“My parents were working all the time, you know. We had sick relatives, so a lot of time and money went to them. My parents were focused on their challenges. I escaped into an inner world of fiction and reading, flying through books. That was my life for many, many years."

“I ended up in detention a lot. Detention was great, because I could read in peace. At the front of the school were rankings of students on the honor roll and in detention. I was always at the top of both."

“I’d never be the world’s greatest athlete, but I was in great physical condition by the end of high school and still have the build from years of squats and power cleans.

This was a useful experience for me because I learned to strengthen things that were previously weak areas. I brought an area up from a zero to a five out of ten just by grinding through it. It was also helpful for me to learn my limitations, to learn humility - unlike an academic topic, no matter how much I practiced lacrosse, I'd never be as good as someone who just had the instincts for it. Knowing what I was weak at allowed me to become strong.

Those are my character traits. 'Good at math,' 'disobedient,' 'grind when I have to,' and 'harshly assess my weaknesses.' This was a disadvantage early on, but it paid off later in life."

“Immutable money, infinite frontier, eternal life.”

"Technology's first law: whatever can be done over the internet will be done over the internet. (Though it might take a while for any given phenomenon to move online.) The statement might sound obvious, but the implications are far-reaching."

“Being too conservative on safety actually leads to systemic risk.”

“Risk aversion is reward aversion.”

“Technology is the driving force of history.”

“Science and technology are not the newspaper headlines of each day; politics and crime are - even if the former is where most of our attention should be."

"To be against technology is to be on the wrong side of history. You can't put the genie back in the bottle. You won't take away voices newly gained by billions."

“There is so much emerging tech to be excited about:

Bitcoin, Ethereum, and crypto in general; startup cities; reversing aging; brain-machine interfaces; transhumanism; robotics; digital nomadism; AI-assisted content creation, including AI video and decentralized video; virtual reality as a replacement for offices; augmented reality for productivity; telemedicine; personal genomics; CRISPR; health tracking; pure biomedicine as well as consumer biomedicine, which overlaps with quantified self. 3D printing in metals is a little more speculative, but I think that's getting better quietly. Pseudonymity aided by crypto and AI voices and faces is also emerging. I think we'll build an entire pseudonymous economy.

I have to remind myself that these things are still new to 99 percent of the population. The way to calibrate this is to ask the average person, 'What are the top five 3D printers?' or "What are the top five drones?'

Most people can't go into the full list. Maybe they can name one or two, but they can't tell you all the innovation that's happening, so it's still early in that space."

"Democrats need to learn experts aren't always right. Republicans need to learn experts aren't always wrong. Libertarians need to learn that a state can succeed. Progressives need to learn that a state can fail."

“Google founder and computer scientist Larry Page said any law more than fifty years old has to be re-examined. Any law written before the internet needs to get re-examined, or it's going to collapse.

Cryptocurrency is going to cause the same situation. Today we have ninety-year-old laws wielded by seventy-year-old people to prevent twenty-somethings from using twenty-first century technology."

"As states lose trust, their soft power declines. Less deference to the state means less voluntary compliance. Then, only hard power is left. The more states use hard power (coercion), the less soft power (persuasion) they have. Which means yet more use of hard power. It's a negative feedback loop."

"Decentralization doesn't mean an absence of leadership. It means a choice of many leaders. Crypto has allowed millions of people to partially exit their existing financial and political systems for large-scale experiments in self-governance and self-determination...even if not all of them have realized this yet. Decentralization restores the consent of the governed."

"Everything technology is doing means more upside, more downside. That's my one-liner for the future: more upside, more downside."

"The blockchain is the most important development in history since the advent of writing itself."

“Crypto is more than an asset class because it transforms the custody, trading, issuance, governance, and programmability of anything scarce. It's a new financial system, not just some ticker symbols."

“Because all value becomes digital, the entire economy will eventually become the cryptoeconomy.”

"The blockchain contains a cryptographically verifiable, replicated, unfalsifiable, and provably complete digital record of a system. It's the ultimate triumph of the technological truth view of history because there are now technical and financial incentives for passing down true facts, regardless of the sociopolitical advantages anyone might have for suppressing them."

