Technology
The "Curiosity Premium"
There's something unique when the reality blends with the digital world. On more occasions than I can count, Paul (@PDJ) repeated me how curiosity is what sets winners apart from regular folks. After being on the board of so many startups and having created more wealth than the GDP of the small Mexican city I'm in right now, he's convinced this is the pattern that leads someone to success. And this is actually the reason he built Dystil - to act on this curiosity. When I heard Aravind, one of the brightest and most level-headed mind in AI, come to the same conclusion, it felt made me smile. If two of the smartest people I've been exposed to are saying the same thing, it's worth listening. Here's a quick recap of the "Curiosity Premium": For most of history, being smart basically meant knowing stuff: remembering facts, doing math in your head, having answers. But AI just made all of that free. Anyone can look up anything instantly now. So "knowing things" isn't worth much anymore. What's still valuable? Asking good questions. Being curious enough to go "wait, why is that true?" or "what if we tried this instead?" That's the one skill AI can't just hand you, because it requires you to actually care about something first. The argument is that curious people have always quietly won at life, not because they're geniuses, but because asking questions makes you better at whatever you do, more fun to be around, and more likely to end up around other interesting people who help you level up. It compounds over time. Now flip it to the AI era: since AI can already out-recall and out-calculate any human, the only thing left that actually separates people is what they choose to get curious about and what they do with the answer. So curiosity goes from "nice personality trait" to literally the most economically valuable thing about you. Two things kill curiosity: school systems that reward you for having the right answer instead of asking a good question, and algorithm-fed apps that just spoon-feed you stuff instead of making you wonder about anything. Both train you to stop asking. He thinks that's the actual risk of the AI era. Not robots taking jobs, but people getting talked into believing they have no purpose left, when really the door just opened wider for anyone willing to stay curious. Basically: stop trying to know things. Start trying to wonder about things.
