By The Moments where you were forced into difficult situations, and you are forced to review who you are and change who you are, reality 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 your crime and you're forced to face the reality and all the expectations you had a where this thing was going to head, you know, come rushing back out of you.
I have to crash to the floor because you'd been denying reality, all along. So these moments of trauma and suffering or what actually bring us back to reality, the forces to reconcile with ourselves, the forces 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.
And of all quick question about that tweet about the the internet and the three stages of the internet and these epochs of evolution. How would you compare? Well, projecting the blockchain out into the future. How do you look at that? And compare it against the mobile and web, you know, parts of this journey and what's different about it and maybe what's the same. So we might be able to see patterns but also differences.
Yeah, I put up a tweet recently for the references. I said that the three most important epochs of the internet where first the web second mobile and third block chains, and obviously there's going to be controversial. Lots of people jumped in my comments to tell me how 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 and obviously there will be other acts like VRA, our will probably be quite interesting but it arrived.
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 entity.
He's 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, you know, and so on Rise Up in Facebook, but now I think the most interesting action is going in blockchains and Bitcoin is the obvious one, which is where literally redefining what money is and moving it onto the internet as opposed to having it be in the possession of any
Will government or small group of people, and I think there will be hugely beneficial repercussions to Society for doing that. But then, with the etherium, we're building an entire decentralised stack of Wall Street, on top all the things that Wall Street does or London, or Shanghai or Hong Kong or New York, you know, do with all their financial institutions is being done better and easier and smoother on this decentralized Finance Tech. 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 defy description.
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 competitor. This is like the old city stick 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 a Renaissance Italy with Florence and so on. But I think we're building the virtual equivalent.
That using block chains and I think we will also see, huge advancements and decentralized mechanisms for building decentralized, social networks for building decentralized. You know, they call non fungible tokens or decentralized Registries of items in assets, both digital and pointing to in the real world. And we will see, decentralized me game worlds. And eventually it to my mind, a block chain is actually a precursor for a meadow verse. Let me tell you what I mean by that. Like when VRA are
Are 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 are 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 heart.
Hardware that lets us in but hopefully, they'll be competing Hardware standards and they will let us into one large decentralised 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 the Interlink with each other and these are the kinds of distributed consensus and penis problems that block, chains 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 desire.
Fine, they're basically Venture Capital done in public. Right. The way these companies work is they create a protocol, then the IPO, and then they raise money. Like, literally their First Act is an IPO. And then, after that, the investors start coming in, where's the classic Tech model, which is close 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 the company IPOs and most of the appreciation is gone, and that might have made a hundred extra thousand X and you get to fight.
Or 20% a year. So, with with blockchains because the currency is built on them, or permissionless the IPO and 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. 99% of it is junk as opposed to normal stars were 90% of this junk. So it's even worse than the normal setup. So the people it looks really skinny and looks really worthless. But this is kind of an IQ test. It's really going to differentiate the capable people from the ink.
Little people. So, you know, the vast majority what happens in blockchain landing is going to be terrible, but I believe that there will be a peace emerging out of that and I think we've already had a few huge bits around Bitcoin is cerium defy and so on and that we're seeing with n ftes and soon. I think we'll see what social protocols and we gave me 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.
The iPhone showed up to Nokia and Ericsson. It must have looked like, martians. I just landed, you know, from space with battleships. And there was just nothing they could do if you're sitting 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 would have to write this massive software stack and build a touch screen phone and you know, it just it was just 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.
So is that moment when it gets over the chasm and gets over to regular people using it web and mobile. I remember those moments. I tried to, you know, enter this new world and it was very challenging.
Challenging, you gotta get your meta mask. You got to figure out all this stuff and it's quite confusing. And I mean, it could be me. Obviously, it could be user are but they're, you know, my experience was very difficult and I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on how
how that affect how? That's going to happen. Yeah, the early versions aren't designed for the average user and people who say, I'm looking for a nap. Give me an apt. An average user uses every day are missing the point entirely the average user every day is not.
Involved a stash and 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 you know, busy trading exotic derivatives and Wall Street, right? So the early versions of this stuff. Yeah, met a mask looks weird to you. But hey, mass 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, you know, 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, you know people are driving a car, not a shittier car know what the what you're able to do with meta mass is literally. Everybody else is driving their nice car. And you 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
Dealing with this. It's a completely different Beast. So yeah, it's not ready for Prime Time by the time. It is ready for Primetime. 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, I mean, look, it's hard to see when
that it's hard to see when that happens the future. Because it's so decentralized that it's the speed of the system itself is really hard to wrap your head around.
