Podcast notes: Ranji Nagaswami on MIB with Barry Ritholtz

On what brought her to UBS: 

• After business school, started as a quant. Ran the entire department globally running running FI eventually at UBS.Started at UBS and eventually held senior positions at Bridgewater as well. 
• Lived through the SNL crisis, asked to help with a high-yield portfolio, learned extensively from the chaos during that time frame. Essentially lived a career to jumping into things, being a problem solver throughout, eventually asked to run the division.

On markets 98-99: 

• "Buffet has lost it"- that was a saying then. Said she was a value investor herself in FI world. Gary Brinson, legendary value investor was critical in shaping her theories. Shortly after she joined, the firm was sold to Allianz capital. Then she moved to equities from FI, an unorthodox move according to her. 
• Barry mentions - best equity researchers all started as FI researchers. Ranji says its true because they understand cap structure, term structure, risk at a very granular level.
• 2000-04 - all of HY opportunities became value opportunities. Eventually Ranji rose to become CIO at Bernstein. Joined the firm at a troubled time. A fundamental reset was needed to firms retail investors
• Bernstein embraced the work of Kahnemen in terms of value investing. Recency bias, confirmation bias etc. shaped the retail offers to many retail investors
• She thought about, what are resources of risk/return needed to be though, and therefore brought down funds from 55 to 15
• Asset allocation strategies - were to single best way to manage biases

On the current Hirtle Callaghan position: 

• Now at Herdle Callahan, a firm that was the pioneer in the outsourced CIO business
• Think about an endowment, foundation, family - a 200 million firm that can not have the scale that is needed to attract human capital and everything else. Not just the operational backbone, but ability to access world class managers at low fees
• They are the mayo clinic. Someone comes in with an issue, and they need their problems solved

How do you fit in vs. other firms?

• 30 yrs ago, when the firm was formed, the outsourced CIO was not known. The Endowment model was not known. Single solution was not known. The industry didn't know any of that. Herdle Callahan firm is the largest standalone and privately owned firm with ~20 billion in assets today
• Most firms have conflict of interest as they have their own products (passive, active, liquid etc.)
• Factor investing was the firms way always, well before it was popularized
• Buying assets, any class, at the cheapest prices and reasonable valuations over long-time horizons is the firms strategy

On women in finance: 

• The data suggests that not much has changed. Ranji sees it as a personal mission. Balanced work force not just gender balanced workforce is her mission. Best possible pool of talent is important
• Process design is critical here. Inputs that drive recruiting, those need to be taken into account
• What's holding Wall street back? Unconscious bias. Leadership has not made it a priority 
• Barry mentions - women perform better as portfolio managers, and the make more unbiased decisions
• Ranji says - it's about culture of the firm

On asset management: 

• Pooling of assets was novel in the last 40 years, and it has been a tremendous innovation
• Savings have been more productive than before

Markets today: 

• We have come a long way from 2009, when everything was cheap. Interest rates have caused some of this. All risky assets are fully valued, and indeed over valued. Bond markets, the risk-free parts are fully valued. Credit is also looking fully valued as well. It's historical, relative to opportunities
• When you look at macro - earnings a strong, growth is fine, inflation is subdued, so we are prolonging this scenario
• Outside the US - earnings revisions are double digit
• Within equities - Europe is looking good. There is still room for improvement
• In the past 10 years of performance, Europe has done nothing
• Today, 10 years later, we have the excess of that. Risk free treasuries, corp orates, everything looks expensive to an extent

REITS, MLPs etc. vs. risk free: 

• Now, a negative view on energy. 4-6% weight in energy
• REITS - fully valued for a while now

Active vs. passive debate: 

• Journalistic excess for the most part. The firm is agnostic to this. There's time and place for both
• Today - Ranji is getting interested in active managers. In a market like today, active is looking better

On Aspen institute: 

• Aspen fellow now. Institute was created to ask leaders in business - what's their responsibility to society
• Using readings that are time tested - stoics, Aristotle, how do we trade off choices in society
• As we confronted with retail investors - all of the principles, to be a steward of client capital going forward

Experience at Bridgewater: 

• Fascinating institution in how they think about markets and risk. Broadened and deepened understanding there
• The culture piece, transparency, etc. in its benign form continues. 'How to be better at getting better' is the motto
• Bridgewater is a singular culture - the principles that have endured there - transparency and excellence

Herdle Callahan: Multiple asset classes - what's the process like for alternative investment selection: 

• First inform the client - if the market turns, the illiquid portfolio will double, this is explained to all clients
• No FoF. Within these asset classes - only investing in them - if it's cheap to public market beta
• Understanding correlation to rest of portfolio is important as well
• 11K HFs out there - most are correlated to equities. Merg-arb - is structural beta, don't wanna pay too much for that
• The portfolio construction for us - deeply focused on strategies of underlying managers. Deep research process on manager selection. Illiquidity premium must exist vs. the market

Whats the most interesting thing that people don't know about you? 

• "Conceptual creative side married to a hyper rational side has made me a leader thinker and a doer"
• Mentors were a very important factor. Burton Markhael was a mentor
• Never giving up on the value philosophy was important
• David Swinson helped shape philosophy of governance. People underestimate role on governance

Books: 

• Most important books in finance were on human behavior.
• http://ritholtz.com/2017/09/ranji-nagaswami-outsourced-chief-investment-officer/#more-190030

Impact investing - how significant is it? 

• Pension fund purchasing power is driving change in investing -  use capital for more productive uses in society. 
• "I'm a fundamental free market capitalist' ...but it has gone too far. Lack of responsibility - charging reasonable fees etc. is important. Changes are positive, but highlight the importance of  finance in society
• Increasing interest in ESG investing. More interest rather than actual commitment of capital
• It's not about dogma, it's about not being secondary to return generation

Outside office: 

• Mostly with Aspen leaders
• Meditation - talks about it at work

Advice to young people: 

• Be curious, be prepared, and build lasting relationships
• Only way to succeed in the market is playing the long-game. All you know, is how much you don't know

Notes From: David Enrich. “The Spider Network.” (4/19)

September 23, 2017 

“John Ewan was born five years after Minos Zombanakis fathered his interest-rate mechanism. But by 2005, his professional life revolved around Zombanakis’s creation. Ewan didn’t have any particular interest in finance or banking. Raised in a family of quasi-socialists, he aspired to be a scientist, majoring in biology at the University of Bath in southwestern England. Tall and with muttonchop sideburns, Ewan played the guitar and loved the theatre. But his real passion was travelling. ”

September 23, 2017 

“Back in England, the twenty-nine-year-old Ewan applied for a number of jobs. He eventually accepted one at the British Bankers’ Association and started working there in April 2005.”

