The only moment that really exists is now—even tomorrow or yesterday are just thoughts in the current moment. So, nothing exists outside of right now. You're not necessarily going to be around for any appreciable period of time. Everything you do will be forgotten, like everything in the past has been forgotten, It's not to say it's meaningless, but it's more to say that you create your own meaning; you interpret your own meaning; you are the meaning of your own life.

If you want to operate at maximum productivity, efficiency, and creativity, you're going to work on things that you're excited about at the moment you're excited about them and accept nothing less. It is better to sit on your butt and do nothing than it is to work on things that you are not excited about.

I do believe that 99% of effort in life is 'wasted'. And it's not wasted in the sense that you don't learn something; you do learn something. But if you look back at all the term papers you wrote and all the classes you took and all the people you dated and on all the thoughts you had and all the things you stressed about and all the decisions you made, 99% of them didn't matter; they were inconsequential; and there were a few 1% decisions that did matter.

You have the feeling of certainty, you are absolutely sure that you're not wrong—this feeling is something we should always be skeptical of because when people have been absolutely certain, even in a domain as apparently full of certainty as mathematics, they've been shown to be wrong.

Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett kind of say that everybody they know who's smart is an avid reader, and I have a hard time refuting that. I have yet to meet someone who I consider to have a very high-functioning level of intelligence who doesn't read for fun. Underline those last two words: for fun.

Many have feared that one day progress will come to a halt, that science will end. In fact, we are at the beginning of infinity, and we will always be at the beginning of infinity precisely because we can improve our ideas.

This finite resource model of the world implicitly assumes finite knowledge. It says, 'Knowledge creation has come to an end. We are stuck at this current point, and, therefore, based on the knowledge that we have currently, these are all the resources available to us. Now we must start conserving.'

If there was a meaning to life, then we would all be stuck trying to figure out that meaning, and the moment that a person found that meaning and shared it with everybody else, then we would all be enslaved to that particular meaning. So, I think it's liberating that there's no meaning to life; you can create your own meaning...

Things to aspire to move past in your life: First, you want to get out of your parents' basement. Then you're living with roommates. Then you wanna get away from roommates ... Then you're driving to work. Then you want to get of a commute. Then you're waking up to an alarm clock. Then you want to get away from an alarm clock. Then you're basically living a highly calendared and scheduled life. You want to get away from your calendar. Then, finally, you want to get away from email and text messages.

All probability is actually subjective. Uncertainty and randomness are subjective. If you don’t know what the outcome’s going to be, so you roll a dice, that's because you individually do not know; it’s not because there is uncertainty there deeply in the universe.

Zeno’s paradox is about the domain of pure mathematics. But we don’t live in a world of pure mathematics; we live in a world of physics. And if the physics says that we can transverse an infinite number of points in a finite amount of time, then that’s what we’ll do regardless of the mathematics says.

We never have the final word—and that’s a good thing. That’s a really positive, optimistic thing because it means we can keep on improving, we can keep on making progress, and we can keep on discovering new things. There is no end of science.

Domestication, harvesting crops, metallurgy, chemistry, physics, developing engines and rockets—all of these are things that are taking things that we thought were worthless and turning them into resources. Uranium has gone from being completely worthless to being an incredible resource.

It is questioning these deepest assumptions that we have where we think there's no possible way we could be mistaken that leads to true progress, to genuine fundamental change, in the sciences and everywhere else.

I do think clear thinking allows you to make better decisions and have better judgment—and better judgment is everything. If you have good judgment in this life, you're going to thrive in the modern world, because you will be applying judgment everywhere.

No one has ever seen the core of the sun and no one will ever observe the core of the sun. But we know about stellar fusion. We know that hydrogen nuclei are being crashed together there to form helium and in the process producing heat. We don’t see the big bang. We don’t see the movement of continents. Almost everything of interest in science we do not observe.

That's what science is ... It's not about trends and predictions; it's about explanation. Only once we have the explanation can we in fact, make the prediction.

I think, 100 years from now, people will look back, and it will be considered laughably archaic that we used to pass around pieces of paper, [and we] had something literally called a 'money printing press' that they could [use to] print as much money as they wanted in the background. And so, by doing that, they impoverished all of society in a hidden way.

I just feel like the attacks on free speech are the single most disgusting feature of modern technology and modern society. And the fact that Twitter and Facebook censor so often and so freely... If I could wish anyone out of existence, I would wish the trust & safety teams and their jobs out of existence. I think censorship has no place on these platforms. We are absolutely capable of taking care of ourselves...

All knowledge is conjectural. It's always being guessed. It's our best understanding at any given time.

There goes my solution for Zeno’s paradox, which says before you can get all the way somewhere, you have to get halfway there. And before you can get halfway there, you have to get a quarter of the way there, and therefore, you’ll never get there.

Almost everything of interest that you know about science is about the unobserved.

What we know about quantum theory is that all physically possible things occur.

Length is not described by quantum theory; it's described by the general theory of relativity. And in that theory, space is infinitely divisible. There is no smallest possible length or time.

What we're seeing is the transition of power from institutions to individuals, but it's going to be messy. It's going to take a couple of generations, or at least a generation. And in the meantime, the institutions are fighting back.

In general relativity, the idea is the opposite. It says things can continuously vary, and the mathematics requires that things be continuously variable so they can be differentiated and so on. The idea there is that you can keep on dividing up space and you can keep on dividing up time.

Every mathematical theory is held inside a physical substrate of a brain or a computer. You're always bound by the laws of physics and these pure, abstract domains may have no mappings to reality.

Web3 doesn't have to appeal to everyone; it's trying to appeal mainly to the applications that would otherwise be deplatformed or benefit from decentralization or creating a frontier where no such frontier currently exists ... There's no ironclad law of software that all new software movements have to appeal to all people.

When you look back on your life, the moments you're gonna be proudest of is when you rose past circumstances that were difficult, when you rose past your suffering, and then you accomplished something. That's where character is built. That's where resumes are made. That's where people have their proudest moments.

Intelligence is a cheat code ... You can swap it for almost anything else in the modern world. Because the modern world is full of so much leverage, smart people can employ that leverage with code or media or labor or capital to, kind of, magnify what they want. They can make good decisions, and then the impact of the good decisions is magnified by leverage.

If you cannot communicate clearly, then it is a sign that you cannot think clearly.

I think that having a clear mind and clear judgment and clear thinking is a cheat code to life, and I tend to find there is a correlation... between people who are clear communicators, clear thinkers, and have good judgment. And you want to surround yourself with people that have good judgment, because that's how you're gonna win at life in general.

The point of reading is to spark your own creativity and to spark your own thoughts. So, it's almost like you're starting a fire in your brain.

Something like web3, heck yeah, you bet they're gonna try and stop it. You bet they're gonna try and outlaw it. You bet they're going to crack down on it. If they didn't, then it wouldn't actually be that valuable ... That said, I do think that countries that try to ban or stop or slow down web3 are going to find themselves, increasingly, on the wrong side of history.

We’re caught in this Schelling point, this coordination point, for the institutions: How do I know if I should hire you? Will you have a diploma from Harvard? I know it’s not as good as it used to be. I know a Harvard humanities diploma’s probably nonsense at this point, but I don’t have any other credibility metric to filter you, and I need to do it in an efficient way.

Science is not about predicting where the trend starts and where the trend goes.

A resource is just something that, through knowledge, you can convert from one thing to another.

The core of web3 is open source. The core of crypto is open source ... In fact, I think it was Chris Dixon who said that web3 is the business model for open source.

That's sort of my definition of web3—the code is open, the data is owned by the users, and the network is owned by the contributors.

So much of the world, so much of it is your interpretation of the world. So much of mindset is your mindset. To a tree or a rock or a house or even another person, reality is very different. To an object, reality is neutral. To another subject, reality is subjective from their point of view.

One thing I would be careful about is mixing what is true with what you want to be true. And I see this happening in business a lot where a new business trend comes up, people are excited about it because they want to make money, but then they also start projecting all these other fantasies onto it. And I'd be very, very careful about that.

A really good book has to be read slowly. If you're reading books quickly, and you're proud of the speed at which you're reading them, you're reading the wrong books. It's like lifting weights that are way too light; you're just cranking through the exercise.

The fact that we have not yet seen mass Bitcoin adoption in developing countries is a bit of a yellow or red flag for the industry. It means that it's still super hard to use, people don't understand the concept, and they still haven't figured out the advantages.

These days, I just try to have less opinions about things. I kind of feel like I don't need to have an opinion on everything. And that's not for being right or wrong; it's just to kind of have mental clarity and to have peace of mind.

I think a lot of the modern conflicts that are otherwise avoidable are driven through fear. So, always be very, very wary of people who are trying to scare you. Usually, they're up to no good.