NOTES FROM MARCH '22

March 13, 2022

The basic problem with our society is a disconnect between consensus reality and actual reality. We have no shortage of natural leaders. But they cannot actually lead us anywhere. They are operating in consensus reality rather than actual reality. Their joysticks are not plugged in. When the consensus is nonsense, sober good sense is nonsense. Nonsense is no use to anyone.

March 10, 2022

How To Achieve Your 10-Year Plan In The Next 6 Months

How can you achieve your 10 year plan in the next 6 months? — Peter Thiel

• As research has shown, only 16% of creative ideas happen while you’re sitting at work. Most will happen while you’re relaxing, commuting, traveling, spending time present with loved ones, etc.

• Reading books should stimulate new ways of thinking and ACTING in the world. If you’re not acting differently, you’re not actually learning, and thus not changing. Your behavior is what shapes circumstance, confidence, personality, and relationships.
• For most people, learning has become an escape from doing. Filling your head with useless information is the opposite of hard-won wisdom and understanding, which can only happen via the application of knowledge and re-application based on experience in the real world.

Do not let preparation become procrastination.

The internet is more distracting and hard to evade than a Las Vegas casino.

If you only had 3 months left to live, what would your goals be?

• Every new day, you are closer to the day you die. Was your last day worth it? Getting you closer to your purpose for being this lifeform?

• If you have a true goal, something that is extremely valuable to you, and that you believe to be very important, ONLY THEN can you begin to properly value and use your time.

• As Ryan Holiday has said, “This is a fundamental irony of most people’s lives. They don’t quite know what they want to do with their lives. Yet they are very active.”

Get very clear on

• What you believe
• And what you should do because of that belief

• And how to most effectively accomplish that belief

• If you had 6 months to live, how much of that time would you spend on Twitter?
• If you had 6 months left to live, would it be difficult to wake up at 5AM?
• Would it be hard to “find your voice” or market your ideas? Not at all. If you believed you were doing something very important, you’d shout from the rooftops. You wouldn’t hold back and restrain for fear of what others think.

Be willing to experiment, to try new things, and to fail.

March 9, 2022

People often strive for greatness by imitating greatness, when usually great artists are just utterly themselves.

March 5, 2022

Are we witnessing an increase in ideological conformity and polarization in society because we no longer believe in religion or God? To fill the void of meaning? We are gaining power but losing meaning. Humans believe and coordinate based on stories, and since the old stories are fading we are anxiously searching for new ones.

March 3, 2022

Why You’re a Christian by David Perell

• Religious or not, every Westerner bathes in the waters of Christian ideology.
• We should study religion not to dogmatically accept faith, but to understand the foundations of our worldview.

…where we’ll binge-read biographies about some hot new tech CEO while skipping the one about the most important figure in Western history: Jesus Christ.

• The book of I Corinthians says that the truth of Christianity hinges upon the resurrection’s historical reality — meaning that the story of Christ dying on the cross and coming back to life must be literally true.
• Christ was either the Son of God or a madman.

Christianity is the invisible frame around modern thought.

They look down on people who inherit religion from their parents, but unquestioningly inherit ideas from the culture in which they swim and the media they consume.

March 2, 2022

• You do not need more ideas, you need to execute on the ideas you have. Do not suffer from partial execution syndrome.
• There does not ALWAYS have to be an endgame. I always immediately go to, “well how is this going to get me to X?” You can do things just because you enjoy them and you’re curious about them. In fact, often times the best projects start from following a curiosity.

March 1, 2022

Writing: The World’s Best Networking Activity

Writing is the most scalable professional networking activity – stay home, don’t go to events/conferences, and just put ideas down.

Building your network, your audience, and your ideas will be something you’ll want to do over your entire career. Think of your writing like a multi-decade project.

Generally, I believe words are not what I have to give the world.

I’ll write if it’s something worth writing about, which is to say a neglected or unconventional topic. A lot of writing is hive mind, very few new ideas, very few revelations. More noise than signal. I’ll speak when I think there’s something new or interesting to say.

NOTES FROM FEBRUARY '22

February 28, 2022

I have been reading annual shareholder letters from incredible CEO’s like Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Warren Buffet of Berkshire Hathaway.

Amazon Annual Letters

• Take responsibility and execute on the ideas you have.
• This strategy is not without risk: it requires serious investment and crisp execution against established franchise leaders.
• It’s All About the Long Term
• We first measure ourselves in terms of the metrics most indicative of our market leadership: customer and revenue growth, the degree to which our customers continue to purchase from us on a repeat basis, and the strength of our brand.
• We will continue to focus relentlessly on our customers.
• We will continue to focus on hiring and retaining versatile and talented employees, and continue to weight their compensation to stock options rather than cash.
• We know our success will be largely affected by our ability to attract and retain a motivated employee base, each of whom must think like, and therefore must actually be, an owner.

Give the world something it wants, but does not yet know how to get; think Amazon, Uber, Airbnb.

• Setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been, and will continue to be, the single most important element of Amazon.com’s success.

The team you build is the company you build.

• …but we still have so much to learn. Though we are optimistic, we must remain vigilant and maintain a sense of urgency.
• We intend to build the world’s most customer-centric company.
• I constantly remind our employees to be afraid, to wake up every morning terrified. Not of our competition, but of our customers. Our customers have made our business what it is, they are the ones with whom we have a relationship, and they are the ones to whom we owe a great obligation.
• We must be committed to constant improvement, experimentation, and innovation in every initiative.

Berkshire Hathaway Annual Letter

• Berkshire Hathaway pays roughly $9 million daily to the Treasury.
• Long-term interest rates that are low push the prices of all productive investments upward, whether these are stocks, apartments, farms, oil wells, whatever.
• BNSF will be a key asset for Berkshire and our country a century from now.
• I have urged that [students] seek employment in (1) the field and (2) with the kind of people they would select, if they had no need for money.

February 25, 2022

In many industries where giant data sets simply don’t exist, I think the focus has to shift from big data to good data. Having 50 thoughtfully engineered examples can be sufficient to explain to the neural network what you want it to learn. - Andrew Ng

February 23, 2022

• We are all filled with experiences and skills and knowledge and creativity, yet the poorly designed systems of today do a suboptimal job of cultivating these gifts.
• We need a new social operating system.

February 22, 2022

Oura

Inside Tracker

Levels

Eight Sleep

February 21, 2022

• All languages can be understood as a form of thought-control.
• Alien life probably won’t be anything like our own.

February 19, 2022

Ideas have to pass through the very narrow window of human language, and often all the nuance is lost.

The world is not an automaton which continues deterministically based on current realities. Betting against invention and innovation has, on the whole, turned out to be a bad bet over the course of human history.

February 16, 2022

• What’s the hardest you’ve ever worked on something?

• How many hours were you working a week?

• Why did you work so hard? Why did you care?

• When were you the most unmotivated in your life?

• What’s the thing you’re the most proud of?

• Do you think it was worth it?

February 13, 2022

• Governments and corporations play a role, but if they were doing everything correctly we would not have startups.

February 12, 2022

A mind free of passions is a fortress. - Marcus Aurelius

February 11, 2022

Founder as Vicitm, Founder as God

• The top players have a paradoxical quality: they’re often extreme insiders or extreme outsiders, rather than being average.
• Extreme insider-outsiders are hard to pin down: they are x but also not-x. Today they are x, tomorrow they are not-x. They understand that the world demands flexibility but are also committed to particular ideas.

• How much of this can be avoided? How do you avoid becoming a sacrificial victim? The simple answer, of course, is that if you really don’t want to get killed, you shouldn’t sit on the throne.

February 9, 2022

• Today, we’re seeing start ups focused on helping start ups start up. In the Web3 space there are a lot of start ups focused on building tooling for a market that doesn’t necessarily exist yet.

February 8, 2022

Ownership and the American Dream

We used to be a country that celebrated the risk-takers and those who achieved success, because their success showed us what was possible for us, too.

Make Americans Owners: We need to make America the place where everyone is an owner, and everyone acts like an owner. We need to make it the place where hard work and risk taking are applauded and rewarded.

We can revive the American Dream by making ownership an explicit economic strategy.

While DAOs are popular and exciting, critics rightly point out that a DAO’s tokens don’t confer ownership or a right to profit from the success of the DAO. They’re just “governance” tokens, not securities.

February 7, 2022

• Tech Worker Handbook

In the future you’re telling a computer what to do or a computer is telling you what to do. You want to be on the right side of that. - Naval

• Optimize Your Environment to Match Your Work Goals
  • For detailed analytic work (ideally in Phase I 0-9 hours after waking), work in a lower ceiling environment or put on a hoodie or hat to restrict visual field; for Phase II (9-16 hours after waking creative work), work in high ceiling room or outdoors.

February 5, 2022

Notes via Blockchain Futures

• Applying emerging technologies to the work of identifying appropriate talent may enhance an organization’s strategic efforts around diversity and inclusion.
• Over the next decade, a new organizational structure will emerge that decentralizes decision-making and empowers workers. It will be enabled by a number of technologies including secure distributed ledgers and machine-learning systems.
• Innovative organizations are experimenting with reputation-weighted decision making, automated profit-sharing payrolls, and open, mutable policies and codes of conduct.

Over the decade, real-time payroll could extend to real-time profit sharing, triggered the moment the profit is realized by an organization.

• Colony envisions a future of self-organizing companies that “run via software not paperwork,” and in which, according to CEO Jack du Rose, “the relationship is with the contract, not with the company.”

As the Internet of Things is connected to the blockchain via smart contracts—and tokens control the flow of value through it—crowdsourced infrastructures will take advantage of P2P networks to build and govern everything from distributed energy grids to self-managing public services.

🤯 Machines and devices own themselves: Trading in cryptocurrencies, increasingly intelligent devices incorporate themselves as DAOs and issue their own IPOs, cutting out even the marginally profitable middlemen DAOs. Some have service code built into them, while others scout DAO software for market advantages.

• Employers disappear: employment by DAOs not corporations At the intersection of on-demand services and blockchain-based DAOs, service workers find themselves working gigs rather than jobs for organizations that exist in code only, often paid in cryptocurrencies. They may even “gig” for self-owning, self-managing objects like farm machines or even HVAC systems that need servicing.
• People work for crypto-equity in this world of self-owning, self-managing services, long-term economic stability for individuals or families may depend on their investments in a broad swath of DAOs and machines that return micro-dividends.
• In a future where smart algorithms can aggregate and analyze data across a wide swath of blockchain transactions, self-incorporating, self-owning, and self-managing services emerge to meet the needs of a global marketplace.

