YOUTUBE 📚 THE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE 📚 PATREON

*Anyone who's fascinated by technology and wants to become more involved, whether that's to study in a certain field, join or start a business, or simply follow along as we invent the future.

*Optimists and other forward-thinking people who are interested in things like life-extension, and other ways that all our lives could be improved by technology.

*People who are concerned about how fast the future is rushing towards us, yet who are open to ways we can mitigate the dangers while remaining open to the exciting possibilities.

*Everyone who believes that the future of humanity is brighter and bolder than its past, and who's ready to build the kind of world they want to live in.

The feel of this book in my hands is like holding a revelation. It's like holding a vision of humanity's marvelously bright future, and after you're finished reading it, that bright, techno-utopian future Balaji predicts and describes is going to seem a lot more believable - and more imminent.

Balaji Srinivasan is a serial entrepreneur, investor, futurist, and yes, like Eric Jorgenson says, sort of an eccentric genius and comic book villain. He's a big, optimistic thinker with his feet firmly on the ground, while his head can be found way up in the clouds. When he looks at humanity and at the world, he sees value and infinite potential; where other people see walls, Balaji sees windows.

All of which makes it kind of difficult to summarize such a wide-ranging book about the potentially million-plus-year future of humanity and all the progress that could occur over that timespan. Make sure you're sitting down while reading this one, is I guess what I'm trying to say.

Eric Jorgenson (who's also the author of The Almanack of Naval Ravikant) said that researching and writing this book made him live differently, and influenced the kinds of companies and fields he invests in. It gave him an appreciation for our place in the history unfolding today and impatience for the many ways we're punching ourselves in the face.

The Anthology of Balaji is built entirely out of transcripts, tweets, and talks Balaji has shared and that are scattered all over the internet, much like The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. 

In the first part (and the rest of this paragraph is from Amazon), “Technology,” you will see how technology shapes our world today and the ways it could shape our future. In “Truth,” you learn how to think for yourself through the constant clamor of information and media. Finally, in “Building the Future,” you will learn how to wield Technology and Truth to change your life, change your community, and—maybe—change the future of our species.

My breakdown can be read in about an hour, but this, like most of the books for which I've written complete breakdowns, is one that I'd definitely recommend reading in its entirety. There's just too much in there, too many thoughts and ideas that are going to be relevant in different ways to different people, for my breakdown to be an adequate substitute for reading it yourself.

That being said, I've selected 18 of the most fascinating Key Ideas from the book for your consideration here, dealing with everything from life extension and the quest to live forever, to free speech and cryptographic proof of miracles, to the potentially millions of years of technological progress and techno-utopia we have to look forward to, on this planet and out there among the stars.

#1: Growing Toward Infinity

I'm even younger than Balaji (34 at the time of this writing), and I feel exactly the same way - that my life is just beginning. That I'm at the beginning of the beginning of my life, and that my future will be much longer, fuller, and brighter than my past.

This is the dream of transhumanism, which is multifaceted, but rooted in the idea that technological advancements can assist humans in living longer, healthier, more vibrant and cognitively rich lives than has been possible in the entire history of humanity until this point. Perhaps indefinitely, but we'll get to that later.

In fact, some people believe that the first humans who will live to 1,000 years old have already been born...and I don't think that's crazy anymore. Again, more on this later, but when you think of the quite literally unbelievable progress we've made to this point, not to mention the science-fiction-like medical technologies that are either here now or coming soon, I'd say that all of us have plenty of justification for feeling extremely optimistic about not just our own personal futures, but the future of humanity itself.

When you consider what's become available over the last 5-10 years, you have to ask yourself, What if this were to continue indefinitely? Is it that crazy to think that someone who's, say, 5 years old today, would stand a chance of living t0 500 years old given 75 more years of medical progress before they even reach the current life expectancy?

In his book, Excellent Advice for Living, the optimistic technologist Kevin Kelly points out that:

The breadth and scale of the problems we'll be able to solve 75 years from now (5 years from now!) literally only used to exist as science fiction, but today it's an actual possibility. Our capacity to solve problems improves so quickly as a society, yet the majority of people are trained to focus only on shorter timescales.

