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Outside of the inescapable cultural and economic black holes that are the Northeast Corridor and California, perhaps the most relevant place in the US is Florida. Florida has been the single fastest-growing state by net migration over the past 15 years. Its governor, Ron DeSantis, is maybe the most powerful governor in the country, and the President’s unofficial seat of power is Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach. For a time, it looked like Miami might have been able to replace Silicon Valley and New York as the dominant city in tech and finance, respectively. Florida has Disney World and the massive Orlando tourism industry, Kennedy Space Center, the Miami Grand Prix, Art Basel, Inter Miami and Messi, and an economy larger than all but fourteen1 countries on Earth.

Florida’s history, too, has always represented America’s pioneering spirit. Florida was the first place in the US to be visited and settled by Europeans: first Juan Ponce de León’s expedition in 1513 and then the establishment of San Agustín (today St. Augustine) in 1565. It then saw nearly three centuries of being a very sparsely populated haven for pirates, escaped slaves, and pioneers looking to settle on America’s wild southern frontier. This changed when Henry Flagler built the Florida East Coast Railway, bringing civilization to the practically unsettled2 southern part of the state for the first time, sparking a population boom that’s continued to this day. Since 1880, Florida’s population has increased nearly a hundredfold, leading to major innovations in urban planning: Coral Springs was one of the first modern master-planned cities in the US, Seaside and Celebration are some of the best New Urbanist developments, and the massive retirement community of The Villages was the single fastest-growing metropolitan area in the entire country during the 2010s.

I’ve lived in Florida almost my entire life. My family moved to Delray Beach in 2006 when I was two and settled in Boca Raton a year later, where we still live. I go to college at the University of Florida in Gainesville. I’ve been lucky enough to have been all over the state, and with the new GTA VI trailer having just come out, now is as good a time as any to write a travel guide.

Miami

Florida’s largest metropolitan area by far, and its undisputed cultural and economic capital. If you only go to one place in Florida, it should be Miami.

• Downtown Miami/Brickell has one of the most impressive skylines in the country. It's changed dramatically since the first time I visited and continues to evolve rapidly. New skyscrapers go up all the time, usually modern white concrete with blue windows. Bayside Marketplace, though touristy, is nice to walk around. Maurice A. Ferré Park is a nice place to sit. Key word here is “new”. Brickell City Center is a cool new urban development/shopping mall, the Underline is a fantastic new park under the elevated Metrorail line, and the new Brightline train can take you throughout South Florida or even Orlando. A friend observed that Downtown is a lot like Singapore: hot and humid with lots of brand-new white skyscrapers, mixed-use development, and greenery. It’s pretty solarpunk.

• Latin American food is fantastic here. Look for Cuban, Venezuelan, Colombian, Peruvian, not so much Mexican (that's more Texas and the Southwest).

• Miami is hot pretty much all the time. There are about three months a year (December, January, February) where daily highs are below 80, overnight lows are below 65, and it’s less likely to be super humid and rainy. This is the best time to visit, though everybody else knows this and there will be more crowds thanks to tourists and snowbirds. Summer is extremely hot, with “feels like” temperatures around 90-100 during the day from mid-May to mid-October. Unlike most places, it doesn’t get cool at night - it’ll be like 80 degrees at 4 AM. It’s also extremely humid during the summer and it rains most days (though the rains are usually pretty hard and fast in the afternoon, and the mornings are usually sunny).

• Driving around Miami is somewhat dangerous, especially on I-95 and around the more Hispanic areas. Be careful. Transit is quite good around downtown thanks to the free Metromover, but the sparsity of the Metrorail/Tri-Rail/Brightline and slowness of the bus system means you'll be better off with a car. Traffic can get very *very* slow on the MacArthur Causeway (connecting the Beach to the mainland) and on I-95 during rush hour, so be prepared.

• There are two Miamis: the center and south (downtown, Miami Beach, Coral Gables, South Miami, Pinecrest, Kendall, etc): quite clean and safe, more white, wealthy, expensive, not many homeless people around; and the north and west (North Miami, Hialeah, Fontainebleau, Tamiami): still pretty safe (except Gladeview/Brownsville), very Hispanic and mostly Spanish-speaking, and generally more American suburbaslop and less interesting architecture.

• Great museums here include the Vizcaya (a beautiful Tuscan Mediterranean Revival estate in Coconut Grove), the Frost Science Museum downtown, and the highly underrated Ancient Spanish Monastery in North Miami Beach, a literal Spanish monastery built in the 1100s in Segovia and shipped and reassembled brick by brick in Florida. The Pérez Art Museum is okay but not great. The Miami Children's Museum was a lot of fun when I was a little kid. I haven’t been to the World Erotic Art Museum or Jewish Museum in Miami Beach but I’ve heard they’re both cool.

• Miami Beach is my favorite part of the city and has some of the best urban fabric of anywhere in the United States: long houses close together with the narrow side facing the streets, hidden back alleys for car access, major shopping streets flanking the island so that they're walking distance away from anywhere, parks and trees all over, etc. Walk all the way up Collins Ave, work out at Muscle Beach, chill at Flamingo Park or at one of the cafes on the west side, admire the view of the city and cruise ships from South Pointe Park. Sardinia Enoteca has the best lamb I've ever had, La Leggenda has some of the best pizza. South Beach is much more fun than the north side, which has more retirees, houses, condo towers. Avoid Miami Beach during spring break. Otherwise, highly recommend.

• Wynwood is a hip, gentrified neighborhood with graffiti and posters everywhere. It was once the center of the world during the COVID ZIRP crypto boom. Get breakfast at Zak the Baker, peruse the cars and guitars across the street at Walt Grace Vintage, pay the $15 to see the Wynwood Walls if you want (though this is certainly not mandatory), get lunch at The Taco Stand, pose with guns at Lock & Load. Mandatory: even if you aren't into designer clothing, see the nearby Miami Design District, which is an incredibly well-done urban space with some great food.

• Little Havana feels like a foreign country. Written text and spoken words are all in Spanish. Walk down Calle Ocho, check out the park dedicated to anti-communist guerrilla fighters and the park where old Cuban men play chess and dominos, try free samples of Cuban coffee in the tourist shops, eat Cuban food in the restaurants, listen to the bands playing Cuban music on the streets. If you want to see the “old” Miami of Godfather II and Scarface, with its one-story Spanish colonial homes and wood-frame houses, it'll be around here.

• Aventura is a very interesting development, full of gleaming condo towers and with a surprising amount of population density (and Jews). But it's not exactly walkable, there's hardly any transit, and the traffic is absolutely abysmal. The Aventura Mall is colossal - largest in the state and fifth-largest in the country. Its Apple Store is one of my favorites.

• Coral Gables is a nice upscale shopping/dining area but somewhat lacking in character. Not really worth it by itself. The Venetian Pool, however, is awesome, and the UMiami campus is beautiful, modern, and nice to walk around.

• Key Biscayne is underrated. There's not much to do in the town (though Milanezza is a very cool Argentinian-Italian restaurant/market), but Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park is a much more chill beach than Miami Beach. Biscayne Bay is a nice place to go out on a boat, if you have one.

South Florida

Broward County and Palm Beach County.

• The Everglades are a massive, mostly empty swamp covering the southern tip of the state. You can see it by driving through I-75’s “Alligator Alley” or taking an airboat tour, but there’s not much to do here unless you’re a real nature lover and can tolerate lots of heat and mosquitoes.

• The Keys are absolutely beautiful and have a very different feel from the rest of the state - less swamp/forest, more Caribbean islands. Drive slowly down to Key West and stop along the way to explore the small beaches. Along the way you'll see the remnants of Henry Flagler’s Florida East Coast Railroad extension from Miami to Key West. Eat fresh seafood. Key West is more town and less beach than the other keys. Be sure to take plenty of walks to enjoy the white colonial buildings and palm trees. Watch the sunset from always-vibrant, westward-facing Mallory Square. Visit the historic homes of Ernest Hemingway and Harry S. Truman.

• Fort Lauderdale is Miami’s biggest satellite city. There’s less to do in downtown Fort Lauderdale than in Miami. The Museum of Discovery and Science is very cool and has Florida's only 70mm IMAX screen (I rewatched Oppenheimer here, very worth it). On the east side are some pretty nice canals with lots of great houses to admire from the outside. Las Olas Beach is not really worth it unless you're into college party culture - it’s too crowded and chaotic, and hard to find parking. Avoid at all costs during spring break.

• Broward County outside of Fort Lauderdale is arguably more interesting. The beaches are better: my favorites are the north part of Pompano Beach around North Ocean Park and the area around the Deerfield Beach pier. The western suburbs: Sunrise, Plantation, Davie, and Pembroke Pines have the best Asian food in South Florida. Dania Pointe in Dania Beach is the best shopping center, and Sawgrass Mills (thanks to it not being as bougie as Aventura) is the most interesting mall in South Florida. The Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood (“the guitar”) is very cool, like a mini Las Vegas in Florida.

• Boca Raton, my hometown, has a decent amount to do. The best part is the old southeast, designed and built by Addison Mizner. The Boca Resort, though a private club and hotel, is beautiful - get in if you can. Mizner Park is a nice shopping center, and the surrounding area is quite walkable: stroll Palmetto Park Road to the beach or go to the downtown library. If you have a boat, take it out on Lake Boca Raton or Lake Wyman. The rest of Boca is your standard wealthy Jewish Florida suburb. Town Center Mall, University Commons, and Uptown Boca/Mission Bay are places to shop. You can also visit the Costco that AJ and Big Justice go to or relax on the very chill beach at Spanish River Park. The parks here are quite good: Sugar Sand and Patch Reef are full of facilities, and Boca Tierra Park is a good place to read. One of the best things here is the beautiful Spanish River Library and its adjacent lake, parks, and walking trails.

• Delray Beach is underrated. Its downtown area is vibrant, artsy, and walkable, with a lot to see and do: the Tennis Center, Old School Square, Veterans Park, the beach itself. West of that is the stunningly underrated Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens, the remnant of a Japanese pineapple plantation from the early 1900s that today is the best Japanese garden I've been to outside of Japan, with a restaurant and museum to boot. The area around the Delray Marketplace (especially Lyons Road) is a pretty place to bike around some of the last remaining farmland in the area, and the boat ramp at Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge is the best place to watch the sunset over the Everglades.

• West Palm Beach is the second-most interesting city in South Florida after Miami. CityPlace downtown is a cool shopping center with a relaxed vibe and lot to see, even a Herman Miller store. The new builds here are generally very well done, not five-over-one slop. The Norton Museum is the best art museum in the state. The island (Palm Beach) is very nice. Walk along Worth Avenue and see the Worth Ave Clock Tower, and visit railroad tycoon Henry Morrison Flagler's mansion (now a museum). If you can somehow get into Mar-a-Lago (Trump's winter White House), definitely pay it a visit. The West Palm Beach area is better for outdoor activities: Lion Country Safari has free-roaming lions and rhinos to drive past, Okeeheelee Park has all kinds of watersports, Rapids Water Park is the best in South Florida, Jupiter Beach is one of the best beaches in the area.

Central and West Florida

• Downtown Orlando is decent by American standards. The Orlando Public Library is pretty nice, and so is walking around Lake Eola. Toward the east are some nice southern suburbs with porches and mature trees. Avoid the areas (Callahan and Parramore) west of I-4: they have some of the worst urban decay I've seen so close to the downtown of a Florida city.

• If you're into architecture and good urban or suburban fabric, go to Winter Park and Winter Garden. Both excel on both fronts. Lake Eola Heights is good too. Unlike the much newer South Florida, there’s still a good amount of old-growth Southern-style suburbs with mature trees, big porches, and the like.

• The west side of Orlando is where all the resorts are. Disney is my favorite: the best park is Epcot, followed by Magic Kingdom. Be sure to take advantage of Disney's free and expansive transit network to see all the hotels - my favorites are the Contemporary and Fort Wilderness. Disney Springs is a fun shopping area too, and Celebration is an interesting example of a fully-planned community from the 90s. If you like roller coasters or Warner Brothers IP, choose Universal over Disney. Western Orlando outside the parks, around I-4 and International Drive, is a dense mess of hotels, condos, small amusement parks, and shopping malls.

• The far east of Orlando is mostly standard new American exurbs (boring), but the UCF campus is worth the walk around. Continue eastward for a nice rural drive leading towards Cape Canaveral. Kennedy Space Center is awesome - be sure to go to the visitor center and (my favorite part) the Saturn V, and watch a NASA or SpaceX launch if you can.

• Orlando has much better Asian food than South Florida. Go to Orlando Chinatown, Enson Market, and Lotte Plaza.

• The Lake Wales Ridge is highly underrated and has a very different vibe from surrounding areas, with sand, scrub, and actual elevation (the rest of the peninsula is nearly completely flat at sea level). My family goes camping near Lake Wales every year. Also be sure to visit Bok Tower and its gardens, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr.

• Rural Central Florida can get very rural. The Florida Turnpike between Fort Pierce and Kissimmee is one of the emptiest stretches of highway in the country. There’s less swamp and more grassland/prairie than South Florida. There are also a lot of cattle ranches. Peace River is a nice place to go tubing or camping.

• I've spent relatively very little time on the Gulf coast of Florida. Marco Island and Longboat Key are both nice beach-resort-type places (though I like the Keys much better). Tampa is rather boring for its size, though it has a nice riverwalk. I’ve never been to St. Petersburg, Clearwater, Sarasota, Fort Myers, or Naples, though I’ve heard St. Pete and Clearwater have some of the best beaches in the country.

North Florida

• North Florida has a very different vibe from the rest of the state: less tropical, more subtropical; less beach, more forest; much more seasonal variation; less Hispanic/Caribbean/Jewish influence and more Southern influence; fewer palm trees and more Spanish-moss-covered oak and cypress. The summers are just as hot as in the south, but the winters are much cooler. In Gainesville, January lows are in the 40s and highs are in the 60s, and the coldest nights can even dip into the 20s.

• North Florida’s nature is also quite different. Instead of beaches, the main attractions are the abundant, natural, freshwater springs with famously cool, clear water that you can swim in. Rainbow Springs is one of the best. Silver Springs, near Ocala, was the biggest tourist attraction in Florida before Disney World was built. You can swim with manatees at Crystal River.

• Gainesville is great. The University of Florida campus is beautiful and walkable, the downtown area, Depot Park, and nearby residential streets have some of that great old southern urban fabric, and the entire city is covered in mature trees. Paynes Prairie has some great hikes with great views, and Devil’s Millhopper is a huge sinkhole with a rainforest in it. Thanks to it being a college town, there’s an abundance of good food and a lot of young people around. It feels vibrant.

• St. Augustine is the oldest European settlement in the United States. As such, it's maybe the only city on the East Coast with an authentic Spanish colonial feel to it. Most of St. George Street has been tourist-trap-ified, but the 350-year-old star fort Castillo de San Marcos is very worth visiting, as is the Plaza de la Constitución and Flagler College. West of the city is one of Florida's two Buc-ee's locations, which is worth a visit to see just how good a gas station can be.

• Jacksonville is very boring. As a tourist, avoid. St. John’s Town Center is a pretty good upscale mall, and I’ve heard the Cummer Museum, Museum of Science and History, and beaches (Sawgrass, Ponte Vedra Beach, and Amelia Island in particular) are nice, but there are better cities in Florida.

• Tallahassee is also rather boring. It has the state capitol building and Florida State University campus, but isn’t really worth visiting outside of those (the Alfred B. Maclay Gardens were quite nice though).

• Sadly, I’ve never been to the Panhandle west of Tallahassee. The Panhandle travel guide will have to wait for another day.

Aside from California, Florida is probably the most interesting and diverse state in the country. We have huge cities, endless suburbs, swamps, beaches, grasslands, springs, and everything in between. Even after nearly two decades, I still have so much to explore here. Hopefully this guide is a good start.

On July 27, 2024, the Twitter timeline was full of Discourse on trans issues for the millionth time. The catalyst: a post from X software engineer and niche internet microcelebrity Yacine saying

this is your reminder that a one star google review is incredibly damaging to a business

furthermore, you should consistently give businesses that pushes trans flags everywhere one star google reviews. and don't forget to describe why

Given the prevalence of trans women in the tech industry, particularly in AI and on rationalist Twitter, many people (reasonably) rushed to defend them against this perceived attack. Some leaned a bit too far to the left. A day later I tweeted

Y’all are going to force me to write the Enlightened Centrist Manifesto on Trans Issues

Then, in between fits of pacing around an empty WeWork, I sat down and banged it out in around an hour, far faster than I normally write lengthy posts on complex social issues. Here it is in full.

The Enlightened Centrist Manifesto on Trans Issues

Note: since writing this almost a year ago, I’ve slightly changed my opinions, most notably on the sex vs. gender dichotomy. In a footnote1, I explain the changes I’d make if I were to write this again today.

Though I regret that this is not in formal manifesto format, here are some Thoughts on the matter, critiques welcome:

- I have many trans friends (mostly MtF) and they are among the smartest and most interesting people I know. If you were to select a single demographic for high IQ, you could quite possibly do no better than "rationalist and rat-adjacent trans women".

- Trans people should be able to live their lives without fear of harassment or discrimination. They should be treated like anyone else by default. The same laws that apply to non-trans people should apply to trans people, and trans people should enjoy the same rights as non-trans people. As a rule, people should be allowed to live their lives how they want to live them.

- I generally support a laissez-faire approach to what one does with their own body. There should be more (fully consensual) medical experimentation and biological research, not less, especially as transhumanism gets closer and closer to reality. Patients with terminal illnesses should be able to try medication not fully approved by the FDA. This should extend beyond right-to-try and HRT for trans people: men who want to become more masculine should be able to take testosterone and other androgens, for example.

- In the future, biotechnology (or virtual reality) will quite possibly get to a point where a trans person can make their body - from organs to chromosomes - indistinguishable from a person born as their preferred sex. Sex and gender really will be a spectrum at this point. If and when this happens, I will see it as a very positive development, and most or all of my more hesitant views on the matter will update away.

- For a small subset of the population, gender dysphoria is very real. Some people feel true, deep unease and distress with the body they were born in, and HRT and/or surgery is the best way for them to become content and confident with who they are again. My heart goes out towards all people who feel this way, and I wish them the best and hope they get the care they need.

- As a matter of civility and common decency, I refer to trans people using their preferred names and pronouns.

- Spamming businesses that display trans flags (or most other flags) with one-star reviews is uncivil and wrong.

However:

- Biological sex is not a spectrum. Very few, if any, other biological classifications of humans are this bimodal, with differences not just between male and female chromosomes and gonads, not just secondary sex characteristics and hormones and facial features, but between cognition and personality. These differences are robust between cultures, across history, and even among other primate species. Most gender stereotypes can be explained by biological differences, not social constructs. There are a very small number of intersex people - roughly 0.05% of births have ambiguous genitalia - and the vast majority of even these have a predominant hormonal, gonadal, or genetic sex.

- "Gender" is a meaningless concept. It has always been clear that sex is a binary characteristic of humans, but the psychological differences between men and women are much less bimodal than the physiological ones. With the egalitarian nature of liberalism in mind, liberal sexologists in the 50s coined the term "gender" to refer to the social and psychological roles, behaviors, and attributes of men and women. They asserted that sex and gender are different, and while sex is a binary, gender is a spectrum. The problem is that people generally use the idea of "gender" in two different ways. Either they entirely detach it from biological sex, at which point it roughly means "personality" and is thus redundant, or they use it as a stand-in for biological sex, but psychological differences between men and women are to a very large degree determined by biology and are thus not socially constructed.

- Because of the flexible nature of the human brain and the fact that traits are distributed, some percentage of people have roughly the temperament, personality, and interests of the opposite sex. These people used to be generally referred to, sometimes neutrally and sometimes negatively, as "tomboyish" (if women) or "effeminate" (if men). This is very much not the same thing as gender dysphoria, and it is dangerous to conflate the two. HRT and surgery are not the right treatment for these kinds of people.

- With society’s current level of medical technology, you cannot change your biological sex. HRT can change your secondary sex characteristics, and sex reassignment surgery can change the appearance of your sex organs, but your underlying chromosomal sex, sex organs, skeletal structure, personality, etc. remain the same. Sweeping statements like “Trans women are women. Full stop” don’t accurately describe this. “A person got hormone therapy and surgery to feel more like a woman” is not the same as “that person now literally is a woman”.

- HRT, puberty blockers, and sexual reassignment surgery are not risk-free. HRT can increase the risk of blood clots, stroke, heart problems, high blood pressure, diabetes, and even infertility. Puberty blockers like Lupron can cause mood disorders, depression, and osteoporosis. SRS is even more risky. Surgical complications can include loss of erotic sensation, wound breakdown, and even tissue death. One survey found that 54% of vaginoplasty patients had pain requiring medical care two years later, and 64% of phalloplasty patients had complications like device malfunction or dislodgement. Genital surgeries are permanent and irreversible, and other surgeries like mastectomy and facial feminization surgery are very difficult or impossible to reverse fully. Anyone who undergoes such treatments should be made fully aware of the risks, and should only proceed if it would have a positive impact on their dysphoria outweighing the negative impact of the treatments.

- As important as freedom over your body is freedom over your speech. I am wholly opposed to laws requiring people to use the preferred name and/or pronouns of trans people lest they be fined and/or face administrative penalties, as some jurisdictions (Canada, California, NYC, the UK, Scotland) have enacted.

- Many people have taken a repressive attitude towards research on the matter, claiming that it is "settled science”, which it certainly is not. Research into some areas is suppressed for fear of “transphobia”, such as Ray Blanchard’s transsexualism typology, and the idea that some trans women are autogynephilic - they experience sexual arousal at the idea of being a woman - and are not purely dysphoric. The focus of research should be on helping dysphoric people get the care they need, not confining the search space to one dominant theory.

- There has been a dramatic rise in the amount of children identifying as transgender. Some, though certainly not all of them are dysphoric. Since as long as children have existed, they’ve been confused about growing up, and that confusion has manifested itself as “phases” - an emo phase, a communist phase, a skater phase. Some kids, growing up in a very pro-trans environment, believe that they are trans not out of genuine dysphoria, but because their friends identify as trans/they find it cool or interesting/they have normal puberty-related body discomfort. The way kids’ phases are typically dealt with is by letting them explore it and likely grow out of it, but in a lot of cases, the focus is placed on “affirming” and children are encouraged to identify as trans, and even prescribed HRT and puberty blockers even when they are not truly dysphoric. This is made worse by online communities like r/egg_irl and parts of Twitter, which act as though everyone who has natural doubts or questions about gender is trans and should start HRT. Given the risks and potentially irreversible consequences of HRT and puberty blockers, they should only be prescribed to minors if they truly have dysphoria and if their parents consent. Given the total irreversibility of SRS and the developing brains of minors, people should only be allowed to receive it over 18. Almost all jurisdictions ban minors from getting tattoos, let alone SRS.

