North Star Podcast

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Austen Allred: The Future of Education Sep 13, 2018

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Listen Here: iTunes | Overcast | PlayerFM Click Here to Keep Up With the North Star Podcast

My guest today is Austen Allred, the founder of Lambda School — a revolutionary new school. Here’s how it works: Lambda School trains people to be software engineers at no up-front cost. Instead of paying tuition, students agree to pay a percentage of their income after they're employed, and only if they're making more than $50k per year. If you don't find a job, or don't reach that level of income, you'll never pay a cent.

So, how does tuition work?

There are no up-front costs for Lambda School; they only get paid when students do. Once you’re earning at least $50k per year they'll pay back 17% of your income for the first two years, and total tuition is capped at $30,000.

In an age where continuous learning is essential and student debt has skyrocketed, I’m struck by this model. Information is everywhere but learning is still difficult. Online, it can be hard to push through the difficult moments that get you over the hump or find others to share the journey with.

Austen has some exciting solutions and we devote this entire conversation to the present, past and future of education.

David Perell and Austen Allred

Time Stamps

2:50 - Understanding the trade offs of the job market when making education choices

7:33- How Lambda compares to other universities or colleges

13:01 - Austen describes some of the problems with online education

14:43 Participation differences between pre recorded lectures and interactive lectures

15:50 Austen describes living out of his car during his beginnings in Silicon Valley

21:40 Lambda’s end goal and pursuit of sustainability for both the school and its students

22:49 Shifting peoples perceptions on education and the future

24:10 How the current public education system fails to teach people “how” to learn.

27:05 Why hasn’t education changed much over the past 50 years, and how can we change it?

30:50 Austen explains his perspective on the pitfalls and shortcomings of the current high education system and student loans

34:10 Student loan payments and the adverse effects on the borrower

36:05 How apprenticeships fit into the modern education system and how the affect both job readiness for the apprentice, as well as the impact on a mentor.

43:00 The growing divide among society and conflicting schools of thought among sub regions of the USA.

48:30 Austen shares some Lambda School success stories.

Click here to learn more about my company, North Star Media.

You can support the North Star Podcast by leaving a review on iTunes. Or you can share the podcast on Twitter or Facebook.

To listen to other episodes or learn more about the North Star, you can connect with me directly at perell.com and you can always reach out on Twitter at david_perell.

Devon Zuegel: Cities as a Superpower Aug 18, 2018

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Listen Here: iTunes | Overcast | PlayerFM Keep Up with the North Star Podcast Here My guest today is Devon Zuegel, a writer of code and writer of words who spends her time unlocking human potential through incentive design and tools for thought and cities. In this conversation, we jump from coordination problems to urban planning to travel to architecture. We compare cities like Singapore and San Francisco and talk about the power of urban density and architecture to make us happier and healthier. Then, we talk about writing, specifically the three tiers of common knowledge, how to find good ideas, and the concept that Devon calls playing chess with yourself. One thing sticks out from this podcast and other conversations with Devon. Above all else, Devon lives in obsessive pursuit of high leverage ways to spend her time and energy. In the past, that’s led her to computer science and in the future, I suspect it will lead her to cities and infrastructure. Why cities? Devon offers an excellent answer. Cities are big enough to have real importance in the world and small enough to be nimble and somewhat understandable and there are a lot of cities. You can actually hope to make some comparisons in a way that you can’t really do with countries. Please enjoy my conversation with Devon Zuegel. Links Bloom Algorithms To Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions Georgism Devon’s articles related to this episode: Advice on Writing Why Flaking Is So Widespread in San Francisco A Day In Singapore: Urban Identity 2:03 Devon on coordination problems and the problems they’ve caused, such as climate change and housing issues, and how clever solutions to these problems are the reason humans have progressed so much in the past hundreds of years 6:19 Human cognition and thought as it is augmented by media, cities and blockchains and the benefits of this augmentation 8:10 The most classic tool for thought and why it’s such a catalyst for healthy and productive cognition, long term and short term memory function and increased IQ 16:41 Devon’s writing process and why she defines it as playing chess with herself 17:45 How Devon has been able to get her writing to flow and the three categories of topics available to write about, common knowledge, obscure knowledge and the intersection in the middle 20:17 Devon’s theory of on why people in San Francisco are so flaky in comparison to sister cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City 28:16 How Devon chooses what rabbit holes she wants to go down prior to writing an article and how to make most topics interesting by creating a model around the idea 32:25 What makes Singapore so interesting to Devon, in regards to history, culture, GDP growth, etc. and her major observations after visiting the country 47:20 The moment Devon became aware of the effect of architecture and how it can make employees less involved with their colleagues by not promoting micro-interactions 50:53 The five metrics that a house should be described with, that are never used, when being promoted on websites like Airbnb, Zillow, Craigslist, etc. 57:00 Devon chooses the three metrics that she’d pick when it comes to the city she lives in and the home she’s living in for maximum interaction, convenience and mental economy 1:03:16 Algorithms To Live By and why Devon sees it as the best self help book she’s ever read, despite it not being a self help book 1:05:37 Devon’s opinion on Georgism and how people talk about economics as a spectrum from capitalism to socialism or communism and the third category of economic goods that it doesn’t touch upon 1:07:30 Devon’s changing opinions and her epistemic status placed on each of her blog posts written with a strong opinion 1:10:03 Devon’s philosophy of travel and why she views it as scale free regardless of how many or little places you visit 1:11:51 Devon’s philosophy of productivity and how she writes down dozens of notes and uses long form emails to repurpose her ideas into publishable articles Subscribe to my “Monday Musings” newsletter to keep up with the podcast. Quotes “I am very interested in coordination problems. I think that they explain a lot of the problems that we see in the world, everything from climate change to nuclear disarming to issues in cities to making it so that people can actually live where they are the most productive to housing policy. I could go on and on. The solution to coordination problems is incentive design, and clever solutions that are some of the reason humans have been able to progress to the extent they have throughout the past few hundred years.” “The most classic tool for thought, and one that I think we tend to take for granted, is writing. Most people think of writing as a way to communicate ideas that they’ve had in their head to other people. Obviously, it does serve that purpose and people sell books for a reason. But, I think it goes way beyond that.” “In the last year, I have found that writing has gotten a lot easier for me. There’s probably a lot of reasons for this but I think the core is that I realized there are three categories of topics you can write about. There’s the stuff that everybody knows that is trivial to write about because it’s easy. On the other end, there’s stuff that nobody knows yet or nobody around you knows yet, so it takes a lot of time to figure it out and it takes a lot of research. Now, there’s this middle area between common knowledge and really obscure knowledge of stuff that you have a unique perspective on because of where you happen to be in life and you understand it so intuitively that you can just talk, think and write about it fluidly. But, a lot of people don’t know it yet. That’s the sweet spot.” “For me, it’s very important that I can walk places. Walking is a way to interact with your community in these small ways, every single day. The way people get comfortable in a place and in a social group is not through one really intense interaction, but through a bunch of smaller ones where you see things from different angles. You experience, what does my neighborhood looks like on a sunny day, on a cloudy day, or when I’m tired. These tiny, trivial things help you understand, much better, how things function. You get to know the vibe so much better and you meet