Naval Ravikant | Clubhouse Appearance | 03/19/2021

No, it's an observation bias. You can always find an Indian who's a great speaker.

I don't think that's what I was saying. So I think one of the reasons someone would believe that would be sampling bias.

I was thinking more like in Europe, say Sweden or some random country. Assume they have a more well-oiled bureaucracy, the society is a little more systematic, where you don't have to interact with people to get stuff done. Something like that.

Yeah, that's true. I wonder if there's any data. Not exactly this, but related data.

For example, if you look at how COVID spread, the frequency of interaction in terms of... but we don't have any disease that spreads by talking. Although COVID, I would argue, is more a disease of the mind than anything else. Look at how it's driven people insane about lockdowns versus masks versus vaccines. It's as much a mental virus. If social media did not exist, COVID would not have been a thing in the sense that yes, people would have still gotten infected, people would have still died, but we wouldn't have shut down businesses and the economy over it. By the time we figured out what was going on, it would be over.

Yeah, I will agree with you that I think the one-size-fits-all lockdown was not needed, but I think it was a good starting point if I had to guess.

So yeah, we agree with you there.

That's what I said. So, do you think there's a portion that's like mass hysteria?

Yeah, that's a great analogy. And then of course, once it got past a certain level of breakout, it was impossible to contain. Test, trace, isolate only works when a small percentage of the population has it. But once a large enough population has it, it's done. But at this point, COVID is done. You look at the stats, it's crashed down to near zero. A combination of vaccination, herd immunity, and just the arrival of summer weather, ultraviolet radiation, longer days of people being outdoors has essentially snuffed it out of existence. But like everything else, the government took them three months too long to react, and it'll take them three months too long to undo it. They'll never completely undo the lockdowns fully. They'll continue having some equivalent of a residue, like we have with the TSA post-9/11, that will annoy us for the rest of our lives.

So that clashed with this idea of open borders. You can't enforce internal borders in the U.S. constitutionally speaking, because I think this kind of thing just wasn't imagined. It's sort of unprecedented.

By the time they roll that little piece of bureaucracy out, it'll be gone. I don't think COVID will be a thing. There might be a new COVID. The things that we should be investigating are, hey, where did this virus come from? How come we can't send a team into Wuhan to actually check out the lab where it might have leaked out? Because SARS-1 leaked out of labs by accident multiple times. The Spanish flu re-leaked out of the lab in the 1950s. So lab leaks are actually quite common. I'm not saying it was fabricated in the lab, that's a completely different hypothesis and has a much higher bar for evidence. But the idea that this might be one of the eight different viruses that are sequenced and kept in the Wuhan lab, and it might have leaked out, that's worth investigating. But we're not getting to investigate that. So what happens? The next one comes, and the next one, and the next one. So I think those are the kinds of things we should be figuring out: how to make sure this doesn't happen again. The Moderna vaccine was ready two days after the virus was sequenced in the U.S., I think in January. If we have to deal with this again, why can't we do human challenge trials? Why can't we have a simpler packaging of the vaccine to get it to market? We've run vaccine experiments now in different states where some have done it by age, some first-come-first-serve, some tried to separate by population characteristics. Why can't we just objectively look at those? I know the answer: everything is politics now. Everything is politics, so politics destroys the idea of doing objective science or data anymore. So now if you want a lockdown policy or a vaccine policy that makes sense to you, you literally have to move jurisdictions to get it.

