Writing

• “Clark’s final piece of advice: “Get hobbies that don’t involve computers.”

• “As human beings it is our right (maybe our moral duty) to reshape the universe to our preferences.”
• “You learn more per unit time because you make contact with reality more frequently.”
• “The goal is not to avoid mistakes; the goal is to achieve uncorrelated levels of excellence in some dimension.”

No quotes saved for this reading.

• “No matter what you do, you are making a bet on what the future/the steady state of the technology looks like. Any company you build has to be a reflection of that bet on the future expressed through every choice you make: your product, business model, and team/culture/org chart. It’s all one choice.”
• “And so the post-agent business counter-positions its product, go-to-market, and strategy around that which is still scarce and valuable: context, attention, trust and brand to produce sustainably differentiated outcomes via network effects”
• “It’s necessary to have a sense of who the best people are for you, rather than merely trying to get the best people in some generic sense. Here, local > global optima.”
• “Even claiming that you don’t have a point of view is still a perspective. It carries with it that the most important thing is to maintain optionality.”

• “Recall that we would face a flow probability of existential risk of 1% per year for 40 years, so the probability we survive this A.I. explosion is exp(−.01 × 40) ≈ 0.67.”
• “In other words, with log utility it is optimal to take a 1 in 3 chance of ending human existence in exchange for a 2/3 chance of dramatically raising living standards by a factor of 55.”
• “And we assume that it’s a calculation that Anthropic would prefer that we don’t dwell on. After all, as Amodei said....“There’s no end to the rainbow. There’s just the rainbow.”

• “What would it be like to drape myself in the sartorial expression of one of the most polarizing companies in the United States?”
• “Younes is far from the first person in Silicon Valley who’s thought of turning software into soft wear.”
• “Palantir is THE lifestyle brand. The most pro-west, meritocratic, winning obsessed, and based brand on the face of the earth.”

• “I've started thinking in terms of a "velocity of intelligence," or how quickly the distance between knowing something and acting on it collapses. AI compresses that distance, and as it does, the velocity of intelligence rises.”

• “Michael’s unique combination of calm confidence, kind energy, and absolute genius were unforgettable.”
• “She spoke to him about how his parents, both journalists, shaped his worldview. He listened more than he spoke and exuded a maturity and wisdom beyond his years.”
• “We ultimately settled on a valuation 10% lower than what they’d originally proposed. I’m pretty sure this was the last time any investor haggled with Cursor.”

• “watch yourself closely enough for long enough and you almost become a performance for yourself. the self you’re performing for is also you, which means you’re never fully off stage. the performance becomes the person.”
• “now you’re not just experiencing. you’re watching yourself experience. analyzing the experience while it’s happening. and here’s where it gets strange. the observation changes the experience itself.”
• “stuck in a recursive loop of awareness aware of itself. and it is genuinely exhausting.”

• “If you wanted your nation to be at the frontier, I think you had three years to do it: February 2023 to February 2026. That was the window. And it is now closed.”
• “We are now entering the period in which the compute required to reach that level will itself become a strategic resource.”
• “The nuke analogy is overused, but soon the most advanced compute actually will be treated like uranium”
• “Imagine a future nation whose economy, institutions, schools, military, hospitals, and infrastructure are all intertwined with a proud "national" AI model that is in fact a thin wrapper around one of the leading American or Chinese labs models. Then imagine that model being embargoed in an instant, as Fable was this week. The effect would look like an airstrike.”
• “It is about the transformation of civilization, society, and humanity itself. It is a Wonder.”

• “The stagger is a fossil. We type on a fossil every day and never feel it.”
• “The flat row is protecting a supply chain...it falls apart the moment a company makes its own keys, the way Apple does.”
• “Nobody decided that. It just happened, and then it stayed. And that's the part that won't sit right once you've seen it.”

• “The notion that teens can smoke weed and skim Hegel for four years and have a cushy office job waiting on the other side was always doomed.”
• “The people who will win are those who can remake themselves again and again: to summit one peak, descend it, and then hike up the next.”
• “The AI tools are undifferentiated and everyone has them. Your comparative advantage has to be about you...Use AI to get smarter and don’t let it make you dumb. There’s a cognitive equivalent to lifting heavy. Do it three or four times a week.”
• “...I hear depressing defeatism: What can anyone do in the shadow of the technocapital machine? Faced with such fatalism, self-help seems essential.”