February 4, 2022

How we interpret the world is determined by what we see on a regular basis.

• Lack of exposure leads to missed opportunities to explore new interests, hobbies, people and places. With the internet, we have the whole world available to us at our fingertips.

NOTES FROM JANUARY '22

January 31, 2022

According to Gurley, Bezos, and Chesky, the marketplaces that can stay the least extractive for the longest amount of time can consolidate the financial activity in their space and create the most value long-term.

January 28, 2022

Top 10 future technologies you’ve definitely never heard of

January 25, 2022

If the truth is what sets us free, it’s organizations like Google that are keeping us in chains.

January 24, 2022

The Sovereign Individual

Microprocessing will individualize work, away from the standardized work of the assembly line. This will also increase income inequality, since one programmer can write an algorithm worth millions, while another working at an identical laptop could create nothing of value. Resentment between those who create value and those who don’t will increase. As information technology proliferates, low skilled people won’t be taken advantage of anymore, they simply won’t be able to contribute meaningfully to the economy.

The individual as an ensemble: As our access to information technology grows, we’ll be able to multiply our abilities by manifesting a potentially limitless number of agents to complete tasks for us, whether they’re humans or programs. One person’s potential output will increase exponentially with technology. You could even continue acting after death.

The Sovereign Individuals of the information economy won’t be warlords, but masters of specialized skills, like entrepreneurship and investment.

Memorization as a skill will become useless, but the value of quickly learning will increase. We’ll be in a world of abundant information and what you’ll need to know is how to use it.

January 23, 2022

Brilliance might appear to win in the short term, but positioning inevitably wins in the end.

There are three things you cannot buy. Fitness: You have to keep fit, whether you’re rich or not. Diet: You cannot pay someone to be on a diet for you. I think that diet is the biggest sacrifice in my life. Then, looking after your soul. No one can possibly treat your soul but you yourself. This is something you can do through culture and philosophy.

January 22, 2022

Machines will be the world’s future workforce. Who will own them?

• The centralization of AI is likely to be one of the factors that increases the gap between first world countries and the rest of the planet.

• Blockchain and AI are the two extreme sides of the technology spectrum: one fostering centralized intelligence on close data platforms, the other promoting decentralized applications in an open-data environment. How can we find an intelligent way to make them work together?

• federated learning
• homomorphic encryption
• secure multi-party computation
• zero knowledge proofs

January 20, 2022

Social Technology

What is social technology? Social technology is the hardware and software that determine how we organize and collectively live our lives. But it is also the the ideas, knowledge, economics, and institutions that drive culture and sustain societies. And it is the way this knowledge is embedded in the technologies we use.

It went from [the most talented people focusing on] ads to finance and this is not a good thing. The over-financialization of the world is a bug, not a feature.

January 19, 2022

Complexity is the enemy of execution.

• If you are serious about mastering your life, you can’t afford to expose yourself to random information. Each piece of information entering your brain affects your neural network. By curating your information consumption you take a step to shape your mind consciously.

January 18, 2022

Building American Dynamism

It’s now easier to solve critical national problems through startups. For one, many of these companies and their respective problems require large capital investment, and venture capitalists are better at taking on risk and allocating capital than agencies in Washington.

Financialization and a cultural shift away from collective responsibility have led to a decimation of the bureaucracy and a permanent, aging governing class. A country without a vibrant public service culture cannot thrive, especially when competing with countries with effectively mandatory public service in the technology sector, such as China

Many of the young people who would have stayed in public service or adjacent worlds — such as think tanks, academia, or nonprofits — are moving to startups instead to solve thorny problems of government on time horizons that would be impossible for bureaucrats to fathom.

January 17, 2022

Say the least. Absorb the most.

• It is useful to think of your life as an ongoing experiment and your goals as hypotheses. You expect that taking these actions will lead you to the desired results but you cannot be sure until you actually run the experiment.

January 15, 2022

Evolution has advanced the biological brain slowly and gradually over hundreds of millions of years, and in that sense, if humans birth an ASI machine, we’ll be dramatically stomping on evolution. Or maybe this is part of evolution—maybe the way evolution works is that intelligence creeps up more and more until it hits the level where it’s capable of creating machine superintelligence, and that level is like a tripwire that triggers a worldwide game-changing explosion that determines a new future for all living things:

“All species eventually go extinct” has been almost as reliable a rule through history as “All humans eventually die” has been.

It may very well be that when evolution hits the tripwire, it permanently ends humans’ relationship with the beam and creates a new world, with or without humans.

Nick Bostrom describes three ways a superintelligent AI system could function:6

• As an oracle, which answers nearly any question posed to it with accuracy, including complex questions that humans cannot easily answer—i.e. How can I manufacture a more efficient car engine? Google is a primitive type of oracle.
• As a genie, which executes any high-level command it’s given—Use a molecular assembler to build a new and more efficient kind of car engine—and then awaits its next command.
• As a sovereign, which is assigned a broad and open-ended pursuit and allowed to operate in the world freely, making its own decisions about how best to proceed—Invent a faster, cheaper, and safer way than cars for humans to privately transport themselves.

There are no hard problems, only problems that are hard to a certain level of intelligence. Move the smallest bit upwards [in level of intelligence], and some problems will suddenly move from “impossible” to “obvious.” Move a substantial degree upwards, and all of them will become obvious.7

ASI could even solve our most complex macro issues—our debates over how economies should be run and how world trade is best facilitated, even our haziest grapplings in philosophy or ethics—would all be painfully obvious to ASI.

Eventually, Kurzweil believes humans will reach a point when they’re entirely artificial;11 a time when we’ll look at biological material and think how unbelievably primitive it was that humans were ever made of that; a time when we’ll read about early stages of human history, when microbes or accidents or diseases or wear and tear could just kill humans against their own will; a time the AI Revolution could bring to an end with the merging of humans and AI.12

January 14, 2022

• It feels like a lot of the DAO space is just people who want to run ordinary businesses rediscovering by trial & error why corporations exist.
• In practice, not all DAOs are decentralized or autonomous, so it is best to think of DAOs as internet-based organizations that are collectively owned and controlled by its members.

The most counterintuitive secret about startups is that it’s often easier to succeed with a hard startup than an easy one.

January 13, 2022

• A problem is a terrible thing to waste.

January 12, 2022

The truth is that labor and wages are not the optimal solution for building sustainable wealth; asset ownership and access to capital is. If you want to become wealthy and obtain financial freedom, you need to own assets — capital > labor.

Evolve or you’ll go out of business.

January 11, 2022

The team you build is the company you build.

• We are going to see more people tweeting and blogging about low-code and no-code frameworks that reduce developer friction in creating complex AI-powered applications.

• Web3 Article Moxie
• If something is truly decentralized, it becomes very difficult to change, and often remains stuck in time.
• Blockchains are designed to be a network of peers, but not designed such that it’s really possible for your mobile device or your browser to be one of those peers.
• With the shift to mobile, we now live firmly in a world of clients and servers – with the former completely unable to act as the latter – and those questions seem more important to me than ever.
• Given the history of why web1 became web2, what seems strange to me about web3 is that technologies like ethereum have been built with many of the same implicit trappings as web1. To make these technologies usable, the space is consolidating around… platforms. Again.

Advanced robotics, increasingly sophisticated algorithms, deep learning networks, exponential growth in computer processing power and bandwidth, voice/facial recognition and other tech – all were paving the way towards a highly automated society.

January 10, 2022

• The market incentivizes the proprietary hoarding of information and closed internal development rather than open, collaborative development.

• I am very fascinated by the convergence of AI and crypto - in many ways they are opposites. If AI is communist, crypto is libertarian. I do believe who controls AI in the future will determine how society functions. Is it owned by a small group of powerful individuals or the commons?

All power rests on the ability to control language. Humans make sense of the world through stories.

• The stories we tell shape the way we see the world and guide our responses to the problems we face.

January 9, 2022

Incentives are a superpower.

January 8, 2022

When does wisdom of crowds become madness of crowds?

• Democracy should provide checks and balances on the elites - how good of a job are they doing?

• We are all prone to evil.
• There is a saying that the line between good and evil is not a line between classes of people or political parties - but a line that passes through the hearts of each and every one of us.

Nobody’s smart enough to design a society; you’ve got to experiment.

• Q: If we can connect brains to an AGI (+ our quantified body data), will they know better than us what we should do?

• Perhaps there is less patriotism today bc/ the current generations have not had to sacrifice anything for the country. It sounds counterintuitive but if you make sacrifices and give things up for someone or something, we feel more drawn to and connected to that thing.

January 6, 2022

How can we accelerate coordination? How can we better coordinate ourselves, to inspire better coordination mechanisms in the world?

Improving coordination means better resource allocation, less corruption, and more symmetry between value created and value captured.

January 3, 2022

And so, although the present generation lives in the most prosperous period in human history, it’s plausibly also the most dangerous.

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” — Buckminster Fuller

January 2, 2022

Goal Setting via How I set and execute 50-year goals

1. Clear, ~permanent long-term vision. I hold my vision very firmly, change it very rarely, and see it as infinite. It is the core of my identity, the center of who I am, and my reason to get out of bed in the morning.
2. Thread that converts my long-term vision to tractable daily actions. Long-term vision => decade themes => year OKRs => quarter OKRs=> weekly/daily actions.
3. Minimize bullshit that does not advance my long-term vision. I delegate, pay, ignore etc.; doesn’t matter as long as I just don’t do it.

January 1, 2022

When long-term goal setting, I am learning it’s more important to optimize for skills, systems, and traits - opposed to objects or simple pass fail metrics. Focus on becoming a person with skills that will simply attract the ‘things you want.’ Focus on systems and processes versus things and objects.

“With a system, you are less likely to miss one opportunity because you were too focused on another. With a system, you are always scanning for any opportunity.”

Instead of ‘I want to be a millionaire’ - what traits, skills, and habits do millionaires have? Focus on upgrading your mindset via books, conferences, networking, optimize your mind, practice persuasion, writing, influence, invest in assets, acquire new skills, learn accounting, work ethic, travel to expand perspective, build a business, etc. and you will become a millionaire as a by-product.

Visualize the type of person you want to become in 1 year, 5 years, 10 years…what traits and skills does this person have, what do they invest their time and energy into? And reverse engineer this to the present day and begin.

“Goals determine your direction. Systems determine your progress.”

In 2022, food, transportation, and especially housing prices will rise, and while many people will receive pay raises, they will be significantly poorer in real relative wealth.