people you wouldn’t meet if you were in an Uber.” “Algorithms To Live By is the best self help book I’ve ever read and it’s not intended to be a self help book, it’s intended to be an algorithmic look at certain problems that people see day to day. But, it helps me frame certain problems that I personally run into in terms of the algorithmic complexity. I realized the stress that I was feeling about certain things I was worrying about, were actually totally rational.” Subscribe to my “Monday Musings” newsletter to keep up with the podcast. TRANSCRIPT DEVON: I am very interested in coordination problems. I think that they explain a lot of the problems that we see in the world. Everything from climate change to nuclear disarmament to issues in cities and making it so that people can actually live in where they're the most productive, in housing policy. Well, I could go on and on and on with the list. So the solution to cooperation problems is incentive design. And I think clever solutions to incentive design are some of the reasons why humans have been able to progress to the extent that they have throughout the last few hundred years. So a primary example is contract law, it makes it possible for people to trust one another. Other examples are the development of risk and the concept of commodifying the risk. DAVID: I was having a conversation yesterday in another podcast and the guest was saying that in 1471, what happened was people were able to pool maritime risk. And what happened was it let big expansive ship voyages happen because you could pull risks together. And so if you invested in a ship and say that ship broke down, then you wouldn't lose all your money. And by pooling risk and by coming up with new financing and coordination solutions, you could do things that weren't previously possible. I thought that was really interesting. DEVON: Totally. That's a great example. Actually. Old maritime risk looks a lot like venture capital today wherein venture a lot of things fail. A lot of things fail spectacularly. But if you can spread out that risk across a whole pool of investments, it only takes a few to like really, carry the whole fund. In the case of maritime investments, a lot of the ships broke down, they had problems. But if one ship came back with a whole load of goods that could repay all of the rest of the costs. However, most, most investors back then couldn't take that risk because most of them would have failed. They might've lost all their money before they hit that one big one. And so by the development of that maritime risk, they were able to get past that sort of short-term problem and to get into the run longer returns. I think that's a really good metaphor for all sorts of problems that we run into wherein the short term it's rational to do a thing that is not as interesting, that it's not as lucrative, but it's also not as risky. But if we're able to coordinate as a society, as a company or whatever level you want to talk about. So one more concrete example to bring it down from like highfalutin, venture capital and maritime risk, you could just look at cooperation problems as simple as when you're dating someone for the first time, there's that standard wait three days until you text them back after you met them because you want to come off as cool. You don't want to come off as desperate, right? But if you really like each other, like all this is going to signal is that you don't like them very much. And that may be rational for you because you don't want to come off as desperate. But if you're both doing that, you end up with an outcome where it seems like you don't like each other very much and it takes a really long time to actually realize that you do. Ideally, you would have some neutral trustable third party who could be a person A, person B, out Alice and Bob like you both like each other. You told me that you liked each other, just go for it. You know, have fun. And I think a lot of healthy relationships that I've seen have actually started in this way because of some small quirk at the very beginning. It can be super useful, but a lot of the pain that I see my friends going through when they date is literally just the result of playing games because rationally, you're supposed to. It's basically a prisoner's dilemma. And so if you can have someone who forces you into the correct quadrant where everyone is better off, that's much better. DAVID: So then let's jump into sort of human cognition and human thought. Maybe begin with media. What interests you? Sort of when I think of where this conversation is going to go today. So much of it is about augmentation, right? Like cities augmenting the potential for humans interact and making that so much easier. And blockchain augmenting human coordination is making that easier. And then here with thought and having tools, augmenting human thoughts and letting us go places that we probably wouldn't be able to go if we were stuck in the mountains on our own. DEVON: I think the underlying reason I'm interested in incentive design is because it allows us to unlock human potential and allows people to do much cooler stuff that makes them happier, healthier, makes life more worth living. I see ways to augment our cognition as serving that same purpose though from a different angle. The umbrella term that people sometimes give this is tools for thoughts and we have basically the same brains that we and our ancestors had thousands of years ago, but we're able to do so much more. Part of that is because we've developed incentive design. The other reason is because we've developed tools for giving our cognition more leverage. And I use the term leverage actually very specifically. You can only get so strong no matter how much you lift. How once you go to the gym, like you're still not going to be an order of magnitude stronger. You're definitely not going to be two orders of magnitude stronger. However, if you design an engine, if you just even add a lever that gives you that leverage, you can do so much more with your muscles. I see that that translates directly to your brain. The most classic tool for thought and one that I think we tend to take for granted is writing. Most people think of writing as a way to just communicate ideas that they've had in their head to other people. It obviously does serve that purpose. People sell books for a reason, but I think it goes way beyond that. So one thing that writing does for you is it expands your working and your long-term memory. With the long-term memory, it's pretty obvious. You take notes, maybe you don't remember all the details, but you can look them up later. DAVID: To your point, even today I was writing something this morning and I wrote something that I wrote about a year ago and I have no recollection of writing it and I read it and I was like, wow, that's actually pretty smart and it really helped me, but I think to your point, there's a permanent element of writing and being able to sort of work through sentences and craft them, makes it so that you can achieve thoughts because of the repetition and the sort of tweaking and editing of writing that you can't do if you're just speaking like we are right now. DEVON: 100 percent. And I've also had that experience more times than I can count of like coming across something I've written and being like, oh, this is interesting, I wrote that. That came out of my brain. And as long as you have enough of a pointer to that idea that you can find it when it's necessary, or it gets surfaced by accident because you happen to open up an old notebook. That's extremely powerful. It makes you much better at remembering. I think even more importantly, a writing helps you with your short term memory, your working memory. There have been a lot of studies showing that a working memory is one of the highest things correlated with IQ and the ability to solve problems. And I think the reason for this is because if you have good working memory, you can hold a lot of state in your head and you can sort of fiddle with that state. You can hold contradictory but potentially correct ideas and outcomes in your head while you work through the problem. And then they collapse into one at the end. DAVID: Describe state real quick for someone who doesn't have the computer vocabulary that you do. DEVON: So state is what is the current status of the world right now. Let's say you're working through a personal problem and with your family or something, and you want to go through step by step and sort of understand the implications of what different people have done. You're getting the story from different friends, like maybe you're helping reconcile like your aunt and your uncle or something like that, having marital problems and you want to understand how they got to that point and how, given where they are right now at that point, like how different changes result in better or worse outcomes. Understanding the current state of the situation and then like fiddling with it and being able to hold all of those sort of partial computations in your head are really important to be able to compare them and to be able to move forward and find a solution. DAVID: So you're saying that writing and sort of computers at large now help us hold more state so then we can move on to higher-order tasks that perhaps aren't memory, that our brains a…