• “...they ration scarce capacity toward the areas where the marginal productivity of AI justifies the marginal cost of using it.”
• “These are narrower, more disciplined, and more token-efficient applications than the vision of autonomous agents running everything everywhere all at once.”
• “A more plausible path is uneven diffusion: frontier deployment concentrated where the returns justify the compute, broader adoption shaped by cost and capacity, and asset prices periodically forced to reconcile ambition with physical constraint.”

• “if your information diet is the trending page of arxiv plus whatever survives the group chat filter, you will reliably reach the same conclusions as everyone else, at the same time, which makes those conclusions worth approximately nothing.”
• “...knowledge and productivity compound like interest. the daily edges look trivial in isolation. what you read, what you record, how fast your loop runs, who you argue with. give them a few years and they produce careers that look like luck from the outside.”

• “You can assemble an iPhone with 996, but you could have never designed one.”
• “This is conspicuous consumption pointed at nothing, oriented around the act of consumption itself.”
• “We are watching people who have more freedom than the Medicis use that freedom to pretend they have less freedom than the line worker in Shenzhen, and we applaud it.”

• “Against this backdrop of history, on Earth and in the cosmos, our individual lives are brief flickers in the chasms of time.”
• “Far more possible arrangements of human DNA exist than there are atoms in the observable universe.”
• “Being alive at all is the most extraordinary stroke of good luck we will ever experience.”
• “Later, Schweitzer put it this way: “I am life that wills to live in the midst of other life that wills to live.”

• “Our current generation of students and builders must accomplish orders of magnitude more than previous generations in the same amount of time.”
• “The opportunity cost of our attention has never been higher.”
• “The moment is finite. The chapter is your choice. The book is your legacy. What are you building with your fixed amount of time?”

• “Frontier AI models, like airplanes, should be required to go through technical testing and auditing, and their release should be blocked or reversed as a threat to public safety if they do not meet high standards of safety.”
• “If AI really will soon be “a country of geniuses in a datacenter”, or anything remotely close to it, then AI is likely to be the dominant source of military and economic power for any nation.”
• “There is an aspirational but realistic future world in which a broad nonpartisan coalition, driven by direct recognition of the challenges posed by AI, leads to sane and forward-looking policies being adopted much faster than usual.”

• “The old thesis of sources of economic power has lost intellectual dominance. Now, economic power is instead largely conceptualized through the logic of weaponized interdependence.”
• “The reality is that most countries do not depend on either U.S. financial markets or the U.S. government for funding.”
• “But U.S. leverage is not unlimited. The United States faces a determined rival with many cards of its own to play. It isn’t in a position to use its economic leverage to impose any vision of a global economic order on China, let alone use its economic pull to integrate China into a strategic order.”

• “They had come for food but found what they really needed: reconciliation and renewed joy.”
• “The important point for deeper reflection is that our hungers can sometimes tell us more about what we want than we register on a surface level.”
• “When reflecting on the life choices we have made, do we feel driven by the same hungers as before? And, if not, what deep need are we still trying to satiate?”

• “Many people feel awe when looking at photos taken from space, when staring at great natural vistas...And we of the atom and the pixel, whose world is of physical laws and ancient natural origin, do seem to sense that missing element.”
• “They are not building God because they miss Him. They are building something that has brought them, unexpectedly, to the edge of where He would be.”
• “Something is doing the work religion does sociologically while failing to do the work religion does for a person.”
• “People need meaning, and intense, world-shaping work is one of the oldest ways to find it.”
• “If there is a God, I hope he is watching San Francisco in the year of our Lord 2026.”

• “AI will produce something that looks right at a glance, following patterns that are statistically likely to work but rarely deeply considered.”
• “As the baseline improves, the average will look increasingly polished. Standing out won’t come from tools or speed, but from how much care you’re willing to put in.”
• “Because when anything can be built, the only edge is in what you choose and how well you shape it.”

• “How each of us chooses to live and find meaning in our lives and human civilization are examples of infinite games.”
• “At the same time, the enduring value of a business organization is not measured by those past successes, but by the business's ability to keep succeeding, not just during the time the current team is executing, but well beyond their tenure.”
• “Those in business should have both finite and infinite mindsets held in tension.”

• “The window to get this right won't be open forever; at stake is the future of the internet, and as a result, intelligence itself.”
• “It is how we tell the universe we are alive, and that we love being alive enough to fight for a more perfect future.”
• “This idea–that the world is something we create for ourselves, not something we inherit—is one I think about often.”

