G Naut

Live Free , Always Be Learning , Smile

[Millie Marconi @MillieMarconnni]

A Chicago philosopher wrote one book in 1940 proving that 95% of the books you have read in your life, you didn't actually read, and Charlie Munger has been telling people to read it for 50 years.

His name was Mortimer Adler.

He spent 40 years at the University of Chicago, ran the editorial board of the Encyclopædia Britannica, and built his entire career on one uncomfortable observation about the people around him.

Most adults who called themselves well-read had not actually read a book in the real sense even once. They had run their eyes over the pages, registered the words, formed a vague impression, and put it back on the shelf.

The book had passed through them without ever entering them.

In 1940 he wrote How to Read a Book. It has stayed in print for 86 years.

Charlie Munger recommends it. Naval Ravikant recommends it. Fareed Zakaria recommends it.

Every serious thinker who builds a career on absorbing information eventually finds their way to this book, and the reason is that Adler had isolated something nobody else was naming clearly.

There are four levels of reading. Almost everyone is stuck on the second one. The fourth level is so different from what most people call reading that you have probably never done it in your entire life.

Level one is elementary.

You learn it as a child. You decode the letters into words and the words into sentences. You finish the sentence and understand roughly what it said. This is reading the way a 7-year-old reads, and almost every adult on earth has stopped developing past this point in some quiet way.

Level two is inspectional.

This is skimming. You move through a book quickly to figure out what it is broadly about. You read the back cover, scan the table of contents, glance at a few paragraphs, and form an opinion. Most adults who claim to have read 50 books a year are actually doing this. They are inspecting books, not reading them. They walk away with a vague sense of the argument and almost none of the evidence that supports it.

Level three is analytical.

This is the level Adler said most people have never properly experienced. You take one book and you wrestle with it for as long as it takes. You identify the question the author is trying to answer. You map their argument from front to back. You write your disagreements in the margins. You force yourself to articulate, in your own words, what the author is claiming and why. The point is not to finish the book. The point is to argue with it as if the author were sitting across the table from you. Most people never do this once in their life, because it is exhausting and slow and feels nothing like the reading they were taught as children.

Level four is the one almost nobody knows exists. Adler called it syntopical reading. The word means "across topics," and the technique is something closer to running a small private research lab in your own head.

You pick a single question that actually matters to you. How does power corrupt people. Why do civilizations collapse. What makes a marriage last. How does a person change their own mind. Then you assemble five or ten or twenty books from different authors, different centuries, different traditions, all of them taking a swing at the same question.

You do not read any of them cover to cover. You move between them. You find the chapter in book three that addresses the same question as the chapter in book seven. You force those two authors to argue with each other inside your own head.

The book stops being the unit of reading. The question becomes the unit. And the authors become voices in a conversation you are now hosting.

This is the level where reading stops being consumption and starts being construction.

You are no longer absorbing what someone else thinks. You are building a position of your own out of the friction between people who disagreed.

Adler argued that this is the only level of reading where you stop being a passive receiver of other people's ideas and start being someone who can produce ideas of their own.

The reason Charlie Munger has been recommending this book for 50 years is that this is exactly how Munger has always thought. He calls it building a latticework of mental models. The technique he is describing is just syntopical reading applied for a lifetime.

You take the strongest insight from psychology, the strongest insight from biology, the strongest insight from economics, and you stack them against the same problem until something new falls out the bottom.

The reason most people never reach level four is not that it is intellectually difficult. It is that it is logistically uncomfortable. It requires you to keep multiple books open at once.

It requires you to take notes that nobody is going to grade. It requires you to abandon the goal of finishing books and replace it with the goal of answering questions.

This is also why AI just changed everything Adler was teaching.

NotebookLM, Claude, and tools like them let you do syntopical reading at a speed that would have looked like magic to a Chicago philosopher in 1940.

You upload 10 books on the same question. You ask the AI to surface every place those authors agree and every place they contradict each other.

The technique Adler said almost nobody on earth had reached can now be run on a Sunday afternoon by anyone with a laptop and one good question.

The technique was always the unlock. The bottleneck used to be time. The bottleneck is now curiosity.

