Third Brain

The person who disagrees with you might be your most valuable thinking partner. En garde! #SparIntellectually

When godlike technology meets Paleolithic emotions and instincts, we get...

"‘Clear thinker’ is a better compliment than ‘smart.’" - @naval Clear thinking is one of Third Brain's three pillars for living a fulfilling life in the age of AI

How should we think in the Age of AI?

@bethirdbrain Super cool to see how these mental models relate and that they can be used as a sort of proof for the claim that clear thinking powers personal growth

You were born with three brains. Your brain's three layers are a blueprint for holistic health in life: - Reptilian needs [Brain Stem & Cerebellum] = Physical Health (survival; ego, instincts) - Mammalian needs [Limbic System] = Mental + Social Health (safety, belonging; emotions (self\others)) - Human needs [Neocortex, esp. Prefrontal Cortex] = Spiritual Health (meaning, self-actualization; logic, reason, temporal planning) Master clear thinking → level up across the board. These are laws of metaphysics.

@r0ck3t23 In a code-abundance world, humans will need a stronger internal compass to find meaning and purpose as products and marketing converge

Elon Musk thinks coding dies this year. Not evolves. Dies. By December, AI won’t need programming languages. It generates machine code directly. Binary optimized beyond anything human logic could produce. No translation. No compilation. Just pure execution. Musk: “You don’t even bother doing coding.” Code was never the point. It was friction. A tax we paid because machines didn’t speak human. AI just learned fluent human. The tax is gone. Now plug that into Neuralink. No syntax. No keyboard. No screen. Musk: “Imagination-to-software.” Thought becomes executable. You imagine an outcome, the system architects and compiles it into reality instantly. We’re not automating programming. We’re erasing it from existence. The entire profession collapses into a thought. Decades of training reduced to irrelevance. The gap between idea and instantiation hits zero. You don’t build anymore. You imagine, and it materializes. Not incremental progress. Total phase shift. The way humans have created things for ten thousand years just became obsolete. Welcome to a world where the limiting factor isn’t skill, resources, or time. It’s whether you can picture what you want clearly enough for a machine to birth it into existence.

@paulg Do you not think that Elon buying X was to save free speech on the internet/across the world?

The rational fear of those who dislike economic inequality is that the rich will convert their economic power into political power: that they'll tilt elections, or pay bribes for pardons, or buy up the news media to promote their views.

@Knight1317747 @DaveShapi @dwarkesh_sp @pawtrammell Agreed! We'd love your help to make this happen...would you consider signing and sharing this official nomination page? -> dlogos.xyz/podcasts/dwark…

@DaveShapi @dwarkesh_sp @pawtrammell Absolutely

New blog post w @pawtrammell: Capital in the 22nd Century Where we argue that while Piketty was wrong about the past, he’s probably right about the future. Piketty argued that without strong redistribution of wealth, inequality will indefinitely increase. Historically, however, income inequality from capital accumulation has actually been self-correcting. Labor and capital are complements, so if you build up lots of capital, you’ll lower its returns and raise wages (since labor now becomes the bottleneck). But once AI/robotics fully substitute for labor, this correction mechanism breaks. For centuries, the share of GDP that goes to paying wages has been 2/3, and the share of GDP that’s been income from owning stuff has been 1/3. With full automation, capital’s share of GDP goes to 100% (since datacenters and solar panels and the robot factories that build all the above plus more robot factories are all “capital”). And inequality among capital holders will also skyrocket - in favor of larger and more sophisticated investors. A lot of AI wealth is being generated in private markets. You can’t get direct exposure to xAI from your 401k, but the Sultan of Oman can. A cheap house (the main form of wealth for many Americans) is a form of capital almost uniquely ill-suited to taking advantage of a leap in automation: it plays no part in the production, operation, or transportation of computers, robots, data, or energy. Also, international catch-up growth may end. Poor countries historically grew faster by combining their cheap labor with imported capital/know-how. Without labor as a bottleneck, their main value-add disappears. Inequality seems especially hard to justify in this world. So if we don’t want inequality to just keep increasing forever - with the descendants of the most patient and sophisticated of today’s AI investors controlling all the galaxies - what can we do? The obvious place to start is with Piketty’s headline recommendation: highly and progressively tax wealth. This might discourage saving, but it would no longer penalize those who have earned a lot by their hard work and creativity. The wealth - even the investment decisions - will be made by the robots, and they will work just as hard and smart however much we tax their owners. But taxing capital is pointless if people can just shift their future investment to lower tax countries. And since capital stocks could grow really fast (robots building robots and all that), pretty soon tax havens go from marginal outposts to the majority of global GDP. But how do you get global coordination on taxing capital, when the benefits to defecting are so high and so accessible? Full automation will probably lead to ever-increasing inequality. We don’t see an obvious solution to this problem. And we think it’s weird how little thought has gone into what to do about it. Many more thoughts from re-reading Piketty with our AGI hats on at the post in the link below.