In their book, Scarcity, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir show that when people are forced to make due with limited resources, their attentional capacities are restricted to a narrower focus on the very next short-term problem.

An idea like transhumanism wouldn't even register to the person who has no reliable access to clean drinking water, and why should it? They likely wouldn't be able to spare the cognitive resources to think about living forever. They have to survive today first.

But once we make inroads on solving these sorts of immediate, scarcity problems, we will free up capacity to lift our sights and attack the next biggest problem we face.

The world is confronted by far too many short-term problems for transhumanism to become an immediate global priority today, but we can work towards it. Both as individuals and as a society. Individually, we can get rich ourselves and help other people get rich too, which I'll come back to later.

Solve your immediate scarcity problem, and make sure you can survive today and for a reasonable time into the future. Then, as Balaji has done (and is doing), build distribution; build a network; build optionality. Put your ideas out there into the world, claim them, and become known for them. Enlist the help of others to spread those ideas, and build an audience.

Then, on a longer-term horizon, you can think about transhumanism, the techno-utopian future of humanity, and living forever. Never ignore your long-term vision or forget about it either. It has to stay with you, even in the beginning. You have to build the muscle of looking up from your daily concerns and asking the BIG questions, like What am I going to dedicate my life to creating?

Some people think that they "should" or would even want to "retire" as soon as possible and then set up on a beach somewhere, slowly sinking into the sand until they die. But it's a bad idea. Maybe not a bad idea - just a boring idea. Honestly, I'd give it a month or two (max) before you start looking around and asking hard questions again.

Eventually, if you're anything like Balaji and myself (and not everyone has to be, but I suspect many people are), you'll feel an irresistible pull - a compulsion - to start investing in the future you want to live in. To be a part of that future, instead of sitting it out on the beach.

#2: The Emotional Case for Technology

Pessimism is a direct threat to the future of humanity. There, I said it.

The creators of these shows and movies, books and other productions - the ones that try to convince you that the world is going to hell and that you should just give up and let it happen - think they're so smart for their "critiques" of contemporary society, but really it's just lazy thinking. Not to mention dumb and harmful.

Assuming that the future will be worse is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Get enough people to believe it, and they'll hasten that dystopia's arrival.

They'll either begin acting in a way that's going to make the world worse ("Since the world is running down the drain anyway, I may as well get while the getting's good"), or they'll stop doing the things that could prevent that dystopian future from becoming a present reality ("Starting that eco nonprofit is a waste of time because it's a losing cause anyway"). Lazy, stupid, dangerous thinking. All of it.

Look, it's always up to us what technology is used for, and what's even developed in the first place. We made our present (I'm not going to call it a "dystopia"), and we will make our future too. It's being made right now, with the ideas, beliefs, and behaviors that are growing in strength right now, whatever they happen to be.

#3: The Next Problem is Solvable

All of this is leading up to the fundamental idea expressed in the quote above, namely that a solution exists to our problems and that it's up to all of us, collectively, to find them and put them into action.

Remember what Kevin Kelly said in Excellent Advice for Living: you just have to imagine how much our ability to solve problems improves. That can be hard to see from where we're currently standing. We're at the base, the beginning, of the adjacent possible, and we'll only begin to glimpse our future possibilities once we travel further: the path is made by walking.

To disbelieve in the ability of smart people to devise ingenious solutions is to bet against progress, and that's never worked out for anyone in the history of humanity, now has it? Yes, new technologies create additional problems (cyber-terrorism, nuclear waste, greenhouse gases, etc.), but they also create additional solutions (cyber-security, nuclear safety protocols, solar technology, etc.)

What we need to do is adopt a fundamentally optimistic orientation when it comes to the future. We have to build confidence in our ability to solve big problems, and stack up evidence that we can overcome the obstacles standing before us today.

#4: Technology is Just Getting Started

It's exciting enough talking about all the amazing stuff that's here now, but we're only talking about present-day realities and the science-fiction-y stuff that's coming around the very next bend. In, say, 5-10 years. But what about the next 100 years?! What about the next 1,000?!

