Friday Fodder #16
What's Trending? What's Transcendent?
As I lay here on Thursday night, Bitcoin is teetering right at $99k. Saylor just released another $3 billion convertible note on MSTR and everyone is eyeing the price and just waiting for the official word. Are you ready for $100k $BTC? What happens next?
The future seems to be happening faster these days. Here’s 3 interviews you might have missed that help think about what the next few years might be like:
Jensen Huang talks about the past and future of Nvidia products with Bill Gurley and Brad Gerstner.
Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreesen talk about the “little tech” (VC) agenda and how public policy can release or stifle innovation.
In one of his most compelling interviews yet, Peter Thiel talks with Bari Weiss about the nature of memes, science, the counter-elites and how the Trump administration might work. Must listen.
On to the reading!
Timely
From Prediction Markets To Info Finance - Vitalik Buterin explains why betting markets are so powerful and how they’re a glimpse of what’s coming. We have new tools to demonstrate whom to trust, we just need to put them together.
We’re Jealous Of Our Conservative Peers - Publius is a part of the Yale Daily News and this is wild to read. Even the liberal elite college students are screaming “challenge us!” Openness to new ideas shouldn’t be revolutionary in 2024, but it still is in some places.
Just Delete Them - A call to stop wasting time on people online that aren’t a part of your life.
Literacy Rates Haven’t Fallen By 20% - Measure apples to apples but the picture still isn’t all that peachy. There are clearly still lots of good reasons to get rid of the Department of Education
Adding Payments To Your Agentic Workflows - There’s been this vague notion out there that sometime in the future AIs will talk to other AIs and they will transact in money without human intervention. Welcome to the first step of this future. Stripe built an API to integrate payments directly into agentic LLM flows.
Timeless
The 6 New Rules of Communicating - The age of the orator is dead. Today belongs to the 3 hour conversationalist. Related to the trend of informal vernacular, Ted Gioia tells us the days of the most inspiring speeches are over.
The Present Future - It’s weird to think about, but the decisions we make about new tools that might be used for decades or more are being made now. We don’t think much about the guy who invented the computer mouse (Doug Engelbart, incidentally) but his successor is working AI tooling today.
The Barnum Effect - Usually the Barnum effect is used to debunk tarot readers or psychics or other such charlatans. But I find myself thinking about the Barnum effect more often now with LLM output, along with the somewhat related sycophancy bias. It’s become trendy to ask ChatGPT about ourselves and we should be weary of the answers. (Related: A friend smartly fed one side of our conversation to Claude and asked it to summarize the other side’s arguments.. it was pretty accurate.)
The Pygmalion Effect - On the other hand, the pygmalion effect is still a real thing and works wonders on almost everybody. Give others, and yourself, an expectation of mastery and see what striving comes next.
Books
Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI by Reid Hoffman - Sometime soon I’ll be publishing a set of work that I’ve co-written along with Claude, so it seemed fitting to frontrun with a book cowritten with GPT4. Hoffman explores some different areas of human work and how they’ll be changed by AI. Written in 2023 so it’s already out of date, but still useful.
Tweets
Cheers!