YouSaid · the spoken record

Balaji S. Srinivasan

lines on the record
222
first
2022-07-04
most recent
2022-07-04
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “They think transhumanism is like the Klaus Schwab version from the World Economic Forum where you all become mishap and monsters and you're edited and you're”

    2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Anyway, but Sinatra is a good example. Point being that at least Google people kind of know that the ranking is not objective. When you call it a bestseller list, the impression is that it's a numerically ranked thing and it's not editorialized, but it is. Anyway, pointing all the way back up, Tim Ferris's unjuiced, unedited list was interesting because I looked at that. That's actually kind of some open source analytics itself. And when I looked at that, I was like, you know, this interesting, there is a stealth topic here, which I'm also really interested in that Tim's listeners are interested in. And I'm not sure it's being named as such, and that is transhumanism. And that's Huberman Lab. That's life extension. That is brain machine interface. And it's limber generation. It's all your fitness stuff. It is all the recovery stuff and so on. All of that is sort of a whole growing positive, in my view, positive trend. The problem is people have pathologized.”

    2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “Because it's like a very proper noun to query, right? So if you could measure it, and Google is the kind of company that when it was good, it was measuring this kind of stuff, their intent, basically you could argue as to what was number one. Is it the thing that people want to get? It's like searching for Apple should it be the fruit there or should it be, well, actually, if they look for apples, they want the fruit. If they want apple, then they want the company, that kind of thing.”

    2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “So basically, back in the 80s, the guy who wrote, you know, the book The Exorcist, which actually got turned into a movie, sued the New York Times because his book hadn't been Now, what's funny is you'll get a different, if you Google it, you'll probably actually be surprised. For a long time, it was the Sinatra web framework, and now it's Frank Sinatra, you know, the Wikipedia article. And the thing is, that's a great example of what should it be? Most people who are looking for Sinatra are probably looking for the web framework, but most people on the”

    2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Importantly, by the way, to my knowledge, the Tim Ferris rankings are not juiced or editorialized and so on. Did you know that you're probably aware of this? Maybe your listeners aren't. The New York Times bestseller rankings are an editorial product.”

    2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “What's the stealth topic? So I saw the list of the top 10 Temferris podcasts last year where I was number one and number two, despite how long they were, so hopefully the listeners got something out of it. It was an honor just to be nominated.”

    2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “ATT Unix was good, but it wasn't hackable. I couldn't customize it. I couldn't take it apart, look at the engine block. I couldn't make it work on tiny devices and giant servers. I couldn't make it mine. And so currently, it's good, yes, that we have Google Trends and that we have like you can kind of get some sense from the Twitter API and so on, but they're very locked down in a certain way where there's queries you can't easily run. You might have to pay a lot for the API and so forth. Versus if that data set was open, we'd have completely different understanding of society and history and politics. It would be at the same level as the unlock going from AT&T Unix to Linux, or the unlock going from like PayPal to Bitcoin.”

    2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “No, no, no, no. You're right. In one sense, we've got far more information than we ever had. In another sense, I know we have 100 or 1,000 X left to go. And the reason is that think about the difference between, and this is a tech analogy. So you might be like, well, think about it, huh? Okay, but think about the difference between AT&T Unix and Linux. Now, most people, so if you're an engineer, you're like, yeah, dude.”

    2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Of the Overton window, just like huge mass of people shift the midpoint of a price. The thing is, as I mentioned earlier, with Twitter, that back end is not open state. So because it's not open state, we cannot see sentiment moving as we can with price, not as easily.”

    2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Remember this, right? And Singapore was going to cane him as per Singapore law. And frankly, had he been a Singaporean or he had been anybody other than an American, he would have been a law taker. Okay, the law would have just been applied. But all kinds of pressure got applied on this side of the policy market. And Lee Kwan Yu was like, okay, we're going to like reduce the number of strokes of the cane. He didn't set it to zero because that would have been too much of a give. But as a consideration for the, like the US government made it like a diplomatic situation and like a president got involved and all this stuff they're telling Singapore. So the pressure for Singapore was significant on the policy side. And so now the law was negotiable. That's what it means for something to quote get political is that you have huge masses of people that assemble and they shift the midpoint.”

    2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “So once you kind of see that is the macro of how I think about prices and policies, you know, when people say, oh, it's getting political, what they're really talking about is just like with the price example, most people are price takers. You know, as I said, you go and buy the orange juice. Just like most people are law takers. The policy is just applied to you. But if somebody is powerful enough or it's like a weird enough situation, that law flexes. Concrete example. Singapore, I'm taking an example that's like out of our time and place, you know, and so on, so people don't get mad. Singapore like two and a half decades ago, I think in 1997, there was an American citizen, Michael Fay, who was vandalizing things in Singapore.”

    2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “That's the same concept in financial terms as the Overton window. The Overton window is the set of what things are politically acceptable. And sentiment shifts back and forth. There's a thing, here's the current center, and as radicals push that thing that was totally unthinkable moves to the center or conversely, conservatives push, and suddenly it gets pushed back. That's kind of like buy and sell pressure. In fact, you can think of it a lot like that on any given issue. you have essentially almost like votes you have a thousand votes for this level of the policy and 5,000 votes for this level of the policy and 10,000 votes for this level of policy and then you have someone on the other side and when you can shift over those vote banks you shift that midpoint which is a policy just like if you can shift over the order book you shift over the price”

    2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “You're a price taker, it's set price $4.99 or something like that. The thing is, if you start emptying out the shells, if you buy 100 units of orange juice and then you go to the next door, it might be 550. And then the third store here is you're coming and they set it to $7 and so on and so forth, right? You start moving the market price. You are now a price setter in a sense when you start clearing out units. So you've got 100 units at $499 and then 200 units at 550 and now you can get 300 units at 7 and your supply increases as the price increases. And then conversely on the other side. And so that is actually how a price is born. Most people don't usually think about this because you're buying like single individual consumer units. You're not like a bulk purchaser. But when you're purchasing in bulk, suddenly people are negotiable. They can make more money on it. They're okay with negotiating. Okay. What's my point? This idea of market depth, just like we see like a price shift back and forth, you know, with sales.”

