Some prior editions:
Random facts:
The price of inaction is far greater than the cost of making a mistake
I’ll always remember what Synthesis founder Chrisman Frank told me: “Still haven’t met anyone who has quit drinking and regretted it.”
Instead, playful exchanges produce trust, reciprocity, and VIBES—the ineffable group energy that squads value most
I think all the greatest minds that I’ve ever worked with share this in common: They have ultra-strong curiosity, he says
$250b of India’s GDP exports are essentially GPT-4 tokens… what happens now?
This is well documented in Vienna because it’s now widely known that Freud was doing dubious experiments on women. But now these experiments are basically commonplace psychiatry. We should be very afraid that a freakshow practice by weirdos in Vienna is now the mainstream way of understanding the mind across the western world. Freud is universally discredited, and yet is still core of so much in the modern era. It’s nuts
Barring cataclysms, I consider the development of intelligent machines a near-term inevitability. Rather quickly, they could displace us from existence. I’m not as alarmed as many, since I consider these future machines our progeny, “mind children” built in our image and likeness, ourselves in more potent form
As Sam Altman wrote in 2017, “I believe the merge has already started, and we are a few years in”:
Our phones control us and tell us what to do when; social media feeds determine how we feel; search engines decide what we think. The algorithms that make all this happen are no longer understood by any one person
Cancer hates mushrooms — 2/3 an ounce a day = 45% lower risk of cancer
“Mushrooms are like the swiss army knife for treating diseases.”
I see a lot of people with talent but the one thing they don’t have is that just love of doing it for the sake of it. — Rodney Mullen
China’s petrochemical sector will “add as much production capacity for ethylene and propylene – the two most important petrochemical building blocks – as presently exists in Europe, Japan and Korea combined.” Meanwhile, U.S. producers have increased exports of petrochemical feedstocks, intermediates, and polymers – more than three-quarters of the increase in production has gone to China. As a result, there is a new “symbiosis between the largest global source of demand growth – China – and the largest global source of supply growth – the United States
Korean saying, 3 things in life that are unavoidable = taxes, death, and Samsung
Neil Gaiman’s Masterclass
-Eventually he realized he had to start finishing them – the improvement was QUANTUM
-Whenever he’s stuck, he ask “what does my character want?” this is always your way through – you can put two of the strongest and most developed characters together, have them battle over what they want, discuss it, search for it, find it
Some view this regression phenomenon as the foundational policy of the crypto space: “whatever is permitted by the protocol’s code and market structure is legitimate.” This viewpoint, while rarely expressed in such direct terms, is remarkably common among crypto users
4chan started as a community for anime lovers; Inspired by Japanese forum + image board
Going to the gym when you don’t feel like it gives you the greatest high
When all these sensory and emotional tides have ceased to flow, then the spirit is free, mukta –at least for the time being. It has entered the state called samadhi. Samadhi can come and go; generally it can be entered only in a long period of meditation and after many years of ardent endeavor
Perpetual futures are like a never-ending lease on a car, while traditional futures are like a car rental with a fixed return date.
Token buyers will be to investors what bloggers/tweeters are to journalists: Tokens will break down the barrier between professional investors and token buyers in the same way that the internet brought down the barrier between professional journalists and tweeters and bloggers.
In real estate you make money on the buy not the sell
Educator Abraham Flexner traces the origins of discoveries, often born from curiosity rather than an aim for utility. “Throughout the whole history of science most of the really great discoveries which had ultimately proved to be beneficial to mankind had been made by men and women who were driven not by the desire to be useful but merely the desire to satisfy their curiosity.”
Before menopause, a woman is aging slower than a man by almost a decade – then menopause hits and it’s like falling off a cliff in terms of aging
If you think in terms of surface area, it’s easy to see why we are so anxious, stressed, and constantly behind.
We feel like we need more time, but what we’re craving is more focus. What we need is a smaller surface area.
Your surface area becomes part of your identity. She’s the ‘busy person’ with her hand in every project. He’s the guy with four houses.
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Most of the really happy people I know have a relatively small surface area. I know billionaires with two houses. Most of my close friends only have 4-5 close friends – everyone else is a friend in the loose sense of the word. Most of the productive people I know at work are focused on one or two things, not 5.
Russians have been sad and resigned for thousands of years,” she replied. “It’s how we stay resilient. I’m against this war, but I can’t do anything but wait, like everyone else. They manipulate us with artificial ideas. Garbage. But the West has been humiliating us for too long. Don’t we also have a right to be who we want to be without feeling like barbarians?”
Seth Godin talks about how he changed his own negative self-talk by listening to Zig Ziglar tapes, for three hours a day, for three years. Similarly—but slightly different—Cathy Park Hong transcribed Richard Pryor’s audio and film performances.
On a similar note, this is also why the “beach episode” has become a staple in ACG works. Setting aside the fan service, these beach episodes typically don’t depict any major conflicts, and focus purely on showcasing interesting character moments. It’s not a stretch to deduce that this is also why westerners typically despise or eschew “filler episodes” that don’t advance a main conflict, while people in Japan / Asia tend to enjoy and appreciate them more
Breath control is emotional control
Globally, twice as many people die from suicide than from homicide. In Germany, 18x more people die from suicide than from homicide (primarily a result of low homicide rates).
