Dabidoe

Good stuff! Share some links curious to see what you're up to.

Great advice thanks!

Has anyone taken the leap and made their first hire for their business? I run a video production company which is doing OK but I've hit my breaking point as a "solopreneur" and I need some help shooting some videos. I don't have any big projects in the pipeline at the moment but have a lot of personal projects I'd like to work on and feel that hiring someone/looking for an intern would help me stay motivated and complete tasks. I don't want to exploit intern labor but realistically can't afford a fulltime salary and would rather offer studio time usage, share gig $ and more. Anyone have any experience in this have any advice on hiring/growing beyond the "one man band"?

This false equation is not productive. Putin nor Netanyahu are "good guys" both are corrupt and run countries with militaristic populations and expansionist ambitions... but if you pay attention to the details it's clear that one is engaging in far more ruthless barbarism under far less valid circumstances than the other. Netanyahu is no Putin. Nor is he an angel. I think it's sad that people who never gave a shit about the Middle East dogpiling on Israel because it's the new cause du'jour are the same ones who rattled the saber for Ukraine to march into a buzz saw. The Ukranain people (my ancestors) have been annhilated and have nothing to show for it, it was a battle that they never would have won and all our $ just led to more slaughter. We have to be adults and stop moralizing and judging how countries do things. This "interventionista" thinking is pointless.

The reality is what we call "AI/LLM" is just a tool built around a massive spreadsheet and graph, not an "entity." It's closer to a parlor trick just mimicking human knowledge, despite how convincing it is. That said it's a fucking amazing tool and parlor trick or not it's revolutionizing how we interface with computers. No code programming is a vast improvement on traditional coding and nobody in their right mind would spend the years learning BS jargon if it weren't necessary to execute the goal of programming which is taking thoughts and translating them onto the digital world. When you compare the "compute / watt" the human brain is about 10 watts of power compared to the hundreds of thousands of watts of power required to power these mega-models. We are a long ways away at the moment from being anything close to human level intelligence (generally speaking, less so on specialized tasks) Ray Kurzweil predicted 2029 for what we call "AGI" and that seems about right. I don't think the AGI will be anything that different from the current iteration of chat GPT in principal but it's capabilities are going to vastly dwarf humans. The thing I find most interesting about what makes computers "smart" is the ability to exist outside of spacetime. They can gain experience non-linearly and achieve experience laterally thousands of years of experience (albeit through "brute force.") Using massively expensive and power-hungry GPU clusters they are not bound to our spacetime limited "one minute at a time" existence. So even if computers have the intelligence of a toddler they have the added benefit of being able to gain infinite experience if you have enough $ to throw at it. It will be a super tool and the real danger is what asshole is going to use that supertool to try and destroy humanity...

I think focusing on the here and now, what you like doing today, what you're interested in is going to be more fruitful than pondering on your greater impact. Building skills is always a fruitful activity, even if it doesn't "Make sense" for what you think you're goals in life are. The act of being in the moment putting your all into something you're engaged in is a great use of time and will help you feel better. You never know when your collection of mini skills will build on eachother into a "talent stack." I've gone through periods of life (and going through a bit of one now) where I don't really know what the hell to do next. I think getting caught up in the thought storms can be very painful and make you question everything about your life. The solution is to act in spite of feeling, not living in fear. I made my first linkedin post this week and it made me realize "what the hell was I afraid of"? I no longer really give a shit about getting a real job (I'm an "entrepeneur", run my own video production company and do some fix 'n' flip stuff for $) so why not just stop giving a fuck? All the ideas in the world about making your epic impact are cool and all but realistically everything begins in the here and now, the doing. By flexing the muscles of "doing" rather than just ruminating on possibilities you will be more effective into achieving a grander purpose. Just live your life one step at a time and give yourself some self love and permission to just draw kitty cats or screw around if you're enjoying it!

I think this is just yet another example of people who take themselves too seriously failing to attempt humor. It's got some moments but humor + lectures don't mix well. He seems a little off his rocker just full on culture warrior, would be nice if he came back down to earth instead of right-wing radical thought leader.

