1-Thread on information & digital networks & personal/intellectual growth. I'll get around to it but this is mostly about how I've used platforms like @MargRev to leapfrog knowledge & am starting to use ones like @interintellect_ to expand sources for info I'd not otherwise find

2-Quick backgrnd: I spent my 20's & early 30's as a Naval Officer as a part of the Naval Special Warfare community. I was a founding member of the groups that expanded the capability of SEAL teams from purely kinetic operations to a fusion of kinetic and intel ops during OIF/OEF

3-It was loads of technology and data as well as kinetic operations & if you worked in that domain when I did you knew me and what I did. Usually ppl like me continue on in that life somewhere in the industrial military complex. My son got sick though so I had to quit cold turkey

4-After i left that world, my head was mostly filled with things that made me interesting in the domain of counter insurgency in one of two countries that were all classified. I wasn't permitted, by law, to express a political opinion publicly. I was a wiped hard drive circa 2015

5-Over the last five years I've created a blog that's attracted a few million readers, written a book and been published in a bunch of major pubs. And I have to confess, I at first i mostly was scraping @margrev for terms I didn't understand, topics I had no experience w and....

6-..authors that had written new books on things I didn't know about. And then I wrote things about them. And something funny happened. When you write a book review or an essay on something you've read, and you reach out to the author to ask a question something funny happens.

7-They respond. If you put together a thread and @ them, sometimes they RT and respond. And before you know it, you're talking to first person authorities on topics and trading knowledge. I can't tell you how consistent this is. If you put the time into reading...

8-...the work people put out, and engage them on it intelligently, they engage back. And u learn things from people that other people pay tens of thousands of dollars for a degree to say they understand them officially...

9-And so now, I've been around a bit and have enough things written that it's a little easier. And now @TheAnnaGat has founded something like the @interintellect_ where there's now a

10-...infrastructure around connecting global intellectuals to create hosted online salons. And it's mostly scaling the bootstrapping knowledge I did over the last 5 years. And it's fantastic. At the moment in a salon zoom call hosted by @balajis, whose work I've followed for yrs

11-...with a dozen other people I've followed for years watching knowledge exchange and growth real time. And the acceleration of ideas is tremendous...and finally happening outside the world of academia or book tours....

12-In many/most domains I'm still parroting. But in others, where I have firmer grounding like technology and politics, I'm generative. And the knowledge acceleration continues. I'm not @tylercowen yet...but I'm gaining. & I can't help think how much better a place the world....

13...would be if more people with the energy and desire to do this...did it. So check out @MargRev ...and @interintellect_ ...listen to @cowenconvos and spend some time on the smarter parts of @twitter and fall in some rabbit holes... It's an amazing time to be alive........