Ben McCarthy

Wonder is the proper response to reality. Let me show you why.

[Ben McCarthy @BenMcC]

Our atoms have been inside of stars, and floated suspended in outer space for longer than our species has existed.

Most of the atoms in your body are 13.7 billion years old, and being you is just the latest page in the story of their life...

🧵

[Ben McCarthy @BenMcC]

I asked ChatGPT to analyse my ‘For You’ feed for hidden mood manipulation... it definitely found some things:

The emotional atmosphere is:

• High arousal: hot takes, ambition, intellectual pressure, outrage
• Status-comparison loops: achievements, big-name validation, productivity wins
• Cultural noise: memes, jokes, absurdity
• Threat cues: DDoS attacks, political chaos

Baseline effects:
• Slightly heightened anxiety
• Constant micro-comparison to others
• Pressure to “stay in the loop”
• Feeling like the world is fast + unstable
• Fragmented attention
• Less calm + spaciousness

Comment if you want the prompt to analyse your own feed

[Ben McCarthy @BenMcC]

I asked ChatGPT to analyse my ‘For You’ feed for hidden mood manipulation... it definitely found some things:

The emotional atmosphere is:

• High arousal: hot takes, ambition, intellectual pressure, outrage
• Status-comparison loops: achievements, big-name validation, productivity wins
• Cultural noise: memes, jokes, absurdity
• Threat cues: DDoS attacks, political chaos

Baseline effects:
• Slightly heightened anxiety
• Constant micro-comparison to others
• Pressure to “stay in the loop”
• Feeling like the world is fast + unstable
• Fragmented attention
• Less calm + spaciousness

Comment if you want the prompt to analyse your own feed

[Ben McCarthy @BenMcC]

@gregisenberg Wow, huge response.

I want to make you an AI that personalises your advice for your audience. It will transform your overwhelmed inbox, and give you hours back every week.

DM me.

[Ben McCarthy @BenMcC]

@albysjourney @ycombinator Good luck dude!

[Ben McCarthy @BenMcC]

Everyone is a genius

[Daniel Nguyen @daniel_nguyenx]

Nike: Everyone is an athlete
Apple: Everyone is an artist
Shopify: Everyone is an entrepreneur
Cursor: Everyone is a developer
Cluly: Everyone cheats

What's about your company?

[Ben McCarthy @BenMcC]

Deep fake Sinatra covering Schism is the entire purpose of AI

[Ben McCarthy @BenMcC]

Humanity will split. Not class war - something weirder.

Those who can steer externalised reasoning vs those who are steered by it.

Those who use AI to amplify their agency vs those who outsource agency to AI

The differentiator becomes: "do you know what you want?"

[Ben McCarthy @BenMcC]

Writing externalised memory.

Civilisation became accumulative. Knowledge could compound across generations. You got philosophy, law, science, history. Cities grew because you could coordinate through records. Empires became administrable.

Oral cultures died.

[Ben McCarthy @BenMcC]

But also: someone confused becomes more confused (lost in algorithmic slop and AI-enabled confirmation bias). Someone lazy becomes more passive (why think when AI thinks for you?). Bad faith actors cause exponentially more damage.

[Ben McCarthy @BenMcC]

“Well-written = true” collapsed with ChatGPT

The replacement is “feels right = true”

We’re returning to belief-based reality

[Ben McCarthy @BenMcC]

This company has the Mandate of Heaven.

[𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗿𝘂𝘀𝗵𝗻𝗮— 𝗲/𝗮𝗰𝗰 @techwith_ram]

House, Food and a Girlfriend. Best possible benefits from a company.

Right ?

[Ben McCarthy @BenMcC]

@Dan_Jeffries1 Absolutely cooking. Was that your whole prompt?

[Ben McCarthy @BenMcC]

“No person in the world should worry about economic insufficiency while chasing their uniqueness. This privilege should be socialised”

[Prakhar Gupta @prvkhvr]

Hi, notes from a guy who was raised by a very successful father, and grew up around friends with very successful fathers:

1. Its true, life with money can be boring. Although my father never bought us anything but economy (he insisted we buy luxury with our own money— more on this in a little bit) he did take us around the world. The world at large is not as exciting to me as to someone who hasnt seen it. For me the world was a factt of life as a child, never an achievement of life as an adult.

2. You dont need to own cars, watches, and big houses to be done with cars, watches and big houses. One is sufficient to show you how meaningless the other things are. What is meaningful post-money is family, purpose and the adventure of your life. The toys are mere jewellery pieces. Exciting for a short while, empty in the long run. My father, who is more in Viraj’s category than I am, would agree. But you only realise it after you can have the cars, watches and resorts to realise they were toys you used as baits to manipulate your own behaviour.

3. Despite having money, all my friends crave status. They know they live on borrowed status from their fathers and it haunts them. You see very capable men under rate themselves because they never escape their fathers’ shadows. They go to clubs, double down on cars and brands, and juice their Instagrams and dating profiles just so they can feel the hit of status. Alas, all those things are empty and cause feelings of more impotence for them in the long run.

4. Life with money is not boring. I have a slight disagreement with Viraj here. Actually, the world is your oyster. You can do ANYTHING without fear of going bust or broke. Thats a super power and frankly, no person in the world should worry about economic insufficiency while chasing their uniqueness. This privilege should be socialised, and we should be careful not to glorify poverty and be careful about which struggles we choose to glorify. However, most people with money are more fearful of losing that money than excited about making their own money. This causes a bigger problem, something far more serious that boredom— the feeling of impotence.

5. The real problem of generational wealth is that kids grow up in an economic superstructure where nothing they do matters. They work in family establishments, make no real decisions, have no real impact, hate their own fortunes for being ‘unexciting’, borrow status from their fathers that doesnt really work, get into power politics with their own father and siblings. Its not that everything is boring, its that nothing is meaningful.

6. A side note about inter generational wealth building: my father would say this often to me “i am the son of a poor father, you are the son of a rich father. Please use my life’s sacrifice to see farther than I do”. And I guess, what I did learn is that Buddha needed to be a prince to see how ‘spiritually empty’ wealth is. This is not to say wealth is not desirable, but that true joy is not in the dopamine hits of a new toy. Its in setting out on your own adventure, and bringing pride and victory to people that love you. Or at least this is how far i see. Buddha saw even further. But then he was the son of a king, and I of a lawyer.

7. My father realised through his lifetime, as many people who make money in their lifetime do, that the resorts and flights are not going to make you happy. They may bring temporary pleasure, but joy is found in other things. Joy is found in meaning. And I was somewhat born with that knowledge. THAT is a privilege- to be set free to chase your own dreams, bound neither by your limitations nor by your desires.

Hope that helps.

[Ben McCarthy @BenMcC]

@Iwhoaminane @jxmnop The one person in the comments that knows what’s up

[Ben McCarthy @BenMcC]

If nature had a way to sustain riskier bets, what would it look like?

Yeast contains a protein Hsp90 that inhibits many mutations, but stops working under stress (drought, heat). Suddenly, a multi-generational treasure chest of adaptions appears. Most bad, some just right.

[Ben McCarthy @BenMcC]

Technological change from market investors is like evolution.

It enforces a mechanism where change only comes from incremental improvements, not leaps into the unknown.

But despite that constraint it delivered all the complexity of nature?

[Chris Painter @ChrisPainterYup]

It’s kind of scary to think that if there were a technology that was extremely useful to humanity to build, but it was extremely capital intensive, and building it incrementally wouldn’t have a smooth gradient of returns/revenue, we might just never build it.