This is the most important learning from this experience. Forget about the fiduciary 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, as more information comes to light. But what's super interesting about what happened this week, and I think is the most impactful societally over time, is that we're seeing this phenomena where individuals in aggregate can believe something to be true and make it true.

And we saw this with Tesla. And I don't think Tesla got this level of notoriety because it was such a longer play out cycle. But Elon was not hitting numbers that people thought he was going to hit, margins, production volume, etc. People were shorting the stock. But enough people believed in the story that Elon told about what he wanted the future to look like, that they bought the stock, and that gave him the ability to do shelf offerings, raise additional.

capital and ultimately build the business and make it manifest in reality that he said would happen. And the same is true of Bitcoin. And the same is true of Trump. And the same is true of storming the capital. In all of these cases, there was a belief in something.

And there was an aggregation of individuals using social media as a mechanism for sharing and talking and engaging and creating a collective outcome that wouldn't have happened through a centralized system or a centralized process, and wouldn't have happened in the traditional way where history defines the future. And I think that is what's so powerful about what's happening right now.

And we're seeing it in financial markets, but we're also seeing it play out in politics. And we're seeing it play out in the real world in a remarkable way. And it goes back to this notion that like a stock is worth the underlying value of the company. And that's not true.

People can dream a stock to be anything as they did with Tesla at the time that people were buying Tesla stock. The historical performance of that business was not what hedge funds considered to be a profitable, good business. It shouldn't be worth anything. But the belief in what it could be is what drove the value of that stock.

And ultimately, that value enabled that business to become true. And it's amazing to see it happening. And I think the counter, which is really what makes this so striking, is the centralized institutions that are trying to block this from happening. And the shutting down of Parler, which is a big part of the problem, is that it's a big problem.

And it's a big problem. And the shutting down of Robinhood Trading are equivalent, from my point of view, or at least equivalent, I think will be perceived to be equivalent broadly, which is if a group of people get together and try and use an online service to make a change in the world by sharing and talking with one another and communicating a belief, a collective belief, and that gets yanked away from them, that institution that has the ability to yank it away from them is evil.

And it will force people to decentralize and it will enable new ways of trading, new ways of communicating and new ways of building. And that's the profound change that I think this decade is going to realize. And we're just seeing it start now. We talked about decentralization. And, you know, we all feel the emotional response to the little guy getting screwed by the big guy that controls the system.

And we want to fight the system. That's the basis of every great movie. It's worth highlighting, though, that decentralization and what I would kind of characterize as swarming behavior, uncontrolled swarming behavior, can actually have negative consequences. And there's a reason systems are so much more efficient than they were in the early 2000s.

And that's because exist. You know, when you put a bunch of people in a room, let's say you put 100 people in a room and every time and someone says the word door, and every time you hear the word door, you're supposed to repeat it. Within 30 seconds, the entire room will be like deafening with everyone screaming door, door, door, and suddenly everyone will be screaming it.

That's a feedback loop that occurs in an uncontrolled social system. And that's what's occurred with GameStop. And it's what occurred with with with Bitcoin. So there are, as we've seen, remarkable outcomes when you allow systems to operate without centralized control, and without centralized brake pads, that kind of slow them down or put in place some rules and some obligations to how that system operates.

The problem with decentralization, and this swarming approach to resolution, where lots of people basically work together individually, is you end up with things like cancel culture, where before a judge and jury determines whether or not someone did something wrong, the community decides that person should be punished and shouldn't.

And then the system shuts them down in the real world and their career and their life is ended and ruined. And we saw the same and we saw the same with the Capitol riots, you know, people basically died because of the swarm that occurred, where this idea that there was fraud in the election became an echoing, deafening noise for these people, and they swarmed and killed people.

And the system by which you can actually have vigorous debate, and the system by which you can actually have controls and processes and judges and juries and trials, is what needs to be improved for this to work. Otherwise, people will go to decentralization, and you will have a Lord of the Flies moment that engulfs civil society, because the tools are there today.

And so centralized systems can work, but they have to adapt and adapt quickly to be fair and to enable and to not discriminate. Otherwise, we're gonna see Lord of the Flies, and we're gonna see decentralization being the solution to getting out system that's inhibiting us and we're going to end up having really fucking ugly outcomes.