Here’s How You Make 2017 The Year You Get Your Hoverboard: Unleash The Wisdom of the Crowds By Updating People’s Cultural Software

The hoverboard. It’s pretty much the symbol of everything we wanted out of the future that we never got.

Sure. Sure. The iPhone is cool. And, yes, we’re grateful for what’s coming in virtual reality. But what we all really, really want is a hoverboard.

And yet, we don’t have it. Why not?

Well, a lot of it comes down to the fact that most of us still don’t understand how human intelligence works. If you don’t understand the brain well, then you can’t really use it to invent the stuff you want most. This is the graphic that is key to understanding human intelligence. At birth, a human toddler is only more intelligence than a chimp or an orangutan in one area: social intelligence. This social intelligence is what enables humans to learn from other humans.

It’s how we upload culture from other humans.

Over time, that culture faces evolutionary pressure and you end up with better and better culture. Just look at what has happened to human tools over time. We went from stone tools to bronze tools to iron tools. Actually, just compare what has happened to music players in the last few decades:

The culture that has produced most of these technological marvels has certain core, cultural traits that set it up to innovate. They love science. They embrace mistakes, analyze them and use them to get better. That culture isn’t perfect. Nerds fall for Descartes’ Error hardcore. And yet, imagine if the rest of humanity took the best of nerd culture. What could 7 billion humans who consistently embraced mistakes, analyzed them and used them to improve do?

I’ll tell you what. They could make a freaking hoverboard.

Humanity is running old cultural software. The faster we update it the sooner we get all the cool shit we want. And so, the smart bet if you want cool shit is to focus on unleashing other people’s intelligence. That’s the job this guy gave me.

And so, that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to take all the big ideas, break them down, make them fun and make them as pop cultural as possible. But we’re just the next link in the chain. Your job is to run with them. Take them. They’re free. Repackage them for your culture. Share them.

And one of the best things you can do is take down the myth of genius. That’s a weird, Western myth that comes out of our obsession with individualism. It’s an idea well past its scientific sell-by-date. You can read about that here. Meme it out of existence, internet.

We only ask one thing in return. The chance to buy a…

We’ll pay fair market value. But it turns out something has to exist before you can buy it. And, yes. We’ve seen those concept ones that work on a magnetic track. And, no. That doesn’t do it. We want a pink one. Like Marty McFly. One, two cutie pies.


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