Life Principles

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Why?

Science:

Robust scientific evidence shows sleep is the most powerful “performance enhancement” mechanism in the world.

1. Brain function: detoxification, stress relief, memory consolidation and learning, increase in willpower
2. Overall system: tissue repair, inflammation fighting, immune system support

Evolution:

1. Studies of hunter-gatherer tribes (like the Hadza) show 8-9 hours of sleep per night

1. Wind-down Routine: no food 4 hours before sleep, no electronics 1 hour before sleep
2. Sleep Conditions: Dark, quiet, safe
3. Rhythm: consistent sleeping time from 10pm to 7am, exposure to morning light upon awakening to anchor a consistent body clock (circadian rhythm)

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Science:

1. Most robust health outcomes by combining aerobic exercise (walking/running) with resistance training (lifting)
2. The cardio protects your heart and metabolism, while the strength training protects muscles and bones

Evolution:

1. Walking: Hunter-gatherers walked a lot, 5-10 miles per day
2. Lifting: Regular bouts of lifting/carrying
3. Sprinting: Rare bursts of life-or-death intensity sprinting

1. Daily walks + stretching: endurance and flexibility
2. Daily push-ups/squats + some weights: strength
3. Sprint 1-2 times/week: peak fitness/hormonal response (I play basketball for this)

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In food, it’s more about what we don’t consume vs. what we consume.

The modern food industry is full of products optimizing for taste at the expense of health. Less is more.

Science:

1. Oxidation and Inflammation are the main enemy of the body, fasting induced autophagy cleans those bad cells
2. In fasting, body burns fat instead of sugar, running on ketones, a cleaner energy source for the brain (less radicals produced)

Evolution:

1. Hunter gatherers’ bodies adapted to regular long periods of no food intake

1. Intermittent Fasting: maintain a strict eating window from 12pm to 6pm for regular autophagy
2. Longer fasts: complete water fasts 1 full day a week (I usually do Sundays, easy to remember)
3. Deep cleansing fasts: 3-7 day water fasts once a year, usually at the end of the year

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Science:

1. Too much sugar and carbs bad for blood sugar levels
2. Lead to fat storage + all kinds of problems, including oxidation and inflammation
3. Chewing thoroughly: good for dental health, reduces hunger and lessens inflammation

Evolution:

1. As discussed, our DNA is more adapted to a paleolithic diet
2. Hunter-gatherers did not consumer modern processed foods, added sugar and carbs

1. Eat: Protein (fish, eggs), vegetables (broccoli), healthy fats (virgin olive oil, cocoa, nuts/seeds)
2. Avoid: Carbs and sugar in moderation
3. Chew 20-30 times per bite

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Why?

We increasingly have advanced technology for targeted biological programming.

However, this needs to be done carefully and in a targeted manner.

Overall, longevity therapies are much less important than the first four principles (sleep, exercise, fast, eat clean), which have by far the highest marginal utility for health.

1. Measure what nutrients your body lacks
2. Supplements: I take some Multi-vitamin powders, Coenzyme Q10, NMN (during my eating window)
3. Therapies: occasional cell therapies boosting immune system

1. Daniel Lieberman: The Story of the Human Body
2. Mark Sisson: The Primal Blueprint
3. Robb Wolf: The Paleo Solution
4. Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene
5. Richard Dawkins: River out of Eden

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Create mental separation with your mind’s default programming.

There are two important parts of the brain.

Limbic System (“monkey brain”):

1. Optimized to avoid deathly dangers (tigers and predators)
2. Today, many of those existential dangers are gone, thus the limbic system often presents an over-exaggeration, erring on the side of excessive fear (a source of anxiety)

Neocortex (“thinking brain”):

1. Sometimes tends to over-analyze things that may not be important or are simply not calculable

Observing yourself in meditation:

Awareness itself creates distance.

Once you observe yourself as an external party, you create distance to those two systems, and are not mindlessly controlled by their default programs.

Reprogram your software, build positive habits in your subconscious meditative state.

If life is like a game in a simulation, what ultimately matters is whether you can interpret all the light and sound signals fed to your consciousness in a positive way.

It’s easier to do so when you take a moment and stop immersing yourself into your daily “player character”.

