@Naval through the looking glass part 2. His second periscope in tweets. Includes: Airpod love, equal outcome sucks, paleo trumps keto, Elon worship, why have children, and a perspective on death. Caveat: not a direct transcription. The first thread - bit.ly/2HJAbPS
I don’t own Apple stock but I really love Airpods. I think these are the best product they’ve made since the iPhone. – N
1/3 Why tokens are inseparable from blockchain. A public blockchain is assembling resources from anonymous resources/actors all over the world. Making sure those resources are provided and people can consume those resources. – N
2/3 Someone has to keep track of who’s providing the resources, distributing them and consuming them. When you do that you essentially have a ledger entry of credits and debits and that automatically creates a currency. – N
3/3 In my mind blockchains will involve currencies. I’m sure there are exceptions but they are very pathological. – N
Fiction recommendation: I stopped reading fiction a while ago. I’d still recommend sci-fi, particularly Snow Crash. Incredible cyberpunk novel. In some way it predicted cryptocurrency, VR, the internet. Had a huge influence on me. – N
The right book at the right time will speak to you in a way that the right book at the wrong time just won’t. Read Krishnamurthy in my 20s, didn’t make sense. Read him in my thirties, changed my life. – N
1/14 On status and wealth. Deep down, all of us want to be free, nobody wants to be told what to do, how to live their life. The easiest path to freedom, to get rid of the money problems, is the money. – N
2/14 Though most people would say they’re above it, the world would be better if we made everybody richer. – N
3/14 I don’t mean double the bank account. I mean like the real thing. Nicer house, environmentally conscious; nicer car, electric car; food on the table, reliable high quality internet. – N
4/14 Not talking about redistribution, or socialism. The world would be a better place is everybody was richer. Wealth is a positive sum game. – N
5/14 It’s the reason Silicon Valley works. We can get together form a product or service, create more value, more wealth than before we found it. – N
6/14 The positive sum game of capitalism gets a bad rap. The problem is people signalling against wealth. ‘Money is the root of all evil, I’m beyond wealth, I don’t need it’, or attack income inequality. – N
7/14 All of this is status signalling – trying to gain status in the eyes of the tribe saying ‘I’m looking out for the entire tribe, not just the rich.’ – N
8/14 There must be other ways to order people, than an oligarchy. But many of the others are zero sum games. – N
9/14 What’s annoying about status is that it’s the currency politicians, academics and journalists move in. A zero sum game where for me to be higher, you have to be lower. One of the ways they seek status is by attacking wealth. – N
