Tech Historian

This is Elon Musk’s favorite book. He’s been rereading it for 23 years, and it inspired his most famous engineering-first approach. Here are the 7 lessons from “Structures: Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down” that made Elon the richest person in the world:

A woman will forgive you for being evil, selfish, proud, wicked, arrogant, dangerous & manipulative. But a woman will never forgive you for being weak.

JOHN F KENNEDY: "Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men."

Men in their 20's once carved masterpieces like this by hand

You need to watch Kenneth Clark’s 1969 docuseries, Civilisation. He covers the fall of Rome up to the mid 20th century. It’s 13 parts and 11 hours long, but it’s incredible.

The story of young Alexander taming his horse Bucephalus is one of my favorite because it reveals so much about the future king's character and why he'll be called the Great. “My son, you must seek out a kingdom equal to yourself—Macedonia is not big enough for you!”

This is the best thing you will read on the internet today and likely this week.

Watch a team of humanoid robots running a full 8-hr shift at human performance levels. This is fully autonomous running Helix-02 x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

Winston Churchill fought his depression with bricks. He'd lay them for hours at his country home in Kent. He joined the bricklayers' union. And in 1921 he wrote about why it worked. It took psychology another 75 years to catch up. He called his depression the "Black Dog." It followed him for decades. His method for fighting it back was as basic as it sounds: laying brick after brick, hour after hour. Churchill spelled out his theory in a long essay for The Strand Magazine. People who think for a living, he wrote, can't fix a tired brain just by resting it. They have to use a different part of themselves. The part that moves the eyes and the hands. Woodworking, chemistry, bookbinding, bricklaying, painting. Anything that drags the body into a problem the mind can't solve by itself. Modern psychology now calls this behavioral activation. It's one of the most-studied depression treatments out there. Depression sets a behavior trap. You feel bad, so you stop doing things, and doing less means less to feel good about. Feeling worse makes you do even less. The loop tightens until you can't breathe inside it. Behavioral activation breaks the loop from the action side. You schedule the activity first, even when every part of you doesn't want to. Doing it produces small rewards: a wall gets straighter, a painting fills in, a messy room gets clean. Those small rewards slowly rewire the brain. Action comes first, and the feeling follows. Researchers at the University of Washington put this to the test in 2006. They studied 241 adults with major depression and compared three treatments: behavioral activation, regular talk therapy, and antidepressants. For the people who were most severely depressed, behavioral activation matched the drugs. It beat the talk therapy. A 2014 review of more than 1,500 patients across 26 trials backed up the result. Physical work like bricklaying does something extra on top of this. It crowds out rumination, the looping bad thoughts that grind people down during the worst stretches of depression. Bricklaying needs both hands and gives feedback brick by brick: each one is straight or crooked. After an hour you can see exactly how much wall you built. No room left for the mental chewing. The line George Mack used in his post, "depression hates a moving target," is good poetry. The science behind it is sharper. Depression hates a brain that has somewhere else to be.

There's an unfortunate game theory to a large civilization in that it requires hard work, ethical behavior, and deferral of gratification to build. But then eventually people start to forget that and think "why would I work hard when theres all this stuff here already? I should just be hedonistic". Slowly, the civilization starts to decay causing it to take care of people less, which causes more people to defect ("why should I take care of a system that doesn't care for me? Especially when there's so much fun to be had by neglecting it"), until eventually it collapses because everyone has defected.

"I'm too scared to talk to this girl" What your ancestors did on a random Wednesday:

The man who waits for the perfect shot will die with a full mag

“Let me not then die ingloriously and without a struggle, but let me first do some great thing that shall be told among men hereafter.” — Homer, Iliad

Recipe for an incredible childhood: Stephen Biesty’s Cross section books

genuinely just go lock the fuck in anon the retard who does beats the genius who thinks 10/10 times the world is yours, you just have to go seize it don’t listen to the idiots saying hard work is no longer the move. they’re lazy and coping 12+ hour days until you’re there.

Elon Musk advice to ambitious people: Try to read a lot of books (read broadly), ingest as much information as you can and develop a good general knowledge.