Why do we fund public schools according to the home value of people's parents' homes? Why we do that? That's what we do in this country. It's barbarism ... Can you explain to a six-year-old why the quality of their education correlates to how nice their family's home is? It's an insane idea.

We have 100+ years of data on influenza; we do not have anything approaching that—we don't even have 1 year of good data—on SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19). So, until I have more confidence in the conclusions which are swaying all over the place on a weekly basis right now, I am going to assume the absolute worse and act accordingly.

I think voice is the next frontier ... I believe that Alexa and the Google home are the next iPhones, and that the next complete explosion in innovation and excitement is going to be what people build on top of the voice device when the voice device is at scale in a half decade.

One in four American women are back to work two weeks after giving birth... About a third of babies are born via c-section now, so you've got a material number of women who are coming back to work two weeks after giving birth, who still have wounds, and are still recovering from significant surgery.

What I'm saying to a lot of entrepreneurs is, 'Hey, here's some good news: If you started a business within the last 10 years, you've lived under what I think is a fake environment ... This is going to be great opportunity for you to build some scars.'

I wish that computer science departments and technology companies would think about talent that way colleges think about football teams. They go out and find the talent. They have recruiters out there looking for it.

From an evolutionary standpoint, we are who we are... because we have a tendency to overreact. We are under-penalized for overreacting and very, very penalized for under-reacting as a species if we're just looking at natural selection.

We are so detached from what is happening in the rest of the world, and I think a lot of that has to do with what we see on our social media feeds

Nick Bloom at Stanford did this great great experiment where people in call centers got to work from home instead of an office. Their productivity went up by over 13%, and they were half as likely to quit over the next six months.

To be able to actually create massive business impact has nothing to do with the ability to post hustle porn memes on social media... That does not advance your business, and instead, it promotes a really toxic idea that working yourself to death, sacrificing your emotional and physical health, all those things, it promotes this falsity that those are actually good.

If you look at the Spanish Flu of 1918, it wasn't one flu; it was three massive waves over the course of about a year. That's what happens when you let your foot off the brake—when you get excited, and you think you have this thing under control, and then all of a sudden, everyone starts going back to work. It screws the system. You end up seeing these massive waves again.

Mark Zuckerberg, as far as I understand it, wanted to build a social network to help people at Harvard meet each other. He ended up being the most dangerous person in the world. And now, incidentally, as a byproduct of that, gets to have thoughts about how public schools are in America.

I think we're really in our silos. We think that whatever is in our Instagram feed is what life looks like, and it's not the case. I think it's making us less compassionate and making us less able to love.

No one has so quickly, efficiently, and flamboyantly discredited the entire tau of philanthrocapitalism the way Donald Trump has in just two years. It is now inarguable that being a business person is no guarantee of intelligence. It is now inarguable that knowing one industry does not make you an expert even necessarily on that industry and certainly anything else. It is now inarguable that, in fact, being the guy who made ties in Mexico and China does not make you supremely qualified to bring jobs back from Mexico and China. Arsonists are not, in fact, the best firefighters.

Having dads take paternity leave is not just better for the health of the child, but also for the health of the birthing mother, both physically and emotionally

Most of these cultures have been created with all white and Asian men, and we have to ask ourselves, can these big technology companies actually change and welcome women?

If you have practiced thinking about worst-case scenarios, even when the unexpected hits, you will be better equipped to cope and make good decisions under duress.

If you're the smaller startup that has a real focus and traction with customers, you have some advantages against the large incumbent that has multiple lines of business, because it's harder for them to focus.

If you're not out there swinging for the fences in terms of wanting to be a unicorn and raising a hundred million bucks... you can actually do a lot of things differently, and you can do them on your own schedule, and you can do them for customers versus for investors ... Independence, to me, is the most valuable thing there is.

I think it's both right to check the power of the most powerful companies, and it's probably wrong to assume that their power is complete. Often, what happens is these very large companies are the ones that cause their own downfall—they trip over their own shoelaces, they don't react to something quickly enough, or they over-complicate their products.