Context: As with the other articles in the ‘Notes from the book’ series, the primary reader I had in mind when writing this is me. I use these notes as an online Journal, with the act of writing a way to learn better, and the act of publishing, a driver to be very clearer in my views and to create an easy to access reference source from wherever I am. You may find some of the quotations longer than a typical book review, and this is by design. The notes are those I highlighted when reading the book using my Amazon Kindle – I outline how I sync these to my publishing workflow in this article.
Introduction by me
Balaji Srinvasan is an entrepreneur, investor and futurist. He is probably most famous for his pro Crypto stance.
Eric Jorgenson previously wrote the Almanac of Naval – which was excellent – i wrote about this here. This latest collection of quotes and ideas of Balaji is also excellent. I enjoyed this far more than Balaji’s own book – The Network State.
For anyone who has read or listened to Balaji on a podcast (All-In, Tim Ferriss, Bankless, Lex Friedman) – as you might expect this book is deep and intense. I found it fascinating though as it centers a core theme that I’ve been wrestling with, and have touched on (here) – Truth – i.e. the sense that we are overwhelmed by biased, corrupt and misleading information, which is drawing us away from the original ideals of the free, open, secular, capitalist, libertarian societies that most aspired to at the beginning of the 20th century.
The book is written in 3 sections: Technology, Truth and Building the future. At the end there is a handy section on recommended reading covering topics across: Maths, Science, History and Entrepreurism.
I absolutely recommend buying the book – it will challenge your thinking even if you are mostly aligned with many of Balaji’s positions. I also can’t do it justice in terms of calling out key talking points as there are so many! I’m just going to call out my favourites below.
From hereon quotes directly from the book with words in italics re my take on why this is important.
Part 1: Technology
The Value of Technology
Referring to “the tech industry” is dumb. That’s a label we kind of accept, but it’s not a clear thought. You would not call something “the physics industry.” Every industry uses technology, like every industry uses physics.
This quote rings true for me – in the organisation where i work from a functional perspective we have a “Technology” group as a service vertical, and from a markets perspective we have a “Technology” group also – but this doesn’t make sense in a world where tech is embedded in everything.
Technology’s first law: whatever can be done over the internet will be done over the internet. (Though it might take a while for any given phenomenon to move online.) The statement might sound obvious, but the implications are far-reaching.
This begs the question to think through what else in your life will move to being done over the internet. Knowledge work is a given for disruption, but we’re also seeing a lot of things in the real economy move online.
Regulation is the primary barrier for many businesses. Historically, Silicon Valley has been engaged with purely technological issues like building a faster hard drive or optimizing bandwidth. Businesses like this are built continually. But companies using genomics or drones encounter the physical world. In that case, the main barrier is not technology. The primary risk is actually regulatory risk. Evangelizing this point was my primary focus for two years as a Venture Capitalist.
It’s important to think about the unseen innovation you would have without regulation.
Writing this in 2024, with a new Trump Presidency locked in, and the plans of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to delete unproductive regulation and functions – this quote becomes ever more relevant. I think DOGE will transform the US and other markets will follow – we’ve already seen how successful Javier Milei has been in Argentina adopting this mindset.
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Lots of people mistake the value of new technologies. Things that initially seem frivolous become important down the line. Video games led to 3D graphics, now leading to virtual reality. Social networking led to services like Lyft. Twitter started as breakfast updates, and now it’s used for revolutions and breaking news. Those things are not as trivial as people think.
I think we often overestimate the value of tech in the short term, but underestimate it in the long term.
The Impact of Technology
Every area the government touches sees prices inflate. That’s due to regulations or subsidies, which impairs the increases of labor productivity from technology.
Today we have ninety-year-old laws wielded by seventy-year-old people to prevent twenty-somethings from using twenty-first century technology.
Again, these quotes highlight the importance of DOGE – starting afresh by removing unneeded regulations and government departments using a ‘zero-based budgeting’ type mindset.
Our Digital future
Crypto is more than an asset class because it transforms the custody, trading, issuance, governance, and programmability of anything scarce. It’s a new financial system, not just some ticker symbols.
I think this is an under-appreciated point of view. But it’s also true that real world practical use-cases are somewhat nascent.
On disk → Online → On-chain. On-chain is like the third level of deployment. Files that only you care about stay on your local disk. Files that are important to others get put online. And files that are really important to others will get put on the blockchain. When you put information online, you get distribution, sharing, collaboration, etc. When you put it on-chain, you get immutability, verifiability, monetization, etc. On-chain is not suitable for everything, just like you don’t put everything online. Putting something on-chain is a stronger version of putting it online. It lessens the impacts of link rot, stealth editing, downtime, format obsolescence, firewalls, and many related issues.