Full show notes at the publisher

Michael Nielsen: Tools for Thought Jul 09, 2018

Show notes

Listen Here: iTunes | Overcast | PlayerFM Keep up with the North Star Podcast. My guest today is Michael Nielsen a scientist, writer and computer programmer who works as a research fellow at Y Combinator Research. Michael has written on various topics from quantum teleportation, geometric complexity and the future of science. Michael is the most original thinker I have discovered in a long time when it comes to artificial intelligence, augmenting human intelligence, reinventing explanation and using new media to enable new ways of thinking. Michael has pushed my mind towards new and unexpected places. This conversation gets a little wonky at times, but as you know, the best conversations are difficult. They are challenging because they venture into new, unexplored territory and that's exactly what we did here today. Michael and I explored the history of tools and jump back to the invention of language, the defining feature of human collaboration and communication. We explore the future of data visualization and talk about the history of the spreadsheet as a tool for human thought. “Before writing and mathematics, you have the invention of language which is the most significant event in some ways. That’s probably the defining feature of the human species as compared to other species.” LINKS Find Michael Online Michael’s Website Michael’s Twitter Michael’s Free Ebook: Neural Networks and Deep Learning Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science Quantum Computation and Quantum Information Mentioned In the Show 2:12 Michael’s Essay Extreme Thinking 21:48 Photoshop 21:49 Microsoft Word 24:02 The David Bowie Exhibit 28:08 Google AI’s Deep Dream Images 29:26 Alpha Go 30:26 Brian Eno’s Infamous Airport Music 33:41 Listen to Speed of Life by Dirty South Books Mentioned 46:06 Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig 54:12 Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut People Mentioned 13:27 Rembrandt Van Rijn’s Artwork 15:01 Monet’s Gallery 15:02 Pierre Auguste Renoir’s Impressionist Art 15:05 Picasso’s Paintings 15:18 Paul Cezanne’s Post-Impressionist Art 25:40 David Brooke’s NYT Column 35:19 Franco of Cologne 56:58 Alan Kay’s Ted Talk on the future of education 57:04 Doug Engelbart 58:35 Karl Schroeder 01:02:06 Elon Musk’s Mars-bound company, SpaceX 01:04:25 Alex Tabarrok Show Topics 4:01 Michael’s North Star, which drives the direction of his research 5:32 Michael talks about how he sets his long-term goals and how he’s propelled by ideas he’s excited to see in the world. 7:13 The invention of language. Michael discusses human biology and how it’s easier to learn a language than writing or mathematics. 9:28 Michael talks about humanity’s ability to bootstrap itself. Examples include maps, planes, and photography 17:33 Limitations in media due to consolidation and the small number of communication platforms available to us 18:30 How self-driving cars and smartphones highlight the strange intersection where artificial intelligence meets human interaction and the possibilities that exist as technology improves 21:45 Why does Photoshop improve your editing skills, while Microsoft Word doesn’t improve your writing skills? 27:07 Michael’s opinion on how Artificial Intelligence can help people be more creative “Really good AI systems are going to depend upon building and currently depend on building very good models of different parts of the world, to the extent that we can then build tools to actually look in and see what those models are telling us about the world.” 30:22 The intersection of algorithms and creativity. Are algorithms the musicians of the future? 36:51 The emerging ability to create interactive visual representations of spreadsheets that are used in media, internally in companies, elections and more. “I’m interested in the shift from having media be predominantly static to dynamic, which the New York Times is a perfect example of. They can tell stories on newyorktimes.com that they can’t tell in the newspaper that gets delivered to your doorstep.” 45:42 The strategies Michael uses to successfully trail blaze uncharted territory and how they emulate building a sculpture 53:30 Michael’s learning and information consumption process, inspired by the idea that you are what you pretend to be 56:44 The foundation of Michael’s worldview. The people and ideas that have shaped and inspired Michael. 01:02:26 Michael’s hypothesis for the 21st century project involving blockchain and cryptocurrencies and their ability to make implementing marketplaces easier than ever before “The key point is that some of these cryptocurrencies actually, potentially, make it very easy to implement marketplaces. It’s plausible to me that the 21st century [project] turns out to be about [marketplaces]. It’s about inventing new types of markets, which really means inventing new types of collective action.” Host David Perell and Guest Michael Nielsen TRANSCRIPT Hello and welcome to the North Star. I'm your host, David Perell, the founder of North Star Media, and this is the North Star podcast. This show is a deep dive into the stories, habits, ideas, strategies, and rituals that guide fulfilled people and create enormous success for them, and while the guests are diverse, they share profound similarities. They're guided by purpose, live with intense joy, learn passionately, and see the world with a unique lens. With each episode, we get to jump into their minds, soak up their hard-earned wisdom and apply it to our lives. My guest today is Michael Nielson, a scientist, writer, and computer programmer, who works as a research fellow at Y Combinator Research. Michael's written on various topics from quantum teleportation to geometric complexity to the future of science, and now Michael is the most original thinker I've discovered in a long time. When it comes to artificial intelligence to augmenting human intelligence, reinventing explanation, or using new media to enable new ways of thinking, Michael has pushed my mind towards new and unexpected places. Now, this conversation gets a little wonky at times, but as you know, the best conversations are difficult. They're challenging because they venture into new, unexplored territory and that's exactly what we did here today. Michael and I explored the history of tools. This is an extension of human thought and we jump back to the invention of language, the defining feature of human collaboration and communication. We explore the future of data visualization and talk about the history of this spreadsheet as a tool for human thought. Here's my conversation with Michael Nielson. DAVID: Michael Nielson, welcome to the North Star Podcast. MICHAEL: Thank you, David. DAVID: So tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do. MICHAEL: So day to day, I'm a researcher at Y Combinator Research. I'm basically a reformed theoretical physicist. My original background is doing quantum computing work. And then I've moved around a bit over the years. I've worked on open science, I've worked on artificial intelligence and most of my current work is around tools for thought. DAVID: So you wrote an essay which I really enjoyed called Extreme Thinking. And in it, you said that one of the single most important principle of learning is having a strong sense of purpose and a strong sense of meaning. So let's be in there. What is that for you? MICHAEL: Okay. You've done your background. Haven't thought about that essay in years. God knows how long ago I wrote it. Having a strong sense of purpose. What did I actually mean? Let me kind of reboot my own thinking. It's, it's kind of the banal point of view. How much you want something really matters. There's this lovely interview with the physicist Richard Feynman, where he's asked about this Indian mathematical prodigy Ramanujan. A movie was made about Ramanujan’s mathematical prowess a couple of years ago. He was kind of this great genius. And a Feynman was asked what made Ramanujan so good. And the interview was expecting him to say something about how bright this guy was or whatever. And Feynman said instead, that it was desire. It was just that love of mathematics was at the heart of it. And he couldn't stop thinking about it and he was thinking about it. He was doing in many ways, I guess the hard things. It's very difficult to do the hard things that actually block you unless you have such a strong desire that you're willing to go through those things. Of course, I think you see that in all people who get really good at something, whether it be sort of a, just a skill like playing the violin or something, which is much more complicated. DAVID: So what is it for you? What is that sort of, I hate to say I want to just throw that out here, that North Star, so to speak, of what drives you in your research? MICHAEL: Research is funny. You go through these sort of down periods in which you don't necessarily have something driving you on. That used to really bother me early in my career. That was sort of a need to always be moving. But now I think that it's actually important to allow yourself to do that. That's actually how you find the problems, which really get, get you excited. If you don't sort of take those pauses, then you're not gonna find something that's really worth working on. I haven't actually answered your question. I think I know I've jumped to that other point because that's one thing that really matters to me and it was something that was hard to learn. DAVID: So one thing that I've been thinking a lot about recently is you sort of see it in companies. You see it in countries like Singapore, companies like Amazon and then something like the Long Now Foundation with like the 10,000-year clock. And I'm wondering to you in terms of learning, there's always sort of a tension between short-term learning and long-term learning. Like short-term learning so often is maybe trying to learn something that feels a little bit richer. So for me, that's reading, whereas maybe for a long-term learning project there are things I'd like to learn like Python. I'd like to learn some other things like that. And I'm wondering, do you set long-term learning goals for yourself or how would you think about that trade off? MICHAEL: I try to sit long-time learning goals to myself, in many ways against my better judgment. It's funny like you're very disconnected from you a year from now or five years from now, or 10 years from now. I can't remember, but Eisenhower or Bonaparte or somebody like that said that the planning is invaluable or planning plans are overrated, but planning is invaluable. And I think that's true. And this is the right sort of attitude to take towards these long-term lending goals. Sure. It's a great idea to decide that you're going out. Actually, I wouldn't say it was a great idea to say that you're going to learn python, I might say. However, there was a great idea to learn python if you had some project that you desperately wanted to do that it required you to learn python, then it's worth doing, otherwise stay away from python. I certainly favor, coupling learning stuff to projects that you're excited to actually see in the world. But also, then you may give stuff up, you don't become a master of python and instead you spend whatever, a hundred hours or so learning about it for this project that takes you a few hundred hours, and if you want to do a successor project which involves it, more of it. Great, you'll become better. And if you don't, well you move onto something else. DAVID: Right. Well now I want to dive into the thing that I'm most excited to talk to you about today and that's tools that extend human thought. And so let's start with the history of that. We'll go back sort of the history of tools and there's had great Walter Ong quote about how there are no new thoughts without new technologies. And maybe we can start there with maybe the invention of writing, the invention of mathematics and then work through that and work to where you see the future of human thought going with new technologies. MICHAEL: Actually, I mean before writing and mathematics, you have the invention of language, which is almost certainly the most significant single event in some ways. The history of the planet suddenly, you know, that's probably the defining feature of the human species as compared to other species. Um, I say invention, but it's not even really invention. There's certainly a lot of evidence to suggest that language is in some important sense built into our biology. Not the details of language. Um, but this second language acquisition device, it seems like every human is relatively very set to receive language. The actual details depend on the culture we grow up on. Obviously, you don't grow up speaking French if you were born in San Francisco and unless you were in a French-speaking household, some very interesting process of evolution going on there where you have something which is fundamentally a technology in some sense languages, humans, a human invention. It's something that's constructed. It's culturally carried. Um, it, there's all these connections between different words. There's almost sort of a graph of connections between the words if you like, or all sorts of interesting associations. So in that sense, it's a technology, something that's been constructed, but it's also something which has been over time built into our biology. Now if you look at later technologies of thought things like say mathematics, those are much, much later. That hasn't been the same sort of period of time. Those don't seem to be built into our biology in quite the same way. There's actually some hints of that we have some intrinsic sense of number and there's some sort of interesting experiments that suggest that we were built to do certain rudimentary kinds of mathematical reasoning but there's no, you know, section of the brain which specializes sort of from birth in solving quadratic equations, much less doing algebraic geometry or whatever, you know, super advanced. So it becomes this cultural thing over the last few thousand years, this kind of amazing process whereby we've started to bootstrap ourselves. If you think about something like say the invention of maps, which really has changed the way people relate to the environment. Initially, they were very rudimentary things. Um, and people just kept having new ideas for making maps more and more powerful as tools for thought. Okay. I can give you an example. You know, a very simple thing, if you've ever been to say the underground in London or most other subway systems around the world. It was actually the underground when this first happened, if you look at the map of the underground, I mean it's a very complicated map, but you can get pretty good at reasoning about how to get from one place to another. And if you look at maps prior to, I think it was 1936, in fact, the maps were much more complicated. And the reason was that mapmakers up to that point had the idea that where the stations were shown on the map had to correspond to the geography of London. Exactly. And then somebody involved in producing the underground map had just a brilliant insight that actually people don't care. They care about the connections between the stations and they want to know about the lines and they want some rough idea of the geography, but they're quite happy for it to be very rough indeed and he was able to dramatically simplify that map by simply doing away with any notion of exact geography. DAVID…

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Kevin Kwok: How Systems Work Jul 01, 2018

