Rob Henderson: An Internet Academic
North Star Podcast
Rob Henderson is one of my favorite up-and-coming writers. I like him because he's one of those people who doesn't fit into a category. He's a Ph.D. candidate in psychology, but I met him in a book club about technological stagnation. He's spent years in the academy, first at Yale and now at Cambridge, but most of his influence comes from his online writing. Most of all, he's interested in human nature. In particular, psychology, status, and social class.
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Chrisman Frank and Ana Lorena Fabrega: How Childhood Education Will Change
North Star Podcast
This week, I have two guests. Both are affiliated with Synthesis, a new kind of online school where kids learn through games and simulations. One is Chrisman Frank, the CEO of Synthesis. The other is Ana Lorena Fabrega, who is their Chief Evangelist.
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Ash Fontana: Building Artificial Intelligence
North Star Podcast
Ash Fontana is an entrepreneur, investor, and author. As an entrepreneur, he was only of the early employees at an online investing platform called AngelList. From there, he became the Managing Director at Zetta, the first investment fund focused on artificial intelligence. Now, he's the author of the AI-First Company.
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Li Jin: Creating the Creator Economy
North Star Podcast
My guest today is Li Jin, the founder and managing partner at an early-stage venture capital firm called Atelier.
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Zena Hitz: Liberal Arts Thinking
North Star Podcast
My guest today is Zena Hitz, a tutor at St John’s and the author of an excellent book called Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. Her book explores the meaning and the value of learning for its own sake, through images and stories of bookworms, philosophers, scientists, and other learners, both fictional and historical.
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Tiago Forte and Will Mannon: Building Cohort-Based Courses
North Star Podcast
I have two guests today: Tiago Forte and Will Mannon.
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Gagan Biyani: Building Silicon Valley Startups
North Star Podcast
My guest today is Gagan Biyani, the current CEO of an education startup that helps teachers run Cohort-Based Courses on the Internet and has students from around the world. Gagan also founded a multi-billion dollar online education platform called Udemy. Afterward, he founded Sprig, a food delivery platform that grew to a nine-digit valuation but eventually failed. So today, he has the distinct pleasure of being both the founder of a unicorn and the founder of a massive failure.
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Trevor Bauer: Playing Professional Baseball
North Star Podcast
My guest today is Trevor Bauer, who is arguably the very best pitcher in Major League Baseball. I wanted to interview Trevor not only because he's an excellent pitcher, but because he takes a radical approach to the game. He's a physicist and a scientist. A scholar and an entrepreneur. And you don't find that combination very often.
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Nik Sharma: Building DTC Companies
North Star Podcast
My guest today is Nik Sharma, the founder of Sharma Brands and an advisor to companies like Judy and Cha Cha Matcha. Nik is one of my very best friends, and my go-to person for all things commerce. Since we first met, we've spent hours exploring the future of marketing and commerce together, and recorded this podcast to give you a window into what our conversations are like.
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Kevin Kelly: Seeing the Future
North Star Podcast
My guest today is Kevin Kelly, who co-founded Wired Magazine in 1993 and served as its Executive Editor for the first seven years. As one of the most important futurists of our generation, he's published a number of books including The Inevitable, What Technology Wants, and New Rules for the New Economy which is my favorite one. Coolest of all, he's also a founding member of the board of the Long Now Foundation, a non-profit devoted to encouraging long-term thinking.
info_outlineMy guest today is Balaji Srinivasan, an angel investor and entrepreneur. When it comes to the future, he's the single most creative person I know because he's so technical, innovative, and polymathic. Talking to him is an experience unlike talking to anybody else, which I tried to replicate in this conversation.
A little bit about Balaji. He's worked as the Chief Technology Officer at Coinbase and a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. In the world of academia, he holds a BS/MS/PhD in Electrical Engineering and an MS in Chemical Engineering, all from Stanford University. He's also taught at Stanford, where his online course has reached 250,000 students worldwide.
This episode is a whirlwind through Balaji's interests. We started by talking about his production function. We talked about what holding all those degrees from Stanford taught him about learning, how he identifies talent, and what building and selling two companies for more than $100 million taught him about management. We also talked about his interests in genomics, how to reverse aging, and why living forever is the ultimate goal of technology. At the end, we built off the ideas I talk about in my online writing school called Write of Passage to talk about his plan to fund online writers with a project called MediaFund.
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Show Notes
2:42 - What Balaji learned about how to learn from his extended time in academia and why he doesn't read the instructions until he has to.
4:21 - Why knowing philosophy and history is so integral to starting a successful company.
6:54 - Why Balaji thinks we are severely underutilizing the collaborative potential of the internet.
12:45 - How remembering references to knowledge instead of the knowledge itself gives Balaji a better way to argue his points.
13:47 - Why searching for people who are "hungry and can teach us something" serves everybody who is involved very well.
19:39 - The "tour of duty" and how to create a great strategy for developing and managing yourself and your team.
24:25 - The movement from a centralized century to a decentralized century and why Balaji feels the future is moving more towards his lifestyle.
31:19 - How technology hyper-deflates the market of everything it touches.
38:23 - How the past is wrapping back around to the future and how the evolution of education is leading the way.
44:49 - Why abstraction means progress as a culture up to a certain point and can become harmful beyond that.
48:57 - How to optimize your information diet to make you smarter, more effective, and more honest about where you spend your energy.
54:07 - The future of online education and why it doesn't end with Wikipedia.
59:32 - New ways to look at incentive structures for writing and how it inspires technological and social growth.
1:04:27 - How to bridge the gap between Hollywood, big data, and education.
1:12:43 - The future of the internet and why the pseudonymous economy seems likely to Balaji.
1:15:04 - How we can use a "crypto oracle" to create an unfalsifiable history of our digital information.
1:21:31 - Why a worldwide ledger of record is the future we need in an information-driven world.
1:26:59 - Why Balaji believes that the pinnacle and goal of technology is to help humans live forever.
1:32:50 - How to build a digital country through writing.
1:39:34 - Why genomics needs more attention from the general population and technology.
1:44:42 - Why writers will be the future of millionaires and billionaires.