September 23, 2017 

“The BBA wasn’t a bank. It wasn’t a government agency. It wasn’t even a company. It certainly wasn’t regulated. But it was probably one of the financial world’s most powerful institutions. And that was because the BBA controlled something called Libor.”

September 23, 2017 

“Zombanakis’s innovative method of calculating interest rates on large loans had quickly become popular, but for more than a decade, it had remained an informal mechanism. Whenever a group of banks teamed up on a loan, they essentially would arrange their own version of the benchmark. There was nothing etched in stone, no way to easily replicate the rate for day-to-day use.”

September 23, 2017 

“One impediment to accommodating these nascent markets was the lack of uniformity in how banks calculated interest rates that fed into swaps and other instruments; negotiating interest rates on a contract-by-contract basis was hardly efficient. At the request of the Bank of England, in October 1984 the BBA set up a committee of commercial bankers and powerful central bank officials to contemplate the issue. After extensive deliberations, the group hatched an idea: Each day, the BBA would collect from a group of banks—not just British ones, but also American and European lenders—data about how much it cost each of them to borrow money from each other, on a percentage basis down to two decimal places”

September 23, 2017 

“BBA would disseminate the average to the banks and others for use in various financial instruments. The number was dubbed “the BBA standard for interest rate swaps.” That didn’t exactly roll off the tongue, so the group decided on a marginally catchier acronym: BBAIRS. That name didn’t last long. On New Year’s Day in 1986, the BBA for the first time published something called the London interbank offered rate—Libor, for short. Pronounced LIE-bore, it would soon be the basis for much of the modern financial world.”

September 23, 2017 

“By the 1990s, the phrase “London interbank offered rate” was buried in the fine print of an increasing number of American loan agreements. Before long, the fortunes of just about anyone who borrowed money in the United States and, to a slightly lesser extent, elsewhere in the Western world hinged on Libor.”

September 23, 2017 

“From the start, though, Libor was prone to problems. Chief among those was the potential for banks to manipulate it for their own benefit. Doing that was alarmingly easy. In the 1990s, junior bank employees would simply pick up the phone and call in their submissions to financial data company Thomson Reuters every morning around eleven o’clock. A low-level Reuters employee punched all the banks’ data into a computer and calculated the averages. Nobody of any seniority monitored the process. Virtually all it took for a bank to skew Libor was for it to skew its own submission.”

September 23, 2017 

“Big providers of financial data were among the entities paying licensing fees to use Libor. So were banks. But the largest, most lucrative clients were those (like the Merc) that were spending lots of time creating new types of derivatives. Those derivatives needed to be based on something, and Libor often seemed like a good bet. Ewan got to work expanding the menu of Libor varieties and licensing out the benchmark for use in what he called an array of “novel derivatives.”

September 23, 2017 

“Each spring, Ewan and Merriman or another colleague fanned out across the City of London and Canary Wharf to check in with the banks about how they thought Libor was working. As far back as 2005, around the time that Ewan started his job, the BBA had been hearing scattered complaints about Libor’s integrity. That year, Barclays was the main dissenter. Its concern was that Libor was too high; banks seemed to be reporting data that overstated their borrowing costs.”

September 23, 2017 

“For more than a century, UBS—its name an acronym for its predecessor, the Union Bank of Switzerland”

September 23, 2017 

“a conservative lender, not aspiring to anything more than being a trustworthy servant of its mostly Swiss clientele. It was considered the premier place to work in Switzerland. Like (of course) clockwork, bankers were rewarded with promotions every two years. When they reached the rank of vice president, managers got to line their new office with their choice of wood: mahogany, walnut, or pine. But the bank had started to stray from tradition during the last decade of the twentieth century. Enviously watching Wall Street firms, Union Bank embraced practices such as hedge fund investing.”

September 23, 2017 

“Smith, a Brit, hadn’t attended college, having gone straight into banking in 1989, joining a company that would one day be absorbed into UBS. In 2003, he was transferred from London to the Zurich office, where he was a midlevel trader”

September 23, 2017 

“There was a password-protected Excel spreadsheet into which he was supposed to enter data every morning about how much it cost the bank to borrow money from other banks. Then he would hit a “submit” button embedded in the spreadsheet, and off the data went. The system was an upgrade over the phone-it-in approach that the BBA had used in previous years, but it was still clunky and prone to crashing.

Smith had basically no clue what he was doing. ”

September 23, 2017 

“Even as a rookie on the desk, he understood what was going on. The traders had big positions whose values hinged in large part on Libor—precisely what Marcy Engel and Richard Ross had warned the CFTC would happen. A lot of money was on the line. So Smith generally followed their requests when it came to what he entered into his spreadsheet. He didn’t see any reason not to.”

Notes From: David Enrich. “The Spider Network.” iBooks. 

Check out this book on the iBooks Store: https://itunes.apple.com/dk/book/the-spider-network/id1145710390?mt=11

Notes From: David Enrich. “The Spider Network.” (3/19)

August 13, 2017 

“In many industries, that would have been the final straw, but London’s financial arena in the 1980s was a wild, reckless place. The City was about to undergo the violent tremors of Margaret Thatcher’s deregulatory revolution, and hungry young traders and brokers were in high demand. Spencer resurfaced at a smaller brokerage firm called Charles Fulton. By now, despite his money-losing ways, he was developing an expertise in a fast-growing corner of the markets called interest-rate derivatives. When Charles Fulton converted into a publicly traded company in 1985, Spencer took his earnings—about $200,000—and with a few colleagues decided to create a new brokerage firm that would specialise in matching up buyers and sellers of interest-rate swaps and other derivatives. They launched Intercapital in May 1986. Its name would later be shortened to ICAP.”

August 13, 2017 

“One of the pieces of sage counsel that Brent Davies pounded into his impressionable mentee’s head, over and over again, was the following: “Never trust a broker.” Brokers, he explained to Tom Hayes, were like the hyenas of the investment banking world, wild, clownish figures who feasted on the carcasses left behind by stronger, more cunning predators—namely, traders. These weren’t run-of-the-mill stockbrokers, the types who handled many grandparents’ portfolios of blue-chip stocks. These particular middlemen—known in the industry as “interdealer brokers”—solely interacted with people at big banks and other financial institutions.”

