Tyler/Balaji Srinivasan - from the “Conversations With Tyler” podcast (Full episode list)

  • Academia should be more open source but incentives aren’t aligned right now

  • VC concentrated in Silicon Valley bc VCs didn’t want to fly to board meetings

  • Kids are plugged into phones/internet, taking time away from being plugged into state school “network”

  • Theory: exit as a source of liberty

  • Russians/Chinese/Eastern Europeans were “vaccinated” against communism due to near term (30-year) memory of why it doesn’t work (!!!)

  • Countries to win the future = software-savvy small countries (Estonia, Singapore, Israel); software-savvy leaders who run country like a tech company

  • Skype into robot and work from across the world

  • “China may well be vectoring in that direction”

  • Bitcoin is more a system property rights and contract law than a PayPal competitor

    • It’s about who has the property. Less energy intensive than Brinks trucks/military/cops needed to protect property

  • You can “root and branch” exit the system (financial system) - new set of rules let’s you route around

  • Internet let you route around mail/TV

  • 2% of wealth right now goes to financial intermediaries

  • You have “total custody” over our crypto token

  • “Agility of the value” of crypto tokens dramatically increases

  • Use tokens - programs consume them, but/trade pro frantically; use them as inputs for API calls

  • In future - people could use personal tokens to finance their schooling/dreams (in next 10-20 years)

    • Financing will become low-threshold activity similar to broadcasting today (YouTube, Twitter)

    • Blockchain can uplift talented people all over the world

  • Drones are very, very underrated

    • Drones for construction (!!!!!!!)

    • Surrogates = movie about drone future

  • Chinese internet = underrated

    • China has a hunger to prove something as a civilization. Americans want to prove something more on an individual level

  • There are more English speakers outside US that in US

    • Once they have smartphones, they’ll be way more involved in our conversations. Hundreds of millions of people joining our conversations (ex: Nigeria, India)

    • Andela = Nigerian software

    • “Digital Blue collar” jobs in Nigeria, Brazil, India (ex: image identification)

    • To solve unstructured problem: list, rank, iterate (iterate brutally through this)

    • Try 150 times; if you don’t get a hit, make a change

  • Tuning out the Valley is the key to unique success

    • Look for fields/areas where tech hasn’t spread yet - that’s where the biggest opportunities are

  • He wants to move to Singapore (“optimal place for my preference vector”(!))

  • Idea for something in the genomics/quantified self space that he’s working on….stay tuned