11 Books I never tire of rereading: - The Beginning of Infinity - The Fabric of Reality - Objective Knowledge - Conjectures and Refutations - Science and Human Values - The Almanack of @Naval Ravikant - 1984 - Siddhartha - The Sovereign Individual - Atlas Shrugged - The Fountainhead

@Naval's number one reading advice: “Go read The Beginning of Infinity and The Fabric of Reality [by David Deutsch]. They rewired my brain, made me smarter.”

Peter Thiel: I think we live in a society in which all the culture and politics hate science and technology in all forms. The easy way to see this is just by looking at all the science fiction movies. They always show technology that kills people, destroys things, doesn’t work, or is dystopian. The future is going to be a combination of Terminator, The Matrix, Avatar, and Elysium. I watched the Gravity movie the other day. You would never want to go into outer space. You’d just want to be back on a muddy tropical island somewhere. I’m not blaming Hollywood. I think it simply reflects the broader culture. Silicon Valley, and what it represents, is radically countercultural. It is very much at odds with what people in the Western world actually think about the future or what they want. So, it’s like a Zeno’s paradox type situation where you have, on the one hand, accelerating technological change (or at least the potential for it), and on the other hand, a culture and political system that is incredibly reactionary and hostile to it.

Everyone talks about Snow Crash for the Metaverse and cyberpunk stuff, but no one mentions how Stephenson normalizes teenagers working at 15 and being taken seriously. It’s a world where competence, not age, defines responsibility—so different from how we treat the youth today.

— Isaac Asimov

Jeff Bezos: “I always tell people who want to be entrepreneurs that… You need a combination of stubborn relentlessness and flexibility, and you have to know when to be which.”

Basic economics

@Naval: “The means for learning are now abundant… but it’s the desire to learn that’s scarce. College is a checkbox. And the easiest way to see that is if we say, OK, you can go to college but you wouldn’t get a diploma—would you still do it?’”

Steve Jobs: We started with nothing. So whenever you start with nothing, you always can shoot for the moon. You have nothing to lose. And the thing that happens is when you sort of get something, it's very easy to go into cover-your-ass mode. What we're trying to do is to realize the very amazing time that we're in and not go into that mode. Now, how come they came to Apple to work on this? We hired these people from other companies, and the reason they came to Apple was because they knew what to do. But the companies they were working for wouldn't take the risk and do it. And we said, come to Apple and build this. And they said, well, who do I have to convince to do that? Nobody. Just go do it. And we got a collection of, I think, some of the finest computer scientists in the world.

Freedom can never be given, it can only be taken away.

@Naval on American culture: “The culture of freedom, individual liberty, open-ness, and protection from the greatest slaughterer of mankind, government.”

Prices are the economy’s nervous system.

Perplexity marketing goes hard

Best book on psychotherapy I’ve read, thanks to @naval’s recommendation. Sadly, it’s counter-culture. Many with “mental illnesses” would benefit from reading Glasser’s work instead of wasting hours discussing their feelings or past with a therapist or taking brain-numbing drugs.

“Everything you read makes sense if you simply translate ‘experts’ as ‘crazy people’.” — Marc Andreessen

Peter Thiel on higher education: