Thread by @eriktorenberg

Just a random handful of takeaways & quotes from Balaji Srinivasan's interviews. Ongoing thread 👇

The whole concept of a real name is a social construct, imposed externally to track ppl

It used to be that you used whatever name you wanted in whatever village you were going & you could always reboot

In some cultures, knowing real name of something was to have power over it

Satoshi was the first pseudonymous billionaire & won't be the last.

What Satoshi did by using a pseudonym is he made sure that everyone focused on the technology and the ideas he put out there, not on his celebrity, basically eliminating ad hominem attacks against him,

If your bank account is your store wealth, your real name is your stored reputation.

What digital currency will unlock is the ability to have intermediates.

You don't need to wager your entire bank account or your entire real name on something anymore.

Prediction markets will help keep media accountable:

Currently, there's a strong disincentive for speaking the truth if it makes your in-group look worse or your out-group look better.

Financial incentives help counteract those tribal incentives.

We are a nation of immigrants, but also emigrants.

Since Mobile makes us more mobile, & law is a function of latitude & longitude, it's cheaper to change the law under which you live

The way to do that used to be by voting, but exit is becoming easier, which also empowers voice

Voice really matters when people are leaving in droves.

W/o exit it’s mostly symbolic. Or it becomes revolution.

Sovereign Individual enables libertarian founder to rebuild the state.

Parable of seen & unseen: Takes more empathy & imagination to think about the value that isn't created as a result of regulation, relative to value the regulation saves

(e.g self-driving cars prevent countless deaths, but might introduce a few new ones. Easy calculus. And yet.)

W/o risk-taking, you keep the few that might die from it, but you don’t get the cure that will save the masses

The promise of charter cities to create spaces for this asymmetric risk-taking.

This in a nutshell is why we need parallel institutions across the board

Advice on metrics:

When you pick a North Star metric, make sure to include a second measure of quality to compensate for possible gaming of the first metric.

E.g. if you incentivize salespeople on revenue, also pick a metric related to, say, customer feedback or churn

Bus #: how many ppl can get hit by a bus & startup continu

Once bus # is more than 1 for every position, you have to view ppl as replaceable.

That's a critical transition that happens in companies where they evolve from a collection of individuals to a multi celled organism.

What happens in Sovereign Individual world:

Good things — Society based on choice & consent. Citizen becomes customer.

Bad things — criminals gain new technology too.

Punchline: More upside & more downside. But net positive, and increased global equality of opportunity.

Can’t you seize BTC? You have to:

1- identify person

2- find a way to take private key from person

it shifts the logic of violence, where it used to be that if you had the biggest military, you could take the most money, But not as easy anymore.

https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg/status/1188999781617524737

Best movements combine best of the right (substance) & left (optics)

Hierarchy, capitalism, meritocracy, profit *and* egalitarianism, mission-driven, community ethos, & storytelling.

Crypto enables new economic opportunities:

More information asymmetry means more liquidity which means you can rent out your time.

Any down time you could convert into money just based on how hard you're willing to work

Press button, get work.

The communist manifesto asked "wouldn't it be great if you could be a hunter in the morning, and a tailor at night, & switch through many different professions?"

What if you could actually do that in such a way that didn't involve killing millions of people, like communism did?

Voice & Exit illuminated:

Voice is voting, Exit is immigration

Voice is making a bug report, Exit is forking

Voice is trying to do turnaround of a company, Exit is leaving to start your own

VR will be to crypto what the iPhone was to the internet.

The internet was going but post 2008 w/ iPhone apps where people can program for, internet exploded

everything became more useful when you could do it in a mobile form factor (email, twitter, google maps)

When have your virtual reality and virtual currency. What you get is a virtual economy, right?

And now, via telepresence you can now have somebody be a migrant worker without actually having to leave their family,

Immigration policy is now your firewall

Bullish on perfumes and food because we are conditioned to sight and sound and some extent touch via haptics but scent will be harder to replicate.

Is VR implausible?

Consider Twitter in 2007, ppl tweeting abt breakfast.

The idea that ppl would get fired over tweets, that significant fraction of news would be wrappers over tweets, that politics would shift from offline to this online war zone—that too seemed implausible.

Internet increases variance in everything: You'll get more upside & more downside

e.g. We used to have 30-minute sitcom, we now have 10 second GIFS & 10-hour Netflix binges. 10 min wrap up podcasts and 3 hr long interview shows.

Twitter is a library combined w/ civil war.

You're here studying & ppl are just shooting at each other & sometimes you'll tweet something meant for other learners & a war zone participant will catch wind & shoot at you & try to pull you into the ongoing worldwide social war.