I got many responses. Some were positive and kind:

• “Have very rarely read a write up this long on a such controversial topic where I agree with literally every point made, so well written!!”

• “based”

• “COMMON THEO WIN”

• “based and enlightened centrist pilled”

• “remarkably based. I co-sign at least like 95% of it, which on this topic rounds up. I'm impressed”

Some were thoughtful criticisms. One person (Warty Dog, @warty_dog) wrote:

I think ur wrong on sex and gender

1) the tally is complicated but HRT changes sex physiology substantially and I don't think it's natural to classify into 2 kinds with trans in their birth sex. the case is stronger for childhood transition. note also that the features you come in contact more in most context are the ones more changed

2) there are cultural components of gender that are not redundant with "personality". there is also something of a caste system where we treat the genders differently, "trans women are women" means trans women are female caste

3) "gender dysphoria" is a term from medicine (🤮). there is a deep subconscious part in the brain that tells you which gender/sex (?) you are, and it's sometimes not congruent with your body and role in society. also, it should be included in the tally of biological differences

Another (Liz Lovelace, @liz_love_lace) wrote:

re: the trans manifesto

you got it very right!

i basically agree with everything you said

i do have some interesting thoughts to add

1) trans people and lefties really like the talking point "trans people kill themselves if they don't transition and/or if they're not accepted by society", which, imo, is the leading cause of trans people killing themselves

not the things, the *talking point* is what makes so many trans people kill themselves, especially teenagers. When one's whole community says that they should be suicidal, they become suicidal

2) gender dysphoria is kind of an outdated way to think about trans people

it's real, sure, but pushing "gender dysphoria is a very real disorder that just affects some people and the only cure is transition" was always just rhetoric to convince normies that trans people are real

i never had dysphoria, i just thought "wouldn't it be neat to be a girl" and then became a girl, and yeah it's neat as fuck

3) the way i view "gender" is kind of the "archetype" that someone wants to belong to

there's value in belonging to a legible cluster of people, like "guy" or "girl" or "nonbinary", but you could think about it more granularly, like "butch lesbian" or "buff guy" or "nerdy guy"

so yeah good job, i'm impressed that you're so un-brainwormed about this

Then, there were various low-tier criticisms from both sides.

• “Lmao yall take yourselves soooo seriously, leave trans people alone you hateful dweebs”

• “Everything in your "However" section is incompatible with the lies that transpeople have to tell themselves in order to not freak out over what they've done to their own bodies.”

• “So should men be allowed in women’s bathrooms? Why is it civil or common courtesy to lie to someone’s face?”

• “Lol I'm not racist, BUT.. Stfu you coward”

I find myself linking back to this post more than any other long-form post I’ve written. I think this is because it represents something I think is highly undervalued: taking a complex and nuanced issue and writing out a complex and nuanced take on it2.

Write More Specific Takes

Most issues, especially controversial ones, are pretty nuanced. Nuanced issues, like trans3, tend to be composed of a series of interconnected issues, rather than a single issue: are trans women women? what is a woman? should trans women be allowed to play in women’s sports? Generally, one political tribe tends to pick a specific list of opinions (trans women are women, a woman is whoever identifies as one, trans women should be allowed to play in women’s sports) and the opposing tribe picks a list of the opposite opinions. If you have some opinions from List A and some from List B, it’s hard to engage with either side. The solution is to write out a full list of your opinions from both sides, as a sort of position paper. This helps:

1. Clarify your own thoughts on the matter. In the process of writing my piece on trans, I learned about Blanchard’s transsexualism typology in depth and read papers on criminality, neuroscience, and the risks of hormone replacement therapy. This is a valuable intellectual exercise just for the sake of it.

2. Move the world towards a more nuanced and accurate understanding of a complex and controversial topic for which neither tribe’s premade set of answers is sufficient, and

3. Produce valuable intellectual output publicly on the Internet, which not many people have, as something you can point to to demonstrate your intelligence, knowledge, thoughtfulness, writing ability, etc.

What you write doesn’t even have to be wishy-washy acceptable centrism. If you frame your beliefs in a polite and persuasive enough way, even beliefs that would be considered radical in some circles can pass right through the low decoupler’s mental filters. Famously, Curtis Yarvin writes so well that he can get away with endorsing normally scary concepts, like dictatorship.

The next time you feel the need to write about a controversial issue4, write out something like my trans manifesto. It can be the entire piece, or the skeleton of something that resembles a traditional essay more, or even just an internal guide for you to keep in mind while you write, but it should be clear, it should be detailed, it should be polite, and it should be nuanced. The epistemic commons must be maintained, and you should help maintain them however you can.

Over the last couple weeks, I listened to all 100 of the top albums on the infamous music website Rate Your Music, in chronological order.

This started when I realized my listening habits were far too narrow. Probably 80% (not even joking) of the music I listened to on Spotify in the past year has been either Logic1, Kanye West, or Daft Punk. If I really wanted to be able to have opinions, if I wanted to develop taste, I needed to go broader. I couldn’t trust myself to pick the right albums, however. When the Apple Music 100 Best Albums list came out, I decided to trust the experts and go through the list.

I started at the top with the intent of working my way down. #1 was Lauryn Hill’s classic The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, which I loved. But after looking through the rest of the list, I realized that even a normie like me could tell that it sucked. Drake, Bad Bunny, and Travis Scott ended up on here? No To Pimp a Butterfly or Madvillainy or Graduation? I decided if I really wanted to develop taste, to become a true music bro, I had to turn to the dark side. I had to go to Rate Your Music.

RYM isn’t your average music website. You won’t find any Drake, or Michael Jackson, or Taylor Swift2. Though there are some popular musicians (the Beatles, Kanye West, and Kendrick Lamar come to mind), much of the list is dedicated to /mu/-influenced esoterica. Ever heard of Selected Ambient Works 85-92 by Aphex Twin, or In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel, or Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven by Godspeed You! Black Emperor? Me neither. After deciding to listen in chronological order, to best trace the evolution of genres and tastes, it was time to dive in.

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The 60s

• Kind of Blue - Miles Davis (1959)

• The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady - Charles Mingus (1963)

• A Love Supreme - John Coltrane (1965)

• Highway 61 Revisited - Bob Dylan (1965)

• Pet Sounds - The Beach Boys (1966)

• Blonde on Blonde - Bob Dylan (1966)

• Revolver - The Beatles (1966)

• The Doors - The Doors (1967)

• The Velvet Underground & Nico - The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967)

• Are You Experienced - The Jimi Hendrix Experience (1967)

• Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band - The Beatles (1967)

• Songs of Leonard Cohen - Leonard Cohen (1967)

• Electric Ladyland - The Jimi Hendrix Experience (1968)

• The Beatles [White Album] - The Beatles (1968)

• The Velvet Underground - The Velvet Underground (1969)

• Karma - Pharaoh Sanders (1969)

• In a Silent Way - Miles Davis (1969)

• Abbey Road - The Beatles (1969)

• In the Court of the Crimson King - King Crimson (1969)

The 1960s is the decade with the most familiar artists - the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, the Beach Boys, and the Doors, just to name a few3. I had tried listening through the entire Beatles discography beforehand, but got bored after about four albums of early 60s mass-produced teenybop pop. Their four best albums - Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s, the White Album, and Abbey Road - written and recorded largely after their touring days, were different, and much better. I’ve never been much of a jazz fan, but I was very pleasantly surprised by Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, and John Coltrane, plus Pharaoh Sanders, who I hadn’t heard of. One of the most unique albums of the decade was Songs of Leonard Cohen, a spoken poetry album delivered with a soft voice and strumming acoustic guitar, which I liked a lot more than I expected. Another was The Velvet Underground & Nico, a cult classic produced by Andy Warhol, with an experimental sound and lyrics about sexual deviancy and drug abuse before they were cool.

My favorite album of the decade was, of course, In the Court of the Crimson King by King Crimson: a fusion of progressive rock, jazz, and classical done incredibly well. Its five songs both work beautifully together and stand fully on their own. “21st Century Schizoid Man”, famously sampled on Kanye’s “POWER”, has almost metal-like intensity in both instruments and vocals. “I Talk to the Wind”, in contrast, is soft and ethereal. “Epitaph”, the group’s magnum opus, is a grand, nearly nine-minute-long symphony about the Cold War. “Moonchild” is two minutes of Mellotron and ten minutes of surprisingly good improv, and “The Court of the Crimson King” brings everything back in a grand finale. I had already listened to it before many times, but listening to it in the context of its time only solidified its supremacy.

The 70s

• Bitches Brew - Miles Davis (1970)

• Paranoid - Black Sabbath (1970)

• What’s Going On - Marvin Gaye (1971)

• Master of Reality - Black Sabbath (1971)

• Led Zeppelin [IV] - Led Zeppelin (1971)

• Pink Moon - Nick Drake (1972)

• Clube da Esquina - Milton Nascimento & Lô Borges (1972)

• The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars - David Bowie (1972)

• Close to the Edge - Yes (1972)

• The Dark Side of the Moon - Pink Floyd (1973)

• Future Days - Can (1973)

• Innervisions - Stevie Wonder (1973)

• Red - King Crimson (1974)

• Blood on the Tracks - Bob Dylan (1975)

• Wish You Were Here - Pink Floyd (1975)

• Station to Station - David Bowie (1976)

• Songs in the Key of Life - Stevie Wonder (1976)

• Low - David Bowie (1977)

• Animals - Pink Floyd (1977)

• Marquee Moon - Television (1977)

• Unknown Pleasures - Joy Division (1979)

The 70s, though again full of popular artists like Pink Floyd and David Bowie, started to show more of RYM’s more underground albums. My favorite of those was Clube da Esquina by Milton Nascimento and Lô Borges. One of my favorite albums of all time is Buena Vista Social Club, and I saw a lot of parallels between it and Clube da Esquina - created by an artists’ collective in a poor Latin American country, and rising to critical acclaim and commercial success. Where Clube da Esquina differs is its more experimental sound, and the clear and beautiful sound of Nascimento and Borges’ vocals.

There were three artists - Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, and King Crimson - who also had listed albums from the 60s. None of them were able to surpass their previous albums. In particular, I had high hopes for King Crimson’s Red, which, aside from “Fallen Angel”, just wasn’t as good as their debut. Interestingly, every member of King Crimson except band founder and guitarist Robert Fripp left between 1969 and 1974, which probably had something to do with it.

This was my first time seriously listening to Black Sabbath, David Bowie, and Pink Floyd, and I was pleasantly surprised to like all of them. Black Sabbath was heavy and absolutely foundational to the heavy metal genre, exemplified by the song “Iron Man”. David Bowie sounded like an alien, but in a good way - “Starman” and the rest of Ziggy Stardust was a ton of fun to listen to, like corny pulp fiction sci-fi come to life. Pink Floyd was the best of the three. The Dark Side of the Moon and Animals were solid, but Wish You Were Here was excellent - a touching tribute to band co-founder Syd Barrett, who went insane from substance abuse and had to leave the band before they made it big.

There were also a couple soul albums: What’s Going On by Marvin Gaye (famously rated by Rolling Stone as the #1 greatest album of all time) and Innervisions and Songs in the Key of Life by Stevie Wonder. Songs in the Key of Life in particular, was just a beautiful album, particularly “Isn’t She Lovely”. I never thought the harmonica could be used so well.

The 80s

• Closer - Joy Division (1980)

• Remain in Light - Talking Heads (1980)

• Ride the Lightning - Metallica (1984)

• Hounds of Love - Kate Bush (1985)

• Master of Puppets - Metallica (1986)

• The Queen Is Dead - The Smiths (1986)

• Doolittle - Pixies (1989)

• Disintegration - The Cure (1989)

For some reason, there were far fewer albums from the 80s than any other decade, even the 2010s. Curiously, nearly all of the most popular 80s artists are conspicuously missing, including Michael Jackson, Prince, Madonna, U2, Bruce Springsteen, Van Halen, Billy Joel, AC/DC. Regardless, the albums left on the list are pretty good. Remain in Light was a preview of the next few decades of electronica. Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets were great follow-ups to Black Sabbath, and The Queen Is Dead was post-punk alt rock exemplified. Despite these, this was the most forgettable decade on RYM’s list.

The 90s

• Heaven or Las Vegas - Cocteau Twins (1990)

• Spiderland - Slint (1991)

• Laughing Stock - Talk Talk (1991)

• The Low End Theory - A Tribe Called Quest (1991)

• Nevermind - Nirvana (1991)

• Loveless - My Bloody Valentine (1991)

• Selected Ambient Works 85-92 - Aphex Twin (1992)

• Souvlaki - Slowdive (1993)

• In Utero - Nirvana (1993)

• Midnight Marauders - A Tribe Called Quest (1993)

• Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) - Wu-Tang Clan (1993)

• The Downward Spiral - Nine Inch Nails (1994)

• Illmatic - Nas (1994)

• Grace - Jeff Buckley (1994)

• Dummy - Portishead (1994)

• Symbolic - Death (1995)

• Liquid Swords - Genius/GZA (1995)

• Soundtracks for the Blind - Swans (1996)

• LONG SEASON - Fishmans (1996)

• Endtroducing… - DJ Shadow (1996)

• Either/Or - Elliott Smith (1997)

• OK Computer - Radiohead (1997)

• F# A# ∞ - Godspeed You! Black Emperor (1997)

• Homogenic - Björk (1997)

• In the Aeroplane Over the Sea - Neutral Milk Hotel (1998)

• Mezzanine - Massive Attack (1998)

• Aquemini - OutKast (1998)

Now we’re getting somewhere.

The 90s had both the most albums and the most diversity of genres out of any decade on this list. There was Loveless by My Bloody Valentine, which pioneered the “shoegaze” genre “characterized by its ethereal mixture of obscured vocals, guitar distortion and effects, feedback, and overwhelming volume”. There were Nevermind and In Utero by Nirvana, grunge albums bursting with anger and frustration. There was the folksy, bluesy rock album Grace by Jeff Buckley, his only album before his tragic death at 304. There was The Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails - if you like metal grinding on metal and people screaming, you’ll love this one. The two most interesting genres, however, were rap and /mu/core.

The 90s was both the first decade on the list to have rap and, arguably, the golden age of the genre. Illmatic by Nas is an enduring classic that holds up just as well 30 years later: “NY State of Mind” and “The World Is Yours” are songs you can really vibe to. Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) and its follow-up, Liquid Swords by Wu-Tang member GZA had pseudo-Asian influences before rappers being weeaboos was cool. Aquemini by OutKast was pretty cool, though I still prefer Stankonia and Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. The Low End Theory and especially Midnight Marauders by A Tribe Called Quest were fantastic: perfectly blending jazz with rap, a fusion you almost never see in popular music today.

The other genre is /mu/core, characterized by unique vocals, erratic instrumentation, sometimes deliberately low-quality sound, and tracks that often go 20 minutes or longer. In other words, albums designed to deter normies. Soundtracks for the Blind by Swans is a nearly two and a half hour long concept album reminiscent of Everywhere at the End of Time, complete with recordings of dialogue from a nursing home. LONG SEASON by Fishmans consists of a single, 35-minute-long song and is the only Japanese album on the list. F# A# ∞ by Godspeed You! Black Emperor is over an hour but with just three songs, each consisting of multiple movements, plus a spoken intro and lots of slow, instrumental parts. Homogenic by Björk has one of the most unique vocals I’ve ever heard, especially the song Jóga (it’s hard to even describe, you just have to listen to it). Perhaps the biggest cult classic on the entire list is Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, with surrealist lyrics, peculiar instruments (a singing saw!), and a “psychedelic folk” style.

The best album of the decade, however, was Radiohead’s OK Computer. I fucking love this album. Radiohead went from a decent but totally undifferentiated debut pop album (Pablo Honey, known for the single “Creep”) to a pretty good, relatively unique second album (The Bends) to the absolutely fantastic, completely irreplicable third album that is OK Computer. “Airbag” hypes me for the rest of the album; the first beat drop in “Paranoid Android” gives me goosebumps; “Subterranean Homesick Alien” is weird and delightful; the finale of “Exit Music (For A Film)” is powerful and moving; “Let Down” is uplifting without venturing into normie pop territory; “Karma Police” is just one of the great songs of all time; “Fitter Happier” is an eerie and fitting interlude reminiscent of Stephen Hawking; “Electioneering” emulates Led Zeppelin’s rock without losing Radiohead’s sound; “Climbing Up the Walls” is dark and introspective; the glockenspiel-and-soft-guitar melody in “No Surprises” is beautifully bittersweet; “Lucky” is a solid banger; and the call bell at the end of “The Tourist” is placed perfectly. Not a single song is less than great, and they all work well together: just a 10/10 album throughout.

The 2000s

• Kid A - Radiohead (2000)

• Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven - Godspeed You! Black Emperor (2000)

• Since I Left You - The Avalanches (2000)

• Discovery - Daft Punk (2001)

• Vespertine - Björk (2001)

• The Glow Pt. 2 - The Microphones (2001)

• Velocity : Design : Comfort - Sweet Trip (2003)

• The College Dropout - Kanye West (2004)

• Madvillainy - Madvillain (2004)

• MM..FOOD - MF DOOM (2004)

• Illinoise - Sufjan Stevens (2005)

• Late Registration - Kanye West (2005)

• Donuts - J Dilla (2006)

• In Rainbows - Radiohead (2007)

• Deathconsciousness - Have a Nice Life (2008)

The aughts are much like the 90s: also full of rap and /mu/core. Radiohead’s Kid A and In Rainbows are excellent albums, but nothing can top OK Computer for me. MF DOOM’s Madvillainy and MM..FOOD are masterpieces of both production and wordplay, layering multiple rhyme schemes, some mid-sentence, into the same verse. J Dilla’s Donuts is nearly perfect instrumental hip hop, from which I caught so many samples from other songs that I lost count. A common theme in /mu/core albums is that they’ll have one, and only one excellent song out of an otherwise hard-to-interpret album. “Dsco”, on Sweet Trip’s velocity : design : comfort., is a perfect example of this. Go listen to it right now.

My two favorite artists of the decade are Kanye West and Daft Punk. Though I wish they’d included Kanye’s Graduation (which, strangely enough, ranks at #622 overall5), The College Dropout and Late Registration are fantastic albums - they blend soul with rap in a way that would typically be experimental and esoteric, but Kanye does it in a way that sounds fun and poppy. Both of these albums contain a dizzying variety of moods, from the fun of “The New Workout Plan” to the passion of “Through The Wire” to the free-flowing reminiscence of “Last Call” on College Dropout, or the the catchy “Gold Digger” to the sad “Roses” to the absolutely triumphant “We Major” on Late Registration, but they all sound like Kanye. Even Kanye’s most stupid lyrics (“Plus my Aunt Shirley, Aunt Beverly, Aunt Clay and Aunt Jean/So many Aunties we could have an Auntie Team”) manage to sound good.

Daft Punk’s Discovery, however, is the best album of the decade. After sitting through like ten /mu/core albums designed to be as far from pop as possible, turning on Discovery felt like coming home - if home were a futuristic space odyssey with a distinctly European feel. Like OK Computer, Discovery doesn’t have a single bad song. Unlike OK Computer, almost all of Discovery’s songs are so good that they can fully stand by themselves - Romanthony’s dance anthems of “One More Time” and “Too Long” on both ends of the album, the overdrive-heavy “Aerodynamic”, the orgasmic guitar solo at the end of “Digital Love”, the bouncy, funky “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger”, the groovy buildup and vocals of “Crescendolls”, the beautiful, contemplative “Something About Us”, the incredible beat drop of “Voyager”, and the sad electronic woodwinds on “Veridis Quo”. The best song on the album is the penultimate “Face to Face”, where Daft Punk show their total mastery over the art of sampling. I mean, just watch this video. Absolutely incredible.

The 2010s

• My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy - Kanye West (2010)

• The Money Store - Death Grips (2012)

• good kid, m.A.A.d city - Kendrick Lamar (2012)

• To Pimp A Butterfly - Kendrick Lamar (2015)

• Carrie & Lowell - Sufjan Stevens (2015)

• ★ [Blackstar] - David Bowie (2016)6

• Blonde - Frank Ocean (2016)

• Atrocity Exhibition - Danny Brown (2016)

• Igor - Tyler, the Creator (2019)

• Ants From Up There - Black Country, New Road (2022)

The defining characteristic of this decade was rap that transcended the genre. It opened with Kanye’s magnum opus, MBDTF, which perfectly blends post-2007 Kanye’s braggadocio and energy with an over-the-top, almost orchestral production style. Try “All of the Lights”, “Devil in a New Dress”, or “Runaway”, which isn’t very orchestral, but some consider it Kanye’s best song. It was immediately followed up by Death Grips’ The Money Store, another cult classic, although more of the underground rap cult than the /mu/ cult. “I’ve Seen Footage” is the best song on the album; the rest aren’t as good.

The 2010s also had Kendrick Lamar’s two best albums, good kid, m.A.A.d city and To Pimp A Butterfly, the latter of which is ranked #1 out of nearly 6.2 million releases on Rate Your Music. GKMC tells the story of Kendrick’s upbringing among poverty, drugs, and violence in Compton, California; while TPAB speaks more broadly of black culture, racism, and discrimination. GKMC has more individual bangers (“Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe”, “Backseat Freestyle”, “Money Trees”, “Swimming Pools (Drank)”, and “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst” come to mind), but TPAB is overall a better album.

Frank Ocean’s Blonde and Tyler, the Creator’s Igor complement each other very well. Both are concept albums that tell a story with innovative production that blends rap with R&B, soul, and electronica. Blonde has a more soft, upbeat mood and minimalist production, exemplified by the 10/10 track “Pink + White”, though “Nights” and “Futura Free” are excellent too. Igor goes much harder, with a heavy electronic sound. The first two tracks, “IGOR’S THEME” and “EARFQUAKE”, make up one of the best two-song lineups I’ve heard.

A RYM Retrospective

So, what did I learn from my foray into the world of high taste? What even is high taste? We can try to answer this by examining what all 100 of these albums had in common, which wasn’t much - most of them are very different from each other. The main thing that springs to mind is that they’re all unique. This may be obvious, but consider how much of the music you listen to has very little that distinguishes it - especially rap (can you even tell the difference between 21 Savage, Kodak Black, and NLE Choppa?)

