Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

  • When Money Drives Itself

    The concept of the “family office” dates back to 1901. After his lucrative sale of an iron mine to U.S. Steel in 1901, John D. Rockefeller assembled a dedicated team of trusted advisors to manage every aspect of his family’s financial life — from investments and budgeting to insurance, wealth transfer planning, tax strategies, and…

  • Why Bringing People Together in the Real World is the Future of Virtual Reality

    The uncanny melding of perception and reality has always been central to the promise of virtual reality (VR). In a highly immersive VR experience, users lose their sense of disbelief and embody their avatars, roaming freely as if in “The Matrix,” “Star Trek’s” holodeck, or “Ready Player One’s” Oasis. Today, most VR technologies are a…

  • Crypto is Growing Up. It’s Going to Change How Global Financial Systems Operate

    Over the past decade, crypto has faced its share of failures and scandals. CEOs have landed in prison, markets have crashed, and pump-and-dump schemes have swindled investors out of their life savings. The drama has earned crypto a chorus of haters, with critics declaring it an elaborate Ponzi scheme and an “utterly pointless” innovation. “Let…

  • Move Over, SWIFT. Stablecoins Will Rule Cross-Border Payments

    Across the world, digital payments are already mainstream. In countries like India, Thailand, and Brazil, the vast majority of the population uses a centralized platform to send money instantly from their phones, even if they don’t have a bank account. Users in places like the US and China can pick from a variety of different…

  • How “Small, Smart, Cheap, and Many” Is the new era of US National Defense

    Across the world, and on multiple fronts, the US faces a weapons crisis. A prominent policy think tank found that in a potential conflict with China in the Taiwan Strait, the US military runs woefully short on the long-range, precision-guided missiles that can hit Chinese naval forces from a safe distance. In nearly two dozen…

  • Fixing Mental Health Treatment Through Data

    Despite more than 14 million adults in the U.S. suffering from severe mental illness (SMI)—like major depression, schizophrenia, or bipolar disorder—little has changed in terms of how we treat these individuals in decades. Quality mental healthcare could help them live healthy, fulfilling lives, but too many can’t access care, or receive inadequate care at best.…

  • Why Data Is the Missing Link for Fixing America’s Infrastructure Problems

    Utility companies call them PSPSs, or public safety power shutoffs. To electricity consumers, they’re simply blackouts — dreaded long days without lights, air conditioning, internet, and other modern conveniences. For many small businesses, the impacts are felt in lost revenue. Implemented as a cautionary measure to prevent high winds from yanking down live electricity wires,…

  • Why a Deep Dive into the Oceans Can Help Secure our Future on Earth

    Consider, for a moment, an email that someone in London sends to a work colleague in New York. That message would depart from a server in the UK and arrive at a data center somewhere on the East Coast so instantaneously that it might seem as though the missive never really traveled at all. But,…

  • It’s Time to Treat Academics Like Sports

    In sports, we celebrate talent and give athletes the resources and personalized support they need to develop their skills. Why can’t we do the same in academics? Treating academics like sports means establishing a system where students are encouraged to pursue their interests and develop their talents to their fullest potential. It means respecting the…

  • Fintech’s Next Frontier: The Outdated Credit Score

    Across industries, consumers engage in a wide range of grand bargains pertaining to their personal data. It works like this: In return for giving companies access to information about ourselves, we get some degree of greater convenience, more personalized offerings, and better experiences.  For instance, when we allow cookies to collect our internet browsing and…

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