Everything in the NFT space is moving too fast, but what if it's just the beginning?
But sometimes madness is a good thing, just ask early ETH and BTC holders to figure it out: a little risk and a little madness can turn a few thousand dollars into millions.
Not everything has to go crazy, though. I balance some of the soaring parts of my portfolio with conservative investments with long-term stable returns. I'm not talking about bonds or funds with maturity dates, I'm talking about an asset class that will grow by more than $1 trillion over the next 5 years.
The price of a real asset grew by 14% per year from 1995 to 2020, almost double the rate of return on real estate and gold, which has almost zero correlation with stocks.
Understand the power of compounding
It looks crazy out there now, right? The money of various investment institutions is frantically looking for good targets, and billionaires are also flying away from the earth.
Here are some crazy things that happened in July, with the level of madness generally on the rise:
Tiger Global just deployed $6.7 billion in venture capital in three months.
Gary Vaynerchuk bought a CryptoPunk for $3.7 million. It was the second highest price of the day.
Axis Infinity's revenue in July exceeded $190 million, up 16-fold year-over-year.
Mark Zuckerberg and his company mentioned "Metaverse" 20 times on Facebook's earnings call.
Cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which has been in existence for three years, has a valuation of $18 billion.
Richard Branson flew into space on July 11. On July 20, Jeff Bezos traveled to space.
LVH Mouq Chairman and CEO Bernard Arnough overtook Bezos to become the world's richest man.
Last week, physicists used Google's quantum computer to create a time crystal and show a new phase of matter.
Within the same week, the scientists engineered mirror images of DNA polymerases, opening up the possibility of "mirror life."
Awesome People's Julia Lipton captures this very well:
The world is starting to look like Ready Player One, faster than I thought...
What happened in July 10 years ago made the year very crazy. Now, it feels like a normal July. And everything is picking up and it feels like science fiction.
The only way not to be completely confused by what is happening now is to read more science fiction.
The NFT madness and high valuation have attracted a lot of ridicule from the outside world. This is the common way people react to strange things, and it's very easy to think of everything as a bubble, or a temporary bubble, or as a Ponzi scheme where people are tired of the coronavirus and seek to take risks, or wait to collapse. Being skeptical will make you look smarter and responsible. One way to definitely give adults extra points is to make fun of people who believe "this time is different."
But this time it's always different. When we stretch the timeline and ignore the cycles and volatility, history looks like a huge exponential curve.
When you pull the long line, a different perspective emerges. If you read the hundreds of thousands of words I wrote in Not Boring, you can only learn one concept from it, and that is:
The world will continue to get crazier in exponential form.
What seems futuristic today will look eccentric and outdated a decade from now. Newsworthy events today will become commonplace events in the future. What the 2031 opponents are opposing is almost unthinkable from today's point of view. We evolved to predict (and survive) future events by looking back at past experiences. But as the pace of progress accelerates, the effective duration of our past experience shortens.
This article is a recent series of attempts to understand what is happening in a different and serious way. I'm a staunch optimist, but I want to try to build more frameworks and reasons on the basis of optimism.
It, like Dreams All the Way Up, is one of those articles that I think may decline in reviews in the short term and will be criticized. That's fine, this article is not a short-term prediction. I don't have the ability to predict the future. Everything in the world is always changing rapidly. We are likely to be at the highs of the local market now.
Optimists seem to be more intellectually lazy than pessimists, but optimists are increasingly justified.
Pessimists sound smart. But it is the optimists who make money.
I don't think it's just bull market claims. Going back in time may be more important than imagining the future. So, open our hearts and let's be ready. We will discuss:
Die Progress Unit and Law of Accelarating Return
Venture capital Rorschach Ink Experiment and the $320 trillion global stock market
Composite Colossus
How to survive in madness
In 2015, Tim Urban wrote a two-part series on artificial intelligence (AI) on his wildly popular blog "Wait But Why." Because the article contained some rather crazy ideas, Urban used a 2,000-word preface to explain to his readers why they shouldn't see what he was about to write as too sci-fi or futuristic.
Urban's main point is that human progress is exponential. For now, however, it's hard to realize or understand that this chart is about to go vertical.
Urban explains: "You have to remember what it's like to stand on a time graph: you can't see what's on your right side. "We can look back at the past with relative certainty; but it is impossible to look to the future with any certainty, especially when progress itself is growing at an increasingly rapid rate.