August 13, 2017 

“The brokers—few of them university educated, but most of them highly astute—also were infamous for spoon-feeding traders bogus information that had no purpose other than tricking them into doing trades that weren’t really worthwhile to anyone but the brokers themselves. Similarly, if a trader wanted to spread misinformation in the market—for example, nudging the price of a thinly traded instrument higher based on a hazy rumour about pent-up demand for that particular product—a broker could be an ideal conduit. One illustration of the industry’s culture was that brokers used the word broking to mean “tricking” or “misleading”—as in, I was broking him to believe something that wasn’t true.”

August 20, 2017 

“ For really high-end clients, the Tradition brokers took things a few steps further via a luxury villa they rented in the Moroccan desert. During the day, they lounged poolside; at night, they went out to clubs in Marrakesh. The brokers and their middle-aged guests often returned to the villa with prostitutes in tow. One guest referred to the occasional Marrakesh jaunts as his “week [of] joy in the NSL zone.” That stood for “no sperm left.” Once, laughing so hard that they nearly cried, the brokers offered to pay a Moroccan prostitute the equivalent of two dollars to be defecated upon. “Yup,” one of those brokers reflected, “we are classy people.”

August 20, 2017 

“Hayes had started feeling distinctly unloved at RBS. That summer, a batch of his trades had gone wrong. He had been up about £600,000 for the year. Suddenly, he was down £100,000. The £700,000 swing was a pittance for a bank of RBS’s size, but it meant that managers needed to be informed. That turned out to be a problem: Hayes had started trading a new type of instrument without getting the proper authorisation inside the bank. It hadn’t seemed like a big deal, but now that he had lost money, that decision was going to get someone in trouble. Hayes’s boss didn’t intend for that person to be him. He instructed Hayes to write an e-mail to a manager a couple of rungs higher, acknowledging that he had been trading when he wasn’t supposed to. Within a few months, Hayes was told to fall on his sword and hand in his resignation. With an offer from the Royal Bank of Canada in his pocket, Hayes followed orders. The voluntary resignation didn’t leave any blemish on his records and was undetectable for future employers. Indeed, when the Canadian bank asked the investigative firm Kroll to perform a standard[…]”

August 20, 2017 

“In a follow-up phone call a few weeks later with UBS, the RBC compliance executive concluded that Hayes “had not been openly underhand, but was in some respects perhaps young and naïve. RBC would have given him ‘a good bollocking’ and subjected him to enhanced supervision with the aim of making a better human being of him.” The RBC executive added that “they had no proof that this was down to deliberate dishonesty. It may have been that it was simply a poorly constructed model or even the result of inadvertent error.” RBC recommended that UBS subject Hayes to three to six months of enhanced oversight.”

Notes From: David Enrich. “The Spider Network.” iBooks. 

Check out this book on the iBooks Store: https://itunes.apple.com/dk/book/the-spider-network/id1145710390?mt=11

Notes From: David Enrich. “The Spider Network.” (2/19)

August 13, 2017 

“On the trading floor at RBS, Hayes noticed that it wasn’t the biggest clients who elicited enthusiastic laughter and applause when they”

August 13, 2017 

“called. Instead, it was small pension funds and other unsophisticated investors—so-called dumb money. They lacked access to high-quality financial data and generally weren’t as sensitive to tiny differences in the prices that banks would offer them. In other words, they were ripe for being duped, and RBS traders fought to get access to them.”

August 13, 2017 

“BM had a problem. The company, with operations all over the world, had issued debt to finance its European businesses in Swiss francs and German marks. But IBM preferred to have all its debts denominated in American dollars—otherwise its finances were tethered to volatile and unpredictable international exchange rates. In 1981, IBM turned to Salomon Brothers for help. The Wall Street firm approached the World Bank—one of the leading issuers of debt anywhere, and an entity with a tolerance for bonds denominated in a variety of currencies—and convinced it to sell a slug of bonds that were identical to the IBM debt except for one crucial difference: They were in dollars. Then IBM and the World Bank simply swapped responsibility for making interest payments and eventually repaying the principal on their respective bonds. It was the birth of a new financial derivative: the swap.”

Notes From: David Enrich. “The Spider Network.” iBooks. 

Check out this book on the iBooks Store: https://itunes.apple.com/dk/book/the-spider-network/id1145710390?mt=11

Notes From: David Enrich. “The Spider Network.” (1/19)

August 6, 2017 

“Tom can sometimes come across as arrogant about his abilities,” a teacher wrote in 1992. “He should appreciate the value of diplomacy!” his English teacher said on another occasion. Hayes acknowledged the problem: “I need to improve my attitude in that I respect ideas I disagree with,” he wrote in a self-assessment.”

August 6, 2017 

“And Hayes became obsessed with collecting things. He stock-piled used train tickets. He built a vast army of toy metal soldiers. He amassed dozens and dozens of football stickers, which he arranged in particular orders. His purest love, though, was mathematics. He cherished the simplicity, the objectivity of numbers. They never lied, they never disappointed you, unlike so many people in his life. You couldn’t misinterpret numbers—a valuable quality for a literal-minded boy like Hayes. Equations were beautiful, not to mention reliable: Marriages could fail, friends could fight, girls could ignore you, and QPR could (and often did) lose, but the square root of nine was always three, the angles of a triangle always added up to 180 degrees”

August 6, 2017 

“ Hayes was watching people robotically feed coins into the machines and calculating which machine was due to deliver the next jackpot. Then he would put his money in. The tactic worked”

August 6, 2017 

“After Hayes’s first year in college, Brown told Sandy that her son could have a summer job working in the Treasury. She turned down the offer on Hayes’s behalf, without asking him. Sandy felt her son was too conservative to fit into Blair and Brown’s centre-left government. She described Hayes to acquaintances as a Thatcherite, a reference to the 1980s Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Coming from Sandy, the label was derogatory.”

August 6, 2017 

“Pulling off profitable transactions on behalf of clients wasn’t the only way that traders made money. They also were expected to place their own separate bets on the direction of markets and to amass positions so that they profited if their bets turned out to be correct. This was fundamentally different from market making, but market makers were among those plying this type of trade in addition to their main jobs.”

August 13, 2017 

“Hayes cannily accepted the UBS operations gig, but when he returned to Nottingham in the autumn, he started applying for trading jobs at other banks: the Royal Bank of Scotland, J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Deutsche Bank. He landed interviews everywhere other than at Goldman. When the Scottish bank offered him an entry-level position as part of the bank’s training program, he accepted and informed UBS that he no longer wanted the back-office assignment.”