I mean seriously: what might we be able to do, given 100...1,000...hell, what about 1,000,000 years of technological progress? Think! Dream! Imagine!

There's an absolutely incredible book on this called What We Owe the Future, by the Oxford philosopher William MacAskill. It's one of my absolute favorite books of all time and it's just...mind-blowing. There's no other word for it. Anyway, what he urges us to imagine (there's that word again) is that the 117,000,000,000 humans who have ever lived might represent less than 1% of the total number of human beings who ever will exist.

Here, take a breath while you ponder that.

Seriously, I won't keep going until you're ready.

Still need a minute? You good? Okay...

There could be millions and millions of years of human history yet to come; we could expand and explore and colonize the vast reaches of the outer universe; there are potentially trillions of human beings who will exist (and, most importantly, have great lives) in the future. But only if we solve our most pressing problems now. It's up to us. None of those beautiful, infinitely valuable human beings will ever exist if we don't get our collective shit together, is I guess what I'm saying here.

Another important point that Balaji makes is that the rate of change is accelerating as well. It's not that we'll make the same amount of progress in the next hundred years as we did in the last hundred years, but that we could make more progress in the next 10 years than we have in the last 10 million.

#5: The Most Important Thing We Can Invent

We are the first generation of humans who actually have a realistic shot at ending death, but...should we?

I think Balaji may be missing something here, but he's absolutely correct in assuming that time has value because it's so limited. Then again, so does life. It means something because it doesn't last forever, and our lives are infused with a thrilling (and terrifying) sense of urgency because they won't last forever.

Ending death might make human lives less meaningful, but I also don't think that's an argument against making the attempt. Because, say we do "end death" and come up with technology that will expand human lifespans indefinitely. You can just...opt in. No one's saying that you have to upload your consciousness to a computer. You can still die if you want. A moral, open question.

Another interesting part to this is that having a realistic shot at living to 500 makes tragic accidents even more tragic, something else that Will MacAskill tackles in his book. If you expect to live for another 480 years, yet die at 20, somehow that's "more sad" than "only" missing out on, say, another 60 years of life.

What every optimistic, forward-thinking person can agree on, though, is that we need to evangelize technological progress and push for the elimination of as much as scarcity as we possibly can. In that sense, life-extension (and everything that comes with it) is the most important thing we can invent. Some people still die even though they don't want to. Some die without even being given the choice.

#6: The Highest Priority of Technology

Balaji believes that "ending death should be the highest priority of technology," and, as stated in the Key Idea above, I don't disagree. At least not completely.

This issue will come up again later in this breakdown, but I'd like to draw the distinction between "value" and "urgency." Ending death could be the highest priority in terms of value (what we should aim for), but not in terms of urgency.

There are many more urgent problems that technology can help us solve - or at least mitigate) before we finally getting around to living forever. No one should starve to death; no one should die from dehydration; no one should be too poor to stay alive. Ending these afflictions is the highest priority of technology.

Balaji makes another important point when he says, "Not life extension, youth extension." Yes! It's not about spending twenty more years in bed at the end of your life, it's about never getting old in the first place. Healthspan, not lifespan.

Again, What We Owe the Future deals with this t00 - in case you can't tell, I really want you to read that book too! It's so unbelievably good. But we're all agreed: we want more years of health and vitality, not more years of sickness and decline.

What's also unbelievably exciting is that all this is beginning to look like just an engineering problem! There's nothing inevitable about aging. It's not like there's some invisible limit beyond which we can't make more progress, some organ we can't grow in laboratories, some brain region within which we can't stimulate neurogenesis. It's all possible. And it's our highest priority.

#7: How to Live Forever

This is more or less an extension of the previous Key Idea, but it was too cool not to draw your attention to it here. I mean, there's nothing stopping us from making diagnostic tools like these a reality. We can make it happen. We can prevent disease, death, and, perhaps worse, aging, and it's not that far off. The future, as they say, is already here!