Show notes

Listen Here: iTunes | Overcast | Click Here to Keep Up with the North Star Podcast Our guest this week is Kevin Kwok and this episode is a special treat. Kevin was an investor at Greylock Partners, where he mainly focused on marketplaces, cryptocurrencies, and autonomous vehicles. Kevin is particularly interested in understanding the underlying structures that shape industries and the core loops that drive companies. And among other things is currently working on a class on loops, network effects, and growth models. In this wide-ranging conversation, Kevin and I jump between various topics such as A/B testing cities in China, Saudi Arabia and the future of democracy, and why we have democracies in countries and dictators in companies. Then, Kevin distills lessons from five extremely long biographies — four of them about US President Lyndon B. Johnson and one of them about Robert Moses, the “master builder” of New York City. Drawing on those Caro biographies, Kevin talks about power, where it originates, and how to think about systems. Kevin has an in-depth knowledge of political history, governments, technology and growing a company in the internet age. Today, we’ll weave all of those threads together. Links Kevin on Twitter Kevin’s Website The Power Broker, Robert Caro Lyndon B. Johnson Biographies, Robert Caro Time Stamps 1:27 Kevin talks about Robert Caro and his biographies on Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson 3:08 How systems are the underlying reason for power in governments and companies 6:49 Kevin’s observations on the significant similarities between governments, religions and companies 10:27 Kevin defines his theory of loops and how they are a pattern that can be seen in the most successful businesses 14:03 Kevin’s observation on how successful governments and businesses use loops to scale 17:34 The two ways Kevin sees legibility, why it’s so important in creating synchronization between founders and employees, and how it’s the reason for Uber’s success 22:32 Kevin’s fascinations with Stripe’s thoughtful leaders and their transparency in growing the company 28:26 Why the outcome of loops is a leverage effect and how leverage can remove constraints and compound systems for more gain and less effort 34:49 Kevin talks about China’s goal to urbanize more of its country through A/B testing and his opinion on the pros and cons of their strategy 40:35 A brief history of Saudi Arabia, and its implications about whether democracy is declining. 46:25 Kevin’s opinion on the future of currency and how cryptocurrency is reshaping markets and their functions 51:32 Kevin talks about how infrastructure shapes how residents interact with their cities and the underlying problems that can arise 57:44 Kevin’s take on the new trend of contrarianism, how we’ve seen this pattern before and how to be most effective with a contrarian view 1:00:20 How Steve Jobs was a perfect example of contrarianism followed by impact 1:01:58 Kevin talks about his current focus on loops and his hope that humans continue pushing and testing this frontier Quotes “It’s too easy to see what other people are doing. It’s so easy to raise capital if you can paint a compelling case for why there’s a good return. The best companies are companies that have these internal compounding proprietary advantages that get better and are impossible for anybody else to do other than them. That’s what I mean by loops. There’s different ways this can look. For example, network events as people come and talk about them is an example of a loop. The value of the user increases as more people join the network and that’s an internal loop that other people, who don’t have your network and don’t have your users, can’t benefit from.” “People try to figure out how to build these systems that are independent from their hours put in. Fundamentally, your scarce resource is your hours. There’s just some finite cap and the level of productivity you can get. You can get more productive but there’s a finite cap to how much more productive you can get on your hours. As long as your output is contrast by your hours, there always is some cap to it. The question is, how do you get increased leverage on that and, how do you keep increasing the leverage on that at some point? Ultimately, capital is actually less of a constraint if you have a working business model than just the cognitive load and your ability to actively work on different things.” “Think about how much has been shaped structurally, without even realizing it, by the decisions that were made by people crafting the Internet standards. All of those decisions people made have had huge downstream impacts on every layer that has been built on top of them. I don’t think we regret that. I think that we look at it and we say, let’s make sure we do all of the good things there. Let’s also think about the mistakes we’ve made as we create other industries, whether that’s the current waves of finance, or the current waves of tech, or whatever. When you’re in these nascent periods of new industries, how do we make sure that we help the people who we trust to be making those decisions be there at the end.” “I think that a lot of people talk about contrarianism as being against the grain, and having views that other people disagree with. Of course, the challenge is the decision of, ‘I have this view that people disagree with. Is that actually a good view or a view that people disagree with because it’s a bad view?’ Similarly, it’s hard to judge the people around you because it could be that you have a view that is mainstream in your community, but it’s actually a contrarian view in the larger view of people. My view of contrarianism is that the important part isn’t in having this view that everybody else disagrees with. The important part is bringing it to everyone else, taking that view and causing it to become non-contrarian.” “The people we should be most excited about that have contrarian views are the people who don’t just have them, they then go make sure that those views stop being contrarian and we all believe them. In fact, it’s the people who we look back and say, was that even that contrarian of a view? Actually, we all believe it. And I think that there is too much of a focus on the standing apart and being the one with the unique insight versus the part which is, ‘how do you educate everybody else and bring that back into the mainstream consciousness?’. That is a lot of work and proves that what you were thinking about was actually valuable and important. That’s the part of it that I wish was more focused on, not the part where you just feel hipster.” TRANSCRIPT DAVID: Kevin Kwok, welcome to the North Star. KEVON: Thanks for having me. DAVID: So you absolutely loved Caro biographies and I thought that would be a fun place to begin this podcast. KEVON: I'm glad I get to do my paid advertisement for Caro now. So Robert Caro has written five biographies right now, one of which is on Robert Moses who is kind of the person who built all of New York City. And then the other four are kind of four biographies of Lyndon Johnson who is probably everyone's least interesting president when they don't know about him. And then after reading the biographies, he’s by far the most interesting I think. The craziest thing about the biographies is that they are extremely long and so they're just these huge tomes that if you try to get someone to read, nobody will because they kind of look at it and then they are like, I would much rather go and read 10 books instead of reading one of those. And so it's super hard to get people to start with it. And Caro has certainly done himself no favors on that, but they're just the best books I think about understanding power, where it originates, structuralism, and how you think about the kinds of systems and people who understand how to figure them out and make them work for good or for bad. Which both, I think, you know, Moses in New York, then Lyndon Johnson and the Senate, and then the White House are both kind of the peak examples. DAVID: What is it about power that interests you so much? And is there a story that you can tell from one of the biographies that illuminates your interest in power? KEVON: Yeah, for sure. I think power is less the thing that interests me about the biographies as much as understanding systems. For most people, it's hard to understand the companies they work at or how the government functions or why New York grows and the way that it grows is something that feels too complex to kind of be legible and be understood. But then you look at, you know, someone who does it and you don't understand why they're able to do it. And unpacking that I think is just super useful to get people down the road of saying, wait, actually how do all of these systems work? And can I figure out the kind of thing in either the company I work at to make it work better or in the kind of why the government operates in the way it does. And so to give you one example though, we could go on for infinite examples on this. I think if you look at Senate history, there really wasn't, you know, we now look at the Senate as kind of this dysfunctional organization that doesn't really ever produce meaningful bills, has a large impact. Uh, and that's not actually a recent phenomenon. I think that in general is actually how the Senate has always operated. But there's this brief period when Lyndon Johnson enters the Senate and then becomes majority leader where the just sheer volume of important bills that pass is ridiculous. Like most of the progressive bills we now look at whether that's kind of !medicare related or whether that's a punch of the public works or whether that's the civil rights act, all are kind of ones that Lyndon Johnson shepherded through and shepherded it through at a time where the southern senators had tremendous amounts of power. And where they were not interested in civil rights or anything like this kind of being passed through. And so a lot of it is kind of him going into this sub 100 person organization understanding at both the kind of personal level, but also kind of where there a centralization of power, whether that was how to raise money better and funnel that to government. Whether that was how to set up the subcommittees that actually had the organizational power and had the kind of power to shape what moved down the pipeline of bills or whether that was kind of setting up a structure where he decided had people in all of the subcommittees and helped both expedite bills. And eventually, people went to him to kind of make sure that their bills will get passed. But then that also gave him a tremendous amount of insight and knowledge and control what bills were getting passed and having leveraged with all the other senators. And so I think, you look at a bunch of those examples and then they're not dissimilar from how we look at companies now, right? Or how we look at any type of organization now of where are the natural places, where the constraints on the system are and where are the places where power resides and I think Lyndon Johnson certainly did not always do things for the greater good. He did things for his own personal power which sometimes was aligned with the greater good but oftentimes was not. And I think the interesting thing is how do you understand those systems? And then how do you hopefully have people who care about building good things out of those systems, understand them and use them. DAVID: Building off of that, even in that answer, you talked about companies, you talked about government and you strike me as somebody who looks at models and frameworks that sort of may be representing a lot of different domains with the world. How do you think about that? KEVON: Yeah. The thing that always strikes me about organizations is that whether you look at governments or religions or companies, all of them are kind of topologically equivalent. Like they're all kind of the same thing. There are organizations of people that have some set of rules for who's in the group. Some set of rules for how the group makes decisions and come to a consensus, some sort of rules for how they allocate resources and all of these things. And so you can look at them on a bunch of different factors and they vary right, for example, you looked at a lot of companies and companies kind of allow both the company and the employee to unilaterally decide if they want to be part of the company. Whereas governments, for example, kind of have this rule that says, hey, as long as you don't commit treason, if you're a citizen, you're a citizen. And so they vary on different things. But actually, once you account for that, at similar orders of magnitude they're very similar. And so I think as an example, one thing I think about a lot with companies is are companies today are more similar to a companies a thousand years ago or are they more similar to city states a thousand years ago and what are then the lessons you can draw if you look at all the different things that are similar in some regard but different in others that you looked at and say, hey, you can actually learn some interesting lessons about how religions organize and structure themselves for crypto projects. Are there lessons for how the Senate operates for decisions within companies or things like that. DAVID: So how do you think about balancing the similarities between different structures but also the reality that as things grow and scale, begins to change the properties of something. Right? Because you could see similarities between different companies for example. But also there's an inherent tension between growth and wanting to sort of rest on those models, but things change as they scale. KEVON: Yeah. That's, that's a great question. I think the thing that always confuses people is that as their companies grow or as any organization grows by an order of magnitude on any dimension, whether that is customers or employees or a number of purchases or anything, it's just a fundamentally different company and a different system. And the things that you've built and the processes you have that work great when you're 10 people, stop working when you're 100 people and definitely don't work when you're 100,000 people. And so a part of it is that you have to be comfortable saying, how do I understand that even just being successful at the same thing, we are successful, that will by definition obsolete our competence at it because it will grow by order of magnitude and will be fundamentally different. And how do you understand what are those ecosystems and loops that you have? And you know, as they get to a new scale, how they change and what they need to transition to and what that looks like, that might be very different. DAVID: So we were at dinner about a month ago and we were talking about loops and you have some really interesting ideas in terms of the relationship between loops, sales, network effects, maybe even careers. So just gonna let you run with that. KEVON: Yeah. It's funny because I feel like I talk about loops with a bunch of people or on !twitter. And then I realized that everyone just asked me what loops are and I don't have a great explanation because I feel like it's not discussed super often. I think to kind of start from the beginning of it. I think one of the things that I've thought about a lot is if the two of us were going to start a company a thousand years ago, 500 years ago, the best way to start a successful company would be to get the government to give us exclusive trade routes between the US and India and guarantee that anyone else using those routes, the military or the navy would go stop them. And you could bui…

Full show notes at the publisher

Sara Dietschy: The Life of a YouTuber Jun 07, 2018

Show notes

Listen Here: iTunes | Overcast Keep Up with the North Star Podcast Introduction

My guest today is Sara Dietschy, a YouTuber and content creator based in New York City.

