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Shadowing practice: Which U.S. Big Tech Companies is Balaji Most Bullish On? | The Tim Ferriss Show

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  1. The US big tech companies that are the most bullish on, though I'm not, I don't think actually, I shouldn't say I don't.0:05
  2. I don't know if I actually hold any shares in these companies.0:11
  3. I might in some like entity of an entity, okay, but it's certainly not to my knowledge of large holding.0:13
  4. I'm actually most bullish on Twitter slash square and Facebook.0:19
  5. And the reason is, Twitter slash square, the reason I put them is they're going to become probably merged into something like with squares, Bitcoin support and the fact that0:23
  6. Jack is CEO of both.0:32
  7. Of course, they're two separate entities, but he can figure it out and probably offer Bitcoin payments on Twitter for many things and basically build like a Bitcoin Ethereum into0:33
  8. Twitter.0:43
  9. What do I mean by that?0:43
  10. Like a Bitcoin Ethereum meaning it's like a lot of the functionality or copied functionality of Ethereum like root stock sort of, I think, cloned the Ethereum EVM.0:44
  11. So it might have a lot of the functionality of Ethereum or salon or some of these other chains, but that is sort of Bitcoin backed.0:53
  12. And there's different ways of doing that.0:59
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  1. There could be basically essentially a centralized version that says like a minimal decentralized component, which is one way of doing it.1:01
  2. And you just like load Bitcoin onto it and the rest of it is centralized.1:07
  3. There's ways of doing with zero knowledge.1:10
  4. There's a number of different engineering tradeoffs that could be made.1:12
  5. But essentially, I think that's it.1:15
  6. That's one direction like Twitter slash square and Facebook because Zuck is also a founder and he's just like his, I do respect him.1:17
  7. I really do.1:26
  8. And the reason I do is the number of hits that he's taken over the years to start is like a 21 year old kid in his dorm to build1:27
  9. what he's built.1:36
  10. And from that to this three billion person network, I mean, a lesser founder would have backed down after the mistake on was it called Libra?1:37
  11. But Libra and then DM and now he's doing Novi, which actually I think is a much better chance of working because it's natively crypto.1:49
  12. I mean, look, it's hard.1:54
  13. It's easy to say.1:55
  14. I did actually say this at the time that what they should have done is start with Bitcoin and Ethereum payments and WhatsApp and do remittance corridors rather than doing1:56
  15. this.2:04
  16. I think there might be some public record of it, but I definitely definitely talked about it.2:05
  17. Rather than doing like like a new coin, start with the existing ones, build up experience on that on rather than doing Libra.2:09
  18. That wasn't their first shot.2:17
  19. But you know what?2:18
  20. That looks like what they're doing now with Novi.2:19
  21. And very, very few people would have had the conviction to persist with something in the face of that level of resistance.2:21
  22. I'm going to talk congressional hearings.2:30
  23. Most people would have quailed.2:32
  24. Same with all the negative press.2:34
  25. Same with, I mean, like the Oculus bet, that's two billion dollars for something where they had to go through multiple iterations to get the product to work, but now2:36
  26. they're going to maybe rebrand the company around the metaverse or Instagram.2:44
  27. You know, like I made this comment like basically Instagram was not an easy call.2:47
  28. This is something where it's being retrospectively litigated because it's worth a lot.2:55
  29. But just to just to bullet point this, Instagram raised at 500 million valuation the day before Zuck offered a billion for the company.2:58
  30. One billion was like 25 % of their cash in hand.3:05
  31. They about like four billion of times.3:08
  32. There's actually a lot of money.3:09
  33. It was weeks before the Facebook IPO.3:10
  34. The board wasn't consulted.3:12
  35. They were just informed and Instagram had no revenue.3:13
  36. Yeah, that's not an easy call.3:17
  37. That's not an easy call.3:20
  38. And in fact, John Stewart mocked it at the time.3:22
  39. He's like a billion dollars for Instagram.3:25
  40. The only thing that's worth that is something that instantly gets me a gram of cocaine, right?3:27
  41. Like everybody mocked it, made fun of it.3:32
  42. They said, oh, this is such a bubble purchase.3:34
  43. They're so stupid.3:36
  44. It indeed drew the IPO potentially.3:37
  45. I mean, there were so many aspects to that where that was a highly, highly non -consensus call that has now been turned into, oh, it was an obvious buy,3:38
  46. right?3:51