Yeah, I think counting on the government to save you in anything is sort of silly. They can't take care of your health. The U.S. food pyramid, the FDA food pyramid, has literally been upside down for the last 50 years, but no one calls them out on it. Grains and simple carbs are at the top still, and the whole thing is complete nonsense. Everyone gets an SSRI prescription. Most of the heroin addicts are actually taking so-called legal prescription drugs. If you follow the government on how to get a job or what to go to school for, you're probably screwed in wealth creation. So the government is there as a safety net, as the lowest common denominator, a catch-all. It should be there as a safety net for the people who would otherwise slip through the cracks. That's their job. But when they try and tell everyone what to do, they destroy productive civil society in the process. So I think the role of government should be to save the people who are in too desperate or unfortunate of a situation to save themselves, but to leave the productive members of society alone so they can create and innovate and pull the rest of society forward. When you try to make a one-size-fits-all, treating everybody as a cog in a machine, that's when you get societal collapse. I mean, right now we're basically surviving on inflated money. We basically took 10 or 20 years' worth of wealth that the future generation should have had and squandered it in one or two years because of our bungled COVID response. Our kids are going to be paying for it for a long time through unnecessary inflation and through the upward collapse of housing prices, and by keeping all these zombie businesses afloat that basically need to go out of business. We may also end up losing the dollar's reserve currency status in the next decade because of the debacle in the last few years. We've also given the green light to politicians to print money non-stop, which is going to have ruinous consequences. So these are not consequence-free actions. When the government tries to solve problems for everybody, they end up being the biggest problem. Look, I was just as scared as anyone when COVID started because at the time, we didn't know if the infection fatality rate, the case fatality rate, was half a percent, one percent, two percent, three percent, five percent, ten percent. There were images and videos of people dropping dead in the streets in China, and it was really scary stuff. But once it became clear that the CFR was actually quite a bit lower and that this was a very non-linear disease that hit older people and people with comorbidities much harder, the rest of us should have been unlocked to go about our business, especially outdoors. Banning outdoor dining, banning outdoor walking, banning parks, banning beaches, all this stuff is complete nonsense, utter nonsense. And the people who advocated that should be ashamed of themselves, but we're not even going to hold them accountable. Instead, what we did was we normalized the printing of huge amounts of money, locking people in their homes, and ushering in socialism by essentially banning capitalism. This self-fulfilling spiral to the bottom, and there are going to be consequences for it. I hope that there are consequences for the people who advocated these terrible policies even after the evidence was clear that they weren't working, that they shouldn't be universally applied or blanket applied to the entire population. But I doubt we'll see that level of accountability because, unfortunately, common sense is uncommon, and people are now so highly politicized that they essentially just vote for their red or blue party regardless of the facts. We may have lost the ability to do error correction because through identity politics, people now identify with how they should vote as opposed to voting on the merits. There are very few centrists left, very few swing votes left. I hope there's enough to kind of punish or at least hold accountable people who made bad decisions.

Anything both parties can agree upon, we should probably oppose. Voters... so one of the things that both parties agree upon, for example, is not having term limits. But I think term limits would help go some of the way toward solving what you're talking about, which is really the capture of politicians. They kind of think the same way because they become part of the DC intelligentsia and the DC intellectual crowd. Another interesting thing would be to take federal offices and put them outside of DC, so you don't have everyone having groupthink and becoming one sort of elite sector with very homogeneous beliefs. The two-party system, I don't think it was necessarily anticipated by the framers of the Constitution. Many things were not. For example, me having the right to vote would not have been anticipated in the Constitution. But one of the things they also didn't anticipate was the formation of political parties because I think they didn't want to place restrictions around speech. And if you don't place restrictions on speech, which I think is the correct answer, then you automatically get attempts to monopolize the vote. You get people ganging up to monopolize the vote, and that creates the parties. Eventually, it leads to a two-party system because number two and number three always just gang up against number one. So a two-party system is kind of inevitable in the way our system is designed. But that's not necessarily all bad. David Deutsch, a physicist and philosopher of sorts, makes the great argument that a two-party system is good in that it lets you clearly pin the blame on one party who's in power and their policies when those policies go poorly. So this time around, Trump's handling of COVID was not great, so he got pinned for it and he's out. Whether you agree or not, there was someone clearly to blame. Whereas in a parliamentary system where you're splitting power, it's not clear who was in charge. Maybe the party in charge wanted to do it, but there was a fringe coalition formed out of some radicals they had to include who wanted to do it a different way. So in a parliamentary system, it's much harder to hold people accountable, and it's hard to switch back when you make a mistake. So I think that, you know, the Republicans were in power for a little while, and they overreached and got deposed. Now the Democrats have nearly total power over our government. They will probably overreach and probably get deposed, and it will go back and forth. It's funny that if you look at the three industries where government has the most influence, the most regulation, housing, healthcare, and education, they seem to be the three industries where there just hasn't been any productivity growth whatsoever. Or in fact, the opposite may be happening as well.

I'd like to push back on that a little bit though, because the school I went to, and I've seen this in a lot of different schools, engineering degrees at this point actually cost more than liberal arts degrees. They price them higher than they would a sociology degree. So I don't think we're pretending that, but I do see what you're saying.

