Episodes
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When I started recording The Context several years ago, based on an idea and a conversation with my friend Massimo Curatella in Rome, I didn't imagine that I would keep going with the determination, and the frequency that I found myself being able to deliver. It has been a wonderful experience, and I want to keep continuing.
This is the season finale of The Context, and we will take a few weeks of pause and then restart with season four. It may be that we will introduce some new components, refresh the thumbnails, which could be the easiest and least intrusive or profound innovation. Maybe we will do something else. I am planning to restart the new season of The Context with as much curiosity as much dedication and dependable creation of hopefully useful and valuable thoughts, expressed in my own way, as before.
I am very much looking forward to continuing creating content receiving feedback from you on this journey that gave me and hopefully you as well, a lot of satisfaction. See you in the new season of The Context.
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Over the course of many years, I had the opportunity of meeting a lot of wonderful creative, passionate people. As I would hear their ideas, I would be becoming their advisor or their mentor.
What are the necessary steps that they need to be making in order to maximize their opportunities, overcome their challenges and keep going forward on the path they have chosen? It is something that is very valuable, otherwise there wouldn't be a large market for this kind of advice.
I am always interested to make technologies or services that previously were very exclusive available to the broadest possible number of people instead. With Torre Coach this is what we are trying to do: to make professional coaching available to everyone, to disrupt the business model of coaching, to really democratize the access to this wonderful tool of personal and professional development.
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Serendipity is our ability to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves in front of us. Mistakenly serendipity is associated with luck, but that is not the case. Our senses and our ability to perceive the world have evolved in a very precise manner to find the fine balance between the maximum amount of information that they can bring to the nervous system for analysis, and its capacity to actually come to conclusions around the information, and decide on the next steps. Information in order to be useful must be actionable and non actionable information is a burden that evolution has trimmed away from our process of acquiring knowledge about the world.
How do you change the world? Because of how and what you have become is of fundamental importance. Serendipity, in this sense, is strongly related to your fitness to your being well adapted, and to your adaptability. And in turn, being adapted and adaptability are related as well, because the excessive degree of adaptedness may diminish your capacity to change. And as a consequence may cancel your adaptability.
If you explore new things, the opportunities for serendipitous discovery are, in turn, improving your adaptability, starting from a given state of adaptedness.
Serendipity becomes the recognition of the value of change in the world, and the value of you changing with the world.
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What is the value of knowledge? And how can you both acquire and then deploy knowledge in order to leverage that value, create more knowledge, create more value in a wonderful, virtuous circle? That is the basis of civilization. It has been important but difficult to measure what you could actually do with the knowledge that you acquired as the distance between the moment of acquisition and the moment of application has become very long, or even, as many of us suspect for certain subjects that we are compelled to study in high school, never happens. There are new interesting and intriguing trends that try to address this: income-sharing agreements, such as the services offered by Torre Coach which enable people to pay for the value received through their increased income, and blockchain-based platforms that pay you as you demonstrate to have learned certain skills. We have to become better at both learning and at putting what we learn to work. With both human help and technological help at our disposal, we are lucky and can design a path of continuous improvement.
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In the world of Blockchain, we periodically have waves of enthusiasm and innovation, where new ways of implementing and leveraging this technology is explored by an increasing number of people: developers, investors, users, experimenters of all kinds.
BitClout as of today is barely 2 weeks old, but already about 100,000 people signed up to play with it, and you can too.BitClout is based on its own blockchain and has a native token, and the user interface looks very much like Twitter, where you can post, reply, like, and there are users that you can follow and be followed by them. The big difference is that each account, in turn, has its own native currency.
On BitClout what you can do is to put money in the creator coin of the people you like and you follow, and that of course will inspire them to keep doing what they do and what you love, but rather than just having that as a return, you will have a potential financial return as well. The reason is because, as more people put money in the creator coin of a given account, the value of that account will go up. When anyone decides to sell the Creator coin, the value of that coin will go of course down. As you can see, BitClout created a market in the consensus of the value around an individual. You’ll be able to find millions of people who follow you today on Twitter, and these people may follow you on BitClout as well, and they might invest in your creator coin.
There are many important consequences:
A business model that is not based on advertising
No need to exploit the data of the users
A decentralized uncensorable base of posts
The possibility of developing alternative user interfaces
A platform with APIs for second layer applications (imagine DeFi on BitClout)We will see over the next few months how the platform will evolve. I am optimistic and invite you to experiment with it.
My BitClout account is http://bitclout.com/u/davidorban, and I hope to see you there!
