Birthday Musings and Wisdom

Opens November 5th 2020 on his 33rd birthday, born in 1987 in Wailuku, Hawaii, delivered by his OB-GYN grandfather who delivered over 4000 babies, with birthday wishes from 30 countries and two heads of state.

Contrasts safe professions like doctors and professors who must follow rituals and be let in with entrepreneurs' non-linear paths, citing Jack Dorsey becoming a licensed massage therapist while building Twitter.

Recounts founding three crypto companies, Invictus Innovations, Ethereum GmbH, and Input Output, the last of which got the job done after he learned HR, budgets, project plans, and contract negotiation.

He learned patience and respect for iteration, getting it right enough to reach the next step, a lesson schools fail to teach since they treat mistakes as moral failings rather than the source of passion in fields like physics.

There is a huge quantity of unvalidated opinionated information, and no complex problem has a single solution, so people fight not over solutions but over differing values, talking past each other.

Shares his simple value that if you take money to build something you must build it or at least leave something behind, unlike an industry willing to dump hundreds of millions into marketing to be first mover.

100 million users is meaningless without substance, citing MySpace and Pets.com as vanity-metric chasers who never built anything of value.

The lesson recurs from ICO mania to altcoin mania to the current DeFi mania, exploding in people's faces while the retail users get the bill and the project creators keep the money.

The most political US election since 1860 has people angry with predictable violence coming, and recommends Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People with its idea of starting with the end in mind, imagining your own funeral.

Alfred Nobel, a weapons manufacturer, read his own mistaken obituary and created the Nobel Prize so his name would mean the highest honor instead of dynamite.

People are not islands but interconnected, living off the handed-down labor of others even to live off the land, so relationships matter deeply.

The greatest people understand relationships are not just barter but building rapport, accepting people, making them feel safe, and genuinely listening, once the standard and now the exception.

Cites George H.W. Bush, who wrote over 30000 handwritten letters and befriended his SNL impersonator Dana Carvey, sending him get-well notes, a model of acknowledging people across radically different politics.

Admits a reputation early on for being difficult with low tolerance and strong opinions, learning that an emotional bank account of listening and acknowledgment turns raging into forcing people to be better.

Marvels that all wisdom, from Stoics like Marcus Aurelius and Seneca to Taoism and Buddhism to dying philosophers on YouTube, is now fully accessible yet too few consume it.

Most people are unhappy, few like Matthieu Ricard reach nirvana, and modern society forces no search for meaning, causing boomerang kids and high suicide rates in Switzerland, Japan, and the US.

The veil is pulled back on the old rituals and religions, but a marketplace of ideas allows synthesis, citing Viktor Frankl's logotherapy and Man's Search for Meaning against the distraction economy of alcohol and vices.

As peers start dying or getting sick in your 30s you grasp life's fragility and finiteness, asking what makes time well spent, drawing on thinkers from Ernest Becker to Albert Camus's Myth of Sisyphus and Sartre on absurdity.

Introduces the value of mirrors, things that show who you actually are rather than who you aspire to be, which is why people avoid institutions that do that like the Government Accountability Office.

The whole crypto industry is a mirror to central banks' monetary policy, an anathema exposing their lies, and soon AI-enforced accountability systems will reveal how honest people are in every dimension of life.

Uses meditation as an example where brain-computer interfaces like Muse measure brain waves to give beginners a feedback loop, applying deliberate practice to every area of life.

Once he saw failure as a personal failing but now looks for it, asking how he will fail at a thing and judging new fields by whether they have mirrors that show who he really is.

Asked about life's greatest pain across 50 countries, he calls unrequited love an emotional cancer, citing a Greek saying that you never forget the people you help who then screw you.

The deeper pain is being misunderstood as a creative non-conformist forced to live as a pariah, citing a history professor who asks students who would have been abolitionists in 1850.

The be-that-guy non-conformist with crossed arms at a Nazi rally is rare because conformity keeps your job and family, which is why society venerates Mandela and Steve Jobs, who simply chose to set fear aside.

As the first in three generations of doctors to take a different path everyone thought him crazy, and his mother's breaking point was his Larry King interview in Toronto, since Larry King had interviewed Nixon and Reagan.

Caring nothing for external validation is the most liberating thing, since those who love you stay even if they think you are crazy, and that liberation is how you change the world.

Society undervalues creativity, and he hired Dor Garbash as Voltaire product manager partly for an ASCII heart in his PhD dissertation, giving Cardano the largest DAO in the world.

Advises parents that children decide under their watch whether creativity is good or bad, thanking his own saintly parents for a rich fertile environment he pays forward at his company.

Turns to health, noting coronavirus gave him a full checkup that came back great, but that the decisions he makes today decide whether he is healthy in his 50s, 60s, and 70s given the latency of chronic disease.

Cites a Buddhist saying that people work hard to get wealthy then sick then spend the wealth to get healthy, and his grandfather who retired a millionaire only for his grandmother's Parkinson's to end their plans, warning against a deferred life.

Reflects that at 33 he will soon be the oldest in the room, like the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs joint interview by Walt Mossberg at All Things D in 2007, so health and meaning grow ever more important.

Thanks the community, comparing their loyalty to the fans who followed conservative broadcaster Rush Limbaugh, now facing terminal lung cancer, recalling his own childhood volunteering at Judy Quillivan's cat refuge, and closes to go get a dry-aged steak.