To illustrate this point, Urban wrote a thought experiment:
Imagine you take a time machine back to 1750, capture a living person, and then take him back to the present, take him around and see how he reacts. Everything we take for granted — cars, tall buildings, iPhones, live sports, recorded music, Google Maps — would have shocked him in such a horrible way that he might actually be scared to death.
If the man wants to keep the game going, to take the people of the past to 1750 and then be scared to death, then he can't go back 250 years and arrest people from 1500. Because 1750 and 1500 are too similar. Maybe there will be something new in 1750, but that's not enough to shock people in the 16th century. To achieve the same effect, Urban guessed he had to find someone who lived around 12,000 B.C., before the First Agricultural Revolution. Similarly, the man of 1500 should not go back between 12,000 and 24,000 B.C., "He must go back more than 100,000 years and find someone he can show him fire and language for the first time." ”
He referred to the time when people were shocked and scared to death in the future world as the "Death Process Unit" (DPU). DPU vividly illustrates the views of futurist Rey Cruzwell, author of Singularity Approaching: The Law of Accelerated Returns.
The law of accelerated returns states that the rate of progress is accelerated because humans can use the technology they have mastered to advance faster than previous generations without technology.
This is true in terms of DPU or actual numbers, but according to Urban, there are three reasons why we cannot understand the impact of exponential progress:
1. When people talk about history, we always think in a straight line. It's hard to imagine how crazy the future will be, because most people infer from past growth rates, and even those who are more optimistic and risky will extrapolate from current growth rates.
If you admit that the pace of progress is accelerating, it is not enough to speculate about the future at the speed of the past and even the present.
2. The trajectory of recent history is often distorted. More difficultly, in the short term, assuming economic growth accelerates could make you look silly or even lose money. The whole process didn't go well. A period of rapid growth may give way to a period of slow growth. Progress happens in the S-curve (similar to the Gartner hype cycle we often talk about here), and it may even look like we're regressing in some ways. But over time, if you stretch the timeline, these are just skewed curves on the exponential curve.
3. Our own experiences make us old people with stubborn views of the future. We've experienced growth in the past, but we've never experienced growth in the future. As a result, it's easier to intuitively understand what the future will look like through linear inferences based on our actual experiences. But things will have a different trajectory in the future. We believe that anything that deviates too far from our past experience or historical average will return to the average.
We're making progress, and it's getting faster, but how did that happen?
Two years later, in a 2017 article titled "Neural Connections and the Magical Future of the Brain," Urban introduced another useful analogy: the Human Colossus. We evolved from cells to humans capable of producing large quantities of books and sharing them around the world, and at that time, humans became human colossus, essentially a large organism with shared knowledge. Computers and the Internet have made knowledge (and tool) sharing so powerful that today, you can go online and connect with anyone, download almost any information, even fork a complete code base or download design drawings.
By connecting to the Internet, anyone can access all of human knowledge. What people have spent thousands, centuries, or even years developing can be used and mixed by one person in a second. We have more bricks than ever before, and we can use them to build new buildings faster.
The conclusion here is that human knowledge is compounded, that we are building new things on the shoulders of giants at an ever-faster rate, and that our brains are not very good at understanding all these things in the present moment.
If you stop, you can feel it's happening all around us, right now.
Venture capital Rorschach Ink Experiment and $320 trillion in global markets
Now there are a lot of new and incomprehensible things happening at the same time. To make it easier for everyone to understand the process, let's start with a familiar and quantifiable place: venture capital.
This chart has caught the attention of the VC and startup community over the past few weeks. It shows the total amount of U.S. venture capital activity over the past 10 years.
U.S. venture capitalists are investing more in 2020 than in any previous year: $164 billion. By 2021, they have invested 91 percent of that, or $150 billion, with $75 billion and $75 billion in the first and second quarters, respectively. This is only half a year's investment amount. If they stick with it, VCs will invest $300 billion in startups in 2021, which is 83 percent more than in any previous year.
The financing sheet is a Rorschach inkblot quiz.
If you think we're experiencing an anomaly caused by Tiger Global Fund and covid-19, maybe your brain will predict something like this:
The venture capital you get will increase. But now the investment environment is already very hot. From 2011 to 2020, our COMPOUND growth rate has reached 15.4% (we don't consider 2021 for the time being, it's a strange year, it may regress to the mean).