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There is a lot of enthusiasm lately around NFTs, Non Fungible Tokens, especially among those who have been following Bitcoin and Blockchain applications, but they didn't know how to relate to them. Maybe they weren't attracted by the financial aspect or the decentralization that they could represent or the more radical societal implications.
Should you care about NFTs? And why all the interest? Should you now turn everything you have into an NFT? What does that even mean? The ability to better handle digital objects than alternative systems has been a promise of blockchain technologies for long. Bitcoin is digital money, and the promise of Bitcoin is to be a better money than other alternatives.
The solution of NFTs is the ability to transfer the uniqueness of physical objects that are not interchangeable, to unique digital objects that become also not interchangeable, as a consequence of wrapping them in a digital signature that is managed on the blockchain. We know of all the various features of Blockchains: the transparency, the traceability, the free unfettered participation, and so on. As you combine this wrapper around a digital object that makes it unique, with the rest of the features that blockchains have, you achieve something that can be applied in various areas, and they can be useful indeed useful, with a staying power that deserves your attention.
The first application of NFTs has been the collection of digital art. In the past few months the prices of certain auctions reached levels that are hard to justify. But as it is often the case, it is not the price that matters, and you should not concentrate on that, or the mere expectation of financial gain when experimenting with NFTs.
I sold as an NFT my first tweet about Bitcoin from 10 years ago, and it gave me direct experience in the process. An opportunity to see if the platform was friendly enough. And indeed, one of the best surprises was how much the systems have evolved and how easy the process has become.
There will be many other applications of NFTs in the future, and we are really at just the beginning of this new interesting technology.
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We have always been asking questions about who we are and how we think. What defines our identity, our awareness of ourselves and of others? We have tried to explore and experiment the dynamic boundaries of this understanding by altering our states of cognition through means that go from the pretty abstract, like meditation, to the very concrete, assuming substances like alcohol, or psychedelics. In order to see what happens and in order to achieve a deeper understanding of how our mind and our body reacts to the world and reacts to our own internal states, this reverberating set of behaviors and experiments, this fractal attempt to explore what is possible, has been going on for thousands of years.
With the organization of our societies, the set of rules and regulations that influence or define what can or cannot be done, obviously should take into account this ongoing experiment as well. The hypocrisy and the contradiction of governments that regulate and allow dangerous drugs like tobacco and alcohol that cause dependence, deaths in the millions worldwide versus prohibiting other substances like cannabis or 5-MeO-DMT is perverse.
So what are the limits of our pursuit of cognitive freedom? Is our ability to pursue these experiments of introspection and understanding of self awareness and awareness of others going to increase or decrease? I really hope that in the future we will understand that in a responsible and self aware manner these experiments should continue, that our degrees of freedom around them should increase. And that whether with chemical or other technological means, understanding who we are, has been and is going to be a genuinely human pursuit.
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Taking the first step is dramatic and exciting. Most of us don't remember when we took the first step as a child, learning how to walk, but our parents probably remember it very fondly. But taking the first step is also important in any endeavor, because quite obviously any objective you have in front of you can only be reached if you start. And if you do not start, you don’t even try, you will never reach your goal.
People don’t take the first step because they are afraid of failure, or of the unexpected they will discover. Of what they will learn about themselves on the journey towards the unknown. Even worse, a lot of those people feel completely justified in pointing their finger towards those who do want to experiment, who are dreaming things that are difficult and uncertain and dangerous, and sometimes even impossible, blaming them for daring. Don't be one of those people.
It doesn't matter what you do. It doesn't matter what you aspire to do. Just take the first step.
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Is it worth dreaming impossible dreams? Think about it. What is the alternative? Should you not dream at all, or only dream, reasonable dreams? It is, I believe our nature to yearn for the impossible, and fail, or against all odds and all expectations, even our own, achieve it. Achieving impossible goals is what we have been doing for thousands of years. Improbable, unthinkable, impossible!. And we are now living in a world that thousands of years ago people like us have only dreamt about.
As with many things, if you don't try, you are guaranteeing that it is not going to happen. And if you try and it doesn't happen, you may learn a lot of things along the way.
Now, whether we are talking about space whether we are talking about reforming a nation, scientific exploration, or a new art form, writing a novel, or preparing for a profession, searching and finding a person to love and spend your life with... dreams like these are exhilarating and fantastic and uplifting and they are wonderful to share.
The value, for example, of space exploration is in itself, because of the technological benefits of what we are able to do and learn and apply in so many different areas on Earth. But space exploration, as a metaphor of our desire to explore, of our desire to understand, is maybe even more precious, more valuable in inspiring us to attempt what we want to achieve as individuals and as a civilization.