Marc Andreessen in his interview with Joe Rogan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ye8MOfxD5nU) discusses all major news being stored on chain in the future so we can go back to the source to establish the truth.
The long-term impact of crypto may make finance fundamentally less profitable. The existing financial system has ATM fees, overdraft fees, wire transfer fees, origination fees, and fees of every kind at the retail level and investment level. I think it’s interesting to make a table of every fee in finance and ask which of them are actually going to be around in twenty years. How much of the profit will get pushed out of finance? I can imagine we will treat finance almost like a communications network. Then we will have more profit for people who are actually building businesses and doing things of value. It is possible fortunes in the future are made only by funding or building startups. It will take decades to play out, but the economic logic of crypto-versus-financial-services is similar to internet-versus-telecom.
I think this is a fascinating perspective. We’re already seeing companies like Wise look to take on cross-border payments, and bring the take rates right down in an area which used to be a massive money spinner for banks and card networks.
Our physical future
I’ve often thought that the most fundamental way to price things might be energy, measured in joules. How much energy did it take to assemble my phone, to pull the materials out of the ground and shape them into that configuration?
I think this is a really important concept; it’s the foundation for an article i’m drafting/researching on power – and specifically Small Nuclear Reactors (SMRs).
The moral is clear: if you’re against life extension, you want us to die. We can win that moral battle; people have to concede. If you’re for universal healthcare, you better be for life extension research and technologies.
The goal of transhumanism is simply to become the absolute best version of yourself. I think all of tech will be focused on it in five to ten years.
Transhumanism encompasses self-measurement, external devices (like phones, watches, glasses, earbuds, contacts), body modifications, super-soldier serums (check out myostatin null), brain-machine interfaces (like neuralink), nootropics and other cognition-enhancing drugs (like in the movie Limitless), genetic modifications with CRISPR for genetic diseases, and AI-augmented human capabilities (bionics, telepresence). It’s basically a suite of technologies to power up humans.
This is an interesting perspective on Tranhumanism – a topic for which i’ve always had an innate distate. I think i’ve always been of the view to enjoy the limited time i have, rather than spending time focussing on extending it. Perhaps i should rethink this position.
Part II: Truth
The types of truth
Distinguishing social consensus from truth is really important because they’re not the same. Often we will say, “Oh, that is true,” because there is a social consensus.
Scientific Truth
If it’s not independently reproducible, it’s not science.
Every statistic is a numerical distillation of a raw data table. Ask for that table.
Political Truth
Political truths—like money, status, and borders—are true if everyone believes them to be true. You can change these by rewriting facts in people’s brains, such as: What is a dollar worth? Who is the president? Where is the border? These truths are what our establishment is set up to manipulate.
Everybody has strong opinions about people they’ve never met based on tales told by people they do not know.
People around you repeating the same idea may have gotten it from the same source. This fools our truth sensors, but popularity does not equal truth. There is no point debating someone who can’t whip out plots, primary URLs, or raw data. Argue with signal sources, not signal repeaters.
Economic Truth
Unpopular truth is a reliable source of profit. Behind every great fortune is a great thoughtcrime.
I truly believe this. One of the main goals in investing is to identify places where the narrative is wrong – too pessimistic / over optimistic etc – and exploit this.
Cryptographic Truth
One particular piece of decentralized truth is most interesting to me: Crypto Oracles. Many of today’s contracts or transactions are bets on things like, “Will this price go up or down?” or “Will the temperature go up?” A more complicated one: “Do I need to pay out this farmland insurance because there is a drought?” That’s an example of a contract that combines a financial function and a fact about the world. To execute automatically through a smart contract on the blockchain, the contract needs access to data about the outside world, which is not purely financial. That’s what crypto oracles do.
What’s the point? Right now all of the data I’m describing are in separate places. The real estate data happens here, the medical data happens there, the price data happens way over there, the temperature data happens somewhere else. What I call the “ledger of record” is essentially the integration of all these crypto oracles.
People put data on-chain because they will earn money for supplying it. People pay for the information because they can trade off of it or use it to provide services. Each individual oracle has an incentive to put its data online. The data of all of those individual oracles go into the ledger of record, which gives us cryptographically verifiable facts about the world.
These quotes were an eye-opener for me. I need to think and learn more about Crypto Oracles.
We need to grow from “who owns what Bitcoin” today to “who said what things at what times” in the future. We will know what facts were asserted, when, and by whom. That is a very powerful thing. With cryptography, we can start to displace media corporations as the source of truth.