If you pay attention to the DPU/accelerated regression law perspective, you may see something very different:
I'm not a blind optimist! The market will definitely have a downturn for a few years! But if the curve is exponential rather than linear (both Kurzweil and Urban thought it would be), it would be like this. In fact, even I was too conservative. If I plot the curve at a compound annual growth rate of 20.8% from 2011 to 2021, our market size will reach $1.9 trillion by 2031, twice the size of the last histogram above, and this is without accelerating the size of investment. It's very difficult to imagine accelerated growth, even for people like me who were born optimistic.
Even Tiger Global, the world's fastest-growing venture capitalist, has struggled to do just that. The Financial Times reported last week that the Tiger Fund raised $6.7 billion in March, most of which was already in place in June. $6.7 billion in 3 months! According to the Financial Times:
In June, the company said in a letter to investors that it had "consistently underestimated" the market for private tech companies. Six months ago, data showed that there was a $3 trillion market opportunity. The company says it is now close to $5 trillion.
While this is clearly a self-serving act: Tiger Global Needs to Explain Why It Spent Investors' Money So Quickly and Why Investors Should Give It another $10 Billion, It's also instructive. If Tiger Global has been underestimating the potential of the market, then the rest of us may have far underestimated the potential of the market.
For competitive reasons highlighted by Everland in Playing Different Games, Tiger Global's rapid deployment strategy may be correct, as they may have spotted the market's perpetual acceleration trend earlier than others. If this trend is still in its infancy, you should invest as much as you can in fast-growing companies.
That said, going from $300 billion a year now to $2 trillion a year in 10 years is a huge leap forward. Especially since this money needs to generate a return.
Based on my very rough estimate from this chart of VC returns (taking the midpoint of the range, assuming that the 0.5% fund return is 20 times, or 30 times, >), we can conclude that the average cash return of AVC funds in the United States is 2.13 times. This means that to generate a historical average return of $2 trillion, you need to create about $4.25 trillion worth of startups each year. This may seem unbelievable because, as I wrote in my memorandum to Not Boring Capital, all the unicorn companies in the world are worth just $2.37 trillion today.
This information is now outdated. Since July 12, 29 new unicorns have been born, and the market capitalization of all 779 companies has totaled $2.485 trillion, slightly higher than Apple's market capitalization of $2.41 trillion.
In any case, this means that every year, we need to create almost twice the value of the unicorns that exist in the world today. It's not just on paper, we also need real exports! When you look at the size of the entire market today, it seems unbelievable.
The total market capitalization of all listed stocks worldwide is about $117 trillion. Of these, the S&P 500 has a market capitalization of $36 trillion and the Nasdaq 100 has a market capitalization of $20 trillion (there is overlap between the two: Apple is the largest company in both indices). This would mean that, over time, the value of venture-backed companies in just 5 years will need to exceed the value of the 100 companies currently in the NASDAQ index. It's getting more and more unbelievable!
But the market is not static. According to the World Bank and Sibil Research, the total market capitalization of all listed companies in the world has grown from $1.138 trillion in 1975 to $117 trillion today, an increase of about 100 times, with a compound annual growth rate of 10.6% over 46 years.
Take a look at this beautiful GIF I did above, which shows the once-in-a-decade growth in the market value of listed stocks around the world. At the end of each decade, looking back, this chart looks very steep, as if it is unlikely to continue to rise. Then, when you look at this chart, it's important to keep this in mind, which predicts a compound annual growth rate of 10.6% in the market capitalization of globally listed stocks over the next 10 years.
According to this projection, the market value of listed stocks will reach $203 trillion over the next 10 years, which is almost twice the sum of today's market capitalizations in terms of newly generated value alone.
Look at the NASDAQ index, which is dominated by tech stocks, you can do the same thing.
The 100 largest U.S. tech stocks alone are worth $20 trillion. At a compound annual growth rate of 10.5 percent, that number would rise to $54 trillion over 10 years. To be clear, Nasdaq doesn't even include some of the world's biggest tech companies, including Chinese giants Tencent and Alibaba.
Both predictions are smoother than the actual situation in the future. But this may not be the case. If we look to history, 10 years from now we will see a market filled with much higher numbers than we can reasonably understand now. Some of the new market capitalization will come from today's public companies, some will come from today's private unicorns, some will come from existing startups that have not yet become unicorns, and some will come from companies that don't even exist. It is impossible to predict what kind of combination it will be.