With more than 300,000 subscribers, Sara’s created a docu-series, a daily vlog and recently launched a new podcast called The Creative Exchange.

Sara is one of the most inspiring people I know.

Before she moved to New York, Sara grew up in Dallas, went to college to study computer science, dropped out, and moved to Nashville. Through her work, Sara explores the intersection of technology and creativity. Sara rocks the YouTube scene with her sincerity and a contagious zest for life.

The internet spells the end of oppressive creative regimes, the death of gatekeepers and the fall of Hollywood. On the Internet, agility is essential. In this day in age, vlogs showcase the everyday experiences of real people with real stories that exist in real life.

We live at a time where people have deep and intimate relationships with their favorite YouTubers — people they’ve never met before that feel like their best friends. Millennials and Gen Z have the luxury to ask what is my passion and use the internet to build a career.

On the internet, people want to connect with individuals, not massive companies or a bland television ad. They want to connect with people, not companies, and it’s influencers like Sara that are leading the charge.

In this episode, Sara explains how she rose to Youtube stardom and the characteristics she’s noticed between herself and other successful influencers.

Sara and I go back to her time as a musician — an on-stage performer who played in front of large audiences. We talk about all the Sundays Sara spent at a local Megachurch in Dallas, where she played in a band and was blown away by top-notch production quality.

We discuss what it means to do work you love, and the power of staying busy, how Sara’s built a career around the vlogosphere.

Finally, we talk about her first viral moments, how she forced herself to become extroverted and the takeover of new media.

Links

Sara’s Youtube Channel

Sara’s Podcast, The Creative Exchange

Time Stamps

1:27 Sara talks about who she is and what to expect from her Youtube channel

2:14 How Sara turned from a basketball-loving tomboy into a musician

6:39 Sara’s first love and how it gave her the most creative highs of her career thus far

7:28 Her transition from music to videography and how her church was the driving factor for her moving behind the lens

10:08 Her move to Nashville and how she leveraged value in turn for artist’s time for her first docu-series called Creative Spaces

11:35 Sara’s belief that the harder you work the luckier you get and how she notices serendipity in her life the more she works towards her goals

12:50 Sara’s, very calculated, first viral moments featuring TWO shoutouts from Casey Neistat

17:01 Sara talks about her passion for creativity and what motivates her throughout the process

18:20 The one characteristic Sara has found in common amongst all of her passionate friends and interviewees

24:36 The three pillars Sara believes makes a good Youtube channel

26:26 Sara’s Youtube career, from 0 to over 300,000 followers

33:09 Sara talks about why audiences relate to an individual over a brand

36:22 The clear divide between Hollywood and new media, as proven by the Cannes Film Festival

39:52 Sara’s rule to always be working on something or learning about topics outside of her job in order to have that essential escape

45:40 The changes happening in New York City and Sara’s prediction that Hudson Yards is becoming the next Midtown

50:32 How our ecosystem is built around cars and how storytellers may impact the sharing economy

51:41 Where Sara’s inspiration comes from and how she works with deadlines

55:53 How Sara trained herself to become more extroverted so she could meet more creatives

58:32 Sara’s vision for the future and her perspective to see it as a never-ending journey

1:00:24 How Sara sees her future on Youtube

Quotes

“Serendipity I think is huge. Being in a place where things are happening is a big deal. If you want to make music videos for country stars for the rest of your life, you have to be in Nashville. If you want to be a creative business type and you want flavors from different industries, be in New York. If you want strictly entertainment and acting, you have to be in LA. I fully believe in location helping tremendously.”

“Everyone who is doing something that they love, and it’s never all rainbows and butterflies, but to the people who are doing what they love-it’s because they have gone through so many things before that to figure out what they want to be doing now. I think a lot of people wait around, and wait for something to hit them. They wait for their passion to hit them and it so doesn’t happen that way.”

“I myself, as much as a person who creates it and consumes it, am so much more motivated by people in the real world. Instead of watching Wolf of Wall Street, I’m going to watch a couple of Gary Vaynerchuk Vlogs. I am way more inspired by seeing the behind the scenes of a CEO in real life than a fabricated story of this crazy Wall Street dude.”

“I think if you just have these huge massive goals-like one massive goal every five years-I don’t think it’s the healthiest thing. If you don’t achieve it, you’re destroyed. If you do achieve it, you’re going to be empty inside and be like, what’s next? I always have these miniature things in my head, I want to meet these five people, I want to do these five things. If they happen sick, if they don’t, move on to the next thing. It’s taught me to be stoked on the journey because you’re never going to arrive.”

Conclusion

You can support the North Star Podcast by leaving a review on iTunes. Or you can share the podcast on Twitter or Facebook.

To listen to other episodes or learn more about the North Star, you can connect with me directly at perell.com and you can always reach out on Twitter at david_perell. And if you enjoyed this episode, you’ll like the episode with Kyle Chayka, who writes about the intersection of art, architecture, and how the internet is transforming society. We also talk about Kyle’s time in Beijing, the co-evolution of fashion and internet culture, and the present, past and future of minimalism.

Paul Cooper: The Timeless Allure of Ruins Jun 04, 2018

Show notes

LISTEN HERE: ITUNES | OVERCAST

My guest today is Paul Cooper, who spends his days exploring ancient and modern ruins.

I’m going to begin this introduction with a hot take: Paul has one of the best Twitter accounts in the world.

Ruins are special. They freeze a moment in time forever. They remind us of the shortness of life and the inevitable entropy of history. Paul's book, River of Ink, is predicated on the idea of bringing ancient cities back to life in a fictional context.

In this episode, we talk about the academy in the internet age, compare functional and sacred architecture, and dream about time travel. We explore the strange and perplexing history of the Roman Colosseum and investigate letters written on clay tablets in ancient Mesopotamia. And now, I invite you to enjoy this journey through space and time, as we explore the many shades of human history.

Note: Since I enjoyed this podcast so much, I wrote a short blog post about it.

Useful Links

Paul’s Book, River of Ink

Find Paul Online

Learn More About Paul

The Timeless Allure of Ruins, Paul’s BBC Feature

Paul’s The Atlantic Articles

Show Notes

1:00 How Paul’s childhood, surrounded by castles in South Wales, inspired him to study ancient ruins

1:53 Paul’s first novel, River of Ink, depicts a fictional story of the events that could have taken place during a real thirty-year gap in Sri Lankan history

3:31 Paul’s most surprising takeaway from his year living abroad in Sri Lanka

4:07 Paul is captivated by the spark in imagination that occurs when walking through ancient ruins, a passion he shares with his 39,000 Twitter followers

5:29 Paul questions the transition a building undergoes from functioning structure to ancient ruin

7:26 Why are there flowers in the Colosseum that don’t exist anywhere else in Europe? Paul explains the answer botanist Richard Deacon discovered explaining the ancient mystery

10:38 Ruins: A place where the future is spontaneously canceled. Paul’s observation on ruins and their story as a place where the future was spontaneously canceled

12:34 Paul explains the tension between a building’s first few years and the inevitability that one day it will have to be torn down

15:14 Paul asks: "At what point can you say a ruin is "finished" and it’s permitted to destroy it?"

25:32 Paul talks about the invention of writing and how it has shaped ancient architecture, philosophy, and mathematics

28:24 Get a short peek into Paul’s second book, set in the Assyrian Empire

29:33 If Paul could travel back in time, what would he see? These are his top three choices

31:29 Paul explains the similarity between ancient ruins and ghost towns

39:32 Paul talks about the interplay between ruins in time and what they represent today, explaining how these structures feel oddly static when you enter them

41:40 Paul’s eerie story of a haunted church in Norfolk and why he believes these stories exist

43:55 Paul’s realization that for thousands of years, each person visiting a ruin has brought a different perspective, causing a continuous variation from the truth of ancient structures and historical stories

45:42 Paul’s opinion on what people in the year 5,000 will find the most interesting about today’s civilization

49:57 How the Internet is reshaping academia

53:03 Paul’s observation of the new self-education movement

You can support the North Star Podcast by leaving a review on iTunes. Or you can share the podcast on Twitter or Facebook.

