which is I think the coupon clipping for the middle class people, where, you know, they spend so much of their time optimizing frequent flyer miles they could have just gotten another job instead.

Obviously this requires you to have a career or a job where your earning is somewhat under your control, where you can put in more hours and earn more. But I would argue that for anyone who has any ambition to create any wealth, you have to be in creative endeavors. You have to be creating things, brand new things. That's the only way to get to wealth. So if you're going to be creating things, then you need creators' time. Creators need a lot of free time. They need a broad and open mind. If you look at entrepreneurs who are successful, yes, they grind all the time, but that initial moment of entrepreneurship when they created a company, that was the point where they made like the hardest and most important decision. If they'd created the wrong space or they started with the wrong person or they structured the wrong way, no amount of hard work would have saved them later. It's like when you build an app, you know, if you're Paul Davison and Rohan Seth and you create Clubhouse, that is way better than like trying to create a thousand apps and grinding through it and, you know, starting in the wrong place. So creativity is the point of leverage, and creativity requires a free mind. It requires open space, it requires open time. And so if you aspire to be a creator and if you aspire to be wealthy, then you can't have a busy calendar. This is not an excuse for laziness. This basically means that now all of your time is going into your creative and intellectual endeavors.

So for me, as far back as I can remember, no matter what job I was in and no matter even what company I was doing, when I would come home late at night and I'd be tired from work, what would I do? I'd have a couple of friends come over and we'd brainstorm on startups. I was always brainstorming on the next thing because it was exciting to me. That's what I wanted to do. So just protect your time. Don't spend your time doing things that other people can do. Don't spend your time doing the mundane. Don't spend your time unless you enjoy it. Like if you enjoy it, then it doesn't matter. So another way I would put it is like you want to spend all your time either learning, earning, or relaxing. And relaxing is a broad category. Relaxing includes spending time with your kids if you have them, or, you know, exercising if that's what you want to do. So relaxing is just the category of things where like these are things that I enjoy doing. But other than that, you want to be learning and earning. Okay, you could also probably add fitness into that, right? Exercise. Sure, great. But you kind of don't want to do anything else. Not if you're a creative person, not if you have some leverage, not if you have some ambition. You want to be outsourcing everything else.

The classic, classic, classic example here is returning things. Like you order something. Now, these days look different with Amazon, but in the old days, you buy something, that thing breaks. Most people will go back to the store and they'll wait in line at customer service and they'll argue over things. They'll wave their receipt, you know, or they'll sit on hold with customer service for an hour to get a $10 refund. Well, you just said your time's worth 10 bucks. It's actually worse than that because that hour you spent in front of customer service not only cost you an hour, but it costs your emotional well-being. You're probably angry the whole time. So there's another hour that you lost being angry and calming down from it. And really, how many creative hours in a day do you have? It's like two or three. It's not a lot. So if you burn those creative hours on activities that are frustrating or menial, you will not get the chance to be creative. And unfortunately, the world is not rigged in such a way the harder you work, the more you get. Hard work is a prerequisite, it is an ingredient, but you cannot outwork everybody else. There just aren't that many hours in the day. So Elon Musk is, yeah, he works hard, but he's not usually working harder than someone who runs a grocery store in the pandemic. He just can't. There just aren't more hours in the day. So it is much more about how he chooses to spend his time that helps get him to where he is. And obviously when he was a kid, he spent a lot of time learning science and possibly rocketry and equations and running businesses and things that, you know, other kids were having fun socializing and playing in the swimming pool or who knows what, right? They're just allocating their time differently. So it's not about increasing the time you have, it's about time allocation. So setting your hourly wage is just a way of saying I choose to allocate my time to the things that I think are important, and this is a cutoff below which I will consider these things unimportant.

Probably true.

Well, free speech is something that has been litigated as a society and what we converge upon is what the laws of the land are. So if it's legal to say it, you should be able to say it on Twitter. The fact they have to layer something more on top and be more restrictive is where I kind of have a problem with it. Trust and safety is a very Orwellian kind of organization. You know, it's the Ministry of Truth. The liars always call themselves a Ministry of Truth. And the trust and safety organization is basically saying, actually, we have a different code of speech that is allowed here. And even that would be fine, it's a private company, I get that. But it is a monopoly. It is a network effect based monopoly on microblogging. And anyone who has their head screwed on straight in the tech industry knows that it's a dirty secret of the tech industry that it just leads to these aggregated monopolies. That leads to these—until blockchains come along and decentralize all the things. And so in this monopolistic situation that we're in, what we find is that the town square is run by a private company and that private company has a different definition of free speech than what we have converged upon as a society with our laws and rulings and constitutions and various titles and acts and legislation. If speech should be limited, then that is a debate which I think would be a horrible thing, but that is a debate that should be had at a societal level and we should modify the constitution for that. It should not be decided by a private company that finds itself in a utility-like position and becomes a monopoly. And it is invariably true that that trust and safety team will get captured by certain actors. To all the people out there who say that it's great for the trust and safety team and Twitter is a private company and they can do whatever they want, how would you react if tomorrow Peter Thiel and Donald Trump and a few other billionaires came in and bought Twitter? Would you still be rooting for them as a private company to be allowed to do whatever they want? Obviously not. And that exposes the hypocrisy of the whole situation.