That's every technological Revolution does
Not even vaguely resemble. The one that came before it, they're not predictable by definition. If they were predictable. We would need the technological Revolution. We could just cut to the chase. Clearly. You saw something in the future
that you made a right, you AngelList. So you obviously saw some opportunity which was something in the future. And
so I think it's right to process. We go through. Yes. Yes individuals. Placed 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 always right. What I like to do is I like to place a symmetric
I swear, if I am right, I will be paid. Extremely well, and if I'm 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 more the less, the less people who get it from the traditional investing background, the better. It is for people
like me.
I want to totally change gears and speak about something else. If like if we met you said something about don't build castles on other people's beaches, you know Twitter is a beach club as is a bitch implying that we should own the relationship. Ourselves is text messaging around age is WhatsApp group of version of that or not.
Yeah, that's your own beats because you can switch it because the contact list is inside your phone. So, if WhatsApp be platforms, you can switch the signal signal removes. You can go to WeChat which are removed. 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, it's days were numbered. That's the point at, which know,
I know 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. Take a literally just change your longer algorithm, and then kick them. And then you would basically lose followers for 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 robbed the platform of all Vitality. I actually think Twitter is now becoming 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 a something happening 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 the quality of discourse on Twitter is 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 know the block chains are not quite yet ready for Primetime Block Chain. 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 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 podcasts, and my email list, all the, which would 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, she's got some into this room, right? So it's not
For me, how is this improving my life? So, I'm very practical that way and I don't think theme gives you all that much in modern society. It's much more of a trap in many ways than it is, the has benefit. Now, obviously, enjoy the some level or I wouldn't even be here. So I'm contradicting Myself by just by the act of being here, but that said, I, you know, if I were trying to build something solid than I would count on my podcast, I would count on my blog and I would kind of email subscribers or newsletter. Notice how
I'm stack has a much nicer censorship policy than, for example, a clubhouse or a Twitter does because sub stack 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 invest more in the Twitter platform. I just think that's, you 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.
Her also. And so if Twitter lunches spaces and Clubhouse exist, I'm still going to use Clubhouse. Why? Just because of redundancy. I want to be on two different platforms. I won't have followers in two different places because then if one of them Cuts me off, if still got my followers in the little 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 surface in somebody else's.
Are
you might have find it unpleasant that we find it Pleasant? Because that's how we got your attention on Twitter. So you had up to that, you brought up something really interesting. I think which is a good segue for cutouts. Whitney. Can you talk about when you became an investor in clubhouse because that Periscope I listened to today, that's inspired me to try
and summon you today
was because you're talking about how Periscope had all of these issues and you like that post, but that
was me like, oh cool. He's interested in maybe a Grace. When did you
First invest
in clubhouse.
Well, I've always wanted a product like this and I pitched, actually, a friend of mine, David King. I'm 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 pivot it away. But he knew call Davison pretty well. And Paul actually, and Paul and I used to work together coinless. Paul was CEO coinless briefly. And so, I remember when Paul left? I said, man, you're meant to do and consumer Products company and you're going to do something that is like a small hard-charging.
This 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 is before it was anything, really. And I think he gave me a small allocation that I hope for which is the story of our relationship. But he's a fantastic guy. 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. Yeah. I think that's awesome because in your defense or in any investors defense, like I think it's unfair that people say, are they
These investors are promoting Clubhouse, but I'm like, if you didn't like it,
you wouldn't talk about it or be on it. Like you have to enjoy the platform. Otherwise, it's useless, right? So,
of course, I mean, there are people who are much larger investors than me who have spoken far, fewer words and clubhouses, you know, in a way I'm almost at slightly resentful. I'm like, hey, I'm just making you richer. Why aren't you doing your share? Right? I don't see anybody else creating rooms to pull. You couldn't write. But that said I also I also reserve the right to drop out of clubhouse at any moment and
Fact, there was a round in between after the round. We're invested with there is more money and a chance to put more and I passed and 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 like, make room for new investors, 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. I totally take it off and I was one of the probably 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 to show, you know, I didn't want the obligation for a show. I don't want the pressure first show, and so, it's, yeah, I'm not, I'm not here trying to make my Clubhouse investment successful. My Clubhouse investment is Tiny compared to some many, many, 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 Twitter's degenerated, is it becomes very difficult to speak on Twitter because everything you say is this
Excerpt of what you're actually thinking. It's not, you know, you're not there to provide the context and I'm Twitter people with straw, man. You rather rather than steel menu. They will try to find the the worst possible interpretation of what you said. They'll try and attack it. So Clubhouse is much better. Because here, when you're talking to somebody else will, firstly, mostly audience can't talk back. So we were 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, you know, at our best intentions closer, worst intentions. It's like when you, when you're in a cocktail party, you know, you, you don't end up fighting with everybody at the cocktail party, right? Like, I remember, I tweeted once a Jack Dorsey and I said, what is Twitter? And he basically said, oh, it's a place for people to have conversations as 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.