Tiebout sorting - model for how to solve free rider problem in politics where folks can move btw jurisdictions to the one that suits their preference

Treats ballot not as something to be aggregated alone, but as a search query

This is happening online already w/ social neworks

e.g here is preferred tax rate, abortion policy, etc & rather than aggregate with ppl local to you, you treat it as a search query where you can find ppl who share values.

Finding ideological patriots in the cloud & then migrating to live w/ them will be story of 21st century

Social Network Supply Chain—visualize yourself & then visualize all the nodes around you—co-workers, investors, friends—& look at these folks and ask which of them would go south in the event of a negative news article coming from this or that political direction

An additional model of diversity: 1,000 different micro cities that are pure examples of different ways of living.

Cloud formations taking physical shape:

2 ppl meeting for a day—ppl meet on LinkedIn & get coffee

2 ppl for a yr—EHarmony

100K ppl for a day—Protest

100K ppl for a week—Burning Man.

No upper limit to scale & duration. 100K ppl can live together for yrs = cloud cities.

Another example of best of left & right: Singapore healthcare is both far to the left and far to the right of the American system

Left = compulsory savings account

Right = once that money is there in HSA, it’s free market capitalism from there on (insurance, reimbursement, etc)

Why are the free speech people sometimes reprehensible?

Criminalize freedom of speech, and, among the people who will pursue, many will be criminals.

Not a reflection of the merits of freedom of speech, even though restrictions on them will paint it in a poor light.

The meta thing is to hold as a highest value is choice/exit

That is to say, if you choose to be in a society that has a centralized government and that works for you, wonderful

if you choose to be in a basically a commune, and people could actually make that work, wonderful.

To be sure, the right to emigrate at all times doesn't necessarily mean the right to immigrate at all times

Harvard doesn't have open borders. Neither does the New York Times. You can't just go and walk in and get a job or admission there.

Glen Weyl's view: Exit is never meaningful without other people. If exit is done collectively, voice is involved in organizing that collective exit.

Crowd choice:

"If we all move there, your tax rate is currently 10%? Can you knock it down to 9.5?" And we'll all move there. They'll . calculate it and say, okay, I can discount it and we'll lose $ here, but we'll make it up on volume, boom, it's win win"

Imagine a world where they've invented the ability to have flying cars that are very fast so that you can very quickly move across physical jurisdictions.

At that point, it starts becoming just meaningless to have geographically bounded nation states.

What would end up happening is that people would subscribe to different nation states services, which then would negotiate with each other the terms on which their members will interact with each other, and people would be a member of one or more anyways.

To reiterate:

mobile is making this more mobile, and law is a function of latitude and longitude.

So if it's cheaper to change your x&y location, it's cheaper it also change the law under which you live

Two ways to opt out of current location: VR & physically moving.

In the long term, nation states eventually become commoditized providers of land (e.g uranium) and rule sets (laws), and you can kind of pick among them.

then finally, the true borders of a community are no longer the geographical borders, but the ideological borders.

Critiques of libertarianism:

1- Non-aggression principle: if somebody first strikes you and knocks off your head, then you can even retaliate. So if you're just premised on retaliation, you're not going to spread. Communists were definitely willing to first strike and so on

Critiques of libertarianism:

2- "Live & let live" is not a winning ideology. Galt's Gulch is a retreat

As opposed to a tactical placing your foot back to then drive forward w more energy

E.g. we'll move to America, build up there & then come back into Europe like 100yrs later

"I'm convinced by public choice theory--I don't think that many of these regulations are today at least optimized for the consumer I think they're optimized for optics, a person ascending some higher regulatory position

I think very few of them are actually consumer protecting"

Re: drug policy

Netherlands model: drugs are basically legalized.

Singapore model: execute drug smugglers.

Those are extreme left or right--what US does is take the worst kind the left and the right (e.g. healthcare)

Technocracy is inevitable:

if I install software, I know on some level a software engineer wrote this, but think much more implicit is that in yours and everybody's head, some political engineer, some meme-genius, installed memes in our head we can' even trace the origin of.

Ideal property law changes: allow for diff kinds of system administrators to experiment w/ diff kinds of property law.

e.g. Twitter 2.0 w/ marketplace for usernames.

e.g. The earlier you sign up for FB, more $ you get.

Lots of things that work in practice, but not in theory

Different things you need to optimize in society:

The first is the path of the citizen: vote w their ballot, vote w their wallet, vote w their feet. I think that's important that we have all three options or they can choose among their leaders.

