learning from smart people
Growing up I had never been in a room with two extremely smart people. It wasn’t until after university when I started my first company that I met really smart people. Most people never meet an extremely smart person in their lifetime. If we are the average of the 5 closest people that surround us, well I guess most people will be… average?
I thought about this while listening to Lex Fridman and Michael Saylor discuss concepts on economics, engineering principles, and philosophy. Anyone anywhere can now open up this podcast, press play, and immediately get exposed to two extremely smart people. We can now create artificial environments of smart people who surround us.
Podcasts like this can increase the global intellectual bar of “average” just by simply exposing people to extremely smart people. If Steve Jobs came to my high school, I wouldn’t have skipped class to meet him because I didn’t even know who he was. On top of that he never would have come to my high school. There was a 0% chance I would have learned from Steve Jobs growing up. The same is still true today. If Michael Saylor walked into a high school, would students skip class to learn from him? How many young students know who he is?
We can change this by incorporating “learning from smart people” in schools. Low effort, high impact solution to improving education quality. It’s almost ridiculous to think that students learn from an average physics professor when they could learn form Richard Feynman on YouTube. There is no exposure to money and how it works when they could be listening to Naval’s podcasts on “How to Get Rich (without getting lucky)”.
We do this at TKS where students learn about a “person of the week”, which could be a founder, philosopher, scientist, investor… really anyone who’s interesting and has made an asymmetric impact in the world. It creates a massive advantage being exposed to a variety of smart people, no matter what age we are.
Anyways, that’s all to say this episode was great. Highly recommend listening to it.