• “The challenge is how to live with virtue and technology when technology tends to erode virtue and place and human texture.”
• “This republic requires men and women to do long-form deliberation, serious thinking, honest humility and daily striving.”
• “To stave off Huxley’s dystopia, we must deliberately shape our children’s souls so that they can be creators, doers and thinkers embracing the next frontier.”

• “His thesis adviser told the student newspaper that Rao managed to “accomplish an enormous amount without ever seeming to get out of balance.”
• “Colleagues at the private-equity giant knew him as someone with a dry sense of humor and liked to call him “Chairman Rao.” He could win without fighting and push without seeming pushy, they said.”
• “When Blackstone executive Martin Brand invited a team to his home in the West Village to play poker one evening in 2012, Rao beat his bosses in a winner-takes-all game.”
• “You’re not going to strike a balance,” Fleming said he told Rao. “This is a historic time with a historic company. You’ve been pointing toward this your whole career,” Fleming added. “You’re in the room. Ride it.”

• “The most important companies are actually organizational inventions. They create a new kind of institution around a new kind of work, and in doing so, they make a new kind of person possible.”
• “The best companies today are operating at a higher altitude, they describe the change their existence makes possible: the industry that gets revived, the institution that gets rebuilt, the civilizational bet that gets won, the class of human effort that becomes possible for the first time.”
• “AI will make many things easier to copy...but no matter how many pitches argue that AI will make it easier to build an institution, it will not make it easy to build a new institution.”
• “The old talent market rewarded companies that made people feel chosen. The next one will reward companies built in shapes the old market could not have produced, and the people inside them will become something the old shapes could not have made possible.”

• “AI offers us a way out of these gaps, empties, impasses, “new starts,” and “different kinds of failures.”
• “Even as a scholar and teacher of English, I do not believe that I am uniquely equipped to detect impersonation of human writing by LLM and other forms of AI.”
• “It seems to me that what is wanted, in art, is to harness the power of the unfinished. All earthly experience is partial.”

• “A well-designed office with some decent decor works to corral the unconscious “elephant” part of your mind, not the rider. While a few creative polymaths seem to thrive in messy offices, when I’m in a tidy space it feels like I’ve closed a bunch of tabs that were hogging mental processing power.”
• “If you read my blog you likely have some altruistic goals or lofty projects that motivate you. Don’t leave value on the table by working on them in a crummy space. Stop trying to save the world under miserable fluorescent overhead lights.”

• “It’s hard to figure out how to become more ambitious, but I think it’s possible. Ambition seems to be quite malleable.”
• “I don’t know how to do it, but for all of you Stanford students, I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering. Greatness comes from character and character isn’t formed out of smart people — it’s formed out of people who suffered.”
• “When the future finds us, it should see us fighting like hell. We should work hard in these pivotal years, leaving nothing on the table...I hope our ambitions rise to meet these last years of the human era.”
• “If your cause is worth fighting for, you should fight like hell. How ambitious are you? What do you allow yourself to yearn for?”

• “Price’s Law states that the square root of the number of people in a domain does 50% of the work.”
• “Price’s Law reveals that equality of outcome and equality of opportunity cannot coexist in complex systems.”
• “Compounding happens in the margins, in the weird micro-connections between the stuff that didn’t work and the stuff that did.”

• “That’s the gap. The moment between knowing what you should do and actually doing it. The dead space where your brain offers you options. Where you negotiate with yourself. Where you consider alternatives. Where you find reasons not to. This gap is what’s destroying you.”
• “The problem is that every time you enter that gap, you’re burning energy. Every single negotiation drains you.”
• “You can kill the gap immediately. You can make it impossible for it to exist in the first place. Not by strengthening your willpower. By removing the need for it entirely. You do this by eliminating the decision before your brain gets a chance to negotiate.”
• “The gap is already there. It’s not going away on its own. You have to kill it.”

• “In moments of clarity, we can make contact with that value structure, and it will tell us, in no uncertain terms, that almost everything we do is irrelevant.”
• “This now reminds me that what I’m looking for is not the truth about my soul; I’m just looking for the next iteration of the experiment that is my life.”
• “What matters will rise up from the mess.”

• “The best world is one where people are not subjects, but players.”
• “You do not get to utopian poetry writing by having faith that someone else will figure it out. You are not praying to God, you are praying to men more ignorant than you.”
• “The direction of civilization is not fixed. History is yours to write. Get to work.”