“The last era was big data. The next era is verifiable data.”

“Crypto allows free markets without corporations.”

“Bitcoin at $100B is an industry. Bitcoin at $1T is a world power. Bitcoin at $10T would be the global government that so many have predicted, just in very different form. If Bitcoin can truly make it to $10T and stay there, it would constrain all the nations of the world."

“Even when the goods themselves can’t be digitized, the interfaces to them will be.”

“Being really good at software is going to keep earning compounding returns. That's important. I'm increasingly thinking of the physical world as a printout of digital wealth. Ask yourself: what can hitting a button do? In 2010, one button could print a PDF. In 2020, one button can deliver any item. In 2030, maybe one button can build anything."

"Aging may be a reversible condition, if it is caught early."

-David A. Sinclair

"Determining the type of evidence people accept is as important as knowing their incentives. Some take data, but many only accept popularity."

“Many people do not reason forward from logical premises, but backward from social consequences."

“Right now all of the data I'm describing are in separate places. The real estate data happens here, the medical data happens there, the price data happens way over there, the temperature data happens somewhere else. What I call the 'ledger of record' is essentially the integration of all these crypto oracles.

People put data on-chain because they will earn money for supplying it. People pay for the information because they can trade off of it or use it to provide services. Each individual oracle has an incentive to put its data online.

The data of all of those individual oracles go into the ledger of record, which gives us cryptographically verifiable facts about the world."

"Crypto oracles are more important than people think. Today it's global consensus on price history; tomorrow it's global consensus on history."

"Essentially all human behavior has a digital component now. Every purchase, every communication, every Uber ride, every keycard swipe, and every step with a Fitbit - all produce digital artifacts.

In theory, you could eventually download the public blockchain to replay the entire cryptographically verified history of a community. That's the future of public records. This is to our current paper-based system what paper records are to oral records."

"How to change the world:

1. Discover true facts.
2. Acquire sufficient distribution."

"I said I was a pragmatic idealogue, and this is why. I'm an idealogue about discovering true facts and pragmatic about acquiring sufficient distribution.

It's unusual for someone to consciously combine discovering true facts and executing to acquire sufficient distribution, via money or followers. You need to learn how to make media clips and movies, write, publish, direct, encapsulate, build relationships, and build political coalitions; you need to learn how to fight."

"I come into every discussion with the assumption that I need to justify everything from scratch. I take nothing for granted. I'm used to having people quibble with every word and every statement."

"Non-obvious truths are always unpopular in some way, because they are either very technical or very sacrilegious. Popular communication channels are biased toward telling you obvious things or false things - or both.

I worry about how to protect the ability to discover true facts. We need a huge variety of reproducible research. The pseudonymous economy is important because to discover and share true facts, people need protection from backlash or cancellation.

For whatever comes next, we need to have decentralized sources of truth. We need to have statistics that do not come from guys in their basements making things up. This is very important. We need to grow from 'who owns what Bitcoin' today to 'who said what things at what times' in the future.

We will know what facts were asserted, when, and by whom. That is a very powerful thing. With cryptography, we can start to displace media corporations as the source of truth."

"Media is like a shimmery mirror. Reality is on the far side, what you read is on the near side, and the media is controlling the middle."

"They call it the media because it mediates our interpretation of reality."

“Code is how machines know what to do. Media is how humans know what to do. If you ran a computer program over your media diet, you could figure out what concepts you are reinforcing through repetition. The program could show 'nutritional facts' on your media diet, like you see on your food.

A list of the top thousand keywords to pass through your screen would show you what you are loading into your brain. It might not necessarily be the concepts you want to learn."

“If you are what you eat, then you think what you see.”

“Stories that favor their agendas are magnified 100x, while those that conflict are diminished 100x or silenced entirely. The net distortion of reality could be 10,000x or more."

"The story behind the story is usually more interesting than the story. Why this journalist? These sources? This tone? That omission?"

