Thread by @jradoff

1/23 Podcast of the year - @tferriss and @balajis on:

transhumanism vs. anarcho-primitivism
Web3
Decentralization & counter
Code > principal-agent problem
DeFi=every asset tradable
new governments

Impossible to cover 5 hrs here; read for 22 ideas.

tim.blog/2021/11/15/bal…

2/23 The US went from winning everywhere without fighting, to fighting everywhere without winning (example: regarding Covid-19 as a military defeat for the US)

3/23 Blockchain changes the Principal-agent problem (misalignment of incentives between principal and an agent) into a coding/debugging problem

4/23 Example: In the future, management becomes automation - if you tell a robot to unpack a box it does it (no incentive alignment issue).

5/23 "If the goal is to eliminate human error, then it is an error to have humans in the system"

6/23 All of these extremes of capital-social structure are not optimal:
Communist Capital: You must Submit

Woke Capital: You must Sympathize

Crypto Capital: You must be Sovereign

Goldilocks zone? humans are individuals but humans are social and you make compromises.

7/23 Example: when not everyone has to hold their own coins but everyone CAN, then there’s still enormous leverage over the system. (Not everyone needs to be entirely self-sovereign)

8/23 Robotics reduces the size of the minimum viable modern society (maybe from hundreds of millions of people to thousands?)

9/23 The future is a Decentralized West vs Centralized China

10/23 Cycles of centralization <-> decentralization:

When centralized: people resent control and want power

When decentralized: chaos; what’s scarce is leadership

11/23 But centralization vs. decentralization is not exactly a cycle -- it is more like a helix with these cycles intertwined and moving together (I interpreted this as some systems are decentralizing while others are in a process of centralization)

12/23 Horizontal gene transfer is a metaphor for cultural copy-pasta.

13/23 Transhumanism vs anarcho-primitivism:

Anarcho-primitivism: back-to-the-land, living more simply

Transhumanism: Technology is what makes us human

14/23 Example of technology making humanity possibly: Cooking.

We outsourced our metabolism to cooking.

Let’s go to the stars!

15/23 We tend to think of countries, communities, companies, etc as different things but they will all become projections of social networks.

16/23 Blockchain becomes the software stack for running a community.

Blockchains can contains all property rights, history, access, identity, etc

A "company" become likes an app in this ecosystem

17/23 Order books are price discovery mechanisms; everything will go on-chain and make everything computable, traceable, priceable
So: crypto wallet contains everything - every currency, stock, every video game potion, etc.

18/23 In this universe, we then have the DeFi (decentralized finance) matrix:

all of these assets can be exchanged against each other, offering instant liquidity, cross-collaterilzation, programmability, etc.

19/23 There's no more "developing world" vs. "developed world"
Just ascending vs descending world
[Example: San Francisco as a descending city?]

19/23 If you aren’t extremely careful with blockchain smart contracts (audit them, etc.) it means you will be compromised Day 1.

Crypto basically has a built-in bug bounty.

Result: the most secure systems ever created.

20/23 Kevin Mitnick style social engineering will be on the rise (just like you see on Discord now)

21/23 Future government business models: inflation and subscription.

Subscribe to a government almost like a SaaS platform which provides certain services.
Create new “digital REITs” where community members have long-term interest in the shared community, not just their parcel

22/23 Balaji likes $BTC more than any other - because of the disappeared founder, the ideological (quasi-religious) elements, “nothing competes with it” @Bitcoin

But he's a polytheist and not a Bitcoin maximilist, which is too extreme.

23/23 Re-read Dune! @tferris says: very nuanced view of how people make myth.

[Compare to how early Satoshi texts are somewhat religious in structure since they go beyond algorithms and talk about value judgments (e.g., debt=bad)]

In closing, I hope you'll listen to the podcast, and not just stop at my list. There was too much good material to post about here.

Many of the ideas will challenge how think about things, or equip you with better ways of understanding and explaining the age we live in.