Intro 0:00

‘Web3 is the business model for open source’ 1:27

Web3 doesn't have to go mainstream to be valuable 3:18

Life is a single player game 5:53

Be carful mixing the truth with what you want to be true 12:32

In the modern world, clarity of thought is everything 15:52

Pseudonymity and accountability 20:42

Read what you love until you love to read 25:00

Physicists get the ultimate feedback from reality 34:46

‘People who converge on the truth converge together’ 41:04

‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’ 42:37

Ruthlessly prioritize your time 46:12

Web3 in the developing world 49:29

Being wrong in the digital world doesn't cost as much  55:33

Don’t take on problems you can’t solve 59:01

Knowledge is what makes a resource a resource  1:01:02

Pessimism is intellectually seductive 1:05:05

Don’t worship at the alter of credentials 1:06:55

Be wary of scare tactics 1:08:47

The ‘final boss’ for crypto is the state 1:14:12

Crypto is the Internet’s immune response to overregulation 1:21:10

History will look unkindly on attacks on free speech 1:23:11

Outro 1:26:58

You get to ask a question and then I'm going to bounce you back to the audience and then I'll discuss that question.

Unfortunately, I found that other formats just don't work as well.

And I reserve the right not to answer your question, but feel free to ask any question.

I think specific questions are better ones that are practical and concrete rather than these wide ranging philosophical questions.

I think philosophy is better experienced in the particular than in the general or the abstract, because then it can have a real impact on our lives.

And I'm just here to have fun, just like all the rest of you and learn something.

And I'm probably gonna make mistakes and much of what I say is gonna be wrong.

Don't take it out of context, resist the urge to tweet things that are sensationalist and out of context.

These days, 1 of the ways I survive on Twitter is by blocking frequently with extreme prejudice, so keep that in mind.

1 of the reasons I'm doing a Twitter space instead of just tweeting as much is because Twitter, as usual, continues to be very combative.

People like to misinterpret things, take things out of context, and just strawman everything rather than steelman it.

So 1 of the advantages of a format like this is that I can provide more context.

I'm gonna mute my mic while I go through the requester's profiles, and yes, your profiles do matter, and I'm gonna figure out who I'm bringing up here.

think about how open source will transform Web 2 to Web 3 startups, companies?

As I promised, even though I know you and respect you, I'm going to move you back to the audience.

Oops, I think I may have bounced him from the space altogether.

If he doesn't, I will send him an Apology later.

Anyway, if I did bounce in for the space, I owe him an apology.

If you have a crypto application or a web3 application and it's not open source, and is it really even open source?

In fact, I think it was Chris Dixon who said that Web3 is the business model for open source.

And it's amazing to me how many people beat up Web3 without realizing that this is the heir to the open source movement that's found a business model and how many of the original OSS folks consider crypto a scam when it may be the answer to many of their dreams.

And I think that's as simply as I can put it.

You couldn't have web3 without open source.

Of course you can have open source without web3, but I would argue that web3 allows you to take your open source application, actually instantiate and run it in distributed format and get paid for it and let the users own their data.

The data is owned by the users And the network is owned by the contributors.

So that's probably the 3 big differences between web 3 and web 2.

For anyone who's looking for a slightly more precise definition than just taking web and incrementing the number behind it by 1.

We've got a lot of questions here, so I'm just going to start, Maybe I'll crank through people a little bit faster.

So I have a pretty simple question is with web 3, since we are on the topic with web 3, what do you think like just AI and ML kind of found their way into the whole ecosystem?

How can web 3 be more mainstream so that there's no kind of question about it later that whether it's actually legit or not.

I just want to get this question out from more from the student's perspective, if you can answer it.

I don't quite fully understand the question that you're asking.

Would you mind rephrasing it a slightly different way?

I think it was something about how can you get web 3 out there?

Look, these things are going to be adopted on their own schedule.

Web3 is going to build lots of hopefully useful apps that you couldn't have otherwise.

It's trying to appeal mainly to the applications that would otherwise be deplatformed or benefit from decentralization or creating a frontier where no such frontier currently exists so you can have innovation.

There's no ironclad law of software that all new software movements have to appeal to all people.

In fact, you could argue that open source didn't actually transform large chunks of software and most users never directly interacted with or use open source for quite a long time, but yet it still had a huge effect in the data center in the background and debugging and building the underpinnings of much of what we see on the web.

