Unconventional views of the world help challenge the status quo.
If you don’t push the boundaries sometimes of what is politically correct, you risk becoming a sheep that blindly follows the pack. Sheep can accidentally walk off a cliff when they can’t see far enough in front of all the other sheep.
Sheep life feels like a nightmare to me.
I spend a lot of time consuming content I completely disagree with. My biggest fear is that life becomes an echo chamber run by Instagram influencers selling diet shakes and skinny teas.
Here are a few of my semi-controversial ideas. No conspiracy theories, just ideas that are slightly warped, that you can riff on and play with.
The billionaire space race is a good thing
Billionaires like Yolo Elon, Branson, and Bezos going into space could be viewed as the ultimate badge of “made it” status. The fact they all seem to be making the space trip so close to each other wreaks of an ego marathon to see whose rocket ship is bigger.
I get the backlash reported by Forbes. Earth is pretty screwed thanks to climate change. Bezos’s Amazon is not exactly the shining light of corporate holy land. There are plenty of skeletons in Bezos’s wardrobe, I’m sure of it. There’s something that is missed though.
Privilege shouldn’t stop progress.
Going into space advances humanity’s race to explore worlds outside of our own. Every trip into space advances the technology that takes humans there. Every trip makes it seem more and more possible commercial space flight can take larger numbers of humans to see what exists beyond our atmosphere. I’d like my future children to be able to go on a school excursion to Saturn or Pluto or another galaxy.
We can’t live in the Earth baby bubble forever. We may need a second planet given how well we’ve managed to pollute this one.
Most of all, space travel reminds us that anything is possible. In an era where hope is scarce, that’s a powerful message we need to hear more often.
Space travel keeps the dreamers breathing. As long as we have dreamers, we have hope for a world where humans can stick around. Nature might get a second chance too. Or alternate life forms could be found in places we’re yet to explore.
I believe the opposite to conventional commentary about the billionaire space race. Staying on Earth gives humanity an expiry date.
Staying on Earth is naive.
Venturing out into space is what we’re destined to do. If a privileged few get to take joy flights and it advances that cause, then I’m fine with it. As long as Musk doesn’t throw another Tesla out the window of his shuttle as subliminal advertising. (Space littering should be a crime.)
The US dollar probably has an expiry date
A quarter of all US dollars in existence were created since the start of 2020. Many financial commentators like Raoul Pal and Dan Held even say the number is closer to 35%.
Either way, what’s the point of money if it can simply be created out of thin air? Money is losing its value fast. The crazy thing?
Currencies like the US dollar are how we get paid for the work we do and the time we spend away from our families. History shows that the average lifespan of a government-issued currency is 27 years.
What causes a currency to disappear?
It happens when governments create too much money out of thin air to pay for things like wars. Eventually, people no longer trust the currency and neither do the other countries they trade with.
The US government, for example, is working on creating a digital currency, according to the chair of The Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell. The big advantage for governments to have a digital cryptocurrency is they can use behavioral economics on their citizens. Let me explain what that means without my banker hat on.
A digital US dollar would allow the government to see how you earn money, spend money, and invest money.
They could then implement customized monetary policy. So, the interest you earn on digital dollars if you’re middle-class, could be higher than the interest a stinking rich person earns. When stimulus money is issued, the government could set an expiry date.
They could say, “Here’s $1000, mate. Go spend it now like a good citizen.” If you don’t spend the digital dollars they give you, they could simply set an electronic expiry. This has huge ramifications, both good and bad.
During the switch from regular dollars to digital dollars, that’s when some form of reset on our money could likely occur. You trade in your ice cube melting currency for the Federal Reserve’s Version 2.0 of a better life.
Money has to go digital so it can move faster and become borderless. The real question is, what will money be worth when this change happens?
Dogecoin will fail
I love crypto. I just don’t invest in anything that’s designed to be a joke and has no real-world application. That’s what Dogecoin is to me. Elon is simply pumping up Doge on Twitter to remain cool with Gen Z and millennials. Bloomberg finance agrees.
Looking cool and solid investments generally don’t go together. When the dog currency is eventually pumped and dumped as far as it can go, I suspect it will cause a slight earthquake in crypto markets. Good cryptos like Ethereum will be wrapped up with the dog money.
