Rohit Krishnan (@krishnanrohit), venture capitalist and author of the blog Strange Loop Cannon, joins Erik on this episode. Takeaways:

- Many of the people at the top of their fields today say they would never get hired if they were just starting out today. Today’s selection process at elite institutions has become more stringent but has dropped the interesting variance that exists at the top of the pyramid. Plenty of people have gamified the selection process. If you’re hiring, you want to find the interesting misfits.

- Higher ed used to be fantastic but now it is groaning under its scale. There should be more of a focus on job training rather than general liberal education.

- Billionaires should be more eccentric and experimental. There aren’t enough idiosyncratic billionaires in the world.

- It’s easier than ever for information to get from one place to another with the rise of the internet but it also means that it’s easier than ever for ways to use that information to make money to get from one place to another. This has resulted in the barbell distribution of outcomes that we see these days.

- Clustering has important benefits. There’s something about bouncing ideas off of other people and egging them on in person that is special, despite the connectivity that the internet has brought.

- Hierarchies make it easy to get things done in general, but hard to get any one thing done.

- There are many more areas where we are not polarized than where we are polarized these days. Changing someone’s mind is a function of time and encouragement and repeated explanations, rather than forcefully convincing someone you are right and they are wrong.

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