"Perhaps this is the first step in enlightenment: when someone asks, 'Why don't you unconditionally trust media corporations?', you should ask how many articles they have personally independently replicated. Scientists know better than to blindly trust every paper."

"The term 'story' indicates the importance of narrative in modern media. It's so easy to repeat a narrative."

“If you aren’t running a corporation based on hereditary nepotism where the current guy running the show inherited the company from his father's father's father's father, you're more diverse and democratic than the owners of The New York Times Company.

You don't need to take lectures from them, anyone they employ, or anyone under their social influence. You have the moral authority to hire who you need to hire, within the confines of the law."

“The most constructive type of criticism is building an alternative. Yes, deconstruct the establishment. Use every verbal, technical, and monetary weapon we have. That is extremely important. But build something better. It is incumbent on us to build something better."

"We need a different form of media all about relevance and skill building, an optimal information diet. What skills do you actually want to build?"

"The media you consume changes the decisions you make. The technology you have changes the decisions you can make."

“On the other end of the spectrum is reading about some issue in a different country. Unless I have relatives, businesses, or operations there, it's not relevant to me on a daily basis.

People might say, 'You should be concerned about these things.' The problem is there are seven billion people on the planet. As a kind of toy experiment, think about this.

There are 86,400 seconds in a day. In 12 days, if you learn one of those seven billion people's names per second, you could learn the names of a million people. It would take you 120 days for 10 million people; 1,200 days for a hundred million people; and 12,000 days for a billion people.

Basically, it would take your whole life to even learn the names of the seven billion people on the planet. You cannot possibly care about them all equally. You have to triage or somehow prioritize. You have to rank-order what you're paying attention to."

"Algorithms and incentives could surface what is important and true rather than what is popular and profitable."

"On the other hand, optimizing for sentiment around a keyword like 'Mars' or 'Bitcoin' is something new. It's essentially pure activism.

An organization optimizing for creating sentiment around Mars or life extension would get very different results.

Sentiment was hard to measure until recently, thanks to Natural Language Processing (NLP), a computer's ability to understand human language.

Prioritizing changing sentiment instead of clicks means creators stay ethical and avoid the trap of creating clickbait. We can all found, fund, and patronize personal media corps committed to key ideas, such as faster drug testing, self-driving cars to cut traffic fatalities, or nuclear fusion to stop climate change.

Any thesis for positive change through technology can be turned into a media company. We can fund creators to produce amazing content on life extension, brain-machine interfaces, or colonizing Mars.

Clicks and prestige would be zero-sum metrics for a decentralized activist community, but sentiment is not. You're convincing the external world something is a good idea.

Fill up the sentiment bar, and we can go to Mars."

"As the Fourth Estate, the press sees its role as holding others in society accountable. As the Fifth Estate, social media is how society holds the press accountable. You can't have an 'informed citizenry' if citizens can't inform other citizens. The concept of social media as the Fifth Estate may be the most enduring part of Mark Zuckerberg's contribution."

“Own a media corporation or be owned by one.”

"Only the very richest people can afford to be cynical about the merits of technological progress. The billions of people who just got their first smartphones had their lives dramatically improved. They are too pragmatic to romanticize the past."

"People with scientific and technical backgrounds have not taken it upon themselves to write about technological progress as a duty. We need to take time out of our busy days to make the case, repeatedly and with high production values, that technological progress is the most important thing we can do for broad prosperity, economic growth, and for life itself.

We may not get life extension or the whole suite of transhumanist technologies (brain-machine interfaces, stem cells, CRISPR gene therapy, and more) unless you, personally, evangelize them online.

Not just with tweets, but with articles. Not just with articles, but with videos. Not just with videos, but with feature films. Not with just a few films, but with an entire Netflix original library's worth.

We need to create a parallel media ecosystem full of inspirational content for technological progressives - a lifetime's worth of content that makes the case for immutable money, infinite frontier, and eternal life."

“To get lucky, you must first take a chance.”

"You want a win-win mentality rather than a crabs-in-the-bucket mentality. A win-and-help-win mentality is even better. Your win helps you help me win, and vice versa. Win and help win is actually the profit maximization strategy in the long term.