But surprisingly, that's exactly what $300 billion in venture capital is currently investing in — companies that invest today may not go public for the next 10 years. Assuming $2 trillion in 2031 requires a $4.25 trillion annual return, this will continue into the next decade. By 2041, at the same compound annual growth rate, the value of globally listed stocks will reach $877 trillion, of which $147 trillion will come from NASDAQ.
It's crazy, all based on just typing a few x* (1+10.5%)^10 in a spreadsheet! It's simple. You can make the spreadsheet display any information. How can we create all this value in 20 years?
To make all this credible, we need to go back to innovation itself, and for that, we need to go back to the topic of Colossus.
Numbers can be easily composited. While it's hard to clearly capture how innovation is synthesized, it does.
I wouldn't explain this philosophy better than Tim, so let's go back to Colossus:
If the core motivation of the human individual is to pass on genes, which allows the species to continue, then the power of macroeconomics makes the core motivation of the human Colossus to create value, which means that it tends to invent new and better technologies. Every time it does, it becomes a better inventor, which means it can invent new things faster.
Humans spend their entire lives building primitive things for the next generation of builders. Each new invention is the product of centuries of innovation, and then it becomes a simple, uncluttered input to the next invention. Like a good API, each new invention abstracts all the complexities of its creation process.
Let's use tires as a relatively simple example. In the 4th century BC, Mesopotamia invented the wheel. As early as 1600 BC, ancient South and Central America used rubber to make rubber balls for games. In 1844, Charles Goodeyle invented vulcanized rubber, in 1847 Robert Thompson patented pneumatic rubber tires, and in 1888, the Irishman John Boyd Dunlop successfully commercialized the first pneumatic tire. 120 years later, in 2008, the Tesla team made an evolved version of this tire as part of the car's many accessories, each of which had its own long and tortuous evolutionary process, culminating in the first sports car. The Tesla team didn't need to reinvent the tire.
The same compounding processes can be found everywhere in the economy. Each invention is the latest in a series of compound innovations.
The time crystal mentioned above was only because Paul Benioff came up with the concept of a quantum computer in 1980 with the idea of a Turing machine derivative, which dates back to charles Babbage's concept of a computer in 1834, and then the physicists of Los Alamos created the first simple prototype in 1998, and Google developed the Sycamore quantum computer in 2016 without considering its real use at the time. Physicists have brought the idea of using it to create time crystals, which in itself stems from its long-standing physics roots. Now that we have functioning quantum computers and time crystals, a new generation of inventors can use them as input to something new and crazier.
This oversimplified chart is also true: the hard work of previous generations made it easier to create new content.
That's why the pace of innovation is accelerating. Discovery becomes an invention, it becomes a cornerstone, and then it becomes an invention, it becomes a cornerstone, and so on.
Let's look at fintech. In the venture capital boom, fintech stands out. In the second quarter alone, VCs invested $34 billion in fintech companies, or 45 percent of the $75 billion, according to Pitchbook (via The Economist). This makes sense, the Economist notes that they have made $70 billion from fintech exits by 2021.
We discussed numbers in the previous section. This part is not about "what". It's about "why.".
Fintech is clearly an early beneficiary of compound innovation. Stripe, founded in 2009 and $13.4 billion in 2013, have built a lot of infrastructure on which a new wave of fintech companies can more easily build.
Robin Hood doesn't need to connect directly to your bank to withdraw money; it connects via Plaid.
Jeremy Smith, one of Equi's co-founders, told me that without fintech infrastructure products like Plaid and Modern Treasury, they wouldn't have been able to develop their own products.
Ramp uses Stripe's Isuing products to make and manage cards.
At the same time, entrepreneurs continue to build more infrastructure. Last week, I spoke with two companies that develop card products on Heritage. Portfolio companies Unit and Embedded allow other companies to add banking and trading operations to their products.
Fintech infrastructure companies can create huge financial outcomes for their investors and enable the next wave of companies to create products that were previously impossible or at least very difficult, expensive, time-consuming, and imperfect. They influence compound innovation.
I once wrote about the impact of off-the-shelf software on the growth and speed of new companies:
Redpoint venture capitalist Logan Bartlett has speculated that just 10 years ago, even a great company would take seven or eight years to build what Ramp could do in two years. Ramp's team consisted of fewer than 100 people. Of course, Ramp is now worth more and grows faster than similar companies in the past.
API-first companies let other companies focus on their core differences rather than reinventing the wheel. Younger companies can become bigger and faster than before. You know what to do.
