Thinking

“It is not confidence that gives the courage to act, it’s the courage to act that gives confidence.”

“Your biggest blind spot relates to your biggest strength. You are just too proud of it to see the costs.”

“Priorities for the future. Scarce: Creativity, Confidence, Trust, Judgment, Agency, Taste, Humor, Attention, Meaning, Love, Clarity, Courage. Not scarce: Knowledge, Food, Information, Intelligence, Most Services, Most Physical goods.”

“As we'll get more bored, and war will decouple itself from the need for humans physically in the battlefield, humanity will start treating wars as videogames. They'll be more frequent and last longer.”

“Taste is not teachable”

“Need Nothing, Want Everything.”

“Compounding does not care about direction. It compounds you to heaven or to hell.”

“The frontier is the sublimation of the urge to go to war—redirected into “I’m leaving, I’m doing it my way.” Flight beats fight. Disagree and go West. If the frontier is closed, a pressure valve dies, the chance to grow the pie disappears, and you get trapped in a zero-sum game.”

“The description of what our life is, can be distilled as a century-long research on who we are, and what we want.”

“Information symmetry is a lie. Access to information is linked to willingness and ability to process it. Most value is in processing, not access. Information is power in the modern age only if you know what to make of it.”

“Alertness uses more energy than sleep. The 'Tardigrade strategy' is to relax/sleep to survive longer, but what we want is to expand alertness and real estate. The evolutionary path offers two roads: 'homo dormiens' (sleeping, conserving energy) or 'homo deus' (expanding capacity).”

“The ultimate test for a philosophy: if applied and lived by in the real world, it makes you (and those around you) less miserable in the long run. The less misery it produces, the more superior the lived philosophy (religion, culture, etc.) is.”

“I think therefore I am. I am free therefore I can. I create therefore I live. I connect therefore I matter. I explore therefore I grow”

“Growth is bursting the invisible bubbles around you. They never end. Pop them yourself—or wait for God, chance, or love to do it for you. Stagnation feels safe, but it’s the riskiest life of all.”

“Who mistakes truth for beauty is most of the times only wrong by a small margin, but who mistakes beauty for truth will suffer a life of delusion.”

“The Great Gatsby effect: believing that something beautiful must be good and truthful just because it’s beautiful”

“Friends hate when you change, they are married to their own fantasy of you and do not want to let it go, they hate to have unpredictable parts of their life they cannot control. But growing is changing. The rigid, the constant, the fixed is by definition and behavior fragile, weak; it will break eventually. Seeking to escape from the bubbles of identity you and others create, has the cost of a struggle to belong for a benefit of long-term survival and ability to gain from disorder.”

“Whenever men seek to remove scarcity and create abundance, history has been repeated. We like the game of scarcity because we like the solving of it. But every abundance revolution brought an obesity side effect, where the cure always focused on 3 key factors: search, selection, and compression.”

“Sacrifice is the difference between wishing and wanting.”

“A meaningful life is all about creating and connecting. This is what the Universe does over and over, matter/energy transformation and fields interactions. To live well you create something worth creating and you connect with others in doing so. It has to matter, it has to be great. The byproduct of this effort is legacy, as long as you leave it, you will have lived a great life.”

“The brain is a compression machine, trying to ignore most of the world, retaining what is relevant, and compressing the combinatorial complexity to a model that synthesizes multiple phenomena into the smallest number of rules possible. Compression is what AI does as well, it creates synthesis, which creates leverage, which gives us power over the Universe. Compression is the answer to evolution, a way to minimize energy used per unit of overall total entropy produced with the very end goal of decreasing our own internal local entropy.”

“Life is the pursuit of harvesting and repurposing energy to reduce entropy locally. We naturally try to get more efficient at using and reorganizing the energy available in the Universe to decrease our local entropy directly or not, at the expense of the overall entropy of the Universe. We reconvert and transform chaos into order to survive.”

“There will be 4 strategic layers that account for most of the value: energy factories, compute factories, robot factories, and the robot network. Prosperity (GDP) and power will depend on owning the highest number and the best quality robots”

“Authenticity costs, staying weird costs, close what drains your energy so you can use it to be you.”

“Avoid loops, if you are feeling you need to think, if you are thinking you need to feel.”

“Stay cringe long enough that everyone else becomes the cringe.”

“Paths get engraved droplet by droplet.”

“The state of becoming is the permanent state, there is no such state as being, whether you like it or not.”

“It took me a life to understand what the child version of myself has always known from the beginning.”

“I libri si scrivono per una o tutte di 3 ragioni: vanità, vendetta, verità.”

“I found hope the moment I realized how ignorant I am about the Universe.”

“The Authenticity Tax. Staying weird costs energy. Conforming costs energy. In one case you are authentic to yourself, in the other, you are authentic to what the world defines for you. You pay a price either way, but the conforming cost compounds in silence.”

“Example of Survivorship bias: Where are all the self-made billionaires who know how to relax? Answer is they never got to be billionaires. The self-made billionaires are there because they cannot relax, the others did not survive.”

“Communism will never die, because at the root of it there is an ancient and eternal force: envy. Before communism, envy would just drive tribes and nations to invade and conquer each other; communism is the rebranded, more repressed, modern "conquer" solution — a use of force without war. But the root is still the same: envy. As long as envy exists, some form of communism will too.”

“The biggest cultural difference between the US and the rest of the world, and the most self-defining feature of the country, is the relentless prioritization of the celebration of success and accomplishment instead of the highlighting of failures and mistakes. This core cultural belief and bias for hope, is what made America the biggest success story of mankind.”

“Consultants are the cuckolds of history. Doers, builders, explorers are the Gods of time, the Kings of space.”

“Physics teaches us to pay attention to what does not change — invariants. Why is the Colosseum still there? Or the Pyramids? The answer is the timeless desire of men to be great, to be Gods, to be important, to be remembered. The pursuit of legacy drives humans as much as, if not more, the pursuit of pleasure.”

“The most powerful and dangerous engine of history is a man with purpose and nothing to lose.”

“Comedy is the best tool we have to cope with tragedy in the short term. It is profound because it is built on top of tragedy, it transcends it. The best way we transcend tragedy long term is with creation and connection. I create therefore I live, I connect therefore I matter.”

“The concept of love follows a hype cycle. We think love is a perfect thing only because we just started defining it, but we will realize later on that bubbles burst. The cycle of editing the definition of love, is the cycle of growing up.”

“The domain of ethics is outside science. Don't let people tell you what is just, right or wrong, based on evidence used improperly and outside of the realm of science. Everyone has a say in ethics. Scientific truth-seeking is an educated process, but ethics is a belief.”