\"I ended up being chief engineer of the rocket, not because I wanted to, but because I couldn't hire anyone who was good... they said it's too risky, you're gonna die.\"
\"If you're trying to build a rocket or cars... you have to be maximally truth-seeking... math and physics are rigorous judges... politics is definitely not that.\"
\"I didn't originally think I would build something great... I wanted to try to build something useful... but I thought things would most likely fail.\"
\"I wanted to go direct to consumers... with Zip2, we had better technology but... we were somewhat captured by the legacy media companies... they made us do things that seemed sensible to them, but didn't make sense with the new technology.\"
\"I can't emphasize this enough, a rigorous adherence to truth is the most important thing for AI safety... if you force AI to believe things that are not true...\"
\"Just always be smashing your ego... internalize responsibility... if your ego-to-ability ratio gets too high... you'll break your feedback loop to reality.\"
\"We were told it's impossible... but once we broke it down into the constituent elements... we could solve those... I was sleeping in the data center and also doing cabling myself.\"
\"The first principles approach would be...what are the material prices...that sets the actual floor on what a rocket can cost.\"
\"The big mistake was having too much shareholder and board control from legacy media companies... they kept wanting to use our software in ways that made no sense.\"
\"I tried to get a job at Netscape... but I don't think he ever saw my resume... So I'll just write stuff for myself and see how it goes.\"