Innovation is the child of freedom and the parent of prosperity.

Most of the time, innovation is an incremental process. It looks disruptive when you're looking backwards, but at the time, it's surprisingly gradual. The first version of a new technology looks surprisingly like the last version of an old technology.

The faster you can read a book, the worse a book it is. If you can speed read a book, you should just put that book away. It doesn't deserve to be a book.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us quite starkly that we haven't been doing enough innovation. We've haven't been developing enough vaccines. We haven't been searching for ways to expedite vaccine development. We haven't been developing enough diagnostic devices.

We've been here before. We've expected innovation and automation to destroy jobs, but it never does. It always creates new kinds of opportunity for employment. It creates the wealth that enables people to employ others.

All failures and sins are just ignorance—it's just a lack of knowledge. If we were to speed up the accumulation and application of knowledge through innovation, we would be able to solve all of humanity's problems.

This pandemic is accelerating things and forcing people to work remotely. Twitter recently announced that they're going fully remote. Many of the companies I'm involved with are wondering if they should even go back to having an office. I wouldn't be surprised if the next Silicon Valley moves to the cloud. That would be an incredibly good thing for all of humanity because then we could distribute it.

Up till the middle of 2020, the 9 closest relatives of this pandemic virus had been collected more than 1,000 miles from Wuhan by Wuhan scientists and brought to Wuhan.

Invention is the coming out with a prototype of a new device or a new social practice. Innovation is the business of turning a new device into something practical, affordable, and reliable that people want to use and acquire.

All of their research on these bat coronaviruses... had been done at lower levels at BSL-2 and BSL-3 ... There's no requirements, even if people are sick. Even they fall sick, they don't have to report it. They don't have to quarantine. So, there would have been no record of someone being infected in the lab by such a virus.

When I pressed, for example, the Royal Society in London and also the Academy of Medical Sciences to hold a debate on the origin of a pandemic that's killing north of 10 million people, I was told the topic is too controversial ... The question of sort of opening it up to a proper conversation is just not acceptable within conventional science.

We're building a decentralized finance infrastructure for borrowing, lending, derivatives, trading, custody—all of that stuff. The things that Wall Street does for 20% of the United States GDP will be done for 1% of GDP in crypto land.

The crypto system is starting with finance but laying the foundation for future companies to be built completely distributed with potentially anonymous contributors, anonymous funding, anonymous cash, and anonymous developers.

I had no idea about this whole history of collaboration between not just the US but many other countries across Asia and Europe with labs in China to do quite risky virus work that might have led to this pandemic. So here, it's not just whether Western scientists are afraid of provoking China; it's really a question of are they also complicit in the origin of COVID-19.

We tend to over-lionize and remember a few inventors as being the creators when it's actually much more of a team and distributed process.

This is something that you learn in Silicon Valley very early on—ideas are a dime a dozen. Every idea has been floating around. Even a lot of the old ideas that failed were initially bad ideas had at the wrong time.

The effects of innovation are overestimated in the short-term and underestimated in the long-term.

I wouldn't be surprised if in ten years from now, the rest of the tech industry is just as distributed as the crypto industry is today.

Western virology feels worried that its entire research program—indeed the whole of biotechnology—might lose its funding, might lose its license, if a major accident is revealed to of happened as a result of work in a laboratory.

Innovation is a process of evolution, and like any process of evolution, it requires trial and error. Innovation happens by taking the body of innovators that surround you one step further, engaging in lots of trial, having error, and obtaining feedback from customers in the economy. All of those pieces are necessary.

Innovation is the child of freedom because it's a free and creative attempt to satisfy freely expressed human desires.

If we can innovate more, we're not going to destroy the planet. It's the reverse—innovation is the safest way of saving the planet. It's the poorest countries that are seeing the most damage to the environment at the moment.