The Anthology of Balaji: A Guide to Technology, Truth, and Building the Future

I think we are overconsuming novelty and underconsuming purpose. What’s the good stuff? It is what helps you boost the measurable variables you care about. It’s increasing your truth, health, and wealth. It’s your knowledge, your physical fitness, your bank account balance, or some combination of them.

At each stage of life, I used my current skill and applied it in a new domain to learn another skill. I never started completely at zero; I was always building from a previous skill.

Elon, Zuckerberg, and all the smartest founders are building their own media arms, going direct and routing around legacy media corporations. Doing so is now a core competency. A CEO or a founder who does not build direct distribution is not doing it right. It’s like a company not building a website.

Wealth creation is the technological creation of order. It is the difference between a bunch of bricks lying on the ground and a house; the difference between a bunch of pieces of wood lying on the ground and a chair. You can see those differences in physical space.

Physical, then Digital, then Native Digital

A framework I use often is the evolution from the physical version to the intermediate form, and then to the internet-native version. If you’re into electrical engineering, you can think of this as the evolution from analog to analog/digital, and then to native digital.

Money seems to be locally zero-sum (after a trade happens, Person A has –$1, Person B has +$1), but actually money is globally positive-sum. In a voluntary exchange, A and B both gain in wealth because they both get non-monetary benefit from making the trade.

The leverage on software is only going to increase. This is where all the value creation is going to come from. It will be mainly software creating value and everything else executing it.

The hard way to gain status is to build something, to accomplish something, to add value. The easy way to gain status is to accuse someone else of being a bad person.

An “important feed” will be very different from the “news feed.” What is important often is not new, and what is new often is not important.