Most people will keep reading the way they always have. A book at a time. Eyes over the pages. No question driving it. No other authors in the room. Adler called that level two for a reason.

You are not behind on your reading list.

You are behind on the level you are reading at.

[Brian Graham 🦬 @iroasmas]

me as i read 40% of what claude wrote back and type in “continue”

[Ted @tlschwerz]

This is an INSANE level of awareness.

[Naval @naval]

New podcast on vibe coding - A Return to Code.

A Return to Coding 00:20

The Personal App Store 03:17

Vibe Coding Is a Video Game with Real-World Rewards 06:22

Pure Software Is Uninvestable 10:33

A Place for Each Model 14:22

AI Is Eager to Please 17:57

Why Math and Coding? 22:10

The Beginning of the End of Apple’s Dominance 24:17

Coding Agents As Customer Service Reps 27:55

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Your brain treats your own kid's first taste of blueberries the same way it treats winning money. Watch a stranger's kid do the same thing, and nothing happens. Brain scans proved it.

Researchers have run dozens of experiments on this. When parents look at a photo of their own child, the dopamine reward areas light up. The same areas that fire when you eat sugar, fall in love, or get a promotion. For a stranger's child, those areas stay quiet. The reward circuit is wired specifically for your kid.

The boss is dealing with the opposite problem. Scientists call it hedonic adaptation, which is a fancy way of saying your brain gets bored fast. A Dutch study tracked 1,530 people before and after a vacation. Most came back no happier than people who never went away at all. The biggest happiness boost was actually before the trip, from looking forward to it. A Korean study found post-vacation happiness lasts about a month, then fades back to normal. Vacation length between 4 and 14 days made no difference.

So the boss has to keep upgrading. Bali in year two feels like Tuesday in year two. The brain adjusts to the new normal in weeks, so the next trip has to be bigger and more expensive to feel anything new.

Kid firsts skip this entirely. Each first is brand new because your kid is brand new. A 2025 USC study scanned new fathers watching videos of their own baby. Their brains lit up across three areas at once: reward, emotion, and the regions that try to read what someone else is thinking. None of this happened for a stranger's baby.

A four dollar box of blueberries can hit a parent's brain harder than a five thousand dollar dinner hits the boss's brain. Different brains, different rules.

[Wolves After Dark @WolvesAfterDark]

Jaden teaching Jokic important lessons 😌

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

III. The Specific Structure of the AGI Unemployment Argument and Where It Goes Wrong
The AGI catastrophist argument typically runs like this:
1.AGI will be capable of performing any cognitive task a human can perform.
2.Cognitive tasks constitute the majority of employment in advanced economies.
3.Therefore, AGI will be able to replace the majority of workers.
4.Therefore, mass permanent unemployment follows.
Step 3 to Step 4 is where the lump of labor fallacy smuggles itself in. The argument assumes that the quantity of cognitive work to be done is fixed, such that when AGI does it, humans are left with nothing. But this is precisely what is not true, for all four channels described above.
Let me be more specific about how each gap in the argument fails:
Gap A: “AGI can do the task” ≠ “There is no more task to do”
When spreadsheets replaced bookkeepers in the 1980s, they did not reduce the total amount of financial analysis done in the American economy. They increased it, massively, because the cost of analysis fell, which meant more analysis got demanded, which meant more analysts got hired — to do more complex, higher-value analysis that the spreadsheets enabled. Automation of the low end of a cognitive spectrum does not eliminate work in that domain; it shifts the frontier of what human effort gets applied to upward.
AGI will do the same thing. If AGI can draft a competent first-pass legal brief in 30 seconds, law firms won’t employ zero lawyers. They’ll employ lawyers who review, refine, strategize, negotiate, argue in court, build client relationships, exercise judgment in novel situations — and they’ll take on far more cases per lawyer because the cost per case has fallen. Total legal work done in the economy will increase, not decrease, because more people will be able to afford it.
Gap B: The Argument Ignores Price Effects on Demand
The catastrophist framing treats the displacement of workers as a pure subtraction problem. But displaced workers who find new jobs (as they historically do) are also consumers. The productivity gains from AGI don’t disappear into a void — they show up as lower prices, higher real wages, or both. Higher real purchasing power means more consumption of more goods and services, which means more demand for labor to produce them.
Furthermore, the catastrophist argument generally ignores what happens to the profits generated by AGI-driven productivity. Those profits go to shareholders, who spend and invest them, creating demand elsewhere. Or they get competed away in product markets, lowering prices and raising real consumer purchasing power. Either pathway generates demand for labor.
The only scenario where this mechanism fails is one where the gains from AGI are so concentrated and the distribution so pathologically skewed that effective aggregate demand collapses — which is a political economy problem (a distributional problem solvable through tax policy and redistribution) rather than a fundamental unemployment problem caused by the technology itself.