So I don't think there's any ironclad law that web 3 has to go mainstream.

The same way, like I don't think Bitcoin has to go like super mainstream to be valuable.

If it just becomes a reserve asset like gold, how many people actually hold gold as a reserve asset?

Not a lot, but it doesn't take a lot for people to park their wealth in something like that and use it as a reserve asset for it to be valuable.

So the same way I'm not convinced Web3 necessarily has to go mainstream anytime soon for it to be incredibly valued.

If you just have a lot of very smart people tinkering on the edge, building apps, accepting Web3 currencies, and innovating in that whole field and partaking in DeFi or NFTs or anything of that sort, it doesn't have to be mainstream.

Because you're dealing with money and memes, it can spread virally and it can build and hold and capture value very fast.

People have made huge fortunes in crypto without it having even gone mainstream yet, and I think that trend can continue for quite a while.

If that's your automatic response, then you haven't studied it enough.

If I could just reread it and then maybe get your take on it.

You said, The reality is life is a single player game.

You're born alone, you're going to die alone.

You're gone in 3 generations and nobody cares.

I mean, I think about this quite a bit myself.

I spend quite a bit of time alone and sometimes it has me thinking, what's the point?

So I was just, I wanted your, your take on that.

Obviously it's not a hundred percent true.

Life is also a multiplayer game, But I think it's more interesting to consider it as a single player game, because that's not a thought that gets brought up as often.

Society always trains us for society's ends and society is a multi user organism.

So it will train us for the multi user game.

So only the individual can themselves stumble upon the single-player game and that frame of mind and see where it takes them.

So why is this an interesting frame of mind?

So much of the world, so much is your interpretation of the world, So much of mindset is your mindset to a tree or a rock or a house or even another person reality is very different to an object reality is neutral to another subject reality subjective from their point of view.

So a lot of this is up to you how you want to interpret it.

Another point here is that the only moment that really exists is now, even tomorrow or yesterday are just thoughts in the current moment.

You're not necessarily gonna be around for any appreciable period of time.

Everything you do will be forgotten like everything in the past has been forgotten.

It's not to say it's meaningless but it's more to say that you create your own meaning, you interpret your own meaning, you are the meaning of your own life and that gives a freedom.

Now you can, You're free to interpret this however you want.

Inside every person is either a budding god or a budding demon or an angel or a saint.

It's entirely up to you how you choose to interpret it.

I just recommend that you interpret it in a way that is as close to reality as possible because then you're likely to make less mistakes.

And if you have the choice, if you must choose that interpret it positively, because it's just better to live a positive experience than a negative 1.

People who commit suicide, for example, God bless them, but they left the game too early.

They were going to leave the game anyway.

So you may as well just stick it around, see what it has planned for you.

Is the problem that there's a lack of meaning?

If there was a meaning to life, then we would all be stuck trying to figure out that meaning.

And the moment that a person found that meaning and shared it with everybody else, then we would all be enslaved to that particular meaning.

So I think it's liberating that there's no meaning to life.

And certain meanings that you create or interpret are far more pleasant than others.

Some of them can lead you directly to a life of contemplative bliss.

Some of them can lead you straight to creativity.

Some of them can lead you to helping other people.

I would argue that the meanings that are best to create and work on are the ones that self actualize you against your natural talents.

The thing that you enjoy doing that puts you in flow, that has some worthwhile benefit either to yourself or to society, and doesn't cause extreme negative repercussions for you in this life.

And just be aware that a lot of the things that look like they're good for you are actually just good for you in the short term, and they do cause negative repercussions in the long term.

So to me, the part of the secret of living a good and happy life is just understanding the long-term consequences of your actions.

And so if you create a meaning that long-term will lead you to compound interest in good relationships and in creating wealth for yourself and not having a very busy mind and just being able to go through life sort of happy from moment to moment, that's going to be a better life that you've created for yourself.

But yeah, if you want to create a harsher and darker or shorter life for yourself, you should feel free to make that choice.

I just don't think it's a very wise choice.

The single player game frame also robs you of this idea of outside agency.

It takes away this idea that you are a victim, that things happen to you, that you don't have agency in your life.

I think that the belief that people fall into where they're victims.

There are real victims in real circumstances, but they're far rarer than Twitter would have you believe.

