Society has conditioned you to seek happiness and pleasure behind every street corner. Your entire day is completely and utterly devoted to the search for small doses of pleasure, which you attempt to gather into large doses. And that becomes your entire life.... one large, never-ending chase. And that will never end.

I think counting on the government to save you in anything is sort of silly. They can't take care of your health ... The FDA Food Pyramid has literally been upside down for the last 50 years, but no one calls them out on it. Grains and simple carbs are at the top still, and the whole thing is complete nonsense.

Everyone's a chaser. Everyone's a pleasure-chaser. Everyone's looking for one dose after another. Haha, hehe with their stupid friends. Socialization, social media, this and that, Instagram, whatever it may be. That's what everybody does. No one gets fulfillment in anything.

I think children give you the unique opportunity to genuinely love something more than you love yourself. And I think that is really important for being happy because the moment you love something more than you love yourself, you're no longer self-obsessed; you're no longer thinking about yourself all the time. And the source of misery is thinking about yourself all the time.

There's a lot of people who think that coding will be automated. These people have never written serious code ... There is no automaton that will create the next Bitcoin. There is no automaton that will create the next Quake. There is no automaton that will create the next Minecraft. It just does not exist. Those are creative efforts. Creativity cannot be programmed. We do not know how to program creativity.

Truth is a solitary pursuit, because there aren't many people in the world who are genuinely seeking truth. Therefore, by definition, all of your so-called friends are going to be individuals who aren't interested in truth. Therefore, you will always be the black sheep and the odd man out.

You have to find something bigger than you in life eventually, and if you don't, you blow yourself up—maybe not physically and literally but probably mentally ... That could be children, that could be God, that could be a cause, that could be some personal spirituality, that could be some movement, that could be some circle. It could just be the 20 cats that live in your apartment and you love them to death. But whatever the heck it is, you got to love something more than you love yourself because if you don't, you blow your brains out.

If meditation is real... it should be doable by anybody anywhere—because it's literally the art of doing nothing. Any creature can do nothing. It's like the most basic thing—just do nothing. And anyone should be able to do it and should be able to do it in any place at any time. If you need a special mandala or a special cushion or a special sarong... that's not real. That's just human man-made usual bullshit. If something is truly universal, then it is available to all human beings at all times in all places.

The computer is the most powerful tool ever invented by humanity. In your pocket, you're carrying the single most powerful thing that all of humanity has ever invented ... Every little bit you can do to figure out how to use that better than you did before is going to give you enormous leverage.

I think most people are working too hard. I think most people are just basically spinning wheels... The older you get, the better you get at just declining work that you know is useless. I have this theory that 99% of work that you do is useless. You still have to do it because it's iterating your way to the 1% that is useful. But, in an ideal world, if you are omniscient, you would just cut to the 1%.

I tell people to learn to code the same reason why I'm sure, in the 1600s or 1700s, it was good advice to tell people to learn to read and to write. Yes, not everyone is going to be a great author. Yes, not everyone is going to be an avid reader. But they should all know how to read and write. And I think coding is just the new literacy. For the same reason you learn mathematics so you're not innumerate, and for the same reason you learn to read and write so you're not illiterate, it's important to learn to code so that you are not computer illiterate. Computer literacy is a basic fundamental skill that will be a requirement of society going forward.

If you wanted to get rich in the 1700s or 1800s, you did with labor. If you wanted to get rich in the 1900s, you did it with capital. If you want to get rich in the 2000s, you do it with code, maybe media.

The world is not rigged in such a way that the harder you work, the more you get. Hard work is a prerequisite, it is an ingredient, but you cannot outwork everybody else; there just aren't that many hours in the day.

The world is false. Society is false. Everything around you is false. The world is, in fact, evil. And it's evil because it is based purely upon untruth. So, all of society is false. Everything you see around you, all the books that are published are false; all the newspaper clippings are false; all the media's false; all the nonsense that the spiritualists talk and the motivational speakers and the self-help and self-development and the gurus, it's all false. And it's all false because it is all based upon getting you to believe something.

'Do your best' has no meaning. Do you do your best when you walk to your car?

Everyone in the world has been completely and utterly conditioned by words and ideas and concepts and notions. They throw around words, because the words have been thrown to them.

The spiritual body is completely covered up—you lost touch with it because modern society is so full of choices and distractions that we're just always amusing ourselves. We're amusing ourselves to death ... You want to give that a chance to emerge. And, right now, I would argue that most people are spiritually obese—and I mean like 300-pound obese; I don't mean 180-pound obese ... That means that their true self, which they've lost connection with—their subconscious, is buried under layers and layers of non-inspection.

In this modern day and age, the leverage that's available to any given human is far greater than it's ever been. You can go on Clubhouse; you can talk to thousands of people. You can put out a tweet that can reach millions of people. You can write a piece of code that can be run on millions of machines ... Everything is available to you. Everything is out there, both to consume and to produce. If you're sufficiently driven and impatient, you will figure out how to navigate your way through that ecosystem.

Every successful person I know has an action bias—almost to a fault. When they think of something, there's a very short interval before you find them just doing it. And they're okay with failing. They're okay with iteration—trying over and over and over. In fact, the least successful people are the ones stuck in analysis paralysis.

Mental models are stupid people. All of these things that you hear in the intellectual realms are nonsense and garbage. The mind has to be trained toward truth. And that cannot be done through any kind of academic or intellectual pursuits.