Juan Orbea

In this interview we discuss what, if anything, can be learned from his unusual career path. Should more people pass on university and just throw themselves at solving a problem they care about? Or would it be foolhardy for others to try to copy a unique case like Chris’?

Since serving his jail sentence and leaving behind his criminal past, Brett has become a leading consultant on tech security, now helping people learn how to protect themselves against the type of person he once was. 

The mathematically obvious path will feel like “the right decision.” But note that what even shows up on your life dashboard is put there by your network. And the math associated with each option — the rewards and frictions and probabilities — are determined by your unique network. And your network is the result of the network decisions you made... See more

To appreciate the nature and significance of the coming “singularity,” it is important to ponder the nature of exponential growth. By the end of the first half of the chess board, the inventor had accumulated one large field’s worth (4 billion grains), and the emperor did start to take notice. Incidentally, with regard to the doublings of... See more

Until artificial rubber was invented by the colony-impaired Germans, no modern economy could exist without the natural stuff. All of the important powers had tropical colonies where rubber was produced. For the Netherlands, it was Indonesia; for France, it was Indochina; for the British, it was what they then called Malaya, as well as many other... See more