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this is the most important learning from
this experience forget about the fiduciary
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and the governance responsibility of
these companies whether they were good or bad will be resolved over the next
couple of weeks and months i'm sure
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as more information comes to light but what's
super interesting about what happened this week
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and i think is the most impactful societally
over time um is that we're seeing this phenomena
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where um individuals in aggregate can believe
something to be true and make it true and um
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we saw this with tesla and i i don't think tesla
got this level of notoriety because it was such a
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a longer playout cycle but elon you know was not
hitting numbers that people thought he was going
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to hit margins production volume etc people were
shorting the stock but enough people believed in
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the story that elon told about what he wanted the
future to look like that they bought the stock and
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that gave him the ability to do shelf offerings
raise additional capital and ultimately build the
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business and make it manifest in reality that he
said would happen and the same is true of bitcoin
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and the same is true of trump and the same is
true of storming the capital in all of these cases
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there was a belief in something and there was an
aggregation of individuals using social media as
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a mechanism for sharing and talking and engaging
and creating a collective outcome that wouldn't
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have happened through a centralized system or
centralized process and wouldn't have happened
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in the traditional way where history defines the
future and i think that is what's so powerful
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about what's happening right now um and we're
seeing it in financial markets but we're also
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seeing it play out in politics and we're seeing it
play out in the real world um in a remarkable way
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and it goes back to this notion that like a stock
is worth the underlying value of the company and
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that that's not true people can dream a stock to
be anything as they did with tesla at the time
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that people were buying tesla stock the historical
performance of that business was not what hedge
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funds considered to be a you know a profitable
good business it shouldn't be worth anything
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but the belief in what it could be is what drove
the value of that stock and ultimately that value
00:02:06
enabled that business to become true um and it's
just it's amazing to see it happening and i think
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the counter which is really what makes this
so striking is the centralized institutions
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that are trying to block this from happening and
um the shutting down of parlor and the shutting
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down of robin hood trading are are equivalent
from my point of view um or at least equivalent
00:02:28
i think will be perceived to be equivalent broadly
which is if a group of people get together and try
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and use an online service to make a change in the
world by sharing and talking with one another and
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communicating a belief a collective belief and
that gets yanked away from them the institution
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that has the ability to yank it away from them
is evil and it will force people to decentralize
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and it will enable new ways of trading new
ways of communicating new ways of building
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um and and that's the profound change that
i think this decade is going to realize and
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we're just seeing it start now we talked about
decentralization and you know we all feel the
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emotional response to the little guy getting
screwed by the big guy that controls the system
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and we want to fight the system that's the basis
of every great movie it's worth highlighting
00:03:10
though that decentralization and what i would
kind of characterize as swarming behavior
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uncontrolled swarming behavior can actually have
negative consequences and there's a reason systems
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exist you know um when you put a bunch of people
in a room let's say you put 100 people in a room
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and every time and someone says the word door and
every time you hear the word door you're supposed
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to repeat it within 30 seconds the entire
room will be like deafening with everyone's
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screaming door door and suddenly everyone will be
screaming it that's a feedback loop that occurs
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in an uncontrolled social system and that's what's
occurred with gamestop and it's what occurred with
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with bitcoin so there are as we've seen remarkable
outcomes when you allow systems to operate without
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centralized control and without centralized brake
pads that that kind of slow them down or put in
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place some rules and some obligations to how that
system operates the problem with decentralization
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and this swarming approach uh to to resolution
where lots of people basically work together
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individually is you end up with things like
cancel culture where um before a judge and jury
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determines whether or not someone did something
wrong the community decides that person should be
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punished and shuts them down in the real world and
their career and their life is ended and ruined
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and we saw the same and we saw the same with
the capital riots you know people basically died
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because of the swarm that occurred where this idea
that the there was fraud in the election became an
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echoing deafening noise for these people and they
swarmed and killed people and the system by which
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you can actually have vigorous debate and the
system by which you can actually have controls
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and processes and judges and juries and trials
is what needs to be improved for this to work
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otherwise people will go to decentralization and
you will have a lord of the flies moment that
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engulfs civil society because the tools are there
today and so centralized systems can work but they
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have to adapt and adapt quickly to be fair and
to enable and to not um discriminate uh otherwise
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we're gonna see lord of the flies and we're gonna
see decentralization being the solution to getting
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out of the system that's inhibiting us and we're
gonna end up having really [ __ ] ugly outcomes