Miscellaneous Artifacts
A Conversation with Jony Ive
Making things for people is the highest virtue - a profound service to the species. This was my "stoned ape" moment and one of the most influential talks i have listened to in my life to date about creating products, building companies and crafting/maintaining a vision. Truly remarkable.
The Extended Mind
The boundary of the mind is not the skull. Clark and Chalmers argue that cognition bleeds into the environment: a notebook, a phone, a collaborator can become genuine parts of the cognitive system. One of the most quietly radical ideas in philosophy of mind, and increasingly hard to dismiss in a world where we think with and through our devices.
The Fear of Being Average
"I'd rather fail gloriously than succeed conventionally."
Theodore Roosevelt — The Man in the Arena
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." Brilliant, brutal reality of doing anything meaningful. As you move through life, most people — critics — are not in the arena. They will never be in the arena. They are comfortable being spectators. Don't pay attention to them. Teddy says it best: they are timid souls who never know victory nor defeat. There is tremendous virtue in taking action and spending time intentionally towards a worthy cause.
Steve Jobs — Secrets of Life
"When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and you're job is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it… Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again." This quote is my totem. I come back to this a lot. This is my foundation, the lense by which i have trained myself to view life. once you realize that simple fact, you will never be the same.
The Straussian Moment
Genuinely what I believe to be one of the most fundamental philosophical pieces of the 21st century. Thiel's views on human primality, the shortcomings of the Enlightenment, religion, and esoteric versus exoteric truth cut tremendously deep and explain the bedrock of our civilization. Brilliant, and I would recommend that all who are discerning enough take the time to dissect and understand the fabric of western reality.
Silicon Valley's Secrets Are Hiding in Marc Andreessen's Library
"There are answers worth billions of dollars in a $30 history book." — Charlie Munger
What is New Media?
A masterclass in understanding how information moves through post-modern civilization. This essay maps the mechanics of new media with precision: the interplay between long-form and short-form, how ideas compress and expand as they travel, and why storytelling remains the core unit of cultural transmission regardless of the platform. If you want to understand how attention actually works, how narratives propagate, and why some ideas achieve escape velocity while others die in the feed, start here.
The Lighthouse Playbook
On preferential attachment: a16z is the star-making machine of Silicon Valley. Walk into the a16z lobby on Sand Hill Road and you are surrounded by old Hollywood memorabilia, film posters, books on the studio system. This is not decoration. It is philosophy. Great venture firms understand that building a company is an act of narrative construction, that capital follows story before it follows spreadsheets, and that the dynamics powering the Hollywood dream factory, the manufacturing of belief, magnetism, and cultural gravity around a person or idea, are exactly the dynamics that turn a startup into a category. This piece captures that playbook clearly.
What to Do
For young, ambitious people, the most virtuous thing you can do with your life is work on good, new, meaningful things. Take care of the world, make new things. This is not a call to productivity or career optimization — it is a moral claim. The world gets better when talented people spend themselves on hard problems that matter. Graham makes the case simply and directly: if you have the ability and the years, squandering them is a waste not just of your potential but of what could have been given to the world.
Curate People, Not Content
Practical wisdom you won't find in any MBA textbook or case study. A lot of what separates great founders from good ones comes down to talent aggregation: the ability to get brilliant people genuinely excited about solving meaningful problems. That's a skill in itself, and Naval gets at the intuition behind it here.