IRL information asymmetry
Get closer to the secrets and gossip
A few years ago, a mentor who’s been active in tech since the 2010s let me in on a secret: Marc Andreessen is one of the most prolific WhatsApp curators in the world. He has started hundreds of chats just to ensure he’s always at the source of the signal.
To be clear, these group chats he creates aren’t just for “s-tier influencers and founders”. Of course, he has access to and conversations with them as well. But from my understanding, it’s Andreessen’s ability to identify people who may not have a public presence but clearly know something about a niche topic that he wants to keep tabs on. And it’s through these private texts where he gets his head start on understanding what everyone else finds out a few months (or years) later.
I’ll spend hours searching the corners of Twitter for high quality niche accounts, only to find pmarca already following most of them.
Anyways, what’s the point of this Andreessen group chat fanboying?
Well, for the last 30 years, much of the value in knowledge work has come from diligently curating and producing high-quality research from across the internet.
But as AI tools become more accessible and capable, this information arbitrage quickly evaporates. Soon enough, surfacing the right information on the internet becomes a commodity.
Key words being on the internet. Whatever frontier models can train on is fair game.
So if there’s diminishing returns on who can spend the most time sleuthing for links and typing up the longest reports, where does the value flow to?
To those who have access to information that’s not already in the public domain.
It’s now clear to me that the most important arbitrage in this AI world is the access you have to trade secrets and alpha that others don’t know about.
Or as Tyler Cowen beautifully puts it in an interview with David Perell (a bit long but worth it)
Humans know secrets; maybe AIs can be fed secrets, but they don’t in general know secrets. Now, a human only knows so many secrets—that’s partly where decentralization comes in.
How AIs will handle secrets, I think, is a big and interesting question; it’s somewhat under-discussed.
It seems like in the Peter Thiel definition of a secret, which is something you know about the world that other people don’t know, there’s a chance that those go up because now there’s less of an incentive to put things in the public domain since they can spread so much faster.
So there might be more of an incentive to hoard information. It will be worth more to you because the public information you used to hold is now worth very little. The future—the AI-rich future—is also a world replete with secrets.
Secrets are super important; gossip is very emotionally and practically potent. It’s another part of this new structure we’re not ready for. We got to talk more about this: why social networks are more important now.
How good are you with secrets? Are you good at trading secrets? If you are, you’re a lot more productive than you used to be. You ever have these conventions with your closer friends like, ‘I’ll tell you this secret, it’s not quite a deal, but it’s understood that you’ll tell me that secret in return?’
Increasing returns to social networks—social networks become way more important as well.
And very similarly, Ben Thompson mentions this idea in a post about deep research.
One additional point he makes that piqued my interest was how these "secrets" are actually a huge bull case for prediction markets. If this information is eventually going to the public domain, how can those with the information asymmetry capture some of that value?
For what it’s worth, the legal and ethical definitions of insider trading in this new paradigm of information markets are still in their earliest stages. It’ll be interesting to see how these frameworks evolve.
Here is a brief exchange I had with my friend who was questioning the above tweet:
So then, the natural question is “how do I acquire more secrets?”
Learn how to rally an IRL community through meetups
Be selective about the events you attend, spend your social battery wisely
Travel to different parts of the world
Get closer to the gossip
Be the reason people connect, become a critical node in your social graph
It’s having the create your own yacht mentality: find ways to bring interesting people to your home turf and share things.
The importance of collecting “secrets” becomes asymmetric as the competitive advantage in the public domain erodes.
Hey, great read as always. You've captured this perfectly. It's so true how AI is changing the value of information curration. The arbitrage shift is reall. Thanks for this perspective.