Thrazanity and 21 others

serious things casually & casual thangs srsly - mįñdpæłåçë

[Thrazanity and 21 others @Thraaz]

how it started how it’s going

[Milton Friedman Quotes @MiltonFriedmanW]

Milton Friedman on five myths that just won’t die:

1) The Robber Baron myth
2) The Great Depression myth
3) The Big Government myth
4) The Free Lunch myth
5) The Robin Hood myth

[Interesting things @awkwardgoogle]

Japanese reporter is left speechless after seeing japans newest $70 million maglev train fly by at 310 mph

[Percy @percyishim]

Matthew McConaughey shares why he refused to rehearse Interstellar’s famous crying scene, how it was filmed in one take, and what the moment meant to him.

“They were about to play the tape and was like ‘let’s rehearse’ and I went ‘no no’”

“And I remember I had a note and I handed it over to Christopher Nolan and all of sudden, things came over and the cameras were there and we played the tape”

“That first take is the one we used”

“I tried to think about it as what if one day you went to work and you were gone for 10 years and when Casey Affleck and Jessica Chastain came one as the gap, the dread of having to miss that in my own life and my own kids”

“I just reacted”

[Shane Parrish @shaneparrish]

How a simple kitchen gadget made an entire island gain weight

[Trung Phan @TrungTPhan]

Anthony Bourdain on Brad Bird’s Ratatouille:

“I think it’s quite simply the best food movie ever made. The best restaurant movie ever made. Best chef movie.

The tiny details are astonishing: The faded burns on the cooks’ wrists. The ‘personal histories’ of the cooks. The attention paid to the food.

And the Anton Ego Ratatouille epiphany hit me like a punch in the chest. Literally breathtaking.

I saw it in a theater entirely full with adults and the reaction to that moment was what movie making was once — a long time ago — all about: Audible surprise, delight, awe, and even a measure of enlightenment.

I am hugely and disproportionately proud that my minuscule contribution (if any) early, early in the project’s development led to a ‘thank you’ in the credits. Amazing how much they got ‘right’.”

Bourdain even visited Pixar HQ to give a chat during the film’s production.

Glorious shoutout in the film credits.

***

The Ringer has good history on film: https://t.co/E3UrhO86LO

The text above is an email he sent to another chef: https://t.co/mMKQqU6Fj9

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

The only way to stand out in the AI age is by being incredibly creative

Like this Van Gogh shirt I just saw.

Weird but scroll stopping

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

Charlie Munger spent 50 years studying why intelligent people make catastrophically stupid decisions.

It is the most useful thing I have ever watched:

1. Incentives are more powerful than anyone thinks. Munger says he has been in the top 5% of his age cohort his entire life in understanding the power of incentives and he has still underestimated it every single year. Federal Express could not get their night shift to work efficiently until someone realized they were paying by the hour. They switched to paying by the shift. The problem disappeared immediately.

2. People rationalise terrible behavior when their incentives point that way, and they do not even know they are doing it. A doctor in Nebraska was removing perfectly healthy gallbladders for years. When Munger asked an old colleague whether the doctor knew he was harming patients, the answer was no. he genuinely believed the gallbladder was the source of all medical evil and that removing it was an act of love. That is incentive-caused bias at its most extreme.

3. Psychological denial is real, and it is not just for weak people. A family friend's son flew off a carrier in the North Atlantic and never came back. His mother, a completely sane woman, simply never believed he was dead. Reality was too painful, so she distorted it until it was bearable. Munger says we all do this to some extent, and it causes terrible problems.

4. Consistency and commitment tendency are one of the most powerful forces in the human mind. Once you have stated a position publicly, you are psychologically locked into it. Max Planck said the really important new physics was never accepted by the old guard. A new guard came along that was less brain blocked by its previous conclusions. If this happened to the deans of physics, Munger says, imagine what it does to ordinary people.

5. The Chinese brainwashing system used on prisoners of war worked better than torture. They did not start with big demands. They maneuvered people into making tiny little commitments and declarations and slowly built from there. The same mechanism operates in every cult, every sales system, and every ideology that gets deeply embedded in people's heads.