Yeah, and what's worrying is that over the past 100, 200 years, it's the same institutions, the same colleges and universities, that have maintained the top ranks: the Harvards, the Oxfords, the Cambridges, Yale, etc. Whereas if you look at any other industry, that's just not the case. Things change. In the technology industry, there's a reason IBM isn't at the top anymore. And the list goes on. So why is it that... I'll give you a counter example. It is somewhat true even in the tech industry. The top VC brands, there is some turnover, certainly more than in universities, but they are relatively static. So the Kleiner Perkins, the Sequoias of the world tend to stay on top, and it's very hard to break into those ranks. The reason is that colleges and VC firms are very similar businesses. They're curation and signaling businesses. What they do is get applicants, curate them, find the smartest people, and then signal to the world that these are the smartest people. They transfer reputation to them. And then if they are correct, they get credit for that and get paid for it. Then their funnel at the top expands, and they get even more students to pick from, and they'll get to pick the best ones again. And they just repeat. The VC model is the same way. VCs fund companies. If they have a few early successes, their signal becomes valuable, and then they get a better class of companies to curate from. So everyone knows who the top deals in Silicon Valley are, just like colleges know who the top students are. But the top students end up going to the top universities because they want the top university brand. The top startups end up going to top VCs because they want the top VC brand. So the rich get richer, and to those who have more, more is given. It's a loop around curation and signaling that feeds into each other. It's a feedback cycle. So they do kind of establish themselves at the top. Now you can break in, but to break in you have to create a gargantuan brand from scratch. So if you can side in sideways and create a huge new brand from scratch, you get to play. How does that happen in venture capital? You can be Andreessen Horowitz, where you walk in with a huge brand, you throw a lot of money at the problem, and you create something new. Or Y Combinator, where you do something different, you take on a class of entrepreneur that nobody was willing to help before. Same way on the school side. You can do something brand new, like the Lambda School model, where you take in a class of students and train them for a thing that normal schools aren't willing to do. So it is possible to break into these curation and signaling businesses, but there's a very natural feedback loop that leads to a few winners at the top who are very static for a long period of time.

Yeah, it's going to be a very hard effect to break. I don't know the solution to the problem. I think the signal and curation... you can get an education without going to Harvard, you can build a great alumni network without going to Harvard. What you can't get is that easy stamp, that credential of 'I went to Harvard.' The doors that opens, that is the part that's incredibly difficult to replace. And I'm not sure how or who is going to replace that. Within the tech industry, if you went to Y Combinator, that's probably good enough, you don't need to go to Harvard. Or if you are funded by a top VC, or if you start a cool company, or even if you build a great open source project, or even if you have an amazing blog or Twitter, it might get you past. But in most industries, Harvard is still Harvard.

So now, is it proof of work or is it proof of achievement?

Not that much. I think more people hopefully will come out of this being pro-homeschooling, and we'll get to see a lot more experiments in that space. And the internet should enable them to do that, but I don't see it as a mass movement. I think for most people, school is an attractive bundle of daycare plus socialization plus education all rolled into one. It's unpopular to talk about the daycare part, but if you see a lot of people basically saying, 'We need schools to reopen,' what they're basically saying is, 'I can't handle the kids at home.' And that's a valid concern. If you're living in a two-working-parent household, it's really hard to have kids in the house while you're both trying to work and keep your sanity. But for some reason, we're not allowed to talk about that. Now, what if you were to design a school from the ground up that wasn't designed to indoctrinate, but rather was built by people who decided that kids, this is really just daycare for people who are not yet old enough to take on the responsibility of being full adults in society, but are biologically old enough that historically they would have been out fighting wars or getting pregnant. So let's put you into this daycare center where you get free play, you get to learn on your own dime, you get socialized. The teachers don't have to act like prison wardens, they like having you around, they're just keeping a loose eye on you. I haven't really thought this through, but school is hopefully going to get redesigned. But again, because the state has its fingers in the pie, it's going to move very slowly and maybe not even in the right directions. At the end of the day, adaptation happens at an individual level. Society follows the individual's actions, it doesn't lead them. So what we'll see happening is enough individuals will break off from the existing system, they'll form their own little systems, and hopefully those will guide society in the correct direction. I think that's going to be in the direction of more choice. Ideally, in my world, there would be full-on vouchers. Whatever the cost it takes to go to public school, every poor kid with a choice takes that money and goes to a private school instead. That would create some level of choice. Homeschooling is another level of choice. Unschooling, where kids don't even go to school at home or anywhere else, they just do whatever they want, would be another level of choice. And it's not as bad as you think. Unschooled kids actually turn out to be only one grade behind public school kids. Think about that. By the time you're in 12th grade, if you hadn't gone to school at all, if you just sat at home and did whatever you wanted whenever you wanted, you'd be at the equivalent of an 11th grade student. There are even studies that show you would catch up when you went to college and be indistinguishable from a public school student. And homeschool students are years ahead of public school students, even years ahead of private school students. So there's a lot of slack in the system for innovation if you really genuinely cared about your child's education. You would not outsource it to a public school or even a private school. You would take responsibility for it. Obviously, that's very difficult to do, it requires a certain level of means, but it can also be done through neighborhood and community. Homeschooling doesn't mean you sit at home and try to teach your kid calculus. It means you get together with other people in your neighborhood and solve the problem at a local level with a lot of thought and involvement.

Wouldn't the bar for this proof of work for admissions to prestigious colleges be different for various groups? For example, for someone in the top 0.001% of cogency, if they don't have connections, but if they have connections, say legacy admissions or donations, then it's good enough if they're in the top one...

