From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
This ease of gaining virtue status on social media, coupled with our innate desire for status, explains the platform's toxicity. We're drawn to the simplest form of status acquisition, and social media facilitates this with minimal effort, creating a cycle of virtue signalling that feeds our need for recognition and approval.
It's the convergence of technologies at any given time that allow individuals to achieve the things which simply were not possible before. Your smartphone can be used to diagnose diseases for example – every disease has a pattern.
The word engage is the most important thing when it comes to creating a strong brand. From day one, any time someone would comment I would comment back to them- and I started to understand our audience really quickly. I probably spent 3 or 4 hours a day on our social media channel replying to people.
People also lose sight of the fact that technology driven globalisation has been extremely beneficial for a lot of people outside the US. Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted above the poverty line in India, China, Africa and elsewhere.
We've had an explosion of platforms that have atomized the delivery and consumption of music, and I'm really for that- it's democratized music. Previously, there were a lot of gatekeepers that controlled how you were supposed to listen to music… that's all gone now.
The potential of wearable health monitoring is enormous, and under appreciated by a lot of society, because version-1 of wearables were – to put it politely – underwhelming. The health care industry spends a lot on curative costs… and if you shift the curative to the preventative, you can save a tonne of money and have better outcomes.
Each of us needs a space to think deeply. The best space to think combines the comfort of paper and the advantages of digital technology—in a focused, distraction-free environment.
Academics, research analysts, and even regulatory agencies have recognized that today's markets are more liquid and less expensive than before the advent of HFT. This is no doubt due in part to the improvement in liquidity provisioning that has arisen from the better risk management that computers provide over human traders.
Kodak had been living in linear-time, something which is intuitive to most of us, where we think in days, weeks, months, years… The world had already started to shift when people like Steve Jobs started to take-advantage of the fact that you could connect the dots.
Digital media has allowed a complete bypass of those structures – there's less control around power – and people can amass huge followings for totally irrational reasons.
Ageing is malleable, we can control it. 20% of our health in old-age is due to genetic factors, and the rest is due to our lifestyle. We can measure this clock. It's literally measuring chemicals in our own DNA.
The only way social media can work is if you are incredibly authentic. If you try and cultivate and curate too much it can be very obvious and transparent.