6. Pavlovian association shapes buying behavior at a level most people never consciously process. Munger estimates three quarters of all advertising works on pure Pavlov. Coca-Cola does not want to be associated with funerals. They want to be associated with the Olympics, wonderful music, heroics. The association itself changes how people feel about the product at a subconscious level. Raising the price of a product can actually increase its market share because price and quality are associated in the human mind, and people use price as a signal of value.

7. Persian messenger syndrome is alive and running every major organization. The Persians killed the messenger who brought bad news. Bill Paley in his last 20 years, did not hear one thing he did not want to hear. everyone around him knew bringing bad news was dangerous. The result was that one of the most powerful men in media made terrible decisions for two decades because reality never reached him.

8. Social proof causes otherwise intelligent people to follow each other off cliffs. When one oil company bought a fertilizer company in the 1970s, practically every other major oil company rushed out and did the same. There was no rational reason for oil companies to own fertilizer companies. But if Exxon was doing it, it was good enough for Mobil. Every single acquisition was a disaster.

9. The efficient market theory persisted in academia for decades despite Berkshire Hathaway existing as a living contradiction. One economist kept adding sigmas to explain away the anomaly. two sigma, then three, then four, eventually six sigma. Munger's observation: It is better to add a sigma than change a theory just because the evidence comes in differently. That economist later went into money management himself and sank like a stone.

10. Contrast bias warps perception constantly and invisibly. Put your hand in hot water, then room temperature water. It feels cold. Put your hand in cold water, then room temperature water. It feels hot. same bucket. The human sensory apparatus has no absolute scale, only a contrast scale. Real estate agents exploit this deliberately. They show you two overpriced, awful houses first, then take you to a merely overpriced house, and it feels like a bargain.

11. The frog in slowly heating water is the business version of contrast bias. If something bad comes to you in small pieces, you are likely to miss it entirely. Munger says he has known many high-powered brilliant businessmen who were destroyed this way. not because they were stupid but because each incremental change was too small to trigger alarm. The contrast was never large enough to notice.

12. Authority bias is so powerful it can make trained professionals watch a plane crash. In flight simulator experiments, when the pilot, the authority figure, does something that any trained co-pilot knows will crash the plane, 25% of the time, the co-pilot sits there and lets it crash anyway. They have been trained to know better. The authority relationship overrides the training.

13. Deprivation super reaction syndrome explains why people go insane over small losses. Munger's neighbor had a 180 degree view of the harbor. the neighbor put in a pine tree about 3 feet high that turned it into a 179 and three-quarter degree view. They had a blood feud that went on for years. The New Coke disaster is the corporate version. Coca-Cola told customers they were changing a flavor and triggered a deprival super reaction so powerful that Pepsi was weeks away from releasing old Coke in a Pepsi bottle. smart engineers. brilliant lawyers. armies of psychologists. All missed it.

14. Envy and jealousy are far more powerful than greed and almost entirely absent from psychology textbooks. Munger says Warren Buffett has said half a dozen times that it is not greed that drives the world but envy. In a thousand-page psychology textbook, the index entry for envy and jealousy is blank. One of the most powerful forces in human behavior and academia essentially ignores it.

15. Gambling addiction is not explained by variable reinforcement alone. Skinner thought he had fully explained gambling by showing that variable reward schedules pound in behavior more powerfully than fixed ones. But the people who design modern slot machines know things Skinner did not. Lotteries where you pick your own number get far more play than lotteries where the number is assigned to you. People who commit to a number believe it has more validity because they chose it. Near misses on slot machines trigger deprival super reaction syndrome. It is four or five psychological tendencies working together, not one.

