Beginning with brand rather than substance is dangerous.

But the indeterminate future is somehow one in which probability and statistics are the dominant modality for making sense of the world. Bell curves and random walks define what the future is going to look like. The standard pedagogical argument is that high schools should get rid of calculus and replace it with statistics, which is really important and actually useful. There has been a powerful shift toward the idea that statistical ways of thinking are going to drive the future.

American government is not dominated by engineers, it is dominated by lawyers. Engineers are interested in substance and building things; lawyers are interested in process and rights and getting the ideology correctly blended. And so there is sort of no really concrete plan for the future.

If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth.

If you think about basic science or coming up with new theories of mathematics, these are not the kinds of things which are necessarily a well-defined market to pay people.

As an investor-entrepreneur, I’ve always tried to be contrarian, to go against the crowd, to identify opportunities in places where people are not looking.

Google makes so much money that it’s now worth three times more than every U.S. airline combined.