The Anthology of Balaji: A Guide to Technology, Truth, and Building the Future

people pay for the value provided to them. They pay for the impact on them, not the cost to provide it.

I lie awake at night and think, Okay, here’s what I’ve learned today. How does that fit into my broad collection of ideas? Where are the contradictions, overlaps, and so on? Most people do not do this. They just compartmentalize. They’ll learn something, but they won’t try to propagate it through other things they know to see if it conflicts with o

Marc Andreessen’s anti to-do list is also good: write down what you just did, and then cross it off. Even if you get off track, this gives you a sense of what you were working on and your progress.

In venture capital and content creation, originality is really, really valued. Whether you call it originality, being disobedient, or being contrarian—the combination of being analytical and not fully obedient has been important.

If the purpose of technology is to reduce scarcity, then the ultimate purpose of technology is to eliminate mortality.

Taking some time off Twitter can be helpful, which I do every once in a while. I took almost four months off Twitter to complete all the final details in my book and get it shipped. Win off Twitter to win on Twitter. Pretty much anything you want, you cannot actually win on Twitter itself. You have to win off Twitter and announce on Twitter.

I’m less focused on the contemporaneous and more focused on finding things that are true but that most people don’t know.

Platforms like Substack, Patreon, and Ghost allow writers to optimize for dollowers. Dollowing is a scarce and valuable behavior, unlike following. In the battle of ideas, dollowing is more important than following or just retweeting.

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.

Start out with some end-state of the world you’d like to achieve; for example, youth extension, people on Mars, or building new cities. Your goal doesn’t have to be that ambitious. Usually it springs from some passion—often a positive passion, but sometimes a negative passion. For example, you might hate the way healthcare insurance works and try t