    2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “Absolutely. Social and financial volatility. And the way of thinking about that. So let's start with financial because it's a little more quantitative and people know about it. There's this concept called market depth. And if you've ever looked at Coinbase Pro or any crypto exchange, you see this like V-like thing with the buy orders on one side and the sell orders on this side. And this is like how a price is born. Normally most people in normal life are price takers. You go to the store and you buy.”

    2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “They do just to deal with this, they buy in bulk, they have various futures contracts and so on. They buy and sell collars, so they give up some of the upside on that margin to bound their downside. They're getting aluminum for X dollars per kilogram as opposed to greater than X or lower than X. So those companies actually buffer all kinds of crazy variations to give you that clean, dependable 99 or 29 or 1499 whatever price. And governments do this as well in lots of other ways. That's why you don't have people walking down the streets with AKs. That's why you don't have mobs pillaging and so on and so forth.”

    2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “Me talk about can I talk about that for a second? The pretty building okay, so This is something I actually write about in the book, which is we're sort of re entering high volatility times. And the thing about this is most people don't think about it this way, but companies and governments shield people from volatility to an extent that we don't really think about that much. And now that shielding is going away. For example, when you go and buy a laptop from Apple and they quote you some price, let's say, I don't know what it is, $14.99 or $199. I don't know what the number is. Okay, I'm just making that up. When they quote you that price, that's a price that they are selling it for, but the price of aluminum is bouncing around. The price of their rare earth elements on the back end, that's bouncing around their cost of goods is, if they were just buying at spot prices, bouncing around every day. And so in theory, their margin could shrink or grow or whatever on a given day.”

    2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “There's a famous cartoon. It's a guy, he's like, This looks like it's like goodbye. And someone over here is they're like, bye, bye, bye, bye. And then the guy's like, this doc could really excel. And someone over here sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, you know, like this, right? And it's this hilarious sort of loop, which you don't want to be the current thing. You don't want to be the person who is. Buying high selling low. And I think the only way to not do that is set calendar reminders, assess your portfolio, like whether it's a quarterly basis or something like that, and try to make async decisions. You almost never want to sell on bad news, buy on good news. That's my macro outside of any given specific thing.”

    2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “To them. And you can mark them to market. They've got downs and they've got ups, but they are absolutely massive things with tens of millions of dedicated people around the world. And they've come out of nowhere. So yeah, I don't believe that they're going to go away. But again, not financial advice. It's just my personal belief. You can get much more sophisticated in that. But the absolute worst thing to do, by the way, and this is maybe obvious, but I'll just say this, is the worst thing to do is buy an asset when it's in the news and sell it when it's in the news. And what you instead want to kind of do is it's inevitable that something will pique your attention. And then what you do is you set a calendar reminder, you know, let's say 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, so that you are almost like retargeting yourself. And then you go and you actually do research on it outside of the scrum, outside of people yelling about it, you intentionally do it async to the market sentiment.”

    2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “I'd say stick with that. I mean, again, not investment advice and so on, but basically those ecosystems are just still absolutely massive. If you look at, as I said, I think I said something like buy it and then hold it for 10 years. And let's see where we are in 10 years. The fundamentals in terms of not just number of users, but conversation, if Twitter was open source, or rather more specifically if it was open state, that is to say not just the source code was available, but the back end was available, the database was available, okay, not just through an API, but that you could just hit a key and see every tweet if you wanted to, every public tweet at least. If it was open state and you could plot the number and the depth of interactions on Bitcoin and Ethereum and all of their offshoots, not just those keywords, but the thousands of keywords and memes and communities and so on that have been built on these, these are like countries that have built out. And those are things that just have mass.”

    2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Is the fundamental question one of digital freedom? And I can kind of tease that out. But it's fundamentally, do you actually have property rights on the internet, digital property rights? Or can somebody with a police badge from the US or Chinese establishment, depending on what side of the world you're on, get into all of your stuff, surveill all of your stuff, take all of your stuff, freeze and seize all of your stuff, and so on and so forth. So that fundamental question of whether digital property rights should exist and whether they will be valuable in the medium to long term is what gives me confidence in the space, not the specific price. I can talk more, but that's price is down, price is up. I would only invest in those kinds of things that I believe further that aspect of freedom and control.”

    2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “Years ago. Not to say in a thump chest way, but just that you want to try to identify these things that have value independent of that. Can you have a system where the root permissions are independent of the US and Chinese establishments?”

    2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “Listen to them A lot of people Sure. So I'm not a trader, much more of a long-term investor slash angel slash VC. There's actually a fun tweet today by a guy Travis underscore Kling. I've been doing this for 46 straight months. I've never seen one like this before. And he's got a list of all the carnage in the markets. And the thing is, that carnage is in the crypto markets, but it's also in the non-crypto markets. And it's a little more pronounced in crypto, but it is definitely like a systemic type of thing. And the way I type kind of think about it is I was, there's very few spaces that I get into where I don't have an all-weather thesis that works independent of the price. And so I was in genomics way before people were talking about genomics. Doing machine learning way before people were talking about machine learning. It's kind of weird to see people talking about stuff that you're doing like 10 or 15 or whatever.”

    2022-07-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT