Pinned
We don't need no education
We don't need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teacher, leave them kids alone
Michael P Gibson
17.8K posts
Michael P Gibson
@William_Blake
Coffeehouse radical capitalist. Gutter whiskey poet. Cofounder 1517 Fund + Thiel Fellowship
- In 1665, Cambridge University closed b/c of the plague. Issac Newton quarantined himself at his childhood home. It was the most productive time of his life. He discovered the calculus & laws of motion. Stuck a bodkin in his eye to study optics. How will you spend the next year?
- Not many know he was an applicant to the Thiel Fellowship way back in 2013 or 14. We passed on him because we didn't think a media company had the scalability of tech startup. Our mistake! But Charlie kept coming to our events for a long time.Charlie Kirk was a HELL of an operator. What an entrepreneur. Even if you don't like him, just look at the organization he built. Look at the way he brought high performance out of people so young. He represented a standard of excellence and discipline you don't often see anymore
- Courage is in shorter supply than geniusAgency > Intelligence I had this intuitively wrong for decades, I think due to a pervasive cultural veneration of intelligence, various entertainment/media, obsession with IQ etc. Agency is significantly more powerful and significantly more scarce. Are you hiring for agency? Are
- I was always puzzled as to why there wasn't an in-depth book on the origins of PayPal. Jimmy Soni's new book, The Founders delivers. Superbly written. And truly extensively researched - interviews w/ all the main players (@elonmusk @peterthiel @mlevchin @DavidSacks @reidhoffman)
It’s a race between technology-driven abundance and government-driven poverty.- How’s this for a sense of destiny — when he was 16 years old in 1890, Churchill wrote this to a friend:
- Startup idea: bathroom club. This startup owns and maintains nice bathrooms in cities across America. Only members who pay membership dues are allowed to use the facilities. Starbucks/Equinox but actually for bathrooms. There has been a tragedy of the commons w/ respect to
- WTF Happened In 1971? Very much understudied era in history. The fork in the road, when stagnation began to spread.
- Gates paid way more than Elon's offer to divorce his wife. Bezos paid about the same. Some billionaires want mistresses. Others want free speech.
- We need national rent-seeking controlWe need national rent control.
- About the same time Larry Summers said the Thiel Fellowship was “the most misdirected philanthropy of the decade.”