#8: Win and Help Win

Legendary speaker and sales trainer Zig Ziglar (whose name is also the most fun name to say in the history of names - try it!) always said that you can get anything you want in life, as long as long you help enough other people get what they want. I first read those words more than a decade ago and they've never left me.

We need each other, and there's literally no one on earth who is "self-made." People say that Arnold Schwarzenegger is self-made, and yet in his foreword to Tim Ferriss's book, Tools of Titans, the very first words he writes are "I am not a self-made man." I remember winning an argument with someone (a discussion, rather) about whether or not Arnold was "self-made," and I distinctly remember the moment I won that argument - when I showed the other person that foreword. Cleanest victory ever!

Anyway, we need each other. Always have, always will. And it goes far beyond just getting out of each other's way; it involves actively clearing away the obstacles in each other's paths so that we can all move ahead faster. That's how the collective game is won.

As we'll discuss in the next Key Idea, wealth creation isn't finite. Someone else's victory doesn't diminish yours, and although alone we can do so little, together we can do so much.

#9: Wealth Creation is an Infinite Game

There are many good games you can play in life: mastering your craft; helping others; making money; raising a family; righting wrongs; and many more besides.

What you'll notice, though, is that the best games are infinite, rather than finite. There can be many winners in an infinite game, multiple ways to win, and the game can be enjoyably played forever and ever. Learning comes to mind - reading books. That's a game where literally everyone can win, and which will never end for as long as you live.

Wealth creation is also one of those games, even though most people aren't conditioned to think of it that way. They think that one person has to lose for another person to win, that someone's wealth comes at the expense of someone else's livelihood, and that there isn't enough to go around. There is.

But there are right ways and wrong ways to play the wealth creation game. Hoarding stolen wealth and harboring a mad desire to accumulate more is one of the fastest ways to lose the game. Helping other people get rich and live better lives is one of the fastest.

We can all win the wealth creation game, and the world can be made richer than we could possibly imagine if we would only work together. Going back to the last Key Idea, that means getting anything we want in life by helping enough other people get anything they want. It's a game as old as time, and there can be as many winners as there are people on this earth.

#10: The Ultimate Independence

The brilliant investor (he would agree) Nassim Taleb published an incredible book of 500+ aphorisms that are like lightning bolts to your prefrontal cortex, challenging you to reconsider your received opinions about life, love, money, religion, and everything else that we can't stop thinking about.

It's called The Bed of Procrustes, and here's one of the things Taleb has to say about wealth:

In other words, the less money you need, the less dependent you are. When you own enough "things" and nothing owns you, you are free.

Taleb goes on to write the following, and I must say that it's jarring to hear him swear! You just don't expect it coming from someone who's read so many books:

When you don't have to submit to the will of the people who sign your paycheck; when you don't have to adopt the beliefs and the "accepted speech" of those who seek to control you; when you don't have to depend on anyone to stay alive and move around on this beautiful green earth, you are free forever.

#11: The Cost of Speech

Free speech isn't free, and in some parts of the world, only rich people are allowed to have an opinion. This current state of affairs is due to the mistakes that masses of human beings have made in the past, but as I see it, there are two paths forward.

The first path - and they aren't mutually exclusive whatsoever - is to get busy getting rich yourself. Get as rich as possible so your speech can be as unrestricted as possible and so you can be as free as possible. Get rich enough to be able to speak your mind, yet elevate your kindness to the point where your speech doesn't hurt anyone who doesn't deserve to be hurt.

The second path is to defend the same rights of others, and help other people speak freely, no matter what their past, current, or future socioeconomic status.

This is somewhat of a moral minefield, for reasons of which you're already aware. For some people, "hate speech" is just speech they hate hearing, and the only free speech they support is speech that supports their moral position. I can't go along with them - and I won't, because none of them contribute anything to my income.

Personally, I lean towards all speech being permissible, no matter what, although of course I realize the dangers. Words can and do incite violence, and so you have to ask, shouldn't we ban those types of words and messages? Okay, but who's going to do the banning? Who decides?