Yeah, that's a good point. I believe you're correct in that a lot of what is ethics would be subjective, but I believe that there's also certain objective things that we as a society agree upon as ethics, and those things we have actually codified into laws in many cases. So examples of things that I think we would all agree follow the domain of ethics are honesty. You don't want to lie to people, right? So if you're a company that's actively lying to people or even withholding material information, that is an example of non-ethical. Another thing I think that many of us could say would be unethical would be rent-seeking through regulatory capture. So if you're making money mostly because you bribe regulators through some roundabout lobbyist scheme, then that is somewhat unethical. Then you can kind of get into gray areas like smoking and, you know, if you're selling marijuana or pornography or psychedelics, and I think this is up to each person. So I kind of leave this a little bit more in the domain of, you know, the individual themselves. You have to comply with your own moral code.

I'll tell you something interesting though. I've met a lot of incredibly wealthy people, right? Incredibly wealthy people. And they're sort of an interesting bag. Firstly, one interesting point is they're generally less happy than the average person. Like that whole thing about like money doesn't buy you happiness, like rich people are unhappy, it weirdly turns out to be true. Most of them are miserable for reasons that I still have even a hard time wrapping my head around. But the second piece is that almost all of them believe deep down in their souls that they were doing something good for humanity while they did it. So you can disagree with that, but it's just the way people are hardwired. A lot of people have good intentions. Now the weird thing is intentions don't forgive everything. So what then ends up being unethical? Dishonesty is a clear one. Violence, coercion is another one. So if you are doing something that may be legal in the United States but what you're doing internationally or overseas might be unethical or in this case would be coercive, to go get blood diamonds being a famous example, right? Then that is unethical. If we get into something like defense stuff, you know, just like Ministry of Truth is obviously the Ministry of Lies, Defense Department is obviously the Department of War, right? So if you're arming the Defense Department to go and blow people up, well, now that's borderline ethical, right? There's some people who will say that's unethical, the reason is to bomb poor brown people in the Middle East. Well, another person might say, no, no, this is national defense, this is mom and apple pie, this is the military, you can't criticize the military, that's our army, they keep us safe and these are boys getting blown up for us. You know, there's the old line that one man's terrorism is another man's freedom fighter, right? It's just a question of which side you're on. So this is where it gets murky.

So I don't think I have some incredible grasp on ethics, but here's another point about ethics. When you are doing something unethical, you usually know it yourself. You know it. You know it's unethical. You know because you have this weird feeling in your gut and you're kind of like, and there's a part that goes, 'Hmm, can I get away with this?' Right? There's always like that little devil on your shoulder arguing with a little angel on your shoulder. I think most of us actually know when we're doing something unethical. So maybe it just even boils down to listening to your own moral self. I will say that I have found that people who generally engage in what most of us would call unethical behavior—and sure it happens, you know—I would say that those people are generally not very happy people. They themselves view everyone else in the world around them as equally unethical. So they're just distrustful and they're not connected to other humans. And deep down, I do believe that self-esteem is the reputation that you have with yourself. And so when you're cheating your own according to your own moral code and nobody else's, then you know, so you have to live up to your own moral code, not just the others. Everyone has their own moral code. That's the beauty of humanity. We're all different. We all have different viewpoints. It's all subjective in that sense. But there are some collective sins. Coercing other people is a collective sin. That's why I'm so opposed to censorship. Censorship is literally silencing somebody. It's clapping their hand over their mouth and saying, 'You're not allowed to say that.' That is coercion. So silencing people, being dishonest, coercing people, forcing people, these are obviously the things I think that we can all agree upon that are unethical. Beyond that, I think it boils down a lot to your own personal moral code.

