YouSaid · the spoken record

Ross Dawson

lines on the record: 67
first: 2022-08-19
most recent: 2022-08-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Sure. Well, I mean, just search for me or the book, but I'm at Ross Dawson.com on Twitter at RossDawson or on LinkedIn. And the book is at Thriving on Overload.com.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Will just say, look, just the machines, get over it. And so I think the divide we'll have is that we are going to have increasing divides of opinion around whether or not these are sentient. But I do not really see that we have a valid way of being able to determine that they actually are or are not when they are displayed all signs of sentience, but they are certainly at this point and for the foreseeable future simply manifestations of extremely clever algorithms.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My primary point around this is that we will never know. So that's the bot that Blake Lemoine was talking with gave every appearance of being sentient. It certainly claimed to be. But I don't think that remains to be sentient. But in 10 years or 20 years when the AA bots even more vehemently say they are sentient and please don't turn me off and I love you and I want to save humanity. At what point do we start believing them? And I'm not sure that we have any mechanism or being able to determine whether there actually is sentient. So I think we're going to have a divergence where some people start to believe that these AIs are sentient. And absolutely it is clear to me that we will have many people who do fall in love with AI, some of which AI is designed to, people to fall in love with it, others just buy the by. And there are plenty of people that will fight for robot rights and there's plenty of other people.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Be designing our as individuals and developing our skills and organizations in being able to envisage and to frame this future, which I believe will be the most successful organizations. And of course as nations in terms of creating the transition opportunities for workers, the education and the economic structures that support this. So human work will change, but I absolutely believe that humans have three fundamental capabilities, expertise, creativity, and relationships that will always transcend the capabilities of machines. So I don't think we need to be worried by this. We just need to be taking the right approach.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I absolutely have a place and as a compliment. And what we need to be doing is to designing work and designing AI and training humans so that they can be complementary in creating wonderful value in these roles. Now, that's my frame, but the challenge is that not all executives and leaders are thinking in this way. So I think that we do have very broadly two futures, possible futures work. One which is very negative. We have technological unemployment, massive numbers of people laid off. A small elite who are still designing the AI systems, whatever, and making money. And that is not a desirable future. We also do have a more desirable future of work, which is, I think, broadly, where more people are more able to express their uniquely human talents supported by technology. And I think both are possible, but we do need to”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My primary frame around AI and the future of jobs is how will AI and humans be complementary? So we need to be looking at AI as to not jobs it will replace, but what jobs will complement and how do we redesign those roles so that humans and AI can both do what they are best at, each of them to create better outcomes and hopefully better work for people. And I think that every single role from the, I mean, there are some roles which will be replaced and some of them will be machinery operation, which I suppose you could describe as truck driving as a complex machinery operation, or rather operation of a machinery and complex environment, which is our roads. But in most cases, there are still other human roles which should be played in those logistics and infrastructure and so on. And in the case of your doctors or your lawyers or any other knowledge work roles, AI”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Too much invest in the wrong way at the wrong time. So I think the timeframes are critically important. And the other is the investment vehicles. So the other is finding the opportunities, which are the right ways to be able to invest. And of course, these are often non-public companies. And you need to be able to find the ways in a highly competitive environment to invest at the right prices in the companies which are going to shape these industries. Frames around how it is we engage on that. Yes, I absolutely believe these are the types of areas where there'll be extraordinary value creation in the future.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and what I would say, again, coming back to portfolios, need to be looking at traditional investments as well as, I suppose, future investments. So a few points to make. One is that the pace of change in where value is created is going to accelerate. And the domains which the domains I described, I think, will in some guys be absolutely have massive value creation. One of the great challenges as investors is the timeframes that we take. There's many things we can say will inevitably happen, but the timeframes for them to happen more predictable. And when you invest in those is very important. So you can see a massive, you know, the dot-com bust is an example. Yes, the ideas were right. They all happened. They all came true, but there's a lot of money plowed into them and then it fell flat because it was invested at the”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of well, let's say either renewables on one frame, another is non-polluting energy production. And so there's a whole array of potential new technologies that may emerge which could drive transformation of the energy industry. And then transformation of energy is pretty much in place. It's continuing to move faster than almost all past prognostications, but there are not only current trajectories for transitions of energy, not just production, but also distribution, but also the potential for new energy sources. So, I mean, I could go on, but I mean, these are some of the industries where I see that there's, all of which will absolutely be creative billionaires.