Two books I read recently helped me tremendously to understand what’s happening now with Artificial Intelligence: Prediction Machines and Power and Prediction (affiliate links) by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb. The authors are economists and professors at the University of Toronto, one of the leading institutions studying the economic impacts of AI. Their…
Imagine a product manager sitting down with his team on a Monday morning to plan the next week. The main item on the agenda is the decision of whether to create a mobile app for their e-commerce website. The team quickly gets excited about the idea, imagining all the possibilities it could entail. They propose…
One of my current obsessions is understanding exactly how a new idea, such as the “Second Brain” meme I’ve spent the last 5 years working on, moves from the fringes of society to become a part of mainstream culture. This isn’t idle speculation: in 6 months, on August 2, 2022, my book Building a Second…
Our vision is that every single person in the world has the opportunity to create a Second Brain – a personal system of knowledge management – of their own. Everyone should have the chance to gather information and ideas, turn them into valuable knowledge, and use that knowledge to improve their own lives and the…
Octavia Estelle Butler was born in 1947 in Pasadena, CA. Known in her early years as “Estelle,” she was raised by a single, widowed mother who worked domestic jobs to make ends meet. Painfully shy and introverted from a young age, Estelle became an easy target for bullying at school. Her shyness combined with slight…
We’ve been led to believe that we are at the precipice of an Artificial Intelligence explosion. Yet the progress in our digital assistants and self-driving cars seems to have stalled. Computers choke at even the simplest requests, and most of the digital world continues to be handcrafted by humans. But quietly, hidden in plain sight,…
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was sitting in my high school U.S. History class. We watched in horror as the aftermath of the twin towers’ collapse unfolded on live TV. I was in my third year, and at 16 years old thought I was just beginning to understand the world and my…
Here are the best online articles and blog posts I read in 2020. For each one I’ve provided a short excerpt and an explanation of how it shaped my thinking. #1 Seeing Like an Algorithm “Understanding how the algorithm achieves its accuracy matters even if you’re not interested in TikTok or the short video space…
This is the first interview I’ve done that was recorded on video, with Nicholas McCay on his podcast Eclectic Spacewalk. Originally published on their Substack newsletter, you can also read the full transcript. Here’s the show notes: How growing up in a diverse cultural household shaped his worldview. (03:02) Reading and books were always a…
Illustration by Mark Weaver We are living in the midst of an Informational Apocalypse. The volume of information we’re exposed to every day continues to explode without regard for the number of hours in a day. “Information overload” has evolved from a narrow preoccupation to a pervasive state of mind. Every minute of our day…
Check out my super in-depth, 2-hour conversation with my co-instructor David Perell below. We talk about what we think the future of online education will look like, how creativity and productivity are evolving in the modern world, and what we’ve learned from teaching over 1,000 students through our online courses, Building a Second Brain and…
On a recent Sunday afternoon, while reading on the couch, I was startled to realize that I had a life philosophy. It’s not a very deep or sophisticated one. It’s not rooted in a grand narrative. It doesn’t specify precisely which rules to follow or which decisions to make. But it has served me well….
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