The path to political power is shifting. Instead of politicians learning social media, the next wave of leaders will be social media natives who build massive followings first and then leverage that audience to enter politics.
Our brains evolved for a world of linear change, not exponential curves. This cognitive blind spot leads to underestimating threats like viruses and opportunities like compounding, as we tend to perceive exponential growth as linear in the short term.
Geography provides the foundational 'hardware' for a nation (e.g., navigable rivers, defensible borders). However, this must be paired with effective 'software'—governance, laws, and culture—to achieve prosperity. One without the other, like in Argentina's case, leads to underperformance.
The belief that Luddites were simply anti-progress is a historical misreading. Technology created long-term societal wealth but caused immediate, unrecoverable job loss for them. AI will accelerate this dynamic, creating widespread disruption faster than workers can adapt.
The primary function of a college degree is to signal desirable employee traits—intelligence, work ethic, and compliance—rather than to impart useful skills. As more people get degrees, the signal weakens, forcing students into an expensive and wasteful 'credential race' for ever-higher qualifications to stand out.
The pursuit of a massive, Joe Rogan-sized audience is a limiting factor in podcasting. The real opportunity lies in niche topics where hosts with deep passion and expertise can cultivate a sustainable audience of 25k-50k listeners, which is sufficient to support an ad-based model.
As AI automates entry-level white-collar jobs, a growing number of college graduates will face unemployment. This creates what historian Peter Turchin calls 'elite overproduction'—people educated for elite roles with no positions to fill. This disenfranchised group is a prime demographic for socialist movements.
The printing press didn't just spread information; it forged modern nations. By concentrating publishing in major cities, it standardized local vernaculars (e.g., Parisian French), creating linguistic communities that became the foundation for national identity and replaced the pan-European Latin elite.
Small-scale UBI trials are inherently flawed because participants know the income is temporary. Retirement, however, is a massive, long-running natural experiment in UBI for those over 65. Its immense popularity proves that a guaranteed, permanent income is a viable and desirable social policy.
Private Equity investors often misunderstand the VC model, questioning the lack of deep due diligence. They fail to grasp that VCs operate on power laws, needing just one investment to return the entire fund, making the potential for exponential growth the only metric that truly matters.
Unlike China's vast, easily unified plains, Europe's geography of mountains and rivers created natural barriers. This prevented a single empire from dominating and instead fostered centuries of intense competition between states. This constant conflict spurred rapid technological and military innovation, ultimately leading to European dominance.
With just three weeks of intense, focused research on epidemiology, writer Tomás Pueyo became a key advisor to governments during the COVID-19 pandemic. His experience reveals that dedicated individuals reading primary sources can quickly surpass the knowledge available within official channels, exposing significant gaps in institutional expertise.