Once you get calm distance in meditation, you can begin to reprogram habitual reactions, increasing your “baseline happiness.“

Realize that Increasing your “baseline happiness level” is much more important than chasing temporary “happiness spikes.”

Studies on people who win the lottery vs. those who get disease (spikes vs. crashes) shows that after a short time, both groups quickly return to their previous baseline happiness.

We spend most of our lives living with our baseline level of happiness. This is one of the most underappreciated facts of human life.

Increasing and maintaining this baseline is thus absolutely paramount.

Meditate at least 10 minutes a day as part of your morning routine.

Meditating for a short period of time every single day is better than meditating sporadically.

Most importantly, try to maintain that meditative state throughout the day. Treat life itself as a form of meditation.

After exploring many methods of meditation, I use a combination of them, which I categorize into two buckets.

Separate:

1. Transcendental mantras: these are single syllable “prayers” that settle your mind
2. Observe breath, body or thoughts: use observational awareness to create calmness and distance to “yourself”

Reprogram:

1. Positivity: think positive thoughts, smile!
2. Gratefulness: think about things you are grateful about

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1. Scientific studies show the act of smiling alone can make you feel happier
2. Happiness => smiling; but also smiling => happiness!!!!!!
3. Smiling activates neural pathways that release neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins, natural mood lifters and pain relievers

1. Morning Routine: Add deliberate smiling and laughing into your morning routine
2. During the day: Use all opportunities to smile and laugh, even when you don’t feel like it

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Life is a big game with many sub-games, each sub-game is a huge probability distribution. Sometimes things go our way, but oftentimes things do not go our way.

If we are to take seriously the task to be as happy as possible, to maintain a happy state as much as possible, we have to be able to flow with the probabilities of life happily.

If all your happiness comes from one single game, when things go against you in that game, it tends to crush you, making your happiness extremely fragile.

Build a resilient baseline happiness with diversified pillars.

Realize there are many different sources of happiness in this world, many different games that can serve as great pillars for your happiness.

At the very least, we’ve outlined 8 big ones in this document alone:

1. Body
2. Mind
3. Love
4. Wealth
5. Power
6. Fame
7. Learning
8. Experiencing

Be able to swim with the currents of life.

If things are a little tough at work (wealth), maybe you get to spend more time with your family (love).

If things are a bit tough with love, maybe you get to spend more time improving your health and living longer with higher quality (longevity).

If a new opportunity emerges to create value and make money, maybe you lean into it a bit more.

If your body needs rest, maybe you spend more time learning about cool subjects (like quantum physics or the mystics!).

(you get the idea).

All these are amazing games, amazing sources of happiness.

Play each one with equal joy, and let them serve your happiness, instead of destroying your happiness to play any one of them.

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Maintaining a moderate material life not overly reliant on external luxuries has several key advantages.

Minimizes downside risk of sadness shocks.

As discussed, we tend to feel the same baseline happiness whether living a luxurious or regular material life.

1. Studies on people who win the lottery vs. get disease, show after a short time, both return to their previous baseline happiness
2. A former Blackstone colleague of mine never ate a piece of meat in his life: doesn’t mean his baseline happiness is lower than someone who has

By living a stoic material life, or at least not overly depending on material luxury, you:

1. Minimize sadness shocks when you can’t afford external luxury
   • Chinese adage: Easy to go from simplicity to luxury, hard to go from luxury to simplicity (由俭入奢易，由奢入俭难)
2. While enjoying your same baseline happiness!

Reminds you that the most important source of happiness comes from within.

Maximize your internal baseline happiness, not rare happiness strikes.

Gives you flexibility to explore the world.

1. Too much reliance on material comfort leads to more fear of losing
   • Chinese adage: The one who has no shoes doesn’t fear the one who wears them (光脚不怕穿鞋的)
2. Too much reliance on material comfort leads to less space for exploring
   • Daodejing: It’s frugality that gives birth to breadth of experience (俭故能广)
   • A person who is too comfortable, gets reluctant go climb a mountain in hard conditions
   • Someone who is only comfortable exercising with a gym stops exercising when he can’t go to a gym
3. Low ego helps you to flow and merge with life
   • If you are too prideful about your ego, you close many options because you think they may affect how people look at you, and therefore can’t fully immerse yourself into every moment of life

1. Don’t identify yourself with outside things
   • Avoid reliance on luxury consumption items
   • Own what appreciates, rent what depreciates
2. Don’t identify yourself with a certain ego or self-image
   • Purposely train a thick face + thick skin
   • Try to get rejected as many times as possible, it means you are testing your boundaries and growing
3. Minimize the things you “feel bad about”
   • Don’t let entrenched social norms, often set by beneficiaries of the status quo, shame you into internal self-sabotage

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Humans deeply crave for growth, meaning and purpose.

The modern problem: religious faith challenged by modern science, leaving people with a huge emptiness inside, and no clear direction in life.

We need positive beliefs to fill religion’s spot. Filling it with negativity and anxiety destroys our modern psyche, leading to lots of depression in society today.

Deeply believing that the best is ahead of you, no matter during highs or lows of life, generates hope and energy.

Couple of great reads on this:

1. Myth of Sisyphus: Sisyphus spends his entire life rolling a stone, but Sartre writes “one must imagine Sisyphus happy”
2. Strings of Life: Chinese short story of a blind man who lives a happy life, chasing a dream of regaining his vision that is actually futile (he doesn’t know it’s futile)
   • It’s better to be optimistic and wrong, than to be pessimistic and right

1. Meditation: train to think positively and be excited for the future
2. Vision: find positive visions of the future the world can go to (Bitcoin, AI, longevity etc.)

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Focus on results does not bring results, focus on process leads to results.

Example: you don’t lose weight by worrying over the weight number, you lose weight by focusing on a set amount of exercise and diet everyday.

Daoist call it “doing without clinging”(为而不争).

Buddhist call it “focus on the seed not the fruit” (重因不重果).

Focus on results is uncertain happiness, focus on the controllable process is certain happiness

Find fulfillment in the process itself, not clinging to a particular outcome. Use the goalpost to design and fuel a great rewarding process, not the other way around.

1. Focus on the day: design and live your perfect day every day, focusing on things you can control
2. Intention training: constantly shift your mind towards motivators that find fulfillment in the process itself, not in the result
   • Love
   • Curiosity
   • Creativity
   • Gratitude
   • Humor

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1. Stoic wisdom: focus on what you can control, accept what you can’t control
2. Rationality: Why worry about anything you cannot change? No upside all downside

1. Never regret
   • Instant acceptance and allowance of what has already happened and you can’t change
   • No victim mentality
2. Love what you can’t change: there’s a positive side to everything

There’s a wise Chinese story here worth sharing, called “The old man loses his horse.”

An old man loses his horse.

He thinks losing the horse must be a bad thing, yet a few days later his horse comes back and brings with it a female horse.

He thinks the horse returning must be a good thing, yet soon his son breaks his leg riding the horse.

He thinks his son breaking his leg must be bad thing, but because of the injury his son avoids going to the army, and thereby, avoids death.

The lesson: we occupy such a limited patch in space-time, that we tend to judge things narrowly. We don’t know the entire plan, which is spread throughout the entirety of space-time.

The ultimate trust is to trust in god, to trust in the ultimate wisdom of the plan, to merge and be one with it, and be grateful as part of its divine unfolding.

Always look at things from a positive angle, as the Buddhists say:

“The one who can turn external circumstances with his heart, is equal to Buddha.” (心能转物，则同如来)

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Rationality:

1. Eliminate any source of sadness you can do very little about. No upside all downside

Evolution:

1. Perhaps envy developed in an age of zero sum game in small tribes
2. The world is now big enough for lots of people to succeed together

1. Mindset training: watch your thoughts, practice turning envy into admiration, happiness and an opportunity to learn, make it a subconscious habit

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Why?

1. Some pleasures are short term positive, long term negative, overall very negative, especially those leading to potentially uncontrollable addiction
2. Focus on pleasures that are long term, and compound over time

1. With any action, try to ask yourself: what are the second and third order long term consequences?
2. Avoid
   • Excessive Alcohol
   • Excessive Drugs
   • Other addictive substances and activities

1. Jean-Paul Sartre: The Myth of Sisyphus
2. Herman Hesse: Siddhartha
3. Laozi: Daodejing
4. Tiesheng Shi: Strings of Life

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The more you give, the more you receive.

1. Signals to others that as I become better you become better, making others want you to become better and dissolve boundaries between you
2. Daodejing: The sage doesn’t accumulate for himself, but the more he gives, the more he receives (圣人不积。 既以为人己愈有，既以与人己愈多)

The act of loving is in itself rewarding and a deep human need.

1. Take a look at fan or even stan culture
   • See how people love their idols and stars + how much joy they get from it
2. You realize that the act of loving something beyond ourselves is a deep human need
   • We long to temporarily dissolve our own small boundaries of the ego
   • Chinese adage: the one who gives is luckier than the one who receives (施比受有福)

1. Find a few members you can pour concentrated love to: gods, kids, etc.
2. Try to give everyone even in outer circles a sign of love
   • Inner circle: Time, caring
   • Outer circle: Smile, embrace

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Love can’t coordinate across large population.

Your time and energy is limited, you don’t have enough to give equally to everyone.

1. Even ancient rural China, the most family-based country, used a combination of family + power structures to govern

Helping at scale is best done through other three social batteries, like wealth.

1. Focus on a small number of sustainable loving relationships that compound over long periods of time
2. Constantly changing members of love leads to less compounding + weaker connections/batteries

1. Family members < 10
   • This is your first place in society after birth, or your kids’ first place after birth
   • Love the absolute primary motivation here. Kids have no other currency
   • A place of community and support even when all other batteries fail
2. Close Tribe members < 10
   • Family-Like
   • Need different forms of battery as supplement
3. Close Friends < 30
   • People who are deeply interested in each other and regard each other as a community
   • Need different forms of battery as supplement

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1. Human condition = hedgehogs in the winter
   • We need each other for warmth, but getting too close we will sting and hurt each other
2. Humans desire at the margin
   • The harder you pull, the harder your partners flee your control (especially in romantic love)

1. Stand in love, don’t fall in love: attract don’t chase
2. Maintain traditions that bind you and your loved ones: meals, trips, anniversaries etc.
   • Leave rest of time and space to their own endeavors, respect their individualism

1. Erich Fromm: The Art of Love

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1. Success is a probability distribution. The truth about life is, no one knows for sure – everyone is guessing with different degrees of certainty and probability
2. Hard work and skills are ingredients but far from guarantees, luck plays a huge role
3. If you have a 10% probability of success, draw ten times for high probability of success

1. Safety net: build a financial cushion that allows you to play, by saving (max. revenue min. expenses)
2. Hard work: maximize the potential of each lottery draw
3. Resilience: when something doesn’t work out just move on to the next draw. Deeply understand the probability game

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1. You have to go fish where there are tons of big fish, not where there are none
2. When an industry or product is on the rise, its builders, sellers and investors all rise together
3. Hard work is futile if working against a tide

Find a vision where an old need can be solved by new technology.

Old needs: powerful unchanging human motivators, e.g.

1. Money (revenue or savings)
2. Attracting the opposite sex
3. Welfare for children
4. Prestige
5. Community (fears of getting left out)
6. etc.

New Tech:

1. Hard tech:
   • better way to turn energy to resources
     • e.g. guns/cars/rockets, ASML/TSMC
2. Coordination tech:
   • better way to coordinate resources
     • e.g. internet/finance, Google/Nasdaq

Old need + New Tech = growing industry

1. Play positive sum > zero sum games, growing industries over saturated industries
2. Develop a vision of how this new technology can solve an old problem

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1. Find a vision of a better future, one worth craving for
2. Don’t need to be first mover, can also be fast follower with marginal improvements
3. The vision involves a product, but the product is only part of a vision. A business is often a network of relations, not simply only a product!!!

The simple way to describe leverage is – get more resources in the universe to help you do what you want to do.

When building a product, two important leverages include:

Right Technology

The right technology like software and code gives you leverage by lowering marginal cost of servicing to almost zero.

You are essentially leveraging the entire digital infrastructure and the entire tech stack built over decades and decades to help you.

Imagine how much money and energy you are using here to help your vision and product service .

Right People

Get other people with complementary skill sets to also build what you are building.

You can obviously compensate them with cash or equity or a token stake, but more importantly, great people will help build when they truly believe in the direction.

1. People follow because of a vision + strength of your belief
2. Teams can be centralized organizations (companies) or decentralized communities

A valuable product without scarcity leads to no profits, because efficient markets compete away profits.

You need to design the product not only for value, but also for stickiness and scarcity. e.g.

Quality Flywheel => Better Product

1. Design a system where user growth allows you to improve the technology and product
2. Examples: ASML / NVIDIA

Network Effects => Stickier Product

1. Design a system where more users being on the platform leads to a better user experience
2. Examples: FACEBOOK/AMAZON

High Switching Cost => Stickier Product

1. Design a system where upfront fees like membership fees make people reluctant to switch providers
2. Examples: COSTCO

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Selling is helping. People will ultimately only act in self-interest.

Develop trust with customer that you truly care about them.

People buy from people they trust.

1. Find the product whose vision and value you believe in
2. Tell its story from the point of the customer, what do they gain from the product?

Again – leverage is getting more resources in the universe to help you do what you want to do.

Right Technology:

Digital Media: talk to many people at once through digital media content, again you are leveraging the entire modern tech stack build over decades to help you lower marginal cost of selling.

Right People:

Virality: design your selling network for virality and encourage people to help sell for you. Help these partners make money so they have a true stake in the system.

Build: Unique product + Great retention

Sell: Digital Media + Viral recommendation

= Explosive growth

Lower Cost Product:

1. Scale and Technology (only affordable at scale) lowers cost
2. Examples: Walmart/Temu/Pinduoduo

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Long term

1. Find the vision you believe in for a long period of time
2. Buy early vs. at exact valuation

Contrarian

1. Find the rare subset of asset visions where you believe are right and the market doesn’t seem to agree

Where does the money for investing come from?

Savings

1. Save money by consuming less than you earn
2. Minimize consumption, maximize investment
   • Consumption = money that won’t ever come back
   • Investment: money that turns into asset, which can later be exchanged back to money

Many people don’t realize:

Saving money is itself a form of investing.

In a world world where governments continue to print large amounts of new cash, purely holding cash issued by governments (fiat cash) can sometimes have a negative real return (your money becomes worth less).

Leverage for building is getting tech and people to help you build.

Leverage for selling is getting tech and people to help you sell.

Leverage for investing is getting tech and people to help you invest.

Right Technology

Investing in assets that benefit from future technological trends.

You can also increasingly try using tools like AI to help you structure your investment philosophy, companies like Bridgewater have been doing this for decades.

However, don’t overly rely on technology here, you have to have your own vision and deep conviction as discussed in the previous part.

A pure reliance on outside technology that everyone has access to by definition has no excess profits (they will be competed away).

Right People

Debt or Equity

1. Capital markets are one of the most amazing invention of modernity
2. If you have lots of conviction, you can convince more people to invest with you, either in the form of debt or equity

Help market the asset and the vision

1. Sell the vision
2. Through an asset you own
3. Whose value people can bet on, invest and grow with

Moat – Competitive Edge

Deep Conviction + Concentrated Amounts

1. Use Warren Buffett’s punch-card analogy
   • Imagine you can only invest in 20 things your entire life
   • Forces you to invest in things you truly believe in. If you don’t truly believe in it, you won’t invest sufficiently large amounts, and if you don’t invest sufficiently large amounts, you won’t have meaningful returns
   • Separates you from crowds who want to make money quickly, thereby creating irrational short term market swings (Warren Buffett / Graham call this “Mr. Market”)
2. If you want to buy more when it goes down, it’s investing
   • Without conviction you don’t have staying power
   • Volatility is a gift for the faithful, it actually plays to your advantage if you are truly believe in the asset long term
3. Investing as building the asset
   • Ask not what you can get but what you can do for the asset
   • Treat your investment as helping to build an asset the world needs, this will give you a different angle from almost all other people

Long Term Horizon

1. Understand the power of compound interest – even small returns over long periods of time can be massive
2. Most people want to get rich quick, and that’s the opportunity for those who are patient
3. Even in the age of AI, AI trading will largely be short term focused, giving long term investors a chance to outperform

When analyzing a countries’ economy and wealth, you can use similar criteria as when analyzing an individual or company.