August 13, 2017 

“Hayes started at the Royal Bank of Scotland that autumn. RBS’s office was on the bustling eastern edge of the City, just across a busy street from the Bishopsgate Police Station. Hayes’s starting salary was about £35,000, along with an expected £15,000 bonus—a substantial take for someone just out of university.”

August 13, 2017 

“Hayes spent most of his time doing menial tasks. There was a lot of data entry. He learned to use Microsoft Excel, whose spreadsheets served as the backbone for many of RBS’s trading models. He also scurried around doing personal favours for established traders—he got their keys cut, fetched their coffee, delivered their clothes to the dry cleaner, purchased gifts for their parents and girlfriends. Hayes, like plenty of grunts on trading desks, endured merciless mockery. One subject of harassment was his clothes—he still dressed too well. He wore a jacket and tie to work while most colleagues opted for a business-casual look of slacks and a light-coloured button-down shirt. One trader threatened to cut off his necktie if he wore it again.”

August 13, 2017 

“hen it came to obeying the rules, the only check was the bank’s legal and compliance department, which was supposed to make sure employees knew the rules—statutory, not moral—that they had to follow. ”

August 13, 2017 

“During compliance training sessions at RBS, traders hunched over their BlackBerrys playing the addictive “Brick Breaker” game. The goal was to knock out each layer of tiles, brick by brick, the high score the only measure that mattered.”

Notes From: David Enrich. “The Spider Network.” iBooks. 

Check out this book on the iBooks Store: https://itunes.apple.com/dk/book/the-spider-network/id1145710390?mt=11

Notes From: Tim Ferriss. “Tools of Titans.” iBooks (part 1)

Paul Levesque

September 9, 2017 

“During his peak travel period, Paul traveled 260+ days per year, performing in a different city each night. Here is one of his rules:

“When I landed, I would check into the hotel. The second we checked in, I’d ask them: ‘Is the gym open? Can I go train?’ Even if it was to get on a bike and ride for 15 minutes to reset things. I learned early that it seemed any time I did that, I didn’t get jet lag.”

TF: This absolutely seems to work, even if done at 1 a.m. and for 3 to 5 minutes. I don’t know the physiological mechanism, but I use it.”

September 9, 2017 

“There are a lot of things that he said to me then that I find myself telling the young guys now…. For example, if you don’t do something well, don’t do it unless you want to spend the time to improve it. Still, to this day, I see a lot of guys do stuff in the ring and think, ‘He doesn’t do that well, but he does it all the time.’ You shouldn’t do that.”

Chris Sacca

September 12, 2017 

“Chris elaborates: “Generally, what all of this comes down to is whether you are on offense or defense. I think that as you survey the challenges in your lives, it’s just: Which of those did you assign yourself, and which of those are you doing to please someone else? Your inbox is a to-do list to which anyone in the world can add an action item. I needed to get out of my inbox and back to my own to-do list.”

September 14, 2017 

“GOOD STORIES ALWAYS BEAT GOOD SPREADSHEETS”

“Whether you are raising money, pitching your product to customers, selling the company, or recruiting employees, never forget that underneath all the math and the MBA bullshit talk, we are all still emotionally driven human beings. We want to attach ourselves to narratives. We don’t act because of equations. We follow our beliefs. We get behind leaders who stir our feelings. In the early days of your venture, if you find someone diving too deep into the numbers, that means they are struggling to find a reason to deeply care about you.”

September 14, 2017 

“BE YOUR UNAPOLOGETICALLY WEIRD SELF”

“I gave a commencement speech in Minnesota few years ago [at the Carlson School of Management]. The core of it was to be your unapologetically weird self. I think authenticity is one of the most lacking things out there these days.”

Marc Andreessen

September 10, 2017 

“The number-one theme that companies have when they really struggle is they are not charging enough for their product. It has become conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley that the way to succeed is to price your product as low as possible, under the theory that if it’s low-priced, everybody can buy it, and that’s how you get to volume,” he said. “And we just see over and over and over again people failing with that, because they get into a problem called ‘too hungry to eat.’ They don’t charge enough for their product to be able to afford the sales and marketing required to actually get anybody to buy it. Is your product any good if people won’t pay more for it?”

September 10, 2017 

“To avoid the potential problem of newer hires getting battered more than senior folks, Marc and his founding partner, Ben Horowitz, make a point of smashing each other. “Whenever [Ben] brings in a deal, I just beat the shit out of it. I might think it’s the best idea I’ve ever heard of, but I’ll just trash the crap out of it and try to get everybody else to pile on. And then, at the end of it, if he’s still pounding the table saying, ‘No, no, this is the thing …’ then we say we’re all in. We’re all behind you…. It’s a ‘disagree and commit’ kind of culture. By the way, he does the same thing to me. It’s the torture test.”

September 10, 2017 

“Most people go through life and never develop strong views on things, or specifically go along and buy into the consensus. One of the things I think you want to look for as both a founder and as an investor is things that are out of consensus, something very much opposed to the conventional wisdom…. Then, if you’re going to start a company around that, if you’re going to invest in that, you better have strong conviction because you’re making a very big bet of time or money or both. [But] what happens when the world changes? What happens when something else happens?”

September 10, 2017 

“Marc and I are both huge fans of Steve Martin’s autobiography, Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life. Marc highlighted one takeaway:

“He says the key to success is, ‘Be so good they can’t ignore you.’”

TF: Marc has another guiding tenet: “Smart people should make things.” He says: “If you just have those two principles—that’s a pretty good way to orient.”

September 10, 2017 

“To do original work: It’s not necessary to know something nobody else knows. It is necessary to believe something few other people believe.”

Seth Godin

September 9, 2017 

“BE A MEANINGFUL SPECIFIC INSTEAD OF A WANDERING GENERALITY”

September 9, 2017 

“Keeping track of all the times someone has broken our heart or double-crossed us or let us down. Of course, we can keep track of those things, but why? Why keep track of them? Are they making us better?

“Wouldn’t it make more sense to keep track of the other stuff? To keep track of all the times it worked? All the times we took a risk? All the times we were able to brighten someone else’s day? When we start doing that, we can redefine ourselves as people who are able to make an impact on the world. It took me a bunch of cycles to figure out that the narrative was up to me.”

September 9, 2017 

“Seth has published roughly 6,500 posts on his blog since 2002. Which blog post would he point people to first, if he had to pick one?