To listen to other episodes or learn more about the North Star, you can connect with me directly at perell.com and you can always reach out on Twitter at david_perell. And if you enjoyed this episode, you’ll like the episode with Tyler Cowen, a columnist at Bloomberg who writes about economics, history and culture. In the Two Blundering Fools episode, Tyler shares seriously counterintuitive points on travel, the millennial generation and how he thinks about the future.

Quotes

“Every ruin is a place where a physical object was torn apart and that happened because of some historical force. If a building is ruined, an economic ruin, a closed down factory, it’s been blown up by a bomb, or it’s been abandoned because people moved away-It’s because huge historical forces have washed over it. Each ruin shows a place where the future was just suddenly cancelled. The next day didn’t happen, it was just a ruin. So, each one is a window into a particular historical moment where something changed. That’s what really fascinates me everyday about them.”

“Writing is such an incredible thing. It restructures the way we think. Once you know how to read, it’s impossible not to. If I showed you a page of words and said don’t read this, you wouldn’t be able to. Your brain has been forever changed by being taught the ability to read. The ability to store information outside of our brains suddenly frees us up to do a whole load of incredible things. A pre-literate society has a certain amount of knowledge passed down from the ancestors, who have gathered that knowledge very carefully. And we have to expand so much effort to keep that knowledge together. We have to put it in lists, make it rhyme, do it in patterns. All of these things simplify and help us remember the knowledge passed down from the ancestors. Once we can write down on clay or paper and make the material remember for us, we’re freed up to do a whole load of interesting things like examine philosophy or mathematics.”

“When people in previous ages have looked at ruins, what they see is what we’ve been describing. There was a cataclysmic event, something went wrong here, and they try to tell stories about why that might have happened…Ruins don’t mean anything by themselves. They seem like a kind of place that slightly resists meaning. People try to give meaning to them. They try to tell stories about them that make sense about what must have happened.”

“Everyone who comes to a ruin brings a different perspective and a different story and a different meaning. And all the time, the ruin is just sitting there, kind of meaning nothing. It doesn’t mean anything by itself. It needs somebody to come along and give it meaning. And so in that way, the ruin forms a battle ground. Everybody is in this five way tug of war about what this crumbling mass of bricks in the desert means and that’s what makes them incredible places to study.”

Kyle Chayka: Musings on Minimalism May 03, 2018

Show notes

Listen Here: iTunes | Overcast | PlayerFM Keep Up with the North Star Podcast Summary

Today’s guest is Kyle Chayka, a Brooklyn based writer who has been published in New York Times, Verge, Business Week and more. His studies in International Relations at Tufts University led him to live in Beijing, where he initially noticed the impact social platforms were having on internationalization.

In 2015 he wrote his essay, Welcome to Airspace, dissecting the effect of the growing decentralized geography born from technology and digital platforms.

Kyle Chayka regularly questions the future of society as the internet becomes commodified through brand ecosystems. His article archive can be found on his website, as well as information on his upcoming book regarding the allure of minimalism, The Longing for Less. Aside from his writing endeavors, Kyle is the founder of Study Hall, a freelance journalist collective coordinating office space and live events for independent writers while promoting a digital community.

In this conversation, we talk about the dangerous impact social platforms are having on cultures around the world and how living in the future has become a daunting lifestyle. Why can we visit coffee shops on opposite sides of the world with the same ambiance and aesthetic?

We talk about the effect of the digital nomad movement on cultures, countries and politics and the future impact of this lifestyle on the world.

And finally, we discuss how the internet has created a commodified identity, where humans are failing to interact successfully within this so called utopian future. You can read Kyle’s essay, Welcome to Airspace, and search his article archive on his blog, linked below.

Related Articles That I've Written

Quotes

“The problem is that all the coffee shops look the same no matter where you go.”

“There’s a decentralized geography in the world now that exists mostly because of technology and digital platforms. The coffee shop theory of Airspace is that all these coffee shops look the same because all of the same people are going to them, no matter what country they are in.”

“The way you game the system is by trying to look like everything else that has a good rating.”

“Beauty to me is different ways of aesthetic appreciation and not just looking for beauty in things that aren’t stereotypically beautiful.”

“The future is this catastrophe.”

“People are moving into places they don’t understand or don’t engage with the local community and that can be super destabilizing.”

Links

Find Kyle online:

Read Kyle’s articles:

Welcome to Airspace (1:37)

Reign, Supreme (31:15)

Mentioned in the show:

Kinfolk (2:28)

Brian Eno Music for Airports (26:05)

Rent The Runway (28:49)

Airbnb (43:39)

Bleep (44:39)

Neo Yokio (48:35)

Everlane (57:19)

Gucci (59:05)

Lot (1:00:41)

Show Topics

1:40 The inspiration behind writing Welcome to Airspace, his essay about the decentralized geography occurring in the world as a direct effect of technology and digital platforms.

4:13 Kyle’s connection between Airspace and rating based platforms like Foursquare and Airbnb

5:10 How Kyle’s initial passion for aesthetic and art was established and how he fell in love with the idea of different perspectives inventing new ways of looking at the world

8:03 Kyle’s definition of beauty and how he gained his appreciation for things that aren’t stereotypically beautiful

9:28 How architecture has shaped Kyle writing career and his opinion on humans’ inability to avoid being impacted by architecture as an art form

11:28 Why Kyle’s writing focus is on architecture and how it encompasses the entirety of the human experience

12:15 Kyle’s take away from medieval art as a representation of the same globalization happening today

15:50 How fashion is the fastest moving cultural form as a direct result of digital platforms instantly exposing what is fashionable to cities on the opposite side of the globe

17:42 How national identities are becoming more blurred as cosmopolitan cities in different countries become more and more like each other and distinct from the conservative cities surrounding them

19:40 Kyle on the reason why the digital nomad has become a global trend

21:08 Kyle’s opinion on the long term consequence of the digital nomad lifestyle as it gentrifies countries and promotes political agendas and urban spaces to be built around long term tourists instead of the local population

22:30 How social media is the driving force behind decentralized geography and how the cro-nut can be invented in New York and sold in Beijing within the same week

27:30 Why social platforms are an intersection between identity and ambiance and how users are taking advantage to brand themselves and their companies

31:15 Kyles thoughts on Supreme and how it’s a constellation of markets and experiences

33:14 How the internet has become a commodified place where things aren’t accessible and systems are implemented to exchange identity for monetization

34:16 Kyle’s observation of what was the future ideal and what is the future reality

38:03 How humans are interacting with these future needs and where the next step is for understanding and fixing the problems they are creating, such as the Bitcoin trend

40:20 The new dystopian idea of getting into brand ecosystems and staying in them for years by having one company sell a consumer everything they need to live and commodifying another person’s identity

43:47 Kyle’s experiences in Bejing, China and how it shaped his futuristic perspectives on internationalization within new communities and artistic influence

47:03 Kyle’s opinion on how digital platforms are manipulating identities yet giving users the most freedom they have ever had to express themselves

52:36 Kyle on the shift from TV and radio programs controlled by one CEO to on demand platforms that removed the boundaries

53:53 Kyle on his book Longing For Less and the shift behind minimalism across lifestyles, music, architecture and philosophy

You can support the North Star Podcast by leaving a review on iTunes. Or you can share the podcast on Twitter or Facebook.

To listen to other episodes or learn more about the North Star, you can connect with me directly at perell.com and you can always reach out on Twitter at david_perell. And if you enjoyed this episode, you’ll like Geoff’s Manaugh’s perspectives on how technology is changing architecture in the Burglars, Buildings and Blueprints North Star episode.

Keep Up with the North Star Podcast

Matt Levine: Money Stuff Feb 01, 2018

Show notes

LISTEN HERE: ITUNES | OVERCAST

Today’s guest is Matt Levine, a columnist at Bloomberg covering finance, Wall Street and the broader business world. Before blogging, Matt spent four years as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, structuring and marketing corporate equity derivatives. Before that, he worked as a mergers & acquisitions lawyer and a high school latin teacher. He’s also a graduate of both Harvard and Yale Law School. Matt’s newsletter, Money Stuff is always fresh and I admire Matt’s ability to discuss complex topics in fresh and engaging ways.

In this episode, we talk about Matt's career shift from banking to blogging — from Goldman Sachs, huge and famous, to DealBreaker, teeny and scrappy. Matt shares the ideas that have shaped his worldview and his process for writing. We talk about the books that have influenced him the most, both inside and outside the financial sphere. I particularly enjoyed learning about the Iliad.

“The tech startups are like the great laboratories for these questions now because what has happened weirdly is that the people with the best tech startup ideas have what seems to be enormous leverage over the people with the money.”

Links:

Find Matt online:

Mentioned in the show:

DealBreaker [2:55]
Bloomberg [3:17]
Cravath [6:27]
Gawker [30:17]
BlackRock [37:52]
Vanguard [37:55]
State Street [37:56]

Books mentioned:

People mentioned:

Carl Llewellyn [18:42]
Bess Levin [30:36]
Tyler Cowen [30:50] (episode with Tyler)
Felix Salmon [32:54]
Matt Yglesias [33:00]

Show Topics

1:00 - Introduction to the episode and a bit of background info on Matt. 2:32 - Matt detailing his financial background, his general background, and where he comes from.