1. Vision: is there an appealing vision?
2. Build: is there an advantage in creating products for important needs?
   • Right People + Technology?
   • Layers of value production: turning nature’s energy to resources, stacked on top of each other – which layer does the country have a strength or weakness in?
     • Energy / Agriculture
     • Real Estate / Infrastructure / Finance
     • Software infrastructure
     • Software application /Entertainment
3. Sell: what are the distribution channels, and how strong is the brand of the country (are they trusted)?
4. Invest: what assets are profits being reinvested in? How is the balance sheet financed?
   • Where is money coming from
     • Equity/Taxes/Sales
       • How much is government taking from its people?
       • Is this sustainable?
     • Liabilities/Leverage
       • Short-term Debt Cycle
       • Long-term Debt Cycle
   • Assets
     • What assets does the country have?
     • How much money has been printed / what is inflation?

Summary of wealth concepts

1. Three roles: Build, Sell, Invest (in an area of high success probability, with high iteration/lottery drawings)
2. Four levers: Tech/Code, Media, Capital, People
3. Four moats: Network Effect, Quality Flywheel, Scale, Switching costs

Business/Finance

1. Warren Buffett
2. Yongping Duan (段永平)
3. Ray Dalio

Economics

1. Friedrich Hayek
2. Milton Friedman
3. Henry Hazlitt

Kid’s Education on Wealth

1. Build – builder games (Website/apps/coins)
2. Sell – sales commission games
3. Invest – investing games in 1-5 year horizons starting from 5
   • Create personal 3 statements from young age

Monetary battery is determined by numbers on a database.

Power battery is determined by roles in a certain organization.

You can ask other people to do as you wish because of your role in a certain organization.

How do you get to that position?

Through:

1. voluntary social consensus (other people agree to it), or
2. forced social consensus (other people forced to agree to it, because you have a stronger fist/military).

Today, in most parts of the world, only the government can “force” consensus, since they are the only ones with concentrated military power.

Thus, in the game of power, you either convince people to adhere to you through voluntary consensus (this often overlaps or is in reality powered by the battery of wealth instead), or leverage the power of the government to help you force consensus.

For the avoidance of overlap with the wealth section, this section will primarily focus on the second scenario.

While economics can be a positive sum game, power is often a zero sum game, a question of distribution, a question of downside boundaries.

To use power wisely, focus on the principles below.

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Why?

Understand there is a tension between the collective authority and the individual.

Most fundamentally, as Hobbes described it, without any rules, society descends into chaos.

In chaos, there is no security, because no one can force abidance by rules.

In any country, the essential trade is this:

Individuals trade taxes for security and a certain order.

Though most people already have a nationality by birth, understand that there is a choice you can make in an age of global mobility.

This is one of the most important choices affecting your freedom and security in the world.

How?

Different states have different rules and trade-offs.

The essence of any state organization, is a range of value trade-offs between placing the power in the hands of the individual or the collective.

Some of the most important trade-offs include:

1. Freedom vs. Safety – who owns military power / guns?
   • If ownership is concentrated in government, you have more daily safety but potential oppression
   • If ownership is concentrated in individuals, you have less daily safety and potential gun fights
2. Freedom vs. Unity – who regulates social speech / media?
   • If government regulates speech, the community is more united but individuals are less free
   • If there is no speech regulation, there is potential for spread of falsehoods and less unity
3. Freedom vs. Property protection- who regulates money / markets?
   • If government regulates markets, participants are less free and markets may be less efficient
   • If no one regulates markets, participants are free but fraud and monopoly may be abundant
4. Differing economic engine paradigms
   • Top-down control = centralized computing
   • Bottoms-up control = decentralized computing

Then, there is obviously also a softer question regarding where you feel more emotional and cultural comfort.

Taking all these factors into account, be clear on your trade-offs and choose your partner accordingly.

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1. Wealth best used as carrot, law best used as stick
2. These are better forms of mass coordination than pure “trust” and emotional bonds, without an enforcement mechanism. Humans are fickle
3. Offensive defense: The more comfortable you are using this tool, the more people who are afraid of conflict concede to your needs

1. Law and court battles
   • De facto leveraging power of the collective (military / police / force of government)
   • In place of street fights, we now fight within legal bounds
2. In all outer circle interactions, set your legal boundaries so you are safe on the downside

1. Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan Metaphor
2. George Orwell: 1984, Big Brother Metaphor
3. Frederic Bastiat: The Law

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People are ultimately motivated only by self-interest.

Being the advocate of a group aligns interest, and dissolves the boundaries between you and your audience.

The bigger your tribe, the bigger your potential following.

For example, the mission of SpaceX is the bring humanity to Mars. Humanity itself is the tribe, the death of human intelligence in the universe is the enemy.

On the other hand, helping the right win against the left in politics is a smaller tribe (but equally if not more powerful as a call to action).

Choose your herd. The herd is defined by:

1. a common cause
2. a common enemy
   • common enemy is the most direct way to leverage power of the tribe / collective
   • but know if you are loved, you will also be hated

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In the game of fame, controversy is better than anonymity.

1. Opinions change quickly: one can get famous first and get trusted later
2. Evolution over-exaggerates fear of negative opinion. In a much bigger world, people are more forgetful, and the consequences of negative opinions are generally less than in a small ancient tribe

1. Be where people’s eyes are:
   • New forms of media
     • tiktok, gaming, etc.
2. Give what they want to see:
   • Old forms of content
     • drama, conflict, etc.
     • glimpse into a life that people aspire to

Once enough people see you, those who need and trust you will increasingly come to you, as opposed you going out to search for them. This is the single most powerful benefit of fame. It can be a great screening and trust-building mechanism.

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1. Appearance is not substance: content is more than ever a tool with a motive behind it
2. Don’t care about negative opinions too much
   • Negative social opinion not as bad as it used to be, depending on government and where you are
   • Examples: Trump/Musk are often widely hated, widely loved, with sentiments drastically turning frequently
   • The truth is always a gray area

How?

1. Question the content you see
   • Who benefits from me seeing this?
   • What are their incentives?
   • Are their incentives truly aligned with mine?
2. Separate yourself from the content you create
   • You are not the content you produce, nor are you what other people believe about you at a specific moment in time
   • Every communicator will be misunderstood by some, the larger the crowd the more will misunderstand

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Why?

Humans process information slowly and prioritize simplicity.

Simplicity leads to attention, attention is the currency.

1. Neocortex: operates on few bits/second in processing power
2. Limbic system: very primitive, mostly responds to emotions and energy

1. Neocortex: slow processor of logic, few bits/second
   • Brevity: as short as possible
   • Graphics: use metaphors, graphs and pictures
   • Stories: most digestible form of information intake
2. Limbic system: responds to emotions over logic
   • Humor: offers relief, gives mind a recovery break
   • Exaggeration: activates emotional attention

1. Le Bon – The Crowd

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Math:

Math is the language of the universe.

(or at least the best one we have discovered).

Language connects humans, math connects the universe.

Physics:

Physics dictates how math expresses itself in the tangible universe. It combines math with the reality we can touch and hear.

Living in this universe, it’s hard to go against physical principles.

As Elon Musk beautifully put it:

“Physics is the law, everything else is an opinion.”

Computer Science:

Computer science is a way of using math to create intelligence.

Computer science is giving birth to more intelligence in the world through software and AI, arguably the most important source of societal progress, because intelligence accelerates all other progress.

Understanding the rough contours of both the hardware and software tech stack of our digital economy is one of the most important angles to comprehend our modern existence.

Everything else like biology, chemistry, even financial markets can be studied effectively as emergent disciplines using the frameworks built up in math, physics and computer science.

Languages:

1. English is a must today as the tongue of the world
2. Chinese is important to understand the other half of the world

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The modern scientific method is best understood through Karl Popper’s epistemology, which David Deutsch explains well.

A couple of key insights here.

Inductive reasoning is flawed

We often accumulate observations (e.g., “I’ve seen 1,000 white swans”) to form general theories (“All swans are white”) .

Popper argued this inductive reasoning is logically flawed.

No matter how many confirmations you get, you can never prove a theory true (the 1,001st swan could be black).

Science = conjecture + testing (falsifiability)

Science does not work by proving theories true. It advances by proving theories false.

The best scientific theories are those that are highly falsifiable (make bold, precise predictions) but have, so far, resisted all our most serious attempts to falsify them.

Analogy:

Science is not a process of building an unshakable brick wall of knowledge (verification). It is like a scaffold that is constantly being tested, with the weak parts knocked out and replaced with stronger, more robust structures (falsification).

The scaffold of science gets sturdier, but it never becomes a permanent, unchangeable wall.

This is how we should treat science, and it’s also how we should treat our own life principles.

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There is too much information in the world, you have to decide

1. What’s important to remember
2. How they relate to each other (develop internal consistency)

You might ask: what’s the role of such a personal knowledge tree in an age of instantly available digital libraries?

The answer is, you memorize not to remember per se, but to book your own mind-share for the principles that you deem most important.

It’s one thing for you to read something, it’s a whole different level if you interact with it and ask yourself:

1. Do I agree or disagree with it?
2. Do I want to incorporate this into my own life?

Building your own knowledge structure today is an important way to filter through a world where information is overabundant.

Similar to how I structured this life principles document:

1. What are the important areas of knowledge and what are our goals?
2. What are the most fundamental first principles in this area that guide all other principles?

Refine and adjust this knowledge tree as you progress.

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Humans are deeply interested in each other as social beings, so learning stories about others in a field is a natural way to pique your interest in the field. That’s why, in recent years, podcasts have been so effective, combining interest in personal stories with knowledge exchange.

When you begin your journey in a field, read biographies and find stories of people in the field who are most interesting, or have had the most impact.

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1. Curiosity is great
2. But curiosity with no limits lead to scattered knowledge. You don’t fully understand, and easily forget
3. Learning anything is like learning how to ride a bike
   • focus until you are totally comfortable, then you won’t forget easily

1. Set periodical learning projects focused on one or a few subjects
2. Guide the bounds of your curiosity to this area only
3. Do not stop until you feel like you are fully fluent and intuitive in this subject

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The best way to learn is to teach

1. Learn the material
2. Teach and explain as if simplifying for a kid
3. Realize gaps in knowledge and go back to learning
4. Simplify again

Charlie Munger once said:

“It’s in the nature of things, that many hard problems are best solved only when they are addressed backward.”

Similarly, the Daodejing writes

“Reverse is the motion of Dao.”

There are many ways in which reverse thinking can be helpful, for example:

1. Scientific angle: By questioning a principle, you understand its limits better, and know when it can be falsified through better evidence
2. Action angle: often the best way to achieve something, is by avoiding its reverse. For example, the best way to live intelligently may be to avoid clearly stupid mistakes

1. Stephen Hawking
2. David Deutsch (combining several theories)
   • Quantum Physics: Multiverse theory
   • Epistemology: Karl Popper – conjecture + testing (falsifiability)
   • Evolution: Richard Dawkins
   • Computation: Alan Turing (Quantum Computing)
3. Carlo Rovelli:
   • Seven Brief Lessons of History
   • The Order of Time
4. Jim Baggott: The End of Physics
5. Richard Feynman
6. Naval Ravikant
7. Charlie Munger

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Limited brainpower

1. Humans process information at extremely low speed, few bits per second

Limited Filters

1. Our five bodily senses are like limited filters
   • Imagine someone who never had ears, you couldn’t explain to them what sound feels like
   • If your glasses are shaded red, everything is red in your vision
2. Language and logic are limited tools
   • Language often operates in low single dimension logic, reality is complex and multi-dimensional
   • Daodejing: “The dao that can be expressed in language, is not the real Dao” (道可道非常道)
3. Having a sense of “self” may also prevent us from a merging experience with true reality, as it creates boundaries for perception

What is the “consciousness” that is experiencing those filters / sense of self, which ultimately transcends those filters?

There is a metaphor I really like that is often used in Buddhist teachings:

Consciousness itself is like the ocean, and our subjective sense of a “self” are waves of the ocean, separate but ultimately one.

Spirituality is often a way to experience that “oneness”.

How?

Shut off your regular brain filters for a more direct experience of the universe.

1. Meditation: train your brain to shut off
   • Deep meditative states where you go into harmonic energetic frequencies with the universe
2. Psychedelics: use external chemicals to help shut off
   • Ayuhasca (not yet tried but find interesting)
   • DMT (not yet tried but find interesting)

1. Aldous Huxley: The Doors of Perception by (modern perspective)
2. The Cloud of Unknowing (Christian perspective)
3. Yogananda: Autobiography of a Yogi (Eastern perspective)
4. Suzuki: Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
5. R.A. Nicholson:The Mystics of Islam by (Muslim perspective)