When governments launch their own Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) — as some have already done — expect them to fully ban cryptocurrency and pair their CBDCs with Orwellian social credit systems and under-the-skin surveillance.

• As the rich leave states like New York and California for laissez-faire regimes like Texas, we’ll witness a collapse in tax revenue.
• Tax revenue erosion will soon be a common phrase in city council chambers across the country.

NOTES FROM DECEMBER '21

December 31, 2021

Earn with your mind, not your time.

December 29, 2021

• The concept of the ‘double thank you’ has really clicked with me. By paying others to do things that are not your core competence, you are stimulating the economy and helping people.

The Double Thank You of the Market

December 14, 2021

• Update the programming in your brain if you are not happy with the way things are. Reprogram your mind, habits, thoughts, creativity, perspective, mindset, etc.

December 11, 2021

If you woke up tomorrow morning and found out you had ten years to live, what would you stop doing?

December 10, 2021

No one “builds a house.” They lay one brick again and again and again and the end result is a house. Procrastinators are great visionaries—they love to fantasize about the beautiful mansion they will one day have built—but what they need to be are gritty construction workers, who methodically lay one brick after the other, day after day, without giving up, until a house is built.

December 5, 2021

• As Rabbi Moses ben Maimon (1135–1204), commonly known as Maimonides, said: “Teach thy tongue to say I do not know, and thou shalt progress.”
• Focus on questions where effort will pay off the most.
• When the problem is big and seemingly intractable, break it down into crude smaller components.
• As we are prone to look at things from the inside out, remember to ask the outside-in questions.
• We are never 100 percent confident, update your beliefs as new information becomes available.
• There is always more than one side to problems. Understanding the counterarguments is the key to having an informed opinion.
• Remove as much uncertainty as you can.
• Rushing to judgment can be as harmful as taking too long to make a decision.
• There are levels to learning. Learning from your failures is good. Learning from others’ failures is better. But learning from success is key.
• When teams make decisions, managing the process is critical.
• No amount of book smarts will help you, you have to practice.

December 5, 2021

There is a difference between knowledge and action.

By what I call the narrative fallacy, the media distorts our mental map of the world by feeding us what can be made into a story that can be squeezed into our minds.

• People focus on role models; it is also effective to find antimodels — people you don’t want to resemble as you grow.

December 1, 2021

• Obsession, winning, and balance do not belong in the same sentence.
• It’s a question of ambition and obsession. What are your goals? If you are focused on becoming a master of your craft, changing the world, building a billion dollar business. These things do not happen on 40 hours a week - they take sacrifice and obsession. People will look at you like you are crazy, they will question you, this is normal - it can be a sign you are on the right track.
• Winning is not glamorous.
• Extreme people get extreme results.
• Do not view competitiveness as a negative trait - humans are competitive creatures. Embrace your competitive nature.
• How do we balance competition as a necessity and being an original, and looking for spaces and niches others have not yet found?

NOTES FROM NOVEMBER '21

November 29, 2021

New tools equal new perceptions.

November 28, 2021

Intelligence without imagination: a deadly combination.

The public observes the external signs of wealth without even having a glimpse at the source.

November 22, 2021

• In a world of persistent normalcy, will creativity exist?

November 20, 2021

• What happens after the metaverse? The metaverse is being framed as the ‘singularity’ moment for the world - what happens next? Have we not dreamed beyond this? It will likely not be a utopia…

November 9, 2021

• DAO’s are coordination vehicles fit for the 21st century
• People will cede increasingly more control to AI as they see the results and begin to develop trust with AIs. They will understand us more than we understand ourselves.

Re: Naval on Ferriss podcast - perhaps web3 is not simply porting over web2 concepts and decentralizing them, but creating new types of companies and doing things we have not even imagined yet. Web2 may have its place w/ social media platforms, search, etc. As some of these use cases really benefit from centralization. What models would work well in a web3 world?

November 6, 2021

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has. – Margaret Mead

You’ve got to think about big things while you’re doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction.

We live in a world where our social system is old, our language is old, the way we acquire goods and services is outdated, our cities are detrimental to our health, chaotic and a tremendous waste of resource, and most of all our politics and values no longer serve us.

November 3, 2021

• Future fortunes will favor those that prepare for this inevitable upheaval and embrace a digitally immersive future.

The Sovereign Individual emphasizes self-ownership, rational thought over fatalism, and does not accept the one size fits all approach of mass consumption society.

The internet ended the monopoly that the credentialed class had on valuable information.

November 2, 2021

Social media as a social control mechanism - like in ORWELL’S 1984, 2 minutes of hate. People at boring jobs spew hate on twitter for 2 minutes then go back to their boring jobs. Social media is a substitute to revolution, not a complement.

Once an experiment starts, real-world feedback is often by far the most useful variable to determine how the experiment should be adjusted in the future.

November 1, 2021

It is quite possible that the feature of being human that has made us the intelligent, most powerful creatures on the planet, is our ability to distill external information into internal knowledge.

NOTES FROM OCOTOBER '21

October 27, 2021

• Corporations are just people and unstructured data - this is true for all coordination vehicles.

October 24, 2021

Real power comes from undetectable influence

He brings up the example of the agricultural revolution which resulted in a lower quality of life and shorter lifespans for neolithic societies. No society or individual deliberately chose this technology that fostered disease and misery. Yet they had no chance to go back, as agricultural societies’ population flourished, the hunter-gatherer way of life was marginalized.

We are now in a new techno-economic paradigm which revolves around blockchains. Blockchains allow for something called social scalability: the ability to coordinate large swathes of people without increasing centralization.

Making a handful of good uncorrelated bets that are balanced and leveraged well is the surest way of having a lot of upside without being exposed to unacceptable downside.

Think of yourself as a machine operating within a machine and know that you have the ability to alter your machines to produce better outcomes.

October 20, 2021

• Government is a compromise among men in which some measure of individual freedom is exchanged for security.

As the human is individual in nature, rather than hive-oriented as are some species of insect, true collective decision making is beyond our biological ability.

To develop a theory of change, you need to start at the end and repeatedly ask yourself, “Concretely, how does one achieve that?”

October 19, 2021

• Q: AI in the future: Terminator-style killer bots or conversational agents that are your friends and mentors on the internet?

The fundamentals of many of today’s algorithms have been around for over 30 years. But it’s really only now, in the last 5 to 8 years, that we have had enough data and enough computation to make those technologies work.

What happens to advertisers when you allow your AI to purchase products and services on your behalf?

If you’re an ambitious entrepreneur interested in AI, there’s never been a better time to get involved.

We are unable to process all the data entering through our senses. Because of that, our brains take shortcuts called “heuristics” that unfortunately introduce a number of (sometimes dangerous) cognitive biases.

Seneca: “There is nothing wrong with changing a plan when the situation has changed.”

Huxley: “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”

NOTES FROM SEPTEMBER '21

September 29, 2021

• Our prime objective as a species is to create a nation that can enable coordination on a large enough scale so that we can begin to work collectively towards common goals.
• Not all nations are good at organizing people, and nations that are inefficient at scaling trust will ultimately succumb to ones that are better at that function. This is the natural march of evolution and progress.

September 24, 2021

Why the world is going crazy—and how to win back our minds

If you took all of life on Earth and you compressed it into one 24-hour day, anatomically modern man shows up at four seconds before midnight, cave paintings at one second before midnight. We’ve been playing at civilization for a fraction of a second.

Everything is going into exponential change, from education to quantum computing, to cryptocurrency, to transport, to macroeconomics, to geopolitics, to climate crisis, to everything. It’s breaking our brains. We’re overwhelmed, we’re collapsing in grief.

September 22, 2021

If you take a human being and upgrade them to like 10,000 IQ the outcome might not be what you want, because you’ve got a motivational system and an emotional system that basically evolved in prehuman animals. Whereas if you architect a system where rationality and empathy play a deeper role in the architecture then as its intelligence ramps way up we may find a more beneficial outcome.

• Preference falsification theory states people will broadly lie about their true preferences (thus keeping a public set of preference and a private set of preferences)
• You do not want to become too much like any particular group- being different is a positive, not a negative. But due to our preanimal programming we do not believe this to be the case.

September 21, 2021

The Merge

Unless we destroy ourselves first, superhuman AI is going to happen, genetic enhancement is going to happen, and brain-machine interfaces are going to happen.

It is a failure of human imagination and human arrogance to assume that we will never build things smarter than ourselves.

We will be the first species ever to design our own descendants.

My guess is that we can either be the biological bootloader for digital intelligence and then fade into an evolutionary tree branch, or we can figure out what a successful merge looks like.

How to make friends over the internet

• 90% of meeting people is reaching out, so, unless you’re already very well-known, most of your network building will consist of actively initiating conversations.
• Those with the most number of friends are those who spend the most time reaching out to people and maintaining relationships.
• Any platform that allows you to send private messages to people is a platform where you can make friends.

September 20, 2021

• The internet has made it easy to distribute creative work to millions of people, but no one has figured out how to help creatives make a sustainable living.

September 14, 2021

Man’s progress is not measured by the reaches of his science but by the limits of his superstition. The truth is known. But the truth is unpopular.

September 13, 2021

How to Raise Money for your DeFi Startup

Build slowly and learn what the market wants/needs. Some of Ethereum’s biggest success stories start off as side projects the founders built slowly.

Spend a few months on the idea and iterate through it by having as many conversations as possible with people to better understand the problem space.

My high level recommendation is to be as crypto native as you possibly can. The more ties you make into meatspace the slower you’ll move and spend time on problems that aren’t crucial to your product and customers.

• Also ask them what their LPs let them do with the money (can they yield farm) and will they provide liquidity for your network? Those that do are much more value add since they’ll use your product and risk large sums of capital in your network.

Building up your circle of founder friends is something any entrepreneur should do, just make sure they’re roughly at the same stage so you can provide useful advice to each other.

Questions to Ask

• “given what we’re doing, what are the primary challenges you see and how can we think about them better”,
• “what sort of hiring pipelines have you built up to help portfolio companies”
• Asking how they get their money, what they’ve promised their investors and what their objectives are are important. Not all money is created equal and you want to know what kind you’re dealing with.

September 10, 2021

Work to become, not to acquire.

If creating new things required an abundance of money, billionaires would have a monopoly on creating new things. But most breakthroughs are made by those who lack capital. Being poor can be advantage in innovation.

September 9, 2021

• Humans want to belong to groups, we find self-worth, purpose, identity with such attachments.

• It is a common misunderstanding that the only type of intelligence is human intelligence. We tend to measure intelligence by how close it is to ours.

• A lot of bad ideas are necessary for one great idea.
  • it is about output, how much are you producing?

