Guillaume Verdon
speaker
342 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2023
last heard Dec 2023
Guillaume Verdon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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We used to have sort of one cultural island that was allowed. It was a typical subspace of thought and anything that was diverting from that subspace of thought was suppressed or you were canceled, right? Now we've created a new mode, but the whole point is that we're not trying to have a very restricted space of thought. There's not just one way to think about EAC and its many forks.
And the point is that there are many forks and there can be many clusters and many islands and I shouldn't be in control of it. in any way. I mean, there's no formal org whatsoever. I just put out tweets and certain blog posts and people are free to defect and fork if there's an aspect they don't like. And so, that makes it so that there should be
a sort of deterritorialization in the space of ideas so that we don't end up in one cluster that's very cult-like. And so cults usually, they don't allow people to defect or start competing forks, whereas we encourage it, right?
Yeah. So initially, I think what allowed us to grow under the radar was because it was camouflaged as sort of meta-ironic, right? We would sneak in deep truths within a package of humor and memes and what are called shitposts, right? And I think that was purposefully a sort of camouflage against those that...
seek status and do not want to... It's very hard to argue with a cartoon frog or a cartoon of an intergalactic Jeff Bezos and take yourself seriously. And so, that allowed us to grow pretty rapidly in the early days. But of course, that's
you know, essentially people get steered, their notion of the truth comes from the data they see from the information they're fed and the information people are fed is determined by algorithms, right? And really what we've been doing is sort of engineering what we call high mimetic fitness packets of information so that they can spread effectively and carry a message, right? So it's kind of a
a vector to spread the message. And yes, we've been using techniques that are optimal for today's algorithmically amplified information landscapes. But I think we're reaching the point of scale where we can have serious debates and serious conversations. And that's why we're considering doing a bunch of debates and having more serious long-form discussions. Because I don't think that...
the timeline is optimal for very serious, thoughtful discussions. You get rewarded for polarization. Even though we started a movement that is literally trying to polarize the tech ecosystem at the end of the day so that we can have a conversation and find an optimum together.
Yeah, I mean, I think Jeff is really great. I mean, he's built one of the most... epic companies of all time. He's leveraged the techno capital machine and techno capital acceleration to give us what we wanted. We want quick delivery, very convenient at home, low prices.
He understood how the machine worked and how to harness it, like running the company, not trying to take profits too early, putting it back, letting the system compound and keep improving. And arguably, I think Amazon's invested some of the most amount of capital in robotics out there.
And certainly, with the birth of AWS, kind of enabled the sort of tech boom we've seen today that has paid the salaries of, I guess, myself and all of our friends to some extent. And so I think we can all be grateful to Jeff and He's one of the great entrepreneurs out there, one of the best of all time, unarguably.
Yeah. I think that companies, they tend to optimize quarter over quarter, maybe a few years out. But individuals that want to leave a legacy can think on a multi-decade or multi-century timescale. And so the fact that some individuals are such good capital allocators that they unlock the ability to allocate capitals to goals that take us much further or are much further looking.
You know, Elon's doing this with SpaceX, putting all this capital towards getting us to Mars. Jeff is trying to build Blue Origin, and I think he wants to build O'Neill cylinders and get industry off planet, which I think is brilliant. I think, you know, Just overall, I'm for billionaires.
I know this is a controversial statement sometimes, but I think that in a sense, it's kind of a proof of stake voting, right? If you've allocated capital efficiently, you unlock more capital to allocate just because clearly you know how to allocate capital more efficiently, which is in contrast to politicians that get elected
because they speak the best on TV, not because they have a proven track record of allocating taxpayer capital most efficiently. That's why I'm for capitalism over, say, giving all our money to the government and letting them figure out how to allocate it. Yeah.
Yeah. I think a lot of people would, instead of trying to understand how the technical capital machine works and realizing they have much more agency than they think, they'd rather have this sort of victim mindset, I'm just subjected to this machine, it is oppressing me, and the successful players clearly must be evil because they've been successful at this game that I'm not successful at. But
And I've managed to get some people that were in that mindset and make them realize how the techno capital machine works and how you can harness it for your own good and for the good of others. And by creating value, you capture some of the value you create for the world. And that sort of positive sum mindset shift is so potent. And really, that's what...
That's what we're trying to do by scaling EAC is sort of unlocking that higher level of agency. Like actually, you're far more in control of the future than you think. You have agency to change the world. Go out and do it. Here's permission. Each individual has agency.
Awesome. Well, so, so building technologies and building, it doesn't have to be technologies, just building in general means, you know, having agency trying to change the world by creating, let's say a company, which is a self-sustaining organism that, that, accomplishes a function in the broader techno-capital machine.
To us, that's the way to achieve change in the world that you'd like to see, rather than, say, pressuring politicians or creating non-profits that you know, nonprofits, once they run out of money, their function can no longer be accomplished.
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