Further Back Than Zero Quotes

In the spring of 1940, when the Nazis overran France from the north, much of its Jewish population tried to escape the country towards the south. In order to cross the border, they needed visas to Spain and Portugal, and together with a flood of other refugees, tens of thousands of Jews besieged the Portuguese consulate in Bordeaux in a desperate attempt to get that life-saving piece of paper. The Portuguese government forbade its consuls in France to issue visas without prior approval from the Foreign Ministry, but the consul in Bordeaux, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, decided to disregard the order, throwing to the wind a thirty-year diplomatic career. As Nazi tanks were closing in on Bordeaux, Sousa Mendes and his team worked around the clock for ten days and nights, barely stopping to sleep, just issuing visas and stamping pieces of paper. Sousa Mendes issued thousands of visas before collapsing from exhaustion. 22. Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the angel with the rubber stamp. 22.​Courtesy of the Sousa Mendes Foundation. The Portuguese government – which had little desire to accept any of these refugees – sent agents to escort the disobedient consul back home, and fired him from the foreign office. Yet officials who cared little for the plight of human beings nevertheless had a deep reverence for documents, and the visas Sousa Mendes issued against orders were respected by French, Spanish and Portuguese bureaucrats alike, spiriting up to 30,000 people out of the Nazi death trap. Sousa Mendes, armed with little more than a rubber stamp, was responsible for the largest rescue operation by a single individual during the Holocaust.2 The sanctity of written records often had far less positive effects. From 1958 to 1961 communist China undertook the Great Leap Forward, when Mao Zedong wished to rapidly turn China into a superpower. Intending to use surplus grain to finance ambitious industrial projects, Mao ordered the doubling and tripling of agricultural production. From the government offices in Beijing his impossible demands made their way down the bureaucratic ladder, through provincial administrators, all the way down to the village headmen. The local officials, afraid of voicing any criticism and wishing to curry favour with their superiors, concocted imaginary reports of dramatic increases in agricultural output. As the fabricated numbers made their way back up the bureaucratic hierarchy, each official exaggerated them further, adding a zero here or there with a stroke of a pen. 23.

Zero Line Spender, Saver, Wealth Creator Your financial personality type determines your financial position in life. Let’s say there is a zero financial line that represents a position where you owe nothing and have nothing. Perhaps you can remember those days getting started on your own. So, let us assume you just graduated from college and you’re one of the lucky few who graduated at the zero line, you owe nothing. Pretty amazing considering that in 2013, the debt on student loans exceeded all credit card debt owed in America. But fortunately, you made it out free and clear to the zero line. You’re a “Spender” so you go to the showroom and pick one out. With your job and the car as collateral, you get a car loan and you drop below the zero line. You lifestyle gets more and more expensive and since you are a ‘Spender” you probably take on credit card debt to help finance your lifestyle desires. You are constantly working your way back to becoming a zero, financially speaking. Then, you get married and now there are two in debt working their way back to zero. Eventually, children come along, and the odds of being able to put away enough money to pay your debt and interest and live on the top side of the zero line are becoming virtually impossible. Unfortunately, many Americans live in this position with little or no chance of ever living debt free. When something comes along that requires their savings, they must deplete their funds in order to avoid paying interest and then they must start saving again for their next expense. They are constantly returning to the zero line. The money they have accumulated is compounding interest, giving them uninterrupted growth. Having access to capital allows them to negotiate more favorable loans by collateralizing against their accounts rather than depleting them. They make payments to the lending institution with dollars from their current cash flow, protecting the growth of the money they have saved and invested for their future. Saving and investing with uninterrupted compounding is an important wealth concept for moving further and further away from the zero line.

Thiel’s doomsday predictions also prompted an unusual request. In preparation for a summer 2000 board meeting, Thiel had asked Musk if he could present a proposal. Musk agreed. “Uh, Peter’s got an agenda item he’d like to talk about,” Musk said, handing the reins to Thiel. Thiel began. The markets, he said, weren’t done driving into the red. He prophesied just how dire things would get—for both the company and for the world. Many had seen the bust as a mere short-term correction, but Thiel was convinced the optimists were wrong. In his view, the bubble was bigger than anyone had thought and hadn’t even begun to really burst yet. From X.com’s perspective, the implications of Thiel’s prediction were dire. Its high burn rate meant that it would need to continue fundraising. But if—no, when—the bubble truly burst, the markets would tighten further, and funding would dry up—even for X.com. The company balance sheet could drop to zero with no options left to raise money. Thiel presented a solution: the company should take the $100 million closed in March and transfer it to his hedge fund, Thiel Capital. He would then use that money to short the public markets. “It was beautiful logic,” board member Tim Hurd of MDP remembered. “One of the elements of PayPal was that they were untethered from how people did stuff in the real world.” The board was uniformly aghast. Members Moritz, Malloy, and Hurd all pushed back. “Peter, I totally get it,” Hurd replied. “But we raised money from investors on a business plan. And they have that in their files. And it said, ‘use of proceeds would be for general corporate purposes.’ And to grow the business and so forth. It wasn’t to go speculate on indices. History may prove that you’re right, and it will have been brilliant, but if you’re wrong, we’ll all be sued.” Mike Moritz’s reaction proved particularly memorable. With his theatricality on full display, Moritz “just lost his mind,” a board member remembered, berating Thiel: “Peter, this is really simple: If this board approves that idea, I’m resigning!

To better understand what is happening in a newly deceased person’s body, let’s go back to you, in the hospital, or wherever you had headed to death. No matter how it happens, your body—assuming it is still intact—is now in a desperate battle for life. Immediately, triggered by chemical signals released by the body, it enters a state of severe medical shock with unconsciousness—heralding entry into the proverbial ocean of death. This illustrates how the brain automatically attempts to optimize and derive the greatest meaning for the person. It switches from what can be called “life mode” to “death mode.” As this state of medical shock worsens and the person descends further into the ocean and the heart stops and the person dies, the total loss of blood pressure, down to zero, further activates tiny receptors, which in turn trigger the brain to release even higher—mega—doses of several potent and potentially lifesaving hormones into the bloodstream. The period immediately after death is when the highest levels of adrenaline (epinephrine) are released by the body: one thousand times more than the amounts normally found in the bloodstream. As well as adrenaline, the brain also spews out steroids and other potentially lifesaving hormones, including norepinephrine and vasopressin, which work synchronously to try to raise the blood pressure by tightening blood vessels, squeezing more blood toward the heart and brain. These potentially lifesaving responses start when the blood pressure drops with medical shock but become far more vigorous in death after the heart stops. Some of these hormones also act directly on the heart by trying to stimulate it to beat again. At the same time, after detecting low oxygen levels, the brain stimulates the lungs to initiate last gasp breaths. These are called agonal breaths and are an automatic reflexive response, seen in people as they die, that can help draw more oxygen into the body. But importantly, they create a vacuum in the chest that sucks blood away from the arms, legs, and abdomen and directly toward the heart and brain, where it is needed more. This is like an army calling up its reserves in the time of war. So, as mentioned, instead of an absolute loss of activity in a linear manner from 100 to zero across the whole brain in death, we see there is a dynamic process. There is dysfunction and loss of activity across much of the brain. This in turn facilitates activity in other normally dormant parts of the brain, which are better adapted to deal with the new reality of death. Even now, the brain strives to make meaning out of this situation and its efforts are focused on kick-starting the heart back to life through autoresuscitation.