It's clear given the state of the world that people are self organizing into smaller and smaller factions with increasing amounts of hate towards one another. Do you think the internet has just shoved too many "different POVs" that before the internet would have had a geographical limiting factor? It seems that the extreme right/left are citing the worst case examples broadly onto larger less extreme POVs that they otherwise would not have. A good example of this was the comments section of Lex Fridman's interview with Jared Kushner. A lot of people were culturally programmed to have one POV on the guy (as the son of satan) and were surprised that he wasn't a raving lunatic and could string together a few sentences with clarity and thoughtfulness. Assuming we can understand hatred and division what do you think is the solution? Is it an immutable part of the world that we divide and fight or just an ugly blip in history?

@Basman That's interesting. So do you think that hate is fundamental a tool for survival? Would hate be lessened in a post-scarcity world or would people find different resources to hate one another over?

A video about the techniques, theories and warnings about discovering and connecting with your true self and develop a clearer self awareness of your self as a whole (how do you know what's real vs. ego/imaginary?.) I would like to know specific meditation, contemplation and journaling practices for connecting with and finding my true self. Not sure how much of this is covered in the life's purpose course as I have not done that. How does one properly write one's "life story" and what should one focus on? Emotional memories, objective (ie: in third grade I did...) and what through lines do you focus on to write the narrative? How can you use this self-discovery to forge a stronger self-identity?

This seems antithetical to your expressed identity of being good and moral but go with peace my brother.

I agree. There is very much a negativity bias. Child poverty is down, internet is creative a collective consciousness while very rough on some levels is universally a great thing that's uniting humanity. Facts matter, what are you Ben Shapiro? Does bias matter? Are you really saying ugly people are naturally more hateful of hate or hate makes people ugly? Based on the mind body connection I suppose the latter makes some sense but looks are genetic no? Shell Silverstein isn't exactly Brad Pitt but the guy wrote some beautiful poems and childrens books, not quite Jihadi.

I'm not necessarily interested in awakening in the way others are describing it to be honest. There seems to be an airy-fairy self important vibe that doesn't appeal to me. I greatly cherish my moments of deep insight and understanding, but communicating them seems to be like pissing in the wind a bit. I don't have the right words and seems to fall on deaf ears. In my truly introspective moments I am able to see my "self" as a construct, a set of experiences and DNA behaving semi-autonomously outside of what I guess others are describing as consciousness which I think I mislabeled. That said you are still stuck being your "self" right, you don't awaken yourself out of having to walk to the bathroom correct? On Psychedelics and deep meditation I suppose to use the parlance of the group "My consciousness sees my lower self" and I have an intuition that the consciousness while invisible on some levels is also a universal force that's tied to love. That said I do not want to have conversations with 99.99% of people about this as it seems to diminish the truth behind it trying to explain it to people who seem to have no idea what I'm talking about.

I'm sorry, can't really understand this message. Is it intentionally vague?

Sure. Can you imagine how boring Star Wars would be if it was Yoda and Obi Wan sitting in the council talking about how chill everything was?

According to Huberman Lab the negative effects of weed start at over 2/month. That said, as someone who abused the hell out of weed my whole life and paid for it (age 14-36...) I completely agree with the statement below

Thank you for saying this. I think a lot of people get a little huff of what "higher perspective" could be and start waxing poetic like Moses on Mt. Sinai. The movie Silence is probably my favorite meditation on this subject. Portugese missionairies go to feudal Japan to help persecute christians and are horrified by the cruel religious persecution and "question God's silence." God can't speak, but does he influence the world? Who knows, we can only just have faith that if we are good in our own lives it will help the world. Personally I think that "evil" has a purpose the way light creates shadow etc. It might not be pleasant but in the grand scheme of the world the purpose of evil can be a lesson to inspire greater good. The same way that suffering creates joy, by contrast "sunny days wouldn't be special if it wasn't for rain" to quote the honorable prophet 50 Cent.

Succinct!