They're here to stay until the entire system is disrupted. To give an example, in crypto, the legacy VC brand doesn't matter that much because the entire system is moving to a different way of doing things. Same way in the tech industry, the legacy college credentials, university credentials still matter, no matter what Google says. They do care a lot about what university you went to. In the early days, if you wanted to be a PM at Google, having been at McKinsey or Harvard was a much better path than trying to prove your work otherwise, despite whatever they might have marketed externally. But I would say that when the whole system changes, like you see happening in Silicon Valley or in crypto, then you get reform. Piecemeal reform doesn't work. These networks are too tightly enmeshed into each other. I don't know how to describe it, but it's a form of a network effect where the VC businesses and how they vet things are enmeshed into this ecosystem. It's like trying to change how things grow in a garden. Everything depends on everything else, so it's very hard to change one thing in isolation or wish that one thing worked a different way. It's all enmeshed. But if you burn the garden down or you grow another garden next door, then you get change. Then the whole thing gets rethought from the ground up.

It's funny. When I was first getting into the tech business, I was kind of depressed because I thought Microsoft and Intel would rule the world forever. They were these highly oppressive companies, and it would be so difficult to do anything interesting while they took control of everything. I loved Apple at the time. I used a Mac, I was an Apple fanboy. In fact, when I got to Silicon Valley, the first thing I did after I got to my little apartment and left my bags there was I went to One Infinite Loop and looked at the Apple campus. I remember being disappointed with the plain little building, but I still just loved Apple. Now it's really ironic to me that Apple is the big hegemon that's beating up people with 30% App Store taxes and de-platforming people. Apple is more oppressive than Microsoft and Intel everywhere because if you think about it, the PC was an open platform in the sense that anyone can...

Write an app and run it, but now you can't run an app on your iPhone that's not approved. You can't ship an app on your iPhone except through the App Store. You can't just charge people money for an iPhone app and keep it all; they've got to give them 30%. You can't compete with them if they don't want you to. There's certain apps they just don't even open up or allow through the APIs. Microsoft and Intel were way more open than that. So ironically, this has already played out before. Now, will Apple and Google get unseated in our lifetimes? I don't know. The mobile phone is an extremely tight lock because they've got hardware and software and services working in synchronicity. But I think there are pieces of it that will start getting unbundled. I think crypto has a, decentralization has a good chance of decentralizing social networks. Certainly it's decentralizing finance. And when you start with decentralized finance, then you have the building blocks that start going after the other pieces. Crypto is decentralizing finance and governance. And if you think about it, those are actually two of the most locked down, regulated, protected entities around. And so if you can take out those two systems and decentralize them, then you have a shot at decentralizing everything else. But I suspect open mobile systems will be pretty late in the game because they require not just networks, they also require an enormous amount of software, and most importantly they require hardware.

It's hard to tell right now. I don't know. But my feeling is that they're more on cruise control, but that cruise control is going to take them a long ways because they're cruising at a high speed on a wide open road. So the fact that Buffett invested tells you everything you need to know. He views it as an impregnable fortress that's going to last for decades. But in terms of innovation, would have innovated better under Steve. And when I say Steve, I think when you say Steve you mean Steve and Steve's crew, right? So the Jony Ives of the world and whoever else was involved. He kind of had this crew around him. I think that crew would probably have done things differently. The two things I would point to is, first of all, look at what Apple was before they came in. When Gil Amelio and crew and the people before that were running it, that's more what you can look at to see what Apple without Jobs and his team look like. And I think the second reason to think of it this way is, I see Apple going into a lot of things where it's really bad and sort of trying to show off for status and just kind of failing. So like things like Beats headphones or Apple Music, these sorts of things, or like their Siri or online services. Basically anything Apple's done online has been kind of a miserable failure. And I see them chasing into sort of status-like businesses that are not core to them. That said, they have still done incredible innovations post-Steve Jobs. The AirPods is probably a very good example. I don't know if that was launched or put in motion pre-Steve or post, you know, who knows. Apple will probably be on top for quite a while. I don't know where the displacement happens. Google is, at least thank God Google is around in that sense. If there was only one mobile operating system we'd all converged on, whether it was Apple or Google, if either one of them had one, there would almost be no Silicon Valley as we know it because that one monopolist would be extracting all the profits of the ecosystem and would have very, very little incentive to behave. But at least we have two of them. I think there's a recent announcement that Google is lowering its app store fees to 15% or something like that. I'm sure it's a lot more complicated, the headline I think, dig into it. But that's enough to tell you there's at least some competition going on, which is good.

Exactly.