Do people go in and throwing chairs and be read each other? So maybe it starts as a town hall but it always ends in a fistfight. 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 a 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 to my Twitter feed and blocking people and Beauty people. And
Then responding to the few civil, interesting. People who are 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 conversation the Twitter. So I'm grateful is something like Clubhouse exists where you can speak in context. Now interestingly. I've never had a bad incident speaking at Clubhouse on clubhouse, but what Allah, sometimes happen is people will excerpt something.
What I said on clubhouse, they'll turn it into a tweet. They'll often use this misinterpret. What I was saying, so they just say something else and then somebody else will jump on it and attack it. Like they were a bunch of the are phonies who recently say, oh because I was joking around with Joe Rogan about the are 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, was we are doesn't work yet. But of course, I'm a Believer in VR. Investing 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. And of all hits the yard, look how wrong he is. And look how correct we are, and look how we got him on this one who 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.
My question is about your comments, around decentralization of the social media networks or platforms. How do you see that happening? What's up?
Does that road ahead look like?
So decentralisation doesn't mean that you put everything on a blockchain. It just means that you take the important metadata such like the user ID, the follow graph and, you know, a few important pieces of content and the ones that are persistent less to say, and you put those in the blockchain and then everything else. The the blockchain is has a pointer either to a site that can do hosted audio streaming or host files, or maybe just as a Json file, which has everyone's tweets on it.
So basically what the what the blockchain does is, it doesn't give you a moment to moment decentralisation. What it gives you is the ability to exit, it gives you the ability to leave. So, you know today for example, I'm Neva on Twitter, right. If tomorrow I say something that displeases the powers that be are 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, right? But there's still like they don't have anything on me, but nevertheless. I'm one of those people that
I'll be convenient. If I were to, you know, 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 suspended or they delete my account right now. All of a sudden, the 1.1 million and change followers that I have lost. Now, if it was now, if you would look in 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 would be held in a blockchain, would be just my handle and all the people pointing.
That and I would control my handle. And so if Twitter suddenly blocks me, then I would just redirect the pointer from my handle at Neva which would have which went to twitter.com slash involved 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 click the, my profile or try to fetch tweets for me, from some desktop client with him. 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 in the whole thing is effectively decentralised. And the clearest example of this, the domain name system. You can for example, be kicked off of, you know, let's say your your website. Your, let's say you're posting a medium. If you're a 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 point it to a different hosting provider. So it would at the beginning, we can bring that.
Of decentralization of 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 selling point and because they're centralized and they've been around for a while. They have the best technology to 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 if you've been out with a large
Group, right? You're out with like 8 or 10 people at night, and you're all trying to decide where to go to for dinner, for example, or whose house to go to, to spend the evening. And once everyone kind of settles in 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 are going to have a couple of things going for them. So they obviously start up.
Way behind in terms of user experience and in terms of users, but here's what they do. Offer the world. They offer for 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 that 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 connecting to the rest of the 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 through governance, you get the users themselves are deciding the future of the platform. They're taking ownership in agency as opposed to leaving it up to a small group of benevolent dictators. So, so Navarro on that point, I think your last Point, actually probably answers my question, but when you talk about like a decentralized world,
Social media. I don't think you. You think that hate speech is the same as free speech. So, for example, what happened to parlor? May not happen on a decentralized world, but what you're saying is pure governance would fix that. Is that right? I don't think you can Define the words hate speech. As a problem. I think the moment you create a category. There is no exception for hate speech in the US 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.
I hate speech is the same as shutting down, free speech. So these decentralized social networks will be unsensible 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, you know, 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.
Wasn't going to be really toxic places. Nobody will want to hang out there. Others might be quite control. 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 uses curse words. They're thrown off this thing. Others might say we want all intellectual discourse except for racist. Speech, right? And we get defined 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
Like, India wants Twitter to remove certain accounts and Twitter 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's what is what kind of speech? So now I reject the idea that like, 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 wanted to let Hannah jump in because I know she was super motivated at the start and help desk someone you. Hannah, please jump in.
Yeah, sure thinks so much of all I just had a quick question. I know you shared some really awesome insights about happiness earlier and my question is pretty light-hearted but just pineapple on Pizza. Make you happy? Or is it the worst thing in the world?
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 sense her pineapple and pizza photos, I
would
Sobbing, what do you mind? If I ask you another question real quick when you ask the pleasantly, I don't think any of us could ever say no to that role. Please go first. Okay, cool. Yaniv, all. Actually, another question is if you were in your 20s, now, is there anything new you might work on like any new idea or Like A New Concept?
I mean, this is the beat a dead horse, but I'd be all over crypto and defy and probably decentralized social network.
Oh cool. Thank you something. Would you mind if I ask a follow-up?
Please? Get a drink of
water. Please. Continue.