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To those who are as invasive, non-evasive brain computer invasives, there's ones which can assist people who do not have full control over their body, for example, which is massive marketing itself. But beyond that, to those who choose to enhance their capabilities. So I think that's a massive domain opportunity. It gets onto this thing of how we can move beyond ourselves. So gene editing and epigenetics together are domains where we could not just solve many of the medical challenges today which people are prepared to pay unlimited amounts of money, but also to enhance our capabilities. And of course, the whole ethical minefield and debates which we need to be discussing. But there is again opportunities for us to enhance who we are. And so these are, again, massive opportunity fields. There's the whole field.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People around the world. I think that we hope that there's going to be some wonderful disruption of our current educational system and structures, but also lifelong learning, because in a world, the faster the world changes, the more people need to learn. So I think there's an extraordinary case to that learning education. And this could include some advanced technologies, which is not just about people with videos or lectures or so on, but how it is we can enhance our learning through potentially advance technologies or brain technologies, which does bring us to brain interfaces. So this is probably the single thing I look at most in terms of advancing technologies is brain-computer interfaces. So obviously Neuralink is well known through Elon's Musk's investment, but that's only one of a whole array of companies out there, not necessarily the most promising. So there are many ways in which we could see these being applied, not just”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To food supply chains to how it is we buy cars, to our exercise routines. There's any number of other ways where we can, so say, this is something which is immensely value creating. If I take the tools of AI and apply them, that's incredibly valuable. I think there's a good case that some of the real value is in learning, education. And so the population of the planet will reach 8 billion people on 15th of November 2022, according to some estimates. And almost all of them, whenever they have old enough, will have a smart device, access to the internet, and the ability to educate themselves. So this points to not just economic restructuring, but the incredible value of education. And this is education, of course, not just of children, not just”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think one of the first things we need to be thinking about is capital intensity if we're looking at, well, there's some ways where some billionaires or trillionaires conceivably will be created, which are extraordinarily capital intensive. And there are others which are not capital intensive. And I think it's interesting as we seek to be billionaires as to which of those paths we might look at. So the most obvious of all, I think, is AI. And in terms of the core platforms of AI, this is very capital intensive, not least through how much machine learning and AI specialists get paid these days. So that's where there is potential for massive application of the value of existing large AI companies, essentially all of the whatever latest acronym you want to choose for your Apple's Amazon's Googles. But where there's less capital intensity is potentially the applications of AI. So we can say, all right, well, how can AI be applied?”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Certain parts of your brain. So, Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriter, at some point, says that he takes six hours a day because that's what gets him into the state of mind where these things come together for him.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there's a mid to low alpha state in the brain, so maybe 8 to 11 hertz, which is often correlated with insight. So part of what a shower does is it blurs the senses. So you can't necessarily feel the distinction between your body and the outside. It's all warm. It's all comfortable. The sound of the shower sort of blocks out other extraneous noises. You're really in a spirit where you can get to this point of relaxation of the mind. When you're walking around, when you're sitting at a table eating, when you're doing activities, you're always engaged. You're always getting these sensory stimulus. It's almost close to being a sensory deprivation or I suppose all of your senses are comfortable. There is nothing extraneous. The sound, the feeling, the comfort. You're dissociated from the rest of the world. And that's what pulls you back and that brings your brainwaves to a certain state. You start to get...”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To a problem, or I've perceived something I hadn't seen before. And that is a state of mind. And once we understand some of the ways to nurture that, we can actually get ourselves in the state of mind where that wonderful flash of insight is more likely to happen. So these are some of the practices that I believe mean that we can enhance and significantly enhance our capability for synthesis.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With it. We are bringing them together to add more and more perspectives. And so Gregory Bateson says that wisdom comes from multiple perspectives. We need to bring these multiple perspectives to Brexit. We need to be open to those. That comes back to what I was describing before as this diversity in your portfolios. It's the diversity of the sources, which gives you a diversity of ideas. And what we can bring on top of that is what I described as the states of mind for insight. And so there's some being wonderful advances in neuroscience over the last decade or so, which have actually showed us there are particular states of our mind in terms of activation of particular areas of our brain, in terms of certain brainwave patterns that are correlated with this experience of insight. I think we've all had a time where just suddenly this idea has come to us say, wow, I just got this new idea. I had this solution.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's right. And that is absolutely true. That is truly. And if so, if you got investors that can only hold one idea in their mind at one time, I think that they are greatly disadvantaged. You need to behold the idea. Well, that's right. And that could be right too. Is there some way they could be both right, for example, and bringing that together and integrating those concepts? And that is a paradoxical thinking is one of the ways this has been framed. And again, a lot of studies have shown this is correlated to performance. This all leads to, as I described before, these richer mental models where your mental morals are not necessarily entirely internally consistent. They actually have many facets to them. There's many ways in which you can think you can think in a constructive way about an idea because you are adding to your mental models rather than replacing them. You don't say, oh, I have this idea, oh, that idea that was wrong, I'll replace it.