Yeah, well I'm hoping it's a slow and peaceful transition. You know, I don't want to see a crash. I have a uranium background, so I'm always for revolution. Yeah, and I think everyone who's on this call has a pretty good life. Like if you own an iPhone and you can be in Clubhouse, your life is decent, and you probably should not be hoping for anything like an overthrow. Look, finance is a big one. If all crypto does is decentralize finance, that is massive. That's 20% of the economy. That's the levers of power. That changes the economics and the systems of wealth creation that are available to us. That's a big one. And if you change governance that goes with it, if you change voting, if you change how communities of people online can self-adjudicate, that's another big one. I think social is going to be a big one. We will see social protocols, we'll see innovation in the social domain for decentralized social networks. I think you'll see in gaming, we'll have gaming protocols with long-lived games that may actually become the foundations for eventually layering on a metaverse. You're seeing things in NFTs, there's art which I don't really understand because I don't collect art myself, but it looks pretty hot. So there's a lot going on. I think that just, but you have to remember that crypto only operates in the digital domain. It works because of encryption, and trying to map it or carry its effects into the physical domain is not going to work that well because the physical domain still eventually runs into who owns what physically, and then people with guns can come up and take it from you. So who controls the people with the guns? That's laws and lawyers and judges. So crypto's reach is limited to the digital domain, but that's a big domain. We're spending a lot of our lives and time in that. So I think there's a lot of good stuff to come from crypto, but it's unfortunately going to be limited in the digital domain. But guess what? Finance is almost entirely, if not entirely, in the digital domain. Finance is purely digital. So that's a big one, right? The whole internet revolution happened from 1994 till now, and finance was basically unscathed. Wall Street got to continue running the way that Wall Street always runs, very, very minor changes. You want to talk about signal and curation businesses? The investment banks are signaling curation business. Warren Buffett is in a signaling curation business. So these can all get disrupted through crypto, and that's just the beginning. So when you have 20% of the economy and the wealthiest people and the ones most protected by regulations, who are essentially renters and toll takers on large chunks of the economy, and if you want to talk about an old boys' club that's impossible to break into, that thing is going to get disrupted by crypto, and I'm really around to watch for that. Now I hope that can happen bloodlessly, but there's always a chance that they'll try and weaponize the state against crypto because those people are not going to go without a fight. So hopefully we're just co-opting them one at a time, as the Michael Saylors of the world tune into Bitcoin, the Ray Dalios of the world tune into Bitcoin and buy it. And that's just the beginning, because you poke your nose down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, then you fall one level down, you find Ethereum, then you fall one level down, and then you find a whole bunch of other coins. Then you fall into the bottom pit and you find DeFi, and maybe you just crawl your way back out and shake your head and you're back at the Bitcoin level and you like hanging out there because it's better lit than down below. But there's a lot of innovation happening down in the deep bowels of crypto.

BitClout, I don't want to talk too much about it because it's a weird one. I would say BitClout actually has an application right there, like you can actually go in there and use it whenever the site is up. And I played with it a little bit, but I think we still have a long ways to go. I think part of the reason why it's catching on right now is also because crypto's going through another boom, people are speculating on tokens, so it's kind of a mad rush to make money, which we're kind of in a frenzy, and most these tokens are probably overvalued right now, especially the niche ones. And then I think there's also this NFT craze going on, which I don't fully understand. Like I think there's definitely some value to NFTs, especially when they're within the context of a game or a metaverse or a song inside of a player. But at the same time, paying $70 million for a JPEG or a series of JPEGs or a video seems completely bananas to me. But then I don't understand art, I don't collect art. I get no value out of having art, so I'm just not hardwired for it fundamentally. Collecting and displaying art is a status game, and I just don't like status games. I'm just not hardwired for it. That's not to say it's not a real thing, not to say it may not have value to other people, but I simply don't understand it. But I think the NFT craze kind of tied into the whole coin speculation craze, also tied in the fact that people want an alternative to the centralized social networks. I think all of those are kind of creating a perfect storm where people are looking, and I think we're going to see hopefully a whole group of decentralized social networks coming out. I think it's a really, really hard problem to solve. You have to break the network effect for the existing ones, you have to create something new. Anytime you incentivize something with money, you tend to get low quality content. So I think communities are very important. It's a really hard problem to solve. I hope somebody solves it. I think it's probably the greatest quest of the next 10 years. But I think even if we solve the problem of decentralization, I don't think decentralization and anti-elitism are the same thing. Even if you have decentralization, you still have elitism. BitClout is a perfect example. It's a decentralized social currency, social network, but it's celebrities monetizing their level of celebrity. Right? And even with NFTs, you can say that this is a great way for artists who haven't had the chance or the money to be discovered to get discovered. But if you think about the NFTs that have been valued the most, it's from artists that have had this long following and built a lot of attraction, or people who aren't artists at all. Right? Like Jack Dorsey's first tweet is now an NFT. Elon Musk's NFT about NFTs is an NFT that's sold a lot. Grimes, well she's had a great career and she's definitely credible on her own, but if you look at the kind of people that are investing in buying her NFTs, they're really buying it because she's tied to a white man that has prominence and they're betting on him. So I think that there's a slight nuance between decentralization and something that's not elitist, and I think I'm more interested in someone figuring out the latter. Also, just to go back to a couple of other things that were said, I do agree that the change, to answer Neegan's question, I also think that it's not going to be a step change, it's going to be incremental. And that's partially because the systems are so interconnected. So if you think about education, if we do get to a point where everyone gets to do whatever they want to study and they have full ownership of what they want to learn and mess around with whatever subject of their choosing, that's great. But you'll still have people tending towards the subject that's valued the most by society. So people will still become or try to work towards science and math and coding because that's what society makes you think pays the most. So until we can equalize that, if we should equalize that, and say that an author and a painter are worth just as much as a coder and an engineer, then you'll have true equality. And then that's where things will really start to break down. But until not just the ability to choose whatever you want to study, but also the value given to that choice is equal...