Second, most songs aren’t structured. A lot of popular music has a definite form with ordered repetition, such that you can almost predict what’s going to come next. Weirdly, almost no songs on any of the 100 albums have this trait - most songs are relatively unstructured, and it’s hard to tell what comes next. This naturally requires you to actually pay attention to the music, rather than mindlessly taking it in like you would with pop music. Paying attention to music is a costly signal, one that can provide solid evidence of good taste for those who do it.

Third, almost all albums were the first to either create a new genre or fuse two or more genres in a specific way. Like financial alpha, being the first comes with its rewards. Watch Citizen Kane today and you might be bored by how trite and overplayed everything feels. Watch it when it came out in 1941 and you’d be shocked at how much it advanced the medium of film. If you go back and listen to RYM’s list with the same mindset, you’ll see that Bob Dylan was the first to pioneer folk rock, The Velvet Underground & Nico invented alt rock, A Tribe Called Quest fused rap with jazz, and Radiohead melded… everything.

In the end, though, taste is a nebulous concept. There are no formulas or algorithms for developing it - just subjective feel and “I know it when I see it”. Listening to someone else’s list, even an aggregate of many such lists like RYM, can only get you so far. If you truly want to evolve your taste, you have to venture out yourself, finding what’s interesting to you and literally playing it by ear. Nonetheless, if you feel like your music taste is too narrow or too normie, listening to the top 100 RYM albums is a great first step.

The secret behind Manifest’s unparalleled social atmosphere is the people it attracted. Every single person I talked to, without exception, was both smart and interesting. I could walk up to people I had never met before and instantly insert myself into a conversation on ancient Greek military history, prediction markets applied to romance, or whether AI will end the world. I could look across the room, realize “oh wow that’s so-and-so from Twitter!”, introduce myself, and immediately become friends with them. To quote my new friend Matthew Adelstein of Bentham’s Bulldog:

In the normal world, people like me who obsess over philosophy, worry about AI and existential risks, know who Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander are, and read blogs are a minority. In the real world, when I tell people that I have a blog where I write about niche philosophy topics, I’m a bit embarrassed, a bit like one might be showing off their Lego collection. At Manifest, however, it became real, on a visceral level, that there were people like me, that we’re not some kind of weird alien offshoot from the human population. This may sound like a bit of an exaggeration, and perhaps it is, but it’s hard to overstate just how profound it is to realize that there are other people like you—that they’re not just internet-floating heads, but real, flesh and blood people.

(Byrne Hobart also wisely observed that “The Manifest conference has been a successful experiment: put enough introverts with common interests into a confined space and they’ll spontaneously turn into extroverts.”)

Manifest managed to create that magical feeling of serendipity, where you can flow through a space, passing from conversation to conversation, contribute to each one in turn, and have others do the same for you. One of the most heartwarming things was multiple people coming up to me to tell me that they listen to my podcast and that they like it. One person even said they listened to every episode. I’ve largely optimized for guests so far, but it’s truly special to see that real people enjoy what I make.

Manifest’s other draw is the high density of Twitter celebrities, all gathered in one place, and all easily accessible. At one point, I thought to myself, “what a fantastic venue this is, I’d love to talk to whoever set it up” and then realized Lightcone CEO Oliver Habryka was sitting right next to me.

I finally got to meet Dwarkesh Patel, and we talked about our podcasts. I talked with Scott Alexander about why blog posts are such a great medium for information, and what to do in Japan. I talked with Aella and Nate Soares about creating communally raised genetic superbabies to solve the AI alignment problem. I got to compliment Agnes Callard on her famously colorful outfits. I got Eliezer Yudkowsky in my BeReal and then discussed AI scaling with him, then asked Rob Bensinger why there’s no printed copy of the Sequences1. I chatted with Steve Hsu (apparently a fan of my podcast!) about Dominic Cummings and governance in the UK. I got to hold Simone and Malcolm Collins’ tiny two-month-old daughter Industry Americus Collins while talking with them, Sarah Constantin, Andrew Rettek, Robin Hanson, and Razib Khan about raising kids. I spoke with Tracing Woodgrains about the word “progressivism” in politics, and with Johnny Anomaly about how I explained “eugenics” to my cousin. I talked to Liron Shapira about whether I should drop out of college. I debated with Barak Gila about whether Trump or Biden is better from a pro-tech, pro-growth Gray Tribe perspective, and got a selfie with Richard Hanania after thanking him for his tireless battle against anti-semites online. I watched Crémieux absolutely carry my team in trivia. I introduced Rob Miles to Impulse Labs, and showed Neil Gershenfeld’s work on self-replicating machines to General Fabrication CEO Matt Parlmer. I talked to Tristan Hume about AI interpretability, and to Katja Grace about why my p(doom) has gone down in the last year. I hung out with Byrne Hobart and Samo Burja at Curtis Yarvin’s house. I talked with Dwarkesh and Joe Carlsmith about power-seeking AI. I got plenty of time with the Manifold team: Stephen and James Grugett, Austin Chen, Rachel Weinberg, and Saul Munn, who did an amazing job from start to finish.

Then there were all my friends, both old and new: Werner Zagrebbi (who I’ve known since second grade), Kosher Salt, Alok Singh, Derik Kauffman, Tessa Barton, Bentham’s Bulldog, Whiteboard Programmer, Liam Robins, Max Tabarrok, Brian Chau, James Campbell, Roman Hauksson, Nick Simmons, and Topher Colby.

The events were great too. A couple of my favorites included an impromptu Shabbat service on Friday evening, Alok Singh’s explanation of how you can take the derivative of a discontinuous function at the discontinuity, Johnny Anomaly’s talk on genetic screening, Scott Alexander discussing forecasting with Nate Silver, and a debate between Holly Elmore (affirmative) and Brian Chau (negative) on AI pause. On Saturday night, there was a “night market” that was really more of a random exchange session (this is a common theme at Manifest). I won 1000 mana in a 1v1 trivia contest and traded a piece of knowledge2 on a Post-It note for a small obsidian prism. The next night, Aella and Nathan Young ran the “Miss Alignment” costume contest, with people dressed up as various AI-related memes.

I was also lucky enough to get to interview Manifold co-founders Stephen Grugett and Austin Chen live. Both interviews were recorded and will be up on all platforms this week.

The venue fit the occasion perfectly. Lighthaven is a complex of buildings on the site of the now-defunct Rose Garden Inn in Berkeley. When it’s not being used as an event space, it’s the working headquarters of Lightcone Infrastructure and home to many rationalists - a mix of village, hacker house, WeWork, and resort. Lighthaven has six buildings, each with their own unique character - from the wide open, more modern Aumann Hall to the darker, Gothic Bayes Hall. It’s absolutely bursting with places to sit and gather - giant indoor and outdoor sitting areas, more intimate upstairs salons, porches, roof decks, outdoor gazebos, an amphitheater, and even a small geodesic dome. Most rooms are tastefully appointed with soft carpets, low-to-the-ground seating, incredibly well-selected books, and ample natural lighting. Everything has variety, even the green spaces. The huge astroturfed green of Rat Park, meant for large gatherings, contrasts beautifully with the more contemplative Walled Garden, with its trees, flowers, and places to read, do work, or nap.

Lighthaven is the perfect incarnation of the principles of A Pattern Language. Most event venues feel dead - conference centers with square rooms, boring colors, folding chairs, artificial lighting, and ancient nylon carpets and vinyl walls. Lighthaven feels alive. Complete. Whole. It possesses Christopher Alexander’s “quality without a name”. You can read the Guide To Rationalist Interior Decorating, or look at the photos of Lighthaven on its website, but much like Manifest, the only way to really understand the vibes is to be there.

To everyone who made Manifest such a great experience, thank you. I can’t wait to be back next year.

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On January 19, 2024, I woke up early, opened the Apple Store on three devices, and spammed the Apple Vision Pro pre-order at precisely 8:00 AM EST. It shipped two weeks later, and I unboxed it in front of a crowd of 50 or so members from my club, the Society of PC Building, and the Gator VR Club. Since then, I’ve used it extensively every single day and given demos to dozens of people. I have a lot of thoughts on it—both as it exists today, and what it will become further down the road.

v1, 2024

The Vision Pro came in a box larger than any Apple product I’ve ever opened, complete with the headset itself, the Light Seal, two Light Seal Cushions, the Solo Knit and Dual Loop bands, a USB-C charger and brick (rare for Apple), and the infamous $19 Apple polishing cloth, complete with special Vision Pro branding. The headset itself is beautiful. It eschews the Quest’s white plastic for glass and metal, with a curved glass panel covering the EyeSight display on the front, a durable aluminum chassis, high-quality textiles for the Light Seal and cushions, and an adjustable Solo Knit Band made of the finest wool that envelops the back of your head like a hug. It even has orange accents (on the pull tab that detaches the bands), a nod to legendary Apple designer Jony Ive. Despite reviewers’ warnings, I found the comfort of the headset to be fine, and I never had to use the ugly Dual Loop Band. The weight is fine too—definitely heavier than the Quest 3, but not painfully so. The external battery is annoying, but not terrible.

When I tried it on, I was floored by the quality of the tracking. Unlike the Meta Quest 3, you control the Vision Pro with your eyes. To select a UI element, you simply look at it and pinch your fingers together. Hardly anything could be more intuitive. The hand position tracking is excellent, too. The Quest often has difficulties with recognizing when I’m grabbing a window or pointing at a specific element. The Vision Pro, almost never. The passthrough on the Vision Pro is definitely imperfect: it’s dimmer than the real world, and feels like looking at the world through an older iPhone camera, but the latency is ridiculously low. The Quest 3 has major problems with hands, faces, screens, and some other objects distorting the passthrough. The Vision Pro? Almost none. Virtual windows look nearly real—you practically can’t see the pixels, and they stay almost perfectly locked in place. Once, I had some windows in my dorm room, went down 14 floors to swap out my laundry (still wearing the headset), and when I got back to my room, my windows were exactly where I left them. The Quest 3 wins on just one element of immersion—field of view1. The Vision Pro’s FOV is tight enough that there’s a noticeable black band wrapped around what you see.

Once I calibrated it to my eyes and hands, signed in with my Apple ID, and finished setup, it was time to try the software. I spent a while just playing around with it before using it for anything serious. The virtual environments are imperfect but gorgeous, especially the Moon and Haleakalā. Some of the apps, like Sky Guide (planetarium) and JigSpace (3D object visualization) are awesome windows into the future of computing. I tried several iPadOS apps ported to visionOS: it was cool to scroll through X or explore Apple Maps on windows as small as a newspaper or as large as a wall. One of my favorite things to do is FaceTime: though your friends see you as an uncanny 3D scan of your face, you see them as a window in your environment, a tiny hint of what it’ll be like to eventually render them into your environment fully. Spatial Videos are like this too—though they only take up a small part of your FOV and blur at the edges, you can see where they’re eventually headed with the ability to relive your memories.

With the honeymoon phase over, I started to focus on more serious use-cases—mainly, work. This is where I started to run into problems. visionOS resembles iPadOS more than macOS. Its app ecosystem is sparse. Its input mechanisms (voice and virtual keyboard) are extremely slow. Most importantly, it lacks the million tiny things that create the seamless workflow that you get with a real desktop operating system. visionOS is not yet ready for actual productivity. Fortunately, if you have a Mac, you can mirror the screen to the Vision Pro to get a monitor that can be anywhere and any size you want. Unfortunately, you only get one Mac monitor, and it has to be the same aspect ratio as your MacBook: no vertical monitors. Infuriatingly, your keyboard doesn’t show through virtual environments, so if you want to be fully immersed while working, you better know where every single key is. But you have to deal with it anyway, because macOS is so much better than visionOS for work that I ended up forgoing multiple virtual windows altogether and doing all my work on a single Mac window.

There’s one use-case that visionOS excels at more so than any other: watching videos. Folding laundry while watching YouTube on a TV-sized virtual window is cool, but even cooler is watching Dune in 4K resolution, with stereoscopic 3D, high-quality spatial audio, and a virtual screen the size of an IMAX theater. When you’re in Joshua Tree or White Sands, it looks cool but feels fake. When you’re in Cinema Mode on Apple TV, it really, honestly, feels like you’re in a movie theater. This is the Vision Pro’s killer app, the most mature part of Apple’s vision for VR so far, and it’s awesome.

So that’s the state of the Apple Vision Pro today. What can Apple (and Meta) do to bring VR into the future?

Hardware

As a v1 product, the Apple Vision Pro is excellent. But it clearly isn’t mature. It’s not as polished and perfect as the iPhone 15 Pro Max or M2 MacBook Pro—it’s more like the Macintosh in 1984 or the iPhone in 2007. Famously, the iPhone didn’t even launch with an App Store, a selfie camera, a GPS, 3G data, copy and paste, or video recording. We will undoubtedly look back on the Vision Pro with the same surprise.

The hardware of the Vision Pro is a good start, but there’s a long way to go. Even many non-conformist tech people balk at the idea of wearing ski goggles, especially in public. In order to achieve mass adoption, it will have to become much thinner and lighter—resembling glasses more than goggles. An early version of this Apple’s EyeSight display, which is a core differentiator of their VR strategy. In order to be truly immersive, you should be able to see people’s eyes. Marques Brownlee has an excellent video on form factor: he says there are two strategies. One is to start with the ideal form factor and improve the feature set as the hardware gets better. This is what the Meta Ray-Ban Smart Glasses are: simple glasses or sunglasses with nothing but cameras, a mic, speakers, and conversational AI built in. The other is to start with the ideal feature set and improve the form factor as the hardware gets better. This is what big bulky headsets, like the Meta Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro, are. The goal is to end up with something as thin, light, portable, and fashionable as the glasses (even while powered off) while being as powerful and full-featured as the goggles.

The form factor will have to improve, but so will the capabilities of the hardware. The end goal is total immersion—making the headset as indistinguishable from real life as high-quality headphones are from a stereo speaker system. The single best thing they can do for this is passthrough that looks identical to what you see with your eyes. Until direct optical overlay becomes possible, they’ll have to make do with video. They’ve already got the latency down. Now all that’s left is brightness, color, and resolution. They’ll also have to figure out occlusion, so there’s absolutely no distortion around your hands or other real objects when they’re overlaid onto virtual environments. Then there’s the issue of computing power. Unreal Engine 5 and other computer graphics engines are getting really good, and emerging technologies like OpenAI’s Sora are incredibly flexible, but the Vision Pro has nowhere near the computing power required to run either. To get around this limitation, they could allow users to connect to an external GPU—which Apple should start manufacturing if they want to remain competitive with NVIDIA on hardware.

Software

visionOS is a good start, but it’s unfinished. Just as the iPad Pro can never truly replace the MacBook, visionOS will never truly replace macOS until it changes. At least in the short term, it needs strong native mouse and keyboard support, and the ability to run any program that you can run on a Mac, without screen mirroring. Then there are the little things, built up over decades of refining and perfecting macOS, that visionOS can’t match: robust keyboard shortcuts, the right ratio of text size to screen size, different ways to do window management, more optimized apps, better file management, and so on. The single most important thing: workflow on visionOS should be as seamless, with as few brain cycles required, as macOS. At the very least, we need multiple Mac monitors and keyboard passthrough so we can use macOS as visionOS catches up.

As Cleo Abrams points out, the real reason to care about the Apple Vision Pro is connecting with other people. Right now, there are very few features that allow you to do this—essentially only FaceTime. If you and another Vision Pro user are in the same room, you should be able to view virtual objects together. This can be as simple as watching a movie together in a virtual cinema or as complex as playing Dungeons and Dragons or another board game with virtual pieces. If you’re physically in different places, you should be able to see the world from their perspective. If they’re at a concert, you should be able to essentially “remote” into their headset and see it as they see it. You should also be able to enter a virtual environment with them. The ultimate prototype for this is VRChat, which has amassed millions of players over 10 years. Imagine a version of VRChat where you can have any photorealistic (or otherwise!) avatar, in any environment you want, doing anything you want. This is the future.

The Future Should Look Like The Future

Elon Musk has a saying that the future should look like the future. There are three distant future technologies that Apple now has the opportunity to build: JARVIS from Iron Man, the heads-up display from most sci-fi, and the Holodeck from Star Trek. At the rate AI is advancing, JARVIS might be the easiest of the three. Legendary research scientist Andrej Karpathy, who just retired from “building a kind of JARVIS” at OpenAI, has written about his vision for an LLM-based operating system. Recent advances in speech synthesis (like ElevenLabs), ultra-low latency (like Retell) and small LLMs that can run on-device (like LLaMA-2 7B, Mistral 7B, and Gemma) should make this technologically not too far away. Ideally, you should have an always-there assistant who can answer questions and generate content like ChatGPT, interact with your apps and services like Siri, and be personalized to you and your preferences.

The next technology that Apple should work on is a heads-up display. If we want to make Iron Man a reality, we need not just JARVIS, but the HUD. At a bare minimum, it should be possible to lock windows in a relative position so that they’ll move with you, rather than you moving past them, when you walk. Think FaceTime: you might want to be able to walk “with” a friend by having a window with their face follow your position. The concept of widgets on a phone or complications on a watch might be useful here. You could have persistent indicators in the corner of your field of view for the time, weather, number of steps, notifications, or anything else you might want.

The hardest of the three is the Holodeck; a Star Trek technology that uses holograms to create a realistic 3D simulation of whatever you want using voice commands. There are different routes to get there from today’s technology. One route is OpenAI’s Sora and other video generators, which are versatile and easy to use, but inaccurate. Another route is existing computer graphics/game engines, which are much more accurate, but more difficult (and likely more computationally intensive) to use. Eventually, you should be able to ask to be in a streetside café in Rome, or for a realistic 3D model of a Ferrari, and be able to accurately interact with whatever object or environment you’re given.

The goal is a pair of lightweight, stylish glasses more portable than a phone and more productive than a laptop; capable of overlaying content on the real world like a HUD or generating it like the Holodeck; and running an intelligent, powerful, personalized AI assistant. This is the future of personal computing. And it’s not too far from being the present.

Yesterday, November 28, 2023, Charles Thomas Munger died peacefully at a California hospital. He was just a month shy of his 100th birthday. Though I never got the chance to meet him, he left a more profound impression on me than almost anyone else in the world.

Charlie was born in 1924 in Omaha, Nebraska. After serving in the Army during World War II and graduating magna cum laude from Harvard Law, he quickly rose in the world. He practiced law and real estate, saving and investing wisely until he could start his own law firm and investment fund, which he did in 1962. His law firm, Munger, Tolles, & Olson, remains one of the most prestigious in the country, and his investment fund, Wheeler, Munger & Co., averaged a 19.8% a year compound annual growth rate for thirteen years, compared to just 5% for the market.

In 1959, Charlie met Warren Buffett at a dinner party. The two became best friends instantly. They quickly started to do business together, and Munger joined Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway as Vice Chairman in 1978. Together, they built it from a struggling textile mill to one of the most valuable companies on the planet—with holdings in insurance, energy, railroads, consumer goods, and manufacturing, just to name a few. They made legendary investments in See’s Candies, GEICO, Coca-Cola, American Express, BNSF Railway, Berkshire Hathaway Energy, and Apple. Charlie bought his first shares in Berkshire for around $7 in 1962. At market close on the day of his death, his shares were worth $546,869 each.

Munger was involved in many projects outside Berkshire. He was an early investor in Costco, serving on its board of directors until his death. He invested in Chinese businesses through his friend and protégé Li Lu’s Himalaya Capital. He served as chairman and chief stock-picker of the Daily Journal Corporation for decades. He remained an active real estate developer and investor nearly sixty years after his first project. Despite having no formal training, he became an accomplished architect. His passion for building extended to his philanthropy. Throughout his life, he donated over half a billion dollars to charity, mainly student housing and other university buildings, most of which he designed himself.

I first discovered Charlie as a teenager, out of school for COVID, with a lot of newfound time on my hands. I had been a fan of Buffett for a while, but never fully appreciated his right-hand man until I read about him on Farnam Street and Instagram’s @CharlieMungerQuotes. When my mom bought me a copy of Poor Charlie’s Almanack, Munger’s iconic half-biography, half-anthology of speeches, I went through its 600 pages in about two days. I began voraciously consuming not just every Munger speech, shareholder meeting, and interview I could find, but many of the books he recommended. He completely changed the way I think about the world, and was one of the major figures in my move from adolescence to adulthood.

Some people, like John von Neumann, are gifted with nigh-superhuman intelligence. Charlie was gifted with nigh-superhuman rationality, and a knack for communicating it. His mantras for life formed a full operating system: Be honest, trustworthy, and reliable. Sell only what you would buy, work with only people you admire. Learn all the time and think about the world in a multidisciplinary way. Maintain rationality and objectivity at all times no matter what. Learn assiduity—work until the job is done—and equanimity—stoically control your emotions no matter how hard times get. Get rid of selfishness, envy, resentment, and self-pity.

Two pieces of his in particular stood out to me for their incredible clarity and wisdom. Practical Thought About Practical Thought: Turning $2 Million Into $2 Trillion explains in a totally intuitive way how the massive success of Coca-Cola was a result of simple financial and psychological decisions. The Psychology of Human Misjudgment goes through 25 human tendencies that he learned over a lifetime, how they lead to real-world errors, and how to avoid them. Out of everything he’s ever written, I recommend these two the most.

Charlie was a role model for dealing with adversity too. When he was 29, he underwent a painful divorce with his wife of eight years, losing everything. Two years later, his nine-year-old son Teddy died from leukemia. In his fifties, a failed cataract surgery caused him such extreme pain that he had to have an eye removed. He nearly lost his other eye, which would have made him unable to read. He dealt with greater than 50% losses in Berkshire’s portfolio at least three times. And throughout it all, he maintained his hardworking attitude and sense of humor.

Charlie’s was the very model of a life well lived. Despite being worth $2.6 billion (which would be many times higher had he not donated so many Berkshire shares), he did not succumb to loneliness, materialism, and unhappiness as so many rich people do. He was married to his second wife, Nancy Barry Borthwick, for 54 years until her death in 2010. He’s survived by seven children, two step-children, fifteen grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren, with whom he would go on an annual trip to a family compound in Minnesota every summer for over seventy years. From his many, many, many friends, business associates, shareholders, and fans, he achieved something even more important than wealth: earned respect.