Modern Media Is Misaligned with Truth
A list of the top thousand keywords to pass through your screen would show you what you are loading into your brain. It might not necessarily be the concepts you want to learn.
Whether you agree or disagree with them, the information sources you choose will steer your life and establish your priorities. In a real sense, they are upstream of “you.”
A “scissor statement” is something that is obviously true to one party and obviously false to the other. Media and social media companies are constantly searching for and selecting scissor statements because they’re enraging, and therefore engaging.
Giving free content to media corporations in the form of quotes and interviews no longer makes sense. You must build your own distribution to avoid distortion. This is already happening. Elon, Zuckerberg, and all the smartest founders are building their own media arms, going direct and routing around legacy media corporations. Doing so is now a core competency. A CEO or a founder who does not build direct distribution is not doing it right. It’s like a company not building a website.
These are all concepts i’ve been thinking about a lot for the last 4 years. I’m trying to spend more time reading books and less time reading the short shelf-life news of the hour. I also set up this website partly because i wanted to understand how to develop my own distribution.
Part III Building the Future
Believing
We have bad metrics as a society. Rather than GDP, GDP-per-capita, or the stock market, perhaps we should have dashboards of life expectancy (health) and net worth (wealth). A good leader is one who improves these metrics for individuals and society as a whole.
I think about this a lot. A lot of the metrics we use to define the health of an economy don’t seem to capture the sense of wealth / well-being of the population.
Build your personal runway. Here is the basic calculation for reducing your expenses to become financially independent:
[your current savings] ÷ [your yearly expenses] = [personal runway]
This is a great concept i should start using to motivate me to save / invest more, and spend less of non happiness generating things.
The importance of finding Frontiers
Everything changes when a frontier opens up. A new realm of unoccupied space means resources are suddenly less scarce.
Technology is how civilizations unlock new frontiers. Columbus used new navigation techniques to find the new world because the Ottomans had blockaded the known route to India. The internet has actually been the frontier for the past few decades, and with crypto, that will likely continue.
Today, there are four possibilities for the frontier: the land, the internet, the sea, and space. If we assess where we are right now, we learn that currently 7.7B people are on land, 3.2B on the internet, about 2–3M on the high seas, and fewer than 10 in space. Creating frontiers is important. Frontiers give pioneers space to innovate without affecting those who don’t consent to the experiment.
This is true – you need to find new frontiers. The accessible new frontiers in our 2024 world feel like they are all offshoots from new technologies.
Bad leaders divide. Great leaders create
Nothing is more costly than incompetent leadership.
Here is my ranking of types of leaders: socialist < nationalist < capitalist < technologist.
Socialism is the lowest-skill way to put yourself at the head of a mob. This and variants on it, like demagoguery, will work in almost every country. You’re pitting some faction against another.
One step up from socialism, we have nationalism: unifying one nation against the other side of the border. The good part about nationalism is it stops the conflict internally. People are aligned internally because of a common cause. That’s the good part. The bad part about nationalism is that often people are so enthusiastic that they move from nationalism (or patriotism) into much worse jingoism, chauvinism, or imperialism. (Location 1674)
One level up from nationalism, we have capitalism. Now we’re unifying people on the basis of a common cause in the market.
The highest level of leadership is technology leadership. It’s not simple positive-sum capitalism; it also brings something new to the market. You’re literally moving humanity forward.
Why does socialism keep arising over and over again? One way of answering that question: it is the easiest way to become a leader.
The hard way to gain status is to build something, to accomplish something, to add value. The easy way to gain status is to accuse someone else of being a bad person.
Founding
The founder is usually the only one who has the credibility to impose large short-term costs for larger long-term gains.
Founders are selected for legitimacy and competence. That’s different from being selected for legitimacy alone (through inheritance or an election). Founders start new systems from scratch.
At the beginning, goals are qualitative and mission-driven. Once you’re getting ten, twenty, thirty customers (for enterprises) or a few thousand (in consumers), you can start to think about optimizing. The ultimate thing you want is business profit.
Good founders don’t just have ideas; they have a bird’s eye view of the idea maze. Most of the time, people see only the journey and result of one company. They don’t see the paths not taken and don’t think at all about the companies that fell into various traps and died before reaching customers.
I really like the words “bird’s eye view of the idea maze”. This is also true of great leaders in large corporations – they intuitively know the rights paths to follow.
Ideating (on new frontiers / business ideas)
Of all the definitions of a startup, perhaps the best is one from Paul Graham:
a startup is about growth. A startup is a business built to grow extremely rapidly. Rapid growth usually requires some sort of new technology that invalidates the assumptions of incumbents, whether incumbent politicians, incumbent businesses, or incumbent ideas.