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Isn't it fantastic? We are all on Mars! Yes, you too! You cannot directly feel the wind of the thin atmosphere on your hand in the freezing temperature. You cannot feel the lack of oxygen by breathing in the carbon dioxide rich atmosphere or jump high under weak gravity at the red Sunrise over the Martian desert. But we are still all on Mars.
Our civilization has been able to produce the knowledge, and corral the resources that allowed millions of parts working together, and successfully land our latest envoy, and explorer. It will roam, watch, dig and sense. And we will receive and perceive its transmissions, collate and analyze its data.
There are naysayers, there are those who say, Oh, it's worthless to go to Mars, it's worthless to aim and and understand and to feel that yearning and adventure is not what you should feel. I am sure that many times those people are simply wrong, because even if they don't realize, they are on Mars, with you and I. They are part of it too. They are part of humanity and our adventure.
Especially those among us who are able to inspire billions and make us feel the emotions that we feel when we succeed in our highest dreams. The most audacious aspirations.
These Martian adventures are not only emotionally uplifting but very practically benefit all of humanity. It is so important to explore, to understand, to fulfill the dreams of expanding the human race in the universe!
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Probably the most important immediate benefit that you can derive from digital biology, is the mRNA vaccine against COVID-19. This has been developed, tested. and then produced based on our increased knowledge about what is the digital basis of biology, and how it works. But there are many other benefits as well: from understanding your ancestry, your treats and the predisposition to certain types of health conditions,
The shape, and the function of certain molecules, thanks to evolutionary pressure, became the language for programming those functions through the shapes, the proteins express certain functions as veritable molecular machines. The programming language that the biological operating system uses is DNA. We are starting to understand how from DNA through RNA and ribosomes, the recipe for creating certain proteins, ie molecular machines, influences what we are.
Digital biology, the understanding the digital nature of biology is a huge achievement that we are still in the process of completely unlocking. It is going to shape the world.
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Agriculture is the most fundamental and ancient activity that propelled human civilization as we know it today. Before agriculture, there were modern humans, but they formed groups of hunters and gatherers, and they didn't build cities or empires. Agriculture is perceived by many as a very conservative activity. However, it has been over time characterized by a rate of innovation that was necessary in order to be able to feed the populations. And of course, the rate of population was statistically speaking exactly equal to the amount of calories that the level of technology could produce at a given time. Because if you had more people, and not enough calories, there would be starvation and death. This kind of cycle of overshooting population that will then go back to sustainable levels has characterized human civilization for thousands of years.
During the 20th century agriculture advanced to the point of being able to feed everyone on the planet. The next challenge is to do so sustainably and with an increasing biodiversity.
A few days ago I keynote and moderated the opening meeting of the new Think Tank Farm To Fork, that aims to spread the knowledge about advanced technologies in agriculture, especially in view of the new Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union, that embodies those two goals.
The EU is one of the largest markets in the world, and its policies influence technologies, and practices that go well beyond its borders. Getting the incentives right has a profound impact on all of use, the environment, and the planet.
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Technological change not only accelerates. It is jolting.What are the consequences of this jolting technological change? Several years ago, I concluded decentralization was the unstoppable consequence across many different sectors. I could see that new technologies were leading in the same direction.I published. at the time the Network Society Manifesto and the Fundamental Thesis of the Network Society about the nature and the consequences of the social economic transformation
Energy, manufacturing, food, health, learning, finance, security and policymaking are subject to profound disruptions, with jolting technologies acting on them. Each going towards decentralization!
The number of experiments being run worldwide to find what works is exploding and of course a myriad of them fail, but it is enough that some of them succeed, they will spread like wildfire adopted by everyone, because of how attractive how exciting how inclusive how emancipating and thrilling, the new solutions are.
Jolting decentralization is going to characterize your life in the coming years. The surprising developments of incredible leverage that the crowd can have, whether in economic, political, or other ways. The weird fashions and manias that grip us reverberating globally from continent to continent. These are going to stay as a feature of these times. We have to recognize the power of these forces, and we have to develop healthy defense mechanisms, to differentiate what is meaningful from what is plain crazy. The centralized structures’ ability in doing so is going to rapidly diminish.
There is a new course about decentralization in the Jolting Technologies Courses platform. Sign up today, to equip yourself with the knowledge and the skills needed to cope with the disruptions around you!
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Podcasts allow you to continue with numerous types of daily activities, while at the same time listening to interesting long form content made available by your favorite creators. This is one of several reasons that made podcasts so popular.
You can also subscribe to my content in an audio-only podcast format on davidorban.com/podcast using Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Audible or Music, Google Podcasts, or any other podcast player of your choice.