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a great exercise, this wonderful with F. Scott Fitzgerald says something along the lines of the great minds are the ones that can hold two contradictory thoughts at once. And still be able to function.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Conduct them in not just obvious ways. Oh, yes, these two examples, same thing, these connected, but be able to perceive where there may be a connection, but it's not obvious to sense. That's the creativity. That's the value. That's the insight. That's what all inventions come from. That's what all deep insights come from, is those creative connections. Again, that's something which we can nurture. My personal favorite is improvisational theater, which we don't all need to go down and get on the stage and do improv, but we can play games with our children as a great way to do it in terms of, you know, let's come up with them. Let's make up a story on the spot together, things like that, which start to help us to do that. The next level is integrative thinking, where we need to not just take different ideas and see the connections between them, but bring them into being one. And so this is this idea of where we may have what appear to be opposite.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Certainly. So, what has to be at the foundation is openness to ideas. And if we're not open to ideas, then we are not able to keep track in a changing world. So this is, the fast that the world changes, the more we need to be open-minded, able to understand and to see ideas. And so this is something which is being demonstrated by science to be a personality trait, how open we are to experience two ideas. But it is something which has also been demonstrated that we can change, we can improve at, and we can, of course, in a judicious fashion bring ourselves to be open to ideas that will change our mind. And this has to be the starting foundation. Building on that is creative connections, where this is about connecting the dots. That's what synthesis is, is being able to bring together these different ideas to”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When we're in a place of meditation, when we're getting our mind, when you finish meditating, you get up and you walk around and you're engaging with the world, but from a far more balanced place where you can start to see the things and my Zen Master said that this state helps us to distinguish between the trivial and the important. And that's exactly what we need to do in our everyday lives. It's what we need to do as investors. That state of meditation gets us to this point where we can see far more effectively what matters and what doesn't.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the Zen Dojo is not a place where it was 24 hours a day. In fact, it's a place of practice. And whilst I live there and I meditated there, I was during the daytimes a financial journalist. So I'd get on the train, go off and do my work, but meditating twice a day and be part of the practices of the community. But Zen, I think a couple of points around Zen meditation. One is that it is achieving that place of balance.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Constraints which give you the power to explore. And I suppose one, the heart of a lot of this is meditation. Or more broadly what I think of as disciplines of enhanced cognition, ways in which we can bring ourselves to a point of balance in our minds, which means we are not being pulled off center by the little ball of string on the side or these little things on things where we can be in a centered point, points of equipoise. So Feldenkrais actually is a body discipline. I think one of the great metaphors from the Feldenkrais is that you are supposed to from wherever you are be able to move to any other position easily. You don't have to go through any other place. At any point, you are ready to move to any other position. You're always in this place of balance, always ready to be able to not just say, all right, let me pull myself together so I'm ready to go to that, but you're always this place of balance move to where you want to be.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, this is part of this point we're beyond balance. Balance is a difficult word because it means that you're pulled in both ways. So it is about integration. How do you make these part of the whole? And so yin and yang is, in fact, a great metaphor there because the yin and the yang are entine. They are one part of a whole. And that's what we need to be looking for, this equipoise, where these different facets of structure gives us freedom and the ability to have these fission processes means that gives us this within those fission processes, potentially we can have things that are exploratory. I believe that it is not a contradiction to say that you can do efficient exploration of ideas. You can wonder, you can browse the web forever, you can find some things, but you can't actually say, all right, I'm going to spend 20 minutes and I'm going to try to find something I've never found before. And I think that's something which you, you know.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it doesn't mean you think it's right, but that starts to mean that that should be a type of source you gravitate to as complement so that you do have a fully diverse portfolio of sources and perspectives in developing your own rigorous thinking.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, all right, so maybe they have a bias there of various think tanks. They may have biases there, but if you can unpick that, they may be bringing together pointed research, which can actually be complementary to what you're thinking. So you're trying to say, let's make sure that my information sources cannot be described in the same way, that I'm getting as diverse inputs as possible from as diverse array of thinking as possible. And that builds a portfolio which starts to be robust against shifts around changes in reality around things and unexpected worlds. Again, if we go back to the 2008 crisis, it was very easy to look for many people that had the same view on the debt structure of the United States. There were some signals which came largely from outside the mainstream, which provided quite different perspective. And again, these were surprising. These were interesting at the time. And I think that's interestingness. This is interesting.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Terms of the market perspectives that we take in. And so that's challenging where we need to look for what are what may be, well, we certainly are different, must be different and potentially contradictory frames. What we need to bring that together into our own model that we believe, that we find as rigorous and solid. But that information portfolio is to be able to look for some of the frames are, of course, from different people have different beliefs in the way markets work if we're looking for market information, I think from different countries is also relevant. I think that in a way, external diversity is only a proxy for cognitive diversity, but we're certainly looking for anything which can give us some clues around these are people that may think differently. This is analyses that might be different. For example, not just taken from investment banks, but from activist organizations.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, this is a strong but not perfect analogy where we look at an information portfolio and saying if we have a single source, then that's dangerous, just as we have a single investment, that's dangerous. It might do well, but it might not do very well at all. So we need to look for multiple information sources, ones which gives us a diversity of perspectives. Now, what we are, where it's not a perfect analogy is what we're looking for is not necessarily uncorrelated, but distinct. So this is around cognitive diversity. So diversity of sources. So the sources could be getting information from different places and different kinds. But there are also any source which presentual information will have its own frame.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Models in being able to look for, actively look for disconfirming as well as confirming evidence and finding ways to integrate that into our ways of thinking. So that coming back to information that serves us, yes, there are a couple of preliminary filterings in terms of relevance, accuracy, but then in terms of complementarity or ability to add value to existing models. And that's something we simply need to be going through that cognitive process as we are exposing ourselves to information throughout. And the way we find that, again, is looking for the surprises. That is interesting because that doesn't quite fit. There's a lot more relevant than saying, okay, I found lots and lots and lots of things confirms exactly what I thought before.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so a particular piece of information could fit neatly into our current structures. But we need to be highly sensitized to the surprises, the things that don't fit. And of course, we need to be balanced and make sure that it's not spurious, it is not something which is incorrect. But we need to be far more sensitized and far more looking for those things that don't fit our mental models, because that means that we might need to adjust our mental models. And if we manage to incorporate them into our mental models, it means our mental models will be richer, will be more robust, will be more correct in this very complex world. So we need to be looking for the surprises, very carefully assessing the potential for this to be either broad level, correct, or incorrect, but also to add value to our mental models. And this comes back to then our ability to be flexible in the ways in which we're developing our”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, one of the aspects is saying, does this information have positive or negative value form? So information can not only have zero value, it can have negative value, just simply by taking your time if it's useless or even worse if it is incorrect or misleading or just takes you in a wrong direction. So there's plenty of information that has negative value. There's also information that has positive value, and sometimes you need to find what that positive value is, because that is a positive value in relation to your current mental models. How does this piece of information add value to my mental models? And this is partly in terms of another piece of the jigsaw of the puzzle. That's what we're all doing is building out jigsaws, our maps of a particular industry, of a particular company, of understanding how we see the economy panning out.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, this instance, I think it is the tool that we have is our brain and the way that we think about it. So yes, there are tools, and I think that there's interesting, there's a raft of interesting startups out there that are focused on combating misinformation and disinformation by using AI-based checking of sources and information. And so a lot of those are for corporate use. I think we want to see more, which are for individual use. So some tools like that out there, also for a very long time, I intended long time to build a startup, which was based on be able to build assessments of both news outlets and individual journalists as they're working on that problem at the moment. So these are kinds of simple tools. In terms of saying, what is it that serves us? What information serves us? That's our brain needs to be finally attuned to that. Any information we see.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Information productive. What's inside our brains is the most important part of that, but to assist that is the set of tools for capturing, transferring, and building repositories which create, I suppose, this start to build our own frameworks day by day of the notes we are taking into something which is akin to knowledge rather than just a set of notes.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Put them in the structure, see how they're connected. So Rome Research is a software tool which many VCs investors I sign to use. That's given And there's also tools such as Notion, and there's a whole array of competitors or ones adjacent to Notion, such as a table, though it's not as flexible or a few others, which enable you to, again, take highly structured notes and ideas and have different representations of the relations between them, which tend to be more, which are more, I suppose, structured or relational database in the classical database sense rather than networked. But this is an emerging area of thinking tools in what I call information productivity. So I'm a bit surprised, but very few people have used that word information productivity before. But I think that is what we need to be thinking about. How can we productive information? Information is the most valuable resource we will ever have. It's far more valuable than gold or oil or whatever it is that we think of. That's what drives all the value. So we need to be thinking of how do we make that...”