On Twitter, there's many budding victims who are raising their hand, crying for victimhood.

And all you're doing is you're robbing yourself of your agency.

You're robbing yourself of your ability to make a difference in your own life.

So even if you have been a real victim, let's just go ahead and accommodate that for a moment.

I would say it's still a better frame to basically say, no, life is a single player game.

And long-term, when you look back on your life, the moments you can be proudest of is when you rose past circumstances that were difficult, when you rose past your suffering, and then you accomplish something.

That's where characters built, that's where resumes are made, that's where people have their proudest moments.

So if you had no adversity, it would be a really boring game.

Imagine a game of, I don't know, Mario Brothers, where there was no jumping and no prizes and nothing to do and no monsters.

It would be incredibly dull and incredibly boring.

Also a game that went on forever would get really dull.

1 of my other related tweets is, the only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life.

And this 1 triggered a lot of people, which I love the tweets that actually trigger a lot of people, but they're undeniably true.

Which is, intelligence is like this abstract concept that we talk about, but the real measure is, did you get what you wanted in life?

And there's 2 parts in there, it's not just 1 part.

1 part of course is, were you able to hack reality to get what you wanted?

But the more important part is, were you smart enough to figure out what to want in the first place?

And that means there are many booby prizes that simply aren't worth having.

And then there are others that are out of your reach.

It's ludicrous for me to desire wings or even to travel into a rocket into outer space, because it's either low ROI effort or it's unachievable for me.

So what I want to do is to figure out what it is that is worth wanting.

And remember, not wanting something is as good as having it.

So if you can not want in the first place, that's even better.

But the test of intelligence here is getting what you want in life, but also knowing what to want.

So when life is a single player game, you get to craft it.

It gives you a level of freedom you would not have.

Multiplayer games are inherently less free.

I encourage a single player frame simply because society will not encourage it.

You won't encounter it outside of the individual.

And also because it gives you back your agency.

And it has the benefit of being largely true.

I've actually just ventured into this space and, and I'm coming from a place where when I say I just ventured into this space, I'm part of a founding team of a social impact platform called Save a Love, Save a which means selfless service, and Love which means love.

And I wanted to ask you, because I'm really in the, I would say the collective belief that if we bring consciousness and have that intention to bring it into this new space, I really feel that we can ultimately tip the scales of where I would say in real person this world is right now

So maybe I'm innocent, maybe I'm naive, but I really believe that Web3 has that possibility of generating critical mass for good.

So whether we're using it through NFTs, whether we're using it for social impact investment or whatever that is, or actually even having these conversations on Twitter space.

I was wondering, what do you see the future as in this space?

Cause I'm very enthusiastic by it and I'm very hopeful.

I actually think that if we didn't have Web3, I'll be pretty depressed in terms of where we're going as humanity.

So 1 thing I would be careful about is mixing what is true with what you want to be true.

And I see this happening in business a lot where a new business trend comes up, people are excited about it because they wanna make money, but then they also start projecting all the other fantasies onto it.

So what I mean by that is, Web3 I think is really about decentralization.

I'm not sure it's about consciousness or self-awareness.

I do think it's better if people are more conscious.

I think it's better if they have more agency.

I think it's better if they're more self-aware And certainly you can use your time and resources to try and connect the 2.

But I do not know if web 3 automatically leads to a raised consciousness level.

So let me just go back to something slightly more concrete, which is self awareness, which is just how much attention do you pay to your own thoughts, your own mannerisms, your own being, how much do you critically question who you are or do you just blindly accept that everything your mind says to you is true and just the way things are.

So generally I find that the people who are more self-aware are more interesting to be around, they're less of a pain, they're more in control of their emotions, and I find it to be probably the most attractive trait.

That it doesn't necessarily follow from web 3.

Perhaps it's completely orthogonal or perhaps there's a linkage in that web 3 and decentralization force you to take more responsibility personally for the outcome of these systems that we participate in, because now you can no longer just be an oblivious user.

You're also an owner, you're a staker, you're a validator, you're a governor, you're a creator.

So in that sense, anything that gives humans more agency is going to over time force them to be more self-aware, which may lead to a form of higher consciousness.

But it's not clear to me that the 2 connect by default.

And I would caution you to be careful about connecting them by default, because then you may end up building a business that doesn't actually make sense in the real world.

And we want you to be successful so that you can go ahead and spread the consciousness that you want.