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. You know, my friend. Balaji srinivasan who is, you know, brilliant guy? He has a he has a framework that I kind of like for 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 three things that he identifies as sort of the most important.
Important things that we can do in humanity. So I think any of those three is kind of interesting area to think about it, work
on.
Okay. Well, I'll jump in that, so we've all kind of different topic. I am also an angel investor focused on Chicago startups and I'm also very involved with nonprofits and trying to give of time and I've realized it anytime I give like an Adam Grant sense of like give and take. I always get at least 10 x back. What I what I give in lots of different.
Different. You can measure that in lots of different ways. And as I work with my Founders, I realize that they don't have the time this sort of mental capacity, like the room for them to put themselves in those kind of give her situations in the sense of, you know, like mentoring or getting involved with the nonprofit. And one of the barriers there is just like giving money. So I actually created a model. I just wanted to run it past really quick as I'd love to open source. This is like a social impact model to help investors.
Founders and nonprofits. Would you be open to like if I gave you 30 seconds to a minute on that,
you know, honestly, I don't think it's a great use of time for everybody here. Okay? Okay, that's fine. No. No. Yeah, that's fine. That's like a pitch. The room should feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I was on this trap where then we're just going to end up going round robin getting pitch 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
Oh, yeah, totally, that's fine. It wasn't meant to be a pitch in terms of like an investment. I think it's something I want to open source, but
for them,
so I created a model where I is an investor, write a check to a nonprofit that my Founders select and those Founders then get the opportunity over that year.
To engage directly with that nonprofit and through that they've been doing mentoring and all these, like, the value that they've gotten has been insane. The value that the nonprofit has gotten, which is future. Founders in Chicago, has been insane. And the idea is giving this to other investors so they can enable their Founders to get the same level. And as you know, when you go to places where you give first you get so much in return you anyway. Yeah,
sorry.
It's a good idea. That's the beauty of the
internet and that's literally we're doing, it's called invested for but anyway, I'm sorry. I didn't mean that to be like a picture. I really do
appreciate your feedback stood forward. There it is. Yeah, so I think that's
great. Hey, thanks for doing this. And of all, here's a quick question.
And what is a question or topic? That no one has ever asked you, but you wish someone would ask you love that. Oh, I don't really care what people ask
me. I don't know. There's there's there's no hidden cards here. There's nothing. I'm trying to tell the world. There's nothing I'm holding back and anything. I wish people had asked me. No, I don't. I don't want people asking me one thing since fine. Ask whatever you want. I'm just kind of a just a machine that spinning back data at the
You write based on what you put in. It's like a vending machine. You're putting in a quarter. You're pressing a button and you're getting an answer back. You're pressing on some jeans and some memory cells and some neurons. I do not have an agenda here.
It's our old. And here's another quick. Sorry, sort of if you will, who is someone that? I mean, you've talked to so many people who someone that you've never talked to that, it would almost be a dream for you to have a conversation with
No dreams, but I'm very impressed by the work 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 don't use this as a way to mount some campaign to go talk to him because that will be an embarrassment. It won't be a natural conversation. But, yeah, at this, you know, 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 metallic butyrin. I got to me Neil.
Neal Stephenson. And, you know, I kind of went through the checklist and Scott Adams is another one and Tim Ferriss, of course, but after you go through enough of these, you know, at some point this was hey, they're just people, they're interesting people but no one of them is somehow suddenly going to transform your life, for certain creates an amazing conversation. My favorite conversations are with books. It's when I sit there and I read some really interesting book and I get the author's Best work in their best mindset. And I get to engage at my speed at my leisure. And obviously, I don't have the back and forth discussion.
In with them, but actually when it comes to learning I actually think that that conversations take a distant second place to both books or maybe on a third place the books in just thinking for yourself. I haven't needed some arrogant like I'm not but I would say that the majority of what I've learned through in life is by reading and then by applying it and but then by reflecting on it is not going to conversations. I do learn things through conversations, of course, and they tend to be timely news oriented business news.
Politics, you know, or even just kind of ideas for like, where should I live? And, you know, those 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 wealthy or just set you apart from everyone else. You're much more likely to find that through books and self-reflection. Then by talking to anybody like saying sitting here and listening to me, you're doing it because you're bored. Okay, it's not really a form of self improvement, if you're putting this in the self-improvement.
Giant 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.
Well, I guess I just learned, I got to go read a book. Then. There you go. Thank you.
In fact, I've been doing a lot of Club House 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.
I have like a message together. 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 myself feeling my own brain, in my own curiosity. Rather than regurgitating what I know for the thousandth time until you all get sick of me and you know, then start creating some kind.
Kind of a novel is Affordable, has certain beliefs and not others. I don't know half the half the stuff. That's even that Almanac that Eric Jorgensen put together. I would 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.
