Balaji Srinivasan - Optimizing Your Inputs

I think we have 100 million or something people owning crypto today. In 10 years, I think it's very, very, very likely that it's going to be a billion+, maybe even 3 billion. That might be even conservative. If inflation hits in a big way, buy Bitcoin; don't sell Bitcoin. That, to me, is very obvious, but it's not yet obvious, so I'm just saying it.

Monetarily, I'd say, buy Bitcoin, and if you're more adventurous, also by ETH—like 50% BTC and 50% ETH. Put into it what you can afford to just never think about. Literally, if it goes to zero for years, drops 80%, you don't even care; you're not looking at the price ... So, do that, number one, because that alone, I think, is the dumbest and most obvious thing to do to prepare yourself for 5 or 10 years or more of significant financial and monetary disruption, number one.

We're juicing ourselves with sugar, with caffeine, and with whatever the 'dopaminey' stimulus is of social media ... We're dosing ourselves to the absolute maximum. This is a sugar, caffeine, and social media society.

Bitcoin's moving. Yeah, I know the price is down now, but who cares? Whatever hundred billion from zero. Like, it's clearly changed the world. Every potentate knows about it. It's legal tender now in El Salvador. It has transformed the tech industry. It has led to.... all these billion-dollar companies. It's obviously a big deal.

[Mark Zuckerberg]... has 'Lawnmower Man' level power. He could literally make all 3 billion phones in the world show a push notification. He could speak in tongues. He could put whatever he wanted in the feed. He has more reach than Xi Jinping and Biden and Cameron and every president of every country combined. And more engagement; how many people tuned into the State of the Union versus come into Facebook every day. It's got to be like a 100x the number.

Buy Bitcoin and probably ETH. Work remote. Minimize consumption if you can. It's much easier to reduce your expenditure 5x than to increase your top line 5x. Going remote will do a lot for you on that—just getting out of big cities.

Twitter bios, they used to be something like 'I'm Patrick. 32. I like the Steelers.' That was like the 2000s ... And increasingly, what they've become are emojis and hashtags signaling tribal affiliation. 'I'm with this gang. Don't f with me. Here's what I believe. Go away if you don't like it.' And so on and so forth...

How to start a new city: Build a community in the cloud, organize the economy around remote work, enforce laws with smart contracts, practice in-person norms of civility, simulate architecture in VR, eventually crowdfund territory, and materialize city into the real world.

We know what's going on in Bangalore or Budapest but not our bodies. We have information on the other side of the world but not something that is, like, half a foot away. We don't know what's going on subcutaneously.

In the 1800s, everybody was a farmer. In the 1900s, everybody was in manufacturing. In the 2000s, everybody becomes an investor.

One of the things that people don't understand until they're an investor is this idea that money is abundant ... Money is abundant for people who are hard-working with good ideas because they're rare.

The food pyramid is just totally upside down. It tells you to eat all these carbohydrates and grains when actually, that should be the thing you avoid to the maximum extent because we're showing it causes inflammation [and] causes type 2 diabetes.

The only thing more prestigious than science is math. And they're not normally juxtaposed, but I would say math > science.