“The blog post I point people to the most is called ‘First, Ten,’ and it is a simple theory of marketing that says: tell ten people, show ten people, share it with ten people; ten people who already trust you and already like you. If they don’t tell anybody else, it’s not that good and you should start over. If they do tell other people, you’re on your way.”

Scott Adams

September 10, 2017 

“► Naval Ravikant (here) regularly credits Scott’s short blog post “The Day You Became a Better Writer” for improving his writing.

”

September 10, 2017 

“Scott believes there are six elements of humor: naughty, clever, cute, bizarre, mean, and recognizable. You have to have at least two dimensions to succeed.

”

September 10, 2017 

“Fundamentally, “systems” could be thought of as asking yourself, “What persistent skills or relationships can I develop?” versus “What short-term goal can I achieve?” The former has a potent snowball effect, while the latter is a binary pass/fail with no consolation prize. Scott writes about this extensively in his book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life. Here’s one real-world example:

”

September 10, 2017 

“TF: At this point, I asked Scott about a clever line Trump often uses to shut down journalists, which is a quick interjection of “Check your facts, [insert journalist name].”

”

September 10, 2017 

“SCOTT: “‘Check your facts’ is what I call the ‘high ground maneuver.’ It’s the same thing Jobs did when he explained away Antennagate just by saying, ‘All smart phones have problems. We’re trying to make our customers happy.’ He made a national story go away in less than 30 seconds with those two sentences.”

”

September 10, 2017 

“To minimize decisions, Scott wakes up, pushes a button for coffee, and has the same breakfast every morning: a chocolate–peanut butter flavor Clif Builder’s 20-gram protein bar. The next step is exposing himself to new information to generate ideas for his comic strip:”

September 10, 2017 

“There’s a process where once you clear your mind, you have to flood it. You may use different words for this, but I know you do it. So you empty it, and then you flood it with new input that’s not the old input. So I’m looking at the news, I’m looking at stuff I haven’t seen. I’m not looking at yesterday’s problem for the fifth time. I’m looking at a new problem, I’m thinking of a new idea. But then you’ve got to find out where in that flood is the little piece that’s worth working with.”

September 10, 2017 

“if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths: 1) Become the best at one specific thing. 2) Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.”

September 10, 2017 

“Capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable. You make yourself rare by combining two or more “pretty goods” until no one else has your mix. … ”

September 10, 2017 

“At least one of the skills in your mixture should involve communication, either written or verbal. And it could be as simple as learning how to sell more effectively than 75% of the world.”

Alex Blumburg

September 9, 2017 

“Prompts to Elicit Stories (Most Interviewers Are Weak at This)

“Tell me about a time when …”

“Tell me about the day [or moment or time] when …”

“Tell me the story of … [how you came to major in X, how you met so-and-so, etc.]”

“Tell me about the day you realized ___ …”

“What were the steps that got you to ___ ?”

Ed Catmull

September 14, 2017 

“We had to [start over internally] with Toy Story 2. We had to do it with Ratatouille … [since] all our films, to begin with, suck.”

September 14, 2017 

“This is the big misconception that people have, that [in the beginning] a new film is the baby version of the final film, when in fact the final film bears no relationship to what you started off with. What we’ve found is that the first version always sucks. ”

September 14, 2017 

“Right now, we have a three-picture deal with Disney.’ The financial [profit-sharing] terms of the deal, while they were as good as we could have gotten under the circumstances, once we [became] a successful company, then our share of the profits was actually pretty small.”

Maria Popova

September 9, 2017 

“ There is just so much—and I mean so much—universal timeless truth in his private reflections, on everything from the best definition of success to the perils of sitting, which he wrote about 150 years before we started saying, ‘Sitting is the new smoking.’”

September 9, 2017 

“Ours is a culture where we wear our ability to get by on very little sleep as a kind of badge of honor that symbolizes work ethic, or toughness, or some other virtue—but really, it’s a total profound failure of priorities and of self-respect”

September 9, 2017 

“If you don’t have the patience to read something, don’t have the hubris to comment on it”

September 9, 2017 

“Evernote has, as you know, optical character recognition. So, when I search within it, it’s also going to search the text in that image.”

September 9, 2017 

“When Kurt Vonnegut wrote ‘Write to please just one person,’ what he was really saying was write for yourself. ”

September 9, 2017 

“What is the worst advice you see or hear given in your trade or area of expertise?

“‘Follow your dreams.’ It’s impossible to do without self-knowledge, which takes years. You discover your ‘dream’ (or sense of purpose) in the very act of walking the path, which is guided by equal parts choice and chance.”

Notes From: Brad Stone. “The Upstarts.” iBooks. (6/12)

August 12, 2017 

“Despite this optimism, Jordan and his partners identified four risks to their investment:

Safety: What would happen if a guest trashed a home or apartment?

International competition: Would overseas entrepreneurs clone the site?

Regulation: Would cities allow hosts to continue to rent their homes without restrictions?

Executive recruitment: Chesky, Gebbia, and Blecharczyk were running the company as a triumvirate—a council of equals. It was an arrangement that couldn’t last. Could they find new executives they trusted?”

August 12, 2017 

“A host using only the initials EJ had written on her WordPress blog that her San Francisco home had been burglarized and trashed by a guest who had rented it for a week via Airbnb.12

They smashed a hole through a locked closet door, and found the passport, cash, credit card and grandmother’s jewelry I had hidden inside… They rifled through all my drawers, wore my shoes and clothes, and left my clothing crumpled up in a pile of wet, mildewing towels on the closet floor… Despite the heat wave, they used my fireplace and multiple Duraflame logs to reduce mounds of stuff (my stuff??) to ash… The kitchen was a disaster—the sink piled high with filthy dishes, pots and pans burnt out and ruined… The death-like smell emanating from the bathroom was frightening.1”

August 12, 2017 

“EJ had also raised fundamental questions about the safety of users on its site and Airbnb’s role as an arbiter between hosts and guests. Until that incident, Chesky had subscribed to the purist’s view of online marketplaces: Users were supposed to police one another by rating their experiences. Untrustworthy actors would be drummed off the platform by bad reviews, rejected by the web’s natural immune system.”

August 12, 2017 

“ Jeff Jordan, the partner at Andreessen Horowitz who had joined Airbnb’s board of directors, had introduced a similar program at eBay, called Buyer Protection, that adjudicated disputes between buyers and sellers and gave refunds to aggrieved customers. Jordan suggested it could work here as well. Chesky intended to set the guarantee at a modest five thousand dollars. Then Marc Andreessen visited the Airbnb office one night to support the beleaguered founders and suggested they should add a zero to their announcement and reimburse hosts for up to fifty thousand dollars. It was a significant risk at the time, since the company didn’t have insurance and would have to cover any costs itself.

