Great Thinkers Steal & I’m Stealing Some Balaji Insights

Balaji Srinivasan (formerly a16z, 21/Earn, Coinbase, and previous genomics entrepreneur) has been living months and years into the future since January.

He was early to warn anyone who would listen about the coronavirus (including me and other former colleagues who were early and attentive to the threat, like Marc Andreessen and Brian Armstrong). And he hasn’t let up since, unleashing a torrent of threads and possible solutions for the challenges that lie ahead.

For those of you who aren’t paying close attention to his twitter feed, and all the content he’s been putting together recently, I recommend you fix that and follow him.

Here are some of the most incisive comments he’s made in the past several weeks:

Inflation expectations: This is the trillion dollar question for crypto investors: will stimulus lead to long-feared mass currency debasement and inflation? Balaji responds to Joe Weisenthal: "We already face a combination of: supply chain disruptions, producers at home, soaring prices for masks, etc, trillions in stimulus. When checks hit, people will spend on consumer staples. Then prices rise. "Gouging" may be banned, shortages can ensue and markets may go dark."

The "viral funnel": One way to think about segmenting our virus containment strategy is analogous to a customer funnel. "Healthy: masks, social distancing, vaccines, tests; Exposed: more advanced tests; Infected: isolation, drugs; Sick: hospitalization, drugs, PPE for MDs/nurses; Recovered: serology tests. A first cut way of organizing different interventions at big picture level.” He elaborates on all of these points elsewhere in the thread and in his general coverage.

Rise of the citizen journalist & decentralized media: This is one I agree with strongly! We need to accelerate the decentralization and quality control of information businesses, as it is simply irrational to expect journalists to be "experts" in a variety of subjects. The role of a journalist should either be that of a signal curator (what I aim to do), or a very narrow expert. "If there’s one silver lining to this disaster, all can see that corporate media operations are not self-correcting enterprises. We need to build a new decentralized media, staffed by citizen journalists. The principles of decentralized media: 1) Build your own distribution to avoid distortion. 2) Every company a media company. After content marketing comes full-stack narrative. 3) Don’t casually give information to your competitors. And media corporations are your competitors. 4) You are an expert in something. You have a responsibility as a citizen to do citizen journalism, to share that with the world 5) The media should not be “guardians of democracy” nor “enemies of the people”. Neither guardian nor enemy, just the people. All citizen journalists." As I preach to anyone who will listen: BUILD YOUR AUDIENCE!

The importance of keeping score: It’s impossible to pretend the media and state (our “trusted institutions” haven’t failed catastrophically. Why should we give them a mulligan? As Balaji says: “A list of the official misinformation from press & state: Flu is more serious; Travel bans are overreacting; Only Wuhan visitors at risk; Avoiding handshakes is paranoid; Virus is contained; Tests are available; Masks don't help; etc. The reason this is important is that the people who made these mistakes haven't retracted - indeed, many have pretended they didn't happen - and are now pushing for censorship of "misinformation" But without social media, it seems clear the US would have been even slower to act. Official misinformation appears to be international, and we need to document this because the folks that failed are now pushing censorship."

The potential balkanization of Europe and the U.S.: This is one of the most frightening thought experiments, and I hope he's wrong (obviously). But it's impossible to analyze our current state of affairs and *not* be petrified that we're watching the fall of Rome (or at least, the European Union). "Temporary bureaucratic things (like state border controls) have a way of becoming permanent. This could be similar to the sudden breakup of the USSR and Eastern Bloc. From one USA to 50 states, from one EU to 27 member states? All through the 1980s the USSR & Eastern Bloc tottered, and then suddenly fell from 1989-1991. Just broke up into member states. All through the 2010s the USA & EU tottered. And the EU is now arguably de facto broken up. Will the USA follow? The future of the world may be a decentralized West and a centralized East. If the virus breaks incompetent states, then any centralized government that isn't competent enough to fight off the virus gets decentralized. Because each constituent region will defect & erect its own borders."

Some of these thoughts may seem extreme, but I'd remind you that so did his initial look ahead on January 30, a mere two months ago:

"Going viral: What if this coronavirus is the pandemic that public health people have been warning about for years? It would accelerate many pre-existing trends: border closures, nationalism, social isolation, preppers, remote work, face masks, distrust in governments, etc."

It's wild and terrifying how correct he’s been proven in such a short amount of time. How quickly will his other theses be proven (or disproven)? I'm following his evolving thoughts closely.

-TBI

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