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Want to go. There's a wonderful tool called Hypothesis, which is an open source platform for being able to take notes on anything that we see in a shared environment. Even when you're listening to podcasts, for example, there's a tool called SNPT, which enables you to take an audio snippet and transcribe it and pull it into your notes. From all of these ways where you are capturing information, you're then looking at sometimes having to transform it into there's various tools around this and your zapiers and other systems for transferring information so there's a bit of a structure for how you can do that effectively depending on how you're clipping it and where you're putting it. The final point is the repository. This is where I'm putting all of the things that I find. One of the really interesting developments over the last years has been the very strong rise of what I call connected note-taking, where you are able to pull notes together, but also”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I was pulling that back to a broader question, which is how do we take all the information that we see and put that into structured forms? Because, yes, in terms of just journaling, I think we're just writing simple documents are great. But when we start to see the complexity of the world out there and pulling that together, there's a broader structure. And so this is not all covered in the book, but there is an associated course, which goes in a lot more detail into this. But this is this frame of saying this capture, transfer, and repository. So the first point is capturing the information that we see. So this could be something a lot of people just copy and paste or they may use a bookmarking tool, but there are also some other interesting tools. There's web clippers, which enable us to take portions of the things we see on the web and to put them into our app. There's read-wise, which enables us to take our notes from Kindle and transfer.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The core idea. This is the, and there's always counterpoints in there. You're always presenting one side, they always say, well, there's other reasons to think about that. So it never gives you once, you know, this is the way it is. It's always giving you some nuance to it. And you can actually pick out those different elements and write those down on a page and actually say, oh, these are the core elements, these are way related, these are supporting arguments, these contradictory arguments. This appears to be the conclusion, or this is the cautions around that idea. And it's very valuable when going through any content that you believe is really rich, whether you've written it yourself or someone else has, unpick that, pull that apart by representing that visually.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what is, if I put those on a page, how would those be related? So a concept map is a very valuable tool in a simple form. It just says, okay, here's ideas. You draw a line and you write down that line what the relationship is. This idea supports us one. This one contradicts it. This one gives is an example of. And you can start to then lay out the relationship between the ideas. takes effort, but it leads to a far, far clearer argument. So a wonderful example is to look at an economist article. So economist articles have a very common structure. They start with an anecdote. They end with a bit of a throwaway line, or I suppose some conclusion line, they have a few pieces which they expand on throughout. And what you can actually do with the Economist article is to actually take, all right, well, actually, this is...”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, writing is indeed extraordinarily valuable in clarifying our thoughts. I think that Buffett quote is great. Yes. All right, I know what I'm talking about. Let me write it down. Well, all right. I start to see the flaws in my thinking as I write that down. But to get more rigor, I believe some kind of a visual representation is even stronger, is even more powerful, is even less subject to being able to represent an idea in a compelling but not necessarily structured or rigorous way. So in the book I describe some of the tools which we can visual tools we can use to represent things, it's really about the relationships between ideas. If we have a core idea, what are the elements that support it? Does this idea support this other idea? Do I putting a counterpoint to visually represent that as a counterpoint? What are the actual elements of my argument?”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In which we can start to have a tree which represents the space tourism industry. After this actually sort of sit down and actually draw out space tourism as a tree or as a network and be able to explore some of those ideas because it starts to, all right, this elucidates my understanding of what the industry in. What are the drivers? I think some of those logical levels have been, all right. So you've got industry level, but again, what are the motivations? I think that's a higher logical level. Oh, yes, of course, profit. But it's not just that. There's the desire to expand our universe as humans, which is a fairly natural one as humans. But there is also the drivers of planetary change here, which are suggesting we might need some or want some other resources. So, and I think that starts to tie into relationship to other industries of, well, why do we need those resources? So we started to build, I think, a whole structure of thinking as we start to think about it in terms of these logical levels.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Around those companies. All right, so we have the governmental entities, so NASA or various many countries around the world now, not just the China, Russia, US, but dozens of other countries have space programs of various kinds. So we've got some external things there. Then you look at some of what are the things below the companies, all right? Thinking about some of the employees, some of the expertise, some of the science, some of the institutions, the academic institutions, and also some thinking about, again, some of the underlying research. All right, so what are the things underlying this?”