Hey no, I
To say the same things again, but it is it is a point of having listened to that podcast again. So agreed as well. Roxy go for now. I'll what do you like the most about? You know, one. One second one second Roxy, please. I know. I know. It's not my turn to ask my question. So I'll wait for that. But I one thing I was going to say is that I do kind of disagree with you. And you said, this is purely entertainment and that it's people are listening to learn and they're probably I don't remember exactly the quote after that, but I just
Want to disagree for that with that because there are a lot of people in this room. This room has over 3,000 people and for you just don't know who's learning from what. So, I think to say that it's purely entertainment, even some of the things that I've heard, while, you know, people ask you questions. And it's not even just so much as what you're saying, but sometimes it's the way in how you answer it or the way that you structure the sentences or the, the particular words that you choose to say. When you answer the question. Those are learning experiences for some people. So I just wanted to interject and say that I disagree.
That point.
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 like similar might happen to you.
Hey, no, Vol. Can I say something? I'm not sure. I'm in order here for going in order. You know what? Let's let's keep some order to this chaos while I'm not let's go to Roenick that are
no problem. Yeah. Yeah. I know. So you have mentioned this many times. That one person you don't mask makes you feel like are you doing interesting things in your life?
So what do you like most about him?
Well, I think look I've met you.
A few times and 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 and billionaires in this world. Most of them are boring. You, let 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, you know, rich people, bad and poor people good. What nature used to call slave morality, which was the inversion of the old classical Antiquities morality where power and might and were seen as goods. And, you know, later weakness was in victimhood were seen as Goods. So we kind of go through these pendulums where either the person on top.
The lion, the Caesar is a 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 puritanism or progressivism that weakness and victimhood are good. But the reality is, you know, 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's, it is just completely
Be shocking to me, when someone criticizes you on must publicly and you can just see the jealousy dripping off the Tweet. You can literally just see that the shear unhappiness in the misery that this person is in, when all they can do is criticize someone who has done so much. So it just it just reveals more about the critic that it does about the so-called man in the arena, which is Elon Musk. So yeah, he's impressive. He doesn't make me question. If I'm doing everything I could with my life if I'm thinking big enough. That said, I've 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 admired them as technological marbles marbles, but he does make me say, hmm. There's a guy who's following his most intense passions and following them publicly. And am, I 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. You know, I kind of
It's funny. I made myself. Like I went through this a few years ago, was like so what is it that I want to do with my life, right? What is the thing that I want out of my life? And I said, three targets for myself internally. And I basically just said, okay, you know, 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
It's in my life. And I don't want to try that won'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 idol goals that I set for myself and you know, 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 so far so good. Right? 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 Clubhouse.
And all night, but the reality is 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, he was with a friend of his, and his friend was looked very successful. Look, very financially successful. Look very socially successful, this, when I was much younger and he said, he really the quote for this guy to be who said I've always done whatever I want and I was like, wow, he's got
All that all of that and he just did whatever he wanted. So at least resolve that I wouldn't be miserable in the journey, right, 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 you may have even been sued or one step out of jail. So I got to say, it goes well for everybody but hey, it worked for me.
Hey navall. Hi, this is L juniel here at the bottom. So first I want to say I'm just super excited to hear you talk because me to Jenelle. I'm so sorry. There have been people. No, I'm sorry. Thank you so much. I appreciate that. I just want to give people a chance to have been waiting patiently. Veta, welcome. Oops, Frank. Sorry, Frank. Hello.
Hey, how are you?
Nepal to your point, there's a lot of
entertainment and all this and to Roxy's Point, there's a lot of people learning but for the sake of entertainment because they think there's over 3,000 people in here. Let's stick to that.
Give us a guilty, pleasure something that we can't read about.
Well, if you couldn't read about it and how I 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 brains and I thought I did, but I might lose that know. It's like, give us
something about. Yeah, people put out that tweet where they're like, hey, you know, 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 do that. Look every 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.
It is not, you know, nothing nothing. They care about nothing dirty, got something fun.
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 work out. Then I get on the phone. I just basically do a bunch of phone calls. I do a bunch of emails that go for a walk, you know, make dinner play with the kids, go to bed. Like that's my average day and just repeat Ad nauseam. Oh, yeah, and I read a lot in between like I during the day and reading way too much Twitter, but also opened
IBooks or my Kindle and I'll just read pages from a book at night time. I'll use you read, call it depending on the book and you were being twenty to a hundred Pages for you. Go to bed. Okay, I'll give you one. I listen to podcasts in the shower. So I'll put my ear pods out of the shower. So long time ago. I decided that whether Apple sales, they're waterproof, or not. Their pods are extent. They are expendable. So, I would just put on the air pods, 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 to the
Cast 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. We should be on the Tim Ferriss blog. But once in a while, I will just listen to podcast. When the shower, there you go.