16. The most dangerous situations are when multiple psychological tendencies combine toward the same end at once. Munger calls this the lollapalooza effect. Tupperware parties use four or five tendencies simultaneously. Moonie conversion methods combine multiple tendencies and work extraordinarily well. alcoholics anonymous achieves a 50% no drinking rate when everything else fails because it also combines multiple tendencies toward a constructive end. The Milgram experiment is not just about obedience. it involves authority bias, consistency and commitment tendency, and contrast effects all working together. That combination turns human brains into mush.

17. Boards of directors are structurally designed to fail as corrective mechanisms. The top executive is the authority figure. He is doing something questionable. You look around, and nobody else is objecting, which is social proof that it is fine. He flies you around in the corporate jet and raises your director fees every year, which triggers reciprocation tendency. Munger's rule: boards only act when the behavior gets so bad it starts making them look foolish or threatens legal liability. That is the only forcing function that reliably works.

18. John Goodfriend of Salomon Brothers destroyed his career and reputation because he did not fire a trusted employee who had lied to the government. Every psychological tendency pointed toward keeping the man. He was a close colleague. His wife was known. He was part of a group that had made over a billion dollars for the firm. He said he had never done it before and would never do it again. Goodfriend looked into his eyes and believed him. The man did it again. The lesson: everyone who gets caught embezzling says they have never done it before and will never do it again. That is what they all say.

19. Darwin avoided confirmation bias by deliberately seeking out disconfirming evidence. Munger says Darwin was not especially smart by ordinary standards of human acuity. Yet he is buried in Westminster Abbey. Munger studied how Darwin worked and realized he had psychological tricks worth learning. Darwin always paid extra attention to evidence that contradicted his theories. Munger started doing the same and credits it as one of the most important intellectual habits of his life.

20. Why is the most important word in communication? Carl Braun designed oil refineries with spectacular skill, and you got fired in his company if you wrote a communication without explaining why. not just who, what, where, and when, but why. Braun knew that in a complex system where things can blow up, a communication system that always explains the reason behind an instruction works dramatically better than one that does not. Forstein, the general counsel of Salomon, told Goodfriend on multiple occasions that he had to report the employee's misconduct. He explained it was the right thing to do. He never explained what would happen to Goodfriend personally if he did not. he failed to use the most powerful tool of persuasion. Goodfriend ignored him. When Goodfriend went down, Forstein went with him.

[ALHAJI SUGAR @AlhajiSUGAH]

Baroness Von Hellman is the main antagonist and an esteemed fashion genius in the industry.
Cruella (2021) 🎬

[lova @CFC_lova]

A soldier fled from North Korea to South Korea in search of freedom ….

📺📺📺

[BiG iCE @datiCEguy_]

Bro is literally faster than light itself ⚡

[Dr. Julie Gurner @drgurner]

Fantastic explanation of what it takes to be the 1% of what you do...

[The Sigma Mindset @thesigmamindset]

Never thought a video will impact me this much ‼️‼️

[こーずぶろぐ @cozeblog]

YouTubeで700万回以上再生されて話題になっている、
“30日間・毎朝5時起きチャレンジ”
「I Woke Up At 5AM For 30 Days Straight」があまりにも有益すぎたので、特に刺さったポイントをまとめておきます🌅🧠⤵︎

1.朝5時は“究極の静寂”で、集中できるゴールデンタイム
2.早朝にタスクを片付けると、1日全体に“余裕”が生まれる
3.習慣化すると起床〜行動までの“エネルギーロス”が激減
4.朝から動くことで“自己効力感”がじわじわ積み上がる
5.ただ早起きするだけでは逆効果、睡眠管理が最重要
6.早起きは目的ではなく、“やりたいことを始めるための装置”

早起きが人生を変えると言われるのは、
“時間が増える”からではなく、
「自分をコントロールできている感覚」 が生まれるから。

勉強でも仕事でも、
1日の主導権を取り戻したい人は、
まずは1週間だけ“早朝の静寂”を味わってみてほしい。
世界がちょっとだけ変わります。

[Entrepreneurs on X @entreprneursonx]

Kevin Trudeau explains Aristotle Onassis secret society ritual for building wealth.

"He said, I would just be in the same physical space as wealthy people."

[𝕏 Travels, Hotels and Resorts @em3dia]

For generations, heading to the Mediterranean meant navigating crowded airport security lines and boarding a cramped budget flight. But for travelers who believe the journey should be just as spectacular as the destination, there is an incredible alternative.

Traveling from London to Athens entirely by train and ferry is a magnificent slow-travel adventure that treats transit as the main event, letting you watch the landscapes of Western Europe, Italy, and the Adriatic Sea seamlessly unfold outside your window.

The adventure kicks off with an epic rail sprint on Day 1. You will board the morning Eurostar out of London St Pancras, racing through the Channel Tunnel to arrive in Paris in just over two hours. After a casual lunch and a quick metro hop across the French capital to Gare de Lyon, you will settle into a high-speed train bound for Milan. This seven-hour journey is an absolute highlight, threading directly through the dramatic, snow-capped peaks of the Alps before dropping you into the fashionable hub of northern Italy by nightfall.

On Day 2, you enter the heart of Italy. A highly romantic option is to board the cozy Intercity Notte sleeper train out of Milan, falling asleep to the rhythm of the tracks as you head south. If you want to maximize your time, carry on past your connection to the sun-bleached baroque city of Lecce at the very heel of Italy's boot, spending the afternoon exploring its golden stone alleys before catching a local regional train back to the vibrant port city of Bari in the evening. Note: If you are short on time and want to keep the entire trip under three days, you can easily swap the night train for the rapid daytime Frecciarossa train from Milan to Bari instead.

Day 3 transitions your journey from the rails to the waves. Make your way to the Port of Bari to board the grand, overnight international ferry bound for Patras, Greece. Booking a private cabin allows you to enjoy a comfortable bed, while the open decks offer the perfect vantage point to watch the twinkling lights of Italy fade away beneath a canopy of stars.

After roughly 16 hours on the water, you will wake up on Day 4 pulling into Patras Port. From here, the final leg into the cradle of civilization is simple: the Greek rail authority operates a coordinated train-and-bus link that whisks you smoothly along the scenic Peloponnese coastline, dropping you directly into the historic heart of Athens by afternoon.

🎥 sarahbmarks3 | IG

[CooperBaggs 💰🍞 @edgaralandough]

we’re taught to obsess over outcomes. the body, the relationship, the number in the bank account, the version of ourselves we keep promising we’ll become. but the outcome is just a moment. the process is the life.

so the real question isn’t “do i want this?” almost everyone wants the good stuff. the question is: do i want the daily, unglamorous, repetitive work that the good stuff is actually made of?

[CooperBaggs 💰🍞 @edgaralandough]

My favorite line from Atomic Habits has been living in my head rent-free:

“It doesn’t make sense to continue wanting something if you’re not willing to do what it takes to get it. If you don’t want to live the lifestyle, then release yourself from the desire. To crave the result but not the process is to guarantee disappointment.”

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

One of the worst lies you tell yourself: “I just need to gather more information.”

Carl Jung coined the archetype of Puer Aeternus (Latin for the "eternal boy") as an adult who lives in a constant state of boyhood, with a fear of commitment and an obsession with preparation for action that never comes.

The modern world has made it easier than ever to fall into the Puer Aeturnus trap. Information gathering has become sport. Research, studying, learning, planning. All of it jammed into neat little dopamine feedback loops that convince you that you're doing something productive and valuable.

You're just one piece of information away from the big breakthrough. You'll start the business when your business plan is perfected. You'll meet your partner when you've scrolled through another round of profiles. You'll get that dream job when you have one more degree in hand.

I've been there. I was Puer Aeternus. Until I realized that the world wasn't being run by a bunch of geniuses with 47 PhDs and 170 IQs. The world was being run by a bunch of normal people with abnormal bias for action.

The opportunity you seek is floating around at all times. But you have to take action to seize it. Dopamine from information gathering is a dangerous drug. Get your dopamine from action.

[Vala Afshar @ValaAfshar]

“Exercise is the most transformative thing that you can do for your brain today."