For Charlie’s last-ever Berkshire shareholder meeting last May, my dad and I made it a true Buffett-and-Munger-fan day. We ate breakfast at McDonald’s and watched the meeting while eating See’s peanut brittle and drinking Cherry Coke. At 99, Charlie was still razor-sharp, with the same brevity and wit he displayed decades earlier. Warren would answer questions with his characteristic paragraphs, and Charlie would respond with his own insightful one-liners, just like he always has. I pre-ordered the new Stripe Press edition of Poor Charlie’s Almanack months ago. Charlie never got to see it published, but it’ll be a fixture on my bookshelf for years.

Through his many speeches, talks, and clips of Berkshire Hathaway and Daily Journal shareholder meetings, Charlie served as one of my greatest mentors. He kickstarted me on a journey of self-improvement. He motivated me to start going to the gym. I’ve always wanted to be rich, but Charlie helped me think about how. He introduced me to so many different books, ideas, and fields, often tangentially. For example, without Charlie, I never would have discovered Naval Ravikant, and then David Deutsch, and then techno-optimist Twitter. To this day, whenever I make a decision, I think, WWCD: What would Charlie do? From him, I learned so much about not just investing and business, but life. Whatever success I have in my life, I’ll owe much of it to Charlie.

I’ll close with two of his quotes:

[An] idea that I got very early was that there is no love that’s so right as admiration-based love, and that love should include the instructive dead. Somehow, I got that idea and I lived with it all my life; and it’s been very, very useful to me.

…

I think when you're trying to teach the great concepts that work, it helps to tie them into the lives and personalities of the people who developed them. I think you learn economics better if you make Adam Smith your friend. That sounds funny, making friends among ‘the eminent dead,’ but if you go through life making friends with the eminent dead who had the right ideas, I think it will work better for you in life and work better in education. It's way better than just giving the basic concepts.

There’s no eminent dead I’d rather be friends with than Charlie.

There was once a society of people who really liked coffee cups.

Bone china mugs that last for generations, disposable ones with plastic lids, tiny espresso cups and huge ones for lattes, plain white ceramic mugs and novelty ones of all shapes and sizes, matte-black brushed-metal insulated travel cups with rubber grips, self-stirring thick plastic tumblers with fist-sized handles—anything that you could fit a cup of coffee in. Factories churned out billions of coffee cups a month. Everyone had their own coffee cup and loved it—after all, how can you get through the day without a cup of coffee?

One day, the government, with the purest of hearts and the best interests of the people in mind, decided to make some new rules. It wasn’t right that coffee cup manufacturers could flood the market with overproduced coffee cups, so the government made the sensible choice to limit their production, especially of cheap, disposable coffee cups. It also wasn’t right that coffee cup manufacturers could produce poor quality cups that were bad for the environment, so the government began to require officials to monitor the quality and environmental impact at every coffee cup factory. Finally, it wasn’t right that just anybody could go into business manufacturing coffee cups, so the government enacted some wise regulations restricting who could enter the coffee cup business, and requiring expensive permits that would help them fund their regulation efforts.

It wasn’t long after the new rules were enacted that the prices of coffee cups started to rise. At first, the people who could only afford disposable cups were hit the hardest, while those who used self-heating, self-stirring smart mugs with built-in temperature control (many of whom were government officials, professors, and journalists) hardly noticed. Over time, the price squeeze became harder and harder to ignore. Society’s top experts began to blame the increasing prices on the greed of the coffee cup factories. After all, they controlled the production of coffee cups. They could collude with one another to raise the prices, lining their pockets at the expense of the people. With the help of the media, they spread this message far and wide, winning over the hearts and minds of the people. The next election season, the people voted in a new government, far less sympathetic to the coffee cup producers.

The new government, with even more noble interests in mind, decided to help people in need afford the coffee cups that they deserved. Their first action was to create a new program giving low-income families vouchers to buy coffee cups. To help even more people afford them, the government began contracting companies to produce a steady supply of affordable disposable coffee cups. Finally, they limited the prices that certain manufacturers could charge for certain coffee cups. These measures were expensive, but it didn’t matter—in order to fund them, the government borrowed some money and raised taxes on the coffee cup manufacturers, who were wealthy anyway and could afford to pay a little extra to help people in need.

Despite all of these measures to relieve the people, when they went to their stores and websites to buy coffee cups, they couldn’t find any. Lines to buy coffee cups stretched around the block, and those who were lucky enough to find coffee cups only saw the highest prices they’d ever seen. Many people were now unable to afford even the most basic ceramic mugs, and they started to become restless. The coffee cup manufacturers were clearly overcharging the people, and they needed to be reined in by the government.

Meanwhile, those fortunate enough to have bought coffee cups decades ago saw the value of their cups increase and increase and increase. Many of them were able to sell their coffee cup collections for vastly more than they had bought them for, allowing them to comfortably retire.

Soon, an even more radical government was elected. It had campaigned on a simple premise: Coffee cups were a necessary public good, a human right even, and after all, it’s the job of the government to secure the human rights of the people. The people desperately needed coffee cups, but they didn’t want coffee cups mass-produced by a capitalist machine that exploited its workers. They wanted coffee cups handmade by workers fairly compensated for their labor and given equitable working conditions. Only this, they thought, could help ensure that everyone could have access to a coffee cup.

The government made sure to keep their supply restrictions and regulations for private companies in place, but decided to make their own coffee cups. The utmost care was taken to ensure that workers were paid fairly and treated right, and that nothing went wrong in the manufacturing process, so each coffee cup ended up costing far more to manufacture than if it were made by a private company. This was no obstacle, of course—the wealthy could just pay for it. The handful of coffee cups that ended up being made were distributed to the poor. The middle class, on the other hand, started to feel the burden of steadily increasing taxes on top of their increasing coffee cup prices.

Despite this, the government decided not to course correct. It was more important to be kind and to ensure that everyone had an equitable chance at getting a coffee cup than to figure out which solutions allowed the most people to get coffee cups and to work backwards from there. Coffee cup prices continued to get more and more expensive, pricing more and more people out of the market, and in the end, nobody was happy—except for the increasingly wealthy coffee cup owners and the government officials and activists who thought they were doing the right thing.

MIT is not well known for its philosophy department. Nevertheless, it’s been home to such great philosophers as John Rawls, Noam Chomsky, and Judith Jarvis Thompson, and has one of the top-ranking undergrad philosophy programs in the country. The school’s technical-hacker-nerd culture highly values problem-solving, which explains the name of the introductory undergrad philosophy course: “Problems Of Philosophy”. Though I can’t actually take it in person, MIT OpenCourseWare, one of the best resources on the Internet, has an archived version of it on their site.

The course is structured around a series of philosophy’s biggest problems: the existence of God, the mind-body problem, the nature of ethics, and so on. For thousands of years, philosophers from Thales to Douglas Hofstadter have grappled with them, but they remain open. In this essay, I, a college sophomore with virtually no formal training in philosophy, will do my best to solve them12. Sometimes, conventional wisdom in philosophy is right, but sometimes, like Ayn Rand, it takes an irreverent, iconoclastic (sophomoric?) personality to create better explanations that move philosophy forward.

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Does God exist?

No.

“God” can be defined in a few different ways: the omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God of Abraham; any intelligent agent that created the universe; or simply that the Universe itself and everything in it is God. I’ll refute these one by one.

Believers in the God of Abraham usually attempt to reconcile His purported omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence with the existence of evil and suffering—which, as we’ll see, is not possible. This is the problem of evil, first stated by Epicurus over 2300 years ago. If God doesn’t know about the existence of evil, then He is not omniscient. If God knows about this evil but can’t prevent it, then He is not omnipotent. If God has both knowledge of evil and ability to prevent it but chooses not to, then He is not omnibenevolent. Certainly not all suffering is ultimately bad—tearing muscle fibers by lifting weights is how people get fit and strong. Some suffering, however, such as innocent children dying of cancer, certainly is, which is why we spend so much civilizational effort trying to make sure that this doesn’t happen. If kids dying of cancer is the will of God, then is attempting to cure cancer tantamount to rebelling against God’s will?

An even simpler refutation comes from David Deutsch’s criterion for good explanations as hard to vary. Why does the God of Abraham exist and not, say, Zeus, Brahma, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster? Gods have been given credit for the causes of various physical phenomena since humans invented language. Why are there rainbows? God reminding us of His covenant with Noah. Why do we have seasons? Because of Demeter’s response to Hades’ kidnapping and rape of Persephone. In each case, we have come up with better, harder-to-vary explanations for these phenomena. We now know that rainbows are caused by sunlight scattering raindrops and that seasons are caused by the Earth’s axial tilt.

Then there is the case for the existence of any kind of intelligent agent or being that created the universe. Enlightenment philosophers knew this as “deism”; modern-day nerds who claim to be atheist know this as the “simulation hypothesis”. Most arguments for this revolve around intelligent design or fine-tuning: the Universe as it is uniquely supports extremely complex life, and the odds of this are incredibly low. This statement is simply anthropic bias. We already have a better explanation for complex biology, which is evolution and natural selection. As for the fine-tuned universe argument, we have no idea whether or not we live in a unique universe or the relative probabilities of universes with other characteristics (or even if there are any other universes with other characteristics!). The argument that there must be a God because we have no other explanation for our “fine-tuned” universe is an argument from ignorance. It asserts one explanation among competing explanations, none of which have any empirical evidence, and none of which are better than the Occam’s razor explanation that there is no intelligent creator of the universe, and fine-tuning is simply random chance.

Any good Popperian epistemologist can tell you that all scientific theories must be falsifiable: they must be logically able to be refuted by an empirical test. There is no empirical test that can definitively disprove the existence of a supernatural being, and thus its existence is unfalsifiable. An even more succinct way to put this is Hitchens’s razor: anything that can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Assertions of God without empirical evidence shift the burden of proof: it should be up to the asserter to prove the existence of God, not up to the dissenter to disprove the existence of God.

The pantheistic “God of Spinoza”—the idea that God/Nature/the Universe are one and the same, is a similarly poor explanation in that it is not specific nor hard to vary. Saying “the universe is made of God” is the same as “the universe is made of magic”, an explanation that claims to explain everything but explains nothing. This idea says nothing new about God except for that He is the universe, meaning it has no explanatory power. There is no need for a pantheistic God in order to explain the existence of physical laws, for example—they can simply be explained as inherent characteristics of the universe.

What does it mean to say something is “good” or “right”?

What is “good” is whatever ultimately leads to maximal flourishing for humanity. What is “right” is whatever is in accordance with reality.

These two related questions are, in my humble opinion, the most important ones in all of philosophy. To be right is to describe the world as it is; to be good is to aim towards making the world as it should be.

I’ll start with the easier one. To be right is to be in accordance with reality. How do we know we are right? By conjecturing explanations, testing them against reality, and improving them if they fail. This seems so blindingly obvious as to not even be worth mentioning, yet very serious philosophical movements (postmodernism, skepticism, solipsism) and very serious philosophers (Kant, Derrida, Foucault) have denied reality or objectivity one way or another.

With that out of the way, we can turn to the more substantive question: what does it mean for something to be good? In this case, the common sense answer suffices. People typically use results, or consequences, as a justification for their actions. By extension we can say that something is good if it ultimately contributes to maximizing the flourishing of humanity.

There is already a philosophy, founded by 18th-century British philosopher Jeremy Bentham, that advocates for choosing actions which lead to the most amount of good for the most amount of people. This philosophy is called utilitarianism—founded by 18th-century British philosopher Jeremy Bentham and recently reincarnated under contemporary Australian philosopher Peter Singer and the Effective Altruism (EA) movement. According to Bentham, the fundamental axiom of utilitarianism is “it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong”. Doesn’t that sound nice? What could go wrong?

In its mainstream form, utilitarianism fundamentally flawed to the point of being dead on arrival. Its most glaring flaw is the idea that you can measure, and therefore calculate, utility. This is, of course, impossible. Could you imagine trying to say with a straight face that you get 5 units of utility from eating a sandwich, while you get 10000 units of utility from a happy relationship? In the interest of the greater good, well-meaning utilitarians forged ahead anyway and invented hypothetical units called “utilons” to do exactly this. The EA movement, founded with the noble goal of inquiring how to maximize the amount of good that we can do with our money, fell for this meme. A significant EA cause, with hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding, is the Shrimp Welfare Project, which aims to improve the lives of potentially non-sentient water crustaceans. If you create mathematical models to quantify utility, and literally fabricate your estimations for “how much” utility something has, you will get ridiculous results3. Garbage in, garbage out.

Utilitarians also tend to make naive decisions that focus on obvious or immediate consequences at the expense of less obvious or higher-order ones. Peter Singer, for example, has famously argued that end-of-life care should be rationed4, that parents should be allowed to euthanize disabled babies5, and that if you eat meat or don’t donate enough of your income to charity, you are evil. The driving force of his philosophy is that we should do everything we can to eliminate suffering. If you see a child drowning in a pond and fail to save them, you are evil; by extension, if a child is dying of starvation or malaria halfway around the world and you fail to donate to save them, you are evil. This utterly ignores the fact that nearly all reductions of poverty, starvation, disease, and other evils are caused not by direct charity, but by economic growth and technological progress. Singer’s arguments that members of society should be more caring and mutually helpful ignore the fact that societies with private property have led to far more prosperity than societies with communal property. Singer’s arguments that our choices (such as the choice to eat meat or receive end-of-life care) should be limited ignore the inherent value in human freedom. His arguments that we should care about people far away from us over people close to us ignore the personal and social benefits of close families and communities. Rather than creating good explanations for policies that advance humanity, Singer attempts to fully a priori deduce which choices increase utility the most, a fruitless task that leads to ridiculous outcomes.

Embedded in the question of how we can do the most amount of good for the most people is the question of how we should organize society to do so. This question is known as politics, and its answer is the same as that of morality: societies should be organized and judged based on how successful their policies are in increasing human flourishing. Based on centuries of experience, we know that societies that value individual rights, private property, the rule of law, free markets, economic and technological growth, and limited government lead to more flourishing, and are thus more successful, than those that don’t.

You may notice that virtually every approach to ethics either ultimately justifies itself using my criterion of “maximum flourishing for humanity”, or does not justify itself at all. People should do things in accordance with virtue? Virtues—prudence, temperance, fortitude, justice—are defined as behaviors that lead people to do good and create flourishing, so this reduces to my case. People should do things in accordance with moral imperatives? Moral imperatives—do not murder, do not steal, do not lie—are rules that lead to functioning, and ultimately flourishing, societies. People should do things in accordance with God’s commandments? We’ve already established that God can’t be shown to exist, so this line of argumentation can’t be justified and can be safely disregarded6.

One last point is that if it’s morally good to figure out how the world should be, then it’s instrumentally good to work to change the world in this way. Sustainable energy, space exploration, and free digital public squares are morally good, while successfully executing business strategies and creating value for shareholders are instrumentally good. In this way, we can say that as long as what you do is morally good, it’s morally good to be good at what you do.

What is the nature of consciousness?

It definitely exists, but we don’t (yet) know how.

This might be the hardest problem in all of philosophy. Fortunately, like most other (past) hard problems of philosophy, this is really a problem of science.

One thing is for sure: consciousness is real. Why? The simplest possible answer: Cogito, ergo sum. “I think, therefore I am”. Ayn Rand reasons similarly: the existence of consciousness is an axiom beyond the domain of justification. The only way to “prove” the existence or nonexistence of consciousness is through unconsciousness, which is impossible.

As for the nature of consciousness, well, we don’t know. We understand very well the physics of the atoms that make up our brain, the biology of human neurons and synapses, the biology of large structures inside the brain, and the psychology of human thinking, but we have no working theory for how exactly an arrangement of seemingly dumb atoms and cells can become a singular entity aware of both its own existence and the world in which it exists.

One idea that’s given us a unique perspective, and maybe even some progress, on the hard problem of consciousness is the theory of computation. Alan Turing and John von Neumann’s ideas of computational automata showed that extremely simple rules can lead to extremely complex outcomes. The Church-Turing-Deutsch principle found that a universal computing device can simulate any physical process, including consciousness. The rules for a universal (or Turing-complete) computing device are very simple: it need only be able to implement algorithms or simulate a Turing machine. High-level consciousness can clearly implement algorithms—you can trace through the steps of any computer algorithm with your mind. Low-level brain operations clearly implement algorithms themselves, such as protein synthesis, coded on DNA and RNA. The human brain is thus a universal computing device, and consciousness is some form of computation.

Even more recently, we’ve gained some new insights on consciousness from large language models such as ChatGPT. What these models actually do is complicated, but put simply, they are neural networks trained on huge volumes of human-generated text to predict the next word in a sequence7. Despite this “dumb” process, they have many emergent properties that were once believed to be central to consciousness: the ability to write coherently, reason abstractly, and interact with the real world. It’s possible that consciousness is just a purely emergent property, and that adding enough data and enough compute to the next version of ChatGPT will produce a being just as conscious as a human.

Philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers splits the problem of understanding consciousness into the “easy problem of consciousness” and the “hard problem of consciousness”. The easy problem is explaining the inner mechanics of the brain that allow us to perform behaviors such as learning, integrating information, and reasoning. The hard problem is figuring out why we have qualia—instances of conscious experience. All kinds of things are qualia: the mental feeling of joy, the physical sensation of pain, the perception of the sky as blue. Groups such as the Qualia Research Institute are working on this hard problem as we speak, putting us ever closer to the working theory of consciousness that we’ve desired for thousands of years.

Do we have free will?

Yes.

I’m raising my hand right now. Now I’m lowering it. Therefore, free will exists. QED.

Philosophers have a unique talent of critiquing the most obviously true ideas (such as the existence of reality) with reasoning that sounds profound but is actually spurious. Explanations to hand-wave away the existence of free will usually reason that everything is an unimpeded chain of causality, a series of motions determined solely by the physical laws of the universe and predestined by the Big Bang itself.

These explanations are unhelpful. To say “everything is caused by the Big Bang” is as worthless an explanation as saying “our brain is made of a bunch of atoms”: it might be true in the strict sense8, but it won’t help you answer higher-order questions like “what should I do to achieve my goals in life?” More specifically, these explanations are bad because they are reductive—they ignore the reality of emergence. We do not know exactly how the laws of physics acting on atoms in our brains lead to higher-order phenomena. Nevertheless, we have separate rules, theories, and explanations for these emergent phenomena that we call neuroscience and psychology, which do not resemble calculations of physical laws.

Showing that we have free will is obvious. There are a vast array of options available to us in our daily lives, from as trivial as what to wear or eat on a given day to as profound as who to marry or what to devote our careers to. Every day, we experience the act of making choices among these options. We’ve already established that consciousness and conscious experience are real, so free will naturally follows as a corollary9. Like psychology, or biology, or classical mechanics for that matter, free will is an emergent phenomenon. Free will, however, is not an “illusion” because emergence is not an illusion, but a phenomenon as real as physics itself.

What is the self?

You are your information system.

Unlike a lot of questions in philosophy, this one serves an important purpose for the future—namely, if your brain is uploaded to a computer or if you go through a teleporter, do you actually die and get replaced with a copy of yourself, or do you simply resume consciousness much as you would after waking up from a night’s sleep or coming out of anesthesia after a surgery?

For that matter, do you wake up from a night’s sleep, or do you actually die when you drift off at night, leaving a copy of yourself to take your place in the morning? I used to lose a lot of sleep (no pun intended) over this question.

There exists no good theory for consciousness, so there exists no good theory for how consciousness is preserved in these scenarios. However, like consciousness, we know for certain through simply observing our existence that the self exists. While we don’t know for certain whether our qualia are preserved in cases like this, blogger Tammy formulates an excellent conjecture in the article “You are your information system”.

what makes you, you ?

we tend to intuitively think of a person as their entire body, somehow including limbs and organs but not clothing or food.

yet, if you close your eyes, and then i swap your arm with someone else's, when you wake up you will still be the same person, just with a new arm. in fact, i'd argue i could replace everything except for the nervous system (including the brain) and when you open your eyes again you would notice that your entire body has changed but your thoughts and memories have remained the same — rather than, for example, still having the same body but different thoughts and memories.

are you the matter that makes up that nervous system ? i could probably replace neurons and synapses one at a time and you would continue to be the same person. is it the electric signals then ? i could probably put on some synapses a device that absorbs electric signals and then sends out identical but "different" signals and you would still be the same person.

in fact, it doesn't really make sense to ask "which matter" makes up your nervous system: under quantum physics, everything is changing and particles are merely values in an omnipresent field rather than solid objects.

ultimately, what you are, is the information system which your nervous system (including your brain) runs. standing still, walking forwards, teleporting yourself, and being uploaded into a sufficiently powerful computer, all preserve your personhood in the exact same way; there is nothing special about the meat that currently runs your mind.

despite everything, it's still you.

This makes more sense the more you think about it. We know that the cells in our bodies, including our brains and nervous systems, are replaced pretty much constantly, as are the molecules in the cells. We’re pretty sure that consciousness is substrate-independent—that it can run on carbon-based brains or silicon-based computers. The Moravec transfer10 is a procedure where nanobots would slowly replace individual neurons one by one with computational equivalents. Even if it doesn’t intuitively seem that way, it might be possible to gradually upload yourself to a computer over time—and preserve your qualia.

What is the meaning of life?

The goal of what we do in our lives is to be happy. How you get there, within certain bounds, is up to you.

This is one of those questions that is vague enough to sound profound without actually being of much value. It could just as easily mean “why are we alive?”, “what should our driving purpose in life be?”, “what is our reason to continue living?”, “why is anything alive?”, “what is life?” and a million other variations. It’s the embodiment of Wittgenstein’s idea that “philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language.”

A lot of these questions are answered by my previously established answer that there is no God. We and everything else are alive because of the synthesis of self-replicating organic molecules, improved over time through evolution. Life is organized units of matter (organisms) that are capable of growth, sustaining themselves, adapting to stimuli in their environment, and reproducing.

We should thus focus on the question “what should we do with our lives?” In life, what should we seek to achieve?

The obvious answer to this question is eudaimonia, a concept first described by the ancient Greeks. It’s often translated as “happiness”, but its true meaning is closer to “flourishing”—it’s some combination of happiness, contentment, meaning, fulfillment, and life satisfaction. Here, I’ll use the word “happiness” to avoid confusion. But what is happiness—and how do we achieve it?

Like consciousness or the self, happiness is hard to define, but certainly real. If you’re feeling happy, you’ll know it. The sensations we associate with happiness vary from person to person: it can be focused work in a flow state, relaxation, elated joy, the absence of desire, or just a general sense of contentment. The Greeks described this concept as eudaimonia, which translates roughly to “good spirit” or “human flourishing”. The paths to this state are different for everyone, but they share many similarities.

