noslugg

Great men of history had little to no introspection. The personality that builds empires is not the same personality that sits around quietly questioning itself. @pmarca and I discuss what we both noticed but no one talks about: David: You don't have any levels of introspection? Marc: Yes, zero. As little as possible. David: Why? Marc: Move forward. Go! I found people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past. It's a real problem and it's a problem at work and it's a problem at home. David: So I've read 400 biographies of history’s greatest entrepreneurs and someone asked me what the most surprising thing I’ve learned from this was [and I answered] they have little or zero introspection. Sam Walton didn't wake up thinking about his internal self. He just woke up and was like: I like building Walmart. I'm going to keep building Walmart. I'm going to make more Walmarts. And he just kept doing it over and over again. Marc: If you go back 400 years ago it never would've occurred to anybody to be introspective. All of the modern conceptions around introspection and therapy, and all the things that kind of result from that are, a kind of a manufacture of the 1910s, 1920s. Great men of history didn't sit around doing this stuff. The individual runs and does all these things and builds things and builds empires and builds companies and builds technology. And then this kind of this kind of guilt based whammy kind of showed up from Europe. A lot of it from Vienna in 1910, 1920s, Freud and all that entire movement. And kind of turned all that inward and basically said, okay, now we need to basically second guess the individual. We need to criticize the individual. The individual needs to self criticize. The individual needs to feel guilt, needs to look backwards, needs to dwell in the past. It never resonated with me.

Of the 30 people under age 30 who received psychiatric euthanasia in 2024, in the Netherlands, 25 were female. theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/03/…

+We are looking to hire engineers to help us create more web environments for AI agents. Ping me at karpathy@openai.com if interested!

Hi, my name is literally David And I’m going a year without screens in 22 days (down from 10h+ per day) While tracking: - Neuroimaging (fMRI + MRI) - Cognitive + motor tests (very comprehensive) - 131 blood-based biomarkers (@superpower) - Sleep and activity data (@ouraring) - Vision exam - Hearing exam - And more I’m excited to see what the data show We all deserve to know more about how our devices in their current form are affecting us