• “The output matters, but the intention, the struggle, the care is what makes it count, and what gives it weight.”
• “A million views doesn’t make a pound of significance. Light things shape culture, but rarely shape us.”
• “We spend our lives crafting weighted blankets for ourselves—something heavy enough to anchor our ambition and quiet our minds.”

• “At the time the hot things were social networks...but very few companies were tackling what felt like the real, thorny parts of the economy. If you wanted to work on these ‘harder’ areas of the economy but also wanted a Silicon Valley work culture, Palantir was basically your only option for awhile.”
• “These were seriously intense, competitive people who wanted to win, true believers; weird, fascinating people who read philosophy in their spare time, went on weird diets, and did 100-mile bike rides for fun.”
• “The world needs more companies like SpaceX, and Palantir, that differentiate on execution - achieving the outcome - not on playing political games or building narrow point solutions that don’t hit the goal.”
• “But importantly, it seemed that criticism was highly tolerated and welcomed – one person showed me an email chain where an entry-level software engineer was having an open, contentious argument with a Director of the company with the entire company (around a thousand people) cc’d.”
• “One of my favorite insights from Tyler Cowen’s book ‘Talent’ is that the most talented people tend to develop their own vocabularies and memes, and these serve as entry points to a whole intellectual world constructed by that person.”
• “It’s straightforward to trace this back to Peter’s Girardian beliefs: if you create titles, people start coveting them, and this ends up creating competitive politics inside the company that undermines internal unity.”
• “The cost of this was that the company often felt like there was no clear strategy or direction, more like a Petri dish of smart people building little fiefdoms and going off in random directions. But it was incredibly generative.”

• “They are the ugly ducklings of human achievement, who, over the decades, turn themselves into swans.”
• “They walk through life like a curious person browsing through a bookstore.”
• “Slow at the start, late bloomers are still sprinting during that final lap—they do not slow down as age brings its decay. They are seeking. They are striving. They are in it with all their heart.”

• “This suggests that how people fare psychologically with their post-AGI unemployment will depend heavily on how they use their time, not how much of it there is...”
• “This is how we can prepare for our future where we will have to do things from joy rather than need, where we will no longer be the best at them, but will still have to choose how to fill our days.d”
• “This may sound self-serving or wishful, and will doubtless leave many unsatisfied. But, I believe that if we really think these systems will be able to replace us, there is no reason to believe they will not also be able to help us in our search for meaning.”

• “Staring into the abyss means thinking reasonably about things that are uncomfortable to contemplate...”
• “...becoming more willing to stare into the abyss is one of the most important things you can do to become a better thinker and make better decisions about how to spend your life.”

• “So across a range of creative professions, but especially in science, high achievers tend to experience a year of extraordinary, career-defining productivity.”
• “Perhaps there’s a brief window in a person’s life where he has the intelligence, curiosity, and freedom of youth but also the skills and knowledge of age.”
• “It’s depressing that I have just described the opposite of a modern PhD program.”

• “Moore’s Law for everything” should be the rallying cry of a generation whose members can’t afford what they want.”
• “The American Equity Fund would be capitalized by taxing companies above a certain valuation 2.5% of their market value each year, payable in shares transferred to the fund...All citizens over 18 would get an annual distribution, in dollars and company shares, into their accounts.”
• “The changes coming are unstoppable. If we embrace them and plan for them, we can use them to create a much fairer, happier, and more prosperous society. The future can be almost unimaginably great.”

• “I concluded that what we call 'intelligence' is as much about virtues such as honesty, integrity, and bravery, as it is about 'raw intellect’.”
• “You have to be able to motivate yourself to spend large quantities of energy on a problem, which means on some level that not understanding something — or having a bug in your thinking — bothers you a lot. You have the drive, the will to know.”
• “If my father had met Bernie Madoff, he would never have invested money with him because he would have said, ‘I don’t understand’ a hundred times.”
• “Do I really believe that this is true, deep down? Would I bet a large amount of money on it with a friend?”
• “Prior to reading the essay I thought I understood the equals sign. Indeed, I would have been offended by the suggestion that I did not. But the essay showed convincingly that I could understand the equals sign much more deeply.”
• “It is also good advice for understanding things. When in doubt, go closer.”

• “There are men and women in the world who, of their own free will, live a dogless life, not knowing what they miss...”
• “No mere man can ever be so comfortable as a dog looks.”
• “It may be so; and yet again it may be that the dog has his own rightful place in the universe, irrespective and independent of man...”