A few basic things that nearly everyone can do and that will increase happiness for nearly everyone: eat well, stay hydrated, exercise regularly, sleep 8 hours a day, and go outside. Of course, this won’t make everyone happy, nor will it keep people happy in the long run. For that, most people need something more. They need meaning.

Few people have thought about meaning more than psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl. His book Man’s Search for Meaning describes both his own search for meaning during the Holocaust and his approach to psychiatry, logotherapy, that tries to help patients by finding meaning in their lives. Frankl believed that meaning varies from person to person and even from day to day, but that there were three ways to achieve it: creating a work or doing a deed; experiencing something or encountering someone; or the attitude you take towards unavoidable suffering.

These three routes to meaning are such a good framing of the situation that it’s worth diving into them. Creating a work or doing a deed can be anything from finding a hobby you enjoy to building a great business to conquering all of Europe. Experiencing something or encountering someone can be anything from appreciating great art (or music, or literature, or video games) to cultivating great relationships with other people—coworkers, friends, family, significant others. The third point, however, is arguably the most important. How can we find meaning in unavoidable suffering? By doing as the Stoics do. When faced with things beyond your control, simply accept them as they are. Master your emotional responses and self-discipline.

Meaning fits nicely into Ayn Rand’s framework of the three “supreme and ruling” values" of her philosophy, Objectivism. In Atlas Shrugged, Rand describes reason as the means by which we understand reality and acquire knowledge. Purpose is what one decides to do with their life, usually through productive work. Self-esteem is the certainty that one’s mind is capable of reasoning and oneself is worthy of happiness, if one chooses to achieve it.

Though everyone has their own path towards happiness and meaning, there are some principles that anyone can follow. Books like Charlie Munger’s Poor Charlie’s Almanack, Naval Ravikant’s The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, and Ray Dalio’s Principles have offered me more practical, actionable advice on how to live than any moral philosopher I’ve read. Munger in particular offers advice that is so simple—acquire wisdom; be diligent, persistent, and reliable; control your negative emotions and cognitive biases; avoid big mistakes; and be as objective and rational as possible. The best piece of advice of all? Repeat what works.

Are race and gender socially constructed?

No. Also, why is this in a philosophy course?

Ah, the great questions of philosophy. The meaning of life, the nature of the universe, and—the status of race and gender? Leave it to a humanities department at an elite university in The Current Year™11 to make this one of the handful of units of their intro course.

A “social construct”, in the eyes of the neo-Marxist sociologists who invented the concept, is an idea that arises from consensus interpretations of reality rather than the reality itself. Many ideas have been posited to be social constructs: language, currency, beauty standards, nationality, and especially race and gender. Proponents of the idea that gender is a social construct usually argue that while biological sex is something immutable and biological assigned at birth, gender is a set of social or cultural aspects that usually, but not always, correspond to our socially constructed gender binary of male vs. female. Thankfully, this is not really a philosophical problem, but a scientific one, and a rather easy one at that. After all, if science can establish biological explanations for any differences between men and women, then the problem is resolved.

Aside from gender being a notoriously poorly defined concept (what exactly does it mean to be non-binary if gender corresponds to sex?), the idea that social or cultural aspects of masculinity or femininity are purely socially constructed is absurd. On top of the clear differences in chromosomes, hormones, genitals, body type, physical strength, and reproduction, there are genuine biological differences in men’s and women’s brains, personalities, and interests.

Men and women’s brains are different. Women are typically better at reading comprehension, writing ability, and long-term memory. Men are typically better at working memory, spatial skills, and math tests. This explains differences in college majors: women dominate humanities majors such as education and psychology, while men dominate STEM majors like engineering and computer science. In the Big Five personality traits, women scored higher on Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. In nearly every culture around the world, throughout all of history, men and women have separated into what social constructivists would call traditional gender roles: men tend to hunt, fight in wars, and seek ambitious public positions; women tend to maintain the household and raise and educate children. These differences extend across age and even across species. A study of infants showed that baby boys prefer looking at objects, like tractor parts, while baby girls prefer looking at faces. A study of rhesus monkeys showed that males preferred toy trucks, while females prefer plush toys.

Proponents of this idea tend to hand-wave these objections by claiming that gender is a spectrum. “Sure, gender corresponds to sex”, they’ll say. “But these differences aren’t baked in. There are a lot of women who like math and fighting, and a lot of men who like raising children and learning about psychology”. This is true, but misunderstands the concept of group differences. Group differences do not mean that every man prefers math or is better at it, it means that the average man prefers math and is better at it than the average woman. Many women excel at math!

Gender theorists extrapolate the Enlightenment idea that all people are equal under the law to conclude that all people are equal on all dimensions, and thus disparities in outcome must be as a result of some kind of oppression or bigotry or discrimination. Especially after the abolition of all legal barriers and most social barriers against women, and decades of feminist thought in nearly all mainstream cultural institutions, this explanation makes less sense than ever before. Often, the common sense explanation is right, and in this case, disparities in outcome are due to genuine differences in biology and interests.

Feminism should never be about making every outcome between men and women equal, a goal that’s not just unattainable but undesirable. Feminism should be about ensuring that women have the same rights and opportunities as men. Rather than being socially pushed one way or another, both men and women should choose their roles, attributes, and careers. Let the chips fall where they may.

Two of my favorite sections on every intellectual’s Wikipedia page are “Influences” and “Influenced”—who influenced the thinker, and who the thinker influenced, respectively. 20th century English philosopher and polymath Bertrand Russell, for example, has influences from Euclid to Leibniz, and boasts a list of dozens in the “Influenced” section: from philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein to physicist Stephen Hawking to Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara. While I don’t (yet) have anyone to put in my “Influenced” section, this led me to write down a list of my own greatest influences, and what I’ve learned from each of them.

Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston in 1706, the fifteenth child of a candlemaker. His parents only had enough money to send him to school for two years, after which he was apprenticed to his brother James, a printer. At age 17, he ran away to Philadelphia to seek a new start. He worked in various print shops, founded the Junto, went to London, and worked as a clerk to a man named Thomas Denham until Denham’s death. In 1728, he started his own printing house. Publishing both The Pennsylvania Gazette and Poor Richard’s Almanack eventually made him very wealthy. In the 1730s and 40s, Franklin rose rapidly in Philadelphia society: joining the Freemasons, starting his own militia, and founding the Library Company of Philadelphia, Union Fire Company, and American Philosophical Society. In 1748, Franklin retired from the day-to-day of printing to focus on his projects: he founded America’s first hospital and first university, and became the colonies’ Postmaster General and a member of the Pennsylvania Assembly. Franklin also was an accomplished scientist and inventor. He discovered multiple principles of electromagnetism and invented the lightning rod, bifocal glasses, Franklin stove, and flexible catheter. Later in life, he became an outspoken advocate for American independence. He co-wrote the Declaration of Independence and traveled throughout Europe to spread his ideals during the American Revolution. After the war, he served as President of Pennsylvania, hosted the Constitutional Convention, and died at age 84 in 1790. More than 20,000 people, over two-thirds the population of Philadelphia, attended his funeral.

Franklin has a serious claim to being the most prolific and accomplished person in history. He was a writer, printer, entrepreneur, editor and publisher, philosopher, politician, statesman, diplomat, inventor, scientist, and Founding Father. He did this through a combination of hard work and virtue. His surprisingly simple daily schedule shows this: he devoted lots of time every day for work, but also for reading, “Powerful Goodness” (i.e. gratitude), and both planning the day in the morning and debriefing on it in the evening. Other than his unfinished Autobiography, three pieces of his writing in particular stuck out to me as showing his wisdom and character.

First, at the age of 21, he founded his mutual improvement club called the Junto, which evolved from just five people to becoming the American Philosophical Society. In his own words:

The rules that I drew up required that every member, in his turn, should produce one or more queries on any point of Morals, Politics, or Natural Philosophy, to be discuss'd by the company; and once in three months produce and read an essay of his own writing, on any subject he pleased. Our debates were to be under the direction of a president, and to be conducted in the sincere spirit of inquiry after truth, without fondness for dispute, or desire of victory; and, to prevent warmth, all expressions of positiveness in opinions, or direct contradiction, were after some time made contraband, and prohibited under small pecuniary penalties.

His “Standing Queries for the Junto” is a list of twenty-four thought-provoking questions for the club’s weekly meetings. Some of my favorites include:

1. Have you met with any thing in the author you last read, remarkable, or suitable to be communicated to the Junto? particularly in history, morality, poetry, physic, travels, mechanic arts, or other parts of knowledge.

5. Have you lately heard how any present rich man, here or elsewhere, got his estate?

11. Do you think of any thing at present, in which the Junto may be serviceable to mankind? to their country, to their friends, or to themselves?

15. Have you lately observed any encroachment on the just liberties of the people?

20. In what manner can the Junto, or any of them, assist you in any of your honourable designs?

A few years later, Franklin embarked on his “Plan for Attaining Moral Perfection”. He decided to act virtuously all the time, but found it to be more difficult than expected. To counteract this, he developed a method to develop the habit of virtue rather than always trying to be perfect: he wrote a “little book” containing a list of thirteen core virtues, a calendar to focus on one virtue a week and track his transgressions, quotes and prayers to remember, and a daily schedule to ensure he was spending his time wisely. None of this would be out of place in a self-help book today, but Franklin was far ahead of his time.

Finally, in 1757, Franklin (using his pseudonym of “Poor Richard”) published The Way to Wealth. It reads as a sermon given by the fictional Father Abraham, but is in reality a compilation of quotes and aphorisms by “Poor Richard”.

"If time be of all things the most precious, waisting time must be" as Poor Richard says, "the greatest prodigality;"

"Sloth makes all things difficult, but industry all easy;”

“Drive thy business, let not that drive thee; and early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise," as Poor Richard says.

If we are industrious, we shall never starve; for "at the working man's house hunger looks in, but dares not enter." Nor will the bailiff or the constable enter, for "industry pays debts, while despair increaseth them."

"Employ thy time well, if thou meanest to gain leisure; and, since thou art not sure of a minute, throw not away an hour." Leisure is time for doing something useful; this leisure the diligent man will obtain, but the lazy man never…

A man may if he knows not how to save as he gets, “keep his nose all his life to the grindstone, and die not worth a groat at last. A fat kitchen makes a lean will”

'And now to conclude, "Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other," as Poor Richard says, and scarce in that; for it is true, "We may give advice, but we cannot give conduct." However, remember this, "They that will not be counselled cannot be helped;" and farther, that "If you will not hear Reason, she will surely rap your knuckles," as Poor Richard says.'

The Way to Wealth explains Franklin’s practical advice: work hard and use your time well, avoid idleness and sloth, don’t entrust too much of your work to others, be frugal and prudent, but remain grateful, humble, and charitable. Nearly 300 years later, this advice has not changed.

Elon Musk

Elon Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa in 1971. After graduating from UPenn in 1995, he founded two successful startups: Internet city guide company Zip2, acquired in 1999, and online banking and payment company X.com, which merged with PayPal and was acquired by eBay in 2002. Not one to retire, he founded rocket company SpaceX the same year, and became majority shareholder and later CEO of electric car company Tesla in 2004. Both Tesla and SpaceX nearly failed, but today are among the most valuable companies on Earth. SpaceX has since expanded into satellite Internet (Starlink) and Tesla has expanded into solar power and battery storage (Tesla Energy). Elon has co-founded many other ventures: AI research lab OpenAI in 2015, brain-computer interface startup Neuralink in 2016, and tunneling company The Boring Company in 2017. In 2022, he acquired Twitter in order to turn it into a free-speech platform and “everything app”. Today, he is the richest man in the world and one of the greatest entrepreneurs in history.

Elon has taught me the importance of setting grand goals and relentlessly executing to achieve them. While in college, Elon decided what to do with his life with the question “What will most affect the future of humanity?” He came up with five answers: “the Internet; sustainable energy; space exploration, in particular the permanent extension of life beyond earth; artificial intelligence; and reprogramming the human genetic code.” In one way or another, he has made significant progress towards each of these five goals: Zip2, X.com, and Twitter for the Internet, Tesla for sustainable energy, SpaceX for space exploration, OpenAI for AI, and Neuralink for human improvement.

Elon has not only taught me about the importance of capitalism and startups in creating a better future, but given me a blueprint for how to do so.

1. Think backwards from what you want to achieve: sustainable, clean energy, or spreading humanity to multiple planets, for example.

2. Think of an industry innovation that can help achieve that: popular and affordable electric cars like the Tesla Model 3, or cheap and powerful rockets like the SpaceX Starship.

3. Think of a smaller, sustainable business model to eventually fund that: more expensive cars like the Tesla Roadster or Model S, or smaller rockets like the Falcon 9.

Elon described this himself in his Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (2006), and his follow-ups in 2016 and 2023.

Tim Urban describes Elon Musk’s “secret sauce” as follows: realize you don’t know anything, that nobody else knows anything either, and that life is what you make of it. In order to seize the opportunity given to you, “be humbler about what [you] know, more confident about what’s possible, and less afraid of things that don’t matter.” Think like a chef, who sees what’s possible and creates new recipes, rather than a cook, who only executes on recipes written by chefs. As Elon said himself, “I think it is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary.”

Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger

Warren Buffett was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1930. As a child, he became deeply interested in business and investing, buying his first stock at 11 and making more money than his teachers through business ventures in high school. On the advice of his father, a Congressman, he enrolled at Wharton before transferring to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, which he graduated from at 19. He then went to Columbia Business School, where he took classes from his idol Benjamin Graham, the author of his favorite investing book The Intelligent Investor. Buffett was the only person ever to receive an A+ in Graham’s Security Analysis course. After graduation, he briefly worked as an investment salesman for his father, then worked for Graham’s partnership until Graham retired in 1956. Buffett then founded the Buffett Partnership. Between 1956 and its closure in 1969, the partnership earned 2,795% compared to the market’s 153%, without a single down year. Towards the end of his partnership, he began buying stock in a struggling textile mill called Berkshire Hathaway, and assumed control of the company in 1970, becoming Chairman and CEO. Over the last fifty years, Berkshire has made dozens of legendary investments: GEICO, the Washington Post, the Buffalo Evening News, ABC, Salomon, Coca-Cola, Gen Re, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, BNSF Railroad, and Apple. Today, Berkshire is valued at nearly $750 billion, and Buffett’s net worth stands at $120 billion, nearly all of which he has pledged to charity.

Between 1964 and 2022, the S&P 500 gained 24,708%. Berkshire Hathaway gained 3,787,464%—so much that if Berkshire lost 99% of its value, it would still be beating the market. How did Buffett possibly achieve this?

The simple answer is he discovered a system and stuck with it for 70 years. Buffett’s approach to investing is not easy, but it is simple: buy businesses whose intrinsic value is higher than their market price by a substantial margin of safety. Only buy businesses that you can understand and analyze. Focus on buying businesses with excellent underlying economics and a durable, long-term competitive advantage. Hold stocks for the long term, and let your winners continue to win.

Like Buffett’s investing style, his management style is also an amazing case study. Despite employing nearly 400,000 people through its various subsidiaries, only around 20 people work at Berkshire’s headquarters. The company is remarkably decentralized, with Buffett and other top management essentially only doing capital allocation, and almost always getting out of the way to let subsidiary CEOs run their companies. Berkshire has tens of billions of dollars of cash on hand and generates tens of billions more per year, enough to weather even the most severe economic storms. Through its relentless shareholder orientation, stock buybacks, annual meetings, Chairman’s Letters, and shareholder shopping bonanzas, Berkshire has created a cult following unlike almost any other company.

Finally, unlike many other wealthy people, Buffett has managed to remain a happy person: he’s truly passionate about investing, and he’s created a loving family and a world-class company. As he says himself, “No CEO has it better; I truly do feel like tap dancing to work every day.”

Charlie Munger was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1924. He dropped out of UMichigan to serve in the Army Air Corps, and studied meteorology at Caltech during World War II. After the war, he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1948 and moved to Los Angeles, where he worked as a lawyer and later, a real estate developer. In 1962, he founded prestigious law firm Munger, Tolles, & Olson LLP and investment partnership Wheeler, Munger, and Company. Munger soon retired from law to focus on investing, and his firm earned a cumulative 1,157% to the Dow’s 97% until its closure in 1975. Around the same time, he began investing with Warren Buffett, with purchases such as Blue Chip Stamps and Wesco Financial. In 1978, Munger became Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway and has been instrumental in many successful investments, such as Coca-Cola, Wells Fargo, BNSF Railroad, and Apple. Outside of Berkshire, Munger has invested and been involved with Costco, Li Lu’s Himalaya Capital hedge fund in China, Daily Journal Corporation, and real estate developer Afton Properties. Today, even after donating most of it to charity, his net worth stands at over $2.5 billion.

Bill Gates once called Charlie “truly the broadest thinker I have ever encountered.” You can see this for yourself in Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger, one of my favorite books of all time1. The title is a nod to Charlie’s greatest inspiration (and mine), Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack. The book itself is structured into two parts. The first is a biography and personal profile written by close friend and longtime business associate Peter D. Kaufman, and the second is a compilation of Charlie’s own talks and speeches. Charlie’s personality shines through in these speeches: dry wit, a fierce independence and desire to do things his own way, and an impressively well-calibrated sense of rationality, and virtue.

In one of his talks, A Lesson on Elementary Worldly Wisdom, given at USC Business School in 1994, Charlie lays out perhaps his biggest contribution to the world: his “latticework of mental models” approach to thinking and investing. Essentially, good thinking consists of acquiring several dozen mental models from a variety of disciplines, and using them to solve real-world problems. Charlie is multidisciplinary by nature. Famously, he taught himself psychology by reading textbooks, and wrote The Psychology of Human Misjudgment, a compilation of 25 human tendencies and biases and their real-world occurrences, with more practical insight than most psychology texts written by experts. His talk Practical Thought About Practical Thought?, also called Turning $2 Million Into $2 Trillion, is a brilliant case study explaining how he would use his mental-models approach to design Coca-Cola from the ground up to compound 1,000,000x over 200 years.

Charlie’s aphorisms, too, are short, pithy, and full of wisdom.

In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn't read all the time — none, zero.

To get what you want, you have to deserve what you want…How to find a good spouse? The best single way is to deserve a good spouse.

Develop into a lifelong self-learner through voracious reading; cultivate curiosity and strive to become a little wiser every day.

I believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have ever figured out. I don’t believe in just sitting down and trying to dream it all up yourself. Nobody’s that smart.

People calculate too much and think too little.

Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean.

You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience—both vicarious and direct—on this latticework of models.

And my favorite one, enshrined in my Twitter bio, “Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up”.

Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs was born in 1955 and grew up with adopted parents in the heart of Silicon Valley. As a child, he was a natural free spirit, and developed interests in both technology and liberal arts. After graduating high school in 1972, he spent time exploring: being homeless in Portland after dropping out of Reed College, working for Atari in Silicon Valley, and spending months at monasteries in India. In 1976, Jobs founded Apple Computer Company with his friend Steve Wozniak. After releasing the highly successful Apple II in 1977 and less successful Macintosh in 1984, Jobs was forced out by the board of directors in 1985. He founded NeXT Inc. right after, and was instrumental in Pixar’s early successes. NeXT was acquired by Apple in 1997, and Jobs returned as CEO. He consolidated the company’s operations, shut down unprofitable branches, and launched several highly successful products: the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad, before tragically dying in 2011 at 56 from pancreatic cancer.

From Steve Jobs, especially from his posthumous book and legendary 2005 Stanford commencement address, I learned the importance of designing your own life. Jobs spent years wandering before founding the most valuable company in the world, and was better off for his experiences - famously, the typefaces on the Macintosh came from calligraphy classes he took for no credit at Reed College.

Jobs taught me some important lessons on business and management. Be relentless, most of all on yourself. Business is all about teamwork and leadership - so lead a team of the best people possible (“A players”) to make something not merely good, but insanely great. Jobs insisted that even the Macintosh’s circuit boards be beautiful and elegant, even though only engineers and repairmen would see them.

Jobs was always acutely aware of the brevity of life, and the importance of making something of yourself. His driving motivation was to “put something back” - he was grateful for the world and everything in it, and sought to return something to it. He did this by making things that were new, that the world needed, and that he would ultimately benefit from with not just billions of dollars, but a tremendously meaningful and impactful life.

David Deutsch

David Deutsch was born in 1953 in Haifa, Israel and grew up in London. He received a BA in Natural Sciences from Cambridge and his PhD, in quantum field theory, from Oxford. In 1985, he wrote a paper pioneering the field of quantum computing, and discovered some of the first quantum algorithms and error-correction schemes. He is perhaps better known for his two books: The Fabric of Reality (1997), and The Beginning of Infinity (2011). Today, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society, physics professor at Oxford, frequent TED talker, and is currently working on a new branch of physics called constructor theory and a new parenting method called Taking Children Seriously.

The Fabric of Reality is an attempt at a theory of everything that, instead of trying to reduce the universe to equations and particle physics, tries to unite different disciplines to form a cohesive theory. The four “strands” of the fabric of reality are:

1. Quantum mechanics - specifically Hugh Everett’s many-worlds interpretation

2. Epistemology - specifically Karl Popper’s philosophy of science

3. Computation - specifically Alan Turing’s theory of universal computation, refined by Deutsch’s own work in quantum computation

4. Evolution - specifically Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, refined by Richard Dawkins’ theories of gene selection and memetics

The Beginning of Infinity is an even more profound book. It discusses the reach of good explanations and the role of humans in the universe. Humans are “universal explainers”: we can in principle understand and explain everything that can be understood or explained, within the laws of physics. We create explanations through conjecture, not simply extrapolating the past, and we improve them through criticism, something facilitated through dynamic societies like the West. Progress consists of improving our explanations of the universe, and with the right knowledge, we can solve any problem that humanity faces. The book’s coverage is remarkably broad: touching on philosophy, aesthetics, mathematics, physics, and so much more, and it’s a serious contender for my favorite book of all time.

Ayn Rand

Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum was born in Russia in 1905. After the Russian Revolution, where her family lost their wealth, she enrolled in college at age 16, studying history and screen arts, and adopting the pen name Ayn Rand. In 1925, Rand left Russia and moved to Hollywood to become a screenwriter. In the 1930s, she wrote her first novels, We the Living and Anthem. At the start of World War II, she became involved with libertarian political activism and published her first major success, The Fountainhead. In 1951, Rand moved to New York City. She gathered a circle of admirers, developed her philosophy of Objectivism, and released her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged in 1957. Later in life, she promoted Objectivism through talks and essays, dealt with personal and medical problems, and died at age 77 in 1982.