Airbnb was effectively betting its enormous haul of venture capital on the premise that tragedies like the one that had beset EJ would be rare. (The following year the Airbnb Guarantee would grow to a million dollars, insured by Lloyd’s of London.)18”

August 12, 2017 

“Finally, in late summer, Jung called Chesky to check in, and Chesky delivered the news: He had decided not to partner with the Samwer brothers and their clone Wimdu. Summoning up his resolve, Chesky had told his co-founders, employees, and investors that “he would rather not negotiate with a terrorist and go fight and lose than give in,” according to Alfred Lin, a partner at Sequoia. ”

August 12, 2017 

“Jung flew to San Francisco the next day and was thunderstruck when he arrived at the Rhode Island Street office and witnessed its quirky rituals, like lunchtime yoga and a weekly company-wide kickball game. He had heard about the frenetic offices of Wimdu and its “army of ants.” This was the opposite. “It felt to me like only thirty people were there and everyone was very relaxed,” Jung says. “Some people were playing table tennis. Then someone brought a dog out, and it was its birthday. Everyone celebrated the birthday of the dog.”

August 12, 2017 

“In January 2012, Airbnb publicly announced the opening of its international offices. The three founders hit the road, each attending a launch party in a different city and coming together for blowouts in Paris and Berlin. Chesky recalls hardly sleeping for eighteen days. They trained their new employees, gave speeches about the warmth and potential of the Airbnb community, met hundreds of hosts, and doled out countless hugs. “It gave you a feeling that it was not business oriented,” said Nalin Jha, one of the earliest hosts in Delhi, India, who joined the service that year after attending the company’s first local meet-up and recalls being immediately embraced by the general manager Jung had hired. “It was just a small hug, but it suggested there was a soul in the business. That was a very attractive thing, that I was becoming part of a community.”

August 12, 2017 

“Wimdu stuck around but would become an inconsequential player in the home-sharing market. In 2013 it shuttered Airizu, the Chinese subsidiary, and pared back its ambitions outside Europe. Airbnb had shown Silicon Valley that it was better to fight cloners than to accommodate them. “The worst thing you can do to a cloner is to let him keep his baby,” Chesky joked to Oliver Jung. “The cloner doesn’t want his baby. They build the baby to get rid of it.” ”

Notes From: Brad Stone. “The Upstarts.” iBooks. 

Check out this book on the iBooks Store: https://itun.es/dk/8nACdb.l

Notes From: Brad Stone. “The Upstarts.” iBooks. (5/12)

July 31, 2017 

“Hayashi got a close look at the city’s taxi system, which had a fifteen-year waiting list for medallions, caps on the number of cars allowed, and nonexistent service outside of downtown and the airport. Everyone knew the taxi rules needed to be changed but no one could agree on how to do it. In 2009, Mayor Gavin Newsom asked her to overhaul the medallion system for the first time in thirty-two years and to install a New York City–style auction process to raise capital for the city. Hayashi worried that an auction would make medallions unaffordable for most drivers and came up with a new set of rules that raised the price to $250,000, offered low-interest loans to drivers, and gave older drivers a way to cut back on their hours.”

July 31, 2017 

“Hayashi wielded a fast wit and plenty of personal charm to deal with cranky cab-industry vets who were hostile to change. But the fighting took its toll; she says she was “badly battered” by the credit card and medallion fracases and started to see her work as thankless. “I always joked my job was safe because no one else wanted it,” she says. “The drivers hate you because their wife doesn’t love them and their children are ugly and it’s all your fault. The taxi-fleet managers don’t like you because they aren’t making any money. And any regulation is too much regulation.”

July 31, 2017 

“n the summer of 2010, Hayashi’s phone started ringing off the hook, and it wouldn’t stop for four years. Taxi drivers were incensed; a new app called UberCab allowed rival limo drivers to act like taxis.”

July 31, 2017 

“Every time Hayashi picked up the phone, another driver or fleet owner was screaming, This is illegal! Why are you allowing it? What are you doing about this? She knew many of these drivers and fleet owners personally and had done her best to balance their interests along with the public’s, but the result had been a system that didn’t serve passengers or the city particularly well. Then Uber had radically tilted the entire playing field. The enraged drivers “were right,” Hayashi says. “We are sitting here regulating the hell out of these poor guys and then we just ignore what was going on?”

July 31, 2017 

“Hayashi says that she was strident, not screaming, and remembers the Uber execs as “obnoxious” and Kalanick in particular as “arrogant.” “You can’t do this!” she told them. “You can’t just open a restaurant and say you are going to ignore the health department!”

July 31, 2017 

“Kalanick was still in his self-described “burnout phase” after his last full-time job.4 He was traveling around various countries in Europe and South America, wearing a dorky cowboy hat; when back at home, he applied his capacity for manic focus to mastering video games like Wii Tennis and Angry Birds. Chronically restless, he was also investing and advising various startups and giving occasional speeches about his past misadventures as an entrepreneur.”

July 31, 2017 

“Talented with numbers, Kalanick got a perfect score on the math portion of the SAT and became a neighborhood tutor. ”

July 31, 2017 

“Kalanick lived at home during college and pursued a computer science degree. But this was the late 1990s, and for those whose interests lay at the intersection of entrepreneurship and computers, the siren call of the internet was irresistible. Kalanick dropped out of school his senior year, 1998, to join six classmates developing one of the web’s first search engines, Scour.net. The site, which debuted around the same time as Google, let people search the computers of other students on university networks for multimedia files like movies, TV shows, and songs. Most of those files, of course, were being hosted and downloaded online for free, in violation of copyrights.”

July 31, 2017 

“Kalanick and his colleagues believed they could work with rights holders to create a more efficient and economical way to distribute media over the internet. When the rogue file-sharing service Napster took Scour’s technology a step further, allowing people to not only search for files but pass them back and forth, Scour moved quickly to catch up. It introduced its own version of the technology, called Scour Exchange, which made it even easier to trade audio and video files without paying.

Then Hollywood woke up to the impact of peer-to-peer file sharing and moved swiftly to crush it.”