You will automatically receive the episodes of The Context, Searching For The Question Live, Qual è la domanda in Italian.I will be producing additional podcast-only content as well, whether by myself or together with guests in a conversation style.
The first experiments in podcasting, the first wave of popularity of audio distributed over the internet started before video became popular through YouTube or other means. Recently over the course of the past few years, it regained popularity.
Every kind of media has a place whether it is the printed text on dead wood, we call paper, whether it is digital text, online video or even traditional broadcast television. What matters is gaining a share of our global attention. There are 24 hours in a day. When we are watching videos we are exclusively dedicated to that activity. When we are reading a book, we can’t drive. But podcast listening can be done in addition to driving, preparing food, and many other activities.
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We build societies based on the technologies that we have available, on the social contract that we can articulate expressing the mutual interest that we have in order to achieve our goals, and the ability to structure these goals in a way that reinforces the particular unit that the society encompasses. In this way, societies are able to self perpetuate until the point at which one of the components stops supporting it: either a new wave of disruptive technology comes, or the members of the society design and adopt a new social contract or the mechanisms that the society has employed undermine its own operations, for example, from an environmental point of view.
We can measure whether a given society or nation is expected to be able to generate future fitness, through the legal and illegal immigration flows. Look at what are the nations where emigration is larger than immigration. Look at those nations where it is the opposite. Other people want to come in, desperately, even risking their lives, because they realize that the country where they were born, doesn't give them an opportunity to thrive and maybe even to survive in the coming years. If you look at these flow, what you're looking at is a kind of a stock market for nations where people express their desire and their future expectation. The smarter nations can take action, and decide what they want to do, formulated in political programs. I hope that it is going to be possible to have rational conversations around this.
We have to be forward looking: new technologies are coming, these new technologies support new ways of living, new ways of living can give rise to new types of social contracts. And our imagination is such that we can dream, and we can then realize those dreams of just, inclusive, empowering societies that give opportunities to thrive in the future for all.
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Innovation is necessary for the progress of our civilization and invention is necessary in order to be able to generate new kinds of innovation. The first is the improvement of an existing process. The second is about starting on a completely novel path. We can take a look at the creativity that leads to the invention, as the source of this original creation. Human intelligence, human creativity, arts and science are coming from the same root, that we believe genuinely and uniquely defines us.
The methods of how we cultivate this kind of creativity in a given discipline or in an interdisciplinary manner, also evolve. When we are able to resort to books, rather than referring to word of mouth of our ancestors, or when more recently, we can check the Wikipedia article of creative methods, or follow video courses on YouTube .
Now AI tools are becoming available, like GPT-3 for generating text, or DALL-E for images. There is no reason not to label these as fully creative.
How should we approach these? Is the conclusion that creative professionals are now in danger? Not at all. Creative professions are not endangered by these tools. They are accelerated joltingly, just as architects didn't stop designing buildings because computer aided design has become available and AutoCAD became a reference tool of theirs. They just moved from designing buildings by hand to using the computer to be much more effective and proficient. The same is going to happen with the creative professions.
Let's enjoy it, and let's thrive in this new era of jolting creativity.
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In this past year we have learned how important it is to be resilient. The tools that we can apply in order to build the skills that improve our resilience and adaptability, that improve the probability of being able to cope with the various conditions and the situations that surround are of crucial importance.
There have been a scary handful of hours a few days ago, where in a large part of the world Google, and its various platforms became unavailable, whether it was Gmail for sending and receiving email messages, or it was YouTube for uploading or watching videos, and many, many others.
It is easy to realize that relying excessively on those platforms and tools can cripple our ability to be resilient to adapt and to be fit in a complex situation. We must keep evolving our tools: especially peer to peer, distributed, and decentralized platforms are a must. We cannot afford to put our individual, and social survival at risk by relying to an excessive degree on centralized tools regardless of how rich they are, regardless of how their features correspond to our needs, regardless of how they have provided us a stepping stone towards a deeper understanding of the world.
It is one of the reasons why it is so irresponsible to pretend that peer to peer tools are equivalent to infringing or even criminal purposes. It is ridiculous to paint with a wide brush and just pool every possible use together, completely excluding fundamental, legal, and even vital uses that do not rely on the sanctioned permitted compliant regulated platforms.
You owe it to yourself. In order to proceed in your becoming more resilient, you have to learn, teach, adopt and practice what these tools allow.