September 8, 2021

The Universe will pay you back what you give it.

• Why do we work so much? In the West we have been conditioned to think that we are not enough (ref. Edward Bernays) we must pursue objects external from us to feel validated.

• Life in the world is a gift - our natural state is gratitude. We did not create the sun, we did not earn our mother taking care of us when we were younger, we did not earn the ability of plants to grow. Our purpose as lifeforms is to serve and contribute.

• If you want to do big things, it is going to require big sacrifices.
  • You don’t change the world on 40 hours a week.

NOTES FROM AUGUST '21

August 26, 2021

This tweet could not be embedded. View it on Twitter instead.

A. Believe in change Most fortunes across history were built from change. These days we confuse technology with change, but if you look at entrepreneurs and billionaires like Ford, Soros, Rothschild and Schwarzmann, they aren’t tech investors, they are change investors.

Each one of them saw, understood and invested in change. All of them understood changes in their economies, industries and adapted. That’s how they made their money. You don’t need to be able to code to be a billionaire today anymore than you needed to do it a century ago.

B. Play for the big bucks They think much bigger, and act bolder. They are thinking in multiples rather than %. While us mortals focus on the 20%, they focus on and find the 10x. One way they get to play for a multiple is that they think yrs in advance.

One question, I try to ask myself weekly is: How can I 10x my life ? Then: what are the skills and people I need to know to 10x my life.

C. Build an Edge Every single ultra-rich person I have met understands their edge, what they are good at, and then what they aren’t good at, and therefore should pay to get done. They are very effective at this, to the point that they can extract the greatest economies of scale.

They focus their energy on where they have the greatest competitive advantage and then leave the rest for someone else to do. What are the 20% of activities that are responsible for 80% of the positive outcomes? Once they have found their edge they make sure to exploit it.

You’ll see them double and triple down on their most valuable activities, and keep investing in them and ignore everything where they don’t have an edge. Make sure to find your edge and invest in it, and say “NO” to everything else.

D. Network Their best opportunities come from their network. They know they aren’t going to come up with opportunities on their own. They listen to the experts in their network, ask questions, find more experts and keep digging until they can unearth the best opportunities.

They aren’t satisfied with the first answer they get or the first opportunity they come across. They know that the best ideas and opportunities need to be discovered.

E. Live in the Present They aren’t trapped in the past and what they did last yr. They are pragmatic and practical. They focus on the reality of where they stand now and don’t do things just because they have done them for the last decade or year. They go where others aren’t.

Henry Ford wasn’t inventing the next horse drawn carriage. Jeff Bezos wasn’t starting the next hedge fund when he left D.E. Shaw. Based on what I know today, what is the best use of my time, and what am I doing now that doesn’t need to be done?

August 24, 2021

• To bootstrap a new blockchain or app, you need to convince people that other people will also use that blockchain or app. The best blockchain technology in the world is useless without people building on top of it.
• The name of the game is to convince as many people as possible to build on your protocol.
• Then, it’s about those developers attracting and properly incentivizing users.

August 23, 2021

What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.

The greatest rewards come from working on something that nobody has a name for. If you possibly can, work where there are no words for what you do.

August 22, 2021

Productivity is for robots, creativity is for humans.

August 20, 2021

• GDP is a poor way to account for everything in a society. Companies are valued based on future cash flows. We should think of countries in the same way. If you’re innovating and building and have a lot of assets as a country - perhaps it’s okay to be printing money to fund new projects.

• The best entrepreneurs are paranoid - FOMO. The world moves very quickly.

NOTES FROM JULY '21

July 22, 2021

If you could achieve any long term goal you wanted, what would you be working on?

July 12, 2021

Reporting good news can make a person look bad. If we look anxious to reveal good news, our listeners assume that we don’t come by good news very often. Or perhaps our listeners believe we consider the good news a stroke of marvelous luck. Did Michael Jordan need to tell his friends every time he scored thirty points in a game?

• If someone hears our good news through the grapevine, they’re far more likely to be impressed. Clearly we must have so much good news that we don’t even bother sharing it.

NOTES FROM JUNE '21

June 30, 2021

Q: what if people outside of the early adopter set just don’t really care about decentralization?

June 28, 2021

• The most important civilization-saving missions are not in the realms of material technology and “innovation”, or markets and finance, but in the areas of social technology: new (and better) patterns of society conducive to production, law, governance, and moral order.

June 27, 2021

• Ancient Athens had 300,000 residents. Renaissance Florence had 80,000. Countless forgotten cities were far larger. The greatness of a city has little to do with its population, and everything to do with its populace.

June 20, 2021

2020 was the first year of the 21st century. We have been talking about telecommuting and WFH since the 90s, now we have had a wake up call. - Peter Thiel

June 19, 2021

In life, and in business, the person with the fewest number of blind spots wins. The quality of your thinking depends on the mental models in your head.

June 9, 2021

• Over time, the rewards for most creative work will become governed by power laws. A smaller group of winners will collect a higher share of the rewards. And over time, algorithms will play a bigger role in determining those winners, shifting power away from old power brokers and hitmakers.

• In such a scenario, every career becomes a pyramid scheme. If you can attract enough people to buy your tokens, and they can attract enough people to buy even more tokens, the whole enterprise will continue to increase in value. This increase will happen regardless of how much revenue you can generate from doing your actual job. And it will continue until you run out of stories to tell, or until you run out of people to tell stories to.

June 8, 2021

Your Life is Driven by Network Effects

We all think we make these choices ourselves. It certainly feels like we’re in full control. But it turns out that our choices — both in our startups and in our lives — are more constrained than we think.

The unseen hand in them all is the networks that surround us and the powerful math they exert on us.

• Optimize your network to be around ambitious people pursuing the types of projects that you want to be involved in.
• Dunbar’s Law - meant to be in groups of 150
• Humans are nodes on a network - nodes exchange more information when in proximity with one another.

Most things that happen in society are multi-turn and repetitive. These are called preferential attachment processes which happen when something (such as money, status, fame, punishment) is distributed based on how much is already possessed. Most social processes are preferential attachment. For example, if two Founders each tweet out the same great idea at the same time, the one with more status will be given credit for the idea.

What’s fascinating is that this is because of math. Nodes that are “ahead” get picked more often by the other nodes because they are ahead and thus offer the nodes choosing them less friction and more benefit. When this gets repeated many times, it systematically directs more resources to the nodes that already have relatively more.

June 7, 2021

The AI revolution will generate enough wealth for everyone to have what they need, if we as a society manage it responsibly.

The best way to increase societal wealth is to decrease the cost of goods.

June 4, 2021

Write down everything that needs to be accomplished - get to the root. It is easier to look at it brick by brick vs. the whole wall - or you will never start as you’ll overwhelmed.

1. Break down the individual tasks into as much detail as possible by reverse engineering from the ultimate vision/goal/what you are looking to accomplish.
2. Next to each task, write a conservative time estimate in number of hours it will take to complete the task.
3. Now, you make a day by day plan to check each of the tasks off.
4. In my experience, actually writing down the facts of what needs to get done and how much time it will take is a much better way of tackling big projects because it brings clarity to where there was overwhelm.

June 3, 2021

David Lykken

The mind consists of genetically-determined hardware and experientially-determined software. The hardware components are not constructed by genes working either individually or additively but, rather, by groups of genes working sequentially and configurally. Each human mating produces at least some gene configurations that are unique, having never occurred previously. This is why, among other things, human genius often occurs uniquely in an otherwise undistinguished family line.

The quality of one’s intellectual productions is a function of the product of talent (e.g., intelligence) times mental energy. Although there are many and varied tests for assessing intelligence, psychologists have not as yet even attempted to construct a measure of individual differences in mental energy.

Myers’ Law of Self-Perception

Most people see themselves as better than average.

Nine in ten managers rate themselves as superior to their average peer. Nine in ten college professors rated themselves as superior to their average colleague. And six in ten high school seniors rate their “ability to get along with others” as in the top 10 percent. Most drivers–even most drivers who have been hospitalized after accidents–believe themselves more skilled than the average driver. “The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion, economic status or ethnic background,” observes Dave Barry, “is that deep down inside, we all believe that we are above average drivers.” Excess humility is an uncommon flaw.

When you have the beginnings of an idea about something, the worst thing to do is to consult “the literature” before you get started to work on it. You are sure to assimilate your potentially original idea to something that is already out there.

June 1, 2021

O’Donnell’s Law of History

There are no true stories.

Story-tellers are in the iron grip of readers’ expectations. Stories have beginnings, middles, ends, heroes, villains, clarity, resolution. Life has none of those things, so any story gets to be a story (especially if it’s a good story) by edging away from what really happened (which we don’t know in anywhere near enough detail anyway) towards what makes a good story. Historians exist to wrestle with the story temptation the way Laocoon wrestled with the snakes. But at the end of the day, to tell anybody anything, you’ll probably tell a story, so then be sure to follow:

Luther’s Law

Pecca fortiter.

Literally, “Sin bravely.” His idea was that you’re going to make a mess of things anyway, so you might as well do so boldly, confidently, with a little energy and imagination, rather than timidly, fearfully, half-heartedly.

John Allen Paulos professor of mathematics at Temple University

Paulos’ Law of Coincidence

People often note some unlikely conjunction of events and marvel at the coincidence. Could anything be more wonderfully improbable, they wonder. The answer is Yes. The most amazing coincidence of all would be the complete absence of coincidence.

NOTES FROM MAY '21

May 18, 2021

On News

• Quality content is at an all time low - news is not popular based on substance.
• The speed of delivery has increased - due to technology
• The cost to produce content has dropped significantly

• Incentives for creating quality content is misaligned. News orgs answer to the advertisers, and are therefore incentivized to create click-bait content that get the most clicks.

• Most of what we read online is pointless - it is not going to help you become a better person or make better decisions.

It is important to be very conscious of the information you are feeding your brain.

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. We are drowning in information and starving for wisdom.

Your focus is your reality. What we focus on we attract. Where focus goes, energy flows.

May 17, 2021

• It feels like we’re going through life in a state of “continuous partial attention.” We’re there but not really there. Unaware of where we place our attention. Unconscious about how we live.

May 16, 2021

• The key to getting what you want out of life is to identify how the world works and align yourself accordingly.

The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more. - Charlie Munger

If existing institutions knew what they were doing we would not have startups.

Success is not final, wealth is not final. These are mindsets, not destinations.

May 14, 2021

Just as eating cow-meat doesn’t turn you into a cow, studying philosophy doesn’t make you wiser.

May 12, 2021

• For the perishable, every additional day in its life translates into a shorter additional life expectancy. For the nonperishable, every additional day implies a longer life expectancy.

So the longer a technology lives, the longer it is expected to live

May 1, 2021

Quotes via 99 Additional Bits of Unsolicited Advice

• Bad things can happen fast, but almost all good things happen slowly.
• We are not bodies that temporarily have souls. We are souls that temporarily have bodies.
• The greatest rewards come from working on something that nobody has a name for. If you possibly can, work where there are no words for what you do.
• Train employees well enough they could get another job, but treat them well enough so they never want to.
• Being wise means having more questions than answers.
• When a child asks an endless string of “why?” questions, the smartest reply is, “I don’t know, what do you think?”
• Show me your calendar and I will tell you your priorities. Tell me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you where you’re going.
• Money is overrated. Truly new things rarely need an abundance of money. If that was so, billionaires would have a monopoly on inventing new things, and they don’t. Instead almost all breakthroughs are made by those who lack money, because they are forced to rely on their passion, persistence and ingenuity to figure out new ways. Being poor is an advantage in innovation.
• Finite games are played to win or lose. Infinite games are played to keep the game going. Seek out infinite games because they yield infinite rewards.

NOTES FROM APRIL '21

April 27, 2021

• By necessity, founders are rooted in the here and now required to launch a new startup BUT the great founders are also obsessed with what will endure 10, 20, 50 years from now.
• What Can You Do Now, That Will Pay Off In 20 Years Or More?

One of my goals is to listen to the technology, to listen to it, watching how people actually use the technology, versus what it was invented for. You can see how outlaws and kids use it. - Kevin Kelly

April 19, 2021

You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.

Decentralized governance and the ability to handle business differently is the ultimate game-changer. – Mark Cuban

New technology takes longer to adapt than most people think. Streaming was created in 1995 and 26 years later in 2021, people still watch traditional television.

April 16, 2021

Every time a notification, a phone call, or email distracts us, our neural networks get rewired. We become more distractible. Less able to focus. More addicted.

April 15, 2021

Moral preferences are purely subjective. And change with time, culture and lots of other things.

• Thinking that one of us, trivial collections of molecules that bump against each other, discovered an unshakable fundamental moral law of the universe seems naive.

April 14, 2021

• All you should be doing is talking to customers and building stuff.
• What’s the least code with the most payoff?
• Always think about adding one more zero to whatever you’re doing, but rarely think beyond that.

The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed. - William Gibson

If you’re raising capital, take the smartest money you can get (ideally past founders/CEOs).

April 12, 2021

The highest level performers are very conscious of their time and energy bank accounts. Eliminate the drama and focus intensely on your daily goals and objectives.

April 3, 2021

How to Start a New Country

1. Build a community in the cloud
2. Organize economy around remote work
3. Enforce laws with smart contracts
4. Practice in-person norms of civility
5. Simulate architecture in VR
6. Eventually, crowdfund territory - And materialize city into the real world

“Game engines will be the primary way people will have interfaces with the Internet.”

April 2, 2021

• You are being challenged for a reason. Without challenges or challengers we remain weak and incapable of accomplishing our destiny.
• Be very careful of what you attach your identity to - this is the ego at play. It wants to be attached to things (anything) to feel a sense of identity.

NOTES FROM MARCH '21

March 31, 2021

The Network State and Informational Politics

March 26, 2021

• Focus on talent density, lead by inspiration not fear.
• When you feel like you are ahead, push harder - never celebrate early.

After a victory, sharpen your sword.

March 25, 2021

Venture Capital

• Find investors who are able to make yes/no decisions and move on - don’t let yourself be strung along by firms.
• If you only have one point of contact at a firm, a deal is much less likely to happen.
• Successful fundraising is largely a matter of momentum: it starts out very difficult, and then as commitments accumulate you eventually reach a tipping point where new investors start pitching you for the opportunity to participate.

• Fundraising can be hugely distracting. Especially when it’s drawn out over a long time period, it can really take focus off of product development. Be conscious of this and don’t let it derail progress.

• A meta trend I see coming to fruition in the coming years is this - everyone will become exponential entrepreneurs and creators.

• Thesis: human beings create and technology shortens the amount of time it takes to create and turn an idea into reality. Endgame = instant materialization of ideas in the physical realm.

• As more people wake up to exponential tech, fewer people are going to sleep as traditional employees.

Your brain dreams up your whole universe.

March 22, 2021

Solve For Local Before You Can Go Global: If you want to change the world with your company, start by changing your local community. Then expand to your local city, then your country, and then when you have a global brand, you can work on tackling global issues.

“I don’t believe you should do what you’re passionate about; I believe you should be passionate about what you do. Waiting for passion to show up means waiting for fear to go away, and fear is never going to go away.”

March 15, 2021

The whole universe is a computer. A cosmic information processing machine.

The universe computes its own destiny.

The laws of physics are the algorithms.

History is the story of information becoming aware of itself. - James Gleick

February 18, 2021

Human civilization is based on our full intellectual record - and our record should be as advanced as possible if society is to be as advanced as possible.

February 12, 2021

• Mission should not change; ideas can change, process can change - and these two should change. You should always be seeking to build a more effective and efficient machine for achieving your mission.
  • This is your goal as CEO or leader of an organization - build a machine that outputs the objectives as effectively and efficiently as possible.

February 9, 2021

“Talk depletes us. Talking and doing fight for the same resources. Research shows that while goal visualization is important, after a certain point, our mind begins to confuse it with actual progress.” – Ryan Holiday

• Have a bias toward action — let’s see something happen now. You can break that big plan into small steps and take the first step right away. — Indira Gandhi

The superior man acts before he speaks and afterward speaks according to his action. - Confucius

• When we don’t act we create burdens for ourselves. Unaccomplished goals and ideas are like having too many programs running on your computer. It slows you down.
• Once you get rolling, momentum will keep you moving. Action creates more action. Momentum will help you to move ahead more quickly.
• Motion makes you feel like you’re getting things done. But really, you’re just preparing to get something done. And when preparation becomes a form of procrastination, you need to change something.

February 8, 2021

Ikigai

The convergence of four primary elements:

• What you love (your passion)
• What the world needs (your mission)
• What you are good at (your vocation)
• What you can get paid for (your profession)
• Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life Might Just Help You Live a More Fulfilling Life

February 7, 2021

• “The best Founders we see at NFX know when to rethink the assumptions that they and everybody else have made about an area, technology, or market. This unlocks breakthrough thinking in order to make the seemingly impossible, possible.” via Anti-Patterns of 10x Thinking

Questions

• What are potential systems to increase the spread of information? Better than the internet?
• How can we share information more efficiently? How can we increase the quality of information? What are all the forms of information? Has this evolved over time? Or have we just created the technological capacity to quantify this information?

February 7, 2021

Doubt what you know, be curious about what you don’t, and update your views based on new data.

February 4, 2021

• What is going to act as the base infrastructure and protocols for the metaverse?
  • we are already fragmenting the metaverse in web3.0.
  • is it going to start with gaming platforms?
  • what about the cryptocurrencies of each platform. Is there going to be a single accepted currency? A tool or protocol that will easily process the transaction of different currencies…
  • build an operating system? decentralized?

January 25, 2021

• Are you a producer or a consumer?
• Are you a consumer or an owner?

We’re drowning in information and starving for wisdom.

Life supports what supports more of life. - Tony Robbins

January 24, 2021

**Offense vs. Defense ** The phases one experiences can be perceived as offense and defense.

Defense being primarily reading, researching, and preparation. Time pondering and plotting your next moves. Looking at trends, market forces, emerging technologies and ideologies. Based on the information collection process, you begin to formulate your plans and projects.

To bring these projects to fruition and wide-scale adoption you must enter the offense phase. Offense can be described as building; this often takes the form of recruiting, team building, launching products, raising capital for your ventures, marketing/advertising and focusing on users.

January 15, 2021

• Decentralized Autonomous Organizations

January 14, 2021

James Altucher Brainstorm Excercises in Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss

• 10 ridiculous things I would invent
• 10 books I can write
• 10 people I can send ideas to
• 10 industries where I can remove the middleman
• 10 things I disagree with that everyone else assumes is religion (college, home ownership, voting, doctors)
• 10 people I want to be friends with
• 10 things I learned today/yesterday
• 10 ways I can save time

January 10, 2021

“Lasting peace and harmony inherently requires differentiation. A stable society is a differentiated one.”

• Be aware of the self-serving bias: We tend to attribute good things to our own skill, and we tend to attribute bad things that happen to us to luck

January 3, 2021

• Any product that has a social component baked in has fundamental advantages over competing non-social products: better growth loops, better engagement, better retention, better defensibility.
• These advantages accumulate over time.
• Social+ Businesses

January 1, 2021

Thoughts on Time + Energy Investment

• Most spend high amounts of time on things where input is low energy.
• 80/20 - 80% of tasks we invest 20% of our energy (low energy); 20% of tasks take 80% of our energy
• The goal is to align high levels of energy with your most important tasks.

December 31, 2020

• During this time of year, I find it important to revist objectives, goals, and what you are investing your time into.

Some Questions for Goal Setting

• What are my values?
• What are my 12 month goals?
• How can I accomplish these 12 month goals in 3 months?
• Am I being ambitious enough?
• Too ambitious?
• What should I be investing my time into, given these goals?
• What should my routine look like?
  • do your actions match your goals?
• What should I stop doing?
  • what podcasts, reading, escapism, low-value tasks, etc.
• How can I optimize accomplishing these goals?
  • location, routine, surroundings, etc.
  • what are all of the options available?

Habits of World-Class Performers

• A clear mission/vision
• Exercise
• Outsource low-value tasks
• Say ‘no’ often
• Clear daily habits
• Deep work
• Meditation/Journal
• Read often
• Relentless learning
• Conversations with intelligent, high-level individuals

December 18, 2020

• It is worth the bet to get onto new platforms early, build a biz on top of new platforms.

December 15, 2020

• equity is more expensive than debt
  • most governments allow interest on debt to be written off on taxes
• tech companies are trading at 24x revenue
• Roblox and affirm delayed IPOs, they’ll likely attempt to raise a lot more money.

Emerging technologies

• Quantum computing, battery chemistry/tech, neural interfaces, autonomy
• Drones, internet of things, wearable, robotics, esports, 3D printing, VR
• Machine learning, Crypto, 5G
• AR glasses

There’s an old saying that the first fifty years of the car industry were about creating car companies and working out what cars should look like, and the second fifty years were about what happened once everyone had a car - they were about McDonalds and Walmart, suburbs and the remaking of the world around the car, for good and of course bad. The innovation in cars became everything around the car. One could suggest the same today about smartphones - now the innovation comes from everything else that happens around them.