Yeah, so I'd be careful in that. Like, so for example, people have said for the longest time that payday loans are unethical and predatory, but if you actually look at payday lending as an industry and you dig into it, you actually find out there's good reasons why those interest rates are so high. There's a very high default rate, you know, it costs a lot to operate those shops, etc. So it's not always that clear-cut. I think when it comes to business, if you see a monopoly operating, it's only a matter of time before they start being unethical. It's that Google was originally 'Don't Be Evil' then they removed that from their motto and now they censor freely. And they kick people off the Play Store and they claim that like, you know, Android was like this big open source thing but they use all these various agreements and lock-ins to basically control Android and it is a Google-owned farm. So I think it's the nature of companies that when it's the nature of power, you know, the old line is power corrupts, absolutely true. So when any person or any institution gains too much power, they inevitably end up corrupted. They never really—because people are subjective, institutions are subjective, they want to do what's best for themselves and they'll always cloud it and clothe it in making it look like it's good for everybody. So I actually think that if you have a free market and true free market where people are competing with each other on a relatively level playing field, then you will tend to get a good outcome. The pathological case that we have with the internet is that you have free market competition from the starting point, but then because of aggregator benefits and network effects and scale economies, the winners just tend to dominate everything. A friend of mine texted me today and he said, 'Hey, who are the number two, three, four e-tailers behind Amazon?' Go ahead, think it through for a second. It's almost impossible to answer. If you didn't have Amazon, who's the number two that would give you the same things? It's online, I'm not talking about offline. Yeah, offline you can go to Costco for a few things. It's nearly impossible to answer. And this is a freaking store to sell you things. This was a market that in the real world was taken up with thousands of competitors on every street corner, but now we only have one company that is shipping us everything. So it's just the nature of the internet. The scale economies and network effects lead us to single monopolists, and these monopolies inevitably end up corrupted no matter what their intentions are. It's just because power corrupts, because when you have the power and you're forced to make decisions for other people, you're always just going to do them from your point of view and not everyone's going to agree with your point of view. So the only monopolist that ultimately doesn't get corrupted is one who hands over the power, and I don't even know if that is even possible. In fact, you could argue that the United States is a free country because George Washington turned down the third term. He was basically on his way to becoming a king. He was popular enough and he could have just done that and created a new monarchy and he knew despotism. But he was perhaps one of the very, very few people in human history, possibly the only one, who passed up the kingship and said, 'Nope, I'm just going to go and tend to my apple tree.' And from that, you know, he saved the United States from becoming just yet another uninteresting dictatorship or monarchy. Perhaps not giving him too much credit, but I think you get the point in that it's about control.

I think I probably got to go soon. I actually did have a lot to do tonight, so this was sort of my—this is unexpected and unplanned. So maybe I'll take one more question then I'll hop off the air. Thank you, buddy.

Yeah, I mean, it's actually not the most interesting topic. I was just into the startups. I wanted to start a company. That's the best idea to come up with at the time. I've always been very opinionated. I thought there should be a place for product reviews. It actually turned out not to be the best idea in its original incarnation. The correct idea was what Yelp ended up becoming. And at the end of Opinions' lifespan, we were doing restaurant reviews and things like that. But keep in mind, this is before Google Maps existed and local mapping existed, so it was hard to map restaurant reviews on just a generic website in the cloud. So that was just like the first company I started. That's where I learned a lot about, you know, what kind of co-founders you recruit and how you build a hard-charging team and how you tangle with VCs. You know, these biographical stories, honestly, I'm not sure you're gonna learn anything from them. I'm not even sure I'm gonna learn anything from repeating them because these are just narratives, right? They're stitched together narratives in my head and they're not interesting. I've absorbed the ideas. Right? So for example, I think my first philosophical tweet ever was—and I probably created at least at a high level, you know, whatever they call it now, like fortune cookie Twitter or VC advice Twitter or, you know, whatever the heck it was, right? But the tweet that launched it all was the first one, which where I said, 'If you can't see yourself working with someone for life, don't work with them for a day.' And that was a tweet to myself. Right? It was a tweet, it was a lesson to myself that was born out of the Opinions deep end saga, which was just go long-term, long-term, long-term, especially in your relationships. Don't engage in temporary relationships. It actually applies further than that. Don't engage in acquaintances. Don't engage in temporary friendships. This doesn't mean you don't give people a chance. You can absolutely hang out with somebody for a year when you barely know them. But the day you decide that you're not going to be friends forever, there's no more point in investing time in that relationship either for you or for them. They should be free to find someone who really is going to be a friend with them for life, and then you can of course go find someone you can be a friend with for life. So this was the tweet that launched it all. It did come out of my Opinions experience because there were multiple times where I knew that I shouldn't be working with one or two of the people involved, but I basically went ahead and did it for the money. I did it for the money, right? That's the classic reason why people do it, right? You catch people doing it, they're like, 'Oh, I did it for my family.' No, no, I did it for the money, right? And so that was a lesson. That was a hard-fought lesson. I learned that lesson. I wrote that little piece of nugget down as a reminder to myself. It was deliberately provocative because that's how you break through the noise, right? That's how you break through habit. And that one actually got a little bit of a reaction. And then I just started tweeting more and more stuff like that, more notes to myself, more thoughts to myself. And then next thing you know, I have an internet personality. So that's kind of fun. Maybe I can cash this in for some prizes later.

Yeah, there's a numerology code in there. It's like, yeah, decoded properly, you got a private key and the private key will unlock a thousand bitcoins.

Well, I just thought I just followed you, so 340. Beautiful symmetry is destroyed.