I invite you to become a subscriber of the Jolting Technologies Courses. Go to jolting.co and sign up to enjoy both pre recorded videos as well as live sessions where we go in depth, answering the questions that you ask, having conversations about the implications. We are now entering the third decade of the 21st century. It is time that we step up to its challenges.
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Jolting technologies provide such a disruptive advantage, that the ability to apply them across different fields, cross contaminating and taking advantage of the increasing rate of acceleration, is irresistible.
SpaceX is designing, prototyping and testing a new generation of spacecraft called Starship. Starship serial number 8, SN8, flew to the altitude of 12.5 kilometres just a few days ago. During that test flight, many different categories of new solutions were tested, which have never before been tried. Practically all of the steps of this historic test flight were successful, and even though as usual, Elon Musk lowered the expectations beforehand, saying that most likely the test would fail, it was a great success.
The mission of SpaceX is to establish a city on Mars with a million people or more before the end of the century. In order to reach that goal, an increasing rate of innovation is needed. The successful test of SN8 is testimony to this jolting nature of SpaceX and the jolting nature of the new phase of space exploration that we have entered.
The way this has been achieved is through the increasingly sophisticated simulations that we can run, thanks to the power of our computers. For Internet of Things networks, or robotic systems, there is no difference between simulation and reality. As the feedback loop of sensors and actuators is trained at a much improved rate in simulations, when the time comes to test it, the performance will be surprisingly, joltingly good.Subscribe to the Jolting Technologies Courses: you get the first month free. Immerse yourself in the mindset that is the necessary premise in order to understand the reality with the right tools. You can leverage AI, robotic systems, Internet of Things, intelligence augmentation, collective intelligence, in order to be an active protagonist of the world of the 21st century.
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Recently DeepMind, a unit of Google that is dedicated to developing AI-based systems, announced that they have achieved a very high score in a standardized test for protein folding. Basically, they solved the 50-year old problem of how to predict the shape of a protein molecule, starting from the amino acids that compose them.
This is a very important achievement. You will hear it being labeled as the most important scientific result of the 21st century. Now, certainly, there is not one single revolution that we are seeing and going through, there will be many other important scientific results during the 21st century.
We are in a new era of synthetic biology, of AI Driven Protein Engineering. We are not only able to take an existing protein and establish the sequence, and now its shape. We are also able to design new proteins. Churn through thousands or millions of different possible combinations until we find the particular shape that serves our purpose.
For example, we could design very rapidly and reliably, “in silico” (without leaving the computers), proteins that will block the ability of a virus to reproduce in a human cell.
This is due to the jolting nature of AI itself, and we are going to observe it more and more. The different branches of knowledge are not isolated: the achievements in one, the tools that we are developing, are constantly transplanted and fertilize approaches in another.
In the next series of videos of The Context we are going to see additional examples of how AI driven design is increasing the rate of acceleration in different fields.
As you know, you can also acquire the mindset that is now required in order to understand what is going on in the world.
At the jolting technology courses you can sign up, get your first month free access to all the courses, and find out why and how artificial intelligence, quantum computing, blockchain and other technologies are experiencing an increasing rate of acceleration, and why they are jolting. Go to jolting.co and sign up today to the Jolting Technologies Courses.
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The rate of acceleration is increasing! Are you ready? Of course not. No one can really be ready for the jolting times. But we can prepare, and start to be ready. We can acquire a new ability to interpret the world, understand the phenomena around us, applying the lens of the Jolting Technologies paradigm.
With the Jolting Technologies Courses you can not only learn about the technologies but also extend the range of your adaptability as the world transforms.
The Jolting Technologies Courses are available for anyone: you can go to jolting.co, sign up, and you get the first month for free. Start with the Introduction To Jolting Technologies course, then follow with the course on Artificial Intelligence, on Quantum Computing, on Bitcoin and Blockchain, and so on.
Each course is composed of a dozen or so short five minute videos, that you can watch whenever and wherever it is convenient for you. Also, the transcription of the videos are available if you prefer reading. There is an interactive chart, and you can explore and analyze the interconnected nature of the topics that we cover. There are also curated lists of articles and websites available for each course, that allow you to get deeper in the various products and services available already, the implications of the technologies, and keep learning.
Most importantly, there is a monthly interactive Q&A session, where you can get together with me live, and ask questions, but also vote on questions that are asked by others. The next one is on December 15. We dedicate all the time that is needed to understand if you understand, to understand, what are the limits of your current understanding and go beyond them.
There are also convenient corporate license options available for the Jolting Technologies Courses, if you want to adopt it in your business, and make it available for everyone.
Go ahead and connect to jolting.co, and start your journey of learning, of increased adaptability, and of exploration of the world of jolting technologies together with me.
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