I love that. We eventually I love that. We eventually got there because when when you ask a question, the best thing to do is
just shut up after you ask it and let people just telling her story. Sure. Sure. Yeah, that's what it's like a hack. Like, if somebody doesn't want to do something, right? And you're trying to figure out why let's say, like you're trying to sell somebody a product and they want, you know, 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, right? So sometimes you have to ask them again. You'll say well, okay, that that any other reasons and they'll give you a reason and it's like the last reason they give you the one you have to drag out of it. That's the real reason exactly layer, your questions you'll get to it.
I just wanted to add, I'm getting a lot of messages and of all people say, hey bring this person up. This podcast is here. This host is the other celebrities here. And I think we see you as the person, you know, the person of the people. And so, you know, maybe there are great minds on.
State and I think there already are, but the point is we just wanted to equal it out for their anyone. Join the conversation. So, you know, thanks to everyone. That's been participating. So far--and, whether the questions are
useful entertaining or
intelligent or whatnot? Like this is amazing. So thank you so much.
Yeah. One thing I've decided that we don't need anymore as we don't need intermediaries even even the new social media intermediaries. What do I mean by that? Even the Joe Rogan's of the world even the time Karis is the world who are interviewing, you know, people
They needed less now than they were before. So at first, we needed a New York Times to get the word out, then we had Twitter. Okay, then we 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 your 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 and it'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 this is run out of things to say themselves, right, Joe Rogan, poor guy. He's been on what is it? 1,500.
Besides 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 the normal frequent use topics, the frequent conversation topics. He brings on people from all different, walks of life from Academia to science to, you know, martial arts to psychedelics, do what have you, and he'll interview each one of them, you know, very thoroughly, he doesn't
A lot of homework. He's actually the single most prepared interviewer I've ever encountered by far. When I talk to him for two hours, that man was present. One hundred percent 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 look back and to my surprise, he will still completely focused. He was so present anyway, impressive guy, but you just run out of material, so I'm not going to get
Can interview people. But the same time I don't need people to interview me
either.
Love it. Well, I'm doing the opposite of that. Exactly, but Veta sorry to be an intermediary, but I want to ask you a question. If you're back now,
it's fine. If you're running crowd control for me, although, you know, when I the few times I run crowd control by calling people in the clubhouse rooms. I'm brutal. I give him 30 seconds that I kick him off the stage. Yeah, precisely to prevent people from like giving ads or just
rambling. I love it. Thank you Rahul. It looks like it's you then.
All right. Thanks guys, and I've all your spot on here. I am with just five followers. I think I'm up to 18 now, but this Clubhouse allows a space where I can talk to, you know, people who have lot more social media exposure than others. So thank you for that. And thank you Clubhouse for doing this. And thanks saw. Before, for summoning, the vault.
To the, to the stage. I'm first of all, I think I need to change my icon. I'm here in Tokyo, Japan. I just left a job, which had no Wi-fi. Did. Everyone change their face back from not know Vol. So I apologize if I'm missing that.
But my Saviour, the last one bro. Frank nursing. I apologize. I'll do it right after this. I'm fine. I don't know. Wanted to either by the way, like, this is a 20 year old.
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 her imagination
like it. I wanted to expand on the
concept that you put out there. I think in your Tweet storm back in 2018. You said something to can to we should try to set your own
hourly wage and then Outsource everything else. My question is from someone who personally
It's kind of been pinched by the coronavirus and lost business. How how can we expand on? They get back from 0 to 1. Obviously, I still need to look an hourly framework. But how if you could just kind of expand that thought a little on how to get back to just setting your hourly wage and, you know, Outsourcing everything else. Thank you.
Yeah, it's not some hardened for us 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 so it's not meant to be a hard and fast rule. It's just kind of a general understanding of we'll 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 but 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-flier miles. They could just got another job instead. Obviously. This requires you to have a career or a job where you're earning is, 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 if we 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 they need and abroad an open mind. If you look at entrepreneurs right 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 created the wrong space or the start of the wrong person or the structure of the wrong way, no amount of hard work.
