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    Season 1 · Episode 1

    Decentralization of Information & Technological Advances

    ZADAN with Jace Galloway

    · 2:49:58

    The conversation

    Jace Galloway traces his Library of Consciousness project back to his own schooling: No Child Left Behind, a top-down learning style, and three years of high school in which he says he attended about a hundred days in total, learning instead from Wikipedia and early YouTube. He recalls being accused of cheating on the pre-SAT, explains how a truncated Napster download of "Yellow Submarine" taught him to fact-check, and compares verification methods with ZADAN.

    From there the talk widens into decentralization. Jace describes cryptocurrency with the currency stripped out, an "internet of exchange," and his curated library of documentaries organized as a free course in a Facebook group. ZADAN talks about his anxiety, depression and habit of living for his future self, and Jace recounts years of foot surgeries and being blocked on Twitter by Nassim Taleb. Later stretches cover AI, car ownership, a speculative Elon Musk plan to buy up car loans, and teachers recording lessons once for everyone.

    Topics, with timestamps

    Pick a time to start listening right there.

    1. How No Child Left Behind shaped Jace's schooling
    2. Learning from Wikipedia and YouTube instead of class
    3. A short Napster file and learning to fact-check
    4. Two ways to verify what you read online
    5. Joy versus happiness and living for your future self
    6. Crypto without the currency: an internet of exchange
    7. Building the Library of Consciousness
    8. AI, automation and the end of car ownership
    9. Getting blocked on Twitter by Nassim Taleb
    10. Foot surgeries and choosing happiness anyway
    11. Fukushima, worst cases and an economic constitution
    12. A slot machine parable about failure
    13. Predicting an Elon Musk play for car loans
    14. Teachers recording lessons once for every student

    Worth hearing

    • Jace says he attended roughly a hundred days of high school across his sophomore, junior and senior years, learning at home from Wikipedia, YouTube and documentary channels.
    • After he finished the pre-SAT in under an hour and scored about 200 points short of perfect, the school called in his parents and asked how he had cheated.
    • He learned to check his sources when he discovered the "Yellow Submarine" he had played for years was an incomplete Napster download, and he took from it that being wrong is a chance to find more of the truth.
    • ZADAN's method for checking a claim is to read the top five results for a positive search and the top five for a negative one, then look for where they agree.
    • Jace was blocked on Twitter by Nassim Taleb after tagging him repeatedly, and treated it as a lesson that admiring someone does not make the relationship two-way.
    • ZADAN separates happiness, which he calls a chemical reaction, from joy, which he treats as a daily choice, and describes dealing with intense anxiety and depression as a creator.
    • Jace's vision for decentralized education has teachers record a 50-minute lesson once, store it on a blockchain, and let it reach any student anywhere.

    ZADAN's original episode notes

    In this episode of the podcast, Jace and I dive deep into topics such as the schooling system, the decentralization of information and technological advances that drive the industry forward as well as many other awesome in-depth topics.