4:19 - How Matt got into classics, a bit on his experiences in college, and his job out of college.

7:00 - The books that have shaped Matt’s perspective and worldview the most and bit on what took him into the world of finance, marketing, and accounting. Also, what some of his experiences were in that field.

11:21 - The aspect of puzzles in these fields of M&A and Matt detailing his journey from investment banking to blogging.

13:40 - How Matt’s day is structured to write, read, do deep work, and not be exhausted afterward. Also, a bit on Matt’s way of writing and learning.

15:55 - Matt detailing how he has learned to easily sift through a lot of the false information that’s commonly found and find true information. Discussion about the reality of financial investing that’s commonly mis-portrayed in the media.

20:14 - Which sorts ideas and life experiences beyond the bank that come up all the time that have been foundational for Matt’s way of approaching the world. Some discussion on law in general, lawyers, and contracts.

“You get a certain amount of legal realism baked into you in law school I think and a certain amount of skepticism about the magic functions and words in contracts.”

24:59 - Matt’s partial background in academic finance and how this has helped him understand more in the field of investing. Discussion on shareholders, share buy-backs, and running companies.

31:44 - The people that have influenced Matt the most and some discussion on how blogging has changed over the years.

35:30 - What some of the main goals are that Matt tries to accomplish everyday and a bit on the writing that he does.

37:49 - Topics and things that Matt finds the most fascinating to write about and figure out. Discussion on shareholders, index funds, writing, and investing.

Hey again, it’s David here one more time. You can support the North Star Podcast by leaving us a review on iTunes. Or you can share the podcast on Twitter or Facebook.

To listen to other episodes or learn more about the North Star, you can connect with me directly at perell.com and you can always reach out on Twitter at david_perell. And if you enjoyed this episode, you’ll like the episode with Tyler Cowen, another columnist at Bloomberg who writes about economics and culture. In the podcast, Tyler shares counterintuitive insights on travel, the millennial generation, and how he thinks about the future. Thanks again for listening.

Tyler Cowen: Two Blundering Fools Jan 25, 2018

Show notes

Listen Here: iTunes | Overcast Subscribe to my Monday Musings Newsletter to Keep Up with the Podcast Tyler Cowen is an economics professor at George Mason University. He runs the Mercatus Center, which bridges the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. He blogs every day at Marginal Revolution, writes for Bloomberg, and hosts his own podcast called Conversations with Tyler. He writes about economics, arts, culture, food, and globalization. As I prepared for this episode, I settled on three things that I wanted to focus on: how Tyler thinks about travel, the rise of China and India, and how he learns so much. Enjoy this exploration of knowledge and culture, and I hope you laugh with us along the way. I particularly recommend Tyler’s most recent book, Stubborn Attachments. Transcript David: Tyler Cowen, welcome to the North Star. Tyler: Thank you for having me. David: So tell me a little bit about where you grew up in northern New Jersey. What was growing up like for you and what were you into as a kid? Tyler: I was born in Kearny, New Jersey, Hudson county, which was a blue collar town, and my father climbed some kind of career ladder from having been bankrupted at thirty, to being upper, upper middle class, so I caught different parts of that income stream. I went to a great high school where I had four or five close friends who were super smart and had a blast. We were like a nerd fest before nerds were cool and I learned something every day but not from the teachers. I loved it and I just knew New York City. David: Well, let's dive into it. I think that one thing that's really interesting about the Internet is I like to say it rewards obsession in a way that the world didn't use to and I think a byproduct of that is nerd culture is, is cool now. Tyler: You know, I specialized in the style of learning before there wasn't an internet and then when the Internet came along, I feel it made me like 20 times more productive. So I'm very lucky to have gotten this extreme productivity boost at about age 40, which is very rare in careers. There are people who might have some kind of productivity turning point when they're 29 or 22, but to get it at age 40, it's given my life a very different trajectory. David: So I know you wrote a book about that, but talk about what was that productivity boost like, how do you think about productivity, and how did that boost manifest itself? Tyler: Well, I worked very hard for years at trying to absorb more information and absorb it quickly and order it effectively and when the way you do that is driving around to used bookstores and carry used books home and read them, well, that's a wonderful thing to do, but when you can just go to your iPad or your laptop and whoosh, it's all there, you're going to do a lot better. Tyler: Whereas people who say do research, they've been made more productive by the Internet in other ways, but they're less concerned with absorbing information. So I feel I've gotten a relative gain compared to many other people. David: So does that mean that you're hopping around between different subjects? Like if I go on marginal revolution, I could go from traveled economics to then yesterday, right, about North Korea and America. So are you hopping around or how has that style of learning changed over the years? Tyler: I have long-term study plans, like part of my long-term study plan is to understand India and China much better. So that's kind of a 10 year project that I'm always in the middle of, but of course using the Internet to help me makes it much easier. Plus travel, travel being a key to learning. We'll get back to that. Uh, and then during the day I just try to keep up with the flow, the flow of good articles and new ideas. Tyler: And you know, the flow always beats me. But you wake up at seven, you go to bed at 11:00 PM, there's interruptions, you exercise, you eat, but the day is the flow, the flow is your day, like it or not. David: Dodging bullets and trying to survive. So there was analogy I got a couple months ago of if, if you're learning is a ship, when you try to steer something for long-term, so say that you want to learn about India in the next 10 years. The advice that I got which I thought was quite good was just steer your ship. So change your twitter feed, change your social streams one or two degrees. How do you think about it? Tyler: I view myself as a prisoner of my passions. So what helps me is to be very motivated to do what I do. So I don't sit down and strategize like what's my optimal career plan? Tyler: I just think what'll keep me involved and I figure they kind of compound interest on that learning will just accumulate and as long as I'm having fun, I'll stay motivated like way past other people and that's going to go well for me. So it's almost a deliberate absence of strategy except for motivating me. Compounding fuels success in almost anything. Albert Einstein once called it the 8th wonder of the world. pic.twitter.com/1QcE9Q1hsU — ᴅᴀᴠɪᴅ ᴘᴇʀᴇʟʟ ✌ (@david_perell) October 23, 2017 David: What are those core passions? Tyler: Travel of course, food, just social science and generally walking through the world on a given day and you see things like you go to Barnes and Noble, they offer like a loyalty card, buy more books with us, we'll give you a discount and you think, well, why are they doing that? How does that make economic sense? And you want to try to figure it out so you just want to try to figure things out. It's almost a Sherlock Holmes like game and there's always more and more and more and more and more and it drives you crazy, but it's fun. David: What is it about China and India in particular that appealed to you? Tyler: Obviously they're two highly populous countries. The US could have a billion more people and we'd still be, you know, the third most populous country in the world. China now by at least one measure has the world's largest GDP and I'm an economist. India is probably headed to having the world's largest GDP. So it does go back and think, imagine you're a British person in 1910, like what should you study? Where should you travel? Well, the United States. To complain that you don't like the pollution or not all the food is what you expect. It's irrelevant, right? You go to the United States, if you don't, you're kind of a dummy. So for me right now, China, India, that's like the United States in 1910. I feel obliged to learn it more by obligation, but it's fun. It's also a passion. David: So when you're going about learning something like China, India, of course you'd go to the Bloomberg New York Times, but I think that there is, to back to nerd culture, there are probably certain sections of the Internet of the world that will give you a very rich experience that the average person wouldn't get. David: You seem to be very good at that. How have you been thinking about studying China in India in a way that most people wouldn't think about? Tyler: China and India I consider hard to learn because when you read about their histories, things don't fall into intuitive categories that maybe they do for Chinese people for instance, but all the different dynasties, they tend to blur together. You could read the same Chinese history book a bunch of times in a row and at the end you're still confused and you don't really know how to place it all, so to pick some side areas, so for me, Chinese food or Indian classical music or certain features of Chinese geography or ethnic regional culture and to learn those well and just keep on attacking the elephant from all these different sides rather than just, "Oh, I'm going to sit down and read this book on Chinese history.". Tyler: That tends not to work. It works really well for like Paris or the Florentine Renaissance, but for unfamiliar parts of the world and I look for these sideways in the door. David: Well, let's dive into China first. Where in China have you been and what have the really striking experiences been for you during your travels set? Tyler: My goal is to go to all the provinces in China in a significant way and not just putting a toe in. I'm past the halfway point. My favorite part of China is the west and the southwest, especially Yunnan province. It's highly exotic. It's about half regional minorities. That has some of China's best food. It's extremely reasonably priced that has remarkably little pollution by Chinese standards. People are very friendly, uh, there are actually quite pro-american because of the history of America. Helping them out in the war against Japan is just amazing fun. Tyler: I think right now it's probably the best trip in the world is to go to western China. David: Wow. So western China and eastern China, of course, because we're just talking about GDP, it seems like most of that would be concentrated in eastern China. So let's start with western China. What is it about it that makes it so interesting and is it authentic to what's happening in China because it is so different demographically. Tyler: Authentic is a tricky word. So if you go to Oregon is not authentic America. Well yeah, but it's not typical either. Nor is New Jersey. So southwestern China, it's just accessible and it's fun. So Beijing I love. It's fantastic. Everyone should go multiple times, but in some ways it's a tough slog. A lot of the city is ugly. The pollution can be awful and it's so large. It's not really walkable for the most part, although it's walkable within neighborhoods. Tyler: You can go to Beijing and think you don't really like China. That's the wrong impression. So I would say Udon, it's like this backdoor into China and it will open up ways of thinking about China and then when you go to Beijing you'll like Beijing a lot more. So you know, to get to Udon, you probably have to go through Beijing to fly there. So yeah, stop in Beijing for a day, but find the back doors that get your passions and that's going to be western China. David: And now in terms of what I would consider, I don't know if this is totally true, but that's how I model China. There are four big mega cities. You know there's, there's the manufacturing center, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing. Can you talk about the differences between them? Tyler: Well, Guangzhou and Chongqing are also mega cities. Some people believe Chongqing, which now has been made its own province is bigger than any other locality in China. We don't even know because there are so many people who are within China, in essence, illegal migrants. We're not sure how many people are are there. The different parts of China until recently have not been economically integrated, so they have cuisines that are quite unlike each other, maybe more unlike each other than different European cuisines. Visually, some parts will look the same because these mega cities have been built up recently using more or less common patterns so you can have the deceiving impression that you're going to the same place over and over again, even though you're traveling to many parts of China, but European say that about the US often like "Oh, the whole country feels the same." If you live here, you know, it's not true, right? There aren't really significant differences. Tyler: So to go to Hunan Province or to go to Shenyang in the northeast, which is near North Korea, or go to, you know, Chengdu in Sichuan and forgive all my pronunciations which are not proper Chinese. Uh, you're seeing much more diversity than anything you're likely to do in either Europe or the US. You're seeing what's now the world's most important country. Again, I can't stress how favorable the prices are. You can stay in a five star luxury hotel in most parts of China other than Beijing or Shanghai for less than $100 a night and it will be, you know, a wonderful quality experience and the best food in the world, you know, a meal will never have to cost you more than $20 unless you order a highly unusual dish like shark fin soup. So if you're on any kind of budget, there was no reason not to go. Tyler: Crime is close to zero for women overall it's quite safe. I mean everywhere it has some problems, but as the world goes, one of the best areas to travel in solo if you're a woman. The main reason not to go is air pollution. But again in the west that's a much smaller problem. David: Right. I was reading that there have been 16,000,000 new bikes installed in China in the last year and a half and, and a lot of people are saying that the changes in transportation there may do something at least to help boost the air pollution, which I thought was interesting, but I want to dive into infrastructure. How has being in China, uh, changed the way that you think about infrastructure and sort of the way that you think about how development happens? Tyler: Infrastructure is their specialty. They have, what is one of the world's two or three best train systems given how large the country is, that's important. A remarkable thing about traveling and mainland China is you can wake up in the morning and one city and be in almost any other part of China the same day just by taking a train trip and you'll see amazing things on the way. But in terms of planning your journey, everything is within a day without having to mess around with flights and with flights, you don't see what's in between. So you can go like Beijing to Shiyan see the terracotta warriors, that's maybe about six hours. So there's this remarkable sense of freedom you have because of the infrastructure. Along so many dimensions, now they are probably more innovative than we are. And to see that is impressive, we Americans are so complacent and smog. We think where the world's innovators, the Europeans lag behind true on average, but China does something like the payment system. Tyler: There's this way quicker and much better and you'll come back here and curse, like having a, you know, stick your chip in the thing and it doesn't always work. They're rebuilding their world in some ways. They're outdoing us. David: In terms of innovative. How do you define innovative and in what sense do they have an advantage by by not having had the PC and being able to jump straight to sort of a mobile first world? Tyler: In some cases, they're just not locked into older systems as you mentioned. Also, this is more disturbing. We should be bothered by this by having less rule of law. They can just "do things and get them done" and that's not always a good thing. A privacy law. They don't have the concerns you would have in Europe or the United States, but a Chinese payment typically is you take out your smartphone, you scan a qr code, it can be done in a second and a half. Tyler: The error rate seems to be very low. Uh, it's processed perfectly well. It's cheaper, better, quicker and more convenient than what we do and they beat us and we're not really catching up. And we need, uh, to absorb that lesson for the first time maybe ever. But at least for a long time, the US now has a peer country. Like Soviet Union was never that peer, only with weapons were they a peer. China in terms of creativity and GDP. Arguably right now is a peer. You ought to go and learn from your peer, right? How can you not do that? David: Yeah. I couldn't agree more. I was talking to a friend last night. I think Hong Kong might be a goo…

