Kevin Tanaka

Steve Jobs in 1983 on what makes computer programming different from every other medium: This is a 26-year-old Steve Jobs two years before he'd be ousted from Apple reflecting on the strange nature of software. He starts with an observation: "It's an odd thing… you've never seen an electron, but computer programs have no physical manifestation at all. They're simply ideas expressed on paper. Computer programs are archetypal." To make the point land, he compares programming to television. When you watch tapes of the JFK funeral from 1963, he says, you'll start to cry. You'll feel the same emotions people felt twenty years ago. You can feel the excitement of Neil Armstrong landing on the moon. That's what television does well. It captures experiences and recreates them. "It takes a lot of money and it's somewhat limited, but we can do a pretty good job of that." But computer programming, Jobs argues, does something fundamentally different: "What computer programming does is it captures the underlying principles of an experience, not the experience itself, but the underlying principles of the experience. And those principles can enable thousands of different experiences that all follow those laws." His example is the video game. A Pong game encodes the laws of gravity and angular momentum. It sets up "this stupid little Pong game, but the ball always follows these laws." No two Pong games are ever the same and yet every single one obeys the same underlying principles. That's the distinction Jobs is drawing: television preserves a moment. Software preserves the rules that generate moments. A film captures one sunset. A program captures the physics that produce every possible sunset. It's worth sitting with how early this was. In 1983, most people thought of computers as calculators or word processors, tools for completing tasks. Jobs was already describing them as something closer to a new artistic medium: a way to bottle the laws of a world and let other people run them.

Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann on building company culture: "It's a lot more like gardening than architecture."

"Scaling laws are not physical laws. They're empirical observations just like Moore's Law was." Satya Nadella on why AI's exponential growth is real, but not guaranteed:

Scream (1996) BTS lost footage

Peter Lynch's brutal truth about investing:

Bill Gates in 1984, age 28, on why money was never the point: In a TODAY show interview with Jane Pauley that aired on March 26, 1984, a young Bill Gates sat down to discuss the early days of Microsoft, which was on track to do just over $100 million in revenue that year. When Pauley pressed him on when exactly he became a millionaire, Gates deflected: "Microsoft's a company owned primarily by its employees. And it's not easy to put a value on it." Pauley pushed further, asking if he was "kind of half telling" her that he wasn't in it for the money. Gates responded: "I don't think anyone at the company's in it for the money. It's a much more exciting field than trying to measure exactly how much we're selling or how much it's worth. The creation of these programs is something you can sit down and see people enjoying and solving real problems." Gates then explained why he dropped out of Harvard, framing it as a matter of urgency rather than ambition: "Things move very quickly in the industry and it was really the urgency to get out there and be the first one to put a BASIC on the microcomputer. That caused me to drop out." When Pauley called him a genius, both as a computer whiz and as someone with business acumen, Gates pushed back on the label but described what actually energised him: "I enjoy working with the people, talking about what we're going to get done, getting real excited, making sure that the structure is there, that the ideas get measured properly and really leading the company. That's exciting." Asked whether he'd burn out before 30, given how common burnout was in the industry, Gates was direct: "The work we're doing, it's not like we're doing the same thing all day long. We go into our offices and think up new programs. We get together in meetings. We go out and see end users. We talk to customers. There's so much variety and there's always new things going on. I don't think there'll ever come a time when that would be boring." Finally, Pauley asked if he could ever see himself working for somebody else answering to a boss. "I'm used to having a company where the ideas that I have are something that I can easily pursue. So I think it'd be a tough transition."

Sundar Pichai on how his childhood in India shaped his belief in technology: The Google CEO grew up in a household where modern conveniences arrived slowly and each one fundamentally changed his family's life. He recalls waiting years for their first phone: "There was a 5-year waiting list and we got a rotary telephone but it dramatically changed our lives. People would come to our house to make calls to their loved ones." The impact extended beyond connecting with family. Sundar describes how the phone transformed something as routine as getting medical results: "I would have to go all the way to the hospital to get blood test records and it would take 2 hours to go and they would say 'Sorry it's not ready come back the next day.' 2 hours to come back and that became a 5-minute thing." That experience planted something in him: "As a kid, this light bulb went in my head, this power of technology to kind of change people's lives." Water was another lesson. Sundar explains what daily life looked like during a drought: "We had no running water. It was a massive drought, so they would get water in these trucks. Maybe eight buckets per household. So me and my brother, sometimes my mom, we would wait in line, get that and bring it back home." Years later, that same household had running water and a water heater. The contrast wasn't abstract to him. It was something he had physically carried in buckets as a child. "For me, everything was discreet like that. So I've always had this thing. Firsthand feeling of how technology can dramatically change your life and the opportunity it brings."

