Journal

when negotiating, diplomacy, backchannelling and pitching doesn’t work, try brute force.

One of the hardest things to do in life, in entrepreneurship, in relationships, is to believe in yourself when no one else does. This part of the journey is the hardest, yet all what the ultimate destination is about. It’s not to prove others wrong. It’s about proving yourself right, to yourself.

"History never repeats itself. Man does" - Voltaire.

“If a factory is torn down but the rationality that produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a government but the patterns of thought that produced the government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves.” - Robert Pirsig I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change. I thought that thirty years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy, and to deal with those we need a cultural and spiritual transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.” - James Gustave (“Gus”) Speth

Calimg yourself is a full-time job. So many things in my external world are constantly affecting my groundedness and taking my center away. And if that wasn’t enough, my internal world quite often shakes me up and puts me off course. However, the tools for calming myself dont exist in the external world. The answers always lie within me.

It’s true that logic is usually the best way to succeed in an argument, but if you want to succeed in life it is not necessarily all that useful

Not everything that makes sense works, and not everything that works makes sense.

"Like an explosive awaiting a spark, unimaginably numerous environments in the universe are waiting out there, for aeons on end, doing nothing at all or blindly generating evidence and storing it up or pouring it out into space. Almost any of them would, if the right knowledge ever reached it, instantly and irrevocably burst into a radically different type of physical activity: intense knowledge-creation, displaying all the various kinds of complexity, universality and reach that are inherent in the laws of nature, and transforming that environment from what is typical today into what could become typical in the future. If we want to, we could be that spark." - David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity

क्यों डरें ज़िन्दगी में क्या होगा, कुछ ना होगा तो तज़रूबा होगा- Javed Akhtar This quote by the great Indian lyricist and poet roughly translates to "why fear what will happen in life. If nothing happens, you'll gain experience" Feeling this quite viscerally these days.

ever wonder why pink himalayan salt is pink? turns out, pink himalayan salt comes from a singular salt mine in Pakistan (formed millions of years ago after ancient seabeds dried up) and over time many minerals, notably iron oxide, seeped into the salt crystals. It is iron oxide that gives this salt a pink/rosy hint - bascially rust! Also turns out, that pink himalayan salt is actually no more healthier than regular salt. It's all marketing!

allow yourself to take a U-turn on things you once wanted, opinions you held strongly, career decisions you could have traded anything for, and feelings that once ruled your world. There's no playbook to life, stop living someone else's construction of how we ought to live. It's okay to spend many years going after something, whether it's a job, a person, a skill, or a place, and then once you get there, you realize that it's not for you. It doesn't matter what others might think of your decision to turn around and go in a different direction. Life is not linear. Life is too short to stick to one thing.

if you ask "why" enough times, you end up in the math or physics department at a university. if you still ask "why" afterwards, you end up in church.

one of the main things that made me curious about the AI 2027 article was their prediction that almost all the effort by frontier labs in model R&D was going to be directed towards developing better researcher agents, and not apps or tools.

why are humans always altering their mind/consciousness? Whether it's a coffee and a cigarette in the morning to alcohol and cocaine in the night, it feels like a lot of us are - in some way or another - constantly trying to change their perceived sense of reality. Hell - sometimes I think even a huge cup of icecream sends me to space. I personally know at least half a dozen people in my immediate vicinity that go on astral journeys via psychedelics almost every weekend, and are comfortable doing that for days at a time. Given we don't know pretty much anything about consciousness, it feels conterintuitive to conduct such experiments. But, is that really so?

hello world