The world’s best-scoring country in 1800 (Belgium, 33%) suffered from child mortality twice as high as the worst-scoring country today (Angola, 17%).
In an interview, Mr. Johnson said he didn’t care what present-day people thought of him. “I’m more interested in what people of the 25th century think of me,” he said. “The majority of opinions now represent the past.”
Road accidents cause 2.2% of deaths worldwide – more than malaria (1.1%), war (0.2%), and homicide (0.7%) combined.
Twelve thousand years ago, there were only 2.5 million people on earth: a quarter of the population of London today.
The unemployed are more likely to follow the peddlers of hope than the handers-out of relief.
I knew from the age of 13 that this is what I was gonna do until the day I died – Mr. Beast
@eshear
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but if you just listen and watch yourself talk enough, it stops feeling weird and cringe and starts feeling normal, like watching anyone else. You hear the actual content eventually.
Talk to a man about himself and he will listen for hours
Nothing beats funny – Will Smith
Circa the early 2000s, “internet safety” discussions revolved around first-order issues like identity theft, cybercrime and child exploitation. But with the benefit of hindsight, these direct concerns were swamped by the internet’s second-order effects on our politics and culture. Indeed, between an information tsunami and new platforms for mass mobilization, the internet destabilized political systems worldwide, even leading to outright regime change in the case of the Arab Spring.
There is also a privacy issue with Twttr. Every user has a public page that shows all of their messages. Messages from that person’s extended network are also public. I imagine most users are not going to want to have all of their Twttr messages published on a public website
It is not stress that harms us but distress.

“It makes me raise my level. If it doesn’t hurt a little bit, it’s because you don’t care enough.” – Holger Rune
I used to write infrequently, only when I had a free two- or three-hour block of time. Since this summer, however, I’ve started writing in 15-minute bursts, and have seen a huge benefit in both the quality and quantity of my work. Making use of each and every small fragment of time has improved my writing and editing processes, as well as my output
Han writes:
The complaint of the depressive individual, ‘Nothing is possible,’ can only occur in a society that thinks, ‘Nothing is impossible.’
As Nietzsche’s Zarathustra declares:
All of you who are in love with hectic work and whatever is fast, new, strange — you find it hard to bear yourselves, your diligence is escape and the will to forget yourself. If you believed more in life, you would hurl yourself less into the moment. But you do not have enough content in yourselves for waiting — not even for laziness!
as any old-time nethead will be quick to lecture you, the Internet was a lonely (but thrilling!) cultural backwater for two decades before it hit the media radar. A graph of the number of Internet hosts worldwide, starting in the 1960s, hardly creeps above the bottom line. Then, around 1991, the global tally of hosts suddenly mushrooms, exponentially arcing up to take over the world.
Charlie’s life and wisdom by sharing something he wrote me in 2001: “Maybe we have a new version of Lord Acton’s law: easy money corrupts, and really easy money corrupts absolutely.”
Its greatest failure in the past eight years has been its inability to address the malaise shared by young people in Taiwan: long working hours, low pay, unaffordable housing, poor protection for renters, and a growing gulf between the mega-rich and everybody else.
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” — Richard Feynman
“Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.” — Colin Powell
And—this is the most important part—anytime you choose to help others, you activate this state. Caring for others triggers the biology of courage and creates hope.
Sometimes I’ll know exactly what I need to do in order to leave the bog, but I’m too afraid to do it. I’m afraid to tell the truth, or make someone mad, or take a risk. And so I dither, hoping that the future will not require me to be brave
In 1899, a promising young poet and would-be revolutionary dropped out of the theological seminary in Tbilisi, Georgia. He took with him 18 library books, for which the monks demanded payment of 18 roubles and 15 kopeks. When, 54 years later, the same voracious bookworm died, he had 72 unreturned volumes from the Lenin Library in Moscow on his packed shelves. At the time, the librarians probably had too many other issues with Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, aka Stalin, to worry about collecting his unpaid fines
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Stalin not only read, quickly and hungrily: he claimed to devour 500 pages each day and, in the Twenties, ordered 500 new titles every year — not to mention the piles of works submitted to him by hopeful or fearful authors. He annotated with passion and vigour. Hundreds of volumes crawl with his distinctive markings and marginalia (the so-called pometki), their pages festooned with emphatic interjections: “ha ha”, “gibberish”, “rubbish”, “fool”, “scumbag”; and, more rarely, “agreed”, “spot on”, or the noncommittal doubt conveyed by the Russian “m-da”.
Buddhist texts speak of three kinds of gifts — material resources, sharing the Dharma with others, and non-fear, which is the greatest gift. Because bodhisattvas are free from fear, they can help many people. Non-fear is the greatest gift we can offer to those we love. – Thich Nhat Hanh
Religion is way to get a very good idea to cross over time
In a land of great rivers, the Volga is the river. They call it matushka, the mother; it flows from the Valdai Hills to the land of the Chuvash, the Tatars, the Cossacks, the Kalmyks, and into the Caspian Sea
Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, in which he outlines his idea that great art involves the careful interplay between two core elements of the human psyche, the Apollonian (which promotes order, symmetry, and harmony) and the Dionysian (which stands for violent chaos and intoxication).