• More reading

• FDA approves genetically engineered pigs
  • The pigs, developed by medical company Revivicor, could be used in the production of drugs, to provide organs and tissues for transplants, and to produce meat that’s safe to eat for people with meat allergies.
  • The pigs are called GalSafe pigs
  • they lack a molecule called alpha-gal sugar, which can trigger allergic reactions

December 14, 2020

Notes on blockchain

• As tokenised virtual assets increase in value, they can be traded, insured, and securitised. In the right circumstances, users might also be able to obtain loans from their NFTs and to lease their NFTs if they don’t use them often. And if NFTs and other virtual assets are in high demand, users would want to buy and sell them on trusted platforms for other virtual assets, cryptocurrencies, or real money.
• By the same logic, the NFT market has the potential to skyrocket if a small number of blockchain-based apps can reach mainstream status and have a potential knock-on effect for other NFT assets.

• By creating an open developer platform, in combination with a free market-based economic system and a high number of users, Decentraland can provide substantial incomes to investors and potentially entrepreneurs within the platform, first through real estate transactions, and subsequently through virtual goods.

• OpenSea = a marketplace for virtual goods, they do millions in transaction volume

December 13, 2020

Blockchain is Silicon Valley raising the pirate flag again and doing something interesting and slightly dangerous and subversive. - Chris Dixon

December 12, 2020

Notes via Barack Obama Medium article

• the world rarely consists of black and white, devleop mental models to think about the world and make decisons.
• develop a process for making decision
  • listen to close advisors and your team
  • ask for the feedback of people smarter and more knowledgable than you are
  • build your dark net. Reid Hoffman reference
  • develop a group of advisors who think differently
  • it is not diversity when everyone looks different but thinks the same.
  • have at least one contrarian
• take time to recharge and decompress

Notes & Quotes via Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us

• And even if we scatter to the stars, isn’t it likely that we may take our problems with us or find, later, that they have followed us? The fate of our species on Earth and our fate in the galaxy seem inextricably linked.
• Aristotle opened his Metaphysics with the simple statement: “All men by nature desire to know.”
• If open access to and unlimited development of knowledge henceforth puts us all in clear danger of extinction, then common sense demands that we reexamine even these basic, long-held beliefs.
• It is this further danger that we now fully face—the consequences of our truth-seeking. The truth that science seeks can certainly be considered a dangerous substitute for God if it is likely to lead to our extinction.

• Thoreau also said that we will be “rich in proportion to the number of things which we can afford to let alone.” We each seek to be happy, but it would seem worthwhile to question whether we need to take such a high risk of total destruction to gain yet more knowledge and yet more things; common sense says that there is a limit to our material needs—and that certain knowledge is too dangerous and is best forgone.

• What is terraforming? Process of modifying the atmosphere, temperature, ecology, etc of a planet or moon to be similar to the earth, to make it inhabitable.

Knowledge

• think about knowledge and memory as a semantic tree or the internet
  • you have a web of knowledge, links, an intranet.
  • continue to link pages together and you will better be able to recall information

December 10, 2020

Notes & Quotes via Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us

• First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary.
• As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones.
• Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.
• Moravec’s view is that the robots will eventually succeed us — that humans clearly face extinction.
• Roddenberry’s vision of the centuries to come was one with strong moral values, embodied in codes like the Prime Directive: to not interfere in the development of less technologically advanced civilizations.
• In The Agony and the Ecstasy, Irving Stone’s biographical novel of Michelangelo, Stone described vividly how Michelangelo released the statues from the stone, “breaking the marble spell,” carving from the images in his mind. In my most ecstatic moments, the software in the computer emerged in the same way. Once I had imagined it in my mind I felt that it was already there in the machine, waiting to be released. Staying up all night seemed a small price to pay to free it—to give the ideas concrete form.
• Failing to understand the consequences of our inventions while we are in the rapture of discovery and innovation seems to be a common fault of scientists and technologists.
• The dream of robotics is, first, that intelligent machines can do our work for us, allowing us lives of leisure, restoring us to Eden.
• In his history of such ideas, Darwin Among the Machines, George Dyson warns: “In the game of life and evolution there are three players at the table: human beings, nature, and machines. I am firmly on the side of nature. But nature, I suspect, is on the side of the machines.” As we have seen, Moravec agrees, believing we may well not survive the encounter with the superior robot species.

December 9, 2020

• One of management guru Peter Drucker’s most famous lines is “what gets measured gets managed.”

December 8, 2020

The Smartest Generation

• We have the ability to become more intelligent than any generation of humans that has come before us.
  • simply because of the access to general knowledge and specialized knowledge at scale we have at our fingertips.
  • we can access the ideas, theories, and thoughts of the best minds living today at the click of a button.
  • we can access college courses, podcasts, YouTube tutorials, all of this was not available even just a few years ago.

Topics to research

• cryptography
• DAO’s
• smart contracts
• blockchain

December 7, 2020

• Via Ben Greenfield blog
• Daniel Schmachtenberger describes how many “smart drugs” work by artificially increasing one chemical in the brain by overriding its natural function. Problem is, this can cause depletion or neglect of other things, causing imbalances and negative consequences like dependency or a post-smart drug “crash.”
• Recent research suggests that the notion of a single intelligence quotient vastly oversimplifies intelligence, which is in fact composed of various aspects of what is called “multiple intelligences,” such as verbal intelligence, problem-solving, spatial reasoning, etc.
• This is all based on a theory proposed by Howard Gardner which states that intelligence is not unified, but rather multiple, consisting of a set of relatively independent intelligences including linguistic intelligence, mathematical intelligence, spatial intelligence, musical intelligence, kinesthetic intelligence, interpersonal intelligence, intrapersonal intelligence, naturalist intelligence, and even based on more recent research, the addition of spiritual intelligence and emotional intelligence.

December 6, 2020

On Hiring

• “So the way to compete against the giants is not with money. Google will outbid you. They have oil derrick that spits out $30bn in search revenue every year. To win, you need to tell a story about cogs. At Google, you’re a cog. Whereas with me, you’re an instrumental piece of this great thing that we’ll build together. Articulate the vision. Don’t even try to pay well. Meet people’s cash flow needs. Pay them so they can cover their rent and go out every once in awhile. It’s not about cash. It’s about breaking through the wall of cynicism. It’s about making 1% of this new thing way more exciting than a couple hundred grand and a cubicle at Google.”

December 4, 2020

• A government that collects money from all its citizens and businesses each year has never built a system to distribute money to us when it’s needed most.

If the work you’re doing isn’t either leading to something being built or taking care of people directly, we’ve failed you, and we need to get you into a position, an occupation, a career where you can contribute to building. There are always outstanding people in even the most broken systems — we need to get all the talent we can on the biggest problems we have, and on building the answers to those problems.

November 30, 2020

• In the beginning, great technologies are complicated and attractive to a small group of people, typically the ‘rebels’ of society.
  • think personal computers or the internet
  • what is this now? blockchain, crypto, ideas of decentralization
  • this started in the 1990s

Currency is always being recycled

• think corporations, they invest and spend money, consumers take the money and spend it and it goes right back to the same corporations
• via investments, employees, etc.

November 28, 2020

• It can be very important to be paranoid - the lack of paranoia and foresight to consider 2nd and 3rd order consequences is what has led to the current climate in politics and economics.

• I am concerned about a small number of corporations owning all of the algorithms that will result in an even larger accumulation of capital by a small number of people, and the algorithms will have inherent biases and will control even more of our lives than today.

• A possible answer is to create a more distributed world, help more people accumulate capital, I do like the idea of everyone working for the common good but this is not inherent to human nature - this is why capitalism has worked to increase standard of living via technology and innovation.

November 26, 2020

Consciousness

• This thing we call consciousness seems to me to be so fragile. In that, we can sit quietly and clear our minds for 30 minutes via meditation or ingest small amounts of a substance and our identity, worldview, and perceptions can be drastically altered.
• So much so, we expand our identity to become almost a different person - in that the way we speak and observe the events around us for a period of time changes.

• Making the hypothesis, most notably to my knowledge by Buckmister Fuller, that at some point in the future we’ll be able to transfer ourselves/consiousness to far away places. This seems on-base to me if consciouness is this fragile. Just a bunch of atoms.

• An observation I have been pondering recently is how signigicant the impact of ideas and theories one has at my current stage of 18-25 years old, reflects and predicts the time and energy investment of that person in the following decades of their life.
• On the contrary, it is unfortunate many people do not continue to follow these things. (this is due to a number of reasons)
• But, I think back to Elon’s list of the 5 biggest areas he thinks will have the most impact on the future of humanity and he has been dedicating his life to these ideas ever since.
  • He first postulated on these ideas when he was around 20, in college.

• Personally, I am very interested in the future of work/education, AI, biotechnology, blockchain/distributed systems, metaverse/virtual worlds, GameB, startups, and technology - it is likely (and I am hopeful) the following decades of my life will consist of these things - via working in startups/solving problems that correlate to these areas.

• Technology and startups feel like they’re moving so fast, but any important companies or products take 10+ years to build.
  • all big things start small, all good things take time.
  • everything important takes long term thinking
• I like to frame ideas in questions.
• I like to look for solutions/ideas by asking questions
• Question perceived truths and paradigms
  • if biz owners could use 1 algorithm to run their entire business, would they?
  • Is the current workplace/employment model going to last 5 more years? What does the new model look like? Why will it or won’t it last? (what emerging technologies and trends would shape a shift?)
  • What is the best way to solve these questions?
  • What does the workforce of tomorrow look like?

November 25, 2020

Nixon ended the gold standard in 1971 - our dollar is not backed by anything.

• These monetary dislocations have impacted several areas of our society. Consumer health relies on heavily inflated asset prices, not the health of the real economy. With price stability dissipating, rampant inflation has lifted consumer prices, lowering our standard of living. As we lose 2% of our purchasing power leaving our money in the bank, we must throw our savings into an overvalued stock market fueled by speculation and greed — not a booming economy that we desperately need. Since we have to work 300% harder to buy the same stock, we’re always busy, tired, and broke. We take shortcuts, bolstering the disastrous American diet. Our lust for fast food has created a simultaneous mental health and obesity crisis.
• The rise of blockchain technology has revolutionized how we think about money in the 21st-century. It’s the first time in history where money can be transferred peer to peer without passing through a central authority, the first decentralized network to enable the financially savvy, from hardcore Cypherpunks to GenZ libertarians, to break free from the tyrannical forces of the modern financial system.

November 23, 2020

Lessons

• Surround yourself with smarter, more mature minds. The smartest people you can find.
• Surround yourself with people who challenge you and teach you.
• Entrepreneurs must be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.
• As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments.

Breakthrough in aging

• Tel Aviv University found a form of oxygen therapy - hyperbaric oxygen chamber - can be used to reverse two key indicators of biologicla aging: telomere length and senescent cells.
• what are telomeres? Telomeres are the protective caps on the end of chromosomes
• what are senescent cells? Cells that are older and worn out

There’s people who change the world, and then there’s people who criticize them.

• Don’t have an issue with valid criticism.

November 20, 2020

• As with many things in life, we are restricted by knowledge and awareness.
• I ask, what are the bottlenecks that exist preventing the transition to accelerated growth and innovation?

November 19, 2020

Be in a hurry to learn, not in a hurry to get validation. — Evan Williams

• All we have in this life is time and energy, it is up to us to choose how we would like to invest each of these.

November 16, 2020

• Everybody has a worldview, a unique way of looking at the world. We see opportunities based on this worldview. Where you see nothing, someone else may see an amazing opportunity.
• I like to think of it as a light specturm - you see a vertical slice of the spectrum - and you will live your life based on that perspective, where someone else sees a different world because they have a different slice.
• To me, it’s exciting to think about the entire spectrum - all of the opportunities, trends, ideas, etc that exist - and how you only see a fraction of them with your current perspective.
• and realize that you can begin to explore, be curious, and expand that perspective to increase the number of opportunities you see.
• The world is full of opportunities.
• You can increase your perspective to optimize.

November 11, 2020

Thoughts

• We currently live in a Game A system - in this system you are objectively ‘rewarded’ for pursuing domination, wealth, control, power, market share (insert any Game A vector)
• Also, competition and rivalry are innate to human biology - there is no reason to feel guilty for pursuing wealth and success.
• Let the spirtual guide the individual
• So much fear and doubt - resulting in procrastination - exists in my life because I am a proponent of decentralization and power to the people so I want to work on projects which insert these ideas and types of ventures at a societal scale
• But, as I am learning, it is difficult in today’s world to reach a critical mass of people with these ideas.
• So, is the interim answer to pursue Game A projects in the near term - accumulate capital and power i.e. career/identity capital (connections, reputation, skills) and then use this platform/vehicle to pursue projects I am passionate about?
• At what cost?

Work

• The concept of work is SO fascinating to me
• we spend a third or more of our lives on something whether we like it or not, most people hate it, or tolerate it at best, and this is all in the name of what?
• perpetuating a system that we are slaves to - to accomplish things we have been programmed to ‘want to’ accomplish
• I think it unlocks the keys to the future/universe - bc/ if we restructure the work model we unlock so much time
• time to then invest into new ideas, technologies, the sciences, etc.
• all stems back to one of my core axioms that the ultimate product of the human mind is to create and build - so what is preventing humanity from doing more of this? what do we spend our time doing?
• we need to reform the work model - this will have political, economic, and social implications

November 10, 2020

• “Busyness” Isn’t a Badge of Honor, it’s a Sign of Weakness
• How to Avoid the Busy Trap (and Other Misuses of Your Time)

  Being busy is a form of mental laziness. -Tim Ferriss

• For world-class performers, busyness and stress are the enemy. They’re a sign you’re off-track. It means you’ve been lazy and undisciplined, and have let too many unimportant tasks take you away from what really matters.

“Busyness and exhaustion should be your enemy. If you’re chronically stressed and up late working, you’re doing something wrong. Do less. But do what you do with complete, hard focus. Then when you’re done be done, and go enjoy the rest of your day.”

November 9, 2020

Notes from Peter Thiel’s Religion

• Trying to outcompete rivals leads to mediocre performance, so companies should avoid competition and seek to create value instead of beating rivals.
• The Hindu Vedas teach that the world spins along an endless cycle: creation, rise, decline, destruction, and rebirth. Even if the cycle repeats for millions of years, it will continue to spin forever.
  • Nisbet argues that ancient people saw time as cyclical, and no idea has been more important to Western Civilization than the idea of progress.
  • Christian theology sees time as linear. It moves away from the Garden of Eden, and toward a day of judgement, justice, and the establishment of a divine, peace-filled kingdom.
• To Peter Thiel, short-term thinking is the essence of sin. Like The Bible, he advises us to make plans and sacrifice the present for the future. Greatness is like chess. Chess player José Raúl Capablanca said: “To begin you must study the end. You don’t want to be the first to act, you want to be the last man standing.”

“The shortest distance between two points is reliably a straight line. If your dreams are apparent to you, pursue them. Creating optionality and buying lottery tickets are not weigh stations on the road to pursuing your dreamy outcomes. They are dangerous diversions that will change you.” “When we pursue optionality, we avoid bold decisions. Like anything meaningful, venturing into the unknown is an act of faith. It demands responsibility. You‘ll have to take a stand, trust your decision, and ignore the taunts of outside dissent. But a life without conviction is a life controlled by the futile winds of fashion. Or worse, the hollow echoes of the crowd.”

• All objects are desirable when they belong to your neighbor. Society will push you towards competition, but you shouldn’t compete with your peers or depend on them for guidance.

• Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman (1918–1988) - expert for remembering what he learned

  • consumption does not equal learning - our brains filter and forget most of what we consume - or we wouldn’t be able to operate in the world.
  • A person who reads without pausing to think and reflect won’t remember nor apply anything they read.
  • Articulate what you read, write down key points, ask questions, explain it to someone.

Truth is one, the wise call it by different names.

• Assume you are wrong - always seek the truth, listen to the bad news.
• It is very difficult to remain moral and ethical in a game theoretical world.
  • even if you want to do the right thing, and choose not to do something, you will be beaten in Game A terms by someone who is willing to do the things you are not.

November 8, 2020

• Come up with more ideas and theories
  • alternatives to current political, economic, and social structures
  • economic theory that doesn’t capitalize every thing and idea
  • poitical stucture where groups are in charge

November 3, 2020

Parkinson’s Law

• Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
  • A New Zealand firm tested a 4-day workweek and found that it actually boosted productivity, creativity, and job satisfaction.
  • In 2019, Microsoft Japan closed their offices every Friday, and saw a ~39% increase in YoY sales per employee.
  • A 23-month study in Sweden found that nurses who worked a 6-hour workday had higher productivity levels and lower absentee rates than those with a longer workday

The Streisand Effect: try to remove something from the internet publicly, more people will view it.

• “Williams James knew that every man is “ready to be savage in some cause.” The distinction, he said, between good people and bad people is “the choice of the cause.”” (89)
• “The essential trait of the successful man is not only perseverance but almost a perverse expectation of how difficult it is going to be. It is having redundancies on top of redundancies, so you can absorb the losses you eventually incur. One must not just steel one’s heart but also one’s spirit so that there is no such thing as an obstacle – just information. The earlier you spot and anticipate setbacks, the less demoralizing they will be. We want things to be easy. We want them to be clean. They rarely are.” (126)
• “And so it is that even setbacks can contain opportunities within them, if conspirators are patient and resourceful enough.” (129)
• “Machiavelli would say that a coup or a conspiracy can succeed only if the will of the people is on its side.” (241)
• “The world was not big enough for Alexander the Great, but a coffin was.” — Juvenal

November 2, 2020

When you unprogram yourself, you see that there’s other forms of currency. Like relationships are a more important currency than money itself.

Frameworks for Entrepreneurs

• Instead of making a to-do list, ask ‘what is the one highest impact thing I can do today?’
• Prioritize the rest of your tasks based on impact and urgency

• What is the most important thing you can be working on right now?

• Set clear measurable goals that are both ambitious and realistic
• Then set your anti-goals, the things you don’t want to happen along the way
• Run quick calculations on what it will take to succeed, then spring into action

Be impatient with action and patient with results.

• Always take action when you make a decision, get 1 hour of momentum
  • For instance, talk to a customer or send a cold email.
• Become a person that just does the work
• Amateurs focus on outcomes, professionals focus on the process and systems.
• Motivation is the result of process, not the cause.
• Example; the most successful entrepreneurs are not focused on ‘grinding’ or ‘hustling’ they are just doing what they do - they are focused on the process. They have built systems which become routine.

As a CEO, the ultimate goal is to build a strategic machine that successfully accomplishes the outcomes and objectives of the organization.

1. Recruiting
2. Culture
3. Growth
4. Operations
5. Customer, client, user conversations
6. Capital
7. Product

Fiscal Illusion

• Term coined by Amilcare Puviani in 1903
• fiscal illusion theorizes that the ruling class intentionally misleads the public by exaggerating the benefits of public services and obscuring the total tax burden.
• theory was developed and popularized by economist James Buchanan in the 1960s as a way to better understand tax policies and outcomes.

For prioritizing projects

1. Is this task still important, or has the situation changed? Often we commit to tasks or projects that are important at the time, but become less important as situations evolve.
2. Am I really the only person who can do this? Many top performers think that doing something on their own is easier than teaching someone else how to do it. Trust your colleagues, and give them the chance to surprise you. Ask ‘WHO’ not ‘HOW’
3. Is this the most important thing right now? Or am I using it to avoid something else? Deep down, you know when you’re doing this.
4. If this was the only thing I completed today, would I be satisfied with my day’s work? Part of avoiding burnout is focusing on work that will give us a sense of accomplishment.

November 1, 2020

Elon Musk

• Goal is to extend human consciousness as far as possible into the future so we can understand more about consciousness
• to do so, we cannot stay on earth
• Q: why can we not stay on earth
  • there will be a self-terminating event or natural event that ends human life in future
  • Elon’s answer is to become a multi-planetary species and build cities on Mars
  • Other potential solutions to this problem include taking a look at physics

Biocentrism

• Concepts such as time, space, and even causality are increasingly being demonstrated as meaningless.
• All of science is based on information passing through our consciousness but science hasn’t the foggiest idea what consciousness is, and it can’t explain the linkage between subatomic states and observation by conscious observers.
• Science describes life as a random occurrence in a dead universe but has no real understanding of how life began or why the universe appears to be exquisitely designed for the emergence of life.