I uh, have no words for this lol, but my intuition is hate is a little more than skin deep. After all Che Guevera isn't on a bunch of t-shirts because of his ideology and that guy sure lit up a lot of people. There are some great points in this thread but I think it's clear the lowest hanging of fruit is starting with your own behavior and beliefs. It seems that pain, isolation and hate are all fruit of the poison tree. We conform to groups even though those groups seem to isolate us from the broader humanity. I'm a jew that has friends in Israel and it took me reading hundreds of comments of people saying awful things, true things and more to make me realize there is good and bad in both arguments and that the real enemy is people of all sides behaving like pieces of garbage. Would a resource-rich future (post-scarcity) help solve this? It's feasible that we can build enough robots to build enough homes for every human (on this planet or beyond) and grow enough food... but will we destroy ourselves before we get there? Either way, I just want to find peace within myself so at least I don't get all triggered and annoyed unnecessarily at the unavoidable stream of hate and lunacy dominating the "zeitgeist."

There was a good series on mental health with Paul Conti and Andrew Huberman where Paul stated that the subconsciouss makes up 95% of who we really are. That rang true to me given that so much of my life has had confusing, logically unexplainable events that can only really be explained by motivations driven by my subconscious. So on an abstract level I can understand all of that. I have a specific DNA, epigenetic triggers, life experiences that influence the fabric of my existence. The structure of my subconscious mind seems to be affected by all of that. Does the "subconscious" in any way relate to the "cosmic conscious" mind that they speak of in spirituality? Is the self (sub + conscious) just a different interface/ or "mask" for the cosmic consciousness?

How can we really tell what a false belief or identity is? I like to think I try to be a good person, reject group think etc... but I'm seeing that a lot of people feel that way are doing awful things in the world. I get angry at people who say bad things, but other people probably would get angry at me for my beliefs. Are there universal truths that are "more good than bad"? I think religion seems like a stabilizing and unifying force on some levels (spiral dynamics blue > red) but there's also so many examples of hate and division within religion. So... should we just accept that the world's an imperfect place filled with hate as best we can?

I think a lot of people put the cart before the horse with this spiritual work. You need to have a solid foundation as a human being before you should attempt to go out into the world and make change. Jesus was a carpenter first after all...

I've had some very strange insights on this I'm having trouble wrapping my head around. From a scientific perspective is the "one who listens" the deeper self and the "one who talks" just an operating system? On some level we're all just a collection of 37 Trillion cells or whatever. So is consciousness just an operating system a "GUI" if you will? I've listened to enough actualized/deepak/others to agree with it in concept but wanted to think about it for myself. I can't help but think (and had some insights meditating/psychedellics) that there is a silent controlling force to the entire world (maybe even elementary particles?) which would make logical sense given that we're technically all relatives of a big ball of matter that just popped into the universe in a trillionth of a second (big bang.)

Ad block extensions are worth their weight in gold! Youtube claims they're going to stop them but there are ways around this. Hoes are precious! Completely agree, just parroting other people's opinions is not going to give you any insights into the nature of yourself, only a member of a different group. Then again, not everyone's cut out for independent thought (maybe just due to conditioning, but seems like there are alot of dumbdumbs out there.) I don't agree with Leo about everything but I respect that he is speaking from within himself as opposed to just using a bunch of spiritual group think buzz words or trying to sell us some supplements.

@Hugo Oliveira Sent! @DianaFr Thank you for your great advice... I recently stopped smoking pot (was doing at work ) which has helped but I can see there's a lot of room for improvement in terms of both self discipline and self care. @MarkKol? I have a girlfriend, she has a job I have a job... Also man no offense but I wasn't making this post to argue about religion. Jewish culture is thousands of years old and by definition has some backwards elements. While I think the subject is very nuanced you do have a point about the Middle East being a far more "Spiral Dynamics Red" type mentality. It is what it is... That said Tel Aviv is a very culturally advanced metropolitan place and everyone I met there was amazing. Jewish people might be kinda dickish and rude (some guy bumped into me and said "EXCUSE YOU!" lol) but they were far less spiritually dead and far more inclusive and communal as a culture than America. When I came back I was in Penn Station room full of nearly a hundred people all silently looking at their phone, a stark contrast to bright loud social Israel.