Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture

Humans have realized it's more efficient to actually compete for status in these virtual worlds than it is in real life, and that's especially true for young people

I think we will see the next generation of educational content be much more appealing visually - it'll have cinematic language and production values and will open up education to the masses in a way that we've never seen before from text.

Every person now has a choice at any moment in time for how to entertain themselves and they're always going to go to the best option because it's one tap away on their phone

I certainly think there's a lot of great ideas locked away in books today that are very forbidding and not appealing to the masses which could be turned into educational content using video that would reach many more people

I just think if your best ideas are locked away in some dense textbook, by its very nature it's not going to reach a lot of the audience you want it to

What the internet and social media have done essentially is increase the surface area of status seeking to the digital realm and virtual realm, and vastly expanded that surface area.

Young people realize that communicating quickly is most efficiently done by a photograph or video and not by writing text....They say a photo is worth a thousand words - there's some truth to that.

Today with content, at any point in time you are competing with what's on a person's smartphone. This means that formally different lines of business and different industries now compete head-to-head.

Everyone now has to figure out with their content how to compete with every other form of entertainment

I have this core thought that almost everything in the world could be fixed by tightening feedback loops

The secret to success? - Just show up

High conversational entropy is correlated with interestingness as a human being

I think one of the most powerful things that any business can do is to clearly figure out why their growth flattened and why certain people don't use your product - it's often very different than what you think

Humans are a social creature and we are status seeking by nature

I still think video has a lot of room to penetrate a lot of markets that we currently still rely heavily on text for

There's so much hidden knowledge that's not in guidebooks that's in the minds of the people who live wherever you're visiting

The best salespeople actually try to understand the client and what their needs are first, and then they adapt their story to that

There's much more to learn from the people who don't use your product, than those who do

Instagram photos are just advertisements of our life

The truth is, and not a lot of people like to admit it, is that most people don't read

A goal is just gamifying your own life

Elegance is the maximum amount of information communicated in the minimum way

We are constantly in this cultural battle to find sources of scarcity

What we're living through now contains the largest network effect businesses in the history of the world

We're just terrible at looking at ourselves. We will always be the most biased observer.

If you look at the things that are the best status signifiers for humans, they tend to be those things that are most visible that we have on us at all time

We've actually NEVER had more resources available to everybody for learning

Some crazy questions you could ask to make a conversation more interesting

There's no such thing as bad publicity

Almost always, the largest social networks broaden out over time

Everything has become entertainment because of the medium through which it's transmitted

The software interface is a form of language