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, one of the things you could categorize at the same level are all the companies. All right, so all of these companies are at the same logical level. So then at the higher level, we've got the industry. All right. So then start to think, well, what is the industry? Well, if you fact, so for example, Virgin Galactic is squarely a space tourism company. But in fact, Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' one, is doing space tourism, but that's only really just a sideline or bit of revenue or a bit of public attention for some broader objectives of exploring and creating value from space. And similarly, SpaceX has got its space tourism, as again an element of it. So we can think, all right, well, the industry which contains this, well, there's actually some adjacent industries. There's this space tourism, there's planetary exploration, there's external space exploitation. So if we think, all right, so then what are some of the adjacent things”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The foundation of a lot of the thinking structures of McKinsey and many other consulting forms, that's essentially what it lays out. So whenever you get a report from a major strategy firm, we'll have this kind of thinking behind it. You'll have some structure and some rigor around the logical levels and what it is you receive. But this is something which we can start to apply for ourselves. I think in being able to understand the structure of things, if we've seen this idea of connecting the information, all right, we have something come in. Being able to connect it to other things is what gives it value. And when we can start to connect in, is this a similar type of instance to something? So I suppose give me an example of industry.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the book, I identified three structures for how it is we build our frameworks, trees, networks, and systems. So a tree is, in fact, a hierarchy. Things have subsidiary elements and we can build a structured hierarchies for thinking where things fit. Now, if we drill into this, I think one of the most important concept is that of logical levels. And what is something which is a higher logical level or what is something at a lower logical level? So whenever we might get to a particular concept, we might say, well, what are specific examples or instances of this concept? What falls under this concept? What is a lower logical level? Well, what is a higher logical? What is this an example of? What is this, the things that fall into? Or what are things that are a peer level? So this is all being taught, all taught in the pyramid thinking, which is Barbara Minto, she's”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ones which have more facets to them, which are more robust because they can deal with more variety and circumstances, and we can demonstrate to be more effective over time. And so this is a cognitive thing. All of this is about our human cognition. We have some wonderful technology tools, but still by far the most extraordinary thing in the known universe is the human brain. As investors, the single thing which will drive our results is going to be in applying our human brain, our cognition effectively, and enhancing our cognition. So in a way, all of this frame around thriving and overload is saying, how do we enhance our condition and enhance our thinking be better at perceiving all of the signals that well sent to us in order to be able to have a better model which results in better decisions?”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To a situation be that a social situation or a car driving by on the road that's built on your mental model of the world. This is where I'm going to position myself in a queue to be able to get to the front faster. So your mental model around how it is that queue works. It's not conscious, but it is essentially your model of the world. So anything that we do, any action we do.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the first prem is that, as you say, people use mental models to talk about particular, I suppose, in a way, heuristics, talked about the circle of confidence from Warren Buffett before. The map is not the territory, which is very true. And it is very useful to be able to think about how we understand the world. But these go deeper than that, where we need to, you know, if we come back to the psychological or psychologist definition of a mental model, it is simply the models that we build our brain of how the world works that inform our actions. So when we are born, we see a rattle, we work out, oh, when you shake the rattle, it rattles. And when I smile at my parents, they smile back. And so there's this simple simplistic point. You start to build a model of the world. When I drop something, it hits the ground. And as we get into more complex situations, we build richer and richer mental models. So whenever you respond,”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And where we can best invest to be able to place the best return. And that's an ongoing process of being able to take the pieces of the puzzle and to put them together and continually evolve our mental models because the world is changing. We can't have fixed mental models by that act of synthesis. It's not about saying, all right, I know. I've worked it all out because in fact you may have worked it out, but tomorrow the world's going to be different and you need to continue evolving that, pulling together the pieces, synthesizing the ideas to have the best, the most valid, never right, but better understanding of the world, which means that, amongst other things, you can invest better.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is that makes sense, which doesn't make sense in my models, how do I enhance that? You might be writing, you might be designing a framework, you may be thinking something through in process. But there are other types of attention as well, which includes exploring where you say, all right, I am going to go on adventure. I'm going to find something which I never would have found otherwise and try to unearth that serendipity of finding things. And this attention is then also about scheduling. What times will I do particular activities? Then the final power, and I believe the most powerful and the most important and in a way the most relevant to investors, is synthesis, because we need to pull all this together. This is literally about this process of building understanding, building a knowledge of the world, knowledge of the markets in a way that we can sense better than other people where the opportunities are emerging, how things are shifting.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT