Transcription
We actually have a lot of smart people in this room. And actually, how many of you have "The Almanac" by Novel? Right? Okay. It's sold about a million copies. So, okay, that's actually a pretty good chunk.
Um, so in the, you know, in our time remaining, got about seven minutes. What is, what's "Nalmanac" 2024? What, what should all these people be thinking about? What's top of mind? You're young, you're smart, or you're, you're young at heart. There are, you know, a lot of obviously cutting-edge people in this room. What, what, what are you thinking about? What should they be working on?
Well, I think you should be working on, you know, whatever you want to work on. That's number one. Your own, in your own native obsession and curiosity will take you much further than trying to follow anybody else's path. You cannot follow anybody else's path. That said, I, I view, you know, in life, all life as problem-solving, uh, as David Deutsch likes to say. Uh, and I would recommend to everybody to go read "The Beginning of Infinity" in "The Fabric of Reality." They rewired my brain, made me smarter. Um, I think that's like my number one reading advice. And people who say, "Go off and like, oh yeah, I read the book," and they come back a week later, "You really read it?" Like, actually properly absorb it. There's a whole coherent philosophy in there, um, that is grounded in physics, mathematics, reality, but also teaches you how to, or, or gives you good mental frameworks for how to think. And what is life? And what is intelligence?
Okay, so that's one thing. Um, but what are the important things in life? The important things in life, to me, are: Number one, you got to take care of your material needs. Uh, you have to have some physical leverage in the physical world. So that means, yeah, you have to create something that society wants. And, uh, as a byproduct of that, and the knowledge that you've accumulated, you can make some money. Great. Money is just stored-up value. And this frees up your time. And this frees up your time to help others and to go do what you want.
Now, what are the other things that you want out of life that you can't get out of money? Um, my personal list is three things that you can't, you can't buy. Uh, and it's my favorite little note to myself on the internet, which is, uh, a fit body, a calm mind, and a house full of love. These are the things that cannot be bought. They must be earned. Right? It's a constant reminder to myself.
There is a fourth, which is respect. But I would argue you don't chase respect because that becomes fame. And the easiest way to kind of not be someone worthy of respect is to chase respect. Respect is emergent. It's kind. Respect is emergent, an emergent byproduct. But at the same time, you can't become a slave to it, otherwise you become like a celebrity. And the celebrity are the most miserable people in the world. It doesn't matter who, who listens to you or likes you, as long as the right people, the people that you listen to and like, like you. That's what matters. So I would rather have the respect of 10 people who I respect rather than respect of the masses. That's just a popularity contest. Uh, and sure, that made more sense in monkey times. But, you know, in modern times, I, I would argue that having the right 10 people listen to you is far more important than having everyone listen to you.
Um, in terms of, you know, the, the checklist of a fit body, uh, I know you've taken that to heart with Network School. Brian Johnson is here, and he's obviously going to whip us all into that. Yeah, he'll whip you all into shape. Uh, I think the answer there's, you know, pretty obvious. Work out hard, lift heavy weights, don't eat sugar. Right? We all know what to do. It's having the discipline to do it, which is hard.
Uh, you know, a calm mind is a, is a, a bigger problem. But I, I think everybody wants to have a calm mind. You're meditation. I mean, that actually does, you've talked about that before. Yeah, meditation is an overloaded word. Uh, it means everything to every person. I think understanding is probably a better route. Uh, in that, you, what, what you want to be is, you don't want to be meditative for an hour a day while you sit there with your eyes closed. You want to be meditative all the time. And so anything that is consistently with you is a byproduct of understanding. It's a deep conviction. And you're only going to get there by thinking it through for yourself. In a way, reading other people's philosophy, including reading the, the almanac, is like reading the answers to a bunch of math problems. Like you got a math textbook, then you skip to the end, you start reading the answers. Well, that's not going to do anything for you. What you want is the understanding. So you can get inspired by other people, but you have to figure it out for yourself. And when, and the things in which you have deep conviction, they do modify your psyche, they do modify your mind, they do modify your internal state. And so that's the kind of meditation that you want.
Um, you also don't want to self-obsess too much. You want to find things outside of yourself if you want a calmer mind. Because, you know, all depressed people are victims of rumination. They're self-obsessed. They're constantly thinking about themselves. And you can see that people who are either highly religious or they have children, they have something that they love more than themselves. They're not self-obsessed. So they can kind of get out of their own minds. So in that sense, I think modern therapy where you can just sit there with a therapist and go in circles for 10 years can be a trap because you're just obsessing about yourself all over again. And the more seriously you take yourself, the less happy you're going to be. Because at the end of the day, there's nothing, you know, unless Brian Johnson gets us, they're living for forever. You exit this world the same way you came in with absolutely nothing. Uh, you can't take it with you.