Could have saved them later. It's like when you build an app, you know, if you're Paul Davis and Rollins 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 Creator, and if you aspire to be wealthy, then you can't have a busy calendar. This is not an excuse for laziness. This is 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'll be tired from work. What I do. I have a couple of friends come over and we brainstorm on startups. I was always brainstorming on the next thing because it was exciting to him. 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 doing, spend your time, unless you enjoy it. Like if you enjoy it, then it doesn't matter. So another way I would put it as like you want to spend all your time, either learning learning or relaxing and relaxing is a broad category relaxing include spending time with your kids if you have them or, you know, doing or 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
We add Fitness into that, right exercise. Sure great, but you kind of don't want to do anything else, not, if you're 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. Right? Like you order something that these days little different with Amazon, but in the old days, you buy something that thing is that thing breaks, right? Most people will go back to the store and they'll wait in line a customer service the
Argue over things in the way of the receipt, you know, other sit on hold the customer service for an hour to get a ten dollar, refund. Well, you just said your time's worth 10 bucks. It's actually worse than that, because that hour you spend phone customer service. Not only the cost you an hour, but it costs you to emotional well-being. You're probably angry the whole time. So there's another hour that you lost being angry and coming 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, you know, the world is not rigged in such a way that the harder you work. The more you get hard work is a prerequisite 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 interested. 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 there 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 is I choose to allocate my time to do the things that I think are important, and this is a cut off below, which I will consider these things.
Aunt.
Awesome. Thank you.
You could speak on it, which is something we'll test another day. Cola, probably true.
Toula. Go ahead.
Hey, all right, she's offended because I said the right name wrong. Maybe or she may be can't speak which is totally fine or audio. Hi, Roxy. Thank you so much patiently, waiting, really appreciate you doing that. Yeah. Absolutely. Okay. So Navarro you talk to you hinted on trust and safety. A bit earlier when you were talking, but my question is, do you see a conflict with the way? Now? Let me scrap that. Let me know, ask that. I'll put
Okay, what the way that trust and safety is growing. Do you see a conflict between the idea of independent tech companies kind of growing trust and safety? In addition to their revenue model is the reason why I say that is because like when you take Twitter for prime example, sometimes not sometimes but all time oftentimes Twitter does profit from the controversy that happens on their platform. And so when you get into this Arena
I guess of self-regulation or trying to figure out what is considered hate speech. Like you mentioned earlier. Does that conflict with the idea of a trust and safety department and the way that it may grow within an independent tech company going forward, when a lot of tech companies do profit from some of these
occurrences.
Free speech is something that has been litigated as such 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 see it on Twitter. The fact that if the 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 the trust and safety organizations. Basically, saying actually we have a different code then.
Then what 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, the tech industry knows that it's a dirty secret of the tech industry. That is just leads to these aggregator monopolies these until blockchains come along and decentralised all the things. And so in this monopolistic situation that were in what we find is that the Town Square is run by private company in that, private company has a different definition of free speech. Then
We have conversion upon as a society with our laws and buildings and constitutions and various titles and acts and legislation. If speech should be limited than 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, too.
To all the people out there who say that, it's great for the trust and safety team, and Twitter's a private company and they can do whatever they want. How would you react if tomorrow Peter teal 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.
Really great points. Thank you. All right. Hello. Welcome back. How was your audio this time?
Kella hear me. Yeah. Okay. Great. Thank you guys for so much for putting this together and of all, thank you so much for coming into this room. So my question is centered around ethical what wealth creation. So, I think that the definition of ethics tends to be subjective or at least these days, it is absolutely subjective. Depending, whether you are, you know, let's say you, you believe in God or a higher being or, and whether you don't I fix,
And be extremely subjective. So when you think about ethical wealth creation, how do you
see that?
Yeah, that's a good point. I believe you're you're correct in that. A lot of what is ethics would be subjective. But I believe that there's also a certain objective things that we, as a society agree, upon as ethics. And for, and, and those things, we have actually codified into laws in many cases. So, examples of things that I think we would all agree fall within the domain of Ethics or 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.
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 lobbyists skiing, then that is somewhat unethical. Then you can kind of get into gray areas like smoking and you know me 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.
More in the domain of like, 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 write incredibly wealthy people and they're sort of interesting bag, but firstly, one interesting point is they're generally less happy than the average person like that. That whole thing about like money doesn't buy you happiness and like which people aren't happy it. Weirdly turns out to be true. Most of them are miserable for reasons that I still have. You been a hard time wrapping my head around.
Run, but the second piece is that almost all of them believed 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 hard-wired. 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
Oil in the United States, but but it's like, what you're doing internationally or overseas might be unethical. Or in this case would be coercive to go get it. Blood diamonds being a famous example, right? Then that is unethical if we get into something like defensive stuff, you know, just like Ministry of truth. It's obviously the ministry of Lies. Defense, department is obviously Department of War, right? So if you're arming the defense department to go and blow people up, well now that's borderline unethical, right? There are some people who will say, that's unethical. You reason is
Bump or brown people in the Middle East. Well, another person might say, none of 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 terrorist 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, I don't think I'm, I'm like, have some incredible grasp and ethics, but here's another point about ethics. When you are doing something unethical, you
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 your kind of like, and there's a party with it. Because, mmm, can I get away with this? Right? There's always like that little devil on your shoulder. Arguable angel on your shoulder. I think most of us actually know when we're doing something unethical. So, maybe 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 as the others. Everyone has their own moral quote. That's the beauty of humanity. We're all different. We all have different.