When crabs-in-a-bucket don't have enough resources, nobody ends up with resources because everybody is getting pinched. Win and help win is actually how technology and venture capital works."

"We have bad metrics as a society. Rather than GDP, GDP-per-capita, or the stock market, perhaps we should have dashboards of life expectancy (health) and net worth (wealth). A good leader is one who improves these metrics for individuals and society as a whole.

Here is my reasoning: most people can't tell you how to compute GDP, but they can tell you what net worth and life expectancy are. They know what it means for those numbers to go up, and they know making them go up is valuable. If these numbers have gone up for you, your life has improved."

"Good: Helping others without concern for yourself.

Smart: Helping others while helping yourself.

Evil: Harming others while helping yourself.

Stupid: Harming others while harming yourself."

“On the internet, we see more upsides and more downsides in everything. Technologists focus on the upside, because the gains should compound, while the losses should be individual events. Once you find a winning formula, you can scale it quickly to make it cheap. This leads to even more net upsides over time, just like every past technological revolution has."

“After my first big liquidity event, I had around ten years of personal runway (the number of years one can go without working). That's when I became kind of invincible, in a sense. Saving money and separating from organizations made me intellectually independent. It was like giving myself tenure."

“I don’t buy cars or homes. After I earned a big payout, whenever I could save time with money, I did. That's the single biggest change I have made. I spend my money on being able to work harder. It sounds funny, but it's true.

I'm not a consumption person; I'm a production person. I'm not burning capital on stuff. Everything is going into the next compounding outcome - not just compounding money, though money is an important tool. Knowledge compounds on other knowledge. Impact, same thing."

“Reducing your cost of living to 1/5x is way easier than increasing your net worth by 5x. If you're willing, you can move to the middle of nowhere and cut your expenditures. You can just read Kindle and live on simple, healthy foods. You can basically reduce your consumption to the level of a grad student.

Then you can go from making, say, 120k in San Francisco and spending 100k a year and having no savings to making 120k in Bali, Indonesia, but only spending 30k or 40k a year with a better quality of life.

Now you're banking 70k 0r 80k a year, and your expenditures are only 40k a year. So every single year you work, you're building up one or two years of time off. That's time off you can use to start a company. It's like angel investing in yourself."

“The ultimate morning routine is to be able to wake up whenever you want.”

“Technology is how civilizations unlock new frontiers. Columbus used new navigation techniques to find the new world because the Ottomans had blockaded the known route to India. The internet has actually been the frontier for the past few decades, and with crypto, that will likely continue."

“Don’t argue on Twitter. Build the future.”

"We are entering a golden age for builders. Consider open source, 3D printing, app stores, and crowdfunding. One person can de-risk, prototype, and accept payments from around the globe.

To influence the direction of tech, pick up a keyboard or put capital at risk. You can build something. Those who won't build will just preach.

That keyboard is increasingly available to billions of people around the world. They have no illusions about the relative utility of preaching versus building."

"The really cynical person and the really docile person have one thing in common: they never make bold moves."

“Don’t do a startup unless you're ideologically driven to make it succeed. You need something beyond economic motivation, because startups are very hard. There are much lower-risk ways to earn money than a startup. Building a startup is an extremely stressful journey toward infinity."

“History is the closest thing we have to a physics of humanity. It provides many accounts of how human actors collide and interact with each other.

The right course of historical study encodes, in compressed form, the results of innumerable social experiments. You can learn from human experience rather than re-deriving societal law from scratch. Learn some history so as not to repeat it."

“The gap between stated preference (what is praised) and expressed preference (what is bought) is an inexhaustible source of startup ideas."

“From a founding and investing standpoint, you have to consider strategic questions. What kinds of platforms are there? What new platforms cure such a pain point that people get on it? Then what else can be deployed on that platform? One of those new platforms is going to be crypto. Lots of people getting crypto wallets is good. We can deploy all kinds of new software once most people have wallets."