[Naval @naval]

Vibe coding is more addictive than any video game ever made (if you know what you want to build).

[non aesthetic things @PicturesFoIder]

Boy swims 4km to shore to save his stranded family deep into the sea (Australia)

[VB Knives @Empty_America]

A 4 Man limit of "Slob Perch" from Devil's Lake North Dakota.

[Boris Cherny @bcherny]

I'm Boris and I created Claude Code. I wanted to quickly share a few tips for using Claude Code, sourced directly from the Claude Code team. The way the team uses Claude is different than how I use it. Remember: there is no one right way to use Claude Code -- everyones' setup is different. You should experiment to see what works for you!

[Chess Feed @chess_feed]

Albert Einstein vs. Robert Oppenheimer | Princeton, USA (1933)

#chess #chessfeed

[Boring_Business @BoringBiz_]

Realizing that male friendships in your 20s and 30s is just sending memes back and forth in a group chat where nothing else is ever said

[G Naut @g_nuat]

@kawamura28w I love this driving range — looks epic — thanks for the great tips

[G Naut @g_nuat]

@StoneageNinja @SanderRegter

[G Naut @g_nuat]

@JaceFrederick Aaaaand we down by 2 now 😂

[G Naut @g_nuat]

@StrandFarm

[Paternal Legacy @PaternalLegacy]

26 weapons grade parenting tips:

1/ Give them a "heads up," 5 minutes until bedtime, 10 minutes before leaving the playground

2/ Look at the world more through their eyes

3/ Don’t discipline like an angry madman. Stay calm and firm, model how you want THEM to resolve conflict

4/ Let them argue their case respectfully. Teaches negotiation and critical thinking

5/ Skip the long lectures

6/ Use natural consequences: forgot homework? Let them explain it to the teacher. Forgot their lunch? They'll figure it out

7/ Be consistent and follow through. "We are leaving the playground if you don't stop..."

8/ Make "How can I help?" part of YOUR vocabulary. It builds reliability

9/ Share your unseen efforts: hustling for work, hitting the gym. Actions speak louder than words but when they can’t see it, TELL THEM

10/ Teach accountability by modeling it yourself: “I was wrong. sorry”

11/ Create family traditions like weekly movie nights, Sunday pancakes, whatever works

12/ More game nights

13/ Take an interest in their interests: video games, books, sports... do it with them.

14/ Hike together. Nature slows time and generates gratitude

15/ Build something. LEGO, puzzles, a fort, the Amazon delivery box

16/ Teach them skills: tie knots, start a fire, read a map

17/ Introduce chess or checkers. Start early

18/ Let them plan a family outing or navigate you there (they can get you through the airport)

19/ Always greet your wife with love. That moment sets the tone for the family

20/ Share some challenges (age appropriate)

21/ Respect their privacy. Knock before entering their room

22/ Teach the value of money early: "wants vs. needs," compounding, saving, etc

23/ Let them see you sweat

24/ Teach them to cook. Start small: eggs, pancakes, cookies. Embrace the mess

25/ No screens at meals ever

26/ Prioritize movement as a UNIT: family walks, workouts, hikes, dance-offs- whatever gets the everyone in synch

[Tommy Siegel @TommySiegel]

bird song

[G Naut @g_nuat]

@PaulCharchian @grok , what would $201 in 1981 invested in stock market be worth today?