1:32 Winston Churchill – the
busiest man in the 20th century: saw the last British Calvary
charge, writes 10 million words, holds office for 65 years, elected
Prime Minister twice, painted 500 paintings etc.
7:06 Can a change of location effect your relationship to
time?
12:37 Writing as zero-to-one
and the importance of getting something down in order to gain
momentum.
17:02 Michael Jordan’s Hall-of-Fame Speech where we learned how
importance anger as fuel and making a career of hanging onto
slights was to him. Could Michael Jordan have been Michael Jordan
without these characteristics?
20:30 How widespread is anger as fuel to success? Is it the best
method and how much correlation is there to someone’s success?
27:20 Anger as a “purity” in our current political landscape.
29:08 Taking a look at the history of change and how the News may
not be the best way to stay informed. Is the current
understanding of “being informed” is a vice rather than a
virtue?
36:20 To be “informed” need to
have basis of understanding before interacting with News sources in
order to contextualize and not come at news with hubris. Problem of
the twitter approach to news: a profession, reporting, that was
once about thoughtfulness, nuance, and the long-form has been
boiled down to 280 characters.
53:18
Peter Thiel’s brain
is in a perpetual Mexican standoff where two competing ideas are
constantly in opposition. Thiel seems to have a great ability to
frame subjects correctly. Eric Weinstein's idea that Thiel is the
world's wealthiest applied philosopher.
58:00 Extending Thiel’s First Principles Movement by simply reading
different things than what everyone else is reading, gathering
different materials.
1:00:02 Is there a danger where reading history becomes the same
thing as watching the news? Ryan’s interest in reading personalized
experiences of history wherein you can learn through other people’s
unique experiences, and more importantly, mistakes.
1:02:25 Ryan’s writing success
is owed to him taking the words of smarter people them him,
re-arraigning them and repackaging them into a unique system. Does
writing always have to be original?
1:05:19 What is it about daily
things that is so important to Ryan?
1:10:42 The idea of looking at
data that shows what artists believe is their best work and what
others believe to be their best work.
1:16:11 How do you know when
something is interesting?
1:20:32 How is Ryan such a
prolific writer?