Rand was unique as both a philosopher and a writer. Her fiction displays heroic, hardworking, and productive people struggling against burdensome governments and parasitic “looters” who seek to exploit them and the fruits of their labor. Atlas Shrugged was not just extraordinarily well-written, but remarkably prescient: depicting a near-future United States where mediocre bureaucrats attempt to regulate productive private businesses out of existence to satisfy their own insecurity and desire for egalitarianism, causing the business leaders to go on strike.

Rand’s close associate and heir, Leonard Peikoff, compiled her ideas in the book Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. Unlike nearly any other philosopher in history, Rand built her system essentially from scratch. Objectivist metaphysics starts with three axioms: reality, consciousness, and identity. Existence exists, we are conscious in it, and A is A. Her epistemology emphasizes reason as man’s tool for navigating the world, and that we should follow reason no matter what. Her ethics held three things: reason, purpose, and self-esteem, as the “supreme and ruling values” of man’s life, and seven virtues: rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, and pride as our tools to achieve these goals. Her political philosophy valued freedom—both personal and economic—as the chief goal of successful societies.

Socrates and Aristotle

Socrates, the founder of Western philosophy, was born near Athens to a fairly wealthy family around 470 BC. Little is known about his life and teachings, and the few sources we do have come from his students, Xenophon and Plato. After being educated in the customs of ancient Athens and serving with distinction during the Peloponnesian War, Socrates became a teacher. Socrates was well-known for his physical ugliness and disdain for material pleasures, as well as his lifelong integrity and devotion to philosophy. Eventually, he became notorious as the “gadfly of Athens”, and the Thirty Tyrants, the pro-Spartan oligarchy ruling the city, charged him with impiety and corrupting the youth. After a legendary trial recorded by Plato in his Apology, Socrates was found guilty and sentenced to death. He died in 399 BC, drinking poison hemlock as his sentence required.

While there were philosophers before Socrates, they mainly focused on what we would today call science and theology. Socrates was the first to focus mainly on ethics, believing all virtue originated from knowledge. He invented techniques that we still use thousands of years later. The Socratic method, for example, has two philosophers dialogue with one another. One will conjecture definitions, while the other will scrutinize and refine them. Eventually, they will approach the truth. Despite his assessment of knowledge as priceless, Socrates championed epistemic humility: famously saying “I know that I know nothing”. Perhaps most importantly, Socrates remained loyal to his philosophical ideals - even choosing the death sentence over renouncing them.

Aristotle was born in 384 BC in Stagira in northern Greece. His father was the personal doctor of the King of Macedon, so he was well-connected in Macedonian palace life. At seventeen or eighteen, he moved to Athens to study philosophy at Plato’s Academy, where he remained for nearly twenty years. Aristotle traveled to Asia Minor and Lesbos, then returned to Macedon to become the personal tutor to the King’s son, Alexander, and the head of the state’s royal academy. After Alexander’s departure to conquer the Persian Empire, Aristotle returned to Athens in 335 BC, and founded his own academy, the Lyceum. Over the next twelve years, Aristotle was remarkably prolific: writing dozens of dialogues spanning every known subject. When Alexander died in 323 BC, Athenians began to resent Macedonians. Aristotle was accused of impiety and forced to flee to Chalcis, where he died the following year.

Like many others on this list, Aristotle was a true polymath. He made advances in a staggering variety of fields: mathematics, physics, biology, astronomy, psychology, economics, politics, linguistics, art, ethics, logic, and rhetoric. His ideas of empiricism, the Golden Mean, and the rules of logic continue to influence philosophy to this day. Even his politics hold up remarkably well: contrasting constitutional government to anarchic pure democracy was a direct inspiration for America’s Founding Fathers.

Curtis Yarvin

Curtis Yarvin was born in 1973 to a wealthy, educated, liberal, secular family and spent much of his childhood abroad, largely in Cyprus. He graduated from Brown University at the age of 19 and dropped out of grad school at UC Berkeley to join a tech company in San Francisco. He created decentralized personal server platform Urbit in 2002, and began reading old books soon after. In 2007, he launched his blog Unqualified Reservations and developed his neoreactionary philosophy, on which he wrote regularly until stopping in 2013 to launch Tlon Corporation and focus on Urbit. Yarvin left Urbit in 2019 to start a new blog, Gray Mirror, which he has written on ever since.

Yarvin has expanded my perspective on politics and government like almost no one else. He holds that the US government (“USG” for short) is a decaying institution, with true power held not by the President and elected officials but by a decentralized network of bureaucrats, journalists, and universities that influence culture - the Cathedral. In order to remedy these issues, we should not rely on democracy - an ineffective and dangerous form of government. Instead, we must turn to the form of government used by nearly every private institution - an accountable monarchy. Accountable monarchies, from the government of Singapore to the management of the New York Times, have a leader with both the natural ability and the legal authority to get things done, and body to check the leader’s power.

Yarvin’s writing, too, is a delight to read: sardonic, witty, and irreverent; loaded with references both historical and modern; and convincing enough to make even the most die-hard mainstream progressive say “hmm” and reflect on their beliefs. Yarvin is not just intelligent and well-read, but unique in a way few thinkers are. I recommend his Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations for an overview of his philosophy, How Dawkins Got Pwned to explore the interesting idea that modern progressivism is descended from Puritanism through mainline Protestantism, and Moldbug on Carlyle to learn about his favorite thinker, Thomas Carlyle.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Arnold Schwarzenegger was born in 1947 in Thal, a tiny village in British-occupied Austria right after the end of World War II. Despite the abuse of his father, young Arnold knew he wanted to become wealthy and important. As a teenager, he decided to become a bodybuilder and spent years intensively weight training. Despite speaking little English, Schwarzenegger moved to the US in 1968 and began training at Gold’s Gym in Venice, California. At the same time, he started his business career: launching a successful bricklaying business and later going into real estate. In 1970, he became the youngest Mr. Olympia winner in history and would go on to win the next five years in a row, and again in 1980. As his bodybuilding career waned, he pivoted to acting, where he became successful through films such as Conan the Barbarian (1982), The Terminator (1984) and Terminator 2 (1991), Twins (1988), and Total Recall (1990). He wisely invested his earnings from bodybuilding and acting, making him a centimillionaire. Later on, he became involved in politics as a capitalist and a Republican. He served as Chairman of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports under George H.W. Bush, and was Governor of California from 2003 to 2011. Today, he remains involved in bodybuilding, acting, and business.

It’s rare to be one of the greatest of all time in a sport. It’s even rarer to be one of the greatest of all time in a sport, then have a successful career in its own right in acting and business and politics. Arnold stands out even among successful people as exceedingly dedicated, persistent, and hungry. Famously, at the peak of his bodybuilding career, he would spend two and a half hours in the gym, twice a day, six days a week, with a smile on his face every rep because he knew he was putting in more work than anyone else to win. Arnold used to (and perhaps still does) write down his goals for the year on a piece of paper and make sure every one of them was accomplished. Even at 75, Arnold can still max out most machines in the gym, and is a fitness icon to people around the world.

Lee Kuan Yew

Lee Kuan Yew was born in 1923 in Singapore, then a backwater, British-colonized island with a population of under half a million. He earned a scholarship to Raffles College, but his education was cut short by the Japanese invasion of Singapore, where he was forced to work for the invaders. After the war, he briefly attended the London School of Economics and studied law at Cambridge, and returned to Singapore in 1950. He practiced law as a barrister and solicitor, and became involved in anti-British politics. In 1954, Lee founded the People’s Action Party, and was elected to Parliament as Leader of the Opposition in 1955. In 1959, the PAP won a landslide victory in Parliament, and Lee was sworn in as the first Prime Minister of Singapore. In 1965, Singapore became fully independent from Britain and Malaysia. Lee served as Prime Minister for the next 25 years, presiding over one of the most profound positive transformations of any country in history. In 1990, he stepped down from active leadership but remained Senior Minister. In 2004, Lee’s son Lee Hsien Loong became Prime Minister, and Lee became Minister Mentor, a role which he held before retiring in 2011. After a long illness, Lee died in 2015 at the age of 91.

Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew was transformed, in his words, “from third world to first”. In 1960, Singapore had a GDP per capita of $428. By 1990, that was $11,862; and today it’s $72,794; one of the highest in the world. Lee’s role in statesmanship was active, but not tyrannical: acting more like a CEO than a president or a dictator. He maintained a free-market economy with free trade; low taxes; excellent public housing, education, and healthcare; and low crime and drug use rates. Singapore’s transformation inspired China’s paramount leader Deng Xiaoping to liberalize China: an even bigger change that lifted over a billion people out of extreme poverty. In the words of Charlie Munger, “If you want one mantra, it comes from Lee Kuan Yew…figure out what works and do it.”

And many more!

Paul Graham (1964-) and Sam Altman (1985-): Paul Graham is a computer scientist, writer, entrepreneur, artist, and investor with a characteristically unique background: a BA in philosophy from Cornell, an MS and PhD in computer science from Harvard, and some formal training in painting from RISD and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, Italy. He then co-founded Viaweb, one of the first online store platforms, selling it to Yahoo! in 1998 for nearly $50 million, where it became Yahoo Store. Now wealthy, he created his own dialect of the programming language Lisp called Arc, began writing his now-famous essays, and co-founded Y Combinator, one of the most successful startup accelerators and venture capital platforms of all time. Sam Altman, a Stanford dropout, joined the first batch of YC in 2005 with his startup Loopt, and quickly became a protégé of Graham. Despite Loopt never achieving traction, it was acquired for $43.4 million in 2012. Altman then went on to become extremely wealthy as an angel investor in many successful startups including Airbnb, Stripe, Reddit, Asana, and Pinterest. He became a partner and then President of YC, succeeding Graham, where he would write much of his now-famous blog and Startup Playbook. In 2015, he co-founded OpenAI along with Elon Musk and others, which began as a nonprofit research lab but became a massive AI corporation, with Altman as CEO. He is also heavily involved in Worldcoin, a crypto project, and Helion, a fusion research company. Both Graham and Altman are accomplished and full of great advice, like the Buffett and Munger of our generation.

Bill Gates (1955-) and Mark Zuckerberg (1984-): Bill Gates grew up in Seattle, Washington, where he became obsessed with computers at the private Lakeside Prep School. He briefly attended Harvard University before dropping out in 1975 to co-found Microsoft, which started off selling BASIC interpreters, made its first big break licensing the MS-DOS operating system to IBM, and eventually became the world’s biggest provider of operating systems (Windows), productivity software (Office), and web browsers (Internet Explorer). Gates stepped down as CEO in 2000 and gradually transitioned away from Microsoft over the next 20 years in order to increasingly focus on other business ventures as well as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the largest charitable organizations in the world. Mark Zuckerberg grew up in New York, where he became obsessed with computers at a young age. He briefly attended Harvard University before dropping out in 2004 to co-found Facebook (sound familiar?) In 2007, he became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, and in 2012, Facebook went public. Now known as Meta, the company owns social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Threads; and experimental ventures Quest and Meta AI. Zuckerberg remains CEO and majority voting shareholder of the company to this day. Today, both Gates and Zuckerberg are worth over $100 billion.

Stephen Wolfram (1959-): computer scientist, theoretical physicist, and entrepreneur. Founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, chief designer of Mathematica/Wolfram Language and Wolfram Alpha, CS professor at UIUC, creator of the Wolfram Physics Project. I admire Wolfram’s curiosity about the world, and some of his favorite topics (cellular automata, computational irreducibility, and the Ruliad) are very interesting.

John von Neumann (1903-1957): Hungarian-American STEM polymath, and likely the smartest human in history. Made huge contributions to the Manhattan project and later the hydrogen bomb and nuclear power; computer science, especially self-replication; game theory. One of the most prolific mathematicians, physicists, engineers, and computer scientists who ever lived. I admire von Neumann’s fearsome intelligence, and his ability to apply it to make lasting contributions to the world.

Richard Feynman (1918-1988): Theoretical physicist, Nobel laureate, Caltech professor, winner of millions of hearts and minds. Feynman worked on the Manhattan Project and for the panel that investigated the Challenger disaster, pioneered the field of nanotechnology, and made strides in quantum electrodynamics. Feynman is well known for his interests outside physics (such as bongo drums and cracking safes), his lucid and memorable teaching style, and his magnetic personality.

Naval Ravikant (1974-): An entrepreneur and venture capitalist known as the “angel philosopher”. Born in India and moved to the US, he graduated from both Stuyvesant High School and Dartmouth College. He co-founded product review site Epinions, fundraising platform AngelList, and social media platform Airchat. He’s also invested early-stage in 200 companies. His wisdom on health, wealth, and happiness is compiled in The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, one of my favorite books of all time.

Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821): Born middle-class in Corsica, he became a military officer, distinguished himself in campaigns in Italy and Egypt, overthrew the French government to become “First Consul” and later Emperor, and singlehandedly nearly conquered Europe until his defeat and exile in 1815. I admire Napoleon’s ambition, charisma, and competence in both military and political affairs.

Alexander the Great (356-321 BC): Born heir to the throne of Macedon and personally tutored by Aristotle. With his father, he consolidated control over Greece. After his father’s death, he conquered the entire Persian Empire, created one of the largest empires in history, and never lost a single battle before his untimely death at age 32. I admire Alexander’s military prowess, leadership ability, and erudition.

Julius Caesar (100-44 BC) and Augustus Caesar (63 BC-14 AD): Gaius Julius Caesar was born to a noble family and rose through the ranks of the Roman Republic’s military and politics, eventually being made consul. He conquered both Gaul and Britain, making him incredibly wealthy, then won a civil war against the Roman Senate and his rival Pompey, becoming dictator. He made many reforms before his assassination just five years later. His adoptive son Gaius Octavius then fought another civil war against Marc Antony, winning and being granted the title Augustus Caesar. He ruled for forty years, dramatically expanded the empire, built roads, established a standing army and police, and rebuilt the city of Rome. Julius and Augustus complement each other well: Julius was the military commander who did what had to be done to save the dying Roman Republic, while Augustus was the peacetime statesman who ushered in a golden age for the next two centuries. At the end of his reign, he said, “I found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble”.

Epictetus (50-135 AD) and Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD): Epictetus was born into slavery and became disabled as a child. He was bought by a wealthy man in Rome, studied philosophy, and later gained his freedom, becoming a teacher of philosophy. After Emperor Domitian banned the teaching of philosophy, he moved to Epirus to found his own school, and died at 85. In contrast, Marcus Aurelius was born into great wealth, training to become emperor under his adoptive father, Emperor Antoninus Pius. Marcus waged successful wars as Emperor, but the Empire was struck by the Antonine Plague, killing millions. Though their lives were very different, both Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius were foundational Stoic thinkers2. Epictetus’ Enchiridion and Marcus’ Meditations remain classic philosophy texts to this day, explaining principles like emotional resilience towards things one can’t control, hard work, virtue, and the goal of eudaimonia: a life well lived.

Deng Xiaoping (1904-1997): Born in Qing China, he became a Marxist and joined the Communist Party. He rose through the ranks of the CCP and became an important politician after the Communists established the People’s Republic of China. After the death of Mao Zedong, Deng won the power struggle and became the paramount leader of China. He embarked on a series of major reforms, the most important of which was economic liberalization that made China one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. I admire Deng’s pragmatism and ability to create lasting change.

Maimonides (1138-1204): Moses ben Maimon was a Jewish theologian, philosopher, and polymath who lived in the Almoravid Empire (Muslim Spain), Morocco, and Egypt during the Islamic Golden Age. He’s known primarily for his fourteen-volume compendium of Jewish law, the Mishneh Torah, and his work reconciling Judaism with Aristotelianism, the Guide to the Perplexed. He worked as an astronomer, a personal physician to Saladin, and a Torah scholar. I admire Maimonides’ intellectual breadth and depth, and his lasting influence on the West’s oldest religion.

I was born in 2004 and grew up fully immersed in the era of technology. The iPhone released when I was in preschool, I practically grew up on Wikipedia and YouTube, and I got my first phone (a Samsung Galaxy Core Prime) in sixth grade. I’ve followed technological and AI progress closely my whole life, including being an early adopter of GPT-3 (mostly for help with essays and copywriting). I’ve lived through and personally experienced the advent of the iPhone, Bitcoin, smartwatches, smart speakers, cloud computing, ride-hailing, online streaming, and much more. I currently study computer science in college. Yet when I checked Twitter on December 1, 2022, I was, for the first time in my life, completely and utterly blown away by a new piece of technology.

Almost every tweet on my timeline was one thing: screenshots of the then brand-new ChatGPT. Here we had an actually useful general-purpose AI capable of writing essays and code, answering questions on any topic imaginable, and even simulating a Linux terminal. Despite its tendency to make up answers and avoid hard questions, its responses were shockingly detailed and believable. I soon got the sinking feeling that everything was about to change.

When Bing Chat released on February 7, Meta’s LLaMA on February 24 (which was then leaked to the internet nearly immediately), and the ChatGPT API on March 1, I began to feel even more uneasy. It seemed as though AI advances were happening faster and faster. Then, in the last twelve days:

• Stanford researchers used LLaMA and GPT-3 to create Alpaca, a model with similar performance to ChatGPT that cost only $600 to train and used 96% fewer parameters

• Open-sourcers on the Internet managed to run LLaMA on cheaper and cheaper hardware: first brand-new MacBook Pros, then old smartphones, then Raspberry Pis

• OpenAI released GPT-4, which is not only significantly more creative, intelligent, and accurate than GPT-3 but has an input limit nearly 10x that of ChatGPT and can process images as well as text

• Google announced it will be releasing its PaLM model to the public, and Anthropic announced the same for its model Claude

• Google and Microsoft both announced new AI integrations with their productivity apps

• Midjourney released v5, which creates incredibly realistic digital art

• PyTorch 2.0, the latest version of the most popular AI library, was released

• Open-sourcers are actively figuring out how to give language models access to outside tools so they can break out of their environments, using technologies like ReAct and LangChain that can be implemented with tiny amounts of code

• Runway announced Gen 2, a text-to-video model

• Adobe announced Firefly, a suite of new AI tools integrated directly into their existing products

• Google began releasing Bard, its AI chatbot

• GitHub announced GitHub Copilot X, a massive upgrade to their already powerful AI coding assistant

• Microsoft Research released a study showing the depth of GPT-4’s cognitive abilities

• OpenAI announced new plugins for ChatGPT, including the ability to browse the web in real time, execute Python code, and connect to the Wolfram Language

As Marc Andreessen said, “I’ve seen some incredible weeks in my life, but this one is up there.”

This sent me into a spiral of existential angst: will AI destroy my career prospects as a software developer? Will it prevent me from ever being a successful entrepreneur or investor? Will it end the ability for people to have a career in general? What’s the point in doing anything productive if it will all be made irrelevant by AI? How can we live meaningful lives if AI overshadows everything we could hope to achieve? What if AI wipes out all life on Earth?

These are deep questions with no easy answers, and I still ponder them daily. Fears of AI misuse, mass unemployment, human irrelevance, or even human extinction are reasonable, and should be taken as seriously as possible. However, I believe there’s good reason to be optimistic. For reasons I describe more in detail below, mass unemployment and imminent superintelligence seem unlikely, and when they do arrive, the world will likely be a much better place.

Let’s start with how AI will impact jobs and the economy over the next few years.

AI (Probably) Won’t Take Your Job (Yet)

The explosion of language models onto the scene has tremendous implications for work, especially white-collar and/or knowledge work. Even before GPT-4 was released, preliminary studies found that GitHub Copilot, a non-state-of-the-art(!) coding assistant, more than doubled developer productivity and that ChatGPT could impact more than 50% of tasks for 19% of the US workforce. Understandably, this leaves a lot of people very worried about AI taking their jobs.

This worry has been seen before many times throughout history. Famously, in the early 1800s in England, the Luddites rebelled and destroyed textile machinery out of fear of losing their jobs. Not only is our world today vastly better than the world of the 1800s, but unemployment is at a near record-low of 3.6%. There’s good reason to believe that in the short term, AI will augment knowledge work rather than replacing it: further reducing the drudgery of certain tasks and allowing workers to focus on more enjoyable and/or productive parts of their jobs, enabling organizations to output much more. It’s also likely that AI will create entirely new jobs that don’t even exist currently, similarly to how a weaver in the 1800s could never foresee becoming a software engineer.

Even if you don’t accept this argument, the idea of impending mass unemployment from AI has three more obstacles that will prevent it from happening.

First, language models are flawed. They have significant issues with factuality, accuracy, and judgment; and no way to reliably understand that they are wrong, let alone avoid it. Jobs that require these characteristics, like doctors and investment managers, are safe in the short term. Similarly, although self-driving cars have been on the horizon for years, they need to be literally 99.9999% crash-free to replace human drivers. It’s usually okay if an email contains a poorly written line, but nobody would fly on a plane with a 1% (or a 0.1%) chance of crashing. Language models are also limited in their scope. Engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, and anyone handling complex and fragile systems or emerging knowledge are safe.

Second, robotics (AI in the physical world) is nowhere near AI in the virtual world. While virtual AI can now create nearly perfectly realistic-looking people and convincing rabbinical sermons, robots can barely grab things and move around, let alone build a house or cook a meal. Moravec’s Paradox observes that fine motor skills are actually much harder to compute than advanced reasoning, and contrary to the predictions of The Jetsons, we have AI video generation before something as “basic” as a robot maid. (It’s important to note, however, that just like we were shocked by ChatGPT, it’s possible that robotics could advance just as unexpectedly.)

Finally, as Marc Andreessen points out, many fields—the government, education, healthcare, law, finance, and more—have heavily protected, regulated, and secured jobs. It’s common for technologists to forget how much inertia there is in certain areas - a full 7% of American adults, or more than 18 million people, reportedly still do not use the Internet. While creative destruction is a powerful force, it is not all-powerful.

We can think of current and near-future AI as a remote, polymathic intern. While it knows about everything and can do anything (at least, anything that doesn’t require a physical body), its abilities are limited to that of an entry-level employee. The AI can’t think for you, only help you think. Given its limited reliability, it shouldn’t be trusted with important decisions. While AI is limited now, however, it will not be forever. When AI becomes as reliable, intelligent, and accurate as humans at any conceivable task, what happens to the economy and our day-to-day lives?

Existential angst

Although it won’t happen tomorrow, it’s highly likely that within most of our lifetimes, artificial general intelligence will become better than humans at almost everything, and replace nearly all economically productive human labor. Given that humans are used to being indisputably the smartest creatures in the world (and the known universe), this understandably causes people a lot of existential angst.