What I haven't written about before, or only recently thought about, is that being able to build faster with fewer employees is in itself a compounding effect.
First, the faster a new company is established, the faster other companies can benefit from it. New primitives create new opportunities for innovation. This is very obvious.
One fact that is rarely explored is that a new company needs fewer employees because it can outsource all the functionality to APIs and software, and more talented employees are freed up to start their own businesses. If you used to need 100 employees to build a product that satisfies your customers, you now need only 10 employees, and those 90 additional employees can start 9 more companies.
Even better, because this 90 employees in the only company would always work on non-core jobs like payments, bank-integrated authentication, scheduling, background checks, data labeling, and so on, which can now be done by plugging in APIs that free up talent that can be used to innovate, not execute.
In Andy Will's latest masterpiece, The Plan of Mary, a character named Stratt describes the past as "unforgiving mystery" by saying:
For fifty thousand years, until the Industrial Revolution, human civilization was all about one thing: food. Every culture in existence devotes most of its time, energy, manpower and resources to food.
Agricultural mechanization has allowed humans to focus on other things. Therefore, in the past few centuries, technology has developed rapidly. I'm not comparing APIs to food, but a similar dynamic process is at work: when people don't have to focus on everyday survival problems, they can invent new things.
Back to our ten small companies. Not only can they create new things on their own, but some of these 10 companies can also provide the cornerstone for creating new ones. Maybe their innovation will help reduce the size of the required team from 10 to 5, unleashing more innovative power, and so on.
It also creates 10 times the number of companies that investors can support and 10 times the chance of achieving significant results without reducing the potential size of any given outcome. Unless these companies compete directly with nearly identical products, they may take a share from incumbents that are less tech-focused, expand their markets, or create entirely new markets. Lightweight teams also reduce the cost of failure, allowing people to experiment with ideas faster before they go all out.
Building blocks allow more new companies to be built faster and leaner.
Faster, leaner companies build more new building blocks.
Compounding process.
This concept of composite construction also drives innovation beyond fintech. Categories that seemed unattainable a decade ago or like pure science fiction now have infrastructure that makes building relatively simple.
Most notably in the cryptocurrency space, smart contracts are literally called "Lego" due to their composability. Everything is inherently open source, and new builders can take advantage of existing LEGO to create exponentially more complex products. We've been talking about cryptocurrencies a lot here lately, and you probably know how much of an impact I think it will have, but if you don't know, read the related article.
NexHealth's mission is to accelerate the healthcare process by connecting patients, physicians, and developers. They want to make it as easy to make health tech products as it is today to create fintech or cryptocurrency products. When the new primitive makes it easier to build new solutions, there are trillions of dollars of value in the healthcare space waiting to be unleashed.
Scale is building ai and machine learning infrastructure and hopes to increase the use of AI and machine learning in the enterprise from the current 8% to all enterprises over the next 20 years.
It's almost impossible to predict how the widespread use of AI and machine learning will have in the coming decades, especially if they're evolving so fast. I previously quoted a two-part article by Tim Urban, "Wait, but why?" Because, in his words, "I quickly realized that what's happening in the AI world is not only an important topic, but by far the most important topic for our future." "The potential compounding impact of AI is why Kurzweil was initially excited about the law of accelerated returns.
In addition to the above areas, space infrastructure has also reached a level where you can land SpaceX.com and book a position for your satellite on a rocket, which is easier than buying a lot of old-fashioned B2B software servitization platforms. Seriously, I suggest you click on the link to experience it for yourself.
Of course, there are compounding effects in this area. Varda is putting together a suite of commoditized space products, much like software companies connecting APIs with the aim of building space factories that would have been impossible to achieve on Earth before.
SpaceX itself is also using its launch and re-entry capabilities to send satellites into space, and through its Starlink business, these satellites will cover the globe over fast internet for $100 a month. Akash Systems will do even better on Starlink, which will offer fast internet around the world for $5 a month, thanks to its patented technology that uses man-made diamonds to dissipate heat, reducing the size and cost of the satellites needed.
These are absolutely amazing achievements that can only be achieved with the combined knowledge and innovation of the Colossus of Humanity, but they are also the cornerstone of more innovation in the future.
What will the world look like when everyone on the planet has access to high-speed internet for just $5 a month?
What would it look like when you made billions of people online anywhere, artificial intelligence, healthcare, crypto, and financial instrument infrastructure, all of which can be called in a few lines of code?