Part of the answer lies in parenting and good education. Again, a story as old as time. Better education leads to better outcomes, in virtually every sphere of human endeavor. And great parenting prevents a multitude of problems before they ever become problems in the first place.

#12: Cryptographic Proof of Miracles

It's wild to think that nobody will be able to delete history anymore, but here we are. I mean, how many miracles (Zero? Millions?) have been lost to history because we didn't have the technology to record them?

It's also not hard to think of scenarios where having undeniable, verifiable, cryptographic records will be an enormous help in making the world a fairer, more peaceful place. What's the downside? Surveillance. All the time. Everywhere.

Here's where the "Well, if you have nothing to hide" people overstep, since that's not the point at all. Not sure that even Jesus would want to be under constant surveillance. So here, as elsewhere in the story of technology, what's left for us to do is wait and hope. Or, better yet, find a different way of thinking about the problem or a way around it.

#13: A Purpose-Driven Life

We're drowning in information and starved for wisdom (E.O. Wilson). The collected knowledge of humanity (and plenty that I could go the rest of my life without seeing) is available to us 24/7 via the smartphone supercomputers we all carry around in our pockets, but it's the filtering of that firehose of information that most people struggle with.

Filtration is always an intentional process, and you have to know what you're looking for. That's where having a purpose comes in; having values, against which to measure your actions and priorities. Having an overarching purpose to your life gives structure to your learning, and allows you to attach all new incoming information to the architecture of your current knowledge. That's when you're learning for something.

Traditional schooling has no such purpose built into it, and we just kinda expect 18-year-olds to be able to decide - once and for all - what they're going to do for the rest of their lives, or at least until they can pay off all their student debt and pursue purpose in their forties (if ever).

The only reasonable way forward is to break free from the grey, bleak, average mass of the school population and formulate your own purpose. This doesn't have to happen all at once. You're allowed to spend a decade or two looking for it. You're allowed to spend your entire life looking for it. But you have to decide on a purpose for yourself, or else one will be assigned to you.

#14: The Root of All Evil

Misinformed people think that money is the root of all evil. The Bible says that love of money is the root of all evil - but that’s wrong too.

It’s the lack of money that’s the root of all evil. When human beings experience scarcity and deprivation, they resort to violent and hateful means to survive. When people have enough, they're generous and cooperative. Not everyone, sure, but it's enough of a pattern to tell you that when we make the world rich, we’ll make the world good.

And the good news is that there’s plenty of wealth to be created for all of us. I won't rehash the same points in the previous Key Ideas, but suffice it to say that it's well within our capabilities to solve our own scarcity problems and then turn around and help others around the world do so as well. But it's not going to happen by holding on to outdated ideas like money can't be used for good. Money is one of our best hopes for good.

#15: Monetize Your Mind

We're living through the digital gold rush right now, and the people without shovels are those who are sitting back, neglecting to build their personal brand online. The best time to start was when YouTube and Facebook first launched, but the second-best time is right now.

What's actually crazy about the whole situation is that there are still billions of people who don't even have access to the internet yet. About 2,900,000,000 people, last time I checked (which was thirty seconds ago). That's almost three billion people who will be following other people, buying products and services, searching for information (and hopefully wisdom), and pushing the creator economy to new heights.

As I write this, the creator economy is set to double in the next few years. Think about that. If you date "the creator economy" from Facebook's inception in 2004, that's twenty years of growth...doubled before 2030. Doubled. If you're not getting in on this, I don't even know what you're doing. That is, unless you have a very good reason for opting out.

There's plenty to be said for a nice, quiet life spent reading books, recharging in nature, and relaxing with friends in family, but what I'm saying - and Balaji is saying as well - is that the massive opportunity is there to create generational wealth, and fast. Major brands are throwing (literally) hundreds of millions of dollars at creators, and mega-creators with massive social media followings are rapidly becoming billionaires.

And. We. Are...Early!

Maybe you don't want to be a billionaire, and that's cool. Actually, fantastically useful exercise is to put a real number to everything you say that you want. It probably costs less than you think. Unless you have zero self-discipline and your hedonic treadmill is on the max setting, you'll find that it's very hard to spend $1,000,000 per year.