To anyone who feels this way about AI: you are not alone. Worrying about future uncertainty is a part of life, and everyone feels this way at times—even Sam Altman and Elon Musk. It’s important to remember three things: we live in the present, humans are remarkably bad at predicting the future, and humans are remarkably good at adapting to change.

Many people naturally fear a world with abundant superintelligence, a world that will almost certainly be vastly different from our own. To deal with this fear, imagine a medieval peasant who is suddenly transported into the 21st century. He would be shocked to see transportation in loud metal boxes, humans living in massive agglomerations of tremendous structures, humans spending much of the day on small metal slabs with glass panels that magically change what they display, the decline of religion and monarchy, and so on. For those of us who are adjusted to this life, however, it would be hard to imagine going back to the Middle Ages—a time with so much more death, destruction, poverty, tyranny, and illiteracy than our own.

The root of much of today’s existential angst comes from the thought of being replaced. Many artists and programmers in particular feel this way. They wonder, how will humans be creative if AI can do everything? How can I possibly compete?

Imagine that you are a talented mountain climber. A company releases a robot that can climb mountains faster and better than any human. Would you stop climbing mountains? Of course not, because it’s not about trying to climb mountains better than an arbitrary robot—it’s about loving what you do. Did landscape painters all quit as soon as photography became possible? No, they adapted to the new changes and enhanced their art. Traditional Egyptian tile-makers and Greek phyllo dough bakers didn’t quit when machinery and mass production “replaced” them, studio musicians didn’t quit when recorded audio and synthesizers “replaced” them, chess and Go players didn’t quit when AI “replaced” them. Humans adapted to living meaningful lives after learning we live in a vast and empty universe, and we will adapt to living meaningful lives in a world with tools better than ourselves at what we do.

Far from replacing it, AI will enable an explosion in human creativity the likes of which has never been seen before. Everyone will have their own personal expert tutor, artist, writer, programmer, and musician. People who love world-building and plot design will be able to write amazing fantasy books by getting an AI to help with writing style and syntax; non-coders will be able to write software that makes their everyday lives easier; product designers will be able to get AI to help with sales and marketing; and so much more. In fact, this is already happening. The leverage AI will bring to people is like the leverage the printing press brought to writers—but much more so.

People also worry about issues such as misinformation and spam on the Internet, and people losing human connection. These worries are not new—they have been around as long as the Internet has (and probably much longer). Spam and misinformation is actually a very solvable problem thanks to cryptography. Cameras and microphones can add a cryptographic key to their metadata and store it on the blockchain so it can’t be copied, ensuring the authenticity of most photos and videos. As for human connection, if COVID taught us anything, it’s that people need in-person interaction with other people. The rise of convincingly fake AI personas on the Internet could make in-person interaction even more important and meaningful—an AI can’t yet fool people in the physical world. While this could change in the far future, (most) humans have no theory of mind allowing them to relate to a machine as a person, meaning that worries about AI replacing humans as friends or lovers are far-fetched, at least for many years.

But what about the biggest possible threat AI could pose in the long term?

Existential risk

What if AI overthrows humanity and kills us all, either because it was given evil goals or just because it was directed to make as many paperclips as possible? What if a superintelligent AI eternally tortures everyone who didn’t actively work to bring it into existence? What if these scenarios are literally a few years or even months away?

Prominent AI thinkers such as Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky take these scenarios very seriously. Yudkowsky believes that if humanity created a human-level AI (an “artificial general intelligence”, or AGI) unaligned with our goals and values, it would cause a “singularity” where the AI rapidly improves itself to become unfathomably superintelligent to the point where we’d stand no chance against it. Worse, this could happen even if we give the AI a simple task such as making paperclips—due to instrumental convergence, we can expect the AI to expand its own cognitive capabilities, prevent itself from being turned off, aggressively acquire resources, and eventually use nanobots to rearrange all molecules in the universe (including the ones that make up humans) into the form of paperclips. Worse still, AGI will happen very soon, and we have no plan for how to ensure that it is robustly aligned. In other words, so says Yudkowsky, we’re screwed.

Much like existential angst about being replaced, anyone feeling existential dread about death, either individual or collective, is not alone. This dread is a part of human nature and has been forever. In fact, one of the oldest recorded stories in human history, the Epic of Gilgamesh, is about a king who embarks on an unsuccessful quest for eternal life. After 1945, the date of the first detonation of a nuclear weapon, many people suddenly became aware that humanity now had the power to wipe itself out entirely. For anyone worried about extinction, I highly recommend C.S. Lewis’ 1948 essay “On Living In An Atomic Age”.

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors — anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things: praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic have written about their plans for impending AGI, and prediction market Metaculus currently predicts AGI to arrive in 2032, with 25% of people predicting before the end of 2026. But is AGI an impending certainty, to happen within the next few years? Although we can’t know for sure, I’m inclined to say no.

Most people who believe AGI is impending believe in the scaling hypothesis—the idea that taking existing AI techniques and simply throwing more and more computing power and training data at them will eventually create AGI. This has been vindicated by the fact that language models, which are essentially predictors of the next word in a text (explained here by Stephen Wolfram), have achieved all kinds of unexpected, emergent abilities that even their creators do not understand fully. There’s no question that the top AIs today have at least some degree of genuine intelligence. Since ChatGPT, and now GPT-4, are already so advanced, it’s only a matter of time before they become AGI.

Yet the scaling approach has many issues. Language models, by their very nature, are not just unreliable but expensive to run, which will hinder their economic adoption. There is good evidence to believe part of GPT-4’s surprising performance on exams boils down to contamination, whereby the AI’s training data includes either the actual exams or sufficiently close problems such that the AI can either repeat the answer from memory or perform very shallow reasoning. As David Deutsch points out, language models are not agentic (they do not have their own goals), and they have yet to create any truly new knowledge, such as proving unproven math theorems or making scientific advances. The top language models today are trained on nearly all human content, potentially creating a shortage of data for new models to be trained on in the future. There could also be diminishing returns to simple scale: according to anonymous sources, GPT-4 has 1 trillion parameters, compared to GPT-3’s 175 billion (and GPT-2’s 1.5 billion), a nearly 600% expansion for a ~20-40% improvement on most performance metrics. While simple scale approaches have worked well for narrow tasks like chess and Go, they have yet to produce a reliable self-driving car, let alone a human-level brain. It’s also possible that government regulation can slow down AI progress, much as it has slowed down the development of nuclear weapons.

Finally, there’s the question of what will happen with AGI once it finally arrives. It’s important not to hand-wave all of the reasonable objections of the AI doomers: they are based on the fact that a superintelligent AI will be vastly more powerful than humanity in at least some areas, and that it could plausibly defeat us all if given the opportunity. Even with AGI, however, there is good reason for optimism.

First, we have no idea what will happen with AGI. This claim is used by the doomers to justify the precautionary principle in slowing down AI development, but it can be used in reverse. It’s true that it could kill us all, but it’s also true that there are substantial weaknesses in the standard Yudkowsky-Bostrom AI doom arguments (I recommend this post, though a bit technical and detailed). Historically, doomers have always been wrong. From Thomas Malthus’ prediction that there wouldn’t be enough resources for an exponentially growing population, to Edward Teller’s fear that the first nuclear weapons test would ignite the atmosphere and end all life on Earth, to Bertrand Russell’s prediction that nuclear weapons would lead either to extinction or an all-powerful world government, history is full of pessimists who have been wrong.

Even if an unaligned superintelligence manages to arise and escape, it might not be the end of the world. As Curtis Yarvin points out, there are likely diminishing returns to intelligence that would limit the power of a superintelligence, and thus its potential danger. Humans cannot understand or trust an AI, limiting its persuasive power. Humans control the world’s physical infrastructure, such as manufacturing and weaponry, and are unlikely to give control of these to AI to build nanobots or launch nuclear weapons, and even if they did, these plans would likely be obvious to detect and prevent. Even a superintelligent AI would likely not be able to brute-force modern encryption techniques such as SHA-256, which would require trying 2^256 different combinations, roughly as many combinations as there are atoms in the observable universe. Certain problems are simply computationally intractable, and more intelligence cannot magically surpass this barrier.

Even if we assume unaligned AI to be powerful enough to defeat humanity, we still have the potential to make progress in AI alignment. Routes such as interpretability (where we attempt to understand how the underlying models work, essentially “reading the mind” of the AI to predict what it will do) and constitutional AI (where we fine-tune AI systems to align to certain principles), are far from formal and robust alignment, but they show promise. Companies like Anthropic and Conjecture, and labs like the Alignment Research Center are hard at work on the AI alignment problem. Much like we’ve been surprised at the rapid pace of AI capabilities, we could be surprised at the rapid pace of AI alignment, especially if slightly superhuman AIs could help us to align unfathomably superintelligent ones.

Finally, humanity is resilient and adaptable. Take nuclear weapons, for example. Since the first Soviet nuclear test in 1949, two enemy nations have always had access to nuclear weapons, and yet they’ve never used them for warfare since then. In fact, no country other than North Korea has tested a nuclear weapon since 1998. Even in false-alarm situations when they were under the impression of imminent nuclear attack, people such as Vasily Arkhipov and Stanislav Petrov have refused to launch nuclear weapons. There are good arguments for the idea that the existence of nuclear weapons, through the principle of mutually assured destruction, has been largely responsible for the relative lack of violence since World War II. Furthermore, the same nuclear technology that has been used to develop bombs has been used to develop abundant, cheap, clean energy that is only getting better. This ability to avoid disaster extends to AI as well—after an early version of Bing’s chatbot went crazy and threatened and/or professed its love for some users, Microsoft did the right thing by quickly fixing the situation, something that even Yudkowsky admitted made him more optimistic.

Utopia

If we can manage to create an aligned superintelligent AI, the benefits will be incredible. We’d likely be able to unlock all kinds of new technologies: life extension or even immortality, nanobots, immersive virtual reality, unlimited energy, full automation of the economy, space travel, and things we wouldn’t be able to dream of today. People would be freed from the tedium of their jobs and become able to pursue what they really want to do in life. AI-utopia doesn’t need to be an utterly foreign experience like uploading our consciousnesses to the cloud and merging with AI, nor full of hedonistic and self-indulgent pleasures with no challenges at all, but simply a better version of our existing lives—complete with new experiences, genuine human interaction, and challenging and rewarding work.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that not only will AI transform the world hugely in the future, it is already doing so. More so than any technology in human history, both the benefits and risks of AI are truly enormous. We are currently well on a path that could lead to either human extinction or boundless utopia. The stakes have never been higher. Yet if there’s anything we can learn from human history, it’s that we are remarkably good at adapting to change and preventing the worst outcomes. When superintelligence eventually arrives, there’s a very good chance we’ll be able to make the most out of it.

The average American lives for around 79 years, or around 28,900 days. Each of these days has 24 hours, making a total of just 693,000 hours (WaitButWhy has an excellent visualization). The relative shortness of our lives means that one of the most important questions to ask yourself is how am I managing my time to best achieve my goals?

To learn from some great examples of time management, let’s look at the daily schedules of two different people—300 years apart, yet both brilliant and successful. One is polymath and Founding Father Benjamin Franklin, and the other is MIT AI researcher and podcaster Lex Fridman. Why these two? Their schedules are well-documented, relatively easy to follow, and surprisingly similar.

Benjamin Franklin

It’s difficult to think of a more accomplished person in history than Benjamin Franklin. Born in poverty in Boston in 1706, he only received two years of formal schooling. At age 17, he ran away to Philadelphia to become an apprentice in a print shop. At 22, he founded the print shop that would make him wealthy as publisher of the Pennsylvania Gazette and Poor Richard’s Almanack. Over the next sixty-two years of his life, he would found the American Philosophical Society, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Library Company, and the Union Fire Company; discover that electricity has positive and negative charges and that lightning is electricity; invent the lightning rod, Franklin stove, and bifocals; write for decades; and become a leading American Founding Father, diplomat, governor of Pennsylvania, and Postmaster General.

It’s not surprising that Franklin created a daily routine to manage his various responsibilities. What may be surprising is that his daily routine is divided into just six blocks.

5 AM - 8 AM: Rise, wash, and address Powerful Goodness! Contrive day’s business, and take the resolution of the day; prosecute the present study, and breakfast.

8 AM - 12 PM: Work.

12 PM - 2 PM: Read, or look over my accounts, and dine.

2 PM - 6 PM: Work.

6 PM - 9 PM: Put things in their places. Supper. Music or diversion, or conversation. Examination of the day.

10 PM - 5 AM: Sleep.

Lex Fridman

Lex Fridman was born in the Soviet Union in 1983, and immigrated to the United States 11 years later. He received a BS and MS in computer science and a PhD in electrical and computer engineering from Drexel University, leaving school in 2014. He worked for Google for a year as a machine learning researcher, then became a research scientist and lecturer at MIT. In 2018, he started the Lex Fridman Podcast, which now boasts 2.21 million subscribers on YouTube with 334 episodes and counting. Outside of academia, he plays the guitar and piano, has a black belt in Brazilian jiu jitsu, and enjoys reading and cooking.

His schedule is blocked into just a few sections.

Morning Routine: After waking up and getting ready, Lex reads a printout of his “morning mantra”. This includes reminding himself of his rules and constraints (limit social media, exercise and eat well daily, get 6-8 hours of sleep a night, etc.), gratitude, reflecting on death, listing his long-term and short-term goals, visualizing the day ahead, and his core principles (compassion, empathy, love, character, integrity, and strength).

Deep Work Session 1: After drinking water and coffee and using the bathroom, Lex spends four hours doing the deepest work of the day with no distractions—no phone, no social media, nothing apart from the task at hand. If a thought comes up, he writes it on a Google Doc and goes back to work.

Break: 5-10 minutes checking social media, 20 minutes playing music.

Exercise: An hour and a half to two hours of exercise: running at least 6 miles while listening to an audiobook, and some intense bodyweight exercise (5 pull-ups and 10 push-ups a minute for at least 15-20 minutes). Lex exercises in a fasted state and doesn’t eat breakfast or lunch.

Deep Work Session 2: After a cold shower, Lex spends another four hours doing deep work with no distractions.

Dinner: Lex eats a keto meal once a day, usually organic, grass-fed beef and cauliflower or carrots, along with electrolytes and a multivitamin drink.

Shallow Work Session: This four-hour session can include deep work, but is generally the time when Lex focuses on email, video/podcast editing, web design, and other shallow work. If Lex isn’t feeling great, he watches Netflix or YouTube documentaries or hangs out with friends during this time.

Reading: Lex spends at least two hours reading—one hour of academic papers and one hour of “fun” reading: fiction or nonfiction. He then takes a pause to focus on gratitude, and sleeps for 6-8 hours.

Putting It All Together

You may have noticed that Lex Fridman and Benjamin Franklin have surprisingly similar habits. Franklin’s “Powerful Goodness” is highly reminiscent of Lex’s morning mantra and gratitude, and both plan their day’s activities in the morning. Both dedicate significant portions of the day to deep, focused work sessions. Both spend time reading, including on things unrelated to the day’s work, contributing to their intellectual range. So how can we learn from their routines?

• Let no time go to waste. Every waking minute, whether it’s work, reading, exercise, eating, or recreation, should be accounted for. This doesn’t mean there’s no time for leisure, but scheduling prevents time from being wasted on activities like scrolling through social media or procrastinating. As Franklin says, “trouble springs from idleness, and grievous toil from needless ease.”

• Make your default activity productive. When most people find themselves with nothing to do, they gravitate towards mindless entertainment: TV if you’re older or TikTok if you’re younger (I’m guilty of doing this more than I’d like to admit). Instead, focus on changing this “default activity” to reading or working on something productive.

• Keep your schedule flexible, but not empty. Lex’s “shallow work session”, for example, can encompass everything from deep work to shallow work to pure recreation, depending on the tasks of the day and his mood. On some days you can work for hours, and on others you may need more rest, and shallow work allows for that.

• Incorporate self-awareness into your day. “Self-awareness” refers to anything involving reflection. Both Lex and Franklin took time each day to reflect on what they were grateful for (something proven to benefit your physical and mental health), as well as planning the day’s tasks in the morning and reflecting on what went well and poorly in the evening.

• And most importantly, work, read, sleep well, eat well, and exercise every day.

As Franklin says, “Lost time is never found again”. Managing time well is key to living a successful life—and Lex Fridman and Benjamin Franklin’s routines serve as excellent case studies.

Take a look at the annual returns of Berkshire Hathaway and you will see a well-known result: between 1964 and 2021, a $100 investment in the S&P 500 would have returned $30,209, but the same investment in Berkshire would have returned $3,641,613. If Berkshire were to lose 99% of its value overnight, it would still outperform the market over its lifetime. This astounding record came about partially because of Warren Buffett’s greatest influence: legendary investor Benjamin Graham. As the intellectual father of value investing, many of Graham’s ideas remain at the core of finance today, and should be studied carefully by any aspiring investor.

The Life of a Legend

The Beginning

Benjamin Grossbaum was born to a Jewish family in London, UK in 1894. Just a year after his birth, Graham’s father, a furniture salesman uprooted the family to America, where they settled in New York City. As a young child, Graham’s family was quite wealthy, and enjoyed luxuries such as a four-story house on Fifth Avenue and a full-time service staff. Unfortunately, tragedy struck the family soon after: when Graham was just eight years old, his father passed away. Through liquidating the family business and selling many prized possessions, Graham’s mother was able to maintain a good life for her three sons without slipping into poverty, but tragedy soon struck again when the Panic of 1907 caused the stock market to fall almost 50%. Graham’s mother, who knew little about the market and was convinced by a broker to use a margin account, lost all her investments. The family was saved from ruin once more by help from relatives, but these experience instilled in Graham a lifelong appreciation for hard work and thrift and a disdain for unscrupulous financiers.

Despite his hardships, Graham excelled in school. He read voraciously, tutored to make money, and developed a lifelong skill in mathematics and love for poetry, literature, and history. In high school, he graduated at age sixteen at the top of his class, then enrolled in Columbia on a full scholarship the following year. Despite working throughout college, he managed to graduate in just two and a half years as salutatorian. He was so talented academically that he received offers to join three different faculties: English, philosophy, and mathematics, as well as a full scholarship to Columbia Law School. Despite these, Graham opted to go into finance, accepting a job offer as bond salesman at Newburger, Henderson, and Loeb and soon being promoted to security analyst.

Graham on Wall Street

With thorough research, Graham soon discovered inefficiencies between the prices of companies and their intrinsic value, something that would become his main strategy for the rest of his career. In particular, he liked to buy “net nets”, companies trading at less than two-thirds of the value of their current assets minus their liabilities and preferred stock. Despite some setbacks, such as losing much of his money during the World War I bear market of 1917, Graham became a junior partner at his firm, a regular contributor to The Magazine of Wall Street, and a money manager for various friends and relatives. With Graham’s mounting success, he left the firm in 1923 to pursue his own investments. Three years later, he founded his famous mutual fund, the Graham-Newman Corporation, with his friend Jerome Newman.

In 1926, Graham-Newman made one of its most famous investments ever. Graham discovered that the Northern Pipeline Company, an offshoot of Standard Oil, was trading at $65 a share and yet paid a $6/share dividend and held $95 a share of cash and bonds. Graham bought a 5% stake in the company and met with the company’s president to discuss liquidating its bond assets and distributing the profits to shareholders. The president refused, and suggested that Graham sell his shares if he lacked confidence in management. Undeterred by the company’s lack of shareholder orientation, Graham bought more shares and forced a proxy vote. The company distributed its assets to its shareholders, Northern Pipeline stock rose to over $110 a share, and Graham profited handsomely.

Graham’s financial success led him back to Columbia, where he began teaching a course called Security Analysis, which quickly became one of the business school’s most demanded courses and is still taught today. Graham’s prosperity, however, was not to come without challenges. In 1929, the stock market collapsed. While Graham did better than the market average at first due to his partnership’s short positions, he was increasingly forced to cover his shorts with money he didn’t have. Graham-Newman was now deeply in debt, and lost 70% of its market value from 1929 to 1932.

Despite his financial difficulties, Graham stayed busy. Alongside his work giving expert testimony in valuation cases, as well as writing three full-length plays, he began work with Columbia Business School assistant professor David Dodd on what would become his academic magnum opus: the textbook Security Analysis. First published in 1934, Security Analysis eventually became the foundational text for value investing. It taught investors to focus on the discrepancy between a company’s listed stock price and its intrinsic value, to always rigorously research the fundamentals of a stock or bond, and to think contrary to the irrationalities of the market. Security Analysis is currently on its sixth edition, and is still widely used in the finance world today.

The stock market eventually recovered, and Graham-Newman with it. By December 1935, the partnership had already recouped all of its losses. Throughout the following years, Graham continued to broaden his interests: one such project was attempting, ultimately unsuccessfully, to convince the US government to back the dollar with a basket of commodities, rather than with gold. He also became a key founding member of what would become the Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts, and a regular writer in their journal.

Graham the Legend

In 1948, Graham discovered the Government Employees Insurance Company, a small auto insurer whose price, despite the post-World War II bull market, had been depressed by Wall Street. Despite it appearing optically more expensive than Graham’s typical deep bargains, he spent nearly a quarter of his firm’s assets on a 50% stake in the company. Why? Because of its tremendous intrinsic value and growth potential. The company had no agents or branch offices, so it spared those costs from customers and could offer them as much as 30% off other auto insurance policies. Even with lower costs, the company was able to boast profit margins far exceeding other auto insurers. Premiums written had increased sixteenfold in ten years, and were continuing to grow rapidly. Graham, now the company’s controlling shareholder, became chairman of the board of directors and remained so for seventeen years. Despite the company’s price appearing to exceed his estimate of its value, Graham never sold. By 1972, Graham’s investment had appreciated more than 20,000%, far exceeding the gains on every other investment in his decades-long career - combined. While Graham typically sold investments quickly to find new deep value stocks, this experience showed him the value of holding on to superior companies for the long term. Today, GEICO is the second-largest auto insurer in the world, and its premiums written have increased from $1.6 million in 1945 to $33.9 billion in 2022.

In 1949, Graham made perhaps his greatest contribution ever to the world of finance: publishing the first edition of The Intelligent Investor. While Security Analysis was targeted at serious students of stock and bond research, The Intelligent Investor applied Graham’s principles to the layman. One such layman was a college student from Omaha, Nebraska named Warren Buffett. Graham’s teachings had such a profound impact on Buffett that he moved to New York and enrolled at Columbia Business School to study under him. Buffett and Graham, two very similar people, developed a close relationship. Buffett received the only A+ in the history of Graham’s Security Analysis course, and eventually worked for Graham’s company for two years.

