Ian Vanagas

David Friedman points out that people only do things for other people for three reasons – love, money, or force. Love doesn’t scale, so the economy can only run on money or force. The force experiment has been run and found wanting. Let’s stick with money.

The personal computing revolution succeeded and we are all miserable. The dream of personal computing as augmentation for the intellect, and the joyful, radical counterculture that arose around the first PC’s has given way to our increasingly dismal present.

Jim aims for an average of 1000 creative hours over a 365 day period. Can be more, but can never be less (and has never been over 10 years).

I turn down  almost  all of these Zoom invitations. Too  many  of them embody presentations, and I prefer more interactive modes.

 We do not create or “have” ideas—if anything is doing the creating or having, it is the ideas themselves.

It is as if there existed, for what seems like millennia, tracing back to the very origins of mathematics and of other arts and sciences, a sort of “conspiracy of silence” surrounding [the] “unspeakable labors” which precede the birth of each new idea, both big and small[.]

When his friend and mentor Raiders owner Al Davis called Parcells to check in, Parcells relayed his injury issues. Parcell’s: “Al, I am just not sure how we can win without so many of our best players. What should I do?” Davis replied: “Bill, nobody cares, just coach your team.”

"I watch the data all day long… I see every uptick or downtick. I put a video out, I watch how it trends. And then I'll make another video and see if that trends similarly." Then, she privates the videos that don't do well. She estimates she's made more than 20,000 TikToks, only a third of which are still public.