The gap between stated preference (what is praised) and expressed preference (what is bought) is an inexhaustible source of startup ideas.
I need to spend more time thinking about examples of this in my life!
From a founding and investing standpoint, you have to consider strategic questions. What kinds of platforms are there? What new platforms cure such a pain point that people get on it? Then what else can be deployed on that platform?
One of those new platforms is going to be crypto. Lots of people getting crypto wallets is good. We can deploy all kinds of new software once most people have wallets. AR glasses are coming too. It might be Facebook’s version three or version four. Apple and Google are also working on them. We might just get a bunch of models at the same time. It’s like anticipating the iPhone. AR glasses are an incredibly predictable invention you can start thinking about now.
You cannot automate something until you’ve done it manually many times. Control all of the factors and show technology cuts costs. Remember, for many legacy companies, information technology is only a cost center. They only adopted the code. You were born in it, molded by it. A full-stack entrant into a new vertical is formidably protean. You can morph your product just by hitting keys. Tesla’s over-the-air updates for its cars are a fantastic example.
I think this is a critical concept for companies looking at value creation.
Validating
The 6 Ps are a useful checklist.
Product—What are you selling? Person—To whom? Purpose—Why are they buying it? Pricing—At what price? Priority—Why now? Prestige—And why from you?
Seems obvious, but many companies can’t easily answer these.
Managing
A founder’s role changes a lot as a company grows. An analogy from the sports world: 1–10 employees: player 10–100 employees: coach 100–1,000 employees: general manager 1,000+ employees: commissioner
Bureaucracy is quantified by the number of people who can veto your actions. Generally, it should be low. Yet if it hits zero, you have no team. The inverse of bureaucracy is direct personal accountability. Many people quickly find they prefer bureaucracy.
Politics is about the disposition of shared resources. The less that is collectively shared, the less room there is for politics. A startup has few politics because there is nothing to loot within the organization. All resources are outside.
Executing
What does good execution involve, in concrete terms? The execution mindset means doing the next thing on the to-do list at all times. Rewrite the list every day or every week in response to progress. This is easy to say but extremely hard to do. It means saying no to other people, saying no to distractions, saying no to fun, and exerting all your waking hours on the task at hand.
In terms of execution heuristics, perhaps the best is Peter Thiel’s “one thing.” Everyone in the company is responsible for one thing. Each person should at all times know what their one thing is, and everyone should know everyone else’s too.
Marc Andreessen’s anti to-do list is also good: write down what you just did, and then cross it off. Even if you get off track, this gives you a sense of what you were working on and your progress.
Evolving
Write out your goals. It’s amazing how few people do. By writing out your goals, you prevent a random walk through life. So many people just wander through life.
I’ve done past year reviews as a form of goal tracking every year for the last five years. I lose track of my major objectives – across Health, Wealth and Happiness from time to time, but having my overarching goals written in prominent places really does help me refocus on what matters.
You have 168 hours per week, ~112 awake. Substitute capital for time, technology for both.
I want to maximize the total number of hours I can work, including weekdays and weekends. I might want to work for sixteen hours one day, then rest the next day. I do meetings only one day a week. The rest of the week, I am totally free to work spontaneously. That’s my single biggest productivity hack: stack all meetings on (for example) Monday and Thursday.
What you choose to load into your brain first thing in the morning is the most precious, precious space. Perhaps your first few hours should be offline with pen and paper, writing things out. Some offline time is good, so you don’t just immediately jack into the internet.
I have a horrible habit of scrolling the news when i first wake. I need to stop doing this.
Learning to learn well
The newest technical papers and the oldest books are the best sources of arbitrage. They contain the least popular facts and the most monetizable truths. What do you know to be true that others cannot or will not bring themselves to admit? There is your competitive advantage.
We all need to read more books.
You can’t really learn something without using it. One day of immersion in a new language beats weeks of book learning. It’s the difference between learning French in school, where you’re memorizing abstract sounds, and actually trying to order something at a restaurant. You’re trying to put a sentence together for a purpose with an unforgiving French waiter who will sneer at you and say, “Lezz just-a speak English, pleeze.”
This is so true about everything. You have to jump in rather than spending too much time on theory.
Build Broadly Applicable Skills
At each stage of life, I used my current skill and applied it in a new domain to learn another skill. I never started completely at zero; I was always building from a previous skill.
I think this is true. There are increasing returns to knowledge. Different mental models can be used across multiple spheres. This is also why i think becoming too specialised and focussed on one area is dangerous.
Tech’s best feature? The past is past. There is always another train leaving the station, another rocket ship blasting off. Found it, fund it, or join it. We’ll have to work to create the future we want.
