• The Best Way To Show Someone You DO Care About What They Have To Say
    • The next time you get into an argument with your wife or your friends, stop the discussion for a moment and, for an expweriment, institute this rule: each person can speak up for himself only after he has first restated the ideas and feelings of the previous speaker accurately and to that speaker satisfaction.
    • Here’s the typical argument: we’re arguing and I wanna win and so you tell me a bunch of things and then I take those things and turn them into the stupidest possible representation of those things, I weaken your argument, make you look like a fool, and then I destroy you. This shows that you’re a coward, because it shows that you need to have a weak opponent before you could possibly win. What you should do is: listen to the person, help them make their argument as strong as you possibly can, and then deal with that, so then you’re sure you’ve taken them seriously. It immediately indicates that you’re not just trying to win, you’re trying to listen, it’s one step toward trust.
    • The Art of Seduction
  • Advice for Students - Stop Wasting Time - This Is Why You Waste Your Time
    • Advice for young people
    • Don’t Be Harmless & How To Become Deadly
  • The best books to read that we should be reading
    • Read the books that have influenced the largest number of other books. They are the ultimate canonical books. You have to know their ideas because they’re implicit in everything else, you start there. You’re an historical creature, those books are about you.
  • The Keys to Growth, Emotional Resilience & Finding Purpose
    • Don’t Be Harmless & How To Become Deadly
  • Advice on Finding a Woman, Marriage and Having Children
    • Trust: you gotta tell the truth to each other.
    • Models
  • Why 10% of Men Get Females, and 90% don’t
    • “I gave her everything I had, he gave her everything she wanted”
  • Desirable Women
  • Why Women Cheat on Nice Guys
  • You Need a Partner Who is a Challenge
  • Bad Relationships in a Nutshell
  • What Happens When You Date Lower Than Your Status
  • Why Do Nice Guys Finish Last?
  • How to be an alpha
    • You have a counter at the bottom of your brain that keeps count of where you are in term of your status. And it bloody-well regulates the sensitivity of your emotions. So if you’re at the bottom of the hierarchy, barely clinging on to the world, everything overwhelms you, and that’s ‘cause you’re damn near dead, and so everything should overwhelm you, you’ve got no extra resources, any more threat and you sunk, so you become extremely sensitive to negative emotions, and maybe also impulsive so that you grab the grabbings goods. And if you’re near the top in the dominance hierarchy and your counter tells you that, then your serotonin level go up, you’re less sensitive to negative emotions, you’re less impulsive, you live longer, everything works in your favour, your immune system functions better, and you’re oriented, at least to some degree, to the medium and long-term future, and you can afford that ‘cause all hell isn’t breaking loose around you all the time.
    • When you first learn how to speak you babble every phoneme, if I was learning to speak an Asian language, there would be phoneme’s I couldn’t pronunce and vice-versa, but the infant babble all of them, all the phonemes, and then as they start to learn the language, they lose the ability to say a bunch of them and only retain the ones that are relevant to that language. So a baby babbles all possible languages, that’s a way of thinking about it, and then loses the ability. You manifest the potential to be possesses by all the set of all possible archetypes, it’s built into your biology, and then as you’re enculturated in your own culture, the set of archetypes that manifest themselves in that culture are the ones that you pull in for your own use.
    • Nihilism: why bother solving a problem if all that’s going to happen is twenty more problems are going to come your way? Why not just give up and die? Is the suffering so intense that the whole game should just be brought to an end?
      • It’s not irrational to work for the destruction of being.
  • The harsh reality of Alpha Male life
    • If you want to have a balanced life, and you should want that, working 80 hours a week non-stop to climb a social hierarchy is not a wise choice.
    • When you’re 19 you’re so clueless, you don’t know a bloody thing, you think you’re not sure you want children. It’s a very rare woman who at age 30 doesn’t consider having a child for primary desire.
  • How to be an alpha male
    • When you’re young you have the potential to become anything but you’re nothing.
  • Traits of Alpha Males
  • Wimps, Alphas & Good men

    • Human beings work. What does that mean? They sacrifice the present for the future. What’s the price you pay? You don’t get the present.

      Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete, in and of itself, you're retired. You retire by saving up enough money, becoming a monk, or by finding work that feels like play to you.

    • To become self-conscious means to become aware of your vulnerabilities and your insufficiencies.

      Wabi-sabi, Vulnerability

    • Do you want to become king of the world or king of your own soul? What do you want to subordinate yourself to? How about the heroic willingness to encounter the unknown and articulate it and share it with other people? There’s no nobler vision than that.

      • Women are more self-conscious than men. Maybe it’s them who taught men to be self-conscious. There’s nothing that makes a man more self-conscious than to be rejected by a woman that he desires, so the woman is always offering self-consciousness to man.

    • Adam (of Adam&Eve) didn't want to be self-conscious. Things were pretty great when his eyes were closed and he was wandering around not worrying about whether he was naked or not.

    • We became more and more alert to threats, more and more alert to threats, until one day we got so alert to threats that we can see threats lurking in the future, and then we became aware of the future, and then we became aware of death, and we became really self-conscious.

    • It’s a lot more calming to remain asleep with no knowledge of the burden of mortality that you would bear with if you become self-conscious.

    • Brain is visual. And we don’t only see with our eyes but with our imagination also.

      • So you can see the future coming and you get to work. It isn’t just the present anymore. I don’t have to just worry about whether or not I’m hungry right now, I’m gonna have to worry about whether I’m hungry tomorrow and next week and next month and next year and for me and for my wife and for my child, and for the community. You can forget about your day-to-day existence. There’s no evidence that people in non-industrialized societies are not happier than people in industrialized societies. Quite the opposite, we’re less happy. We live longer and we don’t die and we have fewer horrible diseases and everything, but we have to carry self-consciousness wherever we go.
  • Maps of Meaning 02: Marionettes & Individuals (Part 1)
    • Pinocchio (1940)
  • Maps of Meaning 04: Marionettes & Individuals (Part 3)
    • 1:16:00 Il fu Mattia Pascal Il fu Mattia Pascal
  • Maps of Meaning 07: Images of Story & Metastory
    • A Billion Wicked Thoughts
      • Vampire, Werewolf, Billionaire, Pirate, Surgeon
    • Science Of Persuasion