US SEC decided to make their own "present" to Durov for birthday.
They want to stop launch of GRAM tokens.

“Our emergency action today is intended to prevent Telegram from flooding the U.S. markets with digital tokens that we allege were unlawfully sold.”

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
2019-212
Washington D.C., Oct. 11, 2019 —
The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced that it has filed an emergency action and obtained temporary restraining order against two offshore entities conducting an alleged unregistered, ongoing digital token offering in the U.S. and overseas that has raised more than $1.7 billion of investor funds.

https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2019-212

It looks like US government declared fight against progress🤨

At the moment I see 2 scenarios this could resolve:
- TON can go to court against SEC, just like KIK team and try to battle it out in a long and painful lawsuit;
- They will launch and then pay huge fine($30-50 mill) to SEC just like what EOS had done.

I think they'll probably push for the settlement. Lawsuits against SEC is costly and uncertain business.
Kik messenger team found that out hard way recently, their CEO Ted Livingston announced that they were planning to close down Kik messenger.

Maybe we as loyal users have to find the way to influence SEC to stop bullying TON.

"Try and fail, but never fail to try."
Vinod Khosla

While many talk about protecting people's privacy and the freedom of speech, Telegram actually does it.

Here's a latest interview of Nassim Taleb.
What I love about Taleb is that he's not just smart, he is wise.
And the type of wisdoms he brings is not a traditional western wisdom, but a mix of middle eastern, Mediterranean kind of outlook on things.
Still haven't read "skin in the game", but feel like picking up this book immediately.
https://youtu.be/a3YOMe4PnKE

Tech evolution effect on society

Lex Friedman's latest interview of Gary Kasparov is simply brilliant. If you play chess I'm sure you know Gary Kasparov is one of the greatest chess players ever.
Gary is brilliant and brave man, he retired from chess, but he continues to fight.
I felt like the middle of interview was especially brilliant, where Gary talks about machine vs human and points out human strength. We hear so much debate about AI taking away all our jobs and making humans obsolete. But Gary some amazing thought about this issue. He was beaten by machine long before AI had become so dominant in ordinary humans lives and h had time to reflect on this new phenomenon.
The the main thought was - machine will always beat human in a closed system. Which gives us the advantage at versatility, but we will obviously have to give up some control...
I don't want to give out more spoilers, just watch the talk. It's brilliant.
It's about 1 hr long, but I felt like its was 10 minutes.
https://youtu.be/8RVa0THWUWw

"Machines will always beat humans at closed system-type problems or games. They don't have to solve them, they just have to make fewer mistakes "
Gary Kasparov

Who are top 5 worlds wisest people currently alive in your opinion ?

In the life we always have to cope with different stresses. We constantly strive to build a "moat" around every aspect of our expecting a more stressful situation that we had ever seen before. Ultimately we will all fail, because we will all die, but that doesn't mean we should ever give give up on building those "moats".
Currently reading "Antifragile" by Nikolas Taleb. And thoughts are brewing in my mind, one of which "why the hell haven't I started reading this book before?!"
And the second thought is about working out what's fragile in my life and what to do to make it Antifragile.

I have to admit I didn't come up with this question(saw it on Twitter), but I loved the fact that this is the kind of question that resonated with some of you .

The surprising part is that about a month ago I've started a list of people who I admire. And the main criteria for me was the wisdom these people have and accomplishments they have made(in my personal opinion).
When I first thought of this idea I thought I'd come up with list of 100 people easily, but so far the list is about 20-30 people.
I might share it here on @talks when I feel like I'm ready.