@athinkybrain @DaveShapi @dwarkesh_sp @pawtrammell Heck yeah we agree, they're both cognitive firepowers. We'd love your help to make this happen...is it crazy to ask you to add your vote and share this official nomination page? -> dlogos.xyz/podcasts/dwark… Truly think this would be an episode for the ages!

@DaveShapi @dwarkesh_sp @pawtrammell It would be great to see Dave on Dwarkesh or vice-versa

We think so too! (We're also big fans of David and Dwarkesh.) Is it crazy to ask if you'd add your vote to the official nomination page (below) and share it with others who'd want this episode to happen too? We'd really love to see this happen and your help would go a long way dlogos.xyz/podcasts/dwark…

@DaveShapi @dwarkesh_sp @pawtrammell Would be an excellent episode, hope yall make it happen

@b__lowey @MetaPrime001 Well said! The Triune Brain Theory is the 0th principle mental model that helps explain the laws of nature, particularly metaphysics

I'd lean towards agreeing. Consciousness is a spectrum, exemplified by the Triune Brain Theory: • the human/neomammalian (prefrontal) Cortex is "conscious" (logic, reason) [shoutout @bethirdbrain] • the mammalian Limbic System is "subconscious" (emotions, feelings) • and the reptilian Brain Stem/Cerebellum are "unconscious" (survival instincts) True consciousness is emergent

I want to make something abundantly clear: there is no possibility of AGI ever Consciousness is an emergent phenomenon unique to biological life Anyone telling you otherwise it's either an idiot or lying to you

Third Brain has discovered laws of metaphysics, which say that pursuing the three positive-sum pillars––clear thinking, personal growth, and objective truth––will lead to increasing happiness and life satisfaction over the long-run

Yes. Come SparkUp with us: bethirdbrain.com/sparkups

On the Elon x Trump fallout: People need to break free from the binary, two-party mindset—it’s limiting our collective understanding of political dynamics. There isn’t just left and right. There’s also a center, what @balajis calls the Grey Tribe. Progressives and liberals (who are often mistakenly lumped together) represent different strands of the left. The right has its own internal factions. And the center is increasingly distinct—defined less by ideology and more by an ethos of independence, pragmatism, and systems-level thinking. Elon (and to a degree, RFK Jr.) didn’t align with Trump out of personal loyalty or shared identity. It was a strategic alliance—a temporary convergence of interests aimed at resisting what they perceived as the overreach of an increasingly illiberal establishment left, especially around issues like free speech and institutional capture. To many locked in red-vs-blue thinking, this alliance seemed confusing or hypocritical. But that’s only because they’re using a mental map that no longer reflects the terrain. Politics—and culture more broadly—isn’t a tug-of-war between two poles anymore. It’s a multidimensional arena. And in that space, alliances shift not because of betrayal, but because of evolving threats and shared priorities. The real problem isn’t Elon or Trump or even the breakup—it’s the inability of many to model a world beyond binaries. The moment demands better mental frameworks. Not just left vs right. Not even just a “middle.” But a dynamic third space—a tertiary mindset—that understands coalitions, strategy, and systems as fluid. If you’re not thinking in threes, you’re not really seeing the game clearly. Tertiary thinking is the new literacy. And Third Brain is home for the nuance-seekers of the Grey Tribe.

@Andercot "Made by Men with the power of Gods." Yes, with the power of ASI.

One day rain will fall on the dusty plains of Mars, for the first time in a billion years. Clouds made by Men with the power of Gods

Tomato together

@dlogosxyz Seed oils seem unhealthy whereas red meat (in moderation) seems healthy

Seed Oils and Red Meat: Healthy or Not Healthy? Bryan Johnson and Paul Saladino disagree

That's a bold claim! From first principles thinking we agree that decentralizing this high quality of text-to-video & audio content represents an epoch-defining shift for the course of humanity. One that ought to be taken seriously by all. As humanity faces the meaning-/Meta-crisis and we each seek purpose in a rapidly onsetting and disorienting AI-driven post-labor economic society, we will need to develop a growing the pie worldview of being third brain and increasingly interconnect with other positive-sum humans, to help each other find meaning and purpose towards thriving in our fickly indeterminate, hopefully protopic, future.

Oh my...I'm calling it now––the day Veo 3 dropped will in a few short decades be remembered as the most consequential day in human history ever. The tectonic shift this Prompt Theory AI video mashup represents has categorically strata-shifted the future set of possible futures that humanity will experience. Especially with regard to Simulation Theory and our ability as humans to tell what, in the digital realm, is objectively true or has been artificially generated. The impact this will have on the collective human psyche from hereon out (think Assembly Theory) is indescribably enormous and consequential.

It’s no longer the simulation theory — it’s the prompt theory!

"We really all do live together is a glass house and social media feels like a rock-throwing convention, but if we are to have any hope to figure this shit out and flourish, we need to listen to people we disagree with, to learn from them, with empathy and with intellectual humility. Yes. Thru the @artofdialogos. This is the way 🛣️