July 31, 2017 

“Scour’s attorneys, like Napster’s, believed the company was protected by the “safe harbor” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, which stipulated that internet companies could not be held liable for the activities of their users. Scour, they argued, wasn’t hosting the content, only pointing to it. But the startup couldn’t hope to fight the combined might of the entire media industry. It laid off most of its staff in the fall of 2000 and declared bankruptcy to escape the litigation.16 “That’s when we really learned how the world can work,” says Droege. “It’s not whether or not you are right or wrong.”

July 31, 2017 

“Despite that setback, Kalanick was ready to dust himself off and try again.19 He started talking to one of his Scour co-founders, Michael Todd, about redeveloping the technology behind Scour and selling it to media companies as a tool to help them distribute their material online”

July 31, 2017 

“Kalanick tried to raise money in 2001, right in the midst of the dot-com bust. Silicon Valley was a ghost town. At a local bar in Palo Alto, a venture capitalist told him that all innovation in software had been done and there was nothing left to invent.21 On September 11, he had a meeting scheduled in L.A. with Daniel Lewin, a co-founder of the Boston-based streaming-media company Akamai. Lewin was on American Airlines Flight 11 and died in the terrorist attacks.”

July 31, 2017 

“Kalanick, twenty-seven, was now utterly alone. He had lived at his parents’ house for a year and had gone without regular paychecks while pursuing deals with companies like Microsoft and AOL, only to watch them invariably fall through.”

July 31, 2017 

“At some point even your friends are like, ‘Dude, you need to do something else.’ To keep going in the face of that can be a lonely existence.”

July 31, 2017 

“Kalanick may not have considered himself a serious candidate for governor but he stubbornly believed he could make Red Swoosh work. Internet mogul Mark Cuban saw promise in the idea and, despite the fact that Kalanick had no regular employees, invested a million dollars in the business in 2005. It was enough to keep going. “I like to call these my blood, sweat, and ramen years,” Kalanick said. “I always very much believed in what we were doing.”23”

August 1, 2017 

“Kalanick had endured the most grueling experience of his life and emerged as battle-hardened and defiant as ever. Around this time, he went out to a nightclub in San Francisco with several friends, including Napster co-founder and Facebook investor Sean Parker. At the end of the night, inebriated, Kalanick was waiting for his friends outside the nightclub when an imperious bouncer told him to move away from the door. Kalanick moved only a few steps away. “Keep going,” the bouncer ordered. Kalanick inched over another step. “Keep going,” the bouncer said menacingly. “I’m not breaking the law. You tell me how I’m breaking the law,” Kalanick replied.

By the time a nearby police officer arrived, the bouncer was forcibly trying to move Kalanick while he defiantly gripped a parking meter with both hands. He was arrested for obstruction of the sidewalk and says he spent eight to ten hours in the city jail before Parker realized what had happened and put up two thousand dollars to bail him out.25

“Fear is the disease. Hustle is the antidote,” he said at a Chicago startup event a few years later.26 “You start a company in 2001, good[…]”

August 1, 2017 

“Uber had the data to make those kinds of prescient decisions. In fact, it was slowly dawning on the founders and board members that Uber was going to have more data about how people moved around cities than just about any other company in history. “I’m an engineer at heart and math moves the needle on this,” Kalanick told me a few years later. “My happy place is right in the midst of all that complexity.”

August 1, 2017 

“The California Public Utilities Commission wanted Uber to register itself as a limo company or, technically, as a “charter party carrier,” but Uber’s lawyers believed the company could make the case that it was merely an intermediary between drivers and riders, not an actual fleet operator. It was as much a limo company as Orbitz or Expedia were airlines, they argued.”

August 1, 2017 

“After that first meeting with Hayashi, Kalanick spent weeks negotiating with Garrett Camp and angel investors Chris Sacca and Rob Hayes over his compensation as CEO. He somehow calculated that he needed a 23 percent ownership stake in Uber, up from his 12 percent stake as a founder and adviser, but declined to explain his logic. The other board members didn’t want to dilute their own holdings but ultimately acquiesced. “The best thing I ever did for Uber was completely roll over in negotiations with Travis,” says Rob Hayes.”

August 1, 2017 

“The bottom line is that I’m all in on Uber,” he wrote.

The excitement and joy of being Uber is coming out my pores and I’ll stop at nothing to see Uber go to every major city in the U.S. and the world. So what’s next? Taxi frustration is going down. Reliability, Efficiency, Accountability, and Professionalism in urban transportation are going way up. Every city Uber rolls into is going to be a better place when we’re done with it and if you live in that city, your world of transportation is changing forever, and it will be oh so Uber when that change arrives.

”

August 1, 2017 

“As 2011 began, Kalanick had another big move in mind. It was time for Uber to raise its first significant round of funding, the Series A. He wanted to work with one investor in particular: Benchmark’s Bill Gurley, who had previously expressed interest in the seed round.”

August 1, 2017 

“Benchmark almost scuttled the deal with a practical joke. Kalanick was on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park to visit rival Sequoia Capital before a scheduled meeting with Benchmark’s partnership. As they waited for Kalanick to arrive, Gurley and his partner Matt Cohler looked at the Uber app and saw a single Uber car in front of Sequoia’s office a mile away. Because Uber did not yet operate down in Silicon Valley, they guessed this oddly idle car was Kalanick’s ride. Cohler summoned the car with the Uber app on his phone, and when Kalanick came out of his meeting, it was gone. He had to run over to Benchmark in his dress shoes, and he arrived sweating and late. That night, the firm sent Kalanick a pair of running shoes. “I don’t know why we thought that was a good idea,” Gurley says of the prank”

Notes From: Brad Stone. “The Upstarts.” iBooks. 

Check out this book on the iBooks Store: https://itun.es/dk/8nACdb.l

Notes From: Brad Stone. “The Upstarts.” iBooks. (4/12)

May 16, 2017 

“Since selling his e-commerce company, Viaweb, to Yahoo during the first dot-com boom, PG, as he was called, had become a font of startup aphorisms, such as “It’s better to have a hundred people that love you than a million people that sort of like you,” and “Don’t worry about competitors; startups usually die of suicide, not homicide.” He was in his early forties and typically wore the I-don’t-care-about-your-social-customs sartorial combination of cargo shorts, a polo shirt, and sandals.”

June 3, 2017 

“One obvious problem was that hosts weren’t presenting their properties online in an appealing way—the photos were grainy and usually taken with the primitive cell phones of the time. They reported this observation back in Mountain View, and Graham compared it to a challenge he had encountered at the online marketplace Viaweb, where he had to show naive retailers how to sell on the internet. “What they needed to do was teach their hosts how to sell,” Graham says. “That was the missing ingredient.”

