Benji

This is interesting and it seems to verify the location of the burial of Alexander the Great, King Philip, and Cleopatra. This struck me as interesting at the time because I’ve recently listened to several Hardcore History episodes on Persian kings - “Kings of Kings” and “Mania for Subjugation”

• Conventionally, right speech means you pay attention to your speech, noticing if there are occasions where you are not exactly being truthful, you’re being harsh, or what you’re saying is divisive. Or maybe it’s just idle small talk, not amounting to much.

• My teacher said, “This is all good. But what will help you most of all is to taste silence.” I asked him why. He said, “When you learn how to live in even a little bit of silence and feel the beauty of it, the sacredness of it, then as soon as you open your mouth, you realize you’re wrong. No matter what you say, even if you use the most refined speech, it’s a crude instrument for expressing the deep experiences of being alive.”

• The more you listen and become sensitive to your speech, the more you taste silence. And the more you drink and taste the beauty of silence—real stillness—sometimes you don’t even want to speak. If you do speak, you want to say something that, in a sense, doesn’t sully the silence. Put another way, you hear when your speech is off, when there are false notes. You become more sensitive both in noticing what is not true and in being vulnerable, fragile

• As Peter Thiel observed in his famous Stanford lecture, founders occupy a peculiar place in the Valley's collective psyche, simultaneously worshipped and vulnerable to sacrifice.

• The Valley's founding stories often follow ancient mythological patterns: the outcast-turned-hero (Jobs), the boy-king (Zuckerberg), the Prometheus figure bringing divine fire to mortals (Musk).

• As Thiel observes, the evolution of founders into sacred figures follows a consistent trajectory: the initial blessing (funding), a period of adversity (the "valley of death"), and eventual triumph or failure.

• When founders succeed at scale, their companies can transcend mere business to become something approaching cosmic centers.

• True sacredness is rooted in forms of value that cannot be bought or sold.

• The crypto space serves as a concentrated laboratory for understanding how sacred narratives can be corrupted into sophisticated fraud.

• The attention economy has created a new priesthood, where the sacred rite of "founding" requires no actual founding, only the ability to perform the outward signs of “founding.”

• When a critical mass of sacred narratives is exposed as cynical manipulations, the ability to discern genuine visionaries diminishes.

• This essay is less a prescription than a reckoning, a meditation on what we stand to lose.