You points all subjective in that sense, but there are some collective sense coercing other people is a collective sense. That's why I'm so opposed to censorship censorship is literally silencing. Somebody it's clapping their hands over their mouth and say you're not allowed to say that. That is coercion. So, 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 was on a lot to your
Personal moral code.
And do you see that being scalable? They see the concept of, you know, ethical wealth creation. So for example, if we break it down some of the financial institutions are you know, basically have predatory practices that are taking advantage of you know, the underbanked of the of the poor. Do you? Do you have a vision or a way that we can scale ethical the just the
concept I didn't so I'd be careful in that.
So, for example, people have said to the longest time, that payday loans are unethical in 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's cost 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 a Google was originally don't be evil when they removed that from their motto. And now this
Sensor freely. So and 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 they use all these various agreements and lock-ins to basically control Android and it is Google owned farm. So I think it's it's a nature of companies that went. It's a nature of power that you know, the old line is power corrupts. Absolutely true. So when any person or any institution games too much power they inevitably end up Carew.
They never lie occurs because people are subjective, institutions are subjective. They want to do what's best for themselves and they'll always Cloud it and close 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 starting point, but then because of aggregator benefits and network effects and scale.
Enemies the winner, Justin to dominate everything, a friend of mine texted me today and he said, hey, who are the number 234 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 thing. It's online. I'm not talk about offline. Yeah. Offline didn't go to Costco for a few things. It's nearly impossible to answer and this is the fricking store to sell you things. This was a market that in the real world was taken up with thousands of competitors and every street corner, but now we only have one company that is shipping us everything. So it's just the nature of the internet that scale economies and network effects lead us to single.
And these monopolist 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 the 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 as one who hands over the power and that it's 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 you could have just done that and created a new monarchy and a new 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 that giving him too much credit, but I think you get, you get the point in that, it's about control.
I think I'm probably got to go soon. I actually did have a lot to do tonight. This was sort of my, this is unexpected and unplanned. So maybe I'll take one more question that I'll hop off the air. Thank you, buddy. All right. Thanks.
We got lucky last Ed just in the in terms of the order that we had then add make it a good one. I don't know if it's a good one. But going back to your earlier point about how you get to choose your time on what will what you do and what you do.
And what was curious about origin, opinions are like, what was, what was going on? You know, what was that? Why did you decide that was thing to work on back in the day as the first part of the question of Europe? For instance. Second one is, it seemed like a lot of what happened opinions, kind of influence everything you've done since kind of cursive you're talking about loud at all. Either way. Thanks for stopping by.
Yeah. I mean, it's it's actually not the most interesting topic. I was just into 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 is lifespan. We were doing restaurant reviews and things like that. But keep in mind, this is before Google Maps existed in and local mapping existed. So it was hard to map restaurant reviews and 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 recruiting, how you build a hard?
Team and how you tank would be seized. You know, these biographical stories. Honestly, I'm not sure you're going to learn anything from them and not even sure. I'm going to learn anything from repeating them because these are just narratives, right? They're stitched together, narratives, in my head and there are no interesting. The 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, what?
Over they call it now, like fortune cookie, Twitter or ghee on Twitter or you know, VC advice, Twitter. 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, keeping him Saga, which was just go long term, long term, long term, especially in your relationships, don't engage in.
Relationships actually applies further than that, don't engage in acquaintances, do 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, but when you barely know them, but the day you decide that you're not going to be friends forever. There's no more Point 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, this was
Is the tweet that launched at all, it did come out of my epinions experience. Because there are 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 went ahead and I did it for the money for the money, right? That's the classic reason why people do it but you catch people doing it. They're like, oh I did it for my family to 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.
Talkative 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 the next thing, you know, I have a internet personality. So that's kind of fun. Maybe I can cash this in for some prizes. Later. Speaking of that have a really funny question and to end it and again, you've been so amazing. Is there a scientific or a specific reason why you follow?
339 people on clubhouse or is it just a coincidence? You do nuggets like that. Like, do you drop things around for people to figure out like, yeah, that's in numerology code in there. It's not. Yeah, because of properly you got a private key and the private key will unlock a thousand. What I know. You don't like to give back to the less fortunate.
I just followed users to be 42. Beautiful symmetry is destroyed have to Google that. Yeah, and and and this simulation has come to an end. Thank you very much and good
night. Thank you. That's awesome. All right, anyone wants to join us up and talk about this. You're more than welcome to yeah. To, to be provocative.
I wanted a ton of
all kick. You
Behavior. Instead of him leaving, that would have been
interesting would have. That would have been a nice headline.
To do instead. Yeah. He said he had to leave before you did get to follow out of it, which is