  47. And the thing about this, the problem is that people who are wrong will not admit they are wrong.3:52
  48. The only way to show that you were not like two X writer than somebody, but 10 ,000 X writer than somebody else is an investment where you're 10 ,0003:59
  49. X writer, 10 ,000 X more correct.4:11
  50. And by the way, this is very common.4:13
  51. Google's toughest search is for a business model or the internet is not going to be a thing.4:15
  52. So many articles on the early internet were like this.4:20
  53. Or of course, Bitcoin is going to zero or COVID -19 is not going to be a thing.4:22
  54. These journals are not off by like 50%.4:27
  55. You can't just like read their article and like think you're being sophisticated by discounting it.4:31
  56. Their mental model of the world is often off by 10 ,000 or 100 ,000 X.4:35
  57. Now, in fairness, just to set a counterpoint, there are some journalists who are incredibly prescient.4:39
  58. There are good and bad and ugly within the world of journalism, right?4:47
  59. Just to be fair.4:52
  60. Sure.4:52
  61. Sure.4:53
  62. But many of them are becoming VCs and angel investors.4:53
  63. Yeah.4:56
  64. Yeah.4:57
  65. Yeah.4:58
  66. A lot of them are defecting because the ecosystem is just full of vitriol.4:58
  67. It's like everyone's pissing in the pool.5:05
  68. So a lot of people are getting out of the pool.5:07
  69. Yeah.5:09
  70. Because the thing is, look, what I'm talking about is really, I should preface it with the corporate journalist, the one who's employed by a legacy media corporation, right?5:09
  71. And that legacy media corporation will like the Salzburgers company, the New York Times, will literally run billboards advertising itself as a truth.5:15
  72. Fox will run billboards advertising itself as fair and balanced.5:22
  73. The Washington Post will literally equate itself to democracy itself.5:25
  74. Now, Facebook doesn't do that.5:28
  75. No tech company has the balls to do that, say that you're equivalent to truth or fairness or democracy itself, right?5:31
  76. But yet that's a for -profit corporation that has the arrogance or the lack of self -awareness or something to come out and say, I determined what is true for5:38
  77. the world.5:45
  78. I am the paper of record, right?5:46
  79. I am the monopoly of truth is upstream of the monopoly of violence.5:51
  80. The monopoly of truth, you say that WMDs are in rock and then people go and invade.5:55
  81. You say that somebody is guilty, you prosecute them in the court of public opinion and then they get prosecuted.5:59
  82. And so that's a super important power that some privately held media corporation shouldn't have.6:04
  83. And so what's happening now, fortunately, is that power is being decentralized.6:09
  84. First, in the most important way, which is on chain truth, cryptographic truth, not argument from authority, but argument from cryptography, not NYT, but BTC.6:12
  85. So that power is being taken away.6:22
  86. And what's funny is, look, as you know, I'm not the kind of person who thinks white is an insult, but these folks are.6:24
  87. And for some rich white nepotists like Salzburger to be determining what is true for the whole world is simply not applicable.6:31
  88. One might even say it's quote, white privilege.6:38
  89. And so instead, what we should have is something that is a global decentralized network where people of every group, including of course, white Americans, can participate and determine what6:41
  90. is true through a mathematical process that starts with figuring out who has what Bitcoin, and then it goes to who has what asset, and then it goes to who6:50
  91. made what assertion.6:57
  92. And that's like the ledger of record concept that we talked about before.6:58
  93. So there's a root and branch thing where corporate journalism has also lost that they don't understand it, just like CCP is hard power and BTC is hard money, cryptography7:01
  94. is hard truth.7:11
  95. And corporate journalism has actually lost control over hard truth.7:12
  96. Just give you one example of this from earlier this year.7:15
  97. Vitalik Buterin made a large donation to India for COVID.7:18
  98. And do you know how people knew that it was real?7:22
  99. Look at the blockchain.7:24
  100. They looked at the blockchain.7:25
  101. That was ground truth.7:27
  102. That's really important.7:29
  103. Okay, because what is the other thing that you tend to do nowadays?7:31
  104. You know, you will, if something's real, let me see if it's on Twitter.7:34
  105. Did that guy actually say that?7:37
  106. Right.7:38
  107. And the thing is, that's actually not perfect nowadays, because Twitter deplath forms a lot of people.7:39
  108. So their record is gone.7:44
  109. Or, you know, last year, Twitter was hacked, if you remember that in Bezos and other people were posting things, right?7:45