In 1977, Sylvester Stallone explained why he wrote Rocky and how he convinced Hollywood to let an unknown actor play the lead. When asked why he wrote the script, Stallone described what he saw as a problem with the films of that era: "I felt at the time that cinema, at least the movies I had been seeing were at an all-time low. It was everything was anti-society, anti-Christ, anti-government, anti-everything. And there was no one to root for." He believed films move in cycles, and he wanted to bring back something that had been lost: "I wanted to get back into the cycle of the films of the 40s and the 50s where people say, 'Hey, gee, I missed the good old films.' Yet Hollywood hasn't taken heed and hasn't made any good old-fashioned type films where morality was at the forefront." Up to that point, Stallone's career had been built on tiny roles, what he called "atmosphere": "I was mostly what is known as atmosphere, always in the background or the guy that was being the drunk that was being stepped over in the gutter and other lame roles." Writing Rocky was his way of giving himself one real shot before disappearing: "I felt that gee, if I was going to go down at least into professional obscurity, I wanted to at least have the opportunity to say to myself, well, you tried. You put your best foot forward and you didn't make it." He knew the character had to match what he could authentically play: "I surely couldn't pass myself off at least as a lawyer in a three-piece suit. I just don't think I have that kind of appeal or whatever it is. So I wanted to take it much more basic. A man from the street. All right. What kind of a man? An underdog. And that being a professional fighter I think has that connotation to it." When the script reached studio executives, they wanted a star. They floated James Caan, Burt Reynolds, Ryan O'Neal, Gene Hackman, and Robert Redford. Stallone's pitch for himself came down to persistence and economics: "Usually it's the old syndrome of knocking on the windows, pestering them, pressing my face in the door, honking their horn in the driveway. In other words, making a real pain in the neck out of myself." "I kept saying I work a lot cheaper and a lot harder and for a lot longer." The film was eventually made for $960,000, which Stallone described as roughly the cost of "a good toothpaste commercial."

Ray Dalio on building financial security across generations: Ray Dalio explains why most people get blindsided by economic shifts and shares three recommendations for the next generation. He starts with the core problem: "One of the problems is that the experience that you had as the last experience is the one that's going to stick in your mind and probably will not be the one that's going to get you. So that the next experience will be very very different." He uses his own family as an example: "I know my parents went through the Great Depression and then they missed out on the boom because then they're always thinking about that." The lesson? You have to study all kinds of crises, including inflationary ones, to get proper perspective. Then he lays out his three recommendations. Recommendation 1: Know your savings runway. "Think about your savings and how much money do you have for savings? And the best way to think about that is to think how much money do I spend each month and how much money do I have saved so that I can how many months am I going to be open?" He continues: "Value savings and calculate it because savings in that is freedom and security." Recommendation 2: Don't sit in cash. Most people assume cash is the safest place to park their money. Ray pushes back hard on that: "The least risk investment that you think from volatility is the least risk investment which is cash is the worst investment over a period of time." His framework for measuring this is straightforward: "You could judge that by judging the rate of inflation in relationship to the after tax income you're going to earn. So if you have an inflation rate that's two or 3% and you're earning 1% and you have to pay taxes on that 1% or the one or 2% that you're going to get, you're going to get taxed essentially at 2% a year and that's going to be a problem." Translation: holding cash quietly destroys your purchasing power every single year. Recommendation 3: Diversify, because you cannot predict the loser. "You have to move into assets that are other assets that are going to do better over a period of time. And when you do that, the most important thing I can convey to you is to diversify well because I can guarantee you that one of those assets, and you won't be able to pick the right one, will be disastrous in your lifetime." He makes the stakes explicit: "You will lose half of that savings if you're in the wrong one. And you won't know what the right one is."

"Great people don't need to be managed. Once they know what to do, they go figure out how to do it." Steve Jobs on why most managers get it backwards:

Ilya Sutskever's chilling prediction: We're building AI that can build the next generation of AI. The closest analog in human history? The Industrial Revolution. But this time, on a much shorter timescale.

Michael Jackson playing with children at Neverland Ranch

The greatest investors and traders master what I call "Active Patience"

"It's a very noisy world. We're not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us." Steve Jobs on why marketing is really about values, not products:

"Smart people don't ask for your credentials. They talk to you for 5 minutes and figure out if you know what you're talking about." Naval Ravikant on the disease of credentialism:

Roberto Carlos vs France, 1997 (Le Tournoi) A 30-yard free kick so insane it literally inspired physics papers on the Magnus effect

Every financial fraud follows the same pattern. Jordan Belfort explains how it happens:

Andrew Huberman explains the neuroscience of why we quit: It's not your muscles giving up. It's your brain hitting a noradrenaline threshold and shutting down voluntary control. Dopamine is the antidote.

Rich Roll on why waiting to "feel like it" is a trap: "You can't think your way into the mood that you seek or the state of mind that you aspire to inhabit. Action is the only thing that can trigger that change." Rich uses running as the perfect illustration of this principle. Imagine you wake up in the morning and you're supposed to do a run because you're training for a race. You don't feel like it. So what do most of us do? "We all resort to that state where we think, 'Well, I don't want to do it right now. I'll just wait until I feel like doing it and then I'll do it then.'" But here's the problem with that logic: "If you're waiting until you feel like doing something, chances are you're probably never going to get to it." The mood you're hoping will arrive on its own? It's not coming. Not without action first. "To take the action despite how you feel about it is the thing that catalyzes the state change." You don't run because you feel motivated. You feel motivated because you ran. He points to what every runner knows from experience: "When they finish the run, they're always glad that they did it. They don't generally regret it. And then they feel better." Notice the sequence. The good feeling comes after the action, not before it. The state change is the reward for showing up, not the prerequisite. And this isn't just about running. As Rich puts it: "That example is applicable to all areas of life." The workout you're avoiding. The conversation you're delaying. The project you're putting off until you're "in the right headspace." You're waiting for a feeling that only exists on the other side of doing the thing.

Rumination is one of the worst symptoms of depression. Yet many therapists indulge it instead of breaking the pattern. The best CBT and DBT practitioners do the opposite. They interrupt the spiral first.