If the main concern is trying to ensure that you don't suffer from severe disease or risk of death... all three vaccines, while not perfect, seem to be effective. If your concern is around preventing symptomatic disease... the data we have today suggests that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are more effective [than Johnson & Johnson's] ... That said, they also seem to have slightly more adverse events associated with them. When I say 'adverse events,' it's fatigue or feeling crummy or pain, etc.

If the work you’re doing isn’t either leading to something being built or taking care of people directly, we’ve failed you, and we need to get you into a position, an occupation, or a career where you can contribute to building.

If you've built something even half interesting, there will be a set of users who find it compelling, and the whole purpose of the product-market fit engine is to identify that segment and systematically expand it over time.

One of the greatest challenges that's facing this country and the world is type 2 diabetes. I think about preventing it kind of the way we thought about sanitation a hundred years ago. No one should die from not having sewers. No one should die from type 2 diabetes.

Rebels are, in fact, not people who break rules just for the sake of breaking rules, but people who break rules that hold them and others back in a way that's positive and constructive for an organization.

We have top-end universities, yes, but with the capacity to teach only a microscopic percentage of the 4 million new 18-year-olds in the U.S. each year, or the 120 million new 18-year-olds in the world each year.

We worry about things like nuclear waste... but we don't worry about how much harm is caused by the pollution from other kinds of power generation. Worldwide, there are hundreds of thousands of deaths a year from people breathing coal dust and emissions from coal plants.

DeFi stands for decentralized finance, but it's really more like open finance. Until now, the history of finance has been centralized or closed. You go up to a bank or some other kind of financial service provider and you engage in a relationship with them where they promise they'll do certain things... But, ultimately, you're putting your money into a black box and you're hoping—and trusting—that they're going to do it exactly like they said. Decentralized finance (DeFi) is an effort to deconstruct that and make all those pieces open and transparent.

The idea here is owning Elon Musk's secret master plan as an NFT could be valuable [or] Jack's first tweet as an NFT is valuable ... You can imagine in the future that the next Elon Musk or the next Jack [Dorsey] brings their big idea into the world as a blog post that is an NFT, and supporters... crowdfund to buy that NFT from the author. And potentially, that crowdfunding is actually used to finance the creation of that big idea.

The reason I thought GMOs were important to include in this book is because they are a great way to help us tread more lightly on the planet. They cause the crop yield to increase and you can grow GMO plants in different places. If climate change happens, you're going to need plants that can survive heat waves and droughts. The GMO toolkit is our best toolkit for accomplishing those things right now, and yet it's stridently opposed by governments and all kinds of groups around the world.

Video games don't make you antisocial. In fact, they're probably one of the most social things you can do.

I actually personally think that audio hasn't changed that much yet ... Discovery is still difficult. Search is still difficult. It's really like a one-way listening experience—you aren't interacting with other listeners; you aren't interacting with the creators. Creators still have to rely on very old business models for monetization.

Tens of millions of laid off workers and their families and many millions of small businesses are in serious trouble right now, and we have no direct method to transfer them money without potentially disastrous delays.

If it’s true that attention is the only scarcity we have in this world of abundance, how come you and I are giving our attention away for free?

I think the real advantage that we're starting to see is that wearables are moving way beyond step counting into much more clinically relevant measurables. That is part of the difference between the earlier attempts of quantified self and what we have now.

The reality is SARS-CoV-2 is not going away ... [It will] probably be endemic like influenza, like the flu. And we're already seeing efforts by the vaccine producers, like Moderna, that have announced that they are already developing an updated version of the vaccine for new emerging dangerous variants.

Just to spend a lot of hours doing something and not have success or meaning—you might as well not spend the hours doing it. There are a lot of people who say, 'I worked 15 hours today, and I work Saturday and Sunday,' but nothing happened! That, to me, is not effective.

I think it's a fairly common mistake for founders to see that a product is working well and then move on to building the next one. They often forget just how hard it was to achieve product-market fit in the first place.

So much ink has been spilled about the driver-less car, but I think the idea of a kitchen-less home is more realistic.

You want to have a great deal of conviction of where you're trying to head, but you want to have a lot of flexibility inherent in how you're going to get there and what the tactics are. Then, you want to be able to run a lot of experiments against that, and you can diversify your risk against any one theory by doing so.