June 3, 2017 

“But Graham was still having trouble wrapping his mind around the idea of people actually sleeping on airbeds. Finally he identified the real opportunity as “eBay, but for spaces” and urged them to think of their brand as comparable to the auction giant’s. ”

June 3, 2017 

“The founders seemed to move slowly on everything. McAdoo remembers them as being a little too “wonderfully frugal,” reluctant to spend their new venture capital, which is ironic considering their later profligacy on elaborate corporate offices around the world. “On the one hand, that is fabulous,” McAdoo told them, discussing the high bank balance. “On the other hand, guys, we need to invest in the business.” They also moved glacially in signing on new employees, declining at first to even hire customer-support help.”

June 3, 2017 

“The founders worked seven days a week but there was a spirit of camaraderie and plenty of goofy fun. They would break occasionally to go to the gym or hang out on the roof. Once a week, they went to a nearby park on Folsom Street for “recess,” to play kickball or even a game of tag. On Friday they usually went to a bar for happy hour.”

June 3, 2017 

“Chesky was moving slowly, but at the same time, he was frustrated that his imagined success wasn’t arriving quickly enough. “Every day I was working on it and thinking, Why isn’t it happening faster?” he told me.4 “When you’re starting a company it never goes at the pace you want or the pace you expect. You imagine everything to be linear, ‘I’m going to do this, then this is going to happen and this is going to happen.’ You’re imagining steps and they’re progressive. You start, you build it, and you think everyone’s going to care. But no one cares, not even your friends.”

June 3, 2017 

“When Nathan Blecharczyk graduated from college, he was not just a skilled programmer but the embodiment of a new Silicon Valley hero: the growth hacker. Growth hackers use their engineering chops to find clever, often controversial ways to improve the popularity of their products and services. Blecharczyk, it turned out, was an exceedingly good one.

That makes the mysterious rise of Airbnb in the year after its graduation from Y Combinator easier to understand. Two other apartment-listing services were far larger: Couchsurfing, which was still laboring under the disastrous effects of its nonprofit status, and Craigslist, the popular and practical online bulletin board that hadn’t changed much in thirteen years. Craigslist had a huge audience; in 2009, it had forty-four million unique visitors a month in the United States alone,7 with active apartment rental and home-sharing channels in many of its 570 cities.”

July 31, 2017 

“Blecharczyk pioneered a clever use of Facebook’s fledgling ad system, which for the first time allowed companies to tailor and target ads to the interests and hobbies that members specified in their profiles. If a user said he liked yoga, for example, he would see an ad from Airbnb on Facebook that announced “Rent Your Room to a Yogi!” If a person liked wine, he’d see “Rent Your Room to a Wine Lover!” and so on.”

July 31, 2017 

“Airbnb returned to Sand Hill Road, the seat of the venture capital industry, to raise more money. Blecharczyk’s productive Facebook and Google ads were expensive, and Chesky had to keep the coffers full. Seeing the company’s growing market opportunity, McAdoo wanted Sequoia to supply the entire round of funding itself, but Chesky had learned at Y Combinator to be wary of giving too much control to venture capitalists, and he insisted on bringing in another firm.”

July 31, 2017 

“Hoffman says he was skeptical at first. Ugh, couch-surfing is not that interesting, he thought. Then Chesky met him at Greylock’s offices on Sand Hill Road over a weekend and spun a compelling vision of Airbnb as the largest hotel chain in the world but one without the expensive burden of maintaining actual buildings or hiring workers like bellhops and maids. “The idea of essentially transforming this massive illiquid asset that existed in most of our lives—the room, an apartment, a house, a unique space—into something that could actually be in an essentially peer-to-peer marketplace is just one of the killer ideas,” Hoffman said. “I was like, ‘Okay, I’m ready.’”12”

July 31, 2017 

“Chesky would remember that dinner with Hartenbaum well. It was the first time he heard of the people whose names would soon send shudders down his spine: the Samwer brothers.

“This is probably what’s going to happen,” Hartenbaum told the three founders over steaks that night. “There are these German brothers. If they haven’t already, they will soon see that Airbnb is doing very well. They will then raise a ton of money in a very short period of time to create a company that will copy you. Then they will try to get you to buy them. And they will make your life miserable.”

Notes From: Brad Stone. “The Upstarts.” iBooks. 

Check out this book on the iBooks Store: https://itun.es/dk/8nACdb.l

Some inspiring text from the TV show 'SKAM'

"Norwegian youth spend more than four hours a day on social media, according to a study. Some believe it's a waste of time, but I understand why we do it very well. Society is straightforward on social media. Where you can just log off, or block everything you don't like. Today, we celebrate our constitution. It says that everyone has equal rights, and that humas are born free and shall remain free. Free to be on social media for four hours. Free to get wasted and f*ck around. Free to use 900.000 for a Russ bus. Norway isn't the same country as it was when the Constitution was written. Norwegian society is constantly developing. Today, thousands of refugees are coming intoEurope in search of a place to live. Those are people from a different culture than us. People whose values we may disagree with. Some are afraid they will threaten our Norwegian values. It would have been best to have the Facebook function to just block them. But that's not how it goes. So, on this day when we celebrate our Constitution.. We shall remember what we celebrate. If we believe in the values it is based on.. If we agree with the idea that all people should be free and have equal rights.. It's not our responsibility to fight to persevere the values for all people. It's not there to open doors to strangers who want to threaten our values.. But it's there to not open the doors for them. We live in a society because we need each other. People need people. It can be tiring to deal with others.. Especially the ones you disagree with. Those who think differently from you. Whether some are from another culture, or a girl who's a lame Facebook friend from elementary school. In a peaceful society with equal rights, we have to manage to listen to, and try to understand each other. Perhaps it's easier to understand if we focus on what we have in common, rather than the differences. Look for what we agree with, instead of what we disagree with. Maybe if we see the worst in others, it is exactly that what they will show us. We have the right to waste four hours on social media every day. Because some before us have fought for the freedom to do so. Soon it's us who will take over this country. It's up to us which values we live by in the future. I hope equal rights and freedom for all the people of this world is a battle we are ready to take on. Completely serious.. If not we, who are raised in the world's most free and richest country.. If not we choose generosity, patience, and openness.. If not we choose to look for and believe in the good in each other.. If not we can fight for righteousness.. Then who would be able to do it?"

Read more at: http://transcripts.foreverdreaming.org/viewtopic.php?f=793&t=29825