  110. So while it's imperfect, in the not too distant future, things, there's things like diesel.7:50
  111. There's there's various kinds of decentralized social networks out there or capsule, all these things that are coming or out there.7:56
  112. In the not too distant future, that back end is also on chain.8:01
  113. So to show that somebody said something, you won't link to Twitter, you'll link to the crypto Twitter version, the on chain record that shows they posted this or said8:05
  114. this, right?8:11
  115. And because it's protected by proof of work or similar consensus algorithm, you can compute how much money would be required to falsify that, how much computation, how much energy8:12
  116. would have to go into falsify that?8:21
  117. That is really interesting, right?8:23
  118. Because you also have multiple confirmations.8:25
  119. It's not just one source.8:26
  120. The thing is, I don't care if somebody, if something has a thousand retweets, what I care about is if it has two or three independent confirmations from economically disaligned8:28
  121. actors.8:36
  122. This is the same as academia, by the way.8:37
  123. Everybody's optimizing citations.8:38
  124. What you actually want to optimize is independent replication.8:40
  125. That's what true science is.8:43
  126. It's not peer review.8:44
  127. It is physical test.8:45
  128. So anyway, this leads to kind of worldview stuff like, what am I, what am I interested in?8:48
  129. Right?8:54
  130. So the reason I was interested in, I said, you know, Twitter, Square and Facebook is they're still founder led.8:54
  131. Okay, because they're founder led, they're getting into respectively Bitcoin and Web three, whereas Google, for example, like, look, I respect Sundar.8:59
  132. It's very hard to run an organization like the one that he does.9:08
  133. But with the big exception of AI, we're under DeepMind, like thanks to DeepMind acquisition, Google really hasn't innovated that much.9:11
  134. There were some promising things like tried to integrate robotics that was taken down by scandal, but basically conceptually, technologically, economically, it was sound to kind of put that all9:19
  135. under one roof and actually advance the state of the art of robotics.9:27
  136. They had Boston Dynamics, they acquired all these companies, they're going to knit them all together.9:30
  137. Unfortunately, scandal took that down.9:32
  138. They had all these messaging apps.9:34
  139. Basically, there's kind of been a drift.9:36
  140. They've kind of got too much money, and they don't have enough focus or what have you, all the same big company stuff.9:37
  141. That thing, remember I said before about how if there's a lot of money within a company, people can do the off diagonal, they can loot, right?9:42
  142. They form those coalitions, right?9:48
  143. The win loss and loss win as opposed to everybody wins.9:49
  144. So that's definitely happening there.9:52
  145. And just to show why I'm not bullish on them, I mean, it's 2021, you know what they don't have, you know, it's a core thing for search that they9:53
  146. would have had like seven years ago, if like probably Larry Page was still in charge.10:00
  147. And do not.10:05
  148. What is that?10:06
  149. Block explorers, right?10:07
  150. Like why don't they have blockchain .info and either scan, like those are, I mean, people don't get this, but block explorers are actually the stealth threat to search.10:10
  151. That is to say, we're not used to thinking of them as a threat to search because financial data of the blockchain type being indexed on a website like blockchain10:22
  152. .com or either scan where you're looking through smart contracts and so on.10:30
  153. That is, that seems like categorically distinct from text and media information that's on the internet, right?10:34
  154. That you go through web search.10:40
  155. But guess what?10:42
  156. The internet of money and the internet of information eventually merged together because with, you know, something like Deesa with what was called Bitclop, but Deesa, if you go to10:42
  157. their block explorer, you can see that every post and like and so on is on chain.10:53
  158. And that shows that actually more than just financial data can be represented on chain.10:56
  159. Social data can as well.11:01
  160. And if social data can, pretty much everything else can because social networks include like media and all this other type of stuff, right?11:02
  161. So it's all going to go on chain eventually.11:09
  162. And some of the zero knowledge stuff, like what Starquer has done is solving some of the scalability issues.11:12
  163. So if it all goes on chain, that actually is a threat not just Google, but also Facebook and Twitter, because indexing the web is hard, indexing social media companies11:16
  164. database is even harder because it's closed and corporate, but indexing a public blockchain is easier than both.11:26