In 1956, at age sixty-two, Graham retired from active investing and closed his partnership. He moved to Beverly Hills, where he became a professor at UCLA’s Graduate School of Business. He spent his time teaching, testifying as a stock expert, and working on the Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts. As he got older, Graham dedicated more time to his more intellectual interests: poetry, literature, and philosophy among them. He soon retired again, this time to work on his memoirs and travel between La Jolla, California, the island of Madeira, and southern France. In 1976, he co-founded his last investment vehicle, a diversified value fund called the Rea-Graham Fund, and died in Aix-en-Provence, France at the age of eighty-two.

Despite his early loss of his father, his childhood poverty, his lifelong difficulty making close relationships, his three painful divorces, and the tragic loss of two of his six children, Benjamin Graham became one of the most influential people in Wall Street history. His disciples include not only Warren Buffett, but such legendary investors as Walter Schloss, Irving Kahn, Bill Ruane, Seth Klarman, and Bill Ackman. According to Buffett, Benjamin Graham once told a friend “Every day, do something foolish, something creative, and something generous”. Graham exemplified these. His willingness to look foolish enabled him to profit greatly from the irrationalities of the market. His lifelong passions for writing poems and plays were certainly creative. Most importantly, his charity and efforts to educate as many people as he could on investing showed his generosity.

Graham’s Lessons

Benjamin Graham came from a different time in the financial world. Scarred by many losses throughout his career, including losing nearly 80% of his personal wealth during the Great Depression, Graham was notoriously risk-averse and rigid in his methods. He would only buy companies that appeared significantly underpriced relative to their assets or earnings, and sell them quickly as soon as they showed an adequate return. He often held hundreds of stocks in his portfolio, causing his returns to suffer due to reversion to the mean. These strategies, while effective in the wild and inefficient markets of the early 20th century, faltered in the much more stable and prosperous second half of the century. In the 1960s, Warren Buffett started expanding Graham’s ideas, largely by focusing on a few superior companies to hold for the long run, and has since earned returns far exceeding Graham’s. Nevertheless, some of Graham’s concepts are timeless, and every investor would benefit greatly from learning them.

A stock is a piece of a business

A stock is not just a number, a ticker symbol, or a line that goes up and down. Instead, a share of stock represents a part ownership interest in an actual business. Owning stock usually entitles you to a share of the company’s earnings, dividend payments, proceeds from the liquidation of assets, and voting power to decide the company’s board of directors and corporate actions and policies. The price of a share of stock is not set randomly, but is based on the market’s best estimates of its future cash flows1. As a result, a company's stock price and returns will eventually reflect its cash flow and profitability. When buying a stock, it is best to focus on the company's intrinsic value, rather than guessing how its price will fluctuate in the short term.

Mr. Market

In the short term, however, stock prices can fluctuate wildly. In just the first half of 2022, for example, investors have had to deal with the world’s economy reopening, record-high inflation, interest rate hikes, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its effect on gas prices, supply chain issues, rising US-China tensions, the tech bubble bursting, and many more. The S&P 500 began the year at 477, bottomed at 366, and today (August 15) sits at 429. In The Intelligent Investor, Graham developed the concept of Mr. Market to reflect this. Imagine you have a business partner named Mr. Market who, every day, gives you a price at which he will buy your interest or sell you his. Sometimes the price is ridiculously high or low, and you will respond accordingly, but most of the time it is wiser to form your own ideas based on thorough analysis of your business.

Margin of Safety

Not only would Graham exclusively buy businesses trading at prices below their intrinsic value, but he would make sure that his investments traded significantly cheaper than their intrinsic value. In Security Analysis, he described this difference as “margin of safety”. Since investing is a game of limited information and sometimes even the best-looking decisions can go wrong, investments must be carefully selected so that even in the worst case, the loss to the investor is minimized. This has perhaps been Graham’s single most influential concept.

Despite dying nearly fifty years ago, Benjamin Graham has influenced generations of investors. From his massive profits with Northern Pipeline and GEICO to his landmark works Security Analysis and The Intelligent Investor to his role as Warren Buffett’s mentor, it’s hard to find someone who’s developed the world of investing more.

Note: All figures are accurate for July 8, 2022 at market close.

Berkshire Hathaway is arguably one of the largest investment vehicles in the world. With total assets of $969.5 billion, a market cap of $620 billion and common stock holdings worth $329 billion, Berkshire is over double the size of the largest actively managed mutual fund in the world (the Growth Fund of America). Yet while many mutual funds hold dozens or hundreds of stocks, Berkshire takes a different strategy: concentrating its investments in a few great companies and holding them for the long term. Just two companies make up over half of Berkshire’s portfolio, and eight companies make up 80%. Each of these eight companies reflects Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger’s investing philosophy, and makes a useful case study for investors who want to maximize their returns.

8. BYD (2.8%)

Currently, Berkshire Hathaway holds a 7.7% stake in Chinese conglomerate manufacturer BYD, at a value of $9.29 billion.

The incredible story of BYD starts with its founder. Wang Chuanfu was born to a family of farmers in one of China’s poorest provinces in 1966, the midst of the Cultural Revolution. Orphaned as a teenager, he had to be raised by his older siblings. Determined to make something of himself, he graduated from both university and graduate school with degrees in chemistry. Wang spent several years as a government researcher, but changed his path in 1995 when he noticed that rechargeable batteries had to be imported from Japan at a high cost. To address this, he moved to the fledgling startup city of Shenzhen, raised $300,000 from friends and family, and began manufacturing batteries.

BYD’s success was impressive: By 2000, the company was one of the largest cell phone battery manufacturers in the world, and soon expanded to manufacturing mobile phone parts and assembling handsets for companies such as Nokia and Motorola. In 2003, BYD bought a nearly defunct state-owned car company, and used it to found the wholly owned subsidiary BYD Auto. With the ability to make cars both cheaper and with longer-lasting batteries than competitors, BYD soon became one of China’s largest automakers.

In 2008, at the behest of Charlie Munger, Berkshire purchased 10% of the company for $232 million. Why would Buffett, a technology-averse, America-centric investor, buy stock in an electrical/automotive company on the other side of the globe? Two reasons:

1. Buffett and Munger admire the vision and capabilities of CEO Wang Chuanfu. Munger once said “This guy is a combination of Thomas Edison and Jack Welch—something like Edison in solving technical problems, and something like Welch in getting done what he needs to do. I have never seen anything like it.” Buffett and Munger frequently stress the importance of outstanding management, and Wang Chuanfu is an excellent example.

2. BYD has a competitive advantage and immense growth opportunities. BYD is highly vertically integrated and has access to cheap labor, contributing to its ability to manufacture cars inexpensively. China also has a rapidly growing EV industry. In 2008, fewer than 3,000 electric vehicles were sold in China. In 2021, that number increased to 2.9 million, making China the largest EV market in the world—and BYD the world’s largest EV manufacturer.

As for Berkshire, the BYD investment has paid off handsomely: returning nearly 40X.

7. Occidental Petroleum (3.2%)

Currently, Berkshire Hathaway holds an 18.7% stake in Occidental Petroleum, at a value of $10.64 billion.

Berkshire Hathaway is no stranger to energy companies, owning many of them through subsidiary Berkshire Hathaway Energy. One such deal was with Occidental Petroleum, commonly known as Oxy. In 2019, Berkshire provided $10 billion to the company in order to purchase Anadarko Petroleum, making Oxy the largest oil producer in the Permian Basin (America’s largest oil basin). In exchange, Berkshire received $10 billion in preferred stock paying an 8% dividend, as well as warrants to buy 83.9 million common shares at $59.62 a share. In March 2022, Buffett began purchasing huge amounts of Oxy stock, and shows no sign of slowing down. Why would Buffett buy a commodity business such as an oil company without the potential for much competitive advantage, especially one whose stock had surged 450% since March 2020?

1. Buffett believes oil and gas stocks are undervalued. With the rise of ESG investing (environmental, social, and governance) that eschews fossil fuels, as well as the lack of investment in recent years by oil drilling companies (due to low oil prices), prices of oil and gas exploration stocks are far lower today than in 2014 (the last time oil was above $100 a barrel).

2. Buffett is betting on higher oil prices (and higher stock prices). With the increase in demand for oil after COVID, as well as the Russian invasion of Ukraine, oil prices have increased significantly since 2020. With troubled international supply chains, Buffett believes both that oil prices will rise (or remain high) and that domestic oil production will increase, two factors that would benefit Oxy.

3. Buffett admires the goals of Oxy’s management. In Oxy’s Q4 2021 earnings call, CEO Vicki Hollub highlighted her desire to generate sustainable free cash flows by increasing operational improvements and production. The cash flows would be used to repay debt, increase the company’s dividend, and repurchase shares, all activities that Buffett applauds.

6. Kraft Heinz (3.8%)

Currently, Berkshire Hathaway holds a 26.6% stake in Kraft Heinz, at a value of $12.49 billion.

Berkshire Hathaway is well-known for loving businesses with strong brands and plenty of cash on hand. When Buffett was given the chance to help Brazilian private-equity giant 3G Capital buy a large stake in the H.J. Heinz Company in 2013, he pounced, providing $12.12 billion in exchange for Heinz stock. In 2015, Heinz merged with Kraft Foods, and Berkshire spent another $5 billion to contribute to a special cash dividend for Kraft shareholders. The new company now controlled beloved brands, including Jell-O, Oscar Meyer, Velveeta, Lunchables, Maxwell House, Capri Sun, and more, with a market cap of nearly $110 billion. Yet despite the seemingly strong position of Kraft Heinz, Berkshire has lost money on the deal. Why?

One main reason: The new company prioritized cost-cutting over innovation. Buffett has historically criticized private-equity deals for their quick turnaround and lack of long-term owner orientation, yet invested with 3G anyway. With 3G essentially running Kraft Heinz, their priority became cutting costs. Among other things, Kraft Heinz switched to zero-based budgeting, meaning they would create an entirely new budget every year rather than adjusting the existing one. While consumer tastes change to prioritize healthier and more sustainable options, Kraft Heinz lagged behind competitors.

Kraft Heinz’s problems came to a head in 2019. Earnings fell by half, and the company took a $15 billion write-down on its Kraft and Oscar Meyer brands and was subpoenaed by the SEC, causing the CEO to resign and the stock to tumble. Warren Buffett publicly admitted his mistake with Kraft Heinz, stating that he overpaid for the Kraft part of the company.

Yet not all hope is lost. The new CEO, Miguel Patricio, has committed to increasing the company’s innovation, selling unprofitable brands to pay down debt, and following the company’s new promise: “to sustainably grow by delighting more customers globally”. Since Patricio’s tenure began, shares of Kraft Heinz have increased, slowly but surely, by around 24%. More so than anything else, Berkshire’s experience with Kraft Heinz demonstrates Buffett’s willingness to stay the course: refusing to sell a struggling business with a strong brand.

5. American Express (6.5%)

Currently, Berkshire Hathaway holds a 20.1% stake in American Express, at a value of $21.49 billion.

Warren Buffett’s relationship with American Express goes back many years, as does the history of American Express itself. Amex was founded in 1850 in Buffalo, New York as an express mail service. In 1857, it expanded to financial services by launching a money order business to compete with the USPS. In 1891, J.C. Fargo, the President of American Express, took a trip to Europe, where he found it frustratingly difficult to use credit to obtain cash. Upon returning home, he launched the famous Amex Traveler’s Cheque to help travelers pay for goods, making American Express one of the most respected financial services companies in the world. Over time, Amex expanded into credit cards and banking.

In 1963, Amex, along with many other financial companies, lent $180 million ($1.74 billion today) to a soybean oil businessman named Anthony “Tino” De Angelis. Unfortunately, De Angelis was a fraud, and the scandal caused Amex to suffer huge losses, tanking its stock price more than 50%. Warren Buffett, then the 32-year-old head of Buffett Partnership, put 40% of his firm’s assets into the company. Not only did this episode demonstrate Buffett’s willingness to, as he puts it, “be greedy when others are fearful”, but also netted him a huge profit.

Starting in the 1980s, American Express decided to pivot into a full-service financial megacorporation, acquiring (among others) securities firm Shearson Loeb Rhoades, investment bank and trading firm Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb, financial services firm Investors Diversified Services, the Trade Development Bank, and brokerage firm E.F. Hutton and Co. While Amex stock doubled between 1981 and 1983, it remained virtually flat for the next ten years. In 1991, insurer First Capital, which Amex held a 28% stake in, went insolvent and was seized by the state insurance commissioner, sending Amex’s stock tumbling. Berkshire saw the opportunity and pounced, buying $300 million in preferred stock, and spending another $1 billion over the next seven years.

Once again, the main reason Buffett bought American Express, both in 1963 and the 1990s, was the strength of the brand and business model. With Amex’s universally recognizable credit cards, high merchant fees, strong cash flow, and loyal customer base, Buffett believed the fundamentals of the business could withstand short-term vicissitudes. Once again, he was right. In 1993, Harvey Golub became CEO and sold off all of Amex’s investment banking and institutional businesses within two years. While many of Amex’s former financial holdings failed (including the spectacular explosion of Lehman Brothers in 2008), Amex prospered: netting Berkshire over $20 billion in unrealized gains.

4. Chevron (6.9%)

Currently, Berkshire Hathaway holds an 8.1% stake in Chevron, at a value of $22.73 billion.

Like American Express, Chevron is a company that has been around for a long time. Its origins can be traced back to Star Oil, a company that discovered oil in California’s Santa Susana Mountains in 1876, and was able to drill 25 barrels a day. Nowadays, Chevron produces 1.8 million barrels a day, nearly half of which are produced domestically. In many ways, Berkshire’s Chevron acquisition is similar to its Oxy purchases: a bet on rising oil prices, increased domestic oil production, and oil companies returning money to shareholders. Also like Oxy, Chevron is one of Berkshire’s newest investments: Berkshire began purchasing in Q3 of 2020 and rapidly increased its buying in 2022. While Berkshire has overall slightly lost money on Chevron, the future of the investment remains to be seen.

3. Coca-Cola (7.7%)

Currently, Berkshire Hathaway holds a 9.2% stake in Coca-Cola, at a value of $25.26 billion.

The Coca-Cola Company is one of Berkshire’s most iconic and well-known holdings. Fittingly, Coca-Cola has an iconic and well-known history. In 1886, pharmacist John Pemberton created a non-alcoholic, sweetened, caffeinated, carbonated beverage flavored with coca leaves and kola nuts that he sold as a headache cure in his Columbus, Georgia drugstore. His bookkeeper, Frank Robinson, designed the now world-famous logo and name. The rest is history: in 1892, the formula and brand were purchased by businessman Asa Candler, and within three years, the newly founded Coca-Cola Company was operating in every state in America.

In 1985, Coca-Cola committed one of the greatest mistakes in business history: they changed their iconic formula. So-called “New Coke” was a disaster. Nearly universally hated by the public, Coca-Cola restored the original formula less than three months later. Two years after the New Coke debacle, the stock market crashed, bringing Coca-Cola down with it. Once again, Berkshire pounced: spending $1.3 billion, by far its largest investment ever up to that point. So far, the investment has multiplied twenty-fold. Once again, how did Berkshire know to buy Coca-Cola?

1. Coca-Cola’s brand is virtually invincible. Coca-Cola has consistently ranked as one of the most recognizable, most valuable, and most chosen brands in the world for decades. Both the name and logo are strongly protected trademarks, and the formula is a closely guarded trade secret.

2. Coca-Cola has an extremely well-designed formula. The sugar in Coke makes it taste delicious, the caffeine gives energy, the proprietary blend of flavorings makes it unique, and the color and carbonation make it appear upscale.

3. Coca-Cola has mastered marketing. Coca-Cola spends over 10% of its revenue on marketing, and uses Pavlovian association, rather than selling, to market—associating itself with happiness, prosperity, familial love, and other highly desirable ideals.

Today, Coca-Cola holds over 20% of the global soft drink market share, and over 40% of the US market share—roughly twice as much as Pepsi’s. Over 1.9 billion servings of Coke products are consumed daily around the globe. Even with serious competition from Pepsi and others, even with paying out billions of dollars a year in dividends, even after giving away most of their bottling rights to franchisees, Coca-Cola has still managed to grow from being worth $2,300 in 1892 to $25 million in 1919 to $10.6 billion in 1988 to $274 billion today, making it one of the most successful businesses in world history.

2. Bank of America (10.0%)

Currently, Berkshire Hathaway holds a 12.8% stake in Bank of America, at a value of $32.83 billion.

The Bank of America is one of Buffett’s most interesting holdings. Not only does it make up a full 10% of Berkshire’s common stock portfolio, but it’s now Berkshire’s only major bank holding after selling huge positions in JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, and PNC Financial. There’s one main reason Berkshire decided to buy Bank of America in the first place:

1. Banks have a strong business model. Depositors provide banks with large amounts of capital in exchange for protection and a low interest rate. Banks take most of the capital and lend it out at higher interest rates, profiting massively off the spread. People will always need a safe place to put their money, individuals and institutions will always need sources to borrow capital, and banks are so vital to the financial system that they will often be bailed out by governments to avoid failing. This model works out well: Bank of America has a return on equity of nearly 11%, and a 30% net profit margin.

A quick caveat: If banks are so great, why did Berkshire sell out of most of them in 2020? The main reason appears to be risk management. Buffett believed Berkshire was overexposed to the banking sector and didn’t want to see severe negative results if the pandemic worsened, so he sold. Why, then, did Berkshire keep Bank of America?

It isn’t entirely clear. Some proposed reasons include that Bank of America keeps more capital on hand to cover loan losses than most other banks, has a safe dividend, trades at a low price to book value ratio, is sensitive to interest rate increases, and that CEO Brian Moynihan has helped make the bank more efficient and responsible with lending. Buffett also bought in cheap, both during the US sovereign-debt crisis of 2011 and the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. Regardless of his reasoning, Buffett has once again made a fortune: $18.2 billion in unrealized capital gains.

1. Apple (40.7%)

Currently, Berkshire Hathaway holds a 5.6% stake in Apple, at a value of $134 billion.

Those who know a little about Warren Buffett may be surprised that his largest holding by far is a technology company. Those who know a lot about Warren Buffett will not. Apple is, to put it simply, a fantastic company with incredible branding, customer loyalty, financial strength, and growth prospects. Yet while today Apple, with its nearly $2.4 trillion market cap, is well known for being great, it wasn’t always seen that way. As recently as 2016, Apple stock was suffering. The company had seen its first-ever iPhone sales decline, as the iPhone 6S failed to meet expectations. In addition, Apple’s reliance on China turned off many investors as US-China tensions began to rise. Combined with a lower-than-expected earnings report, Apple stock sank around 33% to just $22 a share, its lowest level since June 2014. Once again, Berkshire proved its willingness to be greedy when others are fearful: snapping up over 911 million shares over the course of the next few years. Why?

1. Apple has an extremely strong product portfolio with an extremely loyal customer base. Apple’s main products: the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, are designed to work together seamlessly. Its operating systems, iOS and MacOS, are proprietary and have exclusive features, such as FaceTime and iMessage, that incentivize users to continue buying and owning Apple products. This strategy pays off: Apple is ranked the most valuable brand in the world by Interbrand and the most loved brand in the world by the American Customer Satisfaction Index. The iPhone has an unbelievable brand loyalty (defined as the percent of customers who buy a new phone of the same brand) of 92%, compared to just 74% for Samsung and 65.2% for Google. 52.5% of Apple’s net sales come from the iPhone alone, and in Q1 2022, Apple shipped more phones to customers than every other smartphone company in the US—combined.

2. Apple has very strong finances and a willingness to distribute rewards to shareholders. Apple made $94.68 billion in net earnings in 2021, more than any other company in the world (except Saudi Aramco), and nearly double that of 2019 (pre-COVID). Apple’s net profit margin is 26%, compared to the industry average of 15.46%. It sits on a massive pile of $192.7 billion of cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities, even after distributing much of its cash flow to shareholders—spending $85.5 billion on share repurchases and $14.5 billion on dividends in 2021 alone. In addition, when Berkshire bought Apple for the first time in 2016, it was trading at just 11 times earnings: a far cry from the 29.7 P/E ratio of the average tech company today.

3. Apple has excellent future growth prospects. As a constantly innovating technology company, Apple is constantly developing new products and services. In the last 5 years alone, Apple has released the AirTag wireless tracker, HomePod smart speaker, Apple Card credit card, Apple TV+ streaming service, and Apple One subscription bundle. This strategy has paid off: sales from products and services other than the iPhone, iPad, and Mac now make up around 30% of Apple’s net sales, up from 16.5% in 2016. In addition, Apple is quickly growing in emerging markets, especially China, where it has double the market share it did just five years ago.

As for Berkshire shareholders? The company’s shrewd move has made them over $100 billion in unrealized gains—by far its largest gain ever.

Conclusion

By now, you should have picked up a few patterns in Buffett’s style: both in his individual investments and his overall portfolio management. Here are a few important ones to note:

1. Berkshire loves to buy great companies when they’re going through a short-term struggle. Buffett bought Apple during its problems in 2016, Bank of America during the 2011 US sovereign-debt crisis, Coca-Cola after the New Coke debacle and 1987 stock market crash, and American Express as they wrapped up their failed financial ventures in the early 90s. Short-term problems, whether unique to the business or in the overall macro environment, may lower a stock price to attractive levels, without harming the underlying strength of the company.

2. Berkshire loves companies with a strong brand and sticky customer base. Brands motivate customers to keep buying, guarding a business against competition and economic downturns. Apple, Coca-Cola, American Express, and Kraft Heinz are all great examples. In some cases, Berkshire loves these companies so much that it buys them outright (such as See’s Candies, Borsheim’s Fine Jewelry, Dairy Queen, and Nebraska Furniture Mart).

3. Berkshire loves companies that have great financials and management that distributes rewards to shareholders. Buffett prefers companies with high profit margins, lots of cash on hand, not much debt, and a high return on invested capital. The management should be rational and focus on rewarding the shareholders rather than themselves, ideally in the form of share repurchases, dividends, and paying down debt. Examples of this are Apple (again!), Occidental Petroleum, and Bank of America.

If you want to boost your long-term investing returns or just be able to think more clearly about investing, there’s no better way to start than by studying the purchases of the world’s greatest investor.