"The best entrepreneurs are logical enough to think of unpopular truths and then social enough to make those truths popular."

“Think big, start small. Prove, then scale.”

“Anything founded before the internet may not be able to survive the internet.”

“You can’t survey your way to an innovation.”

“Many will strike out at you casually. Later, they will recant, also casually! That's the bit to remember: most hatred is a mile wide and an inch deep. Strip away the negative adjectives and distill legitimate criticism into bugs to fix. Then just plow on."

“With most businesses, the main problem is indifference - people don't even care. If you polarize people and 20 percent (or less) who hear about you love you, you can make a business from that."

“Equity unites, politics divides.”

“Your job: ensure each person wins more when all others win. Off-diagonal incentives will kill organizations. Politics arises when one person's biggest win involves (or requires!) another person's loss."

"More people, more differing incentive structures (hence problems)."

"Both the best and worse CEOs have this in common: the company could run without them."

“When you’re beginning to scale your business (when users or revenue growth are consistently growing), here's a piece of advice: include a paired metric of quality to compensate for possible cheating of the main growth metric.

If you incentivize salespeople on the basis of revenue, you also should look at customer feedback, churn rate, and per-customer profit. Ideally, you assess profit rather than revenue. If you focus on growing users, pay close attention to churn.

Pairing a second measure of quality with a metric of growth is very, very important. This is especially true when a lot of new employees are joining the company."

“The execution mindset means doing the next thing on the to-do list at all times. Rewrite the list every day or every week in response to progress."

“Doing things as fast as you can often means doing them one at a time.”

"Sometimes, business is about figuring out really non-obvious things. More frequently, it's about doing the obvious thing."

“After you solve the biggest problem, something else becomes the biggest problem.”

“If you don’t write history, you will not be the winner.”

“A startup is willing something into existence. Elon has a saying about startups: 'It's like chewing broken glass and staring into the abyss.' The reason is there's no place to hide. You cannot blame somebody else. You just have to figure it out."

“Doing more than one thing is very hard. You can do one big thing, and you can attach lots of subroutines to that. But if you're trying to do more than one big thing, you have to decide every single moment of the day, am I spending time on A or B?"

“Quicker failure means you can create more trials. More trials means you have more chances to find your comparative advantage. Iterate. With the internet, your life can begin much earlier than it could twenty years ago. You can fast forward through the demo and tutorial levels to start playing the real game."

"You have 168 hours per week, ~112 awake. Substitute capital for time, technology for both. Avoid travel. Cancel meetings. Focus on doing."

"Hard work is a competitive advantage. Even the belief that hard work is a competitive advantage is itself now a competitive advantage."

“The newest technical papers and the oldest books are the best sources of arbitrage. They contain the least popular facts and the most monetizable truths. What do you know to be true that others cannot or will not bring themselves to admit? There is your competitive advantage.

I read a lot of old books and new technical journals. I'm less focused on the contemporaneous and more focused on finding things that are true but that most people don't know."

“You are what you read.”

“A startup should be exceptional in at least one dimension. It can't be 'pretty good' at all different things. At least one dimension needs to be 10 times better and amazing to bet on."

“For other types of investing, you have to pay close attention and spend mental energy to a much greater extent than people think. You're watching numbers every single day, looking for the one moment where you hit the button and sell. I think that's a terrible way to live. The kind of investing I like is finding smart people and helping them level up."

“I’ve passed on many good financial investments. I'm not interested in something if it's just about earning money. I invest on an ideological basis. I invest in the world I want to see built."

"Tech's best feature? The past is past. There is always another train leaving the station, another rocket ship blasting off. Found it, fund it, or join it. We'll have to work to create the future we want."

“The more history you read, the more you realize that the past is as surprising as the future."

"Let's get you rich first. I'm very practical about it because, you know, Buddha was a prince. He started off really rich, then got to go off in the woods."

“Specific knowledge is knowledge you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can train someone else and replace you.”

“Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.”

“Truth is a thing that is living from moment to moment - to be discovered, not believed in, not quoted, not formulated. But to see that truth, your mind and your heart must be extremely pliable, alert."