English shadowing practice at C1 with a fast paced American tech conversation

This clip is a segment from The Tim Ferriss Show, where investor Balaji Srinivasan works through which big tech companies he is most bullish on, then argues his way toward Twitter, Square and Facebook. It sits at CEFR C1 and runs at 220 words per minute, faster than 76 percent of the catalogue, so pauses are short and thoughts overlap the way real conversation does. The accent is American. Rare words like centralized, computation, worldview and counterpoint show up as Balaji reasons through Bitcoin, Ethereum and decentralization live, without a script to fall back on.

That live reasoning is what makes it worth practising out loud. Balaji second guesses himself midsentence, restarts a claim, then commits to it, which is closer to daily english conversation practice than a rehearsed answer ever is. If you want english speaking practice that trains you to keep talking while you think, not just to read fluent lines aloud, this opening stretch of the interview is a good place to start.

How to pronounce English words in American accent across this clip's hedges and restarts

Three lines from the opening carry the accent and rhythm that are worth isolating before you touch the rest of the interview.

  • "The US big tech companies that are the most bullish on, though I'm not, I don't think actually, I shouldn't say I don't." Balaji abandons the sentence twice before finishing it. Say it at his pace and you can feel how American speakers stress the word right before a restart, not the whole clause.
  • "I'm actually most bullish on Twitter slash square and Facebook." Notice that "actually" carries the heaviest stress here, and "slash" is spoken plainly, the way people say it when reading a compound name aloud rather than writing it.
  • "What do I mean by that?" A short rhetorical question, pitch rises on "mean" and drops on "that." It is a pattern worth copying if you want to improve your english accent on the questions you ask yourself mid explanation.

A line by line order for this Tim Ferriss Show segment

Work the first nine lines in this order before you move further into the interview.

  • Play line 1, "though I'm not, I don't think actually, I shouldn't say I don't," twice without speaking, just to hear where each restart lands.
  • Shadow this line yourself on the third listen, matching the pauses instead of smoothing them out.
  • Move to line 4, "I'm actually most bullish on Twitter slash square and Facebook," and repeat it until "actually" carries the stress naturally.
  • Isolate line 6, "Jack is CEO of both," four words, and drill it alone for rhythm before reattaching it to the lines around it.
  • Finish on line 9, "What do I mean by that?", and practise the rise and fall until it sounds like a real question, not a flat readout.
  • Once those hold, run lines 1 through 9 back to back for english speaking practice that trains transitions, not isolated sentences.
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