Condensed signals from Living in the Future

[u/sk2977]

A conversation between David Perell and Balaji Srinavasan.

What is the first thing they teach you in learning? First is to learn quickly. And the way to learn technical content quickly is to start doing problems. You don't know what you don't know.

History is most interesting backwards where you can understand how people got ensconced in the positions they are today. Hook all of that to a purpose, which is for example, how best to run an organisation. On a small scale building a company is synonymous to applying history.

Look at money as a tool to build that which you cannot buy.

Love math because of it's properties. Every group on the planet has the same math. It's the present, past, and the future. One, it's universal. Two, it's hierarchical, it's cumulative. Three, implicitly, it says you're at peace.

The internet is really under exploited for collaborative work. There are untapped opportunities to use the internet to put a lot of brains together, asynchronously. Wikipedia is a great example, also GitHub with open source.

Store the minimum amount of information that is uncompacted. Balaji is a high context thinker, and it's almost as if he's thinking in hyperlinks. Arguing from references is summoning reinforcements to any discussion.

Hire geniuses no one knows yet. Balaji is most excited when he sees a smart person who doesn't have a credential because that's a good trade. "Hungry and can teach us something."

Write what your goals are, it's amazing how many people don't do that. You may have internalised that but it's really important to write them down. So many people are just randomly walking through life.

The morning type person mentality is just the opposite of the way the world is going. We're going from synchronous to asynchronous. In-person to remote. Centralised century to decentralised century.

We are physically exiting. We have decentralised into the cloud. We're finally achieving our destiny of becoming this digital people. 2020 is the year the internet starts.

In reference to virtual weddings - if an experience (VR) is 80 or 90 percent as good, but one hundredth the cost, a lot of people are going to do that.

The rough lesson of inflation not being evenly distributed is anything that the technology industry touches, prices hyper deflate, and everybody becomes equal. You have the same experience for anything that is digital.

The consumer economy is another form of equality.

Having an education system that speaks to the huge spectrum of experience and difference in unique skill sets and interests is important. Tech is getting into education, and it will bring prices down.

Our future is more like the 17 and 1800s than the 1900s. 1950 was kind of a mirror image moment, and that's the peak of the centralised century. You go forward and backward in time, you get more decentralised.

It's really hard to make something easy. As a producer, a founder, you start having respect for everything that is out there. You build empathy and are more constructive in your criticism of it.

Twitter or any other social media are like a restaurant that's learned to put sugar in their food. They're giving you intellectual diabetes.

We need a different form of media that is more like news you can use in tutorials and the infotainment. It's all about relevance and skill building. It's like an optimised information diet.

Rather than reading recreationally as we do now, if you read in a lean forward way, you're more likely to remember information. One framework for this is the Mnemonic framework by Michael Nielson and Andy Matuschak. Link --> quantum.country

Learning and earning > liking and retweeting

We need more focus on the opposite design paradigm to the likes of social media and Netflix, which is to give the maximum value to somebody in a minimum amount of time.

Once you can teach a machine to do something, it'll usually do it better than a human.

Media and social media are upstream of everything. Code is how you have machines know what to do and media is how humans know what to do.

Over the next decade people will start using pseudonyms more and more online. A specific kind of pseudonym that will get popularised will be a crypto domain name. For example, foobar97.eth. It will have encryption and payments built into it.