Full show notes at the publisher

Geoff Manaugh: Burglars, Buildings and Blueprints Jan 25, 2018

Show notes

LISTEN HERE: iTUNES | OVERCAST

Today’s guest is Geoff Manaugh, who explores the intersection of architecture, technology, and landscapes. As a professor, he’s taught classes in both the United States and in Australia on topics such as blackouts, the future of cinema, geo-engineering, and the possibility of a San Andreas fault national park.

In the episode, we talk about how the geography of Los Angeles influences bank heists, the new subterranean structures in Singapore and Hong Kong, caves, and how technology is changing architecture.

This conversation will have you exploring new ideas, underground tunnels, sneaking through subway systems, and using blueprints to escape a prison. You can find Geoff online at his blog, BLDGBLOG.

“All of the buildings that we interact with every day tend to be completely overlooked and treated as something that isn’t even worth discussing, and yet that’s where we spend most of our lives.”

“The real world is so much more interesting than people think it is. There’s no reason to be bored — the world is cooler and more futuristic than you might think.”

Links:

Find Geoff online:

Mentioned in the show:

Books mentioned:

A Burglar’s Guide to the City [0:49]

People mentioned:

Geoff Manaugh
Michael Mann [8:00]

Show Topics

1:53 - Introduction to Geoff and discussion on how he got into the architectural field.

3:15 - Diving into anthropology, ancient civilizations, and Geoff’s interest in both ancient structures and architecture.

5:10 - Some discussion on our current architecture and some speculation on us often being surrounded by a built environment. “All of the buildings that we interact with every day tend to be completely overlooked and treated as something that isn’t even worth discussing, and yet that’s where we spend most of our lives.”

7:50 - Discussing how the infrastructure and landscape of a city influence heists and crime. How our environment is much less passive than we think, and how it actively plays a role in influencing the way that we think and what we do.

11:12 - Figuring out how police view a city, taking advantage of various get-away routes, and the grey-areas often found in get-away routes.

12:55 - How burglars think differently about underground structures. Some discussion on tunneling and its relation to different types of landscapes under a city (sandy soil, bedrock, etc).

16:03 - How advances in technology influence architecture, security in the architectural world, and land boundaries.

18:55 - Speculating how well burglars actually know the building that they’re breaking into, how to easily find out the blueprints for a place, and discussion on burglars exploiting vulnerabilities within cities.

23:32 - How Geoff managed to get in touch with several burglars and learn from them. Also, how we unconsciously act like burglars in our lives.

28:19 - The emerging aspect of digital burglary and some discussion on this, as well as a bit on cryptocurrencies and investments. Also, thoughts on the actual definition of burglary and its relation to architecture.

32:14 - Discussing graffiti artists, people riskily exploring of architecture, and a bit on how we pay for city infrastructures, but yet we aren’t allowed to visit some of them.

34:35 - Geoff explaining various subterranean structures, caves, and underground tunnels. Also, how Singapore has begun to excavate outwards beneath the ocean for storage and other uses, architects designing artificial caves, Hong Kong’s future plans with underground infrastructures, and the powerful sense of awe that we can attain from architecture.

41:54 - Further discussion on the many things that we see, but do not consciously appreciate or really notice. Also, a bit of talk on the mysterious places left behind due to architecture evolving.

43:55 - The future of cities and architecture, and what Geoff is most excited about within these fields. The huge possibilities of technology merging with architecture. Also, a bit on quarantining people, isolating people, and relating both of these to architecture.

47:52 - Discussion on the architectural way of thinking and being efficient as a writer.

49:39 - Geoff’s connection to cinema and his perspective on cinema. A bit on what he’s done for cinema as an architect, as well.

51:12 - What has surprised Geoff while working in the television industry about bringing his book into the media network. Also, Geoff’s thoughts on transferring abstract ideas into a filmable scene.

Hey again, it’s David here one more time. You can support the North Star Podcast by leaving us a review on iTunes. Or you can share the podcast on Twitter or Facebook.

To listen to other episodes or learn more about the North Star, you can connect with me directly at perell.com and you can always reach out on Twitter at david_perell. And if you enjoyed this episode, you’ll like the episode with Eugene Wei, a film editor who has worked in some of the worlds largest tech companies, as well as directly under Jeff Bezos. We discuss merging media with technology, company building, his lessons from Bezos, and more.

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