Thankfully, there are thousands of worthless cryptos that go are created and go bust every year. Crypto has become the new form of tech stocks. One bad tech startup isn’t going to bankrupt the public stock exchange. And one dog coin won’t destroy the crypto revolution.
Developers are better off working for DAOs instead of big tech
The typical business is an LLC (Limited Liability Company). The invention of the LLC meant you could create a business and not be personally liable.
The problem with an LLC in the modern era is that it serves profit and shareholders first. It becomes difficult to make decisions as a company gets bigger. So, large corporations waste billions of dollars having meetings that could have been emails.
First we had decentralized digital currencies. Then decentralized finance. Then decentralized apps.
A few years ago, the DAO came along. A DAO is a Decentralized Autonomous Organization. A DAO is a decentralized company structure. The sole purpose of a DAO is to help automate decisions, therefore speeding up innovation. Processes are crowdsourced. The use of investor funds is more transparent.
Developers right now have the opportunity to work for a big tech company and have some of their lines of code be used to breach privacy, make the internet worse, and be sold for a large profit they barely get any money from. Or developers can migrate to projects that are decentralized and run on the new DAO structure of a company.
It’s early days. But the days of developers being taken advantage of for profit could be coming to an end. When your code is deployed on a blockchain-first technology, it changes the transparency of your work.
The remuneration is different too. DAOs compensate developers in new ways. There are options to have a DAO stream money to your digital wallet as you write code. And developers can have skin in the game by getting tokens in the project they’re working on.
Tech business models need to change. The change starts with a new type of company structure.
Corporations will become our landlords
Housing is a great business. Mom and dad investors have been riding the investment property wave for years. Then in 2020 everything changed. Trillions of dollars were created out of thin air. The devaluing of money and zero interest rates meant that cash became trash if left in a savings account.
So we were all forced to invest money in financial assets. It created a problem for businesses too. If you’re a booming business making lots of money, and the CEO stores that money in a bank account, he/she faces the same problem.
BlackRock found another way. Owning property people pay rent to live in is far better than cash that pays you virtually zero interest. Blackrock discovered they could become a giant landlord. They could bid up prices of homes to get rid of the mom and dad investors, and then place a nice fat cat margin on any money the property generates.
I predict corporate landlords are going to become more popular. It’s a great business. And a home is a product we all need. The downside is it can drive up prices and fast-track growing inequality. I’d prefer not to bidding at an auction for a residential property with BlackRock. But call me crazy, hey?
We can stop corporate landlords by refusing to let them enter the market.
Trying to be right on the internet is a waste of time
If you dare publish any form of content on the internet, you’re going to find crazies who hurl rocks at you simply for breathing. I believe you can’t win arguments on the internet — and it’s not worth trying.
Make people think. That’s the best you can hope for.
Remember that before you post anything and you’ll be fine. You’ll feel free. If you’ve got nothing nice to say you should probably be quiet for a while.
There’s enough hate.
There’s plenty of misinformation. What we need is more understanding. If you have a problem with someone then pick up the phone. You’ll avoid destroying your reputation by posting assumptions on Twitter and thinking everything you do is brilliantly flawless.
Social media will become fully decentralized in the next two years
Social media has become a nightmare. Youtube censors crypto and coroni-rona content. Zuckerberg jokes about our privacy. Facebook employees use our data to follow their babe crushes. A change is happening. Social media is being decentralized. Jack Dorsey announced he is going to work to decentralize Twitter.
Bitclout has emerged as a decentralized social media that seeks to be the base layer for what comes next. They have a decentralized Twitter already. Mirror.xyz has emerged as a potential blogging platform for writers who want to earn money from their work.
What’s misunderstood is how quick this change will occur.
I believe social media will be fully decentralized within two years. There are loads of entrepreneurs and developers already working on this huge problem. Gatekeepers, rent-seekers, and censorship-pro platforms will be replaced with social media apps that allow you to own your data and publish according to a crowdsourced governance model decided by the users who own the platform.
The sooner the internet is owned again by us, the users, the better.
Those are a few of my semi-controversial thoughts fresh from the Australian outback. They’re designed to be ideas you can riff on.
Take one idea and go down the rabbit hole. See what you can learn. Prove me right or prove me wrong. In the process, you’ll expand your thinking and that’s what I care about.
When we go beyond political correctness, we discover possibilities that advance important ideas.