“Truth is always new, and therefore timeless. What was truth yesterday is not truth today, what is truth today is not truth tomorrow. Truth has no continuity. It is the mind that wants to make the experience that it calls truth continuous, and such a mind will not know truth.

Truth is always new; it is to see the same smile, and see that smile newly, to see the same person, and see that person anew, to see the waving trees anew, to meet life anew.

Truth is not to be had through books, through devotion, or through self-immolation; it is known when the mind is free, quiet. And that freedom, that quietness of the mind, comes only when the facts of its relationships are understood. Without understanding its relationships, whatever the mind does only creates further problems.

But when the mind is free from all its projections, there is a state of quietness in which problems cease, and then only the timeless, the eternal comes into being.

Then truth is not a matter of knowledge, it is not a thing to be remembered, it is not something to be repeated, to be printed and spread abroad. Truth is that which is. It is nameless, and so the mind cannot approach it."

“I am talking to the individual because only the individual can change, not the mass; only you can transform yourself, and so the individual matters infinitely."

"I want to see people live the lives they are capable of, not just the ones they think they are allowed to live."

“The pathless path is an alternative to the default path. It is an embrace of uncertainty and discomfort. It's a call to adventure in a world that tells us to conform. For me, it's also a gentle reminder to laugh when things feel out of control and trust that an uncertain future is not a problem to be solved."

“As I’ve lived in different places around the world and focused on different kinds of work, I've created mini-experiments that help me learn more about how I want to live my life.

I try to think about time in blocks of one to three months and within each block, I pick one or two things I want to prioritize and test. It might be living in a different type of place, working on new projects, traveling, or learning something new.

My goal is to test my beliefs to get a better understanding of what really makes my life better. Many people say things to me like 'I could never live like you do!' All I can think, however, is 'Have you tested that?'"

“Whatever the arena in contemporary life – health care, education, work, travel and leisure – on the right side of the rope is a friction-free existence where, for a price, needs are anticipated and catered to. Red tape is cut, lines are jumped, appointments are secured, and doors are opened.

On the other side of the Velvet Rope, friction is practically the defining characteristic, with middle- and working-class Americans facing an increasingly Darwinian fight for a decent seat on the plane, a place in line with their kids at the amusement park, a college scholarship, or a doctor’s appointment.”

“Separation is now taking place within public institutions as well, subverting the values that made them public in the first place.”

“Capitalism exists with the consent of democracy, and the more the vast majority find themselves not just outside the Velvet Rope but treated with disdain, the system itself is threatened.

It’s up to all of us – including those well-ensconced inside the Velvet Rope – to create a less segmented society, where Americans from different walks of life actually meet one another and find common ground. If they do, maybe there will be more talking, and less shouting, in public life.

It won’t be easy. There are huge profits to be made in the Velvet Rope Economy, and the temptation there is always to raise the cordons even higher. That’s the way things are going. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

There’s room enough for all of us inside the Velvet Rope.”

#1: "What could we be wrong about tomorrow that everybody agrees on and is completely convinced we're right about today?"

#2: "Do you believe that there's enough wealth to go around (or that there could be in the future), or that the supply of wealth is forever fixed?"

#3: "Would you agree to being under constant surveillance at all times and in all places if you could be guaranteed that all violent crime could be eliminated?"

#4: "What technology do you never want to see invented?"

#5: "What's the most dangerous technology being developed today? Is there at least one possible, positive use-case for it?"

#6: "Are you prepared for the future? Or as prepared as you could be? What changes would you have to make and/or adopt to help you adapt successfully to the future?"

#7: "Do you want to live forever? If it were possible to live indefinitely (assuming you remain in good health and retain all your cognitive faculties), would that be desirable?"

#8: "How long do you believe the human species will exist for?"

#9: "What are the chances that humanity destroys itself before we become an interplanetary (perhaps even intergalactic) species? Is it inevitable?"

#10: "What do you think is the biggest obstacle to progress?"

"Judge a man by his questions, rather than by his answers."

"The path to success is to take massive, determined action.”