Lex Fridman just had another great talk with Elon Musk.
The ending of interview turned out poeticaly beautiful and hopeful.

https://youtu.be/smK9dgdTl40

"I'm Maxist with my family, share everything.... Socialist with my extended family and then as we go up I'm libertarian at federal level. Scale matters."
Nassim Taleb

https://youtu.be/y3LwEdNqu_U

Apparently there's a huge riot happening in Iran with over hundred people killed by goverment. Iranian gov shut down internet(as usual with all tyrannic regimes).
Anyone of you guys from Iran? plz write in our groupchat what's going on
https://youtu.be/rbXCOUzgXVc

Peter Thiels new talk has been posted recently.
I just started to watch it, so I dont know what is all about, but confident that it's going to extremely insightful even before watching.


https://youtu.be/E-IaSS0bbGU

South Park recently created episode about transgender competing with women.
This might look like an absurd, but it's not a news. There have been several transgender athletes competing against girls at high school level.
"Best part" is that those dudes who identify as women actually date girls. So basically they identify as a lesbians. lol
Yet we dont see feminists going out on protests to protect female rights. This tells you something about the moden feminist movement.
The system has been gamed.
The winners are guys who'll get sports scholarship and politicians who "fight for trans rights".
Losers are girls who will get their confidence and health(those who compete in combat sports) destroyed, less scholarships.

https://youtu.be/URz-RYEOaig

Australians thought it would be nice to send Thor to play handball against girls.
Now Im just waiting to see some dudes who identify as 5 years old or identify as crippled so they can finally kick some ass.

https://youtu.be/kqRJkNIwW-A

Jack Ma is Chinese superstar, who's adored by Chinese people and rightly so. Alibaba has helped to bring prosperity to many Chinese families.
However, he left operational control of Alibaba and decided to take on the role of a modern Confucius.
Recently he had a talk with Elon Musk and this was some cringe worthy reality check for Jack Ma.
In this particular video Jack took the role of some kind of practical guy, who's not bothered with scientists(by the way I agree that action is more important than some kind of scientific theory). But he probably doesnt realize that unlike Elon, he's not a practical guy anymore. Elon is running 2 companies and building some mind blowing things while Jack Ma is going around giving motivational talks.

If you want to appear smart, don’t sit next to Elon.
I was really suprised to see this talk, I thought Jack Ma really was this new Confucius, but the more I listened to him talk it felt like as if he has been preparing to this talk by reading inspirational quotes from instagram.
When you are living around people who never criticize anything you say and find some "deep wisdom" even way you say dumb things, you can become delusional and overconfident. And even though I can't call Jack Ma delusional, but he sure was overconfindent about those uncertain issues they discussed.
Im sure we all know this kind of people who can talk absolute bullshit with such confidence that you even start to wonder maybe there's some truth to what they're saying.
It's painful and inconvenient to hear the criticism, but it's better to endure the pain of criticism from people than get destroyed by reality.
There are numerous stories of successful people who destroyed themselves because they were surrounded by bunch of Yes-men.
It's important to have one or two people in your life who can tell you that you're being dumb even when you're on top of the world.
https://youtu.be/fS_TfL7rrHI

Nobody talks about it, but today is a very special day!
Today is the day when USSR attacked Finland. Country lost about 26 thousand people and 30% of their territory in this war against Stalinists. It seems like a large number, but ...
Ukraine, Poland, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania lost several million people from hunger, 2 waves of deportations, hundreds of thousands were arrested and sent to Siberia.

Yes, Finland lost 26 thousand people, but they died as free people and they saved millions from horrors of living under soviet regime.

Finland tought the world a big lesson. This tiny country fought huge monster and even though they were forced to give up part of their territory it was still a huge victory!
So lesson is simple if you get orginised and fight tyrany, you will win even if it seems impossible.

Turkey who is being fed every day by man, thinks that man is turkey's best friend. Until the day when man decides to kill it.
This example illustrates idea of Black Swan.
We can't correctly predict the future inside complex systems based on information from the past. So we are left with managing risk and optionality.
Nassim Talebs idias continue to blow my mind.

Chinese are living in an Orwellian nightmare

Chinese government is monitoring conversations in messaging platforms and cage people like animals.

Another reason to support Telegram and never use any of the messengers that are allowed in China.

https://twitter.com/ezralevant/status/1201174299639533577?s=19