Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Chemistry is not torture but instead the amazing and beautiful science of stuff, and if you give it a chance, it will not only blow your mind but also give you a deeper understanding of your world.
On paper, I am a Tesla guy. I've got money, I'm a nerd, and for years I professionally ran a blog advocating for technology that helps decrease our impact on the environment. I love what Tesla does.
The complexity and nuance of YouTube's culture, creators, drama, genres, styles, and memes is what makes it wonderful for people on the inside, but it is also a wall that keeps people on the outside.
In the Big City, different feels good, like blazing a trail. In a small town, though, different can feel like trying real hard to look special. Or even like rubbing your neighbor's nose in your success.
I hate luxury for luxury's sake. I find it not just brash but societally disruptive. It's just another mechanism of manufacturing discontent by building a thing that most people want but can never have.
Ultimately, our ideas about robots are not about robots. The robot is a canvas onto which we project our hopes and our dreams and our fears... they become embodiments of those hopes and dreams and fears.
People sometimes think that a video pops out of my head with no more work than extracting a booger. Every video is a challenge (an exciting one, sure, but a challenge.) Every collaboration is complicated.
And when I think about that sunrise that I woke up to that morning, I just feel like I got as close to nowhere as I could get, and found out that it was more of a place than anywhere I've been in a long time.
No one really knows how trademarks work. I don't mean, 'Come along with me on this journey and you will be one of the righteous few who truly understands!' I mean, no one really understands how trademarks work.
The landscape of professional creation continues to get more complex. Organizations and platforms of all sorts are vying for a slice of the value created by the relationship between creators and their audiences.
You're going to make decisions that are not in your best financial interest because they make you happier or more fulfilled or because of your values. You're going to do that because you're a good, smart person.
When I was watching 19 and 20-year-olds go through this, dropping out of college to become famous on the Internet, I saw that it can go well but it can also go poorly, and usually it'll be a mix of those two things.
Podcasts, and the way they are distributed, are extremely simple technologically. Indeed, 'RSS,' the feed protocol that connects podcast apps to the audio files that they need, stands for 'Really Simple Syndication.'
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and other economic and social platforms are not trying to build businesses, they are trying to build countries. Countries with laws, law enforcement, borders, and economic policy.
The path to success isn't through my lizard brain, it's through high quality collaboration and making good stuff and understanding difficult situations fully enough to come up with good (or even great) solutions quickly.
The problem is, education in America is sub-optimal because it is an impossible thing to optimize. It necessarily has to be local because different schools face different problems. There are no one-size-fits-all solutions.
As long as we continue to invest in good content that increases excitement about and understanding of science, we're on the right side of this fight, and I have no problem at all stealing from the toolbox of the clickbaiters.
Hoaxes are nothing new. News media isn't hard to fool. It's fun to fool and people like to mess with people. It all goes to show you that we're not all that hard to fool. I think we should just accept that and trust people anyway.
My grandfather was a very successful businessman. He started off as an engineer, but moved to sales to management to executive over a long career. For a while, before I was born, he was the CEO of an oil and gas exploration company.
There are lots of YouTubers that no one knows about who are getting hundreds of thousands of views on content that we would be really upset to see. And no one's holding them accountable because their audience shares all the same biases.
The process of seeking fame is a process of seeking dehumanization. You are looking for it. You want it. But you only want the good parts of it. You want the part where people see you as just a collection of positive things and nothing else.
Creators of content on the Internet are very commonly creators of community. Often times, this community is the most interesting and the most valuable part of making stuff, and many creators require that relationship to inspire them to make stuff.
I think that we rightly spend more time thinking about and criticising the stuff that is really successful, because we want to make sure that we understand all the ways that it is both a positive and negative influence. It isn't always a bad thing.
Marriage can be a religious thing. It can also be a secular thing. And guess what? Not everyone in the world is of the same religion. Preventing gay people from getting married is not an expression of religious freedom. It's an expression of religious oppression.
I got my first trademark in 2005: 'EcoGeek.' It was the name of a blog that had become my job. I had a dream of turning it into a big business. After spending a huge amount of time and money attempting to 'protect' that trademark, I let it lapse. It was still 2005.
We often just accept the things that we like, and complain a lot about the things that we don't like. But if we could, like, intensely dwell on the really great things in life the way we intensely dwell on the negative things in life; I think that would be fantastic.
So the president is like, "Well, once upon a time it was Congress's job to decide whether or not we attacked countries, so let's let them decide." Which is funny, because, as we all know, if Congress were on fire, Congress could not pass the "Pour Water on Congress Act".
Copyright and Trademark are completely different things. Copyright prevents anyone from copying this article and posting it somewhere else. Copyright happens instantaneously the moment I write something down that is unique and from my brain. Trademarks are far more restrictive.
Everyone talks about how the anonymity of the Internet allows people to behave badly, but I think it's the other way around, that the anonymity removes the 'self' from the people we're talking to online. Other people lose their humanity in our eyes. The system is set up to dehumanize.
I still do believe in the power of the Internet for good. I believe it's a net positive. I believe that it does connect people. It does give people a chance to be more of themselves. It does allow for content to be created for audiences that were being completely ignored and neglected.
Hiring and retaining talent in the tech industry is expensive and vital. Those people have real power over their bosses, especially because it is often fairly easy for them to find work elsewhere, and employee walkouts are terrible PR for these leaders who are often obsessed with their public image.
There have been, in my life, a number of times when I have intentionally made decisions that I knew would mean I would make less money or be less influential. I did this because, for whatever reason, it just wasn't worth it. It wasn't worth the stress, it felt icky, it relied on me exploiting relationships that I valued. Stuff like that.
I was 27 when I uploaded my first YouTube video. I had a master's degree and was running a small business. I had had good jobs and bad jobs and was fairly secure in my identity and understood who I was. When my audience or the algorithm wanted me to be something, I knew with a fair amount of certainty whether I wanted to be that thing or not.
There were sirens and the cops were there and they took me to the police station and I got arrested, it was really embarrassing. They actually just- they impeached me over the whole thing, they tried, well, they did impeach me, but I didn't have to actually stop being president, so it was okay. The police weren't actually that involved, it was mostly Congress.
I deal with stress in two ways because there are two kinds of stress. There's stress that you can take care of and there's stress that you can't. The first one, I take care of it as fast as possible, because putting it off always makes it worse. Things that I can't fix? I think about the fact that I can't fix them. I think about why I can't fix them and I come to terms with the fact that this is a problem that I'm not going to overcome and that the world is not a wish granting factory.
But when you are being physically and psychologically tortured, it is difficult to remove yourself from the pressingness of the moment at hand. Here's how I dealt with bullying: I cried, I hated myself, I hated my life. I didn't deal with it, I survived it, but I never dealt with it. So here are two tips from someone with lots of experience. 1: It's not about you, it has nothing to do with you, it's about the assholes doing it to you. 2: Your job is not to deal with it, your job is to survive it, which you CAN do because it WILL end. And then yes, it will get better.