You have very clear thought, and I'm wondering if that would have been a hindrance to your career earlier on in your life to be so clear and so self-aware like you just mentioned or if how do you think that timing has played out for you basically?

Live long enough and you'll naturally become a philosopher.

I think some of it is the times themselves.

People are more self-aware these days and the language of the knowledge of consciousness and self-awareness either through tools like meditation or meditation assistant or books or psychedelics or whatever are sort of spreading.

I'm meeting more and more younger people who are more self-aware and more conscious than I think was true in my generation.

I think there's an underlying question that you didn't ask directly, but you hinted at, which is, Hey, can I make money now and be conscious later?

Or flipping it around is being more self-aware or conscious going to get in the way of my making money?

I don't want to say there's a free lunch here because I don't think there is.

Some of the most self-aware people that I know are not highly motivated, but I suspect those people wouldn't have been highly motivated to make money regardless.

I find that clear thinking is incredibly rewarding.

Not that I'm saying I'm a clear thinker, but on the occasions where I do have clarity of thought, it pays off.

So I wouldn't pass up clarity of thought for anything.

Look, intelligence is a cheat code, right?

If we were playing Dungeons and Dragons and you had high intelligence, it's probably the thing you would want because you can swap it for almost anything else in the modern world.

Because the modern world is full of so much leverage that smart people can employ that leverage whether through code or media or labor or capital to kind of magnifying what they want.

And then the impact of the good decisions is magnified by leverage.

That's really what my whole how to get rich tweet storm is about.

And so I think clarity of thought is incredibly valuable.

And I would say, as I've gotten older in business, it has become even more valuable.

So I do think it has helped me a great deal in business.

1 huge way in that clarity of thought helps you is that I do believe that 99% of effort in life is quote unquote wasted.

And it's not wasted in the sense that you don't learn something, you do learn something.

But if you look back at all the term papers you wrote and all the classes you took and all the people you dated and all the thoughts you had and all the things you stressed about and all the decisions you made, 99% of them didn't matter.

And there were a few 1% decisions that did matter.

Now, could you have gotten to those 1% without the 99?

No, you have to do the work to get set up for the right decision, but could you have gotten there with maybe wasting 90% or 85% or 80%?

What if you had gone from a ratio of 99.1, and obviously it's a made up ratio, but you've gone from 99.1 to 95.5.

Now, instead of 100 to 1 against, you're 20 to 1 against.

So I do think clear thinking allows you to make better decisions and have better judgment.

If you have good judgment in this life, you're going to thrive in the modern world because you will be applying judgment everywhere.

Russians are coming into Kiev, When do I leave?

Every single 1 of them is a judgment call.

And if you make the right judgments, you will have a healthier, happier, and wealthier life.

It is the foundation of a high quality life.

And clarity of thought leads to good judgment.

Examples of how much I value clarity of thought now compared to how much I used to is, I don't keep a cluttered mind anymore because it makes bad decisions.

So if I have to make a decision, I will clear my calendar, which actually is already clear.

But in the old days, I used to clear my calendar and make sure that I spent time on the important things.

A clear calendar lets you focus on the most important thing rather than on just the most urgent thing that happens to be staring at you back from your calendar.

People will send me explanations or emails, or they'll say, Hey, read my blog post, I'll go in and it's 11 pages of gobbledygook and there's maybe like 2 or 3 clear points in there.

If you cannot communicate clearly, then it is a sign that you cannot think clearly.

It's like when you walk up to someone whose desk is a complete mess, yes, at some level it reflects that they're busy, but at some level it also reflects an underlying clutter that they're tolerating in their lives.

And so is this person going to be organized in other ways?

It doesn't mean that a messy desk is automatically a cluttered mind, but it's an indicator.

So I think that having a clear mind and clear judgment and clear thinking is a cheat code to life.

And I tend to find that there is a correlation between people who are clear communicators, clear thinkers, and have good judgment.

And you want to surround yourself with people with good judgment, because that's how you're going to win in life in general.

I wanted to get your perspective on pseudonymy and accountability.

I think there is probably a compelling rationale for it in the socio-political space, but when you're talking about financial implications, financial models, especially in web 3, how do pseudonymy and accountability really come together?

Is it a model that's really sustainable going forward?

So the question is about accountability and pseudonymity in web 3 and behaviour intersect.

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