There's also, I think that's right. I think the people who are hoping that artists are going to get rich off of NFTs are probably going to be sorely disappointed. I think there's a small head of artists who are going to get extremely wealthy, like a very small head, and the vast, vast, vast majority will get lost in the long tail. We're only about a month away from this gigantic tsunami of NFTs where every single thing that can be digitized will be digitized and thrown up as an NFT somewhere. And there'll be people throwing up NFTs that are other people's IP and claiming it as their own. And then there'll be people doing memes and NFTs of NFTs and jokes of NFTs. And I think we're very quickly going to find out that just as Bitcoin and maybe Ether are the only established stores of value, probably only just Bitcoin and crypto, the same way there's only going to be a few things that are going to be Mona Lisa equivalent in the digital domain. And will have created such a showing point of value that people will create fame enough around them that they'll capture and hold value. So I don't know how NFTs are involved, and like I said, I don't know how the art market works. But I think we're about to see a giant flood of NFTs coming in, and then we're going to find out what NFTs are actually worth and whose NFTs are actually worth something.

Yeah, NFT is a very big category, right? It can apply to a pointer to a file living on the blockchain. And so it kind of gives you the right to a piece of art. It could be a domain name system, which is actually within a regulated sort of framework, and then you have exclusive access to that domain. It gives you some capability you wouldn't have otherwise. Or it could be in a metaverse context or in a video game context where I get a certain artifact and now you can't have it because that system actually enforces the NFT. But a lot of these NFTs, they don't really give you anything other than bragging rights, which is fine. Bragging rights and status have value too, especially if you get into a world that's completely virtual with all deep fakes and who knows what's real. Then a verified NFT is an unfakable proof of status. Right? But again, these are kind of back to status games, which I don't really understand.

I think most likely, more than anything else, we're probably going to see NFTs as the next housing bubble burst, and that's going to be really funny and really sad.

Yeah, that sounds like something Balaji would say. He has a longer range view of the future than I do, and so he tends to come up with stuff like that that looks a little ludicrous in the present but turns out to be inevitably true 10 years later.

Yes, the universities remain except for the true cream of the crop. It's sort of like, no offense to anyone, Tinder, but I would guess that the highest quality people aren't on Tinder because they just get taken off the market too quickly. So the same way, the absolute best people aren't applying for jobs at Google. They're starting companies or they're going to more boutique, smaller companies that have higher growth trajectories and where they can work more as a generalist and gain experience and rise up the ladder much, much faster. Going to Google at this point, we're not quite at the status of it being like going to IBM in the 1970s, but we're probably getting closer to that. So I don't think the absolute cream of the crop is going to Google, and I don't think that should be any surprise to anyone who's in senior management at Google. It's probably what they worry about all day long, and there's just no way around it. It's a scale problem. Once you're a certain size, the best people don't want to work there anymore. It's just a pure size thing, not unless they're running the place, and there's just very few of those slots.

Decentralized social media will have decentralized censorship. Every time I don't want to hear from someone, I mute or block them, and that's private censorship, and that's okay because it's at the local level. It's an individual decision, not a top-down imposed one-size-fits-all decision. I don't have a problem with censoring everyone, just let me decide who to censor on what, right? That's the problem. The problem is who gets to do it, because whoever gets to do it, no matter how well-meaning, gets to be in charge. Sure, let's censor just hate speech. Awesome. Just let me define hate speech. Not even define it, let me just adjudicate what hate speech is. You can even define it, I'll just carry out the interpretation. It's like Cardinal Richelieu said, 'Give me six sentences from any honest man, I will have him hanged.' So you can catch someone on anything as long as you're in charge of interpreting the law. So I think that eventually where this has to head is decentralized censorship. So what that means is, I can censor you by muting or blocking you. You can mute or block me. If you think that's not scalable, then you can subscribe to a mute or block list that I've put together, and that will mute and block all the people that I've curated for you. So essentially you select me as an editor. If that's not scalable, then you can subscribe to professional mute block lists. So you could basically say, 'I trust the New York Times to censor my content.' You could even take it one level further and you could switch platforms. If Clubhouse or Twitter were protocols that truly had multiple independent clients, then different clients could run different censorship policies. You could even have a version of Twitter that was safe for your children, which obviously is not the case today. Twitter actually, besides all the hatred and invective and so on that it has on the platform, also has a ton of pornography, and I'm sure all of you have stumbled into it accidentally and been like, 'Holy cow, what is this on my screen?' Hit the back button. So you can distribute the roles, and the more distributed it is, the more local it is, kind of the better off it is for everybody.

Well, first of all, I don't see the problem with people trying to profit off of data. It kind of depends how they do it. Like, there's data all day long that people profit off of. That's just the nature of data. But if you're referring to private data, sure, I should be able to make my mute and block list private, and no one should have access to that unless I give them access to that. And I should be able to sell that, or I should be able to open it up to people that I trust, or I should be able to make it public. And it's actually kind of similar to how lists work on Twitter today. I can have a private list and I can have a public list. They don't yet give me the ability to have a paid list, but eventually they'll probably add that as part of their Super Follow features. So I don't think the issue is necessarily people profiting off data, it's just protecting individual privacy, giving people a choice. The beauty of crypto is that all the data is protected by private keys, so people get a lot more control over the data. In fact, crypto applications are built inside out. Applications like this, Clubhouse, the code is all closed source and the data is owned by the company, Alpha Exploration Company, which owns Clubhouse. So they get to do whatever they want with the data. In crypto land, each user owns their own data, and because their data is protected with their private key, and because the metadata is protected by blockchain consensus, i.e., we all have to agree, miners have to agree on what to put in the blockchain, the application itself is completely open source, which makes it this beautiful thing called composable. That's a word you're going to hear a lot more in the future. Crypto apps are composable, which means they plug into each other like Lego blocks. Every crypto app, essentially, not every, but within certain parameters, can work with many other crypto apps, which is something apps here don't do. Notice how in Clubhouse you have a different identity than you have on Twitter. You have a different follow graph than you do on Twitter. You have to rebuild everything when you come on a Clubhouse. Crypto apps wouldn't work like that. A crypto social network would just suck in the graph from an existing crypto social network. It would suck in the user profiles from identities built in a different place. They might suck in domain name data from a third place. It might pull in your NFT art collection from a fourth place and put it on your profile. It might pull in your crypto wallet so you can receive donations or tips or money from a fifth place. They might put on your sponsorship from a sixth place. So every crypto app that gets built essentially talks to other crypto apps and becomes a better, more powerful thing. They're extremely difficult to build because they have this no-trust model. We don't trust anyone. We have to be ready for anything. But it does mean that as they do get built, they're rock solid, and what they're building is sort of this pile of powerful Legos going on top of each other that looks small today, but eventually you're going to create a superstructure that I think will be very hard for legacy apps to compete with.

Yeah, Urbit is kind of this incredibly cool, geeky science project, I think, which sort of has a very good futuristic vision of how the decentralized world should work and everyone should run their own server. But in the process, Urbit kind of made up its own nomenclature, its own programming language, its own paradigm for how to think about things, its own architecture, its own design. It's just too difficult for mere mortals to grasp. I think if the Urbit team wants to be successful, they have to start building end-user apps that were unimaginable and shipping them in volume to kind of show that system works. But it's architecturally so different from anything else that exists today that it just hasn't seen mass market adoption by developers.