2nd: You need paths for ambitious young people to become leaders.

what's great about the whole startup world is it takes these ambitious young megalomaniacs and it puts them into something where their their actions are actually mostly pro social.

For example, there is a prominent tech founder who was a huge email spammer in college and has now become a tech billionaire.

The criminal breaks rules in order to destroy an entrepreneur breaks rules in order to build

Societies need paths to become a citizen & a leader

People want good regulation:

You don't want to test everything yourself. you want to do diligence on a regulator & then just kind of trust after that point.

What regulators deliver as a product is basically a form of star ratings, and some form of bands of bad actors.

The most valuable companies in the last 20 years have actually all been cloud rather than land regulators.

Google regulates the web, filters out malware

eBay regulator of their own marketplace, filtering out bad actors.

Uber & Airbnb have star ratings

Ridesharing is interesting b/c it's a hybrid of the regulator & the marketplace

multiple different legal regimes that exist at the same x comma y location at the same latitude and longitude.

on your phone, you can opt into different taxi regulatory regimes w the tap of button

Re: responding to market failure, it's actually good to tolerate a bit of anarchy.

by tolerating a period of anarchy, you usually develop a technological solution that's superior to imposing a misaligned third party.

Email spam works this way.

Monopolies have civilizational diabetes: too much abundance takes away drive—can't get to infinity unless you know what 0 is

Shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in 3 generations: 1st becomes wealthy, 2nd inherits some work ethic, & 3rd becomes spoiled kids who've never known hardship

Monopolies generate tons of money

And that money attracts parasites, folks who, in a weird, rational kind of way, want maximum compensation for minimum effort, and that huge amount of wealth now starts getting eaten from within by termites

And so disruption takes care of itself

There's a lot of tech companies are just going to get killed by crypto over the next 20 years.

There's so many different areas that crypto gives you tools to attack: Encryption. Property Rights. Governance. Balance.

The most important data structure in SV is the cap table

A few hundred strangers on a cap table can build Google

Crypto can increase the scale of those cap tables by 1,000x.

From aligning a few hundred ppl to millions of people.

What could that enable? Sovereign Collectives

Sovereign Collectives:

20,000 Amazon engineers worth was enough to bring NYC to the bargaining table. NY is 27 million person state. Why did they care about 20,000 people?

Probably made economic sense. Shows that small amounts of coordinated ppl can influence law.

tech ethos (win & help win) is neither progressive nor conservative /libertarian.

progressives would would deny win-win, see world as zero-sum.

conservatives/libertarians are not as ambitious or collective (prefer live and let live)

Progressives are generally against inequality and concentration of wealth and corporate power.

And libertarians/conservatives are often against centralization, and concentration of state power.

Crypto aims to decentralize both.

In economics there's this concept called the solo convergence theorem: all economies converge as a model.

I'm not sure that's real in economics, but I know it's real on Twitter: all ideologies converge the same ideology (the sick burn, the dunk, "let me get this straight")

B/c Twitter turns us into monsters.

What's funny is even if you actively try to not do this, the 1% of the time you do it will be the tweet that seen by, like 80% of people, right?

And what happens is, people even if they don't realize it, subconsciously respond to incentives.

Satoshi should not actually be analogized to a religious leader, like Jesus, but instead somebody like Newton or Einstein.

They're someone who's worthy of respect, but also can be wrong, and should be!

Newton probably would have been tickled that Einstein corrected his theory.

Consider a policeman or teacher having their savings go to a pension fund, who then puts it into a VC, which then goes & puts it into a startup.

W/ crypto, that teacher, if they choose, can go straight to the startup. They can still go the old route, but now they have a choice.

Folks are primed for egalitarianism when they are being selected ("equality!"), and they're primed for elitism when they are doing the selecting

When selecting, they don’t just want a average school for their kid, they want the best school. Not a random doctor, the best doctor.

So when you turn everybody into investors, you make everyone a selector. That's a massive shift.

They're thinking about wealth & value creation, which involves downside as well as upside.

They appreciate that $ doesn't grow on trees, & it's hard to make(w/o printing or taxing).

Contrasting French & American Revolutions:

The French Revolution was like, we want food, give that to us. But didn't change until regime changed.

American revolution said, we want legitimacy. So ppl experimented w/ democracies & made a better system that replaced existing one.

The French Revolution was like a pure left revolution, but the American Revolution was a balance of left and right.

And so it was both all men are created equal *and* no taxation without representation.

Dynamism/inspiration of the left & practicality/concreteness of the right.