Daniel Schmachtenberger

• Maximum polarization on both political sides
  • ea. side believes if the other wins it will be the end of the republic of America
  • we believe what feels true and what those around us choose to believe
• Since earliest large scale civilizations (Egypt and Sumeria) a very small percentage of these groups have been republics
  • most are monarchies/top down systems
  • corporations are run this way as well, hierarchies
• democracies and republics typically follow a period of cultural enlightenment
  • the people in the society are all educated and understand how the society works
  • this creates the ability to collectively sensemake.

October 23, 2020

Autonomous Driving

• industry will likely submit to natural geographic monoplies due to the amount of location-specific driving data necessary to launch and have a winning platform.
• first movers will be able to collect more data thus increasing the likliehood of having a better platform.

Estonia

• Estonia, a tiny Baltic nation with a population of only ~1.3 million people, is considered one of the most digitally advanced countries in the world.
• The world’s first e-government 🇪🇪
• The first country to launch a Digital Nomad Visa
• The first country to offer digital residency to non-Estonians living anywhere in world
• The first country to hold nationwide elections using electronic voting
• The first country that Ikea first entered digitally before establishing a physical presence

Genies

• Created an agency named Avatar Agency to represent the interests of celebrity digital doubles
• Avatars don’t get tired, can “travel” anywhere, and are available 24 hours a day.
• idea: As the next generation of consumers spend increasingly more of their lives in some form of a digital realm, 3D avatars will likely be everywhere.

• idea: Avatars are the next medium of expression, and 3D allows you to effectively operate and command virtual beings.

• Q: How big is the digital goods opportunity?
• I’m very bullish on digital goods, NFT’s, etc. Take Fortnite: Last year, it sold $1B in avatar skins.

October 21, 2020

• Very important to recognize the motives driving the actions of individuals and society
• Be willing to take a different path
  • reverse engineer your desires and motives to get at the root of what interests you and what you believe is important for the future of humanity.
  • typically, we have a dozen or more motives driving our actions, we are personally only aware of half of them, and we only publicly share 2-3 of them.
• Accept that the path for you will likely be dissimilar to the path pursued by the masses.
• The path being followed by the masses is likely not the right path for you.
• Success is at the intersection of your strenghts, a topic that excites you, and self belief.

• Compare yourself to where you were yesterday, not to where someone else is today.

• Question: do you build a personal brand, corporate brand, or neither?
  • I do not intend to build a personal brand at the moment.
  • However, I do believe it to be critical for certain discussions in society to take place.
  • If I see a lack of dialouge around a positive future, transparency, decentralization, etc. it may make sense to build a brand to share messages that I believe urgently need to be spread.

August 5, 2020

Colorado

Utah

July 18, 2020

Just arrived in Arizona.

June 26, 2020

Asheville, North Carolina

April 23, 2019

Creativity

• Take ideas from one place and apply them to another. Even if it’s totally different context. Study things that may seem totally unrelated to what you’re currently doing. 
• Creativity isn’t about creating something totally new. It’s about refashioning something that already exists. So - to be more creative read a lot of things in different contexts. 

It’s easier to be a critic than a creator. 

What valuable market is no one going after?

April 15, 2019

We’re simply the by-product of millions of years of evolution and adaption. A few millennia ago, we didn’t have the level of self-awareness and consciousness that we have today. The same stresses about life, work, finances, health, relationships. Life, as we know it today, has grown so complex. We’re worried about our careers, how we’re going to make money, if you’re going to go out to lunch today, that guy that just cut you off on the highway, checking Snapchat or Instagram - these things didn’t exist. We’re so overwhelmed. We’re just conditioned and accustomed to it. It’s business as usual. What if we returned to the simplicity? The planet functions on cycles, as do societies. What will it take, to get that simplicity back?

April 12, 2019

• It’s always going to feel like there is more to do.  

  Your dream dies tomorrow. 

• The planet has existed for 13.8 billion years. We have the opportunity to change what life has been like forever. The greatest change since the beginning of mankind. Creating something that has not existed in billions of years. 
• Focus on something bigger. Focus on changing the universe forever. All of humanity as we know it. 

April 5, 2019

Scaling Ideas

• Everything around us was once an idea in someone’s head, but they’re not the one who carries it out once the idea gets going.
• An idea, once implemented, takes on a life of its own.
• This is why it is so important to share your ideas with the world. Because of what happens once they are out in the world.

March 9, 2019

• Always work hard on something that is uncomfortably exciting.

March 1, 2019

If you feel lost, remember it gets better with time.

• We often are compelled to help those in a phase of their life that we personally went through and grew the most.
• Understand this, and learn what motivates individuals and what their ultimate purpose is - where they receive fulfillment.

February 27, 2019

The Digital Society Accelerator

• Help people launch businesses and document the process

Thought

• Lots of funding and talent flowing to e-learning/courses
• Q: Is there a possibility big companies (Netflix, Amazon) are making people lazier, to the point where they are not so interested in learning?
• There still exists a necessity to learn, acquire skills, etc. to apply to careers.

February 20, 2019

Idea

• “Content autopilot” - a software that creates your email list or social media content and sends it out to your subscribers and followers automatically.
• People do not pay you because you have likes and followers, they pay because you serve them and provide value.
• Q: What if social media didn’t exist?

February 19, 2019

• The mind is capable of absolutely anything. We can all be chosen ones, It is all in your mind.
• It is a process of rewiring your mind. You can rewire your mind to optimize for whatever you want.
• Material items are the byproduct of focus, work ethic, and mission.

February 4, 2019

• One of the hardest parts of running a business in knowing what to focus on – having clarity. Starting a new business or new endeavor can be overwhelming. 
• Lack of knowledge or resources typically isn’t the problem - it’s lack of understanding of where to start. There’s no shortage of information. 
• We’re drowning in information and starving for wisdom.

January 13, 2019

It would be a sin to not share what is inside of your head with the world. The creativty you share will help make the world a more productive and happier place. Don’t rob the world of your gifts.

January 9, 2019

• If you are driven by materialistic items and buying things i.e. working for a new watch or new car (selfish goals that benefit you and you alone) you will never be truly fulfilled, no matter how many things you accumulate. 
• Successful people are driven by fulfilling a mission and helping/serving. Something much bigger than themselves. Selfless goals that benefit humanity. (They may reward themselves with material items, but that is not their primary motivator, rather a by-product). 

Happiness comes from setting life goals for oneself and progressing and improving as a person as you work towards them and being able to celebrate those achievements with those closest to you. 

January 6, 2019

Questions

• How/why do you keep going?  (I’ve realized it’s not about the money, that’s what you hear all the time but when you’re broke that’s typically your primary motivator and focus. Once you have it, it’s not the goal anymore.) 
• Money does not make you happy, but not having money can make you unhappy.
• When were you happiest in life? Now or younger with less responsibilities? 

• Q: If you could not pass any money to your kids, what 3 strategies or tips would you give them? 

• Book on money Thou Shall Prosper: Ten Commandments for Making Money.

September 26, 2018

I wasn’t interested in making a lot of money but I was interested in making a lot of living. - Dale Carnegie

• Everyday is a new life to a wise man.
• Don’t expect anything from anyone.
• Focus on actionable goals. What can you do today? 

• Be contrarian. Do what others aren’t doing. 

• There should be fires - be worried if things are going perfectly. 
• God gives the toughest battles to the strongest of his people.

September 18, 2018

• People don’t value what they don’t fight for.

1. Love is everything 
2. The secret to living is giving (to give you have to keep growing) 3. When you’re suffering, you’re obsessing about yourself; how you have less or lost love or a material thing. All suffering is about self, so shift your view and start appreciating things outside yourself. 

Some people are praying for the things you take for granted. 

• Manage expectations 
• Do things right - and if you make a mistake learn from it. Experience comes from bad decisions. 
• Find a need and focus on it - solve peoples problems. 
• Travel often. Expand your perspective.

September 15, 2018

• Follow what excites you. 
• Everyone works when they’re motivated, it takes a true champion to work when they’re not motivated. 
• “Those who most need to do something are the least likely to do it. Those who are overweight are the least likely to exercise and eat healthily. Those who are poor are the least likely to learn about their finances and growing income.”
  • is this paradigm accurate?
  • if it is true, why?
• Progress = Happiness  
• The secret to living is giving.

September 11, 2018

• Core components of making a dream come true: having a clear vision, making actionable goals, leveraging and building networks, and getting out of your comfort zone to make that dream come true. 
• Take MASSIVE action. SPEED
• Risks aren’t that scary once you take them. 

  “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.”- Mark Twain

• We as humans fear the unknown and the “not yet.” Live simply and be happy in the moment.
• What we most fear doing is what we most need to do. Your success in life is determined by the number of uncomfortable situations you’re willing to put yourself into. Do one thing every day that you fear. 
• 99% of people in the world are convinced that they are incapable of achieving great things so they aim for mediocre. The level of competition is thus fiercest for realistic goals. It is easier to raise $1M than $100K, it is easier to pick up the one 10 in a bar than the five 8s. If you’re insecure, the rest of the world is too.

September 4, 2018

• While the ambition of changing the world and inspiring creators and everyday people to follow their dreams is an important driving force - I love a challenge. Life is one big challenge to me. I’m in a competition with myself every single day. I do it to prove to myself that I can. I have these businesses and this vision for each of them and what I want to be able to accomplish with them and the people we want to impact, but at the end of the day just love the process.
• My life is dedicated to teaching people how to create freedom and happiness and stability in their lives. Escape the status quo.

September 1, 2018

Few will act for the many, but many will act for the one.

March 25, 2018

• Your self worth doesn’t come from what you earn, it comes from what you create. Create something, don’t just own something. 
• Always be who you are. Never give up your identity to fit into society. 
• Stay crazy - it’s the crazy ones who change the world. 
• Intellectual curiosity - never stop learning. 
• Find happiness inside you. Be at peace with yourself. 
• Learn to navigate the gray area. Life is rarely black and white, it’s full of ‘gray area’ i.e. new and different situations. It’s ok to not know the answers, make the decision you think is best and feels right to you. This means you are growing.
• Stay close to anything that makes you glad you are alive. 

March 22, 2018

Advice and Habits 

• Do what others don’t - be contrarian, if you want a life other people don’t have you must do things other people don’t do. 
• FOCUS: make actionable goals and work on them everyday - don’t get involved in too many projects. Focus + master one and then diversify. 
• Relationships - build connections and meet people, surround yourself with people who support you and are working on projects you’re interested in. 
• Get out of your comfort zone. Life begins at the end of your comfort zone. Discomfort = growth.
• Follow what excites you, be willing to step out of your comfort zone and share those experiences with others. 
• Don’t focus too much on the past.

Don’t be a prisoner to things you can’t change

• Read books. All it takes is one book to transfrom your life.