A Quote by Taavet Hinrikus

I spent my workdays at Skype creating a more connected world. We were shrinking the distances between people, making it easier to connect across countries. Then I'd go to my bank to transfer my euros to pounds, and it was like going back in time 50 years: expensive, inconvenient, and painfully slow. It was a nightmare.
I found when we released Not Your Kind of People it was hard for me to go back on tour, especially when we had some runs that were 7 or 8 weeks in a row and I wouldn't see my family the whole time. It has gotten easier with the internet you know because you can Skype or get on Facetime and connect with your family. It was much harder to do that when we started Garbage 20 years ago.
When we talk about technology changing the world, we often hear about how it makes our lives easier, more connected, safer, or even healthier. They're all things we can easily identify with. The Internet makes our lives easier; services like Skype and WhatsApp allows us to be more connected - the examples are endless.
Part of the concept of the euro zone was to establish a common market. The banks were going to bank across all their countries like we bank across states. But that concept got killed for a whole bunch of reasons that I won't get into. That was a good concept, by the way. It may yet return, because there are huge economies of scale in banking. That's another thing people don't quite get.
I'm convinced that sending people to Mars is so expensive that if you go once and bring the people back and then go again and bring the people back, we're eventually going to run out of money. But what if we send people the first time and they don't come back? What if they stay there?
For my family and Howard's partner, who is like family, for 10 years we were in a state of shock. It takes time to appreciate fully what was going on then. That's connected because post-9/11 New York is so completely different from the way it was and the counterculture movement going on before then was so remarkable; I think people are appreciating it a lot more now.
After we finished touring 'Ignore The Ignorant' we had this perfect idea that we were going to take a couple of years off, that was the plan. Because we thought we were definitely going to take time off, I was going to go back to college, that was what I was going to do. Because the whole idea of it was that I have spent ten years in this band and not even realised that that amount of time has passed.
The creatives, they want to connect with people. These artists, the clothing designers, they want to connect with people the same way that music gets to connect with people. But the cost of silk is too expensive. And they won't lower their quality levels. So I can spend $2 million on a record and give it out in a democratic way. They could spend all their time making the greatest dress in the world, and it's just impossible to hand-make that many.
Back in the late 1970's, when I was fifteen years old, I spent every penny I then had in the bank to fly across the continent in a 747 jet to Brandon, Manitoba, deep in the Canadian prairies, to witness a total eclipse of the sun.
It was easy being healthy when I was young. I was full of energy, so sports and physical challenges were fun. But as I got older and the spring left my step, exercise became harder, and eating, drinking and watching TV became easier. By the time I was 50, I'd put on 50 pounds.
When we gaze at a star in the Milky Way which is 50,000 light-years away from our sun, we are looking back 50,000 years in time." "The idea is much too big for my little head." "The only way we can look out into space, then, is to look back in time. We can never know what the universe is like now. We only know what it was like then. When we look up at a star that is thousands of light-years away, we are really traveling thousands of years back in the history of space.
I was born in Evanston, Illinois. I spent my elementary and part of my junior high school years in a D.C. suburb. And then I spent my high school years in Minnesota. And then I spent my college years in Colorado. And then I spent some time living in China. And then I spent three years in Vermont before moving down to Nashville.
I did 30 Minute Meals for five years on local television, and I earned nothing the first two years. Then I earned $50 a segment. I spent more than that on gas and groceries, but I really enjoyed making the show and I loved going to a viewer's house each week. I knew I enjoyed it, so I stuck with it even though it cost me.
My view always is that we should learn the lessons, both of the last sort of 50 years of policy-making and it is possible to get to a foreign policy that is engaged and active without going back to where we were in the post-9/11 world.
We were constantly traveling between Malaysia and Singapore, which is connected by a bridge at the southernmost end of Malaysia. In fact, when I was a child, I had to go between countries twice a day to go to school, because I was living in Malaysia at the time but attending primary school in Singapore.
I call it "being interrupted by success." We had done The Soft Bulletin, which came out in 1999, and we knew we that were gonna make another record before too long. But in between this, we were still in this mode of kind of just - not re-creating what we could be, but kind of doing different things. For the longest time in the Flaming Lips we were like, "Make a record, go on tour. Come back, make another record," and you know, I think, frankly, we were kind of like, "There's more to life than just recording records and going on tour."
Skype is one of the world's greatest inventions. I use it almost daily to connect with the people I care about when I'm away shooting. It makes the distance so much more bearable and I actually feel like I'm in the same room as my loved ones.
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