And then finally, a house full of love is actually the easiest one. But people wrap themselves up in in knots over it because, uh, you can create it anytime you want. Just love the people in your life that you know. You, you, you express your love. It's the wanting love back, that neediness, that craving, that is the problem. But you can create love anytime you want. So I think that if you can kind of make your money and work on those three, then you're in pretty good shape. And that, that to me is what self-improvement is. I mean, I think the only real improvement is self-improvement. As you know, I don't really believe in, uh, groups, uh, other than as a vehicle, uh, for the individual to improve themselves. All rights are fundamentally individual rights. All truth-seeking is an individual, uh, thing. Curiosity is an individual thing. Groups are effective for getting things done. Humans are an organized species. We're not hive mind like answer bees, but we are meant to kind of rally together, use our ideas, tell stories to each other, inspire each other, and then use collective efforts to get what we want. But if you're looking to improve yourself, or if you're looking to figure out the truth, uh, you're probably much better off as an individual following your own natural curiosity. And that's really what it boils down to is curiosity and sort of a commitment to learning the correct answer. And I think if you have that, then you can fulfill almost any desire. All the tools are there. Uh, you know, as I've quipped before on Twitter, like the, the means of learning are abundance. It's a desire to learn that's scarce. And that's true even within me. You know, most of the time I'm exhausted, I don't want to learn, I just want to, uh, relax or do the things that I'm already good at. But at the same time, if I look back on my life, almost everything great that I've managed to pull off, you know, great by my own definition, not by the world's definition, has, yeah, has come from, has come from following my own natural intellectual obsessions. Yep.
So I think if, if you can get obsessed over something, uh, and if you can dive into it and sort of just let yourself go and just learn everything about it with no motive other than just you want to know the answer, I think that that is the kind of the basis for all of the so-called self-improvement out there. You, you have Brian Johnson here somewhere. You know, he's obsessed with not dying and aging well. He's obsessed, and that's great. He's following his intellectual obsession, and we all get to learn from that. Um, you're following your obsession on the network state. There are people out there following their obsession on AI, on crypto. There are people who are following their obsession on history, you know, Roman history, whatever it is. But if you kind of get obsessed with something, you can figure it out to a detail that other people don't. It can satisfy yourself. And if you go deep enough into anything, you find the same commonalities. You find the same philosophies. Um, you know, as a weird aside, I've gotten into photography recently. You know, I have young kids, so don't ask me why, but it's just kind of a way of combining, uh, art and science, being social and antisocial, doing something utilitarian. But sure enough, I'm obsessed with photography. But I'm reading all the philosophical photography blogs where the, you know, the author is talking about, what is the meaning of life? And what is art? And, you know, what is science? And etc. It's like, if you go deep into anything, you'll find the same kind of common threads. And so I, I think it's self-improvement really just comes from letting yourself be yourself, follow the things that you really want to follow, figuring out the things that you want to figure out, not worrying about what other people want or other people think. And then you kind of find yourself in the same place at the end, no matter which route you take.
To be intelligent, you have to be curious, right? And if you're curious, you care about the truth. And you care about being wrong. I'm wrong all the time. I've been wrong. People call me out, like, "Oh, have you revised reviews on AI? Were you wrong?" This, like, I'm wrong in everything, right? But I'm trying to figure out the answer. I'm not trying to be consistent with what the image you have of me. I, I could care less on that.
As you were talking about persuasion, there, one of the rules of persuasion is, if you make a public proclamation about something, you will then not wish to go against that. Your self-image will not want to, uh, transgress and go against it. Go against this. This is very, very true. Very, very true. You would rather a weird reality, right, than, uh, and social media is a public extraction machine. People are on there all day saying, "Here is my public proclamation on this thing I don't know [ __ ] anything about." And then they have to be consistent with that until it's not until it's socially acceptable to not be brilliant. Yeah. And this is what the whole Marxist struggle sessions is all about, which is make you confess in public, and then you have to believe that. So, you know, North Korean prisoners of war in North Korea were like forced to write confessions, and then they basically slowly turned, and they thought they were communists. And so we're seeing that done on social media now, where people are being forced to virtue signal and extract confessions and say, "Yes, I believe in this," or "Yes, I believe in that." And and now they have to stick to it. But this is why it's so, so, so important to only write the truth and only speak the truth. Because as you said, we, we are now living in an age of, of mass public extraction machines where you extract statements out of people, and then they have to rewire their brain to be consistent with their past proclamations. And it's an incredibly powerful form of persuasion. This, yeah, this goes back to being as a thing called consistency bias, but it has been taken to a ridiculous degree.
Yeah, in fact, Ben Franklin used to use it quite cleverly. He would go to someone who was a social enemy of his, not maybe not like an overkill, you on sight enemy, but someone who didn't like him. And he would be in a public setting, and he would ask that person, he would say, "Hey, I, I see you have this book on your bookshelf, or you're reading this book, and it's, it looks really interesting. May I borrow the book?" And this is back in the day when books were very hard to come by, they're very expensive and very treasured. And, you know, one of the reasons you chose your friend circle carefully was cuz you were building overlapping libraries and borrowing and lending books. So, but it was just on the edge of it was socially unacceptable publicly to refuse to give someone your a book that you had for on loan. And of course, it was also, uh, a way of showing that, oh, I, you know, it's flattery. It's flattery as well. I'm so erudite, you want to borrow my book, you want to learn what I'm, what I'm, uh, what I'm reading. So people would loan him the books. And he wouldn't read them, he would just borrow them. And then, you know, a few weeks later, he would return them. But now, what's happened is this person has publicly loaned you a book in front of their friends. So if they've loaned you a book, that means that they probably like you. You wouldn't loan a book to your enemy, right? And so all of a sudden, it kind of breaks the ice and starts having the person think more kindly of you. It's a very small example of consistency bias. But I think in social media land now, we've weaponized this. It's become incredibly powerful.
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