What happens when you combine cheap, rich internet access with a tool like Rapid?
All innovation is done through a compounding process. Everything is getting crazier, faster and faster.
Even without taking into account cheap, fast internet around the world, regions such as Africa, Southeast Asia, and India will experience tremendous growth in the coming decades, creating new innovators and adding billions to the global middle class. In the coming decades, the development of digitalization, remote work, and cryptocurrencies will break down national borders and make the global playing field more levelly.
I haven't touched the metaverse yet. In his Primer, Matthew Bauer talks about all the different innovations needed to stitch the metaverses together, each of which is the result of a long series of small, compound innovations. Once the Meta universe becomes a reality, the next huge platform will shift (Facebook is sure that it will happen), what kind of madness will this trigger? What does the value chain look like when you're primarily engaged in digital products?
What if you combined it with cryptocurrencies? The rise of games like Axis and the crazy demand for NFTs suggest that there is a real demand for digital employment and identity. Bernard Arno's rise to the top of Forbes' rich list proves that people are willing to spend money to show off; it happened during the recent NFT renaissance. People always want to express themselves and show off themselves. NFTs and metacosms open up new venues for experimentation and identity seeking, with little to no production cost or environmental impact.
The process is not linear. This is exponential and completely unpredictable. We have introduced only a small fraction of the countless innovations that will themselves spawn new innovations, and it is impossible to simulate the results of the arrangements and interactions between the fields we have described. 10 years ago, cryptocurrencies were almost non-existent. What new categories will emerge over the next decade that will exceed our expectations?
All of this is saying: I know things look weird right now, but when you look right from the chart, it's just a small bright spot.
Here's the thing: While the game may continue to evolve, it doesn't mean that the game has obvious or simple gameplay.
First, there is a risk of timing.
If the Fed raises interest rates, growth assets could suffer in the short term. Clumsy cryptocurrency regulation is a legitimate concern. The market will never rise in a straight line. Although global stock markets and the NASDAQ composite grew at a COMPOUND of about 10.5% and eventually rose, there are still many ups and downs along the way. Please do not mortgage your house and YOLO as risky assets. You need to play a role in the game.
Second, there are macro and tail risks.
What happens to the market if the dollar loses its position as a global reserve currency? The threat of climate change will not disappear anytime soon. Will the further rise in financial markets create extreme wealth disparities that can trigger violent instability? Will the government tax investment income or even stifle innovation in order to maintain social order?
These are tail risks, and there are countless unimaginable things that could happen. Perhaps the next global crisis will not be a good thing for innovation. Everything is unknown.
However, we can roughly assume that over the next decade and beyond, the rate of progress will continue to increase and the curve will continue to steepen. Figuring out how to play is still tricky.
Both Kurzweil and Urban show that progress is exponential and does not necessarily allow companies or markets to derive value from progress.
Although both the global stock market and the NASDAQ have achieved perfect compounding, their composition changes frequently. It's hard to predict which companies will reap the value created by compound innovation.
If innovation continues to accelerate, there may be entirely new technologies or models that will replace existing leaders. Mobile devices have dramatically changed this landscape; will cryptocurrencies have the same impact on fintech? Is there another platform shift that no one anticipated that could dramatically change the landscape?
Also, if the market capitalization of globally listed stocks reaches $320 trillion in 10 years, I'd really be shocked, not because I don't think that much value will be created, but because I suspect that so much of it will flow into the listed stocks. If cryptocurrency is a disruptive force, as it seems, then more and more trillions of dollars of value will flow to token holders rather than public market shareholders. If these token holders are value creators – creators and consumers – that's a great thing, but it means closing your eyes and buying S&P, NASDAQ, or other open market indices isn't as safe as it seems.
The issue I emphasize is that I'm confident that treating what's happening as a fad or a temporary frenzy will make our minds seem outdated.
Everything is getting faster and faster. Everything is getting crazier. It is impossible to predict exactly what will happen.
So how do you prepare?
It's important to keep an open mind. You should continue to play great online games. Reading science fiction will make madness seem more familiar (I just finished Project Mary, and it's great). For those who are a little crazy, there will be plenty of opportunities.
Take a long-term view. As Patrick Collison said in describing his admiration for Jeff Bezos to Ezra Klein:
The concept of using time frames as a competitive advantage has deep implications because you're willing to wait longer than others, and your organization is so oriented.
Let yourself position yourself this way, jump in, and enjoy everything. The future will be crazier than you think.
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