The Anthology of Balaji

Selected Highlights

If you haven’t studied something in depth, your mental model of it often implicitly reduces to a few scenes from a Hollywood movie.

...money as a tool to build things I can’t buy today. Elon Musk is building SpaceX because he can’t buy a trip to Mars. You can have all the money in the world, but you can’t buy a trip to Mars. One hundred years ago, the richest man in the world couldn’t buy an iPhone. That’s the kind of progress I care about.

We didn’t fly for the entire history of humanity, and then suddenly we did. Our only real constraint is physical law. This is why I don’t pay much attention to people claiming something is impossible based solely on past failure. Things change, tech advances, and the mythical Icarus is succeeded by the very real Wrights

Prices are up in education, healthcare, and real estate, but they’re down in computers and telecommunications. In every area technology touches, the price decreases. Everybody becomes more equal because they have the same iPhone or Android phone experience. They’ve got the same Google, Wikipedia, GitHub—anything that is digital.

Distinguishing social consensus from truth is really important because they’re not the same. Often we will say, “Oh, that is true,” because there is a social consensus. You can position facts at two poles: political facts and technical facts. A political fact is true if enough other people believe it to be true; for example, who the president is or where the border of a country is. That’s actually a psychological phenomenon. If you can install software to enough people’s brains, you can change those truths. That is social consensus.

People forget how completely non-obvious the entire digital revolution has been every step of the way:
1995: “WWW will fail.”
2002: “Google will fail.”
2007: “iPhone will fail.”
2013: “Facebook will fail.

Today, there are four possibilities for the frontier: the land, the internet, the sea, and space. If we assess where we are right now, we learn that currently 7.7B people are on land, 3.2B on the internet, about 2–3M on the high seas, and fewer than 10 in space. Creating frontiers is important. Frontiers give pioneers space to innovate without affecting those who don’t consent to the experiment.

Entrepreneurs who know the history of their industries understand which assumptions will be invalidated with new technology.

History is the closest thing we have to a physics of humanity. It provides many accounts of how human actors collide and interact with each other.

You are what you read.