The other good news here is that there is a market for literally everything online, and you've got people pulling down eye-popping incomes in the wildest niches. There's a YouTube channel with a million subscribers making videos about knitting, of all things. Yeah. Knitting.

You also don't need to be the best in the world in your chosen field, or be the best looking, or have the most money to spend on paid ads (although those all help). At a basic level, people want to learn from people who know where they're going and how to get there. They want to follow people who tell them the truth, who deal in total transparency and authenticity, and who show up differently than everyone else. That's how you stand out. Different is better than better, and the market is only saturated for average.

#16: Build It Yourself, Build It Together

Most people generally want the same things out of life. Speaking for myself, I want to be able spend relaxed, unhurried, stress-free time with my friends and family. I want to read great books and lift heavy weights. I want to do work that I'm proud of, that positively impacts the lives of others, and I want to have a good doing it.

The specifics will vary with the individual, but the broad outlines of a life well-lived are understandable by all. There are a multitude of people who are already living that life, who are actively working to make that kind of life available to others, and you can just join them. You can invest in the future you want to see. Like...that's an option, more than it ever was before.

You (yes, you, the person reading these words) can help direct the future course of humanity and play a meaningful part in shaping the quality of life for every single human being who lives after us. We have the power to do that, now, and it's urgent that we exercise that power, collectively.

#17: The Opening of the Digital Frontier

Humanity needs open spaces to expand into, and shutting down frontiers is one of the fastest and surest ways of plunging the world into conflict.

Luckily for all of us, there are at least four frontiers (the fifth being the mind, but let's table that discussion for now): the land, the internet, the sea, and space, as Balaji points out in the quote above. Which is to say that the universe is wide open for exploration, expansion, and discovery.

We fight because we're all trying to crowd into the same small spaces, and we come together when we have large, inspiring, audacious goals to pursue in a wide open arena like the internet, land, sea, and space. The answer, therefore, is to keep the frontiers open and open them still wider. There's room for all of us once we do.

#18: What Else Comes Next?

It's almost literally impossible to imagine how much better life could become in the future. It's also so easy to forget how rough we had it in the past! And not that long ago, either. The following inventions have saved billions of lives (each):

*Synthetic Fertilizers (Invented in 1909)

*Blood Transfusions (Invented in 1913)

*Vaccines (Invented in 1955)

None of these inventions are more than 115 years old, and the rest of this chart is just insane. There's no other word for it. I counted 39 different inventions that have each saved the lives of at least 1,000,000 people since 1900. Many of them save millions and millions of lives every single year. Insane.

Those new inventions are also coming faster and faster: the rate of invention and improvement is getting faster all the time. Compare the number of lives saved before 1900 and the billions of lives saved after 1900 - what do you notice?

The world still faces massively important, urgent problems. You know that and I know that. But there are also untold millions of people working diligently toward solutions, and the results of their work can be seen every single time you meet someone who would have died without antibiotics, nanotechnology, diagnostic imaging, and everything else that we can't even conceive of yet.

So why do some people seem to think that progress is over? Don't they know what they sound like? They sound like those "esteemed" individuals from the turn of the 20th century who are quoted as saying that everything that can be invented has been invented. In 1900 they said this. Yeah. So how dumb are those people who say the same things now going to look in a hundred years?

So we have problems. Well are you just going to sit there and find fault with everything? Are you going to just sit around waiting to die? Or are you going to get moving? Are you going to join the future and get with the program? Or are you going to sit this one out? I for one believe that the future is going to be so much better that I can hardly sit still.

I’ve been taking detailed notes from every single book I’ve ever read since 2014, and they’re all here on my Patreon for just $1.

They’re updated monthly (sometimes twice a month), and by supporting me on Patreon you’ll also be able to keep up with everything I’m reading and learning, and get my best notes, takeaways, and summaries from every book that I finish.

More Patreon rewards are available as well, like being mentioned by name in all my YouTube videos, Patron-only discounts, special offers, and more.

Click here for instant access to all of my book notes for just $1!