Well, I think it's a part of a larger meta principle, which is, where do you get your feedback from? Right? When you're doing your work or when you're going about your life, what tells you you're wrong? Because all of life is sort of a creation and then error correction process. If you're an evolution, evolution works through variation of genes and then natural selection weeds out the ones that didn't work. If you're trying to invent something, you try something, you get errors, trial and error, then you iterate, iterate, iterate. And then in science, you make conjectures and you get criticism. If you're building a company, you're always trying new things and you're getting feedback from the market and you're failing. So every system, every person, every set of ideas evolves through feedback, feedback, feedback. You're always trying things and getting feedback. If you couldn't get feedback, you'd essentially stagnate and die. So the key question really is, where are you getting your feedback from? And I would argue there's two broad categories. There's the people who get their feedback from free markets or from nature. So if you're a scientist, then your experiment actually has to work out in the physics lab, for example. Or if you're an inventor and you build a plane, the plane actually has to fly. You're getting feedback from nature, and if you're wrong, your plane crashes, you die, or your company fails. Similarly, if you're operating in the free markets, if you're an investor or a trader or you're raising money to do a project as an entrepreneur, if you fail, you lose your money. The market punishes you by taking the money away and driving you bankrupt. These are systems that are very unforgiving, and so people don't like them because they have a sense of right and wrong, success and failure, and they lead to highly unequal outcomes. And farmers and scientists and entrepreneurs and people running businesses, working in businesses, especially close to the customer and close to the money, are going to get feedback from free markets and from nature. And then the other side is you have people who are getting feedback from other people. And so these could be journalists, these could be academics, these could be politicians. And so those people naturally end up into socialism because they have to keep other people happy. So it's more about looking good than doing good. It's more about getting the rewards and getting clapped on the back for, 'Yeah, you try to help, now let's all go congratulate each other.' I don't mean to belittle too much. You need some of both. If you went with only the scientists, creator types, and there were none of the academic types, you'd end up in a very dog-eat-dog world, right? It would be very brutal, it would be almost Malthusian or Darwinistic. Whereas if you went to the other extreme side where everything is based on what other people tell you, it's all about social approval, you know, social media favors socialism because on social media all your feedback is from other people. It's all likes and follows based on what other people like. So I think politics, journalism, and academia naturally tend towards socialism. Whereas of course businesses, things like farming, invention, creativity, and research in the physical sciences tends towards, I would say that's capitalism, but more of a meritocracy. You know, at the end of the day, one really funny line that I heard, it's not much a pejorative on either side, but it was just a good line, was that leftists are people who hate market outcomes, and right-wingers are people who hate left-wingers. Or right-wingers are people who hate leftists. So what that kind of says is that there's a bunch of people who say, 'Man, wouldn't it be great if we were all equal?' And those people don't like evolution, they don't like the way evolution works, they don't like the way free markets work, they don't like the way mother nature works, right? That's unfortunate. And it's good because if that instinct didn't exist in the human race, like I said, it would be a dog-eat-dog world. We'd all be left to our own devices. In the household, the mom always wants us to get along. She wants all the kids to behave because she loves everybody. She wants it to work out equally for everybody. But at the same time, maybe dad, or you can switch mom and dad around if you're in a non-traditional household, has to go out there and work the farm in an old school world, and he knows it's not equal. Someone has to lift things and kill things and carry things and build things. So these are just like the masculine and feminine sides of nature playing out. But any society which is overrun with feedback from only one side will be imbalanced. And what social media has done recently is it has really amplified this idea that everyone takes feedback from each other. Here we are, close friends, thousands of us in a room. This was unimaginable just a few years ago, it was impossible 10 years ago. So social media is driving us more and more towards socialist tendencies because it's stitching us together. But at the same time, there are countervailing forces. Crypto is making everybody an investor, right? Subject to free market forces. So there are countervailing forces. It's very difficult to say how this plays out.

Yeah, I think look, companies are driven by the profit motive. And when they act woke, they're acting woke because they think it'll bring them bigger profits. So they kind of just want to be left alone. I've noticed upfront sometimes I'm a little surprised when I see companies doing things that they're cynically just sort of signaling to the outside world they're behaving a certain way. They literally just do it because it's the easiest way to get the thing out of their hair and get the job done, right? They're just dispassionate about it. It's unfortunate. But Nassim Taleb had that great blog post and chapter in his book, 'Skin in the Game,' about the intolerant minority and about how intolerant minorities actually run the world around us. And when I was growing up in the 1980s, the most intolerant minority was the Christian right wing. And so this was the Nancy Reagan 'Don't Do Drugs' crowd, and you couldn't, like pornography was really looked down upon, and gays and lesbians had a really difficult time, and AIDS was considered like a certain kind of disease, and it was just not a good environment for anyone who wasn't pro-family, pro-Christian. But now it feels like the pendulum has swung the other way, and the new moral majority is actually much more on the left, saying you should speak a certain way, think a certain way, act a certain way, and you're guilty of all kinds of sins, and your identity determines who you are and your capabilities, and you should feel bad about being privileged or successful, what have you. So the pendulum has kind of swung the other way, and I don't know where it ends up, but it's sort of a weird place to be. Anyway, I didn't mean to turn this into an Evolve podcast session, so I apologize. I think I wandered into your room to have a conversation and sort of turned into that. So I'm probably going to quiet down and exit shortly, but I thank you for giving me the pulpit for this brief period of time.

Okay, one question. One question, I promise. This is one question, and after that you don't have to answer anything.

Oh, I can't explain Kapil in this context. He either speaks to you or he doesn't, and you should just figure it out for yourself, honestly. I don't think what he's saying is true for him, and I think it is said with utmost sincerity. I don't think he's for everybody. I think you can get that same stuff he's talking about from a thousand different sources, and I consume all of them. But I found him to be very, very insightful. However, like anybody else, when you're put on Twitter, you're put on Clubhouse, you're performing on the stage, and a caricature of what you're doing and saying comes out. I think if you're interested in what Kapil is doing, go read his books. I think that's actually the best way to get a sense of it without letting the ego of a personality sort of manifest in the way of what he's talking about. His books are actually really interesting. I think his blog posts are really interesting. The problem with being in Clubhouse is it turns performative. You're on stage. It's not necessarily the best venue for everybody. Anyway, that's it for me. Thank you.