Random Quotes
Random quotes from the internet. Emphasis mine.
If every species in our evolutionary tree was scared of evolutionary forks from itself, our higher form of intelligence and civilization as we know it would never have had emerged
In other words, while the board may have had the charter of a non-profit, and an admirable willingness to act on and stick to their convictions, they ultimately had no leverage because they weren’t a for-profit company with the capital to be truly independent.
“The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less.” -Socrates
“Obviously, we are all spending way the fuck more than we need to in the Western World and it is a complete waste of all of our time, energy, happiness, and the entire planet. So let’s analyze our true needs as humans and figure out efficient ways to meet all of those needs. Then we’ll enjoy our new more natural life while continuing to earn a rich-world wage for a few years. Since the earnings will be far more than our spending, we will save and invest it, and the work portion will quickly become optional”
Unlike an ideologically disaligned and geographically centralized legacy state, which packs millions of disputants in one place, a network state is ideologically aligned but geographically decentralized. The people are spread around the world in clusters of varying size, but their hearts are in one place.
We all like to think we’d have put $25k into Facebook in ’04. In hindsight, we all believe we’d take the risk and get in early. Yet, another risky early opportunity is in front of you today.
You need some degree of idealism and determination. In building a startup, you cannot be purely economically motivated. At least I couldn’t, because many times the rational thing to do is quit. The rational thing to do is quit and get a decent job where they pay you well and you don’t have as much responsibility. There’s nothing wrong with that. If you’re a rational human being, that’s probably a pretty good thing to do.
The reason to do a startup is to build something you can’t buy. Elon cannot buy a trip to Mars. I wrote The Network State because to unblock biomedicine and get life extension tech- nologies, we need to solve the sovereignty problem. I think this is the long-term path to super-soldier serums and other breakthroughs for humanity.
The less money you need, the less dependent you are.
Without something to build, any intellectual movement degenerates into a status competition, where participants feel the righteousness of finding everyone else wanting without the responsibility of building what they actually want.
Unpopular truth is a reliable source of profit. Behind every great fortune is a great thoughtcrime.
You’re pursuing truth, health, and wealth, in that order. That’s actually the right priority order. For example, you’d never want to do something that’s untrue to make money or sacrifice your long-term health for wealth. Learn to determine what is true. Pursue health because, without that, you have really nothing else. Then wealth is important, but it’s third—though it’s important to have that third.
Many things that are true are unpopular; many things that are popular are untrue.
When Trump got deplatformed from Twitter, whatever else you think about that, future historians will look at that as a moment “the most powerful man in the world wasn’t even the most powerful man in his own country.” It showed that your social media account is not yours.
Without a pilot taking risks, we don’t test a new faster plane. Without the new faster plane, we lose millions of man-years of time (our lives) due to slower air travel.
We have to start talking more about our values than our valuations. Money is only a tool. What really matters is building something you can’t buy. That’s how we actually improve metrics like life expectancy.
It is easy to delude yourself into believing that the promotion, the MRR number, the more dangerous hike, will earn you peace. We delude ourselves that even though it isn’t making us happy now, bigger amounts of the same will do so in the future.